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Table of Contents
Learning Reactive Programming with Java 8
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
Why subscribe?
Free access for Packt account holders
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Downloading the example code
Errata
Piracy
Questions
1. An Introduction to Reactive Programming
What is reactive programming?
Why should we be reactive?
Introducing RxJava
Downloading and setting up RxJava
Comparing the iterator pattern and the RxJava Observable
Implementing the reactive sum
Summary
2. Using the Functional Constructions of Java 8
Lambdas in Java 8
Introducing the new syntax and semantics
Functional interfaces in Java 8 and RxJava
Implementing the reactive sum example with lambdas
Pure functions and higher order functions
 Pure functions
Higher order functions
RxJava and functional programming
Summary
3. Creating and Connecting Observables, Observers, and Subjects
The Observable.from method
The Observable.just method
Other Observable factory methods
The Observable.create method
Subscribing and unsubscribing
Hot and cold Observable instances
The ConnectableObservable class
The Subject instances
Summary
4. Transforming, Filtering, and Accumulating Your Data
Observable transformations
Transformations with the various flatMap operators
Grouping items
Additional useful transformation operators
Filtering data
Accumulating data
Summary
5. Combinators, Conditionals, and Error Handling
Combining the Observable instances
The zip operator
The combineLatest operator
The merge operator
The concat operator
The conditional operators
The amb operator
The takeUntil(), takeWhile(), skipUntil(), and skipWhile()
conditional operators
The defaultIfEmpty( ) operator
Handling errors
The return and resume operators
The retrying technique
An HTTP client example
 Summary
6. Using Concurrency and Parallelism with Schedulers
RxJava's schedulers
Debugging Observables and their schedulers
The interval Observable and its default scheduler
Types of schedulers
The Schedulers.immediate scheduler
The Schedulers.trampoline scheduler
The Schedulers.newThread scheduler
The Schedulers.computation scheduler
The Schedulers.io scheduler
The Schedulers.from(Executor) method
Combining Observables and schedulers
The Observable<T> subscribeOn(Scheduler) method
The Observable<T> observeOn(Scheduler) operator
Parallelism
Buffering, throttling, and debouncing
Throttling
Debouncing
The buffer and window operators
The backpressure operators
Summary
7. Testing Your RxJava Application
Testing using simple subscription
The BlockingObservable class
The aggregate operators and the BlockingObservable class
Testing with the aggregate operators and the BlockingObservable
class
Using the TestSubscriber class for in-depth testing
Testing asynchronous Observable instances with the help of the
TestScheduler class
Summary
8. Resource Management and Extending RxJava
Resource management
Introducing the Observable.using method
Caching data with Observable.cache
Creating custom operators with lift
 Composing multiple operators with the Observable.compose
operator
Summary
Index
Learning Reactive
Programming with Java 8
Learning Reactive
Programming with Java 8
Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in

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First published: June 2015

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ISBN 978-1-78528-872-2
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Author

Nickolay Tsvetinov

Reviewers

Samuel Gruetter

Dávid Karnok

Timo Tuominen

Shixiong Zhu

Commissioning Editor

Veena Pagare

Acquisition Editor

Larrisa Pinto

Content Development Editor

Adrian Raposo

Technical Editor

Abhishek R. Kotian

Copy Editors

Brandt D'mello

Neha Vyas
Project Coordinator

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Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

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Production Coordinator

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Cover Work

Conidon Miranda
About the Author
Nickolay Tsvetinov is a professional all-round web developer at
TransportAPI—Britain's first comprehensive open platform for
transport solutions. During his career as a software developer, he
experienced both good and bad and played with most of the popular
programming languages—from C and Java to Ruby and JavaScript.
For the last 3-4 years, he's been creating and maintaining single-
page applications (SPA) and the backend API architectures that
serve them. He is a fan of open source software, Rails, Vim, Sinatra,
Ember.js, Node.js, and Nintendo. He was an unsuccessful musician
and poet, but he is a successful husband and father. His area of
interest and expertise includes the declarative/functional and
reactive programming that resulted in the creation of ProAct.js
(http://proactjs.com), which is a library that augments the JavaScript
language and turns it into a reactive language.

First of all, I want to thank my wife, Tanya. I wrote this book

because she told me that I was capable of doing this. She was
with me all these months; I worked late at night and on
weekends, but she didn't mind that. She also helped me with the
content of this book. Thank you, Tanya; I love you and I dedicate
this book to you. I want to thank my baby girl, Dalia. She is the
one who makes me learn and do new things. One day, I want her
to be proud of me—she is my sun. I want to thank my colleagues
from TransportAPI, especially Dave, who helped me with my
English, and Jonathan and Martin, who gave me the courage to
finish the book.

I want to thank Astea Solutions, as they gave me space to write,

as well as my parents, Georgi and Dimana, who did the same for
me on weekends. Finally, I want to thank all my friends who
supported me—Simeon, Rosen, Deyan, Pavel, my sister, Marina,
and many more.
Thank you!
About the Reviewers
Samuel Gruetter holds a BSc degree in computer science from
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. As
a student assistant and member of the Scala team at EPFL, he
developed RxScala, which is a Scala adaptor for the RxJava
Reactive Extensions library. In this way, he contributed to RxJava.
He was also a teaching assistant for the Principles of Reactive
Programming massive open online course on Coursera, which is the
first online course on reactive programming.

Dávid Karnok is a research assistant and PhD student at the

Research Laboratory on Engineering and Management Intelligence
of the Institute for Computer Science and Control of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences.

He has been working with Java and related core technologies since
2005 to bring Java's benefits to manufacturing and logistic
companies.

