NYPL RESEARCH LIBRARIES
3 3433 06824543 4
AND THE
ETERNAL ORDER
BUCKHAM
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CHRIST AND THE ETERNAL
ORDER
CHRIST
AND
THE ETERNAL ORDER
"In whom are all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge hidden"
BY
JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM, D.D.
PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN
PACIFIC THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
BOSTON
THE PILGRIM PRESS
NEW YORK — CHICAGO
I906
^Publishers Weekly
£011j
- 1
Copyright, 1906
By The Congregational Sunday-School
and Publishing Society
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO MY FATHER
WHO FIRST AWOKE IN ME THE IMPULSE TO FAITH
AND FIRST LED ME TO PERCEIVE THE
NOBILITY AND OPPORTUNITY
OF THEOLOGY
PREFACE
Almost from boyhood the writer has been con-
cerned in finding a mental setting for Jesus Christ.
Sometimes it has been a disturbing, but more often
a stimulating, problem. The problem arose ap-
parently from the absorption of his earlier religious
life in God as Presence and Father, and the diffi-
culty in finding such a place beside him for Christ
as the Bible and the Church seemed to require.
For a time the words, " Believe in God, believe also
in me," afforded temporary standing-room. The
first clear light on the intellectual problem came,
after entering the ministry, through reading Fred-
erick Denison Maurice's Theological Essays, in
connection with the words in Colossians, " Christ
in you, the hope of glory." The result was a great
illumination of mind and uplift of heart. The
difficulty of accounting for Christ in the contrasted
aspects of his historical limitation and his universal
significance largely disappeared. The conclusions
reached were presented in an article entitled " The
Indwelling Christ," published in The Andover Re-
view for August, 1 89 1, and met with a very warm
response. The substance of this article is included
in Chapter II, Part III of this volume. The con-
ception was but germinal and needed time for
development and that adjustment to theological
[vii]
Preface
movements and systems which the present study
aims to give.
In coming into an ever larger conception of the
meaning of Christ and of his relation to God and
to humanity, I have been most largely indebted to
two men, — the late honored and beloved Professor
Egbert C. Smyth, learned interpreter and earnest
defender of the Incarnation, and Dr. George A.
Gordon, theologian and preacher, friend and inspirer
of those who are searching for an ampler con-
ception of Christianity. Into the labors of many
others also I have entered, as will appear in the
pages that follow, and that not without the keen
sense of privilege which must come to one who is
working in any department of truth to-day.
In treating such a theme as this, one cannot
but feel sometimes that he has transgressed the
wisdom of the Psalmist who said, " Neither do I
exercise myself in great matters, or in things too
wonderful for me." But with all the consciousness
of the limitation of knowledge and the inadequate
results of our efforts to attain and to express ultimate
truth, one cannot but feel also that along with the
"dust and chaff" of speculation lie gathers enough
of real truth to reward the endeavor and to prove
the instinct which impels us to seek an answer to the
great mysteries of life and God and destiny to be
a divine impulse.
Perhaps the best recommendation this book could
have is that it is open to the charges both of mysti-
[ viii ]
Preface
cism and of rationalism; for the two tendencies
counteract one another, and a theology which is
not both mystical and rational is not a fair inter-
pretation of Christian faith.
If there is any note of dogmatism or of specula-
tive presumption here, it is repudiated at the outset.
In discussions of this nature, to lay down any
challenge of " thus and thus it must be " is both
irreverence and folly. One can be very sure only
of principles of reason and facts of experience.
Interpretations of these facts can be rational and
helpful only as they are tentative and suggestive.
As such they have both validity and value.
In concluding this prefatory word let me say
that this interpretation of the Christ has not been
made from a partisan or one-sided view-point. It
is useless to prop up any theology which does not
rest upon secure foundations. I have faced both
sides of this question. I share sufficiently the
spirit of the age to feel keenly the difficulties of
the New Testament Christology. It would be
much easier, and apparently much more scientific
and sensible, to throw aside all the supernatural and
metaphysical elements of Christianity and explain
Christ simply as a very good man with only a very
good man's significance in a revelation which has
no particular historical culmination. But would it
be true to the facts ? That is the vital question.
Truth that is exclusive and not inclusive, that
sacrifices reality to clarity, that blinks the harder
[ix]
Preface
facts and ignores the deeper meanings, is no truth.
It is only the shallow verdict of a self-sufficient and
pseudo-scientific age-spirit. We ought not to
decide this Christological problem without getting
as near as possible to the absolute human view-
point, independent of the presuppositions of either
the first century or of our own. When, therefore,
we find that on the whole the major witness of the
mind of humanity, in its most enlightened part,
has recognized supernatural, or better, mystical
elements in Christianity, we may well hesitate be-
fore eradicating them in obedience to the impulse
of our time. If we do, we shall surely pave the
way for the misgivings of Bishop Blougram,
" Once feel about, and soon or late you hit
Some sense, in which it might be, after all.
Why not, ' The Way, the Truth, the Life ' ? "
Truth is too large, life is too real, mystery is too
great for snap judgments, either by an individual
or a generation, especially judgments of denial or
exclusion. Far better is it, and far truer, to believe
too much than too little, to unduly greaten Christ,
if that is possible, than to unduly narrow him.
Berkeley, California.
[*]
CONTENTS
Part I
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRIST
Chapter
I. The Christology of To-day . . .
II. Revelation : Progressive and Final
III. The Christocentric View-point
IV. Christ Interpreting God . .
V. Christ Interpreting Nature
VI. Christ Interpreting Man
VII. The Worship of Christ . . .
Page
3
10
18
26
32
39
47
Part II
ASPECTS OF CHRIST
VIII. The Human Christ 57
IX. The Historic Christ 64
X. The Eternal Christ 71
XI. The Living Christ 78
XII. The Cosmic Christ 85
[xi]
Contents
Part III
THE POTENCIES OF CHRIST
Chapter Page
XIII. Christ Pre-present and Pre-potent . 97
XIV. Christ Indwelling 104
XV. Christ in Conscience 116
XVI. Christ Regenerating 124
XVII. Christ Atoning 133
XVIII. Christ Risen 142
XIX. Christ Returning 151
XX. Christ and Social Redemption . . . 159
XXI. The Kingdom of Christ 166
APPENDIX
I. Historical Sketch of the Christocentric
Theology 177
II. The Vital Issues of the Harnack Con-
troversy 184
[xii]
PART I
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRIST
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God."
"This teacher was reason itself, it was visible in him and indeed
appeared bodily in him." — Justin Martyr.
"With Clement of Alexandria, the idea of the Logos has a content
which is on the one hand so wide that he is found wherever man rises
above the level of nature, and on the other so concrete that an authentic
knowledge of him can only be obtained from historical revelation." —
Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. II.
" That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows ! "
— Robert Browning, Epilogue.
" What we want is not a summation of doctrine. We have had enough
of that. What we want a great deal more is something to give us breadth
of standing and a greater vitality of idea." — Horace Bushnell, Life
and Letters.
"Ring in the Christ that is to be." — Alfred Tennyson.
CHRIST
AND THE ETERNAL ORDER
I
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF TO-DAY
We face vital issues in Christology. There is per-
plexity, uncertainty, confusion. Divergent theories,
varying attitudes prevail. Agnosticism Present.day
looks upon Christ with a respectful pity, Christolo&y
as one prattling innocently of a God of whom he
knew nothing; Monism, the Mysticism of modern
science, absorbed in cosmic secrets, feeling after
the Unknown, ignores Christ; Naturalism promptly
classifies him with the genus homo and queries no
further; Humanitarianism honors his humanity,
and is blind to himself; Philosophy and Ethics
pay tribute to his teaching and fail to apprehend
the Teacher; the older Orthodoxy clings desper-
ately to outgrown formulas of his Deity, convinced
of standing fast for a truth that it can neither re-
late nor define, yet conscious of the antiquity of
its armor and the inadequacy of its defense. The
scholarship of the Church is absorbed with ques-
tions concerning the literary sources of his life and
with problems connected with its historical presen-
tation.1 And all the time the Living Christ moves
1 " The unsatisfactoriness of the present teaching, which
leaves us only Jesus of Nazareth, is becoming more and more
[3]
Christ and the Eternal Order
among men, and they find in him the Way, the
Truth, and the Life.
So long as Christ has not only personal pre-
eminence, but the power of saving men, the ques-
tion will be, must be, asked : Whence
A Question
that will not has he this power, what is the secret of
be put aside t x
his life-giving personality, why does he
continue so to dominate our modern thought and
ideals? Is it a fictitious and failing hold that he
has upon us, or is it real and vital and destined to
be controlling? If so, what is the secret? What
think ye of Christ ? The question presses and
burns, and refuses to be put aside. Thinking men
must meet it, meet it anew in this day, and strive
to answer it in the light of enlarged conceptions
of God and of man and of the universe.
I
The most virile and hopeful movement in mod-
ern theology is what is known as the Christocentric
Theology} Largely the outgrowth of
The Christo- , , _ , „, , . ,
centric The- modern study of the Gospels and of the
ology, and
its arrested Historic Christ, it has laid hold of the
Progress
true worth and significance of Jesus
Christ with an insight and a power that have
aroused attention and produced conviction. But
it has failed to move onward beyond a certain
apparent from day to day." — Pres. Charles Cutbbert Hall,
The Universal Elements of the Christian Religion, p. 144.
1 A historical sketch of the Chistocentric Theology will
be found in the Appendix.
[4]
The CJiristoIogy of To-day
range of affirmation. The principle has been
clearly stated, the method justified, the sufficiency
of the Christ personality demonstrated, but prog-
ress is arrested. It still remains to show how
nature and humanity are to be interpreted through
Christ. The Christocentric theology is at a stand-
still, and for this reason: The Historic Christ (to
whom the modern Christocentric thought has con-
fined itself) alone is insufficient to interpret either
humanity or nature. The difficulty is that nature
and humanity were here before Jesus. Unless,
therefore, Jesus was intimately related to a Logos,
who was before him, nature and humanity ex-
plain him, rather than he them. With a thrill of
insight and joy, the new theology has caught the
universal significance of Jesus as the new science
of history has disclosed him. Not until the evo-
lutionary principle had reconstructed the con-
ception of history was it possible to realize how
commanding and constructive a place Jesus Christ
occupies in human history. It is no wonder that
the new theology, smitten with the splendor and
significance of this new disclosure of the cen-
trality of Jesus, has confined its attention to this
illuminating fact, and failed to coordinate with it
the fact of the presence of a religious nature
and a spiritual Presence in humanity before the
Incarnation.1
1 The Ritschlian theology is surprisingly narrow and
short-sighted here. " The distinction," says Kaftan, " drawn
[5]
Christ and the Eternal Order
It is this limitation of view, this concentration
upon the historic and individual in Christ, to the
The Defect of neglect of the inner, eternal, less defin-
centricThe" able, more universal in him, that has
oogy caused the reluctance and protest, which
have all along accompanied the new theology, on
the part of many philosophical and comprehensive
minds. If Christianity can be wholly reduced to
historic terms and centered in Jesus Christ, what
of those fundamental and underlying elements in
Christianity which are common to all religions,
and which seem to be an innate possession of the
human soul, a part of man so far as he can be
detached from a historic setting?
The time has come when the Christocentric the-
ology must either enlarge its conception and its
interpretation of Christ, or surrender its position.
In order to be the center of the historic movement,
Christ must be more than this ; he must be the
center and power of the whole sphere of the reli-
gious life of man, Christian and non-Christian, past
and future, elemental and developed, primitive and
perfected.
Thus are we led, just as inevitably as the Chris-
tian thought of the first century was led, from the
Historic Christ to the Eternal Christ, from the
Christ of Experience to the Logos, — showing that
between a historical and ideal Christ involves the destruc-
tion of our faith in the Christian revelation." (Dogmatik,
P- 404-)
[6]
The Christology of To-Day
Christianity involves, necessitates, such a develop-
ment.
There are two equally characteristic and signifi-
cant facts about the gospel — the simplicity that
is in Christ and the profundity that is in Christ.
Side by side with the simple story of the Man of
Galilee are the mystic, far-reaching intuitions of
Paul and of the authors of the Fourth Gospel and
of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Cut out one or the
other presentation and the New Testament is shorn
either of its simplicity or of its splendor.
II
Whatever the origin of the Logos doctrine,
whether it came from the Greek mind or the Jew-
ish, or both, through Plato or the Stoics,
tvi m i «• , The Value of
or Philo, matters comparatively little, the Logos
Doctrine
The value lies in the idea itself, as it
meets a universal conviction of the human mind in
its searching into the relation of humanity to God.
Greek, Jew, Oriental, Western, first century or
fourth century or twentieth century, — so that a
theology think itself through concerning Jesus
Christ, it comes to much the same conviction of
the divineness of humanity and the humanness of
God, as both truths stand out strong and clear in
the revealing personality of Christ.
Neither the phenomenal, uncorrelated Christ of
Ritschlianism, having the worth of God and repre-
senting him to men, yet not himself divine, nor
[?]
Christ and the Eternal Order
the racial prototype of Schleiermacher and others,
" a man in advance of his age and surroundings,
Transition so exceptional in moral development
chnstoiogy ancj consciousness as to become and
remain a guide and example to his fellow men in
all religious faith and conduct," 2 will satisfy Chris-
tian thought. Such tentative, makeshift concep-
tions of Christ will serve only for transition
purposes. We must move on, either into the
naturalistic interpretation of Jesus as a singularly
good man but without racial significance, or into a
reaffirmation and reinterpretation of the Logos
doctrine in terms of modern thinking.
Ill
This volume is an essay in the direction of the
adaptation of the fundamental truth of the older
Christology to the atmosphere and in-
Christianity
is Philosophy terests of the present day. Ever since
as well as m *
History and the rise of Ritschlianism in Germany
Ethics _ J
and the publication of the Hibbert Lec-
tures of Edwin Hatch in England, the tendency has
been to abjure the metaphysical element in Chris-
tianity and to exalt the historical and ethical. The
movement has been healthful, invigorating, clarify-
ing, restoring a long-disturbed balance. But it
has been a movement of protest, built upon a nar-
row foundation, and its limitations are becoming
more and more apparent. Minds of a certain type
1 Evolution of Trinitarianism, L. L. Paine, p. 282.
[8]
Tlie Christology of To -Day
chafe and are restive under its restrictions. For
such at least a larger interpretation of Christ is
essential. But must we then say that it is all a
matter of temperament, and that the best that can
be done is to consign the historical Christ to the
man of the practical temperament and the mystical
Christ to the man of the mystical temperament and
so have done with the problem? Rather, shall we
not say that Christianity is so comprehensive in its
scope, and the Christ so sufficient and significant,
that he not only meets the need of every type of
mind, but that he unites all moral and spiritual
values so harmoniously and consistently that every
man may recognize in him not only his own especial
need but also something of what his fellow finds?
This is the conviction and purpose with which
this book is sent forth. It is an endeavor to de-
lineate the Greater Christ. If the aspects of Christ
presented seem so many as to be confusing it is
only because his import is so large and his poten-
cies are so rich. If the historical aspect of Christ
is subordinated to the spiritual and eternal it is
only because the Historical Christ is now attracting
an attention that is too exclusive to be compre-
hensive. For it is only in relation to the eternal
that the true values of history can be apprehended,
just as it is only in history that we can recognize
the true values of eternity.
[9]
II
REVELATION: PROGRESSIVE AND FINAL
RELIGION involves revelation. Otherwise it is
purely one-sided and subjective, a bird with a
broken wing. The outgoing of God to man, the
impartation of the Divine to the human, is revela-
tion. Unless there had been revelation from the
very beginning of human life, preceding and in-
itiating it, religion could have been only a human
product and must have withered away, root and
branch. For religion is either a divine-human
mutuality, or it is a colossal human self-deception.
And such a self-deception must have long since
worn out. The very survival of religion, if not
its very existence, implies revelation.
Revelation is multiform. The channels of the
divine communication are rich and varied. Life
Revelation is revealing; nature is revealing; rea-
muitiform son^ inspiration, conscience are reveal-
ing. God touches man at as many points and
through as many media as man touches God.
Always the relation is reciprocal. Always on the
Revelation : Progressive and Filial
6
part of God it is revelation, and on the part of man
religion. " Revelation," it has been well said, " is
but the obverse of discovery. No truth is ever
revealed to an intelligence except as it is dis-
covered ;" nor is any truth discovered except as
it is revealed.
Revelation is universal. Revelation is not con-
fined to any one people or age. It is as impartial
as the sunlight.
"Love works at the center,
Heart-heaving alway;
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day." *
Men were not seeking God vainly in the pre-
christian centuries. Revelation reached to the
Aztec and the Chinaman, as well as to Reveiation
the Greek and the Jew. It flowed forth imPartial
with the stream of Time ; it flows to-day. The
light dawned with the dawning of intelligence.
Through the muddy vesture of human ignorance
and superstition it long glowed but dimly, but the
light itself was the pure flame of eternal truth.
But, though revelation is universal, it is not uni-
form. God has ever been impartial, but never
undiscriminating. Races differ, reli-
. —, Revelation
gions diverge, revelation varies. Certain discrimina-
tive
truths possess certain nations. Racial
capacities are unlike. All cups are filled, but all
are not of the same shape or capacity. God has
1 Emerson, " The Sphinx."
Christ and the Eternal Order
some nations, as he has some souls, " whom he
whispers in the ear," not that they may keep the
secret to themselves, but that they may impart
it to others. Revelation is for transmission, as
election is for service.
II
May we not take another step and say that, as
revelation, though universal, is nevertheless dis-
Reveiation criminative and comes to different races
in differing forms and degrees, so to two
or three races especially, and to one supremely,
God revealed himself, in order thus to impart him-
self most fully and most normally to humanity at
large?
Until the later years of the last century it was
customary to magnify the revelation to the Jews
by disparaging, or denying, revelation to other
peoples. Now that the study of religion has
shown the reality and extent of the divine revela-
tion to many peoples, — and in some measure to
all, — the superiority of the Hebrew religion can
be made evident only by comparison, no longer
simply by contrast. -It is by such comparison,
free and fair and impartial, and by that only, that
the true splendor and scope of the revelation of
the divine glory and righteousness to Israel ap-
pears. Compared with the imperfect conceptions
of other races, the truth reached by the Hebrew
[12]
Revelation : Progressive and Final
^
prophets (but reached only by revelation) is so
transcendent in its nature as to justify calling it,
not the only, but the highest, revelation of God to
any people. This is simply induction from litera-
ture and history, and not mere assumption in
behalf of a theory. The superiority of the Hebrew
conception of God is a demonstrable fact. And
the inference is natural, if not inevitable, that the
superiority is due, not simply to greater achieve-
ment, but also to a unique and gracious revelation
on the part of God.
Ill
One more step makes our ascent complete. If
the Divine Being may reasonably have revealed
himself with especial clearness and ful-
1 Revelation
ness to and through one nation, may he through an
° t Individual
not as reasonably have revealed himself
yet more fully to and through one individual —
still for the sake of humanity? Can any form of
revelation conceivable be as pure, as persuasive,
as perfect, as incarnation? Detach the question,
as far as possible, from its connection with Christ
and consider it by itself.
Besides incarnation in an individual, there are
but three other forms which revelation could con-
ceivably take for its ultimate expression. Granted
that revelation is progressive, it must culminate
either in a direct communication from above, or in
[>3]
Christ and the Eternal Order
nature, or in incarnation, general or individual.
Revelation by direct communication, oral or writ-
ten, appeals to the uncultured mind as quite the
most complete and convincing method possible.
A Koran from heaven, commandments graven on
tablets of stone, an infallible Bible — such, to the
unthinking mind, seems the only infallible, abso-
lutely satisfying method of revelation. But a
moment's consideration of the rigidity and inade-
quacy of language displays the defect of such a
method. The provincialism and hollowness and
unreality which would inevitably attach to it show
it unworthy of a God whose thoughts are high
above our thoughts and his ways above our ways.
When we turn to nature it is at once evident
that while nature affords a constant and cumulative
revelation of God, it does not constitute
Nature inad- . . -
equate for the highest, the complete revelation. It
Revelation .
there is harmony in nature there is also
discord ; if there is beauty there is also ugliness ;
if there is evolution there is also devolution ; if
there is life there is also death. It is conceivable
that nature might have been constituted without
these defects, but it is questionable how far a flaw-
less creation would meet the needs of our moral
nature in the struggle for character. A perfected
nature goes best, as Paul saw, with a perfected
humanity. There is enough in nature of sublimity
and beauty to reveal God increasingly to men, but
nature herself is not, and could not be, so perfect
[■4]
Revelation : Progressive and Final
a medium of revelation — so truly capax Dei — as
humanity.
Coming to humanity, then, as alone capable of
affording the highest revelation of God, the ques-
tion at once arises whether national,
Humanity as
racial or individual incarnation offers the a whole inad-
equate for a
purest, most responsive and most inten- Perfect Reve-
sive medium for the divine purpose. A
chosen nation, as we have already seen, constitutes
a natural and effective instrument of revelation,
but one that must in the nature of the case have
limitations. A peculiar people, peculiarly en-
dowed and enlightened, is intelligible, but a perfect
people in whom God is perfectly incarnated would
be an abnormal spectacle that would alienate the
world rather than save it. Only figuratively and
by analogy can God be said to have incarnated
himself in Israel. And only thus, too, can he be
said to have incarnated himself in the race as a
whole. The idea of humanity as the incarnation
of God has of late gained increasing favor. In
a sense it is a true and fruitful conception. God
is in humanity, in men of all times and races,
revealing himself as virtue, truth and love. But
only in a secondary and figurative sense can this
be called incarnation. There is a mingling of
baser elements with finer, of earthy with spiritual,
of satanic with divine, in humanity which makes it
incompetent to speak of humanity as the incarna-
tion of God in any reasonably exact sense. Panthe-
[»S]
Christ and the Eternal Order
ism alone can make humanity, as a whole, wholly-
divine by breaking down all distinctions between
divine and human, good and evil.
IV
It is only in a single life, unitary in its purity
and radiance, all-embracing in its winsomeness
and sympathy, that we can hope to find
j»nreveaia a true incarnation, a perfect revelation
of God, in his human kinship and
character. Given such a life, and a true knowl-
edge of God and an assured confidence in him
follow. Personality alone suffices. Only a person
can reveal a person. If God is personal, nothing
less than a personal being can reveal him as he is.
Nature may reveal certain of his qualities and
attributes ; humanity in its corporate and supe-
rior life may disclose even more of his nature ;
but only a person, conscious, clear-souled, perfect,
can reveal his very Self. " It is no more unworthy
of God," says Athanasius, " that he should incar-
nate himself in one man, than it is that he should
dwell in the world. Since he abides in humanity,
which is a part of the universe, it is not unreason-
able that he should take up his abode in a man,
who should thus become the organ by which God
acts in the universal life."1 Whether such a
Revealer must of necessity be human or divine,
1 De Incarnatione Verbi.
[16]
Revelation : Progressive and Final
&
or both, is a question that cannot be settled
abstractly. The first task of Theology is to focus
all its light, concentrate all its attention upon the
individual man whom history furnishes as the only
possible claimant of such a prerogative and, with-
out prejudice or passion, ascertain whether he
bears the marks, carries the strength, and exhibits
the grace necessary to the fulfilment of so solitary
and sublime a mission.
[ "7 1
Ill
THE CHRISTOCENTRIC VIEW-POINT
Christian Theology should begin where the
Christian religion began — with Christ. He is
Christ the tne radiating center of both. Theol-
forchrisTian* °gy> °f course, precedes Christ, just
Theology as joes reiigion# Yet both were made
new in him. As a matter of fact we cannot
divest ourselves of our Christianity in studying
theology. We are Christian by environment,
whether we are such by conviction or not. We
may make pretense to be unaffected by Christian
conceptions, and beginning where the untutored
savage began, with Natural Theology, ask what
are the evidences of God in nature (a question,
however, which the primitive man never asked),
pass from Natural Theology, as most systems of
theology do, to the Bible as a source of revelation,
thence to the doctrine of God as a Trinity, thence
to anthropology, and so at length arrive at Christ.
Such a method, although it has the seeming
advantage of following and repeating, after a
[18]
The Chris tocen trie View-Point
fashion, the racial experience in reaching Christ,
is nevertheless both unreal and irrational. For, in
the first place, the racial process cannot
r l The True
be reproduced in one nurtured in Chris- order too long
reversed
tian truth and standing upon a higher
level of revelation. He may look back, but he
cannot go back, over the course of develop-
ment. Moreover, to ignore our vantage-ground,
to defer the study of Christ until after the study of
nature, of God and of man, is to fail to make use
of our chief source of illumination. It is like
hunting in the dark when a light is at hand. "To
build up a professedly revealed theology on a pro-
fessedly natural one is to construct a system with-
out either unity or profound connection," wrote
Sabatier.
The mind of Christ colors, even if it does not
shape, all our thought of God, of nature and of
humanity. For the mind of Christen-
dom is, at least partially and professedly, Light wee
the mind of Christ. The true method
of theology, therefore, is to go first to the
Christ, — the ultimate fact of Christianity, the
clearest, strongest Light upon the whole reli-
gious horizon, — determine, so far as possible,
what this Light is, whence it is, how far it throws
its beams, and then, if it prove a true Light, to
study God, nature and humanity in the illumina-
tion of its rays. In other words, Christian The-
ology should be Christocentric.
[19]
Christ and the Eternal Order
It is strange how slow we have been in coming
to this view-point, or rather in coming back to it,
for it was that of the early fathers, as
toaTruI? well as of the apostles. "Men still
believe," says Dr. McConnell, " that
' belief in God ' is a prerequisite, preparing the
way for one who would be Christ's disciple.
They, therefore, with well-meaning folly, assault
the mind with ' evidences.' They would estab-
lish first the being of God by means of argu-
ments drawn from nature, from history, from
intuition, from the reasonableness of things. They
would first discover God, then introduce Christ
as his Son, and prove the relationship. They
strangely fail to note that should they be suc-
cessful in the preliminary task, Christ becomes
superfluous. It exactly reverses his method. For
' no one knoweth . . . the Father, save the Son,
and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal
Him.' " 1
That theology is slowly but surely adjusting
itself to the Christocentric view-point, making
him central in form who is central in fact, is as
clear as it is hopeful. It means the coming of
Christianity to a new and deeper self-conscious-
ness, a fresh sense of the reserves of truth and
power which lie in the simple but profound
evangel.
If it be asked what gain will accrue from the
1 Christ, p. 206.
[20]
The Christocaitric View-Poi?it
Christologizing of theology, the answer is, gain in
the direction of unity, of reality and of progress.
