02. The Threefold Approach to the Person of Christ
CHAPTER II THE THREEFOLD APPROACH TO THE PERSON OF CHRIST
EMERSON said, “The Name of Jesus is not so much written as ploughed into the history of the world.” Men may differ about the application of His ideals to human affairs, or protest that modern society cannot be organized on His precepts. But those who insist that life’s well-being depends upon obedience to His teaching and example preponderate in numbers and influence. There is a general agreement that His standards are the criteria of ethical judgments. To understand the transformations wrought by the Personality of Jesus Christ, we should approach it from every possible angle. First, the documents which contain the sufficient accounts of His career should be studied. Second, the experiences of His steadfast disciples should be kept steadily in view. Third, the organic witness of the Christian Church to her Founder, expressed in her sacramental, theological and evangelizing energies, should be treated as genuine evidence. The exclusion of any one of these avenues of approach will result in inadequate conceptions of Him, and lead to erroneous evaluations of His mission. Scholars who rely solely upon the documents in the case face the frequent and sometimes incapacitating hazards of literary transmission. The limitations of authors, however venerable and gifted they may be, are reflected in their writings: a rule which obtains in sacred as well as secular literature. It is scarcely possible to obtain a sufficient knowledge of Julius Caesar from his Commentaries or other records concerning him, unless his concrete achievements in expanding and welding together the Roman Empire, and in shaping the political and social evolution of Western nations, are brought into the picture. Similarly those who endeavor to interpret Jesus exclusively by the canonical Gospels and Epistles omit a large amount of available material essential for their aim. The Psychological Reconstructionist, who at the moment occupies the center of the stage in Christological discussions, is as liable to miss his mark as the Traditionalist, the Apocalyptist, the Ethicist or the Skeptic. Each of the groups specified has its valuable contribution to make to an undertaking of the first magnitude. But no one of them singly and alone is competent to render a balanced and an allround conception of Jesus.
(1) The Traditionalist confines his apologetic to the verbal accuracy of the New Testament writings as a Divine revelation infallibly given and received. He further supposes they were thus transmitted under conditions which practically obliterated the individuality of their authors, reducing them to a state of mentality virtually identical with that of hypnosis. He claims in behalf of this literalism that the Evangelists and Apostles portrayed a Figure of godlike perfection, immaculate in every particular, and entirely free from the possibility of error. Moreover, as he regards them, these portrayals are final and complete, nothing can be added to or taken from them.
Such a claim is symptomatic of a defective intellectual attitude prolific of needless difficulties. Nineteen centuries of Christian history largely dominated by Jesus as the Christ, not only of the Church, but of the whole fabric of advanced society, are treated as though they were negligible in behalf of a theory of Holy Scripture which cannot be sustained. An isolated view of the Master is hereby permanently confined to certain categories which, however spacious and commanding, have since been supplemented by other categories derived from the actual experience of countless believers in the various ages of the Christian dispensation.
Consider, for instance, the admirable elucidations of this question in our own day of the late Professor William Newton Clarke, Professor H. R. Mackintosh, Principal Alfred E. Garvie and Professor Edwin Lewis. Their interpretations of Jesus follow the clue first suggested by August Dorner, who argued that the Incarnation was not a precipitate intervention of the Divine Nature in human life, but an ordered unveiling from God manward, and a correspondingly historical development from man Godward, of which Jesus is the nexus and consummation.
