BR 121 .T65 
 
 Tigert, Jno . J. 1856-1906. 
 The Christianity of Christ 
 and His apostles 
 
THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 
 AND HIS APOSTLES 
 
THE 
 
 CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 
 AND HIS APOSTLES 
 
 HISTORICAL STUDIES OF FUNDAMENTAL 
 NEW TESTAMENT PROBLEMS 
 
 BY 
 
 / 
 
 JNO. J. TIGERT, D.D., LL.D 
 
 EDITOR OF THE METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW 
 
 " Te shall k/tow ike truth, and the truth shall 
 ■makeyoufree."—}usvs Christ 
 
 Nashville, Tenn. ; Dallas, Tex. 
 
 Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South 
 
 Smith & Lamar, Agents 
 
 1905 
 
Copyright 
 
 190s 
 
 By Smith & Lamar 
 
TO 
 
 MARY, HOLLAND, AND JOHN 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The prevailingly negative and destructive tend- 
 encies and results of much current theological 
 criticism have begotten not ill-grounded fears 
 among the conservative, and some grave mis- 
 givings as to their actual position among those 
 liberals who are not wholly given over to be- 
 lieve a lie. Meanwhile, ordinary mortals must 
 have a shelter in the time of the storm. To 
 throw up such a shelter is the object of the fol- 
 lowing constructive studies. They are not 
 polemical. They aim to be historical. They 
 are the sober reflections of one who' abides in 
 essential orthodoxy after a wide range of read- 
 ing that has tended, more or less, to shake the 
 foundations. The author trusts that he has an 
 open mind for truth. He believes with the 
 Apostle that whatsoever doth make m-anifest 
 is light. The summing up of the theological 
 situation which he was compelled to make for 
 his own mental and religious peace, he is hope- 
 
 (vii) 
 
viii Preface 
 
 ful may perform a like office for those who are 
 similarly afflicted. He has endeavored to pre- 
 serve breadth of sympathy with Christian 
 scholars of many types; but to that breadth 
 he could not sacrifice the breath of life which 
 comes from Christ alone. In these pages, he 
 endeavors to give, with sincerity and calmness, 
 his reasons for continuing to believe that one is 
 his Master, even Christ, and that all others are 
 but brethren. It is hoped that the standpoint 
 of generous and sympathetic, and yet con- 
 vinced and un fearing, orthodoxy from which 
 these pages are written will not prove offensive 
 to those who are of another mind, and who 
 have supplied so much excellent literature of a 
 contrary tendency which has provoked, as he 
 hopes, a wholesome reaction in the mind of the 
 author. If this little book shall bring repose to 
 inquiring and disquieted spirits, the prayer and 
 purpose of its writer will have been answered. 
 
 JnO. J. TiGERT. 
 Spring Hill, i July^ ipoS* 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Nature of the Christian Religion i 
 
 II 
 
 The Vocation of Jesus the Proof of His God- 67 
 
 head 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Foundation of Christendom 107 
 
 IV 
 Biblical Criticism and the Christian Faith. . . 151 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Pfleiderer's " Early Christian Conception 
 
 OF Christ " 185 
 
 Loisy's "The Gospel and the Church " 196 
 
 INDEXES 
 
 Authors Quoted or Referred to 205 
 
 Scripture Passages Quoted or Explained. . . . 207 
 
 (ix) 
 
I 
 
 THE NATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 RELIGION 
 
THE NATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 RELIGION 
 
 On the surface at least it wears a surprising 
 look that, at the beginning of the twentieth 
 Christian century, men should still be inquir- 
 ing. What is Christianity? That millions of 
 humble men and women in many generations 
 should have had living experience of its real- 
 ity and worth does not diminish this surprise 
 at the present attitude of the scholars and 
 savants. The inquiry might seem the more 
 reasonable, or the less surprising, if it pro- 
 ceeded only from the scholars of alien civiliza- 
 tions, such as that of Japan in the Far East; 
 which are but now beginning to be penetrated 
 by the spirit and institutions of Christendom, 
 if not of Christianity. But the question is 
 started at the centers of Christian learning and 
 by the leaders of theological thought. At 
 
 (3) 
 
The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Berlin Professor Harnack, perhaps the fore- 
 most Christian historical scholar of our times, 
 iwhose dating of the early Christian docu- 
 ments^ and history of the later Christian dog- 
 mas^ are alike in their scientific exhaustiveness, 
 has published the brilliant and reverent trea- 
 tise^ that has been turned into EngHsh under 
 the title, "What is Christianity?"; while here 
 in America, at the Union Theological Sem- 
 inary in New York, Professor Adams Brown 
 has paralleled Herr Harnack's title and work 
 in a volume^ profoundly and widely learned, if 
 not so charming and sensitively religious. 
 Even our Roman Catholic friends have not 
 remained undisturbed among the swift-rush- 
 ing currents of the day, and at Paris Alfred 
 Loisy's work^ divides public attention with the 
 
 ^ "Chronologic der altchristlichen Literatur." 
 
 ^ "Dogmengeschichte." 
 
 ' "Das Wesen des Christentums." 
 
 * "The Essence of Christianity." 
 
 '*"The Gospel and the Church": largely a reply to 
 Harnack, but containing independent views that Roman 
 theologians must attend to. 
 
And His Apostles 
 
 new Gallicanism which Premier Combes has 
 precipitated upon Pius X. 
 
 Thus ahke in CathoHc and in Protestant the- 
 ology, at BerHn, Paris, and New York, the 
 learned representatives of three of the foremost 
 peoples of the modern world, and of widely- 
 different schools of doctrine, have consented 
 together at least in this, that they think it nec- 
 essary, at the present stadium of man's knowl- 
 edge, to set forth afresh, according to the light 
 that is in them, the essential nature of the 
 Christian religion. 
 
 These are not superficial men. The posts 
 they occupy, as well as the works they have 
 produced, certify that they are penetrated with 
 a vivid sense of the deepest tendencies and 
 needs of the time. Upon the threadbare theme 
 of the modern progress in physical science and 
 mechanical invention I need not dwell; though 
 the very mass and intricacy of the facts condi- 
 tion the intellectual outlook and fix the far 
 horizons of the scientific mind. So far as fluid 
 
The Christianity of Christ 
 
 physical theory has begun to solidify in the 
 dogmatic materialism of a Haeckel,® or the 
 crudities of a Goldwin Smith/ it is perhaps 
 enough to allow it to break and fall of. its own 
 weight. Scientific, philosophical, and theolog- 
 ical scholars seem fairly agreed in this judg- 
 ment on materialism. A deeper conditioning 
 of the intellect of modern man, and therefore 
 of the Christian as of all other standpoints, has 
 issued from the fresh, full fountains of ideal- 
 istic philosophy. Readers of RitschP and 
 Kaftan^ and Hermann^^ and Harnack^^ ; of 
 Fairbairn^^ and the Cairds,^^ and an almost 
 countless host of English, Scottish, and Amer- 
 
 ' "The Riddle of the World." 
 ' "Guesses at the Riddle of Existence." 
 ^ "Justification and Reconciliation." 
 " "The Truth of the Christian Religion." 
 '" "The Christian's Communion with God." 
 " Works mentioned above, 
 
 ^- "Philosophy of the Christian Religion" ; "The Place 
 of Christ in Modern Theology." 
 
 ^^ "The Evolution of Religion" ; Discourses. 
 
And His Apostles 
 
 ican theologians, know that Leibnitz and Kant 
 and Hegel and Lotze, whatever corrections of 
 their conclusions may be necessary, have not 
 lived in vain. Lastly, Christian philological 
 and historical scholarship, directed alike to the 
 Old Testament and the New, but especially to 
 the former, and drawing within its widespread 
 net the ancient civilizations and religions of 
 Babylon and Assyria/* has taken us to the ulti- 
 mate sources of Semitic religion, so far as they 
 are historically explicable. Surely, then, these 
 are grounds enough for the dissipation of the 
 surprise we were at first disposed to feel at the 
 attitude and inquiries of Harnack and Brown 
 and Loisy, even if taken to be typical of the 
 theological situation in Germany and America 
 
 " Sayce, in numerous works ; Hilprecht, "Explora- 
 tions in Bible Lands during the Nineteenth Century"; 
 McCurdy, "History, Prophecy, and the Monuments"; 
 Rogers, "History of Babylonia and Assyria" ; Hommel, 
 "The Ancient Hebrew Tradition"; Delitzsch, "Babel 
 und Bibel," and the numerous replies to the latter. 
 
8 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 and France. We may, perhaps, without pre- 
 sumption join them in a fresh search for the 
 innermost essence of the Christian religion, — 
 a conception of it that shall draw the purest 
 and best minds of our day, bewildered by the 
 clamor of many voices on every side, to become 
 learners in the school of Christ. 
 
 I do not deem it necessary or expedient to 
 enter into any general examination of the 
 works of the authors to whom reference is 
 made above, — though their books are brief, 
 and the three may be read in a few days, — or 
 even to indicate in detail the grounds on which 
 their conclusions have proved unsatisfactory. 
 Suffice it to say that the books have been in- 
 terestedly and sympathetically read; that the 
 reading of them is, in part, the genesis, — at 
 least the immediate genesis, — of the present es- 
 say; and that those who may be curious to 
 measure the angle of my divergence from such 
 scholars, at whose feet I should gladly sit in 
 many things, may gather their materials by a 
 
And His Apostles 
 
 comparison of the processes here pursued on 
 a small scale, and the results here reached, with 
 those which have proved unsatisfying. Hav- 
 ing had, I may humbly claim, some experience 
 of the power of the religion of Christ from my 
 very youth, and having been drawn through 
 many years by personal inclination, as well as 
 by editorial duty and my vow as a presbyter in 
 the Church of God, to a fairly close and broad 
 study of the literature of the issues involved,^ ^ 
 I trust I may, without immodesty, also at- 
 tempt to answer the question. What is Chris- 
 tianity? and to declare those things which are 
 most surely believed in the Christian commu- 
 nity. 
 
 I shall begin with a definition : with the ex- 
 planation and defense of the several elements 
 of this definition, or historical and spiritual 
 
 ^■^Somewhat elaborate reviews of nearly all the 
 books mentioned in the preceding footnotes will be 
 found from my hand in the pages of The Methodist 
 Quarterly Review for the last ten years. 
 
lo The Christianity of Christ 
 
 conception, of the Christian rehgion, the rest 
 of this chapter will be occupied. 
 
 Christianity is the religion of God's redeem- 
 ing love, manifested in the Incarnate life, the 
 Atoning death, and the glorious Resurrection 
 of Jesus Christ, the Founder of the Kingdom 
 of God, whose citizens are become sons of God 
 by the power of his Spirit, and brothers of all 
 mankind. 
 
 First of all, Christianity is religion. It is 
 not theology; though there is, of course, a 
 Christian theology, since man must reflect on 
 his religion as he does on all things else he ex- 
 periences. This theology, so far as vital, is a 
 product of the religion, and a hedge round 
 about it; it is not the root from which the re- 
 ligion springs, nor the. trellis upon which this 
 vine of God's planting grows. At its best, the- 
 ology is a correct human science of divine 
 things. The divine things are permanent — 
 nay eternal, and hence unchangeable. With a 
 true instinct for the permanence of religion, 
 
And His Apostles ii 
 
 our Roman Catholic friends have mistakenly 
 transferred its unchangeability to its dogmas — 
 the formulas of historical origin and develop- 
 ment which undertake to measure and to illu- 
 mine, or simply to protect (perhaps for only a 
 given age), its realities. Dogmas, like all 
 other scientific formulas with a human history, 
 can maintain their place in sound thinking 
 and assured conviction only by maintaining at 
 the same time a consistent place in the sum 
 total of known realities ; or, at least, their har- 
 mony with man's whole verifiable conception 
 of the world. Through nineteen centuries 
 Christianity has maintained its vital touch with 
 human life and interests through a body of 
 progressing and enlarging dogma, ever chang- 
 ing through the external apologetic interest 
 which shapes it, and yet never surrendering the 
 changeless realities of religion which it in- 
 closes. The core of dogma is divine. Whether, 
 at the beginning of this twentieth century, the 
 vastly greater and more complex volume of 
 
12 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 man's knowledge is to bring at last a fatal and 
 final breach with that divine order of the world 
 for which Christianity stands, is the very ques- 
 tion W'hich makes the modern crisis. That the 
 Christian religion has so far fairly met the new 
 conditions is hardly doubtful; that it will con- 
 tinue to meet them, it is the effort of apologetic 
 theologians to show : in any case, it is certain 
 that the modern mind is forever done with an 
 acknowledged dualism in knowledge and ex- 
 perience. The dogma must live its life in the 
 intellect that is informed with all other knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 To Christianity belongs, not only the un- 
 changeableness of religion, but also the un- 
 changeableness of history. This religion has 
 been mediated to humanity by facts. Incarna- 
 tion, Atonement, Resurrection appeal to us as 
 facts. If we find Cardinal Newman^ ^ placing 
 the superiority of Romanism to Protestantism 
 
 ^"In his "Apologia Pro Vita Sua" and elsewhere. 
 
And His Apostles 13 
 
 in its objectivity (and so Loisy), it is because 
 too often a pseudo-Protestantism, in its abuse 
 of the right of private judgment, has seemed to 
 suspend reaHties, both of the rehgious and of 
 the historical order, — the facts of man's re- 
 Hgious nature, as well as the objective, histor- 
 ical facts of Christianity, — upon the fancies 
 and vagaries of personal opinion and individ- 
 ualistic self-assertion and conceit; as if these 
 facts could be annihilated by disbelief of them, 
 or in any degree altered by our personal atti- 
 tude toward them. ''He that rejecteth me and 
 receiveth not my words hath one that judgeth 
 him: the word that I have spoken, the same 
 shall judge him in the last day."^^ The foun- 
 dation facts of Christianity have a very differ- 
 ent objectivity from that of blinking Madon- 
 nas, utterly meaningless and useless even in 
 the system of those who credit them ; and from 
 that of the priestly hocus-pocus of the altar, 
 
 ^^John xii. 48. 
 
i4 The Clu'istianity of Christ 
 
 which by the distinction of substance and at- 
 tributes made by a false reaHsm is withdrawn 
 from the inspection of the senses : for these 
 Christian facts are estabhshed, either by the 
 psychology of religious experience, old as the 
 world and broad as humanity, on the one hand, 
 or on the basis of the veracity of the human 
 senses and the trustworthiness of the ordinary 
 canons of historical testimony, on the other. 
 So established, they are immovable and un- 
 changeable foundations, possessed of an ob- 
 jectivity which man cannot alter; though, ac- 
 cording to the fixed laws of human probation, 
 — probation in both the intellectual and the 
 moral sense, — they have to make themselves 
 good afresh, like all other knowledge, in the 
 consciousness of each new generation. 
 
 Nor is Christianity philosophy, though capa- 
 ble, since truth is one, of philosophical state- 
 ment and defense. Nor yet is it ethics, or an 
 art of right living. It includes this. It cannot 
 be divorced from righteousness. But deeper 
 
And His Apostles 15 
 
 than ethics, as back of theology and philoso- 
 phy, is religion. And what is Religion? 
 
 Religion is the communion of God with the 
 human spirit issuing in a life whose center is 
 this communion; or, in older phrase, the life 
 of God in the soul and life of man. And the 
 Christian religion is no other than communion 
 with God, mediated by Christ and his Spirit. 
 
 If this communion is a delusion, there is no 
 religion; and with the denial of the reality of 
 religion goes Christianity, and every other ac- 
 cepted historical manifestation of the presence 
 and energy of God in human life and history. 
 This communion includes, of course, two ele- 
 ments ; and but two. On the divine side, com- 
 munion is self-manifestation; on the human 
 side, it may be summed up in one comprehen- 
 sive and most real experience, prayer, which, 
 in its widest sense, includes worship and con- 
 formity of the w^ill, life, and nature of the 
 worshiper to the revealed character and de- 
 mand of the worshipful God. 
 
1 6 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Without tarrying to mark finer distinctions, 
 I may notice that the experience of normal 
 men with great uniformity develops the knowl- 
 edge of self, of the world, and of God. These 
 are of tremendous persistence and great uni- 
 versality. The permanent disturbance of nor- 
 mal apprehension in either of the three spheres, 
 or the commingling of the spheres themselves, 
 may be accepted as a mark of insanity. Only 
 the fool says in his heart. There is no God. 
 The experiences of self and the world, as well 
 as the self-revelation of God, carry the mind 
 in its earliest life through to the knowledge of 
 God, which is rarely abandoned, but grows 
 with our growth and strengthens with our 
 strength. The conviction, like certain vital 
 functions in the body, lies deeper than our 
 volition or consciousness — and for the same 
 reason. When, especially in the master spirits 
 of the race, the consciousness and dominance 
 of self and the world are reduced to the vanish- 
 ing point, the consciousness and power of God 
 
And His Apostles 17 
 
 are in possession of the field. By every token, 
 the Founder of Christianity, alone among men, 
 perfectly suppressed self and the world, and 
 lived a life of unbroken communion with God 
 and of undisturbed love and loyalty to him. 
 For most men, self and the world are nearer 
 and more noisy; but God, if deeper and appar- 
 ently more silent amid the clamor of the voices 
 of the flesh and of the world, is more persist- 
 ent; speaks often and powerfully out of the 
 silences when the other voices are hushed, or 
 out of the bitter experiences that reveal the 
 nothingness of self and the world; and he is 
 certainly the only satisfying portion of man's 
 inmost nature. Fellowship with God was the 
 ancient keynote of Hebrew religion that in 
 many Psalms,^ ^ for example, contains the 
 
 " Psalms xvi,, xHx., Ixxiii., cxxxix. : cf. Kennedy'3 
 "St. Paul's Conceptions of the Last Things." "Im- 
 mortality is the corollary of religion. If there be reli- 
 gion, i. e., if God be, there is immortality, not of the 
 soul, but of the whole personal being of man. Ps. xvi. 
 9." — A. B. Davidson, Job, p. 296. 
 
 2 
 
iS The Christianity of Christ 
 
 promise of immortality and heralds the victory 
 over death and the grave proclaimed by Christ 
 and Paul. In truth the so-called consciousness 
 of God is only God revealing himself in the 
 consciousness. The reality of communion 
 with God, and of his self-revelation, is every- 
 where assumed in the New Testament. "Flesh 
 and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but 
 my Father which is in heaven,"^^ said Jesus to 
 Peter after his great confession in Cesarea 
 Philippi. Though Jesus himself had been for 
 long the daily associate and intimate teacher of 
 his disciple, the central truth of Christianity, 
 upon which as possessed by persons Jesus pur- 
 posed to build his Church, had come as an in- 
 Avard divine revelation and conviction to Peter : 
 into the heart of the Rock Apostle the Divine 
 Father whispered the secret of his Son's nature 
 and person. 
 
 This self-revelation of God is no peculiar 
 
 '*Matt. xvi. 17. 
 
And His Apostles 19 
 
 privilege of apostle or prophet : rather apostles 
 and prophets, being heirs of the heritage in an 
 eminent degree and the earliest recipients of 
 the experience, have made the initial and nor- 
 mative record in the New Testament which the 
 experience of later Christians reproduces ever 
 new and powerful in heart and life.^^ ''Eye 
 hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have en- 
 tered into the heart of man, the things which 
 God hath prepared for them that love him. 
 But God hath revealed them unto us by his 
 Spirit, for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea 
 the deep things of God/'^^ That spiritual dis- 
 cernment of the deep things of God can come 
 only by divine self-manifestation is clear, "For 
 what man knoweth the things of a man save 
 
 '^ "The Bible itself is an expression of experience. 
 If this experience had not continued, the Bible would 
 have become only the record of an ancient and forgotten 
 life, powerless to preserve Christianity In the world." — 
 Dr.W. N. Clarke, "Outline of Christian Theology," p. 18. 
 
 " I Cor. ii. 9, 10. 
 
20 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 the spirit of man which is in him ? Even so the 
 things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit 
 of God."^^ Hence the spiritual man judges all 
 these things, while he himself is rightly not 
 amenable to the judgment of those who know 
 them not. John Locke tells us the story of the 
 man blind from birth to whom "red" seemed 
 like the sound of a trumpet. Destitute of the 
 sense of sight he must express himself in the 
 language of hearing: so foreign is the lan- 
 guage of heaven to the strangers of earth. 
 Even the Christ of history is one with the 
 Christ of experience, the latter carrying us in 
 our personal consciousness to the Divine Per- 
 son and redemptive power of the former, since 
 no man can say that Jesus is the Christ but by 
 the Holy Ghost. Every Sunday the Chris- 
 tian presbyter dismisses the congregation of 
 Christ's people with a challenge to the present 
 reality of a living experience springing from 
 
 "i Cor. ii. II. 
 
And His Apostles 21 
 
 the Persons of the Trinity themselves : *'The 
 grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love 
 of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, 
 be with you all."^^ Is it true, or is it not? If 
 it is true, Father, Son, and Comforter, accord- 
 ing to the promise of Jesus Christ, reside in 
 every Christian breast; the high and lofty in- 
 habitant of eternity, according to the older He- 
 brew conception, dwells with him that is of a 
 humble and contrite spirit. 
 
 Thus it is evident that our ordinary doctrine 
 of the witness of the Spirit is too narrow. The 
 Spirit witnesses not only to personal accept- 
 ance and the forgiveness of sins and the adop- 
 tion of sons, but also to the fundamental re- 
 alities of the Christian religion, — the love of 
 the Father, the mediation of the Son, his own 
 indwelling and illumination, — which are bound 
 up with forgiveness as one whole. It is in this 
 point of view that it becomes evident in what 
 
 ^'2 Cor. xiii. 14. 
 
22 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 sense the ''forgiveness of sins" is the heart of 
 Christianity as a personal experience and may 
 be taken, as it sometimes is, as the whole of 
 the gospel. 
 
 Unitarianism appears a simplification of 
 Christianity and an elimination of Trinitarian 
 mysteries. As such, it should contribute 
 mightily to the universal extension of the gos- 
 pel. But history belies this expectation. It is 
 agreed by the freest and most rationalistic his- 
 torians of dogma and of the Church that the 
 triumph of Arianism in the fourth century 
 would have been the extinction of Christianity ; 
 Socinianism exhibited no fructifying power; 
 and modern Unitarianism is a corpse of theo- 
 logical thought so dead that it savors of disre- 
 spect to kick it. "Everything on which Atha- 
 nasius staked his life," says Harnack, "is de- 
 scribed in the one sentence, God himself has 
 entered into humanity/' Have we not here the 
 secret of the universal failure of the Unitarian 
 conception of Christianity? If God did not 
 
And His Apostles 23 
 
 draw nigh to man in Jesus Christ, the raison 
 d'etre of Christianity is canceled, and the Chris- 
 tian spirit rejects the Unitarian scherne as van- 
 ity and Hes. It is an interpretation of the gos- 
 pel which annihilates it. So then we conclude 
 that Christianity is religion, — the religion of 
 the communion of man with God, the God who 
 is Father, Son, and Spirit. 
 
 The second virtue of this definition is that 
 It traces the Christian religion to its ultimate 
 source in the love of God. Any conception of 
 religion or any interpretation of the gospel 
 that is untrue to the original, essential, un- 
 changeable love of God will be cast out as false 
 by the Christian conscience. That "God is 
 love" is the deepest truth of the divine self- 
 manifestation in his Son, in that Son's apostles, 
 and in the hearts of all their followers. This 
 love is the only hope of sinners and the only 
 shelter of humanity. It is of the eternal nature 
 of God, unproduced, underived : lest we should 
 overlook it, twice within the limits of a brief 
 
24 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 epistle the Apostle John tells us that "God is 
 love."^* That the holiness of God involves 
 also the necessary condemnation of sin may 
 have led some to preach as if the text read, 
 "God gave his only-begotten Son that he might 
 love the world"; but there is no sentiment in 
 the New Testament even distantly akin to this. 
 The atonement is born of the divine love; not 
 the divine love of the atonement. The new- 
 born babe lying upon its mother's breast is the 
 most helpless and dependent of earth's crea- 
 tures. If the mother love could be transformed 
 into malignity, the babe's future would be hope- 
 less: indeed, instant destruction would be in- 
 evitable; it must perish. Likewise, if God 
 could become the enemy of man and array him- 
 self against his child, there could be no deliv- 
 erance for the helpless and sinful race. 
 
