The person and place of Jesus Christ; the Congregational union lecture for 1909

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

GIFT OF
PROFESSOR CLARENCE S. JCIRSH

M\\ -

THE PERSON AND PLACE OF
JESUS CHRIST

THE PERSON AND PLACE
OF JESUS CHRIST

Wljt Congregational Pinion lUcture
for 1909

BY

P. T. FORSYTH, M.A., D.D.

PRINCIPAL OF HACKNEY COLLEGE
HAMPSTEAD

'■*■ Morality is the nature of things.^' — Butler

CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM
NEW YORK : RATON & MAINS

ADVERTISEMENT

By the Committee of the Congregational Union
OF England and Wales.

The Congregational Union Lecture has
been established with a view to the promotion of
Biblical Science, and Theological and Ecclesiastical
Literature.

It is intended that each Lecture shall consist of
a course of Prelections delivered at the Memorial
Hall, but when the convenience of the Lecturer shall
so require, the oral delivery will be dispensed with.

The Committee promise to continue it only so
long as it seems to be efficiently serving the end for
which it was established, or as they have the necessary
funds at their disposal.

For the opinions advanced in any of the Lectures,
the Lecturer alone will be responsible.

Congregational Memorial Hall,

Farringdon Street, London,

775405

PREFACE

I WILL beg leave to plead that these pages are
lectures and not a treatise. The handling rests on a
system, but it is less systematic than suggestive in
form. Some repetition also may perhaps be tolerated
on this ground. The same may, I hope, be borne in
mind in regard to the style. Most of the discourses were
in part delivered to an audience, which may account
for features that would be less in place if only meant for
the eye. The spoken style admits for instance of
inflections and emphases which made sufficiently clear a
sentence that may have to be read twice. It admits also
of more ease and intimacy at times, of personal references
and spiritual applications foreign to the remoter and more
ambitious idea of a treatise. Moreover the position I
take up makes the personal religion of the matter the
base of the theology.

I cannot hope to have made every suggestion on
such a theme as obvious as it should be in a press
article. It is a subject in which the writer must rely
much on the co-operative effort of the reader, and
must chiefly court the student. The merchan of

these goodly pearls must be seekers ; and without
even divers they cannot be had.

vU

viii Preface

If it came to expressing obligations the foot of each
page would bristle with notes and references. But
that also is foreign to the lecture form, and especially
to the form of lectures which made a certain effort to
be as popular as the subject and its depth allowed.
Besides, an apparatus of the kind would have given to
the book an aspect of erudition which its author does
not possess. It is not meant for scholars, but largely
for ministers of the Word which it seeks in its own way
to serve. It does not extend the frontiers of scientific
knowledge or thought in its subject. One or two
references I have given. But had they been multiplied
there are some names that would have incessantly
recurred. And especially those of Rothe, Kahler, Seeberg
and Griitzmacher — without whom these pages would have
been lean indeed. In certain moods, as one traces back
the origin of some lines of thought or even phrases of
speech, the words come to mind, " What have I that I
have not received ? "

Those who read to the end will find that the writer
agrees with the opinion that the British attitude to
criticism must be above all critical. The service
rendered to Christianity by the great critical movement
is almost beyond words. And there is a. vast amount
of foreign work which duly and practically recognises
the fact, without surrendering the note of a positive
Gospel. But it is a misfortune to us, which is also
almost beyond reckoning, that most of the translated
works are those of a more or less destructive school.
For extremes are always easier to grasp and to sell. It
should also be added in fairness that many scholars of
the negative side possess the art of putting things ; in
high contrast with the style of their deeper opponents, so

Preface ix

amorphous often both in matter and mode. The mis-
fortune to the partially educated in this subject, who only
read English, is great ; especially as the popular impression
is produced (and sometimes pursued) that all the ability
and knowledge are on one side. Certain nimble popular
journals live on the delusion ; and they have not so much
as heard whether there be alongside of brilliants like
Wernle or Schmiedel giants like Kahler or Zahn. It
would not be too much to say that the latter two are
among the most powerful minds of the world in the
region — one of theology, and one of scholarship. Yet in
this country, and certainly to our preachers, they are
almost unknown.

It may be useful to add that the lectures were under-
taken ten years ago, that the lines of treatment were
being then laid down in the writer's mind, and that in
the choice of his subject he took counsel with none, met
no request, and even had to put aside suggestions of
subjects which it would have been valuable to follow.
The Congregational Union, under whose auspices the
lecture stands, simply asked the present writer to be the
next to deliver it. The Union neither prescribed nor
suggested subject or point of view. And responsibility
belongs entirely to the author to whom was given so free
a hand.

B

SCHEME

PAGE

A. REVEILLE AND PASSWORD.

Lecture i. Lay Religion and Apostolic. ... i

B. RECONNAISSANCE.

Lecture 2. The Religion of Jesus and the

Gospel of Christ. ... ... ... ... 33

Lecture 3. The Greatness of Christ and the

Interpretations thereof. ... ... ... 61

C. THE ADVANCE.

I. First parallel.

Lecture 4. The Testimony of Christ's Self-
Consciousness — Was He a Part of His
Own Gospel? ... ... ... ... 99

Lecture 5. The Testimony of Apostolic In-
spiration— in General. ... ... ... 135

si

xii Scheme

PAGE

Lecture 6. The Testimony of Apostolic In-
spiration— in Particular. ... ... ... 157

Lecture 7. The Testimony of Experience in

the Soul and in the Church. ... ... 185

n. Second parallel.

Lecture 8. The Moralising of Dogma, illus-
trated by the Omnipotence of God. ... 211

Lecture g. The same illustrated by the Ab-
soluteness of Christ. ... ... ... 237

D. THE ADVANCE IN FORCE.

Lecture 10. The Pre-existence of Christ. ... 259

Lecture 11. The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of

Christ. ... ... ... ... ... 291

Lecture 12. The Plerosis or the Self-Fulfilment

of Christ. ... ... ... ... ... 321

SYNOPSIS

SYNOPSIS

LECTURE I

LAY RELIGION

Christianity is a theological religion or nothing. It centres in
the person of Christ rather than in the Christian principle, and is
the religion of His atoning Incarnation. How does this affect the
fact that it is a lay religion ? Our erroneous conception of lay
religion — which is not opposed to a religion truly priestly, but to
a theology mainly expert. Lay religion means the experimental
religion of the conscience. What is meant by theological reaction.
Theocentric Christianity and anthropocentric. Here lies the great
religious issue of the hour — a God that serves Humanity or a
Humanity that serves God?

LECTURE II

THE RELIGION OF JESUS AND THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST

What is meant by the 'religion of Jesus' which is offered as
simple lay Christianity — the difficulties in the seemingly simple
phrase — the great reserves of Jesus. The effect on a 'religion of
Jesus' of the new religious-historical school is that there never
was in actual history any such thing as is meant by the phrase.
Christ was not the first Christian. The real conflict is not between
an infallible Bible and a fallible, but between a New Testament
Christianity and one which believes it knows better. It is not
between inspiration and criticism, but between incarnation and
evolution. It is not between no revelation in Christ and n revelation,
but between a revelation and the revelation in Him. The great
issue is the superhistoric finality of Christ. That is the true value
of His Godhead. And finality is a matter neither of thought nor

u

XV i Synopsis

power but of life, eternal life in Christ for every age alike. Here
the most recent philosophy and evangelical Christianity meet.
Christianity is not believing with Christ, but in Christ. Christ
does not impress us with a new sense of God, but God in Christ
creates us anew.

LECTURE III

THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST AND THE INTERPRETATIONS THEREOF

The recent growth in our sense of Christ's greatness developed by
critical and historical study. Does it still reach Godhead ? Is
Godhead necessary to explain the personality achieved in Jesus
Christ ? The real site of Christ's greatness is not in His character
but in His action, i.e. in His cross. It is the cross that ethicises,
universalises, and therefore laicises, Christianity. The historic
attempts to explain Christ are mainly three — Socinian, Arian, and
Athanasian — God's prophet. His plenipotentiary, and His very
presence as Redeemer. The necessity for some form of the
Athanasian answer, with the finality which it alone assigns to
Christ.

/

LECTURE IV

THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST's SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS —
WAS HE A PART OF HIS OWN GOSPEL?

The Christ of the New Testament as a whole certainly was. The
issue of the hour is a choice between the New Testament Christ
and the academic — between the Christ of the Apostles and of the
critics. The "scrapping" of the New Testament. The Christ of
the Synoptics with His claims requires a Christology — the Christ of
the extreme critics calls only for a psychology — with a type of
religion subjective and ineffectual. The extraneous bias in much
criticism. Christ's great confession of Himself in Matthew xi. 27
and its exposition. Only by his Godhead does he offer himself to
the whole lay and laden world. The critical argument and its
fallacy. What is our authority for confining ourselves to the words
of Jesus for His Christianity ? Or even to the Synoptical record ?
Do we have there the whole Christ? We certainly have not the
whole Christ of the first Church, of His Apostles. What is the
ground for going behind them ? Have we the means ? Can the
Christ of the New Testament be got out of the Synoptics ? Or is
the Synoptic Christ quite incompatible with the apostolic ? In
selecting critically from the Gospels, what is to be the standard ?
Christ the Character or Christ the Redeemer? The development
of Christ in the gospels— was it ethical or evangelical ? Herrmann's
severe verdict on theological liberalism.

Synopsis xvii

LECTURE V

THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC INSPIRATION — IN QBNERAL

Was apostolic inspiration simply a high form of the common
faith ? Was it the mark of gifted laymen ? Was it the truest of
tentative explanations of Christ, or had it an element of special
knowledge ? Was it the continuation of Christ's testimony to him-
self? Its place in the evolution of belief, and its relation to
Christ's finality. Distinction between the material and the formal
element in revelation. Inspiration the necessary and integral close
of revelation. The New Testament represents not the first stage
of a new evolution, but the last phase of the revelationary fact.
Illustration from the acts of a legislature.

LECTURE VI

THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC INSPIRATION — IN PARTICULAR

"The fact without the word is dumb; the word without the
fact is empty." The Apostles' own view of their inspiration as
condensed in i Cor. ii. and i Peter i. ii, 12. Their inspiration
was the unique and final interpretation of the unique and final
revelation — the thought about himself of a Christ living in them.
Could the synoptic Christ have produced historic Christianity ?
Genius and inspiration. The Bible is the real successor of the
Apostolate. The authority of the Bible and the authority in the
Bible. A parable.

LECTURE VII

THE TESTIMONY OF EXPERIENCE IN THE SOUL AND IN THE CHURCH

The two streams in current Protestanism, Revelation and
Illumination. The place of experience in Christianity. As nature
is to science so is Christ to faith. The difference between our
experience of a Saviour, and our experience of a Saint. Faith and
impression. What we experience in Christ is a Saviour for the
lay soul and not merely a presence for the mystic adept. That is,
we have one whose action is deeper than the certainty of our self-
consciousnesa. There is no rational certainty which has a right
to challenge moral — and especially the moral certainty of being
saved. The enlargement of personal evangelical experience to the
historic scale of the Church. The first Church could never have
included Christ in his own Gospel unless he had himself done so.
We must take the whole New Testament's Christianity, as prolonged
in the experience of an Apostolic Church. Otherwise we must
think it was a poor Christ who could not protect his followers
from idolatry of him.

xviii Synopsis

LECTURE VIII

THE MORALISING OF DOGMA — ILLUSTRATED BY THE
OMNIPOTENCE OF GOD

Dogma, the intellectual self-expression of a living Church. It
does not exclude but demand criticism — on its own evangelical base.
Melanchthons words. Early dogma was too little lay and moral in
its nature, and too prominently metaphysical, especially in connexion
with Christ's person. We begin here by examining the empirical
ideas of divine greatness and omnipotence. In what sense God is
not omnipotent. The union of two natures in this light and its
unsatisfactory moral results.

LECTURE IX

THE SAME ILLUSTRATED BY THE ABSOLUTENESS OF CHRIST

Let US get at truth whatever happen to tradition, and let us be
exact with terms. Neither common sense nor philosophy gives a
basis for the Incarnation, but at most only points of attachment.
It can only be proved religiously — by the experience of its own action.
The true assent to it is the life-act of faith. Application to religion
of the idea of the absolute. It is an experience — and one open to
all. And an experience of the historic Christ. And of him as final
judge and redeemer. The absoluteness of holy love has other
methods than the philosophic absolute, however adjustable they
may be. " Morality {i.e. experience) the soul of things."

LECTURE X

THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST

As emphasis moves from the Virgin birth, we must go to explain
Christ by His pre-existence. The paucity of allusion in the New
Testament, and the two ways of explaining it. Was Christ at every
hour conscious of all He was ? His pre-existence and its kenotic
renunciation are needful to explain the volume and finality of the
Church's adoring faith. Had Christ an esoteric teaching, reflected
in John ? The pre-existence of Christ cannot be directly verified
by experience as His present life may be. But experience, though
the mode of faith, is not its measure. A Christ who existed for the
first time on earth is not adequate to the classic experience of
the New Creation, and especially to the regeneration of the race.
The chief object of such a doctrine is not philosophical nor even
theological, but religious — to give effect to the depths of the

Synopsis xix

condescending love of God. Jesus the only man in whom the
relation to God constitutes his personality. He embodied not simply
the divine idea, nor the divine purpose, but God's presence with us.
And this He did not by the acquisition of a divine personality,
but by its redintegration through a moral process.

LECTURE XI

THE KENOSIS, OR SELF-EMPTYING OF CHRIST

Some doctrine of kenosis is called for if we hold the pre-existence.
There are difficulties, but it is a choice of difficulties. And they
are more scientific than religious, as they concern the how and not
the what. A series of analogies in the experience of life. Must a
complete self-emptying part with holiness and share our sin ?
Only temptation, and not sin, is truly human. True freedom
possible only to the holy. What then was renounced? Omni-
science, etc. ? The attributes of God cannot be parted with ; but
they may be retracted into a different mode of being, and from
actual become potential. Such a view leaves us untroubled by
the limitations and ignorances of Christ. He consented not to
know, and was mighty not to do.

LECTURE XII

THE PLEROSIS, OR THE SELF-FULFILMENT OF CHRIST V/

A Christ merely kenotic would be but negative. And we must be
positive. In humbling Himself, Christ must realise Himself. And
His self-realisation must mean our redemption. Failure to find this
positivity in the Chalcedonian doctrine of the two natures. Persons
now count for more than natures in an Ethical Faith. It profits
more, therefore, to speak of the involution and fulfilment in Christ
of two personal movements — the manward movement of God and
the Godward movement of man, each personal, and both meeting
and blending in the person of the Son. The growth of Christ's
personality was the growth of human redemption. In His person
the Agent of creation became such a soul as He was wont to make
— for a purpose possible only to Godhead. He was creaturely, but
uncreated — all men's creator in a true man's life. What we really
mean by the Godhead and manhood of Christ.

/

LECTURE I
LAY RELIGION

LECTURE I

LAY RELIGION

The root of all theology is real religion ; of all Christian
theology, and even apologetic, it is Christian religion, it
is saving faith in Jesus Christ. It is justifying faith, in the
sense of faith in a forgiving God through the cross of
Jesus Christ. But this religion cannot be stated without
theology. If theology can be shewn to be irrelevant to a
living and evangelical faith, then the Church can afford
to treat it with some indifference, and to leave its pursuit,
like philosophy, to the Universities. But the Christian
religion is theological or nothing. We are but vaguely
and partially right in saying that Christ is the Gospel.
Years ago to say that was the needful word ; but it is now
outgrown and inadequate. The Gospel is a certain in-
terpretation of Christ which is given in the New Testa-
ment, a mystic interpretation of a historic fact. It is
the loving, redeeming grace of a holy God in Christ and
His salvation alone. Theology, it is true, does not deal
with thoughts but with facts. That is the great note of
modern theology. But the Christian fact is not an
historic fact or figure simply; it is a superhistoric fact
living on in the new experience which it creates. The
fact on which Christian theology works is the Christ of

i

4 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

faith and not of history only, of inspiration and not
mere record, of experience and not of memory. It is
the Christ of the Church's saving, justifying faith.

A Christianity without such faith is not Christianity.
Spiritual sensibility is not Christianity, nor is any degree
of refined unction. A spirituality without positive, and
even dogmatic, content is not Christianity ; nor are
gropings when stated as dogmas ; nor is a faith in the
broad general truths of religion. Christian faith must
surely dogmatise about the goodness of God in Christ, at
the least. A conversion which is but a wave of spiritual
experience is not the passage from death to life. Religion
can only be made more real by a deepened sense of the
reality of the salvation. An access of religion which does
not mean, first or last, a deeper repentance and a more
personal faith in Christ's salvation may be sincere enough,
and it is certainly better than worldliness or unconcern ;
but it is not believing unto life. It is not New Testa-
ment Christianity. And, tender as we should be to it as
a stage, we must be very explicit when it is offered as a
goal. Gentle as we may be to it as a search, we must be
quite plain with those who proclaim it as the great find.
If Claverhouse had developed a mystical piety which
made him deeply sensitive to the devotions of his Church ;
or, if Alva had retired into a monastery and spent his
time in sincere devotion on the exercises of Loyola and
beatific visions ; if they forswore their old aggression,
and melted to their depths at the presence of the sacra-
ment; and if it was all unmingled with a repentance still
more deep, because they had harried the Church of God,
wounded his faithful saints, and crucified Christ afresh,
what would there be in that to place them in the same
faith as Paul, or the same spiritual company ? I remember

I.] Lay Religion 5

Bradlaugh and his violent iconoclastic days, so able,
ardent and ignorant. And he might stand for a type of
others. If such men developed one of those spiritual
reactions which lead some of the unbalanced to a religious-
ness as extreme as their aggression had been ; had a
long-starved soul burst into an Indian summer of mystic
sensibility and abstract piety, which all the time was
little troubled about the old intellectualist arrogance and
ignorant insolence, the rending of Churches, the grief
caused to the old disciples, or the shipwreck made of
many a young faith ; if the new sense of God brought no
humiliation, no crushing, and almost desperate, repent-
ance, curable only by a very positive faith and new life of
forgiveness in Christ and His Cross ; what were the
Christian value of such a piety ? Would such a religion
have much more than subjective worth as a phase of
religious experience more interesting to the psychologist
than precious for the Gospel ?

The essential thing in a new Testament Christianity
is that it came to settle in a final way the issue between
a holy God and the guilt of man. All else is secondary.
All criticism is a minor matter if that be secure. The
only deadly criticism is what makes that incredible ; the
only mischievous criticism is what makes that less credible.
And all the beauties and charms of a temperamental
religion, like Francis Newman's, for instance, or Kenan's,
or many a Buddhist's, are insignificant compared with a
man's living attitude to that work of God's grace for the
world once and for ever in Jesus Christ.

§ § §
A faith whose object is not such a Christ is not

Christianity; at least it is not New Testament Chris-
tianity ; and the great battle is now for a New Testament
c

6 The Person and Place of Jfsns Christ [lect.

Christianity. It is not faith in Christ when we rise no
higher than " just a man, but what a man ! " You cannot
use the word faith in relation to a Christ Hke that. Faith
is an attitude we can take only to God. God is the only
correlate of faith, if we use words with any con-
science. Faith in Christ involves the Godhead of Christ.
Faith in Christ, in the positive Christian sense, means
much more than a relation to God to which Christ
supremely helps us. It is a communion possible not
through, but only m Christ and Him crucified. It means
that to be in Christ is to be in God. It means the ex-
perience that the action of Christ with us is God's action,
that Christ does for us and in us what holy God alone can
do, and that in meeting with Christ we meet with God.
When it comes to revelation, only God could do justice
to God. Theologically, faith in Christ means that the
person of Christ must be interpreted by what that saving
action of God in him requires, that Christ's work is the
master key to His person, that His benefits interpret His
nature. It means, when theologically put, that Christ-
ology is the corollary of Soteriology ; for a Christology
vanishes with the reduction of faith to mere religion. It
means that the deity of Christ is at the centre of Chris-
tian truth for us because it is the postulate of the redemp-
tion which is Christianity, because it alone makes the
classic Christian experience possible for thought. I am
not judging individuals, I speak of types of religion ; and
I suggest that the Christian experience, for the Church
if not for every individual maturing in it, is the evan-
gelical experience, the new creation in atoning forgiveness.
It is not mere love and admiration of Jesus, however
passionate. It is not simply a hearty conviction of the
Christian principle. Nor is it a temper of Christian

I.] Lay Religion 7

charity. When Paul said he had the mind of Christ
he did not mean the temper of Christ ; he meant the
theology of Christ. And by that he meant not the
theology held by the earthly Christ, but that taught
him by Christ in heaven. A reference to i Cor. ii. i6
will show this at once. " Who hath known (by a gnosis)
the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him ? But
we have (by faith) the mind of Christ." That is, of the
Lord, the Spirit.

§ § §

The theology that turns merely on the Christian

principle (taken as distinct from Christ's perennial person)
reduces Christ's character to a far too placid level, which
does not correspond to the passionate Christ of Synoptic
history. Perhaps a one-sided reading of the Johannine
Christ might mislead us to think thus of Him, But his
was no Phidian majesty. He was not calmly, massively,
and harmoniously filled by a principle of divine sonship,
whose peace was as a brimming river ; for a pious sage, a
Christian Goethe, might be that. The sinlessness of
Jesus was not of that natural, sweet, poised, remote, and
aesthetic type. It was not the harmonious development
of that principle of sonship through the quietly deepen-
ing experiences of life— just as His nightly communion
cannot have been simply a blessed and oblivious respite
from the task of each day, but its offering, outspreading,
and disentangling before the Father who prescribed it.
Gethsemane was not the first agony. Each great season
was a crisis, and sometimes a stormy crisis, in which the
next step became clear. There is much truth in Keim's
treatment of Christ's temperament as the choleric. Tiie
sinless certainty of Jesus was the result of constant
thought, passion, and conllict as to his course and victory.

8 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect.

crowned by the crisis of all His crises in the decision and
triumph of His cross. And His power was not quies-
cent, reserved strength alone. It was not monumental.
But it was energy put forth in a positive conflict, in
mortal moral strife for the overthrow of God's enemy,
through the redemption of the race, the forgiveness of its
guilt, and its moral re-creation.

And to such a Christ Christian faith corresponds. It
is not a warm sense of sonship as the crowning form of
natural religion or of a devout temperament. It is not
a frame of reasonable views, benignant charity, patient
pity, and strong repose. It is the experience of having
in Christ, His crisis, and His victory, that salvation,
that pardon, that new life which God alone can give. It
is not looking up trustfully to a loving Father, but giving
one's self thankfully to a redeeming Saviour and His
Father. Again I say I am not speaking of ripening
individuals, but of that corporate, central, and classic
experience which gives the type of every other, makes
the Church the Church, and carries the note of the Gospel.

§ § §
One is tempted sometimes to speak to preachers in this

vein : " Yes, the incarnation is the centre of Christianity,
and you must convince people that it is so. But it is an
intricate question. Its true solution is beyond the
average man. Perhaps you can best accommodate it to
your lay hearers if you take it on the experimental side,
and bid them believe that Christ was God because He
forgives and redeems as God only can. But, of course,
for the real grounds of the belief more deep and philo-
sophic considerations are involved. And these are
beyond you ; they must be left to the Church through
its theologians. And lay faith in the incarnation must be

r.] Lay Religion g

a fides implicita, or the acceptance of something which
experience only indicates, but does not found."

The advice in its first part is good ; but in its second
it is bad and dangerous, and it would put Christ at the
mercy of theological Erahmans. It is quite true that the
scientific treatment of the question leads into regions
where the lay believer is not at home. But these regions
are only the hinterland of that historic Christ within
our personal experience — within an experience where the
believer is not only at home, but has his birth and being
as a Christian. All Christology exists in the interest of
the evangelical faith of the layman who has in Jesus
Christ the pardon of his sins and everlasting life. We
are all laymen here. It is quite misplaced patronage to
condescend to lay experience with the superiority of the
academic theologian or the idealist philosopher, and to
treat such lay experience of the Gospel as if it were good
enough for most, and the only one they are yet fit for,
but if they passed through the schools they would be able
to put their belief on another and better footing. It is
the evangelical experience of every saved soul that is the
real foundation of Christological belief anywhere. For
Christ was not the epiphany of an idea, nor the epitome
of a race, nor the incarnation, the precipitate, of a
metaphysic — whatever metaphysic he may imply. The
theology of the incarnation is necessary to explain our
Christian experience and not our rational nature, nor our
religious psychology. It is not a philosophical necessity,
nor a metaphysical, but an evangelical. Philosophy, on
the whole, is perhaps against it. And the adoption of the
tone I deprecate is but a survival of the bad old time when
we had to begin with a belief in the incarnation (on the
authority of the Ciiurch and its metaphysical theologians

10 Th( Person and Place of Jestis Christ [lect.

as set out in the creeds) before we could have the benefit
of an evangelical faith. It is on the contrary an evan-
gelical faith like a converted miner's that makes any
belief in the incarnation necessary or possible at last.
""We begin with facts of experience, not with forms of
thought. First the Gospel then its theology, first
redemption then incarnation — that is the order of experi-
ence. That is positive Christianity; which isas distinct
from rational orthodoxy on the one hand as it is from
rational heresy on the other.' The mighty thing in
Christ is his grace and not His constitution — the fact
that it is God's grace that we have in Him, and no mere
echo of it, no witness to it, or tribute to it. That is our
Christian faith. And that certainty of the saved experi-
ence is the one foundation of all theology in such
Churches as are not stifled in mediaeval methods or bur- J
dened by their unconscious survival. .

§ § §
It is this unique experience of a unique Saviour who is

the new Creator that we have to urge in the face of every
theory that makes it impossible and of every practice
that would make it nugatory. And at the present day
we have to make it good both in life and in thought — in
life against the mere bustle of progress, and in thought
against a mere procession of evolution that has no goal
already latent at its centre.

The evolutionary idea is certainly compatible with
Christianity ; but not so long as it claims to be the su-
preme idea, to which Christianity must be shaped.
Evolution is within Christianity, but Christianity is not
within evolution. For evolution means the rule of a
levelling relativism, which takes from Christ His absolute
value and final place, reduces Him to be but a stage of

I.] Lay Religion ii

God's revelation, or a phase of it that can be outgrown,
and makes Him the less of a Creator as it ranges Him
vividly in the scale of the creature. There is no such
foe to Christianity in thought to-day as this idea is ; and
we can make no terms with it so long as it claims the
throne. The danger is the greater as the theory grows
more religious, as it becomes sympathetic with a Christ
it does not worship, and praises a Christ to whom it does
not pray. A book so devout as Bousset's Jesus does for
the Saviour what the one-eyed Wotan did so tenderly for
Brunnhilde within the touching Feuerzauber, " Ich kiisse
die Gottheit dir ab," '• I kiss thy Godhead away." To
say that evolution is God's supreme method with the
world is to rule out Christ as His final revelation. It is to
place Christ but at a point in the series, and to find Him
most valuable when he casts our thoughts forward
from himself to a greater revelation which is bound to
come if evolution go on. But when Christ's finality
is gone, Christianity is gone. Yea, and progress
itself is gone. For there is no faith in progress perma-
nently possible without that standard of progress which
we have in Christ, the earnest of the inheritance, the
proleptic goal of history, the foregone sum of the whole
matter of man. Progress without any certainty of the
goal is as impossible in practice as it is senseless in
thought. It is mere motion, mere change. We need a
standard to determine whether movement be progress.
And the only standard is some prevenient form or action
of the final goal itself. Our claim is that for religion the
standard is God's destiny for man, presented in advance
in Christ — presented there, and not merely pictured —
presented to man, not achieved by him — given us as a
pure present and gift of grace — and presented finally there.

12 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Man has in Christ the reality of his destiny, and not a
prophecy of it.

§ § §
We are often adjured to go the whole length of our
Protestant principle by insisting that Christianity is a lay
religion, not a priestly, and by adjusting the form of our
Gospel to the lay mind. But this adjustment is coming
to mean something which provokes a little doubt whether
we have any positive idea of what a lay religion means.
It properly means an experienced religion of direct, indi-
vidual, and forgiven faith, in which we are not at the
mercy of a priestly order of men, a class of sacramental
experts. It is certainty of Christ's salvation at first hand,
by personal forgiveness through the cross of Christ in the
Holy Ghost. It does not mean a non-mediatorial reli-
gion, a religion stripped of the priestly order of acts or
ideas. New Testament Christianity is a priestly religion
or it is nothing. It gathers about a priestly cross on
earth and a Great High Priest Eternal in the heavens.
It means also the equal priesthood of each believer. But
it means much more. That by itself is ruinous indi-
vidualism. It means the collective priesthood of the
Church as one. The greatest function of the Church
in full communion with Him is priestly. It is to
confess, to sacrifice, to intercede for the whole human
race in Him. The Church, and those who speak in its
name, have power and commandment to declare to the
world being penitent the absolution and remission of
its sins in Him. The Church is to stand thus, with the
world's sins for a load, but the word of the atoning cross
for the lifting of it. That is apostolic Christianity.
That is the Gospel. Evangelical Christianity is media-
torial both in faith and function.

I.) Lay Religion 13

But, in the name of a simplicity which is not Christ's,
lay Christianity is ceasing to be even the priesthood of
each believer in virtue of the priesthood of Christ. It is
coming to be understood as the rejection of apostolic,
mediatorial, atoning Christianity and the sanctification
of natural piety — sometimes only its refinement. It is
more preoccupied with ethical conduct than with moral
malady, with the fundamental truths of religion than with
the fontal truths of mercy. And whereas we used to be
able to appeal to our laymen and their experience against
a Socinian and undogmatic and non-mediatorial Chris-
tianity, we can now appeal to them only against a
sacerdotal and clerical. We used to be able to take
refuge from Arianism (to which the ministers of the
Church might be tempted by certain philosophies), in
the evangelical experience of its members. We used to
think that the sense of sin which was lost from the
intellectuals or the worldlings would be found among the
Christian men who were in lay contact with the world,
its temptations, its lapses, and its tragedies. But expe-
rience hardly now bears out this hope. Perhaps the
general conscience has succumbed to the cheap comforts
and varied interests of life ; or the modern stress on the
sympathies has muffled the moral note ; or the decency
of life has stifled the need of mercy; or Christian liberty
has in the liberty lost the Christ. But, whatever the
cause, the lay mind becomes only too ready to interpret
sin in a softer light than God's, and to see it only under
the pity of a Lord to whom judgment is quite a strange
work, and who forgives all because He knows all. It is
on a broken reed we too often lean when we turn from
the theologian's "subtleties" to rely on the layman's
faith. For the layman becomes slow to own a faith

14 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect.

which begins in repentance rather than benevolence.
He is slow to confess a sin that is more than backward-
ness, untowardness, or ignorance. The number grows
of high and clean-living youths who cherish an ideal
Christianity but feel no need for a historic and perennial
Christ. The tendency of the lay mind is backward
to the eighteenth century, to a wise, humane, and urbane
religion, only enlarged by all the ideality and fraternity
that enlarge Deism to modern Theism. It goes back
to a religion of belief in human nature, of spiritual
bonhommie, of vague and kindly optimism, of good
sense, well-doing, and such a sober estimate of the state
of things between God and man as avoids extreme ideas
like curse, perdition, mortal vigilance, or any eternally
perilous edge of life. It is the type of religion which
commends itself to the intelligent, sympathetic, active
and well-disposed young Christian, who would like, above
all things, for righteousness' sake, to be an active
politician, alderman, or member of Parliament. This is
an excellent Christian ambition. May it spread ! But it
is often the ambition of a type of man who tends to
treat positive Christianity as theology, and to regard the
theologian of an Atonement as our fathers did the priest,
or as the Sicilians regard a sanitary officer — to treat
him, at the worst, as a gratuitous sophisticator of things
very ancient, simple, and elemental, or as a mere survival,
now useless or even mischievous. Or it views him, at
the best, as a harmless hobbyist, no better than a philoso-
pher. Such lay religion is ceasing to regard the apostles
with their priestly Gospel of Christ as laymen. It treats
them as theologians, and in so far complicators. It
views them as confusing the lay issue. It would eliminate
the priestly and atoning element from the nature of the

I.] Lay Religion 15

Gospel, for a kind of religion which is but a spiritualising
of the natural man, or a mystic devoutness. It regards
Christ as the most inspired of the prophets of God's
love, the most radical of social reformers, and the noblest
of elder brothers. Whereas, the Church must stand on
Christ the priest, His sacrifice, and His redemption ;
and it could not stand, as it did not arise, upon Christ
the beneficent prophet or noble martyr. And the
condition of our Churches shows that this is so. With
an ideal or a fraternal Christ they dwindle and the
power goes out of them.

§ § §

I am trying to avoid the dogmatism of dogma. But I
am also striving concisely to sharpen the issue, to be
explicit and clear, and to point the choice the Church
must make or go under. And the Free Churches the
first.

Revelation did not come in a statement, but in a
person ; yet stated it must be. Faith must go on to
specify. It must be capable of statement, else it could
not be spread ; for it is not an ineffable, incommunicable
mysticism. It has its truth, yet it is not a mere truth
but a power ; its truth, its statement, its theology, is
part of it. There is theology and "theology." There
is the theology which is a part of the Word, and the
theology which is a product of it. There is a theology
which is sacramental and is the body of Christ, so to
say ; and there is a theology which is but scientific
and descriptive and memorial. There is a theology
which quickens, and one which elucidates. There is a
theology which is valuable because it is evangelical, and
one which is valuable because it is scholastic. It is no
Christianity which cannot say : " I believe in God the

i6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Creator, who, in Christ, is my Almighty Father, Judge
and Redeemer." That is theology, but not " theology."
It is pure religion and undefiled. It is worlds more
precious than any freedom that forwandered spirits deify
in its place. But our laity has not yet learned to
distinguish between these two senses of Christian truth.
They are ghost-ridden. They are obsessed by a mere
tradition of the long gone days, when the theologians
made a hierarchy which only changed the form but not the
spirit of the Roman ; when the Reformation succumbed
to a theological hierarchy instead of a sacerdotal ; when
the laity, who were not professional theologians, had to
take an intricate system from the experts, with an
implicit faith like that of Rome in the old days, or, in
new days, like the implicit faith with which the inexpert
readers swallow the expert critics ; when the laity took
over this faith provided for them, and only made it their
business to see it accepted and carried through into
public life by others equally unable to judge it. What
the laity is suffering from is the feeble afterwash of the
long past days of tests. But the ministry in the main,
and the theologians in particular, have for some genera-
tions now moved forward into another world of things,
another habit of thought, and another kind of authority.
And our competent guides know this. But our laity to
a large extent do not know it, and they are played upon
by those who know just a little more. They are victims
to an anachronist suspicion of an obsolete " theology,"
when they should be confessors of personal faith and its
vital theology, if Christianity is not to be lost in the
sand. It would be a deadly calamity if we were to relapse
to that dogmatocracy, that rule of the professional
theologian, that Protestant Catholicism which half-ruined

I.] Lay Religion 17

Lutheran Protestantism in the seventeenth century.
How great a calamity it would be, we are able to mark,
when we observe the effects of our subjection to-day to
the negative dogmatocracy of the critics, evolutionists,
monists, and socialists who take Christianity in hand in
the interest of dogma which changes its spots but not
its spirit.

§ § §
Lay religion tends to be simple, easy, and domestic
religion, with a due suspicion not only of a priesthood
but even of a ministry. Some sections of it are more
interested in the children than in the ministry. They
believe in schools, hospitals, temperance, boys' brigades,
and all the excellent things the mayor can open ; with
sometimes but small insight and distant respect for the
deeper things that dawn upon the experts of the Soul,
and do not go straight home to business or bosom. It
is preoccupied with righteousness as conduct more than
with faith as life indeed. It thinks the holiness of God
a theological term, because nothing but love appeals to
the young people who must be won. If it only knew
how the best of the young people turn from such
novelistic piety ! And the view taken of sin corresponds.
Sin is an offence against righteousness or love instead of
against holiness ; and it can be put straight by repentance
and amendment without such artifices as atonement. It
just means going wrong; it does not mean being guilty.
The cross is not a sacrifice for guilt, but a divine object-
lesson in self-sacrifice for people or principles. The lay
mind tends to associate a sense of sin with the morbid
side of human nature, or with the studies of men who
are in more contact with a theological past than with a
human present. Christ saves from misery, and wrong.

l8 The Person and Place of Je-us Christ [lect.

and bad habits, and self distrust ; but not from guilt.
He reveals a Father who is but rarely a judge, and then
only for corrective purposes. The idea of a soul absolutely
forfeit, and of its salvation in a new creation, grows
foreign to the lay mind. And the deep root of it all is
the growing detachment of that mind from the Bible, and
its personal disuse.

And this lay religion the pulpit is occasionally tempted
to adopt, partly from wrong education, partly from
poverty of nature or belief, partly from a fear of seeming
to be behind date or out of touch with the pew. While
those preachers who do not thus part with the native
language of the Gospel, and to whom its specialities are
the true realities, are apt to be disheartened, benumbed,
and paralysed in the face of the spiritual self-satisfaction
that confronts them, the this-worldiness, the at-homeness
in human nature. They find no effective fulcrum in a laity
like that for any protest they may make against clerical
priestliness. They find but a platform impatience, and
irritation, and invective. And they begin to ask if clerical
priesthood deserves all the denunciation it gets. They
ask if the clerical priest, by the effect he does give to
the real and distinctive priestliness of Christianity, will
not always be stronger than a lay anti-priestliness of the
unspiritual sort. They would rather spend less time and
fury upon the denunciation of priesthood, and more upon
an effort to make the Churches realise the priestliness
they have all but lost. What shall it profit any Church
to commit suicide to save itself from slaughter.

§ § §
It is probably impossible now to change the lay men-
tality of which I speak in those who are its victims.
But we can perhaps save the next generation for a true

I.] Lay Religion ig

Church. We can teach and act as men who really believe
that it is only a Church of true priests that can withstand
a Church of false ones. It cannot be done by a Church
of no priests, which is indeed no Church. A lay religion,
alien to apostolic and mediatorial belief, can never
make head against the evangelical apostolicity which
may lie deep but potent beneath the errors of sacerdotal
Catholicism.

We have laicised the idea of the ministry by treating
it simply as one of the departments of Christian work.
We have been told that all forms of Christian life are
equally sacred, and that just as good work can be done
for Christ in the Christian pursuit of other walks of life.
And the half-truth there has been so abused and over-
driven that the Churches send their most capable youth
to these other pursuits (often to make proof how false
the notion of their equal sanctity can become) ; and we
tend to a ministry of the mentally and spiritually inferior,
unable to command the strong and capable personalities.
That is one result of the laicising of belief, of the level-
ling of the Gospel to life instead of the lifting of life to
the Gospel. It is the result of erasing the feature unique
in the Gospel, and consequently in the office which
preaches it.

§ § §

In a word, as I say, lay religion is coming to be under-
stood as the antithesis, not of sacerdotal religion, but
of theological, of atoning religion ; that is to say,
really of New Testament Christianity. And so
understood, it has neither power nor future. And
most thorough Christians will move in the end to join
that Church, free or bond, which has most of the

20 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

power, the future, the authority, and the liberty which
are in the Christ of the Apostles, and of the Church.

The greatest of the human race is He who, as the
Holy One that came out from the Father, was a priest
before all else, and who has for His chief object with
the world the ordination of all men in a Church as priests
in Him. He was one to whose sacrifice, atonement, and
prayer mankind owes, daily and for ever owes, its moral
renovation and its divine destiny. Christianity is such
priestly religion ; it is not what tends to be known as lay
religion, or the religion that arrests the well-disposed
man in the street. It is the religion of the common man
who lives on the sacrifice of Christ. If the belief in a
priestly Christianity came to be confined to the ministry,
then spiritual command and influence would, and should,
remain with the ministry, amid whatever errors beside,
amid the errors even of Rome. But lay religion, in the
minimist sense of the word, affectional and ethical
religion, will never save us from the perils of priestly rule.
For it cannot give us our Great High Priest, eternal in
the heavens. And it certainly cannot unite us with Him
in the priesthood of a true Church. They are logical
enough who say that Incarnation, Atonement, Priesthood,
and a Church all hang together ; so that having denounced
an Atonement they must go on to denounce a Church.
But it is more logical still to extend the chain and go on
to say that a Church with all these beliefs is indis-
solubly bound up with the consummation of Humanity
in a Kingdom of God.

§ § §
There is a misunderstanding that is likely enough
here. One might easily incur the charge of being a
laudator temporis acti, and of lamenting the former days

I.] Lay Religion 2i

that were better than these. I would, on the contrary,
Slate my conviction that there never was a time in the
history of the world when there were so many souls bent
on seeing and doing the will of God. There was never
a time when spiritual sympathies and appetites were so
quick and general as to-day, never an age when so
many were set upon the Kingdom of God, and certain
aspects of it were so clearly and widely seen.

A slight knowledge of the past can readily mislead us
here. We too easily transfer the religious eminence of
the historic saints and heroes to the Christian public of
their time, which we view in the golden haze which
radiates from them. But in the Middle Ages of Anselm
and Bernard personal piety was almost confined to the
monasteries and convents. The rest were but institutional
Christians, and members of the Church without being,
or professing to be, members of Christ. Men were religi-
ous in the lump, as tribes often are that are converted
with their chiefs but unchanged in their hearts. And
even when the Reformation substituted personal faith for
wholesale religion the change was realised but by few
beyond the great leaders. The passionate interest and
conflict of the hour was not for personal piety, but for
public liberties, for the right of Gospel preaching, for
freedom of Confession, or for a national Church. And
in all these public ardours there was the greatest danger
of the Reformation burning out, and the old Church
flowing back over its ashes, as public Christianity is en-
dangering us to-day. What saved the Reformation
religiously was the rise of Pietism, which rescued faith
both from the politicians and the theologians. It was
not till then, and but partially then, that the religion of
the Reformation penetrated to masses of people. Had
D

22 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

it done so before, the counter-Reformation would have
been impossible. But before Pietism could fully reach
the large Christian public as personal experience, the
rationalism of the eighteenth century had begun to give
off its widespread chill.

So I venture to say there are more spiritually-minded
people in the world to-day than ever before ; though I
cannot stay to trace the renascence of spirituality from
the century I have named. It is largely due, in this
country at least, to the Evangelical movement, to the
romantic or Tractarian movement, and to the idealist
movement in philosophy, as these are represented by
Low Church, High, and Broad.

But after this admission I also venture to repeat that
Christianity means much more than spiritual appetite or
sympathy. Personal faith means much more than ideal
religion or romantic. These pieties are too subjective, and
they do not contain that which makes Christianity Chris-
tian. The thing that marks Christianity is the objective gift
of God in Jesus Christ. What is the nature of that gift ?
The difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is
a very deep and real one, but it does not turn upon greater
or less spirituality. It is hard to say on which side of
the line you find more of that. They differ upon totally
different conceptions of the gift of God in Christ. Both
Rome and Reformation start from the supernatural gift
in Christ, as every Church must do, else it does not
remain a Church. No Church is possible on a basis of
religion ; it must be a basis of salvation. Both Churches
knew that Christianity must be something more than
religious sensibility, ideal aspiration, beautiful prayers,
the great general truths of our spiritual nature, or even a
passion for the Kingdom of God. Both knew that a

I.J Lay Religion 23

Church and a faith could rest only on a positive revelation
and not a subjective inspiration. They parted when
they came to describe the revelation, the gift, the way
by which the Kingdom must come. That was also what
parted Jesus and Judaism. Both of these lived for the
Kingdom. It was their life passion. But they were a
world apart in the way they believed it must come ; and
the difference was fatal.

And to measure truly the Christianity of an age we
must ask how far it grasps God's true gift, and not how
eagerly or finely it seeks it. What is its conception of
salvation ? What is it that makes it religious ? What
is the object of its religion ? Do not ask, What is its
dream ? or, What is its programme or its piety ? but,
What is its Gospel ? Do not ask, What is its experience ?
Ask what emerges in its experience ? It is not the lack of
religiosity that ails the Church, it is the lack of a Gospel
and a faith, the lack of a spiritual authority and a
response to it.

For the leaders of the Reformation the gift was not an
institution, nor was it vaguely a Christian spirit, but the
Holy Spirit as personal life. It was direct personal
communion with a gracious and saving God in Jesus
Christ. It was direct obedience to his authority.
What they presented to us was a Kingdom finally
won in Christ, and not one yet to be won by any
faith or work of ours. It was what they called "the
finished work," and what is now called the absoluteness
or the finality of Christ. And it is here that, for the
hour, the Church is their inferior. It has fallen from
their evangelical height. The world has gone forward
in its religion, but the Church has gone back in its faith.
Unhappily, the thing in which the world has gone forward

24 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

is of less value than the thing in which the Church has
gone back. Religion is secondary, but positive faith is
primary. We have more religion than ever before — some-
times more than we know what to do with ; do we find
more faith on the earth ? We have more sensibility and
more seeking, but have we more strength, footing, and
command, in proportion ? Have we the old heroes' grasp
of the sure and unspeakable gift ? Have we their experi-
ence of it ? Have we our fathers' experience of it ? Is
it as hard as it should be for us to be patient with those
who deny and destroy it ? Our religion understands
better some aspects of the Father ; does it understand
the only guarantee of His fatherhood — the Redeemer ?
The spread of religion has cost us the depth of it. Its
modern charm has cost us its power. We have vivid
religious interests, but no decisive experiences. We have
fine sympathies, but not a more fearless conscience ; a
warmer ethic, but a poorer courage ; eloquence about
morals, silence about holiness ; much about criticism,
little sense of judgment. The religious crowd has little
discernment of the spirit of its prophets. Our religion
has more moral objects, but less moral interior. It wrestles
with many problems between man and man, class and
class, nation and nation ; but it does not face the moral
problem between the guilty soul and God. It pursues a
high righteousness of its own, but it is too alien to the
righteousness which is of God by faith. It dwells upon
a growing moral adjustment, it does not centre on a
foregone and final moral judgment in which God has
come for our eternal salvation. In a word, as I have said,
we are more concerned with man's religion than with
God's salvation. We compare and classify religions
more than we grasp the massiveness of grace. And we

I.] Lay Religion 25

are more tender with the green shoots of the natural
soul than we are passionate about the mighty fruits of
the supernatural Spirit.

But all this means that a rich soil is forming for the
great new word when it pleases God to send its Apostle.
Only let us be sure that when he comes he will be an
Apostle and not a Saviour, a preacher of the change-
less word to the changed hour, and not a new Christ to
make good something lacking in the old.

Our first business with the Gospel is to understand it.
And our first business with the spiritual situation is to
understand that. Let us go on to try to do both, to
grasp the salvation of God in the religion of man. And
here there is great hope. The critical challenge to Faith
is drawing out the resources cf faith.

§ § §

An ultra-liberalism in a historic religion like Chris-
tianity has always this danger — that it advance so far
from its base as to be cut off from supplies, and
spiritually starved into surrender to the world. If it is
not then exterminated it is interne i in a region ruled
entirely by the laws of the foreign country. Gradually
it accommodates itself to the new population, and is
slowly absorbed so as to forget the first principles of
Christ. It comes to live in a religious syncretism which
is too much at home with the natural man to bear the
marks of the Lord Jesus. This is what happened to
most of the Jews in the Exile.

But there a remnant remained, gathered the closer
round the living word of the Lord, which is so exotic
in the world and yet so charged with the true promise
and life of the world's future. And this is also the effect

26 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

of the ultra-liberalism of which I speak. It elicits a
positive reaction which rallies the Israel of faith.

When we use the word reaction, let us note its two
meanings. It may mean, passively, mere stampede. Or
it may mean reacting positively ; as a chemical reagent
does, in the way of repelling the effect of something else,
and even mastering it. It is often said that the effect of
the reds and ultras of undogmatic religion is reaction in
the passive sense of retreat, in the negative sense of
merely throwing people back in panic to repristinate a
stage which is really long outgrown. But what really
happens with those who grasp the whole situation is not
reaction in the sense of flight to cover ; it is the
deploying of reserves. It is a deeper evolution, under
stress and crisis, of the resources latent in vital faith.
It is a development, adjusted to the new situation, of
wealth previously unrealized within our evangelical
religion. Our depths are shaken to the top. We
discover and work a gold-mine on our hereditary estate.
The hidden riches of our secret power are brought to
light. A new sense dawns on us of the depth, sweep,
and solemnity of the trust God gave us in His Son.
And we wake to feel anew, about the Gospel in which
we slumbered, that God is in this place and we knew
it not.

The heresy that creates the stampede is incompetent
heresy. When the one thing comes lightly the other as
lightly goes. But the beneficent function of competent
heresy is to correct, nay, it is still more to elicit, to
discover the higher truth to itself, and to enhance the
Church's sense of power, even when the time is not ripe
for scientific adjustment.

There is another effect — one of sifting and sobering

I.] Lay Religion 27

within the Church itself. Every crisis has th?j judging,
separating, selective, steadying effect. It makes clearer
and sharper the line between the real possessors of an
evangelical, living, saving faith, and those who are merely
spiritual. It clarifies. And it brings to their feet some y

who may have been but dabbling with belief and toying /
with negation. ^.

When we write off entirely the worldly people who
care for none of these things, and the light people who
trifle with them, the real strife appears to be what it was
in the first century of Christianity in the issue between
Jew and Christian. It becomes the issue between the
men of religion and the men of faith ; between those who
reverence and those who worship Christ ; between those
who beatify Him and those who deify Him; between
those who honour Him, with a certain discrimination
and reserve, and those who trust their whole soul and
world to him for ever and ever ; between those who
treat Him with admiration or even affection, and those
who give him faith — which (I have said) is a thing which
can be given to no created being, even were he created
before the worlds, but to God alone. It is an issue
between those who regard him as the greatest contribu-
tion ever made to the human soul, and those who view
Him as the one consummation and satisfaction of the
holy will of God. We are driven to a vital choice, within
Christianity itself, between an ego-centric and a theo-
centric religion. It is not clear enough when we talk
about a Christo-centric Christianity. Even with Christ
in the centre we must go on to ask a question which
divides Christianity into two streams, one of which ends
in the eternal kingdom of holy God, and the other in the
brief sovereignty of spiritual man. We have to ask, in the

28 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Gospel's interest, whether Christ is central to a glorified
Humanity or to a glorious God ; whether man's chief
end is to develop, by Christ's aid, the innate spiritual
resource of a splendid race, or to let the development
flow from its reconciliation, redemption, and subjection
to God's holy will by Him. What we are developing at
the moment is an anthropo-centric Christianity. God and
Christ are practically treated as but the means to an end
that is nearer to our enthusiasm than anything else — the
consummation and perfecting of Humanity, The chief
value of religion becomes then not its value to God, but
its value for the completing and crowning of life, whether
the great life of the race or the personal life of the
individual. Love Christ, we are urged, if you would
draw out all that is in you to be. Our eye is kept first
upon our self-culture, our sanctification, in some form,
by realising a divine presence or indwelling, with but a
secondary reference to the divine purpose. God waits
on man more than man waits on God. God is drawn
into the circle of our spiritual interests, the interests
of man's spiritual culture, as its mightiest ally and
helper. We have many kinds of effort — some genial,
some ascetic — for the development and deepening of the
soul's life, in some of which the spiritual man is thought
to be a stage higher than the Gospel man. Whereas,
if we forgot our spiritual life after a wise and godly
sort and lived more to God, His finished Gospel, and
that purpose of a kingdom for which Christ died, He
would take better care of our spiritual life than all our
forced culture of it. In a subtle way this tendency is
less Christo-centric than ego-centric. It is monastic.
It is not theo-centric. For in any theo-centric faith
man lives for the worship and glory of God and for

I.] Lay Religion 29

obedience to His revelation of Himself; which is not in

man, and not in spirituality, but in Christ, in the historic,

superhistoric, Christ. Christ is not the revelation of

man, but of God's will for man ; not of the God

always in us, but of the God once and for all for us.

\ Christ did not come in the first instance to satisfy

the needs and instincts of our diviner self, but to

honour the claim of a holy God upon us, crush our guilt

into repentant faith, and create us anew in the act. He

did not come in the first instance to consecrate human

nature, but to hallow God's name in it. He came to

fulfil God's will in the first place, and to fulfil human

destiny only in the second place and by consequence.

These two streams may not seem far apart in their
origin, but they part widely as they flow on. And one
makes glad the City of God and His Kingdom, and the
other is lost at length in the desert. The latter makes
Christ and Christianity to culminate and be exhausted
in the service of man, the former makes their first work
always to be the honour and worship of God. In that
worship man grows to all his destiny, and warms, and
even melts, in perpetual brotherly love and service.
The one makes the centre of Christianity to be the
ideal or spirit of Christ, the other the Cross of
Christ. One makes the Cross the apotheosis of
sacrifice with a main effect on man, the other makes it
the Atonement with its first effect on God. The result
of the latter is a Church ; of the former, a social State
more or less spiritualised, and more or less fleeting.
The latter postulates the deity of Christ, the other but
his relative divinity.

The Godhead of Christ is a faith that grows out of
that saved experience in the Cross which is not only the

30 The Person and Place of Jems Christ [lect.

mark but the being of a church ; so that undogmatic
Christianity is foreign, false, and fatal to any church.
J>The deity of Christ is the necessary expression of such a
church's sense of what God has done for the soul in
Christ. It is the theological expression of the experience
which makes Christianity the experience that when we
commit ourselves in faith to Christ we enter actual
communion with God. God is in us and we in God
when we are in Christ, when we are what Christ makes
us to be. It is upon this experience that the Church
is thrown back in every challenge or crisis. With all its
might the Christian Church repudiates the Unitarian
position of Wernle, that " there is much Christianity
without faith in Christ." Christian men are thus made to
ask if they really have Christ in such a way as to have
God in Him and Him alone. They are made to examine
their personal faith and that of their Church. They are led
to ask if Christ has not been ceasing to be the sacrament
on earth of God's real presence, and becoming but the
prophet or saint of a God remote, however immanent.
They are roused to put such questions as these : Would
it make a real difference to me if Christ were not God, if
in Christ God were not in His world uniquely and once
and for all ? Can the old faith live on its new phase ?
Can we sustain the old worship ? Can we keep near to
a God who is only near to us in an immanent sense ?
Can a Christ who only ministers to the world by giving
it fresh hope and confidence in itself, cure the awful and
growing egoism of the world, or only sublimate it ? Can
our souls find rest in a Christ who only says, " Come
unto Me, and behold what you may be if you are true
to your best self, and true to a divine Humanity, as I
am ? " Such questions are forced on us by the hour ; and

I.] Lay Religion 31

we are driven, by God's grace, to repair a slackness that
was coming upon our communion with Christ, a shallow-
ness too easily exploited by the plausible ; and we are
moved to reduce a distance that was growing between
us, and that failed to alarm us because we dreamily took
our sympathy with Him for our faith in Him.

LECTURE II

THE RELIGION OF JESUS AND THE
GOSPEL OF CHRIST

LECTURE II

THE RELIGION OF JESUS AND THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST

There is nothing we are more often told by those
who discard an evangelical faith than this — that we must
now do what scholarship has only just enabled us to do
and return to the religion of Jesus. We are bidden to go
back to practise Jesus's own personal religion, as distinct
from the Gospel of Christ, from a gospel which calls him
its faith's object, and not its subject, founder, or classic
only. We must learn to believe not in Christ, but with
Christ, we are told.

But the innovator has always the burden of proof;
and the first question we must ask our adviser here
is, what is meant by the religion of Jesus ? Have you
in view his popular doctrine or his personal piety ?
Was it the religion he presented in his vocation, or
that which he cherished in his most private soul ? Do
you mean that our religion should lie in following his
popular teaching, or should it lie in reproducing his own
personal faith ? F^or the word religion is somewhat
ambiguous. If you mean the doctrine he taught us, then
you treat him as no more than a prophet of the most high
and earnest kind. But he was more than teacher and
preacher. He was a personality. However lofty that

35

30 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

treatment of Jesus as a prophet may be, it is, on the whole,
a lower spiritual level than is taken when we view him as
a saint, whose grand legacy is his inner self, with its per-
sonal and intimate faith lying behind the greatest things he
said to such audience as he had. It is otherwise with us.
All the great Christian teachers impress us with the fact
that their teaching is far ahead of their experience,
and that they built better than they knew. Even Paul
preached a Gospel greater than anything he attained in
his own soul. He was apprehended of what he could but
imperfectly apprehend. Whereas our impression from
Christ is just the converse. His personal experience is
far greater than anything he said or could say to his
public. All he said rose, indeed, from his own experience ;
for he was no lecturer. But also it is all less than his
experience. He received from none the Gospel he spoke.
He found it in himself. Indeed it was himself. He only
preached the true relation between God and man because
he incarnated it, and because he established it. But, as
we have his teaching, it is only a partial transcript of
himself, of his whole self as the Cross and its Apostles
revealed him. And therefore you cannot treat him as
teacher alone. You cannot do so even if you take his
teaching itself. The doctrine carries you beyond a doctor.
He was a part of his own Gospel. He could teach nothing
without indirectly teaching himself. This is so, apart
from the fact that He did directly declare himself to be
our Judge, Redeemer and King, the sole determiner of our
relation to God ? So that the religion taught by Jesus,
brings us face to face with his soul who taught it, as him-
self more momentous for our destiny than anything he
taught. Jesus the saint, even if he go no higher, is more
for us than Jesus the prophet.

ii.J The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 37

We are thus carried within the doctrine to the saint,
from the public message to the private faith. We have
to copy that faith, it is said, even more than we have to
accept and obey those teachings, and the change repre-
sents the great difference between the old rationalism
and the new.

But here, again, great difficulties arise. If by the
religion of Jesus, which we are to reproduce in our
degree, is meant his most private and intimate relation
with the Father, two things must be said.

(i). We have few data.

(2). And the data that we have put it beyond us.

(i). We have few data. We have no information
whatever about the form taken by the communion of
Father and Son. How far it was what we call a revela-
tion from soul to soul, or how far it was the thrill along the
line, as it were of a common being — how far it was a God-
consciousness and how far a self-consciousness of God — we
are not informed. It was the secret of Jesus alone.
And he kept it. Not by breaking that reserve must his
religion act on men. His innermost experience was
certainly engaged in our service, but the steps of the
process are inaccessible to us. It is a mystery what took
place on the nightly mountain tops, in the far interior of
his soul, where his strength was perpetually renewed, his
vision cleared, and his decisions made. The religion of
Jesus in that sense was absolutely his own. What he
was for God it was not for man intimately to know. We
are blessed in what he did.

