-_ -—\ 
 
 BT 201 .G68 1922 
 
 Gore, Charles, 1853-1932* 
 
 Belief in Christ 
 

 
 / 
 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2017 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/beliefinchristOOunse_O 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF BELIEF 
 
 BELIEF IN CHRIST 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 [Reconstruction of Belief — I). 
 
 THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN. 
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 2 Vols. 
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD 
 (Bampton Lectures for 1891). 
 
 THE BODY OF CHRIST. 
 
 DISSERTATIONS ON SUBJECTS 
 WITH THE INCARNATION 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 RELIGION. 
 
 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 ORDERS AND UNITY. 
 
 SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY. 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED 
 CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN. 
 
 THE QUESTION OF DIVORCE. 
 
 Edited by 
 
 LUX MUNDI. A series of Studies in the Religion 
 of the Incarnation. By Various Writers. 
 
 CONNECTED 
 THE OLD j 
 
 AND THE 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF BELIEF 
 
 BELIEF IN CHRIST 
 
 V 
 
 BY CHARLES GORE, D.D. 
 
 HON. D.D. EDIN. AND DURHAM, HON. D.C.L. OXFORD, HON. LL.D. CAMBRIDGE 
 AND BIRMINGHAM, HON. FELLOW OF BALLIOL AND TRINITY COLLEGES, 
 OXFORD, AND FELLOW OF KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON 
 
 LONDON 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 
 
 1922 
 
Printed in Great Britain by 
 Hazell, Watson <£ Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, 
 
PREFACE 
 
 1. This volume is, again, an appeal to men to think 
 for themselves, and to think freely. It does not 
 concern itself with any question of orthodoxy, that 
 is of ecclesiastical authority. Such questions are 
 deferred to the next volume, which will concern the 
 Church, where they will be wholly in place. But 
 in this volume they are quite omitted. 
 
 It is not that I am under the illusion that my 
 own beliefs, or those of other men, orthodox or 
 unorthodox, with very few exceptions, have been 
 actually reached purely or mainly by an argumenta¬ 
 tive process. They have been the result of a complex 
 of movements within the soul, and of influences from 
 without it, which are largely emotional, moral and 
 social, and not in the narrower sense intellectual. 
 But if the resultant belief or theory is to be described 
 as rational, that must mean that it can account for 
 the relevant experience in its widest sense, and the 
 facts of nature and history, better than any other 
 theory j and the best way to test the ability of any 
 theory to do this is not mainly by attacking other 
 theories, but by approaching the facts constructively 
 and critically and seeing what theory appears to 
 emerge out of their free consideration. 
 
 Accordingly this volume is an attempt to take a 
 critical estimate of all the evidence which concerns 
 the person of Christ, and to show that the belief 
 about Him which really grows out of the evidence, 
 taken all together, and which best accounts for all 
 
VI 
 
 BELIEF IN CHRIST 
 
 the facts, is just the traditional belief in the incarna¬ 
 tion of the eternal Son of God. I seem to see the 
 intellectuals of my generation, and of the generations 
 below me, as, for the most part, the victims of a 
 delusion. What is called “ free thought ” is really 
 thought enslaved to a negative dogma, which is not 
 really valid ; viz. that the sort of redemptive action 
 of a personal God, which the Bible professes to record, 
 cannot really have occurred. If the inhibition of 
 this negative dogma is removed—if the enquirer is 
 again really open-minded—then I believe that free 
 enquiry will be found to establish what is substan¬ 
 tially the traditional belief. That is the thesis of 
 this volume. And, as I say, it is a challenge to 
 men to think for themselves. 
 
 2. The argument of this volume does not begin at 
 the beginning. It presupposes the conclusion of the 
 first volume on Belief in God. Every year of my 
 life makes me more firmly convinced that all the 
 questions which concern the person of Christ are 
 really secondary to the question whether the teaching 
 about God, which was the message of the Hebrew 
 prophets and of Jesus Christ and His apostles, is 
 true—whether it rests upon a real self-disclosure of 
 God to men. I have not of course in this volume 
 repeated the arguments which convince me that so 
 it is. They constitute the substance of my first 
 volume. But I should like to call the attention of 
 my readers to the admirable article on “ Theism 55 
 by Dr. A. E. Taylor in Hastings’ Encyclopaedia 
 oj Religion and Ethics, and particularly to its con¬ 
 clusion. “ In the present generation,” he says, 
 “ the issues seem to be clearing. Philosophers are 
 certainly tending, though not without exception, to 
 range themselves in two camps. Those to whom 
 the business of philosophy seems to consist mainly, 
 if not exclusively, in providing a logical basis and a 
 
PREFACE vi* 
 
 methodology for exact science appear to be identify ~ 
 ing themselves with the doctrine of logical pluralism 
 and taking up a definitely atheistic attitude which 
 involves the denial of the objectivity of judgments 
 of value; those on the other hand who are con¬ 
 vinced that the business of philosophy is to make 
 life, as well as science, intelligible, and consequently 
 find themselves obliged to maintain the validity of 
 those categories of worth apart from which life would 
 have no significance, are, in the main, declared 
 Theists.” This is, I believe, true. But I would add 
 that philosophy, though it can, working by itself, 
 substantiate Theism, cannot substantiate the equi¬ 
 valent of the Biblical idea of God without the 
 postulate of a positive self-revelation of God. Nor 
 can it show the idea of a self-revealing God to be 
 untenable. And that God has in fact so revealec? 
 Himself, especially through the prophets of Israel and 
 Jesus Christ, seems to me to be established by the 
 most cogent reasons. Also the conviction that God 
 had so done is so manifestly the ground on which 
 Jesus stood, and on which His Church has always 
 stood, that I find it very difficult to understand how 
 any of those who reject this foundation, and depic- 
 cate the very idea of a positive revelation, can 
 suppose that the fabric of Christianity would remain 
 
 standing. x. • -d i 
 
 It is quite true that there were elements m Baby¬ 
 lonian, Persian and Greek thought which the Jews 
 had assimilated before our Lord s time, and that 
 they were the richer for the assimilation. And it is 
 true also that Christianity, which is the flower of 
 Judaism, assimilated more from Hellenism than the 
 Jews had previously done ; and that it must learn 
 in like manner to assimilate important elements fiom 
 Indian and Chinese and Japanese thought and art 
 and religion. But this was done of old, and must 
 
viii BELIEF IN CHRIST 
 
 still be done, so as to leave as the main constructive 
 element in the fabric the specific belief in God which 
 came from Israel. On this Christianity was built and 
 must stand. This is the assumption of this volume 
 which I did my best to prove in its predecessor. 
 
 But if I live long enough to accomplish my design 
 I should wish to come back upon the argument of 
 the first volume and consider at length some of the 
 criticisms made upon it. 
 
 I have done my best to make the argument in this 
 volume intelligible to those of my readers who are 
 not used to books of biblical criticism, by putting 
 into footnotes and appended notes, which they can 
 omit, some of the more detailed critical enquiries. 
 
 Perhaps I ought to apologize for the frequency 
 with which, at certain points in this book, I have 
 referred to other writings of mine. But where I had 
 nothing new to say of much importance, it seemed 
 better to refer to what I had written elsewhere than 
 to increase the bulk of this book by repeating it. 
 
 C. G. 
 
 St. Luke's Day , 1922. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The Jewish Background 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The Belief of the First Disciples . 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The Faith of the First Church and of 
 St. Paul • ••••• 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 St. John and the rest of the New 
 Testament. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 The Apocalyptic Teaching of Jesus . 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Is THE Doctrine of the Incarnation 
 True ? . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1 
 
 34 
 
 70 
 
 106 
 
 136 
 
 162 
 
 )X 
 
X 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Definitions of the Councils con¬ 
 cerning the Person of Christ . .196 
 
 The Implied 
 Trinity 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Doctrine of the Holy 
 
 *•.... 281 
 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 Sin and the Fall . . . . .256 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 The Atonement ...... 280 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Summary and Conclusion . . . 806 
 
 Table of Subjects ..... 822 
 
 Index of Names 
 
 827 
 
BELIEF IN CHRIST 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 Twice in the Gospels Jesus is represented as asking 
 a question bearing upon His own person. The first 
 occasion was at the opening of what we may call 
 the second stage of His mission, when an intense 
 opposition centring in the religious leaders of Israel, 
 the scribes and Pharisees, had declared itself openly 
 in Galilee, and the faith of His first eager disciples 
 was beginning to be deeply tested . 1 Then it was 
 that, away from the centres of the life of Israel, 
 almost as a fugitive, in the neighbourhood of a city 
 beyond the Jordan, whose very name—Caesarea 
 Philippi—would strike upon Jewish ears as repul- 
 sivelv alien, He pressed upon His disciples the direct 
 question : 44 Who do ye say that I am ? He had 
 asked them first what people in general were saying 
 about Him, and that question was easily answered. 
 It was generally believed that He was someone 
 extraordinary, of prophetic character and divine 
 commission . 2 But more than such vague answers is 
 
 1 Mark iii 6, 22, vii 1-13, vih 11, 15. The great question is 
 
 recorded in viii 27 ft'. . T , . 
 
 2 What exactly was meant by saying He was John the Baptist, 
 
 or Elijah, or one of the prophets is not easy to define. It must be 
 remembered that the Messianic king, the remote descendant of 
 David, is, as in Jer. xxx 9, Ezek. xxxiv 24 Is. lv 4, called simply 
 David ; in like manner a successor of aohn the Baptist or of Elijah 
 might be called simply by his name. People might say—Here we 
 have John the Baptist, or—Here we have Elijah, over again. 
 
 1 
 
2 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 expected of the disciples. The question is again 
 pressed home : 44 Who do ye say that I am ? ” 
 
 And Peter commits himself to the great confession : 
 44 Thou art the Christ.” 
 
 Once again on the eve of the Passion Jesus is 
 represented as asking—not the disciples, but the 
 Pharisees 1 — 44 What think ye of the Christ ? Whose 
 son is He ? ” It was a question not directly about 
 His own person, but about their idea of 44 Him who 
 was to come.” But in the minds of the disciples, 
 who believed Him to be the Christ, it must have 
 sounded as a question about Himself. And both 
 these questions asked by our Lord imply that His 
 person presented a problem which must be raised 
 and solved. And it is characteristic of our Lord’s 
 generally undogmatic method as a teacher that He 
 insists that the answer should be found as a judgment 
 of men’s own minds under the teaching of God, 
 rather than by any explicit pronouncement from His 
 own lips. 
 
 As we know in history, the answer of the first 
 disciples, who became the Church of Jesus Christ, 
 was given gradually or in stages. First it was that 
 Jesus is the Christ. Then that Jesus is Lord. 
 Finally that Jesus, the Christ, is the pre-existent 
 Son of God, Himself very God, who for us men 
 and for our salvation was made flesh. This final 
 answer was formulated in Creeds and protected by 
 dogmatic decisions, and became the central point 
 of the Christian faith. 
 
 To-day when the questions of our Lord are quoted 
 — 44 Who do ye say that I am ? ” 44 What think 
 
 ye of Christ ? ”•—what is generally intended is to 
 ask whether the familiar doctrine of the Church 
 
 1 As represented in Matt, xxii 41. In Mark xii 35 the ques¬ 
 tion is asked of the people, in view of the teaching of the scribes, 
 “ How say the scribes that Christ is the Son of David ? ” So in 
 Luke xx 41. I have retained the more familiar form of the question 
 as the difference is irrelevant. 
 
WHERE WE START 
 
 a 
 
 concerning the person of Jesus gives the true answer 
 to these questions. In our day it is widely questioned 
 and sometimes scornfully repudiated ; or it is sug¬ 
 gested that the precise answer to be given to these 
 questions does not seriously matter, if only we are 
 agreed in following the example of the life of Jesus. 
 But the world cannot settle down to regard Jesus 
 as nothing more than the best of men or the greatest 
 of spiritual teachers. Most men feel that there is 
 something mysterious and unique about His person. 
 Nor does it seem possible to leave the great question 
 unanswered. It obtrudes itself upon us and demands 
 an answer. And if we cannot be content to receive 
 passively the dogmatic teaching of the Church, but 
 feel the necessity of opening afresh the question 
 for ourselves, certainly it is not our Lord who will 
 condemn us. He certainly would have men think 
 for themselves, and reach a personal conviction 
 which they can feel to be wrought into their souls 
 by God’s own Spirit. 
 
 The purpose of this volume, then, is to make the 
 enquiry about Christ’s person afresh, with a mind 
 as open as possible to all sources of evidence, and 
 with a resolute determination to go 44 whither the 
 argument leads.” But I shall take for granted the 
 conclusions reached in the volume which preceded 
 this on Belief in God. That is to say that I shall 
 take for granted not only that there is a God in some 
 sense, but that He has really disclosed Himself to men, 
 especially in a historical process through the prophets 
 of Israel and through Jesus of Nazareth, who, what¬ 
 ever else He was, was 44 a prophet mighty in word 
 and in deed ” in the succession of the prophets of 
 Israel. Thus the God in whom we start by believing 
 is indeed the one supreme Spirit who is present and 
 active everywhere in the world, but He is also 
 beyond the world and above it, subsisting in the 
 fulness of personal consciousness and will before 
 
i 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 the world was: awful in holiness and perfect in good¬ 
 ness, power, and wisdom : the absolute Creator of 
 all that is, and the Father and Judge of all rational 
 •spirits. For the justification of this faith I must 
 refer back to the reasonings of my first volume. 
 When I say that it will here be taken for granted, 
 I mean that anyone who is to read this volume 
 sympathetically and judge of it fairly, must be pre¬ 
 pared at least to accept it as a provisional hypothesis 
 with the consequences which the preceding volume 
 indicated. He must not have his mind closed by 
 a dogmatic prejudice against that kind of redemp¬ 
 tive action of a personal God to which the Bible 
 witnesses, or against such special acts of God as we 
 call miraculous. He must be prepared to follow along 
 the lines of the growth of the apostolic faith and to 
 seek with an open mind to appreciate its grounds. 
 
 In standing upon this platform to start with, we 
 have this advantage, that we start where the first 
 disciples—we may say with all reverence where 
 Jesus Himself—started. For the Gospels make it 
 quite evident that Jesus took for granted the God 
 of Israel and the religion of Israel , 1 even while He 
 deepened the thought of God and emancipated the 
 religion from its Pharisaic fetters. Professor Bethune 
 Baker has recently said “ I know almost nothing 
 about God’s character apart from Jesus.” 2 This is 
 a not unfamiliar position, but it is to me amazing. 
 Something surely of an important kind about the 
 character of God had become apparent to deep¬ 
 thinking men, like Zoroaster and Aeschylus and 
 Plato, all the world over, and Dr. Bethune Baker 
 is surely the last man to wish to ignore these verdicts 
 of the natural conscience. We owe a great debt of 
 gratitude to Baron Friedrich von Hiigel, who is 
 always bidding us keep in mind that it was not 
 
 1 See Belief in God, pp. 94—5. 
 
 2 The Modern Churchman, Sept. 1921, p. 301. 
 
a 
 
 THE JEWISH DOCTRINE OF GOD 
 
 only along the line of Israel that mankind had gained 
 real knowledge of God. But what is from our 
 present point of view much more important is that 
 44 the Jesus of history ” would assuredly have utterly 
 repudiated the supposition that He was to teach 
 men their first serious lessons about God’s character. 
 He certainly assumed that His hearers knew a great 
 deal about it—all, in fact, that the prophets had 
 told men, for whom the character of God was the 
 main theme of their mission. 
 
 I will counter Dr. Bethune Baker’s statement with 
 another , 1 which, if somewhat exaggerated in the 
 other direction, is far nearer the truth than his : 
 44 In what way did the teaching of Jesus differ from 
 that of His contemporaries ? Not—and the nature 
 of much modern writing renders it desirable to em¬ 
 phasize the negative—not by teaching anything 
 about God essentially new to Jewish ears. The God 
 of Jesus is the God of the Jews, about whom He 
 says nothing which cannot be paralleled in Jewish 
 literature.” I think this is an exaggeration. The 
 teaching of Jesus about the character of God, as 
 the Father of each individual soul whose love goes 
 out to seek and save the lost—the God in whose 
 eyes each individual soul is of identical and absolute 
 value—the Father represented in the Parable of 
 the Prodigal Son—is surely fresh teaching. Certainly 
 our Lord set the character of God in a quite new light 
 in manifold ways. Certainly also His teaching was no 
 borrowed or merely traditional teaching. He said 44 No 
 man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to 
 whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.” But the 
 God and Father of whom He constantly spoke was 
 the Jehovah of the Jewish prophets and Psalmists . 2 
 
 1 From Drs. Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, The Beginnings 
 
 of Christianity (Macmillan, 1920), vol. i. p. 288. . , 
 
 2 The only word ascribed to our Lord which appears at first sight 
 
 to be a repudiation of His Jewish forerunners is John x 8 : All 
 
6 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 There was, in fact, no wavering in the early Church 
 as to the continuity and identity of their faith with 
 the old Jewish faith about God. When St. Paul 
 quotes “the Scriptures,” though it be a predominantly 
 Gentile Church to which he is writing, he means 
 the books of the Hebrew canon. When he says 
 “ Whatsoever things were written beforehand were 
 written for our learning, that through patience and 
 comfort of the Scriptures we might have hope,” or 
 that “ every Scripture, inspired of God, is also 
 profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, 
 for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God 
 may be complete, furnished completely unto every 
 good work ,” 1 it is the Hebrew scriptures exclusively 
 that he is thinking of. Indeed, both in St. Paul’s and 
 St. Peter’s Epistles and in St. James and in the Acts 
 and in the Epistle to the Hebrews the constant 
 assumption is that the Christian Church was the old 
 Jewish Church, the Church of the prophets, reformed 
 and reinspired. This alone accounts for the fact that 
 the earliest Church put in the foremost place among 
 its appeals the argument from prophecy. 
 
 Thus it came about that the Bible of the Jews 
 became the Bible of the Christian Church before the 
 New Testament books were written. It is indeed 
 astonishing how wholeheartedly the Gentile world, 
 
 that came before me are thieves and robbers : but the sheep did 
 not hear them.” But to interpret this single word as a repudiation 
 of Moses and the prophets and John the Baptist would be in glaring 
 contradiction to the Gospels generally and to the Fourth Gospel 
 in particular. See i 7-8, 17, 31, 45, ii 16, iii 10, iv 22, 
 v 46-7, vii 22-3, viii 56, xii 14-16, 39-41, xix 28, 36, 37. 
 The mind of the writer of the Gospel is such that he could not have 
 ascribed to our Lord any repudiation of the ancient prophets. 
 To interpret this startling saying we must refer back to Jer. xxiii 
 1-4, and Ezek. xxxiv 1-16, concerning the shepherds (rulers) 
 of Israel who maltreat and neglect the flock, with whom our Lord 
 associates the present rulers of Israel, the Pharisees and Sadducees 
 who are set to harass and persecute His disciples, the sheep who hear 
 His voice. 
 
 1 Rom. xv 4, 2 Tim. iii 16-17. 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE CHURCH 7 
 
 which came very speedily to constitute the vast 
 majority of the Christian society, accepted the Old 
 Testament. There were, no doubt, rebels against 
 such acceptance in the second century, of whom 
 the famous heresiareh Marcion was the most im¬ 
 portant. He would have discarded the Old Testa¬ 
 ment and all that belonged to it as the work not of 
 the Supreme Being, but of another lower God, the 
 creator (demiurge) of the material world. He w r ould 
 have had the Church preach a Jesus who revealed a 
 supreme and hitherto unknown God, and a Jesus who 
 had not even a real body of material flesh, such as 
 must have been a creation of the dishonoured 
 demiurge of the Old Testament. There are moderns, 
 amongst whom is Dr. Harnack , 1 who have very deep 
 sympathy with Marcion, at least in his attempt to 
 discard the Old Testament out of the Canon. But 
 the Church teachers would have nothing to do with 
 his revolutionary proposal. They clung to the Old 
 Testament. They saw clearly enough that to reject 
 the Old Testament would be to reject the Jesus of 
 history who stood without hesitation upon that 
 platform. 
 
 This is all the more noticeable because some at 
 least of the teachers of the early Church did not, 
 like those of the mediaeval Church or the Churches 
 of the Reformation, rate the Old Testament too high. 
 These Fathers acknowledged frankly that its in¬ 
 stitutions of worship were of heathen origin and its 
 morals to start with on a barbaric level . 2 But 
 they were full of the principle of God’s gradual 
 working in the education of mankind. He justifies 
 Himself, they said, by the results. Only by a large 
 toleration of what was unworthy in a half-barbarous 
 
 1 See Harnack, Das Evangelium vom fremden Qott (Leipzig, 
 1921), pp. 24811. See also an interesting review of the book by 
 Lowther Clark in Theology, vol. iii. no. 17. 
 
 2 Cf. Lux Mundi, pp. 240-2 and Pref. p. xxu. 
 
8 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 group of tribes, only by a divine patience and 
 gradualness, could He have educated them up to 
 the level of the teaching first of the prophets 
 and then of Jesus. Even St. Augustine, who is 
 in a measure responsible for the over-estimate of 
 the Old Testament, says that we wrong the New 
 Testament if we put the Old on a level with it . 1 
 Nevertheless all the Fathers saw that the religion 
 of Jesus Christ is the outcome of a historical process, 
 and its roots are fixed in Israel. The Old Testament 
 and the New cohere inseparably. St. Paul is quite 
 right in saying that as an apostle of Jesus Christ 
 there has been no change in the object of his v r orship. 
 It is still “ the God of our fathers ” whom he serves 
 with a pure conscience , 2 and the whole Christian 
 Church, though in the main Gentile in origin, in be¬ 
 lieving in Jesus, knew they were accepting as the true 
 God the God of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets. 
 
 It was the conviction that the self-revelation of 
 God given through the Hebrew prophets was true and 
 real that made the Christian Church, when it went 
 out into the world of the Roman empire, intensely 
 and deliberately combative not merely for some belief 
 in God, but for the specific belief inherited from Israel 
 and consummated in Christ . 3 And this had two very 
 important results—first, that it made impossible for 
 the teachers of the Christian Church the “deifica¬ 
 tion ” of their Master. 
 
 I 
 
 As we have seen, the question for the Christian 
 Church became very soon—Is this Jesus, who is 
 clearly divine in some sense, really God ? And that 
 is the question which interests us to-day. And the 
 answer v r e give depends for its meaning on what we 
 
 1 Aug. de Oest. Pelcig. 15. 
 
 2 Acts xxii 14, xxiv 14 ; 2 Tim. i 3. 
 
 3 See Belief in God, pp. 108 f., 129 ff., 150 ff. 
 
THE GOD OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 9 
 
 understand by God. The world into which the 
 Church went out used the term God in a very loose 
 and comprehensive sense. There were Gods many. 
 The heavenly bodies were unanimously believed 
 to be Gods, and very formidable Gods too, for 
 they dominated the world, like remorseless fates. 1 
 Further, there were deified men in abundance— 
 such as the old hero Heracles, or ancient founders, 
 like Romulus, or the recent founders of the Empire, 
 Julius and Augustus, or philosophers who had 
 brought men the truth. Even the Epieuieans 
 regularly called their founder Epicurus a God. And 
 the philosophers who believed in a sense in the unity 
 of God found no difficulty in this wide use of the 
 term God. For to them, according to the current 
 Stoicism, God was reason, and reason was God the 
 reason in all things and the reason in men. Men, 
 therefore, were portions of God in respect of their 
 reason. God and man were of one substance. The 
 more rational a person was the more he became god. 
 
 There is a curious passage quoted by Origen from 
 some contemporary writer on the Stoic use of words 
 who defines a “ god ” in its most general sense as 
 44 an immortal, rational being ; in which sense every 
 rational soul is a god.” Others, he says, add to 
 the definition that a god must be pure spirit, m 
 which case human souls will only become gods when 
 their souls leave their bodies. Others only make 
 the requirement of moral goodness. “ So that every 
 seemly soul is already a god,” even while it is still 
 
 This earth, the sphere of their tyranny, took on a 
 
 an obsession. This earth, tr 
 sinister and dreadful aspect.” 
 
 2 See Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, d. 41. 
 is quoted as saying “ Quis p 
 qui pars ipse dcorum est ? ” 
 
 ics. n. 41. The Stoic poet Manilius 
 
 philosophic de Plolin (Paris, 1921), p. 145, note 4. 
 
10 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 in the body. Others confine the term god to beings 
 “ who have some control in the world in respect of 
 its administration, like the sun and the moon. In 
 a different sense the word is applied to the supreme 
 administrator. And above all they call god the being 
 immortal and uncreated, the supreme king, which 
 is the universe.” 1 The great philosopher Plotinus 
 in the third century insisted that the root and source 
 of all things is in unity—in the One. But this did 
 not hinder him from recognizing gods in the sun 
 and the stars and the gods of popular tradition. 
 With him also the term God “ n’est pas du tout un 
 terme reserve,” 2 and this because reason and God 
 are the same thing. And thus, because godhead 
 was comparatively a vulgar thing, Plotinus very 
 seldom calls his Supreme Being, the One, by the 
 name God. Rather, as he is above reason, so he 
 is something above God. 
 
 Obviously from this—the Hellenic—point of view, 
 it would have been easy and inevitable to deify 
 Jesus or to call Him a god. Plow should one 
 so excellent in power and goodness not be a god ? 
 I shall have occasion shortly to discuss the position 
 of the German, Wilhelm Bousset, and his school, 
 who contend that in the early Hellenistic churches 
 it was in fact this pagan spirit which came to be 
 dominant and led to the conception of Jesus as God. 
 
 1 This passage is in the Prologue to Origen on the Psalms , see 
 Lommatzsch, tom. xi. 351 ; cf. Hamack, Hist, of Dogma (Engl, 
 trans.), vol. i. p. 119 n., and Inge, Christian Mysticism , App. III. 
 There is no doubt that this Hellenic use of the term God in a very 
 wide sense affected some Christian writers, as, e.g., when Clement 
 of Alexandria speaks of the soul of man by a true knowledge 
 and righteousness “practising to be god” (fx*\eTa ehai debs, 
 Strom, vi. chap. xiv. sect. 113); and Greek Fathers sometimes 
 speak of Christians, in Christ, “ being made god ” (9eoTroie7a9cu). 
 Such language is derived from the common Hellenic use, but it is 
 not properly Christian. On the whole matter of Hellenic beliefs, 
 Jules Lebreton’s Les Origines du Dogme de la Trinite (Paris, 1919), 
 chap. i. # may be very profitably consulted. 
 
 2 Amou, op. cit. pp. 108, 124 f. 
 
JEWISH MONOTHEISM 11 
 
 But, even according to this school of critics, this^ 
 supposed assimilation of the beliefs and worship of 
 the Church to the model of the religions about them 
 was not possible on the soil of Palestine or in the 
 first Jewish circles of the Church. For these first 
 disciples the idea of a man being raised to divine 
 honours was something impossible to entertain. No 
 doubt the religion of Israel had grown upon the 
 common soil of Semitic religions, and the terminology 
 of polytheism slightly taints the Old Testament at 
 its earliest levels. 1 But this taint had long cen- 
 turies ago been scrupulously purged away. Only 
 One could be called God or worshipped by any Jew, 
 He whom St. Paul in true Jewish spirit calls “ the 
 blessed and only potentate, the King of kings and 
 Lord of lords, who only hath immortality, dwelling 
 in the light unapproachable, whom no man hath 
 seen nor can see.” 2 Greeks might identify God and 
 man, but to an Israelite there was no distinction 
 so deep and impassable as the distinction of the 
 Creator from all His creatures, even the highest. 
 
 Nor was it at all within the compass of the con¬ 
 temporary Jewish imagination that God should niam- 
 fest Himself in human form. Doubtless there had 
 been in old days theophanies. God, they read m 
 the Scriptures, had manifested Himself, as it ap¬ 
 peared, even in human form to men. But these 
 were momentary epiphanies; they had long ceased; 
 and the later theology had explained them away. 
 There was no tendency of thought among the Jews 
 of the time after the Captivity such as would have 
 led naturally towards an idea of incarnation. 
 
 II 
 
 The dominant thought of the Greek world, when 
 Christianity came into it, was pantheistic and 
 i See appended note A, p. 28. 2 1 Tim. vi 15-16. 
 
12 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 polytheistic, but earlier, as in Aristotle, and later, 
 as in Plotinus, there was a philosophical monotheism 
 which believed in the existence of one God absolutely 
 separated from mundane and human affairs, who 
 could take no interest in man, and could influence 
 the world only as an object of desire or intellectual 
 contemplation. Now the religion of the Jews was 
 a monotheism, but totally different from this religion 
 of the philosophers. The one God of the Hebrews, 
 Jehovah, was thought of as intensely concerned in 
 the world and in mankind, as constantly active both 
 in nature and in man. And He had made man in 
 His own image and likeness, so that the activities 
 and emotions of the human mind had their source 
 and counterpart in Him. 
 
 That admirable Anglican mystic of the seventeenth 
 century, Thomas Treherne, vividly contrasts the 
 heathen deities who 44 wanted nothing ” with 44 the 
 Lord God of Israel, the living and true God,” who 
 44 from all eternity wanted like a God. He wanted 
 the communication of the divine essence, and persons 
 to enjoy it. He wanted worlds, He wanted spec¬ 
 tators, He wanted joys, He wanted treasures.” 1 
 It was because of this divine 44 want ” of an en¬ 
 larging fellowship in the divine life and activity that 
 He had created rational spirits and had appointed 
 men as His vicegerents in the world to 44 have dominion 
 over the works of His hands.” 2 But on the widest 
 scale God had been disappointed in man. Rebellion 
 on his part had baffled God’s purpose. Nevertheless, 
 God had not abandoned His good mind towards man, 
 but had proceeded to carry it out by a method of 
 election. 
 
 Again and again God is represented as choosing, 
 and making covenant with, some selected group to 
 be the agents of His universal purpose. So it was 
 
 1 See T. Treherne, Centuries of Meditations (Dobell, 1908). n. 29. 
 
 2 Gen. i 28, Ps. viii 5-8. 
 
13 
 
 BELIEF IN DIVINE PURPOSE 
 
 with the family of Noah, with Abraham, with Isaac, 
 with Israel under Moses, with the remnant of Israel 
 who returned, purged and faithful, from the Cap¬ 
 tivity. And all this selective method of God, choosing 
 a small group out of the whole of mankind to be His 
 instruments, for all its apparent narrowness, had 
 always a universal purpose, as is declared in the call 
 of Abraham : “In thy seed shall all the families ol 
 the earth be blessed.” This is where Israel stands 
 distinctive among the nations of the earth 1 in 
 their intense belief in an energetic divine purpose, 
 of which only their own nation is the selected 
 instrument, but which through their nation is to 
 become the heritage of all the world, and which at 
 the last, in spite of all the wilfulness of man, is 
 certainly to take full effect. Because God is God, 
 at the last shall be the Day of the Lord, when God 
 shall come into His own in the whole creation. 
 Thus it is that Israel was the parent of what the 
 Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce proclaims to be 
 the only true history, the history which is also 
 philosophy, which sees the past as alive in the 
 present and pressing on towards a goal and con¬ 
 summation in the future. 2 
 
 The Greeks and Romans never discarded their old 
 legend of a Golden Age in some remote past follovco 
 by a gradual decline age after age, so that they are 
 almost totally without the sense of a progressive 
 purpose in the world; and if their imagination 
 wanders beyond the present world-order they con¬ 
 ceive, more after the manner of the Easterns, ol 
 innumerable cycles of time, each chaiacterized b\ 
 gradual deterioration and ending in final catastrophe, 
 without any divine purpose running through the ages 
 
 1 See, however, Note B at the end of this chapter on the idea of 
 
 divine purpose in the teaching of Zoroaster. ■ 
 
 2 See Benedetto Croce, Teoria e storia della storiographia (Ban, 
 1917), pp. 186-92 ; and see Belief in God , p. 132, note 1. 
 
14 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 as a whole and moving on to its consummation. 1 
 Of this conception of divine purpose running through 
 all things and destined to final effectiveness in spite 
 of all failures and catastrophes by the way—for 
 which the rebellion of free spirits is responsible— 
 a divine purpose with which it is man’s highest 
 joy to co-operate—of this infinitely fruitful belief in 
 a divine purpose of progress the religion of Israel is 
 the effective source. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This expectation of a kingdom of God 2 to come 
 is as fully important an element in the Jewish back¬ 
 ground of Jesus as the belief in the one only God, 
 the righteous Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth. 
 And it is necessary for us to get as clear a picture 
 in our minds as possible of the great expectation, 
 as it had been formed in earlier days, and as it was 
 held at the time of our Lord’s birth, education, and 
 ministry. Let us dwell first on some central and 
 classical expression of the hope from early times. 
 
 Here is one which is common to Isaiah and Micah 3 : 
 
 “ And it shall come to pass in the latter days, that the 
 mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in 
 
 1 See Be van, Hellenism and Christianity , pp. 180 S.: “In 
 some form or other this idea, that the present is vastly inferior 
 to an ideal past, seems to have been general in classical antiquity. 
 In the philosophic schools naturally an attempt was made to get 
 a more far-reaching view of the universe, and here the notion was 
 elaborated of the process of things being a cyclic movement, in 
 which history repeated itself over and over again without any end.” 
 
 . . . “ Decline within each period and the periods endlessly repeat¬ 
 ing themselves in an mi varying round.” The whole chapter should 
 be read. 
 
 2 The actual phrase “ the kingdom of God ” or “ the kingdom of 
 heaven,” as something to be established in the future, does not 
 appear to occur earlier than the Gospels (see Foakes Jackson and 
 Lake’s Beginnings of Christianity, vol. i. pp. 269-70). But the idea 
 is constant in the prophets and the phrase also, or something like 
 it, in the sense of the divine sovereignty, e.g. Ps. cxlv 12-13. 
 
 3 Is. ii 2-4, Micah iv 1-3. 
 
15 
 
 THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ISRAEL 
 
 the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above 
 the hills ; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many 
 peoples shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to 
 the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God o 
 Jacob ; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will 
 walk in his paths ; for out of Zion shall go forth the 
 law (or 4 instruction ’), and the word of the Lord from 
 Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations, 
 and shall reprove many peoples ; and they shall beat 
 their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into 
 pruning-hooks : nation shall not lift up sword against 
 nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 
 
 This great vision, and many like it, will be found to 
 involve certain distinguishable elements. 
 
 (1) The idea of the spiritual sovereignty and uni¬ 
 versality of the religion of Israel—so that all nations 
 must seek the word of the Lord from Israel as its com¬ 
 missioned dispenser. This idea finds vivid expression 
 again and again in passages which are amongst the 
 loftiest in the Old Testament, as when Isaiah sees 
 Egypt and Assyria linked with one another in one re¬ 
 ligion through Israel as its medium 1 ; or the Second 
 Isaiah sees faithful Israel, now purified, reinstated, 
 and reunited, set “ for a covenant of the people, 
 for a light of the Gentiles ” 2 ; or Zechanah sees 
 “ ten men, out of all the languages of the nations, 
 taking hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, 
 
 1 Is. xix 23-5. 
 3 Zech. viii 23. 
 
 2 Is. xlii 6. 
 
 4 Malaclii ill. 
 
16 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 a radiant life of knowledge, immortality and joy 1 ; 
 or finally where the Psalmist sees the men of all 
 nations calling Zion their mother. 2 It is a fall 
 from this high level when the final vindication 
 of Israel appears as merely their victory over the 
 heathen. 
 
 (2) But, secondly, this glorious vision is only 
 possible if all the horrible tyrannies, the monstrous 
 fabrics of pride, insolence, cruelty and lust, which 
 vex the groaning earth, have been crushed and 
 annihilated, either by the manifest hand of God 
 working through whatever external agency He may 
 choose, or by the strengthening of Israel and its 
 king. Thus a great part of the writings of the 
 prophets is occupied with the 44 dooms 55 upon 
 Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Tyre, and the rest. But 
 so corrupt and false to its trust is Israel itself, 
 God's chosen instrument, that it too must fall under 
 scathing judgment, only never, like the other world 
 powers, 3 to the point of its utter destruction. Israel 
 suffers only thereby to be purged, and, though it 
 be but as a faithful remnant, to pursue its course. 
 People sometimes ask what element of inspiration 
 there is in the Book of Esther, and why it is in the 
 Canon. I should be disposed to answer that now T here 
 is the sense of the indestructibility of Israel, even 
 under circumstances of extremest peril, coupled with 
 the responsibility of all individual Israelites for the 
 maintenance of their faith and loyalty, expressed 
 more vividly than in the words of Mordeeai to Esther, 
 the Jewish wife of a Persian king— 44 Think not with 
 thyself that thou shalt escape in the king’s house, 
 more than all the Jews. For if thou altogether 
 
 1 Is. xxv 6-8, 
 
 2 Ps. Ixxxvii 5. So the Greek Bible rendered it : “ Zion is our 
 mother.” 
 
 3 Only in Jeremiah is the idea of a restoration appended also 
 to the dooms upon the nations, or some of them : see Jer. xlvi 26, 
 xlviii 47, xlix 6, 39. But see also xxx 11. 
 
THE MESSIANIC KINGDOM 17 
 
 boldest thy peace at this time, then shall relief and 
 deliverance arise to the Jews from another place ; 
 but thou and thy father’s house shall perish ; and who 
 knoweth whether thou art not come to the kingdom 
 for such a time as this ? ” 1 
 
 (8) In the prophecies which secured the strongest 
 hold on the imagination of the people, the divine 
 instrument of the sovereignty of Israel is to be 
 an anointed king of the house of David, “ the 
 Christ ” (anointed one) as he alone came in later 
 days to be called. This became the national hope 
 —the raising up by the hand of God of the righteous 
 king of David’s line, who is to administer the divine 
 righteousness on earth with a resistless power and 
 finally in perfect peace—to whom God stands so 
 close that he is to be called His Son 2 and to bear 
 His name upon him, 44 Immanuel, God with us, 
 
 “ Mighty God, Everlasting Father.” 3 
 
 The prophets generally see the glorious Messianic 
 day looming in the immediate future just behind their 
 present troubles and sufferings, 4 just as they see the 
 purging judgment over the whole world behind each 
 particular judgment on each nation which sets itself in 
 turn against God and His people. 5 6 These immediate 
 expectations are never realized. Nevertheless, their 
 failure does not destroy the confident expectation. 
 As God is God, so at last it must be. Even when the 
 
 i Esther iv 13-14. 2 Ps. ii 7 and (?) 12, lxxxix 2G-7. 
 
 3 Is. vii 14, ix 6. The Jews seem never to have interpreted 
 these names as meaning that the King was himself to be God. 
 
 It was the name of God that was to be upon him ; cf. Micah v 4. 
 We must always distinguish the original sense of the prophecies 
 from that which the Christian teachers saw in them. But it is, of 
 course, quite credible that the sense later assigned to them may 
 have lain in the intention of the inspiring Spirit. In some cases 
 I should find it difficult to doubt this. 
 
 4 See especially Is. vii 10—17 and Micah v 5 : cf. the expectation 
 concerning Zerubbabel in Haggai, and the expectation of Jewish 
 sovereignty in Daniel immediately after the downfall of Antioclius 
 
 Epiphanes. 
 
 6 See later, pp. 139 ff. 
 
18 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 figure of the sovereign king of David’s line is absent, 
 the vision of the kingdom remains. And before our 
 Lord’s time, though the hope of the world-sovereignty 
 of Israel never looked so remote as under Roman 
 supremacy, the figure of the victorious king of David’s 
 line is again brought into prominence. In the 
 44 Psalms of Solomon a Pharisaic work of some 
 fifty years before our Lord’s day—the expected 
 kingdom has again its centre in the wonderful and 
 all-powerful king, who is there first apparently called 
 14 the Lord Christ.” 1 
 
 (4) The vision of the days of the Messiah, or of 
 the good time to come, which formed so large a part 
 of the prophetic message, vague as it remained in 
 its details, had some other definite features which 
 must be noted as forming part of the Jewish back¬ 
 ground of the New Testament. Israel, restored, 
 converted and supreme, is to' be granted by God 
 a new and everlasting Covenant which shall renew 
 the old covenant made with David and augment its 
 spiritual richness. 2 It is to be accompanied by an 
 outpouring of the divine Spirit 44 upon all flesh,” 3 and 
 by a resurrection of righteous Israelites, who have 
 died before the dawning of the great day, to partici¬ 
 pate in its blessings. 4 We cannot understand the 
 New Testament unless we remember that the coming 
 of the glorious kingdom, or reign of God and His 
 Anointed, was to be accompanied by the inauguration 
 
 1 Pb. Sol. xvii 36 : “ They are all holy and their king is Christ 
 the Lord ” (Xpiarbs K vpios), or it may be translated “ an anointed 
 Lord.” But in Lam. iv 20 the Hebrew text “ The Lord’s anointed ” 
 appears in the Greek Bible as Xpurrbs Kvpios. 
 
 % Jer. xxxii 40,1 5, Ezech. xvi 60, Is. lv 3, lix 21. 
 
 3 See Ezeeh. xi 19, xxxvi 24 ff., xxxvii 14, xxxix 29, Is. 
 xxxii 16, xliv 3, lix 21, Zech. xii 10, Joel ii 28-29. The oentre 
 of this effusion of the Holy Spirit of God is the Messiah himself 
 (Is. xi 1, 2), or “ the Servant of Jehovah ” (xlii 1, lxi 1). But 
 the Messiah does not appear in O.T. prophecy as himself destined 
 to give the Spirit to his new people. 
 
 4 Is. xxvi 19, Dan. xii 2. (Here also is the resurrection of the 
 unfaithful to shame and contempt.) 
 
19 
 
 THE 44 ONE LIKE A SON OF MAN ” 
 
 of a New Covenant, the effusion of the divine Spirit, 
 and the Resurrection of the Dead. 1 
 
 (5) This was the hope of Israel, vague in detail, 
 but fairly definite in general outline, which we find 
 in possession as soon as we approach the Gospels, 
 in its more spiritual form in the hopes of the humble 
 and pious folk among whom our Lord was born, 
 and in a fiercer secular form in the zealous nationalism 
 of the popular heart. How Jesus both accepted and 
 transmuted this hope it will be in part our business 
 to consider. 
 
 But there is one feature of this hope, to which 
 we shall have to give more detailed consideration 
 when we come to speak of the much discussed sub¬ 
 ject of our Lord’s apocalyptic teaching, 2 but which 
 we must not omit now. We shall find our Lord 
 speaking of Himself as 44 the Son of Man ” who is 
 to come at the last on the clouds of heaven, with 
 the holy angels, in great power and glory, to judge 
 the world and gather together His elect. 3 Now 
 there is one only passage in the Old Testament— 
 a passage which had clearly been given great import¬ 
 ance—to which this language refers. It is the vision 
 of Daniel. 4 
 
 And behold there came with the clouds of heaven 
 one like unto a son of man, and he came even to the 
 Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him. 
 And there was given him dominion and glory and a 
 kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should 
 serve him : his dominion is an everlasting dominion 
 which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which 
 shall not be destroyed. 
 
 1 I say nothing here of the figure of the Servant of Jehovah, who 
 redeems Israel by the sacrifice of his life, in Is. lii, liii, which seems 
 to have taken no hold on the imagination of Israel before our Lord’s 
 time. 
 
 * Cap. V. p. 137. 
 
 3 See Mark xiii 2G-27 and xiv G2. 
 
 4 Dan. vii. 13-27. 
 
20 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 In this vision the being in the form of a son of man 
 stands not for the Christ but for the people of 
 Israel—the “ people of the saints of the most high,” 
 just as the four animal forms who come out of the 
 sea 1 represent the empires of Babylon, Media, Persia 
 and Greece. They are all merely symbolic figures. 
 What the writer is contemplating under these figures 
 is the establishment, in the place of the Empire of 
 the Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great, now 
 represented by the persecutor Antiochus Epiphanes, 
 of the people" of Israel in triumph upon the earth. 
 
 It is the old Messianic hope without mention of the 
 Messiah. 
 
 In the past it was thought that our Lord was 
 simply referring back to this vision, interpreting the 
 figure like to a son of man of the Christ, instead of 
 the whole people of Israel; just as He interpreted 
 the Suffering Servant of Jehovah as the Christ, 
 whereas originally he had stood for the whole people, 
 or the whole of the faithful remnant. But recent 
 study has brought into much prominence the later 
 Jewish Apocalypses, and amongst them, most con¬ 
 spicuously, the Book of Enoch and the part of that 
 composite book which is called the Similitudes, 
 which is held to date from the first century before 
 Christ. And in these Similitudes a unique represen¬ 
 tation is found. The imagery of the Book of Daniel 
 is revived in a new sense. A celestial being, called 
 the Elect One, in the form of a son of man, and 
 called also “the Son of Man,” 2 who has existed in 
 heaven from the beginning, is summoned forth by 
 44 the Lord of Spirits ” (that is the name of God in 
 these Similitudes) to sit upon His throne and execute 
 His judgment upon the sinful world. He is twice 
 
 1 Verse 3. 
 
 2 The passages, however, which call him the Elect One and those . 
 which call him the Son of Man are held by the experts to have 
 belonged originally to different documents. 
 
21 
 
 THE APOCALYPSES 
 
 called 44 the Anointed, 551 but otherwise suggests in 
 no respect the Christ of Jewish tradition, the anointed 
 King of David’s line. He is a heavenly being, 
 neither God nor properly man, but man-like. But 
 the language used by our Lord about the coming of 
 the Son of Man in judgment so much more closely 
 represents the idea of these Similitudes than the 
 idea of Daniel that it is difficult to doubt that our 
 Lord had it in mind. We remember that the Epistle 
 of Jude, one of 44 the brethren of the Lord, 55 is full 
 of reminiscences of the Book of Enoch, and there 
 is no reason why our Lord should not have been 
 acquainted with it. 2 Only if so, as we shall see, He 
 sets its imagery on a wholly new background in 
 applying it to Himself. 
 
 We shall have to return to this subject when we 
 are examining our Lord’s language. But it is neces¬ 
 sary, in describing the Jewish hope, to say something 
 about these Jewish Apocalypses which have lately 
 been engaging so much attention. 3 
 
 1 In c. xlviii 10 and lii 4. But see Beginnings of Christianity, 
 p. 371. Note also that in lxxi 14, as it stands, Enoch himself is 
 said to be constituted the Son of Man. Dr. Charles, however, 
 would alter the text. On the very ambiguous nature of the 
 
 document see appended note, p. 30. 
 
 2 I am assuming what I see no good reason to doubt,^ that the 
 author of the Epistle of Jude was really one of our Lords family, 
 probably a half-brother. 
 
 3 For a general account of the Apocalyptic literature we may 
 o-o to Dr. Charles, Between the Old and New Testaments (Williams 
 & Nor^ate, “ Home University Library ”), or to Lagrange, op. cit.> 
 or to Drs. Foakes Jackson and Lake, op. cit., pp. 126 following. 
 
 Dr Charles is an expert and, like most experts, is over-enthu¬ 
 siastic on his special subject and, I think, greatly exaggerates 
 its importance. And an American writer, Dr. Simkhovitch, not 
 a theologian by profession but an economist, who has published 
 an exceedingly interesting essay. Towards the Understanding oj 
 Jesus (Macmillan, New York, 1921), expresses feelings about these 
 apocalypses which many of us will be found to share : In the 
 
 apocalyptic and eschatological literature of the time the woild 
 was to come to an end. But what really did come to an end in 
 that literature was the last shred of thinking capacity and common 
 sense.” He would perhaps admit that 2 Esdras is a partial 
 
 exception. 
 
 3 
 
22 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 This not very attractive type of literature was 
 quite unknown to our learned men of old, except 
 in the case of the Apocalypse of Ezra, which we 
 find in our “ Apocrypha ” as the Second Book of 
 Esdras. These apocalypses belong to the centuries 
 immediately before or after the birth of our Lord. 
 They were soon discarded by Jews and Christians 
 alike, but found favour for a time in some quarters, 
 and many of them survive in translations into many 
 languages, indicating their former popularity. They 
 are written as in the persons of ancient seers—Adam, 
 Enoch, Noah, the sons of Jacob, Moses, Ezra— 
 recording visions of the mysteries of nature and 
 creation, and of the angels and of the future destinies 
 of the world, the day of judgment, and heaven and 
 hell. 1 And one of their chief characteristics may be 
 said to be that, instead of this world being the scene 
 of the kingdom of God (as in the Old Testament), 
 this world is represented, at least in many of them, 
 as wholly passing away and another world, the world 
 of heaven and hell, as taking its place. 
 
 In the prophets and psalms we have a great deal 
 of language about nature, which represents it as 
 violently moved in sympathy with God’s acts of 
 judgment and mercy, and in terror at His coming. 
 “ The hills melted like wax at the presence of the 
 Lord.” “ All the host of heaven shall be dissolved 
 and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll.” 
 “ The sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and 
 the moon shall not cause her light to shine.” “ The 
 mountains and the hills shall break forth- before you 
 into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap 
 their hands.” We shall have to come back upon this 
 sort of language, where we find the like to it being 
 
 1 They seem, in their speculative interest in the mysteries of 
 nature and the unseen world, and their elaborate doctrine of angels 
 and in their “other world” hopes, to exhibit an influence alien 
 to Israel. We may perhaps find in Persia the source of this 
 
 influence. 
 
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 
 
 23 
 
 used by our Lord and His disciples. It is difficult 
 to say how far it is consciously metaphorical. Cer¬ 
 tainly in the later days of prophecy the prophets 
 contemplated a physical catastrophe on the vastest 
 scale accompanying the divine judgments on the 
 world and the ushering in of the divine kingdom. 
 The old heaven and the old earth yield to a new 
 heaven and a new earth. But the new heaven and 
 the new earth always, on examination, appear to 
 be the old heaven and the old earth purified and 
 renewed, with Jerusalem still at the centre and the 
 nations of the world doing her homage. 1 
 
 But this was not the case in the later Apocalypses. 
 There, says Dr. Harnack, 2 “the expectations for the 
 future become more and more transcendent ; they 
 are shifted increasingly to the realm of the super¬ 
 natural and the supramundane; something quite 
 new comes down from heaven to earth, and the new 
 course on which the world enters severs it from the 
 old ; nay this earth , transfigured as it will be, is no 
 longer the final goal; the idea of an absolute bliss 
 arises whose abode can only be heaven itself .” So 
 also Dr. Charles writes : “ The hope of an eternal 
 Messianic kingdom on the present earth, which had 
 been taught by the Old Testament prophets and 
 cherished by every Israelite, was then abandoned. 
 The earth had come to be regarded as wholly unfit 
 for the manifestation of the kingdom.” 3 
 
 I cannot but think that in recent literature the 
 importance of these Apocalypses has been immensely 
 
 1 See Is. xxiv 23 (apparently a late prophecy incorporated in 
 Isaiah), and Is. lxvi 19-24 and Joel ii 32, iii 16. So it is, as we 
 
 shall see, in the New Testament. 
 
 2 What is Christianity ? (Eng. Trans., Williams & Norgate), p. 137. 
 
 3 Between the Old World and the New, p. 119. If Dr. Charles 
 means by “then,” at the date c. 100 B.C., when the new style of 
 apocalypse begins, then the statement is not, I think, true. The 
 old hope survived in full operation into N.T. times—see The Psalm* 
 of Solomon and the N.T. But it is true within a certain range of 
 feeling or thought represented in these apocalypses. 
 
24 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 exaggerated. For example, we are constantly told 
 that the established belief of the Jews and of the 
 Pharisees in particular, and therefore of St. Paul 
 in his Pharisaic days, included the belief in a Messiah 
 pre-existing in the heavens, after the manner of the 
 44 elect one 55 of the Book of Enoch. This I believe 
 to be so exaggerated an estimate as to be positively 
 untrue, and I have dealt with this at some length 
 in a note appended to this chapter. What I would 
 seek to do here is to point out that the heavenly 
 being of Enoch , though he may be called the anointed 
 one, is a substitute for the Christ of Jewish tradition 
 and quite different in idea. When the Jewish idea 
 of a Messianic kingdom of perfection in this world 
 was abandoned by the apocalyptic writers in favour 
 of another world wholly different from this, the 
 tradition of the Messianic kingdom to come became 
 an awkward encumbrance which could not be fitted 
 into their scheme. They either left it out altogether 
 (like the author of our Similitudes of Enoch) and let 
 the day of judgment and the other world succeed at 
 once to the confusions of this world, or they inter¬ 
 posed the Messianic kingdom, with or without the 
 personal Messiah, as a temporary preparation for, 
 or foretaste of, the real heaven to come, 1 to be 
 succeeded in its turn by conflict and confusion. 
 From their point of view the Messiah and his kingdom 
 upon earth were not wanted. What they wanted 
 was the other world. And the so-called Messiah ol 
 the Book of Enoch, who is the divine instrument of 
 judgment and the harbinger of the world to come, is a 
 substitute for the human king of the family of David 
 who was to inaugurate the kingdom of God in this 
 world. The two ideas belong to different orders of 
 thought. Now, no doubt, the Messianic hope when 
 
 1 This is the first form of the idea of the millennium, which we 
 find in the Revelation of St. John. 
 
THE OLD MESSIANIC HOPE 25 
 
 our Lord came into the world was full of confusions. 
 Nevertheless nothing is more certain than that what 
 was in possession, and remained in possession, was 
 the old orthodox Jewish tradition of a king of David’s 
 line who was to restore the kingdom to Israel and to 
 make Israel the centre of a world-wide kingdom of 
 God. How our Lord dealt with this expectation, 
 and what use He made of the apocalyptic idea on a 
 new basis, we shall see in due course. But all the 
 evidence shows that the old Jewish tradition, as it 
 appears in the 44 Psalms of Solomon,” and not the 
 apocalyptic vision, possessed the ground in the New 
 Testament times. This is the Messianic hope of the 
 circle of humble, pious folk among whom our Lord 
 was born. This is the basis of the preaching of 
 John the Baptist, as it is represented in the Gospels, 
 who expects and finds the Christ as a man among 
 men on earth. All the anxious questioning of the 
 Jews expressed in the Gospels concerning the origin 
 of the Christ; and what is to be expected of Him, is 
 on the same basis. God was 44 to restore again the 
 kingdom to Israel ” through an anointed king of 
 David’s line. Like the influence of the Essenes, 
 which hardly appears in the New Testament, so the 
 influence of the apocalypses doubtless existed in a 
 certain circle—a circle, we suspect, from which our 
 Lord was not wholly alien—but it was by no means 
 dominant or common. This the evidence seems to 
 indicate quite unmistakably. 1 
 
 On this basis I may quite briefly indicate the stand¬ 
 points of the different parties among the Jews with 
 whose names the Gospels make us familiar the 
 Sadducees, the Herodians, the Pharisees ; and I must 
 
 1 See Matt, ii 4-6, Luke i 32-3, 54-5, 76-9, ii 11, 26, 34, 38, 
 For the preaching of John the Baptist seo p. 45. For later indi¬ 
 cations see Matt, xii 23, xxii 41 ff., xxiv 5, 24, xxvii 42, Mark 
 x 47, xi 10, Luke iv 41 ff., ix 20, Acts i 0; cf. John i 41, 
 
26 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 add, though the name is only once mentioned, the 
 Zealots. 1 
 
 The Sadducees are most favourably represented 
 in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, which appears to belong 
 to their tradition. In the New Testament their 
 chief representatives are the high priestly family of 
 Annas, a thoroughly worldly group, occupied with 
 the interests of their position, and determined, above 
 all things, to keep on good terms with Rome, so as 
 to retain whatever relative independence and govern¬ 
 ing authority were still allowed to them. They 
 probably were totally without the Messianic expecta¬ 
 tion, and, indeed, it is not anywhere suggested in 
 Ecclesiasticus. 
 
 The Herodians were no doubt equally alien to it. 
 They were the adherents of a semi-Jewish dynasty 
 whose consistent policy had been, while maintaining 
 the Jewish religion, at least in form, and giving it a 
 magnificent shrine in the new temple at Jerusalem, 
 to favour the absorption of Israel in the general 
 
 world of the Roman Empire. 2 
 
 But the Pharisees, as Josephus says, “ had the 
 multitude on their side.” They were the real leaders 
 of religion. Not that they were advocates of armed 
 resistance to Rome. They saw the hopelessness of 
 this, and in fact they had apparently joined in the 
 petition, offered to Augustus soon after our Lord’s 
 birth, that Judaea might be made a Roman province. 
 They anticipated, no doubt, less interference with 
 true religion under a religiously indifferent Roman 
 
 1 The point of view of these parties, in relation to our Lord’s 
 teaching, is admirably characterized in Professor V ladimir 
 Simkhovitch’s Towards the Understanding of Jes-us (Macmillan, 
 New York, 1921)—a most interesting study; also in Stephen 
 Liberty’s Political Relations of Christ's Ministry (Milford, 1916). 
 
 That one of the apostles is called the Zealot indicates, what other 
 evidence indicates, that the party was already in existence, as 
 assuredly its spirit was. Of the Essenes, as they do not cross our 
 path in the N.T., I say nothing. 
 
 2 Simkhovitcli, op. cit. pp. 15-17. 
 
POPULAR NATIONALISM 27 
 
 governor than under an Herodian prince bent on 
 secularizing Judaism. But they held passionately to 
 the hope of the Messiah. We probably interpret 
 them best if we represent them as believing that the 
 chosen people, by the strict observance of the lav 
 and the tradition of the elders, would merit and 
 obtain such favour of God as that Lie would bare 
 His arm and work the great redemption by His own 
 
 omnipotence. . 
 
 But this acquiescence in foreign sovereignty did 
 not satisfy the people as a whole. Since the days 
 of the Maccabean revolt, under the Greek and the 
 Roman yoke alike, Judaea seethed with nationalism, 
 and the Zealots were the extremists in this move¬ 
 ment. For them the hope of the Messiah meant the 
 hope of a king who would lead them in revolt against 
 the Roman supremacy, and, by the power of God 
 assisting him, do as the Maccabees had done of old, 
 only on a very much grander scale—that is, win 
 liberty for Israel, and even world sovereignty. It is 
 impossible to read the pages of the Jewish historian 
 Josephus, without seeing what a seething mass of 
 nationalism Judaea was in our Lord’s lifetime, and 
 how the Messianic hope presented itself to the heart 
 
 of the people. 1 
 
 I hope enough has been said to enable any reader 
 who has an ordinary acquaintance with the Old 
 Testament to realize the extreme importance of 
 beginning the study of Christ on the background 
 
 i See Simkhovitch, op. cit, pp. 27 f.: “ The reliigion ■^ 
 fathers became [to the Jewish people at large] the unfurled banner 
 of a nation at bay. . . . From now on, whether m passive resist¬ 
 ance or in open rebellion, the only Lord and Master they recognised 
 wm the Lord of Hosts . . . with whom they were in covenant 
 and who must send the great Deliverer to save His people in their 
 hour of need.” Cf. p. 30 and p. 48 : “ The loud nationalist call 
 to rebellion, the fervid hope for a Messiah, God s anointed leader 
 and the redeemer of Israel, stirred the deepest emotions. 
 
28 
 
 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 of the traditional Jewish faith and hope. This 
 is equally important for what it excludes—that is, 
 the possibility of our Lord’s first disciples “ deifying ” 
 their honoured Master in the way Greeks would have 
 done, because their minds were full of the “ jealousy ” 
 of the One God the Creator; and for what it in¬ 
 volves—that is the eager expectation of divine re¬ 
 demption, which, at the period when Jesus was born, 
 was especially acute and which ran upon the tradi¬ 
 tional lines of the prophetic forecast of the Messiah 
 and his kingdom on earth. 
 
 Note A 
 
 Traces of Polytheism in the Old Testament 
 
 As is well known, the common Hebrew word for 
 God is a plural “ elohim.” But this is interpreted by 
 A. B. Davidson ( The Theol. of the O.T., p. 100) and 
 Driver ( Genesis , pp. 402 ff.) as a plural of majesty rather 
 than as a relic of polytheism. Nevertheless, we find 
 phrases in the O.T. which suggest that there were other 
 Gods besides Jehovah—phrases which would not have 
 been used in the later days of Israel : and the same 
 must be said of the use of elohim for judges and rulers 
 (Psalm lxxxii 6), or for the dead (1 Sam. xxviii 13), 
 or perhaps for angels (Psalm viii 5). Such uses are 
 probably derived from a tradition older than strict 
 monotheism. But all this laxer use of the title God 
 had been rendered impossible by the teaching of the 
 Prophets. Only One could be called God or worshipped. 
 
 Of course the use of Psalm lxxxii (“I have said ye 
 are Gods ”) ascribed to Jesus in John x 34 is interesting. 
 It might suggest that our Lord wished to encourage 
 something like the extended Hellenic use of the term 
 God. But a single phrase in a single Gospel must not be 
 interpreted so as to be quite out of harmony with the 
 general teaching of our Lord. This particular passage 
 is, I think, one of those in which (granted its genuineness) 
 our Lord asks questions solely to force men to think out 
 their own meaning without conveying any positive 
 
THE TEACHING OF ZOROASTER 29 
 
 teaching at all. He means 44 How can you object to 
 my calling myself the Son of God, when you yourselves 
 are bound to recognize that in the Psalms judges are 
 even called Gods in some sense ? There is here plainly 
 some sort of communication of divine authority to men 
 such as you should recognize also in me.” I shall have 
 occasion later (pp. 186 f.) to point out that it was part ot 
 the method of our Lord to test men’s sincerity an*I 
 consistency by questions which cannot be taken as 
 suggesting any positive teaching on His pari', e.g. Mark 
 x IS and xii 35-37. 
 
 Note B 
 
 The Idea of Divine Purpose in the Teaching of Zoroaster 
 
 Quite independently of Israel, the Persian or Iranian 
 race, under the prophetic guidance of Zoroaster, whose 
 date is quite uncertain but who was assuredly a real 
 man and a great prophetic soul, was taught to see this 
 world as the scene of a divine purpose one day to triumph. 
 Whether Zoroaster was an ultimate dualist appears to 
 be uncertain. But certainly he saw this world, and the 
 larger universe, as the scene of a conflict between a gooo 
 spirit and a bad. But the good spirit is to triumph. 
 44 Deliverers ” or 44 saviours ” are sent to help forward 
 his victory. And the call to all men is to exercise their 
 free will by co-operating with the good god and His 
 instruments, and so 44 make the world advance. The 
 enc l— 44 the last turning of the creation in its course - 
 is certain. The scene of history is to close in a day oi 
 judgment, beyond which is a perpetual hea\en for the 
 righteous ( 44 t,he best mental state”), a perpetual hell 
 (“the worst life”) for 44 the liars” or those who have 
 followed the false spirit, and perhaps a middle region 
 for 44 those whose false things and good things balance. 
 This primitive ethical gospel ol Zoroaster became much 
 overlaid and buried in rubbish ; and thus it contrasts 
 with the Jewish faith in having been on the whole in¬ 
 effectual ov$r any wide area: see Dr. Sydney Cave s 
 Introd. to the Study of some Living Religions oj the East 
 (Duckworth, 1921—a very useful study), pp. 04 If. ; 
 
£0 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 ef. Hoffding’s Philosophy of Religion (Eng. trails., 
 Macmillan, 1906), p. 53, and Bevan’s Hellenism and 
 Christianity , p. 187, where, however, the statement that 
 Zoroaster looked for one Saviour in the fulness of time 
 to destroy evil does not seem to be borne out by the 
 earliest authorities. It is certainly not to be found in 
 the deeply interesting Gathas ( Sacred Boohs of the East , 
 vol. xxxi.). 
 
 In the recent work of Eduard Meyer, Ursprung und 
 Anfdnge des Christenthums , vol. ii., a very important place 
 is assigned to Persian beliefs—the beliefs emanating from 
 Zoroaster—in influencing the later religion of Israel. 
 In particular the whole idea of the 44 world to come 
 as a world quite different from the present world—a 
 world of heaven and hell which begins when this world has 
 vanished—such as appears in many of the later Jewish 
 Apocalypses, is supposed to be due to Persian influ¬ 
 ences, and also the developed angelology and doctrine of 
 Satan. 
 
 NOTE C 
 
 The Belief in the Pre-existing Son of Man 
 
 It is the fashion to-day to speak as if the Jews, and 
 especially the Pharisees, of our Lord’s day believed in 
 the Messiah as the Son of Man, already existing in the 
 heaven from the beginning of time and destined to be 
 manifested in God’s good time. So Dr. Rashdall 1 (quoting 
 Weiss) : 44 Wrede and Bruchner have conclusively shown 
 that Paul before his conversion held the belief, as a 
 Pharisee, that the Messiah existed from all eternity with 
 God in heaven.” Thus, 44 as an apostle of Christ, he 
 thought of Jesus as the Messiah and therefore ... a 
 heavenly being who existed with the Father before His 
 manifestation on earth.” So Dr. Stanton 2 : The pre¬ 
 existence of Jesus 44 was inevitably suggested by the 
 identification of Jesus with the heavenly Son of Man.” 
 So also Dr. Harris, Creeds or No Creeds (Murray, 
 1922) : 44 It is one of the most assured results of recent 
 
 1 Idea of Atonement, pp. 127-9. 
 
 2 The Gospels as Historical Docwnents, vol. iii. 
 
31 
 
 THE PRE-EXISTENT SON OF MAN 
 
 Synoptic criticism (liberal as well as orthodox) that the 
 title Son of Man implies pre-existence, and that not 
 merely impersonal or ideal pre-existence, but actual and 
 personal pre-existence in a state of divine glory and 
 majesty with the Father in heaven 55 (see pp. 220, 264, 
 367). But we must confront these scholars with Dal- 
 man, 1 than whom, I suppose, there is no greater authority 
 on Jewish matters : “ Judaism has never known any¬ 
 thing of a pre-existence peculiar to the Messiah, ante¬ 
 cedent to his birth as a human being” “ The dominance 
 of the idea in any Jewish circle whatever cannot seriously 
 be upheld.” “ The common opinion that Paul simply 
 adopted his designation of Christ as ‘ the last Adam 5 and 
 4 the second man ’from the Rabbinic theology is erroneous, 
 for their theology knew nothing of such a comparison 
 between Adam and the Messiah.” Nor did it know any¬ 
 thing of a pre-existent ideal man. Dalman seems to me 
 to prove his case. 
 
 (1) In documents which can reasonably be held to be 
 pre-Christian there is nothing to suggest a pre-existing 
 Son of Man or pre-existing Messiah except the Similitudes 
 of Enoch, of which we are just going to speak, and in 
 post-Christian Judaism only the “ Ezra Apocalypse 
 (see 2 Esdras vii 28, xii 32, xiii 26-52, xiv 9), 2 * * and 
 nothing else till we come to a seventh- or eighth-century 
 document, and later to mediaeval mysticism. The only 
 pre-Christian ground of the idea, then, appears to be 
 the Similitudes of Enoch. 
 
 (2) But we must be very careful in quoting this docu¬ 
 ment. What we have to do with is a translation in 
 Ethiopic from a Greek translation of the original. Our 
 existing version is confessedly greatly interpolated. 
 Moreover, it has passed through Christian hands. 
 Ao-ain, the critics rightly discern, underlying our existing 
 Ethiopic text, two documents , from which the relevant 
 passages are quoted—one of which (A) speaks of a 
 celestial figure which is called “ the Elect One, and 
 another different document (B) which speaks of another 
 
 1 Words of Jesxis , pp. 128-32, 248, 252. , , 
 
 2 See Dr. Box’s The Ezra Apocalypse (Pitman, 1912). The date 
 
 of the whole book is c. a.d. 120. Some of the passages referred to 
 
 belong to an older document, c. a.d. 90. 
 
32 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 
 
 being whose countenance had the appearance of a man,' 
 and who is afterwards called 44 that Son of Man” or 
 44 the Son of Man.” 1 Both documents appear to have 
 assigned to the celestial figure the same functions, though 
 pre-existence is only asserted of 44 the Son of Man. * 
 Now it seems to be probable that the document (A) is 
 original and the document (B) interpolated either by a 
 Jew who sought to divert the title Son of Man, derived 
 from the Book of Daniel, from the Christian human-born 
 Christ, or (less probably) by a Christian from a somewhat 
 different motive. See Lagrange Le Messianisme chez 
 les Juifs (Paris: Lecoffre, 1909)—a careful and ex¬ 
 haustive examination. On the general idea of pre- 
 existence see pp. 43 ff. ; on the Similitudes, pp. 87 f. 
 
 Further, we must notice that the Similitudes as they 
 stand give a confused impression. The 44 Son of Man,” 
 or Elect One, is a celestial quasi-angelic being who is 
 properly neither God nor man and is never destined for 
 human birth and life. He is rather a substitute for the 
 Messiah than the' Messiah (see Beginnings of Christi¬ 
 anity, by Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, p. 371). 
 But in one passage (lxxi 14), which is supported by 
 another interpolated passage (lx 10) and by the 44 Book 
 of the Secrets of Enoch” (see Lagrange, p. 97) Enoch him¬ 
 self is represented as that Son of Man. (See Beginnings, 
 p. 371. Dr. Charles would alter the text.) 
 
 (3) Dr. Charles’ theory that the wicked 4 Kings ’ and 
 4 mighty men ’ of the Similitudes, whom the Elect is to 
 overthrow, are the later Maccabean princes is surely con¬ 
 tradicted by the plain statement that they are idolaters. 
 44 Their faith is in the gods which they have made with 
 their hands ” (xlvi 7). His suggested parallels from the 
 Psalms of Solomon are not parallels. There the 
 Maccabean rulers are described as worse than the heathen 
 ( p s . Sol. i 8, viii 14, xvii 16) but not as idolaters. The 
 fact that in the Similitudes the adversaries are described 
 as heathen seems to leave us without any certain evidence 
 of date except what is found in the traces of the 
 Similitudes in the Gospels. 
 
 1 See Charles, Booh of Enoch, pp. 64-5 
 
 2 Charles, op. cit. p. 65. 
 
33 
 
 THE PRE-EXISTENT SON OF MAN 
 
 (4) All, then, that I think it is at all safe to assume 
 is that the pre-Christian author of the Similitudes of the 
 Book of Enoch borrowed from Daniel the idea of a 
 celestial figure 44 like unto a Son of Man ”—regarded it 
 as an individual and not a mere image of the sacred 
 nation—called the individual 44 the elect one,” and 
 represented him (still with Daniel) as coming on the 
 clouds of heaven to 44 the Lord of Spirits ” (as he calls 
 God) and being appointed by God to sit on His throne 
 and judge the world and usher in the world to come. 
 This celestial being was, of course, conceived as pre¬ 
 existing, and the idea would have been known to what¬ 
 ever circle of persons was familiar with the Similitudes. 
 But the circle does not appear to have been a large one. 
 As I have shown, it was the old-fashioned idea of the 
 Messiah, who was to be the Son of David and to restore 
 the kingdom to Israel on earth, which is assumed to 
 prevail in the Gospels and early chapters of Acts, and 
 none other. And it is (I think) quite certain that in 
 our Lord’s day 44 the Son of Man ” was not recognized 
 (before He adopted the name) as a title of the Messiah. 
 Also there does not appear to be in the New Testament 
 any recognition whatever of a pre-existing Man or 
 celestial being in human form (see below, pp. 76 n. 2, 87 f., 
 115, 313). 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 Upon the basis of the Jew’s belief in God, and his 
 vivid, though confused, expectation of His coming 
 and His kingdom, our task lies now with a certain 
 group of Jews, the first disciples of Jesus. W e 
 have to examine the gradual growth of their faith 
 in their Master, first as the promised Messiah, then 
 as the Lord of all, then as the incarnate Son of God ; 
 and our object will be to enquire whether this faith, 
 as it reaches expression in St. Paul and the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews and St. John, was in such sense 
 inevitable, or required by the facts of the case, as 
 that it can be pronounced the only legitimate inter¬ 
 pretation of the person of Jesus, valid for us to-day 
 as for them of old. 
 
 I 
 
 This is a profoundly interesting study of the growth 
 of a conviction in a gradually expanding group : 
 but it is also a difficult study because every step of 
 our progress will be over ground which has been 
 the subject of acute controversy—controversy which 
 is still as far as possible from any general settlement 
 in the world of Biblical criticism ; and my readers 
 must be patient with me if I proceed very carefully. 
 
 As has been explained 1 in the volume which pre¬ 
 ceded this, the mass of the critical work which has 
 
 1 Belief in God , pp. 215 ff. 
 
 34 
 
PROF. HARNACK 
 
 35 
 
 been poured from the European press, and the most 
 famous of the attempted reconstructions of “ the 
 Jesus of history,” have been produced upon the 
 basis of an assumption that the miraculous and 
 generally the supernatural-—that is the coming of 
 God into the world of man and nature in a new 
 sense with a directly redemptive purpose, ac¬ 
 companied with special acts calculated to marx 
 that purpose—cannot really have occurred, or, at 
 any rate, is not rationally credible. As has been 
 shown, to start from such an intellectual assumption 
 involves very violent treatment of our documents, 
 the Gospels, which are full of the miraculous and 
 of the faith in a special activity of God for the re¬ 
 demption of mankind. Thus it leaves the fabric 
 of the evangelical narrative in so shattered and pre¬ 
 carious a condition (as anyone can see for himself) 
 that each critic who aims at reconstruction can 
 select and reject amongst the materials that remain 
 almost at will. This is what accounts for the 
 amazing differences in the resultant “ Jesus of 
 History ” which is offered us by different schools 
 of critics. 
 
 (1) To-day there are three such schools which 
 excite the most interest. There is first the Liberal 
 Protestant School, of which Professor Harnack may 
 be taken as the outstanding representative. In his 
 famous lectures on “The Essence of Christianity” 1 
 Jesus appears as a simple and gracious figure indeed, 
 preaching an ethical gospel, inspired by the con¬ 
 viction of the Fatherhood of God, the infinite and 
 equal worth of every human soul, the duty and joy 
 of self-sacrifice and brotherliness, and the inward¬ 
 ness of true religion or the kingdom of God. “ In 
 the combination of these ideas—God the Father, 
 providence, the position of men as God s children, 
 
 1 In the English translation, What is Christianity ? (Williams 
 and Norgate) ; in the original, Das Wesen des Christenthums. 
 
36 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 the infinite value of the human soul—the whole 
 gospel is expressed.” 1 The work of the gracious 
 teacher was accompanied by a marvellous power of 
 healing (“ by suggestion ” as we should now say), 
 which is represented in an exaggerated form in the 
 Gospels as they stand, mixed with nature miracles 
 which, of course, it is taken for granted cannot 
 really have occurred. 2 But the 4 ’ miracles,” of 
 whatever sort they were, and the claim of Jesus to 
 be the Christ (which in some sense is admitted), 
 with everything that would involve superhuman 
 quality in Him, are passed over by Harnack very 
 lightly. His ethical teaching and influence was 
 the thing that mattered. The subsequent belief 
 of the disciples in His corporal resurrection from 
 the dead, and their expectation of His coming in 
 glory,.and the later introduction of a doctrine of 
 Incarnation, with a metaphysic of Christ’s person 
 and of the Trinity in God, and the theory of a visible 
 church with sacraments and priesthood—all these 
 elements of Christianity are treated as regrettable 
 necessities, due' in part to the pressure first of the 
 Jewish and then of the Hellenic environment, and 
 in part to the exigences of an elementary organiza¬ 
 tion struggling to maintain itself. They were the 
 husk necessary for the time to the preservation of 
 the kernel. They are for the most part quite alien 
 to the spirit and intention of Jesus, and their sole 
 justification lies in the extent to which they enabled 
 the one thing necessary—the essential ethical spirit 
 of Jesus—to maintain itself and again and again to 
 be revived. But the Christ of Pauline and Joliannine 
 theology, and even the Christ of the Acts, stands 
 already at a great distance from the Jesus of 
 history. 
 
 1 Op. cit. p. 70 ; of. p. 79: “ The thought that he who loses his 
 life shall save it . . . effects a transmutation of values.” 
 
 2 See pp. 27-31. 
 
37 
 
 DR. SCHWEITZER 
 
 (2) In violent contrast to the Jesus of the Liberal 
 Protestant School, which has many representatives 
 in this country, stands the Jesus of the Apocalyptic 
 school represented by Schweitzer and Loisy, which 
 also has had great influence on not a few English 
 writers. 1 
 
 All the startling “ apocalyptic ” features of the 
 Gospels which Harnack sought to eliminate or 
 reduce in significance, are by these writers brought 
 to the front in their reconstruction of the original 
 history, and made to occupy almost the whole 
 ground. Jesus is represented as what we cannot 
 but call an enthusiastic fanatic, who believed him¬ 
 self to be destined to be manifested immediately 
 from heaven as the Christ or the Son of Man (of the 
 Book of Enoch) to judge the present world and in¬ 
 augurate the next world. 
 
 Schweitzer and his school make it a chief point 
 of their contention that “ the Christ ” of the Gospels 
 is not an earthly person, but one to be manifested 
 in glory from heaven, according to the picture in 
 the Similitudes of Enoch. Therefore our Lord on 
 earth was not the Christ, but only believed Himself 
 to be destined to become the Christ on the Day of 
 Judgment. Incidentally I would note 2 that this is 
 flatly contrary to the evidence of the Gospels. There, 
 whatever the Christ is afterwards to become, He is 
 represented as first of all an earthly person, born 
 of the seed of David. 
 
