What Kind of Christ Is the Hope of the World?

What Kind of Christ Is the Hope of the World?

WHAT KIND OF CHRIST IS
THE HOPE OF THE WORLD?
J. P. Sanders

Jesus Christ is the hope of the world. However, there are many who praise his life, laud his ethics, and love his character who deny his deity. In the very beginning it is fitting that we should say the Christ about whom we are speaking is the Christ of the New Testament, the Christ who was virgin born, who performed miracles, who was raised from the dead the third day, and who ascended to the right hand of the Father. All these things the Bible teaches concerning Jesus yet many modernists deny. The Christ of the modernist is a good man, a noble example, a sacrificing servant, even a master teacher, but not God revealed in human flesh. He becomes therefore a mere man regardless of how virtuous his life may have been. .
Moderpism came into existence as a result of the desire on the part of certain religious persons to apply the evolutionary hypothesis and the empirical method of modern science to the field of religious thinking. The essential elements of Christianity— that which makes it distinctly Christian—have been neglected for a religious liberalism which is distinctly unchristian.

Now to notice some of the particular features of modernism. In the first place, in modernism God no longer holds the central place. The central place in religion in the modernist way of thinking lies in the individual’s religious experience which is quite difficult often for him to define. God no longer is central, his word no longer is authority, and in a sense every man becomes a law unto himself. Confusion and chaos result.

What do they mean when they say that religious experience takes the central place? They simply mean that there is no authoritative standard by which all of us may measure our conduct and guide our lives, but the experience of every individual toward those things which he conceives to be spiritual constitutes the norm by which he orders his own life in a religious way. That, of course, is difficult to grasp and is not something that we can easily lay our hands on. The essential thmg about religion from this point of view is not obedience nor conformity to the will and the word of God, but, to use their language, it is the integration of one’s own personality. The gathering up of the far-flung bits of one’s emotions and feci mgs and the unifying of them toward a central purpose. That is what they mean by salvation. Consequently there is no need for redemption, there is no need for a saviour, there is no need for a sacrifice, there is no need for a death on the cross reconciling man to God. Sin, rather than being actual, is merely relative, and the fundamental structure of Christianity is gone. Only its ethical content remains. This the modernist recognizes as superior to other systerns of ethics the world has produced. He holds on to that but rejects every bit of supernaturalism that he finds in the Scriptures, the deity of Christ, his miracles, his bodily resurrection, his ascension to the right hand of the Father, and the incarnation of God himself in Christ. The Bible, consequently, is no longer the word of God to man. It is but the feeble attempt of mankind reaching up to a God which he conceives to be the determiner of his destiny. The Bible is simply an evolutionary product of human thinking. That’s what religion becomes according to modernism.

Humanism goes modernism one better. It feels that modernism is too conservative and takes even a more liberal point of view than modernism does. It no longer holds to the ethical ideals of the New Testament and of Jesus Christ as being supreme. Certain humanists rep-resent even the teaching of Jesus as being inadequate to modern life. I am not talking about the humanism of the renaissance, neither am I talking about the humanism of some of the literary writers of some of the past few decades, but of a distinctly religious humanism which belongs to the twentieth century and which is but an extreme form of modernism. The humanist believes with the modernist that the essential feature of religion lies not in conformity to the will of God but in the integiation of the human per-sonality. But he, differs from the modernist in many respects. He denies that there is any such thing as Providence in the world. Consequently there can be no value in prayer and certainly no answer to prayer, even though sometimes the psycological value is admitted. The humanist does not believe that the existence of the woild requires a great and infallible intelligence and personality, such as the Bible represents God possessing. Everything is necessitated, no purpose directing it, and with no “far off divine event” toward which the world is working. Religion is a mere human affair and most humanists deny the necessity of believing m the immortality of the soul.

I do not believe that the Hope of the world lies in the Christ of modernism nor the religion of humanism. It is our purpose during this discussion to present the Christ of the New Testament who is the. hope of the world.

