CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY WiLLARD FiSKE Endowment Cornell University Library BT201 .M15 1913 Doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ. oiin 3 1924 029 375 155 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029375155 (Tbe international XlbeologlcaL Xibrarg. PLANNED AND FOR YEARS EDITED BY The late Professor CHARLES A. BRIGGS, D.D., D.Litt., AND The late Principal STEWART D. F. SALMOND, D.D. THE DOCTRINE OF THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST By Professor H. R. MACKINTOSH, D.D. THE DOCTRmE OP THE PERSOIN' OF JESUS CHRIST By Professor H. K. MACKINTOSH, D.D. ....ERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY THE DOCTRINE OF THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST H. E. MACKINTOSH, D.Phil., D.D. PBOFBSSOR OF THEOLOGY, NEW OOLLEUH EOIKBUBOH EDINBURGH T. & T. CLAEK, 38 GEOEGE STEEET PRINTED IN ORRAT BRITAIN BV UOURISON AND QIBB LIMITED t. A T. CLARK, EDINBURGH NEW TOBK: CHARLES SOBISNER'S SOSS First Edittov .... Jvgust 1912 iJECOND Edition. . . . March 1913 Beprinted December 1914 July 1920 September 1923 ... .... January 1927 September 1931 March 1937 July 1945 February 1948 September 1951 The Rights of Translation and of Eeproduction are Reserved, 10 THE MEMORY OP (glorcus ©oie I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK PREFACE. It may not be unnecessary to inform the reader that the present book is designed chiefly as a student's manual, which, with a fair measure of completeness, should cover the whole field of Christology. This so far excuses two of its more prominent features : the large space given to historical narration, and a certain frequency of allusion to modern literature. My purpose was not simply to formu- late the results reached by a single mind — results, as I give fair warning, in no sense original or extraordinary — but also to furnish what might be considered a competent guide to the best recent discussion, in this country and Germany. If these pages should have helped any student to take his bearings in the world of Christological thought, or suggested fruitful lines of new inquiry, their object will have been fully achieved. Nothing in the book, it is probable, may seem so inde- fensible as the more or less speculative tone of the con- cluding chapters. Some, I fear, wiU judge that, all pro- testations notwithstanding, I have added one more to the vain attempts to explain in detail how God became, for our redemption, incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. I am conscious that a problem of method is indicated here on which opinions are widely divergent, and are likely to remain so. To abstain from all efforts to reach a con- structive synthesis of the data which faith apprehends would, as is known, have been in harmony with well-marked and ably championed tendencies of our time. I can only plead that, while it certainly " has not pleased God to save His Vlll PREFACE people by argument," it nevertheless does not seem poss- ible to vindicate the absoluteness of Christ as an intel- ligent conviction except by passing definitely into the domain of reasoned theory. It is not that Dogmatic starts where faith ends. It is ratlier that Dogmatic is called to fix in lucid conceptual forms the whole rich truth of which faith is sure. The revelation and self-sacrifice of God in Christ — which forms the very heart of the New Testament message — cannot really be presented to the mind without raising problems of an essentially speculative character. Hence there will always be metaphysic in theology, but it is the implicit metaphysic of faith, moving ever within the sphere of conscience. My sincere thanks are due to my friend and colleague, the Eev. Professor H. A. A. Kennedy, D.D., who has helped me to revise the proofs, and has guided me at many points by valuable counsel and suggestion. I am also indebted to the Editor of the Expositor for permission to use some portions of an article lately contributed to its pages. n. R. MACKINTOSH. New College, Edinbukgh, Octoher 1912, In the Second Edition I have made a few corrections, which do not affect the substance of argument or exposition. H. K. M. February 1918. CONTENTS. BOOK 1. CHRISTOLOGY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. INTKODUCTION. Main tyjios o( apostolio thought, 1. Motives leading to Christ- ology, 2. CHAPTER I. PAQI Chwst in the Synoptic Gospels ..... 6-35 The Synoptics as Gospels, not biographies, 5. The human portrait of Jesus, 9. Messiahship of Jesus, 14. Son of man, 19. Son of God, 25. The personal authority of Jesus, 31. Note on the Siiilessness of Jesus, 35-39. CHAPTEE n. Primitive Chkistian Belief ..... 39-48 Early speeches in Acts, 30. First Epistle of Peter, 44. CHAPTER III. The Cukistology of St. Paul ..... 49-77 Genesis of the Pauline Christology, 50. The glorified Lord, 62. Clirist and the Spirit, 57. The historic Christ, 62. The Son of God, 65. Pre-existence, 66. Cosmic activity of Christ, 69. Subordina- tion of Christ to God, 71. Advance of Paulinism on nrimitive Cliristian belief, 74. CHAPTER IV. Christology in the Epistle to the Hebrews . . 78-87 Christ as High Priest, 78. The human Jesus, 79. Sonship of Christ, 80. Pre-existence, 83. Subordination, 84. Comparison with Pauline view, 86. X CONTENTS CHAPTEK V. PAOH Christoloqt in the Apooalypsk .... 88-93 Messiauio symbolism, 88. Heavenly gloiy of Jesus, 89. Relation of Christ to God, 90. CHAPTER VI. The Johannine Chkistology ..... 94-121 Messianic interest, 94. Cliristologioal design, 95. Humanity of Jesus, 99. Son of God, 102. Pre-existence, 103. The risen glory, 106. Son of man, 108. Clirist-mysticism, 110. Simple modalism, 112. Teaching of the Prologue, 115. First Epistle of John, 120. BOOK II. HISTORY OF CHRISTOLOGICAL DOCTRINE. CHAPTER I. Christolosy in the StTB-ApcsTOLio Age . . . 122-139 Introduction, 122. The Apostolic Fathers, 127. Ignatius, 129. Gnostic Christology, 134. The Apostles' Creed, ISd. CHAPTER II. Beginnings of the Chkistological Dogma . . . 140-158 The Greek Apologists, 140. Irenseus, 144. Monarchianism, 147. Sabellius, 151. Tertullian, 154. CHAPTER III. The Ascendancy op the Logos Dooteine . . . 159-174 Noo-Platonism, 159. The Alexandrian Theologians : Clement, 161. Origen, 164. Correspondenoeof theDionysU, 170. Piul of Samosata, 171. CHAPTER IV. The Abian Contkoveesy ..... 175-195 The heresy of Arius, 176. The Nicene Creed, 179. Athanasius, 183. Marcellus of Anoyra, 189. Movements of Semi-Arianism, 191. The Cappadocian Divines, 192. CHAPTER y. CONTEOVERSIES AS TO THE FULL HUMANITY OF ChEIST . 19C-222 ApoUinarianism, 196. Nestorianism, 201. Cyril of Alexandria, 205. Eutychianism, 209. Dogmatic Epistle of Leo, 211. Council and Creed of Chalcedon, 212. Monophysite Controversy, 216. Monothelite Controversy, 219. John of Damascus, 222. CONTENTS XI CHAPTEB VL PAGE Latkb Chkistologt in the West . . . • '223-229 Augustine, 223. Spanish Adoptianisra, 225. Middle Ages, 226. Thomas Aquinas, 228. Duns Scotus, 229. CHAPTER VII. Chkistologt op the Refokmation Chubohes , . 230-246 Lnther, 230. Christology of the Lutheran Church, 237. Ecformed Christology, 242. Socinianism, 245. CHAPTER VIII. Chkistologt in the Nineteenth Century . . . 247-284 Theocentric and Anthropocentrio Interpretations, 247. Schleier- macher, 250. Hegel and his School, 256. Kenotio Theories, 264. Domer, 272. Christology in Britain and America, 276. Ritschl and the Eitschlians, 278. Modern Radical School, 281. BOOK III. THE RECONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT OF THE DOCTRINE. PART I. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. CHAPTER I. The Intelleotttal Need fok a Cheistologt . . 285-305 What Christianity is, 285. Objections to Christology, 286, Jesus as hero or genius, 287. Literal fidelity to Chalcedon impossible, 292. The doctrine of Two Natures, 294. The reconstruction of Christology, 299. Metaphysics in Christology, 302. CHAPTER II. Cheistoiogt and the HisTomc Christ , , . 306-320 Jesus the point of departure, 306. History and the Gospel, 307. Herrmann's view of the historic Christ, 315. The risen Lord, 317. CHAPTER in. Christ's Person in Relation to His Work . . . 321-844 Christ known through His saving influence, 321. His ethical supremacy, 325. His work of Atonement, 329. Union with Christ, 333. His revelation of the Father, 340. His work illumined by His person, 341. XU CONTENTS PART II. THE IMMEDIATE UTTERANCES OF FAITH. CHAPTER IV. PAGE Christ the Object of Faii'K ..... 345-362 The simplest starting-point, 345. Faith in Christ and faith in God, 345. Such faith central in New Testament, 349. Faith to be inter- rogated at its highest stage, 353. Jesus as merely Subject of faith, 353. History and an Absolute personality, 355. Forgiveness medi- ated through Jesus, 357. " Jesus-religion," 359. CHAPTER V. The Exalted Loud ...... 363-382 The Christ of faith a transcendent Person, 363. Did His influence cease at death ? 367. The resurrection a point of transition, 369. Christ as Giver of the Spirit, 373. His intercession, 376. Mysticism, 378. Sovereignty of Christ, 379. CHAPTER VI. The Pktvfect MANnooD of Ciikist .... 383-406 Docetism, 383. Jesus an individual man, 385. Yet universal, 391. Integrity of Christ's manhood, 394. Its sinless quality, 400. Sig- nificance of His humanity for faith, 404. CHAPTER VII. The Divinity of Christ ..... 407-426 Modes of approach, 407. Giving Christ the right predicate, 410. Godhead the ultimate ground of His sinlessness, 41 2. Of His unshared Sonship, 415. Of His risen Life, 418. Is "Godhead" the right word t 419. The incarnation as core of the Gospel, 424. PART III. THE TRANSCENDENT IMPLICATES OF FAITH. CHAPTER VIII. The Chkistian Idea of Incaknation .... 427-444 The transcendent problems of Christ's person, 427. Ethnic beliefs in incarnation, 428. Incarnation and Divine immanence, 431. Absolute immanence of God in Christ, 434. Incarnation and evolu- tion. 437. Incarnation remedial in purpose, 440. CHAPTER IX. Thjj Pre-existf.nce of the Son .... 445-462 rre-existence an inferential conception, 446. Objection to it on CONTENTS XUl PAGB grounds of history, 449. Objection on grounds of theory, 450. Ideal pre-existenco, 454. Difficulties of conception as ~ whole, 457. Ita religious value, 458. CHAPTER X. The Self-Limitation of God in Christ . . . 463-486 Recent Kenotio thought, 463. The basal principle or idea, 466. Data of problem, 469. Moralisation of categories, 472. Analogies in human life, 474. Transposition of attributes, 477. The self-reduced Life in history, 479. Limits of the present discussion, 482. Criticism made by Ritsohl, 485. Note on Dr. Sanday's Psychological Theory . . . 487-490 CHAPTER XI. The Self-Realisation of Chiiist .... 491-507 Development in the Incarnate person, 491. Stages in Christ's development, 493. Objections considered, 496. Mutual approach of God and man in history, 499. Moral correlation of Divine self-limita- tion and self-fulfilment, 504. The charge of inconceivability, 505. CHAPTER XII. Chkist and the Divine Tmunitt .... 508-52C Christianity a new form of monotheism, 508. Experimental idea of the Trinity in New Testament, 509. Economic view of the Trinity, 512. An immanent construction permissible, 515. Objection that this is to think God in abstraction, 515. Objection that the world id God's other, 519. Objection that an intra-divine duality means ditheism, 523. Conclusion, 526. Appendix, Jesus' Birth of a Virgin . . ■ . 527-534 INDKX , 63B ABBREVIATIONS. PCO. . . "Rastvngs' Dicticmary of Christ and the Gospels (\^^G-\'iO%). DO. . . . DogmengescMchte. EOT. . . ExiMsUor's Greek TestaTnent (ed. Sir W. R. Nicoll, 1897- 1910). IIDB. . Hastings' Zlidionary o/tt« BiW« (1898-1904). RE. . , . Heal-Encydopddie fur protest. Th^ologie u. Kirche^ (ed Hauck, 1896-1909). ZTK, , , Zeitsdvrift fiir Theologie wul Kircnt. THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST BOOK I. CHRISTOLOGY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. INTRODUCTION. It may be well to state clearly that in the sketch of New Tfstament Christology which follows, I have advisedly made no attempt to expound the numerous minor phase? nf opinion. On the contrary, my range has been confined somewhat severely to the main types of apostolic doctrine. These, we may compute, are six in number : tlie Synoptic, the primitive (which here includes 1 Peter), the Pauline, the types represented by the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse, and the Johannine. It is not assumed that all six types are totally independent of each other, but only that in a broad way they are capable of being distinguished. By the Synoptic type, in the enumeration just given, is denoted the mind of Jesus Himself as it may be gathered from the Synoptic Gospels ; with this explana- tion, the order of types may be taken also as approximately LiTEEATUBE on the New Testament Christology as a whole — The text- books on New Testament Theology by Baur, Feine, Holtzmann, Schlatter Stevens, Weinel, and B. Weiss ; Beyschlag, Die Christologie des Neuen Testaments, 1866 ; Denney, Jesiis and the Gospel, 1908 ; Granbery, Outline of New Testament Christology, 1 909 ; Shailer Mathews, The Messianic Hope in the New Testament, 1905; J. Weiss, Christus, die Anfange des Dogmas, 1909 (Eng. tr. 1911) ; Clemen, Beligionsgeschichtliche ErkV-rung des Neuen Testa- menis. 1909 : Rawhnson, The New Testament Doctrine of the Christ. 1926. I W THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST chronological. Nothing has been said about Christology in Deutero-Paulinism or in the less prominent Catholic Epistles (James, Jude, 2 Peter). These are of course matters which demand to be carefully investigated in their own time and place, but the aims of the present treatise, I felt, would be best attained by keeping to the main stream of Christological statement and reflection. That there is a main stream, that the authors of the New Testament are eventually one in their view of Christ, with a unity which is powerful enough to absorb and subdue their differences of interpretation, is not indeed to be lightheartedly assumed. But it is rendered ex- tremely probable by the simple experimental fact that the Church has always found it possible to nourish her faith in the Eedeemer from every part of the apostolic writings. Further, this natural presumption is vindicated by a closer scrutiny of the facts. Two certainties are shared in common by all New Testament writers : First, that the life and consciousness of Jesus was in form com- pletely human ; second, that this historic life, apprehended as instinct with the powers of redemption, is one with the life of God Himself. In Christ they find God personally present for our salvation from sin and death. Yet in spite or rather because of this basal agreement it is the more impressive to contemplate the sovereign freedom with which they surveyed Christ, telling what they saw in books which have been quite justly described as literature, not dogma. Each looked at Jesus with his own eyes ; each spoke out of his own mind ; and to force their words about Him into a mechanical and external harmony is simply to misconceive the genius of Christian faith. We may venture to determine the motives operating within the New Testament mind and leading its spokesmen to " christologise " in modes which transcend the theocratic ideas of Judaism. In the main, they appear to have been four in number.^ (1) Beading the Old Testament with Christian eyes, ' Cf. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte*, i. 92. CHRISTOLOGICAL MOTIVES 3 they felt that its revelation terminated in Jesus. His person, His deeds, His fate and subsequent victory were recognised as constituting a real and even a precise fulfil- ment of prophecy. From the days of the fathers God had foretold His advent and prepared His way. God had foreseen and pre-ordained Him, and in Him the Church, and had committed to Him the task of establishing the Divine Kingdom. How great then must this Man be, and how inevitable that minds like St. Paul should seek to express His greatness under the highest forms provided by first-century thought. (2) The characteristic Christian faith in Jesus' exaltation to a place of supramundane and universal power impelled to reflection those who held it. Their sense of His Lordship concerned the present and it concerned the future. It signified the joyous assurance that the Holy Spirit given by Him was powerfully energising in believers and begetting in them a tran- scendent life ; it signified also that He would come at last in glory, that in the final scene of all He would be revealed as central and omnipotent. This consciousness of the Spirit and this hope of the Parousia form the vital heart of the primitive Christology. But if Jesus is now so great, can He have reached this place by becoming ? Must not the antecedents of His career be such as harmonise with His present dignity ? (3) Thought was stimulated by the success of mission- ary enterprise. Apostolic men went out beyond the Jewish circle, and found everywhere that the Gospel made its own impression. With ever-increasing vividness it became clear that Jesus was for the whole world. His significance was as universal as the hunger for God and righteousness. He must therefore be defined in absolute and universal terms. (4) Finally, the witness of Jesus to Himself could not but quicken thought regarding His consciousness of a unique Sonship and the presuppositions on which it rested. The time came when searching questions were put by hearers 4 THK PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST of the Gospel respecting Jesus' right to faith, and Jewish monotheists could not decline the challenge. Just as little could they omit to attach fundamental importance to the Lord's own words concerning His relationship to God. These four kinds of impulse represent with tolerable completeness the religious forces by which the Christological activity of the fiirst generation was controlled and inspired. And in a real sense, though in different measures, each of the four still retains its old value. " The New Testament writers," it has been said, " did not think of Christology and of the Atonement without sufficient motives, and as long as their sense of debt to Christ survives, the motive for thinking on the same subjects, and surely in the main on the same lines, will survive also." ^ ' Deniiey, Jesus and the Gospel, 101 CHAPTER I. CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. Our point of view in this study of Jesus' personality, as depicted in the Synoptic Gospels/ is determined chiefly by two facts, each important in its own way. To begin with, we are interested more in convictions than in the LiTERATUEE — Soott, The Kingdom and the Messiah, 1911 ; Holtzmann, Uaa messianische Bewussisein Jesu, 1907 ; Porter, The Messages of tli' Apocalyptical Writers, 1905 ; Easton, Christ in the Gospels, 1930 ; Sanday, The Life of Christ in Recent Research, 1907 ; Dalman, Die Worte Jesu, 1898 (Eng. tr. 1902); Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 1908 {Eng. tr. 1 910) ; Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, 1 925 ; Loofs, Wer war Jesus Christus ? 1 922 ; Monnier, La mission historique de Jesus, 1908 ; Titius, Reich Gottes, 1895; Moffatt, Theology of the Gospels, 1912 ; Bultmann, Jesus, 1926. ' Jesus is presented from much the same point of view in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the hroad impression being identical (cf. our familiar phrase, ' ' the Jesus of the Synoptics"), though in each case a variation of light and shade is observable. Thus the standpoint of Mark is indicated by 1' : "The gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." He has a specific Christology ; Jesus was Son of God (i.e. one with God in nature) even while on earth, and is so addressed at the Baptism, the first recorded incident of His life. Mark draws Him as He appeared to contemporaries, living out the truth of Divine Sonship. There is no story of birth or infancy. While the general conception has close affinities with Paulinism and the Fourth Gospel (cf. J. Weiss, Das aelteste Evangelium, 42 ff.), the human limitations of this Divine personality are not forgotten — witness the report of His inability to do miglity works in Nazareth (6°). In Matthew, on the other hand, Jesus appears as the fulfilment of Old Testament hopes and Messianic predictions ; He is the Son of David and of Abraham. But though the true Christ of prophecy, with a special mission to Jews, He has heeu rejected by His own nation and has in consequence established a Ivingdom of all peoples. The name Immanuel (God-with-us) belongs to Him. Matthew strongly inclines to omit statements of Mark which might seera incongruous with a proper reverence for Jesus' person (see Allen's Commentary, xxxi tf. ), and gives prominence to our Lord's place as future Judge. Luke, while not obtruding a Christology (he resembles Q in this), seizeH every op]>ortuuity to acceutu.Tt.e tlie universality til .Ic„suh' mission. b THE PERSON OF JEStJS CHRIST mental processes by which they were attained. We wish to know what the writers of the first three Gospels believed concerning Jesus; it is for us a less urgent question how far we can ascertain the exact order in which the varied elements of this belief arose, or the influences under which it was formulated in words. That the Evangelists should have regarded Jesus as Messiah is obviously a fact of much greater significance than anything now discoverable as to the successive stages of their faith. Once we have made out their convictions, we are justified in pleading that the content of an idea must not be con- fused with its history, inasmuch as " things are what they are, not what they came from." Whatever the story of its genesis, these writers had gained a wonderful impres- sion of Jesus ; this impression they enshrined in books which now are in our hands ; and from those books we may catch that impression on our own minds without a too disturbing pre-occupation with matters of chronology or the affiliation of conceptions. But indeed — and this is the second decisive fact — the character of the Gospels is of a kind which makes chronological exactitude quite impossible. We cannot date any of the three with certainty, nor can we arrange their contents in a temporal order which commands any- thing like unanimous assent. To a considerable extent the investigation of the life of Jesus, in recent times, has been stultified by a radical error in method ; the error of supposing that the Gospels are biographies in the He is the Son of God, seeking all men ; hence His genealogy is traced not merely to Abraham, but to Adam. The evangelist's chief interest centres in His supernatural healing ministry. Both Matthew and Luke narrate the Virgin-birth, thus apparently referring Jesus' special Sonship to His birth from the Spirit. Q is an entity so hypothetical and nebulous that any attempt to draw out its Christology must be in a high degree precarious. Harnack makes an interesting contribution to the subject in his Sayings of Jesus, 233 ff., based, of course, on his special construction of Q. He finds that the com- piler of Q regarded Jesus as the Messiah, consecrated as Son of God at the Baptism ; also that he never calls our Lord A Kipws, but simply Jesus, or "the Christ." GOSPELS NOT BIOGRAPHIES 7 modern sense. It is true that biography involves much more than a precise system of dates based on careful inquiry into the relation of different episodes to each other, yet it is totally inconceivable apart from some such chronological framework. We have only to glance at the Synoptics to perceive that they have not been com- posed on this plan. Their purpose is simply to convey the impression of a great Personality, but they make no attempt to cover the entire life. The available sources of information are not subjected to an exact scrutiny, in the manner of a modern scientific historian ; nor are the person, experience, and beliefs of the central Figure exhibited as conditioned by the circumstances of His milieu. Details, whether of the career of Jesus, or of the modes in which the whole image of His person stamped itself on the minds of His disciples, are treated broadly, with the essential selective freedom of the preacher. They depict Jesus, in short, as any onlooker of goodwill might have watched Him in Palestine. Two things stand out boldly in their narrative — the portrait of Jesus as He lived in His familiar habit among men, His personality laden with Divine grace to the sinful ; and on the other hand, the believing response to this personal- ity more and more evoked in human souls. But in neither case can we fix the exact progress of events. The course alike of Jesus' self-revelation and of the disciples' adhesion to Him is only discernible in part. And yet it scarcely matters. The character and work of Jesus, in its unique redemptive significance, and the reflection of it gradually formed in the apostolic mind, may be more than sufficiently realised and interpreted by means of the evangelical memoirs we possess. This being so, we may justly put aside here most of the difficulties in the Gospel record which modern criticism has unearthed. The difficulties, or many of them, are there undeniably ; but their importance may easily be overestimated. It makes comparatively little difference in our view of Jesus, for example, whether the cleansing of 8 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST the Temple belongs to the commencement of His career or to its close. No one can be quite sure whether His public ministry lasted three years or one ; in either case our belief regarding the greatness of His person is the same. Similarly, we must not exaggerate the importance of the question how far the picture of Jesus furnished by the Synoptics has been substantially affected by later Christian experience. The possibility of this cannot be denied. But it is only upon the hypothesis that the Christian view of Jesus is mistaken that the incidence of this modifying force would form a legitimate subject of complaint. If in some transcendent way He was Son of God, those who believed in Him must have required a certain period of time to realise fully the magnitude of His person. When their eyes were opened, in consequence of the resurrection, what they beheld was no free and independent creation of religious fancy ; it was the deeper, eventual truth of facts now appreciated for the first time. Faith, in other words, did not incapacitate the evangelist? as narrators ; it showed them, rather, how infinitely the life of Jesus deserved narration. The impulse to select, to fling upon words or incidents a light answering to the later situation of the Church, is natural and intelligible ; what is not so is an impulse to deform or to fabricate. " Fidelity to the historical tradition," a sympathetic writer has said, " was undoubtedly the chief aim of the Synoptic writers. Their work may here and there bear traces of theological colouring, but their first interest was in the facts. Their part was not to interpret, but simply to record." ^ We assume, then, the substantial correctness of the Synoptic portrait. It appeals to the mind of the true seeker with self-evidencing and harmonious power. The writers have nothing of pose, of doctrinal inflexibility, of mis- timed literary artifice. Their subject has been given to them ; it would be against nature for them to take liberties with its essential meaning. Besides, the ' Professor E. F. Scott, The Fourth Gospel, 2. JESUS HUMAN CHARACTER y uniform quality of the whole guarantees its truth ; its pure originality constitutes a certificate of origin. As the fragrance dwells in each rose-leaf, so all the uniqueness of Jesus is present in each word. In jeder Aeusserung steckt der ganze Mensch. To repeat, our task is interpretative rather than historical in the narrower sense. It is to take a cross- section of the Synoptic view of Jesus, with the object of differentiating the elements which blend in it, so register- ing the composite impression held and fixed in tradition. Now in the deepest sense, the Synoptic view of Jesus is simple, with the simplicity of nature. He is greater, indeed, than any record of His life ; yet it also has caught from Him the consistent tone of simple majesty. On the other hand, within this great unity we encounter differ- ences, contrasts, individually distinguishable aspects, each of which contributes a vital element to the whole. His person is exhibited in a variety of relations to God and man. Very specially what He claimed to be was expressed, by Him or on His behalf, in a few profoundly significant titles. In these titles are gathered up the ideas which believers, by the time our Gospels were composed, had come to cherish regarding Jesus, but which, as they held, sprang originally from His own self-consciousness. To understand what such names or titles mean is perhaps to solve the hardest and most elusive problem in Synoptic Christology. But first we mu.st scrutinise the human portrait the evangelists have drawn. In contemplating Jesus the man, as mirrored in the Synoptics, we must safeguard ourselves against the tendency to signalise in His character those features exclusively which attract the modern mind.' A not ' Harnack has a scathing passage on "the extreme and mutually exclusive " views of Jesus' individuality to be found in modern literature (Sayings of Jesus, p. xiii). On the humiliating controversy as to the "mythical" Christ and the "historical" Jesus, see Mnirhead's articles in the EevUsw of Theology and Philoso})hy, vol. vi. 577 tf., G33 ff. 10 THE PERSON OF JESDS CHRIST unnatural revolt has taken place from the mediaeval image, which sank deep into the common heart, and which had represented Him chiefly as a mild and lowly- Sufferer, quiet, patient, averse to conflict, whose life and death breathed only gentleness and calm. To-day, the pendulum bids fair to reach the opposite extreme. In many a modern sketch, Jesus is given a fiery and imperious temperament, with a capacity for indignant or scornful passion which now and then escapes from His control. For the idol of our time is strength, and the supreme religious personality must be all compact of power and energy. The Gospels confirm neither of these opposed delineations. Indeed, the fashion in which different minds draw from the same record widely differing conceptions of the central Character is surely a suggestion that in His person there met, wondrously, the most diverse attributes and dispositions elsewhere manifested only in disparate and one-sided forms. The evangelists nowhere seek to prove Jesus' manhood ; it is for them a tacit and self-evident assumption. He is revealed to us within the lines and dimensions of human experience ; and the general trustworthiness of the narrative may be reckoned from the fact that His higher being, though accepted by thu writers, is never obtruded incongruously or at random. Church history is rich in evidence that Christians forget the manhood of their Lord with amazing ease ; but they have done so only because they read the Gospels with veiled face. Jesus' bodily and mental life plainly obey the rules of natural human development. Luke sums up the scanty recollections of His childhood in the statement that " Jesus continued to advance in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man " (2°^) ; and the words enunciate a principle that covers the entire life. It is impossible to conceive a point at which the evangelists would have held that He had nothing more to learn of His Father's will. In the physical sphere He is authen- tically man. When the Temptation was past, He THE PIETY OF JESUS 11 hungered ; on the cross He thirsted and longed to drink ; He slept from weariness in the boat upon the lake. His career closed in pain and death and burial. And His soul-life is equally normal. There were hours when He rejoiced in spirit ; the unbelief of His own countrymen moved His astonishment ; He marvelled at the centurion's faith ; glimpses of His heart break out in His compassion for the unshepherded multitude or for the widow of ISTain, in the brief anger with which He drove the money- changers from the Temple, in the desire for the com- panionship of the Twelve, in His tears over Jerusalem. Every wholesome emotion touched Him, finding fit outlet in word or act. Most significant of all. His piety is human. The Baptism and Temptation were scenes of prayer ; He was found by disciples praying in secret ; it was with prayer on His lips that He healed the man deaf and dumb, that He fed the multitude, that in the garden He wrestled through the agony and at the end gave up His spirit. No shadow of estrangement fell on His communion ; yet the unquenched longing with which He resorted to the Father betokens a deep, consuming sense of need. Three characteristics of Jesus' personal religion are placed by the Synoptic Gospels in strong relief. First, His faith, His conscious trust in God. Here lay the source of the felt power in which He accomplished every duty. It rested, doubtless, on the consciousness that the Father and He were bound by unseen ties, yet as it filled and controlled thought and act we feel it to be something which we are being called to imitate, because ideally and distinctively the faith of man. So He was enabled to cast His burden on the Lord, all the more completely as the Cross drew near. Nowhere does Jesus' trust in God appear more wonderful than in presence of the catastrophe which, in outward semblance, was to sweep down His person and His cause to common ruin. If He triumphed in prospect of a death for sin, it was through a confident reliance on the Father. And from 12 THE I'ERSON OF JESUS CHRIST this flowed His peace. The untroubled calm of soul we mark in Him was manifested less during His passion, when He was faced by His foes, than in the more testing hours just before, when He parted from His friends. But frequently in the course of His public ministry there is visible a profound contrast between tumult and uproar round about Him and the interior calm of a heart at rest in God. This inward rest He strove to impart to others (Mtll^S; cf. Jn 1627). Finally, He was actuated by an infinite love, which may be said to have formed the very substance of His nature. It was primarily love to God, in whom were the well-springs of His life, but it over- flowed in a comprehensive love to man. Jesus felt keenly the pressure of temptation. The impulse of self-preservation could not become conscious without inducing the distress of moral conflict. We find Him wrestling with the desire to evade pain, to enjoy things wholesome and lovely, to command success and acquire influence. Had He not shrunk from death, He would have belonged to another race than ours. And in the struggle thus forced on Him, He knew the power of sin so far as it may be known apart from self -identification with its evil ; so far, yet no further. Christendom speaks of " the Temptation," as if that which followed His baptism were an isolated fact. But the pressure lasted to the end ; and few things in the Gospels are more subduing than the words in which Jesus gratefully acknowledges the fidelity of those who had remained with Him through- out His trials (Lk 2228'-). The Jesus of the Synoptics shares in the common secular beliefs of His own time. His human faculties operate in media coloured and impregnated by the greal movements of the past. He appears on the page of histoiy as a Jew of the first century, with the Jewish mind and temperament. To interpret His message we need not travel out beyond the Hebrew frontier; nothing is here from the wisdom of Buddha or Plato, nothing even from the fusion of Hellenism and Hebraism in the crucible of LIMITATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE 13 Alexandria. He was nurtured in Galilee, where He must have encountered some impressions of the larger world ; but little in His teaching recalls Greco-Eoman civilisation. Nevertheless, the universality of His spirit has affinities with the nobler mind of Greece. In the main His soul drew its nourishment from prophet and psalmist ; yet there was that in Him, He knew, which would make Him comprehended and efficacious in the world outside Palestine. "The character of Jesus," it has been said, "does not reveal Jewish traits merely, but such also as are Hellenic in the larger sense, so that in Him these definite types of manhood wonderfully complement and balance each other. The fulness of the times had come." ^ It has gradually become clear that to make Jesus responsible for such things as the details of an ethico- political system, valid for all time, or to invest His words with legal authority in matters of Biblical criticism and history, is wholly misleading and irrelevant. The realm of scientific knowledge is one in which He became like unto His brethren. Incontestably He exhibits at different times a wholly abnormal penetration, a perception of men's thoughts which far outstrips the insight even of prophets. But we cannot speak of His omniscience except as we desert the sources. " Of that day or that hour,'' He said plainly, "knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, nor yet the Son, but the Father" (Mk 13'^) — a declaration of ignorance which, it is sug- gestive to note, is not insisted on after the resurrection (Ac 1^). Along with this goes the fact that He makes inquiries and manifests surprise; but that in doing so He was acting a part is credible only to the incurably docetic \nind. It also appears from the Synoptic narrative that the mighty works of Jesus were not done out of (as it were) independent personal resources, but through power received from God. The Father had bestowed on Him the Messianic Lordship over all things embraced within ' von Soden. Die wichtigsten Frrgen im Leben Jesu, 110. 14 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST His life-work ; this delegated authority He exercised in faith and acknowledged with thanksgiving. He ascribes the glory of His miracles to the Father. At the same time, the verdict passed on Nazareth to the effect that, owing to the unbelief He encountered there, Jesus could work no miracle (Mk 6^), has often been misconstrued. The meaning is not that the people's mistrust deprived Him of Messianic power ; it is rather that the ethical con- ditions of reception being absent, a moral impossibility existed that He should put His power in active operation. Christology of an ds priori tendency has too often been permitted to encroach upon the interpretation of the first three Gospels, with results equally disconcerting and incoherent. Attempts, for example, to vindicate for Jesus a " double consciousness " or a " double will " — the one human and beset with limitations, the other infinite and Divine — merely impose on the evangelic data a dogmatic schematism of much later origin, thus gravely impeding the work of objective inquiry. Not only do they break tlie marvellous unity of impression created by His person ; they are the outcome of a tendency, mistaken though devout, to refiect on these earthly years the radiant glory of the exalted Christ. But this is to ignore the well-marked New Testament distinction in the mani- fested being of Jesus before the resurrection and after. To the apostolic mind, the life of the Ascended One was no mere prolongation of the earthly career. It was an existence charged with a higher power, because invested with new and universg-l attributes. To ignore the human conditions of the historic life, therefore, is to miss the contrast of earthly humiliation and ascended majesty. It is also to miss the vast redeeming sacrifice of God ; for these circumstances of self-abnegating limitation form the last and highest expression of the love wherewith the Father bowed down to bless us in the Son. A constitutive element in the faith of Israel had long been the hope of the Messiah, conceived not as a second JESUS THE MESSIAH 15 God, but as the Saviour-representative of Jehovah. Thiti Messianic .faith is a projection into history of faith in the living God. It is natural, accordingly, that the first article of the new Christian creed should have been the Messiahship of Jesus, the crucified and risen Nazarene. In the Synoptics the name " Christ," the Greek equiva- lent of Messiah, is always an official, never a personal, name. The problem of the Messiahship, however, entered on a quite new phase when certain recent scholars, and particularly Wrede, taking up the suggestions of Lagarde and Volkmar, put forward the contention that the Messianic claim was never made by Jesus, but was read back into the history in the sub-apostolic age. The hypothesis cannot be regarded as a happy one. We can point to a series of incidents which make it virtually certain that Jesus felt Himself to bb Messiah, and declared His consciousness of the fact to others.^ Proof positive is furnished by the narrative of the Temptation, which is meaningless except as related to a preceding Messianic experience ; by His message to the Baptist in prison (Mt ll^'); by the epoch-making words of Peter at Csesarea Philippi (Mk 8^*) ; by Jesus' solemn entry into Jerusalem ; by His open confession before the high priest ; by the mocking cries flung at Him during the crucifixion ; finally, by the inscription placed above His head. Even the view defended by certain recent writers, to the effect that Jesus claimed Messianic dignity only for the future, as Messias designatus, but refrained from asserting it as an actually present fact, fails to satisfy the recorded data. It brings out the cardinal truth, however, that for Jesus' own mind the future coming of the Messiah in glory constituted His most characteristic and decisive ' This is quite compatible with the view that, prior to the resurrection, it was only in hours of specially heightened feeling that His disciples recognised His Messiahship, that they used the name with only a partial consciousness of its implications, and that as He hung on the Cross their faith was eclipsed (cf. Lk 24^'). Von Soden has a fine passage on the experimental basis of the disciples' faith in Jesus as Messiah in Theologischt dhhamdlungen Weizsdcker gewidmet, 167 f. 16 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST Messianic work. Death would invest Him with the full exercise of His official power. A more important question yet remains: Jesus believed Himself to be Messiah ; where lay the meaning of this title for His mind ? We are so far able to determine its meaning for His contemporaries. In Jewish religion (cf. Ps 2) " the Christ " denotes the anointed Head and Lord of the Divine Kingdom, ruling over a redeemed people in bliss and majesty. The Messiah was conceived now as a superhuman figure, now as a man chosen and endowed for His unique task. Bousset remarks that the Messianic hopes of the Jews in our Lord's day must have oscillated between the poles of pure earthliness and pure transcendence. No universally acknowledged type of faith prevailed. Even John the Baptist, with his robe of camel's hair and his thundering prophecies of judgment, could be taken for the Messiah. But in general the function of the Coming One was believed to be the inauguration of the new Kingdom, a catastrophic judgment being the essential prelude to His work. Jesus' attitude to this ancient hope may be defined by saying that while retaining the traditional outline of the idea, He infused into it a fresh and spiritual content. It still pointed to the King of the Divine Kingdom ; it still involved the redemption of the subjects by One anointed for the task ; but the significance both of " kingdom " and of " redemption " underwent a radical transformation. His reading of the name was new even when compared with the prophetic thought of the Old Testament. Every political suggestion fell away, every hope of national predominance ; the office was conceived for the first time in spiritual and ethical — even if eschatological — terms. At this decisive point, therefore, Jesus broke with tradi- tion. His purpose declared itself at the Temptation, when He turned once for all from the received Messianic ideal to identify Himself with a conception till then unheard of. Thenceforward to be Messiah signified for His mind not the work of a religious Teacher, or of a new Lawgiver, but RESERVE OF JESUt( 17 the vocation of Oue who must bring complete salvation for sinful men, opening the Kingdom of God to all believers. His life and death are the only worthy comment on His thought. " Jesus was greater than any name, and we must interpret the names He uses through the Person and His experiences and powers, and not the Person through a formal definition of the names." ^ The consciousness that He was the Messiah must have come to Jesus not later than His baptism. No other point of time has any claim to rank as the commencement of the fully recognised vocation. We cannot tell through what inward experiences this certainty took possession of Him ; and it is vain to guess. The vision vouchsafed to Him at the Jordan was such that He Himself must be regarded as the source of the main elements of the narrative. In that hour He knew Himself summoned by the Father to fulfil the Messianic work, and was filled with the power and knowledge requisite for His task by the reception of the Holy Spirit. It is at first disconcerting to find that Jesus' self- avowal as Messiah was characterised by singular reserve. Nor is this explicable by the inadequacy and unspiritu- ality of the traditional conception ; for, as we have seen, it was still open to Jesus to make of the title what He chose. It has been suggested that Jesus was silent concerning His Messiahship simply because it was for long a problem to His own mind ; we ought to think of it as dawning on Him gradually, through a process of doubt and struggle. But this seems to be incompatible with the decisive im- portance of His baptism, which called Him to a task He must have regarded as Messianic. The true explanation appears to lie in the familiar consideration that Jesus novel conception of the Kingdom, as the reign of the loving and holy Father, entailed also a novel conception of His own function. His partial concealment is therefore due to the ^ Denney, Jems and the Gospel, 208. On the ethical side, we get oni clearest look at what our Lord meant by Messiahship in His message to the Baptist in i-i-ison (Mt IP"-). 