01. The Christ of Christian Tradition

CHAPTER I THE CHRIST OF CHRISTIAN TRADITION No issue before the human mind to-day is fraught with greater importance than a correct apprehension of the significance of Jesus. He has always compelled the reverent attention of reflective and serious people. Their response to His supreme religious genius demonstrates how deeply it has absorbed the variant multitudes who have expressed their consciousness of Him in speech, in literature, in art, in architecture, and chiefly in their efforts to emulate His example and to do His will. The historic theological controversies waged around His person and mission manifest the eagerness of the disputants rightly to understand the purpose of His being. Our ambiguous era is preoccupied with a multiplicity of perplexing problems. But none of them is more challenging in nature or vital in result than the answer to that old inquiry: “What think ye of Christ?”

Scholars who do anything, however imperfect, toward establishing a larger, clearer vision of Him, help to satisfy the world’s sorest need. Saints whose fellowship with Him penetrates behind learned opinions and intellectual attitudes perceive Him superior to changing categories and forms of thought, and their experience illuminates the discussion.

Every sincere approach to Jesus is more or less contributory to the general welfare. His revelation of the invisible God has in it the opulence of true life. His consciousness of the All Father was supplemented by His familiarity with the world of the here and now. His standards of man’s ethical and spiritual relationship to the seen and unseen worlds necessitate the consideration not only of philosophy and theology, but of science and psychology, of politics and economics. His teaching and the elements it introduced or sanctioned bear on the totality of human existence here and hereafter. Nor can what He authorized be ignored or violated without jeopardizing that existence. It is therefore gratifying to observe that an increasing number of men and women are convinced that civilization’s beneficial progress must be more directly swayed by the motives and the principles of Jesus.

Amid the volcanic upheavals and driftings of time He remains the watershed of faith for Christians, and for many non-Christians who accept the spiritual order. Whatever came before Him predicted Him; all that followed Him proceeded afresh from Him. He is the Lord of the House of Life, and the Friend and Lover of its occupants. His compassionate regard for sentient creation made His sacrificial service a delight. “He went about doing good not with a sense of duty, but with that sense of peace that comes to any creature in the fulfilment of its being.” [1] The vision of truth and its beauty has been vouchsafed to [1] William Ellery Leonard: The Poet of Galilee, p. 34. devout and gifted souls in every age. But the choicest spirits among them only approximated its wider ranges. Jesus is the sole exception. In Him “there shines more of the unexplored and mysterious goodness of this universe, and in Him there is more promise of that unimaginable blessedness that may sometime flood the world, than in any other. Through Him we make better contacts with that which lifts the values of human life to the highest level.” [2] The majority believe in Him, not on metaphysical or psychological but on experimental grounds. Yet their experience is far from being exclusively subjective. It originates in the individual, to be tested and confirmed by the consentient testimony of the Christian centuries, and of the Church as God’s most characteristic creation in Christianity. Such a combination checks the vagaries of emotionalism and tones down the extravagances of fanaticism. It enlists the support of substantiated facts; blends the ideal with the real, and [2] Henry N. Wieman: The Wrestle of Religion with Truth, p. 127. corroborates its claims by the unbiased results of historical investigation. The problem of relating faith to history is always with us. Lessing was doubtless correct in his assertion that “contingent truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” This judgment was evoked, however, by the emphasis of eighteenth-century apologetics upon miracles as a convincing evidence of the credibility of Christianity. But the prevalent theology of to-day is disposed to agree with Bergson that intuition rather than reason is the creative faculty of our highest knowledge. Faith also is reason in its loftiest mood; a spiritual determination based on loyalty to conscience and the law of right, and not upon ratiocination. [3] From this viewpoint religious beliefs are not entirely dependent upon alleged historical events any more than upon dogmatic declarations, though both have their place and meaning as secondary lines of proof. The time has certainly passed, if it ever was, in [3] Cf. D. M. Baillie: Faith in God and Its Christian Consummation, p. 231 ff. which the oldest Christian literature could be treated as a tissue of forgeries and deceptions. For scientific inquiry it was an episode, “in which,” to quote Harnack, “much was learnt and after which much must be forgotten.” The general position and particular details of that literature may be accepted as trustworthy. But it is through personality, whether human or divine, as the gateway of all revelation, that we possess and exercise the faith that matters. In His personality Jesus offers us the manifestation of God, not by a series of impressive truths concerning Deity, but by the far more compelling instrumentality of His own actual being and character, which originated in His total consciousness of oneness with the Father. In this respect Jesus was “the pioneer and perfection of faith,” [4] who as “the Supreme Believer” realized in Himself the fulfillment of the twofold quest of God after man and