II
That theology needs unifying, hardly admits of
question. As theology broadens and becomes
more comprehensive with enlarging sci- how to unify
entific knowledge, the need of a unifying Theolo&y
principle becomes more and more evident. Most
of the great systems of theology have been at-
tempts at unification. They have failed because
they have sought unity in system rather than in
personality. Cumbrous systems centering in the
sovereignty of God, or human sin, or the divine
authority of the Church, or the Bible, must give
place to the unifying and harmonizing personality
of Christ, unfolding, in its revelation of God, the
relations and proportions of truth. " The principal
content of Christianity," said Schelling, " is first,
Christ himself, not what he said, but what he is
and did." To limit the principal content of Chris-
tianity to Christ himself might seem to involve a
meager and restricted theology. On the contrary
the implications of Christ's personality are in-
comparably rich and replete. From him, as a
center, lines of suggestion and interpretation
extend in every direction, Godward, manward,
natureward. Toward him all problems point,
all paths converge. The unity which results
[21]
Christ and the Eternal Order
from making .him central is a unity of simplicity,
yet one of incomparable comprehensiveness, co-
herence and harmony, a unity in which all truths
find their order, all legitimate interests their pro-
portionate value, all right activities their true
place and meaning.
Ill
The Christologizing of theology means, also,
the imparting of new reality to theology. The
How to make disposition on the part of theology to
heoogyre ^rift \nto remote seas of abstraction and
speculation is all too apparent. It is this that has
made theology " caviare to the general " ; this
that has made its voice thin and querulous and
dogmatic. Men ask for the note of vitality, of
sincerity, of reality, in theology. " When the-
ology is made to square with life," said Conan
Doyle, " I will read it up." Countless signs to-
day point to personality as the key to reality. It
is time that theology concerned itself less with the
divine attributes and the human will and the two
natures of Christ, and more with the God who has
attributes and the man who has a will, or is a will,
and the Christ whose personality is of far more
concern than his nature. It is true that person-
ality itself is the greatest of all problems and leads
far into the realm of metaphysics and psychology,
and the courageous mind cannot content itself
[22]
The Christocentric View- Point
with any taboo which curtails its freedom or any
tether which limits its range of thought. But in
dealing with personality, the mind grasps a reality
whose atmosphere attends it in its most remote
and difficult adventures into the mystery which
enfolds all that is most real. The fact and mean-
ing of personality nowhere stand out so vividly
and so completely as in Jesus Christ. He is the
most real person of history, in puissance and
permanence. He offers the richest study in per-
sonality that humanity presents. He is a real
problem and not an academic one. No question
is at once so fascinating and so vital as the prob-
lem of his personality. The theology that centers
in him cannot but be real.
IV
The Christologizing of theology also promises
progress. If Christianity is a revelation, progress
must come through the unfolding of
, . . The true
its content, not through successive ac- Progress of
. Christianity
cretions. Right here lies the crux of an unfolding
r r /~>i Revelation
the question of the absoluteness of Chris- not a series
1 of Advances
tianity. If Christianity simply intro-
duces and inaugurates a new religious era in which
the Spirit continually opens new truth, not con-
tained in germ in the original revelation of the
incarnate Son, then the claim for Christianity of
absoluteness and finality must be relinquished.
[23]
Christ and the Eternal Order
If, on the other hand, the incarnation is central in
its significance and inexhaustible in its content, if
in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge, then Christianity is absolute and final,
and progress consists in the development of its
content, the unfolding of its implications and its
applications. Modern thought demands a choice
between these alternative conceptions, and the
future of Christianity depends largely upon the
decision. This is the problem which Robert Brown-
ing raises and resolves in A Death in the Desert.
He presents first, the view which makes Christianity
a stage in the divine revelation :
" I say that man was made to grow, not stop ;
That help, he needed once, and needs no more,
Having grown but an inch by, is withdrawn :
For he hath new needs, and new helps to these.
This imports solely, man should mount on each
New height in view ; the help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth.
Man apprehends him newly at each stage
Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done;
And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved."
To this the aged John replies :
"This might be pagan teaching : now hear mine.
I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise."
[>4]
The Christocentric View-Point
Here we have, set over against one another, in
their true antithesis: Christianity relative and
Christianity absolute, Christianity partial Theaitema-
and Christianity final, progress through tlves
an advancing revelation and progress through an
unfolding revelation. If the former alternative is
accepted, the personality of Christ is but a sec-
ondary and comparatively inconsequential factor,
revelation is a process of which Christianity is only
a stage, not the culmination, and advancing truth
leaves Christ behind. If the latter alternative be
the true one, Christianity is the absolute religion,
the all-inclusive revelation, the Person of Christ is
central in human life, and progress in theology
consists in the Christologizing of doctrine, the
interpretation of the universe in relation to the
incarnate Son of God.
[25]
IV
CHRIST INTERPRETING GOD
JESUS revealed the divine Fatherhood. The sub-
stance of the doctrine lay in the dim disclosures
"Our °f earlier revelations; the doctrine itself
Father" came with Jesus Christ. " In the dis-
tinctive peculiarity of that conception lay the root
of all the new elements of his teaching,"1 says
Wendt. This is but the confirmation at the hands
of thorough-going scholarship of the swift intui-
tion of Renan : " God conceived immediately as
Father — this is the whole theology of Jesus."
It is this which Harnack, too, finds to be the
essence of Christianity, although he, also, does
scant justice to the personality through whom the
great truth came.2
Not that in point of originality this truth of
divine Fatherhood was absolutely new with Jesus,
Divine Dut m potentiality and in universality
anlwTrmh lt was new with him. No one before
with jesus jesuS) Jew or pagan, had ever made it
a vital, personal, practical reality. No one before
him had given it universal significance and appli-
1 Teachings of Jesus, Vol. I, p. 184.
2 See the appendix for a discussion cf the Harnack con-
troversy.
[a6]
Christ Interpreting God
cation. It is true that if we look for a declamatory,
dogmatic assertion of the universality of the divine
Fatherhood in the words of Jesus we shall look in
vain, but it pervades his whole teaching, as the dawn
pervades the sky, silently, serenely, splendidly.
I
Whence did Jesus derive this truth of the divine
Fatherhood? Partly through the ancient normal
medium of social, national, parental «Noman
instruction. But this teaching alone, Fath'eVbut"5
though passed through the alembic of the Son
religious genius and raised to the highest level of
the prophet, fails to account for the intensity and
confidence with which Jesus realized this truth.
Nothing less than a unique religious consciousness
will suffice. Great truths do not originate in small
souls. They are not guesses, nor surmises, nor
happy hits. Men do not gather grapes from thorns,
nor figs from thistles. The man through whom
humanity entered into its richest experience of God
can hardly have been less than holy, guileless,
undefiled, a priest forever after the order of Mel-
chizedek, one to whom we may apply every term
of endearment and homage without fear or con-
straint. From the character of his mission, from
the quality of his personality and from the quiet
confidence of his own words concerning himself
{e.g. Matt, ii : 27) we are impelled to find in him
a sonship peculiar to himself.
[27]
Christ and the Eternal Order
II
But if God was Father to Jesus Christ in an es-
pecial sense and manner, does not that make him
Perfect somewhat less than a Father to us?
reaqmresp°er. Rather, it is through Jesus Christ that
fectSonship he ^ & perfect Father to us. The
relationship, like that of friendship, is mutual.
The father who has an only son who is disobedient
and rebellious may learn through suffering love a
great deal of what fatherhood means, but if he had
a son who was in perfect concord and sympathy
with him he would know a great deal more of the
meaning of fatherhood through such a son. It
may be that God can be a perfect Father to us
only because he has a perfect Son. He is a per-
fect Father to us, as well as to his only begotten
Son, — so far as our imperfection and sin permit
the relationship to be perfect. The father in the
parable was a truer father to the prodigal because
he had an elder son who was ever with him.
With this truth of perfect Fatherhood through
perfect Sonship there enters inevitably the real
essence of the Trinitarian conception,
and the Trin- namely, the existence of a wealth of
life, of love, of relationship in the Being
of God such as no naked numerical unity, no soli-
tude of absoluteness, no closed circle of existence
will express. To assert that the same human
qualities — the best of them — which we find in
[28]
Chris/ Interpreting God
ourselves are also in God, raised to their perfection,
is to differentiate the Being of God. For there
certainly must be other qualities in him besides
these human ones. And to differentiate the Being
of God is to postulate that for which the Trinity
stands. To secure a symbol that expresses diver-
sity in unity, that postulates in God human as well
as transcendent attributes, that makes Fatherhood
not a mere contingent relationship but inherent
in the divine Selfhood — this is the motive of
Trinitarianism.
To accept Jesus' presentation of God as Father
as final does not necessarily mean its acceptance
as ultimate. Fatherhood applied to
1 , The Father-
God is more than a metaphor and more hood of God a
Homologue
than an analogue ; it is a homologue. It is
taken from a relationship which is partly physical
and partly spiritual ; therefore it cannot be ulti-
mate. But as our present nature and environment
cannot be wholly spiritual, Fatherhood is final for
the present stage. No higher and ampler repre-
sentation of God is possible to humanity, for this
term as applied to God seizes and sanctifies our
highest and holiest consciousness. It remains for
us not to seek a higher conception but simply to
unfold the content of this.
The Fatherhood of God, as taught by Jesus, in-
volves: (i) The divine nearness and accessibility.
Fatherhood implies home life, and home life is a
sphere of close contact and free intercourse be-
[29]
Christ and the Eternal Order
tween parent and child. Here lies a complete
and sufficient motive for prayer. (2) Fatherhood
involves a ri^ht over us which by the
Thelmplica- . & . J
tionsof very term is a natural ricmt. To assert
Fatherhood J &
the Fatherhood of God does not define
whether he is such by creation, or derivation, or
in what manner, but it does imply a deep, funda-
mental, inherent bond, which can be broken, but
cannot be dissevered. (3) Fatherhood involves
the divine love for us. Jesus never said " God is
Love." But when he called God " Our Father,"
he said as much, and said it more concretely and
convincingly.
Ill
Jesus' conception of God as Father is by no
means rigid, or exclusive of other conceptions of
him. The truth of God's sovereignty is
The Father- , . , . , T ,
hood of God recognized in the title Jesus attaches
not an Exclu-
siveConcep- to him, " Lord of heaven and earth.
tion. .
But he is a sovereign Father, rather
than a fatherly Sovereign. His spiritual nature
is given full recognition in that saying — the
nearest to a definition of God which Jesus pre-
sents— "God is a spirit." Nevertheless it is as
Father that Jesus loves to address and to refer to
God. It is significant how seldom he uses the
common Old Testament appellations for God.
Richer, ampler, dearer, more vital to Jesus than
any other is the word Father.
[30]
Christ Interpreting God
The stability and sufficiency of the doctrine of
the Divine Fatherhood is proven by its history.
The attempts to make other conceptions
Why the
of God controlling have failed. Calvin- truth of the
i • i • 1 til- Divine
ism, deism, pantheism have had their Fatherhood
prevails.
day and ceased to be; agnosticism and
monism vainly strive to supersede Divine Father-
hood, which in spite of doubt and dismay never was
so strongly entrenched in the faith and thought of
humanity as to-day. The reason is not far to seek.
The truth of the Divine Fatherhood is at once a
judgment of value and a judgment of reason ; it is
both exoteric and esoteric ; it satisfies the heart
and does not affront the intellect; it is neither
anthropomorphic nor speculative; it does not
clothe the Deity with " parts and passions " nor
does it dissolve him into a nebulous abstraction.
It is as ample as it is definite in the wealth of its
meaning for thought and for life. Out of it grows
the doctrine of the Trinity, but without exhausting
or superseding it; from it flow unfailing currents
of life and truth. It is one of the endless mis-
understandings of the Unrecognized Christ that so
many persons to-day say " Our Father," without
realizing through whom the revelation came.
[31]
V
CHRIST INTERPRETING NATURE
AMONG the rude representations of Jesus carved
by a loving though uncultivated Christian art
Thejoyous upon the tombs of the catacombs of
Rome is one which pictures him as a
youthful shepherd bearing a recovered lamb, or
kid,1 upon his shoulders. The fresh countenance
and athletic figure serve to suggest not only the
saving power and love of the Redeemer, but, in-
directly also, a phase of his character which is
coming into greater recognition as the perspective
of the years gives us a truer conception of the rich-
ness of his personality — that is, his closeness to
nature. It is well that we have not only the infant
innocence and childhood charm of that unknown
yet best-known face as it shone upon the souls of
the old Masters, not only the various portraits
of the mature beneficence and thoughtfulness of
Jesus the Teacher, not only the Ecce Homo and
other representations of the face marred as no
other man's, but also an essay of art to suggest
1 The fact that the figure resembles a kid rather than a
lamb has furnished Matthew Arnold a touching motif 'for his
sonnet " The Good Shepherd with the Kid"
[32]
Christ Interpreting Nature
the joyous health and grace of the youthful Christ,
in the strength and serenity and joy of his redeem-
ing might. And no elaborate work of art could
better do this than the crude, symbolic shepherd
of the catacombs.
Jesus was not only the Man of Sorrows and
acquainted with grief, but the Man of Nature and
acquainted with joy. Life sang as well . ,,
*■ J J ° Jesus love
as sobbed for him, and above its sob of Nature
arose its song. It was not in barren, priest-ridden
Judea that Jesus was brought up and passed
most of his life, but in fair, fertile, simple-hearted
Galilee where men lived near to nature. Those
thirty years in picturesque Nazareth, almost voice-
less so far as the Gospel narrative is concerned,
are gradually filling the reverent imagination with
pictures of Jesus as the inspired student of Scrip-
ture poring over the glowing prophecies and
nature-psalms of the Old Testament, and as the
free, communing, spirit-filled youth, moving alone
in contemplative joy through the fields and over
the hilltops of Nazareth, looking, listening, loving,
drinking in from the fountain of nature all the
sweetness, the purity, the wisdom, and the glad-
ness with which it overflows. And afterward, in
the stress and heat of those burning years of his
ministry, how often did he turn aside to the quiet
mountainside, the restful lakeshore, the secluded
garden for refreshment and soothing and strength
in communion with the Father.
3 [ 33 ]
Christ and the Eternal Order
The nature-teaching of Jesus is not less marked
and characteristic than his personal attachment
The best Na- and resort to her. Though neither
ture-teachmg botanist nor geologist, biologist nor
ornithologist, never was such a nature-teacher as
Jesus. Picture him on the hillside of Galilee,
preaching the Sermon on the Mount, the open
heavens above him and the fair fields about, the
soft breeze caressing him, the dew of youth upon
his brow, the light of love upon his face, the poise
of health, the freedom of faith and the great joy of
his mission upon him. Of what does he speak?
Of life and duty and trust and freedom from care,
while the skies bend down in benediction and the
breeze whispers Yea and the flowers nod a gentle
Amen. No part of this sweet sermon which the
summer winds of Galilee have wafted to us across
the years, is more dear to the heart of Christen-
dom than that in which, with the swift seizure of a
divine insight, Jesus unfolds the very heart of the
scene about him in the words: " Behold the birds
of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they
reap, nor gather into barns ; and your heavenly
Father feedeth them. . . . Consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do
they spin : yet I say unto you, that even Solomon
in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
Here is nature-teaching that has no parallel. So
long as birds fly, this lesson will fly with them;
[34]
Christ Intrcprcting Nature
so long as flowers bloom, this word will bloom
in them. Nor does this passage stand alone.
Throughout Jesus' teaching run the roots of nature-
symbolism and analogy, holding it fast to reality
and supplying it with unfading verdure and beauty.
Aphorism, precept, parable, twine about some fa-
miliar nature fact which lends form and support,
and often, in Jesus' use of it, seems itself a part of
the greater spiritual truth which it symbolizes.
II
But, according to the Gospels, a still more inti-
mate sympathy and fellowship than this existed
between Jesus and nature. Nature re- Miracles the
sponds to minds that understand and ESSreto'
love her — almost miraculously. Finer Personahty
laws, subtler adaptations, secret sympathies, flow
forth from her to meet the seer, be he scientist,
artist or poet It would be strange, indeed, if she
had made no unusual response to Jesus. Given
a personality whose insight and purity and force
were such as to change the whole course of the
life and thought of the world, and what must have
been its legitimate and transforming power over
nature ! Marked, indeed, would be the discrep-
ancy if He who had power on earth to forgive sins,
could not also say to the sick of the palsy, " Take
up thy bed, and walk " ; if He who could cast out
seven devils could not also heal the fever-stricken
body.
[35]
Christ and the Eternal Order
The personality of Jesus is the greater miracle,
and carries the other miracles with it, or (if any
The greater be ofTended) stands without them. To
Miracle explain the miracles away is quite as
difficult as to explain them. Of almost all, if not
all the miracles of Jesus, it is coming to be seen
that the more they are studied the more closely
do they cling to his personality and refuse to be
torn away. For long, theology strove to make use
of miracles in precisely the way that Jesus for-
bade, as signs, evidences. As such they have been
defeated by science and have come to naught.
But the moment we begin with the personality of
Jesus, cease defending miracles as infractions of
law, and relate them to those subtle mental and
spiritual forces to which nature so swiftly responds,
science raises her embargo and abandons her hos-
tility. The miracles of Jesus attest the accord of na-
ture and spirit. They are notes of a deeper harmony
which underlies apparent confusion and discord.
Ill
The gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be a revela-
tion and leave us wholly in the dark concerning
jesus trust- tne religious meanings of nature. If
hisNatuTe- Jesus has no deep spiritual insights
teaching into nature his " credentials " 1 are
lacking. If his nature-teaching is wrong, we can-
not trust him fully in his revelation of God and
1 Ecce Homo, Chap. V.
[36]
Christ Interpreting Nature
his understanding of man. To make him less than
central in revelation is, in the end, to displace
Christianity; to make him central requires that
he be trustworthy in his interpretation of nature
as well as of God and man. " His was a childlike
understanding of nature," it is said, " possible only
at a period before science had discovered to us
the true order and understanding of nature." But
it may be that the narrowly scientific and un-
believing are, after all, the childish, and he, the
childlike, the trustful, the far-visioned, the truer
scientist, — in the science of ultimate truth. His
teaching was not simply a reflection of that of
his day. It was not made up of current ideas,
scientific or theological. It was his own. While it
grew out of the ideas and conceptions of his time,
it is on a higher level, a universal plane, where no
scientific or theological mutations can touch it. It
has the note of the timeless and the universal.
Not that Jesus' interpretation of nature is com-
plete and exhaustive on all sides. On the purely
scientific side of nature he did not The fan,ng
touch; on the esthetic side he did ^!TJk Tide
not dwell ; it was the moral, the spirit- of Nature
ual interpretation of nature, as it stands related to
the life of the soul, with which he was concerned.
And here we may accept his word as final. What
is that word ? It is that nature is God's — full of
his thought and of his love. If it be said that, in
this optimistic and providential view of nature, he
[37]
Christ and the Eternal Order
ignored entirely that darker side which modern
science has brought out in such terrible distinct-
ness, the answer is that he did not ignore the
darker side but saw it transformed and absorbed
in the light of the All-Father's love. The falling
sparrow is Jesus' interpretation of the evil and
suffering of nature. Explain the pain of nature
he does not, but interpret it he does. " Not with-
out your Father " is a word with larger meaning
than has yet been taken from it. All-embracing
compassion, all-wise beneficence, all-inclusive ulti-
mate justice and well-being are in this word. It
goes further and deeper than science ventures to
go, or can go.
Few and simple as are Jesus' words concerning
the meaning of nature, the light which they throw
upon nature will never cease to invest it. Analyze
our modern nature trust and joy, and it will be
found to rest ultimately largely upon Christ's
teaching. Humanity will come, more and more,
to see nature, not only through his eyes, but
through himself, through the undivided revela-
tion which he brought, — or rather which he was
and is, — to the world.
[38]
VI
CHRIST INTERPRETING MAN
In order to understand any organic species it is
necessary to know it in its origin, its development,
and its maturity. Most emphatically is Humanity
this true of humanity. It is not enough thrdoeughad
to trace its origin and its development ; Prototype
we should see it also in its perfection. Anthropol-
ogy alone is insufficient to explain man ; anthro-
pology and history are insufficient; we need also
revelation. Since we cannot see the future man,
the final product of social evolution, by him to
know what manhood is, we require a Prototype, a
Forerunner, an Ensample by whom to interpret
ourselves and our race. But is this possible? Is
not the perfect man impossible save as the product
of a perfect society? Yes, unless he enter the race
from above, as a sent and supernatural being, " trail-
ing clouds of glory from God who is his home."
Here, then, we meet our chief problem : Can we
find reasonable cause and evidence for the tran-
scending of evolution, in the case of Christ? In
[39]
Christ and the Eternal Order
other words, is revelation consonant with evolution?
If we were obliged to find in Jesus the sole instance
of departure from a rigid law of devel-
and Evoiu- opment, the strain upon faith would be
severe ; but such is not the case. The
law of evolution grows more flexible as it reaches
the higher ranks of life. Other forces enter
and act with it. There is at least one phenome-
non which is absolutely inexplicable by evolution
alone, — the fact of genius. The great souls
that have enlightened and enriched humanity can
by no means be explained simply as the prod-
ucts of racial development. They enter the race
mysteriously, supernally, royally. Genius cannot
be produced as a new rose is, by experiment and
culture ; its comes as a gift from above. No form
The Mystery °f evolution can account for Raphael
of Genms or Shakespeare. Ancestry fails to solve
the benign mystery of genius. We are in a realm
where natural selection and hereditary instinct are
puerile futilities. The law of heredity acts, but it
is transcended. The supernatural absorbs, molds,
transfigures the natural and endows it with a power
and radiance that hold us awestruck and spell-
bound. By this token, the gift of genius, we know
beyond a peradventure that this world is ruled and
endowed from above and not from beneath or
within. Evolution is God's process — beautiful
and fruitful — but it is not his only process. He
is not limited to one method. Evolution and rev-
[40]
Christ Interpreting Man
elation are not mutually exclusive terms. With
the advent of self-consciousness evolution yields
to a higher law. "Resident forces" are supple-
mented by non-resident ideals. An amoeba does
not need an ideal before him in order to stimulate
him to perfect development, but a man does. Con-
scious development cannot proceed without a goal,
an ideal, — a Christ.
Does this mean that Christ is simply a religious
genius? Yes, and No! Like every other genius
he is a gift of God to men — the Gift of jesUsthe
God to men. He so far transcends all GiftofGod
other men in goodness and in greatness as to con-
stitute a class by himself, in which, by virtue of his
peculiar vocation, he is the sole possible member.
This gives him a relation both to God and to hu-
manity which had he been less than divine he could
not have fulfilled. His deity is not above his hu-
manity nor alongside it, but in and through his
humanity. By virtue of his perfect humanity he is
the revelation, not only of God, but of humanity,
— the God-man. The individual can see himself in
the whole splendor and scope of his possibilities
only in Christ; and the highest vision of society is
that of a corporate body made up of persons striv-
ing toward the Christ-life and thus in their common
life realizing the kingdom of heaven. It is only
through Christ that a man can know himself, his
brother man, or the humanity of which both
partake.
[41]
Christ and the Eternal Order
II
The first and greatest revelation that Christ
makes to mankind, then, is the revelation of its pos-
sibilities. What can a man become,
veais our what can man become ? The answer lies
Possibilities , _,, ,
in the Christ. There have been other
partial answers. Every great and good man is such
— Gautama, Confucius, Socrates. But the com-
plete answer is found only in Christ. The sages,
heroes, prophets are but broken lights of him, and
he is more than they. When Pilate said, Behold,
the man, he unwittingly acted as spokesman to the
race. Mankind has looked, and beneath the crown
of thorns has seen so regal a brow, behind the
purple robe so great a heart of sacrificial love, as
to make all who receive him kings and priests unto
God. In this Man every man sees his own man-
hood transfigured and crowned. His is a manhood
magnetic with spiritual currents, vital with com-
municative puissance. The moment a man sees
Christ, he sees himself in a new light. Undreamt-
of possibilities flash upon him. He is a new crea-
ture, old things are passed away, behold all things
are become new. In an old house in Bruges there
is this simple motto : " There is more in me."
Beholding Christ every man reads that motto " writ
in living characters." It is true that seeing Christ
each sees One forever and forever beyond him,
but the humanity is so warm and real, the splendor
[42]
Christ Liter pre ting Man
so winsome and impelling that we are attracted
and not repelled by the superiority. He is, as
Dr. Gordon calls him, the Flying Goal. It is only
by poetic license that we can speak of becoming
Christs ; but to be like him — that is the result of
seeing him as he is. This is Spurgeon's account
of his conversion, swift, simple, sufficient: "I
looked at Jesus, and Jesus looked at me, and we
were one forever." In that look the great preacher
saw his own possibilities hidden in Christ's excel-
lences. Such an unveiling is there, for all who will
look.
Through Christ man sees, also, the counterpart of
his possibility, that is, his sinfulness. On one side
of the coin of humanity is stamped the
J t , Christ
image of the King • on the reverse side reveals our
& . . . . Sinfulness
that of a distortion almost too devilish
to be human. The first possibility could not be,
without the second. Christ reveals both, — the
one in himself, the other in his anti-self. In see-
ing his possible goodness in Christ a man sees
also his possible evil, and somewhere between the
two his own present sinfulness. If I had not come
. . . unto them, they had not had sin. Sense of sin
is independent of Christ ; sensitiveness to sin comes
with him. If Christ were not lifted up before men
as he is, it is probable that the same fearful moral
callousness would recur that cursed the pre-Chris-
tian world. Man does not see himself as he is, or
as he might be, unless he sees himself also as sinful.
[43]
Christ and the Eternal Order
Doubtless the fact of sinfulness has been abnor-
mally exaggerated in many periods of the life of
the Church, but, if so, it has been only by de-
parting from that normal, healthful but poignant
sense of sinfulness created by the contact with the
real Christ.
Ill
Once more, Christ interprets man to himself by
revealing to him the true proportions and harmonies
Christ reveals of his being. The danger of a one-
Sltryoftrue sided development is one of the chiefest
perils of a complex civilization. This
tendency Christ perpetually and benignly restrains.
The physical, the intellectual, the cultural, each
clamors for complete control. The paths of in-
vitation open to the indulgent development of one
side of our nature. And when one has given free
rein to such a specializing until he has become
a scientific, or literary, or musical monomaniac,
all distorted in one direction, all dwarfed in others,
and then one day Jesus appears across his path
and he looks up and sees the splendid complete-
ness and symmetry of his manhood, his own crip-
pled life starts forth into distressing shapelessness
and incompleteness !