18 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST all but insurmountable difficulty of proclaiming Himself as the Messiah without stirring into flame passions of a kind which would have rendered the people deaf to His unique message. Thus it is significant that in Nazareth (Lk 4^*) He is represented as assuming the role simply of a prophet. The confession of Peter at Csesarea Philippi was in all probability the first occasion on which the Messiahship of Jesus was made the subject of conversation by the Master and the disciples. It does not follow that Jesus' real dignity then for the first time suggested itself to the Twelve. There are facts (cf. Jn 1) which indicate that the possibility of His being the Messiah may have occurred to His followers from the very outset. What is new in Peter's confession is its personal assurance and devotion ; and it is this, not its being a flash of religious genius, which evoked the unusual emotion vibrating in Jesus' answer. Here then, in Holtzmann's phrase,^ lies the true peripeteia of the drama, on which the entire action turns. Jesus now explicitly accepts the Messianic name ; nay more, in the fact that it has been attributed to Him He finds clear evidence that the Twelve were beginning to attain true convictions on the subject of His person. Yet there remained the possibility of further misconception; and Jesus therefore at once proceeded to check the forma- tion of too secular hopes by uttering a definite prediction of His death (Mk 8^^). But it was only by His entry into the city and during the trial before Caiaphas that He announced His Messiahship to the world at large. In Jesus' hands the idea of Messiahship came to be associated with unprecedented claims. " By His heathen judge He was condemned," Dalman writes, " as a usurper of the throne ; by the Jewish tribunal, as One who pretended to such a place as had never been conceded even to the Messiah." ^ In short, for Jesus to use the title was ipso facto to supersede it. While therefore it is true that the Messianic claim was indispensable as a mode of express- ' Das messianische Bewusslsein Jesu, 88. « Die Worte Jesu, i. 257. UNPRECEDENTED CLAIMS 19 ing our Lord's vocation within the lines of Jewish religious history, the title in itself is the product of a special develop- ment, and was bound to give place to forms more adequate and universal.^ This is this truth which has been put falsely, or at least confusedly, by saying that Jesus always felt Messiahship a burden, and would have dispensed with it if He could. The hand which Jesus laid upon traditional Messianism was that of a creative master. At each point He was free of the conceptions of the past. It was especially through His anticipation of the Cross that Jesus rose above the limits of the older thought. How early this anticipation visited His mind we have not the information to decide ; but the view expressed by Holtzmann,* that any one who regards the story of the baptism as containing really credible recollections of a definite point at which Jesus' Messianic consciousness was born, and who holds also that His conception of " Messiah " is related to Dn 7, may reasonably believe that our Lord had the prospect of death before Him from the first, is a noteworthy concession to the inherent probabilities of the case. However this may be, at all events it is certain that Jesus was the first to make current coin of the idea of a suffering Messiah. In pre-Christian Judaism, Is 53 had never been interpreted in a Messianic sense. In that sublime picture of vicarious pain, however, there lay truths which found a perfect echo and fulfilment in Jesus' soul.^ Thus it was, we may surmise, that for Him the ancient conception of Israel's national Messiah was so glorified as to pass into that of the Eedeemer of the world. We now turn to what has justly been described as the most confused and intricate problem in New Testament ' But as Peter used it, it expresses in its own way the same idea of uniqueness and absoluteness as we find elsewhere in the names vl6s and = Op. cU. 88. " Cf. Professor H. A. A. Kennedy's articles in the Expository Times for 1908. Is 53 also contains the idea of the Servant's resurrection and His lubsequent career of effectual activity. 20 THE PERSON OF JESUK CHRIST Theology. This is the meaning given by Jesus to the name " Son of man." From the point of view both of ideas and of history we are still engaged with the preceding topic, since the adoption of the title " Son of man " may itself stand for a quite definite interpretation of Messiahship. It broadens and universalises a conception which had shown itself capable of very narrow limitations. " Son of man " is only used by Jesus in the Synoptics, virtually always as a self-designation. It is at least obvious that the evangelists understand it so. The name occurs as early as Mk 2^". Many scholars believe that Jesus employed it only after Peter's great confession ; but it is possible that He had used it long before. Not till His trial, however, did the significance of the claim dawn upon the wider public. Its total absence from New Testament writings other than the Gospels (except Ac 7^*) is easily explained by its practical inconvenience, since it is " as curious a phrase in Greek as in English," ^ and would he familiar only to Jews. But the later disappearance of the name at once puts out of court the suggestion that in the Synoptics it is due to interpolation. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke the title is found on Jesus' lips about seventy times, representing forty occasions more or less. The notion that it properly means " some- body " may be put aside. In such verses as " The Son of man is come eating and drinking" (Mt 11 ■*■"), and " Betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?" (Lk 22**), it is manifestly applied by Jesus to Himself. That our Lord should speak of Himself in the third person is not necessarily unnatural, for St. Paul does the same thing (2 Co 12^); besides, the title was tolerably familiar as a title. We have no guarantee, of course, that all these three-score texts give a perfectly accurate report of Jesus' words ; and allowance must be made for the possibility that " Son of man " has in some cases been inserted by the evangelist. But the necessary deductions under this head are so few as to leave the main result unaffected. It is ' Burkitt, Earliest Sources for the L'fc ofjesun, 64. SON OF MAN AS A TITLE 21 noticeable, further, that the passages containing the name fall naturally into two groups according as they refer (a) to Jesus' earthly work, especially as it culminates in suffering and death, or (6) to the final glory of His Parousia. Speaking broadly, " Son of man " occurs more frequently towards the close of the Gospel story, while the proportion of passages tinged with eschatology mounts rapidly at the end. These facts are themselves a valuable indication that some intimate relationship existed in Jesus' own mind between the name " Son of man " and His impending death. The first source of the name is irrecoverably lost in far-past ages,^ but we are justified in believing that its nearer, proximate source is Dn 7^'. This, it may be noted, is one of the few points on which scholars have reached virtual agreement. We are carried back, then, to the Danielle vision in which, after the bestial forms symbolising the four heathen empires, there emerges a ■fymbolical human Figure on whom the universal Kingdom is conferred. "Behold, there came with the clouds of heaven one like unto a son of man . . . and there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and tongues should serve him." Whether " one like unto a son of man " denotes the ideal Israel or an individual is uncertain, though the former view is more convincing. But in the Similitudes of Enoch, as Professor Burkitt puts it, " the figure of Daniel, the Son of Man who was with the Ancient of Days, is personified and individualised. From of old this Son of Man, this celestial human being, has been hidden with the Most High, but one day He will be revealed." ' Jesus was probably familiar with this circle of ideas, and nearly everywhere His use of the name is only intelligible if it denotes an individual person. It has indeed been argued that the distinction which exists in Greek between " man " ' For the ' ' religionsgeschiclitlioh " yiew, see Weinel, Biblische Theologii des NT (1911), 30 ; Bousset, Eaupiprolleme der Gnosis, 149 ff. ' Op ril. fi.l. 22 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST simply and " Son of man " could not have been expressed by one speaking, as Jesus did, in Aramaic; and that accordingly the phrase for Him must have really meant nothing more than " man in general." In the first place, however, the linguistic facts are doubtful. Dalman, with whom Dr. Driver agrees, has stated what seem excellent reasons for denying that " man " could be expressed in Aramaic in no way except this ; " Son of man," it is possible, may be a literal rendering of an independent Aramaic phrase. Apart from this, however, even if we concede that the Aramaic term was equivalent to " man " simply, still " the Man,'' used by Jesus as a title for Him- self or His office must have been employed in sensu eminenti ; must have meant the special, or well-known, or unique " Man." ^ Nor can Dr. Sanday's suggestion be overlooked that, since Jesus may have spoken Greek, o vtos ToO avBpcoTTov may have been one of His own phrases. But what does the term mean ? To begin with, it is almost certainly unbiblical to explain it as equivalent to " man in idea " or " the ideal man." Baur, slightly modi- fying this, takes it as equivalent to one qui nihil humani sibi alienum putat ; Wellhausen thinks it equal to " man normal in relation to God," although, since Jesus was neither a Greek philosopher nor a modern humanist, this signification, in his judgment, proves sufficiently that the phrase was never used by Jesus. He is at least right in the contention that ideal humanity is a Greek or modern, not a Jewish, conception ; and while it is undoubtedly embodied in the character of the Son of man as realised in Jesus, it forms no part of the connotation of the term. On the other hand, there is no foundation for the older dogmatic theory that our Lord's intention, in using the title, was to assert distinctly His real manhood ; for of His real manhood the audience could not be in doubt. The truth, so far as I can judge, appears to be something like this : Jesus took the name, in a spirit of complete freedom, from the familiar Dauielic verse, possibly being influenced ' Of. Bousset, Die Religion des Jvdenthums (1 Aufl.), 262. THE TITLE A PARADOX 23 in some degree also by the Similitudes of Enoch. He began by using it to denote His own special or repre- sentative humanity, as appointed to future glory and transcendent sway ; but with this, especially in the later months, He combined a note of sharp contrast, defining and enriching the primary signification by the added thought of suffering.^ In any case, contrast is of the very essence of the truth. Triumphant glory, over-against which is set utter self-abasement and humiliation — this, on the whole, is the meaning fixed for us by a careful scrutiny of the Synoptic usage. It is not too much to say, indeed, that Jesus, in His selection of the name, had an educative purpose. It was a spiritual mystery, a problem not less than a disclosure. Tradition had defined the title only imperfectly ; it awaited final interpretation : and this Jesus gave by stamping on it the impress of Himself. As the marble takes shape under the sculptor's chisel, masses of rejected matter fall away ; so Jesus drew forth from the potentialities of the conception that which harmonised with His own higher thought. In His hands the name provoked reflection. While in no sense an obvious appellation of the Messiah — otherwise the question of Mt 16^^: "Who do men say that the Son of man is ? " would be inept — it yet proved suggestive of Messiahship to those who cared to search deeper. Into the title furnished by tradition He poured a significance of His own which transcended the past ; for in affirming, e.g. that the Son of man had power on earth to forgive sins (Mk 2^"), He rose above inherited and conventional ideas. The name was designed to indicate not so much the nature as the vocation of its Bearer ; it signalised the transcendent place and function still awaiting Him. Of the available modes of self- description it was the least political, and as on other occasions He appears to deprecate the title " Son of David " as too provocative, or at least as irrelevant to the true conception of Messiahship, so Jesus chose the apocalyptic > We must never lose sight of Is 63 ; cf. Feina, Theologie d. NT, 68. 24 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST name of Son of man, especially near the end, as one which laid the required emphasis on the future greatness thus far concealed under obscurity and destined to be still more darkly eclipsed in death. And the solution of this apparent antinomy He found in the decisive significance of His cross. So far from rendering His future glory impossible, it was to be the gate of entrance to His consummation. In the Synoptics, accordingly, our Lord's usage of the title " Son of man " constitutes a paradox. Just as the idea of the Kingdom points to a transcendent order of things which, though future, is none the less actually present ; ''■ so the correlative name of Son of man embraces likewise the " hereafter " and the " here." Its point of departure is the thought of coming glory, but that eventual triumph is mediated through suffering and death. It unites anticipation with reality. Yet this seeming contradiction is vital to the inward spiritual coherence of the idea. It is through indignity and pain and death that He who must reign passes to His Kingdom, As it has been put : " The ' Son of man,' in the mature mind of Jesus, is the Person who unites a career of utmost service and suffering with a sure prospect of transcendent glory. And herein we touch at once the depth and height of His originality." ^ The work of Jesus, in a large measure, came to consist in training the disciples to under- stand this novel thought of Messiahship, to perceive and appreciate inwardly the mystery of the fact that " not in spite of His death, but in and through His death. He was to assert Himself as Son of man." ^ When therefore they at length seized His drift, what their minds fixed upon as forming the vital content of the title He had chosen was the Divine destiny which lay ^■eiled in the future, and ' Kaftan has put it excellently : " Only a paradoxical formula will cover the ascertained historical facts. It must run thus — The future salvation ii beeome present, yet has not ceased to le future " [Jesus und Paulus, 24). ^ Muirhoad, Eschatology of Jesus, 203. ' Scott, The Kingdom and the Messiah, 243. THli NAME " SON OP GOD " 25 the experience of self-sacrifice through which it must needs be attained. The Son of man must suffer many things ere He comes with the clouds of heaven. The last of the special titles predicated of Jesus in tlie Synoptics is " Son," or, in its fuller form, " Son of God." We cannot, of course, ascribe precisely the same meaning to every instance of its use. In the lips of the possessed (Mk 3"), of unbelieving Jews (Mt 27^"), of the centurion at the cross (Mk 15^*), and, by implication, of Caiaphas (Mt 26^^), it obviously carries something less than its full significance. From the words of the centurion, •' Truly this man was a son of God," we may judge that he found in our Lord a man of such sublime courage and righteousness as indicated a greatness more than human. How near this poetic or symbolic usage may have ap- proached to theological conviction, it is less easy to deter- mine. But in the majority of cases belonging to this class, nur wisest course is to regard " Son of God " as a synonym of Messiah. Even when at the baptism a Divine voice hailed Jesus as " My beloved Son," what stands out most clearly is His consecration to the Messianic task. In the Old Testament, we may note, the title " Son of God" is given a varied application — to angels, to the chosen people, to the theocratic king who reigns over and represents them, to the Messianic Deliverer of the future. The promise to David concerning Solomon is most typical : " I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever ; I will be his father, and he shall be My son " (2 S 7^^-"). In this passage and others like it, the name guarantees to its bearer the special protection and love of God, a relation- ship which in Ps 2 is actually represented under the symbol of paternity. The outer side of the relation was represented by the certain possession of Divine glory and power; the inner consisted in the peculiar enjoyment of His love as its chosen object. It was primarily on this inner aspect that the mind of Jesus dwelt. Nowhere in the Synoptic records does 26 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST He adopt for Himself the fully-phrased name " Son of God," perhaps as finding in it a too familiar designa- tion of the Messiah, or one too certain to evoke political expectations. Everything goes to prove that His supreme conception of His own person was expressed simply in the name " Son." Not merely does it occur in two ex- ceptionally striking words, of indubitable authenticity (Mt 1127, Mk 1332, cf. 8"); certain other pieces of indirect evidence bear directly on the same point. Such are, for instance, a veiled allusion to His special Sonship in the parables of the Vineyard and the Marriage Feast His question to Peter about the taxing of kings' sons; and His conversation with the scribes as to the relation between David's Son and David's Lord. We may perhaps catch the tone of unique filial self-consciousness in His custom of naming God the " Lord of heaven and earth," but never His Lord. However this may be, no one can miss the significance of the name " My Father " go frequently applied by Him to God (Mt 7^1 lO^^ 1"'^" etc.); a deliberate and selected phrase which sets '. personal relation to the Father in a distinct place itself. No parallels from pagan thought are of the le use in illustrating this ; the Hellenic conception of the Divine Fatherhood, for example, starts not from ethical but from cosmic presuppositions. Nor is any real equivalent to be found in the religion of the Old Testa- ment. If ethnic ideas leant with more or less decision to a naturalistic pantheism, Judaism had long stood in peril of the petrifying rigidities of deism. Jesus' incom- municable consciousness of filial oneness with the Eternal is a new thing in the world. In his second chapter, Luke represents the conscious- ness of this unique Sonship as already present at twelve years (2*"-^^). There can be little doubt that from this indication and others we are justified in concluding that Jesus knew Himself Son before His call to the Messiah- ship. The sense that His life flowed from God directly, having in Him all its well-springs, laid upon Him more JESUS' FILIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 27 commanding obligations than those of earthly affection. In the narrative as it stands there is no suggestion that the episode formed the birth-hour of Jesus' special con- sciousness of God and Himself ; one is rather led to think of processes only now becoming visible upon the surface. The grace by which He lived brooded over His develop- ment. As He stands in the Temple, not answering questions merely but asking them, the curtain's edge is for a moment lifted from a hidden life which we must conceive of as sustained and informed perpetually by the clear knowledge that the Father and He belonged wholly to each other. To Him the word came unceasingly : " Son, Thou art ever with me, and all that I have is Thine." But the study of our Lord's filial consciousness must always centre in the great words of Mt 11^^: "All things are delivered unto Me of My Father ; and no one knoweth the Son, save the Father ; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him."^ These words, the most im- portant for Christology in the New Testament, were apparently spoken on the return of the disciples from their first preaching mission. They are instinct with a high and solemn joy. As commentators have remarked, the whole passage has a Johannine quality which is unique, or all but unique, in the first three Gospels. The words come home to us not so much as the sudden flash of a transient emotion as rather the overflow of an habitual mood of feeling. To question their authenticity is a desperate expedient, and it is difficult to take seriously the insipid suggestion that they are more than half a quotation from the Son of Sirach. What it is of supreme moment for us to note is " the unqualified correlation of the Father and the Son " these words pro- claim. We are brought face to face with a relationship of absolute intimacy and perfect mutual correspondence, ' On Harnack's argument in favour of tlie "Western" text, so far as it changes the present {iTriyiy^aKei) into the aorist {lyvu), see Denney, Jestu and the Gospel, 272 tf. ; Kiihl, Das Selbstbewusstsein Jeau, 21 ff. 28 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST which is intransferable by its nature. Not merely is tlie Father's being, to its inmost secret, open to the soul of Jesus, without that sense of mystery and inscrutable remoteness of which the greatest prophets had been conscious ; not merely is the Son's knowledge of the Father complete, final, and inaccessible to every other save those to whom the Son is mediator : along with this goes the fact that Jesus' inmost being is known to the Father, and to none else. " Between Jesus and God, one may say, all is common."^ This is not to repudiate Old Testament revelation as worthless ; it is to declare that nothing which can be called revelation of the Father is worthy to compare with the knowledge given in and through the Son. The revealing medium has an absolute and exclusive harmony with that which is revealed. All others become children of God by way of debt to Jesus ; in His case alone Sonship is the constitutive factor of His being. The life of the Father and the Son is one life, and either can be known only in the other, lu Ishese inexhaustible words, accordingly, there is presented something far greater than a new conception ; the con- ception is expressive of a new fact beyond which religion cannot go, for " the sentence as a whole tells us plainly that Jesus is both to God and to man what no other can be." * It was a final intimation of truth which the apostles kept ever after in their heart. Never again could they attempt to realise the Divine Fatherhood but there rose before them the person of the Son, as life and death had revealed Him ; in like manner, to possess the Son was literally to possess the Father also. Looking both at Jesus' own mind and at Christian experience, there is no reason why we should not use the word meta- physical to denote this special Sonship, not as though metaphysical stood in contrast with ethical, but to mark the circumstance that this Sonship is part of the ultimate realities of being. ' Goguel, L'ap6tTe Paul et JSsus-Ohrisl, 198. ' Denney, op, cit. 272. SONSHIP AND KNOWLEDGK UK GOU 29 Harnack has unduly minimised this aspect of the truth in his too categorical statement that " the name of Son means nothing but the knowledge of God." ^ Jesus relation to God, he urges, consists merely in the fact that He knows God thus and thus, that He has come to recognise the sacred Being who rules heaven and earth as Father, as His Father. Yet we may not thus reduce what is evidently presented as a mutual unity of life to a phenomenon of religious knowledge ; and if Jesus could declare (Mk 1 3^^) that He stands closer to God than even the angels, whose nature is heavenly, it is scarcely credible that in Mt 1 V" He is not claiming a place in an order of things far transcending all mundane relationships.'^ Knowledge of God, moreover, in Harnack's sense, is some- thing which begins to be ; if Sonship, then, is constituted by this knowledge, it also must begin to be ; but can it be reasonably held that Jesus would have confessed His filial relationship with God to be a fact of temporal origin ? I cannot think so. Every attempt to conceive of Him as becoming the Son of God makes shipwreck on the unconditioned character of His self-consciousness. It is quite in accord with this that the Jesus of the Synoptics nowhere affirms His pre-existence. He simply refers the origin and secret of His personality to the perfect love of God, His mind moving always within the limits of the human fact. For deeper truth, if deeper truth can be expressed in speech, we must turn to the Fourth Gospel. On a careful estimate, our results up to and including this point are these: Neither in the self-disclosure of Jesus nor in the faith of disciples have we encountered anything which could even plausibly be described as a theory of incarnation, or of two natures hypostatically united in a single person. The Christology of Jesus and His followers yields rather the picture of One who by a career of faith, service, and mighty works — a career culminating in death — is cognizable as the perfect revela- ' What is Christianity? 128. ' Cf. Titius, Jesu Lehre mm Reich Gottes, 118. 30 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST tion of the Father and the destined Sovereign of the world. The terms of description are so far immanent, while yet it is clear that His consciousness of unique Son- ship lifts Him beyond the plane of normal human life. By His chosen name of Son He proclaims what He is to God and for God ; of the fact that He occupies this place no doctrinal interpretation is offered, nor is the fact analysed in its eternal implications, before and after. These im- plications, we ought to note, are neither denied nor asserted ; and it is quite conceivable, even from the present stand- point, that they may yet emerge as welcome or even necessary elements of deeper Christian thought. There are, to say the least, points of attachment for what apostles may yet divine as to the pre-existent glory of " the Son " or " Word " and His place within the Godhead. Nevertheless, it remains true that the self-consciousness of Jesus was, in the main, historically conditioned. When He spoke of Himself as Son par excellence, the name indicated a perfect and redemptive filial life which took shape and form in unclouded fellowship and ethical solidarity with the Father. For the mind of Jesus this unshared Sonship is the supreme reality. All other facts concerning Him receive from it their whole value and meaning. In particular, it shed a revealing light on His personal vocation. It was not that He awoke to find Himself Messiah, rising after- wards on this stepping-stone to the consciousness of Son- ship. Exactly the reverse is the truth ; He was Son of man, Messianic Head and Sovereign of the Kingdom, in virtue of the still more fundamental conviction that He was Son of God.^ This, and this only, interprets to us such things as His magisterial criticism of the Law ; and makes it all but impossible to believe that His view of the Kingdom did not quite consciously embrace the whole world. The ground of ' " With the most careful and reverent application of psychological methods, it is obvious that cur's Lord's consciousness of Sonship must have preceded in time His consciousness of Messiahship, must indeed have formed a stepping-stone to the latter. In spite of all that has been deduced from the apocalyptic and dogmatic Messianic conceptions of the times, we must assert that the consciousness of Divine Sonship and tf Messiahship AUTHORITY CLAIMED BY JESUS 31 His vocation, then, lies in the uniqueness of His nature. Because He is God's Son, He does and can do God's work. Yet in the last resort these two are inseparable. As human life mounts in the scale of greatness, vocation and personality become more and more coincident ; in the case of Jesus the coincidence was absolute. Apart from these select titles or modes of self-descrip- tion, we must glance at the evidence contained in the Synoptic Gospels of a peculiar and indeed unexampled authority to which Jesus habitually laid claim. He assumed a place within the relations of God to man, as of man to God, which none but He could occupy. Thus it is not too much to say that He Himself, as King, came by degrees to displace the Kingdom as the main subject of His teaching. Meek and lowly of heart, He yet displayed an incomparable majesty of bearing, which gave sanction to each new commandment by a simple ' Verily, I say unto you." This elevation of tone and mien was recognised on every hand. The possessed, the crowd at Nazareth, the Pharisees of the capital, His own disciples — all were conscious of it. But more; the utter loyalty He demanded was instinctively accorded. If the claims of Jesus to personal obedience are felt to be amazing, not less wonderful is the free and joyous acquiescence with which men responded to His call. The secret of this overwhelming impression lay not in His miracles, obviously; for according to Mark His first disciples had been gained ere the first miracle was wrought. It lay rather in Himself. Somehow He was able to impart the certainty that in Him men were face to face with God. In His voice sounded a tone — we can still hear it — of boundless and unconditioned power. could not have existed together from the beginning ; for the consciousness of Messiahship never meant anything else for our Lord than a consciousness of what He was about to tecome. In His soul the consciousness of what He was must have come first, and only when this had attained to the height of consciousness of Sonship could the tremendous leap be taken to the consciousness of Messiahship " (Harnack, Sayings 0/ Jesus, 245-246). 32 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST Amongst the founders of religion He is unique in the fact that His claims were not so much argued as presupposed. Without explaining His title or reasoning about His place as Divine Redeemer, He announced that in His person the saving power of God was present ; present to make all things new. Never does He refer, like the Baptist, to one who should come after Him and complete His task. He was Lord, not only of all things for the Kingdom's sake, but of the very Kingdom as such. He had the keys ; with Him it rested to declare for men the conditions of entrance. How completely He refused to be one in a series we gather most clearly from His attitude to the ancient Law. August and sacred as were its precepts. He put them royally aside, setting in their place the perfect principles of the transcendent Kingdom over which He should come to reign. In recent years it has been emphatically denied that Jesus claimed to forgive sin, yet on grounds which must be pronounced insufficient. To the guilty who sought Him out, His presence formed the medium of pardon. Pew episodes are more obviously authentic than the healing ol the paralytic (Mk 2), where the narrative simply falls to pieces if we strike out Jesus' self-presentation as Forgiver. His rejoinder to the angry protest of the scribes would be pointless, but for the implied assertion that His gift of pardon was as real and as immediately verifiable as His gift of bodily strength. From the incidents of the woman with the issue of blood and the dying malefactor, it appears that our Lord frequently made use of this power. The significance of this can hardly be overestimated. By coming forward as incarnate pardon He proclaimed His ability to lead the sinful, there and then, into the Father's presence. His person, as they saw it, was a sure guarantee of God's mercy. But when we think it out, clearly forgiveness is a Divine miracle, something which in its infinite marvel is inexplicable by the resources of nature or humanity ; it presupposes the very grace and might of the Eternal. By the claim to impart peace of JESUS THE JUDGE 33 conscience, therefore, Jesus laid His hand, with quiet assurance, on a unique prerogative. And by its exercise He opened the Kingdom of heaven to believers. Jesus, then, was habitually conscious that in His person Divine power had entered the world for the accom- plishment of all that can be called salvation. He was the Chosen One, by whose presence evil was already overcome in principle ; the predicted Deliverer who should save many by His death ; the Victor who should conquer the last enemy by rising from the grave and in due time appear in glory as Judge of all mankind. His claim to be Judge in the great future has occasionally been denied, but in one who knew Himself to be the inaugurator of the per- fect Messianic age it is in fact neither novel nor incredible. One who remits sins on earth in the consciousness that God's holy love is present in His person, may well dis- charge that solemn function at the End. Bousset has argued that the steps are even yet discernible by which the later Church mounted to this ascription of Judgeship ; but it may be pointed out that even in the most primitive form of the tradition — " Whosoever confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess before My Father who is in heaven" (Mt, 10^^)— Jesus definitely takes a place as Intercessor or Advocate in the heavenly world which is certainly not less superhuman in significance than the claim to be final Judge of men. The uniqueness of Jesus for His own consciousness could not be more startlingly demonstrated than by this fact, that He who forbade His followers to judge each other should have foretold that He Himself will judge the world. Thus with ever-increasing power it was borne in upon the disciples that no comparison or parallel could be insti- tuted between Jesus and the great figures of the past. No prophet had invited men to confess his name ; no prophet had declared that the relation of men to himself would fix their destiny in the future Kingdom ; no prophet had dared to say : " All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father." For these great souls it had been enough 3 34 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST to announce, " Thus saith the Lord." Jesus, however, as it has been put, " knows no more sacred task than to point men to His own Person." * He is the object of saving faitli ; this we may conclude with whole-hearted assur- ance, albeit the phrase " believe in Me " occurs seldom or never in the Synoptics.^ No serious mind will miss the significance which was bound to be assigned to such professions by all who gave them credit. The disciples could not but have their own thoughts regarding One who made such claims and wielded such power over the spirits of men. And it is a crucial circumstance that Jesus, who must have perceived the trend of their reflections, welcomed with joy the absolute religious trust and incipient worship of the Twelve. In the foregoing pages we have studied the main features in the Synoptic representation of Jesus Christ, Our materials have been derived partly from the manifest self-consciousness of our Lord, partly from the impression He produced on other minds. As regards the witness of Jesus to Himself, it is at all events such as to demonstrate the futility of saying, with Bousset, that He simply ranks Himself by the side of struggling humanity, or with Wellhausen, that He nowhere assigns a central place to His own person. So far from this, He may be better described as having identified the Gospel with Himself.^ Moreover, the impression made by Him on others was of such a kind that far-reaching questions in regard to His ultimate identity could not be evaded; and when once these ques- tions as to what lay behind His redeeming influence, and explained it, had been asked, it was inevitable that the attempt should be made to furnish an intelligible and coherent answer. This answer, as it took shape in the apostolic mind, is present in solution in the Epistles and the Fourth Gospel. It was no false metaphysical scent which drew St. Paul and his successors into the difiBcult ' Herimann, Communion with God, 93. = Of. Feine, Die Theologie d. NT, 26-34. ' Cf. Mk 8*', " Me and My words." HIS SINLESSNESS 35 paths of Christological reflection ; it was a resolute en- deavour to set forth convictions which had been borne into their hearts with an irresistible force of evidence — the conviction, above all, that in the life of Jesus God had been personally present in their midst. The question whether they were well or ill advised in their affirmation of His Divine being is one which necessarily is insoluble by the methods of historical science. Then as now, only those could attain to evangelical faith in the God- head of Jesus who knew that in Him they had met with the Father. Nothing but irrefragable religious experience will explain the amazing fact that, without a tremor of hesitation, the apostles took the responsibility of asking men to believe in Christ as Son of God from all eternity. NOTE ON THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS. The testimony to Jesus' sinlessness which may be gathered out of the Epistles rests on no a priori dogma, but is a transcript of convincing facts of which we have a clear view in the Synoptics. Historical argument will not of course carry us all the way, yet it does prove that Jesus thought of Himself as sinless. It also permits us to believe that in aflfirming His sinlessness the apostles cannot have been at war with their recollections of His life, " suppressing defects in His character which they had observed, or acknowledgments of shortcoming made by Himself." i The Synoptics certainly record no explicit claim to moral purity on Jesus' part ; nothing so direct as the question, " Which of you convicteth Me of sin?" (Jn 8''^). But neither do they anywhere eulogise Him or attempt to prove His innocence ; they offer simply a plain tale of His words and works. Various minor traits of bearing and conduct, however, reveal undeni- ably His own conviction. When we recollect that His mission opened with a call to repentance, that He condemned " the righteous " unsparingly, that He urged personal confession on His followers yet was Himself a stranger to the language of contrition, we can explain this only by the supposition that He reckoned Himself inwardly pure. This absence from the mature mind of Jesus of any consciousness that sin had tainted Him is ' Forrest, Avihority of Christ, 26. 36 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST the really decisive fact. He stood without fear or shame in the light of God. There is no trace of healed scars, no memories of defeat. He was no penitent, like St. Paul or Augustine, nor does He confess sin when He is dying. Men may of course be sinful unawares, but not such men as Jesus. The intense moral pain that vibrates in His rebuke of Peter (Mt 16^') implies an exquisite sensitiveness to the presence of evil. Not only so ; as Goguel has remarked, a personality of this depth and ethical intensity, had He felt conscious of sin in even the slightest degree, would have been overwhelmed by feelings of poignant and consuming grief.* Further, in view of the obligation resting on Him to dispel erroneous impressions. His persistent silence, notwithstanding the presence within Him of a bad conscience, would have been the last hypocrisy. Finally, on every page of the Gospels, we encounter such imperial demands for obedience, as well as gracious promises of help and pardon, as it would have been an enormity for a sinful man to utter. Traces of moral imperfection have nevertheless been dis- covered at various points in His career. His denunciation of the Pharisees has been characterised as harsh and unfeeling; His behaviour to His mother and brethren has been censured for a grave lack of affection ; and to some His cleansing of the Temple has appeared as a blameworthy excess of zeal. Still more graceless accusations have been based on other narrated acts. Most readers will feel that His conduct on each of the occasions specified is a quite intelligible manifestation of fidelity to His Messianic task. It was a task which provoked resistance necessitating counter-resistance in its turn ; and it would have been a vice in Jesus, not a virtue, to shrink from the painful duty. Enough that such a one as He was conscious, even in these and similar instances, of complete adequacy to His own ideal. Against the view that Jesus had no interior experience of sin, it is illegitimate to urge His self-subjection to baptism. For in His case also acceptance of the rite signified the definite resolve to associate Himself with the Messianic community in expectation of the Kingdom and in the corresponding passion for righteous- ness; but while for the people the advent of the Kingdom demanded penitence and the abandonment of known sin, from Jesus it asked self-consecration to the Messianic activity by which the Kingdom was to be brought in. Jesus' baptism, in ' Op. eit. 202. HIS SINLESSNESS 37 short, formed a crucial stage in His deepening self-identification with sinful men — " a great act of loving communion with our misery,'' as it has been described, in which He numbered Him- self with the transgressors and took all their burdens as His own. More difficulty will be felt in interpreting His reply to the young ruler, whose salutation, " Good Master," He waved back with the uncompromising rejoinder, " None is good save one, even God" (Mk 10^*). The words cannot be a veiled confession of moral delinquency, which certainly would not have taken this ambiguous and all but casual form. What Jesus disclaims, rather, is Ood's perfect goodness. None but God is good with a goodness unchanging and eternal ; He only cannot be tempted of evil, but rests for ever in unconditioned and immutable perfection. Jesus, on the contrary, learnt obedience by the things which He suffered, being tempted in all points like as we are (He 5^ 4^^). In the sense of transcendent superiority to moral conflict and the strenuous obligation to prove His virtue ever afresh in face of new temptation and difficulty. He laid no claim to the " absolute " goodness of His Father. Which reminds us emphatically that the holiness of Jesus, as displayed in the record of His life, is no automatic effect of a metaphysical sub- stance, but in its perfected form the fruit of continuous moral volition pervaded and sustained by the Spirit. It is at once the Father's gift and progressively realised in an ethical experi- ence. This follows from the moral conditions of incarnation. It may also be held, with much reason, that Jesus' words to the young ruler must be interpreted exclusively in the light of the incident itself. In that case, they are simply meant, like so many of Jesus' utterances, to throw the man back upon his own mind. And accordingly they cannot be relevantly cited in a discussion of our Lord's sinlessness. For some recent thinkers the concept of sinlessness is dis- qualified by its unduly negative character, and they accordingly propose to replace it by the idea of Jesus' perfect fidelity to His vocation. Sinlessness, if predicated of a child, might mean no more than incapacity for conscious transgression. Now not only does the concept of fidelity to vocation bring out a characteristic of fundamental importance in Jesus' personality, but several New Testament passages usually quoted under the head of sinlessness might be still more fitly placed under the other category (e.g. 1 P 221, pii 27- 8_ 1 Jn 35)_ Nevertheless, the specific thouglit of 38 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST sinlessness is one which we cannot afford to lose. We need a pre- dicate which bears directly, not merely on Jesus' fulfilment of His task, hut on the inner life which made this fulfilment possible — the private hidden stream of thought, feeling, and volition which flowed out of a stainless development dating from very birth. " In a so-called civil vocation," writes Haering, " it is possible to be faithful apart from perfect inward purity ; in the case of Jesus fidelity was possible only through an unperturbed com- munion with the Father in the hidden deeps of the heart." ^ Such moral perfection is to us inexplicable ; yet, as Mr. Bradley has said, " not to know how a thing can be is no dis- proof that the thing must be and is." Ethical psychology, based on the experience of sinners, must ever find sinlessness a mystery. We are sure of the fact; sure also that the fact was mediated in ethical and spiritual modes. Jesus alone was sinless, because He felt as we do not the powerlessness and insufficiency of the human will to sustain itself in goodness ; also because He felt as we do not man's sheer dependence on the Holy Father whose re."ponse to simple and complete faith passes understanding. ' L>ir chridliche Olaube, 398. CHAPTER 11. PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN BELIEF. The initial stage of primitive Christian thought is reflected most typically in the early speeches of the Book of Acts. Especially in their Christology, it is agreed, these Petrine sermons are of the highest value, containing as they do precisely the kind of teaching that might be expected from men for whom the resurrection of Jesus had created a new world of feeling and anticipation. We can see the apostolic mind begin to adjust itself slowly to a great and novel situation, though naturally a considerable time was to elapse before an effort could be made to formulate the doctrinal conclusions implied in their practical rehgious attitude. St. Peter's message may be briefly summarised in the statement that Jesus — a person well known to his Jewish hearers — is the Messiah ; that His Messianic dignity has been proved by resurrection from the dead ; and that He will return presently to bring in the last consummation. In simple outlines he pictures the Prophet whom their leaders put to death. "Jesus of Nazareth," we read, " a man approved of God to you by mighty works and wonders and signs, which God did by Him in the midst of you" (2^2), by the side of which we may place a later verse : " God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power: who went about LiTBKATTjRE — Weizsacker, Das apostolische Zeitalter*, 1902 (Eng. tr. 1894-5) ; McGiffert, History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age, 1897 ; Guukel, Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes ', 1908 ; E. F. Soott, The First Age of Christianity, 1926 ; Monnier, La premilre epitre de Vapdtre Pierre, 1900 ; Wemle, Die Anfange unserer Religion^ 1904 (Eng. tr. 1903-4). 