Professor Lloyd Morgan in his Gifford Lectures on Life, Mind and Spirit, projects the evolutionary hypothesis into the debate by his contention that although the life movement is, as science teaches, an unbroken continuity, any one of its emergents is more than the mere sum of its antecedents. General Jan Christian Smuts airs a. kindred concept in the philosophical hypothesis of Nature’s inherent developments which he terms Holism. Both these thinkers show traces of the influence of Bergson’s Creative Evolution, and furnish the intelligent Christian, cleric or layman, with fresh and impressive backgrounds for his belief in Jesus as the crown of God’s creative purpose in redemption. Their broad, constructive reasonings vindicate our instinctive rejection of what Professor Pringle-Pattison describes as “the lower Naturalism,” by which he means the prevalent habit of interpreting the superior forms and values of life by their historical origins alone. [1] In one notable respect Professor Morgan and General Smuts were anticipated by John Stuart Mill. The strange blend of Scotch common sense and Gallican political fervor which colored many of Mill’s utterances induced men of opposite parties and opinions to shelter their diversities under the protection of his great name. His Logic dealt in a masterly way with the problems of knowledge as these bear upon man’s connection with the physical universe. But the Utilitarian position he assumed exposed his reasonings to the damaging criticisms of Professor F. H. Bradley, whose Principles of Logic have made some of Mill’s arguments archaic. He asserted historical sociology cannot admit that in the world’s development a character could arise which had no relation to the past and no roots in existing conditions. Yet he conceded that Jesus was charged with “a special express and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth [1] Cf. The Idea of God, p. 88ff. and virtue.” [2] This quotation is taken from his familiar tribute to Christ as still left to us, whatever else may be taken away by rationalism’s forays upon faith. It is greatly to the credit of Mill that, though he began his intellectual life deeply alienated from the Christian revelation by his father’s insolent metaphysic, he nevertheless steadily rose to so noble an appreciation of its central Personality. And if some twentieth-century moralists and metaphysicians more clearly apprehend the significance of Jesus, it is because they stand on Mill’s shoulders.
Yet such attempts to prepare the way for “the larger Christ who is to be” are arbitrarily repudiated by the Traditionalist. He impeaches Christian and scientific thinkers alike when they suggest new methods which emphasize the immense differential the Master created in human development.
(2) The Apocalyptist is also confident that he can successfully plow his solitary furrow, and interpret our Lord according to the times [2] Cf. Essays on Religion, p. 255. in which He lived, with scrupulous regard for His actual historical matrix. He is at the poles from the Traditionalist in some important issues, yet at one with him in his reliance upon the written Gospels. So the Apocalyptist makes no concession to other interpretations of Christ’s life, which are dictated by the experience of its regenerating power. His standpoint moreover is entirely too subjective and therefore unscientific. He is committed to the idea that Jesus anticipated an imminent catastrophe, to be speedily succeeded by the inauguration of His personal sovereignty in a glorified world. This typically Semitic conception is advanced as the only motivating impulse of His teaching concerning the unfolding Kingdom of God, which is to spread as leaven in the meal through the oncoming ages, and grow from small beginnings, like the mustard seed, until it shall embrace the whole range of human life. Dean Inge well observes that much apocalyptism during the last century B.C. and the first century A.D. was “a compromise between the religion of rewards and punishments and the religion of spiritual deliverance.[3] In this respect it totally differed from the stress which our Lord’s prophetism laid upon the ever-increasing reign of the Divine righteousness in the far-reaching vistas of the future.
Harnack, in his well-known volume, The Essence of Christianity, reiterates the vital importance of Jesus as the prophet and teacher, and shows that His authority consisted in truths originative in Himself, independent of the contemporary theologies of His time. On the other hand Schweitzer, in The Quest of the Historical Jesus and Warschauer in The Historical Life of Christ, cling to the apocalyptic principle as the explanation of the Jesus of history. To be sure, He accepted the apocalyptic outlook of His day, but His real message was independent of it. He demanded a new life of fellowship with God, which contemplated progressive advance toward perfection for all mankind. It is therefore sheer assumption to regard Jesus as absorbed in a wholesale apocalyptism. This would constitute Him an [3] Outspoken Essays, First Series, p. 247. unbalanced and shortsighted propagandist of mediocre ideas and of a provincial cast of mind.
