The Person and Work of Christ

by B. B. Warfield

This collection of the writings of the late Dr. Warfield deals, with rare exegetical skill and unusual command of the relevant critical literature, with what the Bible teaches concerning the person of Christ and His work as Redeemer. Warfield stresses the fact that the only Jesus discoverable in the New Testament is a supernatural Jesus and over against those who commend a merely human Jesus he maintains that it is “the desupernaturalized Jesus which is the mythical Jesus, who never had any existence, the postulation of whose existence explains nothing and leaves the whole historical development hanging in the air.” Among the chief merits of these writings is the contribution they make toward an understanding of the distinctive nature of Christianity and the help they afford in distinguishing between genuine Christianity and its counterfeits.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

PART I: THE PERSON OF CHRIST

The Historical Christ

The Person Of Christ According To The New Testament

The Christ that Paul Preached

The Emotional Life of our Lord

Jesus Alleged Confession of Sin

The Humanitarian Christ

The "Two Natures" and Recent Christological Speculation

Christless Christianity

PART II: THE WORK OF CHRIST AS REDEEMER

Redeemer and Redemption

Chief Theories of the Atonement

Modern Theories of the Atonement

Christ our Sacrifice

The New Testament Terminology of Redemption

The Essence of Christianity and the Cross of Christ

APPENDIX SERMONS

The Risen Jesus

The Saving Christ

Imitating the Incarnation

FOREWORD

This volume contains the principal articles written by the late Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield having to do with the person and work of Jesus Christ . 1 All of its articles, with the exception of the one entitled The Emotional Life of our Lord, were included in the ten volumes of his collected writings— all of which are out of print—published by the Oxford University Press subsequent to his death. To be more specific, two of the articles that compose the body of this volume have been taken from that one of the Oxford University Press volumes entitled Studies in Theology, five from one entitled Biblical Doctrines and six from the one entitled Christology and Criticism.

For the purpose of this volume these articles have been divided into two groups—one dealing with the Person of Christ and the place He occupies in the Christian religion and the other dealing with the nature of His redeeming work. In other words, the first group deals mainly with the Incarnation and the second mainly with the Atonement. It is not alleged that these articles, written from time to time as the occasion seemed to require, treat these great themes in all their aspects. This is particularly true of those dealing with the work of Christ inasmuch as they confine themselves almost wholly to His work as priest with only incidental allusion to His work as prophet and king. It is alleged, however, that they deal with that which is most central to an understanding of Christ's person and work, with that apart from which there can be no adequate knowledge of who Christ was and is and what He did and does.

The view of the person of Christ set forth in this volume, namely that He was perfect deity and complete humanity united in one person, has been incorporated in one form or another in all the great creeds of Christendom—Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Wesleyan—and confessed for nearly two thousand years by practically all of those calling themselves Christians, at least until the rise and spread of anti-supernaturalistic thinking in relatively recent times. What is true of this two-nature conception of the person of Christ is almost equally true of the view of Christ's work set forth in this volume. Every great branch of the Christian Church has assigned to His death, regarded as an expiatory sacrifice, the place of primary importance. Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics and Protestants unite in accepting the Cross as the symbol of Christianity and in singing the praises of the "Lamb that was slain." But while Warfield found confirmation of his view of Christ and His work in the fact that it has found expression in the great creeds of the Church and even more, perhaps, in the fact that it has found expression in the great mass of the songs and prayers that have accumulated through out the Christian centuries yet it was not in these facts that he found his primary reason for holding it. For him such considerations were always secondary. His primary reason for holding both his view of Christ's person and His view of Christ's work was his belief that they and they alone are taught in Scripture. To the task of showing that a synthesis of the teaching of Scripture support these views and these views alone Warfield devoted much effort. So well has he performed this task—so at least it seems to the writer—that those acquainted with his labors, whether or not they embrace his views, will find it impossible to deny that his view of the person and work of Christ is the Biblical view.

We do not have to look far to discover why Warfield attached primary significance to the Biblical data. It finds its explanation in the fact that the Bible, especially the New Testament, is the source of all the actual knowledge that we possess of Christ and His work. There is, as he is not slow to point out, but little to choose between those who deny the historicity of any Jesus and those who deny the historicity of the only Jesus of whom we have any knowledge. Moreover he presents solid historical grounds for believing in the historicity of the Jesus of the New Testament and as over against those who under the influence of hostility to tire supernatural strip the Jesus of the New Testament of all that is miraculous he maintains that it is "the desupematuralized Jesus which is the mythical Jesus, who never had any existence, the postulation of the existence of whom explains nothing and leaves the whole historical development hanging in the air." It is no mere symbolic Christ who meets us in these pages, a Christ to whom men ascribe whatever thoughts and ideals they desire to commend to others, but an actual historical person who in the days of His flesh was seen with the eye, heard with the ear and touched with the hand (I John i. 1-3) and who risen from the dead abides the same through every change and chance of time, able because of what He experienced on earth to save unto the uttermost all those who come unto God through Him.

One of the chief merits of these articles is the light they throw on the nature of Christianity and so the help they afford in distinguishing between genuine Christianity and its counterfeits and near-counterfeits. Every article contributes its quota but most of all the articles entitled Christless Christianity and The Cross of Christ and the Essence of Christianity —the former of which is aimed at those who deny that Jesus himself occupies an indispensable place in the religion He founded and the second of which is aimed at those that deny that the death of Christ as an expiatory sacrifice belongs to the essence of Christianity. Taken as a whole, it cannot be said that Warfield regarded one group of these articles as more important than the other. He constantly insisted that the object of our faith as Christians is never Christ simpliciter but ever Christ as crucified and that it is no more possible to have a Christianity without an atoning Christ than it is to have a Christianity without a divine Christ.

Three of Warfield's sermons have been included in the Appendix—sermons which deal in turn with Christ as risen, Christ as our saviour and Christ as our example. The late Francis L. Patton, himself one of the most instructive as well as one of the most brilliant of preachers, in A Memorial Ad dress, spoke of Warfield's sermons as "models of the better sort of university preaching" and added that "they were the ripe result of religious experience and minute exegetical knowledge, and in their meditative simplicity reminded us of some of the best of the Puritan divines." It is suggested that those unfamiliar with the writings of Warfield and the manner of man he was turn to these sermons first of all.

These writings of Warfield have been republished—in response to widespread requests—in the belief that in their particular field they have not been superseded by any sub sequent writings. No brand new theories of the person and work of Christ have appeared since Warfield wrote. At the most there has appeared modifications or combinations of previously existing ones. No doubt if Warfield were writing today he would not overlook or ignore the writings of John Knox, D. M. Baillie, Martin Dibelius, Anders Nygren and Gustaf Aulen, not to mention others, but we may be sure there would be no change in his affirmative teaching regarding the person of Christ and His redeeming work grounded as it was on the teaching of the New Testament. However long or short the period during which these writings retain their eminence they have been reprinted in the belief that the Person with whom they concern themselves will ever remain the central fact in human history. Certainly if Jesus Christ be what Warfield with those calling themselves Christians throughout the centuries, including the first century, have all but universally believed, at least until relatively recent times, namely, "the eternal Son of God who became man, and so was, and continueth to be God, and man, in two distinct natures, and one person, forever" it cannot be that men's attitude toward Him is a matter of indifference. It must be that it is a matter of eternal significance and hence that every theory of thought and life that competes for the allegiance of men, as age succeeds age, into which He does not fit or rather in which He does not occupy a central place is thereby revealed as fatally inadequate if not as wholly false. Wherefore tragically as well as gloriously the prophecy of Simeon finds continued fulfillment: "Behold this child is set for the falling and rising of many in Israel."

This is the second volume of the writings of Warfield published by the Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company. The first under the title The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible contains his major articles in exposition and defense of the Bible as the written Word of God and as such the only infallible rule of faith and practice with an important introduction by one of the ablest of living scholars. That this company expects to republish more of the writings of Warfield (D.V.) is indicated by the fact that it has obtained the publication rights in all of the ten volumes of the collected writings of Warfield published by the Oxford University Press.

S. G. C.

PART I:

THE PERSON OF CHRIST

The Historical Christ

The rise of Christianity was a phenomenon of too little apparent significance to attract the attention of the great world. It was only when it had refused to be quenched in the blood of its founder, and, breaking out of the narrow bounds of the obscure province in which it had its origin, was making itself felt in the centers of population, that it drew to itself a somewhat irritated notice. The interest of such heathen writers as mention it was in the movement, not in its author. But in speaking of the movement they tell something of its author, and what they tell is far from being of little moment. He was, it seems, a certain 'Christ,' who had lived in Judea in the reign of Tiberius (14-37 A.D.), and had been brought to capital punishment by the procurator, Pontius Pilate (q.v.; cf. Tacitus, 'Annals,' xv.44). The significance of His personality to the movement inaugurated by Him is already suggested by the fact that He, and no other, had impressed His name upon it. But the name itself by which He was known particularly attracts notice. This is uniformly, in these heathen writers, 'Christ,' not 'Jesus.' Suetonius ('Claudius,' xxv.) not unnaturally confuses this 'Christus' with the Greek name 'Chrestus'; but Tacitus and Pliny show themselves better informed and preserve it accurately. 'Christ,' however, is not a personal name, but the Creek rendering of the Hebrew title 'Messiah.' Clearly, then, it was as the promised Messiah of the Jews that their founder was reverenced by 'the Christians'; and they had made so much of his Messiahship in speaking of Him that the title 'Christ' had actually usurped the place of his personal name, and He was everywhere known simply as 'Christ.' Their reverence for His person had, indeed, exceeded that commonly supposed to be due even to the Messianic dignity. Pliny records that this 'Christ' was statedly worshipped by 'the Christians' of Pontus and Bithynia as their God (Pliny, 'Epist.,' xcvi. [xcvii.] to Trajan). Beyond these great facts the heathen historians give little information about the founder of Christianity.

What is lacking in them is happily supplied, however, by the writings of the Christians themselves. Christianity was from its beginnings a literary religion, and documentary records of it have come down from the very start. There are, for example, the letters of the Apostle Paul (q.v.), a highly cultured Romanized Jew of Tarsus, who early (34 or 35 A.D.) threw in his fortunes with the new religion, and by his splendid leadership established it in the chief centers of influence from Antioch to Rome. Written occasionally to one or another of the Christian communities of this region, at intervals during the sixth and seventh decades of the century, that is to say, from twenty to forty years after the origin of Christianity, these letters reflect the conceptions which ruled in the Christian communities of the time. Paul had known the Christian movement from its beginning; first from the outside, as one of the chief agents in its persecution, and then from the inside, as the most active leader of its propaganda. He was familiarly acquainted with the Apostles and other immediate followers of Jesus, and enjoyed repeated intercourse with them. He explicitly declares the harmony of their teaching with his, and joins with his their testimony to the great facts which he proclaimed. The complete consonance of his allusions to Jesus with what is gathered from the hints of the heathen historians is very striking. The person of Jesus fills the whole horizon of his thought, and gathers to itself all his religious emotions. That Jesus was the Messiah is the presupposition of all his speech of Him, and the Messianic title has already become his proper name behind which His real personal name, Jesus, has retired. This Messiah is definitely represented as a divine being who has entered the world on a mission of mercy to sinful man, in the prosecution of which He has given Himself up as a sacrifice for sin, but has risen again from the dead and ascended to the right hand of God, henceforth to rule as Lord of all. Around the two great facts, of the expiatory death of the Son of God and his rising again, Paul's whole teaching circles. Jesus Christ as crucified, Christ risen from the dead as the first fruits of those that sleep—here is Paul's whole gospel in summary.

Into the details of Christ's earthly life Paul had no occasion to enter. But he shows himself fully familiar with them, and incidentally conveys a vivid portrait of Christ's personality. Of the seed of David on the human, as the Son of God on the divine side, He was born of a woman, under the law, and lived subject to its ordinances for His mission's sake, humbling Himself even unto death, and that the death of the cross. His lowly estate is dwelt upon, and the high traits of His personal character manifested in His lowliness are lightly sketched in, justifying not merely the negative declaration that 'He knew no sin,' but his positive presentation as the model of all perfection. An item of His teaching is occasionally adverted to, or even quoted, always with the utmost reverence. Members of His immediate circle of followers are mentioned by name or by class—whether His brethren according to the flesh or the twelve apostles whom He appointed. The institution by Him of a sacramental feast is described, and that of a companion sacrament of initiation by baptism is implied. But especially His sacrificial death on the cross is emphasized, His burial, His rising again on the third day, and His appearances to chosen witnesses, who are cited one after the other with the greatest solemnity. Such details are never communicated to Paul's readers as pieces of fresh information. They are alluded to as matters of common knowledge, and with the plainest intimation of the unquestioned recognition of them by all. Thus it is made clear not only that there underlies Paul's letters a complete portrait of Jesus and a full outline of his career, but that this portrait and this outline are the universal possession of Christians. They were doubtless as fully before his mind as such in the early years of his Christian life, in the thirties, as when he was writing his letters in the fifties and sixties. There is no indication in the way in which Paul touches on these things of a recent change of opinion regarding them or of a recent acquisition of knowledge of them. The testimony of Paul's letters, in a word, has retrospective value, and is contemporary testimony to the facts.

Paul's testimony alone provides thus an exceptionally good basis for the historical verity of Jesus' personality and career. But Paul's testimony is far from standing alone. It is fully supported by the testimony of a series of other writings, similar to his own, purporting to come from the hands of early teachers of the Church, most of them from actual companions of our Lord and eye-witnesses of His majesty, and handed down to us with credible evidence of their authenticity. And it is extended by the testimony of a series of writings of a very different character; not occasional letters designed to meet particular crises or questions arising in the churches, but formal accounts of Jesus' words and acts.

Among these attention is attracted first by a great historical work, the two parts of which bear the titles of 'the Gospel according to Luke' and 'the Acts of the Apostles.' The first contains an account of Jesus' life from His birth to His death and resurrection; or, including the opening paragraphs of the second, to His ascension. What directs attention to it first among books of its class is the uncommonly full information possessed concerning its writer and his method of historical composition. It is the work of an educated Greek physician, known to have enjoyed, as a companion of Paul, special opportunities of informing himself of the facts of Jesus' career. Whatever Paul himself knew of the acts and teachings of his Lord was, of course, the common property of the band of missionaries which traveled in his company, and could not fail to be the subject of much public and private discussion among them. Among Paul's other companions there could not fail to be some whose knowledge of Jesus' life, direct or derived, was considerable; an example is found, for instance, in John Mark, who had come out of the immediate circle of Jesus' first followers, although precise knowledge of the meeting of Luke and Mark as fellow companions of Paul belongs to a little later period than the composition of Luke's Gospel. In company with Paul Luke had even visited Jerusalem and had resided two years at Caesarea in touch with primitive disciples; and if the early tradition which represents him as a native of Antioch be accepted, he must be credited with facilities from the beginning of his Christian life for association with original disciples of Jesus. All that is needed to ground great confidence in his narrative as a trustworthy account of the facts it records is assurance that he had the will and capacity to make good use of his abounding opportunities for exact information. The former is afforded by the preface to his Gospel in which he reveals his method as a historian and his zeal for exactness of information and statement; the latter by the character of the Gospel, which evinces itself at every point a sincere and careful narrative resting upon good and well-sifted information. In these circumstances the determination of the precise time when this narrative was actually committed to paper becomes a matter of secondary importance; in any event its material was collected during the period of Paul's missionary activity. It may be confidently maintained, however, that it was also put together during this period, that is to say, during the earlier years of the seventh decade of the century. Confidence in its narrative is strengthened by the complete accord of the portrait of Jesus, which its detailed account exhibits with that which underlies the letters of Paul. Not only are the general traits of the personality identical, but the emphasis falls at the same places. In effect, the Jesus of Luke's narrative is the Christ of Paul's epistles in perfect dramatic presentation, and only two hypotheses offer themselves in possible explanation. Either Luke rests on Paul, and has with consummate art invented a historical basis for Paul's ideal Christ; or else Paul's allusions rest on a historical basis and Luke has preserved that historical basis in his careful, detailed narrative. Every line of Luke's narrative refutes the former and demonstrates the latter supposition.

Additional evidence of the trustworthiness of Luke's Gospel as an account of Jesus' acts and teaching is afforded by the presence by its side of other narratives of similar character and accordant contents. These narratives are two in number and have been handed down under the names of members of the earliest circle of Christians—of John Mark, who was from the beginning in the closest touch with the apostolic body, and of Matthew, one of the apostles. On comparison of these narratives with Luke's, not only are they found to present, each with its own peculiar point of view and purpose, precisely the same conception and portrait of Jesus, but to have utilized in large measure also the same sources of information. Indeed, the entire body of Mark's Gospel is found to be incorporated also in Matthew's and Luke's.

This circumstance, in view of the declarations of Luke's preface, is of the utmost significance for an estimate of the trustworthiness of the narrative thus embodied in all three of the 'Synoptic' Gospels. In this preface Luke professes to have had for his object the establishment of absolute 'certainty,' with respect to the things made the object of instruction in Christian circles; and to this end to have grounded his narrative in exact investigation of the course of events from the beginning. In the prosecution of this task, he knew himself to be working in a goodly company to a common end, namely, the narration of the Christian origins on the basis of the testimony of those ministers of the word who had been also 'eyewitnesses from the beginning.' He does not say whether these fellow narrators had or had not been, some or all of them, eyewitnesses of some or of all the events they narrated; he merely says that the foundation on which all the narratives he has in view rested was the testimony of eye-witnesses. He does not assert for his own treatise superiority to those of his fellow workers; he only claims an honorable place for his own treatise among the others on the ground of the diligence and care he has exercised in ascertaining and recording the facts, through which, he affirms, he has attained a certainty with regard to them on which his readers may depend. Now, on comparing the narrative of Luke with those of Matthew and Mark, it is discovered that one of the main sources on which Luke draws is also one of the main sources on which Matthew draws and practically the sole source on which Mark rests. Thus Luke's judgment of the value and trustworthiness of this source receives the notable support of the judgment of his fellow evangelists, and it can scarcely be doubted that what it contains is the veritable tradition of those who were as well eye-witnesses as ministers of the Word from the beginning, in whose accuracy confidence can be placed. If the three Synoptic Gospels do not give three independent testimonies to the facts which they record, they give what is, perhaps, better,—three independent witnesses to the trustworthiness of the narrative, which they all incorporate into their own as resting on autoptic testimony and thoroughly deserving of credit. A narrative lying at the basis of all three of these Gospels, themselves written certainly not later than the seventh decade of the century, must in any event be early in date, and in that sense must emanate from the first followers of Christ; and in the circumstances—of the large and confident use made of it by all three of these Gospels—cannot fail to be an authentic statement of what was the conviction of the earliest circles of Christians.

By the side of this ancient body of narrative must be placed another equally, or perhaps, even more ancient source, consisting largely, but not exclusively, of reports of 'sayings of Jesus.' This underlies much of the fabric of Luke and Matthew where Mark fails, and by their employment of it is authenticated as containing, as Luke asserts, the trustworthy testimony of eye-witnesses. Its great antiquity is universally allowed, and there is no doubt that it comes from the very bosom of the Apostolic circle, bearing independent but thoroughly consentient testimony, with the narrative source which underlies all three of the Synoptists, of what was understood by the primitive Christian community to be the facts regarding Jesus. This is the fundamental fact about these two sources—that the Jesus which they present is the same Jesus; and that this Jesus is precisely the same Jesus found in the Synoptic Gospels themselves, presented, moreover, in precisely the same fashion and with the emphases in precisely the same places. This latter could, of course, not fail to be the case since these sources themselves constitute the main substance of the Synoptic Gospels into which they have been transfused. Its significance is that the portrait of Jesus as the supernatural Son of God who came into the world as the Messiah on a mission of mercy to sinful men, which is reflected even in the scanty notices of him that find an incidental place in the pages of heathen historians, which suffused the whole preaching of Paul and of the other missionaries of the first age, and which was wrought out into the details of a rich dramatization in the narratives of the Synoptic Gospels, is as old as Christianity itself and comes straight from the representations of Christ's first followers.

Valuable, however, as the separation out from the Synoptic narrative of these underlying sources is in this aspect of the matter, appeal cannot be made from the Synoptics to these sources as from less to more trustworthy documents. On the one hand, these sources do not exist outside the Synoptics; in them they have 'found their grave.' On the other hand, the Synoptics in large part are these sources; and their trustworthiness as wholes is guaranteed by the trustworthiness of the sources from which they have drawn the greater part of their materials, and from the general portraiture of Christ in which they do not in the least depart. Luke's claim in his preface that he has made accurate investigations, seeking to learn exactly what happened that he might attain certainty in his narrative, is expressly justified for the larger part of his narrative when the sources which underlie it are isolated and are found to approve themselves under every test as excellent. There is no reason to doubt that for the remainder of his narrative (and Matthew too for the remainder of his narrative) not derived from these two sources which the accident of their common use by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, or by Matthew and Luke, reveals, he (or Matthew) derives his material from equally good and trustworthy sources which happen to be used only by him. The general trustworthiness of Luke's narrative is not lessened but enhanced by the circumstance that, in the larger portion of it, he has the support of other evangelists in his confident use of his sources, with the effect that these sources can be examined and an approving verdict reached upon them. His judgment of sources is thus confirmed, and his claim to possess exact information and to have framed a trustworthy narrative is vindicated. What he gives from sources which were not used by the other evangelists, that is to say, in that portion of his narrative which is peculiar to himself (and the same must be said for Matthew, mutatis mutandis), has earned a right to credit on his own authentication. It is not surprising, therefore, that the portions of the narratives of Matthew and Luke which are peculiar to the one or the other bear every mark of sincere and well-informed narration and contain many hints of resting on good and trustworthy sources. In a word, the Synoptic Gospels supply a threefold sketch of the acts and teachings of Christ of exceptional trustworthiness. If here is not historical verity, historical verity would seem incapable of being attained, recorded, and transmitted by human hands.

Along with the Synoptic Gospels there has been handed down by an unexceptionable line of testimony under the name of the Apostle John, another narrative of the teaching and work of Christ of equal fulness with that of the Synoptic Gospels, and yet so independent of theirs as to stand out in a sense in strong contrast with theirs, and even to invite attempts to establish a contradiction between it and them. There is, however, no contradiction, but rather a deep-lying harmony. There are so-called Synoptical traits discoverable in John, and not only are Johannine elements imbedded in the Synoptical narrative, but an occasional passage occurs in it which is almost more Johannine than John himself. Take, for example, that pregnant declaration recorded in Matt. xi. 27-28, which, as it Occurs also in Luke (x. 21, 22), must have had a place in that ancient source drawn on in common by these two Gospels which comes from the first days of Christianity. All the high teaching of John's Gospel, as has been justly remarked, is but 'a series of variations' upon the theme here given its 'classical expression.' The type of teaching which is brought forward and emphasized by John is thus recognized on all hands from the beginning to have had a place in Christ's teaching; and John differs from the Synoptics only in the special aspect of Christ's teaching which he elects particularly to present. The naturalness of this type of teaching on the lips of the Jesus of the Synoptists is also undeniable; it must be allowed—and is now generally allowed—that by the writers of the Synoptic Gospels, and, it should be added, by their sources as well, Jesus is presented, and is presented as representing Himself, as being all that John represents Him to be when he calls Him the Word, who was in the beginning with God and was God. The relation of John and the Synoptists in their portraiture of Jesus somewhat resembles, accordingly, that of Plato and Xenophon in their portraiture of Socrates; only, with this great difference—that both Plato and Xenophon were primarily men of letters and the portrait they draw of Socrates is in the hands of both alike eminently a sophisticated and literary one, while the Evangelists set down simply the facts as they appealed to them severally. The definite claim which John's Gospel makes to be the work of one of the inner circle of the companions of Jesus is supported, moreover, by copious evidence that it comes from the hands of such a one as a companion of Jesus would be—a Jew, who possessed an intimate knowledge of Palestine, and was acquainted with the events of our Lord's life as only an eye-witness could be acquainted with them, and an eye-witness who had been admitted to very close association with Him. That its narrative rests on good information is repeatedly manifested; and more than once historical links are supplied by it which are needed to give clearness to the Synoptical narrative, as, for example, in the chronological framework of the ministry of Jesus and the culminating miracle of the raising of Lazarus, which is required to account for the incidents of the Passion-Week. It presents no different Jesus from the Jesus of the Synoptists, and it throws the emphasis at the same place—on His expiatory death and rising again; but it notably supplements the narrative of the Synoptists and reveals a whole new side of Jesus' ministry, and if not a wholly new aspect of His teaching, yet a remarkable mass of that higher aspect of His teaching of which only occasional specimens are included in the Synoptic narrative. John's narrative thus rounds out the Synoptical narrative and gives the portrait drawn in it a richer content and a greater completeness.

This portrait may itself be confidently adduced as its own warranty. It is not too much to say with Nathaniel Lardner that 'the history of the New Testament has in it all the marks of credibility that any history can have.' But apart from these more usually marshaled evidences of the trustworthiness of the narratives, there is the portrait itself which they draw, and this cannot by any possibility have been an invention. It is not merely that the portrait is harmonious throughout—in the allusions and presuppositions of the Epistles of Paul and the other letter-writers of the New Testament, in the detailed narratives of the Synoptists and John, and in each of the sources which underlie them. This is a matter of importance; but it is not the matter of chief moment; there is no need to dwell upon the impossibility of such a harmony having been maintained save on the basis of simple truthfulness of record, or to dispute whether in the case of the Synoptics there are three independent witnesses to the one portrait, or only the two independent witnesses of their two most prominent 'sources.' Nor is the most interesting point whether the aboriginality of this portrait is guaranteed by the harmony of the representation in all the sources of information, some of which reach back to the most primitive epoch of the Christian movement. It is quite certain that this conception of Christ's person and career was the conception of his immediate followers, and indeed of himself; but, important as this conclusion is, it is still not the matter of primary import. The matter of primary significance is that this portrait thus imbedded in all the authoritative sources of information, and thus proved to be the conception of its founder cherished by the whole of primitive Christendom, and indeed commended to it by that founder himself, is a portrait intrinsically incapable of invention by men. It could never have come into being save as the revelation of an actual person embodying it, who really lived among men. 'A romancer,' as even Albert Reville allows, 'can not attribute to a being which he creates an ideal superior to what he himself is capable of conceiving.' The conception of the God-man which is embodied in the portrait which the sources draw of Christ, and which is dramatized by them through such a history as they depict, can be accounted for only on the assumption that such a God-man actually lived, was seen of men, and was painted from the life. The miracle of the invention of such a portraiture, whether by the conscious effort of art, or by the unconscious working of the mythopeic fancy, would be as great as the actual existence of such a person. Of this there is sufficient a posteriori proof in the invariable deterioration this portrait suffers in its secondary reproductions—in the so-called 'Lives of Christ,' of every type. The attempt vitally to realize and reproduce it results inevitably in its reduction. A portraiture which cannot even be interpreted by men without suffering serious loss cannot be the invention of the first simple followers of Jesus. Its very existence in their unsophisticated narratives is the sufficient proof of its faithfulness to a great reality.

Only an outline of this portrait can be set down here. Jesus appears in it not only a supernatural, but in all the sources alike specifically a divine, person, who came into the world on a mission of mercy to sinful man. Such a mission was in its essence a humiliation and involved humiliation at every step of its accomplishment. His life is represented accordingly as a life of difficulty and conflict, of trial and suffering, issuing in a shameful death. But this humiliation is represented as in every step and stage of it voluntary. It was entered into and abided in solely in the interests of His mission, and did not argue at any point of it helplessness in the face of the difficulties which hemmed Him in more and more until they led Him to death on the cross. It rather manifested His strong determination to fulfil His mission to the end, to drink to its dregs the cup He had undertaken to drink. Accordingly, every suggestion of escape from it by the use of His intrinsic divine powers, whether of omnipotence or of omniscience, was treated by Him first and last as a temptation of the evil one. The death in which His life ends is conceived, therefore, as the goal in which His life culminates. He came into the world to die, and every stage of the road that led up to this issue was determined not for Him but by Him: He was never the victim but always the Master of circumstance, and pursued His pathway from beginning to end, not merely in full knowledge from the start of all its turns and twists up to its bitter conclusion, but in complete control both of them and of it.

His life of humiliation, sinking into His terrible death, was therefore not his misfortune, but His achievement as the promised Messiah, by and in whom the kingdom of God is to be established in the world; it was the work which as Messiah he came to do. Therefore, in his prosecution of it, He from the beginning announced himself as the Messiah, accepted all ascription's to him of Messiahship under whatever designation, and thus gathered up into His person all the preadumbrations of Old-Testament prophecy; and by His favorite self-designation of 'Son of Man,' derived from Daniel's great vision (vii. 13), continually proclaimed Himself the Messiah he actually was, emphasizing in contrast with His present humiliation His heavenly origin and His future glory. Moreover, in the midst of His humiliation, He exercised, so far as that was consistent with the performance of his mission, all the prerogatives of that 'transcendent' or divine Messiah which He was. He taught with authority, substituting for every other sanction His great 'But I say unto you,' and declaring Himself greater than the greatest of God's representatives whom He had sent in all the past to visit His people. He surrounded Himself as He went about preaching the Gospel of the kingdom with a miraculous nimbus, each and every miracle in which was adapted not merely to manifest the presence of a supernatural person in the midst of the people, but, as a piece of symbolical teaching, to reveal the nature of this supernatural person, and to afford a foretaste of the blessedness of His rule in the kingdom He came to found. He assumed plenary authority over the religious ordinances of the people, divinely established though they were; and exercised absolute control over the laws of nature themselves. The divine prerogative of forgiving sins he claimed for Himself, the divine power of reading the heart He frankly exercised, the divine function of judge of quick and dead he attached to His own person. Asserting for Himself a superhuman dignity of person, or rather a share in the ineffable Name itself, He represented Himself as abiding continually even when on earth in absolute communion with God the Father, and participating by necessity of nature in the treasures of the divine knowledge and grace; announced Himself the source of all divine knowledge and grace to men; and drew to Himself all the religious affections, suspending the destinies of men absolutely upon their relation to His own person. Nevertheless he walked straight onward in the path of His lowly mission, and, bending even the wrath of men to his service, gave Himself in his own good time and way to the death He had come to accomplish. Then, His mission performed, He rose again from the dead in the power of His deathless life; showed Himself alive to chosen witnesses, that He might strengthen the hearts of His people; and ascended to the right hand of God, whence He directs the continued preparation of the kingdom until it shall please Him to return for its establishment in its glorious eternal form.

It is important to fix firmly in mind the central conception of this representation. It turns upon the sacrificial death of Jesus to which the whole life leads up, and out of which all its issues are drawn, and for a perpetual memorial of which he is represented as having instituted a solemn memorial feast. The divine majesty of this Son of God; His redemptive mission to the world, in a life of humiliation and a ransoming death; the completion of his task in accordance with His purpose; His triumphant rising from the death thus vicariously endured; His assumption of sovereignty over the future development of the kingdom founded in His blood, and over the world as the theater of its development; His expected return as the consummator of the ages and the judge of all—this is the circle of ideas in which all accounts move. It is the portrait not of a merely human life, though it includes the delineation of a complete and a completely human life. It is the portrayal of a human episode in the divine life. It is, therefore, not merely connected with supernatural occurrences, nor merely colored by supernatural features, nor merely set in a supernatural atmosphere: the supernatural is its very substance, the elimination of which would be the evaporation of the whole. The Jesus of the New Testament is not fundamentally man, however divinely gifted: he is God tabernacling for a while among men, with heaven lying about Him not merely in his infancy, but throughout all the days of His flesh.

The intense supernaturalism of this portraiture is, of course, an offense to our anti-supernaturalistic age. It is only what was to be expected, therefore, that throughout the last century and a half a long series of scholars, imbued with the anti-supernaturalistic instinct of the time, have assumed the task of desupernaturalizing it. Great difficulty has been experienced, however, in the attempt to construct a historical sieve which will strain out miracles and yet let Jesus through; for Jesus is Himself the greatest miracle of them all. Accordingly in the end of the day there is a growing disposition, as if in despair of accomplishing this feat, boldly to construct the sieve so as to strain out Jesus too; to take refuge in the counsel of desperation which affirms that there never was such a person as Jesus, that Christianity had no founder, and that not merely the portrait of Jesus, but Jesus Himself, is a pure projection of later ideals into the past. The main stream of assault still addresses itself, however, to the attempt to eliminate not Jesus Himself, but the Jesus of the Evangelists, and to substitute for Him a de-de-super-naturalized Jesus.

The instruments which have been relied on to effect this result may be called, no doubt with some but not misleading inexactitude, literary and historical criticism. The attempt has been made to track out the process by which the present witnessing documents have come into existence, to show them gathering accretions in this process, and to sift out the sources from which they are drawn; and then to make appeal to these sources as the only real witnesses. And the attempt has been made to go behind the whole written record, operating either immediately upon the documents as they now exist, or ultimately upon the sources which literary criticism has sifted out from them, with a view to reaching a more primitive and presumably truer conception of Jesus than that which has obtained record in the writings of His followers. The occasion for resort to this latter method of research is the failure of the former to secure the results aimed at. For, when, at the dictation of anti-supernaturalistic presuppositions, John is set aside in favor of the Synoptics, and then the Synoptics are set aside in favor of Mark, conceived as the representative of 'the narrative source' (by the side of which must be placed-though this is not always remembered—the second source of 'Sayings of Jesus,' which underlies so much of Matthew and Luke; and also—though this is even more commonly forgotten—whatever other sources either Matthew or Luke has drawn upon for material), it still appears that no progress whatever has been made in eliminating the divine Jesus and His supernatural accompaniment of mighty works—although, chronologically speaking, the very beginning of Christianity has been reached. It is necessary, accordingly, if there is not to be acknowledged a divine Christ with a supernatural history, to get behind the whole literary tradition. Working on Mark, therefore, taken as the original Gospel, an attempt must be made to distinguish between the traditional element which he incorporates into his narrative and the dogmatic element which he (as the mouthpiece of the Christian community) contributes to it. Or, working on the 'Sayings,' discrimination must first be made between the narrative element (assumed to be colored by the thought of the Christian community) and the reportorial element (which may repeat real sayings of Jesus); and then, within the reportorial element, all that is too lofty for the naturalistic Jesus must be trimmed down until it fits in with his simply human character. Or, working on the Gospels as they stand, inquisition must be made for statements of fact concerning Jesus or for sayings of his, which, taken out of the context in which the Evangelists have placed them and cleansed from the coloring given by them, may be made to seem inconsistent with 'the worship of Jesus' which characterizes these documents; and on the narrower basis thus secured there is built up a new portrait of Jesus, contradictory to that which the Evangelists have drawn.

The precariousness of these proceedings, or rather, frankly, their violence, is glaringly evident. In the processes of such criticism it is pure subjectivity which rules, and the investigator gets out as results only what he puts in as premises. And even when the desired result has thus been wrested from the unwilling documents, he discovers that he has only brought himself into the most extreme historical embarrassment. By thus desupernaturalizing Jesus he leaves primitive Christianity and its supernatural Jesus wholly without historical basis or justification. The naturalizing historian has therefore at once to address himself to supplying some account of the immediate universal ascription to Jesus by his followers of qualities which he did not possess and to which he laid no claim; and that with such force and persistence of conviction as totally to supersede from the very beginning with their perverted version of the facts the actual reality of things. It admits of no doubt, and it is not doubted, that supernaturalistic Christianity is the only historical Christianity. It is agreed on all hands that the very first followers of Jesus ascribed to him a supernatural character. It is even allowed that it is precisely by virtue of its supernaturalistic elements that Christianity has made its way in the world. It is freely admitted that it was by the force of its enthusiastic proclamation of the divine Christ, who could not be holden of death but burst the bonds of the grave, that Christianity conquered the world to itself. What account shall be given of all this? There is presented a problem here, which is insoluble on the naturalistic hypothesis. The old mythical theory fails because it requires time, and no time is at its disposal; the primitive Christian community believed in the divine Christ. The new 'history-of-religions' theory fails because it can not discover the elements of that 'Christianity before Christ' which it must posit, either remotely in the Babylonian inheritance of the East, or close by in the prevalent Messianic conceptions of contemporary Judaism. Nothing is available but the postulation of pure fanaticism in Jesus' first followers, which finds it convenient not to proceed beyond the general suggestion that there is no telling what fanaticism may not invent. The plain fact is that the supernatural Jesus is needed to account for the supernaturalistic Christianity which is grounded in him. Or—if this supernaturalistic Christianity does not need a supernatural Jesus to account for it, it is hard to see why any Jesus at all need be postulated. Naturalistic criticism thus overreaches itself and is caught up suddenly by the discovery that in abolishing the supernatural Jesus it has abolished Jesus altogether, since this supernatural Jesus is the only Jesus which enters as a factor into the historical development. It is the de-de-super-naturalized Jesus which is the mythical Jesus, who never had any existence, the postulation of the existence of whom explains nothing and leaves the whole historical development hanging in the air.

It is instructive to observe the lines of development of the naturalistic reconstruction of the Jesus of the Evangelists through the century and a half of its evolution. The normal task which the student of the life of Jesus sets himself is to penetrate into the spirit of the transmission so far as that transmission approves itself to him as trustworthy, to realize with exactness and vividness the portrait of Jesus conveyed by it, and to reproduce that portrait in an accurate and vital portrayal. The naturalistic reconstructors, on the other hand, engage themselves in an effort to substitute for the Jesus of the transmission another Jesus of their own, a Jesus who will seem 'natural' to them, and will work in 'naturally' with their naturalistic world-view. In the first instance it was the miracles of Jesus which they set themselves to eliminate, and this motive ruled their criticism from Reimarus (1694-1768), or rather, from the publication of the Wolfenbuettel Fragments (q.v.), to Strauss (1835-36). The dominant method employed—which found its culminating example in H. E. G. Paulus (1828 )—was to treat the narrative as in all essentials historical, but to seek in each miraculous story a natural fact underlying it. This whole point of view was transcended by the advent of the mythical view in Strauss, who laughed it out of court. Since then miracles have been treated ever more and more confidently as negligible quantities, and the whole strength of criticism has been increasingly expended on the reduction of the supernatural figure of Jesus to 'natural' proportions. The instrument relied upon to produce this effect has been psychological analysis; the method being to re-work the narrative in the interests of what is called a 'comprehensible' Jesus. The whole mental life of Jesus and the entire course of his conduct have been subjected to psychological canons derived from the critics' conception of a purely human life, and nothing has been allowed to him which does not approve itself as 'natural' according to this standard. The result is, of course, that the Jesus of the Evangelists has been transformed into a nineteenth-century 'liberal' theologian, and no conceptions or motives or actions have been allowed to him which would not be 'natural' in such a one.

The inevitable reaction which seems to be now asserting itself takes two forms, both of which, while serving themselves heirs to the negative criticism of this 'liberal' school, decisively reject its positive construction of the figure of Jesus, A weaker current contents itself with drawing attention to the obvious fact that such a Jesus as the 'liberal' criticism yields will not account for the Christianity which actually came into being; and on this ground proclaims the 'liberal' criticism bankrupt and raises the question, what need there is for assuming any Jesus at all. If the only Jesus salvable from the debris of legend is obviously not the author of the Christianity which actually came into being, why not simply recognize that Christianity came into being without any author—was just the crystallization of conceptions in solution at the time? A stronger current, scoffing at the projection of a nineteenth-century 'liberal' back into the first century and calling him 'Jesus,' insists that 'the historical Jesus' was just a Jew of his day, a peasant of Galilee with all the narrowness of a peasant's outlook and all the deficiency in culture which belonged to a Galilean countryman of the period. Above all, it insists that the real Jesus, possessed by those Messianic dreams which filled the minds of the Jewish peasantry of the time, was afflicted with the great delusion that He was Himself the promised Messiah. Under the obsession of this portentous fancy He imagined that God would intervene with His almighty arm and set him on the throne of a conquering Israel; and when the event falsified this wild hope, he assuaged his bitter disappointment with the wilder promise that he would rise from death itself and come back to establish his kingdom. Thus the naturalistic criticism of a hundred and fifty years has run out into no Jesus at all, or worse than no Jesus, a fanatic or even a paranoiac. The 'liberal' criticism which has had it so long its own way is called sharply to its defense against the fruit of its own loins. In the process of this defense it wavers before the assault and incorporates more or less of the new conception of Jesus—of the 'consistently eschatological' Jesus—into its fabric. Or it stands in its tracks and weakly protests that Jesus' figure must be conceived as greatly as possible, so only it be kept strictly within the limits of a mere human being. Or it develops an apologetical argument which, given its full validity and effect, would undo all its painfully worked-out negative results and lead back to the Jesus of the evangelists as the true 'historical Jesus.'

It has been remarked above that the portrait of Jesus drawn in the sources is its own credential; no man, and no body of men, can have invented this figure, consciously or unconsciously, and dramatized it consistently through such a varied and difficult life-history. It may be added that the Jesus of the naturalistic criticism is its own refutation. One wonders whether the 'liberal' critics realize the weakness, ineffectiveness, inanition of the Jesus they offer; the pitiful inertness they attribute to him, his utter passivity under the impact of circumstance. So far from being conceivable as the molder of the ages, this Jesus is wholly molded by his own surroundings, the sport of every suggestion from without. In their preoccupation with critical details, it is possible that its authors are scarcely aware of the grossness of the reduction of the figure of Jesus they have perpetrated. But let them only turn to portray their new Jesus in a life-history, and the pitiableness of the figure they have made him smites the eye. Whatever else may be said of it, this must be said—that out of the Jesus into which the naturalistic criticism has issued—in its best or in its worst estate—the Christianity which has conquered the world could never have come.

The firmness, clearness, and even fulness with which the figure of Jesus is delineated in the sources, and the variety of activities though which it is dramatized, do not insure that the data given should suffice for drawing up a properly so-called 'life of Jesus.' The data in the sources are practically confined to the brief period of Jesus' public work. Only a single incident is recorded from His earlier life, and that is taken from His boyhood. So large a portion of the actual narrative, moreover, is occupied with His death that it might even be said—the more that the whole narrative also leads up to the death as the life's culmination—that little has been preserved concerning Jesus but the circumstances which accompanied His birth and the circumstances which led up to and accompanied His death. The incidents which the narrators record, again, are not recorded with a biographical intent, and are not selected for their biographical significance, or ordered so as to present a biographical result: in the case of each Evangelist they serve a particular purpose which may employ biographical details, but is not itself a biographical end. In other words the Gospels are not formal biographies but biographical arguments—a circumstance which does not affect the historicity of the incidents they select for record, but does affect the selection and ordering of these incidents. Mark has in view to show that this great religious movement in which he himself had a part had its beginnings in a divine interposition; Matthew, that this divine interposition was in fulfillment of the promises made to Israel; Luke, that it had as its end the redemption of the world; John, that the agent in it was none other than the Son of God himself. In the enforcement and illustration of their several themes each records a wealth of biographical details. But it does not follow that these details, when brought together and arranged in their chronological sequence, or even in their genetic order, will supply an adequate biography. The attempt to work them up into a biography is met, moreover, by a great initial difficulty. Every biographer takes his position, as it were, above his subject, who must live his life over again in his biographer's mind; it is of the very essence of the biographer's work thoroughly to understand his subject and to depict him as he understands him. What, then, if the subject of the biography be above the comprehension of his biographer? Obviously, in that case, a certain reduction can scarcely be avoided. This in an instance like the present, where the subject is a superhuman being, is the same as to say that a greater or lesser measure of rationalization, 'naturalization,' inevitably takes place. A true biography of a God-man, a biography which depicts His life from within, untangling the complex of motives which moved Him, and explaining His conduct by reference to the internal springs of action, is in the nature of the case an impossibility for men. Human beings can explain only on the basis of their own experiences and mental processes; and so explaining they instinctively explain away what transcends their experiences and confounds their mental processes. Seeking to portray the life of Jesus as natural, they naturalize it, that is, reduce it to correspondence with their own nature. Every attempt to work out a life of Christ must therefore face not only the insufficiency of the data, but the perennial danger of falsifying the data by an instinctive naturalization of them. If, however, the expectation of attaining a 'psychological' biography of Jesus must be renounced, and even a complete external life can not be pieced together from the fragmentary communications of the sources, a clear and consistent view of the course of the public ministry of Jesus can still be derived from them. The consecution of the events can be set forth, their causal relations established, and their historical development explicated. To do this is certainly in a modified sense to outline 'the life of Jesus,' and to do this proves by its results to be eminently worth while.