[4] Hebrews 12:2. The Bible text used in this book is taken from the American Standard Edition of the Revised Bible, copyright 1901, by Thomas Nelson & Sons, and is used by permission. of man after God. Hence the unique significance of Christianity is found, not in its enunciation of the twin verities of Divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood, but in the incarnation of those verities in the person of our Lord. Here we confront the Eternal One, and the believer in a Christlike God finds in Christ a climax and a theme, a motive and a spirit, which reveal God’s deepest nature. In other words, God is in Christ, as He is not elsewhere, reconciling the world to Himself. [5] We confess Jesus as the Word of the Father in the sense that He is the ultimate expression of His love and justice as the Redeeming God. To be sure, He is the Jesus of history, and not merely a symbolical idealization. The theory of the Christ myth is a plausible explanation which defies the specific data of the Gospels, and resorts to sophisticated speculations, under the cover of the curious pretension prevalent among ultra liberals that they investigate without prejudice. Their conclusions, which belong to the developments of the [5] Cf. Francis J. McConnell: The Christlike God, p. 135.

Rationalist Movement from 1830 to the present day, are now looked upon as fundamentally wrong, even by radical critics. Further, Jesus is the Christ of faith in the profound sense that He has been received by successive generations of believers as the Revealer of spiritual perfection, and the sole Mediator between God and man. Their witness is both subjectively mystical and objectively historical. Whether we take counsel with the New Testament or heed the voice of Christian history, the outcome is the same. It is that the influence of Jesus, which for nineteen centuries has molded and guided the worthwhile life of mankind, has not been generated by a phantom projected by religious rapture into the realm of imagination, but by a dynamic personality of exhaustless power. The Gospels and Epistles are a record of extraordinary spiritual contacts and interpretations which derive from Him. The experiences they relate have been measurably repeated in the Church, ubique, semper et alt omnibus.

It is conceded that the conceptions of the Apostolic writers have to be modernized because they are conveyed in by-gone tongues, and “are entangled with traditions and philosophies which have grown strange to us. How can we recover them in their inner significance?

What do they mean when we try to express them in those forms of thought which are most vital for us?” [6] The same difficulty holds in reference to the Christian concepts of nearly every period. But this will not dismay those who realize the formidable barriers inherent in language as the medium of ideas. These barriers yield to the processes of linguistics, the methods of logic, and the application of psychological factors. Obscure or outworn formulae cannot conceal the identical experiences of the Divine life, which underlie the vast variations of human thought and speech. We are also justified in appealing to the creeds, provided we treat them as statements of the faith of their respective periods, without the final authority which is Christ’s alone. They bear

[6] E. P. Scott: “The Limitations of the Historical Method” in Studies in Early Christianity, edited by Shirley J. Case, p. 17. the marks of theological and philosophical controversies, some of which are recurrent, while others have sunk below the level of curiosity. The question they at least suggest, and which all previous Christian belief and history emphasize, is whether the Christ who was the guiding star of those creeds is the Illuminant of our own age. Does He still lead us on the altar stairs that slope through darkness up to God? Can He make Himself known to our generation, as the all-sufficient Savior, and the Lord of good life?