 But this love is recognized as redeeming 
 love. It brings deliverance through the death 
 
 ="^1 John iv. 8, i6. 
 
And His Apostles 25 
 
 of Christ from the retributive wrath of a holy 
 God and the merited penalty of sin.^^ Christ 
 himself is redemption (^dnoXvtpoaig).^^ This 
 love of God, therefore, is directed not to angels, 
 but to men ; not to sinless, but to sinful, beings. 
 It is active, outgoing, seeking, transitive. It 
 removes obstacles. It comes in the person of 
 Jesus Christ to seek and to save the lost. It 
 pays a price for its own satisfaction. It is 
 based on the infinite preciousness of its object 
 to the heart of God, apart from moral desert. 
 The human soul, even in sin, is a treasure 
 whose possession God himself desires and is 
 willing to purchase at a great price. "A doc- 
 trine of atonement," well says Dr. James Den- 
 ney, "is a doctrine of the cost of forgiveness to 
 God." A cheap forgiveness is a kind of moral 
 horror, for it can only mean that sin, so terrible 
 to man, is nothing to God. This undeserved, 
 seeking, saving love directed to the unworthy 
 
 '^Rom. iii. 24; Eph. i. 7; Col. i. 14. 
 '®i Cor. i. 30. 
 
26 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 and the outcast is the deepest lesson of the par- 
 able of the Lost Son^^ — that crown of all our 
 Lord's parabolic sayings. Whatever may be 
 involved in the transition from a probationary 
 to a punitive state, from the temporal to the 
 eternal world of fixed results, there is no rea- 
 son to question that the gospel represents this 
 love as following the vilest into the depths and 
 to the lowermost limit of possible recovery. 
 
 The primary redemptive movement of the 
 divine love manifests itself in the Incarnation. 
 Here lies the heart of the question in our day 
 about the nature of Christianity. The dignity, 
 the beauty, the purity, the intellectual original- 
 ity and force, the spiritual insight and genius, 
 even the moral uniqueness and sinlessness, of 
 Jesus are freely, nay gladly, recognized. All 
 that realm, the Galilean has conquered. On 
 this plane there seems the opportunity of recon- 
 ciliation of the religion of Christendom with 
 
 "Luke XV. 11-32. 
 
And His Apostles 27 
 
 the science of Christendom, preparatory to the 
 universalizing of Christianity. If the reahty 
 of the Incarnation be surrendered, for theology 
 itself, as well as general knowledge and com- 
 mon intelligence, there seems to be great relief : 
 all the puzzles of the dual nature of the Incar- 
 nate Person, all the mysteries of the Trinitarian 
 existence of the Godhead, are eliminated at 
 one stroke; and Jesus, as the fairest flower of 
 humanity, diffuses his fragrance throughout 
 the world. It is a tempting suggestion. If 
 Christ and Christianity can be reduced within 
 the limits of the human, amalgamation with all 
 else that is human, — science, ethics, social re- 
 form, political advance, — immediately follows. 
 Moreover in many minds, — let it be frankly 
 acknowdedged, — the suggestion is not born of 
 the spirit of compromise, but of dire necessity. 
 The modern mind is really for Christianity — 
 without miracle and without dogma ;-^ but so- 
 
 ^ Such is the contention of Mr. Matthew Arnold in 
 his ''Literature and Dogma." How attenuated Chris- 
 
28 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 phisticated by the conception of the universahty 
 and uniformity of law, by the reign of causal- 
 ity, and by the brilliant generalization that 
 most men have agreed to style evolution, with- 
 out raising further hard questions, it revolts 
 fundamentally and almost instinctively at the 
 notion of Incarnation — the living of the life of 
 God within the limits of the life of even the 
 wisest, purest, and most Godlike man. It is, 
 therefore, not so much a proposal of compro- 
 mise and surrender, a price to be paid for the 
 allegiance of aliens, as it is a condition and de- 
 mand created by the modern spirit, without 
 which it seems to find itself unable to enter 
 upon the path of religion. As such, we may 
 sympathize with it. 
 
 tianity becomes in the hands of this apostle of culture 
 I need not stay to point out : in the hands of others 
 (positivists, pantheists, agnostics, secularists) the thin 
 thread of "the Power not ourselves that makes for 
 righteousness" breaks in twain, and both ends, — the 
 "Power not ourselves" and the "righteousness" for our- 
 selves, — are flung away. 
 
And His Apostles 29 
 
 But let us reflect. Christianity without the 
 Incarnation ceases to be religion. It surrenders 
 its distinction. Jesus, however unique in the 
 ethical realm, is no more a bond and mediator 
 between God and man than Socrates, with 
 whom he has been so often compared. Har- 
 nack more than intimates that the discourse 
 of Jesus, as set forth in Mark, Matthew, and 
 Luke, was exclusively of the Father and never 
 of himself. But this is a mistake: and the 
 Ritschlians generally have been obliged to 
 assign to Jesus the "value" of God. Here 
 Loisy joins the issue most effectively with 
 Harnack, and I very cordially side wuth the 
 Catholic against the Lutheran. Whatever may 
 or may not have been the apocalyptic elements 
 that entered into Jesus' total conception of the 
 Kingdom of God, in the Sermon on the Mount 
 itself his own lordship in the Kingdom is di- 
 rectly coupled with the rewards of obedience 
 to the Father's will: "Not every one that 
 saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into 
 
30 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth 
 the will of my Father which is in heaven. 
 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, 
 have we not prophesied in thy name? and in 
 thy name have cast out devils? and in thy 
 name done many w^onderful works? And then 
 will / profess unto them, / never knew you: 
 depart from me, ye that work iniquity. "^^ And 
 the great and decisive passage in Matthew and 
 Luke is an indisputable and integral element of 
 the synoptical tradition : *'A11 things are deliv- 
 ered unto me of my Father, and no man know- 
 eth the Son but the Father: neither knoweth 
 any man the Father save the Son, and he to 
 whomsoever the Son will reveal him."^^ Upon 
 this knowledge and power Jesus bases his direct 
 invitation to the world to come (not to the 
 Father but) to himself: ''Come unto me all ye 
 that labor and are heavy laden, and / will give 
 you rest. Take my yoke upon yon, and learn 
 
 '*Matt. vii. 21-23. 
 
 '° Matt. xi. 27 ; Luke x. 22. 
 
And His Apostles 31 
 
 of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart : and 
 ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke 
 is easy, and my burden is light."^^ 
 
 This conclusion is not merely theoretical. 
 As has been intimated, it has the widest con- 
 firmation of history, and, it may be added, of 
 Christian experience. Every form and species 
 of Unitarianism is felt to deprive Christianity 
 of its worth and, as religion, is doomed. Christ 
 has a divine place in his religion or (essential- 
 ly) he has none. Unitarianism may be compre- 
 hensible; it may be acceptable to the scientific 
 spirit; as a simplification it may seem the bet- 
 ter adapted to diffusion; we may even forgive 
 the tortuous exegesis of professional theolo- 
 gians like Wendt,^^ George Holley Gilbert,^^ 
 and others who, in this interest, would exclude 
 the preexistence from the sayings of Jesus re- 
 
 "Matt. xi. 28-30. 
 
 *' "Teaching of Jesus," II. 168-178. 
 
 ^ In his "Revelation of Jesus." 
 
32 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 corded in the Gospel of John, or, what amounts 
 to the same thing, reduce it to a purely ideal 
 significance; but, when the last concession is 
 made, the witness of the New Testament, of 
 the Christian consciousness, and of history is 
 uniform that without a Divine Christ his re- 
 ligion is powerless and dead. It might sur- 
 vive as ethics or as a programme of social 
 progress; but the satisfaction of the scientific 
 demand, thus conceived, is the denial of the re- 
 ligious need; and Christianity is asked to sur- 
 vive by a sacrifice that involves its death. 
 
 That the redeeming love should come to man 
 by way of the Cross is to-day, as from the be- 
 ginning, another stone of stumbling. Theo- 
 logically, it is thought to be inconsistent with 
 the basal fact of the divine love on which I 
 have insisted as the ultimate source of the 
 Christian religion ; ethically, it is thought to in- 
 volve a contradiction of our primary intuitions. 
 Historically, it is sometimes hinted that the 
 doctrine of Atonement is not older than An- 
 
And His Apostles 33 
 
 selm,^^ and owes much of its Protestant cur- 
 rency to Grotius;^'^ or that, so far as PauHne, 
 it is only a juridical reflection of Roman law in 
 the Christian firmament. 
 
 Once more I may appeal to the New Testa- 
 ment, to Christian consciousness, and to his- 
 tory that a connection between the death of 
 Christ and the forgiveness of sins is primitive 
 and constant in the Christian religion. It is 
 directly traceable to the lips of Jesus in the 
 two great sayings of the Synoptical Gospels : 
 ''The Son of man came not to be ministered 
 unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ran- 
 som for many {^ovvac ryjv '^vxvjv avrov ?iV- 
 rpov dvrl nolXojv) ,"^^ and 'This is my blood 
 of the covenant which is shed for many unto 
 
 ^*''Ciir Deus Homo?" finished at Capua in 1098. 
 
 ^' "Defense of the Catholic Faith Concerning the 
 Satisfaction of Christ Against Socinus," published in 
 1617. 
 
 "® IMark x. 45 ; Matt. xx. 28 : "to liberate many from 
 the misery and penalty of their sins," Thayer, sub voce. 
 
 3 
 
34 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 remission of sins (efg a^eOuv aiiapTiCyv).''^ 
 When we descend to the apostoHc circles we 
 find the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 John, and Paul all committed to the use of the 
 great words, IXdoxsaOaL, t/lacr^og', iT^aarripiOv : 
 "Wherefore it behoved him in all things to be 
 made like unto his brethren, that he might be a 
 merciful and faithful high priest in things per- 
 taining to God to make propitiation for the sins 
 of the people ( eig to IXdaxeGOai rag aiiaprtag 
 tov Xaov)'' f^ "And he is the propitiation for 
 our sins ([Xacr^og ianv nepl tc^v ay.apt lidv 
 n[i(^v) ; and not for ours only, but also for 
 the whole world (jtepl oXov tov xoa^iov)'' f^ 
 "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but 
 that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the pro- 
 pitiation for our sins ( xal dnearsLXEv rov vlov 
 avtov LAaa^ov nept rcdv a^aajDrtcoz^ n[iG}v) ; 
 "Whom God set forth to be a propitiation, 
 
 ^^Matt. xxvi. 28. 
 
 "'Heb. ii. 17. ''i John ii. 2. '"i John iv. 10. 
 
And His Apostles 35 
 
 through faith, by his blood ( ov npoeOsto 6 Beog 
 IXaaryjptov Slol TclcytEog iv rco avrov al^att), 
 to show his righteousness because of the pass- 
 ing over of the sins done aforetime, in the for- 
 bearance of God."^^ Thus on the widest in- 
 duction of the several classes of the apos- 
 tolic literature of the New Testament, we find 
 a threefold witness to the reality of atone- 
 ment by propitiatory sacrifice in the death of 
 Christ. 
 
 That the demand for atonement is consist- 
 ent with the love of God is manifest when we 
 regard the holy element in that love; and that 
 the divine love provides the atonement is ex- 
 pressly declared. "Herein is love," to quote 
 once more a pivotal passage, ''not that we loved 
 God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son the 
 
 ^^ Rom. iii. 25 : See Sanday's full discussion of this 
 passage, "It is impossible to get rid, from this passage, 
 of the double idea (i) of a sacrifice, (2) of a sacrifice 
 which is propitiatory." — Com. on Romans, in Interna- 
 tional Critical Commentary. 
 
36 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 propitiation for our sins." And Paul declares, 
 *'God commendeth his own love toward us, in 
 that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died 
 for us.""^- It is clear that there was no antece- 
 dent indisposition in this divine love to forgive, 
 else it could not have freely provided the nec- 
 essary means to forgiveness. It is clear that 
 the divine holiness interposed an obstacle to 
 forgiveness, else the propitiatory sacrifice had 
 been unnecessary.'^^ The atonement is thus at 
 once the propitiation for sins and the measure- 
 less revelation of the forgiving love of God. 
 More than twenty years ago I printed an ex- 
 
 ^'Rom. V. 8. 
 
 ^^ "The obstacle to forgiveness," says Dr. Stevens, 
 ''lies not in God's feelings, but in his essential right- 
 eousness, which so conditions his grace that without its 
 satisfaction he cannot in self-consistency forgive. In 
 the heathen view expiation renders the gods willing to 
 forgive ; in the biblical view expiation enables God, 
 consistently with his holiness, actually to do what he 
 never was unwilling to do." 
 
And His Apostles 37 
 
 position of the doctrine of atonement"*"^ which 
 enters into details and combats objections. I 
 have no disposition so much as to look into 
 that earlier piece of work just now; though 
 I abide by its conclusions and the grounds of 
 them. It is enough to say, in this connection, 
 that, as of the essence of Christianity, the 
 atonement presents tw^o aspects — toward God 
 and for man. Toward God it is propitiatory; 
 for man it is vicarious. Jesus in his death is 
 man's substitute before God and the author 
 of salvation by the remission of sins. The 
 Scriptures have nothing to say, indeed, of com- 
 mercial equivalence in penalty, an uncondi- 
 tional exchange of so much for so much which 
 is utterly foreign to the moral realm, nor of 
 that other impossible human theory of ethical 
 transfer of character. But rob the atonement 
 of its propitiatory and vicarious character, and 
 you degrade it to the level merely of a moral 
 
 ^"Methodist Doctrine of Atonement," in the Meth- 
 odist Quarterly Review (New York) for April, 1884. 
 
3^ The Christianity of Christ 
 
 spectacle, — which, indeed, it is, subHmely ap- 
 peahng and moving, — or of a governmental 
 expedient, — which subordinately and conse- 
 quentially it may be; but neither the moral 
 spectacle nor the governmental expedient an- 
 swers to the full and deep representation of the 
 New Testament concerning the ground and de- 
 mand and provision of atonement in God him- 
 self; nor is any view that omits the propitiatory 
 and vicarious elements able to inake the guilty 
 conscience clean.*^ 
 
 The Spirit answers to the blood, 
 And tells me I am born o£ God. 
 
 That the earliest theme of apostolic preach- 
 ing, b}^ Peter'^'^ no less than by Paul,*^ was Jesus 
 
 *^ Perhaps the best of our recent treatises on the sub- 
 ject is Dr. James Denney's "The Death of Christ." Dr. 
 Bernhard Weiss in his just now (1905) published "Re- 
 ligion of the New Testament" has some exceedingly- 
 valuable expositions of the pertinent scriptures. 
 
 *"Acts ii 24-36; HI. 15, 21; iv. 2. 
 
 "'Acts xiii. 30-37; xvii. 18: "because he preached 
 Jesus and the resurrection." 
 
And His Apostles 39 
 
 and the resurrection does not admit of doubt. 
 The resurrection was the tremendous event 
 that reestablished the faith of the apostles and 
 disciples, and clearly became the most vivid 
 and the overshadowing and dominant fact in 
 the consciousness of the Apostolic Church. It 
 was a physical resurrection. The empty grave 
 alone might not establish this fact; but the 
 documents are uniform in placing the stress on 
 the evidence of the senses and indisputable 
 tests of bodily existence and sensible experi- 
 ence — such as eating and drinking, and the 
 correction or corroboration of sight by touch. 
 "Him God raised up the third day," is Peter's 
 summary in the Acts of the experiences of the 
 disciples with their Risen Lord, ''and showed 
 him openly, not to all the people, but unto wit- 
 nesses chosen before of God, even to us Vv^ho 
 did eat and drink with him after he rose from 
 the dead."'*^ In the earliest summary of the 
 
 ^Acts X. 40, 41. 
 
/fO 7 lie Christianity of Christ 
 
 evidence by Paul, "he was seen of Cephas, then 
 of the tweh'e ; after that, he was seen of above 
 five hundred brethren at once, of whom the 
 greater part remain unto this present, but some 
 are fallen asleep; after that, he w^as seen of 
 James, then of all the apostles; and last of all 
 he w^as seen of me also, as of one born out of 
 due time.""^^ The details of the gospel narra- 
 tives amply confirm these Petrine and Pauline 
 summaries. "Jesus saith unto them, Come 
 and dine. . . . Jesus then cometh and 
 taketh bread and giveth them, and fish like- 
 wise. ... So when they had dined, Jesus 
 saith to Simon Peter,"^^ etc. "And they gave 
 him a piece of a broiled iish and of an honey- 
 comb, and he took it, and did eat before 
 them."^^ "Behold my hands and my feet, that 
 it is I myself: handle me and see; for a spirit 
 hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.''^^ 
 "Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy 
 
 "'i Cor. XV. 5-8. ^"John xxi. 12-15. 
 "Luke xxiv. 42, 43. "Lnke xxiv. 39. 
 
And His Apostles 41 
 
 finger, and behold my hands ; and reach hither 
 thy hand and thrust it into my side: and be 
 not faithless, but believing."^^ And yet Jesus' 
 own commendation is upon a mightier demon- 
 stration than that of sense, ''Blessed are 
 they that have not seen, and yet have be- 
 lieved."^^ 
 
 To this history must be added prophecy — on 
 the lips of Jesus himself. These prophecies 
 were of the obscurer as well as the plainer kind, 
 and on that account possess with many critical 
 minds the greater weight. ''Destroy this tem- 
 ple, and in three days I will raise it up"^^ is a 
 sentence that (historical criticism warrants us 
 in saying) undoubtedly fell from the lips of 
 
 ^^John XX, 27. ^^John xx. 29. 
 
 ^°John ii. 19; cf. Matt. xxvi. 61; xxvii. 40; Mark 
 xiv. 58; XV. 29, 30. John records the saying in the 
 course of his history, but makes no mention of its use 
 at the trial of Jesus ; while Mark and Matthew have no 
 record of Jesus' use of the saying, but both mention its 
 production as proof of blasphemy at the ecclesiastical 
 trial of our Lord. 
 
The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Jesus. ''As Jonah was three days and three 
 nights in the whale's belly ; so shall the Son of 
 man be three days and three nights in the heart 
 of the earth,"^^ is an equally indisputable say- 
 ing in which a definitely limited but other- 
 wise wholly indefinite interment, with no men- 
 tion of either death or resurrection, is dwelt 
 upon. 
 
 St. Paul long since set forth the conse- 
 quences of the denial of the resurrection of 
 Jesus. "Now if Christ be preached that he 
 rose from the dead, how say some among you 
 that there is no resurrection of the dead ? But 
 if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is 
 not Christ risen. And if Christ be not risen, 
 then is our preaching vain, and your faith is 
 also vain. Yea, and we are found false wit- 
 nesses of God ; because we have testified of God 
 that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not 
 up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the 
 
 'Matt. xii. 40. 
 
And His Apostles 43 
 
 dead rise not, then is not Christ raised; and, if 
 Christ be not raised, your faith is vain ; ye are 
 yet in your sins. Then they also which are 
 fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this 
 life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all 
 men most miserable. But now is Christ risen 
 from the dead, and become the first fruits of 
 them that slept. "^^ These consequences follow 
 as certainly to-day as when the apostle wrote. 
 The resurrection gave life to Christianity; it 
 sustains the life of the Church now; without 
 it the religion of Jesus must perish. 
 
 Historically, as we have seen, the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus is sufficiently attested. Even 
 Keim, with all his indisposition to transcend 
 the limits of historical and natural science as 
 he conceives them, is obliged to conclude that, 
 though "history can take cognizance only of the 
 faith of the disciples that the Master was risen, 
 and of the marvelous effect of this faith in the 
 
 ^'i Cor. XV. 12-20. 
 
44 T-he Christianity of Christ 
 
 establishment of Christianity"; yet ''in order 
 to account for this faith of the disciples and its 
 effect in conquering and renovating the world, 
 we must suppose, contrary to the natural order 
 to which science is confined, that God did not 
 let what he had ordained end in death, or hand 
 over the resurrection of Jesus to the uncertain 
 play of subjective visions."^® With his extra- 
 natural and extra-scientific explanations we 
 need not concern ourselves ; the facts are much 
 more naturally accounted for by the physical 
 resurrection. The tendencies to its denial even 
 among some theologians of our day are the re- 
 sult of the pressure of the modern spirit. But, 
 if in Jesus God became incarnate, the resurrec- 
 tion and ascension become his natural, if not 
 necessary, exit from the earthly sphere, and 
 this pressure is misdirected. The resurrec- 
 tion is the direct continuation of the line which 
 marks the character and activities of Jesus. 
 
 '"'Jesus of Nazareth," VI. 360-362. 
 
Aiul His Apostles 45 
 
 As an historical religion, therefore, Christian- 
 ity includes this fact in its foundations. It is 
 as the living and glorified Head of his Church 
 that Jesus perpetuates his work. By one Spirit, 
 proceeding from the Father and from the Son, 
 are we all baptized into one Body. Sever the 
 Head from the Body and the Body dies. The 
 Church lives through her living Head, "who 
 ever lives to make intercession for us." 
 
 For a moment, I may review the course 
 along which we have come. Christianity is re- 
 ligion, — communion wijth God mediated by 
 Jesus Christ and sustained by his Spirit ; it has 
 its source in the freely bestowed and freely 
 bestowing love of God ; which, in turn, is a re- 
 deeming activity exerted toward sinners, mani- 
 fested in and measured by the Incarnation, the 
 Atonement, and the Resurrection of Jesus 
 Christ. So far the Gospel centers in the Per- 
 son of Jesus, and what he was and did is more 
 than what he taught beyond this sphere, all his 
 ethics having their spring here both for him 
 
4^ The Christianity of Christ 
 
 and for his disciples to the end of time. "Oth- 
 er foundation can no man lay than that is laid, 
 which is Jesus Christ. ''^^ It is a divinely laid 
 foundation in the birth, the death, and the 
 resurrection of Jesus Christ, to which no hu- 
 man master builder can add, and from which 
 he cannot take away. It is a real and objective 
 foundation, unchangeable with the unchange- 
 ableness of God, beyond the reach of Churches, 
 councils, and theologians. The essentials of 
 the Christian religion are embodied in its 
 Founder. The attempt to remove any of them 
 is to dismember Him.^^ 
 
 ^^i Cor. iii. ii. 
 
 ^ On the great passage in i Cor, iii. ii, Meyer cor- 
 rectly and decisively remarks : ''The foundation already 
 lying there, however, is not that which Paul had laid 
 (as most interpreters, resting on verse lo; including dc 
 Wette, Neander, Maier, Hofmann) •; for his affirmation 
 is universal, and if no one can lay another foundation 
 than that which lies already there, Paul, of course, 
 could not do so either, and therefore the keiuevoq must 
 have been m its place before the apostle himself laid 
 
And His Apostles 47 
 
 We may now pass to Jesus' life work as a 
 Teacher and the Founder of the Kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 In a sense, we are now turning from the his- 
 torical and the spiritual to present, practical, 
 and concrete Christianity. We turn to the 
 teaching of Jesus concerning the law of love as 
 
 his foundation. Hence the Kel/nevoc ds/xOuog is that laid 
 by God (so, rightly, Riickert and Olshausen), namely, 
 Jesus Christ himself, the fundamentum essentiale, he 
 whom God sent, delivered up to death, raised again, 
 and exalted, thereby making him to be for us wisdom 
 and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. 
 . . . This is the objective foundation, which lies there 
 for the whole of Christendom. But this foundation is 
 laid (v. lo) by the founder of a Church [as Paul], 
 inasmuch as he makes Christ to be appropriated by 
 believers, to be the contents of their conscious faith, 
 and thereby establishes them in the character of a 
 Christian Church." — H. A. W. Meyer, Commentary on 
 First Corinthians in loco. Cf. Beet : "Christ is the 
 foundation of the Church, objectively; inasmuch as 
 upon his death and resurrection rest his people's faith 
 and hope. He is so subjectively by his presence in them. 
 