3» 40 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with Him" (10^^). But this Man whom they had slain is now vindicated marvellously ; the hopes set upon Him have become certainties. As we read in a verse the importance of which for the primitive Christology we cannot overestimate : " God hath made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified " (2^^). These words reveal the secret of the new faith. For the first time it has broken on human minds that Jesus is Lord. It is by resurrection that He has taken His place openly as the Christ. We need not interpret the words as meaning that He was not Messiah previously, a position which makes a chaos of the Synoptic narrative ; but certainly we may affirm that not till after death and resurrection was He the fully manifested Christ, in a perfect manner all that which the Christ was to be. This is in harmony with the general conviction expressed throughout the New Testament (cf. Eo 1*) that resurrection opens a new transcendent stadium in the career of Jesus. He was the Christ even during His lifetime on earth, and was acknowledged in that character by faith ; yet His true status could be then disclosed only in a restricted and conditioned measure. " The fact that He was raised from the dead did not make Jesus the Christ; but it showed Him to be such." ^ Thus the gospel preached by St. Peter may be con- densed in the one truth that Jesus, crucified and risen, is the promised Christ of God. He is attested by miracles wrought by Himself or done later in His name, but supremely by the amazing miracle of the resurrection. This appeal to Jesus' miracles, it is worth noting, is the ' Mathews, Messianic Bope, 130. The name of J. Weiss is prominently associated with the opinion that for the primitive faith the eartlily Jesus was not yet Messiah, but even he is unable to carry through so drastic an interpretation. Thus we find him conceding that the disciples who preached alter Pentecost "must have known or believed that Jesus in some form or other regarded Himself as the fulflUer of the prophecy (Dt 18'*), the iinal messenger of God to Israel, in some sense or other the Messiah " {Christ: the Beginnings of Dogma, 23). EARLIEST FORM OP DOCTRINE 41 only direct and concrete allusion to the events of His earthly life. Even His work as Teacher is barely mentioned (10^*). The speaker's mind is drawn irresistibly to other topics. Less than we might have expected is said as to the bearing of Jesus' death on the forgiveness of sins ; though His death is described freely as foreseen and pre-ordained of God ; and, what is very significant, it is distinctly alleged to have been necessary, presumably as a part of His redeeming work (2^^). But what absorbs the preacher is Jesus' deliverance from the grave and entry into glory. " This Jesus did God raise up," he declares, "whereof we all are witnesses" (2^^). He is speaking not merely in view of the resurrection appearances, but in the power of that ineffaceable impression left by Jesus in the long intercourse of their discipleship. The Easter faith is the living resultant of the vision of the Risen One acting on and harmonising with the pure and sublime image of Jesus which had been stamped upon their memory. The hall-mark of New Testament religion, faith in an exalted Lord, is thus shown firm and clear at the very outset. Men who had been daily in Jesus' company knew that they were still in relations to Him. He was still the same Person they had known and loved ; death and resurrection had not impaired His individuality. " We ate and drank with Him after He rose from the dead" (10"). Even if a saying of this kind may reveal traces of unconscious materialisation, at all events it proves how different the intercourse of the risen Christ with His followers is felt to be from a merely subjective and transitory vision. As it has been put : " There is no such thing in the New Testament as an appearance of the Eisen Saviour in which He merely appears. He is always represented as entering into relations to those who see Him in other ways than by a flash upon the inner or the outer eye : He establishes other communications between Himself and His own than that which can be characterised in this way." ^ To be related thus to the exalted Lord is the differential feature ' Denney, Death of Christ, 67. 42 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST of Christianity. His presence inspired believers, and so trustfully did they lean on it that death was nothing more terrible than falling asleep (7*"). Various epithets have been appended to this first sketch of Christological doctrine. By some writers it has been roundly described as humanitarian ; but every sympathetic reader must feel that in the conceptions of " Christ " and " Lord " there lay from the beginning a wealth of content and of implication far transcending the limits of mere man- hood. Others, in view of a passage like Ac 2'^~'*, prefer to speak of it as Adoptionist ; and in this questionable terminus technictis, better reserved for the view which dates Jesus' special Sonship from the baptism at the Jordan, there is at all events this much truth, that Jesus is represented as entering on full Messianic dignity at the resurrection, and as having first manifested His new sovereign power by the outpouring of the Spirit. But a better adjective than either is " rudimentary." The total absence of the idea of pre-existence, for example, is significant for the theological TidiveU of the belief. At the same time, there are positive features which prove that Jesus was already viewed as having His place somehow within the sphere of Godhead. To be raised to God's right hand is to participate in the Divine power and glory. The gift of the Spirit is bestowed by Him, and this Spirit is the Spirit of God. We ought not to forget that this claim to possess the Spirit was largely an appeal to something which even the onlooker could recognise and verify. The acceptance of Jesus as Christ manifestly led to a new experience. Spirit-filled men rose up to proclaim a gospel of salvation from sin, death, and all diabolic powers, and it was impossible to deny that their inspiration was really due to their connection with Jesus. In other ways also His person had the religious value of God. Prayer is offered to Him as well as in His name,' and God ' 7" ; possibly 1" also, for just before St. Peter speaks of Him as Lord. Of. 2 Co 12', EeT 5", Jn 14'"-, and on the whole subject Zahn, Skizzef aus dem Leben der alter, Kirche, 1894, 271 ff. PRAYER TO CHRIST 48 is said to have appointed Him judge of quick and dead. He is Himself the theme of gospel preaching, the object of faith, the source of penitence and forgiveness. Over and over again. His name, i.e. His person as revealed and known, is proclaimed as sole medium of redemption (238 3 18 412 1943) Most significant of all is His possession of the title " Lord," a familiar Old Testament designation of Jehovah. In the same way, verses from prophecy or psalm which at first referred to God are applied directly to Jesus, and the conception of Him as occupying the throne of Israel is merged in the vaster thought that He is King of the world. As Feine has pointed out,^ these lofty predicates are only intelligible if we suppose that the disciples in retrospect were conscious that even Jesus' earthly life revealed traces of His higher being. Even then He had been anointed with the Holy Spirit, and had been " holy and just " ; even then He was known by the sublime name of the " Son of Man " (7°*). The primitive Christology can be best interpreted as the fruit of adoring memory quickened by the experience of a risen and glorified Eedeemer. We are now in a position to consider the suggestion that in the earliest faith two forms of faith in Christ went side by side, in peaceful rivalry : that to which He was but a prophet and forerunner, and that to which He already appeared as authentically Divine in majesty and redeeming power. If this means that these forms of Christological belief were held respectively by two different groups of Christians, it must be said at once that so far as the New Testament is concerned the hypothesis is without foundation. Both estimates were held by all Christians. Jesus was indeed " a prophet mighty in word and deed " (Lk 24}^)? but also from the very outset He was the Messiah-King who had been vindicated by His rising from the dead and reception of universal authority. From which ' Theologie d. NT, 203. » The term to?s (3'», i^) is " Servant" rather than "Son," and all but Dertalnly contains an allusion to Is 63. 44 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST we may draw two inferences : first, that the difference ol view between St. Paul and the primitive apostolic society was not one of principle, but of degree, since the risen Jesus was never regarded as an ordinary man. And secondly, that it is needless to have recourse to a supposed " Messianic dogmatic " for the august epithets from the first attributed to Christ. They are sufficiently accounted for by the appearances of the risen Lord. This primitive conception of Christ is pervaded by an intense eschatological feeling. While it is an exaggera- tion to speak of Jesus' earthly life as being for St. Peter no more than " a preliminary career," yet there is certainly a startling preoccupation, or rather absorption, of mind in the hope of the Parousia, which may break on the world any moment. The impending return of the Messiah is the keynote of tlie whole. " Eepent ye, therefore, and turn again . . . that He may send the Christ who hath been appointed for you, even Jesus" (3''- ^''). The period of waiting will be short. Men still think in the forms of national Messianism. Into these forms, however, rudimentary though they be, a new and infinite content has been poured. We find, indeed, scarcely an effort to create a system of conceptions adequate to the revolutionising experience through which the witnesses of the glorified Lord had passed. Doctrine could not begin till men had first lived themselves into the new thought of Christ. But already their attitude is that of faith and worship. Jesus' nature is seen to be universal and absolute in the sense that everything which can be called salvation is mediated by His power. Exaltation has set free His influence from all limits, whether of place or time ; He is now available everywhere and always. It could only be a question of time until a theological master- mind should rise to set forth the unsuspected significance of these elemental facts of faith and life. Turning now to the First Epistle of Peter, we find a writer who is interested, it may be fairly said, rather in FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 45 the salvation accomplished by Christ than in theoretical problems relating to His person. The Epistle, like the speeches in Acts, rests on and revolves round the contrast of the passion of Jesus with His present sovereignty, " the sufferings of Christ and the glories that should follow " (1^^). In both the evidence of Old Testament prophecy is appealed to, and more than once the same quotations occur. Both emphasise the Divine fore-ordination of the Cross ; both refer to the sinless perfection of the self- sacrificing Victim. We may gather the writer's favourite thought of Christ from the fact that " Jesus " is never used by itself, while " Christ " has become a proper name. Weiss is probably correct in explaining this as " due to the fact that the person of Jesus is contemplated by the Christian always and exclusively in His specific quality as Mediator of salvation." ^ It is a point in Christology where a slight change of accent has taken place as contrasted with the Petrine speeches. Is there a further advance in 1^^ ? When it is said that the Spirit of Christ in the prophets " testified before- hand to the sufferings of Christ," and in a related verse (1^") that Christ " was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world, but was manifested at the end of the times for your sake," may we conclude that the writer believed in the pre-existence of Christ ? The arguments on either side will be found in the commentaries ; here it can only be said that the language of 1^^ by itself apparently means no more than that the Divine Spirit, now so much identified with Christ as properly to be called Eis Spirit, moved also in the prophets of old time. The principle of life and power that filled the manifested Christ was operative even prior to His coming. But on this view the passage after all marks a stage towards the full assertion of pre- existence, though it does not assert it quite directly. The Spirit in which the inmost being of Jesus was constituted had pointed on to the sufferings that befell Him. On the other hand, 1^" is distinctly more significant. While the word • Biblical Theology of ih^ New Testament, i. 226. 46 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST " foreknown " (irpoeyvMcr/xevov) in no way involves the pre-existence of Christ, since it is used even of Christians in 1^, yet the unusual combination of "foreknown" with " manifested " may justly be considered as placing the matter beyond doubt. Only that can be manifested which was in being before manifestation. Thus, even though the point is not insisted on, the person of Christ is already lifted clear of the contingencies of time, viewed as the embodi- ment of a Divine Spirit, and given a place within the redeeming world-plan of God. More and more the historical is being fused with the eternal. The Christ so characterised, then, was revealed in the last times. We have a vague hint as to the constitutioij of His person in the difficult phrase (3^^), " being put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit"; where the two datives (crapKi and Trvev/iaTi) are exactly parallel, The flesh is the sphere or element in which death took place ; similarly, the spirit is the sphere of resurrection, the element of life that made it possible. In virtue of one aspect of His being, Christ died ; in virtue of the other and higher, He was raised again.^ The verse at first sight comes very near to the orthodox doctrine of the Two Natures ; what it really does, however, is to contemplate the personality of Christ from two different points of view, as capable of death on the one hand, and on the other of resurrection. Spirit means here the Divine vital principle, in a higher potency than it attains in man, and thus characterised by an essential and indestructible energy. The evidence that Christ's spirit was laden with vast abnormal powers is that " He went and preached unto the spirits in prison " (3^^ 4*). Whatever this means, it proclaims that wherever men are, Christ can save. Even in the region of the dead He must have manifested His power.2 Formerly, in Ac 2^*, the ground of Jesus' resurrection had been found merely in Old Testament prediction, but now the step is taken of attributing it to • In a sense Ro 1°- * may be compared. ^ Of. Denney, Jestis and the Gospel, 48, THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST 47 bhe energies inherent in His nature and due to the unction of the Messianic Spirit. We are entitled to say, I think, in view of these data, that First Peter exhibits a form of Christology slightly more developed than that of the first chapters of Acts. Yet its tone is thoroughly primitive ; there is nothing in the v?ay of precise analysis or speculation. If the epistle was written by St. Peter, as it may well have been, we must recollect that a man of his type would probably care little for reasoned theories regarding the loved person of His Lord. He lived amid the memories of the past and the ardent hopes of a near and glorious future. Nevertheless, there can be no reasonable doubt that he shared the specifically Christian estimate of Jesus. The Spirit of God, as we have seen, is definitely spoken of as " the Spirit of Christ " — in itself an amazing fact. " Son of God " is nowhere used, but we meet with the significant and full-toned phrase, " the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1^), with an undeniable implication of Christ's special Sonship. The declaration that angels and authorities are subject to Him (3^^) does more than assert His risen glory ; it affirms that He is personally participant in the sovereignty of God, whom angels serve as messengers. The somewhat unusual phrase, " Sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord" (3^% echoes Is 8^^, where "Lord" has reference to Jehovah. And in 4" we read : " Through Jesus Christ, whose is the glory and the dominion for ever and ever." The balance of the verse is in favour of an interpretation which ascribes the doxology to Christ, but in the last chapter (5") virtually the same form is used in reference to " the God of all grace." Details of this kind can never be quite conclusive, but at all events they mark with some clearness the direction of the stream. The primitive apostolic Christology lays due stress on the subordination of Jesus Christ to God the Father, while yet already He begins to fill the sphere of the Divine. He is believed in with adoring trust, as monotheists can believe in none but God. If this ia 48 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST the attitude taken by men of uiispeculative minds, the tact is only the more full of suggestion. It implies that the normally Christian intelligence cannot refrain from predicating of Jesus Christ the religious value of God. Not metaphysics in the wrong place, but faith conscious of its own significance and therefore reaching out to a clear expression of its proper content, has been responsible for the high Christology to be found even in the first origins of our religion.^ ' The materials for an exhaustive treatment of the primitive Christology would of course have to be drawn also from St. Paul {e.g. I Co 15* ^O and the synoptic Gospels. But I have not entered on this field, my object being merely to sketch the main distinguishable types of Christology present in the Kew Testament, CHAPTER III. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. In the following statement of St. Paul's view of Christ it has not been thought necessary to make a sharp dis- tinction between the four great Epistles — to the Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians — and the later group, known as the Epistles of the Imprisonment. Eor one thing, excel- lent critical opinion may be quoted for the statement that all the Imprisonment Epistles are genuine, so that post- Pauline developments, say in Ephesians, need not so far be allowed for. Moreover, if we have already in Eo 9' — and perhaps even in 2 Th 1^^ — ^ an explicit assertion of Christ's deity, it is plain that quite early the apostle had expressed an estimate of our Lord's being beyond which it was impossible to go, and we may discount the hypothesis that in his later years he gave himself up to unbridled and fantastic specu- lation, of a sort wholly alien to his previous thought. This means that chronological charts of St. Paul's advance in Christian knowledge, which have pleased no one but their authors, may be laid aside. It is a better plan to attempt a comprehensive view of his thought in its plastic and vivid unity. Enough if we mark here and there a difference of accent in earlier and later formulations. LiTERATTJBE — Schmidt, Die pauUnische CTiHstologie, 1870 ; Somerville, iS(. Paul's Conception of Christ, 1897 ; C. A. Scott, Christianity according to St. Pawl, 1927 ; OlscLewski, Die Wurzeln der paulinischen Cfiristologie, 1909; Goguel, L'apbtre Paul et Jesus Christ, 1904; Weinel, Paulus de Mensch vnd sein Werk, 1904 (Eng. tr. 1906) ; Wrede, Paulus^, 1907 (Eng tr. 1907); Kaftan, Jesus und Paulus, 1906; Feme, J esus Christus und Paulus, 1 902 ; Bruckner, Die Enstehung der paulinischen Christologie, 1 903 ; Kfilbing, Die geistige Wirkung der Person Jesu auf Paulus, 1906 ; Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 1913. ' von Dobschiitz, Kommentar (1910), in loc. 4 50 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST Is a genetic account of St. Paul's view of Christ possible ? Can we tell what set his mind a- working on the subject, or what quickening influences shaped his beliefs ? Holsten, preceded by Baur, long maintained that we must take the apostle strictly as a theologian, whose letters are brief statements of dogmatic. He wrote primarily as a logician, only in the second place as a missionary. Like his other doctrines, Christology took form in his mind as the outcome of a reasoning process, of pure logic applied to the fate of Jesus. Confronted by the Messiah's death on the cross, an event, as he felt, laden with the Divine redemptive purpose, St. Paul, yielding to a strictly intellectual com- pulsion, gave up the theological system of Judaism and replaced it by one in which Christ appeared as a synthesis of historical tradition and Hellenistic doctrines of a pre- existent " Heavenly Man." It is a theory deeply marked by the influence of Hegelian dialectic. On such terms St. Paul's gospel, as Kaftan puts it, is simply the gnosis of the Messiah's death ; not the fruit of a great religious experience, but the cold, rational production of a patient theorist. More recently the place of Holsten's purely imman- ental theory has been taken by that of a large and active school of writers, united by keen devotion to the methods of scientific history of religion. Their interest for the most part has lain in tracing the descent of ideas. And the gist of their conclusions, so far as we are now concerned with them, has been expressed with admirable clearness in Weinel's somewhat audacious words : "The Christological dogma already existed in all essential particulars before Jesus was born. Jewish Messianic speculations had already imagined a picture for the completion of which nothing was wanting but the Nicene dogma that the Father and the Son were of the same substance. . . . Even the statement that the world was created by the Son of God was as current an opinion among the Jews as every- thing else that Paul tells us of Christ's life from the beginning of the world until His second advent in judg- HOLSTEN AND WEINEL 51 ment." * The value of this may be gathered from the single fact that in Jewish Messianism the ideas of a redeeming death and triumphant resurrection are nowhere to be found. Apart from this damaging circumstance, however, it is of interest to note that, according to Briickner, Wrede, and other scholars, the elements even of the Judaistic " Chris- tology" had mostly been taken over from Oriental myths. In various lands and faiths the yearning dreams of salvation had created, in wavering outline, the imaginative figure of a " Saviour " ; and the different features of the sketch came to deposit themselves, like crystals in a supersatu- rated solution, on the head of the Messiah hoped for by Jews. St. Paul, who fell heir to this creation of apocalyptic fancy, merely added the name of Jesus, and at once his Christology was complete. Instantly he felt that Jesus must have been and have done all things portrayed in the Messianic dogmatic. The Christ of the Pauline Epistles, therefore, has no relation at all to the historic Jesus. We need scarcely hesitate to regard St. Paul, indeed, as the real founder of our religion. It is obviously an intellectualistic theory, as much so as that of Holsten. Waiving the fact, conceded frankly by Gunkel,* that of this pre-Christian apocalyptic " Christ " we are in complete ignorance, the entire hypothesis rests on the A priori assumption that there can have been nothing genuinely new and creative in the apostle's view of Christ. His ideas on the subject must all have come to him from outside sources : as for attributing the vital core and heart of his Christology to a vast, revolutionising experience, it is not be dreamed of. No doubt the Damascus vision counts for something ; but what happened to him then, apparently, was not that he knew himself redeemed, but that he formed a reasoned opinion. He merely learned to give the name " Jesus " to the Divine heavenly being in whom he believed already. There is nothing to be said about this except that it is preposterous. If anything is sure about St. Paul, it is that his theology ' St. Paul, 313. ' Zum religionsgesch. Verstdndnia d. NT, 94. 52 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST is, as Wernle puts it, " the theology of a converted man." Every idea is a Christian idea. At Damascus there oc- curred a real event which changed his life from the centre to the circumference, and once for all caused him to forget the things that were behind. It is vain to interpret his Christology, therefore, by the hypothetical contents of his mind in earlier years ; as vain as to " explain " Shakespeare's historical plays by the materials he may have found in North's Plutarch or Holinshed's Chronicles. To suppose that the Pharisee became the Christian apostle merely in consequence of an intellectual readjustment, or that he could have induced the primitive society to tolerate, let alone adopt, a view of Christ thus generated, appears to me a theory out of all intelligible relation to human life. This is not to deny that certain inherited conceptions may have influenced the periphery of the Pauline doctrine, or determined the wording of some few phrases of description. But it is lost labour to start from these things. St. Paul's Christology is based on the experience of the glorified Lord vouchsafed to him in the hour of his conversion, illustrated and confirmed by the Spirit-sustained life of fellowship with Christ which was then begun. When he speaks of Christ, he is not combining ideas, but transcribing in- wardly reported fact. For him the basis of true religion was not made by man, but given by God ; and the knowledge of Jesus the Christ, through which he had peace with God and was become a new creature, he owed to a transforming spiritual experience.' The living and dynamic centre, then, of the Christology of St. Paul is his experience of the glorified Lord, by whom he had been "apprehended." In this respect he is ' The drift of opinion away from Wrede and Bruckner's view of St. Paul's indifference to tlie liistorio Jesus has been illustrated in a startling manner by the suggestion of J. Weiss, based on 2 Co 5", that the apostle came in contact with Jesus at Jerusalem prior to the crucifixion {Paulus und Jesm, 1909). Much more attractive is Moffatt's explanation of the passage, according to which "the knowledge of Christ after the flesh is probably the Messianic belief of Pharisaic theology such as Paul had CHRISTOLOGY DUE TO CONVEESION 53 in agreement with the primitive society. Both he and they looked upward, not backward. The staple of his thought comes not from inherited ideas as to the Messiah, but from a wonderful inward sense of possession by the sovereign grace of Christ. As we shall see, it is impossible to fuse too intimately his doctrine of Christ and of the Spirit. Yet, on the other hand, this exalted One is identical with Jesus who died for sin. The apostle cannot think of Christ and not think also of the cross He bore ; " I determined," he writes to the Corinthians, " to know nothing among you but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified " (1 Co 2^). We must conclude that his mind started from the Eisen One who encountered him in glory at Damascus, moved thence to the cross, which the Lord had endured, and came finally to rest on the person of the Crucified. His present experience of Christ is decisive as to what he must think of the death undergone by the Messiah ; on the other hand, the fact that such a reconciling death was possible is an index of the inherent dignity of Him who suffered. The full truth, accordingly, is not to be expressed either by saying that St. Paul's view of Christ's person is derived from his doctrine of atonement, or, con- versely, that his Christology fixed his doctrine of the atonement. In reality person and work define each other. The exalted Lord, known from the first as such, would not he Lord unless He had died " for our offences " (Eo 4'*'-) ; on the other hand, what Christ inherently is to God accounts, in the apostle's view, for the supreme religious value of His acceptance of the Cross. St. Paul, like all the writers of the New Testament, is convinced that the exalted Jesus is " the Christ " or Messiah — " Christ " for him still keeps a flavour of its shared in his pre-Christian days" {Paul and Paulinism, 18). If this he so, we may be said to have from the apostle's own lips a protest in advance against the modem radical derivation of his Christology. He is telling us, as in Gal l'*"", that ' ' from the very outset, a better knowledge of Christ's nature had shone upon him." The whole question of the genesis of his Christologioal ideas is very ably discussed by Olschewski, Die Wurzeln dtr faul. Christologit, 1909, whom I have followed in some points. 54 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST official sense — but also he transcends ab initio the current Messianic idea, perceiving the cardinal significance of Jesus, not for Jews merely, but for mankind. He nowhere employs the title " Son of Man." The Kingdom of God he virtually merges in the person of Christ. The phrase " Kingdom of God " itself, which seldom occurs, was so completely Jewish in origin and associations that he must have found it unhelpful in his missionary work. At the same time, its eschatological reference is still retained in what the apostle means by "salvation" and " eternal life " ; for he never ceased to look yearningly towards a consummation in which death, sin, sickness, demons, and every godless principality and power should be overcome and annihilated. Jesus the Christ was already clothed with universal power, and would ere long appear once more to bring all things to completion. Those who had accepted Him as Messianic King would at His appearance be made perfect members of the Messianic Kingdom, and thus be, in the full sense of the word, saved. In tracing now his conception of Christ we shall endeavour to follow as far as possible the movement of his own mind, beginning with the thought of the exalted Lord, and passing back thereafter to the historical, and what may be called the eternal, antecedents of Christ's present glory. It was due to his amazing experience of conversion that St. Paul's faith came to be fixed steadily, and from the very outset, on the risen and glorified Eedeemer. He habitually conceives of Christ as clothed in the So^a or Divine radiance in which he first beheld Him at Damascus. That moment was for him a piercing glimpse of a new world ; his sight of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ he can compare with nothing but that first creative hour when God said: "Let there be light!" (2 Co 4«). Here is the basis of his faith. From day to day he is preoccupied with the risen Lord, the Son whom it had pleased God to reveal in him (Gal 1^*). The attitude is THE RISEN SAVIOUR 55 one, of course, really common to all New Testament writers, but St. Paul's unique experience lent to it a peculiar intensity and passion. All redeeming influences are streaming out from Christ's risen power to fill the life of the believer. He is not to be separated, whether in thought or prayer, from God Himself.' It is with this one purpose that He has been exalted, that in the Spirit He should bring home to men the universal reconciliation with God once for all accomplished on the cross. He is Head of the Church, which is His body ; yet not of the Church alone, for His omnipotence, like His knowledge and His love, is complete and all-embracing. God has set Him far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come (Eph l^^). The hour of doom struck for the power of darkness when He rose from the grave. Even yet He has not attained the full victory, which will cul- minate only in His final advent, when the last enemy shall be vanquished and God will fulfil His purpose to sum up all things in Christ, both things in heaven and things in earth. Nevertheless, this glorious, royal Lord is not far away from His people, too high for human need or for that sympathy and care on which they are dependent while yet in the body. On the contrary. He is within and beside them always, to guide, comfort, warn, inspire, so that the apostle could literally speak of himself as being in Christ, of his life as being his own no longer, but the life of Christ living in him (Gal 2^°), and could pray for his converts that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith. Thus in Eo S'l*^- the strain of confidence and praise sweeps up from point to point with gathering intensity ; from the death of Christ to what is greater still. His rising from the dead, from His rising to His session at the right hand of God, and finally, as to a height at which imagination fails, to His work of inter- cession. This is the Christ before whose face St. Paul lives from day to day, and to wiiose advent he strains forward with keen desire. 56 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST No part of the apostle's teaching has a more vital bearing on his thought of the Exalted One than his mystic conception of the believer's union with Christ.^ Eound this idea his religious feeling crystallised. The phrase "in Christ" or "in the Lord" occurs nearly 240 times in the Epistles \ve have accepted as genuine, and it is used with reference to every side of experience. " I am persuaded in Christ," he writes (Ko 14i*); "if there be any consolations in Christ " (Ph 2^) ; " the dead in Christ " (1 Th 4^'). It is as though Christ were the air or element in which the Christian moved and had his being, thinking with His mind and willing with His will. The believer has absolutely become the organ or instrument of the Lord, and is drawn, spirit, soul, and body, into His dominating and recreating life. It is a relation of spirit to spirit, yet not a relation individualistically realised ; for — and this point is particularly accentuated in Ephesians — the Church is the body of Christ, in which old divisions of Jew and Gentile are done away. This final turn of thought, however, he has prepared for by the earlier conception of Christ as the Head of the body, of which individual Christians are the members ; " we, who are many," he writes to the Church in Rome, " are one body in Christ." (12^). The bond uniting Christ and Christians is such that the same predications can be made of both. In His death we also die, only to rise in His resurrection to newness of life. His power is made perfect in our weakness ; and it is no contradiction of this, but its true expression, that the apostle bears about in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus (2 Co 4^°), for only in proportion as the private forces of the believer decay can his natural capacities be absorbed and utilised by the higher power of Christ. The fact that St. Paul conceived this union or communion as mediated by the Spirit may possibly explain how he feels at liberty to change from the phrase " in Christ " and speak of Christ dwelling in us ; for the ' It has been expounded with a fine sympathy by J. Weiss, Die Nachfolgi Christi, 83-98. ONION WITH CHRIST 57 interpenetration between the Spirit-life of believers and the Spirit of Christ is perfectly reciprocal. Plainly this faith-mysticism lets in a flood of light on the Pauline Christology. A single verse like 2 Co 5", " If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation," reveals in a flash the last ground of his religious conviction about the Lord. He with whom men can be thus in a relation of mutual vital possession has obviously a nature which is more than human ; that entrance of His life into us, met and appro- priated by our absorption in Him — whereby we are able to denude ourselves of an unrighteous past and live anew to holiness — involves on His side something of the uni- versality and transcendence of God Himself. It has been argued that this synthesis of personality and spiritual im- manence in the Christ of St. Paul is in reality unthinkable, inasmuch as the two sides of the combined idea are irreconcilably opposed, and to take the combination seriously can only lead to the depersonalising of Christ in a quasi- pantheism. But we may reasonably urge that this is to beg the question of His divinity, in a negative sense. The figure of the head and the members (Col 1^*) seems peculiarly fitted to represent the relation of Christ to His people in both lights — as characterised equally by transcendence and by mystic vital union.^ There is nothing more luminous or creatively original in St. Paul's thought than his living correlation of Christ and the Spirit as they are manifested in experience. It is not merely that the phenomena of the Spirit are for him a decisive proof of Christ's Messianic position ; still further, the presence of the Spirit as a fact of power in the believing life is a self-communication of the Lord Jesus, who as Spirit dominates the new order of being into which Christian men have been translated. Spirit means supernatural power, yet not for St. Paul power revealed most typically in ecstatic rapture, but the ethical force from which spring such normal Christian graces as love, joy, peace, long-suffering, and kindness (Gal 5^), ' Cf. Olschewsti, op. cit. 153-54. 58 THK PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST which he sees to be more wonderful by far than speaking with tongues.^ In Dr. Moffatt's words, "his first experi- ence of the Lord was a vision of Jesus as the risen and exalted Christ. The reality of Christ's nature was Spirit, on his view; Jesus was installed or constituted Son of God with full powers by the resurrection, which revealed and realised his true nature as life-giving Spirit. His life in the flesh had limited him. It was a phase of being which could not do justice to him. But when that temporary impoverishment of nature was over, the heavenly reality shone out in its fulness. The Spirit radiated on men, it was poured into their hearts, as the Spirit of one who had died and risen for the sake of men. We must extinguish, however, the misconception that Paul regarded the Spirit as acting on the lines of a natural force in the evolution of the religious life. To him it meant the gracious power of God which evoked faith in Jesus as the crucified and risen Christ, and then mediated to the receptive, obedient life all that the Lord was and did for his own people." ^ Life " in the Spirit," his characteristic term for personal religion, can have its source only in the exalted or spiritual Christ, so that, when he describes men as being " in Christ " or " in the Spirit," he is thinking not of two rival or parallel realities, but of one revolutionary experience seen from two points of view ; for life flows to men from Christ and the Spirit in- differently. The ground of this epoch-making combination is clearly to be sought in his conversion. He had met the Exalted One face to face; and that spiritual event, in which the Spirit was energising, had had the Lord Jesus for concrete and substantial content. This once for all fixed his conception of the Spirit, lending it precision of outline, and protecting it against the wandering and unethical fancies of paganism. The Spirit of God, long promised for the latter days, was now known to be the * His perception of this difference of value marks a forward step in the history of religion. ' Paul and PauUniam, 37-38. CHRIST AND THE SPIRIT 59 very Spirit of Jesus. It is a salient example of how God reveals new truth through the medium of life. Not only so ; but we are thus once for all secured against the temptation to explain the Pauline Christology either as the product of mere theological reflection or as a mosaic of fragments borrowed from the traditions of Jewish apocalyptic. In point of fact, it is the offspring of creative religious intuition, working upon the felt realities of experience. " This inner fusion with the conception of the Spirit," as Olschewski puts it, " con- stitutes the specific and distinctive essence of Paul's Christology, and just on this account we must hold that its roots lie in the fundamental experience of Damascus." ^ At the same time, the relation of Christ and the Spirit is not that of identity, but of vital unity. The opposite view has been taken strongly. " He could not distinguish the Son from the Holy Ghost," Weinel says ; ^ a statement the force of which is naturally lessened by its retractation on the next page. The wording of 2 Co 3^' may seem to decide the question ; " the Lord," the apostle avers plainly, "is the Spirit." Yet the following clause faintly reaffirms the distinction in the words, " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." No one can imagine that " Christ " and " the Spirit of Christ " mean the same thing precisely. Not to speak of the fact that St. Paul does not regard Jesus as the incarnate Spirit of God, but affiliates his ideas on this subject to other lines of ancient thought, various minor data are significant. The person who died upon the cross, and rose again, and will come at last to judgment, is nowhere named " Spirit." Christ, moreover, gives the Spirit in its fulness. And in the triple blessing of 2 Co 13^*, the Spirit is co-ordinated with Christ and God as a separately discernible element in the one redeeming agency. It is important to recollect that the theological ideas of Christianity came first, and ' Op. ^. 161. • Si. Paul, 326 ; of. Sehmiedel, Band-Kommentar, ii. 192. 60 THK PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST that only afterwards were they fitted with more or less exact verbal distinctions, so that usage might for a con- siderable time show a certain fluidity or free play of expression. By the form of identification St. Paul indicates just the familiar experiential fact that Christ, by whom God saves men, and the Holy Spirit, in whom He conveys to them Divine life, are so indissociably one in significance and operation and media that from the point of view of practical faith they are seen as true equivalents of each other. Yet within the unity there is distinction. As it has been put, " Christ in you, or the Spirit of Christ in you ; these are not different realities ; but the one is the method of the other." ^ We have already encountered the principle that on St. Paul's view the Lordship of Christ first came to full reality at His exaltation to the right hand of God. There is a sense in which His glory is superior even to His pre-existent life. He is now possessed of the Name above every name. It is represented as somehow a reward of His voluntary sacrifice : " He humbled Himself . . . where- fore God also highly exalted Him " (Ph 2'). The classic passage for this side of the Pauline teaching is Eo 1*, which declares that He was constituted or declared Son of God with power, in virtue of the Spirit of holiness, by rising from the dead. The Divine energy which effected the resurrection set Christ free from the confining limits of life in the flesh, and gave untrammelled and complete expression to His proper Sonship. With this we may compare Eo 14^, a verse which points to the authority of Christ as now covering all men, in this life and the next. Similarly, it is always the risen Lord who bestows the Spirit. In these statements it appears to be implied, first, that Christ has ascended to be Lord of all things, taking this place subsequently to and as a result of the resurrection ; and in the second place, that originally His personal nature was such as to qualify Him for this transcendent place. Presently He will come to judge ' Moberly, Airniemcnt and Personality, 194. THE LAST ADAM 61 the world in God's name. But in strictness no sharp line of distinction is drawn between God and Christ as regards this judicial act or function. The two names occur jointly, or as alternatives.^ God, or Christ, or God through Christ, will judge men and work the last great change on believers. But we must not play off the future against the present, as if even for St. Paul the believer " never is, but always to be, blest." He shares to the full the ardent primitive \ hope of Jesus' return, as inaugurating the final consumma- tion ; none the less on his view salvation is already real through the present activity of the Lord who became incarnate, died, and rose again. The crucifixion had been the ruin of the hostile cosmic powers ; having disarmed and exposed them, Christ triumphed over them in the cross (Col 2'^). The Kingdom of God, which is righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Ko 14i'), is actual even now. Christ died once, but the redemptorial virtue of His death is in Him for ever. The relation of the exalted Christ to men as Life- giver leads the apostle, in one place, to designate Him by the title of "the last Adam" (1 Co 15*^). Adam was head, representative, and type of the race derived from him ; through transgression this race became carnal and subject to death : so in like manner, Christ as risen is Head of a new redeemed race made one with God by His death and raised above the power of the flesh by contact with the Spirit. Adam was earthly, Jesus heavenly ; Adam a transgressor, Jesus obedient ; Adam only a living soul, Jesus a quickening spirit, " a Being above nature, who had life and was capable of giving it."^ The new spiritual principle that came with Him is made incorporate with all who trust Him, thus vivifying their whole being in its relation to God, self, and all things else. The Spirit of holiness being the inmost reality of Christ, He becomes the organic head of a new spiritual creation ; and as grace and life are more potent than sin and death, His reign ' Cf. Sanday and Headlam, Romans, 88S. * Fairbairn. Christ in Modern, Theology, 311. 62 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST will far exceed in scope and triumph the doom entailed by ancient transgression.