_The Kernel and the Husk_, that however much their general presumption
against miracle may have been inductively and patiently reached; yet
when they come to deal with the evidence about Jesus Christ, this
conviction (which ought to stand on one side inquiringly) becomes to
them an underlying postulate; it is settled beforehand; it is present
with them in their exegesis, not simply as a motive for sifting the
evidence carefully, but as a touchstone of truth by which it may all
be tried. Probably the author would believe that he has reached his
conviction against the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth, not merely from
a general induction as to the absence of miracle in the lives of
others, but also from an unprejudiced scrutiny of the evidence of the
life of Jesus Christ Himself. But this is just what we are not at all
prepared to concede. On the contrary, we maintain that his scrutiny is
wholly prejudiced. Examine the evidence with a bias sufficiently
powerful against belief in miracle; and you may end in the result
which this author reaches. Examine it without such a bias; and you
will find yourself at every turn protesting against his mode of
treating the evidence. It is a scrutiny of the evidence _on the basis
of the inadmissibleness of miracles_, which gives him that coherent
theory about the growth of the Christian tradition, and those
consequent principles of interpretation of the text of the Gospels,
which he appears to regard as the simple result of the evidence
itself.
We shall very likely be surprised to find that, after all, the
abstract impossibility of miracle is not laid down,--nay, is expressly
disclaimed,--by him. Miracle (if we rightly understand) is not
impossible absolutely,--not even, he adds, _à priori_ improbable; yet
it is _equivalent to_ an impossibility, because the will of the Father
indwelt wholly in Jesus, and because the perfect uniformity of natural
processes as we have experienced them, is, _in fact_, and with no
exceptions, the will of the Father[215]. No general reflections upon
our dependence, in ordinary life, on the good faith of an uniform
nature, ought to blind us to the fact that this last position neither
has, nor can have, any adequate ground at all. It is surprising that
with so weak a statement of the impossibility of miracle, the
principle of the impossibility of miracle should have to bear the
extraordinary weight that is put upon it. Nothing short of a
demonstration of this impossibility would fully justify the critical
position that is adopted. For it is, in fact, upon this impossibility
that the whole re-reading of the history is based.
It is probably true that if once the hypothesis of the impossibility
of miracle be accepted as practically certain, an earnest mind,
penetrated with this as its overruling principle, and dwelling upon
the Gospels always and only in the light of this, will be compelled
gradually to re-read in one place and re-interpret in another, until
the whole has been, by steps that upon the hypothesis were
irresistible, metamorphosed into a form as unlike as possible, indeed,
to what it wore at first, but still one which can be felt to be
precious and beautiful. But we are entitled to point out how
absolutely this re-reading of the evidence depends upon the truth of
the principle which underlies it. For the sake of this, all sorts of
violence has to be done to what would otherwise be, in one incident
after another, the obvious meaning of words, the obvious outcome of
evidence. Without the certainty of this, the new method of reading
must be critically condemned as baseless and arbitrary. This alone
makes it rationally possible. Without the strong cogency of this it
falls instantly to pieces.
Now orthodox Christians are sometimes accused of reading their
historical evidence in the light of a preconception. They begin with
the doctrine of the Creed, and read all records of fact with the
conviction of that doctrine in their hearts and consciences. We need
not be altogether concerned to combat this statement. Perhaps few
records are read, or would ever be read intelligently, except in the
light of the reader's preconceptions. But our point is to see clearly
that at all events the new reading of the Gospel history is itself so
entirely the outcome and creature of its antecedent principle, that it
cannot without that hold together for an instant.
Let us be content, for the moment, to view the orthodox Christian and
the new rationalist as both alike really reading the Gospel narrative
in the light of a preconceived principle; the one viewing everything
on the basis of the perfect Divinity of the historical Jesus Christ
(with the corollary that it is impossible for us to determine _à
priori_ what power His perfect Humanity--for which we have no
precedent--would, or would not, naturally and necessarily exhibit);
the other viewing everything on the basis of the absolute
impossibility, or at least the incredibleness, of miracle. We might
point out that the former in his hypothesis has a principle which
absolutely fits and perfectly accounts for every part of the evidence
which confronts him; while the latter is compelled, by the cogency of
his principle, to reconstruct for himself almost every chapter of the
evidence. And if we go one step further back, and ask, what is the
antecedent reasonableness of the one hypothesis, or of the other? from
what source is each derived? We must claim it as simple fact, that the
former hypothesis is itself the direct outcome of the evidence,--the
inevitable outcome, indeed, so long as the evidence stands: while the
other is at bottom, an assumption, held absolutely in the teeth of the
evidence actually existing in respect of the life and consciousness of
Jesus of Nazareth, and itself on other grounds not merely unproved,
but essentially incapable of proof[216].