He was the first to port Microsoft's Rx.NET framework to Java back

in 2010; however, the concept was so ahead of its time that his
library didn't catch much attention until Netflix came out with the
independent RxJava port in 2013. He joined the project not much
later and is a core collaborator and has contributed to about 30
percent of the code in the library over the years. With several years
of reactive programming experience and as a core developer of
RxJava, he frequently answers questions about the library on Stack
Overflow, where he reviews pull requests on the RxJava GitHub
project page and posts bug fixes and enhancements on a regular
basis.

Timo Tuominen develops large-scale software projects from

conception to completion for clients, including major telcos and
device manufacturers. As the technical lead, he has created dozens
of products and services both for consumer and business use.
Working with Futurice, he started using RxJava in 2013 and
designed one of the first pure RxJava architectures on Android. His
novel approach was a result of the uncompromising functional
reactive programming principles that he applied to an existing
platform. Several apps and thousands of code commits later, he is
now convinced that RxJava and FRP represent a new and better
way to build software.

I would like to dedicate this book to everyone who has put up

with my RxJava innovations.

Shixiong Zhu is an RxJava committer and also maintains the

RxScala project. He received his master's of science degree in
computer science from Peking University, China. After that, he joined
MicroStrategy and worked on several big data projects. He has also
worked on the infrastructure team at Xiaomi. Currently, he is living in
Beijing and working on the Apache Spark project, which is a fast and
general platform for large-scale data processing.
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Preface
Reactive programming has been around for decades. There has
been a few implementations of reactive programming from the time
Smalltalk was a young language. However, it has only become
popular recently and it is now becoming a trend. Why now you ask?
Because it is good for writing fast, real-time applications and current
technologies and the Web demand this.

I got involved in it back in 2008, when the team I was part of was
developing a multimedia book creator called Sophie 2. It had to be
fast and responsive so we created a framework called Prolib, which
provided objects with properties which could depend on each other
(in other words, we implemented bindings for Swing and much more
—transformations, filtering, and so on). It felt natural to wire the
model data to the GUI like this.

Of course, this was far away from the functional-like approach that
comes with RX. In 2010, Microsoft released RX and, after that,
Netflix ported it to Java—RxJava. However, Netflix released RxJava
to the open source community and the project became a huge
success. Many other languages have their port of RX and many
alternatives to it. Now, you can code using reactive programming on
your Java backend and wire it to your RxJava's frontend.

This book tries to explain to you what reactive programming is all

about and how to use it with RxJava. It has many small examples
and it explains concepts and API details in small steps. After reading
this book, you will have an idea of RxJava, functional programming,
and the reactive paradigm.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, An Introduction to Reactive Programming, will introduce
you to the concept of reactive programming and will tell you why you
should learn about it. This chapter contains examples that
demonstrate how RxJava incorporates the reactive programming
concept.

Chapter 2, Using the Functional Constructions of Java 8, will teach

you how to use the new lambda constructions of Java 8. It will
explain some functional programming concepts and will show you
how to use them with RxJava in your reactive programs.

Chapter 3, Creating and Connecting Observables, Observers, and

Subjects, will show you the basic building blocks of the RxJava
library called the Observables. You will learn the difference between
'hot' and 'cold' Observables and how to subscribe to and
unsubscribe from them using a subscription instance.

Chapter 4, Transforming, Filtering, and Accumulating Your Data, will

walk you through the basic reactive operators, which you will learn
how to use to achieve step-by-step computations. This chapter will
give you an idea of how to transform the events the Observables
emit, how to filter only the data we need, and how to group,
accumulate, and process it.

Chapter 5, Combinators, Conditionals, and Error Handling, will

present you with more complex reactive operators, which will allow
you to master observable chaining. You will learn about the
combining and conditional operators and how the Observables
interact with each other. This chapter demonstrates the different
approaches to error handling.

Chapter 6, Using Concurrency and Parallelism with Schedulers, will

guide you through the process of writing concurrent and parallel
programs with RxJava. This will be accomplished by the RxJava
Schedulers. The types of Schedulers will be introduced and you will
come to know when and why to use each one of them. This chapter
will present you with a mechanism that will show you how to avoid
and apply backpressure.

Chapter 7, Testing Your RxJava Application, will show you how to

unit test your RxJava applications.

Chapter 8, Resource Management and Extending RxJava, will teach

you how to manage the resources used as data sources by your
RxJava applications. We will write our own Observable operators
here.
What you need for this book
In order to run the examples, you will need:

Java 8 installed, which you can download from Oracle's site

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-
downloads-2133151.html
Gradle to build the project—2.x, which you can download from
https://gradle.org/downloads
Eclipse to open the project. You will also need the Gradle plugin
for Eclipse, which can be downloaded from the Eclipse
MarketPlace. Of course, you can use Gradle from the command
line and go through the code with Vim or any other arbitrary text
editor
Who this book is for
If you are a Java developer who knows how to write software and
would like to learn how to apply your existing skills to reactive
programming, this book is for you.

This book can be helpful to anybody no matter if they are beginners,

advanced programmers, or even experts. You don't need to have
any experience with either Java 8's lambdas and streams or with
RxJava.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish
between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of
these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames,

file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter
handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts
through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

Observable
.just('R', 'x', 'J', 'a', 'v', 'a')
.subscribe(
System.out::print,
System.err::println,
System.out::println
);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code

block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

Observable<Object> obs = Observable

.interval(40L, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)
.switchMap(v ->
Observable
.timer(0L, 10L, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)
.map(u -> "Observable <" + (v + 1) + "> : "
+ (v + u)))
);
subscribePrint(obs, "switchMap");

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you
see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in
the text like this: "Interfaces of this type are called functional
interfaces."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Piracy
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes
the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human
Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a
finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative
relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature. “He is our
representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because
we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is
grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as
with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must
smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is
saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of
freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that
they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the
ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.” J. C.
C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement
does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and
no one definition can compass it.” In this sense we may adopt the
words of Forsyth: “In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a
world's sin on (not in) a world-soul.”

