JESUS CHRIST
Three elements enter into every Christian's conception of his
Lord--history, experience and reflection. Jesus is to him a figure out
of the past, a force in the present, and a fact in his view of the
universe. Whether we be discussing the Christ of Paul, or of the Nicene
theologians, or of some thoughtful believer today, we must allow for the
memory of the Man of Nazareth handed down from those who knew Him in the
flesh, the acquaintance with the Lord of life resulting from personal
loyalty to His will, and the explanation of this Lord reached by the
mind, as, using the intellectual methods of its age, it tries to set His
figure in its mental world.
The Jesus of the primitive Church was One whom believers worshipped as
the Christ of God, in whose person and mission they saw the fulfilment
of Israel's prophecy and the inauguration of a new religious era. They
represent their conception of Him as corresponding to and created by His
own consciousness of Himself. He was aware of a unique relationship to
God--He is His Son, _the_ Son. And because of this divine sonship He is
the Messiah, commissioned to usher in the Kingdom of God, and to bring
forgiveness and eternal life to men. This He does by becoming their
Teacher and their lowly Servant, laying down His life for them in
suffering and death, and rising and returning to them as their Lord. He
appeals to them for faith in God, for loyalty to Himself as God's
Servant and Son, and for trust in His divine power to save them.
This conception of Jesus is given us in documents which must be
investigated and appraised as sources of historical knowledge. The four
gospels are our principal informants, and no other writings in existence
have been so often and so minutely examined. Among scholars at present
it is a common hypothesis that Mark's is the earliest narrative; that
this was combined with a _Collection of Sayings_ (compiled, perhaps, by
Matthew) and other material in our first gospel, and by another editor
(probably Luke) with the same or a similar _Collection of Sayings_ and
still other material in our third gospel. Later yet, a fourth evangelist
interpreted for the world of his day the Jesus of the first three
gospels in the light of his own and the Church's spiritual experience.
The earlier sources, as is usually and naturally the case with literary
records of the past, are considered historically more reliable than the
later. The words of Jesus in the form in which they are given in the
Synoptists are more nearly as Jesus spoke them, than in the form in
which they are recorded in _John_. There is a tendency, often found in
kindred documents, to make events more marvellous as the tradition is
handed on. In _Mark_, for instance, the Spirit descends upon Jesus "as a
dove," symbolizing the quietness with which the Divine Power possessed
Him; in _Luke_, the symbol is materialized, and the Holy Spirit descends
"in _bodily form_ as a dove." The writers interpret the narrative for
their readers: _Matthew_ takes Jesus' ideal of the indissoluble
marriage-tie, as it is given in _Mark_, and allows, in the practical
application of the ideal, divorce for adultery; he adds to Jesus' word
about telling one's brother his fault "between thee and him alone"
further advice as to what shall be done if the brother be obdurate,
ending with "Tell it unto the Church." _John_ substitutes for the many
sayings of Jesus in the earlier gospels, in which He appears to look
forward to a speedy and sudden coming of His Kingdom in power, other
sayings, in which He promises to come again spiritually and dwell in His
followers. On the other hand, in some particulars scholars think that
the later writers had more accurate information, and used it to correct
misunderstandings conveyed by their predecessors; the length of our
Lord's ministry, the procedure followed at the trial, the date of the
crucifixion, are by many supposed to be more exactly given in _John_
than in the Synoptists. In general there is no reason for questioning
the data in the later sources, save as they seem to come from an
interest of the Church of their day, unrelated with the Jesus of the
earlier records.
In such documents we must expect some events to be supported by more
historic proof than others. The evidence for Jesus' resurrection (to
take a typical case), is far weightier than that for His birth of a
virgin-mother. There is probably no scrap of primitive Christian
literature which does not assume the risen Christ; and the origin of the
Christian Church, and the character of its message and life, cannot be
explained apart from the Easter faith in the Lord's victory over death
and presence with His people in power. The virgin-birth rests on but two
records (possibly on only one), neither of which belongs to the earlier
strata of the tradition, and which are with difficulty reconciled with
the more frequently mentioned fact that Jesus is the Son of David (an
ancestry traced through Joseph). But in discussing the historicity of
the narratives, it is just to the evangelists to recall that their main
purpose was not the writing of history as such, but the presentation of
material (which undoubtedly they considered trustworthy historically)
designed to convey to their readers a correct religious estimate of
Jesus Christ. "These are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in His
name." They do not often take the trouble to tell us on what evidence
they report an event or a saying; they either did not know, or they did
not care to preserve, the sequence of events, so that it is impossible
to make a harmony of the gospels in which the material is
chronologically arranged. But they spare themselves no pains to give
_the truth of the religious impression of Jesus_ which they had
received.
