THE BOOK OF CHRIST
It is of course the merest commonplace to say that the revelation of
God in the Scriptures comes to its climax in Christ. The revelation in
Christ gathers up all that is loftiest in the utterances of the Old
Testament and gives it embodiment in a human life. It is legitimate to
declare that there is little either in the teaching of Christ or in his
character that is not at least foreshadowed in the Old Testament. The
uniqueness of the Christ revelation consists in the manner in which the
separate streams of truth of the law and the prophets and the seers and
the poets are merged together in the Christ teaching, and in the fine
balance with which the ideal characteristics seen from afar by the
saints of the older day were realized in the living Christ. We might
justly say that a devout reader of the Old Testament could find rich
elements of the Christ revelation even if he should never see a page of
the New Testament. The virtue of the New Testament, however, is that
all the elements revealed throughout the course of the historic periods
of Israel's career are bound together in the life and character of
Christ. It is no mere epigram to say that if the greatest fact about
the Scriptures is God, the greatest fact about God is Christ. Any
thorough study of the Scriptures must revolve around Christ as its
center. If the Scriptures mean anything, they mean that in Christ we
see God. Of course it is open to the skeptic to reply that in all this
the Scriptures are completely mistaken; but he cannot maintain that
this is not what the Scriptures mean. The Book comes to its climax with
an honest conviction that Christ is the consummate revelation of God.
The day when men could charge any sort of manipulation of the material
by Scripture writers for unworthy doctrinal purposes is past. We have
in another connection said that each of the New Testament books was,
indeed, written with a definite aim, but this does not mean that facts
and teachings were twisted out of their legitimate significance. That
Christ is the supreme gift of God to men is so thoroughly built into
the biblical revelation that there is no digging that idea out without
wrecking the entire revelation itself. To maintain anything else would
be to do violence to the entire scriptural teaching. The burden of the
entire New Testament is that God is like Christ.
This may seem to some to be a reversal of present-day approach to the
study of the Christ. We may appear to be attacking the problem from the
divine angle rather than from the human. Why not ask what Christ was
rather than what God is? It is indeed far from our purpose to minimize
the rich significance of the humanity of Jesus, but we are trying now
to get the scriptural focus. We do not believe that we can secure that
focus by looking upon the character of Christ as a merely human ideal.
The might of the scriptural emphasis is that Christ is the revelation
of God. We are well aware that ordinary theological debate has centered
on the question as to the extent to which Christ is like God. The Bible
is colored with the belief that God is like Christ. This may seem at
first glimpse to be a very fine discrimination, but the importance of
that discrimination appears when we reflect that mankind is more eager
to learn the character of God than to learn how far a man can climb
toward divinity. In all such discussions as this we proceed at peril of
being misunderstood, but we must repeatedly affirm that important as is
the problem as to the human ideal set forth in Christ, the divine ideal
set forth in him is more significant as explaining the hold of the
Bible on men. Is it not sufficient for us to behold a lofty human ideal
in the portrait of Christ without such emphasis on this ideal as also a
revelation of the divine character? The answer depends upon what we are
most interested in. If we care most for a perfect and symmetrical human
life, we reply that we find that perfection and symmetry in Christ. In
our second chapter we laid such stress upon the importance of the
enlarging human ideal that we have committed ourselves to the
importance of the Christ ideal as a revelation of the possibilities of
human life. But if we take that ideal in itself without any reference
to the character of God, how much enlargement does it bring us? As
members of the human race we can indeed be proud that a human being has
climbed to such moral stature as did Jesus, but what promise does that
give that any other human being can attain to his stature? As a member
of the human race I can be profoundly thankful for a philosopher like
Kant. I can, indeed, dedicate myself to the study of the Kantian
philosophy with some hope of mastering it. I can seek to reproduce in
my life all the conditions that surrounded the life of the great
metaphysician, but I cannot hope to make myself a Kant. Strive as I
may, such transformation is out of the question. I may attain great
merit by my struggle, but I cannot make myself a Kant. The more
intensely I might struggle, the more convinced I would become of the
futility of my quest, and the genius of the philosopher might tower up
at the end as itself a grim mockery of my ambition. So it is with the
Christ if he is not a revelation of the God life at the same time that
he is an idealization of the human life. Viewed as a revelation of
God's character the Christ life is the hope of all the ages. Viewed
only as a masterpiece of human life it might well be the despair of
mankind.
