In my last lecture I tried to effect a transition from the idea of
religious truth as something believed by the individual, and accepted
by him on the evidence of his own Reason and Conscience to the idea of
a Religion considered as a body of religious truth handed down by
tradition in an organized society. The higher Religions--those which
have passed beyond the stage of merely tribal or national Religion--are
based upon the idea that religious truth of enduring value has been
from time to time revealed to particular persons, the Founders or
Apostles or Reformers of such religions. We recognized the validity of
this idea of Revelation, and the supreme importance to the moral and
religious life of such historical revelations, on one condition--that
the claim of any historical Religion to the allegiance of its followers
must be held to rest in the last resort upon the appeal which it makes
to their Reason and Conscience: though the individual may often be
{158} quite justified in accepting and relying upon the Reason and
Conscience of the religious Society rather than upon his own.
The view which I have taken of Revelation makes it quite independent of
what are commonly called miracles. All that I have said is quite
consistent with the unqualified acceptance or with the unqualified
rejection of miracles. But some of you may perhaps expect me to
explain a little more fully my own attitude towards that question. And
therefore I will say this much--that, if we regard a miracle as
implying a suspension of a law of nature, I do not think we can call
such a suspension _a priori_ incredible; but the enormous experience
which we have of the actual regularity of the laws of nature, and of
the causes which in certain states of the human mind lead to the belief
in miracles, makes such an event in the highest degree improbable. To
me at least it would seem practically impossible to get sufficient
evidence for the occurrence of such an event in the distant past: all
our historical reasoning presupposes the reign of law. But it is being
more and more admitted by theologians who are regarded as quite
orthodox and rather conservative, that the idea of a miracle need not
necessarily imply such a suspension of natural law. And on the other
hand, decidedly critical and liberal theologians are more and more
disposed to admit {159} that many of the abnormal events commonly
called miraculous may very well have occurred without involving any
real suspension of natural law. Recent advances in psychological
knowledge have widened our conception of the possible influence of mind
over matter and of mind over mind. Whether an alleged miraculous event
is to be accepted or not must, as it seems to me, depend partly upon
the amount of critically sifted historical evidence which can be
produced for it, partly upon the nature of the event itself--upon the
question whether it is or is not of such a kind that we can with any
probability suppose that it might be accounted for either by known laws
or by laws at present imperfectly understood.
To apply these principles in detail to the New Testament narratives
would involve critical discussions which are outside the purpose of
these lectures. I will only say that few critical scholars would deny
that some recorded miracles even in the New Testament are unhistorical.
When they find an incident like the healing of Malchus's ear omitted in
the earlier, and inserted in the later redaction of a common original,
they cannot but recognize the probability of traditional amplification.
At the same time few liberal theologians will be disposed to doubt the
general fact that our Lord did cure some diseases by spiritual
influence, or that an appearance of our Lord to the disciples--of
whatever nature--actually {160} did occur, and was the means of
assuring them of his continued life and power. At all events I do not
myself doubt these two facts. But at least when miracles are not
regarded as constituting real exceptions to natural law, it is obvious
that they will not prove the truth of any teaching which may have been
connected with them; while, even if we treat the Gospel miracles as
real exceptions to law, the difficulty of proving them in the face of
modern critical enquiry is so great that the evidence will hardly come
home to any one not previously convinced, on purely spiritual grounds,
of the exceptional character of our Lord's personality and mission.