But if our hypothesis is itself the outcome of the evidence, and fits
with perfect exactness into all its intricacies, then we yield far too
much if we treat it as on the level of a mere preconception. To
persist in reading the New Testament by the light of the preconception
of the dogma of Christ's Godhead (with the corollary that no miracle
is incredible as miracle), is to be prejudiced only in the same sense
in which the scientist is prejudiced who persists in studying the
records of astronomy in the light of certain preconceptions as to the
parabola or the law of gravitation.
But what is the case with the other hypothesis? By it the historical
Jesus Christ is swept away; and another personality, which does not
exist in the history at all, but which the history has suggested to
certain earnest-minded critics of our own day, is substituted in His
place. All those who witnessed of His words and deeds to the Church,
all those whose witness the Church has accepted and sealed, are
thoroughly mistaken, mistaken in the very points which to them were
fundamental. However honest they may have been in their superstitious
ignorance, they certainly bore to the world what was, in fact, false
testimony. It is impressive, with a strange impressiveness, to follow
this hypothesis through the story of Christ's life; and see with what
ingenuity, often plausible, often pathetic, the old facts are
refashioned to meet the new principle.
Cardinal, of course, in difficulty as in importance, is the narrative
of the Resurrection; that plain statement of fact, to testify whereto
was the primary qualification, and primary function, of Apostleship;
and which, from S. Peter and S. Paul downwards, has always been
recognised as cardinal to the faith of the Church.
Now given; first, the certain conviction that no miracle occurred; and
secondly, a working hypothesis as to the growth of the Christian
Scriptures, which not only enables, but requires, you to set aside, on
grounds of subjective criticism, all such evidence as seems to you to
be improbable; and it follows that, if you are still of a very
religious mind, you will probably have to take refuge in what may yet
be to you the beautiful story of a Resurrection exclusively spiritual.
You must, of course, deal very violently with the direct evidence. But
that is already covered by the general theory you have reached as to
the historical genesis and value (or lack of value) of the books of
the New Testament. And, of course, in adopting such a view of the
books of the New Testament, you are reducing to a phantasm the reality
of your belief in the Holy Catholic Church, which has enshrined and
consecrated, as perfectest truth, what are really at best only
fables,--capable, indeed, of clumsily representing the truth to the
childish or the stupid, but beginning to be absolutely pernicious to
minds which have reached a certain point of intelligent education.
Tolerating these things, however, you may admit the truth of the
Resurrection (as you may admit every proposition of the Creed) in
words; only in a sense so refined, so exclusively spiritual, that no
bodily reality of resurrection is left. There is no resurrection in
your creed correlative to the dying. There is no resurrection more, or
more demonstrable, than what we believe to be true of men in general.
There is no resurrection which enters within the ordinary sphere of
human history, or admits any direct contact with the normal methods of
human evidence or human proof. The question raised is not whether
current imaginations of the Resurrection may possibly be more or less
exaggerated in the way of materialism, but whether there was any
corporeal reality of resurrection at all. And the question is settled
in the negative. The foundation fact of the Creed is etherealized
away; and all the rest, with it, becomes together impalpable and
subjective.
We do not say that there is not a large element which is true, in the
thought of such a writer as we have been considering. Where the mind
is so devoutly in earnest, it is no hard task to believe that it too
must be animated originally by truth. We need not say, therefore, that
the work of this earnestness may not serve us all, and contribute to
the thought of us all. It may well be true that in our bald
understanding of the doctrine of the Resurrection,--or indeed of the
whole Incarnation, from beginning to end,--we have, many of us, too
little imagined the scope and depth of its spiritual import. If our
orthodoxy has been so well content with insisting mechanically upon
the literal fact, as not only to forget, but to disdain or disown in
any measure, the vast spiritual realities which it ought to express to
us; then our stupidity, or narrowness, in orthodoxy, is in part to
blame, for the distaste which they have created towards orthodoxy in
some natures more sensitive than our own. In so far as they can, in
this respect, return good for evil, we will not be slow to acknowledge
our debt to them. We will be grateful for any new suggestion they can
discover, as to the moral beauty or import of the Resurrection, or of
the Incarnation, or of any or every other miracle considered upon its
moral side as allegory. Some ways at least there may be, in which
their insistance may tend to deepen for us our understanding of
truths, whose more spiritual aspects we had dwelt upon perhaps, in
some cases,--perhaps had even imagined,--far too little. But doubtless
that true element of their work, which the mind of the Catholic Church
will assimilate, will be greatly modified from the form in which it
now presents itself--to them as to others. It will, to say the least,
be positive rather than negative; stimulating spiritual sensibilities,
but not by explaining away the facts of the body; widening (it may be)
our insight into the divineness of history, and the depth of the
meaning of certain events which happened in it,--but not shattering
both it and them, by dissolving their historical truth.