 When Jesus first sent out the Twelve, He expected 
 
 1 The best book by which to judge of Schweitzer’s view is the 
 second part of his treatise on “ The Lord’s Supper ” ( Das Abend - 
 mahl). This second part has been translated as The Mystery of the 
 Kingdom of God : The Secret of Jesus' Messiahship and Passion, 
 by Walter Lowrie, and published in New York (Dodd, Mead & Co., 
 1914). It is most illuminating. In his larger and later work, 
 published in English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Black, 
 1910), his theory is constantly referred to and assumed. But its 
 grounds are not continuously given as in the earlier book. 
 
 2 See below, p. 76 n. 1. 
 
 4 
 
38 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 His coming as Christ to occur before their mission 
 to the cities of Israel was completed, that is within 
 a few weeks. 1 As a result of His disappointment 
 in this expectation, and by reflecting on the death 
 of John the Baptist and on the figure of the Servant 
 of Jehovah in Isaiah liii, He came to the conviction 
 that His own sacrificial death was necessary to 
 bring the day of Resurrection and the coming of 
 the Christ in glory, and so gave Himself to death. 
 He died upon the cross with the cry of desolation 
 on His lips, and left His disciples overwhelmed with 
 the consciousness of failure. But their reviving 
 faith, feeding upon “ visions ” of Jesus as risen and 
 glorified, built the fabric of the belief of the eailiest 
 Church in the heavenly Christ immediately to appear 
 in glory, which again was gradually transmuted 
 into the Christ of later Christian belief. By this 
 apocalyptic school of interpreters Christ s ethical 
 teaching is even ludicrously minimized. He had, 
 according to them, no thought of founding or le- 
 founding a Church to live a new kind of ethical 
 life in this world. He was a man possessed with 
 one idea, the idea of the immediate end of the world 
 and of Himself as the instrument of the divine 
 judgment; and this idea rendered all this world and 
 its concerns a matter of little moment, as indeed 
 the life of the world was almost over. All that is to 
 be done is to repent and to detach oneself absolutely 
 from all worldly ties, so as to be free to be admitted 
 into the world to come which is immediately 
 imminent. 2 
 
 From this Jesus the Christ of the Church is indeed 
 very far removed. It was only in fact by His ceasing 
 to be remembered as historically He was, that He 
 could be serviceable for the generations to come. 
 
 1 This is based on Matt, x 23, on which see below, p. 152 n. 
 
 2 This is what is meant by describing Christ’s moral teaching as 
 merely “ interims-ethik.” 
 
39 
 
 DRS. BOUSSET AND LAKE 
 
 (3) There is a third school, for so it must be ranked, 
 which is best represented by Bousset in Germany 
 and Kirsopp Lake in England. 1 In this school the 
 Jesus of history is a very dim figure indeed. Little 
 or no originality of preaching about God or human 
 life is ascribed to Him. He preached a “message 
 of the kingdom of God and the duty of fellowship 
 in righteousness and love and mercy and forgive¬ 
 ness,” 2 a message also of obedience to God and the 
 pre-eminence of spiritual values, largely presented in 
 parables. He died a loyal martyr to his witness for 
 real righteousness against the selfish conservatism 
 and religiosity of the Pharisees, the worldly hostility 
 of the Sadducees, and the violent ideals of popular 
 leaders of nationalism. But all the supernatural 
 features of the Gospels, and almost all the apoca¬ 
 lyptic claim, is to be ascribed to the first Jerusalem 
 community of disciples, and not to Christ. 3 
 
 The account which Bousset gives of the belief of 
 this community is very similar to that given by 
 Schweitzer, but it is ascribed, as I say, to the com¬ 
 munity and not to Jesus. This is the first trans¬ 
 formation—that by which the historical Jesus 
 becomes the apocalyptic Christ. The second trans¬ 
 formation is still more important. It occurred in 
 the Hellenistic churches such as Antioch, Tarsus 
 and Damascus. There the Pagan religious^ world 
 was largely occupied with “ mystery cults ” that 
 is religious societies, which worshipped hero-gods— 
 Dionysus or Hermes or Serapis, or Cybele and Attis, 
 or Osiris and Isis—by whose patronage they believed 
 
 1 The central work of this school is Kyrios Christos (a history of 
 the faith in Christ from the beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus), 
 by Wilhelm Bousset, Gottingen, 1921. The school is best repre¬ 
 sented in England by Dr. Kirsopp Lake, Landmarks of Early 
 Christianity , and the larger work, The Beginnings of Christianity , 
 in which he collaborates with Dr. Joakes Jackson. 
 
 2 Bousset, op. cit. p. 74. . , ... , j* 
 
 a p 37 . “ Hier nioht der histonsche Jesus spncht, sondern cue 
 
 Gemeinde,’ die ihron Glauben an den Menschensohn verkundet. 
 
40 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 themselves to be about to be translated from the 
 miseries and bondage of material life and death 
 into immortality and bliss. These mystery religions, 
 about which I shall have more to say, were sacra¬ 
 mental ”—that is to say, participation in the blessings 
 of the redemption offered by them was to be secured 
 by undergoing certain ceremonies of initiation, and 
 subsequent fellowship in a community of initiated 
 persons, who held some secrets of mystical Knowledge 
 not communicated to the outer world. And they 
 had emancipated themselves from their original 
 national or local boundaries, and become, as we 
 may say, world religions. In these mystery religions 
 the hero-God, who was the object of worship, was 
 called “ Lord.” In the Christian communities, 
 then, of the Hellenistic world Jesus also began to be 
 called “ Lord ” ; and this title, for the majority of 
 the Gentile converts, carried with it all the associa¬ 
 tions of their former cults. Even before St. Paul 
 came to the front in these Gentile churches, they 
 were already in part assimilated to these Pagan 
 societies. But it was St. Paul’s genius which, on 
 a basis of the old Jewish monotheism and apoca¬ 
 lyptic beliefs, developed a doctrine of Jesus the Lord, 
 the author of individual and present salvation “ in 
 Christ ” or “ in the Spirit,” mediated by sacramental 
 actions and in a sacramental fellowship, for any 
 man of any race, whereby the old Jewish and the 
 new Hellenic ideas of religion were brought together 
 in one system ; and this was the basis on which 
 what we know as the theology and sacramental 
 system of the Catholic church was founded. Sub¬ 
 stantially the same principles later found similar 
 expression in the theology of the unknown thinker 
 whom the Church called St. John. This was the 
 second great transformation by which the Christ 
 of St. Paul and of “ St. John,” which is almost the 
 Christ of the Catholic Church, takes the place of 
 
41 
 
 THE GOSPELS 
 
 the apocalyptic Christ, and becomes still further 
 removed from the Jesus of history. 
 
 The educated Englishman to-day who is inter¬ 
 ested in religion is fairly familiar with the Liberal 
 Protestant conception of Jesus, and with the con¬ 
 ception of the Apocalyptic school. But the theory 
 of the school of Bousset is still strange to him. 
 However we shall hear more of it. We are being 
 frequently warned by grave voices that this is the 
 most important of the theories with which orthodoxy 
 or traditional Christianity is confronted. I shall, 
 of course, have to return to it, and to the others 
 just described. But for the present I leave them. 
 The method which I propose to follow is first of all 
 positive not negative. Confessedly all these theories 
 involve leaving out and repudiating as unhistorical 
 large elements in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts 
 as they stand. Now I am making no claim for 
 complete freedom from error in the Gospels. But 
 I have sought to establish 1 their claim to be regarded 
 as serious history compiled by competent men, which 
 must not be violently dealt with ; and I have given 
 my reasons at some length for refusing to regard the 
 strictly miraculous and supernatural elements in the 
 Gospel narratives as incredible on a 'priori grounds. 2 
 
 I do not propose to go over this ground again ; but 
 perhaps X had better briefly restate the position with 
 regard to the Gospels and Acts which it was sought 
 to establish in the first volume and which is to be 
 
 taken for granted in this. 
 
 The position is (1) that the second of our Gospels 
 was really written by John Mark, who from his 
 youth up had lived in his mother’s house at Jerusalem, 
 at the very centre of the apostolic fellowship, and 
 had been afterwards the companion of his cousin 
 Barnabas and of St. Paul, and more paiticulaily, 
 
 i See Belief in Gcd, chaps, viii. and xi. 
 a Belief in God , chaps, ix. and x. 
 
42 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 according to an early and trustworthy tradition, 
 of St. Peter, whose customary teaching about the 
 things said and done by Christ he set himself to 
 reproduce as faithfully as possible; (2) that the 
 
 third Gospel, which is based upon Mark’s material, 
 and also upon another document containing matter 
 common to the third Gospel with the first, which is 
 commonly called Q, as well as upon information 
 from other “ first-hand ” sources, was really written 
 by the physician Luke, the companion of St. Paul, 
 who has explained his motive and his method in a 
 luminous preface to his Gospel, which its contents 
 amply vindicate; and (3) that the Acts is part of 
 the same work as the Gospel, by the same author, 
 who had the fullest opportunities of obtaining trust¬ 
 worthy information about the beginnings of the 
 Christian Church. It follows that these books 
 ought to be taken, provisionally but in all serious¬ 
 ness, as credible historical documents, unless indeed 
 they should prove themselves otherwise. 
 
 I propose then that we should build the structure 
 of our argument in the main upon the Gospels of 
 St. Mark and St. Luke and upon the Acts, and upon 
 the other books of the New Testament which are 
 not involved in serious controversy, letting nothing of 
 importance rest upon the unsupported testimony of the 
 first Gospel and using the fourth only as subsidiary. 1 
 
 But I would call my readers’ attention to the 
 fact that to-day controversy is not so much con¬ 
 cerned as formerly with the authenticity and date 
 of documents. Thus perhaps the most important 
 recent German work on “ Christian origins ” is that 
 of Eduard Meyer, the distinguished author of the 
 immense History of Antiquity (Geschichte des Alter- 
 ihums). He comes to his task 2 therefore on the basis 
 
 1 But see below, Chapter IV., pp. 107 f. 
 
 a The Ursprung und Anj&nge des Christenthums, 1921, in two 
 volumes, awaiting a third. 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST 
 
 43 
 
 of very wide knowledge and a high general authority 
 as a historian. He talks with some impatience 
 of modern criticism as unreasonable, meaning, 
 suppose, specially modern New Testament criticism^ 
 He ascribes the third Gospel and the Acts to Luke„ 
 and the second Gospel to Mark, the interpreter ^ 
 (Dolmetscher) of Peter, according to the tradition, 
 and recognizes the work of Matthew behind our 
 first Gospel. If he has in fact to give Ins readers 
 a conception of Jesus widely different from that of 
 the Evangelists, it is not because they were not 11 
 a position to know the facts, but because he cannot 
 apparently conceive of the supernatural as being 
 really historical. 4 It is just this assumption that 
 I desire we should not take with us to our study 
 of the Evangelists, but should approach them wit 
 an open mind and give them a chance to tell then 
 story as to those who have ears to hear. 
 
 II 
 
 All the Gospels put the activity of Jesus upon 
 the immediate background of the preaching oi the 
 great prophet who deeply stirred Jewish society, 
 John the Baptist. Josephus, the Jewish bistowai, 
 gives some account of him as a good man and 
 m-eacher of righteousness, who used baptism as 
 hb in.trame»t f« ga.hemg the «««'» » 
 
 righteousness together ; and tells us that because 
 of the great excitement which he caused among le 
 
 i - Qij . “How that (i.e. that the author of the 
 Fo^rtlf Gospel *uitended to f^/of th“ 
 
 things'We to me in the positions of modern 
 criticism.” 3 p 159 
 
 < IS^ot example, his account of the Last Supper', pp. 174 it., 
 and of the saying of Matt, xi n-> P- • 
 
44 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRSTjDISCIPLES 
 
 people and the persuasive power over them which 
 he showed, Herod put him to death for fear he should 
 cause some rebellion ; and he thought it better to 
 act betimes and put him out of the way rather than 
 to repent at leisure for having done nothing. 1 In 
 all the Gospels he is presented to us, not only as a 
 preacher of righteousness, who revived the memories 
 of the old prophets by the tremendous force of his 
 denunciations and encouragements, but also as one 
 who was conscious of a definite mission to proclaim the 
 immediate advent of the Kingdom of God, to herald 
 the Christ who was to come, and “ to make ready 
 a people prepared for the Lord.” 2 
 
 There are matters of detail concerning the Baptist 
 on which the Gospels appear to disagree, but on the 
 chief points which alone concern our present enquiry 
 we may feel sure. 
 
 (1) The spirit of ancient prophecy revived in John 
 in the sense especially that for him the coming of 
 the Kingdom was as far as possible from being some¬ 
 thing which the nation, as it was, could afford to 
 welcome. Their eager nationalism was not enough. 
 God who was to visit them in the coming of His 
 
 1 Antiq. xviii. 52. Josephus’ particular phrases are obscure, 
 though the general sense is plain. The editors of the Beginnings of 
 Christianity, pp. 101 ffput a definite meaning on Josephus which, 
 I think, Mr. Creed ( J.T.S. , Oct. 1921, p. 59) has shown to be 
 mistaken. 
 
 The motive assigned to Herod for John’s imprisonment is not 
 necessarily exclusive of the motive assigned by the Gospels. His 
 motives may well have been mixed. It has been pointed out 
 (Belief in God, p. 206) that Josephus, writing always to conciliate 
 Roman opinion, observes a discreet silence about Christianity; 
 and his silence about any relation of John to Jesus should not be 
 allowed to discredit the Gospel account. 
 
 2 The phrase, “ the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” occurs only 
 in St. Matthew iii 2 ; but the same message is implied in all the 
 other Gospels. Schweitzer tries to persuade us that he believed 
 himself sent to prepare for—not the Christ, but Elijah, who was 
 to precede Christ. But “ the mightier than I, the latchet of whose 
 shoes I am unworthy to stoop down and unloose,” who “ shall 
 baptize you with the Holy Ghost ” (Mark i 7, 8 ), can be none other 
 than the Christ. 
 
45 
 
 THE WITNESS OF THE BAPTIST 
 
 Christ would take no account of their descent from 
 Abraham. Pie demanded a holy people; and 
 sinners in Zion, however alert their national zeal, 
 had as good cause as in the days of Isaiah to tremble 
 at the approach of the day of God as before devouring 
 fire and everlasting "burnings. A fundamental 
 change of mind was needed, and John’s baptism 
 was the symbol of admission to a new Israel a 
 44 people prepared for the Lord.” 
 
 (2) It is the testimony of all the Gospels that 
 John not only announced the immediate coming of 
 the Kingdom and the Christ, but recognized Jesus, 
 on the occasion of His coming to his baptism, as 
 44 the greater one ” who was to come. The meagre¬ 
 ness of Mark’s narrative, till he reaches (at ver. 14) 
 the Galilean ministry, suggests that only at that 
 point did his special information begin. What 
 precedes is a bare summary of what everyone knew. 
 But his brief narrative implies that, though the 
 vision of the opening heaven and the descending 
 Spirit was for Jesus only, the divine voice was for 
 John also—whether heard with his outward ear 
 or only in his inward spirit, like the word of the 
 Lord by the old prophets, we need not enquire— 
 and it proclaimed Jesus the Son of God, by which 
 was then understood, I think, neither more nor less 
 than the Christ. This information must have been 
 conveyed, we should suppose, by John himself to 
 some of the first disciples; and St. Peter in the 
 Acts represents the companionship of the apostles 
 with one another and with the Lord ^ Jesus as 
 44 beginning from the baptism of John.” 1 There 
 are differences in detail among the Gospels, but 
 there is a common witness which we ha\e no leason 
 
 for hesitating to accept. . 
 
 But with the narrative of the Galilean ministry 
 of Jesus, we get upon the ground of chief importance. 
 
 1 Acts i 21-2. 2 See appended note p. 68. 
 
46 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 III 
 
 If we are to do our best to judge of the impression 
 produced by Jesus upon the first group of His 
 disciples, and especially upon those who came closest 
 to Him and whom He chose to be “ the Twelve,” 
 we should read, at one sitting, with as fresh and free 
 a mind as possible, ignoring difficulties of detail, the 
 Gospel of St. Mark down to the beginning of the 
 Passion narrative, and then, again at one sitting, the 
 Gospel of St. Luke from the beginning of the ministry 
 down to the Passion, and then at least the Sermon on 
 the Mount and the Parables in St. Matthew. What 
 follows represents my often-renewed impression of 
 such readings, of the justice of which my readers 
 must judge. 
 
 To speak in the most general terms, I submit that 
 whatever previous ideas may have been in the minds 
 of these disciples concerning the purpose of God for 
 Israel, and concerning His kingdom and the Christ 
 who was to come, were quite overwhelmed by a 
 new influence or impression which threw everything 
 else into the background—the overwhelming im¬ 
 pression of the person of Jesus—“ the Son of Man,” 
 or “ the Man,” as He called Himself. 
 
 I do not think it is possible to doubt (1) that the 
 evangelists intend to convey the impression that 
 Jesus, habitually from the beginning of His ministry, 
 called Himself the Son of Man. 1 
 
 (2) That He really so called Himself. Seeing that, 
 except on one occasion, when Stephen, at the moment 
 of his martyrdom, calls Jesus the Son of Man, with 
 obvious reference to His own words before the San¬ 
 hedrin (Mark xiv 62), the first Christians, according 
 
 1 See Beginnings, pp. 374—7 : “ The opinion of the writers of 
 the Gospels is thus clear that Jesus used the phrase ; that he 
 used it of Himself.” “ The writers understand Jesus to refer to 
 Himself.” So also Bousset, Kyrios Christos, pp. 5 ff. 
 
47 
 
 THE SON OF MAN 
 
 to the evidence, did not use this title of their Lord 
 at all, or in addressing Him, it seems the extreme of 
 perversity to maintain that the attribution of the 
 title to Jesus is due to the early community, 1 and 
 that He probably did not in fact use the title as a 
 designation of Himself. 
 
 (3) That, whereas after Peter’s confession of His 
 Messiahship, the title acquires in the mouth of Jesus 
 a quite distinctive Messianic significance, it was as 
 first used by Him plainly not intended 01 understood 
 in a Messianic sense at all. For we are repeatedly 
 told that Jesus was refusing to make any public 
 claim to be the Messiah. The Aramaic word, trans¬ 
 lated Son of Man, would apparently have meant 
 simply “ the man.” Its use by Jesus may be com¬ 
 pared to its frequent use in the case of Ezechiel as 
 the name by which the divine voice called him. 
 There it signifies that he is a man, and also a man 
 singled out for a special vocation. 2 So also in Ps. 
 viii 4 it represents mankind viewed, as we may say, 
 in the ideal. I suppose when our Lord first so called 
 Himself, quite without reference to Messianic dis¬ 
 tinction or glory, 3 He meant His hearers to think of 
 Him as “ the man ” in some specially representative 
 sense, though I should shrink from ^ such a modern¬ 
 sounding phrase as “ the ideal man.” 
 
 The Jews were distinguished by profound rever¬ 
 ence for their teachers, who were primarily teachers 
 of religion, and those who heard Jesus came very 
 speedily to regard Him as a great teacher sent from 
 God They were impressed at starting by the novelty 
 of His teaching. “ What is this ? ” men cried out. 
 “ A new teaching ! ” 4 Already they had heard what 
 seemed a new teaching from John the Baptist. 11 in 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 ) Bousset and Kirsopp Lake. 
 
 >e Ezech. ii 1, iii b and constantly, 
 s in Mark ii 10, 28, Luke vii 34, ix i>8, xn 10 (all from Q). 
 
 ark i 27. 
 
48 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 substance it was the teaching of the ancient prophets 
 revived, yet, at least by contrast to what many 
 generations of the people had received from their 
 official guides, or by comparison with popular ideas 
 about the Christ who was to come and the kingdom 
 of God, it was very new teaching which they heard 
 from John. And doubtless they were prepared for 
 the like from Jesus. But what they heard—for in¬ 
 stance in the sermon given by St. Luke, or the longer 
 version, the “ Sermon on the Mount 55 in St. Matthew, 
 or the teaching about the merely relative obligation 
 of the Sabbath, or about the new wine which could 
 not be put into old bottles, or about sin having its 
 seat only in the heart—the great saying of which 
 St. Mark 1 says that it “ cleansed all meats,” or again 
 our Lord’s estimate of the absolute worth of every 
 human soul—all this no doubt struck in their hearts 
 a profounder and richer note of novelty than any¬ 
 thing said by John the Baptist. 2 
 
 Moreover, we are bound to believe that some of 
 the disciples at least were impressed sufficiently to 
 be able to treasure the words of Jesus—doubtless in 
 many cases the often-repeated words—and to repro¬ 
 duce them accurately, with even sharp precision. 
 This was in the Jewish schools the quite normal 
 faculty of the pupils of any teacher. 3 We may be 
 prepared to maintain against all comers that the 
 reports in the Synoptic Gospels of the words of Jesus 
 bear, with not much exception, the quite unmistak¬ 
 able stamp of genuineness. This, I think, must be 
 the verdict of the literary sense. Nevertheless, it 
 is also quite apparent that the disciples had very 
 
 1 St. Mark vii 19. 
 
 2 There are admirable modern accounts of the ethical teaching 
 of our Lord, amongst which I still think Ecce Homo pre-eminent. 
 But in this book I am concerned only with the estimate of our 
 Lord’s person and restrain myself from the consideration of His 
 teaching. 
 
 3 See Belief in God , pp. 191—2. 
 
40 
 
 THE IMPRESSION OF THE PERSON 
 
 little intelligent perception, during our Lord’s human 
 lifetime, of His meaning. They were capable of what 
 we cannot but call stupid misunderstandings. They 
 were even astonishingly dense, unimaginative, and 
 unsympathetic. It would be quite untrue, we feel 
 as we read, to interpret the influence of Jesus upon 
 them as the influence of His teaching upon receptive 
 pupils. It really was not in the main the substance 
 of His teaching that was gradually making them 
 new men. Unmistakably it was the commanding 
 authority of His person and their unbounded faith 
 in Him. 1 
 
 Critics of the orthodox tradition are always re¬ 
 proving the theologians for having overstated the 
 prominence of the person, and the personal claim, 
 of Jesus. 44 To lay down any 4 doctrine ’ about his 
 person and his dignity, independently of the Gospel, 
 was quite outside his sphere of ideas.” He does 
 not talk about himself.” 3 The measure oi truth in 
 such statements we shall have to consider later. But 
 let there be no mistake. The dominant influence of 
 Jesus upon the disciples did not lie in anything that 
 He taught them, whether about Himself or about God 
 or about the kingdom of God, but in c * The Man ” 
 Himself—in the impression of overwhelming authority, 
 certainly supernatural and 44 of God,” resident in Him. 
 
 It is this that constrains them at the beginning to 
 leave all and follow Him. It is authority which 
 expresses itself in His works of healing, especially, 
 but not only, the healing of the possessed. The 
 sense of it is vividly presented to us in the case of 
 
 1 Simkhovitch, op. cit. p. 78, has a very good passage about the 
 difference in powerful movements which stir mankind between 
 faith in ideas and understanding of ideas : “Do not think tor the 
 moment that it is understanding of the ideas which moves man¬ 
 kind ; it is their faith in the ideas.” With the disciples it was not 
 even yet faith in the ideas of Jesus. It was simply a bewildered 
 
 confidence in Him. 
 
 2 Hamack, What is Christianity ? p. 129. 
 
 3 Beginnings of Christianity, p. 288. 
 
50 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 one who was neither a disciple nor a Jew—the 
 Roman centurion who had been paying attention 
 to Jesus, and had gained the conviction that He 
 occupied in nature a position comparable to his own 
 in the army. No doubt, that is to say, He was 
 “ under authority ”—the authority of God ; but 
 within the sphere of His activity He could do as He 
 willed with nature, as the centurion could with his 
 subordinates. 44 With authority He commands, and 
 it obeys Him. He speaks, and it is done. 1 So again 
 it is that the ruler of the synagogue falls at His feet— 
 full of belief in His power. 2 That is the impression. 
 His authority in working what we call miracles and 
 what the Gospels call 44 powers ” is paralleled by His 
 moral authority. He taught as He worked, 44 as one 
 having authority ” of a divine kind in Himself. So 
 as 44 the Man ” He claims to forgive the sins of the 
 paralytic and, to prove His right to do so, He heals 
 his disease. And in teaching He does not generally, 
 though He does at times, refer beyond Himself— 
 “ This is the word of the Lord,” or “ Thus saith 
 Scripture.” Even in revising the divinely-given law 
 of Sinai, it was enough to say 44 But I say unto you.” 
 
 Many moderns seem quite to underestimate or 
 almost to ignore this overwhelming impression of 
 authority. The disciples are being led to believe 
 that in the physical world, though He will do nothing 
 to help Himself, He can do anything to help those 
 in need, or themselves, His companions. Such was 
 doubtless the impression of His feeding of the five 
 thousand out of so miserably inadequate a supply, or 
 rescuing the disciples suddenly, when they roused Llim 
 out of sleep in the storm at sea. They were growing 
 to believe that He would be equal to all the emer¬ 
 gencies which might occur. And in the moral sphere 
 His word was enough. They could not question it. 
 And though He did not seem to know everything, yet 
 i Matt, viii 5-13, Luke vii 1-10. 2 Mark v 22. 
 
HIS IMPLIED CLAIM 51 
 
 He had a strange power of reading men’s hearts; and 
 at times Lie spoke as if He were the final judge of 
 men, not only in view of their public acts but of their 
 secret lives. In certain of the parables this assump¬ 
 tion that He is the final judge is plain. 1 But it is 
 implied elsewhere. We think of such a saying as 
 “ Many shall come to me in that day . . • then will 
 I protest unto them, I never knew you.” 2 Here what 
 is implied, both in St. Matthew and St. Luke s 
 version, is that nothing matters to a man at last 
 except the judgment of Jesus on him, and that this 
 judgment goes to the heart of the reality and cannot 
 be misled by appearances or professions. So else¬ 
 where we hear that to deny Him and be ashamed of 
 Him here in this world means to be disowned by 
 Him at last, and that that is the final disaster. 3 He 
 is the ultimate judge. 
 
 There are three other kindred features in the im¬ 
 pression which our Lord plainly made on His disciples 
 which we shall note. He spoke as being infallible. 
 He was indeed as far as possible from being a dog¬ 
 matic teacher who loved to teach men a secret lore 
 ex cathedra. There was nothing about Him of this 
 tone. And He did not shrink from telling the 
 disciples of something which was not within His 
 knowledge. But whatever He did teach, He taught 
 as if it were certainly true, and (unlike the prophets 
 who delivered a message from God) as if the fountain 
 
 1 So most dramatically in Matt, xxv 19. I know that St. 
 Matthew seems at times to heighten the Messianic colouring of our 
 Lord’s sayings. But I agree with Sunday (The Life of Christ m 
 Recent Research, p. 128, note 1) that it is “ wanton to doubt this 
 parable. See also the Tares, Matt, xiii 41, and the Talents, 
 Luke xix 11 and Matt, xxv 14. Dr. Rashdall, Conscience and Christ ; 
 p. 48, seeks to substantiate the doubt whether our Lord ever spoke 
 of Himself as the actual judge. But the witness that He did is 
 
 not only St. Matthew’s. . 
 
 2 Matt, vii 22 ; cf. Luke xiii 24 ff., which is vivid and clear m 
 
 its implication. „ _ , • «rr~ 
 
 3 Mark viii 38, Luke ix 2G, Matt, x 33 ; cf. Luke xxi 3G io 
 
 stand before the Son of Man.” 
 
52 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 of truth was in Himself. “ No man knoweth the 
 Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son 
 willeth to reveal Him.” “Heaven and earth shall 
 pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” 
 Secondly, there was not in His language the least 
 trace of a sense of sinfulness, or even possible un¬ 
 worthiness, such as has possessed at all times prophets 
 and seers. Finally, there was an exclusiveness about 
 His claim on men, as if He were not merely one of 
 the representatives of God but in some profound 
 sense the only one. He appears, indeed, to delegate 
 to the Twelve and the Seventy authority to teach 
 and to heal diseases, but this is in His name or in 
 utter dependence on Him. In Himself He seems to 
 brook no rival. “ Come unto me,” He says, “ and 
 X will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and 
 learn of me.” “ He that loveth father or mother 
 more than me, is not worthy of me.” “ Follow me 
 and let the dead bury their own dead.” This sort 
 of language seems to breathe nothing less than the 
 
 divine jealousy over human souls. 
 
 Now all this time questions were pending in the 
 minds of the disciples as to who He was. Tiieie was 
 some secret, some mystery, about His person. 
 
 The report of the divine voice at the baptism, the 
 story of the temptation in the wilderness which 
 Jesus must at some time have communicated to 
 them, the strange cries of the demoniacs “ Thou 
 art the Son of God*—the holy one ol God, and theii 
 horror of Him as of some awful power, and “also 
 certain solemn and hardly intelligible words of His 
 own, made them conscious of a mystery. There 
 were names, “Son of Man,” 4 Son of God, Ghiist, 
 which were in their ears and would have to be ex¬ 
 plained. But while all this process of questioning 
 was going on, something deeper was happening. 
 Beyond all possibility of question, and seemingly by 
 His own deliberate intention, Jesus, so far as they 
 
AUT DEUS AUT HOMO NON BONUS 53 
 
 yielded their faith to Him, was taking the place of 
 God, or in modern phrase gaining 44 the values oi 
 God,” for their souls. Not all the values of God. 
 They did not, I suppose, at that time dream of Him 
 as the creator of the world and the ruler of the course 
 of nature. No doubt they thought of Him as wholly 
 under God. But within the sphere of their personal 
 lives, He had been growing to have to them the 
 values of God, as the object of their absolute faith, 
 their infallible refuge and informer and protector 
 and guide. 
 
 This seems to me quite an irresistible impression. 
 There is an old saying of unknown origin—either 
 Jesus Christ was God or He was not a good man 
 which critics sometimes treat with great derision, 
 do not think it can be so derided. There is more 
 in it than they seem to recognize. How could men 
 be in the constant companionship of the Jesus ol 
 the Synoptic Gospels—such as we have been seeking 
 to describe Him, surely without exaggeration 
 without coming to be in the attitude tow aids Him 
 which is only legitimate towards God ? And was 
 He not deliberately encouraging, and bringing about 
 this attitude towards Himself in their souls l Did 
 He not exhibit the sort of exclusive claim which 
 suggests nothing else but the “ jealousy ” of God ? 
 And is it not the supreme sin of pride or arrogance 
 for any man, even a commissioned propnet, to allow 
 himself to assume this exclusive position ? Must 
 not every commissioned servant be always crying 
 44 Send, O Lord, by whom thou wilt send ! Thou 
 hast many messengers and all of them subject to 
 error and weakness, I most of all ? The implica¬ 
 tion of infallible, exclusive authority which seems 
 to inhere in the words and tone of Jesus doc s 
 seem to me to express, il not the jealousy of God, 
 then some such quality as lies at the heart oi all 
 spiritual tyranny and false sacerdotalism. 
 
54 
 
 the belief of the first disciples 
 
 IV 
 
 We have now to consider the question of the 
 person of Jesus from another point of view, that is, 
 of the titles by which He was called or by which He 
 called Himself. I have argued that if we regard 
 the Synoptic Gospels as giving us good history, we 
 must also regard it as certain that John the Baptist 
 pointed to Jesus as the Christ who was to come, and 
 did so on the ground, in part at least, of the divine 
 voice heard by himself at the baptism of Jesus pro¬ 
 claiming Him “ the beloved Son m whom God was 
 well pleased.” The record of the baptism as given 
 in the Gospels would have come, we should suppose, 
 from John. Whether “ the voice,” either on this 
 occasion or at the Transfiguration was one which 
 an indifferent by-stander would have heard with 
 his ears, or whether it came, like “ the word oi the 
 Lord ” to the prophets, only to the spiritual hearing, 
 we need not discuss, any more than the question 
 whether the narrative of the temptation, which 1 
 suppose our Lord related to the Twelve, is 
 intended as an allegoric expression of events which 
 happened only in Christ’s consciousness or as a 
 record of outward events. 1 In either case it is 
 certain that Jesus was believed by Himself and by 
 John to have been divinely certified at His baptism 
 as the Son of God and the temptation of Jesus in¬ 
 volved His consciousness that He was so.- So 
 
 1 Though, for myself, I can feel no doubt (with Origen) that the 
 former is the true interpretation ; see Epistles of St. John, pp. 236-7. 
 
 > I see no sign whatever in the Gospels of any advance m our 
 Lord’s estimate of His own person. This idea, which is constant y 
 asserted as if it were to be taken for granted, may or may not be 
 open to theological objection but the question need not be raised. 
 There is no evidence. And whether the word of God at the 
 baptism, “ In thee I have been well pleased , refers 
 
 to the past of the human life of Jesus or to the eternal past or to 
 the Christ as prefigured in prophecy, it certainly does not sl 'PP 
 tho idea that the moment of baptism made any difference to H.s 
 Sonship. The “ Western ” reading of St. Luke in 22, Thou art 
 
THE SON OF GOD 55 
 
 says the only story we have of His childhood the 
 scene in the Temple when He was twelve years old—— 
 “ Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s 
 business,” or “ in my Father’s house.” It follows 
 that those who received the testimony of John and 
 Jesus believed Him to be truly, in some sense, the 
 Son of God, and when they heard the demoniacs 
 so hailing Him and heard Jesus seeking to silence 
 them, they must have felt that there was mystery 
 attaching to this title; but on the whole, they 
 probably simply identified it in meaning with the 
 Christ, the king of David’s line in whom God s 
 promises to Israel were to be fulfilled, neither more 
 nor less. It would not appear that till St. Paul 
 comes on the scene the Church generally realized 
 its true significance. 1 It is true that there is no 
 evidence of the title Son of God being used in the 
 later Jewish literature of the Christ, but it was 
 twice used of the Son of David or of David in the 
 Psalms 2 and of the righteous man in the Book of 
 Wisdom, 3 and the evidence appears to be conclusive 
 that the disciples took it as meaning no more than 
 the Christ. 4 
 
 my beloved son ; on this day have I begotten thee,” is surely due 
 to a reminiscence of Ps. ii 7. 
 
 1 See later, pp. 78 ff. _ . . ~ , , 
 
 2 Ps. ii (which is treated as Messianic in the Psalms of Solomon) 
 
 verses 7 and (perhaps) 12, and lxxxix 2G-7. See Dalman s Word* 
 of Jesus (Eng. trans.), pp. 268 ff. 
 
 4 So 1S it°appears \o have been understood when the demoniacs 
 
 hailed Him by the title “ Son of God,” in Mark in 11, v 7 ; c . 
 Matt, viii 29; Luke viii 28 : “He suffered not the devils to speak 
 
 because they knew him knew Him M cf : 
 
 iv 41, where, after the exclamation “Thou art the Son of God 
 is the explanation “They knew that he was the Christ. So a 
 the trial, P Matt. xxvi 63, and parallels m Mark and Luke>,and 
 when our Lord is mocked upon the Cross (see Matt 
 cf Mark xv 32). St. Matthew seems to represent the disciples a., 
 identifying “ Son of God ” with Christ in the confession of Peter, 
 xvi 15.^ The same appears to be the representation of John 1 49. 
 The “ King of Israel ” is the synonym for the Son ol Goa. 
 
56 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 This, however, is by no means true of the sense 
 in which our Lord used it of Himself. The great 
 passage, “ No one knoweth the Son save the Father : 
 neither doth any know the Father save the Son,” 
 which occurs in both St. Matthew and St. Luke, 
 and with its wonderful context is authentic beyond 
 reasonable dispute, asserts a relationship of mutual 
 knowledge between Father and Son which suggests 
 something essential and eternal. 1 So the phrase 
 “ Of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even 
 the angels in heaven, neither the Son,’ 2 which again 
 must surely be authentic, because no latex believer 
 would have attributed such limitation of knowledge 
 to the Christ, suggests at least a super-angelic son- 
 ship. Once more in the parable of the husbandmen 
 Jesus distinguishes Himself as the only Son sharply 
 from all the other messengers of God. 3 As I have 
 said, it would not appear as if these utterances made 
 much impression at the time. The thoughts of the 
 
 1 Matt, xi 27, Luke x 22. See Dalman, pp. 283, 285: “But 
 in this case of mutual understanding, its thoroughness p.e. 
 the thoroughness of mutual knowledge] and absolute infallibility 
 are assumed. He who stands in so uniquely close a relation to 
 God is the only possible mediator of the kind, and also at the same 
 rime the absolutely reliable revealer of the whole wealth of the 
 divine mysteries.” . . . “ The passages appear to imply that Jesus 
 had shown no cognizance of any beginning in this relationship. 
 It seems to be an innate property of His personality. bee also 
 Harnack, Sayings of Jesus (Eng. trans., Williams and Norgate), 
 p. 302. “ A formal likeness of Father and Son, who are distin¬ 
 
 guished only by the different names, and a relationship oi X atner 
 and Son which never had a beginning, but remains ever the same, 
 is here expressed. This is unacceptable to Harnack and, quite 
 arbitrarily, he omits part of the text. Other writers make the whole 
 passage the work of a later J ewish Christian prophet, basing liimse 
 on Ecclus. U 1, 23, 26, 27. But this sort of criticism can dissolve 
 any evidence. I shall recur to the passage later (see pp. 89f, 109 i). 
 
 We notice that our Lord never speaks to the disciples of “ our 
 Father,” except in giving them for their use the-Lords Prayer. 
 He speaks of “your Father,” or “the Father, and of my 
 Father.” This appears with express emphasis m John xx l /. 
 But it is apparent also in the Synoptists. 
 
 2 Matt, xiii 32 and Matt, xxiv 36 (R.V.). 
 
 s Mark xii 6 ; also Matthew and Luke. 
 
THE CHRIST 57 
 
 disciples were confined to the question, Is he the 
 Christ ? But they have survived among our Lord’s 
 most indisputable words, and they seem to me to 
 bear beyond question the sense of a sonship unique, 
 superhuman and essential. There is not really much 
 difference between what they involve and what is 
 taught in the discourses of St. John. 
 
 It is profoundly characteristic of what I have 
 called our Lord’s undogmatic method that He should 
 have uttered these solemn sayings—which seem 
 to open out such momentous glimpses into the 
 mystery of His personality—but, as it were, in¬ 
 cidentally or by implication only, and left them 
 as germs to fertilize later in men’s minds. So with 
 regard to His being the Christ, though in that case 
 there were many suggestions from without, He chose 
 that the conviction of His messiahship should mature 
 in their own minds and become a confession of their 
 own lips, not something dictated to them by Him. 
 Thus, under circumstances of deepening anxiety, 
 and in or near a city the very name of which— 
 Caesarea Philippi—spoke of alien and foreign in¬ 
 fluences repugnant to the heart of every Jew, He 
 asked them the question, “ Who do men say that 
 I am ? ” and then pressed home upon them the more 
 searching question, “ But who do ye say that I 
 am ? ” and Peter replied with the great confession, 
 “ Thou art the Christ.” It was a decisive moment, 
 and it strikes us as most natural that our Lord 
 should have signalized the greatness of the moment 
 by meeting the confession with the solemn and 
 rich benediction which Matthew alone records . 
 “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona, for this is 
 not anything thou hast learnt by human influence. 
 It is a real disclosure made by my heavenly Father 
 lj in thy soul. It is a conviction wrought in thee 
 
 bv God.” 
 
 Henceforth, though the world is not at present to 
 
 
58 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 know it, the secret that Jesus is the Christ is an open 
 secret in the apostolic company, and Jesus proceeds 
 at once to build upon it in the way most calculated to 
 test them and terrify them. “ From that time began 
 Jesus to show unto His disciples, how that he must 
 go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the 
 elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed 
 and the third day be raised up.” This prophecy 
 is made “ openly ” and repeated again and again. 1 
 The ideas suggested were profoundly contrary 
 to the vague and elastic, but always glorious and 
 radiant, ideas of the Messianic king which the Jews, 
 and the disciples amongst them, entertained. They 
 had all along had cause for anxiety as to whether 
 the crowds drawn by the “ powers ” and by the 
 words of their Master were the prelude to His real 
 triumph. It was quite plain that there was a wide 
 interval between welcoming His words and wonderful 
 benefits and really obeying from the heart His search¬ 
 ing doctrine. Of the latter there was no sign on any 
 large scale. And the leaders of the nation appeared 
 to be all against Him. Nevertheless there had been 
 something radiant and triumphant about their earlier 
 experiences with Him in Galilee. Nothing less is 
 implied in the description which Jesus gave of His 
 company, in explanation of their having no special 
 fasts of their own, such as the Pharisees had, and 
 John’s disciples. He compared them to a happy 
 band of friends round a bridegroom in the moment of 
 his joy and triumph. No doubt He struck the note 
 of loss and sorrow to come—“ The days will come 
 when the bridegroom shall be taken away from 
 them ”—but the present scenery is painted in radiant 
 colours. It might be a fitting prelude for the glorious 
 days of the Messiah. But anxiety had deepened ; 
 and now, just when they had given full expression 
 to their faith that He verily was the Christ, He let 
 
 1 Mark viii 31, ix 12, 31, x 33-4. 
 
THE SUFFERING SERVANT 
 
 59 
 
 the blow fall upon them in all its weight, and drove 
 it down upon them again and again. 1 e way o 
 the Christ was to be the way of the Cross, the way (' 
 failure and death. And Peter’s impulsive protest 
 brought upon him the sternest rebuke Get tnee 
 
 behind me, Satan ! ” _ . . _ 
 
 We cannot doubt that this profound change in the 
 
 idea of the Christ was effected by our Lord siden 1 - 
 fying Himself, the Son of Man, with the Sufferi g 
 Servant of Jehovah in the later Isaiah. In these 
 wonderful chapters (Is. xl onward ^e servant of 
 Jehovah ” is first Israel in general (xli 8 f.), and then 
 apparently the select remnant of the people, w l 
 alone arc the true Israel (xlix 1 - 3 ) through whom 
 alone the purpose of God can realize itself. But 
 though no doubt the prophet begins by using t 
 Servant ” as a personification of the nation or gro p 
 within the nation, yet he appears to ’ Reamed away 
 as he contemplates the Servant to think of lnm as a 
 real Person who is by his obedience and his unde- 
 
 Sled sufferings ,nd death to win 
 of “the many.” We feel this already in earlier 
 
 nassases 1 but the impression becomes overwhelming 
 
 CSfSJS passage (Iff 1. and liii), 
 
 to us for the most part, as we hear it, as simply tl 
 
 history 0 of the paslon of Jesus>ri.t«„ beforehand. 
 
 I will present the passage m F)r. 
 
 analysis 2 : 
 
 se^ant^ej^tat^on after an a^ece^^t period of 
 
 i h* 4 - one- ” Then this is developed in cap. hi . 
 The first part (1-9) presents “three several stages in 
 the ideal Servant’s humiliation: the erceivi.w 
 
 K StiViEs « before he» U and 
 
 : niiltus W Time (Nisbet), PP . 152-5, very slightly 
 
 abbreviated. 
 
60 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 reviewing the period of their incredulity. First, in spite 
 of the prophetic report, or message, pointing to him, 
 few or none, they say, amongst his nation recognized 
 him : he had no outward grace, or beauty of form, 
 attracting attention ; he grew up in their midst like some 
 mean or lowly shrub, struggling to maintain itself in 
 an arid soil: men despised him, and even held aloof 
 from him in aversion. In truth, however,” [so they pro¬ 
 ceed to confess], they themselves were the occasion of 
 his distressed appearance : “ he was bearing the conse¬ 
 quences of our sins, although we in our blindness imagined 
 him to be stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted ”— 
 i.e. smitten, as by a divine judgment, for some heinous 
 offence—“ whereas, in fact, it was we who had gone 
 astray, and the penalty, instead of recoiling upon us, 
 lighted in its entirety upon him. So far from being 
 guilty himself, he bore the guilt of others and relieved 
 them of its penal consequences. Though he suffered 
 willingly, and made no answer to his accusers, he was 
 still oppressed : first imprisoned by an unjust sentence, 
 he was afterwards led away to execution, not one among 
 his contemporaries considering that he was thus cut off, 
 not for his own sins, but for those of the people. In 
 spite of the innocence of his life, his death was that of 
 a malefactor and his end inglorious.” 
 
 [The final paragraph, however, reverses the character 
 of the scene and introduces the promise for the future.] 
 
 “ It was Jehovah’s pleasure thus to bruise him : but out 
 of death will spring a new life : after his soul has been 
 made a guilt offering, he will live again, enjoy long life, 
 and be rewarded with the satisfaction of seeing God’s 
 work, or 4 pleasure ’ prosper in his hand. Possessed of 
 an intimate 4 knowledge ’ of the dealings and purposes 
 of God, he will 4 justify the many,’ whilst his final reward 
 for having submitted to the death of a transgressor will 
 be that he will be ranked as a conqueror and honoured 
 among the great ones of the earth : inasmuch as 4 he bore 
 the sins of the many and made intercession for the trans¬ 
 gressors.’ ” 
 
 This astonishing vision of the prophet appears to 
 have made little or no permanent impression on the , 
 
the CHRIST MUST SUFFER 
 
 61 
 
 imagination of Israel. 1 Its idea of kingship quite 
 escaped them. They never identified the glorious 
 Messiah with the Suffering Servant. This was tin 
 work of Jesus. Some modern critics have ventured 
 to doubt whether Jesus shows the influence of this 
 prophecy. But, I think, quite unreasonably. Two 
 points seem to prove it(1) that our Lord plain y 
 regards the sufferings of the Christ and riis^deari 
 as necessary because prefigured in Scripture. 1 ' •' 
 is it written of the Son of Man ? ’ “The Son of 
 Man goeth as it is written of Him. How, then, 
 should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it mus 
 be ? ” And the same intense conviction of prophecy 
 and fulfilment appears in the earliest Church, and 
 
 it appears from the beginning associated with the 
 
 figure of the “servant of Jehovah. Indeed t 
 could hardly have been otherwise, for, though the 
 Old Testament may provide types and suggestions 
 of the idea of a suffering Christ, it contains nothing 
 which can be compared with Isaiah lm m vividness 
 
 0 P u r r SS Lord e seems plainly to identify Himself 
 with “ the Servant,” when He quotes from the 
 “ Servant ” section of Isaiah to interpret His mission 
 at Nazareth, 5 and St. Luke also represents Him 
 
 . It ,eft apparent traces on certain t^r —^ 
 
 J ntdt* ^77 
 on Is. liii, which has recently been translated by g .; inter . 
 
 Aytoun (see Tan. ,^violent perversion of the sense of 
 
 preted of thelifthemarhs ongnominy and shame are diverted from 
 Mm P «pon to peopkand his^dversaries. This is a most cunous 
 
 d ° C Xk'i X 12, of. Matt, xxvi 24, 54, 56, Luke xviii 31, xxiv 
 25 ry°or. xv 3,, Acts ii23, ^3,^,2^, 1 30 
 
 “Thy e hoty servant Jesus.” So Philip expounds to the eunuch, 
 ... oi «• 1 Ppfor ii 21 ff. and Matt, vm 17. 
 
 V ‘“ Luke iv18. from Is. Ixi. Driver is surely right in represents 
 these words as put in the mouth of the Servant. 
 
62 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 as quoting of His own end the words concerning the 
 Servant, “ He was reckoned with transgressors.” 1 2 3 
 But perhaps more convincing in their originality 
 are the two passages in St. Mark where our 
 Lord speaks of Himself as to give His life a 
 “ ransom jor many,” and of the cup, at the Last 
 Supper, as “ this is my blood of the covenant which 
 is shed for many .” 2 It does not seem to me to be 
 doubtful that this “ for many,” twice repeated, is a 
 reference to Isaiah liii. “ My righteous servant shall 
 justify many” “He bare the sin of many.” z This 
 is all the more noticeable because the significance 
 of the precise word does not seem to have been 
 perceived, so that it has vanished from the versions 
 of St. Luke and St. Paul. 
 
 Our Lord then, who was plainly set radically to 
 revise the conception of the Christ, and who, though 
 He did not disclaim His Davidic descent, yet was 
 manifestly anxious not to emphasize it, 4 deeply 
 involved as it was in ideas of temporal sovereignty, 
 sought to effect His purpose by identifying the 
 Christ, as no one had done before Him, 5 6 with the 
 Suffering Servant, and that by associating both with 
 the title He had chosen for Himself-—the Son of 
 Man or the Man. Henceforth the Man, the Christ, 
 and the Suffering Servant are the same person. And 
 one more step had to be taken to complete our 
 Lord’s profoundly new doctrine of the Christ, and 
 that was, as the sequel to suffering and death, to 
 
 1 Luke xxii 37. 
 
 2 Mark x 45, xiv 24 ; so also in St. Matthew, cf. Heb. ix 28, Rom. 
 w 15. 
 
 3 Is. liii 11, 12. In the LXX the word tto\\o7s, noWous, ttoWcov 
 recurs three times. Also as one reads the LXX of Is. liii 12— 
 iraped6dri els Q6.va.rov —it is difficult to doubt that this phrase pro¬ 
 moted the constant use of this verb in connection with our Lord’s 
 betrayal and surrender to death. 
 
 4 On our Lord’s Davidic descent as a real fact, see Dalman, 
 
 pp. cit. pp. 316 ff. 
 
 6 Unless, indeed, John the Baptist: see John i 29. 
 
63 
 
 THE SON OF MAN IN GLORY 
 
 introduce in a new form, what was already suggested 
 in Isaiah liii, the idea of resurrection and glory, in 
 a new form—for He identified the Christ with the 
 figure of glorified manhood in the visions of Hamel. 
 
 The passage has been already quoted and its 
 original sense explained. It is an image of e 
 people of God, by the side of the world-empires 
 imaged in the four great beasts-" And I saw in the 
 night visions, and behold there came with the cmud, 
 of heaven one like unto a son of man, and he came 
 even to the Ancient of Days. . . . And there was 
 given him dominion and glory and a kingdom, that 
 all the people, nations and languages should serve 
 him ; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which 
 shall not pass away, and his kingdom that "' h “j * 
 shall not be destroyed.” Now, I have alre y 
 explained how probably before our Lords time, in 
 the Similitudes of the Book of Enoch, this figure of 
 the chosen people was converted into the figure of 
 „ h ea venlv being, “ The Elect One,” pre-existing in 
 the hlaveL wh^ at the end of the world was to 
 be manifested in glory as the agent of divine ju g 
 ment, seated on the very throne of God. I his 
 being first described as in countenance like a man 
 and possibly called “The Son of Man, 1 is the 
 “ Anointed One,” and, as one may sa Y’ * s a 
 stitute for the old prophetic Messiah Tins is a 
 truer expression than to say He is identified with the 
 Messiah, for He has no connection with any cart 1 y 
 son of David in the imagination of the Apocalyptm 
 writer Now I have insisted that it must be 
 regarded as certain that “ The Son of Man was 
 not a term which for the crowd or the disciples 
 
 carried with it Messianic associations when our 
 
 Lord first used it. It was our Lord who first for 
 them identified the Son of Man both with the 
 Suffering Servant and with the Christ, the Son o 
 i For doubts on this subject see above, p. 31. 
 
04 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 David. But I think it is most probable that the 
 Book of Enoch had already interpreted the human 
 figure in Daniel as being—not an image of the nation, 
 but a mysterious person, who is to be manifested in the 
 clouds as God’s vice-gerent in judgment at the end 
 of the world, and had given this interpretation of 
 Daniel such currency that our Lord can use it as a 
 means of extending the meaning of His own title, 
 the Son of Man, and giving to the conception of the 
 Christ its new meaning. 1 2 
 
 We had better have before us the Pharisee’s con¬ 
 ception of the Christ to come and the Apocalyptic 
 conception of the Son of Man, that we may see 
 how our Lord both fused and remodelled them. 
 
 We take the Psalms of Solomon, dating from a 
 Pharisaic source about a generation before our 
 Lord’s birth, and in the 17th Psalm we find this 
 account of the Christ : 
 
 “ Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king, 
 the Son of David, at the time which thou sawest, 
 O God, that he may reign over Israel, thy servant, 
 and gird him with strength that he may shatter 
 unrighteous rulers. Purge Jerusalem from nations that 
 trample her down to destruction. . . . He will not 
 suffer unrighteousness to lodge any more in the midst 
 of his people ; nor shall there dwell with them any man 
 that knoweth wickedness; for he shall know them, 
 that thev are all sons of their God, and he shall distribute 
 them in their tribes upon the earth, and no sojourner or 
 foreigner shall sojourn any more among them.” 3 
 
 This is the old prophetic vision, only without any 
 of the wide hope which is found in many of the old 
 prophets for all the nations of the earth. There is 
 in this Psalm nothing but destruction for the heathen. 
 
 1 It must be remembered that on all showing the Jewish Messianic 
 ideas were confused and vague. Our Lord seems first to have given 
 them spiritual coherence. 
 
 2 Psalms of Solomon, xvii 23-5, 29-31. 
 
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 
 
 65 
 
 And the method of the Christ-King is to be the 
 method of the ruthless conqueror. We have seen 
 already how utterly our Lord repudiated any such 
 conception of the office of the Christ, and both pro¬ 
 foundly spiritualized and universalized the concep¬ 
 tion of the Kingdom. He went back to the noblest 
 form of the ancient vision, and far beyond it.. 
 
 Then let us take the Apocalyptic conception oi 
 the Elect One from the Similitudes of Enoch, based 
 manifestly on the vision of the Book of Daniel. 
 
 “ And there I saw one who had a head of days, and 
 His head was white like wool, and with Him was another 
 being whose countenance had the appearance of a man, 
 and his face was full of graciousness like one of the holy 
 angels. And I asked the angel who went with me and 
 showed me all the hidden things, concerning that bon oi 
 Man who he was, and whence he was, and why he went 
 with the Head of Days. And he answered and said 
 unto me : This is the Son of Man who hath righteous¬ 
 ness with whom dwelleth righteousness, and who re- 
 vealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden. . . . 
 And this Son of Man whom thou hast seen . . . shall 
 loosen the loins of the strong and break the teeth ot the 
 sinners . . . and darkness shall he their dwelling, and 
 worms shall be their bed . . , because they' do not 
 extol the name of the Lord of spirits. At that hour 
 the Son of Man was named in the presence of the Lord 
 of Spirits, and his name before the Head ot Days. . . . 
 He shall be the staff to the righteous whereon to stay 
 themselves and not fall, and he shall be the light of the 
 Gentiles, and the hope of those who are troubled m 
 heart. . . . And he hath been chosen and hidden before 
 Him before the creation of the world and for evermore. 
 
 44 And he sat on the throne of his glory, and the sum of 
 judgment was given unto the Son of Man, and lie cause 
 the sinners to pass away and be destroyed from off the 
 face of the earth, and those who have led the world 
 
 astray.” 1 
 
 i The Book of Enoch (Dr. Charles’s translation), xlvi, xlvm 
 2, 4, 0, lxix 27. 
 
66 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 If this, as seems probable, is really a writing 
 which dates before the time of our Lord, and the 
 passages just quoted are not, as a whole, Christian 
 interpolations, 1 which again seems probable, we need 
 not doubt that this interpretation of Daniel’s, “ one 
 like unto a son of man,” who came with the clouds 
 of heaven and was brought near to the Ancient of 
 Days and given universal and everlasting dominion 
 and glory and a kingdom, 2 was known to our Lord 
 and used by Him. But He transformed completely 
 the whole basis of the conception of the “ Elect 
 One,” who in Enoch is a purely celestial figure, 
 angelic rather than human. In our Lord’s use of 
 the figure, he is first of all the man born of a woman 
 and living the human life among His fellows ; then 
 the suffering “ Servant of Jehovah,” who wins re¬ 
 demption for the many by the sacrifice of His life ; 
 and so only passes to resurrection and glory and 
 the awful dignity of the judge of the world. It is 
 on this basis that the note of resurrection and glory 
 and power is sounded in the ears of the disciples, 
 side by side with the note of suffering. “The third 
 day he shall rise again.” And they are to “ see the 
 Son of Man coming in the glory of His Father with 
 the holy angels.” 3 
 
 This, then, is the conclusion of our enquiry. The 
 conception of the Messiah which Jesus caused to 
 grow in the minds of the disciples was profoundly 
 original in the sense that it took up all the elements 
 of ancient prophecy and recent interpretation, and 
 
 1 See Dalman, op. cit. p. 243 : “ A Christian interpolator should 
 above all things have made it clear in some way that the Son of 
 Man coming in judgment was Jesus of Nazareth. But the Son of 
 Man in this case appears never to have been upon earth, far less 
 to have passed through the state of death.” See, however, above 
 p. 31, for the title Son of Man. 
 
 2 Dan. vii 13—14. 
 
 3 Mark viii 31, 38, xiv 62. On the eschatological teaching of our 
 Lord and the question of its relation to reality see at length 
 pp. 135 ff. 
 
THE MESSIAHSHIP OF JESUS 
 
 67 
 
 combined them in a whole in Ilis own person—in 
 a whole which, while it realized 1 heir. best spirit, 
 was quite remote from the expectations of His 
 contemporaries. According to Jesus teaching, t le 
 Messiahship had its basis in His humble and patient 
 manhood, and it was to have its centre m is 
 rejection and suffering and crucifixion, and its 
 vindication in His resurrection and in the mission 
 of His Spirit (for the resurrection of the dead and 
 the effusion of the Spirit were, as we have seen, 
 elements in the ancient prophecies of the Messianic 
 days), and it was to find its consummation m His 
 Lordship in heaven and in His coming to judge the 
 
 quick and .dead. , ,, 
 
 But in spite of the special help given to them m 
 the vision of the Transfiguration, the disciples had 
 at present no ears for the note of glory beyond 
 humiliation and through it. They could only attend 
 to the announcements of utter shame and rejection 
 and death. Not only did He speak to them of His 
 own death, but of the death of their national hopes. 
 He told them quite plainly that Jerusalem was 
 doomed, 1 and that their city and temple would be 
 destroyed; and He bade them accept this utter 
 seeming failure, both of Him, their Master, and of 
 all that their patriotic hearts held dear, as some¬ 
 thing inevitable and necessary for the kingdom to 
 come. 2 It was too much for them. It stirred in 
 their minds a despondency and repulsion which 
 overcame even their loyalty and their faith m Him. 
 
 There is hardly any tragedy in history which 
 moves us more than the failure of the disciples. 
 But it was a temporary tragedy. Iheir failure 
 became an element in their strength and power 
 Their faith in Jesus lived again, and took form and 
 glory after their recovery, and in the next chapter 
 
 1 On this see below, pp. 140fh 
 
 2 Luke xxi 28. 
 
68 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES 
 
 we shall trace its course. What we have done so 
 far is to recognize that, quite apart from their ideas 
 about the person of Jesus their Master, which were 
 no doubt vague and uncertain, quite apart even 
 from the new conception of the Christ which Jesus 
 had planted in their reluctant souls to bear fruit 
 after their temporary failure, there was another and 
 deeper impression which they could not shake off. 
 They had been keeping company with one who, 
 deliberately as it seemed, had come to occupy 
 towards their souls a place of authority which is 
 practically God’s place. He had come to have for them 
 the values of God. We can conceive nothing further 
 from the method of Jesus than that He should 
 have startled and shocked their consciences by pro¬ 
 claiming Himself as God. But He had done some¬ 
 thing which in the long run would make any other 
 estimate of Him hardly possible. 
 
 NOTE (to p. 45) 
 
 On the Relation of John the Baptist to Jesus 
 
 We need not dwell upon the small differences of detail 
 between the first three evangelists in their accounts of 
 the circumstances of the baptism of Jesus and His recog¬ 
 nition by John as the Christ. But the Fourth Gospel 
 makes a great deal of John’s testimony to Jesus as the 
 Son of God, by which he appears to mean simply the 
 Christ (see i 8, 26, 32-5, iii 22-30, v 33, x 41). John 
 is also there represented as calling Him 44 the Lamb of 
 God which taketh away the sins of the world,” thus 
 identifying Him with the Suffering Servant of Jehovah of 
 Is. liii; and it alone records, what is very interesting, 
 that some five of the apostles had been previously 
 disciples of John and had been directed by John to Jesus, 
 and had in some sense become His disciples then and 
 there, and had acknowledged Him for the Christ (John 
 i 35-51), and had had some profound experiences of 
 Him before the end of John’s ministry and their call 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST AND CHRIST 09 
 
 to be “ fishers of men ” (John ii and iii 22). I do not 
 think all this is at all impossible. As Dr. Holland points 
 out, 1 their early confession that Jesus was the Christy 
 or “ the Son of God, the King of Israel,” was an echo of 
 the popular Jewish hope which their subsequent experi¬ 
 ence obliterated, so that they had to rediscover His 
 Messiahship in a quite new sense. Nor do I see any ¬ 
 thing improbable in John having, perhaps first among 
 the Jews, identified the Suffering Servant with the Christ. 
 
 I think we have in these additions to the story^ of the 
 Synoptists genuine memories. See Burney, Aramaic 
 
 Origin of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 104 ff. ... 
 
 It is worth noticing that the record of the divine voice 
 at the baptism is given by all the Synoptists as “ I his is 
 my beloved son in whom I was ” or “I have been well 
 pleased.” This makes it plain that none of them regard 
 the Sonship as dating from the baptism, though I think 
 that to the consciousness of John (but not to that of 
 Jesus), as to the rest of the Jews, the term at that time 
 meant no more and no less than the Christ. This idea 
 of the Christ must have come from Ps. ii 7 and 
 lxxxix 26. 
 
 As a result of his preaching and baptism the disciples 
 of John ” appear to have constituted a distinctive 
 fraternity, whom John bound together by special rules. 
 He taught them to pray and to observe special fasts, 
 and “ on some points of ceremonial he may have had 
 tenets of his own ” (see Luke xi 1, v 33, John iii lo ; 
 cf. Acts xviii 25, xix 3—4; and see Latham s Pastor 
 Pastorum , p. 155). But it does not appear clearly in^the 
 Acts how much they understood “ concerning Jesus. 5 
 
 1 In The Philosophy of Faith and the Fourth Gospel (Murray, 1921), 
 pp. 172 f. 
 
 0 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH AND OF ST. PAUL 
 
 It would seem that all the effort of Jesus was directed, 
 in the latter part of His ministry, to the training of 
 the Twelve, and especially to the preparation of 
 their minds to welcome the principle of sacrifice, and 
 withstand the shock of the Cross . 1 Crucifixion in 
 the Roman provinces was an exceedingly common 
 punishment. The spectacle of men bearing the cross¬ 
 beam to their place of punishment would have been 
 familiar enough. But to the heart of the Jewish 
 nation it must have been the symbol of subjection 
 and ignominy. And to the natural heart of the 
 disciples the course which Jesus, whom they had 
 confessed to be the Christ, had, as it appeared, so 
 deliberately chosen, seemed doubtless an intolerable 
 betrayal. There was, indeed, at the last hour one 
 moment of seeming triumph; for Jesus, who was so 
 reluctant to figure as the Son of David, because of 
 the false associations of royalty implied in the title, 
 accepted it from the blind beggar Bartimaeus on His 
 way to Jerusalem, and later consented to be hailed 
 as King by a mixed crowd, in a momentary fit of 
 
 1 Crucifixion was the ordinary Roman punishment for persons 
 supposed to be dangerous to the Empire, see Hastings Diet, of 
 the Bible, i, p. 528. After the death of Herod the Great Josephus 
 {B.J. ii v 3) tells us that Varus crucified 2000 rioters at one 
 time, cf. ii xii 6, xiii 2, xiv 9; also (v xi 1) that, at the destruction 
 of Jerusalem, the crucifixions inflicted by Titus were so constant 
 and numerous that there was neither room for the crosses nor 
 wood to make them. 
 
 70 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE CROSS 71 
 
 enthusiasm, at His entry into Jerusalem . 1 And if 
 the cleansing of the temple occurred immediately 
 afterwards , 2 that was another triumph, which would 
 have raised the spirits of the disciples. It would have 
 seemed for the moment as if He was now going to 
 assert His power. But this brief elevation of spirits 
 was followed by the warnings of immediate betrayal 
 and death, and it became plain that not all that 
 Jesus could do had availed at all to inspire into the 
 disciples’ minds the acceptance of the Cross. . 
 
 There is no tragedy in history more moving than 
 the rejection of Christ—all the more that it was not 
 due to anv extraordinary wickedness in the Jev s 
 or the Romans, but to the ordinary motives of men. 
 In the Sadducean family of Annas it was due to 
 the selfish determination to uphold by all means 
 their own precarious position of authority, digm y 
 and wealth, under the Roman sovereignty, and to 
 suppress every movement that might make t e 
 Romans jealous ; in the Pharisees, to their refusal, 
 at the bidding of one who was in their eyes the merest 
 layman, to acknowledge profound mistakes, and to 
 think over again from the beginning what was the 
 meaning of the religion of which they were the 
 orthodox representatives ; m the mass of the people 
 to their worldly preoccupation of mind and their 
 stubborn nationalism, which made them entertain 
 wild hopes, and blinded them to the spiritual way 
 of redemption which Jesus presented to them ; m 
 Pilate to the refusal to do what very few Roman 
 governors would have dreamed of doing—to prefer 
 abstract justice, in the case of an impotent individual 
 to the apparent interests of the Empire and himself. 
 
 i T cannot but think that St. John’s explanation of the fit of 
 , • Kv the excitement due to the raising of Lazarus (xn 
 
 ot ** whioh mak6S lt at thc ““££? 
 fntelLfble In the Synoptists taken alone it appears unaccountable. 
 
 m MsfJohn however, puts it at the beginning of the ministry. 
 I think it is not improbable that it occurred twice. 
 
72 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 Such refusals and obsessions are all around us every 
 day. They constitute the common atmosphere of 
 society, certainly in our own time as much as of 
 old. The mind of the ecclesiastical authorities, as 
 exhibited in Church history towards 44 unauthorized ” 
 prophets, constantly recalls the Pharisees. The atti¬ 
 tude of politicians and men of business and governing 
 classes towards moral principles constantly recalls 
 the Sadducees and Pilate. The attitude of popular 
 movements constantly recalls 44 the common people ” 
 of Jerusalem and Galilee. It is the tragedy of human 
 life from the point of view of the believer in God. God 
 comes unto His own and His own receive Him not. 
 
 And if the most tragic feature in the whole situa¬ 
 tion is the failure of the Twelve—if we can hardly 
 bear to read the story of Peter's denial—yet we must 
 not be scornful. The doctrine which they were 
 required to embrace was a very new one-—contrary 
 always to flesh and blood, but to none so contrary 
 as to the Jews. It is not easy to realize the depth 
 of the requirement which our Lord made upon His 
 disciples’ hearts and minds when Fie bade them not 
 only contemplate His own seeming failure and death, 
 but also anticipate the doom which He so solemnly 
 pronounced upon their nation and city and temple, 
 and be prepared to witness its accomplishment even 
 with joy, as the necessary prelude of the kingdom of 
 God . 1 No one, Jew or Gentile, can know his own mind 
 or the mind of men and women in general without 
 recognizing that the real strain on faith is the spectacle 
 of the present seeming weakness of God and of good, 
 which no prospect of future reversal seems able to 
 counterbalance. Truly God 44 delivers His strength 
 into captivity and His glory into the enemies’ hands.” 2 
 
 1 Luke xxi 2S-31. 
 
 2 Ps. lxxviii 61 (Bible version). The reference is to the capture 
 of the Ark of God. Our Prayer Book version, “ their power . . . 
 and their beauty,” is a mistake. 
 
the recovery of the twelve 
 
 73 
 
 I 
 
 But a few weeks after the crucifixion and en¬ 
 tombment of Jesus, the company of “ the brethren,” 
 numbering one hundred and twenty persons, and 
 centering upon the Twelve, are presented to us in the 
 beginning of the Acts in a wholly different frame of 
 mind. They are now radiant and confident, and are 
 prepared to face an even world-wide mission, appar¬ 
 ently of a most desperate kind, and to challenge the 
 world, with a clear understanding at least of the 
 around of their mission. I have contended in the 
 volume which preceded this , 1 that nothing can satis¬ 
 factorily account for their sudden, complete and 
 corporate change of mind, except a cei tain series of 
 facts, some of which are recorded in detail by the 
 Evangelists, and which are summarized at an earlier 
 date bv St. Paul 2 —that is the finding of the tomb 
 of Jesus empty on the third day, and His repeated 
 appearances afterwards, with a humanity strangely 
 changed in physical condition, but still the same- 
 which had assured them, beyond possibility of mis¬ 
 take, of His actual resurrection from the dead. On 
 the fortieth day after the Resurrection St. Luke 
 records that these appearances came to an end with 
 the Ascension , 3 which after another ten days was 
 followed by the promised effusion of the Holy Spirit, 
 I do not propose to go again over the ground of the 
 
 1 Belief in God, pp. 262 ff. 
 
 2 Bdward Meyer, XJrspru 
 
 3 There seems to me 
 of Moyer (op. cit., vol. i. 
 is an interpolation. 
 
74 
 
 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 44 evidences ” of these events having actually occurred. 
 Without in any way blinding ourselves to difficulties 
 or discrepancies of detail between our authorities'— 
 such as occur in all original testimonies by ordinary 
 people, unless they have been artificially rectified-—I 
 do not think that it is possible either to reject them 
 or to call them doubtful. It seems to me psycho¬ 
 logically certain that such a rapid, simultaneous con¬ 
 version of such unimaginative men as we know the 
 Twelve to have been from the state of mind as described 
 in the Cospels, both before and after the crucifixion 
 of Jesus Christ, to the state of mind described in the 
 beginning of the Acts, could not have occurred except 
 by the impact of indisputable facts of experience, 
 such as those to which they attributed their newly- 
 won convictions. 
 
 Nor do I propose to recur to the question of the 
 Lucan authorship and trustworthiness of the Acts 
 of the Apostles. Some critics hold that in the 
 earlier chapters (i-xii) St. Luke is dependent upon 
 Aramaic documents. Dr. Burkitt has recently 
 suggested that St. Mark’s narrative may originally 
 have extended over the period covered by them . 1 
 We can leave these questions aside as doubtful. 
 What we are not justified in doubting is that, in 
 his intercourse with Philip the Evangelist and 
 Mnason, the 44 original ” disciple, and some of the 
 women of the apostolic company, and no doubt 
 others at Caesarea and at Jerusalem, and with John 
 Mark in Rome during St. Paul’s imprisonment 
 there—John Mark who had probably lived through 
 
 1 Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus (Constable, 1922), p. 79. 
 “ It may be well to remind ourselves that we do not know how far 
 the narrative (of Mark) extended over the ground covered by 
 St. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. The first half of the work ends 
 with the name of ‘ John who was surnamed Mark,’ and it is plausible 
 to suppose it may have been in the work of Mark that the third 
 Evangelist came across the life-like episode of Rhoda.” Certainly, 
 however, Papias’ description of Mark’s record does not suggest 
 this larger scope. 
 
75 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS 
 
 all those early days in his mother’s house at Jerusalem 
 where the apostolic company assembled—Luke had 
 excellent opportunities for knowing the facts i\i l 
 sufficient accuracy to enable him to wntc trus 
 worthy history. In Rackham’s Acts we have a 
 very careful and thoughtful study of these ea y 
 chapters. To my mind, one of the most convincing 
 assurances of their trustworthiness lies m the exact 
 account given of the nature of the early belief i 
 Jesus. St. Luke published his record at least not 
 earlier than St. Paul’s release from his first captivity 
 He had been St. Paul’s trusted companion all throug 
 the period when he was writing his epistles. H 
 must have been quite familiar with St. 1 aul s iu 
 doctrine of Christ, and of justification and salvation 
 in the Church which is His Body. I do not indeed 
 see any signs that St. Luke assimilated St. Paul s 
 theology very deeply-he was a historian with a 
 vivid perception of the beauties of moral character 
 rather than a theologian, we should suppose , but 
 re gives us touches of Paul’s theology in the speeches 
 !n the latter part of the Acts. As we shall see, it 
 St Paul who first in the record of the Acts calls 
 Tcsus the Son of God *; it is St. Paul who talks 
 about justification by faith, as distinguished from 
 works li the law 3 ; it is St. Paul who talks about 
 ‘‘the Church of God which he purchased with 
 his own blood.” 3 The circumstances of these 
 speeches, as the Acts records them, do not give 
 much opportunity for the characteristic Pauline 
 theology* They consist of St. Paul’s first approaches 
 to Jewish and Gentile hearers, and of his aprtogia pu> 
 vita sua to the Jews and to the Church. But some 
 of his characteristic phrases are tlicie. Whereas 
 
 . nr\ c oo Tti^ singular that in tho Acts as a 
 
 1 Acts ix 20, cf. xm 32. 1 ° p i Father except m 
 
 Acts" t ie 7 e (the a wo^ y o"nsen Jesus) and Acts ii 33, where 
 
 Peter refers to this promise. 3 xx 2 g. 
 
 2 xiii 39. 
 
76 
 
 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 in the earlier part of the Acts they are quite absent. 
 This is very noticeable. It indicates that St. Luke 
 had good authorities for the early speeches he 
 records and did not write at random ; thus we can 
 approach the first part of the Acts with reasonable 
 confidence to see how it represents the primitive 
 belief. 
 
 The disciples, as represented especially by their 
 leader St. Peter, are set before us as simply filled 
 with the thoughts forced upon them by the 
 Resurrection and later by the effusion of the Holy 
 Spirit. The central thought is that of the Lordship 
 of Jesus the Christ. Though God certified His 
 mission “ by mighty works and wonders and signs 
 which God did by him in the midst of Israel,” yet 
 Israel had crucified and slain Him by the hands of 
 the Romans. But now God had vindicated Him 
 by the Resurrection and exalted Him by His right 
 hand and to His right hand ; and it was He who 
 had poured forth the promised gift of the Holy 
 Spirit, which He received from the Father. “ There¬ 
 fore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that 
 God made him both Lord and Christ, 1 this Jesus 
 whom ye crucified.” 
 
 So far as appears in the Acts, Peter raised no ques¬ 
 tion concerning the divine Sonship or pre-existence of 
 Jesus. 2 He is content throughout, as in his discourse 
 in the house of Cornelius, to speak of Him as the 
 man “Jesus of Nazareth, anointed with the Holy 
 Ghost and with power, who went about doing good, 
 and healing all that were oppressed with the devil; 
 for God was with him.” But now, risen and exalted 
 
 1 Acts ii 22-3G. This must not be taken to imply that he was 
 not the Christ when on earth. It was as the Christ that He suffered, 
 iv 10. 
 
 2 We should notice that the glorified Christ is the man Jesus of 
 Nazareth who had lived and died on earth. There are no signs at 
 all of the pre-existent heavenly man-like being of the Similitudes of 
 Enoch. 
 
77 
 
 THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 
 
 to heaven, He is “ Lord of all ” and “ ordained of 
 God to be the judge of quick and dead.” It is in 
 His name, and through belief in Him, that men 
 must receive remission of sins and the gift of the 
 Holy Ghost. 1 It is in His name that miracles 01 
 power are done. 2 There is indeed salvation in none 
 other: for neither is there any other name undei 
 heaven that is given among men, wherein we must 
 be saved. 3 He is “the Prince ” or “ the Prince 
 of life,” and the “ Saviour.” His is the Name. 
 This is their summary creed—Jesus is the Christ— 
 Jesus is Lord. The one name of salvation is the 
 name of Jesus. Beholding Him m the moment of 
 martyrdom, standing as Son of Man on the right 
 hand of God, Stephen addresses to Him the prayer— 
 “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” and probably the 
 words following, “ Lord, lay not this sin to their 
 charge ” i U st as Jesus on the cross had addressed 
 the Father, “ Father, into thy hands I commend 
 my spirit,” “ Father, forgive them.” Before Pente¬ 
 cost, when the disciple who was to fill up the place 
 of Judas had to be chosen, they had prayed and said 
 “ Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts ol all men, 
 show of these two the one whom thou hast chosen, 
 to take the place in this ministry and apostleslnp, and 
 it is probable 5 that the Lord Jesus just mentioned 
 is in that place also being appealed to, to make a 
 fresh choice in order to fill the vacancy in the number 
 of the twelve whom He had chosen when on earth 
 It should be noted that “to call on the name of 
 Jesus,” that is to invoke Him in prayer, is spoken 
 of (cap. ix 14, 21) as the characteristic habit ol the 
 
 disciples. 
 
 Further it was 
 
 “ in the name of the Lord Jesus 
 
 i Acts x 36-43. 2 ^ e j s }}} o-i i x 14-1G 
 
 6 Acts i 21-4. The consideration to the contrary is that t ie 
 singlt Greok word for • that knoweth the hearts (^S^wra) is 
 used of God, i.e. the Father, m xv 8. 
 
78 
 
 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 that men were baptized 1 ; and, if we accept the 
 account of what occurred at the Last Supper as 
 St. Paul declares himself to have “ received ” it 
 and as the Synoptists relate it, we must believe 
 that when the disciples met for “ the breaking of 
 the bread” 2 they celebrated, according to their 
 Lord’s institution, the sacrament of Llis body and 
 blood, and in that solemn rite acknowledged that 
 He who had given His body and blood in sacrifice 
 for them upon the Cross, and who was now alive 
 at the right hand of God, was also amongst them on 
 earth, where they were gathered together in His 
 name, to be their spiritual food, and to bind them 
 together in one. Such a rite and such an accom¬ 
 panying belief seem to imply a conception of 
 Christ’s person beyond what, to judge from the 
 record of Acts, they were at present explicitly enter¬ 
 taining or proclaiming. 3 
 
 What then was “ the faith in Jesus ” or “in His 
 Name ” of the first Christian community, intellec¬ 
 tually considered ? It was not, we should judge, an 
 explicit faith in His deity, but faith in Him as Lord. 4 
 “ Jesus is Christ and Lord ” and “ He has sent down 
 upon us His Holy Spirit ” was their summary creed. 
 But to believe in the universal Lordship of Jesus, 
 and His enthronement at God’s right hand—to be¬ 
 lieve that He is to judge the quick and dead—that 
 
 1 Acts viii 16. I have not cited the text (Matt, xxviii 19), 
 “ baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the 
 Holy Ghost,” because, on purely critical principles, it is difficult 
 to be sure of its being really a word of Christ on earth ; nor do I 
 discuss the question of baptism only in the name of Jesus. The 
 whole body of sacramental questions, with the question of the 
 -Church and its authority, is deferred to the next volume. 
 