48 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 the law of life, — a teaching which is the direct 
 consequence of the revelation of the love and 
 Fatherhood of God. It is not necessary to es- 
 tablish here by a critical inquiry the exact na- 
 ture of the Kingdom of God.^^ The literature 
 of the subject is voluminous and instructive, 
 and is still increasing. Jesus clearly regarded 
 himself both as the Founder of the Kingdom 
 and as King within it. The Old Testament 
 dispensation is preparatory, and even John 
 the Baptist is external to the Kingdom. ^^ 
 The Kingdom is, in general, the reign of 
 God through his Son in holy love over the 
 hearts and lives of men who accept the law of 
 
 The rock on which we stand is both beneath our feet 
 and within our hearts. This foundation, laid objectively 
 for the whole Church on the Great Facts, was laid 
 subjectivel}' in the hearts of the Christians at Corinth, 
 as the firm ground of their personal hopes, by Paul." — 
 Commentary on First Corinthians. 
 
 ^^See Bruce ; and Orr, in Hastings's "Dictionary of 
 the Bible." 
 
 ''':Matt. xi. II. 
 
And His Apostles 49 
 
 supreme love to him and of universal love to 
 their kind. 'The Kingdom of God is not 
 meat and drink, but righteousness and 
 peace and joy in the Holy Ghost," is the 
 final conception and deposit in the Chris- 
 tian consciousness as reflected in the Pauline 
 Epistles. The Church, though falling far short 
 of the ideal, may, for our present purpose, be 
 accepted as its organized and visible form. It 
 is one : its marks are the congregation of faith- 
 ful men, the preaching of the pure word of 
 God, and the two sacraments of Baptism and 
 the Lord's Supper. All the Churches, — if we 
 accept the superficial plural, — contribute to the 
 Kingdom and belong to it; and yet it is more 
 than the sum of all the Churches. The redeem- 
 ing activities which, humanly speaking, ema- 
 nate from the Kingdom fall upon all men as 
 potential sons of God and citizens of his realm. 
 The divine administration as directed toward 
 wicked and rebellious children, — who are still 
 children in the divine regard, — is for their 
 4 
 
50 Tlic Cliristianity of Christ 
 
 reclamation and salvation. Jesus laid down 
 the golden rule and the law of love as the neces- 
 sary legislation of the Kingdom ; and St. John 
 adds to his declaration of the divine love 
 (''Herein is love, not that we loved God, but 
 that he loved us, and sent his Son the pro- 
 pitiation for our sins") the deduced injunc- 
 tion, ''Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought 
 also to love one another."^^ More briefly: 
 "We love, because he first loved us."^^ The 
 motive of the love we ought to bear one 
 another is not found in the worthiness of 
 the object, even as this is not the source and 
 spring of the divine love ; but in the undeserved 
 goodness of God in the gift of his Son for 
 us and for all men, notwithstanding their 
 and our unworthiness. Once more the vital 
 place and practical value of the Incarnation in 
 Christianity become apparent. ]\ioreover, the 
 Fatherhood of God is the original truth, from 
 
 "'r John iv. to, tt. '^''i John iv. 19, 7^. ['. 
 
And His Apostles 51 
 
 which is derived the brotherhood of man; a 
 brotherhood estabHshed through the relation 
 of the children to a common Father. And 
 what is the world, both within and with- 
 out the Church, more in need of to-day than 
 the reduction of the law of love to practice 
 and the everyday and matter-of-course rec- 
 ognition of the brotherhood of men? Let us 
 notice some applications of the law of the 
 Kingdom. 
 
 There is the urgent problem of capital and 
 labor. Are not the basal laws of political econ- 
 omy confessedly the expression and outgrowth 
 and, when consciously followed, the organiza- 
 tion of the principle of self-interest, which, on 
 the merely human plane, is regarded as legiti- 
 mately and necessarily controlling? Under the 
 law^ of supply and demand, does not the capi- 
 talist go into the open market to buy labor as 
 he goes to buy material ? Does he not seek to 
 purchase flesh and blood on the same terms and 
 according to the same conditions on which he 
 
52 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 purchases lumber or bricks or stone ? I am not 
 asking, Is he cruel in his feelings or purposes ? 
 In the view of economics, simply, Is not the 
 price of labor regulated as a matter of course 
 by the law of supply and demand ? Is the num- 
 ber of the children in the workman's family, 
 or only the number of other workmen clam- 
 orous to do the given work for the same or 
 lower wages, the decisive element in estimating 
 compensation for labor? On the other hand. 
 Does the workmen's union consider the human 
 suffering entailed by the prolonged and general 
 strike, or only its effect on the advancement of 
 wages? I need not tarry to give formal an- 
 swers to such a list of questions. It is clear 
 that if the antagonisms of capital and labor are 
 ever to be permanently reconciled, it must be 
 through the bringing in of a higher law than 
 that which rules the commercial world. The 
 economic world cannot be divorced from the 
 Christian. In a word, the reconciliation must 
 come because both capitalist and laborer are 
 
And His Apostles 53 
 
 made members of the Kingdom of God and ob- 
 serve the law of the brotherhood. Nothing else 
 can regulate human greed, on the one hand, or 
 human envy and withholding of that which is 
 meet, on the other. The Kingdom of God is 
 not sociological in the ordinary sense; but it 
 brings in the law and the better hope of an- 
 other society of which Jesus Christ Is the Head, 
 and this law becomes effective as the individual 
 capitalist or laborer becomes a citizen of the 
 Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is not of this 
 world because Its law transcends and trans- 
 forms the laws of human society; but it is of 
 this world by the very function and fact of 
 this transformation. Economics and sociology, 
 pure and simple, need a supplement which Is 
 supplied by the law of love in the Kingdom of 
 God. If It be objected that such a supplement 
 is commercially chimerical and Impossible, — 
 after the manner of the usual coarse and blind 
 criticisms on the precepts of the Sermon on the 
 Alount, — the answer is at hand. If the law of 
 
54 ^^he Christianity of Christ 
 
 love is not thus capable of practical and general 
 introduction into the affairs of men, then Jesus 
 was a mistaken enthusiast in his announcement 
 of this supreme and universal demand, and the 
 Kingdom of God is a city in cloudland. But, 
 to my mind, the correct reading of the Gospel 
 of Jesus Christ gives every man the most prac- 
 tical measure of his Christianity, and the most 
 legible warrant of his citizenship in the King- 
 dom, in the degree of the operation of the law 
 of love in his life.^^ 
 
 A favorite specific prescribed by the social 
 reformers is the shortening of the hours of 
 labor. Shorten them by all means. If seven 
 or eight hours of manual labor a day will sus- 
 tain the laborer's family at its present stage of 
 comfort at least, society or commerce ought 
 not to exact ten. But some reformers seem to 
 have been sadly disappointed that the emanci- 
 pated laborer does not always devote his two 
 
 '■'See Dr. C. A. Briggs's "The Ethical Teaching of 
 Jesus." 
 
And His Apostles 55 
 
 or three hours of leisure to the reading of good 
 books in the *'hbrary" which he is supposed to 
 have made haste to accumulate, or to his gen- 
 eral moral and religious improvement. Though 
 the notions of such men as Bishop Potter con- 
 cerning the necessary functions of the saloon 
 as the "poor man's club" fall but little short of 
 outright diabolism, it is nevertheless true that 
 thousands of workmen with their shortened 
 time will employ their newly acquired leisure 
 over their beer-mug and pipe rather than over 
 books and religious newspapers. 
 
 Let these shortened hours stand as repre- 
 sentative of all else that it is proposed to give 
 the laborer — better wages, better houses, better 
 food. Let it be granted at once that these im- 
 proved conditions will give many a man a 
 chance for his life — his intellectual and spirit- 
 ual life as well as his physical. Let it be 
 ofranted that Christians owe it to their Lord 
 and to themselves, as well as to the underpaid 
 laborer and the "submerged tenth," to afford 
 
5^ The Christianity of Christ 
 
 these better conditions. There is no question, 
 indeed, of the duty of the Church and of so- 
 ciety. But, to save unthinking sociological en- 
 thusiasm from sore disappointment, it may be 
 asked. In the light of experience and our knowl- 
 edge of human nature, what results are to be 
 reasonably expected from these changes? Are 
 the social reformers preaching a sane, sober, 
 true, whole gospel when they lead us to antici- 
 pate the general redemption of society through 
 the adoption of these measures ? 
 
 All of these changes may be summed up in 
 the ambitious language of the books on sociol- 
 ogy as "transformation of environment." By 
 a transformed environment it is thought that 
 society may be regenerated en masse. I fear 
 not. On Fifth Avenue the increased income 
 and leisure lead often only to the substitution 
 of the bottle of champagne for the bottle of 
 beer; of the grand ballroom of the very rich for 
 the low dance-hall of the very poor; of gilded 
 and elegant lust, which reaches its end if need 
 
And His Apostles 57 
 
 be through the divorce court, for the foul de- 
 bauchery of the dive and the slum. The gospel 
 of regeneration through a new environment, — 
 unless the new environment is wide enough to 
 include the Kingdom of God and all its saving 
 forces, — is evidently a defective and misleading, 
 — I do not say false, — gospel. A transformed 
 environment is often needed for both the very 
 rich and the very poor to prepare the way for 
 the Gospel of Christ. Jesus probably thought 
 it more necessary for the former than for the 
 latter. But, in either case, he who thinks that 
 a change of environment secures a change of 
 heart is vastly mistaken. At the extremes of 
 society we have two environments which, with 
 the exception that the men and women who 
 move in them are human beings, have scarcely 
 an element in common. Yet it might be a very 
 nice question which of these extremes stands 
 most in need of the redemption provided in 
 Christ. The lusts of human nature are com- 
 mon to both wings, and differ only in the de- 
 
58 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 cency and scale of their gratification. As inti- 
 mated above, Jesus doubtless thought the case 
 of the rich sinner more desperate than that of 
 the poor. Let the Christian sociologist go be- 
 fore as the John the Baptist of the Gospel of 
 Jesus the Christ. Particularly, let both wings 
 of society be reached by enlisting the very rich 
 in the service of the very poor. Let us not be 
 discouraged if numbers of the very rich refuse 
 to be enlisted, and if numbers of the very poor 
 refuse to be helped. No problem is more deli- 
 cate and difficult than that of helping the help- 
 less, whether rich or poor. It is visionary to 
 believe that we shall ever be able to bring the 
 whole face of society to a common level, eco- 
 nomical and financial, or moral and religious. 
 Meantime, the gospel of love and service is of 
 supreme obligation, and must dictate the life 
 and control the energies and resources of all 
 who profess and call themselves Christians. 
 We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities 
 of the weak, even to the extent of bearing the 
 
And His Apostles 59 
 
 infirmities of him who is weak by his own fault 
 and sin. But transformation of environment 
 will not solve the whole problem : our gospel 
 must include not only the transformation of the 
 environment, but the transformation, the reor- 
 ganization, the regeneration of the human be- 
 ings who move in the midst of it. 
 
 Here in America, and more especially in the 
 South, the race problem is always with us. 
 Are we expecting the legislators at the state 
 capitals, or the congressmen at Washington, to 
 solve it ? Is not the political world, like that of 
 economics, confessedly ruled by the law of hu- 
 man self-interest and advancement? Is there 
 any hope for the solution of such a problem by 
 political machinery, except as the agents who 
 control the machinery and the populations that 
 are controlled are members of the Kingdom of 
 God? And what is this but declaring once 
 more that the reduction of the law of love to 
 practice is the Christian and only solution of 
 the race problem? Granted that the negro is 
 
6o The Christianity of Christ 
 
 often ignorant, brutal, savage. ^^ Granted that 
 his too frequent record of unmentionable crime 
 is horrible and revolting. If all were a thou- 
 sand-fold worse than it is, the law of the broth- 
 erhood of the Kingdom is all the more mani- 
 festly the only sufficient remedy. For the duty 
 to discharge all the offices of love, let us recall, 
 does not rest on the worthiness of the object, 
 but on the free, undeserved love of God in 
 Christ Jesus alike to us and to the negro. If 
 St. Paul were writing to-day, he might ask, 
 **Is God the God of white men only? Is he 
 not also of the negroes?" and he would answer, 
 ''Yes, of the negroes also." And in that an- 
 swer would be wrapped up the Christian dy- 
 namic of love that should dissipate racial ha- 
 treds and variances and solve racial problems 
 of whatsoever nature. 
 
 ""Though we are prone to overlook his astounding 
 progress — as an owner of realty and a payer of taxes, 
 as a farmer, merchant, manufacturer, and professional 
 man ; progress, educationally, morally, religiously. 
 
And His Apostles 6i 
 
 The Church is committed by her Lord to the 
 work of foreign missions — to the Hmit of 
 world-wide evangehzation. And much of the 
 professed disbehef in foreign missions is hol- 
 low and selfish and avaricious, even when the 
 disbelievers essay to justify themselves by the 
 needs of the home field. Nevertheless, If we 
 love not the negro whom we have seen, how 
 shall we love the Chinaman whom we have not 
 seen ? Is not the negro the wounded, bleeding, 
 half-dead Jew lying helpless and naked in the 
 road that leads from every Southern door, to 
 whom he among us who would acquire the 
 neighborly character of the Good Samaritan 
 must minister ? Can any assiduous devotion to 
 the distant needy one absolve us from the duty 
 of ministration, according to the ability which 
 God giveth, to this desperately needy one who 
 is just at hand? 
 
 But I must draw toward a conclusion. Rome 
 has annexed to her conciliar definitions the 
 anathema sit: let him be anathema — that un- 
 
62 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 fortunate one who believes not the foregoing 
 ecclesiastically defined dogma. The Pauline 
 and Protestant anathema is, 'Tf any man preach 
 any other gospel unto you than that ye have 
 received, let him be anathema,"^''' or, 'Tf any 
 mian love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be 
 anathema: Maranatha."^'^ Jesus himself said, 
 "Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be 
 broken : but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will 
 grind him to powder."^^ It is the divinely fixed 
 and unchangeable elements of the living Gos- 
 pel, preachable and preached for the salvation 
 of the world, as they center in the historical 
 Jesus, the Incarnate, Atoning, and Risen Sav- 
 iour, altogether lovely and lovable, which, if 
 man reject, he, by his irresponsiveness to the 
 last manifestation of love, advertises his worth- 
 lessness and irredeemableness and his fitness 
 for the refuse heap of God. It is Christianity 
 
 *'^Gal. i. 9. ^i Cor. xvi. 22. 
 "'Matt. xxi. 44; Lnke xx. 18. 
 
And His Apostles 63 
 
 as religion that saves ; without it the soul dies. 
 That the Gospel, notwithstanding the outstand- 
 ing characteristics of modern mind and life 
 that we have been considering, is in this new 
 century renewing its youth and giving promise 
 of universal and permanent conquest, as of the 
 Absolute Religion, few open-eyed observers 
 will deny. Christians, — the one Church and 
 family of God in the earth, — are recognizing 
 the law of love as binding them all together 
 and as binding the Body of Christ to the world 
 of mankind; Christian missions are covering 
 the earth as the waters cover the sea ; Christian 
 philanthropy is the noblest and most conspic- 
 uous mark of our times. That the twentieth 
 century will witness developments of the Chris- 
 tian religion with which only those of the first 
 will be comparable, one ventures little in proph- 
 esying. Christ is King to-day in a sense and 
 with a breadth of which flaming apocalyptists 
 scarcely dared to dream ; and perhaps the new 
 century shall 
 
64 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Bring forth the royal diadem, 
 And crown him Lord of all. 
 
 And now the task I set out to do in this 
 initial study is done. In meager outHne I have 
 sought to exhibit the essential characteristics 
 of the Christian religion. Its Origin has been 
 sought in the love of God; its Means in the 
 redemption which is in Christ Jesus, through 
 his Incarnation, his Atonement, and his Resur- 
 rection; its End in the founding of the King- 
 dom of God and the binding of men to God 
 and one another by the law of love. *'Thy 
 kingdom come" must be the prayer and labor 
 of the Church, for it is the hope of the world 
 lying in the wicked one. All the selfishness 
 and antagonisms of men are to be lost in the 
 Kingdom which ruleth over all. 
 
 I may close with a repetition of the definition 
 which alone seems to me to do justice to all the 
 elements of the Christian religion, none of 
 which may be omitted without fatal injury : 
 
 Christianity is the religion of God's redeem- 
 
And His Apostles 65 
 
 ing love, manifested in the Incarnate life, the 
 Atoning death, and the glorious Resurrection 
 of Jesus Christ, the Founder of the Kingdom 
 of God, whose citizens are become sons of God 
 by the power of his Spirit, and brothers of all 
 mankind. 
 5 
 
II 
 
 THE VOCATION OF JESUS THE 
 PROOF OF HIS GODHEAD 
 
THE VOCATION OF JESUS THE 
 PROOF OF HIS GODHEAD! 
 
 "My meat," said Jesus, ''is to do the will 
 of him that sent me, and to finish his work."^ 
 
 ^I am conscious that this chapter could not have been 
 written without the perusal of Albrecht Ritschl's "Justi- 
 fication and Reconciliation." I have had before me a 
 page of notes made just after the book was read about 
 four years ago. But I am unable to make detailed ref- 
 erences without again reading a large volume, into 
 which I have not had leisure so much as to glance. I 
 shall hope that, as reflecting my own convictions stated 
 in my own way, the essay is not the worse for that. 
 While there are elements of the Ritschlian theology that 
 are to be decisively rejected, I am confident that the 
 judgment of those who regard Ritschl as the greatest 
 and most influential German theologian since Schleier- 
 macher is correct. He Is destined, I think, to an increas- 
 ing influence in America, and, discriminatingly used, is 
 capable, with Kaftan, of rendering the largest service to 
 evangelical orthodoxy. — J. J. T. 
 
 'John Iv. 34. 
 
 (69) 
 
70 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Though occurring in the Fourth Gospel, this 
 is a saying of the Lord's that bears the mint- 
 mark of his coinage as indisputably as the 
 most luminous of the self-attesting sayings of 
 the Synoptical Gospels. It passes current 
 without question or suspicion even among 
 the hostile critics of the Gospel in which it 
 occurs, as having the exact and full value of 
 the mind of Christ. It was evidently stere- 
 otyped from his lips; for the record in which 
 it appears is evidence sufficient that, so far 
 were those who heard it from being equal to 
 its invention, that they wxre quite incapable 
 of understanding it after it was spoken into 
 their ears. Its inimitable originality betrays 
 its source and stamps its parentage to the end 
 of time. Whether we look upon it as a tele- 
 scopic or as a microscopic text, — as bringing 
 nigh the great which is very far off, or as mak- 
 ing large and discernible the delicate and ob- 
 scure that is just at hand, — it is the deepest 
 disclosure of the fountains of our Lord's life. 
 
And His Apostles *]i 
 
 We have all seen in the Roman churches the 
 pictures of the "bleeding heart" of Jesus. 
 Garments and flesh are torn aside, and the 
 quivering heart, from which the blood drops 
 are falling, is exposed impaled upon the spear 
 point. Not this hideous daub of the meaner 
 sanctuaries, nor the masterpiece of the great 
 cathedrals, affords the true insight into the 
 interior depths of Christ's life. Rather he 
 himself deliberately puts the veil aside and 
 invites the adoring gaze of his disciples when 
 he says, "My meat is to do the will of him 
 that sent me." From the psychological point 
 of viev/, these words open up our Lord's life 
 to its innermost core. The setting, with all 
 the wealth of delicate and natural detail that 
 marked the interview with the woman of 
 Samaria, is evidently historical. The errand 
 of those who went away into the city to buy 
 meat and who, on their return, obtusely asked, 
 "Hath any man brought him aught to eat?" 
 is the last circumstance that makes inevitable 
 
72 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 the saying itself and our belief of it as a word 
 from the mouth of Jesus. Its force and com- 
 pass entitle it to be used as the key to unlock 
 the sacred secret of the person and life of 
 Jesus. 
 
 What does it mean ? 
 
 I. It cannot mean less than this, that the 
 consciously and deliberately chosen, and stead- 
 ily pursued, personal end and purpose of Je- 
 sus sei-ved him for satisfaction and sustenance. 
 To do the will of him that sent him proved 
 to be his soul's meat, the solid satisfaction of 
 his soul's need, the one food that answered 
 the ultimate demands of his nature. 
 
 I. How did this doing of the will of an- 
 other meet the deepest needs of Jesus' own 
 soul? In a threefold way. 
 
 (i) It was a response, of course, to the 
 demands of his own nature; it was the devel- 
 opment of his own gift. Even skeptical in- 
 vestigators like Wernle recognize in Jesus 
 what they are pleased to denominate a super- 
 
And His Apostles 73 
 
 human consciousness. That there were very 
 extraordinary elements in that consciousness 
 the most casual reader of the Gospels must 
 recognize. The scientific method demands 
 that we begin by taking full and exact account 
 of these elements. It is outraged when the 
 claims of Jesus are set aside without taking 
 account of his mind and his work. From 
 this unique consciousness of Jesus, according- 
 ly, we may take our point of departure. 
 
 Jesus was true to God because he was true 
 to himself, and did not, wdiile obeying a wnll 
 consciously other than his own and divine, 
 substitute for his own conscious nature, gift, 
 and call something alien to them. What Je- 
 sus was and did was primarily of himself and 
 as himself; otherwise the development and 
 course of his life become unreality and mock- 
 ery. There are forms of statement of the 
 Anselmic doctrine of atonement which lend 
 countenance to the view that Jesus could stand 
 in the place of another only because he had 
 
74 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 no post of his own to occupy. There is a 
 point of view in which that is, no doubt, pro- 
 foundly true. But, for my present purpose, 
 it must also be made evident that the pecul- 
 iarity of Jesus' consciousness was that it ap- 
 pointed for him a path so unique that he alone 
 could w^alk in it. Duty, in general, is of the 
 higher to the lower: of the Maker and Mas- 
 ter to the creature and servant. What the 
 latter can render is only a meed of service in 
 recognition of a debt of gratitude already in- 
 curred. But original and absolute duty is of 
 the Superior to the inferior, apart from the 
 character and conduct of the latter. Now Je- 
 sus found his consciousness possessed of this 
 peculiar quality of absolute duty, penetrating 
 his soul to its depths, and dominating from 
 first to last the activities of his life. The pe- 
 culiarity of this self-consciousness of Jesus, 
 as we may gather from almost every page of 
 the Gospels, was that while it was native, per- 
 sonal, original, and gathered the true law of 
 
And His Apostles 75 
 
 its active expression from within, it was at 
 the same time identical with the will of God, 
 objectively imposed and recognized as such. 
 
 (2) Thus, though in the fullest sense spring- 
 ing from the deepest wells of his selfhood, 
 it was not selfish, for this unique personal end 
 and purpose found its satisfaction, — still per- 
 sonal, if one insist upon it, — in an absolute 
 and unvarying devotion to the welfare of oth- 
 ers. "He that saveth his life shall lose it, and 
 he that loseth his life shall save it," was an 
 axiom of the ethical and religious life born 
 of Jesus' crystalline knowledge of his own 
 soul and the lav;s of its healthful and sinless 
 activity. This rule of life-saving which Jesus 
 lays down so unwaveringly for the observance 
 of his disciples was tested to the uttermost in 
 his own experience. In this the Master was 
 not better than his disciples; it was enough 
 for Jesus that he be as his disciples. Initial 
 victories v/ere won in the temptations of the 
 wilderness; the final, at Gethsemane and Gal- 
 
76 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 vary; but the law was formulated in the ex- 
 perience of Christ long before these final crises. 
 If at the last, when the price of loyalty to the 
 law of his selfhood, which was at the same 
 time devotion to his kind and, as will be noted 
 explicitly, unqualified submission to God, was 
 the sacrifice of his life, there was a momentary 
 faltering in the Garden or on the Cross, that 
 faltering was but momentary, and the selfhood 
 of Jesus followed the law of its absolute de- 
 velopment in a final sacrifice of self for the 
 highest good of the race of which he was a 
 member. 
 
 (3) The native law of his selfhood not only 
 demanded complete devotion to the good of 
 his kind but found itself identical with the 
 execution of the plan and purpose of God. 
 This was the third moment in the satisfying 
 sustenance of him whose meat was eminently 
 ''to do the will of him that sent him, and to 
 finish his work." That "man shall live by 
 every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
 
And His Apostles 77 
 
 of God,"^ Jesus had adopted as the law of his 
 life at the very beginning of his ministry; 
 "Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done"* 
 was the word of acceptance of the Father's will 
 in the Garden; and "the prince of this world 
 cometh and hath nothing in me"^ was the 
 final verdict of his consciousness as he went 
 forth to betrayal and crucifixion. 
 