And when one compares all our documents, it is significant that they do
not give us discordant estimates of the religious worth of Jesus. The
meaning for faith of the Christ of _John_ is not at variance with the
meaning for faith of the Christ of _Mark_ or of the Christ of the
supposed _Collection of Sayings_. The Church put the four gospels side
by side in its Canon, and has continued to use them together for
centuries, because it has found in them a religiously harmonious
portrait of its Lord. This is also true of the portraits of Jesus to be
found in the _Acts_ and the epistles. The Christ of the entire New
Testament makes upon us _a consistent religious impression_; and the
unity of His significance for faith is all the more noteworthy because
of the different forms of thought in which the various writers picture
Him. Behind the primitive Church stands an historic Figure who so
stamped the impress of His personality upon believing spirits, that,
amid puzzling discrepancies of historical detail and much variety of
theological interpretation, a single religious image of Him remains. We,
whose aim is not primarily to reconstruct the figure of Jesus for
purposes of scientific history, but to arrive at an intelligent
conviction of His spiritual worth, are entirely satisfied with a
portrait which correctly represents the religious impression of the
historic Jesus.
Two diametrically opposed classes of scholars have denied that in the
Christ of the gospels we possess such a trustworthy report. A very few
have held that the evangelists do not record an historic life at all,
but describe a Saviour-God who existed in the faith of the Church of the
First Century. The allusions, however, in the letters of Paul alone to
definite historical associations connected with Jesus are sufficient to
confute this view. There undoubtedly was a Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover,
the divine redeemers of mythology, of whom this theory makes so much,
are most unlike the Jesus of the gospels in moral character and
religious power; and the old argument is still pertinent that it would
have required a Jesus to have imagined the Jesus of the evangelists'
story.
A much larger number of scholars, determined beforehand by their
philosophic views to reject all elements in the records which transcend
usual human experience, have for several generations sought to
reconstruct the figure of Jesus on an entirely naturalistic basis.
Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man,
Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist,
who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such
reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even
the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions. They
fail to do justice to Jesus' consciousness of Himself, of His unique
relation to God, of His all-important mission to men, as the critically
investigated documents disclose it. Historically, they do not give us a
Figure sufficiently significant for faith to account for the Christian
Church; scientifically, their portraits do not long prove satisfactory,
and are soon discarded on further investigation of the facts; and
religiously, they do not appeal to Christian believers as adequate to
explain their own life in Christ.
It is not surprising that these attempts have failed. The historic Jesus
did not make the same impression upon everybody who met Him; men's
judgments of Him varied with their spiritual capacities, and their
spiritual capacities affected what He could do for them. There is enough
historicity in the narratives to convince sober historians, whatever
their faith or unfaith, that Jesus existed as a man among men, and that
He was conscious of a relationship to God and a significance for men
which transcend anything in ordinary human experience. It requires
something more than sound historic judgment to see in Jesus what He saw
in Himself, or what Peter saw in Him when he called Him "the Christ of
God." We can never prove to any man on the basis of historical research
alone that the portrait of Jesus in the gospels correctly represents the
_religious_ impression of the historic Jesus. When we deal with
anything religious, a subjective element enters and determines the
conclusion, exactly as the artistic spirit alone can appreciate that
which has to do with art. The gospels as appreciations appeal only to
the similarly appreciative. We can show that the earliest stratum of the
gospel tradition, according to the most rigorous methods of critical
analysis, gives us a Jesus who possessed a meaning for His followers
akin to the meaning the Jesus of our four gospels possessed for the
Church of the First Century, and possesses for the Church of our day.
Only as Jesus comes to have a supreme worth to any man can he believe
that the estimate of their Master in the minds of the first disciples
can be the accurate impression of a real man.
When, then, we speak of the Christ of history, we mean not the figure of
Jesus as reproduced by scientific research apart from Christian faith,
but the Christ of the four gospels, whose figure corresponds to the
religious impression received from the historic Jesus by His earliest
followers. _Lives of Christ_ by historical students have their value
when our main aim is historical information; but the best of them is
poor indeed compared with our gospels when we wish to attain the life of
Christ's followers. The humblest reader of the New Testament has the
same chance with the most learned scholar of attaining a true knowledge
of Jesus for religious purposes; and Jesus remains, as He would surely
wish to remain, a democratic figure accessible to all in the simply told
narratives of the evangelists.