This being so, I do not think that our answer to the problem of
miracles, whatever it be, can play any very important part in Christian
Apologetic. When we have become Christians on other grounds, the acts
of healing may still retain a certain value as illustrating the
character of the Master, and the Resurrection vision as proclaiming the
truth of Immortality in a way which will come home to minds not easily
accessible to abstract argument. The true foundation not merely for
belief in the teaching of Christ, but also for the Christian's
reverence for his Person, must, as it seems to me, be found in the
appeal which his words and his character still make to the Conscience
and Reason of mankind. This proposition would be {161} perhaps more
generally accepted if I were to say that the claim of Christ to
allegiance rests upon the way in which he satisfies the heart, the
aspirations, the religious needs of mankind. And I should be quite
willing to adopt such language, if you will only include respect for
historic fact and intellectual truth among these religious needs, and
admit that a reasonable faith must rest on something better than mere
emotion. Fully to exhibit the grounds of this claim of Christ upon us
would involve an examination of the Gospel narratives in detail: it
would involve an attempt to present to you what was this teaching, this
character, this religious consciousness which has commanded the homage
of mankind. To attempt such a task would be out of place in a brief
course of lectures devoted to a particular aspect of Religion--its
relation to Philosophy. Here I must assume that you feel the spiritual
supremacy of Christ--his unique position in the religious history of
the world and his unique importance for the spiritual life of each one
of us--; and go on to ask what assertions such a conviction warrants us
in making about his person and nature, what in short should be our
attitude towards the traditional doctrines of the Christian Church.
You may know something of the position taken up in this matter by the
dominant school of what I may call believing liberal Theology in {162}
Germany--the school which takes its name from the great theologian
Ritschl, but which will be best known to most Englishmen in connexion
with the name of Prof. Harnack, though it may be well to remember that
Harnack is nearer to the left than to the right wing of that school.
The fundamental principle of that school is to base the claims of
Christianity mainly upon the appeal which the picture of the life,
teaching, character, and personality of Christ makes to the moral and
religious consciousness of mankind. Their teaching is Christo-centric
in the highest possible degree: but they are almost or entirely
indifferent to the dogmatic formulae which may be employed to express
this supreme religious importance of Christ. In putting the personal
and historical Christ, and not any doctrine about him, in the centre of
the religious life I believe they are right. But this principle is
sometimes asserted in an exaggerated and one-sided manner. In the
first place they are somewhat contemptuous of Philosophy, and of
philosophic argument even for such fundamental truths as the existence
of God. I do not see that the subjective impression made by Christ can
by itself prove the fact of God's existence. We must first believe
that there is a God to be revealed before we can be led to believe in
Christ as the supreme Revealer. I do not believe that the modern world
will permanently accept a view of the Universe {163} which does not
commend itself to its Reason. The Ritschlians talk about the truth of
Religion resting upon value-judgements. I can quite understand that a
value-judgement may tell us the supreme value of Christ's character and
his fitness to be treated as the representative of God to us, when once
we believe in God: but I cannot see how any value-judgement taken by
itself can assure us of that existence. Value is one thing: existence
is another. To my mind a Christian Apologetic should begin, like the
old Apologies of Justin or Aristides, with showing the essential
reasonableness of Christ's teaching about God and its essential harmony
with the highest philosophic teaching about duty, about the divine
nature, about the soul and its eternal destiny. The Ritschlian is too
much disposed to underrate the value of all previous religious and
ethical teaching, even of Judaism at its highest: he is not content
with making Christ the supreme Revealer: he wants to make him the only
Revealer. And when we turn to post-Christian religious history, he is
apt to treat all the great developments of religious and ethical
thought from the time of the Apostles to our own day as simply
worthless and even mischievous corruptions of the original, and only
genuine, Christianity. He tends to reduce Christianity to the
_ipsissima verba_ of its Founder. The Ritschlian dislikes Dogma, not
because it may be at times a {164} misdevelopment, but because it is a
development; not because some of it may be antiquated Philosophy, but
simply because it is Philosophy.[1]
In order to treat fairly this question of doctrinal development, it
must be remembered that what is commonly called dogma is only a
part--perhaps not the most important part--of that development.
