ait PW a4 = %. a ae - ‘ * PRS EP aes “ ee te ene ly Fch eo Sonne « THE LIBRARY OF REVEREND HARRY M. NORTH GRADUATE OF THE CLASS OF 1899 TRUSTEE 1919-1932 DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY DURHAM, N. C. \\ THE CHARACTER OF JESUS FORBIDDING HIS POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION WITH MEN. BY HORACE BUSHNELL. NEW YORK : CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS. 1906 MG hae ~ Tn the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the sor the Southern District of Ni D mmr c-h. R. PUBLISHER'S ADVERTISEMENT, In this little volume we reprint, with consent of the Author, the tenth chapter of his Treatise, Na- TURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. This chapter, taken as a sketch of the self-evidenc- ing, superhuman character of Christ, has attracted much attention ; and we have been solicited, many times over, in the various notices and reviews of the book, as well as by private readers, to give it to the public by itself. This, too, we do the more readily, that it makes a complete whole by itself, and is in a style to be read by multitudes who probably will not undertake to master the more elaborate and difficult argument, of which it is only a subordinate member. 2477596 PS. mi, wea. Tere tye Digitized by the Inter in 2022 with fund Duke University Lit 4 https://archive.org/details/characterofjesu: CONTENTS. We assume nothing reported of him to be true, 5 The only character that has aperfect youth,. . . The picture stands by itself, . A 6 5 9 e The absurd pictures given of infant prodigies, . . Jesus the only great character that holds a footing of innocence, The only religious character that disowns repentance, He unites characters difficult to be united, . é, A The astonishing pretensions of Jesus, . oleae . His pretensions enter also into his actions, . a ihe Nobody offended by these pretensions, . S liner) What mere man could support such pretensions? , Peculiar in the passive virtues, . = . . Does not falter in the common trials of exinence! . His passion, no mere human martyrdom, . His agony misplaced, taken as being only a man’ A . It is, humanly speaking, excessive, . 3 . ° . The pathology is divine, . His defence before Pilate, all that could be made, seals He undertakes what is humanly impossible, AO He assumes to set up the kingdom of God among men, His plan covers ages of time, . = . ay ee Such attempts not human, CF age Nate Sp Bem te ne He takes rank with the humblest orders of society, - No great secial architect ever saw the wisdom of it, . 247796 6 CONTENTS. And still he raises no partisan feeling, . No human leader in this, . . . Origina\ and independent as no man is, Teaches by no human method, . » Warped by no desire to gain assent, . Comprehensive, under no human conditions, Could not Hold a one-sided view, . . Clear of all the current superstitions, But no liberalist, < . P ~ ° His simplicity is perfect, . . ° Shining as pure light, P . * Adequately teaches God even to the humble, This morality is not artistic, . s . But intuitive and original, . 2 . Never anxious for success, . . . Raised and made sacred by familiarity, Our experience of men reversed in him, Recapitulation, . ~ Fy F = Did such a being actually exist? . . Was he a sinless character ? . Mr. Parker’s estimate of him, ° . Mr. Hennel’s estimate, ‘ s Fy Faults charged, . : < ° . ° Faults supposed and intimated, . His invective against the Pharisees, . Milton’s right of invective, - = The fact of his miracles inferred, . . His errand is order itself, . . . No disrnption of laworsystem, . . The mythical hypothesis impossible, Their success Mr. Parker concedes, e The miracles are in place in a gospel, . Miracles rejected, so is Jesus the Grand Miracle, Jesus himself the all-sufficient evidence, PAGE Sa PSVSSASAIARSAFSSSEIR B BS KFCHEAKRARESS THE Wir kACTER, OF JESUS. Ir is the grand peculiarity of the sacred writings, that they deal in supernatural events and transac- tions, and show the fact of a celestial institution finally erected on earth, which is fitly called the kingdom of God ; because it shows Him reigning, as a Regenerator and Restorer of the broken order of the world. Christianity is, in this view, no mere scheme of doctrine, or of ethical practice, but is in- stead a kind of miracle, a power out of nature and above, descending into it; a historically supernat- ural movement on the world, that is visibly entered into it, and organized to be an institution in the person of Jesus Christ. He, therefore, is the central figure and power, and with him the entire fabric either stands or falls. To this central figure, then, we now turn our- selves ; and, as no proof beside the light is neces- sary to show that the sun shines, so we shall find that Jesus proves himself by his own self-evidence. The simple inspection of his life and character will suffice to show that he cannot be classified with mankind (man though he be), any more than what we call his miracles can be classified with mere nat- (7) 8 CHARACTER OF JESUS. ural events. The simple demonstrations of his life and spirit are the sufficient attestation of his own profession, when he says—“ I am from above ”—“I came down from heaven.” Let us not be misunderstood. We do not assume the truth of the narrative by which the manner and We assume facts of the life of