G. B. Foster, on Mat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot

beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than
twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled,
that thus it must be?” “On this ‘must be’ the Scripture is based, not
this ‘must be’ on the Scripture. The ‘must be’ was the ethical
demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral
for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism
is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David
in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to
contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under
obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute
atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a
member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5
—‘members one of another.’ As membership of the whole makes him
liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part
makes him liable for the sin of that part.”

Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a

sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer;
though it was not as the Son [pg 756]that he suffered, but in
modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man
became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the
surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and
passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out
of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in
giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the
reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity
could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that
of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.” The
Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53,
affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that
the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore
punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual
of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though
he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the
incarnation.
Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the
law and justice of God was not destroyed by his
incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of
the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race,
each member of the race since Adam has been born
into the same state into which Adam fell. The
consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to
his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of
human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make
satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty,
or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by
that holiness upon the guilty.

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 117—“Christ had taken upon

him, as the living expression of himself, a nature which was weighed
down, not merely by present incapacities, but by present incapacities
as part of the judicial necessary result of accepted and inherent
sinfulness. Human nature was not only disabled but guilty, and the
disabilities were themselves a consequence and aspect of the guilt”;
see review of Moberly by Rashdall, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 3:198-
211. Lidgett, Spir. Princ. of Atonement, 166-168, criticizes Dr. Dale
for neglecting the fatherly purpose of the Atonement to serve the
moral training of the child—punishment marking ill-desert in order to
bring this ill-desert to the consciousness of the offender,—and for
neglecting also the positive assertion in the atonement that the law
is holy and just and good—something more than the negative
expression of sin's ill-desert. See especially Lidgett's chapter on the
relation of our Lord to the human race, 351-378, in which he
grounds the atonement in the solidarity of mankind, its organic
union with the Son of God, and Christ's immanence in humanity.

Bowne, The Atonement, 101—“Something like this work of grace

was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that
was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful
possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite
obligation to care for his human family; and reflections upon his
position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing only make more
manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive of God as sitting
apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is not love at all, but
only a reflex of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive
him as bestowing upon us out of his infinite fulness but at no real
cost to himself, he sinks before the moral heroes of the race. There
is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world
upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and
becoming the supreme burdenbearer and leader in all self-sacrifice.
Then only are the possibilities of grace and love and moral heroism
and condescension filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the
work of Christ himself, so far as it was an historical event, must be
viewed, not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation
of that Cross which was hidden in the divine love from the
foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the
human world at all.”

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:90, 91—“Conceive of the

ideal of moral perfection incarnate in a human personality, and at
the same time one who loves us with a love so absolute that he
identifies himself with us and makes our good and evil his own—
bring together these elements in a living, conscious human spirit,
and you have in it a capacity of shame and anguish, a possibility of
bearing the burden of human guilt and wretchedness, which lost and
guilty humanity can never bear for itself.”

[pg 757]
If Christ had been born into the world by ordinary
generation, he too would have had depravity, guilt,
penalty. But he was not so born. In the womb of the
Virgin, the human nature which he took was purged
from its depravity. But this purging away of depravity
did not take away guilt, or penalty. There was still
left the just exposure to the penalty of violated law.
Although Christ's nature was purified, his obligation
to suffer yet remained. He might have declined to
join himself to humanity, and then he need not have
suffered. He might have sundered his connection
with the race, and then he need not have suffered.
But once born of the Virgin, once possessed of the
human nature that was under the curse, he was
bound to suffer. The whole mass and weight of God's
displeasure against the race fell on him, when once
he became a member of the race.
Because Christ is essential humanity, the universal man, the life of
the race, he is the central brain to which and through which all ideas
must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all
pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend
across the town without first ringing up the central office. You
cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of
us can say of him: “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Ps.
51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, he must
bear in his own person all the burdens of humanity, and must be
“the Lamb of God, that” taketh, and so “taketh away, the sin of the
world” (John 1:29). Simms Reeves, the great English tenor, said that
the passion-music was too much for him; he was found completely
overcome after singing the prophet's words in Lam. 1:12—“Is it
nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any
sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is brought upon me, Wherewith
Jehovah hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.”

Father Damien gave his life in ministry to the lepers' colony of the
Hawaiian Islands. Though free from the disease when he entered,
he was at last himself stricken with the leprosy, and then wrote: “I
must now stay with my own people.” Once a leper, there was no
release. When Christ once joined himself to humanity, all the
exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Through himself
personally without sin, he was made sin for us. Christ inherited guilt
and penalty. Heb. 2:14, 15—“Since then the children are sharers in
flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same;
that through death he might bring to naught him that had the power
of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver all them who through
fear of death were all their life-time subject to bondage.”

Only God can forgive sin, because only God can feel it in its true
heinousness and rate it at its true worth. Christ could forgive sin
because he added to the divine feeling with regard to sin the
anguish of a pure humanity on account of it. Shelley, Julian and
Maddolo: “Me, whose heart a stranger's tear might wear, As water-
drops the sandy fountain-stone; Me, who am as a nerve o'er which
do creep The Else unfelt oppressions of the earth.” S. W. Culver:
“We cannot be saved, as we are taught geometry, by lecture and
diagram. No person ever yet saved another from drowning by
standing coolly by and telling him the importance of rising to the
surface and the necessity of respiration. No, he must plunge into the
destructive element, and take upon himself the very condition of the
drowning man, and by the exertion of his own strength, by the vigor
of his own life, save him from the impending death. When your child
is encompassed by the flames that consume your dwelling, you will
not save him by calling to him from without. You must make your
way through the devouring flame, till you come personally into the
very conditions of his peril and danger, and, thence returning, bear
him forth to freedom and safety.”

