New Testament as, by their own mere statement, guaranteeing
themselves. On the contrary, there is one single, definite, historical
fact, which is represented there as the central heart and core of the
evidence upon which the conviction of their truth depends. This fact
is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Though this is not
the whole of the Christian Creed, yet this, according to S. Paul, is,
to the whole of the Christian Creed, crucial. 'If there be no
resurrection from the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be
not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have
testified of God, that he raised up Christ; whom He raised not up, if
so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not
Christ raised; and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are
yet in your sins.' To be direct personal evidence of a certain fact,
and that fact the resurrection;--this was, in the view of S. Peter and
the Apostles, the first qualification, and the central meaning, of
Apostleship: 'must one be ordained _to be a witness with us of His
resurrection_;' 'this Jesus hath God raised up, _whereof we all are
witnesses_.' Upon the historical truth or falsehood, then, of the
resurrection, hangs the whole question of the nature and work of Jesus
Christ, the whole doctrine of Incarnation and Atonement.
But in saying this, it is necessary to guard our proper meaning. If we
admit the fact of the Resurrection to be cardinal, what is the fact of
the Resurrection which is in question? It is as far as possible from
being simply a question whether 'a man' could or could not, did or did
not, reappear, after death, in life. When we speak of the historical
fact, we must mean at least the whole fact with all that it was and
meant, complex as it was and many-sided; not with its meaning or its
proof isolated upon a single page of the book of history, but having
far-reaching affinities, parts essentially of its interpretation and
of its evidence, entwined in the depths of the whole constitution of
our nature, and the whole drama of history from the first moment to
the last. However much Christians may have at times to argue about the
simple evidence for the 'yes' or 'no' of the Resurrection of Jesus, as
if it were the alleged resurrection of any other man that was in
question, neither the question itself, nor the evidence about it, can
possibly be, in fact, of the same nature or upon the same level, as
the evidence about another. No amount of conviction of the
reappearance in life of any other man, would have any similar meaning,
or carry any similar consequences. The inherent character of Him who
rose, and the necessary connection between what He was, and had said
and claimed for Himself, on the one hand, and on the other His rising
out of death; this is an essential part of that fact of the
resurrection, which comes up for proof or disproof. The fact that
Jesus Christ, _being what He was_, the climax and fulfilment of a
thousand converging lines--nay, of all the antecedent history of
mankind--rose from the dead, and by that fact of resurrection
(solemnly fore-announced, yet none the less totally unlooked for)
illuminated and explained for the first time all that before had
seemed enigmatical or contradictory in what He was,--and indeed in all
humanity; this is the real fact of the resurrection which confronts
us. It is this vast fact which is either true or false. The
resurrection of the crucified Jesus cannot possibly be a bare or
simple fact. When viewed as a material manifestation of the moment
only, it is at least misunderstood; it may be unintelligible. It is,
no doubt, an event in history; and yet it confronts us, even there in
its place and witness in history, not simply as a finite historical
event, but as an eternal counsel and infinite act of God.
Yet there are times when we must consent to leave much of all this,
for the moment, on one side. Whatever else the event in history may
carry with it, of course it must stand its ground as a mere historical
event. The mere fact may be but a part of it; yet all will be
overthrown if the fact be not fact. And so, though the truths of the
Christian religion, and the evidence for them, be at least as wide as
was represented above, yet they present themselves to our minds still,
as they presented themselves at first to the minds of men, within the
sphere and the rules of ordinary human history and historical
evidence. Here are events written on the page of history. Examine
them. Are they historically false or true? If they be not false, what
do they mean and involve? This is the modest way in which they present
themselves.
No one will now dispute that Jesus died upon the Cross. If He did not,
on the third day, rise again from that death to life;--cadit
quaestio--all Christian dogma, all Christian faith, is at an end.