 2 Acts ii 42. 
 
 3 On the doubts constantly being raised whether Jesus really 
 in fact instituted any sacrament of His body and blood for future 
 observance by His Church, see appended note A, p. 99. 
 
 I must not, of course, pass over the position of the critics who 
 constantly inform us that it is in St. Paul that we first find the 
 affirmation that Jesus is Lord. See appended note B, p. 102. 
 
79 
 
 HOW WAS IT TO END ? 
 
 from Him the Spirit of God is received and in His 
 name sins are forgiven in baptism and wonders 
 done—that His name is the one name of salvation 
 given to all men under heaven—that He is to be 
 called upon in prayer—that He is present in the 
 breaking of the bread ” to be the spiritual food ot 
 His disciples—all this taken together means certainly 
 that He had for them “ the values of God. Not 
 indeed all the “ values ” of God, for they would not yet 
 have thought of Him, as far as we can see as the 
 Creator or sustainer of the world. But with regard 
 to all that concerned their spiritual relations to God, 
 Jesus held towards them such a position as a mere 
 man, however highly endowed, could not have held. 
 How was this to be accounted for? It was an 
 ambiguous moment. One can imagine an intelligent 
 Greek, who knew the severity of the Jewish mono¬ 
 theism, and was accustomed to constrast it with the 
 lax ascription of deity to eminent things or persons 
 in the Hellenic or Roman world, watching the Chris¬ 
 tians in Jerusalem with interest, and taking note 
 that these Jews were apparently abandoning what 
 he had always regarded as their chief religious 
 stronghold—their stubborn belief in one only God 
 and their stubborn refusal to worship any other 
 being. What was to be the end of it ? 
 
 II 
 
 It was not to end in any weakening of Mono¬ 
 theism Among the fiercest of their Jewish enemies 
 was one who, converted to faith in Jesus, was to show 
 them how to conciliate their old faith in the One 
 God with their newly born faith in the Lordship of 
 
 J Tdo not think it is an accident that St. Paul is 
 said by St. Luke, at the first moment after his 
 
80 
 
 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 conversion to have proclaimed 44 Jesus that he is the 
 
 Son of God.” 1 Nor is it without serious meaning 
 
 that St. Paul describes his own conversion as the 
 
 revelation within him of Jesus as 44 God’s son ”— 
 
 44 to reveal his Son in me that I might preach him 
 
 among the Gentiles.” 2 That was the term, so 
 
 solemnly used by Jesus of Himself, in which St. 
 
 Paul saw the secret of Flis person. No doubt from 
 
 the date of his conversion his soul went out in 
 
 passionate faith toward Jesus as the glorified Christ 
 
 and as the Lord. But he was, what no one of the 
 
 earlier apostles had been, a man who had received the 
 
 highest training of the Jewish schools 44 at the feet 
 
 of” the renowned Rabbi Gamaliel, and we should 
 
 judge from his Epistles that he was not only a Jewish 
 
 theologian but also had imbibed at his native city 
 
 of Tarsus something of the philosophical spirit for 
 
 which it was famous. He could not be content to 
 
 worship Jesus as Lord without understanding why 
 
 such worship could be given Him, and how it was 
 
 to be reconciled with the strict faith in one onlv 
 
 %/ 
 
 God, one only object of worship, which retained his 
 whole-hearted loyalty to the end. 
 
 He had the opportunity after his conversion of 
 thinking out his position. After his first 44 act of 
 reparation ” at Damascus when, with all possible 
 courage and at the greatest risk, he proclaimed his 
 new faith 44 that Jesus is the Son of God ” and 44 con¬ 
 founded the Jews that dwell at Damascus, proving 
 that this is the Christ,” he was hurried secretly out 
 of the city and passed probably some years in Arabia. 
 Then, three years after his conversion, he paid a brief 
 visit to Jerusalem, where again 44 he preached boldly 
 in the name of the Lord,” but again was in risk of 
 
 1 It must be remembered that Acts viii 37 (the only previous 
 mention of “ the Son of God ” in our old version of Acts) is 
 probably not part of the true text. 
 
 « Gal. i 1C ; cf. ii 20. 
 
81 
 
 THE INTERVENTION OF PAUL 
 
 his life from the hostility of the Jews, and was sent 
 off to his old home. Tarsus, out of harm’s way, and 
 must have been there perhaps some seven years. 
 But we hear little or nothing of any evangelistic 
 work there. 1 It is probable that his sojourn both in 
 Arabia and in Tarsus was on the whole a time of 
 retirement and thought. From the time when 
 Barnabas fetched him to Antioch, his life must have 
 been one of ceaseless strain. But before that he had 
 had time to think out the meaning of his new faith, 
 of which he had already, at Damascus and especially 
 at Jerusalem, received “the tradition, 2 and he had 
 found in the doctrine of the divine sonship the way 
 of reconciliation between his old Monotheism and 
 his new belief in the Lordship of Jesus. 3 
 
 But before we enquire into the sources of St. 
 Paul’s doctrine of Christ’s person, we must have it 
 clearly before our mind, and we should take notice 
 that the way in which it is referred to in his epistles 
 seems to show conclusively that, in its main lines, 
 it must have formed part of his first preaching 
 
 1 He speaks (Gal. i 21) of going “into the region of Syria and 
 Cilicia,” and of the Christians in Judaea hearing “ that he that 
 once persecuted them now preached the faith of which he ^ once 
 made havoc.” We hear of “ brethren in Syria and Cilicia^, and 
 at the beginning of the second missionary journey “ ho went through 
 Syria and Cilicia confirming the churches” (Acts xv 23, 41). 
 But if these churches were of his foundation we should have been 
 likely to hear something of them. And we hear nothing. 
 
 2 He tells us himself that he received the tradition concerning 
 the Resurrection (1 Cor. xv 1-3) and concerning the institution 
 of the Eucharist (probably there was more that he does not 
 mention). Galatians i 17, ii 6 must be read in the light of these 
 
 disclosures. ... 0 . 0 
 
 3 X am glad to see that Eduard Meyer, Ursprung, vol. u, p. 348, 
 
 recognizes the importance, not only of “ the tradition which 
 St. Paul received in Damascus and Jerusalem, but also of the 
 long pdriod of subsequent reflection before he began his mission 
 work : “ In dor langen Zeit, die er nach seiner Bekehrung in 
 
 Damascus und Tarsus zubrachte, muss er fiber die neue Erkenntms 
 gegrubolt haben, die ihm aufgegangen war, bis er mit seiner 
 Anschauungen in reinen war und sie sich in seiner Weise logisch 
 zurecht gclegt hatte, so dass er alsdann die Missionstatigkeit 
 beginnen konnte.” 
 
82 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 when founding liis churches, for it is not introduced 
 anywhere in his writings as if it were a new 
 thing. 
 
 He is full of the familiar thought of the Lordship 
 of Christ, and indeed occasionally the Lord (Jehovah) 
 and the Lord (Christ) are unmistakably identified— 
 that is, Old Testament language about the former 
 is applied to the latter. 1 But St. Paul has—what 
 the Church before him apparently had not—an 
 explanation. Christ can be thus treated as divine 
 Lord, or identified with Jehovah, because before 
 He was sent into the world He was with the Father 
 as His Son—“ his own son ” (Rom. viii 3), 66 the son 
 of his love ” (Col. i 13). The glorified Christ can 
 be the very “image of God ” 2 because, at the be¬ 
 ginning of things, as Son of the Father, He had been 
 God’s “ image”—the expression of the invisible 
 God. 3 Through Him, the Son, has God done 
 whatever in the process of creation He has done. 
 He is “ the heir of all creation ”—“ through him 
 are all things ”—“ in him were all things created, 
 in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and 
 things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or 
 principalities or powers ; all things have been created 
 through him, and unto him (he is their end) ; and 
 he is (or 4 he exists ’) before all things, and in him 
 all things have their coherence.” He is not only 
 the creator of all that is, but also the continuous, 
 immanent principle of order in the universe. 4 It 
 is He who was supplying the need of the Israelites 
 in the wilderness as “the rock that followed 
 
 1 See Romans x 9—15 (Joel ii 32) ; 2 Thess. i 9 (Is. ii 10, 19, 
 21); 1 Cor. ii 16 (Is. xl 13, lxx) ; 1 Cor. x 21 (Mai. i 7, 12). 
 This identification has been described as “ not proven ” in any 
 case in the N.T. But it seems to me beyond dispute. See Sunday 
 and Headlam on Rom. x. 
 
 2 2 Cor. iv 4. 3 Col. i 15. 
 
 4 See 1 Cor. viii 6 ; Col. i 15-17. Nothing can better Lightfoot’a 
 
 notes on this passage. 
 
HIS DOCTRINE OF CHRIST S3 
 
 them.” 1 He it was who “when the fulness of the 
 time was come ” was sent forth “ born of a woman* 
 born under the law,” “ in the likeness of the flesh 
 of sin,” but “ knowing no sin,” 2 as man to redeem 
 mankind, whether Jews or Gentiles, who will believe 
 on Him. He was, as man on earth, their example* 
 and their propitiation before God, and now He is 
 continuously from heaven the source of their new 
 life by His spirit. For that divine Sonship which 
 was veiled during His mortal life and in His death* 
 was declared again unmistakably in His resurrec¬ 
 tion 3 ; and thereupon, being exalted to the heavenly 
 places, He communicates His own Spirit, which is 
 the Spirit of God, to the Church, which is His body* 
 and to all its members, so that “ in Him ” they may 
 live as sons in His sonship, and by Him be renewed 
 into His image, and remaining in Him, 4 whether 
 they live or die, may be prepared to meet Him when 
 He comes in glory, being already associated with 
 Him in the life of God. 
 
 This is St. Paul’s doctrine of Christ in summary, 
 I think Dr. Allan Menzies (commenting on 2 Cor. iv 
 4) is right in saying “ It was difficult for them 
 (Jews) to take in how one who had been a man on 
 the earth could be [a] God, and if this was not 
 accepted, all the other Pauline doctrines remained 
 incredible, a tangle of paradoxes and indisci etions. 
 The verse shows very clearly how the whole of Paul’s 
 thought hinged on his doctrine of Christ’s divinity.’ 
 
 St. Paul is not a scientific writer who exhibits 
 his thought accurately and consecutively stated. 
 If he had been this, he would have saved the 
 
 1 1 Cor. x 4. In this connection I am inclined to believe that 
 the A.V. of verse 9 gives the right reading : “ Neither let us tempt 
 Christ, as some of them also tempted. 
 
 2 See Rom. viii 3, Gal. iv 4, 2 Cor. v 21. 
 
 « ^In’the~Lord,” or “in Christ,” or “in Christ Jesus,” or “in 
 
 the Lord Jesus.” 
 
84 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 controversial and critical world a great deal of 
 trouble, but lie would not have been St. Raul. Fie 
 does, however, incidentally give us what it is 
 hardly an exaggeration to call a careful theory of 
 the meaning of the Incarnation in the Epistle to 
 the Philippians, though the theory as given is only 
 incidental to an ethical exhortation. His theme 
 is humility, and his example of humility is Christ, 
 not only within the compass of His human life but 
 before that—in the act of taking humanity. For 
 44 pre-existing in the characteristics [or nature] 
 of God, he set no store on equality with God, but 
 emptied himself, taking the characteristics [or 
 nature] of a servant, and being made in the likeness 
 of men ; and being found in fashion as a man, he 
 humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto 
 death, yea, the death of the cross. Wherefore also 
 God highly exalted him, and bestowed upon him 
 the name which is above every name ; that at 
 the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things 
 in heaven and things on earth and things under the 
 earth, and that every tongue should confess that 
 Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” 1 
 
 1 Phil, ii 5-11. This is one of the passages in the N.T. which 
 have been obscured by excessively minute scrutiny. I do not 
 think anything can better Liglitfoot’s commentary. Some people 
 are disposed to dispute that “ emptied himself or annulled him¬ 
 self ” is meant as a description of the act of the Incarnation at 
 all They would apparently translate “he emptied himself, 
 having taken,” i.e. He first took human nature and then humbled 
 Himself. But “emptied himself” here is surely parallel to 
 “ beggared himself” or “made himself poor” m 2 C°r. vm9. 
 Both phrases describe an act of abandonment by our Lord of the 
 state belonging to His divine nature which was involved m becoming 
 man. “Emptied himself” is therefore to be distinguished from 
 the “humbled himself” which follows in Phil, ii 7, and which 
 describes His conduct after He became man. oee Menzies on 
 2 Cor. viii 9. “ With the phrase ‘ chose poverty’ [or maae himself 
 
 poor’] we may compare ‘lie emptied himself (Phil, ii), which 
 refers not to the act of Jesus as a man, but to the great act of 
 humiliation He performed when He gave up His existence m the 
 form of God, and took on Himself the form of a servant. 
 
 The word translated ‘‘characteristics” (or “nature, which 1 
 
85 
 
 HIS CO-ORDINATION WITH GOD 
 
 This being St. Paul’s doctrine of a real incarnation 
 of the Son of God, who pre-existed in the essential 
 characteristics or nature of God, we ask whether 
 St. Paul believes Him to have been, and calls Him 
 without qualification, God. What everywhere con¬ 
 fronts us in St. Paul’s letters is that he attributes 
 to Him—always in definite subordination to God, 
 the Father 1 —all the characteristic functions of 
 God ; the creation of all things in the universe and 
 the maintenance of creation, as we have seen ; the 
 providence which directs the accidents of life ; the 
 “ grace ” that redeems men and holds them ‘ k in 
 Christ ” or “ in the Lord ” as the sphere in which 
 they live ; the final judgment which is unerringly 
 to assess each human life; the crowning of the re¬ 
 deemed with glory and the consummation of the 
 whole creation. 2 In the whole range of divine 
 activities there appears to be no district in which 
 
 think is a better word) is literally “ form. ; but the English woicl 
 is misleading. The original word describes the peimanent 
 characteristics” or “kind” or “manner of bebl S ” of an y thia &* 
 See Lightfoot in loc. and Trench, Synonyms, pp. 247 ft. bo the 
 “ form of the servant ” describes the permanent characteristics 
 or “ nature ” of manhood—with probable reference to the “ servant 
 of Jehovah ” in Second Isaiah. The words “ likeness ” and ‘ fashion 
 which follow affirm that the Son of God not only took the real 
 nature but also the outward appearance and condition of manhood. 
 The Son not only became really man, but ordinary man, like other 
 men to look at, and like other men in all the changing conditions 
 
 1 Alike in (a) His cosmic activities, and ( b ) in His redemptive 
 activities the Son is subordinate to the bather ; see for (ct) 
 l Oor. viii 6, Col. i 15, and for (6) Gal. iv 4, Col. i 19, 1 Cor. xi 3 
 It is not necessary to multiply quotations. And the essential 
 subordination of the Son to the Father, as recipient to source, 
 has always been the Catholio doctrine. See Westcott on 
 John xiv 28. In 1 Cor. xv 28 St. Paul speaks of the ultimate 
 order, when the work of the mediatorial Kingdom of Christ is fully 
 accomplished, and all resistance and rebellion is over for ever, and 
 in that ultimate order the Son is subordinate to the bather. 
 
 2 It is not necessary to multiply quotations, but see Col. 1 14-ia, 
 1 Thess. iii II, 2 Cor. xiii 14, and Gal. i 3, 2 Cor. v 17, 2 Cor. 
 v 10, Rom. vi 23, 2 Thess. ii 14, Plnl. m 21, n 10, Eph. 
 
 i 10. 
 
86 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 God, that is the Father, is not associated with His 
 Son, nor is it in St. Paul’s mind apparently con¬ 
 ceivable that the honour paid to the Son, the Lord 
 Jesus, throughout the whole created universe, should 
 be any derogation from or should be distinguishable 
 from the honour paid to the Father, or that there 
 should be anything given to the Father in the way 
 of homage by His creatures which is withheld from 
 the Son. On the whole the instinct of monotheism 
 (and no doubt the pressing necessity to maintain 
 the language of monotheism in churches of Gentile 
 origin) leads St. Paul generally to speak of the Fathei 
 alone as God and of the Son as Lord: For us 
 
 there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, 
 and we unto him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, 
 through whom are all things, and we through him 
 (1 Cor. viii 6); but so completely is the Son repre¬ 
 sented as sharing in the divine life and activity that 
 it is, I think, wilful to question the ascription to 
 the Christ, who was born of Jewish stock “ as con¬ 
 cerning the flesh,” of the words—which seem so 
 plainly to suggest the antithesis of the glory of 
 Christ to His humiliation—“ who is over all, God 
 blessed for ever ” 1 or to question the phrase in 
 St. Paul’s speech at Miletus to the Ephesian elders, 
 “ the Church of God which he purchased with his own 
 blood,” or “ the blood which is his own.” 2 We 
 should conclude, then, that as St. Paul constantly 
 associates the Lord (Jesus) in all the strictly divine 
 activity and glory, so occasionally he calls Him 
 
 God. 
 
 We know that St. Paul would have attributed 
 
 1 Rom. ix 5. See Sanday and Headlam in loc. 
 
 2 Acta xx 28. In this phrase I think with Rackham God means 
 the Father, but the blood of Christ is called “ his own. In 
 Titus ii 13, however, I think Parry, following Hort, is probably 
 right in treating the words “ Jesus Christ ” as in apposition to 
 “ the glory of our great God and Saviour.” Christ, that is, is 
 “ the glory of God” (see below, pp. 128ff). 
 
THE SOURCES OF ST. PAUL’S DOCTRINE 87 
 
 his doctrine of Christ to direct divine inspiration. 1 
 Just as our Lord would have St. Peter assured 
 that his confession of His Messiahship was due to 
 nothing lower than divine revelation, so would St. 
 Paul have felt and claimed for his fuller conviction 
 about Christ’s person. But in neither case can 
 divine revelation be taken to exclude human and 
 external influences. Whence, then, we ask, did St. 
 Paul derive, not his conviction, but the materials 
 through which this conviction expressed itself ? 
 
 It has been commonly suggested by those who 
 are absorbed in the new study of apocalyptic 
 that St. Paul’s idea of the pre-existent Christ is 
 derived from the Similitudes of the Book of Enoch 
 or from similar sources which have perished. But 
 this suggestion ought to be abandoned. The figure 
 in the Similitudes is that of a quasi-angelic being in 
 human form, who is being preserved in the secret 
 treasury of God to be manifested only at the end of 
 the world to carry out the Divine judgment and to 
 usher in the world to come. If in the original docu¬ 
 ment he is called 44 the son of man ” (which I hold 
 to be very doubtful), yet in no real sense has he ever 
 been man, nor ever will be—that is, not in the sense 
 of sharing the nature or experience, physical and 
 spiritual, of the sons of men. It is a fundamentally 
 “ docetic ” figure—that of these Similitudes—neither 
 in anv real sense divine nor in any real sense human. 
 St. Paul shows, I think, not the slightest tiace of such 
 a presentation. He never speaks of the Son of 
 Man ” ; and the pre-existent 44 Son of God ’ of St. 1 aul 
 is divine, subsisting in the 44 form ” of God, and not 
 yet in any sense human ; but at a definite moment m 
 time, by a definite human birth of a woman, He be¬ 
 came man. It was not that He appeared merely in 
 human guise, but that He really became man, m the 
 solidity of human flesh and reality of human character, 
 
 1 Gal. i 12, 15, 16. 
 
88 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 and as man lived, and was crucified and died, and was 
 buried, and rose again and was glorified, and is 
 “ to come.” 1 Nor is there any reason to think that 
 St. Paul was influenced by Philo’s hazy conception 
 of the ideal man who exists among the ideas of the 
 eternal world, 2 nor by any ancient myth of an eternal 
 man. There is no trace in St. Paul of any eternal 
 man ” at all. The only phrase pleaded on behalf 
 of such a suggestion is the phrase the second man 
 is from heaven.” In its context, I think, this phrase 
 can only describe the coming of Christ in glory, not 
 His first appearance on earth. 3 The Apostle is 
 answering the question “ with what manner of body 
 do they [the dead] come,” that is, at the resurrection 
 day. And he answers that they will come in a 
 spiritual body, like to Christ who has now become 
 “ life-giving spirit,” and will come as the “ second 
 man from heaven.” St. Paul was, in fact, not 
 enunciating any old theory w r hich he might be 
 supposed to have learned as a Pharisee, but some¬ 
 thing which the resurrection of Christ (and his vision 
 of the risen Christ) had taught him for the]first 
 time. 4 
 
 To recur, then, to the question wiience St. Paul 
 derived the material for this conception of Christ: 
 I think the answer must be in the first place that 
 
 1 See for St. Paul’s doctrine Phil, ii 6-10, Gal. iv 4. This 
 verse in Galatians with Rom. i 3 implies the reality of His human 
 flesh ; when St. Paul talks of His character as obedient, meek and 
 gentle, he implies His full spiritual humanity. As He had the 
 “form ” of God, so He took the “form,” that is, the real nature, 
 of man. St. Paul was not confronted with any docetism. But 
 there is no reason to think he would have made any terms with it. 
 Christ in glory is still human and His “ body of glory ” is the pattern 
 of the body of glory which we are all destined to enjoy, Phil, iii 21. 
 On 2 Cor. v 16, “ Christ after the flesh,” see appended Note C, p. 105. 
 
 2 See Lebreton, Origines, p. 216. 
 
 3 1 Cor. xv 47. See Robertson and Plummer, in loc. (Internal. 
 Crit. Comm,.). Also Dalman, op. oit., pp. 251 f. 
 
 4 On what has just been said, I must refer back for confirmation 
 to the Note on pp. 30 if. 
 
THE WORDS OF CHRIST 
 
 89 
 
 he was much better acquainted than some people 
 appear to suppose with the words of Christ. We 
 must recognize, as has been already argued, that 
 St. Paul, after his conversion, received 44 a tradition ” 
 which in certain respects was already formulated. 
 
 I think this tradition probably included a record of 
 the sayings of Christ. But whether this be so or 
 no, we are bound to acknowledge that St. Paul 
 had in his mind, if not in his hand, some record 
 of the words of Christ, and assumes that the converts 
 knew it also—for four times he refers to a particular 
 “ word of the Lord ” as of final and decisive authority . 1 
 I think also St. PauPs ethical teaching shows un¬ 
 mistakable and close familiarity with Christ’s teach¬ 
 ing. His estimate of the law of love, and his descrip¬ 
 tion of love, and of 44 the fruits of the spirit,” and 
 his appeal to “ the meekness and gentleness of Christ,” 
 and to His example of humility, will, if we meditate 
 on them, convince us of this . 2 In the same w r ay I 
 think the remarkable phrase which occurs five times 
 in St. Paul’s epistles, 44 The Father of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ,” 3 and which is used side by side with phrases 
 such as 44 our Father” or 44 the Father,” means 
 that St. Paul knew how it had been our Lord s 
 habit to speak to His disciples—never of 44 our 
 Father,” 4 but of 44 your Father,” and 44 my Father.” 
 44 The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ ” then, as 
 St. Paul uses it, means Him whom Jesus Christ 
 used constantly to speak of as 44 my Father.” And if 
 he knew how Jesus spoke ol God as His F ather, 
 he must have known that He spoke of Himself as 
 the Son. Thus I have grown to feel convinced 
 
 1 1 Cor. vii 10, ix 14, 1 These, iv 15, Acts xx 35. In the last 
 two cases the “words of the Lord” have not been otherwise 
 preserved. In the first two they have. See also 1 Tim. vi 3. 
 
 a go Dr. Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement, pp. 106 ff. 
 
 3 Rom. xv 6, 2 Cor. i 3, xi 31, Lph. i 3, Col. i 3. , 
 
 4 “ Our Father ” (in the Lord’s Prayer) is only put into the 
 
 lips of the disciples. 
 
90 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 that St. Paul must have had in his mind, and very 
 possibly in written form before his eyes, such words 
 as “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 . 1 All things have been delivered unto 
 me of my Father : and no one knoweth the Son, 
 save the Father : neither doth any know the Father 
 save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth 
 to reveal him,” and “ Of that day and that hour 
 knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, 
 neither the Son,” and again the parable of the 
 Husbandmen, suggesting so sharp a distinction be¬ 
 tween the servants of God (the prophets) and the 
 only Son. Though, as I have said, the note of the 
 divine sonship of Christ was absent apparently from 
 the first Apostolic preaching, it is very difficult 
 to doubt that there was thought and talk about such 
 memorable sayings as these in their bearing on the 
 mystery of Christ’s person. And St. Paul was more 
 quick than others to catch their full meaning. 
 
 Moreover it is plain that St. Paul’s doctrine of 
 the pre-existence of the Son, before the world was, 
 and His co-operation with the Father in all His 
 works, and His incarnation in the fulness of time, 
 did not in any way shock or surprise the Church. 
 There were, we know, aspects and elements in 
 St. Paul’s teaching which excited alarm and caused 
 dissension. This is much more evident in St. Paul’s 
 own Epistles than in the Acts. But there is no such 
 note of emphasis on his teaching about the person 
 of Christ as to suggest that it was surprising by 
 its novelty or calculated to raise antagonism. It is 
 taken for granted as an accepted truth. And this 
 could not have been the case if the idea of Jesus 
 
 1 I suspect that 1 Cor. i 18 ff. is reminiscent of the context of 
 these words : “ I thank thee. Father,” etc. 
 
CHRIST’S LORDSHIP IN NATURE 91 
 
 as Son of God, in a unique and pre-eminent sense, 
 had not been in the tradition of the first Jerusalem 
 Church, though for the time it appears to have 
 been almost ignored, while attention was wholly 
 concentrated upon His Messiahship and Lordslnp. 
 Those who believe, as I do, that the author of the 
 Fourth Gospel gives us real memorials of Jesus, 
 and is no other than John the son of Zebedee, wi 
 remember that he was at Jerusalem at least during 
 the earlier stages of St. Paul’s career as an Apostle, 
 and that St. Paul had converse with him as one of 
 the “ pillars.” It is universally assumed that at. ram 
 influenced the author of the Johannine writings 
 I cannot help thinking it is possible that St. Jol 
 mav have communicated something to St. Paul. 
 
 I should not, of course, wish to lay any stress on 
 this possibility. But I do wish to lay stress on 
 the fact that St. Paul’s doctrine of the Son of God 
 seems to have caused no surprise or opposition; 
 and this could hardly have been the case unless it had 
 been already present in germ in the tradition of the 
 Church, though it was not apparently much in evi¬ 
 dence, while the whole attention of the Church was 
 
 ureoccupied with something else. 
 
 There is nothing in the Synoptists whic 1 very 
 directly suggests the association of the Son in the 
 activities of creation or of nature, though there is 
 one saying in the Fourth Gospel which probably does 
 suceest it 1 : “ My Father worketh hitherto and 
 
 I work ” But as soon as ever the idea of the Son, 
 as associated with the Father in His eternal life, 
 had presented itself to St. Paul’s mind it would 
 probably have clothed itself m the associations of the 
 Wisdom^of God as that is presented in the Bool oj 
 Proverbs and especially in the Wisdom of Solomon 
 with which St. Paul in the Romans shows himself 
 
 well acquainted. 2 
 
 i John v 17-20. 2 See Sanday and Headlam, p. 51. 
 
02 
 
 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 The divine 44 Wisdom ” in these books is not 
 conceived of as really a person, but it is strikingly 
 personified. It is represented as if it had separate 
 existence as God’s effulgence or self-expression, before 
 ever the world was; and (perhaps in Proverbs, 
 certainly in the Book of Wisdom) as His agent in 
 creation and in His self-revelation to men. Much 
 of the language that St. Paul uses about the activity 
 of the Son in the creation and sustentation of the 
 world is paralleled in this literature. “The Lord 
 possessed me (or 4 formed me ’) as the beginning of 
 his way, before his works of old. I was set up from 
 everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth 
 was. . . . Then I was by him as a master work¬ 
 man (?) y and I was daily his delight, rejoicing 
 always before him ; rejoicing in his habitable earth ; 
 and my delight was with the sons of men.” 1 And 
 in the Book of Wisdom, Wisdom is called 44 the 
 artificer of all things . . . Yea she pervadeth and 
 penetrateth all things. . . . She is an effulgence 
 from everlasting light; and an unspotted mirror of 
 the working of God, and an image of his goodness. 
 And she, being one, hath power to do all things ; 
 and remaining in herself, reneweth all things : and 
 from generation to generation passing into holy 
 souls, she maketh men friends of God and prophets.” 
 44 She reacheth from one end of the world to the other 
 with full strength, and ordereth all things graciously.” 
 And Solomon prays, 44 Give me wisdom, her that 
 sitteth by thee on thy throne ; . . . send her forth 
 from thy holy heaven, and from the throne of thy 
 glory bid her come.” 2 
 
 There can be no doubt that at least the Book of 
 Wisdom exhibits the influence of Greek philosophy. 
 The intellectual world, under the influence of 
 Platonists and Stoics, was full of the conception of 
 a divine Reason, immanent in the universe as its 
 1 Prov. viii 22-30. 2 Wisd. vii 22 to ix 18. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE WISDOM 93 
 
 order and law, and the source of the reason of man. 
 St. Paul’s own city Tarsus, where he was brought up, 
 and to which he returned for a good many years 
 after his conversion, was pre-eminently a philosophic 
 city. 1 I do not suppose that St. Paul was a member 
 of any of the philosophic schools. But I think it 
 is impossible he can have been ignorant of the 
 philosophical ideas which constituted the common 
 intellectual atmosphere of educated men in his own 
 cjpy. And when we read such phrases as m him 
 (the Son) all things consist ” or “ in him we live and 
 move and have our being,” we cannot dissociate 
 such an idea of an immanent God from the influences 
 of current philosophy, or doubt that in St. Paul s 
 mind this current conception of a pervading reason 
 helped him to frame his conception of the activities 
 
 of the Son of God in nature. 
 
 Nevertheless the influence of philosophy, or even 
 of the Book of Wisdom, on St. Paul must not be 
 exaggerated. St. Paul’s attitude towards philosophy 
 is not sympathetic or at all trustful. He delivers his 
 solemn affirmations about Christ wholly as a revela¬ 
 tion of God. As I have said, I believe him to have 
 found in Christ’s own words the source of his doctrine 
 of His divine sonship, He may have found there 
 also a foundation for his doctrine of the co-operation 
 of the Son with the Father in the creation and main¬ 
 tenance of nature. But as regards both doctrines, 
 or, to speak more properly, both parts of the same 
 doctrine, we shall note that the authors of the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews and the Fourth Gospel are entirely 
 at one with St. Paul. They all use the same language 
 
 i See Strabo, xiv 5, 13 : “The zeal of its inhabitants for philo¬ 
 sophy and general culture is such that they have surpassed even 
 Athens and Alexandria and all other cities where schools of 
 philosophy can be mentioned. And its pre-eminence in this 
 SspeotVao groat, because there the students are ^ to^speople 
 and foreign students do not readily settle there. btrabo was an 
 older contemporary of St. Paul. 
 
94 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 about the functions of the Son in nature. They 
 reflect, no doubt, the language of the later Jewish 
 theology about the Wisdom or Word of God. But 
 the principle of such language is a fundamental 
 principle of Old Testament religion. It is the refusal 
 to separate the spiritual from the material, or God’s 
 work in men’s souls from His work in nature. It 
 would have seemed self-evident to a Jew that if the 
 Son is the organ of God’s revelation and communica¬ 
 tion of Himself to men’s souls, He must also and 
 equally be the organ of ;His work in creating and 
 ordering nature. And in this principle we must 
 surely see a real inspiration of the Spirit of truth. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Next, the Epistle to the Hebrews must claim our 
 attention. Nothing can bring more clearly before 
 our minds the novelty of literary criticism considered 
 as a science than the fact that for so many centuries 
 this Epistle should have been held to be by St. 
 Paul. For though the ultimate theology is closely 
 similar to St. Paul’s, the tone of thought, as well 
 as the phraseology 1 and style, is characteristically 
 different. Who wrote this Epistle we do not know, 
 but we are, I think, safe in saying that it was written 
 for Jews and before, but not much before, the 
 destruction of Jerusalem, and that it was written 
 by one whose thought suggests Alexandria as his 
 spiritual home. 
 
 1 Thus God is scarcely called the “Father”; the idea of our 
 being “ in Christ Jesus ” or “in the Lord ” is absent; the doctrine 
 of the Spirit is very slightly touched. There is (strangely) no 
 assertion of the universalism of the Gospel. The antitheses “ law ” 
 and “ grace,” “ faith ” and “ works,” “ flesh ” and “ spirit ” are 
 not to be found. It is not certain that the author was acquainted 
 with Philo’s writings, but he certainly breathed in their atmosphere. 
 For instance, for him heaven is the world of spiritual and intel¬ 
 lectual realities and earth the world of shadows and images. People 
 who say that for the early Christians heaven was definitely a place 
 above our heads seem to forget the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
 
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 95 
 
 It has one dominant purpose, that is to present 
 to thoughtful Jewish converts, who were in danger 
 of relapsing, the essential superiority of Christianity 
 to the religion of the Old Testament and its finality, 
 on the ground of its providing for men, through 
 Christ, perfect and unhindered approach to God. 
 That is to say, in other words, that its subject is the 
 high-priesthood of Christ. But though this special 
 doctrine of the Epistle is a fascinating subject, we 
 are not at present directly concerned with it. What 
 we are concerned with is simply the author s doctrine 
 of the person of Christ, and^ this we shall find is 
 
 almost identical with St. Paul’s. 
 
 “ Jesus,” then, (for the writer most often used 
 
 this purely human name,) had not the beginning o 
 His personal existence when He took flesh. Before 
 all creation He was the effulgence of God’s glory and 
 the very image of His substance. 1 These phrases 
 suggest coeternity with God, but not directly person¬ 
 ality But they are coupled with the personal 
 words “ the son,” and the “ heir of all things ” ; 
 and (as with St. Paul) it is the Son through whom 
 God made the worlds, and it is He who bears along 
 or upholds all things by the utterance of His power. 
 As Son of the Father He builds the house of which 
 Moses is the servant. 2 Again, as with St. Paul, 
 all His activity in redemption is seen upon the back- 
 wround of His functions in the whole of nature. He 
 is “ God’s Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, 
 through whom also he made the worlds; who, 
 being°the effulgence of his glory, and the very image 
 of his substance, and upholding all things by the 
 word of his power, when he had made purification 
 of sins, sat down on the right hand of the majesty 
 on high.” 3 But though there is thus unmistakable 
 continuity of personal being and action between 
 these different “ moments ” ol the Son s life, yet 
 
 -. 3 i 2-4. 
 
 i i 2-4. 
 
 2 iii 1-6. 
 
96 
 
 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 there is no idea of any eternal manhood. Fie became 
 man at a particular date. Thus Fie who had been 
 so much above the angels was “ made a little lower 
 than the angels .” 1 “ He partook of flesh and 
 
 blood.” 2 “ Fie taketh hold of the seed of Abra¬ 
 ham.” 3 “ He sprang out of Judah.” 4 And great 
 
 emphasis is laid on the reality of His manhood in 
 spirit as well as flesh. “ He was in all points tempted 
 like as we are, yet without sin.” 5 “In that he 
 himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to 
 succour them that are tempted.” 6 “ Who in the 
 
 days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and suppli¬ 
 cations with strong crying and tears unto him that 
 was able to save him from death, and having been 
 heard for his godly fear, though he was a Son, yet 
 learned obedience by the things that he suffered ; 
 and having been made perfect, he became unto all 
 them that obey him the author of eternal salvation.” 7 
 His priesthood for men depends upon the reality 
 of His manhood and human development: and it 
 is in the perfection of His manhood that “ he sat 
 down on the right hand of God.” 8 
 
 Thus as He is properly divine, so Fie is properly 
 human : but His personality is divine throughout 
 —He is the eternal Son. That in which He offers 
 Himself is “ eternal spirit.” 9 Whether, in the 
 quotation from Ps. xlv , 10 He is called “ God ” is not 
 certain; but the words of Ps. cii, which describe 
 the activity of the Lord (Jehovah) and His un- 
 cliangeableness and eternity, are certainly ascribed 
 to Jesus , 11 and apparently to Him is ascribed “ the 
 glory for ever and ever.” 12 Certainly in this Epistle 
 there is the full doctrine of the Incarnation, quite 
 explicit. 
 
 I ii 9. 2 ii 14. 3 ii 16> 4 vii 14> 
 
 6 iv 15. 6 ii 18. 7 V 7-9. 8 x 12. 
 
 9 ix 14. 10 i 8. Westcott translates “ God is thy throne.’* 
 
 II i 10. 12 xiii 21. 
 
THE HEBREWS AND PHILO 
 
 97 
 
 But before leaving this Epistle I should wish to 
 emphasize its relative independence not only side 
 by side with St. Paul’s Epistles, but also side by side 
 with Philo. 
 
 No doubt the author’s intellectual equipment 
 and outlook are those of Alexandrian Judaism, but 
 the special value of his testimony to the doctrine 
 of the Incarnation lies in this—that whereas the 
 ideology of Philo and of other like Jewish thinkers 
 would have come naturally to him, as a matter of 
 fact his Christianity—his faith in Jesus—had given 
 to all the current of ideas represented by Philo a 
 wholly changed basis and tendency. He believed 
 in the man Jesus : he clung with intense conviction 
 and appreciation to His human sufferings of body 
 and mind. The object on which his mind rested was, 
 not an idea, but a person of flesh and blood, who has 
 lived and struggled and suffered among the ordinary 
 children of men. It is this strongly held historical 
 basis of his faith which so deeply differentiates it 
 from the ideology of Philo. It is not that he has 
 transmuted the faith of the first disciples into some¬ 
 thing different by the use of Alexandrian ideas. It 
 is that the first faith in Jesus, the actual historical 
 person, accepted as what He declared Himself to be, 
 the Son of God, has found in the Alexandrian tradi¬ 
 tion of Judaism ideas and terms in which it can 
 express itself. This is to say that, by the side of St. 
 Paul the writer to the Hebrews stands with a \cry 
 substantial originality, and with a very independent 
 grasp upon the facts concerning Jesus; but, by the 
 side of Philo, he stands on a different basis, and is 
 travelling by a different road to a different goal. _ 
 
 I will leave to another chapter the rest of the 
 New Testament books. But I feel that we have 
 already traversed together—I and my readers— 
 the most important and the most difficult part of 
 our road. The task on which we set out was to 
 
98 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 follow along the process by which the faith in Jesus 
 of the first disciples developed into a clear belief 
 in His person. 
 
 We watched how, unconsciously, the overmaster¬ 
 ing sense of authority resident and active in Him 
 brought them into an attitude towards Him which 
 cannot be otherwise described than that He came to 
 have for them 44 the values of God.” We saw too 
 that Jesus Himself seems to have deliberately minis¬ 
 tered to this result. Then we watched their failure of 
 faith over the scandal of the cross and their recovery 
 in the light of the Resurrection. Again we saw how 
 their crucified Master, now raised to be the Lord of 
 all at God’s right hand, comes to have, in even fuller 
 sense than before, the values of God for them. W r e 
 cannot doubt that there must have been deep ques¬ 
 tioning in their souls and probably in their conver¬ 
 sation as to the secret of His person and how the Man 
 could be thus exalted to the place of God. But we 
 catch no word about the divine Sonship in their public 
 preaching. It is St. Paul who, as far as our records 
 go, first appears to have brought the idea of the Son- 
 ship, grounded so securely in Christ’s own language, 
 to explain the divine exaltation of the Man and to 
 give the Church the formula for its creed ; but w T e 
 have seen that the Church and its teachers, as 
 far as St. Paul’s Epistles and other documents of 
 the New Testament 1 enable us to judge, appear to 
 have accepted this doctrine about eternal Sonship 
 and incarnation without controversy or demurrer. 
 We have seen the same doctrine a few years after 
 St. Paul’s death unhesitatingly affirmed in the 
 Epistle of a man equal to St. Paul in intellectual 
 equipment, though independent of him in training 
 and in the character of his mind. What we have 
 still to ask ourselves is whether this process in the 
 disciples’ minds, so far as we have followed it, is 
 
 1 See below on the Epistles of Peter, James and Jude, pp. 127 ff. 
 
THE INSTITUTION OF THE EUCHARIST 99 
 
 for us really imaginable unless we suppose that the 
 leading under which they were moving forward was 
 the leading of God, and the conviction about Jesus 
 to which they were led was the truth. But to that 
 question we shall return, when we have considered 
 the other documents of the New Testament. 
 
 Note A 
 
 On the doubts raised whether Jesus in fact instituted the 
 Sacrament of His Body and Blood for the observance oj 
 His Church. 
 
 Bousset and the critics of his school maintain that 
 the sacramental ideas and rites of St. Paul in particular 
 those connected with the Eucharist were not derived 
 from Jesus or from the early Jerusalem church, but had 
 their origin in the Hellenistic churches of Syria, where 
 sacramentalism was developed among the Christians 
 under the influence of the Pagan mystery religions with 
 which they had been familiar before their conversion. 
 What St. Paul did was, with the help of a vision, recorded 
 in 1 Cor. xi 23 ff., to formulate and give consistency to 
 the sacramental principle on the basis of the Jew s belief 
 in God and the newly-won belief in Jesus as . the Lord 
 and as 44 the Spirit.” This theory must wait for fuller 
 consideration till the next volume. But before Bousset 
 wrote, and more widely than his influence has spread, it 
 has been the custom (see Inge’s Outspoken Essays (1919), 
 pp 227 f. and 249) among many critics to maintain 
 that Jesus instituted no sacraments as He founded no 
 church. Doubtless He celebrated a fraternal meal with 
 His disciples before His Passion, which had a spiritual 
 significance, as He was probably accustomed to do. 
 But He instituted no rite for any future church, such as 
 is implied in the words 44 Do this in remembrance of 
 me ” (1 Cor. xi 24, 25). The suggestion of these critics 
 is that when St. Paul speaks of himself as having 
 “ received from the Lord” and 44 delivered to you 
 (1 Cor. xi 23) the account of the institution of such 
 a rite at the Last Supper, with the solemn injunction 
 
100 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 “Do this in remembrance of me,” he means that he had 
 received it in a vision from Jesus. This vision did not 
 correspond at all closely to the historical reality, but 
 its teaching and the practice based upon it spread rapidly 
 through the churches. So that when the Synoptic Gospels 
 were written it had become the accepted institution in 
 all the churches and was related in the Gospels as history. 
 
 This theory seems to me to be in manifold ways 
 arbitrary and improbable. For (1) St. Paul speaks also of 
 having “ received ” and “ delivered ” the record of the 
 Resurrection in 1 Cor. xv 2-4, and no one can reasonably 
 doubt that he is there referring to the tradition of the 
 Church (see verse 11). It is obvious, therefore, to inter¬ 
 pret his words about the “tradition” of the Eucharist 
 in the same sense (see Dr. Anderson Scott in Cambridge 
 Biblical Essays , p. 337). It was “ from the Lord ” as 
 its source, though through the Church, that St. Paul 
 received it. 
 
 (2) If he had received it in a vision surely its form would 
 have been different. It would hardly have come as an 
 historical record. See Stanton, The Gospels as Historical 
 Documents , vol. iii. pp. 273 ff.: “ A passage earlier in 
 the Epistle, where the apostle is interpreting [the sacra¬ 
 ment] will suggest that Jesus [in the vision of Paul] 
 might have said 4 The bread which ye break is a com¬ 
 munion in my body—the cup which ye partake is a 
 communion in my blood. 5 ” Nothing can read less like 
 a vision than St. Paul’s actual narrative. 1 Or if such a 
 vision had been seen or imagined by St. Paul, which 
 did not correspond to the facts as they had been hitherto 
 received or to the practice of the churches already 
 
 1 Eduard Meyer, Ur sprung , vol. i. p. 175, is very emphatic that 
 the account of the Last Supper, as St. Paul gives it, ‘‘belonged 
 to the oldest element of the tradition, as Paul had received it in 
 Damascus.” It was as “ a sharply formulated tradition (fest 
 formulierte Tradition) that he produced it. “ He received the 
 tradition of the institution of the Last Supper in the same sense 
 ‘ from the Lord ’ as he received the Gospel as a whole. . . . In fact 
 his information came naturally from the three years of his period 
 of instruction in Damascus, which was completed through his 
 intercourse with Peter and James in Jerusalem. Therefore it 
 cannot be plausibly suggested that he here (i.e. in 1 Cor. xi) 
 offers a special tradition about the Lord’s Supper differing from 
 the general tradition.” 
 
THE INSTITUTION OF THE EUCHARIST 101 
 
 established, is it likely that such a vision would have 
 altered the practice of all the churches, including the 
 Jewish churches, for whom the first Gospel was written ? 
 This seems very improbable. 
 
 (8) Curiously enough the critics are driven to seek 
 the account of the original institution which has been 
 least deeply affected by St. Paul’s vision in the Gospel 
 of his companion St. Luke, according to the shorter 
 reading of his Gospel, found in some Western authorities, 
 which leaves out all the words after “ this is my body ” 
 —down to “ poured out for you.” I cannot but agree 
 with Dr. Salmon that the words should not be omitted 
 (see Dr. Salmon’s The Human Element in the Go&pels 
 [Murray], pp. 492 f.). I think we can only suppose that 
 their omission, like the omission of verse 17 in other 
 authorities, is due to a desire not to duplicate the giving 
 of a cup. It is utterly improbable that St. Luke meant 
 to reject both St. Mark’s account and St. Paul’s belief 
 and practice, with which he must have been well 
 acquainted. 
 
 (4) Dr. Rashdall’s pages on the Last Supper (The Idea 
 of Atonement , pp. 37 ff.) are written to dispose of the 
 idea that “ a certain expiatory value was attached by 
 our Lord Himself to His approaching death ” in the 
 phrases “ This is my body [which is given for you],” 
 “ This is my blood of the covenant which is shed for 
 many [for the remission of sins].” With the subject of 
 the atonement we shall have to deal later on. But as 
 far as the accounts of the Eucharist are concerned 
 Dr. Rashdall’s pages seem to me to represent that type 
 of “ criticism ” which is least worthy of the name— 
 the type of criticism which is resolved at all costs to 
 eliminate what it does not want to accept. It is quite 
 certain that the words in St. Mark, St. Matthew, St. 
 Paul, and St. Luke (longer text) all alike postulate a 
 Christ who believed Himself to be inaugurating a new 
 covenant, according to the prophecies that so it should 
 be ; and to be inaugurating it by sacrifice—by His blood 
 —as the first covenant at Sinai had been inaugurated. 
 And as it had been declared that the servant of Jehovah 
 would, by “ pouring out his soul unto death ” as a guilt 
 offering, redeem “ many,” so St. Mark and St. Matthew, 
 8 
 
102 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 by the use of the words “ for many,” convey to us the 
 thought that Jesus knew He was so doing. 
 
 (5) Some critics—influenced by Schweitzer—suppose 
 the words of St. Matthew, “ I will not drink henceforth 
 of the fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it 
 new with you in my Father’s kingdom, intimate that 
 our Lord expected the immediate coming of the End 
 and His union with His disciples at the heavenly feast 
 of the Kingdom. In part they make this the ground 
 for disbelieving that Jesus instituted any sacrament for 
 constant observance in His Church. He had no thought 
 for an intermediate period. But St. Mark, on whom 
 St. Matthew is based, and St. Luke omit the words 
 “ with you.” Without these words the saying has no 
 suggestion of any immediate renewal of fellowship with 
 His disciples. They only intimate that this is His las „ 
 meal on earth, and that the new wine of the Kingdom 
 lies immediately before Himself. And where the 
 emphasis has to be laid on the particular words we 
 must prefer St. Mark and St. Luke in agreement to 
 St. Matthew’s version. But of the eschatology of our 
 Lord we treat later in this volume. 
 
 Note B 
 
 On the question whether the First Church in 
 Jerusalem called Jesus Lord 
 
 We must not, of course, ignore the position taken by 
 critics of the school of Bousset, and others, that the 
 term “the Lord” (mJpios) for Jesus was due to the 
 Hellenistic Christian churches at Antioch, Damascus, 
 Tarsus, and the like, who passed through a rapid assimila¬ 
 tion to the Pagan mystery religions, even before St. I aul 
 began his public ministry. These Pagan adherents of 
 mystery religions addressed their patron gods or goc - 
 desses as Lord or Lady-Lord Hermes, Lord Serapis 
 Lady Cybele, etc. Thus Bousset holds that the title 
 (or its equivalent in Aramaic) was not used in the early 
 Jerusalem community, but was first used m these 
 
 Hellenistic churches. 1 
 
 i Bousset, Kyrios Christos, pp. 77 ff. ; of. Glover, Conflict of 
 Religions, p. 356. 
 
103 
 
 JESUS IS LORD 
 
 On the other hand, let us hear Dalman 1 : “At first 
 the title, used in speaking to or of Jesus, was no more 
 than the respectful designation of the Teacher on the 
 part of His disciples. As soon as Jesus had entered 
 into His state of kingly majesty, it became among His 
 followers an acknowledgment of sovereignty ; and when 
 they addressed Him as the Son of God [which apparently 
 was not commonly done in the days before St. Paul], 
 then 4 our Lord,’ as applied to Jesus, was not widely 
 separated from the same designation for God. But it 
 must be remembered that the Aramaic-speaking Jews 
 did not, save exceptionally, designate God as 4 Lord,’ so 
 that in the Hebraist section of the Jewish Christians 
 the expression 4 Our Lord ’ was used in reference ^to 
 Jesus only, and would be quite free from ambiguity. 
 
 The question is this, then—Was the title Maran or 
 Lord used of Jesus by the early Jerusalem community 
 in a sense betokening sovereignty ( 44 Lord of all ”)—in 
 a sense which, among Greek Christians of a few years 
 later, easily merged into the sense of the same word as 
 applied to'God (Jehovah), but which at present would 
 not have been precisely so used in Jerusalem ? 
 
 St. Luke plainly implies that it was, with the title 
 44 Christ,” used by them as their special term for the 
 exalted Jesus. 2 See Acts i 21, (?) 24, ii 36, (iv 38, 
 v 14), vii 59, (?) 60, viii 16, ix (1), 10, 13, 15, 17, (29), 
 (42), x 36, xi 8, 17, 20, (21), 23, (24). 
 
 There seems to me no kind of reason to doubt this, 
 especially as St. Luke appears to be careful to avoid 
 the title Son of God, till he comes to St. Paul. He 
 seems to imply that the one title was, and the other 
 was not, in use. 
 
 There are two other indications looking in the same 
 direction. 
 
 (1) First, that even in the thoroughly Greek church 
 of Corinth St. Paul assumes familiarity with the in¬ 
 vocation 44 Maranatha,” 44 Come, O our Lord ! in 
 Aramaic, which means clearly that it had an Aramaic 
 
 1 See Dalman’s Words of Jesus, p. 327. 
 
 * I have put in brackets ( ) the occasions where the word is 
 used by St. Luko in his own person and not ascribed specially to 
 some speaker other than himself. 
 
104 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH 
 
 origin. (The same Aramaic phrase occurs in the 
 Didachk, which is a document (I think) quite inde¬ 
 pendent of St. Paul.) Bousset admits the force of this 
 as an argument that the title “ Lord ” goes back to the 
 original Aramaic-speaking church at Jerusalem, but 
 pleads that it is not impossible 44 that the Maranatha 
 formula had its origin, not on the ground of the original 
 Palestinian church, but in the bilingual region of the 
 Hellenistic communities of Antioch, Damascus, and 
 Tarsus itself.” 1 No doubt it is possible : for we know 
 little or nothing of these communities and their manner 
 of speech. But the probability surely is that the 
 Hellenistic Christian communities there talked Greek. 
 Even in Jerusalem the names of the men chosen to 
 minister to the Hellenists are all Greek names. And 
 Bousset is surely mistaken in saying that St. Paul’s 
 44 tradition ” goes back to these Syrian communities 
 only, and not to Jerusalem. Where St. Paul talks about 
 the tradition concerning the Resurrection (1 Cor. xv 3), 
 there he certainly means the tradition which he had 
 received from the earlier apostles— i.e. at Jerusalem— 
 for he ranks himself with them as 44 the last ” and 
 irregular apostle, and adds, 44 Therefore, whether it were 
 I or they, so we preach.” The tradition which he 
 received was therefore theirs before he came on the 
 scene. It came from Jerusalem. Again, in Rom. xv 19 
 .St. Paul speaks of Jerusalem as his starting point. 
 
 (2) St. Paul was of course conscious that there were 
 “ Gods many and Lords many,” but certainly nothing 
 in his use of 44 Lord ” as a title for Jesus Christ suggests 
 affinities with the heathen. It was, according to 
 St. Luke, used with special reference to the dignity of 
 the ascended Christ and His future coming. The phrase 
 44 Maranatha,” 44 Come, O our Lord,” also suggests that. 
 St. Paul in his (probably earliest) Epistle to the Thes- 
 salonians constantly uses it with this suggestion : the 
 day of the Lord, the coming of the Lord, etc., see 
 1 Thess. ii 19, iii 13, iv 15, 16, 17, v 2; 2 Thess. i 7, 
 ii 1, 8, 14. But this is a distinctively Jewish idea. And 
 
 1 P. 84. It is noteworthy that Bousset confesses “ Schwieriger 
 ist es eine Alterbestimmung fur das Vorkommen des griechischen 
 Kyriostitels in Syrien und seiner Umgebung zu gewinnen.” 
 
CHRIST AFTER THE FLESH 105 
 
 his characteristic phrase iv K vp(<o suggests something 
 
 quite alien to the heathen cults. . 
 
 On the whole, Bousset’s position is singularly ill 
 
 founded. 
 
 Note C 
 
 On the phrase of St. Paul, 44 Christ after the flesh. 
 
 It is difficult to feel sure what exactly St. Paul means 
 bv the words of 2 Cor. v 16 : “ Wherefore we henceforth 
 know no man after the flesh: even though we have 
 known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him no 
 more.” He is speaking, in a measure generally of the 
 ambassadors for Christ, not only of h ™se lf . That is 
 (in part) the force of the plural we. He is describing 
 how the appreciation of the love of Christ involves fo 
 them death to their selfish selves, and to all the narrow¬ 
 ness of natural affections. “To know men after th 
 flesh ” is to appraise them according to the standards 
 of class, or race, or disposition. To “ know Christ after 
 the flesh” would be to appreciate Him as a Jew woi 
 naturally appreciate Him, as the heaven-sent Messenger 
 who is to exalt the Jewish race and minister to Jemsh 
 pride. St. Paul had felt this pride m Christ, but before 
 he recognized Jesus as the Christ. What he seems to 
 mean is that all such narrow and partial prejudices> have 
 been abolished by the expulsiye power of a love^which 
 is sniritual and universal. It is difficult, I acknowledge, 
 to feel quite certain of St. Paul’s meaning, ^t certainly 
 he does not mean by 44 knowing Christ aftertes , 
 knowing Him as having become really and fully huma 
 in body as well as soul. That he could never repudiate. 
 See Dr. Menzies’ commentary in loc. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 ST. JOHN AND THE REST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 I 
 
 The doctrine of the divine Sonship and incarnation 
 of Jesus Christ is given quite unmistakably in St. 
 Paul’s Epistles and the Epistle to the Hebrews, but 
 it is given incidentally and by implication. But in 
 St. John’s Gospel, read in the light of the prologue 
 and the conclusion, 1 it is given explicitly and directly; 
 and the main, though not the only, object of the 
 writing of the Gospel appears to be to affirm the 
 doctrine with all the authority which the personal 
 testimony of the author can give it. 
 
 I call this Gospel St. John’s, and on the whole I 
 believe it to give us at first hand the mature testi¬ 
 mony of the son of Zebedee. But the widespread 
 denial or doubt of his being the author, or the direct 
 author, of the Fourth Gospel, and the consequent 
 uncertainty about the authority to be attached to it, 
 have seemed to make it wiser to build the structure 
 of our argument independently of it in the first 
 instance. So we have built it especially upon St. 
 Mark and St. Luke, and upon the Acts, and upon St. 
 Paul, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. But having 
 done this we can supplement our argument with an 
 appeal to St. John. 
 
 1 John i 1-18 and John xx 30. Chap, xxi is evidently an 
 appendix, by the same author, I believe, as the rest of the book, 
 with an addition (verses 24, 25) by his companions. 
 
 106 
 
 / 
 
Dll. STANTON AND OTHERS 
 
 107 
 
 Dr Stanton has recently, in a very careful study 
 of the Fourth 
 
 The actual author .as, he supposes a young» 
 than the Apostle wbobdy ^ 
 earlier than he, but ^ *£&?**& independent 
 associated with ^_ 4l ^ cQuld rememb er having 
 memories of h s ow heard Jes us, and .ho 
 
 sometimes himseli s Vnnwledffe which was 
 
 felt himself possesse o divine revelation 
 
 •* !T4 fctoTTy'‘SU. iocition with His 
 
 made n a " mk’s very soon after His departure. 
 
 personal disciples y ^ theory . R seems 
 
 I cannot be satisne with the impression 
 
 apples tX^rEpistle-a personal testimony, 
 
 i Stanton, «« « ***** *“* “ 
 
 (Cambridge, 1920), P- 281 * r ;tten I have noted that Ed. Meyer, 
 
 ^ Since this chapter was wntten, ir ^ the aut hor 
 
 Ur sprung, i p. 312, treats as ndiculo y himgel{ a8 « the disciple 
 
 of the Fourth Gospel mtende P son of z e bedee. “This 
 
 whom Jesus loved and as Jo understand how modem 
 
 was the mask he a*ruined Ueca ^ doubt thig> Also he * 
 
 critics can have brought tbe ™ eP tion of the Logos is derived from 
 confident that the author s « onc ^ ernra >» doctrine), and not from 
 Palestinian Jewish 80U pf- 1( $ th thoU gh he may have known of the 
 Greek philosophy, or In > ^ oig\ I have also read Eh. 
 
 eurTent^reek phUo^hje- $^JZ p el (Oxford 1922) who 
 Burney’s Aramaic Origin of the sour ^ 37 In his 
 
 is (of course) insistent on 1 s eyewitness of the events 
 
 opinion the author must bavebe > Je6U0 , oved ” : but he 
 
 he describes—really . th ® ““Sbvter ” and not the apostle. He 
 identifies him as John the p y ^ j eruS alem, belongmg to 
 thinks that he must b °® ained J in the Rabbinical schools, and 
 
 the priestly circle, and probably at Antioch soon 
 
 that he wrote the G ° S P® , his residence at Ephesus. I am 
 
 after a.d. 75, before he ^tially Palestinian, and not Hellen- 
 
 not without hopes that the ess t^o^ ei, and itg high value as an 
 
 istic, origin and characte ts G f our Lord’s life and to' His 
 
 "“I "oontome to be regarded as an assured result 
 
 of critical enquiry. 
 
108 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 so personal that it must be first-hand, and I see 
 no sufficient reason to doubt that the claim is true. 
 i>ut Dr. Stanton’s study at least shows very cogent 
 reasons for believing that both the narrative of the 
 Fourth Gospel and the discourses rest upon a real 
 apostolic experience, and I hope that critical students 
 will heed his arguments. 1 
 
 Thus he seems to me to show convincingly that 
 tne prologue to the Gospel, though of course it 
 stands first, is not by any means the governing 
 factor in the whole book. 2 On the contrary, in the 
 bulk of the book, after the prologue, there is no 
 allusion to the doctrine of the (personal) Word of 
 God which is the characteristic feature of the prologue, 
 and “ the word of God ” is given, as in the First 
 Epistle, only its normal meaning of the divine 
 message. 3 Jesus there appears only under those 
 titles which He certainly used of Himself—the 
 Son of Man and the Son of God—or the title which 
 was certainly ascribed to Him with His express 
 sanction—the Christ. The substance of the book, 
 which is of a narrative character, must, Dr. Stanton 
 argues, be taken to represent the real experience 
 (and the conviction based upon the experience) 
 of an apostle or apostolic group, which was shared 
 by or communicated to the mind of the author, 
 supposed to be a different person. To put this 
 experience on record was his primary object. Only 
 at the last moment, so to speak, before he wrote 
 his “ gospel ” did the current idea of the Logos 
 (the divine Word or Reason or Power always active 
 
 1 Op. cit ., chap, vi, p. 209. 
 
 2 Pp. 166 if. This argument is substantially also Harnack’e, 
 see p. 167. See also D. C. Somervill, A Short History of our-Re¬ 
 ligion (G. Bell & Son), p. Ill: “A kind of preface or prologue, 
 which may also be regarded as an epilogue or summing up of the 
 whole matter.” 
 
 3 See John v 38, x 35, xv 25, xvii 6, 14, 17. This is also the 
 sense of the word ” in 1 John i 2. 
 
109 
 
 ST. JOHN AND THE SYNOPTISTS 
 
 in the universe) suggest itself to the author as a 
 suitable term to express the nature and functions 
 of the Son. So he formulates his dogmatic prologue 
 with the help of the new term with which both 
 his Jewish training and his Asiatic experience had 
 made him familiar. Thus the idea of the prologue 
 must be thought of as having presented itself to 
 his mind only after the narrative and ideas of the 
 body of the Gospel were already formed and fixed, 
 and, Dr. Stanton would say, after the First Epistle 
 had been written. Further, the bulk of the Gospel 
 must represent matter which had already become 
 familiar in the oral instruction given to the congrega¬ 
 tions of Asiatic Christians . 1 
 
 Dr. Stanton also indicates with admirable precision 
 how closely akin the idea of the divine sonship ol 
 Jesus, as presented in the Fourth Gospel, is to what 
 is found already in the foundation documents of 
 the Synoptic Gospels 2 —to the conception of divine 
 sonship implied in the narrative of the Temptation 
 and presented in great sayings of our Lord which 
 have been already examined; and how the ideas 
 of St. John vi about Christ, as through His flesh 
 and blood the spiritual food of the world, are really 
 implied in the language which Tie is recorded to 
 have used, in the Synoptic Gospels and by St. Paul, 
 at the Last Supper. On such grounds Dr. Stanton 
 argues that the idea of the divine sonship of Jesus 
 presented in the body of the Gospel must be accepted 
 
 1 See pp. 50, 282. tt 
 
 2 Pp. 2G7 ff. Cp. Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus, p. S 02 : _ it 
 
 the first evangelist himself wrote the passage [St. Matt, xi 25-7] 
 as we read it, then even with the most cautious interpretation of 
 the passage, his own Christology approached very nearly to that 
 of the Johannine writings in one of the most important points. 
 In view of the fact that the saying occurs in substantially identical 
 form in St. Matthew and St. Luke, and must therefore have so 
 occurred in Q, we should substitute for Harnack s opening woi ds 
 something of this land—“ If, as we cannot doubt, the first recoidei 
 of our Lord’s words, whose written record lies behind all our present 
 Gospels, wrote the passage as we read it, etc. 
 
110 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 as resting on genuine utterances of Christ, and lie 
 shows the reasonableness of believing that, if such 
 utterances were really made as the Synoptists record, 
 they were more frequently and more emphatically 
 made than there appears. “It is improbable that 
 such sayings could have been spoken, and yet have 
 stood alone in the intercourse of Jesus with His 
 disciples. Even in order that they might be rendered 
 intelligible, and be duly impressed upon their minds, 
 they would need to be repeated.” Dr. Stanton 
 also argues afresh with great force how well the 
 Synoptic narrative can be fitted into the frame¬ 
 work of the story of the Fourth Gospel, and I should 
 add how much on the whole it gains thereby in 
 intelligibility. 
 
 I have written so much by way of preface because 
 writers are apt to assume that, if they reject the 
 direct authorship of St. John the son of Zebedee, 
 they can dispose of the whole Gospel as a work of 
 pious imagination. I do not agree that the direct 
 authorship can be rejected. But what I think is a 
 prejudice against the authorship of St. John is still 
 a very strong prejudice, and it seems to me very 
 important that the world which especially claims 
 to be critical should remember that it has still to 
 reckon with the Fourth Gospel, both as to its incidents 
 and its teaching, as making an historical claim which 
 cannot be ignored, and representing a tradition quite 
 independent of St. Paul. 
 
 I always find myself impressed by the fact that 
 this Gospel four times calls attention to occasions 
 when the disciples failed to apprehend at the time 
 the meaning of some word of Jesus, and only after¬ 
 wards in retrospect perceived what it had really 
 been, 1 and also calls attention to our Lord’s having 
 promised His disciples that the Holy Spirit, whom 
 they were to receive after His departure, would so 
 1 John ii 22, viii 27, x 6, xii 16. 
 
THE DIVINE SONSHIP IN ST. JOHN 111 
 
 act within their minds as not only to interpret what 
 they remembered of His words, but also to bring out 
 of their “ subconscious selves ” what had been 
 forgotten or ignored. 1 That such should have been 
 their experience seems to me to be thoroughly m 
 accordance with human nature. 2 Thus I am disposed 
 to believe that the record of our Lord’s words con¬ 
 tained in the common matter of St. Matthew and 
 St. Luke represents the first memory of what He had 
 said, more or less exactly as He said it, but the 
 Fourth Gospel gives us what had been a gradually 
 growing recollection in the mind of St. John and 
 probably of others, viz. that the sayings of our Lord 
 about His divine sonship had been more frequent 
 and more emphatic than the earliest record had 
 
 Here in the Fourth Gospel, then, St. John, pre¬ 
 supposing the Synoptic record, supplements it with 
 incidents and discourses especially intended to bear 
 on the point of divine sonship. 3 Thus, apart from 
 the comments of the Evangelist, so far as they can 
 be kept distinct from the words of Christ, we have 
 a discourse of Christ (cap. v) in which He asserts 
 
 2 D^C .^omervill, op. cit., p. 106, quotes from Mr. Bruce Glasier s 
 memoir of William Morris, written twenty-five yeais after his 
 death the following : “I have found that my memory is, on many 
 occasions, subject to what seems to be a sort of illumination o 
 «inspiration.’ J Thus when I have fixed my mind on one, say, of 
 the incidents recalled in these chapters, the scene has begun to 
 Perhaps slowly at first, but afterwards rapidly and 
 clearly Medi« u^on it for a time, I have lifted my pen and 
 begun to write. Then to my surprise the conversations long 
 wSd or hidden somewhere in my memory, have come back to 
 b onWimes with the greatest fulness, word for word, as we say. 
 Nay not only the words, but the tones, the pauses and the gestures 
 of the sneaker.” My own belief is that in the Fourth Gospel the 
 memory of incidents and things seen is precise and clear cut. But 
 ae memory of words, though true in its ultimate substance, has 
 become in its form transmuted and sometimes enlarged by medita¬ 
 tion In almost all cases, however, clear-cut sayings of our Lord 
 which are original and verbally genuine can be discerned. 
 
 3 See xx 31. 
 
 
112 
 
 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 at once, as always, His subordination to the Father, 
 but also His constant association with Him in His 
 works, in such general sense as, perhaps, suggests 
 His co-operation with the Father even in the processes 
 of nature. “ My Father worketh hitherto, and I 
 work ” (v 17-18). The co-operation actually asserted 
 (verses 19-29) is something quite transcending the 
 human level, though He who so works is called 
 46 Son of Man.” That is to say, there is asserted 
 a divine sonship belonging to the Son of Man under 
 human conditions, which yet can only belong to the 
 man, because He had come into His manhood out 
 of a pre-existence in God. 1 This is affirmed again 
 and again in the next chapter (vi 88, 41, 62), as 
 also that He is to return, in His manhood, to the 
 heaven whence He came. Again in the discourse 
 of chapter viii this pre-existent sonship is affirmed 
 and identified with the eternal existence of God 
 (verse 58). Again the Son and the Father are 
 declared to be one thing (x 80) and, as has been 
 explained above, 2 I do not think the apparent 
 minimizing of this claim (verses 88-36), when the 
 Jews rightly understood it as a claim of Godhead, 
 can be taken at its face value. The almost startling 
 incompatibility of the minimizing explanation of 
 
 1 There are two assertions by our Lord that “ the Father ” is 
 “ greater ” than He (x 29, xiv 28). It has been long a matt-er 
 of controversy in the Church (see Westcott’s note) whether this 
 superior “ greatness ” of the Father to the Son refers to the God¬ 
 head of the Son or to His manhood. It seems to me that the words 
 —so far like the words of our Lord recorded in St. Mark and St. 
 Matthew, asserting the Son’s ignorance of the day and hour of the 
 “ end of the -world ”—are spoken by the Son in His manhood 
 and with direct reference to His present human state, but that 
 it is not an adequate explanation of them to say that they describe 
 Him as “ inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.” For 
 they refer not to His manhood merely (which, according to the 
 teaching of the Church, had no separate personal existence) but 
 to Himself. They seem to me to describe an inferiority which 
 the incarnation of the Son has (so to speak) intensified, but which 
 depends upon and postulates an eternal subordination. 
 
 : See pp. 28 f. 
 
THE LAST DISCOURSES 113 
 
 His divine sonship with the general argument of 
 the Gospel does indeed give us a guarantee that the 
 Evangelist would not have preserved the words 
 unless he had felt sure that they were really spoken 
 by our Lord; but I think they must be interpreted, 
 not as minimizing His meaning, but as intended to 
 force the Jews to consider that, according to their 
 authoritative Scriptures, something much less than 
 Godhead would justify a claim of divine sonship 
 in some sense. They could not, therefore, dispose 
 of His inconvenient claim upon them merely by 
 repudiating its full implication. More than this 
 kind of meaning cannot be attached to this strange 
 and isolated passage consistently with the constant 
 tenor of the Gospel as a whole. 
 
 In the last discourses immediately before His 
 passion our Lord is constantly represented as one 
 who was conscious of having in one sense come 
 from God—but without thereby leaving God, lor 
 He was still abiding in the Father and the Father 
 in Him, and to see Him is to see the Father—and 
 as being immediately to return to God to resume 
 an interrupted glory and to fulfil the purpose of 
 His mission by the bestowal of the Spirit, whom 
 the Father is to send in His name and at His hands. 1 
 We shall have to return upon these last discourses 
 about the Holy Spirit. All that we need now to 
 do is to assure ourselves that in them, as in the rest 
 of the Gospel, what we are presented with, in our 
 Lord’s words, is an indisputable and constantly 
 reiterated assertion on His part of divine sonship. 
 This is primarily an assertion of what He was then 
 and there in His manhood ; but it is also frequently 
 and plainly implied that He has been through the 
 ages the Son with the Father, dependent upon Him 
 for His very life, but also belonging essentially to 
 the divine being; that He came into the world 
 
 1 xiv 16, 26, xv 26, xvi 7. 
 
114 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 voluntarily in fulfilment of a divine mission of re¬ 
 demption—to accept death at the hands of men for 
 their salvation—and that He was about to resume 
 an interrupted glory on His return to heaven as 
 Son of Man, carrying thither His manhood to become 
 through the Spirit, whom He is to send down from 
 the Father upon His chosen body, the fountain head 
 of a new life. 
 
 Now I do not say that the author of the Fourth 
 Gospel was unacquainted with St. Paul. That can 
 hardly have been the case. But I say that all this 
 body of teaching appears to have grown quite inde¬ 
 pendently of St. Paul. It has its own independent 
 phraseology and characteristic ideas, notably the 
 dominant ideas of 44 light ” and 44 life and truth, 
 of the conflict of belief and unbelief, of judgment 
 perpetually being enacted, and of eternal life already 
 enjoyed. And it must be held to rest upon the 
 foundation of a real tradition of the words of Jesus 
 in the churches of Asia and in the school of St. 
 John ; for myself I go farther, and believe it records 
 both the real memory and the deep meditation of 
 St. John as given us by himself. And I do not 
 see any point at which the record of the Fourth 
 Gospel—apart from the prologue, which has still 
 to be considered—suggests the influence of the 
 current Logos-philosophy of the Hellenistic world. 
 There is really nothing needed to account for it 
 but the Old Testament and the actual life and 
 teaching of Christ. 
 
 The outcome of this experience upon the author 
 has been to generate an idea of Christ as to the nature 
 of which he leaves us in no doubt. He believed 
 that Christ, the Son of Man, was the eternal Son of 
 God, who is very God. He identifies Him with the 
 Jehovah of the Old Testament, for he speaks of 
 Isaiah as having seen His (Christ’s) 44 glory ” when, 
 in his vision in the temple, he saw the form of Jehovah 
 
ST. JOHN’S PROLOGUE 
 
 115 
 
 sitting upon His throne 1 ; and he represents the 
 penitent Thomas as calling the lisen Jesus 
 Lord and my God.” Also he plainly believes the 
 eternal Son of God to have come or been sent by 
 God into the world as man—the Son of Man. But 
 there does not seem to me to be any trace of a belief 
 in a pre-existent man or Son of Man. It vas the 
 pre-existent Son of God who was sent into the world 
 (iii 16-18) as Son of Man, and who after His death 
 and resurrection carried that manhood into heaven 
 in pursuance of a divine purpose of redemption. 
 This alone gives a fair interpretation of the language 
 of the Gospel as a whole. The author’s mind is 
 preoccupied with making it evident that Jesus was 
 really the Son of God. But he leaves us in no doubt 
 as to the reality of His manhood, both bodily and 
 
 spiritual. 3 . 
 
 All this belief of “St. John” concerning Jesus 
 
 grew I believe with Dr. Stanton, on the ground of 
 a real historical tradition or (I should say) of a real 
 memory, and in substance antedates the prologue. 
 It is with this belief already in his mind that, when 
 he came to give his Gospel written form, he found in the 
 
 1 See Burney, op. cit. f p. 37. 
 
 s In vi 62 our Lord is represented as anticipating His ascension : 
 “ What and if ye see the Son of man ascending up where he was 
 hcfnro ” In iii 13 I think we must suppose that we have a re¬ 
 flection of the Evangelist and not a word of Christ. The ascensron 
 has plainly already occurred. The sense in which the Son of 
 man came down from heaven ” is defined by the verses which 
 Mlow It is in the sense that “God sent his Son’ (verses 16 
 „_J 171 anc l His “only begotten Son” (verse 18) into the world 
 to save the world and that He came to save the world as man, the 
 
 S °?No M doubt the reality of our Lord’s manhood physically is 
 what he sees represented symbolically in the blood from His pierce 
 side xix 34-5. Cf. 1 John v 6 ; see my Exposition of St. Johns 
 W* in loo • see John iv 0 and xix 28 for His being tired and 
 tihrsty ’ Dr Burkitt (The Gospel History and its Transmission, 
 p?*233J has the courage to say that “ In no early Christian doemnent 
 is the real humanity of Jesus so emphasized as in the i ourtn 
 Gospel.” The reality of His human spirit and human sympathy 
 appears in xi 33-8 xii 27, xiii l,etc. 
 
116 
 
 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 current idea of the Logos (the word or reason of God) 
 the best vehicle for expressing his doctrine in a concise 
 and dogmatic shape, such as would arrest the imagi¬ 
 nation and conciliate the sympathies of the world for 
 which he was writing. For his w T orld was plainly 
 one deeply liable at the moment to be diverted by 
 the rising tide of “ Gnostic ” speculation from the 
 belief in the Incarnation, or (what is the same thing) 
 the belief that Jesus is the Son of God. It appears 
 indeed very vividly in St. John’s Epistles that his 
 w T orld was a troubled w r orld—a w r orld full of move¬ 
 ments calculated to mislead and destroy this funda¬ 
 mental faith. 1 And all these movements would 
 recognize in the term “ the Logos ” one of their 
 keywords or favourite thoughts. 
 
 For the Hellenistic wrorld was possessed with the 
 idea of a Law or Force or Mind moulding and govern¬ 
 ing the universe. This was the God immanent in 
 the world, “in whom we live and move and have 
 our being,” of which the mind or spirit in each man 
 was a minute portion. This current belief was of 
 Stoic origin. Obviously, like the modern more or 
 less pantheistic utterances of Shelley and Goethe and 
 Wordsworth (in his earlier phase), this philosophy 
 responds to a widespread demand of the human spirit 
 that it shall be able to see God in all things and 
 to feel its own kinship with the divine. Before St. 
 John’s days it had taken many different forms and 
 moved in many different directions. Thus a Jew of 
 Alexandria before our Lord’s time, in the Book of 
 
 1 The signs of trouble are apparent in 1 John i 18-26, iv 1-6, 
 v 6-10; 2 John 7-11. The precise nature of this hostile move¬ 
 ment I have sought to describe in Epistles of St. John, pp. 109 ff., 
 165 ff., 170 f., 191 ff. It denied St. John’s central faith, viz. that 
 in the man Jesus the highest and lowest had become one—that 
 the man Jesus was really and personally the Son of God come in 
 the flesh, and it denied this by separating the man Jesus from the 
 divine Christ, who was represented only as coming down upon the 
 man at His baptism out of the heavenly regions and leaving Him 
 before His passion. 
 