A series of synchronism's with secular history indicated by Luke, whose historical interest seems more alert than that of the other evangelists, gives the needed information for placing such a 'life' in its right historical relations. The chronological framework for the 'life' itself is supplied by the succession of annual feasts which are recorded by John as occurring during Jesus' public ministry. Into this framework the data furnished by the other Gospels—which are not without corroborative suggestions of order, season of occurrence, and relations—fit readily; and when so arranged yield so self-consistent and rationally developing a history as to add a strong corroboration of its trustworthiness. Differences of opinion respecting the details of arrangement of course remain possible; and these differences are not always small and not always without historical significance. But they do not affect the general outline or the main drift of the history, and on most points, even those of minor importance, a tolerable agreement exists. Thus, for example, it is all but universally allowed that Jesus was born c. 5 or 6 B.C. (year of Rome 748 or 749), and it is an erratic judgment indeed which would fix on any other year than 29 or 30 A.D. for his crucifixion. On the date of His baptism— which determines the duration of his public ministry—more difference is possible; but it is quite generally agreed that it took place late in 26 AD. or early in 27. It is only by excluding the testimony of John that a duration of less than between two and three years can be assigned to the public ministry; and then only by subjecting the Synoptical narrative to considerable pressure. The probabilities seem strongly in favor of extending it to three years and some months. The decision between a duration of two years and some months and a duration of three years and some months depends on the determination of the two questions of where in the narrative of John the imprisonment of John the Baptist (Mt. iv. 12) is to be placed, and what the unnamed feast is which is mentioned in John v. 1. On the former of these questions opinion varies only between John iv. 1-3 and John v. 1. On the latter a great variety of opinions exists: some think of Passover, others of Purim or Pentecost, or of Trumpets or Tabernacles, or even of the day of Atonement. On the whole, the evidence seems decisively preponderant for placing the imprisonment of the Baptist at John iv. 1-3, and for identifying the feast of John v. 1 with Passover. In that case, the public ministry of Jesus covered about three years and a third, and it is probably not far wrong to assign to it the period lying between the latter part of 26 A.D. and the Passover of 30 A.D.

The material supplied by the Gospel narrative distributes itself naturally under the heads of (1) the preparation (2) the ministry, and (3) the consummation. For the first twelve or thirteen years of Jesus' life nothing is recorded except the striking circumstances connected with His birth, and a general statement of His remarkable growth. Similarly for His youth, about seventeen years and a half, there is recorded only the single incident, at its beginning, of His conversation with the doctors in the temple. Anything like continuous narrative begins only with the public ministry, in, say, December, 26 A.D. This narrative falls naturally into four parts which may perhaps be distinguished as (a) the beginning of the Gospel, forty days, from December, 26 to February, 27; (b) the Judean ministry, covering about ten months, from February, 27 to December, 27; (c) the Galilean ministry, covering about twenty-two months, from December, 27 to September, 29; (d) the last journeys to Jerusalem, covering some six months, from September, 29 to the Passover of (April) 30. The events of this final Passover season, the narrative of which becomes so detailed and precise that the occurrences from day to day are noted, constitute, along with their sequences, what is here called 'the consummation.' They include the events which led up to the crucifixion of Jesus, the crucifixion itself, and the manifestations which He gave of Himself after His death up to His ascension. So preponderating was the interest which the reporters took in this portion of the 'life of Christ,' that is to say, in His death and resurrection, that about a third of their whole narrative is devoted to it. The ministry which leads up to it is also, however, full of incident. What is here called 'the beginning of the Gospel' gives, no doubt, only the accounts of Jesus' baptism and temptation. Only meager information is given also, and that by John alone, of the occurrences of the first ten months after His public appearance, the scene of which lay mainly in Judea. With the beginning of the ministry in Galilee, however, with which alone the Synoptic Gospels concern themselves, incidents become numerous. Capernaum now becomes Jesus' home for almost two full years; and no less than eight periods of sojourn there with intervening circuits going out from it as a center can be traced. When the object of this ministry had been accomplished Jesus finally withdraws from Galilee and addresses Himself to the preparation of his followers for the death He had come into the world to accomplish; and this He then brings about in the manner which best subserves His purpose.

Into the substance of Jesus' ministry it is not possible to enter here. Let it only be observed that it is properly called a ministry. He Himself testified that He came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and He added that this ministry was fulfilled in His giving His life as a ransom for many. In other words, the main object of His work was to lay the foundations of the kingdom of God in His blood. Subsidiary to this was His purpose to make vitally known to men the true nature of the kingdom of God, to prepare the way for its advent in their hearts, and above all, to attach them by faith to His person as the founder and consummator of the kingdom. His ministry involved, therefore, a constant presentation of Himself to the people as the promised One, in and by whom the kingdom of God was to be established, a steady 'campaign of instruction' as to the nature of the kingdom which He came to found, and a watchful control of the forces which were making for His destruction, until, His work of preparation being ended, He was ready to complete it by offering Himself up. The progress of His ministry is governed by the interplay of these motives. It has been broadly distributed into a year of obscurity, a year of popular favor, and a year of opposition; and if these designations are understood to have only a relative applicability, they may be accepted as generally describing from the outside the development of the ministry. Beginning first in Judea Jesus spent some ten months in attaching to Himself His first disciples, and with apparent fruitlessness proclaiming the kingdom at the center of national life. Then, moving north to Galilee, He quickly won the ear of the people and carried them to the height of their present receptivity; whereupon, breaking from them, He devoted Himself to the more precise instruction of the chosen band He had gathered about Him to be the nucleus of His Church. The Galilean ministry thus divides into two parts, marked respectively by more popular and more intimate teaching. The line of division falls at the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, which, as marking a crisis in the ministry, is recorded by all four Evangelists, and is the only miracle which has received this fourfold record. Prior to this point, Jesus' work had been one of gathering disciples; subsequently to it, it was a work of instructing and sifting the disciples whom He had gathered. The end of the Galilean ministry is marked by the confession of Peter and the transfiguration, and after it nothing remained but the preparation of the chosen disciples for the death, which was to close His work; and the consummation of His mission in His death and rising again.

The instruments by which Jesus carried out his ministry were two, teaching and miracles. In both alike He manifested His deity. Wherever He went the supernatural was present in word and deed. His teaching was with authority. In its insight and foresight it was as supernatural as the miracles themselves; the hearts of men and the future lay as open before Him as the forces of nature lay under His control; all that the Father knows He knew also, and He alone was the channel of the revelation of it to men. The power of His 'But I say unto you' was as manifest as that of His compelling 'Arise and walk.' The theme of His teaching was the kingdom of God and Himself as its divine founder and king. Its form ran all the way from crisp gnomic sayings and brief comparisons to elaborate parables and profound spiritual discussions in which the deep things of God are laid bare in simple, searching words. The purport of His miracles was that the kingdom of God was already present in its King. Their number is perhaps usually greatly underestimated. It is true that only about thirty or forty are actually recorded. But these are recorded only as specimens, and as such they represent all classes. Miracles of healing form the preponderant class; but there are also exorcisms, nature-miracles, raisings of the dead. Besides these recorded miracles, however, there are frequent general statements of abounding miraculous manifestations. For a time disease and death must have been almost banished from the land. The country was thoroughly aroused and filled with wonder. In the midst of this universal excitement—when the people were ready to take Him by force and make Him King—He withdrew Himself from them, and throwing His circuits far afield, beyond the bruit and uproar, addressed Himself to preparing His chosen companions for His great sacrifice—first leading them in the so-called 'later Galilean ministry' (from the feeding of the 5,000 to the confession at Caesarea Philippi) to a better apprehension of the majesty of His person as the Son of God, and of the character of the kingdom He came to found, as consisting not in meat and drink but in righteousness; and then, in the so-called 'Peraean ministry' (from the confession at Caesarea Philippi to the final arrival at Jerusalem) specifically preparing them for His death and resurrection. Thus He walked straightforward in the path He had chosen, and His choice of which is already made clear in the account of His temptation, set at the beginning of His public career; and in His own good time and way—in the end forcing the hand of His opponents to secure that he should die at the Passover— shed His blood as the blood of the new covenant sacrifice for the remission of sins. Having power thus to lay down His life, He had power also to take it again, and in due time He rose again from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the majesty on high, leaving behind Him His promise to come again in His glory, to perfect the kingdom He had inaugurated.

It is appropriate that this miraculous life should be set between the great marvels of the virgin-birth and the resurrection and ascension. These can appear strange only when the intervening life is looked upon as that of a merely human being, endowed, no doubt, not only with unusual qualities, but also with the unusual favor of God, yet after all nothing more than human and therefore presumably entering the world like other human beings, and at the end paying the universal debt of human nature. From the standpoint of the evangelical writers, and of the entirety of primitive Christianity, which looked upon Jesus not as a merely human being but as God himself come into the world on a mission of mercy that involved the humiliation of a human life and death, it would be this assumed community with common humanity in mode of entrance into and exit from the earthly life which would seem strange and incredible. The entrance of the Lord of Glory into the world could not but be supernatural; His exit from the world, after the work which He had undertaken had been performed, could not fail to bear the stamp of triumph. There is no reason for doubting the trustworthiness of the narratives at these points, beyond the anti-supernaturalistic instinct which strives consciously or unconsciously to naturalize the whole evangelical narrative. The 'infancy chapters' of Luke are demonstrably from Luke's own hand, bear evident traces of having been derived from trustworthy sources of information, and possess all the authority which attaches to the communications of a historian who evinces himself sober, careful, and exact, by every historical test. The parallel chapters of Matthew, while obviously independent of those of Luke— recording in common with them not a single incident beyond the bare fact of the virgin-birth—are thoroughly at one with them in the main fact, and in the incidents they record fit with remarkable completeness into the interstices of Luke's narrative. Similarly, the narratives of the resurrection, full of diversity in details as they are, and raising repeated puzzling questions of order and arrangement, yet not only bear consentient testimony to all the main facts, but fit into one another so as to create a consistent narrative—which has moreover the support of the contemporary testimony of Paul. The persistent attempts to explain away the facts so witnessed or to substitute for the account which the New Testament writers give of them some more plausible explanation, as the naturalistic mind estimates plausibility, are all wrecked on the directness, precision, and copiousness of the testimony; and on the great effects which have flowed from this fact in the revolution wrought in the minds and lives of the apostles themselves, and in the revolution wrought through their preaching of the resurrection in the life and history of the world. The entire history of the world for 2,000 years is the warranty of the reality of the resurrection of Christ, by which the forces were let loose which have created it. 'Unique spiritual effects,' it has been remarked, with great reasonableness, 'require a unique spiritual cause; and we shall never understand the full significance of the cause, if we begin by denying or minimizing its uniqueness.'

The Person Of Christ According To The New Testament

It is the purpose of this article to make as clear as possible the conception of the Person of Christ, in the technical sense of that term, which lies on—or, if we prefer to say so, beneath—the pages of the New Testament. Were it its purpose to trace out the process by which this great mystery has been revealed to men, a beginning would need to be taken from the intimations as to the nature of the person of the Messiah in Old Testament prophecy, and an attempt would require to be made to discriminate the exact contribution of each organ of revelation to our knowledge. And were there added to this a desire to ascertain the progress of the apprehension of this mystery by men, there would be demanded a further inquiry into the exact degree of understanding which was brought to the truth revealed at each stage of its revelation. The magnitudes with which such investigations deal, however, are very minute; and the profit to be derived from them is not, in a case like the present, very great. It is, of course, of importance to know how the person of the Messiah was represented in the predictions of the Old Testament; and it is a matter at least of interest to note, for example, the difficulty experienced by Our Lord's immediate disciples in comprehending all that was involved in His manifestation. But, after all, the constitution of Our Lord's person is a matter of revelation, not of human thought; and it is preeminently a revelation of the New Testament, not of the Old Testament. And the New Testament is all the product of a single movement, at a single stage of its development, and therefore presents in its fundamental teaching a common character. The whole of the New Testament was written within the limits of about half a century; or, if we except the writings of John, within the narrow bounds of a couple of decades; and the entire body of writings which enter into it are so much of a piece that it may be plausibly represented that they all bear the stamp of a single mind. In its fundamental teaching, the New Testament lends itself, therefore, more readily to what is called dogmatic than to what is called genetic treatment; and we shall penetrate most surely into its essential meaning if we take our start from its clearest and fullest statements, and permit their light to be thrown upon its more incidental allusions. This is peculiarly the case with such a matter as the person of Christ, which is dealt with chiefly incidentally, as a thing already understood by all, and needing only to be alluded to rather than formally expounded. That we may interpret these allusions aright, it is requisite that we should recover from the first the common conception which underlies them all.

I. THE TEACHING OF PAUL

We begin, then, with the most didactic of the New Testament writers, the apostle Paul, and with one of the passages in which he most fully intimates his conception of the person of his Lord, Phil. ii. 5-9. Even here, however, Paul is not formally expounding the doctrine of the Person of Christ; he is only alluding to certain facts concerning His person and action perfectly well known to his readers, in order that he may give point to an adduction of Christ's example. He is exhorting his readers to unselfishness, such unselfishness as esteems others better than ourselves, and looks not only on our own things but also on those of others. Precisely this unselfishness, he declares, was exemplified by Our Lord. He did not look upon His own things but the things of others; that is to say, He did not stand upon His rights, but was willing to forego all that He might justly have claimed for Himself for the good of others. For, says Paul, though, as we all know, in His intrinsic nature He was nothing other than God, yet He did not, as we all know right well, look greedily on His condition of equality with God, but made no account of Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and, being found in fashion as a man, humbled Himself, becoming obedient up to death itself, and that, the death of the cross. The statement is thrown into historical form; it tells the story of Christ's life on earth. But it presents His life on earth as a life in all its elements alien to His intrinsic nature, and assumed only in the performance of an unselfish purpose. On earth He lived as a man, and subjected Himself to the common lot of men. But He was not by nature a man, nor was He in His own nature subject to the fortunes of human life. By nature He was God; and He would have naturally lived as became God—'on an equality with God.' He became man by a voluntary act, 'taking no account of Himself,' and, having become man, He voluntarily lived out His human life under the conditions which the fulfillment of His unselfish purpose imposed on Him.

The terms in which these great affirmations are made deserve the most careful attention. The language in which Our Lord's intrinsic Deity is expressed, for example, is probably as strong as any that could be devised. Paul does not say simply, 'He was God.' He says, 'He was in the form of God,' employing a turn of speech which throws emphasis upon Our Lord's possession of the specific quality of God. 'Form' is a term which expresses the sum of those characterizing qualities which make a thing the precise thing that it is. Thus, the 'form' of a sword (in this case mostly matters of external configuration) is all that makes a given piece of metal specifically a sword, rather than, say, a spade. And 'the form of God' is the sum of the characteristics which make the being we call 'God,' specifically God, rather than some other being—an angel, say, or a man. When Our Lord is said to be in 'the form of God,' therefore, He is declared, in the most express manner possible, to be all that God is, to possess the whole fulness of attributes which make God God. Paul chooses this manner of expressing himself here instinctively, because, in adducing Our Lord as our example of self-abnegation, his mind is naturally resting, not on the bare fact that He is God, but on the richness and fulness of His being as God. He was all this, yet He did not look on His own things but on those of others.

It should be carefully observed also that in making this great affirmation concerning Our Lord, Paul does not throw it distinctively into the past, as if he were describing a mode of being formerly Our Lord's, indeed, but no longer His because of the action by which He became our example of unselfishness. Our Lord, he says, 'being,' 'existing,' 'subsisting' 'in the form of God'—as it is variously rendered. The rendering proposed by the Revised Version margin, 'being originally,' while right in substance, is somewhat misleading. The verb employed means 'strictly 'to be beforehand,' 'to be already' so and so' (Blass, 'Grammar of NT Greek,' English translation, 244), 'to be there and ready,' and intimates the existing circumstances, disposition of mind, or, as here, mode of subsistence in which the action to be described takes place. It contains no intimation, however, of the cessation of these circumstances or disposition, or mode of subsistence; and that, the less in a case like the present, where it is cast in a tense (the imperfect) which in no way suggests that the mode of subsistence intimated came to an end in the action described by the succeeding verb (cf. the parallels, Lk. xvi. 14, 28; xxiii. 50; Acts ii. 80; iii. 2; II Cor. viii. 17; xii. 16; Gal. i. 14). Paul is not telling us here, then, what Our Lord was once, but rather what He already was, or, better, what in His intrinsic nature He is; he is not describing a past mode of existence of Our Lord, before the action he is adducing as an example took place—although the mode of existence he describes was Our Lord's mode of existence before this action—so much as painting in the background upon which the action adduced may be thrown up into prominence. He is telling us who and what He is who did these things for us, that we may appreciate how great the things He did for us are.

And here it is important to observe that the whole of the action adduced is thrown up thus against this background— not only its negative description to the effect that Our Lord (although all that God is) did not look greedily on His (consequent) being on an equality with God; but its positive description as well, introduced by the 'but. . . .' and that in both of its elements, not merely that to the effect (ver. 7) that 'he took no account of himself' (rendered not badly by the Authorized Version, He 'made himself of no reputation'; but quite misleading by the Revised Version, He 'emptied himself'), but equally that to the effect (ver. that 'he humbled himself.' It is the whole of what Our Lord is described as doing in vs. 6-8, that He is described as doing despite His 'subsistence in the form of God.' So far is Paul from intimating, therefore, that Our Lord laid aside His Deity in entering upon His life on earth, that he rather asserts that He retained His Deity throughout His life on earth, and in the whole course of His humiliation, up to death itself, was consciously ever exercising self-abnegation, living a life which did not by nature belong to Him, which stood in fact in direct contradiction to the life which was naturally His. It is this underlying implication which determines the whole choice of the language in which Our Lord's earthly life is described. It is because it is kept in mind that He still was 'in the form of God,' that is, that He still had in possession all that body of characterizing qualities by which God is made God, for example, that He is said to have been made, not man, but 'in the likeness of man,' to have been found, not man, but 'in fashion as a man'; and that the wonder of His servant-hood and obedience, the mark of servant-hood, is thought of as so great. Though He was truly man, He was much more than man; and Paul would not have his readers imagine that He had become merely man. In other words, Paul does not teach that Our Lord was once God but had become instead man; he teaches that though He was God, He had become also man.

An impression that Paul means to imply, that in entering upon His earthly life Our Lord had laid aside His Deity, may be created by a very prevalent misinterpretation of the central clause of his statement—a misinterpretation unfortunately given currency by the rendering of the English Revised Version: 'counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself,' varied without improvement in the American Revised Version to: 'counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself.' The former (negative) member of this clause means just: He did not look greedily upon His being on an equality with God; did not 'set supreme store' by it (see Lightfoot on the clause). The latter (positive) member of it, however, cannot mean in antithesis to this, that He therefore 'emptied himself,' divested Himself of this, His being on an equality with God, much less that He 'emptied himself,' divested Himself of His Deity ('form of God') itself, of which His being on an equality with God is the manifested consequence. The verb here rendered 'emptied' is in constant use in a metaphorical sense (so only in the New Testament: Rom. iv. 14; I Cor. i. 17; ix. 15; II Cor. ix. 3) and cannot here be taken literally. This is already apparent from the definition of the manner in which the 'emptying' is said to have been accomplished, supplied by the modal clause which is at once attached: by 'taking the form of a servant.' You cannot 'empty' by 'taking'—adding. It is equally apparent, however, from the strength of the emphasis which, by its position, is thrown upon the 'himself.' We may speak of Our Lord as 'emptying Himself' of something else, but scarcely, with this strength of emphasis, of His 'emptying Himself' of something else. This emphatic 'Himself,' interposed between the preceding clause and the verb rendered 'emptied,' builds a barrier over which we cannot climb backward in search of that of which Our Lord emptied Himself. The whole thought is necessarily contained in the two words, 'emptied Himself,' in which the word 'emptied' must therefore be taken in a sense analogous to that which it bears in the other passages in the New Testament where it occurs. Paul, in a word, says here nothing more than that Our Lord, who did not look with greedy eyes upon His estate of equality with God, emptied Himself, if the language may be pardoned, of Himself; that is to say, in precise accordance with the exhortation for the enhancement of which His example is adduced, that He did not look on His own things. 'He made no account of Himself,' we may fairly paraphrase the clause; and thus all question of what He emptied Himself of falls away. What Our Lord actually did, according to Paul, is expressed in the following clauses; those now before us express more the moral character of His act. He took 'the form of a servant,' and so was 'made in the likeness of men.' But His doing this showed that He did not set overweening store by His state of equality with God, and did not account Himself the sufficient object of all the efforts. He was not self-regarding: He had regard for others. Thus He becomes our supreme example of self-abnegating conduct.

The language in which the act by which Our Lord showed that He was self-abnegating is described, requires to be taken in its complete meaning. He took 'the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men,' says Paul. The term 'form' here, of course, bears the same full meaning as in the preceding instance of its occurrence in the phrase 'the form of God.' It imparts the specific quality, the whole body of characteristics, by which a servant is made what we know as a servant. Our Lord assumed, then, according to Paul, not the mere state or condition or outward appearance of a servant, but the reality; He became an actual 'servant' in the world. The act by which He did this is described as a 'taking,' or, as it has become customary from this description of it to phrase it, as an assumption.' What is meant is that Our Lord took up into His personality a human nature; and therefore it is immediately explained that He took the form of a servant by 'being made in the likeness of men.' That the apostle does not say, shortly, that He assumed a human nature, is due to the engagement of his mind with the contrast which he wishes to bring out forcibly for the enhancement of his appeal to Our Lord's example, between what Our Lord is by nature and what He was willing to become, not looking on His own things but also on the things of others. This contrast is, no doubt, embodied in the simple opposition of God and man; it is much more pungently expressed in the quantitative terms, 'form of God' and 'form of a servant' The Lord of the world became a servant in the world; He whose right it was to rule took obedience as His life-characteristic. Naturally therefore Paul employs here a word of quality rather than a word of mere nature; and then defines his meaning in this word of quality by a further exegetical clause. This further clause—'being made in the likeness of men'—does not throw doubt on the reality of the human nature that was assumed, in contradiction to the emphasis on its reality in the phrase 'the form of a servant.' It, along with the succeeding clause—'and being found in fashion as a man'—owes its peculiar form, as has already been pointed out, to the vividness of the apostle's consciousness, that he is speaking of one who, though really man, possessing all that makes a man a man, is yet, at the same time, infinitely more than a man, no less than God Himself, in possession of all that makes God God. Christ Jesus is in his view, therefore (as in the view of his readers, for he is not instructing his readers here as to the nature of Christ's person, but reminding them of certain elements in it for the purposes of his exhortation), both God and man, God who has 'assumed' man into personal union with Himself, and has in this His assumed manhood lived out a human life on earth.

The elements of Paul's conception of the person of Christ are brought before us in this suggestive passage with unwonted fulness. But they all receive endless illustration from his occasional allusions to them, one or another, throughout his Epistles. The leading motive of this passage, for example, reappears quite perfectly in II Cor. viii. 9, where we are exhorted to imitate the graciousness of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who became for our sakes (emphatic) poor—He who was (again an imperfect participle, and therefore without suggestion of the cessation of the condition described) rich—that we might by His (very emphatic) poverty be made rich. Here the change in Our Lord's condition at a point of time perfectly understood between the writer and his readers is adverted to and assigned to its motive, but no further definition is given of the nature of either condition referred to. We are brought closer to the precise nature of the act by which the change was wrought by such a passage as Gal. iv. 4. We read that 'When the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them that were under the law.' The whole transaction is referred to the Father in fulfillment of His eternal plan of redemption, and it is described specifically as an incarnation: the Son of God is born of a woman—He who is in His own nature the Son of God, abiding with God, is sent forth from God in such a manner as to be born a human being, subject to law. The primary implications are that this was not the beginning of His being; but that before this He was neither a man nor subject to law. But there is no suggestion that on becoming man and subject to law, He ceased to be the Son of God or lost anything intimated by that high designation. The uniqueness of His relation to God as His Son is emphasized in a kindred passage (Rom. viii. 3) by the heightening of the designation to that of God's 'own Son,' and His distinction from other men is intimated in the same passage by the declaration that God sent Him, not in sinful flesh, but only 'in the likeness of sinful flesh.' The reality of Our Lord's flesh is not thrown into doubt by this turn of speech, but His freedom from the sin which is associated with flesh as it exists in lost humanity is asserted (cf. II Cor. v. 21). Though true man, therefore (I Cor. xv. 21; Rom. v. 21; Acts xvii. 31), He is not without differences from other men; and these differences do not concern merely the condition (as sinful) in which men presently find themselves; but also their very origin: they are from below, He from above—'the first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven' (I Cor. xv. 47). This is His peculiarity: He was born of a woman like other men; yet He descended from Heaven (cf. Eph. iv. 9; Jn. iii. 13). It is not meant, of course, that already in heaven He was a man; what is meant is that even though man He derives His origin in an exceptional sense from heaven. Paul describes what He Was in heaven (but not alone in heaven) —that is to say before He was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh (though not alone before this) —in the great terms of 'God's Son,' 'God's Own Son,' 'the form of God,' or yet again in words whose import cannot be mistaken, 'God over all' (Rom. ix. 5). In the last cited passage, together with its parallel earlier in the same epistle (Rom. i. 3), the two sides or elements of Our Lord's person are brought into collocation after a fashion that can leave no doubt of Paul's conception of His twofold nature. In the earlier of these passages he tells us that Jesus Christ was born, indeed, of the seed of David according to the flesh, that is, so far as the human side of His being is concerned, but was powerfully marked out as the Son of God according to the Spirit of Holiness, that is, with respect to His higher nature, by the resurrection of the dead, which in a true sense began in His own rising from the dead. In the later of them, he tells us that Christ sprang indeed, as concerns the flesh, that is on the human side of His being, from Israel, but that, despite this earthly origin of His human nature, He yet is and abides (present participle) nothing less than the Supreme God, 'God over all [emphatic], blessed forever.' Thus Paul teaches us that by His coming forth from God to be born of woman, Our Lord, assuming a human nature to Himself, has, while remaining the Supreme God, become also true and perfect man. Accordingly, in a context in which the resources of language are strained to the utmost to make the exaltation of Our Lord's being clear— in which He is described as the image of the invisible God, whose being antedates all that is created, in whom, through whom and to whom all things have been created, and in whom they all subsist—we are told not only that (naturally) in Him all the fulness dwells (Col. i. 19), but, with complete explication, that 'all the fulness of the Godhead dwells in him bodily' (Col. u. 9); that is to say, the very Deity of God, that which makes God God, in all its completeness, has its permanent home in Our Lord, and that in a 'bodily fashion,' that is, it is in Him clothed with a body. He who looks upon Jesus Christ sees, no doubt, a body and a man; but as he sees the man clothed with the body, so he sees God Himself, in all the fulness of His Deity, clothed with the humanity. Jesus Christ is therefore God 'manifested in the flesh' (I Tim. iii. 16), and His appearance on earth is an 'epiphany' (II Tim. i. 10), which is the technical term for manifestations on earth of a God. Though truly man, He is nevertheless also our 'great God' (Tit. ii. 13).

II. TEACHING OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS

The conception of the person of Christ which underlies and finds expression in the Epistle to the Hebrews is indistinguishable from that which governs all the allusions to Our Lord in the Epistles of Paul. To the author of this epistle Our Lord is above all else the Son of God in the most eminent sense of that word; and it is the Divine dignity and majesty belonging to Him from His very nature which forms the fundamental feature of the image of Christ which stands before his mind. And yet it is this author who, perhaps above all others of the New Testament writers, emphasizes the truth of the humanity of Christ, and dwells with most particularity upon the elements of His human nature and experience.

The great Christological passage which fills chap. ii of the Epistle to the Hebrews rivals in its richness and fulness of detail, and its breadth of implication, that of Phil. ii. It is thrown up against the background of the remarkable exposition of the Divine dignity of the Son which occupies chap. i (notice the 'therefore' of ii. 1). There the Son had been declared to be 'the effulgence of his (God's) glory, and the very image of his substance, through whom the universe has been created and by the word of whose power all things are held in being'; and His exaltation above the angels, by means of whom the Old Covenant had been inaugurated, is measured by the difference between the designations 'ministering spirits' proper to the one, and the Son of God, nay, God itself (i. 8, 9), proper to the other. The purpose of the succeeding statement is to enhance in the thought of the Jewish readers of the epistle the value of the salvation wrought by this Divine Saviour, by removing from their minds the offence they were in danger of taking at His lowly life and shameful death on earth. This earthly humiliation finds its abundant justification, we are told, in the greatness of the end which it sought and attained. By it Our Lord has, with His strong feet, broken out a pathway along which, in Him, sinful man may at length climb up to the high destiny which was promised him when it was declared he should have dominion over all creation. Jesus Christ stooped only to conquer, and He stooped to conquer not for Himself (for He was in His own person no less than God), but for us.

The language in which the humiliation of the Son of God is in the first instance described is derived from the context. The establishment of His Divine majesty in chap. i had taken the form of an exposition of His infinite exaltation above the angels, the highest of all creatures. His humiliation is described here therefore as being 'made a little lower than the angels' (ii. 9). What is meant is simply that He became man; the phraseology is derived from Ps. viii., Authorized Version, from which had just been cited the declaration that God has made man (despite his insignificance) 'but a little lower than the angels,' thus crowning him with glory and honor. The adoption of the language of the psalm to describe Our Lord's humiliation has the secondary effect, accordingly, of greatly enlarging the reader's sense of the immensity of the humiliation of the Son of God in becoming man: He descended an infinite distance to reach man's highest conceivable exaltation. As, however, the primary purpose of the adoption of the language is merely to declare that the Son of God became man, so it is shortly afterward explained (ii. 14) as an entering into participation in the blood and flesh which are common to men: 'Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same.' The voluntariness, the reality, the completeness of the assumption of humanity by the Son of God, are all here emphasized.

The proximate end of Our Lord's assumption of humanity is declared to be that He might die; He was 'made a little lower than the angels . . . because of the suffering of death' (ii. 9); He took part in blood and flesh in order 'that through death . . .' (ii. 14). The Son of God as such could not die; to Him belongs by nature an 'indissoluble life' (vii. 16 in.). If he was to die, therefore, He must take to Himself another nature to which the experience of death were not impossible (ii. 17). Of course it is not meant that death was desired by Him for its own sake. The purpose of our passage is to save its Jewish readers from the offence of the death of Christ. What they are bidden to observe is, therefore, Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels because of the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God the bitterness of death which he tasted might redound to the benefit of every man' (ii. 9), and the argument is immediately pressed home that it was eminently suitable for God Almighty, in bringing many sons into glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect (as a Saviour) by means of suffering. The meaning is that it was only through suffering that these men, being sinners, could be brought into glory. And therefore in the plainer statement of verse 14 we read that Our Lord took part in flesh and blood in order 'that through death he might bring to nought him that has the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage'; and in the still plainer statement of verse 17 that the ultimate object of His assimilation to men was that He might 'make propitiation for the sins of the people.' It is for the salvation of sinners that Our Lord has come into the world; but, as that salvation can be wrought only by suffering and death, the proximate end of His assumption of humanity remains that He might die; whatever is more than this gathers around this.

The completeness of Our Lord's assumption of humanity and of His identification of Himself]f with it receives strong emphasis in this passage. He took part in the flesh and blood which is the common heritage of men, after the same fashion that other men participate in it (ii. 14); and, having thus be-come a man among men, He shared with other men the ordinary circumstances and fortunes of life, 'in all things' (ii. 17). The stress is laid on trials, sufferings, death; but this is due to the actual course in which His life ran—and that it might run in which He became man—and is not exclusive of Other human experiences. What is intended is that He became truly a man, and lived a truly human life, subject to all the experiences natural to a man in the particular circumstances in which He lived.

It is not implied, however, that during this human life— 'the days of his flesh' (v. 7)—He had ceased to be God, or to have at His disposal the attributes which belonged to Him as God. That is already excluded by the representations of chap. i. The glory of this dispensation consists precisely in the bringing of its revelations directly by the Divine Son rather than by mere prophets (i. 1), and it was as the effulgence of God's glory and the express image of His substance, upholding the universe by the word of His power, that this Son made purification of sins (i. 3). Indeed, we are expressly told that even in the days of the flesh, He continued still a Son (v. 8), and that it was precisely in this that the wonder lay: that though He was and remained (imperfect participle) a Son, He yet learned the obedience He had set Himself to (cf. Phil. ii. by the things which He suffered. Similarly, we are told not only that, though an Israelite of the tribe of Judah, He possessed 'the power of an indissoluble life' (vii. 16 in.), but, describing that higher nature which gave Him this power as an 'eternal Spirit' (cf. 'spirit of holiness,' Rom. i. 4), that it was through this eternal Spirit that He could offer Himself without blemish unto God, a real and sufficing sacrifice, in contrast with the shadows of the Old Covenant (ix. 14). Though a man, therefore, and truly man, sprung out of Judah (vii. 14), touched with the feeling of human infirmities (iv. 15), and tempted like as we are, He was not altogether like other men. For one thing, He was 'without sin' (iv. 15; vii. 26), and, by this characteristic, He was, in every sense of the words, separated from sinners. Despite the completeness of His identification with men, He remained, therefore, even in the days of His flesh different from them and above them.

III. TEACHING OF OTHER EPISTLES

It is only as we carry this conception of the person of Our Lord with us—the conception of Him as at once our Supreme Lord, to whom our adoration is due, and our fellow in the experiences of a human life—that unity is induced in the multiform allusions to Him throughout, whether the Epistles of Paul or the Epistle to the Hebrews, or, indeed, the other epistolary literature of the New Testament. For in this matter there is no difference between those and these. There are no doubt a few passages in these other letters in which a plurality of the elements of the person of Christ are brought together and given detailed mention. In I Pet. iii. 18, for instance, the two constitutive elements of His person are spoken of in the contrast, familiar from Paul, of the 'flesh' and the 'spirit.' But ordinarily we meet only with references to this or that element separately. Everywhere Our Lord is spoken of as having lived out His life as a man; but everywhere also He is spoken of with the supreme reverence which is due to God alone, and the very name of God is not withheld from Him. In I Pet. i. 11 His preexistence is taken for granted; in Jas. ii. 1 He is identified with the Shekinah, the manifested Jehovah—'our Lord Jesus Christ, the Glory'; in Jude verse 4 He is our only Master [Despot] and Lord'; over and over again He is the Divine Lord who is Jehovah (e. g., I Pet. ii. 3, 13; II Pet. iii. 2, 18); in II Pet. i. 1, He is roundly called 'our God and Saviour.' There is nowhere formal inculcation of the entire doctrine of the person of Christ. But everywhere its elements, now one and now another, are presupposed as the common property of writer and readers. It is only in the Epistles of John that this easy and unstudied presupposition of them gives way to pointed insistence upon them.

IV. TEACHING OF JOHN

In the circumstances in which he wrote, John found it necessary to insist upon the elements of the person of Our Lord—His true Deity, His true humanity and the unity of His person—in a manner which is more didactic in form than anything we find in the other writings of the New Testament. The great depository of his teaching on the subject is, of course, the prologue to his Gospel. But it is not merely in this prologue, nor in the Gospel to which it forms a fitting introduction, that these didactic statements are found. The full emphasis of John's witness to the twofold nature of the Lord is brought out, indeed, only by combining what he says in the Gospel and in the Epistles. 'In the Gospel,' remarks Westcott (on Jn. xx. 31), 'the evangelist shows step by step that the historic Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God (opposed to mere 'flesh'); in the Epistle he re-affirms that the Christ, the Son of God, was true man (opposed to mere 'spirit'; I Jn. iv. 2) .' What John is concerned to show throughout is that it was 'the true God' (I Jn. v. 20) who was 'made flesh' (Jn. i. 14); and that this 'only God' (Jn. i. 18, Revised Version, margin 'God only begotten') has truly come in . . . flesh' (I Jn. iv. 2). In all the universe there is no other being of whom it can be said that He is God come in flesh (cf. II Jn. ver. 7, He that 'cometh in the flesh,' whose characteristic this is). And of all the marvels which have ever occurred in the marvelous history of the universe, this is the greatest—that 'what was from the beginning' (I Jn. ii. 13, 14) has been heard and gazed upon, seen and handled by men (I Jn. i. 1).

From the point of view from which we now approach it, the prologue to the Gospel of John may be said to fall into three parts. In the first of these, the nature of the Being who became incarnate in the person we know as Jesus Christ is described; in the second, the general nature of the act we call the incarnation; and in the third, the nature of the incarnated person. John here calls the person who became incarnate by a name peculiar to himself in the New Testament—the 'Logos' or 'Word.' According to the predicates which he here applies to Him, he can mean by the 'Word' nothing else but God Himself, 'considered in His creative, operative, self-revealing, and communicating character,' the sum total of what is Divine (C. F. Schmid). In three crisp sentences he declares at the outset His eternal subsistence, His eternal intercommunion with God, His eternal identity with God: 'In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God' (Jn. i. 1). 'In the beginning,' at that point of time when things first began to be (Gen. i. 1), the Word already 'was.' He antedates the beginning of all things. And He not merely antedates them, but it is immediately added that He is Himself the creator of all that is: 'All things were made by him, and apart from him was not made one thing that hath been made' (i. 3). Thus He is taken out of the category of creatures altogether. Accordingly, what is said of Him is not that He was the first of existences to come into being—that 'in the beginning He already had come into being'—but that 'in the beginning, when things began to come into being, He already was.' It is express eternity of being that is asserted: 'the imperfect tense of the original suggests in this relation, as far as human language can do so, the notion of absolute, supra-temporal existence' (Westcott). This, His eternal subsistence, was not, however, in isolation: 'And the Word was with God.' The language is pregnant. It is not merely coexistence with God that is asserted, as of two beings standing side by side, united in a local relation, or even in a common conception. What is suggested is an active relation of intercourse. The distinct personality of the Word is therefore not obscurely intimated. From all eternity the Word has been with God as a fellow: He who in the very beginning already 'was,' 'was' also in communion with God. Though He was thus in some sense a second along with God, He was nevertheless not a separate being from God: 'And the Word was —still the eternal In some sense distinguishable from God, He was in an equally true sense identical with God. There is but one eternal God; this eternal God, the Word is; in whatever sense we may distinguish Him from the God whom He is 'with,' He is yet not another than this God, but Himself is this God. The predicate 'God' occupies the position of emphasis in this great declaration, and is so placed in the sentence as to be thrown up in sharp contrast with the phrase 'with God,' as if to prevent inadequate inferences as to the nature of the Word being drawn even momentarily from that phrase. John would have us realize that what the Word was in eternity was not merely God's coeternal fellow, but the eternal God's self.

Now, John tells us that it was this Word, eternal in His subsistence, God's eternal fellow, the eternal God's self, that, as 'come in the flesh,' was Jesus Christ (I Jn. iv. 2). 'And the Word became flesh' (Jn. i. 14), he says. The terms he employs here are not terms of substance, but of personality. The meaning is not that the substance of God was transmuted into that substance which we call 'flesh.' 'The Word' is a personal name of the eternal God; 'flesh' is an appropriate designation of humanity in its entirety, with the implications of dependence and weakness. The meaning, then, is simply that He who had just been described as the eternal God became, by a voluntary act in time, a man. The exact nature of the act by which He 'became' man lies outside the statement; it was matter of common knowledge between the writer and the reader. The language employed intimates merely that it was a definite act, and that it involved a change in the life-history of the eternal God, here designated 'the Word.' The whole emphasis falls on the nature of this change in His life-history. He became flesh. That is to say, He entered upon a mode of existence in which the experiences that belong to human beings would also be His. The dependence, the weakness, which constitute the very idea of flesh, in contrast with God, would now enter into His personal experience. And it is precisely because these are the connotations of the term 'flesh' that John chooses that term here, instead of the more simply denotative term 'man.' What he means is merely that the eternal God became man. But he elects to say this in the language which throws best up to view what it is to become man. The contrast between the Word as the eternal God and the human nature which He assumed as flesh, is the hinge of the statement. Had the evangelist said (as he does in I Jn. iv. 2) that the Word came in flesh,' it would have been the continuity through the change which would have been most emphasized. When he says rather that the Word became flesh, while the continuity of the personal subject is, of course, intimated, it is the reality and the completeness of the humanity assumed which is made most prominent.

That in becoming flesh the Word did not cease to be what He was before entering upon this new sphere of experiences, the evangelist does not leave, however, to mere suggestion. The glory of the Word was so far from quenched, in his view, by His becoming flesh, that he gives us at once to understand that it was rather as 'trailing clouds of glory' that He came. 'And the Word became flesh,' he says, and immediately adds: 'and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth' (i. 14). The language is colored by reminiscences from the Tabernacle, in which the Glory of God, the Shekinah, dwelt. The flesh of Our Lord became, on its assumption by the Word, the Temple of God on earth (cf. Jn. ii. 19), and the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. John tells us expressly that this glory was visible, that it was precisely what was appropriate to the Son of God as such. 'And we beheld his glory,' he says; not divined it, or inferred it, but perceived it. It was open to sight, and the actual object of observation. Jesus Christ was obviously more than man; He was obviously God. His actually observed glory, John tells us further, was a 'glory as of the only begotten from the Father.' It was unique; nothing like it was ever seen in another, And its uniqueness consisted precisely in its consonance with what the unique Son of God, sent forth from the Father, would naturally have; men recognized and could not but recognize in Jesus Christ the unique Son of God. When this unique Son of God is further described as 'full of grace and truth,' the elements of His manifested glory are not to be supposed to be exhausted by this description (cf. ii. 11). Certain items of it only are singled out for particular mention. The visible glory of the incarnated Word was such a glory as the unique Son of God, sent forth from the Father, who was full of grace and truth, would naturally manifest.

That nothing should be lacking to the declaration of the continuity of all that belongs to the Word as such into this new sphere of existence, and its full manifestation through the veil of His flesh, John adds at the close of his exposition the remarkable sentence: 'As for God, no one has even yet seen him; God only begotten, who is in the bosom of the Father—He hath declared him' (i. 18 in.). It is the incarnate Word which is here called 'only begotten God.' The absence of the article with this designation is doubtless due to its parallelism with the word 'God' which stands at the head of the corresponding clause. The effect of its absence is to throw up into emphasis the quality rather than the mere individuality of the person so designated. The adjective 'only begotten' conveys the idea, not of derivation and subordination, but of uniqueness and consubstantiality: Jesus is all that God is, and He alone is this. Of this 'only begotten God' it is now declared that He 'is'—not 'was,' the state is not one which has been left behind at the incarnation, but one which continues uninterrupted and unmodified— 'into '—not merely 'in'—'the bosom of the Father'—that is to say, He continues in the most intimate and complete communion with the Father. Though now incarnate, He is still 'with God' in the full sense of the external relation intimated in i. 1. This being true, He has much more than seen God, and is fully able to 'interpret' God to men. Though no one has ever yet seen God, yet he who has seen Jesus Christ, 'God only begotten,' has seen the Father (cf. xiv. 9; xii. 45). In this remarkable sentence there is asserted in the most direct manner the full Deity of the incarnate Word, and the continuity of His life as such in His incarnate life; thus He is fitted to be the absolute revelation of God to man.

This condensed statement of the whole doctrine of the in-carnation is only the prologue to a historical treatise. The historical treatise which it introduces, naturally, is written from the point of view of its prologue. Its object is to present Jesus Christ in His historical manifestation, as obviously the Son of God in flesh. 'These are written,' the Gospel testifies, 'that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God' (xx. 31); that Jesus who came as a man (i. 30) was thoroughly known in His human origin (vii. 27), confessed Himself man (viii. 40), and died as a man dies (xix. 5), was, nevertheless, not only the Messiah, the Sent of God, the fulfiller of all the Divine promises of redemption, but also the very Son of God, that God only begotten, who, abiding in the bosom of the Father, is His sole adequate interpreter. From the beginning of the Gospel onward, this purpose is pursued: Jesus is pictured as ever, while truly man, yet manifesting Himself as equally truly God, until the veil which covered the eyes of His followers was wholly lifted, and He is greeted as both Lord and God (xx. 28). But though it is the prime purpose of this Gospel to exhibit the Divinity of the man Jesus, no obscuration of His manhood is involved. It is the Deity of the man Jesus which is insisted on, but the true manhood of Jesus is as prominent in the representation as in any other portion of the New Testament. Nor is any effacement of the humiliation of His earthly life involved. For the Son of man to come from heaven was a descent (iii. 13), and the mission which He came to fulfil was a mission of contest and conflict, of suffering and death. He brought His glory with Him (i. 14), but the glory that was His on earth (xvii. 22) was not all the glory which He had had with the Father before the world was, and to which, after His work was done, He should return (xvii. 5). Here too the glory of the celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another. In any event, John has no difficulty in presenting the life of Our Lord on earth as the life of God in flesh, and in insisting at once on the glory that belongs to Him as God and on the humiliation which is brought to Him by the flesh. It is distinctly a duplex life which he ascribes to Christ, and he attributes to Him without embarrassment all the powers and modes of activity appropriate on the one hand to Deity and on the other to sinless (Jn. vii. 46; cf. xiv. 30; I Jn. iii. 5) human nature. In a true sense his portrait of Our Lord is a dramatization of the God-man which he presents to our contemplation in his prologue.