^ So deeply absorbed is St. Paul in the risen Lord that it has not infrequently been held that he was indifferent to the historic Jesus, his gospel only beginning when Jesus' career on earth had ended. This, however, is gravely misleading. To his mind the distinction of earth and heaven, so wide for modern thought, was relatively small. While he had no personal knowledge of Jesus like that enjoyed by the Twelve, it may be taken as an assured fact that he was acquainted with the evangelical tradition, and indeed knew about Jesus what the ordinary Christian knew. In Arabia, after his conversion, he need not have lived wholly apart from Christians. Besides, he had spent a fortnight with St. Peter in Jerusalem, and it will be admitted that much may be told in a fortnight if Jesus is the subject-matter, and the learner an apostle. There is nothing inconsistent with this in the striking language of Gal 1": "The gospel preached by me is not according to man ; for neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, except by revelation from Jesus Christ " ; which is but a forcible declaration that the Messiahship of Jesus was once for all disclosed to him by no human intermediary, but by a vision of the Lord Himself. Jiilicher, with a pleasing vigour, has observed that " an apostle of Jesus Christ who had no desire to know about the Messiah's earthly life, and for dogmatic reasons passed by with scorn, as mere carnal weakness, everything revealed by God's Son in the form of a servant, is not the Paul of history, but a monstrosity of modern logic." ^ As Drescher shows, it is possible to draw a fairly complete sketch of Jesus, and especially of His character and disposition, from the ' From all this we may gather what St. Paul would have said regard- ing the modern attempt to put him alongside of Jesus as part founder of Christianity. "Paul is not the second after Jesus," Daissmann remarks finely, "but the first in Christ." ' Jesus U7id Faulus, 55. ST. Paul's knowledge of jesus 63 Pauline materials.' At the same time, the interest which guides his pen is not purely or even mainly historical. There is no reference to Jesus' miracles, His faith, His prayerfulness. His habits as a man amongst men. Certain words of Jesus are cited as authoritative, chiefly on minor points. His birth, His sinlessness, His institution of the Supper, His death on the cross and rising on the third day — these things are reported with a few lesser details. The reason for this comparative reticence must lie in the apostle's mind being engrossed chiefly with the great decisive fact of redemption as an experience. But it is clear that unless certain facts concerning Jesus were known to him, through historical tradition, the confession " Jesus is Lord " would have meant nothing. Hence it is an axiom for St. Paul that Jesus lived and was true man. He was made of a woman, born of the seed of David according to the flesh. He is the last Adam, founding a new humanity. There might appear to be a docetic undertone in the statement (Eo 8^) that God sent His Son " in the likeness of sinful flesh " ; but the meaning is simply that while Christ's flesh is as real as ours, and as human, it was not Mke ours sinful. The flesh of man, with this one exception, was the pattern of His flesh, but in Him alone it may be seen in a perfected relation to the Spirit. But Jesus' sinlessness — St. Paul knew of it, as of His unique self-consciousness, from the impression made on the disciples and conveyed by them to the new convert — was not the mere absence of moral fault. The fulfilment of the law is love, and the figure of the Nazarene who bore the cross for sinners must have shone upon him with the radiance of ineifable and self- abnegating grace. A complete morel identity links the present Lordship to the past humiliation. Yet the life lived by Jesus on earth, as St. Paul dis- cerned, was a form of being wholly inadequate to His ' Das Leben Jesu lei Paulus. For some admirable pages on the harmony of detail in St. Paul's picture of Jesus and that of the primiti v society, cf. Feine, Theologie d. NT, 200 IT. 64 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST true nature. It confined Him within limits ; it prevented the full manifestation of all that which He really was. For His origin lay in a higher world, that of eternal being, from which by a voluntary act He came amongst men, taking the form of a servant. To the original disciples the astounding paradox had been, that the Jesus whose companions they had been, and who had died in shame, was now raised to the right hand of God ; to St. Paul the paradox was rather that the Exalted One, proved by resurrection to be the Son of God and of heavenly nature, should have taken flesh and died at Calvary. They saw the resurrection against the lowly ministry with its still more lowly end ; he viewed the earthly life in bold relief against the glory of ascension and pre-existence. The mere fact that Christ should have accepted human life, to surrender it in death for our sake, thrills him with a wondering gratitude. The unique personal constitution of Jesus, during His earthly lifetime, consisted of a body of flesh and blood, and, in addition, of that which the apostle denominates " Spirit.'' The two elements are mentioned side by side in Eo !*■ * ; on which Dr. Denney has observed that " the expression Karh Trvev/JM d'yicoavvT}'; characterises Christ ethically, as learcL crdpKa does physically. Not that it makes the sonship in question ' ethical ' as opposed to ' metaphysical ' : no such distinctions were in the apostle's thought. But the sonship, which was declared by the resurrection, answered to the spirit of holiness which was the inmost and deepest reality in the Person and life of Jesus." ^ It was a " Spirit " which sealed Him with a specific character ; not merely energising as Divine power in His life, but supplying the efiicient ground of His victory over death. To it St. Paul's mind recurred, most probably, when his mind dwelt on the theme of Christ's pre-historic life ; " Spirit " was the element or medium, so to speak, of that life, in virtue of which there was continuity between the different phases of His career. 1 EOT. ii. in 7oc. THE SON AS ETERNAL 65 In eternity, on earth, and now in the present and unending glory, His unity with God was a unity in or through " Spirit." In the first paragraph of Eomans, as in the great verses we have just examined, Jesus Christ is designated the " Son of God," a title never used by St. Paul save with a certain grave solemnity.^ It is no longer a Messianic name of honour merely ; it has been assigned the loftier function of expressing the original and inherent unity of life by which Christ is conjoined with God. Accord- ing to the usage of the Old Testament, he was specifically God's Son on whom God's love was set, but in St. Paul this is a mode of thought transcended, even if not cancelled. If we take verses like Eo 8'^ : " He that spared not His own Son," or Col 1^*: "the Son of His love," we can only agree with Weiss that " it would be a mistake to interpret these passages as though ' sonship ' were merely another way of expressing love ; because God so loved this being, therefore he was the Son of God. The reverse is true: Because he is the Son, therefore God loves him."* Son of God by eternal nature — it is in this character that He comes into the world. Already in that unbeginning life He had been the image of the invisible God (Col 1^^). We are not entitled to make the apostle responsible for an explicit doctrine of " eternal generation " ; but unques- tionably he does mean that the relation of Christ to God is increate and essential. It has been inferred from Eo 1^ where the Sonship of Christ is put in connection with His rising from the dead, that the Pauline Christ is Son only after the resurrection. But the words really mean that only then was His Sonship fully and actually manifested ; He is known as Son from that point onwards, but by inference the mind passes beyond and behind that fact to the Sonship which is superior to time. ' "With scarcely an exception it is only used in such portions of the letters as are marked by an especial elevation of style " (Weinel, St. Pa%l, 324). Examples are Ro 8»^ 1 Co 1", Gal 2». ' J. Weiss, Christ : the Beginnings of Dogma, 66. 5 66 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST It is observable that St. Paul touches on our Lord's pre-existence, always or nearly always, in a quite incidental manner. This does not prove that the idea was no part of his " gospel " — a point on which so far we have no evidence — but it proves, at all events, that pre-existence was an idea so familiar to Christians as to require no explanation or apology. Nowhere is his tone that of the sponsor for a doctrinal novelty. As to particular texts, undue weight must not be placed on Gal 4*, " God sent forth His Son," although the phrase is significant enough (ef. Eo 8*). Somewhat more explicit is 1 Co 10*, where it is asserted that the Eock which followed the Israelites in the desert, and of which they drank, was Christ ; He is conceived, that is, as having played a real part in Old Testament history. And there is general agreement that 2 Co 8' bears not upon the " poverty " of Jesus' lifetime on earth, but on His sacrifice in being born ; for the " poverty " and " riches " in question must obviously be correlative, and since He neither was Himself rich in the literal sense, nor made others so, it is impossible to take literally the poverty here ascribed to Him. The verse is one which in import transcends the phenomena of time and space, announcing not merely that Christ's earthly life was inferior in glory to His prior condition, but — a yet more sublime thought — that He entered upon the lower state by His own volition. Finally there is Ph 2^'', a passage "marked by epic fulness and dignity," the amplest and most deliberate of all St. Paul's declarations on the theme. Lightfoot has thus paraphrased vv.* and ' : " Though existing before the worlds in the Eternal Godhead, yet He did not cling with avidity to the prerogatives of His Divine majesty, did not ambitiously display His equality with God ; but divested Himself of the glories of heaven, and took upon Him the nature of a servant, assuming the likeness of men." ^ Christ, that is, came into our world from a previous state of Divine existence ; in that estate He ^ PMliiipiana, 110. THE CONCEPTION OF PRE-EXISTENCE 67 possessed self-conscious independent life, with a will that ruled itself ; a will that might have been exerted in other modes, but actually was exerted in this mode of self- abnegation. It is asserted — and on the assertion hinges the thrilling moral appeal of the passage — that before He came as man Christ's life was Divine in quality ; not merely like God, but participant in His essential attri- butes {iiop^Tj). The crucial fact is that the apostle, even though refraining from speculation as to the relationship to God of the Eternal Son, does not scruple to describe Him as subsisting in, and then giving up, " a being so in the form of God that to be equal with Him is a thing of nature." He took a life of manhood through the abdication of infinite glory. And the motif of the passage — meta- physical only so far as it is ethical — lies in the subduing thought that when it was open to Christ so to employ the powers of His inherently Divine dignity as to insist on being worshipped as God, He chose to reach this supreme position, of Lordship acknowledged universally, by the path of lowliness, obedience, and death. Thus His descent reveals the vastness of His love, and justifies His later exaltation. This exaltation is undoubtedly conceived as in a real sense the reward of the great sacrifice that went before ; on the other hand, to talk of " deification " is out of all keeping with the apostle's mind. To a Jew the notion that a man might become God would have been flat blasphemy. Ascension only served to bring out in full actuality what was originally implicit ; it but unfolded the essential glory and dignity of Christ's person. Pre- existence and Lordship, therefore, are in strictness relative to each other.^ It is of course possible to discount the impression made by such declarations. The first believers, it may be said, vied with one another in finding or inventing names • Cf. H. A. A. Kennedy, EOT. iii. in loc. Too much importance should not be ascribed to Deissmann's interesting suggestions as to the influence on St. Paul of language associated with the worship of the Emperor. 68 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST by which to enhance Jesus' glory. But whether they fipoke of His birth of a virgin or His eternal Sonship, it was only a hyperbolical attempt to utter His spiritual greatness. The idea of His pre-existence, Jiilicher has surmised, may have been helped into currency by the widespread contemporary belief in the transmigration of souls. " If I have been man already, innumerable times, why should Jesus not have lived in heaven for centuries as the Son of Grod ? " "^ In other quarters it has been maintained that for St. Paul's mind, as for the mind of his fellow-Christians, the thought of Christ's pre-existence was no more than a subordinate and ancillary symbol It is obvious that whatever names St. Paul might use would have had their own previous history, but we must not beg the question whether he could or could not fill them with a new significance. Further, it is vain to urge that the con- ception of pre-existence is either peculiar to St. Paul or of merely peripheral importance for his view of Christ. It is present conspicuously in Hebrews and in the Johannine writings ; there is some reason to believe, indeed, that it derives ultimately from Jesus. In the presence of these facts, it is gratuitous to plead that the writers of the New Testament attached to it only minor religious value, and would have waived it readily to satisfy an objector. The origin of St. Paul's thought of pre-existence has been sought especially in the alleged Jewish- Hellenic idea of a pre-existent " heavenly Man," the archetype and pattern of created manhood. Following the Alex- andrian theory, as various scholars have maintained since Baur, he taught that Christ pre-existed in heaven as a human personality, inclusive of a body. The evidence for this startling hypothesis is of the slenderest. In Ko 5 the parallel between Adam and Christ is more an illustration than anything else; it is St. Paul's way of saying that Christianity is the absolute religion. And in 1 Co 15**~*' — the locus classicus — all likelihood of ' Paulus wnd Jesus. 32. THE HEAVENLY MAN 69 Alexandrian influence, except possibly by way of implied polemic, is negatived by two main considerations : that the " heavenly Man " whom Philo names " the First Man " is emphatically named " the Second Man " by St. Paul, and that the passage is throughout concerned not in the least with the pre-existent but with the exalted Christ. It was only in virtue of resurrection that He became the arche- type and head of a new race. It would be arbitrary to deny that the apostle's mind may have owed something to Buch floating conceptions of transcendence as the Philonic, but it is still more unfounded to describe it as in any intel- ligible sense the germ or organic core of his Christology, since in point of fact it is mentioned merely in one chapter of one epistle. A minor but equally decisive circumstance is its incompatibility, in its Alexandrian form at all events, with other Pauline statements as to the pre-existent One. A being who was from eternity in the form of God could not also be said to have eternally worn a human body. The notion, however, that St. Paul's view of Christ started from the idea of the " heavenly Man " will always fasci- nate those who are resolved to interpret his " gospel " in exclusively humanitarian terms. The pre-existent Christ is further conceived as having mediated by personal Divine agency in the creation of the world (1 Co 88, Col V^^). If there be a reference to Gnosticism in the latter passage, as is probably the case, it is by way of recoil, not of imitation. I quote again Lightfoot's paraphrase: "He is the perfect image, the visible representation of the unseen God. He is the Firstborn, the absolute Heir of the Father, begotten before the ages ; the Lord of the Universe by virtue of primo- geniture, and by virtue also of creative agency. For in Him and through Him the whole world was created, things in heaven and things in earth, things visible to the outward eye, and things cognizable by the outward per- ception. His supremacy is absolute and universal. All powers in heaven and earth are subject to Him. Thia subjection extends even to the most exalted and most 70 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST potent of angelic beings, whether they be called Thrones or Dominations or Princedoms or Powers, or whatever title of dignity men may confer upon them. Yes, He is first and He is last. Through Him, as the mediatorial word, the universe has been created ; and unto Him, as the final goal, it is tending. In Him is no before or after. He is pre-existent and self-existent before all the worlds. And in Him as the binding and sustaining power, universal nature coheres and consists." ' In this picture of Christ, stimulated it may be in part by the Philonic conception of the Logos, the apostle moves onward from historical to cosmic modes of interpretation. We may single out the three main statements : first, Christ is the organ of creation, absolute in function and eternal in existence ; secondly, in Him all things are held together, cohering in that unity and solidarity which make a cosmos ; thirdly, as all things took rise in Him, so they move on to Him as final goal. The aorist tense is used to affirm that Christ created all things, for the writer is thinking of the pre-existent One ; but the fact that he lapses into perfects and presents is a suggestive hint that he contemplates this pre-existence through the medium, so to speak, of the exalted Life. Or to put it otherwise, Christ is conceived as creator of the world qua the Person in whom the universe was in due time to find its organic centre in virtue of His work of reconciliation ; He was the initial cause of all things, as being destined to be their final end. His function as Creator is proleptically conditioned by His achievement as Saviour. The apostle's mind, here as everywhere, starts from the risen Lord, and, as Professor Peake observes, " the work of the Son in His pre-existent state is referred to, that the true position of the exalted Christ may be understood." ^ It is interesting to compare an earlier form of the same idea. This is in 1 Co 8* : " To us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto Him ; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through ' Colossicms, 144. ' EOT. iii. in loc. CHRIST AND CREATION 71 Him." Christ is the agent in creation, yet He is here designated not as Son, but by the title usually applied to the risen Saviour. As in Colossians, the ideas of creation and redemption are united — redemption being the present fact from which thought begins, and in the light of which alone creation can be interpreted. The Son before xll time is visible through Christ's historic work in grace. On the other hand, what is last in knowledge may be first in reality. In the Colossian passage, therefore, we can dis- cern also this inferential counter-movement of thought ; redemption is a fruit of, and has its basis in, Christ's place and work in nature. The same oscillation of mind between the poles of eternity and time may be seen in the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel and in the opening paragraph of Hebrews. In view of this exalted estimate of Christ, it is at first disconcerting to read plain statements in the same author which affirm His distinct subordination to God the Father. A candid exegesis will acknowledge, I think, that now and then the matter is too clear for dispute : Christ is given a place inferior to God, and His work as Mediator and Reconciler is eventually traced to the Father as originative cause. As examples we may take " God sent forth His Son " (Gal 4*), " He that spared not His own Son" (Eo 8^% "God hath highly exalted Him " (Ph 2»), " It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell" (Col 1"); and it should be noted that these phrases are selected indifferently from the earlier and later writings. The gift of Christ to men, His sacrifice in death, the saving content of His life, and the bestowal on Him of the glory of exaltation are in turn asserted to be due to God. The whole career of Christ, in short, with its vast issues, is regarded as having redounded supremely to the glory of God the Father (Ph 2"). To this we scarcely need to add the explicit statement of 1 Co 11* : "The head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God," with which the great climax of 3^ may 72 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST be compared: "All tbings are yours . . . and ye are Cbrist's, and Cbrist is God's." Even more striking, per- haps, is a third verse in the same epistle, where St. Paul anticipates the final surrender of the kingdom by the Son : " Then shall the Son also Himself be subjected to Him that did subject all things unto Him, that God may be all in all" (15^*). As Loofs has shown, it is a verse the mystery of which laid a spell on many of the Greek and Latin Fathers.^ It appears to contemplate a point of time when Christ, having put all enemies under His feet, will abdicate and submit even Himself to the Most High. There is no parallel to this anywhere in the New Testament.^ It may possibly be a relic of Jewish belief as to the destiny of the Messiah ; and at a later stage, as in Col 1^^, the apostle seems to have put it on one side.^ But at all events it is proof of the subordina- tionist aspect of his view of Christ. Whatever inference we build on these expressions, they are at least no evidence that St. Paul was an early Arian. To say that " Christ is not God, but the Son of God," or that " The Son was called into life and endowed with power by God for the creation and redemption of mankind," is to signalise but one side of the Pauline Christology, and not the most remarkable. We are justi- fied in saying that his view was not simply incoherent. But it is certain that he held the deity of Christ. If he nowhere puts it with dogmatic precision, at least the doxology in Eo 9^ is significant ; also his habitual use of "Lord "as the proper title of the exalted Christ, and his frequent bracketing of Christ with God as the fount of all grace and peace. The mere fact that he could write Col 2' : " In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily," is really decisive ; for the words mean ' Of. article " Christologie," RE. iv. ' Weizsacker long ago suggested Jn \fr^ — " in that day ye shall ask Me nothing"— but a precise exegesis scarcely bears him out (see Jahrh. f, deutsche Theologie, 1857, 183-84). • Of. Titius, Die neutest. Lehre von der Seligkeit, 2 Abtheil. 35. THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SON 73 that in Christ there is to be found, as a unity or in organic relation, the entire sum of qualities and attributes by which the being of God is constituted. The subordina- tion of Christ, therefore, was on his view compatible with His having a place within the sphere of Godhead. It was a subjection by which the unity of God was exhibited, not destroyed. In the solution of this antinomy, St. Paul affords less aid than we might expect. In common with the primitive apostolic society, he looks to Christ equally with God for all things in the present or the future, representing now the one, now the other, as Judge, Saviour, and Lord without any sense of facing a painful problem, much less a contradiction. Questions on which a later age fastened had not arisen in his mind. One simple mode of relieving the strain has indeed been recommended. It is to identify the Pauline dualism in Christology with the twofold interpretation of Christ which has been felt to pervade the New Testament as a whole. The first or historical view moves always within the human fact of Jesus' life on earth, finding in His unique manhood the perfect vehicle of Divine grace. The other or transcendent view fixes upon the higher nature manifest in all Christ's life and work, and from this recurs to His pre-incarnate life in God and as God. Are not subordinationist phrases more easily intelligible (it is said) if we relate them simply to the former, or historical, interpretation ? This would virtually be the theory of Calvin, who comments on 1 Co 3^^ : HcBC suhjectio ad Christi humanitatem refertur. Jesus Christ, as a historic person, who was entrusted with a vocation in and for mankind, and submitted HimseK to God in the discharge of it — how else than in subordina- tionist terms could St. Paul speak of His relation to the Father ? I do not wish to deny the force of this, which would indeed be quite convincing but for certain state- ments that unquestionably plant the subordination predicated of Christ within the eternal and transcendent sphere. The pre-incarnate One and the Risen Lord 74 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST equally are pictured as subject to the rule of God the Father (Gal 4*, Col 1^'). The Son is personally one with God, yet also subordinate in the sense indissociably bound up with the very thought of sonship. And St. Paul, so far as can be seen, would not have consented to reduce either of these two forms of truth to the other — Christ and God are of one Divine nature, yet within this unity there obtain relations of higher and lower. It will be seen that St. Paul's view of Christ represents a noteworthy advance on the primitive apostolic conception as indicated by the Petrine speeches in Acts. He was the first to speak of Christ as agent in creation, and to draw together closely the Spirit and Christ's inmost being. He led the way also in teaching a mysticism which has its pivot or point of departure in the Christian's union with Christ. In this sense his Christology is in- dependent and unique. This originality has been turned into a grave charge against the credibility of his conclusions by those who argue that we cannot really expect a true estimate of the person and work of Christ from one who had not been an immediate disciple. Whether he did or did not spin Christology freely out of his own mind, at least we are unable to control the statements for which he makes himself responsible. It is a striking fact, however, that his estimate of Christ never became, so far as we know, the subject of controversy in the primitive Church.^ Men who dissented violently from his interpretation of the Law found no difficulty in his conception of the Saviour. His was one true way, they felt, of stating the impression made on him and them alike by the crucified and exalted Lord. He nowhere betrays a feeling that the idiosyncrasies of his thought are leading him on to dangerous ground where he must move with a tender regard for others. He can count on sympathy and comprehension. The categories he ' Not that controversy would discredit his interpretation ; but in point of fact there was none. ST. Paul's view original 75 employed were such as to gain the confidence and approval of Christian men. Nevertheless, it may be argued that the aptness of the Pauline Christology to the first century is precisely the reason why it is impossible for us. Owing to the provi- dential advance of human thought we have irrecoverably lost his point of view. The fact that primitive believers welcomed his estimate of Jesus is, moreover, no evidence of its real truth. Naturally all views of Christ that enhanced His glory or gave worthy expression to His redeeming influence were pleasing to their minds ; but they would certainly have greeted a different set of thought-forms with equal fervour, provided they rose to the same level of imaginative and ideal power. This is true no doubt in the sense that some im- portant elements in the Christology of St. Paul are even yet of partially dubious interpretation ; it is a vain ques- tion whether we accept them, for we cannot tell what they mean. Who will claim to know for certain the whole import for the apostle's mind of such phrases as " the form of God " and " the form of a servant " (Ph 2^^-), as they are predicated successively of the pre-existent and the incarnate Christ ? Nor can we deny that several pre- Christian influences — Jewish theology, Philo, Stoicism — may have left their mark on his language. Yet it is a.n unseeing criticism which finds in these anything more than the outward setting of the picture.^ If the gospel ' Cf. a valuable page in Eeischle, Theologie und Religionsgeschichte, 40. Harnack's recent statement is also worth quoting : "It is utterly improbable that St. Paul arrived at the central conception of a Son of God, who died and rose again, through the myths of Western Asia ; the premises of his reasoning and the historical premises which lay in the death on the cross and the belief in the resurrection of Jesus must of themselves have led him up to it. But it is quite possible that the idea underlying those myths had won some influence over him, without his being aware of it, not only upon the cosmological development of the idea, but also upon the determination and power with which the apostle advanced it" (Fifth International Congress of Free Christianity, 1910, p. 104). Similarly, how much had been done by the progress of Hellenistic relioious thought to jifpHre the term o-om)/) for Christian usage we nia}- learn from the 76 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST was for the men of that age, it must be conveyed in the vernacular of their minds, by those to whom con- temporary ideas formed a natural and vital atmosphere. On the other hand, it is in no way fatal to the validity of an idea — that of pre-existence, for example — that it should have had a previous history in Jewish thought. The revelation of God in Christ, if interpreted at all, must of course be interpreted by ideas already present in the world ; ideas, we may believe, not altogether un- inoulded by a higher wisdom for the service they were to render. If in addition we contemplate the Pauline Christology as a whole, we perceive that in every age it has gained the free recognition and assent of the Christian mind. The thought, for example, that Christ by essential nature is such that He gathers men into union with Himself, opening the gates of His spiritual being to receive us as only God can ; that in eternal love He bowed down to earth to bear man's sin ; that the destinies of His Church and of the world are in His hands for ever — can we dismiss these things as the outworn formulas of a remote past, in which there remains no substance or value any more ? On the contrary, they rise spontaneously in the intelligence of those who to-day are impressed by Jesus as they were who first believed in Him. But more, the Christology of St. Paul is possessed of that sublime and inexhaustible quality which is native to enduring truth. His loftiest descriptions of the Lord Jesus, far from having faded into obsolescence, still evoke our reflection, as they elude it, by their very greatness. researches of men like Paul Wendland (of. his article in the Zeiischrift fur neuUst. Wissenschafl, 1904, 335 ff.). Christians, we can see, employed that term to express the glorious fact that in Jesus they had found everything which can be called salvation — from sin, from death, from judgment, from the tyranny of demons. In the case of New Testament writers, however, it is scarcely questionable that the old form has been filled with a new spirit. Indeed, it may be argued that they " consciously and deliberately opposed the 2wTi)/) who had appeared to them, and His influence, to the earthly ffUTTJpes and their false titles of honour." This certainly holds true of the Apocalypse (see Moff'att's Commentary in the Expesilor's Oreek Testament, y. 307-17). Cf. Haruack, Reden und Aufsatze, i. 299 ff. ELEMENTS OF PERMANENCE 11 They are still beyond us as of old ; we can but throw out our minds at an infinite reality ; and to the last the believing consciousness will vainly strive to know the depth and height beheld by the apostle in Christ Jesus as he wrote : " In Him were all things created, in the heavens and the earth, things visible and things invisible . . . fo7 in Hira dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." CTIAPTEE TV. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. In point of time, the Epistle to the Hebrews is the first systematic sketch of Christian theology. A very complete picture of Christ is drawn, line after line being added to fill out the majestic introductory representation (1^"*). His person is contemplated throughout as the source or presupposition of the work accomplished by Him as the High Priest of men. Jesus, we read, is " the Mediator of a new covenant" (12^*, cf. 9^^ and 8«) ; this is His essential function ; and the pre-eminence of the new covenant over the old, as well as its lasting glory, is due to the incomparable dignity of the one eternal Priest. Christ is like Aaron in certain ways : His commission is from God, not self-assumed, and for all His unique superi- ority He keeps touch with the needs and frailties of the people, one with them in suffering and temptation. But still more He is unlike Aaron : He abides a priest con- tinually (7^') ; being holy, guileless, undefiled, and separate from sinners. He needs not to offer sacrifice for His own sin, as in the old order (7^). Formerly men were made priests without an oath, whereas in constituting Jesus the Son a priest for ever " the Lord sware, and will not repent " Literature — Riehm, Der Lehrbegrijf dea Hebrderbriefs', 1867 ; Mtedgoz, La thtologie de Vepitre aux Hebreux, 1894; Davidson, Hebrews, 1882; Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 1899; Milligan, The Theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 1899; Bousset, Die Religion des Judenthums', 1906; Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, 1893; Drummond, Philo JudcBUS, 1888 ; Scott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 1922. 78 THE HUMAN JKSCTS 79 (7*^). With His life and death a new dispensation has opened : " In Him the shadows of the Law Are all fulfilled, and now withdraw." His sole earlier type is Melchisedec, that ancient and mystic figure in whom king and priest are one, " the direct creation of God, without any of the accidents of time," independent alike of descent and posterity. Already we can see that Christology is the doctrinal centre of the Epistle. The writer makes no profession of having been an eye- witness, yet his picture of Jesus is singularly vivid and arresting. He must, one feels, have had access to good original tradition. Nowhere in the New Testament is the humanity of Christ set forth so movingly ; for " not even all the Gospels show us Jesus in the weakness of His flesh side by side with the purity of His spirit, as He is exhibited here. " ' We see Him proclaiming salvation (2^), agonising in prayer (5'), embracing the Cross with joy and faith (12^), suffering the last penalty without the city gate (13^^). The name " Jesus " occurs by itself at least ten times. Sprung from the tribe of Judah, He passed through the normal development of human life, learning obedience, even though a Son, by the things which He suffered (5*). Into His course there entered sinless frailty and dread temptation ; no aspect of His life or character escaped the assault of evil. And thereby He was schooled in sympathy. Yet no corrupt strain existed in His nature to which temptation could appeal. His sinlessness is definitely affirmed, more particularly as a supreme qualification for His work as Saviour and Inter- cessor. A frank emphasis, without parallel in the New Testament, is laid on His human virtues. These constitute the ethical life of the Son of God. There are allusions to His fidelity (S^), His trust in God (2^% His piety (5'), His patience under reproach (12^). The strong crying and tears with which He is said to have prayed "to Him ' Bruce, Epistle to the Hebrews, 443. 80 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST that was able to save Him from death " are as unlike as possible to the ontological impassivity that has been ascribed to the Christ of Hebrews. When He is said to have been " made perfect " (5*), it is not meant that He overcame fault or defect, but that He realised to the full what He had it in Him to be. He became perfect through experience, as the bud is perfected in the flower. Potencies of absolute goodness were evoked by a moral discipline which made Him the High Priest of mankind. Such unity with the will of God, however, finally expressed in death, is not something which He gradually acquired ; in principle it is something which He brought with Him when He came (10^"^). Along with this realistic portrait of Jesus goes a Christ- ology at least as lofty as that of Paul. Hebrews, like the rest of the New Testament, begins from the exalted Lord ; " We have such a high priest," the writer sums up at one point, " who sat down on the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens " (8^). It is the distinctive work of Christ to be Priest within the veil, " a minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle " (8^). From the stress put upon exaltation we gather that Messianic ideas still come naturally to the writer's mind, but they are receding from the foreground, and other than Messianic terms are about to replace them for purposes of interpretation. Assuming, then, the present glory of Jesus, the writer's argument as to His personal dignity is regressive. He goes back to the original nature which renders possible the present majesty. From the first Christ was capable of what He now is. In the exordium of the first chapter, accordingly, Christ is set forth as " Son," a name which defines His nature as in essential relation to the Father. In the character of Son, He is " the effulgence of God's glory and the very impress of His substance " (!'). If " effulgence " or reflected brightness hints at essential unity between light at the centre and light diffused, "impress" or image or facsimile points to a distinctness in which one side of the CHRIST AS SON 81 duality is a perfect, yet dependent, reproduction of the other.^ The language is no doubt that of the schools ; but the writer is master of his terms, not their slave, and can mould them to the spirit of his exposition. " Son " is itself a metaphor, and there appears to be no good reason why an apostolic writer should not elucidate its meaning by other metaphorical expressions current in his own day. The Divine place of the Son is signalised by the fact that in 1* He is said to uphold all things by the word of His power, and in 1' is actually addressed as " God." Possibly in view of Jewish beliefs as to the mediation of angels, the writer is at special pains to emphasise their inferiority to the Son. They are bidden to adore Him; no angel has ever been named Son, as He is, or placed on God's right hand. He is also above Moses and the prophets. In spite of this transcendence, Jesus on earth was made a little lower than the angels (2^). It was a temporary but real humiliation, for the life to which He stooped in His redemptive purpose formed but an imperfect medium of His higher being. He assumed flesh, not only that He might be apprehensible, but in order to suffer by tasting death for every man; and there is more than one pathetic reference to the ignominy of the Cross. Nowhere is the writer's religious feeling more penetrating than when he insists (2^^'^") that at His coming into the world the Son did not stop half-way, but chose a veritable share in our lot. " Since then the children are partakers in flesh and blood, He also Himself in like manner took part of the same ... for verily not of angels doth He take hold, but He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham." We are led to think of a descent on His part, even if nothing is said, here or elsewhere, regarding the effect on His previous form of existence produced by this sublime act. Thus He lecame High Priest (5^), and His complete and perfect priesthood is the outcome of His having been made like men in all things, in suffering, in self-oblation ' Cf. Fairbaim, Christ in Modem Theology, 324. 6 82 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST (7^^) — all leading up to and culminating in that death and victory by which He overcame the devil and accomplished an eternal salvation (9^^). God set the seal upon His work by crowning Him with glory and honour (2®). It has been held that in Hebrews the term " Son " takes on a certain speculative colour, and that the obviously ethical significance of the name as used by other New Testament writers tends to give place to a sense more explicitly metaphysical. Some justice there may be in this; yet the distinction of ethical and metaphysical is not one which we can press, at least to the extent of construing the two ideas as disparate alternatives. It is begging the question to say that because " Son," as applied to Jesus, denotes primarily a relation of special intimacy and fellowship, the psychological coefficients of which we can in some degree conceive, it cannot also mean a relation which is essential and transcendent. If, as all will concede, the name "Father" is not incapable of a sense equally ethical and metaphysical, may the same not be true of " Son " ? There is a theological positivism which would deny even to apostolic men an interest in Christ such that it longs to know Him in His own nature. It is a less simple question whether in Hebrews the name " Son " is given to the pre-existent One or exclu- sively to the historic Jesus. Our decision will rest on materials supplied by the first chapter. The writer's mind clearly starts from the Sonship revealed by exalta- tion following upon the career of earth ; this is steadily before his mind at every point. But are there indications that he thought also of the pre-incarnate life as a life of Sonship ? " The name," says Professor A. B. Davidson, " is not directly given to Him in His pre-existing state, but the inference that it was applicable is inevitable. It was the same Son in whom God spake to us, through whom He made the worlds (1^) ; and there is no hint that the name Son became the possession of a Being already existing on His entering into the flesh." ^ And ' Hebrews, 74. HIS PRE-EXISTKNCE 83 from a somewhat different point of view, Professor Bruce pleads that the writer's interest in magnifying the sacrifice of Christ required the Sonship to be of older date than the life on earth.^ We may note for ourselves, in addition, that origination from God and precise likeness to God — both conaCituents of Sonship — are in 1' plainly said to have characterised the pre-historic One. In favour of this view, though it has great names against it, is the fact, noted by Kiehm, that the Subject of the three stadia of action — creation before all time, atonement on earth, and the heavenly ministry — is set forth as personally identical throughout. The same difficulty meets the ex- positor in what are virtual parallels, Col 1^^ and Jn 1^^ However this may be, it is safe to say that Hebrews can be quoted for the pre-existence of Christ, and that this pre-existence is specifically conceived as personal As Weiss puts it,* all theories to the effect that what is meant is no more than an impersonal principle go to wreck on 1^~*. Christ's eternal being is repeatedly made a foil to the sorrow, tears, shame, and death endured by Him in the flesh ; His earthly life is an episode, though not an episode merely, in a history without beginning and without end. It was the reproach of Christ which Moses bore ; it was by Christ Himself, as Lord, that of old the foundations of the world were laid. Very few words in all are spent on His pre-temporal life, yet it fills a larger place than in any other New Testament Epistle. But the writer has no speculative key to incarnation as an experience. He says not one word as to the method of it, and although he points out how the Son came into our very midst by taking flesh and blood, there is no passage to be compared with Ph 2*-". What is underlined is the fact that He came into humanity, not out of it ; His coming was a supernatural event. At the same time, docetism is ex- cluded firmly. Christ's very purpose in taking flesh was that He might suffer. Not only so, but His experience has contributed to His present character. As the fruit ' Op. eit. 441. ' New Testament Theology, ii. 189, note. 84 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST of His passion He is now a merciful and faithful High Priest in whom the frail and sinful are sure of sympathy purchased at a great price. Just because the once suffer- ing Jesus is also the Exalted Head of the Christian society, the idea of imitation is raised to the supreme level of religious faith. He is the Forerunner who has passed through the heavens as our Priest; He is the beginner and finisher of faith, whose course of brave endurance we must consider, when tempted to faint or grow weary. He can help us in our suffering, inasmuch as He has Himself been a sufferer, but now lives in glory and universal power. The writer's exposition of Christ's redemptive work is in keeping with the centrality of his thought of Sonship. It is as Son that Christ discharges priestly functions, sacri- ficing Himself in death, and, after death and resurrection, entering through His own blood as priest within the veil. In the character of Son, also, He offered Himself to God " through eternal Spirit " (9^*, cf. 7^*). This striking phrase almost amounts to a definition of His nature ; it denotes that the Spirit which dwelt in Him and made Him what He was, proved to be inextinguishable by death, and thus enabled Him to carry on for ever a priestly work in the higher sanctuary. The importance of this heavenly func- tion for the writer's mind is cardinal. But it too is based on Sonship. It is as Son that Christ intercedes ^414 ij'zs 924^. as Son He bears the once-made sacrifice before God on our behalf as He enters the holy place ; as Son He sits down on the right hand of God (1*), heir of all things, and destined to appear a second time to them that wait for Him (9^). Thus the eternity and perfection of the new covenant are once for all guaranteed by the fact that Christ is Son of God. Nevertheless, the antinomy we have found in St. Paul returns also in the Christology of Hebrews. On the one hand, the Godhead of Christ is explicitly asserted. The Son acts as Creator, and the relations of created things to God are mediated by Him. No proof is given of this, which is in itself significant. But on the other THE SUBORDINATION OF CHRIST 85 hand, the Godhead so enunciated is compatible with real subordination. Everywhere the Son is viewed as dependent on the Father — for appointment as heir of all things (1^), for calling as High Priest (5^), for resurrection (13^°), for exaltation (1^^). In 1* He is described without qualification as " the first-born." Xot Christ, but God, is the final Judge of men. The Son's place is not on, but on the right hand of, the throne of God. The two views are there ; and they must simply be acknowledged. It is idle to refer one of them to Christ's deity, the other to His manhood. As Baur has remarked,^ if the words " This day have I begotten Thee " (1^) seem to define Christ as posited by God's will, and therefore in a sense temporal and accidental, the metaphors of 1' as plainly teach that the relationship is one of essential nature. This may of course be criticised un- favourably as an unmediated conjunction of metaphysic and history in which justice is done neither to the logical sharacter of speculation nor to the demands of exact historical inquiry. As a matter of fact, the duality is simply indissociable from the Christian view of Jesus. Faith is conscious of the personal presence of God in Him ; it is therefore inevitable that He should be regarded alike in a Divine or eternal aspect — implying somehow a real pre-existence — and in an aspect for which He fulfils His mission under the conditions of time. It may turn out that the antinomy is insoluble by thought ; but the writers of the New Testament at least obey a true instinct in affirming both estimates even if the grounds of their organic unity cannot be made apparent. No man thinks or writes in a vacuum, and there can be no question that Hebrews reveals the influence of Alexandria, that crucible of all creeds. Some of the writer's phrases have a history behind them. There is a significant resemblance between his description of the Son and epithets applied by Philo and the Book of Wisdom to the Logos or Wisdom personified.