THE IDEA OF THE LOGOS 117 
 
 Wisdom, had assimilated this Hellenistic belief in a 
 divine energy and law and spirit, immanent in the 
 world, and had identified it with the Wisdom of God. 
 As we have already seen, 1 in this beautiful little book 
 Wisdom appears as something more than a mere 
 personification of a divine quality. It is a living 
 being, as well as a pervasive force throughout the 
 whole universe. It is a spirit expressive of the inner 
 being of God, and it is the revealer of God in nature 
 and to man through His saints and prophets. Here 
 we have an intermediate being presented to us inter¬ 
 mediate between the supreme and inaccessible God 
 and the material world. And it is a very active 
 power, which later on in the book, under the name of 
 the Word of God, is described as leaping down from 
 the divine throne to work His miracles of judgment 
 upon Egypt, 44 a stern warrior into the midst ot the 
 
 doomed land.” 2 
 
 Later Philo, the Jew of Alexandria, elaborated this 
 conception of an intermediate being, whether we are 
 to call it person or no, who as the divine Logos is 
 not only the immanent reason and law ol the world, 
 but also the active instrument of God and the re¬ 
 vealer of His mysterious being. This idea of an 
 intermediate being between the high and inaccessible 
 God and the material world became exceedingly popular 
 in all sorts of forms. But outside the influence of 
 the Jewish religion it is almost always associated 
 with the notion of matter as essentially evil, so that 
 the supreme God could not be conceived of as eithei 
 responsible for creating it, or enduring to come in 
 immediate contact with it. Nor was the human 
 imagination generally content with one divine or 
 semi-divine intermediate being. The world teemed 
 with beliefs in mysterious 44 powers ” or "Gods,” 
 who in various ways represented a divine activity 
 for man’s enlightenment and salvation. These powers 
 i Above, p. 92. ? Wisd. xviii 15. 
 
 9 
 
118 
 
 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 were identified with the Gods of old popular beliefs 
 
 _for example with the old nature spirits who died 
 
 in the decay of autumn and lived again in the rebirth 
 of spring. These now reappear as Saviour Gods, 
 who will redeem men from the endless flux and 
 misery of material life and bring them by a new birth, 
 symbolically represented, into the security of the 
 heavenly life beyond death. All these kinds of 
 beliefs—whether in the Logos as immanent mind or 
 spirit of the universe, or in the Logos as an inter¬ 
 mediate being between the supreme God and the 
 material world, or in divine persons, vaguely con¬ 
 ceived, through whom, by mysteries of initiation 
 and sacramental participation, men can be saved 
 from the miseries and fluctuations of material life arid 
 brought into the upper world of light and eternity 
 —were already at work in the Hellenistic world, 
 that is the world of mixed Oriental and Greek culture, 
 when Christianity came into it. Obviously, this 
 class of beliefs provided a condition in the souls of 
 men, or a spiritual atmosphere, favourable to the 
 spread of any religion of redemption or salvation, 
 like the Christian religion. Obviously also, with 
 its innumerable intermediate beings, or its one 
 Logos neither really God nor really man, and with 
 its almost universal belief in matter as so evil a 
 thing that the high God could not directly touch it 
 or be responsible for it, this whole class of beliefs 
 was calculated, in its many movements, to pervert 
 fundamentally the Christian tradition. 
 
 This St. John sees very vividly. Thus in the Pro¬ 
 logue to his Gospel he accepts the term Logos, which 
 has both its Hellenistic meanings such as we have 
 been describing, and also its properly Jewish meaning, 
 which we are very familiar with in the Old Testa- 
 men t__“the word of God” by which He created 
 the world and proceeds forth to govern His people 
 through His prophets, and to chastise the rebellious 
 
THE PROLOGUE PARAPHRASED 119 
 
 with His judgments. He seems to say to the Jewish 
 world—“ All that you have believed about God as 
 proceeding forth by His word to create and govern 
 nature, and to reveal Himself to man by His prophets, 
 belongs to Jesus, and in Him is consummated.’' 
 And to the Hellenistic world—“ All that you have 
 imagined of a divine activity in the world and a 
 divine spirit, all that you have dreamed of a divine 
 mediator or mediators between the highest and 
 the lowest, and of mysteries of salvation, here have 
 their justification and fulfilment, and also their 
 correction.” 
 
 Now I will attempt to paraphrase the prologue so as 
 to bring out its general meaning, 1 2 referring from time 
 to time to sayings in the Gospel which illustrate it. 
 
 At the beginning, before the world was, you must 
 think of God as having already with Him His Word , 
 the expression of Himself, God with God ; and the 
 whole world of created things without exception was 
 brought into being through this W ord. Nor must 
 you think of the Word as a mere quality of God, but 
 as a person with God, in whom is life in its fulness. 
 [As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath Pie 
 given to the Son to have life in Himself.] Thus as 
 all the life in creation is from Him, so specially is 
 the life of men. To them as rational beings life 
 is given in their reason and conscience as light— 
 that is as illumination and guidance, as a , “ way ” to 
 be chosen and followed. So the light is given to 
 all men. But men have loved darkness rather than 
 light. They have followed their own desires and 
 fancies instead of the divine leading, that is v hat 
 we see in the world at large. The light is shining in 
 the darkness and the darkness has not admitted it. 
 So it was when John the Baptist came, who was 
 
 1 Where the reading is disputed, or the punctuation, I simply 
 take what seems to me the better reading or stopping. 
 
 2 Or “ nevertheless the darkness has never overwhelmed the light. 
 
120 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 not indeed the Light, but was a witness to the Light, 
 calling men to faith in Another. And all the time 
 that Other, the Word who is the True Light, lighten¬ 
 ing every man who comes into the world, was coming, 
 and at last He came. The world to which He came 
 was His own, as He was the creator of it, but it 
 would not recognize Him. He came thither as to 
 His own possession, but men—His own'—refused to 
 receive Him. That is, most men refused, but there 
 were some who welcomed Him, and they received 
 from Him the title to sonship of God, as all men 
 receive it who believe on Him as He has disclosed 
 Himself. This sonship is given by a new birth, not by 
 the methods of natural birth. It proceeds not from 
 mixture of human seeds, nor from carnal desire, 
 nor from the will of a man, but purely from the will 
 of God. 1 And all this coming of God into the world 
 to enlighten and to regenerate those who would receive 
 Him reached its fulfilment thus—the Word became 
 flesh. Our creator and illuminator took our nature 
 and tabernacled among us, as the glory of God taber¬ 
 nacled among the people of Israel 2 ; and we His 
 
 1 As will be seen, the phrases used, “not from bloods (i.e. the 
 mingling of human seeds) nor carnal desire, nor the will of a man 
 (a husband),” describe exactly the negative conditions of the 
 human birth of Jesus of a virgin mother. Many of the early Fathers 
 in fact had the singular, not the plural, in their text of St. John. 
 They read it “ who vxis born.” Some modem scholars, including 
 Dr. Inge and Dr. Burney, accept this as the original reading. I do 
 not think this is probable. But I think it is certain (with Dr. 
 Chase, Zahn and others) that the passage describes our new birth 
 to divine sonship after the pattern picture of His birth who alone 
 is in the fullest sense Son of Ctod : so that the reader is reminded 
 of a begetting and birth which took place without carnal impulse 
 or the act of any man. 
 
 2 In this phrase—“ the Word was made flesh and tabernacled 
 among us, and we beheld His glory ”—St. John has brought 
 together three characteristic Jewish ideas, which the Aramaic 
 Targums lead us to believe were already in current use : Memra (the 
 Word of God, constantly used to express God in action), Shekinta 
 or (Hebrew) Shekinah (the tabernacle or abiding-place of God 
 among His people, as above the cherubim in the Hoty of Holies, 
 and on special occasions besides), and Yekara (the glory which 
 
121 
 
 ST. JOHN’S DOCTRINE JEWISH 
 
 witnesses who speak to you beheld His glory, be¬ 
 holding God in Him, as men see a father in his only 
 son, full of the divine favour and truth. Here was 
 one greater than John the Baptist and prior to 
 him, as he himself bore witness : here was one who 
 could do and give what Moses could not do or give. 
 For the vision of God has been always unattain¬ 
 able to men: but here God only-begotten, the 
 Son, whose place is in the bosom of the Father, 
 hath interpreted Him [as He said, “ He that hath 
 
 seen me hath seen the Father ’ 5 ]. 
 
 It is after this preface in which the writer plainly 
 announces the full and ultimate conclusion of beliefs 
 to which he has come,” 1 that he begins his story. 
 
 There is one point on which I ought to make my 
 meaning clear before leaving St. John. 
 
 It has been for long a matter of ceaseless discus¬ 
 sion whether St. John’s term the Logos is derived 
 from the Hebrew and Palestinian tradition or from 
 the Hellenistic world of thought, I cannot but believe 
 that in St. John’s own mind its origin and mean¬ 
 ing are fundamentally Palestinian and Jewish. I do 
 not deny that he chooses the term as one familiar 
 to the Hellenists. That I have already said. I do 
 not suppose he had ever read Philo or any Stoic 
 philosopher. But the idea and the word “ Logos ” 
 were in the atmosphere of the Asiatic churches and 
 St. John'—with great discernment as it appeared- 
 sees in it the best word to interpret to his generation 
 the idea of the Son of God and His relation to the 
 world both before and in the Incarnation. Neverthe¬ 
 less his own mind accepts and uses the tcim rathei 
 
 under the cloudy veil shows itself in flashes). See below, p. 128, 
 
 ° n i d See Dr^tL\s PP Holland, The Philosophy of Faith and the Fourth 
 Gosvel p 262. I was delighted to read in Dr. Armitage Robinson s 
 recent 'lecture on the Fourth Gospel, given inManclgster Cathedral 
 an enthusiastic appreciation of the value of Dr. Holland s 
 protation of the Fourth Gospel. 
 
122 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 in the Hebrew than in the Greek sense. Not exclu¬ 
 sively, but on the whole and first of all, the term in 
 Greek meant Reason : while in the Old Testament 
 the Word of God meant not reason at all, but the 
 utte 7 'ance of the will of God, or the expression of 
 His mind. So as applied by St. John to the Son 
 it means at bottom much what St. Paul meant by 
 calling Him God’s “ image,” and the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews by calling Him “ the expres¬ 
 sion of his substance.” 
 
 In the Targums, or Aramaic interpretations of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, “ the Word (Memra) of God ” is 
 constantly used where the Hebrew speaks simply of 
 God. 1 The “ Word of God ” is almost “ God in 
 action.” In this sense, as has been already men¬ 
 tioned, “ the Word of God ” occurs in the Book of 
 Wisdom, 2 and in a closely allied sense “ the Wisdom 
 of God.” Dr. Rendel Harris 3 has shown how 
 closely the phrases of St. John’s prologue are modelled 
 upon the description of the activity of the divine 
 Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs and, still more, 
 in the Book of Wisdom. St, John was probably 
 acquainted with the Targums, which were already 
 assuming fixed form, and with Proverbs and Wisdom. 
 So it was from Jewish sources that he derived the 
 term which he chose to express the scope and mean¬ 
 ing of the Incarnation. But we cannot doubt 
 that its familiar use in the Hellenic world, of which 
 he cannot have been ignorant, partly determined 
 his choice. In the generation after St. John it was 
 chiefly in its Hellenic sense that the phrase came 
 to be understood. But it was not so in St. John s 
 mind, nor did his Gospel grow on any Hellenic soil. 4 
 
 1 See the passages quoted by Burney, op. cit. p. 38. 
 
 2 Wisd. xviii 15, see above, p. 117. 
 
 3 See his Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, Camb., 1917. 
 
 * For the argument of Reitzenstein, who would trace the whole 
 intellectual and mystical substance of the Fourth Gospel to a Hellen¬ 
 istic (Graeco-Egyptian) source, see appended note at the end of 
 the chapter, p. 133. 
 
A DOPTION ISM 
 
 123 
 
 II 
 
 We have passed in review the Synoptic Gospels, 
 the Acts, the Epistles of St Paul and that to the 
 Hebrews and the Gospel ol St. John. In the 
 Epistles ’and in the Fourth Gospel we have found 
 a clearly expressed doctrine ol Jesus Christ as a 
 eternal and divine person the Son of Go d , the divine 
 agent in the creation and maintenance of ail that 
 exists who at the last was incarnate for man s 
 redemption in Jesus Christ. We have found the 
 mounds of this doctrine in the Synoptic Gospels. 
 Nothin o' else can explain the impression made by 
 
 Xt V« th, disoV« 
 
 about His divine sonship. In the first artotth 
 Acts however, before the appearance of St. Paul 
 upon the scene, we seem to finda situaUon m which 
 Tesus as the exalted and glorified Chnst, is mdeea 
 treated as divine and worshipped as divine, but 
 which no question of pre-existence or divine sonship 
 seems to be entertained. This situation is often 
 represented as if the first disciples regarded Chnst 
 as strictly only a human person who, as Christ, had 
 been exalted to divine honours on the throne of 
 God or deified. This is what is called the adop- 
 tionist ” theory of Christ’s divinity. It played its 
 art l a hcLy among Jewish Christians m the 
 second century under the name of Ebiomsm mid 
 it was the clearly defined doctrine of Paul of bamo 
 t tL third But it is quite misleading so to 
 
 ^ was 
 
 m Jerusalem. Hbiomsm, other 
 
 doctrine was a clearly held theoi). . , • 
 
 rtf y“o C «i SS£ 
 
 and of the Spirit whom He had given them. 1 he 
 
124 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 creed was, “ Jesus is Christ and Lord. He has 
 given us the Spirit.” But when, after a few years, 
 the converted Saul felt at once the pressing need of 
 a theory of Christ’s person, and found this need 
 satisfied in Christ’s own language about His sonship 
 to God, and so proclaimed the doctrine of the In¬ 
 carnation, his words excited no dismay or dispute. 
 Universally, as far as we know, the churches accepted 
 his position. This means that, though hitherto 
 they had not felt the pressure of the need for an 
 explanation of their worship of the glorified Christ, 
 yet, when once it was felt, they found it not in 
 adoptionism but in the theory of the Incarnation ; 
 and they found the warrant of this doctrine in Christ’s 
 own language. I cannot help thinking that in the 
 memory and mind of some at least of the apostolic 
 company this explanation must have been ferment¬ 
 ing under the surface of their public witness before 
 St. Paul appeared ; otherwise his teaching would 
 have excited more comment. The celebration of 
 the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, as well 
 as the memory of some, of His words, must, one 
 would think, inevitably have led to such thoughts. 
 What remains for us to do is to examine the rest of 
 the documents of the New Testament, those especially 
 which appear to be most independent of St. Paul, to 
 sec whether “ adoptionism ” is to be found in them, 
 and first of all the most non-Pauline of all the books, 
 the greatest expression of the spirit of Jewish apo¬ 
 calypse, the “ Revelation of John the Divine.” 
 
 (a) The Revelation. 
 
 There is no more thrilling book in the literature 
 of the world than the Apocalypse of John. It is 
 this quite independently of the question who John 
 the Seer is, whether the “ Son of Thunder,” the 
 apostle, or the supposed “ Presbyter John,” or 
 whether the visions belong to an earlier or later date 
 
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE APOCALYPSE 125 
 
 in the first century-—problems which we need not dis¬ 
 cuss. 1 And it is also the most Judaic book in the New 
 Testament, beyond all question. The God who there 
 confronts us in all His majesty and all His tremendous 
 activity of judgment, is the God of the Old Testament 
 in His most fearful aspects. There are touches of 
 tenderness, but they are rare. If this book is really 
 written by the author of the Fourth Gospel and 
 the First Epistle of John, then we must suppose 
 that the acute crisis of persecution forced the Apostle 
 to concentrate his mind for the time on that part 
 of the truth about God which the Son of Thunder 
 had never forgotten, but which had been pressed 
 into the background by the fresher revelation of 
 divine, self-sacrificing love. Now the tremendous 
 God of Justice-—God the almighty and God the 
 avenger-—occupies the whole stage. But with one 
 startling difference. The One God of this uncom¬ 
 promising Jewish monotheism has a partner on His 
 throne. It is now 44 the throne of God and of the 
 Lamb,” and the adoration of the whole world is 
 directed towards His partner as to Him. There 
 can be no question that Jesus, 44 the Lamb as it had 
 been slain,” is on the throne of God and treated as 
 God. And there can be no doubt that this exalta¬ 
 tion of the Lamb to divine functions and honours 
 is explained on the principle of merit. It is the 
 reward of His supreme self-sacrifice." All this 
 suggests the 44 Adoptionist ” Christology sometimes 
 ascribed to the Apocalypse. But we are pulled 
 up short at the idea of such an ascription. Is it 
 conceivable that in a book so intensely Jewish 
 another should be equalled to God ? Lias God, the 
 God of Israel, forgotten His ancient 44 jealousy ” ? 
 
 1 Of course Burney’s theory of the Aramaic original of the Gospel 
 enables him easily to assign Gospel and Apocalypse to the same 
 person—the presbyter John—for the Greek of the Gospel is not 
 his Greek, but a translation. 
 
 2 See Rev. v. 
 
3 26 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 There is, we notice, twice in the book, when John 
 would “ worship 55 an angelic messenger, a stern 
 repudiation on his part of the homage which only 
 God must receive. 1 Well then, we are bound to be, 
 as I say, pulled up short at the proposed intrusion 
 into the heart of Judaism of an idea so alien to it. 
 We look again at the language of the Apocalypse. 
 Certainly there is no theory of Christ’s person there. 
 But there are two points which are enlightening. 
 
 (1) That the great phrase (in part taken from 
 Isaiah), which is here heard from the lips of God 
 to signify His activity from the beginning of time 
 to the end of it—the Alpha and the Omega, the 
 first and the last is also heard from the lips of 
 Christ. 2 This means unmistakably that the associa¬ 
 tion of Christ in the activity of God had no beginning 
 in time. No doubt it was only in time that He was 
 glorified as God in His manhood. But what rendered 
 that possible was His co-existence and co-ordination 
 with God from the beginning. 
 
 (2) Such also is the lesson of the figure whose 
 name is called the Word of God. 3 This surely is 
 an intensely Jewish phrase. “ The Word ” here is 
 not, I think, used as in the prologue to the Gospel. 
 But it indicates something intensely active and 
 energetic. It reminds us of the startling simile 
 in the Book of Wisdom, already referred to more 
 than once, where the Word of God is figured as a 
 warrior leaping off His divine throne to rush in a 
 moment to execute divine justice. It is the activity 
 of God personified, as He has shown Himself in the 
 government of the world. But we cannot question 
 that the figure on the horse in the Apocalypse is 
 Christ, 4 and this also means that the seer of the 
 Apocalypse identified Jesus the Christ with the 
 
 1 xix 10, xxii 9, and contrast i 17. 
 
 2 Sec i 8, xxi 6, on the lips of God ; cf. Is. xli 4, xliii 10, xliv 6. 
 On the lips of Christ, i 17, ii 8, xxii 13. 
 
 3 xix 11-16. 4 See Swete’s and Charles’ notes on the passage. 
 
THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 127 
 
 divine warrior of the Old Testament, that is with 
 God the world ruler. Decisively then, we mus 
 say that the theology of the Apocalypse is not 
 adoptionist. The person who is Jesus existe 
 from the beginning with God and in God. 
 
 (b) The Epistle of James 
 
 When we pass to the Epistle of James we pass 
 to another deeply Judaic document. And it is, as 
 concerns both its origin and its date, a rather mysteri¬ 
 ous document, though, on the whole, I think we may 
 still assign it to “ the Lord s brother, and date it 
 accordingly before he was exeeutft (as Josephus tel s 
 us) in Jerusalem, under Annas the Younger, t e 
 Tewish High Priest, in a.d. 62. As to its spiritual 
 and moral value, it speaks for itself as plainly as 
 anv document of the New Testament. It is full ot 
 the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, and no less 
 clearly of the spirit of the ancient prophets and the 
 Wisdom literature. Theologically there is very little 
 in it that is specifically Christian as distinc ro 
 what is Jewish. It is severely monotheist. There 
 is also plainly no trace of St. Paul’s influence, and 
 the writer appears to combat, not St. Paul’s doctrine 
 of justification, as written in his Epistles, but some 
 perverted version of it. 2 His mam interest. is, I 
 think rightly interpreted by Hort. It is m th 
 ideal for man disclosed by the word of God at Ins 
 creation, to which his conscience '^^ wflness an 
 which it is God’s present purpose that he should 
 recover. “ Grace,” St. Janies would say, is not 
 contrary to nature, but the restoration of nature. 
 
 As to the person of Christ, with which alone we 
 are here concerned, there are three indications ot 
 St. James’s mind. (1) In his initial greeting to Ins 
 
 Fundamentally St. James’ doctrine of justification is easily 
 harmonized with St. Poul s. 
 
128 
 
 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 Jewish readers he couples the Lord Jesus Christ 
 with God as He whose servant or slave he is; and the 
 more we think of this familiar phrase the more fully 
 it seems to involve the deity of Jesus, when it is 
 used by a faithful Jew ; for it means that he can 
 surrender himself as wholly to Jesus as to God, and 
 that, in fact, the one surrender involves the other. 
 (2) At the end of the Epistle he speaks in one group 
 of connected sentences of the 44 coming ( parousia ) of 
 the Lord ” (twice), of “ the name of the Lord ” in 
 which the prophets spoke ; and of 44 the end of the 
 Lord,” that is, His final dealings with Job. 1 Now 
 the first phrase must refer to the Lord Jesus 2 and 
 the second and third to the Lord Jehovah. But 
 no one could use the same name thrice in such inti¬ 
 mate connection without practical identification of 
 the Lordship referred to in each case. (3) There is 
 a very interesting phrase which may be paraphrased 
 thus 3 : 44 My brethren, can you, while you keep 
 
 showing respect of persons, really hold the faith of 
 (or 4 in ’) our Lord Jesus Christ, the Glory ? ” Let 
 us examine the phrase. 
 
 The Jews spoke much of the glory of Jehovah. 
 And in the latter days of Israel’s religion, when the 
 dread prevailed of speaking of Jehovah at all, or of 
 connecting Him closely with earthly things, they 
 oCtei#~in the Aramaic, which had taken the place of 
 the old Hebrew—spoke of His Word [Memra], or 
 His Glory [Yekara], or His abiding [Shekintah or 
 Shekinah], for reverence sake, instead of speaking 
 of Himself. So we find it in the Aramaic interpre¬ 
 tations of the Hebrew Scripture, which are called 
 Targums, and which were no doubt, if still unwritten, 
 yet in familiar use in our Lord’s da}^. 44 The term 
 
 [Shekinah],” says Dr. Box, 4 44 together with 4 the 
 
 1 v 7-11. 2 So directly after (v 14) must “ the name of the Lord.” 
 
 3 ii 1, following Hort. 
 
 Hastings’ Diet, of Christ and the Gospels, s.v. Shekinah. 
 
129 
 
 THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 
 
 Glory ’ and 4 the Word,’ is used in the Targums as 
 an indirect expression in place of God. It denotes 
 God’s visible presence and glorious manifestation, 
 which dwells among men, the localized presence of 
 the Deity. . . . The visible Shekinah, though distinct 
 from the glory, is associated in the closest way with 
 it. It was conceived of as the centre or source 
 from which the glory radiated.” We understand the 
 idea, if we think of the words 44 the glory of the Lord 
 appeared in the cloud ” or—the constantly repeated 
 phrase— 44 the Lord of Hosts which dwelleth between 
 (or 4 sitteth upon ’) the cherubim,” or 44 the glory 
 of the Lord filled the house ” (Solomon’s temple), or 
 the phrase of the son of Sirach concerning Ezekiel’s 
 vision : 44 the vision of glory, which God showed 
 
 him upon the chariot of the cherubim.” 1 This 
 thought often explains uses of 44 glory ” in the New 
 Testament, as when 44 the glory” is reckoned by 
 St. Paul among the privileges of Israel, 2 or Stephen 
 speaks of 44 the God of the glory,” 3 or the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews of 44 the cherubim of glory.” It 
 refers to the manifested or localized presence of God. 
 Thus either 44 the Shekinah ” or 44 the Glory ” would 
 be for a Christian Jew a natural expression for our 
 Lord, conceived of as the visible manifestation of 
 God among men. Thus when St. John says llie 
 Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us, 
 and we beheld his glory ,” he seems, as has already 
 been suggested, to be using all three current Jewish 
 expressions (Memra, Shekinah, Yekaia) for the 
 Incarnate. And when St. Peter speaks of the 
 spirit of the Glory and the spirit of God,” lie seems to 
 be usingj 44 the Glory ” as a name of Christ. 4 And 
 
 1 Exod. xvi 10, xxv 22, Numb, vii 89, 1 Sam. iv 4, 2 Sam. vi 2, 
 
 1 Kings viii 11, Ecclus. xlix 8. 
 
 = Rom. ix 4. 8 Acts vn 2. 
 
 r < i pet iv 14 ; cf. 1 Cor. ii 8. Hort and Parry are possibly 
 right in rendering Tit. ii 13 “ The manifestation of the Clory of 
 our great Cod and Saviour, that is Jesus Christ. 
 
130 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 I think Dr. Hort must be right in so interpreting 
 it here in St. James. He calls the Lord Jesus Christ 
 the Glory, i.e. the visible manifestation of God 
 among men; and he would shame those whom 
 he is addressing out of showing undue respect for 
 wealthy persons by reminding them that 44 the Glory ” 
 dwelt among men in the guise of a poor man. On 
 the whole, then, though James is almost wholly 
 ethical in his interests and not theological, I think 
 he indicates that, had he been bound to express 
 himself, it would have been in the phraseology of 
 St. Paul or St. John. The presence of his Epistle in 
 the New Testament may be said to justify a Christi¬ 
 anity that is almost purely ethical in its interests, 
 but not an adoptionist Christology. 
 
 The Epistle of Jude, 44 the brother of James,” is 
 again deeply Jewish, though the Judaism is of a 
 more apocalyptic type, and it is also predominantly 
 ethical. 44 The faith once for all delivered to the 
 saints ” for which he pleaded must have been a 
 faith which laid its stress on morals. But he seems 
 to show much more affinity than James with St. 
 Paul’s language. 44 But ye beloved, building up 
 yourselves in your most holy faith, praying in the 
 Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, 
 looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 unto eternal life” is very Pauline phraseology. 
 And “our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ,” is 
 hardly compatible with any lower Christology than 
 
 his. 
 
 (c) The First Epistle of Peter 
 
 This Epistle must be taken on strong external 
 evidence as authentic, and on the internal evidence 
 as written by Peter from Rome, which he calls 
 Babylon, no doubt very shortly before his martyrdom. 
 It is a beautiful and gracious document, a real 
 treasure-house of ethical and spiritual teaching, 
 
131 
 
 THE EPISTLE OF PETER 
 
 very strongly reminiscent of the Gospels and \ erv 
 closely akin to St. Paul’s ethical teaching. In fact 
 the Epistle bears such unmistakable suggestions ol 
 the influence of the Epistles to the Romans and the 
 Ephesians, that we do not expect to find in it any 
 different theology. St. Peter is plainly at one with 
 
 St. Paul. 
 
 The Epistle is written to men and women— 
 obviously Gentiles in the main who ha^ c been 
 redeemed by God’s infinite mercy out of a corrupt 
 world and a most evil tradition into the brother-- 
 hood ”__the elect body, the only true Israel, royal 
 and sacerdotal. This brotherhood is now exposed 
 to obloquy and persecution and is to expect the 
 hand of judgment more and more severely ; but it 
 is to bear it joyfully and charitably, looking forward 
 to the radiant glory in store for them, when the risen 
 and ascended Lord Jesus Christ is revealed. He is 
 now at the right hand of God, above all angels and 
 spiritual powers, unseen but the object of theii 
 exultant faith. But He is to come. He is at hand 
 to accomplish the judgment of God and the glmy 
 of His people. Thus the main stress, as in St. 
 Peter’s preaching in the Acts, is on the Lordship ol 
 Jesus at the right hand of God and on His coming. 
 
 This passionate faith in Him and expectation of His 
 coming is the basis of an intensely other-worldly out¬ 
 look, but it is the basis none the less of a conception 
 of a social life to be lived in this world which is to 
 compel the attention of those who are without the 
 elect body. Besides the emphasis laid on the Coming 
 in Glory there is strong emphasis on the present 
 redemption from the evil world and atonement \\ ith 
 God which has been wrought by Christ through 
 His vicarious sacrifice and blood-shedding. 1 We 
 notice the phrase “ through Christ,” which implies 
 His mediatorship, 2 and the phrase in Chiist, 
 
 1 i 18-21, ii 21 ff.,iii 10. * ii 0, iv II. 8 ut 10, v 10, 14, 
 
132 
 
 ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 which here, as in St. Paul, implies His universal 
 spiritual presence. Again the Lordship of Jesus has 
 phrases applied to it from the Old Testament (“ The 
 Lord is gracious,” 44 sanctify Christ as Lord in your 
 hearts ”) which were written of Jehovah, the Lord 
 of hosts. 1 Once more it is probable that in the 
 phrase 44 the spirit of the glory and the spirit of 
 God ” (iv 14) Christ is described as 44 the Glory,” 
 that is the manifested presence of God—the phrase 
 which we have just considered in connection with 
 St. James. 
 
 When the question is asked whether Peter indicates 
 the pre-existence of Christ, I think the answer is 
 that he seems to indicate it, when he calls the spirit 
 in the old prophets 44 the Spirit of Christ,” and also 
 when he is talking about the death of Christ and 
 the condition and activity of His disembodied spirit. 
 St. Peter speaks very clearly of the (human) spirit 
 of Jesus as separated from the body in death, and 
 of its activity in the unseen world ; and he seems to 
 speak of Christ—the person—as something distinct 
 from the human spirit in which He was acting. 
 He went among the dead, wdthout His human body, 
 in respect of which He w T as dead, but in His human 
 spirit, wdiieh w r as quickened to a new life. 2 
 
 On the whole I think this Epistle indicates a 
 mind predominantly ethical and practical and not 
 theological. But also a mind which w r as at one with 
 the theology of St. Paul in its main lines. 
 
 The conclusion which we are bound to reach is 
 that in St. Paul’s Epistles and in the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews and in St. John we get a definite and cx- 
 
 1 iii 15^(see la. viii 12-13) and ii 3 (see Ps. xxxiv 8). 
 
 2 iii 18-19. This is a point made by Dr. Chase (see Hastings’ 
 Diet, of the Bible, iii 793). But I cannot agree with him that i 11 
 does not seem to imply a pre-existent Christ. 
 
SUMMARY OF NEW TESTAMENT 133 
 
 plicit theology of the Person of Christ as the divine 
 Son incarnate. The different writers have each 
 of them his own point of view, but on the whole 
 their theology is identical. There are other docu¬ 
 ments of the New Testament which, taken by them¬ 
 selves, give us no clear theology of Christ’s person, 
 but there is nothing in the New Testament which 
 indicates a rival theology to St. Paul’s, or what was 
 later called an adoptionist Christology. Such a 
 Christology did appear in the second century in 
 the Jewish Eb ionites and later in Paul of Samos at a. 
 But it must be held to represent a falling away from 
 the standpoint which is either energetically main¬ 
 tained or implied in all the documents of the New 
 Testament. We cannot read the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews—which represents to us among a group 
 of Jewish Christians a “longing, lingering look 
 behind,” and a movement back to the old Judaism 
 —without feeling that a half-instructed Jewish 
 Christianity must have existed fairly commonly, 
 and most probably would have existed in Palestine, 
 which would be very liable to relapse. Accordingly, 
 it is no surprise to find that a generation later than 
 the New Testament times such a relapse has occurred, 
 and that, outside the main streams of Christian life, 
 there are Christians who hold Christ for a mere man, 
 assumed by God. But we do not find that position 
 in the New Testament. 
 
 Note to p. 122 
 
 Our studious friends, whose intellectual home is with 
 the German critics, have lately been murmuring in our 
 ears the name of the Strassburg scholar and philologist, 
 Richard Reitzenstein, as of one whose theories supply 
 a new and powerful explanation of the real origin of 
 Christian ideas and especially of “ Johannine ” ideas. 
 Reitzenstein 1 does in effect suggest that the source of the 
 1 Richard Reitzenstein’s Poimandres (Loipzig, 1904). 
 
 10 
 
rn ST. JOHN AND THE REST 
 
 characteristic Johannine ideas and of much else in the 
 New Testament is to be found in the earliest documents 
 of the Hermetic literature, which he dates from the 
 first century of our era. The Hermetic literature he 
 regards as representing a religious community which 
 had its source in the identification of Hermes with the 
 Logos as the revealer of divine wisdom, and with the 
 Egyptian god Thot, venerated as the founder of Egyptian 
 wisdom. Hitherto the Hermetic books—the revelations 
 of Hermes Trismegistus—have been regarded as an ex¬ 
 ample of Graeco-Egyptian syncretism, with Jewish and 
 Christian elements- at work in it, belonging to the third 
 century, and presupposing the influence of Neo-Platonism; 
 and Reitzenstein appears to have failed in his attempt to 
 show cause to date any part of the literature in the first, 
 century. His grounds for assigning it this earlier date 
 have been subjected by the Roman Catholic scholar, 
 E. Krebs (Der Logos als Heiland , Freiburg im Breisgau, 
 1910) to a very searching and careful examination, and 
 he has shown them to be highly precarious and improb¬ 
 able (op. tit., pp. 133 ff.; cf. Ed. Meyer, Ur sprung, ii pp. 
 56-7). This is the opinion of most of the scholars who 
 have examined the matter. And the whole conception of 
 a wide-spreading Hermetic sect or community appears 
 to be groundless. On the other hand Krebs has again 
 excellently laid bare the purely Jewish roots of the 
 ideas of the Fourth Gospel. As I have already said, in 
 examining the attempt to find a Hellenistic origin for 
 the faith in Jesus as Lord, and for the institution of 
 the sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood, 1 I do not 
 think anything really lies at the root of the doctrine of 
 the New Testament except the tradition of the Old 
 Testament and the new experience which came to the 
 disciples of Jesus in His teaching and person, His life 
 and death and resurrection, and the mission of the Spirit. 
 All the New Testament grew from the Jewish root and 
 this experience of Jesus, including the Gospel of Paul 
 and the Gospel of John. 
 
 But when you come to the second stage, to the spread 
 of the Catholic Church, I think the new criticism which 
 calls our attention to Hellenistic syncretism, and sets the 
 
 1 See appended notes to cap. iii. 
 
the THEORY OF REITZENSTEIN 135 
 
 Gnostic movement on its wider background, has much to 
 teach us. With Christian origins Hellenism has very 
 little to do. But the atmosphere of the mystery religions 
 and of Hellenistic theosophy, with its yearning tor divine 
 fellowship and spiritual light and knowledge and salva¬ 
 tion and a new birth, and its love of sacramental sym¬ 
 bolism and fellowship, has a good deal to do with-the 
 diffusion of the Christian Church. It both provided its 
 opportunity and constituted in part its peril; and we 
 shall have to return upon the modern theor_v ot the 
 fluence of the Hellenistic theosophy and the mysterv 
 religions, when we are dealing with the theory of the 
 Church and the sacraments in the next volume. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 It is undeniable that the apocalyptic expectation 
 formed a large element in the faith of the first 
 Church, and that it was, on the lowest estimate, a 
 considerable feature in the teaching of Jesus. By 
 the apocalyptic expectation we mean the expecta¬ 
 tion that Jesus, the Christ, who had been crucified 
 and now was risen and exalted to heaven, was 44 to 
 come in glory ” to 44 restore all things 55 and 44 to 
 judge the quick and the dead . 551 The Church has 
 long been accustomed to call this 44 the second 
 coming ” : and it is so referred to once or twice in 
 the New Testament . 2 But almost always it is called 
 simply 44 the coming ” or 44 the presence ” of Christ . 3 
 This is the word common to St. Matthew, St. James, 
 St. Paul, and St. John. The birth, the ministry, 
 the passion, the resurrection, the effusion of the 
 Spirit—all these are indeed represented as mo¬ 
 ments or stages in His coming. But all these are 
 viewed as incomplete. Then and then only will 
 He in an adequate sense have come, when He comes 
 into His own, or God comes into His own in Him, 
 in fully manifested glory, so that 44 every eye shall 
 see him,” and every adverse power shall have been 
 put under His feet. This is the old fundamental 
 Jewish hope of the 44 day of the Lord.” And this 
 
 1 Acts iii 21, x 42, xvii 31. 2 Heb. ix 2S ; cf. i G. 
 
 3 7r apouaia. See Matt, xxiv 3, 27, 37, 39, James v 7-8, 1 These, 
 ii 19, iii 13, iv 15, etc., 1 John ii 28. 
 
 136 
 
THE JEWS’ SENSE OF DIVINE PURPOSE 1ST 
 
 had, as we have seen, a very real and undeniable 
 place in our Lord’s own mind and teaching. No 
 one therefore can think seriously about belief in 
 Christ without fully facing this belief in the future 
 coming of Christ in glory. But recently it has come 
 to be widely and confidently stated and believed 
 that Jesus Himself anticipated and proclaimed His 
 immediate coming as the glorified Christ, within 
 the lifetime of His own generation, and was in this 
 (as in some other respects) deluded, or the victim 
 of current ideas which were in fact illusions ; ami 
 there has been a great deal of discussion of the bearing 
 of these delusions of the mind of Christ upon the 
 theology of His person. But we had better, first 
 of all, see whether there is sufficient reason to attribute 
 delusions to Him ; and we can only effectively do 
 this if we have in view the Jewish expectation, 
 Messianic and Apocalyptic, as it was before our 
 Lord came, and take careful note of the way in which 
 He both accepted it and also fundamentally alteied 
 its character. Then only can we estimate the justice 
 with which delusion or mistake is atti lbuted to Hu 
 as regards “ the end ” and the immediacy of the 
 
 CI1 The Jews, as we have already seen, 2 were con¬ 
 spicuous among the nations of the earth for then 
 belief (i) in a divine purpose in the whole world, 
 which was to be progressively realized and fma v 
 consummated, and (ii) in their own race asThe divinely 
 chosen instrument of this universal purpose, as it 
 was said to Abraham, “ In thy seed shall all the 
 
 > This however is of course not a.merdjjde'a “hln 
 
 Lson with him for 
 
 S?aUaXh: U^rTeharaoler of the Old Testament boohs- 
 
 are dealt with below (pp. 1^* b.). 
 
 2 See above, pp. 13 ff. 
 
138 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 families of the earth be blessed.” This is the root 
 of the Messianic hope as the prophets of Israel 
 announced it; and it takes shape in the following 
 forms and features of the hope, which have been 
 already discussed and will here only be alluded to : 
 
 1. That the religion of Israel is finally to win 
 universal sovereignty and universal recognition. 
 
 The mountain of the Lord’s house shall be estab¬ 
 lished in the top of the mountains and all nations 
 shall flow unto it. . . . Out of Zion shall go forth 
 the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” 1 
 
 2. That Israel is the elect vehicle of this true 
 religion, and that the anointed king of the family of 
 David, who is to bear the divine name, and to fulfil 
 the predestined glory of Israel, is to be the instrument 
 of this divine supremacy, this Kingdom of God. 2 
 
 3. That this Kingdom to come is to be accom¬ 
 panied with, or be based upon, a new, more spiritual, 
 and everlasting covenant between God and His 
 restored people, 3 and the nations of the world recon¬ 
 ciled to Israel. 
 
 4. That also it is to be accompanied with an 
 elfusion of the Spirit of God, not only upon the 
 anointed king, but upon the whole people—upon 
 all flesh. 4 
 
 5. That also it must involve a resurrection from 
 the dead of faithful Israelites who have died, that 
 they too may participate in the Kingdom; and 
 this belief in the resurrection of faithful Israelites 
 becomes a belief in a resurrection generally of all, 
 good or evil alike, to glory or shame. 5 
 
 6. This sovereignty of God requires for its estab¬ 
 lishment the infliction of the judgment of God upon 
 
 1 See above, pp. 15 f. 2 g ee above, pp. 16-17. 
 
 3 See above, p. 18. 
 
 4 Is. xi init. and Joel ii 28-9. In Is. xlii and lxi the Spirit is 
 poured upon “ The Servant,” who begins by being the faithful 
 remnant of the people but seems to become an individual. 
 
 5 Is. xxvi 4, Dan. xii 2. 
 
139 
 
 THE DAY OF THE LORD 
 
 every insolent and godless power in turn. The 
 prophets are full of “oracles of Jehovan upon 
 Assyria, upon Egypt, upon Babylon upo Edom 
 unon Tvre upon “ the nations general!}. 
 prophets announce like judgments upon apostate 
 und rebellious Israel and Judah ; but on the nho , 
 “,h a " «k=<l difference. The .judgments «P» 
 the nations are final and irreversible The ]udg 
 ment on Israel is, on the other hand always figured 
 as a severe and just discipline, out of which at a t 
 a faithful remnant is to emerge to fulfil the des y 
 
 ° f 7 h Thes°e particular judgments or . d ° t ?™ S ^ 
 ticular nations are again and again t > ^ " 
 
 the background of tremendous cosmic c^tastropl 
 
 Thus the doom on Babylon (Is. xin 10-1.3) has this 
 background: “ The stars of heaven and the c 
 stellations thereof shall not give their f gh^ the 
 sun shall be darkened in his goin„ , -q 
 
 moon shall not cause her light to slime. . . • ' 
 
 Se tl,c heavens to ttemble and 
 
 shaken ont of he, pl.ee, • ' - >'■ » , 
 
 of hosts, and in the day of his fieice an o. 
 
 again the doom ^^rc host of hcavcl shall be 
 a'seinh and all their host shall fade away, as the 
 
 r ^1^-^^;^iS^unk 
 
 S fill in heaven -. behold it slndl-me down upon 
 Edom ... to judgment. k repea ts 
 
 two quotations because oui ' in His doom 
 
 the language ol these two p » 
 
 '^What'did Isaiah mean by snch \ 
 
 i Except in Jeremiah ; see above, P . 10 n. J. 
 
140 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 with the redemptive acts of God. “ Why hop ye so, 
 yc high hills ? The hills melted like wax at the 
 presence of the Lord.” “ The mountains and the 
 hi Is shall bleak forth before you into singing, and 
 all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” 
 This is a kind of metaphor which we find in poets 
 of many nations. It is akin to what Ruskin called 
 the pathetic fallacy.” It is interesting to learn 
 that mediaeval Jews in Spain commemorated thus 
 the death of a certain Rabbi Isaac Alfasi, on May 12, 
 1103 : This day was a calamity : it was a day of 
 
 misfortune and oppression, a day of darkness and 
 gloom, a day of cloud and mist, a day when the 
 heavens and their luminaries were obscured, when 
 they were clothed with sackcloth. The stars put 
 on mourning; the hills bowed; all Israel was 
 terrified.” And another epitaph on Rabbi Jona 
 from the next century runs: “ Son of Sion, before 
 this stone weep for the sun buried beneath the 
 dust of the earth ; the firmament was clothed with 
 daikness, the constellations were ashamed : the 
 moon blushed ; on the day when the glorv and 
 crown of the Law was buried.” 1 Here we have, 
 no doubt, nothing but conscious metaphor. All 
 that is really meant is that two Rabbis died deeply 
 iegretted, and that nature must have sympathized 
 with the sorrow of the Jews. 
 
 But though such expressions as Isaiah uses may be 
 conscious metaphors, they are not mere metaphors. 
 I hey mean at least that in the prophet’s vision the 
 physical world served the moral purpose of God, 
 and might at any moment be expected to express it! 
 And m the latter days of prophecy, when the triumph 
 ol Israel over the nations seemed more and more 
 impossible by natural means, apocalyptic seers 
 moie and more clearly anticipate cosmic catastrophe 
 
 p. f^ 50 Lagrang ^ Le Mess ^nisme chez les Juijs (Paris, 1909), 
 
THE LATER APOCALYPSES HI 
 
 wrought by God in His omnipotence to end the 
 present world order, and usher in u a new heaven 
 and a new earth.” 
 
 So we get the idea of an “ end of the world 
 followed by a “ world to come,” in the later literature. 
 But in all the books of the Old Testament, and indeed 
 in the New Testament, it appears to be always 
 in some sense this world which emerges, renovated 
 through cataclysm, as the sphere of the Kingdom 
 of God . 1 Only in some of the later uncanonica! 
 Apocalypses, which seem in this respect to exhibit 
 influences from Persia, this world seems to be wholly 
 obliterated at the last day or wholly left behind, 
 and an altogether “ other ” world takes its place. 
 “ The earth however purged and purified is no 
 fitting scene for an eternal kingdom. . . . God » 
 habitation and that of the blessed must be built 
 not of things earthly and corruptible, but of things 
 heavenly and incorruptible.” 2 But enough lias 
 
 1 This will be obvious to anyone who will read Is. xxiv seemingly 
 a late prophecy incorporated in Isaiah where, after the earth is 
 utterly brokeni the earth is clean dissolved,” etc., it still appears 
 that Mount Zion and Jerusalem stand as the centre of the divine 
 kingdom. So it is again in Joel ii after the cataclysm of verses 
 30 31 (see verse 32 and iii 1 and 16-21). So in Darnel vn 1* 
 the sovereignty of the “ one like unto a son of man who came 
 with the clouds of heaven ” and was given universal dominion by 
 t n e “ Ancient of Days ’’—which is interpreted immediately as the 
 rtto of the saints of the Most High, that fact fa.thful Israel¬ 
 is still, like the previous sovereignties of the great beasts, t 
 is the godless powers which it supplants, a sovereignty on this 
 
 ° a And ^th^rnatter is frankly considered we must admit that the 
 expectation of the New Testament is still that of a r^urn of €h » 
 to earth, a heavenly kingdom to come on earth—though it be a 
 new heaven and a new earth—a new Jerusalem which is to come 
 cCn from heaven as God’s 
 
 e e Acts iii 20-21 ; 1 Thess. iv 16 ; Rom. vm 20-22). In - 1 etei 
 Sf the day of judgment by fire is conceived of on the analogy o 
 the earlier judgment by water : both judgments are represented 
 as destroying an old world and bringing a new one into existence 
 which is still only the old one purged and renewed. So also in t io 
 
 lv ° 2 ' Charles, Between the Old and New Testaments, pp. 56-/. 
 
142 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 been said about this already. Where this is so, 
 the Messianic Kingdom, in the old Jewish sense, 
 becomes very difficult to adjust to this “ other world.” 
 It is either ignored altogether or becomes a rather 
 meaningless temporary prelude to the Last Day. 
 
 The influence of these later Apocalypses has of 
 recent years been much exaggerated. We have 
 already had occasion to argue that all the literature 
 of the New Testament tends to show that in 
 our Lord’s day the hope of the Messiah and His 
 Kingdom was on the lines of the old prophetic hope 
 of the King of David’s line, who should restore the 
 kingdom to Israel, whether this hope was more 
 spiritually conceived, as it is represented in the open¬ 
 ing chapters of St. Luke’s Gospel, or was entertained 
 on nationalist and militarist lines as by the mass 
 of the people. When John the Baptist preached 
 the Kingdom and the Christ as at hand, he sought 
 to spiritualize the people’s conception of what was 
 coming, as being something so holy and awful as 
 that only a new Israel, changed and purified in 
 heart, could meet it; but this was only to renew 
 the warnings of the old prophets. There is nothing 
 in John the Baptist’s teaching to suggest the later 
 Apocalypses. 1 
 
 What we have now to discover is the sense in 
 which Christ both accepted and also transformed 
 the old Messianic teaching. 
 
 To go back, then, to the headings under which 
 we summarized the Jewish hope, and to deal very 
 briefly with the earlier ones, (1) it must be granted 
 that our Lord, while accepting the limitation of 
 His own mission on earth to His own people, pro¬ 
 claimed a Gospel of the Kingdom which, having its 
 roots in the Jewish religion (for “ salvation is 
 of the Jews ” 2 ), is now to become world-wide. 
 
 1 Matt, iii 10-12 suggests no more than Mai. iii 2, 3, iv 1. 
 
 2 John iv. 22. But the idea underlies all the Gospels. 
 
HIS MESSIANIC. CLAIM 
 
 143 
 
 The sayings “ The gospel must first be preached 
 unto all nations,” “ Wherever the g 0S P el );i ^» 
 be preached throughout the whole world, th 
 authenticity of which cannot reasonably be doubted, 
 are enough to show this. And at the beginning 
 of His mission, in the account of the Temptations, 
 it is evident that the last temptation would have 
 no meaning except as addressed to one who in some 
 sense was contemplating world-wide dominion. 
 
 (21 It does not seem to have been disputed that 
 our Lord could rightly claim to be of the family o 
 David, as being the reputed son of Joseph, and He 
 certainly acknowledged Himself to be the Chns^ , 
 but it is plain that, m taking the title ol the bon 
 of Man ” and identifying it with the Suffering bervan 
 of Jehovah, and criticizing for its inadequacy the 
 current notion of the Christ as the son of David, He 
 was turning His back in the most marked way on 
 the Messianic hope, both as it was held in nations . 
 circles and as held among the Pharisees He accepted, 
 but He transformed in meaning, the Messiahs 
 kingdom, so as to make it, m the most disconcerting 
 
 sense a kingdom not of this world. . 
 
 (3) He solemnly, at the Last Supper at leas, 
 proclaimed the New Covenant as established 
 
 hi As He declared Himself anointed and possessed 
 bv the Spirit, 4 so He led his disciples to expect I is 
 3uS>„ «%< «»»• »« son., ddinile — * 
 His departure, and the coming of theSp 
 Day of Pentecost was at once identified as 
 sense the coming of the Day ol the Lord. 
 
 , ... ir . • o a Matt iv 8. 3 Soe above, p. 101. 
 
 ! o Iar i T‘ v’l X1 18 21 There is very little teaching about the 
 Hh 8 Sp~ib’ed U,“o«r Lord in 
 
 “•ffi 4 of he first discipies, that, teaching 
 
 like^that of John xiv to xvi must have been given by 1 a . 
 
 6 Acts ii 17-18. 
 
144 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 (5) Our Lord is represented in all the Gospels as 
 constantly foretelling not His death only but also 
 His resurrection : and the resurrection of the dead 
 was, as we have seen, to be one of the signs that the 
 Kingdom was come. 1 
 
 Here then let us pause a moment. If it be agreed, 
 as I think it should be, that our Lord, while He 
 accepted the Messianic expectation, profoundly 
 spiritualized it, declaring the “ Kingdom of God ” 
 to be a kingdom of righteous men, such as must 
 have its roots in the wills and hearts of men, and needs 
 to be spiritually discerned, and is in actual process 
 of establishment 2 ; and if further He took three 
 recognized notes of the Kingdom, the New Covenant 
 of God with His people, and the Resurrection of the 
 Dead, and the effusion of the Spirit, and led His 
 disciples to expect the realization of these notes 
 in the immediate future—that is in His own death 
 and the immediately following events—if this be 
 so, then there was certainly a sense in which He 
 viewed the Kingdom as coming immediately. Thus 
 when we find Him saying “ Verily I say unto you, 
 There be some here of them that stand bv, which 
 shall in no wise taste of death till they see the King¬ 
 dom of God come with power,” 3 and again, before 
 His Jewish judges, “ Henceforth (not 4 hereafter ’ as 
 in our old Bible, but 4 henceforth ') ye shall see the 
 
 1 St. Paul, in Rom. i 4, speaks of Christ’s resurrection as “ the 
 resurrection of dead men ”—i.e. it was the firstfruits and assurance 
 of the general resurrection. There are several indications in the 
 N.T. of this point of view. 
 
 2 See Mark vii 15 ff., Luke xvii 20, 21, John iii 3. 
 
 3 Mark ix 1, Luke ix 27, where the words “come with power ” 
 
 are omitted. In Matt, xvi 28 it stands “ till they see the Son of 
 Man coming in his kingdom.” There was a tendency in St. Matthew 
 to put all these prophecies in the form most suggestive of a visible 
 coming of the glorified Christ. But where the reports differ in 
 detail, one thing is quite certain—we cannot be sure of the very 
 words of Christ on the particular occasion. 
 
145 
 
 THE KINGDOM TO COME 
 
 Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and 
 coining on the clouds of heaven 1 2 3 (as in the v ision 
 of Daniel), we shall be disposed to find the fulfilment 
 of these prophecies in the early chapters of the Acta. 
 There we are given a picture of the little community 
 of disciples absorbed in the sense of their Lord as 
 already exalted by God’s right hand and to God s 
 right hand, and as acting upon them and through 
 them with power from heaven, though there was a 
 further coming to be expected. And so impressed 
 were 44 the brethren ” with the divine power working 
 through the apostles that they regarded them, 
 even in their own community, as a class apart. 
 44 Of the rest durst no man join himself to them : 
 howbeit the (Jewish) people magnified them. 
 The disciples would have felt that they already saw 
 the Twelve, according to Christ’s promise, “ sitting 
 on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 
 
 i Here Mark gives only “ Ye shall see (xiv 62). Bui both 
 Matt, xxvi 64 and Luke xxii 69 give us the “ henceforth («* aprt 
 or fab toO vvv). In St. Luke the words are From henceforth 
 shall the Son of man be seated at the right hand of the powei 
 of God ” But whatever the exact words, our Lord is recalling 
 the vision in Daniel vii of one “like unto a Son of man coming 
 
 with the clouds of heaven.” _ 
 
 1 do not think there is any need to suppose our Lord in these 
 
 nlaces to be citing the Book of Enoch. Daniel vn 13 satisfies all 
 [he requirements oi the quotations. There is an excellent paper of 
 the late Dr. Moorhouse, Bishop of Manchester, entitled Did Our hold 
 Jesus Christ share the Popular Opinions of the Jews on Eschatology 
 (which he circulated but, as far as 1 know, did not publish), m 
 which he answers his question in the negative, or in the.sense. that 
 He “transmuted” the popular Apocalyptic. He s,}., . . 
 
 think, in the main, truly : “ There is good reason to believe that 
 our Lord invariably took his apocalyptic imagery, not from the 
 later apocryphal writings, but from the books of the canonical 
 prophecies.” But I have argued above that our Lonl s language 
 assumes that the figure in Daniel had been tdready .pcogm^d « 
 an individual person such as can be identified with the Messiah, 
 and this identification probably came from Lnocfi. 
 
 2 Acts v 12. See Rackham in loc. 
 
 3 See Luke xxii 30. 
 
146 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 Already the community of believers in Jesus as the 
 Christ was the real Israel, and the Apostles were its 
 princes, and Christ was not only reigning in glory 
 in heaven but was so manifested on earth in judg¬ 
 ments and wonderful works. 
 
 (6) But we have still to consider the two last 
 headings (6 and 7) of the Messianic expectations, and 
 first that of judgment on the hostile, godless powers. 
 Our Lord, then, certainly, like the old prophets, pro¬ 
 nounces a doom on a hostile power, but in this case 
 the hostile power is the chosen people itself, who in 
 their rejection of the Christ have shown themselves 
 the enemies of God. 
 
 This is plainly the meaning of the parable of the 
 vineyard 1 which appears in all three Synoptic 
 Gospels. The sin of Israel has been consummated 
 in the rejection of the Son of God, and God will 
 come in judgment to destroy these unfaithful agents 
 (I suppose the Jewish rulers in particular), and give 
 His spiritual possession in charge to others—doubt¬ 
 less the 44 little flock ” to whom Jesus said 44 It is 
 your Father’s good pleasure to give you the king¬ 
 dom.” 2 The same doom is recorded to have been 
 pronounced with passionate anguish at the end of 
 the woes upon the scribes and Pharisees in 
 St. Matthew. 44 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . 
 Behold your house is left unto you desolate,” 3 and, 
 in St. Luke, with bitter tears' when Jesus beheld 
 the city and wept over it. 4 St. Paul, we notice, 
 entertained no doubt that the doom on Jerusalem 
 was irreversible— 44 wrath is come upon them to 
 the uttermost.” 5 
 
 But, of course, the most detailed judgment on 
 Jerusalem is in what is called our Lord’s apocalyptic 
 
 1 Mark xii 9. 3 Luke xii 32. 
 
 3 Matt, xxiii 37-8. It is possible that verse 39 was pronounced 
 
 before the entry into Jerusalem. 
 
 4 Luke xix 41 ff. 5 1 Thess. ii 15-16. 
 
THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM 147 
 
 discourse given in St. Mark xiii, 1 and the parallel 
 passage in the other Gospels. There we read how 
 our Lord had His attention called by one of His- 
 disciples to the magnificence of the temple buildings, 
 and makes it the opportunity for denouncing upon 
 them speedy and complete ruin. Then when the 
 inner circle "of disciples asks Him when this is to 
 happen and what sign is to presage the disaster, 
 our Lord describes a time of spiritual confusion, 
 political unrest, and physical calamity, which is 
 to be expected before the judgment falls. And 
 Lie warns the apostles that they are to find not 
 only the Jewish rulers but the world powers arrayed 
 against them in their task of preaching the Gospel 
 unto all the nations, and that they are to be objects 
 of universal hatred, and to be subjected to the 
 severest strain. Then, when they see an awful 
 profanation of the Holy Place occurring, such as 
 is obscurely described in the Book of Daniel, the 
 disciples who are in Judaea are to escape from the 
 doomed city at once, without a moment’s delay, 
 and flee to the mountains. A scene of unparalleled 
 horror is to be expected from which they shall barely 
 escape, and the physical horrors shall be made more 
 
 i The critics have largely accepted the view that a considerable 
 part of the discourse (verses 7-8, 12, 14, 17 22, 24—7, 3 ^ 
 not pronounced by our Lord but was a little apocalypse due 
 to some prophet near the time of the destruction of Jerusalem 
 about a.d. 66— -and is the “oracle” which Eusebius (H.E. m o, 
 apparently on the authority of Hegesippus) declares to have wamed 
 the Christians of Jerusalem to escape and remove to Pella, a city 
 of Peraea. I do not see sufficient reasons for adopting this view. 
 The “oracle” referred to by Eusebius may have been simply a 
 warning that now was the moment to act on the Lord s admonition 
 given to a few disciples privately nearly forty years before, and 
 carefully treasured in writing by the Jerusalem Church as its secret. 
 This would account for St. Mark here using a written document, 
 
 M * h In Mathew*th^queltion tamado to concern both the destruction 
 
 ~ We^nnot dou,A that * 
 
148 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 trying by the seductions of false Christs and false 
 prophets (verses 5-23). There are to follow 44 in 
 those days, after that tribulation,” portents in the 
 heavens described in the words of Isaiah—darkened 
 sun and moon, falling stars, shaken heavens, and also 
 —what has no counterpart in Isaiah*—the coming 
 of the Son of Man in power and glory, accompanied 
 with angels whom He will send to gather together 
 His scattered people from all quarters of the world 
 (verses 24-7). Then we are taken back to the time 
 of preparation, and the disciples are warned of the 
 certainty of the doom, and that this generation 
 shall see it accomplished (verses 30-31). Then, in 
 what appears to be sudden contrast, we hear of a 
 certain day and hour (“ that day ” and “ that hour ”) 
 which is veiled in complete uncertainty, of which 
 even the Son has no knowledge ; and the discourse 
 as it stands ends with a warning to them, couched 
 in a parable, that, though their Lord after 
 His departure should seem to delay His return, 
 they are always to watch, for it will be sudden, 
 when it comes, and they know not when to expect 
 it (32-7). 
 
 The main purpose of this discourse—apart from 
 its warnings of the spiritual trials which our Lord’s 
 apostles are to expect—is to declare explicitly and 
 with imaginative 1 detail, such as we are familiar 
 with in the 44 judgments ” of the old prophets, the 
 certain doom upon Jerusalem to be accomplished 
 before 44 this generation had passed away.” This 
 was a definite prophecy, and it was fulfilled in a.d. 70, 
 amidst unimaginable horrors. 
 
 (7) But this doom upon Jerusalem is thrown, after 
 the manner of the ancient prophets, and in the 
 
 1 Tlie details appear to be details of the picture, as presented 
 to their imagination, rather than detailed prophecy of circum¬ 
 stances. Thus the Christians of Jerusalem did not “ flee to the 
 mountains,” but over the Jordan and just across it to Pella, opposite 
 southern Galilee. 
 
149 
 
 THE END OF THE WORLD 
 
 words of Isaiah, upon a background of cosmic por¬ 
 tents-—darkened sun and moon, falling^ stars, shaken 
 heavens, heralding the coming of the Son of Man as 
 described in the vision of Daniel, but now as coming 
 to earth to fulfil what had always been associated 
 in prophecy with the Messianic kingdom that is, 
 the gathering of the true Israelites from all the 
 quarters of the globe. 1 And there are other passages 
 in which our Lord is recorded to have spoken oi the 
 coming of the Christ in glory to wind up the present 
 world history in scathing judgment and abundant 
 blessino', in phrases which are based upon Daniel s 
 vision "but assume that the figure of one like to 
 a son of man 55 has been already identified with the 
 Christ, 2 and the final Day of Judgment^ a familiar 
 prospect. The distinctive scenery of the day ot 
 judgment is more prominent in St. Matthews 
 accounts of our Lord’s discourses than m those of 
 the other Evangelists. But it is not, I think, possible 
 to doubt that our Lord did not merely describe the 
 destruction of Jerusalem in terms of celestial portents, 
 after the manner of Isaiah, but dia throw this 
 judgment upon the background of the great and 
 universal Day of Judgment with the glorified Christ 
 for judge, thus adopting the latter apocalyptic 
 
 In what sense, we ask? Well, it seems to me 
 that any believer in the God of the prophets and 
 of our Lord must believe with them m a Day oi 
 God, as bringing the present age, or human history, 
 to its climax. God, for all His long tolerance ol 
 human wilfulness and arrogance, must one clay 
 come into His own in His whole creation, and every¬ 
 thing must be seen in its true light as what it is 
 
 1 Dent. XXX 3, Jer. xxiii 3, xxxii 37, Ezek xxxiv 13, etc. 
 
 » Such passages are Matt, xiii 40-41, tlio conclusion of the 
 parable of the Tares, Matt, xvi 27, Mark vin „8, Luke ix -0, 
 Matt, xxv 31 ff., Luke xii 40 and 4b, xix lo, John v 28. The fiibt 
 Church was plainly full of this expectation. 
 
 11 
 
150 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 really worth. That is the “ day of judgment 55 in 
 its essence. And no believer in Christ can doubt 
 that this final disclosure of things as they really 
 are will be the manifested victory of Christ. His 
 judgment on men and things will be shown to be 
 the final judgment and the judgment of God. And 
 this Day, like all the preparatory and partial “ days 
 of judgment,” will speak the divine doom on all 
 corrupt civilizations and godless and inhuman forms 
 of power and institutions of cruelty and lust, and 
 on all rebels against God and right, only now 
 not partially and locally, but universally, in the 
 whole created world. We cannot, it seems to me, 
 hold any conception of progress which is con¬ 
 sistent with the facts of experience, without recog¬ 
 nizing that the divine purpose of progress works 
 through cataclysms as well as gradually, and that the 
 final coming of the Kingdom (if such an expectation 
 is entertained) must involve a cataclysm also on 
 the vastest scale. It seems to me quite certain 
 that our Lord enforces this doctrine, and that 
 He clothed this moral certainty in the tremendous 
 imagery of the rending clouds, and the descending 
 form, and the throne and the angels, and the 
 judgment spoken on every soul. Certainly our 
 Lord was ready enough to use imagery, and knew 
 well enough how to distinguish symbolism from 
 literal language. I cannot doubt that His picture 
 of the Last Day is the clothing of an awful reality 
 in symbolic forms. Only let us agree that our 
 Lord, in this solemn imagery, did affirm that human 
 history would reach its climax in what would be 
 at once the coming of the Kingdom in full glory 
 and the final Day of Judgment, and threw upon 
 this background the immediate judgment on 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 But now we come back to the question mentioned 
 at starting this enquiry—did our Lord declare that 
 
151 
 
 THE COMING OF THE END 
 
 the Last Day would follow immediately on the Fall 
 of Jerusalem, and did He in this respect show Him¬ 
 self to be under the influence of a current apocalyptic 
 expectation, and in fact mistaken ? 
 
 There was certainly, I think, mistake somewhere. 
 St. Matthew with his “ immediately ” (xxiv 29) must 
 be interpreted as meaning that the great day would 
 follow the destruction of Jerusalem as a separate 
 event without any considerable interval. And, in 
 the sense intended, this certainly did not occur. 
 But St. Mark’s words are vaguer, “in those days, 
 after that tribulation ” (xiii 24), and St. Luke 
 suggests an interval of indefinite length : “ Jerusalem 
 shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times 
 of the Gentiles be fulfilled ” (xxi 24). Plainly we 
 cannot rely upon having the precise words of Christ, 
 and we seem to detect contrary tendencies in St. 
 Matthew and St. Luke—in St. Matthew to accentuate 
 everything apocalyptic in our Lord’s words, and in 
 St. Luke to minimize. If we are to form a sound 
 judgment we must look at the general tenour of our 
 Lord’s teaching as a whole, and not lay stress upon 
 
 single phrases in one Gospel. 
 
 I would say then that the extreme apocalyptic 
 estimate of Christ formed (for example) by Schweitzer 
 must certainly be rejected. He represents the 
 Christ of current Judaism as simply the Heavenly 
 Figure of Daniel and Enoch. He would have us be¬ 
 lieve that there was no question of our Lord while 
 on earth being the Christ already. It was simply 
 that He believed Himself, and was believed by 
 others, to be destined to be the Christ from heaven. 
 But that estimate alike of current Jewish belief 
 and of the special belie! concerning Jesus is, as has 
 already been shown, quite contrary to the evidence. 
 Holding this mistaken or very one-sided idea of 
 the Messianic expectation, Schweitzer maintains 
 that our Lord, when He first sent out the Twelve, 
 
152 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 expected to come as Christ in the clouds of heaven 
 (without dying) before their brief mission was ended, 1 
 and that He had no idea of promoting any Kingdom 
 of God in the world or establishing (what is the 
 same thing) any new way or order of life among 
 men. All His rapt attention was on the Last Day 
 and the other world, as to come within the next 
 few weeks. When He was disappointed about this, 
 His disappointment, and the warning of the execution 
 of John the Baptist, taught Him to think that He 
 should offer Himself for death and that His sacri¬ 
 ficial death would certainly move God to bring the 
 kingdom from heaven at once. 
 
 All this picture of our Lord is surely violently 
 one-sided and distorted. Our Lord assuredly pro¬ 
 claimed a kingdom of God, characterized by a new 
 vision of God and a new conception of righteousness, 
 which in one sense was already in being—a kingdom 
 of God established in the hearts of men—already 
 within men or among them. 2 Again, He certainly 
 spoke of the growth of the kingdom under the figure 
 of the growth of a plant and the diffusion of leaven; 
 and again, as a mixed society on earth, which only 
 
 1 This is founded on Matt, x 23 : “But when they persecute 
 you in the city, flee unto the next : for verily I say unto you, Y e 
 shall not have gone through the cities of Israel, till the Son of man 
 be come.” But the whole of this section in St. Matthew, verses 
 16-23, appears to be antedated. It belongs properly to the prepara¬ 
 tion by Christ of the apostles for their experiences after He was 
 gone from them. (See Mark xiii 9—13, and Luke xxi 12—19.) -The 
 particular words quoted, which do not appear in St. Mark or St. 
 Luke, probably in their original context meant “ Never stay any¬ 
 where to press the Gospel on those who do not want it. There 
 will always be unevangelized places to be given their chance before 
 the Gospel is preached in the whole world and the end comes.” 
 I think we must conclude that St. Matthew, in adapting the words 
 to a much earlier situation—a preliminary mission of the Twelve 
 exclusively to Jews—has given them a misleading appearance. 
 At any rate, whatever the words may be held to mean, it is an 
 unreasonable thing to accentuate a solitary and unsupported saying 
 so as to give to Jesus an appearance of being such a fanatic as is 
 quite out of character with the general tone of His teaching. 
 
 s Luke xvii 20; cf. Matt, xi 12, xiii 44-6. 
 
ST. LUKE AND ST. JOHN 
 
 
 at the filial day could be completely purified. 1 He 
 certainly prepared His “little flock” to become the 
 New Israel, and therefore (in some sense) the kingdom 
 of God on earth. 2 Again, He certainly spoke of a 
 preaching of the Gospel of the kingdom throughout 
 the whole world, 3 * and He must have known, He who 
 was supremely sane, that this must be an affair of 
 a Ion o' time. Moreover, He speaks again and again 
 of the strain upon courage and faith involved m 
 waiting while God seems to do nothing—this under 
 the figure of the man of property who leit the ad¬ 
 ministration of his property to others and went 
 away “for a long time,” and in other similar 
 parables * ; and He asked the startling question : 
 
 “ When the Son of man eometh, shall he find the fait 
 on the earth ? ” 5 —or will the strain have been too 
 much for it'? It is plain that St. Luke is aware of a 
 tendency to misrepresent our Lord (as he think ) 
 having prophesied an immediate end, and desires to 
 
 Also we cannot ignore the teaching of the I°u rtl1 
 Gospel. The final coming is there and m the First 
 Epistle of St. John, still the object of expectation. 
 But the writer also plainly thinks it his business to 
 remind the Church that the apocalyptic expecta¬ 
 tion was not the whole of our Lord’s teaching, nm 
 (in his eves) its most important element, thus 
 also prepared for the establishment of His kmgdom 
 here and now in the world, by the sending of His 
 Spirit, which was also His own return by the Spmt. 
 
 P Thus, on the whole, we seem to me to have even 
 
 1 Mark iv 30, Matt. xni p^the’ciuirch. But this is reserved 
 
 2 That is to.say. He the Chinch.^ ^ 1Q> xiv 9 
 
 f0r . Zu. 1 xxv m i 9 ‘ cf. e Luk: xix 12, “ into a far country.” 
 
 1 LukeSfl2 8 ' “Because they supposed that the Kingdom of 
 
 G “ d 7ohnt 28 6 -tv! y 39? tTO" the last day ”), xi 24, xii 48, xxi 
 
 22-3 ; 1 John ii 28, iii 2, 2 John 7. 
 
154 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 reason to believe that our Lord’s teaching about 
 the coming of the kingdom was much more com¬ 
 plex and many-sided than the apocalyptic school 
 acknowledges. He accepted, but He transmuted, 
 the apocalyptic hope. He prophesied an immediate 
 coming by the Spirit. He prophesied a speedy 
 coming in judgment on Jerusalem. He also threw 
 this c *doom” upon the background of a final coming 
 or Day of Judgment. No doubt the first disciples 
 expected this final day immediately, and the ex¬ 
 pectation has coloured the report of our Lord’s 
 words in St. Matthew and perhaps somewhat in 
 St. Mark also. But it is in both these Gospels that 
 we read the indisputably authentic words of Christ: 
 
 Of that day and that hour knoweth no one, not 
 the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but 
 the Father.” This certainlv means that our Lord 
 had not—at least in His mortal state—a map of 
 the future spread before Him. We should take 
 these words in connection with those recorded of 
 our Lord by St. Luke, before His ascension, in 
 answer to a question of the disciples, which shows 
 them still clinging to the old Jewish hope in its 
 fallacious form: “ Dost thou at this time restore 
 the kingdom to Israel ? ”—“ He said unto them, 
 It is not for you to know times or seasons which 
 the Father hath set within his own authority.” 1 
 These last two sayings mean, I think, unmistakably 
 that our Lord gave no teaching at all upon the time 
 of the end. He left it wholly vague and indefinite. 
 
 Thus, we must, on reviewing the whole evidence, 
 give a negative answer to the question whether our 
 Lord was mistaken about the time of the end. I 
 think we have seen cogent reasons for saying that 
 our Lord refused to give any teaching on the subject, 
 and declared it not to be within the scope of His 
 knowledge, as He then was. There was mistake— 
 
 1 Acts i G, 7. 
 
ST. PAUL'S EXPECTATION 
 
 155 
 
 but it was on the part of the disciples, and not of our 
 Lord ; and we have, I think, to admit that it has 
 somewhat discoloured some expressions, especially m 
 the first of the Synoptic Gospels, but not sufficiently 
 to prevent our correcting the discolouring out ol 
 
 the total impression left us. . 
 
 I think, also, that this answer to the question is 
 the one suggested by the attitude of the disciples, 
 especially St. Paul, in the matter. Plainly he at 
 first shared the expectation of the end within his 
 own lifetime, 1 and plainly also he grew out ot it 
 not out of the expectation, but out of its immediacy 
 —simply by the growth of his experience and re¬ 
 flection," and without any shock. It would appear 
 as if the expectation was to him not an article 
 of faith ” and not something for which he had a 
 word of Christ. Otherwise there would have been 
 the sense of shock. And St. Paul’s attitude is 
 reflected in that of the whole Church. Jerusalem 
 
 f„|]_i,y wholly natural means, but according to 
 
 e prophecy of Jesus: yet “the end” did not 
 come Then we find the seer of the Apocalypse 
 making another prophecy. The hostile power is 
 now not the apostate Israel but the Roman Empire 
 turned persecutor ; and the seer pronounces upon 
 it the doom of God, and again throws that doom 
 upon the background of the End. The Church we 
 gather, like St. Paul, had experienced no shock in 
 seeing that the Day of God did not immediately 
 follow', as they had expected, the doom on Jerusalem. 
 They prepared to see another doom on anothei 
 hostile power, persecuting Rome, and again to throw 
 it upon the background of the final and universa 
 
 3U ThE represents the attitude which our Lord would 
 have His disciples take. Because they believe m 
 God, they must take it for granted that in no 
 
 t Phil, i 23, 2 Tim. iv 0. 
 
 i 1 Thess. iv 14, 1 Cor. xv 51. 
 
15G THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 department can evil be ifinally victorious. The end 
 is certain and is to be eagerly expected. God must 
 come into His own. That is “ the day of the Lord,*’ 
 or “ day of judgment.” In the world’s history there 
 are many days of judgment. Over long periods in¬ 
 deed God seems to do nothing and the world-power 
 to have it all its own way. But there are also days 
 when the world-power seems to be cracking and 
 dissolving, and then it falls. God has bared His 
 arm. Sooner or later the judgment of God falls 
 “ naturally ” on every institution which ignores, 
 persistently and defiantly, the law of righteousness. 
 u Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles 
 be gathered together.” Thus we have many “ last 
 days,” 1 or days of extremity,” followed by “ days of 
 the Lord.” But all these da}^s of the Lord, of which 
 the Bible record is full, are the prelude of something 
 final and universal —the Day—after which God is 
 to be all in all. Of the date of this we knov r , and 
 are to know, nothing, and of its character and manner 
 of coming we hear only in apocalyptic imagery and 
 symbolism, as a reflection in a mirror, or in a riddle. 
 Only we know it is certain to come, and as we belong 
 already to the kingdom of God we most passionately 
 and eagerly desire to see it fully consummated. 
 
 It is from such a point of view as this that, though 
 it is going somewhat out of our way, v T e can attempt 
 a brief answer to the question which is continually 
 being raised afresh, whether Christianity is a religion 
 of this world or an other-worldly religion-—whether 
 Christians are to labour for the gradual upbuilding 
 of the city of God on earth by the transformation 
 both of individual characters and human institu- 
 
 1 I think Westcott (on 1 John ii 18), and Hort (on 1 Peter i 5), 
 and Parry (on 2 Tim. iii 1) are right in distinguishing “ the last 
 day” from “last days” and “a last hour.” “There is clearly a 
 distinction to be drawn, according as the article is used or not.” 
 
THIS WORLD OR THE NEXT ? 157 
 
 tions, or whether they are to look forward to the 
 destruction of this wicked world and all that belongs 
 to it, and the perfecting of man’s hopes in a qui e 
 
 different world called heaven ? . 
 
 The problem is generally stated in somewhat mis¬ 
 leading terms—as an alternative—but there can be 
 no question that for a very long period of time 
 popular religion has contented itself ui ie n1 ^ 11 
 with the latter expectation : and that the apat y 
 of religious people in the face of social injustice 
 —all that has given point to the charge that 
 “religion has been the opium of the poor —has 
 been due in great measure to the hold that this 
 idea has had on the religious imagination. But 1 
 think that any frank consideration of the New 
 Testament will lead us to the conclusion that the 
 New Testament, as well as the Old, is on the oth 
 side. 1 There the aim is that the kingdom of God 
 should come “ on earth as it is in heaven The 
 end is always pictured as the Return of Chnst 1 
 dory and triumph from heaven to earth with the 
 angels and saints-all the treasures of heaven to be 
 fused with a purged and renewed earth : t is the 
 redemption of “the whole creation : it is the 
 New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven 
 to be God’s dwelling-place upon the new earth 
 and under the “ new heaven ” : it is the kingdom 
 of the world ” made “ the kingdom of the Lord and 
 of his Christ.” We will not concern ourselves with 
 
 1 Sen ,'ibove D 141 n. 1, with references. I find m Hastings Diet, 
 feee above, p. ’ <t T >r ^ t j 10 heaven which is 
 
 of the Bible, art Heaven: ™ a heaven that is 
 
 Qosp.1 - (p. 3231. The nee to toe a q.»'e romo.ho . J 
 
 brought to realize that m. tl L Y clauses, and if the Lord’s 
 
 Prayer tvers pnn^d Ld^eHedL as to .naUe this evident. 
 
158 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 the question of the meaning to be attached to the 
 preliminary millennium of the Apocalypse. But there 
 can be no question, I think, that the ultimate king¬ 
 dom is in the New Testament, on the whole, figured 
 not only as including this world, purged by scathing 
 judgment, but in some sense as centring upon it. 
 Let us allow as fully as possible that all the language 
 about the last things is highly figurative : never¬ 
 theless it is intended to impress and affect our 
 imagination, and it makes the greatest possible dif¬ 
 ference if our imagination becomes rightly coloured— 
 if what we come to anticipate with assurance is 
 not our being carried away to some other remote 
 world, but the victory of God in the creation and 
 world that we know. 
 