(2). And this is farther clear from the data we have.
Especially from such a passage as Mat. 11, 27. " No
man knoweth the son but the father, neither knowcth
any man the father but the son, and he to whom the sou

£

38 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [r,ECT.

wills to reveal Him." This alone puts our faith, our
sonship through Jesus, on a quite different footing from
his, which was through none. The data we hive put
the personal religion of Jesus beyond us, except in so far
as he might reveal it. And the only form in which he
revealed it was in the exercise of his public vocation.
He had esoterics, perhaps, but no confidants — not even in
Gethsemane, where we have but a corner of the veil lifted ;
and that not in a confidence, but in a soliloquy indifferent
about being understood. Some even think the passage
in Matthew xi. 27 a soliloquy rather than an instruction.
His inmost experience was not a thing transferable in
itself. In so far as Fatherhood should come to us at all it
could only come by appropriating the Son, and not by cul-
tivating Sonship, not by repeating the Son's experience.
For he could not be repeated. " Me ye have not always."
Such was the nature of the revelation he had from God —
that it could only be man's according as man was in him —
not directly, as his own knowledge was, but only through
him. No one was for Jesus with the Father what he must
be for all, he had a relation with God, he had dealings with
God, which were not a part of his vocation with men,
but the ground of it, and its condition — ^just as we, his
preachers, have dealings with him which are no part of
our service of his church, and must not be flung before
our public.

§ § §
It has been lightly said that there is no sin against God

but the sin we commit against our brother ; which seems

to imply that for the soul there is no relation with God,

and no practical duty owed Him by the soul and refused,

except that of the love or service of man. It is surely

forgotten what is the first table of the Christian Law.

n.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel oj Christ 39

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and soul, and will, and mind." That is the greatest
of acts. And the love of our neighbour is but the
second thing. Have there been no cases where God was
defrauded of his first claim on man, while the second was
even more than met ? Have there been no men — are
there none — who have loved, served, and helped man with
the devotion of a lifetime, while they never were fired or
lost in love of God, and never gathered strength from
reposing in a complete trust in Him, and leaving men in
His hands ? Is our first duty to humanity not to commit
it to God ? Are there none to-day, blameless in all the
service of their kind, for whom there can be waiting
nothing but condemnation in respect of the love and
communion they denied to a God Who sought that above
all else, and Who had the first right to both trust and
worship ?

There is a devotion to God, and to God in Christ,
which calls lor the spikenard of our secret souls at the
cost even of some oblivion of the obvious poor. And to
refuse that claim, if the claim be good, is surely no light
sin ; for it defrauds God of the first of His rights over
us, and of our response to His personal and private love.
There is a life within the life of service, and within the
fellowship of humanity, which is in the long run the
condition of all the best human service and the most
patient human pity. Without it the enthusiasm of
humanity dies. Christianity becomes a fine and fading
Positivism ; and Positivism is unable to bear the strain
of the world's grief and guilt. The fierce impatience of
many who love men not wisely but too well, because they
love them more than God, is proof how little the soul can
be stayed upon public service, or its spiritual ritual
exhausted in bencticeuce.

40 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

So also within the soul of Jesus at its centre, and
throughout his whole life, there was an obedience and a
communion which was a charge on him, and a joy, prior
to all the blessing he shed on men. His first and inmost
relation was to his Holy Father whose name he had to
hallow before all else. That holiness in its love was his
supreme revelation. So much so that the one and only
thing he could do at last, even for the men who refused
him, was the hallowing of that name, and the perfect
honouring and atoning of that supreme sanctity in his
steadfast experience even unto death. Nothing he did on
man could do so much for man at last as his hallowing and
satisfying, as man, of God's holy soul.

But about that whole region Christ was almost entirely
silent. We have it but indirectly. He only said as much
as lets us know it was there, and supremely there. And
it is so easy, therefore, for those who come to these
records with but the critical or the humanitarian tact, to
miss it ; and to declare with great plausibility that it was
not there, and was only imported by apostles who fixed
it upon their master in a way that, had he lived, he would
have lived to repel. The secret of the Father was
with the Son alone. No man knew why the Father
had chosen Jesus of Nazareth. And Jesus believed
in his sonship for reasons entirely between his Father
and himself, for reasons quite past us. We believe
in the Father because of Christ ; why he believed
in the Father he has not told us. We are here at
an ultimate. We may gauge the meaning of his
public Messiahship as we can never pierce the sonship
that underlay that expression of it. For that sonship
there was an inner condition in his nature, a native and
unique unity with God, which all Christology is but an

II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 41

imperfect attempt to pierce. He knew the Father's love,
and he was himself pure love, without the alienation,
the self-will, the sin, that not only removes us far from God
but severs us. For the peculiar revelation of his Father's
iawe there was in Christ a peculiar being. But two things
here are greatly dark. We cannot trace either the steps
by which the Son became incarnate, or those by which
Jesus arrived at the consciousness of his unique sonship,
and reached that perfect certainty and clarity of it which
shines in all he said or did. Neither history nor
psychology gives us the means of sounding such mys-
teries. The analogy of our own religious experience
fails us here; and scientific inquiry is arrested for want
of objective material. But when we consider what he is
to our practical faith ; when we reflect on his Church's
experience of him, and feel how far it is beyond either
our analogy or our induction ; when we remember, indeed,
how far faith is from having a parallel in any other expe-
rience or process of the soul whatever ; we are driven to
conclude that that sense of himself, as one who could be
neither paralleled or repeated, had a superhuman foun-
dation. The last roots of his unique experience lay in a
nature as unique; from which it grew in an organic way,
with the kind of free necessity which belongs to that
spiritual region of things.

§ § §

Let us observe what is the effect of the most recent views
about the origin of Christianity upon this point, upon the
plea that the first form of Christianity was the so-called
religion of Jesus. I refer to the new religious-historical
school of Germany. At the present hour it is not the
evolution of the biologists or the anthropologists that
need give us much concern. Any fear once entertained

42 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

of these is now outgrown. Our real concern begins when
the evolutionary principle is carried into the history of
religion ; when it is made to organise the new knowledge
drawn from psychology and comparative religion, and
to organise it with the same confidence with which, in
the levels of biology, the new knowledge was once
organised into an evolutionary doctrine declared to
be the world's explanation come at last. Religion,
it is now said, is evolution which has reached spiritual
pitch. The various religions represent various stages
in the ascent. Each religion is the best for the social
stage it covers. No religion is final. And so, with
the end of any absolute or final religion, there is an end of
much that troubles the world, for instance of Missions at
least. For Christian Missions cannot live upon improving
the heathen, but only on passing them from death to life.
But the crisis is concentrated when we come to the
religions that surrounded Israel, and especially Christ.
They really supplied, it is said, those ideal elements that
have done most to make Christianity so powerful in his-
tory. There is, of course, it is said, no denying the historic
reality of some prophetic Christ, of great ethical and spi-
ritual power. But the Christ of Paul, of the New Testament
generally, the Christ of the first ages of the Church, the
incarnate, the atoning, the judging, the redeeming, the
adored, the glorified Christ, the Christ of the Apostles,
the Sacraments, and the Church is described as a syn-
'"*- ^ crgtjsjiL He is not the inner Christ revealed but a
- ■a/«. compounded Christ put forward. He is a splendid column
of spray sent up by the collision of east and west, of
Judaism and the farther East, of prophetism and
gnosticism. It is impossible to believe. Relativism will
not allow us to believe, that " the Holy God was a con-

II. J The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 43

temporary of Augustus." The deification of a Roman
Emperor or the worship of the Buddha is to religious
psychology intelHgible enough. We rate such things at
their proper anthropological value. And in the like
valuation we must now include the worship of Christ.
There was a certain psychological necessity in it — men
being what they are — but no theological reality. The
dream of a Christ was afloat on the age in various forms.
Spiritual history had been conceived by fantastic oriental
mysticisms as a redemptive drama. Gnostic notions of
strange and heavenly beings created a whole ascending and
descending hierarchy of occult redemptive influences.
These more or less naturalistic dreams and longings were
drawn to Judaism for a stay, with its supernatural genius
and its ethical salvation. And they found a fruitful point
of attachment for the great aeon in Jesus with his ethic,
his healing, his love, his obedience, his religious insight,
his spiritual genius, his powerful personality. And so we
explain the rise of a whole religion of man's mediated
union with the heavenly being; but so, also, we find such
a creed impossible as a revelation, however explicable by
the laws of historic development in the spiritual region
of man's nature. Israel's national spirituality was hypo-
statised into a Christ decorated by pagan idealism with
cosmic powers. For it is quite impossible, it is said, from
the meagre relics about Jesus left us by criticism, to con-
struct the kind of Christ that grew out of Jesus, without
importations from other sources. Thus Christianity is
really a religion of general spiritual truths, developed by
man in aspiration, and not of special facts willed by God
in revelation. It need hardly be said that such an explana-
tion of Christianity is entirely fatal to its survival, except
as an old phase of religious development which has its

44 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

uses still, and as a fine but passing product of the
spiritual genius of the race now essentially outgrown.

§ § §
We shall, however, leave for the present the discussion
of these theories in order to exhibit their bearing on the
matter we have in hand — the first form of Christianity
to which we have access. There is one great service
which this religious-historical school has rendered. It
has destroyed the fiction of the igth century that there
was ever a time in the earliest history of the Church
when it cultivated the religion of Jesus as distinct from
the Gospel of Christ. The school, of course, may believe
itself able to insulate that religion of Jesus and cultivate it,
to disengage it from the Gospels by a critical process, and
preach it to a world pining for a simple creed rescued
from the Apostles. That is another matter which I do
not here discuss. But it is a great thing to have it
settled that, as far as the face value of our record goes,
and apart from elaborate critical constructions of
them, such imitation of the faith of Jesus never existed
in the very first Church ; but that, as far back as
we can go, we find only the belief and worship of a
risen, redeeming, and glorified Christ, whom they could
wholly trust but only very poorly imitate; and in his
relation to God could not imitate at all. It does not of
course follow that the first Church was right in this
respect. That is not the point at present. They might
have been doing Jesus an injustice in regarding him as
they did. They might have been, the Apostles in particular
might have been, so misled by contact with him, that their
mystical enthusiasm could not be quite fair to his more
modest claims. They might have been superstitious
hero-worshippers. They might, through their very

II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 45

proximity to Christ, be in a state of faith as inchoate
and plastic as their theology ; it would run into any
mould their environment might supply; and they might
be the victims of a religious crudeness from which we can
only escape now, at this remote but enlightened distance
of time. They may have been, without knowing it, the
prey of beliefs and longings which were floating in the
air of the age ; beliefs which, to their poor eyes, seemed
to radiate from the master, but which were really only
settling down on him, covering and clouding him. And
it may be that only now, by the methods of critical
science, we are in a position to tell them that they were
quite wrong about all that marked him off from the
holiest prophet, and about all that went to make the
Christian Church and its experience. That may all be
so. But it is not the point for the moment ; which is,
that this school has made it impossible now to say that
the earliest Church had a view of Christ far more simple
and more religious than any which makes him the
Eternal Son of God, and the centre of the world's drama
of redemption. We can no longer say that its faith was
a faith in God like that of Jesus, and not a faith in
Christ as true God. That plea may, perhaps, be con-
sidered to be silenced. We may for ourselves edit the
faith of the first Church in that interest of a simple piety,
but we cannot now say that the faith so edited (and
emptied) was that of the first Church. It is recognised
that what we may call Pauline Christianity was the
faith of the first Church we know anything about, and
even of the Evangelists. All which helps to clear the
ground.

§ § §
If we were to go to criticism of the position of tiiis

46 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

school we should have to point out that the theological
features it rejects were in Christian faith before it be-
came acted on by influences definitely gnostic ; that the
oriental Gnosis in question did not begin to affect the
Church, so far as we know, till the second or third
generation ; by which time its faith in Jesus as Messiah
and Lord, Redeemer and glorified, sacrifice and Saviour,
was well secured — as indeed there never was a time
when it was not secured, after the grand recuperation of
Easter and Pentecost. It is not as if the apostolic
construction of Jesus was a thing of slow growth,
gathering in the outside influences of Judaic theology,
and gradually changing Jesus into Christ. For it has
often been remarked that one of the chief evidences of
the resurrection of Jesus was the otherwise quite inex-
plicable change which lifted the company of disciples
from despair to a faith, hope, and joy the most trium-
phant and permanent in history. It is only turning the
same fact to another angle to say that the suddenness of
the Church's faith in an atoning, redeeming, glorified,
eternal Christ is quite unintelligible unless there was that
in Jesus which made it inevitable as soon as the whole
range of his work was finished, and the total scope of
his person realised. It is not credible that the disciples
of Jesus should have changed to apostles of Christ without
the Resurrection ; nor can it be believed that despair should
have turned to joyful worship had they not, by the new light,
discovered something in the Jesus they knew which
could be confessed in no other way than by worshipping
him as the God they had been brought up to know ;
which there is no doubt from the New Testament they
did.

§ § §

II.] 7' he Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 47

There is another thing. The Gnostic systems which
are regarded as providing the theological material of a
supernatural Christ had this common feature. Their
spiritual universe was an elaborate provision for an
absentee God. Their object was to secure the supreme
God as far as possible from contact with the world, or
even proximity to it, by providing hosts of intermediary
aeons, emanations, and the like. That was the genius of
their systems, among whatever variations in detail. I
confess that in these systems, so far as I know anything
about them, I find much that is attractive, much that is
more congenial to the modern and idealist mind than
the somewhat stiff mentality of the Apostolic Fathers,
or the Christianised philosophy of the Apologists with
their logism. The Gnostics had what these had not.
They had Geist. They had spiritual imagination and
subtlety. And it strikes a more modern, spiritual, and
universal note than all the pagan philosophy which was
discovered by the Apologists to underlie the Gospel of
Christ. The Gnostics were really obsessed with the idea
of Redemption — which always tends to vanish when it is
the chief business of the Church to produce political
apologists, or to commend itself to the State or the
public by showing how long men have been Christians
without knowing it, and how much more deeply
Christian they have been and are than they feel. There
is much in the old Gnosticism which comes home to the
weary Titan of the modern mind. But one thing there
is which does not appeal to us of these Christian days.
And it is a thing that we should have expected to find
repelling us in the New Testament if its theology had
been constructed under gnostic influences. I mean that
gnostic effort to keep the divinest in the divine as far as

48 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [i.ect,

possible from real contact with the world, while his agent
at several removes fills the foreground. We find the
tendency even in pre-Christian Judaism with its hosts
of angels. But it is just the opposite that we discover in
the New Testament, and especially in its Pauline and
Johannine parts. Its Christ does not come between us
and God, either as prophet, teacher, or saint. He brings
God. God is in him. He does not darken deity, or
push deity away. Whatever may be said of the crimes
of some later theologians in that way, it cannot be said
that the total effect either of the New Testament or its
Christ has been to banish God from humanity. Quite
the other way. The immanence of judgment in life (to
take no more than that), the moral continuity and
sequacity of life here and hereafter, the award for deeds
done in the body — the Church's insistence on these
things has neutralised the effect of a heaven or
hell which it made too remote, and has kept God in
man's life. The central object of the systems said
to be syncretised into Christian theology has been
not only ignored, but defeated by New Testa-
ment Christianity. God is brought near both theo-
logically and experimentally. And He has been brought
near to all. Christ did not enable certain promising
classes of men, by escaping from their first gross and
hylic condition, to rise to the supreme God and his far
country. But this high God was in Christ, not creating
Christ, and not emitting Christ at some removes, but
present in Him, acting and suffering in him, reconciling
the world, making men sons only in this His son, and
giving them an intimacy of communion as far from their
old alienation at the one end as from mere fusion of
being at the other.

1 1. J The Reltgio7i of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 49

And if it be said that Gnosticism was so modified and
made innocuous by passing through the best Judaism on
its way to Jesus as to produce this change, one asks
whether any syncretism with the effect of a distinctive
religion could possibly take place between the work of
Jesus, viewed as the lofty ethical imperative of his grand
individualism, and the myth of redemption as Gnosticism
presents it.

§ § §

Much that is of permanent value has been done by the
religious-historical school. Criticism is our triend and
not our enemy in its place. It is a good servant but a
deadly master. It becomes our enemy only when it
aspires from being an organ of Evangelical faith to be its
controller. Now as of old the Church has to listen to
the thought, the science, that grew up in it and around it ;
but it has to accept or reject it not according to its
rational value, but according to its compatibility with
the central life and experience of redemption which makes
the Church. The school I name takes, indeed, too much
on itself when it dissolves into syncretistic myth the
version of Christ that has made the Church, and goes
behind even the Jesus of the Gospels to reduce him to
the limits of a spiritualised rationalism. If the extreme
critics are right with the Jesus they construct scientifi-
cally from the records, then we know the real Jesus
rather in spite of the New Testament than by it. But
all the same they have done much fine and new work.
They have greatly vivified the New Testament. They
have helped to clear up some of the relations between
Paul or John and the Gnostic influences these apostles
had to deal with. They have made it more clear than
before that influences which could not create Christ

50 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

yet prepared for him and formed a calculus to express
him ; that he gave voice to much that was tongue-
tied in the aspiring world, and revealed the thoughts
of many hearts ; that he came in a fulness of time to
be the key of a world of which he was not the product,
and to answer questions which if he do not answer he
only aggravates. For it should be more clear than it
is to many that by his fate he does aggravate the problem
of life if he do not answer it.

But we should not avoid the real issue raised by
the school — Did the New Testament faith, the apostolic
faith, in Christ make Christianity, or was it made by
Christianity ? For the answer represents two distinct
religions. The evolution, the relativism, that makes us
to outgrow the New Testament Christ will also carry
us beyond the religion of Jesus, and the cult of Fatherhood.
Christianity itself will become but a stage, even on its ethical
side. Its Fatherhood of God will be merely a spiritual idea
of great but passing value. The Father will come to appear
but a shimmering, fleeting, and perhaps credulous symbol
of an unknown Hinterland capable of we know not what.
It will be a symbol, also, not unmixed with an alloy of illusion
for practical purposes. And as these purposes are effec"
ted in the moral march of man out of old Judea, and as
the illusion can be safely dropped, the idea may pass into
another idea which supersedes it ; but an idea which may
also round upon it, and destroy it, as it, in its day, de-
stroyed the passionate gods of the pagan pantheon. The
Father God may go the way of the despot God when the
paternal conception has worked out its happy moral
effect ; and it may yield its place to the monistic substi-
tute which moves altogether if it move at all ; which
moves to pessimism, racial suicide, and finally the

II. J The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 51

suicide of God ; and which meaning to move on the
whole to righteousness, moves only to whatever righteous-
ness may be made to mean in the absence of an abso-
lutely righteous and Holy One who has given a revelation
of Himself as final as the problem is universal.

§ § §
To imitate the religion of Jesus is to cultivate an order
of piety absolutely different from the entire tradition of
the Christendom created by the Gospel of Christ, a
tradition which became most explicit in evangelical
Protestantism. And though tradition may have less
weight in systematic theology, (which is a branch of
science, and so far progressive in its nature,) in the
region of piety we are in the most conservative part
of us, where tradition means and ought to mean most.
In any faith the type of its religion is far more stable
and continuous than its dogmatic form. And a real and
great reformation is so much more than a reconstruction
according as it affects this type. It is much easier to change
a whole theology than to change the type of a religion, to
change faith where it appeals to the most permanent
elements of the soul. Now in the great Lutheran
Reformation, which changed the religious type much
more than the theological or even ecclesiastical, there
was one thing that was not changed but only deepened,
and that was the necessity of repentance for a truly
Christian faith. It was on the matter of sin, repentance,
confession and absolution that the whole Reformation
movement turned. And its effect was to lay a stress
unprecedented upon what had always been a central
affair of Christianity — a religion of repentance and for-
giveness. Roman, Greek and Protestant Christianity
are here at one. And the declaration now that

ja The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Christianity consists in imitating at a reverent distance
the reh'gion of Jesus only shows that we are in the
midst of a movement and an apostacy more serious
than anything that has occurred in the Church's history
since Gnosticism was overcome.

For if the religion of Jesus means the state of his own
consciousness there is there no trace of repentance, how-
ever far we go back in pursuit of his experience. On the
other hand, if we take the teaching of Jesus, he was upon
this matter of repentance most insistent. Without
it all must perish. Was he, then, practising one
type and prescribing another ? Can it be doubted ?
But if he prescribed a repentance he never
felt, and could not feel, then he was destroying
in advance any suggestion that our religion was his own
at several removes. He was destroying the idea that
ours could be a filial and uplooking piety as free of
repentance as his own. He was setting up for us a type
different from his own, though one which was made
possible for us by his own alone. And the whole faith of
the Church has recognised the deep and vital distinction.
Has there ever been an influential man in the Catholic
Church who could say that his type of religion has
more in common with that of Christ than with that of
Peter, Paul and John ?

The tendency to ignore this distinction, and to make
classic for Christians a type of faith in which sin is
converted into immaturity or ignorance, and repentance
becomes but regret — that tendency is at the root of all
that does most to weaken and secularise the Churches
to-day ; and its exponents are moral reactionaries.
They teach a paganism which, however refined in them,
will not remain refined for long in those they persuade.

II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 53

Faith is ceasing among many of the rehgious to be peni-
tential faith ; and this is a lack that no mere spirituality
can fill. It is a mere sympathetic faith, or a faith of heroics,
like Peter's ignorant boast that he would never desert
his Master. And it will have Peter's end. No mere
faith in a Master can ensure that we shall not betray him
under sufficient pressure. "Though all men forsake
Thee yet will not I." "I know not the man." The
boast was sincere enough, sympathetic and shallow
enough. From a platform it would have swept the
house. But Christ knew men. His deepest insight was
into religious sophistication. And he put the avowal by
him. He weighed it at its true worth. Then came the
days of horror and humiliation, when Peter lay in a
deeper grave than Christ. That is the kind of humilia-
tion that is being prepared for a slight and facile faith.
And the only hope for us then is in the Resurrection
light upon the Cross. Our only hope is not simply in a
deepened spirituality chastened by error. A chastened
piety is not the Christian faith, else Martineau were its
great modern prophet. Our only hope is to be rooted in
repentance, grounded in forgiveness, established in a
redemption, and quickened in a real regeneration. It
is that we may be " regenerated to a living hope by the
Resurrection of Christ from the dead " (i Peter i. 3).
I have used these words not as a mere quotation, but
because they are Peter's own account of his experience
of what made him a Christian for good. It was the
word of the risen Saviour " Tell my disciples and Peter''
that raised him from the lying and perdition of those
awful days to a life he never lost. It was this that
translated him into a confession deeper than that of his
sin, that that same Jesus he had crucified was both

F

54 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Messiah and God (Acts ii. 36). It was no remembrance
of Christ's teaching and no emulation of Christ's
religion that brought that to pass.

Our talk of sin is palpably ceasing to be the talk of
broken and contrite men. It has no note of humilia-
tion in it. Our pious heart does not meditate terror.
We are not frightened at ourselves. We have a softness,
but not the sacred tenderness that comes from that
humiliation alone. It has not the patience, the love of
the brotherhood, the passion to serve the Church instead
of correcting and scourging it, which come over the
hearts of men taken from the jaws of death, nay
raised from its abyss. Our speech of sin has not behind
it the note of " my sin, my sin ! " And in consequence
our thought and speech of Christ loses the authentic
note of " My Lord and My God." We do not know an
"eternal sin" and an awful Redemption, and therefore
we do not know an Eternal Redeemer in the Christ we
praise. That Redeemer must prevail ; but his Kingdom
and its service may be taken from us and given to others.

§ § §
But, it is said, this is the religion of judaised apostles;
it is not the religion of the gospels, which knows repent-
ance, to be sure, but does not grow out of it as a native
soil. Well, let us ask if that be so. If we turn to
the Synoptics with their reflection of the apostles' religion
(which is the only religion we can copy) what do we
find the type to be ? It is a continuous confession of the
sinless Christ by sinful men. Like all the deepest con-
fession of Christ, it is a confession not of religion but of
sin and salvation. Everything these narratives say is to
glorify such a Christ ; and they miss no chance of con-
fessing the stupidity and the wickedness of the men who

II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 55

wrote them (or who were at the writer's ear), stupidity
and wickedness not only continued up to the very end,
but contributing to the crisis and the catastrophe. These
gospels form an apostohc confession of unfaith to all
time. They confess their Lord in a form which, like the
epistles also, is a confession of faith carrying an unspar-
ing confession of sin. The apostles always denounce sin
in the spirit of confessors of it — which is a very safe rule
for denunciators. It is the confession of men to whom
their sin and its forgiveness by Christ was so serious and
central that it was a new creation and passage from death
to life. It is the confession of men so centrally changed
by this forgiveness that, while their sin is blacker than
ever, they can write of it almost as if it were not theirs ;
so thoroughly are they severed from it by their new
Creator. To see in the apostolic expressions about the
meaning of Christ's death nothing but dogma, and no
tremendous witnesses of an unutterable new life — are we
harsh if we say that that is a confession of spiritual
trance, if not decadence.

At least it is no wonder that such eyes should fail to see ^
in the Saviour the Incarnate God. For it is only on the
experience of a Redeemer from eternal death into eternal
life that the New Testament witness of Christ's Godhead
rests. And it is only the same experience that has pro-
longed that witness in the Church. The Gospel of Jesus
made the " Religion of Jesus" impossible. For it made
the first Christians worship in the Holy One of God the/>-
very Holiness of God. And for the religion of to-day
there is not hope till, by grace or judgment, by repent-
ance or calamity, we get over the levity of modern
liberalism, and restore repentance to the foundation of
our faith. No faith born in true repentance could speak

56 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

of our all being " sons of God " like Christ. Nor can we

hear without fear and grief such words from Christian

men.

§ § §

We come, then, to our communion with God not along
with Christ, and in like fashion with Christ, but through
Christ, and in him. We do not believe with him, or
by his help, but in him. We believe in Him ; and in
Him it is that we have our power to believe. He is
not only faith's object but also faith's world. He
becomes our universe that feels, and knows, and
makes us what we are. Deep as the thirst for God lies
in the soul, nowhere but in Christ do we have the
communion that stills it. The communion, I say, and
not merely the union, the fusion, the co-mingling, of
which the high mystic dreams. Truly it is a mystic
communion. The possession of God is sure for every
age and soul only in Jesus Christ as its living ground,
and not merely by Christ as its historic medium. The
historic prophet is our Eternal priest. All other union
is partial, occasional, not for life, but for moods and
hours. To live in the love of God is, indeed, a passion,
and from time to time an experience, perhaps, of high
gifted souls. But only by faith in Christ does it cease to
mark certain fitful seasons or favoured groups, and
become a public possession and a constant life. It is
impossible to live the religion of Jesus, because there are
not in us the conditions there were in Jesus for God to
reveal Himself directly, completely, and finally. He
cannot do this mighty work because of our unbelief.
But the belief which makes our sonship possible He gives
us in the gift of Christ and Christ's action upon the soul.
The superhistoric personality of Jesus was the only human

11.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 57

personality to whom God could fully reveal himself as
the Holy and absolute Father. Therefore that personality,
condensed, realised, and pointed in his cross is our only
way to the final certainty of such a Father. True, it is
not the only thing that makes us crave for a Father in
heaven ; nor, perhaps, the only thing that fills us at times
with the great surmise and voluminous intuition that it
is so. For many experiences in fine lives may raise us
to that conviction for the time. But Christ crucified is
the only power that makes it for us a life-certainty, a
new and sure life, a new life-principle, a new creation,
with no more doubt and no more denial for ever.
Whatever clouds may dim the radiance of our day from
time to time there is no night there. And however the
flush of elation may subside, and the sense of God's
nearness abate, there is no more dividing and estranging
sea. And why ? Because in Christ God not only comes
near to us but by an eternal act makes us His own. We
hold for ever only because here we are seized and held
by the Eternal. God has, by the resurrection of Christ,
regenerated us into a living hope; He has not simply
given us a living hope that we may one day be
regenerate (i P. i. 3). Any living hope we have is the
action of Christ's resurrection in us. Prophets, and
even men of genius, can by their message bring us
near to God, but they cannot permanently keep us there,
or cure that rebound and reversion in which our soul
gravitates to earth and cleaves to the dust. Nothing can,
till we are quickened by that unique, living, and Eternal
word wherein God comes near to us in very presence and
act, and not in message alone. He comes near and
makes us His own. Others can impress us with
God; in Christ God creates us anew. Others by their

58 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

very purity may make us doubt whether we have any
right to approach a Holy God who is only too sure to us
for our peace ; but in Christ such misgivings are
submerged in the discovery that He has taken the matter
out of our hands into His own, and Himself has come to us
and made us His for ever. And then we not only draw near
to God and not only have a new relation to Him, but
we enter His communion, and share His life, and are
marvellously made to partake of His Eternal Love to
His Eternal Son. That is done in Christ ; where God
did not send but came. Our life is hid with Christ in
God. He is the ground, and not only the means, of our
salvation. And the ground of our salvation must be the
object of our faith, and of our faith in God. The god-
head in a Redeemer is the only form of godhead we can
bring to the test of experience. Godhead means finality ;
and we can have no real God on the lines of either
thought or power, because there we can have no finality.
Finality is a matter of life, of the Eternal Life given by
Christ alone. Here the newest philosophy and the oldest
Christianity meet.

For personal and final union with the Father and
His love there is no way for us but that faith in Jesus
which his disciples found forced upon them by the
compulsion of his grace. And the one compressed
channel by which it came was the cross and its
redemption. Jesus was for the Apostles and their
Churches not the consummation of a God-conscious-
ness, labouring up through creation, but the invasive
source of forgiveness, new creation, and eternal life.
In Christ God did not simply countersign the best
intuitions of the heart but He created a new heart
within us. There was for the New Testament no way

II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 59

to the communion of the Father but by the forgiveness
which was Christ's grand and comprehensive gift —
at once redemption and eternal life. It was in
giving him up unsparingly to the death that God gave
us all things, all our destiny, all Eternity. What,
it has been asked in many tones of late, what
is the essence of Christianity ? The best known
answer that of Harnack, is too meagre. He is too much
of a devout historian, and too little of a spiritual thinker.
The essence of Christianity is Jesus Christ, the historic
Redeemer and Lord and God, dwelling in his Church's
faith. I have already said that there never was a time,
even in the Church's earliest days, when Christianity was
but the reproduction of the personal faith of Jesus, or
the effort to live his ethic. It was always a faith in
Jesus concentric with the Church's faith in God.

"The Christian religion begins," says Wobbermin,
" historically viewed {i.e. apart from faith and so far as
documents carry us) it begins, not with the religious self-
consciousness of Jesus but with that of the first disciples.
We can carry back the line of Christian faith straight to
them, but not beyond them to Jesus himself. Beyond
the whole chain he stands as the person who first made
this form of faith and life possible. And it was not that
he extended into his disciples his own religious self-
consciousness. Not one of them ever said or thought
that. None came to the Father but only the Son, and
those to whom it was the Son's will to reveal Him."

In the first form in which we know it then, the religion
of Jesus was the religion of which Jesus was the object
and not the subject. He was never regarded as the first
Christian. If we reject that objective faith in him, then,
we start with something quite different from the

6o The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. ii.

religion of our only source of information, and if we
start with a Jesus different from that of our New
Testament sources, a saint rather than a Redeemer, we
are beginning with a construction, a manufactured
article. And not only is a construction no beginning,
but, if it come to construction, why must we prefer the
Jesus of critical or speculative construction to the Christ
of theological and apostolic construction ? Why prefer a
Christ constructed from documents, without their
experience, to a Christ constructed from documents
whose experience we repeat, and which are themselves
a part of the revelation {See Lecture on Inspiration). For
upon the central things the apostolic documents are the
prolongation of the message of Jesus. They are Christ
himself interpreting his finished work, through men in
whom not they lived but he lived in them. Christ in the
Apostles interpreted his finished work as truly as in his
lifetime he interpreted his unfinished work. In both cases
he interpreted it as the hour shaped it and as a growing
faith could bear it. Many things which they were not
able to bear during his life he said, through select lips, to
those in whom the finished work had created the soul of
insight and understanding. It is men broken by his
cross and healed by his Spirit that have the secret of
the Lord.

LECTURE III

THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST AND THE
INTERPRETATIONS THEREOF

LECTURE III

THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST AND THE INTERPRETATIONS

THEREOF

The sense of the greatness of Christ's character and of
his historic influence is higher to-day than ever. What
does that mean in regard to his person ? We may note
one or two points at the outset.

1. As to his antecedents in Israel and the Old Testa-
ment it must be admitted gratefully to modern scholar-
ship that Israel began by sharing with the whole Semitic
East, and the nearer East generally, the same religious
ideas, ethics, and customs, allowing for their development
by each nation on its own lines. So far God was work-
ing in them all. Yet only in one people, only in Israel,
did God Himself open out, and reveal Himself by a
special and redeeming word. But this word for this
people gradually revolutionised all, renovated it, sur-
mounted it, and either neutralised a great part of the
Oriental legacy, or rejected it. So that the difference,
on the whole, submerges the affinities between Israel and
the Semitic East, between the revelation which finds in
Israel and that which seeks in all the rest of Humanity.

2. So, also, when it came to a point, in regard to
Christ. A deeper knowledge of the Judaism of Christ's

64 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

time forces on us the conviction that there was in his
mere thought or precept little that was new and original.
It can mostly be gathered from contemporary Judaic
ideas on such subjects as the Kingdom of Heaven and
its ethic, God, Father, Messiah, Resurrection, and the
conflict between God and Satan. But the power of
Jesus still grows, both in the way of drawing men, sub-
duing them, and uniting them ; and no less in the way of
dividing them, Where does it lie ? It is something
gained to recognise that it does not lie in novel truth,
(and that heresy, therefore, is not necessarily loyalty) ;
but that it lies in the new divine personality, and the
redeeming, consummating act of God effected in it. The
religious power of the world is not ideas or truths,
powerful as these are, but personalities and their deeds.

3. And this impression of Christ's greatness is deepened
as we turn to account the fine results of recent scholar-
ship upon his life; especially if we were to follow those
who reduce his public activity to a year. We remark
that he entered on life with anything but a passionless
simplicity of nature ; yet it was as a complete and
finished character, with entire moral adultness and
adequacy to each deepening situation. He was perfectly
sure and self-sure, knowing his mind and carrying it
through with an energy of will unparalleled in the history
of the great. The concentration and unity of his
character and purpose is the more amazing as he had not
a long life, like Goethe's, in which to work out the
tremendous contradictions and collisions in his vast
soul. " The spiritual power which broke up the old
pagan world and founded a new is here compressed into
a single volcanic point." What a man ! What a maker
of men ! What a master of men and of events ! What

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 65

a sovereignty was the mien of his self-consciousness ! Lord
of himself and all besides ; with an irresistible power to
force, and even hurry, events on a world scale ; and yet
with the soul that sat among children, and the heart in
which children sat. He had an intense reverence for a
past that was yet too small for him. It rent him to rend
it ; and yet he had to break it up, to the breaking of his
own heart, in the greatest revolution the world ever
saw. He was an austere man, a severe critic, a born
fighter, of choleric wrath and fiery scorn, so that the
people thought that he was Elijah or the Baptist; yet he
was gentle to the last degree, especially with those
ignorant and out of the way. In the thick of life and
love he yet stood detached, sympathetic yet aloof, cleav-
ing at once both to men and to solitude. He spoke with
such power because he loved silence. With an almost
sacramental idea of human relations, especially the cen-
tral relation of marriage, he yet avoided for himself every
bond of property, vocation, or family; and he cut these
bonds when they stood between men and himself. Full
of biting irony upon men he yet was their healer and
Saviour. Of a quick understanding which tore through
the pedantry of the Scribes, with a sure dialectic which
never failed him, and never left him at the mercy of his
hecklers, he had yet a naive nature and a pictorial speech
which brought him very near to the simplest — whom
next moment some deep paradox would confound, and
even wound. Clear, calm, determined, and sure of his
mark, he was next hour roused to such impulsive passion
as if he were beside himself. But if he let himself go he
always knew where he was going. With a royal, and
almost proud, sense of himself, he poured out his soul
unto God and unto death, and was the friend of publicans

66 i he Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

and sinners. With a superhuman sense of authority he
had a superhuman humiaty. When he emptied himself
it was done in the fulness of God. He could be bitter,
and almost rough in his virility, yet he could pity, obey
and sacrifice like a woman. The mightiest of all indi-
vidual powers, he has yet set on foot the greatest Socialism
and Fraternity the world has known, which is still but
in its dawn. " King and beggar. Hero and Child,
Prophet and Reformer, Pblemist and Prince of Peace,
Ruler and Servant, Revolutionist and Sage, man of
action, man of ideas, and man of the Word — he was all
these strange things, and more, in one person." *

And he was all that without being torn asunder as a
common man would have been ; for, if his heart broke,
his soul never did, nor his will. He was all that, in a
unity greater than the unity of the most uncommon men,
a unity ruled by his tremendous will. Dwell on the
wealth of his person more than its mystery, on his
irresistibility rather than his gentleness, on his steadfast
energy of concentration upon his one work more even
than his elemental force of passion or his depth of suffer-
ing— dwell on such things if you would come near the
centre and secret of this personality and its root in
coequal God. His effect on the human soul is greater
than any human cause can explain, whether you think of
the extent of his effect in history, or, still more, of the
nature of his effect in a Church and its experience.

§ § §
We may, perhaps, put the matter thus. If we say there
is no limit to the greatness of Christ's personality, where,
then, did his limitation lie?

* For this sentence, and more in this paragraph, cf. Weidel, Jesu
Personhchkeit, igo8.

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 67

It is not relevant to point to the limitation of his
knowledge, the absence of political or aesthetic sympathies,
or any other result of his being the true son of his age
and servant of his special vocation. These things do
not constitute moral personality. They are only some
of the conditions within which moral personality may
reveal or approve itself. Personality is not limitation,
nor the negation of limitation, but the surmounting of it.
Determination here is not negation, but power. For it
is self-determination. Christ, as the moral result of his
life's humbled action in death and resurrection, was
determined as the Son of God in power. Rom. i. 4. The
personality is shown not by the limitations but in them —
in their conquest and exploitation. In der Beschrdnkung
zeigt sick erst der Meister.'^Mere individuality may be defined
by limitations, but personality is expressed within them,
by transcending, overflowing, and utilising them. The
individual may be a circle or plot walled off from others, but
the person is a bubbling spring among them that overflows
them. The one is an area, the other is a centre of power
The sun is not a measurable round hole in the sky, but a
power-centre so active that when we feel him most we
cannot see his rim and limit, which we yet know to be
there. It is overflowed and irradiated. The limitation
is lost in the power. So with the limitations on the glory
of Christ. They give it feature and enhance it. On
the other hand we may often observe that an excess of
such powers as Christ lacked may go along with great
poverty of moral power or greatness. Napoleon was
one of the greatest elemental geniuses the world has ever
seen, yet under his very shadow Wordsworth could still
deplore in France the absence of a " master spirit."
Greatness of personality is quite compatible with absence

68 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

of genius ; while consummate genius may go with great
moral poverty in the personality, and a total lack of per-
sonal greatness — as a case like Turner's shows.

But it will be said that however we magnify the great-
ness of Christ's personality we yet cannot reach a Godhead
for him. For that is a qualitative difference, and we
cannot cross the bar of deity by any mere expansion of
human greatness. The remark might be true if by the
greatness of personality we meant but its wide vision,
its elemental force or its demonic genius. But we are
concerned in Christ with something much more than the
area, the force, or the velocity of a personality. As the
person of Christ is much more than his character, so it
is also more than his personality. He was a personality,
to be sure, whatever we think of his person. He was a
very great personage. But he could never have been for
history what he is had he been but a colossal and magnetic
personage. The mystery of his person resides in its
nature from the beginning, in its quality and not
its amount, in its native finality and not its volume
or passion. It is in its divine nature and moral
quality : in its holy quality more than its infinite
compass ; in such a way that we say, if God be not thus
He is less than the God we crave for and the world needs,
the last reality of soul and conscience. This is the holy
love that deserves to be almighty and infinite. Nay,
this is the holy love that is infinite. For it is a greatness
of love, not only an intensity but an intrinsic greatness
of love, a kind and not a degree of love, which shows
itself invincible by all the world and all its worst. It is
holy, sacrificing, saving love to the uttermost.

It is infinite love not finite, God's love not man's. God
so loved ; not so intensely but so holily. God is in Christ,

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 69

loving to the uttermost there, and not merely saying or
showing by an agent that He loved. There is a quali-
tative difference from any natural passion or affection in
the love that loves the Holy with entire holiness, loves
a world in arms against it, and loves it so invincibly as
to save, loves it from death into life eternal. Love that
was not overcome of such evil overcame evil as God —
overcame it absolutely, finally, with the grace of an infi-
nite holy God. To extend what is given us in Christ,
therefore, is not to pass into another genus when we are
driven to call him God.

§ § §
But granting the tremendous differences, and contra-
dictions even, between man and God, it is not impossible
to find in the reality of a person a union of them which
is impossible in a rational scheme. And in this respect
modern, philosophical thought is totally different from
Hellenic or medieval. It has come to realise the in-
adequacy of thought for reality. It has therefore given
more room and rank to faith as an organ of knowledge.
It has admitted that all real knowledge is not scientific
in its form. Indeed it sees that science cannot give us
reality (but only method), whereas faith can. And a
formula which logic might call contradictory, such as the
Godman, becomes less an absurdity than an indication of
adequate thought on the greatest matters. It is in the
region of moral personality that we find the truth that
lies in credo quia absurduui. Ihe absolute claim of pure
and logical thought has been reduced. It is not equal to
modern life — and especially to the growth of the personal
idea, and the pricelessness of the soul. Scholasticism,
medieval and modern, has been dethroned. No dogma
is adequate to spiritual reality. Things have to be

G

70 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

reckoned with as real which are quite irrational, and
life's whole destiny is risked on them. Those who use
rationality as the test of reality, however modernist they
may be, are not yet out of the medieval ban ; and when
they apply the rational principle destructively they are
only the victims of an inverted scholasticism. They are the
dogmatists of negation. And in the end they form a bitter
disappointment to those who once hoped to find through
them an escape from traditional dognia into a grander
plerophory of truth, but who really find only that they
have exchanged a rich dogma for a lean. Some things
irreducible to proof or logic, and some vulnerable to the
critic, are among our mightiest forces ; and on the other
hand some things logically irresistible are for life totally
inapplicable and absurd. The greatest things we believe
we cannot comprehend, not only in religion, but in
practical life. Nor is it fatal if our statements about
them are in flat contradiction. The greatest of realities
is the greatest of paradoxes. This is true even of the
final quantities handled by science itself, like the atom ;
which is extended and yet indivisible for thought ; yet in
the paradox we have the most fruitful of beliefs for the
development of modern physics.

But we can rise higher than that. We have the most
obstinate of antinomies, we have the most intractable of
paradoxes, when a belief so essential to society, action,
and character as human freedom and responsibility is
conjoined, as it must be, with its incompatibles — scientific
causation or divine grace. There is a series of facts
explicable only on the one line, and a parallel series,
inseparable from it, explicable only on the other. We
have to accept both, and to believe for our life that
reality is too great to be covered by one of the formulae

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Inierpretatioits thereof 71

alone, but equally needs the other and opposite. We
can daily observe that these two contradictory things
have their practical and fruitful union in many a
character, which they unite to sustain, develop, and
adorn in the maze of life. And we are well aware that
human society and history would be impossible without
belief in both ; as the government of a free country is
carried on only by two irreconcilable yet cooperant
parties.

Kant revealed a whole series of these rational anti-
monies. And it was thus that he broke the reign of
dogma; it was by no direct criticism of theological loci.
For the essence of authoritative dogma is to make faith
depend on rational consistency for its being; and the
essence of negative dogma is to think belief can be
destroyed by being shewn to be rationally inconsistent.
Beware of clearness, consistency, and simplicity, espe-
cially about Christ. The higher we go the more
polygonal the truth is. Thesis and antithesis are both
true. But their reconciliation lies, not as Hegel said,
with a superfined rationalism, in a higher truth which is
also of the reason, but in a supreme and absolute
personality, in whom the antinomies work. lis marchont.
It is the category of personality that adjusts the con-
tradictions of reason ; which, after all, is not abstract
thought but a person thinking.

§ § §
The application to the Godhead of Christ may be
clear. God and man seem to exclude each other ; and
the difference certainly is very deep. But to realise
the depth of the difference is only the more to realise the
greatness of Christ as theGodman. Theology is peculiarly
vulnerable to the rationalist, because it is engrossed with

72 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

the last, and therefore the most alogical, realities. And
its central doctrine in particular seems offensive to a
rapacious logic, to a common sense with an insatiable
thirst for empire. But none the less, as the kind of great-
ness grows on us which exists in Christ's person, we
grow also to feel that the categories of critical thought
which are so useful below are no more competent there
than feet for the air. To express this greatness we
need not two truths lying in a third, but two great
powers at least, two personal movements, and these in a
surmounted collision within a person. We need man and
God, and we need them in a Godman and in a cross.
How inadequate it must be to rationalise as doctrine, in
even the most constructive way, a revelation which was
only possible by the act of the Son of God in the Cross.
So true is it that the wisdom of God is folly with men,
and the foolishness of men is God's wisdom. Theory
indeed we must prosecute. The effort to adjust the great
paradox could only cease with the paralysis of thought.
But we shall theorise more successfully and modestly on
our living and justifying faith if we realise that our
theories are but " thrown out." They are but projected
at the reality from our experience of it ; they are faith
codifying itself; they are not reality, nor competent to
reality. After all the centuries of toil upon this doctrine,
even with our kenotic efforts, we sometimes ask, have we
really done what was not done at Chalcedon, where the
two sides were stated against their heresies but not ad-
justed, and left lying parallel but not organised ? Only
some heresies were repudiated as being incompatible not
with logic so much as with the evangelical experience.
They were repudiated, but no real solution could be put
in their place. And no theories, and no clash of theories.

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 73

no mere truths.or the incompatibility of truths, can destroy
our confidence of faith that the Christ who gave and
gives us our redemption is the rock of any reality
possible to life at its deepest, to life as one whole, to life
eternal, and that he is the human presence of Eternal
God. But most of the failure to recognise the divine
greatness of Christ arises in the end from a moral failure
to appreciate him as personal saviour ; and that failure
rises from a defect in the estimate of the sin from which he
saves. A lofty ideal is not mighty to save.

§ § §
For where is the true site of the greatness of Christ ?
Is it in the mere force and volume of the historic figure,
or in the nature of his historic work ?

If we take but two features alone in Christ we find our-
selves before elements which it is impossible to combine
in any conception except that of personality with its
alogical and inconsistent unity ; and in this case it is a
personality great and contradictory beyond the mould of
any other. Unity of personality does not always go with
harmony of qualities. Unity of purpose need not imply
aesthetic symmetry of character. And the artists, and
aesthetic Christianity generally, have misled us about the
harmony and balance of Christ's character. There is
something too Mendelssohnian in their moral music,
something too well-groomed and habited in their mental
type, in their carriage something too much of the
Christian gentleman. In Christ there are two features
which are to be unified in no fair picture but only in one
rnighty person. The severity of judgment in Christ and
the tenderness of the pity form a contradiction which
seems as final in its own region as the antinomy of the
divine sovereignty and human freedom is in another

74 ^^'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

plane. So much so that between these two elements some
can never find themselves in Christ, never come to rest in
him, so long as they view him as a teacher, a character,
or a personality alone. At one time they are drawn to
his mercy, at another they are crushed by his severity.
Now they run into his shelter, now they are chilled in his
austere shadow. Now he is all sympathy, now all
judgment. And their whole life in relation to him is an
alternation of moods, now trust, now fear — until the per-
sonality is consummated for them, and perfectly expressed
in his "finished work." It is expressed and consummated
in no symmetrical scheme or conception of his character,
and in no psychological harmony of his history, but in
the deed unspeakable and full of glory, in the final act of
the cross, where all is gathered in one for our peace,
where the whole Jesus at last takes effect, with the judg-
ment, indeed, there, but the grace uppermost, as he bears
in himself his own judgment on us. What the cross is
for the soul and the race can be put into no theology,
adjusted in no philosophy. No thought or form can con-
tain the greatness of the personality which it took the
eternal act of cross and resurrection fully to express.

It is the work of the cross that crowns and carries
home the greatness of Christ. There the Master
becomes our Lord and our God. Impression there
becomes faith. And as faith can only have God for its
object it is bound to pass, in the cultus at least, into the
worship of Christ ; and in theology it passes into the
belief in his real deity, however expressed. It cannot be
too often recalled that the article of Christ's deity is the
theological expression of the evangelical experience of his
salvation, apart from which it is little less than absurd,
and no wonder it is incredible.

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 75

§ § §

Some unity of a Christ so great with God is not denied
by any with whom we are here concerned. The problem
is, how we are to construe it.

When Jesus says, " I and the Father are one," he
uttered an experience which the author of the Fourth
Gospel cannot have merely imagined. To think he did , ^ -^

IS pure Pyrrhonism ; it is not criticism. If anything is
sure to us about the mind of Christ we are sure that such
was the relation he cherished and expressed towards his
Father. The only question is, what did it mean for
him ?

Now, in asking what was the exact content of Christ's
consciousness on such a point we are barred at the outset
not merely by the meagreness of our data but by a con-
sideration still more serious. It is a psychological im-
possibility for us to go very far in reconstituting the
consciousness of Christ. To say we can is to beg the
question by placing him on a human and penetrable level
at the start. He knew what was in man and needed
no telling; but does not his own chief account of himself
say that no man knoweth the Son but the Father ?
The intimate relationship between them is not accessible
to us. We can only say, with Lotze, that it is im-
possible for us to exaggerate that intimacy. And the
most subtle speculations of the Church, when they are
interpreted with the insight of a sympathetic intelligence
instead of sealed up by the dulness of a scornful, are but
the finest efforts of human thought to feel its way into
that divinest mystery.

But yet we do not easily consent to be entirely Agnostic
on such a matter. Nor do we believe that such entire
ignorance is the decree of Him who wills to be inquired

76 The Person and Plac: of Jesus Christ [lect.

of. And Christian effort to advance, to grow in the
knowledge of the Son of God has taken three historic
stages, all of which survive in modern forms. These we
may describe, in ecclesiastical language, as the Ebionite
(or Socinian), the Arian, and the Athanasian. Of these
the Ebionite or Socinian stage we may perhaps consider
to have been outgrown in principle as the result of the
more competent and sympathetic attention given by
modern thought both to the nature of religion and to the
self-consciousness of Jesus. The Athanasian stage, at
the other end, is bound up with the existence of a
Church, and is alone compatible with that experience of
final Redemption in Christ which makes the Church-
The Arian stage is that which still fascinates those who
have abandoned the lower extreme without having
reached the higher, and who, having lost faith, or never
having had the historic mind, sit loose to the Church
and its experience. It is the conflict of Arianism and
Athanasianism, under modern conditions, ideas, and
methods, which must engage the concern of Christian
people for at least the next generation.

§ § §
I. The first or Socinian stage represents what is true
enough if it be not called final — the individual saintliness
and moral supereminence of Christ. For it is in-
dividualist. When he spoke of his unity with the
Father, and said they were one, he only meant (it is
said) that they were entirely at one. It was an ethical
unity. The one will was tuned completely to his vis-a-
vis in the other and gave back his note. The son of
man had an insight into the Father's will which was
only matched by his absorbing desire and moral power
to do it. Father and Son confront each other. The

jii.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 77

;dea is harmony or congruity rather than condignity ;
and the conception of Christ involved is no more than
prophetic. He is our rehgious hero, a rehgious genius
unsurpassed ; but not '* My Lord and my God." The
advantage of such a conception is, first, that, as far as it
goes, it is true. And second, that everyone who need
be considered is agreed about it. If Christ was no more
than moral hero and prophet of the Lord he was that
at least. So that if the essence of Christianity were its
lowest common denominator, if it were (as it is not)
what divides us least, we need go no further than this
position to gather the greatest possible number into the
Christian pale. But the genius of Christianity is not
minimist. And the object of Christianity is not
majorities, not the gathering in or as many people as
possible in a given time on the simplest base; which
would be setting the great pyramid on its moral apex. But
it is the glorifying of the Father, the hallowing of his
name; and then the enfolding of as many as seek first
such a Kingdom as the cross founded in doing so. It is
peace among men of such good-will. The Socinian
position has attractions for the lay stage or type of
mind, which is religious, and rational, and nothing
more. But it abolishes certain finite difficulties only to
create infinite. It places Christ as it places all the
prophets whose series he crowns, among the men to
whom God but spake, and who could not but obey that
word. And the deep difference, among those who are
interested in Christ at all, is that between those who
call him " Lord and God " with his first believers, and
those who call him hero with his latest admirers —
admirers who are yet able to judge him more search-
ingly than they were ever judged by him, or expect to be.

78 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

I cannot regard as other than Socinian the idea that
in Christ we have the greatest of created personalities
completely filled with the Spirit of God. For the centre
of gravity must always be where the personality is ; and
in this case it is in the created humanity alone. The
person concerned is a person in the same created sense
as the rest of us, however magnificent in his scale and
range, and however filled with the Holy Ghost. His
communion with God is in principle the same as ours.
He is, like the Church, the habitation of the Spirit, and
neither the giver of the Spirit nor his eternal correlate. The
Lord is not the Spirit. Such a Christ does not indeed offer
to the Spirit the opposition presented by the rest of us,
but that is a matter of relative perfection. Like us, he is
a creature, only created ad hoc, for a special function, and
as a special organ of the Spirit. And he is not even
created before the world ; but he is the classic instance
of created man. The notion of Jesus as the grand and
perfect receptacle of the spirit, its most glorious tenement
the most fine and adequate of all its human instruments
in history, however generously you construe that notion,
does not really rise above the Socinian level. It is
certainly below the New Testament idea, whatever
countenance it may find in certain inchoate New Testa-
ment phrases. For we must oiten remark that in the
New Testament we find no complete theory or explicit
theology of either Trinity or Incarnation ; but we have
the faith and the principle which are impossible other-
wise, and which, under the heat of conflict and the
growth of Christian mind, revealed at last the invisible
writing on its heart of a perfectly triune God.

2. The second or Arian stage is represented by those
who see in Christ not merely the perfect prophet, but a

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 79

personality unique in his supramundane nature, and not
merely in his function and the way he discharged it.
They do lay stress not on his message but on his divine
person, and the position he took toward men. They
recognise not only his spotlessness before men, but his
sinlessness before his own conscience and God, rising to
such a height that he knows and proclaims himself to be
the final judge of mankind. He is not only man's moral
model and his spiritual king; and he is so related to God
that he declares man's final standing before God to be
identical with man's relation to himself.* They own tha
Christ has not only a special function but a unique
position. He stands with God facing man much
more than with man facing God. He is a secondary
God. So that our highest possible development of
human communion with God could never reach
that of Christ. Yet he is not of one nature with God.
He is a creation — an intermediary creation. If he is not
of Humanity, neither is he of Deity. He was too humble
before God to be of God. His subordination is that of
a creature, after all, though created before the worlds for
a unique task. And it carried with it inferiority.! It is
admitted that the highest claims which we find in the

"♦^ That Christ did make that claim to the divine function of judging and
determining the world for eternity is to me so indubitable that I should
make the point decisive of sound and guiding criticism. And, in my humble
opinion, a scholar so able and sympathetic in many ways as Bousset is
here discredited for the higher ranges of the subject as the victim of
criticism rather than its master. And this estimate is confirmed by his
treatment of the Messianic idea, and the part it played in the mind of
Christ.

t This is a moral position which it is the whole business of the
Athancisian position to deny : and it is a position which, from its urgent
ethical mischief to-d,iy, might alone condemn it as the theology most
fitting to the chaotic time. Service and obedience are not undivine, and
not a badge of inferiority.

bo T/ie Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

mouth and the mien of Jesus are claims that he really made.
And he was justified in making them. He was sinless.
He was, and is, man's Judge, Redeemer, and King. But
these functions were conferred and delegated by God,
who will one day resume them from His sublime servant.
All that is held is an Arian idea of Christ's person, its
origin, and nature. He was not a man, but he shared
creatureship with man. He was a created being;
fashioned before the foundation of the world, indeed, and
equipped by his Maker with especial power and place,
which took him out of individual Humanity, made him
God's corporate representative of Humanity, perhaps the
agent of its creation, and enabled him for the exercise of
the one grand divine purpose with Humanity; but still a
creation, with less than eternity in his own nature,
with no more than such endowment as made him the
efficient organ for carrying out what was more eternal
than himself, namely, God's purpose of self-revelation.
Even were he regarded as a personality created for the
special purpose of being filled with the Spirit uniquely
and entirely — he would still be a created being and
therefore more man than God. What he had from God
was a plenary commission, in virtue of which he redeemed,
judged, and ruled as King. But as a Satrap King still,
with a Suzerain who conceivably could dethrone him ; a
tributary King, who one day would render his royalty
up. He was God's plenipotentiary. His superhuman
chancellor, the most private secretary of his eternal
praise, and so far invested with His power and prestige.