Each age seems to have its own way of phrasing its religious needs; and
various elements in the picture of Jesus have been prized by the
succeeding ages as of special worth. Our generation finds itself
religiously most interested in three outstanding features in the record
of His life:
(1) _His singular religious experience._ His first followers were
impressed with His unique relation to God when they saw in Him the
awaited Messiah. The narratives represent Him as invariably trusting,
loving, obeying the Most High as the Father, Lord of heaven and earth.
His sayings lay special stress on God's tender personal interest in
every child of His, on His stern judgment of hypocrites, on His
Self-sacrificing love, and on His kindness to the unthankful and the
evil. While it is not easy for us with the limited materials at hand to
discriminate clearly between the elements in Jesus' thought of God which
He shared with His contemporaries, and those which were His own
contribution, so discerning a believer as Paul, reared in the most
earnest circles of Jewish thought, could not name the God to whom he had
been brought through Jesus, without mentioning Jesus Himself; God was to
him "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." The Deity Paul
worshipped may be described as that loving Response from the unseen
which answered the trust of Jesus; or rather that personal Approach to
man from the unseen which produced Jesus. Men who had not been atheists
before they became Christians are addressed by another writer as
"through Jesus believers in God." It is not enough to say that in Jesus'
experience God was Father; others before Him, both within and without
Israel, had known the Divine Fatherhood. It was the fatherliness in God
which evoked and corresponded to Jesus' sonship, that formed His new and
distinctive contribution. A mutual relationship is expressed in the
saying: "No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know
the Father, save the Son." Moving familiarly as a man among men, Jesus
did not hesitate to offer them forgiveness, health, power, life; and to
offer all these as His own possessions through His peculiar touch with
the Most High--"All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father." In
the words of the late Professor G.W. Knox, "Jesus set forth communion
with God as the most certain fact of man's experience, and in simple
reality made it accessible to everyone."
His consciousness of God was not something wholly new; He was not "a
lonely mountain tarn unvisited by any stream," but received into His
soul the great river of a nation's spiritual life. He was the heir of
the faith of His people, and regarded Himself as completing that which a
long line of predecessors had begun. He did not find it necessary to
invent new terms to express His thought; but as He passed the old words
through the alembic of His mind they came out with new meaning. His
originality consisted in His discriminating appropriation of His
inheritance, and in His using it so that it became alive with new power.
Madame de Staël said that Rousseau "invented nothing, but set everything
on fire." Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with
God, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown
before. The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman Empire,
with a few thousands of proselytes here and there in the larger towns
about the Mediterranean, became in a generation a force which entirely
supplanted the Jewish missionary movement and rapidly spread throughout
the world.
(2) _A singular character._ More striking than anything Jesus said or
did is what He _was_. That which He worshipped in the God He trusted, He
Himself embodied. We can estimate His character best, not by trying to
inventory its virtues (for a very similar list might be attributed to
others of far less moral power) but by feeling the effect He had on
those who knew Him. They are constantly telling us how He amazed them,
awed them, and bound them to Himself. Their superlative tribute to Him
is that, holding His own pure and exalted view of God, they felt no
incongruity in thinking of Him as beside God on the throne. It may have
been their belief in His Messiahship, accredited by His resurrection and
destining Him to come with power and judge the world, that led them to
place Him at the right hand of God; but there was the place where He
seemed to them to belong. None have ever conceived God more highly than
they who said, "God is love," and these men set Jesus side by side with
God. The evangelists do not attempt to describe what He was like; they
let us hear Him and watch Him, as He lived in the memories of those who
had been with Him; and He makes His own impression. The crowning tribute
is that we have no loftier adjective in our vocabulary than
"Christlike."
(3) _A singular victory_--a victory over the world and sin and death.