Notice, however, that this guilt which Christ took

upon himself by his union with humanity was: (1)
not the guilt of personal sin—such guilt as belongs to
every adult member of the race; (2) not even the
guilt of inherited depravity—such guilt as belongs to
infants, and to those who have not come to moral
consciousness; but (3) solely the guilt of Adam's sin,
which belongs, prior to personal transgression, and
apart from inherited depravity, to every member of
the race who has derived his life from Adam. This
original sin and inherited guilt, but without the
depravity that ordinarily [pg 758] accompanies them,
Christ takes, and so takes away. He can justly bear
penalty, because he inherits guilt. And since this guilt
is not his personal guilt, but the guilt of that one sin
in which “all sinned”—the guilt of the common
transgression of the race in Adam, the guilt of the
root-sin from which all other sins have sprung—he
who is personally pure can vicariously bear the
penalty due to the sin of all.

Christ was conscious of innocence in his personal relations, but not

in his race relations. He gathered into himself all the penalties of
humanity, as Winkelried gathered into his own bosom at Sempach
the pikes of the Austrians and so made a way for the victorious
Swiss. Christ took to himself the shame of humanity, as the mother
takes upon her the daughter's shame, repenting of it and suffering
on account of it. But this could not be in the case of Christ unless
there had been a tie uniting him to men far more vital, organic, and
profound than that which unites mother and daughter. Christ is
naturally the life of all men, before he becomes spiritually the life of
true believers. Matheson, Spir. Devel. of St. Paul, 197-215, 244,
speaks of Christ's secular priesthood, of an outer as well as an inner
membership in the body of Christ. He is sacrificial head of the world
as well as sacrificial head of the church. In Paul's latest letters, he
declares of Christ that he is “the Savior of all men, specially of them
that believe” (1 Tim. 4:10). There is a grace that “hath appeared,
bringing salvation to all men” (Tit. 2:11). He “gave gifts unto men”
(Eph. 4:8), “Yea, among the rebellious also, that Jehovah God might
dwell with them” (Ps. 68:18). “Every creature of God is good, and
nothing is to be rejected” (1 Tim. 4:4).

Royce, World and Individual, 2:408—“Our sorrows are identically

God's own sorrows.... I sorrow, but the sorrow is not only mine. This
same sorrow, just as it is for me, is God's sorrow.... The divine
fulfilment can be won only through the sorrows of time.... Unless
God knows sorrow, he knows not the highest good, which consists in
the overcoming of sorrow.” Godet, in The Atonement, 331-351
—“Jesus condemned sin as God condemned it. When he felt
forsaken on the Cross, he performed that act by which the offender
himself condemns his sin, and by that condemnation, so far as it
depends on himself, makes it to disappear. There is but one
conscience in all moral beings. This echo in Christ of God's judgment
against sin was to re-echo in all other human consciences. This has
transformed God's love of compassion into a love of satisfaction.
Holiness joins suffering to sin. But the element of reparation in the
Cross was not in the suffering but in the submission. The child who
revolts against its punishment has made no reparation at all. We
appropriate Christ's work when we by faith ourselves condemn sin
and accept him.”

If it be asked whether this is not simply a suffering

for his own sin, or rather for his own share of the sin
of the race, we reply that his own share in the sin of
the race is not the sole reason why he suffers; it
furnishes only the subjective reason and ground for
the proper laying upon him of the sin of all. Christ's
union with the race in his incarnation is only the
outward and visible expression of a prior union with
the race which began when he created the race. As
“in him were all things created,” and as “in him all
things consist,” or hold together (Col. 1:16, 17), it
follows that he who is the life of humanity must,
though personally pure, be involved in responsibility
for all human sin, and “it was necessary that the
Christ should suffer” (Acts 17:3). This suffering was
an enduring of the reaction of the divine holiness
against sin and so was a bearing of penalty (Is. 53:6;
Gal. 3:13), but it was also the voluntary execution of
a plan that antedated creation (Phil. 2:6, 7), and
Christ's sacrifice in time showed what had been in
the heart of God from eternity (Heb. 9:14; Rev.
13:8).
Our treatment is intended to meet the chief modern objection to the
atonement. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:222, speaks of “the
strangely inconsistent doctrine that God is so just that he could not
let sin go unpunished, yet so unjust that he could punish it in the
person of the innocent.... It is for orthodox dialectics to explain how
the divine justice can be impugned by pardoning the guilty, and yet
vindicated by punishing [pg 759]the innocent” (quoted in Lias,
Atonement, 16). In order to meet this difficulty, the following
accounts of Christ's identification with humanity have been given:

1. That of Isaac Watts (see Bib. Sac., 1875:421). This holds that the
humanity of Christ, both in body and soul, preëxisted before the
incarnation, and was manifested to the patriarchs. We reply that
Christ's human nature is declared to be derived from the Virgin.