I. First of all, the Christ of the New Testament was virgin born.
The modernists ask why no more material is presented in the New Testament concerning' the virgin birth if it is such a cardinal doctrine in Christianity. Mention is made only in Matthew, chapter one and Luke, chapter three. The modernists believe that it could not have been of great importance. Let us see. While mentioned directly only by these two, many other writers show that they were acquainted with it and assumed it in the foundation of their work. Mark began his gospel with the ministry of our Lord. The infancy records, therefore, were purposely left out. Yet he begins by referring to Jesus as the Son of God. In no place does Mark call Jesus the son of Joseph, but always the son of Mary. The prologue to John’s gospel shows conclusively that John was acquainted with and agreed with the doctrine of the virgin birth. “The word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, even as the glory of the only begotten of the Father.” John clearly presents both the pre-exristence of Christ as well as the absence of earthly fatherhood.

Paul also knew of the virgin birth of Christ although he nowhere directly mentions it. When he speaks, of the birth of Christ he says, “God sent forth his Son born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). “God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3). “Being made in the likeness of men” (Php_2:7). Paul never mentions Jesus as belonging purely to the category of mankind. Concerning all men he says,'“There is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22-23). Yet in reference to Christ he says, Christ himself “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Not only then in Matthew and Luke but in the other gospels and all the way through the New Testament the virgin birth of Jesus Christ is assumed.

Harry Emerson Fosdick refers to the virgin birth as a biological miracle, our modern minds cannot accept. He is faced, therefore, with the problem of explaining a sinless life on the part of a human person. A. B. Bruce one time said, “A sinless man is as much a miracle in the moral world as a virgin birth in the physical world.” It is no more difficult to assume one than the other. The modernist assumes that the story of the virgin birth was created in the same way that such stories were created in the literature of other religions. They point to the fact that in Buddhism and other religions of the East such stories are prevalent. Careful examination, however, will reveal that the virgin birth of Jesus Christ is in a class by itself. The births revealed in the mythologies of pagan religions were really not virgin births at all. Buddha’s father was supposed to be a God who appeared in the form of a white elephant. The mythical father of Augustus was Apollo, who appeared in the form of a snake. The mythical father of Alexander was Ammon, who also appeared as a huge serpent. There is absolutely no parallel between these stories and the story revealed in the Scriptures. All of them are vile adulteries of beastial rela-tionships compared to the pure, chaste story of Chi ist, who was born of Mary. The virgin birth of Jesus is unique in that it was the subject of prophecy more than 700 years before he was born. Isaiah said, “Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). Matthew quoted this statement from Isaiah and applied it to Jesus, (Matthew 1:23). The virgin births in connection with the stories of pagan religious leaders were always invented many decades after the leader’s death. Nothing in the literature of the leader’s day, certainly nothing before his day, advocated the type of birth by which he came mto the world. It was only, in some instances, after hundreds of years had passed, that these stories were, assigned to these pagan characters. But 700 years before Jesus wvas born the pioph et of (tod told that he should be born in a virgin way. Not only do the Scriptures teach it, the very life of Jesus demands it. He was without sin, he spake and taught, as never man spake. Even his worst critics ascribe to him the highest moral excellence. From a human point of view it would be difficult to imagine that 2000 years ago the world reached a peak of perfection. Why has no one in all the intervening centuries been able to match the life of Christ. The power, beauty and perfection of his personality require a miraculous explanation. The virgin birth fits in perfectly with his sinless life and the story of the resur-rection in presenting a congruous wnole. Such a birth would naturally awaken a great expectancy, and in that expectancy we are not disappointed. All that he taught and said is evidence of how he was born. In spite of all this, however, there are many who ac-cept the moral miracle of Jesus’ sinlessness while re-jecting the physical miracle, which, according to the gospels, is a presupposition underly ing his sinless life. Since a sinless Christ is the only Kind of Christ who could be the proper object of faith and worship, it is not reasonable to cast out those unusual features in regard to his birth, life, and death, which provide the foundation and give meaning and significance to the type of life he lived. It is apparent at once to the careful student of the New Testament, that the early disciples and Jesus’ apostles regarded him as Lord. They did this even during his lifetime as well as following his resurrection, and were encouraged in ’t by Jesus himself. Entirely consistent with this point of view is the fact that Jesus was regarded as sinless by the apostles and the eariy disciples. Paul describes him >n a well- known verse as “him who knew no sin’’ (2 Corinthians 5:21). Some have supposed that the words found in Romans 3:3, “Made of the seed of David according to the flesh/’ refer to the fact that Jesus came into the world in the ordinary way. The expression, however, is auite recon cilable with the miraculous birth. In fact it is even possible to discover a positive allusion to Jesus’ virgin birth in this verse, since it merely refers to his descent according to the flesh, and recognizes the fact that there was another side to his nature which was not of human descent. After all things are properly considered, the only plausible thing to do is to accept the actual story concerning the birth of Jesus given in the account of Matthew and Luke. They present a worthy and an acceptable account of the beginning of a life which all disciples regarded as sinless. They embody the faith and the sinlessness of Jesus, in the form of a history of his birth from a virgin through the power of the Holy Spirit. This history is not the creation of the Christian’s faith, it is not a mere legendary expression of the belief that the Lord of the church was a man altogether free from moral taint and sin. But it is welcome as a worthy account of the birth of one who was the holy one of God, of the congruous starting point of a life that was free from sin. After all the scientific spirit in the name of science has no right to negative the possibility of the miracles happening. Always there have been men, versed both in science and in religion and of undisputed scholarship, who have held to the doctrine of the virgin birth. Those who represent it as a doctrine held only by the illiterate and the unscholarly are themselves uninformed on this important point. Dr. Orr of Edinborough, Dr. Sanday of Oxford, Sweet of Cambridge, and Dr. Robert Dick Wilson of Princeton, are all scholars of the first order who always re-tained their beliefs in this New Testament doctrine.