Meanwhile of the one-sided aspect we can but say that no doubt
transcendental spiritualism has a great attractiveness. The Magian
aspiration always was fascinating. Individuals, indeed, of
enthusiastic sympathies, trained themselves in dogmatic truth, and
indulging their freest speculations always on a background of
inveterate dogmatic instinct, may fancy the 'spiritualized
Christianity' to be in itself a stable and a living completeness; but
as a system, it will neither produce life nor perpetuate it. It is an
attempt to improve upon the Church of Christ, upon the conditions of
human nature, upon the facts of history. The Church of Christ is not
so. The Church of Christ does not ignore the fundamental conditions of
human experience. The Church of Christ is balanced, harmonious,
all-embracing, all-adjusting. The Incarnation was the sanctifying of
both parts of human nature, not the abolition of either. The Church,
the Sacraments, human nature, Jesus Christ Himself, all are twofold;
all are earthly objective, as well as transcendental spiritual. And so
long as this world is real as well as the next; so long as man is body
as well as soul; so long all attempts to evaporate the body and its
realities are foredoomed to a necessary and a salutary failure. The
religion, which attempts to be rid of the bodily side of things
spiritual, sooner or later loses hold of all reality. Pure
spiritualism, however noble the aspiration, however living the energy
with which it starts, always has ended at last, and will always end,
in evanescence.
[215] See especially the concluding paragraphs of letter xix.
[216] 'The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all hands
to be simply a question of evidence.' These are the words as much of
Professor Huxley as of the Duke of Argyll. _Nineteenth Century_, April
1887, p. 483: cp. Feb. 1887, pp. 201, etc.
VII.
_THE ATONEMENT._
ARTHUR LYTTELTON.
I. Theological doctrine, describing, as it professes to do, the
dealings of an all-wise Person with the human race, must be a
consistent whole, each part of which reflects the oneness of the will
on which it is based. What we call particular doctrines are in reality
only various applications to various human conditions of one great
uniform method of Divine government, which is the expression in human
affairs of one Divine will. The theological statement of any part of
this method ought to bear on its face the marks of the whole from
which it is temporarily separated; for though it may be necessary to
make now this, now that doctrine prominent, to isolate it and lay
stress on it, this should be done in such a way that in each special
truth the whole should, in a manner, be contained. We must be able to
trace out in each the lines of the Divine action which is only fully
displayed in the whole. Neglect of this not only makes our faith as a
whole weak and incoherent, but deprives the doctrines themselves of
the illumination and strength which are afforded by the discovery in
them of mutual likeness and harmony. They become first unintelligible
and then inconceivable, and the revelation of the character of God,
which should be perceived in every part of His dealings with men,
becomes confused and dim to us. This has been especially the case with
the Atonement. In the course of religious controversy this doctrine
has become separated from the rest, at one time neglected, at another
over emphasized, till in its isolation it has been so stated as to be
almost incredible. Men could not indeed be brought to disbelieve in
forgiveness, however attained, and the conviction of remission of sins
through and in the Blood of Christ has survived all the theories which
have been framed to account for it; but nevertheless, the unreality of
these theories has been a disaster to the Christian faith. Some of
them have strained our belief in the moral attributes of God, others
have given men easy thoughts of sin and its consequences. This has
been so because they have treated the Atonement apart from the whole
body of facts which make up the Christian conception of God and His
dealings with men. In this essay the attempt will be made to present
the doctrine in its relation to the other great Christian truths: to
the doctrines, that is, of God, of the Incarnation, of sin.
(1) On the human side the fact with which we have to deal is the fact
of sin. Of this conception the Bible, the most complete record of the
religious history of man, is full from the first page to the last.
