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REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
REVELATION AND
THE HOLY SPIRIT
AN ESSAY IN BARTHIAN THEOLOGY
BY
F; W. CAMFIELD, M.A., D.D.
WITH A FOREWORD
BY
REV. JOHN McCONNACHIE, M.A., D.D.
Author of" The Significance of Karl Earth " and
" The Bartbiati Theology and the Man of To-day "
" Thesis approved for the Degree of Doctor of Divinity
in the University of London"
LONDON : ELLIOT STOCK
(Proprs. SIDNEY KIEK & SON, LTD.)
1 6 & 17 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.4
MCMXXXIII
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
r .
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD by Dr. McConnachie . . . vii
PREFACE ....... ix
I. THE IDEA OF REVELATION . . .II
II. THE WITNESS TO REVELATION ... 47
III. THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION THE HOLY
SPIRIT AND FAITH
(1) REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT . 85
(2) REVELATION AND NATURE OF FAITH . IOO
(3) CONTRASTED CONCEPTIONS OF FAITH . IOy
(4) WIDER ASPECTS OF THE SPIRIT'S WORK
IN FAITH AND LIFE . . .. Il8
IV. THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE . . . .128
V. THE SPIRIT AND REASON . . . . 1 68
VI. THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY . . . .194
VII. THE SPIRIT AND GOD .... 224
VIII. THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION . 257
INDEX 299
FOREWORD
By REV. JOHN MCCONNACHIE, M.A., D.D.
IT affords me the utmost pleasure to write a Foreword
to this book by my friend Dr. F. W. Camfield on
Revelation and the Holy Spirit. I have never met Dr.
Camfield in the flesh, but for several years I have
communed with him in mind and spirit in a common
interest in the Barthian Theology. It was an article of mine
in the Hibbert Journal some six years ago, he informed
me, which first made him aware of this new movement,
and he set himself to acquire a knowledge of German
in order that he might read Barth in the original. As a
former student of that Barthian before Barth Dr.
P. T. Forsyth he was already more than half prepared,
and he made rapid progress. This book will reveal to
the world, what I have known for several years, that
Dr. Camfield possesses one of the acutest minds which
are at present engaged with this theology, and he has a
real contribution to make, particularly regarding the
doctrine of Revelation.
I read this book in its original form as a thesis for
the D.D. of London University, and was deeply impressed
by its intellectual power, and grasp of the principles of
Barthianism. I urged its publication then, and I am
glad that it is now to appear. I gladly take also this
opportunity of acknowledging some use which I made
Vll
FOREWORD
of the thesis in my recent book, which in the nature of
the case I could not acknowledge.
As this is the only theology which, in my opinion,
is taking seriously at the present moment the rethinking
of the doctrine of Revelation, I would bespeak for this
able and scholarly volume a warm welcome from the
whole Church.
JOHN McCoNNACHiE.
PREFACE
THE aim of the following essay is to think through
again the Christian idea of revelation, and to do it from
the standpoint of the New Testament conception of the
Holy Spirit. The thesis which I attempt to expound
and develop is, that in this conception a category is
supplied whereby the meaning and implications of
revelation as Christianity understands that term may be
discovered and brought out. Revelation brings its own
category of interpretation. It shines in its own light.
It is seen in and through itself. It is not just a collection
of ideas and disclosures which, in order to be seen as
revelation, have first rationally to be correlated with
the forms of categories of man's natural reason. That
would make a rational principle the real 'locale' of
revelation. But revelation, inasmuch as it is essentially
dynamic and creative, brings with it the principle of its
own interpretation. What that means and whereto it
leads, it is hoped the following pages will make clear.
IX
CHAPTER I
THE IDEA OF REVELATION
THERE is perhaps no greater need to-day for religion
than that of a fresh examination of the idea of revelation.
This is necessary not only in the interests of Christian
theology but also of the whole range of man's thought
on the final problems of life and the universe. What do
we mean, or rather, what ought we to mean, when we
speak of revelation ? The word is commonly used with a
bewildering variety of connotation. We speak of the
revelations of science, of poetry and art, of human
nature, society, life and love, and so on. The word
revelation is stretched to cover all the discoveries,
inventions, perceptions and intuitions which enlarge and
extend our experience. Religion itself is made parallel
with these perceptions and discoveries of the human
mind and spirit, and it is often defended as a method of
approach to reality equally vivid with others. In Canon
Streeter's fine book Reality, for instance, religion is, as
it were, laid alongside of science and art, as having, at
the lowest, an equal right with these in the interpretation
of the mystery of the universe.
The attempt is accordingly made to 'reconcile'
religion with these other activities of man's mind and
spirit. We have, as it were, a mass of positive con-
tributions to the understanding of reality which must
find a way of living together in the same house; a
number of different lines of approach which must
somehow be made to converge on the same point. The
scientist has his contribution, the artist his, and the
religious man his. The difficulty of adjusting and
reconciling these positive contributions, these different
12 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
lines of approach is acutely felt. The relation between
science and religion, which perhaps bulks most in the
mind of the modern man who is interested in and
concerned for both, is, in spite of all the praiseworthy
and not wholly unsuccessful attempts which have been
made of late to ' reconcile ' them, that of a painful
tension ; and this tension only seems to weaken when
the scientist begins to lose confidence in himself, and
when the religious man forswears all dogmatism and
contents himself with a vague mysticism when, that is,
he surrenders the idea of a positive word addressed to
him and accepts the position of a mere seeker after truth.
And though the tension between religion and art is
perhaps less relevant in this connection, it is in truth
scarcely less striking, especially in our own day. And
it is not easy to see how the difficulties caused by these
tensions can ever be overcome while the various
activities of man's mind and spirit, science, art, religion,
and the like are regarded, each as a positive and valid
method equally with the others, for the interpretation
of reality.
The truth is, our difficulties to-day arise from the
fact that the freedom, independence, autonomy of the
mental life of man in every direction of its activity is
accepted almost universally, and in the most unqualified
way. The idea of autonomy as applied to the sciences
and to all the fields of man's mental activity is taken as
pre-supposition. That the mental worker should be
guided in his conclusions by anything other than the
subject-matter of his investigations and the methods
appropriate thereto, that he should be interfered with,
in any sense, by any outside considerations, that, for
example, religious or theological considerations should
be permitted to lift up their heads in the field of scientific
"THE IDEA OF REVELATION 13
conclusion, this is regarded as intolerable. If there be
such a thing as universally accepted dogma, it is this idea
of the autonomy of the sciences.
We are well aware, of course, how modern the dogma
is. In the Middle Ages it would have been regarded as
the supreme heresy. The Church was not indisposed
to grant even a wide measure of freedom to the mental
worker, so long as it was clearly recognised that theology
had the last word. Theology was the " Queen of the
Sciences " and she was no constitutional but an absolute
monarch. Every branch of man's mental life was
brought into subjection to theology. St. Thomas
Aquinas could produce a ' Summa ' which should be a
compendium of the whole mass of human knowledge
on the mysteries of the universe, because he was able to
take this supremacy of theology over every direction of
man's mental life for granted. That the sciences were
not autonomous, that they had no independent rights,
that they must take their bearings from theological truth,
and have their conclusions adjusted to that truth, this was
regarded as inevitable, necessary and right. It is easy to cry
out against this tyranny, to charge the Mediaeval Church
with blindness and obscurantism ; and, of course, the
situation could not last. Conflict, tension and even
disruption were bound to appear. But it was not mere
tyranny or obscurantism which denied autonomy to the
various departments of man's mental life. The Church
felt instinctively that her claim to be in possession of
revealed truth was imperilled and even denied, if the
pre-supposition of autonomy, namely that truth is an
open question, that it is still to be sought, were
granted.
The connection between revealed truth and the
activities and conclusions of man's reason was declared
14 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
to consist in the fact that the former was completely
congruous with the latter, that it was but the extension
of rational knowledge, that it was built upon a sub-
structure of rationally ascertainable and verifiable truth
which it simply completed. But in making that claim,
theology granted to reason, in principle, the very
autonomy which it denied to it in fact. If theology
appeals to reason, then by reason must it stand. It
cannot at one and the same time dominate reason, set
limits to reason, and accept the verdict of reason, wait
upon the conclusions of reason. This consideration
was, however, countered by the assertion that reason has
been thwarted and perverted by man's sin, and that
therefore it must submit itself to the domination of
revelation, in the doing of which it would find itself
renewed and strengthened. The result of this con-
clusion was that a new significance came to be attached
to dogma as the expression of revelation on its intellectual
side. Dogma came to be considered as a form of law.
Man's reason must accept a limit, a law imposed from
without. The Church was interpreted as a great system
of society and government, the spiritual counterpart of
secular society, parallel with it in its nature, and embracing
by divine right the whole body of humanity. Of this
divine society each man was a subject, and the whole of
his life, including his intellect, was subordinate to its
government. The conception of law entered into that of
dogma. Dogma was the Church's law for man's mind.
The result was, that a certain spirit of expediency crept
into the idea of divine truth. There were times when
divine truth was regarded less in its quality of truth than
in its quality of law, which it was expedient to maintain
in the interests of the organisation of human life in the
Church, This new significance can clearly be seen in the
THE IDEA OF REVELATION IJ
attitude of the Church to heresy. Heresy was treason
against the sanctity of divine government as well as, and
sometimes rather than, falsity ; and as treason it could
appropriately be punished. In all this, it becomes apparent
that what was lacking, and indeed it is still largely lacking,
was any thorough-going examination of the relation of
revelation to the autonomy of man's reason. A kind of
compromise between the two was set up by giving to
dogma the aspect of law, and this compromise worked
on the whole fairly successfully, while there was little or
nothing in man's mental life to offer serious challenge
to the conclusions of theology.
But, as we have said, this situation could not last.
At the Renaissance reason largely secured its autonomy
as over against the domination of the Church. Science,
art, scholarship began to claim for themselves indepen-
dence. No longer were they willing to accept direction
and to have their conclusions forestalled in the interests
of theology. The unity of man's mind in relation to the
last truth of things began to break up. Each separate
department of thought claimed to go on its own way
unimpeded, and to approach the problem of truth from
its own particular angle.
Now the result of this, in many ways, very right and
necessary liberation, was that religion and theology lost
not only sovereignty, but even autonomy for themselves.
The ironic circumstance has rarely been remarked, that
it was considered a great achievement on the part of
Schleiermacher, that he should have succeeded in
establishing the autonomy of religion. Religion came to
be looked upon as a branch of philosophy, or ethics.
It was felt to possess no independent right or .place of
its own. Religion was the true philosophy or it was
the indispensable sanction of ethic. It must appeal to
1 6 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
philosophy or to ethic, to substantiate its claim. It
could not, as it were, stand on its own foundation, it must
stand on a foundation laid for it by metaphysics or ethic.
The " The Queen of the Sciences " found herself to be
their handmaid, looking to them for the right to lift up
her head in the house of man's mental life.
And this position religion still retains in the thought
of many. In Hegelianism religion is just the crude
adumbration of that which reaches its perfection in
philosophy. It is just crude philosophical intuition. The
New-Idealists, such as Croce and Gentile, interpret it
after this fashion. Its autonomy is conceded in a sense,
but only as raw material for philosophical truth. No
true-ness is granted to it as such, only the possibility of
attaining true-ness through philosophical criticism and
speculation. From another point of view religion is
regarded as a derivative of ethic. Ethic postulates
religion after the manner of Kant. The practical reason
as distinct from the theoretical reason leads out to the
great affirmations of religion. Ritschlianism though
deriving much from Schleiermacher is, to a large extent,
constructed upon the foundation of the philosophy of
Kant. Its idea of ' beruf ' or calling, is a moralistic one.
Its conception of the kingdom of God as a realm of moral
ends, together with its renunciation of metaphysics and
its system of value-judgments, means that religion is
taken as the supreme moral valuation of life. From
ethics it derives its validity and its right. On ethics it
stands. By ethical reflection must it be interpretated
and evaluated.
Schleiermacher, as we have said, was the first great
pioneer of the autonomy of religion. In that respect he
may be called "the Father of Modern Theology."
According to him, religion was no derivative of
THE IDEA OF REVELATION IJ
philosophy or ethics but an original, independent,
underived datum. Its essence was pure feeling, the
feeling of absolute dependence. It was the primal
reaction set up in the soul of man, antecedent to all
reflection and to all action, by the universe around him ;
an inevitable, a priori feeling of absolute dependence.
An original God-consciousness belongs to the very
nature of man. In the sense that he is absolutely
dependent, man becomes inevitably conscious of God. It
is not relevant to our purpose to discuss Schleiermacher's
method of establishing the God-consciousness through
this original, given, feeling of absolute dependence. He
has not been widely followed in this respect. But he
did succeed in drawing attention to the autonomy of
religion, in delivering it from its subjection to philosophy
and ethics, and in establishing its right to a place of its
own in the mental life of man. His followers have given
themselves to the task of establishing this autonomy
on a more satisfactory basis. Indeed it is scarcely an
exaggeration to say that the whole effort of modern
theology has been towards the making valid of the
autonomy of religion, and to the drawing out of its
implications. Troeltsch, for example, has discovered in
man's reason a transcendent element which is met by the
presence of the transcendent in the universe. According
to him, the essence of religion is not feeling, but intuitive
reason. The transcendent element in reason guarantees
the autonomy of religion. Otto in his much discussed
book Das Heilige (The Holy) carries the discussion a
stage further. He too finds a religious a priori in the soul
of man, but interprets it as an original, underived
apprehension of what he calls ' the numinous ', that which
awakens awe; a feeling which is unique and which
persists and is intensified and at the same time refined
B
1 8 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
through all reflection and rationalisation. Through the
efforts of these and other workers the autonomy of
religion has secured wide recognition. It is still, of
course, widely attacked, and the New Psychology has
brought fresh weapons of offence. But it still remains
as a powerful instrument of apologetic. And this
autonomy of religion is generally looked upon as the
fundamental principle of revelation. If revelation is to
be spoken of, it is thought that the autonomy of religion
must be the all-determining idea. So we have a number
of autonomous activities of man's mind, of which religion
is one, perhaps the chief. In the mutual action and inter-
action of these activities in their concurrent approach
to the problem of the universe, is truth to be discovered.
Religion takes its place with a contribution of its own
to make, a contribution which may not be ignored or
misprized.
But religion and supremely Christianity have never
been comfortable in this position. To be regarded as
standing with other and parallel activities of man's mind
and spirit, and moving with them to the supreme object
of their common quest this, religion has ever felt to
be fatal in the long run to its existence as revelation.
The question arises, can it remain as a ' positive ' in this
position ? Can it hope to be, in the end, more than a
certain spirit, attitude, temper, influencing and colouring
all these other activities ? Can it establish itself as truth in
any definite or positive sense ? Must it not forswear the
idea of revelation ? Is not the last word after all left
to science which does lead to definite and positive con-
clusions ? Must not religion be relegated to the position
of a mere mental and spiritual attitude, which yet allows
science to be supreme in the realm of statement or
conclusion ? Something like this seems to be the view
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 19
of Kirsopp Lake in his book, The Religion of Yesterday
and To-morrow. A place is certainly left for religion in
this book, but throughout, the final and decisive word
about the nature of life and even about the being of
God is left to science. And Julian Huxley's thesis of
" Religion without Revelation " would appear to indicate
the final direction in which this conception of religion
is moving.
Now religion and especially Christianity have ever felt
themselves to be definitely and positively truth or nothing
at all. In distinction to all mere feeling or experience,
all mere tone, temper and attitude of mind and spirit,
Christianity at any rate proclaims itself as word, and as
last word, that is to say as revelation. It claims to be
something which is to be believed. It envisages not an
approach to the problem of life parallel with other
approaches, but a subversion of the whole idea of human
approach as such. That is to say, it places in the fore-
ground not an approach of man to reality, but an approach
of reality to man. It conceives of reality not as the object
of man's investigation but as the subject of man's life.
While in science and philosophy man starts out from his
experience, and by examining and clarifying it, seeks to
discover reality, here reality takes the initiative and treats
man and his experience as its objects. In other words
Christianity sets out from the idea of grace ; not from an
a priori within the soul, in the sense of something positive
within the nature of man which meets with something
positive outside of him, but from a negative in man's
life, indeed from man's life regarded as a negative, a
negative which is met by grace. God moves towards
man, man does not move towards God. All comes
from grace, begins in grace, and ends in grace. Man is
sought and found, he does not seek and find.
20 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
If then we are to speak to any purpose of revelation,
it is this idea which we must first examine. It darkens
counsel and introduces confusion to use the word
revelation to cover man's general and many-sided
approach to reality in the investigating and clarifying
of his experience, until we have either accepted or rejected
this claim which Christianity in especial makes. It is
necessary, at any rate provisionally, to put revelation in a
category of its own. We are concerned with a movement
from God to man and not from man to God. We have
to develop the idea of God not from below upwards but
from above downwards. We have to do, not with man
reaching God, but with God reaching man. Our
concern is with no evolutionary process discernible in
the world, but with a revolutionary act on the world.
The mind will be prepared for the sympathetic
entertaining of this idea by a multitude of considerations.
Too much stress may doubtless be laid on the deep and
continually recurring sense of need for revelation in
this sense. Dean Inge criticises with asperity but not
without justice, the implications of the phrase, "A
gospel for human needs." 1 To point to a feeling of need
is not to say that that need will be satisfied. Religion
which is based on human needs, or which makes these
needs the criteria of truth is certainly open to the charge
of subjectivism. When men make the longings and
desires which rise in them from their felt sense of need the
standards of their beliefs, the way is opened to a debased
pragmatism which can justify all kinds of error and
superstition. But the need which cries out for revelation
1 See Outspoken Essays, p. 267.
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 21
lies deeper than any mere desire craving for fulfilment.
It is in its deepest significance a longing to burst through
all the bonds of subjectivity. In other words the need
which postulates revelation is an a priori sense of
negativity. It is not simply that there is an a priori in
the soul of man, in the sense of a positive apprehension
of the religious object as continuous with his life,
it is that there is an a priori of a negative kind. Man
does not feel in the depths of his being that he has
got God, but that he hasn't got Him, that he is somehow
alienated arid cut off, that he is in his empiric actuality, a
negative, a need, an emptiness as over against God. It
is to establish bonds of union and communion with
the Deity, to set up a relation, to bring himself and
God really together, that he betakes himself to
religion.
Men crave not merely for an extension of their powers
and possibilities, but for the invasion of these by wholly
other powers and possibilities. They have ever felt,
dimly or clearly, the utter inadequacy of their natural
powers, even the highest and finest, before the vast
mysteries and the giant antagonisms of life. The
longing of men for something beyond and other than
those discoveries, perceptions, and intuitions, which lead
them to envisage reality as a mere object of thought and
activity, their continually recurring conviction that
reality cannot primarily be object but must be thought of
first and foremost as subject, their craving for an
authority before which they can bow, rather than a datum
which they can investigate all this is striking fact which
cannot be without deep significance.
But the need for revelation takes on a deeper meaning
still, when it is borne in mind that life calls upon men,
not merely to investigate experience, but above all to
22 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
master it. Life brings with it experiences of the most
diverse kinds. Every day of our lives we pass through
many and disconnected experiences, and we are constantly
striving to synthesize and master them. They cannot be
made available for the interpretation of life unless they
are not only classified and examined by reflection, but
brought into some kind of subjection to the experiencing
subject. Life proceeds through the mastery of experience.
Where experience is not in some measure brought under
control, it leads to the complete disintegration of life and
mind. And it may be argued 1 that the function of poetry
and art is not to extend the borders of our knowledge,
but to enable us to master our experience. In all genuine
artistic expression, different elements of our experience
are brought together in such a way that the mind can, as
it were, rise above them. We attain a kind of salvation.
Our experiences are fused together in a new element.
Poetry, art, music and the like bring to our experiences
something which in themselves they do not possess.
They are an answer to a life need, which is no mere
subjective desire or longing but an ineradicable necessity
of our nature.
And yet they are no real answer. They seem to be an
answer only because they give moving and sometimes
satisfying expression to a need. They are not revelation ;
only a mode of self-expression. Nothing is said to our
need, no answer is given to our question, but the need
is for the moment adequately expressed, the question is
set out in something like the true scope of its implications.
When Wordsworth says :
To me alone there came a thought of grief,
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong,
1 I recall a lecture by Drinkwater.
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 23
he is indicating, in an almost perfect way, the function of
poetry and art. The need is truly and deeply expressed.
Man is delighted to find that there is something more to
be said about the facts and experiences of life than simply
' there they are.' He is delighted to discover that he can
do more than point to their stark actuality. He can so
bring that actuality into relation with the deep life-
forces of his own being, that these forces receive
expression and a kind of quickening. The very facts
that threaten life can be so orientated as it were towards
life, that thereby life is enhanced and enriched. Death
for example, the great enemy, can be set forth in such
terms of sublimity, majesty and beauty, that it becomes no
mere fact which can only be indicated, but a vast signi-
ficance, creating within the soul new emotions, new
life-stirrings and life-quickenings. But all the time, what
is happening is that man's deep need is receiving an
expression, which for the time calms the mind and
satisfies the spirit. It is a case of self-expression not of
revelation, of the question being put, not of the question
being answered. Experience is not really mastered, it is
only deeply expressed. That this is so, is evident in the
case of one deep experience of human life we may
perhaps anticipate so far as to call it the fundamental
experience of human life the sense of sin and guilt.
Even here artistic expression is not valueless. Aristotle
spoke of poetic tragedy as having its supreme value in the
purgation of the emotions through terror. The Greek
theatre, which largely occupied itself with the tragedy of
guilt, aimed at the purifying of the human soul, and so
became a kind of pulpit. And yet, that poetry and art
are totally inadequate to deal with the experience of sin
and guilt it would be superfluous to argue. The
tragedy of OEdipus closes in darkness and the night. In
24 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
poetry and art the experience of guilt is not mastered,
no word of forgiveness relieves its tragedy, nothing is
said to it, it simply expresses itself. The gods remain
wrathful, and dark fate works itself out into its last
inexorable conclusion.
Nevertheless, poetry and art have much to teach us in
regard to the idea of revelation. They are useful in
promoting the insight that the only answer to the question
put by human life is to be found, if at all, in the question
itself. That is to say, sin itself must somehow be
made to speak of forgiveness, death must be made to
speak of new life. Unless the very experience of sin can
be made to speak of something beyond itself, unless death
can so come home to our consciousness that it has some-
thing really to say, revelation is out of the question. The
poet and the artist will speak of our human lot of death
in such a way as to create new life-quickenings within
the soul. v In their inspiration death is no mere stark
object, it does something. In a sense we may say it is
no dumb thing, it speaks. If only it could say something
new to experience, instead of merely giving expression
to what experience says of it 1 If only it could be made
to speak of something beyond itself!
This, however, it cannot do. It does not speak of
revelation, it merely indicates how it would like to speak
of it. But in pointing to the need for revelation, in
indicating what revelation must be if it is to be revelation
at all, it performs an invaluable service. Somehow life
must come and lay hold of death, that the very idea of
death may enter into consciousness in a new way ;
holiness and righteousness must come into sin, that the
sense of sin may be in consciousness the conviction of
forgiveness and redemption, if real revelation is to take
place. There must be, not simply a going forth of
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 2J
experience in full activity and expression, but a coming
down into experience.
But a further and most important consideration which
will dispose the mind sympathetically to entertain the
idea of revelation, lies in the fundamentally negative
nature of the results gained by man's own approaches to
reality. Nothing is more pathetic than the apparently
invincible confidence in science, for example, which still
obtains in the popular mind. We have no desire to
under-rate the immense service rendered to human life
by science. Professor Whitehead truly observes : " The
great conquerors from Alexander to Csesar and from
Caesar to Napoleon, influenced profoundly the lives of
subsequent generations. But the total effect of this
influence shrinks to insignificance if compared to the
entire transformation of human habits and human
mentality produced by the long line of men of thought
from Thales to the present day, men individually power-
less, but ultimately the rulers of the world." But the
fact remains that science but enlarges the problem of
the universe, it does not bring it nearer solution. As
Bernard Shaw has truly observed, science never solves
one problem, without bringing to light ten new ones.
To give one definite instance, will anyone deny that the
enormous advance in astronomical knowledge has
magnified the problem of the universe to dimensions
hitherto unrealised ? When the hero of Hardy's Two on
a Tower confesses himself appalled by the sight of the
vast inter-stellar spaces through his telescope, when his
astronomical knowledge inflicts upon his mind the sense
of a terrible chaotic purposelessness, bringing home to
him a problem before which his mind sinks back in
powerlessness and indeed in fear, is he not thereby
1 Science and the Modern World, p. 259.
26 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
avowing the essential negativity of the results of science
for the purpose of revelation ? Will anyone in cold blood,
with the results of scientific investigation before him,
and with the long course of philosophical reflection
through the ages added thereto, claim that we are in
reality one whit nearer to any final word upon the
mystery of the universe? Surely if science has any
positive function in this regard, it is to bring it home to
us that our wisdom consists in an ever clearer realisation
of our ignorance ; that by means of it our question is
emphasized and enlarged rather than answered. We are
well aware that in so speaking we open ourselves to the
charge of philosophical scepticism, but the throwing
about of names and reproaches will not avail, while the
facts remain so clear. But the charge of philosophical
scepticism is not one to be taken seriously. Our
knowledge is made none the less real and valuable within
its own proper sphere by emphasizing and bringing out
into clear view its own limits. If we advance from what
Schweitzer has called ' simple ignorance ' to * com-
plicated ignorance ' we have none the less really advanced.
Dr. Forsyth has pointed out that an important element
in grasping the solution of a problem, is to see how big
the problem is. And the solution when grasped reveals
and establishes the value of those contributions which
set out the problem in its true dimensions.
We shall see, when we come to discuss in a later
chapter the relation of revelation to reason, that the
positive discoveries and conclusions of science and
philosophy are not simply set aside, they are on the
contrary re-established in a new if relative way. Never-
theless history alone will point to the conclusion that they
cannot reach any final and decisive word in regard to the
mystery of the universe. Schweitzer has observed that
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 27
x " since the time when man attained the conditions
precedent to such an apprehension and judgment of
things as we might call in our sense a Weltanschauung
that is, since the individual learned to take into con-
sideration the totality of being, the world as a whole,
and to reflect as a knowing and willing subject upon the
reciprocal relations of a passive and active sort which
subsist between himself and the All no far-reaching
development has really occurred in the spiritual life
of humanity. The problems of the Greeks turn up again
in the most modern philosophy. The scepticism of
to-day is essentially the same as that which came to
expression in ancient thought." 2 And Brunner, in
speaking of metaphysics, has pointed out that " in every
period when metaphysics is alive, it is alive in every
one of its different types." But if this be true, and it is
surely undeniable, if man's positive approaches to
ultimate truth and reality, whatever they discover on the
way, but emphasize at last his own essential negativity
and ignorance, and if this quest for final truth is one which
man cannot abandon so long as he remains man, how is it
that we are not more ready to consider the possibility
of a totally different kind of approach, that of reality to
man? Science itself when it arrives at a true under-
standing of itself, must raise the question of revelation.
And now to come directly to the subject of our
presentation, it is clear that we should have no ground
for entertaining the idea of revelation, in the sense in
which we have been speaking of it, were it not for the fact
1 The Mystery of the Kingdom of God; Introduction, pp. 47-48.
2 The Word and the World, p. 15.
28 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
that witness has been borne that such revelation has been given.
Here lies an arresting fact which stands across the
pathway of man's search after reality : definite, earnest,
challenging witness confronts us, that revelation has been
given. Our first task then is to examine the witness.
It will seem a huge and unwarrantable petitio prindpii
to assert that this witness is given only in the New
Testament. This contention will be attacked from many
sides, and specially from the side of Comparative
Religion. Why, it will be said, limit revelation to
Christianity and especially to the writings collected
together under the title of The New Testament ? The late
Baron von Hugel was always insistent in maintaining
that it is possible to speak of Christianity as revelation,
only if revelation be allowed to the other great religions
of the world as well ; only if preveniences, approaches
of reality to man, be granted in these. This, of course,
may be at once conceded in general terms. But the idea
which seems to underlie this contention may not forth-
with be allowed to pass. Is it meant that we must make
a sort of preliminary framework of the content of
revelation into which these different religions must
somehow be made to fit ? Can we make no evaluation of
the witness which is immediately to our hand in the
New Testament, excepting under conditions prescribed
by the general religious history of mankind ? Supposing,
as a matter of fact, we found in our witness something
which disqualified every other kind of witness as such,
are we to reject it on this ground out of hand ? This
would be to work a priori, to begin with ideas philo-
sophical or religious, instead of with the facts, with the
witness. Surely the right method for the Christian
believer is to begin quite definitely and even exclusively
with the kind of witness which he finds immediately to
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 29
his hand. He must ask himself what is the nature of
the witness ? Does it really speak of revelation ? Let the
adherent of some other religion do the same from his
standpoint. The question is not, what are the religious
ideas that appear from an examination and comparison
of the various religious systems, and can we combine these
by means of some a priori idea of what constitutes
revelation ? The question is rather what is said to have
happened ? Is revelation really spoken of ? Have we any
word of a real approach of reality to man ? And the more
this method is kept in mind, the clearer does it become,
that such a word is never definitely and positively
articulated save in Christianity, save in the New Testament.
For there, everything turns on a real happening, a real
coming of reality to man which as Emil Branner has
pointed out has the character of a ' once-for-all '
happening. 1 In pagan religions the events which are
witnessed to, have the character of mythological events
in that they are by their very nature repeatable. The
incarnations, avatars, etc., of pagan religion have nothing
about them which prevents them from being repeated at
will. They are objectivations of nature processes, or
speculative ideas. They can happen again and again.
There is no real, all-decisive coming of reality to man,
nothing that brings all life to a decisive point, nothing
that absolutely determines the course of existence. They
do not mark a new method of approach between man and
reality, a method which disqualifies in this relation the
ordinary approaches from man's side to reality. They
are valuable in supporting that autonomy of religion of
which we have spoken, in bearing witness to the essential
independence and creativeness of the religious spirit in
man, but they can help us little if we put revelation into
1 See Brunner, Der Mittler, chapter I, et passim.
30 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
a category of its own, which provisionally, at any rate,
we propose to do. At anyrate we do find a very
definitely articulated word of revelation in the New
Testament. Whether that word can substantiate itself
or no, is not here the question. But we may interrogate
that word, we may examine that witness, without raising
at the beginning the question whether such a word is
found elsewhere.
One other objection may be glanced at in passing. It
is sometimes said from within Christianity itself, that
attention cannot be confined to the pages of the New
Testament but that regard must also be given to the
traditions of the Catholic Church. There is that in
Christianity, it is said, belonging to the subject-matter of
revelation, which is not found expressly in the New Testa-
ment. The New Testament cannot be isolated from
the whole body of the tradition of the Church, cannot
be considered independently and in itself. This
objection, however, whatever weight it may have in
itself, is not serious for our purposes. For the Church
has ever taken its stand on the position that there is
revelation in the New Testament. It has founded itself
on the New Testament witness. Whether anything but
what is definitely contained in the New Testament can
be allowed to pass as revelation, can only be determined
when the nature of the New Testament witness has
been determined.
But what do we mean when we speak of examining the
witness ? The examination which we have in view can
scarcely be that of rational criticism. Rational criticism
can deal with alleged historical facts and with the
evolution of religious ideas, but it cannot deal with any
element in these which is real revelation. In rational
criticism, the subject-object relation remains unchanged ;
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 3!
the reason approaches an object. The reason finds itself
confronted with what claims to be truth, but the truth,
while it may indeed be truth, can never become revelation
until the reason has worked on it, and embraced it. It
is in being worked on by the reason, that truth becomes
revelation according to rational criticism. That is to say
what makes truth revelation is some activity on man's
part. But this destroys the idea of revelation as an
approach of reality to man, a real coming of God into the
field of man's consciousness. Here the subject-object
relation is transcended. Here it is impossible to deal
with revelation from the standpoint of pure objectivity.
Here consciousness itself is acted upon, invaded, attacked,
organised in a new way. Here man's being is brought
to a point of decision and crisis. Here reason in its old
connotation falls away, for reason can only contemplate an
object, approach an object. Here the knowledge is not
knowledge of an object, but knowledge of being known
by a subject. The correlation of revelation with reason
is something effected by revelation itself. Its principle
is not some immanent principle of reason, but a trans-
cendent principle which revelation itself brings. The
criteria of revelation will appear not in any rational,
objective examinations which we make of it, but in those
examinations which it makes of us. We shall deal with
this point at greater length when we come to examine the
nature of faith. Here it will be sufficient to point out
that an examination of the witness will consist in no
rational criticism as such, but in an attempt to discover
whether or no the character of revelation is sustained
throughout ; whether, that is, the speech is coherently
and consistently that of an approach of reality to man and
not that of man to reality, and whether the specific ideas
that arise as the subject-matter of revelation, are ideas
32 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
which are germane to man's being known by a subject
rather than to his knowing of an object. Such an
examination will be, in itself, open ears for revelation
proper. It is obvious that revelation in this sense can
never be proved, for directly we speak of proof we step
down again to the subject-object relation. But it can be
heard. " Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the
word of God " (Romans x, 17).
Now we cannot approach the New Testament without
at once perceiving that it does speak decisively of
revelation in this sense. Whether it speaks coherently
or convincingly is not now the question. But testimony
is very definitely borne to the fact that there has been such
revelation. Not only have we the witness of certain
deeds and events which are declared to be of God, but
these have a character which is all their own. They are
historical in the sense that they witness to the fact that
something of prime importance has really happened,
but they are not historical in the usual sense, for what has
happened cannot be apprehended by historical knowledge
as such, but only by a new faculty, a new organisation of
consciousness itself which is called faith. They are
subject to an interpretation which does not lie in their
mere historical character. They form the material for a
great ' word ' in which all their value lies, but which is
not deducible from their nature as mere historical
events. They are given an ' eschatological ' significance,
that is to say, they have the character of all-decisiveness
and once-for-allness. They are not events which are, as
it were, interpolated into the general course of history,
so that a recurrence of them becomes a possibility. Their
whole nature precludes recurrence. They gather history
to a crisis, proclaim its end, merely as history. If they
belong to mythology, the mythology is very different
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 33
from that which generally passes under that name.
And they are authenticated, not by any rational validation,
but by a transcendent element which is spoken of as the
Holy Spirit. We have not only a new event, we have
also a new consciousness in which the new event loses
its character of mere historicity and becomes spiritual
reality. And this happens in no rational-casual way,
as if the event in its character of history produced the
consciousness which embraces it, so that this conscious-
ness is mere result and sequence of the event ; it happens
in a purely transcendent way, in and through the operation
of the Holy Spirit upon the mind and consciousness of
man. The word of this revelation discloses not a
continuity between man and reality which would make
revelation at the last unnecessary, but a vast discontinuity,
upon which it bears down with all its weight. And in so
doing, it opens up for the first time, the possibility of a
thorough-going mastery of experience. This discon-
tinuity, it declares, covers all life, even the life of thought
and reason, making thereby man's approach to reality a
fundamental impossibility and disclosing the radical
necessity of an approach of reality to man. A thorough-
going criticism and judgment is proposed of the whole
range of man's life, a criticism and judgment indicated
by terms as fundamental as ' death ' and ' resurrection '.
A new knowledge issuing from this criticism and judg-
ment comes to take command of man's mind, so that
" he that is spiritual (that is the recipient of the divine
transcendent Spirit) judgeth all things, yet he himself is
judged of no man" (i Cor. ii, 15). Everywhere the
connecting links between man and God are declared to
be not in man's empirical nature as such, but in God alone,
so that the empirical man is as such disqualified, and his
reconciliation with God becomes an act of new creation.
c
34 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
" If any man be in Christ he is a new creature (there is a
new creation, R.V. margin 2 Cor. v, 17). A complete
and thorough-going aggression on empirical man is
here proposed, an aggression which would be intolerable
and absurd from any merely rational point of view, but
which takes on a new semblance of validity and reason-
ableness if a real approach of reality to man fall within the
realm of possibility. " The natural man receiveth not
the things of the Spirit of God ; for they are foolishness
unto him" (i Cor. ii, 14). It must surely be clear
that in all this we have a very fruitful field of investigation.
The investigation is likely to lead to surprising results,
results moreover which will give grave offence to the'
' natural man.' Of this, however, we are fully fore-
warned : " Unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto
the Greeks foolishness" (i Cor. i, 23). But it may
possibly be, that the whole range of man's thought and
knowledge will be seen in a new light, which, while
calling it in question, will yet give it a firmer validation.
The thinker is under no a priori obligation to accept this
' revelation ' ; it is scarcely wisdom, however, on his
part simply to pass it by.
There are, however, certain difficulties and objections
which are felt by many to be so strong as to deter them
from proceeding energetically with this line of enquiry.
They feel that, be the witness what it may, if revelation
be not directly correlated with the rest of our knowledge
and experience, we fall at last into sheer irrationality
and dogmatism. They feel that the witness must not
only be examined and clarified but that it must be
interpreted. And by interpretation they mean, translated
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 35
into those categories and thought-forms which we
utilise in the rest of our knowledge. Thus they feel that
the idea of an approach of reality to man which dis-
qualifies as such all approaches of man to reality for the
purposes of revelation, cannot be entertained, however
strong the witness to its reality may be. It will be our
endeavour to deal with these difficulties and objections
as we proceed in our enquiry. But a few words about
the most outstanding of them would seem would seem
to be called for here and now.
First, it is said, no witness however strong could be
acceptable which pointed to a pure transcendence of God,
and set aside that conviction of His immanence which
is so powerful to-day in religious thinking. It may be
pointed out, however, that the question has to do not
with the fact of the divine immanence but with its nature.
It will hardly be contended that there is no problem
here ; that the truth of the divine immanence is so clear
and devoid of complications, that it can forthwith be
laid hold of, and made a category for the interpretation of
revelation. Let it be granted that in all our experience
there are trans-subjective elements and in all our
knowledge trans-human references which point to the
supernatural, it does not follow that an examination of
these undertaken in any philosophic way will yield us
anything that deserves to be called revelation, or put into
our hands the key for the interpretation of what presents
itself to us as revelation. The question is what has
revelation to say to these trans-subjective elements in our
knowledge and experience ? In other words, the question
is what is the nature of that immanence which we are
disposed to think we understand so clearly ? Certainly,
if God were not in some way immanent in the world, it
would be impossible to speak of revelation at all;
36 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
indeed, it would be impossible to speak of God at all.
God would be a being between Whom and the world
there were no connections, that is, He would not be God ;
for the very idea of God and supremely of a revealing
God implies connections with the world of the closest
kind. Indeed it implies that these connections are the
fundamental ground and reality of the world's life. But
the question arises, are we to think of the divine im-
manence as a principle which forthwith validates the
evolution of thought and experience, or are we to think
of it as constantly bringing this evolution to a point of
criticism and new departure. If the latter, it will be
evident that we are in no position to estimate the nature
of immanence until we have had a revelation from the
transcendent. The approach of reality to the world will
light up the workings of reality in the world. But we
shall make a big mistake if we commence with these
latter, assume that we know them, and on the basis of
our assumed knowledge proceed to criticise what presents
itself to us as revelation. In any case, examination of
the witness should not be debarred or rendered futile
at the beginning by any a priori assumptions on our part
with regard to the nature of immanence. Certainly if
upon our examination we discover that the witness leaves
no room for immanence at all, if we are presented with a
pure transcendence and an absolute dualism of God and
the world, if God be presented simply as a " divine
invader," to quote Canon Raven's term, the witness
will fall to the ground. But it may be that the problem
of immanence will be illumined for us. The present
writer recalls a dictum of his teacher Dr. Forsyth which
left an abiding impression on his mind. Said Dr. Forsyth :
" You may talk as much as you like of the divine im-
manence, so long as you remember that it is the
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 37
immanence of the transcendent." This is anything but
an empty paradox. It presents a vital consideration.
The second objection which may be glanced at here, is
that the method proposed in our enquiry involves so
radical a breach with all our ordinary ways of thought
and enquiry that it cannot be entertained. In all fruitful
enquiry, it is said, we proceed from the known to the
unknown and that to proceed in any other way is, in Dr.
Mackintosh's words, " to build from the roof." To
begin, not with man and his experience, but with God
and His approach to these, is, it is said, to proceed from
the unknown to the known and that is an impossible
proceeding. But here again, is it not too easily assumed
that there is no radical and fundamental problem of
knowledge? When we speak of advancing from the
known to the unknown, the question arises, what is it
that is really known ? Can anything be said to be truly
known, unless everything is known ? It would take us
too far to discuss the problem of knowledge in its far-
reaching philosophical implications. But it is an
unwarrantable supposition that no kind of knowledge
can be made possible for man, save that which consists
in an extension of .his ordinary rational knowledge. It
is a trite observation that what we call knowledge is a '
partial thing, that is, a knowledge of parts and not of the
whole. But inasmuch as it is the knowledge of parts,
is it in the last resort knowledge at all ? Is the whole a
mere collection of the parts ? Is it not rather that which
alone gives real meaning to the parts, so that knowledge
of the whole can alone supply real knowledge of the
parts ? Tennyson's well-known lines about the " flower
in the crannied wall " suggest that really to know any-
thing, even the simplest thing must involve the
knowledge of the whole :
38 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
If I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
We know much about a thing, but the thing in itself
eludes our understanding. And when we speak about
proceeding from the known to the unknown, do we
mean that we work up to knowledge of the thing in
itself, by applying the method by which we know about
it ? Certainly any witness to revelation which proclaimed
our knowledge and experience to be simply illusory,
which denied its relative right and validity, could not be
entertained. But it is conceivable, to say the least, that
we might possess a witness which set forth the true
relation of this relative knowledge of ours to real
knowledge.
When we suggest that nothing is really known until
the whole is known, so that to talk about working up
from the known to the unknown is at bottom an empty
phrase, we are not indulging in a feat of verbal leger-
demain. For whatever may be our theoretical or
philosophical standpoint, in personal experience the
ultimate incomprehensibility of all existence becomes an
inescapable and poignant fact. We rejoice in our
knowledge only, in the main, when we are able to detach
ourselves from real existence and take up the position
of spectators of the world and life. When we can, as it
were, withdraw tora point outside of life, and contemplate
the world as an object, when we just look on and analyse
and classify, we feel that we are getting to know. But
there are moments of experience, points of existence,
in which the whole of our knowledge becomes
problematic. The philosopher as philosopher may feel
that he knows much, but the philosopher as man, as the
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 39
living existential point in which the mystery of the world
becomes consciousness and experience is aware that he
knows nothing. Job in the midst of his distress is not
comforted at all by the reasons and explanations of his
friends. It is he that is in the dark, and not merely certain
tracks of his mind. The man, standing at the moment
of existence, is the mystery and not just certain outlying
regions in his mind and consciousness. And he emerges
into a new light only as it is brought home to him that
in his experience, as he stands at his moment of existence
and not in any position of spectator, the fundamental
mysteriousness and incomprehensibility of everything rise
into clear manifestation. Obviously, if his experience
were a case of exception in a field of reality otherwise
known, there would be nothing more to say about it.
Some form of naturalism would be the explanation of
the world, or even may be, some form of philosophical
idealism, for all philosophic idealism implies that evil
is in some sense necessary to the Absolute. 1 But what
Job knows of a surety as he stands at the moment of
existence is that the mystery of his experience is both
real mystery, and that it is so to speak the precipitation
into experience of a fundamental and universal mystery
which belongs to everything that is. And knowing that,
understanding that the world as a whole is one huge
question-mark, he perceives both that an answer there
must be, for in no part of it is the world self-explanatory,
and that that answer cannot be found in the world but
must come to the world.
Thus when we are urged to mount up from the known
to the unknown we reply, if one only could 1 But what
in the last resort is known ? Is there any continuous way
from our partial, outside, theoretical knowledge to real
1 See Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 15.
40 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
knowledge, from knowledge about a thing to the thing
in itself, from the " flower in the crannied wall " to God
and man ? And any witness which declares that there is
no such continuous path from our side, that the way is
from God to man and not from man to God is not to be
set aside ab initio. It may well be that the parts are known
only as the whole is given, that the real knowledge comes
through a fundamental criticism of what we call
knowledge, a criticism which in virtue of being such,
will establish the right of our knowledge by making clear
its relativity.
But, it may be said, there is one region of our nature
where we do possess real knowledge, knowledge that
is, not of parts, and not merely about things, but of the
whole ; and that is the region of our religious conscious-
ness. The religious consciousness, it is said, is an
inalienable possession of the human consciousness
generally. It belongs to man as man, however weak it
may be in this man or that man. And therein is given an
immediate intuition of God, of the whole, which is
the fundamental knowledge which validates all our
knowledge. Revelation will consist in the extension,
deepening, purifying and clarifying of this part of our
nature, ^hus Dr. Oman in his book The Natural and
the Supernatural after pointing out that man has been
rightly defined as a rational animal, as a tool-using animal,
as a laughing animal, and as a religious animal, observes
that it is necessary to look for a common root for all these
distinctive characteristics and to see in one of them the
stem and in the others the branches. The common root,
he says, is man's non-acceptance of his environment.
To be rational, to use tools, to laugh in the face of life,
to be religious, witness, each in its own way, to the fact
1 p. 82, et seq.
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 4 1
that man has won a victory over his .environment. -Bat,
says Dr. Oman, " it is very improbable that man won
four separate and unconnected victories over his environ-
ment. One must have been the stem and the others
the branches." He concludes that the stem is in 'man's
religious consciousness for " only one thing in life
challenges in its own right man's submission to his
environment and that is the sacred," and man's con-
sciousness of the sacred belongs to his definition as man.
Thus in religion man is in immediate contact with the
supernatural, he has an intuitive knowledge of the whole
and in this contact and knowledge his reason and action
are validated.
And Dr. Adam in his article on ' Theology ' in the
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, concludes that
philosophy of religion is the highest stage or form of
theology. What is proposed is a thorough-going
examination of the religious experience and particularly
of the Christian experience which is regarded as essentially
continuous with the religious experience in general,
whatever and however far-reaching the modifications
may be which it brings into this ; a correlation of all this
with the rest of our knowledge and experience ; and
all issuing in a philosophy of religion in which the
distinctively Christian witness is of course contributory
but cannot be sole. Here again we have the idea of a
more or less straight path from man to God, from man
as a religious consciousness to God and revelation. There
is a religious a priori within the soul which is the organ
of revelation.
So again Schaeder 1 in his Geistprobkm der Theologie
though insisting that theology must be theocentric, and
that the movement of revelation is a movement from God
1 For a more detailed notice of Schaeder's book, see C. IV.
42 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
to man and not from man to God, is yet anxious to
represent that movement as a meeting and carrying
forward of a movement which takes its rise in the spirit
of man. It is distinguished from this in its source and
origin rather than in its fundamental nature. Revelation
accordingly possesses a deep and abiding kinship with
philosophical idealism which points the way to real
knowledge of the world. * Dr. Wheeler Robinson takes
up much the same attitude in his book The Christian
Experience of the Holy Spirit. He begins with religious
experience and will find the warrant of all that comes with
the claim to be revelation in the nature of the human spirit.
In surveying the Biblical witness he notes indeed that
the true Hebrew dualism is " not the contrast between the
human body and soul (or spirit) but that between
terrestrial nature as being of one order and celestial as
being of another." And he very truly observes that
" except for the divine spirit in His historic work and
transcendent power, we should not know as we do, the
nature of the spirit in man." It is not altogether easy to
understand from this, how he can maintain that " the
true discovery of transcendence is through immanence." 2
He adds, however, that " in the light of the realised
revelation we come back to see its warrant already in the
nature of human spirit finding its highest life in relation
with other spirits, and realising its life at the highest in
sacrificial devotion and unselfish love." 3 And in
speaking of Christ as a new fact, a new disclosure and
not merely as the highest achievement of the human race
he remarks "the new fact may, after all, be related to
the old realities (that is, the spiritual factors of human
personality in general) as is the flower to the root, the
flower that we should never have inferred from the root.
1 p. 10. z p. 56. 3 p. 75.
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 43
Our fundamental assumption was the ultimate kinship
of God and man, and we must not lightly surrender
this." 1
We have thus, in these writers, who may be taken
as representing the modern tendency in religious and
theological thought, the idea of a more or less direct
continuity between the religious consciousness as an
original datum, and the knowledge of God ; a proceeding,
so far as the interpretation of revelation is concerned,
from the known to the unknown, a taking of religious
experience as the point of departure, and the religious
a priori as the organ of revelation.
Now here again, it must be obvious that any witness to
revelation which simply set aside the religious con-
sciousness, declared it null and void, denied the existence
of any religious a priori in the soul of man or refused it
any validity, would ipso facto fall to the ground. A God
to Whom we did not belong, a God Who had left no
witness of Himself within the human consciousness,
a God between Whom and man there were no personal
connections and relationships, would not be God at all.
It is precisely in the fact of such connections and
relationships that God is the God of our life. But the
question arises, of what nature are these connections and
relationships ? It may very well be that owing, let us say,
to man's sin and fall, these very connections and
relationships have become the supreme problem of man's
life, and by no means its solution. It may very well be
that man's religious consciousness is the field in which
the problematic in man's experience generally, gathers to
a head and reaches its acutest point. And here again the
question must be delivered from all merely theoretical
associations and placed at the centre of the individual's
1 pp. 117-118.
44 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
own personal existence. We ask, does the individual
man, standing at the moment of his personal existence,
realise himself to be in possession of the knowledge
of God through the contemplation of his religious
consciousness as a striking fact which challenges attention,
and through the recollection of the religious a priori
within his own soul? Is it not rather the case that
standing simply there, he feels his distance from God, his
alienation from Him ? Is it not the case that, standing
simply there, he is conscious of perplexity, darkness,
mystery and trouble of heart ? Must not something come
to him, a word from without sound in his ears ? Must
not something happen to him and happen in him if he is
to know God, something which will not simply bring out
and make him see a kinship with God belonging to his
nature as such, but which will effect this kinship in a
new creative way ? Is not the religious consciousness
pre-eminently, the field in which the knowledge of God
comes home only by way of a fundamental crisis and a
new and creative decision ?