II.

Several preliminary considerations merit attention. Let us agree with Aristotle that man is a political animal, whose communal existence is indispensable to his complete self-realization.

Let us further agree that history’s latest phases, which stress the economic factor as the governing force of social movements, have in them moral elements deserving approval. Yet the individual deludes himself who dreams that any social or political Utopia would end man’s aspirations, or appease his hunger for the things of the Spirit. However well contrived and ordered, such a temporal paradise could not silence the soul’s insurgent questionings, nor solve its hardest problems, nor engage its superior functions. Despite the ameliorating drift of earthly circumstances, there is still a huge hiatus in human life, which provokes skepticism, discontent, and the sense of wasted energies. These agitations are quite as conspicuous among leisured and cultured groups as among the industrious, the ignorant, or the poor. Despite their affluence or destitution they look before and after, and sigh for what is not. The satiety of wealth and the world’s wearying honors chafe their owners no less than the deprivations and embarrassments of poverty afflict the unprivileged multitudes. If the rejuvenated social estate so many desiderate to-day were theirs to-morrow, they would discern beyond its equities and adjustments the more spacious horizons which excite fresh longings and bolder experiments. And this for the reason, as Principal John Caird said in the temper of the best idealism, that the human soul is the seat of a potential infinitude, by virtue of which it finds a limit only to be inspired to transcend it.

There is another fixed quality of human nature which remains changeless amid ceaseless change. It monopolizes all ranks and conditions: princes and peoples, literates and illiterates, capitalists and industrialists. It is that quality which compels man to estimate his own life: the self-security which Spinoza said should proceed sub specie eternitatis. This inquisition makes him aware that he is a pilgrim of the infinite, a seemingly weak yet mysteriously mighty being; apparently at the mercy of Nature’s ruthless and gigantic forces, yet forever beyond their governance. It is the fascinating secret of our kind that its spiritual possibilities transcend its sensory endowments.

Man may have many fetters, but he can always be unbound at the center from which things are perceived and appraised. Invincible alliances with “the powers of the world to come,” and wholesale commitments to whatever they shall determine for him, are his possessions by the grace of God. His imagination constructs an ethereal universe which transcends his actual surroundings. These, charm they never so wisely, cannot dissipate his fears, nor ease the doubts that dim his prospects, nor stay the lashings of his violated conscience, nor dominate the promptings of his will or the impulses of his heart. Hence he is by nature religious, and can no more help being so than he can help being a social and political being.

Here, where two worlds meet in man, often antagonistically, Jesus enters the situation to transform it. The differences already mentioned, which He introduced elsewhere in society and its organizations, are traceable to the one supreme and controlling difference which He established in human relations with the Unseen. Whatever we conceive of God, the race, the moral order, the universe, or of its ultimate purpose, has a rationale, of which for His followers Jesus is the norm. Those who feel obligated to account for His intervention in a systematic world, which tolerates no haphazard events and connects all that is with preexistent causes, must face the fact that in such a uniform and ordered world Jesus has historically appeared. Account for His coming as we may, its reality is registered in the Christianity which owes to Him its origin and direction. Admitting for the moment the naturalistic explanation that he was simply a member of the human race, and as much its product as any other member of that race, what follows? The fact that, notwithstanding all drawbacks, the normal course of things proved equal to His production: a sequence which frustrates fatalistic verdicts imbued with prevalent pessimism upon that race. How can we despair of a humanity which brought God’s Hero to birth at Bethlehem?

Those who maintain that the young Jew who came to hear John the Baptist, and convinced him that He was the promised Messiah, was the Son of God in a singular and supreme sense, assert, in harmony with the New Testament Scriptures, that this Joshua (a name of which Jesus, meaning “Jehovah saves,” is the Greek form) broke into our realm from the Infinite Beyond. He was not an emergent from within humanity, but its Creator’s supreme self -manifestation of Himself to His offspring.