It is in upholding the supremacy of the moral
and spiritual nature that Christ most persistently
corrects our inner chaos and restores harmony
and balance to our feverish and incoherent lives.
[44]
Christ Interpreting Man
With unerring insight and firmness he puts the
ethical and religious ideal of life first and then
finds a place for all real and worthful interests in
subordination to this. This order is in his teaching
o
because it is first in himself. Nothing is more char-
acteristic of Christ than the superb poise, both of
his character and of his conduct. Sublimity and
sweetness, strength and grace, thought and feeling,
blend to make his life a perfect symphony. And,
witnessing, we know that this is what man was
meant to be. Thus the Christ interprets and
harmonizes human nature.
IV
It is as unreasonable to study man and leave the
Man out, as to study history and leave Christianity
out. Christ has woven himself into the Christ shapes
very mind structure of humanity. Psy- HumanIdeals
chology tells us that it is impossible for a person
to read a book without being a somewhat different
being for it.1 Much less is it possible to hear the
Christ story without being changed by it. And
when an entire civilization is saturated with the
Christ as its acknowledged Ideal, he must enter,
consciously or unconsciously, into all thinking and
doing, with a force that it is impossible to measure.
Individuals reject him, but humanity has received
him. Only through him can we know ourselves —
our possibilities, our imperfection, our true harmony
1 See James' Psychology^ Vol. I, p. 5.
' [ 45 ]
Christ and the Eternal Order
of being. Man as seen through evolution alone is
a racial epiphenomenon, a freak, a nondescript;
as seen through the average man he is a bundle
of contradictions, " a groveller on the earth and a
gazer at the sky"; as seen through Christ he is
a child of God, an heir of the eternal, a unit of
realizable possibilities. The light of the Incarna-
tion falls upon the entire nature and history of man.
It lights up the dull eyes of our low-browed simian
ancestor with the promise of immortal progress
and attainment; it falls upon the slowly develop-
ing, plodding savage and makes his every upward
step significant; it falls upon the most hopeless
individual member of the race and reveals him as
a brother of the imperial Christ and capable of
illimitable progress.
[46]
VII
THE WORSHIP OF CHRIST
IT concerns us to ask: What light is thrown by
the modern Christocentric theology upon the
much debated question concerning the worship of
Christ?
The aversion of the older Unitarian school to
the worship of Christ received its most representa-
tive expression in Emerson's Sermon
'-ni t nc* i • i i 'i Emerson on
on I he Lord s Sicpper, in which he said : the worship
t i tt • i • of Christ
"I am so much a Unitarian as this:
that I believe the human mind can admit but one
God, and that every effort to pay religious hom-
age to more than one being, goes to take away all
right ideas. ... In the act of petition the soul
stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more pres-
ent to your mind than your brother or your child.
But is Jesus not called in Scripture the Mediator?
He is the Mediator in that only sense in which
possibly any being can mediate between God and
man — that is, an instructor of man. He teaches
us how to become like God. And a true disciple
of Jesus will receive the light he gives most thank-
[47]
CJirist and the Eternal Order
fully, but the thanks he offers, and which an
exalted being will accept, are not compliments,
commemorations, but the use of that instruction."
How bare and cold and un-Emersonian this
reads, in our day of a broader and richer concep-
Theodore ^'10n °f Christ ! Indeed the sermon
Parker throughout has not a single suggestion
of the true Emerson. In contrast with its nega-
tive and chilling plaintiveness Theodore Parker's
indiscriminating heartiness is refreshing. " Jesus
made a revolution in the idea of God, and himself
went up and took the throne of the world. That
was a step in progress, and, if called upon to wor-
ship the Jehovah of the Old Testament, or Jesus
of Nazareth, a plain man, as he is painted in the
first three Gospels, I should not hesitate; I should
worship my brother, for in the highest qualities
this actual man is superior to men's conception of
God. . . . Let us not be harsh, let us not blame
men for worshiping the creature more than the
Creator. They saw the Son higher than the
Father, and they did right. The popular adora-
tion of Jesus to-day is the best thing in the
ecclesiastical religion." And yet, with customary
outspokenness, he proceeds immediately to add,
"But I do not believe in the perfection of Jesus."
The contrasted attitude of these two devout and
virile thinkers upon this subject can be understood
only as one traces it to the contrasted tempera-
ments and view-points of the two men. Emerson,
[48]
The Worship of Christ
the transcendcntalist, meditative, mystical, wor-
ships the God of nature, the Absolute; Parker, the
humanist, the preacher, the reformer, worships
God in his human attributes, his Fatherhood, his
Motherhood, his Brotherhood. To the latter,
therefore, Jesus representing the human side of
God appeals much more strongly.
II
Turning to William E. Channing we find his
position nearer to that of Parker than to that of
Emerson. In his Baltimore Ordination
r- /— 1 • . . ,,,„ , i • i 'William
bermon Lhannmg said: We also think Eiiery chan-
r f rr> • • • ■ ning
that the doctrine of the Trinity injures
devotion, not only by joining to the Father other
objects of worship, but by taking from the Father
the supreme affection which is his due, and trans-
ferring it to the Son. . . . Men want an object of
worship like themselves, and the great secret of
idolatry lies in this propensity. A God, clothed
in our form and feeling our wants and sorrows,
speaks to our weak nature more strongly than
a Father in heaven, a pure spirit, invisible and
unapproachable, save by the reflecting and puri-
fied mind. . . . We believe, too, that this worship
of Jesus, though attractive, is not most fitted to
spiritualize the mind, that it awakens transport
rather than that deep veneration of the moral per-
fections of God which is the essence of piety."
4 [49]
Christ and the Eternal Order
It is difficult for us in the wider outlook and
more human atmosphere of this twentieth century
to realize the point of view of one who
moral than thus seeks to school himself away from
the worship of the more human and
lovable attributes of the Deity to those of "a
pure spirit, invisible and unapproachable, save by
the reflecting and purified mind." When Chan-
ning goes on to speak of the " moral perfections "
of God he must mean, not the highest moral
perfections, for those are the very qualities re-
vealed in Christ, sympathy, sacrifice, love, but
the less central, less "attractive," perfections, —
justice, holiness, impeccability. To imply that
these are more " moral " than love is to impeach
the very heart of morality, as well as of God. A
Unitarian is surely the last Christian of whom we
should expect this.
The question, after all, is this : Is the heart of
God essentially human, — in the highest, noblest
The Real sense of humanity? In other words, is
issue ]ove central in the divine Being? If
so, Christ is so true and sufficient a revelation of
him that we may accept his words : " He that
hath seen me hath seen the Father," and draw
from them their natural corollary — he that wor-
ships the Son worships the Father.
It is impossible to worship Christ without wor-
shiping God. Herein lies the solution of the whole
difficulty — which is purely academic and not real,
[S°]
The Worship of Christ
except when it arises from a merely humanitarian
conception of Christ. So long as Unitarianism
can keep its conception of Christ down at the level
of ordinary humanity it is entirely self-consistent
in not worshiping him ; but the moment he escapes
these limitations (as he often does with Unitari-
ans), he inevitably calls out the worship which his
perfect Sonship really makes equivalent to worship
of the Father. Fatherhood is impossible without
Sonship. Imperfect Sonship implies imperfect
Fatherhood. Perfect Fatherhood cannot be un-
derstood without perfect Sonship. If Jesus had
been no more, no higher, than any other son of
God we should not have come to the knowledge
of the divine Fatherhood that we have in Chris-
tianity. To worship Christ is to worship perfect
Fatherhood through perfect Sonship.
Ill
Seeing in Jesus none other than a good man,
it is not strange that Emerson protested against
worshiping him and administering the
•i-i .... , i . The Secret of
service which so highly exalts him ; nor channing-s
53 J . Attitude
that Theodore Parker, while condoning
the worship of Christ in others, rejected it for him-
self. It is strange, however, that Channing, who
held so high a conception of Jesus that he could
say, " We believe that Jesus Christ was the most
glorious display, expression and representative of
God to mankind, so that seeing and knowing him,
[5-]
Christ and the Eternal Order
we see and know the invisible Father," should have
objected to the worship of Christ. It can be ex-
plained only as arising from his extreme aversion
to the doctrine of the Trinity, which he understood
only as it was so sadly misrepresented in the New
England theology of his day. It was Frederick
Robertson who said of Channing, " I should be very
glad, if half of those who recognize the hereditary
claims of the Son of God to worship, bowed down
before his moral dignity with an adoration half
as profound or a love half as enthusiastic as
Dr. Channing's."
The discussion concerning the deity of Christ
has passed into a distinctly new phase in the
TheRitsch- Ritschlian theology. Starting from the
han Attitude vantage-ground of Luther, who, it is
held, regarded confidence in Christ as the true
confession of Christ, the Ritschlian school, going
forth with its famous divining-rod, Worth-judg-
ment, finds the spring of Christ's true divinity in
his sinless and perfect character and his perfect
fulfilment of his unique vocation in redemption.
Ritschl entitles Jesus " the perfect self-revelation
of God " and says of him : " He is that magnitude
in the world in whose self-end God makes his own
eternal self-end in an original manner operative and
manifest." 1 " The Deity of Christ can only be ex-
pressed by saying that the mind and will of the
Everlasting God stand before us in the historically
1 The Ritschlian Theology, Garvie, p. 280.
[s«]
Tlic Worship of Christ
active will of this man," 1 writes Hermann. And
again, " We first know what Divine Nature is
when we apprehend it in Christ." To the same
effect Kaftan declares: "That Jesus Christ is God
means that in him we have a complete revelation
of God."2
That this representative relation of Christ to
God and to men amounts to actual deity may be
doubted. But that it warrants worship of him can
hardly be questioned. For as Hermann affirms:
" We stand thus toward Christ in a relation of the
greatest conceivable dependence."
Whatever the limitations and inconsistencies of
the Ritschlian school, it is firmly grounded and
sincere in its devotion to Christ and in its as-
cription to him of virtual deity. The difference
between the Ritschlian conception of Christ's deity
and that of the older Unitarianism represented by
Channing, is this : In order to ascribe deity to
Christ the early Unitarians thought it necessary
to limit and circumscribe his humanity, whereas
Ritschlianism conceives that perfect and exalted
humanity is, in so far, deity.
The natural inclination of the heart, won by the
grace and glory of Jesus, to pay homage to him
who so uniquely reveals the Father, involves no
real inconsistency, much less any disloyalty to the
Supreme Being. The sincere worship of the true
1 Communion with God, p. 138.
2 Dogmatik, p. 419.
[53]
Christ and the Eternal Order
Christ includes within itself the worship of the
Father. It is worship of the Father in the Son.
Hewhowor- The worship directed to Jesus finds
wffifclthe its ultimate object and explanation
Father also ^ the Etemal Christ> the LogQSj jn_
carnated in Jesus. As such it is worship of
the Revealing God, the Father manifested in the
Son.
[54]
PART II
ASPECTS OF CHRIST
" In him was life ; and the life was the light of men."
" Many man for Christes love
Was martired in Romayne
Er any Christendom was knowe there
Or any cros honoured."
— Old English Verse.
"All who are rational beings are partakers of the word, that is, of
reason, and by this means bear certain seeds implanted within them of
w'sdom and justice, which is Christ." — Origen, De Principia.
" The very God ! think, Abib ; dost thou think ?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too —
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, " O heart I made, a heart beats here ! "
— Robert Browning, An Epistle.
u Christ is lost, like the piece of money in the parable; but where? In
thy house, that is, in thy soul. Thou needest not run to Rome or Jeru-
salem to seek him. He sleepeth in thy heart, as he did in the ship ;
awaken him with the loud cry of thy desire. Howbeit, I believe that thou
sleepest oftener to him than he to thee." — Walter Hilton, T/ie Scale
of Perfection.
VIII
THE HUMAN CHRIST
So far as the modern emphasis upon the Historic
Christ is in the interest of his true humanity
the motive is unimpeachable. Unless AHuman
Jesus is understood and felt to be Christneeded
deeply, really, richly human, he can have no
lasting and saving hold upon humanity. What-
ever tends to actualize and vivify Christ's human-
ity, therefore, may be hailed as wholesome and
true. But the question is : Is the historic Christ,
as such, and alone, the most truly and wholly
human Christ? On the contrary, we hold that too
narrow and exclusive attention upon the historic
Christ obscures and limits his real humanity.
I
There are two distinct and contrary meanings
bound up in the term " human " as we commonly
what is it to employ it. The first is that of the
be Human? weakness, incompetency, imperfection
of which we are conscious as attaching to our
human nature. This meaning appears in such
common phrases as "to err is human," "human
follies," " human nature." On this side of our
human nature there is enough that is discour-
[57]
Christ and the Eternal Order
aging, weak, pitiful. It is human to be selfish ;
human to be sensual; human to be indifferent,
hateful, cruel. The other hemisphere of our hu-
man nature is as bright as this side is dark, as
noble and beautiful as this side is ignoble and
unholy. To our humanity belong, also, dignity,
strength, divineness. It is human to aspire, to
rise, to attain, to bless, to sympathize, to love.
Now it is impossible to think of these higher
qualities of our humanity without seeing that while
they are ours, while they belong to us and befit us
far more than the opposite qualities, they are ours
as spiritual rather than as human beings. They
are ours as from above and not from beneath.
Strangely do these two conflicting lives meet in
us, forming the insoluble mystery and tragedy of
our being, —
" My life is twofold;
Human and divine, buried and crown'd."
Whoever has caught, however dimly, a vision of
ideal manhood, or has striven, however vainly, to
realize it, knows that if he could only
To be perfect .
humanly is find a man who really is all that a man
to be divine . .
might be, to such a one he would give
the utmost homage of heart and soul. Life is one
long, disappointing search for the reality of that
image of human perfection that lies in the depths
of each human heart. Jesus Christ is the fulfil-
[58]
The Human Christ
ment of the longing, the end of the search, the
realization of the image. As such he is' splen-
didly, supremely human; but just because he is
so supremely human he is also divine. For the
perfectly human is divine, because the perfectly
human is a human impossibility. No mere man
has reached it; no mere man can reach it. Not
a man who ever lived but has felt that he could
have reached a higher manhood, but not a man
but has felt that had he done his utmost he
could not have been a perfect man. Perfection is
outside the range of human possibility, — in the
present life at any rate. Paul, who reached it as
nearly as any one, exclaims with noble earnest-
ness, " Not that I have already obtained, or am
already made perfect." Others, looking from the
outside, may think a man near perfection ; he him-
self knows better. And if he is a true man he will
confess his imperfection. Why is it that Jesus
never made such a confession? By that token
we must infer, either that he was far less perfect
than the best of his fellows or far more perfect.
Thus the study of the historic Christ leads us on
into conjectures, convictions, affirmations concern-
ing him which take us out of the his- The perfect
torical, the understandable, the narrowly S^oTe115'
human, into the realm of the spiritual, than Man
the mysterious, the universally human. Only so
could we have a completely human Christ, a Christ
who at once satisfies us and saves us. Of men
[59]
Christ and the Eternal Order
of imperfect, incomplete humanity, nobly striving
after perfection, the world has had many, and richly
have they helped their fellows ; but not one of them
could redeem humanity because not one was wholly,
perfectly human. Paradox though it seem, perfert
humanity is necessarily superhuman, supernatural,
divine. If the best that is in us all is divine, He in
whom the best rules absolutely is divine indeed.
Would we have a Christ who is wholly, richly, per-
fectly human, we needs must have an incarnation.
II
Here we are met by what seems an insuperable
objection. If Christ is perfectly, supremely, di-
vinely human, what of that struggle
Pe?fectachrist vvith self, that attainment, that victory
over evil which is the very glory and
crown of our humanity ; without which humanity
is but a semblance and no reality? A Christ who
is not " in all points tempted like as we are " is no
Christ, at least no human Christ. It is worthyfof
note that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
who presents the most touching and humanizing
picture of the Christ, tempted, battling, overcom-
ing, is one who from start to finish of his noble
epistle represents Christ as the divine Mediator,
the perfect Revealer of God — "the effulgence of
his glory, and the very image of his substance."
In his mind there was no incongruity between such
divinity and such humanity.
[60]
The Human Christ
And not only is there to him no incongruity be-
tween these two aspects of Christ, but clearly he
feels that the one is essential to the other. For
immediately upon asserting the tcmptability of
Christ, he adds " yet without sin." It was that
alone which gave significance to Christ's tempta-
tion, that it was ivitJiout sin, as no other man's has
ever been. In other words, it is the divinity of
Christ which gives depth and scope and reality to
his humanity. If his humanity had not been
divine humanity, it could not have been perfect
humanity, and if it had not been perfect, it would
have had no peculiar and universal significance.
Ill
All that Nestorianism and Socinianism, all that
Unitarianism and Ritschlianism have insisted upon
for the true humanity of Christ, — his
dependence, his temptability, his strug- J?0Cne™ffo?ds
gle, his victory — finds ample place in soiSeiy^om-
the theology of the incarnation. In Development
fact, the very conditions involved in an
incarnation afford the only adequate scope for
the development and realization of a full, com-
plete, perfect humanity. The gradual awakening of
Jesus to the consciousness of a peculiar mission to
men (Messiahship), based upon a peculiarly pure
and intimate sense of communion with God, must
in itself have led to peculiar temptations, struggles,
yearning toward men, fellowship with God.
[61]
Christ and the Eternal Order
It is impossible to account for Jesus' assumption
of the r61e of Messiahship except as he felt within
himself a unique heavenly endowment, qualifying
him for a superhuman task. Given this endow-
ment and this vocation, and you have the con-
ditions essential for the complete development of
a character made perfect through sufferings. The
stress and sublimity of the temptations attending
the assumption of his mission, so graphically and
feelingly allegorized in the temptations of the
wilderness, are such as are possible to and pro-
ductive of a humanity deeper, nobler, more po-
tent, than any other man has possessed. And so
throughout, to the garden hour and the darkness
of the cross.
The level of a person's life is indicated by the
character of his temptations. It is a crude mis-
take that any level of human life is free
is°tobeUman from temptation. It was far from the
empte wicket gate that Christian met Apollyon.
Holiness immunes are the victims of a peculiarly
subtle temptation. To be above temptation and
struggle Christ must have been, not sinless, but
unsinable, not perfect but super-perfect. It would
be nearer the truth to regard him as the most
severely tempted of men. The fact that his temp-
tations were on the very highest level does not
diminish their power. Sensual temptations may
be the most immediate and violent, but not the
most insidious and terrible. It is only a Christ,
[62]
The Human Christ
looking down from a pinnacle of the temple, who
sees the real depths below.
He who has won his victory on the lower levels
of temptation can understand little of the storms
that assail him who stands upon the
higher. But he who has won on the J^vScSy
higher levels can understand something shympathythe
of the whole range of temptation, down
to the very bottom. It is impossible to think of
Jesus struggling with lust or alcoholism, yet the
intensity of his own temptation lets him into the
secret of every temptation with the wealth of com-
plete sympathy. Such a One stoops to a Mary
Magdalene without effort and treats even a Judas
with marvelous charity and pity.
The Human Christ is touched with a feeling of
our infirmity not because of his imperfection but
because of his perfection, not because of his limita-
tion but because of his fulness, not because he is
" merely " human, but because he is divinely
human.
[63]
IX
THE HISTORIC CHRIST
THE modern illumination of the Historic Christ is
twofold: the refreshening of Jesus as a person in
history and the beginnings of an under-
The Historic J i=> fc>
Christ revivi- standing of his influence upon history.
As the result of the first of these inves-
tigations, we have to-day the most vivid and sci-
entific knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth reached by
any generation, since his own. Not only has the
dust been brushed from the original portrait, but
new pictures of his country, his people, his environ-
ment, have been painted, with the utmost possible
accuracy and realism, and hung beside the original,
in order that all possible light may be thrown upon
this most preeminent of men. Criticism, which
seemed at one time about to shatter the reality
of the historical Jesus, has resulted in establishing
the trustworthiness of the Gospel narrative. It is
evidence of the return to equilibrium of Biblical
criticism that one of the leading New Testament
scholars of the day can say : " Let the plain Bible
reader continue to read his Gospels as he has read
them; for in the end the critic cannot read them
otherwise." 1
1 Harnack, Christianity and History, p. 58.
[64]
Tlie Historic Christ
The striking and significant fact concerning this
fresh illumination of the Jesus of history is that he
proves so real and so magnetic to the world of
to-day. Many centuries separate him from us;
mighty changes have swept across the interven-
ing generations ; civilization has moved on through
diverse periods and vast developments, but the
Man of Xazareth is the same yesterday, to-day and
forever in his hold upon men. Above the now
curious and outgrown ideas of his time, the meager
life, the archaic customs, he rises supremely real,
supremely commanding and supremely winsome.
Knowledge of the second aspect of the Historic
Christ, namely, his impress upon history, has not
progressed so far. In fact we have just
, . __ The Effect of
begun vaguely to apprehend, without jesusupon
History
yet estimating carefully and broadly, the
effect which Jesus has had in determining the
course and movement of human history. It is an
arduous enterprise and awaits the genius and labor
of historians yet to appear. The merest glance
at the movement of history reveals how large, how
revolutionary, how beneficent, has been the part
which Jesus has played in forming men and shap-
ing events. Rightly to estimate this, it is neces-
sary to study the impact of Jesus, not only upon
the history of the Church and of Christianity itself,
5 [65]
Christ and the Eternal Order
but the total, often subtle influence of his teaching
and personality upon the entire movement of
humanity.1
How far has Jesus molded civilization in the last
two thousand years, — its movements, tendencies,
events, its thought and life? It cannot
"Far as the °
curse is be said that he has completely controlled
found" r J
Christendom itself. He does not yet
guide, for he has not yet conquered the motives
of world-wide humanity; he has not yet been
universally crowned ; he has not yet put all things
under his feet Nevertheless, Jesus has dominated
history. He has been its Force of greatest mo-
ment. Now exalted, now thrust aside, now hon-
ored, now ignored, he has persistently asserted his
sway over the tumultuous forces of the world. He
has bidden its waves and tempests, " Peace, be
still." He has commanded its evil spirits, "Come
forth." He has spoken " Ephphatha " to its
blindnesses, shamed and driven forth its irreverent
money-changers, has said, " Take up thy bed, and
walk " to its impotents, " Go, and sin no more "
to its penitents. He has called, " Awake " to its
dormancy and, "Arise" to its death. Through its
market-places he has gone, within its temples he
1 " Jesus therefore cannot belong exclusively to those
who call themselves his disciples. He is the common honor
of all who bear a human heart. His glory consists not in
being banished from history; we render him a truer worship
by showing that all history is incomprehensible without him."
Renan, Life offesus.
[66]
The Historic Christ
has entered, into its sick chambers he has softly
stolen, across the thresholds of its prisons and
dens and brothels and into all its lowest hells he
has fearlessly stepped ; within its palaces and par-
liaments he has gone ; beside its open graves he
has stood, and the toiling, sinning, suffering, sor-
rowing, aspiring world has felt him and known him
and bowed before him and loved him. Of the
greatest and most enduring of human organiza-
tions, the Church, he has been the acknowledged
Master and Lord. To millions of redeemed souls
he has been Light-bringer and Life-giver.
The crises of history have turned upon Christ,
not always obviously, but always his teachings,
his person, or his Church, have been implicitly, if
not explicitly, involved. Evolutions and revolu-
tions, wars and pacifications, colonizations and
reformations have felt his power. Art, literature,
science, have been purified and stimulated by him.
Civilization itself has been largely molded by him.
Take away all that is distinctively Christian from
civilization, and what a disintegration and corrup-
tion would remain ! Without him the world
might have had another Greece or Rome, but
not an England or an America. The free-
dom of the slave, the emancipation of woman,
the rescue of the helpless, the amelioration of the
laborer, the progress toward universal peace —
such are some of the achievements of Christ in
history.
[67]
Christ and the Eternal Order
II
But is it the Jesus of history simply who has
accomplished all this? Could any individual
An Aiiy alone, however vital his influence upon
his own and succeeding generations,
have so mastered and molded human history?
Only by virtue of an inner, spiritual principle, in
league with him, moving within the human soul
both before and at the same time that Jesus moves
upon it from without could these great achieve-
ments have been effected. No external force, argu-
ment or person can affect the individual or society
decisively except there be Somewhat or Someone
within that responds to, and abets, the outer influ-
ence. We may call this inner advocate, Con-
science, or Reason, or Ideal, or whatever we
choose ; we may assert that it inheres in our very
being and constitution ; but when we have done
our best to identify this Inner Impulse with our
self, we know, that however intimately inwrought
into our very selfhood, nevertheless it is not of
our earth-born nature, not our individual posses-
sion, but is, in its essence, universal and eternal.
Nor is this inner Reality impersonal, an abstrac-
tion or a quality, but a vital, concrete, personal
Presence. Who, then, can it be but He of whom
Frederick Denison Maurice wrote, in his impas-
sioned way: " I mean a reality, I mean something
[68]
The Historic Christ
that docs not proceed from you or belong to you.
Nay, stay a moment. I mean that this light
comes from a Person, from the Lord and King
of your heart and spirit — from the Word — the
Son of God."
Ill
To neglect, or subordinate, or set aside, the
Jesus of history results either in mysticism or
in rationalism. The warning is writ ThePeriiof
large in the history of doctrine. Mysti- 'Srif1*16
cism too often sailed away without Chnst
chart or compass upon unknown seas and dis-
appeared in fog and futility. Rationalism dug so
deep for a foundation for faith that it was buried
under the soil upon which it should have built.
Absolute Idealism spurned the earth and has
always remained in the air. To find in Jesus
Christ, as does Hegelianism, only an Idea, how-
ever rich in significance and fruitful in influence,
of which Jesus is but the concrete expression, is
to resolve religion into an unfolding and apothe-
osis of Reason, and Christianity into a syncretistic
gnosis. Christianity began with a historic person
and rests absolutely and permanently upon history.
The Jesus of history can never, without apostasy
and disaster, be ignored or left behind.
But to account for Christianity by the Historic
Christ alone is quite as one-sided and disastrous,
L69]
Christ and the Eternal Oi'der
for it leaves no place for a direct and inner
communion with God. Christ means far more
The equal to humanity than a historic individual.
£grthefiFter-" The unique and potent place which he
nal Christ hoMs jn the jjfe of the race can be
explained only as we connect the Historic Christ
with the Christ who was before history and above
history, — the Word who was in the beginning
with God and was God. This Christ was in the
world before Jesus came and remained after he
had departed. The Eternal Christ was the first
Messenger of the Incarnation and the first Mis-
sionary of the Cross. It is he who was preferred
before the Historic Christ, for he was before him ;
it is he who survived Jesus and glorified him.