They draw this conception of Christ especially from
his own consciousness of himself, so far as we can reach
it, especially from his humility and sense of depen-
dence. But they exclude almost entirely the one

\

III.] The Grealiicss of Christ and Infgrprefations thereof 8i

decisive factor in the modern strife between a lay
liberalism and positive faith — his consummatory and final
work of the cross, and all that that meant for the soul's
destiny in the apostolic gospel. With that exclusion
there is no poor case for such an interpretation of Jesus.
It is, in some form, the view of most of those who treat
the cross as ojtiose and yet cannot settle to a thin ^"^'^
Unilarianism. It is the crypto-unitarianism of many who X/'TT/O^
feed themselves and others on Christian sympathies and ' ' ''j>v

Christian ethic without Christian redemption. With that
omission there is no little to be said for an Arian Jesus. He
seems at home in our lay reading of the Synoptics — which
forgets the space they give to his priestly passion. Many
of his express statements about himself, during that frag-
ment of his existence which was covered by the kenosis of « f ^
his earthly life, and was engaged with the national prolego- '" '' '
mena of his universal work, are compatible with such a
view. What he knew of his work and Kingdom was
taught him of God (Mat. xi. 27). " It is all taught me
of my Father." In John he speaks but what he hears
from the Father, and does but what he sees the Father
do. His miracles, even in the Synoptics, he often does
as the orgin of the Father, and often also as the result
of answered prayer, and not out of a parallel and
autonomous power. John xi. 41, 42, "Father, I know
th.'it thou hearest me now as always," said just before
calling Lazarus forth, and said in a voice whose
loudness revealed the spiritual tension which for him
was prevailing prayer. In Luke xi. 20, he casts out
devils with the finger of God, or, as Matthew says, by
the Spirit of God. And a phrase I used a moment ago,
about the surrender of his kingship at last, will recall, by
its echo of i Cor. xv. 24-^8, how much could be said for

82 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

this Arian stage from other parts of the New Testa-
ment. It is a matter of fair discussion whether the
express and formal theology of the New Testament, as
distinct from its gospel, faith and worship, is always
beyond the Arian stage. I mean what is called the
Biblical stage of theology ; remembering that the New
Testament has faith and not dogma for its first con-
cern, and that the expressly theological passages are
incidental to a pastoral purpose and an evangelical
effect. They are incidental to the epistle though funda-
mental to the subject. Such truth is distinct from the
theology latent and necessary to the New Testament
gospel, and waiting there to be revealed by the Spirit to
the Church's soul, when it became tense in the strain of
a mortal crisis, and when its last spiritual reserves had
to be called out in the battle for its existence in a pagan
world. It is one thing to see but an Arian Christ while
the theology of the gospel was but in the making. That is
the morning twilight. It is another thing to stand
arrested there and denounce an Athanasian Christ now
that the providence of the Spirit has revealed, in
the tremendous experience of the historic Church, a
gospel which is possible on that profound base alone.
That is the evening twilight. And when it claims to be
the advanced and primitive view it can only be advanced
in the sense of being at eventide and verging to sheer
oblivion.

But even if the reported and express statements of
Christ carried us no farther than this stage the matter
is not closed. Could Christ teach the disciples what he
taught Paul ? For if on earth he was always fully con-
scious of all he was, where were his real humiliation and
his true humanity ? We ourselves are at no moment

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 83

conscious of all we are or have been, and certainly not
of what we shall be (t Jn. iii. 2). Would even a Christ
created before the worlds be conscious on earth of all
the power and glory that the greatest Arianism would
postulate for him in his antenatal life ? I speak of the
greatest Arianism, as distinct from the trivial Arianism
to which the public mind is apt to turn.

§ § §

We may perhaps put it thus. If in the first, or Socinian,

stage Christ appeared as God's perfect prophet, in this

second, or Arian, stage he appears as God's plenipotentiary ,

What more do we want ? Have we not explained the

greatness of Christ ? No, not yet. We want in Christ

God's real presence.

In the first stage Christ is the man ; in the second he

is the superman. We must still ascend to the supernal

man, the Lord from heaven.

§ § §
I spoke of a fatal exclusion and renunciation of the

work of the cross made by those who hold this Arian
view on the basis of one part of Christ's self-consciousness
alone. I call it fatal because it displaces the centre of
gravity, because the last secret of the Saviour is not in
his earthly self-consciousness as we know it but in his
salvation. They ignore not only other parts of Christ's
self-consciousness as I hope to show later (Lect. xi.) but,
still more, the Christianity of the Epistles, the Chris-
tianity of Redemption, the crisis and crown of Christ
and his salvation in the cross. In so doing they raise
what is the question of the hour in this subject. It is
a question that rose also upon the apostles. And the
Epistles are the first stage of the answer, religiously
normative, though not theologically finished. It is this

84 The Person and Place of Jcsiis Christ [lect.

question ; could God's plenipotentiary, for the last purposes
of the soul and the last destiny of the race, be a creature ?
Could man's King, Judge, and Saviour be other than
Godhead itself? Could God's commission, however
superhuman, do, for such as we, the work of his presence ?
Could God delegate his divinest work of redemption to
even the greatest of his creatures, or commit all judgment
to one with less than the Godhead of the Eternal Son ?

This, at least, is the great question within the Church
to-day. It is not the question between the Church and
the world, which is whether there was in Christ a real
revelation. We have settled that, wherever Agnosticism
is surmounted. And what is crucial is the farther inquiry
whether that revelation in Christ was final ; whether in
Christ God sent or went to the world; whether in Christ
He announced himself or gave Himself; whether Jesus,
who spoke in God's name, really stood in God's place,
where the first Church, by its worship of him, put him.
The greatest issue for the moment is within the Christian
pale; it is not between Christianity and the world. It
is the issue between theological liberalism (which is prac-
tically unitarian) and a free but positive theology, which
is essentially evangelical.

§ § §
3. It is a question that demands at last the Athanasian
answer. Christ is too great for any smaller answer. For
greatness is in the nature of Athanasianism. The first
Athanasianism was a grand escape for the soul. And
the passion for amplitude and plerophory to the measure
of Christ will always send the human mind to some form
of Athanasianism, with such metaphysic, whether in the
Bible or not, as makes that answer possible, according
to the state of contemporary thought at any specified

iii.j The Greatness of Christ and interpretations thereof 85

time. The question I have described as so crucial in the
Church demands the answer of the cross, when the cross
is taken as redemption from guilt, and not mere martyr-
dom for principle, or sacrifice for love. It demands the
faith of such a cross, and the metaphysic arising out of
that faith. The sinner's reconcilement with a holy God
could only be effected by God. And I press the efieduation
of it. The cross did not mean news that God was willing
to receive us on terms which another than God should
meet ; nor that God sat at home, like the prodigal's father,
waiting to be gracious when we came. But with God
to will is to do ; and the God who willed man's salvation
must himself effect it — not accept it, and not contrive it,
but effect it. Only he who had lost us could find us, only
he who was wronged could forgive, only the Holy One
satisfy His own holiness. To forgive he must redeem.
Fully to forgive the guilt he must redeem from the curse.
And only the creator knew the creature so as to redeem.
And to know mankind He must live in mankind. To
offer for man he must be man. Only God Himself with
us, and no creature of His, could meet the soul's last
need, and restore a creation undone. Christ, the
source of the race's new creation, is as divine and
as truly creator as the God of the world's beginning.
(So with the Spirit, as the source of the new birth of the
individual). For the great work needed was to recreate,
which is what mere liberalism and its humanism denies.
The great task was not to re-inforce but to re-create, and
to set us on Eternal rock. But if the Saviour was but
an emissary of God and not very God, we are not on
rock, even if we are off the sand. There is then no
absolute certainty of salvation for the race. And we
must have that certainty for faith. Vox Christian faith

H

86 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

is much more than the sense of a spiritual God : it is the
trust of an absolute God. And the note of an Apostle
is not spirituality, but the power of a Gospel which passes
us from death to life ; passes us not merely through a stage,
but through the mortal crisis. This power and certainty of
the race's salvation we can only have from God Himself as
Saviour, God could not depute redemption. We could not
take eternal pardon from a demigod, or commit the soul to
him for ever as we do to Christ. No half-God could
redeem the soul which it took the whole God to create.
God himself must be the immediate doer in what Christ
did to save. I shall have to point out, nearer the close of
this series, that the effect of Christ upon history could
not be explained by any greatness which a created soul
could achieve on earth ; and certainly not by the moral
action cognisable by us during his brief public life. It
is explicable only by an eternal act in Godhead which
was the ground of all on earth — only by God acting in
him. On any lower ground God but accepted Christ's
work, or even commissioned it ; he did not do it. And
does it need a God to accept another's sacrifice ? Are
not all egoists masters in the un-divine art of arranging
for the sacrifice of others and accepting it ? Mere accept-
ance of sacrifice by God means that He was really
reconciled by a third person neither God nor man. And
what is the effect of that on free grace? Ruinous.
There is then no such thing. If a created being, however
much of a personal splendour, was the real agent either-
of revelation or redemption, then grace was procured from
God, and not given — which is a contradiction in terms.
For then the effectual thing was not done by God but by
another. And God was not reconciling in Christ, but at
most through him. It all impairs the freedom and

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 87

monopoly of the jealous God Himself in our salvation.
And remember the first charge upon any theology which
has gone beyond the rationalist stage of an egotist concern
for its own liberty — the first charge on a true and positive
theology is regard for the freedom of God. That is the
only source and condition of man's freedom. The prime
condition of human freedom is a free God, and such faith
as seeks first his freedom, and has all other things added
unto it. And especially we must regard the freedom of
God's grace and of his salvation. If a created will
effected our salvation, God's reality in it is one vast stage
removed, and His sole grace is impaired. The only real
representative or plenipotentiary of a God whose grace
is free and all his own must be God. He must be of God
not merely from God. He could be no creature, whether
that creature had his power as a gift from God, or
acquired it by moral effort under God. The absolute
nature of the salvation brought to our faith can only be
secured by the absolute nature of him who brought it.
If it is an eternal salvation, and the gates of hell cannot
prevail against it, he who gives it is an eternal saviour.
If we have God for our eternal portion, then he is God in
whom we have it, and not only through whom. In him,
and not through him ! The Christianity which denies
that is less " advanced " than that which confesses it — less
advanced at least as Christianity, less forward in the faith
that makes theology, however it may stand with the
rationalist theology that claims to licence faith from
some source above it. A salvation only through Christ
leaves us with a religion too subjective for use. And the
excessive religious subjectivity of the hour is the nemesis
of a mere liberalism whose next stage is the destruction
of religion altogether.

88 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

§ § §
And this consideration may be added here. Will

many not be driven to the alternative of either praying
to Christ or praying /o>' him ? Many of those who lean
to a positive and liberal theology, and who retain belief
in intercessory prayer at all, both believe in prayer
for the dead and practise it. And when they pray for
the whole of mankind they cannot ignore its majority in
the unseen, including both our benefactors and our beloved,
We may pray, we do pray, for the whole creation. If
that may include the dead, can it exclude a created and
departed Christ ? May we, must we, not, if we have
leave to pray for the blessed dead at all, pray for the
greatest lover and benefactor in our race ? Should not
the collective Church pray for its founder ? If he was
but a created Christ, to whom we may not pray, would
the gratitude of a Church he created not move it to a
great bidding prayer for him ? And on great commemor-
ative occasions at least, as the sense grows of our spiritual
obligations to such a Christ, should we not be driven to
lift our soul as Parsifal ends " Redeemed be the
Redeemer."

Lord God, who savest men, save most

Of men Christ Jesus who saved me.

§ § §

The two lines of inquiry converge, I said — the work of
Christ and the consciousness of Christ ; and they con-
verge here. He was conscious of himself as Redeemer.
This was a part of his Messianic sense, no less than was
his action as Judge and King. He knew he was there
not only with God's judgment, but with God's final
salvation. And for Israel that had always meant the

III.] Tke Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 89

presence of God Himself as man's refuge, righteousness,
and redeemer. Each of these three features, God's
judgment, His salvation, and His presence, is equally
prominent in the Messianic idea of the Old Testament
and its great good time. The closing era should be so
rich in good because God himself would dwell in it. And
when Christ knew Himself as the Messiah of man and of
God, when he translated the Messianic idea in terms of
his own sonship, he lost no one of these features. If the
judgment and the salvation of God were incorporated in
him, so also, and no less directly, was God's presence.
The great Messianic time, like the history it crowned,
was God's coming, it was not His sending. God was no
more remote. He did not begin where his messenger,
his creature ended. He was not removed by the measure
of Christ's very existence, nor distant by the diameter of
that vast personality. He was that messenger. That
greatness was God's greatness. That love was God's
love. That grace was God's immediate grace, and no
echo, report, or image of it ; it was God's grace as surely
as that judgment, or that forgiveness, was God's.

Jesus did not indeed put all this into words. He did
not lecture about his person. He spoke and acted as
only such a God with us could. But if he was not theo-
logically express about his Godhead was he not conscious
of it? Surely he was at least subconscious. It was
fundamental to his manner of life, and work, even if we
thought a full sense of it was but occasional and in-
cidental. Our greatest truths, perhaps, escape from us
rather than are preached. If his deity be not express
always in the preaching of his lips, it is essential in the
gospel of his person and cross. If it is not unmistakable
in everything he said it is inevitable in the thing he did.

go The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Had he no sense of that ? How could one of his insight
miss all such latent significance as I have indicated in
the claims he made ? He knew himself to be among
men for certain universal purposes, to be final king,
judge, and redeemer. Could it escape him that these
were functions which in Israel's ideal were reserved for
God alone? He calls himself king in God's kingdom. He
is the bridegroom of the true Israel, whose husband, in all
the Old Testament, was God alone. He is to sit on the
throne of glory, where no Jew could place any but God.
The angels he sends forth as his angels. The blessed of
the father are his elect. The omnipotence of God is
given him in a passage (Mat. xxviii. i8) which it is much
easier, with all the tremendous demand it makes on us,
to assign to him than to ascribe to the daring of a Church
which put it in his mouth. How could disciples of his
have made him say anything like that (whether the words
are stenographically correct or not) unless it was in tune
with his own claim for himself? He knows himself to be
the final judge, and there is no appeal, and no revision of
his sentence. He takes, in many ways, God's place to
the faithful. And all the while he is not obscuring
God, or displacing Him, but revealing, mediating, con-
veying Him; yet doing it not as a mere transparency, a
mere exhibition of God, but as a mighty will and living
personality, with a real agency in things. Either in such
a case we have the incarnation of God, or we have the
deification, and the self-deification, of a man. If we are to
talk of mythology, which of these is more mythological?
And the latter was especially alien to Israel, with its
awful gulf between God and man.

§ § §
The tendency of the hour among the more piquant

III. J Tfte Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 91

expositors of such matters is to regard the greatness of
Christ as the incarnation of Humanity rather than of
God. On this two remarks only may be made. First,
if we use Saxon, and say, for the incarnation of Human-
ity, the enfleshment of flesh, we perceive that there is
something wrong. And we go on to see that it is not an
incarnation of Humanity that is meant, but only a con-
densation, or epitome. And second, if we speak of the
incarnation of Humanity in any sense that leaves room
for God at all, one of two things follows, which are both
wrong, (i) Either Christ incarnates a created Humanity
dwelling with God in the recesses of premundane time —
in which case we are back upon one of the many shades
of Arianism. (2) Or he incarnates an increate Human-
ity ; which is therefore an eternal integer or factor in
Godhead. This gives us not so much an incarnation of
God as a deification and idolatry of man, ending practi-
cally in his debasement. The finitude, and therefore the
reality, of man is gone.

The Eternal Son of God is then but the Humanity
eternal in God. This is a view which is much in keeping
with the modern man's keen self-consciousness and his
dull ethic which takes no measure of either his race's sin
or a holy God. It gives to Humanity what belongs to
the only begotten Son. It gives to the Humanity that
the Son came to redeem the position which belongs to
the Son alone, and alone made redemption possible.
Humanism is then simply the old cthnicism, gentilism,
or heathenism made universal. It is an enlargement of
what is both to Old Testament and New Testament the
supreme heresy, that man is enough for himself and has a
right in God. Man is referred to his divine self for
his destiny. It is paganism with a Christian facing.

92 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Humanity is safe in its own innate resources, its
immanent inalienable deity. If redeemed at all it is
self-redeemed, to its own endless praise and glory ;
which is surely another religion from Christ's. Positiv-
ism has been described as Catholicism with the bottom
knocked out ; but this is a Positivism with a Trinity
forced in. The old beliefs, cults, and phrases are first
deflated, and then twisted into modern arabesques. As
history goes on the burden of the old ceremonialism is
replaced by the officialism of the social state. A church
of faith becomes a fraternity of comfort. Theology
becomes anthropology. And religion hardens into a
service without a trust or a loyalty. Worship vanishes
for work, and work descends into an Egyptian corvee.

§ § §
Throughout all, the impressive thing about Christ's
vast self-consciousness is his sense of finality. It is upon
this that so much turns — not on his being a revelation of
God but the revelation, the final revelation. It was with
Christ's world that God had henceforth to do. There is
no thought in Christ (or in the New Testament at all) of
another coming from God to complete his work. The
Spirit only applied it — especially to individuals. In him
God said his last word, and took his inmost and final
attitude to men. The Father has only now to do with a
kingdom created by the Son. But if the Son were a
creature that means that God had to do with a kingdom
secured by an inferior, and only presented to Him. And
how could God's kingdom be the work of another than
God, or only indirectly of God ? Christ's sense of
finality we must recognise; which is his faith, however
implicit, in his own Godhead. We must acknowledge
his sense of his own finality in the last moral issue of th^

iii.J The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 93

world, the supreme human issue, the issue between God
and man, hfe and death. He knew he was decisive in
that issue. And who could be final or decisive there
but God ? The final revelation could only be God re-
vealing Himself, in the sense of God bestowing Himself,
and Himself coming to men to restore communion.
What remains to be done for finality after that ? A
message could never be a final revelation, nor could a
messenger. We should then infer God, surmise God,
take Him on trust from another, or otherwise have him
at one remove, but we should not possess him. He might
be God for us, but not God with us, or in us. And
unless he were God finally with and in us we should
doubt often if he was for us. But we possess God in a
Christ who does, and knows he does, things reserved
always for God to do. His love was not an echo of God's
love; or a declaration of it by one who might have ex-
aggerated by temperament. No depth of conviction on
the part of a created and prophetic Christ however holy
could give us final certainty as to the Grace of God.
" God only knows the love of God." God alone can for-
give, who is the holiness offended ; God alone judge
who is the living law. Was the Great Saviour so dull as
not to realise that ? As he felt his own mission alone
among all men to save, how did he feel as he read in his
Bible words like these: — "I am God, and besides me
there is no Saviour" ? How would that strike him as he
knew himself to be not the mere herald of salvation but
the Saviour, when he not only forgave particular cases
but knew that he was there to ransom the world by an
offering for its sin ? Cculd he have said " indirectly it is
God, but directly it is I " ? Is there any trace of such
theologising with him ? Must he not have known himsell

94 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ fLEcx.

for the incarnation of the Eternal saving Will of God,
the Eternal agent of the Eternal purpose?

§ § §
If it be said that he must have showed his conscious-
ness of his divine nature (and not merely of his divine
vocation), by a position of more independence and
initiative over against God, the answer is this : His
sense of unity with God was too great and intimate for
that. It was the unity of the Son — of a perfect obedi-
ence ; which is just as divine as perfect authority is. It
was not the unity of a second God, a joint God, a God
in perpetual alliance with God. I keep asking, is the
principle of obedience, which is man's very salvation, not
divine, not in Godhead at all ?

§ § §
At least, we have seen and shall see, there is nothing in
the consciousness of Christ, however reserved about it
he had reason to be, which is incompatible with
the postulate of his deity as that is demanded by the
nature of his work in our saved experience. And it is
only to that personal and final faith that it really comes
home. The deity of Christ cannot be proved to either
the lower or the higher rationalism, either to the deistic
or the idealist, the Wolffian or the Hegelian. It cannot
be proved either to the man in the street or the sage in
the chair — but only to the evangelical experience. It is
our pardon that is the foundation of our theology — our
eternal pardon for an " eternal sin " (Mark iii. 29). Did
Jesus connect this saving effect of his with his person or
with his message ? With the work he did, or with the
idea he brought? We are here at a most crucial
question — indeed the question. He can only be under-
stood by those who hold the right relation to him. 1

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 95

suppose we are all agreed about that. What is that right
relation ? Is it our critical relation to an idealist, or our
subject relation to a Saviour ? Are we but an aided
Church, or are we a purchased people ? Do we chiefly
learn from his words, and admire at his character, or do
we worship at his feet — which ? It is really the choice
between a religion finally cosmic and rational and one
finally personal, ethical, and evangelical. The great
conflict to-day must be settled in the personal religion of
each inquirer. It really is not a question of our con-
clusions but of our faith. It calls for decision rather
than arbitration, for choice rather than compromise ;
because it is the finest form of the deep dilemma between
Christianity and the world. And it is this. Is saving
faith a Rationalism, i.e. a faith in universal ideas, in-
tuitions, or processes, which have no exclusive relation
to a fixed point in history ? Or is it gathered to such a
fixed point, in the historic Christ, where God, in
presence, actually offers himself to man in judgment and
for man in Grace ? Do we start from the World or the
Word ? Are we to demand that Christ shall submit to
the standard of certain principles or ideals which we
bring to him from our human nature at its heart's
highest and its thought's best ? Or as our new creator
is he his own standard, and not only so but both judge,
king, and redeemer of human nature, and the fountain of
a new life, autonomous in him, and for all the rest derived ?
Is he our spiritual hero, or our Eternal Lord and God ?
Is he the prophet and champion of man's magnificent
resource, or is he the redeemer of man's spiritual poverty
and moral wreck ? Did he come to transfigure before
men the great religious and ethical ideas, or to infuse
into men new power, in the thorough, final, and godlike

96 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

sense of endowing them with a new and ransomed life ?
Did he refurbish Humanity, or redeem it? Did he
release its best powers, or bestow them ? That is the
last issue, however we may blunt its edge, or soften its
exigency in particular cases. It is between a rational
Christianity and a redemptive. And it is not to be
obscured by extenuations which plead that the function
of ideas is redemptive, or that redemption is the pro-
foundest rationality in the world, the "passion which is
highest reason in a soul divine," That was a line that
nearly lost Christianity to the pagan public in the old
apologists, whose great object was to make their religion
stand well with the Universities and the State — a perilous
attempt for Christianity. The crisis of society and of the
Church is at present such that a clear issue is the first
necessity, a clear issue for a final choice. When we are
dealing with the last things it is from the lack of choice
that we suffer most, not from the lack of compromise.
It is lack of decision, it is not lack of an ideal ethic, that
is our moral disease at this hour. We avoid decision in
a languid liberalism, or in a gentle, genial spirituality. But
though we may compromise on measures we may not on
faith. We need more of the spirit of compromise in
affairs, but we have too much of it in the soul's faith.
The real object of Christian research is not the purely
historic Christ, the historic residuum, nor is it
Humanity's spiritual ideal; but within the historic
Christ it is the living God, the Saviour, who chose
us to choose Him, and whom we find here, in his history,
or not at all. It is not the ideal man we seek,
who verifies and glorifies our noblest Humanity, con-
vincing us of its inalienable place in God in spite of all
our sin; but it is the redeeming God who sets Humanity

III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 97

in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. It is not a theological
difference which troubles us but a religious. It is lack of
personal and positive religion. And it is the attempt to
cover with one vague Christian name two different
religions, and two distinct and incompatible gods. And
when it comes to a choice of religions, what we need is
more religion, more searching religion, and not advanced
knowledge. And more religion among the religious is
the chief need of the hour.

LECTURE IV

THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST'S SELF-
CONSCIOUSNESS— WAS HE A PART OF HIS

OWN GOSPEL?

LECTURE IV

THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST's SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS —
WAS HE A PART OF HIS OWN GOSPEL ?

This is a question that has been stirred into extraordi-
nary vitality by Dr. Harnack. And that I may be just
to Harnaci<, and dissever him from the extreme critics
who have exploited his phrase, let me quote his words.
He says : " What belongs to the Gospel as Jesus preached
it, is not the Son but the Father alone." In quoting
these words it is common to overlook the important
qualification, " As Jesus preached it." Now what Jesus
preached was but part of the whole Gospel. The whole
claim of Jesus for himself is not to be determined by the
explicit words he uses about himself, but also, and even
more, by the claims set up on us by the whole gospel of
his person and work when these had been perfected. The
claim of Jesus in his cross and resurrection is even greater
than the claim explicit in his mouth. His redemption
has been a greater power than his doctrine. In respect
of Harnack's meaning, the author puts himself right
in the sentence following that I have quoted, where
so many stop and do him wrong : He goes on
"Jesus belongs to his gospel not as a part of it, but as
its embodiment. He is its personal realization and its

I lOI

102 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

power. And such he will always be felt to be." More-
over, adds Harnack in a subsequent publication {Reden und
Aufsdtze II. 364), "There is no generic category under
which Christ can be placed, whether it be Reformer,
Prophet or Founder." Harnack's meaning, therefore,
would seem to be that Christ was no part of his own gospel
but the whole. He declared a Father who was only to be
known in the Son. He did not belong to God's great
gift ; he was that Gift. God gave Himself in Christ.
Such a belief would seem to be more just to Harnack
than the use too often made of his isolated phrase.

The answer to the question does not lie on the sur-
face if we confine ourselves to the Synoptics. But there
is no doubt about it if we go by the whole apostolic
teaching. From Paul to John it is declared that Jesus
was the gospel, and offered himself as such, and that
none come to the Father but by him and in him. For
the New Testament, taken as a whole, the historical
Christ is the Messiah that was coming through the Old
Testament ; who appeared in Jesus as the word made
flesh, full ot grace, and truth, and power, and signs, and
wonders ; who was crucified and rose, making atonement
for the sins of the whole world ; who ascended up to
heaven, where he now and forever represents us with the
Father, sends his Spirit, and rules his Church. He
was not a mere Rabbi of the law, but the Messiah of
the final promise, and, since his death, the Saviour
of the whole world. He was not the Nazarene,
the most illustrious figure of the New Testament,
and, indeed, of religious history ; but he was the
Christ who underlies and carries the whole history of
salvation, and therefore the history of the world. He
was a Christ with a premundane history of his own. For

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 103

the New Testament, as a whole, he was the Christ of the
gospel— of something which is indeed within .the Bible —
but of something which is its soul and not its residuum.
He was the Christ of a Gospel within the Bible, and not
simply the Jesus of a Bible within the Bible, not simply
the Jesus of a Bible reduced by criticism alone to a
historical remnant. He was not the Jesus left us by the
extreme critics, one whose great action must be wholly
compressed between his baptism and his death; but
he was the Eternal Son of God, preached by a cloud
of witnesses, many nameless, of whom Paul was the
chief. He was the Son " with a prologue of eternal
history and an epilogue of the same," throned not on
the world's history simply, but at God's right hand where
all history is judged ; the Son whose earthly life is only
intelligible on that background.

That is the New Testament Christ. And if we re-
pudiate that we should be clear what we do. We are
making a choice between the New Testament and the
modern critical school. It is not as if the whole New Testa-
ment when critically handled were on their side. They do
not now claim that. What they claim is that the history
behind the New Testament is. They claim that apostolic
Christianity, being what I have said, misunderstood Jesus.
They do not attempt to read modern interpretations into
Pauline passages, as our Broad Churchism was apt to do.
We should be clear and frank that in adopting the most
modern view we repudiate the New Testament as Christ's
expositor, in favour oi an exposition totally different,
offered by modern criticism working entirely on the
Synoptics, or on what is left of them by a certain
philosophy of religion. We reduce the New Testament
to a piece of tradition ; and in so doing we surrender the

104 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

protestant position to the catholic, as so much modern
culture does in effect.

The question of the hour then, is this — if we
keep critically to the Synoptics can the Christ of the
New Testament be retained ? The inquiry has changed
since the Tubingen days. The historical reality of Jesus
is not much challenged. What is challenged is the
dogmatic Christ in his finality and absoluteness, which
is the apostolic interpretation of his history. And of
late the question is even more narrowed. Criticism is
being driven to grant that even the Synoptics are
written in the interest of this final and apostolic Christ.
Can we, may we, go behind that Christ ? Can we shed the
apostolic theologisms which are said to distort even the
Synoptics, and construct a simple human Jesus to be the
delight of the lay type of mind everywhere? You perceive
that such teaching does not repudiate evangelical Protes-
tantism merely, but the New Testament. And thus the
question of the right of such teaching in the Church is
more serious than ever. Undogmatic Christianity repu-
diates the New Testament interpretation of Christ. It is
one thing to claim the right to a free handling of the
New Testament, it is another to repudiate the New
Testament version of Christ for the critical. One is
lawful in a Church, and one is illicit.

Of course it must at once be recognised that if
Christ did preach himself he did not do it in the
way of a blunt or naive egotism. That is not how
he convinced the disciples that he was the Messiah,
yet he made the belief irresistible in them. It is not the
way he convinced the apostles of the divinity in him ; yet
he so impressed it that they could do no other than
worship him. We shall have gained much from questions

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self- Consciousness 105

like Harnack's if they cure us of the habit of looking for
a revelation in statements, for brusque dogmatisms of
the kind that satisfies the plain man, with the muzzle of
his ' Yes or No ' at our head. Christ always refused
satisfaction to the demand that he would tell his critics
plainly if he were the Messiah or not. He is not the
Christ of the plain-dealer. He always did refuse to
be coerced, or have his methods prescribed. There he
was masterful and impracticable. He was the sole
judge of the situation, as he is of the world. It was for
him, as the revealer, both to read the moment and to take
the only way in it consistent with the revelation. And
that some people should perish upon his refusals con-
cerned him less than that he should compromise his
Father's way and will for his work — which was not, after
all, to save men the trouble of judging and choosing, nor to
gather the largest possible number of believers in a
given time.

§ § §
Let us look at his teaching in the Synoptics then and
see where it carries us. Let us see if it do not carry us far
beyond a teacher of truth, or even a preacher of the Father ;
if we have not in his synoptical proclamation of the
Kingdom sufficient points of attachment for the Johannine
preaching of himself.

Surely he preached himself as the Messiah of the
Kingdom. It was a Messiahship of burden much more
than of elation — even if we do not interpret the burden
of it in the sense of Bousset, who reads there not the
burden of the Cross but the burden of a misconception in
which he was hopelessly entangled. Is it not equally
true that he thought of himself as in a category distinct
from other men, whether we regard his relation to God

lo6 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect.

or to the world ? Where he came salvation came — as to
Zaccheus by his very presence. He stood between men
and God, not with men before God. A word spoken
against him was comparable, however different, to a sin
against God's Holy Spirit. For both were against God.
They were not like sins against men. That is to say, he
has to make his historic personality parallel with the Holy
Spirit before he can set up the contrast, which is only
effectual between beings ejusdem generis. He was greater
than the temple, he said — as no prophet could be. In
the parable of the vineyard he is the only son, the
beloved, distinct from all the messengers besides. He
never prays with his disciples, much as he prays for
them ; and the Lord's prayer was given by him but not
used by him. There is a line between him and them,
delicate but firm, " often as fine as a hair but alwavs as
hard as a diamond." What he asks is devotion to his
person and not simply to his doings, to his soul and not
to his words. To trust him is more even than to do his
commands. To love God and man in obedience to a
commandment is better than to be the slave of ritual, but
it is still to be outside the Kingdom of his Gospel. (Mark
xii. 34). He has nothing to say about martyrdom for a
cause, even for the Gospel ; but he has a supreme blessing
for those who lose life for his sake and the Gospel's.
There is not a relation of life, however deep or tender,
that must not be sacrificed to his claim upon due occa-
sion. Here he assumes a right comparable only to that
of death, which claims and snatches us from every rela-
tion of duty, passion, or interest. He assumes the right
belonging to a God who masters us in death if He never
did before. Perhaps no age has ever been so qualified to
measure the tremendous nature of this claim as our own ;

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 107

when the natural and family affections are prized and
praised as they never were before ; when the whole of
literature is dominated by them, through minor poets and
novelists; and when the whole of Christianity is often
expressed, and taken to be exhaustively expressed, in
their terms as a pitiful fatherhood and a loving sonship.
Again, what does he say has the blessing at the last ?
It is not kindness to children (or to childlike believers),
nor to the poor, but their treatment in his name.
Philanthropy, indeed, means much in the great judg-
ment ; but not for itself, not as humanity, but because
it was done to him really, however unwittingly. His
reward was to those who made themselves hated,
not for their religion but for him. Men's final relation
to God would depend not on moral conduct but on
whether Jesus owned or disowned them as true confessors
of him. But this is surely justification by faith. Or
can Jesus have forgotten himself for a moment in the
interest of theology ? Or has some Pauline editor put
the words into Christ's mouth ? I have never heard that
this has been suggested. But I do note that even
Johannes Weiss, in his commentary, is carried by such
a passage beyond the human personality to its divine
content. Such an identification by Jesus of his own
work with God's one business with history, of his own
world-role with God's, leads Weiss to say that " Jesus is
here thinking no longer of his human personality but of
the divine content whose vessel he is'' (on Mark viii. 38).
We recall the other well known passages where Jesus
considers himself the Judge of the world. While his
promise of his presence in the midst of any group met in
His name was something that a Jew associated only with
God. His exercise of forgiveness, again, all the by-

io8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

standers understood, and resented, as infringing the
prerogative of God. If it be said that forgiveness for
Christ's sake is not in the Gospels, but only a direct for-
giveness from God, it must be answered that that is not
so. It is true that forgiveness for the sake of Christ
crucified is not expressed in the Gospels ; but, apart
from all disputes about the meaning of ' Thy sins are
forgiven thee,' it is not disputable that it is always for-
giveness conditioned by faith in Jesus, and repentance
before his great and condescending personality, whose
mighty humility the cross did but gather up and con-
summate. It was a forgiveness he knew to be guaranteed
by something peculiar to himself. The kingdom, more-
over, is promised only to those that attach themselves
to his person. If it is not expressly forgiveness for
the cross's sake, it is forgiveness for Christ's sake.
But in the light of after events and experiences we
see what that meant. We see the whole Christ. It
meant for the sake of one who had the cross latent in his
very nature, and that not only as his fate but as his con
summation (for the cross did not simply befall Christ).
It was for the sake of one whose person never came to
its full self, or took full effect, but in the cross— even as
he came to earth altogether by a supramundane sacrifice,
and in the exercise of a cross assumed before the founda-
tion of the world.* Further, He repeals at will parts of the
divinest thing they knew— the Mosaic Law (Mat. xix. 3).
He declares that the supreme organ of God's will on
earth, Israel, — God's Son Israel, will be wrecked upon
its attitude to him, and replaced by foreigners. In
regard to the Pharisees, again, he uses not so much the

*See the closing lectures.

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 109

fierce bitterness of the mere Carlylese critic as the awful
severity of the supreme Judge. In the whole region of
revelation, indeed, he carries himself in a sovereign and
final way. And if it be said that even he always treated
his sovereignty as conferred, what is that so long as it was
eternally conferred ? What is it but the principle of an
Eternal Son in eternal generation from the Father.
Neither he nor his have claimed that he was an inde-
pendent and rival potentate in heaven, but that he was
and is a personal and eternal pole in Godhead. Is it a
misuse of the Great Invitation, 'Come unto me, etc'
(Mat. xi. 28) to treat it, in the way Christendom has
done, as opening for every age alike an eternal refuge
in him, and not merely as an appeal to the harassed
contemporaries of his earthly life ? Or did he mean,
not ' I am the secret,' but only ' the secret is with me' ?
Could any man keep himself out of his Gospel of a
Father if he had that consciousness of moral and spiritual
perfection, of absolute holiness, of room for the race, which
never deserted Jesus in his darkest hour? He never did,
or felt he did, anything but the will of the Father, which
will indeed he was. And he looked forward to his life
and all its ministry being consummated in a death which
was to open a new relation between God and man, and
to set up the new and universal covenant, whose day had
long ago been foreseen by Jeremiah, his nearest counter-
part in the Old Testament, and the culmination of its
content. I venture to think that these are all features
which, though they have not all been unchallenged, yet
are challenged by a criticism which is not purely historic,
but which has made up its mind before on other grounds,
on grounds of philosophic, dogmatic, or anti-dogmatic
dogmatism.

110 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

§ § §
But can you possibly explain such a Christ except by

some Christology ? Can a mere psychology with its
subjective type of Christianity explain such a Christ ? Is
the absence of a Christology in the Synoptics not the
assumption of much ' advanced ' criticism, instead of its
result? Can it be that advanced criticism means criti-
cism in advance of the facts ? Is it pure historicism that
is at work here? Is it strict evidential science? Is it
not the philosopher in the historian that does the criticism
when we are told that Christ was not essential to his
own Gospel ? Not that I object on principle to a parti
pris. Pure historical criticism is impossible in the case
of Jesus. I would only urge that the prejudice should be
faith and not dogma, personal faith and not negative
dogma. I would urge that the prejudice should be
positive religion and not negative theology. Can such
a record be adequately, sympathetically handled with-
out faith in the person ? Must you not trust him
ere he shall seem worthy of your trust? Can you
sift and win the essential thing out of these docu-
ments by scientific research alone ? Criticism of such a
story is not possible without a side taken, consciously or
unconsciously, either in faith, unfaith, or philosophy ? Is
not every estimate of Jesus a confession of faith, rich or
poor? Does he not reveal every man, judge him, and
place him? In the case of a figure like Jesus, with
such an appeal to the soul, does an absolutely scientific
critic exist, one perfectly disinterested, who has
completely succeeded in excluding every ray of light
likely to discolour a portrait wholly and solely his-
torical ? If the belief of Christendom has been
deflected by the apostolic version of Christ, is there

IV,] The Testimony of Chrisfs Self -Consciousness iii

nothing which deflects, to right or left, the version
of the modern critic ? The mischievous work of the
apostles on the genuine human Christ has been compared
by some critics to that of those speculative monks who
thought nothing of covering a priceless Greek classic
with a palimpsest of medieval dreams. Is it quite absurd,
when we see the work of some of the critics, to recall the
treatment of Shakespeare by Colley Gibber, or of
" Paradise Lost " by Bentley ?

§ § §

I have asked if Jesus was in his own doctrine of God,
in his supreme revelation of God as Father ? Now it is
not well to stake any great doctrine upon a single text,
or, indeed, on several. But, nevertheless, there are texts
and texts. And a well-assured saying of Christ himself
about himself is more than a proof text. As the expres-
sion of his own experience it is one of those documents,
like an imperial rescript, which are no mere documents,
but are themselves part of the history. They are instru-
ments and not mere evidences. And there is one text
which every critical effort has failed to shake, except for
those who come to it with their minds made up so to
think of Christ that it could not be true on any
evidence. Harnack accepts it in the main. I allude to the
familiar passage already named, Mat. xi. 27 : " No man
knoweth the son but the father, neither knoweth any
man the Father but the son, and he to whom the Son
willeth to reveal him." Upon this passage alone I should
be ready to base my own conviction that Christ believed
his sonship to be unique in kind. And I am driven farther
by it — to his prc-existence. I do believe that that idea
was in Christ's consciousness here ; though it may be
hard, on the one hand, to adjust it to other phases of

112 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

that consciousness, and though we cannot, on the other
hand, suppose he had in his thought later trinitarian
categories.

I make no direct use in this connexion of the prior
phrase, about all things having been delivered to him of
the Father ; because I agree with Wellhausen and others
who interpret it not of all power but of all the knowledge,
the revelation, needful for his task. "All I need to
know for my task has been taught me by the Father."
But I would make this use of the words — to show that
when he said the unique knowledge of the Father was the
great gift that was directly his, his for his Father's
work, he believed that it was his alone ; that no one was
for him with the Father what he was for all ; and that,
therefore, his own word must be the last word on his
relation to the Father. Whatever he thought of his
relation to the Father and the Father's work with men
was, in his judgment, given him of God, and there was
no more to be said.

What, then, did he think of that relation ? What was
taught him by the Father about his Sonship ? Surely
the Father and the Son here are both absolute terms.
Certainly it is so with the Father. The phrases are
" the Father " and " the Son." It is not my father. The
Father in his holy Eternity is meant. And with such a
Father the Son is correlative. Whatever is meant by the
Father has its counterpart in the Son. If the one is an
eternal Father the other is a co-eternal Son. There is
all the fulness in the expression, " the Son," that there
is in "the Father." Moreover, it is said here that our
human knowledge of the Father, as distinct from sur-
mises, analogies, or deductions about a Father —
any knowledge which is comparable in certainty to

IV.] The Testimony of Chrisfs Self -Consciousness 113

Christ's own — is derived from Christ, and is entirely
dependent on his will and nature. If we are sons we
are sons only in him. There is nothing absolute about
our sonship. Is it reading in Paulinism here, except in
phrase, when I say we are sons only if we are adopted
into sonship ; which Christ does in the Father's name,
the passage says, and in no arbitrary way, but on the
principles which control his own filial relation to God,
and make him the one incarnation of God's holy saving
will. The Son is determined in his choice of his illumi-
nates by the same principle as guided the Father (v. 25)
in his own case. The captain of the elect is the grand
Elector. There was an election of men by Christ as
of Christ by God ; and Christ's election of men was
God's; and some were taught and some left, at Christ's
royal choice. He chose the seekers and left the
self-contented, filled the hungry with his good things
and sent the self-satisfied empty away. He had nothing
to teach those who knew all about it, any more than he
had healing for those who felt whole. He passed by the
philosophers and the healthy-minded, and spoke to the
sick waiters for Israel's salvation. And he is himself a
like mystery to men with the Father. His person is
beyond all psychology, and its key is in God's hands
alone. The Son is lighted up, is revealed only by the
Father, as the Father by the Son (Mat. xvi. 17). Flesh
and blood does not reveal the truth about him, but only
the Father in heaven. The son is so unique in his kind
that only God's revelation can read him or teach him.
At his inmost he is as much of a mystery as the Father
is. Yet he gives himself to be known. And this know-
ledge of him is a new religion. To know the God in Christ
is another religion from that which knows God only

114 ^^'^ Persofi and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

through Christ. It is the new and only way to know
God as religion must know him. With the person of
Jesus comes a new religion, of which he is the object,
and not simply the subject as its saint or sage.

The son, then, knows the Father with the same know-
ledge as the Father has of himself. And it was a
knowledge which was not transferable. The power that
Christ gave was the power to know the Father in him ;
it was not the power to know the Father as he did.
It was the power to know the Godhead of the Father
by the incarnate Godhead of the Son.

§ § §
Do you complain that to speak of the son knowing the

father with the Father's own knowledge of himself is to

introduce theological intricacy into a matter of filial

faith ? Let me venture to answer (after reminding you

that the words are Christ's), first, that if filial faith

comes to possess our whole being the theological

intelligence on such matters will no longer slumber. A

filial faith is a theological faith. Second, that it is

Christian teachers that we have in view ; who, for the

sake of their own certainty and the powerful simplicity

that goes with certainty, might well be less afraid of faith's

mental Hinterland than they are. And, third, that they

should be ready with some answer to those of their flock

who ask for an interpretation of passages like i Cor. ii., or

who raise the question of two Gods, Father and Son.

The chapter I have just named is classic for the

psychology of inspiration and its value. I have more to

say about its authority in the next lecture. But I point out

here that Paul makes a tremendous claim for the Church's

knowledge of God as concentrated in the knowledge of

the apostles. He says it does not rest on human

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self-Cunsciotisness 115

thought — neither upon logical inference, the divination
of genius, nor the impressive speculation of philosophy.
All these are more or less "thrown out" at God,
What we have, he says, is the very truth given of God.
Nay, we share in the self certainty of God, It was an
immense thing to say — a thing as vast as when it is
preached that God by His Grace and His Spirit includes
us in His love for His eternal and holy Son. And if it
was not true it was a huge and fantastic delusion which
must discredit all apostolic witness. How could Paul
possibly rise to such a statement ? He did not rise ; he
was lifted. He was entered and seized by the Spirit.
On these great central matters of faith not he spoke but
Christ spoke in him — as, at his height, he knew it was
not he that lived his life of faith but Christ that lived in
him.* " We have the mind of Christ," the theology of
Christ, Christ's theology. We think and know, on these
things, as Christ did and does. And Christ ? Christ is a
part of the consciousness of God. Follow the passage up.
Paul uses the psychological analogy of our self-conscious-
ness. Man, he says, made in God's image, has the
marvellous power of being at once the thinker and the
object of thought, of facing himself, of observing him-
self, of understanding his own understanding, of re-
porting on himself. And this because he is a living
Spirit. Who knoweth a man but the Spirit, the con-
sciousness of a man which is in him.f His conscious-
ness is a self-consciousness, which is also the only

•This no more implie'l infallibility in every statement than it did
impeccability in every act. I3iit it did imply central truth as it did
central and subduin« righteousness

t Spirit is here used as what makes man man, quite differently from its
usual sense with Paul as the specific gift of new life which makes a
Christian a Christian.

ii6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

means of our knowing him. So also God knows him-
self— by his Spirit. Now the Lord Christ is that
Spirit. Christ is part of the consciousness of Godhead.
And as no man can read our interior till we utter our-
selves, till our own spirit report, so we cannot know
God except by his own Spirit— His Word (as John calls
it), His Christ (as Paul calls it). God knows Himself by
the Spirit. We know God by that Spirit issuing as a
Word. We know Him by the Spirit by which he knows
himself — by that Spirit living in Christ as its Word,
knowing God by God's self-knowledge, and entering us,
by Christ, with the same supernatural knowledge. The
rest may reason, and welcome ; but we of the Spirit
know. Christ witnesses in us of his unity of being with
the Father, when we pursue the faith that changes us
from death to life.

So the great passage of Paul must be expounded. So
he and his believed. We must then make a choice
between the belief that he was profoundly, superhumanly
right, or that he was learnedly and speculatively mad, as
Festus decided before us. The theology of the extreme
critics goes with Festus. So little is it "new."

I put it, then, that Christ uttered these words of
Matthew, and that what they mean is what I have said.

This is, perhaps, the nearest approach made by Jesus
in the synoptics to calling himself directly the Son of
God in the special sense. It is the 4th Gospel in mice.
The idea of an Eternal Father is unthinkable without an
• Eternal Son of equal personal reality and finality.
And, little as Jesus troubled himself with what was
thinkable or unthinkable, how can we deny that that
idea underlies his words and gives their full meaning. An
Eternal Father must have an Eternal Son. The Father

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 117

from before the foundation of the world has his vis-a-vis
in a co-eternal Son. And Jesus believed himself to be
that Son ; else surely he would have confessed some
religious relation to him. If he was not that Son, a
relation to such a Son would have been part of his
religion. But no Son, apart from himself, had any
place in his religious world. So that the passage in
Matthew is almost as clear as if Christ had said in
words, what he did say in effect often, but never so
nearly as here, " I am that Son." He was thus central
to his own Gospel. But his was never the egoist's way of
saying so. He never said, for instance, in so many words
that he was the Messiah ; but he spoke and acted as only
Messiah could. And so he taught the one Father as
only the one Son could. He taught a Son as unique as
the Father. To acknowledge that Christ taught the
Eternal Father is, in the presence of such a passage
as this, to acknowledge also that he knew himself, in
that hour at least, to be the Eternal Son that a real
Fatherhood in Eternity demands. In recognising the
substantial force of this passage Harnack is far separated
from the extreme critics, whom he describes as the
victims of their own subjectivity.

Yet the object of life is not to strive for a belief in the
co-eternity of the Son, but to find in Christ, as the
living Saviour, that which makes nothing less than such
a belief a need, a refuge, and a joy of the soul.

§ § §
Observe at another angle the argument that is so freely

used by many who carry Harnack whither he would not.

Jesus came chiefly to preach; Wiiat he left on earth

was doctrine of an impressive kind. It is not made out

that he was in his own doctrine. Therefore, the apostles

Il8 The Person and Fhice of Jesus Christ [lect.

who, without question, put his person in front of his
doctrine misrepresented him ; and in their teaching they
gave us too Httle of his speech and too much of himself
(or their version of him). They gave too little of his
historic principles and too much of his super-historic
self. That is to say, Jesus was a preacher; He did not
put himself in front of his doctrine ; His apostles did
put him there ; and in so far they are wrong, and they
misrepresent him. That is the argument.

There is a fallacy somewhere. And it is here. You
say that the one legacy of Jesus was a doctrine of the
Father, reinforced by the powerful personality of the
prophet. Why do you say that ? What entitles you to
say that the great thing Jesus brought the world was
a doctrine, a doctrine rather than a deed, and that he left
as his achievement his principle rather than his person ?
You admit that this was not the view of the apostles, nor
of the first Church ; it was not the view of those who
received whatever legacy he did leave. You are coming
to admit that it was not the view of the Synoptists.
Why do you say they were all of them wrong ? You
take your stand on certain words of Jesus alone. But
what entitles you to do that ? You make a huge assumption
very silently. You assume that the words were his final
or only expression of himself, and gave effect to all that was
in him. Does that go without saying? Was it by his
recorded words that his life took chief or sole effect ?
Were they not, though expressions of his real self, yet of
his unfinished self? His work was not half done till he
died. Why insulate the words, whose direct reference
was but to an incomplete situation, a raw audience, and
an inchoate context of events? The synoptics are an
apostolic product; why detach them so absolutely from

IV.] The Testimony of ChrisVs Self -Consciousness 119

the other apostolic products in the New Testament ?
Why say that in these you have no commentary from the
completed Christ on his own words and work ? When his
life was over, and its net action on his world came to be
realised, then the apostles had the full expression of the
personality, in whose light all that precedes must be
read. And in that light it was not his doctrine but his
deed that arrested his circle, changed them, and sent them
out to change the world. His words are so precious
because they are the words of one who proved himself by
his work alone to be the great authority on himself. Is
it not the issue of his life that gives weight to his words
about himself? With your emphasis upon his statements
alone, are you not in bondage to the bad old idea of
revelation, namely, that it consists of a teaching rather
than a person, of statement or precept rather than
act, of a complete truth rather than a finished deed,
of truth about God rather than of God as truth ? How
ineradicable, how subtle, that pagan, catholic orthodox
fallacy is! Have we not learned how much greater
a person is than a principle or a truth, and by how much
Christ's total work was his greatest word, in whose light
we read all his words. In the light of his cross we see
the most wondrous depths in his law. F'or instance, " I
am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of
Israel." When the cross broke open Christ's univer-
sality these words contain not a final truth but a great
providential scheme at a penultimate stage. Do we not
yet understand that the nature of true revelation is that
it should come by historic facts and deeds rather than by
truths, even the truths uttered at a stage by the chief
actors in the deed ? Whether Christ taught himself or
not he gave himself, in a lifelong act as great as his person

120 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

and ascending to his cross. He left this gift as his legacy
to his Church and world. And what was the greatest
effect of his gift to the Church? It was to open their
eyes to see that his gift of himself to man was so great
because of his prior and greater gift of himself to God,
his offering of himself for men to God, which was always
the supreme giving with him. And hence he was treated
by those who first received the complete gift as no mere
impressive personality to be remembered with reverence,
but as a Saviour to be received by faith, and duly honoured
by nothing less than worship. God alone could duly hallow
God in man. It was only after his death that the full
truth could be told because only then did the full truth
exist, because his death was its creation. Only in
the completion of the cross did Christ become the object
of Gospel preaching, because only there was he perfected
and final as Redeemer. It was not till then that his
disciples came to worship him. And what one
observes is this, that those who have found themselves
in his death cannot hear enough about his life ; but
those who find their account only in his life are soon
satiated with interpretations of his death. And they
even sink to the level of Pfleiderer, and those who dilute
his statement that, "The permanent thing in the Christian
faith of redemption is the moral ideal of the self-redemp-
tion of society through the solidarity of the helpful and
exalting love of its members." That is, all kind and help-
ful people are redeemers in the same sense as Christ.
But for us it is his death that makes Christ unique. His
death gives us command of the whole Christ as is not
given us by his life or his words. He was perfected only
in his conquest of death ; and only in that consummation
do we see him clear and see him whole. And only when the

IV.] The Testimony of Chrisfs Self -Consciousness 121

deed was done was it of any use to talk of it, even to his
own. His consummation there released the spirit by
which alone he could be understood. Like the great-
est geniuses, he had to create the spirit that understood
him. The Spirit was released for men by the same act
as released men for the Spirit.

§ § §
We should take more seriously the growth of Jesus.

We are all agreed that Jesus grew in obedience, learning

it by the things that he suffered. He was not simply an

event in history; he had himself a history, which is the

moral marrow of all history. His natural consciousness

grew, and the content of it grew, as he grew from child

to man, and came to know the world. His spiritual

consciousness, his sense of sonship, also grew, as he

settled the conflicts that beset him about his Messiahship.

Is it too much to press into the deeper meaning and

condition of such growing obedience, and to say that as

he did the deeper will he knew the deeper doctrine, his

grasp of sonship also grew. The growing form of his

obedience must have had for its concomitant a growth in

the power of reading the meaning of his experiences;

yea, a growth not only of his consciousness but of

his personality, (his subjective personality, not his

objective relation to God) a growth in which his

deepening will met his deepening fate ? And must we

not go forward on that line to say that it was only by

death that he himself took the full measure of his death,

and conveyed that interpretation to his disciples ? It

was only in victorious death, (with its obverse of

resurrection,) that he was perfected, found himself,

' arrived,' ripened, and was determined not as Son but

as Son in power (Rom. i. 4). It was not till he died that

122 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

he possessed his whcle soul, came to his own, entered on
all he really was, was exalted to his true heaven, and
could teach about himself things impossible before
His teaching during life was the teaching appropriate to
the national stage of his universal work, to the pro-
visional stage of his personal task. It is immaterial at
this point to ask whether this great interpretation
through death was conveyed by him to his disciples in a
"gospel of the 40 days," or by his inspiration, from behind
the veil, of men like Paul, in whom he lived more really
than they did in themselves.

The question is often asked, why the idea of the
kingdom of God disappears outside the Synoptics ?
Have we not here one answer ? Is it not because of the
essential change created in the whole situation by the
finished work, by the perfecting of Christ, by his coming
into his kingdom, by his identification with the kingdom,
and its real establishment in his redemptive triumph ?
The King is the Kingdom. To be " in Christ " is to be
in the Kingdom. The historic idea becomes the mystic
reality. The future becomes the present. The apostolic
preaching of Christ therefore took the place of Christ's
own preaching of the kingdom. He was now identi-
fied with the Kingdom. How could that have happened
if his teaching or memory had been his real legacy,
if he was not more than all he said, and his manner
of death more than all his method of address ?
Nothing in his life served the kingdom like his manner
of leaving it. The Gospel of Christ replaced the Gospel
of the Kingdom, because by his death he became the
kingdom, because he became all that the kingdom
contained, he was the "truth" of the Kingdom, and his per-
sonal perfecting was ipso facto and pari passu the securing

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self-Consciousness 123

ofthe Kingdom. Like " Messiah," the Kingdom was an
Old Testament phrase, which served to enclose what he
brought in himself; and the pitcher, the phrase, was
broken as the true light shone. The testimony of Jesus
is the Spirit of the Kingdom. The Kingdom was great
with him. The Gospel of the Kingdom was Christ in
essence; Christ was the Gospel ofthe Kingdom in power.
The Kingdom was Christ in a mystery ; Christ was the
publication, the establishment of the Kingdom. To
bring the kingdom preach the King. He was the truth
of his own greatest Gospel. It is wherever he is. To
have him is to ensure it. He sparkles in his Gospel
of the Kingdom ; but the Kingdom shines out full and
final in his perfecting, in his finished soul and eternal
whole.

§ § §
There is another way of putting the matter (suggested
by Kahler) which does not always have due attention.
Why should we insulate the Synoptics as the sole source of
our knowledge of what Jesus wished taught as his gospel ?
He^eft some bequest; was it his teaching? If it was,
did he make the careful provision he ought to have done
for the preservation in purity of a gift so supreme ? Or
for any correct record of his life's story ? Was it either
his life or teaching that was understood to be his grand
bequest by those he left ? Did he think of leaving with
them anything but himself, as cross and resurrection had
made him — himself and his speedy return ? If his words
were the treasure, what foresight did he use to anticipate
and avert that huge misrepresentation of him and his
doctrine which, we are told, began almost at once, and
which he would have been very dull as a teacher not to
think possible in ordinary conditions? Did he ever erect

124 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [r. ect.

the Galilean ministry which fills the Synoptics into the
touchstone ? If he did, where is it so said ? And why
was it not at once put into fixed and authoritative shape
to meet the Apostolic doctrine that was doing his memory
such mischief ? If he did mean the matter of his ministry
to be the test, why was the memory of it such a failure for
the purpose of arresting its perversion ? Why did not
the very earliest Church in its mission work confine itself
to carrying on his sententious style, his moral precepts,
and his parabolic form ? Why did they not adhere
closely to comment on his words and deeds, as all the
pupils of a great master did with his TrapaSoo-ts, or tra-
dition, at that day ? Even James, it is remarked, the
nearest in tone to the Synoptics, does not repeat their
teaching, but he calls for faith in the Lord of Glory, and
a life accordingly. What ground have we for saying that
if the Apostles had been true to the intention of Jesus
they would have prolonged and expanded his teaching
and beneficence, instead of going off upon a theological
Gospel ? It is more than ever wonderful that they did
not prolong his mode of instruction if we follow the view
of so many and hold that there was little original in his
teaching, little beyond what could be drawn, and was
drawn, from the Old Testament, or Judaic tradition.
To Jews brought up like the Apostles that fact would
only have given the more weight to Christ's words, and
deepened their obligation to continue the new impulse he
had infused into the old truths.

Does it not all point to this, that the real legacy of
Jesus was himself — the impression of the personality
which gave to his * occasional ', and sometimes transitory,
teaching its real worth. Nay, impression is not the
word. His great legacy was an achievement. The mere

[V.] The Testimony of Christ's Self-Consciousness 125

impression evaporated as disciples forsook him and fled.
It was a new life, a new creation, that he effected. Some-
thing happened which rallied them, and converted the
fading impression into living and justifying faith — some-
thing which had the real gospel, and the real gospel power,
in it. Christ rose. A new master made of them new men.
A new Christ turned them from disciples into apostles.
The Spirit came. The cross opened. These things
were what made the Church, and not the teaching oi
Jesus. That teaching was only preserved from oblivion
by the existence of a Church founded on another base,
on an atoning salvation which alone gave the Church its
living interest in the records of the Saviour, and gave to
his words their authority. The gospels were written by
and for people who were made Christian by Christ's
death and resurrection and their theological meaning.
They were written to edify the converts of the Cross, and
not to challenge or correct a theology of incarnation and
redemption.

§ § §
The inadequacy of the Synoptics alone is shown from

another point of view, which I suggested a moment
ago. It is recognised by most that there was a develop-
ment of some kind in the course of Christ's public
ministry. And it is admitted by most that such
an idea was not in the mind of the Evangelists, that
in the gospels it is not set out, and, if it is to be
traced, it must be picked out. It is more or less of a
construction. It does not lie on the face of the docu-
ments. So much so that within my own memory it was
thought a heretical and somewhat hazardous suggestion,
due to wits more sharp than sound. The Synoptics do
not offer it, though they may be made to yield it. But

126 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

how are we to trace it ? I mean, what are we to look for
in that way ? What kind of development shall we seek ?
What is the ideal scheme of growth which the Gospel
material is to fill in, perhaps by some re-arrangement ?
The Gospels themselves, I say, offer no such scheme.
We mu:t get it elsewhere, and then the Gospels will
illustrate it. Where shall we get it ? To what, in what
respect, are we to suppose Jesus developed ?