(3) The Ethicist starts out with the Apocalyptist, but they part company on the question of Christ’s moral teachings and whether these have more than temporary significance. The Ethicist maintains as against the Apocalyptist that the paternalistic theism of the Master’s Sermon on the Mount and the ethical imperatives of His discourses were not intended by Him to serve as a bridge between a world that was dying, and one about to be born in a cataclysmic upheaval. Such utterances possessed permanent values beyond the shock of every convulsive circumstance. But in acknowledging that Jesus reflected the apocalyptic ideas of His time, the Ethicist fails to distinguish between His intrinsic message concerning the universal Fatherhood of God, and the nationalistic outlook of contemporary Judaism. This failure betrays an obliviousness to the transcendent worth of our Lord as the superb religious genius, not only of His day, but of all time. His proclamation of an ideal social order to be perpetuated in individual piety, and by the establishment of national and international relations upon a purely spiritual basis, sanctions and amplifies the noblest prophecies of Israel’s seers and of the world’s best idealism.
(4) The Skeptic, keenly aware of the disparities and contradictions already noted, maintains that no trustworthy conception of Jesus is possible. Wrede, the German savant, avows that after years of patient investigation, he is unable to reproduce from the New Testanent’s material a consistent and verifiable presentation of the Master as a historic personality. The late Georg Brandes declared in his last book that Christ was a lovely myth, and thereby voiced the belief of other radical speculators, who view the Gospels as the work of a brilliant but unlicensed imagination. Their verdict is a virtual disavowal of historical veracity and an admission of intellectual and spiritual prejudice.
(5) The Psychologist is attracted by the sociological benefits of Christ’s message. But he denies on a priori grounds the validity of the Divine portrait contained in the Gospels and Epistles, and thus implicitly invalidates the results of historical criticism. Christianity stands or falls with the conviction that Jesus walked this earth as the Word made flesh, and that in Him the Everlasting One manifested Himself in Time for the salvation of the world.
It heralds an Evangel of universal Redemption which is inwoven with human history, and must therefore have been in some manner conditioned by it.[4] If no such person as Jesus existed historically, as the Psychologist avers, it is necessary to discover behind this mythical being the resplendent mind which enunciated the ideals attributed to Jesus. The attempt to do so, begun somewhat clumsily by the late President G. Stanley Hall, has since been furthered by more competent theological scholars. Georges Berguer, in Some Aspects of the Life of Jesus, and Professor Shirley J. Case, in his volume, Jesus, A New Biography, aim to portray Him as He appeared
[4] Cf. E. P. Scott: “The Limitations of the Historical Method” in Studtes in Early Christianity, edited by Shirley J. Case, p. 5. to those who knew Him face to face, with utmost fidelity to His social orientation.
According to this view, “the picture in the oldest (Christian) documents is an artist’s creation, to be reduced by removing features that owe their presence to the creative impulses of the author and his associates at the moment when the document was written,” and “to be supplemented by information wherever the data may be found...” Especially is it necessary to enlarge the author’s horizon by a more complete integration of Jesus within the distinctively Jewish setting where He had actually lived. [5] But such a portrait, as the books in question show, is a projection of subjective fancy, quite unlike the presentation of Him given in the Gospels and substantiated by the Church’s testimony during the centuries. ii The second avenue of approach to the Master is also needlessly exclusive and constricted. At the same time it is less concrete [5] Cf. Jesus: A New Biography, p. 6. than that constituted by the historic documents and the theories attached to their origin and interpretation. It consists of the constantly growing body of testimony to Jesus derived from experience. This testimony is valid in so far as it relates to the transforming effects of faith in Him upon individual and collective life and character. But it transgresses its legitimate boundaries when it is employed either to support or oppose the varying documentary problems and philosophies arising out of our various contacts with Jesus. Supreme within its own realm, experience, as Kant showed once and for always, is secondary beyond it, since it is liable to substitute emotion for reason and fancy for fact. For instance, the application in certain Evangelical schools of the experiential values of the Christian life to such issues as the authorship of the Book of Job, the first chapters of Genesis, or the Fourth Gospel, is unwarranted, prejudicial to reality, and productive of confusion. These and similar questions belong to historical criticism, and cannot be decided by states of feeling, however devout or sincere. The thrusting of pious emotionalism beyond the limits of credibility, in order to prevent the ravages of unbelief, has frequently reacted in the contrary direction.