^ Philo ' NeuUd. Theol. 237. » Of. Holtzmann, NT Theologie, ii. 294 f. 86 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST had spoken of the Logos as the mediator between God and man, as the first-born creature, as the oldest Son of God, as the organ or instrument of creation and providence. But while we recognise the Alexandrian vocabulary, it is quite mistaken to infer from this that the underlying system of ideas is in each case the same. Philo in com- parison with Hebrews is " as water unto wine." In Philo the Logos floats vaguely in a medium which is neither personal nor impersonal, as the unity of subordinate logoi that pervade the world ; the soul which has been caught up in ecstasy and initiated in mystery may dispense altogether with the Logos ; God is impassably severed from the world by a gulf the Logos only can bridge ; and at no point is the Logos identified with the Messiah. But in Hebrews the Messianic Son— nowhere designated as Logos — descends into history as a Eedeemer, and through a career of temptation, death, and victory becomes the great High Priest of men, by whom alone we come to God. It is clear that a wholly new religious interest is predominant. The author of Hebrews has carried over to Jesus predicates and epithets drawn from the cultured phraseology of his time which appear to him pre-eminently suited to declare His greatness. With a sovereign freedom he argues that what philosophy has aspired to is given in Christ. We must not make him responsible for more than this verbal debt. It is indeed difficult to conceive how an apostolic writer is to satisfy a certain type of criticism. Let him create a new world of ideas, and he is in danger of being pronounced unintelligible ; let him use the categories of his day, even though baptized in the name of Christ, and he is scouted as a plagiarist who has nothing of his own to say. The Christ of Hebrews does replace the Philonic Logos, in which philosophy had, as it were, been dreaming of a Saviour ; but to state the one in terms of the other is impossible. The Christologies of St. Paul and of Hebrews are similar in many important features. Both teach that Christ did not begin to be at His earthly incarnation, but ST. PAUL AND HEBREWS 87 was Mediator of creation from the first ; and in each case the argument moves in a regressive direction, from His exalted glory to His pristine estate. Both teach that He has reached a glory far above men and angels by way of the cross ; it was at the resurrection that for the first time — in some sense as reward — He attained to a mani- fested greatness which was His always by right. Both teach His true Godhead yet real subordination. At the same time, vital differences prove that as constructions they are wholly independent. The idea of High Priest has no place in St. Paul, and much is said in Hebrews about our Lord's heavenly ministry to which in St. Paul there answers only the thought of intercession. Hebrews also brings out in a new way — here more or less anticipating the Fourth Gospel — the glory of Jesus' life on earth, with its riches of acquired sympathy. If in St. Paul imitation of the earthly Jesus is swallowed up in the thought of union with Christ (cf., however, 1 Co lO^^"-), in Hebrews the Leader of all the faithful is our pattern in temptation, who endured before us the gainsaying of the wicked, and suffered, as we also must suffer, without the gate. In the later book the mystical side of Paulinism is absent, even from 3^* and 6*, and though the writer looks forward to the Parousia, there is no suggestion, as in 1 Co 15*°"^^, of a future when Christ will abdicate, and His Messianic reign merge in the absolute dispensation of the Father. CHAPTEK V. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE APOCALYPSE. The view of Christ which inspires the Apocalypse of John — the Domitianic date seems proved — offers a peculiarly interesting study in contrasts. On the one hand, whatever be its sources, the book is now rightly, regarded as the product of an intensely Jewish form of Christianity. To the writer Jesus is the true Messiah. He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah (5^), the bright, morning Star, the Boot and Offspring of David (22^*), whose destiny it is to rule the nations with a rod of iron (5^' etc.) — all manifestly Old Testament predicates. On the other hand, so exalted is another vein in his conception, that Bousset speaks of it as apparently the most advanced Christology in the New Testament. Nor ought we too hastily to assume that this is due to Pauline influence. It may represent a late independent branch of primitive faith. Here we are concerned less with the origins of the writer's symbolism, than with the immense significance he has forced it to carry. "His vision of Jesus," Dr. Moffatt has said, "came to him through an atmosphere of truculent and fantastic Messianism, which was scarcely lucid at all points, and which tended to refract if not to blur the newer light." The inconsistencies and inequalities of his usage " are mainly due to the fact that the writer's LlTEEATUEE — Bousset, Die Offenbarung Johannis", 1906 ; Moffatt, " Revelation," in the Expositor's Oreek Testament, 1910 ; Porter, Messages of the Apocalyptical Writers, 1905 ; Briggs, Messiah of the Apostles ; Peake, in Mansfield College Essays, 1909 ; Sohmiedel, Johannine Writings, 1908 ; Titius, Die neutestamentUche Lehre von der Seligkeit, Abtheil. iv., 1900 ; Charles, The Book of Revelation, 1920. MESSIANISM 89 Christian consciousneas repeatedly tends to break through forms too narrow for its fulness. Probably the materials at the author's disposal would have been better arranged had this been anything less than the presentation of a living Kedeemer in heaven as the Messiah of God's people upon earth. The mere fact that the Messiah had lived, involved a readjustment of Messianic categories ; the further fact that he had suffered and risen meant that many had to be reshaped." ^ It is the heavenly life and activity of Christ that occupy the foreground, although the days of His flesh are not wholly forgotten. The name " Jesus " occurs five times, twice in the now familiar phrase, " Lord Jesus." Primitive thought is revealed in the Judaistic appellations of the Messiah, as also in the Danielle reminiscence, " one like unto a son of man" (14^*). Eschatological forms are frequent. The Kingdom will be established by the advent of Jesus, not by the develop- ment of society. The past is His ; but above all He is herald of the future, ushering in the day of final triumph when those who have kept His testimony shall be made priests of God and His Christ, and reign with Him a thousand years. His vestments in 1^' are priestly. But the seer's favourite title for Jesus is " the Lamb." It occurs twenty-nine times as a significant and touching index of His redeeming work and of the awed yet tender adoration evoked by it, for the blood of the slain Lamb which purges sin, guarantees to all the faithful a like victory through suffering and death. Yet all memories of the past are virtually absorbed in the vision of Jesus' heavenly glory. He who was dead now lives to bless and rule. And it is not going too far to say that the song uttered in His praise passes upward from point to point, till, in all essential ways. He is frankly identified with Godhead and fills a Divine place. His power is far superior to the angels. Omnipotence, omniscience, and eternity are ascribed to Him. He is the " Living One " whose conquest of the tomb gave Him ' Expositor's Oreele Testament, v. 297. 90 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST the keys of death and Hades (l^^); like Jehovah (Ps 7». He searches the reins and the hearts with eyes like a flame of fire ; the seven spirits of God are His ; He has power to unlock the secrets of human destiny (ch. 5) ; and, in the Christophany with which the book opens, such is the godlike and overwhelming radiance of His person that the seer falls at His feet as dead. He is source and end of all existing things, assuming thrice with solemnity the specifically Divine name, "the First and the Last," and the impression of absolute eternal power is deepened by the additional circumstance that the words, " I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end," spoken by God Himself in 21*, are elsewhere uttered by Jesus (22^^) in an emphasised form. This makes it virtually certain that He is ranked with God, not with finitude, in such phrases as " the beginning (or principle) of the creation of God " (3^*), and that He is conceived as filling this place eternally, not merely after His exaltation. Within this Divine sphere, His relation to God is that of Sonship. In the letter to the Church of Thyatira He designates Himself " Son of God," and His words make reference more than once to " My Father " {2^ 3*). Once only He is described as "the Word of God" (19^^), a token that we are somewhere within the range of Johannine and Alexandrine ideas. Even if the phrase is not an interpolation, however, the nature of the context scarcely invites an immediate or unconditional identifica- tion with the Logos as conceived in the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel. Throughout the book the praise of this Divine person- ality is echoed passionately. In IQi" the seer is bidden worship God only, but the Apocalypse as a whole heaps proof on proof that already the adoration of Jesus is a distinctive feature of Christian religion, this earthly praxis being no more than a reflex of the homage paid on high. " Unto Him that loveth us, and washed us from our sins by His blood ... to Him be the glory and the dominion for ever and ever " (1^- *). This is closely parallel THE ADORATION OF JESUS 91 to the doxology in T^"*-, which is addressed to God. Along with this may be combined two salient passages, 5^' and 7^*, in which God and Christ are held forth as the objects of a single intense movement of adoration: " Unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, be the blessing," is the worship offered in 5^* by the totality of animated creation ; " Salvation unto our God which sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb," is in 7^" the song of the great multitude of the redeemed, which no man could number. In both instances God the Creator and Jesus the Kedeemer are exhibited in the same indissociable unity, the same oneness with difference. And with this representation the mystical expressions har- monise which occur in the beautiful picture of the heavenly Jerusalem (21^' ^*), regarding which it is said, in fulfil- ment of the Old Testament ideal, that "the Lord God Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple thereof," and again that " the glory of God did lighten it, and the lamp thereof is the Lamb.'' This last verse is obviously parallel to and a reminiscence of Is 60^*: "The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory " ; where a recent commentator points out the noteworthiness of the fact that in the closing phrase " the Lamb " occupies the place of " thy God " in the prophecy.^ We have only to read the seven epistles to the Churches consecutively to realise with a vividness scarcely felt in any other part of the New Testament how central, incomparable, and all-determining is the place of Jesus in the life and faith of first-century believers, and how impossible any com- parison is between His function as the medium and as it were the very atmosphere of redemption and that of* any other, whether prophet, saint, or martyr. Christ does not live, as we do, by the grace of God, but we live by the grace of God and Christ. A monotheist Jew, of the first Christian generation, finds himself not only free, but actually bound, to identify Christ in His attributes with God, and can use with adoring freedom such ' Professor C. A. Scott, Commentary (Century Bible), 294. 92 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST unparalleled phrases as " the throne of God and of the Lamb." i As in the rest of the New Testament, the tran- scendence of Jesus — His place within the Divine sphere — is still combined with a view of His person as subordinate to God. However misleading it may be to say, as Wernle does, that in the Apocalypse Jesus is only the highest in the great company of mediators ; however obvious the author's conviction that in ascribing praise to Jesus he cannot go too far or far enough, since words must still fall short ; yet this Person, alone, unapproachable and supreme, is yet uniformly presented as dependent on God the Father. In the opening verse, whatever rendering we choose, it is made clear that the revelation which forms the subject was given to Jesus Christ by God. And in 3^^ Christ's risen glory is depicted as in some real sense the outcome and reward of His earthly fidelity, for He promises to all who overcome a share in His own acquired royal power and judicial dignity. Lofty as His position is. He still reveals Himself as the exemplar of His people. To object, as some writers do, that it is only because Jesus is not God that He can be conceived as the pattern of humanity, and that the naming separately of Jesus and God virtually disproves the author's belief in His Divine significance, is to assume the very matter in dispute. The same may be said of the contention that, since the gift of exaltation is conferred on Christ, we cannot be meant to take seriously various other expressions in which His original divinity appears to be asserted. Weiss has pointedly replied to this, that so far from one position neutralising the other, it really furnishes its sufficient ground. None but He who was Divine by nature could sit upon the Divine throne.^ ' It ia not as if the author had decided this question of Christ-worship unrefleotively. The issue filled his whole mind. His book is a trumpet- call to Christians to worship Jesus and refuse to worship the Roman Emperor (cf. MofTatt, op. cU. 307-17). ' NT Theology, ii. 277. CHRIST SUBORDINATE TO GOD 93 Here, then, as elsewhere in the apostohc writings, the Christian view of Jesus stands firmly on a founda- tion of experience. It is the impression made by the historic Eedeemer on hearts surrendered to Him, joined to the consciousness of the new life in the Spirit which He conveys to them from His place on high. To this Jesus belong " the glory and the dominion for ever and ever " (P), No one knew better than the author that the Apocalypse was a book for the people, not for the theologian,^ and that the literary and mythological details of his symbolism have no unity but that of the religious passion which employed them. " The writer's Christology," it has been said, " may mingle naively archaic elements like the lion of the tribe of Judah, or the iron sceptre which dashes nations in pieces, with speculative ideas like the first principle of creation or the eternal Divine word — it matters not. What his work reveals is that Jesus is practically greater than any or all these ways of represent- ing Him ; neither the imagination of the Jew nor the philosophical faculty of tihe Greek can embody Him ; in the faith and life of the seer He has an importance to which neither is adequate ; the only true name for Him is one which is above every name." * ' Wemle may be right in his suggestion (Anfdnge, 230) that the b)ok is of lay origin. • Denney, Jesvs and the Oosj/el, 10. CHAPTER VI. THE JOHANNINE CHRISTOLOGY The writer of the Pourth Gospel — on the evidence it is still possible to regard him as John the Apostle^ — has explained very clearly the purpose of his work. In words which may have formed the conclusion of the Gospel as originally composed, he declares plainly : " These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through His name" (20^^). He felt himself to be in line with primitive Christian belief. The point at which he passed beyond primitive ideas was not in replacing the Messiah by the Logos, but in perceiving how much is eventually implied in Messiahship. Jesus' Messianic function he construes uniformly in terms of Divine Sonship. Or, to put it otherwise, he formulates Messiahship in categories more universal and absolute, working back to those ultimate presuppositions which were best fitted to impress the wider contemporary intelligence. But the specifically Messianic interest is never out of sight. Thus in chapter 1, Andrew reports to his brother LiTERATUKE — Soott, The Fourth Gospel, its Purpose and Theology, 1906 ; Drummond, The Character and Authorship of the Fourth Oospel, 1903 ; Sanday, Criticism of the Fourth Oospel, 1 905 ; Lutgert, Die johanneische Christologie, 1899 ; Barth, Das Johannesevangelium und die synoplischen Evangelien, 1905 ; B. Weiss, Der johanneische Lehrbegriff, 1862 ; Holtz. mann, Hand-Kommentar^, Bd. iv., 1910 ; Titius, Die neutestamentliche Lehre von der Seligkeit, Abtheil. iii., 1900 ; Sohmiedel, Johannine Writings, 1908 ; Heitmiiller, in Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments' (ed. J. Weiss), 1907 ; Kim, article " Logos," in BE. xi. ; Manson, The Incarnate Glory, 1923. ' This is not meant to negate the possibility that a later editor or editors may have arranged the apostolic material, or that certain passages in tha Gospel as we have it are in the wrong order. MESSIANISM 95 Simon that he has found the Christ, and Nathanael hails Jesus in that character on the ground of His preternatural knowledge. The woman of Samaria also is convinced, while a similar process of reasoning goes on in the minds of the Jerusalem populace, as revealed in their question : " When the Christ shall come, will He do more signs than those which this man hath done ? " (7^^). The works of Jesus, moreover, are characteristically Messianic. He comes to raise the dead, to bestow the Spirit in fulfilment of the ancient promise, to receive the Lordship of all things ^335 iQisy It lies with Him also to execute judgment ; though, as has been pointed out, " the judgment is taken out of the future, and carried back into the actual life of Christ," ^ an earlier conception of judgment thus being supplemented by the notion of a present and continued process. His miracles are placed in the same light, but it is significant of St. John's profounder and more spiritual interpretation that outward miracles are regarded (5^') as but the signs of greater works still, wrought by Jesus in His function of awakening, animating, judging, and illumin- ing the souls of men. He is represented, in short, as exerting a delegated but competent authority such as only the Messiah could assume. But the Jewish horizon has vanished. Whatever Jesus may be as Christ, He is definitely for the whole world. The writer intentionally selects the person of Jesus Christ as the subject-matter of his Gospel. Our Lord's conscious- ness of His relation to God, His transcendent nature, His willingness to communicate eternal life, and the issues of the attitude which men take to His person — these form the real centre of the picture. " The point of view," says Mathews, " is certainly not that of the Synoptic Gospels, but it is precisely that of a devoted disciple, who, looking back upon the career of his Master through the course of years, would be quick to see how constantly Jesus was in reality presenting Himself as the subject of definition."* ' Scott, Fourth Gospel, 214. ' MessicMic Sopc, 246. 96 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST The relation of Father to Son had already been signalised in a great Synoptic passage (Mt 11^^) in terms which involve the uniqueness of Jesus' nature, so that in part the change of emphasis is prepared for. At the same time, the repre- sentation of Christ diverges from that of the older Gospels, in so far as the Fourth Gospel represents His discourse as revolving almost exclusively round His own person and the revelation it contains. He is alike the subject and object of His message. Thus the Gospel opens with a carefully constructed Prologue, the purpose of which is to affirm the eternal Godhead of the personal Word who became flesh in Jesus Christ; and (if chapter 21 is by a later hand) it virtually closes on the same note, in the adoring cry of Thomas, "My Lord and my God" (2028). In great measure, however, the distinction between the two readings is that of fact and theory. The first three Gospels had pictured Christ in His familiar habit among men, as any onlooker might observe Him ; the fourth undertakes to penetrate behind this to its deeper ground. If they moved always within the fact of Jesus' human life, St. John offers an articulated view of the relationship of Christ to God, when followed up into its final implications.^ Jesus is the Christ, in the last and highest sense of that term, because He is primarily the Eternal Word or Son, come forth in history as the perfect manifestation of the Father. The varied elements of the story — the miracles of Jesus, His sayings. His experiences — are so arranged as to focus the light directly on this Divine truth. Each incident, each discourse, reveals a new aspect of Jesus as the Christ who is also the Incarnate Son, and can be the first only because He is the second. Constant reference to this central aim lends the Gospel its singular uniformity of tone and language. ' Both readings are inspired by religious conviction. St. John's interest in the Godhead of Jesus Christ was, as Mr. Purchas has noted, " not philo- sophical ; it was intensely practical. To him Christianity meant the lovo of God reaching forth and stooping down to men wandering in darkness " (Johammine Problems, 101). THE JOHANNINE DISCOURSES 97 As regards the authenticity of the Johannine dis- courses, a working compromise is being slowly effected between reasonable men on both sides. A few scholars would still claim for the evangelist a quite literal exactitude. At the other extreme, a large body of writers contend that the teaching of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel is really an expansion in philosophic terms of an estimate of Jesus which has virtually no point of contact with the person known to us from the Synoptics. On this view, the apostolic authorship is out of the question. Gradually, however, there is growing up a mediating party, who are more or less prepared to waive the question of authorship, but in any case are convinced that the Johannine witness of Jesus to Himself is at bottom histori- cally trustworthy, while yet His actual words have passed through the colouring medium of the writer's personal reflection. His type of exposition, so unlike that of the Synoptics, is due to his having thoroughly worked over into his own style his recollections of what Jesus said and did. But it is incredible that a Christian apostle should have taken liberties with the self-consciousness of Jesus. We may say with Haupt that the teaching of Jesus has an authentic commentary bound up with it, or, in Burton's admirable phrase, that the Gospel is " a series of historical sermons " ; ^ but in either case there is a vital accuracy. The pregnant pictorial words of the Synoptics are gone, the original matter has largely been melted and recast in memory, yet we feel no final discrepancy between the Master's thought as we know it elsewhere and the evangelist's report and exposition. Truth learnt by St. John and the Church around him, ere the close of the apostolic age, was felt to have lain from the very outset in Jesus' words, and in the light of this perception the words themselves assumed a new aspect. Thus we may explain the comparative absence of development alike in Jesus' self -revelation and the apprehension of it by the disciples. Objects really separate in time merged in each other unawares ; to the ' Short Introduction to the Gospels, 128. 7 98 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST evangelist looking back, as Dr. Sanday suggests, the evolutionary process was foreshortened.^ It is an axiom, therefore, that the apostle's view of Christ had passed through a rich and fruitful process of transformation.^ We can imagine spiritual forces which may well have produced the change. Such were his fellowship with the exalted Lord ; the common faith of the living and suffering Church ; the challenge of the wistful religious longings which pervaded the Graeco- Roman world ; not least, perhaps, the teaching of St. Paul, with which he must have been familiar. Unless experience is something of which God can make no use, these influences must have operated on St. John's recol- lections of the historic Jesus and have tended to evoke an ever profounder apprehension of His supreme religious significance. The Fourth Gospel is then fundamentally the work of an apostle, who, in the evening of life, and as a protest against the idealising tendency which sought to turn Christianity into a group of abstract conceptions, made known to the Church the intuition he had gained of the eternal value of the historic Lord — His unique relation to God as uncreated Son, His relation to men as essential Life and Truth. Throughout he strives to convey the total impression of this Christ. The secret of his Gospel lies in its unique combination of history with clear-sighted faith. It belongs to a class of writings which may be described as not merely historical but prophetic, and has the qualities rather of a portrait than a photograph. As it has been expressed finely : " The greatness of the Fourth Gospel consists in this, that it takes us back to the living Person of Jesus as the ultimate force in Christianity. There was a danger in the period immediately following the apostolic age that the religion of Christ would soon cease to bear any vital relation to its founder — John perceived that a religion thus severed from Christ Himself would be emptied of its real content and power. It was the life ' Criticism of tlie Fourth Gospel, 157. " He is himself conscious of this ; U^ IS^s leW"-. THE RETUEN TO CHRIST 99 which had been the Light of men." ^ The final import of the historic Personality had yet to be set forth ; and St. John, essaying this task, has seized the inmost truth of Jesus' self-consciousness with a surer grasp even than the Synoptics. Thus the difference of interpretation is after all only a matter of degree. There is a close affinity, for instance, between the Christology of the Fourth Gospel and that of the Second.* As a whole the Johannine picture of Christ makes on the reader's mind an impression of harmnnious and sublime transcendence. Incessu patet deus ; this is indeed the mien of God manifest in the flesh. At the same time it is a rather unfortunate mistake to regard the delineation of Christ as out of touch with the common experience of men. To say that the Logos-Jesus is incapable of human weakness, and that the writer has obliterated all traces of a moral struggle in His life, is totally misleading in view of the cry for deliverance from the passion in 12''^; and in chapter 5, where Jesus is represented as Judge, it is noticeable that His fulfilment of the office is made wholly dependent on His obedience to the Father. "I can of Myself do nothing; as I hear, I judge" (5^"). The real fact is that manifestations of the humanity of Jesus are recorded with greater vividness in the Fourth Gospel than in any of the first three.^ He is shown to us wearied at Jacob's well, weeping beside the grave of Lazarus, grateful for the companionship of the Twelve, anticipating the cross with alternate shrinking and desire, athirst on Calvary, and bearing, even after the resurrection, the marks of the spear and the nails. He is bound to His fellows by ties of blood. He is guest with His family at ' Scott, op. cit. 291. ' Of. J. Weiss, Das dlteste Evangelium, 42-47. ' Cf. Weizsiicker, Jahrbitcher fur deutsche Theologie, 1857, 175 ; Drummond, Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, 422 f. Professor F. C. Burkitt has said that "in no early Christian document is the real humanity of Jesus so emphasised as in the Fourth Gospel " (Gospel History a/nd its Trans/mission, 233). 100 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST a wedding-party, receives advice as to His conduct, carea for His mother with His latest breath. He offers prayer. He is subject, moreover, to the limits of earthly experience ; for although more than once very remarkable knowledge is attributed to Him, yet definite details, such as His inquiry regarding the place of Lazarus' tomb, make it impossible to say that He is depicted as omniscient. His oneness of nature with us is specially exhibited in His uniform dependence on God. He prays to God as His Father, and gives thanks that His prayer is always heard (11"). The will of God is throughout the source and background of His mission to the world. Consecrated and sent by the Father (10^*), He speaks only those things which He has seen and heard of Him, or, as it is expressed in one place, " as the Father hath taught Me " (8^^). He is in fact a commissioned deputy to whom both words and works have been "given." His higher knowledge is described as being His by communication, and He confesses that He can do nothing of Himself but that which He sees the Father do (5^*). Knowledge and power equally are mediated through the Spirit. Not only so; His relation to God is somehow conditioned by His moral attitude. " He that sent Me is with Me ; He hath not left Me alone ; for I do always the things that are pleasing to Him" (8^^); and again: "therefore doth the Father love Me, because I lay down My life" (10"). But this human dependence, on the other hand, is no mere commonplace fact which might have simply been taken for granted: it is of the essence of this unique life; it flows ultimately from His special and unshared Sonship, and is the form of that special Sonship under the conditions of human experience. That He should do Divine works on earth results from His singular relation to the Father. The power necessary for His vocation is given from day to day, but it is only because He is Son that He can receive it. While therefore the mutual love and knowledge of Father and Son are insisted on, the relationship is not THE HUMANITY OF JESUS 101 such as to involve a simple equality. The Son is dependent at each point on the Father, but it would be gravely unfaithful to St. John's interpretation to speak of the Father as being dependent on the Son. There remains a true subordination, a human subjection and (as it were) inferiority, on Jesus' side. What has frequently been missed, however, is that this subordination is depicted as expressing itself in modes which are purely ethical. It is mediated, that is, by authentic human motives, desires, prayers, acts of submission and compliance, and nothing could be more inaccurate than to regard it as necessitated by the inherent properties of a metaphysical Divine " substance " or as illustrating the rigid, self-acting categories of an d, priori ontology. To assert that " the moral attributes, trust, pity, forgiveness, infinite sympathy, are replaced by certain metaphysical attributes, which are supposed to belong more essentially to the Divine nature," is not to interpret what the evangelist has written, but to impose on him an erroneous modern theory. It is a reading of the facts wholly out of keeping with the character of One who, when exhorting the disciples to keep His commandments, could promise that thereby they would abide in His love, " even as I have kept My Father's , commandments, and abide in His love" (15^"), and who, in ' another place, is presented as entreating the Father to glorify Him with the glory which had been His before the world was (17*). Metaphysical attributes, in any sense in which they are represented as opposed to ethical attributes, are irrelevant to such a situation. All the predicates affirmed of Jesus by Himself are of a fundamentally religious type ; they are meant to state personal relations humanly, so that human souls may lay hold upon the only true God in His Son, Jesus Christ (17^). The Christ of the Fourth Gospel, then, is truly man, one with us in all points, except sin. The secret of His uniqueness lies in an un- paralleled relation to the Father. Men can be children of God only by the new birth ; Jesus is the Son of God by eternal nature. This combination of personal unique- 102 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHKIST aess with human dependence is put very strikingly in 5^*, where each side is brought out alternately : " As the Father hath life in Himself, even so gave He to the Son also to have life in Himself." The power to impart life is a derived power ; on the other hand, as imparting it, Jesus is for men that which none can be save God — the source of life eternal. In like manner, He does nothing but what He sees the Father do, yet He does the same works as the Father. Like the Synoptic writers, the Fourth evangelist represents Jesus as seeking by human fellowship to train the disciples into a spiritual conception of His purpose. By degrees, under His influence, they became aware that the gift He desired to impart was Divine and universal, namely, the possession of perfect life in union with Himself. A crucial stage in their progress is dated from St. Peter's words : " We have believed and know that Thou art the Holy One of God " (6^*) ; and it is a significant minor detail, testifying to the substantially historical character of the narrative, that there is no intrusion at this point of the ideas of the Logos or the eternal Sonship.^ The disciples are coming to recognise the Messiah, but, as they rise to a religious point of view, the name is assuming a new content. The distinctive name of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, however, is " the Son of God," or, more briefly and simply, as in the Synoptics, " the Son." At least thirty times He employs the phrase " My Father," on nine occasions when speaking to God directly ; seventeen times, by the lowest estimate. He designates Himself " Son " or " Son of God." In the Johannine writings, and throughout the New Testa- ment as a whole, the primary reference of this name is clearly enough to the historic Person, known and remembered within the domain of human fact. So far then it denotes ' Those who regard the Fourth Gospel as a philosophical romance or a thesis in theology may still do well to read the essay appended by Renan to his Fie de Jisua (ed. 13). THE SON OF GOD 103 our Lord as one who held towards God a unique relation- ship of intimacy and love, manifested in entire obedience to His will. This aspect of the matter we have had occasion to study closely, and at present we need not dwell on it. But as one who loved ultimate conceptions, St. John felt the inadequacy of this, and he pressed on to eluci- date its absolute eternal ground. He does so in the first place by expounding the witness of Christ to the identity of nature subsisting between Himself and the Father. That nothing less august than such a unity is meant may be gathered from the charge made by the Jews against His claim to special Sonship, namely, that He made Himself equal with God (5^^ lO'^). i^ 519-29 this identity or parallelism is drawn out in considerable detail, only a faint allusion being made to the subordina- tion of the Son ; the Father and Jesus are one in quicken- ing power, in authority to judge, in worthiness to be adored. It is a remarkable passage, the distinctive note of which is audible in the words, " that all may honour the Son, even as they honour the Father." This unique relation of Son to Father is elsewhere described by the term "only-begotten" (3^*), joined to and explained by the phrase, " who is in the bosom of the Father " (1^^). Shades of meaning but faintly discernible in the Christology of St. Paul are thus deepened and intensified. Sonship is defined in its highest terms. The Son is of the same nature as the Father, Divine powers and qualities devolving on Him in virtue of His inherent birthright. Yet His possession of these powers is seen so steadily from the ideal or timeless point of view that it nowhere cancels the element of weakness and restriction inseparable from the personal presence of the Son in human life. At various points the writer opens up, beyond this unity of Father and Son, a vista of its eternal character. He transcends the first three Gospels by insisting on the fact that the Sonship of Christ is increate and un- beginning, the presupposition of all time and history. 104 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST In the beginning (l^, cf. Gn P) He had been the Word with the Father. Ere coming from heaven He had lived a life somehow characterised by spiritual relationships (17^); it was not some impersonal moment or tendency in God which had taken flesh and dwelt among men, but the Son, eternal object of the Father's love (17^*), and possessed thereby of a perfect knowledge of the Father which was capable of reproducing itself in His earthly consciousness. As one whose place is in the Father's bosom (1^^), He presents God in propria persona. He knows God thus because He has always known Him, so. " I speak the things which I have seen with My Father " ; " no man hath ascended into heaven, but He that descended out of heaven." Numerous other salient passages dwell on this prior life of Sonship. To the Jews' question where He will go that they cannot come. He answers, " I am from above " (8^^). In the mysterious declaration, " Before Abraham was, I am " (8^*), the tense is apparently chosen to denote, as far as human speech permits, the timeless and unbecoming eternity of His inmost being. And in the upper room. He speaks to the Father of " the glory which I had with Thee before the world was " (17^), and prays that it may be restored to Him. Yet the main object of these statements is not to make certain speculative predications, in a so-called metaphysical interest, but to exhibit Jesus as the final revelation of the Father. This is the pivotal and organising idea in St. John's theology. We can see the conviction in his mind that none can reveal perfectly save He who is that which He reveals. In His essential love, accordingly, the Father has poured forth His being in Jesus, that a perishing world may have life through Him. " Believest thou not," Jesus asks, " that I am in the Father and the Father in Me ? The words that I say unto you I speak not from Myself : but the Father abiding in Me doeth His works " (14i»). It has been urged that Jesus' claim to a pre-existent knowledge of God must reduce His earthly experience JESUS THE FINAL REVELATION 105 to mere semblance. Could He learn what previously He had known ? On the other hand, are we prepared to conceive the life of God and of man as so totally disparate in ethical and spiritual character that what pertains by origin to the one may not reproduce or mediate itself organically in and through the other ? Are divinity and humanity to be thus defined by mutual exclusion ? If not, there may be nothing self-contra- dictory in the view that Jesus' knowledge of God was experimental in kind — mediated, that is, by the un- measured gift to Him of the Spirit, as acting on and interpreting to His mind the normal development of His own life^ — while yet its deepest fount lay in His eternal being as the Son. To take the parallel case of love, it is a frequent suggestion in the Fourth Gospel that Jesus, though loved eternally as Son, keeps Himself in the love of God by doing His will. " This is an assertion of the ultimate truth, that the union of Jesus with God depends on moral conditions ; not that through His conduct He had in the first instance to gain His Father's love — it was there from the beginning — but that He can retain it only on the one condition, that He makes the will of God His own."^ In some such way we may conceive His earthly realisation of the perfect knowledge of God. Apart from a theory more or less on these lines the evangelist must have held that either no continuity or no difference obtained between the pre-existence of the Son and His earthly life. Humanitarianism or docetism would have been forced upon him. The conclusions at which we arrive regarding the historic accuracy of the Johannine discourses is of course to be applied also to Jesus' recorded words about His pre- temporal being. It would seem that these words were uttered in exalted hours of feeling, when our Lord's self- consciousness expanded to a length and depth and height that passes understanding. As we listen, we hear only the plunge of the lead into unfathomable waters. It is ' J. Weiss, Christ: the Beginnings of-Dogma, 156 106 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST possible, and we have to allow for the possibility in our interpretation, that lapse of time may have altered light and shade in the apostle's memory. One feels it scarcely credible that Jesus should have spoken on the subject so often or so clearly as to be at once intelligible to the great bulk of His auditors ; for otherwise the silence of the first three Gospels is enigmatic. On the other hand, while He may have displayed a marked reticence on this theme, as on that of His Messiahship, we have reason to believe that He spoke regarding the antecedents of His life on earth with such significance that the brooding evangelist later became conscious of the claim to pre-existence implied in His words ; a pre- existence not of an ideal type, but real and personal. The last stage of Jesus' reported interpretation of Son- ship is represented by His prediction of the glory to be resumed by Him after death, and of His abiding spiritual presence with the disciples (ch.l3 &.). Eesurrection would mark His entrance on a larger, unseen life, free from the limits of time or space, and this involved a change in the dignity of Jesus' person at least in the sense that it conferred on Him an omnipresence and universality of influence He had lacked on earth. We have seen that Sonship, in initial content, was a relation with God of unequalled love and intimacy. This is what we already find in the Synoptics : though even there, as Titius has remarked, the absolute tone with which the name Son is used in Mt ll^ss- naturally suggests a more tran- scendent background of meaning.^ But now the Fourth Gospel proclaims that Jesus as the Son is eventually to share in the omnipotence and absoluteness of God Himself. Thus in the deliberately chosen language of 13': " Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He came forth from God, and goeth unto God," there is no convincing reason for re- stricting " all things " to the sphere of perfect revelation, so as to exclude omnipotence in the full sense. Nor is it ' Jesu Lehre vom Reich Gottes, 118. THE FUTURE GLORY OF THE SON 107 easy to grasp the philosophical position of those who quote such a verse in confirmation of the view that in the New Testament Christ is made absolute Lord of the Church merely, not of the universe. We cannot break up reality in unrelated parts. The absolute Lordship of the exalted Christ is the starting-point of all New Testament writers. Some of them refrain from theologising on the matter, but to St. John, as he sought an explanation for his own mind, its reality appeared in complete harmony with Jesus' intimations of His own pre-existence. Why (he felt) should not One who had shared the very glory of God Himself share it once again ? He had mediated in the creation of all things from the beginning ; He had come to His own, though they received Him not (1"); it was fitting, therefore, that He should be their Lord and Master after the resurrection. Hence the Divine power to which Jesus ascends is in no way incommensurate with His nature, overwhelming (as it were) a finite form with an infinite content ; still less is it the prize of usurpation. It is the Father's gift, bestowed in consequence of Jesus' fidelity in the work given Him to do (17*-*), and fitly answering to His essential being. But the resurrection is past before the truth of Jesus' greatness has dawned on His followers. The wonderful scene which culminates in Thomas' cry of adoration (20^) portrays the experience of one on whom the dis- covery has just broken, and whose eyes are blinded with excess of light. In the risen Jesus, fresh with victory from the grave, the apostle discerns the very Lord of glory ; and perceiving in a flash of joy and peace that all he had sought for in the Father has been vouchsafed to men in the Son, he grasps the person of Jesus as possess- ing for faith the value and the reality of God. If his reported words mean anything, they mean an ascription to Christ of Divine prerogatives, they salute Him as the medium and vehicle of that life which is found only in the Eternal. There has been a manifestation of God in human form. Faith in Jesus Christ, aware 108 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST of its own significance, becomes an explicit faith in His divinity. Our conclusions up to this point are on the whole confirmed by Sb. John's usage of the title " Son of man." It is a striking minor detail that, as in the Synoptics, this name is employed solely by Jesus. It occurs some twelve times. But the accent has shifted slightly from His vocation to His person ; so that by using the phrase in harmony with his lofty view of our Lord's nature, the evangelist strives to bring out the uniqueness of Jesus' person- ality. As in the first three Gospels, we can still trace its primitive Messianic sense. Thus in 12^*^a question put by the multitude — " Christ " and " Son of man " are used indifferently. In the Synoptics, as we have seen, two types of passage occur in which Jesus speaks of the " Son of man " ; they are allusions either (a) to His earthly work and especially to His passion, or (&) to the glory of His Parousia. Taking the inverse order, it appears that although the name is nowhere in the Fourth Gospel put in relation to the Second Coming, the majority of passages where it occurs refer quite specifically to Jesus' exaltation (d^^ 682 etc.) or to His being glorified (12^3 IS^i). It is implied that transcendent glory awaits the Son of man, and befits His person ; and this is plainly an expansion of one side of the Synoptic idea.