Christianity, among whom Reimarus led the way in a fragment "On the Aim
of Jesus," published with others anonymously in 1778. He charged Jesus
with using religious motives as merely a means to a political end; but
supposed that, after he found death impending, he renounced the
political aim, and pretended that his purpose was only a moral one. A
few able scholars have been disposed to blend the last view with the
others. They suppose an original Theocratic purpose to have been
entertained by Jesus, in which the moral and religious principle
predominated, but which was not at first exclusive of the political
element. They suppose, however, a progress in his aim; that after his
rejection by the people, "which he regarded as God's rejection of any
national limitation of his work," he inferred that his mission was to
found a spiritual kingdom. Though the direct imputation of a political
aim has not been a favorite expedient with ultra-rationalist critics
since Reimarus was answered by Reinhard and others, it ought not to be
passed without consideration. It is continually reappearing in modified
forms. And this happens, because it is impossible to present the
hypothesis that Jesus intended to be a Jewish Messiah without involving
the supposition of something political in his object, and in his means
of accomplishing it. Accordingly a very recent critic[33] of
Christianity, writing in the interest of "Free Religion," and
representing Jesus as claiming to be a Jewish Messiah, after saying very
truly that "the popular hope of a Priest-king transformed itself in the
soul of Jesus into the sublime idea of a spiritual Christ ruling by
love," is constrained to say, inconsistently, in another place, that, if
Jesus had assumed the office, he would not have hesitated to discharge
its political duties, and to exercise political sway. Here, then, is a
revival of the imputation to Jesus of a political aim. But I am not
aware that it is anywhere in recent criticism enforced with any new
strength of argument. It is obviously contradicted by the general
bearing of his actions, and by the whole tone of his teachings when
rightly apprehended. It is contradicted by his utter neglect of
political measures. He could not be induced or forced to take the
position of a political ruler. Admirers wished to proclaim him King: he
sent them away, tore his disciples from them, and went himself into the
mountain to commune with God. Asked to settle a dispute about property,
he says he has never been constituted an administrator of civil justice.
When shown the tribute-money, and inquired of if it were lawful to pay
tribute unto Cæsar, he makes the memorable reply in which he at once
acknowledges the rights of the government _de facto_; and the rights of
conscience and religion, which to deny would be usurpation. He was the
first to distinguish the spheres of the church and of the state so
intimately related, but never to be blended. And this is just what the
political Messiah, the Priest-king, could not have conceived. The
outlines of his church may serve as the model of a free church to-day.
There was no political motive to enter it. It had no officer who could
exercise political power. There was no authority but in the
congregation. It was amenable to no political head. Its fundamental
truths were the equal relation of all men with God as his children, and
the common relation of all men with one another as brethren. The only
end of his church was the moral and spiritual development of its members
and of all men; the only condition of membership, the recognition of
this end; and, with it, of the providential gift of truth and life given
in Jesus Christ's consciousness of God, and an appropriating and
co-operative sympathy with his character and purpose. Its method was
free conference and prayer in the spirit of unity, and in devotion to
the regeneration of the human family; a method, the results of which, he
assured them, would be the reaching of decisions which would be in
essential harmony with his own spirit, the Spirit of God. He drew more
from the synagogue than from the temple. Worship might ascend anywhere
from the heart. One need not go to Jerusalem. No political Messiah could
have thought of any centre of the restored Theocracy but the holy city,
to which the tribes should repair with their sacrifices, and the
converted heathen bring their votive offerings to Jehovah, the God of
Jews; but the temple must be destroyed, and not one stone of it left
upon another, according to Jesus, in order to prepare for that worship
of the Father by men in spirit and in truth, which he, as the Christ,
would inaugurate.
[Footnote 33: See "The Index," Toledo, Jan. 1 and Jan. 8, 1870.]