Supreme as I believe to be the value of Christ's great principle of
Brotherhood, it is impossible to deny that, if we look in detail at the
moral ideal of any educated Christian at the present day, we shall find
in it many elements which cannot explicitly be discovered in the
_ipsissima verba_ of Christ and still less of his Apostles. And
development in the ethical ideal always carries with it some
development in a man's conception of God and the Universe. Some of
these elements are due to a gradual bringing out into clear
consciousness, and an application to new details, of principles latent
in the actual words of Christ; others to an infusion of Greek
Philosophy; others to the practical experience and the scientific
discoveries of the modern world. Christianity in the course of
nineteen centuries has gradually absorbed into itself many ideas from
various sources, {165} christianizing them in the process. Many ideas,
much Hellenic Philosophy, many Hellenic ideals of life, many Roman
ideas of government and organization have thus, in the excellent phrase
of Professor Gardner, been 'baptized into Christ.' This capacity of
absorbing into itself elements of spiritual life which were originally
independent of it is not a defect of historical Christianity, but one
of its qualifications for being accepted by the modern world as a
universal, an absolute, a final Religion.
It does not seem to me possible to recognize the claim of any
historical Religion to be final and ultimate, unless it include within
itself a principle of development. Let me, as briefly as I can,
illustrate what I mean. It is most clearly and easily seen in the case
of Morality. If the idea of a universal Religion is to mean that any
detailed code of Morals laid down at a definite moment of history can
serve by itself for the guidance of all human life in all after ages,
we may at once dismiss the notion as a dream. In nothing did our Lord
show his greatness and the fitness of his Religion for universality
more than in abstaining from drawing up such a code. He confined
himself to laying down a few great principles, with illustrations
applicable to the circumstances of his immediate hearers. Those
principles require development and application to the needs and {166}
circumstances of successive ages before they can suffice to guide us in
the details of conduct. To effect this development and application has
been historically the work of the Church which owes its origin to the
disciples whom he gathered around him. If we may accept the teaching
of the fourth Gospel as at least having germs in the actual utterances
of our Lord, he himself foresaw the necessity of such a development.
At all events the belief in the continued work of God's Spirit in human
Society is an essential principle of the Christian Religion as it was
taught by the first followers of its Founder. Take for instance the
case of slavery. Our Lord never condemned slavery: it is not certain
that he would have done so, had the case been presented to him. Very
likely his answer would have been 'Who made me a judge or a divider,'
or 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.' No one on
reflection can now fail to see the essential incompatibility between
slavery and the Christian spirit; yet it was perhaps fourteen hundred
years before a single Christian thinker definitely enunciated that
incompatibility, and more than eighteen hundred years before slavery
was actually banished from all nominally Christian lands. Who can
doubt that many features of our existing social system are equally
incompatible with the principles of Christ's teaching, and that the
{167} accepted Christian morality of a hundred years hence will
definitely condemn many things which the average Christian Conscience
now allows?
And then there is another kind of development in Ethics which is
equally necessary. The Christian law of Love bids us promote the true
good of our fellow-men, bids us regard another man's good as equally
valuable with our own or with the like good of any other. But what is
this good life which we are to promote? As to that our Lord has only
laid down a few very general principles--the supreme value of Love
itself, the superiority of the spiritual to the carnal, the importance
of sexual purity. These principles our consciences still acknowledge,
and there are no others of equal importance. But what of the
intellectual life? Has that no value? Our Lord never depreciated it,
as so many religious founders and reformers have done. But he has
given us no explicit guidance about it. When the Christian ideal
embraced within itself a recognition of the value and duty of Culture,
it was borrowing from Greece. And when we turn from Ethics to
Theology, the actual fact of development is no less indisputable.
Every alteration of the ethical ideal has brought with it some
alteration in our idea of God. We can no longer endure theories of the
Atonement which are opposed to modern ideas of Justice, though they
were quite compatible with {168} patristic or medieval ideas of
Justice. The advances of Science have altered our whole conception of
God's mode of acting upon or governing the world. None of these things
are religiously so important as the great principle of the Fatherhood
of God, nor have they in any way tended to modify its truth or its
supreme importance. But they do imply that our Theology is not and
cannot be in all points the same as that of the first Christians.