2. That of R. W. Dale (Atonement, 265-440). This holds that Christ is

responsible for human sin because, as the Upholder and Life of all,
he is naturally one with all men, and is spiritually one with all
believers (Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our
being”; Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”; John 14:20—“I am in
my Father, and ye in me, and I in you”). If Christ's bearing our sins,
however, is to be explained by the union of the believer with Christ,
the effect is made to explain the cause, and Christ could have died
only for the elect (see a review of Dale, in Brit. Quar. Rev., Apr.,
1876:221-225). The union of Christ with the race by creation—a
union which recognizes Christ's purity and man's sin—still remains as
a most valuable element of truth in the theory of Dr. Dale.
3. That of Edward Irving. Christ has a corrupted nature, an inborn
infirmity and depravity, which he gradually overcomes. But the
Scriptures, on the contrary, assert his holiness and separateness
from sinners. (See references, on pages 744-747.)

4. That of John Miller, Theology, 114-128; also in his chapter: Was

Christ in Adam? in Questions Awakened by the Bible. Christ, as to his
human nature, although created pure, was yet, as one of Adam's
posterity, conceived of as a sinner in Adam. To him attached “the
guilt of the act in which all men stood together in a federal
relation.... He was decreed to be guilty for the sins of all mankind.”
Although there is a truth contained in this statement, it is vitiated by
Miller's federalism and creatianism. Arbitrary imputation and legal
fiction do not help us here. We need such an actual union of Christ
with humanity, and such a derivation of the substance of his being,
by natural generation from Adam, as will make him not simply the
constructive heir, but the natural heir, of the guilt of the race. We
come, therefore, to what we regard as the true view, namely:

5. That the humanity of Christ was not a new creation, but was
derived from Adam, through Mary his mother; so that Christ, so far
as his humanity was concerned, was in Adam just as we were, and
had the same race-responsibility with ourselves. As Adam's
descendant, he was responsible for Adam's sin, like every other
member of the race; the chief difference being, that while we inherit
from Adam both guilt and depravity, he whom the Holy Spirit
purified, inherited not the depravity, but only the guilt. Christ took to
himself, not sin (depravity), but the consequences of sin. In him
there was abolition of sin, without abolition of obligation to suffer for
sin; while in the believer, there is abolition of obligation to suffer,
without abolition of sin itself.

The justice of Christ's sufferings has been imperfectly illustrated by

the obligation of the silent partner of a business firm to pay debts of
the firm which he did not personally contract; or by the obligation of
the husband to pay the debts of his wife; or by the obligation of a
purchasing country to assume the debts of the province which it
purchases (Wm. Ashmore). There have been men who have spent
the strength of a lifetime in clearing off the indebtedness of an
insolvent father, long since deceased. They recognized an organic
unity of the family, which morally, if not legally, made their father's
liabilities their own. So, it is said, Christ recognized the organic unity
of the race, and saw that, having become one of that sinning race,
he had involved himself in all its liabilities, even to the suffering of
death, the great penalty of sin.

The fault of all the analogies just mentioned is that they are purely
commercial. A transference of pecuniary obligation is easier to
understand than a transference of criminal liability. I cannot justly
bear another's penalty, unless I can in some way share his guilt. The
theory we advocate shows how such a sharing of our guilt on the
part of Christ was possible. All believers in substitution hold that
Christ bore our guilt: “My soul looks back to see The burdens thou
didst bear When hanging on the accursed tree, And hopes her guilt
was there.” But we claim that, by virtue of Christ's union with
humanity, that guilt was not only an imputed, but also an imparted,
guilt.

With Christ's obligation to suffer, there were connected two other,

though minor, results of his assumption of humanity: first, the
longing to suffer; and secondly, the inevitableness of his suffering.
He felt the longing to suffer which perfect love to God must feel, in
view of the demands upon the race, of that holiness of God which he
loved more than he loved the race itself; which perfect love to man
must feel, in view of the fact that bearing the penalty of man's sin
was the only way to save him. Hence we see Christ pressing forward
to the cross with such majestic determination that the [pg
760]disciples were amazed and afraid (Mark 10:32). Hence we hear
him saying: “With desire have I desired to eat this passover” (Luke
23:15); “I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I
straitened till it be accomplished!” (Luke 12:50).

Here is the truth in Campbell's theory of the atonement. Christ is the

great Penitent before God, making confession of the sin of the race,
which others of that race could neither see nor feel. But the view we
present is a larger and completer one than that of Campbell, in that
it makes this confession and reparation obligatory upon Christ, as
Campbell's view does not, and recognizes the penal nature of
Christ's sufferings, which Campbell's view denies. Lias, Atonement,
79—“The head of a clan, himself intensely loyal to his king, finds
that his clan have been involved in rebellion. The more intense and
perfect his loyalty, the more thorough his nobleness of heart and
affection for his people, the more inexcusable and flagrant the
rebellion of those for whom he pleads,—the more acute would be his
agony, as their representative and head. Nothing would be more
true to human nature, in the best sense of those words, than that
the conflict between loyalty to his king and affection for his vassals
should induce him to offer his life for theirs, to ask that the
punishment they deserved should be inflicted on him.”