 And not only is this the truth about the end of 
 the world, but it is also true that the Church—- 
 which is the old Israel renewed and refounded by 
 Christ—is, or is the representative of, the kingdom 
 of God on earth here and now, albeit not yet per¬ 
 fected, 1 the kingdom which is “righteousness, peace, 
 and joy in the Holy Spirit.” So the ethics of the New 
 Testament are predominantly social ethics—the ethics 
 of brotherhood; its discipline is primarily moral 
 discipline. The aim of the Church is to show here 
 and now the true human fellowship realized in Christ. 
 It is bound to make war, in the name of Christ, on 
 all injustice as much as on all impurity. It must 
 take all human life for its province. It must de¬ 
 velop its philosophy, its art, its principles of social 
 economy. It exists in the world, but not of the 
 world, and that means that it must vigorously and 
 combatively maintain the true principles of human 
 brotherhood and human life against “ the lusts of the 
 flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life ” 
 —that is, against the social aims and practices of 
 the selfish, avaricious, and lustful world. This seems 
 1 “ Non aclhuc regnat hoc regnum,” St. Augustine says. 
 
THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT 159 
 
 to me indisputable. The only question which remains 
 to answer is whether the idea of a gradually and 
 progressively realized kingdom of God in this wor d 
 —a Church gradually appropriating the world, and 
 consequently a world progressing towards perfection 
 —is to oust the apocalyptic idea of a Christ manifested 
 in cataclysm and judgment at the end-whether the 
 two conceptions are mutually exclusive. Many ot 
 our Christian socialists appear to think so, and among 
 the radical reconstructors of the Gospel men as unlike 
 one another as Harnack and Schweitzer take it for 
 granted that the apocalyptic hope is gone beyond 
 recall and for good. 
 
 But I think we must not accept as mutually 
 exclusive alternatives the idea of a progressive 
 realization of the kingdom here and now and the 
 apocalyptic hope. Both seem to me to find then 
 place in the teaching and mind of Christ; and both 
 seem to me to be equally warranted by experience 
 and needed for the equipment of human souls all 
 down the generations. We are to labour ioi the 
 establishment of the kingdom of God m the name of 
 Christ and in the power of His Spirit here and now. 
 But neither Christ nor experience warrants us in 
 believing that we are to see the extinction of the 
 power of evil within the present world order. Pro¬ 
 gress as we recognize to-day, is an exceeding y 
 fitful and chequered process There is no' 
 against the collapse of civilizations and Churches. 
 TTie powers of evil do not seem to be worn out or to 
 
 I* JSLd-»ly to tote r -MP***- 
 
 of old, there appears to be the most fearful waste 
 of the best human effort* « seems to me that 
 Jesus Christ would prepare us for all this by tiic 
 apocalyptic, other-worldly hope. He would have us 
 believc tliat no good effort for the cause ot truth 
 and righteousness will ever really be lost. Their 
 “ works follow with” the suffering servants who 
 
160 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 seem to die defeated, but “ in the Lord.” With 
 them (or in them) the fruits of what they have thought 
 and done and suffered are gathered into the treasury 
 of God in the heavenly world unseen, and one day 
 we shall see them with our eyes. We shall see the 
 fruit of all true human effort integrated in the perfect 
 fellowship, when Christ comes again—when the City 
 of God descends. But we are not led to expect the 
 City of God as the culmination of a gradually pro¬ 
 gressive movement to perfection. The present world 
 order will always present the aspect of a more or less 
 desperate struggle. It is on the other side of Arma¬ 
 geddon that the City of God will appear. And that 
 final battle will be won, as it seems, by the pure act 
 of God, and the New Jerusalem will appear from 
 heaven, so that we cannot imagine that we have 
 fashioned it. 
 
 This is metaphorical teaching or symbolism, no 
 doubt: but only in metaphor or symbol can we 
 envisage the truth about the future. And the 
 apocalyptic metaphors, which possess the hearts of 
 men in days of seeming moral disaster, correspond, 
 we may be persuaded, with spiritual realities. 
 
 Note to P. 147. 
 
 An Illustration from Tacitus 
 
 It is instructive to read, in connection with Mark xiii 
 7-13, Tacitus’ introduction to his Histories, in which 
 he is to describe the events of a.d. 68-70, and amongst 
 them the Jewish War and the capture of Jerusalem, 
 from the point of view of the Roman Empire : “ The 
 story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with 
 warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during 
 times of peace. It tells of four emperors slain by the 
 sword, three several civil wars, an even larger number of 
 foreign wars, and some that were both at once. . . . Now, 
 too, Italy was smitten with new disasters, or disasters 
 which it had not witnessed for a long period of years. 
 
FROM TACITUS 161 
 
 Towns along the rich coast of Campania were submerged 
 or buried. The city was devastated by fires, ancient 
 temples were destroyed, and the Capitol itself was fired 
 by Roman hands. Sacred rites were profaned, and 
 there were adulteries in high places. r Lhe sea swarmit 
 with exiles, and the cliffs were red with blood. Morse 
 horrors reigned in the city. . . . Slaves were bubed 
 against their masters, freedmen against their patrons, 
 and if a man had no enemies he was ruined by his 
 friends. . . ” Then, after describing some better 
 features of the life of the time, he continues : “ Besides 
 these manifold disasters to mankind there were portents 
 in the sky and on the earth, and the warnings of thunder¬ 
 bolts, a premonition of good and of evil, some doubtiu , 
 some obvious. Indeed, never has it been proved y 
 such terrible disasters to Rome or such clear evidence 
 that the Gods were concerned not with our safety but 
 with vengeance on our sins.” 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 IS THE DOCTRINE OF THE INCARNATION TRUE ? 
 
 Thus far we have been pursuing a purely historical 
 method. Thus, after duly taking into account the dis¬ 
 tinctively Jewish background of beliefs and expecta¬ 
 tions in which the faith in Jesus had its origin (cap. i), 
 we occupied ourselves in tracing the growth of the 
 idea of His person as it appears in the New Testament. 
 We began from the first undefined belief of the 
 Twelve, which the scandal of the Cross temporarily 
 overthrew (cap. ii) but which revived under the ex¬ 
 perience of the Resurrection and the coming of the 
 Spirit and took shape in the enthusiastic conviction 
 of the original Church in Jerusalem that Jesus was 
 truly the glorified Christ, the Lord of all, the object 
 of worship, appointed to be the final judge of quick 
 and dead. 
 
 This passionate faith, which might have seemed 
 to be moving in the direction of the deification of 
 the man Jesus, was interpreted to the Church itself 
 by Saul of Tarsus—the scourge of the Church who 
 was converted to become its glory—in the light of 
 the title which in momentous utterances Jesus had 
 used to describe Himself—the title of the Son of God. 
 Not the deification of a man, but the Incarnation of 
 the pre-existing Son, St. Paul declared to be the 
 interpretation of His person. And though no teacher 
 of the Church before St. Paul can be shown to have 
 given it expression, yet it appears that the whole 
 
 1G2 
 
ST. PAUL’S FUNCTION 
 
 163 
 
 apostolic group and all the young churches welcomed 
 the interpretation as the truth, quite without con¬ 
 troversy. They must have felt that St. Paul was 
 onlv giving clear utterance to what the language 
 of Jesus implied about Himself, and what alone 
 could explain or justify the unreserved faith they 
 reposed in Him. The same doctrine of Christ s 
 person is expressed from a rather different point of 
 view by the Alexandrian author of the Epistle to 
 
 the Hebrews (cap. hi). . , , . f 
 
 We saw that the Fourth Gospel gives this doctrine ol 
 
 incarnation its fullest and most deliberate expression 
 and makes the most decided claim to find in the 
 language of Jesus Himself its indisputable justifica¬ 
 tion ; and it was pointed out how strong the grounds 
 are for believing that the Fourth Gospel presents 
 us with a real historical tradition supplementary to 
 the earlier Gospels. Finally we examined the language 
 of the seer of the Apocalypse, and of James, andof 
 Jude and of Peter, and, though they do not plainly 
 state any theory of Christ’s person, we found it almost 
 impossible to believe that they could have been 
 satisfied with anything short of th e Incamatm 
 doctrine, in view of the indications of their faith 
 
 " There'iss we saw, no rival adoptiomst theory—no 
 doctrine that is of a man adopted into the Godhc at 
 (anotheosis)—to be found in the New Testament, 
 whether previously to St. Paul’s activity or after his 
 appearance on the scene. What had happened was 
 that the years immediately succeeding the death and 
 resurrection of Jesus saw the Church concentrated 
 upon the worship of the glorified Christ and Lord, and 
 treating Him as having “ the values of God for them, 
 
 without apparently finding it necessary to form oi 
 
 proclaim any theory of H.s person. When St Paul 
 was given to the Church to do this service for th , 
 they ^appear to have accepted his interpretation 
 
161 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 unanimously. It must have been already at work, 
 we feel, under the surface in the apostolic company, 
 though it does not find expression in the Acts. 
 Later, in Jewish Ebionism and in Paul of Samosata’s 
 Adoptionism, we are given positive theories—rivals 
 of the Incarnation doctrine—as that Jesus was an 
 inspired man and no more, or a man assumed into 
 the Godhead on account of his excellence—but these 
 were certainly deteriorations from the level of the 
 whole New Testament, even from the unformulated 
 belief of the first Jerusalem Church. Indeed it is 
 impossible to read the Epistle to the Hebrews with¬ 
 out feeling that the writer’s mind is full of the fear 
 that any clinging to antiquated Jewish rites and 
 ceremonies, on the part of those who have once con¬ 
 fessed Jesus, will involve a lapse, not only morally 
 but intellectually, from their first faith. And this 
 is what actually occurred, if not to the group overseas 
 to whom the Epistle to the Hebrews was apparently 
 addressed, yet certainly in Palestine and nearer 
 home (cap. iv). 
 
 After this we devoted special attention to the 
 apocalyptic element in the New Testament—the 
 expectation of the future coming of the Christ in 
 glory—and endeavoured to see it in its relation to 
 the whole Messianic idea; and we saw that there are 
 no adequate grounds for the often repeated asser¬ 
 tion that Jesus Himself entertained the delusion of 
 the immediate coming of the end of the world (cap. v). 
 
 We shall have to pursue the course of the faith 
 to its formulation in the creeds of the Church and 
 the decisions of the Councils. But we had better 
 pause here. The theologians of the later Church 
 are unanimous in declaring that they were not 
 originating anything, but defending and defining the 
 faith of the New Testament—the faith of the apostles. 
 This, no doubt, may be disputed and must be ex¬ 
 amined. But I think we shall find that they were 
 
RIVAL THEORIES 
 
 165 
 
 justified in their contention in the seme that where 
 we pass off the ground of the New Testamen w 
 leave behind us, already accomplished, the fundc 
 mentally creative work in Christian theology. 
 
 But whether this be wholly true or no, there is 
 at any’rate enough truth in it to justify us m pausing 
 at this point to ask whether the doctrine of the 
 incarnation of the Son of God, as we find it in St. 
 Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews and St John 
 io reallv the only legitimate way of thinking ot ai 
 accounting for' the historical person—Jesus o 
 
 Nazareth. 
 
 I 
 
 At the beginning of our inquiry* I described eertam 
 rival interpretations of His person which at pieseat 
 are largely in occupation of the intellectual field, 
 and which are associated especially with the names 
 of Harnack, Schweitzer, and Bousset. It is commo 
 
 to the maintainers of all these riva interpretatimis 
 
 that they approach the Gospels with what X thrnk 
 xxr _ Tvincf rail a dogmatic prejudice. On general pm 
 op£ and Sorical grounds they peremptorily 
 refuse to admit the credibility of muacles^ so far as 
 
 these go beyond healings of the sic v .y 
 
 suggestion, and apparently quite as peWtorfiy they 
 refuse to entertain, as even an hypothesis to oc 
 
 s.’&snrss^ z e, ■» *->■ - ; 
 
 miraculous and (however much mspned by 
 
 ”Zded. I also "vested «»»« “V °' 
 
 i See above, pp. 35 ff. 
 
 12 
 
166 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 the Gospels which refuses the strictly miraculous 
 is forced to eliminate so much out of the foundation 
 documents as to discredit them deeply as historical 
 records. The narrative has to be rewritten from the 
 point of view of each new critic, accentuating this 
 and leaving out that, as his particular judgment 
 dictates. The proof that this is so lies in the extra¬ 
 ordinary differences between the various critical re¬ 
 constructions of the historical Jesus, notably between 
 the three to which I specially called attention. My 
 answer, therefore, to those “ critical ” estimates I 
 have attempted to give in this way—I have urged 
 the high claim of our foundation Gospel documents 
 and the Acts of the Apostles to take rank as credible 
 history. I have begged my readers to approach 
 the study of these documents with an open mind. 
 Taking them, not as exempt from error, but as good 
 history, and seeking to give an impartial attention 
 to all the elements of the narrative, I have sought 
 to trace the growth of the belief in Christ’s person 
 as it is represented in these narratives and as it 
 reaches its coherent expression in the Epistles. The 
 picture of the development of a belief which such 
 impartial study discloses is to my mind very con¬ 
 vincing. The facts as they are recorded account for 
 the developing belief, and the belief interprets the 
 facts. It alone can interpret the facts as a whole. 
 In proof of this I must go back to Harnack and 
 Schweitzer. 
 
 Harnack admirably describes the ethical teaching 
 of Christ, but there are three elements in our funda¬ 
 mental records which he perforce refuses to admit 
 as historical, not on critical but on a priori grounds : 
 the claim of a divine Sonship which, as it stands 
 (both in St. Mark and Q), Harnack admits to be 
 superhuman ; the tremendous apocalyptic claim, 
 which he minimizes towards vanishing-point; and 
 the miracles, especially the real Resurrection. That is 
 
HARNACK’S ESTIMATE 
 
 16 
 
 to say that out of four elements in our foundation 
 Gospels, which are all equally and obtrusively present 
 Harnack chooses one and fashions his picture_ o 
 of it alone, with the result that the Jesus of history, 
 as he represents Him, seems altogether inadequate to 
 account for the results which have flowed forth from 
 Him Jesus, the ethical and spiritual prophet, was 
 a feet of history, but it appears that there was much 
 
 the i r wouldadvise anyone to read Haniack’s account 
 
 of the faith in Jesus of the apostolic band mini 
 diately after His death * and, without stopping to 
 criticize it in detail, ask himself whether it does not 
 require the actual fact of the Resurrection, and what 
 followed, to account for it. The picture m the 
 CosDels and Acts is lifelike and unmistakable. A 
 hesitating, vacillating company who deserted their 
 Master In the hour of His seeming failure and death 
 are after a brief interval, transformed into a radian , 
 confident band who can face the wor wi 
 flinching courage. The change is accounted for by 
 certain factsJhe fact of the Resurrection made 
 evident by the repeated appearances of the rise 
 
 KSS-V. « 
 
 “L SS conversion! herein differing from 
 
 most authorities, as early as a ^“tlmrecOT^which 
 death. He does not question that the lecorfl wn c 
 
 day and IHs subsequent appearances was, what he 
 
 ’“Sori »cci£n of solid and di.tinct evenfe 
 
 i Lecture IX of What is Christianity ? 
 
168 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 died for them. They felt that He must have sur¬ 
 vived death, and that God must vindicate Him. 
 Their Messianic beliefs invested Him with supreme 
 Lordship. And all this, though in reality their faith 
 had failed them under the scandal of the Cross, and 
 God had not vindicated Jesus by any outward event, 
 and He did not come in glory as they expected. 
 Granted the primitive faith, solidly grounded on 
 the experiences recorded in the last chapters of the 
 Gospels and the opening chapters of the Acts, the 
 Church can start on its course, as we see it, in the 
 enthusiasm of conviction. But it was the facts 
 which created the conviction. And apart from the 
 impact of indisputable facts, the moral transformation 
 of the apostles and the triumphant certitude of the 
 Acts are quite unaccountable. Also, I cannot believe 
 that St. Paul’s doctrine of the divine Son incarnate 
 would ever have received the unquestioned accept¬ 
 ance which the evidence shows it received, if it had 
 not been grounded beyond question on the Lord’s 
 own witness to Himself. 
 
 It is almost comic to pass from Harnack to 
 Schweitzer, for what is all in all to the one is nothing 
 to the other. For Schweitzer Jesus is hardly an 
 ethical teacher at all. He is an apocalyptic seer 
 of what we cannot but call a fanatical type. He is 
 tnat and almost nothing else. He created a flaming 
 expectation in the first Jerusalem Church of His 
 speedy coming in the clouds of heaven. Again we 
 note, as with Harnack, that there is nothing admitted 
 to have occurred which accounts for the trans¬ 
 formation of the character of the Twelve from 
 utter despondency to confident enthusiasm. But in 
 JIarnack’s account the first Christians have at least 
 a task before them. There is an ethical gospel— 
 a gospel of divine Fatherhood and human brother¬ 
 hood—to be preached, and a life to be realized on 
 earth by the community of believers. Christianity 
 
OTHER ESTIMATES 169 
 
 is 44 the Way.” But according to Schweitzer they 
 appear to have nothing to do—no divine legacy left 
 them, except the expectation of the Christ coming 
 in the clouds to judge the world, which was not 
 realized. The Christ who has been so potent a 
 factor in human history, who has given to men so 
 new a sense of the worth, here and now, of human per¬ 
 sonality and human life, has, according to Schweitzer, 
 hardly anything to do with Jesus as in fact He was. 
 He again, like Harnack, only more one-sidedly, has 
 fastened upon one element in the record—the apoca¬ 
 lyptic—and has sought to fashion out of it the 
 complete picture, again with the result that the 
 supposed Jesus cannot supply any intelligible ex¬ 
 planation of the Church which was called by His 
 name. 
 
 In Bousset’s and Kirsopp Lake’s estimate of 
 history there is even less in the historical Jesus than 
 Harnack or Schweitzer finds there. There is even 
 less any adequate historical cause of the great effect. 
 On the showing of these very radical critics the 
 Catholic Church owes comparatively little to Him 
 except His prophetic teaching about God and the 
 example of His noble life and self-sacrificing death. 
 
 Now, is it not the most effective argument against 
 all these three schools of interpreters to show that 
 there is a picture of Jesus of Nazareth, which is 
 formed by taking our records seriously as historical 
 documents, which takes in what each of these groups 
 of interpreters wishes to emphasize, but by taking 
 in also what they severally or all together repudiate 
 (though without any critical ground for their re¬ 
 pudiation) can combine all the elements in one 
 strangely compelling and convincing whole, which 
 moreover is obviously adequate- as no one of these 
 partial or one-sided estimates of the Jesus ol 
 History ” is—to explain the effects which are summed 
 up in the religion of the New Testament ? 
 
170 
 
 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 II 
 
 Certainly it is easier to examine the views of the 
 critics whom we have been considering than those 
 of our English Modernists. The German and 
 French scholars at any rate express their views as 
 lucidly as possible, and show us quite clearly what 
 they mean and whither they are moving. But 
 the greater number of our English Modernists do 
 not give us this intellectual satisfaction. 
 
 The Report of their Conference at Cambridge in 
 the summer of 1921, on Christ and the Creeds, 1 
 seemed to me to be more markedly characterized 
 by strong statements of what the speakers do not 
 believe than by clear exposition of what they do. 
 It was unfortunate also that the question, what is the 
 best intellectual expression which we can find for 
 the truth about Christ, was crossed and confused 
 by a quite different issue—what is the intellectual 
 obligation involved in the honest recitation of the 
 Creeds. These two issues had better be kept quite 
 distinct, and with the latter we are not concerned 
 in this book. It was also apparent that the speakers 
 at the conference were men holding very different 
 views. Nevertheless the Report made certain things 
 evident. 
 
 (1) The Modernist movement as a whole is not, 
 as Dr. Sanday used to try to persuade us to believe, 
 a movement which would be satisfied with eliminating 
 from the Christian creed the affirmation of certain 
 miracles, leaving the ideas about God and the 
 Incarnation untouched. It is a movement which 
 as a whole demands a trenchant rehandling of our 
 doctrine of God and of the person of Christ. It is 
 a clear gain to recognize this. The really root 
 1 Report in Modern Churchman , Sept. 1921. 
 
THE ENGLISH MODERNISTS 
 
 171 
 
 question is the question of what sort is the God in 
 whom w r e believe. 1 
 
 (2) Some of those who took part in the conference 
 44 differ ” (as one of them says) “ from the Chalce- 
 donian Fathers by holding that the substances of 
 deity and humanity are not two but one. Perfect 
 humanity is deity under human conditions, 
 have already sought to make it evident that such an 
 idea as this was familiar enough in the Greek world, 
 but is quite contrary to the fundamental Hebrew 
 doctrine of God the Creator, always essentially and 
 fundamentally distinct from all His creatuies, which 
 our Lord and His apostles take for granted. 3 That 
 men are portions of God in respect of their reason 
 or spirit—that God would not be complete without 
 man—that a man by becoming good and realizing 
 himself as a rational being would become God or 
 a god—are familiar propositions in certain types of 
 Hellenism and (except the last) in certain types of 
 modern philosophy. But they are flatly contrary to 
 the root conceptions on which our religion was based. 
 The first matter (intellectually speaking) on which we 
 have to make up our minds is whether the Hebrew 
 conception of God, which is the foundation of the 
 Christian religion, is valid i.c. due to a real self 
 disclosure of God through the Hebrew prophets and 
 Jesus Christ. We only lose time by trying to evade 
 this question. In the volume which preceded this 
 X have sought carefully to examine it, and to give the 
 reasons which seem to me to justily the belief in a 
 positive self-disclosure of God on which the Christian 
 
 Gospel is based. 
 
 i This is admirably emphasized in an article by the Rev. Richard 
 Hanson, “ Anglicanism and Modern Problems,” Church Quarterly , 
 
 Al 2 ^Report, pp. 196-8. Again, p. 293. The idea thus expressed, 
 “ They treat Cod and man as two distinct, real existences (sub¬ 
 stances) each with its own special characteristics,” is repudiated as 
 unsatisfactory. 
 
 3 See above, p. 5 
 
 and Belief in God , chaps, v and vi. 
 
172 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 (3) Others in the Conference repudiated very 
 emphatically the conception which we find so 
 decidedly expressed in St. Paul and St. John of a 
 divine person, pre-existing, who in the fulness of 
 tune became man for our salvation. 1 Language is 
 used which suggests the ancient idea of Adoptionism 
 I . e *^ ea a perfectly good man and singularly 
 in spued prophet raised to divine honours and 
 identified with God. Now I associate myself wholly 
 wdh a remark made by Dr. Kirsopp Lake 2 : 
 
 Adoptionism seems to me to have no part or lot 
 m any intelligent modern theologv, though it is 
 unfortunately often promulgated, especially in pulpits 
 which are regarded as liberal. We cannot believe 
 that at any time a human being, in consequence 
 oi ins virtue, became God, which he was not before, 
 °l an y human being will ever do so. No doctrine 
 oi Christology, and no doctrine of salvation, which 
 is Adoptionist in essence, can ever come to terms 
 with modern thought. 55 I do not think there is 
 any doubt that we have in our day to choose ulti¬ 
 mately between the incarnation doctrine of St. 
 
 I aul and St. John and the Creeds and, on the other 
 hand, the conception of Christ as the best, or one 
 ot the best, and most inspired of men, who left to 
 men the heritage of the grandest teaching about 
 the fatherhood of God, and the possibilities of 
 humanity, and the purest example of love and 
 sacrifice, and who, after His death, was deified only 
 m tne imagination of His disciples. But I cannot 
 square the record of Jesus, as it stands, with such 
 incontestable evidence of reality, in the Gospels, or 
 the record of the impression which He made on His 
 disciples, with any merely humanitarian estimate 
 °f Hu ?- lhe bedrock of the Catholic conviction 
 anout Jesus is in these earliest records. But on this 
 
 1 Report, pp. 287, 288, 27C f. 
 
 Landmarks in Early Christianity, pp. 131-2. 
 
THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE 
 
 173 
 
 I have already said what seems to me the certain 
 truth 1 ; and I can only ask my readers to concentrate 
 on this point all their powers of spiritual appre¬ 
 hension, with the sincere desire to reach a decision. 
 Before I take leave of them, I shall ask them to 
 estimate the importance for human life which is 
 involved in that decision. 2 But all that I ask for 
 now is a frank and conscientious exercise of the 
 responsibility of judgment on the facts of the case. 
 Dr. Bethune Baker at the Cambridge Conference 
 spoke of men being “ hypnotized by orthodox pre¬ 
 suppositions.” I seem to see more intelligent people 
 to-day who are hypnotized by unorthodox pre¬ 
 suppositions. However, there is no question at 
 present of orthodoxy or unorthodoxy. These words 
 imply an ecclesiastical authority, and no question 
 of ecclesiastical authority has been raised at all. 
 I have been trying to proceed simply as an individual 
 doing his best to form a true judgment in view of 
 all the facts. That seems to be for many minds 
 to-day the first necessity. And I ask for a like 
 frankness on the part of my readers. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But there is no doubt that the New Testament 
 doctrine of the person of Christ, while it has inspired 
 and still inspires the faith of millions, also rouses 
 a sense of antagonism in a great many minds-—an 
 antagonism of a kind which is peculiar to our time. 
 They feel what can perhaps best be expressed by 
 saying that the doctrine in effect dehumanizes 
 Christ, even if in theory and formally it safeguards 
 His manhood. This Christ, they say, whom you 
 describe as sinless, and who certainly, if the pages 
 
 1 Soe above, p. 4G ff. 
 
 2 See below, pp. 314 ff. 
 
174 
 
 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 of the Gospels can be taken to give an undistorted 
 picture of Him, appears as never betraying any 
 sense of error, moral weakness, or insufficiency'—this 
 Christ moreover whom you describe as personally 
 the eternal Son of God manifested in human flesh, 
 and at no moment therefore merely man*—makes 
 no appeal to us. His example is of no use to us. 
 YY hat we need for our help and encouragement is a 
 man who is only a man and has no resources but 
 such as are common to men, and no exemptions from 
 human frailties. Only such a Christ could encourage 
 us to believe that we can become as he was. 
 
 Words like these are often used with deep sincerity 
 and real passion. When like words were used to 
 Augustine many centuries ago, he pressed his Pelagian 
 antagonist with the inquiry whether he meant that 
 he wanted a Christ who starts precisely from the 
 common human level of sinfulness ; and whether, 
 therefore, he would not, if he were logical, find the 
 most encouraging Christ to be one who had to start 
 with the most evilly disposed nature to tame, and 
 the most unruly lusts and passions to subdue. 1 
 This is a very shrewd question which the objector 
 would not have found it easy to answer. In fact, 
 if it is merely a question of an encouraging example, 
 the most valuable example for each of us would appear 
 to be the person who starts most completely on 
 his own level. But it is impossible to read' the 
 Gospels and not feel that Jesus Christ did not appeal 
 to men primarily or chiefly as an example they 
 
 Augustine, c. Julian, op. imperfect. iv. cc. 48-57. These are verv 
 interesting chapters. See c. 49 : “ Christus . . . sieut in virtute 
 
 omnmm hommum maximus, ita esse in carne libidinosissimus 
 debmt ; and c. 52: “Sic es amator egregius castitatis ut 
 tibi castior videatur qui concubitus illicitos cupit, sed ut non 
 perpretret, suae cupiditati resistit.” Again Christ, according to 
 -Julian, should be represented as saying, “Estote ergo casti, quia, 
 ut vobis ad me imitandum obstacula excusationis auferrem, 
 iibminosior vobis nasci volui, et tamen maximam libidinem meam 
 concessos fines nunquam transire permisi.” 
 
CHRIST OUR EXAMPLE 175 
 
 could follow. They felt Him to be in some for¬ 
 midable sense above them—teaching and working 
 with a quite extraordinary authority—drawing them 
 with a tremendous claim as from above—claiming, 
 controlling, saving, judging. About this there can 
 be no question, if the Gospels are in any sense 
 historical. And it is no use fashioning a Christ 
 of our own fancy. 
 
 We must not, of course, minimize the reality and 
 value of His human example. Certainly, as St. 
 Peter says, He left us an example that we should 
 follow in His steps. This cannot be too strongly 
 or constantly insisted upon, and we will come back 
 to it. But first of all let us think out the meaning 
 of this plea for an example on our own level. Let 
 us realize the limitations of mere example. The 
 mere example of one individual man upon his fellows 
 tells most when men are living close together under 
 similar conditions—as amongst the crew of a ship, 
 or the soldiers of a regiment, or the boys of a school, 
 or the members of a profession. Anything which 
 suggests difference of conditions weakens the force 
 of mere example and speedily annihilates it. The 
 example of a respectable clergyman’s temperance 
 has no effect upon a man living in an uncomfort¬ 
 able cottage with no refuge but the public-house. 
 Difference of race, again, or remoteness of time, 
 almost at once destroys the force of example. An 
 Englishman is not commonly much impressed by 
 the hardness of ancient Spartans or the asceticism 
 of Indian fakirs. Once again the strong sense of 
 what we call genius in another, in proportion to the 
 feeling of uniqueness which it arouses in us, destroys 
 the appeal of his example. In all these ways, it must 
 be acknowledged, the mere example of a Christ who 
 lived nearly two thousand years ago in remote 
 Syria, under conditions utterly unlike ours—one, 
 moreover, who was on all showing a supreme moral 
 
176 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 genius would have little effect on us to-day, and 
 indeed would hardly have survived in the memory 
 of men but as a remote legend. 
 
 In fact, if you look to the men of supreme moral 
 and religious influence in our race, you find that 
 this influence has depended upon their pow T er of 
 perpetuating themselves in some sort of institution 
 or system of teaching and discipline. The Buddha 
 perpetuated himself in “ the way ” which he taught 
 —the way of escape into the ultimate Nirvana out 
 ox the endless and weary succession of existences ; 
 and the success of his method for those who accept 
 
 his premiss that life is an evil to be escaped from_ 
 
 has been made evident dowm the generations in 
 constant examples. What we have to take note of 
 in the case of our Lord is the actual manner in which 
 his example and teaching were in fact perpetuated, 
 and we shall be astonished, and perhaps at first 
 irritated, to find how in fact it w T as the belief in Him 
 as a person essentially superhuman and divine which 
 alone enabled His influence to become permanently 
 powerful. J 
 
 As a teacher, living as man among men, it ap¬ 
 peared that neither His teaching nor His example 
 was effective with His first disciples. He w r as alto¬ 
 gether too high for them—too unworldly. They 
 failed under the strain He laid upon them and de¬ 
 serted Him. What recovered them was their hardly 
 won faith in His resurrection, which convinced them 
 of His supernatural Sonship, and their consciousness 
 of the divine Spirit—His Father’s Spirit and His 
 own received as a distinctive gift at a memorable 
 moment. Thereby they realized Christ as their 
 living Lord who from heaven was inspiring, guiding, 
 governing and enriching them with an inward life ; in 
 virtue of which His outward example, their memory 
 of which is recorded in the Gospels, became some¬ 
 thing quite different from the mere example of a 
 
CHRIST IN US 
 
 177 
 
 departed hero. The example living in their memory 
 was the pattern of humanity, or “ the way,” in 
 accordance with which He was moulding them from 
 heaven by His Spirit. It was only “ in Christ ” that 
 they could follow Christ. But it was only because 
 He was something more than man—something in 
 respect of which they would have felt it madness to 
 equal themselves with Him—that He could be living 
 in them and they in Him—that He could thus have 
 access to their inmost souls, and remake them, and 
 “ dwell in their hearts by faith.” 
 
 And this has been true for all successive generations 
 of Christians. The example of Christ has been of 
 supreme importance. He called Himself the Son of 
 Man, or the Man. That pattern of glorious man¬ 
 hood—glorious in all its relations, Godward and man- 
 ward, and not least in its matchless self-control— 
 has appealed to men in each successive generation 
 as presenting an ideal before which all cynicism is 
 put to flight. Here is the man whose life is alto¬ 
 gether worthy of fullest admiration. If He is the 
 real man, there remains no manner of doubt in our 
 hearts that the life of a man, even under extremest 
 conditions of failure and suffering, is altogether worth 
 living. But in its supreme perfection it would seem 
 to us, as it seemed to the first disciples, an example 
 of despair. It postulates for life forces and powers 
 which we seem to lack. And, in fact, He appears 
 in the Gospels as claiming a mastery over other 
 men’s lives which it is not for a mere man to claim. 
 But He did not end by setting an example. He 
 died, but He is still alive. That is the point of 
 the Christian belief. It concerns “one Jesus who 
 was dead, whom Paul,” and all Christians since, have 
 “ affirmed to be alive.” Yes, alive in the heavens— 
 the same Son of God who came down from heaven 
 to redeem our nature from within by Himself taking 
 it, and exalting it into the glory of God ; and who 
 
178 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 thus alive in the heavens is alive in us also by His 
 Spirit, moulding us inwardly into the pattern of the 
 life He showed us outwardly in word and work. 
 There is no possibility of question that this is the 
 way in which Christ’s example has in fact appealed 
 to men in the succession of generations. They have 
 studied 44 the life,” 44 the way,” in the pages of the 
 Gospel, as described in His words and as lived in 
 His conduct, and also as reflected in countless saints 
 who were His true disciples ; and however low r the 
 level at which they may have started to become His 
 disciples and to imitate Him, however degraded and 
 polluted they have felt their manhood to be, they 
 have not despaired because they believed in Him, 
 not only as their pattern of manhood, but as their 
 Redeemer, in whose name they were set free from all 
 the guilt of the past and were granted that incom¬ 
 parable blessing, the forgiveness of their sins—that 
 is, the opportunity constantly renewed of a fresh 
 start free from all the guilt and burden of the past— 
 and also that without which example and absolution 
 would have been alike useless—the gift of the Spirit, 
 the Spirit of His Father and His own Spirit, poured 
 into them out of His heavenly manhood to purge them 
 and strengthen them and renew them inwardly after 
 the pattern which in His human life He had shown 
 them outwardly. No one can doubt that that has 
 been the way in which Christ has exerted His in¬ 
 fluence and made His example effective down the 
 centuries like the example of no other man. This 
 sort of influence has a sort of analogy in the influence 
 of other men over their fellows. But in His case 
 there has been an 44 influence ” or 44 inflowing ” of 
 Him into all those who have accepted Him as their 
 Master which has been quite distinctive. Of no mere 
 man could it be said that he could thus gain effective 
 entry into the very centre of the personalities of all 
 other men, so as to renew them from the roots of 
 
THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 179 
 
 their being by his spirit, and make them 44 in 
 him ” new men. That is a recreative act which, 
 in the full sense in which it has been experienced 
 from the first, can be assigned to none other than 
 Him 44 in whom we live .and move and are.” 
 
 Unless I am very much mistaken, there is singu¬ 
 larly prevalent to-dav, especially in the English- 
 speaking world, what is, I am persuaded, at the 
 bottom an irrational pride—the sort of pride which 
 is rooted in a wholly false view of human independ¬ 
 ence—which is only willing to accept a doctrine of 
 incarnation if it be understood as the incarnation of 
 God in humanity at large, of which the incarnation 
 in Christ is only what I may call the foremost speci¬ 
 men. According to this presentation, I am to see in 
 Christ what I have it in me to become. He demon¬ 
 strates the power of the divine Spirit in humanity 
 in a sense which, without Him, I should never per¬ 
 haps have suspected, but which, once instructed by 
 Him, I can realize in myself without needing from 
 Him anything but the light of His example. He 
 says to us, in effect, 44 You can all be Christs like 
 me, if you will.” But this is the most astonishingly 
 imhistorical representation. I do not mean merely 
 that the matter is not so represented in the New 
 Testament, but that it has not so been realized in 
 Christian experience. 
 
 However, the highest type of Christian experience 
 may be found in the New Testament. And what 
 we find there does, to a degree which startles us, 
 negate the manner of thinking and speaking which 
 I have just tried to describe. 
 
 In the New Testament there is scarcely a hint to 
 be found of a universal gift of the Spirit of God to 
 men because they are men. 1 There is suggested a 
 
 1 James iv 5 is, of course, very difficult. If it means “ He [God] 
 jealously longs for the spirit which He [at our original creation, 
 when He breathed into our nostrils the breath of life] caused to 
 
180 
 
 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 universal presence to all men of the divine Light 
 which is the Word of God, 1 but the Spirit, who makes 
 the light effectual, is, as a matter of fact, represented 
 as given only through the Risen Christ to those who 
 believe in Him, and as a gift communicated at a 
 definable moment. Let us confine ourselves to the 
 historical or literary facts for the present. I am 
 not saying that the New Testament excludes the 
 idea that the Holy Spirit is in such sense “ the 
 giver of life,” as that wherever life is, and especially 
 wherever rational and moral life is, He Himself must 
 be. This is indeed suggested in the Old Testament. 
 There God’s spirit or breath is in all things and 
 inspires the natural gifts of all men, as well as the 
 special endowments of the prophets. As the Book 
 of Wisdom says, “ the spirit of the Lord filleth the 
 world.” And I think the orthodox Christian theology 
 of the Holy Trinity makes such an assumption in¬ 
 evitable. Thus we are not to agree with Origen, 
 who would seemingly have actually limited the 
 activity of the Holy spirit within the circle of the 
 saints,” or the believing Church. It is not for us 
 so to limit God’s activity. The Spirit, like the wind 
 which represents Him, “ bloweth where it listeth. ’ 
 Nevertheless, from end to end of the New Testament 
 the gift of the Spirit is only contemplated first as 
 given to John the Baptist, the prophet who is to 
 prepare for Christ, 2 then as especially the agent 
 in the conception of Christ, 3 then as imparted to 
 Christ for the fulfilment of His mission, 4 and, finally, 
 as to be expected from Him and as actually poured 
 out by Him upon those who believe in Him. Thus 
 in the Gospels men are expected to see in Christ the 
 action of the Holy Spirit, and it is blasphemy against 
 
 dwell in us,” as Dr. Hort interprets, then there is no reference here 
 to anything but the spirit of man, which is distinct from the Spirit 
 of God. 
 
 1 John i 9. 2 Luke i 15, also ii 25 ff. to Simeon. 
 
 3 Luke i 35. 4 Mark i 10. 
 
THE SPIRIT MEDIATED BY CHRIST 181 
 
 the Spirit to attribute His works to the evil one. 
 And the disciples are to expect the Spirit as a future 
 endowment which they have not yet received. This, 
 of course, is in a very marked way the teaching 
 of the Fourth Gospel : 44 The Spirit was not yet 
 (given), because Jesus was not yet glorified.” 1 “ My 
 
 Father will give you another helper in my name,” or 
 “ I will send him unto you.” 2 But it is equally the 
 teaching of St. Luke at the beginning of the Acts. 
 There the disciples are anxiously to await a gift 
 which they have not yet received, and the gift is 
 represented as communicated in an objective form 
 under memorable conditions on the day of Pentecost . 
 Afterwards, also, the gift appears as given in an 
 objective manner in baptism and the laying on 
 of hands. 3 The disciples of John the Baptist 
 at Ephesus need to be instructed about the gift 
 of the Holy Ghost and to receive Him in due 
 manner. 4 
 
 Even the saintly Roman soldier Cornelius, with the 
 pious group around him, though his prayers and alms 
 have already gained him acceptance with God, and 
 though God makes evident by a visible manifestation 
 that He has given him His Spirit, must receive at 
 least the outward form of baptism. 5 So important 
 it is to make it evident that the New Israel only, 
 the Church of Jesus Christ, is the home or sphere 
 of the Spirit. I suppose that if you had asked a 
 New Testament disciple what it is to be a Christian, 
 he would have given one of two replies—either that 
 a Christian is one who believes that Jesus is Lord 
 or that he is one who has 44 received the Spirit ” 
 of God. St. Paul uses the phrase as equivalent to 
 being a Christian. 44 Received ye the Spirit,” he 
 asks, 44 by the works of the law or by the hearing 
 of faith ? ” It is not possible to state too strongly 
 
 1 John vii 39. 2 John xiv 16, xv 26. 
 
 3 Acts viii 17-18. 4 xix 1-6. 5 Acts x 24-47. 
 
182 
 
 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 that the Spirit is, in the New Testament, regarded 
 as possessing the Church, and as not to be expected 
 or looked for except as received from Christ and 
 within the membership of His society. 
 
 Let us then sum the matter up. Thank God the 
 New Testament sets no limit to the activity of the 
 divine Spirit. Nay, it may truly be said that it is 
 blasphemy against the Spirit to deny His activity 
 wherever we see active goodness among men. But it 
 is true that the New Testament deliberately concen¬ 
 trates our attention upon the new gift of the Spirit 
 as given in Christ and through Christ. It tells us 
 that all that we see in the man Christ is to be made 
 common to all men of good will—but it adds 44 in 
 Christ ” and 44 through Christ.” It addresses man¬ 
 kind as needing to be redeemed, and the effective 
 evidence of such redemption is found in the gift 
 of the Spirit communicated to them as a newly- 
 given gift from Christ. We are all to be anointed by 
 the same Spirit which possessed Him—we are all 
 (if you will) to be Christs—but it is not as individuals 
 in our own right. That right we are left to suppose 
 we have lost and can only recover in Christ. 1 It is 
 idle to dispute that this is the message of the Bible. 
 Thus there is truly to be an incarnation of God in 
 humanity, but it is in the New Humanity, through 
 Christ, by deliberate faith and conscious incorpora¬ 
 tion into His society. That is the message declared 
 and covenanted and open. What lies in the secret 
 counsels of God for humanity beyond the area of 
 this message, or where the message has been mis¬ 
 understood because misdelivered, is not part of the 
 message, though it may be part of the hope of the 
 human heart which has been taught in Christ that 
 God is justice and love, and that there is no limit to 
 His love. 
 
 1 John i 12, “As many as received him, to them gave he the 
 right to become children of God.” 
 
SUPPOSED FAULTS IN CHRIST 183 
 
 Then to wind all this up. I think no one who 
 considers how the Catholic Church has blurred the 
 full message of Christ’s humanity and His human 
 example of which we shall have sad occasion to 
 speak—can be anyway surprised if such unfaithful¬ 
 ness has led to violent reactions of feeling against 
 the Church and the message of the Church. But 
 after all, what we want to know is the truth about 
 the Christian message : and also we make an eager 
 appeal to the specifically Christian experience. Of 
 the Christian message then as the New Testament 
 expounds it and as Christian experience over the 
 centuries has on the whole confirmed it, 1 say this 
 without hesitation: that it does not proclaim a 
 Christ whose human example would have sufficed 
 for us : or a Christ who is only a specimen of the 
 forces of manhood which we all already carry within 
 ourselves. It proclaims Christ the * Man * indeed, 
 but the man whom we need as our saviour as well as 
 our example—whom we need to make us new men, 
 through faith in Him and by the receiving of His 
 Spirit, in such a way as is inconceivable unless He 
 is all along something much more than man. So 
 that the very features of the Person which seem 
 to remove His example furthest from us appear at 
 the last as the very conditions of its being brought 
 close to us in permanently effective power. 
 
 IV 
 
 There is another kind of objection to the idea or 
 doctrine of Christ as really the manifestation of God 
 in manhood, on the ground of doubts about His 
 moral perfection. I am sure, for instance, that there 
 are a good many honest people who feel that our 
 Lord’s tremendous denunciations of the scribes and 
 Pharisees 1 are indiscriminating and violent—that 
 1 Matt, xxii, Mark xii 38-40, Luke xx 45-7. 
 
184 
 
 IS TIIE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 they would indeed be in the spirit of the Old Testa¬ 
 ment, but that, if Christ really uttered them, they 
 were not worthy of Him. 
 
 Again, the “ cursing of the barren fig-tree,” taken 
 as it stands in Mark, is described as expressing a 
 spirit of sudden anger, unreasoning and revengeful; 
 so that the critics, who are very skilful in getting 
 rid of what they do not like, very commonly seek to 
 exclude it as a historical incident from the narrative, 
 and represent it as a parable misunderstood. I do 
 not think they are successful. For it stands a very 
 vividly described incident in St. Mark’s narrative, 
 with details which seem singularly precise and con¬ 
 vincing. 1 It is true that St. Mark’s explanatory 
 phrase, “ for the time of figs was not yet,” appears 
 to be misleading. What our Lord was apparently 
 expecting to feed upon was the green knops (the 
 “ green figs ” of Cant, ii 13) which appear on the 
 fig-tree before the leaves, and without which any 
 leafy fig-tree will, of course, be barren for the year. 
 These green knops are, we are informed, still 
 commonly eaten in Palestine. Not finding any, 
 our Lord discerned in the fig-tree the type of an 
 outward show of life (the leaves) which is in fact 
 unfruitful, and He pronounced a solemn doom on 
 this deceitful show. It seems to me a miracle of 
 judgment very penetrating in its significance. I do 
 not feel the least inclined either to doubt the fact 
 or to apologize for it. 
 
 As to the denunciations of the scribes and Pharisees, 
 they may perhaps have been directed, not against 
 all the scribes and Pharisees, but against a certain 
 class or section of them. But if the Gospels and 
 St. Paul represent the historical situation with any 
 fidelity, these rigid maintainers of Jewish orthodoxy 
 and tradition were as a class deeply corrupted by 
 formalism, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and self- 
 
 1 Mark xi 12 ft, 20 ff. 
 
CHRIST’S SEVERE JUDGMENTS 185 
 
 seeking. 1 Our Lord does not appear anywhere to 
 have denounced the principle of ecclesiastical 
 authority or ceremonial observance—to this question 
 we will come back in the next volume—but, if we 
 consider what the characteristic vices of ecclesiastical 
 authority have been in many ages when the Church 
 was seemingly powerful, and the awful hindrance 
 to the spiritual influence of Christ’s religion which 
 these characteristic vices of ecclesiastics have proved 
 themselves to be, we shall surely feel that the Master 
 of human life, who discerned so deeply its tendencies 
 and dangers, had good cause to utter even the 
 tremendous denunciations which are ascribed to 
 Him of pride and selfishness parading itself in the 
 guise of religion. Again I cannot apologize or 
 explain away. I know indeed that there is a spirit 
 in our age which would like to eliminate out of its 
 conception of God the whole element of fiery indig¬ 
 nation, whether against false religion or any other 
 kind of sin. 44 I believe,” writes one of our 
 modernists, 44 that we shall come to see that it is 
 precisely those contemporary ideas of the wrath of 
 God and His ultimate avenging activity as destroy¬ 
 ing Judge, which are the unauthentic elements in 
 the teaching ascribed to Jesus.” 2 Language like 
 this, I confess, makes me shiver. I feel sure in my 
 conscience that if God is really as the prophets 
 disclose Him, and sin is essentially what the Bible 
 represents it as being—and the deepest spiritual 
 experience of Christendom has given its assent to 
 the representation—the wrath of God against sin 
 and the awfulness of final judgment remain a quite 
 essential and permanent element of 44 the truth as 
 it is in Jesus.” Thus I read our Lord’s tremendous 
 44 dooms ” with awe and terror indeed, but not 
 
 1 See Rom. ii 17-23, and, besides the passages in the note on 
 p. 183, Luke xvi 14. 
 
 2 Dr. Emmet in the Modern Churchman, p. 221. 
 
186 
 
 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 with any expectation that the enlightened con¬ 
 science of men will ever have cause to wish them 
 away. Without them the picture of Jesus would 
 fail altogether to represent the whole truth about 
 God. 
 
 It is, of course, sometimes pleaded that we have 
 no right to claim for our Lord moral perfection in 
 the fullest sense—that in fact He disclaimed such 
 goodness when He said to the young man “ Why 
 callest thou me good ? None is good save one, 
 even God.” 1 But it is, I think, certainly a mistake 
 so to interpret His words. In the Gospels generally 
 our Lord seems to present Himself to Llis disciples 
 as an infallible guide and teacher and pattern. 
 There is not in all our Lord’s words (other than the 
 words in question) the slightest sign of the conscious¬ 
 ness of sin or of the fear of going wrong. Certainly 
 He cannot have disclaimed goodness, even in the 
 highest sense, with any kind of consistency. And 
 the saying in question admits of a very natural and 
 suggestive interpretation. This young man came in 
 a spirit that was both self-complacent and flatter¬ 
 ing. Doubtless he both wanted to make himself 
 agreeable and to receive commendation. It was a 
 cheap thing to say “ Good Master,” and our Lord 
 pulls him up. “ Young man, think what goodness 
 means when you call me good.” I do not think 
 our Lord either disclaims goodness, nor, on the other 
 hand, that He means, as some orthodox com¬ 
 mentators have suggested, that He is good because 
 He is God. I think He simply means that the 
 goodness the young man is in search of is to be 
 found in God only, and he is not to give flattering 
 titles to men. 
 
 There are at least three occasions where our 
 Lord appears in the Gospels as simply challenging 
 
 1 St. Mark x 18 and Luke xviii 18. St. Matthew seems to 
 tone the saying down (xix 17). 
 
HE DOES NOT DISCLAIM GOODNESS 187 
 
 men to think before they speak—not to make glib 
 statements, or use convenient arguments which 
 intellectual or moral consistency ought to make 
 them shrink from. Thus He confronts the glib 
 and constant statement of the scribes, that the 
 Christ was to be the son of David 1 with the language 
 of the psalm, held to be David’s, where he appears 
 to address the future Christ as Lord, and He asks 
 how David could call His future son his “ Lord.” 
 I do not think it is at all necessary to suppose that 
 Christ was here making any pronouncement on the 
 authorship of the psalm. He was simply pressing 
 the scribes with the duty of thinking before they 
 spoke-—His meaning being that their account of 
 the Christ was inadequate in the light of their own 
 Scriptures. So in the same way we should interpret 
 the strange passage, referred to earlier, in St. John, 2 
 where our Lord, so contrary to His general teach¬ 
 ing in this Gospel—which is quite unmistakable-— 
 appears to minimize the meaning of the title “ Son 
 of God.” He seems to have meant that, at least in 
 some sense, His opponents must recognize its legiti¬ 
 macy in the case of anyone who represents in any 
 way the authority of God. In all these cases 
 mistaken conclusions have been drawn from the 
 words of Jesus-—as that He did not claim goodness, 
 or that He disowned sonship to David, or that He 
 meant little by calling Himself Son of God. These 
 conclusions are shown to be mistaken by the general 
 sense of His teaching. What He was doing in these 
 cases was to insist on men’s thinking before they 
 spoke-—thinking whether a convenient argument or 
 lightly uttered word was not really incompatible 
 with what intellectual consistency or moral serious¬ 
 ness would force them to acknowledge. And this 
 is surely a very important lesson. 
 
 But we return to our main thesis. It is indeed 
 
 2 John x 3G. See above, pp. 5-6. 
 
 1 Mark xii 35. 
 
188 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 the case that we could hardly believe the doctrine of 
 the Incarnation, if we saw evidence of hasty passion 
 and moral imperfection in Jesus, or if He appeared 
 to have confessed to being deficient in goodness. 
 But such evidences and confessions are not really 
 to be found. The character of Jesus, as the Gospels 
 descrioe Him, remains in the moral region supreme 
 and perfect—so impressive, I think, in its majesty, 
 that it hushes in our minds the first suggestions of 
 criticism. 
 
 V 
 
 , Finally we have the suggestion to consider, that 
 Jesus showed Himself in certain respects unmistak¬ 
 ably deluded—the victim of current errors. Without 
 asking what kind of belief concerning Jesus would 
 be compatible with the acceptance of such a sug¬ 
 gestion, let us first of all consider carefully and 
 frankly the facts of the case. 
 
 We are bound to recognize in Jesus a real limita¬ 
 tion of knowledge. He Himself—in a saying which 
 cannot be supposed to have been invented for Him. 
 but which is assuredly authentic—declared Himself 
 ignorant of the day and hour of the end of the world. 
 He had no map of the future spread before His eyes. 
 He, the Son of God—at least in His mortal life— 
 was limited in knowledge and knew His limitation. 
 Thus there is no sign whatever that Fie transcended 
 the knowledge of natural things common to His 
 Palestinian contemporaries. Also, there is no pre¬ 
 tension of knowledge on any such subject. There 
 is in His teaching none of the 44 science falsely so- 
 called, which abounds in the contemporary apoca¬ 
 lypses. He cannot be said to have given any teaching 
 at all on any subject except on the great spiritual 
 subjects. And on these He seems to speak with a 
 sense of full authority amounting to infallibility. 
 
HIS SUPPOSED DELUSIONS 
 
 189 
 
 I cannot resist that impression. “ Verily. I say 
 unto you. 5 ’ That is enough. 1 
 
 But there are certain points on which our Lord 
 is commonly supposed to have given positive teaching 
 which was in fact erroneous. 
 
 1. He is supposed to have proclaimed His own 
 immediate coming in glory and the end of “ this 
 world.' 5 I have dealt with this point at length. 2 
 The conclusion which the facts seem to me to warrant 
 is that our Lord expressly disclaimed knowledge of 
 the time and season of the end. and expressly warned 
 His disciples against supposing that God intended 
 such knowledge for them, though His disciples, or 
 some of them, misunderstood Him. There is no 
 real warrant for ascribing delusion to our Lord's 
 mind on the subject. Under this head no more 
 will be said here. 
 
 2. He is perceived to have shared the current 
 belief in devils and diabolic possession ; and this, 
 if is taken for granted, was no more than a super¬ 
 stition which we have outgrown. 
 
 Now I am not disposed to deny that in this matter 
 also there may have been occasional misunder¬ 
 standings on the part of His disciples. As I read 
 the account of the healing of the Gadarene, or 
 Gerasine, demoniac in St. Mark (Mark v 1-17), it 
 suggests itself somewhat readily that the supposed 
 permission given by Jesus for the entry of the 
 “ legion 55 of demons into the swine may have been 
 a misinterpretation on the part of the disciples. 
 And sometimes, when our Lord is speaking of evil 
 spirits, He undoubtedly uses metaphorical language. 3 
 But I think it is quite certain that He did believe 
 in evil and in good spirits, and in their activity 
 among men; arid not only did He believe this, but 
 
 1 On our Lord’s use of “Amen,” see Dalman, Words of Jesus , 
 pp. 226 ff. 
 
 2 Chap. V. 3 E‘9' Luke xi 24-7. 
 
190 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 He made it a quite distinct element in His teaching. 
 He would have His disciples look out upon the world 
 as a scene in which the conflict of good and evil 
 is not merely carried on among men. Behind the 
 activities of bad men He sees an awful invisible 
 agency organizing and maintaining a kingdom of 
 evil and enslaving the souls of men. 44 An enemy 
 hath done this ”—an evil will or army of wills, set 
 to thwart the good purpose of God . 1 And in various 
 widespread kinds of disease He recognized evil 
 spirits as possessing men and women, and constantly 
 dealt with them accordingly. 
 
 But have we the right to class all this as delusions 
 which we have outgrown ? Certainly, as to the 
 existence of spirits and their activity among men 
 there has been a very widespread assent given by 
 the conscience of men, and of men of the profoundest 
 spiritual insight. The testimony of such a man 
 as Frederick Denison Maurice is very impressive . 2 
 I do not think our knowledge authorizes any denial 
 of it. It seems to me that not only the personal 
 experience of individual souls but the spectacle of 
 the organization and continuity of evil influences in 
 the world, suggests the truth of the explanation 
 which our Lord certainly adopted as His own. And 
 as to the reality of diabolic possession, I have been 
 again and again deeply impressed by the testimony 
 of missionaries in non-Christian countries, that they 
 are not able to doubt it. 44 It ma}^ or may not 
 exist in England,” they say, 44 but it certainly 
 exists in India or China or Africa.” 
 
 On the whole—in view of the deep mystery of 
 evil in the world—I fail to see what right men have 
 to treat the belief in evil spirits and their activity, 
 
 1 See Mark iii 22—30 ; Luke xi .17—26 (the obvious metaphors 
 do not conceal the also obvious intention of teaching truth) ; Matt, 
 xiii 28 ; Luke x 18, xiii 16, xxii 31, etc. 
 
 2 See my St. John's Epistles, pp. 145 ff. 
 
HIS TEACHING ABOUT THE O. T. 
 
 191 
 
 or the belief in good spirits or angels, as error and 
 delusion, or as childish fancy which the mature 
 mind outgrows. But one point must be kept steadily 
 in view. The whole world in our Lord’s time, and 
 Palestine not less than other districts, was weighed 
 down by the terror of evil spirits, just as a great 
 part of the world is to-day. Jesus no doubt affirmed 
 that they really existed and were the cause of 
 numberless moral and physical evils. But He would 
 not suffer men to remain in dread of them. His 
 whole teaching w r as of redemption. If men would 
 trust God, they could be free—free from the fear 
 of evil spirits and from the fear of death. And He 
 was come to lead them to this liberty. As He is 
 recorded to have said to the Seventy : “I beheld 
 Satan fallen as lightning from heaven. Behold, 
 I have given you authority to tread upon serpents 
 and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy : 
 and nothing shall in any wise hurt you.” 1 No 
 doubt it was this sense of victory over the powers 
 of evil among Christians which, as much as anything, 
 promoted the spread of the Church. The character¬ 
 istic of Christians should not be their belief in the 
 activity of evil spirits, but their belief that they 
 are impotent against the Redeemer of men. 
 
 3. There is lastly the assertion to be considered 
 that our Lord gave positive teaching about the Old 
 Testament which identifies Him with traditional 
 ideas about that literature which modern critical 
 science has shown to be untrue. I think this is an 
 exaggeration. On the whole our Lord’s teaching 
 about the Old Testament is most remarkable for its 
 profound spiritual truth. No doubt, as He spoke 
 of the sun rising, so He spoke of the Books of 
 the Law as by Moses and the Psalter as by David, 
 and drew lessons from the narratives without any 
 question being raised of their historical character. 
 
 1 Luke x 18-19. 
 
192 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 It would have been impossible to do otherwise, if 
 lie was freely to use human language intelligible 
 to the people of Galilee or the Rabbis of Jerusalem. 
 I should suppose that He did not know what the 
 progress of critical science has made fairly evident 
 to us, but I should suppose also that there was in 
 Elis own consciousness a great distinction clearly 
 present between what Tie did know—the spiritual 
 content of Elis message—and all the popular assump¬ 
 tions of knowledge on matters which were not within 
 His scope. On matters not within the scope of His 
 mission, He appears as giving no positive teaching 
 at all. 
 
 The only occasion on which it seems to me that 
 it can be- plausibly pleaded that He laid stress upon 
 a question of authorship or literary character in 
 books of the Bible was in His argument about Ps. cx. 
 On that occasion the verbal difference between the 
 narratives of the three Evangelists makes it evident 
 that we cannot rely on having the precise words of 
 Christ. On the other hand His purpose is quite 
 plain. It is not, as some moderns would have us 
 believe, to repudiate the Davidic descent of the 
 Christ, but to make it plain that the Scribes, 
 if they were true to their accepted principles, would 
 not be able to speak as if the Christ was to be the 
 Son of David and nothing more. They must recog¬ 
 nize Him as David’s Lord as well as David’s Son. 
 
 I think it is quite enough for the fair interpretation 
 of the passage to represent our Lord as confronting 
 the Scribes with the requirements of their own lore, 
 without laying any stress on it Himself. I have 
 already pointed out that this sort of argumentum 
 ad hominem appears to have been characteristic of 
 our Lord. I should like to repeat that I believe 
 there must have been in His own consciousness 
 a vast region of common assumptions which He was 
 content to take for granted without confusing them 
 
REPLIES TO OBJECTIONS 
 
 193 
 
 with the things which He knew J Thus as concerns 
 the argument about Ps. cx, I do not think we are 
 compelled either to force men in the name of Jesus 
 to accept a theory of authorship which seems to us 
 very improbable, or to declare Christ mistaken. 
 It belonged to a region of knowledge in which He 
 knew that He had no commission, and in which 
 knowledge beyond that of His contemporaries 
 would, in fact, not have helped but hindered His 
 mission. 
 
 As to the bearing of our Lord’s limited human 
 knowledge on the theory of the Incarnation, more 
 will be said in the next chapter. Here I want only 
 to draw a distinction, which I think the facts warrant, 
 between limitation of knowledge which must be 
 acknowledged in Him and anything which can be 
 called delusion or the teaching of error, of which I 
 cannot see the traces. ♦ 
 
 I know there are many good men who would say 
 that we can believe that our Lord was really the 
 victim of certain current delusions and taught in 
 accordance with these delusions, without affecting 
 our faith in the reality of the Incarnation as St. Paul 
 and St. John believed it. Here I admit I stumble. 
 But I need not pursue the question, because I dis¬ 
 pute the premiss. I see no positive delusion or error 
 in the teaching of Jesus. The truth of what He can 
 fairly be said to have taught seems to me to stand 
 secure, in spite of all the developments of science and 
 changes of human circumstance. 
 
 I have been seeking in this chapter only to show 
 what seems to me the essential weakness and one¬ 
 sidedness of each of the various humanitarian 
 estimates of Christ, and to obviate the objections 
 which are made against the doctrine of His person 
 as St. Paul and St. John present it to us. There is 
 
 1 On the limitations of our Lord’s knowledge within the sphere 
 of His mortal life as man, see below, pp. 225 It'. 
 
194 
 
 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE 
 
 always, however, something unsatisfactory about the 
 result of saying no to a string of objections. Each 
 answer may seem in turn fairly satisfactory, but 
 there remains the sense that there is or may be 
 44 something in them.” And, in fact, on a subject 
 so great and mysterious as the person of Christ, it 
 is absurd to suppose that everything will be clear. 
 I have done my best with each of the objections in 
 turn, and I am not without hope that the answer 
 in each case will be felt to be stronger than the 
 objection. But it is quite certain that it is not 
 by any such negative process that any real con¬ 
 viction will be won. The real conviction must come 
 from the study of the positive picture in the Gospels. 
 It must be the gradually growing assurance that 
 this picture is not one which can be due to human 
 invention or imagination. It must overwhelm us 
 with the sense of its truth, and with the sense that 
 only the doctrine of the Incarnation can really 
 interpret it or account for it. And toward this 
 sort of conviction the removal of objections and the 
 consideration of particular literary problems only 
 make a very partial contribution. The conviction 
 itself must be of the sort suggested by Jesus Himself 
 when He said of Peter’s first conviction of His 
 Messiahship : 44 Flesh and blood hath not revealed 
 it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven,” 
 and of the sort which St. Paul meant when he said, 
 44 No man can say Jesus is Lord but in the Holy 
 Spirit.” 
 
 Certainly it is not the case that our deepest and 
 most important convictions are those which involve 
 least difficulty, or those against wffiich fewest ob¬ 
 jections can be plausibly urged. Certainly also, as 
 concerns the faith in Christ’s person, the Evangelists 
 do not, on the vffiole, give us the impression that they 
 sought to remove difficulties for faith out of their 
 records. On the wffiole they give us the impression 
 
THE GROUND OF CONVICTION 195 
 
 of candour and naivete in a high degree. It is not 
 pleaded therefore that there are no difficulties about 
 the traditional faith in Christ. What is pleaded is 
 that, if all the facts are frankly faced, the only con 
 ception which adequately accounts for them is the 
 conception which the first Church was led to form— 
 the conception of the incarnation of the Son of God 
 —the doctrine of “ the Word made flesh.” 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE DEFINITIONS OF THE COUNCILS CONCERNING 
 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 
 
 We have been carefully reviewing the New Testa¬ 
 ment, and we have seen good reason for reaching 
 the conclusion that only the conception of Jesus 
 as the eternal Son of God incarnate is adequate to 
 account for the facts of the case—that is especially 
 the spiritual authority claimed and exercised by 
 Him, which so plainly passes the limits of legitimate 
 human influence, and His own occasional utterances 
 about Himself: or, to view the matter from the 
 side of the disciples, the awestruck devotion passing 
 into worship which they experienced, and which 
 they expressed after the Resurrection by calling 
 their Master 44 the Lord ” in a sense which certainly 
 involves divine sovereignty. And we noted how 
 carefully this conception of the Lord’s person was 
 expressed by St. Paul and St. John and in the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews upon the background of, 
 and consistently with, the traditional monotheism 
 of the Jews, and how it was apparently accepted 
 throughout the apostolic churches without con¬ 
 troversy or demur—how it is implied in the New 
 Testament writings where it is not explicit . 
 
 I 
 
 Merely considered as literary documents—the 
 earliest which remain to us concerning the origin 
 
 196 
 
THE N. T. IN THE CHURCH 197 
 
 of Christianity—the books of the New Testament, 
 or almost all of them, stand by themselves in 
 importance. They alone represent the creative 
 period of the Christian Church, in the sense that 
 all the later literature represents an attitude of 
 conscious dependence upon a message already 
 delivered. Thus (1) we know practically nothing 
 about our Lord except what we find in the New 
 Testament. Among the few sayings ascribed to 
 Him which are preserved outside the New Testament 
 only one has any bearing upon the question of His 
 person—that which occurs among His sayings in a 
 papyrus discovered not long ago on the site of 
 Oxyrhynchus in Egypt 1 : 41 Where one is alone, 
 so am I with him. Raise the stone and there you 
 will find me; cleave the wood and there am I too.” 
 This, if it were a genuine saying, would seem to 
 ascribe to our Lord Himself a declaration of His 
 universal presence in nature. But he would indeed 
 be bold who would assert its genuineness. As 
 Dr. Burkitt says, these brief sayings seem to repre¬ 
 sent an early Egyptian amalgamation of Hellenistic 
 and Christian ideas. And the apocryphal 44 Gospels ” 
 which remain to us serve no purpose at all except to 
 show how poor a thing the early Christian imagina¬ 
 tion proved to be when it sought to invent further 
 accounts of our Lord’s infancy or childhood, or of His 
 appearances after His resurrection. Again (2) there 
 is no other record of the first life of the Christian 
 Church except St. Luke’s in the Acts. (3) As to the 
 Epistles, it would be impossible to make a brief 
 statement about the signs of their early diffusion 
 and influence which would be sufficiently accurate. 
 Certainly some of St. Paul’s most characteristic 
 ideas as concerning justification by faith and the 
 relation of Grace to Law did not deeply influence 
 the early Church. Plainly they had not understood 
 1 See Grenfell and Hunt, Logia Iesou (1897), p. 12. 
 
 14 
 
198 
 
 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 him. But as far as the conception of Christ’s person 
 is concerned, the doctrine of the incarnation of the 
 pre-existent divine Son in Jesus the Christ is the 
 accepted tradition behind the earliest sub-apostolic 
 writers—Clement, Barnabas, Ignatius, Hermas and 
 the Apologists. 1 It holds the field before the Christian 
 Church had any New Testament. 
 
 This is what the ordinary Christian has not grasped. 
 The earliest Christian Church had a collection of 
 Holy Scriptures ; but it was simply the Old Testa¬ 
 ment canon. It is marvellous with what unanimity 
 the Gentiles, who very soon swallowed up the Jewish 
 element in the Church, accepted the Jewish founda¬ 
 tion and the Jewish Scriptures. It was long before 
 they collected their apostolic writings into a canon. 
 The history of this formation of a canon is obscure, 
 as very much is obscure in the earliest Christian 
 history. But by the middle of the second century 
 the four Gospels were practically canonized, and 
 doubtless from very early days the apostolic Epistles 
 were read in the churches to which they were addressed, 
 and began to pass from church to church. How¬ 
 ever, for the first hundred years of the Church’s 
 existence it had no Bible—no standard of reference 
 —except the Old Testament and “ the tradition ”•— 
 that is, the teaching first given in each local church 
 by its apostolic founder, fortified by the constant 
 intercourse between the different churches. We 
 have already seen that the writers of the Epistles 
 can take for granted a certain “ tradition ” as known 
 to those they wrote to ; and from what they take 
 for granted we can more or less gather the content 
 of the tradition in the different churches. 2 
 
 So equipped, then, the young churches started on 
 their career in a world singularly well adapted to 
 
 1 See appended note at the end of the chapter, p. 228, on Hermas, 
 the Didache, etc. 
 
 2 See Belief in God, pp. 207 ff. 
 
THE HELLENISTIC WORLD 199 
 
 puzzle and bewilder them. For the Hellenistic world 
 of the Roman Empire was in a state of intellectual 
 ferment. It was not a day of great philosophers, 
 but it was a day when intellectual interest was keen. 
 Men were widely seeking some doctrine of the 
 whence and the i i whither ”—some doctrine of 
 how the world which seems so evil was made and is 
 governed—and how the hapless soul of man is to 
 escape from the changes and chances of this mortal 
 life into some region of calm and security and 
 immortality. And the cities were full of teachers 
 and lecturers—who had each of them a 44 gnosis,” 
 a 44 knowledge ” or theory of his own, which was 
 either divulged to all who would come and listen, 
 or reserved as a secret for the initiates into this or 
 that 44 mystery-cult.” Christianity spread rapidly 
 because of its moral attractiveness, and especially 
 probably because of its practical spirit of brother¬ 
 hood. And there were multitudes of 44 gnostics ” 
 who were ready enough to adopt the Christian ideas 
 and sacred names, and adjust them to their cosmic 
 theories. So the Christian churches found them¬ 
 selves in a bewildering world of speculation and 
 of fusion between different systems and traditions, 
 and they were forced to clear up their ideas and to 
 know their own mind. Moreover, though Christianity 
 had qualities which made it popular, it had others 
 which rendered it profoundly unpopular. It was 
 suspected of being a secret society, disloyal to the 
 Emperor and the Empire. It was thus always 
 subject to persecution, because it was supposed to 
 encourage the dangerous elements in society. And 
 the darkest stories were told about its nocturnal 
 gatherings and secret orgies. So, not only was it 
 driven by its inner necessities to obtain a clear 
 account of its own doctrine, it was also driven to 
 explain itself to those outside, and to seek to remove 
 the suspicions of the authorities. This is the origin 
 
200 
 
 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 of the 44 Apologies,” and it is the apologists of the 
 second century who made the first attempt to present, 
 in terms acceptable and intelligible to the outside 
 world, an explanation of Christianity as a doctrine 
 and as a way of life. 
 
 Of these apologists let us take Justin Martyr as 
 an example. He had found his way to Christianity 
 through disappointment with the various philo¬ 
 sophies. But he retained his philosopher’s dress, 
 and would still present the doctrine in which he had 
 found satisfaction so as to be intelligible and accept¬ 
 able in the world that he had left. He made great 
 play with the Logos-doctrine, that is the doctrine 
 of the divine reason and energy immanent in the 
 universe, which, as we have seen, was the popular 
 idea of the day, and one which Christianity could 
 use in its own sense. But he is not by any means 
 a sure-footed theologian, and he falls into modes 
 of expression which he had much better not have 
 used, and which the Church after him had to re¬ 
 pudiate—as when he talked of the Word or Soil of 
 God as a “second God.” 1 So it was with the pious 
 but somewhat stupid prophet Hermas, of Rome. 
 He too means well and gives fervent exhortations 
 to his fellow Christians through the medium of his 
 visions. But again he is not at all a clear thinker, 
 and his phraseology is loose. But all the while the 
 Christian churches in the different cities were closely 
 knit together and intensely conscious of unity. 
 Thus as we survey the early period we seem to see 
 the Church as a whole standing before the world, 
 with grand moral steadfastness and an intense sense 
 of practical security in its tradition of religious 
 belief and practice, but subjected to an intellectual 
 cross-questioning of a very puzzling kind. Will you 
 admit this ? Do you believe that ? Will you 
 accept this suggestion ? Will you accommodate 
 
 1 See below, p. 242. 
 
MISTAKES OF EARLY WRITERS 201 
 
 yourself to that popular theory ? And the Church 
 made many mistakes in its haste, and corrected 
 them somewhat painfully at its leisure. Only 
 gradually and hardly did it fashion its terminology, 
 chiefly by the help of certain men who relatively 
 deserve the title of great men : Xrenaeus, 1 whose 
 intellectual perceptions were very sure ; Tertullian, 
 the African, who was much more brilliant and also 
 much more rhetorical and one-sided ; and Origen 
 of Alexandria, who, in spite of certain very precarious 
 speculations and excursions into the unknowable, 
 was the greatest of all. 
 
 Now it is obvious that this process cannot be 
 described in detail in one chapter in a small volume. 
 I propose to make only one or two general observa¬ 
 tions before we approach the age when the Church, 
 in formal councils, gave certain dogmatic definitions 
 of its doctrine of the person of Christ, to which we 
 must pay more precise attention. 
 
 The chief intellectual difficulties of the Church 
 were (1) with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity— 
 that is especially the relation of the Son, conceived 
 of as an eternal and divine person, to God the Father 
 and to the Holy Spirit. It was in this region that 
 it found the greatest difficulty in fixing its termin- 
 
 1 See on Irenaeus Belief in God, p. 47. Dr. Rashdall has 
 strangely accused him of what later was called Apollinarianism 
 (see Jesus Human and Divine, p. 13). But Irenaeus gives us an 
 account of our Lord’s temptations, according to which the divine 
 Word left the man or the manhood in Jesus to struggle and suffer 
 unaided in those dark hours, uanzp yap f\v dvOpanos, iva netpaodr), 
 outcvs na\ Kayos \ha do^aaOf}’ 7]<rvxK ovros H-*? rod \6yov 4v ra neipd^adat, 
 etc. (iii 19, 3). The phraseology may be easily criticized. ^ But it 
 certainly quite clearly means that Irenaeus thought of Christ as 
 having a properly human mind and will in which to be tempted 
 and struggle. Again, he says : “ He struggled and overcame : He 
 was man fighting for His fathers, and by His obedience pac ing the 
 debt of their disobedience. . . And in order to fight the human 
 fight fully “He passed through every age, from infancy to man¬ 
 hood, restoring to each communion with God ” (iii 18, 6, 7). He 
 was what He seemed—really man (ii 22). See my Dissertations, 
 pp. 108 ff. 1 cannot think w T hat caused Dr. Rashdall to make such 
 
 a statoment. 
 
202 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 ology: (2) in maintaining its hold on the real 
 humanity of Christ. The Hellenistic world was 
 still possessed with the sense that the source of 
 spiritual contamination for souls lay in the body 
 and the material world, and that the redemption 
 of the soul lay in its exemption from matter. And 
 following on this conception of matter as evil was 
 a horror of the idea of any real incarnation of God. 
 The Church could not remain uninfluenced by this 
 tendency. Thus we have a whole series of attempts— 
 Docetism and all the varieties of Gnosticism-—to 
 explain away the reality of Christ’s physical man¬ 
 hood ; and all such attempts appear to have met 
 with a great deal of sympathy and success. Ter- 
 tullian, looking back on the history of Gnosticism 
 at the beginning of the third century, can speak 
 of the dismal experience which the Church had 
 passed through ol seeing 44 one and another, the 
 most faithful, the wisest, the most experienced in 
 the Church, going over to the wrong side.” 1 Mean¬ 
 while there was comparatively little difficulty in 
 maintaining the originally divine nature or deity 
 of Christ. The popular instinct was all on this side. 
 
 The ablest opponent of this fundamental article 
 of faith was a brilliant but morally disagreeable 
 man—Paul, the bishop of Samosata, the favourite 
 and courtier of Zenobia, the Queen of Palmyra. 
 His doctrine is broadly the same as one we are 
 made familiar with to-day—that the person Jesus 
 did not exist till He was born of Mary ; that the 
 divine Word or Wisdom (conceived of as a quality 
 or aspect of God and not as a person) dwelt in him 
 as it dwells in other men, but in a unique degree, 
 so as gradually to deify him, till from having been 
 a man he became God. The support which Zenobia 
 gave her favourite made it very difficult for the 
 local episcopate to secure his deposition. But as 
 
 1 de praescr. 3. 
 
203 
 
 THE CLAIM OF THE COUNCILS 
 
 soon as Zenobia was defeated by the Emperor 
 Aurelian his strength was gone. It would seem 
 that he had no popular support in the Church, 
 though he became indirectly the parent of an in¬ 
 tellectual school of which Arianism was the fruit. 
 
 This very rough sketch must suffice to bring us 
 to the period of the Councils. The reason why we 
 must consider their dogmatic definitions is not because 
 they represent the action of ecclesiastical authority, 
 for with that at present we are not concerned, but 
 because, viewed historically, the teaching about the 
 person of Christ which we get in the New Testament, 
 and which we find from the first as the tradition 
 of the Church, seems here to reach its intellectual 
 expression, or at least its technical formulation. 
 That at least was the claim made for these formulas 
 
 _that they represented no new doctrine and no 
 
 addition to the doctrine of the Bible and the tradition 
 of the Church, but were simply its expression in an 
 articulate form with a view to defending it against 
 the invasion of proposed interpretations of Christ 
 which would have fundamentally destroyed the 
 Church tradition in its real meaning. The question 
 for us is whether this is really so, or whether, on the 
 other hand, the definitions are encumbrances which 
 the faith of the New Testament would have done 
 better to dispense with, or which, even if they were 
 once necessary, are now certainly to be regarded ns 
 antiquated expressions of the faith m terms of a 
 philosophy which has been long outgrown, and tor 
 which we can surely find better substitutes m the 
 language of modern thought, retaining the ancient 
 formulas only as historical records. This is a very 
 insistent question to-day ; and though we are not 
 yet in a position to pay regard to the question ot 
 ecclesiastical authority, we can discuss these formulas 
 very profitably on their merits. 
 