Jesus believed in and proclaimed a new order of things in the world--the
Kingdom of God--in which His Father's will should be realized. It was an
order in which men should live in love with one another and with God, in
which justice, kindness and faithfulness should prevail in all
relationships, and in which all God's children's needs should be
supplied, their maladies healed, their wrongs righted, their lives made
full. This Kingdom was already in the earth in Himself and in the new
life He succeeded in creating in those who followed Him. It found itself
opposed by physical forces that were injurious to humanity; and these He
met fearlessly, sleeping in a storm so violent as to terrify His
fisherman companions; and, what is more, He commanded these forces for
His Father's purpose in a way that amazed His first followers and is
still amazing to us. The reports of His mighty works have to be
carefully scrutinized by historical scholars, and no doubt the
historicity of some of them is much more fully attested than that of
others; but when every allowance is made for the ideas of a
prescientific age in which miracles were relatively frequent, and for
the possible growth of the marvellous elements in the tradition, enough
remains to show that here was a Personality whose power cannot be
limited by our usual standards of human ability. Judged by past or
present conceptions of what is natural, His works were supernatural; He
Himself regarded them as the breaking into the world through Him of the
new order that was to be. He discouraged men's craving for the
physically miraculous, and thought little of the faith in Him produced
by its display; but there can be no question of His extraordinary
control of physical forces for the aims of His Kingdom. It was, however,
in the moral conflict between the Divine Order and things as they were,
that He saw the decisive collision, and faced it with heroic faith in
His Father's victory. When the dominant authorities in Church and State
were about to crush Him, He looked forward undismayed, and in the
glowing pictures of fervent Jewish men of hope He imaged the Divine Rule
He proclaimed coming in power.
He was to His followers the Conqueror of sin. He went forth to wage war
with evil in the world, because He was conscious that He had first bound
the strong man, and could spoil his house. In an autobiographical
parable He seems to have told them something of His own battle with
temptation and of His victory. They found in Him One who both shamed
and transformed them; they saw Him forgiving and altering sinners; and,
above all, His cross, from the earliest days when they began to ask
themselves what it meant, had for them redemptive force.
He was to them the Victor of death. However the historian may deal with
the details of the narratives of the appearances of the risen Jesus to
His disciples, he cannot fail to recognize the conviction of Jesus'
followers that their Lord had returned to them and was alive with power.
We must remember that it was to faith alone that the risen Jesus showed
Himself, and that no one outside the circle of believers (unless we
except Saul of Tarsus) saw Him after His death. Historical research,
independent of Christian faith, may not be able positively to affirm the
correctness of the Easter faith of the disciples, for the data lie, in
part at least, outside the range of such research. But the historian
must leave the door open for faith; and he may go further and point out
that faith's explanation best fits the facts. Present faith finds itself
prepared to receive the witness of the men of faith centuries ago. The
attempt to banish Jesus from our world signally failed; He was a more
living and potent force in it after, than before, His death.
This singular religious experience, character and victory we ascribe to
the Jesus of history through the tradition which preserves for us His
religious impression upon His immediate followers. There are some who
lay little stress upon the events of the past; like Shelley's Skylark,
they are "scorners of the ground." Why, they ask, should we care what
took place in Palestine centuries ago? The answer is that it is the
roots which go down into historic fact which give the whole tree of
Christian faith its stability and vigor. A tree gathers nourishment and
grows by its leaves; and Christianity has undoubtedly taken into itself
many enriching elements from the life about it in every age; but a tree
without roots is neither sturdy nor alive. A Christianity which
disregards its origin in the Jesus of genuine memory may label anything
"Christian" that it fancies, and end by losing its own identity; and a
Christianity which does not constantly keep learning of the Jesus of the
New Testament, and renewing its convictions, ideals and purposes from
Him, ceases to be vital. We do not think of Christianity as a fixed
quantity or an unchanging essence, but as a life; and life is ever
growing and changing. But with all its growth and change it keeps true
to type, and the type is Jesus Christ. The gospels, which conserve the
impress of that Life upon men of faith, are anchors in the actual amid
windy storms of speculation. We are not constructing a Christ out of our
spiritual experiences, but letting Him who gave life to these early
followers, through their memories of Him, recreate us into His and their
fellowship with God and man.
Their spiritual experiences are the sensitive plate which caught and
kept for all time the image of the historic Jesus; but their experience
is a memory, and there must be a further experience in us upon which
this memory throws and fixes His image before we know Jesus Christ for
ourselves. Unless a man's soul is unimpressionable, he cannot be faced
with the Christ of the New Testament without being deeply affected. "We
needs must love the highest when we see it," and to millions
throughout the earth Jesus is their highest inspiration. For them He
ceases to belong to the past and becomes their most significant
Contemporary. They do not look back to Him; they look up to Him as their
present Comrade and Lord; and in loyalty to Him they find themselves
possessed of a new life.