The second minor consequence of Christ's assumption of humanity

was, that, being such as he was, he could not help suffering; in
other words, the obligatory and the desired were also the inevitable.
Since he was a being of perfect purity, contact with the sin of the
race, of which he was a member, necessarily involved an actual
suffering, of an intenser kind than we can conceive. Sin is self-
isolating, but love and righteousness have in them the instinct of
human unity. In Christ all the nerves and sensibilities of humanity
met. He was the only healthy member of the race. When life returns
to a frozen limb, there is pain. So Christ, as the only sensitive
member of a benumbed and stupefied humanity, felt all the pangs of
shame and suffering which rightfully belonged to sinners; but which
they could not feel, simply because of the depth of their depravity.
Because Christ was pure, yet had united himself to a sinful and
guilty race, therefore “it must needs be that Christ should suffer” (A.
V.) or, “it behooved the Christ to suffer” (Rev. Vers., Acts 17:3); see
also John 3:14—“so must the Son of man be lifted up”—“The
Incarnation, under the actual circumstances of humanity, carried
with it the necessity of the Passion” (Westcott, in Bib. Com., in loco).
Compare John Woolman's Journal, 4, 5—“O Lord, my God, the
amazing horrors of darkness were gathered about me, and covered
me all over, and I saw no way to go forth; I felt the depth and
extent of the misery of my fellow creatures, separated from the
divine harmony, and it was greater than I could bear, and I was
crushed down under it; I lifted up my head, I stretched out my arm,
but there was none to help me; I looked round about, and was
amazed. In the depths of misery, I remembered that thou art
omnipotent and that I had called thee Father.” He had vision of a
“dull, gloomy mass,” darkening half the heavens, and he was told
that it was “human beings, in as great misery as they could be and
live; and he was mixed with them, and henceforth he might not
consider himself a distinct and separate being.”

This suffering in and with the sins of men, which Dr. Bushnell
emphasized so strongly, though it is not, as he thought, the principal
element, is notwithstanding an indispensable element in the
atonement of Christ. Suffering in and with the sinner is one way,
though not the only way, in which Christ is enabled to bear the
wrath of God which constitutes the real penalty of sin.

Exposition of 2 Cor. 5:21.—It remains for us to adduce the Scriptural

proof of this natural assumption of human guilt by Christ. We find it
in 2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our
behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
“Righteousness” here cannot mean subjective purity, for then “made
to be sin” would mean that God made Christ to be subjectively
depraved. As Christ was not made unholy, the meaning cannot be
that we are made holy persons in him. Meyer calls attention to this
parallel between “righteousness” and “sin”:—“That we might
become the righteousness of God in him” = that we might become
justified persons. Correspondingly, “made to be sin on our behalf”
must = made to be a condemned person. “Him who knew no sin” =
Christ had no experience of sin—this was the necessary postulate of
his work of atonement. “Made sin for us,” therefore, is the abstract
for the concrete, and = made a sinner, in the sense that the penalty
of sin fell upon him. So Meyer, for substance.

We must, however, regard this interpretation of Meyer's as coming

short of the full meaning of the apostle. As justification is not simply
remission of actual punishment, but is also deliverance from the
obligation to suffer punishment,—in other words, as “righteousness”
in the text = persons delivered from the guilt as well as from the
penalty [pg 761]of sin,—so the contrasted term “sin,” in the text,
—a person not only actually punished, but also under obligation to
suffer punishment;—in other words, Christ is “made sin,” not only in
the sense of being put under penalty, but also in the sense of being
put under guilt. (Cf. Symington, Atonement, 17.)

In a note to the last edition of Meyer, this is substantially granted.

“It is to be noted,” he says, “that ἁμαρτίαν, like κατάρα in Gal. 3:13,
necessarily includes in itself the notion of guilt.” Meyer adds,
however: “The guilt of which Christ appears as bearer was not his
own (μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν); hence the guilt of men was transferred
to him; consequently the justification of men is imputative.” Here the
implication that the guilt which Christ bears is his simply by
imputation seems to us contrary to the analogy of faith. As Adam's
sin is ours only because we are actually one with Adam, and as
Christ's righteousness is imputed to us only as we are actually united
to Christ, so our sins are imputed to Christ only as Christ is actually
one with the race. He was “made sin”by being made one with the
sinners; he took our guilt by taking our nature. He who “knew no
sin” came to be “sin for us” by being born of a sinful stock; by
inheritance the common guilt of the race became his. Guilt was not
simply imputed to Christ; it was imparted also.

This exposition may be made more clear by putting the two

contrasted thoughts in parallel columns, as follows:

Made righteousness in him = Made sin for us =

righteous persons; a sinful person;
justified persons; a condemned person;
freed from guilt, or put under guilt, or
obligation to suffer; obligation to suffer;
by natural union with the
by spiritual union with Christ.
race.

For a good exposition of 2 Cor. 5:21, Gal. 3:13, and Rom. 3:25, 26,
see Denney, Studies in Theology, 109-124.

The Atonement, then, on the part of God, has its

ground (1) in the holiness of God, which must visit
sin with condemnation, even though this
condemnation brings death to his Son; and (2) in the
love of God, which itself provides the sacrifice, by
suffering in and with his Son for the sins of men, but
through that suffering opening a way and means of
salvation.

The Atonement, on the part of man, is accomplished

through (1) the solidarity of the race; of which (2)
Christ is the life, and so its representative and
surety; (3) justly yet voluntarily bearing its guilt and
shame and condemnation as his own.