V. TEACHING OF THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

The same may be said of the other Gospels. They are all dramatizations of the God-man set forth in theoretical exposition in the prologue to John's Gospel. The Gospel of Luke, written by a known companion of Paul, gives us in a living narrative the same Jesus who is presupposed in all Paul's allusions to Him. That of Mark, who was also a companion of Paul, as also of Peter, is, as truly as the Gospel of John itself, a presentation of facts in the life of Jesus with a view to making it plain that this was the life of no mere man, human as it was, but of the Son of God Himself. Matthew's Gospel differs from its fellows mainly in the greater richness of Jesus' own testimony to His Deity which it records. What is characteristic of all three is the inextricable interlacing in their narratives of the human and Divine traits which alike marked the life they are depicting. It is possible, by neglecting one series of their representations and attending only to the other, to sift out from them at will the portrait of either a purely Divine or a purely human Jesus. It is impossible to derive from them the portrait of any other than a Divine-human Jesus if we surrender ourselves to their guidance and take off of their pages the portrait they have endeavored to draw. As in their narratives they cursorily suggest now the fulness of His Deity and now the completeness of His humanity and everywhere the unity of His person, they present as real and as forcible a testimony to the constitution of Our Lord's person as uniting in one personal life a truly Divine and a truly human nature, as if they announced this fact in analytical statement. Only on the assumption of this conception of Our Lord's person as underlying and determining their presentation, can unity be given to their representations; while, on this supposition, all their representations fall into their places as elements in one consistent whole. Within the limits of their common presupposition, each Gospel has no doubt its own peculiarities in the distribution of its emphasis. Mark lays particular stress on the Divine power of the man Jesus, as evidence of His supernatural being; and on the irresistible impression of a veritable Son of God, a Divine being walking the earth as a man, which He made upon all with whom He came into contact. Luke places his Gospel by the side of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the prominence it gives to the human development of the Divine being whose life on earth it is depicting and to the range of temptation to which He was subjected. Matthew's Gospel is notable chiefly for the heights of the Divine self-consciousness which it uncovers in its report of the words of Him whom it represents as nevertheless the Son of David, the Son of Abraham; heights of Divine self-consciousness which fall in nothing short of those attained in the great utterances preserved for us by John. But amid whatever variety there may exist in the aspects on which each lays his particular emphasis, it is the same Jesus Christ which all three bring before us, a Jesus Christ who is at once God and man and one individual person. If that be not recognized, the whole narrative of the Synoptic Gospels is thrown into confusion; their portrait of Christ becomes an insoluble puzzle; and the mass of details which they present of His life-experiences is transmuted into a mere set of crass contradictions.

VI. TEACHING OF JESUS

1. The Johannine Jesus.—The Gospel narratives not only present us, however, with dramatizations of the God-man, according to their authors' conception of His composite person. They preserve for us also a considerable body of the utterances of Jesus Himself, and this enables us to observe the conception of His person which underlay and found expression in Our Lord's own teaching. The discourses of Our Lord which have been selected for record by John have been chosen (among other reasons) expressly for the reason that they bear witness to His essential Deity. They are accordingly peculiarly rich in material for forming a judgment of Our Lord's conception of His higher nature. This conception, it is needless to say, is precisely that which John, taught by it, has announced in the prologue to his Gospel, and has illustrated by his Gospel itself, compacted as it is of these discourses. It will not be necessary to present the evidence for this in its fulness. It will be enough to point to a few characteristic passages, in which Our Lord's conception of His higher nature finds especially clear expression.

That He was of higher than earthly origin and nature, He repeatedly asserts. 'Ye are from beneath,' he says to the Jews (viii. 23), 'I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world' (cf. xvii. 16). Therefore, He taught that He, the Son of Man, had 'descended out of heaven' (iii. 13), where was His true abode. This carried with it, of course, an assertion of preexistence; and this preexistence is explicitly affirmed: 'What then,' He asks, 'if ye should behold the Son of man ascending where he was before?' (vi. 62). It is not merely preexistence, however, but eternal preexistence which He claims for Himself: 'And now, Father,' He prays (xvii. 5), 'glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was' (cf. ver. 24); and again, as the most impressive language possible, He declares (viii. 58 A.V.): 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am,' where He claims for Himself the timeless present of eternity as His mode of existence. In the former of these two last-cited passages, the character of His preexistent life is intimated; in it He shared the Father's glory from all eternity ('before the world was'); He stood by the Father's side as a companion in His glory. He came forth, when He descended to earth, therefore, not from heaven only, but from the very side of God (viii. 42; xvii. 8). Even this, however, does not express the whole truth; He came forth not only from the Father's side where He had shared in the Father's glory; He came forth out of the Father's very being—'I came out from the Father, and am come into the world' (xvi. 28; cf. viii. 42). 'The connection described is internal and essential, and not that of presence or external fellowship' (Westcott). This prepares us for the great assertion: 'I and the Father are one' (x. 30), from which it is a mere corollary that 'He that hath seen me hath seen the Father' (xiv. 9; cf. viii. 19; xii. 45).

In all these declarations the subject of the affirmation is the actual person speaking: it is of Himself who stood before men and spoke to them that Our Lord makes these immense assertions. Accordingly, when He majestically declared, 'I and the Father are' (plurality of persons) 'one' (neuter singular, and accordingly singleness of being), the Jews naturally understood Him to be making Himself, the person then speaking to them, God (x. 33; cf. v. 18; xix. 7). The continued sameness of the person who has been, from all eternity down to this hour, one with God, is therefore fully safeguarded. His earthly life is, however, distinctly represented as a humiliation. Though even on earth He is one with the Father, yet He 'descended' to earth; He had come out from the Father and out of God; a glory had been left behind which was yet to be returned to, and His sojourn on earth was therefore to that extent an obscuration of His proper glory. There was a sense, then, in which, because He had 'descended,' He was no longer equal with the Father. It was in order to justify an assertion of equality with the Father in power (x. 25, 29) that He was led to declare: 'I and my Father are one' (x. 30). But He can also declare 'The Father is greater than I' (xiv. 28). Obviously this means that there was a sense in which He had ceased to be equal with the Father, because of the humiliation of His present condition, and in so far as this humiliation involved entrance into a status lower than that which belonged to Him by nature. Precisely in what this humiliation consisted can be gathered only from the general implication of many statements. In it He was a man a man who hath told you the truth, which I have heard from God' (viii. 40), where the contrast with 'God' throws the assertion of humanity into emphasis (cf. x. 33). The truth of His human nature is, however, everywhere assumed and endlessly illustrated, rather than explicitly asserted. He possessed a human soul (xii. 27) and bodily parts (flesh and blood, vi. 53 if.; hands and side, xx. 27); and was subject alike to physical affections (weariness, iv. 6, and thirst, xix. 28, suffering and death), and to all the common human emotions—not merely the love of compassion (xiii. 34; xiv. 21; xv. 8-13), but the love of simple affection which we pour out on 'friends' (xi. 11; cf. xv. 14, 15), indignation (xi. 33, 38) and joy (xv. 11; xvii. 13). He felt the perturbation produced by strong excitement (xi. 33; xii. 27; xiii. 21), the sympathy with suffering which shows itself in tears (xi. 35), the thankfulness which fills the grateful heart (vi. 11, 23; xi. 41). Only one human characteristic was alien to Him: He was without sin: 'the prince of the world,' He declared, 'hath nothing in me' (xiv. 30; cf. viii. 46). Clearly our Lord, as reported by John, knew Himself to be true God and true man in one indivisible person, the common subject of the qualities which belong to each.

2. The Synoptic Jesus.—(a) Mk. xiii. 32: The same is true of His self-consciousness as revealed in His sayings recorded by the Synoptics. Perhaps no more striking illustration of this could be adduced than the remarkable declaration recorded in Mk. xiii. 82 (cf. Mt. xxiv. 36): 'But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, nor yet the Son, but the Father.' Here Jesus places Himself, in an ascending scale of being, above 'the angels in heaven,' that is to say, the highest of all creatures, significantly marked here as super-mundane. Accordingly, He presents Himself elsewhere as the Lord of the angels, whose requests they obey: 'The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them that do iniquity' (Mt. xiii. 41), 'And he shall send forth his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other' (Mt. xxiv. 31; cf. xiii. 49; xxv. 31; Mk. viii. 38). Thus the 'angels of God' (Lk. xii. 8, 9; xv. 10) Christ designates as His angels, the 'kingdom of God' (Mt. xii. 28; xix. 24; xxi. 31, 43; Mk. and Lk. often) as His Kingdom, the 'elect of God' (Mk. xiii. 20; Lk. xviii. 7; cf. Rom. viii. 33; Gal. iii. 12; Tit. i. 1) as His elect. He is obviously speaking in Mk. xiii. 22 out of a Divine self-consciousness: 'Only a Divine being can be exalted above angels' (B. Weiss). He therefore designates Himself by His Divine name, 'the Son,' that is to say, the unique Son of God (ix. 7; i. 11), to claim to be whom would for a man be blasphemy (Mk. xiv. 61, 64). But though He designates Himself by this Divine name, He is not speaking of what He once was, but of what at the moment of speaking He is: the action of the verb is present, 'knoweth.' He is claiming, in other words, the supreme designation of 'the Son,' with all that is involved in it, for His present self, as He moved among men: He is, not merely was, 'the Son.' Nevertheless, what He affirms of Himself cannot be affirmed of Himself distinctively as 'the Son.' For what He affirms of Himself is ignorance— not even the Son' knows it; and ignorance does not belong to the Divine nature which the term 'the Son' connotes. An extreme appearance of contradiction accordingly arises from the use of this terminology, just as it arises when Paul says that the Jews 'crucified the Lord of glory' (I Cor. ii. 8), or exhorts the Ephesian elders to 'feed the church of God which he purchased with his own blood' (Acts xx. 28 in.); or John Keble praises Our Lord for 'the blood of souls by Thee redeemed.' It was not the Lord of Glory as such who was nailed to the tree, nor have either 'God' or 'souls' blood to shed.

We know how this apparently contradictory mode of speech has arisen in Keble's case. He is speaking of men who are composite beings, consisting of souls and bodies, and these men come to be designated from one element of their composite personalities, though what is affirmed by them belongs rather to the other; we may speak, therefore, of the 'blood of souls' meaning that these 'souls,' while not having blood as such, yet designate persons who have bodies and therefore blood. We know equally how to account for Paul's apparent contradictions. We know that he conceived of Our Lord as a composite person, uniting in Himself a Divine and a human nature. In Paul's view, therefore, though God as such has no blood, yet Jesus Christ who is God has blood because He is also man. He can justly speak, therefore, when speaking of Jesus Christ, of His blood as the blood of God. When precisely the same phenomenon meets us in Our Lord's speech of Himself, we must presume that it is the outgrowth of precisely the same state of things. When He speaks of 'the Son' (who is God) as ignorant, we must understand that He is designating Himself as 'the Son' because of His higher nature, and yet has in mind the ignorance of His lower nature; what He means is that the person properly designated 'the Son' is ignorant, that is to say with respect to the human nature which is as intimate an element of His personality as is His Deity.

When our Lord says, then, that 'the Son knows not,' He becomes as express a witness to the two natures which constitute His person as Paul is when he speaks of the blood of God, or as Keble is a witness to the twofold constitution of a human being when he speaks of souls shedding blood. In this short sentence, thus, Our Lord bears witness to His Divine nature with its supremacy above all creatures, to His human nature with its creaturely limitations, and to the unity of the subject possessed of these two natures.

(b) Other passages: Son of Man and Son of God: All these elements of His personality find severally repeated assertions in other utterances of Our Lord recorded in the Synoptics. There is no need to insist here on the elevation of Himself above the kings and prophets of the Old Covenant (Mt. xii. 41 if.), above the temple itself (Mt. xii. 6), and the ordinances of the Divine Law (Mt. xii. 8); or on His accent of authority in both His teaching and action, His great 'I say unto you (Mt. v. 21, 22), 'I will; be cleansed' (Mk. i. 41; ii. 5; Lk. vii. 14); or on His separation of Himself from men in His relation to God, never including them with Himself in an 'Our Father,' but consistently speaking distinctively of 'my Father' (e.g., Lk. xxiv. 49) and 'your Father' (e.g., Mt. v. 16); or on His intimation that He is not merely David's Son but David's Lord, and that a Lord sitting on the right hand of God (Mt. xxii. 44); or on His parabolic discrimination of Himself a Son and Heir from all 'servants' (Mt. xxi. 33 if.); or even on His ascription to Himself of the purely Divine functions of the forgiveness of sins (Mk. ii. and judgment of the world (Mt. xxv. 31), or of the purely Divine powers of reading the heart (Mk. ii. 8; Lk. ix. 47), omnipotence (Mt. xxiv. 30; Mk. xiv. 62) and omnipresence (Mt. xviii 20; xxviii. 10). These things illustrate His constant assumption of the possession of Divine dignity and attributes; the claim itself is more directly made in the two great designations which He currently gave Himself, the Son of Man and the Son of God. The former of these is His favorite self-designation. Derived from Dan. vii. 13, 14, it intimates on every occasion of its employment Our Lord's consciousness of being a super-mundane being, who has entered into a sphere of earthly life on a high mission, on the accomplishment of which

He is to return to His heavenly sphere, whence He shall in due season come back to earth, now, however, in His proper majesty, to gather up the fruits of His work and consummate all things. It is a designation, thus, which implies at once a heavenly preexistence, a present humiliation, and a future glory; and He proclaims Himself in this future glory no less than the universal King seated on the throne of judgment for quick and dead (Mk. viii. 31; Mt. xxv. 31). The implication of Deity imbedded in the designation, Son of Man, is perhaps more plainly spoken out in the companion designation, Son of God, which Our Lord not only accepts at the hands of others, accepting with it the implication of blasphemy in permitting its application to Himself (Mt. xxvi. 63, 65; Mk. xiv. 61, 64; Lk. xxii. 29, 30), but persistently claims for Himself both, in His constant designation of God as His Father in a distinctive sense, and in His less frequent but more pregnant designation of Himself as, by way of eminence, 'the Son.' That His consciousness of the peculiar relation to God expressed by this designation was not an attainment of His mature spiritual development, but was part of His most intimate consciousness from the beginning, is suggested by the sole glimpse which is given us into His mind as a child (Lk. ii. 49). The high significance which the designation bore to Him is revealed to us in two remarkable utterances preserved, the one by both Matthew (xi. 27 if.) and Luke (x. 22 if.), and the other by Matthew (xxviii. 19).

(c) Mt. xi. 27; xxviii. 19. In the former of these utterances, Our Lord, speaking in the most solemn manner, not only presents Himself, as the Son, as the sole source of knowledge of God and of blessedness for men, but places Himself in a position, not of equality merely, but of absolute reciprocity and interpretation of knowledge with the Father. 'No one,' He says, 'knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son . . .' varied in Luke so as to read: 'No one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son . . .' as if the being of the Son were so immense that only God could know it thoroughly; and the knowledge of the Son was so unlimited that He could know God to perfection. The peculiarly pregnant employment here of the terms 'Son' and 'Father' over against one another is explained to us in the other utterance (Mt. xxviii. 19). It is the resurrected Lord's commission to His disciples. Claiming for Himself all authority in heaven and on earth—which implies the possession of omnipotence—and promising to be with His followers 'alway, even to the end of the world'— which adds the implications of omnipresence and omniscience—He commands them to baptize their converts 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.' The precise form of the formula must be carefully observed. It does not read: 'In the names' (plural)—as if there were three beings enumerated, each with its distinguishing name. Nor yet: 'In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,' as if there were one person, going by a threefold name. It reads: 'In the name [singular] of the Father, and of the [article repeated] Son, and of the [article repeated] Holy Ghost,' carefully distinguishing three persons, though uniting them all under one name. The name of God was to the Jews Jehovah, and to name the name of Jehovah upon them was to make them His. What Jesus did in this great injunction was to command His followers to name the name of God upon their converts, and to announce the name of God which is to be named on their converts in the threefold enumeration of 'the Father' and 'the Son' and 'the Holy Ghost.' As it is unquestionable that He intended Himself by 'the Son,' He here places Himself by the side of the Father and the Spirit, as together with them constituting the one God. It is, of course, the Trinity which He is describing; and that is as much as to say that He announces Himself as one of the persons of the Trinity. This is what Jesus, as reported by the Synoptics, understood Himself to be.

In announcing Himself to be God, however, Jesus does not deny that He is man also. If all His speech of Himself rests on His consciousness of a Divine nature, no less does all His speech manifest His consciousness of a human nature. He easily identifies Himself with men (Mt. iv. 4; Lk. iv. 4), and receives without protest the imputation of humanity (Mt. xi. 19; Lk. vii. 34). He speaks familiarly of His body (Mt. xxvi. 12, 26; Mk. xiv. 8; xiv. 22; Lk. xxii. 19), and of His bodily parts—His feet and hands (Lk. xxiv. 39), His head and feet (Lk. vii. 44-46), His flesh and bones (Lk. xxiv. 39), His blood (Mt. xxvi. 28; Mk. xiv. 24; Lk. xxii. 20). We chance to be given indeed a very express affirmation on His part of the reality of His bodily nature; when His disciples were terrified at His appearing before them after His resurrection, supposing Him to be a spirit, He reassures them with the direct declaration: 'See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having' (Lk. xxiv. 39). His testimony to His human soul is just as express: 'My soul,' says He, 'is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death' (Mt. xxvi. 38; Mk. xiv. 34). He speaks of the human dread with which He looked forward to His approaching death (Lk. xii. 50), and expresses in a poignant cry His sense of desolation on the cross (Mt. xxvii. 46; Mk. xv. 34). He speaks also of His pity for the weary and hungering people (Mt. xv. 32; Mk. viii. 2), and of a strong human desire which He felt (Lk. xxii. 15). Nothing that is human is alien to Him except sin. He never ascribes imperfection to Himself and never betrays consciousness of sin. He recognizes the evil of those about Him (Lk. xi. 13; Mt. vu. 11; xii. 34, 39; Lk. xi. 29), but never identifies Himself with it. It is those who do the will of God with whom He feels kinship (Mt. xii. 50), and He offers Himself to the morally sick as a physician (Mt. ix. 12). He proposes Himself as an example of the highest virtues (Mt. xi. 28 if.) and pronounces him blessed who shall find no occasion of stumbling in Him (Mt. xi. 6).

These manifestations of a human and Divine consciousness simply stand side by side in the records of Our Lord's self-expression. Neither is suppressed or even qualified by the other. If we attend only to the one class we might suppose Him to proclaim Himself wholly Divine; if only to the other we might equally easily imagine Him to be representing Himself as wholly human. With both together before us we perceive Him alternately speaking out of a Divine and out of a human consciousness; manifesting Himself as all that God is and as all that man is; yet with the most marked unity of consciousness. He, the one Jesus Christ, was to His own apprehension true God and complete man in a unitary personal life.

VII. THE TWO NATURES EVERYWHERE PRESUPPOSED

There underlies, thus, the entire literature of the New Testament a single, unvarying conception of the constitution of Our Lord's person. From Matthew where He is presented as one of the persons of the Holy Trinity (xxviii. 19)—or if we prefer the chronological order of books, from the Epistle of James where He is spoken of as the Glory of God, the Shekinah (ii. I)—to the Apocalypse where He is represented as declaring that He is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End (i. 8, 17; xxii. 13), He is consistently thought of as in His fundamental being just God. At the same time from the Synoptic Gospels, in which He is dramatized as a man walking among men, His human descent carefully recorded, and His sense of dependence on God so emphasized that prayer becomes almost His most characteristic action, to the Epistles of John in which it is made the note of a Christian that He confesses that Jesus Christ has come in flesh (I Jn. iv. 2) and the Apocalypse in which His birth in the tribe of Judah and the house of David (v. 5; xxii. 16), His exemplary life of conflict and victory (iii. 21), His death on the cross (xi. are noted, He is equally consistently thought of as true man. Nevertheless, from the beginning to the end of the whole series of books, while first one and then the other of His two natures comes into repeated prominence, there is never a question of conflict between the two, never any confusion in their relations, never any schism in His unitary personal action; but He is obviously considered and presented as one, composite indeed, but undivided personality. In this state of the case not only may evidence of the constitution of Our Lord's person properly be drawn indifferently from every part of the New Testament, and passage justly be cited to support and explain passage without reference to the portion of the New Testament in which it is found, but we should be without justification if we did not employ this common presupposition of the whole body of this literature to illustrate and explain the varied representations which meet us cursorily in its pages, representations which might easily be made to appear mutually contradictory were they not brought into harmony by their relation as natural component parts of this one unitary conception which underlies and gives consistency to them all. There can scarcely be imagined a better proof of the truth of a doctrine than its power completely to harmonize a multitude of statements which without it would present to our view only a mass of confused inconsistencies. A key which perfectly fits a lock of very complicated wards can scarcely fail to be the true key.

VIII. FORMULATION OF THE DOCTRINE

Meanwhile the wards remain complicated. Even in the case of our own composite structure, of soul and body, familiar as we are with it from our daily experience, the mutual relations of elements so disparate in a single personality remain an unplumbed mystery, and give rise to paradoxical modes of speech, which would be misleading, were not their source in our duplex nature well understood. We may read, in careful writers, of souls being left dead on battlefields, and of everybody's immortality. The mysteries of the relations in which the constituent elements in the more complex personality of Our Lord stand to one another are immeasurably greater than in our simpler case. We can never hope to comprehend how the infinite God and a finite humanity can be united in a single person; and it is very easy to go fatally astray in attempting to explain the interactions in the unitary person of natures so diverse from one another. It is not surprising, therefore, that so soon as serious efforts began to be made to give systematic explanations of the Biblical facts as to Our Lord's person, many one-sided and incomplete statements were formulated which required correction and complementing before at length a mode of statement was devised which did full justice to the Biblical data. It was accordingly only after more than a century of controversy, during which nearly every conceivable method of construing and misconstruing the Biblical facts had been proposed and tested, that a formula was framed which successfully guarded the essential data supplied by the Scriptures from destructive misconception. This formula, put together by the Council of Chalcedon, 451 A.D., declares it to have always been the doctrine of the church, derived from the Scriptures and Our Lord Himself, that Our Lord Jesus Christ is 'truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures unconfusedily, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, Only-begotten, God, the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.' There is nothing here but a careful statement in systematic form of the pure teaching of the Scriptures; and therefore this statement has stood ever since as the norm of thought and teaching as to the person of the Lord. As such, it has been incorporated, in one form or another, into the creeds of all the great branches of the church; it underlies and gives their form to all the allusions to Christ in the great mass of preaching and song which has accumulated during the centuries; and it has supplied the background of the devotions of the untold multitudes who through the Christian ages have been worshippers of Christ.

The Christ that Paul Preached

"THE monumental Introduction of the Epistle to the Romans" - it is thus that W. Bousset speaks of the seven opening verses of the Epistle - is, from the formal point of view, merely the Address of the Epistle. In primary purpose and fundamental structure it does not differ from the Addresses of Paul's other Epistles. But even in the Addresses of his Epistles Paul does not confine himself to the simple repetition of a formula. Here too he writes at his ease and shows himself very much the master of his form.

It is Paul's custom to expand one or another of the essential elements of the Address of his Epistles as circumstances suggested, and thus to impart to it in each several instance a specific character. The Address of the Epistle to the Romans is the extreme example of this expansion. Paul is approaching in it a church which he had not visited, and to which he apparently felt himself somewhat of a stranger. He naturally begins with some words adapted to justify his writing to it, especially as an authoritative teacher of Christian truth. In doing this he is led to describe briefly the Gospel which had been committed to him, and that particularly with regard to its contents.

There is very strikingly illustrated here a peculiarity of Paul's style, which has been called "going off at a word." His particular purpose is to represent himself as one authoritatively appointed to teach the Gospel of God. But he is more interested in the Gospel than he is in himself; and he no sooner mentions the Gospel than off he goes on a tangent to describe it. In describing it, he naturally tells us particularly what its contents are. Its contents, however, were for him summed up in Christ. No sooner does he mention Christ than off he goes again on a tangent to describe Christ. Thus it comes about that this passage, formally only the Address of the Epistle, becomes actually a great Christological deliverance, one of the chief sources of our knowledge of Paul's conception of Christ. It presents itself to our view like one of those nests of Chinese boxes; the outer encasement is the Address of the Epistle; within that fits neatly Paul's justification of his addressing the Romans as an authoritative teacher of the Gospel; within that a description of the Gospel committed to him; and within that a great declaration of who and what Jesus Christ is, as the contents of this Gospel.

The manner in which Paul approaches this great declaration concerning Christ lends it a very special interest. What we are given is not merely how Paul thought of Christ, but how Paul preached Christ. It is the content of "the Gospel of God," the Gospel to which he as "a called apostle" had been "separated," which he outlines in these pregnant words. This is how Paul preached Christ to the faith of men as he went up and down the world "serving God in his spirit in the Gospel of His Son." We have no abstract theologoumena here, categories of speculative thought appropriate only to the closet. We have the great facts about Jesus which made the Gospel that Paul preached the power of God unto salvation to every one that believed. Nowhere else do we get a more direct description of specifically the Christ that Paul preached.

The direct description of the Christ that Paul preached is given us, of course, in the third and fourth verses. But the wider setting in which these verses are embedded cannot be neglected in seeking to get at their significance. In this wider setting the particular aspect in which Christ is presented is that of "Lord." It is as "Lord" that Paul is thinking of Jesus when he describes himself in the opening words of the Address - in the very first item of his commendation of himself to the Romans - as "the slave of Christ Jesus." "Slave" is the correlate of "Lord," and the relation must be taken at its height. When Paul calls himself the slave of Christ Jesus, he is calling Christ Jesus his Lord in the most complete sense which can be ascribed to that word (cf. Rom. i. 1, Col. iii. 4). He is declaring that he recognises in Christ Jesus one over against whom he has no rights, whose property he is, body and soul, to be disposed of as He will. This is not because he abases himself. It is because he exalts Christ. It is because Christ is thought of by him as one whose right it is to rule, and to rule with no limit to His right.

How Paul thought of Christ as Lord comes out, however, with most startling clearness in the closing words of the Address. There he couples "the Lord Jesus Christ" with "God our Father" as the common source from which he seeks in prayer the divine gifts of grace and peace for the Romans. We must renounce, enervating glossing here too. Paul is not thinking of the Lord Jesus Christ as only the channel through which grace and peace come from God our Father to men; nor is he thinking of the Lord Jesus Christ as only the channel through which his prayer finds its way to God our Father. His prayer for these blessings for the Romans is offered up to God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ together, as the conjoint object addressed in his petition. So far as this Bousset's remark is just: "Prayer to God in Christ is for Pauline Christianity, too, a false formula; adoration of the Kyrios stands in the Pauline communities side by side with adoration of God in unreconciled reality."

Only, we must go further. Paul couples God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ in his prayer on a complete equality. They are, for the purposes of the prayer, for the purposes of the bestowment of grace and peace, one to him. Christ is so highly exalted in his sight that, looking up to Him through the immense stretches which separate Him from the plane of human life, "the forms of God and Christ," as Bousset puts it, "are brought to the eye of faith into close conjunction." He should have said that they completely coalesce. It is only half the truth - though it is half the truth - to say that, with Paul, "the object of religious faith, as of religious worship, presents itself in a singular, thoroughgoing dualism." The other half of the truth is that this dualism resolves itself into a complete unity. The two, God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, are steadily recognized as two, and are statedly spoken of by the distinguishing designations of "God" and "Lord." But they are equally steadily envisaged as one, and are statedly combined as the common object of every religious aspiration and the common source of every spiritual blessing. It is no accident that they are united in our present passage under the government of the single preposition, "from," - "Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." This is normal with Paul. God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ are not to him two objects of worship, two sources of blessing, but one object of worship, one source of blessing. Does he not tell us plainly that we who have one God the Father and one Lord Jesus Christ yet know perfectly well that there is no God but one (I Cor. viii. 4, 6)?

Paul is writing the Address of his Epistle to the Romans, then, with his mind fixed on the divine dignity of Christ. It is this divine Christ who, he must be understood to be telling his readers, constitutes the substance of his Gospel-proclamation. He does not leave us, however, merely to infer this. He openly declares it. The Gospel he preaches, he says, concerns precisely "the Son of God . . . Jesus Christ our Lord." He expressly says, then, that he presents Christ in his preaching as "our Lord." It was the divine Christ that he preached, the Christ that the eye of faith could not distinguish from God, who was addressed in common with God in prayer, and was looked to in common with God as the source of all spiritual blessings. Paul does not speak of Christ here, however, merely as "our Lord." He gives Him the two designations: " the Son of God . . . Jesus Christ our Lord." The second designation obviously is explanatory of the first. Not as if it were the more current or the more intelligible designation. It may, or it may not, have been both the one and the other; but that is not the point here. The point here is that it is the more intimate, the more appealing designation. It is the designation which tells what Christ is to us. He is our Lord, He to whom we go in prayer, He to whom we look for blessings, He to whom all our religious emotions turn, on whom all our hopes are set - for this life and for that to come. Paul tells the Romans that this is the Christ that he preaches, their and his Lord whom both they and he reverence and worship and love and trust in. This is, of course, what he mainly wishes to say to them; and it is up to this that all else that he says of the Christ that he preaches leads.

The other designation - "the Son of God" - which Paul prefixes to this in his fundamental declaration concerning the Christ that he preached, supplies the basis for this. It does not tell us what Christ is to us, but what Christ is in Himself. In Himself He is the Son of God; and it is only because He is the Son of God in Himself, that He can be and is our Lord. The Lordship of Christ is rooted by Paul, in other words, not in any adventitious circumstances connected with His historical manifestation; not in any powers or dignities conferred on Him or acquired by Him; but fundamentally in His metaphysical nature. The designation "Son of God" is a metaphysical designation and tells us what He is in His being of being. And what it tells us that Christ is in His being of being is that He is just what God is. It is undeniable - and Bousset, for example, does not deny it, - that, from the earliest days of Christianity on, (in Bousset's words) "Son of God was equivalent simply to equal with God" (Mark xiv. 61-63; John x. 31-39).

That Paul meant scarcely so much as this, Bousset to be sure would fain have us believe. He does not dream, of course, of supposing Paul to mean nothing more than that Jesus had been elevated into the relation of Sonship to God because of His moral uniqueness, or of His community of will with God. He is compelled to allow that " the Son of God appears in Paul as a supramundane Being standing in close metaphysical relation with God." But he would have us understand that, however close He stands to God, He is not, in Paul's view, quite equal with God. Paul, he suggests, has seized on this term to help him through the frightful problem of conceiving of this second Divine Being consistently with his monotheism. Christ is not quite God to him, but only the Son of God. Of such refinements, however, Paul knows nothing. With him too the maxim rules that whatever the father is, that the son is also: every father begets his son in his own likeness. The Son of God is necessarily to him just God, and he does not scruple to declare this Son of God all that God is (Phil. ii. 6; Col. ii. 9) and even to give him the supreme name of "God over all" (Rom. ix. 5).

This is fundamentally, then, how Paul preached Christ - as the Son of God in this supereminent sense, and therefore our divine Lord on whom we absolutely depend and to whom we owe absolute obedience. But this was not all that he was accustomed to preach concerning Christ. Paul preached the historical Jesus as well as the eternal Son of God. And between these two designations - Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ - he inserts two clauses which tell us how he preached the historical Jesus. All that he taught about Christ was thrown up against the background of His deity: He is the Son of God, our Lord. But who is this that is thus so fervently declared to be the Son of God and our Lord? It is in the two clauses which are now to occupy our attention that Paul tells us.

If we reduce what he tells us to its lowest terms it amounts just to this: Paul preached the historical Christ as the promised Messiah and as the very Son of God. But he declares Christ to be the promised Messiah and the very Son of God in language so pregnant, so packed with implications, as to carry us into the heart of the great problem of the two-natured person of Christ. The exact terms in which he describes Christ as the promised Messiah and the very Son of God are these: "Who became of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was marked out as the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead." This in brief is the account which Paul gives of the historical Christ whom he preached.

Of course there is a temporal succession suggested in the declarations of the two clauses. They so far give us not only a description of the historical Christ, but the life-history of the Christ that Paul preached. Jesus Christ became of the seed of David at His birth and by His birth. He was marked out as the Son of God in power only at His resurrection and by His resurrection. But it was not to indicate this temporal succession that Paul sets the two declarations side by side. It emerges merely as the incidental, or we may say even the accidental, result of their collocation. The relation in which Paul sets the two declarations to one another is a logical rather than a temporal one: it is the relation of climax. His purpose is to exalt Jesus Christ. He wishes to say the great things about Him. And the two greatest things he has to say about Him in His historical manifestation are these - that He became of the seed of David according to the flesh, that He was marked out as the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead.

Both of these declarations, we say, are made for the purpose of extolling Christ: the former just as truly as the latter. That Christ came as the Messiah belongs to His glory: and the particular terms in which His Messiahship is intimated are chosen in order to enhance His glory. The word "came," "became" is correlated with the "promised afore" of the preceding verse. This is He, Paul says, whom all the prophets did before signify, and who at length came - even as they signified - of the seed of David. There is doubtless an intimation of the preexistence of Christ here also, as J. B. Lightfoot properly instructs us: He who was always the Son of God now "became" of the seed of David. But this lies somewhat apart from the main current of thought. The heart of the declaration resides in the great words, "Of the seed of David." For these are great words. In declaring the Messiahship of Jesus Paul adduces His royal dignity. And he adduces it because he is thinking of the majesty of the Messiahship. We must beware, then, of reading this clause depreciatingly, as if Paul were making a concession in it: "He came, no doubt, . . . He came, indeed, . . . of the seed of David, but . . ." Paul never for an instant thought of the Messiahship of Jesus as a thing to be apologised for. The relation of the second clause to the first is not that of opposition, but of climax; and it contains only so much of contrast as is intrinsic in a climax. The connection would be better expressed by an "and" than by a "but"; or, if by a "but," not by an "indeed . . . but," but by a "not only . . . but." Even the Messiahship, inexpressibly glorious as it is, does not exhaust the glory of Christ. He had a glory greater than even this. This was but the beginning of His glory. But it was the beginning of His glory. He came into the world as the promised Messiah, and He went out of the world as the demonstrated Son of God. In these two things is summed up the majesty of His historical manifestation.

It is not intended to say that when He went out of the world, He left His Messiahship behind Him. The relation of the second clause to the first is not that of supersession but that of superposition. Paul passes from one glory to another, but he is as far as possible from suggesting that the one glory extinguished the other. The resurrection of Christ had no tendency to abolish His Messiahship, and the exalted Christ remains "of the seed of David." There is no reason to doubt that Paul would have exhorted his readers when he wrote these words with all the fervour with which he did later to "remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, of the seed of David" (II Tim. ii. 8). "According to my Gospel," he adds there, as an intimation that it was as "of the seed of David" that he was accustomed to preach Jesus Christ, whether as on earth as here, or as in heaven as there. It is the exalted Jesus that proclaims Himself in the Apocalypse "the root and the offspring of David" (Rev. xxii. 16, v. 5), and in whose hands "the key of David" is found (iii. 7).

And as it is not intimated that Christ ceased to be "of the seed of David" when He rose from the dead, neither is it intimated that He then first became the Son of God. He was already the Son of God when and before He became of the seed of David: and He did not cease to be the Son of God on and by becoming of the seed of David. It was rather just because He was the Son of God that He became of the seed of David, to become which, in the great sense of the prophetic announcements and of His own accomplishment, He was qualified only by being the Son of God. Therefore Paul does not say He was made the Son of God by the resurrection of the dead. He says he was defined, marked out, as the Son of God by the resurrection of the dead. His resurrection from the dead was well adapted to mark Him out as the Son of God: scarcely to make Him the Son of God. Consider but what the Son of God in Paul's usage means; and precisely what the resurrection was and did. It was a thing which was quite appropriate to happen to the Son of God; and, happening, could bear strong witness to Him as such: but how could it make one the Son of God?

We might possibly say, no doubt, with a tolerable meaning, that Christ was installed, even constituted, "Son of God in power" by the resurrection of the dead - if we could see our way to construe the words "in power" thus directly with "the Son of God." That too would imply that He was already the Son of God before He rose from the dead, - only then in weakness; what He had been all along in weakness He now was constituted in power. This construction, however, though not impossible, is hardly natural. And it imposes a sense on the preceding clause of which it itself gives no suggestion, and which it is reluctant to receive. To say, "of the seed of David" is not to say weakness; it is to say majesty. It is quite certain, indeed, that the assertion "who was made of the seed of David" cannot be read concessively, preparing the way for the celebration of Christ's glory in the succeeding clause. It stands rather in parallelism with the clause that follows it, asserting with it the supreme glory of Christ.

In any case the two clauses do not express two essentially different modes of being through which Christ successively passed. We could think at most only of two successive stages of manifestation of the Son of God. At most we could see in it a declaration that He who always was and continues always to be the Son of God was manifested to men first as the Son of David, and then, after His resurrection, as also the exalted Lord. He always was in the essence of His being the Son of God; this Son of God became of the seed of David and was installed as - what He always was - the Son of God, though now in His proper power, by the resurrection of the dead. It is assuredly wrong, however, to press even so far the idea of temporal succession. Temporal succession was not what it was in Paul's mind to emphasize, and is not the ruling idea of his assertion. The ruling idea of his assertion is the celebration of the glory of Christ. We think of temporal succession only because of the mention of the resurrection, which, in point of fact, cuts our Lord's life-manifestation into two sections. But Paul is not adducing the resurrection because it cuts our Lord's life-manifestation into two sections; but because of the demonstration it brought of the dignity of His person. It is quite indifferent to his declaration when the resurrection took place. He is not adducing it as the producing cause of a change in our Lord's mode of being. In point of fact it did not produce a change in our Lord's mode of being, although it stood at the opening of a new stage of His life-history. What it did, and what Paul adduces it here as doing, was that it brought out into plain view who and what Christ really was. This, says Paul, is the Christ I preach - He who came of the seed of David, He who was marked out in power as the Son of God, by the resurrection of the dead. His thought of Christ runs in the two molds - His Messiahship, His resurrection. But he is not particularly concerned here with the temporal relations of these two facts.

Paul does not, however, say of Christ merely that He became of the seed of David and was marked out as the Son of God in power by the resurrection of the dead. He introduces a qualifying phrase into each clause. He says that He became of the seed of David "according to the flesh," and that He was marked out as the Son of God in power "according to the Spirit of holiness" by the resurrection of the dead. What is the nature of the qualifications made by these phrases?

It is obvious at once that they are not temporal qualifications. Paul does not mean to say, in effect, that our Lord was Messiah only during His earthly manifestation, and became the Son of God only on and by means of His resurrection. It has already appeared that Paul did not think of the Messiahship of our Lord only in connection with His earthly manifestation, or of His Sonship to God only in connection with His post-resurrection existence. And the qualifying phrases themselves are ill-adapted to express this temporal distinction. Even if we could twist the phrase "according to the flesh" into meaning "according to His human manifestation" and violently make that do duty as a temporal definition, the parallel phrase "according to the Spirit of holiness" utterly refuses to yield to any treatment which could make it mean, "according to His heavenly manifestation." And nothing could be more monstrous than to represent precisely the resurrection as in the case of Christ the producing cause of - the source out of which proceeds - a condition of existence which could be properly characterised as distinctively "spiritual." Exactly what the resurrection did was to bring it about that His subsequent mode of existence should continue to be, like the precedent, "fleshly"; to assimilate His post-resurrection to His pre-resurrection mode of existence in the matter of the constitution of His person. And if we fall back on the ethical contrast of the terms, that could only mean that Christ should be supposed to be represented as imperfectly holy in His earthly stage of existence, and as only on His resurrection attaining to complete holiness (cf. I Cor. xv. 44, 46). It is very certain that Paul did not mean that (II Cor. v. 21).

It is clear enough, then, that Paul cannot by any possibility have intended to represent Christ as in His pre-resurrection and His post-resurrection modes of being differing in any way which can be naturally expressed by the contrasting terms "flesh" and "spirit." Least of all can he be supposed to have intended this distinction in the sense of the ethical contrast between these terms. But a further word may be pardoned as to this. That it is precisely this ethical contrast that Paul intends has been insisted on under cover of the adjunct "of holiness" attached here to "spirit." The contrast, it is said, is not between "flesh" and "spirit," but between "flesh" and "spirit of holiness"; and what is intended is to represent Christ, who on earth was merely "Christ according to the flesh" - the "flesh of sin" of course, it is added, that is "the flesh which was in the grasp of sin" - to have been, "after and in consequence of the resurrection," "set free from 'the likeness of (weak and sinful) flesh."' Through the resurrection, in other words, Christ has for the first time become the holy Son of God, free from entanglement with sin-cursed flesh; and, having thus saved Himself, is qualified, we suppose, now to save others, by bringing them through the same experience of resurrection to the same holiness. We have obviously wandered here sufficiently far from the declarations of the Apostle; and we have landed in a reductio ad absurdum of this whole system of interpretation. Paul is not here distinguishing times and contrasting two successive modes of our Lord's being. He is distinguishing elements in the constitution of our Lord's person, by virtue of which He is at one and the same time both the Messiah and the Son of God. He became of the seed of David with respect to the flesh, and by the resurrection of the dead was mightily proven to be also the Son of God with respect to the Spirit of holiness.

It ought to go without saying that by these two elements in the constitution of our Lord's person, the flesh and the spirit of holiness, by virtue of which He is at once of the seed of David and the Son of God, are not intended the two constituent elements, flesh and spirit, which go to make up common humanity. It is impossible that Paul should have represented our Lord as the Messiah only by virtue of His bodily nature; and it is absurd to suppose him to suggest that His Sonship to God was proved by His resurrection to reside in His mental nature or even in His ethical purity - to say nothing now of supposing him to assert that He was made by the resurrection into the Son of God, or into "the Son of God in power" with respect to His mental nature here described as holy. How the resurrection - which was in itself just the resumption of the body - of all things, could be thought of as constituting our Lord's mental nature the Son of God passes imagination; and if it be conceivable that it might at least prove that He was the Son of God, it remains hidden how it could be so emphatically asserted that it was only with reference to His mental nature, in sharp contrast with His bodily, thus recovered to Him, that this was proved concerning Him precisely by His resurrection. Is Paul's real purpose here to guard men from supposing that our Lord's bodily nature, though recovered to Him in this great act, the resurrection, entered into His Sonship to God? There is no reason discoverable in the context why this distinction between our Lord's bodily and mental natures should be so strongly stressed here. It is clearly an artificial distinction imposed on the passage.

When Paul tells us of the Christ which he preached that He was made of the seed of David "according to the flesh," he quite certainly has the whole of His humanity in mind. And in introducing this limitation, "according to the flesh," into his declaration that Christ was "made of the seed of David," he intimates not obscurely that there was another side - not aspect but element - of His being besides His humanity, in which He was not made of the seed of David, but was something other and higher. If he had said nothing more than just these words: "He was made of the seed of David according to the flesh," this intimation would still have been express; though we might have been left to speculation to determine what other element could have entered into His being, and what He must have been according to that element. He has not left us, however, to this speculation, but has plainly told us that the Christ he preached was not merely made of the seed of David according to the flesh, but was also marked out as the Son of God, in power, according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead. Since the "according to the flesh" includes all His humanity, the "according to the Spirit of holiness" which is set in contrast with it, and according to which He is declared to be the Son of God, must be sought outside of His humanity. What the nature of this element of His being in which He is superior to humanity is, is already clear from the fact that according to it He is the Son of God. "Son of God" is, as we have already seen, a metaphysical designation asserting equality with God. It is a divine name. To say that Christ is, according to the Spirit of holiness, the Son of God, is to say that the Spirit of holiness is a designation of His divine nature. Paul's whole assertion therefore amounts to saying that, in one element of His being, the Christ that he preached was man, in another God. Looked at from the point of view of His human nature He was the Messiah - "of the seed of David." Looked at from the point of view of His divine nature, He was the Son of God. Looked at in His composite personality, He was both the Messiah and the Son of God, because in Him were united both He that came of the seed of David according to the flesh and He who was marked out as the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead.