^ The second type of Synoptic allusion, dealing with Jesus' work on earth and with the passion it involves, is also represented in the Fourth Gospel. It is represented, for example, by sayings which describe the Son of man as giving meat that endureth to everlasting life (6^^), or attach eternal life to eating His flesh and drinking His blood (6^^), or declare that He must be " lifted up " (3i*). It will be observed that this Johannine usage retains that element of paradoxical contrast which we found to be characteristic and indeed constitutive of the title in the Synoptics, even though the facts are con- ' Cf. Eivald, Die Evangelienfrage, 43-47. THE SON OF MAN 109 fcemplated from a slightly different point of view. Certain scholars have maintained that the original signi- ficance of the name is well-nigh inverted in the Tourth Gospel, but a careful scrutiny of the data scarcely bears this out. What is undeniable, however, is that in St. John the title " Son of man " seems always to convey the suggestion faintly that for Jesus it is an amazing thing that He should be man at all. He was man indeed, like His brethren ; yet in this humanity there resided a Divine content which gave Him a place apart. Or, as it may be put otherwise, the human aspect of His life is not the primary and original aspect ; He came into humanity from a higher realm. His disciples may eat His flesh and drink His blood, for He is to pass through death, dying as only man can die ; yet only one who was more than man could thus dwell in believers as their inward Ufe. Similarly, it is the Son of man who is to be lifted up, not on the cross merely, but by exaltation. On the one hand, this implies His inherent Divine transcendence, which alone makes such exaltation conceivable ; on the other, it pre- supposes His real manhood, since exaltation comes by way of death. Thus so far from the title, as used in the Fourth Gospel, containing no reference to Jesus' higher claims, it invariably connotes these loftier antecedents as the foil or background against which the fact of His true humanity is placed. We cannot eliminate the duality. As it has been expressed : " In several passages the contrast is ex- pressly marked between the present revelation of Jesus as Son of man and the true glory of His Divine nature. . . . The significance of the name in all these verses lies in the suggestion that the human nature of Christ was united with a higher nature which was present in it even now, and would at last become fully manifest." ^ This note of contrast never seems to fail. The Son of man, in all points authentically human, has heaven open to Him perpetually, and will yet ascend up again where He was before (6'^). Hence it is not going too far to ' Scott, Fourth Gospel, 184 (?). 110 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST say that no appreciable distinction can be drawn in the Fourth Gospel between what is predicated of the Son of man and of the Son of God. Both names, originally Messianic, are raised to the highest power. If the one denotes the eternal origin of Christ in God, the other points to His human affiliation but connects it with a higher being with which it is significantly contrasted. This suggestion of a Divine transcendence is the distinctive feature which St. John adds to the Synoptic view. The Christ-mysticism of the Fourth Gospel has always been regarded as casting a revealing light upon its final interpretation of Jesus' person. We can scarcely over- estimate the importance for the evangelist's mind of this conception of mystic union, by which believers are made partakers in the higher life streaming to them from Jesus. The doctrine is central in more than one of the great discourses. " I am the living bread which came down out of heaven ; if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever " (6^^) ; " I am the vine, ye are the branches ; he that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit" (15^); "I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one" (17^^). It is worth noting that this vital fellowship is nowhere described in the Fourth Gospel as being mediated by the Spirit, though in the First Epistle expressions are found which distinctly point that way (3^* 4^^). At the same time we observe that the idea of life-union with Christ is unmistakably connected with His exaltation.^ It is not something possible for men while He still lived on earth ; rather it forms a substitute, in the future, for His visible presence in their midst. Hence its prominence in Christ's parting words. " Because I live," is His promise, " ye shall live also." The presence of Christ in the believer is a super- ' Of. Titius, Bie neutest. Lehre von der Seligkeit, iii. 68 f. It does not follow that the historic Jesus could not have spoken of life-union with His followers, as of something to be realised in tlie future. There is a very fair Synoptic parallel in Mt 18™, the authenticity of which we need not doubt. THE JOHANNINE MYSTICISM 111 natural indwelling, bj which they partake in His spiritual Ufe. In 17^^ and elsewhere this indwelling is explained or illustrated by the analogy of God's indwelling presence in Christ ; and as the relation of God to Christ, notwith- standing this mutual interpenetration of life, is wholly personal in character, the communion of Christ with men is also personal ; it is a relation of spirit to spirit. And as Christ dwells in the believer, so the believer dwells in Christ, is incorporated or transplanted into the sphere of His supernatural Hfe. This also is paralleled by the abiding of Christ in the Father. " In that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you" (142»). It has however been contended that in the Fourth Gospel this living and spiritual conception is infected with a quite unethical and realistic strain of thought, according to which Christ conveys to men a higher and all but physical essence whereby they partake in the life of God. The union, it is true, is regarded as supernatural ; bur this in no way precludes an interpretation on ethical and psychological lines. For the vehicle of Christ's self-im- partation is His word ; His word is as it were the medium or element of the reciprocal possession, as it is put in 1 5', " if ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you." And with this it is in harmony that abiding in Christ is represented as being mediated and sustained, on the believer's side, by faith (5^), obedience (14^^-^^), and love (16^^). St. John has occasionally been unfavourably com- pared with St. Paul in this matter, and accused of having introduced at a crucial point factors of thought which are less than spiritual, and which prepared the way for later ecclesiastical dogma. It is not necessary to reply to this by urging that St. Paul is the real offender ; since for any such counter-charge there is no proper ground. But at least we may point out that the Johannine view lays a deeper emphasis even than the Pauline on the psycho- logical mediation of life-union as a present experience, and that the union itself is everywhere defined as a 112 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST spiritual relationship of person to person. The mutual immanence, if we may call it so, is the intelligible resultant of Divine grace and human faith. The roots of this Johannine conception may be traced partly no doubt to the doctrine of St. Paul, but in addition the direct influence of Jesus' teaching is apparent. From this central and characteristic thought we are irresistibly led to one view of Christ's person rather than another. If He is thus one with men, and they with Him, it is impossible to confine His life within the dimensions of normal manhood. But the Fourth evangelist does not leave us to mere inference. Over and over again he represents union with Christ as being, in itself, vital union with God. The analogy of Christ's oneness with the Father is made explicit : " That they may all be one ; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us" (17^^). This is a conception of which still more is heard in the First Epistle of John. In the Gospel the same practical identity of Christ and God is signalised in those passages which deal with the mission and activities of the Spirit. Not merely is Christ present in the community by the Spirit ; He is Himself the object of the Spirit's witness. He is indeed the Giver of the Spirit to His people. But the same predications are made of God. He too is to send the Spirit and come in the Spirit along with Christ. Thus from a fresh point of view the religious equivalence of Christ and God is revealed as the truth from which radiates the whole teaching of the Gospel. The Christology of St. John, then, may be condensed in the truth that the Father is personally in the Son, the Son in the Father (10'^ 141°), ^he most august and profound words of our Lord are simple affirmations of this fact: "I and the Father are one"(103'', cf. 17"); "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father" (14*, cf. 12**). These utterances and others like them carry our minds in the direction of a simple modalism — Jesus SIMPLE MODALISM 113 Christ is God revealed to faith — but no theory of the fact, or of its remoter implications, is anywhere sketched out in the manner of a theological speculation. We are shown that the word of Jesus is the word of God Himself, and conveys a Divine life to the soul ; that the Father, exhibited to faith in a historic career, is now fully known in His Fatherhood. Faith is certain of this, and affirms it unconditionally. It is another question how far we can penetrate to the ontological grounds of this modalism and give a speculative or independent account of them which will gain the interest and assent of the philosopher. Even the Logos-conception, which St. John has employed — whether as an implied solution of the problem or as a statement of it in final terms — is incompetent to give us a complete understanding of all mysteries in this tran- scendent realm. No theory expressible in words, no com- bination of ideas, even those of an apostle, can after all avail to place us at a point where we see the life of God- head on its inward side. Nevertheless, we know and are sure that in Jesus' person the God of heaven and earth has appeared among us ; that the Son reveals the Father perfectly as being one with Him who is revealed; and that our eyes are enlightened by Him in all knowledge because He dwells within as our inmost life. This is the keynote of the Johannine interpretation. The faith out of which it comes, and which it strives to evoke in other minds, is the great faith that Christ and God are one — the Son sharing the supernatural life of the Father, the Father completely manifested in the Son. This unity has often been described as if in the last resort it were limited and defective, a unity merely of will and purpose. And the objection is no doubt well taken, provided we agree that will is something less and lower than ultimate reality. If behind all will and thought there exists in God a mysterious incognizable substance, not to be described in terms familiar to human experience, but representing the point through which the threads of cosmic relations pass, and constituting the 8 114 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST inmost essence of the Divine life, then indeed the oneness of Christ with God is after all only relative. But the supposition is mistaken. There is in the universe nothing more real than will, the living energy of spirit ; nothing more concrete and actual, whether it be in God or man. II is the last home and sanctuary of essential being. We may therefore conclude that the true and inherent Godhead of Jesus Christ, if human words can affirm it, is affirmed unequivocally in the Gospel of St. John. He is completely possessed of those qualities which constitute the proper life of Deity. Yet even here we encounter that unfailing counter- strain of subordination which we have seen to be present in the New Testament as a whole. It is noteworthy, indeed, that Jesus affirms His personal dependence on God precisely in those passages which deal with His uniqueness. Both ideas are prominent, for instance, in 5^'~"^'. So too in 17 the pre-existent glory, which Jesus entreats may be restored, is a gift bestowed by the Father. It is misleading to say that this subordination has reference solely to the life on earth. It is of course manifest during the earthly life in a special degree ; Jesus declares that He can do nothing of Himself,^ that His works, like His knowledge or His right to judge, have been given Him of the Father. But we introduce the distinctions of a later age when we argue that such expressions of de- pendence are only meant to cover Christ's human nature, or His incarnate life, or what theology designates " the estate of humiliation." For the subordination is quite distinctly predicated of the filial life as such ; it character- ises Sonship everywhere, always. Even in regard to His exalted life Jesus could say, " I will pray the Father for you" (16^^), thus projecting the idea of subordination to the other side of death ; and as a parallel to this, relating to His pre-existence, we cannot ignore the state- ment (10^'') that the Father sanctified Him and sent Him 1 A trait which forbids us to speak of the JohanniDe Christ as "omni- potent." PROLOG DE TO THE GOSPEL 115 into the world. His advent implied, of course, that the dependent nature of the Son became manifest under the new conditions which pertain to a true human life ; ^ but St. John suggests that it was because His eternal relation to the Father had been one of filial reliance that He could thus reveal Him perfectly on earth. It is erroneous, therefore, to play off assertions of His Godhead and of His subordination against each other, as if either weakened the force of its opposite, or reduced it to a merely symbolic sense. The evangelist is equally in earnest with both things. For his mind both sayings are essential to the complete truth : " I and the Father are one," and " The Father is greater than I." Sonship is inconceivable without dependence. In the words of Lutgert : " The superiority of God to Jesus does not mean that He reserves anything to Himself ; on the contrary. He wholly conveys Himself to Jesus, making Him sovereign of the entire world. What it does mean is that God is everywhere and at each point the Origin, the Giver, the Foundation ; while Jesus is the obedient and receptive organ of His will." ^ We turn now to the special teaching of the prologue (1^~^*). It was convenient to defer the Christology of these introductory verses until the general thought of the Gospel had been examined, for after all the subject of the Gospel is not the Logos or Word, but the Divine person Jesus Christ. But with this general exposition in our minds, it is all but impossible to maintain that • It has been maintained that the idea of humiliation is virtually foreign to the Johannine thought, in which the conception of revelation has taken the place which the sacrifice of the cross occupied for St. Paul. Piquant contrasts of this sort have a very real didactic value, but they must not be overpressed. There is sacrifice for St. John in the incarnation as well as in the cross (1^), but also in the intervening life. " Though the gi-eatest stress," Mr. Purchas rightly observes, is "laid throughout the Gospel upon the Son's transcendent dignity, the aspect under which that dignity is invariably contemplated is not that of dignity gloriously won, or dignity brilliantly maintained, but of dignity humbly put aside, and only mani- fested in pre-eminence of self-sacrifice " {Johannine Problems, 104). " Die johann. Ghristologie, 34. 116 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST the prologue serves a speculative and not a practically religious purpose. The first paragraph, as Harnack puts it,i is a mere preface, not a philosophic programme. Its special ideas are not allowed to intrude upon the record, nor does Jesus ever name Himself " the Word." ^ The prologue on the whole makes the impression of having been written last, in a current vocabulary and mode of thought fitted to make appeal to a quite specific con- stituency. "The writer desires to avail himself of a conception more congenial to the thought of his readers than to his own, in order to set forth in words familiar to his readers the doctrine he wishes to teach, viz. the uniqueness, finality, and all-sufficiency of the revelation of God made in the person of Jesus Christ." * It is no ds priori philosopheme, by assimilating which the mind was to be prepared to understand and estimate the facts about to be narrated. To say that St. John derived the Logos-conception from Philo (who may have had it from the Stoics or even Heraclitus) is one of those tantalisingly ambiguous pro- nouncements which darken a subject almost as much as they enlighten.* We cannot indeed hold that there is no mutual relation. But the influence of Philo appears to have acted in a twofold direction. First, by way of antagonism. The evangelist uses Philo's term to deny Philo's thought. In the Fourth Gospel " Logos '' means word, not rational cosmic order; uttered revealing speech, not immanent reason ; an agency or force dynamic or personal in nature, not static or vaguely ideal. There is nothing answering to this in Philo. It is not merely that in the earlier writer the Logos is probably impersonal ; it is also carefully separated from God ; as in various Gnostic schools, it is inserted between God and the world to prevent their ' ZTK. ii. 189-231. ' As He does in the Evang. Infantiae, o. 1. * Burton, Short Introdudion to the Gospels, 132. * Cf. Harnack's trenchant paragraph, Dogmengesch.' i. 109. Can we assume " that every presentation of the doctrine of the Logos had passed through the moulding hands of Philo " ? THE LOGOS-CONCEPTION 117 contact, even though in a philosophical point of view it may serve as intermediary ; and to crown all, the nature of the Logos is such as to make wholly inconceivable its entrance, by incarnation, upon the real processes of history. But in St. John the Word is personal, is Himself Divine, mediates in the creation of the world, and enters human life by becoming flesh in order that as Jesus Christ, the historic Messiah, He may live and die as man and reveal the very heart of God. Thus even were the evangelist's debt to Philo an ascertained fact, we should still have to acknowledge that the borrowed notion was submitted to changes so radical as virtually to transform it into its opposite. In the second place, Philo's influence, or at least the influence of a general philosophical atmosphere typified by Philo, may well have decided which of the terms furnished by the Old Testament the evangelist should select for his purpose. Several such terms were open to him — Wisdom, the Spirit, the Angel of the Lord, the Word. In any case, too little allowance has been made for Old Testament associations. The action of the word of God in Gn 1 may well have supplied the first suggesr tion of the Logos, and at various other points in tlie older Scriptures the creation and governmenb of the world, as well as the progress of revelation, are traced to the Divine word going forth from God as the active organ of His will.^ We hold then that what St. John required and sought for was a term worthy to express the absolute nature of Christ, in whom the eternal, self-revealing God was incarnate ; and that this seemed to be furnished by the con- temporary religious thought, in which the Logos-conception had become familiarly established. He perceived its extra- ordinary value for the expositor. More significantly than any other word it gave expression to that aspect of Christ's life and work which he regarded as supreme. In addition to its place in Old Testament thought, it had received ' Pa 33« 107=» 147i», Is 55", Jer 23=». I 1 8 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST from Hellenism a certain cosmic width of meaning, and thus furnished a point of contact — this every missionary must appreciate — between Christianity and current modes of religious speculation. He chose it therefore as peculiarly fitted to recommend the Light and Life which had appeared in Jesus ; but in choosing it he took full precautions to ensure by his exposition that its Christian import should not be overshadowed by former associations. The Word is interpreted by Jesus, not Jesus by the Word. So far from being captured for speculation, the Logos receives a connotation which is fundamentally ethical, personal, soteriological.^ Its colour and significance are drawn from what the writer has known of Jesus, Son of God and Son of man ; it is handled with perfect freedom and without any suspicion of bondage to a phrase. St. John was too near Christ to adopt a really Greek view. In the prologue he but sums up the total impression left upon him by the personality of the Saviour. If we recall the allied doctrine of Hebrews, and the teaching of St, Paul that all things were created by Christ and for Him (Col 1^^), it will seem very natural that St. John should advance to the explicit identification of the historic Jesus with the creative Word. A glance at the details of the prologue may illustrate these results. In v.^ three weighty predications are made of the Logos : (a) He was from the beginning, or eternally; (J) He existed in a living personal relation- ship with God ; (c) His place was within the Godhead. It is next affirmed that He was the medium or instrument of creation. Stress is laid on the truth of His universal relation to humanity ; not only was the life in Him the light of men (v.*), but it gives light lo every man coming into the world (v.*). His Divine life had been immanent in the world from the first, though unrecog- nised ; but now He came in person, and to all who received Him He gave the right to become children of God. The commentators point out how v.^* resumes and care- ' This is well put by Schlatter, Die Lehre der Apostel, 131-32. THE LOGOS-CONCEPTION 119 fully corresponds to the first verse of the Gospel. The Word is throughout the subject of discourse, though not named explicitly in the interval; but now in v.^* the announcement of the Incarnation is laid point for point alongside of the initial statement regarding the absolute eternal nature of the Word. Westcott has drawn out the exact harmony. " ' He was God ' and ' He became flesh ' : eternity and time, the Divine and human are reconciled in Him. ' He was with God ' and ' He tabernacled among us ' : the Divine existence is brought into a vital and historical connection with human life. ' He was in the beginning ' and ' we beheld His glory ' : He who ' was ' beyond time was revealed for a space to the observation of men." * By the phrase of deep simplicity, " the Word became flesh," it appears to be taught that He passed into a new form of existence, a form essentially qualified by human mortality and dependence. Coming forth from God, He took individuality as a man, in unbroken personal continuity with that which He was before. We may distinguish four stages in the thought thus briefly summarised. There is (1) the Word in His primeval everlasting being; (2) the Lord who comes to His own as Life and Light ; ^ (3) Jesus Christ, upon whom the writer's mind has been fixed from the very outset, and who is now further characterised (4) as the only- begotten Son. Minor details, such as the mention of the Forerunner (v.^), or the significant phrase, " them that believe on His name " (v.^^), prove the evangelist's mind to be in vitalising contact with religious expea-ience from first to last. The entire representation is as it were an avenue conducting the mind to a redeeming view of Jesus as an historic person, and the term " Logos," by which the subject ' Commentary, in Zoc. ' Certain scholars hold that in the recently discovered Odes of Solomon there is revealed a tendency in Jewish thought which has close affinity with the Johannine conceptions of life, light, truth, etc. (of. Kendel Harris, Th* Odes and Psalms of Solomon', p. liiiflf.). 120 THE PERSON OF JESDS CHRIST is introduced, is never more than a subordinate element in a special vocabulary, which presents the personality of Christ in a certain aspect and with a special aim. It is obvious that nothing in the prologue is intended to shed light upon the mode of the Incarnation, however distinctly it may assert the fact. Yet when it is read, as it ought to be, with constant reference to the Gospel it has introduced, no one can miss the clear indication of the motive which is conceived of as underlying the advent of Jesus Christ. It is the Divine desire to impart life to a perishing and darkened world. No doubt it is charac- teristic of St. John, in contrast to the Pauline view, to regard the earthly life of Jesus less as a humiliation than as a revelation of Divine glory, the beams of which shine forth clearly in His wondrous works. Nevertheless, he is wholly at one with St. Paul in the conviction that the redeeming work of Christ centres in the sacrifice of the cross (1^*). Jesus speaks of His death as the hour of His being glorified (122*'2* 13^^), and declares that He came into the world to die (12^^). But death for Jesus is part of His life as Son. And life and death together make up the perfect revelation. The whole is viewed in the light of eternal fact, the lines of change or temporal distinction being obliterated. All that St. Paul beholds in the exalted Christ is found by St. John, the personal disciple, in the veiled glory of the earthly Life. Thus in the transcendent consciousness of eternal life as an experience generated by the knowledge of the Son, eschatology passes into the background. The Christology of the First Epistle of St. John is in harmony with the teaching of the Gospel. The first three verses form an implicit commentary on the prologue with which the Gospel opens, and as such they caution ua once more against a too theoretic interpretation of the Logos- conception. So complete is the identification of God and Christ that in a series of passages it is impossible to be certain of which the writer speaks. This is the case, for instance, FIRST EPISTLE OF JOHN 121 in the great closing verse : " We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding that we know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son, Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life " (5^"). What is specially distinctive of the Epistle, however, is the emphatic condemnation of certain active champions of heresy. In the spirit of docetic idealism they had begun very early to disunite the saving word of life from the historic Jesus, and to seek another path to fellowship with God than the mediation of the incarnate Christ. It is possible that they were enthusiastic students of the Alexandrian philosophy animated by the desire to impose the Philonic Logos-conception upon the Christian facts, but in the process dissipating their significance and value. Of these men St. John writes in tones of the gravest indignation. To deny that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh {A^ ^), or that He underwent actual death (1^ 5^), is to abandon, the faith for an ti- Christian lies. To refute an error so far-reaching the writer falls back on per- sonal testimony, declaring in the first verse of the Epistle that he is proclaiming " that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled." The presence of Life among men had been audible, visible, tangible. Christ's advent in the flesh is that on which hangs everything that can be called salvation; victory belongs only to those who receive Him as the Son of God. " Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father : he that confesseth the Son hath the Father also " (2^3). BOOK II. HISTORY OF CHRISTOLOGICAL DOCTRINE. CHAPTER I. CHRISTOLOGY IN THE SUB-APOSTOLIC AGE. § 1. Introduction. — In the Neutestamentliche Theologte of Holtzmann we find an interesting passage,^ in which the writer expresses the conviction that even in St. Paul and St. John there lie the seeds and origins of the later Christo- logical development. This at least indicates that our study of the doctrine in history ought to start from the teaching, not of Jesus Himself, but of the apostles. It Literature — On the history of Christologioal doctrine as a whole : Hamaok, Lehrhuch der Dogmengeschichte*, 1909 (Eng. tr. 1894) ; Loofs, £eii- faden zum Studium der Dogmengeschichte*, 1906 ; Seeberg, Lehrbuch der DogmengeschicMe', 1908 ff. ; Baur, Die chrislliche Lehre von der Drei- einigkeit und Menschwerdung, 1841—43 ; Dorner, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi', 1845-53 (Eng. tr. 1861-63) ; Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, 1896 ; Bethune- Baker, History of Early Christian Doctrine, 1 903 ; Kriiger, Das Dogma von der Dreieinigkeit und Oottmen chheit, 1905; 'Boawetsoh., Orundriss der Dogmengeschichte, 1909 Cave, The Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1 925. On the present chapter : Loofs, article " Christologie, Kirchenlehre,'' in RE.' iv. (to which I owe much) ; Engelhardt, Das Christentum Jnstins, 1878 ; Lightfoot, St. Clement of Rome, 1890, and St. Ignatius, 1889 ; Zahn, Ignatius von Antiochien, 1873 ; von der Goltz, Ignatius von Antiochien als Christ und Theologe, 1894; Rainy, The Ancient Catholic Church, 1902 Kriiger, article " Gnosis," in RE.' vi. ; Moody, The Mind of the Early Converts, 1920 ; McGiffert, The Ood of the Early Christians, 1924 ; Katten busch. Das apostolische Symbol, 1894-1900 ; Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 1888. >i. 418, cf. 353. 122 THE EARLIEST CHRISTOLOGY 123 was from their preaching that the earliest circles of believers received a conception of the Lord. The common faith evoked by the evangelism of apostolic men is the seed-plot of ecclesiastical Christology. To these primitive Christian societies the Gospel of the Kingdom came primarily as a Gospel of Christ — i.e. good news about God resting on and revolving round an historic person. This person had revealed God's mind toward men ; He had wrought salvation by His death ; as Eisen and Ascended Lord He was soon to return in glory, and establish the Kingdom in its fulness. He was the Messiah promised from of old, but Messiah in a sense the novelty of which was slowly dawning on the Christian mind. To speak of an " official " doctrine of Christ in New Testament times is, however, impossible. His Divine uniqueness was indeed acknowledged everywhere. From the first it was felt that He had a universal and eternal meaning, stretching over history and reaching back to the inmost sphere of the Divine. All believers held to Him an attitude of trust and worship. Much earlier than the days told of in Pliny's famous letter they sang hymns to Christ " as though to God." So high a name was but the expression of their new life in Him. But we are not in a position to say exactly how the average believer thought of this uniqueness. Jesus belonged to, if He did not fill, the sphere of God — so much was certain ; but men did not question themselves more particularly as to the bearing of this on the axiom of the Divine unity. They were content to have life through His name, and to leave problems of theory alone. The marks of a Christian were, thus far, more practical in kind. Probably the general belief included as its chief items faith in the one God revealed in Christ, a hope in the life everlasting guaranteed by the historic Messiah, and the conviction that after baptism one ought to live in conformity with the example of Jesus. Do we know of any primitive circle, evangelised by apostolic men, which held a purely " humanitarian " view 124 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST of Christ ? Was there anywhere a group of believers who considered Him to be only an eminent religious teacher, like the prophets, though greater ? There appears to have been one such group. In his Dialogue with Trypho (cap. 48) Justin writes : " Some there are of your race, who allow that He is Christ, but declare Him to be a man of men ; with whom I do not agree." The same party regarded Him as the son of Joseph and denied His pre-existence. But it is noteworthy that even so these were but a section of Jewish Christianity. They formed part of the Ebionite sect, and, like all Ebionites, held that it was by the descent of the Spirit at His baptism that Jesus was endowed for the vocation of Messiah. Certain scholars have argued that this represents the genuinely original Christology, current among the first Christian Jews of Palestine. But the facts are dead against them. St. Paul's teaching as to the Person of our Lord never was, so far as we know, the subject of controversy ; which of itself proves that the apostles took the higher view of Jesus' nature. Or, to take another example, the Christo- logical heresy against which St. Paul warns the Colossians contained elements, as Lightfoot has shown, of a Gnostic character. Instances of this kind are sufficient evidence that various types of Christological thought prevailed even among Jewish Christians at the close of the apostolic age, and the effort to make them out unanimously humanitarian is a failure. Of course, some colour may seem to be given to the mistake by the fact that all types of tradition in the first century lay stress on Jesus' true humanity. From the beginning the Christian mind assumed that Jesus of Nazareth was man. But Loofs points to two considera- tions tending to show that in primitive Jewish -Christian circles there were no advocates of mere humanitarianism. In the first place, to hold, as unquestionably they did hold, that Jesus at His baptism received the plenitude of the Spirit, is to affirm a very great, an absolutely super- natural, thing. It is to assert that a certain individual, THE SUB- APOSTOLIC AGE 125 at a particular point of history, had vouchsafed to Him the Spirit of the liviug God in its fulness. Between such a view and that of St. Paul the gulf is not impassable. Secondly, this idea of Jesus as a Spirit-filled man is not, in the strict sense, an expression of their religious estimate of Jesus ; it is a theory of the subject, though an incipient one ; it is an attempt to explain the uniqueness which that estimate ascribes to Him. Our problem therefore is : What was the prevailing religious estimate of Jesus at the close of the apostolic age ? It is scarcely enough to say that He was held to be the Messiah. That is of course true ; but, on the one hand, " Christ " had become for Gentile believers little more than Jesus' surname, while, on the other, for Jewish Christians, the title bore rather on the future than the present, and carried men's minds into the world of eschatology. This being so, we shall find a cleai-er instance of the practical religious attitude of the Church in the custom of 'prayer to Jesus. That this custom pre- vailed in the sub-apostolic Church is made virtually certain by the facts to which we can point at either limit of the period.^ Prayer is addressed to Christ directly in the New Testament (Ac 7« 1 Co 1 2, 2 Co 12^, Eev 2220) ; and according to the principle lex supplicandi, lex credendi we may regard this as the practical " deifying " of Jesus which anticipated a theoretical Christology. Again, in 113 we have Pliny's letter to Trajan, formerly referred to, in which he reports that Christians of his province were accustomed to gather before sunrise on a fixed day of the week, and sing alternately " a hymn to Christ as though to God." In the age of the Apologists the worship of Jesus was viewed by the heathen as a mark of Christian faith, and in the immediately following generations the practice of men like Irenaeus and Tertullian does not admit of question. Facts like these, which Loofs enumerates, justify his temperately expressed conclusion that we ought to consider tlie invocation of Christ "as an inherited ' Zahn, Skiiaen aus dem Lehen der alton Kirche^, 271 ff. 126 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST custom prevailing in all, or at least all non-Ebionitic, churches of the post-apostolic age." " This custom," he adds, " shows more clearly than any incipient Christological speculation, that to the believers of the time from which we have to set out Christ belonged to the sphere of God. And this is the root from which sprang the development of the Christological dogma." * How far this religious estimate of Christ took the shape of ascribing to Him the predicate 6e6<; is uncertain.^ One gathers generally that the divinity of our Lord, for the most part expressed in practical terms, was a recog- nised fact among Christians in the second century. For the Christian niind at large He was both God and man, though certain Jewish-Christian groups may have scrupled to use the decided language of their fellows. Many, how- ever, were content to believe in " one God, one Lord," without in the least impairing their monotheism, or pushing reflection beyond the stage of naive faith. In this transition period of the sub- apostolic age there were, according to Harnack, two main streams of Christo- logical reflection. " Jesus," he writes, " was either regarded as the man whom God has chosen, in whom the Godhead or the Spirit of God has dwelt, and who, after testing, was adopted by God and invested with dominion (Adoptian Christology) ; or He ranked as a heavenly spiritual being (or the highest after God), who took flesh, and went back to heaven again after completing His work on earth (pneumatic Christology)." * Hermas, he argues, is a clear example of the former point of view, which was later declared heretical ; Barnabas, Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp illustrate the latter. Harnack himself tends more recently to modify this sharp distinction. Loofs, indeed, had urged that both Christologies, to the limited extent in which they are correctly formulated, go back rather to the '■ Op. cit. 22. ^ Trais deov was a common title ; cf. 1 Clem., and Didaohe, o. 9 and 10. It at least expressed the belief that His connection with God was of a unique kind. ' See ITistory of Dogma (Eng. tr.), i. 190 S. THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS 127 primitive two-sided estimate of Christ Karh a-dpKa and Kara irvev^a. This he traces to Eo 1^'-, and considers to be the most ancient and most widely spread of all Christological formulas. It meant that Christ was con- templated alternately on the side of His natural and His supernatural being, without any effort to determine to which the personal subject in Him belonged. There is much that is attractive and illuminating in this suggestion, though it will not cover all the facts. But in spite of the rudimentary character of early Christological ideas, they rested on quite definite convictions. Gospel traditions kept men aware that the self-consciousness of the historic Jesus had been more than human, while His post-resurrec- tion appearances, due to His own direct agency, supplied a final proof of His supramundane nature. Ebionism had little influence in the wider life of the Church. No one of course operated with ideas like the modern " person- ality " ; but it was never doubted that the " Spirit " present in Jesus was essentially Divine and pre-existent, nor would the suggestion that Jesus was a man who had become God have been understood at this time. He was always viewed as both things^heavenly Divine Spirit, and true man who had suffered and died. In prayers and hymns He was worshipped along with God the Father. § 2. The Apostolic Fathers.- — We shall gain a clearer view of this common faith by examining data presented in the writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers, from the year 90 to 140. Ignatius apart, we find that the rest exhibit a striking variety of ideas. All start, as the New Testament does, from the historic Christ, who is identified with the exalted Lord. He is the perfect revelation of God, His servant, His beloved ; or again, it is said that God " chose " Him. It is agreed that He existed before His birth in a state of glory and power, and Clement of Eome (about 95) calls Him "the sceptre of the majesty of God," and declares that His coming to earth was a willing self-abasement (c. 16). From the 128 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST beginning He was Lord of all things, by Him the world was created, God took counsel with Him at the creation of man.^ On the whole His eternal prior existence was simply assumed, for it was felt that One to whom men appealed in prayer could not be the creature of time. Such ideas of pre-existence must not be confused with those current in Judaism. One point has caused difficulty. When we read in 2 Clement (c. 9) : " Christ the Lord who saved us, being first spirit, then became flesh," or in Hermas (S. 5, 6) : " The holy pre-existent Spirit, which created the whole creation, God made to dwell in flesh that He 'desired," are we to say that the pre-existent Christ is being identified with the Holy Spirit ? Baur, Harnack, Loofs ^ and others have maintained this, but in his last edition Seeberg puts forward strong reasons for denying it, and appositely cites St. Paul's identification of the Lord with the Spirit in 2 Co Z^'', although his general practice of differentiating them is quite plain.^ But in any case we are entitled to affirm that at this stage the dogmatic distinction had not been worked out. Christ is Spirit, or Holy Spirit, by His very essence ; as Spirit He is one with God, and of the same nature. It is even said that His sufferings were the sufferings of God.* Not that we are to import a Nicsean significance in these phrases. Alongside of the unity of the Son with God goes an emphasis upon His subordination that would scarcely have been possible two centuries later. This was due to inherited ideas about Jesus' Divine mission, His life of obedience and trust, and His return to the Father. Indeed there are parts of Herman where, to secure definiteness of outline, Christ is represented as an angel or lofty spirit, though passages may also be quoted of a different tenor. Wlien Jesus is called Son of God, in literature of this ' Barnabas, c. 5. ' Loofs calls this Binitarian Monotheism, and thinks that it commended itself by falling in conveniently with the KarA. aipKa-Karh, Trveufia formula. ' Lehrbuch d. DogmengeschicUe^, i. 98. * 1 Clem, e, 2. CHRIST AND THE SPIRIT 129 period, the name " is connected more especially with the human life by which it was manifested." ^ Hence we can- not assume, as we might later, that " Son " per se implies a personal relation of the personal factor in Christ to or in the Father. But although speculation was not yet busied with the point, incipient tokens of it are traceable in Hermas, who certainly names the pre-existent Christ by the title Son (S. 9^^). How close the relation between the Son and the Father was conceived to be, may be seen from the opening words of 2 Clement : " Brethren, we ought so to think of Jesus Christ, as of God, as of the Judge of quick and dead." It was possible, in short, to accentuate either His Divine unity with, or His personal distinction from, the Father. As regards the entrance of Christ into human life, two streams of reflection are observable. On the one hand, the pre-existent Son of God, it is taught, joined Himself to the man Jesus, making him thus God's Servant, and as Spirit pervading and energising all the workings of the flesh. The man Jesus is but as it were the form and vehicle of the (Christ) Spirit — a view, obviously, with a certain leaning towards dualism. Traces of it may be found in Hermas and Barnabas. The other line of reflection conceives Christ to have become man, exchanging one form of being for another ; and this may be illustrated from 8 Clement, and particularly from the letters of Ignatius. It permitted men to predicate now Divine and now human properties of the one Christ. Certain advocates of the former view, it is possible, held that the union between the Son of God and the man Jesus took place at His baptism — an idea which had been maintained by groups of Jewish Christians, and formed part of the philosophical theory elaborated by Cerinthus in the interests of docetism (Iren. 1. 26). But for this period it would be a mistake to insist on this distinction. § 3. Ignatius. — When we turn to the attractive ' Swete, 2'he Apostles' Creed, 29. 130 THK PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST personality of Ignatius, the martyr bishop of Antioch, it is to one in whose thoughts and life Jesus Christ formed the inspiring centre. His letters (written before 117) reveal an almost apostolic sense of Jesus' person as a whole, and have left a deep mark on later Cbristology. " Nowhere else," Dr. Sanday has remarked, " have we the idea of the fulness of Godhead revealed in Christ grasped and expressed with so much vigour." ^ His ideas are Johannine in the main. In perfervid language he sets forth Christ, again and again, as the Revealer of God and the Eternal Head of a race of redeemed men. " Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the mind of the Father," ^ " the unerring mouth in whom the Father hath spoken." ^ He starts from the historic Christ, now exalted and im- passible, and dwells with great emphasis on the reality of His earthly career, pointing in turn to His birth, baptism, sufferings, death, descent into Hades, and resurrection.^ " Ignatius," it has been said, " is the great teacher of the sacramental significance of the incidents of the incarnate life,"° and just for this reason his anti-docetism is pronounced. '' He suffered truly," he writes to the Smyrnaeans, " as also He raised Himself truly ; not as certain unbelievers say, that He suffered in semblance, being themselves mere semblance."' One or two passages are singularly like the second article of the Apostles' Creed. A strong and keen sense of history comes out. It was because the disciples " touched " Christ that they were able to despise death.' Flesh, in the view of Ignatius, belongs to Christ's nature permanently, even in heaven. The whole value of Christianity would perish with the denial that He came into a genuinely human life. This is maintained vehemently against all who professed to give a purer and more spiritual theory. Far from concealing, Ignatius rather glories in the paradoxes and ' Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, 244. " Eph. 3. ' Rom. 8. * Cf. Trail. 9, where, as Lightfoot says, the word "truly " is repeated agaiu and again as "a watchword against dooetism." • Ottley, Doct. of the Incarnation, vol. i. 164. '2. ' Smyr. 3. CHRISTOLOGY IN IGNATIUS 131 antitheses of Christ's being ; they are cardinal to the salvation He brings. " There is one only physician," he writes in a classic passage, " of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate, God in man, true life in death. Son of Mary and Son of God, first passible and then impassible." ' Neither aspect can be dispensed with ; whatever the verbal tension, the idea must somehow be put in words that God has appeared in, or as, man ; the Eternal in time. The union of these two sides, in a vitally indissociable union, is the hall-mark of Ignatian Christology. It is also implied that the relation of Jesus Christ to the Father is of a unique kind. In Him have been manifested things wrought in the ancient silence of God and perfected in His counsels.