In a previous chapter, we used the phrase "man's response to his highest
inspirations" as a description of religious experience; and in
responding to the appeal of Jesus, His followers pass into the
characteristically Christian experience of the Divine--an experience
which involves two main elements: communion through Jesus with God, and
communion with Jesus in God.
_Communion through Jesus with God_. His singular religious experience
they find themselves sharing to some degree. They repeat His discoveries
in the unseen and corroborate them. God, the God and Father of Jesus
Christ, becomes their God and Father, with whom they live in the trust
and love and obedience of children. And for them Jesus' consciousness of
God becomes _authoritative_. It is not that they consider Him in
possession of secret sources of information inaccessible to them, but
that, incomparably more expert, He has penetrated farther and more
surely into the unseen, and they trustfully follow Him. He does not lord
it over them as servants, but leads them as His friends. "Man," says
Keats, in a remark which illustrates Jesus' method with His disciples,
"Man should not dispute or assert, but whisper results to his neighbor."
He, who of old did not strive nor cry aloud, still so quietly gives
those who obey Him His attitude towards God, that they scarcely realize
how much they owe Him. Only here and there a discerning follower, like
Luther, is aware how all-important is the contribution that comes
through a conscious sharing of Christ's revelation, "Whosoever loses
Christ, all faiths (of the Pope, the Jews, the Turks, the common rabble)
become one faith."
And when once Jesus is authoritative for a man, He is the _supreme_
religious authority. A tolerant Roman, like Alexander Severus, set
statues of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, "and others of that
sort," in his lararium; and many today are inclined to make a similar
religious combination. Where Christ is concerned, there can be for His
followers no other "of that sort." We cherish every discovery of the
Divine by any saint of any faith which does not conflict with the
revelation of Jesus; but to those who have found Him the Way to the
Father, His consciousness of God is decisive. In the margin of his copy
of Bacon's _Essays_, William Blake wrote opposite some statement of that
worldly-wiseman, "This is certain: if what Bacon says is true, what
Christ says is false." A loyal Christian must set every opinion he meets
as clearly in the light of his Lord's mind, and choose accordingly his
course in the seen and in the unseen.
When through Jesus we are in fellowship with His God, Jesus Himself
becomes to us _the revelation of God_. The Deity to whom we are led
through His faith discloses Himself to us in Jesus' character. What we
call Divine, as we worship it in One whom we picture in the heavens or
indwelling within us, we discover at our side in Jesus; and if we are
impelled to speak of the Deity of the Father, when we characterize our
highest inspirations from the unseen, we cannot do less than speak of
the Deity of the Son, through whom in the seen these same inspirations
pass to us. Jesus Himself awakens in us a religious response. We
instinctively adore Him, devote our all to Him, trust Him with a
confidence as complete as we repose in God. We are either idolaters, or
Jesus is the unveiling in a human life of the Most High; He is to us God
manifest in the flesh.
And Jesus is also _the revelation of what man may become_. None ever had
a sublimer faith in man than He who dared bid His followers be perfect
as their Father is perfect. He did not close His eyes to men's glaring
unlikeness to God; He said to His auditors, "ye being evil"; He believed
in the necessity of their complete transformation through repentance.
But when He asked them to follow Him, He set no limits to the distance
they would be able to go. He did not warn them that they must stop at
the foot of Calvary, while He climbed to the top; or that they could not
go with Him in His intimacy with the Father. Some Christians, out of
reverence for Jesus, think it necessary to draw a sharp line between Him
and ourselves, and remind us that we cannot overpass it; but He drew no
such line. He believed in the divine possibilities of divinely changed
men. As a matter of fact we find ourselves immeasurably beneath Him,
and, the more we long to be like Him, the greater the distance between
us seems to become. But He is as confident that He can conform us to His
likeness, as that He Himself is at one with His Father.