We may be somewhat puzzled by the designation of the divine nature of Christ as "the Spirit of holiness." But not only is it plain from its relation to its contrast, "the flesh," and to its correlate, "the Son of God," that it is His divine nature which is so designated, but this is made superabundantly clear from the closely parallel passage, Rom. ix. 5. There, in enumerating the glories of Israel, the Apostle comes to his climax in this great declaration, - that from Israel Christ came. But there, no more than here, will he allow that it was the whole Christ who came - as said there from the stock of Israel, as said here from the seed of David. He adds there too at once the limitation, "as concerns the flesh," - just as he adds it here. Thus he intimates with emphasis that something more is to be said, if we are to give a complete account of Christ's being; there was something about Him in which He did not come from Israel, and in which He is more than "flesh." What this something is, Paul adds in the great words, "God over all." He who was from Israel according to the flesh is, on the other side of His being, in which He is not from Israel and not "flesh," nothing other than "God over all." In our present passage, the phrase, "Spirit of holiness" takes the place of "God over all" in the other. Clearly Paul means the same thing by them both.

This being very clear, what interests us most is the emphasis which Paul throws on holiness in his designation of the divine nature of Christ. The simple word "Spirit" might have been ambiguous: when "the Spirit of holiness" is spoken of, the divine nature is expressly named. No doubt, Paul might have used the adjective, "holy," instead of the genitive of the substantive, " of holiness"; and have said "the Holy Spirit." Had he done so, he would have as expressly intimated deity as in his actual phrase. But he would have left open the possibility of being misunderstood as speaking of that distinct Holy Spirit to which this designation is commonly applied. The relation in which the divine nature which he attributes to Christ stands to the Holy Spirit was in Paul's mind no doubt very close; as close as the relation between "God" and "Lord" whom he constantly treats as, though two, yet also one. Not only does he identify the activities of the two (e. g., Rom. viii. 9 ff.); but also, in some high sense, he identifies them themselves. He can make use, for example, of such a startling expression as "the Lord is the Spirit" (II Cor. iii. 17). Nevertheless it is perfectly clear that "the Lord" and "the Spirit" are not one person to Paul, and the distinguishing employment of the designations "the Spirit," "the Holy Spirit" is spread broadcast over his pages. Even in immediate connection with his declaration that "the Lord is the Spirit," he can speak with the utmost naturalness not only of "the Spirit of the Lord," but also of "the Lord of the Spirit" (II Cor. iii. 17 f.). What is of especial importance to note in our present connection is that he is not speaking of an endowment of Christ either from or with the Holy Spirit; although he would be the last to doubt that He who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh was plenarily endowed both from and with the Spirit. He is speaking of that divine Spirit which is the complement in the constitution of Christ's person of the human nature according to which He was the Messiah, and by virtue of which He was not merely the Messiah, but also the very Son of God. This Spirit he calls distinguishingly the Spirit of holiness, the Spirit the very characteristic of which is holiness. He is speaking not of an acquired holiness but of an intrinsic holiness; not, then, of a holiness which had been conferred at the time of or attained by means of the resurrection from the dead; but of a holiness which had always been the very quality of Christ's being. He is not representing Christ as having first been after a fleshly fashion the son of David and afterwards becoming by or at the resurrection from the dead, after a spiritual fashion, the holy Son of God. He is representing Him as being in his very nature essentially and therefore always and in every mode of His manifestation holy. Bousset is quite right when he declares that there is no reference in the phrase "Spirit of holiness" to the preservation of His holiness by Christ in His earthly manifestation, but that it is a metaphysical designation describing according to its intrinsic quality an element in the constitution of Christ's person from the beginning. This is the characteristic of the Christ Paul preached; as truly His characteristic as that He was the Messiah. Evidently in Paul's thought of deity holiness held a prominent place. When he wishes to distinguish Spirit from spirit, it is enough for him that he may designate Spirit as divine, to define it as that Spirit the fundamental characteristic of which is that it is holy.

It belongs to the very essence of the conception of Christ as Paul preached Him, therefore, that He was of two natures, human and divine. He could not preach Him at once as of the seed of David and as the Son of God without so preaching Him. It never entered Paul's mind that the Son of God could become a mere man, or that a mere man could become the Son of God. We may say that the conception of the two natures is unthinkable to us. That is our own concern. That a single nature could be at once or successively God and man, man and God, was what was unthinkable to Paul. In his view, when we say God and man we say two natures; when we put a hyphen between them and say God-man, we do not merge them one in the other but join the two together. That this was Paul's mode of thinking of Jesus, Bousset, for example, does not dream of denying. What Bousset is unwilling to admit is that the divine element in his two-natured Christ was conceived by Paul as completely divine. Two metaphysical entities, he says, combined themselves for Paul in the person of Christ: one of these was a human, the other a divine nature: and Paul, along with the whole Christian community of his day, worshipped this two-natured Christ, though he (not they) ranked Him in his thought of His higher nature below the God over all.

The trouble with this construction is that Paul himself gives a different account of the matter. The point of Paul's designation of Christ as the Son of God is, not to subordinate Him to God, as Bousset affirms, but to equalize Him with God. He knows no difference in dignity between his God and his Lord; to both alike, or rather to both in common, he offers his prayers; from both alike and both together he expects all spiritual blessings (Rom. i. 7). He roundly calls Christ, by virtue of His higher nature, by the supreme name of "God over all" (Rom. ix. 5). These things cannot be obscured by pointing to expressions in which he ascribes to the Divine-human Christ a relation of subordination to God in His saving work. Paul does not fail to distinguish between what Christ is in the higher element of His being, and what He became when, becoming poor that we might be made rich, He assumed for His work's sake the position of a servant in the world. Nor does he permit the one set of facts to crowd the other out of his mind. It is no accident that all that he says about the historical two-natured Christ in our present passage is inserted between His two divine designations of the Son of God and Lord; that the Christ that he preached he describes precisely as "the Son of God - who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was marked out as the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead - Jesus Christ our Lord." He who is defined as on the human side of David, on the divine side the Son of God, this two-natured person, is declared to be from the point of view of God, His own Son, and - as all sons are - like Him in essential nature; from the point of view of man, our supreme Lord, whose we are and whom we obey. Ascription of proper deity could not be made more complete; whether we look at Him from the point of view of God or from the point of view of man, He is God. But what Paul preached concerning this divine Being belonged to His earthly manifestation; He was made of the seed of David, He was marked out as God's Son. The conception of the two natures is not with Paul a negligible speculation attached to his Gospel. He preached Jesus. And he preached of Jesus that He was the Messiah. But the Messiah that he preached was no merely human Messiah. He was the Son of God who was made of the seed of David. And He was demonstrated to be what He really was by His resurrection from the dead.

This was the Jesus that Paul preached: this and none other.

The Emotional Life of our Lord

Introduction

It belongs to the truth of our Lord's humanity, that he was subject to all sinless human emotions.l In the accounts which the Evangelists give us of the crowded activities which filled the few years of his ministry, the play of a great variety of emotions is depicted. It has nevertheless not proved easy to form a universally acceptable conception of our Lord's emotional life. Not only has the mystery of the Incarnation entered in as a disturbing factor, the effect of the divine nature on the movements of the human soul brought into personal union with it has been variously estimated. Differences have arisen also as to how far there may be attributed to a perfect human nature movements known to us only as passions of sinful beings.

Two opposite tendencies early showed themselves in the Church. One, derived ultimately from the ethical ideal of the Stoa, which conceived moral perfection under the form of apatheia,naturally wished to attribute this ideal dira0eaa to Jesus, as the perfect man. The other, under the influence of the conviction that, in order to deliver men from their weaknesses, the Redeemer must assume and sanctify in his own person all human patha, as naturally was eager to attribute to him in its fulness every human pathos. Though in far less clearly defined forms, and with a complete shifting of their bases, both tendencies are still operative in men's thought of Jesus. There is a tendency in the interest of the dignity of his person to minimize, and there is a tendency in the interest of the completeness of his humanity to magnify, his affectional movements. The one tendency may run some risk of giving us a somewhat cold and remote Jesus, whom we can scarcely believe to be able to sympathize with us in all our infirmities. The other may possibly be in danger of offering us a Jesus so crassly human as scarcely to command our highest reverence. Between the two, the figure of Jesus is liable to take on a certain vagueness of outline, and come to lack definiteness in our thought. It may not be without its uses, therefore, to seek a starting point for our conception of his emotional life in the comparatively few2 affectional movements which are directly assigned to him in the Gospel narratives. Proceeding outward from these, we may be able to form a more distinctly conceived and firmly grounded idea of his emotional life in general.

It cannot be assumed beforehand, indeed, that all the emotions attributed to Jesus in the Evangelical narratives are intended to be ascribed distinctively to his human soul.3 Such is no doubt the common view. And it is not an unnatural view to take as we currently read narratives, which, whatever else they contain, certainly present some dramatization of the human experiences of our Lord.4 No doubt the naturalness of this view is its sufficient general justification. Only, it will be well to bear in mind that Jesus was definitely conceived by the Evangelists as a two-natured person, and that they made no difficulties with his duplex consciousness. In almost the same breath they represent him as declaring that he knows the Father through and through and, of course, also all that is in man, and the world which is the theatre of his activities, and that he is ignorant of the time of the occurrence of a simple earthly event which concerns his own work very closely; that he is meek and lowly in heart and yet at the same time the Lord of men by their relations to whom their destinies are determined, — "no man cometh unto the Father but by me." In the case of a Being whose subjective life is depicted as focusing in two centers of consciousness, we may properly maintain some reserve in ascribing distinctively to one or the other of them mental activities which, so far as their nature is concerned, might properly belong to either. The embarrassment in studying the emotional life of Jesus arising from this cause, however, is more theoretical than practical. Some of the emotions attributed to him in the Evangelical narrative are, in one way or another, expressly assigned to his human soul. Some of them by their very nature assign themselves to his human soul. With reference to the remainder, just because they might equally well be assigned to the one nature or the other, it may be taken for granted that they belong to the human soul, if not exclusively, yet along with the divine Spirit; and they may therefore very properly be used to fill out the picture. We may thus, without serious danger of confusion, go simply to the Evangelical narrative, and, passing in review the definite ascriptions of specific emotions to Jesus in its records, found on them a conception of his emotional life which may serve as a starting-point for a study of this aspect of our Lord's human manifestation.

The establishment of this starting-point is the single task of this essay. No attempt will be made in it to round out our view of our Lord's emotional life. It will content itself with an attempt to ascertain the exact emotions which are expressly assigned to him in the Evangelical narrative, and will leave their mere collocation to convey its own lesson. We deceive ourselves, however, if their mere collocation does not suffice solidly to ground certain very clear convictions as to our Lord's humanity, and to determine the lines on which our conception of the quality of his human nature must be filled out.

I. Compassion and Love

The emotion which we should naturally expect to find most frequently attributed to that Jesus whose whole life was a mission of mercy, and whose ministry was so marked by deeds of beneficence that it was summed up in the memory of his followers as a going through the land "doing good" (Acts xi. 38 ), is no doubt "compassion." In point of fact, this is the emotion which is most frequently attributed to him.5 The term employed to express it6 was unknown to the Greek classics, and was perhaps a coinage of the Jewish dispersion.7 It first appears in common use in this sense, indeed, in the Synoptic Gospels,8 where it takes the place of the most inward classical word of this connotation.9 The Divine mercy has been defined as that essential perfection in God "whereby he pities and relieves the miseries of his creatures": it includes, that is to say, the two parts of an internal movement of pity and an external act of beneficence. It is the internal movement of pity which is emphasized when our Lord is said to be "moved with compassion" as the term is sometimes excellently rendered in the English versions.10 In the appeals made to his mercy, a more external word11 is used; but it is this more internal word that is employed to express our Lord's response to these appeals: the petitioners besought him to take pity on them; his heart responded with a profound feeling of pity for them. His compassion fulfilled itself in the outward act;12 but what is emphasized by the term employed to express our Lord's response is, in accordance with its very derivation, the profound internal movement of his emotional nature.

This emotional movement was aroused in our Lord as well by the sight of individual distress (Mk. i. 41; Mt. xx. 34; Lk. vii. 13) as by the spectacle of man's universal misery (Mk. vi. 34, viii. 2; Mt. ix. 36, xiv. 14, xv. 32). The appeal of two blind men that their eyes might be opened (Mt. xx. 34), the appeal of a leper for cleansing (Mk. i. 41), — though there may have been circumstances in his case which called out Jesus' reprobation (verse 43), — set our Lord's heart throbbing with pity, as did also the mere sight of a bereaved widow, wailing by the bier of her only son as they bore him forth to burial, though no appeal was made for relief (Lk. vii. 13).13 The ready spontaneity of Jesus' pity is even more plainly shown when he intervenes by a great miracle to relieve temporary pangs of hunger: "I have compassion on" — or better, "I feel pity for" — "the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat: and if I send them away fasting to their home, they will faint in the way; and some of them are come from far" (Mk. viii. 2; Mt. xv. 32), — the only occasion on which Jesus is recorded as testifying to his own feeling of pity. It was not merely the physical ills of life, however, — want and disease and death, — which called out our Lord's compassion. These ills were rather looked upon by him as themselves rooted in spiritual destitution. And it was this spiritual destitution which most deeply moved his pity. The cause and the effects are indeed very closely linked together in the narrative, and it is not always easy to separate them. Thus we read in Mark vi. 34: "And he came forth and saw a great multitude, and he had compassion on them" — better, "he felt pity for them," — "because they were as sheep not having a shepherd, and he taught them many things." But in the parallel passage in Mt. xiv. 14, we read: "And he came forth and saw a great multitude, and he had compassion on" ("felt pity for") "them, and he healed their sick." We must put the two passages together to get a complete account: their fatal ignorance of spiritual things, their evil case under the dominion of Satan in all the effects of his terrible tyranny, are alike the object of our Lord's compassion.14 In another passage (Mt. ix. 36) the emphasis is thrown very distinctly on the spiritual destitution of the people as the cause of his compassionate regard: "But when he saw the multitude, he was moved with compassion for them, because they were distressed and scattered, as sheep not having a shepherd." This description of the spiritual destitution of the people is cast in very strong language. They are compared to sheep which have been worn out and torn by running hither and thither through the thorns with none to direct them, and have now fallen helpless and hopeless to the ground.15 The sight of their desperate plight awakens our Lord's pity and moves him to provide the remedy.

No other term is employed by the New Testament writers directly to express our Lord's compassion.16 But we read elsewhere of its manifestation in tears and sighs.17 The tears which wet his cheeks18 when, looking upon the uncontrolled grief of Mary and her companions, he advanced, with heart swelling with indignation at the outrage of death, to the conquest of the destroyer (Jno. xi. 35), were distinctly tears of sympathy. Even more clearly, his own unrestrained wailing over Jerusalem and its stubborn unbelief was the expression of the most poignant pity: "O that thou hadst known in this day, even thou, the things which belong unto peace" (Lk. xix. 41)!19 The sight of suffering drew tears from his eyes; obstinate unbelief convulsed him with uncontrollable grief. Similarly when a man afflicted with dumbness and deafness was brought to him for healing we are only told that he "sighed"20 (Mk. vii. 34); but when the malignant unbelief of the Pharisees was brought home to him he "sighed from the bottom of his heart" (Mk. viii. 12).21 "Obstinate sin," comments Swete appropriately, "drew from Christ a deeper sigh than the sight of suffering (Lk. vii. 34 and cf. Jno. xiii. 20), a sigh in which anger and sorrow both had a part (iii. 4 note)."22 We may, at any rate, place the loud wailing over the stubborn unbelief of Jerusalem and the deep sighing over the Pharisees' determined opposition side by side as exhibitions of the profound pain given to our Lord's sympathetic heart, by those whose persistent rejection of him required at his hands his sternest reprobation. He "sighed from the bottom of his heart" when he declared, "There shall no sign be given this generation"; he wailed aloud when he announced, "The days shall come upon thee when thine enemies shall dash thee to the ground." It hurt Jesus to hand over even hardened sinners to their doom.

It hurt Jesus, — because Jesus' prime characteristic was love, and love is the foundation of compassion. How close to one another the two emotions of love and compassion lie, may be taught us by the only instance in which the emotion of love is attributed to Jesus in the Synoptics (Mk. x. 21). Here we are told that Jesus, looking upon the rich young ruler, "loved"23 him, and said to him, "One thing thou lackest." It is not the "love of complacency" which is intended, but the "love of benevolence"; that is to say, it is the love, not so much that finds good, as that intends good, — though we may no doubt allow that "love of compassion is never" — let us rather say, "seldom" — "absolutely separated from love of approbation";24 that is to say, there is ordinarily some good to be found already in those upon whom we fix our benevolent regard. The heart of our Saviour turned yearningly to the rich young man and longed to do him good; and this is an emotion, we say, which, especially in the circumstances depicted, is not far from simple compassion.25

It is characteristic of John's Gospel that it goes with simple directness always to the bottom of things. Love lies at the bottom of compassion. And love is attributed to Jesus only once in the Synoptics, but compassion often; while with John the contrary is true — compassion is attributed to Jesus not even once, but love often. This love is commonly the love of compassion, or, rather, let us broaden it now and say, the love of benevolence; but sometimes it is the love of sheer delight in its object. Love to God is, of course, the love of pure complacency. We are surprised to note that Jesus' love to God is only once explicitly mentioned (Jno. xiv. 31); but in this single mention it is set before us as the motive of his entire saving work and particularly of his offering of himself up. The time of his offering is at hand, and Jesus explains: "I will no more speak much with you, for the prince of this world cometh; and he hath nothing in me; but [I yield myself to him] that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do."26 The motive of Jesus' earthly life and death is more commonly presented as love for sinful men; here it is presented as loving obedience to God. He had come to do the will of the Father; and because he loved the Father, his will he will do, up to the bitter end. He declares his purpose to be, under the impulse of love, "obedience up to death, yea, the death of the cross."

The love for man which moved Jesus to come to his succor in his sin and misery was, of course, the love of benevolence. It finds its culminating expression in the great words of Jno. xv. 13: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends: ye are my friends, if ye do the things which I command you"27 — rather an illuminating definition of 'friends,' by the way, especially when it is followed by: "Ye did not choose me but I chose you and appointed you that ye should go and bear fruit." "Friends," it is clear, in this definition, are rather those who are loved than those who love. This culminating expression of his love for his own, by which he was sustained in his great mission of humiliation for them, is supported, however, by repeated declarations of it in the immediate and wider context. In the immediately preceding verses, for example, it is urged as the motive and norm of the love — spring of obedience — which he seeks from his disciples: "Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; and so shall ye be my disciples. Even as my Father hath loved me, I also have loved you: abide ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be fulfilled. This is my commandment, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you" (Jno. xv. 8-12). As his love to the Father was the source of his obedience to the Father, and the living spring of his faithfulness to the work which had been committed to him, so he declares that the love of his followers to him, imitating and reproducing his love to them, is to be the source of their obedience to him, and through that, of all the good that can come to human beings, including, as the highest reach of social perfection, their love for one another. Self-sacrificing love is thus made the essence of the Christian life, and is referred for its incentive to the self-sacrificing love of Christ himself: Christ's followers are to "have the same mind in them which was also in Christ Jesus." The possessive pronouns throughout this passage — "abide in my love," "in my love," "in his (the Father's) love" — are all subjective:28 so that throughout the whole, it is the love which Christ bears his people which is kept in prominent view as the impulse and standard of the love he asks from his people. This love had already been adverted to more than once in the wider context (xiii. 1, 34, xiv. 21) in the same spirit in which it is here spoken of. Its greatness is celebrated: he not only "loved his own which were in the world," but "loved them utterly" (xiii. 1).29 It is presented as the model for the imitation of those who would live a Christian life on earth: "even as I have loved you" (xiii. 34). It is propounded as the Christian's greatest reward: "and I will love him and manifest myself unto him" (xiv. 21).

The emotion of love as attributed to Jesus in the narrative of John is not confined, however, to these great movements — his love to his Father which impelled him to fulfil all his Father's will in the great work of redemption and his love for those whom, in fulfilment of his Father's will, he had chosen to be the recipients of his saving mercy, laying down his life for them. There are attributed to him also those common movements of affection which bind man to man in the ties of friendship. We hear of particular individuals whom "Jesus loved," the meaning obviously being that his heart knit itself to theirs in a simple human fondness. The term employed to express this friendship is prevailingly that high term which designates a love that is grounded in admiration and fulfils itself in esteem;30 but the term which carries with it only the notion of personal inclination and delight is not shunned.31 We are given to understand that there was a particular one of our Lord's most intimate circle of disciples on whom he especially poured out his personal affection. This disciple came to be known, as, by the way of eminence, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," though there are subtle suggestions that the phrase must not be taken in too exclusive a sense.32 Both terms, the more elevated and the more intimate, are employed to express Jesus' love for him.33 The love of Jesus for the household at Bethany and especially for Lazarus, is also expressly intimated to us, and it also by both terms, — though the more intimate one is tactfully confined to his affection for Lazarus himself. The message which the sisters sent Jesus is couched in the language of the warmest personal attachment: "Behold, he whom thou lovest is sick"; and the sight of Jesus' tears calls from the witnessing Jews an exclamation which recognizes in him the tenderest personal feeling: "Behold, how he loved him!" But when the Evangelist widens Jesus' affection to embrace the sisters also, he instinctively lifts the term employed to the more deferential expression of friendship: "Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus." Jesus' affection for Mary and Martha, while deep and close, had nothing in it of an amatory nature, and the change in the term avoids all possibility of such a misconception.34 Meanwhile, we perceive our Lord the subject of those natural movements of affection which bind the members of society together in bonds of close fellowship. He was as far as possible from insensibility to the pleasures of social intercourse (cf. Mt. xi. 19) and the charms of personal attractiveness. He had his mission to perform, and he chose his servants with a view to the performance of his mission. The relations of the flesh gave way in his heart to the relations of the spirit: "whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mt. xii. 50) and it is "those who do the things which he commands them" whom he calls his "friends" (Jno. xv. 14). But he had also the companions of his human heart: those to whom his affections turned in a purely human attachment. His heart was open and readily responded to the delights of human association, and bound itself to others in a happy fellowship.35

II. Indignation and Annoyance

The moral sense is not a mere faculty of discrimination between the qualities which we call right and wrong, which exhausts itself in their perception as different. The judgments it passes are not merely intellectual, but what we call moral judgments; that is to say, they involve approval and disapproval according to the qualities perceived. It would be impossible, therefore, for a moral being to stand in the presence of perceived wrong indifferent and unmoved. Precisely what we mean by a moral being is a being perceptive of the difference between right and wrong and reacting appropriately to right and wrong perceived as such. The emotions of indignation and anger belong therefore to the very self-expression of a moral being as such and cannot be lacking to him in the presence of wrong. We should know, accordingly, without instruction that Jesus, living in the conditions of this earthly life under the curse of sin, could not fail to be the subject of the whole series of angry emotions, and we are not surprised that even in the brief and broken narratives of his life-experiences which have been given to us, there have been preserved records of the manifestation in word and act of not a few of them. It is. interesting to note in passing that it is especially in the Gospel of Mark, which rapid and objective as it is in its narrative, is the channel through which has been preserved to us a large part of the most intimate of the details concerning our Lord's demeanor and traits which have come down to us, that we find these records.

It is Mark, for instance, who tells us explicitly (iii. 5) that the insensibility of the Jews to human suffering exhibited in a tendency to put ritual integrity above humanity, filled Jesus with indignant anger. A man whose hand had withered, met with in the synagogue one Sabbath, afforded a sort of test-case. The Jews treated it as such and "watched Jesus whether he would heal him on the Sabbath day, that they might accuse him." Jesus accepted the challenge. Commanding the man to "rise in the midst" of the assemblage, he put to them the searching question, generalizing the whole case: "Is it lawful to do good or to do evil on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?" "But," says the narrative, "they kept silent." Then Jesus' anger rose: "he looked around at them with anger, being grieved at the hardness of their heart." What is meant is, not that his anger was modified by grief, his reprobation of the hardness of their hearts was mingled with a sort of sympathy for men sunk in such a miserable condition. What is meant is simply that the spectacle of their hardness of heart produced in him the deepest dissatisfaction, which passed into angry resentment.36 Thus the fundamental psychology of anger is curiously illustrated by this account; for anger always has pain at its root, and is a reaction of the soul against what gives it discomfort.37 The hardness of the Jews' heart, vividly realized, hurt Jesus; and his anger rose in repulsion of the cause of his pain. There are thus two movements of feeling brought before us here. There is the pain which the gross manifestation of the hardness of heart of the Jews inflicted on Jesus. And there is the strong reaction of indignation which sprang out of this pain. The term by which the former feeling is expressed has at its basis the simple idea of pain, and is used in the broadest way of every kind of pain, whether physical or mental, emphasizing, however, the sensation itself, rather than its expression.38 It is employed here appropriately, in a form which throws an emphasis on the inwardness of the feeling, of the discomfort of heart produced in Jesus by the sight of man's inhumanity to man. The expression of this discomfort was in the angry look which he swept over the unsympathetic assemblage. It is not intimated that the pain was abiding, the anger evanescent. The glance in which the anger was manifested is represented as fleeting in contrast with the pain of which the anger was the expression. But the term used for this anger is just the term for abiding resentment, set on vengeance.39 Precisely what is ascribed to Jesus, then, in this passage is that indignation at wrong, perceived as such, wishing and intending punishment to the wrong-doer, which forms the core of what we can vindicatory justice.40 This is a necessary reaction of every moral being against perceived wrong.

On another occasion Mark (x. 14) pictures Jesus to us as moved by a much lighter form of the emotion of anger. His disciples, — doubtless with a view to protecting him from needless drafts upon his time and strength, — interfered with certain parents, who were bringing to him their babies (Lk. xviii. 15) "that he should touch them." Jesus saw their action, and, we are told, "was moved with indignation." The term employed here41 expresses, originally, physical (such, for example, as is felt by a teething child), and then mental (Mt. xx. 24, xxi. 15, xxvi. 8; Mk. x. 41, xiv. 4; Lk. xiii. 14, cf. II Cor. vii. 11) "irritation." Jesus was "irritated," or perhaps we may better render, was "annoyed," "vexed," at his disciples. And (so the term also suggests) he showed his annoyance, — whether by gesture or tone or the mere shortness of his speech: "Let the children come to me; forbid them not!"42 Thus we see Jesus as he reacts with anger at the spectacle of inhumanity, so reacting with irritation at the spectacle of blundering misunderstanding, however well-meant.

Yet another phase of angry emotion is ascribed to Jesus by Mark, but in this case not by Mark alone. Mark (xiv. 3) tells us that on healing a leper, Matthew (ix. 30) that on healing two blind men, Jesus "straitly," "strictly," "sternly," "charged" them, — as our English versions struggle with the term, in an attempt to make it describe merely the tone and manner of his injunction to the beneficiaries of his healing power, not to tell of the cures wrought upon them. This term,43 however, does not seem to mean, in its ordinary usage, to "charge," to "enjoin," however straitly or strictly, but simply to "be angry at," or, since it commonly implies that the anger is great, to "be enraged with," or, perhaps better still, since it usually intimates that the anger is expressed by audible signs, to "rage against." If we are to take it in its customary sense, therefore, what we are really told in these passages is that Jesus, "when he had raged against the leper, sent him away;" that "he raged against the blind men, saying, 'See that no one know it!" If this rage is to be supposed (with our English versions) to have expressed itself only in the words recorded, the meaning would not be far removed from that of the English word "bluster" in its somewhat rare transitive use, as, for example, when an old author writes: "He meant to bluster all princes into perfect obedience."44 The implication of boisterousness, and indeed of empty noise, which attends the English word, however, is quite lacking from the Greek, the rage expressed by which is always thought of as very real. What it has in common with "bluster" is thus merely its strong minatory import. The Vulgate Latin accordingly cuts the knot by rendering it simply "threatened," and is naturally followed in this by those English versions (Wycliffe, Rheims) which depend on it.45 Certainly Jesus is represented here as taking up a menacing attitude, and threatening words are placed on his lips: "See that thou say nothing to any man," "See that no one know it"— a form of speech which always conveys a threat.46 But "threaten" can scarcely be accepted as an adequate rendering of the term whether in itself or in these contexts. When Matthew tells us "And he was enraged at them, saying . . ." the rage may no doubt be thought to find its outlet in the threatening words which follow:47 but the implication of Mark is different: "And raging at him," or "having raged at him" — "he straightway sent him forth." When it is added: "And saith to him, 'See that thou say nothing to any one" a subsequent moment in the transaction is indicated.48 How our Lord's rage was manifested, we are not told. And this is really just as true in the case of Matthew as in that of Mark. To say, "he was enraged at them, saying (threatening words)," is not to say merely, "he threatened them": it is to say that a threat was uttered and that this threat was the suitable accompaniment of his rage.

The cause of our Lord's anger does not lie on the surface in either case. The commentators seem generally inclined to account for it by supposing that Jesus foresaw that his injunction of silence would be disregarded.49 But this explanation, little natural in itself, seems quite unsuitable to the narrative in Mark where we are told, not that Jesus angrily enjoined the leper to silence, but that he angrily sent him away. Others accordingly seek the ground of his anger in something displeasing to him in the demeanor of the applicants for his help, in their mode of approaching or addressing him, in erroneous conceptions with which they were animated, and the like. Klostermann imagines that our Lord did not feel that miraculous healings lay in the direct line of his vocation, and was irritated because he had been betrayed by his compassion into undertaking them. Volkmar goes the length of supposing that Jesus resented the over-reverential form of the address of the leper to him, on the principle laid down in Rev. xix. 10, "See thou do it not: I am a fellow-servant with thee." Even Keil suggests that Jesus was angry with the blind men because they addressed him openly as "Son of David," not wishing "this untimely proclamation of him as Messiah on the part of those who held him as such only on account of his miracles." It is more common to point out some shortcoming in the applicants: they did not approach him with sufficient reverence or with sufficient knowledge of the true nature of his mission; they demanded their cure too much as a matter of course, or too much as if from a mere marvel-monger; and in the case of the leper at least, with too little regard to their own obligations. A leper should not approach a stranger; certainly he should not ask or permit a stranger to put his hand upon him; especially should he not approach a stranger in the streets of a city (Lk. v. 12) and very particularly not in a house (Mk. i. 43: "He put him out"), above all if it were, as it might well be here, a private house. That Jesus was indignant at such gross disregard of law was natural and fully explains his vehemence in driving the leper out and sternly admonishing him to go and fulfil the legal requirements.50 This variety of explanation is the index of the slightness of the guidance given in the passages themselves to the cause of our Lord's anger; but it can throw no doubt upon the fact of that anger, which is directly asserted in both instances and must not be obscured by attributing to the term by which it is expressed some lighter significance.51 The term employed declares that Jesus exhibited vehement anger, which was audibly manifested.52 This anger did not inhibit, however, the operation of his compassion (Mk. i. 41; Mt. ix. 27) but appears in full manifestation as its accompaniment. This may indicate that its cause lay outside the objects of his compassion, in some general fact the nature of which we may possibly learn from other instances.

The same term occurs again in John's narrative of our Lord's demeanor at the grave of his beloved friend Lazarus (Jno. xi. 33, 38). When Jesus saw Mary weeping — or rather "wailing," for the term is a strong one and implies the vocal expression of the grief53 — and the Jews which accompanied her also "wailing," we are told, as our English version puts it, that "he groaned in the spirit and was troubled"; and again, when some of the Jews, remarking on his own manifestation of grief in tears, expressed their wonder that he who had opened the eyes of the blind man could not have preserved Lazarus from death, we are told that Jesus "again groaned in himself." The natural suggestion of the word "groan" is, however, that of pain or sorrow, not disapprobation; and this rendering of the term in question is therefore misleading. It is better rendered in the only remaining passage in which it occurs in the New Testament, Mk. xiv. 5, by "murmured," though this is much too weak a word to reproduce its implications. In that passage it is brought into close connection with a kindred term54 which determines its meaning. We read: "But there were some that had indignation among themselves . . . and they murmured against her." Their feeling of irritated displeasure expressed itself in an outburst of temper. The margin of our Revised Version at Jno. xi. 33, 38, therefore, very properly proposes that we should for "groaned" in these passages, substitute "moved with indignation," although that phrase too is scarcely strong enough. What John tells us, in point of fact, is that Jesus approached the grave of Lazarus, in a state, not of uncontrollable grief, but of irrepressible anger. He did respond to the spectacle of human sorrow abandoning itself to its unrestrained expression, with quiet, sympathetic tears: "Jesus wept" (verse 36).55 But the emotion which tore his breast and clamored for utterance was just rage. The expression even of this rage, however, was strongly curbed. The term which John employs to describe it is, as we have seen, a definitely external term.56 "He raged." But John modifies its external sense by annexed qualifications: "He raged in spirit,""raging in himself"He thus interiorizes the term and gives us to understand that the ebullition of Jesus' anger expended itself within him. Not that there was no manifestation of it: it must have been observable to be observed and recorded;57 it formed a marked feature of the occurrence as seen and heard.58 But John gives us to understand that the external expression of our Lord's fury was markedly restrained: its manifestation fell far short of its real intensity. He even traces for us the movements of his inward struggle: "Jesus, therefore, when he saw her wailing, and the Jews that had come with her wailing, was enraged in spirit and troubled himself'59 . . . and wept. His inwardly restrained fury produced a profound agitation of his whole being, one of the manifestations of which was tears.

Why did the sight of the wailing of Mary and her companions enrage Jesus? Certainly not because of the extreme violence of its expression; and even more certainly not because it argued unbelief — unwillingness to submit to God's providential ordering or distrust of Jesus' power to save. He himself wept, if with less violence yet in true sympathy. with the grief of which he was witness. The intensity of his exasperation, moreover, would be disproportionate to such a cause; and the importance attached to it in the account bids us seek its ground in something less incidental to the main drift of the narrative. It is mentioned twice, and is obviously emphasized as an indispensable element in the development of the story, on which, in its due place and degree, the lesson of the incident hangs. The spectacle of the distress of Mary and her companions enraged Jesus because it brought poignantly home to his consciousness the evil of death, its unnaturalness, its "violent tyranny" as Calvin (on verse 38) phrases it. In Mary's grief, he "contemplates" — still to adopt Calvin's words (on verse 33), — "the general misery of the whole human race" and burns with rage against the oppressor of men. Inextinguishable fury seizes upon him; his whole being is discomposed and perturbed; and his heart, if not his lips, cries out, —

"For the innumerable dead

Is my soul disquieted."60

It is death that is the object of his wrath, and behind death him who has the power of death, and whom he has come into the world to destroy. Tears of sympathy may fill his eyes, but this is incidental. His soul is held by rage: and he advances to the tomb, in Calvin's words again, "as a champion who prepares for conflict." The raising of Lazarus thus becomes, not an isolated marvel, but — as indeed it is presented throughout the whole narrative (compare especially, verses 24-26) — a decisive instance and open symbol of Jesus' conquest of death and hell. What John does for us in this particular statement is to uncover to us the heart of Jesus, as he wins for us our salvation. Not in cold unconcern, but in flaming wrath against the foe, Jesus smites in our behalf. He has not only saved us from the evils which oppress us; he has felt for and with us in our oppression, and under the impulse of these feelings has wrought out our redemption.61

There is another term which the Synoptic Gospels employ to describe our Lord's dealing with those he healed (Mt. xii. 16), which is sometimes rendered by our English versions — as the term we have just been considering is rendered in similar connections (Mk. i. 43; Mt. ix. 30) — by "charged" (Mt. xli. 16, xvi. 20; Mk. iii. 12, viii. 30, ix. 21); but more frequently with more regard to its connotation of censure, implying displeasure, "by rebuked" (Mt. xvii. 18; Mk. ix. 21; Lk. iv. 35-41, xix. 42; Mk. viii. 30; Lk. ix. 55; Mt. viii. 20; Mk. iv. 39; Lk. iv. 39, viii. 24).62 This term, the fundamental meaning of which is "to mete out due measure," with that melancholy necessity which carries all terms which express doing justice to sinful men downwards in their connotation, is used in the New Testament only in malam partem, and we may be quite sure is never employed without its implication of censure.63 What is implied by its employment is that our Lord in working certain cures, and, indeed, in performing others of his miracles — as well as in laying charges on his followers — spoke, not merely "strongly and peremptorily,"64 but chidingly, that is to say, with expressed displeasure.65 There is in these instances perhaps not so strong but just as clear an ascription of the emotion of anger to our Lord as in those we have already noted, and this suggests that not merely in the case of the raising of Lazarus but in many other instances in which he put forth his almighty power to rescue men from the evils which burdened them, our Lord was moved by an ebullition of indignant anger at the destructive powers exhibited in disease or even in the convulsions of nature.66 In instances like Mt. xii. 16; Mk. 12; Mt. xvi. 20; Mk. viii. 30; Lk. ix. 21, the censure inherent in the term may almost seem to become something akin to menace or threat: "he chided them to the end that they should not make him known"; he made a show of anger or displeasure directed to this end. In the cases where, however, Jesus chided the unclean spirits which he cast out it seems to lie in the nature of things that it was the tyrannous evil which they were working upon their victims that was the occasion of his displeasure.67 When he is said to have "rebuked" a fever which was tormenting a human being (Lk. iv. 39) or the natural elements — the wind and sea — menacing human lives (Mt. viii. 26; Mk. iv. 39; Lk. viii. 24), there is no reason to suppose that he looked upon these natural powers as themselves personal, and as little that the personification is only figurative; we may not improperly suppose that the displeasure he exhibited in his upbraiding them was directed against the power behind these manifestations of a nature out of joint, the same malignant influence which he advanced to the conquest of when he drew near to the tomb of Lazarus.68 In any event the series of passages in which this term is employed to ascribe to Jesus acts inferring displeasure, greatly enlarges the view we have of the play of Jesus' emotions of anger. We see him chiding his disciples, the demons that were tormenting men, and the natural powers which were menacing their lives or safety, and speaking in tones of rebuke to the multitudes who were the recipients of his healing grace (Mt. xii. 16). And that we are not to suppose that this chiding was always mild we are advised by the express declaration that it was in one instance at least, "vehement" (Mk. iii. 12).69

Perhaps in no incidents recorded in the Gospels is the action of our Lord's indignation more vividly displayed than in the accounts of the cleansings of the Temple. In closing the account which he gives of the earlier of these, John tells us that "his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house shall eat me up" (Jno. ii. 17). The word here employed — "zeal" — may mean nothing more than "ardor"; but this ardor may burn with hot indignation, — we read of a "zeal of fire which shall devour the adversaries" (Heb. x. 27). And it seems to be this hot indignation at the pollution of the house of God — this "burning jealousy for the holiness of the house of God"70 — which it connotes in our present passage. In this act, Jesus in effect gave vent "to a righteous anger,"71 and perceiving his wrathful zeal72 his followers recognized in it the Messianic fulfilment of the words in which the Psalmist represents himself. as filled with a zeal for the house of Jehovah, and the honor of him who sits in it, that "consumes him like a fire burning in his bones, which incessantly breaks through and rages all through him."73 The form in which it here breaks forth is that of indignant anger towards those who defile God's house with trafficking, and it thus presents us with one of the most striking manifestations of the anger of Jesus in act.

It is far, however, from being the only instance in which the action of Jesus' anger is recorded for us. And the severity of his language equals the decisiveness of his action. He does not scruple to assault his opponents with the most vigorous denunciation. Herod he calls "that fox" (Lk. xiii. 32); the unreceptive, he designates briefly "swine" (Mt. vii. 6) ; those that tempt him he visits with the extreme term of ignominy — Satan (Mk. viii. 33). The opprobrious epithet of "hypocrites" is repeatedly on his lips (Mt. xv. 7, xxiii. passim; Lk. xiii. 15), and he added force to this reprobation by clothing it in violent figures, — they were "blind guides," "whited sepulchres," and, less tropically, "a faithless and perverse generation," a "wicked and adulterous generation." He does not shrink even from vituperatively designating them ravening wolves (Mt. vii. 15), serpents, brood of vipers (Mt. xii. 34), even children of the evil one: "Ye are," he declares plainly, "of your father, the Devil" (Jno. viii. 44). The long arraignment of the Pharisees in the twenty-third chapter of Matthew with its iterant, "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" and its uncompromising denunciation, fairly throbs with indignation, and brings Jesus, before us in his sternest mood, the mood of the nobleman in the parable (Lk. xix. 27), whom he represents as commanding: "And as for these my enemies, bring them hither and slay them before me."74

The holy resentment of Jesus has been made the subject of a famous chapter in Ecco Homo.75The contention of this chapter is that he who loves men must needs hate with a burning hatred all that does wrong to human beings, and that, in point of fact, Jesus never wavered in his consistent resentment of the special wrong-doing which he was called upon to witness. The chapter announces as its thesis, indeed, the paradox that true mercy is no less the product of anger than of pity: that what differentiates the divine virtue of mercy from "the vice of insensibility" which is called "tolerance," is just the under-lying presence of indignation. Thus — so the reasoning runs, — "the man who cannot be angry cannot be merciful," and it was therefore precisely the anger of Christ which proved that the unbounded compassion he manifested to sinners "was really mercy and not mere tolerance." The analysis is doubtless incomplete; but the suggestion, so far as it goes, is fruitful. Jesus' anger is not merely the seamy side of his pity; it is the righteous reaction of his moral sense in the presence of evil. But Jesus burned with anger against the wrongs he met with in his journey through human life as truly as he melted with pity at the sight of the world's misery: and it was out of these two emotions that his actual mercy proceeded.

III. Joy and Sorrow

We call our Lord "the Man of Sorrows," and the designation is obviously appropriate for one who came into the world to bear the sins of men and to give his life a ransom for many. It is, however, not a designation which is applied to Christ in the New Testament, and even in the Prophet (Is. liii. 3) it may very well refer rather to the objective afflictions of the righteous servant than to his subjective distresses.76 In any event we must bear in mind that our Lord did not come into the world to be broken by the power of sin and death, but to break it. He came as a conqueror with the gladness of the imminent victory in his heart; for the joy set before him he was able to endure the cross, despising shame (Heb. xii. 2). And as he did not prosecute his work in doubt of the issue, neither did he prosecute it hesitantly as to its methods. He rather (so we are told, Lk. x. 21) "exulted in the Holy Spirit" as he contemplated the ways of God in bringing many sons to glory. The word is a strong one and conveys the idea of exuberant gladness, a gladness which fills the heart;77 and it is intimated that, on this occasion at least, this exultation was a product in Christ — and therefore in his human nature — of the operations of the Holy Spirit,78 whom we must suppose to have been always working in the human soul of Christ, sustaining and strengthening it. It cannot be supposed that, this particular occasion alone being excepted, Jesus prosecuted his work on earth in a state of mental depression. His advent into the world was announced as "good tidings of great joy" (Lk. ii. 10), and the tidings which he himself proclaimed were "the good tidings" by way of eminence. It is conceivable that he went about proclaiming them with a "sad countenance" (Mt. vi. 16)? It is misleading then to say merely, with Jeremy Taylor, "We never read that Jesus laughed and but once that he rejoiced in spirit."79 We do read that, in contrast with John the Baptist, he came "eating and drinking," and accordingly was malignantly called "a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners" (Mt. xi. 19; Lk. vii. 34) ; and this certainly does not encourage us to think of his demeanor at least as habitually sorrowful.