204 
 
 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 II 
 
 The first occasion for an ecclesiastical dogma was 
 found in the heresy of Arius. He was a clever and 
 influential parish priest of Alexandria who was one 
 of the numerous pupils of a famous teacher, Lucian 
 of Antioch, a martyr in the Diocletian persecution 
 (about 311), and also the parent of an Antiochene 
 school of teachers, some of whom it is fair to call 
 rationalists. Arius' theory of the person of our Lord 
 was a complex one, 1 but it is mainly with one startling 
 feature in it that the Church concerned itself. He 
 affirmed that Christ was indeed the incarnation of 
 a pre-existent being, the Word or Son, who was 
 44 divine ” in a popular sense and could be called 
 God and worshipped, but who was not really of the 
 nature oi God the Creator. He was a creature who 
 had a beginning from the divine will, and was the 
 created medium through whom God made other 
 creatures. Arius, like the rest of the Church, held 
 fast to the old doctrine of God the Creator derived 
 from the prophets of Israel. He was not a pantheist. 
 He xecognized that there can be no confusion between 
 the Creator and the creature. Christ in His original 
 nature must be either one or the other. He must 
 come from one side or other of the line which sepa¬ 
 rates the creative nature from the created. And 
 he quite definitely put Christ on the side of the 
 creatures. He was not of the nature of God, but He 
 came into existence by His will. Thus to account 
 for His exalted and quasi-divine character and posi¬ 
 tion, he would have had the Church regard Him 
 as something like a demigod or created God in His 
 first being, and as a divinized hero in the human . 
 
 1 It is carefully described by Hamack, Hist, of Dogma (Eng. 
 trans.), vol. iv, cap. i, and by Robertson in his admirable Intro¬ 
 duction to the translation of Athanasius in Nice?ie and Post Nicene 
 Fathers (Parkers, Oxford, 1892). 
 
AGAINST ARIUS 205 
 
 guise which he afterwards assumed. He seems to 
 have been a thorough intellectualist in love with 
 his own theory, and to have thrown himself zealously 
 and successfully into the task of propagating it. 
 Doubtless he saw in it a bridge by which the non- 
 Christian intellectual world could be persuaded to 
 accept Christ and worship Christ without abandoning 
 its own familiar categories. 
 
 This is what the Church saw from another point 
 of view—-that Arianism was a bold attempt to assi¬ 
 milate within the Christian Church the pagan idea 
 of a demigod. Arms’ first opponent was his bishop, 
 Alexander ; and it was the commotion stirred by 
 Alexander’s resistance to Arius which alarmed the 
 Emperor Constantine—persuaded that this was merely 
 a question of w^ords, and anxious above all things to 
 promote the peace of the Church in which he had 
 recently learned to see the hope of the empire. This 
 led him to try the expedient of summoning a General 
 Council, which should represent the bishops of all 
 the Christian churches of the empire, to settle the 
 matter. The Council met in 325 in Nicaea and 
 condemned Arius almost unanimously, and, as an ex¬ 
 pedient to make the condemnation effective, modified 
 an existing baptismal creed, especially by intro¬ 
 ducing into it the word Ilomoousios , “ of one sub¬ 
 stance with the Father ” ; which henceforth became 
 the test word of orthodoxy, being selected, we ob¬ 
 serve, because of its exclusive power, because though 
 Arians would accept a word which sounded very 
 like it —Homoiousios (of like substance with the 
 Father)—they simply could not say that Father and 
 Son were of the same substance or reality. 
 
 This choice of a word—and that a word not found 
 in Scripture—to exclude from the Christian Church a 
 group of men believed to be in error, but in a highly 
 metaphysical region, when the word which they were 
 prepared to accept differed from the w r ord selected 
 
*206 
 
 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 only in a single letter, is a proceeding naturally 
 repulsive to moderate men at all times, and especially 
 to the modern Englishman. Nevertheless, we must 
 confess that it was necessary. To tolerate the 
 Arians was to tolerate both the pagan conception 
 of a created God or demigod, and also the conception 
 of a deified hero : that is to say, the Church, in 
 tolerating them, would have turned its back on the 
 foundation of its religion—its belief inherited from 
 the prophets of Israel that there was only one God, 
 and there could be none other than He, and that 
 none but He might be adored as God. It is only to 
 say the same thing in other words to say that, if 
 the Christian Church had not been in fundamental 
 error for nearly three hundred years in worshipping 
 Jesus the Christ as its Lord and calling Him God, 
 that must be because He came originally from the 
 other side of that unfathomable gulf which divides 
 the self-existent God the Creator from all His crea¬ 
 tures, even the highest—because He belongs to the 
 only eternal reality, the being of God. The long- 
 persecuted Church was just being called to assume 
 the role of the established religion of the empire. It 
 was about to enter upon the tremendous charge of 
 guiding the half-converted tribes who were beginning 
 to pour over it and were destined so soon to over¬ 
 whelm it. It is very easy to see that if it had 
 consented, however reluctantly, to tolerate what 
 Arianism asked it to tolerate, polytheism, both philo¬ 
 sophical and popular, both civilized and barbarous, 
 would have effected its lodgment securely within 
 the Church. The Church did not, in fact, keep its 
 doctrine wholly free from deleterious matter derived 
 from paganism. Far from it. But if it had done 
 what the Arians asked of it, its belief in one only 
 God, one only object of worship, would have been 
 submerged in the flood of pagan polytheism. 
 
 I will venture to quote once more the remarkable 
 
ATHANASIUS 207 
 
 acknowledgment on the part of Thomas Carlyle 
 which Froude relates 1 : 44 He made one remark 
 
 which is worth recording. In earlier years he had 
 spoken contemptuously of the Athanasian contro¬ 
 versy of the Christian world torn in pieces over a 
 diphthong ; and he would ring the changes in broad 
 Annandale on the Ilomoousion and the Ilomoi- 
 ousion. He now told me that he perceived Chris¬ 
 tianity itself to have been at stake. If the Arians had 
 won, it would have dwindled away to a legend.” 
 
 The speedily won decision of the Council of Nicaea 
 proved to be a surprise rather than a victory. Owing 
 to a variety of political and other causes, for more 
 than fifty years of bewildering controversy, the fate 
 of its momentous decision hung in the balance. So 
 far as the controversy was really theological at all, 
 it was a struggle of religious faith holding on to a 
 tradition and a revelation, against an ingenious in¬ 
 tellectual theory, supported by a closely knit coterie 
 of scholars of the school of Lucian, and aided by a 
 mass of mere conservatism which was only reluctant 
 to accept the new word Ilomoousion. Athanasius, 
 who was the champion of orthodoxy from the time 
 of the Council, when he was still a deacon, till the day 
 of his death, makes the real nature of the struggle 
 constantly evident. In his first writings, when he 
 was a very young man, he had shown himself fas¬ 
 cinated by the current philosophy of the Logos — 
 the divinity immanent in the world—and had inter¬ 
 preted the Incarnation in the light of it. 2 But 
 
 1 Carlyle’s Life in London , ii 462. See also the similar judgment 
 
 in Harnack, Hist, of Dogma , iv 43 : “ Had the Arian doctrine 
 
 gained the victory, it would in all probability have completely 
 ruined Christianity,” etc. 
 
 2 Dr. Rashdall, in Jesus Human and Divine (Melrose, 1922), p. 14, 
 reproduces an earlier paper in which, with astonishing emphasis, 
 he accused Athanasius (like Irenaeus, see above, p. 201) of bein<* 
 Apollinarian : “It cannot be too strongly asserted that Athanasius 
 was an Apollinarian.” In a note to the republished paper, in con¬ 
 sequence of protests, ho modifies his statement thus : “In his 
 
208 
 
 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 through all the long years of conflict his philosophical 
 interests are almost wholly swallowed up in his 
 passionate but also deliberate and rational zeal for 
 Christianity as a religion resting on a person who 
 can be wholly believed in and worshipped as the 
 Redeemer because He is really God as well as man 1 
 —a religion, moreover, which is essentially the same 
 religion as had its beginnings in the Old Testament, 
 the religion of the one God, who is not less truly one 
 because He has come nearer to us in His incarnate 
 Son, and we have recognized a distinction as of 
 persons in the one divine being. Athanasius argues 
 elaborately and persistently, but never as a philo¬ 
 sopher contending for his theory, always as one 
 put in charge of a revelation and a tradition, always 
 with his eye fixed upon the strictly religious interests 
 and loyalties. It is a great mistake to speak as if 
 
 earlier days.” What should we think of an historian of to-day 
 who should speak of Mr. Gladstone in retrospect as “ a strenuous 
 Tory,” or of a distinguished bishop, still alive, as “a pugnacious 
 High Churchman,” and then explain that he was referring to his 
 hot youth ? Dr. Rashdall then says that in the Orations there is 
 “ no trace of any distinct recognition of a human soul in Jesus,” 
 and that his later distinct repudiations of Apollinarianism were 
 “ formal ” and “ that it may be doubted how far this admission 
 really affected his general way of thinking.” 
 
 The truth behind all this is that the circumstances of current 
 controversy and the tone of the Alexandrian atmosphere both alike 
 tended towards a one-sided emphasis on the Godhead of Christ, as 
 compared with the manhood. But Athanasius was on his guard. 
 I have quoted in my Dissertations , pp. 122-6, many passages 
 from the Orations dealing with our Lord’s assertion that He did not 
 know (Mark xiii 32) and similar texts. Athanasius’ explanation 
 of the texts may be regarded as more or as less satisfactory. But, 
 at any rate, they make it quite evident that he recognized in our 
 Lord’s manhood, or “ flesh,” a human mind which must be in 
 itself limited and susceptible of progress and liable to ignorance. 
 This is plain through the whole course of his controversial life, as 
 well as in his later utterances when Apollinarianism was specifically 
 in question. No doubt Athanasius was always reluctant to give 
 up old friends on account of their excesses, whether Apollinarius 
 or Marcellus. But he was himself precisely not Apollinarian. 
 
 1 Harnack and Robertson give us excellent accounts of 
 Athanasius’ doctrine, and Dr. Bright (Church of the Fathers) is 
 ncomparable in his vivid estimate of Athanasius as a person. 
 
AGAINST APOLLINARXUS 209 
 
 the outlook of the Church in the matter was mainly 
 philosophical. All that the Church did was to choose 
 the best available term to express the truth that 
 Christ was God, and that there could not be any 
 being conceived of or worshipped as God except 
 the one God without abandoning the foundation of 
 the revelation on which the Church rested. Certainly 
 Athanasius against Arius stands for permanent and 
 practical religion against an intellectual theory which 
 in fact turned out to be a very transitory phase of 
 philosophy indeed. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But before the death of Athanasius the balance of 
 interest had shifted from one aspect of the person 
 of the Redeemer to the other—from Ilis Godhead 
 to His manhood. A hundred years earlier Origen 
 had prefaced his most speculative book—on The 
 Principles of Things —by pointing out that there was 
 a Christian tradition which it was the first business 
 of the Church to hand down, and that (among other 
 necessary points) it proclaimed a Christ who was 
 both eternally and permanently God and also, by 
 His incarnation, really man. In the traditional 
 religion of the mass of the Christian people it was in 
 ancient days always rather the belief in His manhood 
 that was in peril than that in His Godhead. But 
 the Church’s duty was always to be true to the double 
 idea or double fact and, in spite of one-sided ten¬ 
 dencies, it fulfilled this duty. This is illustrated by 
 the history of the Councils. One of the most zealous 
 of the Athanasians and one of the ablest, Apollinarius 
 of Laodicea, in his zeal to maintain the moral per¬ 
 fection and immutability of Christ, embraced the 
 notion that in Christ the divine reason and will took 
 the place of the changeable human will and fallible 
 human reason. So that the manhood of Christ 
 
210 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 which He took at the Incarnation was not a full and 
 complete manhood, but a manifestation of the divine 
 reason veiling itself and expressing itself in a human 
 flesh and animal soul, or principle of life. 1 This 
 idea, which ought indeed to startle anyone who has 
 read the Gospels, including the account of the tempta¬ 
 tion and of the agony in Gethsemane, Apollinarius 
 made more plausible apparently by the idea that in 
 the divine Word lies the eternal archetype of all 
 created things, 2 and in particular of human nature, 
 which was made in the image of God—so that the 
 eternal Word can even be spoken of as the archetypal 
 or eternal man, and we may suppose that He was 
 always destined to act as man in a human body. 
 But there is a good deal of uncertainty about the date 
 and the nature of this refinement. 
 
 It must be confessed that zeal for the full meaning 
 of the manhood of Christ was not a very conspicuous 
 characteristic of Greek theologians. Nevertheless, 
 when thus challenged by Apollinarius the Church 
 was true to itself. The Council of Constantinople'— 
 the history of which is very obscure in many respects 
 •—certainly followed the lead of an earlier Council 
 at Alexandria and condemned the Apollinarians, but 
 without any special definition. When the Council 
 was later reckoned for ecumenical, this 3 was what 
 it was chiefly credited with—that it had affirmed 
 that the Church must proclaim a Christ who was not 
 only truly God but also perfectly and completely 
 man, with all the complement of properly human 
 faculties, spiritual as well as physical. Once again 
 
 1 He adopted the psychological theory which would describe 
 man as made up of body, soul, and spirit. 
 
 2 The Fathers mostly read John i 3, 4 as “Without him [the 
 Word] was not anything made. That which hath been made was 
 [eternally] life in him.” 
 
 3 As also that it gave completed expression to the doctrine of the 
 Trinity by bringing the Holy Spirit as well as the Son under the 
 term Homoaumoa. 
 
AGAINST NESTOKIUS 2U 
 
 the Church had behaved, not as a group of philo¬ 
 sophers or psychologists seeking to frame a satis- 
 fying theory of Christ’s person, but as the trustees 
 for a religion rooted in historical facts, bound to 
 the full reality of Christ the man. 
 
 To-day it is not necessary to argue the case against 
 Apollinarius. All our modern Lives of Christ, and 
 books about Christ, give the fullest interpretation 
 to His manhood and call attention to the over¬ 
 whelming evidence which the Gospels give us of the 
 human spirit—reason and will and feeling—in Jesus, 
 Present-day enthusiasm is all for the full manhood. 
 The question with us is only whether this reality of 
 His manhood is consistent with personal Godhead, 
 In ancient days, however, Apollinarius and His 
 followers found much more popular sympathy than 
 those who were accused of denying the personal 
 Godhead of Christ. 
 
 IV 
 
 Then once more the balance shifts. There was a 
 school of theologians, already alluded to, who had 
 their centre at Antioch and did honour to Lucian 
 as their master, amongst whom the most famous 
 names were those of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore 
 of Mopsuestia. They were scholars with whom 
 modern Englishmen would have natural sympathy. 
 Their zeal was for a critical and historical interpre¬ 
 tation of the sacred books, and for the reality of 
 the manhood of Christ. In strenuous opposition 
 to the tendencies of Alexandria, and especially of 
 Apollinarius, they emphasized the freedom of Christ’s 
 human will and the reality of His human growth 
 and human limitations in mind as well as body, 
 even to the point of postulating for Him, as it seemed, 
 an independent human personality, at any rate to 
 start with. The “ connection ” between the divine 
 
212 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 Word or Son and the human person of Jesus, the 
 adopted Son, was, in their estimation, so close as 
 to involve actual identification of the man Jesus 
 with the Son of God. But this was apparently 
 a gradual process and was the reward of a con¬ 
 tinually fuller moral perfection. Fundamentally and 
 originally the man Jesus was a separate person from 
 the eternal Son. 
 
 One of the disciples of this school, Nestorius, 
 a fiery and pugnacious character, became Bishop 
 of Constantinople in a.d. 428. His “ chaplain,' 5 
 Anastasius, took an early opportunity vehemently 
 to repudiate the term theotokos which if was cus¬ 
 tomary to apply to the Blessed Virgin Mary, signi¬ 
 fying precisely that her infant Son was personally 
 God. “ Let no one, 55 he cried, “ call Mary Theotokos ; 
 for Mary was but a woman ; and it is impossible that 
 God should be born of a woman.” Nestorius threw 
 himself into the defence of the Antiochene doctrine in 
 special antagonism to the influences from Alexandria, 
 where the great Cyril was archbishop. In particular, 
 he was said to have committed himself to the assertion 
 that “ the child of two or three months old I cannot 
 call God.” At once a tumult arose in the Church, 
 and controversy was fierce. Few things in the 
 history of the Church have probably harmed it more 
 than the bitterness and uncharitableness of its con¬ 
 troversialists. Nestorius was bitter. But what has 
 mostly harmed the Church was the bitterness of its 
 protagonist Cyril. And there is no question that the 
 theology he poured forth was distinctly one-sided 
 and ill calculated to satisfy the reasonable scruples 
 of the Antiochenes. But with these matters we are 
 not here concerned. Nor are we really concerned 
 with the question whether, after all, Nestorius ulti¬ 
 mately meant to deny what the Church was at pains 
 to affirm. There is now ground for believing that, 
 had he lived a few years longer, he might have been 
 
THEOTOKOS 213 
 
 satisfied to accept the decision of the Council of 
 Chalceaon in 451, in which he could have recognized 
 the safeguarding of what he valued. 1 
 
 But the obscurity of many of the details of the 
 controversy, and the painfully uncharitable tone of 
 it, which leaves a most disagreeable impression on 
 our minds, cannot be allowed to obscure the real 
 importance of the issue. The Creed of Nicaea 
 affirmed that it was the eternal Son of God, Himself 
 very God, who for us men and for our salvation had 
 come down and taken flesh of Mary and been born 
 and suffered for us. And long before Nicaea that 
 was the passionate faith of the Church. It was 
 really God, the eternal Son, who was bom of Mary, 
 and who lived and died under conditions of a real 
 humanity. And this continuity of personality was 
 the very thing which Nestorius seemed to deny. 
 Thus once more a Council, reckoned as ecumenical, 
 was held at Ephesus in 431, and Nestorius was 
 violently condemned and the title Theotokos , as 
 applied to the mother of Jesus—that is, strictly, 
 
 the bearer of God ”—was made obligatory for 
 acceptance by the officers and teachers of the Church. 
 And I do not think it can be doubted that here again 
 the Church, in refusing to admit that Jesus was a 
 separate person from the Son of God, and affirming, 
 on the contrary, that it was the same person—the 
 Word or Son—who was eternally in the being of 
 God and through whom all things were made, who 
 was born as a baby of Mary and lived and died upon 
 the Cross—in affirming this and denying its contrary 
 the Church was certainly only reaffirming the doctrine 
 of St. Paul and St. John and the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews. 
 
 1 On the subtle and difficult question what Diodore, Theodore, 
 nnd Nestorius actually and precisely meant to affirm and deny’ 
 
 1 would refer to the very just summary, as it seems to me, given by 
 Dr. Kidd in his just published History of the Church, vol. iii, chaps, 
 xi and xii. 
 
 15 
 
214 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 The spiritual importance of the question at issue 
 may be made more apparent by four considerations. 
 
 (1) The sum and substance of Christian redemp¬ 
 tion lies in the real union of Christians with Jesus, 
 the man who lived and worked and suffered on 
 earth and now reigns in heaven. And the point is 
 that in being made one with Him—-baptized into 
 Him and receiving into ourselves His very life, His 
 flesh and blood—we are really made one, not with 
 any created or intermediate person, but with God 
 Himself. And it is only because He is verily and 
 personally God that His manhood can have imparted 
 to it this capacity for universal participation and 
 assimilation. St. Cyril is always recurring to this 
 
 P °(2) Christians from the beginning, and notably 
 St. Paul, have insisted upon the pre-eminence and 
 uniqueness of the self-sacrifice of Christ. Now, 
 judged by an objective standard, the measure o 
 Christ’s self-sacrifice within the limits of His mortal 
 life cannot be said to be greater, at any rate, than 
 that of multitudes of martyrs. But it is not within 
 these limits that the uniqueness of Christ s self- 
 sacrifice is found. It lies in the region of His pre¬ 
 existent life. It consists in this, that one who 
 existed in the glory of God consented to abandon 
 this to us inconceivable glory of life, in order to 
 accept the conditions and limitations and sufferings 
 of real manhood. This act of self-sacrifice is strictly 
 unique, and it is so only because the person who 
 sacrifices Himself is very God—not closely united to 
 God but personally God. His acts are strictly God s 
 
 acts and His love God’s love. , 
 
 (3) Herein lies also the clue to the fi?iality of the 
 Christ. Intellectually considered, nothing is more 
 essential to a full faith in Christ than this recognition 
 of His essential finality—to which we shall have to 
 recur later on. This means that He is not only the 
 
THE PRINCIPLE AT STAKE 215 
 
 greatesl prophet and the most conspicuous saint 
 , n ^ the f n ° bl f , leader of hu manity who has ever 
 
 “1 l f f ° r lf ., t ia * wele all > obviously we could 
 look for another as great as He, possibly greater 
 
 than He. And if Jesus be, as at the last analysis 
 Nestoiiamsm always asserts, a human person, one 
 mong millions of human persons, whom the divine 
 Word united to Himself and even (finally) absorbed 
 into Himself there is no reason in the nature of 
 things why the process should not be repeated. It 
 is, m fact, only the highest example of what occurs 
 m its measure in every good man. There may be 
 another Christ, even conceivably a higher and more 
 enlightened one. There is no real ground for 
 asserting the finality of the Christ, unless He be 
 personally God in manhood. Then, and then only, 
 must He be essentially and necessarily final. For 
 there can be no disclosure of God in manhood or 
 ol manhood m God even conceivable which should 
 be completer or fuller (at least under the conditions 
 of this world) than is given us in Him who is the 
 Word made flesh. Nor in the nature of things can 
 there be another such. There can be no other such 
 person as the only-begotten Son of God. 
 
 (4) This, too, is important—the “ Nestorian ” 
 conception is exceedingly difficult to grasp with 
 precision. It is deeply evasive intellectually con¬ 
 sidered, and appears to pass from one form to another. 
 Hut the Creed of the Church is a creed for common 
 men, and must be able to express itself, in those 
 points for which it claims popular acceptance, in 
 broad affirmations—broad as well as true. The 
 orthodox creed that for us men and for our salva¬ 
 tion very God, the Son of God, consented to come 
 down from the bosom of the Father to become man 
 and for us to die has this broad intelligibility. 
 
 But freed from refinements and reduced to a like 
 broad intelligibility, it is impossible to doubt that 
 
 the teaching of Nestorius would have inevitablv 
 
 * 
 
216 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 taken shape in the proclamation of Jesus as the 
 deified man, 1 which from every point of view would 
 have been a disaster. 
 
 V 
 
 Once more, and for the last time, the balance 
 shifts. It is now an old Constantinopolitan monk 
 called Eutyches, who affirmed that though God¬ 
 head and manhood were separate before the Incar¬ 
 nation, yet in Jesus the manhood was in some 
 sense absorbed and swallowed up in the Godhead. 
 There was a widespread tendency towards this sort 
 of “ monophysitism ”*—this doctrine of the absorp¬ 
 tion of the manhood in the Godhead—and the 
 Eastern Church might easily have overbalanced on 
 that side. But the West, in the person of the great 
 Leo, Bishop of Rome, put its weight on the other 
 side, and at Chalcedon, in 451, the last of the great 
 definitions was made which affirmed that the man¬ 
 hood remained in Christ, not only complete, but 
 permanently unconfused—that as Christ was con- 
 substantial with God according to His Godhead, so 
 He became and remained consubstantial with us 
 according to His manhood. So the doctrine was 
 fixed that in Christ incarnate there is one person 
 and that divine, but two natures, divine and human, 
 the one original and the other voluntarily assumed 
 by incarnation but permanent and distinct. This 
 -—the Chalcedonian—may be considered in principle 
 the final definition of the Church. If a century later 
 the Church had occasion to affirm that in Christ was 
 the reality of a human will , and the whole rational 
 activity of manhood, that was only a reaffirmation* 
 
 1 If Nestorianism among Syrians and Assyrians has not taken 
 any such shape it is, I think, because their so-called hi estorianism 
 is really not Nestorianism at ail, but in part simply a difficulty of 
 language and in part loyalty to a persecuted leader. 
 
AGAINST EUTYCHES 217 
 
 important enough in itself—of what was really 
 secured in principle by the definitions which excluded 
 Apollmarianism and Eutychianism. 
 
 VI 
 
 W e need pursue tlie history of ecclesiastical dogma 
 no fuither. In this volume we are in no way con¬ 
 cerned with any question of the authority which 
 these decrees have as dogmas of the Church. The 
 whole idea of Church authority will be ignored till 
 we reach the subject of the Church in the next 
 volume. At present we are simply taking these 
 decrees as important facts in the historical develop¬ 
 ment of the doctrine of the person of Christ. And 
 we cannot fail to be conscious that they have at 
 different periods, and especially to-day, been the 
 subject of widespread criticism in intellectual circles, 
 often violently and contemptuously expressed, 
 especially at their culminating point in the formula 
 ol Chalcedon which demands our acceptance of the 
 conception oi Christ as throughout, from eternity to 
 eternity, one and the same divine person , who 
 nevertheless, as incarnate and made man, subsists 
 in two distinct natures , divine and human. Now, 
 (1) the u nature ” includes the will and the conscious¬ 
 ness ; and we are here (the critics tell us) postulating 
 in the human Christ two wills and consciousnesses, 
 lying (so to speak) side by side in the same person 1 — 
 a very impossible conception—whereas in the Gospels 
 what we are witnesses of is one person, Jesus the 
 Christ, with one will and consciousness, the con¬ 
 sciousness and will of a Son, in presence of another 
 will and consciousness, that of His Father who is 
 in heaven ; and there is no suggestion of a dualism 
 of wills or consciousnesses in Ilis own person. 
 
 (2) The identity of the divine personality through¬ 
 out seems to involve the idea of Christ’s manhood 
 
218 
 
 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 as 44 impersonal.” So the theologians have con¬ 
 stantly called it. But it is a wholly unacceptable 
 idea. It is precisely in Jesus, 41 the Son of Man,” 
 that we seem to see all the characteristics of human 
 personality at their highest. 
 
 Now it must be acknowledged that these are 
 very important criticisms which, as we hear them, 
 strike home with a powerful sense of truth. And 
 there is another of a different kind which urges 
 that the Councils were in their definitions, by the 
 use of such words as 44 substance,” 44 person,” 
 44 nature,” tying the Christian religion to a tem¬ 
 porary phase of philosophy which is past and gone, 
 and from which it had better now shake itself 
 free. 
 
 I would seek to give these criticisms, what they 
 clearly deserve, the most candid consideration, 
 which shall be quite free, that is, shall at present 
 quite ignore the questions of the ecclesiastical 
 authority claimed for these decisions. 
 
 1. The only true and historical way of regard¬ 
 ing these dogmatic decisions is to regard them as 
 primarily negative. Their motive was not any 
 positively felt need of interpreting or defining the 
 faith as a thing good in itself, but simply the 
 pressing necessity for excluding certain very power¬ 
 fully supported intellectual theories which were 
 at work and which were calculated to undermine 
 the traditions of faith worship and practice which 
 the Church was set to maintain—what it called 
 44 the tradition.” It must be admitted that the 
 love of intellectual definition for its own sake took 
 possession to a dangerous extent of the Church 
 both in East and West. But these 44 intellectual 
 exercises ” have not crystallized as disciplinary 
 decrees. It is important to notice that Athanasius, 
 and the Fathers generally, take a very restricted 
 view of the legitimate functions of the Church with 
 
219 
 
 THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 regard to Christian doctrine. Athanasius contrasts 
 it with its functions in respect of discipline. In this 
 latter region it claims to issue directions on its own 
 authority. Thus the Council of Nicaea with regard 
 to the Easter festival said simply that 44 it seemed 
 good (eSofe) ” to the bishops to give such and such 
 directions. But with regard to doctrine it is much 
 more modest. 44 With reference to the faith they 
 wrote—not 4 such and such things were determined,’ 
 but 4 thus the Catholic Church believes.’ And they 
 added immediately the statement of their faith, 
 to show that their judgment was not new but 
 apostolic, and that what they wrote was not any 
 discovery of theirs, but was what the apostles 
 taught.” 1 And, as a matter of fact, St. Athanasius 
 in his almost endless argumentations hardly ever 
 refers to the decision of the Council, but prefers to 
 conduct all his argument in the region of scripture 
 and the necessities of practical religion and reason. 
 And in this he is not singular. It is so with almost 
 all the Fathers. A dogmatic decision was for them 
 certainly a regrettable necessity, only justifiable 
 under extreme need. 
 
 2. But I think that, for reasons already given, 
 we are bound to admit that in the case of each of 
 the four great councils the decision at which it 
 arrived to exclude certain lines of teaching or pro¬ 
 posed explanations of the person of Christ was a 
 necessary decision—really necessary if the faith of 
 the New Testament was to be maintained. As I 
 have said, to admit as tolerable the Arian explanation 
 of Christ as in effect a demi-god, and thus to re¬ 
 pudiate the whole basis of strict monotheism, which 
 inspires both Old and New Testaments, would have 
 ruined Christianity, by assimilating it to insurgent 
 Paganism. It was just as necessary, if the faith 
 of St. Paul and St. John was to be maintained, 
 
 1 Dc Synodis , c. 5. 
 
220 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 decisively to exclude any teaching which funda¬ 
 mentally distinguished the person of Jesus from the 
 person of the Son of God, and thereby converted 
 “incarnation” into “indwelling,” and substantially 
 assimilated Christ to prophets and saints. In the 
 other direction it was certainly as necessary to ex¬ 
 clude the ideas which would have rendered Christ's 
 manhood fundamentally unreal, especially in respect 
 of just those regions of mind and will and spirit in 
 which man is distinctively man. It was, in fact, 
 in view of the ecclesiastical tendencies of the day, 
 a miracle of grace that the Church took so firm a 
 stand against Apollinarius and the Monophysites, 
 though it is precisely this that involved it in the 
 postulate of the two natures to which we shall return 
 directly. I see no reason to doubt that if St. Paul 
 and St. John could have had the situation explained 
 to them, they would have accepted the necessity 
 for the definitions. 
 
 3. Though, as I have said, we constantly read 
 highly critical and even contemptuous estimates of 
 the terminology of the Councils, I do not see that 
 they could have found at the time better words in 
 which to embody their decisions, nor have I ever 
 seen any better modern terms suggested. In fact 
 the critics do not generally suggest that the work 
 was badly done for its time, but they suggest that 
 the Councils used (as they were bound to use) the 
 philosophical categories and terms of their day, and 
 that these categories and terms have been outgrown. 
 
 But it is very necessary to protest that the Church 
 was not professing to act philosophically. It chose 
 the term “ of one substance ” to exclude the idea 
 that Christ was not really God and then to exclude 
 the idea that He was not really man. As the Church 
 used the term it was acting with practical statesman¬ 
 ship and discrimination, rather than with philo¬ 
 sophical accuracy : for it is plain that “ unity of 
 
221 
 
 THE CHOICE OF TERMS 
 
 substance” is used in rather different senses when 
 it is applied to describe (1) the relation of Christ to 
 the Father and (2) His relation to His fellov r men. 
 Its aim was practical. So again it was practical 
 necessity which led to its doing the world a great 
 service—that is, selecting an old word which hitherto 
 had meant no more than “ substance ” (i.e. hypostasis ) 
 and stamping it with the distinctive meaning of 
 “ person,” an idea for which hitherto Greek and 
 Latin philosophy had had no term. Once more, 
 if it was, as I think it was, essential that the Church 
 should maintain that the Creator and His creatures 
 —God and man—belong to kinds of reality which 
 are essentially different, I do not see that it could 
 have chosen a better word to use than “ nature,” 
 when it affirmed in Christ’s one person two 
 “ natures,” the one original and the other acquired. 
 I do not see then how the way in which the Church 
 did its defensive or self-protective work, so far as 
 the choice of its terminology is concerned, could 
 have been bettered. Nor do I see how the 
 terminology in question could be bettered to-day, 
 so long as it is granted that the idea to be expressed 
 is that of the incarnation in a real and full manhood 
 of one who belonged to the eternal being of God, as 
 a Son with His Father. On the contrary it has 
 always appeared to me fairly evident that what 
 the critics want is not better terms to express the 
 same idea, but the substitution of a different idea 
 —either the substitution of what is fundamentally 
 the pantheistic conception of God, according to 
 which God and man are parts of the one substance, 
 in place of the essentially different Biblical idea 
 of God the Creator distinct from His creatures, 
 or the substitution of the idea of a God-indwelt 
 man for that of the incarnate God. 
 
 Of course, I know that there is a philosophy which 
 deprecates the whole idea of the existence of real 
 
-222 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 objects or things having distinctive qualities or 
 natures, created by God and in a measure really 
 knowable by us, and of persons made in the image 
 of God, and therefore having a different nature 
 from mere things and animals, and of God as the 
 only self-subsistent and self-complete being, the 
 Creator of all that is. What this philosophy suggests 
 to us as the ultimate reality is (to use Lord Balfour’s 
 language) 44 an identity wherein all differences 
 vanish, or a unity which includes, but does not 
 transcend, the differences which it somehow holds 
 in solution.” But this sort of philosophy is not 
 the only Idealism. And it has to reckon with the 
 sort of Realism which the common sense of man¬ 
 kind as well as the theology of the Bible postulates. 
 And granted the sort of Realism which believes in 
 real objects having distinctive natures, and in real 
 persons, and in a real God the Creator, I do not think 
 the terminology of the councils can be easily bettered. 
 
 4. But the best things can be most lamentably 
 abused; and it is manifest in history that the 
 Greek genius, which exercised itself rightfully within 
 the Christian Church in defining and protecting 
 the fundamental faith of Christendom, became 
 enamoured of its own intellectualism and to a 
 lamentable extent distorted the true character and 
 estimate of the Christian religion. For the Christian 
 religion is a way of life— 44 the way ” was the first 
 name for the Church. This 44 way ” involves and 
 depends upon a certain self-disclosure of God and 
 certain ideas about the destiny and capacity of man 
 and his sin and need of redemption. Thus it requires 
 a Creed, and it is idle to regret the necessity. It 
 must perforce have formulated and defended the 
 intellectual principles on which its way of life 
 depends. But it ought always to have presented 
 itself to mankind first of all as a way of life. While 
 in fact, under the dominant influence of Greek 
 
223 
 
 MISUSE OF THE DOGMAS 
 
 intellectualism, the interest in the intellectual pro¬ 
 positions and formulas became the foremost interest, 
 and the Church presented itself to the world, not as 
 a society called to live a life, but as a society main¬ 
 taining a very elaborate system of doctrines, the 
 propagation of which was its chief business. This 
 is the impression we get in history of the later Greek 
 Church, though the impression made by its mystics 
 and saints must not be forgotten. And a similar 
 intellectualism may be charged against the Western 
 schoolmen, even though Erasmus and his friends 
 did not by any means judge them fairly. 
 
 Under such conditions the misuse made of the 
 definitions of the Church is of this kind. They ought 
 to have been regarded as simply warning men off 
 certain misleading and one-sided lines of logical 
 development, leaving them to get their positive 
 picture of Christ from the Gospels, and their positive 
 theory from the books of the New Testament. That, 
 as we have seen, was the real intention of Athanasius 
 and others of the Fathers. They talk very little 
 about the definitions. All their argument—good 
 and bad—-is upon the ground of Scripture and 
 occasionally of tradition, and of the meaning of the 
 sacraments and the requirements of the spiritual 
 life. But another tendency is also apparent and 
 in effect prevails. The dogmatic decisions become 
 premises to argue from, and Christ is represented 
 not as He was, but as, it was thought, He must 
 have been. Thus, because it is laid down that there 
 are to be recognized in Christ the two distinct 
 natures, divine and human, what it is not unfair 
 to call a fancy picture of Christ is drawn, as acting 
 now in one nature and now in another, now as God 
 and now as man, which does not really correspond 
 to the picture in the Gospel. Again, it comes to be 
 argued that because He was God, therefore He must 
 have been continuously omniscient, and such a plain 
 
224 
 
 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 statement as “Of that day and that hour knoweth 
 no one, no, not the Son,” is explained away to mean 
 that He did not choose to reveal what He really 
 knew. “ The truth,” as Theodoret grimly observed, 
 “ tells a lie.” Later all that belongs to human 
 limitations—mental growth, anxiety, faith, hope, 
 even prayer in the real sense—is excluded from Flis 
 consciousness as inconsistent with His Godhead. 
 The intellectual dogmas, instead of serving their 
 original and legitimate purpose, have become the 
 premises from which conclusions are drawn as to 
 what the Incarnate must have been, which practically 
 obscure the picture in the Gospels. So we feel it 
 to be with the later scholastic theologians. The 
 reality of our Lord’s humanity, so far as the life of 
 His soul was concerned, becomes almost obliterated. 1 
 
 Or again, because the dogmatic decision against 
 Nestorius laid it down that there was one continuous 
 personality and that divine, the phrase becomes 
 current that the humanity of Christ was “ im¬ 
 personal,” 2 whereas in the Gospels we feel that 
 we have a picture of the Son of Man intensely in¬ 
 dividual and unmistakably personal in Flis manhood. 
 
 5. But the abuse of a thing does not prove that 
 it has no use. The definitions of the Councils were 
 no doubt misused, but we have seen reason to believe 
 that they were necessary, and that the lines of 
 thought which they were intended to exclude were 
 really destructive of the foundations of the Christian 
 faith. The best way to test their legitimacy is to 
 inquire whether, accepting them as limits to our 
 thinking, we are able to accept at its full value and 
 fairly interpret the picture which the Gospels present 
 to us of the Son of Man. As we have seen, it is not 
 the picture of a mere man with a merely human 
 consciousness or a merely prophetic claim. It cannot 
 
 1 See on all this my Dissertations, pp. 154 ff. 
 
 2 I quite recognize the truth which the phrase is meant to convey 
 (see below, p. 227). It is not used in the formula of Chalcedon. 
 
THE SELF-EMPTYING 225 
 
 be so interpreted in any one of the Gospels. Only 
 the incarnation doctrine of St. Paul and St. John 
 can really interpret it. On the other hand, the 
 divine person in the Gospels is certainly presented 
 to us as growing in wisdom, as being tempted, as 
 asking questions, apparently for information, as 
 praying, as overwhelmed with anxiety, as asking 
 upon the Cross the great question of the perplexed 
 and dismayed all the world over, and finally, as, 
 at least in one respect, asserting His ignorance. 
 And, negatively, He never shows any sign of tran¬ 
 scending the knowledge of natural things possible 
 to His age, country, and condition. How can these 
 facts be reconciled with His personal Godhead ? 
 
 I see no help in solving this question so great 
 as is supplied by two phrases in which St. Paul 
 characterizes the act of the Son of God in taking 
 our manhood 1 —“ he beggared himself” (or “made 
 himself poor”), and “he emptied himself” or 
 “ annulled himself.” St. Paul, in using these words, 
 is not thinking of any particular aspect of the human 
 life of Jesus, such as the limitation of His know¬ 
 ledge ; but he regards the Incarnation in itself as 
 having involved in some sense the abandonment 
 of “ riches ” which belonged to the previous divine 
 state of the Son. It is when we look at the facts in 
 the Gospel that we are led to welcome St. Paul’s 
 words as giving us the clue to what we see there. 
 The divine Son in becoming man must, we conclude, 
 have accepted, voluntarily and deliberately, the 
 limitations involved in really living as man—even 
 as sinless and perfect man—in feeling as a man, 
 thinking as a man, striving as a man, being anxious 
 and tried as a man. Jesus does not indeed appear 
 in the Gospels as unconscious of His divine nature. 
 He knows He is Son of the Father. He “ remembers ” 
 how He came from God and would go back to God. 
 But He appears none the less as accepting the 
 
 1 2 Cor. viii 9, Phil, ii 7. 
 
226 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 limitations of manhood. And St. Paul, I say, gives 
 us the hint which directs our vision. This was no 
 failure of power. God is love, and love is sympathy 
 and self-sacrifice. The Incarnation is the supreme 
 act of self-sacrificing sympathy, by which one whose 
 nature is divine was enabled to enter into human 
 experience. He emptied Himself of divine preroga¬ 
 tives so far as was involved in really becoming man, 
 and growing, feeling, thinking and suffering as man. 
 
 No doubt such a conception raises questions to 
 which we can find no full answer. Thus—Is the 
 self-emptying to be conceived of as a continual 
 refusal to exercise the free divine consciousness which 
 He possessed, or as something once for all involved 
 in the original act by which He entered into the 
 limiting conditions of manhood ? And I think if 
 we are wise we shall not attempt to answer the 
 question. We have not the knowledge of the inner 
 life of Jesus which would make an answer possible. 
 Or again, we are asked how we relate this “ limited 55 
 condition of the Son as incarnate with His exercise 
 of all the cosmic functions of the eternal Word— 
 what the New Testament calls “ the sustaining 55 or 
 “ bearing along of all things ” or the holding all the 
 universe of things together—and again I think 
 we had better give no answer. All that appears 
 evident is that it was the eternal Son who was 
 manifested in human nature as Jesus of Nazareth, 
 and that within the sphere and limit of His mortal 
 life Fie appears as restricted by human conditions ; 
 and we thankfully accept this supreme example of 
 humility and self-sacrifice, without attempting to 
 relate it to what lies outside our possibilities of 
 knowledge. 1 We do well to be agnostics, if we put 
 our agnosticism in the right place. 
 
 1 I have endeavoured to enter at greater length into this question 
 in Dissertations, ii, where I have also given full quotations from 
 the Fathers. 
 
THE SELF-LIMITATION OF GOD 227 
 
 Now the recognition that the Incarnation involved 
 this limitation in the exercise of divine faculties, 
 within its sphere, is quite consistent with the terms 
 of the ecclesiastical definitions. We are bound to 
 recognize the nature of God and the nature of Man 
 as both belonging throughout to the person of the 
 Christ, and as in their essence distinct. Only that 
 power of self-limitation and self-adaptation in God 
 which we have already recognized as in a measure 
 involved in creation, and especially in the creation 
 of free spirits, 1 we should here, in Jesus Christ, 
 recognize again as brought to bear with a fresh 
 intensity to make the Incarnation really possible, 
 spiritually as well as physically. Just as we believe 
 that now in the heavenly places Christ is still truly 
 man, but that the manhood is all radiant with God¬ 
 head : so in His earthly state we should believe 
 that Christ was really God and so knew Himself, 
 but that Godhead was submitting itself to the 
 limitations of manhood. As St. Cyril puts it: “ He 
 suffered the limits of humanity to prevail in His 
 case.” 2 
 
 But we must surely repudiate that mode of speech 
 which prevailed at the time of Chalcedon and later, 
 whereby the life of Christ on earth was represented as 
 containing two consciousnesses and two wills, so to 
 speak, juxtaposited in distinction the one from the 
 other, so that He thought and spoke and acted now 
 as God and now as man. We should repudiate this, 
 because we feel that the Gospels present us with 
 one who is, and knows Himself to be, always and 
 in all things the Son of God, but who is throughout 
 existing, acting, and speaking under the conditions 
 and limitations of manhood. 
 
 Also we should deprecate the unguarded use of a 
 phrase which became current among theologians—- 
 we mean the phrase which describes Christ’s man- 
 1 See Belief in God, pp. 115-17. 2 Dissert p. 146. 
 
228 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS 
 
 hood as 44 impersonal.” All that this really means 
 is that the manhood had no separate personality. 
 There was only one person—the eternal Word'— 
 who exists eternally in God, who was active in the 
 whole universe, and who at last was incarnate in 
 Jesus Christ. But when He took the manhood, 
 complete in all human faculties and activities, He 
 became to it the centre of personality. He made it 
 personal. Thus the humanity of Jesus in the 
 Gospels has nothing of abstract universality about 
 it. It is no mere veil of the Godhead. It is, indeed, 
 intensely individual. And if man, in distinction 
 from all other creatures, was originally made in the 
 divine image and likeness, we can understand how 
 the divine person can become the ego or subject 
 of the manhood in Jesus without its thereby ceasing 
 
 to be human. 1 
 
 I do not then think that the Chalcedonian formula, 
 summarizing the decisions of the Councils, recjuiies 
 revision in itself ; but if we would justify it, we must 
 recognize very frankly that the purpose of the dogmas 
 was negative—to exclude certain fundamentally 
 misleading interpretations of the person of Christ— 
 and we must insist that for our positive conception 
 of the person of Jesus we need constantly to study 
 with unembarrassed eyes the picture in the Gospels 
 and the doctrine of the Epistles. 
 
 Note A, see p. 198 
 
 (1) “ The Shepherd ” of Hennas. 
 
 (2) The 44 Didache .” 
 
 (3) The 44 Odes of Solomon 
 
 ( 1 ) “ The Shepherd ” of Hennas .—Undue attention 
 has, I think, so far as his theology is concerned, been 
 given to this interesting prophet of the early Roman 
 Church. He is interesting as a prophet—interesting on 
 
 1 See further appended note B, p. 230. 
 
HERMAS AND DIDACHE 22D 
 
 account of his visions, which he and others believed to 
 be inspired, and on account of the enthusiasm which 
 he threw into the message from God given him to 
 deliver. His importance lies in the ethical region. He 
 
 whi'J lat t th i 6 ,9 hurch - or th at part of the Church 
 which accepted him as a prophet, still clearly viewed 
 
 the Christian religion as “ the way.” Its main interest 
 was moral. The theological background of Hernias' 
 visions, was not apparently scrutinized. If we do 
 scrutinize it, it must be confessed that his theoloo-y is 
 confused and confusing. He certainly believed in the 
 incarnation of the Son of God, Who 44 was older than 
 any creature, through whom all things were made and 
 m whom they are sustained. He is thus certainly no 
 Hbiomte or humanitarian in his estimate of Christ 
 
 ft!! wi 18 con J fu 1 si ^ in ^ language he uses about 
 f+i °J Spiri i a ? d holy s P ints » and about the relation 
 of the Son and the Spirit, whom he sometimes seems 
 to identity, and he may be accused of 44 Apollinarian 55 
 language about the flesh of Christ. I think the best 
 account of him is still Horner’s. But the fact is he was 
 no theologian, and his careless language is such as 
 must almost inevitably have occurred before the days 
 when doctrine was formulated. 
 
 (2) 'lhe teaching of the Twelve Apostles still appears to 
 me to be a very early and very Judaic document which 
 must represent some group of Christian communities 
 quite outside the mam streams of Christian influence 
 who must, moreover, have lost contact with the main 
 streams early, and remained uninfluenced by the ideas 
 
 vl .1 and T St * John ‘ Its ethical teaching is not 
 like that of St. James. It barely deserves to be called 
 Christian. The document does not supply any clear 
 indication of a doctrine of Christ’s person. But it 
 includes the direction to baptize 44 in the name of the 
 lather and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” which 
 implies the doctrine of the Son as a divine person. 
 
 (d) The Odes of Solomon. —I he beautiful mysticism 
 of these odes, which Dr. ltendel Harris discovered and 
 published some fourteen years ago (Cambridge Press') 
 implies (see especially Ode 4!) a quasi- Johannine 
 doctrine of Christ (see p. 76). 
 
 36 
 
230 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 
 
 (4) As has been already remarked, the Ebiomtes, i.e. 
 that obscure section of Judaistic Christians who definitely 
 rejected the doctrine of Christ as a divine person 
 incarnate, represent a later deterioration ey eanno 
 
 be quoted as if they represented the belief of St. James. 
 see q Hort, Judaistic Christianity, p. 200; and B. • 
 Kidd, History of the Christian Church (Oxford, 19-2), 
 
 i, pp. 85-103. 
 
 Note B, see p. 228 
 The Term “ Enhypostasia ” 
 
 We should be very grateful to Dr. H. M. *° r 
 
 his most suggestive and excellent Study m Chnstology, 
 and to Dr. Headlam for his preface to that study. 
 Dr. Relton has done good service m seeking to familiarize 
 us with the term enhypostasia, to which Leontius o 
 Byzantium sought to give currency to express the idea 
 that the manhood of Jesus found its personality m the 
 personality of the Son of God. Leontius holds a \ery 
 Important place in the sixth century as resisting the 
 current tendency to monophysitism even inside the 
 orthodox church. I have tried to bring this out in 
 Dissertations, hi (see quotation, p 277, and references m 
 index under the heading Leontius). May 1 '‘•ntuie 
 however, to deprecate the attempt of Dr. Relton to 
 revive the idea of Apollinarius that we are to ascribe 
 an eternal humanity to the Word, before His incarnation. 
 I suppose that there is some deep sense in which it must 
 be true that all created things have their eternal counter¬ 
 part in the Word, and humanity amongst them. But 
 ^ applies to all created things. And we do weU no 
 to be “wise above that which is written. There is 
 nothing in Scripture suggesting an eternal manhood n 
 God—nothing at least that is not more adequately 
 represented by the idea that man pre-eminently was 
 made in the divine image. And this is enoug.i o 
 explain how God could take our manhood. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE IMPLIED DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 I 
 
 It has already become apparent that the Christian 
 faith in Jesus as the Son of God or Word of God 
 incarnate involves a belief that the being of God is 
 not so “ simple ” as the Jews, with their less intimate 
 knowledge of God, had supposed. He is still the 
 “ one Lord and His name one ” ; but this unity is 
 found to contain a distinction wdthin itself—first 
 of all the distinction of Father and Son, which had 
 not been made evident at first. 1 God had, so to 
 speak, come nearer to men in Jesus Christ, to redeem 
 them, and more of His inner being had shown itself 
 to the discerning minds of men in the process. It 
 is very important to take note that belief in the 
 Holy Trinity was not the result of any philosophical 
 or speculative movement among the Christians. 
 
 There have been in the w r orld speculative philo¬ 
 sophies which have arrived at some sort of Trini¬ 
 tarian belief. Thus we read of an Indian Trinity- 
 Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva-—and of a Trinity in the 
 later Greek (Neo-Platonist) philosophy—The One, 
 
 1 Whatever anticipations of Trinitarian doctrine have been 
 discovered by Christian theologians in the Old Testament were 
 certainly not apparent to the Jews. I have already had occasion 
 to speak of the development in later Jewish thought of the 
 “wisdom ” or “ word ” of Cod, as alive and operative in nature, 
 in terms almost suggestive of distinct personality. But this 
 suggestion never became explicit among them. 
 
 231 
 
232 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 Reason, and Soul. The former of these doctrines of 
 Trinity was an intellectual attempt to construct a 
 bridge between the Absolute One and the many 
 gods of popular belief, and also an attempt to 
 harmonize hostile cults 1 ; and the latter was the 
 result of a purely philosophical attempt to analyse 
 existence into its elements. But the Christians, 
 without any philosophical intention at all, and with¬ 
 out any speculative interest, found themselves 
 believing in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as a result 
 of their experiences as the disciples of Jesus. The 
 name of God had become for them the name of 
 the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. 
 As a consequence of the way in which they came so 
 to believe, it follows that the doctrine at first pre¬ 
 sented no intellectual difficulty to their minds : foi 
 in fact mankind experiences no intellectual diffi¬ 
 culty in believing anything which comes to it as 
 experienced fact, though the intellectual analysis of 
 it may prove it to be as mysterious as possible, and 
 the explanation of it wholly baffling. So it appears 
 to be at present with the ultimate elements with 
 which physics deals, and indeed generally with the 
 ultimates of every science. 2 The difficulty of ex¬ 
 planation and analysis does not carry with it any 
 difficulty in believing that the facts are so and so. 
 So it was at last with the Christians, when the need 
 of explaining themselves became urgent, and their 
 speculative interest was awakened. They found the 
 idea of the Trinity most mysterious, and its formu¬ 
 lation in words most difficult and always finally 
 
 1 See De la Mazeli&re, Evolution de Civilisation Indienne, ii 1 2 : 
 “De fait la trimurti n’est pas la conception de trois hypostases, 
 mais la reconciliation de trois cultes hostiles.” 
 
 2 This is what Huxley means by protesting that he was not so 
 foolish as to reject Christianity because it is mysterious. “ The 
 mysteries of the Church are child’s play compared with the mysteries 
 of Nature. The doctrine of the Trinity is not more puzzling than 
 the necessary antinomies of physical speculation ” (see my Bampton 
 Lectures, lect. ii, note 15, pp. 246-7). 
 
HOW THE BELIEF AROSE 238 
 
 somewhat unsatisfactory; but, before they made 
 any attempt to understand or to formulate, they 
 would have said that in their experience of Jesus 
 and His Spirit the true God had unmistakably 
 revealed Himself to them and laid hold upon them 
 in a novel way. So that, as I say, they found 
 themselves believing in Father and Son and Spirit; 
 and the subsequent difficulty they found in ex¬ 
 plaining to themselves or to others the mystery 
 involved in their belief did not disturb their faith 
 in the fact. 
 
 How the belief came about we can easily under¬ 
 stand. They came to believe in Jesus as being the 
 Son of God. And reflecting on what His own words 
 about Himself implied, and also on what was implied 
 in His divine sovereignty as Lord of all, they 
 recognized in Him, as we have seen, one who had 
 come into the world from the Father and who 
 belonged to His being, as Son with a Father. Then 
 again they were led to expect from Jesus, the 
 Christ, the outpouring of the Spirit of God. And a 
 few days after He had finally left them, the Holy 
 Spirit actually came, taking them as it were by 
 storm, and possessing their souls with an almost 
 intoxicating force. And the Spirit dealt with them 
 like a person controlling them, and guiding them, 
 in the most unmistakable ways. So we see in the 
 Acts and Epistles how the thought of God was 
 modified by their experiences, and the Name of 
 God became to them the threefold Name of the 
 Father and of the Son, or Lord Jesus Christ, and 
 of the Holy Ghost. It is very interesting to watch 
 how the very complex and difficult idea of Trinity 
 in Unity passes into their experience, and we will 
 seek to follow the process in some detail. But the 
 result is manifest prior to any reflection upon the 
 intellectual problem which it presents. You see 
 what had happened when St. Paul prays that “ the 
 
234 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, 
 and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit may be with 
 you all ” ; or when he writes about the 44 same Spirit 
 who pours out the manifold gifts in which the Church 
 rejoices, and the 44 same Lord ” who presides over its 
 manifold ministrations, or the 44 same God whose 
 presence is felt in all its various activities ; or when, 
 enumerating the grounds of Christian unity, he 
 makes mention of the one Spirit, one Lord, one 
 God and Father of all 1 ; or when St. Peter writes 
 to the Christians of Asia as those who feel upon 
 them a divine election according to the predes¬ 
 tinating choice of God the Father, in sanctification 
 of the Spirit, unto obedience to Jesus Christ and 
 purification through His blood 2 ; or when St. Jude 
 bids Christians to build themselves up in their most 
 holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keeping them¬ 
 selves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ. 3 In all these cases the name 
 44 God ” is reserved for the Father. It was only 
 slowly that the Son and the Spirit came to be freely 
 called God, though both St. Paul 4 and St. John do 
 so call the Lord Jesus. The reason for this reserve 
 was, no doubt, that the instinct of monotheism was 
 against such a use, and nothing was more important 
 than to preserve the monotheistic standing ground 
 of the Old Testament against the surging Paganism 
 around. But there is no question that the gracious 
 activities of the Son and the Spirit among men were, 
 to their believing minds, properly activities of God. 
 Thus, whether it be the case, as St. Matthew’s Gospel 
 relates, that our Lord actually named the Threefold 
 Name to the disciples before His departure, or 
 whether, as so many critics suggest, it was rather 
 that the Palestinian editor of the first Gospel was 
 so familiar with the formula as to attribute it to 
 
 1 2 Cor. xiii 13, 1 Cor. xii 4-6, Eph. iv 4-5. 2 1 Pet. i 2. 
 
 3 Jude 20-21. 4 See above, p. 86. 
 
235 
 
 HOW EXPRESSED IN N. T. 
 
 our Lord, we understand how inevitable it was that 
 the Name of God should have come to be so named ; 
 and when, toward the end of the first century, 
 Clement of Rome wishes to repeat the solemn 
 affirmation of the old prophets 44 as the Lord liveth,” 
 we understand how natural it was that it should 
 take the threefold form— 44 as God liveth, and the 
 Lord Jesus Christ liveth, and the Holy Spirit.” 1 
 That is what 44 the living God ” had come to mean. 
 
 II 
 
 Now we must examine more in detail how the 
 distinctions in the being of God emerge. 
 
 (1) The three distinguishable Persons .—That the 
 Son of God, as He was on earth, was a person 
 distinguishable from His Father is evident. He 
 spoke of His own intimate fellowship with the 
 Father as person with person. We have traced the 
 steps by which the first disciples were led to the 
 conviction that this fellowship of Son with Father 
 was superhuman and belonged to God’s being before 
 the world was—that is to His eternal being. 2 We 
 have seen no reason to doubt that St. Paul occasion¬ 
 ally calls the Lord Jesus by the title God, and 
 St. John evidently does so. This is the new thought 
 0 f G 0 d—that the Father was never without His Son, 
 or God never without His Image or Word—sub¬ 
 ordinate to the Father as He who receives to Him 
 who gives, but belonging to His Being. So far the 
 
 i Clem., ad Cor. lviii 2. I do not cite 1 John v 8—the text of 
 the three heavenly witnesses—because, of course, it is not authentic. 
 We may be thankful that Roman Catholic scholars are now allowed 
 
 to acknowledge this. 
 
 e Dr Rashdall says ( Jesus Human and Divine , p. 50) that St. John 
 does not call the pre-existing Word “ Son,” but surely he does in 
 John i 18 (if the right reading is “ God only begotten, it carries 
 the'same meaning); cf. iii 17. Abo Jesus asserts that His Self— 
 He who now speaks as man—was pre-existent (vm 58, x 3(5, xvi 28, 
 
 xvii 5). 
 
236 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 New Testament plainly implies a distinction of 
 persons in the Godhead. 
 
 Again the Christ, who is the Son, was to bestow the 
 Spirit, in whom He Himself lived. In the Synoptists 
 our Lord very seldom is represented as speaking 
 about the Spirit. Once He seems to speak of the 
 Spirit, who dwells in Him and in whose power He 
 acts, as a person who can be blasphemed, and again 
 j le promises that He shall dwell in His disciples 
 and inspire them to speak right words. 1 But we 
 have noticed that the intensity of the belief of the 
 earliest Church in the Spirit would suggest that our 
 Lord must have spoken more on this subject than 
 the Synoptists would suggest, and certainly in the 
 fourth Gospel there is much more. There certainly 
 our Lord speaks of the Holy Spirit as of a distinct 
 person, “ another paraclete ” or helper, who is to 
 take His own place. In these last discourses, 
 though the Greek noun for Spirit is neuter, He is 
 always referred to by the masculine adjective “ He.” 2 
 He is described in decidedly personal language as 
 guide, interpreter, remembrancer, witness and judge, 
 convicting the world. 
 
 Thus it does not surprise us to find the earliest 
 Church in Jerusalem and in its further extension 
 speaking of the Holy Ghost as of a person possessing 
 the Church. To lie to the Church, as Ananias and 
 Sapphira did, is to “ tempt ” the Holy Ghost and 
 to lie to Him, that is to God. He is a person 
 being “resisted ” by the Jews. He gives directions, 
 speaking in the heart of individuals, to do or not 
 to do this or that, to go here or there. He “ carries 
 off ” Philip the Evangelist. He is joined to the 
 apostles and elders at the Council in Jerusalem in 
 
 1 Mark iii 29, xiii 11. But in the Old Testament once at least 
 the Spirit of God is momentarily distinguished from the Father 
 as sending the Righteous Servant, “The Lord God hath sent me 
 and his Spirit” (Is. xlviii 16). 
 
 2 John xiv 26, xv 26, xvi 8. 
 
THE SPIRIT DISTINCT FROM CHRIST 237 
 
 giving their decision. He directs the appointment 
 ot particular missionaries and appoints presbyter- 
 bishops J From time to time the Lord Jesus appears 
 to Stephen and to St. Paul, or speaks to the latter , 1 2 
 but such appearances or messages appear to be 
 thought of as quite distinguishable from the ordi- 
 nary guidance given by the Spirit : that is to say, 
 
 the Spirit of Jesus ” is not confused with the Lord 
 Jesus. 
 
 So in St. PauTs Epistles the Holy Spirit is spoken 
 or as a person. He intercedes with groanings for 
 the Church, as dwelling at its heart, and the Father 
 recognizes His mind, because He intercedes accept¬ 
 ably. He bears witness within the heart of the 
 Christian to his human spirit. He can be grieved 
 and disappointed . 3 Constantly in St. Paul He is 
 spoken of as “ the Spirit ” or “ the Spirit of God ” 
 or “ the Spirit of Christ,” so as to be plainly distin¬ 
 guished from Christ, though in one passage Christ 
 m His glorified manhood is spoken of by St. Paul as 
 having become “quickening spirit ,” 4 and once “the 
 Loid and the Spirit ’ appear to be identified. 
 This passage, and the various uses of “ spirit ” in 
 the New Testament, are examined elsewhere in some 
 detail . 5 But for the present I will content myself 
 with a protest. To say, as “the critics” are so 
 fond of doing, without more ado, that St. Paul 
 identifies the glorified Christ and the Spirit, on 
 the strength of one phrase , 6 while in some thirty 
 passages he distinguishes them, is unreasonable and 
 as far as can be from the spirit of legitimate criticism. 
 St. Paul is not a writer who is precise in his use of 
 
 1 See Acts v 3, 4, 9, vii 51, viii 29, 39, xiii 2, xv 28, xvi 7 xx 28 
 
 2 Acts vii 55, ix 41, xviii 9, xxiii 11. 
 
 3 Rom. viii 16, 26, 27, Eph. iv 30, 1 Thes. v 19. 
 
 4 1 Cor. xv 45. 
 
 6 2 Cor. iii 17. See appended note, p. 253. 
 
 • And even here, according to the MSS., he also speaks of “ the 
 Spirit of the Lord,” thus drawing a distinction. 
 
238 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 terms. But he is a writer who, without such tech¬ 
 nical precision, has a remarkable power of making 
 his meaning clear on the whole. He uses spirit 
 in a great variety of senses. But on the whole he 
 leaves no doubt in our mind that he thinks of the 
 Holy Spirit dwelling in the Church as a self-conscious 
 and willing agent, distinguishable from the Father 
 or God and from the glorified Christ. There is “one 
 God and Father,” and “one Lord,” and “one 
 Spirit.” That is the total impression. 
 
 Thus I think we shall give a true account of the 
 doctrine of the Bible as a whole about the Holy 
 Spirit if we say that in the Old Testament the Holy 
 Spirit of God expresses the activity of God in the 
 world, and especially His activity in inspiring ex¬ 
 ceptional men and most conspicuously the prophets ; 
 and that He is promised as the special endowment 
 of the future Messiah and of the “ servant of 
 Jehovah,” and thereafter as the endowment of all 
 men in the Messianic kingdom. But in all this there 
 was very little tendency to speak of the Spirit as a 
 person distinguishable from God. In the New Testa¬ 
 ment, however, this tendency becomes very marked. 
 The Spirit is still the active energy of God. But 
 there is a very marked tendency to think of Him, 
 lodged as He is in the heart of the Church and in the 
 heart of the individual Christian, as a person—a 
 self-conscious subject—distinguishable from God and 
 from Christ, the Lord or the Son of God, who sends 
 
 Him. 
 
 On the whole I hold it as unquestionable that the 
 Church at the end of the Apostolic Age is found 
 believing, as a result of its experience of Jesus and 
 His Spirit, in three distinguishable agents : (1) God, 
 whom they now know as the Father j (2) Jesus, the 
 Christ and Lord, whom they believe in as the Son 
 or Word of the Father, who for their sakes had been 
 made man, and in that manhood glorified and 
 
THE THREE MUTUALLY INCLUSIVE 239 
 
 spiritualized had gone into heaven and had sent 
 down upon the Church (3) the Holy Spirit, His 
 own Spirit and the Father’s, to be their helper, 
 strengthener, guide, and intercessor; and their 
 thought of the one God includes that of the three 
 “ persons.” 
 
 (2) Their mutual inclusiveness .•—But so far we have 
 given but a very one-sided account of the theology 
 of the New Testament. It is true that they believe 
 in one God the Father, and one Lord the Son, and 
 one Spirit of the Father and the Son, each conceived 
 of as divine and personally distinct. But this sug¬ 
 gests three Gods, and that is not by any means the 
 total picture. So close a unity is suggested that 
 each involves the others. This impression is conveyed 
 quite without the appearance of conscious intention, 
 but very subtly, both in St. Paul and in St. John. 
 In St. Paul the Holy Spirit possesses the Church 
 and its members, so that the Church as a whole and 
 the body of each member of the Church is His temple 
 (1 Cor. iii 16, 17, and vi 19). But the presence of the 
 Holy Spirit, that and nothing else, implies and 
 carries with it the presence of Christ. He treats the 
 Spirit dwelling in us, or our having the Spirit, as 
 equivalent to Christ dwelling in us (Rom. viii 9, 10). 
 And the Spirit (or Christ) dwelling in us implies or 
 involves God dwelling in us (1 Cor. iii 16, 17). Each 
 involves the others. So again it is the Spirit that 
 binds the body, which Christians are, into one, and 
 diffuses in it His manifold gifts. Therefore it is the 
 body of Christ'—even Christ Himself—and He also 
 is described, not only as the head of the body, but the 
 all-pervading source of its life and unity (1 Cor. 
 xii 11-13 and Eph. iv 15-16), and the “ fullness of 
 Christ ” into which it grows is also called the “fullness 
 of God ” (Eph. iv 13, iii 19). Though the Three are 
 spoken of as personally distinct, each by His presence 
 and actions involves the presence and action of all. 
 
240 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 The three are one. So in St. John the promised 
 coming of the Spirit involves Christ’s coming : “I 
 will come unto you.” The 44 other paraclete/’ is to 
 be no substitute for His absence but the security for 
 His presence. And as He abides in the Father, and 
 the Father in Him, so His coming will be the Father’s 
 coming : 44 We will come unto you ” (St. John xiv 
 16-23). So in creation and the sustentation of nature, 
 Christ is the agent—through Him are all things, and 
 in Him all things consist. For that very reason all 
 things are 44 through ” God as well as from Him and 
 unto Him (Rom. xi 36). This subtle thought appears 
 constantly. The three are by no means separate 
 persons. There is, it seems, in the three but one 
 being, one mind, one activity. 
 
 The common idea of human persons attributes to 
 them a mutual exclusiveness. They have been de¬ 
 scribed as 44 impermeable.” This impression, how¬ 
 ever, is largely derived from the separatedness of 
 human bodies. When we get to the spiritual self of 
 a man, we find that personality is radically social 
 and deeply permeable. 1 Nevertheless, the impression 
 given us of the mutual interpenetration of the divine 
 Three suggests a unity to which the closest conceivable 
 fellowship of human persons could not approach, 
 it would seem as if the Father can do nothing except 
 through the Son or Word and by the Spirit, and the 
 Son nothing except from the impulse of the Father 
 and in the Spirit, and the Spirit nothing except from 
 the Father and the Son, bringing them with Him in 
 His action. 2 
 
 1 See especially Canon Richmond’s Essay on Personality^as a 
 Philosophical Principle (Edwin Arnold, 1900)—a very valuable 
 book which has never received sufficient attention. 
 
 2 It is to be noted, however, as I have mentioned before, that 
 barely a word is said in the N.T., as far as I can ascertain, of the 
 activity of the Spirit in nature or in the conscience of men in general, 
 or anywhere at all except inside the Church. The gift of the Spirit 
 is represented as poured out upon Christ and, through Him, upon 
 
THE FORMULATION OF DOCTRINE 241 
 
 All this has a more absorbing interest because it 
 appears so unintentionally. It all emerges in the 
 processtof man’s redemption (save so fai^as cosmic 
 functions are also, ascribed to the Son). 1 But it 
 v, ouid seem as if, in the process of redemption, we 
 necessarily get some glimpse into the eternal being 
 of God. This appearance of a trinity in unity— 
 as Father and Son and Spirit co-operate in the work 
 of . redeeming man—suggests necessarily what God 
 is in Himself. The secret of His being is, as it were, 
 m a measure, overheard. The Church, through its 
 experience of redemption by Father, Son, and Spirit, 
 iound itself believing in a trinity of divine persons 
 and (none the less) in the unity of God. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It was with this equipment of faith that the Church 
 went out into the world which w r e have already 
 described as full of intellectual curiosity and the love 
 of abstract discussion, as well as full of a deep sense 
 of spiritual need, which prepared it to welcome any 
 real or pretended revelation from the unseen world. 
 It was required to explain its faith to the outside 
 world, and it found the necessity equally urgent to 
 
 His Church. 1 lie Spirit was not yet ” till Christ poured it out, 
 and, except in the channel of the Church, not a word is said suggest¬ 
 ing His activity. This silence surely does not mean that the Spirit 
 is not the “ giver of life ” wherever life is. And we are surely 
 right to argue that where the fruits of the Spirit in human goodness 
 appear, there is the activity of the Spirit. But it is very notable 
 that, while the Word of God is said to be the Light which lightens 
 every man, nothing of the sort is suggested about the Spirit. Our 
 attention is solely directed to His action in the Church—so far as the 
 New Testament is concerned. 
 
 1 It is worth noting that we can know nothing (save by very fallible 
 conjecture or reasoning) about the inner relations of the being of 
 God except what is reflected in the original experience of the 
 Church. Thus the ground for belief in the eternal procession of 
 the Spirit from the Father through the Son lies simply in the fact 
 that He did so “ proceed ” when He was poured out upon the 
 Church. 
 
242 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 explain itself to itself. And the stimulus to explana¬ 
 tion lay chiefly in various suggestions or theories which 
 might be more or less plausible, but which the Church 
 felt would undermine its faith and its tradition, or were 
 contrary to Scripture— 44 Scripture ” meaning first the 
 Old Testament books and then, as the Gospels and 
 St. Paul’s Epistles and the other books of the New 
 Testament were gradually 44 canonized,” the New 
 Testament books also. 
 
 As has been already explained in connection with 
 the doctrine of the person of Christ, the Church 
 teachers made many mistakes. The 44 prophet ” 
 Hermas in the Roman Church was widely believed 
 in as a real prophet who received symbolic visions 
 which really came from God; and his moral message 
 was full of edification; but he had no instinct for 
 theology, and his utterances, so far as they concern 
 the doctrine of God, are confused and confusing. 1 
 
 So also some of the apologists, in their attempts to 
 expound the Christian faith in terms of current 
 philosophy, use expressions which were afterwards 
 repudiated by the Church, as when they seem to 
 represent the divine Reason as an eternal quality 
 in God which became the personal Word or Son only 
 when proceeding forth from God in the act of crea¬ 
 tion. 2 Inasmuch as the individual teachers were 
 certainly not infallible, mistakes were inevitable. 
 But St. Paul and St. John, when they look back to 
 the beginning before the world was, suggest to us 
 no such idea, but the thought of one who in that 
 eternity already was the Son and the Word of God, 
 with God as His offspring, but distinct from Him. 
 
 1 He seema to confuse the Holy Spirit with the eternal spiritual 
 being of our Lord ; and Justin Martyr’s teaching about the Holy 
 Spirit is unsatisfactory, as judged either by Scriptural or later Church 
 standards (see Dr. Armitage Robinson, The “ Apostolic Preaching 
 of St. Irenaeus, S.P.C.K.; and Swete, The Holy Spirit in the Ancient 
 Church, pp. 25-39). 
 
 2 See Dr. Kidd, Hist, of the Church, i 359-71. 
 
THE DIFFICULTY OF EXPRESSION 243 
 
 “ He (the Son) is before all things.” “ In the 
 beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
 God, and the Word was God.” 1 
 
 On the whole the difficulty proved to be to avoid, 
 on the one hand, language which suggested Tritheism 
 i.e. the belief in three Gods rather than one, or 
 one God who was the source of two others, the Son 
 and the Spirit, or who was the source of one other 
 (the Son) and an influence called the Holy Spirit— 
 and, on the other hand, to avoid what came to be 
 called Sabellianism, or Modalism, which sought to 
 describe Son and Spirit as only aspects, phases, or 
 manifestations of the one God and not distinctive 
 persons. On the whole, the danger was greater in 
 the Tritheistic direction than in the Sabellian, for 
 the Church was keenly alive at least to the distinctive 
 being of the Son who was incarnate. One difficulty 
 was that, to start with, there was no word current 
 in Greek or Latin to express “ person.” You could, 
 of course, describe a human person by calling him 
 a man, or a spirit by calling him an angel or demon 
 or God, and you could talk of mind or soul, but for 
 a person as such—whether God, or angel, or man— 
 there w r as no current word. It was, in fact, the 
 Christian sense of the value of personality which 
 disclosed the need of such a word. Origen, in de¬ 
 scribing the “ tradition ” of the Churches derived 
 from the apostles, which all Christians are bound 
 to hold, describes it as a belief in the one God, the 
 Creator of all that is, and the author of the Old 
 Testament as well as the New, who before all creation 
 was the Father of Him, the Son, through whom all 
 things were made, and who in these last days, empty¬ 
 ing Himself, was incarnate and was made man, by 
 a birth of the Virgin and of the Holy Spirit, being 
 and continuing to be God : and in the Holy Spirit 
 as associated in honour and dignity with the Father 
 
 1 Col. i 17, John i 1. 
 
244 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 and the Son. 1 This account of tradition manifestly 
 leaves open questions, especially about the Holy 
 Spirit, which Origen would have men solve by dili¬ 
 gent investigation of the Holy Scriptures. Finally, 
 however, it was decided that the Three must be 
 regarded as “ of one substance, 55 that is to say, as 
 belonging to the one eternal being of God, and that 
 each must be distinguished as eternally a person— 
 the words chosen to designate “ person 55 —that is, the 
 conscious subject—being the Greek word,“hypostasis, 5 5 
 which hitherto had been used in the general sense 
 of substance, and the Latin word “ persona, 55 which, 
 meaning first the actor’s mask, and then his “ part 55 
 or the character which he represented, and then the 
 part which anyone is called to play in life, was already 
 trembling on the verge of meaning what we mean by 
 a person. The Fathers are profuse in their apologies 
 for the inadequacy of these terms. Man has no 
 celestial language, but God has revealed Himself so 
 distinctly that we must find the best words we can 
 to describe and guard the revealed reality. After a 
 time, of course, as always happens when a new T 
 terminology is adopted, people got used to the terms, 
 and the apologies are not so much heard. The 
 Church doctrine is that God subsists as three persons 
 in one substance or reality. “ Deus Pater, Deus 
 Filius, Deus Spiritus Sanetus. Ft tamen non tres 
 dii : sed unus est Deus. 55 But it was again and 
 again affirmed that the term “ person 55 is not used 
 of God in exactly the same sense as it is used of 
 human persons. The Three are one in a fuller sense 
 than could be true of three human individuals. 
 
 Harnack and others have laid great stress upon 
 certain differences of a metaphysical kind which 
 appear to distinguish the way of thinking about the 
 Trinity which we find in the great Greek teachers 
 (Origen and, later, the Cappadocians, Basil and the 
 
 1 De Princip., i 4. 
 
ST. AUGUSTINE 245 
 
 Gregories) and Latins like Tertullian, from what 
 yve find in Athanasius at Alexandria and Augustine 
 in the West. The truth is that the former teachers 
 begin, on the whole, from the thought of the different 
 persons, and then seek to give intellectual expression 
 to their unity, while Athanasius and, especially, 
 Augustine, begin from the unity, and then within the 
 unity are at pains to be true to the distinctions also. 
 There is a difference ; and doubtless it would have 
 become considerable if these Church teachers had 
 been merely philosophers pursuing abstract truth. 
 But they had, all of them, behind them the faith 
 of the Church in the one God the Father, and the 
 eternal Son who was incarnate in Jesus Christ, and 
 the Holy Spirit who had inspired and guided in 
 such and such ways the people of God, and who 
 could only be described as “ persons,” and who yet 
 belonged to the being of the one God. Granted this, 
 their metaphysical differences, in the extremely rare¬ 
 fied air in which a discussion of the eternal being, 
 whom we know only in part and discern only in a 
 dim reflection, must necessarily proceed, are not, to 
 most of us, of much importance, and easily admit of 
 being exaggerated. 1 
 
 Amongst us, however, Dr. Rashdall has been 
 constantly appealing to the teaching of Augustine 
 and later of St. Thomas Aquinas as if they did not 
 really maintain the distinct and eternal 'personality 
 of Father, Son, and Spirit, but were content to 
 believe in one God in whom “ Father,” “ Son,” and 
 “ Spirit ” are names only for qualities or activities 
 within the one divine mind and being, which are 
 not distinguishable persons at all. 2 Now it is quite 
 true of St. Augustine that, deriving his philosophy 
 from Neo-Platonism, partly through the medium of 
 
 1 See Tix6ront, Histoire des dogmes (Lecoffre, Paris) ; vol. ii 
 gives a very fair account of these differences (pp. 67 ff. and 261 ff.). 
 
 1 Rashdall, Jesus, Human and Divine, pp. 24 f., 61 f., 67. 
 
 17 
 
246 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 Victorinus Afer, he is jealous above all things for 
 the maintenance of the unity of God. And the 
 human analogy which he loves best as pointing 
 upwards to the divine being is the analogy of the 
 distinct functions in the single human person—the 
 fundamental Self (mind or memory) with its expres¬ 
 sion in Thought (or word), and then again in Will 
 (or love) ; and it is quite true that this analogy of 
 itself would not suggest three persons in the God¬ 
 head. It is a manner of thinking the issue of which 
 would be Unitarian, no doubt. 
 