This is the Christ of consciousness, the Christ
of the Fourth Gospel, the Inner and Eternal
Prototype and Ideal.
[7°]
X
THE ETERNAL CHRIST
THE distinction between the Historic Christ and
the Eternal Christ is by no means a merely-
academic and speculative distinction. Aheipfui
It represents, even if it fails to ex- Distinction
press, a real element in the Christian conscious-
ness. The Christ whom we love and worship we
feel is not a mere creature of time. Manifested
in time, he nevertheless transcends time, in nature
and in significance. Else we could not justify our
attitude toward him. It is only as the Historic
Christ and the Eternal Christ supplement and
fulfil one another that we gain a consistent and
complete conception of Christ as he exists in
Christian life and consciousness.
I
The Historic Christ gives form and embodiment
to the dim and indistinct outlines of the Eternal
Christ. Fact ratifies ideal ; sight con- The Historic
firms consciousness. In the assuringly fhhenEtefrnais
real and tangible Jesus, the Eternal Chnst
Christ comes forth from the vague background of
eternity and the shifting shadows of experience,
[7-]
Christ and the Eternal Order
and stands out in the clear light of incarnate,
historic reality. " That which we have seen and
heard declare we unto you." Men turn to him
with joy as to One whom they have already known
in the deeper insights of the soul. Jewish proph-
ecy of the Messiah is but a fragment of the in-
stinctive prescience of the human spirit that finds
its realization in Jesus. He, as he comes, inter-
prets this prescience to itself. The white light of
dawn above the eastern hills is part of the sunrise,
but when the sun itself swings clear and free above
the horizon the fainter flush that preceded it is
both explained and exceeded. So the Christ of
history explains and exceeds the light of the Eter-
nal Christ in the soul.
At first thought it seems impossible that any
individual, with his single, segregated qualities and
his necessary limitations, can represent
How can . . *
these the heart of the Living God, can m-
things be ?
carnate the Eternal Word. How can
one man stand for God? It seems like snatching
a star from infinite space and making it burn upon
an earthen candlestick. No wonder that when the
proposition is detached from the Person, the in-
tellect rebels, faith fails. But when we turn to the
New Testament and read the familiar story, in its
simple and convincing straightforwardness, the
figure of Jesus rises before us so sane and yet so
sublime that we feel we cannot compress him into
the mold of ordinary humanity. He rises too high
[72] '
The Eternal Christ
above all other men to be measured by customary
standards. We cannot bind him to the bed of
Procrustes. He passes through the midst of us
and of our inadequate estimates and standards
and leaves us awed and humiliated. He grows
upon us in mystery and majesty. What can we
do but bid conception follow upon conviction and
crown him Lord of all?
" But," objects the realist, " this is an unwar-
ranted idealizing of history, a wholly irrational
exaltation of an individual life, a purely arbitrary
universalizing of a person fixed to a single genera-
tion and a single race." Is this a conclusive ob-
jection ? It would be, if Jesus were the sole revela-
tion of God, or if he were unrelated to other forms
of revelation. The Historic Christ unpreceded by
and unrelated to an Eternal Christ would be an anom-
aly, thrust into the process of history, unheralded
and unexplained. But coming as the embodiment,
the historic incarnation of a Christ eternally ex-
istent and present in humanity universally and from
the beginning, the Historic Christ interprets, clari-
fies, consummates the whole process of revelation.
II
Not only does the Historic Christ define and
fulfil the Eternal Christ, the Eternal Christ ratines
and universalizes the Historic Christ. If the His-
toric Christ verifies the Eternal Christ, not less does
the Eternal Christ verify the Historic Christ. His-
[73]
Christ and the Eternal Order
tory alone will not save the world, even if it be the
history of a divine Man. History without relation
to eternity would be a hopeless maze, an
The Eternal ' *
Christ wit- endless flux, a meaningless succession.
nesses to
the Historic lo make Christianity dependent upon
Christ . .
historic fact alone is as short-sighted
and suicidal as to cut it away from fact altogether.
" Woe to us," well says Harnack, " if our faith
rested on a number of details to be demonstrated
and established by the historian." * To the same
effect Sabatier wrote : " Criticism will always be a
just cause of alarm to those who elevate any his-
torical and contingent form whatever into the ab-
solute, for the excellent reason that an historical
phenomenon, being always conditioned, can never
have the characteristics of the absolute."2 The
Christian consciousness, individual and corporate,
which is the ultimate reliance of religious truth,
is above historic fact, precedes it, outruns it, out-
ranks it. In its pure, essential self, truth may be
factless, formless, eternal, absolute. But, for us at
least, truth, though not identical with form or fact,
is always clothed with form or fact. In this relation-
ship the advantage is mutual. If fact expresses
truth, not less does truth glorify fact. If the Christ
of history focuses, visualizes, incarnates the Eternal
Christ, the Eternal Christ interprets, glorifies, trans-
figures the Historic Christ.
1 Christianity a?id History, p. 60.
2 Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 167.
[74]
The Eternal CJirist
III
It is a daring, and almost overwhelming, hypoth-
esis that thus unites history and eternity with
the golden link of a single life, a soli-
TiL . The Life that
tary consciousness. It requires a superb links Eternity
, r , . . 1111 and History
outreach of faith to grasp and hold
fast such a conception. To surmise and speculate
over it is not difficult, but to hold Christ, as Paul
held him, as the solution of all problems and the
inspiration of all deeds — this is a summons to
supreme heights of thought and life. And yet, it
is neither irrational nor without analogy. It taxes
reason, by transcending lower superficial and
merely common-sense views of the universe, but it
does not transgress reason. Philosophy tends
more and more to exalt personality. This doc-
trine carries forward this tendency and con-
centrates all truth in one perfect, divine-human
personality. Science furnishes an analogy in what
Professor Shaler has termed " critical points,"
and Professor De Vries " saltation," where either a
sudden leap from below or an external reenforce-
ment occurs, as miraculous in natural history as
are certain phenomena, scorned by the scientist,
in human history. Are there not critical points,
saltations, in human history? Above all is there
not one critical point, as epochal as that of the ap-
pearance of man on the earth, namely the advent
of him whom Paul calls the Second Man, the Lord
[75]
Christ and the Eternal Order
from heaven, in whom time and eternity meet, who
thus becomes the Revelation of God and the
Creator of a new humanity?
Moreover, this hypothesis approves itself to the
pragmatic test, — it works. The man who takes
ThePra - Jesus Christ as his Interpreter and End
maticTest finds himself in harmony with God,
with nature and with humanity. God is real, liv-
ing, near; nature is resplendent, harmonious,
aspiring; humanity is dear, lovable, salvable.
Ethical relations are clarified and strengthened,
spiritual insights purified and potentialized. The
spiritual mind which is life and peace takes posses-
sion of the soul. The universe has a meaning, the
present life a purpose, the future a hope. In
Christ the man is a new creature. Old things are
past away, behold all things are become new.
Not every man who takes Christ as the Center
of his universe, the Explanation and Goal of exist-
ence, thinks himself through as to what
Christ means *•»■*»*-»•■ t>
™man°hSnny Christ means to him intellectually as
he knows wejj as spiritually. Very rare is the
Christian who attempts, or who needs to attempt,
to solve the problem of the Christ personality —
how he is related to God, to nature and to human-
ity, and why he has such power over himself. And
yet Christianity demands, for the sake of its own
consistency and self-assurance, that this attempt
be made. And when made, it inevitably leads to
the distinction between the Historic Christ and the
[76]
77/6' Eternal Christ
Eternal Christ, the Christ of history and of expe-
rience, and the endeavor to relate the two aspects
to each other. Only in the Logos Christology
is there room fur this problem and only in the
Living Christ can we find its solution.
[77]
XI
THE LIVING CHRIST
CHRIST has been to humanity, successively, an
inner, prophetic, potential Logos; a visible, his-
toric individual God-Man, and an invisible, exalted,
living Lord. We may not say that the Living
Christ is a fusion of the Eternal Christ and the
Historic Christ; but the Christ whom we know in
the blending of these is a completer Christ. In
effect he is a new Christ, — new in universality
and in potency.
I
The Living Christ, risen and redeeming as well
as cosmic, indwelling and prepotent, is the Christ
of Paul, as the Historic Christ is the
The Living ,1-1-1
Christ Paul's Christ of the Synoptics, and the Eternal
Christ J r
Christ the Christ of the Fourth Gospel.
It was the Living Christ whom Paul met on the
Damascus road. For this Living Christ it became
Paul's passion to live. Very little of the Historic
Christ appears in the writings of the great apostle.
He is there, as the indispensable historic revelation
(beyond him in the cosmic background the Eternal
Christ), but to Paul the resurrection projected
[78]
The Living Christ
Jesus into a new and limitless sphere of relation-
ships and potentialities, far more vital as well as
universal than was possible to Him in his earthly
life. And this Living Christ Paul succeeded — to
speak after the manner of men — in enthroning as
the ever-living Lord of humanity. Once and
again the Church has drifted away from him, now
toward the merely human and historic Jesus, now
toward the Eternal but indistinct Christ of Reason ;
but always it has been brought back, face to face,
heart to heart, with the Living Christ, and always
Paul has had a part, now greater, now less, in
effecting the return. It was Paul through whom
Luther and Wesley and the Protestant Church
found again the Living Christ.
The Living Christ is our Christ of to-day. The
pagan world had the Eternal Christ and rejected
him; the Jews had the Historic Christ The Living
and crucified him; we have the Living chrSofe
Christ, and now is the day of salvation. Todav
Not that we of to-day have not also the Eternal
Christ and the Historic Christ. The Living Christ
embraces both of these. We do not start where
the pagan world started, with a mere revelation
within. We do not start where the disciples started,
with a flesh and blood Companion. Our Christ
has emerged from the shadowy recesses of con-
science and reason, has passed through and be-
yond the limitations of earthly existence, and
become the Living Lord of humanity, clear to
[79]
Christ and the Eternal Order
conception, winsome to the heart, potent over the
will ; Master of the individual, Lord of the Church,
Redeemer of the world.
Into this Living Christ both the Eternal Christ
and the Historic Christ pass, each, as it were, los-
ing himself to find himself in one revealing Person,
who was before time and place, in time and place,
and above time and place, as well as in them, the
Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, who was,
who is, and who is to come.
II
This is the Living Christ because he himself
lives. He lives in a deeper, larger sense than
••Life in Jesus lived. For He who toiled at the
Himself" carpenter's bench and renewed his phy-
sical strength with food and drink and slept away
the weariness of the day, was necessarily " cabin'd,
cribb'd and confin'd " by material limitations. It
could not be otherwise. But, in fuller union with
the Eternal Logos, freed from the accidents of in-
dividuality, the restrictions of time and place and
the confinements of human knowledge and activ-
ity, he now truly, completely, gloriously lives.
Not that the Living Christ, let it be repeated,
is another or different being from the lowly, loving
Jesus. In character and purpose and communi-
cableness he is unchanged, the same yesterday,
to-day and forever. But he has passed on into
wider relations and fuller life. In Tennyson's In
[80]
77/6' Living Christ
6
Memorimm the poet, in one of the cantos, addresses
his immortal friend:
11 Tho' mix'd with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more."
In the eternal life, identity is not lost in the wider
spiritual relationships but is so heightened and
glorified as to win a nobler and more unselfish
love. Jesus is no less real and lovable in his
eternal transfiguration as Living Lord than in his
temporal taskmastership.
Ill
This is the Living Christ also because he gives
life. The earthly Jesus redeemed a few, the Liv-
ing Christ redeems many; the former
° J "I came that
gave life, the latter gives it more abun- they may have
dantly. This Life-giver touches the in-
dividual and he becomes a new creature. He
imparts himself to his Church and reformations and
revivals follow. He moves upon society and free-
dom, peace, brotherhood dawn, never to set till the
kingdom has come.
The Living Christ is more, not less, personal than
the earthly Jesus. The body is, without doubt, an
expressive instrument of personality, but
. r ■ t "Spirit with
by no means a perfect instrument. It spirit can
r meet "
is not sensitive enough for the finest
communications. We comprehend one another
more by inner intuitions than by outer signs. The
6 [8.]
Christ and the Eternal Order
intimate thought-feeling of another person comes
to us as a kind of unmediated personal impact. The
finer and more sensitive to one another we grow,
the less need of language or symbol. Shouting,
pantomime and gesticulation disappear before the
finer culture. Signless, soundless, soulful is the
purest, deepest self-impartation. The sense of
presence, of communion, is the most intense and
vital experience that the Christian has. Call it
the presence of God, or of Christ, or of the Spirit, it
matters not. It is the Father, the Spirit, the Son
— the Living God. But let us not forget that the
Living God comes to us only through the Living
Christ. In his very impartation of himself to us
he becomes the Living Christ. Whoever experi-
ences the nearness of God feels his nearness in
Christ. The Son who reveals him, reveals him
near. Such an experience is a living and personal
experience. It is too vital to be impersonal. In-
deed it is more personal than the ordinary contact
of every-day intercourse. More personal even than
the communion of the disciple who leaned on Jesus'
breast was that of him who said, " It is no longer I
that live, but Christ liveth in me."
IV
The Living Christ is more, not less, potent
than the earthly Jesus. If Christ were only a
figure in history, however majestic, however in-
[82]
The Living Christ
6
flucntial, however fadeless, he would fall short of
being a Redeemer. There is a sense in which a
great spirit of the past, like Washington,
• • , mi 1- • i ,• . "lam with
lives, and ever will live, in the lives of you always,
even unto the
his countrymen. Each new creneration end of the
J ° world "
appropriates him, is made better, more
patriotic by him. No effort is needed to keep
such a memory, such a personality, alive. It keeps
itself alive and inspires and uplifts the heart of the
nation perpetually. Jesus Christ lives, and will
ever live, in this way, not as a national but as a
racial hero. But this is not the only way in which
he lives. If it were, " what soul could utter on the
true scale of his soul the universal woe, 4 We trusted
that it should have been He who should have re-
deemed mankind ' ? " l For such an influence could
no more save mankind than the rays of a star
could melt the winter snows. It needs more than
a memory, a history, a record, to redeem a world.
It demands no less than a living, present, vitalizing
Person. And such is Christ. Men revere the
name of Washington, but they are not baptized
into it; nor do they sing to him, " My faith looks
up to thee," or, " Dear Lord and Master mine ! "
There is a potency as well as a supremacy in the
Christ which declares him living in a sense that no
other man, past or present, lives. Just how, or
why, it is so, we may not be able to tell ; but such
1 P. T. Forsyth, The Holy Father and the Living Christ,
P- *33-
[83]
Christ and the Eternal Order
is the incontestable consciousness of ever multiply-
ing millions who share in part at least the experi-
ence of the apostle: "I can do all things in him
that strengtheneth me."
We need a Living Christ, and a Living Christ we
have. The Church sometimes longs for one of the
The Living days °f the Son °f man » ^e disciple
Ij0Td wishes himself back in the days of the
Galilean companionship ; but it is not the visible,
tangible Christ who is most real, most personal,
most vital, but the Christ whose spiritual presence
and power are vitally felt. It remains for the
Church to realize this, to cease thinking of the
Christ merely as a historic person, or as an exalted
and heavenly being, and to find in him the vital
nearness and reality of a Living Lord. With such
a Living Christ in human life all best things are
possible ; they are certain. We may be of good
cheer. The Living God is on the throne. The
Living Christ is in the world.
[84]
XII
THE COSMIC CHRIST
In company with fellow travelers, an American
once stood, looking down upon Interlaken. Ob-
serving how deeply he was moved by Ascene
the nobility and beauty of the wonder-- "Chnstllke"
ful scene, a German lady standing next him, her-
self sharing his emotion, spoke in an undertone of
reverence and joy the single word, " CJtristlicli /"
It seemed to him, as he caught it, the one word
that expressed and interpreted the scene, translat-
ing it into spiritual meaning, into human-divine
values.
What was there Christlike in the scene — any-
thing more than that its purity and freshness and
harmony suggested corresponding moral qualities
in the life of the One altogether lovely? Most
persons would say, " This is all." But a more '
tenacious reflection follows further and queries
whether it is not possible that, through Him who
in some way caused both this beautiful vale and
this resplendent Character to be, there may not be
some deeper and subtler relationship.
[85]
Christ and the Eternal Order
It is one of the most striking facts in the history
of human thought that a good man who lived a
Christ and humble life in a Roman province and
died upon a cross two thousand years
ago should have aroused in more than one of his
contemporaries the conception that he himself
was, in some mystical but profoundly real way,
uniquely and vitally connected with nature, nay
with the process of creation itself. The author of
that marvelous book, the Fourth Gospel, which
has hushed the world to silence with its deep
authoritative note, has dared to affirm that the
Word incarnate in Jesus was also the medium of
Nothing made unIversal creation. " All things were
without Him ma(je through him; and without him
was not anything made that hath been made."
And Paul, one of the most virile and commanding
minds the world has ever known, came to practi-
cally the same thought of Christ: "All things have
been created through him, and unto him; and he
is before all things, and in him all things consist."
Nor did these daring minds fail of a following.
The Apologists, trained in all the subtleties and
skepticisms of Greek thought, took up the con-
ception and made it the very center of a theology
that won for Christianity intellectual prestige and
strength. Origen, that most capacious and glow-
ing mind of the Early Church, made for the doc-
[86]
TJie Cosmic Christ
trine a permanent place in Christian theology.
Athanasius gave it a still deeper interpretation,
declaring that " he who contemplates Creation
rightly is contemplating also the Word who framed
it and through him begins to apprehend the
Father."1 To this day this conception has held its
own, commanding the support of many of the
most acute and thorough thinkers of every genera-
tion, including our own.
Modern science seems, indeed, to shatter this
conception as an empty dream. If there is crea-
tion at all, it must be continuous, and Does Science
the process of evolution, by which the contradict?
universe came to be what it is, knows Jesus Christ
only as a minute and hardly distinguishable prod-
uct of human development, having no more to do
with its stupendous movement of world-architecture
than an insect has to do with the creation of the sun
in whose warmth it basks. But is it so sure that
modern science thus carelessly fillips Christ into
oblivion?
In all the vast, titanic process by which the uni-
verse came to be what it is, if we accept the
controverted nebular hypothesis, the
.... r , . , No Cosmos
whirling of star-dust, the swirl and crush without
. Rationality
of matter, the magic of chemical reac-
tions, the emergence of vegetable and animal life,
was there no order, no purpose, no progress? Was
it all one colossal, fortuitous, meaningless dance of
1 Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians I, 12.
[87]
Christ and the Eternal Order
unintelligent, undirected forces? If so, why has
evolution been from " an indefinite incoherent ho-
mogeneity, to a definite coherent heterogeneity"?
Why have life, harmony, beauty, intelligence
emerged? Evolutionary philosophy itself assures
us that unless a factor is present in the initial
stage of a process it will not emerge in the final
stage. We are forced to the conclusion that there
has been from the beginning a principle of Order
in creation. This principle of Order, — what is it
but an unmistakable evidence and expression of
Mind, of Reason, of Wisdom? And can Wisdom
be less than personal? Here we have reached the
prologue of the Fourth Gospel : " In the beginning
was the Word." A cosmos demands a cosmic
Christ
The world of nature, as we know it through
experience, or through reason, or however, is a
what is realm of uniformity. Science is con-
umiormity? structed upon the prevalence of uni-
formity. Uniformity is not simply a law that we
find in nature ; neither is it a category of the hu-
man mind which we impose upon nature; it is a
synthesis of the Mind within nature and the mind
within ourselves. Nothing will account for the
law of uniformity in nature except a divine Mind,
a Logos, which precedes and underlies and per-
meates the very structure and process of creation,
constituting the universe a cosmos and not a chaos.
[88]
The Cosmic Christ
II
But is this Logos teleological, purposive, be-
nevolent, as it should be in order to be a true
Logos ? The answer lies in the existence of beauty,
virtue, personality. These realities are here ; sci-
ence tells us that once they were not here. What
will account for their coming?
Beauty cannot exist without an eye and an ob-
ject. It is neither in the eye alone, nor in the
object alone, but in that correspondence The same
between them which can be explained ft°t^teesCsneer
only by a common authorship of both. and Sccne
The traveler looking down upon Interlaken be-
holds a scene whose beauty, as he sees it, is
the result of countless millenniums of geologic
upheaval and chemical alchemy. And he himself,
as he gazes upon it, helping to create for himself
the beauty which he sees, is the result of still more
marvelous creative processes. Can the joy and
reverence with which the conjunction of the scene
and of himself stirs his soul be accounted for
otherwise than by a vinculum uniting them, a
common relationship of both to a Mind, a Logos,
through which traveler and vale alike came to be
what they are? It is not simply, as Emerson
said to the rhodora, "The self-same Power that
brought me here brought you." Besides this, we
must infer that the same Wisdom that created
and inheres in the beautiful flower or the in-
[89]
Christ and the Eternal Order
spiring scene created and inheres in the observer
and establishes the bond between them. Thus,
again we come back to the Eternal Logos, the
Cosmic Christ.
Futhermore, the very existence of personality,
as well as the mutual communication between
human persons, necessitates a Logos
implies a philosophy. Personality cannot have
come from impersonality. The stream
does not rise higher than its source. Nature pro-
duces freaks, but her freaks are never finer than
her fruits. Personality issuing from impersonality
disrupts and derides every law of science, and of phi-
losophy, including that of evolution. Personality
lives and moves and has its being in an eternal
order of reason that is itself a personal, divine
Word. Nor can there be, as Horace Bushnell
has said, any basis of communication between per-
sonalities except through the Logos that is both in
themselves and in the medium of communication.
" It is only as there is a Logos in the outward world,
answering to the logos or eternal reason of the
parties, that they can come into a mutual under-
standing in regard to any thought or spiritual state
whatever." x
The Logos doctrine seems to many, in this sci-
entific, practical age, remote, speculative, untenable.
Yet Bushnell, one of the most vital, intense, unfet-
tered of modern thinkers, is by no means alone in
1 God in Christ, p. 21.
[9°]
The Cosmic Christ
finding in the Logos theology the only adequate
interpretation of Christ, of humanity, and of the
universe.
Paul's Cosmic Christ finds little recognition in
present-day nature philosophy, but now and again
from some deep, devout, reflective mind come
words like these from Alfred Tennyson : " I firmly
believe that if God were to withdraw himself from
the world around us and from within us but for one
instant, every atom of creation, both animate and
inanimate, would come utterly to naught, for in
him alone do all beings and things exist." This is
not monism. Taken in connection with the poet's
further declaration that in Christ our higher nature
was " truly divine, the very presence of the Father,
the one only God, dwelling in the perfect man,"
it comes much nearer to Paul's word, " In him all
things consist."
Ill
But any view of nature which sees only its
divine side and fails to recognize the presence of
disorder, disease, imperfection, is rose-
colored and unreasonable. It is useless darifsiSeof6
to close our eyes to the frustration, the
ineptitude, the ugliness, the cruelty, that nature
thrusts before our reluctant vision. With pathetic
bewilderment the mind of the trustful and sensitive
child comes upon the ever-increasing evidences of
pain and evil in nature, arousing in him the ques-
[9']
Christ and the Eternal Order
tion finely typified in the closing line of William
Blake's child-poem, The Tiger:
" Did He who made the lamb make thee ? "
What is the meaning of it all? Is it the blind-
ness and stumbling of a self-made, uncaring world?
Or were the Persians right in holding that after
Ormuzd the Good created, Ahriman the Evil cre-
ated also? It seems an insoluble difficulty, the
rock upon which faith must go down. And yet
the heart compounds with the eyes in approving
those words in the old Hebrew cosmogony : " And
God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold,
it was very good." And a yet deeper response of
the soul answers the words of the Logos hymn :
" And without him was not anything made that
hath been made."
The only solvent of this obstinate problem in
Providence which I have been able to find — and
Germinal ^ ls Dut partial and tentative — lies
found °in Na- in the increasing indications that come
from science and from nature-study of
the presence in nature of something like freedom
in man, — the power, however limited, of initiation,
of experiment, of self-development. Into the
ancient injunction of Elohim to the animal king-
dom " be fruitful and multiply," we may well read
a meaning larger than that of mere reproduction.
The potency of variation, the power to develop
fresh functions and new forms, — this is granted to
[92]
The Cosmic CJirist
the lower forms of life. Creation provides both a
divine norm, resident in each divergent type, and
also a certain range of self-activity, a field of modi-
fication, a power to the contrary, or, in other words,
scope for that will to live, and to live in its own
way, which is so manifest in all forms of life. l
With such a field for self-energizing, becoming
more and more intelligent as life mounts upward,
there is room, not only for the great voluntary
divergence of vegetable and animal frimttTe"
forms, but also for that deflection from Norm
the norm, that distortion and degeneration, whose
effects we see in the disease and the deformity
marring the face of nature — marring but not de-
spoiling the beauty, blurring but not obliterating
the meaning, hindering but not frustrating the
divine purpose of perfection. For in nature as in
humanity, the tendency is upward, the light grows,
the divine purpose unfolds. Obnoxious growths,
destructive forces, venomous animals, disappear
under the control of man, God's agent and collab-
orator. The comely, kindly, and serviceable sur-
vive. The meek inherit the earth.
1 Since writing the above there has come to my attention
a scientific work of great value which strikingly tends to
confirm this theory — "Evolution, Racial and Habitudi-
nal" by the veteran missionary and scientist, John T. Gulick,
published by the Carnegie University of Washington, D. C.
From a careful and detailed study of the habits of the snails
on the island of Oahu, Mr. Gulick has demonstrated the
preponderance of self-initiated habit over environment in
determining the development of new species.
[93]
Christ and the Eternal Order
As man advances, nature advances. As his
progress is dependent upon her, so is hers upon
waitin for mm- Long indeed has been nature's
the Manifcs- waiting for the manifestation of the
tation ol trie o
Sons of God sons of God . but at last the self.
imposed bondage of her imperfection has been
broken. The inalienable bond between man and
nature, constituted in that Eternal Logos who is
the sole interpretation of each to the other, is
drawing the two into ever closer sympathy and
service. Together they move on toward the
vision of the prophet, the apocalypse of peace,
when " they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my
holy mountain."
Is there no Christ in all this progress in scien-
tific knowledge? Is there no Christ-love in all our
deepening affection for nature? When our eyes
are opened we shall see that every newly-known
force of nature released for the blessing and help
of man, every new law that admits us to a wider
knowledge of the cosmos, every quickened insight
into the ongoing of nature, reveals more of that
Word which was in the beginning with God,
through whom all things were made, and in
whom all are to be consummated.
[94]
PART III
THE POTENCIES OF CHRIST
" A perfect man, of the degree of the perfection of Jesus Christ,
reaching ' unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ,' is to me
more incomprehensible, more impossible, than the incarnate Son of God.