It is pure perversion, to be sure, when Renan, after the debasing fashion of his sentimentalizing frivolity, transmutes Jesus' joy in his redemptive work (Jno. xv. 11, xvii. 13) into mere pagan lightness of heart and delight in living, as if his fundamental disposition were a kind of "sweet gaiety" which "was incessantly expressing itself in lively reflections, and kindly pleasantries." He assures us that Jesus travelled about Palestine almost as if he was some lord of revelry, bringing a festival wherever he came, and greeted at every doorstep "as a joy and a benediction": "the women and children adored him." The infancy of the world had come back with him "with its divine spontaneity and its naive dizzinesses of joy." At his touch the hard conditions of life vanished from sight, and there took possession of men, the dream of an imminent paradise, of "a delightful garden in which should continue forever the charming life they now were living." "How long," asks Renan, "did this intoxication last?", and answers: "We do not know. During the continuance of this magical apparition, time was not measured. Duration was suspended; a week was a century. But whether it filled years or months, the dream was so beautiful that humanity has lived on it ever since, and our consolation still is to catch its fading fragrance. Never did so much joy stir the heart of man. For a moment in this most vigorous attempt it has ever made to lift itself above its planet, humanity forgot the leaden weight which holds it to the earth and the sorrows of the life here below. Happy he who could see with his own eyes this divine efflorescence and share, if even for a day, this unparalleled illusion!"80

The perversion is equally great, however, when there is attributed to our Lord, as it is now very much the fashion to do, "before the black shadow of the cross fell athwart his pathway," the exuberant joy of a great hope never to be fulfilled: the hope of winning his people to his side and of inaugurating the Kingdom of God upon this sinful earth by the mere force of its proclamation.81 Jesus was never the victim of any such illusion: he came into the world on a mission of ministering mercy to the lost, giving his life as a ransom for many (Lk. xix. 10; Mk. x. 4; Mt. xx. 28); and from the beginning he set his feet steadfastly in the path of suffering (Mt. iv. 3 f.; Lk. iv. 3 f.) which he knew led straight onward to death ( Jno. ii. 19, iii. 14; Mt. xii. 40; Lk. xii. 49-50; Mt. ix. 15; Mk. ii. 1-9; Lk. v. 34, etc.). Joy he had: but it was not the shallow joy of mere pagan delight in living, nor the delusive joy of a hope destined to failure; but the deep exultation of a conqueror setting captives free. This joy underlay all his sufferings and shed its light along the whole thorn-beset path which was trodden by his torn feet. We hear but little of it, however, as we hear but little of his sorrows: the narratives are not given to descriptions of the mental states of the great actor whose work they illustrate. We hear just enough of it to assure us of its presence underlying and giving its color to all his life (Lk. iv. 21;82 Jno. v. 11, xvii. 1383). If our Lord was "the Man of Sorrows," he was more profoundly still "the Man of Joy."84

Of the lighter pleasurable emotions that flit across the mind in response to appropriate incitements arising occasionally in the course of social intercourse, we also hear little in the case of Jesus. It is not once recorded that he laughed; we do not ever hear even that he smiled; only once are we told that he was glad, and then it is rather sober gratification than exuberant delight which is spoken of in connection with him (Jno. xi. 15). But, then, we hear little also of his passing sorrows. The sight of Mary and her companions wailing at the tomb of Lazarus, agitated his soul and caused him tears (Jno. xi. 35) ; the stubborn unbelief of Jerusalem drew from him loud wailing (Lk. xix. 41). He sighed at the sight of human suffering (Mk. vii. 34) and "sighed deeply" over men's hardened unbelief (viii. 12): man's inhumanity to man smote his heart with pain (iii. 5). But it is only with reference to his supreme sacrifice that his mental sufferings are emphasized. This supreme sacrifice cast, it is true, its shadows before it. It was in the height of his ministry that our Lord exclaimed, "I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished" (Lk. xii. 50).85 Floods lie before him under which he is to be submerged,86 and the thought of passing beneath their waters "straitens" his soul. The term rendered "straitened"87 imports oppression and affliction, and bears witness to the burden of anticipated anguish which our Lord bore throughout life. The prospect of his sufferings, it has been justly said, was a perpetua188 Gethsemane; and how complete this foretaste was we may learn from the incident recorded in Jno. xii. 27,89 although this antedated Gethsemane, by only a few days. "Now is my soul90 troubled," he cries and adds a remarkable confession of shrinking at the prospect of death, with, however, an immediate revulsion to his habitual attitude of submission to, or rather of hearty embracing of, his Father's will. — "And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour!91 But for this cause, came I to this hour! Father, glorify Thy name!" He had come into the world to die; but as he vividly realizes what the death is which he is to die, there rises in his soul a yearning for deliverance, only however, to be at once repressed.92 The state of mind in which this sharp conflict went on is described by a term the fundamental implication of which is agitation, disquietude, perplexity.93 This perturbation of soul is three times attributed by John to Jesus (xi. 33, xii. 27, xiii. 21), and always as expressing the emotions which conflict with death stirred in him. The anger roused in him by the sight of the distress into which death had plunged Mary and her companions (xi. 33); the anticipation of his own betrayal to death (xiii. 21); the clearly realized approach of his death (xii. 27); threw him inwardly into profound agitation. It was not always the prospect of his own death (xii. 27, xiii. 21), but equally the poignant realization of what death meant for others (xi. 33) which had the power thus to disquiet him. His deep agitation was clearly, therefore, not due to mere recoil from the physical experience of death,94 though even such a recoil might be the expression not so much of a terror of dying as of repugnance to the idea of death.95 Behind death, he saw him who has the power of death, and that sin which constitutes the sting of death. His whole being revolted from that final and deepest humiliation, in which the powers of evil were to inflict upon him the precise penalty of human sin. To bow his head beneath this stroke was the last indignity, the hardest act of that obedience which it was his to render in his servant-form, and which we are told with significant emphasis, extended "up to death" (Phil. ii. 8).

So profound a repugnance to death and all that death meant, manifesting itself during his life, could not fail to seize upon him with peculiar intensity at the end. If the distant prospect of his sufferings was a perpetual Gethsemane to him, the immediate imminence of them in the actual Gethsemane could not fail to bring with it that "awful and dreadful torture" which Calvin does not scruple to call the "exordium" of the pains of hell themselves.96 Matthew and Mark almost exhaust the resources of language to convey to us some conception of our Lord's "agony"97 as an early interpolator of Luke (Lk. xxii. 44) calls it, in this dreadful experience.98 The anguish of reluctance which constituted this "agony" is in part described by them both — they alone of the Evangelists enter into our Lord's feelings here — by a term the primary idea of which is loathing, aversion, perhaps not unmixed with despondency.99 This term is adjoined in Matthew's account to the common word for sorrow, in which, however, here the fundamental element of pain, distress, is prominent,100 so that we may perhaps render Matthew's account: "He began to be distressed and despondent" (Mt. xxvi. 37). Instead of this wide word for distress of mind, Mark employs a term which more narrowly defines the distress as consternation, — if not exactly dread, yet alarmed dismay:101 "He began to be appalled and despondent" (Mk. xiv. 33). Both accounts add our Lord's own pathetic declaration: "My soul102 is exceeding sorrowful even unto death," the central term103 in which expresses a sorrow, or perhaps we would better say, a mental pain, a distress, which hems in on every side, from which there is therefore no escape; or rather (for the qualification imports that this hemming-in distress is mortally acute, is an anguish of a sort that no issue but death can be thought of104) which presses in and besets from every side and therefore leaves no place for defence. The extremity of this agony may have been revealed, as the interpolator of Luke tells us, by sweat dropping like clots of blood on the ground, as our Lord ever more importunately urged that wonderful prayer, in which as Bengel strikingly says,105 the horror of death and the ardor of obedience met (Lk. xxii. 44). This interpolator tells us (Lk. xxii. 43) also that he was strengthened for the conflict by an angelic visitor, and we may well suppose that had it not been for some supernatural strengthening mercifully vouchsafed (cf. Jno. xii. 27f. ), the end would then have come.'106 But the cup must needs be drained to its dregs, and the final drop was not drunk until that cry of desertion and desolation was uttered, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" (Mt. xxvii. 46; Mk. xv. 34).107 This culminating sorrow was actually unto death.

In these supreme moments our Lord sounded the ultimate depths of human anguish, and vindicated on the score of the intensity of his mental sufferings the right to the title of Man of Sorrows. The scope of these sufferings was also very broad, embracing that whole series of painful emotions which runs from a consternation that is appalled dismay, through a despondency which is almost despair, to a sense of well-nigh complete desolation. In the presence of this mental anguish the physical tortures of the crucifixion retire into the background, and we may well believe that our Lord, though he died on the cross, yet died not of the cross, but, as we commonly say, of a broken heart, that is to say, of the strain of his mental suffering.108 The sensitiveness of his soul to affectional movements, and the depths of the currents of feeling which flowed through his being, are thus thrown up into a very clear light. And yet it is noticeable that while they tore his heart and perhaps, in the end, broke the bonds which bound his fluttering spirit to its tenement of clay, they never took the helm of life or overthrew either the judgment of his calm understanding or the completeness of his perfect trust in his Father. If he cried out in his agony for deliverance, it was always the cry of a child to a Father whom he trusts with all and always, and with the explicit condition, Howbeit, not what I will but what Thou wilt. If the sense of desolation invades his soul, he yet confidingly commends his departing spirit into his Father's hands (Lk. xxiii. 46).109 And through all his agony his demeanor to his disciples, his enemies, his judges, his executioners is instinct with calm self-mastery. The cup which was put to his lips was bitter: none of its bitterness was lost to him as he drank it: but he drank it; and he drank it as his own cup which it was his own will (because it was his Father's will) to drink. "The cup which the Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" (Jno. xviii. 11), — it was in this spirit, not of unwilling subjection to unavoidable evil, but of voluntary endurance of unutterable anguish for adequate ends, that he passed into and through all his sufferings. His very passion was his own action. He had power to lay down his life; and it was by his own power that he laid down his life, and by his own power that he trod the whole pathway of suffering which led up to the formal act of his laying down his life. Nowhere is he the victim of circumstances or the helpless sufferer. Everywhere and always, it is he who possesses the mastery both of circumstances and of himself.'110

The completeness of Jesus' trust in God which is manifested in the unconditional "Nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt" of the "agony," and is echoed in the "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit" of the cross, finds endless illustration in the narratives of the Evangelists. Trust is never, however, explicitly attributed to him in so many words.111 Except in the scoffing language with which he was assailed as he hung on the cross: "He trusteth in God; let him deliver him now if he desireth him" (Mt. xxvii. 43), the term "trust" is never so much as mentioned in connection with his relations with God. Nor is the term "faith."112 Nor indeed are many of what we may call the fundamental religious affections directly attributed to him, although he is depicted as literally living, moving and having his being in God. His profound feeling of dependence on God, for example, is illustrated in every conceivable way, not least strikingly in the constant habit of prayer which the Evangelists ascribe to him.113 But we are never directly told that he felt this dependence on God or "feared God" or felt the emotions of reverence and awe in the divine presence.114 We are repeatedly told that he returned thanks to God,115 but we are never told in so many words that he experienced the emotion of gratitude. The narrative brings Jesus before us as acting under the impulse of all the religious emotions; but it does not stop to comment upon the emotions themselves.

The same is true of the more common emotions of human life. The narrative is objective throughout in its method. On two occasions we are told that Jesus felt that occurrences which he witnessed were extraordinary and experienced the appropriate emotion of "wonder" regarding them (Mt. viii. 10; Lk. vii. 9; Mk. vi. 6).116 Once "desire" is attributed to him (Lk. xxii. 15), — he had "set his heart," as we should say, upon eating the final passover with his disciples — the term used emphasizing the affectional movement.117 And once our Lord speaks of himself as being conceivably the subject of "shame," the reference being, however, rather to a mode of action consonant with the emotion, than to the feeling itself (Mk. viii. 38; Lk. iv. 26).118 Besides these few chance suggestions, there are none of the numerous emotions that rise and fall in the human soul, which happen to be explicitly attributed to our Lord.119 The reader sees them all in play in his vividly narrated life-experiences, but he is not told of them.

We have now passed in review the whole series of explicit attributions to our Lord in the Gospels of specific emotional movements. It belongs to the occasional manner in which these emotional movements find record in the narrative, that it is only our Lord's most noticeable displays of emotion which are noted. One of the effects of this is to give to his emotions as noted the appearance of peculiar strength, vividness and completeness. This serves to refute the notion which has been sometimes advanced under the influence of the "apathetic" conception of virtue, that emotional movements never ran their full course in him as we experience them, but stopped short at some point in their action deemed the point of dignity.120 In doing so, it serves equally, however, to carry home to us a very vivid impression of the truth and reality of our Lord's human nature. What we are given is, no doubt, only the high lights. But it is easy to fill in the picture mentally with the multitude of emotional movements which have not found record just because they were in no way exceptional. Here obviously is a being who reacts as we react to the incitements which arise in daily intercourse with men, and whose reactions bear all the characteristics of the corresponding emotions we are familiar with in our experience.

Perhaps it may be well explicitly to note that our Lord's emotions fulfilled themselves, as ours do, in physical reactions. He who hungered (Mt. iv. 2), thirsted (Jno. xix. 20), was weary (Jno. iv. 6), who knew both physical pain and pleasure, expressed also in bodily affections the emotions that stirred his soul. That he did so is sufficiently evinced by the simple circumstance that these emotions were observed and recorded. But the bodily expression of the emotions is also frequently expressly attested. Not only do we read that he wept (Jno. xi. 35) and wailed (Lk. xix. 41), sighed (Mk. vii. 34) and groaned (Mk. viii. 12) ; but we read also of his angry glare (Mk. iii. 5), his annoyed speech (Mk. x. 14), his chiding words (e. g. Mk. iii. 12), the outbreaking ebullition of his rage (e.g. Jno. xi. 33, 38) ; of the agitation of his bearing when under strong feeling (Jno. xi. 35), the open exultation of his joy (Lk. x. 21), the unrest of his movements in the face of anticipated evils (Mt. xxvii. 37), the loud cry which was wrung from him in his moment of desolation (Mt. xxvii. 46). Nothing is lacking to make the impression strong that we have before us in Jesus a human being like ourselves.

It is part of the content of this impression, that Jesus appears before us in the light of the play of his emotions as a distinct human being, with his own individuality and — shall we not say it? — even temperament. It is, indeed, sometimes suggested that the Son of God assumed at the incarnation not a human nature but human nature, that is to say, not human nature as manifesting itself in an individual, but human nature in general, "generic" or "universal" human nature. The idea which it is meant to express, is not a very clear one,121 and is apparently only a relic of the discountenanced fiction of the "real" existence of universals. In any case the idea receives no support from a survey of the emotional life of our Lord as it is presented to us in the Evangelical narratives. The impression of a distinct individuality acting in accordance with its specific character as such, which is left on the mind by these narratives is very strong. Whether our Lord's human nature is "generic" or "individual," it certainly — the Evangelists being witness — functioned in the days of his flesh as if it were individual; and we have the same reason for pronouncing it an individual human-nature that we have for pronouncing such any human nature of whose functioning we have knowledge.122.

This general conclusion is quite independent of the precise determination of the peculiarity of the individuality which our Lord exhibits. He himself, on a great occasion, sums up his individual character (in express contrast with other individuals) in the declaration, "I am meek and lowly of heart." And no impression was left by his life-manifestation more deeply imprinted upon the consciousness of his followers than that of the noble humility of his bearing. It was by the "meekness and gentleness of Christ" that they encouraged one another to a life becoming a Christian man's profession (II Cor. x. 1); for "the patience of Christ" that they prayed in behalf of one another as a blessing worthy to be set in their aspirations by the side of the "love of God" (II Thess. iii. 5); to the imitation of Christ's meek acceptance of undeserved outrages that they exhorted one another in persecution — "because Christ also suffered for sin, leaving you an example, that ye should follow in his steps; who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth; who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously" (I Pet. ii. 21-23). Nevertheless we cannot fix upon humility as in such a sense our Lord's "quality" as to obsecure in him other qualities which might seem to stand in conflict with it; much less as carrying with it those "defects" which are apt to accompany it when it appears as the "quality" of others. Meekness in our Lord was not a weak bearing of evils, but a strong forbearance in the presence of evil. It was not so much a fundamental characteristic of a nature constitutionally averse to asserting itself, as a voluntary submission of a strong person bent on an end. It did not, therefore, so much give way before indignation when the tension became too great for it to bear up against it, as coexist with a burning indignation at all that was evil, in a perfect equipoise which knew no wavering to this side or that.' It was, in a word, only the manifestation in him of the mind which looks not on its own things but the things of others (Phil. ii. 5), and therefore spells "mission," not "temperament." We cannot in any case define his temperament, as we define other men's temperaments, by pointing to his dominant characteristics or the prevailing direction of his emotional discharges.123 In this sense he had no particular temperament, and it might with truth be said that his human nature was generic, not individual. The mark of his individuality was harmonious completeness: of him alone of men, it may be truly said that nothing that is human was alien to him, and that all that is human manifested itself in him in perfect proportion and balance.

The series of emotions attributed to our Lord in the Evangelical narrative, in their variety and their complex but harmonious interaction, illustrate, though, of course, they cannot of themselves demonstrate, this balanced comprehensiveness of his individuality. Various as they are, they do not inhibit one another; compassion and indignation rise together in his soul; joy and sorrow meet in his heart and kiss each other. Strong as they are — not mere joy but exhultation, not mere irritated annoyance but raging indignation, not mere passing pity but the deepest movements of compassion and love, not mere surface distress but an exceeding sorrow even unto death, — they never overmaster him. He remains ever in control.124 Calvin is, therefore, not without justification, when, telling us125 that in taking human affections our Lord did not take inordinate affections, but kept himself even in his passions in subjection to the will of the Father, he adds: "In short, if you compare his passions with ours, they will differ not less than the clear and pure water, flowing in a gentle course, differs from dirty and muddy foam."126 The figure which is here employed may, no doubt, be unduly pressed:127 but Calvin has no intention of suggesting doubt of either the reality or the strength of our Lord's emotional reactions. He expressly turns away from the tendency from which even an Augustine is not free, to reduce the affectional life of our Lord to a mere show, and commends to us rather, as Scriptural, the simplicity which affirms that "the Son of God having clothed himself with our flesh, of his own accord clothed himself also with human feelings, so that he did not differ at all from his brethren, sin only excepted." He is only solicitous that, as Christ did not disdain to stoop to the feeling of our infirmities, we should be eager, not indeed to eradicate our affections, "seeking after that inhuman apatheia commended by the Stoics," but "to correct and subdue that obstinacy which pervades them, on account of the sin of Adam," and to imitate Christ our Leader, — who is himself the rule of supreme perfection — in subduing all their excesses. For Christ, he adds for our encouragement, had this very thing in view, when he took our affections upon himself — "that through his power we might subdue everything in them that is sinful." Thus, Calvin, with his wonted eagerness for religious impression, points to the emotional life of Jesus, not merely as a proof of his humanity, but as an incitement to his followers to a holy life accordant with the will of God. We are not to be content to gaze upon him or to admire him: we must become imitators of him, until we are metamorphosed into the same image.

Even this is, of course, not quite the highest note. The highest note — Calvin does not neglect it — is struck by the Epistle to the Hebrews, when it declares that "it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful High-priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people" (Heb. ii. 17). "Surely," says the Prophet (Is. liii. 4), "he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows" — a general statement to which an Evangelist (Mt. viii. 1) has given a special application (as a case in point) when he adduces it in the form, "himself took our infirmities and bore our diseases." He subjected himself to the conditions of our human life that he might save us from the evil that curses human life in its sinful manifestation. When we observe him exhibiting the movements of his human emotions, we are gazing on the very process of our salvation: every manifestation of the truth of our Lord's humanity is an exhibition of the reality of our redemption. In his sorrows he was bearing our sorrows, and having passed through a human life like ours, he remains forever able to be touched with a feeling of our infirmities. Such a High Priest, in the language of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "became" us. We needed such an one.128 When we note the marks of humanity in Jesus Christ, we are observing his fitness to serve our needs. We behold him made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, and our hearts add our witness that it became him for whom are all things and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory to make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.

IV. Conclusion

It is not germane to the present inquiry to enter into the debate as to whether, in assuming flesh, our Lord assumed the flesh of fallen or of unfallen man. The right answer, beyond doubt, is that he assumed the flesh of unfallen man: it is not for nothing that Paul tells us that he came, not in sinful flesh, but in "the likeness of sinful flesh" (Rom. viii. 3). But this does not mean that the flesh he assumed was not under a curse: it means that the curse under which his flesh rested was not the curse of Adam's first sin but the curse of the sins of his people: "him who knew no sin, he made sin in our behalf"; he who was not, even as man, under a curse, "became a curse for us." He was accursed, not because he became man, but because he bore the sins of his people; he suffered and died not because of the flesh he took but because of the sins he took. He was, no doubt, born of a woman, born under the law (Gal. iv. 4), in one concrete act; he issued from the Virgin's womb already our sin-bearer. But he was not sin-bearer because made of a woman; he was made of a woman that he might become sin-bearer; it was because of the suffering of death that he was made a little lower than the angels (Heb. ii. 9). It is germane to our inquiry, therefore, to take note of the fact that among the emotions which are attested as having found place in our Lord's life-experiences, there are those which belong to him not as man but as sin-bearer, which never would have invaded his soul in the purity of his humanity save as he stood under the curse incurred for his people's sins. The whole series of his emotions are, no doubt, affected by his position under the curse. Even his compassion receives from this a special quality: is this not included in the great declaration of Heb. iv. 15? Can we doubt that his anger against the powers of evil which afflict man, borrowed particular force from his own experience of their baneful working? And the sorrows and dreads which constricted his heart in the prospect of death, culminating in the extreme anguish of the dereliction, — do not these constitute the very substance of his atoning sufferings? As we survey the emotional life of our Lord as depicted by the Evangelists, therefore, let us not permit it to slip out of sight, that we are not only observing the proofs of the truth of his humanity, and not merely regarding the most perfect example of a human life which is afforded by history, but are contemplating the atoning work of the Saviour in its fundamental elements. The cup which he drank to its bitter dregs was not his cup but our cup; and he needed to drink it only because he was set upon our salvation.

ENDNOTES

1. “Certainly,” remarks Calvin (Commentarius in Harmoniam Evangelicarum, Mt. xxvi. 37), “those who imagine that the Son of God was exempt from human passions, do not truly and seriously acknowledge him to be a man.” “But Christ having a human nature the same for substance that ours is, consisting both of soul and body,” argues Thomas Goodwin (Works, Edinburgh ed., 1862, iv. p. 140), “therefore he must needs have affections, — even affections proper to man’s nature and truly human. And these he should have had, although this human nature had, from the very first assumption of it, been as glorious as it now is in heaven.” “In what sense the soul is capable of suffering,” says John Pearson (An Exposition of the Creed, New York ed., 1843, p. 288), “in that he was subject to animal passion. Evil apprehended to come tormented his soul with fear, which was as truly in him in respect of what he was to suffer, as hope in reference to the recompense of a reward to come after and from his sufferings.”

2. There is some exaggeration in the remark: “The notices in the Gospels of the impressions made on his feelings by different situations in which he was placed, are extraordinarily numerous” (James Stalker, Imago Christi, 1890, p. 302). The Gospel narratives are very objective, and it is only occasionally (most frequently in Mark) that they expressly notify the subjective movements of the actors in the drama which they unfold.

3. Direct mention of our Lord’s human ‘soul,’ under that term (psucha) ), is not frequent in the Gospels: cf. Swete on Mk. xiv. 34, “Though the Gospels yield abundant evidence of the presence of human emotions in our Lord, (e. g. iii. 5, vi. 6, x. 14, Jno. vi. 33), this direct mention of his ‘soul’ has no parallel in them if we except Jno. vii. 27; for in such passages as x. 45, Jno. x. 11 psucha is the individual life (see Cremer s. v.) rather than the seat of the emotions.” J. A. Alexander on Mk. xiv. 34 remarks that “my soul” there “is not a mere periphrasis for the pronoun, (I), but refers his strange sensations more directly to the inward seat of feeling and emotion.” Cf., however, the Greek text of Ps. xlii. 6, 12, xlv. 5; but also Winer, Grammar, etc., Thayer’s tr., 1872, p. 156. The term pneuma occurs rather more frequently than psucha, to designate the seat of our Lord’s emotions: Mk. viii. 12; Jno. xi. 33, xiii. 21; cf. Mk. ii. 8; Mt. xxvii. 50; Jno. xix. 30.

4. Such an attempt as that made by W. B. Smith (Ecce Deus, 1911, p. 101), to explain away the implication of our Lord’s humanity in the earliest Gospel transmission, is, of course, only a “curiosity of literature.” “Mark,” says he, “nowhere uses of Jesus an expression which suggests an impressive or even amiable human personality; or, indeed, any kind of human personality whatever.” What Mark says of Jesus, is what is commonly said of God — of Jehovah. The seeming exceptions are merely specious. He ascribes “compassion” to Jesus: it is the very core of the oriental conception of God that he is merciful. He speaks of Jesus “rebuking” (epitimao) or “snorting at” (embrimaomai) men: these are expressions suitable to God and employed in the Old Testament of Jehovah. He tells us that Jesus “loved” the rich young man — the only ascription of love to Jesus, by the way, in the Synoptics: but the rich young man is just a symbol, the symbol of Israel, whom Jehovah loves. And so on.

5. Mt. xx. 34; Mk. i. 41; Lk. vii. 13; Mt. ix. 38, xiv. 14, xv. 82; Mk. vi. 34, viii. 2. Cf. Mk. ix. 22. Not at all in John.

6. Splagchalzomai: see Bleek, An Introduction to the New Testament,§33, (vol. i, p. 75); J. A. Alexander on Mk. i. 41; Plummer on Mt. ix. 38. Buttig’s monograph, De Emphasi splagchalzomai, we have not seen.

7. So Lightfoot, on Phil. i. 8.

8. It is found in the LXX in this metaphorical sense apparently only at Prov. xvii. 5. Cf. Swete on Mk. i. 41.

9. Oikteiro, which does not occur in the Synoptic Gospels, and indeed only once (Rom. ix. 15) in the N. T. The adjective, oiktirmon occurs at Lk. ix. 38 (also Jas. v. 11 only in N. T.); the noun oiktirmos,occurs in Paul (Rom. xii. 1; 2 Cor. i. 3; Phil. ii. 1; Col. iii. 12; also Heb. x. 28 only).

10. A. V. Mk. i. 41, vi. 34; Mt. ix. 38, xiv. 14; R. V. Mk. i. 41; Mt. ix. 36, xx. 34.

11. ’Eleeo (sometimes, eleao), Mt. ix. 27, xv. 22, xvii. 15, xx. 30-31; Mk. x. 47-48; Lk. xvii. 13, xviii. 38-39; cf. Mk. v. 19; Mt. xviii. 33. This word also is not found in John. In Mk. ix. 22 only is splagchnizomai used in an appeal, and even there its more subjective sense is apparent. On eleos and its synonymy see J. H. Heinrich Schmidt, Synonymik der grieschischen Sprache iii., 1879, § 143, pp. 572sq.; and the excellent summary statement by Thayer in Thayer-Grimm, Lexicon etc., sub voc. eleeo.G. Heine, Synonymik des N. T: -lichen Griechisch, 898, p. 82, states it thus: “eleos is the inclination to succor the miserable, OIKr&p uSs the feeling of pain arising from the miseries of others .. . oiktirmos is the feeling of sympathy dwelling in the heart; eleos is sympathy expressing itself in act.” splagchnizomai is a term of feeling, taking the place of oiktiro.

12. W. Lutgert, Die Liebe im Neuen Testament, 1905, thinks it important to lay stress on this side of our Lord’s love. “In the Synoptic portrait of Christ the trait which stands out most clearly is the love of Jesus. He not only commanded love, but first himself practiced it. It is not merely his thought but his will, and not merely his will but above all his deed. He therefore not only required it but aroused it. It expresses itself accordingly not merely in his word, but in the first instance in his act. Jesus’ significance to the Synoptists does not consist in his having discovered the command of love, but in his having fulfilled it. For them Jesus is not a ‘sage’ who teaches old truths or new, but a doer, who brings the truth true, that is, acts it out” (p. 53). “His love never remains a powerless wish, that is, an unsuccessful willing, but it always succeeds. The working of Jesus is described in the Gospels as almighty love” (p. 54). “Since his acts are really love, they have primarily no other purpose but to help. Their motive is nothing but the compassion of Jesus” (p. 58). Accordingly, Lutgert insists, no cry to Jesus for help was ever made in vain: “Jesus acts precisely according to his own command, Give to him that asketh thee” (p. 55).

13. Render, not “he had,” but “he felt compassion,” to bring out the emphasis on the “feeling.”

14. J. A. Alexander’s note (on Mk. vi. 34, repeated verbally at Mt. ix. 36 and xiv. 14) is therefore too exclusive: “What excited his divine and human sympathy was not, of course, their numbers or their physical condition, but their spiritual destitution.” It was both. Cf. Liitgert, as above, p. 68: “It is a characteristic trait of Jesus that he feels pity not merely for the religious, but also for the external, need of the people and that he acts out of this pity. The perfection of his love stands precisely in this — that it is independent of gratitude. He helps to help.”

15. Cf. Plummer in loc.: “A strong word (eskulmenoi)is used to expresss their distress. . . . Originally it meant ‘flayed’ or ‘mangled,’ but became equivalent to ‘harassed’ or ‘vexed’ with weariness or worry. . . . ‘Scattered’ seems to suit shepherdless sheep, but it may be doubted if this is the exact meaning of eppimenoi. . . . ‘Prostrated’ seems to be the meaning here.”

16. According to some commentators, sullupoumenos at Mk. iii. 5 expresses sympathetic compassion (so e. g. Meyer, Weiss, Morrison, J. B. Bristow, art. “Pity” in DCG); see note 38. Some commentators also read agathos, Mk. x. 18, of ‘benevolence’; cf. kalos, Jno. x. 11, 14.

17. Cf. James Stalker, Imago Christi,1890, p. 303. “He not only gave the required help in such cases, but gave it with an amount of sympathy which doubled its value. Thus, he not only raised Lazarus, but wept with his sisters. In curing a man who was deaf, he sighed as he said ‘Ephphatha.’ All his healing work cost him feeling.”

18. Dakruo, silent weeping: see Schmidt, Synonymik der griechischen Sprache, I. 1876, § 26, p. 470sq.

19. Klaio, audible wailing: see Schmidt, as above. Cf. Hahn in loc.: “eklausen of the loud and violent wailing called out by an inner feeling of pain. . . . The contrast should be observed between the joyful outcry of his disciples, and the inner feeling of Jesus whose spirit saw the true situation of things, undeceived by appearances.”

20. Stenazo, “pitying as I think,” comments Fritzsche, “the calamities of the human race” and so Euth. Zig., Grotius, Meyer. On the other hand, DeWette, Weiss, Lagrange think the sigh, a sigh not of sympathy but of prayer (Rom. viii. 23, 26).

21. ’Anastenazo,intensive form, here only in the N. T., but found in LXX. “The Lord’s human spirit,” comments Swete, “was stirred to its depths.”

22. “In both cases,” Swete (on Mk. vii. 34) suggests, “perhaps the vast difficulty and long delays of the remedial work were borne in upon our Lord’s human spirit in an especial manner.”

23. ’Agapase, On the words for “love” see Schmidt, Synonymik, etc. III. 1879; § 136, pp. 474sq; agapao, pp. 482sq.

24. Morrison in loc. Cf. Liitgert, as cited, p. 59: “According to the Gospels, therefore, Jesus loves the needy. When Wemle maintains that the Evangelists have shown us a Christ who leads his life ‘in joy over nature and good men’ (p. 83), this conception of Christ contradicts the earnestness of the Gospels through and through: it is precisely the characteristic of the Gospels that the motive of Jesus’ love according to them, so far as it lies in men, is in the first instance negative. The people called out his compassion (Mt. ix. 36). Jesus’ love does not have the character of admiration, but simply of compassion. It is not delight, but deed, gift, help. It required therefore a needy recipient.

But the love of Jesus to the people has also a positive motive, which is, however, nowhere expressed, — that is, pleasure in their good.” Cf. what Liitgert says, pp. 92sq., of the coexistence with Jesus’ love of hate, directed to all that is evil in men.

25. The negative side of the exposition is stated very well by Wohlenberg in loc.:“It would contradict fundamental elements of Jesus’ preaching if those were right who hold that Jesus was inwardly of the young man’s mind, and, looking upon him, conceived an affection for him, precisely because he had already made so much progress in keeping the divine commandments, and showed himself burning with enthusiasm for undertaking more. And how would this harmonize with what is afterwards said in verses 23 and 24sq.” . . . The positive side is given excellently by J. A. Alexander in loc.: “Most probably, love, as in many other places, here denotes not moral approbation, nor affection founded upon anything belonging to the object, but a sovereign and gratuitous compassion, such as leads to every act of mercy on God’s part (compare Jno. iii. 18; Gal. ii. 20; Eph. ii. 4; 1 Jno. iv. 10, 19). The sense will then be, not that Jesus loved him on account of what he said, or what he was, or what he did, but that, having purposes of mercy towards him, he proceeded to unmask him to himself, and to show him how entirely groundless, although probably sincere, was his claim to have habitually kept the law. The Saviour’s love is then mentioned, not as the effect of what precedes, but as the ground or motive of what follows.”

26. For the construction, see Westcott in loc. The term is, of course, agapao.

27. The term is agapa — although its correlative is oi philoi.

28. Cf. Meyer in loc.: “The agapa ha ema is not love to me, but: my love to you,as is clear from agapasa humas and from the analogy of ha chara ha ema verse 11, cf. verses 12, 13.” This instance carries the others with it. Westcott, if we understand him, wishes to take this phrase undifferentiatedly as including both the subjective and objective senses: “The meaning of the words cannot be limited to the idea of Christ’s love for men, or to that of man’s love for Christ: they describe the absolute love which is manifested in these two ways, the love which perfectly corresponds with Christ’s being.” “His love,” he apparently takes objectively, of love to God.

29. Westcott: “to the uttermost”: so Godet, etc. Lutgert, as cited, p. 154 note: “eis telos means, not ‘until the end’ but ‘to the utmost,’ absolutely; cf. I Thess. ii. 16; Lk. xviii. 5, and besides the parallels from Hennas adduced by Jiilicher, Gleichnisreden Jesu, II. p.282, also Barnabas iv. 6, eis telos apoleson autan and xix. 11, eis telos misaseis ton ponaron. Therefore John too has the conception of complete, purified love.” In the text he had written: “The word xiii. 1 is a parallel to xii. 28. According to the one word the life of Jesus hitherto is described as a glorification of God, according to the other as love to his people. The love which he practiced in his death, the Apostle places by the side of the love which he had hitherto practiced: on the other hand it is distinguished from his love hitherto as an especial, new manifestation of love. By the love which he practiced in his death, he loved them to the uttermost. Now his love is become an absolute, purified love, for his love first becomes absolute when he gives his soul. The death of Jesus serves therefore for John not only as the last and highest proof of his love, but as its perfecting.”

30. ’Agapao: xi. 5, xiii. 23, xix. 26, xxi. 7, 20. Cf. Mk. x. 21.

31. Phileo: xi. 3, 36, xx. 2.

32. Jno. xx. 2, not “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” but “the other disciple whom Jesus loved.” Jesus loved both Peter and John. Cf. Westcott in loc. Hence Westcott says (on xiii. 23) that the phrase “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” “marks an acknowledgment of love and not an exclusive enjoyment of love.”

33. ’Agapao: xiii. 23, xix. 26, xxi. 7, 20; phileo: lat. 2.

34. Cf. Meyer on Jno. xi. 5: “agapa: an expression chosen with delicate tenderness (the more sensuous philein is not again used as in verse 4), because the sisters are mentioned”: and Westcott: “The Evangelist describes the Lord’s affection for this family as that of moral choice (agapa. .).”

35. Cf. Mt. xi. 19, Lk. vii. 34 (xii. 4), Jno. xi. 11 (xv. 14, 15).

36. The preposition in the participle sullupoumenos merely emphasizes the inwardness of the emotion (Thayer-Grimm, Lexicon, etc. sub voc. suv,ii. 4). Cf. Fritsche in loc.: “Beza and Rosenmiiller have properly seen that the preposition suv is not without force. But their interpretation: ‘when he had looked indignantly about him at the same time grieving, etc.’ would require ama lupouµevos and does not render the force of sullupouµevo,. We have no doubt, therefore, that the preposition suv,should be referred to the mind of Jesus, i. e., ‘when he had looked about him with anger, grieving in his mind . . . he said’”

37. “It is” says James Denney (DCG., I. p. 60) justly, “the vehement repulsion of that which hurts,”

38. See Schmidt, Synonymik etc. II, 1878, § 83. 14, 588 sq. Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament7 1871, p. 224: “This lupa, unlike the grief which the three following words [pentheo, phraneo, kopto]express, a man may so entertain in the deep of his heart, that there shall be no outward manifestation of it, unless he himself be pleased to reveal it ( Rom. is. 2) .”

39. See Schmidt, as above III, 1879, § 142: orga is “wrath (Zorn) as it is directed to punishment or vengeance” (p. 512) ; “orga stands in closer relation to the vengeance which is to be inflicted than thumos”(p. 553); “it accordingly can be nothing else than the violently outbreaking natural impulse, uncontrolled by the reason, which we call by the word ‘wrath’ (Zorn) ; and the idea that such an impulse seeks its end, and therefore the thought of vengeance or punishment which this impulse seeks to wreak on the guilty one, lies close” (p. 555). Cf. Trench, p. 124. Lutgert, as cited, pp. 98, 99, is careful to point out that Jesus’ anger is never personal, and never passes into revengeful feelings on his own behalf.

40. Cf. “the wrath of the Lamb” Rev. vi. 18. Thomas Goodwin (Works, IV. p. 144) wishes us to understand that when such emotional movements are attributed to the Exalted Christ, they have their full quality as human emotions, affecting the whole Christ body as well as spirit. “Therefore, when as we read of the ‘wrath of the Lamb,’ as Rev. vi. 18, namely, against his enemies, as her of his pity and compassion towards his friends and members, why should this be attributed only to his deity, which is not capable of wrath, or to his soul and spirit only? And why may it not be thought he is truly angry as a man, in the whole man, and so with such a wrath as his body is afflicted with, as well as that he is wrathful in his soul only, seeing he hath taken up our whole nature, on purpose to subserve his divine nature in all the executions of it?”

41. ’Aganakteo:see Schmidt, Synonymik etc. III, 1879, pp. 360-562: ’Aganaktein and aganaktasis designate, to wit, the displeasure (Unwillen) which we feel at an act in which we see a wrong (Unrecht)or which outrages our human sentiment and feeling” (p. 561). “Jesus” comments Lagrange in loc. “was irritated by their hardness.”

42. Swete in loc.: “We hear the Lord’s indignant call, as it startles the disciples in the act of dismissing the party.”

43. ’Embrimaomai: see especially the detailed discussion of this word by Fr. Cumlich in the Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 1862, pp. 260-269. “It is, now, exegetically certain that Jesus here (Jno. xi. 33) was angry. Only this, open and vehement anger, and no other meaning belongs philologically to eubrimasthai”(p. 260, opening the discussion). “From what has been said, it is sufficiently clear that, 1) bremo, just like fremo always expresses, transferred to man, nothing but the active affection of anger, never ‘a general [mental movement],’ least of all ‘sorrow; 2) that moreover brima, and its frequentatively heightened and yet at the same time interiorizing (en) intensive embrimasthai,expresses only a strong, or the strongest degree of wrath, which, precisely on account of this strength being incapable of being held in, breaks out externally, but still gives vent to itself rather in uncontrollable sound than word” (pp. 265-6, closing the discussion). Cf. p. 209: “Embrimasthai designates primarily a single emotion, and this one is a vehement ebullition of his anger, a real infremere.”Cf. Meyer on Jno. xi. 33: “The words brimaomai and embrimaomai are never used otherwise than of hot anger in the Classics, the Septuagint, and the New Testament (Mt. ix. 30; Mk. i. 43, xiv. 5 ), save when they denote snorting or growling proper (Aeschyl, Sept.461, Lucean, Necyom. 20.”

44. Fuller (Webster), about 1801, cited in The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, I. 951, where other citations also are given.

45. Certain late grammarians (see Stephens’ Thesaurus sub voc. embrimasthai and brimoomai)define brimosmai “to threaten”; and some of the lexicographers do the like: Hesychius for example defines brima as “threat,” and Suidu embrimasthai itself as “to speak with anger and to blame with harshness,” the latter part of which is repeated in the Etym. Mag. A scholiast on Aristophansa, Eq. 855 defines brimasthai as “to be angry and to threaten.”

46. Mt. viii. 4, ix. 30, xviii. 10, xxiv. 6; Mk. i. 44; I Thess. v. 15; Rev. xix. 10, xxii. 9 only.

47. So that Zahn (on Mt. ix. 30, p. 385) is misled into explaining: “He admonished them in a menacing tone.” Something more than this is said.

48. Meyer on Mk. i. 43 quite accurately connects the embrimasamenos auto with exebalen only, translating: “after he had been angry at him,” though he supposes the exebalen to have been accompanied by “a vehement begone now! away hence!”and accordingly arbitrarily paraphrases the embrimansamenos “wrathfully addressed him.” On Mt. ix. 30 he accurately translates: “He was displeased with them, and said.”

49. J. A. Alexander, in Mt. ix. 30, puts this view in its most attractive form: “It can only mean a threatening in case of disobedience, charging them on pain of his serious displeasure and disapprobation.” It comes to the same thing when Westcott (on Jno. xi. 33) says: “There is the notion of coercion springing out of displeasure.” Cf. Morrison: “Peremptorily charged them” (Mk. i. 43) ; Zahn: “He enjoined them in a menacing tone” (Mt. ix. 30). Others, of course, transfer the matter from Christ to the Evangelists; thus even Weiss can write (on Mt. ix. 39) : “Perhaps the Evangelist is thinking with respect to this ebullition of the resultlessness of such prohibitions, which is so strongly emphasized by Mark (cf. vii. 36).”

50. Three or four such comments on Mk. i. 43 as the following, when read consecutively, are instructive. Weiss: “But obviously Mark thinks of the healing as taking place in a house (exebalen),perhaps, according to the connection with verse 39, in a synagogue. Entrance into the house of another was, no doubt, forbidden to lepers, according to Lev. xiii. 48 cf. Num. v. 2 (see Ewald on the passages, and Alterth. p. 180), but not altogether access to the synagogues: in any case the resort of the people to Jesus and his healing of the sick broke through the restrictions of the law, and from this also is explicable Jesus’ demeanor of haste and vehemence.” Wohlenberg: “After or with the manifestation of vehement anger, Jesus sends the man forthwith away (exebalen)from his presence . . . and nothing indicates that Mark conceived the occurrence to have taken place in a house. An intensely angry emotion was exhibited by Jesus towards the healed man, because he observed in him a false and perverse idea of the transaction.” Keil: “The occasion, however, of the angry expulsion of the healed man, we certainly are not to seek in the leper’s breach of the law through entering the house of another (Lev. 46 cf., Num. v. 2) but chiefly in his state of mind” . . . Edersheim (Life and Times, etc., I. 496) : “This [‘cast him out’], however, as Godet has shown (Comm. on St. Luke, German trans. p. 137), does not imply that the event took place either in a house or in a town, as most commentators suppose. It is, to say the least, strange that the Speaker’s Commentary, following Weiss, should have located it in a synagogue’ It could not possibly have occurred there, unless all Jewish ordinances and customs had been reversed.”

51. As e.g. Lagrange on Mk. i. 43: “’Embrimaomai:(again xiv. 5; Mt. ix. 30; Jno. xi. 33, 38) cannot mean anger here, but only a certain severity. Jesus speaks in a tone which does not admit of reply.”

52. Zahn on Mt. ix. 30 (p. 385) reminds us that the word suggests “the audible expression of wrath.” Cf. Mk. xiv. 4-5 where we are told that “there were some that had indignation (aganaktountes), among themselves — and they murmured (enebrimonto) against her.” The inward emotion is expressed by aganakteo,its manifestation in audible form by embrimaomai.

53. See above, note 19; and cf. Gumlich, TSK, 1882, p. 258.

54. ’Aganakteo: see above, notes 41 and 52.

55. Dakruo (not klaio as in verse 33): see above, note 18.

56. See above: note 43.

57. So Hengstenberg, in particular, and many after him.

58. John Hutchison, The Monthly Interpreter, 1885, II. p. 288: “A stormof wrath was seen to sweep over him.”

59. Kai etaraxen eauton. Many commentators insist on the voluntariness of Jesus’ emotion, expressed by this phrase. Thus John Hutchison, as above, p. 288: “It was an act of his own free will, not a passion hurrying him on, but a voluntarily assumed state of feeling which remained under his direction and control. . . . In a word there was no ataxia in it.” For the necessary limitations of this view see Calvin on this passage. Cf. Lutgert as cited, p. 145.