Now, to these questions the apostles give a certain
answer. He grew as Saviour. He developed as Re-
deemer. He grew in his vocation rather than in his
position, more even than in character. He did not
become either the Son or the sinless. As the situation
became more vast, grave, and tense, there grew in him
not only knowledge but force and grasp in his one work.
He learned a redemptive obedience — not indeed to acquire
its nature, but to unfold its form as the crisis deepened.
Because he was a son (his Sonship he did not learn) he
learned obedience. It is not the acquisition of Sonship
but the growth of an incarnated Redeemer that the
Epistles teach us to look for in the Gospels, the process
of Redemption rather than incarnation. The idea is con-
densed in Hebrews ii. lo, " to perfect the captain
of salvation by sufferings." Not the man Jesus was
perfected but the Saviour, not the moral character so
much as the work possible only to that character. Here
we certainly have moral development, but it is not the
increase of a moral nature so much as the deepening
mastery of a moral vocation. It is not the aesthetic
development of a moral character of symmetry and
balance, but the dynamic development of a Redeemer,
of a Son of God in power which was at last determined
in his resurrection. It is not so much a perfect product

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 127

of sanctification that we have, but a perfect agent of
justification; not perfection of the admirable personality —
but perfection of the finished work ; not

" A soul by force of sorrows high,
Uplifted to the purest sky
Of undisturbed Humanity "
(which is a stoic ideal after all, as Wordsworth's always
was a chastened spirituality) but one who was always
equal to cope with each mounting antagonism that a
Redeemer had to meet. This, of course, could only be
done by an ethical personality and its victory ; but it is
not the ethical idea that is uppermost, but the evangelical,
the theological, the functional, the evolution of the
Saviour, rather than the man, in so far as they are separ-
able. And it is not I who say they are, but those who
lake the man and leave the Saviour.

But the growth that is traced by those who reject the
idea of redemption as being something foisted by the
apostles on Jesus, is the growth of such ethical character
as a saintly modern man would be expected to achieve by
a sympathetic and scholarly biographer. If the Gospel
material is to fill up some conception of development, and
the development is not that of a redeemer, it must be
that of an ethical character of the modern type. Is it
hard to choose between the value and authority of the two
ideals ? If each is an importation into the Synoptics,
which is the more likely to do justice to them — that
favoured by the founders and heads of the Churches that
produced and used them, or that imposed by laborious
scholars living at a date so remote as our own,
working often with more psychological acumen than
personal faith, and working under a bias against apostolic
interpretation. Development is meaningless without a

128 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

standard or principle. And my contention would be that
the apostles represent the atmosphere of the evangelists ;
that the apostolic ideal is the principle of any development
which the evangelists may imply but do not set them-
selves to press; and that any construction of the evan-
gelists other than this must be more alien and more
artificial. To set forth Christ as Redeemer is at least
more germane to our data than to exhibit him as the
flower of spiritual character, which certainly was not the
interest of our sources at all.

§ § §
Those who select the Gospels out of the New Testa-
ment, and the Synoptics out of the Gospels, you perceive
then, do not stop there. They sift the Synoptics and
select from them a putative primitive Gospel. They
select the essential thing, as they deem it. I have
asked what is their test of the essential ? The rest
of the New Testament, we have seen, does offer a
standard for those narratives. It is the evangelical,
the dogmatic, Christ, whom the critics reject ; the
Christ who is much more the object of faith than
the subject of it. And that is the test that the
Church has used throughout its deeply experienced
history. Even when the Bible was not accepted en bloc,
this was so. It was Luther's test for a canon within the
canon. He took what made for that apostolic, saving
Christ. And we all do as Luther did, so far. We all
make our own canon within the canon. We do not find
every part of the Bible equally authoritative or equally
valuable. We each select the passages which do most
for us, which come most home to our chief need, and
the need we find unmet elsewhere. We have many
individual ways of making that selection, varying up-

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 129

wards from literary taste to evangelical experience. But
when it has to be done on the scale of a Church, or a
science, it must be done under some common guiding prin-
ciple. Now for the Church's selection of the canon, the
guiding principle was the evangelical principle of
Redemption, the apostolic note. It was the witness,
direct or indirect, to Christ the Redeemer, and not
Christ the personage, the hero, saint, or prophet. And
it was the same redemptive principle that the Church
applied, in the evolution of its theology, to test the
heresies of the right or of the left. All its metaphysics
were so many inadequate efforts made, in the greatest
language of the period, to secure that substantial and
final interest of a real redemption — as our social efforts
are made to-day. These are efforts to express redemption
in the inadequate forms of social re-arrangement when
what we need is social re-generation. We need a re-
formed Church more than a re-adjusted state.

But if that redemptive and apostolic principle be
discarded in selecting from the select books the essential
Christ, what is to take its place? What is the guiding
principle to be? What is the ultimate thing, whose
witness in the Synoptics is their permanent thing ? You
say it is just spirituality, a deeply humane spirituality?
What do you mean by that? Is it the simple, rational,
natural, continuous relation that we can now discern
between God and Man, the last conditions in thought of
God, man, and the world ? But is that not Metaphysics ?
At any rate, is it not religious psychology ? It is not a
historical test pure and simple that you are making the
norm. It is often a metaphysical test, a monistic test,
in which we measure religion by its transfiguration of
our deep, natural, immanent relation to God and the

130 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

world based on identity of being and nature. Yet we
were given to understand that it was just the metaphysic
in the old creeds that made the worst burden of them.
Can it be that the critic who sends in his card as the
representative of the new scientific firm is really the
agent of the old metaphysical house, who, after
ruining it, is starting the same industry under en-
tirely new management, in a fresh place of business ?
Is the test for the essential thing in the Gospels
composed of certain ideas, movements, or sympathies,
rising out of the continuity of rational process in God and
man, and either springing up in the human mind as its
natural nexus with God, or generalised from the various
faiths into a universal philosophy of religion ? Is general
religiosity the test of positive rehgion ? Is the amor-
phous the standard of the organic ? Is the nebula the
measure of the world, or the protoplast of the paragon ?
Is what we should naturally expect God to do to be the
measure of faith in what he has done ? Is that old
apriorism not dead yet ? Are we to begin by admitting
only what we consider worthy of Him ? Is that what
we are to put in the centre of Christianity, that and not
the invasive Word, the spiritual enclave, the actual
revelation, the pure gift and person of Christ in its
originality and finality, welling up in the soul's history
like a quenchless spring of living water in the bottom of
the Dead Sea? Is nothing to be credited to the Father
of spirits but what is allowed by the instincts of nature's
sweetest child ? Everywhere (it is said) you find that a
good God forgives upon mere repentance and confession,
that he comes in aid to his worshipper's cry. Our hearts
say that, the spiritual summary of the world's faiths says
that. If there be anything said about Christ, even in

IV.] The Testimony oj Christ's Self -Consciousness 131

the New Testament itself, which contradicts that, it must
out. If a holy judge affright our dreams when we had
gone to rest on a kind Father's kiss, it is the nightmare
of a stale and indigestible creed. If a mediator, an
atonement, is preached, it is a sophistication. If any-
thing in the Gospels points that way, disallow it. It is a
dishonour to the great and ready heart of God. "But
then the textual or other evidence ? " " O, that is lower
" criticism. The passage has spoken blasphemy. What
"further need have we of witnesses? It is worthy of
" death." Is there anything in the Godhead of Christ
which is forbidden by modern monism, modern evolution?
" Delendum ! Such a Christ is a foreign body intruded
" between God and the Soul. Forgiveness is but a
"rudimentary way of speaking about the relation of
"absolute to finite being; or it is but *a religious
"expression for a psychological process,' a divine way of
"speaking of the healing and softening effect of spiritual
" time and its genial process upon the disturbed moral
" consciousness. God is not angry. Ritschl has settled
" that. It was all our ignorance. Salvation means
"getting rid of the idea that he is angry; it is escaping
"from a misconception of him, clearing up a misunder-
" standing, Sanctification is the art of learning to soothe
"the excessive pertinacity and philistinism of conscience,
" putting that bore into his place, and acquiring the
" cachet of the cultivated suburbs of the devout soul." O,
it is all so able, so genteel, so dull, so morally ordinary, so
spiritually banal ! I must allow myself to quote here
what one of the noblest Germans of them all, and the
most religious, says about the liberal theologians and
critics of the hour. Nobody will accuse Herrmann
of orthodoxy. He has been pointing out that the liberal

132 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

theologian (what we call the advanced) lacks one thing
that orthodoxy had and still has — power. If liberalism,
he says, could acquire this it would be far superior to the
old creed — if it could meet as effectively as the old did
man's need of power and life. It would be better because
it would cut adrift much wreckage that the old still
drags with it and should lose. And he associates this
element of power with the central and supernatural place
given to Christ, both in history and in our private experi-
ence— Christ as the sole being to whom the soul can and
must absolutely submit as unto God. " But," he says,
"this is just what in the liberal theology you do not
have. Its representatives are accomplished experts in
the appreciation of piety outside them, but a piety of
their own, a religion of decision, seldom emerges into the
light of their consciousness. They are masters in the art
of presenting to us the way in which the prophets
received the word of God, or the way an apostle's soul
was filled with conflict first and then with peace. They
can wipe the dust of centuries from the words of Jesus.
Nay, they can trace for you, with a high ardour, his
incomparable spiritual style. But they seldom show a
sign of concern about what Christ means for themselves.
They do not betray that a personal life bears down on
them out of the page of Scripture, and, full and warm,
conquers them for his own. If that were their concern
they would at least be silent when others adore him as
Lord because he alone compels the worship from their
soul. So long as they do not feel that, they cannot do
the work of theology, nor lay for ever the ghost of dog-
matic controversy when the old creed claims that there is
no theology but itself. But in the Churches of the Refor-
mation the sleeping sense will yet wake that religion is

IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 133

the veracity of the inmost life to the actual situation of
his soul, and that Christian religion can only grow from
what a man himself experiences of the present reality of
the person of Christ." (Kultur d. Gegenwart I, 630.)

The final tendency of "advanced theology" is back-
wards. Like Moliere's ghost, it has improved very much
for the worse. It relapses to the outgrown Deism of the
eighteenth century. That was a rationalism which
ignored history ; this is a rationalism which deforces it.
And its great act of violence is the driving of a fatal
wedge between the Synoptics and the Epistles, between
the message of Jesus and the Gospel of his Apostles.

§ § §

I should like to add a point which has often arrested
me, and one whose development would carry us far.
Jesus loved the Father in entire obedience, humility
and trust. He trusted Him when every human and
rational reason for trust was gone. But yet neither
from himself nor his apostles do we hear any reference
to his faith — though faith is the one link between him
and them. The evangelists have a rich store of phrases
for his relation to God, whom he heard, saw, knew, etc.,
but they never say he believed in God. And never does
he say " Believe in me as I in the Father." The reason
is that our faith has to make its way over darkness and
distance, both in thought and will, which never troubled
him. He no more confesses his faith than his sin. The
religious problem for him and us was not the same. He
possessed the certainty and communion of the Father in
himself. And we believe in the Only Son as he believed
in none.

LECTURE V

THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC
INSPIRATION— IN GENERAL

LECTURE V

THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC INSPIRATION —
IN GENERAL

The line of proof we follow (if we may call it proof, if
it is more than movement) is threefold. We began by
interrogating the self-consciousness of Christ. But we
may have had occasion to find that for some this is
bound to be incomplete. For, first, we are exposed to
the challenge of the Higher Criticism on the passages
concerned. And second, on a kenotic theory, the self-
consciousness of the earthly Christ is in comparative
occultation. Hence, we push forward the second line of
works — the New Testament, its reflection of Christ, and
especially its inspiration by him. We are driven to what
might be called his self-consciousness in his apostles.
And beyond that we have the third line, the line of
experience in the soul of the individual or the Church.

It is with the second parallel of advance that we come
now to be concerned — with the value for our subject of
the New Testament testimony and its inspiration,
meaning by that the apostolic testimony. I do not refer
here to the general faith of the first Church, to the faith
that wrung from it the confession and worship of Jesus
as Christ and Lord. I have more in view than the

137

138 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

impression Jesus produced on men in numbers. I do
not speak of the New Testament as the mirror in which
we see the reflected image that Christ made in the
Church. I speak now of it as his mouthpiece. I speak
of the apostles in chief, and of that special exercise of
faith which in them is called inspiration. And I go to
ask what is the value of the apostolic inspiration, in
order that we may assess the value of the apostles' view
of the person and work of Christ. Was their view of
him a passing impression, a personal opinion, perhaps an
early extravagance that we must leave behind ? The
religious-historical school have virtually recognised that
views of Incarnation, Atonement, Redemption and
Sacrament are not to be explained away out of the New
Testament however they may be explained into it. It is
an immense admission which I shall often use ; for it
concedes that the views developed by the later Church
on such subjects are really rooted in the apostolic creed,
whether that creed was rooted in the mind of Jesus or
not. If the apostles were right about Christ, the Gospel
of the whole Catholic and Evangelical Church is right.
It is of prime moment, therefore, that we should know if
the inspiration of the apostles was anything which gives
to their teaching on these heads more than a personal,
temporary, or deflected worth.

§ § §
Must everything in the New Testament be true ? Is

everything we find in Jesus revelation ? Was his
geocentric view of the world, was his view of the author-
ship of a psalm, was his every precept— were these
permanent revelation ? Again was everything equally
revelation that was believed about Jesus by an apostle ?
Or was there not rather a proportion and perspective of

v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 139

faith ? Do such things not stand at varying distances
from the vital centre, and are they not vital accordingly ?
Again, were there any extraneous ideas at work
from other religions on Judaism, on the Church, on the
Apostles, shaping the form of some of their beliefs ? If
so, have we not to go on to ask, what in the New
Testament is of faith, and what comes either from the
mental world of the time or from the idiosyncracy or
the education of the writer — like his mode of argument ?
What is mere impression, and what is speculative
explanation, and what is in the nature of miraculous
supernatural insight by special action of the Spirit ?
These distinctions and questions are inevitable.

§ § §
The Church made a great step forward when it was
led to think less of the inspiration of a book and
more of the inspiration of the men that wrote it
and of the nation that bred them. We learned last
century that inspiration was something too warm and
vital to belong to a book ; it could only be the state of
a living soul. It was personal inspiration and not book
inspiration. That is valuable, but it does not end the
matter. We must take account, as of the Old Testament
nation, so of the corporate consciousness of the Church
as a site of inspiration. And not only so but about the
man we must ask questions. If it was the man that was
inspired, and not the book, was everything the man said
or did inspired ? Or did the inspiration only come when
he had to speak in public, or take the pen in hand ? It
is no necessary guarantee of truth to say it came from an
inspired man. Was he inspired when he saw it ? Was
he equally inspired when he said it, so that we may be
sure that what he said is exactly what he saw ? Which

140 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

acts of apostles were inspired ? Was it inspiration (it
has been asked) when Peter decided to take his wife with
him on a missionary journey, or when Paul discouraged
marriage ? Were such things in inspired men also
inspired ? Or had these men but the potentiality of
inspiration for use on due occasions ; and did it need
some particular historic situation, especially in the
consciousness of the Church, or some special divine
intervention, to produce the inspired state and insight ?

§ § §
Of course, to begin, they had at least such a personal

relation to history as is implied in saving faith in a
historic Saviour. Inspiration had faith for a base. And
it was faith positive, faith at a certain practical juncture.
Accordingly the New Testament books were mostly
occasional, applying fundamental Christianity to par-
ticular situations in the believing Church. But how
much is to be allowed for the situation ? And where is
the permanent element independent of situation, and not
only good for all time but creative ? Surely if we ask the
writers, the apostles in particular, their answer is that
there is such an element, and that it centres about the
person, place, and work of Christ, involving a real
incarnation and atonement. We escape thereby from
Rationalism, orthodox or heterodox ; there is a historic
authority claimed. But we cannot remain in mere
Biblicism. We cannot believe a certain thing just because
it is in the Bible. And our city of refuge is Evangelism.
What we really believe is the Gospel which, with the new
soul, called the Bible also into being, and for whose sake
it exists. It is not the Church. For the books of
the Bible were given to the Church, more than by it, and
they descended on it rather than rose from it. The canon

V ] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 141

of the Bible rose from the Church, but not its contents.
Bible and Church were collateral products of the Gospel.
But we go on. Having fixed in the New Testament
on what was held to be of faith and central to faith, we
must ask, was it true ? How far is that theological faith
a true interpretation of the historical Jesus Christ ?
Does it assign to Jesus Christ what he himself claimed,
or wished claimed, when we read him as a whole ? Does
it express what he compels from us by an examination of
his self-consciousness, or, still more, by an experience of
his work ?

§ § §

Now this last, his work, contains the greatest claim of
all so far as the New Testament is concerned. It is
what the apostles operate with almost entirely. For
them Christians are not people who have a Christian
character, whatever their beliefs, nor those who cherish
ethical ideas about dying to self and living in a larger
whole. But Christians are those who partake by
experience in Christ's death, resurrection, and eternal
life. The apostles do not take our modern line and
interpret the self-consciousness of Jesus. If they had,
we should have more data in our hands for doing it.
The apostolic method was to stake all upon Christ's
person and the cross (with its obverse of the Resurrec-
tion), upon the cross and Christ's work there, appropri-
ated by the Church's faith and experience of the New
Creation.

The question then, is, Is the apostolic method right
in this respect ? Is it a true interpretation of Jesus to do
as it did, and fix on the cross (with the resurrection) as
the key to him and his meaning ? Is this the authentic
word in the Bible ? It is now generally felt how true

142 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

was the selective insight of Jesus in respect to the Old
Testament, when for his teaching he seized on the
prophetic element in it rather than the legal as the fertile
core of its revelation and the red line of God's coming.
Can we be as sure that the apostles were equally right
when, in the prophets, they concentrated on Is. 53,
and seized on Christ's atoning death and resurrection
among all the features of his activity, as the site of
the consummatory and illuminative Word about himself ?
Were they wrong when they found the two lines, the
prophetic and the priestly, meeting there ?

§ § §

In approaching the answer to such questions, and
assessing the value of New Testament inspiration as real
insight into the person and work of Christ, we might
clear the ground with a few more interrogatories.

Could the doctrine of the Atonement, or of the
Incarnation, be established for a Church, for the race,
on the synoptics alone, historically and critically
searched ? I do not think they could. But then neither
could the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, or the Church, to
say nothing of others. Indeed it is only constructively
that we can find there the modern idea of a development
of Christ's public character and purpose. I am sure that
the Church at least, which was founded on the apostles'
atoning interpretation of the cross, could not live upon
the Synoptics alone. It could not find itself in them.

But perhaps these doctrines then are compatible with
the Synoptics and latent there, if they are not palpable.
Are they ? Yes, some would say ; no, would be said by
others. I believe they are. And that is the real
question. It is not whether the Synoptics would yield
the doctrines, but whether the doctrines, and the doctrines

v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 143

alone, explain them. And I think critical opinion is
growing that the doctrines do explain them ; because
the Evangelists wrote in the atmosphere and interest
of such doctrines, though not to prove them. They knew
nothing of our undogmatic Christianity, however we
may revise and edit down what they wrote. They may
have, of course, been taking a liberty with the historic
Jesus in doing so. They may have been importing
the doctrines and imposing them on Jesus. That is
not here the question. But critical opinion is on the
point of outgrowing the idea that the Synoptics represent
undogmatic Christianity. So much the religious
historical school has done for us.

And if it be asked farther whether the apostles,
whether Paul, saw these doctrines in the historic Jesus,
and were forced on them by his revolutionary action on
themselves, of course we must recognise that they did
so see them. We are long past any twisting of their
meaning which would go to show that they did not,
that they meant less than the Reformers thought, and
were really Broad Church theologians or ideologues
born out of due time. We may treat their views as we
think proper once we settle what they were, but the
scientific, the purely historic version of their views is as
I say. For them the theological interest is fundamental.
On such a point Pfleiderer's Paulinism is very valuable.
They did believe they found such doctrines, the doctrines
of grace, at the centre of the historic Christ, whether
you think them fantastics or not for doing so. That is
another question. And it is one that wc must go on
to discuss.

§ § §
The apostles believed Jesus to be the eternal, atoning

144 ^^'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

and redeeming Son of God ; what is the value of their
belief? They did not reason it out on a speculative
basis, however they may have sometimes used specu-
lative ideas as a calculus in the attempt to convey it.
It was a matter of their regenerate experience of Christ's
historic work, and of their insight into its postulates in
terms of current ideas. What is the worth of the
apostolic insight ? Was Christ valuable for the sake of
certain spiritual ideas, or were the ideas valuable as
expositions of Christ ? Was the apostolic insight on
the same footing as ours ? Take the insight of reason,
what Hegel calls the intuition of thought. Has modern
reason as good a right over our faith as the interpretation
of Christ which the apostles offered for revelation ?
Take faith. Has modern faith an equal validity with
theirs, or one even greater by all the long experience
through which the Church has since passed ? Can
modern Christianity, therefore, correct the apostles upon
fundamental truths like the deity or atonement of Christ?

The answer to this question will depend on the place
we assign to the apostles in the economy of revelation ;
on their place as uniquely inspired — inspired as much
above the ordinary level of Christian faith as that is
supernatural to the reason or vision of the world. Let
us examine this.

§ § §

If we start with Christ as giving the revelation of
God in nuce, and say that Christendom and Christianity
form the evolution of that infinite germ, we take a line
which is very welcome to many among us to-day. But
they do not measure, perhaps, all it carries. It carries
this, that, as in the evolutionary progress we come to
know better, the Apostles' Creed is worth more than the

v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 145

Epistles, the Athanasian Creed worth more than the
Nicene, the Augsburg Confession greater than them all,
and the modern Christian consciousness the court of
final appeal beyond that. Or the Vatican decrees,
perhaps, may be the summit — unless you say offhand
that the Roman Church is not a Church at all, but
totally outside the evolutionary area.

This is, however, a result which, welcome as it may
be to the masterless subjectivity of the time, gives no
finality, but makes each age its own spiritual authority.
It gives but Protestant Liberalism or Roman Modernism.
And it is chiefly due to the error of thinking that a
simple conception of evolution, evolution deploying,
under spiritual law, in one direction, with a steady swell,
will suit history, and especially religious history, as well
as it does biology. If that were true, however, I am
afraid we should have to reduce Christ to a position no
higher essentially than one of his own apostles. He
would be Master and they disciples, of course, but they
would be ejusdem generis, like Socrates and his circle ;
and he could no longer be viewed as the revelationary
fact but as its discoverer only — like Darwin. Nay he
could discover but a stage of it. For the grand revela-
tion, on such a theory, could only be at the end, and
not at the beginning of the series, if it ever were
attainable at all.

But if we are dealing with those who do believe in a
past fact really revelationary, and no mere germ, the
question is, what was that fact ? What was the revelation ?
Where did it begin ? And above all where did it end ?
For the kinrl of revelation here concerned is one that
does not go on unrolling indefinitely, but it has an end.
It has a finality, even \i the finality were not allowed.

146 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

§ § §
May I invite you a little way into the philosophy of
the case. Consider the long evolutionary series. The
whole process of creation did not develop at large, but
developed in man to an end, an interpreting end, an
end of infinite value. Man is a close for all the
evolution that preceded him in nature. That is true
even when we recognise the evolution within man him-
self. The evolution in man is a sublimation of the
evolution to man. Nature evolves to a close, which is
none the less a real close because it has within itself an
evolving history. Such closes are what every soul is —
ends in themselves (though with a career), and with
a value more absolute than any mere stepping-stone
to a sequel. When evolution reaches personality and
history, it becomes more than simple and onward
merely. Its nature and method change. It becomes
another thing when it has to do with freedom and
purpose — with souls. In the soul we have a spiritual
world that does not simply arise and crown the past
but invades it and stands over it as the earnest and
surety of its future. The end emerges in the means.
Evolution becomes quite another thing when it rises
to be teleological in this way. It then becomes a
" kingdom of ends." Each soul is an end in itself,
and not a mere cell, or a mere link. Each great soul
stands for a permanent value. And so with each
historic crisis. History moves to ends ; and even if
these again move to higher ends, they are not mere
points of transition. We have a rising series of peaks
not of links — peaks of single and standing value against
the infinite sky. We progress by a progression of crises,
which close, or harvest, each a movement or age, and

▼.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 147

garner its permanent value not only to be carried over to
the next age but also registered and credited in Eternity.
For we grow laterally, vertically, spherically, outward
into Eternity as surely as onward into the future. And
these peaks make an ascending range. These real
closes again postulate a grand end of all ends and
crisis of all crises, a harvest of the world and all
its ages, and even of eternity ; and one, too, not
awaiting history far off, but invading it, pervading it,
and mastering it always. For the spiritual world, as
Eucken reiterates upon us in all his system, not only
accompanies this world but faces it, addresses it, inter-
feres with it, dictates to it, judges it and cannot
rest till it subdue it. There is a fundamental inroad of
a final and autonomous power into the plexus of causal
evolution — a repeated and incessant miracle. And the
Christian plea is that the nature and reality of this
supreme end for the whole soul of man is not only
anticipated or asserted but it is secured in advance by
revelation ; which is not the process, but something in
the process yet not of it, and something that determines
it. And it is this final thing that we have in Jesus
Christ and his crucial redemption. We have in him a
close which is incompatible with a simple evolution, or
mere crescendo, of being. We have, midway, a creator, a
finality, an authority which no evolution can give. That
is what we mean by starting from the revelation in
Christ.''

§ § §
The question then becomes this ; what is the place of
apostolic inspiration in this finality which we have in

*I must deal elsewhere more fully with the question whether in Christ
we have a revelation or the revelation, an interim report of God or a final.

148 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Christ ? If Christ was final what finality or authority
over us is left for his Apostles and their inspiration ?
Have we in them but the first crude guesses in the
evolution of thought about him, guesses raw in the ore
of contemporary notions, which recent thought has
smelted down to a small residuum ? Was Christ the
whole of the Christian revelation, body and soul of it, its
matter and form ? Did Israel, did revelation rise slowly
to its full and final height in Jesus only to drop suddenly
and sharply to the amateur and tentative level of Paul ?
Was Christ removed from the groping thought of Peter,
Paul, and John by a greater gulf than that which parted
him from the Judaism so fatal to him ? Was the
thought of his devotees about him more of a perversion
of him than the thought of the foes he hated so well ?
Wernle says it was so. And it is an idea which acts on
many who never formulate it, never express it, and do
not realise how deeply it affects and depresses them.
The whole stress is laid upon the historic act or person
of Christ. The whole revelation is held to be exhausted
there. That is the history as fact ; the writing of the
history is a quite secondary matter, and belongs to a
much inferior stage. It is a product diluted by
reflection and distorted by artificiality — at most a bad
photograph of the revelation, and not a part of it ;
or it is light turned on Christ instead of issuing from
him. In the actual history (it is said) God was at work
revealing ; but in the record, or commentary, it was man
construing. In the transfer to writing much of the
reality has vanished ; and the living plant is even dried
between the leaves of the book. So it is said. And thus
our very exaltation of the personal revelation in Christ
has led to a fatal depreciation and neglect of the Bible, as

v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 149

being a mere record, which we may use for our satisfac-
tion but need not for our life.

§ § §
Now on that head there is this to say. Christ certainly

was the final and complete revelation of God, in every

material sense. In him the great transaction was done,

the great Word said. In him we have history's final

cause and final crown. In him we have the great close.

All evolution up to him now goes on in him. In Christ

creation " arrived," attained for good. In every material

sense that is so. But in a formal sense it is not so.

The material revelation and consummation in Christ is

not complete without a formal consummation in its

interpretation. The finished work of Christ was not

finished till it was got home. A lesson is not taught,

say our educationalists, till it is learned. He made the

victory real, but he had yet to make it actual. He had

not to gain another victory, but he had to follow up the

victory he had won, and enter on the kingdom it secured.

The great close in Christ had itself to be closed, or at

least clinched, in a close of its own.

§ § §
I have spoken of one error that misleads us — the
treatment of historic and moral development as if it were
a case of simple and continuous evolution ; marred,
indeed, by occasional fits of degeneration and reversion,
but devoid of those great consummations or " harvests '*
which truly end one age and begin another, but are
also permanent acts and conquests of the Absolute
and Eternal. There is, however, another analogy
from nature which is as misleading as it mostly is
to carry natural law into the moral world. It is
the analogy of the germ. The germ in nature unfolds

M

150 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

by absorbing the forces of its environment and ex-
ploiting them for its own individual growth. It is more
concerned to assert and develop its own individu-
ality, or that of its species, than to create a new order
and establish a new world. But a germ, a source, in a
revelation of grace, is different. Its object is not to
absorb the world but to act on it. It has to unfold not
within itself so much as within an intelligence of itself.
Its purpose is not to be but to be understood, to be
answered ; it is not to live on its environment but to
bless it. A germ of life is one thing, and a germ of
revelation or redemption is another. In the one case we
have to do with a created fact, in the other with a
creative. In the one case we have the fact insulated and
self-sufficient, in the other the fact is inert apart from its
being understood and interpreted. You have not the
whole fact without its interpretation. If human evolution
closed in Christ it did not close in a mere Superman,
whose genius it was to thrive on a merely tributary race.
A gracious close like Christ is one that takes effect in
human response and communion, and not in mere contri-
bution. His value is not in himself all unknown, but in
himself interpreted and assimilated by the race in which
he rises. The fact Christ, however complete materially,
is not complete formally, or in effect, till he is understood
and answered, till he is explained and realised in a
Church. That he is complete materially is shown by
the fact that his explanation proceeds from himself. He
is his own interpreter. It is very properl}' asked con-
cerning the synoptic Christ, Why did he not explain
himself ? And the answer is that he did, as soon as the
whole work was done, and the whole fact accomplished
which had to be explained. He interpreted himself in his

V.I The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 151

Apostles, in the New Testament. If Paul's view of
Christ was but a guess, and can now be seen to be a
wrong one, the revelation was left by Christ incomplete,
and therewith the redemption. The great close, there-
fore, ends in bearing witness of itself, and coming to
its own in man's soul. And this happened in the
Apostles. To close this great close is the work of the
New Testament, as something formally, uniquely, integral
to the revelation in Christ.

§ § §
When we say the revelation is Christ we must
take the whole Christ, the whole New Testament Christ,
the Christ as his Spirit interpreted him, and not only
the Christ as an annalist, a reporter, might record him.
To say vaguely that the revelation is Christ, or that
Christ is the centre, is the source of most of our
confusion. The manifestation had to be closed by the
interpretation or inspiration to complete the revelation.
The material revelation had to take effect in a formal in-
spiration before it could start on the career of its own
evolution. It took this formal effect in the New Testa-
ment, which is not the mere product of the revelation but
part of it, the formal element of it, as Christ was the
material. If the only legacy of Christ was the im-
pression he left on his followers, of course this could
not be so. But impression was not all. Christianity
is not an impressionist creed. The faith of the
Church, being an act of life's self-committal and
worship, is more than the posthumous impression
left by Jesus. Had it not been more, like all im-
pressions it would have worn off. As an act it
answered an act — an eternal act, which gives it its own
depth and permanency. It was a new life, a new

152 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

creation. And still greater than the Church's faith is the
apostles' inspiration, a life even within the new life. It
is not only a response, but that part of Christ's great and
final act which is continued by him from the unseen ;
it is not a mere echo of it in his survivors. The New
Testament is not the first stage of the evolution hut the
last phase of the revelationary fact and deed. The revela-
tion had to be interpreted for all time in order to act
on time — ^just as, on a lower plane, the Church of the
early centuries is put into the Athanasian Creed for all
time, and the Reformation into the Augsburg Con-
fession. But the plane is much lower. For into these
documents it was the Church that put itself, whereas
into the New Testament it was Christ that put him-
self, in a way parallel to his self-projection in the
Church. The creeds are not parallel to the Church,
but the Bible is. They are products of the Church.
The Bible is not. It is a parallel product of the
Spirit who produced the Church. The Church was
made by faith, the Bible by inspiration. They are two
products of one Spirit ; the one is not a product of the
other. The Bible was not produced by the Church ; and
yet the Church was there before the Bible. Both were
there collaterally from the Spirit.

§ § §
I may perhaps use another illustration, suggested by
Griitzmacher, which I will somewhat enlarge in the
application. In a parliamentary discussion, if the
subject be very large, the debate may go on indefinitely,
as new aspects of the question are unfolded and new
lights cast upon it. As the discussion is carried into the
press so much the more do new points arise, and again
fresh points out of these. If the parliament were

v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 153

enlarged to the dimensions of the press the evolution and
the length of the analytic process might be interminable.
And it would become quite interminable if the whole of
the population were included in the debate — to say
nothing of the population of the world, extended to all the
population that had ever existed on the earth. Now
such a process would correspond to the simple expansive
evolution of the natural world in a. process. But in practi-
cal affairs a point comes when the debate must be closed.
It really does not exist for its own expansion, but for
the sake of its close, in due time, in an act; which act
is its end, and has a value and authority relatively final.
It is final so far as that debate is concerned, and it is
permanent amid all subsequent debates. It registers
a real achievement and a point won. Even if it
becomes the point of departure for future reform it is
more than that. It has a real value for its present.
It has added to the permanent. So the evolutionary
process culminates from time to time in results which
are not mere products of the process but are im-
posed on it by a will ; and they have more value
than mere points of transition or links of past and future.
And if the process were on a world-scale all these ends,
with their relative finality, with their permanent contri-
bution and eternal value, would be gathered up in an end
absolutely final, the end of all ends, their consummation,
in which they found themselves when the mere process
of their production had faded away with the ink of the
cosmic Hansard. The Christian case is that this cosmic
end has been anticipated with condensed finality at one
point of history, for the sake of all the rest, in the
absolute end, act, and personality of Jesus Christ.

But to go a step further. If parliament simply passed

154 ^'*^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect

its act and proceeded to a new subject what would the
effect be ? It would be nothing. The House would
have the satisfaction of having done something, gathered
up its discussion, and expressed itself, and, so far, the
country behind it, in an act of public will. And it would
then go to the moors, leaving behind it an academic
resolution. But for public life and the public future that
would be perfectly futile. The act of the House's will
must by the same will go upon the House's records. It
must be printed and circulated in due form. It must
be accessible to the nation when the House has risen,
and when that parliament has dissolved. It is not
enough that an account of it should appear in the papers
according to the skill of the stenographer, or the view
of some publicist who studied the debates. It must
be printed by order of the House. And it must carry
the royal seal of finality upon it. That is to say, the
form of the act is there by the same will of the Govern-
ment as carried the principle of the act. The act as
printed and published is an integral though formal part
of the material act of will which passed it. Now,
with all recognition of the difference between the strict
verbiage of an act and the fluidity of much in scripture
both as to word and fact, that illustration represents
the relation of the New Testament to God's fact and
act of Christ. The form is part of the whole act.
And the illustration would be still more detailed if
we included in the Act of Parliament a provision that
it go to the public accompanied by certain schedules
of explanation drawn up by order of the Crown. The
point is that not only does the evolutionary series
exist and work to a positive end, but that that
material end has within itself a formal close, expres-

v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 155

sion, and interpretation ; which is an integral part of
it, essential to its effect, and not simply a first amateur
and tentative stage in its interpretation by the casual
press and public. The formal expression shares, in its
way, in the authority of the material act, and has behind
it the royal power. This is the authority in the Bible.
It is a factor in the finality of Christ. It is a schedule to
the act, and not a mere leader on it. We can no more
believe in the infallibility of the Bible, but we must believe
in its finality. That is the region of its inspiration. It is
a region of religion and faith. For in theology there is no
finality. What science requires is evolution, and theology
is science. But the one need of religion to-day is
finality. And for Christianity that can only be had by
an Incarnate Christ as preached in an inspired Bible.

The point, then, of this lecture is this : When the
Apostles spoke as they did upon such central matters as
the eternal sonship and due worship of Jesus Christ they
did not speak from themselves ; they recorded no mere
impression, and ventured no guess to explain the
impression left by Christ ; but they spoke as men in
whose experience there spoke still more the Christ who
lived in them. And, though on matters lying further
from the centre, on matters of anthropology rather than
theology (like the connection between sin and physical
death), they were less authoritative, yet when they spoke
of Christ's person or his work, they were the organs of
Christ himself, and their truth has a value for all sub-
sequent times which partakes of the authority of that
revelation whom they interpreted.

LECTURE VI

THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC
INSPIRATION— IN PARTICULAR

LECTURE VI

THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC INSPIRATION —
IN PARTICULAR

In positive revelation we have to do with two things.
The one fact has two constituents. We have, first, the
history or the manifestation, and we have, second, the
inspiration or the interpretation of the history. We
have, first, God entering the world, and we have,
second, this entry of God entering man. We have the
fact, and we have the word of the fact. The fact we have
in Christ ; but the word of it, the meaning of it, we have
in believers and apostles moved by Christ. And especi-
ally in the apostles, whose insight becomes itself a fact,
in turn, working upon believers from faith to faith. So
that we have three things — first the incarnate fact, then,
the word or interpretation of it by apostles, and, thereby,
the fact again, but the fact enshrined in the soul of the
believing Church. To use philosophical terms, we
have the thesis, planting itself out in an antithesis, and,
then reclaiming, recovering itself in a synthesis. We
have first, the fact incarnate, then the fact interpreted,
and then the fact enthroned. But we must have the word
as well as the fact, if the fact is to do anything with men.
The word is an essential part of the fact, or, let us say, an

"59

i6o The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

essential function of it. It is the fact reacting on itself.
It is the vast eternal action of Christ reverberating in the
consciousness of his apostles. It went out as power and
returns as light, doubling back luminously upon itself,
as it were, to search its old track by this inspiration.
Only in such a sense is the incarnation prolonged in the
Church. The total revelation needs the inspiration as
well as the manifestation, the thought no less than the
thing, "The fact without the word is dumb; and the
word without the fact is empty."

Now it is only with the interpretation of the fact that
inspiration has to do, and not with the fact itself; for we
do not speak of Christ the fact as an inspired man. Nor
has it directly to do with the establishment of the fact as
a fact. Inspiration has not to do with information but
with insight- It has to do entirely with the theology of
the matter, and not with its historicity. What a pagan
or mantic notion of inspiration they must have who use it
to discredit theology, who in the name of truth dis-
credit interpretation by afflatus. The facts in the
Bible were established by the usual means, as in
Luke's case (Luke i. i). But the meaning of the fact
— that is the field of inspiration. The fact of the
cross, for instance, is established by the ordinary
historic evidence ; but it was no ordinary means that
enabled Paul to see its interior — the atonement, the
centrality, and the finality of it for Christ's work.
The idea of propitiation, for instance, was in Juda-
ism and its ritual. That is something of which we
have the due historic evidence. The inspiration of the
apostle was not in discovering the idea; it was in seeing
its real truth and consummation to be in the fact and act
of Christ. The idea had at last become historically and

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration i6l

finally effective in Christ. The fact of the cross was seen
to mean that consummation. Yet the insight was the
result of that fact's own peculiar nature, working on
Paul's peculiar nature, through the Lord the Spirit. So
that the New Testament writings are really a part of that
fact ; just as the Old Testament is an essential part of
Israel's history, and not merely a description, nor only a
product of it. The apostles read God's will in the fact
of Christ ; but it was from a height of faith to which
that fact had raised them. Christ by his work made
them saints, and by the inspiration of his Spirit he
made them theologians. The inspiration of the
Redeemer gave them that understanding. They saw
the deep things in Christ under the moral coercion
of the fact and its nature, under its creative and
illuminative action on them. It reorganised their whole
conceptual world by giving it a new vital centre, and
therefore a new reading. They saw a new world because
a new king was on its throne. And it was a vital and
creative centre. There was new vision, not simply a
new point of view, because the eyes that saw it were the
eyes of new men.

§ § §
But why isolate the apostles and give them a unique
authority ? The apostles were not the only contempo-
raries of Christ nor his only followers. Yet the rest did
not see what they saw. The whole public, the whole
Church even, did not rise to Paul's height or John's.
How shall we know that the insight and judgment of the
apostles was worth more, was more true to the fact,
than that of other contemporaries of Jesus who were not
so impressed ? Why should they be right, and Judas,
Caiaphas, or Pilate wrong — as well as many better men,

i62 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

like Hillel, who did not respond as the disciples did to
Christ ? How do we know that the apostle's view of him
is the divine truth of him ? How do we know that Paul's
Christianity is truer than that of the Judaistic Christians
who opposed him as earnestly and sincerely as the
rationalists do now ?

Well, in the first place they were all contemporary but
they were not all intimate with Jesus. All had acquain-
tance but all had not knowledge. All had met Christ but
all had not companied with him. Nor were they selected
and taught by him in view of the future.

But even of those who companied with Jesus all did
not see in Him or His cross what John, Paul, and Peter
declare that they at last came to see. And Paul and the
author of Hebrews did not company with Jesus ; yet
they go deeper than any of those that did — for John
owed himself in this respect to Paul. How was it ?
Were the men who saw deepest more holy personally
than the rest ? Was it because they did the will better
that they knew of the doctrine ? Will that overworked
principle explain inspiration ? Why should we prefer the
interpretation of Paul to that of the early chapters of
Acts ? Why prefer even the late Peter of the Epistle to
the early Peter of the Acts ?

Let us see what they believed and claimed as to
themselves. They did claim special, exceptional know-
ledge, quite different from that of natural acumen or
religious genius. Of this claim i Cor. ii. 14 is but a
sample. The natural man, however brilliant or shrewd,
receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they
are spiritually discerned. " He that is spiritual " (which
for Paul did not mean he that has spirituality, but he
that has the miraculous and specific gift of the Spirit,

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 163

the new life of the New Creation, which makes a man
a Christian) "juJgeth all things and is beyond man's
judgment." Or again, v. 16, "We have the mind of
Christ." The context shows that this has nothing to do
with the temper of Christ, or what is now known as the
Christian spirit. And the "we" is admitted to mean
the Apostles, as distinct from the initiates they were
teaching. The meaning is that, by the supernatural
gift of the Spirit, possessed only in the Church, Paul
h id knowledge of the intention of Christ, Christ's
implicit thought, God's meaning in Christ, the theology
of Christ and the cross. That is what Paul meant
(whether he was right in thus thinking he had Christ's
theology or not). So it was not only that the
Apostles were in closer historic proximity to Jesus
than other men, though that makes them historically
unique. Nor was it only that they had the common
faith which marked them off from the world by a new
creation, as members of the Church. Nor was it
only that this faith acted on a natural endowment
which tended to religious exaltation, not only that some
of them were religious geniuses, flushed with a new en-
thusiasm, and kindled to unusual insight. But, by their
own account, they were uniquely instructed by the Spirit,
and not merely renewed. They had what they called
" the gift of knowledge " as a charisma of the Spirit.
Truly it was in no ecstatic way, in no trance or such
like thing. The spirit did not act merely by exalting their
whole nature to a pitch of unique sensibility. Sensibility
does not always mean insight. But indeed it is no more
possible to describe the inner psychology of inspiration
in the apostles than in the prophets. Many Christians
had both the Christian facts and the Christian faitli

164 The Person and Place oj Jesus ChrUt [lect.

who never rose to inspiration. They had only personal
religion in the Spirit. But with the Apostles it was a
special gift of the Spirit, not enlarging the revelation in
matter but certainly opening its interior and pointing
its form. It was the action upon them of the ascended
and reigning Christ — his instruction. Especially so
when the call came to write, when the trying hour and
the anointed spirit met. Paul was more inspired in this
Corinthian chapter than in the third heaven ; so close is
inspiration to history. Besides the living faith and the
special chrism their natural possibilities were roused also
by the actual junctures in which they found themselves.
The occasion of writing was some providential juncture
in the affairs of the Church ; and they managed and
directed that juncture as men writing of final truths
in which they habitually lived, truths given them to
see by the indwelling Lord. They claimed to possess
absolute certainty about the greatest things of God
and the Soul, and the central action of Christ and
His cross. They shared the self-certainty of Christ.
They do not write as if any interpretation of Christ
besides their own was thinkable. And they make a
distinction, which was mostly clear to themselves,
between what they gave as the mind or intention
of Christ and what they did not so give. For some of
their words they claimed a like authority with that of
Christ. They claimed the obedience that the Church
would give to Christ (2 Cor. ii. 9 ; vii. 15, Acts xv. 28).
The whole of i Cor. ii. is of classic value for the Apostle's
view of his own inspiration ; and it certainly does not
allow us to think that he regarded himself as groping
after great truths, making great guesses, or feeling about
at an inchoate stage in the understanding of Christ and
his work.

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 165

§ § §
Now was this sense of unique insight and final inter.

pretation a delusion ? Was it inflation or inspiration ?

Was it ideal obsession or divine visitation ? Were the

apostles megalomaniacs ? And yet founded the Church ?

1. We may note here that their belief in their own
position and knowledge was accepted by the Church
then, and has been corrobated by the Church ever since.
It came home with the demonstration of the Spirit and
of power (Rom. i. 16, i Cor. ii. 4, i Th. i. 5, Ep. vi. 17).
And it is what has survived.

2. It had been provided for by Christ, who said that
in the great crises not they should speak but the Spirit
of God should speak in them. (Mat. x. 20, xvi. 19.)

3. It was the same note of authority and finality as
sounds through all the prophets, who, over and over,
speak their words not only in God's name but in the first
person, as if, for the hour at least, not they lived but
God lived in them.

4. The apostles claimed for their words, especially on
Eternal Truth, a like permanent authority with Christ's.
They even ignore his precepts, which they seldom or
never quote to their Churches; they make their own,
and they expect for them the obedience due to Christ.
In their preaching, moreover, they drop his parable style
for one of their own. And the homiletic of the Church
followed them in this, and did not copy either the
synoptic or the Johannine style of address, and certainly
not Christ's conversational dialectic. In i Thess. iv. 15
we have, " I say unto you by the word of the Lord," as
we have it also in i Kings xiii. 17. In Gal. vi. 2 we find
" Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of
Christ," But there is no such precept from Christ

N

i66 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

that we know of. The law is fashioned by the apostle
out of the Gospel of Christ. Yet how easy it would have
been to refer to some such precept of Christ as the new
commandment to love one another and to minister to
the brethren as he did. So, i Cor. vii. lo, " I give
charge, yet not I, but the Lord." On this ground
the apostles claimed, for their precept if not their person,
the obedience really due to one whom the Church
worshipped. (2 Cor. ii. 7, g, 15, 2 Th. ii. 15, Acts xv. 28.)
They were not indeed reincarnations of the Incarnate,
but they were his organs. The source of their certainty
was one quite different from reason and its proof (i
Cor. ii. 4, and especially verse 12 ; what they knew was
" things given by God ").

The process of this certainty and authority, the
psychology of it they could not explain even to themselves
(i Peter i. 10). It was not irrational, but it was alogical.
Their central truth was a supernatural gift ; it was not
an achievement or a discovery of theirs.

5. What they saw and said in this way was not for
them the revelation but the interpretation of the
revelation. It was not given them by a second
revelation ; it was given by insight into the one and
only revelation ; by the finished revelation filling itself
out in them; by the inspiration that distended the
material fact, and thus formally completed the revelation.
They saw and they said what Christ was, not what an
imaginative intelligence surmised. They translated
Christ, the text, who without the translation would
have been a dead letter so far as history is concerned.
They treated their text exegetically, not fantastically,
not ingeniously. What they gave was the meaning of
Christ; and they gave it in a way that the earthly

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 167

Christ himself could not— in the light of his finished
work. The finishing of that work by the cross was
not always perfectly certain in Christ's earthly thought ;
even in Gethsemane, I have said, he cherished the hope
that there might still open from the Father's will some
other way. But for Paul the cross had come and gone
— or rather had come to remain as the pivot and key of
all. The apostles' inspiration was the interpretation of
the cross as being the revelation of all the revelation in
Christ. We have in it not only the impression on
them from the historic Christ but the tremendous action
on them of Christ the glorified, of Christ in the heavenly
close and consummation of all that he was (and of all
that history was), in his cross, resurrection, and glory.
Their inspiration formed the coda of the crowning
movement in the total work of Christ. What they
spoke was the secret in the cross, the wisdom that
God had hidden away from thought in the mystery, or
sacrament, of the cross (i Cor. ii. 7). They expounded
the sacrament of Godhead, God manifest in the flesh.
Their inspiration was to set forth in word and thought
the principle and power of that supreme sacrament of
the Word, namely Christ ; it was to exhibit formally
the truth materially embodied in the manifestation.
Their work on it was analytic and not synthetic. Their
metier was the knowledge of things already given, i Cor.
ii. 12. It was to set forth the inwardness of the historic
fact and spectacle. It was the searching of the deep
things of God, the exhibition of what was hidden
(hidden, possibly, even from the earthly consciousness
of Christ himself), interpreting such spiritual things to
spiritual men (i Cor. ii. 13).

And this they do not only through the psychological

i68 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect.

effect of the manifestation upon their souls, but much
more, through the selective, the miraculous action in
them of the same Christ who was the manifestation,
and is now in them his own interpreter. They did
not simply echo the cross ; they were anointed by
Christ to decipher it. The apostolic inspiration is the
posthumous exposition by Christ of His own work ;
and it takes as much precedence of his earthly and
(partly) interim teaching as the finished work is more
luminous than the work in process. If Paul felt at his
vital moments that not he lived but Christ lived in
him, then, surely in the great matters of insight and
seasons of speech, it was not he that spoke but Christ
that spoke in him. And if, as Peter says (i Peter i.
lo), the prophets had to study and clarify for themselves,
by their inspiration, things that were given them to
do or speak more greatly than they knew, so we may
venture to say, perhaps {mutatis mutandis), that the
spiritual Christ himself, looking back from his glory
on the work of his humiliation, and still ministering it to
history, opened up his manifestation then by his inspira-
tion in the apostles, in whom he dwelt and prolonged
his work through its actual to its vocal close.

§ § §
So let us aim at some clearness when we say that Chris-
tianity is Christ. The essence of Christianity is not in the
bare fact, but in the fact and its interpretation. It is not
in a mere historic Jesus, evidentially irresistible, but in a
Christ evangelically irresistible, a Christ who is the medi-
ator of the grace of God. Is this not so in regard to the
Old Testament ? Where is our perennial interest there ?
Not in the chronicle but in the message, the purpose in it.
The Old Testament is valuable neither as a history of Israel,

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 169

nor as a history of religion, but as a history of revelation,
of grace, of redemption. And the new scholarship has
done us an unspeakable service in planting us at the outset
at the part of the Old Testament which contains that
interpretation, in planting us on the prophets. It has
moved our starting point from the historic books to the
prophetic, from the narrators to the preachers of the
Old Testament, from the history to the inspiration. It
has made the inspiration of the Apostles of the Old
Testament the standpoint from which all the story is
to be read and construed. They do not so much give us
Israel as what God meant by Israel. And it is only
carrying the same method into the New Testament when
we fix on the Epistles with their dogmatic element, and
make that the view-point from which the fact is to be
read and the gospels themselves interpreted. It is in
these interpreting books that the inspiration lies rather
than in the narrative. There is more inspiration in the
Epistles than in the Gospels, as Luther truly said. That
is to say, in the total revelation the inspirational element
predominates in the Epistles and the exhibitionary
element in the gospels. It is in the Epistles that we
have the essence of Christianity, what the fact means for
God, and grace, and man. It is there the heart of the
fact ceases to be dumb. And it is there that we have
the fixed point from which to exercise the critical method
upon the Gospels with truly religious historic and scien-
tific effect. It is the whole Biblical Christ that is the
truly and deeply historic Christ.

§ § §
What we have, therefore, is results like these.
I. God does in Christ the one thing needful for the holy
redemption of the race into the kingdom. This thing

170 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

done is the power and action of God unto salvation. It
is not merely a source of power to us if we use it, but it
is the act of God finished for us in Heavenly places. In
Christ God redeemed once for all.

2. To make this effective in history it must be declared.
What is the work for us without its word ? It must be
interpreted, unfolded, in thought and speech, else men
would not know they were saved. The work alone
would be dumb as the word alone would be empty.

There are some who recognise in Christ's death no action
beyond what it had, and has increasingly, upon mankind.
It did not act on God but only from Him. Those who
so think may be particularly asked what provision Christ
made that a work with that sole object should be secured
to act on history, and should not go to waste. He wrote
nothing himself. If he had it could not well have
included the effect of his death — unless he had done with
a posthumous pen what my plea is he did by his Apostles.
He did not even give instructions for a written account
which should be a constant source for the effect on us
intended by his life. Nor did he take any precautions
against perversions in its tradition. Yet it is hard to
think that a mind capable of so great a design on pos-
terity should neglect to secure that his deed and its sig-
nificance should reach them in some authentic way. He
surely could not put himself into so great an enterprise,
and then leave it adrift on history, liable to the accidents
of time or the idiosyncracy of his followers. He could
not be indifferent whether an effective record and inter-
pretation of his work should survive or not. He would
then have shown himself unable to rear the deed he brought
forth. It would have been stillborn unless the close of
it in some way secured its action on the posterity which

VI.] The Testimony oj Apostolic Inspiration 171

we are told was its sole destination, on those whom alone
it was to affect or benefit. But that completion of his
work he did secure if he inspired its transmission and
interpretation in the Bible. If he died to make a Church
that Church should continue to be made by some per-
manent thing from himself, either by a continuous
Apostolate supernaturally secured in the charisma veritatis,
as Rome claims, or by a book which should be the real
successor of the Apostles, with a real authority on the
vital matters of truth and faith. But, we discard the
supernatural pope for the supernatural book. And so we
come back, enriched by all we have learned from repudi-
ating a verbal inspiration and accepting an inspiration of
men and souls, to a better way of understanding the
authority that there is in the inspiration of a book, a canon.
We move from an institutional authority to a biblical ; and
then from Biblicism we advance to Evangelism. But it
is an Evangelism bound up with a book because bound
up with history. The Bible is a historic book in a sense
far other than the Koran. There is more in the matter
than personal inspiration, just as there is more in the
corporate Church than a group of sacred souls. Were
personal inspiration all, the end might have been reached
by one great hierophant. But we have a group of them,
with a central message in common, however complemen-
tary its various aspects are, however contradictory even
some of its minor aspects might be. And this because,
for all the pronounced personality of each Apostle, he
was yet the representative of a whole Church, an Eternal
Saviour, and a universal salvation. The interpretation of
the manifold work of Christ should be a corporate matter.
The salvation of the whole Church could not be duly
interpreted by one man in it ; one man could not even

172 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

make a liturgy for a Church ; any such man would be
too nearly its Saviour or its Intercessor. Therefore in
apostles, chosen at his will, the sole Saviour became the
sole interpreter, so far as the elements were concerned
which made him Saviour. He was the real author of
the New Testament (if the image might be pardoned),
with the Apostles, as it were, but his staff, though with
a very free hand. He rounded off his great work by in-
spiring an authoritative account of it, in records which
are not mere documents, but are themselves acts within
his integral and historic act of salvation. They are
spiritual sources and not historic memoranda — sacraments
even more than sources. And they have an authority of
their own greater than is due to mere proximit}' — how-
ever we may be guided by the critics, as subalterns of the
same spirit, in adjusting the fabric or cleansing its face.

There are two classes of historical document. There
are those that simply report a transaction as a narrative
of it might do, either in a book or a newspaper.
And there are documents which are documents in the
case, which, like treaties, focus the action, form an
integral part of the deed itself, and carry not only the
consent which made the act, but the signature which
sends it forth, and perhaps codicils of authoritative
explanation. The New Testament writings (taken of
course out of the ban of verbal inspiration, or of an equal
inspiration in every part), belong to the second class.
They are part of the whole transaction, integral to the
great deed. And we do not get the whole Christ or his
work without them.

The same Christ, the same Spirit * as acted in the

♦••Christ, who by the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself unto God." I
cannot here enter on the difficult question raised by the phrase " The Lord
is the Spirit."

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 173

redeeming deed acted also in the interpretation ; and
with a like novelty, a like originality, a like miraculous,
creative, and final power — with a like absolute origin-
ality, but in a different form. The New Testament, we
have seen, is an integral part of a binary revelation,
which consists of the manifestation and the inspiration or
interpretation which the manifestation itself creates, and
creates both from its historic base and from its home
in the unseen. The difference of this inspiration from
every other lies in the unique nature of the personal
fact, in the generic difference from every other deed
of the deed whose spirit was in both — both in the fact
and in the interpretation — the deed of the Cross.

§ § §
3. I have said that the New Testament writings have

the originality belonging to the fact and work of Christ,

though in a form different from what it had in his

personality. I go on to say that it is in a form different

also from our apprehension of the fact through them. As

we have God by the miracle of Christ, so we have Christ

by the miracle of the apostolic inspiration. (Mat. xi. 27,

xvi. 17). If the manifested deed is miraculous, so is the

inspired. The apostles' understanding of the cross is

miraculous, like the cross itself. It is there by the direct

and specific action of the same Spirit as that by which

Christ offered himself to God, though the action took

another form. So also the form of our illumination

through the apostles is different from theirs by the very

fact that they had no apostles to mediate the truth to

them. As Christ was the direct mediator of the work

itself, having himself no Saviour, so the apostles are the

direct mediators of the central truth about it, having

therein no human revealers. They were untaught by the

174 ^^^ Person and Place of Jems Christ [lect.

words of any man's wisdom in the great leap of finding
in Christ the reality of whatever ideas they had learned
from the age around them.

§ § §
4. The production, then, of this original and unique

understanding of Christ in the apostles is inspiration. Of
its psychology, as I have said, we know little or nothing.
The men may have known little. At least they have
left us little. It was quite different from the trances of
which Paul had experience, but which he does not treat
as sources of inspiration. When he was beside himself
the matter was between him and God alone; it was in his
personal religion. But when it was a matter of inspira-
tion and of interpreting Christ to history, to men, he was
sober for their sakes. (2 Cor. v. 13.) His inspiration
was more than the originality of genius. In Galatians,
you may remember, by a wonderful flash he inverted the
values of Old Testament history, and put prophetic
gospel before statutory law even in historic order.
(Gal. iii. and esp. ver. 17). It was an intuition that
arose from no scholarship, but from his powerful grasp
of the principle of the Gospel which Christ had revealed
to him as so revolutionary for the world. It was his
theology that enabled him to divine what criticism has
only verified. It was a divination greater than that
of the line of scholarly genius which has recently set
his inversion upon a scientific base, and critically shown
the prophets to precede at least the most legal part of
the law. The apostolic inspiration was also more than
the originality of a great poet like Milton, who presents
life, but not God, under aspects so fresh, new, and deep.
It answers the question. What is He going to do with us ?
It is concerned with God's whole and final purpose

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 175

for man and history, and with the inversion of man's
thought and action about it by the cross. Through
Christ, then, this redemption took place ; through the
apostles' interpretation it entered history. He did the
thing, they saw its meaning and proclaimed it ; and they
knew they were doing so in a final way, though not in a
final system. If Christ had not done the thing, but only
proclaimed God's doing of it, the apostles would have
been but his pupils and successors in the work, instead of
his subjects and organs. But He revolutionised man's
relation to God, and thus revolutionised human nature;
they made the change current and set it afloat in history.
But as the act of Christ was one which no genius
could do, so the apostles, as integral agents of that
act by way of its interpretation, were in a different
category from religious genius ; however their native
religious sensibility may have been the point of attach-
ment for the Spirit's use of them.