 (i) The law of his own self-development; 
 (2) the law of absolute devotion to the wel- 
 fare of humanity ; and ( 3 ) the law of complete 
 abandonment and committal to the will of 
 God : these three were completely one law in 
 the inmost nature of Jesus dictating and con- 
 trolling his purpose and plan. 
 
 2. It is hardly necessary to point out that 
 this triple-stranded single law of Jesus' nature 
 applies equally to Doing and Suffering as parts 
 
 'Matt. iv. 4; Luke iv. 4; Deut. viii. 3. 
 
 *Luke xxii. 42; Matt. xxvi. 39, 42, 44; Mark xiv. 36. 
 
 ^John xiv. 30. 
 
78 The Cliristianity of Christ 
 
 of his One Obedience. Indeed, suffering as 
 accepted and ethically satisfying and helpful is 
 itself, in a sense, active. As dumb submission 
 to the inevitable it has no moral value, and is 
 sometimes illustrated even in the case of the 
 lower animals. Mental suffering as mere 
 w^eakness, tending toward and degenerating 
 into disease, is ethically indifferent. It may 
 be simple breaking down and surrender in the 
 presence of the tasks that are refused and set 
 aside because of their assumed incommensura- 
 bility with our resources and strength. Then 
 it becomes morally culpable. None of these 
 characteristics attached to the suffering of Je- 
 sus. It was an active entrance into the sor- 
 rows of the world and a positive acceptance 
 of the burdens of humanity. It was the delib- 
 erate assumption of the office of universal Sin- 
 bearer. No man took his life from him. He 
 laid it down of himself. If it be not profana- 
 tion to liken the highest human suffering to 
 that of him who trod the winepress alone, — in 
 
^liid His Apostles 79 
 
 a majestic solitude of suffering to which there 
 is no human approach or parallel, — then Wash- 
 ington, as he marked the bloody footprints of 
 his men in the snows of Valley Forge and yet 
 held them to the work of the Revolution ; then 
 General Lee, as he moved among the retreat- 
 ing regiments from Gettysburg, saying, "Boys, 
 it was all my fault," and assuming a blame that 
 did not belong to him ; then sad-eyed and sad- 
 hearted President Lincoln, as he wrote words 
 of immortal consolation to that Massachusetts 
 mother who had given five sons to die for their 
 country; then these, and such as these, may 
 know some measure of the active exercise 
 of that vicarious suffering which in the Su- 
 preme Person of history wrought the redemp- 
 tion of the world. Vicarious suffering, so far 
 from being the blot, is the glory of the moral 
 realm. Its superlative exercise in Jesus is a 
 true mark of his deity. It is the outermost 
 rim of his life, encircling and binding together 
 its manifold activities, as these are offered 
 
8o The Christianity of Christ 
 
 unto God upon the altar of humanity, redeemed 
 and sanctified by his blood. 
 
 3. The outward croAvn and completion of 
 the law of Christ's life is found in prayer, 
 which was for him meat since it was the feed- 
 ing of his soul on the will of God. The writer 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews has correctly 
 seized the secret. Jesus, in the days of his 
 flesh, when he had offered up prayers and 
 supplications with strong crying and tears unto 
 him that was able to save him from death, 
 ^'was heard/'^ His Father heard and an- 
 swered with an unmistakable revelation of his 
 will, with which that of his Son came into 
 immediate accord. Prayer was for Jesus the 
 active outgoing of his soul in its highest and 
 best, and always finally victorious, moods to 
 discover the will of God, to penetrate and, as 
 it were, to analyze it to the last limit, that he 
 might arouse and reenforce and feed his ov;n 
 
 ''Heb. V. 7. 
 
And His Apostles 8i 
 
 will by the realized and vivid perception of 
 its identity with the Father's. To this end, 
 he hesitated not, if need be, to spend the whole 
 night in prayer, as before the choosing of the 
 Twelve, upon whose ministry hung the final 
 establishment of the Kingdom of God. So 
 far is this exercise of prayer from being, as 
 alleged by Wernle and others, the proof of 
 our Lord's pure and dependent humanity, — 
 though, on one side, it has its lessons here, too, 
 — that it becomes the exalted and active union 
 with God which attests the divine heights on 
 which our Lord dwelt above the plane of mere 
 manhood and affords the best illustration of 
 the purity and depth of that unique conscious- 
 ness which was in him. In this he is the 
 Apostle and High Priest of our profession, 
 and continues to this day the exercise of his 
 incommunicable mediatorial office. Here lie 
 the characteristics which constitute him the 
 Representative and the Redeemer of men. 
 
 In all the foregoing we may see the equip- 
 6 
 
82 1 lie Cl.ristianity of Christ 
 
 ment of the One Intercessor; thus are we led 
 to 
 
 II. The Isolation and Uniqueness of Christ's 
 Vocation. 
 
 In a twofold sense the isolation and unique- 
 ness of Christ's vocation now become apparent : 
 ( I ) he did not share it with any other messen- 
 ger of God however exalted, as Moses or Eli- 
 jah; (2) it was a vocation for him supreme 
 and solitary, so that he was incapable of divid- 
 ing it with any other calling, coordinated with 
 it or subordinated to it. Coordination is in 
 itself impossible; subordination, intolerable. 
 
 I. The preceding discussion has shown the 
 exalted and unsharable uniqueness of the mind 
 of Christ in its consciousness of union with 
 God and of the identity of its native ends with 
 the plans and purposes of God. So far as we 
 can penetrate from the side of human psychol- 
 ogy, as we endeavor to gather up in a formula 
 of psychical law the phenomena of the con- 
 sciousness of Jesus manifested in the events 
 
And His Apostles 83 
 
 and sayings recorded in the Gospels, this pe- 
 cuHar experience of union with God, and of 
 identity of purpose with him, is of the es- 
 sence of the personaHty of the God-man in 
 w^hom the divine and human natures were 
 joined together in an indissoluble copartner- 
 ship. There were two wills, but between 
 them complete harmony reigned, — nay, abso- 
 lute identity subsisted; this harmony and iden- 
 tity freely proceeding from the human side 
 in its essential and native impulses and ends, 
 and from the divine side in the imposition 
 and penetration of the law of an absolute 
 purpose and plan of God that encountered 
 no obstacle or hindrance in the perfect will of 
 Jesus. 
 
 2. But the uniqueness of Christ's vocation 
 appears also in the exclusion of all other ends. 
 
 Ordinary men, and even men of genius, may 
 have their (i) domestic, (2) social or civil, 
 (3) professional, and (4) artistic or scientific, 
 vocation. These may be but ever enlarging 
 
84 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 spheres for the broadest reaHzation of the all 
 but infinite riches with which even our finite 
 human personality is dowered. And when all 
 are entered into, the conscious possibilities of 
 the person remain unexhausted. 
 
 (i) It is the ordinary duty of men to as- 
 sume the responsibilities of family life. He 
 who refuses the obligations of husband and 
 father generally condemns his own nature to 
 a stunted and one-sided development. God 
 hath set the solitary in the family, and only 
 in the blessed companionships of that circle 
 is the perfection of normal character ordinari- 
 ly possible. This is the law ordained of God. 
 
 (2) Similarly, one must enter into all the 
 duties of citizenship and assume the several 
 relations, and consequent obligations, that 
 arise out of the complex organization of mod- 
 ern society. None can be evaded without 
 guilt. One's best judgment and influence, ac- 
 cording to the measure of his ability and of 
 that station in life wherein it has pleased God 
 
And His Apostles 85 
 
 to call him to this service, must be given to 
 the conduct of the affairs of government, lo- 
 cal and economical, and general and political. 
 The Christian, in particular, according to the 
 precepts of the gospel, must always be the 
 duty-doing and exemplary citizen, rendering 
 unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Only 
 when the exactions of Caesar carry with them 
 the impossibility of rendering to God the 
 things that are God's does the law of exemp- 
 tion from the lower, through loyalty and de- 
 votion to the higher, come into play. 
 
 (3) Commonly there must be added per- 
 sonal devotion to a specific professional or 
 commercial or manufacturing or agricultural 
 calling. No man, with a sound mind in a 
 sound body, can guiltlessly be an idler in the 
 vineyard of this busy world. He who will not 
 work must not eat. He has no right to im- 
 pose his maintenance as a tax upon the ener- 
 gies and resources of his fellows. 
 
 (4) Beyond all these spheres of domestic, 
 
S6 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 social, and business life may lie devotion to 
 science and art (though, in special instances, 
 exclusive devotion to these by the professional 
 artist or scientist may move this sphere of 
 activity up into coincidence with the third). 
 Both the artistic and the scientific interest and 
 activity answer to legitimate developments of 
 human faculty; they lie nearest to the gener- 
 ality and disinterestedness of religion itself, 
 and often afford a field for all noble human 
 endeavor short of the noblest. They are not 
 to be excluded from the life plan of the normal 
 man who seeks to make the most of himself, 
 and by making the most of himself to be worth 
 most to his kind. 
 
 But when we examine the record of Christ's 
 activities, we find that he deliberately exclud- 
 ed and refused all these spheres of development 
 and usefulness, — a plan of life that could be 
 excused and explained only by the superiority 
 and dominant exclusiveness of his unique pur- 
 pose and end. 
 
And His Apostles 87 
 
 ( 1 ) Christ accepted no domestic vocation. 
 He speedily detached himself from the family 
 into which he was born without founding a 
 family of his own. The whole Romish con- 
 ception of the influence of the Virgin with her 
 Son, and of her controlling position as the 
 "queen of heaven," is belied by the express 
 representations of the Gospels, and by the 
 unique consciousness of Jesus which united 
 him with God rather than with his human 
 mother. 
 
 (2) Our Lord peremptorily refused a civil 
 vocation, as reformer, economist, or judge. He 
 was neither a socialist nor a labor leader, as 
 some of the recent superficial interpreters of 
 the gospel would lead us to esteem the carpen- 
 ter of Nazareth, as he is assumed to have been. 
 Such narrowing of his aim was incompatible 
 with the depth and universality of his con- 
 sciously pursued personal purpose and end. 
 As a meliorist, every specific alleviation of the 
 ills of humanity was included in the ultimate 
 
88 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 results of his work; but the universal and 
 eternal significance of that work could not be 
 sacrificed to the temporary role of a social or 
 political emancipator in Palestine or the Ro- 
 man Empire. Jesus, though he announced 
 the principles that carried in them the doom 
 and extinction of human slavery throughout 
 the earth, had not one word to say about the 
 evils of the slavery that honeycombed the Ro- 
 man Empire in his day. He would not be 
 the divider of estates between quarreling and 
 covetous litigants, though announcing every 
 day the laws of the universal brotherhood 
 which he came to establish. As statesman, or 
 warrior, or social emancipator and reorganizer, 
 for his own people or a wider commonwealth, 
 he doubtless might have accomplished much. 
 It does not require much delving beneath the 
 surface of the Gospels to discover that a real 
 temptation for Jesus lay in this direction. But, 
 had he yielded, he could not have been the 
 Saviour of the world. Sinking himself into 
 
And His Apostles 89 
 
 the common categories, he would have sacri- 
 ficed the unique and divine ends of his mission. 
 (3) He did not engage himself in systemat- 
 ic fashion with the sacred learning of the Jews 
 — like Paul. It is now the fashion to assign 
 to Paul (as Wernle does) the credit of the 
 universalization of Christianity. I would not 
 seek to detract from his merit. He was pos- 
 sibly the greatest man that ever lived; but no 
 one knew better than he that his Master was 
 more than man. He had problems of infinitely 
 perplexing detail to solve; he had the most in- 
 veterate prejudices of human nature to over- 
 come, first in himself and afterwards in his co- 
 laborers or their professed disciples; but there 
 is not an epistle of Paul's that does not show 
 that this scholar was utterly incapable of 
 founding Christianity. He was capable of 
 understanding and propagating it, indeed, as 
 few of his own time or since have understood 
 and preached it. But founding it is quite a 
 different thing. It is not overly difficult to 
 
po The Christianity of Christ 
 
 construct from data furnished by Paul him- 
 self the picture of what his life would have 
 been without Christ. A Pharisaic legalist of 
 unusual sincerity and strictness, a doctor of 
 the law, a greater Gamaliel serving his people 
 wdth fidelity and zeal, — these are the rough 
 outlines whose details one need not stay to 
 fill in. 
 
 (4) Christ was no apostle of art or of 
 science. Great and beneficent as is such an 
 apostleship, its noblest exemplars would con- 
 fess the inferiority of themselves and their 
 work to the Christ and his mission. Yet there 
 are not lacking those who rise up to lament: 
 the absence of aesthetic and scientific elements 
 from the gospel that Christ preached, and to 
 condemn the provincial barbarism that ex- 
 cluded such high aims from the sphere of his 
 activities. As if the sense of the beautiful, of 
 which he who saw more loveliness in the lily 
 of the field than in the royal array of Solo- 
 mon was certainly not devoid, could deflect 
 
And His Apostles 91 
 
 this sensitive soul filled with sympathy for 
 human suffering and sin from his task as Re- 
 deemer of men ! As if the perfecting of 
 knowledge were comparable with the great 
 deliverance which he came to work out and 
 proclaim ! As if there were not a heavy in- 
 dictment lying against the mere sestheticism 
 and culture of the day because of its indiffer- 
 ence to the moral ideal and its insensibility to 
 the needs of suffering men! 
 
 Thus I may reach, in explicit and final 
 statement, 
 
 III. The Unique Vocation of Jesus the 
 Proof of his Godhead. 
 
 I. It was, first of all, such a proof, or in- 
 ward demonstration and conviction, for him- 
 self. His unique consciousness and gift fixed 
 the plane and type of his temptations. No 
 inward experiences of Jesus were more real, 
 or entered more intimately into the depths of 
 his consciousness, than these conflicts, whose 
 actual occurrence is the only warrant or ex- 
 
92 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 planatlon of their incorporation in the narra- 
 tives of the Gospels. When we read, **he was 
 tempted in all points like as we are,'* it is im- 
 possible to conceive that Jesus, perfect physical 
 man though he was, had any real temptation 
 in the direction of sensuality. Whatever mere- 
 ly theoretical possibilities must be allowed, to 
 guard his absolute freedom and his perfect man- 
 hood, the trials that assailed him arose from a 
 totally different quarter. As a human being, his 
 temptations lay in determining the career that 
 was demanded by the unique elements of his 
 consciousness. And here, it may be added, the 
 struggle of his human faculties did not arise 
 from a lack of harmony with the Father's will, 
 consciously apprehended and dissented from, 
 but from the necessity that the man, who 
 passed through all the stages from an infantile 
 to a mature consciousness, should discover and 
 penetrate the Father's will, and should fix him- 
 self upon the certainties of his own course, 
 prescribed and determined alike by the divine 
 
And His Apostles 93 
 
 revelation and by the uniqueness of his own 
 personal gift and call. It was necessary that 
 Jesus should come into possession of himself; 
 and by so much as the elements of his per- 
 sonality were complex and unparalleled was 
 the decision as to his actual course difficult. 
 Here, as I conceive, lay the secret of the fast- 
 ing and temptation in the wilderness, of the 
 nights of lonely, wrestling prayer in the desert 
 or on the mountain, of the prayers and strug- 
 gle in the Garden. He discovered unique ele- 
 ments in his consciousness from the moment 
 of his maturity — say, from the time of the visit 
 to the temple at the age of twelve ; but the 
 interpretation of these inward deliverances, 
 and the decisions as to the exact conduct de- 
 manded by them at the several crises of his 
 life, constitute the well-defined field of the pro- 
 bation of Jesus of Nazareth. The most uni- 
 versal of the three temptations in the wilder- 
 ness, and, according to St. Matthew, the last 
 of the three, was the vision of "all the king- 
 
94 ^/'^' Christianity of Christ 
 
 doms of the world and the glory of them" f 
 from which Jesus turned aside to begin the 
 epoch-making and world-shaking proclama- 
 tion, *'the Kingdom of heaven is at hand."^ 
 Thus, 
 
 2. As Founder of the Rule or Kingdom of 
 God, Christ's purpose and plan were from the 
 beginning superhuman, transcending the sphere 
 of all earthly dominion and mere kingly con- 
 quest. As deliberately undertaking the found- 
 ing of the Kingdom of God among men, 
 Christ's personal end and purpose were identi- 
 cal with God's, not only in quality, but in 
 scope and extent. No other servant of the Al- 
 mighty had ever dared to proclaim his mis- 
 sion to be to carry the work of God through 
 completely to a perfect accomplishment, — 
 tsXsL^acd is the verb employed in John iv. 34. 
 This testimony of Jesus in his initial preach- 
 ing becomes indeed the deepest spirit of the 
 
 'Matt. iv. 8. 'Matt. iv. 17. 
 
Aj!d His Apostles 95 
 
 prophecy: ''His name shall be called Wonder- 
 ful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlast- 
 ing Father, the Prince of Peace : of the in- 
 crease of his government and peace there shall 
 be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon 
 his kingdom to order it, and to establish it 
 with judgment and with justice from hence- 
 forth even forever."^ 
 
 The new Kingdom was spiritual, — an em- 
 pire, first of all, over the hearts and lives of 
 individual men, — universal, and unending. It 
 could not be measured by any political power 
 or glory, however unparalleled. The Papacy at 
 its best estate, under its Gregories and Inno- 
 cents and Bonifaces, could not contain it; the 
 combined ecclesiasticisms of to-day cannot 
 mark its boundaries. Historically, Christen- 
 dom, expanding from the band of Jerusalem 
 disciples that chose the successor to Judas to 
 the Church Universal and the Christian insti- 
 
 ®Isa. ix. 6, 7. 
 
9^ The Christianity of Christ 
 
 tutions of the league of Christian States to-day, 
 is the partial and still incomplete exposition and 
 vindication of the Christ's choice and purpose. 
 If prophecies and gospel records alike raised 
 questions of some obscure Jewish writings 
 alone, then the flippant Renan and the ration- 
 alistic Strauss and the agnostic Spencer, and 
 their like, might be entitled to their say. But 
 in so far as History, as the sphere of the free, 
 is superior to Science, as the sphere of the 
 fixed ; in so far as reason and conscience, ethics 
 and religion, as Huxley himself began to sus- 
 pect, afford the distinctive theater of that which 
 is properly and exclusively human, and conse- 
 quently the high point of humanity's contact 
 with the divine and of God's revelation of him- 
 self to man, — just so far does it become evi- 
 dent that the nineteen Christian centuries, 
 which illustrate the vocation and achievements 
 of Jesus of Nazareth, attest the unity and 
 identity of his plan and purpose with those of 
 God himself. And it doth not yet appear what 
 
And His Apostles 97 
 
 Christendom, — the reign of Christ so far as 
 visible, — shall become, extensively and inten- 
 sively, in the earth. Beyond the earthly limits, 
 human thought falters and fails when the ef- 
 fort is made to conceive what the Kingdom 
 shall be wlien Christ shall have put down all 
 rule and all authority and power, and "shall 
 have delivered up the Kingdom to God, even 
 the Father.*' Such conceptions of St. Paul's 
 concerning the ultimate destination of the 
 Kingdom (apart from all theories of inspira- 
 tion) are certainly entitled to outweigh the 
 modern speculations, about which there is not 
 space or need to dispute here, and to determine 
 the true interpretation of the apocalyptic ele- 
 ments, which, on the surface, the teaching of 
 Jesus exhibits. 
 
 3. Even in the Synoptical Gospels, and in 
 the oldest and most authentic elements of 
 them, Christ is represented as the Bearer of 
 God's Revelation and Sovereignty. Here the 
 classical passages are Matt. xi. 25-30 and Luke 
 7 
 
9^ The Christianity of Christ 
 
 X. 21-24. Of the pivotal verse, Matt. xi. 2'/, 
 Luke X. 22, Dr. Sanday says : 
 
 "This passage is one of the best authenti- 
 cated in the Synoptic Gospels. It is found in 
 [nearly] exact parallelism both in St. Matthew 
 and St. Luke; and is therefore known to have 
 been part of that 'collection of discourses' 
 (cf. Holtzmann, Synopt. Evangelien, p. 184; 
 Ewald, Evangelien, pp. 20, 225 ; Weizsacker, 
 pp. 166-169) i^ ^11 probabihty the composition 
 of the Apostle St. Matthew, which many critics 
 believe to be the oldest of all the evangelical 
 documents. And yet once grant the authentic- 
 ity of this passage, and there is nothing in the 
 Johannean Christology that it does not cover. 
 Even the doctrine of preexistence seems to be 
 implicitly contained in it."^° 
 
 In short, its genuineness is indisputable. It 
 is like ''an aerolite from the Johannean heav- 
 
 ^"The Authorship and Historical Character of the 
 Fourth Gospel," p. 109. 
 
And His Apostles 99 
 
 en," says Hase; and ''for that reason," adds 
 Plummer, who cites these words of Hase's, 
 "causes perplexity to those who deny the sol- 
 idarity between the Johannean heaven and the 
 Synoptic earth. "^^ Keim calls it "the pearl of 
 the sayings of Jesus." 
 
 In Matthew^ the passage, properly arranged 
 as a single paragraph in the Revised Versions, 
 both the English and the American Standard, 
 reads : 
 
 "At that season Jesus answered and said, I 
 thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and 
 earth, that thou didst hide these things from 
 the wise and understanding, and didst reveal 
 them unto babes: yea. Father, for so it was 
 well-pleasing in thy sight. All things have 
 been delivered unto me of my Father: and no 
 man knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither 
 doth any know the Father, save the Son, and 
 
 "Commentary on Luke, p. 282; Hase, "Gescliichte 
 Jesu," p. 527. 
 
loo The Christianity of Christ 
 
 he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal 
 him. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
 heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take 
 my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I 
 am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find 
 rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, 
 and my burden is light. "^^ 
 
 In Luke, the complete paragraph reads : 
 "In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy 
 Spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord 
 of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these 
 things from the wise and understanding, and 
 didst reveal them unto babes : yea, Father ; for 
 so it was well-pleasing in thy sight. All 
 things have been delivered unto me of my Fa- 
 ther : and no one knoweth who the Son is, save 
 the Father; and who the Father is, save the 
 Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to 
 reveal him. And turning to the disciples, he 
 said privately, Blessed are the eyes which see 
 
 ^'Matt. xi. 25-30. 
 
And His Apostles loi 
 
 the things that ye see: for I say unto you that 
 many prophets and kings desired to see the 
 things which ye see, and saw them not; and to 
 hear the things which ye hear, and heard them 
 not."^' 
 
 In Luke the passage has a most natural and 
 vivid historical setting in immediate connec- 
 tion with the return of the Seventy, though in 
 both Matthew and Luke it is associated with 
 the denunciation of the three cities, Chorazin, 
 Bethsaida, and Capernaum. "The Seventy re- 
 turned with joy," and the Master said, "In 
 this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto 
 you ; but rejoice that your names are wTitten in 
 heaven/'^* i. e,, "that ye are destined by God/' 
 says Meyer, "to be in the future participators 
 in the eternal Messianic life." In that very 
 hour Jesus also exulted ( T^j/a/lXtdcraro) . His 
 own divine exaltation of joy is closely and ex- 
 pressly connected with the return and rejoicing 
 
 ^'Luke X. 21-24, both Revisions. 
 "Luke X. 17-20. 
 