60. Cf. John Hutchison, as above, p. 375: “He was gazing into ‘the skeleton face of the world,’ and tracing everywhere the reign of death. The whole earth to him was but ‘the valley of the shadow of death,’ and in these tears which were shed in his presence, he saw that

‘Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe,

Are brackish with the salt of human tears.’”

61. The classical exposition of the whole passage is F. Gumlich’s, Die Rathsel der Erweckung Lazari, in the Theologische Studien und Knitlken, 1882, pp. 65-110, and 248-336. See also john Hutchison, in The Monthly Interpreter, 1885, II. pp. 281-296 and 374-386.

62. ’Epitimao: See Schmidt, Synonymik etc. I. 1876, § 4, 11, p. 147: “epitman is properly to impute something to one (as a fault) . . . And indeed it denotes harsh and in general vehement reproaches with reference to unworthy deeds or customs, construed ordinarily with the dative of the person: to condemn with harsh words, to heap reproaches on.” Cf. also Trench, § 4 (p. 12).

63. Swete, on Mk. i. 25: “epitiman, Vg. comminari, Wycliffe and Rheims ‘threaten,’ other English Versions, ‘rebuke’: the strict meaning of the word is ‘to mete-out due measure,’ but in the N. T. it is used only of censure.” Plummer on Lk. iv. 35: “In N. T. epitimrao has no other meaning than ‘rebuke’; but in classical Greek it means — 1. ‘lay a value on, rate’;2. ‘lay a penalty on, sentence’; 3. ‘chide, rate, rebuke.’” “The verb is often used of rebuking violence (verse 41, viii. 24, ix. 42; Mt. viii. 26, xviii. 18; Mk. iv. 39; Jud. ix); yet must not on that account be rendered ‘restrain’ (Fritzsche on Mt. viii. 26, 325).” Morrison accordingly thinks that “rated” might give the essential meaning of the word. Lagrange (on Mk. i. 28) unduly weakens the term.

64. Morrison on Mk. ill. 12.

65. Hahn on Lk. iv. 35: “epitimasen auto, that is, he vehemently commanded him, charged him with strong, chiding words (cf. verses 39, 41, viii. 24, ix. 21, 42, 55), an expression by which Luke would say that Jesus spoke the following words in a tone of highest displeasure”: cf. on verse 39.

66. Cf. Gumlich, TSK, 1862 p. 287: “Similar movements of anger, epitiman instead of embrimasthai directly before or after a miracle, we find also elsewhere in him: threats (Bedrohen)to the wind and the sea (Mt. viii. 26), most frequently in the case of healings of possessed people of a difficult kind (Mt. viii. 28, vii. 18; Mk. ix. 21, i. 25, iii. 12; Lk. iv. 41).”

67. In Mk. viii. 33; Lk. ix. 55 the objects of his displeasure were his followers.

68. Cf. Zahn, Das Evangelium des Johannes, 1908, p. 480, note 82: “Since Jesus, without prejudice to his faith in the all-embracing providence and universal government of God, looked upon all disease, and not merely possession, as the work of Satan (Lk. xiii. 16, x. 19, cf. Acts xvi 38; II Cor. xii. 7), and held him to be the author not only of isolated miseries, but of the death of man in general (Jno. viii. 44) ; Heb. ii. 14 does not go beyond Jesus’ circle of ideas.” — Also Henry Norris Bernard, The Mental Characteristics of the Lord Jesus Christ, 1888, pp. 90-91: “The miracles of Christ formed part of that warfare which was ever waging between the Son of God and the power of evil which he was manifested to destroy. The rage of the elements, the roaring wind, and the surging waves ever seeking to engulf the fishers’ boat: the fell sickness racking with pain man’s body; the paralysis of the mental powers destroying man’s intellect, and leaving him a prey to unreasoning violence, or to unclean desires; the death which shrouded him in the unknown darkness of the tomb— these things were to the Saviour’s vision but objective forms of the curse of sin which it was his mission to remove. The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan were brought together in opposition. The battle between the Lord’s Christ and the great adversary was ever going on. Man’s infirmities and his sicknesses, in the eyes of Christ, were the outward symbol of the sin which was their cause. So the inspired writer, in the healing of the sick, and in the casting out of devils, sees direct blows given, which, in the end, shall cause Satan’s empire to totter to its fall. Every leper cleansed, every blind man restored to sight, every helpless paralytic made to walk, every distracted man brought back to the sweetness of life and light of reason, above all the dead recalled to life — each, in the salvation accorded them, furnished a proof that a greater than Satan was here, and that the Kingdom of God was being manifested upon earth.”

69. Cf. Swete in loc.; also Lagrange: “polla, taken adverbially, does not mean in Mk. ‘often,’ nor even ‘in a prolonged fashion,’ but ‘earnestly; ‘strongly; ‘greatly’ (except perhaps in i. 45) ; cf. v. 10, 23, 43, vi. 20, ix. 26; the Vulgate has, therefore, well rendered it vehementer (here and xvi. 43).”

70. Westcott in loc.

71. Zahn in loc.:p. 168.

72. Meyer in loc.: “In this wrathful zeal which they saw had taken bold of Jesus, they thought they saw the Messianic fulfilment of that word of the psalm. . . .

73. Delitzsch in loc.

74. Cf. James Denney, article “Anger,” and E. Daplyn, article “Fierceness,” in Hastings’ DCG. Also Lutgert, as cited, p. 97 where instances of our Lord’s expressions of anger, “which occupy a large place in the Synoptics” are gathered together, and p. 99 where it is pointed out that “Jesus grounds his declarations of woe, not on what his opponents had done to him, but purely on their sins against the law and the prophets . . . Jesus’ anger remains therefore pure because it bums against what is done against God, and not against what has happened to himself.”

75. Chapter xxi. “The Law of Resentment.”

76. So e.g. Cheyne, G. A. Smith, Skinner, Workman.

77. ’Agalliaomai&: see G. Heine, Synonymik des N.T.-lichen Griechisch 1898,p. 147: “chairo in general, gaudeo, laetor (chara), agalliao, -omai exsulto, vehementer gaudeo, Mt. v. 12; Lk. x. 21 (agalliasis) Lk. i. 14, 44, summum gaudium (frequently in LXX; not classical.” There is a good brief account of the word given by C. F. Gelpe, in the Theologische Studien und Kritlken, 1849, pp. 645-646: “the profoundest and highest transport.” Cf. Codet in loc. “’Agalliasthai,to exult, denotes an inner transport, which takes place in the same deep regions of the soul of Jesus as the opposite emotion expressed by the embrimtsthai, to groan (Jno. ix. 33 ). This powerful influence of external events on the inner being of Jesus proves how thoroughly in earnest the Gospels take his humanity.”

78. Plummer in loc.:“This joy is a divine inspiration. The fact is analogous to his being ‘led by the Spirit in the wilderness,’ (iv. 1).”

79. The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor. Ed. Heber, London 1828. II. p. lxvii. Jeremy Taylor’s object is to show that Christ is not imitable by us in everything; hence he proceeds at once: “But the declensions of our natures cannot bear the weight of a perpetual grave deportment, without the intervals of refreshment and free alacrity.” This whole view of our Lord’s deportment lacks justification: but it has been widely held from the earliest times. Basil the Great, for instance, in condemning immoderate mirth, appeals to our Lord’s example, — although he accounts for his deportment on a theory which bears traces of the “apathetic” ideal of virtue so wide-spread in his day. “And the Lord appears to have sustained” says he (Regulae fusius Tractatae. 17:Migne, PG. xxxi. p. 961), “the passions which are necessary to the flesh and whatever of them bear testimony to virtue, such as weariness, and pity to the afflicted: but never to have used laughter, so far as may be learned from the narrative of the Evangelists, but to have pronounced a woe upon those who are held by it (Lk. vi. 25).” Chrysostom (Hom. vi in Matth.: Migne, PG. lvii. p. 69) in commending a grave life by the example of Christ, exaggerates the matter: “If thou also weep thus, thou hast become an imitator of thy Lord. For he also himself. wept, both over Lazarus and over the city; and touching Judas he was greatly troubled. And this, indeed, he is often to be seen doing, but never laughing (gelonta), and not even smiling even a little; at least no one of the Evangelists has mentioned it.”

80. Vie de Jesus, ch. xi. ad fin.;ed. 2. 1863, pp. 188-194.

81. Cf. the article “Foresight” in Hastings’ DCG. See for example, A. Julicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu. I. p. 144; Paul Wernle, Die Anfange unserer Religion,p. 65: “There was a time in Jesus’ life, when a wholly extraordinary hope filled his soul. . . . Then, Jesus knew himself to be in harmony with all the good forces of his people . . . that was the happiest time of his life. . . . We only need to ask whether Jesus retained this enthusiastic faith to the end. To that period of joyful hope there succeeded a deep depression.”

82. ’Ayalliaomai; see note 77 above.

83. Chara: consult also the use in parables of both chara, Mt. xxv. 21, 23; Lk, xv. 10, and chairo, Mt. xviii. 13; Lk. xv. 5, 32.

84. A. B. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ,21881, p. 334: “Hence, though a man of sorrow, he was even on earth anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows. . . . Shall we wonder that there was divine gladness in the heart of him who came into the world, not by constraint, but willingly; not with a burning sense of wrong, but with a grateful sense of high privilege; and that he had a blessed consciousness of fellowship with his Father who sent him, during the whole of his pilgrimage through this vale of tears?” A. E. Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, 1907, p. 318: “Although in his emotions, varying notes of joy or grief were struck by the changeful experiences of his life among men, yet the undertone was the sense of a great good to be gained by the endurance of a great sorrow.” G. Matheson, Studies in the Portrait of Christ,101909, I. pp. 274 sq.: “We speak of the ‘Man of Sorrows,’ yet I think the deepest note in the soul of Jesus was not sorrow but joy.” C. W. Emmet, DCG. ii. p. 607 b: Christ “is the Man of Sorrows, yet we cannot think of him for a moment as an unhappy man. He rather gives us the picture of serene and unclouded happiness. Beneath not merely the outward suffering, but the profound sorrow of heart, there is deeper still a continual joy, derived from the realized presence of his Father and the consciousness that he is doing his work. Unless this is remembered, the idea of the Man of Sorrows is sentimentalized and exaggerated.” F. W. Farrar, The Life of Christ, 1874, i. p. 318; ii. p. 103.

85. Hahn in loc.: “We see from this verse that Jesus had a distinct foreknowledge of his passion, as indeed he bears witness already in ix. 22, 44. There meets us here, however, the first intimation that he looked forward to it with inner dread (Angst),though there are repeated testimonies to this later (Cf. xxii. 42; Jno. xii. 2; Mt. xxvi. 37).” Cf. Mt. xx. 22: “Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?”; Mk. x. 38: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink? or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”

86. Cf. Meyer on Mk. x. 38: “The cup and baptism of Jesus represent martyrdom. In the case of the figure of baptism . . . the point of the similitude lies in the being submerged . . . Cf. the classical use of kataduein and, baptizein, to plunge (immerge) into sufferings, sorrows, and the like.”

87. Sunecho: see G. Heine, Synonymik etc., 1898. p. 149: “sunechomai, affligor, laboro.”Cf. Plummer in loc.: “How am I oppressed, afflicted, until it be accomplished! Comp. viii. 37; Jno. v. 24. The prospect of his sufferings was a perpetual Gethsemane: cf. Jno. xii. 27.” Weiss in loc.: “And how I am afflicted (bedrangt) until it be accomplished! Expression of human anxiety in prospect of the sufferings which were to come, as in Gethsemane and Jno. xii. 27.”

88. The heos hotou emphasizes the whole intervening time: “I am straitened through all the time up to its accomplishment.”

89. Zahn in loc.,(p. 509) : “The essential content of this incident, narrated by John alone, is the same that the Synoptics record in the prayer-conflict in Gethsemane, which John passes over in silence when his narrative brings him to Gethsemane (xviii. 1-11).”

90. See note 3.

91. This prayer is frequently taken as a continuation of the question. So, e. g. Zahn. (p. 507): “to the question ti eipo,the words which follow: pater, swson me ek tas hopas tautas cannot bring the response; for the prayer is at once corrected and withdrawn (alla ktl),and replaced by an absolutely different one (verse 28). The first prayer shares therefore in the interrogatory inflection of ti eipo and is to be filled out by an ara (or n) eipo derived thence, with the new question, ‘Am I to say, perhaps: Father save me from this hour?’ “ Against this, however, Westcott forcibly urges “that it does not fall in with the parallel clause, which follows: ‘Father glorify Thy Name’; nor with the intensity of the passage, nor yet with the kindred passages in the Synoptics (Mt. xxvi. 39 and parallels).”

92. Zahn (p. 509) : “Into the world of Jesus’ conceptions the possibility of going another way than that indicated by God could intrude; that was his temptation; but his will repelled it.”

93. Tarasso: see Schmidt, Synonymik etc., iii. 1879. § 739. 8. p. 518: Heine, Synonymik etc., 1898, p. 149.

94. Cf. Calvin Com. in Harm. Evang., on Mt. xxvi. 37: “And whence came to him both sorrow and anxiety and fear, except because he felt in death something sadder and more horrible than the separation of the soul and body? And certainly he underwent death, not merely that he might move from earth to heaven, but rather that he might take on himself the curse to which we were liable, and deliver us from it. His horror was not, then, at death simpliciter, as a passage out of the world, but because he had before his eyes the dreadful tribunal of God, and the Judge Himself armed with inconceivable vengeance; it was our sins, the burden of which he had assumed, that pressed him down with their enormous mass. It is, then, not at all strange if the dreadful abyss of destruction tormented him grievously with fear and anguish.”

95. Thus Mrs. Humphrey Ward reports a conversation with Mr. Gladstone (“Notes of Conversation with Mr. Gladstone,” appended to the second volume of Robert Elsmere, Westmoreland ed. 1911): “He said that though he had seen many deaths, he had never seen any really peaceful. In all there had been much struggle. So much so that ‘I myself have conceived what I will not call a terror of death, but a repugnance from the idea of death. It is the rending asunder of body and soul, the tearing apart of the two elements of our nature, — for I hold the body to be an essential element as well as the soul, not a mere sheath or envelope.’”

96. lnstitutes. II. xvi.12: “If anyone now ask, whether Christ was already descending into hell when he prayed to be delivered from death, I reply that this was the exordium,and we may learn from it what diros et horribiles cruciatus he sustained when he was conscious of standing at the tribunal of God, arraigned on our account.” “It is our wisdom,” Calvin remarks in the context, “to have a fit sense of how much our salvation cost the Son of God.” Cf. the discussion in the same spirit of Thomas Goodwin, Works. v. pp. 278-288: “For it is God’s wrath that is hell, as it is his favor that is heaven” (p. 281).

97. ’Agonia: see G. Heine, Synonymik etc., 1898, p. 189: “Contest, quaking, agitation (and anxiety of the issue?) Lk. xxii. 44; Luther, ‘he grappled with death,’ Weizsacker, ‘he struggled,’ Bengel; ‘supreme grief and anguish. It properly denotes the anguish and passion of the mind, when it enters upon a conflict and arduous labor, even when there is no doubt of a good issue:” Plummer in loc.: “Field contends that fear is the radical notion of the word. The passages in which it occurs in LXX confirm this view. . . . It is therefore an agony of fear that is apparently to be understood.” It would be better to say consternation, appalled reluctance.

98. The discussion of the language employed, by John Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed, (New York, 1843), p. 288, note †, is very penetrating.

99. ’Adamoneo: see Heine, Synonymik etc., 1898, p. 148: “pavesco, anger.”Cf. Lightfoot, on Phil. ii. 26: “The primary idea of the word will be loathing and discontent.” “It describes the confused, restless, half-distracted state, which is produced by physical discouragement, or by mental distress, or grief, shame, disappointment, etc.” Lagrange on Mk. xviii. 33: “seized with despondency.” Thomas Goodwin (Works. v.278): “so that we see Christ’s soul was sick and fainted,” “his heart failed him.”

100. Aupeomai: see note 38.

101. ’Ekthambeomai: see Hastings’ DCG. i. p. 48, article “Amazement”; G. Heine, Synonymik etc., p. 149: It “is used of those whose minds are horror-struck by the sight or thought of something great or atrocious, not merely because it injects fear, but because the mind scarcely takes in its magnitude.” Weiss in loc.: “ekthambeisthai cannot designate the dread (Angst)but only the horror (Erschrecken)which attacks Jesus at the thought of the sufferings which stand before him.” Thomas Goodwin (Works, v. p. 275): “It signifies ‘to be in horror.”‘

102. See note 3.

103. Perilupos. J. A. Alexander: “Grieved all round, encompassed, shut in by distress on every side.” Morrison: “The idea is, My soul is sorrowful all round and round.”

104. Swete’s “a sorrow which well-nigh kills” is too weak: the meaning is, it is a sorrow that kills. Thomas Goodwin (Works. v. p. 272) distinguishes thus: “A heaviness unto death, not extensive, so as to die, but intensive, that if he had died, he could not have suffered more.”

105. On Jno. xii. 27. The evidence derived from the conflict of wills in this prayer that these emotions had their seat in our Lord’s human nature is often adverted to, — e.g. by J. R. Willis, Hasting’s DCG. i. p. 17a: — “The thrice-repeated prayer of Jesus in which he speaks of his own will as distinct from but distinctly subordinate to his Father’s adds to the impression already gained, of the purely human feelings exhibited by him in this struggle.”

106. Cf. the description of this “agony” in Heb. v. 7: “Who, in the days of his flesh, having offered up, with strong crying and tears, prayers and supplications unto him that was able to save him from death.”

107. Calvin, Commentarius in Harmoniam Evangelicarum, on Mt. xxvii. 46: “And certainly this was his chief conflict, and harder than all his other torments, because he was so far from being supported in his straits by his Father’s help or favor, that he felt himself in some measure estranged. For he did not offer his body only in payment for our reconciliation with God, but in his soul also he bore the punishments due to us; and thus became in very fact the man of sorrows, as Isaiah says (liii. 3). . . . For that Christ should make satisfaction for us, it was necessary that he be sisted as guilty before the tribunal of God. But nothing is more horrible than to incur the judgment of God, whose wrath is worse than all deaths. When, then, there was presented to Christ a kind of temptation as if he were already devoted to destruction, God being his enemy, he was seized with a horror in which a hundred times all the mortals in existence would have been overwhelmed; but he came out of it victor, by the amazing power of the Spirit” . . . Also Institutes II. xvi. 11: “And certainly it is not possible to imagine a more terrible abyss than to feel yourself forsaken and abandoned (derelictum et alienatum)by God, and, when you call upon him, not to be heard as though he had conspired for your destruction. Christ we see to have been so dejected (dejectum)as to be constrained in the urgency of his distress (urgente angusta)to cry out, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ “Calvin adds with clear insight that though it is evident that this cry was ex intimi anima angore deductam, yet this does not carry with it the admission that “God was ever either hostile or angry with him.” “For how could he be angry with his beloved son, in whom his soul delighted, or how could Christ appear in his intercession for others before a Father who was incensed with him?” All that is affirmed is that “he sustained the weight of the Divine severity; since, smitten and afflicted by the hand of God, he experienced all the signs of an angry and punishing God.”

108. That his death was due to psychical rather than physical causes may be the reason why it took place so soon. Jacobus Baumann in a most distressing book (Die Gemutsart Jesu,1908, p. 10)appeals to the rapidity with which Jesus succumbed to death as evidence of a certain general lack of healthful vigor which he finds in Jesus: “With this liability to easy exhaustion, his quick death on the cross agrees — a thing which was unusual.”

109. Calvin, Institutes ii. xv.12 does not fail to remind us that even in our Lord’s cry of desolation, he still addresses God as “My God”: “although he suffered agony beyond measure, yet he does not cease to call God his Cod, even when he cries out that he is forsaken by him.” Then at large in the Comm. in Harm. Evang.,on Mt. xxvii. 48: “We have already pointed out the difference between natural feeling and the knowledge of faith. There was nothing to prevent Christ from mentally conceiving that God had deserted him, according to the dictation of his natural feeling, and at the same time retaining his faith that Cod was well-disposed to him. And this appears with sufficient clearness from the two clauses of the complaint. For before he gives expression to his trial, he begins by saying that he flees to Cod as his Cod and so he bravely repels by this shield of faith that appearance of dereliction which presented itself in opposition. In short, in this dire anguish his faith was unimpaired, so that in act of deploring that he was forsaken, he still trusted in the present help of God.” Similarly Thomas Goodwin (Works. v. p. 283): “And both these differing apprehensions of his did Christ accordingly express in that one sentence, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ He speaks it as apprehending himself a son still united to God and beloved by him, and yet forsaken by him as a surety accursed.”

110. Cf. the remarks of H. N. Bernard, The Mental Characteristics of our Lord Jesus Christ, 1888,pp. 257sq.

111. Cf. Heb. ii. 13. In Jno. ii. 24we are told that Jesus “did not trust himself (episteusen)”to those in Jerusalem who believed on him when they saw the signs which he did. Cf. Lutgert, as cited, p. 63: “From this the relation of Jesus to God receives a two-fold form: on the one side it is absolute trust, a certainty of receiving everything, a wish and prayer directed to God, which leads to a complete exaltation above nature; but this side of his faith Jesus makes use of only for men. By virtue of this his confidence he fulfils the wish of all who ask him. In this use of his faith he expresses his love for men. The faith of Jesus has however also another side; it is bowing, renunciation and subordination to God. This side of his faith Jesus employs only for himself. The story of the temptation shows that Jesus uses this renunciation in order to glorify God.” (Further, p. 89).

112. Cf. A. Schlatter, Die Theologie des Neuen Testaments, 1909,p. 317: “Perfect love involves perfect trust, and is not thinkable without it. Yet though the disciples have declared that Jesus empowered them for faith and demanded faith of them, they have said nothing of Jesus’ own faith. Even John has said nothing of it although he has rich formulas for the piety of Jesus and speaks of faith as the act by which Jesus unites his disciples with himself. The notion of faith is introduced by him only with respect to Jesus’ relations to men, ‘He trusted himself not to them’; while, of Jesus’ relation to God, he says ‘He heard him, loved him, knew him, saw him,’ but not, ‘He believed on him’ (Jno. ii. 24, viii. 26, 40, xi. 10, xiv. 31, x. 15, xvii. 25, iii. 11, vi. 46, viii. 35). As a rule for the conduct of the disciples toward Jesus is expressly drawn from Jesus’ conduct towards the Father the formula ‘Believe in me as I believe in the Father’ might have been expected. But it does not occur.”

113. Mk. i. 35, vi. 46, xiv. 32, 35; Mt. xiv. 23, xix. 13, xxvi. 36-39, 42-44; Lk. iii. 21, v. 16, vi. 12, ix. 18-28, xi. 1, xxii. 41, 44.Cf. Lutgert, as cited, p. 90:“Also in the expression of his love to God, Jesus fulfilled, according to the Evangelists, his own commandment, not to exhibit his piety openly, but to practice it in secret. The Evangelists therefore designedly lay stress on Jesus’ seeking solitude for prayer. The communion of Jesus with God, the ‘inner life’ of Jesus, falls accordingly outside their narrative. The relation of Jesus with God is not discussed, his communion with God remains a secret.” This is spoken of the Synoptics who alone tells us of Jesus’ habit of prayer (proseuchomai, proseucha, do not occur in John).

114. Cf. Heb. v. 7: “having been heard for his godly fear (eulabeia), “ i.e. for his reverent and submissive awe, “that religious fear of God and anxiety not to offend him which manifests itself in voluntary and humble submission to his will” (Delitzsch in loc.).Davidson in loc.: “The clause throws emphasis on the Son’s reverent submission.” Humanitarian writers debate whether “fear” of God is to be attributed to Jesus. Wellhausen (Israel. und jud. Geschichte,5p. 383,expanded in Skizzen and Vorarbeiten,i.1884, p. 98)represents him as passing his life in fear of the judge of all: “He feels the reality of God dominating life, he breathes in the fear of the judge who demands account. of every idle word and has power to destroy body and soul in hell.” Similarly Bousset (Jesus, 1904, pp. 54, 99, E. T. pp. 112, 203) speaks of him as learning by his own experience “that God is terrible (furchtbar) and that an awful darkness and dread encircles him even for those who stand nearest to him,” and as “sharing to the bottom of his soul” “the fear of that almighty God who has power to damn body and soul together,” which he “has stamped upon the hearts of his disciples with such marvellous energy.” Karl Thieme, however, from the same humanitarian standpoint (Die christliche Demut, i. 1906, pp. 109 sq.) repels such representations as without historical ground: we may historically ascribe reverential awe (Ehrfurcht)to Jesus but not fear (Furcht).“Of course he comprehended God in the whole overtowering majesty of his being, and adored his immeasurable exaltation in the deepest reverence (Ehrfurcht).”But “we may maintain in Jesus’ case an altogether fearless (furchtlos)assurance of God and self.” “We cannot speak of a ‘fear of the judge’ in Jesus’ case, because it does not well harmonize with his faith in his own judgeship of the world. But we can no doubt call the intensity of his obedience, the living sense of responsibility in which he made it his end, his whole life through, to walk, in all his motions, with the utmost exactness according to the will of God as the almighty majestic Lord, his fear of God.” Lutgert (Die Liebe im Neuen Testament, 1895, pp. 88, 89) points to Jesus’ turning to the Father in Gethsemane and on the cross, not as something terrible (furchtbar) but with loving confidence, as decisive in the case. On the place of ‘the fear of God’ in Christian piety, see Lutgert’s article Die Furcht Gotten,published in the Theologieche Studien, presented to Martin Kuhler on 6 January 1905 (Leipzig, 1905, pp. 163 sq.).

115. ’Eucharisteo, Jno. xi. 41; Mt. xv. 36; Mk. viii. 8; Jno. vi. 11, 23; xxvi. 27; Mk. xiv. 23; Lk. xxii. 17, 19; I Cor. xi. 24. On the word, see Lobeck, Phrynicus, p.18; Rutherford, The New Phrynicus, p.69. ’Exomo logeomai Mt. xi. 25; Lk. x. 21; R. V. mg. ‘praise’: so Meyer, Hahn, Zahn, also Kennedy, Sources of N. T. Greek, p. 118.Fritzsche: “Gratias tibi ago, quod.” Better, Plummer: “acknowledge openly to thine honour, give thee praise.” Similarly J. A. Alexander.

116. Thaumazo: see Schmidt, Synonymik etc., iv. § 185, pp. 184 sq.: “it is perfectly generally ‘to wonder’ or ‘to admire,’ and is distinguished from thambein precisely as the German sich wundern, or bewundern is from staunen: that is, what has seized on us in the case of thaumazein is the extraordinary nature of the thing while in the case of thambein it is the unexpectedness and suddenness of the occurrence.” Cf. Art. “Amazement” in Hasting’s DCG. I, pp.47, 48.

117. ’Epithumia: see Schmidt, Synonymik, III, § 145, 3, 5; 146, 8; and of. J. C. Lambert, art. “Desire” in Hastings’ DCG, I,453.

118. ’Epaischunomai: see Schmidt, Synonymik,III, § 140; Trench Synonyms, § § 19, 20. On Shame in our Lord’s life cf. James Stalker, Imago Christi, p. 190, and Thieme, as above, p. 111.

119. When Wellhausen (Geschichte Israels,2p. 346) says, “There broke out with him from time to time manifestations of enthusiasm, but to these elevations of mood there corresponded also depressions,” — he is going beyond the warrant of the narrative, which pictures Jesus rather as singularly equable in his demeanor. Cf. Lutgert, as cited, p. 103.

120. Origen, for example, in his comment on Mt. xxvi. 37 lays great weight on the words: “He began to be,” in the sense that the implication is that he never completed the act. Jesus only entered upon these emotions, but did not suffer them in their fulness. He was subject to propatheia but not to the patha themselves. Similarly Cornelius a Lapide wishes us to believe that Christ instead of “passions” had only “pro passiones libere assumptae.”For a modern writer approaching this position, see John Hutchison, The Monthly Interpreter, 1885, II, p. 288.

121. It is not clear, for example, precisely what is meant by A. J. Mason (The Conditions of our Lord’s Life on Earth, 1896, p. 46),when he says: “When Christ is called ‘a Man’ it sounds as if he were considered only an incidental specimen of the race, like one of ourselves, and not, as he is in fact, the universal Man, in whom the whole of human nature is gathered up, — the representative and head of the entire species.” What is a “universal man?” And how could “the whole of human nature” be “gathered up” in Jesus, except representatively, — which is not what is meant — unless universal human nature is an entity with “real existence?” And if even Mason is unintelligible, what shall we say of a writer like J. P. Lange (Christliche Dogmatik; Zweiter Theil; Positive Dogmatik, 1881, pp.770-771): “The man in the God-man is not an individual man of itself, but the man which takes mankind up into itself, as mankind has taken nature up into itself. And so it coalesces with the divine self-limitation, as the Son of God unites with the human limitation. The man in the God-man embraces the eternal Becoming of the whole world as it goes forth from God according to the energy of his nature. So it is also radically the real passage of the Becoming through the perfected Becoming into the absolute Being, and therefore the proper organ of the Son of God according to his ideal entrance into the absolute Becoming. It is the limited unlimitation which coalesces with the unlimited limitation of the divine man, who takes up into itself the human God.” It is only fair to bear in mind, however, that this statement is partly relieved of its unintelligibility when it is read in connection with Lange’s exposition of the ideas of man and the God-man in his Philosophical Dogmatics, which, in his system, precedes his Positive Dogmatics.

122. Cf. A. B. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ,2 1881, pp. 262, and pp. 427-428: “I see in him traces of strongly marked, though not one-sided individuality . . . Generally speaking, the reality, not ideality, of the humanity is the thing that lies on the surface; although the latter is not to be denied, nor the many-sidedness which is adduced in proof of it by Martensen and others.” Cf. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, ET, pp.280 sq.

123. E. P. Boys-Smith, Hastings’ DCG, II, p. 163a: “The fulness, balance, and unity of the Master’s nature make it impracticable to use in his case what is the commonest and readiest way of portraying a person. This is to throw into the foreground of the picture those features in which the character is exceptionally strong, or those deficiencies which mark it off from others, and to leave as an unelaborated background the common stuff of human nature. Thus, by sketching the idiosyncrasies, and casting a few high lights, the man is set forth sufficiently. But what traits are there in the Lord Jesus which stand out because more highly developed than other features? Nothing truly human was wanting to him, nothing was exaggerated. The fact which distinguished him from all others was his completeness at all points. . . .”

124. T. B. Kilpatrick, Hastings’ DCG, I. pp. 294b-295a: “Yet we are not to impute to him any unemotional callousness. He never lost his calmness; but he was not always calm. He repelled temptation with deep indignation (Mk. viii. 33). Hypocrisy aroused him to a flame of judgment (Mk. iii. 5, xi. 15-17; Mt. xxiii. 1-36). Treachery shook him to the center of his being (Jno. xiii. 21). The waves of human sorrow broke over him with a greater grief than wrung the bereaved sisters (Jno. xi. 33-35). There were times when he bore an unknown agony . . . Yet whatever his soul’s discipline might be, he never lost his self-control, was never distracted or afraid, but remained true to his mission and to his faith. He feels anger, or sorrow, or trouble, but these emotions are under the control of a will that is one with the divine will, and therefore are comprehended within the perfect peace of a mind stayed on God.” There is a good deal of rhetorical exaggeration in the language in which the phenomena are here described; but for the essence of the matter the representation is sound: our Lord is always master of himself.

125. Com. on Jno. xi. 35.

126. Fr. Gumlich. TSK, 1862, p. 285 note b, calls on us to “guard ourselves from” Calvin’s statement that “his feelings differ from ours as a pure,untroubled, powerful but onflowing stream from restless, foaming, muddy waves.” But do not his sinless emotions differ precisely so from our sinful passions?

127. Piscator enlarges upon it and applies it thus: “just as pure and limpid water when mixed with a pure dye if agitated, foams indeed but is not made turbid; but when mixed with an impure and dirty dye, if agitated, not only forms foam but is made turbid and dirty; so the heart of Christ pure from all imperfection, was indeed agitated by the affections implanted in human nature, but was soiled by no sin; but our hearts are so agitated by affections that they are soiled by the sin which inheres in us.”

128. Westcott in loc.: “Even our human sense of fitness is able to recognize the complete correspondence between the characteristics of Christ as High Priest and the believers’ wants.” Davidson, in loc.: “He suited our necessities and condition.”

Jesus Alleged Confession of Sin

THE pericope of "the rich young ruler" is found in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, and it is associated in all of them with narratives of a common type. In all three it immediately follows the account of Jesus' receiving and blessing little children; and it is clear from Mark's representation (as also indeed from Matthew's) that the incident actually occurred in immediate sequence to that scene. In Luke, these two narratives are immediately preceded by the parable of the Pharisee and Publican praying in the Temple; in Matthew they are immediately succeeded by the parable of the workmen in the vineyard who were surprised that their rewards were not nicely adjusted to what they deemed their relative services. It cannot be by accident that these four narratives, all of which teach a similar lesson, are brought thus into contiguity. It is the burden of them all that the Kingdom of God is a gratuity, not an acquisition; and the effect of bringing them together is to throw a great emphasis upon this, their common teaching.

Perhaps this teaching finds nowhere more pungent intimation than in the declaration of our Lord which forms the core of the account of His reception of the children: "For of such is the kingdom of heaven," (or "of God": Mt. 19:14; Mk. 10:14; Lk. 18:16). These "little children" were, as we learn from Luke, mere babies (Lk. 18:15: τὰ βρέφη), which Jesus held in His arms (Mk. 10:16: ἐναγκαλισάμενος; cf. 9:36 and also Lk. 2:28). What Jesus says, therefore, is that those who enter the Kingdom of God are like "infants of days." Such infants are not to be debarred from coming to Him, because forsooth they cannot profit by His teaching or profit Him by their service. It is precisely of such as they that the Kingdom of God consists. "And verily I say unto you," He adds, "whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein" (Mk. 10:15: Lk. 18:17). The meaning is accurately expressed in Alford's paraphrase (the emphases are his own): "In order for us who are mature to come to Him, we must cast away all that wherein our maturity has caused us to differ from them and become LIKE THEM.… None can enter God's Kingdom except as an infant." But when Alford comes to explain what "as an infant" means, he loses the thread and thinks of the innocence, the simplicity, the trustfulness of childhood, or the like. That in which maturity differs from infancy, however, lies just in its self-dependence and power of self-help. We become "as a little child" when, in the words of the revival hymn which was such an offence to James Anthony Froude, "we cast our deadly doing down" and make our appeal on the sole score of sheer helplessness.

Zahn, therefore, strikes a much truer note when he comments: "Over against the fancy (Dünkel) of the disciples, who ground their claim that the Kingdom belongs to them on their intelligence and will, Jesus reminds them that they must rather, by renunciation of their own intelligence and will, obtain the receptivity (Empfänglichkeit) for the blessings and benefit of the Kingdom which the immature children possess of themselves." And so does Wendt: "But in this very respect, of having no claim, so that they could offer nothing but only wish to have something, Jesus finds the ground for the children being permitted to come to Him, that He might show them His love and give them His blessing. For in this unpretentious receptivity He recognizes the necessary condition which must exist in all who will enter the kingdom of God." "Under this childlike character, He does not understand any virtue of childlike blamelessness, but only the receptivity itself (which is the notion impressively emphasized by Him) on the part of those who do not regard themselves as too good or too bad for the offered gift, but receive it with hearty desire." The emphasis which these expositors throw on "receptivity" as the characteristic of infancy—as if it were an active quality—is not drawn from the text but belongs to the habits of thought derived by them from a Lutheran inheritance. It requires to be eliminated before the meaning of our Lord's enunciation can be purely caught. Infancy is characterized by "receptivity" as little as by "blamelessness" or by "trustfulness"; its characteristic is just helpless need. He who receives the Kingdom of God "as a little child" receives it (in this sense) passively; is the pure recipient, not the earner of its blessings. What our Lord here declares is thus, in brief, that no one enters the Kingdom of God save as an infant enters the world, naked and helpless and without any claim upon it whatever.

No more illuminating comment on our Lord's teaching here could easily be imagined than that which is supplied by the immediately succeeding incident, that of the rich young ruler. No sooner had our Lord announced that "whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein," than one appeared before Him bent on making his way into the Kingdom in quite another fashion. And, indeed, if any could hope to acquire it for himself, it might well be supposed to be this eager young man. He had everything to commend him. He was young, he was rich, he was highly placed, he was clean. He was accustomed to desire good things, and, desiring them, he was accustomed to obtain them for himself: and, with the resources at his command,—resources of youthful energy, wealth, position, moral earnestness—he was accustomed to obtain them without much difficulty. He had heard of Jesus, perhaps had heard Him; and he recognized in Him a good man whose counsel were well worth having. And he had conceived a commendable desire for the eternal life which Jesus was proclaiming. What remained but to learn from this good teacher what needed to be done, in order to obtain it? It never occurred to this rich and influential youth, accustomed to get what he wanted, but that this good thing which he now desired might be obtainable at its own proper price; and was he not prepared and fully able to pay the price and so to secure it? It seemed to him an easy thing to purchase eternal life.

It was our Lord's painful task, in response to the young man's appeal for guidance, to reveal him to himself in the shallowness of his nature and outlook; to open his eyes to the nature of that eternal life which he sought, in its radical difference from the life he was living; and to make it clear to him that what he had thought so easy to acquire was to be had only at a great price, a price which he might not be willing to pay, a price which he might find it was impossible for him to pay. And it was our Lord's task, further, on the basis of this incident, to carry home poignantly to the consciousness of His disciples the lesson He had already taught them in the incident of the blessing of the little children, that the Kingdom of God is not a thing into which in any case men can buy their way; that they stand before it helpless, and can make their way into it as little as a camel can force itself through the eye of a needle. It may be conferred by God: it cannot be acquired by men.

As the result of his conversation, the young man departed with his countenance fallen, exceeding sorrowful,12—the eternal life which he had expected to reach out his hand and take was not for him. And the disciples had had borne in upon them with tremendous force the fundamental fact that salvation in every case of its accomplishment is nothing less than an authentic miracle of divine grace; always and everywhere in the strictest sense impossible with man, and possible only with God, with whom all things are possible. The effect of this teaching, if it was naturally to depress those who sought eternal life by their own efforts, was equally naturally to exhilarate those who were looking to God alone for the blessings of the Kingdom, giving them a higher sense of both their certainty and their value. This surely is the right account to give of Peter's question (Mt. 19:27; Mk. 10:28; Lk. 18:28), with our Lord's response to which the conversation closes. We cannot say, then, with Edersheim: "It almost jars on our ears, and prepares us for still stranger and sadder things to come, when Peter, perhaps as spokesman for the rest, seems to remind the Lord that they had forsaken all to follow Him." Peter rather, his heart swelling with freshly inflamed hope (spe ex verbis Salvatoris concepta, remarks Bengel accurately) inquires eagerly (not boastfully but in humble gratitude) into the nature of the blessings which God has in mind for those who have entered the Kingdom. Our Lord meets the inquiry in its own spirit and grants to His followers a splendid vision of their reward,—only closing with words which would leave fixed in their minds the consciousness that all things are reserved to the Divine discretion: "And many shall be last that are first; and first that are last."

There are no substantial differences between the three reports which are given us of this remarkable incident. Each of the Evangelists records details peculiar to himself. Each narrative has its own tone and coloring: Mark's is distinguished by vividness, Luke's by plain straightforwardness, Matthew's by clearness. But it is precisely the same story which is told by them all: the same story in its contents, in its mode of development, in its dénouement, in its lesson. Having any one of the three we have it all, presented after the same fashion and with the same force. It has no doubt been common to represent the descriptions of the opening scene, by Mark and Luke on the one hand and by Matthew on the other, as divergent; and this divergence has been magnified, and serious inferences have been drawn from it, derogatory to Matthew's integrity as a historian and injurious to our Lord's dignity as a Divine person and even to His moral perfection. All this rests upon misunderstanding. The wide-spread vogue it has obtained requires, nevertheless, that it shall be carefully looked into.

A simple reading of the opening two verses in the three accounts reveals at once, of course, a formal difference between Mark and Luke on the one side and Matthew on the other in their reports alike of the words in which the young man addressed Jesus and of those in which our Lord responded to his inquiry. In Mark (and Luke) we read that the young man addressed Jesus as "Good Master" and asked Him broadly, "What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" In Matthew, he is represented as addressing Him simply as "Master," and asking Him with more exact definition, "What good thing shall I do that I may have life?" Correspondingly, Jesus is represented in Mark (and Luke) as replying, "Why callest thou me good? No one is good except one, God. Thou knowest the commandments …"; but in Matthew, "Why askest thou me concerning the good? One there is that is good. But if thou wishest to enter into life, keep the commandments.…" We have spoken of these differences as formal; it would seem to be difficult to magnify them into anything more. Though, naturally, a matter of curious interest, they in no way affect the significance of the story itself. Despite them the two narratives, even at this precise point, yield exactly the same general sense and differ only in the details through which this common sense is brought to expression. To make this evident we need only to attend separately to what each mode of telling the story actually places before us.

According to Matthew, then, scarcely had Jesus issued from the house in which He had received and blessed the children, when an individual (there is a slight emphasis upon his being one out of the multitude) came to Him, and, addressing Him as "Master" (that is, "Teacher," or "Rabbi"), asked Him, "What good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?" He is asking, not for general prescriptions of righteousness, but for a particular requirement by doing just which he may secure the eternal life he seeks; and so set is his mind upon this particular good thing that when Jesus refers him to the divine commandments in general, he still demands (verse 18), "Which?" In response to his demand, nevertheless, Jesus points him just to the divine commandments, thus in effect repelling the implication that eternal life can be grounded on anything but that entire righteousness reflected in the law of God; and, behind that, suggesting that it was not instruction in righteousness that the young man needed but the power of a new life. Jesus' reply amounts, thus, to saying: "Why make inquiry concerning the good thing needed? There is One who is good and He has given commandments; keep them." It is the equivalent of, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them" of Luke 16:29. What Jesus actually says is: "Why askest thou me concerning the good? There is One that is good, and, if thou wishest to enter into life, keep His commandments."

The thing to be noted particularly is that no emphasis falls on the enclitic με, and therefore no contrast is intimated between Jesus and the One that is good. The contrast intimated is wholly between the good thing inquired of and the known commandments of God. To avoid the almost inevitable emphasizing of the "me" in a translation, it might be well to omit it altogether for the moment and to paraphrase simply: "Why dost thou inquire about the good as if that were a matter still in doubt? God, who is goodness itself, has published the eternal rule of righteousness." Keim, it is true, scoffs at the notion that no contrast is drawn between Jesus and God. "But εἷς," he cries, meaning that quite apart from the με the contrast is inherent in the mere declaration that "there is One"—that is to say, only One—"who is good." There is, however, an inadvertence apparent in this. The declaration that "there is One that is good" does set God in contrast with all others: it is to God in His already published will, not to anyone else whatever, that we are to go to learn the law of life. But it does not set God in contrast specifically with Jesus. So soon as it is read as contrasting God specifically with Jesus an emphasis is necessarily thrown on the enclitic με which it will not bear. Jesus is therefore not contrasting Himself here with God. He is only in the most emphatic way pointing to God and His published law as the unique source of the law of life. His own relation to that God is completely out of sight, and nothing whatever is suggested with reference to it. Zahn is accordingly entirely right when he writes: "For the question of the position Jesus assigns Himself between the one good One who is God and men who are evil, little occasion is given by this pedagogic conversation."

Mark, like Matthew, connects the incident of the rich young man closely with that of the blessing of the little children. It was while Jesus was in the act of coming forth from the house (verse 10) in which the blessing of the children had taken place, for His journeying, that an individual from the crowd (εἷς) came running, and fell on his knees, and, addressing Him by the unusual title of "Good Master," demanded of Him what he should do to inherit eternal life. It is the strangeness of the address, "Good Master"—apparently unexampled in extant Jewish literature—which attracts attention here; and naturally it was this which determined the response of Jesus. It threw into relief—as it would not have done had it been more customary—the levity with which the young man approached Jesus of whom he knew so little, with so remarkable a demand. Jesus' response naturally, therefore, takes the form, "Why callest thou me good? No one is good except one, God. Thou knowest the commandments.…" This response at first sight seems in itself to be capable of two constructions. We may either fill out: "Thou art wrong in calling me good; this predicate, in any worthy sense of it at least, belongs to none but God." Or we may fill out rather: "There is a great deal involved, if only you appreciated it, in calling me good; for there is no one that is good but one, that is God." The primary objection to the former view is that it presses the contrast beyond the power of the enclitic με to bear. For the με is enclitic here as well as in Matthew, and can be emphasized here as little as there. The emphasis certainly falls not on it, but on the ἀγαθόν. The sense is therefore certainly not that the young man had called specifically Jesus good; but that he had called Jesus specifically good. There is no contrast therefore instituted between Jesus and God. This is the fundamental fact regarding the passage which must rule its whole interpretation.