Now with these presuppositions let us approach the question of that
great structure of formal dogma which the Church has built upon the
foundation of Christ's teaching. A development undoubtedly it is; but,
while we must not assume that every development which has historically
taken place is necessarily true or valuable, it is equally
unphilosophical to assume that, because it is a development, it is
necessarily false or worthless. Our Lord himself did, indeed, claim to
be the Messiah; the fact of Messiahship was what was primarily meant by
the title 'Son of God.' Even in the Synoptists he exhibits a
consciousness of a direct divine mission supremely important for his
own race; and, before the close, we can perhaps discover a growing
conviction that the truth which he was teaching was meant for a larger
world. Starting from and developing these ideas, his followers set
themselves to devise terms which should express their own sense of
their Master's unique {169} religious value and importance, to express
what they felt he had been to their own souls, what they felt he might
be to all who accepted his message. Even to St. Paul the term 'Son of
God' still meant primarily 'the Messiah': but in the light of his
conception of Jesus, the Messianic idea expanded till the Christ was
exalted to a position far above anything which Jewish prophecy or
Apocalypse had ever claimed for him. And the means of expressing these
new ideas were found naturally and inevitably in the current
philosophical terminology of the day. With the fourth Gospel, if not
already with St. Paul, there was infused into the teaching of the
Church a new element. From the Jewish-Alexandrian speculative Theology
the author borrowed the term Logos to express what he conceived to be
the cosmic importance of Christ's position. He accepted from that
speculation--probably from Philo--the theory which personified or
half-personified that Logos or Wisdom of God through which God was
represented in the Old Testament as creating the world and inspiring
the prophets. This Logos through whom God had throughout the ages been
more and more fully revealing Himself had at last become actually
incarnate in Jesus Christ. This Word of God is also described as truly
God, though in the fourth Gospel the relation of the Father to the
Word--at {170} least to the Word before the Incarnation--is left wholly
vague and undefined.
From these comparatively simple beginnings sprang centuries of
controversy culminating in that elaborate system of dogma which is
often little understood even by its most vigorous champions. You know
in a very general way the result. The Logos was made more and more
distinct from God, endowed with a more and more decidedly personal
existence. Then, when the interests of Monotheism seemed to be
endangered, the attempt was made to save it by asserting the
subordination of the Son to the Father. The result was that by
Arianism the Son was reduced to the position of an inferior God.
Polytheism had once more to be averted by asserting in even stronger
terms not merely the equality of the Son with the Father but also the
Unity of the God who is both Father and Son. The doctrine of the
Divinity of the Holy Ghost went through a somewhat similar series of
stages. At first regarded as identical with the Word, a distinction
was gradually effected. The Word was said to have been incarnate in
Jesus; while it was through the Holy Ghost that the subsequent work of
God was carried on in human hearts. And by similar stages the equality
of the Holy Ghost to Father and to Son was gradually evolved; while it
was more and more strongly asserted that, in spite of the eternal
distinction of {171} Persons, it was one and the same God who revealed
Himself in all the activities attributed to each of them.
Side by side with these controversies about the relation between the
Father and the Word, there was a gradual development of doctrine as to
the relation between the Logos and the human Jesus in whom he took up
his abode. Frequently the idea of any real humanity in Jesus was all
but lost. That was at last saved by the Catholic formula 'perfect God
and perfect man'; though it cannot be denied that popular thought in
all ages has never quite discarded the tendency to think of Jesus as
simply God in human form, and not really man at all. Even now there
are probably hundreds of people who regard themselves as particularly
orthodox Churchmen who yet do not know that the Church teaches that our
Lord had a human soul and a human will.
What are we to make of all that vast structure, of the elaboration and
complication of which the Constantinopolitan Creed which we miscall
Nicene and even the so-called Athanasian Creed give very little idea to
those who do not also know something of the Councils, the Fathers, and
the Schoolmen? Has it all a modern meaning? Can it be translated into
terms of our modern thought and speech? For I suppose it hardly needs
demonstration--that such {172} translation is necessary, if it be
possible. I doubt whether any man in this audience who has not made a
special study of the subject, will get up and say that the meaning of
such terms as 'substance,' 'essence,' 'nature,' 'hypostasis,' 'person,'
'eternal generation,' 'procession,' 'hypostatic union,' and the like is
at once evident to him by the light of nature and an ordinary modern
education. And those who know most about the matter will most fully
realize the difficulty of saying exactly what was meant by such phrases
at this or that particular moment or by this or that particular
thinker. A thorough discussion of this subject from the point of view
of one who acknowledges the supreme claims of Christ upon the modern
mind, and is yet willing fairly to examine the traditional Creed in the
light of modern philosophical culture, is a task which very much needs
to be undertaken. I doubt if it has been satisfactorily performed yet.