I02 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 of the Seventy. According to the reading of 
 the Sinaitic and Vatican fourth century manu- 
 scripts and of other uncials, which have de- 
 termined the text translated in our Revised 
 Versions, this rejoicing was "in the Holy Spir- 
 it." That is, the ecstatic and exultant state of 
 Jesus was recognized as the consequence of an 
 immediate indwxlling and inspiration by the 
 Spirit of God. In the success of the mis- 
 sion of the Seventy, Jesus had ''beheld Satan 
 fallen as lightning from heaven." In this hour 
 of assured triumph of the Kingdom, and of 
 the competence of the human agents through 
 whom the prince and power of darkness must 
 be overthrown, Jesus and the Seventy enjoyed 
 a baptism of mighty joy, which, in the case of 
 Jesus, at least, was directly due to his posses- 
 sion of the Spirit of God. Nothing distantly 
 resembling this is recorded of Jesus anywhere 
 else in the Gospels. It might almost be con- 
 sidered the crisis of his Spiritual Transfigura- 
 tion, of which his Bodily Transfiguration was 
 
And His Apostles 103 
 
 the adumbration and symbol. In that moment 
 of supreme exultation, Jesus burst forth, "I 
 make public acknowledgment of thy glory, I 
 give thee praise (s^oizo?.oyoviiai) , O Father, 
 Lord of heaven and earth." It is in his char- 
 acter as Universal Sovereign that the Father 
 is here addressed by his Son. ''All things," 
 Jesus declares, ''have been delivered unto me 
 of my Father" : not simply the pofcstas reve- 
 landi, though the connection suggests this as 
 a primary reference. He announces himself as 
 the Bearer of the perfect revelation of God and 
 of the Divine Sovereignty in all things per- 
 taining to the establishment and welfare of 
 the Kingdom. ^^ 
 
 ^'"It is quite as unwarrantable to limit -Kavra in anj' 
 way whatever, as it is to take ■nape(S6di] as referring to 
 the revelation of the doctrine (Grotius, Kuinoel, and 
 others), or to the representation of the highest spiritual 
 truths (Keim), which Christ is supposed to have been 
 appointed to communicate to mankind. It is not even 
 to be restricted to all human souls (Gess). What 
 Jesus indicates and has in view is the full power with 
 
i04 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Moreover, he speaks out of the richness and 
 fulhiess of a superhuman and divine conscious- 
 ness whose contents he is well aware are be- 
 yond all natural human ken, and open only to 
 the eye of God : ''no one knoweth who the Son 
 is, save the Father: and who the Father is, 
 save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son 
 willeth to reveal him." The passage asserts 
 a complete mutual knowledge, from which all 
 others are excluded, of the nature, thought, 
 counsel, action, purpose, and end of the Father 
 by the Son, and of the Son by the FatherJ 
 
 16 
 
 which, in sending him forth, the Father is understood 
 to have invested the Son, a power to dispose of every- 
 thing so as to promote the object for which he came. 
 Jesus speaks thus in the consciousness of the universal 
 authority (xxviii. t8; Heb. ii. 8) conferred upon him, 
 from which nothing is exckided (John xiii. 3, xvi. 15) ; 
 for he means to say, that between him and the Father 
 there exists such a relation that no one knows the Son, 
 and so on," — Meyer, Commentary on Matthew, Ameri- 
 can ed., p. 231. 
 
 "Where Luke has yivciCKei tIq eanv 6 vide, Matthew 
 has eTTfytvuGKet rbv vl6v. Matthew's compound verb an- 
 
And His Apostles 105 
 
 In Luke, this profound fact and truth and 
 its consequences, visible even in the time of 
 our Lord and his apostles, are represented as 
 the secret hidden from the prophets and kings 
 of the old dispensation; in Matthew the uni- 
 versal invitation of the Gospel is directly based 
 on the completeness of this mutual knowledge 
 of the Father and the Son and the identity of 
 their nature, purposes, and ends : ''Come unto 
 me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and 
 I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, 
 and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in 
 heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. 
 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.'* 
 
 4. Thus as the Founder of the Kingdom of 
 God and the sole Bearer of the perfect Revela- 
 tion of the Father and of that Father's Sov- 
 ereignty, Jesus is the one Ambassador of heav- 
 en, the Son and heir as distinguished from all 
 
 swers to Luke's rig. "Both," remarks Plummer, Com- 
 mentary in loco, "might be translations of the same 
 Aramaic." 
 
io6 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 other servants, in whom God makes manifest 
 and effective in a wholly adequate, unique, and 
 original way his own eternal end and purpose 
 of love toward all mankind. The fabric of the 
 whole mediatorial activity of Jesus, in life and 
 death, in resurrection and ascension, in his 
 session at the right hand of the Majesty on 
 high, in all that he was, taught, and did, con- 
 stitutes the medium and material of God's per- 
 fect revelation of himself. Consequently Jesus 
 could say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
 Father,"^^ and "I and my Father are one."^^ 
 Hence, in a word, his Godhead affords the sole 
 possible ground and explanation of his voca- 
 tion and work as the Revealer of God and the 
 Founder of the eternal divine Kingdom; and 
 "all men should honor the Son even as they 
 honor the Father."^^ 
 
 "John xiv. 9; xii. 45. ^*John x. 30. ^^ohn v. 23. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE FOUNDATION OF CHRISTEN- 
 DOM 
 
THE FOUNDATION OF CHRISTEN- 
 DOM 
 
 When one reads the first chapter of First 
 Thessalonians, he is probably perusing the first 
 page of the New Testament that was commit- 
 ted to writing. There may be materials in the 
 Synoptical Gospels that assumed written form 
 at an earlier date, but no one of our Gospels in 
 its present shape is as old as this first letter 
 from the pen of the Apostle Paul. Written, 
 say, within twenty years of the close of our 
 Lord's ministry and earthly life, First Thes- 
 salonians associates Jesus with God. The 
 Church of the Thessalonians is "in God the 
 Father and the Lord Jesus Christ."^ The first 
 sentence after the salutation mentions the Per- 
 sons of the Trinity, if I may here by anticipa- 
 tion use the language of later ecclesiastical 
 
 ^i Thess. i. i. 
 
 (109) 
 
no The Cliristianity of Christ 
 
 dogma, on this wise, ''We give thanks to God 
 always for you all, making mention of you 
 in our prayers; remembering without ceasing 
 your work of faith, and labor of love, and pa- 
 tience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the 
 sight of God and our Father; knowing, breth- 
 ren beloved, your election of God, how that 
 our gospel came not unto you in word only, 
 but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and 
 in much assurance."^ The apostle describes 
 the Thessalonian Christians as ''imitators of 
 us, and of the Lord, having received the word 
 in much affliction, v/ith joy of the Holy 
 Ghost."^ In the final verses of this short chap- 
 ter, the elements of the gospel, — the word of 
 the Lord that sounded out in Macedonia and 
 Achaia and through the Roman Empire, — are 
 epitomized. The Thessalonians "turned to 
 God from idols to serve the living and true 
 God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, 
 whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, 
 
 'i Thess. i. 2-5. 'i Thess. i. 6. 
 
Ajid His Apostles m 
 
 who delivers us from the wrath to come."* 
 If we analyze these passages never so briefly 
 and superficially, we find that God is so easily 
 and naturally spoken of as ''the Father" and 
 "our Father," that the teaching of Jesus con- 
 cerning the Fatherhood of God is historically 
 presupposed, prior in time to the writing of 
 this Thessalonian letter, though later reduced 
 to writing in the Gospels we have. The Fa- 
 therhood was of the essence of St. Paul's 
 preaching, though he was not one of the 
 Twelve, and was a commonplace of the gos- 
 pel received among the Thessalonians. The mis- 
 sion of the Holy Ghost, and the power, joy, 
 and assurance which he brings to all Christians, 
 are appealed to, also, as a common experience 
 and possession of the Church, and Jesus is al- 
 ready "the Lord Jesus Christ," in whom, with 
 the Father, the Church exists. On the final 
 passage cited (verses 9, 10) Harnack makes a 
 more impressive comment than any I can give : 
 
 *i Thess. i. 9, 10. 
 
112 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 "Here we have the mission preaching to 
 pagans in a nutshell. The 'living and true 
 God' is the first and final thing; the second is 
 Jesus, the Son of God, the judge, who se- 
 cures us against the wrath to come, and is 
 therefore 'J^^us, the Lord/ To the living 
 God, who is now made known, we owe faith 
 and devoted service; to God's Son as Lord, 
 our due is faith and hope. 
 
 ''The contents of this brief message, — ob- 
 jective and subjective, positive and negative, — 
 are inexhaustible. Yet the message itself is 
 thoroughly compact and complete. It is ob- 
 jective and positive as the message of the only 
 God, who is spiritual, omnipresent, omniscient, 
 omnipotent, the Creator of heaven and earth, 
 the Lord and Father of men, and the great 
 disposer of human history; furthermore, it is 
 the message which tells of Jesus Christ, the 
 Son of God, w^ho came from heaven, made 
 known the Father, died for sins, rose, sent the 
 Spirit hither, and from his seat at God's right 
 
And His Apostles 113 
 
 hand will return for the judgment; finally, it 
 is the message of salvation brought by Jesus 
 the Saviour, that is, freedom from the tyranny 
 "of demons, sin, and death, together with the 
 gift of life eternal. 
 
 "Then it is objective and negative, inas- 
 much as it announces the vanity of all other 
 gods, and forms a protest against idols of gold 
 and silver and w^ood, as well as against blind 
 fate and atheism. 
 
 "Finally, it is subjective, as it declares the 
 uselessness of all sacrifice, all temples, and all 
 w^orship of man's devising, and opposes to 
 these the w^orship of God in spirit and in truth, 
 assurance of faith, holiness and self-control, 
 love and brotherliness, and lastly the solid 
 certainty of the resurrection and of life eternal, 
 implying the futility of a present life which 
 lies exposed to future judgment. 
 
 J55 
 
 ^"The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three 
 Centuries," I. 108- no. Jiilicher, "Introduction to the 
 New Testament," p. 46, also attaches importance to this 
 
 8 
 
114 The Cliristianity of Christ 
 
 Any one enjoying a tolerable acquaintance 
 with the earliest Christian Apologists knows 
 how largely this theism of Christianity bulked 
 in the earliest sub-apostolic presentation and 
 defense of the gospel. For the course pursued 
 there was ample apostolic precedent. If some- 
 times we are disposed to wonder at the meager- 
 ness of the post-apostolic Christian message, 
 we must remember the stupidity and darkness 
 and superstition of that heathen world into 
 which the gospel was introduced and through 
 which it moved with such enlightening pow- 
 er.® Though he had forerunners, not only 
 
 passage as indicating the contents of Paul's missionary 
 preaching and his manner of "speaking to an audience 
 of Gentiles who had never heard the name of Christ be- 
 fore, and to whom he had first to explain the funda- 
 mental religious ideas of repentance, of faith in the one 
 true God, of the Resurrection and the Day of Judg- 
 ment." 
 
 '"Perhaps the most needful preparation for appre- 
 ciating the beliefs of the early Church is to get rid of 
 the assumption or impression that the post-apostolic 
 
And His Apostles 115 
 
 like St. Stephen, but humble Christian men 
 and women whose very names have perished 
 who carried the gospel all the way to Rome, 
 and colleagues, like Barnabas and Silas and 
 Timothy, it is the everlasting greatness and 
 glory of the Apostle Paul that he systemat- 
 ically undertook and successfully accomplished 
 the transplanting of Christianity from Pales- 
 tine to the Roman Empire. ''Hereby alone 
 Paul proves himself to be the foremost . inter- 
 Church started with the fuHness of the apostoHc teaching 
 as that is embodied, for instance, in the New Testament. 
 That is a natural assumption, and it is often made without 
 a thought ; but it is entirely opposed to facts. What the 
 apostles and some others of their generation taught is 
 one thing; what the Church proved able to receive is 
 quite another. The tradition of the apostolic ministry- 
 was vivid; the writings embodying its message, which 
 v/e still possess, were circulating, and they were soon 
 collected and set apart as a special deposit. But the 
 Church, which had a glowing sense of the worth of 
 Christianity, had as yet laid but feeble and partial hold 
 on its treasures of wisdom and knowledge. — Robert 
 Rainy, "The Ancient Catholic Church," pp. 66, 67. 
 
ii6 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 preter of Jesus," says Wernle, though he is 
 pleased to add, '4n spite of his deviations from 
 the message of the Twelve."^ With true his- 
 toric insight, he later adds, ''the communities 
 in which the Spirit finds a habitation are des- 
 tined to alter the current of the world's his- 
 tory."^ 
 
 The general contrast between the Gospels 
 and the Epistles has been often pointed out, 
 and is easily recognized by the general reader. 
 The Gospels, — at least the first three, — are filled 
 with the accounts of the deeds and teachings 
 of Jesus. Miracles, parables, and discourses of 
 wider compass and more general content, may 
 fairly be said to constitute the substance of 
 the Synoptists' narrative. Little place is given 
 to the Person of Jesus, to his preexistence, in- 
 carnation, and divinity. There is no systemat- 
 ic exposition of the meaning of his death or of 
 the need or significance of atonement. If the 
 
 '"Beginnings of Christianity," I. 178. 
 ^Ibid., I. 191. 
 
And His Apostles 117 
 
 resurrection is an exception, it is because it lies 
 so obviously — so conspicuously — in the region 
 of history and fact, where its place must first 
 be made good before it can be utilized in the 
 doctrinal system of the first interpreters of 
 Jesus. In the Gospels the noble ethics of Je- 
 sus are expounded and illustrated, as in the 
 Sermon on the Moimt ; the disciples are taught 
 the spirit, and even a form, of prayer ; the law, 
 even if by quotation, is summarized in two 
 matchlessly comprehensive commandments ; the 
 golden rule is stated; and life in general is 
 brought under the immediate inspection and 
 guidance of the Father, apparently without 
 emphasis on the mediation of the Son. When 
 we turn to the Epistles, all this is changed. 
 The paucity of the portrayal of the life and 
 teachings of Jesus in the Epistles of Paul has 
 often been remarked upon. His Christology 
 and his knowledge of the personal words and 
 works of Jesus seem to be in inverse propor- 
 tion. It is true that sometimes the deepest and 
 
ii8 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 most systematic and explicit Christological 
 doctrines are introduced in a very familiar way 
 and subordinated to practical ends, as when 
 the great Philippian passage^ opens with the 
 exhortation, ''Let this mind be in you which 
 was also in Christ Jesus." But, in general, it 
 may be said that preexistence, deity, incarna- 
 tion, sacrificial death, justification or the for- 
 giveness of sins, sanctification, the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus, his enthronement and return to 
 judgment, constitute parts of a closely articu- 
 lated doctrinal system, in which little place is 
 found for the precepts and parables of the 
 Gospels. It is usual to trace the greater part 
 of this system, and sometimes the w^hole of it, 
 to the experience of Paul at his conversion on 
 the way to Damascus, with all the legalistic 
 struggles that preceded it and the deliverance 
 and peace that followed it. About the most 
 extreme presentation of this general position, — 
 
 Thil. ii. 5-II. 
 
And His Apostles 119 
 
 whose strength does not need to be exaggera- 
 ted, — that I have recently encountered is found 
 in the words of Wernle, of wdiose historic con- 
 jury it is a stock trick to represent falsehood 
 as mightier than the truth. ''Jesus was pre- 
 sented to the Greeks in the shape of a myth- 
 ical drama," he says. "Once again they had 
 a new myth, and that, too, derived from the 
 immediate present. And this conquered the 
 world." Indeed! It is surely open to ques- 
 tion whether the man who could fling off such 
 a careless statement is entitled to recognition 
 either as historian or as theologian. He adds : 
 *'The simple teaching of Jesus of Nazareth 
 had never been able thus to w^in its w^ay to 
 victory, for the world was not yet ripe to re- 
 ceive the impression of a great personality by 
 tself. That which was great and redemptive 
 n Jesus had to suffer itself to be wrapped up 
 n the heavy coverings of dogma; even in St. 
 Paul it lives and works mightily therein. In 
 spite of all, it must be deemed fortunate that 
 
I20 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Jesus was preached to the world by St. 
 Paul."^« 
 
 Such paradoxes of the failure and death of 
 truth unless it assumes the guise and armor of 
 falsehood, in which alone it becomes conqueror 
 and heir of the world, can hardly masquerade 
 in the light of modern knowledge as final his- 
 torical verdicts. It is really pitiful how often 
 Wernle indulges in this little piece of fanciful 
 sophistry, and how uniformly he finds the 
 transformation of truth into falsehood to be 
 '^fortunate" for the gospel or the indispensable 
 condition of its survival. ^^ Satan himself 
 
 ^""Beginnings of Christianity," I. 254. 
 
 "I append a few examples. "Jesus the Redeemer, not 
 the lawgiver, that was his [St. Paul's] watchword. It 
 was a great piece of good fortune for Christianity. As 
 a mere teacher of true religion Jesus would only have 
 taken his place in the ranks of the Greek moral phi- 
 losophers by the side of Socrates or Pythagoras. As 
 such he would doubtless have commanded respect and 
 admiration, but never the faith which gives birth to a 
 religion. Paul saved Christianity from the fate of stag- 
 
And His Apostles 121 
 
 must have been the providence who so uni- 
 formly at the great crises brought forward 
 falsehood to serve the ends of truth. 
 
 naiion as a school of ethics in the universal Greek ra- 
 tionalism." ("Beginnings," I. 176, 177.) It is seldom 
 that one reads anything so shallow as this in what pur- 
 ports to be history. Here are a few more supremely 
 fortunate Pauline falsehoods. "The consequence of this 
 [Pauline rabbinical use of the Old Testament] is that 
 the Old Testament and its God are saved ; the God of 
 Jesus Christ is also the God of Abraham. In a later 
 age the whole assault of the gnostics beat in vain against 
 this rock of apologetics. And thus even this artificial 
 proof from Scripture turned out to be a piece of good 
 fortune for the Church." (Ibid., I. 309) "In St. Paul's 
 controversies with Jews and Judaizers, the great ideas 
 of moral liberty and of sonship to God are striving for 
 a clear utterance. They fail to find an outer form such 
 as to insure their victory; nevertheless it was fortunate 
 for the whole future history of Christianity that they 
 were connected so closely with its origin." (Ibid., I. 
 313.) "It is perfectly incredible within how short a 
 time the Jesus of history had to undergo this radical 
 transformation" into the Christ of dogma; yet "it is for 
 this living and loving Jesus that the apostle's high 
 
12'' 
 
 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 But the general truth of this contrast be- 
 tween the earher and the later parts of the New 
 Testament must be accepted. We must al- 
 ways remember, however, that the Gospels, 
 though holding the first position in our ar- 
 rangement of the canon, and depicting events 
 earlier than those recorded in the Epistles, are 
 really of later composition, and issued from 
 the bosom of that Apostolic Church to which 
 Paul and Apollos and Cephas had already been 
 given and which was in daily enjoyment of 
 that living experience which the Epistles de- 
 scribe. The greatest gift of the Apostolic 
 Church to the Christianity of all time to the 
 
 Christology paves a way into the world." {Ibid., I. 
 339.) Did falsehood ever play a nobler part in the 
 history of humanity and of religion? Finally (I. 340), 
 "Christianity only became a great spiritual power in 
 the world through the theology of St. Paul." Yet this 
 theology, — in its cosmology, Christology, and eschatol- 
 ogy, — was nothing but an effete Jewish mythology! 
 Surely paradox and absurdity can proceed to no greater 
 lengths. 
 
And His Apostles 123 
 
 end of the world is the Gospels. That there 
 is no trace of later times discernible on the 
 broad face of our Gospels no competent critic 
 will assert. That the historical figure of Je- 
 sus, and a true and objective record of his 
 teachings, have been preserved, sober criticism 
 may assert and successfully defend in the face 
 of all the world/^ This is the achievement of 
 the Apostolic Church. Pfleiderer, Wernle, and 
 
 "So Jiilicher, despite the freedom, not to say license, 
 of his criticism : "The Synoptic Gospels are of price- 
 less value, not only as books of religious edification, 
 but also as authorities for the history of Jesus. . . . 
 The true merit of the Synoptists is that. In spite of all 
 the poetic touches they employ, they did not repaint, 
 but only handed on, the Christ of history." — "Introduc- 
 tion to N. T.," p. 371. "It sounds paradoxical to say so, 
 but the history of the Synoptic tradition stretches back 
 to the very lifetime of Jesus. Within a short time after 
 the appearance of the Messiah, certain particularly 
 striking words of his were spread abroad in ever-widen- 
 ing circles, while the fame of his miracles penetrated 
 through the length and breadth of the Jewish lands." — 
 Ibid., p. 374. 
 
124 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 their kind, may indulge their childish prattle 
 about "myths" to their hearts' content; others 
 may talk of the lack of the scientific historical 
 sense in that age of the world. The truth re- 
 mains. Urged on by some sense of solemn re- 
 sponsibility to distant lands and unborn gen- 
 erations which perhaps they themselves could 
 not analyze or fully understand; bent solely, 
 amid all their limitations and disabilities born 
 of the age in which they lived, upon getting 
 the truth about the words and deeds of Jesus 
 on record, — that humble reformed publican 
 whose life had been redeemed by the might of 
 Jesus, remembered his old facility with the 
 pen when he sat at the receipt of custom, and 
 began his collection of the discourses — the 
 "logia" — of Jesus ;^^ that companion of St. Pe- 
 
 ^'"Paplas tells us that the Apostle Matthew inau- 
 gurated this period of writing down (of course in the 
 popular dialect of Palestine) a collection of Sayings of 
 the Lord. . . . We do not doubt the statement of 
 Papias, and it is to the eternal credit of the primitive 
 
And His Apostles 125 
 
 ter's who had listened again and again to the 
 substance of his missionary preaching be- 
 thought himself to make that primary state- 
 ment of "the beginning of the gospel of Jesus 
 Christ, the Son of God," which survives to 
 this day in St. Mark as the oldest of our Gos- 
 pels; that companion of St. Paul's, who had 
 
 community that it preserved to the Church the Jesus 
 of history, as well as the Christ of the believer's re- 
 flection. We know nothing definite as to the motives 
 which induced this apostle to take up his pen, but it can 
 only have been when the number of ear-witnesses of the 
 words of Jesus had considerably diminished, and the 
 need arose of handing on the substance of his Gospel, 
 under the authority of an eye-witness and in permanent 
 form (i. e., in writing) to a rising generation who had 
 neither heard nor seen the Lord. . . . How opportune 
 was the undertaking of Matthew was proved by its suc- 
 cess; even in the Greek communities it was soon felt 
 to be indispensable, and preachers interpreted it as well 
 as they could until good written translations did away 
 with the necessity of such separate efforts, and at last 
 supplanted the Aramaic original altogether." — Julicher, 
 "Introduction to N. T.," pp. 378, 379. 
 
126 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 the instincts if not the habits of an historian, 
 used the work of Mark and of Matthew and 
 of all others of whose trustworthiness and 
 value he could satisfy himself; and, lastly, as 
 I believe will be finally demonstrated by con- 
 vincing internal and external testimonies, the 
 aged Apostle John wrote with his own hand, 
 out of the fullness of his personal knowledge, 
 the unique and incomparable Gospel which 
 bears his name. But, apart from all the crit- 
 ical inquiries which may be started, and have 
 been started, in connection with the Fourth 
 Gospel, the Synoptical Gospels stand as the 
 monumental contribution of the general Apos- 
 tolic Church to the historical foundations of 
 Christianity. The Church of the Apostles gave 
 birth to these Gospels, and if, without the 
 guidance of the canons of historical research 
 or the rules of modern historical composition, 
 that Church produced records so manifestly 
 objective and truth-telling, the general result 
 may be set down to the credit of an absolute 
 
And His Apostles 127 
 
 loyalty to Jesus, of an unflinching fidelity to 
 fact, and of the guidance and inspiration of 
 the Spirit of God. 
 
 But, before proceeding to a general expo- 
 sition of the causes of the acknowledged con- 
 trast between the Gospels and the Epistles, I 
 desire to put in two pleas in abatement when 
 the narrowness and simple historical narration 
 of the Gospels are set over against the uni- 
 versalism and doctrinal contents of the Epis- 
 tles. One of these pleas is based on the con- 
 tents of the Gospels, the other on those of the 
 Epistles. Both may be exhibited in a brief 
 analysis and summary. 
 
 I. The universal destination of the gospel 
 and the divine self-consciousness of Jesus may 
 be collected with certainty, if from relatively 
 few, yet from indisputably genuine, sayings 
 of record in the first three Gospels. The 
 whole question at issue may be said to turn 
 here. If this point be made out, then the 
 short and easy method of mythologists like 
 
128 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Pfleiderer^* and Wernle, the latter of whom 
 does not hesitate to say that the Gospel of 
 John is a mere writing back into the history 
 of the purely dogmatic and apocalyptic and 
 mythical Christology of Paul, is cut up by the 
 roots. It is set aside as a mere conjecture 
 of unbelieving criticism, which is not sup- 
 ported by direct and convincing historical evi- 
 dence, but simply commends itself to the crit- 
 ical faculty as an hypothesis certainly broad 
 enough to explain the facts, if it he assumed 
 that Jesus himself did not evince his posses- 
 sion of a divine self-consciousness and did 
 not preach a gospel of universal significance. 
 But, if an impartial examination of the 
 Synoptical Gospels, in the light of the se- 
 verest critical judgments, establishes the di- 
 vine self-consciousness of Jesus and the 
 universal destination of the gospel as he 
 
 ""The Early Christian Conception of Christ." See 
 review of this book in Appendix. 
 