And are we not precisely here up against the fact which
makes so utterly impossible the suugestion which is some-
times thrown out, that we should construct as it were, a
universal religion out of the different religions of the
world taken as the various forms in which man's religious
consciousness expresses itself? Do not all attempts in
this direction lead eventually to mere humanism? Do
they not involve in the long run a turning away from
God, a dismissal of Him from belief, and not a turning
to Him ? And yet, if the kinship between the human
spirit and the divine be taken as our point of departure,
why should such attempts be thus impossible? Why
should we consent to remain in particularism ? Why
not strive after unification in the religious field ? Does
THE IDEA OF REVELATION 45
not the fact that the religions of the world cannot be
amalgamated, that all attempts in that direction at last
sacrifice God in the process, indicate that in the religious
consciousness, in the religious a priori, we have a problem,
indeed the problem of existence ? As Cardinal Newman
said," Many a man will live and die upon a dogma ; no
man will be a martyr for a conclusion." Religion " has
ever been synonymous with Revelation. It has never
been a deduction from what we know, it has ever been an
assertion of what we are to believe ... a message, or
a history, or a vision." 1
The relation then between the religious a priori and the
consciousness of revelation is by no means direct and
clear. And if we are confronted with a witness to
revelation which will not make identical the religious a
priori and the subjective possibility of revelation, we are
not entitled to refuse examination of it, on that ground.
The relation between God and the world, may not be
from our side a direct relationship at all ; it may prove to
be very indirect. In its directness and so that it becomes
the possibility of real knowledge, it may be visible from
God's side alone, and from our side only as God directly
gives Himself in revelation.
Our examination of these objections to the method
proposed leads to the conclusion that they arise from
the pre-supposition that we possess from our side and in
our knowledge and experience, something which is in
no wise problematic and questionable, something which
stands out clear and sure, and offers us a definite point of
departure, something, therefore, which we can take
1 See Neavxati, by William Barry, p. 154.
46 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
forthwith and make the criterion of everything that comes
to us with a claim to be revelation. We have seen that
this pre-supposition is itself questionable. And it may
very well be, that the supreme warrant of revelation from
our side will be seen to be the very thoroughness and
decisiveness with which we as men find ourselves, in all
the experiences and activities of our life, called in question.
The paradox may be ventured, that revelation alone can
make us see how decisively we stand in question, that
scepticism itself cannot reveal man's life in its true and
fundamental questionableness as revelation does. Does
this mean an escape into sheer irrationality and arbitrari-
ness ? This would be desperation indeed. But let the
following pages answer if they can.
CHAPTER II
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION
THE New Testament witness to revelation gathers round
one who is called Jesus Christ. It sets forth a man who
arose at a certain point in human history, isolates him as
it were from all who came before and all who should
follow after, and attributes to him a meaning and a
significance which it finds in no other. This man is
now to be ' followed ' with absolute decision even if it
means the turning away from everybody and everything
else.
But though this man is thus ' isolated,' he appears in
a context. The witness relates him to preceding history
and to any history that might come after him. He does
not appear without connections and without a context.
He stands in definite and declared relation with a
specific movement in human history, a movement whose
record is given in a body of writings known as " the law
and the prophets." This movement, moreover, is
related to history in general. That is to say, it is
regarded as the movement whose nature it is to draw
all history into itself. The people in whose life it takes
place are an ' elect ' people, a people whose history
exists for a purpose which is the divine purpose for the
worjd. This people, it is said, will be vindicated before
all the peoples of the earth, vindicated that is, as the people
on whom the divine purpose in and for the world took
specific effect. It is necessary to note that the relation
of this people to the rest of mankind is no natural or
historical relation, no relation that the historian might
draw out. The historian may, and of course, must
place the chosen people as a branch of the Semitic race
47
48 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
and correlate its history and institutions with universal
history. But not thus will he light upon the real, the
ultimate relationship of this people with the families of
mankind. This relationship is set up by God Himself,
it exists in the counsels of His will, it is established
by deed of covenant. Knowledge of it is no matter of
historical investigation, but of divine revelation. So
runs the witness.
But this man appears in this context after a fashion
that can only be called critical. First, he brings the
movement represented by this people, and this chapter
of world-history, to an end. " The prophets and the
law prophesied until John" henceforth something
new. The movement of which we have spoken is not
simply carried on by him ; it is brought to a point of
finality and conclusion. The line stretching down-
through the law and the prophets, reaches in him its
term. He is eschatological in his significance and
relation thereto. And inasmuch as this line itself stands
for God's line in the world, inasmuch as the movement
in whose context he stands expresses the fundamental
purpose of history in general, or rather for history in
general, he is eschatological in his significance for the
whole world.
But his relation to his context is critical in a deeper
sense still. It registers not the success of the history
destined by God for the effectuation of His purpose,
but its failure. The chosen people turn out to be the
enemy. The divine movement in the history manifests
itself in Jesus Christ as bringing condemnation and
rejection on the very people who are called out for
it. The history of the chosen people not only comes
to an end in him, it is brought to an end. That is to say,
it reaches in him not merely its culmination, but its
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 49
crisis and its annulment. Jesus stands fundamentally
not in line with his people, but over against them. His
people reject and crucify him, and their crucifying of
him is their own judgment and condemnation. But
that means that all history is brought under crisis and
condemnation. It is the spirit of the world which
asserts itself in the rejection and condemnation of Christ.
The movement of history will not have the divine
movement for history. The fact that the movement
of God in history is in the end resisted, refused,
and rejected by the very people called out for its
recognition and realisation means that history itself
falls under the divine condemnation. Israel in rejecting
Christ shows that it has fallen under the sway of the
prince of this world. So Jesus is eschatological for
Israel and for the world, not primarily in the sense
that he brings them to an end, but in the sense that
he brings them under judgment. Such again is the
witness.
But there is yet more to be said. Crisis is of the very
nature of this man's existence in the world. As
belonging to this world, as part of Jewish history and
universal history, he himself must come to an end. His
meaning and significance cannot appear while his earthly
and temporal life remains. He is manifested as the
Christ only on the further side of his temporal existence.
On this side, the hither side, his Christhood must
remain a secret. He is not yet, what he really and truly
is. He must die in order that his glory may appear.
He is eschatological even in regard to his own human and
temporal self. But as humbling himself, emptying him-
self, and becoming obedient unto death, yea the death
of the Cross, he receives the great exaltation, and the
name which is above every name, so that in his name
D
50 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth, and every
tongue confess that he is Lord. In this man, therefore,
finality is reached. Before him, the history of the
chosen people falls away, universal history falls away,
even his own human and temporal existence falls away,
and that which is new, that which belongs not to the
course of things here, but to the course of things yonder,
appears : so that, " if any man is in Christ there is a
new creation, the old things are passed away ; behold
they are become new " (2 Cor. v, 17).
And yet the old things still remain. The world has
not yet run its course. There is still an interim before
the end. In this man Jesus, has occurred something final
in the relations between God and the world. A final
deed of God has taken place, yet the finality is not yet
actually here, for the world and history still continue.
The final deed, therefore, as it reaches the actual world
can only reach it as final word ; a message, an address,
a critical challenge, a great promise and hope. It can
be seen as deed of God only as it is believed as word
of God. It cannot in the strict sense be experienced,
for the world and history are left standing, it can only
be believed. The historical event is not as such divine
event. The deed of God takes the form of an historical
event, something which belongs to the world and
history still standing. Its inner meaning and content
are not historical, they are eschatological, that is, they
signify the end of history, they mean that history is
brought under judgment. From them all history, all
that is here, falls away. The divine meaning of the
deed is not the same as its historical meaning and
significance. Historically the death of Christ means an
act of human heroism and sacrifice. Eschatologically
and as divine and not human deed, it proclaims the end
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 51
and the new beginning of history and the world. Since,
therefore, the divine deed takes a human and historical
form, it is not the same thing as what we call deed. What
we call deed is actual, experienced happening. But
the world is still standing. The end and the new
beginning are not yet here. All that is actually here,
belonging to our history, is the historical deed itself, the
form which the divine deed took. Therefore this
divine deed is for us, meaning, significance, message,
promise, revelation. A meaning and a message break
out from the historical event which are other than its
historical meaning and significance. The divine word
is no mere verbal message from outside of or alongside
of the historical event ; it is the divine meaning, sense,
content of the event reaching man's consciousness and
eliciting therefrom the response of faith. It is the
spirit of the deed. And inasmuch as the word is the word
of an absolute judgment and an absolute promise and
grace, the word which speaks of all things being brought
to an end and a new beginning, the spirit, sense,
significance of it as it reaches our consciousness is the
Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God. Accordingly that
which is new arises in faith, but strictly speaking only
in faith : not in actuality, not in experience in the
ordinary meaning of that word, but in faith alone, in that
response and orientation of man's consciousness brought
about by the receiving and believing of the word. Faith
now becomes the all-important thing : not faith in
general but faith in the absolute and final sense, faith
as new and critical decision, faith awakened by finality
and therefore faith itself become here and now the
finality for men ; faith in nothing here, in life, in history,
in man, but faith in that from which all here falls away.
Faith now becomes not that which man can justify,
5Z REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
but that which alone can justify man. A radically new
meaning is given to 'faith.
But we must now return to our starting-point and
examine more closely the nature of the witness borne
to revelation.
This witness, we have said, all gathers round one who
is called Jesus Christ. And we observe : it is of Jesus
Christ set forth under two aspects; first under the
aspect of a human historical life, and second under that
of a supra-temporal, transcendent mode of existence.
There is the Christ after the flesh, and the Christ after
the Spirit ; the human Jesus, and the risen Christ exalted
to the right hand of God. And there are two things to
be borne in mind in this connection which are of supreme
importance. First, the relation between these two
aspects of Jesus is from the human and rational point
of view, not a continuity but a radical discontinuity.
It is a relation of death and resurrection. Nowhere in
the New Testament is the unity between the human
Jesus and the transcendent Christ placed in anything
which is rationally discernible and discoverable in the
former. Nowhere is it suggested that in the human
Jesus as such, there was some principle or power in
virtue of which he ' survived ' death and passed straight
on to a transcendent mode of existence. He died and
was raised up. He did not ' survive ' and develop into
his exalted mode of life. He did not just pass from a
lower to a higher stage of being. His death was no
mere episode in an essentially continuous mode of
existence. The risen exalted Christ does not stand merely
for a principle in the human Jesus shown to be permanent
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 53
and abiding. He is separated from the human Jesus
by a discontinuity which from the human and rational
point of view is ultimate, namely death and resurrection.
We have to do, of course, with the one Christ throughout,
but a Christ after two modes of existence which nothing
in our thought can bring together.
And the second point to be noted in this : it is Jesus
under the new risen, transcendent aspect of his life,
and not under the aspect of his human and historical
life, who is declared to be revelation. The New
Testament contention is not that the man Jesus was shown
by the resurrection to be, as such, the likeness, the
manifestation, of God. The Revelation is not, as
many would have it to-day, that God is like Jesus. The
statement that God is like Jesus contains no doubt an
important element of truth, but as it is used to-day it
gives a meaning to the word revelation which is not
that of the New Testament witness. The manhood, the
historical personality is not as such divine. Whenever
the manhood of Jesus is held up as example, it is not in
its positive human excellence, as if that manhood in its
expression of itself were revelation ; it is rather in its
negative and renunciatory aspects. It is in his man-
hood's surrender, negating and dispossessing and not
in its full and free expression, that the human Jesus takes
upon himself the character of divinity. It is in his self-
emptying and obedience unto death, yea the death of
the Cross, that Jesus manifests to the full the mind that
should be in us. Not as manhood expressing itself,
but as manhood renouncing itself does Jesus stand out
before our view. The human Jesus, the personality of
the man Jesus is never the ' locale ' of revelation in the
New Testament. His resurrection is no mere
emphasizing, bringing out, clarifying, and intensifying
54 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
of a revelationary quality or character of the manhood
as such. It is not the Christ after the flesh, but the Christ
after the Spirit, the Spirit of Him who raised up Jesus
from the dead, who is set forth as the Son of God with
revelationary meaning and power. The paradox is
expressed in the opening words of St. Paul's epistle to
the Romans : " born of David's offspring by natural
descent, and installed as Son of God with power by the
Spirit of holiness when he was raised from the dead."
(Romans i, 3-4. Moffatt's Translation.)
We may pause here to note that this witness of the
New Testament to Jesus Christ as revelation is reinforced
by a judgment which comes from the side of historical
criticism. Thus Schweitzer, in dealing with the Messianic
consciousness of Jesus, alleges that in the thought of
Jesus himself, his Messiahship was not yet, but that it
belonged to a mode of existence in the future between
which and his actual present life, no connection can be
expressed in rational terms. He says : *" It is impossible
to express in modern terms the consciousness of messiah-
ship which Jesus imparted as a secret to his disciples.
Whether we describe it as an identity between him and
the Son of Man who is to appear, whether we express
it as a continuity which unites both personalities, or think
of it as virtually a pre-existent messiahship none of
these modern conceptions can render the consciousness
of Jesus as the Disciples understood it. What we lack
is the ' Now and Then ' which dominated their thinking
and which explains a curious duality of consciousness
that was characteristic of them. What we might call
1 The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, pp. 186-187.
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 55
identity, continuity and potentiality, was in their mind
confounded in a conception which quite eludes our
grasp. Every person figured himself in two entirely
different states, according as he thought of himself
now in the pre-messianic age, and then the messianic.
Expressions which we interpret only in accordance with
our unity of consciousness, they referred as a matter of
course to the double* consciousness familiar to them.
Therefore when Jesus revealed to them the secret of his
messiahship, that did not mean to them that he is the
Messiah, as we moderns must understand it ; rather it
signified for them that their Lord and Master was the
one who, in the messianic age, would be revealed as the
Messiah." He also says : *" The Resurrection of the
dead is the bridge from the 'Now' to the 'Then'."
Moreover Schweitzer declares that not as human
personality, not as Jewish rabbi, not as teacher of his
disciples did Jesus think of himself as the revelation
of God : 2 " the Messiah in his earthly state must live
and labour unrecognised, he must teach, and through
deed and suffering, he must be made perfect in righteous-
ness. Not till then shall the messianic age dawn . . .
Thus in the midst of the messianic expectation of his
people stood Jesus as the Messiah that is to be. He
dare not reveal himself to them, for the reason of his
hidden labour was not yet over."
Now it is not our purpose to discuss or defend this
as a critical conclusion, for our concern here is not with
any critical construction of the life and thought of Jesus.
Our concern is with the witness, the New Testament
interpretation of Jesus as revelation. We ask, how is
Jesus set forth as the revelation of God ? But the fact
that such a conclusion appears from the side of an
1 The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, p. 208. 2 Ibid., pp. 188-189.
56 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
historical criticism which has no apologetic ends to serve,
confirms us in our belief that we are not misreading the
witness.
To resume then: the New Testament gospel is
not the report of' the human Jesus, his religion, his
subjective relation to God, brought out and illumined
by the resurrection. It is not the statement of something
of positive and eternal worth in the historical personality
as such, emphasized and made clear through the fact
that it was capable of surviving death. The New
Testament witness to revelation is, as has often been
pointed out, astonishingly indifferent to the historical
Jesus as such. The modern conception of a great,
dynamic, historical personality radiating spiritual vitality
and power is not the New Testament emphasis. The
gospel all gathers round the word of a great human,
rational, discontinuity turned into a new divine
continuity by the deed and action of God Himself. It
implies that just at that point when everything human
comes to an end, all thought, all knowledge, all effort,
something begins from the side of God which from the
point of view of us men is quite new and entirely different.
The principal thing in the New Testament witness to
the historic Jesus, is not that he lived, but that he died,
not that he expressed the native powers and excellences
of a human personality but that he renounced them,
not that his humanity as it were flowered into divinity,
but that it gave itself up to the approach of divinity.
The relation of the humanity to the divinity is in the
nature of a negative to a positive. He " emptied himself
. . . wherefore also God highly exalted him, and gave
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 57
unto him the name which is above every name"
(Phil, ii, 7 & 9, R.V.).
It is necessary to distinguish between the New
Testament story of Jesus, the account which it presents
of his historical life and teaching, and the New Testament
witness of him as the revelation of God. The story was
written for the express purpose of confirming the witness.
There can therefore be no question of disparaging the
story. The assertion which is frequently made that
the standpoint which is here taken up results in a
depreciation of the historical Jesus, that it ends in taking
all religious and revelationary value out of the story
of his life is based upon misunderstanding. Indeed
the light and the value will be far greater than anything
that mere historical criticism and construction working
in independence of the witness can possibly yield. At
every point in the story divine revelation will shine
through. x This criticism also comes with bad grace
from many who, while insisting that we must confine
ourselves to the historical Jesus, the Jesus of historical
criticism and investigation, are busy in reducing our
knowledge of him to ever smaller dimensions. A
nucleus of historical fact is declared by them to be
necessary, but there is no agreement as to what this
nucleus is. But it is surely clear that if we are to speak
about revelation, our first question must be not what
can we, starting as it were, de novo, make of the story,
but what is the nature of the witness? After what
manner is this Jesus spoken of as the revelation of God ?
Of course, if we find that the witness cannot sustain
1 A fuller treatment of this criticism will be found in C.8.
58 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
itself, that it does not after all speak consistently and
coherently of revelation, we may- then turn to the story,
attempt to isolate it from its context in the witness of
revelation, and deal with it after a purely critical and
historical manner. We can abstract it from that
interpretation in which it is set forth as revelation,
and treat it simply in itself. And of course there will
always be a place for this abstraction. But criticism
itself is awakening to the perception that the story
treated thus is an abstraction ; and no finality has as yet
been attained, or ever seems likely to be attained, in the
conclusions reached. In any case our task is clear. We
are enquiring about revelation. Here, it is said, in this
figure of our history, Jesus Christ, is revelation given.
We enquire how is Jesus revelation? Our attention
is focussed upon the witness to the revelation given in
Jesus, and with this witness we must first concern
ourselves.
Now inasmuch as according to the witness we have
the one Christ after two modes of existence, the
connection between which is not natural or rational,'
but supernatural and transcendent, we find involved in
varying degrees of explicitness in the statements of the
New Testament witness the following position. The
essential nature of this man, his person, the ground of
his ego, that which lay behind his psychological states
of consciousness which the mere spectator can in a
measure perceive and scrutinise, is divine and tran-
scendent. There is a secret in this man. Nay more, in
the last reality of his being, he is a secret. He cannot be
understood, interpreted or explained by any of our
ordinary modes of understanding. We possess in
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 59
ourselves no faculty for apprehending who he was. The
understanding of him is itself part of the new event to
which he belongs. " No one knoweth the Son save the
Father " (Matthew xi, 27 R.V.). His secret does not lie
upon the plane of historical visibility or psychological
explanation. Of course, there is a sense in which this
can be said of every great human personality. The
greater a man is, the more difficult it is to understand
him. But what we are confronted with in the witness
concerning this man, is no relative distinction between
him and other men, but an absolute distinction. Inas-
much as he is set forth under the terms of death and
resurrection, inasmuch as between the Jesus after the
flesh and the Christ after the Spirit, there is, humanly
speaking, a discontinuity which no thought can bridge,
we are unable to rank him merely with the great figures
of our history whose personalities transcend our ordinary
understanding. We come up against a difference not
merely in degree, but in kind. There is something in
this man, so the witness everywhere implies, which is
divine and not human. We may perhaps anticipate by
remarking here, that some form of the " two-nature "
Christology seems to be called for. Many people
would set this aside ab initio on the grounds that it is
irreconcilable with the psychological unity of human
personality. Christ, they say, must be interpreted in
terms of the psychological unity of personality. We shall
have more to say about this in a later chapter. But
here, it is pertinent to point out, that we cannot be held
back by any a priori ' musts '. The * must ' implies
that nothing new came into the world in Christ, an
implication which sets aside from the start the very
possibility of revelation as the witness declares it. This
possibility must not be set aside on any a priori grounds.
60 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
It is difficult to keep a priori pre-suppositions out of the
theological field, even as it is difficult to keep them out
of the scientific field, but in both cases it must be done.
Theories must fit facts, and not facts theories. And
the fact here is not the human personality of Jesus as
such, but the witness. Certainly if that witness cannot
be sustained, cadit qucestio, but until that conclusion is
legitimately reached, the witness may not be set aside
on the ground that it violates some a priori pre-supposition
of the psychological unity of personality. And it is
of the nature of the witness that the essential thing about
Christ, the secret of his Person is not capable of historical
or psychological explanation. It is cognisable not by
reason as such, but by that entirely new kind of reason
called faith, a reason conditioned by a new and trans-
cendental relation set up, not from our side at all, but
from the other side of that boundary where our human
thought stumbles not upon a rational continuity but a
fundamental discontinuity. In other words Jesus is to
be understood as revelation only in and through that
which the New Testament calls the Holy Spirit. We
shall endeavour in subsequent chapters to bring this
idea of the Holy Spirit into clearer expression, both in
its relation to the Person of Christ and to that new
reason, that new mode of consciousness which we call
faith. Here and now our concern is simply to emphasize
the fact that according to the witness, the presence of
Jesus in the world stands for the reconciliation of what
is from our human standpoints irreconcilable, that it
betokens the divine life under a human veil, the veil of
mortality, and the divine will and purpose under the veil
of the " flesh of sin." The contention that thereby the
problem of Christology becomes insoluble, must not be
given too much weight. It is not a matter of the first
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 6 1
importance to solve the problem of Christology, but it is
essential to grasp the terms of the problem. Barth
raises the question " can theology and ought theology
to pass beyond prolegomena to Christology ? " x And he
answers, " it might be that with the prolegomena all is
said." Nor need we be deterred by the assertion that
historical criticism reveals to us in Jesus a man whose
consciousness falls within our categories of a psycho-
logically unified personality : for, apart from any other
consideration, criticism is not agreed in revealing Jesus
after this fashion. Schweitzer, for example, as we have
seen, asserts a duality of consciousness in Jesus which
is not capable of rational solution, and though he
doubtless would refuse to make that duality an essential
part of Christology, he asserts it to be a matter of sheer
historical fact that Jesus did think of himself in terms
drawn from the idea of two modes of being and
consciousness. It is unwarrantable to assume that
Jesus was here wrong, on the ground that such a
conception cannot be fitted into our modern psycho-
logical categories. In any case, the putting of the
' locale ' of revelation not in the human and historical
Jesus as such, but in the risen and exalted Lord, and the
putting between these of the complete rational dis-
continuity of death and resurrection, involve according
to the witness, that Jesus, in the ground of his being,
stands discontinuous with the rest of humanity and
can only be understood after a divine and transcendent
manner, through that which the New Testament calls
the Holy Spirit. Such, we repeat, is the witness.
And it is to be noted that this is the fundamental
witness of the New Testament as a whole. Time was,
when it was thought possible to drive a wedge between
1 Das Wort Gottes, p. 178.
6z REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the synoptic portrait of Jesus and that of the rest of the
New Testament. That time has gone, or at least it is
rapidly going. If there is one result of criticism which
we can regard as to all intents and purposes established,
it is that the synoptic gospels were written by men who
saw revelation not in the historical Jesus as such, but
in the historical Jesus interpreted in terms drawn from the
conception of a transcendent mode of life. The interest
of the synoptics was not biographical, it was apologetic,
it was even theological. Of course, it is possible to
deny the truth, the validity, of this interpretation.
One can for example declare that in the New Testament
conception of him, we have an illustration of the deifying
of a human and historical figure. Or one can bring to
one's aid a general philosophy of religion and postulate
a deep and abiding continuity between humanity and
divinity; and on the basis of that pre-supposition,
declare that the historical Jesus by virtue of the spiritual
power and impressiveness of his personality, became the
medium of the life of God to the world. But what
must not be ignored is that in so doing a big assumption
is being made ; the assumption namely that Jesus must
be treated first and foremost from the historical point
of view, and that everything that is attributed to him of
divinity flows from the effect of his human and historical
life and personality. Men seek to explain the trans-
cendent Christ from the historical effect and impression
of the human Jesus. Because, it is said, Jesus was
this kind of personality, divinity was inevitably (some
would say rightly) attributed to him. But if we proceed
thus, we must be clear that we are proceeding with
pre-suppositions that are other than those which governed
the New Testament witness. Here the power of the
exalted Christ is of a different nature from the impact
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 63
and influence of the historical Jesus as such. To insist
on explaining Jesus historically and rationally, is to
begin by denying the specific nature and content of the
New Testament witness. It is to assume from the start
that we have to do with nothing more and nothing
other than an historical fact with its historical sequences
and effects. It is strange that the enormous nature of
this assumption is so poorly seen. When Paul declares
that " no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the
Holy Ghost " (i Cor. xii, 3), he clearly means something
very much more, and something quite other than that
no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, save by sur-
rendering himself to the historic influence and the
personal spell of the man Jesus.
We may note too that, so far as our knowledge can
reach backwards into the faith of the earliest church, it
shows us that a believer might be described in two ways
which were regarded as identical ; first, he was a man
who believed that Jesus was the Christ, and second, he
was a man who had received the Holy Spirit. That
means that the finding of divinity in Jesus was not, in the
opinion of the early church, an historical judgment, but
that it resulted from supernatural revelation. It was
not that men came to attribute a divine value to Jesus
merely because of his influence upon them, but that they
came to do so, in virtue supremely of what was, to mere
reason, a sheer miracle, in virtue of the fact, that is, that
they had received a supernatural endowment, the Holy
Spirit. Truly in order of time a man might confess that
Jesus was the Christ, that he was divine revelation,
before he received the Holy Spirit. His endowment
with the Spirit was no doubt regarded by the earliest
church as following on his confession of Jesus as Lord.
But this confession resulted upon the witness of the
64 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Church, the Spirit-filled community. It was a man's
response to a witness which was empowered by the
Holy Spirit. And as a result of the confession, the
individual was made sharer in the life of the Church ;
he received the Holy Spirit as a personal endowment
which stamped him as now part of the Spirit-filled
community.
And here seems to be the place to make the following
observation. Assuming that the witness is valid,
historical criticism of the records for the purpose of
discovering the actual human Jesus and reconstructing
the events of his life, does not touch the nerve of
revelation. For the New Testament witness is that not
in him treated from the historical point of view does
revelation lie. Not the Christ after the flesh, the Christ
who is tractable to historical and critical enquiry, but the
Christ after the Spirit is the subject of revelation ; and
between these two there is a dualism, certainly not
ultimate or revelation would be impossible, but
rationally ultimate, the dualism marked by the words
death and resurrection. " That which is born of the
flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is
spirit " (John iii, 6) is here as applicable to Jesus as to
any other member of the human race. The two sides of
the antithesis are complete in themselves, from every
rational point of view. Their synthesis is indicated by
the words " ye must be born from above " (John iii, 7.
see margin), no rational but an entirely supra-rational
and transcendent synthesis. The Christ according to
the flesh, and the Christ according to the Spirit belong to
two circles. These circles are rationally disparate,
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 65
completely non-coincident. Revelation consists in the
manifestation of their divine, transcendent coincidence,
expressed by the New Testament term, the Holy Spirit.
It is useless then to expect that criticism will have any
positive contribution to make to revelation. It may
indeed make a negative contribution of immense value.
It does revelation service when it insists on its full rights,
when it will permit no circle to be drawn round any
historical events from which it is to be warned off. In
insisting upon its full rights it helps to clarify the issue,
to make it plain that revelation cannot be found in that
which lies sheer upon the historical field, but only in that
which may open out from history to that kind of
apprehension which is called faith. It can help to make
clear what is not revelation but it cannot discover what
is. So, it is needless to fear lest criticism should imperil
revelation. The data of criticism are not the data of
revelation. The sphere in which criticism does its work
is cut off from that in which revelation functions, by a
chasm which is unbridgeable by any rational or scientific
method. The critical method applied to the sphere of
revelation, assumes that the relation between an historical
figure of the past, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, and the
life of the present, is simply that of the historical influence
and effect of his life and work, and can be no other. In
other words, it begins by assuming that what the New
Testament designates by the Holy Spirit is an unreality.
But by what right does it make this assumption ? If there
is a relation between a figure of the past and the life of
the present which is transcendent and supra-rational it is
clear that criticism can neither affirm nor deny it. Such
a revelation is simply outside the sphere in which
historical criticism functions.
But, it may be objected, is it not conceivable that
E
66 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
criticism might succeed in demonstrating that Jesus never
existed at all ? Or failing that, might it not prove that the
Jesus of history was a man of whom such a transcendent
relation to life could not possibly be predicated, for
example that he was a political or social revolutionary ?
These objections have been dealt with by Brunner in his
book Der Mittler. 1 Brunner agrees that if either of
these positions were established, the case would be
hopeless. But, as he asserts, the actual findings of
criticism up to date are the exact opposite. And the
utmost that criticism could ever accomplish would be to
demonstrate the possibility of the one or the other of these
conclusions, but never their necessity. It might say, for
example, that historically the existence of Jesus may be
denied, it can never say that it must be denied. The
historical critic, as such, is of course under no obligation
to accept the witness of revelation ; but he is not in a
position to say that the Jesus of history was a figure of
whom the apostolic witness could not be the true
interpretation, nor is there the remotest likelihood of his
ever being in such a position.
Moreover, it must not be forgotten that revelation
has something fundamental to say about history itself.
It brings with it a theological interpretation of history.
It proclaims that history has a divine, transcendent
reference. In that interpretation, and in that reference,
the place of Jesus in history is involved, and for the
believer it is established. The question of the historicity
of Jesus is paradoxically not merely an historical one,
it has its faith aspect as well. Only if the historical
aspect and the faith aspect be in irreconcilable
conflict, does the situation become hopeless. But that,
1 See the chapter " Der Christusglaube und die historische Forschung,"
and especially pp. 160-161.
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 67
in the nature of things, can never become a serious
possibility.
And now, having noted in what manner the New
Testament witness to revelation gathers round the figure
of Jesus Christ, we are in a position to indicate more
definitely what that witness is. It is, that in Jesus Christ
regarded as we have regarded him, man discovers his
immediacy to God, or more precisely God's immediacy
to him. The New Testament echoes with the din of
controversy ; against Judaism, against Gnosticism, and
against heathenism. And the insistence that creates and
sustains all this controversial activity is that now Christ
has come, all intermediaries between God and man, of
whatever nature, are done away and man stands in
immediate and direct relation to God. The gravamen
of the charge against Judaism and Gnosticism in the
theoretical field, against heathenism with its idol- worship,
and also against asceticism and all work-righteousness
in the field of man's practical life, was the fundamental
denial implied by all these, of the immediacy of God to
man and man to God in Christ. The New Testament
insists with unflagging emphasis, that there is no ladder
of angels, aeons, spirits, dominations, linking up earthly
man with the transcendent God. Against such spiritual
hierarchies the Christian warfare was unceasingly directed.
Nor were there any intermediate stages between the
righteousness of God and the righteousness of man, no
bridges, no half-way houses, no laws, ordinances,
sanctities no intermixings of the one with the other.
There was no continuity between man and God of a
rational, speculative, religious or moral kind. The dis-
continuity was complete, and because of that, the new
68 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
continuity in Christ, the immediacy between God and
man, man and God, was complete. The intermediaries,
links, continuities go, all of them, but Christ remains.
And it is because of Christ that the intermediaries go.
Christ is the presence in our world of common rational
experience of a new dimension belonging to the trans-
cendent world. He is no intermediary; his existence
precludes the idea of intermediaries. His existence
betokens the immediacy of God Himself to men.
But now in what sense does it betoken this immediacy ?
Not in the sense that we wake up, as it were, to the truth
of God's nearness as a general truth of life. Not
primarily that we become aware of a ' presence ' around
us and overshadowing us, so that we exclaim in the
words of Tennyson's Higher Pantheism :
" Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands
or feet."
This kind of immediacy is quasi-spatial. God is
infinitely near us in space. But there is no revelation
in that. He might be infinitely near to us and yet wholly
unknown. The real immediacy is an immediacy of
relation. In Christ we find God standing immediately
related to us where from our side we stand fundamentally
discontinuous with Him. The human now speaks of
the divine, death of a new kind of life, man's end of a new
beginning. Something new happens to man's con-
sciousness wherein he learns that he has not to get to
God by any exercise or extension of his own powers
and faculties, but that God has come to him by the
exercise of His powers and faculties. God's life is seen
to be standing in the midst of man's death.
But this New Testament witness about Christ that
in him man discovers his immediacy to God receives
further, deeper, and clearer articulation. We purposely
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 69
say articulation rather than exposition or development,
because what immediately follows is substantial part of
the witness itself, and no mere theoretical interpretation
of it. The death and resurrection of Christ are brought
into the closest relation with sin, justification and
redemption. It is not merely that Christ died, but that
he died unto sin, not merely that he rose, but that he rose
unto justification and righteousness. That is to say, sin
and death are brought into the closest and most organic
connection. And the reason why they are so brought
together, is that they both witness to that ultimate
rational discontinuity between man and God of
which we have spoken. Sin is that discontinuity
manifesting itself in the moral sphere, as death is in the
physical sphere. The New Testament will not allow
any absolute distinction between physical and moral as
over against the transcendent God. It is the whole man
in the sum-total of his relationships in the world ; the
whole man, and that means the whole world of man,
that stands in discontinuity with God. Death is the
visible objective fact which marks and prockims this
discontinuity. It is the fact above all others, which
brings it home to man's consciousness. Man falling out
of his true relationship to reality, to God, falls into
death. Man's world detached from its true ground in
God falls into death.
The connection between sin and death can be described
in no rational-causal terms. It is not that sin is the
cause of death in the sense of a rationally discoverable
principle of causality. One cannot link the two things
together in any scientific or philosophical schematism.
The connection exists not in the world as such, with
its physical or historical sequences, but in the tran-
scendent will of God. In that will discoverable only
70 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
in revelation, death is a significance, has an economy,
and that significance and economy are in relation to sin.
It must be emphasized that we have to do throughout
with a revelationary idea ; an idea, that is, which speaks
not of what death is in isolation from the universal
relations between God and man, not of what it is judged
simply as a physical fact within the sphere of other
physical facts, but of what it is in the field of those relation-
ships between God and man in which man's real existence
is grounded. The scientist abstracts death from the
entire realm of significance. He treats of it simply as a
thing in itself. To him it is the antithesis to life, and to
life merely as a physical fact, as a mere datum, a mere
object of enquiry, but not the antithesis to man, as a
being who stands in relation to God. He speaks of what
it means for life as a mere physical existence, not of
what it means for man who is vastly more than a
physical existence. Place death in relation to a mere
thing called life, and it remains just a fact, the end of life ;
but place it in relation to man, and man regarded as the
subject of a relation between himself and God and as
finding his true being in that relation, and it becomes
not a mere fact but an immense significance. 1 It marks
that discontinuity with reality, that breaking off of a
contact which in the moral sphere is experienced as the
sense of sin. It becomes the judgment on man's life.
It is the external sign to him that he and his world are
involved in a discontinuity with the absolutely and
eternally real ; and it becomes the medium of bringing
it home to him that the essence of this discontinuity can
only be described as sin. Man is a fallen being, a being
who belongs to a fallen world. The life-force that rules
him and his world is shown as evil, as sin, in that it may be
1 cf. Denney, The Death of Christ, pp. 282-290.
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 7 1
described also as a death-force, a force that ends in death.
Death posseses not merely a physical, rational, signific-
ance ; its true nature is only seen when it is referred to
the divine, the transcendent, the supra-temporal.
So, the witness runs, Christ not only died, he died
unto sin. His death was not merely a fact of history,
it was a significance, a great divine transcendental sig-
nificance, it was a word of God to man. The fact of
his death, merely as fact tells us nothing. Even
though it be declared that he died heroically or sacri-
ficially, as a martyr or truth lover, or as one who laid
down his life for a cause, nothing is really said to us
about God and His relation to us. On the plane of
mere event, however moving the event may be, the
death of Christ means simply what death in general
means. But the event as word, as significance, and as
Divine transcendental significance, as revealing and
establishing that connection which exists in the will of
of God between death and sin that means something
quite different. Here the death of Christ means an act
of God, an entry of God Himself into the sphere of
that supreme discontinuity of life which is sin. The
death and resurrection of Christ seen not in their historical
light, but in their transcendental revelationary light,
mean forgiveness, justification, reconciliation. Death
is made to be the medium of a new consciousness of
God, the consciousness of His grace, His forgiveness.
While on the rational plane it proclaims discontinuity,
it is now made to speak of a new divine continuity, the
continuity which is expressed in the words reconcilia-
tion and communion. In and through the death of
Christ, man's general consciousness which is largely
determined by the fact of death, is deepened into a
new sin-consciouness. His sense that he is mortal is
72 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
deepened into the sense that he is a sinner. And in
and through this new sin-consciousness man becomes
aware of God as the God of grace. The death of
Christ is seen to be God's provision for his salvation.
Were it not for that death, he would never see the
deep connection in the will of God between sin and
death. He would never see, that is, that the last truth
about himself as mortal man, is that he is a sinner.
But inasmuch as he is made to see this truth through
an act of God Himself, through an actual entry of
God into the sphere of his sin and death, he awakens
to the fact that he is the object of forgiveness and
grace. Sin which rationally speaks of discontinuity
and alienation now comes to speak of a new continuity
and communion. He discovers the nearness of God,
the nearness which is grace, in the very fact which
rationally speaks of farness, that is, in the sense of sin.
Here again the idea of the Holy Spirit is part of the
New Testament witness. Apart from that, we have
to do merely with the historical influence and effect
of the death of Christ upon the mind and hearts of
men. We have simply a moving event in history,
together with the subjective impressions which it makes
upon us. But we have nothing which can be called
revelation. Only if the link which binds us to this
event, is not rational-casual, something in us, but
transcendental, something in God, only if a super-
natural illumination and a supernatural conviction are
given us whereby we see the death of Christ not simply
as fact but as significance, as word, are we in possession
of revelation. We may express the matter crudely by
saying that the prime effect of Christ's death was upon
God and not upon us. It is not because it moves us,
makes a subjective impression on us, as a deed of
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 73
heroism and martyrdom might do, that it becomes
revelation. It is rather because it moves God, bringing
down upon us His consciousness, His Holy Spirit,
that we see it for what it is. The bond which unites
us to the death of Christ is not human but divine, no
mere human impression, but divine life and under-
standing made ours. A transcendental bond unites
the forgiven sinner with the deed which is the source
of his salvation, the death of Christ ; no rational bond,
since between death and life, sin and holiness there are
no rational bonds. No rational explanation of the
atonement is possible. Rationally it must for ever
remain a mystery. But to faith its secret is disclosed,
because faith is the work of the Holy Spirit, the tran-
scendent, supra-temporal, supra-rational understanding,
which links man's consciousness on to the deed of
revelation.
There is yet another element in the New Testament
witness of Jesus Christ which is rarely mentioned, but
which is substantive part of that witness. It centres
in that discontinuity in human life which is called
chance or contingency. Man is a contingent being
in the universe. He is born of the flesh, and in indi-
vidual cases, of the lawless and unregulated impulses
of the flesh. His very existence waits on contingency.
A miscarriage in the womb, and the world, so far as
we can see, would never have had a Plato, a Dante,
or a Shakespeare. Man's life is shadowed by chance,
accident and caprice. He is part of a system which
stands in no rationally discoverable relations with
his life-purposes. Certainly that is so with regard to
the individual. The individual is subject to chance
and accident, is indeed largely the product of chance
and accident. The creation of which he forms a part
74 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
is subject to vanity. The sparrows fall to the ground
apparently without meaning or purpose, and man in
this respect is like the sparrows. One is taken and
the other left, and even in the spiritual world this
apparent chance and contingency hold. Now the
antithesis to chance is choice and election. And the
task of revelation is to make the fact of chance speak
of choice and election. Is it possible for that which
rationally speaks of chance to speak of choice ? What
great word will clothe chance with the significance of
choice? Can chance itself become the material of
revelation ? Here our thought reaches its limits perhaps
more quickly than anywhere else. But we cannot but
be arrested by the intriguing emphasis laid on pre-
destination and election in the New Testament witness.
We note, to begin with, that there is set forth a man
out of this contingent and incalculable world to be the
subject of Divine Incarnation. The eternal and the
transcendental assumes the form of the human, the
contingent, the historical. In no general truth of
reason it is said to us, in no universal law of life is
revelation given, but in this man, at this time, in this
place. Moreover, the believer, the object of redemption
is chosen in Christ from before the foundation of the
world. Rationally his existence as a believer is a thing
of chance. It depends on the fact that he happens to
stand in a temporal relation to the coming of Christ.
But the real bond which unites him to Christ is not
rational-temporal, but divine and supra-temporal; it
cannot be expressed in terms of causality, but in terms
of eternal will and purpose. The God Who comes as
objective revelation, comes also as the bond which
unites a man with that revelation. The eternal will
which manifests itself on the plane of history as revela-
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 75
tion, enters also the field of man's consciousness and
links his life on to that supreme manifestation. The
relation of the believer to the Christ of revelation is the
projection of an eternal relation between the Spirit and
the Son in God. Incalculable harm has been done
by the translation of the idea of election into a rational
dogma. This dogma has been set forth in terms of
an omnipotent will whose features have been drawn
from some incalculable force acting arbitrarily like chance
itself. Men have failed to perceive that election is the
precise opposite of all chance and all contingency.
A will acting arbitrarily is the highest expression of
chance we know. Election in its true meaning is
the guarantee of freedom not its subversion. It pre-
supposes a response and not a fate. It involves a
personal relation, personal in the highest degree because
it is grounded in that personal relation which exists
between the Spirit and the Son in God. Therefore
it is the supreme sanction of freedom. Man's freedom
is grounded in the freedom of God. The projection
of an eternal and personal relationship existing in God,
becomes the ground of the relation of the man of faith
to the object of his faith. Revelation thus meets and
lays hold of that element in human experience which
we call chance. Inasmuch as it is seen to consist in
no general and timeless idea but in a person and a deed
arising out of this contingent world, inasmuch also as
the eternal purpose lays hold of the individual in his
contingent individual existence, chance is seen in a
new light. Like death and sin, chance is the mark of
a fallen world, a world in discontinuity with God.
We need to note, the idea of chance arises out of a
deep experience of individuality. It is the individual
that, as it were, stands out in chance ; we discover that
76 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
on one side of our being we are not confronted by a
universal law of necessity, but that there are, so to
speak, individualised selections playing upon our life
and constituting its determinations. As Baron von
Hugel has pointed out, it is the contingent in our
experience rather than the universal which moves the
will, and thus constitutes the individual. 1 One may say
that chance, contingency, is the raw material out of
which individuality is woven. So the obverse of chance
is election. Chance is, so to speak, the expression of
election on its negative side corresponding to the
circumstances of man's individual life in a world which
is in discontinuity with God. Therefore it can be
made to speak of choice ; not rationally indeed, but
in and through revelation, in and through the Holy
Spirit. Just because it is individual, and cannot be
thought of apart from the individual, just because it
must always have reference to individualised happenings
and experiences, it can point towards choice and election.
And now to sum up ; we have stated that the ' locale '
of revelation in the New Testament is not the human,
historical Jesus as such but the risen, exalted Lord,
and that between these two there is from the rational
point of view a discontinuity so absolute that it can
only be expressed by the words death and resurrection.
Our meaning throughout has been, that there was that
hidden in Jesus of Nazareth which does not yield its
secret to historical or rational enquiry, nor even to that
sense of subjective sympathy and kinship with him,
which is produced by the historical influence which
1 cf. The Mystical Element in Religion, Vol. I, p. 3.
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 77
flows forth from his human life and personality. This
secret which does not so yield itself is precisely that
which makes him the revelation of God, the word of
God directed upon those discontinuities of our life
where the need for revelation arises. The significance
of Christ's life and work is not comprehensible to man
on his natural levels, it is in its true nature compre-
hensible to God alone, and to the men to whom God
discloses it. How is it possible for man on his natural
levels to see in Christ's death an atonement for sin?
What natural, rational connection is there between a
man's death and a radical dealing with the world's sin ?
How also is it possible for a man on such lines to see in the
story of the resurrection, which is so vulnerable on the
side of historical criticism, and which from the merely
historical point of view can never be completely assured,
the overcoming of death for the world, and the beginning
of a new and eternal mode of existence ? How is it
possible from the historical episode of Jesus of Nazareth
to discern one, who in his own experience and mission
gathered up the contradictions and discontinuities of
life, death and life, sin and righteousness, chance and
choice and made the one side of the antithesis to have
the promise and assurance of the other ? How, in a word,
is it possible for mere natural, rational man to discover
in Jesus an actual coming of God into the midst of the
contradictions of our life, into the midst of our death,
our sin, our human contingency and chance ?
It is no wonder that the historical critic is driven
to drive a wedge between the Jesus of history and the
Christ of Paul and John and the Christian Church, to
declare that the latter is entirely different from the
former, and to attribute the latter to the myth-making
activity of man's mind ? How can he do otherwise,
78 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
from the standpoint of history alone? To ordinary
reason and understanding what can the Christ of revela-
tion be, but a problem and an offence ? How can he
ever become the Christ of revelation? To meet the
Christ of revelation, one must in some way come to
share his risen life, the life in which the discontinuities
of our human life are transcended and reconciled, one
must know him, that is, after his transcendental mode
of existence. But that is not a rational possibility.
The possibility lies in God not in anything in us. Only
if that movement from God to the world whose sign
is Jesus Christ, be involved in a movement from God
into the sphere of human consciousness, reason, and
understanding, is it possible to see in Christ the revela-
tion of God. There must be a divine movement
towards and within the soul of man, answering to the
divine moment in human history. In other words
revelation demands the Holy Spirit for its receiving
and understanding. What takes place outwardly on
the plane of history, must take place inwardly within
the sphere of consciousness ; but take place not in a
rational-causal way, as if history as such produced
this inward result, it must take place from God. It
is for that reason that the Holy Spirit becomes in the
New Testament the principle of revelation. Christ
cannot be known as the revelation of God save in and
through the Holy Spirit. And it is in pointing to the
Holy Spirit as the principle of revelation that the New
Testament witness reaches its crown and climax.
The final question that will arise, is that concerning
the truth and validity of this New Testament witness.
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 79
Having tried to make the witness coherent and clear,
we are faced with the question is it true, it is reliable ?
This question, it will be seen from the foregoing, is not
capable of a direct and rationally-satisfying answer.
Rational proof is out of the question where the subject-
matter of revelation is not amenable to rational treatment.
The only answer which we can give which at all
approximates to a direct appeal to the reason is by way
of another question, namely, what does revelation make
of us ? Does it make us real in our relation to the
facts of our life and to the world in which we live ?
Does it speak truth about this life of ours in the world ?
Does it, that is to say, bring out into clear relief those
discontinuities in which our life stands, reveal them
as our true life-problem and set us in a real relation
to them ? Does it call in question the whole field of our
knowledge on the ground that this knowledge in its
search for unity and system ignores these discontinuities
in the full weight of their significance for our lives ?
The contention of the Christian revelation is that its
solution of the problem of our life, and that solution
alone, reveals the problem in the whole range of its
implications. Scepticism itself does not bring home
these discontinuities of our life in the way that revelation
does. To take one single example, it does not bring
home to the man the sense of his sin and guilt. It
passes that by. It does not make man real in relation
to this supreme discontinuity of his life. Just because
revelation does that, it accredits itself as more real
than scepticism. Just because it deals with reality in a
way that nothing else does, just because it opens our
eyes to see that to which we were formerly blind or
dull, just because it makes a man, a man of truth and
reality, is it thereby validated as itself truth and reality.
80 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
But clearly that means that its truth is perceived in no
mere objective and theoretical way, but in and through
a fundamental decision of man's life. This truth is
of such a nature, that it must become true by means of
crisis and decision with the soul of man. It will be our
aim in the following chapters to set out more fully the
necessity and nature of this crisis, and to indicate its
implications for thought and life.
We cannot, however, bring this part of our discussion
to an end without dealing with a criticism which is
likely to arise in the mind of the reader, and which is
often directed towards the theology which is founded
on this estimate of the witness. It will be asked, does
not the stress here laid on the radical discontinuity
between God and man lead to sheer deism and dualism ?
This criticism has already been glanced at in the preceding
chapter, but something more needs to be said about it
here. Our contention is that precisely the opposite is
the case, and this contention we must now strive to
justify. And first let us recall what we said at the
beginning, namely that Christ as God's revelation to
us does not appear apart from a context. He stands in
the midst of a history constituted for the revelation
and redemption of God. That history is related to
universal history, and related in no naturalistic way,
but in and through the Divine will and election. And
history itself is related to the natural world, the cosmos,
which arises by the Divine creation and is sustained by
the Divine providence in order to serve those ends
which belong to the relations between God and man.
There is a continuity reaching up from the lowest part
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 8 1
of the creation to the transcendent God Himself. But
that continuity lies in the will of the transcendent God,
it is the continuity of His creative and redemptive
purpose. It is not a thing, a datum, which can be
seen from below upwards; it can only be seen from
above downwards. And here we may note certain
analogies in our own experience which will help to
make this view of the matter clearer. There is, we
may venture to say, an original native bond between
what we call nature and what we call mind or spirit.
Nature is organic with spirit. But the examination of
nature itself will not reveal to us this bond. Spirit
belongs to another sphere of reality than nature, it
manifests qualities and characteristics that are not to
be found in nature. We do not seek the connection
between the two in some principle equally present in
nature and in spirit, some underlying unity of which
both are parallel manifestations. That leads to a
monism which virtually rules out the existence and
reality of spirit, or to a form of realism which in the
end becomes indistinguishable from materialism. We
look for the connection in the destiny of nature to
pass upward into spirit, to provide the conditions under
which spirit can arise, a destiny which is revealed only
in the realm of spirit. That is to say nature can be
acted on creatively, and only when it is acted on
creatively are its connections with the realm of spirit
made really manifest. We can interpret nature to some
degree at any rate from the standpoint of spirit, but
we cannot read spirit from the standpoint of nature.
From the standpoint of nature what we see is dis-
continuity, not continuity. This is not to say that the
detached scientific study of nature must necessarily
lead to materialism or mechanism. Everything that
82 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
truly is, points to and has connections with something
that is higher ; but it is only within the sphere of the
higher that these connections reveal themselves. Nature
is constituted for spirit not because it is in itself a pale
manifestation of spirit, but because only on the back-
ground of nature are spiritual realities made visible or
so far as we can see made possible. Thus again what
we call law, as natural norm, is prophetic of what we
call freedom, not because law and freedom are lower
and higher manifestations of the same thing, but
because law is convertible into freedom, or rather is
the indispensable condition of freedom, as in human
action. So similarly process is prophetic of action,
not because a process is in itself a diluted act, but
because it can be so reacted upon that free activity
will arise. Nature, law, process are so to speak the
raw materials out of which creative spirit can fashion
spiritual and free relationships. They receive a meaning
and a value, a reality and a right, which in themselves
and apart from their purpose and destiny they do not
possess. Regarded in themselves and by themselves
they are discontinuous with that spirit and that freedom
with which nevertheless they are continuous in virtue
of the fact that they can be acted upon creatively from
above. Let it be understood, that in saying all this,
we are not making any dogmatic pronouncement of
a philosophical nature upon the nature of reality. We
are but saying how things are in our experience, because
we are seeking analogies in that experience which would
help us to understand more clearly the nature of the
relation between God and the world as it is set forth
in the witness to revelation.