The sense need not be, however, that Jesus identifies Himself here with God, though the words are in themselves flexible to that interpretation: "Why is it that thou dost thus address me as good? Dost thou fully apprehend what is involved in this? Art thou really aware that I am indeed that God who alone is good?" It may rather be that Jesus, without implication as to His own real personality, is only directing attention to God as the only true standard of goodness: "Why dost thou use this strange address of 'Good Master'? Art thou seeking someone good enough to give sure directions as to eternal life? Hast thou forgotten God? And dost thou not know His commandments?" If it be thought that some slight contrast between Jesus and God is still discoverable, even in this understanding of the passage, and the enclitic με is appealed to in order to forbid even so much emphasis on Jesus' person, the remark may be in place here as truly as it was with regard to Matthew's phrase, that the contrast involved in the words "No one is good except one, God," is not between God and Jesus, but between God and all others. There can be imported into the passage, in any case, no denial on Jesus' part, either that He is good or that He is God. It is again merely the "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them." The whole emphasis is absorbed in the stress laid upon God's sole right to announce the standard of goodness. The question of the relation of Jesus to this God does not emerge: there is equally no denial that He is God, and no affirmation that He is God. The young man is merely pointed to the rule which had been given by the good God as a witness to what it is requisite to do that we may be well-pleasing to Him. He is merely bidden not to look elsewhere for prescriptions as to life save in God's revealed will. The search for a master good enough to lead men to life finds its end in God and His commandments.

Obviously the drift of the conversation in Mark (and Luke) is precisely the same as in Matthew. The two narratives are in substance completely consentaneous. It is not to be supposed that either has reported in full detail all that was said. Actual conversations are ordinarily somewhat repetitious: good reports of them faithfully give their gist, in condensation. It has been said that Jane Austen records the conversations at her dinner-parties with such, not faithfulness but, circumstantiality that her reports bore the reader almost as much as the actual conversations would have done. There is no reason to suppose that the Evangelists aimed at such meticulous particularity in their reports of our Lord's conversations. Not all that He said, any more than all that He did (Jno. 20:30, 21:25), has been recorded. Each selects the line of remark which seems to him to embody the pith of what was said; and the skill and faithfulness with which they have done this are attested by such a phenomenon as now faces us, where, amid even a striking diversity in the details reported, a complete harmony is preserved in the substance of the discourse. Wilhelm Wagner makes himself merry indeed over what he considers the conceit of Olshausen, who recognizes in both forms of narrative exact historical tradition, and looks upon each as preserving only fragments of what was said. And, no doubt, if the state of the case were as Wagner represents it,—if, that is, the two narratives were mutually contradictory and exclusive of one another, so that one could not say of them, Sowohl … wie … but only Entweder … oder …, Olshausen's treatment of them would be absurd. Since, however, they are entirely in agreement in substance, Olshausen's assumption is a mere matter of course. Each gives us in any case only a portion of what was said. It may be plausibly argued, indeed, that Mark intimates as much by his employment of the imperfect tense when introducing the words reported from the lips of the questioner: ἐπηρώτα. We are told, to be sure, that Mark's imperfects are not significant, that he interchanges them arbitrarily with aorists, and that therefore no inferences can be grounded on them.29 This contention seems, however, to be overstrained; and in a case—like that now before us—where the present, aorist and imperfect tenses are brought together in close contiguity, their shades of implication can scarcely be wholly neglected. The general fact, however, does not rest upon the interpretation put upon Mark's ἐπηρώτα. It lies in the nature of the case that two accounts of a conversation which agree as to the substance of what was said, but differ slightly in the details reported, are reporting different fragments of the conversation, selected according to the judgment of each writer as the best vehicles of its substance.

An account of the relations of the two narratives quite different from this, it is true, is very commonly given. The representation which for the moment seems to be most widely adopted, looks upon Mark's narrative as the original one, and supposes it to have been closely followed by Luke but fundamentally altered by Matthew under the influence of dogmatic considerations. This view implies an interpretation of the narrative of Mark different from that offered above, as well as a different account of the relations of the narratives of the Evangelists to one another. According to it, Mark represents Jesus as repelling the attribution to Him of the epithet "good," because He is conscious of creaturely imperfection; and thus as, in His creaturely humility, setting Himself over against God in the strongest possible contrast. Matthew then is supposed to have drawn back from this representation as derogatory to Jesus' dignity as he conceived it, and to have therefore modified the narrative so that it should no longer imply a repudiation on Jesus' part of either goodness or divinity. That the conception of the drift of Mark's narrative which is assumed in this view is exegetically untenable, we have already endeavored to show. It is already wrecked indeed on the simple enclitic με, which will not allow the contrast between Jesus and God which is its core. That it throws into chief prominence a matter which lies quite apart from the main subject under discussion is also fatal to it. There are, however, general considerations which also quite forbid it. That Matthew should be gratuitously charged with falsifying the text that lay before him in the interests of his doctrinal views is an indefensible procedure. There is no reason to believe Matthew capable of such dishonesty. And why the narrative as it lies in Mark's account should have been less acceptable to Matthew than it was to Mark himself and to Luke remains inexplicable. It is not doubted that the dogmatic standpoint of Matthew was fully shared by Mark and Luke. It is quite certain that, if the meaning put upon Mark's narrative by this conception of it is its true meaning, that fact was wholly unsuspected by either Mark or Luke. And there is no reason to suppose it would have been divined by Matthew either. There can be no doubt that Mark and Luke supposed, when they were narrating this incident, that they were writing down words in full harmony with their reverence for Jesus the Divine Savior, for the expression and justification of which they wrote their Gospels. To attribute to incidents which they record with this intent an exactly contrary significance, a meaning which flatly contradicts their most cherished convictions and the whole tenor of their Gospels, is to charge them with a stupidity in "compiling" their Gospels which is wholly incompatible with the character of the Gospels they have written. A critical theory which is inapplicable except on the assumption of stupidity and dishonesty on the part of such writers as the Evangelists show themselves to be, is condemned from the outset.

Despite its impossibility, however, this theory has of late acquired wide vogue; and it is perhaps worth while to see how it is presented by its chief advocates. We may perhaps permit P. W. Schmiedel to expound it for us. He is speaking at the moment of the Gospel of John and remarks: "And equally unacceptable to this Evangelist would be the record in (Mark 10:17f.) and Luke, that to the address of a rich man, 'Good Master, what must I do to obtain eternal life?' Jesus replied: 'Why callest thou me good? No one is good except God alone.' And yet beyond question this reply came from Jesus' lips. How little it could have been invented by any one of His worshippers who write in the Gospels, is shown by Matthew. With him (19:16ff.) the rich man asks: 'Master, what good thing must I do that I may have eternal life?' And Jesus answers: 'Why askest thou me concerning the good? There is one that is good.' How does Jesus come by these last words? Should He not rather, since He was asked concerning the good, proceed: 'There is one thing that is good'? and that would not only be the sole suitable reply, because of what had preceded, but also because of what follows: for Jesus says further: 'If, however, thou wouldst enter into life, keep the commandments.' Accordingly, in Jesus' view, the good concerning which He was asked, consists in keeping the commandments. How did Matthew come by the words: 'There is one that is good'? Only by having before him as he wrote the text of Mark. Here we have our finger on the way in which Matthew with conscious purpose altered this text in its opening words, so that it should no longer be offensive: and on the way in which at the end he has left a few words of it unaltered, which betray to us the manner in which the thing has been done." This representation turns on three hinges. They are, first, that, according to Mark's account, Jesus repels the ascription of goodness to Him because He is conscious of not deserving it; secondly, that Matthew, offended by this attribution to Jesus of a consciousness of sinfulness, has deliberately altered the story so as to remove it; and thirdly, that Matthew has done this so bunglingly as to retain, at an important point, a trait from Mark which is meaningless in his own narrative.

The third of these contentions obviously neutralizes the second. A writer shrewd enough to undertake and so skillfully to begin the dogmatic alterations ascribed to Matthew would be shrewd enough to carry them successfully through. Certainly he would not have deliberately altered Mark's "No one is good except God alone," and yet have altered it so little to his purpose. To have supposed that Matthew, after having taken the trouble to reconstruct the first portion of the conversation of the young man with Jesus in order to adjust it to his own views, should have neglected to reconstruct the second portion of it and have left it in staring contradiction to what he had just written, would have been bad enough. But to suppose that he did not neglect to reconstruct the second portion also, but altered it too, but altered it so bunglingly as to leave it essentially the same in meaning as it was before alteration, and still in crass conflict with his reconstructed version of the former part of the conversation, is past crediting. A critical theory which will not hold unless we suppose not only that Mark and Luke were too stupid to perceive the open meaning of the incident they were recording, but also that Matthew, who was intelligent enough to perceive it and dishonest enough to attempt to adjust it to the view of Jesus common to all three, was yet so stupid that he could not carry the adjustment through—although it required only the substitution of an obvious neuter for a baldly impossibly masculine,—is clearly unworthy of serious consideration. It is very plain that such a theory is violently imposed on the texts and is driven through in the face of impossibilities. We have already seen that it is based on a failure to catch the meaning, natural and easy, of either narrative the relations of which it professes to expound: we perceive now that the explanation it offers of these relations is nothing less than absurd. There is no reason to suppose that Matthew would put a meaning—and, be it remembered, an intrinsically unnatural and linguistically impossible meaning—on Mark's narrative which it is certain that neither Mark nor Luke put on it; there is no justification for imagining that, if he did, he was dishonest enough to attempt to reconstruct the narrative so as to bring it into harmony with his own conception of Jesus (which, be it remembered, was Mark's and Luke's also); there is no propriety in assuming that if he undertook such a task he was capable of botching it as he is, on this theory, represented as doing. Whatever may be the relations of these narratives, it is certain that Matthew's was not made out of Mark's; and assuredly not as a dogmatic revision in the interests of our Lord's sinlessness and deity.

There is no reason, therefore, derivable from this critical speculation why we should desert the natural understanding of Mark's (and Luke's) narrative and its relation to Matthew's which lies on its surface. And our confidence in it will be greatly strengthened, if we will attend for a little to the alternative interpretations of it which have been proposed. These are very numerous and very divergent. They may be arranged, however, in a not unnatural sequence, and we may thus be enabled to survey them without confusion, and to catch their essential significance with some ease.

The interpretation which imposes on Mark's (and Luke's) narrative a repudiation by Jesus of the predicate "good," with its involved contrast of Him with God, was already current among the Arians, and possibly even in certain heretical circles of the second century. It is only natural that it should be widely adopted again in modern Liberal circles. Wilhelm Wagner in an interesting sketch of the history of the interpretation of the passage chooses G. Volkmar as the representative of this mode of interpreting it. In Volkmar's view, what is given expression in Jesus' reply is that in the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Him God is the sole Good, to whom homage is due. God is the supreme Good, and the adoration of Him the highest aim of the Kingdom of God. "Jesus is the announcer and even the King of the Kingdom of God on Earth, but not the supreme Good itself, which is to be adored. The Son of Man sought only to lead man to the perfect worship of God." To make his meaning clearer he adds: "Also He went (Mk. 1:9) to the baptism of repentance in consciousness of sin (sündbewusst)." Perhaps, however, the spirit of this interpretation is better expressed by no one than by H. J. Holtzmann who writes: "We see Him who is addressed, in the consciousness of His own incompleteness, in remembrance of His severe moral battles and conflicts, in prevision of the approaching tidal-wave of a last and most violent trial, draw back, point above, and speak the humbly great word: 'Why callest thou me good? No one is good, except God alone' (Mk. 10:17–18; Lk. 18:18–19; cf. with this the deflection of Mt. 19:16–17 which even the dullest eye must recognize as tendential). There is only one who stands above the world, without variableness or the necessity of ethical development, the eternally unchangeable God. By this, Jesus affirmed the fixed and immovable interval which separates Godhead and manhood in the moral sphere, as in Mk. 13:32 = Mt. 24:36 He opens the same gulf between the two natures in the intellectual sphere. On both occasions Jesus takes His stand simply on the side of manhood." He goes on to say that the Lord's prayer, which he insists was not merely given to His disciples but was prayed by Jesus in company with His disciples, bears witness to the same effect, in its petitions for forgiveness and for protecton from the evil one. Among English writers J. M. Thompson affords an example of the same general point of view. "The stress in the last sentence is on 'good' not 'me,' " he writes, "but this hardly lessens the force of the passage. It is not enough to suggest that the young man's idea of goodness needed correction, and that Jesus would point him from a wrong to a right meaning of the word. Nor is it Jesus' intention to deny as man any equality with God. The address, 'Good Master' contains no such suggestion. Theology is out of place in this passage, which deals with plain words in a plain way. There is in fact no adequate alternative to the natural interpretation. Jesus did not think Himself 'good' in the sense in which the young man had used the word, and in the sense in which it would be commonly used of God.… If He did not at this time feel Himself to be good in the sense in which God is good, neither did He think Himself to be divine in the sense in which God is divine." "A broad distinction is drawn—a distinction which cannot reasonably be confined to the simple ground of 'goodness'—between Jesus and God." Perhaps, however, no more pungent emphasis has been thrown upon this view than that thrown upon it by C. G. Montefiore. "The reply of Jesus," he writes, "is of the utmost significance. It is obvious that no divine being would or could have answered thus. Jesus knew Himself to be a man.… Yet it is a noble character which peeps through the fragmentary and one-sided records—none the less noble because we may be sure that of Jesus, both in fact and in his own estimate of Himself, the adage was true: 'there is no man that sinneth not.' "

The nerve of this interpretation resides of course in the contention that a repudiation of the epithet "good" is necessarily involved in the question, "Why callest thou me good?" (Mk. 10:18; Lk. 18:19). This contention is unjustified: whether the question involves a repudiation of the epithet "good," or is a call to a closer consideration of the implications of the original request, is a matter for the context to determine; and the context very decidedly determines it in the latter sense. Nevertheless the contention is often given very vigorous expression; and by no one is it given more vigorous expression than by Wilhelm Wagner, who writes as follows: "Whoever cannot attribute to Jesus the use of language more to conceal than to reveal His thought, whoever rather holds the opinion that Jesus really meant His words in the sense in which they must be understood by every unprejudiced hearer,—cannot help allowing that Jesus in Mk. 10:18 distinctly distinguishes between God and Himself, and that He just as earnestly rejects the predicate ἀγαθός for Himself here, and reserves it for God, as in Mark 13:32 he denies knowledge of the day of the Parousia for His own person and ascribes it to the Father alone." Wagner does not admit, however, that in thus repudiating the predicate "good" of Himself, Jesus confesses Himself a sinner. Thus we are advised that it has been found possible to hold to the interpretation of Jesus' response to the young ruler which sees in it a repudiation of the predicate "good," and yet escapes from the ascription of conscious sin to Jesus. There are in fact more ways than one in which this has been attempted. A series of variant interpretations of our passage has thus arisen, differing from one another in the sense put upon the term "good" or in the explanation offered of Jesus' intention in repudiating that predicate, but agreeing that He does repudiate it in some sense, not involving the confession of sin on His part. Some account should be given of these mediating methods of exposition.

Wagner himself, in company with a considerable number of recent expositors, wishes to take the term "good" in the sense, not of moral excellence, but of graciousness, kindness. This, in itself attractive, suggestion is rendered nugatory, however, by the unfitness of the address, "Kind Master" as a preparation for Jesus' reply. Johannes Weiss seems to be right when he remarks of the ἀγαθέ: "The questioner clearly wishes to express by it not merely his reverence but also his conviction that Jesus, as a perfect man, is able to give new life and particular information as to the way to eternal life." Jesus' reply puts the sense of moral perfection on the address. The advantage sought by reading the predicate as "gracious" rather than "good," is that in that case its repudiation by Jesus does not imply a confession of sin on His part. "If the word should be so understood," remarks Dalman, "then there is no need to inquire in what sense Jesus disclaims sinlessness." "His sinlessness or moral perfection Jesus has, therefore, not denied in our passage," is Wagner's way of putting it. The inquiry of P. W. Schmiedel whether the repudiation of "kindness" is not also, however, the repudiation of moral goodness, is here very pertinent; and it is observable that Wagner at least does not seem prepared with a plausible answer to it. After declaring that, since what is under discussion is "kindness," Jesus does not deny His sinlessness or moral perfection, that there is no question raised as to that, he continues: "No doubt, however, He does disclaim the predicate 'kind-gracious' (Gütig-gnädig) for His own person and reserve it for God. Should this result nevertheless seem to anyone equally objectionable with Volkmar's exposition, mentioned above, the reply is to be made to him that we must adjust our conception of Jesus to that of the Holy Scriptures and not vice versa.…" No doubt. Therefore the question presses whether it is easy to believe that the Jesus presented to us, we do not say broadly in the Holy Scriptures, but in the Synoptic Gospels, would repudiate the predicate "kind" or "gracious," when applied to Him, especially with the energy which is supposed in this interpretation of His words. It does not appear that the predicate ἀγαθός is elsewhere in the Synoptics attributed to Jesus, nor is it, for the matter of that, elsewhere attributed to God—and it may be a nice question to which limb of this statement we might consider Mt. 20:15 a quasi-exception. But surely it is difficult to suppose that the Synoptists, who attribute "compassion" to Jesus more frequently than any other emotion, and one of whose number represents the sponsor of another as summing up Jesus' career as a "going about, doing good" (εὐεργετῶν, Acts 10:38), could have understood Him to be repelling here the attribution to Him of "kindness." And surely this repudiation of the predicate of "kindness" sounds strange upon the lips of the Jesus who is represented by them as declaring that He had compassion upon the multitude (Mt. 15:32; Mk. 8:2), and as inviting all those who labor and are heavy laden to come to Him that He might give them rest (Mt. 11:28).

Wagner endeavors to ease this difficulty by suggesting that like εὐεργέτης, which Jesus forbids His disciples to permit themselves to be called (Lk. 22:25), ἀγαθός, "gracious," might have come to be employed almost as a divine attribute; and he connects this suggestion with Jesus' disgust at the "honor-hunger" which characterized "the Scribes and Pharisees" of the time, and which provoked Him to forbid His disciples to be called Rabbi or Leader καθηγητής (Mt. 23:10). This line of thought had already been carried a step further by Karl Thieme, and before him by Karl Heinrich Weizsäcker.53 These writers threw the whole burden of Jesus' repudiation of the predicate "good" upon His revulsion from Rabbinical vanity, and hence held that "this interdiction of the designation 'Good Teacher' has nothing at all to do with the self-consciousness of Jesus, but is solely a repulsion of the Rabbinical title." From this point of view, Thieme, who also takes the ἀγαθός in the sense of "gracious," is able to contend that Jesus by no means repudiates that quality for Himself. "According to this interpretation," he writes, "Jesus defended Himself from involvement in the Rabbinical title-seeking. He repelled it from Himself without giving a single thought to whether He Himself had or had not a right to the title of 'gracious.' He did not address Himself here to a solemn deliverance as to His distinction from God, but, painfully affected by the extravagances of the rich man, He gave expression to His old aversion to the whole odious behavior of the Pharisees and Scribes, in a quick and sharply spoken word of reprehension. It is therefore rather an emotional declaration from which may be learned how unlike the Pharisees and Scribes He was."

Attractive as this exposition is it is burdened with the insuperable difficulty that Jesus does not, in point of fact, refuse for Himself any of the titles which He forbids His followers to accept. He forbade them to be called Rabbi or Leader; but He claims both titles for Himself (Mt. 23:8 f.). It is not merely in (John 13:13) that He vindicates His right to the titles of Master and Lord. Both are put upon His lips with reference to Himself by the Synoptists also (Mk. 14:14; Mt. 26:18; Lk. 22:11; Mk. 11:3; Mt. 21:3; Lk. 19:31), and He constantly and without apparent difficulty accepts them both when applied to Him by others. Thieme himself has to acknowledge that "when He was Himself called Rabbi, He found it right, for He was it, He alone and no other in His little flock." If He revolted against the lust for empty titles of the Scribes and Pharisees, that was because those titles were empty for them; they did not rightly belong to or describe them; were mere vanities with no other function than to gratify pride. He would not have His disciples like the Scribes and Pharisees in this. But it does not follow that He would repel these titles when applied to Himself, to whom they rightfully belonged: in point of fact He did not. There is an essential difference between craving vain titles, and accepting just ones. We may be quite sure that Jesus would not have repudiated the ascription of graciousness to Him unless He had felt that it did not rightly describe Him and that He therefore had no right to it.

A far more widely adopted interpretation of the passage, seeking the same end, accepts the term ἀγαθός in the sense of morally good, but distinguishes between the quality of goodness which is proper to man, and that absolute and indeclinable goodness which belongs to God alone. Jesus, it is said, when He repels the predicate "good" of Himself, and declares that God alone is good, means the term good in its highest, its absolute sense, and in no way implies that He is not good as a man wholly without flaw may be good. Sometimes what is meant by this is that only God is Good-of-Himself (αὐτοάγαθος), has the source of His goodness in Himself; men, though wholly good, can have only a derived goodness, and must owe all their goodness to the goodness of God. Origen, indeed, would carry this distinction far beyond the sphere of creaturely relations, into the Trinitarian relations themselves. According to him our Lord speaks here not as a man but as the Son Himself, and yet separates Himself in His goodness as Son from the Father, the Fons Deitatis, from whom is derived all that the Son is. No other goodness exists in the Son as such save that which is in the Father; and when the Savior says that "there is none good save one only, God the Father," He means to declare, not that He, the Son of God, is not good, but that all the goodness in Him is of the Father. God alone is primarily good; the Son and Spirit are good with the goodness of God: while creatures can be said to be good only catachrestically and have in them only an accidental, not an essential goodness. It is not of the subordinationism of Origen, however, that our modern writers are thinking when they say that our Lord, in denying that He was good and reserving this predicate to God alone, meant merely that His goodness was not original with Himself but derived from God the sole source of goodness. They are thinking of the man Jesus who, they suppose, is here referring His goodness to the Father, the source of all goodness. An example of this mode of expounding the passage is supplied by Karl Ullmann in the earlier editions of his famous book on "The Sinlessness of Jesus." According to him what Jesus means is, "If I am good, I am so only in and by means of God, so far as I am one with God," and he expounds his own meaning as follows: "Here, then, ἀγαθός is to be taken in the most pregnant sense: as the ultimate highest source of good, as the absolute good; Jesus is good, but only in His inward complete communion with God, as the expression of the divine; and in this sense He demands of the young man: "Thou must rise above the common human goodness,—sand in so far also above me, considered as a man detached from God, as merely a good teacher in the sense of the Rabbis and Pharisees—and hold to the supreme source of all good, and thence there will flow to thee the good, and eternal life." Another example seems to be supplied by A. Plummer's comment on Luke 18:19. The young man's defect, he tells us, "was that he trusted too much in himself, too little in God. Jesus reminds him that there is only one source of goodness, whether in action (Matthew), or in character (Mark, Luke), viz., God. He Himself is no exception. His goodness is the goodness of God working in Him. 'The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father doing.… For as the Father hath life in Himself, even so gave He to the Son also to have life in Himself.… I can of Myself do nothing; as I hear, I judge: and My judgment is righteous, because I seek not my own will but the will of Him that sent Me' (Jno. 5:19–30). Non se magistrum non esse, sed magistrum absque Deo nullum bonum esse testatur (Bede). There is no need to add to this the thought that the goodness of Jesus was the goodness of perfect development (see on 2:52), whereas the goodness of God is that of absolute perfection (Weiss on Mk. 11:18)." An extraordinary number of expositors have retained the fundamental notion of this interpretation as one, but not the chief, element in their explanations: a clause or two suggesting that the goodness of Jesus finds its source in God is inserted in the midst of other matter. The difficulty with it is that there is nothing in the passage either to suggest or to sustain it. An attempt has, indeed, been made by Karl Wimmer to find a point of attachment for it in what he calls the conditional sense of εἰ μή. Instead of "No one is good except God," he would render rather, "No one is good if not—that is to say, without,—God"; and then explain this as declaring that goodness cannot exist apart from God. But this is only a curiosity of exegesis.

It has been more common, therefore, to seek the contrast which Jesus is supposed to intimate between His goodness and that of God in the essentially developing character of human goodness as distinguished from the absolute goodness of God. A very clear expression is given to this view by the compressed comment of E. P. Gould: "The reason of this question and of the denial of goodness to any one but God which follows it, is that God alone possesses the absolute good. He is what others become. Human goodness is a growth, even where there is no imperfection. It develops, like wisdom, from childhood to youth, and then to manhood. And it was this human goodness which was possessed by Jesus. See Lk. 2:52; Heb. 2:10, 5:8." The longer comment of H. A. W. Meyer on Mark 10:18, which has in substance been retained by B. Weiss through all of his revisions, is perhaps, however, more typical. "Ingeniously and clearly Jesus makes use of the address, διδάσκαλε ἀγαθέ‚ in order to direct the questioner to the highest moral Ideal in whose commands the solution of the question is given (verse 19). He does this in such a manner that He takes the predicate ἀγαθός in the highest moral sense (against Bleek and Klostermann, according to whom He only denies that man as such, and without relation to God can be called good). 'Thou art wrong in calling me good: this predicate, in its complete conception, belongs to none save One, God.' Cf. Ch. F. Fritzsche, in "Fritzschior. Opusc.," pp. 78 ff. This declaration, however, is no evidence against the sinlessness of Jesus; rather, it is the true expression of the distance which human consciousness—even the sinless consciousness as being human—recognizes between itself and the absolute perfection of God (cf. Dorner, "Jesu sündlose Vollkommenheit," p. 14). For the human perfection is necessarily a growing (werdende) one, and even in the case of Jesus was conditioned by His advancing development, even though it can respond at every point to the moral ideal (Lk. 2:52; Heb. 5:8; Lk. 4:13, 22:28. Cf. Ullmann in the TSK, 1842, p. 700); the absolute being-good that excludes all having become and becoming so (das absolute, alles Gewordensein und Werden ausschliessende Gutsein) pertains only to God who is verae bonitatis canon et archetypus, (Beza)." "Even the man Jesus," adds Meyer (omitted by Weiss) "had to wrestle until He attained the victory and peace of the cross." Quite similarly E. K. A. Riehm writes: The emphatic 'No one is good except one, God,' or, as the words stand in Matthew, 'One is good,' does not fit in well with the explanation according to which Jesus does not wish to refuse the predicate 'good' for Himself, but wishes to say only that the young man should not, from his standpoint, that, namely, He was only a human teacher, address Him as 'Good Master.' We are of the opinion that Christ wishes the word 'good' to be taken in the absolute sense (cf. the ὁ ἀγαθός) and really refuses the predicate in this sense for His own person, and ascribes it to God only. When so understood, the expression does not at all show that Jesus had any other consciousness than that of essential unity with the God-will, but it does show that He was conscious that in His moral development He had not yet reached the highest stage of absolute perfection, which still was therefore proper to God alone."

Following Wagner's example we may add some further examples of this exposition, taken from dogmaticians. He selects for the purpose R. A. Lipsius and J. Kaftan. The former maintains for Jesus, indeed, a development free from the consciousness of guilt, but nevertheless conceives of Him so humanly as to open a great gulf between His hardly retained integrity and the absolute perfection of God. To wish to deny for Him the possibility of sin or natural temptability, he declares, would abolish the reality of His humanity, for to it the σάρξ of necessity belongs. Jesus was tempted, and that shows that He was not free from inner vacillations and momentary obscurations of His God-consciousness. All of this He no doubt victoriously overcame: but certainly we cannot wonder that He felt impelled to distinguish His goodness, if He so conceived it, from God's absolute goodness. In much the same spirit, Kaftan, will not hear of the attribution of impeccability to Jesus. This would yield, he thinks, only an unmoral notion of Him. Jesus' sinless perfection was a truly moral condition and receives its content from the uninterrupted moral trial to which He was subjected. In Mk. 10:18 "the predicate ἀγαθός applies in its absolute sense to God only, who is ἀπείραστος‚ not to man who, while living and walking in the world, remains always subject to temptation. It we would wish to find expressed in this declaration of Jesus, instead of this, the consciousness of a moral fault attaching to Him, that would come into contradiction with His testimony with respect to Himself elsewhere. He is the sinlessly perfect man, but He became such by His own act and confirmation, by virtue of actual ethical decision through temptation." If we may appeal to a prophet of our own, we may find the whole tendency and significance of this mode of interpreting the passage very clearly expounded by H. R. Mackintosh. The salutation of the young ruler, he tells us, Jesus waved back with the uncompromising rejoinder, 'None is good save one, even God.' " And then he continues: "The words cannot be a veiled confession of moral delinquency, which certainly would not have taken this ambiguous and all but casual form. What Jesus disclaims, rather, is God's perfect goodness. None but God is good with a goodness unchanging and eternal; He only cannot be tempted of evil but rests for ever in unconditioned and immutable perfection. Jesus, on the contrary, learnt obedience by the things which He suffered, being tempted in all points like as we are (Heb. 5:8, 4:15). In the sense of transcendent superiority to moral conflict and the strenuous obligation to prove His virtue ever afresh in face of new temptation and difficulty, He laid no claim to the absolute goodness of His Father. Which reminds us emphatically that the holiness of Jesus, as displayed in the record of His life, is no automatic effect of a metaphysical substance, but in its perfected form the fruit of continuous moral volition pervaded and sustained by the Spirit. It is at once the Father's gift and progressively realized in an ethical experience. This follows from the moral condition of incarnation."

That the goodness of Jesus' human nature was a developing goodness, and was not only not while He was on earth but never can be the infinite goodness of God is a matter of course. It is further not inconceivable that in referring to His moral quality He might on occasion quite readily speak of the moral quality of His human nature only, as, in a famous instance, in referring to His knowledge, He has spoken only of His human mind (Mk. 13:32). It is certain, still further, that in speaking of God's goodness in our present passage He has the absoluteness of His goodness in view. So far we encounter no grounds of objection to the general line of interpretation which we have just been illustrating. There is no reason in the nature of the case why Jesus might not have contrasted His human goodness with the infinite goodness of God, which is here adverted to. But neither is there any reason obvious why we should suppose Him to wish, at this moment and in the midst of the irrelevant conversation recounted, to interpose a bit of instruction upon the developing character of His human goodness. The remark of Fritzsche seems also pertinent: "the words, τί με λέγεις ἀγαθόν‚ do not mean in what sense do you call me good? but why do you call me good?" If this question has, as Fritzsche also insists, the force of an "objurgation," and means "You wrongly call me good," it is hard to see how Jesus could have expected His interlocutor to understand Him as meaning no more than that His goodness (as respects His human nature) was not the absolute goodness of Deity. To say, 'You are wrong in calling me good, because though, even in my human nature, I am really good, good through and through, good without flaw, I am nevertheless (in my human nature) not good as the infinite God is good,' would not only be a subtlety which this interlocutor could not be expected to follow, but as addressed to him inconsequent. If Jesus means to contrast Himself as not good with God as good, He can scarcely mean less in this context than that He is, in the common sense of the word, not good; that is, that He is not free from sin. The interpretation which would pare this down to a contrast between immaculate goodness and absolute goodness is a refinement unconformable with the simplicity of the language employed and the directness with which the conversation develops. It is idle to appeal to such passages as Job 4:18, 15:15, 25:5; for the point is, not that the distinction in question is not real, nor that it cannot be expressed in natural language, but that it is not suggested by the language of the present passage and breaks in upon the course of its development. From the dogmatic point of view this interpretation is of course more acceptable than that which sees in the passage a plain confession of sin. It has moreover the great advantage of not giving us a Jesus wholly out of harmony with the Jesus of the rest of the Synoptic tradition, and even perhaps with the Jesus of the remainder of this very narrative—where He speaks of "following" Him as the foundation of the new life. But from the narrower exegetical point of view it is at a disadvantage in comparison with the other; and yet lies open to all the exegetical objections which are fatal to that view.

Still another modification of the interpretation which supposes Jesus in our passage to repudiate the predicate good, has had large vogue. Jesus, it is said, repudiates this predicate not from His own but from His questioner's point of view. This interpretation, which is very common among the Fathers, is well illustrated by a passage in one of Athanasius' anti-Arian tracts. "And when He says," we read, " 'Why callest thou me good? No one is good except one, God,' God, reckoning Himself among men, spoke this according to His flesh, and with respect to the opinion of him who came to Him. For that one thought Him man only and not God, and the response keeps this opinion in view. For, if you think me a man, He says, and not God, call me not good, for no one is good. For the good does not belong to human nature but to God." It is obvious, that to say that Jesus repudiates the predicate only from the point of view of His interlocutor is to say that He does not really repudiate it at all. It is not strange, therefore, as Montefiore seems to find it, that "the capable Roman Catholic commentator," Schanz, "who honestly insists on the correct translation of this verse," understanding its repudiation to be meant ad hominem, adds that "the words do not exclude 'that Jesus as respects His higher nature, may belong to this divine Being.' " And Olshausen is quite logical when he writes:75 "The questioner saw in Christ a mere διδάσκαλος.… To such a conception, however, the ἀγαθός was not suitable. He [Jesus] repudiates, therefore the name and directs him to Him who is Goodness itself. By this, however, the Lord does not deny that He is Himself just the ἀγαθός, because the true God is reflected in Him as His image; only this teaching could not be dogmatically presented to the young man, but should vitally form itself in his own heart." And Keil: "Jesus, taking this predicate in its full sense, uses this address to direct the young man to God as the Supreme Being, when He replies: 'Why callest thou me good?' that is, 'Call me not good,' 'no one is good except one, God.' Jesus by no means repudiates goodness or sinlessness by this, but only says that the predicate would not be suitable for Him if He were nothing more than a διδάσκαλος, for which the young man took Him. This question gives no occasion, however, to instruct the young man thoroughly as to His Divine-human nature." This interpretation, therefore, readily passes into the essentially different one—with which we are on the entirely different ground that Jesus does not in any sense repudiate the goodness attributed to Him—which understands Jesus in His response to be really announcing His deity. The transition from the one to the other of these interpretations is perhaps indicated by such a comment as that of M. Lepin, who writes as follows: " 'Why callest thou me good?' says He to the young man who accosts Him; 'No man is good except God only.' The young man, no doubt, saw in the Master only an ordinary Rabbi. Seemingly Jesus refuses, as due to God alone, a title which is given Him only as man. Perhaps, however, He does not refuse it absolutely, and wishes discreetly to insinuate to His interlocutor, or to His disciples, who surrounded Him, that He to whom this title is given and who, as they well know, thoroughly deserves it, is not merely man but is God also. There is indeed nothing to show that our Savior wishes formally to decline such an attribution; that would indeed be strange and out of keeping with His usual attitude; had He not said, 'Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart?' The turn of expression employed, 'Why callest thou me good?' seems rather intended to cause the young man to reflect upon the unconscious bearing of his appellation. It is thus that on another occasion the Divine Master asked the Jews, 'Why do the Scribes say that the Christ is the Son of David?' Considering the subsequent reflection made by the Savior, the method employed when He remitted the sins of the paralytic is recalled: 'God only can forgive sins, as you say; well, I claim to forgive sins; and thus I prove my authority to do so!' Similarly here: 'Thou callest me good. The title is deserved: thou thyself hast judged me in comparison with ordinary masters; I therefore do not decline it; but consider well! there is none that is good but God alone!' "

A comment like this brings us to the point of turning away altogether from the "objurgatory" interpretation of our Lord's demand, "Why callest thou me good?" It remains therefore only to read the question simply as a question, that is to say as an incitement to inquiry on the part of the questioner. In that case only two lines of interpretation lie open. Either the question, along with the succeeding clause, "no one is good but one, God," is intended to suggest to the interlocutor that Jesus is Himself divine, or else it is intended to turn attention for the moment away from Jesus altogether and focus it on God. The former line of interpretation has been taken by many and was for long indeed the ruling view. As so understood, so far from suggesting that our Lord is neither divine nor good, it is an assertion that He is both good and divine. Ambrose will supply us with a good example of this interpretation. Inveighing against the Arians who make out that our Lord here denies that He is good, he asks that we consider when, where and with what circumspection our Lord speaks here. "The Son of God," he continues, "speaks in the form of man, and He speaks to a Scribe,—to him, that is, who called the Son of God 'Good Master,' but denied Him to be God. What he does not believe Christ adds, that he may believe in the Son of God, not as a Good Master but as the Good God. For, if wheresoever the 'One God' is named, the Son of God is never separated from the fullness of the Unity, how, when the one God is declared good is the Only-begotten excluded from the fullness of the divine goodness? They must therefore either deny that the Son of God is God, or confess that He is the good God. With heavenly circumspection, then, He said, not 'No one is good but the Father only,' but 'No one is good but God only.' For 'Father' is the proper name of Him who begets, but the 'one God' by no means excludes the Godhead of the Trinity, and therefore extols the Natures: goodness is therefore in the nature of God, and in the nature of God is also the Son of God, and therefore what is predicated is not predicated of the Singularity but of the Unity. Goodness is, then, not denied by the Lord, but such a disciple is rebuked. For when the Scribe said, 'Good Master,' the Lord responded, 'Why callest thou me good?' And that means, 'It is not enough to call me good whom thou dost not believe to be God. I do not seek such disciples, who rather believe in a good master according to manhood than according to Godhead the good God."

It is not easy to turn up a modern comment moving on precisely these lines. Perhaps something like it is intended by Friedrich Köster, when he writes: "Should it, now, seem as if Jesus in the words, 'Why callest thou me good,' repels the predicate of goodness from Himself, it is already remarked by Wolf (in Curis ad h. l.), Haec quaestio non negantis est, sed examinantis. 'Dost thou consider well, when thou callest me good, that this predicate belongs to God alone?' It belongs to Jesus, therefore, only by virtue of His perfect union with the Father." And Rudolf Stier plays upon the same note amid others which go to make up his chord, when he writes: "Christ takes care not to say, I am not good, for One only is good, my Father.… He deals more exactly with the word than the rationalists, who 'exhaust themselves in phrases, call Him the best, noblest, most excellent, most perfect, etc.,' and yet deny His divine dignity. He said then to the young ruler what He must say still more strongly to these modern panegyrists, not in kindness but in anger: 'Why callest thou me good?' He, however, at the same time attests His divinity (although He does not speak plainly of what is concealed) when He who knew no sin affirms: 'None is good save One, that is God.' " In support, he quotes in a note the following dilemma: "Choose then, ye friends of reason, between these two conclusions dictated by reason itself. None is good but the one God; Christ is good; therefore Christ is the one God. Or: none is good but the one God: Christ is not the one God; therefore Christ is not good." The sober and pregnant comment of Bengel may also find a place here. "Nevertheless," he writes, "He does not say, I am not good; but, Why dost thou call me good? Just as in Mt. 22:43 He does not deny that He, the son of David, is, at one and the same time, also the Lord of David. God is good: there is no goodness without Godhead. This young man perceived in Jesus the presence of goodness in some degree: otherwise he would not have applied to Him: but he did not perceive it in the full extent; otherwise he would not have gone back from Him. Much less did he recognize His Godhead. Wherefore Jesus does not accept from him the title of goodness without the title of Godhead (cf. the 'Why call ye me Lord, Lord,' Lk. 6:46); and thereby He vindicates the honor of the Father with whom He is one. See Jno. 5:19. At the same time He causes a ray of His omniscience to enter into the heart of the young man, and shows that the young man has not as yet the knowledge concerning Himself, Jesus Christ, worthy of so exalted a title, which otherwise is altogether appropriate to Him. Wherefore, He does not say, There is none good save one, that is my Father, but, There is none good save one, that is, God.' Our Lord often adjusted His words to the capacity of those who questioned Him (Jno. 4:22)."

Most recent writers, however, who have come to see that our Lord's question is non negantis sed examinantis, have also come to see that His purpose here is not inconsequently to proclaim His own deity, but in accordance with the demands of the occasion to point the young man inquiring after a law of life to Him who had once for all proclaimed a perfect law of life. They have, of course, varying ways of expressing the general understanding of the passage common to them all; and they inevitably bring out its implications and connections with more or less completeness, and with more or less penetration. The emphasis seems to be particularly well distributed in a passage in A. Schlatter's "Theology of the New Testament," and we therefore venture to quote it here. "To him who sought from Him, the Good Master, direction as to the work by which he could secure for himself eternal life, He replied that no one is good except God, but God is really good; and instead of meeting his wish and Himself giving him a commandment, He binds him to the divine commandments in their simple clearness. The desire to obtain, instead of them, a new prescription which should now for the first time assure eternal life, Jesus calls impious, a denial of God, which is made no better by being attributed to Him too. To permit Himself to be praised as good, while at the same time, or even thereby, God's goodness is denied, could not be endured by Jesus. Against this kind of religion He ever spoke as the Son who defended the goodness of the Father against every doubt, and hallowed His commandments as perfect. A glorifying of His own dignity at the cost of God's, a trust in His judgment along with distrust in God's commandments, an exalting of His own goodness along with reproaches against God—meant to Him absolute impossibility." No doubt, there are elements in this statement which are open to criticism. But the main matter comes in it to clear announcement. Jesus' concern here is not to glorify Himself but God: it is not to give any instruction concerning His own person whatever, but to indicate the published will of God as the sole and the perfect prescription for the pleasing of God. In proportion as we wander away from this central thought, we wander away from the real meaning of the passage and misunderstand and misinterpret it.

THE HUMANITARIAN CHRIST

What may very properly be called the Chalcedonian settlement" has remained until today the authoritative statement of the elements of the doctrine of the Person of Christ. It has well deserved to do so. For this "settlement' does justice at once to the data of Scripture, to the implicates of an Incarnation, to the needs of Redemption, to the demands of the religious emotions, and to the logic of a tenable doctrine of our Lord's Person. But this "settlement" is a mere statement of the essential facts, and therefore does nothing to mitigate the difficulty of the conception which it embodies. The difficulty of conceiving two distinct natures united in a single person remains; and this difficulty has produced in every age a tendency more or less widespread to fall away from the doctrine, or to explain it away, or decisively to reject it. Weak during the Middle Ages, this tendency acquired force in the great intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Reformation; and then gave birth, amid many other interesting phenomena, to the radical reaction against the doctrine of the Two Natures which we know as Socinianism. The shallow naturalism of the Enlightenment came in the next age to the reinforcement of the movement thus inaugurated, and under the impulses thus set at work a widespread revolt has sprung up in the modem church against the doctrine of the Two Natures.

Germany is today the prseceptor mundi. And how things stand in the academical circle of Germany Professor Friedrich Loofs informs us in his recent Oberlin lectures. "The whole German Protestant theology of the present time," he tells us, has, "to a certain extent," turned away from the conception of the Two Natures. "In the preceding generation," it seems, "there was still a learned theologian in Germany who thought it correct and possible to reproduce the old orthodox formulas in our time without the slightest modification, viz.: Friedrich Adolph Philippi, of Rostock 1882)."

At present," however, Loofs proceeds, "I do not know of a single professor of evangelical theology in Germany of whom this might be said. All learned Protestant theologians in Germany, even if they do not do so with the same emphasis, really admit unanimously that the orthodox Christology does not do sufficient justice to the truly human life of Jesus, and that the orthodox doctrine of the two natures in Christ cannot be retained in the traditional form. All our systematic theologians, so far at least as they see more in Jesus than the first subject of Christian faith, are seeking new paths in their Christology." No doubt matters have not yet gone so far in lands of English speech; but the drift here, too, is obviously in the same direction, and even among us an immense confusion has come to reign with regard to this fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion.