It is doubtless true that what one has seen and felt may be ultimate for him and for those who feel as he does. Their experience may also be as widely diffused as it is beneficial. But it affords no sufficient basis for a stable religious authority on which to rest the entire Christian apologetic. Its deficiency is manifest in the crude but popular prejudice against an open discussion of faith’s essentials. It is disdainful of realities which do not serve its immediate ends. It insists that the unbiased examination of Christian documents and creeds shall either be relinquished as injurious to religion, or that the results of the inquiry shall agree with orthodoxy’s prepossessions. To declare that the historical criticism of Holy Scripture, or the doctrines derived there from, must be subjected to Christian experience, is scarcely less detrimental for a satisfactory approach to Jesus than is the neglect of Christian experience by historical criticism. In this, as in all else concerned, what is true is orthodox, and what is false is heterodox.
Moreover, truth consists in relations, hence the quest for it should be cooperative. We shall then find that the religion of Jesus is eternally self -verifying because it is a religion of the spirit, which does not require us to conform to tradition at any cost, nor to crucify intellectual integrity in order to save our soul’s beliefs. We cannot have a religion, however, without the Absolute in history. Yet how can we discern the Absolute without the reverent use of those mental processes which apprehend its presence? It is only by observing these fixed principles that the whole field of research can be covered, and made to yield further results to the scholar. In their primary aspects, Christian experience and Christian learning are different but not inconsistent. So far from being at odds, they jointly express life’s major realities, and meet in harmony above the din and dust of controversy. Those who enjoy the privileges of academic training, should be able to judge for themselves the values of sound learning allied with unfeigned faith, and productive of what St. Paul terms “reasonable worship.” Certainly no disciple of Jesus need quarrel with conscientious scholarship. Nor can the witness of the Spirit within man form a lasting alliance with the reactionary obscurantism which arbitrarily repudiates the results of scholarship. The reconstruction of the life of our Lord and of His relation to the life of the human family is rather to be achieved by the united efforts of belief and knowledge. Either without the other resembles a boatman rowing in circles because he persists in using one oar instead of two.
Here that true catholicity is implicated, which attains that supreme achievement of the heart and mind in unison a rational faith.
Christian annals do full justice to the paramount consequence of the believing man’s experience, while at the same time they rebuke the excesses due to a prostrated emotionalism which zealots mistake for genuine faith.
Patient investigation and dependable evidence had nothing to do with the ecstasy of the good bishop who, standing for the first time on Mount Sinai, solemnly ejaculated: “Now I know that Moses wrote the Pentateuch [7] The naive remark of a prince of the Church on the miracle of the sun standing still, that “there is a sense in which the sun could be said to both move and stand still at the same time,” further illustrates the delusions of this lopsided method of interpretation. If clergy of high station commit these offenses, no wonder that many are found in the rank and file less advantaged, who regard their peculiar state of mind as the sole proof of the Holy Spirit’s existence as the third person of the Godhead. Herein is also exhibited that total ignorance of the ardent intellectualism exercised in formulating the dogma of the Trinity by those great Cappadocian theologians, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory of Nazianzus and St. Basil of Csesarea.
[7] The evaluation of Jesus is too vital Cf. “The Evolution of the Doctrine of the Trinity” by E. E. Kirk in Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation, edited by A. E. J. Rawlinson, p. 159ff. a proceeding and one too intimately related to the elevation of mankind, to be left to unaided Christian experience. Indispensable as this factor is, it does not furnish an adequate method of approach to the totality of His regnant being.