Of course there are those who believe that it is impossible for Christ
to be a revelation of the human without also being a revelation of the
Divine. We have no desire to quarrel with this position, though we find
it more optimistic than convincing. Incredible as it may seem at first
thought, the universe might theoretically be regarded as a system ruled
over by a Deity who had brought forth a character like that of Christ
just for the sake of seeing what he could achieve in the way of a
masterpiece, without being himself fundamentally involved in
self-revelation. Christ might conceivably be a sort of poetic dream of
the Almighty rather than a laying bare of the Almighty's own life. We
find that human authors by an effort of great imagination fashion
creations in a sense completely different from themselves. It might be
theoretically urged that the character of Christ is different from the
character of God. If this seems very far-fetched, let us remind
ourselves then that there are those in the present world who conceive
of Christ as the very highest peak of human existence and yet deny that
he has any sort of significance as a revelation of the forces back of
the world. Such thinkers maintain that Christ is the best the race has
to show, and yet affirm that the race is but an insignificant item in
the total massiveness of the universe. The Bible establishes the faith
of men against skepticism like this by making the Christ-ideal for God
himself so attractive and appealing.
There are those who proclaim that we do not need any revelations of God
to make then human ideal fully significant--the human ideal stands by
itself. Some such thinkers go consistently the full length of saying
that they are willing to keep their eyes open to the hopelessness of
the universe. They can see nothing beyond this life but total oblivion.
Nevertheless, with their eyes open they will fight on manfully to the
end and take the final leap into the dark without flinching. They are
very apt to add that their philosophy is the only unselfish one; that
the desire of men for any sort of help from conceptions about the
Divine is selfishness where it is not sentimentalism. It is fair to say
that such doctrines seldom meet large response. The reason is not that
men selfishly seek out a God for the sake of material reward that may
come to them, but that they seek him for the sake of finding a resting
place for their minds and souls, for the sake of cherishing an end
which seems in itself worth while, for the sake of laying hold on a
universe in which they can feel at home. If this is selfishness, then
the activities of the human soul in its highest ranges are selfish. If
it is selfish to long for a universe in which the heart can trust, it
is selfish also to enjoy the self-satisfaction with which some of these
thinkers profess to be ready to take their leap into the night. As we
scan the history of Christianity since the day of the Founder we are
impressed that religious organizations as such which arise within
Christianity tend to survive in proportion as they make central the
significance of Christ as the revealer of the character of God. We
would not for a moment underestimate the importance of those groups of
Christians who take Christ merely as a prophet who lived the noblest
life and exalted his truth by the noblest death. Many such believers
manifest the very purest devotion to Christ. They are his disciples.
But the historic fact is that organizations founded on such doctrines
alone do not win sweeping triumphs. On their own statement the most
they hope to do is to spread the leaven of their doctrine into the
thinking of other groups of Christians. Their service in this respect
is not to be disparaged, for at all times the more orthodox opinion of
Christ, so called, needs the leavening of emphasis on the humanity of
Christ. But after all these allowances it is just to affirm that
theology which sees only the human in Christ does not come to vast
power, and that clearly because the world is chiefly interested in the
question with which the entire biblical revealing movement deals,
namely, what is the nature of God? With that question answered we can
best understand the nature of man and the possibility of communion
between man and God.
We may be permitted to pick up the thread of the argument in the last
chapter and ask again what moral purposes rule the forces of this
world. It must indeed be an odd type of mind that does not at least
occasionally ask what this world is for, and what all this cosmic
commotion is about. It is well for all of us to do the best we can
without asking too many hard questions, but the queries will at times
come up and with the normal human being they are not likely easily to
down. We are in the midst of powers which defy our intellects. We do
not go far in the attempt to read the secrets of nature around us
without discovering that all we can hope to spell out is the stages by
which things come to pass, and the mechanisms by which they fit
themselves together. Why they come to pass is beyond us, except in a
most limited sense. The purposes for which events occur in this world
are not self-evidently clear. Explanations of purposes only make
matters worse; and at any moment this problem of the mystery of the
universe may take personal significance in the form of a blow upon the
individual which seems to mock all hope of anything worth while in
human life. There is nothing more futile than the attempts even of
ministers to divine the meanings of afflictions or of those
inequalities of lot which attend the natural order. The preachers can
encourage us to make the most of a bad lot, but their guesses as to why
these things are ordinarily add to our burdens. No, the mind of itself
just by contemplation of the things as they are cannot find much light.
This enigma has always been before the philosophers in the form of the
question as to physical suffering. A number of plausible answers have
been made as to the reasons for pain in the present order. Leibnitz
said that even the Almighty creating the finite world had to adjust
himself to some limitations for the good of the whole; that if some
forces are to run in one direction, there must be mutual concession and
compromise in the adjustment of manifold other activities; and that all
this involves at least apparent stress and injustice at particular
points. This sounds well enough, but why the afflictions of the
individual who happens to be one of the particular points should be
just what they are is a mystery. The upshot is that the ordinary
man--the plain man, as we call him--must either give up the whole
problem by seeking to forget it, or must rebel against it, or he must
find relief in a God whom he can trust without being able to fathom his
plans.