I would deny no essential likeness of the human to the divine ; but even
if we carry the likeness to the possibility of a divine humanity, we are not
to overlook the fact that a difference in degree may amount to a difference
in kind. 1 take a drop out of the ocean. The drop is like the ocean, but
it is swayed by no tides, it bears no ships on its bosom, it does not unite
continents. I take a grain of earth from a mountain. The grain is like
the mountain, but I can dig no quarries out of its bowels, I can cut no
forests on its slopes, I do not see it lifting its summits to the first light
of the day. Man may be like God, but I locate Jesus, not in the drop and
the grain, but in the ocean and the mountain. ... I search among the
sons of men of all time, and I look in vain for one who had the conscious-
ness of 'life in himself.' ... No: any interpretation of the personal life
of Jesus Christ which can satisfy my mind must allow it the substance and
quality and fulness of the life of God. I grant the mystery of the Incar-
nation, but I prefer mystery to insufficiency in my faith. As I watch the
process by which men are made to become sons of God, as I follow the
stream of human redemption in its ceaseless and widening course, I can
trace it to no other or nearer source than the Eternal Sonship of Jesus
Christ." — President William Jewett Tucker, D.D., Life in
Himself: A Meditation on the Consciousness of Jesus Christ.
XIII
CHRIST PRE-PRESENT AND PRE-POTENT
THE term " preexistcnt," as applied to Christ, is
open to three objections: — (i) As a simple time-
affirmation it is empty of content; mere
. Preexistence
previous existence is a barren and color- a barren
• affirmation
less predicate. (2) It is unrelated and
discrete in significance ; such a Christ might be
anything or nothing, so far as his relation to
God and man is concerned. (3) Even in its time-
affirmation the term is uncertain and insufficient;
for it affirms nothing as to the duration of Christ's
preexistence. Ever-existent would be a more
adequate term. There is, in truth, but one term
that suffices to define the relation of Christ to
time — the term eternal. The Eternal Christ tran-
scends time as a part of his supremacy over all
limitations. It is this truth of the eternity of
Christ that theology was striving after when it
accepted and canonized the conception of pre-
existence.
I
As an aid to the conception of the Eternal
Christ, the designation pre-prescnt is preferable
7 [97 ]
Christ and the Eternal Order
in many respects to preexistent. The Pre-pre-
sent Christ is the Christ present before the in-
Pre-present a carnation, not only with God the Father
better term and wjth the creatiorlj but also with hu-
manity. In this usage the term pre-presence
may be taken to denote the transcending of place,
somewhat as eternal transcends time, conveying
us into the realm of pure, not spatial, relations.
Indeed the word has already been elevated
to this signification in the term omnipresence,
— a presence that is super-spatial, rather than
spatial.
The pre-presence of Christ is much nearer the
New Testament representation than preexistence.
The Logos of the Fourth Gospel is
Eternal Life . . , . , , , •
richer than much more than a preexistent being;
he is present with the Infinite as the
eternal Outflow of his Being, the Revelation of his
Nature, the Word of his Wisdom. By virtue of
this very relation to God he is present too in crea-
tion as its interior structural Secret, the Process
and Pattern of its final perfection ; present, also,
with humanity, as the Light that lighteth every
man coming into the world. Christ himself, as
interpreted by the author of the Fourth Gospel,
speaks not so much of his preexistence as of his
pre-presence. If he were asserting merely his
preexistence it would have been more to the pur-
pose to say, Before Abraham was born, I was.
Instead of that his assertion is, " Before Abraham
[98]
Christ Pre-present and Pre-patent
was born, I am" This is an affirmation of eter-
nity, of the transcendence of time, rather than of
mere previous existence in time. The time content
is too narrow and confined for Christ's conscious-
ness. He breaks it and throws it from him that
he may breathe more deeply in the freedom of
the eternal life. Yet the eternal life of which he
speaks so confidently as his, both to possess and
to impart, is never spoken of by him as separate
and solipsistic. Always it is intimately associated
by him with his Father. His own life and glory
are ever " with the Father."
The Christology of Paul, too, is a Christology
of eternal presence rather than of preexistence.
Christ is not only before all things, but Christ
in him all things consist. He is the PJ)eti;natsas
spiritual Rock from which the people Pre'Present
of God drank, the Rock that followed them in all
their wayward wandering. He is the Mediator of
universal reconciliation unto God. Thus potent
and pervasive is his relationship to the universe.
Indeed this Christ of Paul is prc-potcnt as well as
pre-present. He is the active Principle, or rather
the active Personality, through whom God has
been moving upon his world and within it, the
mysterious, indwelling Presence who has been the
hidden source and inspiration of all goodness and
truth, of all progress and all hope. In a word, he
he is not merely a preexistent Christ but a pre-
present, pre-potent Christ.
[99]
4011 L7
Christ and the Eternal Order
II
But how is this eternally present and potent
Christ related to the simple, understandable, com-
a query municable, human Jesus of the Synoptic
Gospels? Is there any vital associa-
tion ? Are not the two figures incongruous and
irreconcilable? At first, it seems so. Our sen-
sations in trying to identify the two may be com-
pared to those of a child when, for the first time,
he sees his father, whom he has known only in the
familiar contact of the home, upon whose knee he
has sat, and whom he has caressed, in the ex-
ercise of a wider and more august relationship, as
a judge on the bench, or a minister in the pul-
pit, honored, revered, exalted. Is this the same
person with whom he has romped in the nurs-
ery and roamed in the fields? The child comes
to the consciousness of the identity with wonder-
ment. Somewhat similar is our own growing ex-
perience of the wider relationships, the deeper
meaning, the universal glory, of the Christ whom
we have first known in his Galilean simplicity.
Ill
How can the same Christ be Plato's Light and
mine, Simon Peter's Saviour and my neighbor's?
How can he be eternal and yet have a place in
history, cosmic yet human, racial yet a Jew, uni-
[ IO°]
Christ Pre-present and Pre-potent
versa] yet an individual? The key to the solution
of this mystery, the reconciliation of this antinomy,
lies in part in the relation of personality
1 ... Personality
to individuality. Personality is possi- vs. individu-
' L ality
ble without individuality. God is a
person, but not an individual. Individuality, too,
can exist without personality. There is individu-
ality among animals, but no personality. There is
even a suggestion of individuality among crystals,
but certainly none of personality. In humanity,
personality and individuality are always conjoined.
We know no person who is not an individual; we
know no individual who is not, at least incipiently,
a person. Jesus was both person and individual.
The Logos is intensely personal but not individual.
Individuality is limiting, personality is free. As
an individual, Jesus was born, lived, and died;
that is, he had a temporal existence. The Eternal
Christ, the Logos, has an eternal existence, apart
from time, above time. But time and eternity,
history and heaven, are not unrelated and incom-
municable. The Eternal Christ incarnated himself
in the individual Jesus. The Word became flesh.
This involved kenosis, self-limitation, humiliation,
but not degradation.
IV
The preexistence or pre-presence of Jesus, as an
individual, is unreasonable; it is the Logos who is
prccxistent. To assert the existence of the man,
[10. ]
Christ and the Eternal Order
the individual, Jesus, before his birth except in
the purpose of God, is to resolve his humanity into
a phantom ; it is no more nor less than
The Logos . _ , 1 i i i t
not jesus, Docetism. On the other hand, the Lo-
gos who indwelt in Jesus, transfusing his
whole self with a divine personality, must have
been, not only preexistent with God, but pre-
present in humanity, as the source of all its light
and its virtue. Before the incarnation the Logos
was in men genetically, partially; in the incarna-
tion he took possession of one man, completely
controlling his whole being, raising his humanity
to its highest exercise and fusing it with Deity.
At least this is the nearest we can come to the
interpretation of this divine mystery. The depth
of the mystery we may not penetrate. Indeed we
cannot penetrate the mystery of physical life and
how can we expect to penetrate this? The very
terms in which we attempt to state it are but ac-
commodations, adaptations, essays at a meaning
which lies beyond our reach.
It is easy to call this " speculation " and taboo
it. It is far simpler and easier to rate Jesus as an
exceptionally good and wise man and stop with
that. But the easy explanation, the surface valu-
ation, is not satisfying. And something in the
unique and perduring personality of Jesus has
compelled men to seek a deeper secret to account
for him. The impulse has led, it is true, to mysti-
cism, extravagance, speculation, but in all the fan-
[ 102 ]
Christ Prc-present and Pre-patent
tastic and futile attempts to interpret this mystery-
there is the persistent conviction that, in some way
or other, Jesus of Nazareth is peculiarly related to
the Eternal God, to his universe, and to humanity.
Above time, around time, through time and into
time, Hows this eternal, timeless revelation of God,
this vital, personal, present Word, this pre-present,
pre-potent, indwelling Christ.
[ I03 ]
XIV
CHRIST INDWELLING
An absentee Christ were no better than an ab-
sentee God. And a Christ who visited the earth
but once — for a mere pin-point of time
saviour insuf- amid the millenniums — would be vir-
ficicnt
tually an absentee Christ. Not such is
the Christ of the New Testament, nor of Christian
theology.1 To be, in any true sense, a Saviour of
humanity, Christ must have been always, as he is
now, a present Saviour. And there is only one
way in which he can be a present Christ, and that
is as an Indwelling Christ.
To speak of Christ as indwelling at once creates
hesitation and confusion in many minds because
!„„»„„,« of the difficulty of conceiving him as, at
Immanence J o '
sonanty°n^tr" tne same time, with the Father in heaven
and with men on earth. It is in reality
the same difficulty that arises in harmonizing the
Divine transcendence and the Divine immanence.
1 " The Logos has not entered abruptly or from without
into humanity; but He was ever in the world." Dorner,
System of Christian Doctrine, Vol. Ill, p. 342.
[ I04]
Christ Indwelling
c*>
In terms of locality such a harmony is quite im-
possible. It is necessary to lay aside entirely all
ideas of place, and to think of the relation only in
terms of compatibility and personality. Is there
any reason why a higher personality should not
indwell in — that is, constantly influence and move,
and, if permitted, direct and mold, — a lower per-
sonality ? An ardent advocate of free will might
protest that this would annul freedom ; but only if
influence were compulsory and restrictive. When
the influence of one person over another, as in the
case of Christ and the soul, is purely rational and
persuasive, and in the direction of the highest
activity and well-being, freedom is promoted, not
retarded.
Eliminating the notion of locality, there is no in-
herent difficulty in conceiving of God as at once
transcendent and immanent. " For thus saith the
high and lofty One that inhabited! eternity, whose
name is Holy : I dwell in the high and holy place,
with him also that is of a contrite and humble
spirit." Nor is there any greater difficulty in con-
ceiving of Christ as at the same time dwelling with
the Father in light everlasting and in the human
heart.
II
It is Paul again who leads the thought of Chris-
tianity to the Indwelling Christ. In the Epistle to
the Romans (8: ioand 10:8) and in the Second
[-°s]
Christ and the Eternal Order
Epistle to the Corinthians (13: 5) he affirms the
presence of Christ in the disciple, and in the strik-
ing passage in Colossians (1 : 26, 27) he
Paul and the b L <S V "
indwelling speaks of " the mystery which hath
Christ r 1 r 1
been hid from the ages and from the
generations : but now hath it been manifested to his
saints, to whom God was pleased to make known
what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among
the [you] Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope
of glory."
The passage is difficult and admits of several in-
terpretations. 'Ei> may mean among or it may
Christ in mean in; the latter, as Lightfoot says,
you seems the more probable. But the
chief problem is whether yon means you Gentiles or
you disciples among the Gentiles. The second
meaning goes better with the allusions to the In-
dwelling Christ in the earlier epistles referred to,
where the allusion is to Christ within the soul
of the Christian, but the former meaning fulfils
far better the figure of the mystery of which the
apostle here makes so much. Is the mystery
simply that the Gentiles should come to believe in
a Jewish Messiah, or is it, rather, that the invisible
Christ who had been among them, in them, through
all the ages and generations, now at length, through
Jesus, is manifested to them in the clear light of
revelation ? 1
1 That this representation of Christ is given in the New
Testament did not escape Calvin, who defined the gospel as
[106]
Christ Indwelling
It is not sufficiently certain that this is Paul's
meaning, to conclude from these words alone
that he teaches a universal indwelling 0ther pas.
of Christ, but something not very far sages
short of this is certainly implied ; and when, in
the speech on Mars Hill, he avers, " He is not
far from each one of us," he teaches a Divine
Immanence of which the Indwelling Christ is but
the fuller explanation. Nor in this teaching does
Paul stand alone in the New Testament. The
author of the Fourth Gospel could hardly have
given to this truth of a universally indwelling
Christ a more emphatic, certainly he could not
have given it a more beautiful and undying, ex-
pression than in the words : " There was the true
light, . . . which lighteth every man, coming into
the world."
Ill
" There is something good in every man," we
are wont to say, with a firm conviction that in the
affirmation we have touched a vital
"Something
truth. Well, then, what is this some- good in every
man "
thing good? It is reason, moral sense,
conscience. Yes, but if these are only automatic
endowments, inherited instincts, functional adjuncts
of man's personality, they may be vestiges of a dis-
tant Creator, but they are not pledges of a present
" the clear manifestation of the mystery of Christ," yet con-
fined the Christ mystery to the Old Testament.
[ I07 ]
Christ and the Eternal Order
Redeemer, man is God's creature but not his
child, there is no vital kinship and communion
between the Divine and the human. What if, on
the other hand, Reason and Conscience are God
speaking within us, Christ indwelling in us, the seal
of our sonship, the hope of glory? The "some-
thing good " within us becomes no
Some One , • -n r-
good in every longer a thing but a Person, a Some
man
One that makes for righteousness, that
impels us on toward that fulfilled personality which
consists in complete union with himself.
This Indwelling Christ is a racial as well as an
individual Presence, and the individual is largely
one Christ of dependent for the strength and vivid-
lndoftheh ness °f the Christ-mystery within him
upon inherited attitude, moral training,
religious instruction. But these, potent as they
are, do not supply conscience, nor furnish spiritual
life, nor insert Christ into his soul. They do but
arouse, awaken, appeal to a life, a possession, a
Christ, within the individual that is his own, — not
apart from the race, but through the race. Christ
is, as Ritschlianism insists, a possession of the
Christian community, and can be appropriated by
the individual only through the mediation of the
community, but he is also, in a less vivid form,
a possession of the race, a Conscience, a Moral
Reason which the individual receives only through
the race, mediated to him through the channel of
racial and ancestral inheritance and training. But
[108]
Christ Indwelling
more than this, there is also a revelation of Christ
to the individual, a Mystery of his own, clouded or
clarified by the racial medium through which his
whole life and selfhood conies, but still his own.
And his attitude toward this inner revelation de-
termines his development and destiny.
IV
It has always puzzled theologians to account for
the deeds of virtue and honor which light up the
pagan world. What is their source and The source of
what their explanation? Some have so agan
far outraged truth as to call them splcndida vitia,
beautiful but deceptive flowers growing out of a
corrupt soil, utterly destitute of worth or holiness,
because not springing from a regenerate principle
within. Others have estimated these deeds over-
highly, and held them up to show to what heights
unaided humanity can attain. The one explana-
tion is as far from the truth as the other. Was
God absent from the human heart before the
Christian revelation? Was there ever a noble
deed or a true word that was not God-inspired?
Xo. A divine Mystery underlay all that was
noble, true, and beautiful in Greek ajid Roman as
well as Hebrew. That Mystery was " Christ in
you, the hope of glory." He was the justice of
Aristides, the wisdom of Plato, the heroism of
Leonidas. If not, what was the source of that
justice, virtue, wisdom ? Surely it was not solely
[ io9 ]
Christ ci7id the Eternal Order
human. And if the divine was interblended, was
it not the presence of the yet unveiled Christ, the
Immanuel, the Eternal Son, the Light that lighteth
every man coming into the world — then a Mys-
tery, now a Manifestation? And if Christ was in
the world before he came in the flesh, surely he is
in men now, and in all men of whatever race and
religion. Yes, Christ is in the heathen heart.
Dim, indeed, is his image, faint the whisper of his
voice, but he is there. How else can we explain
the reception which the Gospel meets as it falls
from the lips of the missionary? " Yes, that is my
Saviour of whom you have told me. I have known
him long." Is not this the Mystery coming forth
to meet and claim the Manifestation?
Only by asserting this organic relation of every
man to Christ can we convince men of their obli-
Every human gations toward Jesus. Only by attribut-
virtue Christ's . _
ing every outflow of moral goodness to
its source in Christ can we give him his true place
in the human heart. It is time we had done with
accounting for the sweet and gracious lives, or the
brave and unselfish deeds of men and women who
are not professedly Christians as the exalted
products of human attainment. If they can be as
gentle, as pure and as true without Christ as we
are with him, then is our faith vain. But it is not
without Christ. Is there any radiant human grace
in any life? — it is Christ-begotten. It is this
presence of Christ which we see in each other's
[no]
Christ Indwelling
lives, this pure radiance which illumines the good
and even gleams fitfully at times from those not
wholly evil, that gives life all its worth and
beauty.1
"And every virtue we possess,
And every virtue won,
And every thought of holiness,
Is his and his alone."
But if this presence of the Indwelling Christ is
universal, if Christ is in every man, what advan-
tage hath the Christian? What is the difference
between the man who has received Christ, and is
born again, and the man who has not received
him? All the difference between being saved and
being unsaved. It makes a heaven-wide differ-
ence whether Christ is in the heart as Ruler or
Remonstrator; whether he is there as the accepted
1 A number of writers, notably Rev. E. M. Chapman in
his stimulating volume, The Dynamic of Christianity, con-
ceive of this universal indwelling source of virtue and truth
as the Holy Spirit, rather than the Christ. In one way the
difference is not vital. "Now the Lord is the Spirit."'
Wherever the Christ is the Spirit is, and vice versa. But
with the Spirit, rather than the Christ as the source of pre-
Christian and extra-Christian goodness, many persons are
likely to miss the significance of the incarnation, and the old
confusion concerning Christ remains ; whereas the univer-
sal presence of Christ involves that of the Holy Spirit.
[i„]
Christ and the Eternal Order
Light, the Guide of life, or as a Light breaking
fitfully through the darkness ; whether the Light
Accepting *s overcoming the darkness or the dark-
theirnnlrtmg ness the Light ; whether a man prefers
darkness to light, or light to darkness.
Receiving Christ the Mystery, leads to receiving
Jesus the Manifestation. Whether the Christ
within shall be a dying hope, a retreating pres-
ence, or an ever-brightening glory, depends upon
will and conduct. With attitude toward the In-
dwelling Christ is intimately involved attitude
toward the Historic Christ. The two blend into
each other. The Christ of the inward mystery
and the outward manifestation are the same. If
we are of the Truth we hear his voice.
There are two objections that naturally arise in
this connection, which, though alluded to else-
where, demand further consideration. The first
of these objections is: What is the need and value
of the Manifestation, if such is the worth of the
Mystery? The answer is: Sunlight is better than
twilight, — though it is always preceded by twi-
light. Humanity stumbled in the twilight; it is
learning to walk securely in the Light.
Nor is the Christ — this is essential to the under-
standing of him — merely a revealing Personality,
Christ DUt an enabling Personality. That is,
enabling men ^ js accompanied, jn a measure that
the prehistoric Christ could not be, by the Holy
Spirit. It is his not only to reveal the Father, but
[1.2]
Christ Indwelling
to enable men to reach the Father. Revealing the
Father without potentializing man were an unavail-
ing and insufficient service. Christ does far more
than that. No better instance of the enabling
power of Jesus Christ can be found than that con-
tained in the "Confessions" of Augustine. In
describing his progress into the light, Augustine
thus refers to the influence upon him of Platon-
ism : " By the study of the Platonist books I was
taught to seek for the incorporeal Truth, and be-
held Thy invisible things understood by the things
that are made, and though cast back, I felt what
the dullness of my soul did not permit me to gaze
upon, I had no doubt that Thou art, and that Thou
art infinite. . . . Of all this I was convinced, yet
was I too weak to enjoy Thee. I prated like One
who knew, yet, unless I found Thy way in Christ
our Saviour, what I deemed true, was like to end
in rue." 1
In these words is disclosed, through the medium
of a personal experience, that which is, equally
with revelation, the great office of the Son of God
— to impart not only sight but strength, not only
the knowledge of the Infinite, but strength to enjoy
him, — without which strength, knowledge is but
a mocking futility.
It is in enabling power, as well as in revealing
power, that Jesus, the incarnate, visualized, indi-
vidualized Christ, exceeds the Logos, the Mystery,
1 Chapter xx.
8 [113]
Christ and the Eternal Order
the prehistoric Christ, — thus constituting Christian-
ity the universal religion. The Person who moved,
darkling and indistinct, behind the forces of Nature
and within the heart of Humanity, could not, ipso
facto, have the same commanding glory as when he
stood forth, visual and distinct, upon the field of
history. If we ask, why then was not the mani-
festation earlier made? the answer is, it could not
be. In order to be historical, the Incarnation
must needs occur at some point in history. That
point, that moment, was the divinely opportune
one. " When the fulness of the time came, God
sent forth his Son." Nothing could lend such
centrality and significance to the Incarnation as a
historical event, as to have it the unfolding and
outshining of a Reality, a Personality, already per-
ceived and felt, but not clearly understood — rather
than the advent of a new and hitherto unknown
manifestation of the Godhead.
The second objection is one arising from the
mystical character of the theory, and formulates
itself somewhat as follows : " This is a needless and
senseless obscuration ; all that you mean is that
there is a certain responsiveness in the human
heart to the presentation of moral obligation and
of the claims of the gospel." But what is this re-
sponsiveness? Is it a mere quality or capacity
that has been inserted or grown up in my soul?
Is it mine, simply and solely, — a part of myself?
If so, I may do what I choose with it, accounta-
["4]
CJirlst Indwelling
ble only to myself. But if it is not mine alone,
but God has placed it within me, is it a mere
product of his will, or is it not rather Christthe
himself, his Logos, his nature, in me? S.'s^ofVhe
My sin may have corrupted all the Soul
rest of my being, but this it cannot touch, for
it is mine, yet not mine; in me, yet not of me.
This is the divine spark, the funkclcin of the Mys-
tics. It is this of which William Law writes, so
raptly yet so rationally : "If Christ was to raise a
new life like his own in every man, then every man
must have had originally in the inmost spirit of his
life a seed of Christ, or Christ as a seed of heaven,
lying there in a state of insensibility, out of which
it could not arise but by the mediatorial power of
Christ. . . . For what could begin to deny self, if
there was not something in man different from
self? . . . The Word of God is the hidden treasure
of every human soul, immured under flesh and
blood, till as a day-star it arises in our hearts, and
changes the son of an earthly Adam into a son of
God."1
But it is not in the Mystics alone that this truth
finds recognition. Alike in religious philosophy
and religious devotion, there is found frequent and
convincing utterance of this truth of an indwelling
divine Mystery, — which is " Christ in you, the
hope of glory."
1 See Inge : Christian Mysticism, p. 283.
C"5]
XV
CHRIST IN CONSCIENCE
The most impressive fact in life, to the reflecting
mind, is the sense of duty. That a being with
such a nature as ours, swayed by such
The Mystery . . . . . .
and Might appetites and passions, such ambitions
of Duty rr . r ...
and fancies, should be invisibly re-
strained on all sides but the highest, and on that
side moved imperatively toward that which is
worthiest for oneself and best for society, — this,
surely, is most significant. The counter fact of
disregard of duty has dulled us to the greater fact
of duty itself. A moment's reflection restores our
wonder. Here, in this mysterious sense of duty,
is an invisible, intangible power that enters into
every life, and every day of every life, with greater
or less control, as the great conservator of society.
Without it humanity would hasten rapidly to de-
generation, perhaps to destruction. It is the
balance-wheel of social relations, the savior of
humanity.
Very commonly, and very misleadingly, duty is
thought of as a majestic impersonality, an uncon-
scious law, like that of gravitation, that knows neither
its author, its purpose, nor its objects. But duty
[116]
Christ in Conscience
is such only to withholdcn eyes. We conic up
against duty as against a blank wall, only to
find stone and mortar resolving into in- r. .
o Duty not
telligence and love, — not less firm, but imPersonal
less forbidding. Duty often seems cruel, only to
prove kind. We feel its grasp as of an iron vice,
but when we yield it proves the hold of a divine
Hand.
The only adequate account of duty is that it is
the reflection of the personal will of God. This
alone explains its power, its purposeful-
, . . , Duty governs
ness, and its personal character. Kverv inthewm
. , J of God
attempt to interpret duty as custom oper-
ating in consciousness fails before the question,
Why does obligation continue to be imperative
when it ceases to be instinctive? The sense of
obligation refuses to lend itself to any solution
save that it originates in the rational appeal of a
higher will to ours, in freedom. Through duty
God makes his will known to us as it relates to our
human life and conduct.
If duty reflects the will of God, conscience may
be called the voice of God. It is a familiar meta-
phor and a true one. The language of
. . . Conscience
conscience may not always be under- the voice
111 • -it of God
stood, but the voice is recognized. Its
tones, heard in the silences of the soul, too musical
and deep for a whisper, are characterized by an
[»7]
Christ and the Eternal Order
authority and finality which belong only to that
which is eternal. To make conscience the imper-
sonal communication of an impersonal law would
argue an impersonal God, and leave duty a puzzle
in evolution. Kant recognized the real source of
duty when he defined religion as the recognition
of all our duties as divine commands.
If duty is thus personal and conscience revela-
tory, there must be relationship here to the Christ,
the personal Revealer of God. Without such a
relationship of Christ to conscience it is impossible
to reconcile our Christianity with our psychology,
our philosophy with our faith. If, as Christianity
affirms, to obey Christ is to fulfil conscience, then
to obey conscience is, in some sense, to obey
Christ. Once more we are brought back to the
immanent Christ, who is in us, not only as the
hope of glory, but also as the guide to conduct,
the voice of duty.
II
The need of a closer correlation of Christian
experience with the moral nature upon which it
rests, has long been felt. If Christian
Christian . . . in
experience experience is treated as wholly unique
and peculiar, wholly unrelated to the
laws and processes of moral life, it can have
neither a rationale nor an apologetic. Until its
ethical and psychological sanity and substantiality
are made evident, it hangs in the air, the sport of
[118]
CJirist in C o?i science
the winds and the proper object of mistrust. No
thoughtful Christian is content to leave his expe-
rience thus isolated and unexplained. The man
who has undergone a change of heart is conscious
that he has passed through a unique and trans-
forming experience ; he is also persuaded that this
experience is profoundly real and normal, and ac-
cordant with the deepest laws of his moral and
rational nature.