Even if I possessed a tithe of the learning necessary for that task, I
could obviously not undertake it now. But a few remarks on the subject
may be of use for the guidance of our personal religious life in this
matter:
(1) I should like once more to emphasize the fact that the really
important thing, from the point of view of the spiritual life of the
individual soul, is our personal attitude towards our Lord himself and
his teaching, and not the phrases in which we express {173} it. A man
who believes what Christ taught about God's Fatherhood, about human
brotherhood and human duty, about sin, the need for repentance, the
Father's readiness to forgive, the value of Prayer, the certainty of
Immortality--the man who finds the ideal of his life in the character
of Jesus, and strives by the help which he has supplied to think of God
and feel towards God as he did, to imitate him in his life, to live
(like him) in communion with the Father and in the hope of
Immortality--he is a Christian, and a Christian in the fullest sense of
the word. He will find in that faith all that is necessary (to use the
old phrase) for salvation--for personal goodness and personal Religion.
And such a man will be saved, and saved through Christ; even though he
has never heard of the Creeds, or deliberately rejects many of the
formulae which the Church or the Churches have 'built upon' that one
foundation.
(2) At the same time, if we believe in the supreme importance of Christ
for the world, for the religious life of the Church and of the
individual, it is surely convenient to have some language in which to
express our sense of that importance. The actual personal attitude
towards Christ is the essential thing: but as a means towards that
attitude it is of importance to express what Christ has actually been
to others, and what he ought to be to ourselves. Children {174} and
adults alike require to have the claims of Christ presented to them
before they can verify them by their own experience: and this requires
articulate language of some kind. Religion can only be handed down,
diffused, propagated by an organized society: and a religious society
must have some means of handing on its religious ideas. It is possible
to hold that under other conditions a different set of terms might have
expressed the truth as well as those which have actually been enshrined
in the New Testament, the Liturgies, and the Creeds. But the phrases
which have been actually adopted surely have a strong presumption in
their favour, even if it were merely through the difficulty of changing
them, and the importance of unity, continuity, corporate life. It is
easier to explain, or even if need be, alter in some measure the
meaning of an accepted formula than to introduce a new one. Religious
development has at all times taken place largely in this way. Our Lord
himself entirely transformed the meaning of God's Fatherhood,
Messiahship, the Kingdom of God, the people of God, the true Israel.
At all events we should endeavour to discover the maximum of truth that
any traditional formula can be made to yield before we discard it in
favour of a new one. If we want to worship and to work with Christ's
Church, we must do our best to give the maximum of meaning {175} to the
language in which it expresses its faith and its devotion.
(3) We must insist strongly upon the thoroughly human character of
Christ's own consciousness. Jesus did not--so I believe the critical
study of the Gospels leads us to think--himself claim to be God, or to
be Son of God in any sense but that of Messiahship. He claimed to
speak with authority: he claimed a divine mission: he claimed to be a
Revealer of divine truth. The fourth Gospel has been of infinite
service to spiritual Christianity. It has given the world a due sense
of the spiritual importance of Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the
Life. Perhaps Christianity could hardly have expanded into a universal
Religion without that Gospel. But we cannot regard all that the
Johannine Christ says about himself as the _ipsissima verba_ of Jesus.
The picture is idealized in accordance with the writer's own
conceptions, though after all its Theology is very much simpler than
the later Theology which has grown out of it permits most people to
see. We must not let these discourses blind us to the human character
of Christ's consciousness. And this real humanity must carry with it
the recognition of the thoroughly human limitations of his knowledge.