II. In a more general way let us now consider his miracles.
Jesus is represented on the pages of the New Testament as performing signs and wonders and many miracles. The religious world in general, and especially those of modernistic and humanistic leaning, have paid but little attention to the miracles of Jesus and have rarely used them as an indication of his divinity since the days of David Hume. Hume was one of the leading deists among the philosophers of the 18th century. Together with his dialogues on natural religion he wrote a tract on miracles. He held that since no one had witnessed a miracle that the evidence was completely against it. He doubted the character and the testimony of those who had produced the New Testament since they had recorded what he and no one else of his age had observed. But we might stop just here to ask the question, What is a miracle? No doubt any definition would be subject to certain limitations and criticisms. And yet in general we might say that “a miracle is an event making known to the senses the presence of a personal power above the human plane and working toward a moral end.” Any attitude toward life or reality involves the acceptance of certain assumptions. The Christian point of view involves the acceptance of certain assumptions which in no way would interfere with the acceptance of the miracles presented in the New Testament. Let us notice what some of thos.e assumptions are. First, a personal God who is good. God is not just a power or force, not just an attribute or an emotion, but a divine person, characterized by righteousness, goodness, and the highest moral and spiritual ideals. Second, there is a moral order. This moral order recognizes and is based on the will of a personal God. Third, into this moral order sin has been introduced as the result of man transgressing the law of Jehovah. Fourth, the moral and spiritual interests of the world are higher than physical interests. All except the grossest materialists would readily admit this. Fifth, miracles are, therefore, a part of the divine purpose to restore order to the moral and spiritual realm. Anyone who believes in a personal God and in the supremacy of the moral and spiritual order will not find it difficult on careful thought to believe that this personal God would perform what we know as a miracle for the purpose of restoring mankind to the plane where God would like to have him.

If it be objected by some that there are miracles in the sacred literature of the pagan religions, let us point out certain qualities that characterize Bible miracles and set them apart from all others. First, Bible miracles were never curiosity devices. They were always ethical in nature and had a moral end. Recall how Jesus refused to jump from the pinnacle of the temple for the purpose of attracting the curiosity seeker and winning applause from the multitude. In the second place, the Bible miracles served as a means of revelation. Through them God made known his i)ower and made known to the people the presence of his power in the person who was performing the miracle. The miracle was not an end in itself but a means to something higher and more spiritual. In the third place, the miracles presented in the Bible never offend the intellect. The miracles of pagan antiquity and even of the apocryphal gospel are full of offense to the refined mind. For example, in the apocryphal gospel Jesus is represented as a lad becoming angry at his playmates and turning them into donkeys. Upon another occasion when reprimanded by his father for making mud birds on the Sabbath day, he turned them all into live birds to the astonishment of his father. Such stories offend the intellect, lack moral and religious purpose, and are absolutely out of harmony with the entire character of our Saviour. The miracles of the Bible are of such character as to appeal to the intelligence. They are all supported by the highest quality of evidence in the presence of which it is much more reasonable to believe than to reject or to doubt.