The tragedy of physical affliction is light as compared to the
tragedies which arise in any conscience which seeks to take moral
duties seriously. To be sure, we live at present in a rather complacent
age so far as the struggles of conscience are concerned. The advice of
the world is to do the best we can and let the rest go. We are not to
take ourselves too seriously. But the long moral advances of the race
have come through those who have taken the voices of conscience
seriously. Now, what can a sensitive conscience make of moral duty?
Assume that we have before us the exalted Christ ideal, and accept this
as the guide of our lives--assume that we even have hope of some day
attaining to that ideal--the distracting question is bound to jump at
us: Are we doing enough? Have we sacrificed enough for those in worse
plight than ourselves? And what about our past mistakes? Shall we go
back and try to undo these? At the very best that might be like
unraveling through the night what we have spun through the day. It will
not do to dismiss this as unhealthiness or morbidness of mind. William
James has shown pretty conclusively that the so-called normal or
healthy-minded moral life is apt to be shallow. The great moral tragedy
of the race is the distance between the ideal and any possible
attainment. We can console ourselves by saying that noble discontent is
the glory of man; but that does not get us far. There is only one way
out, and that is to trust that we are dealing with a Christlike God,
that his attitude toward us is the attitude of Jesus toward men. It is
impossible to feel that in discipleship with Jesus men were complacent
about their own moral perfections on the one hand, or harassed with
self-reproaches on the other. They were advancing toward the
realization of an ideal in companionship with One who not only in
himself realized the human ideal, but who taught them that all the
forces of the world would work together with them in their climb toward
perfection, and that God would be patient with their blunders.
The question as to the character of God becomes more vital the longer
we reflect. The growing conscience of our time demands that two
conceptions be kept together--that of power and that of moral
responsibility. We cannot hold a person responsible unless he has
power; we cannot give a person power unless he is willing to act under
responsibility. This realization is fast modifying all our relations to
politics, to finance, to industry, even to private duties. We are
swiftly moving toward the day when society will insist that any measure
of power which has an outreach beyond the circle of the holder's
personal affairs shall be acquiesced in by society only on condition
that the holder of that power be willing definitely to assume
responsibility to society. What we demand of men we demand also of God,
and we have the scriptural warrant for believing that these human
demands are themselves hints concerning the nature of God. Now, no one
doubts the power of God. All scientific and philosophic trends are
toward the centralization of power in some unitary source. All our
study of nature and of society convinces us that there is a unity of
power somewhere. If this be true, there must be raised with increasing
persistence the question as to whether the World-Power is acting under
a sense of moral responsibility. There were days when this problem was
not raised as it is now. Men assumed for centuries that the king could
do no wrong; that he could order his people about in the most arbitrary
fashion. In our own time we have seen advocacy of the doctrine that the
man of wealth is a law unto himself in the handling of the power that
comes with wealth. Such mistakes never were really a part of the
biblical idea. In shaping the threefold notion of priest and prophet
and king to make the people familiar with the functions of God-sent
leadership the strokes of emphasis always fell on the responsibility of
the prophet to proclaim his message at whatever cost to himself, of the
priest to keep in mind the sacredness of his office, and of the king to
rule in righteousness. These demands were inevitably carried up to God:
and in Christ the supreme effort is made to convince us that we can
trust in the God of Christ, though we may not be able to understand
him. This is not the place for an attempt at determining the essentials
of the Christ career. Some features of that life, however, as
illustrating responsibility in the use of power can be hinted at here.
Take the story of the temptation. We are not concerned now with the
historic form in which the temptation occurred. After the historians
have made all the changes in the drapery of the story they choose, the
fact remains that the temptation narrative deals with the essential
problems of any leader confronted with a task like that of Christ. The
Messianic consciousness was a consciousness of power. How should the
power be used? Should it be used to minister to human needs like those
of hunger? That would promise a quick solution of a sort. The peoples
would eagerly rally around the new deliverer. Should there be an
attempt to utilize the political machinery of the time? There could be
no doubt of the effectiveness of this plan. Should the exalted lofty
spiritual state of the Master be relied upon to carry him through
spectacular displays of extraordinary might that would capture the
popular mind? Each of these suggestions presented its advantages. Each
might have been rightfully followed by some one with less power than
Jesus had; but for him any one of them would have involved a misuse of
power, and hence he cast them all aside.