The Bishop of Birmingham has prepared the way for the union of a really
historical view of Christ's life with a reasonable interpretation of
the Catholic {176} doctrine about him, by reviving the ancient view as
to the limitation of his intellectual knowledge;[2] but the principle
must be carried in some ways further than the Bishop himself would be
prepared to go. The accepted Christology must be distinctly recognized
as the Church's reflection and comment upon Christ's work and its
value, not as the actual teaching of the Master about himself.
(4) It must likewise be recognized that the language in which the
Church expressed this attitude towards Christ was borrowed from Greek
Metaphysics, particularly from Plato and Neo-Platonism in the patristic
period, and from Aristotle in the Middle Ages. And we cannot
completely separate language from thought. It was not merely Greek
technical phrases but Greek ways of thinking which were imported into
Catholic Christianity. And the language, the categories, the ideas of
Greek Philosophy were to some extent different from those of modern
times. The most Platonically-minded thinker of modern times does not
really think exactly as Plato thought: the most Catholic-minded thinker
of modern times, if he has also breathed the atmosphere of modern
Science and modern Culture, cannot really think exactly as Athanasius
or Basil thought. I {177} do not suppose that any modern mind can
think itself back into exactly the state of mind which an ancient
Father was in, when he used the term Logos. This central idea of the
Logos is not a category of modern thought. We cannot really think of a
Being who is as distinct from the Father as he is represented as being
in some of the patristic utterances--I say advisedly some, for widely
different modes of thought are found in Fathers of equal authority--and
yet so far one with him that we can say 'One God, one spiritual Being,
and not two.' Nor are we under any obligation to accept these formulae
as representing profound mysteries which we cannot understand: they
were simply pieces of metaphysical thinking, some of them valuable and
successful pieces of thinking, others less so. We must use them as
helps, not as fetters to our thought. But, though we cannot think
ourselves back into exactly the same intellectual condition as a
fourth- or fifth-century Father, there is no reason why we should not
recognize the fundamental truth of the religious idea which he was
trying to express. A modern Philosopher would probably express that
thought somewhat in this manner. 'The whole world is a revelation of
God in a sense, and still more so is the human mind: all through the
ages God has gone on revealing Himself more and more in human
consciousness, especially through the prophets and other {178}
exceptionally inspired men. The fullest and completest revelation of
Himself was made once for all in the person and teaching of Jesus, in
whom we recognize a revelation of God adequate to all our spiritual
needs, when developed and interpreted by the continued presence of
God's Spirit in the world and particularly in the Church which grew out
of the little company of Jesus' friends.'
(5) I do not think at the present day even quite orthodox people are
much concerned about the technicalities of the conciliar Theology, or
even about the niceties of the Athanasian Creed. They are even a
little suspicious sometimes that much talk about the doctrine of the
Logos is only intended to evade a plain answer to the supreme question
of the Divinity of Christ. You will expect me perhaps to say something
about that question. I would first observe that the popular term
'divinity of Christ' is apt to give a somewhat misleading impression of
what the orthodox teaching on the subject really is. For one thing, it
is apt to suggest the idea of a pre-existent human consciousness of
Jesus, which would be contrary to Catholic teaching. The Logos--the
eternal Son or Reason of God--pre-existed; but not the man Jesus Christ
who was born at a particular moment of history, and who is still,
according to Catholic Theology, a distinct human soul perfectly and for
ever united with the Word. {179} And then again, it is apt to suggest
the heretical idea that the whole Trinity was incarnate in Christ, and
not merely the Word. Orthodox Theology does not teach that God the
Father became incarnate in Christ, and suffered upon the Cross. And
lastly, the constant iteration of the phrase 'Divinity of Christ' tends
to the concealment of the other half of the Catholic doctrine--the real
humanity of Christ. To speak of the God-manhood of Christ or the
indwelling of God in Christ would be a truer representation even of the
strictest orthodox doctrine, apart from all modern re-interpretations.