Contrary to common opinion, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive, and their inconsistency is apparent rather than real.

They find their reconciliation in the personality of our Lord. His character warrants our faith in the actual operation of the supernatural within His strange eventful history. It shows the development of the natural into the spiritual order. It is so charged with ethical and spiritual authority as to become the means of a Divine regeneration in multitudes. [7] According to Sophocles, “Nature’s dice are always loaded.” In this particular instance they revolutionized man’s religious fortunes. So whether Jesus sprang from the racial stock with which He identified Himself as the Son of Man, or from the very heart of the Eternal God as His Only Begotten Son, makes little practical difference so far as His salvatory significance for mankind is concerned. In either case its spirit- [7 ] Cf. George Galloway: Religion and Modern Thought, p. 382. ual renewal and its destiny are centered in Him alone. He is the best that can be of our flesh and blood, and His being reveals limitless potentialities for good in man. No world to which He belongs can be placed under sentence of death. We are justified in entertaining the liveliest expectations for its moral renewal, and in asserting that even those estimates of His origin which are reckoned heterodox flatly contradict the impersonal, mechanical and purposeless theories of current materialism. In Him resistless redemptive agencies have appropriated our earthly existence as their realm, wherein, sooner or later, the Spirit of the Christ shall reign. He has become, as St. Paul averred, “the First-born among many brethren.” [8]

“But if, as the Church teaches, He was God’s actual and unique gift of Himself to humanity, then Christ is forever the revelation of Him who sent Him forth. Apart from this revelation, the Deity as conceived by us is not intelligible, since the attributes we associate with [8] Cf. H. Wildon Carr: The Unique Status of Man, p. 17ff. His nature have their sole warrant in the human order. Here then are two conceptions of His person. If we accept the “natural” theory, it still remains that the life of which He was the consummate flower is a life in which truth, grace and holiness are immanent. If we accept the supernatural theory, the transcendent Deity has unveiled Himself to mankind once and for all in Jesus. Yet whether we accept Him as immanent or transcendent, or as both combined, He is none the less the fountain of that knowledge of God, in which stands our eternal life and freedom.

Again, if God is the Father Jesus represented Him to be, our whole outlook on life is transfigured. The very “winds are henceforth voices; never a senseless gust.” All things are ours since we are Christ’s, and He is God’s. The speech which to the unbelieving mind is sound and fury, signifying nothing, to the mind which is “in Christ” becomes a celestial language. Why is this? Because the human mind is necessarily interpretative, and this function obtains its noblest results when exercised upon the person, the work and the teachings of Jesus. To enlarge upon these claims would be to attempt a close analysis of His entire career, and this is not within my purpose even were it within my power. Yet by every indication we can gather, He knew His own vocation. At His baptism He was anointed for His great mission, and understood that henceforth He was to fulfill in Himself all those lines of thought which He had learned in the Scriptures, including “all righteousness,” as His sinless soul conceived that righteousness. [9]

Since man’s religious nature is his outstanding characteristic, which he shares with nothing else in creation, whoever is supreme for him in the moral and spiritual realm enjoys a permanent supremacy. This is so true of Jesus in our experience, that what He transmits about God and His designs is stamped with finality. Its essentials may be condensed into His single phrase, Holy Father a revelatory saying religion will never outgrow and in which deeper [9] Cf. Arthur C. Headlam: The Life and Teaching of Jesus the Christ, p. ISOff. and richer meanings are ever discernible. It was the fruit of His filial relation with God and of God’s paternal relation with Him. The name Father He constantly and exclusively gives to God; the name Son He assumes Himself. His private devotions, His public ministries, His high priestly prayer, His deeds, discourses and parables clearly show that the sustaining principle of our Lord’s life and being and likewise the gist of His message arose out of His absorbent consciousness of the Eternal Father of all spirits. [10] His followers repeat the words of the ancient creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.” But who among them has even faintly realized the magnitudes of love and justice implicit in this historic confession? Did it have actual control as it has moral authority, it would indeed reinterpret Heaven and Earth for us. If the Creator has toward us none but parental aims, the human situation despite its perplexing difficulties [10] Cf. Auguste Sabatier: Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 148f. is rife with everlasting benevolence. That Jesus thus believed and taught is indisputable. But before men can visualize what arises out of and is involved in that belief and teaching, they must share the temper and the attitude of Jesus. He exemplified His measureless faith and devotion by His meek submission to sacrificial travail because it was the Father’s will.