We thus come naturally to another point in the discussion. The theories
which recognize the political aim of Jesus commonly suppose that he
regarded it as his personal mission to restore Mosaism to its primitive
purity. And, if he shared in the hope of the restoration of the
Theocracy, he would probably take the most conservative ground in regard
to the Levitical institutions and the Mosaic precepts. He would believe
the Jewish people must be made independent, in order to give supremacy
to those institutions. The Roman yoke must be broken, and the coming
kingdom be inaugurated with war. Nothing of this, however, is found in
the ministry of Jesus Christ. When he preached "the kingdom of heaven is
at hand," it was no summons to war. The characteristic qualities of
those who belonged to this kingdom were opposed to the Theocratic
spirit. And the Sermon on the Mount taught, as clearly as the formal
declaration before Pilate, that it was not of this world. Why should his
followers be ready to suffer social persecution, if his aim tended in
the direction regarded with social favor? What mean the non-resistant
exhortations, instructing his followers to waive their rights for the
sake of the higher interests they were living for, if he and his
adherents are charged with the political duty of driving the invader
from the sacred soil? The rise and progress of this kingdom, Jesus said,
on another occasion, could not be observed like those of an empire
founded by force: it would not "come with observation." It had already
come unobserved. It began to come with John the Baptist, until whose
work the law was in the ascendant; but since whom men had been pressing
into the kingdom of heaven, which was tending to supplant the law. And,
on still another occasion, if he expected his movement to leave the
Jewish ritual intact, how could he say, with pregnant significance, that
new wine must not be put into old wineskins, lest they break, and the
wine be lost. I know great stress is laid upon his saying, "Think not
that I have come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I have not come to
destroy, but to fulfil. For truly do I say to you, Till heaven and earth
pass away, not one jot or one tittle shall pass from the law, till all
be fulfilled." But, if taken literally, they prove too much; for,
according to other passages, his teaching on some points--as, for
instance, divorce, and, as many think, the Sabbath--directly conflicted
with that of Moses. He threw doubt directly upon the tradition that God
rested on the seventh day. God, he said, had been always working up to
that hour, and in his own acts of healing done on the Sabbath he had
been co-operating with God. We must therefore interpret freely this
language, and understand by it the everlasting law. The smallest
requirement of the true law, however overlooked and despised it may have
been in the popular exegesis, would have its emphasis in the new
teachings; and whoever slighted it would be the least in the kingdom of
heaven. There is not a word which can be fairly construed into
commendation of the Levitical priesthood. He gives to the Mosaic
precepts cited the most spiritual interpretation, or sets them aside
when they cannot be wrought into a more profound system of natural
morality. He implies his superiority to all preceding teachers,
including Moses. "It was said to the ancients, but _I_ say unto you."
Indeed, his tone in this discourse is any thing but that of a Jewish
Rabbi of his period. It is that of the most human and universal
teaching. It asserts, when we penetrate beyond the immediate occasion of
it to its principle, that which is true in all times and places. Those
affirmations with which it opens, what are they but declarations, the
substantial verity of which it is possible for every man, if he know not
now, yet sometime to know in himself. "Blessed are the poor in spirit:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The spirit of those who can set a
limit to their wants and curb ambition, who do not live blinded by
interests to the demands of a pure soul,--the spirit of such is always
blessed. Happy he who imbibes it from the circumstances of his life; and
happy he who, amidst the blandishments of riches, is taught it by the
discipline of Heaven. These are they to whom has come the kingdom of
heaven from Jesus' day until now. Then, "Blessed are the pure in heart:
for they shall see God." And is not a pure mind the very moral
atmosphere in which man sees God as he is, and rejoices in the sight? A
man's moral sentiments are the medium through which comes to him the
thought of God. Let those sentiments be perverted, and he imagines
either that God is not or that he is different from what he is. His
wrong mind either obstructs entirely the beam which darts from the
Divine essence, or scatters the spotless white of that Sun, the pure
aggregate of Divine perfections, into the particolored tints of the
earthly and sensual soul itself. Again, "Blessed are the merciful: for
they shall obtain mercy." It is even so. Those who sympathize with
human wants will feel the sympathy of God flowing into their souls, and
can never lack assurance of the Divine mercy so long as they keep in
themselves that pledge of it,--the merciful spirit. And so it is a grand
caution, which every one who has wantonly condemned others knows he
ought to keep in memory,--"Condemn not, lest ye be condemned." For the
undeserved, heavy sentence of condemnation which a man lifts high to
hurl with malignant intent at his brother is arrested by an interposing
law of Providence, and falls from his weak hand with its full weight
upon his own head. And at length we come to what might be thought a
studied satire upon the boasted maxims of human wisdom: "Blessed are ye
when men shall speak evil of you falsely for my sake." Is this the sober
truth? Is not Christ, so true elsewhere, mistaken here? It is a verity
as certain as the laws of God. Do not minds advance unequally in truth,
in all the successive phases of a soul's spiritual growth? Whoever goes
before others in thought and life will find men laying this to his
charge. But, if by following the command of Christian truth to his
conscience he has opened upon himself the battery of human
censoriousness, he may exult; for every unjust word or groundless
suspicion will but remind him of his unbribed devotion, and be changed
before it touches his deepest happiness into the benediction of God.