Some who detect the perils of these narrower devices are confident that the institutional life of the Church can unveil the mystery of Christ’s nature. To her and her work in the world they turn for the solution of the problem. Does she not speak with the accents of an authority the duration and weight of which should silence objection? What are the theories of scholars and philosophers, erudite and able though they may be, compared with her undeviating witness to her Lord, in creed, sacrament and practice? Such a position would be far less vulnerable if the Church herself had not submitted to the guidance of enlightened saints and thinkers in the readaptation of her message to the changing enviroments of her career. They revealed an intimate acquaintance with pagan metaphysics and preexisting theological systems, and also an intellectual flexibility which rigid orthodoxy had heretofore forbidden. Even the Incarnation process was subjected to repeated theoretical explanations, and the doctrine of our Lord’s Person did not assume its present accepted form for many centuries. Indeed, the great St. Thomas Aquinas, patron saint of all Roman Catholic seminaries save those belonging to the Jesuit Order, was conspicuous as a bold and visioned innovator. He soared like an eagle above the level of his fellow Scholastics, and with rare prescience foresaw certain controlling principles of doctrinal formulas and interpretations which are now widely accepted by theologians of different denominations. It was this “Angelic Doctor” who incorporated in the creed of his Church Aristotle’s speculation that creation implied previous substances, and therefore was not the making of something out of nothing.” Other germinal ideas traceable to Greek
[7] In a recent Neo-scholastic volume, Cosmology, by Professor McWilliams of St. Louis University, the author criticizes St. Thomas at this very point. See the note in chapter IV on “The Beginning of the World in. Time.” thinkers are found in St. Thomas as well as in the writings of the Fathers and of the schoolmen.
Examples of the originative changes thus effected could be multiplied. But enough have been adduced to show that the advent of Origen, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas, Bradwardine and Calvin, to name but a few pivotal minds of the Patristic, Scholastic and Reformation periods, involved marked transitions in the belief and teaching of the Church. Of all organizations she can least afford to flout her own luminaries, or to forget that they shone in a borrowed light. It would be just as inconsistent for her to profess indifference to the higher sources from which they drew, while appraising to the full their excellence. Not then exclusively in the Church nor in the chosen remnant who charted her course during critical epochs, shall we discern the fuller significance of our Lord’s Person. The bypath of ecclesiastical authority offers strong inducements to those who are averse to the more arduous ways of constant and careful examination. Many Protestants exhibit a decided preference for dogmatic pronouncements, and are disposed to asperse the rights of the mind in matters of faith. Yet the purer Christianity which Protestantism professes to represent sprang from the exercise of those rights. It vindicated every believer’s priesthood and his consequent freedom of approach to God. Liberty of conscience and of inquiry are of the essence of the Reformed Churches.
Surely they cannot have it both ways, nor abrogate in the conclusion what they strenuously maintain in the premises. The Christian Ecclesia of the first two centuries authorized no system of creedal belief, with the exception of the Baptismal formula and its elaborations. 8 Yet in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Cardinal Newman contends that the dogmas Protestantism renounced as superfluous were in reality the latest forms of ideas which, though not found in Holy Scripture, were nevertheless incipient in its authors and in their readers.
8 Cf. Adolph Harnack: History of Dogma, Vol. II, p. 20ff.
This, he adds, was a salutary provision, since Christianity, as a universal religion, intended for all ages and all peoples, was bound to adapt itself to its mutable surroundings or cease to be. Its teachings were thus made capable of infinite applications harmonizing with the social demands upon them. The straitest Protestantism has not been exempt from this law of change and adaptation. The duty of public worship, the substitution of the Lord’s Day for the Sabbath of Israel, the rite of Infant Baptism, and the affirmation that the Bible is the religion of Protestantism, have little if any prominence in the New Testament. They were not directly due to the letter or sanction of the Sacred Oracles, but to the silent growth of ideas fostered by prolonged Christian consciousness.