Something might still be true which might be of interest; something,
even, which for sheer want of a better, might be still the most
interesting fact in the world's long history; but something which,
from the first line to the last, would be essentially different from
the Catholic faith. But, on the other hand, if He did so rise again,
then the fact of His resurrection necessarily raises further questions
as to His nature and being,--necessarily requires the understanding of
further truths for its own intelligent explanation. Now the present
paper is not an evidential treatise. It is no part of our task to
attempt to prove the historical reality of the resurrection. What it
does concern us to notice is the way in which the determination of all
Christian truth hinges upon it. If it falls, all the rest will drift
away, anchorless and unsubstantial, into the region of a merely
beautiful dreamland. As dreamland, indeed, it may still captivate and
inspire; but anchor of sure fact there will be none. It will only be a
beautiful imagination,--a false mirage reflected from, based upon,
falsehood. No doubt imagination is sovereign in the lives of men. But
then imagination means the vivifying of truth, not the spectral
embodiment of a lie.
On the other hand, if the fact of the resurrection stands, then it
cannot stand alone. If Jesus Christ so lived and taught as even the
most indefinite believers concede that He lived and taught, if He then
died on the Cross, _and rose again the third day from, the dead_, you
have indeed already the foundation dogma of the Creed; and having
that, you cannot possibly rest in it: that foundation fact will
absolutely compel you to ask and to answer certain further necessary
questions; and whatever intelligible answer you may choose to give to
them will be essentially a dogmatic definition. Who or what was this
man who thus lived, thus spoke, thus died, and thus rose from the
dead? As a matter of fact, the whole Church of Christ in history
(including the men who had been His own companions, trained and
inspired by Himself,) taught and believed, without shadow of
hesitation, that He was very God. Very gradually, indeed, had they
advanced to this; step by step, through their growing intimacy with a
character whose very excellences were only enigmatical and
confounding, so long as the master-truth, which lay behind them, was
ignored. And very tentative, on His side, was the method of His
self-revelation; through qualities, through inherent powers, through
explicit teachings, slowly felt, slowly recognised, as transcendent,
as impossible, except in relation to a truth which, after long
misconceptions and perplexities, is seen by them at last not only to
be true, but to be the essential truth which He Himself requires of
them. For, be the method as gradual and as tentative as you please,
these witnesses, who are, in fact, the only witnesses the world ever
has had, or can have, of His inner life and teaching, testify
unhesitatingly not only that all true acceptance of Him was, in their
judgment, acceptance of Him as God, but that His life and death were
penetrated by the consciousness of His own Godhead; and by the
deliberate purpose (through whatever unexpected patience of method) of
convincing the whole world in the end of His Godhead, and receiving
universal belief, and universal worship, as God.
Now no one to-day disputes that He was truly man. Is it true that He
was very God? It is either true or false. As to the fact there are
only the two alternatives. And between the two the gulf is impassable.
If it is not false, it is true. If it is not absolutely true, it is
absolutely false. According to the faith of the Catholic Church it is
absolutely true. According to the highest form of Arianism, not less
than according to the barest Socinianism, it is (however you may try
to gloss it over) absolutely false.
Once more, it is quite beyond our province to marshal or press
argumentatively the proofs that He was indeed God. But it is necessary
to see with perfect clearness, how the question must have been raised,
and being raised must have been answered. The very life of the Church
was belief in Him; and she could not remain fundamentally uncertain as
to who or what He was in whom she believed. This was the one thing
which had never been allowed to those who drew near Christ. All
through His ministry those who came near Him, and felt the spell of
His presence, His holiness, His power, were undergoing a training and
a sifting. Moment by moment, step by step, the accumulating evidence
of His transcendently perfect humanity kept forcing more and more upon
them all the question which He would never let them escape, the
question by which they were to be tested and judged; 'What think ye of
Christ?' 'If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.'
If there is a true historical sense in which the clear definition of
the doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus Christ must be assigned to the
Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, yet it would be a great
historical blunder to state or imagine, as inference, that till then
the doctrine was only held partially or with imperfect consciousness
in the Catholic Church. The Church did not, as a result of those
controversies, develop the consciousness of any new doctrine: the
development of her consciousness was rather in respect of the shallow
but tempting logic which would deform, or the delusions which might
counterfeit, her doctrine, and of the perils to which these must lead.