Jesus are reported nothing Tepott- to us; for this, by the supposition, is cae the matter in question. We only as- sume the representations themselves, as being just what they are, and discover their necessary truth, in the transcendent, wondrously self-evident, pic- ture of divine excellence and beauty exhibited in them. We take up the account of Christ, in the New Testament, just as we would any other ancient writing, or as if it were a manuscript just brought to light in some ancient library. We open the book, and discover in it four biographies of a cer- tain remarkable character, called Jesus Christ. He is miraculously born of Mary, a virgin of Galilee, and declares himself, without scruple, that he came out from God. Finding the supposed history made up, in great part, of his mighty acts, and not being disposed to believe in miracles and marvels, we should soon dismiss the book as a tissue of absurd- ities too extravagant for belief, were we not struck with the sense of something very peculiar in the character of this remarkable person. Having our attention arrested thus by the impression made on CHARACTER OF JESUS. 9 our respect, we are put on inquiry, and the more we study it, the more wonderful, as a character, it appears. And before we have done, it becomes, in fact, the chief wonder of the story; lifting all the other wonders into order and intelligent pro- portion round it, and making one compact and glorious wonder of the whole picture; a picture shining in its own clear sunlight upon us, as the truest of all truths—Jesus, the Divine Word, com- ing out from God, to be incarnate with us, and be the vehicle of God and salvation to the race. — On the single question, therefore, of the more than human character of Jesus, we propose, in per- fect confidence, to rest a principal argument for Christianity as a supernatural institution ; for, if there be in Jesus a character which is not human, then has something broken into the world that is not of it, and the spell of unbelief is broken. Not that Christianity might not be a supernatural institution, if Jesus were only a man; for many prophets and holy men, as we believe, have brought forth to the world communications that are not from themselves, but were received by inspirations from God. There are several grades, too, of the supernatural, as already intimated ; the supernat- ural human, the supernatural prophetic, the super- natural demonic and angelic, the supernatural divine. Christ, we shall see, is the supernatural manifested in the highest grade or order ; viz., the divine. 10 CHARACTER OF JESUS. We observe, then, as a first peculiarity at the root of his character, that he begins life with a perfect youth. His childhood is an unspotted, chon er (RY and, withal, a kind of celestial flower. Se perfect ‘The notion of a superhuman or celestial childhood, the most difficult of all things to be conceived, is yet successfully drawn by a few simple touches. He is announced before- hand as “that Holy Thing”; a beautiful and powerful stroke, to raise our expectation to the level of a nature so mysterious. In his childhood, everybody loves him. Using words of external description, he is shown growing up in favor with God and man, a child so lovely and beautiful, that heaven and earth appear to smile upon him to- gether. So, when it is added that the child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and, more than all, that the grace or beautifying power of God was upon him, we look, as on the unfolding of a sacred flower, and seem to scent a fragrance wafted on us from other worlds. Then, at the age of twelve, he is found among the great learned men of the day, the doctors of the temple, hearing what they say, and asking them questions. And this, without any word that indicates forwardness or pertness in the child’s manner, such as some Chris- tian Rabbi, or silly and credulous devotee, would certainly have added. The doctors are not offend- ed, as by a child too forward or wanting in modesty; CHARACTER OF JESUS. 11 they are only amazed that such a degree of under- standing can dwell in one so young and simple. His mother finds him there among them, and be- gins to expostulate with him. His reply is very strange ; it must, she is sure, have some deep mean- ing that corresponds with his mysterious birth, and the sense he has ever given her of a something strangely peculiar in his ways; and she goes home keeping his saying in her heart, and guessing vainly what his thought may be. Mysterious, holy secret! which this mother hides in her bosom; that her holy thing, her child whom she has watched, during the twelve years of his celestial childhood, now be- gins to speak of being “about his Father’s busi- ness,” in words of dark enigma, which she can not fathom. ~ Now we do not say, observe, that there is one word of truth in these touches of narrative. We only say that, whether they be fact or Piet ee fiction, here is given the sketch of a stands by it- perfect and sacred childhood, not of a aA simple, lovely, ingenuous, and properly human childhood, such as the poets love to sketch, but of a sacred and celestial childhood. In this respect, the early character of Jesus is a picture that stands by itself. In no other case, that we remember, has it ever entered the mind of a biographer, in drawing a character, to represent