But even so, when all this is borne in mind, it may be asked, What is
the real meaning of saying that a man was also God? I would answer,
'Whether it is possible to give a modern, intelligible, philosophically
defensible meaning to the idea of Christ's Divinity depends entirely
upon the question what we conceive to be the true relation between
Humanity in general and God.' If (as I have attempted to show) we are
justified in thinking of all human consciousness as constituting a
partial reproduction of the divine Mind; if we are justified in
thinking of human Reason, and particularly of the human Conscience, as
constituting in some measure and in some sense a revelation by means of
which we can rise to a contemplation of the divine nature; if
Personality (as we know it in man) is the highest category within our
knowledge; then {180} there is a real meaning in talking of one
particular man being also divine; of the divine Reason or Logos as
dwelling after a unique, exceptional, pre-eminent manner in him.
As Dr. Edward Caird has remarked, all the metaphysical questions which
were formerly discussed as to the relation between the divine and the
human nature in Christ, are now being discussed again in reference to
the relation of Humanity in general to God. We cannot say intelligibly
that God dwells in Christ, unless we have already recognized that in a
sense God dwells and reveals Himself in Humanity at large, and in each
particular human soul. But I fully recognize that, if this is all that
is meant by the expression 'divinity of Christ,' that doctrine would be
evacuated of nearly all that makes it precious to the hearts of
Christian people. And therefore it is all-important that we should go
on to insist that men do not reveal God equally. The more developed
intellect reveals God more completely than that of the child or the
savage: and (far more important from a religious point of view), the
higher and more developed moral consciousness reveals Him more than the
lower, and above all the actually better man reveals God more than the
worse man. Now, if in the life, teaching, and character of Christ--in
his moral and religious consciousness, and in the life and character
which {181} so completely expressed and illustrated that
consciousness--we can discover the highest revelation of the divine
nature, we can surely attach a real meaning to the language of the
Creeds which singles him out from all the men that ever lived as the
one in whom the ideal relation of man to God is most completely
realized. If God can only be known as revealed in Humanity, and Christ
is the highest representative of Humanity, we can very significantly
say 'Christ is _the_ Son of God, very God of very God, of one substance
with the Father,' though the phrase undoubtedly belongs to a
philosophical dialect which we do not habitually use.
(6) Behind the doctrine of the Incarnation looms the still more
technical doctrine of the Trinity. Yet after all, it is chiefly, I
believe, as a sort of necessary background or presupposition to the
idea of Christ's divine nature that modern religious people, not
professionally interested in Theology, attach importance to that
doctrine. They accept the doctrine in so far as it is implied by the
teaching of Scripture and by the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, but
they are not much attached to the technicalities of the Athanasian
Creed. The great objection to that Creed, apart from the damnatory
clauses, is the certainty that it will be misunderstood by most of
those who think they understand it at all. The {182} best thing we
could do with the Athanasian Creed is to drop it altogether: the next
best thing to it is to explain it, or at least so much of it as really
interests the ordinary layman--the doctrine of three Persons in one
God. And therefore it is important to insist in the strongest possible
way that the word 'Person' which has most unfortunately come to be the
technical term for what the Greeks more obscurely called the three
_huostaseis_ in the Godhead does not, and never did, mean what we
commonly understand by Personality--whether in the language of ordinary
life or of modern Philosophy. I do not deny that at certain periods
Theology did tend to think of the Logos as a distinct being from the
Father, a distinct consciousness with thoughts, will, desires, emotions
not identical with those of God the Father. The distinction was at
times pushed to a point which meant either sheer Tritheism, or
something which is incapable of being distinctly realized in thought at
all. But that is scarcely true of the Theology which was finally
accepted either by East or West. This is most distinctly seen in the
Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: and I would remind you that you
cannot be more orthodox than St. Thomas--the source not only of the
Theology professed by the Pope and taught in every Roman Seminary but
of the Theology embodied in our own Articles. St. Thomas' explanation
of the Trinity {183} is that God is at one and the same time Power or
Cause[3] (Father), Wisdom (Son), Will (Holy Ghost); or, since the Will
of God is always a loving Will, Love (Amor) is sometimes substituted
for Will (Voluntas) in explanation of the Holy Spirit.[4] How little