It is worth emphasizing that this Personality in whom we find the
revelation of God and the ideal of manhood is a figure in history. When
an apostle was speaking of "the one Mediator between God and men," he
laid stress on the fact that He was "Himself _man_." When a distinction
is drawn between the Christ of experience and the Christ of history, we
must not be confused. The content of the name "Jesus" was given once for
all in the impression made by the Man of Nazareth, One made "in all
points" like ourselves. We may understand Him better than those who knew
Him in the flesh; we may see the bearing of His life on many situations
that were entirely beyond even His ken; and so we may have "a larger
Christ," exactly as succeeding generations sometimes form truer
estimates of men than contemporaries; but all that is authentic in our
"larger Christ" was implicit in the Man of Galilee. That to which we
respond as to God is the historic Jesus mirrored in His disciples'
faith. We agree with the eloquent words of Tertullian: "We say, and
before all men we say, and torn and bleeding under your tortures we cry
out, 'We worship God through Christ. Count Christ a man, if you please;
by Him and in Him God would be known and adored.'" And our assurance
that we can become like Jesus rests on the fact that this life has been
already lived. A mountain top, however lofty, we can hope to scale, for
it is part of the same earth on which we stand; but a star, however
alluring, we have no confidence of reaching. Jesus' worth as an example
to us lies in our finding in Him "ideal manhood closed in real man."
In fellowship through Jesus with God we discover that His victory is
vicarious; He conquered for Himself _and for us_ the world and sin and
death.
He imparts His faith in the coming of the Divine Order in the world.
His followers share His fearless and masterful attitude towards physical
forces; when they appear opposed to God's purpose of love, the Christian
is confident that they are not inherently antagonistic to it: "to them
that love God all things work together for good." What is called
"nature" is not something fixed, but plastic; something which can be
conformed to the will of the God and Father of Jesus. A pestilential
Panama, for instance, is not natural, but subnatural, and must be
brought up to its divine nature, when it will serve the children of God.
The Rule of God in nature, like the Kingdom in Jesus' parables, must
both be awaited patiently--for it will require advances in men's
consciences and knowledge to control physical forces in the interest of
love--and striven for believingly. And even when bitter circumstances
seem, whether only for the present or permanently, inescapable, when
pain and disaster and death must be borne, the Christian accepts them as
part of the loving and wise will of God, as his Lord acquiesced in His
own suffering: "The cup which the Father hath given Me, shall I not
drink it?" And Jesus confers His confidence in the alterability of the
world of human relations. Christians believe in the superiority of moral
over material forces, in the wisdom and might of love. A life like
Christ's is pronounced in every generation unpractical, until under His
inspiration some follower lives it; and slowly, as in His own case, its
success is acclaimed. His principles, as applied to an economic
institution such as slavery, or to the treatment of the criminal, are
counted visionary, until, constrained by His Spirit, men put them into
practice, and their results gradually speak for themselves. His
followers in every age have seemed fools to many, if not to most, of
their judicious contemporaries; but cheered by His confidence, they
venture on apparently hopeless undertakings, and find that He has
overcome the world.
Jesus' victory over sin works in true disciples a similar conquest.
Christians label any unchristlikeness sin, and they vastly darken the
world with a new sense of its evil, and are themselves most painfully
aware of their own sinfulness. Jesus' conscience has creative power, and
reproduces its sensitiveness in theirs; they are born into a life of
new sympathies and obligations and penitences. By His faith, and
supremely by His cross, He communicates to His followers the assurance
of God's forgiveness which reestablishes their intercourse with Him, and
releases His life in them; and Jesus lays them under a new and more
potent compulsion to live no longer unto themselves, but unto their
brethren.
Jesus' conquest of death is to His followers the vindication of His
faith in God, and God's attestation of Him; and with such a God Lord of
heaven and earth, death has neither sting nor victory; it cannot
separate from God's love; and it is itemized among a Christian's assets.
The face of death has been transfigured. Aristides, explaining the
Christian faith about the year 125 A.D., writes, "And if any righteous
man among them passes from the world, they rejoice and offer thanks to
God; and they escort his body as if he were setting out from one place
to another near." Christians speak of their dead as "in Christ"--under
His all-sufficient control.
_Communion with Jesus in God._ When the Christian through Jesus finds
himself in fellowship with His God and Father, he does not leave Jesus
behind as One whose work is done. He discovers that he can maintain this
fellowship only as he constantly places himself in such contact with the
historic Figure that God can through Him renew the experience. It is by
going back to Jesus that we go up to the Father; or rather, it is
through the abiding memory of Jesus in the world that God reaches down
and lifts us to Himself. And at such times no Christian thinks of Jesus
as a memory, but as a living Friend. To Him he addresses himself
directly in prayer and praise, which would be meaningless were there no
present communication between Jesus and His disciples.
We cannot say that we have an experience of communion with Jesus which
is distinguishable from our experience of communion with God; we respond
through Jesus to God. But if our God be the God of Jesus, we cannot
think of Jesus as anywhere in the universe out of fellowship with Him.