The miracles reported of Christ have this for their peculiarity, that
they show a power conceived of as divine used for a righteous purpose.
It is significant that practically all the miracles described are those
of healing or of relief. The kind of miracle that an irresponsible
leader would have wrought is suggested by the advice of James and John
to Jesus to call down fire on an inhospitable Samaritan village. The
reported reply of Jesus, "Ye know not what spirit you are of," is the
final comment on such use of power. Now, after we have made the most of
the miracles recorded of Jesus, after we have made them seem just as
extraordinary in themselves as possible, their most extraordinary
feature is this use to which the power was put; and on the other hand,
if we strip the miracles of everything that suggests breach of natural
law and make them just revelations of super-normal control over nature
through laws like those whose existence and significance we are
beginning to glimpse to-day, still we cannot empty these narratives of
their significance as revealing a morally responsible use of force. Let
us be just as orthodox as we can, the purpose of the use of the forces
is the supreme miracle; let us be just as destructively radical as we
please, we cannot eliminate from the Scriptures this impression of
Christ as one who used power with a sense of responsibility. This
revelation is one which the ages have always desired.
We must be careful to keep in mind the connection of the Christ life
with what came before it and what has proceeded from it. Here we have
the advantage which comes of regarding the Bible as the result of a
process running through the centuries. If the Bible were not a library,
but only a single book, written at a particular time, we might well be
attracted by the nobility of its teachings, but might despair of ever
making the teachings effective. There is no proving in syllogistic
fashion that Jesus was what he claimed to be, or that he was what his
disciples thought of him as being; but when we see a massive revealing
movement centering on the idea of God as revealed in Christ, when we
see the acceptance of the spirit of Christ opening the path to
communion with the Divine, and when we find increasing hosts of persons
finding larger life in that approach to the Divine, we begin to discern
the vast significance of the scriptural doctrine that in Christ we have
the revelation of the Christlike God.
In this discussion we have been careful to avoid the terms of formal
and creedal orthodoxy. This is not because the present writer is out of
sympathy with these terms, but because he is trying to keep to the main
impression produced by the New Testament. The fundamental scriptural
fact is that in Jesus the early believers saw God; they came to rest in
God as revealed in Christ. This is true of the picture of Christ in the
earliest New Testament writings. Modern scholarship has not been able
to find any documents of a time when the disciples did not think of
Jesus as the revealer of God. If the disciples had not thought of Jesus
thus, they would have found little reason to write of him. Now the
scriptural authors employ various terms to declare the unique intimacy
of Christ with God. In these expositions Jewish and Greek and even
Roman thought terms play their part. Passages like the opening
sentences of the fourth Gospel, or like the great chapter in the
Philippians, are always profoundly satisfying and suggestive in their
interpretation of the fundamental fact, but that fundamental fact
itself is the all-essential--that in Christ the New Testament writers
thought of themselves as having seen God, and as having gazed into the
very depths of the spirit of the Father in heaven. Believing as we do,
moreover, in the helpfulness of the creedal statements of the church,
we must nevertheless avow that such statements are secondary to the
impression made upon the biblical writers by actual contact with the
Christ. We must not lose sight of the primacy of that impression as we
study our Scriptures. We must not limit the glory of the impression
itself by the limitations of some of the explanations which we
undertake. Much harm has been done the understanding the Scriptures by
speaking as if some of our creedal statements concerning Christ are
themselves Scriptures! The scriptural Christ is greater than any
creedal characterization of Christ thus far undertaken.
Of recent years an attempt has been made to prove that no such person
as Jesus ever existed. The attempt has proved futile, but it has had a
significance altogether different from what the propounders of the
theory intended. The original aim was to show the contradictions of the
testimony concerning Jesus and the inadequacies of the testimony to his
existence as an historical Person. The result has been to show that the
real significance of the Christ life is not to be found in any
particular utterance, or in any specific deed, but in the total impact
that he made upon the consciousness of man as suggesting the immediate
presence of the Divine. The quality of the Christ life satisfies us in
the inner depths as bearing witness to the quality of the God life. We
have no sympathy with the views of the critics just mentioned; but we
must say that no matter how the thought of God in Christ got abroad, no
matter how mistaken our thought of the historical facts at the
beginning of the Christian era, the belief in the Christlike God
nevertheless did get abroad. There is no effacing that conception from
the New Testament. No matter what detailed changes in the narrative
itself radical criticism may think itself capable of making, the door
was opened wide enough in the Christ for the divine light to stream
through. We said in the last chapter that the most important feature of
the biblical revelation is God himself. We must now say that the
supreme fact about God is Christ.