And now we may proceed to note that all these
antitheses, nature and spirit, law and freedom, process
THE WITNESS TO REVELATION 83
and action, point to an ultimate antithesis which the
Bible announces with unfaltering voice, the antithesis
between the world and man on the one hand and God
on the other. Man is not God, and God is not man.
Nevertheless man is made in the image of God in the
sense that a destiny has been stamped upon his life.
Man was made for God and only truly lives when he
draws his life from God. In himself and by himself
man is nothing. " Cease ye from man whose breath
is in his nostrils : for wherein is he to be accounted
of? " (Isaiah ii, 22). "All flesh is grass " (Isaiah xl, 6).
But he becomes something as he takes his life from
God, as he forswears all independence and autonomy
and permits himself to be worked upon continually by
the creative power of God. It is in and through this
creative power of God that man gets for himself
meaning, value, reality and right. It is as the Spirit of
God works creatively upon him that he himself becomes
soul and spirit. Always is the relation of God to man
that of creativeness. Never does man stand related
to God excepting in and through God's creativeness.
A continual giving up of his own independent, auto-
nomous existence, a continual standing in responsibility
and responsiveness to One Who is other than himself,
that is man's true life. The continuity between his
life and the divine, is to be found not in some immanent
nexus belonging to both, but in the nature and will of
the divine life alone. Apart from that responsibility
and responsiveness, and standing in independence and
autonomy, man is discontinuous with God : not dis-
continuous in the sense that he can literally tear himself
away from God, but in the sense that the divine
creativeness turns to criticism and judgment even unto
death. Not in himself, in anything that he is or has
84 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
simply as man, is he continuous with God. His very
response to God is not some native faculty which he
possesses, it is a response to divine creative action ;
personal, in the highest sense personal, but nevertheless
something called forth by God's creativeness.
Now here the very ground of deism and dualism is
cut away. How is it possible to speak of these when
man's life is so absolutely conditioned by God, when
God is left sole and sovereign, and man's life is
determined creatively or critically, and both in the
absolute sense, by God ? Indeed we may turn our
defence into a new offensive and declare that this
view alone can effectively keep deism and dualism at
bay. For where the world and man are allowed in
their independence and autonomy a measure of divine
right, our thought of God must at last either be in
essence deistic or it must tend towards a philosophic
absolutism which represents all the phases of human
life and experience as aspects of the one absolute reality.
But where God stands to man as creative throughout,
where His creativeness turns to criticism and judgment
upon man as he falls out of that responsibility and
responsiveness in which his true life consists, deism and
dualism on the one hand, and absolutism and pantheism
on the other are completely done away.
CHAPTER III
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION: FAITH
AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Part I
Revelation and the Holy Spirit
REVELATION, as we have seen, is according to the New
Testament witness, the approach of reality to man,
not the approach of man to reality. It is an actual coming
of God into the sphere of man's life, and specifically
into the sphere of those discontinuities, sin, death and
contingency, which constitute his life-problem and
proclaim the impotence and impossibility of his existence.
1U The Bible is the Book in which the strange announce-
ment, the ever-recurring theme is, that the God who
has made the world and fills all things, holds all things
in His hand, the omnipresent and almighty comes.
The coming of God is the peculiar theme of this book,
and of this book alone." The divine life links itself
on to our human death, the divine holiness links itself
on to our human sin, the divine election and choice
link themselves on to our human chance and contingency.
This happens, this becomes, this is a great divine event
in Jesus Christ, and this happening is the word of
revelation. Humanity which is the sphere of sin,
death, and chance, becomes united with divinity in the
person of Christ. Two spheres which from the human
and rational point of view are completely discontinuous
meet and are made to coincide in the person of Christ.
God comes into the sphere of man's death. That is
1 Brunner, Der Miftler, p. 254.
86 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
indicated by the death of Christ. The manhood of
Jesus as it were retreats, yields itself wholly up to the
God who enters the sphere of man's death. Jesus the
man, the sharer and representative of our humanity dies.
And he dies, not simply for reasons prescribed by historic
circumstances, not merely as a hero dies, or a martyr,
or the representative of a cause which is opposed and
persecuted. He dies unto God. But since he dies
unto God, he dies paradoxically unto life. x There is
a death which is " the death of death." The humanity
is not destroyed, nor does it merely lose itself in God
as in an ocean of being, it is raised up, and set forth
as the true humanity, the humanity which is according
to the original creation of God. God comes into
the sphere of man's sin. That also is indicated by
the death of Christ. We have seen that sin and death
are bound up together in the relation of man to God.
The humanity of Jesus, just because it is our humanity,
belongs to the " flesh of sin." It therefore yields itself
wholly up to that God whose coming disqualifies it as
such, yields itself up wholly to that judgment of God
upon humanity which is called death. In the very
doing of this, in the offering up of itself, in standing
under the divine judgment, and in the fact that all this
was the very life-movement of Jesus, there is revealed
the essential sinlessness of the individual humanity of
Jesus. In itself, as mere existence, as actual empiric
humanity it was not sinless ; it belonged to the " flesh
of sin." But since the essential being of Christ con-
sisted not in the expression of his actual humanity as
a thing of positive excellence, but in renouncing it, in
its self-emptying and becoming " obedient unto death,
even the death of the Cross," the individual humanity
1 See Earth, Romerbrief, p. 143.
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 87
of Jesus manifests its own sinlessness. It is only from
this point of view that we can understand the sharp,
decisive words, "Why callest thou me good? There
is none good but one, that is God." To interpret this
saying as a mere expression of humility is to trifle with
it. What sort of humility would it be, which would
proclaim something that was not true? Only if our
sinful humanity was united with divinity, only if the
humanity of Jesus, as a mere existence and per se belonged
to the " flesh of sin," and must therefore be delivered
up, renounced, negated, can this saying be reconciled
with the individual sinlessness of Jesus. Christ died
unto sin. Therefore he rose for our justification.
Therefore " of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God
is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and
sanctification, and redemption " (i Cor. i, 30).
Again, God came into the sphere of our contingency,
The sign of that is the Incarnation, whereby a member
of the human race, an historical man, becomes the
object of God's eternal choice, for the purpose of His
coming into the world and His performing of a great
all-decisive deed in which our humanity is constituted
afresh.
Now that which responds to and receives revelation
is faith. And faith as response to revelation means
two things. It means of course believing that that of
which we have spoken really happened in Jesus Christ,
that there was this approach of God, this coming, this
divine event. This happening is believed as objective
divine deed and event. But clearly that in itself is
insufficient. Revelation regarded simply as objective
event is not yet truly revelation. How does it really
88 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
help me, simply to believe that this coming of God
really happened in the case of Jesus Christ? Even
supposing I could believe it in a purely objective way
which of course I cannot, of what value would it be to
me ? Somehow I myself must be united with it, linked
on to it. That a very wonderful thing happened to
an individual member of the human race, tells me
nothing about my life, its meaning and its destiny. It
is only as I see in Christ my death linked on to the
divine life, my sinful nature united with God's holy
nature, my contingent existence laid hold of by the
eternal will, that what happened in Christ becomes
revelation for me. Humanity must be linked on to
divinity in Christ humanity, not simply one man's
human nature if revelation is to be spoken of. And
faith must be not simply believing that in this one man
these great things of which we have spoken happened ;
it must itself be an actual uniting of ourselves and our
nature with what happened in the case of this one man.
There must be a bond uniting the believer in his faith
with the event which is the object of this faith. Only
within its bond, only within this unity, can revelation
be seen as revelation. Revelation in order to be
revelation, cannot be objective merely, it must be
subjective as well. Only in being subjective can it
be seen as objective.
But what is the nature of that bond between the
individual believer in his faith and the revelation which
is the object of his faith ? We have seen that it cannot
be the mere influence, impact and effect of the historical
personality of Jesus. Apart from the fundamental
criticism which we have launched against this view,
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 89
namely that it destroys revelation proper, it must surely
be obvious that such a temporal, causal bond will
weaken as time proceeds. The further off we stand in
time from any great figure of the past, the fainter grows
his direct influence upon us. Even those who inter-
pret the matter after this fashion, are obliged to have
recourse to the idea of the Holy Spirit to sustain and
maintain the strength of this bond. But they leave
this idea, as it were, in mid-air. They interpret the
Spirit as somehow immanent in the idea for which
Jesus stands and which he embodies. They do not
bring the Spirit into any organic relation with the
person of Christ or with that relation in which man
stands to Him in faith. Or else they represent the
matter as if the Spirit were some element which is
common to God and man, in virtue of which man is
able to receive the revelation given in Jesus Christ.
They work with two presuppositions : first, an historical
personality with its influence, impact, and effect on
human consciousness ; and second, an original bond
immanent in both God and man, the Spirit, whereby
this influence is maintained and made effective. In
other words, they presuppose what revelation in its
New Testament sense denies, direct continuity between
God and man. The Spirit comes to stand fundamentally
for an idea of immanence, whereas in the New Testa-
ment He is purely transcendent. And faith becomes
the expression of that which lies immanent in man's
own nature under the stimulus of the impact of an
historical life and personality.
But if the presupposition of the New Testament
witness be valid, namely discontinuity, the bond can
be nothing which is immanent in us. It cannot be
interpreted simply as a rational, moral, or emotional
90 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
response to some outside stimulus. The rational idea
of causality, as if the historical Jesus in the dynamic
of his human personality were as such the cause of faith
breaks down. We have to work with an idea which
transcends that of historical causality. We have to
seek a causality which is other than everything which
usually passes under that name, a causality which
transcends all natural, rational, and historical modes
of working. And here we are brought face to face
with the idea of election or predestination which in
some form or other dominates the whole Biblical
conception of the relation between God and man. " He
hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the
world " (Eph. i, 4.). The cause of faith must be sought
in the eternal will of God, but be it noted, and this is
of the utmost importance, of God as revealed. That is
to say, we are not to think of predestination as some-
thing which could be regarded in the abstract, used as
a logical counter and made to yield logical and rational
conclusions. Predestination is God's predestination, not
simply predestination in itself. God's will is God's
will, not simply what we call will absolutised. The idea
of predestination is not one which derives its content
from any rational conceptions of ours, it derives its
content from revelation alone. Our ordinary, rational
idea of it is that of a will working arbitrarily and
coercively: but what has that to do with revelation?
Arbitrariness is the very antithesis to all that we mean
by revelation; it precludes and excludes revelation.
Predestination means divine transcendent causality,
and the substantive derives its whole content of mean-
ing from the qualifying adjectives. A will acting
arbitrarily and coercively is the highest and most absolute
form of the causality which we know. There is
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 91
nothing transcendent about that ; it is just the carrying
on and making absolute of that which lies within the
field of our rational knowledge and experience. No,
the will of God is something which lies within, and
rises up from, those determinations which constitute
His own nature and being. The relationships within the
Divine being and which make God God, are the ground
of the divine will. God's will is identical with His
nature. The relations within His own being, inasmuch
as these are personal relations, constitute the determina-
tions of His will. For that very reason, the will is an
eternal and unchangeable will, a will before the
foundation of the world, a will removed from all
contingency, a will transcending all that arises in time,
and all that belongs to the causations and sequences
of time, yet a will which is the last ground of all
temporal happenings. And to refer faith to this divine,
fore-ordained, and eternal will of God, to make that
will the bond which unites the believer to the object
of revelation, involves the position that those relations
which exist within the divine being enter upon the
field of time and history and man's consciousness. To
try and think this out is, of course, madness. It all
belongs to that divine coming, that movement of God
to the world which constitutes revelation. To attempt
to describe the 'how' of this, is impossible. But
the position is involved that the relation which is set
up between the believer and the object of revelation
springs out of a relation which is immanent in God.
We call it the relation between the Holy Spirit and the
Son. The coming of the Son means also the coming
of the Spirit. Revelation coming down objectively
in the same act comes down subjectively. The relation
between the Son and the Spirit is, as it were, made
9* REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
human and temporal in the relation between Christ and
the believer. We may put the matter thus, all the
time realising that we know not truly what we say:
the relations between God, Christ and man on the
field of time and history, are the actualisations of the
eternal relations immanent in God between Father,
Son and Holy Spirit. God's eternal will choosing
men from before the foundation of the world and
choosing them " in Christ," thus not arbitrarily, but
according to the determinations which constitute His
nature and His being, means a kind of projection of
these immanent relations into the field of time and
men and history. 1
It needs to be emphasized that predestination does
not mean the selection of a number of people for
salvation and the rest for damnation according to the
determination of an unknown and unknowable will.
That idea does not belong to predestination proper.
It is a rational idea, a rational inference where rational
inferences are out of the question. The will of God
is not unknown. It is made known in revelation.
The determination is not an arbitrary determination
which obviously could have no place in revelation.
It is determination prescribed by, indeed identical with
the relations within the divine nature, which just
because they are such, are personal relations. And on
that very account, it acts upon us not as numerical units
but as persons free, individual, responsible persons.
Predestination has not to do with personal units, but
with personal souls. Its aim is not to collect a number
of units but to act by way of choice and rejection on
persons. That is to say, it is in the very field of our
personal reactions, personal choices, and decisions that
1 See Appendix to chapter VII.
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 93
predestination works. And it works upon us both
critically and creatively. In our actual empirical relation-
ship to God which is that of alienation and discontinuity
we are judged and condemned. But this very judgment
and condemnation is itself, being the judgment and
condemnation of God, creative activity. Predestination
brings into crisis, condemnation, and new creation,
that relation to God in which we actually and empirically
stand. It presses in and presses down upon our life in
its actual relation to God, rejecting us in that relation,
and in rejecting us, choosing us for that relation for
which we were destined according to the purpose that
created us. But this rejection and choice imply re-
sponses from our side which are personal and free. Or
rather we should say that they create these responses
from our side. We may note that even in our ordinary
experience, we encounter that which acts critically and
creatively upon us. *A great poem for example will
often have to create the very faculty of understanding
and appreciating it. It does not merely submit itself
to men's minds, it acts critically and creatively upon
them. It modifies, reacts upon, works on their con-
sciousness. In virtue of a certain spirit within it, it
creates responses. The very attitudes which reject it,
are in a measure created by it. These responses are
free, yet they are created responses. And when we
remember that the relation of God to man is always
and in everything the relation of creator, we are enabled,
not indeed clearly to see, but in a measure to understand
that predestination and free response are not incom-
patible, but correlative. Personal reaction, personal
response is the field in which the divine predestination
works.
1 See Forsyth, The Work of Christ, pp. 16-17.
94 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
The idea of predestination has given endless trouble
to theology. It must always contain its problems and
to discuss them here would take us too far afield. But
the root of the trouble is mainly this, that predestination
has been regarded as if it were human and rational
causality made absolute. It has been only poorly
perceived that predestination points to a mode of
causality which is of a totally different kind from the
rational, indeed it implies a complete break with it. It
means, as we have said, that the ground of the relation
between the believer in his faith and the object of that
faith is to be found in God alone. The relation which
is set up between a man and Christ and which we call
faith springs out a relation immanent in the Eternal
Godhead. It is the relation between the Spirit and
the Son. A predestination which meant the absolutising
of the causation which we know, would be a purely
rational idea, and one entirely removed from revelation.
A predestination acting like a fate on human life, making
thus the relation between man and Christ an unfree and
therefore less than a personal one, could have nothing
to do with predestination in Christ. It would simply
be determinism at its highest pitch, for arbitrary and
coercive will is the worst form of determinism. For
this reason Luther and Calvin gave warning against
abstracting the idea of predestination and treating it
rationally, though it cannot be said that they always
kept in mind their own warning. But they very rightly
inserted that it was a dangerous thing to think about
predestination except " in Christ." Rational causality
in all its forms, whether in that of logical process, or
natural law, or coercive will, has this characteristic
that it excludes freedom and is incapable of setting up
a truly personal relation. It treats men as things, not
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 95
as persons; thus it does not truly choose them. Pre-
destination is causality of a wholly other kind. So
far from excluding freedom it implies it and creates it.
Just because it sets up in human life a relation which
has its ground in an eternal relation in God, a relation
which is supremely personal, the relation between the
Son and Spirit, it is the great charter and guarantee
of freedom. The strange circumstance has often been
remarked upon, that the idea of predestination which
logically and rationally precludes freedom has in
Christian history been the inspiration of free person-
ality and the creator of free political and civic institutions.
The explanation is probably to be found here. It is
predestination which gives to the idea of a personal
relationship with Christ its acutest meaning, and which
therefore gives a new meaning and value to human
personality. Obviously the human and rational idea
of causality yields no relation which is truly personal.
The time element which stretches between revelation
as objective and revelation as subjective precludes a
relation which is really personal ; for what we have is
the influence and effect of a personality, or the dynamic
of an idea, not the meeting of person with person.
Predestination transcends the time element and brings
the believer and Christ really together. Of course
the process whereby this eternal relation between the
Spirit and the Son in God actualises itself in the relation
of faith to its object is a mystery which is incapable of
rational explanation. It is as much of a mystery as the
process whereby the Eternal God becomes incarnate
in an historical man. Certainly it uses historical effects
as media, just as the divine act of revelation on its
objective side used historical events and an historical
personality as media. But in neither case have we to do
96 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
with the mere product of historical causality. The
ground of the Incarnation lies in the eternal relationship
between the Father and the Son ; the ground of faith
lies in the eternal relationship between the Spirit and
the Son within the being of God.
We may reach this conclusion from a somewhat
different side. Christ means the entrance into history
of something that is new. In that which makes him
Christ, the revelation of God, he is not continuous with
history but discontinuous. He is in history but not
of history. In him, history is lifted out of its temporal
sequential setting and set in the light of the divine
event of revelation. " Jesus the Christ means eternity
in time, the Absolute within relativity, the fulfilment
of time, the beginning of that which is above all
temporal change, the aion mellon^ the coming word of
God and salvation." 1 In the light of revelation, history
in general is seen to point beyond itself to a supreme,
transcendent event, a crisis which is not simply a crisis
in history, but the crisis of history. That event, just
because it is transcendent, just because it is the crisis
of history throws its light backwards as well as forwards
and fixes the relation of past events and past persons
to itself. It gathers up the past, as well as determining
the future. Time as such, time as process, flow, sequence
" stands still before it " (Earth). So Jesus is represented
as saying to the Jews, "Your father Abraham rejoiced
to see my day : and he saw it and was glad " (John
viii, 56). Since the crisis is not produced by history,
but upon history, the relations established between what
comes before and what comes after are not merely
those of historical causality and sequence; they are
relations which the crisis itself brings with it. In faith,
1 Brunner, The Word and the World, p. 36.
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 97
therefore, the individual is lifted out of his mere time-
relations and set in immediate personal relationship
with the object of revelation. The relationship which
unites a man with revelation is not a rational, human,
causal, immanent one but a divine and a transcendent
one. There is a relationship in God which corresponds
with the relationship between faith and revelation,
and which is its ground. It is that which the New
Testament designates as the Holy Spirit.
It is necessary to follow up this thought still a little
further. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit is the
Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the Son and not merely
the Spirit of the Father, because He is the Spirit of
revelation and faith. The Son and the Spirit are brought
so close together in the New Testament witness, that
they are almost identified, at any rate, verbally. The
classic instance is, of course, 2 Corinthians iii, 17 : " Now
the Lord is that Spirit ; and where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is liberty." This apparent equivalence
of the Son and the Spirit has led many to suppose that
the idea of the Spirit is fundamentally superfluous,
that the two terms Son and Spirit connote the same
idea. Some have suggested that we might even drop
the term Spirit, and speak simply of the risen and
exalted Lord. But the Spirit is not the risen and exalted
Lord, He is rather the " spirit of him that raised up
Jesus from the dead" (Romans viii, n). Jesus was
" installed as Son of God with power by the Spirit
of holiness when he was raised from the dead "
(Romans i, 4. Moffatt's translation). The Holy Spirit
is the Spirit of Christ, because He is the Spirit of revela-
Q
98 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
tion and faith : and specifically because He is the relation
between the divinity and the humanity in the person of
Christ. This relation, it must be insisted, is a personal
relation. It is not as if two metaphysical or quasi-
metaphysical substances, humanity and divinity, were
joined together. What we have in Christ is the personal
conflict, crisis, and overcoming of two life-movements ;
the human, which is a movement towards death, sin
and contingency, and the divine, which is a movement
towards life, righteousness and eternal will and purpose.
These personal life-movements remain distinct in them-
selves. They go on their separate and opposite ways.
Only if between them there be another which brings
them together, reveals them in and through one another,
makes life to dwell under the form of death, righteous-
ness under the form of sin, eternal will and purpose
under the form of contingency and chance, can there
be real incarnation, or real uniting together of divinity
and humanity. God becomes man in Christ, through
the Holy Spirit. It is indeed true that there is a bond
between God and humanity by virtue of which In-
carnation becomes possible, but that bond is no immanent
nexus between the two, it is wholly transcendent and
creative, it is a bond, a relationship, within the being
of God : it is the Holy Spirit. Thus the Holy Spirit
is the Spirit of Christ, the personal life-movement which
united the rationally disparate entities humanity and
divinity within the person of Christ. Therefore the
divine deed of the Incarnation involves also the sending
of the Holy Spirit. Revelation on its objective side
brings with it revelation on its subjective side.
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the coping-stone
of the doctrines of revelation and faith. Apart from
it, the whole structure lacks unity and coherence. Unless
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 99
there be a relationship in God which becomes in a
measure actualised on the field of time; unless the
relationship between the believer in his faith to Christ
the object of his faith (a relationship which, be it
repeated, is in the acutest sense personal) be the ex-
pression under the form of our human life of the
relationship between the Spirit and the Son in God;
we are left with nothing more than a dynamic human
personality plus the historic effect, influence, impact of
his life on our consciousness. Unless also the terms
in which Christ be construed, are transcendent terms,
terms which express the union of rational discontinuities
and incompatibles, and the terms which describe the
believer's response and faith be equally transcendent
terms, we may find much that is helpful and stimulating
in Christ, but we shall not find what the New Testament
means by revelation.
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is superfluous and in
the last resort meaningless, unless it be considered in
relation to the New Testament conception of revelation
as a whole, and be made the category for the explicating of
revelation. Considered apart and in itself as a doctrine
that can be treated independently, it yields nothing and
leads nowhere. And it is because it has been to a large
extent isolated and considered in itself, that thought
about it has been so extraordinarily sterile. Men take
it as an idea, and pursue the developments of the idea in
scripture and in historical theology, and when they have
done that, they leave the matter, for they can get no
farther. Or they attempt to evaluate it psychologically
and speak of it as the " expression of an experience " ;
and they thus inevitably come to the conclusion that it
possesses only relative truth. It can be dissolved in the
idea of the spirit of Jesus, meaning by that the subjective
100 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
temper, disposition, spiritual quality of the personality
of Jesus, or in the conception of the risen and exalted
Lord. It therefore falls away, for it becomes a mere
duplication of what we have elsewhere and can express
differently. There is no purpose served by retaining
the doctrine if it means no more than these. But the
doctrine of the Holy Spirit is not simply a doctrine of
the Christian religion, it is the doctrine in which all
doctrine culminates. It is the doctrine which makes
the other doctrines really doctrines of revelation. Only
from that point of view does discussion of it lead
to fruitful results.
Part II
Revelation and the Nature of Faith
We are now in the position to deal more directly with
the subject of faith, or the receiving of revelation.
And the first thing that appears in the light of our fore-
going treatment of the Holy Spirit as revelation on its
subjective side, is that faith is a miracle, it is indeed the
miracle of consciousness.
Faith is miracle. There is no way of abating the
rigour of this truth and no way of dimming its glory.
Faith is not the human, rational historical effect and result
of the miracle of revelation. It is the deed and gift of
God. It is the Holy Spirit as seen from the human side.
Human factors and human activity are, as we shall see,
involved in faith, but faith is not, in its essence, a human
activity. The bond of faith which unites the believer
to Christ is no human bond, but a divine transcendent
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION IOI
bond. To ground faith otherwise than in the Holy
Spirit, to ground it in reason or what is called experience
is to refer revelation to the world we know, to assert
that man can get to God, to deny that it is necessary for
Him to come to us. It is to make revelation an extension
of reason or experience, something quantitatively and
not qualitatively different from the human. Christianity
is the revelation of the humanly and rationally impossible,
made possible. It speaks of a love that "passeth
knowledge," of a gift that is " unspeakable," of a way
of God that is " unsearchable." It plants in the centre
of things a Cross which is foolishness to the Greeks and
a stumbling-block to the Jews. It tells of a foolishness
of God that is wiser than men and a weakness of God
that is stronger than men. All this is not antithetical
trifling, or agitated paradox, it proclaims the sovereignty
of revelation over reason, the great aggression against
all human independence and autonomy. It indicates
a kind of knowledge different not only in degree but
in kind to all human knowledge, a kind of knowledge
which disqualifies human knowledge for the purpose
of revelation. There are, indeed, reasons for faith, but
faith is not grounded in reason. There is certainly
experience flowing from faith, but faith is not grounded
in experience. Reason is indeed king in its own sphere,
but that sphere is the sphere of the world of our common
experience, it is not the sphere of God and revelation.
The world with which reason deals is, however, to be
overcome, not primarily explained, but overcome and
explained only in the light of its overcoming. " This
is the victory that overcometh the world, even our
faith" (i John v, 4). We emasculate these words
of all real vitality if we take them simply to mean that
faith overcomes the spirit of worldliness. It is the
102 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
world, the cosmos, the creation, the sum-total of the
facts and forces that enter into our consciousness, that
has to be overcome. Revelation points to an end of
the old world, and the beginning of a new, " new heavens
and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness "
(2 Peter iii, 13). It is a naive assumption on the part
of most thinkers and philosophers that knowledge of
the world is, as such, knowledge of reality. That the
world in its empiric actuality is to be looked on, in
any real sense, as a contradiction, a fall, is an idea that
is scarcely glanced at, much less treated seriously.
But Christianity says precisely this. It declares that the
world is to be overcome, is to pass away, that its ' telos '
is death, that its truth is not in itself but beyond itself
in that resurrection, that new world of God, which
rises out of death. And the rational man who directs
his attention to the explaining of the world has, as such,
to renounce himself before revelation. Not that
revelation invades his proper sphere, but that it proclaims
that that sphere is relative, and must be overcome.
Between the new consciousness of the man of faith, and
the old consciousness of the man of reason and experience
there is a discontinuity, a cleft which is rationally unbridge-
able ; a cleft which is so absolute that it can be expressed
only in the terms death and resurrection. Man sees
himself in a new light, a light which reveals in his world
and his life antinomies which he did not truly perceive
before. Reason itself indeed comes up against
antinomies, for example, that between the theoretical
and practical reason as revealed by Kant. It can, even
as Kant did, catch sight of a radical evil in things which
precludes system. Revelation, however, pushes these
antinomies into the very centre of life, reveals their
earnestness, shows them to be the pivot on which all
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 103
turns, makes cleat the fact that they are not simply
flaws in man's construction of reality, but breaches in
life's very nature. The world itself in its empiric actuality
and totality is to be overcome. Man himself has to be
overcome, has to die that he may rise in his true and real
humanity. Here and now, while his empiric humanity
remains, he is not yet overcome. But the beginning
of his overcoming takes place in his faith, that is, in his
consciousness, his world of thought and feeling, of
attitude and relation. In this realm occurs the crisis,
the miracle, which is faith, or as seen from the divine
side, the Holy Spirit. Faith is therefore miracle. It
is man's consciousness, his thought-world, including
in that term his volitional and emotional life as well as
his mental life, being gathered up into crisis, a crisis
which is not an activity of his own, but an activity of
the Holy Spirit entering his consciousness. Faith
therefore draws upon the whole activity of man's
consciousness, what we have called his thought-world ;
but it draws upon it, not, so to speak, positively, but
negatively. We mean this : it is not as if faith were
itself the positive activity of his consciousness, the
positive expression of it ; it is rather from man's side
the expression of his negativity, the yielding of himself
up to that which gathers his consciousness up into
crisis. In faith man becomes the subject of a great
aggression upon his life, a great approach of God, which
disqualifies his consciousness, his thought-world for
purposes of revelation. Thus Kierkegaard was able
to speak of faith as a ' pathos ' or suffering, and Paul
could speak of it as a ' death.'
It is, from the human side, that in consciousness
which answers to the death of Christ ; but on the
divine, that which answers to his resurrection. When
104 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
we say that faith is miracle, we do not mean that is
something wrought on mere inert passive material.
We do not deny that man has his part to play in the event
of faith. Clearly he is actively engaged in this event.
To believe in revelation is the freest thing that a man
can do, indeed it is thus that he attains true freedom. It
is not as if man were acted upon by a mighty irresistible
force, a great wind that drove him willy-nilly before it.
The relation which faith sets up between man and God
is a personal relation. The response which faith elicits
is a personal response. In the miracle of faith man's
activity is involved in such a way, that the whole man is
brought into a new relation to God. In faith man
expresses himself, not a part of himself but his very self.
But he expresses himself, if we may put it so, in his
negativity, because his being is, from the standpoint of
revelation, a negativity. He renounces himself, abjures
his independency, his autonomy, his claim to have life
in himself. And he renounces himself, expresses himself
in his negativity, because he is met by God in His
revelation, in His Holy Spirit. His being is gathered
up into a crisis, a great life-decision which is so absolute
a crisis that it can only be described as death and
resurrection. The crisis he does not himself create, for
faith is not a crisis in his life, but a crisis of his life. In
this crisis he delivers himself up, he expresses to the full
his negativity, he becomes not his own but another's.
This delivering of himself up is indeed as seen from the
outside, a great deed on the part of man, an activity of
his will. It is decision. But seen from the inside it
is rather a ' suffering ' as Kierkegaard said, even, as Paul
said, 'a death.' But it is also a deliverance and a
resurrection. Not every renunciation of self is faith,
for not every renunciation is miracle. In faith the
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 105
antithesis between activity and passivity is transcended,
because in faith the antithesis between freedom and
constraint is transcended. In faith the ' I will ' becomes
identical with the ' I must.' The man of faith believes
because he must, but that very ' must ' becomes an
expression of his freedom. We may reflect upon the
fact that nowhere are we so conscious of our freedom
as when we are carried forward by the great, high,
spiritual constraints of life. These constraints often give
us sore trouble. We are placed by them in strain and
tension. We feel ourselves torn different ways. Our
yielding to them is, as seen from the outside, a tremendous
activity of the will, but in itself it is a renunciation, an
abjuring of self, a delivering up of the will, a kind of death.
Yet we find our true selves in yielding to them. So,
in the acutest sense is it with faith. There the ' must '
is of the most imperative, and therefore the ' will ' is of
the freest. 1 The miracle of faith is a paradox only because
it is not realised that man, as he is in himself, is from
the point of view of revelation, a negativity. His end,
his * telos,' the whole drift of his life, his empirical
nature is death. This negativity is expressed and
confessed in the miracle of faith. Man surrenders
himself, and in surrendering himself finds his true being,
for his true being is not, so to speak, a movement from
himself outwards, but is a movement from without
inwards. Faith is therefore what has been called a
" totality act," 2 the act of a man in his " unanalysable
totality," but the positive side of that act, the miracle,
the crisis and new creation is not man's act but God's.
It is the Holy Spirit.
1 See Brnnner, The Word and the World, p. 73.
2 Ibid., p. 72.
106 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
There is one misunderstanding likely to arise here, at
which we may glance in passing. When we use terms
like crisis, suffering, death, resurrection in speaking of
faith, we do not mean that faith is necessarily attended
by great emotional upheavals and convulsions in the
experience of individuals. When we reflect upon out
experience in general we discover that often the greatest
and most fundamental changes in our consciousness,
in our whole ways of thinking and willing and feeling,
have taken place within us silently and imperceptibly,
and even gradually. We have to distinguish between
the nature of the change, and our own sensible experience
of the change. The former can only be described as
crisis, but the latter may often be described as process.
So with faith. The divine act and the human response
are, in their nature, not identical with what they are in
man's sensible experience. Faith is not equivalent to
the psychological experiences which attend it. These
experiences are different with different individuals. In
the case of a Paul, a Luther or a Wesley, they take the
form of profound psychological disturbances, great
emotional upheavals ; but in the case of many another
they may take the form of inner, hidden, gradual process
and change. A crisis is not the less a crisis because it
is not visible and sensible. Both in history and in
individual experience the profoundest and most far-
reaching happenings are often the most hidden from
outside observation. Indeed we may say that faith is
always a hidden thing, it is never identical with its
psychological expressions and accompaniments. More-
over we have to remember that, as we have already said,
faith is not a crisis in man's consciousness, it is the crisis
of his consciousness. It is man's actual, empirical
consciousness standing in crisis. It is never something
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 107
which a man just has, a datum in consciousness which
can be explored and described in an objective way,
it is a relation in which man stands. No objective
investigation of consciousness itself will reveal its
presence. It creates experience certainly, but it does
not derive from experience. It is the state of all
experience even the highest standing continually in crisis.
It is for man always death and always resurrection.
Part III
Contrasted Conceptions of Faith
Now this view of faith which we have been attempting
to describe, will perhaps become clearer if we contrast
it with others which have been put forward. We may
begin with the view given in orthodoxy and which finds
its most consistent expression in the teaching of the
Roman Catholic Church. According to this, revelation
is built on a foundation of natural reason. Such truths
as the being of God, the freedom of man's will, and the
immortality of the soul may be demonstrated by the
reason. Given these things, the idea that God has
revealed Himself is declared to be rationally congruous
with the conception of His nature which reason discloses.
Having gone so far, we are invited to investigate the main
facts alleged in the gospel tradition about Jesus Christ,
which are put forward as the subject-matter of revelation.
The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fact
that he founded the Church, and endowed it with his
own authority, are to be investigated as historical
108 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
propositions, and demonstrated or at least shown to be
probable by purely historical means. Historical and
rational enquiry are the indispensable preliminaries to
faith. Not, of course, that every individual must engage
in all this rational activity, but that the Church must
appeal in these matters to the court of reason and
historical enquiry.
Faith becomes founded on demonstrable fact to which
a revelationary meaning or value is attached. And it
is only when the fact is first established as fact, or at
least demonstrated as probable, that revelation can arise.
Faith has two distinct sides. First it involves rational
enquiry and proof, and second it means accepting and
believing a certain meaning or value attaching to the
fact. This acceptance involves believing in truths which
are in no sense rationally demonstrable, but which are
believed purely on the ground that God has revealed
them. It may also mean, as in Roman Catholicism,
accepting certain alleged historical facts for which there
is little or no historical evidence, for example the
Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, but which
God has revealed as having taken place, and which
are congruous with that which does fall within the sphere
of historical attestation. But all this truth and fact
rest upon a foundation which is the object of definite
rational and historical enquiry and demonstration. The
resurrection, for example, can never become revelation,
word of God to man, until it is first established as
historical fact or at any rate as historical probability
by historical proofs. The difficulties of this way of
regarding the matter are so obvious that it is strange
that anyone can be satisfied with it. Faith is committed
to an unending and fruitless apologetic, for the fact can
never be so attested as to eliminate all legitimate dubiety.
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 109
The fact never is proved, it always stands in need of
proving. Nothing can really be done with it, it can
never stand as pre-supposition, we can never begin with
it, we have always, as it were, to reach it. Between man
and revelation there lies something which has to be
substantiated on rational or historical grounds. Never
can revelation get right to man, never can man realise
his immediacy to a present, acting, speaking God. We
are speaking, of course, of the logical implications of
the idea of revelation, as set out in orthodoxy. Orthodoxy
is at bottom rationalism. Man's nature, his reason,
his self-standing activity is always there in its own right
as over against revelation. Revelation is but the
completion of what reason has begun. The super-
naturalism of which orthodoxy speaks is no real
supernaturalism, it is but naturalism raised to a higher
plane. There is no qualitative only a quantitative
difference. The supernaturalism is expressed for faith
in the idea of an infallible church which is continually
in conflict with reason, because at one and the same time,
it rests on a foundation of reason, and yet must seek to
control reason. And the Holy Spirit in this connection
becomes at the last logically, a mere supernatural datum
called in arbitrarily to validate the decisions of the Church.
Faith in this view is just an extension, a prolongation
of reason. There is no element in it of aggression on
man. Man does not really yield himself, he just goes
on in his own native strength as far as he can, and when
he comes to a halt he is met by something which enables
him to go further. Of a life-decision, a life-crisis in
which the whole man is involved, involved in such a
way that he is negated and disqualified for revelation,
involved in such a complete and thorough way that the
terms death and resurrection can alone describe the
110 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
event, this view of faith knows nothing. Faith here
may be a miracle, but it is not the miracle, it is not the end
of the old man in his thought-world so far as revelation
is concerned, and the beginning of the new. The
reason which belongs to faith is not a new kind of
reason, the Holy Spirit, but simply the enlargement
and extension of the old.
Very much the same kind of criticism might be applied
to the conceptions of faith which we find in idealistic
philosophy and modern religious liberalism. In Kant,
for example, faith is a kind of accompaniment of the
practical reason. The moral law in man, the categorical
imperative ' thou shalt ' postulates God, freedom and
immortality. Belief in God is by way of an inference
from the moral law, the categorical imperative. God
is the guarantee, the confirmation, the validation of
something which belongs to the nature of man as such.
Faith here also is but the extension, the prolongation of
reason. There is in it no element of miracle, no Holy
Spirit. Moreover, God is given only as an idea. What
meets experience is not God, but the categorical
imperative, that is, impersonal law. There is no personal
relation in faith, neither is there in this philosophy any
room for revelation understood as we have understood
it, as an approach of reality to man. Man himself
reaches God, through his practical reason, and yet he
does not reach Him ; all he reaches is the idea of God.
He never awakens to his immediacy to God, for God
is never immediate, He lies far on the outside of man's
life as the mere guarantee of the moral law. The bond
which unites the man of faith to God is never a personal
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION III
bond, only a logical one. There is, we repeat, no Holy
Spirit.
The case is very little different if we treat faith with
Ritschl and many modern idealists as a mode of valuation.
Values are things, and they are our creation. The
evaluating of phenomena is an independent, autonomous
act of the thinking being. When I evaluate, I am acting
from my own centre. No personal relation is set up
between me and God, no personal bond unites me to
God. Here once more there is no Holy Spirit. God
becomes a name which is given to abstract qualities.
Another significance is given to faith by Troeltsch who
regards it as a principle of rationalisation. In his
thought, there is a transcendent principle in reason itself,
whereby reason perceives transcendence in the universe
and therefore comes upon God. But here God stands
in essential continuity with man, He is not placed over
those vast discontinuities which constitute the human
problem. There is no approach of reality to man, no
thought of a world to be overcome, and in consequence
no Incarnation and no Holy Spirit.
But faith may perhaps be thought of under the
category of inspiration, as something akin to the
poet's insight or the artist's intuition. This is akin
to Schleiermacher's idea of faith as pure feeling.
Inspiration, however, in that sense, simply means that
man's own nature is roused to a high degree of self-
expression. The powers and forces latent in human
nature are summoned forth. There is no aggression
upon man, no crisis, no life-decision, no new relation
entering his life ; man is simply dilated and augmented.
So far from being overcome, man is thereby increased.
Nothing new happens to man, he simply expresses
himself in a larger and fuller way.
112 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
In none of these conceptions of faith, is the Holy
Spirit treated seriously. And just because He is not
treated seriously, faith does not become a truly personal
thing, a personal relation to God. God is not
immediately given in these conceptions, he remains
simply an idea, a principle, or an experience.
But though faith is neither postulation, valuation,
rationalisation, nor inspiration, it contains all these,
and leads to all these. That is to say it creates a new
thought-world, which though in no rational continuity
with the thought-world arising out of man's own native
consciousness, establishes with it a continuity of its own.
For example, by way of postulation, it demands a
world to be overcome, or to put it into the language
of the old theology a fallen world. This view of the
world as a fall, a contradiction, something to be overcome,
in no way involves the abrogation of a scientific
construction of the world-order. The scientific
conception of evolution is not denied, so long as that
conception is not made final and absolute. The evolution
is that of a world in contradiction, a world to be over-
come. Both terms 'fall' and 'evolution' are only
symbolical. They describe the world from different
points of view. Evolution expresses the time-view of
the world, the world in which time is a necessary
ingredient. Seen from this point of view the world is a
process of ever increasing complexity and differentiation.
The pre-supposition of evolution is continuity. But
the world as continuity is only an aspect, only an
abstraction from the actual world of experience, right and
necessary of course in its place, but not exhaustive and
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 113
not final. ' Fall ' expresses a view of the world from
above and beyond time. Its pre-supposition is discon-
tinuity and an ever-widening discontinuity. The higher
creation ascends in the evolutionary process, the sharper
grows its discontinuity with God : for in man, who
stands at the highest point of evolution, this discontinuity
becomes realised and expressed as sin. * Dr. Tennant
has urged that unless a relative independence or autonomy
is assigned to the world, it becomes impossible "to
find even a partial and proximate solution of the problem
set by the existence of evil in God's world." The
world can then be estimated from the side of its
independence, its autonomy, and from that point of view
it can be described scientifically, as evolution. But
inasmuch as this independence is not final, and inasmuch
further as it is necessary pre-supposition for the existence
of evil, such scientific description is only relatively true.
From the standpoint of God, the world must be described
as fall. That in the form in which it now exists, this
autonomy of the world is the basis of evil, is, to say the
least, indicated by the fact that it articulates itself in
man's consciousness as sin. Sin is the supreme autonomy,
it is man's assertion of his independence as over against
God. It is that point where the autonomy of the
world widens out into definite contradiction. Sin
cannot be isolated from the context of general evil in the
world. Truly it is not to be interpreted simply in
terms of this, for sin has a qualitative distinction of its
own as over against evil in general. But its connections
with general evil are undeniable. Faith therefore both
disqualifies and at the same time leaves room for the
scientific description of the world as evolution. In
postulating a fallen world, a world to be overcome, it
1 See Miracle, Its Philosophical Pre-suppositions, p. 49.
H
114 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
leaves room for rational and scientific description and
at the same time makes such description relative only.
But faith not only involves postulation, it does
justice also to Troeltsch's idea of rationalisation. It
brings with it a new rationality, the mind of the Spirit.
Because it is really transcendent reason, it discovers
in the world, not only an immanent ground but a
sovereign Lord. Troeltsch's reason does not lead to
true transcendence. The God whom it discovers is
the ground of the world, its immanent reason, rather than
the Lord of the world. Faith draws all its conceptions
of the ground of the world from the idea of a great
lordship over the world. It creates a real theology
which, though in regard to its formulations in definite
propositions, it is doubtless open continually to rational
criticism, brings the whole of man's rational thinking
under a supreme criticism and judgment.
Furthermore faith brings a new system of values,
because it brings into life a principle of perfection. The
life of faith, being the Holy Spirit within man's con-
sciousness is a life grounded in perfection. Professor
Alexander in his Gifford lectures entitled Space t Time and
Deity has criticised the idea of God as the supreme value,
the Valor Valoram. 1 He shows that value is always a
relative idea, and that however high value ascends it
never reaches the Absolute. Deity, he argues, belongs
to the order of perfection, but, he goes on to say, it is
on the side of values. Value belongs to the finite,
relative order of existence, it implies the existence of
unvalue. But God is infinite and absolute, and therefore
value cannot be predicated of him, only perfection;
" there is no unvalue with which He can be contrasted." 2
Alexander's conception of God and His relation to the
1 See Book IV, chapter iii. 2 Ibid., p. 410.
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 115
world is very different from the one which rules our
discussion. But his criticism of the application of the
idea of value to God is sound and valuable. Value,
he says, appears in proportion as deity expresses the
movement of the world. We may therefore, from our
our point of view, say that faith, or the Holy Spirit,
brings into life a new principle of valuation. Faith is
not itself a valuation. As Holy Spirit it grounds life in
perfection. Thus it becomes in the New Testament the
principle of justification. Man is justified by faith;
perfection is given to man in his faith. In faith though
not in empirical actuality man attains perfection. But in
empiric actuality, through the grounding of his life in
perfection through faith, a new world of values appears.
" The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith (that is, fidelity), meekness,
temperance " (Galatians v, 22).
Yet once more faith brings with it inspiration, a new
vitality. It does this because it unites a man with the
risen exalted Christ, the Christ of the new transcendent
life. This new vitality makes itself felt within the old
life of the empirical consciousness. The believer
" tastes the powers of the world to come," because he
is made " partaker of the Holy Ghost " (Hebrews vi,
5 and 4). There are gifts of the Spirit arising out of this
new creative vitality; an inspirational life which manifests
itself in a rich harmony of gifts and services within the
fellowship of believers.
Finally the truth for which orthodoxy stands is upheld
and maintained. Orthodoxy strives after a synthesis
of reason and authority, but never really reaches this
synthesis. It lays reason and authority side by side,
and leaves them essentially unreconciled. Faith,
however, in bringing a new reason, which both validates
Il6 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the old while asserting its relativity, effects the needed
synthesis.
There is one further consideration to be addressed in
treating of faith as miracle, as the Holy Spirit. Inasmuch
as miracle without is met by miracle within, the Holy
Spirit becomes the category for the interpretation of
outward, objective revelation. To put it otherwise, an
examination of the new consciousness which arises in
faith will indicate the nature and meaning of the objective
events of revelation which take place on the plane of
history. But here we must guard ourselves against a
serious misunderstanding. It is not meant that an
examination of what is called Christian experience,
undertaken after a psychological manner will lead to a
true conception of objective revelation. That would
indeed be to make a handsome present to the psychologist,
No impartial, detached, scientific examination of
Christian experience, where that experience is treated
as an object, a datum for scientific investigation is in our
thought. What we mean is that the nature of the
miracle within will supply the terms for the interpretation
of the nature of the miracle without. To put it other-
wise : what stands over against us in our faith is a
record of objective facts and interpretations, which
are declared to be connected in some way with the
divine transcendent deed of revelation. Of that record
the Holy Spirit will be the supreme critic and judge
the Holy Spirit, and not mere rational and historical
enquiry. There is a methodology of the Spirit. Man's
new consciousness in faith will discriminate within the
material offered, will discern what is of revelation and
what is not. The Holy Spirit is as Dr. Forsyth used
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 1 1 7
to say "the Highest Ctitic." "He that is spiritual
judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man "
(i Cor. ii, 15). Nothing can be integral to revelation
without which is not integral to revelation within,
for revelation merely without is not yet revelation.
Nothing can be of revelation which does not enter into
faith. There can be nothing in revelation that has to
be accepted on the ground of external authority alone.
Revelation to be revelation must enter into faith. It
must find a response within if it is to be validated as
genuine revelation. All that takes place without, takes
place in its appropriate form within. To demand of
faith that it should accept as revelation what in no sense
happens within the new consciousness of the Holy Spirit,
is illegitimate. Revelation to put it in a word, must
become m. If this had been realised and understood,
how much perplexity and indeed tragedy would have
been avoided ! Men have claimed that the believer
should give assent to a multitude of propositions which
could never become part of his own consciousness.
They have demanded that a multitude of alleged
historical facts should be received, which are incapable
of becoming present spiritual fact. No fact, merely
as fact, is or can be revelation. Only if the past fact
be capable of becoming present, spiritual truth and
reality of consciousness that new consciousness which
we call faith or the Holy Spirit is it a fact of revelation.
Il8 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Part IV
Wider aspects of the Spirit's Work in Faith and Life
In concluding this chapter it is necessary briefly to
glance at some of the wider aspects of the Spirit's work
in faith and life, particularly in relation to certain
criticisms which are often brought against the line of
thought which we have been pursuing. And first it
will be urged that our view involves an undue narrowing
and restricting of the work of the Holy Spirit, that it
confines His activities to the supernatural region, and
leaves no room for His operations in the general field
of man's history, life and culture. Is there no activity of
the Holy Spirit, it will be asked, in the progress of men
and peoples, in the discoveries of science and the progress
of thought, in the expressions of music, art and poetry
and in the moral life of man ? Is not the spirit of man
as it manifests itself in all these varied activities and
energies in a very real sense a revelation of the Spirit
of God ?
Now here we need to recall what was urged in a
previous chapter about the Holy Spirit as the Creator
Spirit, the true nexus between God and the world, a
nexus, however, which can only be seen from the side of
God. And we need moreover to remember that the
new man and the new world that arise in faith are not an
entirely other man and other world from the old, but the
old restored to their true meaning and their divine
definition. Accordingly man's activity in the expression
of the life-forces within him, and especially as that
activity expresses the character of creativeness, discloses
traces of its divine origin and its destiny. The perfect
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION
world of God would be a world in which the divine
creativity was fully expressed and manifested ; and that
would become evident supremely in the mind and life
of man. Therefore everything in man's life which
expresses creativity is a witness to the reality of the
Spirit of God. We may in no way equate man's
activities, even those which belong to his higher nature,
with the activity of the Holy Spirit. On the whole the
historic and cultural life of man discloses a gulf and a
contradiction between our spirits and the divine Spirit.
As knowledge increases, culture develops, and history
evolves, that contradiction becomes more painful and
more acute. Progress in civilisation, says Dr. Forsyth,
means regress in the fear of God. Advance in self-
expression, and all culture is self-expression, leads to
man's deification of his own mind and spirit. That
civilisation and culture need not simply to be approved
and vindicated, but continually to be called in question,
is hardly likely to be denied to-day. But in the light of
revelation we perceive that man's life is destined, is
eternally predestined, for fellowship with God, indeed
for a place within those divine relationships which belong
to God's own being. That predestination holds. It
is not destroyed by man's sin and fall. All man's
attempts, therefore, to express and unify his life derive
their meaning and their value from this divine pre-
destination. Indeed they arise because this predestination
holds. God is still related to the world through His
Holy Spirit. He has not withdrawn His Spirit entirely
from those relationships in which man's life stands.
Faith and the Holy Spirit just because they bring man's
life into crisis, do not simply deny it, they affirm it as
well. Since the creation remains God's creation even
in its fall and sin, it is not simply destroyed and another
120 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
put in its place, it is restored and thus in a real sense
validated. In the expression of its life it carries a
promise and witnesses to a destiny. The Holy Spirit
is not an intruder into the realm of man's spirit, an
intruder that simply brushes aside all the achievements
of that spirit. But neither on the other hand is He
simply an immanence, so that the expressing of that spirit
can be identified with His workings. He is the divine
ground understood as the divine destiny of that spirit,
so that He ever acts upon it critically and creatively,
and creatively because critically. There is therefore a
meaning, a divine predestined meaning for all the
activities of man's spirit, and because of this divine
predestined meaning there are higher and lower
activities and expressions of that spirit. Just because
the Holy Spirit is at work in our life, we and our spirits
work. But nowhere can we draw a clean line of
continuity between the working of the Spirit and that
of our spirits. The continuity is a continuity of crisis
and for that very reason it is a continuity of ever new
creation.