Dante’s moving line sums up the sequel: In la sua volentade e nostra pace, “In His Will is our peace.”

Further, some progress is here made in reading the riddle of the universe. The Fatherhood of God, as the source of Christ’s life and message, elucidates the Creator’s ways in creation. This is desirable, especially in Christian apologetics, for nothing has so hampered the faith of countless sincere souls as the order of Nature. The history of intelligent skepticism is largely the history of adverse judgments on the course of events. From Lucretius to Darwin, it has been reckoned an act of credulity to contend that the natural order is the ordination of an Almighty Father. Yet if such is not the case, the guidance of Jesus collapses at a crucial stage where men have always craved direction. On the other hand, the acceptance of Christ’s revelation of God necessitates the acceptance of that which is implicit in the revelation. The cosmos, notwithstanding its bewildering stupendousness and complexity, fulfills the majestic purposes of its Presiding Mind.

It neither hastes nor rests in its execution of His grand design: steadily pursuing its ageless course toward the goal of righteous and holy being, passing from life to more life, from peace to greater peace. Those who reject this interpretation remind us of the difficulties which it does not remove for them. Without doubt these are real, and likely to continue, since so long as the finite is impotent to grasp the infinite, many pressing questions cannot be answered in the present world. But what of the far greater difficulties involved in the skeptical position? It may be hard to believe what our Lord’s words imply concerning the natural order. It is certainly harder not to believe them. The souls which courageously make the venture are rewarded by an intellectual consistency and a moral steadfastness, which those who decline to make it cannot find in their negativism.

Finally, we here obtain light on the moral order. I am not unaware of the efforts that have been made to show that the ethical is no more than the customary, while the customary is simply that which experience has proved to be prudent and helpful. There is an echo of the Spencerian philosophy, demolished by Doctor B or den P. Bowne thirty years ago, in Professor William James’ assertion that “ ’the true’ is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ’the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” [11] One is reluctant to think that the professor meant all this quotation seems to imply. To reduce morality to expediency is admissible only by giving the latter term a far deeper ethical connotation than it ordinarily conveys. Mortals [11] Praffmatismi: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, p. 222. have often been guilty of flagrant crimes because they conceived these expedient. But if we say that Jesus went to the cross because it was more expedient for Him to endure than to avoid it, do we here illustrate an expediency according to Professor James’ theory? Quite otherwise. The natural thing for Jesus to do was to avoid the cross, but when He voluntarily embraced it, He showed that the natural and the moral are not identities, but that the natural is the setting for the exhibition, the cultivation and the achievement of the moral.

Here, in Keats’ words, an unfriendly environment becomes “the vale of soul making.”

If we see God in Christ and in man, surely we see all else in Him. The whole cosmic process is perceptible as something projected and sustained by the universal Father for “bringing many sons unto glory,” of whom Jesus Himself is the prototype. Why wonder then that Christlikeness has become the human ideal? What can we discover which is superior in thought or deed to His manner of life? In Him God imparts Himself to man in His selfrealizing paternity, and man surrenders himself to God in his self -realizing sonship. Religious certitude is accomplished “when these two terms, God and man, opposed to each other at the origin of conscious life, interpenetrate each other till they reach the moral unity of love, in which God becomes interior to man and lives in him, in which man becomes interior to God, and finds in Him the full expansion of his being. Christianity is therefore the absolute and final religion of mankind” [12] This is the main burden of what follows in the present discussion. The personal, social, political, industrial and cultural life of the world owes far more to Jesus Christ than to any other being who ever lived. But our concern is chiefly with the unspeakable difference Jesus originated in religion. He has given the race not only an adequate and satisfying idea of God, but also a conception of man which finds imperishable values in His personality, [12] Auguste Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 150f. His activities and His circumstances. He has shed the healing radiance of a Father’s ethical love on the sins and sorrows of the common lot.