§ § §
5. It may be asked whether the synoptic Christ, when

read without the medium of the epistles, could have
floated Christianity out into the world. The first answer
to that is that the three gospels were written for people
living in the theological atmosphere of the epistles. The
second answer is No, by themselves they could not have
launched the faith, so far as we can see. If we ask
farther, could the Synoptics keep Christianity a world
power now, with the certain reversion of the world's
mastery soon or late? Again, No. It was the interpre-
tation in John or in Paul that made Christianity historical
for men— though it was Christ's act that made it vital
for God and God's treatment of men. The one gathered
and impelled the race which the other had redeemed by

176 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

a new creation. The act made the soul, the gospel of it
made the Church. Or again, if it is asked whether, with
Loisy at one end or Dale at the other, we could dissolve
the Gospels and leave their Christianity, the answer
must be a very clear. No. You cannot sever the life
from the word and keep the Church as a vitality detached
from the message of the cross.

§ § §
Apostolic inspiration, therefore, is a certain action
stirred by the heavenly Christ in the soul, by which his
first elect were enabled to see the moral, spiritual, and
theological nature of the manifestation with a unique
clearness, a clearness and explicitness perhaps not
always present to Christ's own mind in doing the act.
Inspiration is thus much more than the impression
made by Christ's character or personality. It was a
special charisma, the charisma distinguished from others
by Paul himself as that of wisdom and knowledge, i Cor.
xii. 8 ; where it is put first, as if it were the apostolic
prerogative.

§ § §

Of course, any modern theory of inspiration dis-
tinguishes between miraculous insight and miraculous
dictation, between finality and infallibility of interpreta^
tion. The notion of the writers as being mere penmen is
quite incompatible with the great description of inspiration
in I Peter i. 10, which at least indicates the psychological
and even critical atmosphere in which the supernatural
gift worked. We must connect inspiration with the
personal and moral experience of the inspired (little as
that fact entitles us to bemean the great word inspiration
as we do to-day in using it of the personal experience of
faith's rank and file, and even of happy suggestions in

VI.] The Testimony of Apoatnlic Tmtpiraiion 177

common affairs). It was not hierophantic. It was not
the communication of occult truths quite unapprehended.
It was not psychological magic. True, it is of the nature
of genius, which is always inexplicable — only it is more
so. But genius is an innate predisposition, while this is
a positive gift at a later stage, and on the top even of
genius. Genius is an election, this is more, it is a special
call. Genius is impelled from within, this is moved from
without. Genius has its inspiration in the nature of
the man's personality, this has its inspiration from the
positive nature and action of a manifestation which visits
it. Genius works itself out, this works out the fact and
the person with whom it is in such causal and organic
connexion. It is true that for Paul the Gospel of Christ
did not mean the personal religion of Jesus ; it was a
faith of which Jesus was the object, and not the subject.
And yet he was its subject, in that it came from him —
not, however, from his earthly teaching, but from his
heavenly glory in his task for ever done. For Paul the
Gospel of Christ was not only a Gospel which treated of
Christ, but one which proceeded from Christ. It did not
come from the teaching and partial Christ (whose teach-
ings, if they were to be more relevant than a dreamer's to
an incomplete historic situation, must have been also in-
complete), but from the whole Christ in his complete per-
son and act. To divide up the personality, and detach
the heavenly Christ from the earthly Jesus is not a feat
of criticism so much as a failure of religion, or an intel-
lectual freak and a confession of unfaith.

Apostolic authority, therefore, is not official but per-
sonal, not statutory but experimental, not external but
internal, in the sense that it is a thing of the soul and
not of a mere society or its heads. The apostles are

178 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

authoritative, not because they were in the Gospel group,
not because they formed a college to which Christ had
given a charter. For I have said that not all the group
of disciples became apostles ; and the greatest apostle
was not in the group. But the apostolic authority is
that of those who by a spiritual election had a gift of
supernatural insight — and insight is always more or less
miraculous, whether naturally in a genius or super-
naturally in an apostle. Why should we resent it ? We
do not resent the authority of the real illuminates else-
where. For in its nature it is inward and congenial
to the soul, however outward it may be in spatial
position or historic sequence, or in its spiritual invasion
of our consciousness.

§ § §

As to the authority of the Bible, especially on a matter
like the Godhead of Christ, we may note this. The
mere historical aspect of the Bible is a matter of learned
inquiry. Its evidence for a mere historical fact must
stand at what it is historically worth. The difficulty
only begins with facts which are more than merely
historical, whose value lies not in their occurrence, but
in their nature, meaning, and effect. It is not the
crucifixion that matters but the cross. So it is not
reanimation but resurrection. And here the authority of
the Bible speaks not to the critical faculty that handles
evidence but to the soul that makes response. The
Bible witness of salvation in Christ is felt immediately to
have authority by every soul pining for redemption. It
is not so much food for the rationally healthy, but it is
medicine for the sick, and life for the dead. All the
highest interpretation of the Bible comes from that
principle of grace. Even historical criticism, which is a

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration lyg

real part of theology, should be pursued on that basis.
It should be a work of the Church much more than of
the schools. And from the Church must come the final
correction and appraisement of the criticism of the
schools. It is only knowledge with a soul of faith that
grasps the full scope of revelationary history. For it is
the history of a revelation we have to do with in
Christianity, it is not a revelation of history. Mere
history does not need to be revealed ; it can look after
itself by its own scientific methods.

The authority in the Bible is more than the authority
of the Bible ; and it is the historic and present Christ as
Saviour. The Gospel and not the book is the true
region of inspiration or infallibility — the discovery of
the one Gospel in Christ and His cross. That is the
sphere of inspiration. That is where inspiration is
infallible. Inspired men have been wrong on points and
in modes of argument — just as, even with Christ living in
them, they sinned in life. They have not always been
right by the event. But they were right in the interpre-
tation of the Gospel in Christ as the final work of a
holy God for the race. They were not infallible, but
they were penetrating and they were final, final as to the
nature of the Gospel, of Christ, and of the Church.
The true region of Bible authority is therefore saving
certainty in man's central and final part — his conscience
before God. And all its parts are authoritative in the
degree and perspective of their relation to that final
salvation. What distinguishes the Bible from other
books is not appreciable by those that seek no revelation,
no spiritual footing, no other world amid this, and no
security in the other world. It is only intelligible in its
core to those who are being saved in some positive way.

i8o The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect.

It is to what the Reformers called justifying faith that
the Bible appears most unique and authoritative — to
faith in a justifying God. And it has been said that the
canon is authoritative so far as this, at least, that we
have no writings outside it that could eject one of those
within.

It is by the Bible that Christ chiefly works on history.
All the Church's preaching and work is based on it, on
what we only know through it. As no man could succeed
the apostles in their unique position and work, but their
book became their true successor, so no book can replace
this. The apostles are gone but the book remains, to
prolong their supernatural vision, and exercise their
authority in the Church. In so far as the Church pro-
longs the manifestation and is Christ's body, the Bible
prolongs the inspiration and is Christ's word. The
writers were and are the only authentic interpreters of
Christ. They said so, under the immediate shadow of
Christ's action on them, whether his historic or his
heavenly action. They never contemplate being super-
seded on the great witness till Christ came. If they are
wrong in that, where are they right ? And where are we
to turn ? To a critical construction of what they said —
they including the evangelists ? But does that not make
the critics, the constructors, to be the true Apostolate ?
And if it come to construction (as I have already said) I
prefer the Apostolic to the critical, if we must be forced
on a choice. If the Bible is not inspired but only
documentary we are at the critic's mercy. For what
does it give us apart from its inspiration ? Nothing
of Christ's, but only of the Apostles. In so far as it is a
record it is not so much a record or document of Christ
but of the apostolic view and message of Christ in his

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration i8i

salvation. But it is really a document for apostolic
inspiration, for the apostolic reading of history, rather
than for history as such. It documents not so much the
history of the revelation as the revelation in the history,
a certain construction of the purpose and meaning of the
divine coming and the divine action. If this apostolic
view of things be without inspiration, then about Christ
and his meaning we must simply guess according to our
needs and sympathies. But if it be authoritative any-
where it is on the place, person, and work of Christ, and
not merely on the facts, sequences, or pragmatisms of
his biography. In its substance it is a part of the
revelation ; its penumbra ; and it is as authoritative in
its way as the manifestation whose vibration it is. It
is of eternal moment to the soul whether it take or
leave the Christ that this book as a whole preaches to
the world. For it does not give us the data for a
Christ but Christ's own interpretation of himself.

§ § §
From all this what follows ? It follows that the view of

Christ's place and person which pervades the New Testa-
ment is authoritative for us. The Christ it preaches is
the Christ God sent. The depth, directness, sureness,
and uniqueness of the inspiration guarantee the reality
and deity of the manifestation. If God produces a special
understanding of the fact he must have produced the fact.
If apostles so moved saw in the resurrection of Christ
such significance, then the fact itself is not at the mercy of
mere historical evidence. The act of faith when it rises
to inspiration gives us the reality of its object in giving us
its power. If God made men so to read and trust the
resurrection power. He could not be misleading them as

to the creative fact it streamed from. The same spirit
o

l82 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

effected both. If inspired knowledge grow out of a
certain fact that fact is a part of God's revelation. We
cannot take the resurrection gospel and leave the resur-
rection fact. So also with the cross ; and so with the
person of Christ. If the apostles were right in believing
that their interpretation of the central things, the creative
things — details and peripherals do not concern us — were
given them from the Lord : — if it was Christ who taught
them to believe in himself as the Eternal Son, then the
fact was so. He was the Eternal Son. If they were
right about the source of their knowledge they were right
about the object of it ; these were one and the same. It
is a great " if," I admit. If they were wrong about their
authority and their centre, the outlying pieties of such
fanatics have little moral worth, however beautiful. If they
were wrong there they were of little value anywhere else,
except among the pieties and beauties of faith, which,
however, do not need apostles to their warrant, but appeal
directly enough to our spiritual aesthetic. Only they do
not lift us above an aesthetic religion. Divine love, were
it certain, is easily believed to be all that it sounds in the
love-song of the Christian Church, in i Cor. xiii. The
question is, is it certain ? Was and is Jesus Christ that
love for good and all ? And is there anything that can
separate us from that love of Christ's ? Could angels or
powers or things to come from new heights or depths ?
Could a later revelation come, and a more complete, to
detach us from it, and to release us from its obsession for
some revelation still more divine and more nearly final ?

§ § §
A certain nobleman possessed a house in a fine park ;
and he owned also a great picture of his late countess,
painted by a classic artist in the days when her beauty

VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 183

was the talk of the town. He was so proud of it that he
had it placed on an easel near a large oriel window on
the ground floor, so that not only his guests within but
the public who were allowed to stroll round the house in
the absence of the family might see it. Now a certain
stranger was staying at the hotel in the village by the
park gate while the family was at home and the domain
was closed ; who spent much of his time in rambling
about the neighbourhood, and sketching many of its fine
points. Of course he turned his glass often upon the
mansion with a curious eye ; and one day he fixed it upon
the window with the picture. He was much arrested and
impressed with the lady he saw there, and could not
banish her from his mind. Day after day he stalked the
window with his lens; and, though the time of the day
and the falling of the lights did not always enable him to
see her, yet he did see her so often that, being a highly
romantic young artist, he fell deeply in love with her, and
neglected his sketching to haunt the most commanding
point at the hour when he mostly saw her sit and
meditate there. At last the family went to town and he
had access to the grounds — only to discover that he had
been fooling himself; that his love was silly, and it could
never be answered even were all the obstacles he had
thought of removed. For she was a work of genius but
she had no life. Her beauty was great but she had no
heart. She could neither love, nor scorn, nor help, nor
speak.

If the supernatural figure of Christ that we see set out
in the New Testament is not real it is but a picture at
the great window to fool poor men. With all its beauty
and spell it is no more to keen and hungry souls than the
magic canvas to the dreaming youth. A far plainer reality

184 The Person and Place 0/ Jesns Christ [lect. vi.

would better have met his heart. A real prophet would
mean far more to us than any Christ if the Christ were
but an apostolic phantasy. The apostolic family might
surround their picture with all pious care, admiration, and
observance. They might set it full in the window,
rhapsodise about its beauty, and about the way they felt it.
But it is not the mistress of the house. And it cannot do
or be for any the thing they need most of all. It can
mock them by its very unearthly beauty but it cannot
love their love back. It is a world's wonder of a picture,
but it is only painted on the window ; and it cannot open
the door of its own house to any either to come or to go.

LECTURE VII

THE TESTIMONY OF EXPERIENCE IN THE
SOUL AND IN THE CHURCH

LECTURE VII

THE TESTIMONY OF EXPERIENCE IN THE SOUL
AND IN THE CHURCH

Our present Protestantism is historically composed
from the union of two streams, which take their rise in
two different sources. They still flow alongside with a
fusion so far very incomplete ; and they react on each
other with an amount of irritation somewhat inexplicable
till we perceive that the streams are two, distinct in their
origin and direction. They are the Reformation and
the Illumination : the Reformation from the sixteenth
century, and the diversified movement which marked the
eighteenth century, and which is compendiously known
as the Illumination or the Aufklarung.* They are the
old Protestantism and the new — the one resting on the
objectivity of a given revelation, the other on the sub-
jectivity of human nature or thought ; the one finding
its standard in a divine intervention, the other in im-

* For a full account of the situation we should really have to recognise
three streams. We should have to distinguish within Protestantism the
old objective tendency, resting on history as the authoritative source
(in the Bible), and the newer subjective tendency, resting on Christian
experience, originating in Anabaptism, revisel in Pietism, and rewritten
in Schleiermacher. The one represents classic Protestantism, the other
romantic. I5ut ff>r the present purpose it will be liettcr to confine our
attention mainly to the two currents named in the text. Of course, the
subjectivity of human nature, which I mention immediately, becomes in
Pietism the subjectivity of Christianised human nature.

tS7

1 88 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

manent human reason more or less generously con-
strued ; the one emphasising a divine redemption, the
other human goodness and its substantial sufficiency.
The face of the one movement is towards the Church
and the Bible, the face of the other is towards civilisa-
tion and culture. The one falls back upon historic
humanity, upon the history and the revelation there;
the other on intrinsic humanity and the revelation there.
It is a distinction much more penetrating than the
somewhat vulgar antithesis of Orthodoxy and Hetero-
doxy. It is not so much two theologies as two methods
— if not two religions. And neither is pure. The one,
the Reformation stream, carries down with it much of
the d6bris of mediaeval doctrine ; because at its source,
in the monk Luther, it was mainly a religious and
ethical change rather than a theological. The other, the
Illumination, carries with it much of the pagan debris
of the older Renaissance and of classic antiquity ; since
its element was not so much religion as thought, and its
achievement is not faith but culture, and especially
science. It was really directed at first not against
religion, but against what it thought a false basis of
religion. It sought to replace imagination by induc-
tion as the foundation of our conception of the world.
It asserted the intrinsic divinity of nature, and it would
make the spiritual life but the highest of natural
phenomena. While, therefore, the direct legacy of the
Reformation laid fundamental stress upon the sense of
guilt, and the action of grace, the legacy of the Illumi-
nation laid stress on native goodness, the sense of rational
sympathy, and the sufficiency of human love spiritualised.
For the one, man was the lost thing in the universe, and
the greatness of his ruin was the index of the dignity of

vii.J The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 189

his nature; for the other, man was the one saving thing
in the universe ; and the greatness of his success in sub-
duing the world to his thought and will was the badge
of his heroic divinity, soiled, perhaps, but indelible. The
one lived by redemption and regeneration, the other by
evolution and education. For the one forgiveness was
essential, and it was identical with the new eternal life;
it put life on a quite new track, it was a redemption, a
revolution. For the other forgiveness was incidental,
and simply removed obstacles or redressed lapses in
man's developing career ; it put the train on the old
track, after some derailment by accident, or some loop-
line by error. It was a restoration. The one cultivated
theology and sanctity, the other science and sentiment,
criticism and romance. The one saw the new Jerusalem
descending out of heaven from God, the other saw it rise
" like an exhalation " from earth. The heaven of the one
was in the blue sky, for the other it was in the growing
grass. For the one the great matter was God's transcen-
dence over the world, for the other it was His immanence
in it. So the one degenerated to Deism, the other to
Pantheism. For the one the Incarnation is nothing
but miracle, inexplicable but sure; for the other it is
nothing but universal immanence. For the one redemp-
tion is an interference, for the other it is an evolution.
For the one Christ is absolute, for the other He is
but relative to the history from which He arose. For
the one He closes the old series totally in the new
creation of another, for the other He but mightily pro-
longs it. In the one case we believe in Christ, in the
other we believe like Christ. For the one Christ is the
object of our faith, for the other he is the captain of
our faith, its greatest instance. In the one we trust our

igo The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

whole selves to Christ for ever, in the other we imitate
him. In the one he is our God, in the other our
brother. It is well that the issue should be clear, if
our choice is to be as intelligent and effectual as a faith
should be.

These are the two streams whose junction forms
current Protestantism, and can you wonder that the
situation is complicated and even confused ? We should
trivialise the whole subject if we saw in the serious
religious differences of the day no more than orthodoxy
and heterodoxy — the propriety of certain individuals on
the one hand, faced by the perversity of certain others
on the other. The conflicting views of Messrs. X and Y
are but the points where old opposing forces for the
moment emerge and meet.

And we must own each movement has its relative justifi-
cation. The old Protestantism had come to have great
need of the Illumination. It was growing cumbrous,
hard, and shallow. It needed especially to be trimmed
down and cleared up from the critical side of the
Illumination, and to be deepened and humanised from
its romantic side. In just the same way medisevalism
had called for the Renaissance. But all the same it was
not the Renaissance that really took Europe in hand at
that crisis. It was no Paganism that could save Europe
for the true Church, or the Church for Christianity.
That was done by the self-recuperative power of
Christianity itself. It was done by the self-reformation
of the Church, by the restoration of faith, and not the
renascence of culture. Remember, the Reformation was
not something done to the Church, but by it, and therefore
by its faith. It was the vital Element in the Church dis-
engaging and asserting itself. And so to-day it is not to the

VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 191

Illumination, it is not to any culture, theological, aesthetic,
or scientific, that we are to look for our salvation from
the Protestant scholasticism which choked faith by
orthodoxy in the seventeenth century, and still survives
in the popular levels. That deliverance can only come
by a movement from the interior of faith itself. I know
it would be untrue to say that all the liberalising influence
in the Protestantism of to-day is due to the direct action
of the Reformation spirit of faith or religion. In so far
as that liberality is a correction of our views about God
in the cosmos, it is due quite as much, if not more, to
the Illumination, which was quite independent of the
reformers and rose rather from the philosophers. But
the real matter is not the correction of views but the
correction of real religion, of practical relations between
God and the soul. And that is due, not to the action
of either reason or romance, but to the renovation of faith
by the piety and genius of men like Spener, Francke,
Schleiermacher, and Wesley. *

§ § §
It is not here a question whether each tendency must
ban the other, for we need both ; but it is a question
which of them must be dominant for Christianity, and
especially for original, essential Christianity. I mean for
Christianity as first preached, the Christianity of the
Bible and the apostle. In proportion as it ceases to be a
K-qpvyim, Christianity ceases to be Christianity, whether it
die in the direction of a sacramentalism or a humanism.
It seems to me that this is constantly overlooked by the
spokesmen of a Christianity which is liberal or nothing.
They become as much the doctrinaire victims of a specu-

* I do not forget the influence of the romantic movement on Schleier-
macher, but it was perhaps upon his weaker and less permanent side.

192 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

lative theology as our forefathers were the victims of an
orthodox theology. The experimental Gospel in each
case ceases to be life, and evaporates to a caput mortuum
of certain views broad or narrow. I read a criticism of a
positive theologian by a liberal of the academic stamp in
which occurred this naive saying: "It looks as if the
problems of theology were here confused with the
practical declaration of the Gospel by preacher or
pastor." There is not one of the apostles that would not
be hit by the remark. And it applies with even more
force to our Lord Himself. Where are we to go for our
Christian theology except to their practical declaration of
the Gospel? The New Testament is no collection of
theological loci. And how are we to test a theology at
last but by its service for the purposes of the Gospel ?
Of course, if it is not a theology we are after but a
theosophy, if our interest is in the philosophy or psy-
chology of religion as a product of the human spirit, the
case is altered. But with that the Gospel and the
preacher have little directly to do. It is very interesting,
but it is not vital. It belongs to the Schools, to the
interpretive efforts of man upon the world ; it has little to
do with the Church and its interpretive message of man's
destiny, and its Gospel of God's reality in His redemptive
work.

When the question is forced, therefore, whether the
positive or the liberal movement must rule in a historic
Gospel, we have no hesitation about our choice. We
take the Reformation side of our Protestantism for a
stand, and not the Illuminationist. We may even go so
far, when the issue is forced, as to say that Illumi-
nationism or Rationalism is not Protestantism. We find
our charter in history, and not in human nature ; in the

VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 193

Word, and not the world. The seat of revelation is in
the cross, and not in the heart. The precious thing is
something given, and not evolved. Our best goodness is
presented to us rather than achieved by us. The King-
dom of God is not a final goal, but an initial boon. You
will say, perhaps, the one does not exclude the other.
But for the practical issue on which all turns (except to a
doctrinaire intellectualism), for the last reality, it is more
true at this juncture to press the antithesis than to slur
it. The Gospel stands with the predominance of inter-
vention, and it falls with the predominance of evolution.
Grace is essentially miraculous. Christ is more precious
to us by what distinguishes Him from us than by what
identifies Him with us. The Gospel turns entirely upon
redemptive forgiveness ; and if evolution explain all, there
is no sin, and therefore no forgiveness. The Gospel turns
on the finality of Christ ; but on an evolutionary idea
there is no finality except at the close; it is therefore
inaccessible, for the end is not yet. There can be no
finality on that basis, in anyone who appeared in a middle
point of the chain. So far, therefore, Christ is pro-
visional and tentative till a greater arise. The positive
Gospel, we say, is the dominant thing by which modern
thought must be gauged and its permanence tested. We
may take from the modern mind and its results so much
only as is compatible with a real, historic, redeeming,
final Gospel. That Gospel is the preamble, and the
subsequent clauses that contradict it must go out.

We shall not be foolish enough, sectarian enough, to
make a sweeping condemnation of modern thought in
advance. For one thing, it is very hard to know what is
meant by it. Does it mean the mental world of Kant, and
Goethe, and Browning, or of Spencer, Fiske, and James,

194 T^he Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect.

or of Nietzsche, Tolstoi and Ibsen ? Because they are in
many respects as incompatible with each other, and
hated by each other, as they are opposed to evangelical
Christianity. And, for another thing, we have already
accepted many of the results of modern civilisation. It
has thrust back the frontier of the Church, and given a
mandate to the State to take up province after province
which the Church used to control, in art, science, phil-
anthropy, education, and the like. Well, we largely
agree. We accept the emancipation of these from
religious dictation. Church discipline gives way to civic
rights and police protection. The number of public
subjects on which the preacher is entitled to a respectable
opinion grows fewer, while at the same time there are
more aspects than ever of his own subject open to his
study and demanding his official attention. We accept
the modern repudiation of an external authority in the
forms of belief and uniformity of confession. We accept
the essential inwardness of faith even when we press its
objective. We accept the modern freedom of the indi-
vidual. We accept the modern passion for reality, which
owes so much to science. We accept the methods of the
Higher Criticism, and only differ as to its results. We
accept the modern primacy of the moral, and the modern
view of a positive moral destiny for the world. And we
repudiate imagination, whether aesthetic or speculative,
as the ruling factor in the religious life. We have
assigned another place and function to the miraculous in
connection with faith. We accept the modern place
claimed for experience in connection with truth ; we
recognise that the real certainty of Christian truth canj'
only come with the experience of personal salvation.
In these and other respects we have already accepted

vii.j The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 195

much which would have scared even the stout re-
formers.

II

I would single out for particular stress the place now
given to experience in religion in consequence of the
Reformation view of faith, co-operating with the inductive
method of science — our experience of Christ especially.
What Nature is to science, that is Christ to positive
faith. I would direct notice to the form of the great
issue presented in the question : Are we to believe in
Christ or like Christ ? Are we to trust ourselves to Him,
or to the type of religion He represents ?

I am struck with the absence of any sign of an experi-
ence distinctively Christian in many of those who discuss
the sanctuaries of the Christian faith — such as the nature
of the Cross, or of the self-consciousness of Christ. To
them Christ's first relation is to human power, or love,
and not to sin. They cultivate not trust in Christ, but the
"religion of Jesus." We are driven from pillar to post,
and left with no rest for the sole of our foot. Can we
rest on the Gospels ? No. Criticism will not allow that.
Can we on the Epistles ? No. Protestantism will not
allow that. It would be taking the external authority of
an apostle for our base, and that ends in Rome. But is
there no such thing any more as the testimonium Sancti
Spiritus ? No. Some of these scholars, to judge from their
writings alone, do not seem even so much as to have
heard of a Holy Ghost. And they have a fatal dread of
pietism, and methodism, and most forms of intensely per-
sonal evangelical faith. They are, like Haeckel, in their
own way, the victims of an intellectualism which means
spiritual atrophy to Christianity at last. No, they say.

ig6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ lect.

if you fall back on your experience, you may land any-
where.

But am I really forbidden to make any use of my
personal experience of Christ for the purposes even of
scientific theology ? Should it make no difference to the
evidence for Christ's resurrection that I have had personal
dealings with the risen Christ as my Saviour, nearer and
dearer than my own flesh and blood ? Is His personal
gift of forgiveness to me, in the central experience of my
life, of no value in settling the objective value of His
cross and person ? My personal contact with Christ, our
commerce together, may I found nothing on these ?
"No," it is said, "nothing of scientific objective value.
These experiences may be of great personal value to you,
but they give you no warrant for stepping outside your
own feelings. They may be useful illusions in their
place, but you must outgrow them. You can never be
quite sure that the Saviour you meet is a personal reality.
You can never make it certain to any that He is a con-
tinuous personality with the historic Jesus. And it is even
laid upon us to make it doubtful for yourself." " In your
so-called communion with Christ you have no more real
right," we are told, " to build on the objective personal
reality of your vis-d-vis than the Roman Catholic girl had
to believe in the real presence and speech of the Virgin
at Lourdes. If it is Christ who visits you, it was the
Virgin that visited her. Of so little worth is the fact of
the experience in vouching for the content of experience.
If you commune with Christ, do not gird at those who
traffic with the saints."

§ § §
Now, might I have leave to say that I had to meet that
problem for myself several years ago ? And the answer

vii.J The Testimony of Experietice in the Soul 197

I thought satisfactory was twofold. First, it was personal ;
second, it was historical in two ways.

\\ I take the first first. There is, and can be, nothing so
certain to me as that which is involved in the most
crucial and classic experience of my moral self, my con-
science, my real, surest me. A vision might be a phantom,
and a colloquy an hallucination. But if I am not to be
an absolute Pyrrhonist, doubt everything, and renounce
my own reality, I must find my practical certainty in that
which founds my moral life, and especially my new moral
life. The test of all philosophy is ethical conviction.
That is where we touch reality — in moral action (God as
Spirit is God in adit), and especially in that action of the
moral nature which renews it in Christ. Now, my con-
tention is that my contact with Christ is not merely
visionary, it is moral, personal and mutual. - Nor is it
merely personal, in the same sense in which I might have
personal intercourse from time to time with a man in
whom I am little concerned between whiles. Because
what I have in Christ is not an impression, but a life
change ; not an impression of personal influence, which
might evaporate, but a faith of central personal change.
I do not merely feel changes ; I am changed. Another
becomes my moral life. He has done more than deeply
influence me. He has possessed me. I am not his loyal
subject, but his absolute property. I have rights against
King Edward, however loyal I am, but against Christ I
have none. He has not merely passed into my life as
even a wife might do, but he has given me a new life,
a new moral self, a new consciousness of moral reality.
In him alone I have forgiveness, reconciliation, the grace
of God, and therefore the very God, (since neither love
nor grace is a mere attribute of God). There has been

igS The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

what I can only call a new creation, using the strongest

word in my reach. I owe him my total self. He has

not merely healed me, in passing, of an old trouble, but

He has given me eternal life. He has not only impressed

me as a vision might — even one projected from my own

interior — but he has done a permanent work on me at

my moral centre. He has made a moral change in me

which, for years and years, has worked outwards from

the very core of my moral self, and subdued everything

else to its obedience. In my inmost experience, tested

by years of life, he has brought me God. It is not

merely that he spoke to me of God or God's doings, but

in Him God directly spoke to me ; and more, he did in

me, and for me, the thing that only God's real presence

could do. Who can forgive sin but God only, against

whom it was done ?

Thus the real Catholic analogy to his action on me
and in me is not visions of the Virgin, or the ecstacies
of saints, but it is the Sacraments. In the Catholic view
these are objective and effective upon the inmost substan-
tial self; so is Christ objective, effective, creative, upon
my moral, my real self, upon me as a conscience, on
sinful me. He is the author not of my piety merely but
of my regeneration. My experience of him is that of
one who does a vital, revolutionary work in that moral
region where the last certainty lies. And in that region
it is an experience of a change so total that I could not
bring it to pass by any resource of my own. Nor could
any man effect it in me. And any faith I have at all is
faith in Christ not merely as its content nor merely as
its point of origin, but as its creator. The Christ I
believe in I believe in as the creator of the belief, and
not merely its object. I know him as the author as well

VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul igg

as object of my faith in God. I know him, therefore,
as God. The great change was not a somersault I
succeeded in turning, with some divine help ; it was a
revolution effected in me and by him, comparable only
to my entry on the world. The very fact that in its
nature it was forgiveness and regeneration makes it a
moral certainty, the kind of certainty that rises from
contact with my Judge, with the last moral and personal
reality, who has power even to break me, and with my
Redeemer, who has power to remake me as his own.

§ § §

If certainty do not lie there, where can it be found in
life ? If he is not real, moral reality has no meaning.
There are hallucinations in religious experience, but not
here. They might be connected with the affections but
not with the conscience at its one life crisis. They might
be as impressive as a revenant, but no more morally creative
and redemptive. If you claim the right to challenge th6
validity of my experience, you must do it on the ground
of some experience surer, deeper, getting nearer moral
reality than mine. What is it ? Does the last criterion
lie in sense, or even in thought ? Is it not in conscience ?
If life at its centre is moral, then the supreme certainty
lies there. It must be associated, not with a feeling nor
with a philosophic process, but with the last moral experi-
ence of life, which we find to be a life morally changed
from the centre and for ever. To challenge that means
rationalism, intellectualism, and the merest theosophy.
Do not forget that philosophy is but a method, while
faith, which is at the root of theology, presents us with
a new datum, a new reality.

You refuse the mere dictum of an apostle. But if we
may not rest upon the mere dictum of an apostle, may

200 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lbct.

we not upon our own repetition of the apostolic experi-
ence, of the experience which made them apostles ? I say
repetition, but might I not say prolongation ? We rest
on our own participation in the ageless action of the
same redemption in the Cross as changed them, after
many waverings, for good and all. Is it not the same
act, the same spirit, the same real personality acting on
us both, in the same moral world ? And, expanding my
own experience by the aid of theirs, may I not say this :
I am not saved by the apostle or his experience, nor by
the Church and its experience, but by what saved the
apostle and the Church. When Christ did for me what
I have described, was it not the standing crisis of the
moral macrocosm acting in its triumphant way at the
centre of my microcosm ? Was not the moral crisis of
the race's destiny on Christ's cross more than echoed,
was it not in some sense re-enacted at my moral centre,
and the great conquest reachieved on the outpost scale
of my single crisis? The experience has not only a
moral nature, as a phase of conscience, but an objective
moral content ; as is shown by the absolute rest and
decisive finality of its moral effect in my life and conduct.
If it be not so, then we are asked to believe that men
can produce in themselves these changes which perma-
nently break the self in two, or can lift themselves to
eternal moral heights by their own waistband. But, if
so, what need is there for a God at all ? Do not even
the positivists likewise ?

There is no rational certainty by which this moral cer-
tainty of a creator Christ could be challenged ; for there
is no rational certainty more sure, or so sure, and none
that goes where this goes, to the self-disposing centres
of life. This moral certainty is the truly rational certainty.

VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 201

Christ approves Himself as a divine reality by His revo-
lutionary, causal, creative action on that inmost reality
whereby man is man. That centre from which I act
(and therefore am real), meets, in a way decisive for all
life, with Christ in His act on the Cross. If this contact
represent no real formative activity on me, if it be but
impressionist influence, then the whole and central activity
of my life, whereby I confront it in kind, is unreal. If
the Saviour be unreal and my communion an unreality, a
mere mystic or moody mingling of being, then there is
no reality, and everything is dissolved into cloud and
darkness and vapour of smoke.

§ § §
I do not wish to say anything disrespectful of these

academic critics to whom we owe so very much in the
way of laboratory theology, but they are the second, not
the first. A higher hand must make them mild. A deeper
insight must enlarge their truth. And I much wish they
had more of that ethical realism of Carlyle or Ibsen, only
turning it upon the conscience at the Cross. But so
often (just as a vast memory may impair the power of
judgment) you find the finest critical faculty, and the most
powerful scholarly apparatus, conjoined with a moral
nature singularly naive, and beautifully simple and unequal
to the actual world. Their experience of life and con-
science has no record of lapse or shame. Their world
is a study of still-life ; it has not the drama, the fury, the
pang, the tragedy, the crisis of the actual world at large,
with its horrible guilt and its terror of judgment. It
opens to them none of the crevasses where glow the
nether fires. They inhabit, morally, the West End.
They are in no touch with damned souls. They have
lived in an unworldly purity, and have never been drawn

202 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

from the jaws of hell, or taken from the fearful pit and
its miry clay. They have been reared, many of them, in
the sacred and pious atmosphere of the German manse,
and cradled in the godliness of the most Christian of
homes. The paradox is this, that if purity be the test
of truth, and obedience the organ of theological know-
ledge, if that be the meaning of "will do, shall know"
(as it is not), if they are as right in their views as they
are of heart, then evangelical Christianity would be dying
of its own moral success.

Ill

The second part of my answer to the suggested analogy
between communion with a saint and communion with
Christ our Lord is this. It would enlarge what I have
been saying to the scale of history. Christ has entered
actual history, with piercing, crucial, moral effect, in a
way the Virgin never has, nor any saint. He has entered
it not only profoundly, but centrally and creatively ; she
is adjutorial at most. By his effect upon human ex-
perience he created that Church within which the
worship and contact of the Saints arose. The Church
arose as a product of something which Christ produced —
namely, saving faith. And it is not only the effect of
Christ on the Church that I speak of, but, through the
Church, his effect on history at large. Christ affects
the moral springs of history as no saint has done. They
but colour or turn the stream ; he struck from the rock.
I make all allowance for the fact that, by the Church's
fault, he has affected history less than he might have
done. But it remains true that all we have and hope in
the new humanity owes to Christ what it owes to no
other. And it owes it to a Christ felt and believed to be

VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 203

generically different from every rival or every believer.
What we owe to Christendom, or to great Christians,
they owe to a Christ who owed himself to no man. He~
has entered the history of the Church at least as He has
entered my history — not as the mere postulate, nor even
as the spring, but as the Creator of the new life, the new
self, while he himself needed no new self or new life. I
make all allowance for the reasonable results of historic
criticism, yet he stands in history as a defined conscious-
ness and a creative person, who is powerful not in the
degree in which he is appreciated by our experience, but
in a way which creates experience, and which can only
be appreciated by something greater than our experience
— by our faith. "^Ve know him by faith to be much more
than he has ever been to our experience. I know him,
and the Church knows Him, as a person of infinite power
to create fresh experience of himself, which is experience
of God. My contact with him by faith is continually
deepening my experience of him. And as my experience
deepens it brings home a Christ objective in history, and
creative of the experience, and the life, and the deeds of
a whole vast Church, meant, and moving, to subdue man-
kind not to itself, but to the faith of the Gospel.

§ § §
But how can an individual experience give an absolute
truth ? How can an experience (which is a thing per-
sonal to me in, say, my own forgiveness) assure me of
the world ? How can my experience, my forgiveness,
assure me of the world's redemption ? How can it assure
me of the final and absolute establishment of the Kingdom
of God ? I may experience my salvation, but how can I
experience the salvation of the world — which is for all
(and is so felt by some) a greater concern than their own ?

204 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

The answer is this. My experienced salvation is not a
passing impression but a life faith. It is not a subjective
frame but an objective relation, and even transaction.
The peace of God is not glassy calm but mighty con-
fidence. My experience here is the consciousness not of
an impression on me, but of an act in me, on me, and by
me. It is not an afferent but an efferent consciousness,
as the psychologists would say, like the muscular sense,
the sense not of rheumatism but of energy. And, to go
on, it is the sense not only of myself as acting in the
experience called faith, but it is the sense that that act is
not perfectly spontaneous but evoked, nay, created by its
content and object. And, still to go on, it is the sense
that it is created by another and parent act — which is the
one eternal decisive act of an eternal Person saving a
world. I am forgiven and saved by an act which saves
the world. For it not only gives me moral power to
confront the whole world and surmount it, but it unites
me in a new sympathy with all mankind, and it em-
powers me not only to face but to hail eternity. And
this it does not for me, but for whosoever will. Surely
the Christ who re-creates me in that faith in God must
be God. This is the report of my faith, and of the
Church's faith, upon the act to which it owes its own
existence as an act. Is it to be amenable to unfaith ?
Actor sequitur forum ret, said Roman law. The venue of
criticism is in the court of the challenged faith. That is,
the true and fruitful criticism is that within the believing
Church under the final standard of grace. It is a part of
that self-criticism of the Church whose classic case is the
Reformation.

What Christ has done for me has become possible only
by what He did even more powerfully for others whose

VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 205

faith and experience have been deeper and richer than
mine, but who reflect my experience all the same, even
while they diversify and enlarge it mightily. Standing
over my experience is the experience of the whole
evangelical succession. And standing over that is the
historic fact of Christ's own person, and His conscious-
ness of Himself ("All things are delivered to me of the
Father ") as Lord of the world, Lord of nature in
miracle, of the soul in redemption, and of the future in
judgment. When I meet Him in my inmost soul I meet
one whose own inmost soul felt itself to be all that, and
who has convinced the moral flower of the race, in the
whole historic Church, that He is what He knew Himself
to be. And in that conviction the Church has become
the finest product of Humanity, and the mightiest power
that ever entered and changed the course of history from
its moral centre.

Our experience of Christ is therefore an absolutely
different thing from our experience of saint or Virgin.
In their case, granting it were actual, the visitation
might be but my experience; in His case it is my faith,
which concerns not a phase of me whereof I am con-
scious, but the whole of my moral self and racial destiny
whereof I am but poorly conscious. Faith is the grand
venture in which we commit our whole soul and future
to the confidence that Christ is not an illusion but the
reality of God. We may respond to a saint, but to
Christ we belong.

IV

The third part of my answer would expand what I
have touched on, a few words back, in regard to the
consciousness of Christ.

2o6 The Pet son and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

I have referred to the individual experience, and to its
expansion in the experience of the Church. But is this
enough to give us the reaUty of a supernatural (or rather
a superhistoric) Christ ? If it were, then v^^e should be
in this difficulty, that the experience of believers would
be the seat of God's revelation to us. And fresh
difficulties arise out of that. If it be so, then do we
not give the Church (as the collective experience) a
prerogative which, even if it does not rise to the claim
of Rome, yet puts the individual conscience too much at
its mercy, and obtrudes the Church between it and
Christ ? And, again, if it be so, what was the seat of
God's revelation to the very first Church of all, to the
first believers with no Church behind them ? And what
place is left for the Bible, the record, at all, except a
mere subsidiary one in support of the supreme experience
of a Church ? Whereas the Bible, no less than the
Church, was a parallel result of the Gospel, and part of
the revelationary purpose of God. The gift of the
Spirit * to the Apostles was not simply to confirm
personal faith but to equip them efficiently for their
apostolic, preaching, witnessing work.

We must pass within the circle of the first Church's
experience and testimony, and find a means of stepping
off the last verge of its direct documentation on to sure
moral ground where the documents cease. We must
pass by faith from the field of the first faith certificated
in the documents to the historic reality behind the wall
of documents, and within the ring fence of the testifying
Church.

* The difficult question as to the relation between Christ and the

Spirit (especially for St. Paul) is too large for side treatment. I only

note that our communion is not with the Spirit, but in the Spirit, with
Father and Son.

vn.] The Testitnotiy of Experience in the Soul 207

And we are compelled to do so by the very nature of
that faith and those documents themselves. If we are
not to stultify the first Church and all its history, we
must recognise a point on which critics so antagonistic
to each other as Schaeder and Lobstein agree,* that the
Gospel about Jesus in the first Church truly reflected
Jesus' Gospel of Himself, and grew inevitably out of it.
We could not speak of Jesus with any respect if his
influence not only could not protect His first followers
from idolatry in placing Him where they did — beside
God in their worship — but actually promoted that
idolatry. If they included Christ in his own Gospel,
then he did. It was not in the teeth of him that they
made him an object of faith and worship along with the
Father. They could never have treated him, those
disciples who had been with him, in a way which would
have horrified him as much as some apostles were
horrified at the attempt to worship them at Lystra. If
they found him Saviour through death from sin, found
him the Son of God and the Eternal Christ, then he
offered himself as such in some form or other.

Accordingly the question becomes one of the interpre-
tation of his self-consciousness as the Gospels offer it
upon the whole. We are borne onward by the experi-
ence of the Church upon the experience of Christ in so
far as he revealed it. The Church's first thought of
him was substantially one with his own thought of
himself. What was that ? Was it a thought which
placed him with men, facing God and moving towards
God, or with God facing men and moving to them?
Was he not always with men, but from beside God ?^

♦See Die christlichi W$lt, 1907, No. 19, Sp. 529.

2o8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Can our relation to him, if we take his construction of
it, be parallel to our relation to any apostle, saint, virgin,
or hero ? Into the self-consciousness of Christ I have
already gone. I can only refer again to all the passages
of the Gospels which have their focus in Mat. xi. 25 ff.,*
and which reveal the sense of his complete mastery of
the world of nature, of the soul, and of the future. He
forgave the soul and claimed to judge it. He determined
our eternal lyelation to God. And he used nature at will
for the supreme purposes of grace and eternity.

§ § §
But we must here take another step which replaces us
where we set out, though on a higher plane. This
power of which Jesus was so sure was not there simply
to make a vast and placid self-consciousness. He was
not there simply as a reservoir of moral power instead
of its agent. If he had the power it was not as a miser
of power, to enjoy the satisfaction of possessing it in
self-poised and self-sufficient reserve, not to be a quiescent
character reposing in God. He was there to exercise
the power in historic action. And as it was moral
power, it could only go out in moral achievement. He
was there for a task in which the whole of his power
should be expended. He was there to do something
which only his power could do. If he had power more
than all the world's, it was to overcome the world in
another than the individualist and ascetic sense. It was
to subdue it to himself. The Son was not only to affect
it, but to regain it for the Father. He was not simply
to rule, but to redeem. He was there for action ; and

"* Surely the criticism which dissolves this passage leaves us with little
but dissolving views of anything.

vn.J The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 209

it was action commensurate both with his person, and
with the world, and with the world's moral extremity.
He was there to do that which all the accounts declare
was done in the Cross — to conquer for mankind their
eternal life. It was not simply to fill men's souls at His
as from a fountain, but to achieve for them and in them
a victory whose prolonged action (and not mere echo)
should be their eternal life. With all his power he
was there for one vast eternal deed, which can only be
described as the Redemption, the new Creation, of the
race. Nothing less could afford scope for the exercise
of such power as his, if it was a power that must work
to an active head, and could not be held in mere
benignant self-possession, in quiescent, massive, brim-
ming Goethean calm. The moral personality must all
be put into a corresponding deed. What is the deed
which gives effect to the whole tremendous moral
resource of Jesus ? There is not one except his death.
If we reduce that simply to his life's violent and
premature close, then we are without any adequate
expression in action of so vast a moral personality.
That personality becomes a truncated and ineffectual
torso; or it becomes but an aesthetic quantity, an object of
moral and spiritual admiration, and the source of pro-
found religious influences and impressions, but not of
living faith and of eternal life. It is a grand piece of
still-life, spectacular but not dramatic, with spell but not
power. It can refine but not regenerate, cultivate but
not recreate. And had Jesus not found in his death
the regenerative outlet for the infinite moral power in
his person. He would have been rent witii the unrest
and distraction of prisoned genius. He would have been
no expression of the peace that goes with the saving

2IO The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. vn.

power of God, peace which he then could neither have
nor give. But the finahty of what he did as God on
the cross is the source of that unearthly rest which is
the peculium of the true Church. And it is lost from
all the Churches that are more earnest in bringing a
Kingdom than in working out a Kingdom already
brought. These Churches and their efforts may have
much power, but they lack the divinest power which is
also spell; and they fail to attract those that crave
from power not only results but peace.

LECTURE VIII

THE MORALISING OF DOGMA, ILLUSTRATED
BY THE OMNIPOTENCE OF GOD

LECTURE VIII

THE MORALISING OF DOGMA, ILLUSTRATED BY THE
OMNIPOTENCE OF GOD

In all the Churches but those of sheer external
authority dogma has succumbed to the solvent of
criticism. By which word dogma is not necessarily
meant positive truth, but dogma as such, the specific
theological constructions from the past which have been
sealed with ecclesiastical authority as formally final. A
Church must always have a dogma, implicit or explicit.
A cohesive Church must have a coherent creed. But it
must be a dogma the Church holds, not one that holds
the Church. The life is in the body, not in the system.
It must be a dogma, revisable from time to time to keep
pace with the Church's growth as a living body in a
living world. The study of theology must go on and go
forward. Solution after solution of the great problems
must be both attempted and encouraged by vital faith.
First the pursuit and formulation of doctrine by indi-
vidual thinkers or groups must be pursued and honoured
as an energy inferior to none in the varied lifework of
the Church. And then, at certain stages of the process,
certain Churches may feel that a point of agreement
has been reached, which enables them, if other reasons

0 ai3

214 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

make it desirable, to state their common view in a new
form, as a breathing place for their mental energy, a
salute to other Churches, or a guide for their own
catechumens. The idea of a dogma, as the organised
declaration or confession by any Church of its collective
doctrine, is only the intellectual counterpart of the idea
of the organised Church itself. No Church can live
without more or less organisation, which must include
not its machinery only but its thought. A mere brother-
hood needs no theology ; but then it has no stay and no
influence in history. It is only a sympathetic group.
But a Church must have a creed, either tacit or express,
else it is no church. Christianity certainly is more than
its truth, but there is no Christianity apart from its
truth, A religion of mere affinities is no more a religion
than one of mere freedom. There must be a belief, and
an entrusted entail of belief. The difficulty begins with
the question how far the collective belief is to be pressed
upon individual members or ministers — the question of
subscription. The two questions are constantly con-
fused by thoughtless people. A creed which is but declara-
tory, and corporate, and binding on honour is confused
with particular and individual subscription to it, binding
in right and giving legal status. And the confusion is
increased when people jump to the conclusion that
dogma, or the collective expression of a Church's belief,
must be final in a given form. It is now widely recog-
nised that every form of belief must be changeable in
proportion to its detailed length, and permanent in
proportion to its condensed brevity. And the influences
that now recast the great old fabrics of faith, once so
new and adequate, are part of the action of the same
divine spirit which put them there on a time to serve

VIII. j The Moralising of Dogma 215

their hour and age. It is now preparing a new synthesis
from' the old and positive faith.

To-day the great fabrics of historic dogma not only
succumb to the calm decay of time, but they crumble
faster than ever under the acid that now fills the air —
under modern criticism. This is a source of grief and
fear to many at one extreme, while to some at the other
it is a source of almost unholy joy. For the great
Churches which have publicly and expressly pinned
their existence to specific dogma, patristic or mediaeval, it
is of course a most serious thing. The Roman Church
appears to be honeycombed with a modernism that may
lead either to its disintegration or to a new reformation.
On the other hand, for those free lances of the genial
heart and sterile mind, who face theology as a bull greets
scarlet, and regard positive views as a tramp does four
walls, the collapse of the old structure seems as the
opening of the prison-house to them that are bound.

§ § §
Dogma is the science of faith. Every department of
science has its dogma; and in the hierarchy of the
sciences these dogmas qualify and supplement each other.
In one region we have the dogma of gravitation ; in
another that of evolution ; in another that of affinity ;
in another (if it be another) the molecular dogma; and
so on. Thus in the region of spiritual life we have also
a science. We have a science of faith. And the truth
of it is accepted for fundamental by the Churches, the
living bodies concerned, just as gravitation and the
like are accepted by the universities, which do not, for
instance, enter discussion with the man who challenges
the rotundity of the earth and starts an apostolate of
its flatness.

2i6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Dogma is the science which underlies the mentality of
those living and moving societies. And it exists upon
experienced faith in the holy love of a changeless and
saving God in Christ, just as physical science exists
upon a faith in the uniformity of His action in Nature.

But there is an ambiguity which we must realise and
avoid in the phrase, a science of faith. There are things
it seems to mean and does not. It does not mean a science
of thought attached to faith, like Greek metaphysics. It
does not mean a metaphysic of Being, or a philosophy of
jurisprudence, imported into the Christian faith by the
circumstances of its history and growth. Nor on the
other hand does it mean a science of the subjective
religious acts, a psychology of religion. Far less does
it mean that the psychology of religion shall provide
the dogmas or " broad general truths of religion," to whose
test every belief of faith must submit, as the modern way
is. But it means the science of religion when religion
rises to the positive faith we have in Christianity, the
science of religion as a moral relation, a living and historic
relation between two personalities, two consciences ;
which in Christianity is a redeeming relation. It is the
science of realised redemption. It is a science wherein
faith is not so much the observed object as the observing
subject. It is faith thinking and not only faith thought
of. It is the view of things created by the new man and
not discovered by the modern man. And it is upon the
lines of such an ethical religion alone that we reach that
moralising of dogma which is the demand of many who
are not prepared to dismiss it.

§ § §
No dogma has been affected by the influences of the
age so much as that of the person of Christ. It was the

VIII. J The Moralising of Dogma 217

doctrine of the Church in the first age, when a united
Church laid the lines of its dogma down ; and none has
felt like it the dissolving effect of a divided Church.
And the Chalcedonian or Athanasian form of the belief,
which is embalmed in the current formula of two natures
in one person in Christ, may be said to have been
seriously shaken wherever modern conditions have been
realised. This has occurred the more readily as the
creeds in which it was embodied served for their day the
purpose rather of repelling errors than of adjusting truths.
The truths were not really and inwardly adjusted, but
only placed together ; and they are thus the more easily
shaken apart. They were married but not wedded, or if
wedded not welded ; and though they lived in the same
house, it was not without friction. The human
mind, the moral experience, were not yet ripe enough.
Psychology, and especially religious psychology, had not
then come into existence ; and, while the strongest
assertions were made about the coexistence of the two
natures as a postulate of faith, it was beyond the power
of the metaphysic which then prevailed to show how
they could cohere in a personal unity. The attempts
failed even at a later date, when a doctrine of mutual
permeation (or Trf/nxwp/crfj) took the place of a doctrine
of conjunction and mutual action (or crvvdijida and
dvTiSoo-is). With the modern growth of psychology,
and the modern revolution of metaphysic, such formulae
were bound to dissolve. They were based on an early
metaphysic of natures and a crude science of person-
ality. But the metaphysic of history, the modern
primacy of personality, and the new stress on experience,
coupled with a critical historicism equally modern, have
opened a better way ; and they keep Christ and his

2i8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

problem from retiring into the outskirts of thought.
No dissolution of the old dogma prevents the Chris-
tological question from still being the question of the
hour and of the future for religious thought, when we
are not monopolised by the modern social problem.
The discredit of the dogma has also been increased by
the modern return to the Bible and its Gospel. We
find the scripture doctrine of the subject, inchoate as
it is in form, to be more satisfactory than the
ecclesiastical development of it for a starting point. And
it is satisfactory for this reason. It remoralises the
whole issue by restoring it to personal religion. Yet let
it not be thought that the moralising of dogma makes it
less urgent, less incumbent, less dogmatic. For what is so
insistent, inevitable, and dogmatic as the categorical
imperative which is at the moral centre ?

At the Reformation, with its concentration of religion
on the conscience, and on the guilty conscience, Chris-
tianity became once more personal and evangelical ; that
is, it became predominantly ethical. The key to the
religion was found in personal faith. It was not in the
institutes of theology or the institutions of the Church.
It was in moral and religious experience, in the contact
of a historic Redeemer with our living and personal
experience of redemption. That was what had really
made Christianity in the first century. And it was
what was lost in a Church dominated by Chalcedonian
metaphysic with an Aristotelian editing ; till the personal
faith of the New Testament was rescued from a religion
chiefly institutional and creedal at the Reformation.
Three centuries later another powerful effort was made
by Hegelianism to scholasticise Christianity anew, and to
rationalise Christology on the largest lines. The older

VIII. J The Moralising of Dogma 2ig

and narrower Rationalism had simply abolished Chris-
tology by reducing Christ to a mere man, and any science
of him to the psychology of genius. And Hegel seemed
to restore all by discovering a Christology in the very
nature of thought and being. But the capture of Hegel
by his extreme left has brought his system to much the
same effect as the old rationalism. While the reformed
and evangelical spirit has, by its revival, notably in
Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and others, discredited all the
Hegelian constructions. The Incarnation, being for a
moral and not a metaphysical purpose, must be in its
nature moral. Its metaphysic should therefore be a
metaphysic of ethics, and not of thought as pure being.
And we are shut up to the method of experience to
explain the act of grace in Christ's coming, and to
release it from rational permissions in order to be an
autonomous power. Religion is an ultimate in con-
sciousness— according to its most recent psychology.
And the higher it is, so much the more ultimate, and
the less vassal to rational permissions. It is living
faith that has the promise of understanding the object
of faith. Certainly nothing but faith can decide
whether Christ is properly an object of faith or only its
chief subject. No historic inquiry can decide that, as we
shall see. A religion of moral redemption can only be
understood by a Church of the morally redeemed, as
rational science, in its area, can only be pursued by
rational minds schooled to its method. The theology of
such a gospel opens only to a Church of broken and
converted men. Only the saved have the real secret of
the Saviour. That is the religion of the matter, which
carries its theology. The Godhead that became incarnate
in Jesus Christ did so not to convince, but to save. God*

220 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

head became incarnate so far and in such fashion as the
purpose of redemption prescribed. It became incarnate
in the manner the work required. Man's need determined
God's deed. Christ was almighty— to save. In a word,
the work of Christ, realised in the Church's experience
through faith, becomes the avenue and the key to the
person of Christ. Soteriology is the way of access to Chris-
tology. But where we come down to a bland version of
salvation, to the ebbs and flats of religion, to a lay, light,
and level sense of holiness, sin, judgment, and grace —
when we arrive there (either through lack of " funda-
mental brain work," as Rossetti called it, or of radical
soul work) then the person of Christ becomes unintel-
ligible; impressive, in a sense, but unintelligible. And
the effort of the Church's thought to pierce its mystery
is dismissed as mere metaphysic, in favour of an aesthetic
or a sentimental regard for his character and message.
Most elusive of all is the effort to retain the old pass-
words, while reducing them to no more than disguises
in luminous paint for the subjective processes of a self-
saving Humanity.

§ § §
In speaking of the moralisation of Christology by the

Reformation and the modern movements in its train I
do not think I can do better than offer here a free
translation of a passage in Melanchthon, one sentence of
which has recently been much used as the motto for
this whole tendency. It is taken from the preface to
the Loci of 1521.

" If a man know nothing of the power of sin, of law,
or of grace, I do not see how I can call him a
Christian. It is there that Christ is truly known.
The knowledge of Christ is to know his benefits.

VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 221

taste his salvation, and experience his grace; it is not,
as the academic people say, to reflect on his natures and
the modes of his incarnation. If you do not know
the practical purpose for which he took flesh and
went to the cross what is the good of knowing his
story? Is a doctor but a botanist? Is he content
to know the forms and colours of his herbs ? It is
their virtue that counts. So with Christ. He is given
us as our remedy, or, in Bible phrase, our salvation.
And we must know him in another way than the
scholars. To know him to purpose is to know the
demand of the conscience for holiness, the source
of power to meet it, where to seek grace for our
sin's failure, how to set up the sinking soul in the
face of the world, the flesh, and the devil, how to
console the conscience broken. Is that what any of
the schools teach, metaphysical, critical, or literary ?
Paul in Romans, when he wants to condense Chris-
tian doctrine into a compendium, does he philosophise
about the mysteries of the Trinity, or the method of
incarnation, or an active and a passive creation ?
He does nothing of the kind. He speaks of law,
sin and grace ; of conscience, guilt and salvation.
These are the topics on which a knowledge of Christ
turns. You do not know Christ until you know
these. How often Paul declares to his believers that
he prays for them a rich knowledge of Christ. He
foresaw that we should one day leave the saving
themes and turn our minds to discussions cold and
foreign to Christ. What we propose to do, therefore,
is to sketch the inwardness of those passages that com-
mend Christ to you, that settle the conscience, and
establish the soul against Satan. Most people look

222 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

in the Bible only for classic instruction about goodness
and evil. But it is a philosophic more than a Chris-
tian quest."

§ § § ^
The modern moralisation of religion thus prescribes a

new manner of inquiry on such a central subject as the
person of Christ. It plants us anew on the standpoint
of the Bible, where all human ethic is pointed, trans-
figured and reissued in Christ's new creation of the moral
soul. This rebirth of the race is not a thing yet to be
done, but a thing already done and given into our hands ;
" God hath regenerated us in the resurrection of Christ
from the dead " (i Peter i. 3) ; and it is prolonged in
the Christian experience of many centuries. What,
then, does such a tremendous and revolutionary fact
involve ? How must we think of him who brought
it to pass ? As the incarnation of natural and arbitrary
omnipotence? No, but as one who was potent for
everything morally required by the one need of sinful
Humanity, and the one demand of Holy Eternal Love.