But there is a criticism of our point of view which is
more directly concerned with the question of ethics.
Are we not in danger, it may be asked, of separating
the working of the Spirit from the moral life of man ?
Or even if it be granted that this supposed separation
rests upon a misunderstanding, what positive guidance
do we derive in relation to the problems and perplexities
of man's moral life ? What, in point of fact are the
ethical implications of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit ?
Now it may be pointed out first of all, that it is precisely
in man's moral consciousness that the element of crisis
is specially present. Indeed ethics is in its very nature
crisis. In the region of morals man never simply
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 121
expresses himself. He always recognises himself as in
some sense under judgment. Whenever we hear a
command, whenever even we hear an exhortation, we
hear a judgment passed upon us. This command and this
exhortation mean that simply in the expression of our
life we are against the righteousness of God. Were
that not so, they would be superfluous. Now it is just
because the Holy Spirit brings our whole existence under
crisis, denies and negates it in its empirical actuality,
that He opens up the way to an unending moral develop-
ment. New moral insights, understandings and
aspirations arise through that crisis in which we
continually stand. A higher kind of ethic than that
which belongs to generally accepted ethic becomes
continually a possibility. There is an obedience which
is not merely the keeping of the law, but which is an
obedience unto sanctification, unto divine perfection.
The road to that sanctification is an infinite road.
Moreover from this point of view the moral question
is kept always close to the actual, concrete situations
of life. It never loses actuality by wandering off into
an impractical and delusive idealism which is based upon
a theoretical and abstract interpretation of the world
and the nature of man. Ethic remains fundamentally
an obedience and not an idealism. Every law, and every
institution which arises from the crisis which takes place
in the mind and consciousness of man through the
conflict between desire and duty receives at least a
relative justification and validation. And yet the law
and the institution must not be taken as final; they
must pass under a higher criticism and judgment in that
their observance produces fresh complications in which
the crisis between desire and duty lifts itself in a new form.
Thus, the state and the institution of marriage, to give
122 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
two examples, receive a very definite if relative validation.
They are not to be set aside, but upheld. Never can
they be left behind in the interests of any abstract
freedom supposed to inhere in man's personality. They
arise out of that crisis in which a limit and a judgment
are set to the mere expression of man's natural instincts,
appetites and desires. They present loyalties which
are not mere expressions of man's nature but which are
addressed to that nature. But within these loyalties
there arise fresh complications which can in no wise
be solved by abolishing these institutions and setting up
new ones, complications for which no law in itself is
a solution. So similarly we might deal with law in its
juridic form. It is not to be set aside in favour of any
a priori instinct of freedom or love. It arises out of the
crisis between duty and desire which belongs to man's
moral consciousness. Nevertheless within the region
of law arise new complications and new crises. Law
precludes forgiveness, restrains love, limits spiritual
freedom. No new law will cope with this situation in
any final way. The situation permits of being solved
only bit by bit under the tension of new crises. Never
do we reach a point where problem and crisis cease.
Indeed the further we advance the more does such crisis
become itself the law of our life. This no doubt is
our condemnation inasmuch as it reveals the fact that
an original sin inheres in our very nature as moral
responsible beings ; but it is also our hope. At the
last we take refuge not in our moral achievements but
in the mercy of God alone. We perceive at every
step of our moral way that we are under judgment,
indeed under condemnation, that the righteousness of
man is never identical with the righteousness of God.
But that very perception leads us out far beyond the
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 123
morality of law and institution and prescription and
plants our feet on the road of an ethic which leads to
sanctification. While we can never leave law behind
us, while we can never supplant it by a pure ethic of
freedom and of love in which law finds no place, we do
decisively abandon law as the solution of our moral
problem. The right of law as seen in the light of the
Spirit consists in the fact that it stands for crisis and
judgment. Thus it points to a kind of ethic which of
itself it is unable to realise, for the answer to crisis and
judgment as revealed in and through the Holy Spirit
cannot possibly be law, it can only be forgiveness ; that
is, it can only be the assigning of God's righteousness
to man by deed of grace and mercy. Thus as over
against the morality of law, there is a morality of love
which takes its rise in forgiveness and whose nature
is to bring law to an end. But here and now law cannot
be brought to an end, for it is the indispensable condition
of there being any forgiveness at all. Thus in this
tension between law and forgiveness which is capable
of no theoretical solution, because it arises in definite
concrete situations each of which gives its own peculiar
character to the tension, the moral road becomes a
road of infinite advance, and moral obedience becomes
an obedience unto sanctification. Thus man becomes a
moral personality, for his task is not simply to conform to
a law or even pursue an idealism, but in every concrete
situation that confronts him to form a judgment and
make an act of obedience. He becomes truly responsible
and his ethical development means growth in responsi-
bility. We may add from this point of view that the
Church of faith and the Holy Spirit, in virtue of being such,
is set up to be the moral leader and guide of society ; not
in the sense that it possesses any theoretical solution of
124 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the moral problems and complications of life, but in
the sense that it continually brings into the world a tension
and a ferment which is the condition of the constantly
present possibility and the constantly pressing urgency
of a new and further step onward in moral advance.
Along such lines as these, sketchily as they have been
indicated, must we seek to draw out the ethical
implications of the doctrine of the Spirit. They hold
more promise than does that constant preoccupation
with the question of moral values which bulks so largely
in ethical discussion to-day. This preoccupation with
moral values tends to put man at the centre of things.
The values are his, and they are there to augment his
life. They are in danger of involving him in a new kind
of legalism and also of transplanting him into a region of
theoretical idealism remote from the concrete situations
of life. The ethical implications of the doctrine of the
Spirit keep him close to these situations. He does not
possess a grandiose problem which loses the sense of
the situation here and now. Just because his moral
consciousness is ever bound up with crisis and decision
he is kept close to the problem where it stands at the
moment. But also, inasmuch as he knows that
perfection is never actually here, but always yonder,
that between the righteousness of God and the righteous-
ness of man, there is not only distance which might be
covered from man's side, but judgment and crisis which
can only be overcome from God's, he is kept from
resting in any legalism however subtle and refined, from
any resting in the idea that moral effort and moral
achievement can as such bring salvation.
But now a further criticism of the position outlined in
this chapter calls for notice. It will perhaps be objected
that our conception of the Holy Spirit is too individual-
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION 125
istic, that it fails to do justice to the social aspects of
His working and specially His working in the Church,
the Spirit-filled community, which occupies so large' a
place in the thought of the New Testament. In part,
what has already been said will serve as an .answer to this
criticism, but something further needs to be added.
And first, it must be insisted on that faith, or the Holy
Spirit as seen from the human side, is an absolutely and
intensely personal thing. There cannot be mass faith.
There cannot be, in a strict use of words, corporate faith.
There can be corporate witness, corporate confession,
corporate activity, but not corporate faith. Always it
is the individual, personal man standing in the relation
of faith. Indeed it is only in faith that the individual
becomes a person. Just because faith relates a man to
God Who is in no sense identical with the world, just
because the coming of God in revelation means crisis
and new creation in regard to all life's relationships,
faith must be intrinsically individual. In faith, man
stands out as it were from his world and from all the
relationships which constitute his life, and becomes
himself and no other. In faith he is selected and newly
related as an individual and a person. But having
insisted on this, we pass on to note that it is only in faith,
only in the Holy Spirit, that the true nature of man
as a person is declared. The essence of man's person
is responsibility. He is a person in that he is a being
who is answerable for his life. He has to meet claims,
to make decisions, to pass under judgment. He is a
person, therefore, precisely in those aspects of his being
which bring him into the closest and most vital relations
with his fellows. He is a person precisely in and
through the fact that he is a real builder of society. He
is much more than a social animal, he is a social creator.
126 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
What makes man a real person in the very act sets up a
real society. Thus faith in which man becomes uniquely
a person is the true social bond, and the Holy Spirit
in the very act of creating faith sets up the Church.
Of course, if faith be regarded simply as an experience,
something which a man just possesses and enjoys, the
Church is but a secondary consideration. It plays its
part of course in communicating to a man the message
of revelation, and it may be useful as serving to enrich
and augment his experience. Its value, however, remains
instrumental merely. But inasmuch as the Holy Spirit
meets man precisely in the region where his person
truly arises, in the region of responsibility, inasmuch
as He brings him to a point of crisis precisely there,
He drives him to his fellows in a new way, creates a new
social consciousness, and a new society the Church.
Faith cannot work, cannot express itself save through
love, that kind of love which is no mere natural feeling
or instinct, but a new supernatural bond of union between
man and man. Thus the Church becomes the field in
which the Spirit works, the region in which the gifts
of the Spirit are manifested and exercised. The Church
is no creator of faith, no ark of salvation. God alone
is the creator of faith. But in being this through His
Holy Spirit, He sets up a community of believing people,
which is no mere voluntary association of the like-minded
for their mutual advantage, but the society in and through
which alone, man as a person, a responsible being, can
express and fulfil his true life.
We must, moreover, recall the fact that revelation
means a real coming of God to the world. It is not
an inner mystic illumination granted to individual souls.
It is therefore in that sense historical, and the word of
it can only reach us through the witness and confession
THE RECEIVING OF REVELATION IZJ
of a concrete institution and society. That society
therefore, lays its claim upon every individual to whom
the word has come, to make his contribution to the
witness and confession by which alone that word can be
propagated. Just because it is a case of a word addressed
to man, a word moreover which cannot be heard simply
once, but which must ever be heard anew, the Church
is bound up vitally and organically with the faith and life
of every believer.
CHAPTER IV
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE
IT is but a commonplace to observe that a great change
has passed over the conception of the place of miracle in
revelation in comparatively recent years. For long,
miracles were regarded as among the outstanding proofs
of revelation. The argument from miracle together
with the argument for prophecy was the chief stock-
in-trade of the Christian apologist. It was not perceived
that revelation by its very nature precludes such proof.
For to prove revelation presupposes that it can be
regarded from the point of view of pure objectivity,
that it is a datum which can be approached from the
outside, and validated on merely rational and historical
grounds. But revelation is not really revelation until
it becomes so. It is not revelation until it becomes not
only objective but subjective as well. The fact without
cannot be seen in its nature as revelation until it becomes
fact within. The old apologetic forgot, in this con-
nection, the Holy Spirit.
To-day, however, miracle so far from being regarded
as a support to faith, has become rather a difficulty and
a stumbling-block. The causes that have contributed
to this state of things are well known, but they will bear
a brief mention, and a brief passing examination. First
of all, there was of course the scientific difficulty.
Miracle seemed to conflict with scientific law. But in
surrendering to the idea of a world ruled by universal
law, men forgot not only, as we shall argue more fully
later on, that they were surrendering to an illegitimate
infringement of science on philosophical territory ;
they forgot something more fundamental. They
128
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 129
forgot the presupposition of revelation, namely that
the world is a world to be overcome. They assumed a
self-standing world, a world standing, as it were, in its
own right, to which revelation must accommodate itself.
They assumed that the world in its empiric actuality must
be the standard of reference for revelation. They forgot
that revelation by its very nature cannot concede the
autonomy of science in its full and absolute sense, because
it cannot concede the absolute autonomy of the world
which science investigates.
But not only was there the scientific difficulty, there
was the historical and critical difficulty, the difficulty
that arose from the side of historical criticism of the
gospel records. This seemed to place the New Testament
miracles in doubt. But here again too quick a capitula-
tion was made. It was overlooked that revelation proper
is not discoverable by mere objective historical enquiry *
It is not something that appears sheer on the plane of
historical investigation. It can be perceived by faith
and faith alone. It presupposes a new kind of under-
standing, the mind of the Spirit. To eliminate miracle
merely on the ground of historical criticism is again
to forget the Holy Spirit.
We can pass over the philosophical objections to
miracle, not because these are not important, but because
in the main they find their ground of objection in that
rational dualism of the natural and supernatural which
real miracle involves. This dualism is, however, the
express assertion of revelation; indeed we may say
that it is the very thing which revelation reveals. Not
in rational continuity between the world and God,
but in the sharpest discontinuity from the rational point
of view, in such discontinuity as can only be expressed
by the words death and resurrection does revelation
130 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
manifest itself. Once more the Holy Spirit is left out
of account the Holy Spirit Who is the real unity between
God and the world, a unity which, however, is no
immanent nexus common to both, but a transcendent
reality belonging to God alone, and in Whom therefore
the rationally incompatible and irreconcilable are
harmonised and unified.
But belief in miracle has also to encounter a specifically
religious objection. It is felt that religion is an
essentially inward and spiritual thing, the response of
man's spirit to the Spirit of God ; that spiritual truths
must be spiritually discerned ; that they are eternal and
ever-present truths which authenticate themselves
immediately to the soul; that they are therefore not
dependent on past facts, but belong to a realm of reality
to which miracle, understood in any sense as external
event is irrelevant, and in which it is an intrusion and an
offence. But here the whole nature of revelation as
definite event in history (though not discoverable as
revelation by historical investigation as such) is ignored.
It is forgotten or denied that revelation means a real
coming of God to man, a real approach from God's
side to the world, that it is divine event and therefore
that it is historical. It is assumed that there is direct
unmediated access to God in revelation, that God and
man stand in a relation of essentially unbroken continuity.
It is forgotten also, that the event of revelation is a
cosmic event, that the Kingdom of God is the consum-
mation of nature and history, that man with his spiritual
nature as well as his physical, stands confronted by God
in revelation and not continuous with Him. Here once
more the Holy Spirit as the transcendent bond uniting
man to God in revelation, is displaced by the Spirit as
the immanent nexus between man and God-
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 13!
Our criticism therefore both of the old defence of
miracle as proof of revelation, and of the modern
difficulty and dislike of miracle, for scientific, historical,
philosophical and religious reasons, is essentially one
and the same; namely, that in both cases, the New
Testament conception of the Holy Spirit is set on one side.
It is that criticism which we must now follow up, with
the aim of reaching thereby a new conception of the nature
and place of miracle in revelation.
The discussion of the idea of miracle, like that of the
Holy Spirit of which- it forms a part, has suffered from the
fact that it has been treated largely in isolation from
revelation as a whole. It has become to a great extent
a theme in itself, standing in need of independent
justification. It is true that reference is often made to
the congruity of the idea of miracle with that conception
of God for which revelation stands. Given the
conception of God which appears in Christianity, and,
it is argued, miracles are probable, and perhaps inevitable.
The earlier position, which we have already noted, that
miracles are proofs and evidences of revelation is now
abandoned with practical unanimity, though here and
there we may discern partial and faint-hearted attempts
to revive it. The late Dr. Figgis, for example, in
his Hulsean lectures, The Gospel and Human Needs?
expressed the opinion that miracles, so far from being a
stumbling-block to faith " were becoming once more a
help, were indeed of the essence of revelation " ; and even
made the surely desperate assertion that if the Virgin
Birth of Christ were abandoned, it was all up with
1 See preface, p. vit.
132 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Christianity. His interest of course, was to uphold
genuine Christian theism as against naturalism, pantheism,
and deism. But even so, it is hazardous to call upon
definite specific miracles, such as the Virgin Birth, to
come to the aid of faith, and still more so to make them
in any sense the foundation of faith. Even Bishop
Gore who expended a considerable amount of controver-
sial energy in insisting upon the miracles of the Virgin
Birth and the Bodily Resurrection of Christ in their
literal and physical sense, conceded that the Christianity
of the future, while accepting these miracles, would think
very litde about them. It is very generally recognised
that Christianity must carry miracles, rather than miracles
carrying Christianity. It is then, all the more remarkable
that miracle is treated so much as a theme in itself, that
the terms in which it is defined are drawn not from the
nature of revelation but from that of ordinary reason.
In other words miracle is generally defined in relation
to the idea of law, as that law is formulated by science,
but little attempt is made to bring the idea of law itself
into vital relationship with the Christian conception of
revelation. Miracle is placed in the position of a
defendant before the bar of scientific law. The attempt is
sometimes made to discover a loophole in the net-work
of law through which miracle may creep. Or the idea
of law is scrutinised and criticised with reference to its
philosophical presuppositions, as is done in a masterly
manner by Dr. Tennant, and it is shown that law in its
legitimate signification does not preclude miracle." 1
But here law, however cleared of illegitimate
philosophical presupposition, is still left standing as
the main standard of reference. This is brought out in
two points which Dr. Tennant makes in the course of his
1 See Miracle, Its Philosophical Presuppositions,
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 133
discussion. First, in his assertion, that though miracle
cannot be dismissed as an impossibility, no specific miracle
can be asserted as having happened; for the alleged
miracle may always be explicable in terms of some law
which we do not know as yet, but which we may in the
future discover. And second, and more important still
perhaps, in his insistence that what is called natural
theology must remain as the indispensable foundation on
which everything that claims to be revelation must be
built. That is to say, revelation must dovetail into a
rational induction from the world of experience. The
understanding of the world, as it now is, the world left
standing, as it were, in its own right, must be the prime
object of religious and theological thought. It follows
therefore, that it is the law-controlled world which
constitutes the main term of reference to which miracle
is made. Belief in miracle is indeed justified as probably,
though not certainly, demanded by theism, but the theism
which legitimates this belief is that which is established by
reason apart from revelation, a theism which is therefore
an induction from the world of empiric actuality as
investigated and known by science. Miracle remains,
if at all, as an occasional interference with and inter-
polation into a scheme of things which is in the main
law-ruled. And thus it is that the conclusion is reached
that though miracle is not impossible, it is never clearly
and decisively encountered. We can never say that a
specific event is a miracle, because what constitutes an
event as miraculous, as a direct act of God which can never
be referred to natural law, cannot in the nature of things
be shown to have taken place. All that could possibly
be said of an event, however wonderful, is that it is not
now referable to what we know of natural law. No
delimitation of the sphere of natural law can be made
134 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
a priori, so that we have no standard by which we could
decide whether a particular event was miraculous or not.
We shall attempt presently to do justice to the element
of truth that is contained in this conclusion. Meanwhile
we may note that there is nothing that demands miracle
in this view, save perhaps the general theistic idea. And
even this idea scarcely demands its actuality, it only
leaves the door open for its possibility. In fact the
possibility of miracle is defended, not on the grounds that
religion has any vital interest in miracle as such, but
only because to use Dr. Tennant's words, 1 "it raises
ulterior questions such as the meaning of the phrase
'reign of law,' the nature of inductive science and its
relation to religious belief, the compatibility of provi-
dential guidance of the physical world with a relatively
settled order, the identity and difference between
theism and deism, and indeed a number of closely con-
nected issues comprised in the many-sided problem of
the relation of God to the world and man." Miracle
is therefore a side-issue. The fact of it can neither be
affirmed nor denied ; and even could it be affirmed, it
would add nothing particularly vital to religion. The
controversy on miracle has therefore landed itself into a
kind of impasse, and this condition cannot be regarded as
satisfactory ; for if miracle be a fact, it can scarcely be
otiose. It is difficult to escape the dilemma : if a fact
therefore not otiose, if otiose therefore not a fact.
An attempt to get the discussion out of the impasse
thus reached is made by Dr. Cairns in his book, The Faith
that JLebels. Dr. Cairns makes a hopeful start when he
1 Miracle, Its Philosophical Presuppositions, p. i.
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 135
lays the foundation for a discussion of miracle broad
and deep on the nature of revelation itself. But in his
treatment of the relation between revelation and the
world, he scarcely leaves the world standing in an
independent or autonomous way at all. He begins with
the conception of the Kingdom of God as the funda-
mental reality of the world, and asserts that within that
kingdom there are powers and potencies to which no
limits can theoretically be ascribed. He scarcely concedes
in principle any independence of the world as over
against God ; his thesis is hardly reconcilable with the
idea of a settled order, an order ruled by law, however
relative, though he admits such an order. He finds
revelation to consist for the most part in the thought of
Jesus as expressed in his teaching the human, historical
personality, Jesus of Nazareth. He does not seem to
recognise the relative nature of the thought of Jesus as
man, or to consider that the true inwardness of that
thought can only be understood when we reach a
standpoint above and beyond the historical Jesus as such.
Like so many modern theologians he begins with the
story of Jesus as historical man, instead of the New
Testament witness to Jesus as the revelation of God.
The kingdom of God, he argues, came with Jesus and set
itself against the evils and limitations of life. Jesus
regarded suffering and calamity together with sin, as
forming a kingdom of evil against which he opposed
himself. His miracles, including the nature-miracles,
were of the nature of conquest over this kingdom of
evil. Since the kingdom of God is the final reality of
the world, it is but want of faith to assume that evil
and suffering belong to the nature of things. They have
no standing in reality, they are to be overcome. He
avails himself of Dr. Tennant's conclusion that there
136 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
is nothing in the idea of scientific law, when cleared of
its illegitimate philosophical presuppositions, to render
miracle impossible, a priori; and advances to the con-
clusion that given revelation, given the kingdom of God,
miracle is a power which can be drawn upon, theoretically
at any rate, almost without limits. But he goes too
fast, and he goes too far. With a certain naivete he
protests against the idea that deliverance from evil is
only to be looked for on the other side of death, regardless
of the fact that death is itself the great basic evil, and its
existence and inevitability necessarily involve the jpresence
and persistence of evil to some extent, and even to a great
extent in the world as it now stands. The weakness
of Dr. Cairns' presentation is that it fails to define the
Kingdom of God as having come in Jesus, in such a
way as to leave the world in its empirical actuality still
standing, and standing with a very real if relative
independence of its own. While death remains as the
law of life, while man is not' yet delivered from the
dominion of death, the kingdom of God cannot be said
to have come in the sense which Dr. Cairns attributes to
that word. It has indeed come as word of God to man,
as divine revelation and promise. It has made a
beginning in revelation and in the faith which responds
thereto. It has come nigh. The first act of the great
drama, so to speak, has been played. But the kingdom
of God as present actuality has not yet come. In its
essential meaning and character it lies over the other side
of the great dividing-line of death. It is therefore futile
to assert that there are no essential limits to the power
of miracle. There are such limits. The independent
autonomous world, however relative be its independence,
presents very definite limits to the power and range of
miracle. Dr. Cairns indeed argues that the dominion
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 137
of death has been broken by the resurrection of Christ,
that in the resurrection his faith in the kingdom of God
as the last reality and the all-pervading power of the world
was vindicated ; but he fails to perceive the significance
of the fact that Christ overcame death only by accepting
it and submitting to it. Christ did not x " break through
the world-reality limited through death, by miracle"
in his resurrection. He accepted this limitation, he bore
the evil of the world, he took it away in the bearing of it.
And it is to the cross that he calls his followers, if they
would attain unto the resurrection. The dominion of
death has indeed been broken, but not so that it is now
in present actuality taken away;
One is tempted to ask Dr. Cairns if he believes that
faith here and now could raise the dead, whether he thinks
that it is necessary for men still to bow before the
dominion of death. If death remains still standing, as
it clearly does, then deliverance from evil in the full sense
of the word, in the sense that corresponds with the
kingdom of God, must take place not on this side of
death, but on the other ; and miracle is definitely limited
in the range of its activity and power in the world ; and
limited, be it noted, not simply through any spiritual
deficiency on the part of men, such as lack or feebleness
of faith, but limited by the world itself, its very real, even
if relative, self-standingness, independence and autonomy.
Some miracles are impossible, rebus sic stantibus.
Dr. Cairns is right in his method of handling the miracle
problem, but he is wrong in his presuppositions. He
is right in starting from revelation and in interpreting
revelation as in its nature miracle, but his conception of
revelation needs revising. Revelation does not consist
in the thought and teaching of the historical Jesus in
1 Earth, Das Worth Gottes, p. 89.
138 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
themselves. Nor does it consist in the death and
resurrection of Jesus as mere historic facts. It consists,
as we have seen, in a certain interpretation of Jesus, an
interpretation which mere historical enquiry cannot
reach. It is the New Testament witness of Jesus as
revelation, the apostolic word of gospel, the Christ not
after the flesh but after the Spirit, the Christ who is word
of God to man. To isolate Jesus from the relations in
which he stands in the witness of revelation, is to make
a false abstraction and get all one's perspectives wrong.
It is not what Jesus said, not even what he did as historic
man, but in the divine significance of what he said and
did, what all that means in relation to the transcendent
God and His coming to the world, it is this which is
matter of revelation.
It is only when we have reached the ' secret ' of Jesus,
when we have reached that in him which is hidden from
all mere historical enquiry, that which appeared and was
made manifest to faith through the Holy Spirit in his
risen and exalted life, that we get the Christ of revelation ;
and it is only then that we are in a position to estimate the
real and abiding significance of his thought and teaching
as historical man.
The kingdom of God came in Jesus as word and
promise of God, it did not come " in power " that is,
as present actuality which could be possessed and drawn
upon by men without limit. It was, even in his own
thought, present indeed, but present only in its beginning,
in its promise ; present as the first approaches of an event
which was in its true nature still in the future, beyond
that supreme limitation of the world called death, to-
wards which therefore the urge of the kingdom impelled
him. Certainly the power of the kingdom was with
him, but not if we may make a subtle but absolutely
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 139
essential distinction, the kingdom itself "in power."
To regard the kingdom of God as part of our human
property, so that we can draw upon it almost at will,
is not in accord with the fundamental nature of the New
Testament witness about Christ. Dr. Cairns in his
eagerness to demonstrate that Jesus overcame the world
does not let his thought rest sufficiently on the fact that
he was at last led to the point where his overcoming
could only take place by bearing the world, standing under
its limitations and making them his own, becoming
obedient even unto death, yea the death of the Cross.
In the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ we see
indeed that the present order is to pass away : the end of
the old world and the beginning of the new take place
in advance. But, it is to be noted, they take place in
advance. The old world with its autonomy, however
relative that autonomy may be, is still, for the present,
left standing. The taking away is a revelation, a promise,
a word of God to man, rather than an actual empirical
fact. Miracle does indeed appear in the world, but it
appears under the conditions of a world, which in its
present actuality still remains. To deny that is " to
bite on granite."
Our conclusion on Dr. Cairns' book is that in its
extravagance and lack of realism, it presents an impressive
warning against placing revelation in the historical
personality of Jesus as such. How misleading for
example in its implications, however true in itself, is the
following : x " the difference between His (Jesus')
achievements and the greatest of other men's achieve-
ments is a measure of the spiritual difference between
Him and them. It is like the difference between
Shakespeare and some modern playwright." But the
1 The Faith that Rebels, p. 154.
140 REVELATION. AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
difference between Shakespeare and a modern playwright
is quantitative only, and quantitative differences between
men have nothing to do with revelation as the New
Testament understands it. To seek for revelation in the
quantitative differences between men, to see it in " an
extraordinary spiritual personality," who yet remains of
essentially the same order as ourselves is to abjure the
specific New Testament witness. Revelation arises not
in the quantitative differences between men, and not in
" an extraordinary spiritual personality " as such, but in
the crucial qualitative difference between God and man,
a difference which is expressed in the witness to divine
revelation in Jesus Christ.
Dr. Cairns' treatment of the miracle-problem therefore,
can scarcely be called successful. It is too much in the
nature of a cutting of the Gordian knot, which can only
slowly and painfully be untied. Nevertheless, as a
reviewer of his book observedy he has done something
to lift the question out of the stale-mate in which it had
become set. By beginning with revelation, by taking
the idea of revelation in earnest, and setting the world
as a whole in its light, he had prepared the way for
advance.
At the beginning of this chapter we indicated our
conviction that the clue to the miracle problem lies in
the New Testament idea of the Holy Spirit. It is in and
through the Holy Spirit that revelation becomes truly
revelation. What takes place without, takes place in
its meaning, its nature, its significance, within, in the
Holy Spirit, in the miracle of faith. The nature of
the miracle within is the clue to the understanding of
miracle in the world. We are faced with the problem of
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 141
determining, to begin with, the nature of that new
consciousness which arises in faith, in the Holy Spirit,
and of fixing its relation to our empirical consciousness.
And from thence we proceed to interpret the nature of
miracle in the world, and the relation of miracle to the
world in its autonomy, its nature as law-ruled in the
scientific sense.
And yet this statement of the method of approach to
the problem is liable to misconception. In commencing
with the subjective side of revelation we do not propose
taking Christian experience as our datum, examining it
after the manner of the psychologist, and then proceeding
from the results achieved to certain definite conclusions
about revelation on its objective side. The category of
revelation according to the New Testament witness
transcends the antithesis between subjective and
objective. We can never deal with the subjective and
objective sides of revelation in abstraction the one from
the other. The Holy Spirit means that we see each side
in the light of the other. Our concern throughout is
neither with inward experience nor outward fact in them-
selves, but with the word, the witness which contains certain
definite implications both in regard to inward experience
and outward fact. Our contention is, however, that
nothing can be postulated about revelation on its out-
ward side which is not vitally and organically connected
with what may be postulated on its inward side ; for
revelation only becomes so, in and through the Holy
Spirit. What then may we say as to the relation between
that new consciousness which arises in faith to man's
empirical consciousness ? This is the question on which
at last hinges the whole miracle problem. For the
relation which exists between the Holy Spirit and man's
ordinary consciousness indicates the nature of the relation
142 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
between the supernatural and the natural in general.
The Holy Spirit, Who is the subjective side of revelation,
or to put it otherwise, God in consciousness, is other
than the human spirit, the consciousness which man
actually 'has,' and which can be investigated by the
psychologist. He is transcendent and supernatural. Yet
He is, in revelation, related to that human spirit in such
a way that man comes in some sense to possess God in
his here and now consciousness. The question is, in
what sense ? Could we answer that question with any
precision, we should be in a position to determine the
general relations between the supernatural and the natural.
To that very difficult question we must therefore here
devote a little close attention. And we will approach
our problem by way of a brief discussion and criticism
of Schaeder's valuable book entitled Das Geistprobkm
der Theologie (The problem of the Spirit in Theology).
In this book, Schaeder criticises the Dialectic Theology
associated with Barth, Gogarten and others, on the
ground that the New Testament affirms while this denies
a direct 'having' and 'possessing' of God in
consciousness even in this present life, a having and a
possessing which manifests itself in characteristic
expressions and manifestations of a psychological kind.
According to Schaeder there is a direct union of the
Spirit of God with the human spirit, so that while these
two are to be distinguished from one another, they in a
measure coalesce. Schaeder strongly emphasizes the
distinction between the two, but he protests against
what he conceives to be the dualism which would refuse
to make an essential kinship between the spirit of man
and the Spirit of God the point of departure in dealing
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 143
with problems of faith and the Holy Spirit. The
natural and the supernatural then, are here essentially one
in kind. But, he contends, though the possession of
the Spirit is a psychological visibility manifesting itself
in direct and characteristic psychological forms, it yet
does not fall within the scope of psychology to pass any
verdict one way or the other upon its reality. Will he
then hand over the problem to idealistic philosophy with
which he asserts divine revelation to possess a very strong
congruity ? He will not do this. He will take the way of
philosophic idealism with regard to the theory of know-
ledge, but not with regard to the content of knowledge
where the final things of life and the world are concerned.
That, he says, must come from revelation. Thus he
asserts that faith is in no way dependent upon psycho-
logical or philosophical attestation, but that there is given
in it, as belonging to its nature, an immediate certainty
that what it believes as to its divine origin expresses the
truth and reality of its inner experiences. Faith is a
certainty of a unique kind. The certainty does not flow
from the experience as its sequel, it is the inner nature of
that experience. Therefore though Christian experience
is a psychological fact with characteristic psychological
expressions, it is no psychological datum to be investi-
gated impartially and as it were from the outside, and to
be validated on psychological or philosophical grounds.
But certain difficulties arise at this point. Can psychology
and philosophy be warned off the field in this way ? If in
man's consciousness there may be even here and now, a
direct and literal having and possessing of the Spirit of
God, if this having shows itself in characteristic marks of
a psychological nature, if the connecting link between the
Spirit of God and the Spirit of man can be a fundamental
immanence and kinship relating them with one another,
144 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
it is difficult to see how Christian experience can exempt
itself from those criteria and standards whereby experience
in general receives validation. If the Holy Spirit
becomes definitely and directly a part of experience
through the word of the gospel, how can it not be an
objective datum of enquiry and investigation? The
certainty which is alleged to belong to its nature, inasmuch
as, though coming from God, it has its roots in the nature
of the human spirit, can scarcely escape the challenge
which all alleged human certainty must meet. It will
be involved sooner or later in the general problem of
knowledge. But, urges Schaeder, something happens
to the human consciousness in faith and the Holy Spirit.
It is acted upon by a power coming from outside of itself.
Its certainty arises out of a new orientation and modifica-
tion of consciousness itself. Through the word of the
gospel, the word of the crucified and risen Christ, it finds
itself bound in an absolute dependence on God and by
an absolute claim to obedience to the divine will, and on
that very account freed from self-will and for the love and
service of man. There is much in this point of view
which expresses our own position, though we have our
doubts whether experience can vouch for so much about
itself. The point of divergence, however, arises from
the fact that Schaeder takes his stand on the side of
Schleiermacher in repudiating any fundamental . dualism
of a human and rational kind between man and God.
Thus it is difficult to see how the power that meets man
from without can be at bottom anything more than the
perfection of those spiritual powers and tendencies which
are immanent within man's own nature. And if it is not,
how can the faith experience refuse those criteria of
validity which are elsewhere accepted as authoritative
and determinative?
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 145
Moreover, it may be urged that it becomes increasingly
difficult on Schaeder's presuppositions to claim universal
validity for the Christian experience and the Christian
revelation. Can these be regarded in any unique sense as
supernatural ? We would say that universal validity can
only be predicated of that which brings all religion and
all experience to a point of crisis, which rejects them in
their empirical actuality and sets forward something which
is radically mw. One may indeed establish a differentia
between Christianity and other religions, on the basis of
which a claim to universal validity may be brought
forward. But can such a claim be maintained in this
way ? The question arises, and it is becoming increasingly
acute to-day, whether this differentia is substantially
anything more than the historic individuality of a religion
or a mode of religious expression. Modern historical
science is bringing to light these differentiae everywhere,
and the perception of them is undermining confidence in
absolute validity and leading to the idea of the relativity
of any and every form of religion. Thus Troeltsch began
with a firm conviction of the universal validity of
Christianity. He thought he could establish it very
much on the lines that Schaeder pursues in his book.
He thought he could discern an overwhelming manifesta-
tion of God in human life, the coming into consciousness
of a great power from without and above, a manifestation
and a coming which correspond with a revelation in the
depths of the human soul, " awakening men to a new and
higher quality of life, breaking down the barriers which
the sense of guilt would otherwise set up, and making a
a final breach with the egoism obstinately centred in the
individual self." 1 But further reflection led him to
serious questionings. He asserts that he was led to see
1 Christian Thought, p. 20.
K
146 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
more clearly how thoroughly individual Christianity was,
how inseparably it was bound up with a specific type and
order of historical life and culture. He tells us that he
was led to the conclusion that while Christianity was
valid for us, it did not possess the same validity for other
historical and cultural formations. He could not deny
the possibility, which the deeper study of history made a
possibility of a very high kind, that " other social groups
may experience their contact with the Divine life in quite
a different way" 1 . Historical relativism seems to be the
nemesis on that over-emphasis on experience which is
not absent from Schaeder's treatment.
But what chiefly concerns us here is the bearing of all
this on the subject of miracle. At first sight Schaeder's
thought seems to give a very bold and specific content to
the idea of miracle. Revelation, he insists, is a movement
from God to man and not from man to God. Neverthe-
less the movement becomes a matter of direct inward
experience so that in that experience there is a real and
literal having and possessing of God. This happens
through the fundamental and basic kinship between the
Spirit of God and the spirit of man. Is miracle thus
simply an inward thing, a profound psychic disturbance
and liberation ? Schaeder would repudiate this. He
places the inner miracle in continuity or polarity with the
death and resurrection of Christ. But in what sense is
Christ in His death and resurrection shown to be miracle ?
In the sense apparently that in Him the Spirit of God
came so mightily that He became the bearer of the life
and love of God to man. Schaeder rightly repudiates
too rigid a Christocentricism. He insists that what we
have to do with is no mere example and illustration of
human fidelity on a divine scale, but a real act and coming
1 Christian Thought, p. 26.
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 147
of the transcendent God in Christ. Nevertheless the
miracle remains essentially an inward and spiritual thing.
It is something that happens within the inner life. No
doubt in this way one may think that one has succeeded
in giving a thorough-going spiritual and idealistic
interpretation to the world. Idealism becomes mightily
confirmed by revelation. The world in and through the
miracle of Christ and the answering miracle of faith,
becomes vindicated and validated as essentially spiritual.
But Christianity as we have seen is not concerned with
the validating of the world. Indeed its concern is of
quite a contrary nature. It is concerned with overcoming
it, proclaiming its end as it now is, and its new
beginning. To validate it, leaves it still standing, with
its laws the fundamental criteria of all that comes to it
with a claim to be revelation. One asks, what is the
relation of miracle to nature ? J Schaeder regards the
fundamental character of nature in itself, as weakness.
It is a condition of being just there, just set out, and
therefore unfree and uncreative. In the light of faith,
however, nature is seen to be the creation of God, in the
sense that it becomes the material of His free creative
purpose. Being in itself sheer impotence, having no
creativeness of its own, it is plastic in the hands of God
for His own divine ends. Inhering in its laws and com-
pulsions is the working of the Spirit of God. They are
the forms of the Spirit's working. But the Spirit is the
Creator Spirit, so that nature always stands open to new
creative acts, to miracles. Nature being thus absolutely
amenable to the working of the Spirit, has a teleological
function. It is there to serve man's moral and spiritual
ends. Thus the Spirit affirms nature, draws it into faith.
Schaeder will have nothing to do with the contention of
1 Das Geistprobkm der Theologie, pp. 177-186.
148 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Earth that the nature which surrounds us as being part
of our world, is in some definite and positive way
separated from God, and declares that that statement is
due to the lack of a clear doctrine of the Spirit on the part
of Barth. Apparently he would also dissent from the
view of Tennant that the explanation of evil must some-
how be sought in the fact that the world of our experience
is relatively, at any rate, set, independent, planted out.
The being set out of nature, would according to this view
of Tennant contain in itself a principle of evil and
contradiction, and constitute an obstacle to the free
working of the Spirit of God.
Schaeder's interpretation of nature seems to us very
unsatisfactory. It is much too optimistic. Is there no
principle of contradiction in nature ? Is nature simply
amenable and plastic to the working of the Divine
Spirit ? Can it forthwith serve the ends of man's moral
and spiritual life ? Has not man to wrestle with nature,
to overcome nature, in the interests of the soul ? One
need be neither a Marcionite (and it is interesting to note
that Schaeder absolves Barth from the charge of
Marcionitism) nor a Manichee to see that the principle
of contradiction, which is so apparent in man's will and
consciousness, operates also at a lower level in the world
of nature. Does not nature itself need to be recreated ?
Must we not have new heavens and a new earth if the
Divine Righteousness is absolutely to rule ? Is there no
kind of contrariety between that which is born of the
flesh and that which is born of the Spirit ? Must we not
say that nature itself is Involved in man's sin and fall ?
And if the laws of nature are as such the workings of the
creative Spirit, what need is there for new creation ? Can
new creation be anything more than the perfecting of
what is already there ? At the long last can miracle
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 149
be anything else than the revelation of the spiritual
significance of the world as it now stands? Is it
possible to give to the idea of the new creation a
thorough - going cosmic significance, embracing the
totality of things ?
It seems gratuitous to criticise a point of view which
is in many ways so powerfully theocentric as Schaeder's.
But we are convinced that his treatment suffers from its
drawing too direct a line of continuity between the
working of the Spirit of God and that of the spirit of
man in experience. We are convinced that the ultimate
result of his insistence on a direct and literal having and
possessing of God in the experience of faith will be that
real miracle will lose its significance and content in
an idealistic interpretation of the world. Philosophic
idealism is at last fatal to miracle on which real revelation
lives. And that fact alone makes the synthesis between
philosophic idealism and revelation which Schaeder
proposes, in the long run impossible.
We are forced then to a closer scrutiny of that having
and possessing of God which Schaeder declares to be the
essence of the faith experience. That there is -in some
real sense a having of God is of course not to be doubted,
but of what nature ? There is a moving confession of
Dr. Forsyth which may be quoted in this connection.
He said that he would consider his life well spent, i at
the end he had nothing more to show than a humble
grateful confidence in Jesus Christ as the Saviour of his
soul and his world and the divine promise of the life
everlasting. That is to say, he recognised that though
in a sense he possessed this confidence, it was still to seek.
It had come to him, but now he must come to it. It
was his, yet not as his possession and enjoyment, but
rather as the goal set before him to be attained as the
150 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
result of all his life's strivings. It was not so much his
experience as the destiny, the ' telos ', of all his experience.
And there are those words of St. Paul in Philippians which
may be laid aside this confession as expressing sub-
stantially the same thing : " That I may know him, and
the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his
sufferings, becoming conformed unto his death ; if by
any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the
dead. Not that I have already obtained, or am already
made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may
apprehend that for which also I was apprehended by
Christ Jesus " (Philippians iii, 10-12 R.V.). The essence
of the faith experience is that life's end, life's telos, life's
goal has broken into life. But that means that for us men
the substance of faith is less a possessing than a decision.
Faith is as Brunner says 1<c a having and a not having,"
indeed we may say, a having in a not having. Our
experience 2 " begins its life from moment to moment
as a new thing." In other words between our actual
experience and the new experience of faith or the Holy
Spirit there is a discontinuity, a crisis which is continually
resolved in ever new decision. This discontinuity is
so radical that it can only be described by the words
death and resurrection. " Ye died, and your life is hid
with Christ in God " (Col. iii, 3 R.V.). " Are ye ignorant
that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were
baptized into his death " (Romans vi, 3 R.V.). " If any
man be in Christ, he is a new creature : the old things are
passed away ; behold, they are become new " (2 Corin-
thians v, 17 R.V.). " When Christ who is our life shall
be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested
in glory " (Colossians iii, 4 R.V.). " That which is born
1 Theology of Crisis, p. 63.
2 Heintich Earth, Die Geistfrage im deuischen Idealismus, p. 56.
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE IJI
of the flesh is flesh ; and that which is born of the Spirit
is spirit " (John iii, 6).
Faith then, is the crisis of man's consciousness. It is
man's consciousness being gathered up into " a totality
act," a totality decision but gathered up by a trans-
cendent consciousness, the Holy Spirit. It is not therefore
to be sought for, in definite experiences within the
consciousness, which may be psychologically examined
and perhaps labelled supernatural. It is the decision
which is the miracle of faith ; the consciousness not as
experience in the ordinary meaning of that word, but the
consciousness as decision. Faith is not to be interpreted
as man's consciousness as it were unified, synthesized
and adjusted to some spiritual environment: man's
consciousness as such is not unified and synthesized, but
negated, judged, brought to crisis in faith. The miracle
of faith is not mere adjustment, it is death and resur-
rection, the " mind of the flesh " continually abjuring
itself, giving itself up to the " mind of the Spirit."
Yet once more, and this is of the utmost importance,
when we speak of the miracle of faith, we do not mean
that our consciousness can be estimated and valued from
a new point of view. Faith is not a new way of
interpreting ourselves, valuing ourselves. The miracle
of faith is a real miracle. Something happens to us, an
aggression is made upon us, we are made new not simply
declared new, we die and rise again, and this dying and
rising becomes the supreme life-movement of our
consciousness.
Now this view of faith as the gathering up of con-
152 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
sciousness into a great act of life-decision has an immediate
bearing upon the whole question of miracle. Considering
it still from the point of view of man's inner life we may
express the matter thus : this act of life-decision is on its
positive side supernatural. It is not our act, but God's
act in us. Faith is the gift of God. It is miracle. Our
consciousness understood as decision and as standing
decision, means that while this consciousness still remains
definitely ours, our own actual human consciousness, it
is constantly, as it were, passing upward into what we may
call for lack of a better name, a supra-consciousness which
is not ours, but which is the mind of the Spirit. Efforts
have been made to locate the Holy Spirit in the regions
of the sub-conscious mind. The phenomena of inspiration
have been attributed to the uprising of the divine from
its depths in the sub-conscious into the sphere of the
conscious mind. The Holy Spirit is interpreted as that
which lies deep down in the sub-liminal. But that
presupposes an immanent relation between the divine
and the human. And it denies the nature of faith as
crisis. It is not in the sub-conscious that the Spirit dwells,
but in the supra-conscious, in that element which is
above consciousness as such, but into which the con-
sciousness is continually pressing in and through decision.
If a man will reflect deeply upon the nature of decision,
he will feel, though he will not be able to describe it, this
element which we have called the supra-conscious. As
far as we can describe it at all, we must describe it as
deliverance, deliverance from that pressure of constraint
which gathers round the mind and urges it towards
decision ; it is even a kind of ecstasy, the sense of a
standing out from one's self. Now consider man's
empirical consciousness not as having decision in it, but
as itself being decision. The empirical consciousness
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 153
still remains in its ordinary human actuality, but above it,
ruling over it, is this supra-consciousness, this deliverance,
this standing out of the self, which. is the mind of the
Spirit. It is this which we call the supernatural, miracle,
the Holy Spirit. The supernatural therefore is above
consciousness rather than within it. But just because it
is above it, it is also in a real sense within it, for the very
fact of a crisis of consciousness means that the nature of
crisis belongs to the consciousness before the fact yet
takes place. We need to remember that crisis is as
definite a connection as continuity. We realise our true
nature, we become ourselves only in the act, the decision,
the self-surrender of faith. Ordinary human experience
is there, to lead us to faith. Experience discloses its
true nature in responding to the supernatural. Only
thus, in this response are we truly ourselves. The Holy
Spirit, the supernatural, is therefore in our consciousness,
in some sense, at all times. He is never wholly absent
from it. Were that not true, He could not manifest
Himself there, could not come there in the crisis of faith.
We conclude then, that man's life is never wholly inde-
pendent, autonomous, self-determined, it is always in
some way touched by the supernatural, worked upon by
the Holy Spirit. There is miracle in experience and no
part of experience is wholly without it. But the
supremely important point to notice is, that the element
of miracle within experience can never be discovered by
rational or psychological investigation. It is something
which remains hidden to all psychological inspection.
We can never draw a line in experience between the
natural and the supernatural. Always does the Holy
Spirit remain transcendent; always between the new
consciousness of the Holy Spirit and man's own empirical
consciousness is there from the rational point of view not
154 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
continuity but discontinuity and crisis. This hiddenness
of the supernatural in our experience, this inaccessibility
to all inspection, this impossibility of definitely classifying
experiences as natural and supernatural, becomes of the
utmost importance for us to keep in mind, when we pass
on to consider the nature of miracle in the world outside.
We are now in a position to address ourselves to this
larger question. Miracle within points to the nature of
miracle without. Just as in the man of faith we have to
do with a self which is relatively independent, self-
determined, but which is gathered up in faith into supreme
life-decision, into the supernatural, into the Holy Spirit ;
so in the world, we have to do with an order which is
relatively autonomous, " a planted-out world " to use
Dr. Tennant's expression, a law-ruled world so far as
scientific investigation can see it, but nevertheless an
order which is to be overcome, and which in principle
has been overcome in Jesus Christ. This order there-
fore is only relatively autonomous ; concealed within it
there is the supernatural, there is miracle.
Now that which outwardly corresponds to the crisis
and miracle of faith within, is the resurrection of Jesus
Christ from the dead. The resurrection is therefore as
Barth has called it " the absolute miracle." It is not to
be looked upon simply as an historical event lying within
the sphere of historical events in general. It is the crisis
of all history and all nature, the abrogation of the law-
conditioned order as such. It signifies the end of the
old world, and the beginning of the new. It is the under-
mining and subverting of the world's autonomy, just as
faith, or the Holy Spirit, stands for the subverting of
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 155
man's own autonomy. It points to the end of the " reign
of law " which belongs to the world's autonomy. Paul
expresses it in the words, " Christ being raised from the
dead, dieth no more ; death no more hath dominion over
him " (Romans vi, 9). It is in the words " dieth no
more," and " death no more hath dominion over him "
that the nature of the resurrection is expressed. The
beginning of a new world-order, an order of life which
is not death-ruled and therefore not " law-ruled " for
the end, the telos of law is death law is the order of
the world ruled by the destiny of death it is this which
the New Testament means by the resurrection. Clearly
this is not historical event simply as such, nor is it physical
miracle as such. What historical event, what physical
miracle could reveal that " Christ dieth no more," that
" death hath no dominion over him " ? Of course the
resurrection of Christ is historical, in the sense that it takes
place in history. But the historical facts, be they what they
may, the resurrection appearances for example, all that
emerges into historical visibility and becomes object of
historical enquiry all this is but accompaniment of the
resurrection, not the resurrection itself. It matters little
how these { appearances ' be interpreted, whether
objectively or subjectively, whether realistically or psycho-
logically, whether physically or spiritually these are
curious questions which have only an indirect bearing on
faith. These signs, these appearances were but temporally
bound up with the resurrection, they are not the resurrec-
tion itself. Attempts are sometimes made to insist on
the physical and as we might call it, realistic character of
the resurrection on the grounds that had the first witnesses
been confronted with the dead body of Jesus, faith in the
resurrection would have collapsed. But who has the
right to say that ? If revelation be a reality, if there was a
Ij6 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
real approach of God to the world in Jesus Christ, if in
him the divine life laid hold of our human death, in some
way or other faith in the resurrection would have been
created and maintained. Those who are disposed to
entertain the idea of a subjective and psychological inter-
pretation of the resurrection appearances, may perhaps
find their justification in the reflection that such a great
divine event as is postulated in revelation, was bound to
produce striking psychological phenomena ; and that
these would have proved in the long run too striking and
too powerful to be overborne by any confusion which
perplexing circumstances might have temporarily created
in men's minds. All that would have happened, had
such a contingency as the ' realists ' suggest, taken place,
would have been that the tradition might have taken a
somewhat different form. But these considerations,
interesting and intriguing as they are in themselves, do
not really touch the heart of the matter. What corres-
ponds to faith, is not a crude realistic event, but the
resurrection as the critical event, the subversion and over-
coming of the actual, empirical world and the beginning
of the new order ; the end of the old order in death
(which perhaps precludes the ' physical ' idea of the
resurrection) but the swallowing up of death in risen,
divine life. It is all this, not in its historical, factual
aspect but in its aspect of revelation, of divine word to
man, which constitutes the faith of the resurrection. The
resurrection transcends all our rational categories. It is
the absolutely new, once-for-all event, to which our cate-
gories, subjective and objective, psychological and
realistic, spiritual and physical do not apply. 1 It is the
" absolute miracle " of the world. But as such, as the
supreme crisis of the world, it reveals the fact that the
1 See Earth, Die Auferstebung der Toten (second part passim).
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 157
nature of crisis belongs to the world. For this " absolute
miracle " does the world exist. That is its meaning, its
destiny. The resurrection was, as it were, the gathering
up of all the transcendence in the world into supreme
event and manifestation. But in being this, it reveals
that there is transcendence in the world (incidentally it
is this that we mean, or should mean by immanence ) ;
it is the demonstration of the fact that the world is only
relatively and not absolutely autonomous, independent,
" planted-out," law-ruled.