Throughout the whole course of Jewish development, the idea that man
has offended the justice of God was one of the abiding elements in the
religious consciousness of the race. But it was by no means confined
to the Jews. They have been truly called the conservators of the idea
of sin; but it has never been permanently absent, in some form or
other, from the human mind, although we learn most about it, and can
see it in its clearest, most intense form, in the Hebrew religion. Now
this conception of sin in its effect on the human soul is of a twofold
character. Sin is felt to be alienation from God, Who is the source of
life, and strength, and peace, and in consequence of that alienation
the whole nature is weakened and corrupted. In this aspect sin is a
state in which the will is separated from the Divine will, the life is
cut off from the life of God which He designed us to share. When men
come to realize what is meant by union with God, and to feel the awful
consequences of separation, there arises at once the longing for a
return, a reconciliation; but this longing has by itself no power to
effect so great a change. To pass from alienation to union is to pass
from darkness to light, from evil to good, and can only be
accomplished by that very power, the power of a life united to God,
which has been forfeited by sin. Only in union with God can man
accomplish anything that is good; and, therefore, so long as he is
alienated from God, he can only long for, he cannot obtain, his
reunion with the Divine life. Sin therefore, thus considered, is not
only wickedness; it is also misery and hopelessness. Sinners are
'without God in the world,' and for that reason they 'have no hope.'
This is the aspect of sin as a state of the sinful soul, and as
affecting the present relation between man and God. It has destroyed
the union, has broken down even the sacrificial bridge, for it has
made all acceptable offerings impossible. Man's will is weakened,
therefore he has not strength to offer himself completely and
unreservedly to God; his nature is corrupted and stained, therefore
his offering, could he make it, could not be accepted. Sin is a
hopeless state of weakness and uncleanness. But there is another, in
one sense an earlier, more fundamental aspect of sin. The sins of the
past have produced not merely weakness and corruption, but also guilt.
The sinner feels himself guilty before God. If we examine the idea of
guilt, as realized by the conscience, it will be seen to contain the
belief in an external power, or law, or person against whom the
offence has been committed, and also an internal feeling, the
acknowledgment of ill-desert, a sense of being under sentence, and
that justly. Whether the punishment which is felt to be the due reward
of the offence has been borne or not, the conception of punishment,
when the offence has been committed, cannot be avoided, and it brings
with it a conviction of its justice. These two elements, the external
and the internal element, seem to be necessary to the full conception
of guilt. The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's
enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference
that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty. But it is precisely
because the consciousness of sin does not and cannot stop here that,
over and above any injury to self, any weakness or even corruption
produced by sin, we speak of its guilt. 'Against Thee, Thee only, have
I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight.' This belief in an
external power, whose condemnation has been incurred by sin, may take
various forms; for the power may be represented as impersonal or as
personal, as law or as God. For our present purposes, however, the
distinction is immaterial: the essential point is that it is something
external to ourselves, not merely the echo of the sinner's own
self-inflicted pain and injury. We cannot, however, limit it to this.
For it is not merely an external power, it is also a just power that
is presented to the sense of guilt. Before bare power, unrighteous or
non-moral, an offender may be compelled to submit, but he will not
feel guilt. The state of mind expressed by Mill's well-known defiance
is his who has offended a superior power which he cannot believe to be
just, and it is very far removed from the feeling of guiltiness[217].
The sense of guilt implies the righteousness as well as the power of
that against which we have offended; it is a moral conviction.
Guiltiness, then, regarded in one aspect is the sense of sin, in
another it is the recognition of the law of righteousness, or, if we
may now assume the religious point of view, it is the conviction of
the wrath of God against sin.
It is plain, if we will only scrutinise closely and candidly the
conception of sin and guilt, that no merely 'subjective' explanation
will account for the facts revealed by our consciousness. Even if we
had no scriptural evidence to guide us, the evidence, that is, to take
it at the lowest, of a series of specially qualified witnesses to
religious phenomena, our own hearts would tell us of the wrath of God
against sin. It is irresistibly felt that there is a Power hostile to
sin, and that this Power has decreed a righteous punishment for the
offences which are the external signs and results of the sinful state.
Whatever the punishment may be, a question we need not now discuss,
the sinner's conscience warns him of it. He may apparently, or for a
time, escape it; but it is none the less felt to be the fitting
expression of Divine wrath, the righteous manifestation of the
hostility of God's nature to sin and all its consequences. Guilt,
then, like sin, has its twofold character. It is the belief in an
external hostility to sin expressing itself in punishment, and also
the conviction that such punishment is righteous and just. Thus, when
once God is recognised as the offended Person, the acknowledgment of
the righteousness of His judgment follows. 'Against Thee, Thee only,
have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight; that Thou
mightest be justified when Thou speakest, and be clear when Thou
judgest.'