And His Apostles 129 
 
 preached it, the position of Wernle and Pfleid- 
 erer and many others not only becomes un- 
 tenable but is rendered superfluous and im- 
 pertinent. In such a life-and-death struggle, 
 involving a hand-to-hand conflict with the 
 forces of unbelief as they have intrenched 
 themselves in the works of professedly Chris- 
 tian theologians, it may be necessary for the 
 time to seem to abandon the outposts and to 
 fall back upon the central impregnable citadels 
 of defense. Thus we all know that our pres- 
 ent Gospel of Matthew is not identical with 
 the original collection of Hebrew or Aramaic 
 discourses made by the apostle. The capable 
 investigators of the Synoptical problem are 
 practically unanimous in the conclusion that 
 the narrative sections of our present Matthew 
 are mainly dependent on Mark, wdiile Luke, 
 with the exception of one great section pe- 
 culiar to himself, largely derives his parables 
 and speeches from the same (or a similar) 
 collection originally made by ]\Iatthew and 
 9 
 
130 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 preserved, for the most part, in the Gospel 
 which goes by his name. When we find, there- 
 fore, that the divine self-consciousness of Je- 
 sus is clearly revealed in a passage like Matt, 
 xi. 25-30, Luke x. 21-24, which was sub- 
 jected to a critical examination and interpreta- 
 tion in the light of modern scholarship in the 
 chapter on ''The Vocation of Jesus" — when 
 we find that the divine self-consciousness here 
 shines out with dazzling brightness in an ut- 
 terance of our Lord's that can be traced back 
 to that apostolic collection of discourses, com- 
 mon to both Luke and our present Matthew, 
 we need not concern ourselves at present with 
 the examination of the critical difficulties 
 which have been raised in connection with the 
 baptismal formula as a post-resurrection ut- 
 terance of our Lord's. Similarly when our 
 Lord, In common discourse with the people, 
 speaks of himself as "a greater than Jonas" 
 and "a greater than Solomon"^^ we need not 
 "Matt. xii. 41, 42. 
 
And His Apostles 131 
 
 go to Jewish theology and Messianic apoca- 
 lypses, especially when of uncertain date, to 
 find out what he meant ; for the context of the 
 very book in which the reference to Jonah and 
 Solomon occurs contains the explicit revela- 
 tion of the divine consciousness that was in 
 the speaker. If w^e doubt the controversies re- 
 corded by St. John which Jesus is represented 
 as having concerning his own person with the 
 Jews in the temple courts at Jerusalem, what 
 parable more evidently proceeded from our 
 Lord's lips than the parable of the Wicked 
 Husbandmen and the Slain Son delivered dur- 
 ing passion week in that selfsame place ? That 
 Son is expressly distinguished from the serv- 
 ants of the householder, and of him, even in 
 the hour of his weakness and death, Jesus 
 says, in indisputably prophetic words, of 
 which all history is the fulfillment, "The stone 
 which the builders rejected, the same is be- 
 come the head of the corner"; immediately 
 adding his forecast of the conquering march 
 
132 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 and universal destination of the kingdom, 
 "The kingdom of God shall be taken from 
 you, and given to a nation bringing forth the 
 fruits thereof/® And whosoever shall fall on 
 
 "The first demand upon criticism is that it be crit- 
 ical, and not mere subjective arbitrariness. It is singu- 
 lar how Harnack and Wenile cancel each other in their 
 views of this passage. Harnack denies that this conclu- 
 sion of the parable of the Wicked Husbandmen contains 
 a reference to the Gentile mission. "The words of Matt, 
 xxi. 43," he says, "do not refer to the Gentiles ; it is the 
 'nation' as opposed to the official Israel." ("Expansion 
 of Christianity," footnote, I. 42.) This is but the sub- 
 terfuge, possibly unconscious, of a critic who has com- 
 mitted himself to the exclusion of the universal mission 
 from the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. (See p. 40.) 
 Wernle reaches this passage after finding in Matt. xvi. 
 18 the first utterance of "Roman Petrine tradition and 
 the consciousness of Roman power." "For the first 
 time, too, and surely not merely by chance, the Church 
 and the kingdom are almost identified in this important 
 ecclesiastical document," i. e., St. Matthew's Gospel. 
 "In a passage peculiar to St. JMatthew," he proceeds, 
 "Jesus says to the Jews, 'The kingdom of God shall be 
 taken away from you and shall be given to a nation 
 bringing forth the fruit:^ thereof.' What is the kingdom 
 
And His Apostles 133 
 
 this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever 
 it shall fall it will grind him to powder."^^ If 
 difficulties can be started in connection with 
 the great commission as a woi'd from the 
 mouth of Jesus, none can vitiate the teaching 
 of the indisputably genuine parable of the 
 Good Samaritan which expressly aims at the 
 destruction of the spirit which confines re- 
 ligion within national and ecclesiastical bound- 
 aries. And it was a heathen soldier of the 
 
 of God that the Jews have possessed? It is not, as in 
 other passages, the future Messianic kingdom, but the 
 theocracy, the divine rule. The evangelist might just 
 as well have said, 'Ye shall no longer be the Church.' " 
 ("Beginnings of Christianity," II. 85.) Thus Harnack 
 arbitrarily deprives the words of their natural meaning 
 and force, while Wernle sees in them only the embodi- 
 ment of late ecclesiastical polemic between Christians 
 and Jews. Both positions are unworthy the name of 
 criticism, and are absolutely worthless for the removal 
 of the Gentile mission from the teachings of Jesus. They 
 afford an excellent illustration of the truth that the 
 overthrow of criticism is found in better criticism. 
 "Matt. xxi. 33-44. 
 
134 ^^^<? Christianity of Christ 
 
 Empire, the Capernaum centurion, at the 
 beauty and solidity of whose character, in its 
 humanity, liberality, humility, and faith, Je- 
 sus marveled; and, in the light of whose con- 
 duct and example he was moved to say, ''I 
 say unto you, I have not found so great faith^ 
 no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, that 
 many shall come from the east and the west, 
 and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac 
 and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the 
 sons of the kingdom shall be cast forth into 
 outer darkness."^^ Jesus told his earliest dis- 
 ciples that they were the salt of the earth and 
 the light of the world ;^^ and yet there are those 
 who deny the primitive missionary character 
 and charter of his Church and the universal 
 destination of the gospel as he preached it. 
 
 2. The Epistles, if predominantly doctrinal, 
 are by no means destitute of historical remi- 
 niscences of the teachings and works of Jesus. 
 
 "Matt. viii. 10-12. '^Matt. v. 13, 14. 
 
And His Apostles 135 
 
 We have just seen how the first page of the 
 New Testament, as we have it in the first chap- 
 ter of First Thessalonians, presupposes the 
 general currency and acceptance of Jesus' 
 teaching concerning the Fatherhood of God. 
 Despite many blemishes and shortcomings, 
 some of w^hich wxre of a serious nature, the 
 early testimony is unanimous that a life of ex- 
 traordinary purity and elevation was lived in 
 the new communities. The Pauline Epistles 
 everywhere bear witness to the deep reality of 
 religious experience, and the precepts of Jesus 
 are reflected in the life of love enjoined by the 
 apostle. Moreover, as has often been indi- 
 cated, the great outlines of the life of Jesus, — 
 his birth of the lineage of David, his call of 
 chosen men to the apostolate, his institution of 
 the Supper, his betrayal and shameful death, 
 and his resurrection, — may be easily gathered 
 out of the Epistles. That more of the life and 
 teachings were not directly conveyed to the 
 Gentile Churches m,ay be regretted; but we 
 
13^ The Christianity of Christ 
 
 nuist also consider what was possible in the 
 great transplantation of Christianity in which 
 St. Paul was the principal agent, and the need 
 of simplification in preaching ''Jesus and the 
 resurrection,"^^ or "Christ and him cruci- 
 fied,""^ if these were really the saving facts 
 and truths of the gospel. 
 
 With this statement of two pleas in abate- 
 ment as gathered out of the contents of the 
 Gospels and the Epistles, respectively, I may 
 now proceed to an examination of the grounds 
 of the admitted general contrast between the 
 Christianity of the Gospels and the Christianity 
 of the Epistles. 
 
 We must endeavor to transport ourselves out 
 of the records of history, as contained in our 
 documents, into the region of history itself, — 
 an actual succession of objective events in the 
 real life of the world. Unless they possessed 
 an unusual importance in the view of the 
 writers, quite disproportionate space is de- 
 
 ^"Acts xvii. i8. ''i Cor. ii. 2. 
 
And His Apostles i37 
 
 voted in each of the Gospels to the last week 
 of our Lord's life, from the triumphal entry 
 into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the resur- 
 rection. It is, indeed, difficult for us to realize 
 the unparalleled impression made upon the 
 apostles, and the revolution and creation of 
 conviction, brought about by these final events. 
 What had occurred ? ( i ) There had been the 
 solemn institution of the memorial feast of the 
 Lord's Supper, with which, our accounts au- 
 thorize us to believe, there had been connected 
 moving instruction on the significance of Je- 
 sus' death on the morrow. (2) The betrayal, 
 arrest, and trials before the ecclesiastical and 
 civil authorities followed. (3) The crucifixion 
 on Friday was an awful termination of the 
 holy life of the great and innocent Master who 
 had gone about doing good. (4) The resur- 
 rection, with the appearances on that first 
 Easter Sunday, furnished the tremendous cli- 
 max of this tremendous week. To these events 
 must be added (5) the intercourse of the forty 
 
133 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 days; (6) the ascension; (7) Pentecost, the 
 gift of the Spirit, and the birthday of the Chris- 
 tian Church. 
 
 Let us confine our attention to these seven 
 events, each of them, we may well believe, of 
 inexhaustible significance, through which the 
 apostles must look back to the deeds and 
 teachings of our Lord's ministry. 
 
 First of all, the events themselves must have 
 fastened and fascinated the minds of the dis- 
 ciples. One needs only to allow the full im- 
 pression of the freshness and vigor of the open- 
 ing chapters of Acts to sink into his intelli- 
 gence to recognize the inimitable reality of a 
 living picture. The real character of Jesus, 
 as Lord and Christ, repentance, remission of 
 sins, and the gift of the Holy Ghost were the 
 themes of St. Peter's preaching even before 
 the conversion of St. Paul. 
 
 Secondly, these events at the last recalled 
 and reinterpreted all that Jesus had done and 
 taught, especially his anticipations and instruc- 
 
And His Apostles 139 
 
 tions concerning these very occurrences. From 
 the time of Peter's confession in Cesarea Phi- 
 lippi "began Jesus to show unto his disciples, 
 how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suf- 
 fer many things of the elders and chief priests 
 and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again 
 the third day."-^ That Jesus himself had not 
 been indifferent to the question of his Person 
 is shown by the question he himself propounded 
 in Cesarea Philippi, ''Who do men say that I, 
 the Son of man, am?"^^ Six days after this 
 appeal of the Master, the confession of the 
 rock apostle, and the conversation concerning 
 the decease which he should accomplish at 
 Jerusalem, and the resurrection which should 
 follow, occurred the transfiguration of Jesus 
 in the high mountain apart. According to all 
 the Synoptical Gospels, these events marked 
 the crisis of our Lord's public ministiy, and 
 the whole series centers directly in himself. 
 
 ''Matt. xvi. 21. ''Matt. xvi. 13. 
 
140 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 When the fulfillment of the Saviour's predic- 
 tions came with such overwhelming might, his 
 own teachings about himself, and revelations 
 of himself, were, doubtless, for the first time 
 grasped in their real and full significance. 
 
 But, it may be said, if the transition from 
 the Christianity of the Gospels to the Chris- 
 tianity of the Epistles is to be explained by 
 the interposition of this series of (say) seven 
 events of a character so extraordinary and mi- 
 raculous that they forever made Jesus himself 
 the foundation of his religion, — nay, the very 
 religion itself, — let us not forget that the trans- 
 actions themselves belong to a category of 
 which scientific history can take no account. 
 It might be answered in a word. All the worse 
 for scientific history, w^hich thus begs the ques- 
 tion and declines to attempt the solution of the 
 most urgent problem in the world's life! But 
 let that pass. The queer thing is that the 
 scientific historians, like Keim, Wernle, and 
 company, have so little confidence in their own 
 
And His Apostles 141 
 
 historical canons, and are so overwhelmed by 
 the evidence contained in the simple, objective 
 records which have come down to our times, 
 that they are never content simply to cut out 
 this section of our Lord's career and cast it 
 aside as nothing worth. They always manage 
 to bring it back into the circuit of history as 
 the deterinining factor in the zvhole subsequent 
 development. And thereby they do exactly 
 w4iat St. Peter did in his earliest preaching and 
 what St. Paul does in all his Epistles. Let us 
 consider the resurrection alone. If this be 
 allowed, all the rest follows with it. Take 
 Wernle's treatment as typical : 
 
 ''Contrary to all expectations, the dispersed 
 disciples began to gather together again, at 
 first in Galilee and then in Jerusalem. 'He is 
 not dead,' they cried in triumphant enthusiasm 
 to the murderers of Jesus ; 'he liveth.' The 
 reckoning of the Sanhedrists turned out to be 
 at fault. Their clever calculations proved to 
 be the greatest folly and impolicy, for faith in 
 
142 The Cliristiojiity of Christ 
 
 the crucified and risen Lord brought about that 
 which faith in the Hving Christ had not ac- 
 compHshed : the foundation of the new Church, 
 the separation from Judaism, the conquest of 
 the world. 
 
 "Whence this sudden change? For that the 
 disciples fled in confusion and consternation is 
 a certain fact. Their answer was : the Lord 
 has appeared to us, first to Peter, then to the 
 twelve, then to more than five hundred breth- 
 ren together, then to James, then to all of the 
 apostles, last of all to Paul. From these ap- 
 pearances, — the first must have taken place, ac- 
 cording to the oldest accounts, in Galilee, — they 
 inferred the facts of the resurrection and of the 
 present life of Jesus in glory. In the very 
 earliest time, when St. Paul obtained this in- 
 formation from St. Peter, they were content 
 with drawing these conclusions and required 
 no further proofs. The new faith rests upon 
 the appearances alone. 
 
 ''Our judgment as to these appearances de- 
 
And His Apostles 143 
 
 pends upon the credibility which we attach to 
 St. Paul and his informant, and still more 
 upon our philosophical and religious stand- 
 point, upon our 'faith.' Purely scientific con- 
 siderations cannot decide where the question 
 at stake is the existence or nonexistence of 
 the invisible world, and the possibility of com- 
 municating with spirits. Hence, too, all at- 
 tempts at explanation, which rest upon the 
 axiom that our world oi phenomena is the 
 only reality, are merely subjectively persuasive 
 and convincing. The Christian faith always 
 reckons with the reality of the other world 
 which is our goal. A Christian, therefore, has 
 no difficulty in accepting as the ground of his 
 belief in the resurrection, the real projection of 
 Jesus into this world of sense by means of a 
 Vision. ^ 
 
 A variety of reflections almost spontaneous- 
 ly arises in the mind of a fairly thoughtful 
 
 ^^"Beginnings of Christianity," I. 114, 115. 
 
144 The Cliristianity of Christ 
 
 reader of this passage. In the first place, we 
 catch our young friend, — * 'professor extraordi- 
 narius" in a German university, — despite his 
 wondrous sleight of hand, in the very act of 
 playing his old trick. Faith in the crucified 
 and risen Lord, — that is, the Christianity of 
 the Epistles, which is false, — accomplishes the 
 founding of the Church and the conquest of 
 the world! a task utterly impossible to faith 
 in the living Christ, — that is, the Christianity 
 of the Gospels, which is true ! Really we must 
 be excused from seriously considering a posi- 
 tion which takes refuge in such legerdemain 
 as this. In the next place, if St. Paul is a 
 competent and veracious w^itness, — and what 
 character in history is furnished with better 
 credentials (2 Cor. xi. 22-28) ? — neither sci- 
 ence nor philosophy, unless it be materialism, 
 hinders the Christian from believing the resur- 
 rection to have been "the real projection of 
 Jesus into this world of sense." In other 
 words, (i) if the fact of the resurrection rests 
 
And His Apostles 145 
 
 upon the credibility of testimony, (2) if it 
 is a question which purely scientific considera- 
 tions are incompetent to decide, (3) if ideal- 
 ' istic philosophy can afford to laugh to scorn 
 the mere suggestion that ''our world of phe- 
 nomena is the only reality," or that it is onto- 
 logically real at all, — all of which are positions 
 accepted by Herr Wernle, — then the sane and 
 serious theologian need not be troubled in the 
 smallest degree about how this brilliant young- 
 professor explains the fact, or about the further 
 reasons which he proceeds to assign for not 
 believing it. Our final reflection must resolve 
 itself into an expression of mere wonder that 
 a man who possesses the great learning and 
 ability which Professor Wernle evinces in 
 many parts of his work could dismiss so grave 
 a subject with a mere airy wave of the hand. 
 But it is enough that Wernle, though he in- 
 sists upon his paradox and absurdity of its 
 falsehood, allows that the resurrection was the 
 foundation of the Church and of the conquest 
 10 
 
1^6 TIic Christianity of Christ 
 
 of the world! Thus the resurrection was at 
 once nothing and ez'ery tiling, and our scien- 
 tific historian has without difficuUy solved his 
 problem. 
 
 The conclusion which a really historical con- 
 sideration of the development of the Church 
 forces upon the candid and careful inquirer is 
 that the full and complete reconciliation of 
 the Christianity of the Gospels, — the Chris- 
 tianity of Christ, as it is sometimes called, — 
 with the Christianity of the Epistles, or of the 
 Apostles, is found in the overwhelmingly great 
 series of actual occurrences which intervened 
 between the close of the public ministry of our 
 Lord and the day of Pentecost. It is with 
 great difficulty that we can live again the life 
 of that generation. Since Christianity is trans- 
 mitted to us by an infinitely precious collection 
 of sacred writings, it is very difficult for us to 
 realize, with the first generation of Christians, 
 who had no New Testament, that the founda- 
 tion of the Church and of its conquest of the 
 
And His Apostles 147 
 
 world, — in a word, of Christendoiii, — is not a 
 book but a Person — a divine Person who lived 
 a life, and died a death, "for our sins,"^^ and 
 rO'Se again from the dead, and being by the 
 right hand of God exalted received of the Fa- 
 ther the promise of the Holy Ghost, and poured 
 forth the Christian Church of the centuries. 
 "Other foundation can no man lay than that is 
 laid, which is Jesus Christ."'^ Only when we 
 pass from history as record to history as fact 
 do we dig tO' the deepest foundation of the 
 Church in the sacrificial death and the glori- 
 ous resurrection of the incarnate Son of God. 
 There is no breach between this conception of 
 the salvation wrought out by Jesus and the 
 ethics and history of the spiritual life w^hich 
 fall from his lips in the Gospels. They were 
 consistently united in the faith and life of the 
 Apostolic Church, and the same living syn- 
 thesis exists in the experience and conduct of 
 
 ^■^i Cor. XV. 3. '^"i Cor. iii. 11. 
 
148 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 thousands of saints to-day. The separate rec- 
 ords which we have in Gospels and Epistles 
 have merely divided in the New Testament 
 what from the beginning, i. e., from Pentecost, 
 existed as one whole in the life of the Church 
 and in the experience of the individual Chris- 
 tian. While some of the view points and 
 experiences of Apostolic Christianity are un- 
 doubtedly written back even into a few say- 
 ings of Jesus as recorded in our Gospels,^^ the 
 outstanding and overshadowing fact is that so 
 truly and objectively did the Apostolic Church 
 perform its task of drawing the picture of Je- 
 
 "So Shailer Mathews, "The Messianic Hope in the 
 New Testament," p. 225 : "The original materials of the 
 Gospels, as we have already seen, may be accepted as 
 the work of the disciples of Jesus himself, but the 
 Synoptic Gospels, as completed literary units, represent 
 to a considerable degree the point of view of the Church 
 during the last quarter of the first century." This truth 
 is sufficiently recognized in the text above, but, in order 
 to a true historical perspective, needs to be supplemented 
 by the statement "the outstanding and overshadowing 
 fact is that so truly and objectively did the Apostolic 
 Church perform its task," etc. 
 
And His Apostles 149 
 
 sus as he lived and taught that the contrast is 
 faithfully preserved between the days of the 
 Son of man and those of his followers who 
 planted the Church after his departure from 
 the world. The problem of the literature, — 
 the contrast of Gospels and Epistles, — is cre- 
 ated by the fidelity of those who produced it. 
 
 The title of this chapter was suggested by 
 the language (quoted in a footnote on an 
 earlier page) of Dr. Heinrich August Wil- 
 helm Meyer, than whom Germany has pro- 
 duced no greater exegete. It is but just to 
 cite it here (in part) again: ''Hence the 
 xeliievog OefieXiog is that laid by God, namely, 
 Jesus Christ himself, the fund amentum essen- 
 tiale, he whom God sent, delivered up to death, 
 raised again, and exalted, thereby making him 
 to be for us wisdom and righteousness and 
 sanctification and redemption. . . . This is 
 the objective foundation which lies there for 
 the whole of Christendom."^^ 
 
 ^"Commentary," i Cor. iii. 11. 
 
IV 
 
 BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND THE 
 CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 (^50 
 
BIBLIC\L CRITICISM AXD THE 
 CHRISTIAN FAITH.i 
 
 I. Christiaxity as ax Historical Religiox 
 
 Amexabie to the Caxoxs of His- 
 torical SCIEXCE. 
 
 What are the foundations of the Christian 
 faith in its Protestant form? The Reformer:, 
 accepting the character accorded the Bible in 
 both the Je\\'ish and the Romish Churches, sub- 
 stituted for the infallible Church, with its org^r- 
 of Council or Pope, the infallible Bible, ir.er- 
 rant in letter, and interpreted, nominally by the 
 indi\'idual, but practically by the several sym- 
 bols framed by the RefonnaticMi parties and 
 peoples. This action was both polemically ar.d 
 historically justifiable, if not ine\-itable; since 
 
 Conierer r L : ^ ::. 
 
i5| The Christianity of Christ 
 
 sumably authentic records, against the recog- 
 nized corruptions of a degenerate present. 
 
 I. But is the truth of Christianity dependent 
 upon the preservation of an inerrant record? 
 To state the question in this form is to answer 
 it with a negative. For Christianity is an his- 
 torical rehgion which arose in a definite time 
 and place; which was promoted by personal 
 agents, who can be recognized and described; 
 and which left behind it concrete and world- 
 wide results, distinct and determinate in our 
 day, and capable of being traced to their or- 
 igin. If inerrant records are the necessary base 
 of the science of history, then is scientific his- 
 tory, in any form or sphere, civil or ecclesias- 
 tical, impossible. On the contrary, all history 
 worthy of the name begins with documentary 
 criticism and the assortment and valuation of 
 the available data. Christianity can be no ex- 
 ception to this uniform procedure of history. 
 Nor need it be. 
 
 Moreover, the distinction must be definitely 
 
And His Apostles 155 
 
 made between history external and objective, a 
 series of events in the actual order of the life 
 of the world, and history as mere narrative or 
 record. The criticism of history as record is 
 expressly that we may arrive at history as fact. 
 The fact is antecedent, the record consequent; 
 the fact is independent and exists, so to speak, 
 in its own right and by its own force; while 
 the record is dependent and relative, produced 
 by force of the fact. In the sphere of historical 
 Christianity the recognition of this self-evident 
 principle is not, on the one hand, to fall into the 
 Romish error of exalting trajdition tO' an equal 
 authority with Hoily Scripture ; nor, on the oth- 
 er, is it to accept the Anglican High-church her- 
 esy of the supremacy of the Church because the 
 Apostolic Church produced the New Testament, 
 (i) In the presence of the High Anglican 
 it may be freely granted that the Christian 
 Church is older than the New Testament, and 
 has existed as a concrete, living reality in the 
 w^orld from the beginning till now ; but to these 
 
156 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 obvious facts must be added the further fact 
 that, if the first generation of Christians pro- 
 duced the New Testament, as a record of the 
 source and spring and dominating type of 
 Christian hfe,so the New Testament, not by vir- 
 tue of any ecclesiastical definition of the canon, 
 and not by any dogmatic assignment of exclu- 
 sive authority or inerrancy, but because against 
 all claimants it asserts historically its own truth 
 as a contemporaneous record and as the living 
 Word of God, has begotten and nourished ev- 
 ery generation of Christians since the first. 
 