 Thus if Dr. Rashdall had said that St. Augustine 
 (and later St. Thomas) uses an analogy which sug¬ 
 gests something much less than three persons, he 
 would have said no more than the truth. St. 
 Augustine himself is careful to point this out and 
 correct the impression. 1 For St. Augustine’s faith 
 and doctrine is as far as possible from resting on this 
 analogy or on any argument. It rests in the revela¬ 
 tion of God contained in Scripture and taught by 
 the Church. And there is no doubt how St. Augustine 
 conceives this revelation, and what his doctrine is. 
 It is familiar to us in the Quicunquc vult. It is the 
 doctrine of one God in three 44 persons’’—for we 
 must use the term person for lack of a better name. 
 The divine being is one—one substance, one mind, 
 one will. But this divine being exists in three per¬ 
 sons, each of whom is whole God, in each of whom 
 the divine mind and all the divine attributes exist 
 personally. You may, of course, say that St. 
 Augustine’s doctrine is not intelligible, or you may 
 say that his favourite analogy 2 does not tend to prove 
 his doctrine. But there is no sense in appealing to 
 Augustine as if he did not hold that each of the 
 
 1 Epist. clxix. 6. 
 
 2 He also uses an analogy which suggests distinction of persons— 
 the analogy of the Lover and the Loved. Then he tries unsuccess* 
 fully to make 44 Love suggest a third person (De Trin. viii 14). 
 
ST. THOMAS OF AQUINO 247 
 
 three persons, of Himself, is whole God, or as if he 
 would tolerate any kind of “ reduced 55 Trinitarianism. 1 
 
 So it is with St. Thomas Aquinas. He, too, 
 begins from the divine unity. He, too, like Augustine, 
 derives his philosophy of God partly through Neo- 
 platonist channels—the medium being the unknown 
 thinker who wrote under the name of Dionysius, 
 the Athenian disciple of St. Paul, and who was 
 uncritically taken throughout the middle ages to 
 be really that apostolic man. Thus, like Augustine, 
 he seeks to represent to himself the distinctions in 
 the Godhead after the manner of internal relations 
 within a single thinking and willing subject. No 
 doubt this manner of thinking taken by itself would 
 lead to a Unitarian conception of God. But Thomas, 
 no more than Augustine, contemplates the possi¬ 
 bility of such a conclusion. He knows that the 
 Christian doctrine of God was not the product of 
 human reasoning, but of divine revelation. He 
 knows that human reasonings could never sub¬ 
 stantiate the doctrine of the Trinity, though they 
 may be able to approve it, and cannot disprove it. 
 He himself receives the doctrine of the Bible and 
 the Church without a shadow of question. In article 
 after article of his Summa he asserts, like Augustine, 
 that the Divine being subsists in three eternal and 
 co-equal persons. The relationships in God are not 
 qualities but persons. Godhead is in essence one 
 and indivisible, but each of the persons in whom it 
 subsists is a distinct person {alius) from the others. 2 
 
 1 “ Tantus est solus Pater, vel solus Filius, vel solus Spiritus 
 Sanctus, quantus est simul Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus ” 
 (De Trin. vi 9). 
 
 2 Summa Theol. pars la, qu. xxxi, art. 2: “ Personaliter alius 
 Pater, alius Filius, alius Spiritus Sanctus.” “Cum nomen alius 
 masculine acceptum, non nisi distinctionem suppositi in natura 
 [a distinction^!: subject in nature] significet, Filius alius a Patre 
 convenienter dicitur.” “ Neque tamen dicimus unicum Deum 
 quia pluribus Deitas est communis.” “ Pater est alius a Film' 
 sed non aliud. Et e converso dicimus quod sunt unum sed non 
 
248 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 It requires indeed a philosophical microscope to 
 distinguish in final outcome the doctrine of the 
 Cappadocians who begin with the Three from the 
 doctrine of Augustine and Aquinas who begin from 
 the One. Both with the like emphasis believe in 
 the one God in three persons. 
 
 But I am not writing in the main for those who 
 can move freely in the high air of metaphysical 
 speculation. Probably most of us entertain what 
 seems to us a well-grounded scepticism as to the 
 powers of the abstract reason. But we very earnestly 
 seek to know whether’—apart from subtle differences 
 —the traditional Christian doctrine of one God as 
 existing in three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, 
 is for us believable. It is to this question that I 
 must address myself, without raising any question 
 of ecclesiastical authority. 
 
 I think the experience of the disciples must be, 
 in some sense, repeated in us. I have already called 
 attention to the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity 
 is clearly there'—implicit certainly, and in great 
 measure explicit—in the New Testament, especially 
 in St. Paul and in St. John. It emerged simply 
 in the process of believing in Christ as the Son of 
 God incarnate and in the realized activity of the 
 Holy Spirit’—the Spirit of God received from the 
 ascended Christ. I do not think my readers can 
 question this. To believe in Christ, as the first 
 Christians came to believe in Him, involves us 
 necessarily in the thought of God as not a solitary 
 monad. There in the ultimate being is Father 
 and Son'—God and His Word or self-expression. 
 There already is the distinction of persons. Perhaps 
 we should have been disposed to think of the Spirit 
 
 unus .” Cf. qu. xxx, art. 1 : “ Cum in divinis sint plures res 
 subsistentes in divina natura, plures quoque personas ibi esse 
 necesse est.” Cf. qu. xxix, art. 4 : “ Hoc nomen persona dicitur 
 ad se, non ad alterum ; quia significat relationem, non per modum 
 relationis, sed per modum substantiae quae est hypostasis.’ ; 
 
THE RELIEF OF THE INTELLECT 249 
 
 as only the influence or activity of God in the souls 
 of men. But we must acknowledge that this will 
 not account for the language of the New Testament 
 or the language of Christ, if we believe that He really 
 uttered the discourses in the Fourth Gospel, which 
 it is very hard to ascribe to any lower speaker. 
 Certainly the first Christians felt themselves in their 
 relations with the Holy Spirit as in contact with a 
 person, and so spoke of Him. And if we are con¬ 
 strained to admit distinctions or mutual relation¬ 
 ships in God, it seems absurd to originate a hitherto 
 unheard-of doctrine of Duality for the originally 
 Trinitarian belief, when plainly we have no new facts 
 to go upon. Let us see then whether this doctrine 
 of the Trinity commends itself to our reason. 
 
 I think we shall probably agree with Huxley that 
 the foundations of things are always mysterious 
 and the doctrine of the Trinity not more mysterious 
 than the ultimate principles of physics or biology. 
 To feel that a belief is rational we must feel—not 
 that we could demonstrate it a priori —but that it 
 is grounded in experience and that it interprets 
 experience. It was a true saying of Dr. Hort, 
 who was certainly one of the greatest men of the 
 last generation, that the evidence for the truth of 
 the Christian revelation is shown, not so much in 
 any light which it receives, as in the light it gives. 1 
 What commends the doctrine of the Trinity is the 
 light it throws on some otherwise dark problems. 
 
 1. It alone enables us to think of God as in Him¬ 
 self “ the living God ” apart from and independently 
 of creation. We have seen at an earlier stage of our 
 argument that the “ unassisted ” speculative reason 
 of man arrives, with sufficient assurance, at a belief 
 in God, who is the “ Wisdom and Spirit of the 
 Universe”—that is at what is called the Higher 
 Pantheism; but that it does not seem to carry us 
 1 See The Way, the Truth, and the Life (Macmillan), p. 11. 
 
250 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 with any security to a belief in a God prior to and 
 independent of the world. God appears to be as 
 dependent upon the world for self-expression as 
 the world is on Him. He realizes Himself in the 
 world. Perhaps He only attains self-consciousness 
 in the self-consciousness of men. We also saw plainly 
 enough that from a religious point of view such a 
 conception falls wholly short of what men—what 
 most men—need. The religion of the prophets of 
 Israel and of our Lord gave a profound stimulus 
 to human life just because it represented God as a 
 person, perfect and complete in Himself, having the 
 characteristics of a person, wisdom, justice and love 
 in a supreme sense ; having a will and purpose for 
 men, who were made in His image, but alive in 
 Himself before ever the world was, the Creator of 
 all that is and the judge of all rational beings. We 
 satisfied ourselves that we must accept the message 
 of the prophets and of our Lord as a genuine self¬ 
 disclosure of God. But we find ourselves in¬ 
 tellectually paralysed when we try to give any 
 meaning to this idea of one self-existent being, 
 alive in Himself with the fullness of life before the 
 world was. For life, as far as we can see, involves 
 relationship, and rational or moral life the relationship 
 of persons. How can we think of an eternal will 
 without an eternal effect or product of this will, or 
 of an eternal consciousness without an object of 
 this consciousness adequate to itself, or of an eternal 
 love without an eternal object of love ? To say 
 that God finds Himself first in nature is disastrous 
 for religion. But how can He live and love alone ? 
 Now, as we have seen, the idea of the Trinity was 
 not evolved in response to any such intellectual 
 questionings. No difficulty appears to have been 
 felt by the Jews or first disciples in believing in God 
 who is one only person. But they found them¬ 
 selves, in the way we have described, as a consequence 
 
GOD ETERNALLY ALIVE 
 
 251 
 
 of their experience of Christ and of the Spirit, be¬ 
 lieving in a trinity of persons in the one God. A 
 glimpse into God’s eternal life seems thus to have 
 been given to men. And the relief to the intellect is 
 great. Now we can see how God can be alive with 
 the fullest life we can conceive of—will and reason 
 and love—because His own being involves in itself 
 a relationship of persons. In the eternity which 
 we cannot with our finite intellects conceive He 
 was productive, and found His object of knowledge 
 and object of love in His eternal Word or Son and 
 in the Holy Spirit. As I have said, this apparent 
 necessity of thought carries us much more completely 
 to the conviction of some relationship of persons 
 than to the specific conception of Trinity. Perhaps 
 it does not surprise us that we do not find our rational 
 powers go far enough to discover God as He is. We 
 shall be content to accept God’s self-disclosure as it 
 has been given. But the intellectual relief is great 
 when we find ourself authorized to think of the very 
 being of God as a movement of life in which the 
 Father is eternally expressing Himself and knowing 
 and being known, loving and being loved, in the 
 Son and the Spirit. There is at once the fullness of 
 life in God, for the one eternal being is a fellowship 
 of persons, one with an intense unity, but alive with 
 the movement of a perfect life. I could not have 
 discovered the Trinity. But it is only the dis¬ 
 closure of it which enables me to think about God 
 with any satisfaction as alive and personal in Himself. 
 
 2. I am quite able to see that the higher I go up 
 in the scale of creation the more complex does the 
 living organism become. The nature of man is 
 the most complex unity in the world known to us. 
 If I seek to rise to the source and penetrate to the 
 ground of all life, and find this source and ground 
 to be a living God perfect in Himself, the upward 
 soaring train of thought leads me to postulate that 
 
252 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 this Eternal Being must be something quite different 
 from a monotonous unity. When I admit the dis¬ 
 closure of Trinity—that is multiplicity in unity— 
 it is only what I should expect in the perfect and 
 absolute being. And I can dimly conceive how there 
 in the eternal Word and the Spirit was the counter¬ 
 part, under conditions of eternity and perfection, 
 of all that wealth of life which is gradually evolved 
 on a lower plane in the process of creation. 
 
 3. Again, only when I am a believer in the Trinity 
 do I seem to lose the sense of bewilderment which 
 the old thinkers of Greece experienced in bringing 
 the One, the Unchangeable and the Eternal, into any 
 relation to a world of which the very being lies in 
 movement and change. The moving world and the 
 unchanging, immobile God seemed not merely to 
 belong to different grades of being, but to be in no 
 possible relation to one another. Does not creation 
 involve movement ? Does not God move in the 
 moving world which He sustains in being, and live 
 in its life ? But now I am delivered from all this 
 horrible imagination of a God who is absolute im¬ 
 mobility. For God is eternally alive—eternally 
 moving out into self-expression. He has the whole 
 movement of absolute life within Himself. Thus 
 to create and to begin to live and act on the lower 
 plane of gradual and progressive creation is no 
 unnatural thought to associate with a God who 
 eternally is life in Himself, because there is in Him 
 what is dimly descried as the eternal generation of 
 the Son and the procession of the Spirit. 1 
 
 4. Finally, is it not a delight to believe that the 
 ultimate reality is not monotonous unity, but a 
 unity which contains in itself a fellowship of persons 
 —one with a unity which can never be realized 
 
 1 This idea is developed by Victorinus Afer, whose importance 
 n his influence on Augustine has not had enough made of it (see 
 art in Diet, of Ch. Biography). 
 
REASON AND REVELATION 253 
 
 among human persons, but which at the same tim 
 assures us that personality and personal life essentially 
 involves fellowship ? In man personality emerges 
 out of fellowship and always involves fellowship. 
 The idea of personality as primarily individual and 
 fundamentally selfish we have learnt to be false. 
 It is only in fellowship we begin to realize ourselves, 
 and the more widely we expand into fellowship the 
 more we realize ourselves. And it is with delight 
 that we see the ground of this law in the Supreme. 
 For there the eternal being is fellowship. There 
 is no priority in Him of unity to multiplicity, and 
 no priority ofc multiplicity to unity. The Eternal 
 is one in many and many in one—one God, Father, 
 Son, and Holy Ghost. 
 
 44 If reason,” says Lotze, 44 is not of itself capable 
 of finding the highest truth, but on the contrary 
 stands in need of a revelation, still reason must be 
 able to understand the revealed truth, at least so 
 far as to recognize in it the satisfying and convincing 
 conclusion of those upward soaring trains of thought 
 which reason itself began, led by its own needs, 
 but was not able to bring to an end.” 1 
 
 Is not this a good description of how reason stands 
 towards revelation in this matter of the doctrine of 
 the Trinity ? 
 
 Note. 
 
 On the New Testament uses of “spirit,'” and especially on 
 2 Cor. Hi 17 ; see above, p. 237. 
 
 “Spirit” is used in a variety of connected senses in 
 the New Testament, not always easily distinguishable : 
 (1) Of God (John iv 24 , 44 God is Spirit ”) to express His 
 utter freedom from conditions of place or form. As 
 pure spirit He seeks only spiritual worshippers. (2) Of 
 created spirits, good and bad. In almost all cases such 
 
 1 Lotze, Microcosmus (Eng. trans.), ii 660. 
 
254 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 spirits are spoken of as persons, but in one or two places 
 “ spirit ” is used in a sense not unlike ours when we speak 
 of the spirit of the age (see my St. John's Epistles , pp. 
 168-9). (3) Of the human spirit, markedly distinguished 
 
 from the flesh and from the Spirit of God, see especially 
 1 Cor. ii 11, 2 Cor. vii 1. (4) Of the whole manhood of 
 Christ, as spiritualized and glorified in heaven. See John 
 vi 63, “ The things that I have been speaking to you of 
 —my flesh and blood—are to be thought of as the flesh 
 and blood of the ascended Christ, and therefore as spirit 
 and life, not unprofitable flesh.” Burney, I am glad to 
 see, supports me in this rendering, Aramaic Origin of the 
 Fourth Gospel , p. 109. So in 1 Cor. xv 45, St. Paul 
 says, “ The last Adam became life-giving spirit ” (5) 
 Of the Holy Spirit of God which dwelt pre-eminently in 
 our Lord, and after His ascension is given as His own 
 Spirit no less than His Father’s, to the Church. 
 
 Now the question is whether St. Paul in 2 Cor. iii 17, 
 “ The Lord is the Spirit,” identifies Christ the Lord in 
 heaven with the Holy Spirit, contrary, as I have said, to 
 his constant custom of distinguishing them. I think it 
 is very difficult to suppose this. And the passage seems 
 to me to suggest a quite different interpretation. Accord- 
 ing to the MSS., it runs (ver. 16) : “ But whensoever 
 the children of Israel shall turn to the Lord [referring 
 to Ex. xxxiv 34] the veil is taken away. Now the 
 Lord is the Spirit: and where the Spirit of the 
 Lord is, there is liberty.” Here the sudden transition 
 from the Lord who is the Spirit to the Spirit of the 
 Lord, followed by another transition in the next 
 verse back again to “ the Lord the Spirit ” seems 
 to me to be so awkward as to make eminently probable 
 the minute emendation 1 of the text proposed by Dr. 
 Hort and Dr. Chase, according to which we should read, 
 “ Whensoever it shall turn to the Lord, the veil is 
 taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where 
 the Spirit is Lord, there is liberty. And we all 
 . . . reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being trans¬ 
 formed ... as from the Lord the Spirit.” Here St. 
 
 1 An emendation which only involves the change of v into v 
 Kvpiou into Kvpiov). Dr. Chase, however, prefers Kvpievei. 
 
255 
 
 THE MEANING OF 2 COR. hi 17 
 
 Paul no doubt in some sense calls the Spirit the Lord. 
 But I have come to be convinced that it is in this sense: 
 “ The Lord to whom Israel must turn is the Spirit [i.e. 
 the Holy Spirit now given to the true Israel in the Chris¬ 
 tian Church]. Only where that Spirit is Lord is real 
 liberty, and it is in the power of this Spirit-Lord that 
 we Christians are being transformed.” It is true that 
 St. Paul does not elsewhere call the Spirit Lord, but I 
 think he is led to do so here by the suggestion of the 
 narrative in Exodus: and it appears to me that there is no 
 violence or improbability involved in this supposition, viz. 
 that as St. Paul constantly calls the Father the Lord, 
 and Jesus Christ the Lord, so once he should have called 
 the Holy Spirit the Lord—for obviously He is Lord in 
 Christian souls in the same sense as the Father and as 
 Jesus. This seems to me much more intelligible than 
 that St. Paul should confuse Christ and the Spirit by 
 saying “ The Lord Jesus is the Spirit ” while he else¬ 
 where so clearly and constantly distinguishes them. It 
 is quite intelligible that St. Paul should once call Christ 
 in His glorified manhood “ quickening spirit,” as having 
 become wholly spiritual and the source of life to His 
 Church, but surely not that he should call Him “ the 
 [Holy] Spirit ” with the definite article, contrary to his 
 constant practice. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 We are now occupied in considering certain ideas 
 and doctrines which are involved or implied in the 
 New Testament doctrine of Christ. And one of 
 the most obvious of these is the idea and doctrine 
 of the sinfulness of humanity. For among the most 
 familiar of the titles of Christ is that of the Redeemer 
 or the Saviour—who “ shall save His people from 
 their sins ”—and that of the Reconciler, who by 
 making atonement or propitiation reconciles us 
 to God, and that of the Second Adam who in¬ 
 augurates a new humanity regenerated and renewed 
 in Him. These titles mean that mankind are in a 
 state of unnatural bondage to sin or to the power 
 of evil, and need to have their freedom restored to 
 them by the act of God ; and that they are alienated 
 from God and their true good and need to have a 
 new status of sonship conferred on them by the 
 grace of God ; and that they belong to a race under 
 condemnation and need incorporation upon a new 
 stock. I suppose no one would be disposed to 
 question that the Bible as a whole views men as 
 being to start with in this unnatural condition, and 
 as needing to be saved from it, and as unable to save 
 themselves. This assumption is stated in a striking 
 form by St. John when he says that “ if we say we 
 have not sinned, we make God a liar.” For, as 
 Westcott interprets the phrase, “ all the communica¬ 
 tions of God to men presuppose that the normal 
 
 256 
 
THE O. T. VIEW OF MANKIND 257 
 
 lelations of earth and heaven have been interrupted. 
 To deny this is not to question God’s truth in one 
 particular point, but to question it altogether.” 
 
 I 
 
 This is the point then. The Bible is the record 
 of a Gospel of redemption. It is a proclamation 
 of good tidings from God. It holds out to man 
 the highest and most glorious possibilities in Christ 
 Jesus. But it does so on the assumption that in 
 humanity as it stands there is something radically 
 perverted, in view of which it needs for its salvation 
 something quite different from mere example or 
 encouragement to make the best of itself—it needs 
 fundamental reconstruction by Him who originally 
 created it. 
 
 I have just said that it will hardly be doubted 
 that this is the Biblical assumption, but we had 
 better examine the assumption a little, and especially 
 we had better examine our Lord’s estimate of His 
 brother men. 
 
 This estimate, like everything else in our Lord’s 
 teaching, is given on the Old Testament background. 
 The Old Testament is full of the picture of mankind 
 within and without the chosen people as a wicked 
 world, in which God is profoundly disappointed 
 and which lies under His just and inevitable wrath. 
 On this dark background there is the radiant picture 
 of the righteous who “ walk with God ” ; but, as 
 the sense of the individual spiritual life develops, 
 even the righteous man appears as sinful and con¬ 
 fessing his sinfulness. “ There is no man that 
 sinneth not.” 1 The record of God’s dealings with 
 His saints, Moses, Aaron, and Samuel, is that they 
 are not only “ heard ” but also “ forgiven ” and 
 
 1 1 Kings viii 46 ; cf. Eccl. vii 20, Job iv. 17 (R.V. marg.), 
 xiv 4, xv 14-16. 
 
258 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 “ punished.” 1 Isaiah confesses his own sinfulness 
 as well as his people’s. “I am a man of unclean 
 lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean 
 lips.” 2 The penitent psalmist acknowledges sin 
 as inherent in his nature even before his birth. 
 “ Behold I was shapen in iniquity and in sin hath 
 my mother conceived me.” 3 This is the tone of 
 the Old Testament. Thus when John the Baptist 
 summons Israel to prepare for the coming of the Christ 
 it is by a call to repentance'—a fundamental change 
 of mind—and by a baptism for the remission of 
 sins, 4 and that is represented as the substance of 
 the first preaching of Jesus. 5 
 
 There is no doubt that our Lord is very far from 
 representing human nature as He found it as wholly 
 corrupt. He showed a vivid appreciation of what 
 we should call natural goodness, which He found 
 in those whom the Jews regarded as outcasts at 
 least as much as within the chosen people. He 
 values “ the cup of cold water ” and every act of 
 natural kindness. He welcomes men who show a 
 right disposition of mind as 44 not far from the 
 kingdom of God.” Also He is extraordinarily 
 gracious to the outcasts. The 44 publicans and 
 harlots ” of society are assured of ready forgiveness. 
 He came, He said, not to call the righteous but 
 sinners. But there is a tendency to misrepresent 
 our Lord’s graciousness. Two things are specially 
 noticeable in our Lord’s teaching about sin. (1) He 
 dissociated it wholly from physical and ceremonial 
 associations and placed its seat firmly and only in 
 the heart of man. 6 And (2) His main emphasis 
 is on the sins of 44 the righteous,” that is, of those 
 who were so regarded and so regarded themselves. 
 Sins of violence and lust were, of course, regarded 
 as sins and stamped with reprobation in respectable 
 
 1 Ps. xcix 8. 2 Is. vi 5. 3 Ps. li 5. 
 
 4 Mark i 4. 6 Mark i 15. 6 Mark vii 20-3. 
 
OUR LORD’S ESTIMATE 259 
 
 Jewish society. But Jesus was at pains to bring 
 to light the even deeper sinfulness of spiritual sins, 
 such as were quite consistent with social respec¬ 
 tability and involved no ceremonial pollution— 
 hypocrisy or self-righteousness, avarice, pride, con¬ 
 tempt, hatred, spiritual blindness and prejudice, 
 and above all unmercifulness and the neglect of 
 active goodness. “ Inasmuch as ye did it not unto 
 one of the least of these my brethren . . . depart 
 from me.” Such sins of the spirit He represents 
 as even more dangerous than disreputable sins. 
 “ The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom 
 of God before you.” 1 
 
 When our Lord announced the joy of heaven as 
 lying more in the reclamation of the lost than in 
 the righteousness of “ the ninety and nine righteous 
 persons who need no repentance,” 2 He was speaking 
 to the Pharisees and scribes who murmured at His 
 receiving sinners and eating with them. They are 
 represented in the character of the elder brother 
 in the parable of the prodigal son, and of the 
 righteous Pharisee in the story of the devotions of 
 the Pharisee and the publican. Thus it is im¬ 
 possible to deny an ironical note in this allusion to 
 44 righteousness.” It was exactly this righteousness 
 which He came to expose as 44 a whited sepulchre.” 
 On the whole it must be acknowledged that while 
 our Lord infinitely deepened the sense of God’s 
 willingness to forgive, and refused to regard the 
 outcasts as 44 hopeless cases,” He also deepened and 
 broadened the sense of sin. He appears to assume 
 its universality. Thus it is noticeable that, speak¬ 
 ing to His new flock in the Sermon on the Mount 
 and reminding them of the natural goodness of men 
 in their love of their children, He says : 44 If ye 
 
 then being evil know how to give good gifts,” etc. 
 He compares men to Satan’s 44 goods ” held in 
 1 Matt, xxi 31. * Luke xv 7 ; see verse 2. 
 
260 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 bondage by the “strong man” and waiting for the 
 stronger to deliver them. 1 He claims of men the 
 moral equivalent of self-mutilation 2 as the price 
 to be paid to get rid of sinful inclination ; and 
 nothing can exceed the simplicity with which He 
 speaks of hell, with its awful anguish, as the in¬ 
 evitable penalty of tolerated sin, whether sins of 
 omission or of commission. Thus it is quite natural 
 that, when our Lord has in view the kingdom of God 
 which He is inaugurating, He should declare that 
 none can be fit for it without a fundamentally fresh 
 start. “ Verily I say unto you, except ye turn and 
 become as little children, ve shall in no wise enter 
 into the kingdom of heaven.” 3 And this funda¬ 
 mental turning appears to be inseparable from 
 discipleship to Himself, which means a very thorough 
 faith in Him as the divinely commissioned Redeemer. 
 This is apparent in the Synoptists. And it is pro¬ 
 foundly expressed in the Gospel of St. John. There 
 our Lord is represented as holding Himself aloof 
 from men’s first enthusiasm for Him. “ Jesus did 
 not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all 
 men, and because he needed not that anyone should 
 bear witness concerning man ; for he himself knew 
 what was in man.” 4 He knew to start with that 
 sad secret of human untrustworthiness, which in 
 slow and embittering experience has in countless 
 cases and in every age turned philanthropists into 
 cynics and made wise men mad. Therefore He 
 demands of men a deep reconstruction. “ Except 
 a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of 
 God,” “ Except a man be born of water and the 
 Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” 5 
 
 Certainly this is the spirit in which the first Church 
 
 1 Matt, xii 29, Luke xi 21. This applies not only to the “ pos¬ 
 sessed,” see verses 23-6. 
 
 2 Mark ix 43-9, Matt, v 27-30, xviii 8. 
 
 3 Matt, xviii 2. 4 John ii 24. 6 John iii 3, 5. 
 
THE N. T. ESTIMATE OF MAN 261 
 
 in Jerusalem understood its message. It was no 
 announcement to men of a glory which was already 
 theirs, if only they would open their eyes to discern 
 their true nature. Enlightenment was not enough. 
 They needed to embrace by faith a “salvation,” 
 now first offered them—offered in a new “ name ” 
 which was the only name of salvation—and the gate- 
 way to this salvation was baptism, which conveyed 
 to them what they could not otherwise receive, the 
 forgiveness of their sins, and prepared them for the 
 new gift of the Spirit. 1 Even the saintly Gentile 
 soldier Cornelius, though the effective appeal of his 
 “prayers and alms” to the ear of God is fully recog¬ 
 nized, and though God in merciful manner gives 
 the Holy Spirit to him and his company, is not 
 thereby dispensed from the entrance into the Church 
 by baptism. Like everybody else he needs the new 
 standing ground “ in the name,” and the forgiveness 
 of his sins. 2 
 
 I do not think the New Testament can be accused 
 of any pretension to expound the secrets of divine 
 justice for the satisfaction of our intellect. It does 
 what is much better. It assures us of the character 
 of God and thus enables us to feel quite confident 
 that He will deal in justice and love with every 
 human soul He has created. But it exists to record 
 a Gospel—a salvation for men, publicly proclaimed, 
 and divinely covenanted; and this Gospel is based 
 on an assumption that what humanity needs is 
 something other than development or enlighten¬ 
 ment. It needs fundamental reconstruction—a 
 fresh start, a new birth, forgiveness and renewal,— 
 and of all this there is only one source—the Prince 
 of the New Life, the Saviour, the Redeemer Jesus 
 Christ : and this fresh start is offered, so to speak, 
 objectively, as membership in the new community, 
 
 1 Acts ii 38-40, iii 19-2G, viii 14 ff., xix 4-6. 
 
 2 Acts x 43, 47. 
 
 18 
 
262 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 to those who seek this great deliverance as sinners 
 who need to be saved. 
 
 I do not think I need pursue the enquiry through 
 the New Testament. Everyone recognizes in St. 
 Paul the strongest and most vehement maintainer 
 of the corruption of the “ natural ” man and his 
 need of redemption through faith in Jesus Christ. 
 We will come back to St. Paul directly in connection 
 with the idea of the Fall. I would only say in 
 passing that I think he has been too exclusively 
 judged from the early chapters of the Romans. 
 And even in that Epistle he contemplates “ Gentiles 
 who have no law ” and yet “ do by nature the 
 things of the law ’’—who “ by patience in well¬ 
 doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, 
 and who find what they seek, whether Jews or 
 Gentiles : and he speaks of men of old who ‘ had 
 not sinned after the similitude of Adam s trans¬ 
 gression.” 1 Elsewhere he bids the Christians look 
 for and appreciate (apparently in the world at large) 
 a standard of truth, honour, justice, purity, and 
 virtue. 2 I do not think St. Paul would have been 
 blind to goodness of character wherever found, or 
 would have doubted its acceptableness to God. 
 He is not a systematic theorizer, blind to what 
 does not seem to square with his theory. He is 
 stating a general impression of the Gentile world; 
 and if he paints it in lurid colours, he seems to think 
 that those he writes to will not find the language 
 too strong. 3 Similar language is used by St. Peter 
 to Gentile Christians in similar circumstances : and 
 St. James’ estimate of human nature as it is found 
 among the Jews is not less severe. 
 
 1 Rom. ii 7, 10, 14, v 14. 2 Phil, iv 8. 
 
 3 The Ephesian Stoic, who about the middle of the first century 
 wrote “ letters ” under the assumed name of Heracleitus, speaka 
 quite as severely of Ephesian society. See my Ephesians, p. 253. 
 
THE MODERN ESTIMATE 
 
 263 
 
 II 
 
 The kind of estimate of human nature which we 
 find in the New Testament, both in its optimism 
 and its pessimism—that is, its glorious estimate of 
 what humanity is intended by God to be and is 
 capable of becoming, and its dark estimate of what 
 it has in fact, by rebellion against God, made itself 
 to be—was not out of harmony either with the 
 general sentiment in the period of the Roman 
 Empire when Christianity first spread, or with 
 the general sentiment of the middle ages. In both 
 periods it was natural to men to feel that the world 
 was a very evil world, that nothing that men could 
 do for themselves would make it better, and that 
 they must look for redemption to God and a spiritual 
 world above. But what characterized the early 
 Renaissance, and what reasserted itself 1 in the spirit 
 of industrialism and in modern movements as a 
 whole, at least before the Great War, was a sense 
 of human power—the power of man to redeem him¬ 
 self by his own initiative, especially by the instrument 
 of knowledge in general and the science of nature 
 in particular, which was at his disposal and which 
 he could manipulate in the cause of his own advance¬ 
 ment. This is the gospel of the Kingdom of Man. 
 And this gospel has seemed beyond question to 
 make the language of the Bible sound out of date— 
 as if it disparaged the “ God in man ” which is the 
 only kind of God congenial to this modern spirit. 
 
 It is not that the modern estimate of human 
 nature as it is, or as it has actually been found in 
 experience hitherto, is higher than the old orthodox 
 estimate—apart from some mediaeval and Calvinistic 
 exaggerations. Rousseau and Byron and Shelley 
 
 1 Reasserted itself, I mean, against Lutheranism and Calvinism, 
 which crossed and half-extinguished the spirit of the Renaissance. 
 
264 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 are as emphatic as the writers in the Bible that 
 “ our life is a false nature —’Tis not in the harmony 
 of things.” And now-a-days we hear no more 
 of Rousseau’s idealizing of natural or primitive 
 man. He is involved in the same condemnation 
 with civilized man. All around us to-day a cynically 
 low estimate of man seems to prevail in ordinary 
 literature—a low estimate of his capacity to restrain 
 his lusts, or to maintain unselfishness, honesty and 
 truthfulness in industrial life or in politics or in the 
 law courts ; and the spirit of idealism is fluctuating 
 and weak. What seems to be lacking, where the 
 characteristically modern spirit, in any one of its 
 many forms, prevails, is the readiness to welcome 
 the idea of redemption as the gift of God, or the self¬ 
 revelation of God which is incidental to redemption. 
 We seem to want a God who is so fully to be identified 
 with ourselves that either He must take us as we are, 
 and not judge us or condemn us for our sins, or else 
 (in the case of the more enthusiastic and reforming 
 spirits) that we can find Him sufficiently in our own 
 enlightenment and our own strivings after progress. 
 
 But, after all, we are not in very good spirits about 
 progress and world-redemption. There are a great 
 many people, even among agnostics, who are feeling 
 that there is something in the old language about 
 the need of a return to God. What is greatly to 
 be desired in ordinary men is the courageous de¬ 
 termination to think for themselves. They have 
 been led captive by the prophets of the modern 
 spirit so as to take it for granted that the Bible 
 religion is antiquated. Now, of course, the 
 traditional religion had become encrusted with 
 antiquated ideas in stagnant ages. And an age 
 which is an age of real and progressive science justly 
 demands of religion correspondence with science 
 rightly so called. But when the matter in hand is 
 the interpretation of human life, which science has 
 
SHAKESPEARE’S ESTIMATE 
 
 265 
 
 not hitherto shown any profound power to interpret 
 or to redeem, it is surely not too much to ask people 
 to reconsider frankly for themselves whether their 
 own reason warrants them in rejecting the estimate 
 of human life and its needs which is undoubtedly 
 Christ’s, and the offer of divine redemption which 
 He makes. And it is certain that the optimism of 
 Christianity, its glorious appreciation of human capa¬ 
 bility and destiny, is bound up with its pessimism 
 —with its profound sense that mankind has set 
 itself by its own sin on the wrong road and needs 
 redeeming by God, who alone can redeem it as Pie 
 first made it, and can give it the light and stimulus 
 and direction by which alone it can recover itself 
 and realize itself afresh. 1 
 
 When I hear contemptuous rejections of the 
 Biblical estimate of man as he is, as if it were dis¬ 
 honouring to human dignity, I often think of the 
 man who of all the characteristic spirits of the 
 Renaissance had the profoundest genius as an 
 interpreter of man—our own great Shakespeare. 
 No one ever had deeper interest in humanity or a 
 higher estimate of man’s capacity. 
 
 “ What a piece of work is a man ! how noble in reason ! 
 how infinite in faculty ! in form and moving how express 
 and admirable ! in action how like an angel ! in appre¬ 
 hension how like a god ! the beauty of the world ! the 
 paragon of animals ! ” 
 
 No one moreover ever contemplated humanity 
 with less of the spirit of the prophet and the reformer. 
 He was a typical man of the Renaissance. He 
 stood utterly and marvellously aloof from the keen 
 
 1 I find these suggestive words quoted from Dr. Joh. Weiss, 
 Das Urchristenthum, p. 188 : “ Strange as these things have become 
 to us, we cannot too earnestly make ourselves familiar with the 
 thought that the old Christianity understood the new life not 
 merely as a new mode of thought and moral conduct, but as a 
 wonderful equipment with new powers, the work of God.” 
 
26 6 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 and bitter religious controversies of his time. He 
 seems to know and care nothing about them. He 
 would approach mankind, with all his unmatched 
 genius for understanding and representing it, purely 
 and simply as the spectator—willing to be fascinated 
 and delighted with humanity as he found it, “ good 
 and bad together.” But, so approaching mankind, 
 one fact about human life appears to arrest him 
 and absorb him and terrify him—the fact that 
 men are not free, as they would boast themselves— 
 that they are enslaved by passion and obsessed by 
 delusion. This note becomes conspicuous first per¬ 
 haps in the somewhat morbid atmosphere of the 
 Sonnets—in the marvellous 129th Sonnet about lust, 
 where he exclaims— 
 
 “ The expense of spirit in a waste of shame 
 Is lust in action.” 
 
 Then its violence and deceitfulness and its miserable 
 issue is described with intense realization, and the 
 sonnet ends : 
 
 All this the world well knows j yet none knows well 
 
 To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” 
 
 In the great tragedies this seems to become the 
 one theme—the obsession of men. It may be by 
 lust, or by vanity, or by ambition, or by jealousy, 
 or by pride and the contempt of common men; 
 it may be by the paralysis of too much thinking; 
 but in all cases what is presented to us is the same 
 spectacle of a man obsessed. All the world can 
 see it except he himself. But he, obsessed, is also 
 blinded, and so blinded is driven forward by an 
 inevitable fate to his doom, and only by the violence 
 of the tragedy can the stage of human life be set 
 free again for life to go on its way. This spirit of 
 the tragedies seems to possess Shakespeare. One 
 of our best recent interpreters of Shakespeare— 
 
THE N. T. THEORY 267 
 
 Walter Raleigh—speaks as if even that mighty 
 mind nearly lost its balance in gazing into the awful 
 gulf. And he seems to have recovered himself in 
 his last period—that of the Romances—by refusing 
 to think any more about it. In one of his last 
 utterances, in which the man himself seems to speak 
 through Prospero’s lips, he gives up human life as 
 a riddle without an answer, a dream which has no 
 eternal significance. Certainly he never shows any 
 signs of becoming interested in the faith in divine 
 redemption. But when I hear people reject St. 
 Paul’s estimate of human life as a piece of “ morbid 
 pathology,” I think of Shakespeare and what he 
 seems to have seen in his marvellous mirror. 
 
 For myself I make my profession. I have tried 
 honestly and freely to know myself and to study 
 human life all around me and in the record of history ; 
 and I know no interpretation of human life which is 
 adequate both to the rays of glory which I see there 
 and the encompassing gloom, except the estimate 
 of the Bible. Man is made to be a king, but he is 
 “ a discrowned king ” : and no one can put him 
 again on the way of honour except his God who 
 made him and would redeem him. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Christian idea of sin was not developed as 
 a philosophy by reflection, but appeared as part of 
 a teaching about God and man which claimed to 
 be a divine message given that men might know how 
 to live. Nevertheless it involves a philosophy in 
 that it places the seat of sin in the will and finds 
 its essence in disobedience or violation of a law known 
 to be divine. So the Bible looks out upon a dis¬ 
 ordered and miserable world and finds the secret 
 of the disorder and misery simply in the refusal 
 
 i See his Shakespeare in “ English Men of Letters,” pp. 210-12. 
 
268 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 “Ltfck^oS. “ d other fr “ spirits i» 
 
 So the nature of sin is vividly represented in the 
 
 Ttel w S T y u f the faU ° f Adam and Eve > which 
 dates we should remember, before any of the 
 
 prophets whose writings remain to us. So it is in 
 
 the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms. So it is 
 
 nally defined at the end of the New Testament 
 
 period in the First Epistle of St. John in the pfoase 
 
 Sm is lawlessness’’-the Greek words implying that 
 
 the two terms are convertible—that there is no sin 
 
 which is not the breach of law by a rebel will and 
 
 nothing else in the world which breaks the law of ts 
 
 being except sin (1 John iii 4). It is this doctrine 
 
 St? o g fT peCuhar hopefulness to the Bible, in 
 spite of its stern view of actual conditions. For 
 theie is nothing as God made it which is not good 
 
 substance Th & f ° d end ‘ There is no evil 
 substance. The grossest sms are but the misuse of 
 
 faculties good in themselves. And however much 
 
 let but the wilf h laVe 6ngrai f d vice into our nature, 
 let but the will be again replaced in love to God and 
 
 recovered '“tw -Hi " d , lh f »!»* »»««™ «» be 
 
 doctrine !tfi S f he r ^ dlCal meanin S of St. Paul’s 
 doctrine of justification by faith ; for faith as he 
 
 uses it means the surrender of our being to God in 
 
 freely unoT usT^ ^ gained God can work 
 
 y upon us to accept and to renew “ All thinrrc 
 
 work together for good to them that love God"’’ 
 K he WOr d ’ lf It; were converted to God wouid 
 
 a P r dlSC - And at the last issue al] evil 
 
 fate come fo/ U COnveHed or subdued, and God 
 
 T us BiKl i 1 , 8 ° W e again in His whole creation. 
 
 with hree itfi Sin may be put in contrast 
 
 the Church ?/ ® x P? anatl °ns of it which challenged 
 
 til Tn th w n be ? ln - ning and sti11 challenge it. 
 
 spread the n Hell . enl . stlc world in which Christianity 
 P , the prevalent tendency was to find the secret 
 
RIVAL THEORIES 269 
 
 and source of sin in the flesh or in the material world. 
 The spark of the divine, which is the soul of man, 
 is imprisoned at present in the body with its corrupt¬ 
 ing passions and influences, and is subjected to the 
 mysterious tyranny of the material world. What it 
 must hope for is to be released from the body and 
 delivered from the material world, and so be free to 
 resume its place in the pure being of God. And there 
 were a hundred mysteries and doctrines which offered 
 to secure to the initiated soul emancipation at last 
 and passage into the divine. But Christianity stoutly 
 resisted this tendency to fix the blame of sin in the 
 wrong place. To believe that matter is evil and the 
 source of sin—whether as the creation of an evil or 
 inferior God, or as something eternally existing and 
 intractable—is to despair of the world and of our 
 present life in the body. 1 And the Christian’s deter¬ 
 mination to plant and promote the kingdom of God 
 in the world and to consecrate to God every element 
 in nature, including his own body, depends on the 
 belief that there is nothing bad in the world but a 
 bad will, and that man’s body as well as his soul, 
 and the whole material creation, are the subjects of 
 divine redemption. 
 
 2. It is opposed also to the more modern in¬ 
 terpretation of sin, which came into fashion with 
 the dominance of the idea of development, as im¬ 
 perfection which is gradually being outgrown. It 
 is “ the tiger and the ape ” still surviving in man, 
 which are gradually being subdued to the spiritual 
 
 1 The belief that the material is the evil accounts for the way in 
 which the Gnostic movements, where this doctrine prevailed, swung 
 between an extreme asceticism and an extreme license. To believe in 
 matter as evil begets the desire to be as free from its bondage as 
 possible—that is the source of oriental asceticism. But after all 
 we cannot be free from the body. To eat and drink, in whatever 
 moderation, is as bodily an action as drunkenness. So arises the 
 idea that all bodily acts belong simply to the temporary envelope 
 of the soul and are morally indifferent. And hence the rebound 
 into license. 
 
270 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 or rational purpose. The history of man is the 
 history of a gradual—if slow and interrupted— 
 progress towards perfection. There is, of course, 
 an important element of truth in this conception. 
 Certainly there is a great deal of evil which is ignor¬ 
 ance and imperfection, which gradual enlightenment 
 can cure and which itself affords the stimulus to 
 progress. If we try to think of a comparatively 
 sinless world and what its development might have 
 been, we should imagine it as gradually outgrowing 
 its childish ignorance and youthful mistakes'—as 
 gradually gaining control, and passing on to per¬ 
 fection in the maturity of its powers. But this is 
 precisely to leave out the very thing which sin is. 
 Sin is the refusal of allegiance to God and rebellion 
 against the law of our true being. It is the selfish¬ 
 ness which places our being and its efforts upon a 
 false centre and so disorders our whole world. And 
 sin, rightly so defined, shows not the slightest trace 
 of being outgrown in the process of civilization. 
 There is sin as much in modern London as in ancient 
 Britain, though the sin is of a more or less different 
 kind. Advanced civilization certainly presents a 
 parody of the divine intention for man as much as 
 barbarous societies. Progress no doubt represents 
 the divine purpose, but the reason why progress 
 has been so broken, so fragmentary, and so liable 
 to reversals and catastrophes lies just in the thwart¬ 
 ing, disturbing, destructive power of sin, from which 
 neither education nor refinement of itself has the 
 power to redeem. Perhaps to-day the kind of opti¬ 
 mistic delusion that I have been describing is one 
 into which we are less liable to be betrayed than our 
 fathers or grandfathers. 
 
 3. The Christian doctrine of sin is rooted in the 
 conception of mankind as really free and responsible, 
 and has its roots cut by the doctrine of determinism. 
 According to this latter doctrine, all that has 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF DETERMINISM 271 
 
 occurred in general or in detail has been at the 
 last analysis inevitable. There is strictly nothing 
 that need not and ought not to have been. The 
 doctrine is so alien to fundamental human instincts 
 that while it abounds in the schools of philosophy, 
 it does not adventure itself much into the ways of 
 common life. It could not, in fact, really apply 
 itself to life without moral disaster. To believe 
 that I am and always have been and always must 
 be inevitably determined to do what I have done 
 or shall do, would, beyond all question, as it appears 
 to me, destroy the springs of moral action. I have 
 endeavoured, in the previous volume, both strictly 
 to limit the sphere of human freedom and to main¬ 
 tain its reality, 1 and I will not recur to the subject 
 here. I should like, however, to record a remark 
 which I twice heard made by the late Master of 
 Balliol, Dr. Jowett, which seems to me to be true. 
 He noted that theologians like Augustine, and 
 (strictly speaking) St. Thomas, and Calvin appeared 
 to be able to maintain an ultimate and absolute 
 determination of human actions by God, as a sort 
 of remote mystery of religion, without its interfering 
 with the practical moral appeal of Christianity. 
 But he observed that it would not be so with modern 
 scientific determinism. That is no remote mystery 
 hidden in the inaccessible depths of the divine being 
 and incomprehensible by men. It claims to be a 
 requirement of science, its action is in the field of 
 observed experience, and its effect is wholly in¬ 
 telligible. It is to make all our sense of responsi¬ 
 bility and personal guilt—all that is really meant 
 by the sense of sin—an illusion and to establish the 
 conviction that we cannot help being just what we 
 are. I am thankful to believe that science is 
 
 1 But I will call attention to what seems to me an admirable 
 article in the Hibbert Journal for July 1922, by Captain H. 
 Knox, entitled Is Determinism rational f 
 
272 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 becoming much more conscious of its limitations 
 and may retreat from this truly irrational position. 
 
 IV 
 
 There is one difficulty presented by the Christian 
 doctrine of sin which, since the principle of evolution 
 entered into control of our imagination, has appeared 
 and still appears as most formidable—I mean the 
 doctrine of the Fall. Christianity has not been 
 content with asserting that men in general or 
 universally have proved themselves individually 
 sinners. It has attributed to humanity an organic 
 unity, by descent from a common origin—our first 
 parents, Adam and Eve—and has, in part at least, 
 accounted for the prevalence of sin by attributing 
 the disordering of human nature or its partial cor¬ 
 ruption to the inherited effects of their fall, as it is 
 described in Genesis. 1 There is hardly any allusion 
 
 1 I am here only dealing with the doctrine of sin incidentally as 
 involved m the doctrine of Christ’s person. Thus (1) I am giving 
 the go-by to all the questions raised about the exact nature and 
 effect of the Fall—whether positive or negative: and to the Augus- 
 tinian and Calvinistic exaggerations : and to the Protestant con¬ 
 ception of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity ; though 
 I may remark in passing that I do not think any doctrine of imputa¬ 
 tion can be legitimately attached to St. Paul except in the sense 
 that God sees things not as they are but as they are becoming. 
 This is the real way to see things. Thus faith is imputed as the 
 righteousness it is not yet, because faith does, in fact, contain 
 in itself the whole root or principle of righteousness, by retrans¬ 
 ferring our nature to the allegiance of God in Christ ; and Christ’s 
 righteousness may be said to be imputed to us, though St. Paul 
 does not say so, because as His members we are in Him and on the 
 way to become more and more interpenetrated by Him. Non 
 quotes sumus sed quotes futuri sumus Deus nos amat. 
 
 (2) I am giving the go-by to many interesting questions con¬ 
 nected with the Hebrew story of Paradise and the Fall, and its 
 influence in later times. In this connection Ezek. xxviii, which 
 ^ different idea of paradise from Gen. iii, is very inter¬ 
 esting. Also it is interesting that in the later apocalypses it would 
 appear that that unique fragment of unassimilated mythology, 
 Gen. vi 1-8, was exercising more influence than Gen. iii. But 
 I am only concerned here with the idea of the Fall and of its conse¬ 
 quences in general outline. 
 
THE STORY IN GENESIS 
 
 273 
 
 in the other canonical books of the Old Testament to 
 this primaeval fall, and though it became a subject 
 of interest in the later Jewish schools and we see 
 the fruit of this in the books we call “ apocryphal,” 
 yet the ideas there presented are confused and con¬ 
 tradictory ; and there is nothing about the fall of 
 Adam in the New Testament except in two 
 famous passages of St. Paul’s Epistles. But these 
 two famous passages have exercised an enormous 
 influence on theology, so that a modern Roman 
 Catholic writer on dogmatics says, hardly with 
 exaggeration, that “ the whole dogmatic system of 
 the Church revolves upon the two poles of sin and 
 redemption, the old humanity and the new, Adam 
 and Christ A 
 
 The contradiction between the religious tradition 
 and the scientific conception as popularly stated 
 took this form—that the Bible taught that mankind 
 “ began at the top ” and fell from his high estate 
 into continually deepening degradation from which 
 only “ the elect ” are redeemed by the act of God, 
 while science teaches that mankind began at the 
 bottom in a brutish condition, hardly differentiated 
 from the apes, and has gradually climbed upward 
 by his own efforts through the period of some half 
 a million years during which something which can 
 be identified as our race appears to have been on 
 the earth. Here is a startling contradiction indeed. 
 But the statement requires serious revision. It 
 was only the imagination of theologians in a very 
 unscientific age, and especially in England the in¬ 
 fluence of Milton, which begat the idea of Adam and 
 Eve as created in the full-blown glory of intellect 
 and virtue. Genesis does not in any way suggest 
 it. It suggests for Adam and Eve something like 
 the complete ignorance, as well as the innocence, 
 of childhood. All the beginnings of the arts appear 
 after the fall, and in the line of Cain’s descendants. 
 
274 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 And the story of Genesis iii makes almost no im¬ 
 pression on the rest of the Old Testament, which 
 is throughout the story of a divine purpose for man 
 pursuing its gradual way to its goal, but constantly 
 thwarted and baffled by human sin. This is the 
 impression which the early Christian teachers 
 received. They answered the question whether 
 man was created perfect in the negative. “ He was 
 not created perfect, but only in a condition to attain 
 or receive perfection.” 1 So we may restate the 
 position thus : “ The Bible teaches that man was 
 created free to correspond with a good purpose of 
 God for him : and his advance towards the realiza¬ 
 tion of his heritage of sovereignty in the world might 
 have been inconceivably more glorious and un¬ 
 impeded than it has been but for his constantly 
 renewed and perpetuated disloyalty to God and 
 disobedience to the law of his being. It is to this 
 that his misery is due. And as he was made for 
 constant dependence upon God, so he cannot hope 
 to rescue himself out of his bondage, but only to be 
 rescued by God when he will return to Him in 
 penitence and surrender.” Now I am not aware 
 that such a revised statement brings us into any 
 collision with science. We must not speak as if 
 science could bring human origins into the clear 
 light. The emergence of the distinctively human 
 faculties, and the place and the manner of such 
 emergence, are still involved in impenetrable 
 obscurity. 
 
 But this at least seems to some of us to be certain 
 —and to make a great difference between us and 
 our grandfathers—that we have ceased to be able 
 to treat the story in Genesis as history at all. We 
 see there neither a record preserved in human 
 
 1 So Clement and, in effect, Irenaeus. The Fathers also knew 
 that death was a law of the world before man ; and that man was 
 created mortal by nature. 
 
THE OLD ADAM 
 
 275 
 
 tradition, nor a revealed history of what happened 
 at the beginning. We are not disposed to think 
 that mankind began in a single pair sharply differ¬ 
 entiated from the lower animals. We find it very 
 difficult to form any mental conception of how things 
 happened “ in the beginning.” We are inclined 
 to think that about the beginnings and endings of 
 the world and of mankind—about things which lie 
 outside the possibility of experience or investiga¬ 
 tion by us—we can be taught only in parables or 
 symbols. So we are ready to attach the highest 
 value to the early chapters of the book of Genesis, 
 taking the stories they contain as symbols, not 
 history. We see in them the clearest traces of 
 divine inspiration. We see there true ideas about 
 God and His mind—about the world and man’s 
 relation Ito the world and his relation to God, about 
 the origin and nature of sin and its consequences, 
 and about God’s dealings with man both in judgment 
 and mercy—all so vividly expressed that a child can 
 understand them and the imagination of mankind 
 can never get rid of them. 
 
 But, granted all this, we need to ask ourselves 
 whether the language of St. Paul about the effect 
 of the sin of Adam in letting loose the forces of death, 
 and constituting mankind sinful, can still be used by 
 us ; and whether generally the idea of the Fall and the 
 antithesis of the Old Adam and the New has still 
 really for us the equivalent of its old meaning. 
 
 I think so in this sense. 
 
 1. Sin— i.e. disobedience to God and the law of 
 our being—essentially and always is a fall. In¬ 
 directly it may be through sin that we make dis¬ 
 coveries about ourselves and the world. So sin 
 may be a condition of progress. But not a necessary 
 condition. We could have gained the fruit of the 
 tree of knowledge without sin, for sin is always a 
 perversion and a loss. It puts us in a wrong relation 
 
276 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 to ourselves and to our fellows and to God. Every¬ 
 where, in all its forms, and in every case sin is law¬ 
 lessness and therefore is a fall. We are fallen by 
 our iniquity. Thus Adam and Eve stand for every 
 man and woman, and the story of their fall is the 
 true story of humanity and of what has been its 
 ruin in every individual case. And over against the 
 Old Adam, which is sinful humanity, stands the Last 
 Adam, which is the sinless humanity. Thus in Jesus 
 Christ I see humanity both restored to its true basis 
 and its true relations, and not only restored but per¬ 
 fected in God. And I apprehend the true character 
 of my redemption only when I grasp it as a radical 
 transference of my fundamental allegiance, and so 
 of my whole being, from the stock of the Old Adam 
 to that of the New. 
 
 2. I do not think we shall be driven to accept a 
 merely individual account of sin. I do not think 
 that more accurate science will make us hesitate to 
 say with the Psalmist, “ In sin hath my mother con¬ 
 ceived me.” Whatever science ultimately teaches as 
 to the “ monophyletic ” or “ polyphyletic ” origin 
 of mankind, I think it will continue to authorize us 
 to regard mankind as constituting one race which 
 can be dealt with, whether barbarous or civilized, 
 as having certain fundamentally identical spiritual 
 capacities—that is, intelligence (as distinct from in¬ 
 stinct), the moral conscience, and some measure of 
 moral freedom, capacity in some measure for en¬ 
 larging fellowship and progress, and capacity for God. 
 It appears to me that anthropology and the science 
 of religions work on the basis of the assumption that 
 humanity of all periods and in all countries is one 
 race, and continually tend to justify the assumption. 
 
 Further, it seems to me that psychology tends to 
 emphasize what is the Christian tradition that a 
 man’s soul, or self, is not purely individual. He is an 
 individual with the responsibilities of an individual, 
 
THE LAST ADAM 
 
 277 
 
 and progress towards the ideal will deepen and in¬ 
 tensify his individuality. But that mysterious and 
 elusive thing he calls himself carries within it elements 
 and qualities which are inherited and not personal, 
 and which make him the representative of something 
 much wider and much older than his individual self 
 —of his family, his race, nay of humanity as a 
 whole. In his unconscious mind he carries (so it 
 appears) instincts and memories which are racial 
 and not personal. If this is so, it would be very bold 
 to deny that there may be, or must be, some in¬ 
 heritance of sin, in its weakening and perverting 
 effect upon the spiritual nature, in those roots of 
 our being which lie below the beginnings of personal 
 
 consciousness. 1 
 
 . 
 
 In this book I am only concerned to justify a 
 certain attitude towards man, as fallen and needing 
 to be redeemed, which appears to be inseparable 
 from the appeal of Christianity—which appears to 
 have been the attitude of Christ Himself. This 
 appeal takes shape in St. Paul’s language which bids 
 us die to the Old Manhood that we may live in the 
 New. It treats us as belonging to an old manhood— 
 the Old Adam—which is corrupt according to the 
 deceitful lusts, and would have us regenerated or 
 grafted upon a new stock—the sinless humanity of 
 the Second Man. It would have us believe that by 
 natural inheritance our old manhood came to us 
 
 1 I think it is important to not© that original sin is a fault 
 or defect or disorder in our inherited nature, which admits of more 
 or less. One man’s nature is more disordered to start with than 
 another’s. And the fault or defect can be diminished by self- 
 restraint or deepened by indulgence. Also, it is impoitant to notice 
 that there is nothing in the New Testament which justifies our 
 using the word “ guilt ” of this inherited taint. No doubt it 
 disqualifies us as it stands for the fellowship of God ; but nothing 
 is guilty except the action of a rebellious will, ihe defect of 
 nature in itself is an appeal to the divine compassion to redeem us, 
 not an occasion of His wrath against the individual personally. 
 
 19 
 
278 
 
 SIN AND THE FALL 
 
 more or less weakened and impaired by Adam’s sin, 
 but that it admits of being restored and renewed in 
 Christ. No doubt St. Paul believed in Adam as a 
 person and we cannot easily do so. Nevertheless, 
 I think that there is very little or nothing in St. Paul’s 
 language which will not hold good for us if we take 
 the Old Adam, not as an historical person, but as 
 the symbol of our race as it has made itself by sin, to 
 which by our birth and natural tradition we belong. 
 And there is no force in the strange argument that if 
 the First Adam is symbolical, so may be the Second. 
 We are driven to treat the first as symbolical because 
 we cannot penetrate the mists of ages. But the 
 Christ stands in the light of history. We know that 
 He understands our nature, and we believe He has 
 the will and the power to redeem it. 
 
 In the volume which preceded this I have dealt 
 with the New Testament accounts of the Birth of 
 Jesus as from a Virgin and therefore miraculous. 
 I have there endeavoured to make it plain that 
 this history was not the product of any theological 
 demand. It shows in both its forms—both in St. 
 Matthew and St. Luke—the signs of a date far 
 earlier than any such theological or Christological 
 development as would have made the demand effec¬ 
 tive. I have given what seem to me sufficient 
 reasons for trusting the story ; and I can only refer 
 my readers back to what was said there. But I have 
 also pointed out that already in the Fourth Gospel, 
 where the story in the Synoptists is no doubt assumed 
 as familiar, Christ’s birth of a virgin appears to be 
 referred to as lying behind and interpreting our new 
 birth. St. John, that is, here as elsewhere, assumes 
 what is in substance St. Paul’s doctrine of the Second 
 Adam ; and he suggests that the miraculous con¬ 
 ditions of the birth were appropriate or necessary 
 for the incarnate person who is to be fount of the 
 new sonship. I cannot but repeat here that what 
 
THE BIRTH OF A VIRGIN 
 
 279 
 
 St. John suggests and the Church has emphasized 
 does appear to me to hold good, viz. that any one 
 who grasps the contrast between the sinless Christ 
 and the sinful world—the world in which the greatest 
 saints are the most conscious of their sinfulness— 
 and who accepts Christ as the Second Adam, the 
 new creation in which our manhood is renewed, so 
 far from finding a difficulty in the Virgin Birth of 
 Jesus will welcome it as in the highest degree accept¬ 
 able and congruous in His case, if not rationally 
 necessary. 1 
 
 1 For all this see Belief in God, pp. 274-82, and Dissertations, 
 pp. 63 ff. See also in this volume, p. 120, and note 1, for St. John’s 
 reference (in cap. i. 13) to the Virgin Birth as the basis of our 
 regeneration. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 The idea of atonement made by our Lord for man 
 in the sacrifice of the cross is so prominent an element 
 in the faith of the New Testament and of the whole 
 Christian Church, that it cannot be ignored in any 
 comprehensive treatment of the faith in His person. 
 It has found a welcome as wide and deep as possible 
 in human hearts all down the ages ; but it has also 
 presented peculiar difficulty to the intellect. What 
 is attempted in this chapter is simply to fix attention 
 upon the central idea of the Atonement, as the New 
 Testament presents it to us upon the background of 
 the Old, and to rid it of certain misunderstandings 
 which have been allowed to pervert it. Then I 
 should wish to leave my readers with the feeling— 
 This, at least, is part of the faith in Christ to which 
 my heart and my reason respond. 1 
 
 I 
 
 Let us seek to clear the air by certain preliminary 
 considerations. 
 
 1. It is plain that the redemption of man through 
 Jesus Christ, which the New Testament has for its 
 theme, is a complex process which admits of being 
 regarded in various aspects or from different angles. 
 
 1 It must be remarked that while the Church did in fact define 
 the doctrine of the person of Christ, it left the doctrine of atonement 
 quite undefined. 
 
 280 
 
THE MEANING OF SUPERSTITION 281 
 
 Hence there are marked differences in the points of 
 view of the different books. But they all agree 
 among themselves and with the books of the Old 
 Testament in one point : that ultimately redemption 
 can mean one thing only—the actual restoration of 
 men into the moral likeness of God. The kingdom 
 of God, which is the theme alike of the Old Testament 
 and of the New, is to be a perfected fellowship of man 
 with God and of man with man ; and there can be 
 no fellowship of man with God “except they be 
 agreed ”—that is, except they be of the same mind 
 or character ; and there can be no fellowship of 
 man with man unless they come together in obedience 
 to God and correspondence with His purposes. 
 
 Men are prone to superstition ; and the best 
 definition of superstition is religion which is non- 
 moral. And there has been a great deal of super¬ 
 stition not only in the religions of the world generally, 
 but also among the Jews and in Christendom, both 
 Catholic and Protestant. Wherever men have 
 attributed some kind of power to racial privilege, 
 or to orthodox belief, or to sacraments or charms, 
 or to the prayers of intercessors, which can in any 
 sort of way be a substitute for actual conversion 
 of will—for ceasing to do evil and learning to do 
 well; wherever men have proclaimed or believed in 
 Christ’s atonement, or His righteousness “ imputed 
 to us,” as if it could be made available for us without 
 our being personally changed from evil to good 
 there is superstition ; and the teaching of the prophets 
 and of Christ is on no point more emphatic than 
 in condemnation of this sort of superstition. No 
 expedient or device can exist for bringing us into 
 the favour of God except by our becoming actually 
 godlike. “ In the rich pharmacopoeia of heaven, 
 there can exist none such.” To be and to remain 
 unlike God in character must exclude us from the 
 fellowship of God, however correct our beliefs and 
 
282 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 elaborate our ritual acts ; and, conversely, the Bible 
 as a whole encourages us to believe that there is 
 no external or accidental barrier, whether in the 
 way of intellectual error or hereditary ignorance, 
 which can ultimately exclude from God and His 
 kingdom any man who is really a man of good will. 
 Heaven is nothing else but the home of the godlike ; 
 and hell is nothing else but the state of those who 
 have made themselves, by their own faults, radically 
 incompatible with God. There is no substitute for a 
 good will, and no compensation for a bad one. Thus 
 whatever place vicarious atonement, made for us 
 by our Redeemer, may hold in the scheme of the 
 Bible, we must expect it to conform to this funda¬ 
 mental demand for real, personal righteousness. 
 
 2. “ My song,” says the Psalmist, “ shall be of 
 mercy and judgment.” Such is the theme of the 
 Old Testament and of the New—God’s inevitable 
 wrath on the hard and impenitent heart, and His 
 abounding mercy on the repentant. God is for¬ 
 giving, as being both willing and able to efface 
 sins however heinous. “Though your sins be as 
 scarlet, they shall be white as snow ; and though 
 they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” 
 But only repentance—that is the change of heart and 
 will—can change the face of God towards us. “ Wash 
 you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your 
 doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil ; 
 learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the 
 oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” 
 Such is the constant theme of the prophetic message. 
 And it is the theme of our Lord’s teaching also. 
 
 We find Him asserting the forgivingness of God 
 towards the penitent in the most moving language, 
 both parabolic and simple. It is as expressing the 
 Father s mind that He came “ to seek and save that 
 which was lost.” And we note the stress He lays 
 on the necessity of a changed heart. That is the 
 
283 
 
 THE IDEA OF REDEMPTION 
 
 only evidence that a man is really forgiven. So 
 the unthankful servant in the parable 1 finds that 
 his acquittal, though it had been formal and valid, 
 is invalidated by his showing himself still quite 
 hard-hearted. And on the other hand the woman 
 that was a sinner proves that she has been forgiven 
 by the generosity of her devotion to Christ. 2 Where 
 such love is, forgiveness must have already been 
 given. Here we have the teaching of the prophets 
 intensified. God certainly needs no propitiation to 
 make Him willing to forgive; and nothing is 
 needed by the individual to secure his forgiveness 
 by God but the contrite heart which responds to 
 
 His love. 
 
 3. All this teaching about God we are surely 
 meant to apply to the relations of God to all men 
 individually, in whatever ignorance of God they 
 may have been nurtured, for it expresses funda¬ 
 mental principles of His being. Nevertheless, the 
 constant assumption of the Bible from Genesis to 
 Revelation is that men need something besides 
 true ideas about God. They need an activity of 
 divine power to rescue them from a hopeless con¬ 
 dition into which rebellion against God has plunged 
 them, and this activity of God is what is called 
 redemption. The Bible is a history of divine re¬ 
 demption, and it is only in the process of redemption 
 that the disclosure of the real character of God is 
 made As has been shown in the previous chapter, 
 no one can understand the Bible, Old Testament or 
 New, whose imagination is not filled with this con¬ 
 ception of man as needing to be not enlightened 
 
 only but redeemed. . . 
 
 And further this method of divine redemption, 
 
 though its ultimate aim is universal, proceeds 
 through the election of one people, Israel, to be the 
 redeemed people; and when in the New Testament 
 1 Matt, xviii 21-35. Luke va 47 * 
 
284 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 the Church or people of God is freed from all national 
 restrictions, nevertheless it is the society, and not 
 barely the individual, which is both the subject and 
 the instrument of divine redemption. The method 
 of divine redemption is corporate. No doubt this 
 is to trench upon the topic of the Church, with which 
 we are not concerned in this volume. Nevertheless, 
 it is in its most general sense hardly open to doubt; 
 and it must in some sort be here taken for granted 
 because the idea of atonement has its roots through¬ 
 out in this corporate method of redemption. 
 
 4. This is indisputably so in the Old Testament. 
 God made a covenant with the people of Israel as a 
 whole, and the covenant was inaugurated and per¬ 
 petuated in sacrifice, the sacrifices of bulls and goats, 
 as being in some sense representatives of the people 
 or substitutes for the men who offered them. The 
 sacrificial system expressed their allegiance as a 
 people to God and His law, and the fear wherewith 
 they were to fear Him. The customs of sacrifice 
 date from a time when the people had no under¬ 
 standing of the moral character of God, and the 
 early prophets appear simply to deride them as 
 worthless. But later, through the teaching of the 
 unknown prophet of Deuteronomy and the mission 
 of Ezekiel, the spirit of prophecy and the law of 
 the sacrifices were conciliated. Thereafter the sacrifi¬ 
 cial system is made to express Israel’s constant need 
 of walking with awe before the face of the righteous 
 God and making constant atonement for its corporate 
 and individual sins ; not for its high-handed sins of 
 rebellion and defiance of God, for which the sacrifices 
 did not avail, 1 but for its sins of carelessness and 
 ignorance. Of course the consciousness never left 
 the deeper minds in Israel that “ the blood of bulls 
 and of goats ” could not really “ take away sin.” 
 Nevertheless, the temple worship nourished in the 
 1 See Epistles of St. John , pp. 209 ff. 
 
CHRIST’S TEACHING OF ATONEMENT 285 
 
 heart of Israel a deep sense of its constant need of 
 propitiation. There is no question of this. What 
 is questioned is whether this whole system was not 
 by Christ ignored and abolished as meaningless— 
 whether in His eyes it pointed on to anything which 
 He was to fulfil and not to abolish. 
 
 5. Our Lord would appear to have said nothing 
 about the temple sacrifices. He denounces the 
 Pharisaic tradition as a misuse of authority and a 
 perversion of religion. But He said not a word 
 against the sacrificial system. Presumably He ac¬ 
 cepted it as a divine institution though imperfect. 
 But He positively attached Himself to something 
 in the Old Testament—the prophecy of the Righteous 
 Servant—which gave a wholly different idea of 
 vicarious sacrifice and propitiation on behalf of the 
 nation. The Righteous Servant in Is. liii is repre¬ 
 sented as inaugurating the new Israel of the Restora¬ 
 tion by the vicarious sacrifice of himself. 1 He in 
 his innocence bearing the sins of the people offers 
 his life as a guilt-offering to God. And God accepts 
 the offering—the offering of the one for “ the many.” 
 The righteous victim of unrighteousness becomes 
 the effective intercessor for “ the many ” ; and they, 
 for his sake forgiven and by his knowledge and 
 instruction made righteous, constitute the restored 
 Israel. He sees in them the travail of his soul and 
 is satisfied. 
 
 This moving picture of vicarious sacrifice appears 
 to have made strangely little impression upon the 
 later literature of Israel. But we perhaps have a 
 reflection of it—though it suggests a lower conception 
 
 of Qod_in the heroic self-oblation of the Maccabean 
 
 martyr to expiate the wrath of God upon his nation. 
 His six brothers have been martyred in the persecu¬ 
 tion of Antioclius, in presence of the tyrant and of 
 their mother, who stands by and exhorts them to 
 
 1 See above, pp. 59 ff. 
 
286 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 constancy. Then the youngest, who has seen all 
 his brothers tortured and killed, makes his brave 
 profession, before he follows them: “ These our 
 
 brethren, having endured a short pain that bringeth 
 everlasting life, have now died under God’s covenant ; 
 but thou, through the judgment of God, shalt receive 
 in just measure the penalties of thine arrogancy. 
 But I, as my brethren, give up both body and soul 
 for the laws of our fathers, calling upon God that 
 He may speedily become gracious to our nation ; 
 and that thou amidst trials and plagues mayest con¬ 
 fess that He alone is God ; and that in me and my 
 brethren the wrath of the Almighty may be stayed, 
 which hath been justly brought upon our whole 
 race.” 1 
 
 Whether we have here a reflection of the thought 
 of the later Isaiah or no, we cannot, without a quite 
 arbitrary rejection of well-authenticated texts, doubt 
 that our Lord identifies Himself with the Righteous 
 Servant, 2 and this means that He sees Himself as the 
 inaugurator of the New Israel, and knows that by His 
 voluntary death, on behalf of the people, He is to 
 make propitiation for their sins. Both the crucial 
 texts are, as has been said, stamped with the mark 
 of their origin by the expression “ for many.” The 
 first (Mark x 45, Matt, xx 28) is the phrase “ The 
 Son of man came ... to give his life a ransom for 
 many.” The actual words used only lay stress upon 
 the price of His life which He must pay to set Ills 
 people free. The idea of an offering for sin made to 
 God lies in the prophecy referred to rather than in the 
 
 1 2 Macc. vii 36—8. In 4 Macc. vi 28—9 (an Alexandrian book) 
 the martyr Eleazer is represented as praying “ Be propitious to 
 thy race, being satisfied by our punishment for them. Make my 
 blood an expiation (KaOdpaiov), and my life ('pvxw) a substitute 
 (dvrtyvxop) for theirs.” And the author concludes (xvii 22) 
 that through the blood of these pious men and their propitiatory 
 death, the divine providence saved Israel.” 
 
 2 See above, p. 61, where the point is argued. 
 
THE BLOOD OF THE COVENANT 
 
 287 
 
 words taken by themselves . 1 The other passage, at 
 the Last Supper, is much more explicit: “This is my 
 blood of the covenant, which is shed for many ,” 2 or 
 “ This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” 3 These 
 phrases suggest unmistakably a reference not only to 
 the sacrificial death of the Righteous Servant “ for 
 many,” but also to the sacrifices of animal victims 
 which inaugurated the covenant of Sinai, “ Behold 
 the blood of the covenant.” 4 This is our Lord’s 
 only reference to the animal sacrifices of the Old 
 Covenant; and He declares that the New Covenant 
 is to be inaugurated also in blood—the blood of His 
 own self-sacrifice, by which the many are to be given 
 their new standing-ground before God. In winning 
 this new standing for His people, He, we should 
 gather, is their vicarious representative. He is acting 
 for them, without any co-operation on their part. 
 
 There is here no contradiction of the teaching, so 
 often given by our Lord, of the free forgiveness of 
 sins by the Father wherever He sees a penitent 
 heart. But it supplements it. God is still to deal 
 with men, not as isolated individuals, but as a people. 
 It is the new Israel which is being inaugurated, and 
 
 1 The figure of the “ ransom,” by suggesting the thought of a 
 bandit or tyrant who held the prisoners, became the basis of the 
 strange theory, common in early and mediaeval days, of a trans¬ 
 action between Christ and the devil, in which the devil, by putting 
 Christ to death, took more than his “ rights ” of the Sinless One, 
 and so had no further claim on men. But we can never rightly 
 press either a metaphor or a parable beyond the special point of 
 comparison—in this case the greatness of the price needed to set 
 men free. It was by a similar misuse of a metaphor that 
 “ propitiation ” was made to suggest that God s mind towards 
 man needed to be changed, on which see below, p. 295. 
 
 2 Mark xiv 24. St. Matthew adds (xxvi 28) “ unto remission 
 
 of sins.” 
 
 3 This is the phrase used in the earliest account of the Last 
 Supper which St. Paul received “ from the Lord,” doubtless 
 through the older apostles. 
 
 4 Exod. xxiv 8. In other passages of the New Testament the 
 sacrifice of Christ is regarded as fulfilling the Passover, the Day of 
 Atonement, and the Sin Offering (see Sanday and Headlam, Romans , 
 p. 92). 
 
288 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 the new Israel must be inaugurated in sacrifice—not 
 now the sacrifice of animal victims of which God had 
 no need, but the self-sacrifice of the Man, which 
 knows no limits and goes even to offering His life¬ 
 blood. That is the basis of the New Covenant. 
 
 6. If we are to trust the Fourth Gospel, we must 
 believe that John the Baptist had anticipated this 
 function of the Christ when he called Him “ the 
 Lamb of God which taketh away (removeth by 
 expiating) the sins of the world.” But whether or 
 no “ the critic ” can bring himself to trust the Fourth 
 Gospel at this point, he must acknowledge that the 
 expiation wrought by the self-sacrificing death of 
 Christ is taken for granted in the whole of the New 
 Testament which looks back upon Him. It is taken 
 for granted in the first Jerusalem Church, as appears 
 when St. Philip interprets of Jesus the sacrificial 
 language of Is. liii. It is implied when baptism “ in 
 the name of” Jesus or “by calling on His name” 
 appears as the condition of the forgiveness of sins; 
 for this means that His merit alone avails for re¬ 
 mission 1 ; and this belief pervades the New Testa¬ 
 ment. It is in popular estimation specially attri¬ 
 buted to St. Paul. But it was already in “ the 
 tradition ” as St. Paul received it at his conversion. 2 
 He places it, no doubt, in a special light, but that 
 is all. On this special light, however, in which St. 
 Paul views the doctrine of Atonement we must say 
 a word. 
 
 7. St. Paul, then, especially in the Epistle to the 
 Galatians, is occupied with the claim of the Judaizers 
 who would have insisted on the perpetual obligation 
 upon Christians of the Jewish Law, as represented by 
 the rite of circumcision. And still in the Epistle to 
 
 1 Acts ii 38, viii 16, 32-5, x 43, 46. 
 
 2 1 Cor. xv 3, “ That which also I received, that Christ died for 
 our sins according to the scriptures.” See Dr. Rashdall, The Idea 
 of Atonement in Christian Theology ; quoted below, p. 303. 
 
ST. PAUL’S TEACHING 
 
 289 
 
 the Romans their claim occupies the foreground. As 
 against such a claim he represents the Jewish Law as 
 a temporary expedient to convict the Jews of sin 
 and to prepare them for Christ. This conviction of 
 sin he presses to the full. The Jews, no less than the 
 Gentiles, find themselves involved in sin and unable 
 to endure the tremendous judgment of God. They 
 need to be saved. They cannot save themselves. 
 God must save them. And that is what He has done 
 in Christ. It is a salvation full and perfect that God 
 has provided for men in Christ, and which the apostles 
 are sent into the world to proclaim, and it is wholly 
 the work of God in Christ, an act of divine grace and 
 good favour which man has not merited, and to the 
 accomplishment of which he contributes nothing. 
 On the whole, St. Paul never leaves us in any doubt 
 that the salvation which is offered us of God’s free 
 bounty is nothing else than real deliverance from the 
 power of sin into actual goodness or moral freedom, 
 by the full co-operation of all our powers with the 
 purpose of God. But in the beginning of the Epistle 
 to the Romans, which Protestantism has unduly 
 isolated from the whole of St. Paul, he presses to 
 the full'—even to the point of letting it appear 
 arbitrary — the initial stage of the divine “plan 
 of redemption ”—that is, the new status—the ac¬ 
 quittal (“ justification ”) or forgiveness of sins'—won 
 for us by the “ propitiation ” of Christ. Wholly 
 without any regard to our merits or our demerits, 
 wholly out of the bounty of His free grace, without 
 any co-operation of ours, God has provided in Him 
 who is the Head of the New Race, the Second Adam, 
 Jesus Christ, a “ making amends ” for all the guilty 
 past. His unqualified sacrifice of Himself—unto 
 death and the shedding of His blood—is accepted as 
 something which sets free the love of God to flow 
 out in the full stream of redemptive bounty. Let a 
 man, Jew or Gentile, only believe—that is, let him 
 
290 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 surrender himself to God in Christ and accept His 
 grace, in utter humility and the response of faith to 
 love—and he is acquitted, wholly without regard 
 to the magnitude and multitude of his sins. He 
 is given a fresh start, a fresh status in Christ—of 
 which baptism is the instrument—to live the new 
 life of sonship to God and brotherhood in the com¬ 
 munity of the redeemed, the Church. 
 