Other questions, broached but not settled in Holy Scripture, were so real and imperative that they had to be met by permissible developments of the substance of Revelation. So much was this the case that it is impossible to escape the conclusion that post-Biblical evolutions of the teaching of Christianity are within the scope of its Divine Author’s providential purpose. The presence of need and supply in Nature offers convincing proof of design in material creation. In like manner, the breaches in the structure of the original creed of the Church made it probable that those growths which developed out of the truths surrounding that creed were intended to fill up its fissures. So argued the most gifted advocate, since Bossuet, of ecclesiastical authority and tradition as the media of approach to Christ. In summary, Newman contended that the Apostolic Church received the living seed of truth and the living nucleus of a coherent system of belief; to be developed by its own potentialities reacting upon society, beneath the direction of the Spirit of the Living God. 10 So far the Cardinal enlists consent; he was an evolutionist before Darwin appeared upon the scene, a pragmatist prior to Pragmatism. When, however, he endeavored to relate New Testa- 8 Cf. Alfred Loisy: The Gospel and the Church, p. 180ff.
10 Cf. the Author’s The Three Religious Leaders of Oxford, p. 653ff. ment teaching and Catholic doctrines as the root and the branches of the one tree, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations, his touch was not so sure. Disturbing elements of human error, frailty and misguidance interfered with the smooth operation of his striking theory. It could not stand alone. For Newman the answer to the query how Christian Communions equally confident of their Apostolic descent, yet separated from one another, were to be reconciled, was in an infallible authority. This relieves the situation for Catholics and Protestants alike who identify religious life with its doctrinal expressions.
There is no via media between an inerrant Church for the preservation of an inerrant dogmatic system, and the candid discussion of the dogma or of whatever it implicates.
Auguste Sabatier enforces the foregoing statement in his two works: Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion and Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit. He nevertheless comments that those who do not agree with the assumption on which the theory of infallibilism is based are not concerned for its sequences. But once the premise of an inerrant deposit of sacred truth is conceded, its inerrant interpretation is necessitated. All believers gratefully own the inexpressible service of the witness of the Church to the reality of Jesus and His Gospel. Yet that service is not so final as to forbid any who would seek further light upon their Faith’s present and future prospects. Nor does it bind every motion of their minds in slavish subjection to the past. The touchstone between the true and the false, the essential and the incidental in morals and religion, is not the sole right and property of tradition, nor of the Fathers, nor even of the Scriptures.
Objective authority goes behind these to its original source in Christ Himself. In the words of Bishop Lightfoot of Durham: “The center of Christian Faith is neither a creed nor a book, but a Person and a Life.” The spiritual administration of that authority is not a fixture in chronology nor a decree of antiquity. It is the Voice and Spirit of the Eternal speaking through all His diversified activities, and inseparable from the conscience of men and women. Our sense of its supremacy signifies the discernment of something higher than we are, making an imperious claim upon us. Though it mingles with our consciousness and is manifested through its intimations, it transcends our personality. We cannot interpret this sentiment within our personal limits, because it carries us resistlessly on to the recognition of Another than ourselves, even One who has moral affinity with us, but who is above and beyond us. “We encounter this Objective Authority without quitting our own being. The sanctities He enforces are not contingent on our consent. They are embedded in the eternal realities of righteousness. They hold their quality wherever found, and the revelation of their dominion for one mind is valid for all.”
It is apparent that any one method of approach to Jesus, when employed singly, 11 Cf. James Martineau’s Life and Letters. VoL II, p. 410, and his Essays and Reviews, Vol. I, p. 248. prevents a full apprehension of Him. It should not be less apparent that taken together they converge to a full-orbed view of his marvelous Being and its manifold significance. The Traditionalist, as we have seen, nullifies the operation of the Spirit of God in postBiblical eras, and confuses stagnancy with stability. The Apocalyptist assumes that Jesus was victimized by His dream of a millennial intervention, but since this view mistakes catastrophe for completion, it does not explain the stupendous hold of Jesus upon man’s subsequent faith and devotion. The Ethicist heartily magnifies His claims, yet he not only denies in Him the quality of character essential for their source and range of influence, but also places moral standards above the spiritual dynamic of which they are a derivative. The Skeptic submits his doubts to the dominion of an imagination impervious to the evidences of history. The Psychologist too often indulges a subjectivism scornful of objective realities.