It may be a question, indeed, how far the words implicit and explicit
do, or do not, represent the distinction between the dogmatic
consciousness of the Apostolic and the Conciliar ages. The difficulty
in determining depends solely on this, that the words themselves are
used with different meanings. Thus, sometimes men are said to hold
implicitly what they never perhaps suspected themselves of holding, if
it can be shewn to be a more or less legitimate outcome, or logical
development, of their belief. If such men advance inferentially from
point to point, their explicit belief at a later time may be, in many
particulars, materially different from what it had been at an earlier;
even though it might be logically shewn that the earlier thought was,
more or less directly, the parent of the later. Now in any such sense
as this we shall stoutly maintain that, from the beginning, the Church
held dogmatic truths not implicitly, but explicitly and positively.
They who baptized into the threefold Name of the Father, and of the
Son, and of the Holy Ghost; whose blessing was 'The grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy
Ghost;' who, living in the Spirit, lived in Christ; whose highest
worship was the Communion of the Body and the Blood of Christ, and
whose perfectness of life was Christ; they, so living and worshipping,
did not hold the Godhead of Jesus Christ implicitly; they did not hold
something out of which the doctrine of the Trinity might come to be
unfolded. On the other hand, you may use the same contrast of words,
meaning merely that you have, through cross-questioning or otherwise,
obtained a power which you did not possess, of defining, in thought
and in words, the limits of your belief, and distinguishing it
precisely from whatever does not belong to it. You hold still what you
always meant to hold. You say still what you always meant to say. But
it is your intellectual mastery over your own meaning which is
altered. Like a person fresh from the encounter of a keen
cross-examination, you are furnished now, as you were not before, with
distinctions and comparisons, with definitions and measurements,--in a
word, with all that intellectual equipment, that furniture of alert
perception and exact language, by which you are able to realize for
yourself, as well as to define to others, what that meaning exactly
is, and what it is not, which itself was before, as truly as it is
now, the very thing that you meant.
In this sense, no doubt, the definitions of councils did make
Christian consciousness more explicit in relation to positive truth.
They acquired, indeed, no new truth. Primarily they were rather, on
this side or on that, a blocking off of such false forms of thought or
avenues of unbalanced inference, as forced themselves forward, one by
one, amidst the intellectual efforts of the time, to challenge the
acceptance of Christian people. Primarily they are not the Church
saying 'yes' to fresh truths, or developments, or forms of
consciousness; but rather saying 'no' to untrue and misleading modes
of shaping and stating her truth. Only indirectly, in that effort, the
Church acquires through them a new definiteness of mastery for the
intellect in reference to the exactness of her own meaning.
It is comparatively easy for those who are convinced of a truth to
struggle against its open contradiction. But false modes of stating
their truth, and unbalanced inferences from their truth, are often
staggering to minds which would be unperplexed by any less insidious
form of error. It may be that, in all ages of the Church, even those
who are born and bred in undoubting faith in the Person of Jesus, have
to pass, more or less explicitly, through their own experience of
hesitation and exaggeration, of reaction and counter-reaction, before
they are quite in a position to define, or maintain by argument in the
face of insidious alternatives, the exact proportion of their own
Catholic belief.