Was it by a moral way, by moral conquest, that
Christ came to his final glory? Then it must
have been by a moral way that he left it. Is the end
of our salvation a moral glory? Then the origin of it
must have issued from moral glory. Is it an eternal
salvation? Then its moral glory rose in a moral
Eternity. Did the Eternal come by a transcendent
moral act ? Then that act began in Eternity. A final
salvation means a saving act eternal and absolute.
Some metaphysic is here involved, certainly, but it is a
metaphysic of the conscience. It starts from the con-
viction that for life and history the moral is the real, and
that the movements of the Great Reality must be morally

VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 223

construed as they are morally revealed. The spiritual
world is not the world of noetic process or cosmic force,
but of holy, i.e. moral, order, act, and power. Now con-
cerning the union of the two natures in Christ the old
dogma thought in a far too natural and non-moral way.
Its categories were too elemental and physical. It con-
ceived it as an act of might, of immediate divine power,
an act which united the two natures into a person rather
than through that person. It united them miraculously
rather than morally, into the existence of the incarnate
personality rather than by his action. The person was
the resultant of the two natures rather than the agent of
their union. They were united into a person whose
action only began after the union, and did not affect it.
It began (according to the dogma) in the miraculous con-
ception, which was not an ethical act, rather than in the
grace of the eternal son, who, for our sakes, from rich
became poor. There can be no unity of spirits like
God and man except in a moral way, by personal action
which is moral in its method as well as in its aim. As
Christians we are united with Christ by a moral,
i.e. a personal, process ; and can we think otherwise of
the manner of his union with God which is its base?
It is only in the way of moral modulation that the
divine Logos could become true man. That is where the
Christian differs from all pagan notions of incarnation.
And the Christian idea is so different, so ethical, because
its origin and its seat is in the cross, which is the axis of
the racial conscience, and the historic focus of moral
mediation. It is the cross and not the cradle that has
the secret of the Lord.

But, indeed, it is ethically misleading to speak of union
in such a case. Union is a term too physical, too natural.

224 ^^'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Even terms like permeation or interpenetration are so.
And this is the cardinal error of the old dogma. It works
upon a spiritual subject with physical instead of moral
categories. Its incarnation takes place not by spiritual
power but by natural power, however vastly magnified and
deified, by a fiat rather than a moral act. The error is
very persistent. I admit that some Bible phrases give the
wrong lead, as when we read of the Spirit being
poured out, and without measure. You find it in some of
the recent liberal interpretations of Christ as a human
personality completely filled by the Spirit. But that is
really docetic, however imposing. It dehumanises, it
depersonalises, and therefore it degrades, the human
nature to a vessel for the divine. It reduces the human
below the personal level by treating it as a mere recep-
tacle or tenement of the Godhead. This is a poor and
passive idea of humanity instead of a moral, which must
be active even in its receptivity. And we are but repeating
a form of the old error which construed the human
nature as no more than a coat which was put on,
while the divine became but a palladium dropped from
Heaven in human form, with an action more mechanical
than moral. Whatever may be said against the
Kenosis doctrine, at least it made the whole Christ
on earth the result of a grand moral act in the Heavens.

§ § §
"We might, perhaps, put the matter in this way. Let
us examine a dogma which underlies so much popular
religion and creates so much popular scepticism — the
dogma of God's natural omnipotence. Jesus, we say, was
the incarnation to the world of the power of Almighty
God. But, it is at once objected, we see in Jesus neither
omnipotence nor omniscience. He claimed neither. Do

VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 225

you claim for him, say, divine omnipotence ? The answer
to that question must be Yes and No.

Surely we must distinguish two ideas as to the relation
of power and goodness. Must we not distinguish between
the power which, though it has another and lower nature,
may be put wholly at the service of justice, and the power
which in its nature is justice ; between the might that
serves right and the might which is right ? Can we not
distinguish between a visible thing, like the might of
armies employed in a just cause, in the cause, it may be,
of universal justice, between that and a spiritual power
which is the intrinsic might of justice, the might of
holiness, when Truth unarmed uplifts its head, and shows
how awful goodness is ? Is there not the power that
works for righteousness and the power that is righteous-
ness at work?

All our natural life, of course, starts from the former,
from the idea of physical power, which may or may not
be brought into the service of justice ; and we have that
conception of power fixed upon us by the start. When
we begin to examine our notions we find that established
in possession. So that justice at best is understood but
socially — as natural happiness made general. Socialism
is simply the Christianity of the natural man, the Church
of the not yet born again. What is the idea, the expecta-
tion, by which natural men seek to judge if the course of
the world is worthy of God, and the experience of life
compatible with His goodness ? Is it not the idea
of omnipotence for happiness — the unlimited power to
possess and spread happiness. That is the standard of
their theodicy. If my life, if multitudes of lives, are
lamed or crushed by calamity how can I believe in a just,
kind and omnipotent God? This is the question of the

226 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

natural man. The vietier of a God is to use His omni-
potence for human happiness of a high and wide sort.
When this happiness seems to fail the result is scepti-
cism and pessimism, more or less bitter. Think how the
Lisbon earthquake of 1755 shattered the rational opti-
mism of that thin time to start the deliberate pessimisms
of to-day. It is the inevitable result of the attempt to
measure the whole of anything so spiritual as life or God
by its power to satisfy natural expectations. That is not
God's prime object ; it is not His regimen of the world in
the final account he gives of Himself, His purpose, and
His creature's destiny in the cross of Christ. His is not
the omnipotence that natural happiness requires, far
less that the natural imagination pictures ; but it is
the omnipotence that His own holiness requires. His own
purpose not of love simply but of holy love, the
omnipotence required by His own perfection, the omnipo-
tence required to establish in the world as we find it,
in a sinful world, a kingdom of complete communion
with His Holy Self and His Eternal blessedness. All
power in heaven and earth is delivered to the victorious
Holy One, and to Him alone.

We thus begin with such notions of power as we imbibe
from our first contact with it in natural force, elemental
instincts, or imperious wills. And we carry that order
into our thinking. We construe omnipotence accordingly.
We form ideas of omnipotence which are suggested to
us by nature, and then we demand that a revelation from
God shall begin by accrediting itself to those natural
notions — especially by some miracle. But we demand
an impossible thing when we look for such a reve-
lation in Christ — a human being omnipotent in that
sense. A human being with natural omnipotence would

VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 227

be a monster. Christ did not come with natural omnipo-
tence either for his weapon or for his credentials. He
did not come with a power of unlimited miracle, with a
blank cheque on the universal energy. His omnipo-
tence was not of the kingdom of nature but of grace.
His power was both held and used under moral
conditions, as we see in the cases where it was arrested
by unbelief. He came much rather to convert that
natural method, nay to invert it. He revealed that
holiness was the divine power, and did not wait on
power; that the forces of creation had their end,
charter, and scope in a moral redemption, and they
could not exceed their terms of reference; that holiness,
that moral Godhead, could only establish itself in the
world by its own nature, and not by natural force ; that
his Church could only be established by its Gospel, and
not by anything at the disposal of States, or at the
command of Empire. His kingdom was not of the world.
This principle gave rise to a struggle within Himself,
in the temptation He mastered ; as it has done also
within His Church, in the temptation to which she
succumbed. The power He incarnated was the intrinsic,
supreme, and final power of divine conscience, that is, of
holy love, for the destiny of the world. This is the
true power of God which was incarnated in Christ —
this morally irresistible power of holy love.

In the natural, arbitrary, and unregenerate sense in
which we understand the word, God is not omnipotent.
All things do not work together for an omnipotent God,
but for love's good on God's scale, for an absolutely holy
purpose, to them that love God for His holy purpose
(Rom. viii. 28). At least the God of Christ is not omnipo-
tent in any other sense than that. The God incarnate in

228 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lbct.

Christ is not. He can do only the things that are con-
gruous with His moral, His holy nature and purpose. But
in this moral sense is he omnipotent over the world ?
Is he in final command of history ? Is he secure of the
reversion of time ? Well, what omnipotence is required
for that ? Is it not the power of holiness, not to do any-
thing and everything suggested by human egoism or
fantasy, but to do everything required for its own effectual
establishment on the world ? The purpose of a world
created by a holy God must be holiness, the reflection
and communion of His own holiness. Can God secure
it ? What the world actually is we know, if we let our
conscience speak its verdict on history. Is it in the
power of the Holy God, through the very holiness
smitten by our sin, to secure such a world's holy
destiny still ? That is the ultimate question in life.
That is what, in one form or another, occupies the
first-class minds. And to that question Christ and
His cross are the answer, or they have no meaning
at all. They reveal in their foregone victory the om-
nipotence of holiness to subdue all natural powers
and forces, all natural omnipotence, to the moral sanctity
of the Kingdom of God. And if they do not reveal that
we are left without any ground of certainty about a holy
ending for the world at all. And our guesses will be
hopeful according to our sanguine temperament, our
happy circumstances, our small insight, or our low
demand. It is a tremendous revelation and achievement
in the cross of Christ. " How awful goodness is."
The more we know about cosmic forces, antres vast,
deserts horrible, Alps of thick ribbed ice, seas, continents,
vastitudes of every kind ; of geological ages, stellar
spaces, solar storms; of creature agonies, of social

VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 229

miseries, devilish wickedness, civilised triumphs, historic
heroisms, the grandeur of genius and unquenchable love ;
of all the passion, for evil on the one hand, or, on the
other, for the Eternal, Immortal, and Invisible good —
so much the more we must feel how awful is the holy
love of God, that has secured the grand issue for ever,
that surmounts all principalities and powers, things past,
present, and to come, every other omnipotence ; sur-
mounts, nay exploits, them all, in the Holy One of God,
who by His cross is the same world-conqueror yesterday,
to-day, and for ever. It is a tremendous claim. And
the improbability of it is either a pious absurdity ; or it
is the quiet irony of a God who has it already done in
the hollow of His hand. Like every ultimate interpreta-
tion of life it is a matter of insight — insight into the
world, the Christ, and the Cross. What is lacking
to the seers and geniuses of our time, like Swinburne,
Meredith, or Hardy, is still lack of insight. They
see into "Love in the valley" — and how lovely — what
they do not see into is love in excelsis.

§ § §
The formula of the union of two natures in one

person is essentially a metaphysical formula, and the
formula of a Hellenic metaphysic, and it is more or less
archaic for the modern mind. The term " nature " is a
purely metaphysical term, and one which characterises a
scholastic metaphysic of being rather than a modern meta-
physic of ethic. The metaphysic of being, if not banished
from modern science, tends to be retained only in so far
as the moral is regarded as the real, and the key to being
is found in personality. Even if we do speak at all now of
two natures in one person the accent has moved from the
term nature to the term person. We start with the

R

230 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

historic reality and unity of Christ's person. We work
with such ethical categories — with ideas like personality,
history, and society. These are what command
thought, rather than ideas like being, substance, or
nature, wherever thought works out its new creation in
Kant and comes to close quarters with life. Now the
ideas of personality and society, which mean so much for
history and religion, are condensed in such an idea as
marriage, which is at once the keystone of society and the
great symbol of Christ's relation to man. And in
marriage the ideal is (however far we may be yet from its
general realization) that of two personalities not only
united but completely interpenetrating in love, and grow-
ing into one dual person. " The two shall be one flesh "
— one spiritual personality. This interpenetration is
something of which personality alone is capable. Any
notion Hke "a nature " is too physical in its origin and
action to rise really above the impenetrability of matter,
and the mutual externality of each such nature. This is
one reason why a union of natures complete enough for
personal unity has been so hard to compass with the old
metaphysic, which did not rise beyond a finer physic, or
pass eis dkXh yevo's. The marriage relation is the brief
epitome of the social principle of the kingdom of God, of
the unity of Christ, and the kind of unity in a Triune
God. It is impossible to keep Trinity from Tritheism if
we interpret personality by the categories of being or
substance, instead of interpreting being by the categories
of personality. A personality is much more than intelli-
gent or conscious substance, however refined. In this
sense personality has not a nature. We speak at times of
Christ as being Himself the Kingdom of God ; and it is
not the extravagant phrase that some minds declare it to

VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 231

be. At least it points to a social plurality in Him in
whom His whole Church lives. Which is an idea of the
same class as a divine dualism, the complete interpenetra-
tion, in that "public person," of human and divine
personality. It suggests their interpenetration in a way
of which wedlock gives the symbol or ideal, however far
short it might fall as yet of being the actual analogy
which it will one day become in the Christian evolution
of society, and of thought to correspond. As the
supreme human interests grow more ethical, as the
ethical categories more and more come to dominate
thought in a life whose first concern is personal action,
by so much the more must the great problems that sur-
round the historic Christ be handled on such congenial
and fertile lines. The ethical notion of the true unity as
the interpenetration of persons by moral action must take
the place of the old metaphysic of the union of natures by
a tour de force. Unity of being need not be denied, but
it will be approached and construed on those ethical
lines which alone consist with personal relation and
explain it. The Church has worked long on the old
lines which were laid down by pagan thought rather
than by a final revelation in a person : perhaps, when we
have worked in this new and living way as long, then we
may expect results for which we are not yet prepared but
which we can already forefeel along the line of the true
method. The moral and experimental method in
theology will give us, from its congeniality with the
source of our revelation in a personal Saviour, results as
great and commanding in their sphere as did the applica-
tion of the other experimental method of induction so
appropriate to natural science.

§ § §

232 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Taking this moral method we seem shut up to one of
two theories. If the incarnation was the result rather
than the cause of Christ's moral action then it was the
result either of a great and creative moral decision of his
before he entered the world — which preserves his pre-
existence, and seems to require some form of kenosis. Or
else it was the result of the continuous and ascending
moral action in his historic life, wherein his moral growth,
always in unbroken union with God, gave but growing
effect to God's indwelling ; while the final and absolute
union took place when his perfect self-sacrifice in death
completed his personal development, and finally identified
him with God. So that we then have a progressive
incarnation of God and a progressive deification of man
in a rising scale of mutual involution ; which requires
some form of adoptionism.

In either of these cases everything turns on moral
action (either in the world or before it), whose historic
consummation was in the cross and its redemption.
Either the cross was the nadir of that self-limitation
which flowed from the supramundane self-emptying of
the Son, or it was the zenith of that moral exaltation
which had been mounting throughout the long sacrifice
of his earthly life, it was the consummation of the pro-
gressive union of his soul and God. I do not see why
we may not combine the two movements, as I shall hope
to show. But in either case the supreme moral act of
the cross is the key to the nature of the process. There
the new moral value was really introduced into Humanity,
and if the incarnation did not take place for that purpose
it has no sense or end. The new element was intro-
duced, it was not evolved. An evolutionary incarnation
is none ; it is but blossom. The element of miracle

VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 233

must be there. And it was introduced by a moral
miracle and not a magical, a miracle corresponding to
the nature of moral freedom. A moral end can only be
reached by moral means ; and if the nature and end of
redemption be moral it means that the incarnation which
made it possible must be moral in its nature toOi No
moral redemption would be possible if the God who came
to do it did not assume his manhood by a moral miracle,
a miracle of grace, as real as that which finished it. If
Christ began from a magical act, a prodigious act, a
mere exercise of power, as I have said the dogma* makes
him do, and if emphasis is removed from the atonement to
such an incarnation, as Catholicism tends to do, then it is
very hard to give real moral effect to his closing work.
And history has shown how hard it is. Popular thought
at least is diverted from the cross to the cradle. Evan-
gelical belief, and especially Catholic belief, has had
many unsatisfactory ethical results. Ecclesiastical ethic
is not always Christian ethic (to say the least). And the
reason lies to a great extent in the incongruity between
the moral nature of the Church's Redemption and the
non-moral nature of the Incarnation which was offered
to explain it. Since the incarnation lay interior and
fontal to the redemption, its metaphysical nature over-
bore the moral action of redemption, and much was
pardoned to the conscience of a man who assented to
the dogma. It is often urged among ourselves that the
evangelical construction of Christ's death as atonement
is not as prolific as it should be of moral results — nay
that a certain moral obtuseness has too often gone with

*I might here beg that the dififcrencc be not overlooked between the
dynamic union of the two natures (of whicli I fiave spoken and which I
liave chiefly here in view) and the miraculous birth.

234 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

evangelical orthodoxy and zeal. That is not to be
roundb' denied. In many quarters it is throwing men
of the better (but hastier) sort upon a non-evangelical
Christianity. And the reason is that the atonement
at the Church's centre is not conceived in truly ethical
terms. It is not grasped as the focus and spring of all the
divinest ethic of the conscience, and therefore of the world.
And the reason why it is not so grasped is that its truly
moral and evangelical interpretation, as adjusting the
conscience directly with a perfectly holy God, has been
alloyed with mediaeval. Catholic, and dynamic notions of
incarnation. These being more metaphysical than
moral, arrest its ethical effect, and divide the unity of the
divine action in Christ. The Reformers, with all their
new departure in the religion of Redemption and Justifi-
cation, took over the substance of the old theology about
the divine nature that gave Christ His redeeming power.
With all their moralising of the close of Christ's life they
did not duly moralise its beginning, or the heavenly act
which preceded and prescribed its beginning. And so
we have a paralysing division down the middle of the
divine action in Christ. We have the ethical effect of
Christ on man crossed by an initiative on God's side,
when Christ left heaven, which was more metaphysical
or miraculous than it was moral. And the two disparate
things much confuse that general Christian mind, or
ethos, from which, more than from individual conviction,
so much of our Christian ethic proceeds. Christ could
only redeem into God's holiness if it were from the act
of that holiness that he came : he could only create a
holy ethic if it was in the holiest of acts that his creative
life and work arose. The moral problem set in our need
of salvation can only be solved by a moral movement in

VIII,] The Moralising of Dogma 235

the God who undertook it. A redemptive work is moral
or nothing. But if its first condition is an incarnation
made possible only by such an act of power as underlies
the union of natures into a composite person, then the
redemption is unreal. It is a phantasmagory. If it was
the mere possession of a divine nature and a rank worthy
to atone that gave Christ His saving power, if it was not
the moral quality of his action in the doing of it (either
on earth, or in heaven before coming to earth), then his
work has a moral discount which is bound to reduce the
value of its practical effect, if not to turn it to an
unreality. If his conquest of our moral weakness was
not a victory of his own moral strength, but merely the
power or strategy of a Miltonic omnipotence getting the
better of the prince of this world, can we wonder that
the moral effect on us of such a trial of strength between
two giants is qualified ? Theories of incarnation which
make all turn on the natural omnipotence or omniscience
of the Redeemer are beside the mark. It was not the
rank or power of the Redeemer that made his death
precious for redemption, but his worth. It was his
moral value as the Holy that gave him power, both with
God and man, to prevail. It was his holiness, with
which the Holy Father was perfectly pleased and
satisfied. That is the only Christian doctrine of satis-
faction. If the incarnation was not above all things a
moral achievement by God the redemption cannot be a
moral conquest of man. The divine coming and action is
then magic, however exalted or massive. And revelation
becomes not the self-donation of God in sacrifice, but a
phantasmagory, a transparency, a placard (Gal. iii.i), which
leaves the conscience untouched, though it may move the
imagination to the most magnificent ritual in the world,
and the intellect to the most architectonic orthodoxy.

LECTURE IX

THE MORALISING OF DOGMA, ILLUSTRATED
BY THE ABSOLUTENESS OF CHRIST

LECTURE IX

THE MORALISING OF DOGMA, ILLUSTRATED BY THE
ABSOLUTENESS OF CHRIST

I HAVE been speaking of the moralising of dogma.
I applied that method by saying that the cross of our
redemption was the historic origin of the theology of
the incarnation ; that by the cross also it passes
back from a theological conviction to a life experi-
ence ; and that the practical value of the incarnation
lies in its being the necessary foundation of the cross.
It is when we are remade at the cross that our
eyes are opened to see at its base the door and the
stair that lead down to the incarnation at the founda-
tion of our moral world. Christ's self-consciousness of
His own divine nature must (I have said) be very
powerful for our theological conviction. The value of
the apostolic inspiration, (I have added), cannot be
much less for the same purpose. But it is the new
creation in the cross that translates the belief into
spiritual life, and indeed makes that life, by making
Christ the element of our own final spiritual conscious-
ness. I would now farther illustrate the moralising of
dogma, first in regard to theological dogma, by con-
tinuing to dwell on the cross as the avenue to the

330

240 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect.

incarnation and the incarnation as the foundation of
the cross ; and second, in regard to philosophic dogma,
by translating the doctrine of the absolute into the
terms of religious experience.

§ § §

It does not matter what happens to any creeds or

orthodoxies on this subject, if we but get at the truth.
Let us not resolve beforehand that it is impossible to
modify the old confessions, or to resume, after a slack
interval, the long movement of the Church's thought
to pierce and clarify the mystery of godliness in Christ.
Let the doctrine be reconstructed, reinterpreted, re-
stated— what you will. Provided two things. First that
the task be publicly essayed by competent and reverent
people and not by amateurs, with but a natural religion
and a poor education or none on the subject; for the
worst heresy is quackery. Indeed, the work can really
be done only by the collective Church in earnest faith,
working on the contributions of individuals intellectually
equipped and morally serious. And, second, provided
that what is aimed at is religious truth, which is so
much more than the results of severe historical criti-
cism; truth as it is in Jesus and not about Jesus; truth
which is the Church's supernatural faith giving a
rational account of itself; the truth of a faith which is
not natural religion, but an invasion of the natural
man, and an enclave in the course of history ; the order
of truth which has made Christ what he has been to
the Church and the soul. That is not necessarily the
truth exactly as the Church has formulated it, the
truth as stated in the Church's conception, or dogma ;
but it is the substantial, distinctive, and evangelical truth
of the Church's experience ; the truth, operative however

IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 241

conceived, which has made Christ for his Church some-
thing totally different from what Buddha is for his Church ;
the truth of the dogmas in distinction from the dogmas
as true.

§ § §

The Church has always held fast to the formula about
" the Eternal Godhead in Jesus Christ." What is
under that phrase? Surely it means more than that Jesus
himself was but a unique human personality, and that
the divine element in him was the presence or Spirit
of the Father, dwelling in him as in us, only more so;
to whom he was completely sensitive; with whom he
was filled, in the affectional sense in which one person-
ality may be said to fill another, through love's
saturation and obsession ?

Does the Godhead in Christ mean only that the
Father was in the closest communion of affection with
Christ's human personality ? Or does it not mean that
the personality that met the Father so completely was
itself of the nature of Godhead, and always had been
a divine vis-a-vis to the personality of the Father? Only
in the latter case should we really speak of the deity of
Christ ; only if he was the Ego in some form of the
Eternal Son ; only if he was increate, and had a share
which God could delegate to no creature in the creation
of the world, a share in the world's origin as real as
his part in its Redemption, Reconciliation, and Con-
summation.

To compare great things with small, that powerful
genius Emily Bronte makes the heroine in Wuthering
Heights to say, " I avi Pleathcliffe. He is always, always
in my mind ; not as a pleasure, any more than I am
always a pleasure to myself ; but as my own being." Borne

242 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

on the current of her passion, she goes on to say, " I
love him because he is more myself than I am. What-
ever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
And did not the insight of the Church go on to say the
like sub specie eternitatis of the Son's relation to the
Father ? Is unity of being not the postulate of a love so
engrossing and complete as the genius of the Church's
faith realised that of Father and Son to be ? It is
not only in theology that passion gravitates to meta-
physic. We need but remember also Shakespeare's
sonnets and minor poems to feel that.

It would be better method (and better ethic as well)
if we confined the expression " Christ's Godhead, deity,
or even divinity," to the more thorough-going idea.
There is nothing so necessary to belief and its moral
purposes as more clearness, courage, and conscience in
deciding what we mean by terms. The chief plague
and heresy of the hour in this region is that with the
popularising of religion God tends to become the most
fluid of all words. The prime certainty becomes the
great haze. The living God becomes but as the ether
of life. He pervades, but he does not purpose. He
saturates all, but all does not centre in him. Discussion
thus becomes impossible, from the fact that the intel-
lectual conscience grows damp and limp in the mist.
Terms become so liquid that they run into any mould,
and are sometimes no more tractable than a cloud that
you cannot even mould. The intellectual ethic of
some to-day would ruin them if it took a commercial
instead of a mental form. Clear, strong and honest
heresy is a negative contribution to clear and strong
belief. But heresy in rolling cloud is only stifling,
depressing, and demoralising.

IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 243

§ § §
The Godhead of Christ can only be proved religiously.
Indeed, the only true confession of the Incarnation is
living faith. It can only be based on what is involved in
the idea, the experience, of God that proceeds from Jesus
himself. Is He necessary to the being of the God He
revealed ? If we do not regard Jesus and his full gospel
as God's supreme revelation, as God's ultimate word,
there can be no talk of his Godhead. If we do not
bring all other religious truth to this test ; if we place
above Christ's word those ideas of God which we
draw from the world of nature or reason, those con-
ceptions of Absoluteness, Omnipotence, and the rest
which would be called common-sense notions; if we
take from these, and not from Jesus, our notion of
what God is — then we shall very likely fail in proving
bis Godhead. If we seek in Jesus absolute power, in
the natural sense of the word, we shall not find
it. If we decree beforehand that God is not present
where omniscience is not in evidence we shall drop
the question about Godhead in Jesus. But absolute
Omnipotence or Omniscience is no direct part of a
saving revelation. Absolute power and authority indeed
belongs to Godhead, but it is not the whole of it, it is
not the outgoing element in it, which is love. And an
incarnation may be possible of that element in Godhead
which rather represents absolute obedience, and absolute
holiness of response. That element of subordination
and sacrifice must be there surely. For if there be in
Godhead absolute authority it is hard to conceive of it
without thinking of absolute obedience as there also ;
unless the obedience cease to be correlative with the
authority, unless authority once existed without obedi-

244 ^^** Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

ence, unless there could be an Eternal Father with but
a temporary son, unless obedience be an undivine thing,
and the only divine thing is to lord it, and to wrap one's
self in conscious power with no outgoing love. And
then where is our Christian ethic, or the real divineness
of humility? And then why should Nietzsche not be the
true prophet, and a dens humilis a mere figment fostered
by the weak majority to strengthen their case and better
their lot ?

The self-consciousness of Jesus I have indicated as
being of immense value here ; but how do we know
that his God was not a figure in the window and
his Father his dream ? His self-consciousness taken
alone is only a historic datum. We must have some-
thing that turns that past to our perpetual present. We
must have the Lord, the Spirit. To the evangelical
experience, that Jesus becomes our present Saviour ; and
such a Christ, who has become our experienced Salvation,
is certainly involved in his own God. Christ can only
save if we have God saving in him. A theology of
incarnation must be a theology of the saved. The
fulcrum of any vital doctrine about the person of Christ
must be an experimental faith in him as Redeemer.
Christ is very God to me because, and only because,
he has been God's saving grace to me a sinner ; He
has not simply preached it, or brought it. We cannot
convince the man in the street that Jesus is God, nor
the man that feeds his soul on modern culture. We do
not go to the world of the hearty, alert, interesting,
rational man, even when he has developed some religious
attention and some theological curiosity ; we do not go
to the ordinary able man and propose to convince him by
argument, consecutive, cumulative, or convergent, that

nc] The Moralising of Dogma 245

Jesus was God. That would be to attempt the im-
possible. It would mean that we could have no real
faith in a moral atonement till we were first convinced
of a rational incarnation. And it would mean, as I
have said, that we set about proving that Jesus
possessed the qualities which the natural man of
common-sense, or of common-sense organised into a
philosophy, associates with the idea of God — a supreme
Being, all-knowing, all-present, all-blessing, capable of
all prodigies. No such attempt could succeed. Indeed
it can easily seem absurd. And apart from the in-
congruity of attaching these qualities to a historic
personality, no such claim is made in the New Testament.
It does not offer an omnipotent Christ or an intellectual
paragon. Its appeal is not to the average rational man.
That would be a legalist and not a gospel appeal. To
reject the New Testament appeal is not stupid, not
irrational, as the cheap apologists are prone to say.
The appeal is not made to the shrewd and logical ; it is
made to the heart and conscience in a real experience ;
and to neither of these acting normally, but to an
abnormal and concerned condition of both. It is made
to men created for love who yet do not or cannot love,
to men created for goodness who are in sin, and who are
either uneasy or miserable in it, or too lost to be either.
The need to which Christianity appeals is the need of
the conscience, its supreme need of grace from the God
whose holiness troubles its days or oppresses its nights.
And the first condition to be satisfied by any doctrine
about Christ's person is that it shall be necessary to the
central principle of Christianity that " in Christ we have
a gracious God." Not that we have such a God through

Christ, but that in having Christ we have Him. That
s

246 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

is the marrow of Christianit}^ running through Paul,
Athanasius, Anselm, Luther, Schleiermacher, Wesley,
and indeed all the great evangelic and apostolic succes-
sion. The sum of a religion of commandment, of a legal
religion, may be the mere love of God and love of man. But
Christianity is not a legal religion, and such love, though
not far from the Kingdom, was yet outside it (Mk. xii. 34).
There is no real faith in the Godhead of Christ apart
from the evangelical experience of God's gracious love
of us. And that experience has always required behind
it, for its full force, a real incarnation. The pre-existence
of the Son of God who became incarnate in Jesus has
always been considered requisite for the evangelical
faith of the Church, the faith that God in the cross
really forgave and saved, and that he was not merely
believed and declared to have done so, even by the
greatest of all prophets and the holiest of all saints,
Jesus. We should be clear about the issue. Even a
Roman Church that worships Christ, has a social and a
spiritual future denied to a rational creed that but
admires and honours Him. Christianity is either
Evangelical or Socinian at last. And if it is not the
latter it must stand on the fact that the God we sinned
against was in Christ, really forgiving the sinner at first
hand, that Godhead was actually living in Christ and
reconciling — not sending, visiting, moving, or inspiring
Christ, but living in Him and constituting Him.
Certainly more than inspiring Him, for it is a poor
response to the history to think of Christ simply as
inspired, or visited by a Spirit which came and went.
And I have tried to show that we cannot think of Him
adequately as tenanted by the Spirit, even in an abiding
way — as a created personality quite filled, and always

IX.] The Moralising of Dogma z^y

filled, with the influence of the Spirit, always and per-
fectly answering the Spirit. We may of course reject
the apostolic interpretation and follow a different line
from the New Testament. And we may justify ourselves
in doing so by various considerations — when we do
consider. But if we follow the New Testament as a
whole and as a Gospel, we must think of the divine
element as constituting the historic personality; and we
must think of Christ's earthly life itself, with all its
passion and choice, as due to a great and critical volition
of the same will in a heavenly state. That is a view
essential to apostolic Christianity, and one of the facts
which it believes to be of first necessity for the redeeming
work which is Christianity, and which created the
Church. In the Bible men are preoccupied with the
reality of an incarnation whereof all the pagan ideas
and legends about gods descending and walking the
earth were but presentiments, adumbrations, prophecies,
and even prayers for it. Those Judaistic notions of
Messiah, Redemption, Expiation, and all the train of
ideas which the religious historical school use to dissolve
Christianity into a very effective syncretism, were really
a part of that providential prcparatio cvangelica which
fell into place and found itself in Christ.

So, when we base our belief in the Incarnation on the
Evangelical experience that is a case of the moralising
of dogma in the theological plane.

§ § §
I wish now to illustrate the process of moralising

dogma by applying it in the Christological interest to

another dogma than omnipotence, the philosophic dogma

of the Absolute.*

* For the moralisinR of such a doctrine as Atonement may I refer to my
little book The Cruciality oj the Cross (] ladder & Stoughton, 1909), and
especially its last part.

248 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

What is most keenly discussed in many cultured circles
at present is the Absoluteness of Christianity. What does
that really mean ? Has it any meaning for the Church and
its preachers ? It does not, cannot, mean that a philoso-
phical Absolute can be proved by the Christian revelation
in a systematic way which compels theoretic conviction.
It does not mean that Christian theologians profess to have
solved the problem in which Hegel failed. They have in-
deed a solution to the world ; but not to the same version
of its question as the philosophers put. The idea of the
Absolute has for us not a philosophic but a religious,
practical, experimental value. It really means, in more
familiar language, the finality of Christ for the experience
of life and reality — the soul's last reality. That is the
form which the truth of the incarnation assumes in face
of the challenge that marks the present day. The insight
this luminous age lacks is insight into the greatest moral
fact of history — into Christ. What we need, what
preachers of all men need, is not so much affection to
Christ but insight into Christ. That is the Church's
need, however it may be with individuals. It is not
impression but inspiration. Christianity must stand or
fall by an insight which discerns the finality of Christ
as to life and its destiny. And, from what I have already
said as to the place and function of the cross, you will
not be surprised if I say now that this finality of Christ is
the same thing as used to be described as his " finished
work," his transfer of Humanity, for good and all, from
death to life in relation to God. It is always the cross
that is the offence to the world. It may be the
philosophic world of Hegel with its Absolute; or the
"gothic" world of Nietzsche, Henley, Shaw, Kipling,
Davidson or Wells with its superman, its assertion of the

IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 249

individual and his instincts, its cult of the violent life,
and its protest against humility, sacrifice, poverty,
chastity, or obedience. Or it may arrest the natural
healthy world of comfort and success. The only authori-
tative ethic in the face of these egoisms and subjectiv-
isms is one that is based on the finality of the
historic Christ and his redemption. We are in a world
which has been redeemed; and not in one which is being
redeemed at a pace varying with the world's thought and
progress, or the Churches' thought and work. To believe
that the kingdom has come is another religion from the
belief that it is but coming and that we have to bring it.
It produces a totally different type of faith and life. And
it is the only type that can save Christianity from being
politicised, socialised, and secularised out of existence.
And I would say three things about this belief, of which
that matter of experience is the first."

§ § §
(i) For Christianity the Absolute is not in an idea but
in an experience. It is a layman's matter. It is the very
soul of our universal faith. It is the affair of every man,
if his eternal soul is worth more than all the relative
world. It has little directly to do with the results of
speculation or of comparative religion. Our absolute is
not the last common summit of all thought; for we do
not rally about a minimal point of light that shines dear in
the sky for all quarters, like the pole-star for the sea, or the
shining Fusiyama for Japan. Not is it the least common
denominator of all faiths ; for we are not united most by
the thin thread of belief which divides us least. Of
course, a philosophic Absolute cannot be out of relation

* See Hunziger ProbUme, p. 79, for much that follows.

250 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

to the Christian God ; and there is a metaphysic of faith ;
but it is not the Gospel that Christianity brings, nor the
claim it makes. The Gospel does not say that all reli-
gions are right with their claim to be absolute, right in
the sense that they all bring us to contact with the
Absolute in differing degrees, though none finally — not
even Christianity. That relativism rests on a conception
of the Absolute somewhat abstract and formal — too much
so for the faith of a living and eternal soul, or for its
trust of itself to a living and eternal God. The Chris-
tian claim to absoluteness is a thing of more depth,
breadth, and volume than that — more simple, vital, and
passionate. It has more flesh, blood, content and con-
science. For, among faiths, there is in Christianity a
difference which is qualitative and not merely gradual, a
difference in kind and not in degree only. Christianity
does bring us into contact with the Absolute God — like
other religions; but (if the phrase were allowed) it does
so absolutely and finally. The other religions had a real
message ; Christianity has something beyond a message
more real still. They all told us truth with whatever
error ; Christianity goes beyond a gift of more truth and
less error. Christianity takes us out of the formal region
of truths more or less true; it takes us out of the region
even of absolute truth, truth absolutely true, out of
mere theology. Its revelation is the gift of a true
God, not of truth about God. So long as truth is
propositional or formal, so long as it is any kind of
statement, however exalted and kindled, about God,
it is below the kind of absolute that the soul re-
quires, that life requires, that the world requires.
Christianity gives us a new and absolute life, an absolute,
not in form or truth, but in content and experience. It

IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 251

does not give us anything about God, but it gives God
Himself — the living God to living men. Its revelation is
not doctrinal but sacramental. And in its light — in its
psychology if you will — we can interpret all other faiths.
We then see that the vital thing in every religion is not an
innate evolutionary movement towards an absolute God,
but the absolute God breaking in upon the spiritual con-
sciousness, breaking up through it in essential miracle.
The foundation of the whole world emerges in the moral
and religious life of the soul, takes command, and anchors
us upon something which Eternity cannot shake. For
this is Eternity.

§ § §
(2) For the absoluteness of Christianity lies in an ex-
perience of the historic and most human Christ as a
superhuman visitant, and as the one moral mediator of
personal communion with the living, and holy, and eternal
God. It is an experience of Christ as the absolute con-
science, i.e., as the judge of all, and as the Redeemer,
i.e., the saving health of all — in a word, as the God of
all. It means that the person and work of Christ alone
gives the moral soul to itself. He does for us the ultimate
thing of the soul, its one thing needful. He gives it its
own ".ternal place and communion with an absolutely holy
God. God is the only world in which the soul can find
itself. Christ gives us our God and our soul at once.
God finds us and we find God. In Christ the end of all
makes himself in his love the means to that end. What
is there to be done beyond that, when that is done on
the scale of the race ? To be in living, loving, holy
communion with the living, loving, holy God for ever
is the soul's perfect consummation and final bliss.
And that is Christ's gift. What do we want, what

252 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lbct.

can we conceive, in any farther revelation ? We are
here at a finality and its rest. Endless discovery, of
course, remains, endless explication within the gift un-
speakable ; but in the way of revelation what more is pos-
sible than that God should in his love give Himself to man
completely, though not at any point exhaustively ? What
more can we pray than that He should give us his whole
and holy self, and so bring us to our true and whole self?
And this in Christ, to the classic religious experience
of the race, He has done. The point, you perceive, is
not that this is what a final revelation would do if we had
reached it, but that this is what God in Christ has done
and does. That is the real issue of the hour. Not, Is
Christ a revelation of God ? but, Is he the revelation,
the final and complete revelation, of which all that we
may call revelation besides is but a factor? Most whom
we need here consider admit that Christ is a revelation
of God ; but all do not admit that he is the final revela-
tion, that we have in him God Himself, and the whole
Eternal God, with His last word, with man's last
judgment, his last justification, his last destiny. This
is a matter which cannot be settled by proofs or evi-
dences of Christ's deity, but only by experience — the
soul's experience of eternal Redemption in a Church
of souls. There is no basis for a belief in the Incarna-
tion but this basis of faith. Nor is there any other basis
for certainty of the world's final good. The poet trusts
that somehow good will be the final goal of ill; the
believer knows that this is how it must be so, for so it is.

§ § §
(3) The final thing, the Absolute, in Christianity is the
experience not simply of contact with Christ, not simply
of a revelation given, nor even of a deliverance wrought.

IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 253

but of a new creation effected in Christ. The Son is as
creative as the Father. What he brings is not a revela-
tion which can be tested by the formal tests of truth, and
called final by its coincidence with a final philosophy —
a philosophy of the Absolute. That was the dangerous
method of the early Apologists. It was a dream which
misled many a century ago to think that Hegel's
philosophy, as the last word of thought, had counter-
signed for the moderns Christ's revelation as the word
of God ; with such a reference the Gospel was good for
any amount for which we might draw on it. But the final
thing in Christianity is an experience in which Christ is
not simply the ideal nor the channel, but the creator of
the new man. He is the real principal, and not a mere
intermediary. In his person we have the permanent
divine ground of our communion with God, and not
merely its divine agent once. The work of Christ is the
work of a Christ eternally working for us. If we are
brought to God by the historic Christ we go on to find
that we remain in God only as we abide in the same
Christ as the Eternal Son. It has been so found in the
history of the Church. It is on the. ground of Christ
that we are forgiven, daily forgiven, it is not simply by
means of Christ. He is not the ground of our trust
simply but of our salvation — not an Erkentnissgrund but a
Rcalgrtind. The means is in him identical with the end.
He is God dealing with men directly, though mediatorily.
Now I beg you here not to say such words are meaning-
less. That they are not ; for the thing has been often
said, and by the greatest. And no one is entitled to
deny it till he has grasped the meaning, and is sure
f n good ground it is wrong, God in Christ deals with
men directly but mediatorily. He is the Mediator and

254 ^''^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

not the medium, not the agent. Buddha was a divine
agent. Can we refuse to say he had a commission from
God ? But Christ is the offended Holiness itself exer-
cising forgiveness and salvation ; and doing so in such a
way as to set up, not recognition, not belief, not welcome
even, but communion — on the scale of the race and of
Eternity. To be in Christ is to be in God. He is not
the herald of God's will but God's will in action, God's
final will in universal action on me; and so acting on
me as not simply to impress me but so as to remake
me, and thus build every soul into an everlasting king-
dom. It is not a new mood, or a new conviction he
gives me, but a new life, an Eternal Life, a new world, my
Eternity, my own Eternity, destined, forfeit, and restored.
There is nothing more left for God to give man, but the
appropriation, in experience and in detail, of this one and
final gift of Himself in Christ and his Eternal Life. For
if there be a Mediator in this sense there can only be one.
He can have no successor.

§ § §
It is a mighty matter to have to do with, a vast venture
and committal to make, when we put our soul in
Christ's hands for God and for Eternity, and when we
take in him the Almighty and Eternal into our soul. It
is a step for good and all. We risk all we have on that
pearl. We sell all we have to buy it. It is a tremendous
assertion we make when we go to the world with Christ.
How true it is that society to day needs nothing so
much as the lost sense of God in its midst — holy,
judging, amazing, terrifying, comforting, healing us.
There are those who while they feel that feel it so poorly
and unworthily that they think it can be recovered by
literature, or the stage, or some such mop for the Atlantic.

IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 255

But is there anyway to set God in the midst but His own
way of setting Christ there ? It is a tremendous thing to
go to the world with our Christ, and to many a pretty wit
a thing ridiculous and despicable. 1 do not wonder people
do not believe us. Christ Himself was disbelieved, and
he grows credible but slowly. I cannot myself claim to
have been free born in this faith ; with a great price have
I procured its freedom. I have envied those who took
naturally and sweetly to Christ — though they have helped
m.e little. And I should count a life well spent, and the
world well lost, if, after tasting all its experiences, and
facing all its problems, I had no more to show at its
close, or carry with me to another life, than the acquisi-
tion of a real, sure, humble, and grateful faith in the
Eternal and Incarnate Son of God. All is still well if the
decay of everything else but fertilise the knowledge of him
(Phil. iii. 8). Only, let us not increase the difficulty by
misunderstanding. It is indeed a tremendous thing to
say that the historic Christ outweighs all the world,
the race, its possibilities and its development. Think of
the range of history, the dimensions of the Cosmos. Tell
over in your imagination the whole population of earth,
past, present, and to come. Conceive what it is when we
learn that it would take an express train 114 millions of
years to the nearest star. And Christ outweighs all that
cosmic greatness ! It is beyond flesh and blood to believe
it. But do not let us misconceive the terms of the
demand. Do not let us succumb to mere bigness.
There is no religion in an infinite merely extended,
but only in an absolutely holy love. We do not weigh
Christ against a numerical race, but a fallen. And we do
not mean that Christ was as the end of all development ;
for the development in Christ is far greater than the

256 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

development to Him. He is God's seventh and last day,
in which we men for ever live and grow. No stage, no form
is final. As mere history Christianity is not imperfectible.
What is final is intra-historic, super-historic. That is the
real continuum. It is Eternal Life. But that means much
more than an indestructible spiritual energy with endless
power to vary. All the variations are on a fixed theme.
It is more than the mere spiritual vitality upon which
the Catholic Modernists seem to stand as the essence of
the Church. It is a positive work, word, and message.
It is not the vitality of the Church but the holy will of God
in Christ. The Lord is the Spirit. God is Spirit. Yes,
but a cognisable spirit with inalienable features — a Holy
Spirit. Christ is not a will that might decree anything,
but God's holy will in action for our Salvation, His will
as His saving self, His will as Himself and not a function
of Himself.

§ § §
What is meant then is that as (in Butler's great

saying) " morality is the soul of things," with Christ we

have all things in principle, that the gift is for ever

compendious and insuperable. It means that the gift,

Christ, has a supernatural history not only after it,

but before it and in it; that it is an eternal act and deed

in a historic soul ; that it has in it the final power not

only to enter history mightily but, being there, to

subdue all things to itself, to compel, monopolise,

and consummate history, and so to grow to the goal

latent in its own increate beginning. It is meant that,

as in creation this world is given in its own plane of

Time once for all, so, on the second and eternal plane,

the spiritual and heavenly world is given once for all in

the New Creation in Christ. Christ works upon man

IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 257

with the same absolute creative power as the Father
does; that is the meaning of the Godhead of Christ.
We do not indeed attain once for all, but we are
apprehended once for all. We do not mean that our
religion is final, but that God's revelation is. The
religion must grow ; but its growth is in the power of
appropriating its own finality — as Christ himself did,
in becoming what he always was. We have an absolute
revelation but not an absolute religion. We have in
Christ an absolute grace, crucial for God, which we meet
with an appropriate faith, crucial for the soul. God's gift
is the Eternal Act ; our taking or refusmg it is our
eternal doom. It is the issue of Eternal Life or Death.
Yet we only gradually become conscious how final, how
crucial for Eternity, the faith is that meets a grace so
free. But that slowness matters less ; because it is our
revelation we have to preach and not our religion, it is
our Christ and not our faith, our word and not our
sermons. We have to preach God and not advertise
Him. The gospel still means far more for God than the
martyrs do; and the redeeming Christ is more than the
confessing Church. In Christ we have the whole of God,
but not everything about God, the whole heart of God but
not the whole range of God. We have the final kind of
God but not the final compass of God, the kind and will of
God that history cannot supersede ; the whole counsel of
God but not all his counsels ; all God but not yet all good.
But with even that qualification it is a mighty matter
to believe. Magna ars est conversari cum Deo. It is the
greatest thing in the world. And in two ways it is this
vital thing. It is vital in the sense of being a matter of
life and experience. And it is vital in the sense of being
essential to the life of Christianity in the world, and
decisive for the destiny of the soul.

LECTURE X
THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST

LECTURE X

THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST

To explain Christ and his final work there were two
ideas current in the early Church — his Virgin Birth and
his Pre-existence.

It is possible, of course, to hold both of these. But
the temper and tendency of our time is against the old
emphasis on the former, especially on critical grounds ;
and more particularly because of its absence in cases
where, as in St. Paul, all turns on the uniqueness of
Christ's nature and origin. It is to be noted also that
were the Virgin birth beyond historic criticism it might
not by itself give us a pre-existent Christ, and it need
not give us more than an Arian. It might indicate no
more than a supreme son of God created then or before
through the Holy Ghost for the special purpose of a
sinless redemption.

If, however, we relax the emphasis on the Virgin Birth
we must increase it upon the pre-existcnce, as St. Paul
did.

And we are the more moved to this since, while Jesus
makes no sort of reference to his human birth, sat very
loose to family ties, and rebuked, and even renounced,

a6i

262 The Person and Place of Jems Christ [lect.

his mother in a way (Mk. iii. 21, 31) hard to adjust to
the current hypothesis, yet it is difficult to remove from
him entirely all reference to his pre-existence. Were
these ample and explicit, of course, were his own con-
sciousness of an antenatal life put beyond doubt, any
difficulties of ours would be quite minor as to how such
a life became possible in human conditions. Questions
as to the psychology of the kenotic act could well wait,
if we were perfectly sure from such a source as Christ's
own words about its reality.

But the pre-existence of Jesus is one of those points
where, in the present state of opinion about the fourth
gospel, modern thought is apt to feel insecure from lack of
express data and from distrust of theological venture.
Faith is too timid to-day to stray far from the shore lights
of explicit statement, to launch out into the deep things of
God, and sail by observation of the heavens. It asks,
where are we told this or that ? Such non-theological
religion can do but a coasting trade. You have the same
textual habit of mind both in the hard believers and the
hard critics. A verbal Scripturalism has gone, but it has
given way to another kind, which has not ceased to be
narrow by becoming critical, and has not become really
liberal just by ceasing to be literal. There is a mental
cramp, and certainly an imaginative, which too easily
besets the meticulous scholar. And it is a poor exchange
to fall out of the hands of the theologian, narrow as his
imagination could be, into those of the critic, narrow as
he can be for lack of any imagination at all. There is
an amplitude and an atmosphere about the great dogma-
tists of theology which is absent from the dogmatists
of research. These have the great way with them.
The great theologies are epics, with a fascination for

X.] The Pre- existence of Christ 263

Miltonic minds. In their sphere they have the scientific
imagination so praised by Tyndall, and the cosmic
emotion which W. K. Clifford pursued. And in matters
of the soul it is better to have the dogma of the tele-
scope than that of the microscope. It is better to
have the dogma of Melanchthon, or even Calvin, than of
Wellhausen or Schmiedel (whom I name with due respect
for the great work they represent). The one has the
positivity of infinite revelation, the other the positivism
of the present age. The one descends from the great
sky like a bride adorned, the other struggles from the dust,
with clipped wings and short strokes, to meet a Lord
too much in the air. Each is a dogmatism ; but the one
dogmatism represents, in forms now partly obsolete, the
spacious consciousness of a whole living and believing
Church, gathering up the best thought of its age; the
other betrays the straitened and esurient air of a
scientific school whose thought does not feed its soul.
There is much in the old dogmatism that needs correc-
tion, and there is much in the new mind to correct it.
But how much needs chastening in the new may be
exemplified in the warped and rash acumen of those
critics who venture to assure us, for instance, that it is
now proved that Jesus never claimed to be the judge of
mankind. And this is done in face of the patent fact
that among critics quite as competent there is an equally
decided conviction the other way. In several such cases
we feel how much truth there is in the observation made
by a liberal theologian. " It is remarkable how often
men who can set out admirably the thought of the past
show themselves quite incapable of understanding the
features of their present." The scholar, the historian,
submerges the thinker. Harnack, for instance, is much

264 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

more happy in dealing with the history of Christianity
than with its essence. He is a great historian, and a
valuable apologist ; but as a theologian he is — not so
great. And yet the half-taught mind concludes that
eminence in the one direction makes a man an authority
in the other. It really takes a great deal of theology
to revolutionise theology.

§ § §

I may illustrate what I mean by the treatment of a
passage which is of great moment for the question that
engages us. The allusion by St. Paul to the pre-existence
and kenosisof the Son in Phil. 2, is almost a aira^ Xeyofxevov,
(except 2 Cor. viii. 9.) Now what is the interpretation put
on that fact, that singularity, by the extreme critics ?

There are two possible. We may think that such an
allusion is but a brilliant flash that looked in upon the
writer's mind only to be mentioned and then to vanish
without settling in his thought. It is a mere happy
thought, an injected parenthesis, a jewel dropped on the
way by a rich and lavish mind, too urgent in his spiritual
flight to stop and recover it up for further use. The
rarity of reference is then interpreted as a sign of
the comparative eccentricity of the idea in the writer's
mind. Or, on the other hand, we may be more impressed
by the weight of the reference than by its rarity. We
may think that the isolation and length of the passage in
a practical book is due to its greatness. We may recall
that the whole New Testament (and especially the
Epistles) is occasional in its nature, much of it pastoral,
edificatory, intending Church business and not theological
system. St. Paul was not what orthodoxy made
Luther — a professor of Dogmatics. The theology comes
in by the way, as the ground of the religious or moral

X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 265

appeal. However fundamental, it is allusive and
incidental ; it is not dwelt upon in that proportion to
its intrinsic value which it would have if the writer kept
chiefly in view the majesty and proportion of Christian
truth.

Now of these two possible views about rarity of
reference, the tendency of mere criticism is to prefer the
former. The latter requires a finer, ampler, literary
instinct, a more imaginative psychology, a judgment
more sympathetic and flexible, with more spiritual
savoir /aire. The critical tendency is to say that the
idea in question counts for little in St. Paul because it
is a passing allusion. This is an inference the more
strange from men who otherwise depreciate the Apostle
as a systematiser, and find his greatness in the suggestive
wealth, the vistas, of his experiential thought.

There are other instances. It is held to be a mere
theologoumenon, for instance, to say that in his death
Christ really judged and executed the sinful principle,
paralysed it at the core of human nature and history,
and broke the heart of its objective power ; on the
ground that St. Paul, the great expositor of his death,
seems only to allude to it in a parenthetic reference
to the action of his sacrifice as " condemning sin in
the flesh." The development of the idea in the fourth
Gospel seems overlooked — the destroying of the prince
of this world.

And the tendency I am speaking of, this quantitative
criticism, this concordance criticism, reaches a climax
when it is applied to Christ's own references to his
pre-cxistcnce or his atoning death in the Synoptics.
Because they are few, therefore they are comparatively
insignificant. They are few, it is said, because the matter

266 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

did not bulk in Christ's own consciousness. But a
criticism with some psychological imagination may sug-
gest another interpretation. They may be few just because
they bulked unspeakably in Christ's mind. His thoughts
about his death were unutterable, except in an act ; just
as in the Last Supper, when all his teaching had failed,
he resorts to what Keim so finely calls " his last
parable," the object lesson, the enacted revelation,
finished in the supreme aira^ Aeydjuevov of the cross,
(which is also ignored by much criticism). These
thoughts were too great and engrossing to be spoken of,
especially to his dull entourage. " How am I straitened."
Too straitened in doing the thing, when it came to a head,
to be other than silent about it. The captain is not
loquacious in the rapids. He does not talk about sea-
manship in the storm. The pilot does not teach naviga-
tion in shooting a savage bar. Remember, moreover,
that the first bearing of Christ's great and crowning
action was upon God and not man. He was adjusting
the relation between God and man, and not impressing
individuals, or doing a thing calculated to impress
posterity with a religious message in a religious way.
He was dealing with God for the race. Hence, as the
crisis deepened, his words and thoughts were oblivious of
men and their reception of Him, and engrossed with
what he was doing with God. If his supreme object was
to act on men, the aTra^ Acyd/zcva on the inmost matters
are not intelligible. They are inadequate for the
purpose.

The more rare the reference the more seminal it may
be, and often has been. Isaiah 53 is quite unique in the
Old Testament. Yet one might venture to say it is the
passage in the Old Testament which is the link with the

X.] The Pre-exisience of Christ 267

New, yea, the germ of it, and the passage, which has most
affected the conception of the most unique thing in the
New Testament — the cross — both with the Saviour, the
Church, and the world. And so also the kenotic passage
in Philippians ii. has had an effect upon Christian
thought, faith, and adoration out of all proportion to the
space the New Testament gives to the idea ; as it must
have had a power in a mind like Paul's far larger than
the space it covers in his letters.

§ § §
Criticism, in its vigorous and rigorous reaction from

the Teutonic extreme of Idealism, has sometimes about
it, if not a narrowness, yet an exility, not to say a
stridency, a want of atmosphere and of space, which is
unfortunate in dealing with a reality like Christian faith,
or a book like the New Testament. There is what
might be called a Synoptic positivism ; which corre-
sponds, in its sphere, to the Comtist empiricism in
philosophy ; and it makes criticism, in its present phase,
too much the victim of its own age to be the final
interpreter of History. It applies religious psy-
chology ; but the critical science of religions cannot
give us the psychology of religion. A mere objective
psychology of religion, we are told by an authority
so great as Troeltsch, does not avail without a field
of observation in the living faith of the inquirer. So
that in religion a scientific impartiality and personal
disinterestedness is impossible; and at the root of all we
have a venture of faith and the dogmatic method. No
mere Historicism has the key to history, especially
religious history ; it only cleans the wards of the lock.
The weighing of evidence seems at times even to impair
the power to weigh ideas, to divine personality, or to

268 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

assess faith. Great lawyers are often poor theologians.
There is a realism which bars the way to reality; and
to-day we are much straitened by it. The religion of the
chair may not lack scenery, but it does often lack
horizon, and even sky. It has hues but not atmosphere.
It has detail, but not distance. The place is strait and
the light is poor. It is of Ruysdael and not of Turner.
Or it has genre, but not style.

§ § §

In nothing are these features more apparent than in

our attitude to such a question as the pre-existence of
Christ. Except in the 4th Gospel he says nothing
directly about it, therefore, we are told, it cannot be real.
It seems to be forgotten that the consciousness is in-
separable from the great ^ira^ Aeyo/xevovof Matthew xi., 27,
which is treated in the way I have just described. It
seems even to be forgotten that the kenotic explanation
of his limited knowledge in certain other respects should
apply here, and should suggest an oblivion in Christ of
his eternal past indispensable both to the reality of his
human life and to the efficiency of his divine work for
us. Such oblivion may have been necessary to Christ
himself in the doing of that work, however impossible it
was to those to whom he spoke when the work was done,
and made them think out the explanation of it, and
of his glory who did it. The apostles could not evade
the idea of a pre-existence which may have come home to
Christ himself only in the uplifted hours and the great
crises. For his Godhead cannot mean that at every
hour he was fully conscious of all he was. Probably St.
Paul's belief in the pre-existence of Christ was mainly
reached by the way of inspired, and I would say guided,
inference. It did not rest on Christ's words. It was an

X.] The Pre-cxistencc of Christ 269

inevitable rebound of spiritual logic under his faith's
obsession by the Christ in glory. Such glory, such
Godhead, could not be acquired by any moral victory
of a created being within the limits of a life so brief
as that of Jesus. In a similar application he worked
back from the faith that all things were made for Christ
to the conviction that, as the end was in the beginning,
all things were made by Christ ; and by a Christ as
personal as the Christ who was their goal. And so,
from the exalted glory of Christ, Paul's thought was cast
back, by the very working of that Christ in him and in the
whole consciousness of the Church's faith, to the same
Christ from all Eternity by the Father's side.

§ § §

I do not think that to-day we can evade this same

retrospective pressure of our faith, when its tide is full,
any more than the apostles could.