His God would not be Himself, nor would Jesus be Himself, were the
fellowship between Them interrupted; and we cannot think of ourselves
as in touch with the One, without being at the same time in touch with
the Other. It is an apparently inevitable inference from our Christian
experience, when we attempt to rationalize it, that "our fellowship is
with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ." In communion with God
we are in a society which includes the Father and all His true sons and
daughters, the living here and the living yonder, for all live unto Him.
They are ours in God; and Jesus supremely, because He is the Mediator of
our life with God, is ours in His and our Father.
We have already passed over into the division of our subject which we
called _the Christ of reflection_. All experience contains an
intellectual element, and we never experience "facts" apart from the
ideas in which we represent them to ourselves. But there is a further
mental process when we attempt to combine what we think we have
experienced in some relationship with all else that we know, and reach a
unified view of existence. For example, when Paul took the gospel out of
its local setting in Palestine, and carried it into the Roman world, he
had to interpret the figure of Jesus to set it in the minds of men who
thought in terms very different from those of the fishermen of Galilee
or the scribes at Jerusalem. Similarly John, who wrote his gospel for
Gentile readers, could not introduce Jesus to them as the Messiah, and
catch their interest; he took an idea, as common in the thought of that
day as Evolution is in our own--the Logos or Word, in whom God expresses
Himself and through whom He acts upon the world--and used that as a
point of contact with the minds of his readers. We have to connect the
Christ of our experience with our thought of God and of the universe.
Three chief questions suggest themselves to us: How shall we picture
Jesus' present life? How shall we account for His singular personality?
How shall we conceive the union in Him of the Divine and the human,
which we have discovered?
The first of these questions faced the disciples when Jesus was no
longer with them in the flesh. When a cloud received Him out of their
sight, it did not take Him out of their fancy; finding themselves still
in communion with Him, they had to imagine His present existence with
God and with them. They used their current symbol for God--the Most High
enthroned above His world--and they pictured Jesus as seated at the
right hand of the throne of God. Or they took some vivid metaphor of
personal friendship--a figure knocking at the door and entering to eat
with them--and found that a fitting interpretation of their experience.
These were picturesque ways of saying that Jesus shares God's life and
ours. While our current modes of representing the Divine do not localize
heaven, the symbolic language of the Bible has so entered into our
literature, that in worship and in devout thought we find the New
Testament metaphors most satisfactory to express our faith.
The second question was asked even during Jesus' lifetime--"Whence hath
this Man these things?" The New Testament writers deal with the question
of Jesus' origin in a variety of ways. The earliest of our present
gospels opens its narrative with the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus as
He answers John's summons to baptism. It seems to explain His
uniqueness by the extraordinary spiritual endowment bestowed upon Him in
manhood. The first and third gospels contain besides this two other
traditions: they introduce Jesus as the descendant of a line of devout
progenitors, going back in the one case to David and Abraham, and in the
other still further through Adam to God. They bring forward His
spiritual heredity as one factor to account for Him. Side by side with
this they place a narrative which records His birth, not as the Son of
Joseph through whom His ancestry is traced, but of the Holy Spirit and a
virgin-mother. This gives prominence to the Divine and human parentage
which brought Him into the world. In Paul and John and the _Epistle to
the Hebrews_, there is incarnate in Jesus a preexistent heavenly
Being--the Man from heaven, the Word who was from the beginning with
God, the Son through whom He made the worlds. They present us with a
Divine Being made a man. This last conception is not combined by any New
Testament writer with a virgin-birth. When our New Testament books were
put together, the Church found all four statements in its Canon, and
combined them (although some of them are not easily combined) in its
account of Jesus' origin.
Historical scholars have difficulty in tracing any of these accounts but
the first directly to Jesus Himself; but they come from the earliest
period of the Church, and they have satisfied many generations of
thoughtful Christians as explanations of the uniqueness of the Person of
their Lord. Some of them do not seem to be as helpful to modern
believers, and are even said to render Him less intelligible. We must
beware on the one hand of insisting too strongly that a believer in
Jesus Christ shall hold a particular view of His origin; the diversity
in the New Testament presentations of Christ would not be there, if all
its writers considered all four of these statements necessary in every
man's conception of his Lord. And on the other hand, we must point out
that it is a tribute to Jesus' greatness that so many circumstances were
appealed to to account for Him, and that all of them have spiritual
value. All four insist that Jesus' origin is in God, and that in Jesus
we find the Divine in the human. All four--a spiritual endowment, a
spiritual heredity, a spiritual birth, the incarnation of God in
Man--may well seem congruous with the Jesus of our experience, even if
we are not intellectually satisfied with the particular modes in which
these affirmations have been made in the past. The question of Jesus'
origin is not of primary importance; He Himself judged nothing by its
antecedents, but by its results--"By their fruits ye shall know them."