Not unsuggestively, indeed, nor indirectly, do the oscillations of the
public consciousness in the era of the councils, as to the due
expression of Catholic belief, reproduce on a larger scale, and
therefore with more magnified clumsiness, the alternating
exaggerations of such a single struggling mind. The natural thought
begins, as a matter of course, as Apostles had begun of old, with the
perfect and obvious certainty that Jesus was a man. Then comes the
mighty crisis to natural thought. With infinite heavings and
strugglings, and every conceivable expedient of evasion, it strains to
avoid the immense conclusion which challenges it, catching eagerly at
every refinement, if so be it may be possible to stop short of full
acceptance of a truth so staggering (when it comes to be measured
intellectually) as that the Man Jesus was Himself the Eternal God. Now
however grossly unjust it might be to think of Arianism as if it ever
meant, or held, Jesus Christ to be merely a man; yet it is true that
in respect of the one great question which is at the root of Christian
faith,--is He God, or is He not?--it stands as offering alternatives
and expedients, by which the plain answer 'yes' may be avoided; by
which therefore the answer 'no' is in effect maintained; for between
'God' and 'not God' the distinction cannot be bridged. This, then, is
the real hinge-point of the Catholic faith. But when this, the
greatest of all battles of belief, is won at last, in spite of every
variety of Arian and semi-Arian refining; forthwith the undisciplined
mind, always ready to exaggerate, always difficult of balance, begins
so to run into ardour of expression of its truth, as in effect to make
unreal the other half of the doctrine of the Incarnation. The first
great wonder once grasped, it is so natural, in fervour of insistance
on the very Godhead, to forget or deny the simple completeness of the
very Manhood! It seems so hard,--almost wanting in reverence,--still
to conceive of Him then as perfectly human,--human body and human
soul! What more obvious reaction in the mind of any pupil not yet
perfectly steadied and balanced? Yet these few short sentences
represent not untruly the real process of education, painfully
accomplished by those intellectual struggles which culminated in the
councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, in 325 and 381 respectively.
And when the pupil is steadied from this second excess, and the
Godhead and the Manhood are both grasped, each severally, each
completely, there follows again a perfectly natural result in a new
uncertainty about the union of the two in Jesus. Again it seems an
instinct of reverence which shrinks from the truth. For the Manhood,
it is urged, though complete, body, soul, and spirit, must yet remain,
in Him, a thing separable and separate from His own original Divine
personality. But if the human nature was not verily His own nature, if
it was animated by any consciousness which was not absolutely His own
consciousness, the consciousness of His one undivided personality,--what
or whence in Him was this other than His own individual consciousness?
Is it so, then, the mind begins necessarily to ask itself, that the
mystery of the Incarnate Life was the mystery of a double consciousness,
a double personality? two distinguishable existences, two selves, two
identities, side by side, harmonious, allied, yet nowhere really
meeting in any one underlying principle of unity? It was necessary
that the doubt should be raised, that its meaning and results might be
measured. But it is this which becomes the Nestorianism against which
the council of Ephesus in 431 set the seal of Catholic belief. Once
more, the natural reaction from Nestorianism, when the believer is
keenly alert against its danger, is so to insist upon the indivisible
Personal unity, as to shrink from the admission of any distinguishableness
in Him, actual or possible, between the two natures or characters
which He united, between the human and the Divine elements in His one
consciousness. But this is either once more to curtail the true
completeness of the human nature, or to fuse it with the Divine into
some new thing not truly identical with either. And this is the
Monophysitism of 451, the subject-matter of the fourth great general
council at Chalcedon.
It is said, indeed, that the ages of councils were uncritical ages;
and that their decisions are therefore not to be accepted as
authoritative on questions of minute theological criticism, for which
their uncritical spirit made them specially unfit. The assertion is
perhaps a little beside the mark. You have not to plead that they were
likely to be uncritical, but to shew that they were in fact wrong. It
is clear that they were not specially unfit either to arrive at a
definiteness of meaning, or to express what they meant. They were sure
what they meant; and have expressed it with perfect clearness. The
question is not how critical they were likely to be, but whether their
meaning--which is clear--is right or wrong. Whatever antecedent
probability there may be either in the minds of nineteenth century
critics against their correctness, or in the minds of Churchmen
accustomed to defer to them in favour of it; it is certain that no one
who is really doubtful about the truth of Christianity, will be called
upon to accept it in deference to the mere authority of the Councils.