{184} St. Thomas thought of the 'Persons' as separate consciousnesses,
is best seen from his doctrine (taken from Augustine) that the love of
the Father for the Son is the Holy Spirit. The love of one Being for
himself or for another is not a Person in the natural, normal, modern
sense of the word: and it would be quite unorthodox to attribute
Personality to the Son in any other sense than that in which it is
attributed to the Holy Ghost. I do not myself attach any great
importance to these technical phrases. I do not {185} deny that the
supremely important truth that God has received His fullest revelation
in the historical Christ, and that He goes on revealing Himself in the
hearts of men, might have been otherwise, more simply, to modern minds
more intelligibly, expressed. There are detailed features of the
patristic or the scholastic version of the doctrine which involve
conceptions to which the most accomplished Professors of Theology would
find it difficult or impossible to give a modern meaning. I do not
know for instance that much would have been lost had Theology (with the
all but canonical writers Clement of Rome and Hermas, with Ignatius,
with Justin, with the philosophic Clement of Alexandria) continued to
speak indifferently of the Word and the Spirit. Yet taken by itself
this Thomist doctrine of the Trinity is one to which it is quite
possible to give a perfectly rational meaning, and a meaning probably
very much nearer to that which was really intended by its author than
the meaning which is usually put upon the Trinitarian formula by
popular religious thought. That God is Power, and Wisdom, and Love is
simply the essence of Christian Theism--not the less true because few
Unitarians would repudiate it.
(7) Once more let me briefly remind you that any claim for finality in
the Christian Religion must be based on its power of perpetual
development. {186} Belief in the continued work of the Holy Spirit in
the Church is an essential element of the Catholic Faith. We need not,
with the Ritschlian, contemptuously condemn the whole structure of
Christian doctrine because undoubtedly it is a development of what was
taught by Christ himself. Only, if we are to justify the development
of the past, we must go on to assert the same right and duty of
development in Ethics and in Theology for the Church of the future. In
the pregnant phrase of Loisy, the development which the Church is most
in need of at the present moment is precisely a development in the idea
of development itself.
But how can we tell (it may be asked), if we once admit that the
development of Religion does not end with the teaching of Christ, where
the development will stop? If we are to admit an indefinite
possibility of growth and change, how do we know that Christianity
itself will not one day be outgrown? If we once admit that the final
appeal is to the religious consciousness of the present, we must
acknowledge that it is not possible to demonstrate _a priori_ that the
Christian Religion is the final, universal, or absolute Religion. All
we can say is that we have no difficulty in recognizing that the
development which has so far taken place, in so far as it is a
development which we can approve and accept, seems to us a development
which leaves the {187} Religion still essentially the Religion of
Christ. In the whole structure of the modern Christian's religious
belief, that which was contributed by Christ himself is incomparably
the most important part--the basis of the whole structure. The
essentials of Religion and Morality still seem to us to be contained in
his teaching as they are contained nowhere else. All the rest that is
included in an enlightened modern Christian's religious creed is either
a direct working out of the principles already contained there, or (if
it has come from other sources) it has been transformed in the process
of adaptation. Nothing has been discovered in Religion and Morality
which tends in any way to diminish the unique reverence which we feel
for the person of Christ, the perfect sufficiency of his character to
represent and incarnate for us the character of God. It is a
completely gratuitous assumption to suppose that it will ever lose that
sufficiency. Even in the development of Science, there comes a time
when its fundamentals are virtually beyond the reach of
reconsideration. Still more in practical life, mere unmotived,
gratuitous possibilities may be disregarded. It weakens the hold of
fundamental convictions upon the mind to be perpetually contemplating
the possibility or probability of fundamental revision. We ought no
doubt to keep the spiritual ear ever open that we may always be hearing
what the Spirit saith unto {188} the Churches. But to look forward to
a time when any better way will be discovered of thinking of God than
Jesus' way of thinking of Him as a loving Father is as gratuitous as to
contemplate the probability of something in human life at present
unknown being discovered of greater value than Love. Until that
discovery is made, our Religion will still remain the Religion of him
who, by what he said and by what he was, taught the world to think of
God as the supreme Love and the supreme Holiness, the source of all
other love and all other holiness.