Undoubtedly there is an element in Christian
experience which is not felt in the ordinary proc-
esses of moral life — a sense of divine support, of
spiritual communion, which lifts the soul into a
purer atmosphere. It is difficult to overestimate
the reality and importance of this difference be-
tween the merely moral life and the regenerate life.
Conversion raises the whole content and detail of
life into spiritual and personal relations with God.
Obedience to duty becomes obedience to God ;
the behests of conscience become the promptings
of Christ. And yet the difference, great as it is,
is largely one of recognition — a recognition that
transforms dreary obedience into personal devotion.
All earnest and unselfish obedience of conscience
is obedience to the indwelling Christ. But it is
only when this fact emerges in consciousness that
the soul kindles. It may be confidently affirmed,
out of general human experience, that no one
accepts and devotes himself to a great and noble
duty without feeling a sense of personal associa-
[■■9]
Christ and the Eternal Order
tion, as if he were doing the will of a supreme
person in closest relation with himself. He be-
Feiiowshi comes aware that he is identifying him-
throhughd self w*tn some one "closer than breath-
Duty ing," with whom he thus enters into a
deep and uplifting alliance that stirs his soul to its
noblest exercise. This may be scouted as mysti-
cal, but it is the secret of the absorbing appeal and
the ennobling effect of duty. This sense of compan-
ionship with the Supreme Self makes the soul
fearless and joyful in the midst of sacrifice and
sorrow, in the service of the higher conscience.
What is conversion but this sense of fellowship
with God through duty lifted into the conscious
control of life?
Ill
Those who would guard the sacredness and
autonomy of individuality here interpose the perti-
nent objection to which we have already
An Objection .
and its An- referred:1 "Is not this immanence of
swer
God in Christ destructive of personal
integrity? Does it not disrupt my own personal
character and freedom if Christ is in me, as my very
virtue, my better self, my guide, my conscience?
Did not Paul dishonor his own selfhood when he
said : ' It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth
1 Vide, p. in.
[ I2°]
Christ in Conscience
in me ' ? " Wore it other than an absolutely dis-
interested guidance and an absolutely free and
rational following, it would certainly annul human
personality to be thus inhabited and animated by
divine personality. But the fact, as reported in
consciousness, is that in this relationship, intimate
and determinative as it is, there is not the slightest
infringement of human freedom and personality,
but on the contrary, a conscious development and
fulfilment of personal freedom and power; so that
the Paul for whom it was Christ to live was the
Paul whose own personality thus became freest,
most intense, and most replete. It is only the
influence of abnormal personality that is coercive
and repressive. Live with a thoroughly good
person in spiritual intimacy and your soul be-
comes saturated with him; he is in you, his spirit
atmospheres yours and instils itself into your
thought and conduct. Yet, if his personality is
sufficiently pure and high, there is never for an
instant a violation of your personality. On the
contrary, you are conscious of being your " best
self" under his influence. It is thus with the in-
dwelling of God in Christ with us. Only because
lie is within us are we persons at all. And the
more fully his presence is recognized and honored,
the more completely do we come to ourselves, the
more fully and freely do we realize our own per-
sonality. The Christ of conscience is the germ of
spiritual selfhood within us.
[12!]
Christ and the Eternal Order
IV
The failure to recognize Christ in conscience has
led to a serious misrepresentation of the gospel.
Reaction There is much said in evangelistic
Reaction of preaching about rejecting Christ, which
chnst interprets the rejection simply as that
of the historical, or, more properly, the ecclesi-
astical Christ, and entirely ignores the rejec-
tion of the Christ in conscience, — the Christ
who stands veiled but central within every duty
and every opportunity for service. Not that the
acceptance or rejection of the Christ of the
Gospels is not of supreme importance, but a
great deal more is involved in it than a single
apprehension or a momentary choice. The
subordination of the moral to the mechanical
Christ, of the ethical to the external, results in
a travesty of the real Christ, who cares not
for the "Lord," "Lord," of him who does not
his will.
It is not enough that Jesus taught morality. If
that were all it would leave duty orphaned and
unexplained. What we need to know is that right
is not a mere human deposit, a product of human
creation, however high and worthy, nor yet a
mere external will-product of God imposed upon
humanity, but that it is of the very being and
essence of God, as much a part of his nature as of
ours, — the soul of personality, human and divine,
[ 122]
Christ in Conscience
and therefore the very kernel of the eternal reve-
lation that culminated in Jesus Christ. And that
wo can know only as Christ is recognized in con-
science as well as in history, in character as well
as in creed.
[ 123]
XVI
CHRIST REGENERATING
ETERNAL Love has more than one regenerative
process, more than one path by which he leads
Regeneration men out °f darkness into light, more
and Life than one way of re-creating the soul.
His means are multiform and his messengers
many. Too long the Church has been blind to
the regenerative agencies which lie at the very
heart of life itself. Nature, friendship, home,
thought, labor, love are channels through which
the divine life flows into the human. The means
and messengers of the soul's awaking — who can
circumscribe them?
When the heavenly Beatrice saluted Dante, the
soul of the poet uprose into a new world. "And
passing through a street she turned her
Regeneration
through Hu- eyes thither where I stood abashed : and
man Love
by her unspeakable courtesy, which is
now garnered in the Great Cycle, she saluted me
with so virtuous a bearing that I seemed then and
there to behold the very limits of blessedness." 3
1 Vita Nuova.
[ 124 ]
Christ Regenerating
This hour of " her most sweet salutation " was the
hour of the immortal poet's entrance into the vita
nuova. To explain such an experience as only
the vibration of the chord of youthful sentiment
is to reduce gold to dross. That outshining of
purity and beauty made of Dante another man.
In that hour he was created a poet. God took
him into fellowship with himself. " Every one
that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth
God." Human love that is deep and pure and
sacrificial is of the very quality and essence of the
new life, " the eternal life, which was with the
Father, and was manifested unto us."
And if love has power to awaken the soul, so
also has truth. If there was ever an awakened soul
outside of Christianity, surely it was
Regeneration
that of Plato, " the father of theology, through
~ . Truth"
as Professor Edward Caird calls him.
" By their fruits ye shall know them." He who
lifted so many into the realm of the good, the true,
and the beautiful, — was not he born from above?
The Spirit, blowing where- it listeth, which stirred
John to lofty contemplation and noble expression,
must have been the same which moved Plato.
Find a man in any age who thinks deeply and
loves the truth devoutly, and you have found a
man who is born, not of the flesh but of the Spirit,
whose life is lifted above the lust of the eyes and
the pride of life into the realm where he thinks
God's thoughts after him.
[MS]
Christ and the Eternal Order
And if love and thought afford to God awaken-
ing access to the soul, so also does nature. Not
only are there flashes from her beauty
Regeneration
through which move the soul to momentary
communion with the All-Beautiful, but
here and there is one who lives in constant exalta-
tion of spirit through communion with her, whose
"days are bound each to each by natural piety."
What shall we say of the nature poets, whose souls
have fed upon dawns and sunsets, hues of flowers
and beams of stars? Ignorantly or consciously,
they worship the Soul of all beauty. If they refuse
whatever of lower suggestion they find in nature,
and are true to the highest and finest, are they not
led by the Spirit? What of Wordsworth, the high
priest of nature, finding God in "the light of set-
ting suns," and the law of duty in the march of the
stars? What of Emerson, living in Puritan New
England like a Greek philosopher or a Hindu sage,
oblivious of Sabbath bell and Christian creed, yet
in blissful comradeship with nature and in holy
converse with the Over-Soul?
Are not all these pure and high-hearted lovers,
thinkers, poets, sons of God, children of the Spirit?
Are not all the lowly, love-lit souls, in the narrow
furrow of every-day duty, — in the home, the field,
the shop, — some of them never having heard of
the grace of God in Jesus Christ, some having
heard but not consciously accepted, who lift their
eyes to the hills and walk steadily and uprightly
[,26]
Christ Regenerating
their humble way, — are they not all God's own,
ruled by his laws, renewed by his Spirit?
II
But what, then, of the relation of these regener-
ate ones to Christ? Can they be of the Spirit
and not of Christ? Have they no vital
. Yet no Regen-
touch with Him in whom alone eternal eration with-
out Christ
life is revealed, and through whom the
Spirit works? There can be but one conclusion.
In some way, and in some degree, all who walk
by the Spirit, in any age or land, know the Christ,
— not in the flesh but in the spirit, not all of them
in his historic embodiment, but all in his eternal
personality. Because we of the Christian era and
the Christian area have seen Jesus the Christ we
have believed ; blessed are they that have not
seen and yet have believed. And if some who
have the written record of Jesus and yet fail
to identify him with the eternal Logos in the
Living Christ, are true to the indwelling Christ, we
may wonder that the great light blinds their eyes,
but we may not exclude them from the number
of those who, being led by the Spirit of God, are
thereby sons of God. Call these lives of " outside
saints" incomplete acceptances, if you will, partial
regenerations; nevertheless they are real.
Do we then make Jesus of none effect? Rather
would we seek to understand and exalt him. Not
F 127 ]
Christ and the Eternal Order
otherwise can he be understood and exalted
than as the full shining of an earlier and eternal
. . Light. The prologue of the Fourth
Jesus under- o r o
the°Eternaigh Gospel is the inevitable outcome of clear
Logos and comprehensive thinking upon Jesus
Christ. Athanasius grappled with the same prob-
lem, and reached practically the same conclusion.
So has the great body of devout and thoughtful
minds in every Christian age. Given Jesus of
Nazareth, in the clear and simple outlines of the
Synoptic narratives, and steadily and surely re-
flection conducts the mind back to the Eternal
Word. Jesus interprets the Word, and in turn the
Word interprets him. Since, then, the eternal
revelation precedes and exceeds the bounds of
historical revelation, all who have been and are
true to the wider and fainter revelation are one
with those who are true to the closer and clearer
revelation. For the hardness of our hearts mutual
recognition is not always immediate, but when
shibboleths cease and veils are torn away, it will
be seen that all disciples of the Word, all children
of the Spirit, are one.
Ill
Inconsistency and confusion have characterized
Christian thought concerning the relation of Christ
and the Holy Spirit. Theology has never given
to this relationship as earnest thought as to the
relationship of the Father and the Son. In order
[128]
Christ Regenerating
to account for the righteousness and faith found in
humanity, especially in the Hebrew race, before
the Incarnation, it has been assumed
that the Spirit, independently of the S|Sw?never
Son, was present in the world before KrSeEter-
J1-) , i • i • i • nal Christ
esus came. But, besides involving a se-
rious contradiction of the Divine Unity, this theory
is in every way unsatisfying. To detach the Spirit
from the Christ is like separating heat from light.
It is like severing will from reason. Neither can
be rightly conceived as acting without the other.
Nor can their joint activity occur save through the
Father, the primary power in all spiritual ener-
gizing.1 So close is the relation between Christ
and the Spirit in the illumination of the human
soul that St. Paul (2 Cor. 3:17) momentarily iden-
tifies them. Whenever the veil is taken away
from human hearts so that they see clearly, it
comes, says Paul, through the turning of the heart
to the Lord, who " is the Spirit."
If Christ is essential to one regeneration he is
essential to all. If the new birth cannot take place
without the Spirit, neither can it without The Ever_
the Christ. Jesus, the incarnate Christ, gSftoSS
inexpressibly clarifies, illumines, objec- J£! Eternal
tifies, expresses the indwelling Christ; Chnst
but, after all, it is the latter, not the former, who
is the " essential Christ." Wherever and whenever
1 It was to combat this separation of the activity of the
Word and the Spirit that Luther strove.
9 [ 129 1
Christ and the Eternal Order
regeneration, complete or partial, has occurred
without the pale of historic Christianity, it must
have been through the Ever-present Spirit taking
the things of the eternal Christ and showing them
to men. If one takes the narrower view and holds
that no soul ever entered into the spiritual life until
Jesus came, then Christianity is but an unaccount-
able historical cataclysm, and revelation a comet,
flashing suddenly across the pathway of the steadier
stars of human faith and duty and destined to
disappear in the darkness out of which it came.
IV
Upon the assumption of a circumscribed and
enclosed Christianity, whatever of faith, virtue, love,
TheAbsurdi- were in humanity before Christ, or be-
ties that fol- _.. r . t ,
lowed the yond Christ, are false and deceptive.
Theory that
Christianity 1 hey are not real because they are not
is confined to .
History regenerate, and do not spring from the
life in Christ.1 This inference both Roman Cathol-
icism and Calvinism unhesitatingly accept. In the
unbaptized, the Roman Church finds only corrup-
tion and selfishness. Calvin stoutly affirms that
" everything that proceeds from the corrupt
nature of man is worthy of condemnation." He
admits, it is true, that virtues like those of Camil-
lus were "gifts of God," and that there are "most
excellent gifts of the Divine Spirit, which for the
common benefit of mankind he dispenses to whom-
1 Vide, p. 109.
[ !30 ]
Ch rist Rl 'generi ? ting
soever he pleases," but even these natural gifts
"have been corrupted, not that they can be defiled
in themselves as proceeding from God, but because
they have ceased to be pure to polluted man, so
that he can obtain no praise from them."1
To dissever thus sharply and completely the
"natural man" from the "spiritual man" may
seem to have a certain warrant in parts of Paul's
Epistle to the Romans, but it does not agree with
his speech on Mars Hill, or with his doctrine as a
whole. Nor does it reflect the teaching of Jesus.
The early Church did not recognize this abso-
lutely unrelated nature of regeneration. Cornelius'
prayer and alms could never have come up to God
acceptably if they had arisen from a heart wholly
corrupt and evil. Bound up with a narrow and now
exploded form of the doctrine of the fall of man,
this distorted view of human nature, as utterly per-
verted and alienated from God, has been rejected
by modern thought as unreal and provincial.
With the larger horizons opened by modern sci-
ence and history, it is absolutely incompatible.
The question now becomes: Shall Humanism or
theology go completely over to the avmism
opposite extreme, and adopting the creed of
humanism, declare human nature, in and of itself,
altogether noble and perfect, barring the neces-
sities of incomplete development? Or, shall the-
ology cling to the real truth which underlies
1 Institutes, Book I, chapter 3.
[■31]
Christ and the Eternal Order
Calvinism, namely, the utter worthlessness and
sinfulness of humanity without God, and correct
its false premise by asserting that, as a matter of
fact, humanity never has been entirely without God,
but that in every trite purpose and holy desire and
noble deed the Eternal Word and the Eternal Spirit
have been acting upon and with the human spirit ?
Regeneration thus becomes a divine process as
ancient and as varied as humanity, yet coming to
its full effect only in Christianity; the Holy Spirit,
no late-sent visitant from heaven descending to
earth at Pentecost, nor yet a divine influence re-
stricted to one people alone, but the Father's
gracious Paraclete, sent to help his children from
the beginning; and the Christ, through whom the
Spirit operates, not merely the God-man coming
in the flesh in the fulness of time, but also the
ever-present Word, the Light that lighteth every
man coming into the world.
[ 132]
XVII
CHRIST ATONING
It has been a common practise in systematic
theology to distinguish so sharply as almost to
separate the person of Christ from the incarnation
work of Christ. Incarnation and atone- ment^nsep-
ment have been treated as if they were ara
as distinct as multiplication and division. Incarna-
tion has been regarded wholly as a state ; atone-
ment as a deed. Thus, Professor Denney in his
book, The Death of Christ, accentuates the posi-
tion of many earlier writers as follows : " Christ
not only was something in the world, he did some-
thing. He did something that made an infinite
difference, and that puts us under an infinite obli-
gation. He bore our sins." Most certainly he did
something; but was the sum of his doing confined
to the sacrifice of the cross? Was not all the
rest, — self-conquest, teaching, ministry, — doing
as well as being, sacrifice as well as service?
Could he have been something without doing
something, or done something without being some-
thing? It is a limited view which sets the atone-
ment over against the incarnation, and argues for
[ l33 ]
Christ and the Eternal Order
one or the other as central. They are hemispheres
of one full-rounded revelation, and the equator
which separates them is, at best, but an imaginary
line.
The issue between the defenders of the incarna-
tion and of the atonement is a superficial one, and
disappears as soon as the personality of Christ is
placed in the foreground. Too long the person of
Christ has been obscured. In the doctrine of the
incarnation, the nature of Christ has been empha-
sized at the expense of his person, and in the
doctrine of the atonement, the act at the expense
of the person performing the act. Modern the-
ology is turning from the vain endeavor to under-
An atoning stand the nature of Christ to the more
5fan°anrather inspiring contemplation of his person.
atoning Death The tjme j^ come tQ interpret the
atonement, also, more in the terms of personality
and less in those of accomplishment, to exalt
the dying Christ rather than the death of Christ,
to contemplate the atoning Christ rather than to
speculate concerning the nature of the atonement
wrought by him.
The uplifting of the personality of Christ in
atonement is a return to the New Testament em-
phasis. It is upon him that the ictus there falls,
rather than upon his work. " And I, if I be lifted
up from the earth," " And ye know that he was
[■34]
Christ Atoning
manifested to take away sins," — this is the Johan-
nine emphasis. As High Priest, rather than as
sacrifice, did Christ appeal to the author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews. "Jesus Christ, and him
crucified," was Paul's message. "Who his own
self bare our sins in his body upon the tree," was
the adoring exaltation of the person of Christ by
the author of First Peter. The death of Christ
and the cross of Christ are often alluded to in the
New Testament, but always in closest association
with Christ himself, never in the detached and
impersonal manner of our systematic theology, as
if the death, the sacrifice, possessed virtue in itself
apart from him who died.
The misdirection of emphasis upon the deed
rather than the doer, the work rather than the per-
son of Christ, has lent to the atonement an almost
magical efficacy in the minds of many. If, instead
of exalting him, attention is directed mainly to
the debt he is paying, or the propitiation he is
making, or the death he is dying, until he himself
comes to be looked upon as subordinate to the
transaction of which he is the instru-
i .1 r s^i ■ , i • , The New
ment, we lose sight of Christ behind a Testament
terms, not
doctrine. It is true, there is much in definitionsbut
metaphors.
the New Testament which apparently This makes
11 * the terms not
forms a basis for the construction of less but more
real
the elaborate theory of the atonement
which has been erected, but only if the terms used
are taken literally; and, as Coleridge so pertinently
['35 3
Christ and the Eternal Order
pointed out, these terms are metaphors, not defini-
tions. Of this we may be sure, for the reason
that, taken literally, they are mutually contradic-
tory. Christ cannot be at the same time Ransom
and Redeemer, Priest and Sacrifice, Propitiation
and Advocate.
These ardent New Testament disciples have
experienced a new life, a transforming truth, a
fresh relationship to God in Christ, which no term,
no language, is adequate to express. Therefore
they seize every symbol which helps to convey a
meaning greater than words can contain. To liter-
alize rigidly these words, and attempt to turn their
vital, flaming utterance into set theological phrase-
ology is to withdraw the gaze of the soul from the
atoning Christ in order to fasten attention upon
a plan, a method, a device, for saving men.
II
It is only as we turn from the impersonal, juridical
view of the atonement to the personal and ethical,
that we enter into its deeper and more searching
reality. So long as death, blood, ransom, propiti-
ation, substitution, taken literally, constitute the
essential factors of atonement, it is impossible to
get at the heart of the doctrine ; but the moment
its ethical and personal implications are put for-
ward, these terms become vivid and luminous
symbols, and the doctrine itself vital and thrilling
with the touch of the personal Christ.
[136]
Christ Atoning
The need of atonement lies in the very nature of
moral relationships, disturbed and ruptured by sin.
Men arc bound together in a social
The vicarious
whole. None liveth to himself, and Nature ofsuf-
fenng for Sin
none dieth to himself. Bitter fruits
must be shared, evil deeds must be borne by
others as well as by the doer. Infinite love cannot
reverse this order. "All's love, but all's law."
There is no offhand forgiveness on the part of
God. He never says to his children, "Oh, well,
never mind." It only needs to be shown that
Christ is racial in his relations for the conclusion
to follow that he must needs suffer atoningly for
human sin.
Christ atones by the moral victory which he
achieved, by the manifestation of the divine love
which he made, by the penitence for sin which he
aroused. But this is not all. Christ atones by
bearing, and thus bearing away, human sin.
This is the vicarious element in atonement.
But it is not substitution, nor equivalence, nor
imputation. All these quantitative and forensic
terms must be flung away. They may, perhaps,
have served a purpose, but they have come to
obscure those deeper ethical values of the cross
which set it at the very heart and center of
life.
You cannot help the person who loves you
bearing your sins. Nor can he help it, if he loves
you. He suffers with you and for you in your sin
[■37]
Christ and the Eternal Order
and its consequences, and the more in that he
does not sin with you and for you. And this,
vicarious suffering, bearing our sins by sympathy,
helps bear them away, for it arouses us to re-
nounce that which can bring such pain to others.
The love that thus suffers vicariously burns up the
love of sin until it shrivels and dies in the holy
flame. Thus, ethically, sympathetically, vicariously
— through his racial relationship — the Son of God
bears human sin.
Let us not think that this ethical value of
the atonement was wholly unrecognized until the
modern era in theology. It was the
The ethical _ ^
Value of the ground-tone in the doctrine, which hal-
Atonement °
lowed it from the first, though overlaid
with many false and discordant notes. Now and
then one catches vibrations of this deeper note
in Anselm's Cur Dens Homo. Jonathan Ed-
wards sounds it, full and clear, in his paper on
The Satisfactioii of Christ, in which he repre-
sents the sympathy of Christ with God and with
men as perfected by his death. But only
through the searching thought and spiritual in-
sight of such modern theologians as McLeod
Campbell, Maurice, Bushnell, Dorner, and Rob-
ertson have we come to see the primary ethical
quality of the doctrine. As Nitzsch has put it,
" It is in the depth of his sympathy and in the
endeavor for the world's salvation that Christ
bears the penalty of sin."
[•38]
Christ Atoning
III
We have been speaking of the atonement
hitherto as if it occurred solely at a given point
in time, at a certain crisis in human Eternai
history. But more thorough thinking Atonement
shows that this cannot be. In order to be in any
sense historical, the atonement must be an eternal
process in the heart of God. An eternal atone-
ment is the necessary corollary of eternal divine
love. A love that never suffered for human sin
before the crucifixion, or that never before the
incarnation in great compassion sought to win
men away from sin, would not be love. " The
redemption of the Christ was the manifestation of
that which is eternal in the being of God." ]
An eternal atonement is the only explanation of
a historic atonement. To hold any theory which
contains the implication that God made Eternal Atone.
up his mind, at a certain point in the Sies"oricplains
history of human sin, to be atoned by Atonement
the death of his Son, or even that he determined
from eternity to be atoned at that particular time
and by that particular event, is to degrade our
thought of God. Christ refutes the notion in the
parable of The Husbandmen. Many messengers of
atonement are sent, and all suffer ill-treatment;
the Son comes only when the refusal of other
1 Mulford, Republic of God, p. 184.
[ *39]
Christ and the Eternal Order
endeavors toward reconciliation makes his coming
possible and needful.
Nor need we absolutely exclude — although here
we should proceed with extreme hesitation, lest we
exercise ourselves in things too high for us — the
thought to which theology has clung so tena-
ciously, that in the sacrifice of Calvary the heart
of God was moved to a still deeper and fuller for-
giveness of men. God is unchangeable, yet surely
not stagnant. It is not irreverent to conjecture
that the heart of the Eternal may have known a
fresh outflow of forgiving love to man in the sacri-
fice of Calvary, as Bushnell suggested, arguing
from the analogy of the man who in sacrificing for
one who has wronged him feels a deeper and more
complete forgiveness toward him.
IV
Here, as elsewhere, neither a purely historic
Christ, nor a Christ who was preexistent with the
Etemai Atone- Father but entirely unknown to hu-
ksesrendtheSnIeed manity before the incarnation, will suf-
the Historic fice- God must have been in Christ
reconciling the world unto himself, even
before the great historic reconciliation. Otherwise
it is impossible to account for the sense of divine
forgiveness and compassion experienced by men
before Christianity, as reflected, for example, in
the penitential psalms of Assyrians and Egyptians,
[ J4o]
Christ Atoning
and in the tender assurances of divine forgiveness
in the words of Hebrew prophets and psalmists.
And yet, how almost universally was this inner
revelation despised ; how persistently men pre-
ferred darkness rather than light; how urgent be-
came the need of an historic atonement ! Eternal
love has always waited with the ring and the best
robe and the forgiving embrace, and never without
cost of suffering and sacrifice ; for although the
parable does not tell us what the Father suffered on
the day the prodigal took his journey, and the days
that followed, we may read it between the lines,
in the very warmth of the welcome. But humanity
in its sin had rejected the Indwelling Christ, had
forgotten the deserted home and the forgiving
Father, and it needed the suffering Son of man
and the uplifted cross to restore mankind to itself
and to God. Thus does the sacrifice of Jesus,
in time, disclose the heart of God in eternity and
reveal the sacrificial nature of Love.
[141]
XVIII
CHRIST RISEN
Christian Evidences and Apologetics make far
more of the resurrection than of the Risen Christ;
The Risen the New Testament makes far more of
tChheriResVuerr-sus the Risen Christ than of the resurrec-
rection tion. The difference is more radical
and serious than at first appears. It amounts to
a subversion of emphasis, on the part of Apolo-
getics, from the personal to the impersonal, from
the essential to the incidental. This displacement
of emphasis has injured Christianity not a little;
for false emphasis is first cousin to false doctrine.
The Risen Christ was the day-star of Christianity.
It was he who reawakened the drooping hearts of
Not a resur- tne disciples, and won new believers to
buVan fmper- their ranks. It is commonly asserted
ishable Person that ^ resurrection was the central
truth of the new propaganda. Rather it was the
Risen Christ.1 Not a resurrected body, but an
1 "The apostolic conception of the Resurrection is rather
1 The Lord lives,' than 'The Lord was raised.'" Bishop
Wescott, quoted by Canon Hensley Henson in the Hibbert
Journal, April, 1904.
[ H2 ]
Christ Risen
imperishable Person saved the world. Peter, in
his Pentecostal speech, revealed the secret of the
resurrection when he said of Christ: " Whom God
raised up, having loosed the pangs of death : be-
cause it was not possible that he should be holden
of it." A personality too vital to be held by death
— it was He whom the Church adored and whom
the world could not withstand.
Here, too, lies the secret of Paul's emphatic
resurrection-teaching. To be a Living Christ his
Lord must be a Risen Christ, — this he cannot too
ardently affirm. " If Christ hath not been raised,
then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain."
