024. CHRIST NO MERE ETHICAL TEACHER

CHRIST NO MERE ETHICAL TEACHER

There is an insight of Christian love which rejects the conception of Christ as a merely ethical teacher, a teacher who made no claim to supernatural knowledge and power, and to this testimony of experts science must give heed. It is very plain that the Christ to whom recent theology bids us go back is not the Christ on whom the church has believed and who has wrought the transformations which have been witnessed in individual lives and in Christian history. It is not such a Christ as this to whom the penitent has looked for forgiveness and the sorrowing for comfort. It is not for such a Christ as this that the martyrs have laid down their lives. The insight of love has through all the ages recognized Christ as a miraculous and divine Saviour. Can that be a true theology which ignores the testimony of these centuries of Christian experience? Is it not more likely that the naive impressions of a two-eyed reason may be more trustworthy than the critical perceptions of a one-eyed intellect? I do not quarrel with efforts to bring incarnation and resurrection within the domain of a higher order. To say that "all’s love" does not prevent us from saying in the same breath that "all’s law." All I claim is that there is as much evidence of divine freedom as there is of human freedom; that nature does not prevent surprising and unique acts of God any more than it prevents surprising and unique acts of man; and that intellect enlightened by love cannot only recognize but defend the rationality of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, and of an atonement for the sins of men made by him who is the original author and the continuous upholder of their being. The Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament afford trustworthy evidence that these Christian convictions have a sound historical basis; are justified by the actual teachings and events of Jesus’ life; conform to the essential beliefs of the earliest followers of Christ. Of all our present Gospels, the Gospel according to Mark is acknowledged to represent most nearly the first Christian tradition. If Christ has been what the recent theology supposes, of what sort should we expect Mark’s Gospel to be? Surely it should consist mainly of an account of Jesus’ life; it should be devoid of miracle; it should be replete with moral teaching. But what are the facts? The Sermon on the Mount, the fullest statement of our Lord’s ethical instruction, is wholly lacking in Mark’s Gospel. Miracles are crowded into it so thickly that it is justly called the Gospel of the Wonder-worker. Instead of the life of Christ being the dominant thought, the reader gets the impression that Jesus is hurrying onward to his death, and that his death instead of his life is the work which he came to accomplish. If we are to determine what Christianity originally was by the testimony of the earliest Gospel, it would appear that its main characteristics were not our Lord’s holy life and ethical teaching, but rather his supernatural power and his atoning death.

If it be said that even Mark gives us more than the original gospel, and that we cannot absolutely rely on anything in him which is not also found in the other synoptics, I call attention to the fact that the briefer triple tradition, vouched for by all three evangelists, contains the narratives of the healing of the leper and the paralytic, the casting out of the Gadarene demons, the raising of Jairus’ daughter, the multiplying of the loaves, the walking on the sea, and the transfiguration. All three Gospels declare Christ’s power to forgive sins, his lordship over the Sabbath, his giving of his blood for his disciples. They predict his resurrection, his second coming, the eternal validity of his words, the final triumph of his kingdom. Here is dogma as well as miracle; in fact, the words deity and atonement are only the concrete statement of the impressions which these facts and utterances make upon us. Unless then the whole of this earliest study was fraud or delusion, to go back to Christ is to go back to a Being of supernatural power whose mission is not so much moral teaching as it is dying for men’s sins.