He has taught all and sundry that beyond the horizons which hem us in there is “still more sea.” He has manifested in Himself the perfection of our spiritual nature, and thus become for believers the true and living way into the Holy of Holies. He has presented to the world that immortal type of character which presages the soul’s ultimate emancipation from iniquity and despair. The elect among the blessed, such as St. Paul and St. John, St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine, St. Francis and St. Theresa, Lancelot Andrewes and John Bunyan unitedly exalt in their experience that regenerating power of Jesus which is yet to be attained by those who love and obey Him. Abandonment to His will shall then transform the libertine; dismiss those specters of the mind which prevent confidence in sincere seekers after God; convert the mammonite into a philanthropist, and the victim of self -obsession, ambitious for place and power, into a willing servant of his fellows. In brief, everything man needs to garrison the citadel of his spiritual nature this Redeemer and Regenerator abundantly supplies. His compassion for the shepherdless ones; His charity for the outcast and the degraded; His sympathy with childhood’s innocence; His insight, searching the most remote crevices of the soul with the candle of the Lord, were not so much parts of a conscious program, as activities native to His divine being. Truly He “laid hold on the seed of Abraham,” and federalized in Himself the whole human family. Its efforts to escape His gracious sway succumbed to His genius for its apprehension.

Hence the question again: “What think ye of Christ?” Forget past speculations about Him. Forget the metaphysics of the confessional Creeds. Forget there ever were such valiant doctors and opponents as Nestorius, Apollinaris, Eutyches, Arius, Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria. Allow the great Fathers and the equally great Scholastics, who so ably interpreted Jesus for their own and after ages, to sink out of sight. Call a truce between the warring camps of Modernism and fundamentalism. Haul down their ragged banners, and clear the arena for the entrance of the Lord of us all. Take nothing but the palpable facts of this inquiry as found in the New Testament; in Christian history and experience; in the multiform agencies of the organized Church. What do these facts signify? No better answer can be found than that which was given in the earliest Christian literature; and has since been indorsed by numberless disciples of the Master, belonging to every tribe and nation. He is “the Head of the Body, the Church”: He is “the beginning, the first born from the dead; that in all things He might have the preeminence. For it was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell.” “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” He is “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” He is “the Word, who became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” [13] This is the Truth of and about Christ, which has done His work in the world, andfitransmitted His life to the sons of men. All helpful Christian thinking and doctrine owe their virtue to the concepts evoked by the influence of Jesus upon those who beheld His glory in the days of His flesh.

“In reverent adoration we turn our thoughts toward Him by whose side no other can stand, and with a conviction that we cannot escape, and which the ripening experience of life only serves to make stronger, we exclaim: Here is that Sonship that is ’coeternal and consubstantial with the Father.’ Here is that truth and grace, that love and holiness which are enshrined in the very heart of the Eternal Being. Here is the Light that lighteth every man coming into the world. Here is what men have ever groped for, and concerning which God has nowhere left Himself wholly without witness.

... Here is the promise and power of human [13] Colossians 1:18 f.; 2 Corinthians 5:19; Revelation 22:13; John 1:14. redemption the earnest that struggling and disrupted humanity shall finally become one Family, moved by One Spirit, and forever bearing One Name.” [14] [14] Edwin Lewis: Jesus Christ and the Human Quest, p. 346.