^ Christ is a revelation less of the reason than of the saving will of the Father ; for although Ignatius employs the term \6yo<;, it is scarcely with a technical significance. And this revelation was given, not in His words merely, but in His silent deeds, or, to be more exact, through His inmost self and personality. From this point of view a glance is given to His filial subordina- tion : " the Lord did nothing without the Father," '' as Jesus Christ was to the Father, be obedient to the bishop and to one another." ^ Elsewhere He is said to have been an imitator of the Father,* and there is a reference to His faith and love." But the writer does not insist on this. The fulness of Christ's relation to God is everywhere expressed by the term " Son." For Ignatius, no doubt, as for St. John, the primary reference of this title is to the historic Lord, now crowned with glory. In virtue of His immaculate birth Christ is Son of Man and Son of God, ' Bph. 7. The Apostolic Fathers, as Professor Gwatkin has put it (Studies of Arianism, 6), "scarcely seem to see the difficulty of reconciling divinity with suffering — for this rather than the Resurrection was the stumbling-block of their time. 'If He suffered,' said the Ebionites, 'He was not Divine.' 'If He was Divine,' answered the Docetists, 'His suffering9 were unreal.' The sub-Apostolic Fathers were content to reply that He was Divine and that He truly suffered, without attempting tc explain the difficulty." 2 Eph. 19. ' Mag. 7. IS. < 7'hil. 7. » Ffh. ?0, 132 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST with descent through Mary from David and through the Holy Spirit from God. But I am not convinced by Zahn's careful argument that the name " Son " is essentially and exclusively relative to the miraculous birth in the flesh.' If we take such phrases as " Jesus Christ, who was with the Father before the worlds," * " Jesus Christ His Son, who is His word that proceeded from silence," * or, still more relevantly, a description like " Jesus Christ, who came forth from One Father and is with One and departed unto One " ; * if we consider that no other designation is available for the pre-existent One, since " Logos " is used quite untechnically, I cannot but feel that — since Father- hood and Sonship are essentially correlative for him as for the writers of the New Testament — Ignatius also carries " Son " backward into the eternal sphere. His view will then be that " the Eternal Son of God became man, when God created for Him through Mary a human life, namely the life of the historic Son."^ But however this may be, it is agreed that Christ is presented as pre-existent on the Divine or "pneumatic" side of His being. Not indeed that Ignatius knows anything of the later doctrine of eternal generation, for he uses the epithet " ingenerate " of Christ in His higher being.* But the Subject of the historic life had been as God before He "appeared in the likeness of man."'' We also find in Ignatius the authentically New Testament idea that it was after the resurrection that the Saviour's nature was fully manifested : " our Lord Jesus Christ," he writes, " being in the Father, is the more plainly visible." ^ In what sense is the predicate " God " applied to Christ in these letters ? For it is frequently so applied in moments of deep feeling, even by a writer whose monotheism is emphatic. There are phrases like '' Jesus Christ, our God," "the blood of God," and "the pas- ' Ignatius von Antiochien, 469. ' Mag. 6. ' Mag. 8. * Mag. 7. ' Seelierg, op. cit. i. 101. • Uph. 7. ' Ibid. 19. ^ Rom. 8. CHRISTOLOGY IN IGNATIUS 133 sion of my God." * The entire content of Ignatius' thought of God is drawn from Christ : he sees the two merged in one. Moreover, functions and honours of a specifically Divine character are ascribed to Christ, such as the knowledge of our secret heart, the power to awaken penitence, to raise up prophets, to care in love for His Church. His relation to the Christian is that of in- dwelling : He is " our never-failing life," union with whom, especially in the Eucharist, is eo ipso union with the Father. True, Ignatius makes no effort to construct a set theory of the incarnate person. But it is flying in the face of the actual data to say that for him " God " in this relation is " only a pregnant expression of the fact that in Christ God is grasped and held as eternal salvation,"' if by this is meant that he speaks of the Lord's deity merely in value- judgments. The simple fact is that for Ignatius Christ was identical, personally one, with the highest in the highest realm he knew. Christ's life was the human life of God, His coming the renewal of humanity through the union of God with man. He repeats in other words the simple religious modalism of St. John, but he does so without prejudice to more definite formulations of the truth. The one certain thing is that Christ is truly God and man, no less one than the other. Ignatius nobly represents the living Christological faith of which theology is but the systematised exposition, and the insistent claims of which have ruined many a theory. In a sense, the thread might well be taken up to-day where he dropped it; at all events his pages are extraordinarily modern, and the passion in his words keeps, and will always keep, his thought fresh and vital. In no sense a writer of intellectual power, he cuts his way to ultimate realities by sheer energy of faith. It is because Jesus Christ has mediated to him eternal life through knowledge of the true God that he names Him the Divine Son. Himself little of a theologian, he exhibits the first ' Athanasius later rejected such expressions as unscriptural. ■ Ton der Goltz, Ignatins v. Antiochien als Christ u. Theologe, 25-26. 134 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST stirrings of theological interest in the post-apostolic age , and already, it is clear, faith and Christ are bound up together. Belief in God and in Christ are the same thing in different aspects. § 4. The Gnostic Christology. — Ignatius lived and wrote in full view of Gnostic speculation. More and more it is being felt that Gnosticism — an atmosphere rather than a system — is more easily comprehensible in the light of the general history of religion than as a form of Christianity. Looming on the horizon by the year 60, it became really dangerous in the first half of the second century, striving as it did to capture the Gospel for the philosophy of the age. The Church was to be turned into a mystery- society or a speculative school. At the root of all Gnostic systems — and they are legion ^ — lay the idea of redemption, and the conviction that it was to be won by a rare kind of knowledge.^ In a way, Christ was made the centre of all. Not only so ; at first sight it might appear as if the Gnostics were engaged in a more serious and impressive effort to construe the person of the Lord than their orthodox assailants. But, on the one hand, their Chris- tology was incurably docetic. Partly owing to the accepted metaphysical opposition of spirit and matter, partly through a tendency to see in all things earthly a mystic allegory of great cosmic redeeming processes. His life in flesh was dissolved in unreal appearance. Valentinus says that Jesus did not eat or drink like other men, and that He passed through Mary merely as a channel. By some His birth was totally denied, and of course the same principle, when applied to His death on the cross, robbed it of the value of a re^l passion. On the other hand, the distinctive feature in Gnosticism was its sharp separation between a Christ who is not truly human ' On the many shades of Gnostio Christology, see a valuable note in Seeberg, op. eit. i. 238. 2 What Christ does for men is to reveal transcendent secrets, though there are more mystical suggestions. THE GNOSTIC CHRISTOLOGY 135 and a Jesus who is not Divine. " Christ " is an Aeon who, being " a wonderful concentration of the light and virtue of the Pleroma," or hierarchical Divine cosmos, has come down and joined Himself somehow to the Messiah of the Demiurge, Jesus, that He may infuse a higher mysterious knowledge into receptive souls, thus rescuing for the supernal world nobler elements previously immersed in matter. The union of Christ and Jesus, some held, began at the baptism in the Jordan, and terminated just before death, the precise moment of separation being signalised by the cry : " Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." Basilides taught that Simon of Cyrene was crucified in Jesus' room. Thus Christ is to be sought behind, not in, the personality of Jesus. That Christian ideas enter into this construction is of course not to be denied. The central significance of Christ is vigorously affirmed, and, so far as concerns practical religion, Harnack is probably right in saying that to the majority of Gnostics Christ was a Spirit, consubstantial with the Father.^ His person. His teaching, His career were recognised as an in-breaking of supreme remedial energies from above. Yet a believing instinct led the Church past the danger. Apart from the docetic taint, apart from the indifference to history as also from the fact that Gnosticism turns on cosmic rather than ethical ideas, it was not even certain after all whether the Redeemer came from the highest God or not. He came out of the Pleroma, but was not His divinity such as might be predicated of many Aeons, all less than God and more than man ? Ambiguity on this point disqualified Gnosticism as a substitute for a faith that clung to history, and in that history found very God. At the same time Gnosticism wakened up the Church to more strenuous reflection, and drove orthodoxy from a bare assertion of historic facts, though it cannot be said that the spokes- men of the faith altogether succeeded in avoiding or 1 History of Dogma, i. 260. It is worth noting that o/iooiiino! tiJ; irarpi ia originally a Gnostic phrase. 136 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST surmounting the dualism which heresy had thus so plainly taught. Echoes of Gnostic Christology came later from Marcion (died about 165). He maintained that the good God — in contradistinction from the Demiurge who had made the world — took pity upon men, and that in the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius Christ Jesus came down from heaven as a saving spirit {spiritus salutaris), assumed a phantasmal body, and, as manifesting the highest God, began to preach in the synagogue at Capernaum. But his doctrine has curious inconsistencies. He may have identified Christ with the good God ; in that direction lay all his religious interests. Yet at times there is a clear distinction. And it is remarkable that, with all his docetism, to which the idea of human birth or growth is intolerable, he yet attaches a high value to the crucifixion inflicted on Christ by the Demiurge. Here also the Church felt that the faith of the Incarnation is evaporated in unhistoric fancies. § 5. The Apostles' Creed. — Moving out into a wider field, let us now observe the profound influence exerted by the earliest forms of what is known as the Apostles' Creed.^ The present Latin text goes back only to the eighth century, or possibly to the sixth ; but its main contents can be traced much farther, and scholars describe it as the Gallican recension of the shorter Eoman symbol, that is, the symbol used in the Church of Eome from the third century onwards, and venerated there as an apostolic heirloom. There is virtual agreement that the original Greek text of this Baptismal Creed was in existence before 150 ; how long before is still disputed. Kattenbusch makes Kome its birthplace about 100, Harnack about 150 ; Zahn and Loofs, more or less following Caspari, look for its origin to Asia Minor, and date it somewhere in the period 100—130. We are not concerned here with the details of the problem ; and interesting as are the variations in ' Cf. Loofs, Zeitraden\ 87-88. THE apostles' CREED 137 the earliest Greek and Latin forms, they are of no religious importance.^ But we should note the triadic terms in which the Christian faith is henceforward ex- pressed.. From this time on the Church professed a knowledge of God, and taught it to her catechumens, wliich grasps Him as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. With- out this the Christian faith in God cannot be put in words ; the God of redeeming power and truth is these three in unity. The second article of the Apostles' Creed, according to our most ancient source, Marcellus of Ancyra, is as follows : — (IIiaTevo) et? 6eov iravTOKpaTopa') kol «'? Xpiarov 'Irjaovv, Tov vlov avTov tov fiov(y/evfj, tov Kvpwv r/fioov, tow yevvTjOevra eK TrvevfiaTOt; aylov Kol Maplas ttj? izapOevov, TOP eTTi IJovtIov IliXdrov aTavpaOevra xal ra^evra koX rfj rplrrj ■^fi.epa avacTTavTa sk rwv veicpcov, ava^avTa ets Toil? ovpavovi Kol Ka6r]p,evov ev Be^ia tov irarpo';, odev epj(erai Kpiveiv ^a)VTa<; koX veKpov Cf. 1 Ti S". CHAPTEE 11. BEGINNINGS OF THE CHRISTOLOGICAL DOGMA. § 1. The Apologists. — The Greek Apologists of the second century (the most important names are Aristides, Justin Martyr, Theophilus, and Athenagoras) offer a striking contrast to the mental attitude revealed in the Apostles' Creed. Instead of a plain recital of facts, they proposed, as Christian philosophers, to give a rendering of the ideas of the Gospel in the scientific or speculative language of the day. In Christ they possessed what philosophy is ever seeking, and the higher knowledge given by the new faith they now strove to make explicit in a defensive statement of Christianity. And one idea or fo>'mula which they used to set forth the dignity of Christ's Person affected later theology to its depths. This was the philosophical conception of the Logos, a speculative deposit of varied systems. The Apologists carried over this elastic idea with them from older studies, and in their writings we see the attempt being made to combine it with the conviction, native to the believing mind, that Christ is de6<;, as well as the consciousness that in point of fact they found themselves instinctively paying Him Divine honour. For the mind of that age, be it remembered, the Logos summed up all the Divine forces energising in the worlds of nature and spirit. It was "a formula capable of LiTBRATURB — Engellmrdt, Das Christentum Justins, 1878 ; Holland, article " Justinus," in Diet, of Chr. Biog. ; Flemming, Zur Beurieilung des Chrislentums Juslins, 1893 ; Kunze, Die OottesUhre des Irenaeus, 1891 ; Harnaok, article " Monarchianismus, " in RK liii. ; Zahn, Marcellus von Ancyra, 1867; Carrington, Christian Apolbgetics of the Second Century, 1921 ; Fairbaim, Christ in Modern Theology, 1893 140 THE APOLOGISTS 141 expressing the transcendent and unchangeable nature of God on the one hand, and on the other His fulness of creative and spiritual powers." ^ The current conception of God being utterly abstract and transcendent, a mediator was required to bring Him in contact with the world, and this function only the Logos could fulfil. To the Apologists, then. He is in His distinct or personal being a product of the Father's will (epyov TrpwToroKov tov irarpo';), though eternally immanent as a principle in God, who has never been aXoyo^. In due time He came forth in order to create all things, "begotten from the Father, by His power and will, but not by abscission, as if the essence of the Father were divided." ^ Numerically distinct from the Father,* He is yet one with Him in will. In virtue of His origin He is subordinate to the highest God, but He may be called a second God, and ought to be worshipped, finite in His own being, since there was a time when He began to be. He forms the natural organ of revelation to the finite. Lastly, He has appeared in Christ, not in part merely but completely. In Christ the new law of freedom has been set forth in its entirety, but the Logos had previously been operative in the prophets of the Old Testament and even in heathen sages. He alone is properly to be called Son.* Except Justin, none of the Apologists bestows any particular attention upon the doctrine of Incarnation. The older idea that the union of Divine and human in Christ took place at the Baptism is not found in his pages ; instead, he speaks of Jesus the Christ, " being of old the Logos . . . now by the will of God having become man for the human race " ; ^ and in one passage goes so far into detail as to affirm that " Christ, the whole Logos, who appeared for our sakes, became alike body and reason and souL"* This emphasis upon the presence of the whole ' Harnaok, History of Dogma, ii. 207. ' Justin Martyr, Dialog, e. Tryph. c. 128. • ipie^(f Srepdn Ti. * Apol. ii. 6. • [bid. i. 63 ; of. 23. « Ihid. ii. 10. 142 THE PERSON OF JES0S CHRIST Logos in the Saviour is characteristic of Justin, and forms the implicit ground upon which he goes in declaring roundly that Christ is " God and man." It is a plausible view which finds in him the first faint beginnings of the " two-natures " doctrine, so influential in later centuries ; at all events in his contemporary Melito of Sardes there is a clear allusion to the " two substances " in Christ. According to Justin, the Logos (who even as pre-incarnate is designated Christ) came down from heaven as a Spirit ^ and made Himself one with the flesh conceived of Mary. He asserts, indeed, that the Spirit and power of God mentioned by St. Luke is just the Logos Himself, so that Jesus' humanity may be described as the creation or product of the indwelling Logos. Yet Jesus grew up like other men, using the proper means of growth, and assigning to each stage of the development that which befitted it. The risen and exalted Lord will hereafter judge the world; meanwhile His reign from heaven gives victory to His people over demons and all evil powers. There are indications in Justin that unorthodox views regarding Christ's higher being were not always felt to Involve the forfeiture of the Christian name. And this is intelligible when we recollect that for him Christ's Saviourhood mainly consisted in His having taught mono- theism and a new morality. " Becoming man according to His will. He instructed us in these things for the con- version and restoration of the human race."^ All this has value rather as testifying to the profound impression made by Christ on a mind determined to be philosophic than as a reasoned Christological scheme. In particular, the introduction of the Logos-conception was a dubious expedient, and before long it was to prove itself a weapon which men grasped only by the blade. It is little wonder, indeed, that an idea with so imposing a history should thus have been captured for Christian ^ Terms are not infrequently employed which seem to identify the Logos »nd the Spirit. » Apol. i. 28. THE LOGOS-CONCEPTION 143 service. In tcims St. John had seemed to authorise its Christian usage ; by its suggestion at once of plurality and unity it served to convey the truth that Christ is God, while yet God is one ; and its emphasis on the pre-existence of Christ gave credibility to faith's conviction that all things good, fair, and true fiov?, and have ever flowed, from Him. But in this world fallible men seldom act rightly without mixing their right with wrong. It was so now. In St. John the term Logos is obviously defined by relation to the more fundamental " Son " ; it is secondary and interpretative, more particularly for a specific audience, while " Son " is primary, because rooted in the fruitful depths of history. In the Apologists this relation is turned the other way. Here " Logos " comes on the scene with a settled independent meaning of its own ; it stands for the vast diffused world-reason ; its antecedents are meta- physical, not historical ; and from the outset it is capable of being analysed and explicated quite apart from the Jesus of the Gospels. In this case cosmology, not soteriology, gives tone to the discussion ; Christ is before all things the Logos, rather than the Son, of God. Thus the mind of the Church, in its Christological reflection, was encouraged to move by d priori lines of deduction from the pre-existent Divine Eeason downwards to the world, rather than upwards, by intuition, from the experi- ence of souls redeemed through union with a historic person. If Justin could describe the Logos as " a certain rational power," then the personal colour which the believing consciousness insists upon in all categories that concern Jesus Christ vanishes, and the door is opened wide to ideas so mechanical and unethical as to be incongruous with New Testament conceptions of the being and life of God. Further, if the Logos be defined as caused by God, it becomes plain that the subordination which, in one sense, is an authentically New Testament idea, is on the point of passing into essential dualism and inferiority. So that in certain ways Justin may be said to have anticipated Arius, as moving too much on the same cosmo- 144 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST logical plane. And when Athanasius came to the discussion a century later, he was forced to put the Logos Christology aside. On the other hand, it was particularly easy to explain it in a Sabellian sense.^ Thus a review of the work of the Apologists more than half inclines one to acquiesce in Loofs' verdict : " Their doctrine of the Logos is not a ' higher ' Christology than the common one ; it falls short of the genuinely Christian estimate of Christ. It is not God that manifests Himself in Christ, but the Logos, a depotentiated God, a God who as God is sub- ordinate to God Most High."* But while Justin's formulas thus led him to contrast fatally the Father and the Logos, the conception he was endeavouring to express was in no sense disloyal to Christ. More than once he protests against being accused of worshipping a mere man. Christ, the Logos, is the true Son of God, and has His place essentially in the sphere of the Creator. § 2. Trenceus. — Ireneeus, a native of Asia Minor, and bishop of Lyons at his death in or near 200, wrote a great work, Adversus Hcereses, about the year 185. The influence upon his mind of the Asia Minor tradition is shown in a ruling tendency to keep to the via media of normal Christian thinking, and eschew bold speculations on the inner life of Godhead. Gnostic or Apologist views of the emanation of the Word, expressed in terms of a material hue, were especially distasteful to him. For no one ' On the two wrong roads down which men might be led by the Logos Christology, see a luminous note in Rainy's Ancient Catholic Church, 205. Elsewhere he says (203) of the term "Logos " : " For the domestic interests of the faith, the use of this word is not indispensable. The Church has framed all her great creeds without employing it." " If Christianity had depended on the Logos," writes Mr. Glover {Confiict of Iteligiop,s, 303-4), "it would have followed the Logos to the limbo whither went Aeon and Aporrhoia and Spermaticos Logos. But that the Logos has not perished is due to the one fact that it has been borne through the ages on the shoulders of Jesus." ' Leitfaden *, 129. Dr. Sanday ifihristologies Ancient and Modem, 14-21) the other side persuasively. IREN^US 145 understands how the Son is brought forth by the Father ; His birth, by the nature of the case, is ineffable (generatio inenarrdbilis)} Gnosticism, in opposition to which Irenseus puts forth all his strength, has made it necessary to reassert the unity and simplicity of God, but though God be inscrutable (here Irenaius agrees with his adversaries), it is His will to reveal Himself savingly to men. As Logos, indeed, He has always been manifested in the world, first through the prophets, finally in Christ His Son. " Through the Word Himself, who had become visible and palpable, was the Father shown forth ; all saw the Father in the Son : for the Father is the invisible of the Son, but the Son the visible of the Father." * Alongside of the modalism of such expressions are found some faint suggestions of a Kenotic view : " Well spake he," we read, " who said that the unmeasurable Father was Himself subjected to measure in the Son; for the Son is the cneasure of the Father, since He also comprehends Him." ^ And again: "For this cause the incomprehensible and boundless and invisible One made Himself seen and apprehended and comprehended by those who believe, that He might vivify such as receive and behold Him by faith." ^ There is a revelational identity of Christ and God. Irenseus starts from the historic Jesus, the God-man, not from the cosmic Logos, and his central problem is : Why did Christ descend ? * In any case, Christ is the Logos in human guise, with an eternal personal pre-exist- ence lying behind His earthly career. But it is fruitless toil to build up theories of His origin from or in God, whether as a preparatory approach to creation or other- wise. To him as to Ignatius the pre-historic One is un- begotteu (ayevvr]To<;), and in one place he visits with grave censure those " who transfer the generation of a word uttered by men to the eternal Word of God, assigning to Him a beginning of emergence and a genesis."* ' adv. Haer. ii. 28. 6. ' iv. 6. 6. ' iv. 4. 2. « iv. 20. 5. "ii. 14. 7. »ii. 13. 8. lO 146 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST With equal energy he protests against the Gnostic diifer- entiation of the Logos and the man Jesus. The Eedeemer's person is rather the abiding unity of God with man. The Divine in Christ he names " Son," apparently, when it is desired to bring out His relation to the Father, but " Logos," quite in the manner of the Fourth Gospel, when He is contemplated as the great revelation, the Word or Voice of God, making Him apprehensible. For Irenseus the work of Christ and His person are one organically, and we gain light upon each from the study of both together. Humanity, we are told, lies in sin and death. In Christ this fallen race is saved, not by mere teaching or enlightenment, but in the deeper fashion of what a modern would call personal identifica- tion.^ In His infinite love He was made as we are in order that He might make us to be as He is. Our fleshly and corruptible nature is, as it were, fused or inoculated with Deity, and so made immortal. What we lost in the first Adam, we recovered in Christ the second Adam ; ' for as we become partakers of the Divine nature, union with incorruption confers on us salvation from corruptibility. In other words, Christ saves by gathering the entire race into Himself and suffusing it with His Spirit. Physical terms are used freely, but it would be a mistake to imagine that Irenseus takes redemption to be a purely unethical or material process. On the contrary, for all the weight laid upon the advent of Christ, as in itself redemptorial, it is explained clearly that the In- carnate One had still a work to do, which invested His life on earth with real soteriological meaning. He passed through every age of human life ; * perfect as He was, He became an infant like the rest of mankind. He faced temptation. He bowed Himself to the last suffering of death. Nor is Irenaeus without a real interest in our ' On the central idea of recapitulatio {di'aKe(pa\ala. THE NIOENE CREED 179 attracted by his views, at least to begin with ; but most of all he was assisted by the prevailing fear of Sabellianism. It was only after an immense expendi- ture of intellectual and ethical resources that the Church as a whole was brought to see how the specious simplicity of his theories was totally subversive of the fundamental realities of the Christian faith. § 2. The Nicene Creed. — The first to stamp the doctrine of Arius with churchly disapproval was his bishop, Alexander. Probably in 321, he passed sentence of excommunication on the leader and a few of his chief followers. Alexander's own statements on Christology are opaque, and not devoid of superficial contradictions, but his drift is quite clearly to maintain the essential unity of Father and Son, and the inherent divinity of the Redeemer Christ. To Arius he replied that if Christ is the effulgence of the Father's glory, to deny His eternity is to deny that in God there is light eternal. God, as such, is Father, and this He cannot be without a Son. On the other hand, Alexander holds that the Son is generate of the Father, though in no material sense or by way of actual division. At the same time, as an Origenist of the right wing he can speak of the Logos as " a mediat- ing only-begotten nature," '^ set between the unoriginate Father and created things, and his distaste for Sabellian- ism manifests itself in the phrase that the two natures in the Divine substance were not one, but like in all points. It is even explained that the Father, who alone is im- begotten, is anterior to, as well as greater than, Christ ; on which Harnack well remarks that evidently " the real point in dispute [with Arius] was not as to subordination and co-ordination, but as to unity of substance and difference of substance." * But an irreconcilable hostility to Arius' doctrine is expressed in his insistent claim that the resemblance of the Son to the Father is an essentia) ' History of Dogma, toI. ir. 23. 180 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST one. If the Arians suspected Alexander of Sabellianism, his phrases were more to blame than his ideas. By this time Constantine had become aware of the dispute. Perceiving how detrimental bitter controversy must be to the unity of his empire, he resolved to bring it to an end, and summoned all Christian bishops to assemble at Nicsea in Bithynia (325). It was the first ecumenical Council, and something like 300 bishops attended, mostly from the East. Two presbyters came from Eome, and Hosius of Cordova was the Spanish deputy. In the Council itself we can distinguish three parties, shading off into each other — the Arians, led by Eusebius of Nicomedia, and comparatively few in number; a still smaller group who sided with Alexander by convic- tion ; and between these, the great majority of the bishops, either too indifferent to theology to appreciate the issue, or disposed by conservatism to rest content with Origen as usually interpreted. Of this middle party the spokes- man was Eusebius of Csesarea, by far the most learned member of the Council. First of all the Arians presented a creed shaped to their mind, only to see it torn fiercely in fragments. On this Eusebius of Caesarea brought forward the baptismal creed of his own church, " a short and simple document, admirably recommended to conservative feeling by its scriptural language and prudent evasions of the question before the Council."^ It was Origenist in general type, speaking of Christ as the Logos of God, " the first-born of all creation, begotten of the Father before all ages," and, in short, had the good and bad features of a compromise. The bulk of those present would have accepted it without discussion ; but men like Athanasius and Marcellus of Ancyra, who realised the danger, were resolved not to be put off with ambiguities. They felt that phrases like " first-born of all creation " gave a loop-hole to Arianism, and that the mere statement that the Son " was made flesh " affirmed nothing vital as to ' Gwatkin, Studies of Ariamism, 39. THE NICENE CREED 181 His possession of a true human soul. Possibly in the end it was Hosius of Cordova who urged the Emperor to include the pregnant words onoovcrio'; tw irarpL, as a bulwark against equivocation. Hosius, as a Western, may have overlooked the difficulties in the phrase of which the Easterns were conscious, and which had led them, fifty years before, to reject it in their con- demnation of Paul of Samosata. Further, o/xoovcrio^ agrees with the Western tradition as stated by Tertullian. Once the Emperor had indicated his approval, nothing remained for the majority but to submit ; and ultimately the creed of Eusebius was remodelled in a spirit of stern and resolute opposition to all Arianising views. The text, as passed with virtual unanimity, is as follows : — UccTTevofiev et? eva 6eov iraTepa TravTOKparopa, iravrmv oparwv T€ Kal dopdrcov ttoitjt^v. K.al eh eva icvpiov 'Ir)cTovv XpicTTOV Tov vlov rov 6eov, yevvrjOevTa 6« rov TraTpo<; /xovoyevrj, TOVTeariv €k t?}? ovaiwi rov iraTpot, deov eK deov, ^co aXrjdivov iic 6eov a\r]6ivov, yewTjOevra, oil iroi.riOevra, opi,oovai,ov tS> Trarpl, Si ov ra Travra eyiveTO, to, re iv to) ovpavai Kal ra iv rrj yfj • tov Bi" ■^fia^ Toil? avBpcjDTTOVi Ku'i Sia TTjv rifierepav a^coTrjplav KareKdovTa Koi, aapKcadevTa, ivavdpw-rrrjcravTa, iradovTa, Kal avaffTavra Trj Tpirri rjfiepa, aveXOovra eh ovpavovi, Kal ip'^op.evov Kpivai fdJj'Ta? Kal veKpovf. Kal eh to dyiov irvevfia. Toil'; Se XejovTat ' r)v irore ore oiiK rjv, Kal irplv yevvrjOrjvaL ovk rjv, Kal on i^ ovk ovtoiv iyeveTO, rj ef erepat VTTOcrrdae(o<; tj ovcria'i (j)daKOVTa<; eivai,, rj kticttov rj Tpenrov Tj aXKoccoTov tov vlov tov 6eov, dvadefiaTi^ei, r] KadoXiKrj eKKXrjala.^ ' " We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things both visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only-begotten, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father (homoousion) ; through whom all things were made, both things in heaven and things on earth ; who for us men and for our salvation came down and was made flesh, was made man, suffered, and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens, and Cometh to judge quick and dead. And in the Holy Spirit. But those 182 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST The main desire of those who framed this creed was obviously, as has been remarked, to exclude Arianism. At all costs it must be af&rmed that the Son is not a creature, and that He is of one essence with the Father. This explains the alterations introduced into the Eusebian Creed, of which a brief account may be given. To begin with, Christ is designated, not as Logos, but as Son ; and the two phrases, " the first-born of all creation " and " be- gotten of the Father before all ages," are dropped. Arians could have accepted both. Next, there are additions pointing in the same direction : (1) " only-begotten " has attached to it the explanatory clause, " that is, from the essence of the Father " ; (2) two phrases are inserted, " begotten, not made," and the famous " of one essence with the Father"; (3) the creed ends with unmistakable anathemas. According to these decisions, the Divine Son- ship of Christ is set forth as no accident of time, but an eternal, and, as it were, organic relation within the Godhead. The distinction between Father and Son and their unity are equally stated and balanced over-against each other by the two phrases " from the essence " (distinction) and " of one essence " (unity). Finally, by adding " was made man " to " was made flesh," the Arian tenet that Christ had a real body, but no human soul, was definitively barred out ; the Council, with remarkable self-restraint, laying down no other finding as to the constitution of the theanthropic person. Two curious facts are worth mention, as indicat- ing that the Council had no leaning to Origen, and was more concerned to insist on the unity of Father and Son than the distinction. In the first place, there is no reference to " eternal generation " ; in the second, the anathemas employ VTroo-rao-t? and ovaia as synonyms. The latter usage almost entitles a thinker like Marcellus who aay that 'there was once when He was not,' and 'before being be- gotten He was not,' and ' He came to be of things that were not,' or contend that the Son of God is of a different substance or essence, or created, or (morally) alterable or mutable — these doth the Catholic Church anathematize. ' For tlio Greek- text, see Hahn, § 142. ATHANASIUS 183 of Aneyra to read o/xoova-io^ in a Sabellian sense. The Sabellian associations of the word, at all events, are the most natural explanation of Athanasius' long reluctance to adopt it. In the end only a few refused to sign ; some perhaps, like Eusebius of Nicomedia, subscribing their names with secret reservations ; others feeling, in their own bitter phrase, that " the soul is none the worse for a little ink." In point of fact, the views of Athanasius had been forced on half-convinced men, and reaction came inevitably, with the result that the Council of Nicsa opened a new stage in the controversy it was designed to close. This brings us to the man who now fought for truth in the front rank, and through whose instrumentality the Church was enabled to keep the faith. § 3. Athanasius. — Athanasius (c. 297-373) comes into view at the Council of Nicaea, to which he accom- panied his bishop, Alexander. Probably a native of Alexandria, and doubtless trained in the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of the time, he appears early to have won the regard of the bishop, who employed him as his secretary. By the opening of the Arian controversy he was deacon, and in 326 succeeded Alexander in the bishop's chair. Although technically ineligible, he is considered on good grounds to have played a leading part in the Nicene debates. Though not erudite like Origen, he exhibits a clear and disciplined intelligence, as well as a searching religious power, and a courageous loftiness of spiritual temper, which make his vast influence no mystery. States- man, saint, thinker, he gave his life as a long sacrifice for truth, with hardly one lapse from consistent greatness. His fundamental ideas may be gathered from his tract. On the Incarnation of the Word of God, written before Arius had broached the new theory. Its leading thought is that God Himself has entered human history. Through the fall sin had invaded earth, bringing upon guilty man the fate of corruption and mortality. A higher power must interpose, 184 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST since repentance on man's part would have been insufficient remedy ; and hence in His infinite love God did the wonder of wonders. " The immortal Word took human flesh, and gave His mortal body for us all." ^ He wrought deliverance by receiving the principle of death into Himself, so per- mitting it to wreak all its might and terror on His nature, and annulling its power for all who are one with life in Him. By resurrection He vanquished the powers of corruption for ever, in a triumph which is the surety of our glorious return to God. To use the very words of Athanasius, " He was made man that we might be made God." ^ His piercing criticisms of the Arian doctrine are only an application of these principles, from which he never swerved.' Arius, he said, taught pure polytheism ; for if the Father is not Father everlastingly, and if in time a Son emerges, as the finite progeny of Godhead, and afterwards a Spirit lower still, who can answer for it that this is the end ? Only if the Son is identical in nature and essence with the Father is it possible to speak of the Divine unity, and that this is the Son's true place is settled by the fact that Christians pray to Him. Again, the theory of Arius takes all certainty out of salvation. For how can it be certain if the Logos is morally alterable ; how in that case can we see the unchanging Father in the Son, or regard the Son as the Father's image ? In short, given the Arian view of Christ, it is idle to talk of our attaining to real union with God, or the forgiveness of sins, or immortality. If the Son has a created nature. His becoming man leaves us stiU at a distance from God, for no one who is a creature like ourselves could raise us to oneness with the Creator. He could never give us what He had not for Himself. A God- head not original, but derived, could not be passed on to ' Gwatkin, Arian Controversy, 10. 'On the rendering "God," rather than "gods,"' see Robertson's note, p. 54 of his translation of Athanasius (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. iv.). ' Of. Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte (Ite Aufl.), 162 f. HIS CRITICISM OF ARIUS 185 others. Accordingly, " He had not promotion from His descent, but rather Himself promoted the things which needed promotion ; and if He descended to effect their promotion, therefore He did not receive in reward the name of the Son and God, but rather He Himself has made us sons of the Father, and deified men by becoming Himself man. Therefore He was not man, and then became God, but He was God, and then became man, and that to deify us." ^ This is an idea which perpetually recurs ; to partake of the Son is to partake of God Himself.* And once more, the idea of a cosmological mediator is superfluous. God is not too proud to touch the world, and needs no intermediary to bring Him in contact with finitude. Such a notion is immeasurably more unworthy of Him without whom not even a sparrow falls to the ground, than a clear assertion of His creative activity. Indeed, with a surprising divergence into pure logic, Athanasius in one passage ^ urges that if God needs a mediator to create, and the Logos is a creature, yet another mediator must have been required to create Eim, and so on to infinity. Arius therefore satisfies reason as little as he does religion. Thus, if Arius held Christ as part of the created world, Athanasius contended still more resolutely that His place is within the sphere of essential Godhead. Carefully maintaining that Divine unity to which Sabellius had borne confused witness, he set forth the being of the Son as Divine in the absolute and eternal sense. " Whatever that manner of existence is which differences God from all creatures, that is to be ascribed to the Son as well as to the Father." * His is no mediating nature, as Origen had taught, between the inereate and the created ; " the Son is different in kind and different in essence from things originate, and on the contrary is proper to the Father's essence and one in nature with it." ^ At the same time His independent personal being is secured. What binds ' Or. c. Ar. i. 38-39 (Robertson's translation). » Ibid. 16. ' lUd. ii. 26. * Rainy, op. cU. 335. • Or. c. Ar. i. 68 ; cf. 13. 186 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHBTST Father and Son together is unity of essence (evorrr) Or. c. Jr. iv. 41. » Thid. iii. 4. " de Deer. 20. * When Athanasius says (de Deer. 27) that "the Word is not of another essence or subsistence (^f Mpas oijo-las ij {nroffrdaeus), but proper to the Father's," he is obviously hampered by having so far no settled term for the distinctions in the Godhead. "Hypostasis" and "ousia" are used inter- changeably. The West had personae for the three aspects of Deity, but the Greek equivalent {irpbiTaiira) was suspect owing to its Sabellian associations. This lack of terminological unanimity and clearness was extremely awkward ; and at times we can see that Easterns and Westerns who felt themselves at variance were really in agreement, but got to cross-purposes through the ambiguity of terms, and especially owing to the fact that the technical words in Greek and Latin did not correspond. Something was done to clear up the confusion by the Council of Alfixandrla in 362. LOGOS EEPLACED BY SON 187 among men ; but, being uncompounded in nature, He is Father of one Only Son.'' Again and again it is insisted that this generation is not of the Father's will (e« ^ovX'jcreo)';) but of His nature, for the Son is not to be reduced to the offspring of arbitrary volition. Athanasius' favourite symbol of the relationship is the familiar one of radiance in its unity with the parent light.^ So the Godhead, which exists in the Father, belongs to the Son also in the totality of its essence ; " the same things are said of the Son which are said of the Father, except His being said to be Father."^ Finally, the generation is an eternal one, for " as the Father is always good by nature, so He is always generative by nature." * An argument of this kind, based not so much on logic as on permanent religious considerations, really meant that the philosophical doctrine of the Logos, as interpretative of the Lord's person, had been replaced by the conception of the Divine Sonship. Experience had proved that the term Logos too easily lent itself to cosmological theories with no bearing on salvation, and tended to denote a mediating Being, essentially distinct from God. In such ideas Athanasius could have no interest. The Saviour must be God, if a world perishing in death was to be renewed in Divine immortality. Being very God, how- ever, and having put on human flesh, the Son became liable to suffering ; nay more. He submitted to be put to death in the body, that by His risen power He might quicken all men. In Him, as the Second Adam, we have gained what was lost through the first, for whatever happened to Christ's flesh happened to us also mystically. Loofs has justly remarked that this doctrine of redemption, which goes back through Asia Minor tradition to the Fourth Gospel, is the most important element in the Athanasian theology. Not only was central significance given thereby to the historic Christ, but the religious interests at stake in the Arian controversy were placed in their true light, and the ultimate triumph of the Nicene doctrine assured.* ' Of. Or. e. Ar. iii. 4. ' Ibid. • Pnd. iii. 67. « XK ii. 18-19. 188 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST Looking back, we can perceive that a strongly mono- theistic tendency gave tone to Athanasius' mind, and lent irresistible force to his conflict with the followers of Arius. His unfaltering conviction that the Son has His being within the one Godhead was also in line with immemorial Christian instincts, and was expressed, besides, with such resolute and persistent energy that after his time neither Sabellianism nor a doctrine of subordination affecting the intrinsic nature of the Son could make headway. But withal Athanasius never wavered in the belief that the Father is the source and fountain of deity. These two aspects of theory, the one identifying the Son with the Father's essence, the other representing the Son as somehow caused by, or derived from, the Father as the Divine Monad, are both present in his writings, and neither can be ignored in an estimate of the whole. Animadversions, no doubt, may be made upon this or that defect in his teaching. We should put differently his point that God is Father " by nature, and not of will," for to the modern mind will is the very core and essence of personality. And the Lord's humanity is referred to with ominous frequency in terms which might seem to make it consist only of the flesh. Nor will Athanasius' exegesis always bear inspection, though he has an instinct for the really important passages of the New Testament. His power lay in his possession of the truth, and in his worthy representation of a great cause. His phraseology is by no means sacrosanct, and we should often apply a different mode of argument ; but with the New Testament in our hands it is impossible not to acquiesce in his main conclusion. Even the word " consubstantial " (o/ioova-io^), so fiercely assailed both then and now, is but the assertion of the real deity of Christ in terms of the philosophy by which it had been denied.