No man, today, should be hindered from believing in Christ, because he
does not find a particular statement in connection with His origin
credible. Christ is here in our world, however He entered it, and can be
tested for what He _is_. To know Him is not to know how He came to be,
but what He can do for us. "To know Christ," Melancthon well said, "is
to know His benefits."
The third question, How are we to conceive of the union of Deity and
humanity in Him? is a problem which exercised the Fourth, Fifth and
Sixth Centuries of the Christian Church to the exclusion of almost all
others. The theologians of those times worked out (and fought out) the
theory of the union of two "natures" in one "Person," which remains the
official statement of the Church's interpretation of Christ in Greek,
Roman and Protestant creeds. But the philosophy which dealt in "natures"
and "persons" is no longer the mode of thought of educated people; and
while we may admire the mental skill of these earlier theologians, and
may recognize that an Athanasius and his orthodox allies were contending
for a vital element in Christian experience, their formulations do not
satisfy our minds.
In the last century some divines advanced a modification of this ancient
theory, naming it the Kenotic or Self-emptying Theory, from the Greek
word used by St. Paul in the phrase, "He _emptied_ Himself." The eternal
Son of God is represented as laying aside whatever attributes of
Deity--omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, etc.--could not be
manifested in an entirely human life. The Jesus of history _reveals_ so
much of God as man can contain, but _is_ Himself more. But we know of no
personality which can lay aside memory, knowledge, etc. The theory
begins with a conception of Deity apart from Jesus, and then proceeds to
treat Him as partially disclosing this Deity in His human life; but the
Christian has his experience of the Divine through Jesus, and his
reflection must start with Deity as revealed in Him.
Still later in the century, Albrecht Ritschl gave another interpretation
of Christ's Person. He began with the completely human Figure of
history, and pointed out that it is through Him we experience communion
with God, so that to His followers Jesus is divine; His humanity is the
medium through which God reveals Himself to us. This affirmation of His
Deity is an estimate, made by believers, of Jesus' worth to them; they
cannot prove it to any who are without a sense of Christ's value as
their Saviour. Any further explanation of how the human and the Divine
are joined in Jesus, he deemed beyond the sphere of religious knowledge.
Our modern thought of God as immanent in His world and in men enables
us, perhaps more easily than some of our predecessors, to fit the figure
of Christ into our minds. The discovery of the Divine in the human does
not surprise us. We think of God as everywhere manifesting Himself, but
His presence is limited by the medium in which it is recognized. He
reveals as much of Himself through nature as nature can disclose; as
much through any man as he can contain; as much through the complete Man
as He is capable of manifesting. Nor does this Self-revelation of God in
Jesus do away for us with Jesus' own attainment of His character.
Immanent Deity does not submerge the human personality. Jesus was no
merely passive medium through which God worked, but an active Will who
by constant coöperation with the Father "was perfected." If there was an
"emptying," there was also a "filling," so that we see in Him the
fulness of God. How He alone of all mankind came so to receive the
Self-giving Father remains for us, as for our predecessors, the ultimate
riddle, a riddle akin to that which makes each of us "indescribably
himself." And as for the origin of His unique Person, we have no better
explanations to substitute for those of the First Century; the mystery
of our Lord's singular personality remains unsolved.
While our reflections almost necessarily end in guesses, or in
impenetrable obscurities, our experience of Christ's worth can advance
to ever greater certainty. We follow Him, and find Him the Way, the
Truth and the Life. We trust Him and prove His power to save unto the
uttermost. We come to feel that no phrase applied to Him in the New
Testament is an exaggeration; our own language, like St. Paul's, admits
its inadequacy by calling Him God's "_unspeakable_ gift." We see the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in His face; He is to us the
Light of life; and we live and strive to make Him the Light of the
world. Though we may never be able to reason out to our satisfaction how
God and man unite in Him, we discover in Him the God who redeems us and
the Man we aspire to be. Jesus is to us (to borrow a saying of Lancelot
Andrewes') "God's as much as He can send; ours as much as we can
desire."