Were we to go through what was spoken on the Mount, we might show its
truth commanding unquestionably the assent of our moral natures. It all
takes hold of our mind and life. It comes to us to throw light on what
we do and suffer, and to borrow confirmation from it in turn. Though we
fall so far short of it, and could not have conceived it originally and
from ourselves, as Jesus did, it so accords with the laws of our being
as to seem to be the suggestion of our experience, some admonition
floating to us by intent of God on that ever-heaving sea of life, of
ambition, of passion, of mutual misunderstanding, of strong loves and
piercing griefs, of various mingling sympathies, on whose shore we do
now stand, and whose tide, for our few seconds here in time, laves our
feet and dashes upon us its spray.
We might turn over other pages of Jesus' instruction beyond that
introductory statement of the principles of the kingdom of God, and
evolve its sense in terms presenting an undeniable spiritual fact to all
our race. For instance, "To him who hath shall be given, and he shall
have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away, even
that which he seemeth to have." How true! It is verified in the mental
condition of every man at this moment. We only seem to have the faculty
we do not use. There is no long, healthy sleep to the mind and the moral
will any more than to the body; but the alternative is, live or die. And
thus Jesus was ever holding up the law of the spiritual life to the
light of that day which dawned with his advent. He dwelt on what is
inward. Although you cannot find that once, in his popular teaching, he
laid stress upon observances, times without number he studiously
distinguished between every thing of the nature of ceremonial and those
everlasting obligations of justice and humanity, of inward and outward
purity, which ought to be recognized in the home and in the state, in
all the intercourse of man with man, and in watching over the secret
heart. We may not infer that he was hostile to religious forms. He
observed them. He knew that man needed them, and that souls instinct
with life would perpetuate them and adapt them to their own wants. But
he saw in the spirit of the Scribes the evil of teaching that any
arbitrarily imposed outward act can in itself please God; and, in regard
to such, the whole emphasis of his teaching was, "These ought ye to have
done, and not to have left the other undone." He quoted from the
prophets habitually, "I will have mercy and not sacrifice."
Such is the genius of Christianity,--of Christianity as it came from its
Founder,--the religion which is said to have ripened into the mediæval
theology and the Roman hierarchy. Too little, indeed, has this genius of
Christianity been regarded! The old Judaic spirit which brought Jesus to
the cross has, among Protestants as well as Catholics, too often
crucified the Christianity of Christ. Human metaphysics have been put
into creeds and catechisms. Sects have been founded and built up on the
importance attached to the form of a rite as a part of essential
Christianity. Disputes have raged which the traditions of the Church and
the letter of Scripture have failed to settle, and about which Jesus, if
teaching among us, would not waste a minute's breath.
If further proof were wanting of the breadth and spirituality of Jesus'
view, it might be found in the fact that he was brought to the cross by
the pro-Judaism party. His friends would interpret him differently from
his enemies. The universality and spirituality of his aim were not at
once apprehended by his followers. Their very trust in him would make
them slow to perceive his radical meaning; for, to impute to him what
was in his mind, would seem to be distrust. They would put a limited
construction upon what he said. It would be otherwise with his enemies,
who would be sharp and quick to see the full extent to which his words
would carry him.