it as beginning with a spot- less childhood. The childhood of the great human 12 CHARACTER OF JESUB. characters, if given at all, is commonly represented, according to the uniform truth, as being more or less contrary to the manner of their mature age ; and never as being strictly one with it, except in those cases of inferior eminence where the kind of distinction attained to is that of some mere prod- igy, and not a character of greatness in action, or of moral excellence. In all the higher ranges of character, the excellence portrayed is never the simple unfolding of a harmonious and perfect beauty contained in the germ of childhood, but it is a character formed by a process of rectification, in which many follies are mended and distempers removed ; in which confidence is checked by defeat, passion moderated by reason, smartness sobered by experience. Commonly a certain pleasure is taken in showing how the many wayward sallies of the boy are, at length, reduced by discipline to the character of wisdom, justice, and public heroism, so much admired. Besides, if any writer, of almost any age, will undertake to describe, not merely a spotless, but a superhuman or celestial childhood, not haying the reality before him, he must be somewhat more than human himself, if he does not pile together a mass of clumsy exaggerations, and draw and overdraw, till neither ae nor —_ can find any verisimil- itude in the picture. Neither let us omit to notice what ideas the Rab- CHARACTER OF JESUS. 13 bis and learned doctors of this age were able, in fact, to furnish, when setting forth a remarkable childhood. Thus Josephus, Ape ee: drawing on the teachings of the Rabbis, a ae tells how the infant Moses, when the king of Egypt took him out of his daughter’s arms, and playfully put the diadem on his head, threw it pettishly down and stamped on it. And when Moses was three years old, he tells us that the child had grown so tall, and exhibited such a wonderful beauty of countenance, that people were obliged, as it were, to stop and look at him as he was carried along the road, and were held fast by the wonder, gazing till he was out of sight. See, too, what work is made of the childhood of Jesus himself, in the Apocry- phal gospels. These are written by men of so nearly the same era, that we may discover, in their embellishments, what kind of a childhood it was in the mere invention of the time to make out. While the gospels explicitly say that Jesus wrought no miracles till his public ministry began, and that he made his beginning in the miracle of Cana, these are ambitious to make him a great prodigy in his childhood. They tell how, on one occasion, he pur- sued in his anger, the other children, who refused to play with him, and turned them into kids ; how, on another, when a child accidentally ran against him, he was angry, and killed him by his mere word ; how, on another, Jesus had a dispute with 14 OHARACTER OF JESUS. his teacher over the alphabet, and when the teacher struck him, how he crushed him, withered his arm, and threw him down dead. Finally, Joseph tells Mary that they must keep him within doors, for everybody perishes against whom he is excited. His mother sends him to the well for water, and having broken his pitcher, he brings the water in his cloak. He goes into a dyer’s shop, when the dyer is out, and throws all the cloths he finds into a vat of one color ; but, when they are taken out, be- hold, they are all dyed of the precise color that was ordered. He commands a palm-tree to stoop down and let him pluck the fruit, and it obeys. When he is carried down into Egypt, all the idols fall down wherever he passes, and the lions and leopards gather round him in aharmless company. This the Gospel of the Infancy gives, as a picture of the wonderful childhood of Jesus.) How unlike that holy flower of paradise, in the true gospels, which a few simple touches make to bloom in beautiful self- evidence before us! Passing now to the character of Jesus in his ma- turity, we discover, at once, that there is an element edesustheonly = it which distinguishes it from all area olieatson, Human characters, viz., innocence. By ingofinnocence. this we mean, not that he is actually sinless ; that will be denied, and, therefore, must not here be assumed, We mean that, viewed ex- OHARAOTER OF JESUS. 15 ternally, he is a perfectly harmless being, actuated by no destructive passions, gentle to inferiors, doing ill or injury to none. The figure of a Lamb, which never was, or could be applied to any of the great human characters, without an implication of weak- ness fatal to all respect, is yet, with no such effect, applied to him. We associate weakness with inno- cence, and the association is so powerful, that no human writer would undertake to sketch a great character on the basis of innocence, or would even think it possible. We predicate innocence of in- fancy ; but to be a perfectly harmless, guileless man, never doing ill even for a moment, we consider to be the same as to be a man destitute of spirit and manly force. But Christ accomplished the impossi- ble. Appearing in all the grandeur and majesty of a superhuman manhood, he is able still to unite the impression of innocence, with no apparent diminu- tion of his sublimity. It is, in fact, the distinctive glory of his character, that it seems to be