Melanchthon: “Christ was made sin for us, not only in respect to
punishment, but primarily by being chargeable with guilt also (culpæ
et reatus)”—quoted by Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 3:95,
102, 103, 107; also 1:307, 314 sq. Thomasius says that “Christ bore
the guilt of the race by imputation; but as in the case of the
imputation of Adam's sin to us, imputation of our sins to Christ
presupposes a real relationship. Christ appropriated our sin. He sank
himself into our guilt.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:442 (Syst. Doct.,
3:350, 351), agrees with Thomasius, that “Christ entered into our
natural mortality, which for us is a penal condition, and into the state
of collective guilt, so far as it is an evil, a burden to be borne; not
that he had personal guilt, but rather that he entered into our guilt-
laden common life, not as a stranger, but as one actually belonging
to it—put under its law, according to the will of the Father and of his
own love.”
When, and how, did Christ take this guilt and this penalty upon him?
With regard to penalty, we have no difficulty in answering that, as
his whole life of suffering was propitiatory, so penalty rested upon
him from the very beginning of his life. This penalty was inherited,
and was the consequence of Christ's taking human nature (Gal. 4:4,
5—“born of a woman, born under the law”). But penalty and guilt
are correlates; if Christ inherited penalty, it must have been because
he inherited guilt. This subjection to the common guilt of the race
was intimated in Jesus' circumcision (Luke 2:21); in his ritual
purification (Luke 2:22—“their purification”—i. e., the purification of
Mary and the babe; see Lange, Life of Christ; Commentaries of
Alford, Webster and Wilkinson; and An. Par. Bible); in his legal
redemption (Luke 2:23, 24; cf. Ex. 13:2, 13); and in his baptism
(Mat. 3:15—“thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness”). The
baptized person went [pg 762]down into the water, as one laden
with sin and guilt, in order that this sin and guilt might be buried
forever, and that he might rise from the typical grave to a new and
holy life. (Ebrard: “Baptism = death.”) So Christ's submission to
John's baptism of repentance was not only a consecration to death,
but also a recognition and confession of his implication in that guilt
of the race for which death was the appointed and inevitable penalty
(cf. Mat. 10:38; Luke 12:50; Mat. 26:39); and, as his baptism was a
prefiguration of his death, we may learn from his baptism something
with regard to the meaning of his death. See further, under The
Symbolism of Baptism.

As one who had had guilt, Christ was “justified in the spirit” (1 Tim.
3:16); and this justification appears to have taken place after he
“was manifested in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16), and when “he was
raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Compare Rom. 1:4
—“declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit
of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead”; 6:7-10—“he that
hath died is justified from sin. But if we died with Christ, we believe
that we shall also live with him; knowing that Christ being raised
from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over
him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once; but the life
that he liveth, he liveth unto God”—here all Christians are conceived
of as ideally justified in the justification of Christ, when Christ died
for our sins and rose again. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son in the
likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh”—here
Meyer says: “The sending does not precede the condemnation; but
the condemnation is effected in and with the sending.” John 16:10
—“of righteousness, because I go to the Father”; 19:30—“It is
finished.” On 1 Tim. 3:16, see the Commentary of Bengel.

If it be asked whether Jesus, then, before his death, was an

unjustified person, we answer that, while personally pure and well-
pleasing to God (Mat. 3:17), he himself was conscious of a race-
responsibility and a race-guilt which must be atoned for (John 12:27
—“Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me
from this hour. But for this cause came I unto this hour”); and that
guilty human nature in him endured at the last the separation from
God which constitutes the essence of death, sin's penalty (Mat.
27:46—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”). We must
remember that, as even the believer must “be judged according to
man in the flesh” (1 Pet. 4:6), that is, must suffer the death which
to unbelievers is the penalty of sin, although he “live according to
God in the Spirit,” so Christ, in order that we might be delivered
from both guilt and penalty, was “put to death in the flesh, but
made alive in the spirit” (3:18);—in other words, as Christ was man,
the penalty due to human guilt belonged to him to bear; but, as he
was God, he could exhaust that penalty, and could be a proper
substitute for others.

If it be asked whether he, who from the moment of the conception

“sanctified himself”(John 17:19), did not from that moment also
justify himself, we reply that although, through the retroactive
efficacy of his atonement and upon the ground of it, human nature
in him was purged of its depravity from the moment that he took
that nature; and although, upon the ground of that atonement,
believers before his advent were both sanctified and justified; yet his
own justification could not have proceeded upon the ground of his
atonement, and also his atonement have proceeded upon the
ground of his justification. This would be a vicious circle; somewhere
we must have a beginning. That beginning was in the cross, where
guilt was first purged (Heb. 1:3—“when he had made purification of
sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”; Mat. 27:42
—“He saved others; himself he cannot save”; cf. Rev. 13:8—“the
Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”).

If it be said that guilt and depravity are practically inseparable, and

that, if Christ had guilt, he must have had depravity also, we reply
that in civil law we distinguish between them,—the conversion of a
murderer would not remove his obligation to suffer upon the
gallows; and we reply further, that in justification we distinguish
between them,—depravity still remaining, though guilt is removed.
So we may say that Christ takes guilt without depravity, in order that
we may have depravity without guilt. See page 645; also Böhl,
Incarnation des göttlichen Wortes; Pope, Higher Catechism, 118; A.
H. Strong, on the Necessity of the Atonement, in Philosophy and
Religion, 213-219. Per contra, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:59 note,
82.

Christ therefore, as incarnate, rather revealed the

atonement than made it. The historical work of
atonement was finished upon the Cross, but that
historical work only revealed to men the atonement
made both before and since by the extra-mundane
Logos. The eternal Love of God suffering the
necessary reaction of his own Holiness against the
sin of his creatures and with a view to their salvation
—this is the essence of the Atonement.

[pg 763]

Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 252, 253—“Christ, as God's atonement,

is the revelation and discovery of the fact that sacrifice is as deep in
God as his being. He is a holy Creator.... He must take upon himself
the shame and pain of sin.” The earthly tabernacle and its sacrifices
were only the shadow of those in the heavens, and Moses was
bidden to make the earthly after the pattern which he saw in the
mount. So the historical atonement was but the shadowing forth to
dull and finite minds of an infinite demand of the divine holiness and
an infinite satisfaction rendered by the divine love. Godet, S. S.
Times, Oct. 16, 1886—“Christ so identified himself with the race he
came to save, by sharing its life or its very blood, that when the race
itself was redeemed from the curse of sin, his resurrection followed
as the first fruits of that redemption”; Rom. 4:25—“delivered up for
our trespasses ... raised for our justification.”