Now the resurrection is the one miracle in the world
which we can definitely and explicitly assert. In the light
of it we can assert that there are others, but we cannot with
certainty isolate them and declare them. The resurrec-
tion assures us that the independent autonomous law-
ruled world has been laid hold of by a power that subverts
it as such, and overcomes it. This miracle has not to
be referred to law ; law must be referred to it. Law is
seen to be a relative, provisional, and contingent ordering
of the world, corresponding to the condition of the world
as fallen, as in discontinuity with God, as a world which is
to pass away. Its purpose in the natural sphere is
according to its own order, what its purpose is in the
moral sphere. The real world of God is not " law-ruled "
but personally ordered by God Himself. Even in the
natural sphere, as in the moral, law is there as a kind of
" schoolmaster to bring us to Christ," to miracle, to grace,
to the resurrection. The world now standing, law still
abides but with its rule in principle undermined. We
live in a world ruled fundamentally not by law but by
miracle. But just as in the case of the consciousness
which has seen itself in the light of the crisis of faith, we
are not in the position to select any body of events within
our world and definitely label them miracle. Miracle in
IJ 8 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the world is something which is hidden from sight,
hidden from rational enquiry. Its existence can be
believed, but it cannot be proved. The scientist or
historian cannot as such come up against miracle. That
is true, even as regards the miracles of Jesus. We can
firmly assert in the light of the resurrection a miraculous
element in the works of Jesus, but we cannot say that
this event or that is definitely miracle. Paul found the
Jews still seeking for signs in spite of the miracles of Jesus,
and in spite of the fact that at the time when he wrote,
miracles were believed to be of frequent occurrence.
And similarly to-day. Miracle is in our world, but we
cannot isolate it in definite events which the outsider must
recognise to be such. It abides as a ground for belief in
providence and for the practice of prayer. The believer
may trust in the divine providence, and he may pray, and
pray in the sense of making definite petitions ; and he
may do all this on the ground that real transcendence,
real miracle is at work in the world. He will find that
such faith is justified in experience. He will doubtless
often come up against events in his experience, of the
miraculous character of which he will himself be con-
vinced. But even so, he may not acclaim these before
the world as miracles which the world must recognise as
such. The element of miracle in the world though real,
is not rationally discoverable, is not capable of being
isolated and manifested, and certainly not capable of
objective proof and demonstration.
We may now briefly gather up the conclusions which
we have reached. Miracle is not historical event as such ;
that is to say, it is not something that lies sheer and clear
upon the plain of historical life, so that it can be seen by
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE IJ9
the mere spectator. It is rather something which lies
hidden within historical event, and which is apprehended
by faith, the new consciousness of the Holy Spirit. The
onlooker may sometimes encounter strange events, but
he is in no position to call them miracles. He may also
explain these strange events rationally and scientifically
and yet all the time he may be missing a real element of
miracle in them. For example, he may refer the stories
of healings in the gospels to well-known laws of the
relation between mind and body, but it does not follow
that there was in those healings no more than can be
explained that way. Indeed the Christian is committed
by his faith to, at least, the probability that there was more.
Standing as he does on the faith of the resurrection he
cannot isolate this " absolute miracle " from the whole
context of the activity of Jesus in the world. It was the
Christ of the resurrection, the Christ in whom during the
days of his flesh the resurrection secret lay hidden, who
lived and wrought. And inasmuch as Christ stands in
the context and texture of the world's life, miracle cannot
be excluded from life in general. Apart from the reality
of the miraculous in the world, there is no place for
providence and no place for prayer. Prayer and provi-
dence imply miracle. Apart from miracle, prayer is
merely monologue. There is no response. There is no
divine transcendent activity to correspond with our
human activity in prayer. But prayer in the New Testa-
ment is through and through petition. It is a calling
upon divine, transcendent activity. Of prayer that is not
definitely petition the New Testament knows little or
nothing. The very prayer of communion is communion
with one who has overcome the world, and even here
petition is never absent. And this conclusion may not
be got round, by alleging that spiritual boons are granted
l6o REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
in prayer, but that no deviations or interferences with the
causal law-ruled order may be asked or expected. For
the world is set forth in Christ in the light of its over-
coming, and the whole world is set forth in that light.
We may not indeed bring forth single isolated events in
our experience as objective proofs of faith, but we may
make our faith, which by its very nature is a supernatural,
transcendent thing, the ground for prayer, and prayer
definitely as petition. At the same time we shall recognise
that the world is not yet literally and actually overcome.
That is to say, it still retains a relative independence as
over against God. Therefore we shall not be dismayed
if our petitions are not directly answered. We shall be
willing to wait, for indeed the whole of our life is a
waiting a waiting for that redemption which is assured
to us in our faith. In our life and in our world wonder
is hidden, though we cannot trace it out after a rational
manner. We shall on the ground of miracle continue to
pray and indeed to make our whole inner life a life of
prayer. Were miracle not hidden, were it capable of
being isolated, and definitely delimited, we might pray
only in times of special urgency and distress, and our
prayer would be a sort of magic. We should have two
spheres clearly marked out before our mind's eye, the
sphere of the world's autonomy which could not be
influenced by prayer, and the sphere of transcendence and
miracle which could. Our prayer might easily become
not a call upon God in His personal love and freedom,
but a call upon mere power. It could become less than
personal relation and personal communion.
There is a further misapprehension of the idea of
miracle, which calls for a brief comment in this connec-
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE l6l
tion. It is sometimes said that miracle is simply a new
interpretation and valuation of the world or ordinary
experience. The believer, it is alleged, is able to regard
the world with its laws and events, together with the
experiences of his own life, in a new light. He can inter-
pret them teleologically. That is to say, he can see that
the laws of nature, for example, are the necessary back-
ground for the emergence of moral and spiritual
personality. He can perceive also, that apart from the
trials and vicissitudes of life the higher spiritual values,
such as love, sympathy, and sacrifice would never appear.
Therefore he can call all life and experience miracle. He
can see that something is really happening by means of all
this .apparently fortuitous concourse of events and
experiences, some end is being reached and realised,
divine transcendent purpose is being fulfilled. Miracle
is therefore ordinary experience viewed from a particular
point of view. Miracle is a new subjective reading of
the world, a new valuation of the world. But this idea
overlooks the fact that the world is to be overcome, not
seen from a different angle. The world according to
this idea, is simply accepted and allowed to stand. The
divine act of redemption and revelation is simply identi-
fied with the evolution of the world order. There is no
rational contradiction between the world and God.
Prayer in its petitionary sense, which is the fundamental
sense it possesses in the New Testament, becomes an
impossibility. All that man can do is to perfect his
adjustment to the evolving course of things. He can
make -his correspondence more complete, but he cannot
expect any real answers to his prayers. Religion becomes
essentially impersonal. An evolving process takes the
place of a personal God.
A somewhat similar criticism must be made against a
162 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
conception of miracle which is sometimes brought
forward with the object of easing the strain between
religion and science. According to this conception,
miracle is not the breach, not the abrogation, of natural
law, but the suspension of a lower law through the
operation of a higher. Alleged miracles may be divided
into those contra naturam (against nature) and those supra
naturam (above nature). 1 This distinction was made by
the late Dr. Sanday in a controversy with Rev. N. P.
Williams on the subject of the miraculous, with special
reference to the Virgin Birth of Jesus. There were, said
Dr. Sanday, alleged miracles which were contra naturam
of which the Virgin Birth seemed to be an example, and
others which were supra naturam such as the healings of
disease recorded in the gospels. Miracle of the former
character could not be accepted, while miracle of the
latter was perfectly credible. To quote an illustration,
used by both parties to the discussion, the man who
catches a cricket-ball, suspends the law of gravity, but he
does so, not in the sense that he breaks that law, but in
the sense that he brings into operation another and a
higher law which counteracts its working. Miracle,
therefore, in the sense of the suspension of a lower law
by a higher, may freely be granted, but not where a real
breach is made in a scientifically attested law of nature.
But as Dr. Sanday's disputant was not slow to point out,
the most fantastic miracles could be defended in this way.
Who will maintain that we are acquainted with the whole
range of law as it operates in our world ? But the criticism
of Dr. Sanday's argument goes deeper still. As Dr.
Tennant has observed in the book from which we have
already quoted : 2 " In order that a miracle may have any
1 See Form and Content in the Christian Tradition, by Sanday and Williams.
2 See Miracle, its Philosophical Presuppositions, p. 29.
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 163
significance for dogmatic theology, it must have that
incompatibility with natural law which in the dogmatic
interest has been asserted and in the pseudo-scientific
interest (that is, in the distinction between contra naturam
and supra naturam} has been denied." Miracle is essentially
contra naturam, that is to say, it negates nature as such,
subverts its autonomy, overcomes it. No relief is obtained
by accepting nature as such and adjusting miracle to it.
It is of the very essence of miracle that it should dis-
qualify the empirical world in its own independent,
self-standing, autonomous character. Unless we keep
in the forefront of our minds the idea of a world in
principle overcome, we can make nothing of miracle.
Truly for purposes of scientific investigation, the world
has to be accepted in its own right, but the autonomy of
science in the full and absolute sense, like that autonomy
of reason in general, cannot be accepted without renounc-
ing revelation. That the world is a passing world, that
in Christ's Cross and Resurrection, it has in principle been
judged, negated, redeemed and newly created this is the
declaration of revelation. Such a declaration in no way
denies a relative independence to the world now standing.
Inasmuch as the world is not empirically and actually
overcome, scientific law has its place, and in that place it
is supreme. But a transcendent element and power lies
hidden within the very autonomy of the world, though
its presence is discoverable by faith alone. Our con-
clusion can scarcely be summed up better than in the
words of Cowper's well-known hymn :
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
164 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV
WITH regard to the remarks on Schaeder given in this
chapter, the following may be added from the standpoint
of historical criticism. In Schweitzer's Paul and His
Interpreters, and more fully in The Mysticism of Paul the
Apostle, Schweitzer brings out the point that Paul's faith
was that of a Christ mysticism but not of a God mysticism.
The God mysticism he says was " not yet." Here and
now the believer possessed the experience that Christ
lived in him, but not in strict meaning that God lived in
him. That further stage belonged to the future, the other
side of temporal existence when the Son should have
delivered up the kingdom to the Father and God have
become " all in all." In contrasting Paul's conception of
the world and its relation to God with Stoicism,
Schweitzer says : 1 " In the Stoic view the world is
thought of as static and unaltering. The world is Nature,
which remains constantly in the same relationship to the
world-spirit pervading it and pervaded by it. For Paul,
however, the world is not Nature but a supernatural his-
torical process which has for its stages the forthgoing of
the world from God, its alienation from Him, and its
return to Him. This dramatic view of world history is
also in its own way a kind of mysticism, a mysticism
which can assert that all things are/r<w God and through
God .and unto God. But what it never can assert is that
all things are in God. This is for it simply not the case so
long as there is a sensible material world, and a sensible
world history. It is only when the End comes, when
time gives place to eternity, and all things return to God,
1 The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, p. n. Schweiteer declares the
Areopagus speech of Acts xvii to be unhistorical and un-Pauline.
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE l6j
that they can be said to be in God." We need not
discuss here the precise theological nature of this dis-
tinction between Christ mysticism and God mysticism,
but it does suggest that modification and closer precision
are needed in Schaeder's declaration : 1<e Paul and the
whole Christianity orientated towards him have never
known otherwise than that faith is a having, or better,
that in this present time-world a positive having of God
is possible for man." The c having ' must be inter-
preted as a goal and destiny involving at all times crisis
and decision rather than as a possession which involves
simply expression. Never can a sheer equation be made
between the movements of God's Spirit and the human
spirit, and never a direct continuity.
Schweitzer further says 2 : " According to the Eschato-
logical view the elect man shares the fate of the world.
Therefore so long as the world has not returned to God,
he also cannot be in God. That Paul does not think of
Sonship to God as a being-in-God depends ultimately on
the fact that this sonship is for him, as it also was for
Jesus, a thing of the future. Not until the coming of the
Messianic kingdom will men be children of God. Before
that, they are those who have the assurance of having
been called to this sonship, and are therefore, by anticipa-
tion denominated Children of God." And he adds :
s " The being in Christ is not conceived as a static partaking
in the spiritual being of Christ but as a real experiencing
of His dying and rising again." It is necessary, however,
to emphasize the fact which of course Schweitzer fully
recognises, that Paul does not yet conceive himself as
literally sharing the resurrection of Christ. His aim is
that he may " attain unto the resurrection of the dead,"
1 Das Geistprobhm der Tbeologie, p. 36.
Mysticism of Paul, p. 12. *Ibid. } p. 13.
2
1 66 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
and he explicitly declares, " not that I have already
obtained." The goal is a "high calling." He will
know the " power " of Christ's resurrection by sharing
" the fellowship of his sufferings being conformed unto
his death." The resurrection is his by faith, but not by
possession, and faith draws its character from its object.
It is not literally a possession, it is a crisis, a decision,
even a death.
The making of faith into a having of God is in essence
Catholic, not Protestant. It is the Catholic idea, carried
into the Reformation content of revelation and translated
from the outward world of visible fact and institution into
the inward world of conscious experience. In the
ecclesiastical and sacramental system of Catholicism we
possess an object with which revelation is made identical.
The revelation becomes an historic visibility belonging
to this here and now world. It is a datum, a possession,
on this side of the line which divides the present from the
future. Revelation receives a concretion in time and
history. It belongs to the world's life and history. It is
very definitely a possession of our here and now humanity.
Protestantism, of course, cannot accept the ' givenness '
in that form, but its tendency is often to transplant that
givenness into the world of inner experience. Not as an
historical visibility but as an inner possession of the soul,
is revelation brought definitely and positively within the
sphere of human " having." Our position, which we
believe to be that of the New Testament witness, is that
revelation, the Word of God, cannot be equated with or
made directly continuous with anything here. It stands
over the whole sphere of man's existence both outward
and inward. It implies ever a call to man and a judgment
upon man, and at no point do these cease to be the nature
of the connection of the God given in revelation with the
THE SPIRIT AND MIRACLE 1 67
life of man. Man possesses God truly but only in
constantly renewed decision. It is ever a case of " for-
getting the things which are behind, and stretching
forward to the things which are before."
CHAPTER V
THE SPIRIT AND REASON
FAITH, we have said, is a totality act. But in saying this,
we do not mean that faith is, as is so often stated, an act
of the single undivided personality. This way of putting
the matter cannot be allowed to stand, for the reason that
the single undivided personality is a figment. Personality,
as we know it, is in contradiction, and the more it becomes
truly personality, the more, that is, it becomes a moral
entity, something that is expressed in action and not in
mere being, the more does its nature as contradiction
reveal itself. x " It is distinctive of the moral conscious-
ness that it is not, like the philosophical, single, simple,
and harmonious, but double, divided and even rent. It
is not monistic but dualistic. A solution of the world
which is determined to be theoretic above all, must end
in Monism, which is the death of religion ; but if it be
moral, if it be religious, it must begin with the experienced
and certain fact of the divided conscience, a standing state
of collision, war and sin. It begins with a state of the
consciousness anterior to its branches as theoretic,
aesthetic, or ethical, a state underlying all these." In
faith we are made to stand above that contradiction in
which our personality is involved, above that state which
underlies our consciousness whether as theoretic, esthetic
or ethical. a " Outside of it, (faith) i.e., in sin, man is no
more a unity ; the inward unity or harmony of his exis-
tence is disintegrated into a diversity of autonomous
functions. No totality-act is possible. The will is
separated from knowledge, the feeling from the intellect ;
1 Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, pp. 5-6.
2 Brunner, The Word and the World, pp. 73-74.
168
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 169
there emerge the well-known distinct psychological
functions which the psychologist studies. Empirical
psychology has always to do with this disintegrated man,
never with the integral. For that central act which re-
integrates personality in its unity, namely faith, lies above
the categories with which psychology apprehends its
objects." When therefore we say that faith is a totality
act we are thereby confessing that it is not, in strict
meaning, an act of ours. It is an act of God on us and in
us. It is God in action upon our consciousness. It is
the Holy Spirit. But though the act is not strictly ours,
it is an act in which our whole consciousness is involved.
That state of the consciousness " anterior to its branches
as theoretic, aesthetic and ethical, a state underlying
these," is made the subject of divine action in faith. No
part of our being remains unaffected. The reason, as
well as the feelings and the will, is brought under judg-
ment, is brought to a point of crisis in faith, because
underlying reason, feeling and will alike is this state of
consciousness which is rent, divided, in contradiction.
Reason is brought to a point where it recognises not a
mere truth, but a Lord, a point where it renounces its
autonomy.
The kind of truth which reason encounters in revelation
is not an extension of rational knowledge as such. The
divine knowledge given in faith is not, as it were, super-
added to our ordinary human knowledge. It is not as if
our knowledge carried us part of the way, and then came
in a new divine knowledge of a parallel kind which led us
straight to the goal. We do not proceed by analysis of
the material presented to us in consciousness and by
critical evaluation of our human faculties, and then
discover that in addition to all we learn, something is
presented to us to make up for its defects. The Roman
170 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Catholic view that reason can establish the being and
attributes of God and the fact of human immortality,
while revelation must come in to supplement these with
the knowledge of salvation, the view, that is, that revela-
tion is built upon a foundation of rationally ascertainable
truth, that it completes the building which reason leaves
unfinished, is inconsistent with our pre-suppositions.
What the reason discovers is not God, though it may
establish a first cause and a world ground; not im-
mortality, though it may discover reasons for believing
in the survival of physical death. The relation of
revelation to reason is not that of a mere extension, nor
is it that of a limit or a law ; it is that of an entirely new
and thorough-going criticism, which at one and the same
time calls the deliverances of reason in question and
establishes them in relative right and validity. Revela-
tion involves a new epistemology, that of the Holy Spirit.
Certainly reason has a function to perform even within
the sphere of revelation itself. It may and it must
criticise the declarations of faith in so far as these declara-
tions are necessarily expressed in the forms of rational
thought and doctrine. But the inner meaning and
content of faith, as distinct from its intellectual forms of
expression is not subject to rational criticism. Rather
must we say, it is there to criticise the deliverances of
reason.
Reason is, of course, autonomous within its own
sphere. But that sphere is the world of our common
experience, and that world is, as we have said, a world in
fall and in contradiction, a world not to be just accepted
but to be overcome. The sphere of reason is prescribed
by the object of reason, and that object is the world of
our actual empirical life and consciousness. Knowledge
of the world will then be true knowledge, but it will not
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 1 71
be in the strict sense knowledge of the truth. The world
as such is not truth ; only the world in crisis is truth, the
world redeemed, the world overcome, the world restored
to its original meaning. But inasmuch as the world in
truth is the world of our common experience restored to
its original meaning, the knowledge which reason gains
is not to be set aside and not to be simply extended, but
to be set out in new terms and relationships. The inter-
connections between phenomena which reason discovers
and sets out, will not be denied in faith, will indeed be
reaffirmed, but will be placed in a light which radically
changes their significance. For example, the inter-
connections which modern science has established in its
theory of evolution are matter of genuine knowledge.
In other words, what is expressed by the term evolution
does not take place. Higher forms, that is to say, more
highly differentiated forms do stand in a definite connec-
tion with lower forms, and so far as we can see, this
connection is essentially the same throughout the whole
field of physical and biological existence. We may say
that higher forms evolve from lower, or emerge from
lower in the time series. And yet what takes place is not
really evolution or emergence. Life, for example, does
not evolve or emerge from matter. There are no doubt
definite interconnections between life and matter, definite
material conditions which are necessary to the appearance
of life. The theory of evolution is valuable in establish-
ing the facts of these interconnections and conditions.
But when it proceeds to an interpretation of their essential
nature and sets forth this interpretation as final truth, it
lands itself in ambiguity and indeed in error. The term
evolution, for example, in its strict sense means a mere
unfolding of what is already present. As applied to the
relationship between life and matter, it would imply that
172 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the former is simply a more highly differentiated form of
the latter, that it is but the expression of what is latent
in the latter. Life, however, presents features which are
quite other than those of matter, and evolution in its
strict sense is unable to account for the appearance of the
new. Accordingly we have theories of ' emergent ' or
' creative ' evolution which seek to account for the
arising of the new from the old. These terms are, how-
ever, highly ambiguous. Things do not emerge ; nor
have we any real right to equate the terms creation and
evolution and speak of a creative evolution, for in so
doing we are confounding ideas whose connotations are
essentially different. Nevertheless the point of view
which speaks of evolution with perhaps the qualifying
adjective ' emergent ' or ' creative,' is, as seen from our
side, the human rational side, a true point of view. In
some such way must we describe those conditions and
interconnections which exist between the higher and the
lower. But our side is not the finally true and right side.
The interconnections on which we base our interpreta-
tions are really there, but these interpretations have only
a relative validity. And to extend them in such a way as
to cover the whole field of fact, however critically we may
perform this task, brings us not nearer to the final truth
of things, but in the end leads us further away. We
arrive in a sense at truth, but we never arrive at the truth.
The truth is the crisis, even the reversal (not the destruc-
tion, but the turning-round) of what we mean by truth.
It is our truth set out in a new light which radically
changes its significance. There can be no thought
therefore of dispensing with reason or of taking a flying
leap into anything in the nature of obscurantism. The
work of the scientist and the philosopher must be hedged
about with no restrictions. It must proceed, for the very
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 173
reason that its conclusions may be set out in a new light,
a light which finally reverses their significance, and in the
reversal of which the truth is apprehended.
We shall endeavour to justify this apparently para-
doxical position, by a brief examination of the main
position outlined in Professor Alexander's great work
Space, Time and Deity, so far as that position bears on the
subject of our presentation. This work is particularly
interesting from our point of view for several reasons.
It is an attempt by means of careful and painstaking
analysis of the material presented to reason in conscious-
ness, to construct a ladder whereby the mind may rise
from the most elementary data of experience to the idea
of God ; a metaphysical essay constructed rigidly on
scientific foundations. Alexander will not have it that
there is a conflict between religion and science. He
repudiates any attempts to reconcile religion with science.
He will not admit that the spheres of science and religion
are different, nor will he allow that these two activities of
man's consciousness are parallel modes of approach to
reality. The idea of the autonomy of religion as distinct
from the autonomy of science receives no support from
him. Science he insists, is, and must be, religious.
Purely in virtue of being scientific does science lead to
religion; for the material with which science deals is
no mere datum but a real becoming. To put it other-
wise, science has to deal with an object, which in being
what it is, points beyond itself. The more adequately it
examines and analyses its material, the more it is led
beyond the material presented to it as mere datum.
Though Alexander does not mention Otto's conception
174 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
of the ' Numinous ' in his book, he has since declared it
to be a valid one, and in harmony with the direction of
his own thought. Only, he cannot agree that the
' Numinous ' stands for any objective existence ; rather
does it stand for the next step onward from objective
existence, the adumbration, the shadow, as it were, thrown
forward by existence, of existence which is to come.
Science is always thrown forward by the very data with
which it has to deal. It must, as it were, step in advance
of actual, given existence ; it must by virtue of being
science, become religious. In this philosophy, the
autonomy of science is taken as presupposition, and taken
in such a way, that no room is left for any other autonomy.
Thus the discussion of the relationTof religion to other
aspects and activities of man's consciousness is greatly
simplified. There is no tension between the various
autonomies of religions, science, art, etc., no adjustments
calling to be made between the various approaches of
man's mind and spirit to reality. There remains at the
last but one approach, the scientific, and that approach
can be trusted to do justice to all the demands of the
situation.
Alexander will not concern himself much with the
question of epistemology or the problem of knowledge.
Epistemology he declares to be not the foundation of
philosophy, but one of its chapters. The question of
how we know, he thinks must be solved ' ambulando ' ;
it is solved in the analysis otwhat we know. In this way
reason can go forward without any disturbing and para-
lysing self-questionings. It can go forward, without
fear or hesitation, in a straight line. A philosophy based
on this presupposition, a philosophy in which the auto-
nomy of reason proceeds in this sovereign and all-
dominating way is clearly of the utmost interest in
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 175
connection with the theme of this chapter. We shall
expect to find that the conclusions reached are specially
relevant to our discussion, and as a matter of fact they
are relevant to a degree which leaves nothing to be desired.
The position elaborated in the book may be briefly
summarised as follows. Reality is a process of emergent
evolution of which the first term is space-time and the
last term God. Space-time is the original primordial
matrix from which all actuality arises and ascends. Space
involves time, and time involves space. A careful
analysis of space and time reveals the fact that each needs
the other in order to become actual. They are not two
but one. This space-time is the fundamental creative
principle of all existence physical and mental. The
universe is, as it were, a great ' urge ' upwards from
space-time to God. There is a 'nisus,' a drift, an
evolving and ascending series issuing forth from space-
time. Given space-time and you get eventually the
whole universe of experience which is never a static
thing, a thing complete, a mere datum, but a perpetual
becoming. Now the highest term in that 'urge,' the
highest stage which space-time has as yet thrown out of
itself, so to speak, is man as mind and spirit. But mind
and spirit are not final. They await the appearing of God.
Man as mind and spirit is, as it were, the highest spot at
which this upward * urge ' is at present actualised. It is
to be noted that man is in no sense a fall from God
downwards, but a rise from space-time upwards in the
direction of God. His life-urge is the urge towards the
true, the absolute, the final life. It is in process of
creating God, of reaching Him as it were, as it waxes and
ascends.
176 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
But in this system God is only an idea. He never
becomes actual. He is always the next term on, the next
reality to appear. He is a ' myth ' of the great urge of
the universe, the ' Numinous ' which lies as a shadow
on the sum-total of the phenomena, with which science
has to do. Science involves Him and can never become
truly scientific if it dispenses with Him. But myth
though God is, He is not thereby unreal. The myth is
an idea of the real, and an idea produced by the real.
Indeed the God-idea is the most real idea there is. We
may, in fact, say that God is the nisus of the universe
towards divinity. As ' nisus/ as ' drift,' He is real
existence. But as really God, as divinity in its actual
being, God is only an idea. And here a most important
and vital point is to be noted. Were God in the absolute
sense, the sense demanded by Christianity as by all
theistic religion, to become actual existence, the whole
space-time world would be swallowed up, and abolished
as such. The ' nisus ' would come to an end, and the
universe as we know it would disappear. God's
existence would be veritable sentence of death on all
existing actuality. It would mean, to put it in religious
language, that the whole empirical scheme of things
would be brought under judgment, and under absolute
judgment. The existence of God would mean supreme
and all-embracing ' crisis,' such as from our side could
only be described as death. And yet again, were God
to become a real existence, all existence would be gathered
up, subsumed in Him. The universe would die only to
be raised up into a new mode of being. There is in
Alexander's philosophy no continuity from our side, to
God as an existence, only crisis of a complete and absolute
kind. But just because the space-time order is funda-
mental and cannot be abolished, just because God
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 177
rationally conceived is involved in it and rises from it,
God can never become actual. The universe both
postulates God and proclaims His impossibility. Its
life is a continual effort to bring Him to the birth, but His
existence would mean its death. The infinite and
absolute remains the supreme idea, the goal of the
whole universal process, but as actuality it must
always break up into a number of finites and relatives.
We may gather up Alexander's conception of God
and His relation to the world under the following
points :
(a) God, as the goal of the urge of the universe, the
consummation of the ' nisus ' which springs out of
space-time and makes the world a process of emergent
evolution, God as the reality of the universe Who
nevertheless can never become actuality, is other than
man, other than mind and spirit as we know them. He
is inconceivable, and unreachable by us, the completely
other who yet subsumes in Himself all that we are. There
is a qualitative difference between Him and the whole of
existence including ourselves. x As Earth, in approaching
the idea of God from an entirely different and opposite
side, says, " God stands over against man, as the im-
possible to the possible, as death to life, as eternity to
time."
(&) Man is the point where God becomes real in the
sense of becoming an element of consciousness. He is
real (without becoming actual) nowhere save. in man's
mind. The ' urge ' of the universe which is towards His
appearing, becomes definite experience in man's mind and
spirit. This is interesting as removing the reproach of
anthropomorphism which is often levelled against theistic
belief, as also that of anthropocentricism where man is
1 Das Wort Goftes, p. 165.
M
iy8 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
frequently accused of an overweening conceit of himself
in attributing to himself a special and unique place in the
scheme of things. It is also valuable in rebutting the
suggestion of the New Psychology that the idea of God
arises from a ' libido ' or desire which craves fulfilment.
Clearly if God's existence were a rational possibility, man
would stand in personal and conscious relation to Him,
for only in man does experience of Him arise.
(e) God is bodily, in the sense that all corporeality
is subsumed in Him. That is important as making God's
actuality, were it a possibility, the redemption of all
existence. Could Divine redemption become a reality,
it would cover the whole range of nature as well as that
of mind and spirit. It may be objected that Alexander's
view does not as a matter of fact permit of such ideas as
redemption and transformation ; that he asserts on the
contrary that not only good but evil exists in God,
because God is the whole of existence in its 'nisus' or drift.
Evil accordingly exists in God, but not in His Godhead,
His Divinity. But the universe as ' nisus ' or drift definitely
precludes the possibility of God's actuality. Were that
actuality a fact, the whole system of the universe would
disappear in its present form, but it would disappear not
in the sense of being blotted out, but as being subsumed
in God. The idea is difficult to grasp, because in this
philosophy the very conditions which postulate God,
declare His impossibility as actual being. God while
being in the most vital and organic connection with the
universe yet stands in supreme and absolute contradiction
to the universe. The very * nisus ' which moves towards
the Infinite and the Absolute can only create the actuality
of the finite and the relative. There is surely a contradic-
tion involved in this philosophy, not perhaps a logical or
rational contradiction, but rather a contradiction in
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 179
essential being, in the universe itself of which this
philosophy treats.
(d) God's actuality means the absolute crisis, the
taking-away of all known and experienced reality as such.
He is to the sum-total of things (including mind and
spirit as we know them) as death is to life. And yet He
is the consummation of reality, its complete gathering-up
and subsuming. Were God actual, space-time would
be gathered up into infinity and eternity. As space-time
it would be no more. As infinity and eternity it would
be something other than what it is. Between the life
of God as actual existence and reality as we know and
experience it, there is discontinuity, contradiction, crisis.
Were God actual, man as we know Him would-be a fall
from him and through man all existence would be a fall.
The life-urge in man is precisely what postulates God and
denies His actuality. It is therefore, in relation to God's
actuality, a fall and a contradiction. It is probable that
Alexander would dislike this language intensely. He
might prefer to say that were God in His pure and
absolute divinity a possibility, by that very fact this
whole philosophy would be disproved. But what we are
concerned to show is that the very * nisus ' or movement
which connects the world with God for ever separates
God from the world. It falls back continually upon
itself. Though straining forward to infinity it con-
tinually breaks up into a multiplicity of finite existences.
Now it is not our purpose to criticise Alexander's
method or conclusions from the philosophical point of
view. The present writer can claim no competence for
this task, but he has a kind of intuitive conviction, that
l8o REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
granted the autonomy of the reason and the self-standing-
ness of the world of which reason treats, some such
conclusions are likely to. be reached. Indeed this
philosophy is specially interesting from our point of view
for the very reason that the autonomy of reason is, as it
were, a specialised function of the autonomy of the world
itself. It involves the position that the world of experi-
ence must stand, as it were, inviolable. It cannot be done
away, it is itself in its evolution and drift the only reality.
It cannot be conceived of as a world to be overcome.
Precisely in the impossibility of its overcoming lies the
sanction and charter of reason. Space-time is the
unalterable and creative element from which the world
arises and from which the mind of man in its efforts to
understand the world arises. Abolish space-time and
reason itself collapses. The very categories of reason
are differentiations of space-time. Alexander is therefore
able to relegate epistemology to a very secondary place in
philosophy. The relation between subject and object in
perception and cognition is not a unique one, it is simply
a specialised form of the general relations which exist
between phenomena. This seems to the present writer a
very sound conclusion ; and it involves the position that
granted the actuality of God, reason itself is brought into
that same crisis in which all existence is involved.
Certainly Alexander does not demand the autonomy of
reason in the sense that the determinations of reason in
themselves are constitutive of reality ; on the contrary the
determinations of reality are constitutive of the functions
of reason. Reason is not permitted to evolve according
to the logic of the pure idea. It remains throughout as
x Dr. Tennant would say ' alogical ' and alogical in a very
1 See brief but illuminating discussion of " Reason " in Tennant's book
Miracle, pp. 70-73.
THE SPIRIT AND REASON l8l
thorough-going sense, because it is a determination of
space-time, and a mere function although the chief
function, of the universe in its ' nisus.' It can never
proceed as if it had, so to speak, life in itself. Its life is
but an expression of the life of the universe. Not the
least merit of this philosophy is that it avoids abstraction
like the plague. It may be that this is why it is so severely
criticised by the mathematical philosophers. Reason is
never permitted to abstract from reality, and then deal
with such abstraction in an independent way. It is kept
in the closest connection with experience throughout.
In that sense reason is not autonomous in this philosophy.
But inasmuch as the world of experience is left, as it were,
inviolable, inasmuch as its negating and overcoming are
regarded as inconceivable, the fundamental autonomy of
reason is placed in a greatly strengthened position. It
can collapse only with the collapse of the autonomy of
the universe itself.
Now the chief interest of the philosophy from our point
of view is that, in the very contrast which it presents to
Christianity, it comes paradoxically very close to it. In
making reason autonomous in a sovereign way, through
the grounding of it in the autonomy of the world of
experience, and in finding the meaning of the universe in
God Who is yet made an impossibility through that very
autonomy, it cannot but call up by way of contrast the
very conception of revelation which has been the subject
of our discussion. One might almost say that it is this
conception in reversed position. The interconnections
which it notes as it proceeds upwards from space-time to
God may still remain in this reversed position, but the
whole schematism will stand out in new meaning and
1 82 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
new significance. Instead of beginning with space
time and mounting upwards to God, we begin with God
and note that He stands to the world not in a relation of
rational continuity but in that rational discontinuity which
we term crisis. The world of empirical experience on
account of the very independence and autonomy which
makes God a rational impossibility, is qualified as a world
in contradiction, a fallen world, a world to be over-
come. The ' urge,' the ' nisus ' of the universe which
becomes willed and directed in man, since it leads to the
negation of God, since even on the highest plain of its
activity it brings God down into finitude and relativity,
since it will not let Him be, and be the Lord, indicates a
radical contradiction between man and God, a contradic-
tion in which the creation itself is involved. This life urge
leading to finitude leads to death. God stands over man
and creation " as the impossible to the possible, as
death to life, as eternity to time." The solution can
only come by way of revelation and^miracle, that miracle
which is expressed by the terms death and resurrection.
But granted this miracle, the schematism of Alexander's
philosophy may remain for the most part unchanged, and
it becomes highly significant. There remains between
revelation, thus understood, and this philosophy a curious
affinity. It is established in relative right because it is
brought under a fundamental criticism and judgment.
What brings it under this criticism and judgment is the
fact that in revelation we have not simply a movement
from the universe, but a movement to the universe which
meets that former movement and disqualifies it as such.
Alexander maintains that the various religions of the
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 183
world are, as it were, mythological expressions and
representations of the ' nisus ' of the universe outward
and upward. They are the forms in which man seeks
consciously to relate himself to this ' nisus,' and in which
his mind lays hold of it in a practical and symbolic fashion.
Our contention would be, that however true that might
be of religion in general, it is not true of that movement of
revelation which we call Christianity. For Christianity
is consistently and coherently, in all the range of its
theology and in all the significance of its cultus of worship,
an expression of another movement, namely a movement
to the universe. It exists, ultimately, for no other reason
than to proclaim that this movement has taken place, and
to bring home to men the consciousness of its reality and
power. That is the supreme motive which determines
the whole effort of its thought in the building up of its
theology, and the whole significance of its worship. Its
consciousness of a universal mission. and a universal
validity, does not arise from a sense of mere superiority
to other religions, but of a fundamental and decisive
otherness in relation to them. It arises from the sense
that God has come, that something final and all-decisive
has happened, that " the grace of God hath appeared
bringing salvation to all men" (Titus ii, n, R.V.). Its
Universalism, its Catholicism rests not on a conviction
of the superiority of its thought-content to anything
which can be discovered elsewhere, but purely on the
nature of the divine event to which it witnesses. It
comes not with " excellency of speech or of wisdom : "
rather " I determined not to know anything among you
save Jesus Christ and Him crucified " (i Cor. ii, 2). It
all gathers round the ideas of judgment and grace. It
expresses, that is, not a movement of the world, but a
movement to the world. Everywhere is the Christian
1 84 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
experience, that of being confronted by a reality which
comes to man and brings his whole being and his whole
world under judgment and therefore under grace. Every-
where does it witness to a great divine event which in
its nature is all-determining and all-decisive, which is
essentially " once for all " and non-repeatable. Its
essence lies in its being word to man, and not word 0/man.
No other religion has a theology in the sense that
Christianity has, for no other religion is word of an event
on which the salvation of the world depends. Its
symbolism whether of rite or creed is that of a movement
from God downwards and not that of a movement from
man upwards. Its nature as eschatological that is, as
proclaiming the end of man, time and things, its thorough-
going transcendence, while at the same time it remains
historical, its reconciliation of rational opposites death
and life, sin and righteousness, chance and election
stamp it as something unique and sui genesis in the
history of religion. In the long run it has to be accepted
as a whole or rejected as a whole. It cannot be gathered
up into the general religious consciousness of mankind,
or expressed in terms drawn from a general philosophy
of religion. It is through and through, in thought, in
the cultus of worship, in practical piety, a religion of
grace. It ultimately has no meaning, apart from its
fundamental presupposition, namely, that there has been
an all-decisive approach of reality to man, a movement
not from the universe but to the universe.
It is necessary to pursue this thought a little further.
If one were asked what was the distinguishing feature of
Christianity in its claim to be divine revelation, one would
answer in a bold word, that it is its definite, positive
breach with all religious a priorism. It does not indeed
deny a religious a priori^ but it denies that this has anything
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 185
to do with revelation proper. A philosophy of religion
must concern itself with the nature of the religious
a priori in the soul of man, and the pursuit of such
philosophy is a perfectly legitimate and indeed necessary
activity of the human mind. But what results therefrom
is not divine revelation ; it is an aspect of human thought
and knowledge which, like all other aspects, has to be
brought under the criticism of, and set out in its true
relations by, divine revelation. It belongs to the region
of science and philosophy in general. Christianity is at
bottom something entirely different, and Christian
theology works with data and presuppositions which are
different from those of the Philosophy of Religion.
Indeed we may say that the very heart and centre of the
Holy Spirit idea for thought is no religious a priorism
where revelation is concerned. The Holy Spirit is God,
and being God is transcendent to man. Neither in the Old
Testament nor in the New is the Spirit in any sense a
constituent or property of man's nature. His contact
with the human soul is ever definitely miracle. We may
repeat and emphasize here Dr. Wheeler Robinson's
dictum quoted in a previous chapter : " This is the true
Hebrew dualism not the contrast between the human
body and soul (or spirit) but that between terrestrial
nature as being of one order and celestial as being of
another." And this ' dualism ' is even more definitely
brought out in the New Testament than in the Old. The
Holy Spirit then spells the end of religious a priorism for
the purposes of revelation. A transcendent reality,
something which belongs to God alone, becomes the
true a priori. The only human a priori in the light of
revelation is sin, weakness, need, negativity. " While
we were yet weak, in due season Christ died for the un-
godly " (Romans v, 6 R.V.). " While we were yet sinners,
1 86 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Christ died for us " (Romans v, 8) ; " God being rich in
mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even
when we were dead through our trespasses, quickened us
together with Christ " (Ephesians ii, 4-5 R.V.). In the long
run nothing can be made of the distinctive outlooks of the
Bible if one regards them from the standpoint of religious
a priorism. What can be made from that standpoint of
such ideas as the sovereignty of God, election, grace,
justification by faith, eschatology and the like, which
pervade the whole witness to revelation ? Does not the
* scandal,' the ' offence,' the ' foolishness ' of Christianity
arise in part, at least, from its repudiation of religious a
priorism ? How can a religion which gathers entirely
round the ideas of death and resurrection be fitted into a
philosophy of religion which works with the a priori ides, ?
And whenever Christianity renews iself at its source, does it
not in some form or other mean a breach with all religious
a priorism ? Was that not pre-eminently the case with the
Reformation with its insistence on justification by faith
alone ? Even our modern adventist sects which Spengler
thinks are likely to form the seed-plots of that "new
religiousness " which he asserts will appear before the
complete extinction of this our Western Culture, proclaim
their Christian lineage in this regard at least, that they
represent an absolute (and in their case irrational and
arbitrary) farewell to all religious a priorism. Christianity
resolutely refuses to make anything in man the organ of
revelation. What in man connects him with revelation
is need, sin, death. 1 " No religion ever had the courage
thus to go to the bitter end in giving man up, as the
Christian faith does. All religions make an attempt at
the self-justification of man at least of man' as a religious
subject. It is exclusively the faith in justification by grace
1 Brunner, The Word and the World, pp. 80-8 1.
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 187
alone which sacrifices not only the rational man, or the
moral man, but the religious man as well." The Holy
Spirit means that sight is given to the blind, the lame walk,
the dead are raised up, the poor have the gospel preached
to them. Nothing is so little tractable to religious
a priorism as the distinctive outlooks and ideas of
Christianity. If we press this even to the point of over-
emphasis, it is because we feel that its significance is
strangely overlooked. The very fact that a breach with
religious a priorism is visible in the whole witness to
revelation, shows how impossible it is to interpret
Christianity as a mythological expression of the * nisus '
of the universe outwards and onwards towards deity.
We ask, how comes it to pass that we are presented with
a witness which cannot be dovetailed into any philosophy
of religion working with the idea of a religious a priori ?
And we suggest that the only satisfactory answer to this
question is that Christianity in its true meaning has
nothing to do with that ' nisus ' of which Alexander
speaks, but that it is a movement to and not o/the universe
and the mind of man. The differentia of Christianity from
everything else is more than a mere differentia. What
we have is a newness, an otherness, a difference in kind
and not merely in degree.
It is paradoxically the case that both the strong point
and the weak point of the philosophy we have been
considering is its epistemology. The strong point,
because in it the act of knowing is in no way isolated
from the general relations in which things stand to one
another in concrete experience. Knowing is but a special
function of the general determinations of the world in the
1 88 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
actual course of its evolution. This seems to us, as we
have already said, a fundamentally sound conclusion.
The mind is given no specially favoured place in the
scheme of things. But the epistemology presupposes the
inviolability, the self-standingness, the independence and
the exclusive reality of the world of empirical experience.
It cannot permit anything other than the world of
experience to be real. What this world postulates
and permits, that and that only can come into the field of
consideration. If the world of empirical experiences is
disqualified in its independence and autonomy, if it is a
world which is to be overcome, then the autonomy of
reason itself collapses. If there be not only a movement
from the universe, but a movement to the universe, then
the whole question of epistemology is thrust into the
foreground and made the all-determining one. Reason
itself is involved in the crisis to which our being is
brought. It is compelled together with all being to
recognise a Lord. It has to recognise its own relativity.
And precisely this is the contention of the witness to
revelation given in the New Testament. It is the Holy
Spirit, the new transcendent and supernatural conscious-
ness which appears in the crisis of the old it is that which
becomes the category for the apprehension of the final and
fundamental significance of the world-progress. The
interconnections which the scientist or the philosopher
discovers in the world, these indeed may remain, but
their ultimate and final significance is apprehended by
faith alone. It is only thus that the tension between
science and religion, or to speak more precisely, between
science and revelation is removed. Alexander is probably
right in considering metaphysics as an esse'ntially scientific
activity. Genuine metaphysical knowledge is but a
deepening and extension of scientific knowledge. But
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 189
as such it shares in the relativity of science. It can never
reach to ultimates. Always must it stand under the
fundamental criticism which revelation brings. Always
must reason be brought to that crisis which the new
epistemology, that of Holy Spirit, makes clear.
But now it will perhaps be contended that the autonomy
of reason can maintain itself in that it is possible to
discern in reason itself a transcendent element. Troeltsch,
for example, following Kant maintained such a tran-
scendent element in man's mind which is therefore able to
perceive the presence of transcendence in the world. He
was therefore able to interpret faith as rationalisation.
His thought has certain affinities with the rationalistic
orthodoxy which finds its supreme expression in Catholic
theology, in spite of its wide divergences from this
orthodoxy. Both really hark back to the old ' logos '
idea of Platonism and Stoicism. An immanent reason in
the world, the logos, which is yet transcendent, inasmuch
as it is the creative principle of the world, is recognised
by man, because in man it becomes conscious activity.
In this recognition man is referred to God as the trans-
cendent ground of his life and his world. But in
Catholicism this transcendent world-ground comes to
reveal itself in a way that corresponds with its essentially
transcendental nature. It reveals itself in miracle, the
miracle of the Incarnation. Troeltsch broke with
orthodoxy, because though he was willing to see in Jesus
a unique expression of the logos, he could not admit an
absolute one. He could not exempt even Jesus from the
relativity of history. He could recognise no Incarnation
ex abrupto, no breach between the logos as immanent, and
190 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the logos as transcendent. A transcendent element in
reason, he contended, finds transcendence everywhere in
the world, and not merely in some spot circled round, as it
were, and isolated from universal history. But the more
he attempted to carry out his principle into history, the
more did he encounter in history that which was
individual and * alogical,' that which was not capable of
rationalisation in the strict sense. That is to say, he came
to see that truth is nowhere separable from those distinct
and individual forms in which it has appeared in history
and in which it constitutes and creates history. The
idea of truth which should be universally valid, which
should not be thoroughly impregnated with historical
relativity and contingency, became more and more elusive.
Truth was never pure truth, it was always historically
conditioned, and apart from its historic conditioning, it
had neither meaning nor power. The mind rarely
encounters truth which is universally valid. What it
encounters are rather individualised expressions of truth
which have authority and power only within the concrete
and historic conditions under which they arise. And this
is pre-eminently the case in the region of religion. No
religion is universally valid. Each religion is individual
and it is in its individuality that its strength and even its
trueness lies. That the various religions are pressing
towards some common goal, that their true end is an
escape from the individual forms in which they have
expressed themselves in history into the pure spirit of
religion, Troeltsch is ready to concede. 1 But that goal
is "in the Unknown, the Future, perchance in the
Beyond." The words " perchance in the Beyond " are
significant; must we not say rather from Troeltsch's
premises " only in the Beyond, if at all " ? For is not
1 Troeltsch, Christian Thought, p. 32.
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 19!
empirical history by its very nature individual and
alogical ? Is it capable of yielding true universals ? Is
not historical truth always relative and must it not be
always so?
What has happened then is that Troeltsch starting out
from the authority of reason because of its supposed
transcendental nature and ground, has ended in sheer
relativity. There is no absolute truth possible to man,
only relative truth that is his final conclusion. Reason
after all, has missed real transcendence. And the descent
from this relativism into sheer scepticism is an easy one,
and we may add, ultimately an inevitable one. Modern
thought is well on the way in this descent from relativism
into scepticism. Spengler's great work The Decline of the
West is, in this respect, a straw which indicates the
direction in which the current is moving. *As Brunner
says, " the modern man no longer believes in an absolute
in whatever form it may be offered, whether of Christian
faith, of idealism or of mysticism. If he believes in any-
thing it is in absolute uncertainty." And he adds, " an age
which has lost its faith in an absolute, has lost everything.
It must perish ; its end can only be the end."
The only way of escape from relativism and from the
scepticism in which relativism ends, is for the reason to
renounce its autonomy. Reason ultimately has no life
in itself. It must at the long last surrender either to
scepticism or to what the New Testament calls the Holy
Spirit. It must find its life in a real transcendence, not a
compromised one as in Troeltsch, nor in a forced one, as
in rationalistic orthodoxy, but in a real one, in the Holy
1 The Theology of Crisis, p. 8.
192 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Spirit. It must come under that crisis in which all being
stands in revelation. It must consent at the last to die
that it may be reborn. Among the greatest words
ever written in this connection are the words of Paul :
" Seeing that in the wisdom of God, the world through its
wisdom knew not God, it was God's good pleasure
through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that
believe " (i Cor. i, 21, R.V.). And these words again :
" But we speak God's wisdom in a mystery (that is, a
revelation) even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which
God fore-ordained before the worlds unto our glory :
which none of the princes of this world knoweth : for
had they known it, they would not have crucified the
Lord of Glory : but as it is written, Things which eye
saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into
the heart of man, whatsoever things God prepared for
them that love him. But unto us God revealed them
through the Spirit ; for the Spirit searcheth all things,
yea, the deep things of God. For who among men
jvnoweth the things of a man save the spirit of the man,
which is in him? Even so the things of God none
knoweth save the Spirit of God. But we received not
the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God ;
that we might know the things that are freely given us
by God " (i Cor. ii, 7-12, R.V.). Too long have these
and similar words been given a merely pious significance,
a significance for edification. Too long has their
realistic and ' truth ' character been ignored. Too
long have they, even when their specific declarations
have been brought under consideration, been regarded
as mere Paulinism. These declarations, on the contrary,
belong to the very substance of revelation, they are
expressions of the mind of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit
is the spirit of truth : we must not weaken this declara-
THE SPIRIT AND REASON 193
tion by turning it round and saying, the spirit of truth is
the Holy Spirit, as if our reason as such could discover the
truth, as if the truth were but a mere extension and
amplification of the rational truth which belongs to the
passing world. There is much talk of bringing all the
treasures of wisdom, science, philosophy and culture to
the feet of Christ, as if we had something extraordinarily
valuable to give, instead of at the long last everything to
receive.
N
CHAPTER VI
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY
IN saying that faith is a totality act, we are saying that it is
the act in which man arises as truly man. The real man
appears, man as he is in his true nature and meaning.
Apart from faith, man is not yet truly reached ; only man
as fallen, with his personality divided and in contradiction,
man not at one with himself, man whose actual life is not
grounded in true humanness. Now history is concerned
with man, and man's life. Its interest and its value arise
from a belief in man. That is to say, we believe that in
history we are confronted not simply with an object to be
investigated and evaluated but with an active subject to
be addressed, interrogated and judged, a subject moreover
by whom we are ourselves addressed, interrogated and
judged. We are confronted with man and man's life,
^ultmann has observed that if a man will grasp the
essence of history " he cannot contemplate it, as he con-
templates his surrounding world of nature, and by
contemplating it, orientate himself to it. The relation of
man to history is different from his relation to nature. If
he directs his attention to nature, he substantiates there
only an existence which is not himself. If on the other
hand he turns to history, he must tell himself that he is
himself a piece of history, and thus he directs himself to a
context (an active context) in which he is himself involved
with his own existence. Therefore he cannot simply
contemplate this context as an object, like nature, but with
every word he utters about history, he says at the same
time in a definite way something about himself. Thus
there cannot be actual, objective contemplation of history
1 Bultmann, Jesus, pp. 7-8.
194
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 195
as there is of nature." Bultmann goes on to say that the
essence of history is dialogue. That is to say, what we
encounter in history is not an object but a subject whom
we address and by whom we are addressed. History has
no meaning unless we really come up against man in it.