the natu- ral unfolding of a divine innocence ; a pure celes- tial childhood, amplified by growth. We feel the power of this strange combination, but we have so great difficulty in conceiving it, or holding our minds to the conception, that we sometimes subside or descend to the human level, and empty the char- acter of Jesus of the strange element unawares. We read, for example, his terrible denunciations against the Pharisees, and are shocked by the vio- ty 16 CHARACTER OF JESUS. lent, fierce sound they have on our mortal lips ; not perceiving that the offence is in us, and not in him. We should suffer no such revulsion, did we only conceive them bursting out, as words of indignant grief, from the surcharged bosom of innocence ; for there is nothing so bitter as the offence that inno- cence feels, when stung by hypocrisy and a sense of cruelty to the poor. So, when he drives the money-changers from the temple, we are likely to leave out the only element that saves him from a look of violence and passion. Whereas, it is the very point of the story, not that he, as by mere force, can drive so many men, but that so many are seen retiring before the moral power of one, a mysterious being, in whose face and form the in- dignant flush of innocence reveals a tremendous feeling, they can no wise comprehend, much less are able to resist. Accustomed to no such demonstrations of vigor and decision in the innocent human characters, and having it as our way to set them down contemptu- ously, without further consideration, as “ Incapable and shallow innocents,’”’— we turn the indignant fire of Jesus into a fire of malignity ; whereas, it should rather be conceived that Jesus here reveals his divinity, by what so pow- erfully distinguishes God himself, when he clothes his goodness in the tempests and thunders of na- CHARACTER OF JESUS. 17 ture. Decisive, great, and strong, Christ is yet all this, even the more sublimely, that he is invested, withal, in the lovely, but humanly feeble garb of innocence. And that this is the true conception, is clear, in the fact that no one ever thinks of him as weak, and no one fails to be somehow impressed with a sense of innocence by his life. When his enemies are called to show what evil or harm he hath done, they can specify nothing, save that he has offended their bigotry. Even Pilate, when he gives him up, confesses that he finds nothing in him to blame, and, shuddering with apprehensions he cannot subdue, washes his hands to be clear of the innocent blood! Thus he dies, a being holy, harm- ' less, undefiled. And when he hangs, a bruised flower, drooping on his cross, and the sun above is dark, and the earth beneath shudders with pain, what have we in this funeral grief of the worlds, but a fit honor paid to the sad majesty of his divine innocence ? We pass now to his religious character, which, we shali discover, has the remarkable distinction that it proceeds from a point exactly opposite to that which is the root or radical element in yy. ony re the religious character of men. Human ligious character piety begins with repentance. Itis the Pentance. effort of a being, implicated in wrong and writhing un- der the stings of guilt,to come unto God, The most Fe 18 CHARAOTER OF JESUS. righteous, or even self-righteous men, blend expres- sions of sorrow and vows of new obedience with their exercises. But Christ, in the character given him, never acknowledges sin. It is the grand peculiarity of his piety that he never regrets anything that he has done or been ; expresses, nowhere, a single feeling of compunction, or the least sense of un- worthiness. On the contrary, he boldly challenges his accusers, in the question—Which of you con- vinceth me of sin? and even declares, at the close of his life, in a solemn appeal to God, that he has given to men, unsullied, the glory divine that was deposited in him. Now the question is not whether Christ was, in fact, the faultless being, assumed in his religious character. All we have to notice here is, that he makes the assumption, makes it not only in words, but in the very tenor of his exercises themselves, and that by this fact his piety is radically distin- guished from all human piety. And no mere hu- man creature, it is certain, could hold such a relig- ious attitude, without shortly displaying faults that would cover him with derision, or excesses and de- linquencies that would even disgust his friends. Piety without one dash of repentance, one ingenu- ous confession of wrong, one tear, one look of con- trition, one request to heaven for pardon—let any one of mankind try this kind of piety, and see how long it will be ere his righteousness will prove itself to be CHARACTER OF JESUS. 