III. In the third place, the Christ of the New Testament, who is the hope of the. world, arose from the dead.
Paul represents the resurrection of Jesus as a fact of most fundamental importance to Christianity. “If Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). The modernist maintains that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is of no importance, holds that it is the spirit of Jesus continuing to work in the world which is alone the subject of concern. Yet without the accentance of the resurrection of Jesus it is impossible to explain how Christianity could have got started on its marvelous world conquering career. To all who would give a purely natural account of the origin of Christianity it is incumbent upon them to explain the origin of the belief in the resurrection of Christ. This the modernist finds great diffuclty in doing and most of them simply refuse to face the problem. Of the few who have tried their hand at solving the problem, each has spent most of his time criticising his predecessors’ theory, so that the work of refuting their sceptical points of view is made an easier task. The facts concerning the resurrection story presented in the New Testament are these. First, Jesus died on the cross; second, he. was buried in the new tomb of Joseph of Aramathea; third, a guard of Roman soldiers was placed around the sepulchre; fourth, the grave was found empty; fifth, examination of the grave revealed that the body was gone; sixth, the various appearances of Jesus to his disciples during the period of forty days between his resurrection and ascension. These are historical facts abundantly supported with historical testimony—as adequately supported as any other facts of antiquity. The Bible explanation is that Jesus arose from the dead, his body came out of the tomb, and there is no other explanation that can explain these facts. The various sceptical hypotheses, that have been sug-gested to explain the resurrection of Jesus are as follows: First, that the whole affair was a matter of theft and falsehood, both on the part of Jesus and his friends and disciples. Second, that Jesus was never dead and revived after a temporary lapse of consciousness. Third, that the appearances, so called, were purely subjective, due to the excited minds of the disciples. Fourth, that the appearances were not purely subjective but had an objective cause which, however, was not the body of Jesus, but simply the glorified spirit of Jesus producing visions of himself for the comfort of his faithful ones. Fifth, that there were no appearances, but that the stories were only a strong way of speaking on the part of the disciples concerning the continued life of Jesus in the spirit. Sixth, that these stories are merely myths which were collected years later by his disciples.

All these hypotheses go on the assumption that there was something real to the disciples which demands an explanation. Yet there are none of them which ade-quately account for what happened. They do not account for the moral transformation of the disciples following this experience of witnessing the resurrected Christ. They do not account for the miraculous beginning and growth of Christianity so that the gospel covered the world within a generation. Each of them, with time, might be discussed and the various defects to each pointed out. Hume denied not only the resurrection but all miracles. He said that no one had witnessed them, but that just exactly what the New Testament said, that the disciples did. They saw the resurrected Jesus upon various occasions, at various times of the day, over a period of forty days duration. They not only saw him but their hands handled him, and their ears heard him. They were convinced that he was their Lord whom they had known, who was risen from the dead. All sceptical attempts to explain away the resurrection have failed. The physical resurrection remains. The revivification of the crucified body of Jesus is the foundation on which Christianity rests. Jesus is declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, (Romans 1:3). It is therefore the key to all the Christian religion. Believe it and all other miracles are easy. Deny it and all the others make no difference. And to deny it is to face the task of explaining the evidence that we have.

Without any hesitation we can say that the hope of the world lies in this Jesus, the Jesus who was born of the virgin Mary, performed his works of miracles and signs and wonders, died on the cross, who was buried in Joseph’s tomb, and who came forth to a new life of glory, honor, and immortality. The Christ of scepticism, who lacks all of these attributes, cannot prove sufficient to the task of morally transforming the lives of men and women. Lazarus in his grave needed more than an ideal. He needed a power to recall his spirit from the hadean world that it might reinhabit his body to come forth out of the tomb. We, today, need more than an ideal, more than a human Jesus. We need a sin bearing redeemer, a sacrifice for sin which has been made possible through the death of the Son of God. We, who were dead in our trespasses and sins, have needed the redemptive power of Jesus’ blood. Because he was the Son of God appointed to this task, because he was without sin himself, he could tread the winepress of his sorrow alone, and come forth more powerful than Sam-- son when he carried away the gates of Gaza, marching in the greatness of his strength, mighty to save. He could say, therefore, I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive forevermore. In such a Jesus we rest our faith as the hope of the world.