 (2) In the presence of the Romanist, with- 
 out any theoretical denial of his principle of 
 tradition, we may show that in view of the 
 achievements of modern historical science, the 
 only defensible sense of this term tradition is 
 history; and that, without any dogmatic de- 
 termination of its exclusive authority, or its 
 canonical limits, or its inerrancy as a record, 
 the New Testament, under the sifting processes 
 of criticism, efifectively transmits to the present 
 
And His Apostles 157 
 
 generation a genuine historical deposit and 
 achieves for itself the character of an authori- 
 tative and exclusive source. These same prin- 
 ciples, mutatis mutandis, apply to the Old Tes- 
 tament. 
 
 Hear the conclusion of the matter considered 
 from the historical point of view : Christianity 
 is an historically founded religion, living its 
 historically traceable life in the world since the 
 day of its birth, and exhibiting itself as the 
 most real and stupendous fact of the present. 
 Therefore, historical science alone can prima- 
 rily transcend the dogmatic differences of Ro- 
 manist, Anglican, and Protestant concerning 
 the rule of faith and kindred questions, and 
 lay solidly and permanently, not indeed in the 
 realm of fact, but in the realm of conviction 
 and personal belief, the massive foundations of 
 the Christian faith. 
 
 2. So far as the Old Testament, in our day 
 the especial subject of literary and historical 
 criticism, is concerned, we may accept the ver- 
 
i5'5 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 diet of the Rev. S. R. Driver, who has given 
 us the most careful and scholarly, at once the 
 most candid and the most modest, treatise in 
 English on Old Testament Introduction. "It 
 is not the case that critical conclusions, such as 
 those expressed in the present volume," says 
 Dr. Driver, in his rewritten sixth edition, "are 
 in conflict either w^ith the Christian creeds or 
 with the articles of the Christian faith. These 
 conclusions affect not the fact of revelation, 
 but only its form. They help to determine the 
 stages through which it passed, the different 
 phases which it assumed, and the process by 
 which the record of it was built up. They do 
 not touch either the authority or the inspira- 
 tion of the Scriptures of the Old Testament." 
 
 The publication in the last few years of such 
 books as McCurdy's "History, Prophecy, and 
 the Monuments" ; Rogers's "History of Baby- 
 lonia and Assyria" ; and Sayce's "Higher Crit- 
 icism and the Monuments" and "Early Israel 
 and the Surrounding Nations," with others 
 
And His Apostles 159 
 
 that might be mentioned, has famiharized the 
 popular mind with the fact that there has been 
 preserved a veritable historical record parallel, 
 generally speaking, with that contained in the 
 Old Testament, and serving valuable ends of 
 elucidation and verification. Sayce and Hom- 
 mel may have considerably exaggerated the 
 value of these independent historical materials 
 for the refutation of the literary and documen- 
 tary analyses of higher criticism. But histori- 
 ans will find higher and more constructive uses 
 for these records unearthed by the pick and the 
 spade than those of mere polemics. 
 
 The data are in hand, and are daily increas- 
 ing, for a positive historical reconstruction of 
 that great ancient world of western Asia of 
 which the life of Israel was a part. However 
 the relative political or commercial importance 
 of Israel may have suffered by the uncovering 
 of this wider world, in which the Hebrews but 
 seldom played a leading part, there is incalcula- 
 ble gain in the securing of a correct historical 
 
i6o The Christianity of Christ 
 
 perspective and in the illumination and com- 
 pletion of what remains obscure or fractional 
 in the Old Testament. What once stood alone 
 in that ancient record, moreover, is now 
 vouched for by many witnesses, telling of the 
 same events from the standpoint of the party 
 of the other part, and corroborating, with in- 
 dependent freedom, what prophets and his- 
 torians had set down in the sacred books of 
 the Jews. Such are the priceless gifts which 
 the science of history is now bestowing upon 
 the interpretation of the Old Testament and 
 upon the origins and early developments of 
 revealed religion. 
 
 II. The Historical Person and Teaching 
 OF THE Divine Christ. 
 
 In the second place, the science of history as 
 concerned with the New Testament has surely, 
 if at times slowly and painfully, led us back to 
 the historical Jesus, who is himself the Alpha 
 and Omega of the Christian religion. A great 
 
And His Apostles i6i 
 
 body of Christ's own teaching is secure. This 
 teaching is not only, for the most part, ration- 
 ally and ethically self-evidencing, apart from 
 the record that contains it, but it' is also his- 
 torically traceable to the lips of Jesus, and be- 
 comes, historically and ethically, the norm and 
 standard of all revelation contained in Holy. 
 Scripture. The notion of the equal value of 
 every part of Scripture for ethics and religion 
 is no longer a formula to which the Christian 
 is required to give his assent. "Holy Scrip- 
 ture containeth all things necessary to sal- 
 vation," is the measured language of oiir Ar- 
 ticle of Religion. The ethics of the Sermon 
 on the Mount cut from the neck of the Chris- 
 tian Church the millstone of the ethics of the 
 Conquest of Canaan. The parable of the Lost 
 Son is the uncovering of the heart of God by 
 the hand of his Son, and the imperishable 
 apologetic of the Christian faith framed by its 
 Founder and Head. The Beatitudes are an 
 immeasurable advance on the Tables of the 
 II 
 
1 62 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Law, and should preferably be engraven on 
 the heart of every Christian child. Moreover, 
 while Jesus pronounced upon no modern crit- 
 ical question of date or authorship, the free- 
 dom of his attitude toward Moses, every- 
 where evinced in his discourses, may be taken 
 as the warrant of the privilege and the duty of 
 historical criticism. When Jesus said that 
 Moses for the hardness of their hearts suf- 
 fered the Israelites to put away their wives, 
 he proved himself a critic of the keenest in- 
 sight, for he at once explained the temporary 
 exception and condemned it as a rule of life 
 by the weight of eternal truth. At the same 
 time we must remember that the Old Testa- 
 ment, with which we deal, is the Bible of Je- 
 sus' personal edification and of his public min- 
 istry, and that, while he has set us the exam- 
 ple of a great "discrimination," to use the 
 aptly chosen word of Professor George Adam 
 Smith, "what was indispensable to the Re- 
 deemer," if I may again adopt the language 
 
And His Apostles 163 
 
 of this scholar, ''must always be indispensable 
 to the redeemed." 
 
 Let us remind ourselves, also, that the body 
 of teaching traceable to the lips of Jesus is 
 not confined to the Synoptical Gospels. More 
 and more the phenomena of the Fourth Gos- 
 pel attest its composition by an eyewitness of 
 the ministry of Jesus, and fix its date well 
 within the limits of the first Christian century. 
 I am not unaware of the radical attitude to- 
 ward the evangelical tradition assumed by 
 one of our two new Bible dictionaries. In- 
 deed, I exercised the privilege of transferring 
 to the pages of the journal which I have the 
 honor to edit the masterly expose of the rad- 
 ical positions of the Encyclopcudia Bihlica, 
 which proceeded from the able pen of the 
 present honored President of the British Con- 
 ference, and recent Fraternal Delegate to the 
 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal 
 Church, South. But, despite such radical de- 
 fections, and the grievous hurt to the common 
 
164 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Christian cause resulting from such pubhca- 
 tions, the Gospel of John, — for the Gospel of 
 the Apostle it is, — steadily wins its way to a 
 wider and more assured critical acceptance. 
 
 It unites two apparently irreconcilable char- 
 acters : ( I ) a marvelous minuteness of narra- 
 tive detail and vividness of picturesque repro- 
 duction far surpassing anything found in the 
 Synoptical Gospels; and (2) an absoluteness 
 of universal and final statement of the pro- 
 foundest truths of the Gospel which befits it 
 as the conclusion and crown of the literature 
 of the New Testament. Both these character- 
 istics equally bespeak first-hand knowledge; 
 while its independent scheme of chronology, 
 and the general freedom and firmness of the 
 author's deviations from the Synoptical tra- 
 dition, both by omission and addition, attest 
 the accuracy and certainty of his knowledge, 
 and his unchallenged apostolic position and 
 authority in the closing decades of the first 
 century. The Eternal Divine Word Incar- 
 
A?id His Apostles 165 
 
 nate, whose nature and relations with the Fa- 
 ther and the world are revealed in the Fourth 
 Gospel with a precision and completeness 
 which dogmatic theology may imitate, but 
 cannot surpass, and yet in unfailing harmony 
 with the lowlier and more human representa- 
 tions of the Synoptical tradition, becomes the 
 sole and sure and sufficient foundation of the 
 Christian faith. "Other foundation can no 
 man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus 
 Christ." He is the Way, the Truth, and the 
 
 Life. 
 
 III. Christian Experience. 
 
 The third and final foundation of the faith 
 to which I would invite attention in this con- 
 nection is Christian experience. I may intro- 
 duce the subject with the words of the late 
 Professor W. Robertson Smith : "The per- 
 suasion that in the Bible God himself speaks 
 words of love and life to the soul is the es- 
 sence of the Christian conviction as to the 
 truth and autho'rity of Scripture. . . . The 
 
1 66 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 element of personal conviction, which lifts 
 faith out of the region of probable evidence 
 into the sphere of divine certainty, is given 
 only by the Holy Spirit still bearing witness 
 in and with the Word." We might suspect 
 that these were the words of an historical 
 skeptic offering us stones for bread, were it 
 not that the "testimonium Spiritus Sancti/^ 
 in the absence of all critical controversy, had 
 long before been unanimously appealed to by 
 the Reformers as the supreme and final war- 
 rant of Holy Scripture; and were it not fur- 
 ther true that our Methodist doctrine of the 
 witness of the Spirit, if confined to the single 
 point of our knowledge that we are the chil- 
 dren of God, is, by common consent of com- 
 petent theologians, too narrow. "He that is 
 spiritual judgeth all things," and John Wes- 
 ley, with a spirit of prophecy in this, as in the 
 case of the lower criticism (as indicated by a 
 comparison of the text of his Notes on the 
 New Testament with that of the Revisers of 
 
And His Apostles 167 
 
 1 88 1, or of Westcott and Hort), anticipated 
 Schleiermacher and the theolo'gians of our own 
 day who would verify the entire dogmatic sys- 
 tem by analysis of the implicit presuppositions 
 and contents of Christian experience. 
 
 This doctrine is no city of refuge, newly 
 formed by theologians for who^m the histor- 
 ical foundations have given way. On the con- 
 trary, the uniform, definite, and permanent el- 
 ements of Christian experience, in the convic- 
 tion and forgiveness of sin, the impartation of 
 life, and the purification of the nature, with 
 the recognition of Father, Son, and Spirit, as 
 the Authors and Agents of this great salva- 
 tion, constitute a scientifically recognizable and 
 definable phenomenon of age-long and world- 
 wide occurrence. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear 
 heard, neither have entered into the heart of 
 man, the things which God hath prepared for 
 them that love him ; but God hath revealed 
 them unto us by his Spirit." The Spirit's rev- 
 elation of spiritual things to the spiritual man 
 
1 68 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 is thus, not only the normal privilege but the 
 necessary foundation of Christian faith and 
 the Christian life. This truth, which first rose 
 on my soul in full-orbed splendor when, as a 
 young Methodist preacher, I eagerly perused 
 your Dr. Burt Pope's "Compendium of Chris- 
 tion Theology," Methodism has a special com- 
 mission to preach and to teach. It is not hers 
 by right of discovery, for it has belonged to 
 all the Christian Churches and centuries. It 
 is no peculiar depositum, but it harmonizes 
 with the genius of Methodism in its special 
 emphasis upon Christian experience, and in 
 its assertion o>f that large liberty wherewith 
 Christ makes all his people free.- The Spirit's 
 
 'Professor Friedrich Loofs, of the University of 
 Halle, in the article on Methodism in the new edition 
 of the Hauck-Herzog "Realencyclopadie fiir protes- 
 tantische Theologie und Kirche," cites with approval 
 this address on "Biblical Criticism and the Christian 
 Faith" as exponential of the present position of Metho- 
 dism and as "placing by the side of all external criti- 
 cism the testimonium Spiritus Sancti." He quotes 
 freely from the text above. 
 
And His Apostles 169 
 
 work in the human soul is in perfect con- 
 formity with the Spirit's work in the Word; 
 but that which is immediate with me is the 
 guarantee of that record of the experience of 
 prophet and apostle, immediate with them, but 
 conveyed to me through the medium of a 
 written record. 
 
 God in the World, God in the Word, God 
 in Christ, God in the Soul, — Creation, Inspi- 
 ration, Incarnation, Regeneration, — these are 
 doubtless mysteries all, containing at bottom 
 a residuum of the inexplicable. But they are 
 parallel mysteries, each carrying with it a 
 weight of analogical evidence for the truth 
 of all the others, and each in its own sphere 
 an example of that mighty working whereby 
 God is able to subdue all things unto himself. 
 For us the regenerating act of the Holy Ghost 
 is indeed private and personal; but for that 
 very reason, having experienced in our own 
 hearts this solitary union of the divine and 
 human, the presence of God in Nature, in 
 
170 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Christ, and in the Bible, while still mysterious, 
 becomes credible and certain. 
 
 Thus the strands (i) of historical Chris- 
 tianity, (2) of the Divine Christ, and (3) of 
 the certainties of Christian experience unite to 
 form a threefold cord which cannot easily be 
 broken. The time for readjustment to the 
 main conclusions of historical criticism has al- 
 most fully come. We are not called upon, in- 
 deed, for a final judgment upon them all; 
 many things remain in doubt; some, from the 
 insufficiency of the materials at command, will 
 probably always remain in doubt. But the 
 main problems, such as those of the Hexa- 
 teuch and of Isaiah, appear to have been sat- 
 isfactorily solved, and, amid considerable dif- 
 ferences on details, there is essential agree- 
 ment among the greater critics as to methods, 
 grounds, and results. So far as I can see, 
 there is no reason to anticipate such a reaction 
 from, and repudiation of, the historical crit- 
 icism of the Old Testament, as befell the Tii- 
 
And His Apostles 171 
 
 bingen criticism of the New ; for that criticism 
 was essentially an attempt to rewrite history 
 on the basis of Hegelian a priori philosophy. 
 There is nothing common to these two schools 
 and epochs of criticism, and it is unsafe to the 
 last degree to argue from the fate which over- 
 took one to a kindred overthrow which must 
 speedily befall the other. 
 
 No'; let us not fight as those who beat 
 the air. Rather, possessing the precious pearl 
 and imperishable treasure of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, sitting at the feet of the incompar- 
 able Teacher, the Eternal Divine Word In- 
 carnate, and being guided by the Spirit of 
 the Father and of the Son into all the truth, 
 let us hold fast the profession of our faith 
 without wavering, receiving the kingdom which 
 cannot be moved, even though this same pro- 
 fession carries with it the removal of those 
 things that are shaken, as of things that are 
 made, that those tilings which cannot be shak- 
 en may remain. 
 
172 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 Note. 
 It may not be improper to add that the fore- 
 going essay was confined to twenty minutes' 
 reading before the Third Ecumenical Metho- 
 dist Conference, and was written during the 
 voyage across the Atlantic. It was my inten- 
 tion to revise and enlarge the whole for publi- 
 cation here; but, as the paper has been several 
 times printed and is, in a sense, no longer my 
 property, I have, on second thought, confined 
 the revision to cutting out one or two sen- 
 tences and the insertion of as many more. I 
 was followed by the Rev. Marshall Randies, 
 D.D., of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, in 
 a ten minutes' address on "Recent Corrobora- 
 tions of the Scripture Narratives," and by 
 Chancellor D. S. Stephens, D.D., of the Meth- 
 odist Protestant Church, in an address of the 
 same length on ''The Appeal of the Old Tes- 
 tament to the Life and Conscience of To-day." 
 Whereupon, the floor was first secured by the 
 Rev. W. T. Davison, M.A., D.D., then Presi- 
 
And His Apostles i73 
 
 dent of the British Wesleyan Conference, and 
 next by the Rev. Joseph Agar Beet, D.D., who 
 spoke five minutes each. My apology for the 
 insertion of their remarks must be found in 
 the fact that they enable the reader to judge 
 how far my very brief and imperfect paper, 
 as commented upon by these able scholars, may 
 be accepted as representing, according to Pro- 
 fessor LoO'fs's use of it, the general position of 
 Methodism, in the Eastern no less than the 
 Western Section of the Ecumenical Confer- 
 ence. The Methodist Recorder for Septem- 
 ber 9, 1 90 1, under the headlines, "A Brief but 
 Important Conversation," "The Doctors do not 
 Differ," thus reproduces 
 
 Dr. Davison's Remarks. 
 
 "Mr. President and Brethren, I feel quite 
 unequal to making a five minutes' speech upon 
 this great subject, but I have risen in order to 
 say one or two things w^hich I think should 
 be said at this time. The first is to bear my 
 
174 ^^^^ Chrisfiainty of Christ 
 
 humble testimony as a representative on the 
 Eastern side to the remarkably able paper of 
 Dr. Tigert to which we have had the oppor- 
 tunity of listening. (Applause.) I will not 
 try at this moment to characterize that timely 
 and able and helpful and suggestive produc- 
 tion. I am quite sure that when we come to 
 read it carefully we shall find how much it 
 contains. We had some idea as the paper was 
 somew^hat rapidly read, but it needs to be 
 much more carefully read in order to be ap- 
 preciated. Another thing which I wanted to 
 try to say, if I could, in a minute and a half is 
 this, that God is trying to teach his Church, 
 I believe, at this hour by means of historical 
 and literary criticism as he has taught and 
 guided his Church by other means outside the 
 Church in the course of past ages. We often 
 hear the phrase about more light breaking out 
 of the Holy Word, and it is true that we shall 
 continually find more and more to study in 
 the Book itself. But God teaches us by light 
 
And His Apostles 175 
 
 from outside shining upon the Word, and I 
 believe that we have learned a great deal from 
 the relation between Scripture and pure sci- 
 ence, and that we have learned a great deal, 
 or we might have learned a great deal, fiT>m 
 the relation between scriptural teaching and 
 social theories, and that God has intended to 
 teach his Church by means of these move- 
 ments round about us, and I hope that we 
 have had grace to learn some lessons. I be- 
 lieve that with regard to the subject of the 
 historical and literary criticism and examina- 
 tion of the Bible as a record which is now 
 proceeding God has many things to teach us. 
 Some of them we have already learned — that 
 human faith as such is an amalgam, and that 
 we have to find out by a process of trial how 
 much of that is human and how much divine. 
 When we examine the historical criticism of 
 the Old Testament, and the historical criticism 
 of the New Testament, which is now causing 
 so much attention, we shall not find it a dif- 
 
176 1 he Christianity of Christ 
 
 ficult thing to separate between those elements 
 which are transitory and those which are per- 
 manent. I beheve that Dr. Tigert has led us 
 very largely upon the right lines in those two 
 matters. I do not myself think that we should 
 be too anxious about confirmations of the 
 accuracy of the Scripture history in all de- 
 tails w^hether from archaeology or from other 
 sources. We welcome them. I do not think 
 that w^e need to be anxious about the matter, 
 or to put out anxious hands to catch hold of 
 every possible confirmation and dwell upon 
 it, any more than we need fear on the other 
 side here and there a discrepancy. Rather I 
 believe that attention is being drawn to the 
 spiritual character of that Book which offers 
 us the ultimate ground of appeal, and the 
 authoritative rule of faith and practice — the 
 character of it, the spiritual power of it, and 
 the relation between the Bible and the Church, 
 and between the Bible and Christian con- 
 sciousness. All these matters are being 
 
And His Apostles 177 
 
 brought out, I believe, more clearly than they 
 ever have been before, on account of the his- 
 torical and literary criticism to which the Bible 
 has been subjected in our generation. There 
 is only one other thing v^hich I wanted to say, 
 and it is this, that as we meet from both sides 
 of the Atlantic I hope that we shall cooper- 
 ate. I hope that those interested in topics 
 of this kind will cooperate in the defense of 
 our faith. I dare not speak for others — and 
 yet I think I may; but we upon our side wel- 
 come the cooperation of scholars and Bible 
 students on the other side of the Atlantic as 
 represented by Dr. Tigert and many more. 
 I hope that this Ecumenical Conference will not 
 pass away without, in some fashion or anoth- 
 er, so bringing us nearer together that in the 
 next decade, by the blessing of God, more 
 good work may be done for biblical scholar- 
 ship than ever has been done in the past." 
 
 Then follows the address of the Rev, Dr. J. 
 A. Beet, the distinguished commentator, then 
 12 
 
178 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 professor in the Richmond Theological College 
 of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. 
 
 Dr. Beet's Address. 
 
 *'I wish to express my strong agreement 
 with the admirable paper which we have just 
 had from Dr. Tigert ; but I wish to supplement 
 it by a few remarks which I think ought to be 
 made in this Conference. If we call attention 
 to recent corroborations of the scriptural nar- 
 rative, we are bound to admit that in some 
 cases recent research has, in some small de- 
 tails, contradicted that narrative, and has gone 
 far toward disproving its absolute verbal ac- 
 curacy. Nay, more. Recent and careful study 
 of the Bible has compelled us to modify a 
 theory of inspiration held by our fathers in 
 the middle decades of the last century. Not 
 that we have changed our doctrines. We hold 
 firmly and unanimously the gospel which Wes- 
 ley preached, the glad tidings of salvation 
 which kindled the flame of the Methodist Re- 
 
And His Apostles 179 
 
 vival. Some one said the other day that Meth- 
 odists were unanimous in holding fast the 
 teaching of Wesley. He might have gone 
 further and said that wherever to-day, in 
 the Anglo-American race, there is aggressive 
 evangelism, it is inspired by the same teach- 
 ing. The theology of Wesley is the saving 
 faith of the millions who speak the English 
 language. But some sixty years ago, good 
 men, in their wish to pay honor to the Book of 
 God, propounded a theory of its origin and 
 inspiration, derived not from study of the Bi- 
 ble, but from a priori reasoning about it, a 
 theory which went far beyond the evidence. 
 From the untenable position then taken up we 
 have retreated to an impregnable position by 
 careful study of the Bible itself. Such retreat 
 has saved many an army. It is our only safety. 
 We must ask you to have patience with bib- 
 lical scholarship. It has done much for the 
 spiritual life of the servants of Christ. It has 
 given to us a purer text of the Bible itself 
 
i8o The Christianity of Christ 
 
 and a more accurate knowledge of the lan- 
 guages in which it was written, and has thus 
 brought us nearer to the still small voice which 
 speaks therein. It has given to us a more in- 
 telligible Bible, and the Bible thus interpreted 
 is the only safe theological text-book. But I 
 cannot deny that not a few able biblical schol- 
 ars reject all the distinctive elements of the 
 gospel of Christ. These men, in spite of many 
 services in the details of biblical scholarship, 
 we must meet with resolute opposition. But 
 in our opposition we must discriminate. If 
 we shut our eyes and strike out right and left 
 we shall strike our friends, mistaking them for 
 foes. For instance, some scholars deny, simply 
 because it conflicts with their theory of the 
 universe, the possibility of a dead man's re- 
 turn to life, and therefore refuse to discuss 
 the abundant and overwhelming evidence that 
 Christ rose from the dead. The dogmatism 
 of rationalists is no reason why we should re- 
 vile a man because after careful study he does 
 
And His Apostles i8i 
 
 not think that the last twenty-six chapters of 
 the book of Isaiah come from the same pen as 
 do the earher chapters. After all, questions 
 of date and authorship must be left to those 
 who have made them their special study. Such 
 questions we cannot settle by appealing either 
 to the tradition of the Church or to our own 
 religious experience." 
 