The movement of Jesus, then, may be called revolutionary, not in the
sense of aiming directly at political revolution, but in the sense of
his expecting to found a free, spiritual, and universal religion, which
would uproot and remove in time the partial religions, Judaism included.
Still he designed to connect himself with the Old Dispensation. He
recognized the Divine mission of Moses and the Providential office of
the prophets in preparing for him. In the expectations which they
fostered there was something true as well as something false. When they
depicted a glorious and happy political condition of the Jewish nation
under the Messiah as an earthly king, Jesus must have regarded them as
being in error. We find him pronouncing John the Baptist the greatest of
the prophets of the old order, and declaring that the least in the
kingdom of heaven was greater than he; and the reason is shown by the
context of the words (Matt. xi.) to be that John as a Jewish prophet
regarded the kingdom of God in part as a political kingdom. But the
fundamental idea of the Theocracy, that other nations would be united
with Israel under the dominion of the One True God, was one in harmony
with Jesus' thought.[34] This expectation Jesus regarded it as his
mission to realize and fulfil. He had only to separate from the
Theocratic predictions of the prophets the partial political element, to
bring them into unison with his universal aim. Whatever in the hitherto
prevailing ideas and hopes was capable of expansion he absorbed into
himself, that it might be given out in a wider and higher form, and
live for ever. A case somewhat parallel might be found in the changes
wrought by our late war. Those who took a radical view of the issue of
the contest were exposed to the charge of being revolutionary and
destroying the Constitution. They could reply, "Yes: the issue will be
revolutionary. There will be a new state of law, and of the relations of
the people in important respects, effected by carrying out fundamental
principles. But those principles were the essence of the Constitution;
and to carry them out is only fully to accomplish its purpose, by
annihilating transient provisions at war with liberty and social
justice, and giving scope to the principles of the Declaration of
Independence. We hold to the Constitution. We have come not to destroy,
but to fulfil." So Jesus Christ came not to destroy all that had gone
before, but to fulfil whatever in it was fundamental to the Divine
purpose in relation to man. In this feeling of a real connection between
his movement and the Hebrew ideas and hopes is to be found the principal
explanation of his confining his labors, and those of the apostles when
first sent forth, chiefly to Judea and Galilee. Not only must his own
work be limited in its local scope,--for he could not go
everywhere,--but the historical basis of his movement lay in the Hebrew
history. Among the Hebrew people only could he find suitably prepared
immediate disciples. Salvation was to be from the Jews. And, foreseeing
that the nation as such would reject him, he saw that it was essential
to the extension among the Gentiles of the truths and hopes he inherited
as a Jew, essential to the breaking down of the partition wall which now
kept out the true doctrine of God from the heathen world, that he should
come to a distinct issue with the Jewish authorities, and make it clear
and notorious that it was the narrow spirit of Pharisaism and legal
formality which crucified him. (If he were lifted up, he would draw all
men to him.) And from the first the ruling sect, with the acute instinct
of self-interest, discerned the revolutionary character of his
movement,--that it elevated man above the Jew, and struck at the root of
the idolized Hebrew pre-eminence.
[Footnote 34: See Noyes's Introduction to his Translation of the
Prophets.]
I pass now to a more subtle hypothesis, that Jesus expected to establish
the Theocratic empire by angelic assistance on occasion of his return to
earth, which would occur at the same time with the great outward change
of the world. It is founded on such passages as this: "For the Son of
Man is to come in the glory of his Father, with his angels; and then he
will render to every one according to his works." (Matt. xvi. 27. Comp.
Matt. xiii. 41, and xxvi. 29-60.) It is thus stated by Strauss:[35] "He
waited for a signal from his heavenly Father, who alone knew the time of
this catastrophe; and he was not disconcerted when his end approached
without his having received the expected intimation." His Messianic hope
was not political or even earthly. He referred its fulfilment to a
supermundane theatre.
[Footnote 35: Life of Jesus, Part II. § 66. The charge of enthusiasm is
retained, but not discussed, in his Life of Christ for the German
people.]