*And Bultmann adds, " the dialogue does not arise as a
c valuation ' after one has first recognised history in its
objective state. Much more does the actual encountering
of history accomplish itself fundamentally only in
dialogue."
There are, of course, many who dissent from this point
of view. There are those to whom history is simply a
science with laws as purely objective as are the laws of
physics and chemistry. To them, man does not really
appear in history, they are not concerned with him, indeed
they deny him. He is but the product of forces which can
be arranged and classified under strictly scientific laws.
The late Professor Bury insisted that " history is a science,
no less, no more." But if history is a science, it clearly
claims no special attention from the philosopher, and
scarcely even from the man of science himself. Indeed
it is hardly a distinct branch of science, for all that is
really relevant in it, is contained in the physical and
mental sciences. And it is interesting to note how
meagre a place history occupies in the constructions of
philosophy. In most philosophic systems, history can
scarcely be said to have a place of its own at all. They are
metaphysics of nature or of mind, and they would be just
as valid, if the whole of humanity were contracted to one
single individual with no human life behind, around or
before him. 3 Says Troeltsch : " Down to the time of
1 Bultmann. Jesus, p. 8.
8 Article on Historiography in 'Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.
196 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Herder and Hegel modern philosophy either took no
account of history at all, and abandoned it to historians
litterateurs or theologians; or else brought historical
occurrences under a causal conception which was simply
that of natural science philosophically generalized." It
is true that a change has set in to some extent in this respect
of late, a change to which Troeltsch's own work has
contributed in no small degree. Nevertheless it still
remains true that history as such occupies but a meagre
place in philosophical thought. And to the ordinary
scientist, it would appear as if the behaviour of atoms and
electrons had a definite and positive significance for the
interpretation of reality, while the behaviour of men in
society and in history had none at all.
Now this is very singular. And even more singular
than the fact itself, is it that the singularity of this fact
is so rarely remarked on. The humanism of our time,
as in Bertrand Russell for example, naively abstracts
history as such from the material of philosophy and treats
it as if it were of little or no account. The study of
history comes to have little more than a pragmatic value.
It is useful as suggesting human values ; but these are
regarded from the philosophical and metaphysical point
of view scarcely as phenomena, but rather as epi-
phenomena, things that have no vital and essential place
in any scheme of interpretation of the world. That an
act is as meaningful as a fact whether of physics or
psychology, is, in not a few quarters, regarded as scarcely
worthy of discussion. If action be taken into account
at all, it is regarded as a datum to be subjected to
psychological analysis, a mere thing, an object merely to
be inspected ; and the fact is lost sight of that to treat
it in this fashion, is to misconceive its peculiar and unique
nature and quality. The philosopher when he deals with
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 197
history too often loses sight of the truth, which elsewhere
is regarded as a first principle in science, that his methods
must be determined by the material with which he is
dealing. To treat the correlation of acts within society
as one would treat the behaviour of electrons within an
atom, or even the relations of states of consciousness
within a subject, is a deed of sheer violence. Action
implies as its correlative, not merely detached, impartial
and objective investigation, but something in the nature
of personal response and personal decision. The
investigator is himself involved in the study of action,
as he is not in that of physics or even of psychology. His
response to what confronts him is of a different nature.
He is, as Bultmann says, " addressed."
Now it is against the banishment of history from the
material of scientific and philosophical construction, that
the much discussed book of Spengler, The Decline of the
West, is a weighty protest. Truly the question arises
even here, whether history is truly reached, and indeed
the main interest of the book from our point of view
gathers round that question. But it would be scarcely
an exaggeration to say that this book is the first thorough-
going attempt to construct a philosophy which is based on
history itself, and not a mere philosophy of history drawn
from science or metaphysics. Hegel's philosophy of
history in reality abolishes history. History disappears
in the dialectic of the idea. History is treated as a vast
rational process in which man as such disappears. The
idea abstracted from all action, from all real event, deploys
itself in such a way that its logic gathers all history into
itself. The time-process is a mere index of the logical
198 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
idea of becoming. The idea abstracted from all event
and from every real subject is everything. Man as such
never appears upon the field. Real history does not come
into view. Spengler, however, attempts to take history
in real earnest, indeed in such earnest that everything else
disappears. His book marks a reaction, probably a one-
sided reaction, but a very necessary one against all
philosophy of mere being, every attempt to interpret
reality which would lose sight of real becoming in the
sense of real action. He is very contemptuous of our
modern psychology which leaves the psychologist as a
mere spectator, a mere analyser of states of consciousness.
History is for him the one real subject of philosophy.
Every branch of science and philosophy is for him both
included and concluded in the philosophy of history. He
will not allow any independent value to physical science
or metaphysical system as such. They belong to the
morphology of history. They are historical existences,
historical products, and can only be truly understood and
appraised in that light. Their validity is relative to the
stage of historical becoming to which they belong and
in which they appear. Very noteworthy, in this con-
nection, is his criticism of modern nature science. He
asserts that it is subjective through and through. And the
subject who reads himself and his own nature into the
material with which he is dealing, is no pure subject who
can be isolated from his place in history. The subject is
himself an historical product. He is, as Bultmann says,
though in a sense very different from that of Spengler,
" a piece of history." He is the subject standing at a
certain point in history, so that he cannot himself function
save in the historical position in which he stands. Such
scientific theories, for example, as evolution in the
Darwinian sense, or relativity, or the quantum theory
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 199
could only have appeared when they did. They belong
to the special historical formation of a special historical
stage. The subject cannot be considered in himself;
there is no " in himself." Removed from his historical
context, he has no meaning and no real existence. And
what is said of nature-philosophy is applicable to every
aspect of life and thought. Art, poetry, music, sculpture,
architecture, law, political and social theory, religion, all
receive their nature, character, colour, from the complex
of historical forces which determine the stage of any
particular culture. No science, philosophy, social theory
or religion, no school of art, poetry, music, sculpture,
can be judged by the canons of pure objectivity. It
cannot be isolated from its place in history, and treated,
as it were, on its merits. There is no objective standard,
standing above the flow and flux of historical becoming
and change, to which it can be referred. It arises as a
specialised expression of the culture to which it belongs,
and has meaning and worth only in the context of that
culture. History here thrusts itself forward in an all-
commanding fashion. It asserts itself in a completely
sovereign way. It would seem as if it were striving to
avenge itself of its long neglect as material for philosophy,
by claiming that it alone was worthy of the attention of
the serious thinker.
Spengler's book has scarcely been seen in its true
significance, at any rate in this country. Indeed it has
been rather patronisingly dismissed, in spite of the
tributes that have been paid to the immense range of
learning and the sweeping power of generalisation which
it reveals. There are, of course, many reasons for this.
Idealists and social reformers were repelled by its dark
pessimism. Workers in special departments of history
found themselves put off from a calm consideration of its
200 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
main thesis by numerous inaccuracies of fact in the book.
Scientists could scarcely be expected to welcome a
philosophy which so fundamentally undermined confi-
dence in their methods and results. And philosophers
could hardly tolerate a theory of knowledge which called
all knowledge in question, and made the problem of
epistemology so unpleasantly acute. In Spengler,
' knowing ' itself is an historical product, an aspect, a
side, of historical becoming, historical action. The
paradox of the situation is that Spengler himself
recognises that his own philosophy could only have
arisen just how and when it did. It is possible to-day, at
this stage of the particular culture in which we stand. It
would not have been possible yesterday, and it will not
be possible to-morrow. It partakes of that relativism in
which every philosophy and science stands. How can
we be expected to bow down before such an apotheosis
of scepticism ?
Spengler's book is none the less significant. It is
even a portent, and a portent which thinkers will not do
well to ignore. It is a portent because it thrusts history
right into the forefront and makes it call all our so-called
objective knowledge in question. That history thereby
rinds itself called in question, is a suggestion which
Spengler scarcely seems to have considered. Had he
done so in any thorough-going way, he might have been
disposed to bestow some attention upon the idea of
revelation in its eschatological sense. He might, that is,
have asked himself whether this field of historical
becoming and historical action, might not itself be subject
to a transcendent activity which abrogates history as such,
just as history, in this philosophy, abrogates science as
such. But inasmuch as his theory does take history in
earnest, does thrust it into the foreground, does make it
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 2OI
the material of all true scientific and philosophical
thought, inasmuch also as it raises questions which make
the idea of revelation, as we have been considering it,
specially relevant, it will be necessary to subject it to a
little further examination. We have to ask ourselves
does history after all really appear in this scheme ? Every-
thing is done to make it appear, but do we really get to
history ? Do we reach man ? Spengler will not let us rest
in mere things, mere objects, not even in the objects with
which psychology deals. He will have us reach beyond
these to man and action. But does he get to man after
all ? Does man emerge as man ?
The main thesis of Spengler's book is well-known.
According to it, the subject-matter of history consists of
a number of independent, autonomous cultures, each of
which has its own appointed term of growth, maturity
and decay. Each of these cultures has its own peculiar
physiognomy, its soul-shape as it were, and the soul-
shape manifests itself in every department of its life.
Thus the religion, science, art and philosophy of any
culture are but special manifestations of its particular
soul, and cannot be understood excepting in relation to
the culture as a whole. Accordingly, a particular stage
in the culture can be paralleled with the corresponding
stage of another and previous culture, and even an out-
standing personality in one culture may find its parallel
with that in another. Cromwell, for example was but
the soul of old Pythagoras and old Mahomet taking shape
under the conditions prescribed by the period of Western
culture under which he lived, and under the peculiar
physiognomy of that culture. There are indeed cross-
sections between the cultures, pseudo-morphoses
202 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Spengler calls them, which compel a young and nascent
culture to flow into the mould left behind by a dead or
decaying one. But these pseudo-morphoses, though they
may affect the external direction in which the culture flows,
do not really determine its nature. They introduce a certain
amount of contingency into the schematism of history,
but they do not fundamentally change its character.
Pseudo-morphoses are accidental, contingent phenomena
which need to be noted, but not to be taken into serious
account so far as the general philosophy of history is
concerned. One culture may affect another, but only as
to its outward form, not as to its inward and essential
content. Now the concluding stage of each culture is
what Spengler calls a civilisation. Each culture after a
flowering period in which types of religion, art, science,
law, philosophy, political and social theory and so on,
are manifested, each and all exhibiting in their different
ways the same fundamental characteristics which belong
to the specific nature of the culture itself and make it
different from any other, begins to lose its vitality, its
creativeness, and to harden and petrify in a civilisation.
And the distinctive character of the civilisation, as over
against the culture proper, is abstraction and intellec-
tualism, theory and the mechanisation of life. The
intellect becomes detached, as it were, from the soul and
becomes a mere tool. Creativeness gives place to
analysis, criticism, organisation. Men cease to live, to
feel, to act in a free spontaneous fashion and set to work
to organise, to criticise, to classify and arrange. Thought
becomes more and more abstract. It becomes not the
expression of life but a mere diagram of life. Man loses
character, creativeness, real humanness. He groups
himself in great cities in which he becomes lost, a mere
cog in a great machine. His poetry and art lose their
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 203
inspiration. His religion turns to criticism and mere
ethical theory. His science becomes a thing of
abstractions and formulae which are manipulated with
an ever increasing degree of complexity and abstract
ingenuity until they lose all real contact with experience.
They become signs and symbols, whereby indeed man
finds himself able to work with the universe as with a
machine and so to achieve great practical results ; but for
presenting anything in the nature of a picture of reality,
they are useless. Great systems of religion and philosophy
dissolve under the acid of this imperious intellectualism.
In their construction they represented what Eucken has
described as great life-energies, life-movements, power-
ful spiritual concentrations, but these being absent,
philosophy loses its creativeness and declines to criti-
cism and abstraction. Of course the particular form and
direction which this process takes, will be determined
by the particular type of culture. But always life and
thought lose their spontaneity and power in a bloodless
and devitalised intellectualism. Before, however, the
the civilisation ends in complete petrifaction, the soul of
the culture asserts itself once more, though feebly in
comparison with the period of its growth and maturity.
There is a kind of Indian summer, or to vary the figure,
the dying candle spurts up again before going out. This
shows itself in a phenomenon which Spengler calls " the
second religiousness." In this, men cease to think and
criticise and simply abandon themselves to the desire to
believe. Religion arises again, not indeed in its ancient
power, but in something comparable thereto. It is
interesting to note that Spengler regards religion as of
the very centre of every culture. The soul of a culture
shows itself most clearly and most significantly in its
religion, and the type of religion will determine the
204 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
character of every department of its life including its
science. Every attack of science on religion, therefore,
says Spengler, recoils on science like a boomerang. In
undermining its religion, science is digging its own grave.
But the conflict between science and religion belongs to
the period in which the culture is passing over into the
civilisation : and religion and life avenge themselves
before passing down into extinction, in this phenomenon
of the second religiousness.
Here then history is made the be-all and end-all. It
is not merely that science and philosophy cannot be
adequately understood apart from history, it is that history
is their very stuff and substance, ^s Spengler says,
" The claim of higher thought to possess general and
eternal truths falls to the ground. Truths are truths
only in relation to a particular mankind. Thus, my own
philosophy is able to express and reflect only the Western
(as distinct from the Classical, Indian, or other) soul, and
that soul only, in its present civilised phase by which its
conception of the world, its practical range and its sphere
of effect are specified." He considers it to be the last
great task of our civilisation to construct 2 " a morphology
of the exact sciences which shall discover how all laws,
concepts and theories inwardly hang together as forms
and what they have meant as such in the life-course of
the Faustian Culture" (which is his name for our
culture now passing into decline). Here then Schiller's
well-known saying that the history of the world is the
judgment of the world gains a strange and ironical
significance.
And yet the question must be pressed, is history reached
after all ? Does man appear in this outlook ? Are we
1 The Decline of the West, Vol. I, English Translation, p. 46.
2 Ibid., p. 425.
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 205
confronted in history with anything essentially different
from what we find in nature ? Apparently not. Spengler
says that the sphere of history is to be distinguished from
that of nature, *" as to form, not substance." The same
rigid determinism holds, in history as well as in nature.
We may perhaps pass by the paradox that the very
interpretation which Spengler gives to history is itself an
aspect of the culture in which he lives and moves. One
indeed asks in perplexity, is this system of morpho-
logical relationships to be taken as objective truth, or
is it simply the expression of a certain stage of a particular
culture ? Does this Western culture, in centra-distinction
to all previous ones, strike up against general and
universal truth in this interpretation of history, or does
it merely give final expression to its own inner essence ?
Spengler's attitude to this question is curiously ambiguous.
2 He says : " The morphology of world-history becomes
inevitably a universal symbolism." But symbolism of
what ? Of the real nature of world-history or of one
particular phase, one culture, of world-history ? He tells
us in his preface : " I can then call the essence of what I
have discovered ' true ' that is, trm for me, and as I
believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time ;
not true in itself as dissociated from the conditions
imposed by blood and by history, for that is impossible." 3
This " unphilosophical philosophy," 4 as Spengler calls
it, is declared to be the true scepticism in the sense that
it is real ' skepsis,' that is, seeing : but are we to be
sceptical in this sense of the philosophy itself, are we to
see it only as a subjective thing ? Very elusive in this
respect is Spengler's discussion of the relation of a
morphology of world-history to philosophy. We under-
1 The Decline of the West, Vol. I, p. 6. s Ibid., p. 46.
3 Ibid., p. xiii. 4 Ibid., p. 45.
206 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
stand how it leads to the conclusion that there are no
eternal truths, that every philosophy is the expression of
its own time, " and if by philosophy we mean effective
philosophy and not academic triflings about judgment-
forms, sense-categories and the like no two ages possess
the same philosophic intentions." 1 But is the truth in
the light of which we reach this conclusion itself not an
eternal truth, but only a truth relative to a particular
stage of a particular culture ?
But waiving for the moment this apparent contradic-
tion and accepting provisionally this absolute historicism,
we still press our question, is history really reached ? We
note first of all that these cultures which Spengler passes
under review are completely independent of one another
in their essential nature. They are not connected together
in any causal way. Each culture arises from the un-
plumbed depths of life. They spring up like flowers in
a garden. Between the cultures there is no continuity,
but essential discontinuity. They all, however, follow
the same laws, and they follow them so closely that a
complete morphology of history can be constructed. But
have we not here that very method of abstraction which
is the method of physical science and on which Spengler
pours so much philosophical scorn ? Science, it has been
often pointed out, cannot deal with the individual. It
abstracts from the individual that which it has in common
with other individuals, and on the basis of such abstraction
constructs its picture of reality. Does not Spengler treat
history in the same way ? He pays attention, it is true, to
the individual cultures, but only that he may abstract from
them the features that they have in common. And
within the particular culture itself, the individual
phenomena are not regarded as significant in themselves,
1 7he Decline of the West,Vo\. I, p. 41.
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 2.OJ
but only by virtue of the fact that they are all illustrations
and manifestations of the soul-quality or the soul-shape
belonging to the culture as a whole. The modern
scientist would doubtless defend his method on the
ground that real and practical results follow from it, that,
to use Spengler's own words, he is able to work with
nature as with a machine. And Spengler would defend
his method on essentially the same ground, namely that
it helps a man to live, that is to adjust himself to the epoch
and stage in which his life is cast. But there is a serious
deduction to be made from this apologetic. In science
real results are forthcoming. Man is able to some extent,
and indeed to a great extent, to make the powers of nature
serve his own purposes ; in history he is not so able, for
whether he sees the situation of his own epoch and
adjusts himself to it, or whether he does not, is but
incident, for he cannot bend history to his purposes, he
cannot really utilise the powers and forces of history as
he can those of nature. History confronts him at last
as an iron-bound system, even more iron-bound than
nature.
But there is another feature of Spengler's philosophy
which calls for comment. It is that of periodicity. Each
culture has its period of growth, maturity and decay, and
this period is irrevocably fixed for it by an inner deter-
minism. This is similar to the ancient view of history as
cyclic and it is noteworthy that Spengler confesses his
indebtedness to Nietzsche who preached the doctrine of
eternal recurrence. Certainly Spengler's view is different
from Nietzsche's, but fundamentally it is connected there-
with. Now what is this idea of periodicity but a
nature-concept? We are not arguing here that it is
untrue. We are simply concerned to point out that if
history be subject to the law of periodicity, and if this be
208 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the last tmth about it, it is in no essential way different
from nature. If periodicity be true, then nothing really
happens in history. We are not concerned with
happenings, only with processes. The alleged event is
but a point, a moment in a process. It is not wonderful
that Spengler should end in complete scepticism. History
with him is as dumb as nature. It never speaks, for
nothing really happens.
But finally in this construction, real man is never
reached at all. History is not the story of man. Man
has no essential place in the scheme. For first of all,
man's life is subject to an iron determinism. The
determinism of law in nature becomes a dark and dread-
ful fate in history. Man cannot really respond to address,
cannot really act, all he can do in the end, is to adjust his
life to the determinations which govern its course. It
is not he that counts, or he that acts. A certain mysticism
hangs over the theory. Indeed Spengler's book is
powerfully tinged with mysticism. He speaks much
about the " All." He talks of a culture returning to
its " spiritual home." And mysticism everywhere is
the negation of history. Moreover, individuality and
personality disappear in this construction, though they
are everywhere spoken of, for a great creative personality
is only a ' moment ' in the process of a culture. He is not
unique, for he can be seen as identical in substance with a
personality in a parallel stage of another and previous
culture. Pythagoras, Mahomet and Cromwell are but
expressions of one and the same process. They appear
as individualised concretions of the same process at a
certain stage of its unfolding. If they are creative, it is
only in the sense that they embody creative ' moments '
in a process. The man as such, as individual, as person-
ality is negligible. It is easy to see the influence on Spengler
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 209
of Nietzsche's conception of the superman. The
superman is not really man at all, he is man simply as the
outstanding instrument of an all-determining process,
man as ' power,' as a mighty irresistible force which is not
essentially different from a nature force. There are men,
Spengler tells us, in whom the life-urge is dominant and
all-compelling, who care nothing for truth or right,
because they instinctively know that life has finally
nothing to do with these abstractions. And on the other
hand, there are those who renounce the world, who deny
that the whole world-process has any ultimate validity
or right, and who live in an invisible, metaphysical other
world which has no continuity with the world of out-
ward happenings. There are ' fact ' men, and there are
' truth ' men. These two types of men are, he tells us,
whole men, men to be admired. It is those who fancy
that the order of the world can be changed, who will
neither whole-heartedly accept the world nor reject it,
who are to be despised. " No faith yet has altered the
world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith." 1 It is
interesting to note that Spengler puts Jesus supreme
among the c truth ' men, and speaks of him with great
reverence and admiration. He was, says Spengler,
metaphysical to the very core of his being. Historical
actuality had no meaning for him, for his inner being
lived wholly in the invisible, other world, and he never
supposed for one moment that he could influence the
course of history. For him empirical existence was not
to be altered, improved and reformed but to be abrogated.
It is strange how close Spengler comes here to that
conception of revelation with which we have been
dealing. One thing is lacking, a fundamental thing, and
if it were present, it would make all the difference to this
1 Vol. n, p. 216.
o
210 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
construction of history, namely any belief in the Holy
Spirit. That term, a transcendent term indeed, would
link up the invisible metaphyscial world of transcendence
with the world of historical actuality. This latter world
would still retain a relative independence and autonomy
of its own ; and much of Spengler's historicism would
be left standing, while as whole it would be brought
under a revolutionising criticism and judgment far more
thorough than any that could come from the side of
philosophy. But for lack of that term, Spengler is
thrown back upon the * fact ' man as alone expressing any
reality with which we have to do. And the ' fact ' man
is not really human, he is but the instrument of a cosmic
power which is none other at bottom than a nature power.
On all sides then, Spengler's philosophy sinks down into
mere nature-science. His morphology of history is but
nature-science writ large and moving in another element
than that of nature. It is not necessarily on that account
to be dismissed as untrue, but it is to be recognised in its
true character. Everything is done to give history a
meaning, and the final result is essential meaningless-
ness. History is acclaimed as the one real science,
regulating and evaluating all scientific activity, but real
history is discovered at length not to be there. For what
makes history history, namely man, is found to be merely
a specified determination of a world-process ; accordingly,
a mere thing, a datum to be investigated, a concentration
of force, an embodiment of natural law. And the very
morphology of history which is supposed to be the
supreme criticism of scientific abstraction, is found to be
possible only in that field where such abstraction can fully
express itself. Moreover this very morphology, as we
have already said, is itself subject to the judgment of
history. The world-process produces it, and then
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 211
apparently casts it away. Like all science it is but an
instrument, and an instrument which has only temporal
and relative value.
Our justification for so lengthy a notice of Spengler's
thesis, lies in the fact that it indicates the direction in
which modern philosophy of history in general seems to
be travelling. That is to say, the modern study of history
taken in earnest is moving towards subjectivism,
relativism and scepticism. Troeltsch for example, who
was perhaps the outstanding champion of the attempt to
discover transcendental truth in history, became more and
more relativist, the further research and reflection led him.
He espoused the idea of what he called " polymorphous
truth," truth, that is, of many sides where the sides are so
different from one another that they can never be brought
together in the mind and consciousness of man. This
truth is different for different times and different people.
Nowhere is the absolute met with, and scarcely is any
meeting of the absolute conceivable. The very mind of
man seems to be different at different times and with
different races and cultures. In other words we scarcely
reach the concept ' man ' at all ; we have to do simply
with men who are so different from one another in their
world-outlook and world-feeling, that their nature can
hardly be brought under a common category. Troeltsch
believed that in this he yet succeeded in guarding himself
against mere subjectivism and ultimate scepticism. But
did he in principle ? It is difficult to see how this is
possible. Troeltsch maintained, to quote the words of
Baron von Hugel, "that this chameleon-like truth
this truth utterly different for different times and races
is nevertheless Truth and Life in very deed, and forms
212 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
a reliable vehicle for God to man, and for man to God."
" But," asks the Baron, pertinently indeed, " how can
this be?" 1
The fact is, that the direction pursued so remorselessly
by Spengler and in a qualified sense by Troeltsch and the
modern philosophy of history generally, must raise the
question : are we not compelled to look beyond empirical
history if we would discover real history ? Is history as
empirically known and empirically experienced, real
history? Does not the frame- work of empiric history
need to be broken through, before history in its real
meaning and significance can arise ? We may put the
question in another form ; is the empiric man, the man
we know, real man ? Has he yet attained true humanness ?
Are not the terms * history ' and ' man ' terms which
derive their true significance from beyond the world,
from the transcendent order, and only from this world
so far as this world has been met by another ? Is not the
true man only such in faith, in that totality act in which
he steps, as it were, above and outside his empirical
existence ? And is not history real, only in so far as it stands
in the light and the power of the resurrection, the new"
life which is above and beyond this life and which yet
can become a real power in this life ? In a word, is not
Christ the one hope of the world ? Is it not he and he
alone who can give to history true actuality, and to man
true humanity ? We have an instinctive feeling that life,
our own personal life, has about it a greater promise than
it ever realises or can ever realise in its actual course ;
and that history holds a greater promise than the actual
1 Introduction to Troeltsch's Christian Thought, by Baron von Hiigel,
p. xx.
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 213
course of history can manifest and express. But they
hold that promise not in themselves here Spengler and
the relativists are right but in virtue of the fact that
between actual life and the actual world on the one hand,
and real life and the real eternal world on the other, there
is a link, there is a bond, in itself a transcendent link and
bond, the Holy Spirit. It is that element in life and the
world, not as a power working immanently in the
evolution of history, but as a transcendent power whose
nature is crisis and new creation which really brings to
light the terms ' man ' and ' history ' in their true signi-
ficance, and will not let us rest in any philosophy which
would drag these terms down to mere nature concepts.
And if it be true that life and history have more promise
in them than can be realised in their actual course, if, in
other words, the Holy Spirit be a reality, we shall turn to
the tasks of life and history with new heart and hope.
We shall not believe that what always has been, can
prescribe what always must be. We shall believe that
the new is always possible, and that real achievements can
be secured. And at the same time our striving and our
hope will not be at the mercy of the results which our
efforts may achieve. We shall know that the consum-
mation of history lies always beyond actual history, in
the kingdom of God of which all that happens in time is
but a collection of hints and parables. The mere idealist
will be simply disillusioned and crushed when his projects
and causes collapse. He will feel that he has been led on
by a spirit of mockery and illusion ; or if he search more
deeply, he may feel with Spengler that a dark and mystic
fate, against which there is no appeal, stands over the
ways of men. But the man of faith, the man who knows
that humanity has been touched by the power and promise
of the Kingdom of God, will understand that the promise
214 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
of history lies always beyond its mere possibilities, and so
he will continue at his tasks while life shall last. He will
know that, however much he may achieve or however
little, he will live and die in faith, " not having received
the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from
afar " (Hebrews xi, 1 3, R.V.) he will live and die without
having seen the real promise, the full and final promise of
history. May we not see here the profound and devas-
tating error of all merely secular idealism ? There is
a sense in which Spengler is justified in treating it with
contempt. The secular idealist identifies the promise of
history with the mere possibilities of history. He feels
that there is no more in history than it is capable of
realising and reaching in its actual course. And the
result is that while secular idealism begins as idealism, it
ends in a brutal and crushing tyranny, as we may see in
the case of Russia to-day. Since history disappoints him,
the secular idealist will by means of brute force strive to
impose his ideals upon mankind. He will tyrannically
attempt to make the world correspond to his ideals. But
the man of faith knows that the promise of history far
transcends any achievement which history can reach in
its actual course. That understanding both makes him
believe that real achievements are possible, and must
therefore be striven for, and at the same time makes him
understand that however things may turn out, whether
in success or in failure, there is a great future beyond all
time and history in which our broken achievements are
gathered up, placed as it were in a new setting, and for ever
secured. He will " learn to labour and to wait."
Our relativists then, such as Spengler and Troeltsch, are
right in the sense that in the mere course of actual, empiric
history, neither true history, nor true manhood openly
discloses itself. These things are indeed there, because
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 215
Christ is there and the Holy Spirit is there, but no mere
induction from history can reach the real essence of
history. There may be much in actual fact which seems
to support these inductions, but they no more give us a
true picture of history, than the inductions of the scientists
give us a true picture of nature. As world-views they
rise and they pass, and Spengler is guided by a true
instinct when he apprehends that his own historical
world-view possesses only a relative validity and a passing
significance. The true man is the " man from heaven,"
Jesus Christ, and the actual man is only the true man as
he is united with Jesus Christ by faith ; and the true
history arises only in so far as actual history is capable of
illustrating the power and reality of the Kingdom of God.
How far it is capable of doing that, no man can say
a priori. But that it is capable of doing it to some extent
and to a very real extent, is a conviction that arises from
the new understanding which faith brings, a conviction
that arises from the mind of the Spirit. In Christ " there
is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircum-
cision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free ; but Christ is
all and in all " (Col. iii, 1 1). And this, not simply because
Christ is the all-inclusive man, but because he is the ' new '
man, the man from heaven, and because in faith man stands
as it were outside of and above his empiric humanity and
becomes for the first time, true man. The same thought is
contained in those great words in the Epistle to the
Ephesians " he is our peace who hath made both (that is,
Jew and Gentile) one " (Ephesians ii, 14). Man as Jew,
and as Gentile, man in the empirical actuality of his life, is
not yet real man. Only in faith, in Christ, in the Holy
Spirit, does man stand outside and above his empirical
existence and become for the first time really and truly man.
The new man is not the actual man enlarged, the Jew or
Zl6 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the Gentile enlarged so as to include one another, but the
actual man standing in the crisis of faith, the new man be-
tween whom and the old man there is no visible rational
continuity but only transcendent divine continuity, that
continuity which is expressed by the New Testament term
the Holy Spirit. In that relation there lies a new possibility
for history. The fact of Christ, the appearing of the new
man from heaven, makes history in the true sense possible.
Brunner has pointed out that the sense of history as we
possess it, comes from Christianity. He says : " For the
man of antiquity all temporal happening is a cyclic motion
like the periodicity of nature ; it has no beginning and no
end. If you look at the totality of it you must say :
nothing happens because the end is like the beginning,
or better, there is neither end nor beginning. Time has
no direction. If we Occidentals have another conception
of history, it is because of Christianity. In fact, it is just
that central importance of Jesus Christ in history, to
which we have been pointing. Through faith in Jesus
Christ, through this strange belief that eternity has
appeared in time and truth has become, history acquires a
middle, and with this middle a beginning and an end,
consequently a definite direction. Jesus Christ, so the
believer says, is the turning-point of time, and because
of Him we see the world moving towards an end. By
the fact that He enters time in the middle, with His
absolute weight of eternity, time is stretched out, whilst
before it was rolled up in a circle. Now something has
happened for eternity, and through it the before and the
after are no more meaningless, but infinitely significant.
Through Him there is decision for the world and for every
single man." 1
1 The Word and the World, pp. 54-55.
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 21 7
A contribution of real value for the Christian
interpretation of history has been made by Barth in his
conception of Urges fhiehte. 1 It is unfortunate that we
have no exact English equivalent for the word. 2 Mr.
Birch Hoyle renders the term ' pre-history.' The draw-
back of that rendering is that it brings the idea of time
too much in the forefront and suggests that we are merely
concerned with something which took place before
history. 3 Dr. McConnachie uses the term ( revelation-
history ' which is perhaps as good as any that may be
found. Its only drawback is that it tends to suggest
that a portion of history may be, merely as such,
revelation. Super-history, corresponding to the
significance of the word supernatural in the world of
nature, would perhaps be the best term to use, were it
not that the impression might gain currency that we
have to do with something taking place in a region which
never touches actual history, a transcendental world of
ideas and forms after the Platonic model. By Urgeschichte
is meant that point in actual and empirical history where
reality in its approach to man, as it were, definitely arrives,
where it speaks to man, makes him the subject of address,
and elicits from him that response of faith in which his
whole being is involved in crisis. Thus revelation is
urgeschichtlich) super-historical. It is not historical in
the ordinary sense, for no piece of history as such can be
revelation. Nevertheless it is in history, for revelation
is no mere mystical experience but a real coming of God,
a divine event which is a world event. The idea of
Urgescbichte seems to be necessary. For first, as we have
seen, revelation is eschatological. It is an end event,
not in the sense that it is the last event in an historical
1 See Barth, Dogtnatik, pp. 230-240. 8 The Theology of Karl Earth.
3 The Significance of Karl Earth.
21 8 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
series, but in the sense that it is the once-for-all event, the
intrusion into temporal history of the new world from
above, the event which brings all history under crisis and
judgment and disqualifies it as such for the Kingdom of
God. The Kingdom of God is not the goal of historical
evolution not the emergence of divine forces latent in
the process of history. It is the new world of God, and
must come, in and through the action of God Himself.
The revelation event which betokens this is not there-
fore an historical but a super-historical, an urgeschicht-
lich event.
The same position is reached when we note the content
of revelation. Revelation, as we have seen, is given in
the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These events
possess as revelation, a content and a meaning which do
not belong to their character as historical events. The
death of Christ is the divine atonement for human sin,
the covering of the world's guilt and sin. But whence does
it derive this tremendous significance ? Clearly in no way
from its character merely as an historical event. There
can be no connection from any historical point of view
between the death of a man and a final treatment of sin
and guilt. Historically a death may be a great deed of
human courage, devotion, sacrifice. It may possess a
value for life in that it exerts a quickening and uplifting
influence on those who hear about it and are affected by
it. But that it should possess this supreme, all-decisive,
final significance in relation to the world's sin and guilt
is from the standpoint of mere historical consideration
quite impossible.
It is clear, therefore, that in the death of Christ there
is a divine significance which is quite other than its
historic significance. The spiritual content of an
historical event, the influences and effects which follow
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 219
it on the historical plane all this is of a different nature
from any content of revelation which may be in it. The
revelationary content springs from the fact that it is the
point at which a movement coming down from God
and God's world arrives.
Since God comes down into the region of man's sin
and death, draws infinitely near, places Himself where
these things react upon Him, where they enter, we may
say, into His experience, man's sin is covered and for-
giveness and redemption assured. Inasmuch as God
travels the distance which sin puts between man and
Himself, inasmuch as by a miracle completely beyond
human imagining, holiness comes right into the
experience of a sinful race, then in the very midst of the
evil there is the promise and the power of the good. But
it is this divine coming, this travelling of the distance,
this movement from the yonder to the here, which is the
revelationary event, not the mere historical deed of
heroism or sacrifice. Nevertheless the two are con-
nected together. The historical content of the deed,
and the urgeschichtlich, revelationary, super-historic,
content bear a relation to one another. x The deed as
heroism and sacrifice is not thrown away. Revelation
makes it clear that human achievements have their value.
History is shown to be no vale of illusion, no field of
empty strivings, no region of futile achievement. History
in the light of Urgeschichte is seen to possess value,
meaning, purpose. But in the light of Urgeschichte ^ in
its relation to Urgeschichte \ Apart from that relation it
possesses at last no meaning or value. But that relation
exists and abides. The events and values of history stand
in relation to the divine life and the divine righteousness.
What then may we say about the nature of this relation ?
1 See note at end of Chapter.
220 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
First we may say, that in no way is historical event
and historical value to be identified with divine event and
divine value. The movements of history, even the
greatest and the best, must not be identified with the
movements of the Spirit of God. No event and no value
is a pure creation of the Spirit. We may speak, of course,
of God in history, but always with the proviso that God
means one thing and history another. A divine move-
ment in history is in reality a divine movement to history.
The historical significance and content is different from
the divine significance and content. Much too lightly
do we speak of some specific movement in history
as being of God, anii therefore to be simply accepted,
and whole-heartedly co-operated with. An historical
movement may bear a very definite reference to the divine
working, but experience alone will show that as it
develops, it exhibits features and leads to results which
are evil as well as good. It has continually to be acted
upon both critically and creatively if it is really to
maintain its divine reference. Apart from the infusion
into it of critical and creative power from without and
from above, it deteriorates, hardens, turns to evil. This
can be seen in all the great and beneficent movements of
of history. They have in spite of all their value a nisus
towards evil. They cannot be allowed to run on,
through their own momentum, evolve through their own
innate life and power. The evolution of history is per se
the evolution of sin. We may pause to note, by the way,
what a double-edged weapon in the armoury of the
religious apologist is the argument from development.
That argument as used by Newman and the Catholic
modernists in defence of the Roman Catholic Church
is apt to turn itself against its users. The fact that a
specific type of religion though different from its origins
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 221
is yet a genuine historical development therefrom, should
bring it under careful scrutiny and criticism rather than
secure for it prompt and ready acceptance and vindication.
The argument from development is on the whole an
argument against rather than an argument for. Every-
thing historical is suspect, and under judgment. The
divine and the historical are never identical.
We may say then that what man and history put into or
draw from an event is never the same thing as what God
puts into it or draws from it. And we may say moreover
that the relation of the event, in its divine meaning and
content, to the event in its historical meaning and content
is always that of crisis and new creation. The event
merely as historical event has, so to speak, to be done away,
that it may become divine event. It must not simply
evolve and carry on through its own momentum. Thus
even the death of Christ must cease to be simply historical,
simply a moving event of human heroism, sacrifice and
obedience. It must as historical be infused with the
creativeness of the Spirit, whereby its significance as
divine event may reach man's consciousness, come home
to him as judgment and bring to him grace, forgiveness
and reconciliation with God. It must be lifted out of its
context in the past, and become present, living word
and power and spirit.
We conclude then that history is established in relative
right, and its values and its goals are seen in the light of
revelation to have a divine reference. Historical effort
and achievement are very far from being vain and value-
less. Historical progress is very far from being an empty
dream. Real goals and real values may be, must be,
sought in history and real achievements may be secured.
And this precisely in virtue of the fact that over the whole
of history stands the final crisis of Urgeschichte. Just
222 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
because of that, crisis is seen to be the very meaning of
history, and crisis means new departure, new creation,
progress. It .will be seen, therefore, how much beside the
mark is the criticism that the conception of Urgeschichte
empties history of meaning and reduces the world to
illusion. It is all the other way about. Meaninglessness,
illusion, ' maya ', are the last terms that can be applied to
history in the light of Urgeschichte. In this light we may
emphasize and indeed shout from the house-tops the
words of the poet that " life is real, life is earnest," and
this because we take so seriously the words which follow,
" and the grave is not its goal." What does increasingly
tend to empty history of meaning is precisely the his-
torical temper and attitude. Where men take history in
itself and strive by means of an induction from its course
to construct a philosophy of history, just there relativism
and essential meaninglessness begin to lift up their heads.
And this is becoming increasingly evident to-day as we
saw in our examination of Spengler and Troeltsch. But
where history is set in critical and creative relation to
Urgeschichte , it gains a meaning and a value which no
mere induction can reveal in it.
And the further criticism 1 which has been made that
since history has been thus emptied, it is impossible to
get back behind it to Urgeschichte, falls to the ground.
For we do not first empty history of meaning and then
seek to get to some prototype of history called Urges-
chichte, Our contention is that Urgeschichte has arrived,
that revelation is here, and that therefore we see history
both in its positive and negative significance. We are
presented in the witness with a word and deed of God
which take the form of an historical event whose divine
content is yet other than its historical content. We find
1 Criticism of Schreiner quoted by Birch Hoyle, p. 268.
THE SPIRIT AND HISTORY 223
a point of departure whereby we can see history in its
relation to the Kingdom of God. In so far as history is
negative, its negativity is seen in the light of the revelation
event and seen in that light it turns into a new positivity.
It draws its value not out of itself but out of its relation
to the Kingdom of God, the urgeschichtlicb fact and
reality. What criticises history is precisely the Holy
Spirit, the creativity of God, which will not let history
just stand, or just evolve through the impetus of its im-
manent laws and forces. History as the point of
departure for creative Spirit is alone real history.
NOTE. By the historical content is meant that which the
deed must possess for the observer, not, of course, that
which it possesses for the doer. We do not mean that
the death of Jesus was to himself simply a deed of
sacrifice and martyrdom. The precise content which his
death possessed for himself as historical man is, of
course, impossible for us to determine. Precisely how he
interpreted it we do not know, save that the evidence all
points in the direction that he saw in it a deed of atoning
obedience. Indeed how could he have done otherwise,
since the event was really an ttrgeschicktlich event ? But
we mean that the event simply as it falls on the plane of
history and works in an historical way, by means of
historic effect and impression, cannot get beyond self-
sacrifice, courage, martyrdom in its significance.
CHAPTER VII
THE SPIRIT AND GOD
THE doctrine of the Holy Spirit when taken in earnest
leads to the conclusion that revelation means always and
everywhere God Himself and God alone. Revelation is
God Himself in person, God Himself speaking. Both in
its giving and its receiving we have to do with the
presence and the action of God Himself. No statements
about God are as such revelation ; no statements, that is
which may be taken and considered in themselves and
apart from God Himself in His living, personal address
to the soul of man, His personal light-bringing and
response-creating action. All such statements arise from
ideas and reflections which we draw out of the word of
God, and their truth nature is always relative. Their
value lies in the measure in which they are capable of
becoming the materials for a direct word of God Himself
which creates from man recognition and response. The
word of God leads us indeed to make many statements
about God, man, and the world. We build up from it a
Christian philosophy and a Christian theology. But all
this is in no way to be equated with revelation proper.
It is, in so far as it is truth, truth about revelation, it is
not revelation itself. The revelation is always the real
presence and action of God becoming seen, known and
responded to. Thus for example I may say, God com-
municates to man the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.
That is truth, but it is not yet revelation. To be
revelation, God Himself must say this to a man directly,
in and through the action on him of His Holy Spirit.
We may put it thus : only when by the holding up of Jesus
Christ in the word of the gospel, there is born in me the
224
THE SPIRIT AND GOD
recognition that I should not feel the sense of sin as I do, if
the eternal righteousness were not drawing near to me and
establishing contacts and connections with my life ; only
when I awaken to the realisation that my sense of sin and
my movement towards repentance are, in veriest reality,
God the eternal righteousness coming right to me, and
so on that very account are the movements of the divine
love and mercy and pardon, do I receive revelation. I
may say to a man, * Your sense of sin is itself the word
and promise of the divine forgiveness,' but my state-
ment is not, as such, the word of God. Indeed considered
as statement, it is highly dubious. It may become the word
of God to him, but that is not in virtue of any truth or
or value which it has merely in itself. Something must
happen to him, something which I and my words cannot
bring about, for the statement to become revelation. He
has to hear it as God's word. The living truth, the
living Spirit, has itself, has Himself, to become the truth.
That is to say, revelation involves an action and a
recognition and response which are wholly beyond the
power of what we call truth to bring about. Through
all our human words, the divine Spirit must function if
there is to be revelation.
Once more : I may say that God becomes man in Jesus
Christ, that in Christ we have the divine righteousness
under the form of human temptability, the divine life
under the form of human mortality. That is truth, but
it is not yet revelation. Only when in the light of the
gospel of the Incarnation, I awaken thoroughly to see
that the call of temptation is itself the louder call of God,
so that I shouldn't have this experience of temptation,
of standing in strain and tension were not the eternal
righteousness at work in my life the very strength of the
temptation being therefore on the other side of it the
226 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
power of God ; only when I recognise that my very sense
of death betokens the presence of the new divine life ;
only then, do I possess revelation and only then does the
statement that God in Christ became man, that He as-
sumed the form of human weakness, temptation and
death, become the word of God. These statements are
rationally and logically absurdities. The strength of
temptation is logically the power of evil ; the sense of
mortality is rationally the reaction set up in my mind by
the fact of death. But these can be brought home to my
consciousness in such a way that in and through them and
belonging to them as their inseparable other side I find the
power and the life of God. I cannot of myself bring these
things home to my consciousness in this way, nor can any
man do it for me. But it can get home to me in and
through the word and the Spirit of a God become man in
Christ, in and through the word of a divine righteousness
and a divine life under the form of human temptability and
death. The statement that God becomes man is not then
in itself revelation to me. Only as something happens
to me, only as the truth becomes reality, only as God
Himself speaks through His Spirit does revelation appear.
Revelation cannot be considered apart from the word of
God, that is, apart from God Himself speaking. And all
truth which is germane to revelation is truth which arises
out of the aim and purpose that God Himself should
speak. The first thing then that we are led to say about
God in the light of the Holy Spirit is that revelation is
God, and God is what we mean by revelation.
Let us pursue this truth that God is revelation, and
revelation is God a little further. Though we have to
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 227
speak of revelation in the most objective way conceivable,
we are yet unable to regard it from any purely objective
point of view. It is not objective in the sense that it is
just there, a fact of observation, a datum for dispassionate
scientific investigation. It is not a body of truth which we
can, as it were, sit down before, and proceed from our side
to examine and assimilate, so that the two acts, the giving
and the receiving might be considered entirely apart
from one another. The conception of revelation as
purely objective in this sense, leads to orthodoxy, where
a body of statement purporting to be the truth of God is
accepted on the authority of Church or Bible and defended
on more or less rationalistic grounds. Orthodoxy is
constantly driven to come to terms with rationalism,
because it is itself an intellectualist thing ; it is addressed
to the rational understanding and demands the assent of
the reason as such. It must build upon a sub-structure
of rational knowledge and claim to complete the building
which reason because of its deficiencies leaves unfinished.
But orthodoxy can never be on comfortable terms with
reason, because its subject-matter is transcendent and
miraculous ; and at last it collapses before rationalism
because though addressed to reason it is "withdrawn
from the criticism of the understanding " (Forsyth).
The Holy Spirit in orthodoxy is no vital and organic
principle. It is a supernaturalism brought in, as it were,
to sanction the decisions of orthodoxy. ' Here is
revelation/ it is said, ' we can express it in a detailed
scheme of truth, a body of doctrine, and if you are willing
to hear, if you have the will to believe what God has
revealed, the Holy Spirit will enlighten your under-
standing and enable you to do so ? ' The Holy Spirit is
not, as such, the truth, but some supernatural power which
enables a man to accept a body of doctrine whose nature is
228 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
intellectual and rational. But. when we enquire more
closely into the relation between the Holy Spirit and this
body of statement which is put forward as revelation, we
are met with further statements which have to be
substantiated either on rational grounds or grounds of
external authority.
But if we may not speak of revelation with pure objec-
tivity neither may we speak of it with pure subjectivity.
Revelation is not simply an experience within the soul
which finds intellectual and rational expression as a body
of truth. That puts revelation continually at the mercy
of psychology. The experience becomes a datum for
psychological investigation, and finds itself continually
called in question with regard to its objective reference.
Where revelation is equated with inner experience, the
question as to how this experience is to be evaluated and
judged will always remain a question. Much that has
been advanced in the past as truth from the side of exper-
ience is now relegated to the realm of illusion by the
advance of psychological science. Moreover if revelation
be identical with experience, the truth element is always
secondary and relative. It depends upon the measure of
adequacy with which the experience is evaluated and
rationalised. But revelation is truth. The Spirit is not
a mere experience from which truth may be deduced
der Geist ist die Wahrheit (Barth). It is not the fact of
experience which is the real significance but the ' what '
of experience. Furthermore, as the champions of ortho-
dox dogma are not slow to point out, if it is true to say
that dogma arises from experience, it is no less true
to say that experience arises from dogma. Often it
is positive belief that creates experience rather than the
experience creating the belief.
Yet another consideration of vital importance comes into
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 229
view at this point. How can experience simply as such
be taken as the datum for estimating the truth of revelation
when what we have in view, according to the witness, is
a real coming of God to the world, and the divine action
on the scale of the world ? How can experience in itself
yield the truth that in the Cross of Christ we have a final
treatment of the sin of the world ? How do I reach from
my personal experience of forgiveness and reconciliation
with God the great conclusion that God was in Christ
reconciling the world unto Himself ? Is that great truth
an inference, an induction from my experience? But
what entitles experience to make so vast and far-reaching
a statement ? If I am confronted with a great word which
speaks of God's action on a world scale, that word can
certainly come home to me and create a response in me ;
but I cannot take my experience, regarded as something
which I possess and enjoy, and make it a kind of datum
from which to establish the reality and to formulate the
nature of this great world act. I must take the word
itself, strive to draw out its implications for thought and
life, see the world in its light, and on grounds which are
far wider than anything which I can directly experience,
confess the truth of it. In so doing my own experience
will be enlarged and deepened ; indeed new experiences
will be created within me, new insights and under-
standings. But this will not take place if I simply start
with experience as a datum and from that proceed to
formulate truth. My response to the word of God is a
far bigger thing than anything that can come directly
out of experience. That is why we call faith a miracle
and refuse to identify it with any mere religious a priori.
It is the Holy Spirit; a power and a faculty which
revelation itself must bring.
The current preoccupation with experience has become
230 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
a source of weakness in modern theology. Dr. Tennant,
who is certainly no rigid dogmatist declares that the
extraction of theological doctrine out of religious
experience supposed to be devoid of dogmatic ingredient
must be in vain. l He says : " Distinctively Christian
religiousness is determined by distinctively Christian
doctrine ; Christianity is neither a doctrine nor a life,
but a life coloured by a doctrine." It is a weakness of
Schaeder's fine book on the Spirit that it makes almost an
identity between the Spirit and the experience of faith.
He is thus led to make statements about experience which
experience itself will find it difficult to sustain. When he
tells us that the experience of faith is that of being un-
conditionally bound and unconditionally freed, bound
absolutely in obedience to God and freed absolutely for
service to men, one wonders whose experience he is
talking about. What man will venture to say so much of
his own experience ? To build Christian truth on such
an experience is a somewhat oppressive undertaking in
view of the actual facts of experience. What is needed
if we are to have revelation is something that will create
experience, and create it in such a way that experience will
cease to be preoccupied with itself, but will lose sight of
itself in its object.