APPENDIX 
 
PFLEIDERER'S "EARLY CHRISTIAN 
 CONCEPTION OF CHRIST"^ 
 
 I MUST be pardoned for saying flatly that I 
 cannot understand how Professor Pfleiderer 
 could have written such a book as this unless 
 he had first forgotten all the deeper teachings 
 of the New Testament about Christ. The 
 learned occupant of the chair of theology in 
 Berlin University is a mythologist pure and 
 simple. Much learning has certainly made 
 him mad. The reflection that has been run- 
 ning through my mind in reading this little 
 volume is one of satisfaction that its pages 
 will never be perused by the common, blatant 
 
 ^"The Early Christian Conception of Christ : Its Sig- 
 nificance and Value in the History of Religion." Ex- 
 panded from a Lecture delivered before the International 
 Theological Congress at Amsterdam, September, 1903. 
 By Otto Pfleiderer, Professor of Theology in the Uni- 
 versity of Berlin. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 
 London: Williams and Norgate. 1905. i2mo; pp. 170. 
 
 ('85) 
 
1 86 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 infidel of the street. He would find here more 
 dynamite to be exploded under the walls of 
 Christianity than could be supplied by a whole 
 generation of Ingersolls. Professor Pfleiderer 
 repudiates from his first page to his last the 
 historical foundations of the supernatural and 
 divine elements in Christianity. While de- 
 clining to assert historical connection between 
 the heathen and the Christian myths, both 
 alike are set aside as the baseless fabric of a 
 dream. Historical Christianity having been 
 ignored by a process of criticism that is as 
 shallow as it is false, the author attempts to 
 give a purely ideal worth to the Christian 
 myths which is of more value than the original 
 historical content. If Professor Pfleiderer 
 really believes that the historical foundations 
 of Christianity can be utterly subverted, and 
 the religion itself continue an eternal fountain 
 of light and life to blind and perishing men, 
 he is capable of a credulity a thousand-fold 
 greater than that of a believer in the incarna- 
 
And His Apostles 187 
 
 tion and the resurrection. In his concluding 
 pages the author tells us that we are to "free 
 ourselves from the fatal ban of historicism/' 
 that we are to "let history point the way above 
 history," that "myth and rite were certainly 
 the most suitable forms of expression for 
 primitive Christian belief." Is this David 
 Strauss come to life again? Is it possible that 
 historical scholars will have to repeat the tre- 
 mendous labor of killing once more this snake 
 that was thought to be dead fifty years ago? 
 Certain it is that Pfleiderer seems to be in the 
 stage that Strauss reached just before his final 
 plunge over the precipice, when he was still 
 crying "All's well." A moment later came the 
 despairing confession, "All is lost." It is a 
 shame that a man entertaining views destruc- 
 tive of the very foundations of Christianity 
 should be occupying the chair of theology in 
 the greatest university of the land of Luther. 
 A mature theologian may read Pfleiderer's 
 book without damage — no doubt such ought 
 
1 88 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 to read it. But it has been many a day since 
 a volume has passed under my eye from which 
 exhaled a more deadly infidelity than from this. 
 But, after all, it is not a book difficult for 
 the historical student of Christian origins to 
 answer. So far are the central facts and doc- 
 trines of Christianity from being capable of 
 a mythical explanation, that the wonder is 
 that so little of that world of demonism and 
 apocalyptic fancy into which Christianity was 
 born, both among the Jews and the heathen, 
 clung to the New Testament record, or even 
 as barnacles to the hull of the great ship of 
 Christianity as it cleft its way through those 
 dark waters. It is safe to say that, whatever 
 may still linger in modern Romanism, there 
 is not a single essential fact, doctrine, or prin- 
 ciple of Christianity, as held and taught in 
 the purer forms of Protestantism, that can be 
 shown to be so much as tainted with any ele- 
 ment of Jewish or heathen mythology. Sim- 
 ilarly, the Epistle to the Hebrews in the early 
 
And His Apostles 189 
 
 Church subordinated and aboHshed that min- 
 istry and mediation of angels to which the 
 later Jewish theology attached so much im- 
 portance. Outside of Romanism, so far as I 
 am aware, there is no survival of that Jewish 
 angelology against which the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews aimed his polemic. The 
 Jewish theology may have taught that the 
 Archangel Michael was the guardian and heav- 
 enly representative of the nation, and it may 
 be possible to find traces of this idea in that 
 most mysterious of all the New Testament 
 books, the Apocalypse; but for all Protestant 
 Christians Jesus Christ is the only Apostle and 
 High Priest of our profession, and to no other 
 being, angel or saint, do Protestants look for 
 heavenly Intercession. It is no doubt true that 
 in the extra-canonical literature of the sub- 
 apostolic age may be found a virtual identifi- 
 cation of the Archangel Michael and Jesus 
 Christ, but this is the very literature which the 
 Christian consciousness of that age refused a 
 
190 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 place in the canon of the New Testament. We 
 are no doubt beginning to understand in our 
 day better than ever before the steps of the 
 emergence of Christianity from the status of 
 a Jewish sect to that of the early Catholic 
 Church. The extra-canonical and apocalyptic 
 literature, much of which had wide circulation 
 in some Christian circles, is beginning to im- 
 press us with the view that much ignorance and 
 superstition, on the part of some of the earliest 
 converts to Christianity, was compatible with 
 the reality of Christian faith and life. One 
 needs to travel only to Mexico and South 
 America on this continent, and to Spain and 
 Italy on the other, among the debased Romish 
 populations, to be satisfied that what was true 
 in the first and second centuries is still true in 
 the nineteenth and twentieth. But, on this ac- 
 count, to attempt to rewrite the history of the 
 Christian origins, as Pfleiderer and Wernle 
 have done, on the hypothesis that these ex- 
 crescent superstitions and mythologies explain 
 
And His Apostles 191 
 
 everything, is unhistorical and preposterous. 
 These things were never at home in Chris- 
 tianity and, even if they were, which is, of 
 course, the contention of the mythologists, the 
 fact that the vigorous hfe of the system threw 
 them off is sufficient proof that something else 
 dwelt in it from the beginning. 
 
 The truth is that the novelty of these new 
 apocalyptic studies has very much exaggerated 
 their importance. It is a long road that the the- 
 ology of the next generation has to travel, but I 
 do not doubt its ultimate triumph even with such 
 traitors as Pfleiderer and Wernle in the camp. 
 The whole Old Testament Messianism has to be 
 studied exhaustively in the historical spirit. A 
 fresh historical conception of revelation and its 
 method has to be worked out and firmly se- 
 cured. The Messianism of the New Testament 
 has to be studied afresh in the light of these 
 results. Instead of beginning at the periphery, 
 as Pfleiderer now does, all the data at our com- 
 mand must be used for probing the self-con- 
 
192 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 sciousness of Jesus to its depths. Then again 
 shall a great light arise in the midst of dense 
 theological darkness to enlighten the nations — 
 even the Germans. Christ will once more prove 
 himself the center and substance of his reli- 
 gion. The Church has nothing to fear while 
 the incomparable records of his life and teach- 
 ings are read every Sunday from her pulpits. 
 It is no doubt true, that for purposes of the- 
 ology too abstract a view has been taken of the 
 early history of Christianity. Christianity was 
 far from being the only thing in the world of 
 the first century into which it was born; nor 
 was the New Testament the only professedly 
 Christian literature that circulated widely in 
 the Church before the consolidation of the 
 canon. As has been intimated above, these 
 things are beginning to be better known in our 
 day than ever before. But we are still in the 
 alphabet of these investigations. Professor 
 Charles is very generally esteemed the first au- 
 thority, for example, as the editor of the texts 
 
And His Apostles 193 
 
 of Jewish apocalypses, such as that of Enoch, 
 cited in the Epistle of Jude. Yet we do not 
 travel far among the critics, before we find the 
 suspicion expressed that Charles is all wrong 
 ^in some of his fundamental principles of ar- 
 rangement and interpretation. Certainly it is 
 altogether too early in the day for such icono- 
 clasts and, — though it seem overbold, we ven- 
 ture to add, — sciolists as Pfleiderer and Wernle 
 to begin rewriting the history of Christianity 
 from the assumption that the consciousness 
 of Jesus Christ was submerged in these Jew- 
 ish speculations, an insignificant fragment of 
 which barely shows above the surface of the 
 New Testament in the obscure Epistle of Jude. 
 I am not so presumptuous as to put forward 
 these reflections as if they ought to be consid- 
 ered a detailed, historical reply to Pfleiderer. 
 Better scholarship and larger materials than 
 I possess will be needed for this task. But I 
 am thoroughly convinced that I have given 
 no unjust, — nay, no ungenerous, — account of 
 13 
 
194 ^^^^ CJirisfianity of Christ 
 
 his position; nor have I exaggerated the plain 
 historical considerations which render his po- 
 sition untenable. It is, indeed, a deep grief 
 that professedly Christian theologians should, 
 in some instances, prove the most dangerous 
 foes of the faith. But, from the beginning, it 
 has been so, and it will probably continue so to 
 the end. 
 
 When Pfleiderer exhorts us to ''let his- 
 tory point the way above history," he is 
 really demanding that Christianity shall 
 breathe in a vacuum. The truth is that all 
 theological study is now resolving itself into 
 history — none more so than exegesis and dog- 
 ma. Historical theology has practically the 
 whole field to itself. If Christianity is routed 
 on the field of history, it can never again set 
 its scattered forces in battle array. Yet this is 
 just what Pfleiderer proposes to concede in the 
 outset, — namely, that Christianity has no secure 
 intrenchments on the historical field, — and to 
 make this fatal concession the principle of a 
 
And His Apostles* 195 
 
 new apologetic which is to win permanent 
 peace and final victory. I repeat with the 
 earnestness of the most solemn conviction that 
 no more deadly foe of the faith has pitched his 
 tent on the field of open and declared infidelity. 
 As relentless war must be declared against such 
 apologists as against the external enemy. Such 
 wholesale denial, on alleged historical grounds, 
 of the very forces which make history is 
 reached not by criticism, but by hypercriticism 
 or, as that name has been repudiated, by 
 pseudo-criticism. An historical science which 
 makes of the progress of humanity a series of 
 mistakes bound up in one huge blunder is as 
 impossible as a scientific explanation of the 
 world which starts with the denial of intelli- 
 gence and purpose. Both end in the blind alley 
 of atheism. 
 
LOISY'S "THE GOSPEL AND THE 
 CHURCH/'i 
 
 M. Loisy's contention may be very well repre- 
 sented by a paragraph at the beginning of the 
 third chapter of his section on the Church: 
 'Thus to reproach the Catholic Church for the 
 development of her constitution is to reproach 
 her for having chosen to live, and that, more- 
 over, when her life was indispensable to the 
 preservation of the gospel itself. There is no- 
 where in her history any gap in continuity, or 
 the absolute creation of a new system: every 
 step is a deduction from the preceding, so that 
 we can proceed from the actual constitution of 
 the Papacy to the Evangelical Society around 
 Jesus, different as they are from one another, 
 without meeting any violent revolution to 
 
 ^'The Gospel and the Church." By Alfred Loisy. 
 Translated by Christopher Home. New York : Charles 
 Scribner's Sons. 1904. i2mo; pp. vi, 277. 
 
 (196) 
 
And His Apostles 197 
 
 change the government of the Christian com- 
 munity. At the same time every advance is 
 explained by a necessity of fact accompanied by 
 logical necessities, so that the historian cannot 
 say that the total extent of the movement is 
 outside the gospel. The fact is, it proceeds 
 from it and continues it." 
 
 This is the antipodes of Herr Harnack's an- 
 nouncement that "God and the soul, the soul 
 and its God, are the whole contents of the 
 gospel. *' Both positions are false. Harnack's 
 doctrine is an arbitrary and unhistorical limita- 
 tion of the teaching of Jesus under the influ- 
 ence of a self-chosen canon of the absolute and 
 relative in the gospel. His ov^n Person and 
 mediation are an essential part of the gospel of 
 Jesus which Harnack seeks thus to exclude. 
 Loisy is right enough in his negative criticism, 
 but wrong in his positive historical construction. 
 We can well understand how a man of schol- 
 arship and intelligence, finding himself en- 
 meshed in the actual Roman Church by his 
 
ipS The Christianity of Christ 
 
 priesth(X>d in it, might sophisticate his mind 
 with some such Hne of thought as that stated 
 above. There are crises, and even periods, in 
 the history of mediaeval Christianity when it 
 has a relative justification. But when one with 
 adequate historical and dogmatic knowledge 
 undertakes the detailed application of the prin- 
 ciple asserted to the doctrine, government, and 
 worship of the Roman Church, it breaks down 
 in a thousand particulars. That form of Chris- 
 tianity, in comparison with its purer Protestant 
 embodiments, has the scantiest claim to inclu- 
 sion in the Catholic Church. It is hopeful to 
 see a Roman theologian alive to such questions 
 as have agitated the mind of M. Loisy and will- 
 ing to discuss them, but his limitations are pain- 
 ful and his embarrassments evident. It is diffi- 
 cult to believe in the intellectual honesty of a 
 man who could defend the monstrous pen^er- 
 sion of the mass in a paragraph like this : 
 
 ''The development of the Eucharist has been 
 mainly theological and liturgical. At bottom the 
 
And His Apostles 199 
 
 belief and the rite have no more changed than 
 have the behef in baptism and its rite. The 
 Supper of the early Christians was a memorial 
 of the Passion and an anticipation of that festi- 
 val of the Messiah whereat Jesus was present. 
 There is no very marked difference between the 
 Pauline conception of the Eucharist and the 
 idea that simple Christians [in the Roman 
 Church, he means] have of it to-day, those who 
 are strangers to the speculations of theology, 
 who believe that they enter into real communion 
 with God in Christ by taking the consecrated 
 bread [as if the adoration of the host, familiar 
 to every Romanist, could possibly be described 
 in these terms] . The simple blessing and dis- 
 tribution of wine, detached from the love feast, 
 surrounded by readings and prayers and hymns, 
 became the offering of the mass. Since the 
 death of Jesus was conceived as a sacrifice, the 
 act commemorating this death naturally par- 
 took of the same character. The liturgical 
 form helped to impart the same thing, b}^ the 
 
200 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 real offering of the bread and wine, and the 
 participation of all the faithful in the sanctified 
 food, as in the sacrifices of the ancients. Thence 
 came the idea of a commemorative sacrifice, 
 which simply perpetuated that of the Cross, 
 took nothing from its significance or its merit, 
 and satisfied all the aims included in the com- 
 mon prayer of the Church, interests spiritual 
 and temporal, the salvation of the living and 
 the dead. . . . The evolution of the Eu- 
 charist ended in private masses for the priests, 
 and communions of piety for the faithful." 
 
 That the mass as practiced in the Roman 
 Church takes nothing from its significance and 
 merit of the sacrifice of the Cross is simply 
 false. When the masses for the repose of the 
 souls of the departed are paid for by the living, 
 it Is because they are taught to believe that 
 something more than the already accomplished 
 passion of the Saviour is necessary, and that 
 the priest is competent to repeat on the altar 
 a sacrifice to God which will bring about the 
 
And His Apostles 201 
 
 desired release of souls from purgatory. The 
 rest of Loisy's appeal to history in this matter 
 may be accepted as a fair imitation of the 
 truth; but after all it is an account of the evolu- 
 tion of deadly error and falsehood. It came 
 about, no doubt, after some such fashion as he 
 has described; nevertheless, the Eucharist of 
 the Gospels and the Romish mass are separated 
 by the polar diameter. It is a reactionary and 
 spurious "catholicity," false tO' the principles of 
 the Protestant Reformation, which leads the 
 priestlings and apists of the English Church to 
 smuggle in their poor imitations, under cover of 
 an ambigious or antiquated rubric, against the 
 express and unmistakable declarations of the 
 Articles of Religion. The wretched taste of it 
 all struck such an aesthetic genius as Matthew 
 Arnold when he witnessed the new-fangled imi- 
 tation in the English Church; but deeper than 
 all questions of taste is the sacrifice of the truth 
 for which Protestant England and her Prot- 
 estant Church stand. The battles of the Ref- 
 
202 The Christianity of Christ 
 
 ormation may have to be fought again ; but it 
 is no breach of Christian charity to fight for 
 the truth — to contend earnestly for the faith 
 once for all delivered to the saints. 
 
 For the rest, the attempt of Loisy to put the 
 worship of Christ and the worship of saints 
 on the same level, as being equally foreign to 
 the gospel and equally the fruit of development, 
 can mislead nobody. In this book we have an 
 example of a bright, strong, cultivated mind, 
 sensitive to the currents of truth that are blow- 
 ing through the modern world, but hopeless- 
 ly entangled with an outworn ecclesiasticism, 
 struggling to justify itself in an indefensible 
 position of which it has become at least par- 
 tially conscious. It has a certain theological 
 value as a criticism of the opposite extreme; 
 but its chief value is as a psychological uncov- 
 ering of the refuge of lies. 
 
INDEXES 
 
INDEX 
 
 OF AUTHORS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO 
 
 Anselm, 33. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 27. 
 
 BeetJ. Agar, 47, 48, 1 78-181, 
 Briggs, C. A., 54. 
 Brown, W. Adams, 4, 7. 
 Bruce, A. B., 48. 
 
 Caird, Edward, 6. 
 Caird, John, 6. 
 Charles, R. H., 193, 193. 
 Clarke, W. N., 19. 
 
 Davidson, A. B., 17. 
 Davison, W. T., 173-178. 
 Delitzsch, Friedrich, 7. 
 Denney, James, 25, 38. 
 Driver, S. R., 158. 
 
 Ewald, G. H. A., 98. 
 
 Fairbairn, A. M., 6. 
 
 Gilbert, G. H., 31. 
 Grotius, Hugo, 33, 103. 
 
 Hastings, J., Dictionary of 
 
 the Bible, 48. 
 Haeckel, Ernst, 6. 
 
 Harnack, Adolf, 4, 6, 7, 22, 
 
 29, 111-113, 132, 133. 
 Hase, K., 98, 99. 
 Hegel, G. W. F., 7. 
 Hermann, W., 6. 
 Hilprecht, H. V., 7. 
 Holtzmann, A., 98. 
 Hommel, Fritz, 7, 159. 
 Huxley, T. H., 96. 
 
 Julicher, A., 113, 114, 123, 
 124, 125. 
 
 Kaftan, Julius, 6, 69. 
 Kant, Immanuel, 7. 
 Kennedy, H. A A., 17. 
 Keim, K. T., 43, 44, 99, 103, 
 
 140. 
 Kuinoel, C. T., 103. 
 
 Leibnitz, G. W., 7. 
 
 Loisy, Alfred, 4, 7, 13, 29, 
 
 196-202. 
 Locke, John, 20. 
 Loofs, Friedrich, 168, 173. 
 Lotze, Hermann, 7. 
 
 Mathews, Shailer, 148. 
 
 (205) 
 
2g6 
 
 Index 
 
 McCurdj, J. F., 7, 158. 
 Meyer, H. A. W., 46, 47, loi, 
 103, 104, 149. 
 
 Newman, J. H., 12, 
 
 Orr, James, 48. 
 
 Pfleiderer, Otto, 123, 128, 
 
 129, 185-195. 
 Plummer, Alfred, 99, 105. 
 Pope, W. Burt, 168. 
 
 Rainy, Robert, 114, 115. 
 Randies, Marshall, 172. 
 Renan, Ernest, 96. 
 Ritschl, Albrecht, 6, 69. 
 Rogers, R. W., 7, 158. 
 
 Sanday, W., 35, 98. 
 Sayce, A. H., 7, 158, 159. 
 Schleiermacher, F. D. E., 
 69, 167. 
 
 Smith, George Adam, 162, 
 
 163. 
 Smith, Goldwin, 6. 
 Smith, W. Robertson, 165, 
 
 166. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 96. 
 Stephens, D. S., 172. 
 Stevens, G. B., 36. 
 Strauss, D. F., 96, 187. 
 
 Thayer, J. H, 33- 
 
 Weiss, Bernhard, 38. 
 Weizsacker, K., 98. 
 Wendt, H. H„ 31. 
 Wernle, Paul, 72, 81, 89, 
 115, 116, 1 19-122, 123, 128, 
 
 129, 132, 133, 140* 141-143. 
 
 145, 191. 
 Wesley, John, 166. 
 Westcott and Hort, 167. 
 
INDEX 
 
 OF SCRIPTURE PASSAGES QUOTED OR 
 EXPLAINED 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Deut. viii. 3 77 
 
 Psalm xvi 17 
 
 Psalm xlix 17 
 
 Psalm Ixxiii 17 
 
 Psalm cxxxix 17 
 
 Isaiah ix. 6, 7 95 
 
 Matt. iv. 4 77 
 
 Matt. iv. 8 94 
 
 Matt, i V. 17 94 
 
 Matt. V. 13, 14 134 
 
 Matt. vii. 21-23 30 
 
 Matt. viii. 10-12 134 
 
 Matt. xi. II 48 
 
 Matt. xi. 27 30 
 
 Matt. xi. 25-30 3 1, 97,98 
 
 99, 100-105, 130 
 
 Matt. xii. 40 42 
 
 Matt. xvi. 13 139 
 
 Matt. xvi. 17 18 
 
 Matt. xvi. 21 139 
 
 Matt. XX. 28 33 
 
 Matt. xxi. 33-44 113-133 
 
 Matt. xxi. 41, 42 130 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Matt. xxi. 44 62 
 
 Matt. xxvi. 28 34 
 
 Matt, xxvi, 39, 42, 44 77 
 
 Matt. xxvi. 61 41 
 
 Matt, xxvii.40 41 
 
 Mark x. 45 33 
 
 Mark xiv. 36. . . 77 
 
 Mark xiv. 58 41 
 
 Mark xv. 29, 30 41 
 
 Luke iv. 4 77 
 
 Luke x'. 17-20 loi 
 
 Luke X. 21-24. . . ,30, 97, 98 
 100, 101-104, 130 
 
 Luke XV. 1 1-32 26 
 
 Luke XX. 18 62 
 
 Luke xxii. 42 77 
 
 Luke xxiv. 39 40 
 
 Luke xxiv. 42, 43 40 
 
 John ii. 19 41 
 
 John iv. 33 71 
 
 John iv. 34 69, 71, 76,94 
 
 John V. 23. ... 106 
 
 John X. 30 106 
 
 (207) 
 
2o8 
 
 Index 
 
 PAGE 
 
 John xii. 45 106 
 
 John xii. 48 13 
 
 John xiv. 9 106 
 
 John xiv. 30 77 
 
 John XX. 27 41 
 
 John XX. 29 41 
 
 John xxi. 12-15 40 
 
 Acts ii. 24-36 38 
 
 Acts iii. 15, 21 38 
 
 Acts iv. 2 38 
 
 Acts x. 40, 41 39 
 
 Acts xiii. 30-37 38 
 
 Acts xvii. 18 38 
 
 Acts xviii. 18 136 
 
 Rom. iii. 24 25 
 
 Rom. iii. 25 35 
 
 Rom. V.8 36 
 
 Rom. xiv. 17 49 
 
 I Cor. i. 30 25 
 
 I Cor. ii. 2. . . 136 
 
 I Cor. ii. 9, 10 19, 167 
 
 I Cor. ii. 1 1 20 
 
 I Cor. iii. 11 46-48, 147 
 
 149, 165 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I Cor. XV. 3 147 
 
 I Cor. XV. 5-8 40 
 
 I Cor. XV. 12-20 43 
 
 I Cor. XV. 24 97 
 
 1 Cor. xvi. 22 62 
 
 2 Cor. xi. 22-28 144 
 
 2 Cor. xiii. 14 21 
 
 Gal. '. 9 62 
 
 Eph. i. 7 25 
 
 Phil. ii. 5-11 118 
 
 Col. i. 14 25 
 
 I Thess. i. I 109 
 
 I Thess. i. 2-5 no 
 
 I Thess. i. 6 no 
 
 I Thess. i. 9, 10 in 
 
 Heb. ii. 17 34 
 
 Heb. V. 7 80 
 
 I John ii. 2 34 
 
 I John i\". 8 24 
 
 I John iv. 10 34» 35 
 
 I John i v. 10, II 50 
 
 I John iv. 16 24 
 
 I John iv. 19 50