He commences by heavily discounting the sacred documents themselves, yet proceeds to discover the actual mind of the Master in their discredited pages a method reminiscent of the rustic who severed from a tall tree the limb on which he himself was perched. The Experimentalist confines the infinite ways of God toward man within his own emotional states. The Authoritarian, whose hope is in an unwavering ecclesiastical uniformity, requires that our acquiescence shall he conditioned by our acceptance of its dogmatic deliverances. ill There is virtue in them all and they can be blended into an effective whole. The original documents reciprocate with the experiential life and institutional agencies of Christianity.
Each sustains and supplements the other, safeguarding them from the abuses generated by isolation and overemphasis. Individualists obsessed by the original literature about Jesus, yet immune to the mass of experience which responds to His Incarnation of God’s life in the world, are deficient in historical consciousness. The deficiency can be removed by a more comprehensive background for their faith. The Christ of St. Chrysostom, St. Francis, St. Theresa, St. Bernard; of John Bunyan, John Wesley, General Booth, Phillips Brooks, Dwight L. Moody, and Cardinal Mercier is or should be as real to a vital Christian consciousness as the Jesus of the Gospels, the “Word made flesh” of St. John, the Crucified and Risen Lord of St. Paul; and as much a datum for theological reflection as for religious nourishment. Again, there are scholars who assert the utmost freedom of speculation for themselves in their treatment of the original Evangel, and for their attempts to reconstruct what they claim is the true portrait of Jesus.
Yet wisdom’s impartiality forsakes them when they forbid a similar freedom to those who invoke for their better understanding of Him, not only the New Testament documents, but His entire course in the past as guaranteed by the Church and by the testimony of her children. Lawful liberty is the Christian heritage and prerogative. But however warmly eulogized, it has no jurisdiction in those expositions of Jesus, which reject the account of His royal progress through nineteen stirring centuries. On the other hand, ethereal Christological theories concerning the limitless relationships of Jesus to Deity and the cosmos should be articulated with historical and objective facts.
Professor H. R. Mackintosh clearly points out that “there will always be metaphysic in Christology, but it ought to be a metaphysic of the conscience, in which not substance but Holy Love is supreme.” He further says, “It does not seem possible to hold or vindicate the absoluteness of Christ as an intelligent conviction except by passing definitely into the domain of reasoned theory.” ia Neglect of these weighty advices has brought a scathing challenge on many well-meant utterances, not because they were untrue, but because they leaned toward the purely conjectural. We must not forget, however, that Divine mysteries necessitating spiritual discernment are at stake, and that there is in man a general reason 12 The Doctrine of the Person of Christ, p. 472ff. which takes a higher range than severely logical and scientific reason. Truths can be felt and can also be proved, for we know them not only by the reason, but by the intuitive sense which may be called the heart.
13 Hence Sacerdotalism, Sacramentarianism, Bibliolatry, and other latreia, or worship, are valuable channels for receiving and transmitting the manifold grace of God in Christ Jesus.
It is futile to urge, for instance, that the massive intellect and profound spirituality of the late Baron von Hugel were dedicated to the holiest of enterprises by means of sacramental efficacy alone. His Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, his book on Eternal Life, and his striking biography of Catherine of Siena indicate the diversified sources of his light and knowledge.
Truly Christ is mediated to such rich and communicating spirits in ways other than the Eucharist, which was nevertheless for the Baron the Eternal Offering. Anglo- Catholics 18 Cf. Boutroux’s last chapter in his Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy. also obtain from it the Divine help which they convey to the distressed, the poor and the lowly. Their social passion for the unprivileged should teach Evangelicals who cannot accept their doctrine of the Mass that our Anglo- Catholic brethren are one with their Lord in His warfare against sin and suffering.
Yet the same admirable traits distinguish the Society of Friends and the Salvation Army, which are non-sacramentarian organizations.
Wherever the tokens of fellowship with Jesus appear, there certain validating results follow.
It should be our aim to find in each approach to Him the agreements rather than the differences of believers. They assuredly share one life in their common Lord. Theirs is one struggle and one victory, and they are all members of the one Spiritual Body of which He is the Living Head.