First we consider this. Such a relation as we believe
our Saviour now bears to the Father could not have
arisen at a point of time. It could not have been
created by his earthly life. The power to exercise God's
prerogative of forgiveness, judgment, and redemption
could never have been acquired by the moral excellence
or religious achievement of any created being, however
endowed by the spirit of God. I confess (if I may
descend so far) I had long this difficulty, which
lowered the roof of my faith, and arrested the flight
of devotion. And I am afraid from the state of our
public worship, I was not alone in that difficulty. I
could not get the plentitude of New Testament worship
or Catholic faith out of the mere self-sacrifice of the
liuman Christ even unto death. Nor could I rise to
it from that level. I was too little moved by his earthly

270 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [f^ect.

renunciations to rise to the dimensions of the Church's
faith, for I am not speaking of its creed, which was my
own. The cross of such a Christ, who was the mere
martyr of his revelation, or the paragon of self-sacrifice,
was not adequate to produce the absolute devotion
which made a proud Pharisee, yea a proud apostle,
glory in being Christ's entire slave, and which drove
the whole Church to call Christ Lord and God, in a
devotion the most magnificent the soul has ever known.
Such worship seemed too large a response to anything
which Jesus, with all his unique greatness, did or
determined in the course of His earthly life alone.
The Synoptic record alone would not account for the
Christian religion, nor produce the plerophory of
Christian faith. Christ's earthly humiliation had to
have its foundation laid in Heaven, and to be viewed
but as the working out of a renunciation before the
world was. The awful volume and power of the will-
warfare in which He here redeemed the world, and
turned for Eternity the history of the race, was but
the exercise in historic conditions of an eternal resolve
taken in heavenly places. He could never be king of
the eternal future if he was not also king from the
eternal past. No human being was capable of such
will. It was Godhead that willed and won that victory
in Him. If it was God loving when he loved it was
God willing as He overcame. The cross was the
reflection (or say rather the historic pole) of an act
within Godhead. The historic victory was the index
and the correlate of a choice and a conquest in Godhead
itself. Nothing less will carry the fulness of faith, the
swelling soul, and the Church's organ voice of liturgy in
every land and age. If our thought do not allow that

X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 271

belief we must reduce the pitch of faith to something
plain, laic, and songless, and, in making it more homely,
make it less holy, less absolute, less adoring. The adora-
tion of Christ can only go with this view of Him in the
long run. Nothing lower takes with due seriousness the
superhuman value of the soul, the unearthliness of our
salvation, and its last conquest of the whole world. It
would reduce the unworldlv value of the soul if it
could be saved by anything less than a Christ before
the worlds. It came upon me, as upon many at the
first it must have mightily done, that His whole life
was not simply occupied with a series of decisions
crucial for our race, or filled with a great deed then
first done; but that that life of His was itself the
obverse of a heavenly eternal deed, and the result of
a timeless decision before it here began. His emer-
gence on earth was as it were the swelling in of heaven.
His sacrifice began before He came into the world, and
his cross was that of a lamb slain before the world's
foundation. There was a Calvary above which was the
mother of it all. His obedience, however impressive,
does not take divine magnitude if it first rose upon earth,
nor has it the due compelling power upon ours. His
obedience as man was but the detail of the supreme
obedience which made him man. His love transcends all
human measure only if, out of love, he renounced the
glory of heavenly being for all he here became. Only
then could one grasp the full stay and comfort of words
like these " Who shall separate us from the love of
Christ?" Unlike us, he chose the oblivion of birth and
the humiliation of life. He consented not only to die but
to be born. His life here, like His death which pointed
it, was the result of his free will. It was all one death for

272 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

him. It was all one obedience. And it was free. He
was rich and for our sakes became poor. What he gave
up was the fulness, power, and immunity of a heavenly
life. He became " a man from heaven." When Paul
spoke so he was not thrusting upon his Churches the
rabbinical notion of an Adam Kadmon, or ideal man, in
heaven, in the same sense as Judaism spoke of an ideal
existence of the Temple itself, or the Law, or the
Mother Jerusalem from above, or the heavenly city
which came down out of heaven from God. Probably
enough he knew the notion, but only to transcend
it, to use it freely as a suggestion and not succumb
to it merely as a dogma. God sent his Son, he did
not emit him, he did not think him. The heavenly side
of salvation was not ideal simply but historic, though
it was premundane history. It was an eternal and
immutable transaction. Things were done there. God
sent ; the Son came. And he came consenting to
earn a glory he was entitled to claim. In all most
precious things must we not erwerhen what we ererben,
and appropriate our greatest rights? Godhead came
in Him, only not in force but in virtue, not gross
and palpable but in moral power. He could have had his
legions of angels. He could have come and taken posses-
sion of the world as a apTrayfxov, as an Alexander seized a
country. He could have come as an Apollo King, and
taken the world as a prize of war, by moral storm,
manly beauty, and heroic action. But, though he came
as God, he came to win the world as his Father's gift,
and by the Father's way of the cross as part of the gift.
The self-determination to be man went the whole divine
length to the self-humiliation of the cross. The Son ex-
pressed his true nature as a servant; but it was glorious

X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 273

as the service of the Eternal Son. He was son before he
became man ; even as in his earthly life it was his sense
of Sonship that gave him his sense of Messiahship.
It is what he did in becoming man, more even than what
he did as man, that makes the glory of his achievement
so divine that nothing short of absolute worship from a
whole redeemed humanity can meet it. Nothing short
of that heavenly deed can stir the absolute worship which
is the genius and the glory of his kingdom. Nothing else
can enable us to measure the love of God, the thorough-
ness, the finality, the eternity of it. When God spared
not his own Son, and yielded not even to the prayer of
Gethsemane, it was a piece of Himself that he forswore ;
and in the grief of Christ he cut off His own right hand
for the sake of the Kingdom of His Holiness. What
God felt and did then was not through some relation
to us that came into being with Christ's earthly life, but
it was through something that underlay it. For had it
came into being then, to see and judge the world in Christ
would have been a step so new as to affect the unchange-
ableness of God. Grace would have begun, and so been
finite. But it was a step which lay in the nature of
Godhead for ever, in the eternal, personal, holy, and
obedient relation of the Son to the Father, and in the
act of renunciation outside the walls of the world.

Of course, when we come to discuss the precise mode
of the son's pre-existence with the father, or the psycho-
logical process of the kenosis, we are entirely beyond
knowledge. The act is a postulate of saving faith, but
the mode of action is insoluble. Logical difficulties may
be raised against any view. Hut a kenotic theory so far
has less than some, as I hope we shall see.

§ § §

274 ^^"^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

It is a fact well recognised that Christ's references to
his pre-existencc are much more explicit in the fourth
Gospel than in the Synoptics. And when we consider, it
is not so strange as it seems. If we take those Johannine
references, and couple them with the indubitable preva-
lence of the belief both in Paul, in Hebrews, and the
Apocalypse; if we notice, farther, that the writers treat
the belief not as a new idea which they have to insert
but as a current faith which they would enhance ; we
are driven to conclude that it was a view early common
in almost all sections of the young Church. Is it pos-
sible to think that that could have been the case if the
belief had no point of attachment in the words of Christ
himself? It was a belief whose challenge went to the
heart of Jewish Monotheism. So much so, that, when
Paul had broken with Judaism, the result is expressed
most pointedly in the fact that he went about preaching
Jesus as Lord — as the Kvpios by whom, for an Israelite,
Jehovah alone was meant. Is it possible, then, that the
fourth Gospel especially should have placed such a belief
in the mouth of Jesus himself if there had been nothing
in any of his sayings to j ustify it ? There is much loose tal k
about what his first believers put in the mouth of Jesus;
and too much of it among amateurs who have never
framed any scientific canon to regulate the principles or
limits of such ascriptions, but who simply remove what
does not fit their views.

§ § §
Of course that does not solve the problem created by
the comparative absence from the Synoptics of the
express statements we find in John. But I find as little
difficulty in believing that Jesus had an esoteric teaching
on some subjects as that there were large areas of his

X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 275

consciousness on which he was entirely reserved — such as
his most intimate communion with his Father. I say
nothing here of regions where he was for the most part
kenotically ignorant. And it may well have been that it
was these esoteric hints that were expanded in the fourth
Gospel. Traces of them appear in the Synoptics — especi-
ally in the well known Mat. xi. 27, that embryonic fourth
Gospel to which I so often allude. But we can hardly
be surprised if, in documents for general use in Churches
that were but working their way to a public largely
Jewish, there should be little use made at first of an idea
so startling to a Jew and so blasphemous in effect. For
its effect was to set another personality than the Father
alongside of Him on his throne. It is quite true, as I
said, that the Jews were not all unfamiliar with the
notion of the pre-existence of their Great Sanctities. But
it was quite another thing to assign a pre-existence to a
personal Messiah ; and both Bousset and Dalman, who
are among our chief authorities on the theology of
Judaism, are at one against the view that it cherished
the idea of a pre-existent Messiah. Judaism certainly
could not tolerate the pre-existence of a Messiah invested
with those functions and titles of Jehovah which the New
Testament ascribes to Jesus. Recall the method of Jesus
with his public in the less serious matter of his Messiah-
ship. For most of his life he was reserved about it ; and
he bore it home, even to his disciples, only in an indirect
way that made them seem to discover rather than accept
it. It dawned but slowly, and it shone so briefly that
they lost it at the end. Mow much more need for reserve
on a matter so much more grave? If he bad been ex-
plicit and categorical about his pre-existent life it would
have been to invite from a Jewish crowd a death as

276 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

certain as Rome's suppression of him would have been
had he raised the Messiah's flag. When his end did come
it was on the charge of making himself equal with God.
But if the thought was in his mind it would be sure to
look out at some side window even if it did not call'into
the street. And there are such glimpses. Return to the
passage I quote Mat. xi. 27, "No man knoweth the
Father but the Son." I deal with that at more length
elsewhere. I only ask here whether, if question about
the pre-existence did not arise from other sources,
that idea would not be the first to occur in explanation
of these words. If they appeared in John we should all
say at once that it was by the notion of the pre-existence
they were to be explained, whether the writer was foisting
it on Jesus or not. The Eternal Father would demand
for correlative the Eternal Son, to explain, by solidarity
of being, the Son's exclusive and adequate knowledge of
such a Father.

But the truth which Christ could not hope to impress
by his words he impressed by his crowning act of death
and resurrection. There at last he came into his own.
To these add his expository work in the Church by his
Spirit. It was such things that forced on the Church its
belief in his pre-existence. It was slowly forced, more
slowly than his Messiahship. It could not be otherwise.
But it was inevitable, as the scope and depth of that final
revelation made its way into the mind of faith.

§ § §
It is important at a time like the present that we

should keep clearly in view the interest which is served
by our belief in the pre-existence of Christ. Why should
we press it ? Why was it pressed in the New Testa-
ment? Was it in the interest of some scheme, either of

X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 277

philosophy or theology, which aimed at making more
definite God's relation to the created world ? Was it to
provide some explanation for Christ's miraculous power,
and especially for his resurrection ? Was it to provide a
large system of dogma with a celestial warrant ? Was it
to equip a religion with a central figure calculated to im-
press and command the imagination ? Was it because the
impression made by the historic Christ was so weak that it
succumbed to the current notions of pre-existence which
floated in from the surrounding air and settled down to
germinate in the warm soil of faith ? It was for none of
these reasons that the idea took the place it did, and has
kept it. It was not in the dogmatic interest that it
arose or survived, but in the religious. It was to give
full and infinite effect to the condescending love of
God, and to give range to the soul's greatness by display-
ing the vast postulates of its redemption. Tantae moUs
erat divinam condere gentem. If we feed on Christ
it is on bread which came down from Heaven. The
soul's saviour could be no less a power than the soul's
creator. It all arose from a sense of soul-greatness, from
a direct, intimate, and intense relation between the soul
and the Saviour, to which we grow daily more strange.
It arose out of that experience ; and not from the neces-
sities of a system, or the infection from systems around
These would have been easily ignored had they given no
means of expressing the experience that worked so
mif^litily. It points in the same way when we note that
Paul, in Philippians ii., uses the idea, as it \\as forced on
living faith, for the purposes of that faith's moral culture
To protnote a self-renouncing love he dwells on the
act of self-renunciation which gave them for a Saviour

God himself in a life of humiliation, and no middle
u

278 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

being who was a mere emanation from God in a world
process.

§ § §

What, we may ask, has experience to say on our question ?
Can it have anything to say on the pre-existence of Christ
when it cannot even speak of our own ? Let us see.
Is our experience of Christ parallel with our expe-
rience of ourselves ? To experience ourselves is a piece
of psychology ; is that all we have in the Church's
experience of Christ.

It seems plausible enough to say that the pre-existence
of Christ is not verifiable by our Christian experience.
But everything depends on the experience to which you
appeal. Is it that of the critic ? Or of his age ? Is it
simply the experience of a mystic mood, a pious frame, a
sympathetic religiosity ? Or is it the classic experience
of the regenerate, of the Church within the Church, the
really significant elite of faith ? Is it the experience of
the average Christian who "loves Jesus," or that of the
elect who show what the average Christian means and
must rise to be by his New Creation ? Is the experience
of the ordinary Christian normative for faith ? It is
certain that the spiritual riches of Christ, as understood
and realised by the Apostolic succession of the fit and
few, especially in relation to sin, means what lay
Christianity is too ready to pooh-pooh as theology, and
to ban as metaphysic.

It is indeed one of the most great and fertile of modern
principles that our faith has much more directly to do
with the benefits of Christ than with the nature of Christ.
* It is by what the Saviour has done for me that I know
what he is for me ; it is through the work of redemption
that I know the person of the Redeemer ; it is the work

X.] The Pre- existence of Christ 279

which reveals to me the worker.' But it would be an
abuse of this principle if it were made to mean that
Christ is no more, either to me or to the Church, than
he is felt at any point of time to be. If I am deeply
moved by the example or the ideal he has stamped on
me, I am not therefore justified in saying that he is no
more than ideal or example. If I am touched, humbled,
and cheered by the way in which he reconciles me to
God, I am not therefore warranted in declaring that his
one work for me and for mankind was in this reconciling
way alone, and that it was a work with no action upon
God, and no relation to judgment. I am not entitled to
say that the reconciling effect upon men exhausts the
whole personality of Christ. The work does not reveal
the whole of the workman — directly, at least. And there
is always the question how far our sense of the work is
entitled to prescribe the compass of it ; that is, whether
experience is to be the measure as well as the organ of
faith. The apostles at least were driven by their expe-
rience into a cosmic interpretation of his work who
produced it, far transcending individual experience ; and
they have carried the greatest with them. If the effect
of Christ on us be but our reconciliation, if the benefits
be construed but in that subjective sense, if they do not
extend to redemption from some thing more objective
than our own frowardness with God, that is an effect
that might have been produced by a prophet and martyr
of unparalleled sanctity and unquenchable love. Such a
subjective construction of the benefits of Christ would
not call for the life, death, and resurrection of the ver}'
Son of God. And we need feel no surprise that to-day,
when Christ's work is thought to be exhausted with the
reconciliation of men, the men affected by it should be

28o The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

very unsteady, not to say light, in their views of his
divine person and its range of being. There would be
no necessity, in such a subjective construction of Christ's
work, for the belief to which the early Church was driven
by the apostolic sense of what they had in Christ — the
belief in his pre-existence.

§ § §

The reconciling and redeeming work of Christ is,
indeed, our grand avenue to his person in its fulness ; but
it does not exhaust it, unless that work be interpreted
as the new creation in mice. And certainly if (like so
many good but bornees souls to-day) we reduce the
reconciling work of Christ to his earthly life, character,
and teaching, apart from their consummation in a death
which was more than worth them all, if we cherish a
' simple ' sermon-on-the-mount Christianity, it is quite
impossible to erect on that basis a personality so great as
its advocates really revere. The greater the personality
the more impossible it is to give it full expresssion in
life. We have already seen how large a part of the
activity of his person Christ reserved in the secrecy of his
private and personal contact with the Father. And we
may also observe that, as the crisis of his death drew on,
it was this hidden life that overspread his soul. He
became less and less engrossed with his prophetic effect
on man, and more and more with such priestly gift to
God as God alone could offer, and no man.

By all the deepest experience of the Church the benefit
from Christ is not exhausted in the satisfying of the
heart or in the pacifying of the conscience. Christ does
more than fill or fortify us; he sanctifies. His work,
consummated on the Cross, is yet larger than a deliver-
ance at a historic point. It is the energy of the whole

X.] The Prc-existcnce of Christ 281

eternal person who culminated in that act. He does
more than release us ; he has to uplift and transform us.
He does more than inspire the race, he completes it. He
brings it to the glory for which it was destined by God.
And for this no saintliest man could be enough. Nothing
lower than the Holy God could re-hallow the guilty
human soul. Only the creator of our destiny could
achieve it. Of course, the extent at any one time of the
Church's response to Christ, or the soul's, may be
limited. The horizon of its experience may be partial
and confined. But what is of more moment is the nature
of that experience. It is not psychological, but theologi-
cal. It is not an experience of the soul's old past, nor
even so much of its new self, but of its new creator and
king, its Lord and its God. That changes the nature
of the experience from a subjective to an objective, from
me to one who makes me. It is not simply the experi-
ence of an immense impulse, a vast promotion in good-
ness, a change of sentiment towards God, the clearing
up of misunderstandings, and the wiping of the slate.
What is cured is not merely distance, nor merely estrange-
ment from a loving God, but the obsession by hostility to
a holy God, and the guilt of it all. The forgiveness is
an absolute gift, but it is not an amnesty ; nor is it a
revival ; but in its nature it is a new creation. Christ
does not bring us mere absolution, he is the giver of a
new Eternal life. His charge is the second creation, and
the divine consummation of humanity.

Now for this creative work no mere man is sufficient.
The creators of the greatest works of genius are quite
unable to create the new heart within us, tlie new com-
munion, and to put us beyond all cavil as to our final
destiny in God, They cannot make themselves the

282 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect.

guarantee and surety of that destiny. But Christ does
do this. And he has never ceased to do it. Through-
out the ages there is a ceaseless succession of confessors
of such a theological salvation and not only a psy-
chological only, of a new act of creation and not a
quickened process.

If, then, such be the benefit begun and assured, the
agent of that blessing no more began his work when he
appeared on the earth, than he ceased it when he left the
earth, as man's way is. A man might reconcile me to
God ; but could any greatest man so keep me as to ensure
that we did not fall out again ; or that if we did the due
reconciler would again appear ? A man might reconcile
us to God but he could not unite us for ever with God in
the way that an eternal holiness requires. He could do
no finished work. The greatest thought and passion of
the Church, its experience, and not its philosophy or its
theology alone, has been driven to postulate behind all
the acts of Christ's will on the earth, behind all his pity
and power, an act of his (not merely of his God and ours),
eternal in the heavens, an act which held all these earthly
acts within it. His person has been felt to be greater
than these earthly acts could express. They had all a
volitional foundation in the heavens, which, because it
was action and not mere substance, did not impair their
reality but enhanced it. They had a moral substratum
in the act of his premundane personality, whose power
was not exhausted in our rescue alone — unless that rescue
be viewed as the first stage of a New Creation which had
all the consummation of humanity in its scope.

§ § §
We are thus driven, by the real existence of an Eternal
Father and our experience of his grace, to demand the

X,] The Pre-exhtence of Christ 283

existence of an equally real eternal Son — both being
equally personal and divine. The question, then, is what
is the relation between the Godhead of the Eternal Son
and the man Jesus Christ, and how did it come to pass.
Such questions at once arose among believers ; and they
engrossed the Church's thought during the early centuries
in the many Christological systems that succeeded the
Trinitarian strife. There was a teeming variety of
opinions on the subject in the redeemed community —
as indeed there must always be ; and room must be
made for them. Christian faith insists on the reality
of the incarnation as a fact if we take in all its
seriousness the experience that we have in Christ a
gracious and holy God truly with us ; but the mode of
its process is an open question, on which it cannot be
hoped, and hardly wished, that all the Church should
think alike. And we may have occasion to note that
many who reject the incarnation do so not only because
they wrongly require from it the satisfaction of a
philosophic rather than a religious demand, but, even
more, because they cannot see how such a process could
take place. Which is much as if we refused to act on a
cable from America because we do not understand the
modes of electric action and transformation.

§ § §

It is impossible with due reverence to speak in any but

the most careful and tentative way of the relations within
the Godhead. It has not pleased God to make these
matter of revelation. As we know of Christ only what
he chose to reveal in his vocation and work, so we really
know of God only what He chose to reveal in His Christ.
We practice ourselves a reserve about our inmost experi-
ences and relations which may make intelligible, at least

284 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect

in some measure, God's own reserve with the sons of
Time. On the other hand He wills to be inquired of.
It is not the questions that are intrusive. We are not
called on to sacrifice our intellect, if only we do not
idolise it. And we are not debarred in advance from all
inquiry as to the conditions of Christ's supramundane
existence. St. Paul did not feel so hampered. We are
surely free at least to say some things which it could not
be — could not be consistently with such an idea of God
as Christ himself revealed. There was that in the
earthly personality of Christ which in the heavenly could
not be. For instance, in the earthly personality there
was growth ; in the heavenly there could be none — unless
perhaps he were an Arian Son, a being created prior to
the world's creation. What is of Godhead does not
grow : it is from Eternity to Eternity. The indubitable
movement and change in the living personality of God
does not take the form of growth. Growth belongs only
to corporeal personality ; and in his incarnation the Son
of God did not become for the first time personal but only
corporeally personal, personal under the limited condi-
tion which involve growth. He did not enter personal
conditions but historic. If growth be essential to person-
ality in every form there can be no personal God ; and
our question then becomes of a quite different kind.
There may therefore be in Eternity a personal Being that
does not come to Himself and His perfection by growth.
Whether two or more such can cohere in the one God is
again another question, with its own methods of discus-
sion. But the growth of a divine personality in Eternity
is a much more impossible thing than the co-existence of
three.

§ § §

X.] The Pre-cxistence of Christ 285

In Jesus Christ we have one who was conscious of
standing in an entirely unique relation to the living God.
It is the prophet's prophecy that reveals God, but it is
Christ's person ; and as the Son it reveals Him as the
Father. If His Father be the Father, his Sonship is the
Sonship. He held a relation to God as Father that never
existed in any man before. Nay more, it was one that
no man can ever reach again. Geniuses are repeated, but
Christ never, the Son never. For this relation constituted
his personality. He was not a person who became a son,
or was destined to be a son, but his whole personality
was absolute sonship. This is not true of us. We are
not sons and nothing else. The relation made the
personality in Christ's case. I do not mean that the
relation made Jesus grow into a personality, but it made up
his personality, made the essential thing in it. That is
not so with us. His personalty had another foundation
in God than ours. His person is born of God, ours is
created. We are indeed related to a personal God, as
his offspring, in a way that necessitates our being persons
too. But not such persons. We can reach and develop
personality without reference to God ; he could not.
Destroy his sonship and you destroy his personality.
His personality shaped his work, our work shapes our
personality. Indeed his work was identical with his
personality. Not so with us, whose work is always
less than our personality. Our work is a means for
our personality, his personality was the means of his
work. Of no man can it be said that his relation to God
constitutes the whole personality. But in the case of
Jesus the whole relation to the Father, namely, sonship.
did constitute that personality. Think it away and
nothing is left. His whole relation to the Father would

286 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

be an abstract phrase were it not embodied in an actual
personal Sonship, corelate with the living Father, knowing
the Eternal Father as the Father knows him, and at
every point in Eternity, therefore, so knowing because so
known.

§ § §

There are various views among those who try to
justify in thought their belief, or their effort to believe,
that a great gulf divides Christ from all other men.

There are those for instance who view him as the
realisation of the divine idea, whether of Humanity or of
the Church. The only pre-existence Jesus had was of
that nature. It was not personal but ideal. I shall
have occasion to refer to this view more than once ; and I
will only say here that it seems to me quite inadequate
either to the New Testament or to Christian experience.
Such a faith could have produced neither. It is too
remote and pale to be the source of such a passion as
evangelical faith has been in the history of the Church.
If you reduce the Eternal Sonship to an idea you will
reduce the Eternal Fatherhood to the same tenuity.
And all history follows.

There are others who come nearer reahty by conceiv-
ing Christ as the realisation of the divine purpose. This
is so far an improvement that it brings Christ into
immediate relation with God's will and action rather than
with his thought. He is due to the act of God. He is
the supreme object of the divine election, " the captain
of the elect," the object, though not the eternal object,
of an eternal election — just as human souls are, though
in a pre-eminent and even collective way. He has no
personal pre-existence. His election is thus paralleled to
that of the Church; and we are not taught the actual

X.] The Pre-fxistence of Christ 287

pre-existence of the Church. It is not denied that
an element in Godhead passes from ideaUty into personal
reality ; what is said is that its passage is due to no
movement or process of thought, but to a personal act
and purpose of the Father.

That is the advantage of the view. It has a more
ethical note. But its defect is three-fold. F'irst, it does
not recognise the difference between a Church chosen
like him and a Church chosen in Him. Second, if he
owed his personal existence to God's choice, he was
but one of many choice men, and so we do not rise
above the Socinian idea; it reduces Christ from the
assessor of God's throne to the organ of God's purpose.
And, third, it leaves no room for the consenting act on
the part of the Son. But it is not enough for
Christian purposes that the Father should send ; it is
equally necessary that the Son should come, and that
the one will should be as original and spontaneous
as the other. A fourth defect is that sufficient room
is not left for the mystical element so essential to
Christian faith.

Besides, there is a criticism which applies to both
these views. They come too near the notion that, when the
idea, or the purpose, was at last realised in Christ's
moral achievement of his full personality, there was a
real addition to the riches of Godhead ; that Godhead
at last fully found itself in Christ ; and had attained by
development that which it had not the full consciousness
of being before. What I said a little ago about divine
growth in Godhead may be applied here.

§ § §
Instead of speaking of the realisation of a divine idea

or purpose it meets the case better if we speak of the

288 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

redintegration of a divine person. This will be more
clear I hope when we come to discuss kenotic theories
in the next lecture. The whole moral history of Jesus
on earth was the ethical resumption of such personality
as he laid down by an act equally ethical in its nature.
The advantage here is a very great one. We have the
act of the Son correlative with that of the Father.
We have the Son acting from love as truly and creatively
as the Father. Otherwise it need not be that Jesus,
as the agent of God's purpose and his great gift to
man, should really himself love them, if only he so
loved the Father as to carry out loyally and effectually
His great behest. It need not follow that we are
inseparable from the love of Christ; who might con-
ceivably retire from active and direct concern with us
when he had done his task, handed us over to the
Father, and restored us to a love like his own, the
Father's will. But the Christian love of God is not
a love like Christ's, but a love for ever to Christ and in
Christ. The love of one so creative as Jesus could not
have been without spontaneous initiative at the heavenly
outset of his work. If he came as love it was love that
moved him to come, and not a suggestion or a precept,
far less an emanation, from the Father's love. If he
love to the endless end, he loved from the timeless
beginning, and in no mere passive obedience. His
dependence on the Father was no mere passivity.
Christ's receptivity of God is the mightiest act in human
history ; and a personality so mighty and creative
could never have come there as a mere created product,
or passive precipitate, of the divine purpose. He could
be no mere intelligent means or organ of that purpose.
The whole New Testament conception of him as a

X.] Thg Pre-existence of Christ 289

worshipped being is that of an end and not a means, for
whom God's judgment is his judgment, God's kingdom
his own, and on personal relation to whom turns our
eternal relation to God. His was a sovereign spontaneity ;
which is not affected by the fact that he prayed the
Father for power ; unless we deny all analogy in the
region of the increate to the real causality in created will,
or to the true initiative of inspired prayer.

§ § §

I am afraid that the effort to compress into one dis-
course each of the great themes to which the last three
lectures are devoted involves considerable cost in the way
of clearness. May I point out, as I close this lecture and
prepare for the next, that I have in the rear of my mind
throughout one question which I yet try to keep more or
less in view. It is this. If we hold to the personal pre-
existence of Christ do we not render His life as the
historical Jesus unreal ? We shall see how pointed the
question grows when we come to sharpen it to the issue
involved in the principle non potuit peccare. And in that
form an answer will be suggested to it shortly. But what
I have been trying to do in the present lecture is to
answer it in the more general form shaped by the pre-
existence alone. Could a pre-existent Christ be a real
man? Could he have the effect upon history of a real
personality if he was believed to have existed before
entering history?

And by way of answer let us close this lecture by
clearing our minds of d priori notions of what a real
personality might be presumed to require, a character
that would strike us as aesthetically true if we found it
in a work of imagination. If the whole Christ that fills
the faith, worship, and conquest of the long Church

ago The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. x.

could have been imagined and presented in a work of
literary art beforehand, every Aristotle, Longinus or
Quintilian would have joined to declare it an unreal and
impossible conception. Such a miracle and inversion of
values was effected by Christ, such an extension of the
ideal and resource of personality. Let us here observe
that the reality of a historic influence is not to be
measured simply by what may appear to be the psycho-
logical postulates of a character aesthetically complete,
but by the magnitude, reality, and permanence of his
effects in history. These must be our first standard of
personal reality. A personal unreality could never be-
come the first personal influence in history that the
Christ from heaven has become. The Christ that has
become such is not the humane and residual Christ of
much current religion, but the whole New Testament
Christ. It is a Christ who had not to be stripped by
early criticism of his heavenly life in order to become a
real power ; but on the contrary one whom the faith he
created had to place in partnership with the Creator's
Eternity in order to account for itself. The more the
Church felt the reality of his influence on it, the more it
acted with him upon present history, the more it found
through him an even greater reality in the future than the
present, so much the more has it been driven to construe
his total reality as including his personal action in the
infinite past. His pre-existence, that is to say, has not
robbed him of the reality that is shown in vast historic
effect. And it may be observed in conclusion that if the
influence of the Church upon the world is less to-day
than it once was, that loss of effect is at least concurrent
with an unprecedented weakening of belief within the
Church itself in his life before life and his ante-natal will.

LECTURE XI

THE KENOSIS OR SELF-EMPTYING
OF CHRIST

LECTURE XI

THE KENOSIS OR SELF-EMPTYING OF CHRIST

It is all but impossible to discuss a question like the
Kenosis without entering a region which seems forbid-
ding to the lay mind, and is certainly more or less
technical. And yet some appeal may perhaps be made
to the ministry, among those Churches where the educa-
tion of the ministry has been taken seriously and theo-
logically. It is only when the ministry despises theology
and sacrifices it to a slight and individualist idea of
religion, that the Church immolates intelligence and
finally commits suicide. It parts with staying power in
order to capture a hearing, and surrenders faith to gain
sympathy. The minds that are trained enough to ask
relevant questions on such a subject are also trained
enough to know that they cannot be answered without
considerable effort on both sides — effort both to present
and to grasp. And such earnest minds are in possession
of some at least of the postulates here involved, the ideas
handled, or the methods used. The real difiiculty is with
those who will neither qualify to understand such
questions nor let them alone.

If there was a personal pre-existence in the case of

X 2g3

294 ^^'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

Christ it does not seem possible to adjust it to the his-
toric Jesus without some doctrine of Kenosis. We face
in Christ a Godhead self-reduced but real, whose infinite
power took effect in self-humiliation, whose strength was
perfected in weakness, who consented not to know with
an ignorance divinely wise, and who emptied himself in
virtue of his divine fulness. The alternative to a Kenosis
used to be a Krypsis, or conscious concealment of the
active divine glory for practical or strategic purposes. But
that is now an impossible idea. While on the other hand
an acquired Godhead would really be none. It would be
but deification. And at bottom it is a contradiction. No
creature could become God.

I am aware of the kind of objection raised to the
kenotic theory. Many difficulties arise readily in one's
own mind. It is a choice of difficulties. On the one
hand living faith finds it difficult to believe that the
Christ who created it was not God. And on the other
thought finds it hard to realise how God should become
Christ. But it is something gained to note that the
chief difficulties arise on the latter head, in connexion
with the way in which the fact came to pass rather than
with the fact itseU. That is, they are scientific and not
religious. When we are not so much questioning the
fact as discussing the manner of it — not the what but the
how — it is a matter of theological science not of religious
faith. And the science of it can wait, but the religion of
it cannot.

§ § §

We cannot form any scientific conception of the precise

process by which a complete and eternal being could
enter on a process of becoming, how Godhead could
accept growth, how a divine consciousness could reduce

XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 295

its own consciousness by volition. If we knew and
could follow that secret we should be God and not man.
It is a difficulty partly ethical, partly psychological. Even
if we admit psychologically that certain attributes could
be laid aside — the less ethical attributes like omniscience,
omnipotence, or ubiquity — could self-consciousness be thus
impaired and a love still remain which was fully divine ?
And how can an infinite consciousness be thought of as
reducing itself to a finite? God's infinite consciousness
might indeed determine itself so as to pervade, sustain,
and bind a variety of finite detail without losing consci-
ousness. An immanent God, we believe, does so in
creation. But if He parted with His self-consciousness
as infinite would it not come as near to suicide as
infinite could ?

That, indeed, is what Ed. von Hartmann says is the
very thing the transcendent God must do. His task is
self-redemption from the blunder and impasse of a world.
He must retract himself, retrace his excursion into a
cosmos, and restore himself by a universal negation of
will from a condition of wretched actuality to the set,
grey, apathetic state of mere potentiality. By that self-
renunciation he recovers the true deity out of which he
stumbled and fell into a conscious and actual world. The
divine Sinner becomes the divine Redeemer — and first of
himself. In redeeming the world from its immanent
misery he redeems himself from his transcendent misery
of egoistic consciousness and desire. {Relig. d. Geistes p.
266). This seems a resurrection of the Gnosticism of the
second century, as so much of our modern speculation is.
And it is only a philosophic parody of the kenotic pro-
cess ; which does not think of the divine self-conscious-
ness as going out of existence, but only of its retraction,

296 TJie Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

concentration, or occultation, in one constituent of the
Godhead. The suicide of God is no part of the kenotic
idea, which turns but on self-divestment as a moral
power of the eternal Son ; who retains his consciousness
but renounces the conditions of infinity and its precreate
form.

§ § §

But leaving the metaphysical psychology of the matter
for a moment, have we any analogy in our experience
that would make this intelligible or even credible ?

I am not sure that we have not.

(i.) I will first allude to the familiar experience of
reducing or obscuring the self-consciousness by a drug
voluntarily taken. Here the really effective cause is not
(■he drug but the will to use it. Let us put a case.
Suppose an Oriental court, a foolish young Sultan, and a
venerable vizier, wise, vigilant and devoted, amidst a
ring of plotting pachas. As the vizier sits next to his
master at a feast he observes a pinch of poison stealthil}'
dropped into the imperial cup. He has heard some
Tumour of a conspiracy ; and he knows that poison. It
means slow paralysis and lingering death. In a moment
he must decide ; and he takes the resolve. There is no
other way. He challenges the king to a pledge in ex-
changed cups. And in due course he feels the conse-
quence in the impaired powers with which he drags
through a year or two of life. He lives thus till the ruler
at last learns of his devotion, is stung to his feet by the
sacrifice, and show his gratitude by such a change of life
and a growth in royal worth as rewards his saviour's
love for all it had borne. Now what was it that really
eclipsed the good statesman's powers ? It was not the
drug, but the love, the will, the decision to take it with

XI.] The Kenosis or S el/- Emptying of Christ 297

open eyes, and to part with all that made his high place
and peace, when no other course could save the youth
he loved.

(2.) Again, are there no cases where, by an early act
of choice and duty, a man commits himself to a line of
life which entails an almost complete extinction of his
native genius, tastes and delights. Could no story be
made of a great musical genius, say in Russia, who,
being as full of pity as of genius, was also a passionate
sympathiser with the people ; who deliberately committed
himself, while young and in the flood of artistic success
to certain democratic associations and enterprises, well
knowing what would happen upon discovery; who was
discovered, and deported to Siberia, to an exile both
rigorous and remote, where the violin and all it stood for
was denied to him and all his comrades for the rest of
their life. He must spend his whole heart in loving
fellowship with the commonest toils and needs, and in
patient ministrations to a society which prison debased.
After a lifetime of this the first brief years of artistic joy
and fame might well seem to him at moments almost to
belong to another life, and the aesthetic glory and power
be felt to have turned entirely to social love and service.
And all as the consequence neither of a spiritual process,
nor of a mere indiscretion, nor of a martyrdom only
forced on him, but of a resolve taken clearly and gravely
at a point in his spiritual life.

(3.) Or again. A student at the University develops
an unusual faculty and delight in philosophic study, and
even shows clear metaphysical genius. He is not only at
home in those great matters which live next door to the
very greatest, but he offers promise of real, not to say
striking, contribution to the historic development of that

2g8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

high discipline. Or his gift may be in poetic or plastic
art, to the like high degree. But he is the only son in a
large family ; and, at a critical period in the family affairs,
the father's death makes it his duty to leave study, learn
an unpleasant business, pull things round, and devote
himself to them for the rest of his life with the absorption
demanded by modern industrial conditions. He has to
resign his intellectual delights, call in his speculative
powers, unlearn his native tastes and associations, and
give himself up to active conflict with a vexatious world
doubly galling to him. And in due course he comes to
forget most of what it was once his joy to know. He
becomes subdued (in no ignoble way, in a way of duty)
to the element in which he has to work, and he is
acclimatised to a world both alien anl contemptuous
towards his congenial treatment of the greatest realities.
His contact with reality must now be by the way of faith
and action, and not by the way of thought. He becomes
at his best a practical mystic and amateur, who might have
been a leading genius. Economic, social and ethical
interests, even to drudgery and heart sickness, come to
take the place of the more solemn and unearthly concerns
at the divine call. And the old high joy of thinking, or
art's old calm, must be postponed until another life ; with
many an hour of longing, and many a homesick retro-
spect to what is, after all, the native land of his suppressed
powers. He loses a life but he finds his soul. Is this
not a case where a moral and sympathetic volition leads
to a certain contraction of the consciousness ; not indeed
by a single violent and direct act of will, but by a
decision whose effect is the same when it is spread over
a life ? He has put himself {sich gesetzt) in a position
where he is put upon {gesetzt sein). And, in applying the

XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 299

illustration to the theology of a kenosis in Eternity,
where a thousand years are but as one day, the element
of time between choice and result in the earthly case
is negligible.

(4.) Speaking more generally, is there not often in our
experience a connection between the resolutions and the
limitations of our personality ? By certain deliberate and
early acts of freedom, love, and duty we so mortgage and
limit ourselves that in due course, as we follow them
up, the moral consciousness ripens. We come to a
spirituality which is really ethical and not merely
instinctive, a thing of moral discipline and not naive nature,
something which comes to itself by way of challenge
and conflict, and is not mere legacy. We become men of
faith and not mere religion, men of moral sagacity and
not mere honest impulse. By voluntary discipline we
may come to love truth for truth's sake and not for our
own ; we learn to hold by habit and not mere heredity
to the " ought " of conscience ; we lose self in the love
and worship of God, or in the service of man. But for
the most part these conscious heights are touched but in
rare hours — though they may be the hours of decision
and committal that fashion life. We may soon grow
weary in the course we have taken up. The very
physical, or psychical, nature which was the organ of
our first free resolve, asserts itself, and makes us feel its
clouding power as we pursue the path to which only our
freedom, our supernatural self, committed us. By our
will we have come where our will is itself often obscured
and hampered ; and our first estate, where the choice
was made, is recalled but in a dream. So also Godhead,
by the same free and creative will which gave His
creation freedom, may pass into a state where He is not

300 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

only acted on by that creation but even submerged in the
human part of it ; and where He is victimised, indeed,
for a time by the perverse freedom He created, and is
imprisoned in its death ; by consenting to which death,
however, He gives the supreme and saving expression to his
divine will and life. He lives out a moral plerosis by the
very completeness of his kenosis ; and he achieves the
plerosis in resurrection and ascension. And thus He
freely subdues to Himself the freedom which in His
creative freedom He made.

§ § §
The more moral the original power is, so much the
more strength there is to sacrifice glory to service, and
enjoyment to benediction. So that were the moral
power that of deity itself, the power of self-disglorification
would be enhanced accordingly. Just because He was
holy God, the Son would be morally capable of a self-
dispowering more complete than anything that could be
described by human analogy. As God, the Son in
his freedom would have a kenotic power over Himself
corresponding to the infinite power of self-determination
which belongs to deity. His divine energy and mobility
would have a power even to pass into a successive and
developing state of being, wherein the consciousness of
perfect fulness and changelessness should retire, and
become but subliminal or rare. The world of souls was
made by Him ; and its power to grow must reflect some
kindred mobile power in him whose image it is. The
infinite mobility of the changeless God in becoming
human growth only assumes a special phase of itself.
Had the myriad-minded creator of souls no power to
live perfectly in the personal and growing form of the
souls he made ?

XI. The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 301

But sin ? There, indeed, we do reach a limit. Nan
potuit peccare.

But, then, it is at once said, his personality and man-
hood were not real.

But what if it were thus ? What if his kenosis went so
far that though the impossibility was there he did not
know of it? The limitation of his knowledge is indubitable —
even about himself. He was not perfectly sure that the
cross was his Father's will till the very last. " If it be
possible let it pass." Did that nescience not extend to
the area of his own moral nature, and so provide for him
the temptable conditions which put him in line with our
dark conflict, and which truly moralise and humanise his
victory when potuit non peccare ? He knew he came
sinless out of each crisis ; did he know he never could be
anything else ? How could he ? Would it have been
moral conflict if he had known this? I am, however, well
aware how relevant and how effective is the question
whether even then, whether if that foregone immunity were
there, known or unknown, the battle could have been moral
conflict like our own ; whether he could have been
tempted in every respect like us; whether the victory
could be real. And in reply one might go into the well-
known distinction between physical and moral omnipo-
tence, between formal and moral peccability. I could
remind you how possible it is for you to steal some
article from a shop on your way home, and yet how
impossible. You could, but you simply could not.
Leaving that, however, I would rather answer by an
analogy from the Saviour's own work in his Church.
It is the business of the believing Church to urge on its
members the most real and mortal moral conflict for the
world — for a world, that is, whose redemption our faith

302 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

yet knows to be already achieved and secured by all the
power of God. " Work for the Kingdom ; for it is the
God, who has already secured the Kingdom, that
worketh in you." He cannot fail, but it would be our
worst sin to fold our hands upon that foregone impossi-
bility. We have sometimes even to act as if it were not
so, as if we never knew it was so, and as if all turned on
our moral effort and success alone. And from work we
pass to prayer and remind ourselves how essential to
the soul it is to lay our needs before the Heavenly Father
who knoweth what we need before we ask Him.

§ § §
But there are also farther answers to be made. The
question, remember, is, whether a complete kenosis
would not involve such a renunciation of divine immunity,
such a self-identification with man, as involved a personal
experience of man's sin ? And the farther answer is two-
fold. First, every touch of personal guilt would have
impaired the moral power required for such sympathy.
That is an axiom of modern experience. The guilty
cannot escape from himself, cannot empty himself. And
the incarnation was a moral act so supreme and complete
as to be possible only to a conscience at the pitch of the
perfectly holy. And the second answer is that what is
truly human is not sin. Sin is no factor of the true
humanit}', but only a feature of empirical humanity
which is absolutely fatal to the true. What is truly
human is not sin, but the power to be tempted to sin.
It is not perdition but freedom. Because Christ was
true man he could be truly tempted ; because he was
true God he could not truly sin ; but he was not less
true man for that. Among all his potentialities that of
sin was not there ; because potentiality is only actuality

XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 303

powerfully condensed ; and had potential sin been there
its actuality would have been but a matter of time and
trial. But temptation was potential ; and it became
actual in due course. He could be tempted because he
loved ; he could not sin because he loved so deeply,
widely, infinitely, holily, because it was God he loved —
God more than man. Thus the only temptation with
real power for him was a temptation to good — to inferior
forms of good. It was not the temptation to forsake the
righteousness of God, but to seek it by other paths, less
moral and less patient paths, than God's highway of the
holy cross. It was not salvation that brought Christ
to the Cross. All Israel was set upon the faith of a
salvation in God's righteousness. The collision arose
upon God's way of righteousness. What more plausible
to a man of such power and of such ideas as Christ
than to organise and lead his zealot nation in an irresis-
tible crusade against pagan empire for a new order of
society wherein should dwell the righteousness of God ?
That was the Puritan dream. But even a parliamentarian
army was still an army ; and a Cromwell ruled for God
by the sword — as many of us who are his admirers to-day
would seek the kingdom by the vote, that is, by our politi-
cal tactics instead of by his military. It was what still
makes, and always has made, the chief temptation of his
Church — the reformation of society by every beneficent
means except the evangelical ; by amelioration, by re-
organisation, by programmes, and policies, instead of by
the soul's new creation, and its total conversion from the
passion for justice to the faith of grace, from what makes
men just with each other to what makes them just with
God. It was the temptation to save men by rallying
their goodness without routing their evil, by re-organising

304 The Penon and Place of Jesus Christ [i.ect.

virtue instead of redeeming guilt. To fleer at the Church's
anomalies and enormities needs no great insight or
courage now; the lads do it. But it does need more
than common insight, it needs more than shallow scorn,
to realise that it is not there that the Church's peril lies ;
and that these palpable things are but the graver
symptoms of a far subtler error in which many of the
critics themselves are tied and bound. It is the error in
a Church which preoccupies men with their rights rather
than their mercies, with redress rather than redemption,
with social change where it is men that must be changed
if society is to be saved, with their brotherhood to
each other when the thing lacking is sonship to God,
with goodness rather than grace, with religion rather
than faith. It is the error which leads men to think
that we can have a new Church or Humanity upon any
other condition than the renovation in the soul of the
new covenant which Christ founded in his last hours,
before the very Church was founded, and which is the
Church's one foundation in his most precious blood.

So when it is asked, If He was so holy that he could
not sin what becomes of that moral freedom which
identifies him with man? the answer is that absolute
holiness is the true freedom and the only divine
freedom. Impeccable holiness is the only power by
which the divinest things are finally done. A complete
incarnation into a free humanity is possible only to
the absolute holiness which created the freedom. And
only a soul by its nature identified with God's holiest
will could fully use or impart that freedom which is
the ideal of a true humanity. And such a soul must

do it.

I am well aware how supersubtle this must seem to

XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 305

some : but it is not possible to breathe the air of a region
so high without some subtlety. And without breathing
that air the Church stifles in the tasks of a world. She
must come up here often to breathe, when her very
stalwarts are foreign to the saving secret, heavy with
spiritual sleep, and slow of heart to understand heavenly
things.

§ § §
The difficulty of conceiving psychologically the kenotic
process in the divine consciousness is certainly an
impediment, but it is not an obstacle. * It is out of
reason ' is the complaint. ' We cannot think together
the perfect God and the growing man in one person.'
No, we cannot think them together. But also we cannot
realise them apart. It is only by a paradox of thought
that we possess our own souls and their reality. The
central things of the soul are thus alogical. Life trans-
cends thought. Personality itself is thus alogical ; and it
forms the unity in which truths cohere with practical
effect which will not harmonise and co-operate, which
refuse to be systematised. Faith is not rational in the
coherent, the scientific, the systematic sense of the word
rational. It would be impossible to believe in a God at
all if we insisted on such rationality as His supreme
norm. That insistence is the root of much atheism, at
least in regard to a personal God. Personality and its
movements are alogical — especially on an infinite scale.
For instance, if there be an infinite personal God He is
self-caused. But a self-caused being is as great a blow to
rational conception, and as deep a mystery, as the passage
of the Son from his eternal being to a life of limitation
and growth. Yet the mystery of a self-caused Being
is indispensable to our belief in the divine origin of the

3o6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

world. And certainly (to take another case) to personal
religion absolute Grace is as indispensable as our freedom
and responsibility. So essential for our faith in the
divine nature of Christ also may be the mystery of the
Kenosis, and the inconceivability of the self-dispowering
of the Eternal Son, and the self-retraction of his glory.

§ § §

Most theories which attempt to deal with the Kenosis
have set themselves to answer the question, What did the
Son renounce in becoming man ? What attributes of
Godhead had to be surrendered for incarnation ? And the
replies have been various. Some have begun by a dis-
tinction between the relative and the immanent attributes
of God. They have said that the relative attributes are
those that were set up with the creation of a world, such
as omnipotence, omniscience, and the like, which would
have no meaning before a discrete creation was there;
while the immanent attributes are those ethical and
spiritual qualities, such as absolute love or holiness, without
which God would not be God at all. And such thinkers
have gone on to say that the Kenosis meant the renuncia-
tion of the former and the retention of the latter. God-
head in Christ parted with omniscience, and omnipotence,
as with omnipresence ; but it did not, and could not, part
with absolute holiness or infinite love. Other theories
have gone farther, and have seen in the Kenosis a renun-
ciation of even such immanent attributes as a divine
self-consciousness and absolute will.

In regard to the former class of theories the criticism is
that even the relative attributes could not be parted with
entirely. At most they must be thought of as latent and
potential even were no created world there. They were
ready when creation arose. They are equally necessary

XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 307

to Godhead with the immanent qualities which, again,
cannot be wholly immanent, but must have a real relation
to any world created by the Will of the absolute love.

In regard to the second class of theories, if the renun-
ciation is carried so far as to part with a divine self-
consciousness and will, it is not clear what is left in the
way of identity or continuity at all. What is there, then,
in common between the Eternal Son and the man Jesus ?
What remains of the divine nature when we extinguish
the immanent ethical and personal qualities in any abso-
lute sense ?

§ § §
To get over those difficulties we may perhaps take a

happier course. Let us cease speaking of a nature as if

it were an entity ; of two natures as two independent

entities; and let us think and speak of two modes of

being, like quantitative and qualitative, or physical and

moral. Instead of speaking of certain attributes as

renounced may we not speak of a new mode of their

being ? The Son, by an act of love's omnipotence, set

aside the style of a God, and took the style of a servant,

the mental manner of a man, and the mode of moral

action that marks human nature. (For morality, holiness,

is surely not confined to the infinite mode alone.) He

took the manner that marks a humanity not illustrious,

not exceptional, but sheer and pure, where pomp has

taken physic, and exposed itself to feel what wretches feel

in life's awful storm. Take the attribute of omniscience,

for instance. In its eternal form, it is an intuitive and

simultaneous knowledge of all things ; but when the

Eternal enters time it becomes a discursive and successive

knowledge, with the power to know all things only

potential, and enlarging to become actual under the moral

3o8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

conditions that govern human growth and the extension
of human knowledge. Here we have not so much the
renunciation of attributes, nor their conscious possession
and concealment, as the retraction of their mode of being
from actual to potential. The stress falls on the mode of
existence of these qualities, and not on their presence or
absence. And the history of Christ's growth is then a
history of moral redintegration, the history of his
recovery, by gradual moral conquest, of the mode of being
from which, by a tremendous moral act, he came. It is
reconquest. He learned the taste of an acquired divinity
who had eternally known it as his possession. He won
by duty what was his own by right. As he grew in
personal consciousness he became conscious of himself as
the Eternal Son of God, who had dispowered himself to
be the son of man by a compendious moral act whereby
a God conscious of humanity became a man equally con-
scious of deity. And by a compendious moral act I mean
a prevenient act including in principle all those moral
sacrifices and victories which worked it out in an actual
and historic life.

The attributes of God, like omniscience, are not de-
stroyed when they are reduced to a potentiality. They are
only concentrated. The self-reduction, or self-retraction,
of God might be a better phrase than the self-emptying.
And it is only thus, indeed, that growth is made possible,
and evolution started on its career. No evolution is
possible on other terms, none unless the goal is in the
start. All we have otherwise is only movement and
variety. So far is growth, then, from being incompatible
with, the infinite, eternal, and almighty that it is de-
manded by ij:. Evolution is a mode of the self-limiting
power innate in a personal infinite. And only so is it

XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 309

possible. The conditions of time must lie within the
possibilities of Eternity, the growth of man within the
infinite mobility of the changeless God. Finitwn non
capax infiniti is the principle of Deism ; the principle of
Christian theism is infinitum capax finiti. If the finite
lies beyond the infinite and outside it then the infinite is
reduced to be but a larger finite ; the infinite can only
remain so if it have the power of the finite as well.

§ § §
These points deserve, and need, perhaps, closer atten-
tion. An attribute cannot be laid down, for it is only
the Being himself in a certain angle and relation. But
there are accidental relations, relations, for instance,
contingent on human freedom, which determine the form
in which the attribute exists. They determine its mode of
being, according to the particular position in which the
subject finds himself. Thus omniscience and the rest
are not so much attributes as functions of attributes, or
their modifications. Omnipotence means not that God
should be able to do anything and everything that fancy
may suggest ; but that, in working his will of love, God
is, from his own free resource, equal to all it involves,
and is really determined by nothing outside himself.
Omnipresence, as absolute independence of space, means
that God is not hampered by space, but can enter
spatial relations without being tied by them, can exist in
limits without being un free, or ceasing to be God. And
so on with omniscience and the rest. And the following
illustration has been given from the spectrum. A dis-
persion into colours is not essential to sunlight, which is
light without it. It was hailed and used as light before
such a breaking up was known. Therefore the disper-
sion is not a quality or attribute of light. But it is

Y

310 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

potential in light all the same. As soon as the prism is
there this relative property of light appears necessarily.
Suspend the relation, remove the prism, and the disper-
sion ceases. So it is with the divine omniscience. Omnis-
cience is only a detailed aspect of God's absoluteness,
incidental to the existence of a creation. Before the
prism of creation was actually there God was, and God
was light. He had absolute and simultaneous intelli-
gence as a necessary feature of his being. But since he
created, the absolute intelligence of God in relation to the
world becomes in its form omniscience, which could only
cease with the removal of the world, but even then would
only retire into another absolute form.

God's knowledge, therefore, may be discrete in actual
(shall I say empirical ? ) omniscience, or it may be
retracted and concentrated into potentiality. In the
Kenosis it is contended it did so retire. This happens
in a measure even with ourselves. I am not at every
moment in full consciousness of all the knowledge I
possess. In ordinary life I know much that I am not
conscious of, that never occurs to me, that is as though it
were not, it is in petto and potential till some crisis arrive.
I do not become conscious of it till certain circumstances
arise, and a situation is created that changes it from
potential to actual and active. Meantime, where is that
knowledge? Does it exist? Has it a real existence
before it emerge in that situation ? And so it may have
been when Christ at the world's crisis became man — not
a brilliant man, but true man, normal man. In the matter
of knowledge Christ, as God, Christ in his eternal form,
had an intuitive and simultaneous knowledge of all ; but
when he put aside that eternal form of the Godhead, and
entered time, his knowledge became discursive, succes-

xi.j The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 311

sive, and progressive. The omniscience (or the omni-
potence) of God does not mean that it is incapable of
limitation but rather that with more power than finitude
has it is also more capable of limitation. Only it is self-
limitation ; He limits himself in the freedom of holiness
for the purposes of His own end of infinite love. The
divine omniscience, morally retracted and potential in
Christ, developed by his exercise in a life-series of moral
crises and victories ; till, culminating in the cross and
its consummatory victory, it emerged into actual con-
sciousness and use in the Glorified, to whom all things
were delivered of the Father, all power given in heaven
and earth — when he was determined by the resurrection
so as to be the Son of God with power. What he
achieved was not the realisation of an old ideal but the
redintegration of an old state, He became what he was,
and not merely what it was in him possibly to be. He
reconquered by moral conflict, under the conditions of
human rebellion, a province, even within himself, which
was always his by right. In finding the sheep that were
lost he gradually finds the self, the mode of self, the con-
sciousness, he had renounced. Even for himself the
losing of his life was the regaining of it. The dimin-
uendo of the Kenosis went on parallel with the crescendo
of a vaster Plerosis. He died to live. And his post-
resurrection power is other in form than that of his
earthly life. The form of a servant gives place again to
the form of God. There is a sentence of Milton, in a
letter to Bigot, on his loss of sight which occurs to my
mind. " It is not so much lost as revoked and retracted
inward for the sharpening rather than the blunting of
my mental edge."

§ § §

312 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

It is fruitless to discuss these matters if we come to
their consideration with only physical or material ideas
of what is meant by words like omnipotence. A friend
once told me that her little boy posed her by discovering
that there was one thing God could not do — he could
not see the back of his own head. That is only an
absurd case of the popular and childish order of difficulty
which is the working capital of popular scepticism as
well as of popular apologetic. It starts with the maxims
of common sense to explore the region of eternal spirit
and holy immutable morality. And the object of educa-
tion is not to provide us with ready-made solutions to
such crude questions, but to raise people to putting the
proper questions and to get them into schools that will
exercise them in good and evil. I am thinking, of course,
chiefly of the higher education ; and I mean the schooling
in moral ideas, and in the methods appropriate to moral
ideas, in modern times. It would mean worlds for our
Christian faith, which brought such an inversion of moral
values, if the ethic of Kant and its developments came to
receive as much attention as the universities have given
to the great pagan ethic of Aristotle. I mean such an
escape from the physicists, biologists, and psychologists,
however refined, as shall discipline the mind in the
elements, at least, of ethical method, the genius of ethical
ideas, and the sense of ethical terms; and shall make
proper answers possible by enabling people to put the
proper questions. The bulk of the questions with which
the amateur critic poses faith, and the illiterate heretic
delights the public, are as unanswerable as if it were
asked — what is the difference between London Bridge
and four o'clock ?

XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 313

With this in mind I would return to point out that God
is God not physically but morally, not by power but by
love. That is the Christian revelation. The nature of
Godhead is Holy Love. There lies the region, the nature,
and the norm of its omnipotence. It is no arbitrary or
casual omnipotence, which puts out power just for the
sake of doing it or showing it. It can do, not everything
conceivable to freakish fancy, but everything that is
prescribed by Holy Love. To a physical omnipotence
it is indifferent. Such being its nature, its object with
Humanity is a kingdom of such holy love. But, con-
sidering man's actual sinful state, this can only be effected
by redemption. To this end the Son of God sympa-
thetically renounces the glory of his Heavenly state. He
does it for God's sake more than for man's, for love
of the Holy more even than of the sinner, to glorify the
Holy through the sinner, and to hallow His name. And
nothing can hallow Holiness but Holiness, nothing else
can satisfy it, nothing else can save. God's holy name
must be saved that the sinner may be — and saved by an
all-holy peer. And Christ does it by the holy way, by a
moral act of love, and not by a tour de force. It is an
exercise of sanctity, and not an exertion of strength.
That is his satisfaction to God. He presents God with
a perfectly holy Humanity. He does it because he is
holy infinite love ; he can do it because he is almighty
for that love. It is not a love which might itself be
finite, only with a miraculous physical omnipresence;
but it is an almighty love in the sense that it is capable
of limiting itself, and, while an end, becoming also a
means, to an extent adequate to all love's infinite ends.
This self-renouncing, self-retracting act of the Son's will,
this reduction of Himself from the supreme end to be

314 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

the supreme means for the soul, is no negation of his
nature ; it is the opposite, it is the last assertion of his
nature as love. It is no negation of his freedom ; it is
rather the freest energy of his whole will. He never
willed anything so mightily and freely as the subjection,
the renunciation of self-will to the holy requirement of
God. It is the concentrated omnipotence of love, and
not of mere power, that underlies his limited earthly
existence. And it is incessant obedience. The whole
detail of that earthly existence is the expression of the
act of will by which, in his omnipotent love, he entered
the world. " The act of a great spirit is to be always in
action." All his decisions taken on earth, all his several
volitions are integrated in the one foregone act that brought
him to earth, the one premundane act of pregnant self-
concentration for the carrying out of love's saving purpose
with the world. It is a concentrated and seminal
omnipotence we meet here, a concentration even of that
self-concentration wherein the world was created and
God became immanent in it. If the Creator could not
have become immanent in creation His infinity would
have been curtailed by all the powers and dimensions of
space. And if immanence could not pass by a new act
into mcarnation then God would have been lost in his
world, and the world lost to God.