 On St. Paul’s special teaching about the Atonement 
 I must make two remarks. 
 
 (1) St. Paul least of all men admits of being judged 
 by single texts. He does not guard himself in argu¬ 
 ment. He must be judged on the whole. And so 
 judged, there is no possibility of questioning that 
 St. Paul meant by faith a moral response and not 
 merely an intellectual acceptance. It is self-sur¬ 
 render ; it is the response of will to love ; it is love 
 inchoate. He explicitly says (within a year of writing 
 the Epistle to the Romans) that faith which does not 
 involve love is worthless. 1 He always assumes that 
 faith involves baptism, and baptism is entrance into 
 the new life. He never contemplates belief without 
 discipleship. 2 This becomes overwhelmingly clear in 
 the epistles of the captivity. But it is clear from the 
 time when he wrote to the Thessalonians. Only in 
 his Epistle to the Romans, he is determined to make 
 men see their own worthlessness apart from God— 
 that their only hope is in Him and His unmerited 
 grace—and that the salvation won for them was, 
 in its initial stage, an act done wholly without their 
 co-operation and for them. 
 
 (2) The reason suggested by St. Paul, quite inci¬ 
 dentally, why God should have needed such a 
 “ propitiation ” before He could let the proclama- 
 
 1 1 Cor. xiii 2 ; cf. Gal. v 6. 
 
 2 I think Dr. Rashdall, op. cit. p. 116, is justified in saying that 
 “ at bottom the Catholic theory of justification finds more support 
 in St. Paul, and is far nearer his real thought, than the Protestant 
 theory in its strict traditional form.” 
 
THE TEACHING OF THE WHOLE N. T. 291 
 
 tion of His free-flowing grace go forth among man¬ 
 kind, is apparently 1 that it was necessary to safe¬ 
 guard the reality of the divine righteousness at the 
 moment when it was showing itself as mercy. This 
 is secured if the act which is the instrument and 
 occasion of divine acquittal is an act which placards 
 before men’s eyes the awful price by which their 
 redemption was bought. But we will return upon 
 this suggestion. 2 
 
 8. It is remarkable that, though St. Paul won 
 an undisputed victory over the Judaizers, yet his 
 special arguments in the Galatians and the Romans 
 about the relation of law to grace, and about justi¬ 
 fication by faith, produced little impression upon 
 the Church as a whole. Part of this argument was 
 taken up in a perverted form by Marcion ; much 
 of it again by St. Augustine. But it did not generally 
 colour the theology of the Church. On the other 
 hand, the doctrine of atonement won by the self- 
 sacrifice of Christ, or the shedding of His blood, 
 is equally present as a central point of faith in almost 
 all the books of the New Testament, 3 and in the 
 Church as a whole. 
 
 It is the recurrent theme of the First Epistle of 
 Peter that that which “ redeemed ” the Church was 
 a ransom of infinite value—“ precious blood, as of 
 a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the 
 blood of Christ ” (1 Pet. i 18, 19)—“ because Christ 
 suffered for you ” (ii 21)—“ bare our sins in his 
 
 1 Rom. iii 25—6. 
 
 2 On special phrases of St. Paul, see appended note B, p. 304. 
 
 3 It does not happen to be mentioned in the very brief Epistle 
 of Jude, nor in the Epistle of St. James, which is purely ethical. 
 But even here I think Dr. Hort is probably right in translating 
 St. James v 6 (cf. iv 4) “ Ye condemned, ye murdered, the Righteous 
 One. Is He not become your adversary ? ” If so, “ the Righteous 
 One ” is probably a reference to Is. liii; cf. Acts iv 13-14, “ Jesus 
 his servant, the holy and righteous one,” whom “ ye killed.” And 
 this would probably indicate that the idea of Atonement through 
 the Righteous Servant’s death lay in the background of James’s 
 mind. 
 
292 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 body upon the tree ” (ii 24)—“ suffered for sins 
 once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might 
 bring us to God ” (iii 18). 
 
 Again the point of view of the great Alexandrian 
 teacher who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews is 
 that of the High Priesthood of Christ. For, pre¬ 
 existing as the Son of God, He took our nature, 
 soul and body, that in our nature, but with more 
 than human power, even in eternal spirit, Fie might 
 offer to God the perfect sacrifice for sins, even Him¬ 
 self—the sacrifice of perfect obedience consummated 
 in the shedding of His blood—and so enter into the 
 heavenly places to be our High Priest, our effectual 
 intercessor, and to “ cleanse our consciences from 
 dead works to serve the living God.” Here again 
 the whole status of the Church is made to depend 
 upon the sacrifice of the cross. 
 
 Again in the Apocalypse the same dominant idea 
 reappears in the new song of the redeemed which 
 the heavenly beings sing to “ the Lamb standing 
 as it had been slain in the midst of the throne.” 
 “ Thou wast slain and didst purchase unto God 
 with thy blood men of every tribe and tongue and 
 people and nation, and madest them to be unto our 
 God a kingdom and priests.” Here again it is to 
 the sacrifice of the cross that the status of Christians 
 as a body is attributed. And finally in St. John’s 
 Gospel, though very little is said about atonement, 
 yet Jesus must die for the people of God before He 
 can save it and enlarge it (xi 51, 52), and in the 
 First Epistle, “He is the propitiation for our sins, 
 and not for ours only, but also for the whole world ” 
 (1 John ii 2 ; cf. iv 10). It appears to have been 
 a subject, like the final “ coming ” of Jesus, which 
 St. John thought was sufficiently familiar in the 
 common tradition of the Church, so that he could 
 lay his emphasis where it was more needed. But 
 he plainly took it for granted. 
 
THEORIES OF ATONEMENT 
 
 293 
 
 II 
 
 This book is not a treatise on the Atonement, 
 and it would lengthen it unduly if I were to attempt 
 to review the history of the doctrine in the Christian 
 Church. The most learned recent analysis of this 
 history which we have is Dr. Rashdall’s. He is 
 quite right in calling attention to the extent to 
 which the moral appeal of the death of Christ is 
 emphasized by the Fathers and schoolmen, and to 
 which the aspect of atonement in the work of Christ 
 is, by some theologians, merged in the general doctrine 
 of the Incarnation and its effects. But he labours 
 in vain, as it seems to me, to dislodge from its position 
 in the Christian tradition the belief which, as we 
 have seen, is so prominent and indisputable through¬ 
 out the New Testament—that, prior to all appropria¬ 
 tion by men, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, 
 of the fruits of the Incarnation, there had been on 
 the part of Christ, as the Redeemer of men and 
 the Inaugurator of the New Manhood, a sacrifice 
 offered to the Father, a sacrifice of obedience unto 
 the shedding of His blood, in virtue of which God 
 was enabled freely to justify, or acquit, those who 
 belong to Him, and to give them a new standing 
 ground as sons of God and members of Christ. 
 Everything in the New Testament appears to depend 
 on this initial sacrifice of atonement, reconciliation, 
 and propitiation. 
 
 I do not, as I have said, propose to follow the 
 various theories which by Origen and Leo, by Abelard, 
 by Anselm, by the Calvinists, by Dale and Denney, 
 by McLeod Campbell and Moberly, have been elabo¬ 
 rated to explain the Atonement and account for its 
 necessity. But in no district of theology is the 
 contrast so marked between the hesitating and 
 critical attitude displayed towards these intellectual 
 
 20 
 
294 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 theories of atonement which individual scholars 
 have striven to formulate, and the whole-hearted 
 acceptance of the fact by the great body of the 
 faithful in all ages. Everywhere where Christianity 
 has spread animal sacrifices, and indeed everything 
 which men had been accustomed to call sacrifices, 
 have ceased, because in becoming Christians men 
 have learned about the one, full, perfect and sufficient 
 sacrifice, which renders all others needless and gives 
 to the idea of sacrifice a new meaning. The popular 
 appeal made by the Eucharist or Mass in Catholic 
 Christendom is more than half to be accounted for 
 by the fact that there, by universal acknowledgment, 
 is presented to God, as covering all our approach to 
 Him, the one availing sacrifice. It is a quite modern 
 hymn which bids us pray : 
 
 “ And now, O Father ! mindful of the love 
 That bought us, once for all, on Calvary’s tree, 
 
 And having with us Him that pleads above, 
 
 We here present, we here spread forth to Thee 
 That only offering perfect in Thine eyes, 
 
 The one true, pure, immortal sacrifice.” 
 
 It is a modern hymn, but it expresses in language 
 at once devout and accurate what the heart of the 
 worshipping Church throughout the world has 
 believed and welcomed with adoring love : and the 
 whole purport of the hymn-singing of Protestant 
 Christendom, and the whole strength of the appeal 
 of revivalist preaching, has witnessed to the un¬ 
 dying power of the doctrine of the Atonement. It 
 is hard to believe that anything not grounded in 
 truth could have made such an appeal and received 
 such a world-wide welcome. We isolate ourselves 
 from the “ general heart of man ” if we ignore its 
 power or deny its necessity. The instinct which 
 welcomes it has its roots in Hebrew Scriptures, 
 but it has its roots also in the various theologies 
 
NEEDLESS SCANDALS 295 
 
 of almost every non-Christian tradition. The beliefs 
 may be crude or barbaric, 1 just as the later theories 
 ol atonement in the Christian Church may be morally 
 or intellectually unsatisfying; but it is almost im¬ 
 possible to believe that God is at work in all the 
 widespread instincts of men without also feeling that 
 the instinct which has led men to seek in sacrifice 
 atonement with God is a divine instinct, which 
 Christianity must have expressed and satisfied if it 
 
 was to be what it claims to be—the religion for all 
 mankind. 
 
 What I propose to do is to consider the chief 
 moral and intellectual scandals which have been 
 found in our time in the doctrine of the Atonement 
 as commonly preached, to see whether they really 
 belong to its essence, or to its scriptural presenta¬ 
 tion : and then to consider whether we can find such 
 a rationale of the doctrine as shall make it welcome 
 to our intellects as well as our hearts. 
 
 1. First, then, let us recognize that any pre¬ 
 sentations of the doctrine which suggest any difference 
 of mind or disposition towards men between the 
 Father and the Son—which represent the Father 
 as Justice demanding punishment for sin and the 
 Son as Mercy, pleading with Justice and satisfying 
 it by offering itself as an innocent victim in place 
 of the^ guilty are radically unscriptural. In the 
 New Testament, quite constantly, the mind of the 
 Father is declared to be towards men purely good 
 
 the mind of love and the cost of the sacrifice is 
 represented as the Father’s no less than the Son’s. 
 
 “ God so loved the world that he gave his only- 
 
 The story of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia to Artemis, to procure 
 good sailing for the Greek fleet, is taken as the type of the belief 
 in sacrifice at its worst, but it is interesting to see how Euripides 
 (m the Iphigeneia in Aulis) half moralizes the story by making 
 Iphigeneia offer herself voluntarily for the cause of Greece, and by 
 making Artemis save her and carry her to Tauris, substituting for 
 her an animal victim, as in the Bible story. 
 
296 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 begotten Son 99 x *—“ spared not his own Son, but 
 delivered him up for us all.” 2 Wherever we find 
 the necessity for the sacrificial death to lie, we must 
 utterly refuse to find it in anything in the Father’s 
 mind making Him unwilling to forgive, or distin¬ 
 guishing in any way His mind in the matter from 
 Christ’s. The essential wrath of God over sin is 
 Christ’s as much as the Father’s, and the pardoning 
 mercy the Father’s as much as Christ s. It is a 
 great step to get this fully and utterly recognized. 
 It emancipates the Christian doctrine from the most 
 revolting aspect of propitiatory sacrifice, as it is 
 found all the world over and in the earlier stages 
 of the Old Testament. And there is no doubt that 
 the New Testament excludes it. 
 
 2. Secondly, we need to distinguish the ideas of 
 vicarious sacrifice and vicarious punishment 3 ; and 
 I think we shall find that we can repudiate the 
 second while we welcome the first. We can do this 
 by appealing to the facts. All that came upon 
 Christ in the way of suffering came simply from His 
 life of obedience and sympathy. He never sought 
 pain, 4 as if to witness pain would please the Father, 
 or taught men to seek pain, except so far as service 
 and self-discipline involve it. All that He suffered 
 came simply out of His obedience to His Father s 
 mission, and of His speaking the truth and rebuking 
 sin ; out of His standing stoutly against wickedness 
 in high places, and out of His boundless sympathy 
 with men. This constituted His mission. “ He 
 rode out because of the word of truth and meekness 
 and righteousness.” And as the world was, it 
 brought Him to His death. There is not anything 
 here which suggests any “ punishment ” devised 
 
 1 John iii 16 ; cf. 1 John iv 10, “ Herein is love . . . that . . . 
 God . . . sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” 
 
 * Rom. viii 32. 
 
 3 See Rashdall, op. cit. pp. 98-9, 151. 
 
 * Except in the minor form of the voluntary fast in the wilderness. 
 
NO VICARIOUS PUNISHMENT 
 
 297 
 
 by the Father for the Son. All that is said of the 
 Father is that He did not interfere to spare His son 
 —that He let sin take its course, and show its real 
 nature in this supreme example. The Father, in 
 the divine providence that governs the world, made 
 our sins—and the sins which crucified Christ were 
 the normal sins of men—light upon Him, in exactly 
 the same sense as all the world over the sins of men 
 are vicariously borne by their victims-—the sins of 
 parents by their children, of children by their parents, 
 of rulers by their people, and of people by their 
 pastors. The Father simply sent the Son into the 
 world, and under the normal action of its moral laws, 
 and did not interfere. 
 
 There was a horrible story of that unhappy boy 
 Edward VI having a whipping companion attached 
 to him ; and when the young king did wrong the 
 child - companion was said to be vicariously, and 
 doubtless very unwillingly, whipped. And divines 
 were so misguided as to quote this outrageous instance 
 of substituted punishment as an illustration of the 
 Atonement. It fails as an illustration in two ways. 
 The sacrifice of Christ was voluntary : it was self 
 sacrifice : and there was no kind of “ punishment ” 
 devised for Christ except what was involved in His 
 doing right—in His obedience and His sympathy. 
 
 On the other hand there is a punishment for 
 sinners, and it is of two kinds. There is the eternal 
 punishment—that is, the alienation from God which 
 sin involves and which has eternal consequences, and 
 this Christ never bore. There is not the slightest 
 trace of sin-consciousness in Christ; nor, as far 
 as I can see—be it spoken with all reverence to 
 Dr. Moberly—any trace of what can be called 
 vicarious penitence. The Agony in the Garden has 
 been viewed as if it were a shrinking from the ex¬ 
 perience of the Father’s wrath upon the sins of men 
 with which Christ was to be identified. But this is 
 
298 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 simply groundless imagination. Neither the Agony 
 in the Garden nor the great question upon the Cross 
 appears to suggest any consciousness on our Lord’s 
 part of being identified with human sin. Purely and 
 simply they suggest the agony of a righteous soul— 
 conscious as neither Job nor the Psalmist could be 
 of perfect innocence—finding itself, in a world which 
 it knows to be God’s world, exposed to ignominy, 
 failure, outrage, and death, while God remains silent 
 and does nothing. That Christ should have asked 
 the great question—“ My God, my God, why didst 
 thou forsake me ? ”—and received no answer is, for 
 all who feel the like trial in whatever degree, a cause 
 of profoundest thankfulness. But I cannot see any 
 reason for believing that He experienced in His 
 spirit the sense of the Father’s alienation from the 
 sinner. 
 
 This spiritual and eternal penalty of sin is gone 
 at once as soon as the sin is gone out of the soul. 
 And, as far as we can see, Christ not being a sinner 
 did not bear it. There is another penalty of sin— 
 the temporal punishment which wrongdoing brings 
 with it, and from this, as far as we can see, Christ 
 does not deliver us. Our absolution does not 
 necessarily or usually ward off from us any of the 
 natural consequences of our repented sins. Only 
 it gives us the right spirit in which to bear them, 
 and it turns them into healing penances. To be 
 absolved is not to be let off. “ Heard, forgiven, 
 punished ” was the record of God’s dealings with 
 His saints under the Old Covenant, and it is the 
 record of His dealings with us under the New. 1 
 
 Thus, as far as I can discern, there is in the case 
 of Christ nothing which can be called vicarious 
 punishment, nothing which was inflicted upon Christ 
 instead of us. The doom on unrepented sin remains 
 and the healing chastisement for repented sin remains. 
 
 1 Ps. xcix 8. 
 
299 
 
 CHRIST FOR US AND IN US 
 
 Christ’s sacrifice purchased for us forgiveness—that 
 is all we are told—in the sense that it enabled the 
 flood of the Father’s mercy to flow freely in the 
 channels of the New Covenant. Why such a sacrifice 
 should have been needful for such an end to be 
 attained we shall consider directly. 
 
 3. Lastly it has been an abundant source of scandal 
 that the Atonement—“ Christ for us,” acting in our 
 stead—has been isolated from “ Christ in us,” re¬ 
 newing and recreating our characters. It is notice¬ 
 able how, in St. Paul’s teaching, faith in Christ, 
 our atonement, merges itself, even in the Epistle to 
 the Romans, and much more in his later Epistles, 
 in the faith which appropriates and lives in His life. 
 “ Christ for us”—our sacrifice of reconciliation—gives 
 us our fresh start, but it is but the prelude to 
 “Christ in us.” Our absolution is simply what gives 
 us our admission into the new life. “ I will run the 
 way of thy commandments, when thou hast set my 
 heart at liberty.” Again and again in the New 
 Testament the effect of the atoning sacrifice is stated 
 in terms of actual righteousness, because this is its 
 only purpose. “ How much more shall the blood of 
 Christ, who through eternal spirit offered himself 
 without spot to God, cleanse your consciences from 
 dead works to serve the living God ?” What you were 
 redeemed from “ with the precious blood... of Christ ” 
 was “ your vain manner of life handed down from 
 your fathers.” “ Thou wast slain and didst purchase 
 to God by thy blood men of every tribe, etc., 
 and madest them to be unto our God a kingdom and 
 priests ; and they reign upon the earth.” (The con¬ 
 secrated life is the end and effect of atonement.) 
 “ His own self bare our sins in his body on the tree, 
 that we having died unto sins, might live unto right¬ 
 eousness.” This is the language and purport of the 
 whole New Testament. 
 
 There are, in fact, three relations in which our Lord 
 
300 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 stands to us in the New Testament. There is Christ 
 in front of us , who sets before us the standard of the 
 new life—in whom we see the true meaning of man¬ 
 hood. That is to kindle our desire. Then there is 
 Christ for us —our propitiation or atonement— 
 winning for us, at the price of His blood-shedding, 
 freedom from all the guilt and bondage of the 
 past, the assurance of free forgiveness and the fresh 
 start. Then there is Christ in us —our new life by 
 the Spirit, moulding us inwardly into His likeness, 
 and conforming us to His character. And the three 
 are one. Each is unintelligible without the others. 
 The redeeming work of Christ lies in all together. 
 We may dwell now on one and now on the other, 
 but we can never really isolate one from the others 
 without altogether distorting the meaning even of 
 the one. 
 
 Ill 
 
 We have been at pains, by reviewing the New Testa¬ 
 ment, to understand how central and essential to 
 the Gospel it announces is the conception of the 
 Atonement with God won for us by the sacrifice of 
 Christ. And we have laboured to disencumber the 
 idea of His Atonement of scandals which have been 
 suffered needlessly to disfigure it. Now let us con¬ 
 template it in its legitimate outline, and see whether 
 it commends itself to our conscience and our reason. 
 
 Christ stands as the Inaugurator of the New Man¬ 
 hood, perfect and complete in the midst of our sin- 
 stained and weakened race. He sets the perfect 
 standard of human life while He is on earth, so that 
 none henceforth can doubt what perfect manhood 
 means, and from the heavenly places to which He 
 has passed He supplies the power of the Spirit that 
 men may have wisdom and strength to live the good 
 
THE CENTRAL MEANING 301 
 
 life according to His example. But between the 
 example and the outpouring of the Spirit there stands 
 intermediate another mode of action on our behalf. 
 As the New Man, on behalf of all those who shall 
 give themselves to His allegiance, He offers to the 
 Father a great act of reparation—the sacrifice of 
 obedience consummated in blood and agony upon the 
 cross. Over against all our selfishness, our impurity, 
 our dishonouring of God, He makes that great act 
 of reparation; and in virtue of it the Father bestows 
 upon all those who, by faith and incorporation, 
 are united to Him a new standing ground in His 
 presence, and the gift of free forgiveness ever renew¬ 
 able, so that their past sins are no longer reckoned 
 against them, the guilt and the burden of them is 
 gone, and they can run the way of God’s command¬ 
 ments unimpeded, seeing He has set their hearts 
 at liberty. 
 
 Even here in this sacrificial action we must not 
 isolate Christ from His people. To present ourselves 
 to God, in soul and body, as a free-will offering is our 
 reasonable service, and it is the law of humanity 
 that sacrifice is vicarious as well as individual. 
 We suffer for one another and redeem one another 
 by suffering. St. Paul dares to speak of “ filling up 
 in his flesh that which is lacking in the sufferings of 
 Christ for his body’s sake, which is the church.” 
 And the New Testament constantly speaks of the 
 Cross as our example as well as our propitiation. 
 Nevertheless, as in all that concerns the relation of 
 Christ to His people, that which in us is dependent 
 and imitative, in Him is original and creative. His 
 sacrifice won for His new humanity a boon to which 
 they contributed nothing, which they must receive 
 from Him or in His name simply and solely by faith, 
 the boon of being forgiven ; and over all their im¬ 
 perfect strivings and sacrifices that one full perfect 
 and sufficient sacrifice abides—perpetually pleaded 
 
302 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 —to give adequacy to what is imperfect and expiate 
 what is sinful. 
 
 Christ we believe was one in nature with the 
 Father. His self-sacrificing love is God’s love. 
 Why then we ask should God have needed this 
 expiation ? Why should not free forgiveness have 
 simply been announced as a word of God ? Or, to 
 put it otherwise, if obedience, under the conditions of 
 the sinful world, involved death, and all that Christ 
 gave was obedience even to the point of dying at the 
 hands of men, why should it have assigned to it this 
 propitiatory or expiatory value ? So far as we can 
 find an answer to this question at all, we can find 
 it perhaps best on this line—we can reflect how our 
 thought of God would have suffered, if the great act 
 of reparation had not been made by our Representa¬ 
 tive, acting on our behalf, doing for us what we could 
 not do for ourselves. We should have been without 
 that sense, which nothing has conveyed to the con¬ 
 science of men like the sacrifice of the Cross, of the 
 outrage which sin is upon the majesty of God, as 
 measured by the price which it cost to redeem us. 
 The gift of free forgiveness, the freedom of a fresh 
 start, was not simply given us by God, but bought 
 for us at a great price. This, I suppose, lies at the 
 heart of that rather obscure phrase of St. Paul’s— 
 which is the only passage in the New Testament 
 which even suggests the need of an explanation of 
 the Atonement—where he contrasts “ the passing 
 over of sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of 
 God ” with the great act, at the crisis of redemption, 
 when God “ set forth Christ Jesus ” upon the great 
 stage of the world “as a propitiation taking effect in 
 his bloodshedding, to be made available for us by 
 faith, for the exhibition of his righteousness at the 
 present season that he might be just (righteous) and 
 the justifier (or acquitter) of him that hath faith in 
 Jesus.” Divine righteousness can now show itself 
 
DR. RASHDALL’S “ IDEA OF ATONEMENT ” 308 
 
 freely as mercy, because man, in Christ Jesus, has on 
 the great scene of the world made the perfect act of 
 reparation and borne the uttermost witness to the 
 sovereignty of God by obedience unto death. 
 
 Is there not an immense difference between the 
 effect upon men’s minds of a mere announcement 
 of free forgiveness and the effect upon them of a 
 covenant of free forgiveness bought at so tremendous 
 a price as the death of the Son of God ? The reason 
 for the fearful price being paid to win forgiveness 
 seems to be found rightly by St. Paul in the neces¬ 
 sity for guarding the revelation of the divine mercy 
 from all associations of easy-going indulgence or in¬ 
 difference to sin. It was guarded by the Sacrifice ; 
 and it was God Himself who paid the price. 
 
 Note A 
 
 Dr. RashdalV s “ Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology ” 
 
 This is a most learned and instructive work, for which 
 every student must be grateful. But it seems to me, in 
 some very important respects, extraordinarily arbitrary. 
 Thus Dr. Rashdall rightly notes (p. 75 ff.) that the 
 doctrine of the Atonement wrought by Christ’s sacrifice 
 is not due to St. Paul. “ That view is rendered abso¬ 
 lutely impossible by a single sentence in one of the 
 practically undisputed Epistles of St. Paul himself, 
 ‘ I delivered unto you , . . that which also I received, 
 how that Christ died for our sins according to the 
 Scriptures.’ The belief that in some sense Christ died 
 for sin—in order that sin might be forgiven and removed 
 —was thus quite certainly part of what St. Paul received. 
 It was already an article of the Church’s traditional 
 creed when the apostle of the Gentiles was baptized 
 into it.” Cf. also p. 104; “ That God had forgiven 
 sins through Christ, and pre-eminently through His 
 death, was common ground between himself (St. Paul) 
 and his opponents. It was part of the common faith 
 of the Church.” But (very arbitrarily, I think) Dr, 
 
304 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 Rashdall is disposed to deny that the tradition was 
 due to our Lord’s own teaching. He thinks that the 
 idea “ resulted from the reflection of the Church in the 
 interval which elapsed between the Crucifixion and 
 St. Paul’s conversion—which cannot have been more 
 than a very few years ” (p. 76). It was accepted 
 “ simply and solely on authority.” (pp. 80, 82)—the 
 authority of the Old Testament scripture. “ They found 
 it, as they thought, distinctly foretold that He should 
 do so (die that sins might be forgiven), in books which 
 they regarded as in the most literal and plenary sense 
 inspired writing. In that fact I believe we can discover 
 the historical origin of the atonement doctrine ” (p. 78). 
 But there is no passage which would have suggested 
 the doctrine at all obviously except Is. liii; and that 
 our Lord identified Himself with the Suffering Servant 
 of this passage seems to me to be manifest (see above, 
 p. 61). And the two great words of our Lord about 
 the sacrificial value of His death, which are referred to 
 above, both are grounded on this passage. This alone 
 accounts for the undisputed position of the Atonement 
 doctrine from the first. 
 
 I think that one great omission which is conspicuous in 
 Dr. Rashdall’s conception of Christ is—what is involved 
 in His being the Christ—that He came to inaugurate 
 the new Israel, and that He acts accordingly as the 
 representative before God of the Church of the believers 
 in Him which is yet to be—which by His death and 
 resurrection and the coming of the Spirit He is to bring 
 into effective being, and which is to be the old Church 
 reformed on a new basis, on the basis of a new covenant 
 by sacrifice. 
 
 Note B 
 
 Two phrases of St. Paul which have been needlessly 
 misinterpreted (see p. 291). 
 
 (a) 2 Cor. v 21, “ Him who knew no sin, he made 
 to be sin on our behalf.” I believe that “ sin ** here 
 is the equivalent of “ for sin ” in Rom. viii 3 (“ an 
 offering for sin,” R.V.). In the LXX, following the 
 
TWO PHRASES OF ST. PAUL 305 
 
 Hebrew, the same word stands for sin and sin-offering 
 (dfxapTta, translating chattath). Thus Lev. iv 21, “ It 
 [the bullock] is the sin, i.e. the sin-offering, of the 
 assembly ” ; 24, “ It [the goat] is a sin ” ; 29, “ He shall 
 lay his hand upon the head of the sin ” ; vi 25, “ This 
 is the law of the sin,” i.e. sin-offering ; viii 14, “ The 
 bullock is the sin ” ; cf. Hosea iv 8, “ They feed on the 
 sin.” St. Paul means, I think, simply that “ God made 
 him who knew no sin to be the sin-offering on our 
 behalf.” 
 
 ( b) Gal. iii 13, “ Having become a curse for us.” 
 The argument is—Those who struggle in their own 
 strength under the law end under condemnation or a 
 curse. There is a better way—not of saving ourselves, 
 but of being saved. Fruitful faith in Jesus can do what 
 fruitless struggle cannot. He brought us out from 
 under the curse by His self-sacrifice. He was made a 
 curse for us, i.e. treated as a malefactor, that we might 
 not have to be treated as malefactors. We note that 
 St. Paul is quoting a text of the Old Testament, Deut. 
 xxi 23, which is “ Cursed of God is everyone that 
 hangeth upon a tree [gibbet],” but he leaves out the 
 words “ of God.” It was the world, not God, which 
 treated Christ as a malefactor. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 There are, no doubt, other ideas and principles 
 which the doctrine of the Incarnation implies, and 
 which might fall to be considered here. Thus the 
 affirmation of the Word made Flesh involves, as 
 against all the tendencies of Hellenism, the dignity 
 of matter and of the material world, which indeed 
 is implied alike in the Christian idea of creation, of 
 sin, of the Incarnation, of the Church and the 
 sacraments, of the resurrection of the body and 
 the redemption of the whole creation. But we will 
 defer the consideration of this principle until the 
 sacraments and the resurrection of the body have 
 been discussed in the next volume. Again, we have 
 found ourselves close up against the question of 
 Authority as involved in the idea of a divine 
 message or revelation, but that again shall be 
 deferred for discussion in connection with the 
 Church. Once more we shall probably have been 
 led already to feel the coherence of the various 
 elements of the traditional faith which centres in 
 Christ, and this solidarity of 14 the articles of the 
 faith ” has over against it in our days a like 
 solidarity in the sequence of ideas which are grouped 
 as 44 Modernism.” A certain philosophy appears to 
 lie behind each sequence of ideas. But again we 
 shall be able to bring this out more effectively when 
 the whole cycle of rival ideas has been passed in 
 
 306 
 
THE FIRST FAITH OF THE DISCIPLES 807 
 
 review. So at this point we will summarize our 
 argument and draw it to a conclusion. 
 
 Starting from the Jewish background, whence the 
 first disciples started in the company of Jesus'—the 
 background of the distinctively Jewish belief in 
 God and the expectation of the Messiah and his king¬ 
 dom 1 —we observed how profoundly Jesus trans¬ 
 formed the Jewish expectation, as His contemporaries 
 held it, even while He accepted the title of Messiah 
 - turning His back on political and nationalist 
 ideals, and building up, out of the materials of 
 prophecy, one profoundly unified and spiritual con¬ 
 ception of the Christ, manifested, suffering, dying, 
 rising, glorified, and to come in judgment. And we 
 noted how, quite apart from any question of names 
 and titles, by the unexampled spiritual authority 
 which He wielded, He absorbed the attention, the 
 faith, the devotion of His disciples, so that Fie came 
 to be as God to their souls. This is the feature in 
 the Gospel story which overwhelms us as we read 
 it. But contrary to this deepening attraction of 
 His person, and pulling in the opposite direction, 
 there was the horror of the impending Cross, and 
 the overthrow which it involved of all that had been 
 associated with the Christ and his triumph. 2 We 
 watched the tragedy of the disciples’ failure under 
 the strain of these contending feelings, and then 
 their recovery under the experience of the Resurrec¬ 
 tion and the Ascension and the effusion of the Spirit. 
 But still we noted that all their faith centred on 
 the risen and glorified Lord, the man whom they 
 had known, full of the Spirit and power, whom they 
 had deserted, whom they had seen crucified, now 
 exalted to the throne of God, who had sent thence 
 upon them the Holy Spirit. It would have seemed as 
 if they were on their way to deify their human Master 
 after the Greek manner. But that could not be. 
 
 1 Cap. i. 2 Cap. ii. 
 
808 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 In the providence of God it was the bitterest of 
 their opponents who was to interpret to them the 
 meaning of their faith. This Saul'—in the days 
 when, as he said, he was “ thinking with himself 
 that he ought to do many things contrary to the 
 name of Jesus of Nazareth,” 1 and was “ punishing 
 his disciples ofttimes in every city and compelling 
 them to blaspheme ”•—must have known a good 
 deal about Jesus. Doubtless he learned more after 
 his conversion, at Damascus and Jerusalem, about 
 “ the tradition ” of the Christian society. But he 
 was certainly convinced that it was nothing less 
 than the action of God in his own soul that had 
 “ revealed his Son ” in him ; and this-—the Divine 
 Sonship-—becomes the keynote of his teaching about 
 Jesus. The man born of the seed of David 
 according to the flesh, who after living and dying 
 as man had been exalted to the divine glory and 
 to the supreme Lordship—before He was born of a 
 woman to His human condition, aye, before ever 
 the world was, was the proper Son of God, a Son 
 with His Father, through whom all things were 
 made and in whom all things have their consistency. 
 This is the doctrine of the Incarnation. And we 
 noted that this doctrine, which interprets the person 
 and glory of the ascended Jesus upon the background 
 of Jewish monotheism as the coming of God’s 
 own Son in the flesh, and not the deification of a 
 man, seems to have been without controversy 
 accepted throughout the churches. 2 There is, as 
 we saw, no Adoptionism, properly so called, to be 
 found in the New Testament. And we discovered 
 in the Synoptic records of Jesus several solemn 
 sayings which are most certainly original and which 
 can only be interpreted in the sense of a trans¬ 
 cendental, superhuman Sonship. They do not differ 
 in real implication from the more emphatic utter- 
 1 Acts xxvi. 9. 2 Cap. iii. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF INCARNATION 309 
 
 ances about pre-existent Sonship ascribed to Jesus 
 m the Fourth Gospel. That Jesus so spoke must 
 have been on record in the tradition of the Church, 
 though the force of His words had not been generally 
 realized till St. Paul brought it home to the other 
 apostles in its full force. So only can we account 
 foi his doctrine of Incarnation coming so easily into 
 general acceptance. 
 
 V\ e analyzed the substantially identical doctrine of 
 the Incarnation of the Son or “ Word ” of God in 
 St. I aul, in the author oi the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 and in St. John. Besides the words of Jesus Himself, 
 we found the materials for the conception of these 
 first expositors of the person of our Lord in the 
 Jewish phrases “the Word,” and “the Wisdom,” 
 and the Abiding Place ” of God—phrases expressive 
 of God as He manifests Himself in nature or amongst 
 His people much more obviously than in any 
 purely Hellenistic sources. But it is to be re- 
 membeied that Hellenism had already influenced 
 the Jewish tradition, especially at Alexandria, as 
 m the Book of Wisdom; and the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews at least is an Alexandrian book. 1 
 
 If the Hellenistic influence on Christian origins 
 has been much exaggerated by one school of critics, 
 so by another school of critics has the influence of 
 the later Jewish Apocalypses. This was our con¬ 
 clusion when we examined the eschatological and 
 apocalyptic teaching of Jesus and noted its complex 
 character and originality. That our Lord was an 
 apocalyptic seer there is no doubt, but He profoundly 
 transmuted the apocalyptic tradition in adopting 
 it. On the whole, He approximates far more closely 
 in teaching to the prophets than to the later writers 
 of Apocalypses. In particular, we saw no good 
 reason for supposing that He prophesied the im¬ 
 mediate coming of the end of the world. On the 
 
 1 Cap. iv. 
 
310 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 contrary, He appears to have declared explicitly 
 that He had no map of the future spread before 
 His eyes. 1 
 
 Having thus reviewed the thought - of the New 
 Testament about Christ, we contrasted its doctrine, 
 which is the traditional doctrine, about His person 
 with the most striking and distinctive modern views, 
 all of a humanitarian and rationalistic type, which 
 have claimed the name of critical reconstructions, 
 and found them not truly critical, in that they are 
 strangely arbitrary in what they accept and what 
 they reject, and even violently contrary in their 
 results. We saw reason to claim that the traditional 
 faith—modified, in view of really critical require¬ 
 ments, but substantially unchanged—is alone able 
 to account for the facts as a whole, the facts of the 
 Gospel story and the convictions of the first disciples, 
 by which alone the origin of the Christian Church 
 can be explained. And we considered the most 
 important types of objection which are made to the 
 traditional doctrine. 2 
 
 Then we studied the later development of the 
 doctrine of Christ’s person in outline, and came to 
 the conclusion that the decisions of the Councils, 
 which fixed the doctrine in dogmatic limits, were 
 all of them necessary and justified in their negative 
 aspects, considered as excluding types of teaching 
 fundamentally destructive of the Christian faith ; 
 but that they were open to great abuse when they 
 were made the positive basis on which a pictuie of 
 a Christ was erected, in some points strangely unlike 
 the picture in the Gospels. We felt the need of 
 insisting that, while the decrees were necessary as 
 hedges or safeguards of the fundamental faith of 
 the New Testament, they should be understood to 
 direct us to the Christ of the Gospels as giving us 
 the positive image, and to the apostolic writers 
 1 Cap. V. 2 Cap. vi. 
 
OTHER DOCTRINES INVOLVED 311 
 
 as giving us the positive interpretation, of His 
 person. 1 
 
 Then we proceeded to consider the main ideas 
 and doctrines which the Incarnation doctrine of 
 the New Testament is found to involve ; and first 
 the doctrine of the trinity of “ persons ” in the 
 unity of God, the sense of which gradually became 
 distinct in the process of experience which the Gospels 
 record, by which the Name of God became to the 
 disciples the Name of the Father, and of the Son, 
 and of the Holy Ghost; and we took note of the 
 profound assistance which the reason finds in this 
 conception of the one divine being as not a 
 monotonous unit, but containing within Himself 
 relationships which human language at least can 
 only describe as a fellowship of persons. 2 
 
 Next we examined the presupposition of all the 
 Biblical accounts of Redemption, viz. that man is 
 universally sinful and that, in order to realize the 
 end of his being in fellowship with God and fellow¬ 
 ship amongst men, he needs something much more 
 than enlightenment. He needs such a fundamental 
 recreation and renewal as involves the direct action 
 of the God who made him. He must be saved. 
 He cannot save himself. And w r e examined in 
 outline the meaning of the doctrine of 44 original 
 (or racial) sin,” and found it justified or rather 
 required by the essentially corporate and racial 
 basis of human personality. 3 
 
 Finally we found the idea of Atonement or Pro¬ 
 pitiation made by Christ before God, on behalf of 
 the New Humanity which He came to inaugurate, 
 to be an idea which the writers of the New Testament 
 and the Church from the beginning assumed for 
 true. We found that it clearly depends upon Christ’s 
 own testimony. We endeavoured to rid it of scandals 
 in which, in the current tradition of the Church, 
 
 1 Cap. vii. 2 Cap. viii. 2 Cap. ix. 
 
312 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 it has become too plentifully involved; and thus 
 purged, and presented in its original outline, we 
 found it free from the moral objections which have 
 been urged against it, and deeply responsive to the 
 moral reason, which demands reparation to evoke 
 and justify forgiveness ; and we saw that its in¬ 
 tellectual justification is inseparable from that 
 estimate of Christ’s person which sees in Him the 
 representative head of a new humanity, who can 
 act for His “ members.” 1 
 
 II 
 
 In all this process of observing and thinking we 
 have found no justification for certain opinions 
 which are commonly held and propounded as critical, 
 viz. (1) that the theology of St. Paul and St. John, 
 which is with little difference the theology of the 
 Catholic Church, overlays and obscures the naive 
 theology, if so it is to be called, of the historical 
 Jesus. In any case you cannot get behind the 
 apostolic witness. The Epistles are, as a whole, 
 somewhat older than the Gospels as we have them, 
 and the earliest Gospel records grew up in the heart 
 of the Church which the Acts and the Epistles dis¬ 
 close to us. But also in these earliest records we 
 discern a person who cannot be reduced to merely 
 human proportions. The picture of Him, which 
 we feel compelled to take for history and not for 
 invention, is the picture of the superhuman Son of 
 God. It justifies and requires the theology of St. Paul 
 and St. John. 
 
 (2) We have seen no justification for asserting 
 any determining influence of Hellenistic ideas upon 
 the origins of Christianity, upon the Christianity 
 of the New Testament. It is true that it had a 
 much greater and deeper influence upon its develop¬ 
 ment, which we shall have to consider in connection 
 
 1 Cap. x. 
 
CURRENT MISTAKES 313 
 
 with the sacramental system of the Church. But 
 it had little influence on its origins, save in so far as 
 it had already influenced Alexandrian Judaism in 
 such a way as the Book of Wisdom represents. Like 
 Christianity, so Judaism showed a marked power 
 at different periods to assimilate foreign elements— 
 from Babylonia and Persia and Greece—and to in¬ 
 corporate them into its own proper tradition in a 
 discriminating spirit which never suffered the 
 essential character of its own doctrine to be impaired 
 or obscured. These elements had come to belong 
 to Judaism before Christ was born. They belong 
 to His background. But they were not consider¬ 
 able. It is substantially only the religion of the 
 prophets and the person and teaching of Jesus 
 which provide the materials of New Testament 
 Christianity. 
 
 (3) Nor have we found justification for the ex¬ 
 aggerated importance which a good many distin¬ 
 guished teachers ascribe to the Jewish apocalypses, 
 and especially to the Similitudes of the Book of 
 Enoch. We found no trace in the New Testament 
 of the idea of the Pre-existing Son of Man , who is 
 neither properly divine nor properly human. I sup¬ 
 pose no one believes that such a being ever really 
 existed. He is purely mythical; and it is astonish¬ 
 ing how large an influence even some orthodox 
 theologians seem to allow to this mythical figure, 
 without recognizing that the superstructure of ortho¬ 
 dox theology is immensely weakened if myth enters 
 so largely into its foundations. But in fact the 
 conception does not really appear in the New Testa¬ 
 ment. It is gratuitous to imagine it. 1 
 
 1 The only sentence which really at first sight suggests it is 
 John v 27, “ He gave him authority to execute judgment, because 
 he is the Son of Man.” This sounds like the Similitudes of Enoch. 
 But it is impossible to ascribe the idea of a pre-existing Son of Man 
 to John. He explains his theology in his preface, and it appears 
 constantly in his Gospel, and there is no room for it. It is the 
 Word or Son of God who pre-exists. 
 
314 
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 III 
 
 Not indeed in New Testament times, but in the 
 succeeding ages of the Church, especially when intel¬ 
 lectual life has been keen, the doctrine of the person 
 of Christ has been the centre of bitter controversy, 
 and this controversy has undoubtedly distracted the 
 attention of the Church from what ought always 
 to be its main interest—the following “ the way,” 
 the living the life, the maintenance of the moral, social 
 witness. The religion of Christ, as He taught it, 
 was to be, first of all, the way. The way was a 
 hard way, and made a tremendous claim for sacrifice 
 upon the heart and will of men. Rut for the men 
 of good will it does not appear that our Lord intended 
 the doctrinal claim to prove difficult. 6i If any man 
 willeth to do God s will, he shall know of the teaching, 
 whether it be of God .” 1 But the gravest scandal 
 which Church history presents to many of the best 
 men is that again and again in East and West, 
 among Catholics and Protestants, they see a rigid, 
 controversial, and often merciless insistence on 
 doctrinal orthodoxy, coupled with manifest laxity of 
 moral discipline. The situation in the Church has 
 thus constantly presented features precisely contra¬ 
 dictory to the apparent intention of Christ—that 
 is to say, a concentration of interest on precise 
 orthodoxy, coupled with a great readiness to “ make 
 it easy in moral matters for those who are prepared 
 to submit to the doctrinal authority of the Church, 
 and to conform to its required practice. This, I 
 cannot doubt, is the gravest of all the causes of 
 scandal in the Church, and I cannot minimize it 
 or apologize for it . 2 
 
 1 John vii 17. 
 
 2 I would venture to refer to my “Essex Hall Lecture,” 
 Christianity applied to the Life of Men and Nations, given by me in 
 
 1920, and published by the Lindsey Pres 3 , 5 Essex Street, Strand, 
 London, W.C. 
 
THEOLOGY DISPARAGED 
 
 315 
 
 But when, in order to remove this scandal, men 
 disparage theology they make a fundamental mis¬ 
 take. However many inconsistencies may be found 
 in all ages between men’s lives and their professed 
 beliefs, there can be no question that, in the long 
 run, how men behave will depend upon what they 
 really believe about God and human nature and 
 destiny ; and in particular that the Christian 44 way ” 
 depends for its motives and supports upon a specific 
 doctrine about God and His love and His purposes 
 for man, that is the doctrine of the Incarnation. 
 “ Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that 
 he loved us, and sent his Son.” No one who has 
 followed with any degree of sympathy the argument 
 of this book will doubt that St. Paul and St. John 
 w r ere right in perceiving that the Gospel requires 
 theological controversy, where necessary to defend 
 a certain original and final doctrine on which it 
 depends. 44 Though we, or an angel from heaven, 
 should preach unto you any gospel other than that 
 which we preached unto you, let him be anathema.” 
 “ Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the 
 teaching of Christ, hath not God.” 1 My last words 
 in this volume shall be an attempt to set in a clear 
 light the importance of maintaining (though never 
 by methods of force) the doctrine about Christ of 
 St. Paul and St. John. 
 
 I think the word which best sums up the importance 
 of this Incarnation doctrine is finality or uniqueness. 
 Let me quote the thoughtful language of Edwyn 
 Be van 2 : 
 
 “ The great dividing line, it appears to me, is that 
 which marks off all those who hold that the relation of 
 Jesus to God—however they describe or formulate it— 
 is of such a kind that it could not be repeated in any 
 other individual—that to speak, in fact, of its being 
 repeated in any other individual is a contradiction in 
 
 1 Gal. i 8-9, 2 John 9. 2 Hellenism and Christianity, p. 271. 
 
316 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 terms, since any individual standing in that relation to 
 God would be Jesus, and that Jesus, in virtue of this 
 relation, has the same absolute claim upon all men’s 
 worship and loyalty as belongs to God. A persuasion 
 ot this sort of uniqueness attaching to Jesus seems to 
 me the essential characteristic of what has actually in 
 the field of human history been Christianity.” 
 
 Now it is to me evident that nothing but the 
 doctrine of “the Word made flesh’’—the doctrine of 
 the Nicene Creed—can interpret or justify this unique¬ 
 ness and finality ascribed to Christ. Dr. Kirsopp 
 Lake has set before us the opposite estimate of the 
 teaching oi Jesus in human history, as contributory 
 but as essentially neither final nor complete . 1 Dr. 
 Lake is regarded as an “ extremist.” But my 
 contention is, that no “ mediating ” doctrine, nothing 
 except the full doctrine of the Nicene Creed, which is 
 substantially identical with St. Paul’s and St. John’s, 
 can either explain or justify the ascription to Jesus 
 of finality and uniqueness in the strict sense. What 
 I mean is this : if that doctrine is true, there is 
 finality. No disclosure of God to man, such as is 
 possible in this world, can be even conceived fuller 
 or completer than is given in Him who is God in¬ 
 carnate—the Word made flesh. He that hath seen 
 Him hath seen the Father. And no relation of man 
 to God can be even conceived closer than in Him 
 in whom the Manhood is taken into God. From 
 Him, so conceived, proceeds necessarily the final 
 and universal religion, for whatever elements of 
 truth are found in the religions of the world, and 
 whatever excellencies in moral ideal, here, in Christ, 
 is necessarily something more complete. And we 
 cannot “ look for another ” Christ. There can be 
 no other. That person, Jesus of Nazareth, is on 
 the throne of the universe. 
 
 Christian/T conclusion of h * s Landmarks in the History of Early 
 
THE FINALITY OF CHRIST 317 
 
 On the other hand, no doctrine of Christ, less than 
 this, can justify the claim of finality. If Jesus was 
 a man who began His existence as a person when 
 He was born of Mary—however close the union with 
 God into which He was taken, however full the 
 inspiration of the Spirit granted to Him—there can 
 be no reason in the nature of things why another 
 man, in a later age or in another country, and be¬ 
 longing to another tradition, should not be in the 
 same relation to God and equally or more fully 
 inspired. No form of adoptionist or Nestorian or 
 generally humanitarian teaching can claim finality 
 for its Christ. 
 
 It must be remembered that religion is a thing 
 for common men. The refinements of the Antiochene 
 school which lay behind Nestorianism were very 
 subtle; but Nestorianism as vulgarly understood 
 was their inevitable outcome. Common men can 
 understand the doctrine of the Incarnation, and 
 they can understand the doctrine of an inspired 
 man. But I do not think it is open to question that 
 so far as they came to hold the latter doctrine, 
 though they might accept Christ as the best and 
 most fully inspired man who has hitherto appeared 
 among men, they would neither worship Him nor 
 think Him the final revelation, nor His name the 
 one name, nor His religion the religion for all man¬ 
 kind. I cannot conceive how this can be doubted. 
 
 Of course there are those who would say that 
 the acceptance of the category of evolution in all 
 departments of life, and in the regions of human 
 religion and morality, renders the very idea of 
 a final religion revealed two thousand years ago, 
 and never to be antiquated, quite unacceptable. 
 But I suppose that this objection is based upon a 
 misconception about evolution which we are out¬ 
 growing. Evolution is as compatible with retro¬ 
 gression as with progress, as we were warned by 
 
318 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 Huxley long ago. It must accommodate itself to 
 the facts. The facts of human history suggest 
 nothing less than necessary or uniform progress. 
 In the particular region of the history of religion 
 this is especially the case. The highest level in the 
 religion of Persia was attained in the teaching of 
 Zoroaster, three thousand years ago. The highest 
 level in Buddhism is indisputably the level of 
 Siddartha Gotama. It would remain true, even if 
 Christ were a mere man, that though in that case, 
 no doubt, some successor might attain a higher level 
 than He, yet in fact He still remained the highest 
 ideal. And these considerations suffice, I think, 
 to prevent our rejecting the idea of the incarna¬ 
 tion of God in Christ, once for all, as if it could be 
 repudiated in the name of evolution. 
 
 But there is another consideration perhaps more 
 satisfactory. It is that though Christ is final— 
 though He is on the throne of the world and His 
 judgment the final judgment—though St. John can 
 rightly claim of Christians that any “ advance ” 
 which takes a Christian teacher outside or away from 
 the “ doctrine of Christ ” is self-condemned—yet 
 that Christ and the doctrine of Christ is so rich and 
 manifold that it will take all races and all ages and 
 all sorts of individual characters to realize all that it 
 involves. That is an idea suggested to us by both 
 St. Paul and St. John; By St. Paul when he bids us 
 see the whole development of the Church catholic 
 as the sphere in which Christ is to be gradually ful¬ 
 filled : by St. John when he recalls to us that the 
 function of the Spirit is to lead the Church into “ all 
 the truth.” No doubt this is an often misinterpreted 
 text. It needs to be coupled with the two neigh¬ 
 bouring texts where our Lord speaks to the disciples 
 of the Holy Spirit as “to bring all things to your 
 remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you ” 
 and “ to glorify me : for he shall take of mine and 
 
319 
 
 THE ASCENSION 
 
 shall declare it unto you.” The function of the Spirit 
 is to interpret Christ and not to supersede Him. 
 Nevertheless there is so much to be brought out and 
 interpreted that we are constantly feeling we have 
 only made a beginning of understanding Him, and 
 that as Jew and Greek and Roman and French¬ 
 man and Englishman and German have contributed, 
 so will Indian and Chinese and Japanese. It will 
 take all mankind to understand Him in whom dwells 
 all the fulness of God bodily. 
 
 The ascension of Jesus is the symbol of His 
 finality. He passed to the throne of the world. He 
 is to come to judge the quick and dead. His judg¬ 
 ment on all men and things is to be the final judgment. 
 But the Ascension, though it is in this sense the great 
 end and there can be no higher summit, yet in 
 another most manifest sense is a fresh beginning. 
 It is but the establishment upon His secure throne 
 of Him who is to be the source of redemption for all 
 men : who by His Spirit is to work throughout the 
 world of men until all men have heard His Gospel in 
 effective power and the kingdoms of the world can 
 become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ. 
 
 So understood Christianity is indeed the religion 
 of development or unfolding—the gradual unfolding 
 of all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which 
 are in Christ. 
 
 Note on The Ascension. 
 
 There is an idea current that the articles of the Creed, 
 “He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right 
 hand of God; from thence He shall come to judge the 
 quick and the dead ” depended upon the old Ptolemaic 
 astronomy which rendered possible a belief in a heaven 
 above our heads ; and that the disappearance of this 
 theory has invalidated this group of beliefs connected 
 
320 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 with the Ascension. The same is said to be true of the 
 belief in the descent into hell. Thus Dr. Glazebrook 
 says : “ The clauses have no literal meaning except for 
 those who regard the earth as a fixed centre of creation, 
 with a hollow space underneath for Hades and a solid 
 vault overhead.” And Dr. Streeter, “ The Ascension 
 implies the belief that heaven is a definite region locally 
 fixed above the solid bowl of the skies.” 
 
 But it is a mistake to suppose that all intelligent 
 Christians of the early ages held such ideas. Plato had 
 taught the intelligent world of the Greco-Roman Empire 
 by his myths to accept the principle that about 
 “ the other world ” or other worlds we can be taught 
 for the most part only in figure or allegory. This idea 
 was widely diffused and Alexandrian Judaism gave it 
 additional vogue. There is no doubt that ideas about 
 heaven and hell such as Dr. Glazebrook and Dr. Streeter 
 refer to did prevail in the world of the first centuries, 
 outside the Church and inside it. But it is not the case 
 that they were universal. I doubt whether St. Paul held 
 any such ideas. When he speaks of Christians being 
 now with Christ “ in the heavenlies ” or heavenly 
 sphere, 1 he cannot have been thinking of it as a defined 
 locality. When he speaks of “ being caught up into the 
 third heaven ” I suspect he knew quite well that he was 
 speaking in a figure, as one who sees but a blurred re¬ 
 flection in a mirror, or apprehends but in a riddle. 2 Nor 
 is it the least probable that when the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of our Lord as having 
 passed through the heavens into the true tabernacle 3 
 he was forgetting what he had learned from his Alex¬ 
 andrian teachers, that earthly things are only “ figures ” 
 or “ shadows ” of eternal realities. 4 No one would be 
 disposed to ascribe materialistic ideas of heaven to 
 Clement and Origen. But it is more surprising to find 
 Jerome, when he is interpreting “foolish speaking” 
 (on Eph. iii 5), 5 giving it as an example of such nonsense 
 that Christians dare to say “ that heaven is curved like 
 
 1 Eph. i 3, ii 6. 2 1 Cor. xiii 12. 
 
 3 iv 14, viii 2. 4 ix 23, x 1. 
 
 5 P.L. xxvi 519 f. Dr. Harris, Creeds or no Creeds, called my 
 attention to this quotation. 
 
THE ASCENSION 321 
 
 an arch, and that a throne is placed in heaven, and that 
 God sits upon it, and that, as ii He were a commander or 
 judge, the angels stand round to obey His commands and 
 to be sent on different missions.” Plainly for Jerome 
 the truth and meaning of the Ascension did not depend 
 upon such “ nonsense.” 
 
 Again the Fathers are many of them at pains to ex¬ 
 plain that “ He sitteth at the right hand of God ” was 
 certainly figurative, seeing that God has no right hand. 
 
 Lastly as regards Hades, whether it holds some special 
 position, as a part of or in relation to the earth, there 
 was a good deal of discussion in many circles and among 
 Christians in early times. There again it is hard to 
 believe that when St. Paul speaks of the dead as “ sleep- 
 ing in Jesus ” he was thinking of a pit underground. 
 There is a long and interesting discussion of the matter 
 in Gregory of Nyssa’s de Anima et Resurrectione , where he 
 seems to follow Posidonius the Platonizing Stoic; and 
 he reaches the conclusion “ that the soul, being im¬ 
 material, is under no necessity to be detained in certain 
 portions of nature.” Hades he explains to mean “ the 
 invisible ” (to daSes), and “ to go to Hades ” the transla¬ 
 tion of the soul into the invisible. 
 
 I am not disputing the wide prevalence of merely 
 physical conceptions of heaven and hell such as Coperni- 
 can astronomy must have utterly overthrown. I am 
 only pleading that, even when no one doubted the 
 Ptolemaic astronomy, intelligent Christians did not fail 
 to see that heaven and hell were not spatial terms. 
 
 I have in Belief m God (pp. 272—273) spoken about the 
 Ascension of Christ as a physical fact which the apostles 
 saw, and of its spiritual significance, quite irrespective 
 of changes in our conception of the structure of the uni¬ 
 verse ; and (pp. 180-182) I have endeavoured to show 
 how illogical and unreasonable it is to argue that because 
 in the case of what lies outside possible human experience 
 we must be taught by symbols, therefore we can apply 
 the same symbolic interpretation to events, such as the 
 miracles connected with our Lord’s person, which are 
 stated to have occurred within human experience and 
 have all their significance from having so actually 
 occurred. 
 
TABLE OF SUBJECTS 
 
 Chapter I. The Jewish Background . The great question, 
 pp. 1-3. Where we start. The Jewish background, 
 3-4 ; taken for granted by Jesus and His disciples, 4-8. 
 Importance of this, because of (I) the Jewish doctrine 
 of God and its consequences, 8-11. (II) the expecta¬ 
 tion of the Kingdom of God, 11—14. (HI) the features 
 of the Messianic expectation : (1) the universality of 
 Israel’s religion, 15-16; (2) the doom of the world 
 
 powers, 16-17 ; (3) the King Messiah, 17-18 ; (4) the 
 New Covenant, the effusion of the Spirit and the Resurrec¬ 
 tion of the dead, 18-19 ; (5) Daniel’s vision of the “ one 
 like a son of man ” developed in the Book of Enoch, 19-21. 
 The apocalyptic literature, 22-3 ; its limited influence, 
 24-5. The Jewish parties in our Lord’s time, 25-7. 
 
 Notes.—A. Traces of polytheism in O.T., 28-9. 
 B. The teaching of Zoroaster, 29-30. C. The belief 
 in the pre-existing Son of Man, 30-3. 
 
 Chapter II. The Belief of the First Disciple. Its gradual 
 development : (I) as interpreted by (1) Harnack, 
 
 pp. 35-6; (2) Schweitzer, 37-8 ; (3) Bousset and Kirsopp 
 Lake, 39-41 ; their common assumption, 41 ; the 
 trustworthiness of Synoptic Gospels and Acts, 41-3. 
 (II) The preparation in John the Baptist, 43-6. (Ill) 
 The impression on the disciples of the Galilaean ministry : 
 the title Son of Man, 46-7 ; the impression of authority 
 in word and work, 47-52 ; Aut deus aut homo non bonus , 
 52-3. (IV) The titles of Jesus : The Son of God, 54-7 ; 
 The Christ, 57-9 ; The Suffering Servant, 59-62 ; The 
 glorified Son of Man, 63-6. The failure of the disciples, 
 66 - 8 . 
 
 Note on John the Baptist and Jesus, 68-9. 
 
 322 
 
TABLE OF SUBJECTS 323 
 
 Chapter III. The Faith of the First Church The meaning 
 of the Cross, pp. ?0-2. (I) The recovery of the disciples’ 
 
 faith requires the actual resurrection, 73-4 ; the trust¬ 
 worthiness of the Acts, 74-6 ; the nature of the earliest 
 faith in Jesus as Lord, 76—8. W as it to end in a doctrine 
 of “ deification ” ? 78-9. (II) The influence of St. Paul : 
 the doctrine of the incarnation of the Son, 79-84; His 
 cosmic functions ; His Godhead implied or asserted, 
 85-6 ; sources of the doctrine, 86-90 ; accepted by the 
 other apostles, 90-1 ; the idea of the divine Wisdom, 
 92-4. (Ill) The Epistle to the Hebrews and its doctrine 
 of Christ, 94-7 ; in agreement with St. Paul, 97-9. 
 
 Notes.—A. On the institution by Christ of the sacra¬ 
 ment of His body and blood, 99-102. B. On the question 
 whether the title Lord for Jesus was in use in the first 
 church in Jerusalem, 102-5. C. St. Paul’s phrase, 
 “ Christ after the flesh,” 105. 
 
 Chapter IV. St. John and the Rest of the New Testament. 
 (I) Recent work on the Fourth Gospel—Stanton, Meyer, 
 Burney : The use to be made of the Gospel, pp. 107-11 ; 
 its doctrine of Christ’s person, 111-15 ; the sources of 
 the doctrine ; the historical memory ; the position of 
 the Prologue ; the Logos idea in Hellenism and its 
 influence among the Jews ; St. John’s use of it, 115-19 ; 
 analysis of the prologue, 119-22. (II) The rest of the 
 N.T. : No positive “ adoptionist ” doctrine, 123-4; 
 the Revelation, 124-7 ; The Epistle of James, 127-30 ; 
 1 Peter, 130-2 ; Conclusion, 133. 
 
 Note on Reitzenstein’s theory, 133-5. 
 
 Chapter V. The Apocalyptic Teaching of Jesus. The Messi¬ 
 anic expectation summarized, pp. 136-9. The cosmic 
 catastrophe in the prophets, 139-41 ; in the later apoca¬ 
 lypses, 141-2. The acceptance of the prophecies by 
 Jesus, 142-4. His teaching about the future coming 
 as immediate, 144—6. The doom upon Jerusalem, 
 146-8 ; thrown upon the background of cosmic catas¬ 
 trophe, 148-9. The Last Day really proclaimed, 150 ; 
 but nothing said about times or seasons ; the mistake of 
 the disciples ; the twofold character of Christ’s teaching 
 
324 
 
 TABLE OF SUBJECTS 
 
 about the Kingdom ; His profession of ignorance, 149- 
 55 ; the attitude of St. Paul and of the seer of the 
 Apocalypse, 155-6. Is the Gospel of the Kingdom for 
 this world or the next ? 156-60. 
 
 Note.—An illustration from Tacitus, 160-1. 
 
 Chapter VI. Is the Doctrine of the Incarnation true ? Summary 
 of argument hitherto, pp. 162-4. (I) The positions of 
 
 Ilarnack, Schweitzer, and Bousset arbitrary and one-sided, 
 165-9 ; the true method of reply, 169. (II) The English 
 Modernists, 170-3. (Ill) The objection that we are 
 dehumanizing Christ and making His example unreal 
 considered, 173-9 ; the idea of an incarnation of God 
 in humanity with Christ for foremost specimen, 179-82 ; 
 conclusion, 182-183. (IV) Alleged moral defects in 
 Christ, 184-6 ; His supposed disclaimer of goodness, 
 186-8. (V) His alleged errors as to (1) the end of the 
 
 world, 188-9 ; (2) the activities of devils, 189-91 ; (3) 
 the books of the O.T., 191-3. Summary, 193-5. 
 
 Chapter VII. The Definitions of the Councils concerning the 
 Person of Christ. (I) Their relation to the books of the 
 N.T., pp. 196-8 ; the perilous position of the early 
 Church and the mistakes of its teachers, 198-203. (ii) 
 The definition against Arius ; the teaching of Athanasius, 
 204-9. (HI) The definition against Apollinarius, 209-11. 
 
 (IV) Against Nestorius, 211-13 ; its importance, 214-6. 
 
 (V) Against Eutyches and the Monophysites, 216-7. 
 
 The result at Chalcedon criticized, 217-8. Considera¬ 
 tions : (1) The dogmas negative, 218-9 ; but (2) 
 
 necessary, 219-20 ; and (3) in themselves unexception¬ 
 able, 220-2 ; but (4) abused in effect ; real humanity 
 of Christ obscured, 222-4 ; (5) the true use of them— 
 the picture in the Gospels and the theory in St. Paul ; 
 the 44 self-emptying.” Legitimate agnosticism, 224-6 ; 
 the juxtaposition of two consciousnesses in Christ 
 deprecated, 227 ; the meaning of an 44 impersonal man¬ 
 hood,” 227-8. 
 
 Note.—A. On the Shepherd of Hermas, Didache, etc., 
 228-30. B. On the phrase Enhypostasia, 230. 
 
TABLE OF SUBJECTS 325 
 
 Chapter VIII. The Implied Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 
 
 (I) An outcome of the Christian experience, pp. 231-5. 
 
 (II) (1) The three distinguishable persons, 235-9; (2) 
 their mutual inclusiveness, 239-41. (Ill) The implied 
 doctrine difficult to formulate ; mistakes of early teachers; 
 final outcome, 241-4; supposed differences; Dr. Rashdall 
 on St. Augustine and St. Thomas, 244-7. The rational 
 value of the doctrine for us, 248-53. 
 
 iSote on the N.T. uses of Spirit and St. Paul’s supposed 
 identification of Christ and the Spirit, 253-5. 
 
 Chapter IX. Sin and the Fall. Implied in the N.T., pp. 
 256-7. (I) The O.T. doctrine ; Christ’s teaching ; the 
 
 rest of the N.T. 3 257-62. (II) The modern estimate 
 ot man, 263-7. (Ill) The Bible theory finds the seat 
 of sin in the will. Rival theories : (1) the source of sin 
 in the body ; (2) sin equated with imperfection ; (3) the 
 doctrine of determinism, 267-72. (IV) The Fall of Man ; 
 supposed antagonism with science; restatement; St. 
 Paul’s doctrine of the Old Adam and the New Man, 
 ~ 1 2—5 ; still tenable in substance ; inherited sinfulness, 
 275-7 ; the coherence of the Virgin Birth of Christ with 
 the conception of the Fall, 277-9. 
 
 Chapter X. I he Atonement. (I) Preliminary considerations : 
 (1) no redemption except by being made actually god- 
 like, pp. 280—2 ; (2) God’s willingness to forgive on no 
 other condition than repentance, 282-3 ; (3) the need 
 of atonement involved in the corporate method of re¬ 
 demption, 283-4 ; (4) so in the O.T., 284-5 ; (5) in our 
 Lord’s teaching, 285-8 ; (6) in the Acts ; (7) in St. 
 Paul, 288-91 ; (8) in the rest of the N.T., 291-2. (II) 
 The appeal of the doctrine, 293-5 ; scandals obviated, 
 295-300. (Ill) The central idea of Reparation by the 
 Representative Man as the ground of the gospel of 
 forgiveness, 300-3. 
 
 Notes.—A. On Dr. RashdalPs Idea of Atonement , 
 
 303- 304. B. On two misinterpreted phrases of St. Paul, 
 
 304- 5. 
 
 22 
 
326 TABLE OF SUBJECTS 
 
 Chapter XI. Summcivy and Conclusion. (I) Summary, 
 306-12. (II) Certain “ critical ” opinions not sub¬ 
 stantiated, 312-13. (Ill) Theology must not be dis¬ 
 paraged ; the central question the Finality of Christ ; 
 not compatible with any estimate of His person except 
 the traditional one, 314—7. Finality and evolution ; 
 the meaning of the Ascension, 317-9 ; the Ascension 
 and Copernican astronomy, 319-21. 
 
INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 Abelard, 293 
 
 Acts (of the Apostles), 6, 42, 73- 
 75, 77, 123, 236-7, 261, 288 
 Aeschylus, 4 
 
 Alexander (Bp. of Alex.), 205 
 Alexander (the Great), 20 
 Alfasi (Rabbi Isaac), 140 
 Anastasius, 212 
 Anselm, 293 
 
 Antiochus Epiphanes, 17 n., 20 
 Apollinarius (of Laodicea), 209- 
 211, 230 
 
 Aquinas (St. Thomas), 245, 247 
 Aristotle, 12 
 Arius, 204—209 
 Arnou (Dr. Rene), 9 n., 10 n. 
 Athanasius (St.), 207-209, 219, 
 223, 245 
 
 Augustine (St.), 8, 158 n., 174, 
 245, 246, 291 
 Aurelian (Emp.), 203 
 Aytoun (Rev. R. B.), 61 n. 
 
 Baker (Prof. Bethune), 4, 5, 173 
 Balfour (Lord), 222 
 Barnabas (Ep. of), 198 
 Bevan (Edwyn), 9 n., 14 n., 30, 
 315 
 
 Bousset (Wilhelm), 10, 39, 46 n., 
 47 n., 99, 102 n., 104, 165, 169 
 Box (Dr.), 31 n., 128 
 Brahma, 231 
 Bright (Dr.), 208 n. 
 
 Buddha (The), 176, 318 
 Burkitt (Dr.), 74, 115 n., 197 
 Burney (Dr.), 69, 107 n., 115 n., 
 120 n., 121 n., 122 n., 125 n., 
 254 
 
 Byron (Lord), 263 
 
 Calvin (John), 293 
 Campbell (McLeod), 293 
 Carlyle (Thomas), 207 
 Cave (Dr. Sydney), 29 
 Charles (Dr.), 21 n., 23, 32, 65 n., 
 141 n. 
 
 Chase (Dr.), 120 n., 132 n., 254 
 Clark (Lowther), 7 n. 
 
 Clement (Alex.), 10, 274 n., 320 
 Clement (of Rome), 198, 235 
 Constantine, 205 
 Creed (J. M.), 44 n. 
 
 Croce (Benedetto), 13 
 Cyril (St.), 212, 214, 227 
 
 Dale (Dr.), 293 
 
 Dalman (G.), 31, 55 n., 56 n., 
 62 n., 66 n., 88 n., 103, 189 n. 
 Daniel (Book of), 19, 20, 32, 63, 
 65, 141 n., 145, 147, 149 
 Davidson (Dr. A. B.), 28 
 De La Mazeli5re, 232 n. 
 
 Denney (Dr.), 293 
 Diodore (of Tarsus), 211 
 Dionysius (Pseudo-) 247 
 Driver (Dr.), 28, 59, 61 n. 
 
 Edward VI (King), 297 
 Eleazer (the Martyr), 286 n. 
 Emmet (Dr.), 185 n. 
 
 Enoch (Similitudes of the Book 
 of), 20, 21, 24, 31-33, 37, 63, 
 65, 87, 313 
 Epicurus, 9 
 Erasmus, 223 
 Essenes (the), 25, 26 n. 
 
 Esther (Book of), 16, 17 n. 
 Euripides, 295 
 
328 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 Eusebius, 147 n. 
 
 Eutyches, 216 
 
 Gamaliel, 80 
 Glazebrook (Dr.), 320 
 Glover (T. R.), 102 n. 
 
 Goethe, 116 
 
 Gregory (of Nyssa), 321 
 
 Hanson (Rev. Richard), 171 n. 
 Harnack (Adolph), 7, 10 n., 23, 
 35, 49 n., 56 n., 109 n., 159, 
 165, 166-168, 204 n., 207 n., 
 208 n., 244 
 
 Harris (Dr. Charles), 30, 320 n. 
 Harris (Dr. J. Rendel), 122, 229 
 Headlam (Dr.), 82 n., 86 n., 
 
 91 n., 230, 287 n. 
 
 Hebrews (Epistle to the), 6, 94- 
 97, 133, 164, 292, 309 
 Heracleitus (Pseudo-), 262 n. 
 Hennas, 198, 200, 228, 242 
 Hermes (Trismegistus), 134 
 Herodians (the), 25, 26 
 Hoffding (Dr. K.), 30 
 Holland (Dr. H. S.). 69, 121 n. 
 Hort (Dr.), 86 n., 128 n., 129 n., 
 130, 156 n., 180 n., 239, 249, 
 254, 291 n. 
 
 Huge! (Baron Friedrich von), 4 
 Huxley (Prof.), 232 n., 249, 318 
 
 Ignatius, 198 
 
 Inge (Dean), 10 n., 99, 120 n. 
 Irenaeus, 274 n. 
 
 Isaiah, 14, 15, 17 n.,59, 139, 141 
 
 Jackson (Dr Foakes), 5 n., 14 n., 
 21 n., 32, 39 n., 44 n., 46 n. 
 James (St.), 6, 127-130, 179 n., 
 262, 291 n. 
 
 Jerome, 320 
 
 John (St.), 6 n., 40, 68, 71 n., 91, 
 106-122, 143 n., 155, 163, 181, 
 194, 235, 240, 254, 260, 278, 
 288, 292, 312, 315, 318 
 John the Baptist (St.), 1 n., 25, 
 43, 47, 54, 68, 119, 142, 152, 
 180, 258, 288 
 
 John (the Presbyter), 107 n., 124 
 
 Jona (Rabbi), 140 
 
 Josephus, 26, 43, 44 n., 70 n., 127 
 
 Jowett (Benjamin), 271 
 Jude (St.), 21, 130, 234, 291 n. 
 Justin (Mart.), 200, 242 n. 
 
 Kidd (Dr.), 213 n., 230, 242 n. 
 Knox (Capt. H. V.), 271 n. 
 Krebs (E), 134 
 
 Lagrange (Pere), 21 n., 32,140 n. 
 Lake (Dr. Kirsopp), 5 n., 14 n., 
 21 n., 32, 39, 44 n., 46 n., 47 n., 
 169, 172, 316 
 Latham (Dr.), 69 
 Lebreton (Jules), 10 n., 88 n. 
 
 Leo (Bp.), 216, 293 
 Leontius (Byzant.), 230 
 Liberty (Stephen), 26 n. 
 Lightfoot (Dr.), 82 n., 84 n., 85 n. 
 Loisy, 37 
 Lotze, 253 
 
 Lowrie (Walter), 37 n. 
 
 Lucian (of Antioch), 204, 211 
 I Luke (St.), 42, 43, 46, 61, 73-75, 
 103, 145 n., 151, 154, 181, 278 
 
 Manilius, 9 n. 
 
 Marcion, 7; 291 
 
 Mark (St.), 41, 43, 45, 46, 62, 
 74, 151, 154, 184, 189 
 Matthew (St.), 43, 46, 57, 144, 
 149, 151, 152 n., 154, 234, 278 
 Maurice (F. D.), 190 
 | Menzies (Dr. Allan), 83, 84 n., 105 
 Meyer (Eduard), 30, 42, 73 n., 
 81 n., 100 n., 107 n., 134 
 Milton (John), 273 
 Mnason, 74 
 
 Moberly (Dr.), 293, 297 
 Moorhouse (Dr.), 145 n. 
 
 | Morris (William), 111 n. 
 
 Nestorius (Bp.), 212-216, 224 
 
 Origen, 9, 10 n., 54 n., 201, 209, 
 243, 244, 293, 320 
 
 Papias, 74 n. 
 
 Parry (Dr.), 86 n., 129 n., 156 n. 
 Paul (St.), 6, 8, 11, 24, 40, 55, 
 73, 75, 78-94, 98-101, 104, 
 105, 114, 144, 155, 162, 167 
 
329 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 181, 194, 197, 225, 233, 237, 
 239, 262, 268, 273, 278, 288- 
 291, 299, 301-305, 308, 312, 
 315, 318 
 
 Paul (of Samosata), 123, 133, 
 164, 202 
 
 Peter (St.), 2, 6, 42, 45, 57, 59, 72, 
 76, 130-132, 175, 234, 262, 291 
 Pharisees (the), 25, 26 
 Philip (St.), 74, 236, 288 
 Philo, 88, 97, 117 
 Plato, 4, 320 
 Plotinus, 10, 12 
 Posidonius, 321 
 
 Prophets (of Israel), 14-25, 138— 
 142 
 
 Proverbs (Book of), 91, 122 
 Psalms (the), 22, 55 
 Psalms of Solomon, 18, 25, 32, 
 64 
 
 Q, 42, 109 n., 166 
 
 Rackham (R. B.), 75, 86 n., 
 145 n. 
 
 Raleigh (Walter), 267 
 Rashdall (Dr.), 30, 51 n., 89 n., 
 101, 201 n., 207 n., 208 n., 
 235 n., 245 n., 246, 288 n., 
 290 n., 293, 296 n., 303, 304 
 Reitzenstein (Richard), 122 n., 
 133 
 
 Relton (Dr. H. M.), 230 
 Revelation (of St. John the 
 Divine), 124-127, 292 
 Richmond (Canon), 240 n. 
 Robertson (Bp.), 88 n., 20 4 n., 
 208 n. 
 
 Robinson (Dr. Armitage), 121 n., 
 242 n. 
 
 Romans (Epistle to the), 289 
 Rousseau (J. J.), 263 
 Ruskin (J.), 140 
 
 Sacred Books of the East, 30 
 Sadducees (the), 25, 26 
 Salmon (Dr.), 101 
 Sanday (Dr.), 51 n., 82, 86 n„ 
 91 n., 170, 287 n. 
 
 Schweitzer (Alb.), 37, 39, 44 n., 
 102, 151, 159, 165, 168 
 Scott (Dr. Anderson), 100 
 Shakespeare (William), 265-267 
 Shelley (P. B.), 116, 263 
 Sidgwick (Prof. Henry), 137 n. 
 Simkhovitch (Prof. * Vladimir), 
 21 n., 26 n., 27 n., 49 
 Somervill (D. C.), 108 n., Ill n. 
 Stanton (Dr.), 30, 100, 107-110, 
 115 
 
 Stephen (St.), 77 
 Strabo, 93 n. 
 
 Streeter (Dr.), 320 
 Swete (Dr.), 126 n., 242 n. 
 
 Tacitus, 160 
 Tertullian, 201, 245 
 Theodore (of Mopsuetia), 211 
 Theodoret, 224 
 Tixeront (P6re), 245 n. 
 
 Treherne (Thomas), 12 
 Trench, 85 n. 
 
 Victorinus (Afer), 346, 252 n. 
 
 Weiss (Dr. John), 265 n. 
 Westcott (Dr.), 85 n., 96 n., 
 
 112 n., 156 n., 256 
 Wisdom (Book of), 55, 91, 92, 
 116, 122, 126, 180, 309, 313 
 Wordsworth (William), 116 
 
 Zahn, 120 n. 
 
 Zealots (the), 26, 27 
 Zenobia (Queen of Palmyra), 
 
 202 
 
 Zoroaster,”4, 13 n., 29, 318 
 
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