However much more they may be to ourselves, to such an one as this
they must stand at least as witnesses of what the consciousness of the
Christian community set its seal to, in the way of interpretation of
its own original deposit of belief. We do not much care to argue
whether they belonged to an age of criticism or not. Yet we must needs
be ready to listen to anyone who can prove that their determinations
were wrong. Councils, we admit, and Creeds, cannot go behind, but must
wholly rest upon the history of our Lord Jesus Christ. If anyone could
seriously convict the Creeds of being unscriptural, we must listen to
him and bow,--as scientific men would have to bow to anyone who really
could prove the fundamental propositions of their science to be wrong.
But meanwhile, so complete is the historical acceptance of the Creeds,
and their consecration in the consciousness of the Church; that there
is at least as clear a presumption that we are uncatholic in differing
from them, as there would be that we were unscientific if we dissented
from the most universally accepted faiths of science.
Now even this, the most commonplace statement of the growth of
Christian definitions, will serve to mark what the nature of dogma is.
So far from faith without it being a thing more spiritual or pure,
faith without it is a thing irrational. Faith in what? I cannot have
faith without an object. Faith in Jesus Christ? But who is Jesus
Christ? Is He a dead man? Is He, as a dead man, no longer in any
existence? Or am I, at least, necessarily ignorant as to whether He
and other dead men have any existence, actual or probable? Or is He a
man indeed,--no more; and dead indeed; but, as other good men, alive
after death somehow in the blessedness of God? And what then did His
life mean? or His strange deliberate dying? or what connection have
they of meaning or power with me? And this God that you speak of; do I
know anything of Him? or what? or how? Or again, is Jesus Himself the
living God? And are the things true which are handed down to me in the
Church as taught by Himself about the relations of God? Is He my
living Master; my very Redeemer by the Cross; my eternal Judge? and
where and how have I contact in life or soul with the benefits of His
Cross, or the power of His help? If indeed I have nothing to do with
Him, and no interest in His history, it is possible for me to go on
without caring to answer such questions. But faith in Him can have no
meaning while these are ignored. The question whether He is or is not
God, is one which cannot but be asked and answered.
And either answer to the question is alike dogmatic. The Arian is no
less dogmatic than the Catholic. A dogmatic faith is only a definite
faith; and that upon questions upon which it has become irrational to
remain indefinite, after I have once been brought to a certain point
of acquaintance with them. The question between the Catholic and the
Arian is, not whose doctrine evades definiteness of determination, but
whose dogma is in accord with the truth and its evidence. The negative
answer to the question proposed would only be unjudicial, not
undogmatic. Meanwhile, the affirmative answer would be so complete a
concession of the whole position, that if it has once been made, as
much has really been admitted, so far as any battle, about dogma goes,
as if the whole formal statement of the Athanasian Creed had been
expressly, as it will have been implicitly, included. There is
nothing, then, really to fight against in these words, 'The right
faith is, that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the substance of the Father,
begotten before the worlds: and Man, of the substance of His mother,
born in the world; perfect God, and perfect Man: of a reasonable soul
and human flesh subsisting; equal to the Father, as touching His
Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching His Manhood. Who
although He be God and Man: yet He is not two, but one Christ; One;
not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by taking of the
Manhood into God; One altogether; not by confusion of substance, but
by unity of Person.'
Another thing which perhaps the same commonplace statement may
illustrate as to the character of Christian dogma, is its largeness
and equity. It is harmony; it is proportion; it is the protest of
balanced completeness against all that partiality, which, by
exaggerating something that is true, distorts the proportion and
simplicity of truth. Every several form of error,--we admit it
willingly,--grew out of, and represented, a truth. Catholic doctrine
alone preserves the proportion of truth. To work and to think within
the lines of dogmatic faith, is to work and to think upon the true and
harmonious conception of the Person of Jesus Christ--'Quem nosse
vivere, Cui servire regnare.' In this knowledge certainly there is no
limitedness, and in this subordination no slavery.
The meaning of Christian dogma, then, so far as we have at present had
anything to do with it, is simply this. It is the self-realizing of
the consciousness of the Christian community in respect of the answer
to be given to that one great question, fundamental and inevitable,
with which all in all times who would approach Christ must be
met,--'Whom say ye that I am?'