^ 'Of. Illingworth, Reason and Revelation, 123. "The place oi Athanasius as a great religious leader has been obscured by his position as a theologian ; but when we turn to his writings, where do we iind less of what is commonly called dogmatic theology ? There is argument, reason- MARCELLUS OF ANCYBA 189 § 4. Marcellus of Ancyra. — At Nicsea, we have seen victory being snatched by a resolute minority in face of an immensely larger but divided party. The great mediating group — often called Eusebians, or later Semi- Arians, though this term really belongs to the later party of Homceans — quickly recovered themselves, and a reaction ensued. The belief of the churches was against Arius, yet not definitely for Nicsea. This at all events holds true of the East, where conservative feeling inclined strongly to the indefinite Christological formulas of an older time. Two objections were made. In the first pkce, 6fioovaio<; was a new word, and it was an unheard- of thing thus to put an unscriptural expression (and one previously condemned) into a creed — not the creed of a particular bishop, but a symbol or definition constructed by a general Council, and meant for the whole Church. To this Athanasius rejoins that " if the expressions are not in 80 many words in the Scriptures, yet they contain the sense of the Scriptures." ^ Secondly, the Nicene doctrine was denounced as Sabellian. Some colour, it may be admitted, was given to this accusation by the teaching of Marcellus of Ancyra, than whom the Nicene Creed had no more ardent champion. His is a curiously modern type of theory in certain aspects, and will repay a brief examination.^ ing, searching for proofs and their statement ; but all that belongs to the outworks of his teaching. The central citadel is a spiritual intuition — I know that my Saviour is the God Who made heayen and earth. He took his stand firmly and unflinchingly on that personal experience, and all else mattered little compared with the fundamental spiritual fact. It was not his arguments, but his unflinching faith, that conTinced his generation" (Lindsay, History of the Reformation, voL i. 433). Athanasius felt less interest in the problem of the theanthropic Person, and can hardly be said to recognise the distinction of person and nature. Of. Scheel, 102. ' de Deer. 21. ' A clear, if rather unsympathetic, account of the Christology of Marcellus is given by Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, 75-82. See also Moberly's valuable note. Atonement and Personality, 208-16 ; and Sanday, in HDB. iv. 579. A modern writer who resembles Marcellus is the cele- brated Moses Stuart of Andover ; see some interesting pages in Foster's History of the New England Theology, chap. x. 190 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST His main interest in the unity of God waa exhibited in an energetic antipathy to the ditheism he felt to be encouraged by, if not immediately derived from, the teaching of Origen. But he was not con- sciously a Sabellian. Instead, he went back, as he not quite unnaturally believed, to the authentic doctrine of the New Testament. Holding with the Arians that genera- tion carried with it the inferiority of the Son, as neither co-eternal nor co-equal with the Father, he rejected the term " Son " as a designation of the pre-existent One. " Logos " is the proper term ; the Son, on the other hand, said Marcellus, was generate at His birth " four hundred years ago," at which point of time the Logos — i.e. the eternally inherent power of God, which emerged before time to create the world — came forth into personal subsistence. The original emergence of the Logos being " an active extension of the Godhead," * the relative dis- tinction implied in it was augmented by the incarna- tion ; the incarnate Logos, as he puts it, is " separated from the Father by the weakness of flesh," yet without change in His previous relation. In fine, " the Word as such is pure spirit, and only became the Son of God by becoming the Son of Man."* In the same way, the Spirit exists only since Christ breathed it on His disciples. " We see the Monad being expanded into a Triad." ' At the Parousia, Christ will appear in flesh once more ; there- after the relation of Sonship will terminate, " the Logos being merged in God as He was before the existence of the world." What will then become of His body, unworthy of God in any case, it is impossible to say. If not Sabellian, the theory was at least Sabellian- ising. That its author was acknowledged by the great bulk of the Homousians proves how sincerely they held the Divine unity, and took the threefold historic revela- tion as the point of departure. Marcellus met them here. The Christ of the Gospels is Kara irvevfia the eternal ' irXarii'eada.L ivepydq.. " Gwatkin, Arian Contruoersy, 54. THE CAPPADOCIAN DIVINES 191 Logos, and, until His final abdication, partner in the throne of God. But the scheme was at once rejected as involving a merely transitory incarnation ; and unquestion- ably, so far as language goes, the Son of God is in Marcellus' view a mere phenomenon of time. He came into collision with Christian feeling even more violently by the suggestion that the Lord's humanity itself is but a temporary vesture, a servant's form to be laid aside when the servant's work is done. But in justice we should remember that his refusal of the name " Son " to the pre-incarnate Christ appears not to have been quite definitive after all. He fought passionately for the Nicene Creed, in which the pre-existent One is Son, not Logos ; and when in 371 his followers presented a creed to Athanasius, it was found to contain a distinct acknowledg- ment of the eternal Sonship, with anathemas upon those who held the contrary. At all events, Athanasius never disowned him publicly, though he tacitly refutes him in the Fourth Discourse against the Arians. Not till 380 was Marcellus condemned in the West. " Of whose kingdom there shall be no end," in the so-called Nicseno- Oonstantinopolitan Creed, is aimed at him. § 5. Movements of Semiarianism ; the Cappadocian Divines. — Under Constan tine, who died in 337, and especi- ally in the reign of his successor Constantius, the mediating party were high favourites at court. In 351 his brother's death left Constantius sole Emperor. At once his will became law in religion. Many of the noblest Westerns, in- cluding Hilary of Poictiers and Hosius of Cordova, endured exile for the sake of the Nicene faith. In 356, Athanasius fled to the desert for the third time, not to return for six years, and the triumph of Arianism seemed complete. Under the leadership of .(Etius of Antioch and Eunomius of Cyzicus, men came forward to revive the teaching of Arius in its most objectionable form. Only logic is wanted, and logic tells us that if God is unbegotten and His essence simple, there is no mystery in His being ; on 192 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST the other hand, and with equal obviousness, if the Son is begotten He cannot be God as the Father is ; nay, in strictness. He cannot be like the Father at all, for He is a mere creature. Euzoius only put this Anhomoean position bluntly when at Antioch in 361 he carried the position that the Son is Kara Travra avofioco^ too iraTpi. The next step was explicitly to condemn the Nicene Creed ; and this was duly done in the Sirmian manifesto (357), an overtly Arian document in which it was declared that the words essence, of the same essence, or of like essence, ought not to be used, because they do not occur in the Holy Scriptures, and because the matter passes human comprehension.^ Even the veteran Hosius was compelled to sign, though he would not condemn Athanasius. This seemed to make an end of the Nicene doctrine for good. But the policy of huddling up diffi- culties in silence rarely prospers, nor was the situation cleared by the sedulous evasiveness of the definition promoted by the new Homoean party soon after at the conference in Sirmium (359): "We say that the Son is like the Father in all things, as the Holy Scriptures say and teach." ^ In the capacious ambiguity of a phrase like this, even the punctuation of which was uncertain, all sorts of opinion were at home. Meanwhile, these minimising tendencies made little or no headway in the West. Throughout the East also they were opposed strongly. In 358, Basil presided over a council at Ancyra, which affirmed very emphatically the Son's similarity of essence, and formed the turning-point of the contest by giving rise to the Homceousian party. Eejecting the Nicene " consubstantial " as Sabellian, they declined the Anhomoean position still more vehemently.^ Gradually they began slowly to approximate to the Nicene theology, feeling that with it lay the future of religion. Athanasius returned once more to Alexandria, and held out a con- ciliatory hand. He recognised (de Synodis) that the ' See Halm, § 161. '^ Ibid. § 163. » Ibid. % 162. THE YODNGER NICENE PARTY 193 Homoeousian formula " of like essence " was distinctly meant both to affirm Christ's true Sonship and to deny His creaturehood ; and though preferring his own teims, he was willing to discuss the matter. Two points are worth noting. When Basil and his friends urged that 6/x.oova-io3 194 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST cance midway between the abstract 'essence' and the concrete ' individual,' yet so that it inclined very strongly to the former ; vTr6aTacri,<; was placed in meaning midway between person and quality (accident or ' mode '), yet so that the personal idea was the stronger." ^ Starting as they did from the threeness in the Divine, with the unity as a mysterious problem, it was particularly difficult for the Cappadocians to avoid the semblance of tritheism, and this was an accusation long current in the West. In Christology, their work largely resulted in a revival of the idea of the Logos, as mediator of creation. And yet they ring out clearly the believing certainty that only through God Himself is fellowship with God accessible to man. This determines their view of the Lord's person. But they lay the emphasis otherwise than Athanasius. Basil, for example, argues that the revelation of the Image of God in flesh gives us that knowledge of God which makes us like Him, and that only He who is the essential Good can perfect us in goodness. Gregory of Nazianzus contends that none can deify our spirits save He who is Spirit essentially, and that only the death of the Son of God can atone for the sins of the whole world. Gregory of Nyssa looks back more eagerly to the historic Christ, pointedly naming Him, however, " the only-begotten God," wholly identical in essence with the Father. In 381 the Emperor Theodosius convoked a general Council at Constantinople, and there, in addition to the condemnation of the Sabellians and the various types of Arian, the Nicene Creed in its original form was ratified. No new creed was set forth. For centuries tradition held that the creed now commonly known as the Nicene ^ (technically the Nicseno - Constantinopolitan) had been promulgated at this Council, which is certainly an error. It came into existence earlier, and has close resemblances to a creed which, as Epiphanius relates, was used by the Church of Salamis in Cyprus. Others connect it with ' Harnaok, Grundriss, 182 ; cf. Loofs, in RE. iv. 46. ' Hahn, § 144. COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE 195 the baptismal creed of the Church of Jerusalem. In the acts of the Council of Chalcedon it is ascribed to the 150 bishops who met at Constantinople, and put on a par with the original Nicene Creed, which thenceforward it virtually displaced. Its phrasing and order are distinctly inferior to those of its predecessor. " The elaborate frame- work of Nicasa is completely shattered, and even the keystone clause ' of the essence of the Father ' is left out." 1 The Arian conflict was now over, and the East could lay aside its fear of Sabellianising definitions. ' GwatJcin, Arian Controversy, 160, CHAPTER V. CONTROVERSIES AS TO THE FULL HUMANITY OF CHRIST. § 1. Apollinarianism. — It was now an axiom that the Divine manifested in Jesus Christ was one in essence with supreme Godhead. His real humanity also had been assumed from the first, and explicitly defended in opposition to Gnostic docetism. But men had scarcely reflected on the question how two natures could unite in one personality, or how room could be made, in a life thus dual or composite, for human nature as a whole. Tertullian had spoken of " two substances in one person " ; but this was a Western formula. The instinctive feeling of the Church was of course that in order to save man Christ must Himself be man. But if God and man are actually disparate and incommensurable, how shall this deep craving of the believing consciousness be satisfied ? The problem could not be resolved by the merely figurative declaration that the humanity of Jesus is in the Logos as glowing iron in fire. We have seen that in the Nicene Creed " made flesh " was explained by the added phrase " made man," in order LiTEBATUEE — Voisin, V Apollinarisme, 1901 ; Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule, 1904 ; HoU, AmpMlochius von Ikonium in seinem VerhdUnis zu den grossen Kappadoziern, 1904 ; Swete, article " Theodorus," in Diet. Chr, Biog. ; Harnaok, article " Antiochienische Schule," RE. '. , Bright, History of the Church, :^i^—4i') ; Loofs, Nestorius, 1914; Bethune-Baker, Nesiorius and his Teaching, 190S ; Rany, Ancient Catholic Church, 1902 : Kriiger, article "Cyrill von Alexandrien," RE. -v. ; Loofs, Leontius von Byzantium, 1887 ; Kriiger, Monophysitische Streitig- keiten, 1 884 ; Curtis, History of Greeds, 1 911 ; Hef ele, Gonciliengeschichte, iii. ; Raven, Apollinarianism, 1923. APniJJNARIS 197 to exclude the Arian tenet that Christ had a human body but no human soul. Eudoxius of Constantinople had put the Arian view unambiguously in the creed Icnown by his name : " He took no human soul, but became flesh. . . . Two natures there were not, but instead of the soul was God in flesh, the whole one composite nature." ' Not even Athanasius had grappled with the interior problems of the theanthropic Life. He was accustomed to speak of the Logos as having assumed a human body, or simply flesh ; and while the Saviour was for him — at least in his earlier phase — an individual man, he frequently operates with the conception " flesh " as denoting an impersonal vesture or instrument, to which it was natural to refer the phenomena of suffering, progress, and exaltation. But he never worked out a clear view. An extraordinary variety of opinion prevailed as to the relation of Christ's manhood to ours. Harnack points out that docetism, of a finer or coarser shade, was almost universal. Few ascribed to Christ a genuinely human soul, and by many His flesh was conceived as heavenly in character, as a transmuted form of the Logos, or simply as a garment. "No one in the East really thought of two natures. One eternal Divine-human nature, one Divine-human nature that has come to be, a Divine nature temporarily changed into the human, a Divine nature inhabiting the human or clad in a veil of humanity — these were the dominating ideas." ^ If the Church was to pronounce on the connection between the Divine and human in Christ, she had first to clear up her mind as to the significance of His humanity. Apollinaris of Laodicea (died about 390) was the first to raise the question in an acute form. A theologian of the first rank, he set the problems at which after- centuries laboured. His dominating aim was to secure the complete unity of Christ's person without sacrificing His real deity, or representing Him, with Paul of Samosata or Photinus, as a mere dvdpwTrot! evBeot. But he considered the Ariana were right in objecting to 1 Hahn, § 191. ' Orundrim. 191. 198 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST the current doctrine that it predicated of Christ two personalities ; to quote his words, " if perfect God were joined to perfect man, they would be two — one. Son of God by nature, one by adoption " {6eT6<:)} A man- God is really as unthinkable as a centaur. We must apply the fundamental axiom of logic that two perfect entities cannot become one. Besides, how can we ascribe freedom of will to the man Jesus, without such risks as faith dare not accept ? Where complete manhood is, there is sin. For these reasons Apollinaris was obliged to deny the entirety of Christ's human nature. At first he held that the Logos had taken merely a human body ; later, in a defensive statement of his position, he developed the view — resting on a trichotomic pyschology (cf. 1 Th 5^) — that the body and soul in Christ were human, whereas the place of the human spirit was taken by the Logos. Thus he attained his supreme object; the human spirit, source and seat of mutability, is replaced by the immutable Divine Word. The danger is removed, not by curtailing the Divine nature, which would be heresy, but by leaving out that element in man's being which means a perilous fallibility. As a further ad- vantage, the fatal deficiencies of Arianism are vetoed, for the Logos contemplated in this scheme is no mere creature, but eternally and inherently one with God. These difficulties surmounted, Apollinaris was able to describe the Logos and the abridged human nature as having been fused in " a single nature," " a single essence." Instead of two natures, which imply two self-conscious and self-determining subjects, what exists is an essential union of God and man. There is but one incarnate nature of God the Word (filav cpva-iv tov 6eov Xoyov crecrapKwiMevqv)} Apollinaris took this so literally as to affirm an actual deification of the flesh of Christ, thus furnishing a reasoned basis for the physical doctrine of redemption current in the Greek theology. " His flesh," we read, " makes us alive through the Deity now become one essence with it, for ' Fragm. 81. ^ Ad Ionian. 1. Hahn, § 195. ONE INCARNATE NATURE 199 the flesh is Divine, having been joined to God."^ On his special presuppositions, however, the outcome of ApoUinaris' argument could scarcely fail to be docetic; and we aie not surprised that at last he should venture upon the statement that Christ's flesh is not consubstantial with ours, since it is the very flesh of God. It is even in a sense pre-existent. It may be that in speaking of the pre-temporal reality of Christ's flesh ApoUinaris meant to indicate the belief that the Logos, as such, is archetypal man, " not foreign to that human spirit which is in His likeness, but rather the true perfection of His image.'' But in that case his expressions have an un- fortunate obscurity. Scholars are on the whole agreed in acknowledging the singular intellectual brilliance and power of ApoUinaris' work. Indeed, his theory of the person of Christ has with some reason been declared by certain modern writers to be the most consistent and successful application known to us of the psychological presuppositions and speculative categories of his time. It is a question whether even Athanasius had greater gifts for pure theology. The facd is all the more remarkable — may we not say, the more pro- videntially significant ? — that, notwithstanding the marked strain of docetism in previous Christologies, the Church at this point definitely refused to follow a daring thinker who seemed only to regularise and make logical her own docetic tendencies. Her reasons for this refusal are con- vincing. In the first place, it was felt that ApoUinaris taught no real incarnation after alL In becoming man, the Son of God took possession only of a partial or mutilated humanity. Not only so ; that very constituent of human nature was left out which is intrinsically akin to God and capable of vital relations to Him, and God is conceived as "uniting Himself only with that in man which he shares with the beasts that perish." * Doubtless by maintaining that the Logos can thus replace the principle of intelligence and moral action in man, ApoUinaris so far ' Fragm. 116. * Caird, The Fandamental Ideas of Christianity, ii. 156. 200 THE PERSON OF JEStIS CHRIST brings out the close relationship of the Divine and the human, for only related things can be substituted for each other; but this furnishes no compensation for so grave an omission. Again, sin is primarily an affair of man's spiritual being ; it is the spirit that is corrupted, misguided, estranged from God : hence the salvation we require must be applied to and take possession of that focal point of human life, and this, according to the theory of Apollinaris, is precisely what cannot be. As Gregory of Nazianzus put it tersely : " that which is unassumed is unhealed " (to i^ap airpocrXrjTTTOv, adepdirevrov). The very part of man in which sin resides gains nothing from the redemptive powers of Christ, and consequently falls short of eternal life. And yet again, owing very much to his use of categories which are more physical or metaphysical than ethical, Apollinaris tends to define God and man as absolute contraries which cannot on any terms be truly one. God is immutable, man is mutable; God is essentially self-moving, man is wholly passive; from which it obviously follows that a living unity of the two is in- conceivable. We have to choose between a human and a Divine spirit in Christ. The sublime thought that Christ is perfect in His humanity just because of the personal indwelling of God, and thereby becomes the Head of a new redeemed race, has completely fallen out of sight. Nevertheless, in spite of these grave defects, which prepared the way for Monophysitism, Apollinaris quickened the mind of the Church and forced an interest in vital questions. In particular, he made it necessary for those who rejected his conclusions to admit into their view of Christ a real belief in His spiritual experience as man, lived out " not under unnatural or supernaturally guarded conditions, but under strictly human conditions of growth, trial, dependence, and freedom." ^ It was a lesson the Church took centuries to learn. The task of combating the Apollinarian positions fell chiefly to the two Gregories, who were themselves perhaps ' Dykes, in Expos. Times for Nov. 1905, 66. REFUTATION OF APOLLINARIS 201 too noar the heresy to strike at it with effect. Gregory of Nazianzus rightly finds that the death of Christ is an atonement only as it is the death of One who is true man as well as God, and we have already seen how unerringly he laid his finger on the central weakness of the novel theory. For both thinkers, however, the subject or Ego in Christ was the Logos, His human nature being no more than the sphere in which deification should take place. Gregory of Nyssa compares the relation of the Divine and human to that between a drop of vinegar and the sea in which it is swallowed up,^ and affirms that even Christ's body in which He suffered became identical, because commingled, with the Divine nature that assumed it.^ Man's weakness and mutability disappear in the life of God. Along with this, it is true, went a strong assertion of the two natures. It was the manhood that wept at the grave of Lazarus, the Godhead that raised him up. But these two natures mutually interpenetrate, and Gregory of Nyssa threw out the valuable idea that in Christ's person we see a gmving unity, in which the humanity comes fully to partake of the qualities of Godhead only after the passion and the resurrection.* Thus he was able to make room for the human life of Jesus. In 381, at the Council of Constantinople, Apollin- arianism was explicitly condemned ; but neither in the Church nor outside was a period then put to its influence. § 2. The School of Antioch : Nestorius. — If the criticism of the Cappadocian thinkers occasionally lacked force, it was not so with the theologians of Antioch. Diodorus, founder of the exegetical school of Antioch, had had as his most famous pupil Theodore of Mopsuestia (died 429). Theodore came to the problems of Christology with a mind preoccupied with thoughts of the immuta- bility of God, the freedom of the will, and the reality of Jesus' human life. We must gain a point of view from ' Cf. Draseke, op. cil. 175. " contra Eunomium, •:. 3. • Cf. Bonwctsoh, Grundriss d. DG. (1909), 89. 202 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST which His ethical career is seen as exemplary for ours. Hence no more can be affirmed than a relative moral union of Godhead and manhood ; the Saviour's person consists of two independent natures, each complete within itself, but united in one personality by means of an ethical bond (crvvdcfieia). God is present in Jesus as He was in saints or prophets, only in complete fulness, not substantially but by way of grace or favour (kot evSoKiav, not KaT oiaiav), and in a union which is perfected at the ascension. There is a oneness accordingly for the spectator, a oneness of name, worship, honour ; but the unity so affirmed is imported into the object by the mind, not resident in its actual constitution. The passion, for instance, does not touch the Godhead. Theodore could even speak of two " hypostases," or persons, united as it were by a moral league. This mode of interpretation, beyond all doubt, held within it elements of value. To it the Church owed a vivid realisation of the earthly career of Jesus, with all its richness of ethical experience, and that human individuality of life which means so much for us to-day. " Probably," as Dykes has put it, " Theodore's best contribution to the subject lay in his insistence that the development of our Lord in knowledge and virtue could be no Oearpov, but a genuine human progress culminating in genuine human virtue ; and that this human life and character, with its free self-determination and moral victories, was essential to His work of redemp- tion." * And yet there was not a little in the rational supernaturalism of Antioch to awaken the misgivings of faith. While Theodore himself fulminated against Paul of Samosata as an arigelus diaboli, many others believed that lines of connection could easily be traced from Samosata to Antioch, and that the advantages of consistency and clearness were entirely on the side of the older writer. Theodore and his group, it goes without saying, were convinced adherents of Nicaea, and ' Op. cit. 55. THE SCHOOL OF ANTIOCH 203 in all sincerity acknowledged the presence of the Eternal Word in Christ. But in point of fact it was difficult for them to call Jesus more than a supremely inspired man. He is man side by side with God, man in alliance with God, not God in and through and as man. There is concord of will and purpose, not the oneness of a single personal life. Now, only those could be content with this, whose conception of salvation had declined from the New Testament level. It was not merely that the Antiochenes repudiated the physical doctrine of redemption, for so far they were on right lines ; it was rather that they scarcely felt the necessity for pardon and regeneration. Christ to them is the Leader and Perfecter of faith rather than a Eedeemer who quickens and restores the soul by inward grace. The same tendency to emphasise the ethical more than the religious aspects of the Gospel is shown by the fact that the qualities of manhood they fixed upon for Christ, and vindicated as essential, were abstract moral freedom and the capacity to suffer. But here, as in the Arian controversy, it was found that views which might be held quietly in schools of doctrine woke the sounds of strife when proclaimed in the Church at large. A liturgical phrase began the war. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople in 428, had received his theological education at Antioch. Offended by the application of the epithet OeoTOKo^ to the Virgin Mary, he vehemently took sides with a presbyter who had assailed the word as inaccurate and extravagant. It was a popular term, and even Theodore had used it. But Nestorius pronounced it heathenish. " Mary," he writes, " did not bear the Godhead ; she bore a man who was the organ of Godhead." Not OeoroKoi but XpiaToroKoi; is the right name. As Mr. Bethune-Baker has expressed it : " What he feels must be guarded against at all costs is, on the one hand, the idea that the Godhead itself was bom of a woman, wrapped in swaddling-clothes, suffered and died ; and, on the other hand, the idea that the manhood of the incarnate Word 204 THE PERSON OP JESDS CHRIST was not real manhood like our own." ^ To understand the fierce resistance he met with, we must consider that the word now assailed had come to be a testimony against the Unitarian theories of the day. It goes back at least to Athanasius and probably to Origen. And that Nestorius' dislike of it was not unreasoning, or the product of mere negation, is clear from the fact that he later conceded the word, provided only it was not held to make the Virgin a goddess. But in general he remained true to the Christological traditions of Antioch. God the Word is sharply dis- tinguished from the man Jesus. The Holy Spirit did not create the Word, but formed a temple for Him from the Virgin, which He should inhabit. " For His sake who wears I worship Him that is worn ; for the sake of the hidden One I adore Him that appears. From Him who appears God is inseparable : for this reason I do not separate the honour of Him who is inseparate. I sever the natures, but I combine the worship."^ The man Jesus was not deified, but He was taken into a unique personal conjunction with the Logos, and after the resur- rection lifted up to a share in His universal power. Loofs has pointed out ^ that it was easier for Nestorius ^ Mr. Bethnne-Baker has published a brief work in which he endeavours to clear Nestorius' reputation for orthodoxy {Neslorius and his Teaching, Cambridge, 1908). He comes to the conclusion that Nestorius was in reality no "Nestorian," since "he did not hold the belief commonly attributed to him that in Jesus Christ two persons, the person of a God and the person of a man, were mechanically joined together, one being Son by nature and the other Son by association, so that really there were two Sons and two Christs. He is as explicit as possible on this point" (82). And again: "He did not think of two distinct persona joined together, but of a single Person who combined in Himself the two distinct things (substances), Godhead and manhood, with their characteristics (na<«res) complete and intact though united in Him" (87); "he had had all through the weary years of the struggle ' one only end in view — that no one should call the Word of God a creature, or the manhood which was assumed incomplete ' " (197). It is indeed a question whether dualism can be charged upon Nestorius in any sense that would not also hold against the Creed of Chalcedon. ^ Serm. 9 (Loofs, Neatoriana, 262). • Leit/aden, 290. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA 205 than for Theodore to emphasise the unity of Christ's personality, because, like Marcellus of Ancyra, he regards the terms " Son," " Lord," and even " only-begotten " as terms proper to be used of the Incarnate, rather than "God the Word" or "Man." For they express the duality of nature in Him, the created nature and the increate. It is the historic Christ, single though duplex in nature, that forms his real point of departure. § 3. Cyril of Alexandria.— "^esioiciviS had the misfortune to be opposed by one of the most powerful and most un- sympathetic figures in Church history. Cyril (376—444) had been bishop of Alexandria since 412. A master of diplomatic intrigue, unscrupulous in his methods, ambitious, proud, and violent, he was nevertheless a really great divine, and to this day has a place of special honour among the teachers of the Greek Church. The Christology of Cyril in its essential features is a continuation of the theory held by Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus. Like them, he chiefly aimed at supplying a theoretical basis for the physical theory of redemption, according to which humanity is imbued or saturated with deity through the incarnation ; and the militant opposition which this involved to the theologians of Antioch, who denied the real union of the natures in Christ, was the predominant influence in his doctrinal activities. Starting from the eternal being of the Lo<;os, as a hypostatic distinction in the Trinity, he teaches that He not only assumed but became flesh, and formed the personal subject in the God-man.^ Christ, be it noted, was not an individual man. On the contrary, the Word, ' Ottley well remarks that Cyiil gives no consistent answer to the question what is meant by the "unity" of the Divine person. At one time it appears as an original unity, being constituted by the one unchange- able Logos "who remains even after the Incarnation what He was before it." " Sometimes, on the other hand, Cyril speaks of the person of Christ as if it were a resultant unity," issuing from the amalgamation of the two natures. But the former point of view is more tyjiical. {Doctrine of Iht Incarnation, vol. ii. 82.) 206 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST having passed into human nature, as constituted by rational soul and body — which now are His soul and body indis- sociably — yet remains the one indivisible subject He was prior to incarnation. The two natures are in no way con- fused or mingled — " the flesh is flesh and not deity, even if it has become flesh of God " — but their union has produced a permanent essential state or fact ; it is a evoxrif xaT ovaiav koI Ka6' vTrocrTaaiv, a evoocni (j)vaiK'^. Manhood has been taken up intact into the unity of the Divine essence. But we may speak of a certain interchange of the properties, in this sense that the person being one, all qualities of either nature can be predicated of the one Christ. Thus, for example, the Logos is visible and tangible, and the suffering is the suffering of God. The natures are distinct, yet when we see them most truly we see them in a mysteriously intimate cohesion, all that properly inheres in the one passing over to, and becoming the possession of, the other. There are no doubt occasional infidelities to this point of view, as when Cyril declares the Logos to be as little affected by suffering as fire in glowing steel by the smith's hammer-strokes, and replaces the recorded limitations of our Lord's knowledge by what is really a prudential affectation of ignorance. A favourite mode of expression with Cyril is the phrase that Christ is " one out of two natures " (e/c Bvo (j>vae(ov eh). In other words, before the incarnation two natures existed, thereafter only the one Divine-human nature of the Lord. Indeed, we encounter once again the older ApoUinarian formula, " one incarnate nature of God the Word," which Cyril mistakenly believed to be Athanasian. The phrase is an epitome of his polemic against Nestorius. The Logos had not united with Him- self the person of man ; He had become flesh, and the Virgin had borne the incarnate Word " according to the flesh.'' As soul and body are one in us, so Godhead and manhood were made the one Christ. Hence the Nestorian assertion of a mere " conjunction " or " contact " is to be utterly rejected ; nothing but t. hypostatic union will serva CYRIL OP ALEXANDRIA 207 " If the Word did not suffer for ua humanly, He did not accomplish our redemption Divinely ; if He who suffered for us was mere man and but the organ of deity, we are not in fact redeemed." * One detail of historical import- ance should be noted. Since the person in the God-man is but the prolongation of the one life of the Eternal Word — not the effect of incarnation — it follows in Cyril's view that Christ's human nature is impersonal (dwiro- cTTaTo?). This much resembles the theory of ApoUinaris, but Cyril escapes the danger, at least verbally, by his emphatic insistence on the completeness of the human nature assumed by the Logos. At the same time, while he does not enter explicitly on the question- — even he can still use (jjvcri.'i and vTr6a-Taai,<; as synonyms— Cyril really heads the list of writers who have held that the human nature of Christ possesses no independent personality of its own, and is personal only in the Logos.^ In itself it is reduced to unconscious and impersonal elements. The step, in a multitude of ways, was a singularly unfortunate one. It broke decisively, as we have seen, with earlier and better patristic views. And it added enormously to the difficulty of recognising in the Christ of Church dogma the historic Saviour who had long been enshrined in the inmost heart of faith, for no real meaning could be attached to a human " nature " which is not simply one aspect of the concrete life of a human person. Nevertheless it is a merit in Cyril not easily to be overestimated, that he strove with such persistence to bring out the living and organic unity of Christ's person. And here he was guided by a genuinely religious interest. " This school of Greek theology was right," it has been said, " in the stress it laid on the closest possible union of God with Man in order that the dynamic power of the ' Quoted by Bonwetsoh, Gfrundriss, 90. ' His account of Christ's human knowledge is unconcealed docetism. There was really no ignorance, and could be none, in a nature physically united to the Logos. When Christ said that He was ignorant of the day of judgment, "He usefully pretended not to know." 208 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHHTST Christ-life might operate upon the race whose new Head He is come to be." ^ That is at all events a thoroughly sympathetic verdict on its deepest motive, and it explains much even in Cyril's view of the communicatio idiomatum, or interchange of qualities between the natures, which was later to become fertile in so many unedifying artificialities. Harnack says roundly that Cyril's theory is pure but unintentional Monophysitism. Loofs, with more prudence, remarks that the question whether the Christology is to be called Monophysite is after all a matter of words. " There were many Monophysites who thought just as he did. But if we reserve the name for the view that Christ's humanity was raised above humanity even before the resurrection, and that the fiia t^uo-ts of Christ was, so to speak, the result — by mixture or addition — of the evMcTK, Cyril must be acquitted of the charge."^ From his point of view Cyril naturally attacked Nestorius with vehemence, and they hurled anathemas at each other. Cyril exerted all his powers to bring out the irreligious consequences of Nestorianism. How could the sufferings of a man save us ; and in the Eucharist was it no more than human fiesh that we received ? Eather at every point manhood is blended with Godhead. By thus insisting on " one incarnate nature " Cyril was un- questionably faithful to the instinct of Greek Christianity. Ere long he succeeded in gaining the adhesion of Celestine of Eome (430). .The West, alike by tradition and temperament, occupied a middle position between Antioch and Alexandria, but, having been long accustomed to phrases like deus natus, deus crucifixus est, it now leant to Cyril's emphasis on the unity of the Redeemer's person. Nothing would serve but the meeting of another Council. It was held at Ephesus in 431, and takes rank as the third Ecumenical Council of the Church. Suffice it to say that the Cyrillians first deposed Nestorius, before tlie arrival of his friends, to which they replied by deposing ' Dykes, ul aupra, 57. '^ Leitfaden, 293 f. THK EUTYCHIAN CONTROVERSY 209 Cyril and Memnon of Ephesus. The Emperor confirmed botb sentences, but that on Cyril was soon reversed. By 433 court influence had driven both parties into outward harmony, and Cyril accepted a creed drawn up in great part by Theodoret of Cyrus — whose Nestorian sympathies were strong— while NesLorius was dropped by his old supporters. The terms of this creed paved the way for Chalcedon, but its excessively ambiguous tenor has led Harnack to speak of it as " the saddest and most momentous event in the history of dogma since the condemation of Paul of Samosata." ^ It declared that Christ was " con- substantial with us in His humanity, for there has been a union of two natures ; wherefore we confess one Christ, one Son, one Lord." ^ Nothing was decided as to whether two natures existed in Christ after the incarnation. But Loofs says truly that the arrangement in no way mitigated the difl'erences between Cyril and Nestorius on the question whether Christ was, or was not, an individual man. For Cyril, it was not the person of a man that the Logos had assumed, but man, i.e. the qualities and attributes of human nature. This shadowy abstractness of conception was only too certain to lead men away from the historic life portrayed in the New Testament. Henceforth the strength of the Nestorians lay in Persia. The pious barbarism of the monks flung them ever more violently on the side of Cyril. § 4. The Eutychian Controversy ; Chalcedon. — Cyril's death in 444 seemed to bring peace, when suddenly the flames of war shot up again. They were kindled by Eutyches, archimandrite of Constantinople, a keen but limited and ill-balanced nature, whose piety gave him influence, and who had been one of Cyril's most ardent followers. At a council in his own city he was accused of heresy by Eusebius of Dorylaeum. He had certainly used imprudent phrases. " My God," he said, " is not of like essence with us " ; the body of God could not be a man's ' History of Dogma, iv. 197. » Hahn, § 170. 14 210 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST body, but only like it ; and so forth. Opponents of the Cyrillian theology at once exclaimed that Eutyches was only blurting out what Cyril had held secretly. In 448 a synod held at Constantinople, under the presidency of his bishop, Flavian, condemned the old man on the charge of denying the consubstantiality of Christ's human nature with ours. In the circumstances, Eutyches drew back upon the Christological positions of his old leader, and expressed his own view thus : " I confess our Lord to have become out of two natures before the union. But I confess one nature after the union." But he refused to concede the orthodox belief that two natures existed in Christ after the incarnation had taken place. He found a powerful advocate in Dioscurus of Alexandria, an ambitious and coarse-grained ecclesiastic who felt that the championship of Eutyches might help him to a kind of papacy in the East. On the other hand, he was opposed not merely by Flavian but by Leo of Eome, who had chosen his side with some hesitation. At this point the Emperor, with whom Flavian was no favourite, com- manded him to hand in a confession of faith justifying his evil opinion of Eutyches. The document he prepared is of great interest, as an anticipation of the Formula of Chalcedon.^ It proved that men were beginning to make distinctions between " nature " and " hypostasis," on the basis of which a reconciliation might be hoped for between Alexandria and Antioch. Dioscurus, however, was not to be restrained, and, having persuaded Theodosius to summon a new council at Ephesus (449, known later as the Bobber Synod), he presided over it, and forced through both a rehabilitation of Eutyches and a condemnation and deposition of the Antiochene leaders. The Eoman deputies were refused a hearing. Under cover of an appeal to a resolution of the Council of Ephesus in 431, forbidding the addition of a new creed to that of Nicaea, the Union Symbol of 433 was summarily put aside. Anathemas were pronounced ' Hahn, § 223. LEO's DOGMATIC EPISTLE 211 against all who should teach that in Christ there were two natures subsequently to the incarnation. And it is a very arguable position that Dioscurus faithfully represented the view really held by the majority in the East. It was to this Council that Leo of Eome sent his famous Dogmatic Epistle, which, though left unread, grew every month in importance. It revived Christological formulas which Tertullian and Augustine had made familiar. " Two substances or natures in the one Christ " is the keynote. The substances in the Incarnate remain what they were, but are combined in the unity of the person. Each nature preserves intact its own characteristics, the lowliness and infirmity of man being assumed by the Divine majesty and eternity. " Not only so, but in the Divine- human life of the one person each nature performs its own proper function in alliance with the other, a basis being thus found for Biblical expressions which imply a communicatio idiomatum, or interchange of qualities ; as when it is said that the Son of Man came down from heaven or that the Son of God was crucified and buried. Leo is also emphatic as to the integrity of our Lord's manhood, and makes severe animadversions on the crimi- nality of Eutyches in denying it and so casting the shadow of unreality on the passion which had been endured for our salvation.! The Epistle is written with great practical wisdom and insight, the positive and negative results of previous discussions being lucidly set forth and sagaciously balanced over against each other. Fine shades of theological dis- tinction are avoided, and no efifort is made to follow the ' The following are the most significant phrases : Salva proprietate utriusque naturae et substantiae et in unam coeunte personam suscepta est a majestate humilitas, a virtute infirmitas . . . impasslbilis deus non dedignatua est homo esse passihilis et immortalia mortis legibua subjacere ; . . . qui enim verua est deus, idem rerus est homo . . . agit utraque forma cum alterius communione, quod proprium est . . . propter hanc unitatem personae in utraque natura intelligendam et filius nommis legitur de- acendisse de ccelo . . . et rursus filius dei crucifixus dicitur ac sepultua. Cf. Loofs, Leit/aden, 299. 212 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST Greek divines in subtle or elaborate speculative theories. On the whole, Leo comes a good deal nearer to the view of Antioch than of Alexandria. Still it is impossible to claim him for either. There is no direct refutation of Nestorius, only of Eutyches. Theodosius died in July 450, and in 451 his successoi Marcian convened the synod Leo had asked for, not, however, at Rome, but at Chalcedon. It was the fourth Ecumenical Council of the Church. About six hundred bishops came, and from the first the guidance of events lay in the hands of the Western deputies. Leo's Epistle was recognised as the norm of orthodoxy ; Dioscurus deposed ; Nestorianism and Eutychianism condemned. Shouts were heard from the assembly: "We all believe as Leo does." The inviolability of the creeds of Nicsea and Ephesus was reaffirmed, and thereafter the Council set forth the following definition : — ' E7rofj,evoi TOivvv tok ayioit trarpdcnv eva icai tov avTov OfioiXoyelv viov tov nvpiov rj/j,cov Irjaovv XpLaTov a'Vficj:o}VCi)v(Ti