19 the most impudent conceit! how long before his passions sobered by no contrition, his pride kept down by no repentance, will tempt him into absurdi- ties that will turn his pretenses to mockery! No sooner does any one of us begin to be self-right- eous, than he begins to fall into outward sins that shame his conceit. But, in the case of Jesus, no such disaster follows. Beginning with an impeni- tent or unrepentant piety, he holds it to the end, and brings no visible stain upon it. Now, one of two things must be true. He was either sinless, or he was not. If sinless, what greater, more palpable exception to the law of human development, than that a perfect and stain- less being has for once lived in the flesh! If not, which is the supposition required of those who deny every thing above the range of human de- velopment, then we have a man taking up a re- ligion without repentance, a religion not human, but celestial, a style of piety never taught him in his childhood, and never conceived or attempted among men: more than this, a style of piety, withal, wholly unsuited to his real character as a sinner, holding it as a figment of insufferable presumption to the end of life, and that in a way of such un- faltering grace and beauty, as to command the uni- versal homage of the human race! Could there be a wider deviation from all we know of mere human development ? 20 OHARACTER OF JESUS. He was also able perfectly to unite elements of character, that others find the greatest difficulty in He unites Uniting, however unevenly and partial- characters dif’ Jy. He is never said to have laughed, fester: and yet he never produces the impres- sion of austerity, moroseness, sadness, or even of being unhappy. On the contrary, he is described as one that appears to be commonly filled with a sacred joy ; “rejoicing in spirit,” and leaving to his disciples, in the hour of his departure, the bequest of his joy—“ that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.” We could not long endure a hu- man being whose face was never moved by laugh- ter, or relaxed by humorous play. What sympathy could we have with one who appears, in this manner, to have no human heart? We could not even trust him. And yet we have sympathy with Christ ; for there is somewhere in him an ocean of deep joy, and we see that he is, in fact, only burdened with his sympathy for us to such a degree, that his mighty life is overcast and oppressed by the charge he has undertaken. His lot is the lot of privation ; he has no powerful friends ; he has not even where to lay his head. No human being could appear in such a guise, without occupying us much with the sense of his affliction. We should be descending to him, as it were, in pity. But we never pity Christ, never think of him as struggling with the disad- vantages of a lower level, to surmount them, In CHARACTER OF JESUS. 21 fact, he does not allow us, after all, to think much of his privations. We think of him more as a being of mighty resources, proving himself only the more sublimely, that he is in the guise of destitution. He is the most unworldly of beings, having no desire at all for what the earth can give, too great to be caught with any longing for its benefits, impassible even to its charms, and yet there is no ascetic sourness or repugnance, no misanthropic distaste in his man- ner ; as if he were bracing himself against the world to keep it off. The more closely he is drawn to other worlds, the more fresh and susceptible is he to the humanities of this. The little child is an image of gladness, which his heart leaps forth to embrace. The wedding and the feast and the funeral have all their cord of sympathy in his bosom. At the wed- ding he is clothed in congratulation, at the feast in doctrine, at the funeral in tears ; but no miser was ever drawn to his money, with a stronger desire, than he to worlds above the world. Men undertake to be spiritual, and they become ascetic ; or, endeavoring to hold a liberal view of the comforts and pleasures of society, they are soon buried in the world, and slaves to its fashions ; or, holding a scrupulous watch to keep out every par- ticular sin, they become legal, and fall out of lib- erty ; or, charmed with the noble and heavenly lib- erty, they run to negligence and irresponsible living ; so the earnest become violent, the fervent fanatical 22 CHARACTER OF JESUS. and censorious, the gentle waver, the firm turn big- ots, the liberal grow lax, the benevolent ostentatious. Poor human infirmity can hold nothing steady. Where the pivot of righteousness is broken, the scales must needs slide off their balance. Indeed, it is one of the most difficult things which a cultiva- ted Christian can attempt, only to sketch a theoretic view of character, in its true justness and proportion, so that a little more study, or a little more self-ex- perience, will not require him to modify it. And yet the character of Christ is never modified, even by a shade of rectification. It is one and the same throughout, He makes no improvements, prunes no extravagances, returns from no eccentricities. The balance of his character is never disturbed, or read- justed, and the astounding assumption on which it is based is never shaken, even by a suspicion that he falters in it. There is yet another point related to this, in which the attitude of Jesus is even more distinct Nery Chae Bs from any that was ever taken by man, ing pretensions and is yet triumphantly sustained. ‘if oa speak of the astonishing pretensions asserted concerning his person. Similar preten- sions have sometimes been assumed by maniacs, or insane persons, but never, so far as I know, by per- sons in the proper exercise of their reason. Certain it is that no mere man could take the same attitude of supremacy towards the race, and inherent affinity OHARACTER OF JESUS. 23 or oneness with God, without fatally shocking the confidence of the world by his effrontery. Imagine a human creature saying to the world—“