Although to Paul the Risen Christ involves the
fact of a resurrection, it is not upon the fact that
he places the emphasis, but upon the person who
overcame death and led captivity captive. It is he
without whom Christianity is disabled,
, . . - - . The Person
and not the mere external tact of the transcends
t . the Event
resurrection, much less the manner,
evidences and accessories of resurrection, upon
which theology has been far too prone to dwell.1
True, each of the Gospels presents a circumstantial
account of the events attending the resurrection,
but it is a narrative of experiences rather than a
presentation of evidence. For that very reason it
is, in some respects, all the better evidence. The
vivid human touches that make up the account
are the quickened and memorable impressions that
1 See Harnack's History of Doqma, Vol. I, p. 85.
[■43]
Christ and the Eternal Order
attend a great experience rather than intentionally
gathered testimonies. The disciples were sure of
him risen. That was enough. He still lived — it
was this that set their hearts throbbing, and sent
them forth with the gospel message. The fact
that each saw him risen but none saw him rise,
itself indicates that the emphasis belongs upon the
person rather than upon the miracle involved. It
is possible to believe in the actual resurrection of
Jesus (as, for example, with such a theory as that
of Stapfer *) without assuming the literal resump-
tion by Christ of the crucified body, although all
such theories create as many difficulties as they
remove. The out-and-out miracle is as reasonable
a supposition as any. But, miracle or no miracle,
the emphasis does not belong there, but upon
the Christ, who so stamped the reality of his risen
personality upon the mind of men that it never
has been, and apparently never will be, effaced.
The Christ survives all theories of the resurrection.
He is risen indeed !
II
Christ himself has been too long obscured by
his miracles, particularly by that of the resurrection.
1 "He arose on the third day, but it was not the flesh
that formerly lived that returned to life; it was a spiritual
and celestial body coming forth from the material and earthly
body which died on the cross." See American Journal of
Theology, July, 1900.
[ H4]
Christ Risen
Apologetics has raised so great a dust about this
event that it is difficult for the face of the risen
Sun of Righteousness to shine through. " The
apologist who seeks to refute skepticism by demon-
strating the resurrection as the ' most certain of all
historical events,' and arguing back to the divinity
of the mission and character of Jesus, inverts the
method in which revelation was historic-
11 a mi 111 Christianity
ally given. ... A man will not be able to does not rest
. on a Mirac-
accept this most mysterious of all super- uiousoccur-
rence
natural manifestations, if he has not first
been led up, as the disciples were, to find the
supernatural in the life and person of Jesus; to find
it, that is, in a form in which it can be verified by
human experience." 1 To rest the whole weight of
Christianity upon the provableness of a single
historical event, to make the resurrection the artic-
ulus stantis ant cadentis ecclesiac} is to entrust it
to a support too slender to bear the strain. The
evidence for the reality of the Person, Jesus Christ,
is absolute and conclusive; the evidence for the
external fact of his resurrection is necessarily
much less conclusive. It is sufficient only when
kept in immediate connection with his unique
character and personality.
Evidence is inevitably influenced by personality.
If the same amount of evidence were brought for-
ward to prove the resurrection from the dead of
1 Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience,
p. 157, 3ded.
10 [ 145 ]
Christ and the Eternal Order
Theudas, or Simon the Sorcerer, as of Jesus Christ,
who of us would accept it? It makes all the dif-
ference in the world of what sort of a person a
given act is alleged. It would take a prodigious
deal of evidence to convince us that certain per-
sons whom we know had done a great deed of
self-sacrifice ; of others we would believe it upon
the merest hearsay.1 If you were informed that
Thomas Edison had invented a success-
of evidence ful flying machine you would be pre-
affectedby % % %• •<•
the person in- pared to believe it, but if you were told
volved *
that your neighbor's boy, who does not
know enough to make a kite, had done so, you
would ask to see the machine first. It is unscien-
tific to demand the same degree of proof for the
resurrection of Jesus Christ as would be required
for that of John Smith or Tom Jones. If you ask
a man to believe in the resurrection of Jesus who
does not first believe in Jesus, you ask an unrea-
sonable thing. Nor would it greatly concern us if
it were proved that John Smith did rise from the
dead — except as a remarkable phenomenon. But
if Jesus rose, each of us is intimately concerned,
because of that personality which makes him racial
and representative and by virtue of which we may
say, with St. Paul, If He rose I shall rise also.
1 See article by Canon Henson in the Hibbert Journal^
April, 1904.
[146]
Christ Risen
III
The return of emphasis from the mere external
fact of the resurrection to the Risen Christ is one
of the marked tendencies of contem- - . . .
Emphasis is
porary Christianity. The Ritschlian ^£1^ to
school has done much to promote this Chnst
change. Placing Christ at the helm of history,
Ritschlianism holds that the resurrection of Christ
" is the completion of the revelation made in him,
which not only absolutely corresponds with, but
necessarily results from, the worth of his Person." '
But this subordination of the resurrection of Christ
to his Person has become much wider and more
pervasive than the tenets of any one school. " A
clear distinction has been discerned," says Dr.
James M. Whiton, " between the real resurrection
of Jesus — his rising from the mortal state into
the immortal — and his phenomenal resurrection
in the visible world. So conservatively orthodox a
writer as Dr. G. D. Boardman goes so far as to
say: 'After all, the real question is not, Did
Christ's body rise? That is but a subordinate,
incidental issue.' The real question, as Dr. Board-
man admits, is, ' Whether Christ himself is risen
and is alive to-day.' " 2 As the Church at large
gradually comes back to this earlier and truer
perspective, the physical resurrection will come
1 The Ritschlian Theology, Garvie, p. 224.
2 Miracles and Supernatural Religion, p. 115.
['47]
Christ and the Eternal Order
more and more universally to be regarded as of
minor moment in comparison with the Risen Christ,
who proves the resurrection far more than the
resurrection proves him.
IV
The Risen Christ convinced the disciples of his
identity. Does he convince us? Is he " natural,"
— as depicted in the narratives, — one with the
Christ of Galilee and of the upper chamber? The
Risen Christ portrayed in the Gospels is the. same
Jesus, and yet not wholly the same. Had he been
too much shadow, or too much substance, the
disciples would have doubted, and so would we.
But, not so. He is so much the same
The Resur- , . t p .
rection one of as to be himself, and yet too much
the three 111
Births of changed not to have passed through
Christ r-i ...
death. The transition is not a mere re-
turn to previous limiting conditions. The old
limitations are gone. He comes and goes at will,
with the freedom of the Spirit. Nor is the Risen
Christ in the same stage of self-development.
" According to the New Testament," says Dorner,
" the resurrection is not merely Christ's justification
and his vindication, . . . but also an epoch of de-
velopment in his person." 1 It is a bold conception,
but not without foundation. We instinctively feel
that the Risen Christ of the Gospels, while he is at
one with the pre-resurrection Christ, has passed on
1 System of Ch?isttan Doctrine, Vol. IV, p. 134.
[i48]
Christ Risen
into a wider amplitude of personality and a wider
scope of activity. The ancient Church spoke of
the resurrection as one of the three births of
Christ.1 As such, the resurrection introduces Christ
to an ampler sphere of being. He becomes a
still richer and more productive personality. His
character is just as human and winsome, his con-
tact just as intimate and loving as of old, and yet
there is a closer converse with the spiritual, a richer
self-realization, purities, potencies, pleromas that
awaken fresh love and reverence. His salutation,
as he enters the room, breathes a vital serenity, as
of another realm, and his presence stirs
•111 c • 1 >~n r r t • i Identity ver-
a still deeper faith, lonx nrmly in the suscor-
.... , . , . r poreity
minds of the disciples the identity of
this new selfhood with that of the Jesus with whom
they were so familiar, was the constant endeavor
of the Risen Christ. If he appears to lay undue
stress upon his physical body, his hands, his feet,
his side, it is that he may convince the disciples of
his identity, not of his corporeity. His one aim is
to assure them that this is his very self.
Thus does the Risen Christ accentuate and am-
plify the Christ personality. The resurrection as
an external event is absorbed and lost ReSurrection
sight of in the resurrection as a stage, a p^JUs tf*
waymark in the progress of this expand- Chnst
ing Spirit, " machinery just lent, to give the soul
1 Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, Vol. IV, p. 134,
note. See Col. 1:18.
[ x49 ]
Christ and the Eternal Order
its bent." In the light of the Risen Christ it is
easy to understand those words in the Fourth
Gospel, so enigmatical at the time they were
spoken: "I am the resurrection, and the life."
Here is the utterance of a consciousness so vital,
so puissant, so triumphant, that it scorns death
and sees resurrection only as a phase, a process in
its own invincible, outflowing life. Just as surely
as this Soul, this Consciousness, this Person whom
we call Jesus Christ, is understood in his real
strength and supremacy, just so surely the con-
viction follows that he could not be holden of
death, but that the crucified Christ must needs
become the Risen Christ.
[iSo]
XIX
CHRIST RETURNING
As the mind of the Church grows more sensitive
and discerning in its understanding of Jesus, it
becomes increasingly conscious of a dis- The discord.
cordant note, an inherent self-contra- theGo^pS
diction, in the Gospel representation of symPhony
him. For many years past this disharmony has
been thought to lie in an irreconcilable discrepancy
between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel.
But a more mature study of the Fourth Gospel
and a more thoughtful comparison of it with the
Synoptics shows that this diagnosis has been too
hasty. The point at which the real divergence
occurs, where the picture of our Lord fails to be
true to itself, is that at which Jesus is made to
reverse and confute all his previous teaching con-
cerning himself and his kingdom and, exchanging
the spiritual for the material, the eternal for the
eschatological, to descend to the Jewish level of
thought and expression, and enwrap himself in the
tinsel trappings of his time and people. I refer to
the discourse known as " The Last Things." 1 It is
1 Matt. 24 and 25 ; Mark 13.
[151]
Christ and the Eternal Order
safe to say that for the discerning and devout dis-
ciple of Jesus to-day it is impossible to read these
chapters in the first Gospels without an ever-deep-
ening sense of disappointment and incongruity.
Instead of the simplicity, the sanity, the spirituality
of the Sermon on the Mount, the Parables, the
words at the Last Supper, here are extravagance,
literalism, apocalypticism. This Jesus seated out-
side the walls of Jerusalem is another Jesus from
him of the Galilean hills and lakeside, as well as of
the upper room.
The Jesus who speaks in the thirteenth of Mark
and the twenty-fourth of Matthew is not the Jesus
-. , who takes farewell of his disciples at the
The spectac- L
s^rituVsIc- Paschal meal, in the searching spiritual
ond coming ianguage 0f the Fourth Gospel. The
two accounts as they stand are mutually incompat-
ible representations of himself and of his kingdom.
In the Synoptic discourse Jesus represents his
return as external, cataclysmic, spectacular, — " on
the clouds of heaven with power and great glory" ;
in the Johannine, he represents his return as invisi-
ble and spiritual, — "I come unto you," " Ye in me,
and I in you." l Between these two representations
1 Of the two allusions to a Second Coming in this Gospel
(14:3 and 16 : 22) the first refers to the entrance of the disci-
ple into the future life — ''that where I am, there ye may
be also " — and the second to the reappearance of Christ
after his resurrection.
[152]
Christ Returning
6
we must choose. Shall we do so upon the mere
basis of the priority of the Synoptic tradition or
upon the deeper ground of inherent superiority
and self-consistency ? Which of the two represen-
tations coincides best with Jesus' previous teaching,
with his character, with his attitude toward Jewish
ideas, with his approach to the cross, his conduct
upon trial, his outlook upon the world and his
estimate of its forces? Upon such principles of
choice there can be no hesitation. We turn inevi-
tably from the Jesus of the Advent discourse of the
Synoptics, unnatural, provincial, predictive, to the
Jesus of the last discourse in the Fourth Gospel,
familiar, sane, spiritual. In Him we recognize the
true, ever-living, ever-returning Lord.
This preference for the latter tradition by no
means requires the Johannine authorship of the
Fourth Gospel (although, in the absence of suffi-
cient data, the Johannine tradition is too strong
to be lightly set aside), nor does it require the
acceptance of the discourse at the Last Supper
as the ipsissima verba of Christ. It simply re-
quires that which such scholars as Wendt and
Harnack concede, that this is a genuine and
trustworthy representation of the mind of Christ,
from the view-point of a disciple of rare spiritual
insight.
[153]
Christ and the Eternal Order
II
Nor is it simply the Johannine account of the
returning Christ with which the representation con-
The Kingdom tained in the discourse on the Last
thaerporetentnsd Things conflicts. // is entirely out of
o the Parousia jiarmonyt also, with the earlier representa-
tions of the Synoptic narratives themselves. The
kingdom parables, so characteristic of the first two
Gospels, can with difficulty be reconciled with the
lurid pictures of the second coming of this dis-
course. The kingdom cannot be like a mustard-
seed, or leaven hid in the meal, and at the same
time be preluded by heavens shaking and stars
falling. No ; the earlier part of the Synoptic
tradition, in the main, coincides with the Johannine
in representing Jesus as from first to last, ethical
and spiritual in his attitude, relying upon spiritual
truths, spiritual forces, spiritual methods. It is
hardly loyal to him to conceive him at the end as.
renouncing this for materialistic Jewish concep-
tions and programs. The case is one of united
preponderating Synoptic and Johannine tradition
versus a single alien section of Synoptic narrative.1
It is hardly an exaggeration to assert that the
1 It is true that there are other detached references which
seem to convey the same external, material conception, as,
for example, Mark 8 : 38-9 : 1. But this is an allusion to the
Daniel passage and is a merely figurative expression of his
coming recognition.
[154]
Christ Re in rii ing
issue amounts to this : Was Jesus true to himself
to the last, or not? That he was thus faithful
to his higher purpose, everything goes to prove.
The Risen and Ascending Christ is still true to his
earlier teaching and attitude. His words are of
witness-bearing, the enduement of the Spirit and
of his own unfailing, unseen Presence, and not
of his speedy return. It is only the two men in
white apparel who reassert the temporal external
eschatology that so misled the early Church.
Ill
How, then, account for this strange stratum, this
incongruous element, in the sayings of Christ? It
is possible, of course, to apply heroic The probata
treatment to the narrative, and, even th?LastrDis-
without external warrant of any sort, cours
cut out these alien passages as belonging to an
impure Jewish tradition. But that would leave the
universal expectation of the Second Coming in
the Early Church too far unexplained. It is much
more reasonable to conjecture that Jesus uttered a
prophecy, in his own manner, of things to come
which was so misunderstood and distorted by the
medium through which it passed, as to produce a
false and misleading perspective and impression.
Modern scholarship has made it possible for us
to disentangle, somewhat, the confusion of these
words as reported, and form a reasonable conjec-
ture concerning their purport. Three main threads
[■53]
Christ and the Eternal Order
of coherent prediction appear running through
the highly colored fabric of the prophecy: —
( I ) the approaching destruction of Jerusalem
with the consequent disintegration of the Jewish
nation — a catastrophe which Jesus clearly antici-
pated ; (2) the turbulence of the world history
as it lay before his vision; (3) the marked and
triumphant effect which his own cause was to have
among the forces of history. In this triumph he
himself was to be personally present as Leader.1
The chief object of the whole prophecy seems to
have been to make the disciples observant, watch-
ful, active. In this prophecy he again made use of
the passage from Daniel from which he may have
selected his own title, and which, better than any
other Old Testament prophecy, furnished the key to
the true nature of his own kingdom, as contrasted
with other great world forces and movements.
Unless conservative scholarship has entirely mis-
read Jesus, he used this apocalyptic passage from
Daniel symbolically and not literally, whereas
the disciples, the Apostolic Church and the great
majority of Christians in all the ages since, have
accepted the words as a literal description of the
1 " For Jesus, the idea of his second coming to execute
judgment and to consummate salvation was equivalent to the
certainty of the continuance of his Messianic significance in
the kingdom of God in spite of his death." Wendt, Teachings
of Jesus, Vol. II, p. 283. But it was more than Messianic
significance ; rather, Messianic leadership.
[156]
C/i rist Beta rn ing
manner of his second coming. No more flagrant
instance of the bondage of the letter is to be found
in history. And yet, it is not difficult to see that
in the providence of God this misconception of a
speedy Second Advent really helped on an unde-
veloped and short-sighted Christianity to take its
infant steps until it could bear more light, take
wider visions, and form larger conceptions.
IV
But if, brushing aside the confusions and mis-
understandings of the discourse as we have it, we
break through symbol and figure to the nu . ..,
<=> J o Christ s many
real meaning of the Master, what do we Returns
find it to be? Is there to be a return of Christ?
If so, what manner of parousia is it? No satisfac-
tory answer is possible save that which has been
slowly dawning upon the Church through the un-
folding of history and the progress of Christianity,
namely, that the return of the King is unseen and
spiritual, like the kingdom itself. Thus has Christ
been not only a Living Christ but a Returning
Christ. Thus has he been returning from the day
of his ascension to this. Thus did he return to his
own generation at Pentecost, at Antioch, at Corinth.
In power and great glory he descended to trans-
form the Roman Empire, and to become King of
the nations of the West. He returned at the Refor-
mation to resume his lordship over the Church.
At the Great Awakening he sent forth his angels
[157]
Christ and the Eternal Order
to gather his elect from the four winds. At the
rise of the modern missionary movement the Bride-
groom came and they that were ready went in with
him to the marriage feast. In the release of the
slaves, the reconstruction of prisons, the coming
of the era of hospitals and homes, every unclouded
eye saw him. In the modern social movement he
is the real Leader. The truth of the Re-
Christ . .
already turning Christ is the truth that not only
come # *
is he with his own always, but that he
comes to humanity in ever fresh measures and un-
expected manners to save, and further save, and
yet further save, humanity.
And not only has the Christ been returning in
power and great glory in all the Christian centuries,
And stm to but st*^ more is he to return in the
come years that are before. They are right
who believe that Christ has already come. They
are most right who believe that he is yet to come.
Unto the purifying of the Church he is to come,
unto the redemption of society, the overthrow of
wrong, the universalizing of opportunity, the fed-
eration of the nations, the eternal triumph of peace
and righteousness and love, he is to come. Even
so, come, Lord Jesus !
[158]
XX
CHRIST AND SOCIAL REDEMPTION
Is the Christocentric theology in touch with mod-
ern life? Has it a message for the time? This is
its ultimate test. We are in the whirl The Final
and ferment of a period of social recon- Test
struction, in which — however blind the average
man may be to the fact — not only ethics but the-
ology is deeply involved. Has the Christocentric
theology any cogent and vital contribution to make
toward the settlement of the problems that press
upon us?
I
Manifestly one of the foremost requisites of social
progress is a right and true conception of the struc-
ture of society. If men are held together
J ° Is there a Di-
by nothing more than physical depend- Yine Purpose
J ^ . . for Humanity?
ences, utilitarian motives, material ad-
vantages, the future of humanity is dark — a long
vista of clashes and readjustments — with, at the
best, nothing in the end but superficial progress,
material gains, greater comforts, finer facilities, an
apocalypse of conveniences and advantages, in-
Christ and the Eternal Order
dustrial truce, social stratification, but no vision
of human brotherhood, universal peace and good-
will, world-wide righteousness and love. With a
future limited to material progress, it is an open
question whether society is worth perpetuating,
whether the game is worth the candle. But if
humanity is grounded in a divine purpose and is
capable of indefinite progress in true worthiness,
if society can become a true mutuality of love and
sympathy, then the face of our problem is wholly
changed, a great hope takes possession of us, a
vision of spiritual splendor attends us:
"Order, courage, return,
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God." 1
Unless society were constituted in a divine order,
it could never have reached even its present state
Yes- for the °^ advancement. Nothing but the sense
l\ obligation °f moral obligation could possibly have
reveals it brought men on into an ordered and
secure state of society. The beavers have their
colonies, the bees their hives, but there is no im-
provement in organization and structure from one
millennium to another. Man has not remained
stationary, and cannot. This sense of obligation,
controlling man's growing intelligence as well as
his imperious appetites and ambitions — what is it?
1 Matthew Arnold, Rugby Chapel.
[160]
Christ and Social Redemption
whence is it? The great consensus of mankind has
been that it issues from a divine Source. Latter-day
attempts to find the genesis of the moral sense in a
source no higher than custom and convenience have
not been successful. Men are deeply conscious
that here, in the sense of Duty, is something that
comes from above and beyond themselves.
The Christocentric theology comes forward with
the declaration that the sense of obligation is not
merely an instinct implanted by God in the soul,
but that it is the living will of God in the soul —
the Christ of conscience — that by virtue of this
common divine indwelling every man is of worth
and can become a true son of God, and that society,
possessing this universal divine Presence, is con-
stituted in God and can and will develop into God-
likeness.
The older theology, with its emphasis upon the
divine sovereignty, with its denial of the worth of
all unregenerate virtue and of the presence of
Christ outside the pale of the Church,
, . r A Theology
and with its wreckage plan of redemp- forsodai
Redemption
tion, had no adequate theory of society,
no true conception of the relation of humanity to
Christ, either genetically or historically. It is im-
possible for Roman Catholicism, with its institu-
tionalism ; or Calvinism, with its pessimism; or
Arminianism, with its individualism; or Unitarian-
ism, with its naturalism, to grasp the idea of social
redemption. Not one of the theologies of the past
[161]
Christ and the Eternal Order
has had breadth and power enough to realize the
fundamental relation of Christ to society, in its very
nature and constitution, or to embrace humanity as
a whole in the scope of the divine purpose. The
kingdom of God is alien to them all. It is only
a theology that dares put Christ at
The Principle .
of social the very center and heart of humanity
Redemption _ . . _
that founds society on a principle deep
enough and firm enough to uphold the walls of
a city of God on earth. Nothing but a Christo-
centric theology will convince the world that life
itself, in its every part and relation, is sacred,
spiritual, and belongs to God, and that whatsoever
society does in word or in deed can and should be
done in the name of the Lord Jesus, who is its
Heart and Soul.
II
Not only does the Christocentric theology fur-
nish a principle for social redemption, but a motive.
Nothing will inspire an enduring enthu-
The Motive ' , , . , ,
for social siasm for humanity, a victorious love tor
Redemption ...
men, except the conviction that every
man is of inestimable worth to God and to human-
ity, that there is something in the individual man,
as well as something in humanity as humanity, that
is of exceeding and eternal value. For that con-
viction the Christocentric theology supplies a basis
in the conception of the Indwelling Christ, who is
in all men, giving to each his individual worth and
[ife]
Christ and Social Redemption
to humanity as a whole its splendor and possibility.
To free this divine life, this Christ within each and
within the whole, and make him dominant by
means of the appeal of the Christ of history, —
this is the joyous task of Christianity ; not to make
humanity divine, — for it is that already, potentially,
— but to bring out and make regnant the Divine
within it.
Beside principle and motive for social redemp-
tion, therefore, the Christocentric theology also
furnishes means, — by availing itself of
. . The Means
the definite and concrete redemption forsociai
/--i t Redemption
afforded in the Historic Christ. Here
lies its power.1 It believes in revelation as well as
immanence, in the Christ of Calvary as well as the
Christ of conscience, in the Son of man as well as
the eternal Logos. And in the Living Christ, as
he fulfils and potentializes the Indwelling Christ,
it finds the only sufficient Redeemer of humanity.
Lacking such a historical revelation, we should be
without convincing assurance of the divine purpose
and love and without adequate leadership in social
redemption.
1 " There is no question in the world so vital as this of the
spiritual power. The temperance question, the sexual ques-
tion, the war question, the Irish question, the negro question,
the question of labor, the question of the proletariat and other
such are most grave and pressing. But none of them are so
grave and deep in the long run as the question of the spiritual
power." P. T. Forsyth, Report of Second International
Congregational Council, p. 62.
[163]
Christ and the Eternal Order
III
Inspiring and impelling as is the man Jesus,
as such alone he would be insufficient to accom-
plish the redemption of humanity. The reduction
of Jesus to the level of ordinary humanity and the
corresponding deification of humanity as suffi-
cient to attain its own salvation apparently results
in stagnation of effort. To make God a laborer
together with man, instead of man a laborer to-
gether with God, is stultifying. It needs
entered The- a God-infused religion, a Christ-centered
adwjuatefor theology, to stir men to devoted action
demption" f°r social salvation, for world redemp-
tion. The great social redemption move-
ment of England and America, not only in its
evangelistic phases, but in social reform and social
settlement has been, in the main, grounded in
a Christ-exalting theology. Maurice, Kingsley,
General Booth, Arnold Toynbee, and the men who
have reproduced their spirit and deeds in America,
have had a great faith in Jesus Christ, and in spirit
always, if not always in method, have made hirn
central in motive and in aim. The great mission-
ary enterprise, the noblest and most fruitful advance
toward social redemption in modern times, has been
Christ-animated and Christ-directed.
Around personality converge all problems, all
tasks, all hopes. And the Christ Personality alone
is sufficient to meet them. " Jesus imparted new
[i64]
Christ and Social Redemption
values to tilings: He scattered new thoughts
broadcast in the world. But it was only His |
son that gave these new values and these new
thoughts that victorious power which transformed
the world." l
1 Paul Wcrnlc: The Beginnings of Christianity, Vol. I,
P- 37-
[165]
XXI
THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST
The most marked characteristic of modern reli-
gious life is undoubtedly the breaking down of the
old division between the sacred and the secular,
the Church and the world. The fact is patent; it
needs no demonstration. What does it signify?
When an earnest and observant soul looks out
into the world about him and tries to gauge its
moral and spiritual status, he becomes deeply per-
plexed. He is met by an inextricable confusion,
an interblending of righteousness and unrighteous-
ness, of selfishness and unselfishness, of faith and
The world unfaith, which leaves him bewildered.
Prophet's At times he is optimistic and filled with
scroll hope; at times he is tempted to reecho
the severe and solemn verdict of John Henry New-
man : " If I looked into a mirror and did not see
my face, I should have the same sort of feeling
which actually comes upon me, when I look into
this living, busy world and see no reflection of its
Creator. . . . The sight of the world is nothing
else than the prophet's scroll, full of lamentation and
mourning and woe." 1 This is the earnest outcry
1 Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
[166]
The Kingdom of Christ
of a soul very jealous for God, and yet it is, after
all, a narrow judgment It fails to take account of
the good that lies embedded in the life of the world,
running like a vein of gleaming gold through its
otherwise worthless strata. The gold is unmined
and may not be ecclesiastically marketable, but it
is there nevertheless, and — though his stamp may
not yet be upon it — it is God's.
"To see life steadily and see it whole"1 — that
alone will give the true perspective. And the more
steadily and comprehensively one views life, the
more clearly do two convictions shape themselves
out of its confusions and contradictions.