May we then say that revelation continually moves
between the poles of objectivity and subjectivity ? May
we put it thus : the belief creates an experience, and then
the experience while validating the belief with regard to
its inner content, criticises it as to its form, and strives to
reinterpret the belief, to set it out in worthier and more
adequate forms of expression? In a sense we may
certainly say this. Revelation as truth, and revelation
as experience, act and react on one another, the experience
1 Philosophical Theology, Vol. I, p. 327.
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 23!
clarifying the truth, and the truth as clarified deepening
the experience, and so on in continual and mutual
reciprocity. Only we need the proviso that it is not
experience in itself which supplies the criterion for the
validity of the interpretation, but that element in the truth,
no doubt clarified by experience and reflection, which
calls to experience and makes it a constant standing in
decision and response. What is given to us in revelation
is neither belief as such, nor experience as such, but God
Himself in personal action, that is, as we have seen God
Himself in address to us. Action means that we are
addressed. We have not an experience to be evaluated,
but a response to make. We cannot take revelation as
a datum, a fact of history or a truth of reason, or a state
of experience, and then give it a value which we call
revelation. We are ourselves personally involved and
wholly involved, and involved in constant crisis and
decision. We do not postulate, and we do not evaluate,
and we do not rationalise, we respond. And our response
is not just a response which we make, it is the response
of ourselves. It is ourselves as response. In this
response we find our true being. And the truth of
revelation, its content for thought, its material of belief
belongs to the order of truth and idea which is involved
in this response of life. It is, to use a term of Kierkegaard
which is becoming once more current in theology
" existential truth," an order of truth, that is, which cannot
be received merely by way of rational assent, but
only by way of life-decision. It is a kind of truth which
in order to be seen in its true-ness and reality has to become
truth to a man. In that respect it may be compared to
poetic or artistic truth, which cannot be conveyed from
man to man in mere abstract, intellectualised propositions
but has to be seen and felt, and must elicit a response from
232 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the life-force of a man's own being. Only, in revelation
the response is no mere affective or emotional thing but
a standing decision of the life. The presupposition of
the modern man, says Brunner, " is that there is only one
kind of truth, viz., objective impersonal truth which can
be proved," and that presupposition " excludes for him
all truth which cannot and ought not to be proved
because it has to be appropriated in personal decision." 1
Revelation therefore is a category which transcends the
antithesis of objective and subjective. Its nature is
miracle both as to its giving and as to its receiving. It
belongs to the mind of the Spirit. There is a continuity
between God and man by means of which the truth of
God can be conveyed to the mind of man. But this
continuity is not an immanent nexus between God and
man. It is wholly divine and transcendent. It is not
discoverable in man, but in God alone. It is the Holy
Spirit. What unites man to God is not participation in
a common nature which can be seen, as it were, from both
sides, the manward side and the Godward side. It can
be seen only from the Godward side. Revelation there-
fore cannot be the mere disclosure of truth which man is
to receive, it must be the establishing and effectuating of
this continuity, this bond, wherein and whereby man may
perceive the truth as truth. Only within this bond which,
be it repeated, is divine and transcendent, can revelation
appear. " No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by
the Holy Ghost " (i Cor. xii, 3). We therefore reach
our conclusion again, that God is Himself revelation,
and that revelation is what we mean by God.
But though revelation cannot be treated either with
pure objectivity or with pure subjectivity, we must in the
intellectual and doctrinal formulation of revelation,
1 The Word and the World, p. 62.
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 233
begin with the subjective side. But let it be well under-
stood that we do not mean by that, beginning with mere
subjective experience, and then from an inspection of
that passing on to a formulation of objective truth. What
we mean is that we begin by asking what light revelation
throws on us, and our world, and the final relationships
in which our life stands, before we pass on to discuss in
any objective way the nature of God. We must under-
stand how we are to see ourselves and our world, before
we pass on to any attempts theoretically to formulate a
doctrine of God. If we are to speak objectively of God,
we must first see ourselves in God's light. Our
knowledge of God consists in the knowledge that we
ourselves are known of God. " Now that ye have come
to know God or rather to be known of God " (Galatians
iv, 9 R.V.). We know God objectively, so far as objective
knowledge of Him can be spoken of at all, only in
proportion as we come to know ourselves and our World
objectively, that is, from the side of God. 1 It is for this
reason that we have dealt in this discussion with miracle,
reason, and history, from the point of view of the New
Testament conception of the Holy Spirit, before
attempting in this chapter to speak of God from this same
point of view. It is only on the basis of a treatment of
these former themes that we may, with great reserve,
proceed to make God the direct object of our thought
so far as definite doctrinal statement is concerned. What
then may we now go on to say about God ?
Now the first thing we can say is this : the revelation
of God as miracle is the end of all modalism. Modalism
1 See Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, pp. 103 and in, et passim.
234 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
as it arose in the early church as associated especially
with the name of Sabellius, and as it has been given
modern expression by Schleiermacher, teaches that God
can be conceived of as having manifested Himself under
modes or aspects. In relation to the doctrine of the
Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit do not stand for immanent
and eternal distinctions and relations within the being of
God, they are but aspects seen by us of the one God ! and
these aspects can be, as it were, taken apart from one
another and studied objectively. Seen from one side,
God is Father, from another Son, and from another Holy
Spirit. We are not here directly concerned with modal-
ism in the form which it took in Sabellianism and the
modalistic controversies of the ancient church ; we are
concerned with the modalistic outlook as it permeates
much of our modern thinking about God. Modern
philosophical theism has a strong tendency to some form
of modalism, because it tends to interpret God and the
world primarily in terms of degrees of reality and value,
and to make the life of the universe an expression of the
experience of God. It tends, that is, to make the universe
as necessary to God, as God is to the universe. We have
an ascending series of grades or stages of reality leading
up from the most elementary and rudimentary objects
of experience to God and accordingly at each level we
have an expression of some mode of God's life and
experience. The teaching of Sabellius himself, though
the reports of it which we possess are confused and
contradictory, seems to be fairly clear in its main outlines.
He taught that Father, Son and the Holy Spirit were the
same. The one God revealed himself in three aspects
(prosopa), and these three aspects corresponded with
the stages in the history of creation and salvation. It was
not, as Harnack has pointed out, that behind these three
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 23 5
aspects there was a divine reality (monas) which could be
considered apart from its manifestations. Nor was it
that these three aspects abide eternally as forms under
which God may be considered. To quote Harnack:
" Sabellius taught according to Epiphanius and
Athanasius that God was not at the same time Father
and Son ; but that he had, rather, put forth his activity
in three successive e energies ' ; first, in the Prosopon
(= form of manifestation, figure ; not = Hypostasis) of
the Father as Creator and Lawgiver, secondly, in the
Prosopon of the Son as Redeemer, beginning with the
incarnation, and ending at the ascension, finally, and up
till the present house, in the Prosopon of the Spirit as
giver and sustainer of life." And he adds " We do not
know whether Sabellius was able strictly to carry out the
idea of the strict succession of the Prosopa, so that the
one should form the boundary of the other. It is
possible, indeed it is not improbable that he could not
fail to recognise in nature a continuous energy of God as
Father." 1 Still it seems evident that in the teaching of
Sabellius the Father did not remain Father after his
unfolding in the Son, nor apparently did the Son remain
the Son after His unfolding in the Spirit. There was a
real evolution in the being of God, corresponding with
the evolution of the world in creation and redemption.
Harnack notes that " while up to this time no evident
bond had connected cosmology and soteriology within
modalistic theology, Sabellius now made the histories of
the world and salvation into a history of the God who
revealed himself in them." Here then, we have God
definitely involved in the time-process and unfolding
Himself, because as it were expressing Himself, living
out His experience and history in the stages of that
1 History of Dogma, Vol. Ill, p. 85.
236 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
process. The way is prepared for modern immanentism
and even modern pantheism. It is well-known how
closely Schleiermacher the great modern Sabellian, and
the pioneer of modern religious liberalism, approximated
to pantheistic conceptions of God.
But modalism in all its forms is fatal to the conception
of God given the New Testament witness to revelation.
For first of all, modalism for all its involving of God in the
time-process makes revelation essentially unhistorical.
God becomes seen in different aspects as history unfolds ;
there are degrees of revelation in life and history, but
revelation is none the less essentially unhistorical. There is
no supreme divine event in which God gives Himself once
for all, no all-decisive happening in history and upon
history, no coming down from above, no final movement
from the ' there ' to the c here '. There are, indeed,
divine disclosures which are parallel with the growth
and development of our life. The world is illumined by
a supernatural light, and now one colour and now another
is seen as that light is reflected through the prism of our
life, but the world is not overcome. All that history
does, all that historical personalities do, all that even
Jesus Christ can do, is to stimulate awareness to God, to
deepen man's own native God-consciousness, to start into
activity certain immanent tendencies and powers within
the soul of man. And the more strongly these powers
are stirred, the more can history be left behind. Even
Jesus Christ remains at last but the classic illustration of
man's awareness of God, the point at which the God-
consciousness rose into supreme realisation and
manifestation, the figure of our race whose value for us
is that He stimulates our own nascent perception of God.
But nothing really happens in Him. God does not
personally and decisively act for our salvation and the
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 237
salvation of the world. Christ remains at last our helper
only, and not our Saviour. Modalism is monistic and at
last pantheistic. God tends to become identified with
the universe and its evolution. He is our environment,
an all-pervading presence, and we become increasingly
conscious of Him as we become conscious of our world
in its totality. In Schleiermacher the universe and God
tend to become interchangeable terms.
Moreover modalism tends to relativism. Inasmuch as
God is given only under modes and aspects of His being,
there is no room for an absolute and final revelation.
There is no sure and immutable word of God to man,
nothing given and nothing done once and for all, no final,
eschatological happening, no being in Christ, fixed and
founded, rooted and grounded and growing up into Him.
Modalism means essentially and at the last exclusively
immanence. In Sabellianism the conceptions of the
Father and the Son tended to be left behind. They
corresponded with dispensations or economies of
revelation which belonged to the past. Men were now
living in the era of the Spirit, and the Spirit was an
expression of the Deity in which the other expressions
were swallowed up. The Church instinctively felt this
to be fatal to its life. It meant the setting aside of God's
transcendence in the interest of His immanence, the
divorcing of revelation from history, and the making of it
a mere matter of inner experience, the relegating of Christ
Himself to a secondary and relative and finally outgrown
position in the economy of revelation. And in the
modern era, the doctrine of the Spirit tends to become
more and more preached in the interest of an immanent
conception of God. Indeed it is one of the major
ironies of history, that the idea of the Holy Spirit, which
in the New Testament is entirely transcendent (though
238 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
inward) and which is there above all to guard the trans-
cendence of God in His revelation, should have become
the main plank in a theology of immanence. This fact
alone is sufficient to give us pause. It indicates how easy
it is, in the praiseworthy attempt to reinterpret Christian
doctrine for the purpose of commending it to the modern
mind, to fall into conceptions which are the precise
opposite of those which the original doctrine was framed
to commend and safeguard.
It may seem paradoxical to maintain that modalism is
the attempt to treat God with pure objectivity, to regard
Him as a mere datum presented to consciousness, which
the consciousness can investigate and evaluate. But the
paradox is only apparent. In modalism, particularly in
its modern forms, God is given as object and not as
subject. His revelation of Himself is identified more or
less closely with the unfolding or evolution of the world as
that falls within the sphere of consciousness. He becomes
a mode, or an abstraction, from that which is presented
for our rational thought and enquiry. Modalism is the
objective, scientific method imported into theology.
The scientific mind when it becomes religious is nearly
always modalistic. It tends towards a non-miraculous,
non-historical ' spiritual ' religion, a religion which is an
attempt to read the ' whole ', the Universe, with spiritual
eyes. The spiritual becomes the final valuation of the
world. Revelation is the aspect of the world in its
spiritual significance and meaning. All science proceeds
by way of abstraction. It deals not with the thing in
itself, not with the thing in its individuality and unique-
ness, but with those aspects of the thing which are capable
of being worked up into laws and generalisations. So
God becomes, as it were, an abstraction from the world
in its totality, a mode or aspect revealing the spiritual
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 239
meaning and drift and value of the whole. Historical
events and historical personalities become illustrations,
manifestations and concretions of the spiritual which is
immanent in the world. Jesus Christ Himself is but the
supreme, the unique instance of this manifestation, this
concretion. Schleiermacher found in the modalistic
idea a fruitful instrument for commending religion to the
educated world of his day, and his method has been
widely adopted by liberal religious thinkers. But
modalism is an illegitimate surrender to the scientific
method. It is the abandonment of that which makes
revelation truly revelation, namely miracle and history.
It tends to lose God in the cosmic process, and to dissolve
revelation in the general religious consciousness of
mankind.
But the second thing that we can say is that the
revelation of God in the light of the Holy Spirit is the end
of deism on the one hand, and pantheism on the other.
We have sharply marked off our view of revelation from
that deism and dualism with which it is sometimes
charged, and it is not necessary to repeat what has already
been said. All that needs to be added here is that deism
deals with the idea of God from the standpoint of pure
objectivity, and we have already shown that from that
standpoint He cannot be regarded. In deism God
remains the pure object of thought, and His existence is
established on entirely rational grounds. He is inferred
from the existence and nature of the world, and His
revelation has to be established on grounds of prophecy
and miracle, or on such similar grounds as must be
vindicated by rational investigation and demonstration.
240 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Our distance from Him is a distance in space and time.
It is separation. Whereas in revelation our distance is
alienation, that is, it is a distance set up by His own will
and judgment. The element of truth in deism is, as we
have elsewhere pointed out, that the world of our
knowledge and experience is a relatively independent,
autonomous, planted-out world. Its laws and working
cannot be immediately referred to the will of God. But
this very autonomy betokens the presence of evil in it,
shows that it must be regarded as a fallen world, and
makes it impossible at the last to reach God save in and
through His own revelation. Deism, however, does not
construe the world's autonomy after that fashion. It
regards it as a datum from which by process of enquiry
and reason we can immediately reach the reality and
nature of God. Accordingly it knows nothing of
revelation as we have conceived it. Revelation is made
to consist in a number of truths and ideas which have to
be established on independent grounds of reason. There
is no immediacy of God to man in revelation and there-
fore no Holy Spirit.
It will scarcely be necessary to emphasize the in-
compatibility of the God of revelation with pantheism.
Pantheism identifies God with the world, and makes the
movement of revelation to be the immanent movement
of the world's own life. The Holy Spirit becomes thus
simply the world-soul. There is no word of God to the
world, but only the word of the world about itself. All
transcendence is lost in immanence. Pantheism is of
course a philosophical possibility, but from the point of
view of revelation as we have conceived it, we need not
pursue discussion of it any further.
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 241
The next thing which we are able to say about God in
the light of the Holy Spirit, is that He is the Absolute.
By this we do not mean that He is to be identified with the
philosophical absolute in which all distinctions disappear.
The philosophical absolute is not God, for it is im-
personal. Nor may we say that though the absolute is
not God, 1 " it contains God with all finite personalities
and the objective universe," unless we simply mean by
the absolute " the totality of the existent " (Tennant).
The philosophical absolute cannot be adjusted to God, it
disappears as such in God. " In him (not in the
philosophical absolute) we live and move and have our
being." The distinctions and differentiations in our
experience which the philosophical absolute is called on to
remove, point to certain immanent inalienable distinc-
tions with the being of God. Nature, history, and the
individual life are, as it were, parables of the Eternal
Being of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The
Absolute in revelation is an absolute of eternal relations.
There is ultimately no room for an absolute besides God
Himself. It is God Who is to be " all in all " (i Cor. xv,
28). In union with God, in finding a place within those
eternal relationships which make up the being of God, all
reality must at last stand. The God of revelation, of
miracle, of the Holy Spirit, is the end, by which we mean
the crisis of philosophical absolutism. Philosophical
absolutism from the point of view of revelation, is an
idea which is reached from the wrong end. It is reached
from the idea of rational unity. Not thus can truth in its
absoluteness be attained. For this, it is necessary to begin
not with unity as a rational idea, but with the unity of God
in His revelation, with the Holy Spirit.
1 Valentine, Modern Psychology and the Validity of Christian Experience
p. 78.
Q
24* REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
It may be remarked here that the ' rationale ' of the
doctrine of the Trinity is to be found in the idea of the
Holy Spirit ; not in that of the Son as such, but in that of
the Spirit. Historically, no doubt the doctrine of the
Trinity arose out of Christology. It was because men
saw in Christ no mere man, but the incarnation of God,
that they were led on to postulate eternal distinctions
within the divine being. There was God in His trans-
cendence, His eternity, and God in His manifestation,
His appearance on the plane of time and history : at
least, therefore a binity, a ' two-ness '. And there are still
theologians who are somewhat attracted to the idea of a
binity rather than a trinity. It seems to them that the
conception of a Trinity arose out of a supposed necessity,
for which there appears no sufficient ground in revelation,
to fit the Holy Spirit into this idea of immanent and
eternal distinctions within the Godhead. The Holy
Spirit may, they think, be regarded as the unity of the
' two-ness ', the transcendence of the subject-object relation
in God implied by the terms Father and Son, and not as a
distinct hypostasis. The Holy Spirit, from this point of
view becomes in revelation, an influence, resulting from
the Incarnation, a spiritual and divine power working in
the hearts of men and flowing from the divine deed of
the Incarnation. But this is to drag God down into the
temporal process, to make revelation a temporal thing,
to involve it in the sequences of history. Faith becomes
the temporal and sequential result of the appearance of
Jesus in the world. We are really back again at the idea
of a great historical personality and activity, producing
impressions and exercising a dynamic influence upon his
contemporaries and successors. But faith is, as we have
seen, a transcendent thing, a miracle, something which in
its essence is not a matter of temporal causation, and
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 243
therefore the idea of a binity cannot stand. It cannot in
the long run resist some form of modalism. We see the
Son only in and through the Spirit, and therefore the
Spirit becomes the true ' rationale ' of the Trinity.
The conception of God as the Absolute, not in the
philosophic sense, but in the sense of revelation, in which
the philosophic absolute as such disappears, means that
God is above all the Lord. He is not the world ground,
but the world Lord ; or rather we may say, we reach the
thought of Him as world ground via the revelation of Him
as world Lord. All attempts to reach God as rational
ground of the world, or as philosophic absolute rise from
regarding Him as object and not as subject. But what we
are confronted with in revelation is a supreme subject,
and not a rationally conceived object. That means, that
the world, as such, is not accepted in revelation, not
rationalised and evaluated but brought into crisis and
overcome. It is lifted out of that contradiction in which
it stands, newly constituted and thus restored to its
original meaning, and its true definition. It has a Lord.
"The ground plan of creation is redemption "(Forsyth).
Therefore it is not discoverable by rational thought or
intuitive insight but in and through divine revelation.
We are presented first and foremost not with a world-
ground or a world-reason but with a divine and personal
Redeemer and Lord. And we interpret God as the
ground of the world in the light of that revelation wherein
He comes home as the Lord of the world. It is the
sovereignty of God, understood thus, which is the
germinal principle of all revelation.
From the revelation of God as Sovereign arises the
Z44 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
thought of Him as Creator. The sequence of thought in
revelation is not that God is the Lord of the world
because He is the world's Creator, but vice versa, that God
must be thought of as the Creator of the world because He
is its Lord. He who stands over the world, bringing it
into crisis, judgment and redemption, is its owner, source,
maker. None but the Creator can redeem. It is notice-
able that the second Isaiah, the great old Testament
prophet of redemption, whose dominant idea is that of
the absolute Lordship and Sovereignty of God speaks in
most moving and majestic language of the work of God
in creation. Throughout the entire book runs the theme
of the divine sovereignty : " I am the Lord and there is
none else." The far places of the earth are to behold the
manifestation of His sovereignty in the redemption of His
elect people Israel. The heathen conqueror Cyrus is to
be the chosen instrument of the sovereign purpose of God.
And the vision of Israel's restoration, Israel's redemption,
broadens out into the idea of a new world in which nature
itself serves the interests of the redeemed community, for
nature itself shall be transformed. " Instead of the thorn
shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall
come up the myrtle tree : and it shall be to the Lord for a
name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off "
(Isaiah Iv. 13). The idea of God's Lordship takes on an
eschatological colour ; it expresses itself in the picture
of a great deed of world salvation. And the eschatology
is all the more impressive in that it is entirely free of
fantastic mythology. The new thing which the Lord will
do, will cast all His previous mighty acts into the shade.
" Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the
things of old. Behold I will do a new thing ; now shall
it spring forth ; shall ye not know it ? I will even make a
way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert " (Isaiah
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 24J
xliii, 1 8-1 9). The idols are seen in all their utter emptiness,
all their unspeakable futility. They are empty and vain.
Of the idol- worshipper it is said " He feedeth on ashes ; a
deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot
deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right
hand ? " (Isaiah xliv, 20). The prophet's mind is
absolutely dominated by a supreme incommunicable,
unshared lordship which makes all that is merely human
relative and temporal, mere grass that withers and
perishes : " All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness
thereof is as the flower of the field : the grass wilhereth,
the flower fadeth : because the spirit of the Lord bloweth
upon it ; surely the people is grass. The grass withereth,
the flower fadeth : but the word of our God shall stand
for ever " (Isaiah xl, 6-8). And because his mind is thus
dominated by God as Lord, he speaks with unrivalled
majesty and power of God as Creator. " Lift up your
eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things,
that bringeth out their host by number : he calleth them
all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is
strong in power ; not one faileth. . . . Hast thou not
known ? hast thou not heard that the everlasting God,
the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not,
neither is weary ? there is no searching of his under-
standing" (Isaiah xl, 26 and 28). " Thus saith God the
Lord, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out ;
he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out
of it, he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and
spirit to them that walk therein " (Isaiah xlii, 5). "I
have made the earth, and created man upon it : I, even my
hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host
have I commanded" (Isaiah xlv, 12). "For thus saith
the Lord that created the heavens ; God Himself that
formed the earth and made it ; he hath established it,
246 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited : I
am the Lord ; and there is none else " (Isaiah xlv, 18).
Now from the conception of God as Lord, and as
Creator because Lord, arise the idea of omnipotence,
omniscence, and omnipresence. Omnipotence is not
nature-power or world-power raised to highest terms. It
is that which brings down all word-power, which judges
it and abolishes it. Omnipotence does not mean that what
we call power and experience as power is raised to highest
terms, not that it simply passes beyond the limits which it
encounters in our experience, but that it is brought to
naught. Omnipotence is not just more power, but new
power, a power of a new order, which robs what we call
power of its power. The distinction between the world's
power and God's power is not quantitative but qualitative.
A new power arises, which alone is the real power, and
which finally negates and brings to death all that we mean
by power. Our life is under the dominion of alien power, or
rather alienated power. The powers of nature and of man
have become detached from the power of God. They are to
be set aside in the day of the Lord. " The kingdoms of this
world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his
Christ ; and he shall reign for ever and ever " (Revelation
xi, 1 5 ). The omnipotence of God is the power of Christ's
resurrection ; " the working of his mighty power, which
he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead,
and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all principality and power, and might, and
dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this
world, but also in that which is to come ; and hath put all
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 247
things under his feet " (Ephesians i, 19-21). So similarly
is it with the Divine omniscience. This again is not our
reason and our knowledge extended to infinity. The
omniscience of God is the disqualifying of our knowledge
as such. "Where is the wise? where is the scribe?
where is the disputer of this world ? hath not God made
foolish the wisdom of this world ? " (i Cor. i, 20). Know-
ledge, as we understand it, is a temporary thing, it belongs
to this world, a world which is to be overcome, and
therefore it is to be done away. "Whether there be
knowledge it shall vanish away " (i Cor. xiii, 8). It is
but a human and temporary adumbration of that ' love '
which is above the mere gifts of the Spirit ; which is the
actual consciousness of the Spirit made man's in revela-
tion. The omniscience of God means not simply that
God knows more than we, but that He knows otherwise
than we ; and because he knows otherwise than we, " he
knoweth all things." Omnipotence and omniscience are
not rational terms. They are revelation terms, Holy Spirit
terms. We may not use them as major premisses for the
purposes of logical deduction. We may not say, if God
is omnipotent, then why does this or that happen in the
world, or if he be omniscient where is the place for human
freedom? To speak thus, is to treat omnipotence and
omniscience as mere extensions of what we mean by
power, and what we mean by knowledge. But our con-
ceptions of power and knowledge are only relative. They
are congruous with the world now standing, but not with
the God who is other than the world.
And so with omnipresence. This does not mean that
God pervades time and space like a spiritual ether. It
means that He stands above time and space with all their
limitations. It means that the space-time system belongs
to a world which in revelation stands in crisis, a world to
248 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
be overcome. It implies a new world-order made mani-
fest in Jesus Christ, but made manifest in its relation to our
world-order as death and resurrection. The world
" passeth away." It is included in the life of God, because
as it now exists, as a space-time system it is concluded.
Finally, Lordship means Tri-unity. Lordship implies
relation, and absolute Lordship means absolute relation.
God is the Lord, because He is Father, Son and Spirit, and
in Himself as such ; thus not modalistically nor econo-
mically, but immanently and eternally. Because He is the
Father of the Son, he can create a world without setting
up an absolute which is other than Himself. He can set
up, that is, a relation which shall be included in and not
fall outside the relations within His own being. The great
cosmic conceptions of Christ which are articulated
specially in the epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians
are no part of a mere historic and temporary world- view,
they belong to the spiritual dialectic of revelation. " For
by him (the Son) were all things created, that are in heaven
and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be
thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers : all
things were created by him and for him : and he is before
all things, and by him all things consist (hold together) "
(Colossians i, 1 6-1 7). With us, creation is the expression
of a thought in and through a material which is outside
of ourselves. With God, creation is the expression of a
purpose which is the eternal, generative relation in which
the Father stands to the Son. God then is the Creator
because He is the eternal and absolute Father, "from
whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named "
(Ephesians iii, 15, R.V. margin). And because God is
also the Son of the Father, He can become man without
any diminution of His transcendent deity. The world
into which he enters is a world, which though actually and
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 249
empirically fallen and in contradiction, is yet His own
world, the world created in Him and for Him, a world
therefore which in its true reality abides within that rela-
tion which the Son bears to the Father. The Son can
therefore approach it, though that approach will be
hidden from sense and sight, and apprehended only by
that transcendent relation which we call faith. For Him
to make His presence visible on this side of the contra-
diction of the world to God, would be to divest Himself
of his Godhead. He must take on Himself the form of a
servant, and be made in the likeness of men. Only as He
is, only as the Eternal reality of that relation in which the
world stands to God, can He be truly seen ; only as the
world's restored relation to God, not as the world's actual
empirical relation. He has to take our manhood into
Himself, that is, to abolish our actual empirical manhood,
to carry it through death to resurrection, and so restore it
to its first estate.
And because God is the Spirit of the Son and of the
Father, He can be bestowed upon and received by fallen
and sinful man, man in contradiction, without in any way
surrendering His transcendence, His unknowableness by
those powers and faculties which belong to man on his
natural and human levels. Man can even here and now
possess a God-consciousness which is no mere awareness
of God as an object, but which is a veritable functioning
of the consciousness of God Himself within the mind of
man. He can attain a new kind of knowledge which
transcends the subject-object relation from which his
rational knowledge arises ; while yet that new knowledge
brings no fusion with the mind of God, no sinking of
man's mind in the ocean of universal mind and conscious-
ness, no blotting out of that deep and unsurpassable
distinction between the human and the divine. It is this
250 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
to which the writer of the Epistle to the Ephesians refers
when he says " that he would grant you, according to the
riches of his glory to be strengthened with might by bis
Spirit in the inner man ; that Christ may dwell in your
hearts by faith ; that ye, being rooted and grounded in
love, may be able to comprehend with all saints, what is
the breadth, and length, and depth, and height ; and to
know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that
ye might be filled with all the fulness of God " (Ephesians
iii, 16-19). Suffused with deep and passionate emotion
as this passage is, we should make a great mistake if we
supposed that any word in it is set down without thought
and without definite meaning. The knowledge of which
the writer speaks is the very movement within man's
consciousness of the Spirit, that is of the consciousness of
God. It is knowledge which opens the meaning of the
infinities and the eternities. It is knowledge of the eternal
love which is the very being of God, the love in which the
fulness of the eternal relationships within God Himself
abides. It is the knowledge which comes of being
known by God with that knowledge which God has of
Himself, that is of being loved by God with that love
which is the deep movement of His own life. Faith has
its own dialectic which is other than the dialectic of
reason, and which transcends every mere subject-object
relation. In faith, in the Holy Spirit man no longer
knows himself as an independent autonomous being at
all, he knows himself only in God, while he yet knows
that God remains God and man remains man to all
eternity.
The doctrine of the Trinity means supremely that God
is love. Far above any attributes which we may ascribe
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 2JI
to Him in virtue of His relation to the world, stands His
essence which is love. It is not merely that God loves,
it is that He Himself is love. His being is an eternal
movement in love. The doctrine of the Trinity alone
ultimately safeguards the truth that God's nature is love.
It is not merely that the subject and the object of God's
love are within His own being, thus making His love an
eternal thing, something which belongs to His nature as
such, and not a mere attitude or disposition which He
takes up. The mere relation of Father and Son would
mean simply that God loves Himself. But God does not
simply love Himself, He loves in Himself. That is to say,
besides the subject-object relation, the relation of Father
and Son, there is yet another which involves that God can
love that which is not Himself with the same love where-
with He loves Himself. There is the Holy Spirit.
Through the Holy Spirit the love of God can enfold us
and our world with no other than, but with the same love
as God bears to Himself. Our lives can be rooted in no
mere external relation to God, but in those internal
relations in which His being consists. The love that
binds man to God in the Holy Spirit is none other than
the love which binds the Son to the Father in God's
eternal being. This is the mystery of the love of God,
the height and depth and length and breadth of it. This
is man being " filled unto all the fulness of God."
We are well aware that in speaking thus of the Divine
Tri-unity we run the risk of being charged with pre-
sumption. But the charge falls to the ground. For the
alternative is to treat God as an object which can be
approached and apprehended by us after a rational and
2J2 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
scientific .fashion, an object investigated and known by
the powers and faculties of our human reason. It is that
which is surely the great presumption. How can it be
presumption to acknowledge that God can be thought
of in no other way than as the Lord, to confess His
sovereignty over all thought and reason ? The doctrine of
the Trinity marks the limits of our thought, as human
and rational thought. It is a confession that reason has
found its Lord. It is the reason's acknowledgment of
the Sovereignty of God in His revelation. It is the con-
fession of God's holiness and God's grace. It indicates
our determination to proceed no further than God in His
revelation, not to attempt to transcend this revelation by
any human philosophy, because we know that revelation
is the crisis of human philosophy as such. God gives
Himself to be known as Father, Son and Spirit. Therefore
as such do we confess Him, and give Him the glory.
APPENDIX I
Both the theological doctrine of the Trinity and the
philosophical doctrine of the Absolute are concerned with
the relation of eternity to time. They part company in
that the theological doctrine contemplates an entry of
eternity into time, whereas the philosphical contemplates
a disappearance and dissolution of time in eternity. In the
thought of theology there is a movement of eternity
towards time which to the philosphical idea is a contra-
diction in terms. How can eternity move? Is not
movement a temporal conception? The universal and
absolute cannot be involved in temporal relations.
The philosophical idea resolves the antithesis between
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 253
time and eternity into a conception of the Absolute where
the time element is eliminated. Time and eternity instead
of being treated as dynamic concepts which would require
the ideas of will and movement, are translated into rational
concepts such as the relative and the Absolute, the im-
perfect and the perfect. Treated thus the antithesis
vanishes for " you cannot have a perfection which is a
perfection of nothing, nor a something conditioned
within a perfect system which is perfect apart from the
inclusive system that conditions it " (Bosanquet). So the
perfect and the imperfect, the absolute and the relative
" each has its being in and through the other." Thus
time becomes appearance only, it inheres in the imperfect
and the conditioned which, though necessary to the
Absolute, disappear in it. To the realm of appearance is
accordingly relegated the whole realm of the finite and
temporal, together with all relation and all determination.
Relation and determination are appearances of the
Absolute, they have no place in the Absolute itself.
Revelation, however, treats time and eternity as
dynamic conceptions, and finds their reconciliation not in
any rational idea of the Absolute in which time, relation
and determination are but appearances, but in that of
predestination which implies them and gives them real
meaning and substance. Predestination involves an
entry of eternity into time relations, and therefore also
the fact that relations and determinations belong to reality
itself. The dialectic of predestination yields the Trini-
tarian idea. For those determinations which belong to
predestination are, as such, immanent relations within
reality itself. If predestination be the concept which
unites the ideas of time and eternity it follows that the
relations existing within reality can be carried over into
time relations. Finitum non capax infimti., but infinitum
254 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
capax finiti. The temporal being man, can be made the
subject of a relation to the eternal being, God, which falls
within and not without the relations existing in God
Himself.
It will follow also that the predetermined will of God
entering into time relations becomes an eschatological
deed, a deed which is final, a deed which gathers up all
temporal sequences and events in a crisis of eternal and
absolute significance. This deed clearly cannot be as
such an historical event, for it bursts through all historical
events, but equally clearly it must take the form of an
historical event ; for if historic events possess no relation
to the great divine event, history is made empty of
meaning. Such a deed implies an incarnation and the
ground of the incarnation cannot be other than a relation
existing immanently within the being of God. This rela-
tion cannot b. identical with that in which man as a
historic, temporal being finds himself planted within the
relations existing in the Godhead. The relation between
the Son and the Father in God cannot be the same as the
relation in which man as a creaturely, temporal being is
made participant in the divine life and being, otherwise
there would be no need for the divine eschatological
event, and the incarnate person.
This resolving of the antithesis between time and
eternity in the dynamic idea of predestination rather than
in the rational idea of the absolute involves therefore the
Trinitarian . conception, the conception of immanent
determinations and immanent relationships within the
being of God. It will be seen, then, how incompatible
the Christian idea of God is with the philosophical
Absolute. The one implies an absolute of relations, the
other an absolute in which all relations disappear. It will
also become evident how decisively revelation spells the
THE SPIRIT AND GOD 2JJ
downfall of the autonomy of reason. The conception of
the Absolute means the establishing of reason in a position
of transcendence. From this position revelation de-
thrones it. It must consent to subject itself to the true
transcendence given in revelation if it would carry on
any worthy dialectic in regard to God and reality. It
must recognise itself as an immanence and not a trans-
cendence, as something that is, which is bound up with
the general relations which belong to this present, here
and now, temporal order. It must consent to be brought
to a point of crisis in which it loses itself as reason to find
itself as faith. It must recognise that it has to do with an
order which itself must pass under the judgment and
crisis of the real and the eternal. Not rationally can the
Absolute be set forth, only dynamically, only in terms of
will, judgment, crisis, deed.
APPENDIX II
The distinctions and differentiations of the Persons
within the Divine Trinity raise the question of their unity.
Dr. Wheeler Robinson criticises the idea of corporate
personality as affording a concept by means of which this
unity may be expressed, on the grounds that it is an
abstraction. There is no such thing, he says, as a cor-
porate mind or a corporate consciousness other than as
the common consensus and mutuality of individual minds.
The corporate mind is a metaphor, not a reality. This is
doubtless true as applied to what we call mind or
consciousness or spirit. But as Dean Inge has observed,
*" there is a life below consciousness, and there may be a
life above consciousness or what we mean by conscious-
1 Outspoken Essays, p. 276.
256 REVELATION AND THE HOLY. SPIRIT
ness." And the figure of a corporate consciousness may
have real value as an analogy (for of course it cannot be
more) of the life of God. It has certain obvious
advantages. It indicates how plurality can exist within
unity. It possesses also a certain congruity with the idea
of predestination where the one absolute will becomes the
ground of the separate, individualised determinations and
relations. In the corporate consciousness the individual
will is determined by the corporate will. Each individual
moves from his own centre and yet each individual centre
is grounded in the common will. The idea of three
centres of consciousness within the Trinity may not be so
absurd as is often supposed. It is of course absurd if our
experience of consciousness be the final one. But if we
possess in faith, as has been elsewhere argued (see Ch. IV)
a kind of supra-consciousness, that supra-consciousness
which rises from consciousness standing in decision and
crisis, the idea of three centres of consciousness in God,
crude as it may seem, may be nearer the truth than any
abstraction which would take reality and vitality out of
the Trinitarian conception.
CHAPTER VIII
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION
THE question of Christian origins is one which has
profoundly agitated the minds of men especially during
the last hundred years.
For the most part that question has been treated mainly,
if not solely, as an historical question, to be solved by the
methods of historical science. And clearly, in so far as
Christianity is an historical magnitude, one of the religions
of the world, this method of handling the question is the
right one. The origins of Christianity as an historical
religion must be sought in many different directions.
Jewish Rabbinism and Eschatology, Oriental Syncretism
and the Mystery Religions, Hellenism, Gnosticism,
Mandaeism to all these must the historian give attention
if he would describe the rise and development of the
Christian religion. But if Christianity be not merely an
historical religion, but divine revelation, and revelation
in the meaning whichphas governed our thought through-
out this discussion, revelation as bringing the whole mind
and life of man under crisis, then we must roundly say
that the source of Christianity is Christ and Christ alone.
There must be a " mind of Christ " which supplies the
the content of Christianity as revelation, and all those
interesting and intriguing considerations which gather
round the phenomena which we have mentioned, and
which are so clearly relevant to the rise and growth of
Christianity as a religion, do not here come into view at all.
Now there are many who would agree with the statement
that the source of Christianity is Christ, to whom the
question still remains in large part an historical one. For
they mean by Christ, the Jesus of history, the object of
257
2j8 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
historical investigation. Truly they declare that his-
torical learning and acumen are incapable in themselves of
interpreting Jesus ; that what is needed is sympathetic
intuition and spiritual discernment as well. Still, it is
the human historical figure whose portrait may be drawn
by spiritual devotion and historical learning working
together, who is declared to be the origin of Christianity
and the source of divine revelation. Jesus thus becomes
the crown of history and humanity and in being such,
the revelation of God.
We have already sufficiently indicated our dissent from
this point of view and therefore can content ourselves
here with only a few observations. In setting Christ thus
definitely within the framework of history and humanity,
revelation is made to stand continually at the mercy of
historical criticism, for spiritual experience cannot as such
guarantee historical fact. Moreover we never really get
beyond humanity. The difference between Jesus and
other men becomes at last, simply a difference in degree
and not in kind. An attempt is made sometimes to get
round this objection by saying that a difference in degree
may be so great as to amount to a difference in kind, but
this merely evades the point at issue. Differences in
degree between men are one thing ; the difference
between man on the one hand and God on the other is
quite another. And it is in relation to that fundamental
difference that Christ derives His whole significance in
the New Testament witness. Further if Christ be thus
included within history as the source of revelation, we are
driven back at last to the religious consciousness of man-
kind in general. As the crown of history and humanity
Christ belongs to the world on its religious and divine
side. Thus " back to Christ " in the sense of back to the
historical Jesus who lies open to historical and psycho-
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 259
logical and even spiritual investigation and interpretation,
means back a long way farther still. It means back to
the history and evolution of humanity on its spiritual side.
Christ is eventually merged in religious history. He does
not stand out from it, and stand related to it, after the
manner of a final and all-commanding crisis. The whole
outlook and orientation of New Testament thought is
lost when we take as the origin of revelation, simply the
historical beginning, namely the man Jesus as a man
among men.
"When Paul speaks of having the " mind of Christ," he
is referring to something in human consciousness which
does not arise from historical or psychological causes. He
does not mean the character or disposition of the historical
Jesus. Nor does he mean the mind and outlook, which
are the result of the impact of a dominating human
personality, and which under the force of that impact
begin to attribute to the personality a new dignity and a
new significance. This kind of activity, the activity which
raises to divine heights a personality which has deeply
impressed itself on the consciousness, is all bound up
with man's tendency towards myth-making. And one
must have read the New Testament with poor eyes if one
does not see that it is a polemic against myth-making in
all its forms. Not indeed, that the writers of the New
Testament could wholly escape this myth-making
tendency. To confess that they did not completely
escape it, is simply to confess that they were men. But
all around them and in countless religious and philo-
sophical or quasi-philosophical forms they saw this
myth-making process going on, and they were thoroughly
alive to the power and the danger of the myth-making
Z6o REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
tendency. In so far as the word, the essential content of
the gospel was concerned, they proclaimed unwearingly
that it was the direct antithesis to such myth-making
activity. It was, they said, with an emphasis and an
earnestness which are in themselves impressive, of God
and not of men. Nowhere in the whole history of
religion can we discern such scorn for unreality, such
suspicion of all that rises up simply out of the mind of
man, as we have in the New Testament witness to
revelation. To see that is an indispensable qualification
for understanding that witness. So, in speaking of the
mind of Christ, Paul is referring not to something which
has arisen out of human consciousness but to something
which has entered into it. He is speaking of something
which is organically bound up with that divine and
supernatural action of which the earthly life and career
of Jesus were the historical expressions. The coming of
Christ into the world involved the coming of that mind,
that consciousness which recognised who He was, and in-
terpreted Him as revelation. The relation of the mind that
understands Christ as revelation, to Christ Himself as the
sub j ect of revelation, is not a natural, rational p sychological
relation, but a supernatural ; something which exists not
in the mind of man and which can therefore be explained
causally, but in the mind of God, and which is under-
standable in and through that mind alone. Thus the
coming of Christ involves also the coming of the Spirit,
in Whom He is seen and known as revelation. Both
Christ and the Spirit come from the same source, and are
mutually involved in the one great deed of revelation.
In Christ occurs the eschatological deed of God, the deed
of world-judgment and world-salvation. This deed must
reach us as word, message, gospel, revelation. But we
have ourselves no faculty for the understanding of such a
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 26 1
deed. A mere historical event with its moral and
spiritual significance that we can understand. But an
eschatological deed, a deed of divine revelation, what
power lies in us for apprehending that ? The death of
Christ as heroism, martyrdom, sacrifice that we can
comprehend. But the death of Christ as divine atone-
ment for sin on a world-scale, how can we grasp this ?
Involved therefore in the deed is the presence and action
of the Spirit in Whose light the meaning, the significance,
the revelation of the deed appears. The Word must not
only become flesh, it must become spirit, consciousness,
understanding. The very mind and consciousness which
perceives it for what it is, must be itself one of those
determinations in the predetermined will of God of which
the deed itself is another. And inasmuch as the pre-
determination of God is itself the nature of God, each of
these determinations is shown to be a relation within
God's own being, and the Son and the Spirit are seen to
be explicitly and positively involved in the great deed
of revelation.
The origin of revelation is therefore the mind of Christ
thus understood ; His interpretation, His meaning given
in and through the Spirit Who functions in the mind and
consciousness of man. And concretely we may say it is
the apostolic consciousness and interpretation of Him.
For revelation there must be witness, and for witness there
must be the Spirit. This consciousness and interpreta-
tion are in no wise to be explained, or rather explained
away, as due to an amalgam of floating elements of Jewish
Eschatology, Rabbinism, Orientalism, Hellenism and the
like, catching hold so to speak of an impression and an
impact received from a great dynamic human personality.
262 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Many of these things have no doubt affected the form of
the interpretation, but not its content. In its innermost
essence the apostolic interpretation is an articulation of
the mind of the risen and exalted Lord in the minds of
men. It is a new understanding coming to express itself
in a great word of Gospel, and increasingly unfolding
itself in a wealth of insights and perceptions connected
together by an inherent spiritual logic. Truth and under-
standing about God, man and the world and their mutual
relations, grow out of this apostolic word. The more
definitely these are worked out, the clearer does it become,
that this word is no accidental thing, no fortuitous
phenomenon of history. The word is creative in men's
minds. It reaches out in such a way as to set the whole
world and the whole of life in a new light. It creates a
theology which under the influence of its immanent
principle becomes ever richer, profounder, more vital.
Something is here, which is not of man, nor of history,
but of God.
There is no difficulty in believing that this conscious-
ness and interpretation are given most explicitly and
decisively in St. Paul. He quite definitely drew the
distinction between the Christ after the flesh and the
Christ after the Spirit, and close attention to his teaching
reveals that distinction at every point. Everywhere is
latent and presupposed in his thought the fact that the
relation between Christ as fact of history and the under-
standing of Him as revelation, is not a natural, historical
and psychological one, but a divine and supernatural. In
fact this idea constitutes the immanent logic of his whole
system ; for he had a system though he was no
systematizer, and the logic carries him forward often
quite unconsciously. There is a 'mind' in him which
permeates everything that proceeds out of his own mind,
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 263
an inspiration which is no mere feeling or emotion but
which is the unfolding of a real dialectic of thought,
operating, some might say subconsciously, but we
should prefer to say supra-consciously. There is also
continually expressed a passionate conviction that his
commission and his message came directly from the
heavenly Lord and were no mere matter of a received
tradition; a conviction which in itself could hardly
have much weight with us to-day were it not for the
existence of this all-pervading dialectic of which we have
spoken. But although we have this consciousness most
directly in Paul we can discern it also in different degrees
in all the other New Testament writers and original
witnesses. The Johannine writings, for example, are
full of it. In fact the aim of the fourth gospel is at
bottom nothing other than to present a life of Christ
from this point of view ; to show, that is, not primarily
how the Christ after the flesh lived and walked, but how
the word that became flesh and whose glory those had
seen, " who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God," was mani-
fested. The world says the writer received not Christ,
even His own received Him not, but those who were
born of God received Him.
And the synoptic gospels themselves, which were once
taken as primarily historical and biographical material,
are now seen to be essentially evangelical material. Their
interest is first and foremost to bear witness to the truth
of the apostolic gospel, the apostolic interpretation of
Christ, and to meet the situations both of life and thought
which that gospel created in the Church. If it be said
that nevertheless they betray strong traces of an historical
personality which appears different from the figure
depicted in the apostolic witness, that in a sense is only
264 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
what might be expected. The fact as it lies open to
historical scrutiny does not bear in itself its own inter-
pretation. There is a secret the understanding of which
alone can reveal the meaning of the fact.
The Pauline orientation then, in which the whole New
Testament orientation becomes most pronounced and
most explicit is in its central significance the origin of
Christianity, so that Paul could definitely say, " We
have the mind of Christ." And if one asks why this
should be so, if one finds here an arbitrariness which
seems irrational, it is necessary again to recall the fact that
the method of God in giving revelation is, according to
the whole outlook of the Bible, that of choice and election
and that the conceptions of election and the Holy Spirit
stand or fall together.
Thus in all our attempts to explain the fact of Christ
and to reach out after a Christology we do not begin with
the historical Jesus, and proceed thence to the apostolic
Christ, but contrariwise. We do not seek to show how
the Jesus'discoverable by historical investigation, psycho-
logical insight and religious intuition developed, as it
were, into the Christ of Paul and John. Rather do we
take the latter for our starting-point and from thence
seek to interpret the Jesus of history. And we maintain
that if we are to speak of revelation, of a real incoming of
God into the world, we must proceed after that fashion.
Moreover we discover that only thus does the Jesus of
history become really intelligible. But this is to
anticipate.
There is what looks like a formidable objection to- this
point of view which cannot simply be passed by. It is
urged by many who concern themselves with the question
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 265
of Christian origins. And it is set out with great clearness
and thoroughness in Kirsopp Lake's investigations into
Christology, and very trenchantly in Spengler's brief
but extraordinarily valuable delineation of Jesus in his
Decline of the West. It is that the belief in the resurrection
regarded simply as a belief and without any reference to
its truth, was itself sufficient to account for the develop-
ment or the transformation of the historical Jesus into
the apostolic Christ. Neither Lake nor Spengler believes
of course in the resurrection in any literal fashion, but
Lake at any rate thinks that there were " appearances "
which probably belong to a general category of psychic
events. 1 Given these appearances, it is urged, or even a
belief in them, what would be more natural than that all
the features of the Messiah of Jewish and eschatological
expectation and eventually also of the " kyrios " or
"lord " of the Mystery Religions should be superimposed
upon the Jesus of history ? There is a natural, rational
cause linking up the Jesus of history with the Christ of
faith, and that cause is belief in an astonishing miracle.
Whatever gave rise to this belief, its sheer existence in
men's minds would be sufficient to account for the rise
of apostolic Christology.
Spengler 2 sketches the situation as he conceives it,
with a few vivid strokes. " Among Jesus's friends and
disciples stunned as they were by the appalling outcome
of the journey to Jerusalem, there appeared after a few
days the news of his resurrection and reappearance. The
impression of this news on such souls and in such a time
can never be more than partially echoed in the sensibilities
of a Late mankind. It meant the actual fulfilment of all
1 See Chapter on Christology in The Beginnings of Christianity, by Foakes
Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, Part I., and The Resurrection of Jesus
Christ, by Kirsopp Lake.
2 The Decline of the West, Vol. II, p. 218.
z66 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the Apocalyptic of that Magian Springtime the end of
the present seon marked by the ascension of the redeemed
Redeemer, the second Adam, the Saoshyant, Enosh,
Barnasha, or whatever other name attached to ' Him,'
into the light-realm of the Father. And therewith the
foretold future, the new world-son, ' the Kingdom of
heaven,' became immediately present. They felt them-
selves at the decisive point in the history of redemption.
This certainty completely transformed the world-outlook
of the little circles. His ' teachings,' as they had flowed
from his mild and noble nature his inner feeling of the
relation between God and man and of the high meaning
of the times, and were exhaustively comprised in and
defined by the word ' love ' fell into the background,
and their place was taken by the teaching of him. As the
Arisen he became for his disciples a new figure, in and of
the Apocalyptic, and (what was more) its most important
and final figure." There is no need then to bring in the
supernatural in order to account for the transformation
(or whatever word one may choose wherewith to describe
the process) of the historical Jesus into the apostolic
Christ. The mere resurrection belief, coming, whence
it is bootless to enquire, and explicable, it matters not
how, is sufficient.
Is there any answer to this ? In a sense, we may say
there is not. There is no answer, no sufficient answer at
least, which rises from the same plane of thought, even
one might say, from the same order of consciousness as
that from which the contention proceeds. It is futile,
for example, to say, ' yes, the belief indeed created the
transformation, but the belief was true and our task is
now to demonstrate its truth.' This method of answering
history with history leads to an endless and a fruitless
polemic in which the belief itself dies of sheer exhaustion.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 267
The confession of Christ's resurrection must be a
confession. It cannot be the conclusion of an argument
or the result of an investigation. The truth of it must
create the belief in it. It must be a word which we hear
and to which we respond, not something which we can
approach from the outside and make up our minds upon.
Since the resurrection is not historical (though in history)
but super-historical, it is a divine movement ; a move-
ment therefore which must reach us, bringing new eyes
and ears and understanding. But if there is no sufficient
answer on the historical plane to the contention, we may
say there is not sufficient weight for it on that plane.
The kind of consciousness which is compounded
of belief in physical miracle and the reaction to
dominant human personality, we can, in part at any rate,
discover from history ; and at bottom it is quite different,
not indeed from everything which we can find in Paul or
John, but from the thing which is there. This is the Holy
Spirit as new mind, new consciousness and new under-
standing which, as we have seen, has the power to thrust
itself into all the departments of human thought and
human life in a fundamentally critical and a fundamentally
creative way. Much more feasible would it be to explain
the resurrection appearances as themselves conditioned by
the emergence of this new consciousness. But in that case
they would correspond to something real ; that is to say
they would be real perceptions of the Risen Christ how-
ever psychologically mediated. We take a step beyond
Spengler. He says that all consciousness is historically
conditioned. Whatever be its forms or aspects, whether
it be religious, political, scientific, artistic, it is an
historical formation and phenomenon. We say no ; at the
long last man's consciousness is super-historically con-
ditioned, it is conditioned by its relation to God and His
268 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
eternal will. For that reason its deepest nature is that of
a sin-consciousness, and a death-consciousness which is
what it is, because of the underlying sin-consciousness.
