_"Holy Father."_--JOHN xvii. 11.
It is natural and fitting in an attempt to understand the teaching of
Jesus that we should begin with His doctrine of God. For a man's idea of
God is fundamental, regulative of all his religious thinking. As is his
God, so will his religion be. Given the arc we can complete the circle;
given a man's conception of God, from that we can construct the main
outlines of his creed. What, then, was the teaching of Jesus concerning
God?
I
In harmony with what has been already said in the previous chapter,
concerning Christ's manner and method as a teacher, we shall find little
or nothing defined, formal, systematic in Christ's teaching on this
subject. In those theological handbooks which piloted some of us through
the troublous waters of our early theological thinking, one chapter is
always occupied with proofs, more or less elaborate, of the existence of
God, and another with a discussion of what are termed the Divine
"attributes." And for the purposes of a theological handbook doubtless
this is the right course to take. But this was not Christ's way. Search
the four Gospels through, and probably not one verse can be found which
by itself would serve as a suitable definition for any religious
catechism or theological textbook. Christ, we must remember, did not, in
His teaching, begin _de novo_. He never forgot that He was speaking to a
people whose were the law and the prophets and the fathers; throughout
He assumed and built upon the accepted truths of Old Testament
revelation. To have addressed elaborate arguments in proof of the
existence of God to the Jews would have been a mere waste of words; for
that faith was the very foundation of their national life. Nor did
Christ speak about the "attributes" of God. Again that was not His way.
He chose to speak in the concrete rather than in the abstract, and,
therefore, instead of defining God, He shows us how He acts. In parable,
in story, and in His own life He sets God before us, that so we may
learn what He is, and how He feels toward us.
Christ, I say, built upon the foundation of the Old Testament. To
understand, therefore, the true significance of His teaching about God,
we must first of all put ourselves at the point of view of a devout Jew
of His day, and see how far he had been brought by that earlier
revelation which Christ took up and carried to completion. What, then,
did the Jews know of God before Christ came?
They knew that God is One, Only, Sovereign: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our God is one God." It had been a hard lesson for Israel to learn.
Centuries had passed before the nation had been purged of its
idolatries. But the cleansing fires had done their work at last, and
perhaps the world has never seen sterner monotheists than were the
Pharisees of the time of Christ.[10] And He whom thus they worshipped as
Sovereign they knew also to be holy: "The Holy One of Israel," "exalted
in righteousness." True, Pharisaism had degraded the lofty conceptions
of the great Hebrew prophets; it had taught men to think of God as
caring more for the tithing of mint, and anise, and cumin than for the
weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith, making
morality merely an affair of ceremonies, instead of the concern of the
heart and the life. But, however Jewish teachers might blind themselves
and deceive their disciples, the Jewish Scriptures still remained to
testify of God and righteousness, and of the claims which a righteous
God makes upon His people: "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil
of your doings from before Mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do
well." Nor, accustomed though we are to think of the God of the Old
Testament as stern rather than kind, were the tenderer elements wanting
from the Jewish conception of Deity. Illustration is not now possible,
but a very little thought will remind us that it is to the Hebrew
psalmists and prophets that we owe some of the most gracious and tender
imagery of the Divine love with which the language of devotion has ever
been enriched.
Nevertheless, with every desire to do justice to a faith which has not
always received its due, even at Christian hands, it is impossible for
us, looking back from our loftier vantage-ground, to ignore its serious
defects and limitations. It was an exclusive faith. It magnified the
privileges of the Jews, but it shut out the Gentiles. God might be a
Father to Israel, but to no other nation under heaven did He stand in
any such relation. It was the refusal of Christ to recognize the
barriers which the pride of race had set up which more than anything
else brought Him into conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem. And
when once from the mind and heart of the Early Church the irrevocable
word had gone forth, "God is no respecter of persons; but in every
nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to
Him," the final breach was made; no longer could the new faith live with
the old. And even within the privileged circle of Judaism itself men's
best thoughts of God and of His relation to them were maimed and
imperfect. He was the God of the nation, not of the individual. Here and
there elect souls like the psalmists climbed the heights whereon man
holds fellowship with God, and spake with Him face to face, as a man
with his friend. But with the people as a whole, even as with their
greatest prophets, not the individual, but the nation, was the religious
unit.
Such was the Old Testament idea of God. Now let us return to the
teaching of Jesus. And at once we discover that Christ let go nothing of
that earlier doctrine which was of real and abiding worth. The God of
Jesus Christ is as holy, as sovereign--or, to use the modern term--as
transcendent as the God of the psalmists and the prophets. Their
favourite name for God was "King," and Christ spake much of the "kingdom
of God." To them God's people were His servants, owing to Him allegiance
and service to the uttermost; we also, Christ says, are the servants of
God, to every one of whom He has appointed his task, and with whom one
day He will make a reckoning. But if nothing is lost, how much is
gained! It is not merely that in Christ's teaching we have the Old
Testament of God over again with a _plus_, the new which is added has so
transformed and transfigured the old that all is become new. To Jesus
Christ, and to us through Him, God is "the Father."
It is, of course, well known that Christ was not the first to apply this
name to God. There is no religion, says Max Müller,[11] which is
sufficiently recorded to be understood that does not, in some sense or
other, apply the term Father to its Deity. Yet this need not concern us,
for though the name be the same the meaning is wholly different. There
is no true comparison even between the occasional use of the word in the
Old Testament and its use by Christ. For, though in the Old Testament
God is spoken of as the Father of Israel, it is as the Father of the
nation, not of the individual, and of that nation only. Even in a great
saying like that of the Psalmist:
"Like as a father pitieth his children,
So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him,"
it is still only Israel that the writer has in view, though we rightly
give to the words a wider application. But there is no need of argument.
Every reader of the Old Testament knows that its central, ruling idea of
God is not Fatherhood, but Kingship: "The Lord reigneth." Even in the
Psalms, in which the religious aspiration and worship of the ages before
Christ find their finest and noblest expression, never once is God
addressed as Father. But when we turn to the Gospels, how great is the
contrast! Though not even a single psalmist dare look up and say,
"Father," in St. Matthew's Gospel alone the name is used of God more
than forty times. Fatherhood now is no longer one attribute among many;
it is the central, determining idea in whose revealing light all other
names of God--Creator, Sovereign, Judge--must be read and interpreted.
And the God of Jesus Christ is the Father, not of one race only, but of
mankind; not of mankind only, but of men.