«-tm r - 1 i Eternity
lne first is that into the very structure at the Heart
of Things
and fiber of life, its necessary function-
ings, its common cares, its inevitable ongoings, are
wrought sacred possibilities and symbols, — poten-
cies, disciplines of an eternal order. Toil, sleep, the
daily meal, home duties, community life, trade,
study, religious and civic relations — all the obliga-
tions, services, and dependences that make up the
warp and woof of daily life are in themselves holy
and beautiful and capable of such educative and
fruitful discipline, such harmony and holiness, that
the man of insight who has caught the true mean-
ing of life cannot rest content with the common-
place, sordid world in which the majority of men
llve- » Matthew Arnold.
[167]
Christ and the Eternal Order
There is one, and but one, conception command-
ing and comprehensive enough to express* and
embody the highest ideal of human society, and
that is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of
God is no less than the world transformed into the
medium and expression of the divine life, — the
home, the state, the church, business, society, edu-
cation, literature, art, everything, become the organ
and instrument of God's downreaching and man's
upreaching life. Denied, disclaimed, thrust aside,
neglected, as this ideal of a perfect God-filled human
society has been, humanity is smitten to the heart
with its goodliness. Men in all generations have
dreamed of a Golden Age to come. The prophets
of Israel stretched suppliant hands to God for its
advent. The Christian Church saw the Holy City,
New Jerusalem, descending out of God from heaven.
Poets have sung the coming glory and reformers
have suffered and died that it might be hastened.
In one form or another the ideal has been growing
clearer, more real, more certain. Jesus gave it its
fairest form, its noblest description, its strongest
impulse, when he called it the Kingdom of God
and described it as the pearl of great price, the
treasure hid in the field, the seed growing into a
great and goodly tree. This Kingdom is at hand,
he said to men ; it is among you ; seek it, serve it,
realize it.
It is only in our own time that the true character
and scope of the Kingdom has come to be fully
[,68]
T/ic Kingdom of Christ
recognized. Heretofore the seeker after God, the
man of ideals, has thought to find God and fashion
his character apart from the world, in « Not that
the hermitage, the monastery, the church, shoiidest
Now he sees that he can win the ideal otuVfthe
only in the world, as he finds God in its wor
commonest duty and experience and fills the whole
sphere of life with the endeavor to find his pres-
ence and realize his will.
And yet how far are we from the Kingdom still !
The ancient, bitter denunciations of the world even
now speak a partial truth. How sodden is busi-
ness still, — business which ought to be the very
means and instrument of human intercourse and
fellowship ; how selfish is trade, how infamous
politics, how self-seeking and unaspiring literature,
how artificial society, how imperfect and worldly
the Church ! How near is the Kingdom, yet how
far!
II
Thus there grows up within us the second con-
viction, as strong and as clear as the first, that, ex-
cept by the power and grace of God,
" Thy
the kingdom of God, the redemption of kingdom
come "
human society can never come. It is
his Kingdom ; he alone can bring it to pass. Again
and again men have tried to establish this ideal for
themselves, by means of their own human effort
alone. Utopias, revolutions, reforms, communisms,
[169]
Christ and the Eternal Order
democracies, socialisms, — how hopefully have
they been instituted, how hopelessly have they
failed ! Human nature is too impotent and too viti-
ated to succeed of itself. A great cloud of dis-
appointment and dismay has been slowly gather-
ing over the hearts of those who watch for the
coming of the Kingdom because America has so
far failed to realize the hope of humanity. Munici-
pal evils, legislative corruption, industrial strife,
social estrangement, spiritual lethargy, — are these
the fruits of the civilization begun in such promise
and consecration in this virgin Western world? Is
humanity to go on forever at " this poor, dying
rate "? Is the world never to roll on into the light
of the Golden Age of human brotherhood and
peace? It does not satisfy the eager heart of hope
to be reminded of the progress already made, and
of the necessarily slow and gradual gains by which
alone advance in higher life is made. God can
surely do more for his children, after two thousand
years of Christianity, than this !
Ill
What, then, if men should learn at last to rec-
ognize their own impotence and to rely upon God?
What if the heart of humanity should turn and
become again as the heart of a little child? What
if a wide-spread dissatisfaction with material pros-
perity, with ease and pleasure and selfishness,
[170]
The Kingdom of Christ
should come over our twentieth century civiliza-
tion, — a great longing for righteousness and faith?
Would the coming o( the Kingdom delay and halt
as at present? Would not the Golden Age be
ushered in and humanity come at last to its own?
Some such longing and hope as this seems to
be stirring in the hearts of many throughout
Christendom to-day, based upon the conviction
that political reform and industrial improvement
and social betterment are not enough, indeed that
they are not possible in any real way, without a
regeneration that goes deeper than ex-
. i i r i " Thine is the
ternal wrongs and defects and renews kingdom, and
i i <» 1 - t> • « i r the Powert
the very heart of the individual and of andthegiory,
forever"
society. Nothing of power and per-
manence can come in social redemption so long as
we continue to make of God an Adjunct, an Assist-
ant, an Abettor of humanity in the struggle for
progress, and of Christ simply a Teacher, a Type, a
Helper, to our ends. This is a self-exaltation of
humanity, an affront to the divine Being, a per-
version of the eternal order, which can result only
in futility and disaster. Only the attitude of faith,
of humility, and of service which alone befits man,
can prepare him for his part, as a servant of God,
in bringing in that Kingdom which God withholds
only because man is unprepared to receive it.
God, not man, is the Author of the Kingdom.
If man has dreamed of it, portrayed it, struggled
for it, it is only because God has given him the
t'7']
Christ and the Eternal Order
vision, furnished him the motive, supplied him with
the strength. And if God is the Author and End
of the Kingdom, God in Christ is the Soul of it.
Central within it, furnishing the concrete personal
leadership without which it can never reach fulfil-
ment, is the Living Christ. It is he who occupies
the throne of the Kingdom, not in God's stead,
not as his representative, but as the revelation of
himself in his human aspects and kinship. Serv-
ing this King, one serves not only the King of
kings, but the King of all kingdoms, earthly and
celestial.
It is the very presence and grace of God, felt
and recognized, not only as a pervasive conscious-
ness but as a concrete reality in Christ,
"Do all in the .
name of the which gives this ideal of the Kingdom
Lord Jesus "... .
inclusiveness and effectiveness, incentive
and momentum, while other social ideals fade and
fail. To make Jesus Christ Lord of trade, of in-
dustry, of art, of education, of science, of literature,
of all human pursuits and enterprises, — this is the
way to bring each to highest fulfilment and to re-
late each rightly to all other human interests. This
is the summum bomim of human society, the way
out of chaos to order, out of discord and evil and
imperfection, to harmony, holiness, and happiness.
IV
But if this Kingdom were simply a consumma-
tion, a climax, a coral island lifted out of the
[ T72 ]
The Kingdom of Christ
waters of oblivion upon the sacrificial deposit of
those who lived not to share its blessing, it could
be neither a truly human nor a truly „Thatth
divine Kingdom. It needs to embrace ^ou^nofbe
humanity, to include all generations; it made Perfect "
needs that men come from the East and from the
West to sit down within it and share its fulfilled
joy. It must needs be, that is, not only historical
but eternal, not only earthly but heavenly. Such
is the New Testament representation.
The beginnings of the Kingdom reach far back
of history, of humanity, back into the heart of
Eternal Love, creating all things, purposing* all
things, before all time, through the Eternal Word
of Wisdom. The builders of the Kingdom — how
they multiply upon our vision through the receding
generations, a vast army, each one who obeys the
Divine Will, the eternal Christ within him, making
his contribution to the great structure that has
risen through the ages, and within which, in its
completion, all shall be gathered who have aided,
however slightly, in its construction ; and we know
not how many more. For the kingdom is human-
ity's Kingdom, and the Christ is humanity's Christ.
['73]
APPENDIX
APPENDIX
I
HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE CHRISTO-
CENTRIC THEOLOGY1
Primitive Christian life and thought were Christocen-
tric. To the disciples, Jesus was all in all. Paul found
in Christ not only the absorbing passion of his life, but
the power of God, and the wisdom of God, unto salva-
tion. The author of the Fourth Gospel, in his profound
meditation, found himself impelled to associate Jesus
with the formative Principle of creation and the Light
that lighteth every man coming into the world. The
Greek theology, finding the nexus of philosophy and
Christianity in this Logos doctrine, conceived Christ as
the incarnate Reason that illumines the universe. Origen
centered his rich and radiating system of theology in
Christ. Athanasius, touching a deeper and more ethical
spring, found in Christ's eternal Sonship not only the
clue to the nature of God and of humanity, but also the
link binding the two together. The Antiochian theology
followed the Nicene in concentrating its thought upon
Christ.
But with the rise of Western Christianity the doctrine
of the centrality of Christ sank into subservience to that
of the divine sovereignty as set forth by Augustine. The
1 Reprinted, by permission, from The Bibliothcca Sacra,
July, 1905
12 [ 177 ]
Appendix
Augustine of the " Confessions " is centered upon Christ,
but the Augustine of the " City of God " is absorbed
in the problem of the Church and the ground of its
primacy. " It almost seems/' says Professor Allen, " as
though, if Christ were left out altogether, the scheme of
Augustine would still maintain its consistency as a whole
and retain its value as a working system." 1 Augustin-
ianism was perpetuated by Calvinism. The authority of
the Church in Catholicism, and of the Bible in Protes-
tantism, inevitably obscured the supremacy of Christ. It
was not until, through the combined agency of philoso-
phy, science, and Biblical criticism, Christianity was
released from the bondage of authority, that a day
dawned for the free reconstruction of Christology, and
the reassertion of the Christocentric faith.
It is instructive to watch the current of a new move-
ment in the realm of thought widen and deepen. One
can see, by anticipation, spiritual fields fertilized and
mill-wheels turned by it, if it be of sufficient force and
significance. Such interest unquestionably attaches to
the modern movement toward the Christologizing of
theology, the rereading of the universe in terms of the
consciousness of Christ.
If we ask through whom this movement, in its modern
form, took its rise, the name of Friedrich Schleiermacher,
that great revivifier of spiritual theology, takes prece-
dence of all others. " His it was to make Christ and
his redemption the center of one of the most skilfully
developed systems of theology which the Christian
Church has known," said Henry B. Smith, in his An-
dover address on u Faith and Philosophy." The move-
1 Continuity of Christian Thought \ p. 158.
[178]
Appendix
merit which Schlciermacher thus instituted was Carried
forward by many able successors, among them Schweizer,
Neander, Rothe, and, above all, he whose motto was
'•Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge," Isaac August Durner. The latter's
monumental work, " The Doctrine of the Person of
Christ," completed in 1 856, together with his constant
insistence upon the "universal significance of Christ" as
"the productive archetype" and "objective historical
center" of the higher life, exerted great influence in
shaping thought in the direction of the person of Christ.
The movement thus begun has progressed with char-
acteristic distinctions in Germany, France, England, and
America.
In England, Coleridge, Thomas Arnold of Rugby,
and Frederick D. Maurice prepared the way for a truer
conception of Christ, — as did Thomas Erskine and
McLeod Campbell in Scotland, by exorcising scholas-
ticism and formalism from theology, especially from
Christology, and insisting upon sincerity and reality as
the absolute prerequisites of a genuine theology. From
the day that Maurice, with his searching, iconoclastic
sincerity, thus cleared the way for a genuine Christology,
religious thought in Great Britain has converged more
and more toward the person of Christ. " Ecce Homo "
(1863), Robertson's "Sermons," and the "Lives of
Christ" of Edersheim, Giekie and Farrar helped in various
ways to promote this cause. Liddon's Bampton Lectures
on " Our Lord's Divinity," R. \V. Dale's writings, A. B.
Bruce's "Apologetics" and "Humiliation of Christ,"
have all furthered the movement. At the present time,
the Christocentric theology, as represented in the
Establishment by Canon Gore, and among the Free
[ !79 .1
Appendix
Churches by Principal Fairbairn, is unquestionably the
vital and dominant theology. In addition to Canon
Gore's work on the " Incarnation," and Principal Fair-
bairn's " Place of Christ in Modern Theology " and
" Philosophy of Christianity," this movement has given
us " Lux Mundi," and James Orr's comprehensive and
scholarly volume, " The Christian View of God and the
World," with its able exposition of the principle that the
person of Christ is " necessarily central in his own religion,
nay, in the universe." Upon the same lines are work-
ing, with great enthusiasm tempered by fine scholarship,
D. W. Forrest, — whose work on "The Christ of His-
tory and of Experience," is one of the most suggestive
contributions to the discussion, — J. R. Illingworth, Rob-
ert Horton, Principal Forsyth, and others who are leading
the religious thinking of Great Britain to-day.
Returning to Germany, whatever may be said in criti-
cism of the theological apostasy of Ritschlianism, with
its motto, " Back to Christ," it is assuredly a Christo-
centric movement. Christ is its chiefest Werthnrtheih
In so far, at least, it is apostolic in its character, and
should win from every earnest Christian the Pauline
thanksgiving for all means by which, in whatever way,
Christ is proclaimed. Hermann and Kaftan center
theology in Christ; and Harnack himself — that electric
battery of present-day theology — (though in his own
way) is essentially Christocentric in his position. " Har-
nack is not less convinced than Ritschl of the uniqueness
and originality of Jesus Christ. If we ask where we are
to find the essence of Christianity, Harnack answers in a
word, In Jesus Christ and in his gospel." x
1 William Adams Brown, Essence of Christianity, p. 281.
[180]
Appendix
America has not been wanting in her appreciation of
the significance of the Christocentric movement, nor in
her contributions to its advancement. Henry B. Smith
was the prophet of the movement in this country, and as
early 3 1 ;i), in the remarkable address already alluded
to, lifted high and clear the banner of the new theology
in the memorable words, " Christianity is not only an
historic revelation and an internal experience, but also an
organic, diffusive, plastic, and triumphant force in human
history ; and in this history, as in the revelation and in
the experience, the center round which all revolves is the
person of Jesus Christ." But it was not given to Henry
B. Smith to work out the large conclusions of this far-
sighted inspiration. Before that could be accomplished,
it was necessary that some one should do in America
a work analogous to that of Maurice in England, and
restore to Christology reality and freedom. That was
the part so nobly played, and at such cost, by Horace
Bushnell. Next to the works of Bushnell, probably no
theological treatise in this country has been at once
so emancipatory and constructive as Elisha Mulford's
"Republic of God."
The history of the Christocentric movement in America
is too fresh and familiar to need repetition. The princi-
ple and motive of it received a comprehensive statement
from Professor Egbert C. Smyth, in the initial number
of The Andover Review, in which he wrote : " God is
revealed in Christ. The possibility, the unity, the unifi-
cation, of a science of theology are given in him and in
him alone."
As the wider Christocentric movement has advanced,
it has won for itself here, as in Great Britain, the alle-
giance of many of the keenest and most active minds,
[ '8']
Appendix
both in pulpit and seminary chair. Dr. George A. Gordon
is one of its most earnest advocates. President A. H.
Strong, Dr. A. H. Bradford, and Dr. Wm. Newton Clarke
have in various ways interpreted the Christocentric the-
ology. The late lamented Professor Stearns of Bangor
enthusiastically adopted it in his inaugural, and reaffirmed
it in his address before the London International Council.
President King, in his notable volumes, " The Recon-
struction of Theology" and "Theology and the Social
Consciousness," has made a most valuable contribution
to Christology. Dr. McConnell's " Christ," a book at
once stimulating and superficial, takes the Christocentric
position. The number of Lives of Christ that have
appeared within the last twenty years, and are still ap-
pearing, evidences the unflagging interest in the historic «
Christ. Professor William Adams Brown, of Union
Seminary, in his timely volume, " The Essence of Chris-
tianity,"— a clear and effective study in theology, —
states the conclusion of his research as follows : " Would
we express in a sentence what makes the genius of Chris-
tianity as a historic religion, we cannot do so better than by
saying that it is the progressive realization, in thought as
in life, of the Supremacy of Christ."
By far the largest constructive and carrying power in
the Christocentric school at present belongs to the work
of Principal Fairbairn in England, and of Dr. George A.
Gordon in this country. The former, upon a canvass of
such magnitude as only he can cover, has given us such
a presentation of the " architectonic " nature of Chris-
tianity, as it centers in Christ, — its range, its significance,
its supremacy, as it is related to other religions and to
racial needs, — as affords to Christianity a new concep-
tion of its commission and conquering power as the
[182]
Appendix
universal religion. The latter, Dr. Gordon, in " The
Christ of To-day," "The New Epoch for Faith," and
"Ultimate Conceptions of Christianity," lias given us a
no less inspiring interpretation of the intensive, as con-
trasted with the extensive, relation of Christ to human
life and to our civilization, which He has so permeated
that it can neither understand itself nor realize its ends
apart from Him.
Sufficient evidence has been adduced, perhaps, to in-
dicate how wide-spread, how vital, and how thoroughly
an outgrowth of our own period, is this renewed Chris-
tologizing of theology.1 That it has for many years been
recognized as the dominating principle of modern theol-
ogy is witnessed by the statement of Professor Fisher,
when, at the close of his " History of Doctrine," in
summing up the present doctrinal situation, he concludes :
li The question of the implication of Christ's person and
work forms the rubrics of the modern theological system."
i How far this revival of interest in Christology is a mod-
ern tendency may be seen by noting the proportionate place
given to Christology in a comprehensive system of theology
of an earlier day, such as Hodge's, which consists of three
large volumes : I. Theology; II. Anthropology; III. So-
teriology and Eschatology.
[■83]
II
THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE HARNACK
CONTROVERSY
In the field of theology and philosophy, certain books
serve successively as conflict centers, by means of which
opposing parties define and test one another. Such a
book is Hamack's " What is Christianity ? " It is
admirably adapted to arouse interest and provoke con-
troversy. Candid, perspicuous, positive, pertinent, fasci-
nating in style, filled with the fruits of ripe scholarship
and strenuous thinking, it is not surprising that it has
stirred theological stagnation as no book of the century
has thus far done. It has interested theological students,
shocked Sunday-school teachers, stimulated preachers,
roused theologians from their " dogmatic slumbers," and
drawn the attention of thoughtful minds outside the
Church back to the fundamental problems of theology,
in a remarkable way.
There has been a general effort to " place " the book,
— to apperceive it. Is it orthodox or heterodox, sound
or dangerous, trustworthy or biased? Over this problem
the Church has, for four years and more, been puzzling.
Meanwhile appreciation, endorsement, criticism, and at-
tack have been multiplying.
In estimating the real tendency and significance of
Professor Harnack's statement of the essence of Chris-
tianity, two criticisms are of special value as coming from
[i84]
Appendix
contrasted Christian standpoints — Professor Hermann
Cremer's " Reply to Ilarnack " and Alfred Loisy's u The
pel and the Church."
The controversy regarding Harnack's representation
of the essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Cluistes-
t.hums) resolves itself in the light of criticism and in
perspective into two issues: (i) as to the method of
finding the essence of Christianity and (2) as to what is
that essence.
(1) In order to determine the true essence of Chris-
tianity, Harnack maintains, it is necessary to go back to
the primitive gospel itself, in its purity and simplicity.
Very ably and adroitly has M. Loisy, taking the law of
evolution as his apologetic principle, argued, in refuta-
tion of Harnack, that Christianity is to be understood
only in the whole process and product of its develop-
ment. "The full life of the gospel," he asserts, "is
not in a solitary element of the doctrine of Jesus, but
in the totality of its manifestation, which starts from the
personal ministry of Christ, and its development in the
history of Christianity." l This would be convincing if
the history of Christianity had been pure development.
But, such it has not been. Degeneration has all too
plainly accompanied evolution ; the purity of the gospel
has been stained by contact with a corrupting environ-
ment ; the normal course of development has been de-
flected and distorted by opposition and obstacle ; the
essential and vital truth has been overlaid with extra-
neous and irrelevant accretions. Not that there has not
been development, pure and progressive ; but in order
to trace this it is necessary to disentangle it from false
1 The Gospel and the Church, p. 115.
['85]
Appendix
forms and from extraneous issues, and, above all, to get
back as nearly as possible to the source and spring from
which the movement started. This Harnack endeavors
to do.
" Herr Harnack," writes Loisy, " does not conceive
Christianity as a seed, at first a plant in potentiality,
then a real plant, identical from the beginning of its
evolution to the final limit and from the root to the sum-
mit of the stem, but as a fruit, ripe, or rather over-
ripe, that must be peeled to reach the incorruptible
kernel ; and Herr Harnack peels his fruit with such per-
severance that the question arises if anything will re-
main at the end." * It is strange that M. Loisy makes
no allusion to the fact that this is precisely what Har-
nack, in so many words, had said that he should not do.
" We must not be like the child, who, wanting to get at
the kernel of a bulb, went on picking off the leaves until
there was nothing left, and then could not help seeing
that it was just the leaves that made the bulb. En-
deavors of this kind are not unknown in the history of
the Christian religion, but they fade before those other
endeavors [with what prescience he here forestalls Loisy]
which seek to convince us that there is no such thing as
either kernel or husk, growth or decay, but that every-
thing is of equal value and alike permanent." 2
" But did not Harnack peel the bulb, nevertheless?"
it will be asked. That is the question — whether he
peeled the bulb, or simply peeled off the dead and useless
integument in which it is encased.
(2) Although in his "preliminary" pages Harnack
makes several statements, in which he seems to present
1 The Gospel and the Church, p. 19.
2 What is Christianity ? second edition, p. 16.
[186]
Appendix
the person of Jesus Christ as the center of the gospel,
when he comes to state more precisely the essence of
the gospel, we find that he makes it consist in the Father-
hood of God ; as revealed, not so much through the
character and personality of Christ, as through his
knowledge of God — a knowledge such as no one be-
fore him ever had. " Rightly understood, the name of
Son means nothing but the knowledge of God." l For a
basis of this theory of revelation, Harnack relies upon
the saying, M No one knoweth the Son, save the Father ;
neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he
to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him."
Very clear and simple a Christology is this, but also
very limited. Is it the Christology of Christ himself?
Manifestly not, if we accept the sayings in the Fourth
Gospel as in any sense reflecting the mind of Christ.
For there Jesus gives a prominence to his personality
which makes loyalty to him involve far more than a mere
keeping of his commandments. Nor is this the Chris-
tology of Paul, nor of the New Testament as a whole.
It is impossible to measure Harnack without reckoning
with Ritschl. It is in the Ritschlian denial of the right
of reason to interpret the facts of history and experience
— in other words, its attempt to taboo " metaphysical
theology " — that we find the secret of Harnack's impov-
erization of the gospel. " Thou hast nothing to draw
with, and the well is deep," says Ritschlianism to him
who seeks to know more of Christ than lies upon the
surface of the Synoptic narrative. " Here all research
must stop,"3 proclaims Harnack with the same restrictive
dogmatism. But the author of the Fourth Gospel could
1 What is Christianity ? second edition, p. 13S.
2 Ibid. p. 139.
[■87]
Appendix
not stop here, neither could Paul, nor the unknown writer
of the Hebrews, nor the Apologists, nor Athanasius, nor
Augustine, nor Thomas Aquinas, nor the Mystics, nor the
Reformers, nor the Cambridge Platonists, nor Jonathan
Edwards, nor Horace Bushnell, nor Maurice, nor Fair-
bairn, nor Gordon, nor Loisy. Strongly, steadily,
persistently, this development of the New Testament
Christology has gone forward throughout the course of
Christian history, in tireless response to Jesus' own ques-
tion : " What think ye of the Christ? whose son is he? "
If the development has been in the main a baseless and
fruitless one, the Church has gone far astray and has
much to unlearn.
But such a conclusion is not likely to be reached.
The Pauline conception of Christ is deeply seated in the
heart of the Church ; though no Christology is adequate
for its full expression. It is not strange, therefore, that
such a protest as that of Professor Cremer — undiscrim-
inating, unordered, ineffective, but genuine — flames up
from the faith of the older Protestantism to challenge
Harnack ; while from the side of Catholicism emanates
the scholarly, judicious criticism of Loisy, condemned
for that very scholarship which is its strength.
No defect in Harnack's Christology, however, can
nullify the freshening and stimulating value of his work.
The limitations of his Christology the Christian com-
munion will gradually recognize and fill up ; his clarifying
and glowing treatment of historic Christianity it will prize
and utilize. More than that. In the revelation of the
Divine Fatherhood, Harnack has certainly discerned the
heart of the gospel. That truth is reached, as Harnack
expressly maintains, through Christ. This is Christianity
and it is historic Christianity. It is as distressing as it is
[188]
Appendix
surprising, therefore, to find Professor Charles A. Bri
asserting: u The solution which Harnack gives is de-
Btructive to historic Christianity. He gives a Christianity,
as his German critics rightly say, without Christ. He
gives a Christianity to which a Jew or a Mohammedan
or any monotheistic Oriental would find little difficulty
in subscribing." l Such a superficial judgment is most
misleading. As a matter of fact, neither Mohammedan-
ism, nor Judaism, nor any other Oriental monotheism
ever found the universal P\atherhood of God, in the
intimate sense in which Harnack defines it. If any
Oriental monotheist of to-day has found the Fatherhood,
in the full sense of the word, he has found it, mediately
or immediately, through Christ.
To understand Harnack's real estimate of Christ and
the place which his personality occupies in the gospel,
it is necessary to supplement this volume with such an
utterance as that contained in his lecture on " Christian-
ity and History," delivered before the Evangelical Union
of Berlin, in 1S95. In this lecture he discusses the rela-
tion of the personality of Jesus to history. To quote but
a single sentence : " When God and everything that is
sacred threatens to disappear in darkness, or our doom is
pronounced ; when the mighty forces of inexorable nature
seem to overwhelm us and the bounds of good and evil
to dissolve; when, weak and weary, we despair of finding
God at all in this dismal world — it is then that the
personality of Christ may save us." 2 The import and
emphasis of such declarations are unmistakable in their
ringing accord with historic evangelical Christianity.
No, Harnack has taken the true method and reached
1 The Expositor 1 April, 1905.
8 Translation by T. B. Saunders, p. 47.
[189]
Appendix
the real essence of Christianity, only he has failed to
reeognize the true character and claim of the Mediator
through whom he reached it. The medium through
which he has seen the truth is so transparent and perfect
that he is unaware of it. In order to look through Christ
to the Father, he forgets that he had first to look at him.
He has not seen the Sonship for the Fatherhood. He is
like one who, finding himself in the Holy of holies, forgets
the Holy place through which he has entered ; or, if he
does not forget it, regards it only as a vestibule, a pene-
trate, and not as a part of the Inner Temple.
[ i9° ]
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