And where we have this sin-consciousness brought to the
most decisive and far-reaching expression as in the word
of the gospel, there we have the Eternal Righteousness
and the Eternal Life decisively present and at work;
there we have the resurrection.
Now all this has a direct bearing upon the problem of
Christology proper. The question is sometimes asked :
are we to explain Christ by means of some general
philosophy of the universe lying to our hand ? Or, on the
other hand are we to begin with the recorded facts and
sayings of the historical Jesus together with the impres-
sions which He made on men's minds and hearts, so far
as all this can be ascertained by historical research and
sympathetic insight, and work these up into a philosophy
of value judgments in which Christ will have the value of
God for men ? The answer is, at bottom, by neither of
these ways. By the first way not, for what philosophy
have we which can deal with revelation ? Philosophy has
a certain competence in regard to the universe and man's
life. But what competence does it possess for the new
from above? It can reckon with the movement of
the universe, but how can it reckon with a movement to
the universe ? Revelation, Urgeschichte, falls outside of
its categories. And not by the second way ; for once
again we have no faculty which can get us beyond fact
to revelation, beyond history to Urgeschichte. We begin
then, neither with a philosophy, nor with a fact made the
basis of a value judgment ; we begin with a fact in an
interpretation given in the apostolic witness. We begin
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 269
with a fact which has become a word. Our starting-point
is that there is a fact, the fact of Christ, which is a word of
God to man, the word of God. To a world in discontinu-
ity with, alienation from, God, a world in its creatureliness
and a world in its sin and fall, has come the word of
reconciliation and redemption. This word is no mere
message sent through a prophet, but a final and decisive
deed of God appearing at a certain point in human history.
Yet this deed remains, in its relation to us, word. That is
to say it is not something which we can directly lay hold
of and possess in our experience ; it is something which
calls for attention, decision, faith. To put it bluntly
God did not directly redeem the world, He promised it
redemption in Christ. God was acting in Christ in such
a way that His action directly promised the world's
redemption. The word ' directly ' is of importance here.
A mere message sent through a prophet would be an
indirect promise. It would not be God's own word,
God Himself speaking. All mere words, statements,
messages areyV/j 1 / words, things that men say. They are
not and cannot be of themselves effective promises. If I
tell a man that I will be with him to-morrow, that no doubt
is a promise, but not an effective promise. Whereas if I
jump on a train which leads me to his destination, that is an
effective promise that presently I shall be with him. My
jumping on the train does not mean that now I am with
him, but it is an action carrying an effective promise. So
God's word is God's action which carries in itself the
promise that that action will be available. Thus we say
that God was present and active in Christ in such a way
as to promise the world's redemption. God linked
Himself on to our humanity in Christ in a way that
promised the re-establishment of those true and original
relationships between humanity and Himself which
270 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
belong to the divine purpose in creation. The world
is not actually redeemed and made new. Life and history
go on under the old conditions. But there is a great
difference notwithstanding. God has entered humanity
in Christ in such a way that humanity now stands under
effective promise.
The kind of Christology which this implies can be
indicated in a rudimentary fashion in a few words. In
Christ there was a real union of humanity and divinity.
But this union does not mean that the humanity and
divinity existed, so to speak, side by side within the one
person, according to the Chalcedonian definition and the
Tome of Leo ; so that now Christ acts in one nature, now
in the other. Nor does it mean that there was
a communicatio idiomatum, so that each nature com-
municated its own properties to the other, as Luther
thought. Nor yet that the logos or divine word took the
place of some factor normally belonging to the human
nature, the spirit or nous as Apollinarius taught. Nor
again that out of the union of the two natures, a new
nature emerged as Eutyches and the Monophysites held.
Still less does it mean that Christ was simply a man
uniquely tenanted by the Holy Spirit as modern liberalism
tends to suppose, for this would leave His person human
and not divine, and would make Him differ from us in
degree only and not in kind. Moreover the union of
the two natures was not that between some abstract
perfect humanity and divinity as those imagine who speak
of being incorporated into the perfect humanity of Christ
by means of the sacraments. It was the union between
our actual here and now humanity and divinity, the taking
up of our creaturely and sinful humanity into God. It
was the word being made/&r/> : even more, the word being
made sin " him who knew no sin he made to be sin
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 27 1
on our behalf" (2 Cor. v, 21 R.V.). It was the laying
hold of our flesh, the flesh of sin.
Now this view involves the position that we have to
consider the relation between the humanity and the
divinity of Christ as from our point of view not a con-
tinuity but a discontinuity. The humanity of Christ being
our humanity must be regarded as something which the
divinity disqualifies and negates as such. That is to say,
it is something which has not to be expressed, but to be
surrendered, given up to God ; and in that surrendering
and giving up it finds its true fulfilment. Hence Christ
presses towards the Cross. And His whole historical
life becomes a kenosis, a self-emptying, a yielding of
itself up. But this is only one side of the picture. This
kenosis is really a great divine plerosis. It is the
humanity's real fulfilment. It must be emphasized that
the kenosis is no mere human act of renunciation, and no
act of men renunciation. What meaning, what promise
would there be in that ? It is the human side of the
activity of the divinity which was in Him. Divinity
meets humanity in crisis and new creation. Human
independence, human autonomy, the human standing in
itself and living from itself outward, the human expressing
itself (and that is what our humanity is in its fall and
separation from God, in its detachment from the true
ground of its life) has to abandoned, has to be completely
negated if the true humanity is to appear. The kenosis
therefore implies the plerosis, the Cross implies the
Resurrection. What from our side is a death-ward
movement is from the side of God a life- ward movement.
The gospel story is therefore dominated by the Cross and
the Resurrection. It breathes the Resurrection as Bengel
said. In and through the self-emptying of the actual
empirical humanity, the true humanity which is after the
ZJZ REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
original creation of God finds continual expression until
it rises up revealed and complete in the resurrection. The
works of God are manifested in Jesus all along the line of
His life because the works of man as such are renounced.
Therefore on the part of the earthly historical Jesus we
have on the one hand, a continual dependence upon and
subordination to God, a striving and struggling and
waiting upon His will, a looking from Himself outward
to the leading of God, a perpetual activity of prayer, a
declaration that God alone is good and that He Himself
must not be called good ; and on the other hand we have
an abiding sense of possessing divine authority, the feeling
of a unique relation to God, the consciousness that God's
kingdom is present in Him and that He exercises the
powers of that kingdom. These two attitudes are not
contradictory, they are the inevitable expressions of a
divine-human life, the inevitable results of that death-
ward movement in Him which in virtue of being such is in
its deepest reality a life-ward movement. So we say that
Christ was wholly human and wholly divine. Not
wholly divine because wholly human, as if the full
expression of humanity is divinity ; and not wholly
divine in addition to being wholly human, as if a perfect
humanity and a perfect divinity stood in him side by side
with one another : but wholly divine because in Him
occurred a deed of God in which the human nature which
the divinity had assumed was wholly turned round,
negated in its empirical actuality and restored to its
divine definition.
At this point two considerations arise of great
importance. First, it follows that the person of Christ,
the innermost secret and reality of His being, was divine
and not human. If the renunciation of His humanity
was not at centre the act of a man but the deed of God,
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 273
then Christ possessed no human person but a divine.
This divine person in no way took the place of anything
that is integral to a human self or personality. It had to
do not with the factors which make up an individuality
but with what that individuality ultimately is. All that
belongs to human personality belonged to Christ, even
what we call the ego. But whereas the human ego in us,
though having its ground ultimately in God has become
detached from that ground and has assumed a condition
of independence and autonomy, the ego of Christ arose
in and was determined by a renunciation of that indepen-
dence and autonomy. We have then in the Incarnation a
pure and absolute miracle, but no psychological
monstrosity. On the plane of history and from the point
of view of the historian Jesus remains simply a man. The
early preachers in the Acts of the Apostles could still
speak of Him with perfect propriety as a man : " Jesus of
Nazareth a man approved of God unto you " (Acts ii,
22, R.V.). There was nothing "in" Him, nothing
isolable from the rest of Him, that could be called non-
human. Nevertheless that which determined His
humanity and was the essential secret of His being was
divine and not human.
And the second point that arises at this stage is
contained in the question : are we to consider the
renunciation of His human autonomy as a great act of
moral conquest, a triumph of the human will ? If the
answer be in the affirmative it would seem that we have
in Him simply a man who won a great moral victory, a
man who re-attached himself to the true ground of his
being by means of moral conquest, but not a real
incarnation of God. If the answer be in the negative it
would appear as if His obvious moral struggles were
somehow artificial and unreal, as if He were miraculously
274 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
preserved from sinning and his human and historical
sentence a mere piece of divine play-acting.
But the question is not so simple as this sharp alter-
native would suggest. We have first of all to be on our
guard against a kind of deification of morality. It is
difficult to state the matter in a way which will not give
rise to misunderstanding. Nevertheless it must be said
that what we call moral struggle is in itself but a parable,
an earthly human analogue of the divine will and working.
Constantly do we fall into the tendency of identifying
these two things. This is plain, unabashed work-
righteousness and it is irreconcilable with the doctrine
of justification by faith alone. Thus we tend to suppose
that Jesus attests His divinity in that He overcame sin by
pure activity of moral will and personality. But directly
we rise to the New Testament idea that moral will though
a human analogue of the divine will is not identical with
that will, we perceive that there is no contradiction in the
two statements that the renunciation of Jesus to the will
of God was both a divine act and from our point of view
a human victory. Since this renunciation was funda-
mentally a deed of God it was no human act. Since it
was a deed of God in man, it possessed all the recognisable
features of moral struggle and achievement. The
renunciation of Jesus was the earthly human result and
sequela of a divine self-renunciation. It arose because
of a divine movement of love towards men. It was the
earthly human expression of God's own sacrificial love
come into the world. God Himself in the Person of His
Son comes and stands within the limitations of our
humanity. The movement of love from God to man in
the Incarnation creates a movement of love from man to
God. The renunciation of God in eternity has, as its
human counterpart, a human life of effort and conquest.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 275
This effort can only be called unreal if the deed of God be
called unreal. Certainly there was involved the non potuit
peccare (he was not able to sin) on the part of Christ. Sin in
its true meaning was the very thing impossible to Him.
How possibly could a great God-manward movement
become a falling away of man from God ? How could the
divine subject of the human personality become sinful
subject ? The non potuit peccare belongs to the very
definition of the Incarnate Word. The putting in its
place of the potuit non peccare (he was able not to sin) is a
piece of sheer humanism and moralism, not to say pre-
sumption. But the moral struggle of Jesus is not made
thereby unreal. We may remind ourselves that very
often the temptations which give us the most trouble and
occasion us the bitterest struggles, are those to which our
nature will not let us succumb. We could do these evil
things, but then we simply could not. We are here
terribly temptable but we cannot fall. And the achieve-
ments which cost us the most are not seldom the very
ones which we are bound to realise. We cannot leave
a certain task alone, maybe we wish we could, but we
simply cannot. There are many experiences known to
us in which constraint and freedom are one. And the
intensity of Christ's struggles, the bitterness of the cup
which He had to drink, what is all this but an indication
of the passion of love which lies behind God's deed of
renunciation and sacrifice ? What is it but the earthly
human counterpart of the sacrifice in the heavenly places ?
What we call struggle, what we call pain, certainly does not
exist in the being of God. The Church was guided aright
in rejecting Patripassianism (the idea that the Father
suffered) and also in insisting that Christ suffered in His
humanity, not in His divinity. But the suffering and
striving of the human Jesus is nevertheless an index of
Zj6 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
what it cost God to redeem the world. It is the human
parallel to a great divine sacrifice. It is the creation of a
great, divine deed of love which drew mightily upon
God's will and heart. Even in our experience we find
often that the actual sufferers are not the most real
sufferers. A father who surrenders a son for some great
cause, let us say to fight for his country, does not suffer
in the sense that the son suffers. Indeed he may take
joy in his son's sacrifice and struggle. Nevertheless,
there is something in the father's experience which though
not identical with what the son experiences as suffering,
is often deeper and more agonising. Even in the midst
of his joy, and even as a constituent of his joy, there is a
pain of a totally different nature and kind, but even more
taxing and more terrible. The father is involved in his
son's suffering, sometimes more deeply involved, though
in a different way, than the son himself. And though in
the strict sense we must say that Christ suffered in His
humanity and not in His divinity, it has always been
Christian teaching that the whole Trinity was involved
in our redemption. And though we may not speak of
God being tempted, we must regard the human tempta-
tions of Jesus as the earthly parallel to a divine contending
with the antagonisms that stood in the way of His
redeeming purpose. Thus the non potuit peccare simply
means that it was Divine ' struggle ' (we are bound to use
the word as we have no other) which stood behind the
moral struggles of Jesus. Of course if we are in search
of a mere human example of moral heroism and victory,
we may regard Jesus as winning through in virtue of the
resources of His own will. But moral examples and
illustrations of moral victory cannot save. They may be
helpful often, but they yield no gospel.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 277
There are many criticisms which the conception of
Christology which we have briefly indicated has to
encounter. Of these we may select three, as covering
the main ground of objection. The first is that it is much
too abstract to be convincing ; much too abstract also to
be illumining and helpful. One feels the force of this
objection, and in a sense one has to yield to it. Our
attempt is to put into more or less rational terms, some-
thing whose content transcends all rationality. How
can an act of God be described in the form of our human
speech ? How can we draw a diagram of a movement
from above ? The movement cannot really be described,
it can only be divined, recognised, met. That man knows
the secret of Christ to whom the very sense of sin speaks
of the divine forgiveness, to whom the very sense of
death betokens the reality of the resurrection. In the
movement of the Spirit, not in the movement
of rational thought, he perceives the Word made
flesh, made sin, made death. Abstraction belongs not
to the thing in itself but to all our attempts to put it
into the frame-work of rational speech. There is, however,
a kind of speech which serves its purpose better. It is
that kind of speech which we call preaching, where the
preacher strives to not to describe in a theoretical way,
but to make his speech sacramental of the great divine
event. This kind of speech draws not only on the
theoretical faculty, but on all the powers and faculties of
personality. But even preaching cannot of itself convey
the secret. Only as the word of the preacher becomes
imbued with the power and illumination of the Divine
Spirit Himself, does the light spread, the understanding
awaken and the conviction come. In a sense true
Christology is, from the theoretical point of view, only a
form of polemic. It contends against false and inadequate
278 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
views of the Person of Christ. It can say what will not do
by way of interpretation, it cannot say satisfactorily what
will. It has often been pointed out that the Chalcedonian
definition is in the nature of a reaction against and a
disallowing of Christological heresies, while it leaves the
problem itself essentially unsolved.
If then we are told that our view is abstract and remote
we must confess that we have no reply immediately to
hand. And yet to this criticism we cannot yield. Partly
it is based upon a misunderstanding. It is said that the
idea of a divine person assuming an impersonal human
nature is unreal, that Jesus was a human and historical
personality whose power can be felt to-day, and that no
Christology can be anything but speculative abstraction
which does not stand firm and square on the historic
personality, and derive its essential content therefrom.
This objection, however, has real weight only against those
forms of the two-nature Christology which virtually
deny the human personality of Jesus. Where Jesus is
regarded as acting now in His human nature, and now
in His divine, it becomes impossible to assign to Him
real human personality. He becomes a psychological
anomaly, not to say monstrosity ; a sheer mystery and
not a revelation. An impersonal humanity does not
mean a humanity deprived of human personality. It
means a human nature in which the divine ground of all
that arises as personality in us has become the directly-
working inward principle. The Divine Son of God in
Whom we become sons of God through the Holy Spirit,
is through that same Spirit brought within the sphere of
our human nature. The result of that cannot be other
than a man with all the features and characteristics of
human personality. We cannot divide up the historically
given magnitude of the personality of Jesus, and say this
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 279
in it was human and this divine. We enquire rather
after that ground in which all human personality arises.
And we contend that this divine ground was the Person
of Jesus. To assert therefore that revelation consists
not in the human personality of Jesus as such, but in the
divine ground in which all personality arises and which
in Him was directly operative, is in no way to deny, but
emphatically to affirm, the human personality.
But not only is this criticism based on a misunder-
standing, it is based also on what we cannot but feel to
be a serious perversion of outlook. It belongs to that
movement and tendency in modern thought to claim an
absolute and final value for human personality. Human
personality is declared to possess such high value that God
can be ' expressed ' in it. Now this is surely a kind of
hypostatization of human personality, and here we need
to pause. The danger is great of a subtle kind of
anthropomorphism ; and even worse, of a, doubt-
lessly for the most part unrecognised, denial of the
Sovereignty of God. It is high time that a serious caveat
were uttered against this modern idolatry of personality.
Human personality, it must be roundly asserted, is a
created thing. In no sense is it a part of deity. " Cease
ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils : for wherein
is he to be accounted of ? " (Isaiah ii, 22) ; " Let no man
glory in men " (i Cor. iii, 21) ; " He that glorieth, let
him glory in the Lord " (i Cor. i, 31). This is beyond
any dispute the emphasis of the Bible. To proclaim the
divinity and finality of human personality, to draw any-
thing in the nature of an identity between human
personality and final reality is to depart from the whole
outlook and testimony of Scripture. Personality points to
God, is a human and earthly parable of the divine, no more.
Human personality is, like nature, the material on which
280 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the creative power of God works, it is not the sphere in
which the Deity actually expresses His life. Between
human personality and Divine Person there is a continuity
certainly, but the continuity lies in God ; it is a continuity
of crisis, and creativeness, it is the Holy Spirit. We may
also note, by the way, that the absolute and final value of
human personality involves the position that immortality
inheres in its structure, that it possesses survival value.
But this is a thought which is wholly foreign to the Bible.
There the emphasis is not on immortality but on resur-
rection, a new creative act of God. It is not said that the
human spirit lives on, in virtue of its own spiritual nature;
but that man who is a body-soul being, in sinking down
into death is met by the power of God, Who raises him up
again into a new kind or order of existence. It is God
alone " who hath immortality," and man receives it as
His gift, a gift that flows from His creative or rather
new-creative power and will.
Moreover the idolaters of personality never seem to see
how radically human personality is affected by sin and
guilt. For the most part they treat sin as an incident
and an episode in man's life, and not as radically affecting
the whole relationship of God to man, and accordingly
determining the nature of human personality. They do
not see quanti ponderis peccatum sit. The expression of
human personality is by no means the manifestation of
God, otherwise the doctrine of justification by faith alone
must be totally abandoned. And it is not without
meaning to point to the fact, that the modern idolatry of
personality is contemporary with a strange absence of
real and effective personality. We talk much to-day
about personality, and we give much attention to
cultivating it ; but very little of it is apparent in our midst.
The fact is, personality arises most effectively just where
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 281
men lose sight of it in looking, above and beyond it.
And the theologies which even disallow and disqualify
it as such, are precisely those which have been most
instrumental in creating it in its most real and effective
forms . 1 Says Doumergue, with reference to the theology
of Calvin : " it is the theologies of the bound will which
have saved liberty ; it is the theologies of salvation by
another than man, which have saved human morality ;
it is the theologies of renouncing the world which have
saved the mastery of men, over the world ; it is the
theologies of self-abnegation which have saved human
personality ; it is the theologies which have preached love
for God alone which have saved love for all men ; it is
the theologies of eternal predestination which have saved
progress, even political and social ; it is the theologies of
heteronomy which have conferred on man an autonomy
so masterful in itself that it has subjugated everything ;
it is the theologies which have said, ' God is all, man is
nothing,' which have made of man a force, an energy,
a power, incomparable, divine."
But turning now from the criticism of abstraction we
must give attention to another objection which is often
brought against our point of view. It is that we do not
get in this way a real Incarnation. The doctrine of
the Incarnation, it is said, means the union of divinity
with a perfect humanity, whereas our view, involving
as it does the negating of the actual, empirical humanity
of Jesus makes a real incarnation of the Godhead in human
nature and human life impossible. But now, what is this
perfect humanity but an abstraction ? It is no existence,
but simply an idea, or if one prefers to call it so, an ideal ?
If in Christ, God united Himself with a perfect humanity
(in the sense which the criticism under consideration
1 Doumergue' s Calvin, Tome IV, La Pensee de Calvin, Book I, Chapter i.
282 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
means) He united Himself with something which simply
is not here in this world at all, something which has never
existed and will never exist. On the contrary we say
it is our humanity with which God united Himself in
Christ, our creaturely, sin-stained, death-ruled humanity.
It is our house in which the Eternal Righteousness and
the Eternal Love abode. It is our human nature, not
some ideal or abstract human nature which does not
belong to the realm of existence at all, which God took to
Himself in Jesus Christ. How otherwise is the Incarna-
tion real? How otherwise can it be anything but an
abstraction ? Thus was Christ the friend of publicans
and sinners. Thus did He bear our sins, and carry our
sorrows. Thus did He stand under the judgment of
God for us, a judgment which is over all flesh. Thus was
the Word made flesh. Thus was He Who knew no sin,
made to be sin on our behalf. It was in laying hold of
our humanity, and not expressing it, but surrendering it
to the critical and new-creative power of God, that the
Eternal God became man in Christ. This is the miracle
that moves our wonder and our praise. And it is just
here that we perceive how that the Cross of Christ
supplies the clue to the understanding of the Incarnation.
What has brought orthodox Christology, which still in
its deepest meaning holds the promise of the future, into
a condition of stale-mate, is that men have so much
concerned themselves with the task of uniting together
abstract natures, instead of focussing their attention on
the great divine events of death and resurrection.
We can only understand who Christ was by coming to
realise what Christ did. He died unto sin. He bore the
sin of the world. He presented our nature before God
for judgment and new creation. He entered into our
death, and in the resurrection from the dead, He becomes
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 283
"the firstborn among many brethren." And the
believer dies with Him and rises with Him, not
figuratively, imaginatively, ideally, mystically, but here
and now in faith, and at the last, in the moment of death,
in utmost realism. The purpose of the Incarnation was
the atonement, the reconciliation, the redemption, the new
creation of our humanity, and that purpose determines its
nature. The Incarnation does not simply mean the
mere presence of God in human nature, the uniting
together of two entities to form a kind of spectacle. It
means His presence as will, action, judgment, grace, new
creation. Just as we must interpret the Eternal nature
of God from His predetermined will, so we must interpret
the nature of the Incarnate from the standpoint of
redemptive deed and action. God was not simply present
in humanity in the Person of Christ, He was there doing
something with it, turning it round, reconciling it to
Himself, making it new. It is not as if God first prepared
for Himself a perfect humanity with which next He
united Himself. How could He prepare a perfect
humanity excepting through the judgment and recreation
of our humanity ? And if He could, what would that have
to do with us ? What message, word, hope, promise would
that hold for us ? It is just because our humanity is laid hold
of in Christ, that the Incarnation is so real. And if one
objects that this view attributes actual sin to the humanity
of Jesus, we reply that it means nothing of the kind.
For it must be repeated again, Jesus did not express His
humanity, He renounced it as such, He delivered it up to
God, and that renunciation, that delivering of it up, was
the movement, the ' motif ' of His life as the Incarnate.
The Cross lay at the very heart of His personality. Of
course if we have in view merely a human act of renuncia-
tion, we could not proclaim the sinlessness of Jesus.
284 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
But inasmuch as this is just what we have not in view, but
a real movement from God conditioning the renunciation,
a real plerosis that creates the kenosis, all sin as belonging
to the Incarnate is excluded. A real Incarnation there-
fore implies a laying hold of our humanity, and not some
abstract or ideal humanity. "It behoved him in all
things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might
be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining
to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he
is able to succour them that are tempted " (Hebrews ii,
But we must now turn to yet another criticism. It is
said that our point of view leads to a disparaging of the
historical Jesus ; that thereby the life, teaching, example,
deeds of Jesus are emptied of all real significance for
revelation. Our contention, however, is by no means
that there is no revelation in the historical facts of Christ's
life. On the contrary they are full of revelation. It is
that these facts do not shine in their own light. That is
to say, we have to look above them and beyond them if
we are to discover their true significance. Just as the
meaning of history in general is not gained by an induction
from its course, but must be seen in the light of revelation
(IJrgeschichte) so the meaning of this history does not
lie on the historical plane, but must be seen from above
that plane. We may note, that it is very widely felt
that there was a secret about this man. And the extra-
ordinarily divergent verdicts that have been passed upon
Him from the standpoint of historical investigation
confirm that feeling. Some indeed have felt the problem
of the historical Jesus to be so acute that they have
roundly declared that there was no such person, but that
His story is a piece of mythology. It is only necessary to
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 285
refer to Schweitzer's great book, The Quest of the Historical
Jesus in confirmation of the statement that to the historian
Jesus presents an insoluble problem. Schweitzer himself
is content to leave Him so. He says : x " He comes to us
as One unknown, without a name, as of old by the lake-
side He came to those men who knew Him not." He
even goes so far as to suggest that we must abandon all
attempts after a Christology. 2 " Before that mysterious
Person, who in the form of his time, knew that he was
creating upon the foundation of his life and death a
moral world which bears his name, we must be forced to
lay our faces in the dust, without daring even to wish to
understand his nature." If Christ is to be interpreted it
cannot be from the mere record of Him, it must be from
the witness of Him. But when we stand at the point of
view of the witness, when we stand above the facts as
such in the region of the interpretation, and when through
the Holy Spirit the interpretation becomes real light and
understanding, then the facts of the historical life become
full of revelationary meaning and significance. We may
remark, by the way, that it was historic ' flair ' of the
highest kind which led Schweitzer to approach the life
of Jesus from the point of view of the Passion, and to
read the facts and the sayings of that life from this point
of view. In that way he was able to reach conclusions
which bear a close affinity with the interpretations of faith.
To interpret Christ's life by His death brings the historian
as near as he can get to the standpoint of the believer. At
the Passion the air of history is most heavily charged with
that of Urgeschicbte. It seems strange that Schweitzer
who as historian came so near to the interpretations of the
witness, should as theologian step back from them and
1 The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 401.
2 The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, pp. 274-275.
286 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
rationalise the significance of Christ's life in terms of
immanence.
We do not then ' disparage ' the historical Jesus, or
empty Him of meaning and revelation. Anything but
that. The self-emptying, the kenosis of the earthly Jesus
which finds its consummation in the Cross, is accompanied
every step of the way by a plerosis which finds its con-
summation in the Resurrection. These two movements
of kenosis and plerosis are one movement seen from two
sides, the human side and the divine. The going out of
the human merely as such, means the incoming of the
divine. These two movements are mutually involved
at every point of the Lord's life. It is in them that His
being is constituted. Thus in all His words and deeds
the power of the resurrection, of the new divine humanity,
makes itself felt. Always was Jesus doing the works
of God, for at the centre of His being, the Holy Spirit,
the Spirit of the Cross and Resurrection, the Spirit in
Whom the divinity and the humanity act in one another
and through one another, was at work in all the absolute-
ness and finality of His power. The Fourth Gospel well
brings out this involution of the kenosis and the plerosis
in the life of Jesus. " I can of myself do nothing : as I
hear, I judge : and my judgement is righteous ; because I
seek not my own will, but the will of him that sent me "
(John v, 30). " He that speaketh from himself, seeketh
his own glory : but he that seeketh the glory of him that
sent him, the same is true, and no righteousness is in him "
(John vii, 18). " I am not come of myself " (John vii, 28).
" If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing " (John viii, 54).
" As the Father hath life in himself even so gave he to the
Son also to have life in himself " (John v, 26, R.V.). The
accusation of disparaging the historical Jesus rests upon
the misapprehension that, according to the view which we
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 287
hold, nothing was happening in His life save the renuncia-
tion and the disqualifying of His humanity. It is lost
sight of that that negative movement as we may call it, is
the obverse of a great positive movement, that the kenosis
is in its fundamental reality a divine plerosis. Mere
renunciation possesses no value. It is only when the
human as such is disqualified by the incoming of the
divine, and when therefore the human is restored to its
divine meaning, that revelation arises. Could these two
movements of kenosis and plerosis be dissociated from
one another in the life of Jesus, could the latter be thought
of merely as corning after the former, there would indeed
be much point in speaking of a disparagement of the
historical Jesus. But inasmuch as these two movements
are mutually involved, inasmuch as they take their
character the one from the other, inasmuch as they are
essentially one movement as seen from two sides, the
the charge of disparagement falls to the ground. It is
not the historical Jesus who is disparaged. It is history,
in its claim to reveal the essential content of His person
and work. A life of Jesus in the biographical sense is
an impossibility. But a preaching of the gospel on the
basis of the historic records of His life and words and
deeds, clothes these records with light and life and power.
And we may note, that since the Holy Spirit was
working in the life of Jesus, the Spirit of the Cross and
Resurrection, the Spirit of crisis and new creation, the
Spirit of the self-fulfilment of the divine through the
self-surrender of the human, the Spirit in Whom the
humanity and the divinity act in and through each other,
it came about that the historic Jesus was ever producing
the condition of crisis among the men brought into
contact with Him. To the Pharisees and religious
leaders He is an offence, a stumbling-block. The
288 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
disciples on the other hand forsake all and follow Him.
Zacclmts, the publican, turns right round as Christ
comes to him, while Nicodemus, the ruler of the Jews,
recognising no need for a thorough cleavage and new
departure in his life, remains on the outside. Can any-
one read the record of the Lord's deeds and words
without coming up against a great either-or ? " He that is
not with me is against me ; and he that gathereth not with
me scattereth " (Matthew xii, 30). " If any man would
come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross
and follow me. For whosoever would save his life shall
lose it : and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall
find it " (Matthew xvi, 24-25, R.V.). No historical reason
is adequate to explain this either-or. But when we rise
above the historical plane into the region of Urgeschicbte,
when Christ stands forth in the light of the Holy Spirit
as divine revelation, then this crisis, this great either-or
is seen in its true meaning and significance. The historical
Jesus can only be theologically explained (in so far as we
can talk about explanation at all) never historically or
psychologically. But when we stand at the right
theological point of view the story, as it were, opens out
before us, and many of the antinomies and discrepancies
even, which present such problems to the historical critic,
begin to be resolved. And specially this antinomy:
how could the Jesus of the synoptic tradition have
developed into the Pauline and Johannine Christ, and the
Christ of the Christian Church !
The final question which calls for treatment in this
chapter, has to do with the relation of the conception of
Christology which we have indicated to the traditional
Christology of the Catholic Church. We have already
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 289
indicated both its affinities with and its divergencies from
what is known as Chalcedonianism. It agrees with
Chalcedonianism in affirming the two natures, the human
and the divine within the one Person. To abandon the
two-nature Christology is to erase the deep distinction
between man and God, to make God continuous with
man and nature, and to take all vital significance out of
such words as fall, redemption, resurrection and new
creation. 1 " The opposition against the doctrine of the
natures, against the ' metaphysic ' of the Church's
Christology, conceals the much more fundamental
opposition against the Biblical Christian understanding
of revelation in general. The fundamental contrast of
the Christian faith : creature-creator, sinful creatureliness
the divine world of redemption, this world the world
to come, whose bridging over is the concern of the
Biblical Christian witness of faith, is confounded with a
relative opposition, that of nature and moral law, of being
and value." The great strength of Chalcedonianism is
that it disallows any kind of fusion between the divine and
the human. It establishes that God is not man, and man
is not God. We are convinced that all real Christological
advance must take its bearings from the Chalcedonian
formula. There are, however, certain outstanding
defects. We do not number among the most serious of
these that the problem of Christ's Person is merely
stated and not solved. It may be that little more can
be done than to state the problem correctly. But it is
in the very stating of the problem that Chalcedonianism
falls short. We do not learn from the Chalcedonian
formula that God becomes incarnate in Christ as His
Word. That is to say, the Incarnation is not set forth in
such a way as to make it a message, a call, a judgment, a
1 Brunner, Der Mittler, p. 207.
T,
290
REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
crisis and a new creation. We have two abstract nature
held miraculously together, but the divine nature has nj
action of a critical nature upon the human. The resu
of the uniting of the two natures is a spectacle rather tha
a word to men. Nothing is really said to us. It is her
that the criticism of Chalcedonianism as metaphysi
finds its account. The human is not made to speak of th
divine, and the divine is not made to speak to the huma:
Hence the Chalcedonian formula fails to set forth th
Incarnation as revelation. There is nothing in it whi
calls forth a response from men. The Incarnation become!
something which has to be assented to, not responded t<
It is putting the same criticism in another way when
say that the doctrine of the Incarnation is not stated i
such a way as to imply the Atonement. The two nature:
are static entities and their union is a static thing. Tb
dynamic idea is wanting. From the point of view of tto
formula the Atonement is otiose. What need of a grea|i
deed of atonement, when the human and the divine
'j$A
be brought together without creating crisis, deed, judg|||
ment ? All that is logically necessary is for the believef||j
to be somehow integrated into this unity of the
and the divine. A quasi-physical incorporation into
sacred humanity becomes the necessary thing.
word becomes flesh but there is no sense in which the
word becomes ' sin.' It is true that the letter of Leo
..r
Flavian which was approved by the Council of ChalcedofJ1|
contains the words : 1<e Thus the properties of each natur|fli
and essence were preserved entire and went together toil
v^jy*
form one person ; and so humility was taken up b|||
majesty, weakness by strength, mortality by eternity ; an|f|
for the purpose of paying the debt which we had incurredj|
that nature that is inviolable was united to the nature thai
1 See Bethune Baker's Introduction to the History of Christian Doctrine, p. 2893
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 29!
can suffer, in order that the conditions of our restoration
might be satisfied, and the one and the same Mediator
between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, might be
able to die in respect of the one and not able to die in
respect of the other." But according to this statement,
the deed of redemption stands in no organic relation to
the uniting of the natures. The uniting takes place in
order that the deed may be performed, but the nature of
the deed does not supply the terms by means of which
the uniting of the natures may be understood. The
doing of the great deed does not flow directly from the
uniting of the natures. What is needed in the interests
of the credibility of the creed of Chalcedon is a firmer
emphasis on the fact that it was no abstract perfect
humanity which was united with the divine in Christ,
but our human nature in its actual condition of fall and
sin, a humanity therefore, which as such the divinity
disqualifies. The natures need to be defined less as static
and rational entities than as movements, in which the
human nature is related to the divine not positively but
negatively. It is in the surrender of the human to the
divine that the human nature becomes a perfect human
nature. The incoming of divinity means the outgoing
of humanity in its empiric actuality : yet not its annulment
but its new creation. What Chalcedonianism lacks is any
real understanding of the Holy Spirit as the relation
between the humanity and the divinity of Christ ; the
Holy Spirit through Whom two different movements,
that of humanity and of divinity are brought together
and made to operate in and through each other, so that
what from our side, the human side, is a movement
towards death, is from the other side, the divine side,
a movement of new life.
290 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
crisis and a new creation. We have two abstract natures
held miraculously together, but the divine nature has no
action of a critical nature upon the human. The result
of the uniting of the two natures is a spectacle rather than
a word to men. Nothing is really said to us. It is here
that the criticism of Chalcedonianism as metaphysical
finds its account. The human is not made to speak of the
divine, and the divine is not made to speak to the human.
Hence the Chalcedonian formula fails to set forth the
Incarnation as revelation. There is nothing in it which
calls forth a response from men. The Incarnation becomes
something which has to be assented to, not responded to.
It is putting the same criticism in another way when we
say that the doctrine of the Incarnation is not stated in
such a way as to imply the Atonement. The two natures
are static entities and their union is a static thing. The
dynamic idea is wanting. From the point of view of the
formula the Atonement is otiose. What need of a great
deed of atonement, when the human and the divine can
be brought together without creating crisis, deed, judg-
ment ? All that is logically necessary is for the believer
to be somehow integrated into this unity of the human
and the divine. A quasi-physical incorporation into the
sacred humanity becomes the necessary thing. The
word becomes flesh but there is no sense in which the
word becomes ' sin.' It is true that the letter of Leo to
Flavian which was approved by the Council of Chalcedon
contains the words : 1 " Thus the properties of each nature
and essence were preserved entire and went together to
form one person ; and so humility was taken up by
majesty, weakness by strength, mortality by eternity ; and
for the purpose of paying the debt which we had incurred,
that nature that is inviolable was united to the nature that
1 See Bcthunc Baker's Introduction to the History of Christian Doctrine, p. 289.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 291
can suffer, in order that the conditions of our restoration
might be satisfied, and the one and the same Mediator
between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, might be
able to die in respect of the one and not able to die in
respect of the other." But according to this statement,
the deed of redemption stands in no organic relation to
the uniting of the natures. The uniting takes place in
order that the deed may be performed, but the nature of
the deed does not supply the terms by means of which
the uniting of the natures may be understood. The
doing of the great deed does not flow directly from the
uniting of the natures. What is needed in the interests
of the credibility of the creed of Chalcedon is a firmer
emphasis on the fact that it was no abstract perfect
humanity which was united with the divine in Christ,
but our human nature in its actual condition of fall and
sin, a humanity therefore, which as such the divinity
disqualifies. The natures need to be defined less as static
and rational entities than as movements, in which the
human nature is related to the divine not positively but
negatively. It is in the surrender of the human to the
divine that the human nature becomes a perfect human
nature. The incoming of divinity means the outgoing
of humanity in its empiric actuality : yet not its annulment
but its new creation. What Chalcedonianism lacks is any
real understanding of the Holy Spirit as the relation
between the humanity and the divinity of Christ ; the
Holy Spirit through Whom two different movements,
that of humanity and of divinity are brought together
and made to operate in and through each other, so that
what from our side, the human side, is a movement
towards death, is from the other side, the divine side,
a movement of new life.
292 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Another Christological conception which has had great
influence in Christian thought is that of the ' logos ' or
the ' Word.' The doctrine of the divine logos through
whom the world was made, and who became man in
Jesus Christ has had a long and complicated history with
which we cannot deal here. Its strength and its weakness
lie in the fact that by means of it, it was found possible
to commend Christianity to the thought of the Goeco-
Roman world. The logos idea, it has often been pointed
out, was as primal for ancient thought as is that of
evolution for the thought of to-day. In that thought, it
served a two-fold purpose. First it was the category
used to affirm the rationality of the world. The logos
was the immanent reason of the world, the inner unifying
principle of nature and man. It was the supreme value of all
existence,and the phenomena of existence were arranged in
order of reality according to the measure in which they
participated in this rational value. But in Philo and the
Alexandrines it was combined with a more dynamic idea.
The logos became the divine energy and self-revelation
of God. The universe was the embodiment of God's
rational will. Thus the idea of will which expresses
transcendence is brought into the forefront as over
against the immanent idea of reason. The logos 1
" represents the sum offerees which have their ground in
the will of God working harmoniously together as the
immanent reason of the world." The designation of the
Divine Son Who became incarnate in Jesus as the logos
thus served to bring Christianity into line with the cosmic
process, to connect soteriology with cosmology and so to
produce a Christian philosophy. The danger was lest
revelation should be transformed into a philosophy
working with rational and immanential conceptions. To
1 Scott, The Fourth Gospel, p. 150.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 293
this danger, the early fathers and the framers of Church
dogma were by no means blind. In the main their con-
ceptions of the logos was sharply distinguished from that
of an immanent world reason or world power. They
were careful to emphasize the transcendence of the logos,
and to avoid the idea that the Incarnation was but the
manifestation in terms of one human personality of the
immanent reason of the world. This is perhaps less
true of the early apologists and the Alexandrines whose
concern was to show that Christianity was the true
philosophy and who strove to commend Christianity to
the ancient world as the gathering up, completion, and
harmonisation of the truth given brokenly and in part
in the philosophies of the day.
Our attitude to the logos idea will be determined
according to the way we judge of it, either as a revelation-
ary and theological concept, or as a philosophical idea
and an apologetic device. From the former point of
view it is of great value, from the latter its value is
dubious and its effects have often been misleading. In
many ways the logos idea does great service to the
theology of the Incarnation. It brings out into clear
relief the fact that the God 'of creation and the God of
redemption are one, thus undermining all gnosticism.
It establishes the truth that the ground plan of creation is
redemption, that creation finds its crown and consum-
mation in redemption, that as St. Paul says, the world
was made for Christ and through Christ. It emphasizes
the fact that the continuity between the world and God
lies in God's own word and will and not in some rational
or metaphysical entity uniting them both together. And
yet even here some deduction must be made. The logos
can only perform these services truly, when it is taken in
conjunction with that other great Christian idea, that of
Z94 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
the Holy Spirit. For of itself, its rational and im-
manential connotations are too strong to enable it
effectively to bring out the fact that the connection
between God and the world is expressed by the word
crisis better than by the word continuity. Still the logos
idea is capable of being so stated as to set out the true
meaning and significance of the Incarnation. God
became man as His Word. That is to say, what we have
in Christ is not the word of the world, but the word to
the world, not some immanent spirit in a human saint or
hero but the critical and new-creative action of divinity
upon humanity. The logos or the Word that became
incarnate in Christ, is not the immanent ground of the
world, but its divine reference. It is with this con-
notation of idea and significance that the writer of the
Fourth Gospel utilises the conception of the logos. It
is very improbable that he was influenced to any serious
extent by Philonic and Alexandrian ideas, still more
improbable by any direct Platonic or Stoic influence.
His aim in presenting the idea of the Incarnation to the
Grseco-Roman world under the category of the logos
was critical rather than apologetic. That is to say, his
purpose was to expound who and of what nature the logos
was, in distinction to the ideas current in the thought of
his day. He will present to them the true doctrine of
the logos. He will set that doctrine over against the
current conceptions of it. He does not approach the
men of his time as those to whom the logos is known,
but as those to whom He is essentially unknown. Thus
he says, when the logos appeared, the world knew Him
not, though it was made through Him (John i, 10), and the
true life which was the light for men lay in Him (i, 4).
Even His own, those specially chosen and providentially
led for the recognition of Him did not receive Him (i, 1 1).
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 295
In fact man on his natural level was unable to recognise
the logos. The perceiving of Him involved a new birth
which was not human and natural, not according to the
will of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God (i, 1 3).
The writer's language may no doubt be sometimes
paralleled from Philo and the expressions of con-
temporary thought, but the meaning attached to it is
altogether new, so that in it the logos idea is set over
against, and not in line with, its generally received
connotations. The claim of the writer is that he has
beheld the manifestation of the logos in Jesus Christ :
" We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten
from the Father full of grace and truth " (i, 1 4, R. V.). 'And
by this he means, not that he is one of the original
eye-witnesses of the historic Jesus, nor that by means of
rational insight and intuition he perceived that the world-
reason was expressed in Jesus, but that by means of
supernatural perception and understanding following on
and connected with the new birth, he had beheld the
glorious reality of the Divine Word, long hidden and
inaccessible to ordinary human perception, but made
flesh and appearing in the world in the presence of Jesus
Christ. Moreover the writer lays stress on the fact that
there is only one logos, not many ' logoi.' The one God
Whom no man has seen at any time is declared through
His Son (i, 1 8) Who appears among men as His logos or
Word, so that while the law is given by Moses, grace and
truth (reality in the sense of revelation) came by Jesus
Christ (i, 17). In fact the writer was essaying a difficult
but necessary task, and one which under the circumstances
of the time was peculiarly liable to misunderstanding. His
concern was not, primarily at any rate, to translate the
content of revelation into the thought-forms of his day,
1 No opinion on the authorship of the Fourth Gospel is intended here.
296 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
not to philosophise Christianity, but to lay hold of the
weapons in the philosophic armoury in order to bring
philosophy itself under a fundamental criticism. For
that purpose he takes the logos idea, turns it, as it were,
against itself, showing its relative right but bringing it
into a new relation which radically changes its significance.
In the main, as we have said, the framers of the early
Church dogmatic were actuated by the same purpose.
But in those circles where the apologetic interest was
strong, among those who were anxious for a Christian
philosophy which should align itself with the best
philosophical thinking of the times, there was always
the danger lest the logos idea should be utilised in the
interests of a liberalising tendency moving in the direction
of rationalism and immanentism.
The truth is, as we have said, the logos idea needs, in
order to save it from perversion, to be correlated with the
idea of the Holy Spirit. And it is important to note in
this connection how large a place is given to the Spirit in
the Fourth Gospel. There are some critics who regard
the teaching of the Spirit as being of the very heart and
purpose of the gospel while others, such as Dr. E. F.
Scott, regard it as mainly the result of a desire on the part
of the writer to conserve the traditional belief of the
Church along with his own newer and profounder
interpretations. 1 The former idea would seem to be
nearer to the the truth, for it is difficult to believe that a
conservative interest should lead to so great an emphasis,
particularly as according to Dr. Scott this emphasis
serves to obscure the main intention of the gospel. 2 The
correlation of logos and Spirit is, however, definitely
indicated if it is not formally worked out. This is some-
what obscured by the fact that after the Prologue, the
1 The Fourth Gospel, p. 348. 2 Ibid., p. 3zo.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION 297
logos is not explicitly mentioned though the ideas
connected with it pervade the whole gospel portraiture
of Christ." 3 The hiddenness and non-recognition of
the logos is also stated of the Spirit ; " whom the world
cannot receive, for he beholdeth him not, neither knoweth
him " (John xiv, 17). And just as the reception of the
logos is not a natural, but a supernatural event, the act
of those " born not of blood, nor of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God " (John i, 1 3) ; so
also is it with the Spirit : "ye know him, for he abideth
with you and shall be in you " (John xiv, 1 7, R.V.). More-
over the new birth is the work of the Spirit (John iii,
3-7). The Spirit is not given until Jesus is glorified
(John vii, 39), and we may connect therewith the
declaration concerning the logos, " we beheld his glory "
(John i, 14). It has been a misfortune for the theology
of the Church that this correlation of Logos and Spirit
has been so meagrely worked out. Understood in its
true light it prevents any approach towards identifying
the Christian logos with the immanent reason of the
world. It conserves the idea that the logos is only rightly
understood when interpreted not as word of the world,
but as word to the world.
Our criticism of traditional and orthodox Christology
therefore, is that it needs to be corrected and completed
by transposing it into a new element. It needs to be
interpreted in terms drawn from the great idea of the
Holy Spirit. It is a noble creation, far superior to
anything which modern liberalism would put in its place.
Neither the conception of the two natures, nor that of
the logos may be abandoned. They preserve interests
Ibid., p. 155.
298 REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
which are vital to the gospel message. They are not to
be watered down to suit the demands of rational criticism.
Rather are they to be interpreted in such a way as to bring
the autonomy of reason as well as every other kind of
human autonomy to a decisive criticism and judgment.
The present chapter is an attempt, all too meagre when
measured by the dimensions of the task, to indicate the
method of this interpretation. A great perplexity but a
great promise lies here for the theologians of to-day and
to-morrow. The perplexity and the promise are gathered
up in the great words of Paul which open up endless
vistas of endeavour and endless possibilities of progress
both for thought and life : " that I may know him, and
the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his
sufferings, becoming conformed unto his death ; if by
any means I may attain unto the resurrection of the dead."
INDEX
A Priorism, 19, 21, 4off,
Absolute, The, 241, 2j2ff.
Adam, Dr. D. S., 41.
Alexander, Dr. S., 114, 173-182.
Apollinarius, 270
Aquinas, 13.
Aristotle, 23.
Autonomy, i2ff, 84, 101, 113, 129, 187^ 200.
174, 188, 191, 255, Eutyches, 270.
Dogma (and Law),
Doumergue, 281.
Drinkwater, 22.
E
Epistemology, n$, 170, 174,
B
F
Baker, Dr. Bethune, 290.
Earth, Heinrich, 150. Figgis, Dr. J. Neville, 131.
Earth, Karl, 61, 86, 96, 137, 148, Forsyth, Dr. P. T., 26, 36, 93,
154, 156, 177, 2i7ff, 228. n6, 119, 149, 168, 227, 233,
Bosanquet, 39, 253. 243.
Brunner, 27, 29, 66, 85, 96, 105,
ijo, 168, 186, 191, 216, 232,
289- r
Bultmann, i94f, 197, 198.
Bury, Prof. J. B., 195. Gore> Dr chades> IJZj
H
Cairns, Dr. D. S., 134-140
Catholicism, io7ff, 166, 170. Hardy, Thomas, 25.
Chalcedon, Creed of, 270, 278, Harnack, von, 2346
289$?. Hegelianism, 16, 197.
Chance and Election, 735. Hoyle, Birch, 217.
Communicatio Idiomatum, 270. Hiigel, von, 28, 76, 211.
Cowper, 163. Huxley, Julian, 19.
D
Deism, 8off, 239.
Denney, Dr. James, 70.
Inge, 20, 255.
299
300
INDEX
K
Kant, 16, 102, no.
Kierkegaard, 103, 231.
Kenosis, The, 27 if.
R
Raven, Prof., 36.
Renaissance, The, 15.
Ritschl, 1 6, in.
Robinson, Dr. Wheeler, 42, 185,
255-
Russell, Bertrand, 196.
Lake, Dr. Kirsopp, 19, 265.
Leo, Tome of, 270.
Logos, The, 189, 292-297.
M
Mackintosh, Dr. H. R., 37.
McConnachie, Dr. J., 217.
Modalism, 233-239.
Sabellius, 234^.
Sanday, Dr. William, 162.
Schaeder, 41, 142-149, 165, 230.
Schiller, 204.
Schleiermacher, i5fT, in, 234^.
Schweitzer, 26f, 54f, i64f, 285.
Schreiner, 222.
Shaw, Bernard, 25.
Spengler, 186, 191, 197-211, 265^
Streeter, n.
N
Newman, Cardinal, 45, 220. T
New Psychology, The, 18, 178. a- /
Nietzsche, 207 Tenmnt > "' ''* ^' '" l6 *'
XT r I8O, 2?0, 241.
Non potuit peccare, 275f. /
r /J Tennyson, 37, 68.
Trinity, The, 248ff.
O
Oman, Dr. John, /pf.
Origins, Christian, 257.
Otto, 17, 173.
Troeltsch, 17, in, 114, 145, 1893,
195, 211.
U
Urgeschichte, 2176, 268, 284f.
Pantheism, 240.
Patripassianism, 275. Valentine, Dr. Cyril N., 241.
Philo, 292, 295.
Plerosis, The, 27 iff.
Preaching, 277. W
Predestination and Faith, 90-96. whitenead) Prof . A . N 2J .
Predestination and The Absolute. WMamS) Prof R R> ^
252 255> Wordsworth, 22.
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