In love we were created and endowed with freedom by
an act of God wherein he limited his own freedom by the
area of ours. His omnipotence received a restriction —
but it was from an exercise of His own loving power and
freedom ; and an exercise of it greater than could be
rivalled by all the freedom man received. The freedom
that limits itself to create freedom is true omnipotence, as
the love that can humble itself to save is truly almighty.

xr.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 315

God in his vast act of creative love laid a limit upon
himself to give room to the freeborn to live. He drew
in his universal energy and causation to that extent.
But any limit laid upon power by such love is an exercise
of omnipotence. And when God in his creative love gave
man freedom, it was a mightier exercise of His own free
power than could be matched by all the power man
might exert or fancy in the use of his freedom. So
it was also with the new Creation. There was
more omnipotence (if we can so speak) concentrated
in the person of Christ than was spread in all
creation. To appear and act as Redeemer, to be born,
suffer, and die, was a mightier act of Godhead than lay
in all the creation, preservation, and blessing of the
world. It was only in the exercise of a perfect divine
fulness (and therefore power) that Christ could empty
and humble himself to the servant he became. As the
humiliation grew so grew the exaltation of the power
and person that achieved it. It was an act of such
might that it was bound to break through the servant form,
and take at last for all men's worship the lordly name.

Let us escape, then, from crude notions of finite and
infinite, of weakness and omnipotence. If the infinite
God was so constituted that he could not live also as a
finite man then he was not infinite. There was a
limitation to that extent on His power's infinity, and one
which he Himself did not impose. Hut if He did live as
finite man, then so far was it from being a limitation of
His freedom (except externally and formally) that it was
the greatest exercise of it. It was the greatest act of
moral freedom ever done. The Godhead that freely
made man was never so free as in becoming man. His
self-limitation was so far from impairing his being that

3i6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

it became the mightiest act of it that we know. It was
not limitation so much as concentration. Was Christ
less mighty for his work when he was straitened till it
should be accomplished ? It was rather His intensest con-
centration for the carrying out of His final purpose with
the world. It was the most condensed expression of holy
love. It was holy love acting at a point once for all. And
holy love (may I repeat) is the supreme category of the
Almighty. It is the object for which all God's omni-
potence exists. To achieve that object is His true
omnipotence. How, then, could omnipotence be impaired
by its own supreme act ? Such divine immanence as is
implied in Creation rises by a farther and mightier limi-
tation to incarnation. But it is by a new creative act —
not by prolonging the old process ; not by a culmination
in Christ of the soul of the world, not as the summit of
God's identity with the world ; but by a unique, crowning,
and moral act of self-identification. Immanence cannot
explain incarnation, which is a new departure of more
moral nature. The incarnation is not God's identity
with the world prolonged, but a new self-identification,
which is yet older than the world. The self-limitation
became more severe, but it also rose to a new and a
mightier exertion of divine power. If one may use a
figure from physics, the structure, the nature, of His
action on the world changed under the increased pressure.
By his own will God in Christ reduced his intelligence
from being actual to being potential, within the kingdom
of power or nature ; while from that potentiality, as
Christ grew in grace, it developed and regained actual
omniscience by living it back, by the moral way of the
kingdom of Grace, till he left the world behind, to be
determinei as the Son of God in power.

xi.J The Kenosis or Self- Emptying of Christ 317

§ § §
It need hardly be pointed out how free such views

leave us in regard to those ignorances and limitations in
Christ which make so much more trouble to us than they
did to the evangelists ; those errors, in respect of the
form of the future no less than the history of the past,
which he shared with his time and race. If a young
critic tells us that Christ was ignorant of many things
which the modern schoolboy knows, we may wish the
fact put more reverently, and less like a school-boy, but
we have no vital interest in challenging it. If we are
reminded that there were miracles, and even teachings,
which were impossible to all his power and knowledge
(" greater things than these ") because he was, like most
preachers, dependent on his audience, and could do
nothing mighty amid unbelief — there is little to trouble
us in that. If he did not know it was because he con-
sented not to know. And whatever he did not know, at
least he did know that which is the root, and key, and
goal of all knowledge. He knew to its foundation that
fear, and obedience, and communion of God which is the
beginning of all wisdom that is not self-destructive. And
whatever he could not do — and he could not invent print-
ing— he could do the one thing needful for God, the one
thing which chanj^ed our relations to God, the one thing
needful to give man the power of doing at last what he
was made for, and of achieving through His redemption,
the eternal kingdom of God, in which telegrams and air-
ships arc forgotten among the potsherds of the earth. He
did the central deed in which all man's great and final
doing lies potential. He secured for ever the moral
realm without which our engineers are but building sand
and organising catastrophe. He did the work of God ;

3i8 The Person and Place of Jesii^ Christ [lect.

and he did it in the sense that his doing was God at His
supreme work. It is here that we find our safe seat amid
the inevitable results of criticism. And it is here we find
a far lar^^er Saviour than the humane Jesus of mere
religions liberalism. It is no way to deal with so great a
blessing as criticism arbitrarily to challenge or curb its
rights. The way is to fix our faith beyond its reach. It
is to return to the Epistles for the key of the Gospels, for
the evangelical secret, and the principle of the Highest
Criticism of all. The judgment of the cross criticises all
criticism, and the finality of its felt salvation is the rock

impregnable.

§ § §

To recapitulate. The Church has always taught an
earthly renunciation on the part of Christ, which takes
its eternal value from the premundane renunciation
that made him Christ. We have to make our re-
nunciations in life alone; but he made his before life.
We have no choice as to our birth ; he had. His will
to die was also his will to be born. It is only by
such a moral act, and not in the course of some ideal
process, that we can think of his entry from a world
of power and glory upon the conditions of earthly life.
Only by a moral act could he incarnate himself in human
life, which is in its nature a grand act, choice, and venture,
which is moral at its core, moral in its issues, and moral
in its crown. If it was a real and universal human life
he lived, that could only be by virtue of a moral act
which is at least on the scale of the race ; and if he was
to master the race his act must be on an even greater scale,
greater than the whole race's best, and as great as Holy
God. The act that consented to become man was a
superhuman act, an act of God. He did become crea-

XI,] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 319

turely. He did not simply enter a creature prepared for
him. When he was born human nature was not trans-
formed by a special creation into some superhuman thing
for the spirit of God to enter — as a foreign palace might,
by great furnishing effort and outlay, be transformed into
an English home to honour a visit from our king. Nor
were the two streams parallel while unmingled. There
could not be two wills, or two consciousnesses, in the
same personality, by any psychological possibility now
credible. We could not have in the same person both
knowledge and ignorance of the same thing. If he did not
know it he was altogether ignorant of it. But the ever-
during Sun in heaven was focussed in Christ — condensed
to burn the evil out of man. The divine energy was
concentrated for the special work to be done. The ful-
ness of the Son's Godhead was still the essence of Christ.
That Godhead lost nothing in the saving act. It took
the whole power of Godhead to save ; it was not the Son's
work alone ; far less then was it the work of any impaired
Son. It was not the work of a God minorum gentium, as
the Arian Christ is. It could not be the work of any
created being, however great. The value of the soul
would slowly and surely sink if we believed it salvable by
any creature. It would lower the soul that the most
High made for Himself were it saved by a second-class
God. Such is the ethical effect on society of a false
theology. The divine nature must belong to the universal
and final Redeemer, however its mode and action might be
conditioned by the work it had to do. The divine
qualities were there ; though their action was at once
reduced, concentrated, intensified within the conditions
of the saving work. The divine qualities were kept, but
only in the mode that salvation made necessary. Jesus

320 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. xi.

did not know everything actually, empirically, but only
what was needful for that work. But, as that is the
central final work in human nature, the knowledge
required for it contains the promise and potency of all
knowledge. And, as to the exercise of power, he did
what God alone could do in forgiving human sin, a salva-
tion which is the nucleus and germ of all worthy power
beside. His knowledge, his power, his presence were all
adjusted to his vocation. His vocation was not to apply
or exhibit omnipotence, but to effect the will of infinite
love, and master all that set itself against that. And that
divine vocation was only possible to one who had a
divine position. The world's Redeemer must be the Son
of God.

§ § §
If we ask how Eternal Godhead could make the actual
condition of human nature His own, we must answer, as
I have already said, that we do not know. We cannot
follow the steps of the process, or make a psychological
sketch. There is something presumptuous in certain
kenotic efforts to body forth just what the Son must have
gone through in such an experience. God has done
things for his own which it has not entered into the
heart of man to conceive. It is the miracle behind all
miracle. All detailed miracle was but its expression. It
is the miracle of grace. And it can be realised (little as
it can be conceived) only by the faith that grace creates,
that answers grace, and works by love. Let us not be
impatient of the secret. Love would not remain love if
it had no impenetrable reserves. Love alone has any key
to those renunciations which do not mean the suicide but
the finding of the Soul.

LECTURE XII

THE PLEROSIS OR THE
SELF-FULFILMENT OF CHRIST

LECTURE XII

THE PLEROSIS OR THE SELF-FULFILMENT OF CHRIST

The closeness of the Church's bond with Christ will
always go hand in hand with its belief in his deity.
And the more it realises his salvation the more it will
know the roots of it to be in the great act of a Christ
before the worlds. The whole faith of the Church has
turned upon a conception of Christ which sees in him
the act of God, and worships in him God's immediate
revelation, God's personal guarantee of His holy saving
love, and the eternal mediator of our communion with
Him. Christ is much more than the personal reali2a-
tion of the idea of Humanity and the guarantee of its
universal attainment. That is to say, in the Church's
history a faith in the God in Christ underlay a faith in
the man in him. The disciples indeed began with the
divine prophetic man, in the order of knowledge ; but with
the apostles and the Church it was otherwise. They came
to read him in the order of value, not from the man up-
wards but from the God downwards. That was after
the great finale which made disciples into apostles and
a group into a Church. What did this, what made
apostles, and made a Church, was not the humane side

324 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

or function of Jesus, but the redeeming God in Jesus.
A Church and a theology must be inseparable always.
The saving faith that makes a Church lays hold of
Christ theologically, in his deity. It does not view
him as the pledge of our human future, but as the
foundation of our new communion with a holy God who
will make Humanity's future just what his Kingdom
demands. Living faith knows nothing of an undogmatic
Christ. An undogmatic Christ is the advertisement of a
dying faith. Christ's permanent relation to the world is
dependent on something that can only be dogmatically
expressed — on his eternal relation to the Father. His
effect in ensuring its final destiny depends on his eternal
relation to the Father, on his sonship before the world
was. He is the final Saviour of men, and the surety of
man's future, only as the Eternal Son of God. No
created agent of God could give us that certainty of the
Kingdom of God which faith must have for the King-
dom's sake. It must come in a constant and living
mediator who is no mere medium ; in a historic person
who is not a mere historic link between the ages; in the
only begotten Son who declares the Father from His
bosom, and who is the revelation he brings. For only
God can reveal God. And the King of God's Kingdom
must be God.

Hence, if faith be not saving faith but only sym-
pathetic; if it be but an illumination, or an inspiration,
and not a new creation ; if it be a spiritual culture and
not a spiritual conversion ; if it is first concerned to be
liberal and not evangelical, progressive and not positive,
not regenerative; then there is no foundation and no
future for any belief in the Godhead of Christ, however we
may play with old terms.

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 325

_ § § §

Such a belief is an experience which breaks into two

orders of inquiry. It opens up questions about the

threefold nature of God, or a Trinity as deep as

Godhead, and questions about Christ's historic person —

how the humanity of Jesus is related to his Godhead,

how the nature of his personality fits his function

as the direct visitation of God. It is this latter

question, the Christological rather than the Trinitarian

question, that is of such lively interest to-day. But

any belief in either a Trinity or an Incarnation can

only flow from a final experience of grace by the sinful

soul. And it belongs solely to a Church which confesses

the sin of the world only because it confesses still more

humbly and gladly the absolute holiness of the Saviour.

The Godhead of Christ is an interest of religion before

it is an interest of theology. It is the spring of that

worship of Christ, which in the history of the Church

preceded and inspire 1 thought about him. When we

worship Christ the living Lord and the organ of our

communion with God (as the Church has steadily done),

or when we give him absolute obedience as the King of

the Kingdom of God and the living guide of all history to

that consummation, then we give him a place that can be

held by no mere part of creation, and no mere unit of

history. Is the Kingdom of God the consummation of

creation ? Then surely the Saviour and King of the

Kingdom must be one with the Creator of creation.

The world which was made for such a Christ must have

been made by him. The largest conception of creation is

much more than cosmic in range ; it is also redemptive

in power. It thinks of the cosmos as the arena or the

base of God's salvation. The ground plan of creation —

z

326 The Person and Place of Jcsu^ Christ [lbct.

what is it if it be not found in the final plan of salvation ?
Has creation any ground plan else ? Plenty of process,
but what plan, what goal ? The goal to which the whole
creation moves — is it not that Eternal Redemption ?
Does it not all wait and work to the manifestation of the
Sons of God ? The whole cosmos is great with the re-
deemed Kingdom. But if so, surely then the Kingdom's
Saviour and King is Creation's Maker and Humanity's
God. Christ as the soul's living Lord must be the
Eternal Son.

I know that this is a logic more spiritual than rational.
The problem is not philosophic. It is certainly not to
find a reasoned adjustment of the finite and the infinite
of an absolute and created life. Nor is it a question of
deifying Humanity, as the Church's earlier creeds were
apt to construe it, and the positivist mind tends to
construe it still. The question is this — when we begin
with the Gospel, when we begin with God's holy and
loving will for the world in Christ — how are we to secure
its realization in man ? How are we to establish in man
as a race Christ's mutual, personal, and loving com-
munion with such a God? That is something which no
prophet was ever able to do. Prophetism was a failure
for such a Kingdom ; it could not establish a national,
to say nothing of a racial, communion with God ; how
could a Christ merely prophetic succeed ? Did Christ
succeed by that part of his life which was chiefly
prophetic — the part prior to his death ? The result
of his life and teaching was that they all forsook him
and fled ; but the result of his cross, resurrection, and glory
was to rally them and create the Church in which he
dwells. Is not the creation of God's Kingdom a task
beyond the power of any instrument, any creature ? Is

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 327

it not God's own work ? Whoever did it must be God
himself. Godhead must directly perform and sustain
the great act that set up such communion. God must
do it in person. Only one who incarnated God's holiest
will as His son alone did could produce and establish in
men for ever the due response to that will — the response
of their whole and holy selves. Holiness alone answers
holiness ; and only the Holy God could make men holy ;
it could be done by no emissary of His. We cannot be
sanctified by commission or deputy. No intimation of
Himself by God (through the holiest of creatures)
could effect such an end. His news of Himself must rise
to His sacrifice of Himself; His self-sacrifice must further
be his self-vindication as holy ; and from that it
must go on rising to His self-communication. The Father
who spoke by his prophets must come to save in the Son
and must occupy in the Spirit. He offers, gives, Himself
in the Son and conveys Himself in the Spirit. He
who is the end of all, humbles himself to be the
means, that he may win all. God in Christ asserts
Himself in his absolute freedom (" I, even I, am
he"); He limits Himself for His creature's freedom
("that blotteth out thy transgressions"); and bestows
Himself to make that freedom communion (" For I am
with thee, saith the Lord, to save thee "). It is all one
holy love and grace, in this Eternal threefold action,
both within God and upon man. Only on this Trini-
tarian conception of God can we think of such a salvation
as ours. Only so can we think of Christ as God with us.
But then also we must follow on to ask how such a
Christ is related to this eternal and invisible God.

§ § §
We have no call to-day to prove the real manhood

328 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

of Jesus. For that is universally owned ; and it is all
that many can own. Things were otherwise in New
Testament times, when it was freely held that the man-
hood was phantasmal and unreal. It is against such a
notion that the writings of John are directed, and
especially his Epistles— a fact which makes them some-
what irrelevant when used against the Socinian position
in our own time. They were directed on people who
were more ready to admit the divinity of Christ than
his humanity. And with such people we have at the
moment little to do.

Nor are we always called to convince people of the
uniqueness of the man Jesus. That is, in some sense,
freely owned by most who consider the matter seriously
at all. Everything turns on what is meant by unique,
whether he is unique in degree or in kind, whether it is
the difference between the created and the increate. I
have more than once pointed out that what is denied to-day
is not a superior revelation in Christ but the absolute
finality of that revelation. What we have to stand by is
that finality — not of course in the sense that evolution
has come to an end, but in the sense that all evolution
is now within God's final word and not up to it. It is
unfolding the Christ and not producing him. Christ is
God's seventh and last day in which we now forever
live and labour in rest. That is to say, the divine reve-
lation is final but the human religion which answers it is
not final. The word is final, but the response is pro-
gressive. The finality is as to the kind of God revealed
and not as to the compass, which always enlarges upon us
as culture enlarges our grasp. It is a question of the
explication of God's last gift of Himself. And what we
have chiefly to keep in view is the sort of uniqueness in

xii.j The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 329

the man Jesus which is required for the final and per-
sonal gift of Godhead in him.

Now for such a purpose a Christ merely kenotic is in-
adequate. We have already seen that all revelation is
God's self-determination. For any real revelation we must
have a loving self-determination of God with a view to
His self-assertion and self-communication; and this
self-determination must take effect in some manner of
self-divestment. We have examined the kenotic, or self-
emptying theories of such an act, and we have found
them either more helpful or less. But whether we take
a kenotic theory or not, we must have some doctrine
of God's self-divestment, or His reduction to our
human case. Yet, if we go no farther than that,
it only carries us half-way, it only leads us to the
spectacle of a humbled God, and not to the experi-
ence of a redeeming and royal God. For re-
demption we need someting more positive. It is a
defect in kenotic theories, however sound, that they turn
only on one side of the experience of Christ, viz., his
descent and humiliation. It is a defect because that
renunciatory element is negative after all; and to dwell
on it, as modern views of Christ do, is to end in a
Christian ethic somewhat weak, and tending to ascetic
and self-occupied piety. For we can be very self-occupied
with self-denial ; it is the feminine fallacy in ethics. We
must keep in view, and keep uppermost, the more positive
process, the effective, ascending, and mastering process
which went alongside of the renunciation in Christ, nay,
was interwoven with it, as its ruling coefficient. I mean
that, besides the subjective renunciation, we must note
the growth, the exaltation, of his objective achievement,
culminating in the perfecting at once of his soul and our

330 Thi Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

salvation in the cross, resurrection, and glory. I should
not decline to speak carefully of a progressive in-
carnation. We must have some view, which may be
kenotic indeed, but must also be more positive than
kenoticism alone.

§ § §
Now, the whole Christology of the Church, I keep
saying, has been its effort to conceive by thought the
reality it lived on in its faith of Christ's saving work and
presence for good and all. For the most part, we have
seen, the Church has tried to solve the problem by the
doctrine of two distinct natures inseparably coexisting in
the person of Jesus. Sometimes, indeed, it has gone so
far as to speak of two personalities coexisting within that
single historic life. But no creed (we have seen) has ever
been able to do more on such a basis than to place the two
natures or persons alongside each other, to say that each
must be believed as a postulate of Christian faith and ex-
perience, and to repel attacks or heresies which threatened
to destroy either, or to enhance the one at the expense of
the other. No systematic reconciliation, far less a
psychological, has ever yet been effected. And the
attempts at adjustment have always have tended to im-
pair one side or other of the antinomy. One nature lost
a piece of itself to the other, and so really lost its indis-
cerptible self; or else one was swallowed up by the other.
Either an injury was done to the nature of human
personality, by ignoring its necessary law of growth and
making Jesus a mechanical prodigy of abstract revelation,
without a moral interior (as in By^antinism) ; or damage
was done to the unity and changelessness of the triune
God (as in Arianism, or in some extreme kenotic theories).

§ § §

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 331

Most of those theories were fastened on the Church
in the interests, indeed, of a true redemption, but at a
time when the theology of redemption, was apt to be
conceived in terms of substance rather than subject, of
metaphysic rather than ethic, of things rather than per-
sons. The terms were, however finely material, yet too
material to be duly personal and ethical. The object of
redemption in the creed-making age was less to forgive
man than to immortalise him, less to convert him than
to deify him. It was not a work of grace in the sense of
mercy, in the sense of destroying mortal guilt, but in the
sense of destroying a fatal disease. Grace was the in-
fusion of an incorruptible divine nature or substance into
corruptible human nature. It was antiseptic. It was
the inoculation of the one nature by the other, and the
consequent gift of dcfidapa-ta rather than forgiveness and
communion. It gave life rather than moral peace. It
was not the restoration of unclouded personal relations
so much as the deification of human nature by trans-
fusion of the divine. It was more a communication of
properties than a communion of hearts and wills. And
it is easy to see the result of such a theory in the Roman
doctrine of the sacraments, the kind of virtue they convey,
and the ethic with which they may co-exist.

But we have come to a time in the growth of Christian
moral culture when personal relations and personal
movements count for much more than the relations of
the most rare and etherial substances. The conscience
has come to be the locus of faith, especially since the
Reformation turned grace from subsidy, or antidote, to
mercy. It is a question of the holy conscience of God in
relation to the guilty conscience of man. We are con-
cerned with a relation of wills, of the holy will and the

332 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lfxt.

unholy. Redemption is moral regeneration, and not
mere cure, not mere rescue from an entail of spiritual
disease and death. We are not to blame for a mere
disease, but redemption is rescue from what does leave
us culpable. Sin is more than a disease; and it is
curable by no magical infusion, but only by moral action
on the part of God ; wherein person deals with person,
and soul with soul, in a mutual act of Grace and Faith.
Faith is man's greatest moral act, as Grace is God's.
It becomes the serious acceptance of God's mercy and
not the reception of Christ's body. Regeneration is the
result of faith and not of baptism. Death is banished
by new living. Such faith is what makes Christianity ;
and its experience is the material of all theology. Thus
religion, salvation, gives the law to theology, and not
theology to salvation. This is especially the case with
Christology. Forgive me if I repeat so often that the
principle from which we must set out to understand the
person of Christ is the soteriological principle. Any
metaphysic must follow that and not precede it; it must
be a metaphysic of history and not of being, of soul and
not of substance, of the moral soul and not the noetic
substance, of ethic and not of thought — and especially of
the Christian ethic condensed in faith as the new life.
All Christology must rest on a moral salvation, spiritually
and personally realised. And any metaphysic involved
must be the metaphysic of redemption, which is only the
superlative of a metaphysic of ethics. We believe and
therefore we speak. We believe and then we think.
We explore the New Creation. It is from the experi-
ence of Christ's salvation that the Church proceeds to
the interpretation of the Saviour's person.

§ § §

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 333

Starting, then, from the canon that the Incarnate is
immediately known to us only as the Saviour, it might be
better, it might save us much confusion and collision, if
we were less concerned to speak or think of the two
natures within the life of Christ, as we have long ceased
to think of two persons, or two consciousnesses. Neither
does justice to the interest of salvation. As that interest is
the interest of personal communion, and not of human
deification, it might be better to describe the union of God and
man in Christ as the mutual involution of two personal move-
ments raised to the whole scale of the human soul and the
divine.

§ § §
This is what I would venture (with more heart than

hope) to expound.

There is a certain fascination at present in the idea of
Christ as the apex of that spiritual evolution which
emerges to a divine height in man. He is viewed as the
consummation of a grand spiritual process construed on
scientific lines, as if all the series, from the nebula to
man, were a vast pneumatic biology. And doubtless if
the human process in history were simply one of teeming
movement onward and upward, there would be no difficulty
but much propriety in speaking of Christ as the divine
blossom of the race, or its " heaven-kissing hill." But
then I have more than once said that if such evolution
were the law and scheme of life, its crown and bloom
must be at the close of the series, and not in the far
past. We could have no Christ till we had evolved into
the Kingdom of God. But the historic Christ is there
to act on man and save him, and not simply to consum-
mate him. He is there to bring about man's consum-
mation and not simply exhibit it. He is not a product

334 ^/'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

of man's spiritual evolution but its grand source. If
ever we attain to Christ it is by Christ. The King
makes the Kingdom and not the Kingdom the King.

Moreover we have seen that moral experience and the
psychology of faith will not let us think of man's spiritual
history as a process of simple progress, even on the wide
whole. (See Lecture V.) There is much more than that
allows for, more that is mystic, resolute, dogmatic, more
of a passion, a collision, and a tragedy in life ; in life, note,
and not only in some lives. Man does not simply unfold
to God but God descends and enters man. With this
invasion religion has much more to do than with evolution.
The immanent consciousness of the divine becomes posi-
tive religion only when the leap, the choice, the resolve of
faith treats it as the upheaval of a transcendent reality.

For what is the verdict of religious psychology ? How
does it interpret the spiritual experience of the race as
shown in its supreme form of faith ? Life and progress,
especially on the religious plane, show that at least a two-
fold movement goes to make up the spirituality in human
history, two movements whose opposite directions pro-
duce much friction. And I do not allude by that to the
twofold process within history, wherein degeneration is at
constant war with development, decay with life, and lapse
with progress. That might all go on on what I would call
the horizontal plane of movement — the onward movement
and the backward. But I allude rather to the vertical
action, so to say, in which man is constantly seeking
unto a God and God is constantly passing into man.
Christianity is a religion of depth before it is a religion
of breadth. It spreads to all souls because it pierces
the whole soul. It is so catholic because so radical, so
liberal because so searching. Its God the heaven of

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 335

heavens cannot contain ; and he does not shrink from
descending into hell. Its kingdom does not grow up
through the ground like the grass ; it descends out of
heaven from God. Its prayer that ascends there is moved
by a spirit which comes down from there. Man's word
to God is interlocked with God's word to man. To
conceive history as the field of those two movements on
the upright plane of spirit — the upward movement of
man's quest for God, and the downward of God's con-
quest of man — is far more congenial to the mystery,
grandeur, and tragedy of the soul than the simple,
evolutionary, and culminating process on the level plane
of Time alone. We grow laterally every way, so to
speak, and not only on a plane. The soul dilates into its
circumambient eternity, as it were ; it does not merely
proceed. The city of God is foursquare every way. So
that we have this advantage, that, while we allow its place
to the progressive process which fascinates so many, we
yet supplement it with another which gives history a far
more massive interest, a more vivid, dramatic, and crucial
interest, a far more moral interest than an ordered pro-
cess can yield. We grow in substance and power, and
not merely in range and vision. One would like to do
justice to the evolutionary idea, the progressive idea;
but one would like still more to do justice to the redemp-
tive idea, the regenerative, the deepening idea. For
Christ came to do more to deepen men than to broaden
them. He came as the fulness and not simply as the
ideal, the form to be filled. He came as a life, and not
simply as a line of life.

These movements are both at work in the growth of
the God-led historic soul as prayer and answer, as evolu-
tion and inspiration. Religiously {i.e. supremely) they are

336 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

the two movements that make the world, if we interpret it
from its spiritual height. And they give us the categories
in which God and man meet. They meet in action rather
than in being ; and the unity of being is just such as is
required for mutual action and communion. God and
man meet in humanity, not as two entities or natures
which coexist, but as two movements in mutual interplay,
mutual struggle, and reciprocal communion. On the one
hand we have an initiative, creative, productive action,
clear and sure, on the part of eternal and absolute God ;
on the other we have the seeking, receptive, appropria-
tive action of groping, erring, growing man. God finds
a man who did not find Him, man finds a God who did
find Him. We have the self-complete God who cannot
grow, in whom all things are already, Yea and Amen ;
and we have the inchoate man who must grow, and
stumbles as he grows ; and we have movement in each.
We have on the one hand the perfect God who cannot
grow ; and yet, as the living God, he has in his change-
less nature an eternal movement which He implanted as
growth in the creature He made in his image. And on
the other hand we have this waxing man, who only grows
into the personality that communes with God. He
grows through the moral exercise of that passion for the
Absolute and Eternal which is so much more than God's
return upon Himself because He does not return void but
laden with free souls for His sheaves. We have these
two movements permeating the whole life of historic
humanity, and founding its spiritual psychology. If we
leave Christ out of view for the moment, we recognise
such a strife, such a " Lord's controversy," not in Israel
only but in the great psychology of the race. All
spiritual existence is action. History is action, and

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self-Fulfilment of Christ 337

reciprocal action. It is commerce, and even conflict,
with the transcendent. Its sense of God is not that of
subjective immanence but of living contact with a living
spiritual reality. A true psychology of religion leaves
you at the last face to face with a choice and a venture ;
not an experience in the sense of an impression, but, more
actively, in the sense of a decision ; the decision, namely,
that what we feel facing us, urging us, dominating us, is
not an illusion but the presence and action of a transcen-
dent reality. That is the sure venture of faith. The
divine thing in the soul is not a mystic subjectivity
but objective truth acting upon us at closest quarters,
as a finer, fuller soul in soul.

The vast issue in our personal Humanity, therefore,
is not the still conjunction of two natures in the soul,
but the crisis of two permanent and fundamental move-
ments in it; it is not the union of two entities but the
action of two powers, one passing one way and one
another. If the whole drama of the soul of man
could be compressed into one narrow neck and one
strait gate, that is what we should have — the tremendous
friction (so to say) of these two currents within a
personal experience, And if we could widen that neck
at one part, what we should have would be a whirlpool*
in which the two currents become mutually and crucially
involved, forming a centre of perfect rest.

§ § §
Rudely speaking, that may be used as an image of
what we have in ('hrist. At his central place we have
what we might f:all the node at which the two move-
ments, being compressed, meet, rotate, and cast a line

* What the old theologians would have called a 7rc/)iY(i)^»/<ri?

338 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

column to heaven. The calm is the calm of intense
victory. If life be a comedy to those that think, and
a tragedy to those that feel, it is a victory to those
who believe. But, however it may fare with our imagery,
in Christ, we have two things, the two grand actions of
spiritual being, in final peace and eternal power. We
have the whole perfect action of Godhead concentrated
through one factor or hypostasis within it * and directed
manward both to create and redeem ; and we have also the
growing moral appropriation by man's soul moving God-
ward of that action as its own, as its initial divine nature
and content. In Christ's life and work we have that divine
mobility t in which the living Son eternally was — we have,
that coming historically, and psychologically, and ethically
to be. He came to be what he always vitally was, by what
I have called a process of moral redintegration. He moved
by his history to a supernal world that he moved in by his
nature. We have that divine Son, by whose agency the
world of souls was made, not now creating another soul for
his purpose, but himself becoming such a soul. Surely, as
I have said, if he had it in him to make souls in the divine
image it was in him to become one. On the one side we
have a personality, originally existing under those
spiritual and discarnate conditions (for which our indi-
vidualist ideas of person are so inadequate and misleading)
— we have that personality taking the form and con-
ditions of a corporeal life, in order to be the arena and the
organ of God's revelation and man's redemption. (You
may observe that what we are dealing with is not a contrast

* By what theologians used to call an apotelesma in the Son.

•f I ask leave to use the word mobility to express that uncaused self-
contained vitaUty, that changeless change, in God which is the ground of
the manward movement of which I speak.

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 339

of finite and infinite natures, but of corporeal and dis-
carnate spirituality or personality.) And, on the other
side, we have him growing in this corporeal personality,
this increate but creaturely life. We have his eternal
person living under the conditions of corporeal personality ;
we have his divine mobility, therefore, translated into
human growth. We have together within one historic hfe
the gradual descent and the growing ascent, by a moral
process in each case. We have them on a world scale,
an eternal scale, the scale and manner of spiritual being
in so far as experience tells us of spiritual being. And we
have them in the unity of one historic person, to show
that, however inadequate earthly personality is to
heavenly, they are not incompatible, and they are capable
of the supreme mutual act of love and grace. In the
person of Christ we have the crisis and sacrament of
divine and human love. Do not let us speak here of
impossible contradictions in logic. Let us rather
remember here again that the reconciliation of such
rational antinomies as God's sovereignty and man's
freedom only takes [)lace in the unity of one active
person which has erjiial need of both for full personal
effect. § § §

Christ thus embodies the two movements of spiritual
reality in which man and God meet. Such move-
ments are at bottom acts. For the world is not so
much the abode of God as the act of God ; and man's
function in the world is not so much to settle immanently
into it. even into its growth, as to overcome it, subdue it,
and find himself for a transcendently active God in it.
In either case the movement is a vast act, and the goal is
a personal communion of acts. On either side the
personality is put into a dual act and consummated there.

340 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

So nuich must be allowed to the idea of immanence;
which is a very fertile idea if it is construed ethically as
action, and not ontologically as mere presence or mere
movement ; if it is viewed as the personal action within
the world of a Person who needs other persons and their
free acts for the communion which in Christ He found
absolute and eternal.

Creation is only maintained by the standing act of the
one God in his grace ; who is, therefore, duly answered
only by a whole devoted life as the standing act of man
in his faith. God is active in his work as its incessant cre-
ator, just as in His kingdom He is incessant redeemer ; and
man, too, subsists in action, and becomes what his action
makes him ; and he attains the kingdom by the constant
act of faith which integrates him into the act of grace.
Life, history, at its highest may be figured as a wire
traversed in opposite directions by these two great
spiritual currents, movements or acts.

§ § §

Let us mark still more carefully their co-existence in

Christ.

First, we have man's movement to God, or man's action
on God, either in the way of aspiration and prayer, or in the
way of acquiring from God moral personality.

It should here be remembered that human personality
is not a ready-made thing, but it has to grow by moral
exercise, and chiefly, in the kingdom of God, by prayer.
The living soul has to grow into moral personality. And
this should not be ignored in connection with the moral
psjchology of Christ. He no more than we came into
the world with a completed personality — which would be
not so much a miracle but a magic and a prodigy.

What he brought with him (if some repetition be

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self •Fulfilment of Christ 341

pardoned in a series of lectures) was such a soul as was
bound morally (and not by a fated necessity) to grow,
under his life's vocation, to the personality that was the
complete and final revelation of God, the agent of man's
redemption, and the locus of man's communion with
God. A soul of Godhead is the necessary postulate of
the redeeming personality ; it is the necessary foundation
for the growth of that personality ; and it is the necessary
condition of the finality of his work. It was a personality
that differed from all others by finding its growth to lie
in the unaided and sinless appropriation of that which it
already was. The potuit non peccare rests (but in no fated
or mechanical way) on the non potuit peccare. The ground
of his inability to sin did not lie in the immunity, and
almost necessity, of a nature or rank, but in the moral
entail, the moral reverberation, of his great, initial, and
inclusive act eternal in the heavens. His renunciations
on earth had behind them all the power of that com-
pendious renunciation by which he came to earth ; even
as his earthly acts of individual forgiveness, before lie
came to the universal forgiveness of Calvary, had behind
them that cross which he took up when the Lamb was slain
before the foundation of the world. His relation to God
was immediate from the first, and perfect; but that did
not give him any immunity from the moral law that we
must earn our greatest legacies, and appropriate by toil
and conflict our best gifts. We have to serve ourselves,
heirs to the greatness of our fathers. Non potuit peccare,
nevertheless. The intimacy of his connection with
Humanity was in that respect but qualified. Yet to his own
experience the moral conflict was entirely real, because
his self-emptying included an oblivion of that impossibility
of sin. As consciousness arose he 'was unwittingly pro-

342 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

tected from those deflections incident to inexperience
which would have damaged his moral judgment and
development when maturity came. And this was only
possible if he had, to begin with, a unique, central, and
powerful relation to the being of God apart from his own
earthly decisions. So that his growth was growth in
what he was, and not simply to what he might be. It was
not acquiring what he had not, but appropriating and
realising what he had. It was coming to his own unique
self. I have already said that I am alive to the criticism
to which such a position has been exposed, in that it
seems to take him out of a real moral conflict like our
own. And the answer, you have noted, is three-fold.
First, that our Redeemer must save us by his difference
from us, however the salvation get home by his parity
with us. He saves because he is God and not man.
Second, the reality of his conflict is secured by his
kenotic ignorance of his inability to sin. And third, his
unique relation to God was a relation to a free God and
not to a mechanical or physical fate, or to an invincible
bias to good.

§ § §
The second movement is God's movement to man.

In this connection we note, first, that God by his
nature does so move.

He is no Deistic God. His changeless nature is not
stock-stiff and apart. It has an absolute mobility. It
has in it the power and secret of all change, all out-going,
without going out of Himself. It is part of his self-
assertion as the absolute God that he should determine
Himself into communicating Himself. He moves, he was
not moved, to give Himself in revelation to man. But
was man, then, eternal in God, if in His gift to man He

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 343

do not go out of Himself in this act ? That cannot be ;
for man is His creature and the creature is not eternal.
But He went out always to His increate Son, in whom
and through whom all creation is and all Humanity ; in
and through whom alone we have the revelation and
actual gift of Himself ; who was coming, and not merely
prophesied, in the Old Testament, and in a less degree
in other faiths.

Second, He moves to save.

The coming of Christ in the long course of history is
the coming of God the Redeemer. Man's hunger for
deliverance is the greatest movement in all the soul's life
except one — God's passion to save, and his ceaseless
action in saving. It is here alone that we grasp God's
real presence and rest on it for ever. Valuable as
speculative versions of the Incarnation may be, we only
really have it and believe in it when we sit inside it, by
the saving action which sets us in Christ, and assures us
of the incredible fact that we are included by God's
strange grace in the same love wherewith he loves his
only begotten Son. We are sure of the Incarnation only
as those who taste the benefit of Christ's death in union
with him.

§ § §
What we have in Christ, therefore, is more than the
co-existence of two natures, or even their interpene-
tration. We have within this single increate person the
mutual involution of the two personal acts or movements
supreme in spiritual being, the one distinctive of man,
the" other distinctive of God; the one actively productive
from the side of Eternal God, the other actively receptive
from the side of growing man ; the one being the pointing,
in a corporeal person, of God's long action in entering

344 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

history, the other the pointing of man's moral growth in
the growing appropriation by Jesus of his divine content
as he becomes a fuller organ for God's full action on
man. The two supreme movements of spiritual being,
redemption and religion, are revealed as being so personal
that they can take harmonious, complete, and final effect
within one historic person, increate but corporeal.

We seem, viewing it in this light, to have something
that comes nearer to our experience, something we can
verify, and something, therefore, that is of more religious
value to us, than if we speak too much about a con-
junction of natures. That is not within our experience;
and therein it shares with such theories as a metaphysical
Trinity, or the adjustment of mercy and justice in God,
a certain spiritual impotence as it works to its results.

§ § §
When we set to consider the nature of God's union

with man in Christ we must give proper effect to each
side. In the first place nothing must be done to imperil
the absoluteness, the freedom, of God, His creative
initiative on grounds entirely within Himself. Accord-
ingly, the union in a corporeal Christ can only be an
exalted form of God's relation to those finite con-
ditions which underlay the existence of a created world,
and made it at the same time a finished world. That is
to say, it was a relation that had its roots in Eternity, a
relation within the absolute God, an immanence of the
world in the Transcendent, of the corporeal personality
in the spiritual.

But, in the second place, nothing must be done to
impair the reality of human life, the conditions of its
finitude, the necessity of growth within the course of
time. It does not begin as a finished article. It begins

xii.J The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment oj Christ 345

with certain possibilities, with a destiny engrained in
the protoplast ; but it only passes from a destiny into a
perfection through a career.

But, having given due effect to each side, how can
we have those apparent contradictions united in one
historic personality — absolute God and relative man,
absolute finality and growing attainment, absolute Grace
and growth in Grace, the victory won and yet the victory
to be won, the Kingdom come and the Kingdom coming ?
How are we to adjust the contradiction between the
absolute and the evolutionary in this concrete and crucial
case ? On the threshold of such inquiry let me remind
you once more that it is only in the alogical unity of a
person for whose action and growth they are necessary
that we find the harmony of several antinomies that defy
rational adjustment.

§ § §
We may take a step by remembering the form in which
the union is expressed. It is not in a monumental person
but in an active, not in a quiescent personality, statuesque
and ideal, but in one who exists in a vast movement and
is consummated in a crucial act. The union means that
this act or movement is twofold. In a sense, but in
no monistic sense, we have one nature, in two modes of
action; for moral reality must be in heaven what it is on
earth. It is a polar movement, the reconciliation of
two directions, two tendencies, and not the fusion of
two quantities, and certainly not of two forces. It
is wills that are concerned ; and wills are not forces so
much as elective and directive powers over forces. If
will be a force, it is a force that differs from all
others in choosing them, aiming them, coordinating,
and concentrating them. It lays the guns, so to say.

346 The Person and Place of Jesiis Christ [lect.

As the union of wills we have in Christ, therefore, the
union of two moral movements or directions, and not
merely of two forces or things; and we have their reconcilia-
tion and not merely their confluence, their mutual living
involution and not simply their inert conjunction. Much
that may seem obscure would vanish if we could but
cease to think in terms of material substance or force,
however fine, and learn to think in terms of personal
subjects and their kind of union ; if our minds gave up
handling quantities in these high matters and took up
kinds. It is the long and engrained habit of thinking in
masses or entities that makes so unfamiliar and dark the
higher habit of thinking in acts.

§ § §
And the next step we take is to note that it is a union

whose object is above all religious. It is not to provide
us with a scheme of things, or a ground of ethic. It is to
save. It is to restore. It is to restore the soul's com-
munion with God. It is to regain true religion by a new
birth. The nature of the union must be given us by the
nature of the purpose to be served and the work to be
done. The canon for the Incarnation, I have said, is
soteriological. It is the work of Christ that gives us the
key to the nature of Christ. It is the experience of faith
in his work that alone opens to us the person and the
deity of Christ as the creator of the new life with God.
And difference of experience here, the difference between
saving and sympathetic faith, covers a difference in the
type of religion, which a few generations always reveal as
really another religion. What we have to ask about
Christ then, is this, what account of him is demanded by
that work, that new creation of us, that real bringing of
us to God, not simply in nearness but in likeness ? We

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 347

are to think about Christ whatever is required to
explain the most certain thing in the soul's experience —
namely, that he has given it the new life of God and
mercy, and saved it from the old life of guilt, self, and
the world. We ask what is required in one who not only
opens communications but restores to such as we are real
and complete communion with God, one who does not
pass us on but keeps us in himself, to keep us in God ?
What is required in one who is himself our reconciliation
and our holiness before God ; one who is God's holiness
in human form ; who unites the receptivity which is
religion with the creativeness which is revelation ; in
whom revelation and religion are completely one on the
whole historic scale ? The union of God and man in
Christ was of the nature required by that saving work,
and not by the idea of a paragon Godman. It is the
union in one kenotic person of God's distinctive action
and man's. We have God as a Trinity, i.e. as a personal
God who, without going out of Himself, can move,
love, communicate, in a perfectly spontaneous way, with-
out being moved by any power outside, who has in His
holy self both the ground and object of his outgoing love.
And we have man as a person, but as a creaturely person,
with a twofold disposition — first, to receive rather than to
create, and second by this receptivity to grow as a person,
from the living soul in which he begins, to its own latent
quality and destiny. Is it quite impossible* to unite in

* Here let us once more remember that, when we speak of the possible
or impossible, we arc not appealing to the licence of a psychology merely
scientific or phenomenal, but to a sympathetic and spiritual psychology ;
to a psychology which comes not by the detached observation of
religion as a historic fact, but either experiences religion in that per-
sonal and mystic feature which makes it faith, or at least pursues with
sympathetic imagination the spiritual process of those who are the classics
of tne evangelical exjierience as the summit of religion. Troeltsch is
perhaps the greatest of f»ur authorities on the psychology of religion ;
and he has done valuable service in the stand he has made on this point.

348 The Person and Place of Jestis Christ [lect.

one person — not omnipotence and feebleness; that is
impossible — but the absolute outgoing love of God and
the perfect but growing reception of it by man ? Is it
impossible to have, in one saving man, perfect revelation
and perfect religion perfectly interpenetrating ? Is it
impossible to have, in one mighty person, salvation
already guaranteed and salvation in course of being
wrought ? Did he not himstlf preach of a kingdom that
was coming because it was come ? Is it impossible to
have in that person's very constitution a salvation which
is only worked out by his own appropriation of the deep
content of his own saving soul ? His was a soul framed
for saving, so to say, as the others were framed for being
saved ; and when he came to himself it was to a Saviour,
he came, as we come to ourselves as his saints. His
growth in grace was the history of the world's moral
crisis, it was, in the same act, the growth of our salva-
tion ; for the atoning cross was the principle and the
achievement of his whole moral life. But it was the
working out of a salvation which was already there, in
virtue of the great renunciation whereby the Creator of
souls came in fashion as a soul he made. In a sense, we
were saved by Christ before he was born ; and he was
born because we were thus saved. Could the agent of
creation in Godhead not appear among the persons he
created ? Could the Creator Son not become a creaturely
soul, however increate ?

§ § §
What we have, then, is this. The union of God and
man in Christ is so far like the Creation. On the one
side it is a finished work of God, on the other it is a
progressive work of man. It is a finished work of God
in so far as this; the exceptional, the increate person

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 349

of the historic Jesus, as the kenotic incarnation of
the eternal Son by his own act and movement, con-
tained the Godhead in its whole fulness of holy love.
So that that person by his holy constitution, whether
he knew it at every moment or not, guaranteed
the perfect consummation of salvation in the ever
perfect sinlessness of the Saviour. But the union has
another side — the appropriative ascent and the pro-
gressive deepening of the man Jesus in this sinless
life and holy work ; his enlarging sense of the work
to be done, his rising sense of the power to do it, and
his expanding sanctity in the doing of it. We may
speak of a progressive incarnation within his life, if we
give it a kenotic basis. He grew in the grace in which
he always was, and in the knowledge of it. As his
personal history enlarged and ripened by every experi-
ence, and as he was always found equal to each moral
crisis, the latent Godhead became more and more
mighty as his life's interior, and asserted itself with the
more power as the personality grew in depth and scope.
Every step he victoriously took into the dark and
hostile land was an ascending movement also of the
Godhead which was his base. This ascent into Hell
went on, from His temptation to His tomb, in gathering
power. Alongside his growing humiliation to the con-
ditions of evil moved his growing exaltation to holy
power. Alongside the Kenosis and its negations there
went a corresponding Plerosis, without which the
Kenosis is a one-sided idea. Er starb und wurde. The
more he laid down his personal life the more he gained
his divine soul. Thr; more his divine soul renounced his
immunities the more he acquired of glory. The more he
discarded his privilege the more he appropriated his

350 The Person and Place of Jeans Christ [lect.

dignity. The less he thought of prerogative the more he
grew in power. More and more, as he laid by what he
eternally was, he came to be what he began by being.
The eternal son learned by suffering the sonship he
had never forgotten. And this was the positive process
of the long act of our salvation. Our redemption was
the achieving also of his old incarnation. The growing
involution of those two movements of descent and ascent
was the procession also of the reconciliation of God and
the world. Then the consummation came, and it was
all secured where it could never be undone. But it must
be for ever unfolded for what it is, and not to what it
might be made to become.

Thus the sinless growth of Christ's character is in the
very act growth also of his objective achievement for us.
It is the moral process of man's salvation, and the gradual
act of God. Christ's perfect progress to perfection, his
finished style of achieving his finished work, is only
the obverse and detail of God's act of our redemption,
already absolute in His holy love and His holy Son. His
self-sanctification was ours also. Christ worked out
the Salvation he was. It was only in history and its
conditions that he could realise all that was superhistoric
within him. He was exercised unto the godliness he
brought with him. The deepening of his faithfulness
was the emergence of his deity. He was not acquiring
deity, he was unfolding it. And in his lowest limits his
divinest mastery shows.

§ § §
When we are asked, then, what we mean by the God-
head of Christ we may begin by disowning certain
things which we do not mean. We do not mean that
the whole Godhead and its omnipotence was packed, as

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self-Fulfilment of Christ 351

it were, into conditions of space and time in that historic
person (though the whole Godhead was involved in him
and his work). We do not mean that ** the baby Jesus
was the Lord of Hosts," except in some sense that would
take much explaining. We do not mean that Jesus
himself ever so felt. Nor need we mean that at ever)'
moment of his life he had an equal sense of what he
was. Nor do we even mean that at any moment of his
humiliation he necessarily had the full sense of all he
was. But we do mean that as the Eternal Son he was
the complete and final action of the holy and gracious
love of God our Saviour ; that his holy Humanity went
up always as an absolute satisfaction and joy "to God ;
that God saw in him the travail of His Own Soul and
was satisfied ; that in Christ's historic person God
offered himself in his saving fulness to and for mankind
with the omnipotence required for his saving work.

§ § §
And when we are asked what we mean by the manhood
of such a Christ, we do not mean some stalwart dignity
with which he faced and owned God in self-respecting
godliness. The "manliness of Christ," like his " bravery,"
is an unpleasant phrase. Nor do we mean an elemental
force and passion which linked the natural side of his
personality to the world with the fervour of a Titan's
blood — as if but for the grace of God he could have been
an antedated Mirabeau. We mean much more than his
intimate and sympathetic humanness. For the essence
of Humanity is conscience. It is man's moral relation to
a holy God. And Christ's manhood, therefore, consists
in the moral reality of his experience, his conflict, and his
growth. It means his true ethical personality growing in
an actual historic situation. It means that he counted in

352 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

the public of his age, and really inhabited its spiritual
milieu. It means that he filled a mighty place in the
social situation of his land and time, and that the
immediate reference of all he said and did was to that
situation, however vast, and even infinite, the total
horizon was, the total bearing of his action or speech.
And above all it means that his action arose ethically
out of what he was, that his carriage expressed his
soul, that his vocation rested on his position, that his
receptivity is the greatest human activity, that he was,
first and foremost, the ever receptive Son of the
holy Father, and that he only did the things which
were shown him of God. His manhood was in his
perfectly active receptivity. His subordination was no
inferiority. His obedience was his divinest achievement.
And out of that obedience grew his vast creative, com-
manding, and even coercive, effect upon the world. His
kingly rule is but the upper side of his filial sacrifice, of
the obedience which put him by man's side while he was
on God's. His human person was not the most
illustrious of the many spiritual and providential
personalities that had appeared on earth from God. It
was in its nature exceptional and miraculous. It was a
new departure — more above other men than the first
man was above the nature from which he rose ; yet as
truly of man as man is of nature. He was all men's
creator in a true man's life. And his identity with
Humanity lies not in prolonging, as it were, to the sky
the rarest matter of the race, but in his own voluntary
act of self-identification with it. His identity with man
lay in no mere continuity of substance, nor even in
participating in personality, but in his assumption of
man's conditions of personality, and his renunciation of

XII.] The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 353

God's. It lay in his active acceptance of the human
and sin-laden conditions of communion with God in such
victorious and sinless way as to make that communion
possible and real for every other personal soul. And
amid all that we recognise in him of human conditions
and human growth, even his growth in the consciousness
of what he was, we shall be most careful to note that any
growth in his sense of his Godhead was not the growth
or acquisition of that Godhead itself.

What man has in common with God, altogether, is
not the kind of identity which is claimed in various
theories of continuity and immanence. The immanence
of God is indeed the true unity of Creation ; but it is not
the principle of the communion of God and man. It is
too little ethical for that. Man's identity with God is
formally, personality ; and, materially, it is a mutual
spiritual act possible only to persons. It consists in the
personal nature, and especially the personal action, which
alone make communion possible. So much of parity
there is, else communion were impossible. On each side
is a spiritual person. But in the case of Christ, and in
view of his work to restore communion, the personality
was no created gift, but the Creator himself in a bodily
eclipse instead of heavenly glory. The soul's Redeemer
was the soul's Creator, divested of everything but the
holy love in which he created, and raised by the deep
and long renunciation to a power in which lies the
salvation for ever and ever of the whole created race and
world. Man is indeed incomparable with God, but
incompatible he is not. And in Christ the compatibility
becomes full communion. In Christ the living God is,
to the extent he lives, the giving God. In Christ we
were neither made nor saved to eke out some lack in

354 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

God, nor to meet some hunger in his being ; but of his
fulness have we all received. And we are here as the
fulness and overflow of his creative love, to his praise
and glory in our faith's receptive and sympathetic love.

God in Christ is the maker of his own revelation. It
was God himself that came to us in Christ ; it was
nothing about God, even about his eternal essence or
his excellent glory. It is God that is our salvation, and
not the truth about God. And what Christ came to do
was not to convince us even that God is love, but to be
with us and in us as the loving God forever and ever.
He came not to preach the living God but to be God our
life ; yes, not to preach even the loving God but to be the
love that God forever is.

In Mr. Glover's fine book recently published on The
Conflict of Religions within the Roman Empire (Methuen,
7s. 6d.) he has naturally much to say on the historic
figure and effect of Jesus Christ — so much that it involves
more beyond concerning his person that he does not say.
Mr. Glover gathers up his belief about Jesus in the
following compressed sentence. " Jesus of Nazareth
does stand in the centre of human history; he has
brought God and man into a new relation ; and he is the
personal concern of every one of us." That is really a
tremendous thing to be able to say, as the conclusion of
a true historian. It has the note if not the fulness of
the true Christian faith. And it offers a welcome contrast
to much of the religiosity of slashing litterateurs who
are iconoclasts destitute of the historic sense, as well as
of moral delicacy, and the inward light, and whose moral
ideal is not the loyal but the rebel. But it is a conclusion
that carries us farther than the writer goes, farther, of
course, than he may say he was entitled to go by the

XII.] The Plerosis or the SelJ-Fulfiltnent of Christ 355

scope and compass of his book. At any rate it carries
the mind into a region which we may call metaphysic or
not but which is certainly metempyric, and compels
conclusions much beyond those of moral aesthetic or
religious impressionism. It may be quite true that
Christianity was early captured by Greek and other
metaphysics, and that their bond remains upon Christian
thought to this day. It may be that some who take a
position as decided as Mr. Glover's towards Christ as
" One who brought God and man into a new relation,
and who is the personal concern of each one of us," are
yet unable to use with entire heartiness the language
of the current creeds about the conditions in Christ's
person which underlie such a function and place. But
what is the real explanation of that capture of Chris-
tianity by the metaphysic of the early centuries ? Is it
not here, that the work of Christ, the position of Christ
— his work and place as Mr. Glover states it, his
redeeming, reconciling work as the early Church ex-
perienced it— that these are not intelligible to faith's own
tliought without some metaphysic. A metaphysic of
some kind is bound up with a Christ of this kind.
Without some metaphysic you have not a base for that
mystic adoration of Christ which is so much more than
divine ethic, and which a whole class of churches has
lost. It is impossible to believe in one who changed
the whole relation between the race and God without a
metaphysic of the relation between that one and God.
It is impossible to think of Christ as the personal concern
of every person without a relation between his person
and every other which it is not an absurdity to conceive
in the theological way which makes Christ the agent of
their creation. Such a relation between Christ and other

356 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect.

men carries us, as soon as we reflect and ask about it, into
a Christ supra-historic, supra-human, and premundane.
Some metaphysic of personality is inevitable— except to
such minds as have a native nescience, a positive endow-
ment as negative poles in all that region. Only it must
not be a metaphysic of mere thought, brought up to faith
and imposed on it — injected as it were into its tissue
as a preservative which hardens it, or, if not hardening
it, then soaking it in an inspissated gloom. It must be
a metaphysic of faith itself. It must be some form of the
post-kantian metaphysic of ethic ; a metaphysic of the
ethic which culminates in God's supreme moral act of
redemption and in man's supreme moral act of faith.
It is on such lines that a modern Christology must
be shaped — slowly as the rebuilding may come. A faith in
metaphysic is one thing, and the metaphysic of faith is
another. The former dominated too much the theology
and the religion of the past ; to the latter belongs the
future. It belongs to the metaphysic which is demanded
by the psychology of the distinctive experience of faith.
It is only the Christ of the reconciled conscience that
promises us a Messiah of the intelligible world. It is only
the Christ of the New Creation that can be the Christ of
a complete Weltanschauung, and wear the crown of a new
world wherein dwelleth the righteousness of a holy God.

§ § §
I hope, in these too compressed and tense but not
unmeaning words of mine, that the Lord in some
measure has been transfigured before us. I hope the
atmosphere has been luminous even if every thought
is not lucid, and that it has been good to be here even
if not knowing all we said. The glory of the Lord
is something more than lucid when it breaks out upon

XII.] The PUrosis or the Self-Fulfilment of Christ 357

waiting, watching, praying, bemazed men. And there
is laid upon us, as we go down from the Mount, the
command of silence in the form of an incapacity for
due speech. We cannot see for the glory of that light,
and what we do see is as yet beyond a man to utter.
Still I trust we have felt some of the depth of that
Glory which with unveiled faces we shall one day
behold, and rejoicing in it shall be made like it. Let
us, as we descend, go down with a secret which we
cannot perhaps expound but which we cherish, and smile
to each other like silent lovers in a crowd, and thus in a
true Church of faith-adepts overcome the world. Let
us go down to know that there is nothing in all the
raging valley — neither the devilry of the world nor the
impotence of the Church — that can destroy our con-
fidence, quench our power, or derange our peace. Let
us go down to know that the meanest or the most
terrible things of life now move beneath the eternal
mastery and triumphant composure of an almighty
Saviour and a final salvation which is assured in
heavenly places in Jesus Christ our Lord.

§ § §
And now may he who so emptied himself that he was
filled with all the fulness of God dwell fully in us ; may
he raise, rule, and perfect us in all holiness; to the end
that, bowing before him with every knee both in heaven
and upon earth, and ever more calling Him Holy, Holy,
Holy Lord, we may be, in Him, to the praise and glory
of the Father's Grace Who made us acceptable in the
Eternal S(;n, world without end. Amen.

B B

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

Los Angeles

This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

stU3^l^^ ^

«

OCT 22 195?^

AUG 2 ^ ^51551

RFCTJlD-ffpT

APR 2 5 1962.

1

REC:
ID

APRi ■"

J;^t

AFK

mi •'. n

l^dU

HWiunnt

Perm L9-100m-9,'52(A3105)444

•^\ RFGin^j-H [IBRARY FACILITY

AA 000 618 724 9