Simon, Redemption of Man, 322—“If the Logos is generally the

Mediator of the divine immanence in Creation, especially in man; if
men are differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if the
Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation, i. e.,
the principle of all form—must not the self-perversion of these
human differentiations necessarily react on him who is their
constitutive principle? 339—Remember that men have not first to
engraft themselves into Christ, the living whole.... They subsist
naturally in him, and they have to separate themselves, cut
themselves off from him, if they are to be separate. This is the
mistake made in the ‘Life in Christ’ theory. Men are treated as in
some sense out of Christ, and as having to get into connection with
Christ.... It is not that we have to create the relation,—we have
simply to accept, to recognize, to ratify it. Rejecting Christ is not so
much refusal to become one with Christ, as it is refusal to remain
one with him, refusal to let him be our life.”

A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 33, 172—“When God breathed into

man's nostrils the breath of life, he communicated freedom, and
made possible the creature's self-chosen alienation from himself, the
giver of that life. While man could never break the natural bond
which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond, and
could introduce even into the life of God a principle of discord and
evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger; you partially isolate the
finger, diminish its nutrition, bring about atrophy and disease. Yet
the life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to
untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member. The
illustration is far from adequate; but it helps at a single point. There
has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power,
spiritually, to isolate himself from God, while yet he is naturally
joined to God, and is wholly dependent upon God for the removal of
the sin which has so separated him from his Maker. Sin is the act of
the creature, but salvation is the act of the Creator.

“If you could imagine a finger endowed with free will and trying to
sunder its connection with the body by tying a string around itself,
you would have a picture of man trying to sunder his connection
with Christ. What is the result of such an attempt? Why, pain, decay;
possible, nay, incipient death, to the finger. By what law? By the law
of the organism, which is so constituted as to maintain itself against
its own disruption by the revolt of the members. The pain and death
of the finger is the reaction of the whole against the treason of the
part. The finger suffers pain. But are there no results of pain to the
body? Does not the body feel pain also? How plain it is that no such
pain can be confined to the single part! The heart feels, aye, the
whole organism feels, because all the parts are members one of
another. It not only suffers, but that suffering tends to remedy the
evil and to remove its cause. The body summons its forces, pours
new tides of life into the dying member, strives to rid the finger of
the ligature that binds it. So through all the course of history, Christ,
the natural life of the race, has been afflicted in the affliction of
humanity and has suffered for human sin. This suffering has been an
atoning suffering, since it has been due to righteousness. If God had
not been holy, if God had not made all nature express the holiness of
his being, if God had not made pain and loss the necessary
consequences of sin, then Christ would not have suffered. But since
these things are sin's penalty and Christ is the life of the sinful race,
it must needs be that Christ should suffer. There is nothing arbitrary
in laying upon him the iniquities of us all. Original grace, like original
sin, is only the ethical interpretation of biological facts.” See also
Ames, on Biological Aspects of the Atonement, in Methodist Review,
Nov. 1905:943-953.

In favor of the Substitutionary or Ethical view of the

atonement we may urge the following
considerations:

[pg 764]
(a) It rests upon correct philosophical principles with
regard to the nature of will, law, sin, penalty,
righteousness.

This theory holds that there are permanent states, as well as

transient acts, of the will; and that the will is not simply the faculty
of volitions, but also the fundamental determination of the being to
an ultimate end. It regards law as having its basis, not in arbitrary
will or in governmental expediency, but rather in the nature of God,
and as being a necessary transcript of God's holiness. It considers
sin to consist not simply in acts, but in permanent evil states of the
affections and will. It makes the object of penalty to be, not the
reformation of the offender, or the prevention of evil doing, but the
vindication of justice, outraged by violation of law. It teaches that
righteousness is not benevolence or a form of benevolence, but a
distinct and separate attribute of the divine nature which demands
that sin should be visited with punishment, apart from any
consideration of the useful results that will flow therefrom.

(b) It combines in itself all the valuable elements in

the theories before mentioned, while it avoids their
inconsistencies, by showing the deeper principle
upon which each of these elements is based.

The Ethical theory admits the indispensableness of Christ's example,

advocated by the Socinian theory; the moral influence of his
suffering, urged by the Bushnellian theory; the securing of the safety
of government, insisted on by the Grotian theory; the participation
of the believer in Christ's new humanity, taught by the Irvingian
theory; the satisfaction to God's majesty for the elect, made so
much of by the Anselmic theory. But the Ethical theory claims that all
these other theories require, as a presupposition for their effective
working, that ethical satisfaction to the holiness of God which is
rendered in guilty human nature by the Son of God who took that
nature to redeem it.

(c) It most fully meets the requirements of Scripture,

by holding that the necessity of the atonement is
absolute, since it rests upon the demands of
immanent holiness, the fundamental attribute of
God.

Acts 17:3—“it behooved the Christ to suffer, and to rise again from
the dead”—lit.: “it was necessary for the Christ to suffer”; Luke
24:26—“Behooved it not the Christ to suffer these things, and to
enter into his glory?”—lit.: “Was it not necessary that the Christ
should suffer these things?” It is not enough to say that Christ must
suffer in order that the prophecies might be fulfilled. Why was it
prophesied that he should suffer? Why did God purpose that he
should suffer? The ultimate necessity is a necessity in the nature of
God.

Plato, Republic, 2:361—“The righteous man who is thought to be

unrighteous will be scourged, racked, bound; will have his eyes put
out; and finally, having endured all sorts of evil, will be impaled.”
This means that, as human society is at present constituted, even a
righteous person must suffer for the sins of the world. “Mors mortis
Morti mortem nisi morte dedisset, Æternæ vitæ janua clausa
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