The alternative of two natures is, of course, one nature: and this one nature must be conceived, naturally, either as Divine or as human. The tendency to conceive of Christ as wholly Divine—so far as it has asserted itself at all—has been rather a religious than a theological tendency, if we may avail ourselves here of this overworked and misleading terminology. It has existed rather as a state of heart, and as a devotional attitude, than as a reasoned doctrine. Nothing has been more characteristic of Christians from the beginning than that they have been "worshippers of Christ." To the writers of the New Testament, the recognition of Jesus as Lord was the mark of a Christian; and all their religious emotions turned to Him. It has been made the reproach of the Evangelists that they—following their sources—were all worshippers of Jesus: and it is precisely on that ground that modem naturalistic criticism warns us that we are not to trust their representations as to His supernatural life on earth. To the heathen observers of the early Christians, their most distinguishing characteristic, which differentiated them from all others, was that they sang praises to Christ as God. A shrewd modem controversialist has even found it possible to contend that the only God the Christians have is Christ. "Christianity," says he, "is pre-eminently the worship of Christ. Far away in the background of existence there may be a power, answering to Indian Brahma or Greek Kronos and conceived as God the Father. But the working, ever-living, ever-active Deity is Christ. He is the creator and preserver of the world, the ruler, redeemer, and judge of men. He and no other is worshipped as God, hymned, prayed to, invoked. To him have been transferred the attributes of Jehovah. He and no other is the Christian God." If there is some exaggeration here, it is not to be found on the positive side; and G. K. Chesterton is not overstating the matter when he speaks of Christ incidentally as "the chief deity of a civilization."

This worship of Christ has had, of course, theological results of great importance, some of them even portentous —if, for example, we can with many historians look upon adoration of saints, and especially of the Virgin Mary, as, in part at least, an attempt of the human spirit to supply, outside of the Christ thought of as purely Divine, the human element in the mediatorially conceived Divine relation. But only now and again has it worked back and sought a theological basis for itself by the formal divinitising of the whole Christ. We think here naturally of the Apollinarians, and the Monophysites; but more particularly of confessional Lutheranism, which by its theory of the communicatio kliomatum managed to preserve indeed to theology a human nature for Christ, but at the same time to present a purely Divine Christ to our religious emotions. But we shall have to go back to the Gnostic Docetism of the first Christian centuries for any influential effort speculatively to construe Christ as a wholly Divine Being. If men have here and there forgotten the human Christ in their reverence for the Divine Christ, they have shown no great inclination to explain Christ to thought in terms of the purely Divine.

Revolt from the doctrine of the Two Natures means, therefore, nothing more or less than the explanation of Christ in terms of mere humanity. When we are told by Loofs that the whole of learned Germany has rejected the doctrine of the Two Natures, that is equivalent accordingly to being told that the whole of learned Germany has rejected the doctrine of the Deity of Christ, and construes Him to its thought as a purely human being. It may continue to reverence Him; men here and there may even continue to worship Him. As many of the older Unitarians found it possible still to offer worship to Christ, and incorporated in their official hymn-books hymns of praise to Him as God—such as Bonar's "How shall Deaths Triumph end?" in which Christ is celebrated as "The First and Last, who was and is," or Ray Palmer's "My Faith looks up to Thee," in which he is addressed as "Saviour Divine"— so many of our new German Humanitarians still worship Christ. Karl Thieme, for example, who righteously rebukes his fellows for continuing to use such phraseology as "the Godhead," "the Deity," "the Divinity" of Christ, when they know very well that Jesus is not God but only man, yet strenuously argues that He is worthy of our worship, because of what he calls His "representative unity with God." When asked how his worship of Jesus differs in principle from the gross hagiolatry of the Church of Rome, Thieme naively and most significantly replies, Why, in this most important respect, that he worships only one such holy one, the Romanists many! The adoring attitude preserved by men of this class towards Jesus—whom they nevertheless declare to be mere man— has called out not unnaturally in wide circles a deep disgust. They are not unjustly reproached with idolatry, are contemptuously dubbed "Jesusites"—worshippers of the man Jesus; and occasion has even been taken from their corrupt Jesus- cult to inaugurate a movement in revolt from Christianity as a whole, wrongfully identified with them, in the interests of a pure and non-idolatrous service of God. Men like Wilhelm von Schnehen and Arthur Drews are thus able to come forward with the plea that in their philosophical cult alone can be found true worship, and do not hesitate to declare that the greatest obstacle to pure religion in the world to-day is precisely this idolatrous adoration of Jesus, interpreted as merely a human being. We can only record it to their honour, therefore, when the majority of those who have given up the Deity of our Lord refuse to worship Him, and, while according to Him their admiration and respect, reserve their religious veneration for God alone.

The present great extension of purely humanitarian conceptions of the person of Christ has, of course, not been attained without a gradual development, in the progress of which there has been enunciated a variety of compromising views seeking to mediate between the doctrine of the Two Natures and the growing Humanitarianism. The most interesting of these is that wonderful construction which has been known under the name of Kenotism, from its vain attempt to entrench itself in the declaration of Paul (Phil. ii. 8) that Jesus, being by nature in the form of God, emptied Himself— as our Revised Version unfortunately mistranslates the Greek verb from which the term, Kenosis, is derived—and so became man. The idea is that the Son of God, in becoming man, abandoned His deity, extinguished it, so to speak, by immersing it in the stream of human life. This curious view bears somewhat the same relation to the tendency to think of Christ in terms of pure humanity that the Lutheran Christology bears to the opposite tendency to think of Him in terms of pure deity. As that was an attempt to secure a purely Divine Christ while not theoretically denying His human nature, so this was an attempt to secure a purely human Christ without theoretically denying His Divine nature. In effect it gives us a Christ of one nature and that nature purely human, though it theoretically explains this human nature as really just shrunken deity. Therefore Albrecht Ritsclil called it verschdmter Socinianismus —Socinianism indeed, but a Socinianism differing from the bold Socinianism to which we are accustomed by shyly hanging back and trying to hide itself behind sheltering skirts.

Kenotism differs from Socinianism fundamentally, however, in that Socinianism took away from us only our Divine Christ, while Kenotism takes away also our very God. For what kind of God is this that is God and not God alternately as He chooses, and lays off and on at will those specific qualities which make God the kind of being we call "God," as a king might put off and on his crown, or as a leopard might wish to change his spots but cannot, or an Ethiopian his skin? Of course, this is all—as Albrecht Ritschl again aptly described it, and as Loofs repeats from his lips—"pure mythology"; and the only wonder is that it enjoyed considerable vogue for a while, and, indeed, has not yet wholly passed out of sight on the outskirts of theological civilization. Loofs seems to raise his eyebrows a little as he remarks that, as it has gradually died out in Germany, it has seemed to find supporters in England: "in Sweden, too," he adds, with meticulous conscientiousness, "it was confidently defended as late as 1903 by Oskar Bensow. -The English writers to whom he thus refers are men of brilliant parts—such as D. W. Forrest, W. L. Walker, P. T. Forsyth, and latest of all H. R. Mackintosh. But even writers of brilliant parts will not be able to fan the dead embers of this burned-out speculation into life again. The humanitarian theorizers are in search of a true man in Jesus, not a shrivelled God; and no Christian heart will be satisfied with a Christ in whom (we quote Ritschl again) there was no Godhead at all while He was on earth, and in whom (we may add) there may be no manhood at all now that He has gone to heaven. It really ought to be clear by now that there cannot be a half-way house erected between the doctrines that Christ is both God and man and that Christ is merely man. Between these two positions there is an irreducible "either or," and many may feel inclined to adopt Biedermann's caustic criticism of the Kenotic theories, that only one who has himself suffered a kenosis of his understanding can possibly accord them welcome.

On the sinking of the Kenotic sun beneath the horizon, there has been left, however, a certain afterglow hanging behind it. A disposition is discoverable in certain quarters to speak in Kenotic language while recoiling from the Kenotic name; to claim as a Christian heritage the essential features of the Kenotic Christology while declining to lay behind them the precise Kenotic explanation. An isolated early instance of this procedure was supplied by Thomas Adamson, who draws a portrait of Jesus in his "Studies of the Mind in Christ" (1898) which seems to require the assumption of kenosis to justify it, but who vigorously repudiates the attribution of that assumption to him. Much more notable instances are found in such writers as Johannes Kunze of Vienna (now of Greifswald) and Erich Schiider of Kiel, whose formula for the incarnation is that in Jesus Christ the Godhead is "presented in the form of a human life." According to Kunze the Godhead appears in Jesus always as humanly mediated: the two. Godhead and manhood, can never be contemplated apart; all that is human is Divine, and all that is Divine is human. The omnipotence which belongs to His deity appearing in Christ only as humanly mediated, for example, is conditioned on His prayer; Jesus could accomplish all things by the power of prevalent prayer! So also with all the Divine attributes; the result being that we have in Jesus phenomenally nothing but a man, but a man who, we are told, is nevertheless to be thought of as the Eternal God.

Similarly, according to Schiider, God in becoming flesh has not at all ceased to be what He was; He has only become it "in another way." In the place of the doctrine of the Two Natures, Schiider places the idea of what he calls "the Being of God in Jesus "—das Sein Gottes in Jesus —a phrase which becomes something like a watchword with him. "We have here," he says, "a man before us to whom there is lacking not the least thing that is human, a man who is man in everything, be it what it may"; and yet who is just God become flesh, "having ceased to be nothing which He eternally is," but "having only become it in another manner." By what a narrow line this doctrine of "God in human form" is separated from express Kenotism may be observed from the difficulties in which Schader finds himself when he comes to speak of the act by which the mighty transformation, which he postulates in the Son of God, takes place. Here Iris language is not only distinctly Kenotic, but extremely Kenotic, assimilating him in his subordinationism and transmutationism to what Loofs does not scruple to speak of as tire "reckless" teaching of Gess. "Now, God our Father," he writes, "lets it, lets this Son proceed from Himself as man, and thus enter into history. This is an almighty act of His love, of His reconciling will": "what is in question here is an almighty transformation of the mode of being of the Logos by God." When we are thus told that, "by God's almighty act, God's eternal Son becomes a weak, developing child," we are not so much reassured as puzzled that we are told in the same breath that thus "He does not cease to be what He was, He only becomes the same thing in another way"; nor are we much helped by having it explained to us that even in His pre-existent state the Son of God, because He was Son, was dependent on God, subordinate to Him, and wrought only God's will—so that even in His pre-existent state He used prayer to God, preserved humility in the Divine presence, and lived in obedience to God. It is only borne strongly in upon us that it is an exceedingly difficult task at one and the same time to evaporate and to preserve the true Deity of Christ.

The fundamental formulas with which Kunze and Schader operate—that the incarnation consists in "the Being of God in Christ," that "God is in Christ in human form"—reappear in perhaps even more purity in the writings of the late R. C. Moberly. "Christ," he says, "is, then, not so much God and man, as God in, and through, and as man." "God, as man, is always, in all things, God as man"-, "if it is all Divine, it is all human too." So also W. P. Du Bose wishes us not to forget that "God is most God at the moment when Pie is most love," and not to fail to recognise God "in the highest act of His highest attribute," confusing external pomp with internal nobility—all of which has the appearance at least of being only a way of laying claim to the inheritance of the Kenotists, while avoiding the scandal of the name. Reviewing Du Bose, Professor Sanday falls in with the notions he here expresses, and pronounces it likely that the modems in their insistence on the single personality of our Lord, which is both Divine and human—and, apparently, Divine only because it is perfectly human,—have made an improvement on the old Two Nature doctrine of the Creeds. We may perceive from this how completely the movement is but a phase of the zealous propaganda for a one-natured Christ, and but propounds a new method of submerging God in man. This method is to proclaim the paradox that God is most God when He ceases to be God—when He becomes man. For this condescension marks the manifestation at its height of the highest of all the activities of God—Love.

But we may perceive here, too, what may also legitimately interest us, a stage in the drifting of Sanday's Christological views towards the apparently humanitarian position at which they seem ultimately to arrive. In earlier writings Sanday had taught with clarity the essentials of the Trinitarian Christology, and had pronounced himself unfavourable to the Kenotic speculations. In this review of Du Bose he falls in, however, with Kenotic modes of expression; and soon afterwards he is found confessing himself in some sense a Kenotist—while, nevertheless, in the act of propounding what seems really to be a merely humanitarian Christology. For Sanday's final suggestion is to the effect that we should think of Christ as the man into whose subconscious being—which is to be conceived as open at the bottom and through that opening in contact with the ocean of Deity which lies beyond—the waves of this ocean of Deity wash with more frequency, fullness, and force than in the case of other men, and so with more frequency, fullness, and force make themselves felt in the upper stratum of His being, His conscious self, also than in the case of other men. At the basis of this suggestion there lies a mystical doctrine of human nature, which makes the subliminal being of every man the dwelling-place of God. If we only go down deep enough into man's being, we shall find God; and if the tides of the Infinite only wash in high enough, they will emerge into consciousness. Man differs from man, no doubt, in the richness and fullness with which the Divine that underlies his being surges up in him and enters his consciousness; and Jesus differs from other men in being in this incomparably above other men. There is Deity in Him as well as humanity; but not Deity alongside of humanity, but Deity underlying and sustaining His humanity—as Deity underlies and sustains all humanity. The mistake of the orthodox Christology has been to draw the fine which divides the Deity and the humanity vertically: let us draw it rather horizontally, "between the upper human medium, which is the proper and natural field of all active expression, and those lower depths which are no less the proper and natural home of whatever is Divine." Thus we shall have a Christ whose life, though, "so far as it was visible, it was a strictly human life," yet "was, in its deepest roots, directly continuous with the life of God Himself." That the same may be said in his measure of every man Sanday expressly affirms, and he as expressly identifies this Divine element which is to be found at the roots of the being of both Christ and all other men with what the Scriptures call "the indwelling of the Holy Spirit." Christ thus becomes just the man in whom the Holy Spirit dwells in greater abundance than in other men. He is not God and man; He is not even God in man; He is man with God dwelling in Him—as, though less completely, God dwells in all men. We have reached here a Christology which substitutes for the incarnation a notion which librates between the two conceptions of the general Divine immanence and the special indwelling of the Holy Spirit. According as the one or the other of these conceptions is given precedence will it find its affinities, therefore, with one or another widely spread form of the humanitarian theorizing now so popular. For there are many about us who, declaring Jesus to be no more than man, wish to explain the Divine that is allowed also to be found in Him on the basis of the Divine immanence; and there are equally many among us who wish to explain it on the basis of the Divine indwelling or inspiration.

Those who occupy the former of these standpoints are prone to speak of Jesus as "a human organism filled with the Divine thought." This conception may be presented in a very crass form, or it may be clothed in very beautiful language and made the vehicle of very fervent expressions of reverence for Christ. "I see," explains James Drummond, "in the beauty of a rose a Divine thought, which is no other than God Himself coming unto manifestation through the rose, so far as the limitations of a rose will permit; but I do not believe that the rose is God, possessed of omniscience, omnipotence, and so forth. ... So, there are those who have, through the medium of the New Testament and the traditional life of the purest Christendom, looked into the face of Jesus, and seen there an ideal, a glory which they have felt to be the glory of God, a thought of Divine Sonship which has changed their whole conception of human nature, and the whole aim of their life. . . Such a conception, we are told by its advocates, is far superior to the "masked God" of current orthodoxy; it "exalts Christ above all men, and gives Him a place at the right hand of God." He was, no doubt, only a man—a human organism—but He was a man whose "attitude of will was such that God could act upon Him as upon no other in the history of humanity." "From the dawn of consciousness the human Christ assumed such an ethical uprightness before God that God could pour Himself out on Christ in altogether exceptional activities." In Him "for the first and only time the Almighty was granted His opportunity with a human soul," and, "as the Master kept Himself in unique ethical surrender to God, God acted upon Him in such a manner as to make the metaphysical relationship also unique. The ethical uniqueness implies and renders inevitable its corresponding metaphysical uniqueness of relation to God." For, we are told, "it is possible for God so to fill a responsive heart with His own spirit that every word of that soul becomes a word of God, that every deed becomes a deed of God, that every feeling reveals the loving heart of God willing to suffer with His children. In short, the life becomes such a life as God Himself would five were it possible for Him to be reduced to human circumstances. God could not suggest any improvement. He would find this soul such an open channel that He could at last pom - Himself out to the utmost drop. There would be such complete mutual sympathy that the sorrows of God would become the sorrows of this soul, and the sorrows of this soul the sorrows of God. If in a moment of distress at the onslaught of sin the soul should cry out, 'Why hast Thou forsaken me?' the distress would be as real to God as to the soul, for every sorrow of either God or this soul would cut both ways. The soul would become God's masterpiece. God would throw Himself into its development with such flood that the metaphysical relationship would be beyond anything known to humanity, and beyond anything attainable by humanity. As the supreme work of the Father, and as the supreme response to the ethical cravings of the Father, such a creation could be called in the highest sense the Son of God."

Perhaps we may say that the exaltation of the man Jesus could go little further than this. And we can scarcely fail to observe that we have before us here a movement of thought running on precisely opposite fines from that of the Kenotic theories. In them we were bidden to observe how God could become man; in this we are asked in effect whether it may not be possible to believe that in Jesus Christ man became God. We are naturally reminded at this point that consentaneously with the rise of the Kenotic theories in the middle of the last century there was born also a contradictory theory— that of Isaac A. Dorner—which, with a much more profound meaning, proposed to our thought a solution of the problems of die incarnation which formally reminds us of that just described. Domer, beginning with the human Jesus, asked us to watch Him become gradually God by a progressive communication to Him of the Divine Being, so that, though at the start He was but man, in the end He should become in the truest and most ontological sense the God-man. The difficulties of such a conception are, of course, insuperable; it would compel us to think of the Godhead as capable of abscission and division, so that it could be imparted piecemeal to a human subject, or of manhood as capable by successive creative acts of being itself transmuted into Godhead. But it was inevitable that this theory, too, should leave some echoes of itself in the confused discord of modem thought.

We hear these echoes in the high christological construction of Martin Kahler. We hear them also in the lower theories of Reinhold Seeberg. According to Seeberg, Jesus Christ is just a man whom the willing God has created as His organ and through whom the personal will of God has so worked that He has become fully one with this personal will of God. "The will of God," he says, "chose the man Jesus for His organ, and formed Him into the clear and distinct expression of His Being." He emphasizes the personal character of the Divine will in Jesus, but he allows no second hypostasis in the Godhead as its Trinitarian background. In his view we can admit the eternal existence of only one thinking and willing Divine personality, though in that one personality there co-existed a threefold tendency of will. That particular tendency of the Divine will-energy which aims at the realization of a church, manifests itself in the man Jesus, and so fully takes possession of Him that in Him it becomes for the first time personal and makes Him really the Son of God. Before God thus created Jesus into His organ there was no second ego standing over against the Father; there pre-existed in the eternal God only the eternal tendency of will to create a church. "What is peculiarly Divine in Christ" is therefore only "the peculiar will-content which we can distinguish from other will-con- tents, the tendency of the Divine will to the historical realization of salvation." Seeberg thinks that thus he does justice to the Godhead of Christ. He looks upon Him as the Redemptive Will of God forming as organ for itself a human subject and coming to complete personality in it. "Jesus" he says, "in the peculiar contents of His soul is God." "Herrschaft," authority, therefore belongs to Him; but also "Demut," humility; but especially "Herrschaft," for is He not the personal Son of God, the only personal Son of God that ever was or ever will be? That ever will be," we say: for the question arises, what has become of this personal Son of God now that His life on earth is over and He has ascended where He was before? As before the "Incarnation" the particular Divine will of salvation was not a Divine personality over against the Father, but acquired personality only as it flowed into the human person, Jesus Christ, and formed Him to its organ—has it, now that this man Jesus has passed away from earth, lost again its personality and sunk again into merely the tendency of the Divine will making for salvation? It is Karl Thieme who asks this question. For ourselves, we may be content with observing that in Seebergs construction it is not God, but only the Divine will of salvation, that becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ; and that Jesus Christ is therefore not God, but only, as we say in our loose everyday language, "the very incarnation" of the Divine will of salvation. We see in Him, not God, but only the will of God to save men—and this seems only another way of saying that Christ is not Himself God, but only the love of God is manifested in and through Him. What we get from Seeberg, then, is obviously not a doctrine of the incarnation, but only another form of the prevalent doctrine of Divine indwelling or inspiration, and it is because of this that Seeberg's theory seems to Friedrich Loofs one of the most valuable of those recently promulgated.

In an interesting passage Loofs selects out of the results of recent speculation the three conclusions which he considers the most valuable, and thus reveals to us his own christological conceptions. These are: "First, that the historical person of Christ is looked upon as a human personality; secondly, that this personality, through an indwelling of God or His Spirit, which was unique both before and after, up to the ending of all time, became the Son of God who reveals the Father, and became also the beginner of a new mankind; and, thirdly, that in the future state of perfection a similar indwelling of God has to be realized, though in a copied and therefore secondary form, in all people whom Christ has redeemed." The central point in this statement is that Christ is a man in whom God dwells. "The conviction," remarks Loofs in his explanation of his views, "that God dwelt so perfectly in Jesus through His Spirit as had never been the case before, and never will be till the end of all time, does justice to what we teach historically about Jesus, and may, at the same time, be regarded as satisfactorily expressing the unique position of Jesus, which is a certainty to faith." He is willing to admit, indeed, that he does not quite know what the dwelling of the Spirit of God in Jesus means; and, indeed, he is free to confess that he does not understand even what is meant by the "Spirit of God." And he agrees that the formula of the indwelling of the Spirit of God in Jesus is capable of being taken in so low a sense as to destroy all claim of uniqueness for Jesus. He does not feel so well satisfied with it, therefore, as Hans Hinrich Wendt, for example, expresses himself as being. But he knows nothing better to say, and is willing to leave it at that, with the further acknowledgment that he feels himself face to face here with something of a mystery. Loofs is a Ritschlian of the extreme right wing, and in his sense of a mystery in the person of Christ, leaving him not quite satisfied with the definition of His person as a man in whom God uniquely dwells, we perceive the height of christological conception to which we may attain on Ritschlian presupposition.

What Ritschl himself thought of Christ it is rather difficult to determine; and his followers are not perfectly agreed in their detailed interpretation of it. He himself warns us not to suppose him to be unaware of mysteries because he does not speak of them: it is precisely of the mysteries, he says, that he wishes to preserve silence. Meanwhile he is silent of all that is transcendental in Christ, His pre-existence, His metaphysical Godhead, His exaltation—if these things indeed belong to Christ. If Jesus had any transcendent Being other than His phenomenal Being as man, Ritschl says nothing about it. He seems, indeed, to leave no place for it. He speaks, no doubt, of the "Godhead" of Christ; but by this he means neither to allow that Christ existed as God before He was man, nor to attribute a Divine nature to the historical Christ, nor to suggest that He has now been exalted to Divine glory. He means merely to express his sense that Christ has the value of God for us—that is to say, that we are conscious that we owe salvation to Him. The "Deity" thus predicated to Him, it is explained, is purely "ethical" and not "metaphysical," and, moreover, is transferable to His people so that His Church, viewed as the sphere of His influence, is as Divine as He is. It is the "calling" of Christ to be the founder of the Kingdom of God; and in fulfilling this "calling" He fulfills the eternal purpose of God for the world and mankind. And it is only because His personal will is thus one with the will of God that the predicate of Godhead belongs to Him. "Christ is God" with Ritschl—thus S. Faut sums up the matter—"so far as He is on the one side the executor, on the other the object of the Divine will." It all comes, we see, at the best, to the conception that Jesus is the unique Revealer of God and Mediator of Redemption; and it is in these ideas that the higher class of Ritsclilian thinkers live and move and have their being. To them Jesus is indeed purely human—"mere man" if you will, though the adjective "mere" is objected to as belittling. On the other hand, however, he stands in a unique relation to God "as the embodiment of God's life in humanity, and the guarantor of its presence and power; in whom God verifies Himself to us as Father and Redeemer." There is indeed no metaphysical Sonship with the Father in question; Sonship is an ethico-religious idea when applied to Jesus. When we call Him Son, we do not mean to declare Him God in a metaphysical sense; we but indicate "His superior mission for humanity as representing and communicating the Father's life." By His "centrality for the whole human race, as the one perfect mediator of the Divine life," He is so identified with God that those who have seen Him may be said to have seen the Father also. Through Him and Him only indeed has the Father ever been seen; in Him alone is "manifested the Father's ideal of humanity and the Father's purpose of grace toward the sinful." Through Him alone have men or can men come to the knowledge of the Father and to true and full communion with Him. "He is the one supreme Revealer," and "not only utters the thought of God"—who thus speaks through Him—but "incarnates the life of God, which through Him communicates itself to mankind as a redeeming and renewing power."

It is thus, we say, that the highest class of Ritsclilian thinkers conceive of Jesus. We must emphasize, however, the words "the highest class." For this sketch of their thought of Jesus goes fairly to the limit of what can be said of Christ's dignity on Ritschlian ground. It not only, of course, gives expression to views which would be deemed impossible by a Schultz, a Harnack, a Wendt, but it transcends also what a Kaftan, a Kattenbusch, a Loofs, a Bornemann might be willing to say. For the whole Ritschlian school Christ is not so much Himself God as the means by which God is made known to us, and the instrument through which we are brought to God—and it is therefore only that they are willing, in a modified sense, to call Him Divine. "The term Divinity, applied to Jesus, expresses at bottom" in Ritschl's usage, says a careful expositor of his thought, "nothing more than the absolute confidence of the believer in the redemptive power of the Saviour." "The Godhead of Christ, therefore," says Gottschick, "expresses the value which the historical reality of this personal life possesses, as the power that produces the new humanity of regenerate and reconciled children of God." It is common, indeed, for Ritschlians, like Herrmann, to repudiate altogether experience of the power of the exalted Christ, and to suspend everything on the impression made by "the historical Christ,"—and often, like Otto Ritschl, they mediate this through the Church to such an extent that Jesus appears merely as the starting-point of a movement propagated through the years from man to man; and He may therefore without fatal loss, be lost sight of altogether. The Ritschlian conception of Christ must take its place as merely another of the numerous forms which tire Hunranitarianism of our anti-supematuralistic age manifests.

For the characterizing feature of recent theories of the person of Christ is that they are all humanitarian. The Keno- tic theory, which tried to find a middle ground between the God-man and the merely-man Jesus, having passed out of sight, tire field is held by pure Humanitarianism. The situation is very clearly revealed in the classification of the possible Clrristological "schematizations" which Otto Kirn gives us in his "Elements of Evangelical Dogmatics." There are only four varieties of Christology, he tells us, which we need bear in mind as we pass our eye down the labours in this field of all the Christian centuries. These are, in his nomenclature, the Trinitarian, the Kenotic, the Messianic, and the Prophetic Clrristologies. The former two—the Trinitarian and the Kenotic —allow for a God-man; the first in fact, tire second in theory. They are theories of the past. Only the Messianic and the Prophetic are living theories of to-day; and both of these give us merely a man Jesus. They differ only in one respect. Whereas in the Messianic Christology no less than in the Prophetic, Jesus in His self-consciousness as well as in His essential nature belongs to humanity and to humanity only, He is yet held in the Messianic Christology to be God's absolute organ for carrying out His counsel of salvation, and to be endowed for His work by a communication of the Holy Spirit beyond measure, fitting Him for unity with God and constituting Him the head of the community of God. The Prophetic Christology, on the other hand, looks upon Him as merely a religious genius, who in reaction upon His environment has become the unrivalled model of piety and as such the supreme guide to humanity in the knowledge of God and in the religious life. We may conceive of Jesus as the God- endowed man, or as the God-discovering man. In the former case we may see in Him God reaching down to man, to do him good: in the latter man reaching up to God, seeking good. Between these two conceptions we may take our choice: beyond them self-styled "modern thought" will not let us go.

Whether this reduction of Jesus to the dimensions of a mere man marks the triumph of modem christological speculation, or its collapse, is another question. The reduction of Jesus to the dimensions of a mere man was a phase of thought concerning His person which required to be fully exploited. And in that sense a service has been done to Christian thinking by the richness and variety of modern humanitarian constructions. Surely by now every possible expedient has been tried. The result is not encouraging. To him who would fain think of Him as merely a man, Jesus Christ looms up in history as ever more and more a mystery; a greater mystery than the God-man who is discarded in His favour. Say that the union of God and man in one person is intrinsically an incomprehensive mystery. It is nevertheless a mystery which, if it cannot be itself explained, yet explains. Without it, everything else is an incomprehensible mystery: the whole developing history of the kingdom of God, the gospel-record, the great figure of Paul and his great christological conceptions, the rise and growth and marvellous power of nascent Christianity, the history of Christianity in the world, the history of the world itself for two thousand years—your regenerated life and mine, our changed hearts and lives, our assurance of salvation, our deathless hope of eternal life. And yet we are invited to believe Him to have been a mere man, on no other ground than that it is easier to believe him to have been a mere man than a God-man. For that, after all, is what the whole ground of the assertion that Jesus was a mere man ultimately reduces to. It is intrinsically easier to believe in the existence of a mere man than in the existence of a God-man. But is it possible to believe that all that has issued from Jesus Christ could issue from a mere man? Apart from every other consideration, does there not lie in the effects wrought by Him an absolute bar to all humanitarian theories of His Person? The humanitarian interpretation of the Person of Christ is confronted by enormous historical and vital consequences, impossible of denial, which apparently spring from a fact which it pronounces inconceivable; though, apart from this fact, these consequences appear themselves to be impossible of explanation.

THE "TWO NATURES" AND RECENT CHRISTOLOGICAL SPECULATION

I. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS

ONE of the most portentous symptoms of the decay of vital sympathy with historical Christianity which is observable in present-day academic circles is the widespread tendency in recent Christological discussion to revolt from the doctrine of the Two Natures in the Person of Christ. The significance of this revolt becomes at once apparent, when we reflect that the doctrine of the Two Natures is only another way of stating the doctrine of the Incarnation; and the doctrine of the Incarnation is the hinge on which the Christian system turns. No Two Natures, no Incarnation; no Incarnation, no Christianity in any distinctive sense. Nevertheless, voices are raised all about us declaring the conception of two natures in Christ no longer admissible; and that very often with full appreciation of the significance of the declaration.

Thus, for example, Johannes Weiss tells us that it is unthinkable that Godhood and manhood should be united in a single person walking upon the earth; that, while no doubt men of ancient time could conceive "that a man might really be an incarnate deity," modern men feel much too strongly the impassable barrier which separates the divine and the human to entertain such a notion. And Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel pronounces it "simply impossible," now that they have awakened to inquire "what is psychologically possible and impossible," for men to submit any longer to a demand that does such violence at once to their intelligence and to their religious experience as the demand "that they should embrace the idea of a perfect God and a perfect Man as united in the one and indivisible person of a Saviour whom they are longing to revere." Accordingly, since the divine and human nature cannot be united in Jesus, and since "Jesus was undoubtedly man," he continues, we have simply to regard him as man and nothing more. Coming nearer home, William Adams Brown declares that men are no longer to be satisfied with "the old conception of Christ as a being of two natures, one divine and one human, dwelling in a mysterious union, incapable of description, within the confines of a single personality." Such a conception, he thinks, fails to "do justice to the genuine humanity" of Jesus, who "shares our limitations"; and supposes "an impassable gulf between God and man" which requires "a miracle" to bridge it. The only "incarnation" which is real, he asserts, concerns not "a single instance," but the eternal entrance of God "into humanity."4 These are but examples of numerous deliverances which may differ from one another in the clearness with which they announce the consequences, but do not differ in the decisiveness with which they reject the doctrine of the Two Natures.

The violence of the revolution which is thus attempted is somewhat obscured by the bad habit, which is becoming common, of speaking of the doctrine of the Two Natures as in some sense the creation of the Chalcedonian fathers. Even Albert Schweitzer permits himself to write:

"When at Chalcedon the West overcame the East, its doctrine of the two natures dissolved the unity of the Person, and thereby cast off the last possibility of a return to the historical Jesus. The self-contradiction was elevated into a law.… This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of His existence."

By "the historical Jesus" is here meant the merely human Jesus; and it is quite true that the doctrine of the Two Natures interposes an insuperable obstacle to the recognition of such a Jesus as the real Jesus. There is a sense also in which it may be truly said that at Chalcedon the West impressed on the East its long-established doctrine of the Two Natures—a doctrine which had been fully formulated in the West from at least the time of Tertullian. But by this very token it is clear that the doctrine decreed at Chalcedon was nothing new; and if, as is often the case, the further suggestion is conveyed that what was new in it was the "Two Natures" itself, the perversion becomes monstrous.

It was no part of the task of the fathers at Chalcedon to invent a new doctrine, and the doctrine which they formulated had no single new element in it. Least of all was the doctrine of the Two Natures itself new. No one of the disputants in the long series of controversies which led up to Chalcedon, any more than in the equally long series of controversies which led down from it, cherished the least doubt of this doctrine—not even Arius, and certainly not Apollinaris, or Nestorius, or Eutyches, or any of the great Monophysite or Monothelite leaders, or any of their opponents. The doctrine of the Two Natures formed the common basis on which all alike stood; their differences concerned only the quality or integrity of the two natures united in the one person, or the character or effects of the union by which they were brought together. It was the adjustment of these points of difference alone with which the council was concerned, or rather, to speak more precisely, the authoritative determination of the range within which such attempted adjustments might be tolerated in a church calling itself Christian.

It was not to the fourth-century fathers alone, however, that the doctrine of the Two Natures was "given." There never was a time when it was not the universal presupposition of the whole attitude, intellectual and devotional alike, of Christians to their Lord. The term δύο οὐσίαι may first occur in extant writings in a fragment of Melito's of Sardis (Tertullian, duae substantiae; Origen and later writers generally, δύο φύσεις). But the thing goes back to the beginning. When we read, for example, in Clement of Rome's Letter to the Corinthians, in a passage (xvi) containing echoes of Heb. 1:8 and Phil. 2:6, that "the Scepter of the Majesty of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, came not in the pomp of arrogance or pride—though he could well have done that—but in lowliness of mind," or in a passage (xxxii) manifestly reminiscent of Rom. 9:5, that "the Lord Jesus,"… that Lord Jesus to whom the highest predicates are ascribed (as e.g. in xxxvi)—is "according to the flesh," "of Jacob," the two natures are as plainly presupposed as they are openly asserted in such Ignatian passages as: "There is one Healer, fleshly and spiritual, generate and ingenerate, God in man, true life in death, both of Mary and of God, first passible and then impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord" (Eph. 7:2), or: "For our God, Jesus Christ, was borne in the womb of Mary, according to a dispensation, of the seed of David, indeed, but also of the Holy Spirit" (18:2). Adolf Harnack, it is true, has made a brilliant attempt to distinguish "adoptionist" as well as "pneumatic" Christologies underlying the Christian tradition. But he has felt himself compelled notably to qualify his original representation; while F. Loofs has quite properly permitted the whole notion to drop out of sight;11 and R. Seeberg has solidly refuted it. To discover a one-natured Christ, we must turn to the outlawed sects of the Docetists on the one hand, and the Ebionites with their successors, the Dynamistic Montanists, on the other. Whatever else the church brought with it out of the apostolic age, it emerged from that, its formative, epoch with so firm a faith in the Two Natures of its Lord as to be incapable of wavering. "Perfect man" it knew him to be. But the exhortation of Christians to one another ran in such strains as we find in the opening words of the earliest Christian homily that has come down to us: "Brethren, thus ought we to think of Jesus Christ—as of God, as of Judge of quick and dead";14 and so exhorting one another, they naturally were known to their heathen observers precisely as worshippers of Christ. So fixed in the Christian consciousness was the conception of the Two Natures of the Savior, that nothing could dislodge it. We shall have to come down to the radical outbreak which accompanied the Reformation—Trancendental or Socinian—for the first important defection from it after the early Dynamistic Monarchianism; and it was not until the rise in the eighteenth century of the naturalistic movement known as the Enlightenment that there was inaugurated any widespread revolt from it. It is under the influence of this revolt, which has not yet spent its force, that so many "moderns" have turned away from the doctrine as "impossible."

The constancy with which the church has confessed the doctrine of the Two Natures finds its explanation in the fact that this doctrine is intrenched in the teaching of the New Testament. The Chalcedonian Christology, indeed, in its complete development is only a very perfect synthesis of the biblical data. It takes its starting-point from the New Testament as a whole, thoroughly trusted in all its declarations, and seeks to find a comprehensive statement of the scriptural doctrine of the Person of Christ, which will do full justice to all the elements of its representation. The eminent success which it achieves in this difficult undertaking is due to the circumstance that it is not the product of a single mind working under a "scientific" impulse, that is to say, with purely theoretical intent, but of the mind, or rather the heart, of the church at large searching for an adequate formulation of its vital faith, that is to say, of a large body of earnest men distributed through a long stretch of time, and living under very varied conditions, each passionately asserting, and seeking to have justice accorded to, elements of the biblical representation which particularly "found" him. The final statement is not a product of the study, therefore, but of life; and was arrived at, externally considered, through protracted and violent controversies, during the course of which every conceivable construction of the biblical data had been exploited, weighed, and its elements of truth sifted out and preserved, while the elements of error which deformed it were burned up as chaff in the fires of the strife. To the onlooker from this distance of time, the main line of the progress of the debate takes on an odd appearance of a steady zigzag advance. Arising out of the embers of the Arian controversy, there is first vigorously asserted, over against the reduction of our Lord to the dimensions of a creature, the pure deity of his spiritual nature (Apollinarianism); by this there is at once provoked, in the interests of the integrity of our Lord's humanity, the equally vigorous assertion of the completeness of his human nature as the bearer of his deity (Nestorianism); this in turn provokes, in the interests of the oneness of his Person, an equally vigorous assertion of the conjunction of these two natures in a single individuum (Eutychianism): from all of which there gradually emerges at last, by a series of corrections, the balanced statement of Chalcedon, recognizing at once in its "without confusion, without conversion, eternally and inseparably" the union in the Person of Christ of a complete deity and a complete humanity, constituting a single person without prejudice to the continued integrity of either nature. The pendulum of thought had swung back and forth in ever-decreasing arcs, until at last it found rest along the line of action of the fundamental force. Out of the continuous controversy of a century there issued a balanced statement in which all the elements of the biblical representation were taken up and combined. Work so done is done for all time; and it is capable of ever-repeated demonstration that in the developed doctrine of the Two Natures (as it is worked out with marvelous insight and delicate precision in such a presentation of it as is given, say, in the "Admonitio Christiana," 1581, written chiefly by Zacharias Ursinus and published in his works) and in it alone, all the biblical data are brought together in a harmonious statement, in which each receives full recognition, and out of which each may derive its sympathetic exposition. This key unlocks the treasures of the biblical instruction on the Person of Christ as none other can, and enables the reader as he currently scans the sacred pages to take up their declarations as they meet him, one after the other, into an intelligently consistent conception of his Lord.

The key which unlocks so complicated a lock can scarcely fail to be its true key. And the argument may be turned around. That all the varied representations concerning our Lord's Person contained in the New Testament fall into harmony under the ordering influence of so simple a hypothesis as that of the Two Natures, authenticates these varying representations as each a fragment of a real whole. It were inconceivable that so large a body of different and sometimes apparently divergent data could synthetize in so simple a unifying conception, were they not component elements of a unitary reality. And this consideration is greatly strengthened by the manner in which these differing or sometimes even apparently divergent data are distributed through the New Testament. They are not parceled out severally to the separate books, the composition of different writers, so that one set of them is peculiar to one writer or to one set of writers, and a set of different import peculiar to another writer or set of writers. They are, rather, pretty evenly distributed over the face of the New Testament, and the most different or apparently divergent data are found side by side in the writings of the same author or even in the same writing. The doctrine of the Two Natures is not merely a synthesis of all data concerning the Person of Christ found in the New Testament; it is the doctrine of each of the New Testament books in severalty. There is but one doctrine of the Person of Christ inculcated or presupposed by all the New Testament writers without exception. In this respect the New Testament is all of a piece. Book may differ from book in the terms in which it gives expression to the common doctrine, or in the fulness with which it develops its details, or with which it draws out its implications. But all are at one in the inculcation or presupposition of the common doctrine of the Two Natures.

It has no doubt required some time for the critical study of the New Testament writings to arrive solidly at this conclusion. But it is at this conclusion, it may fairly be said, that the critical study of the New Testament has at length arrived. The day is gone by in which a number of mutually exclusive Christologies could be ascribed to the writers of the New Testament and set over against one another in crass contradiction. Nowadays, the New Testament is admitted to be Christologically much on a level, and though we still hear of a pre-Pauline, a Pauline, and a post-Pauline Christology, this very phraseology shows the dominance of a single type, and the boundary lines which separate even the varieties which are thus suggested are very indistinct. There are in fact next to no pre-Pauline writings in the New Testament, and therefore no pre-Pauline Christologies are taught in it; and though there are writings in the New Testament which in point of chronological sequence are post-Pauline, it is only with much ado that a post-Pauline Christology in the proper sense of the term can be even plausibly discovered in it. F. C. Baur discriminated three sharply divergent types of Christology among the New Testament writers. To the Synoptists Christ was a mere man, endowed with the Holy Spirit as Messiah; to Paul he was still a man but a deified man; to John he was a God incarnated in a human body. We have to travel far from this before we reach, say, Johannes Weiss. To Weiss the whole New Testament is written under the influence of Paul who introduced the Logos Christology. Before Paul, men indeed thought of Christ as a deified man; but no New Testament book is written from this standpoint. After Paul, some explication of what is already implicit in Paul took place; but the general lines laid down by Paul are only deepened, not departed from. The Christologies of Peter, Paul, and John are still distinguished; but the distinctions are posited on little or no differences in recorded utterances.

The difficulty in discovering a substantial difference between the Christologies of Paul and John, for example, is fairly illustrated by the straits to which so acute a writer as Johannes Weiss is brought in the effort to establish one. The only such difference he is able to suggest is that the superhuman Being whose incarnation constituted the Two-Natured Christ believed in by both writers alike, is, with Paul, though divine in his nature, yet of subordinate rank to the supreme God, while with John he is the supreme God himself. Unfortunately, however (or, rather, fortunately), when Paul speaks of the superhuman element in the person of his Lord, he does not hesitate to declare him the supreme God in the most exalted sense, and that in language which, for clearness and emphasis, leaves nothing for John to add to it.

He does this, for example, in Rom. 9:5, where he describes Christ as to his higher nature in these great words: ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων θεὸς εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν. It is instructive to observe how Johannes Weiss deals with such a passage. He is arguing that Paul carefully avoids calling Christ by the high name of "God," although he places Him as "Lord" by the side of God (1 Cor. 3:23, 8:6); and he adds:

"It is, then, very remarkable that in the present text of Rom. 9:5 there stands the following doxology, which can be referred only to Christ: 'He who is God over all, be blessed for ever.' If κύριος had stood here we should not have been surprised; that the text should, however, ascribe to Him here a predicate which puts Him altogether in God's place—without any indication of subordination—is inconceivable. Accordingly it has been rightly assumed that there is a textual corruption here. It is undoubtedly genuine, however, when, in Jno. 20:28, Thomas exclaims to the resurrected Christ: 'My Lord and my God.' So also Christ is called God in 1 Jno. 5:20 and Tit. 2:13. This is accordant with the dominant Hellenistic mode of thought in these late New Testament writings. The strictly Jewish foundation of the oldest Christianity is no longer so strong; feeling is no longer shocked by the appearance by the side of God of a second Godhead."

Needless to say, however, there is not a scintilla of evidence of textual corruption in Rom. 9:5; corruption is assumed solely because the assertion of the passage does not fit in with the lowered Christology which Weiss would fain assign to Paul. The allusion to previous writers who have assumed corruption is doubtless to the recent attempt to revive an old emendation proposed by the Socinian controversialists, J. Schlichting and J. Crell. The suggestion is that the words ὁ ὤν be transposed, so as to read ὧν ὁ (Hoekstra would be satisfied with the simple omission of the ὁ). Thus it is thought the last clause of the passage would be brought into parallelism with its predecessors, and the whole would rise to its climax in the assertion that not only do the fathers belong to the Jews, and not only has the Christ (as regards the flesh) sprung from them, but to them belongs also the supreme God himself who is blessed forevermore, Amen. The mere statement of the proposal surely is its sufficient refutation. The variation of the construction in the instance of the Christ from ὧν to ἐξ ὧν, and the limitation of even this assertion with respect to him to his flesh (τὸ κατὰ σάρκα) render the adjunction of such a clause as the reconstructed form gives us simply incredible. Should Paul, after refusing to declare their own Messiah to belong distinctively to the Jews and carefully limiting his relation to them to merely that of issuing from them—and that, only "according to the flesh"—immediately assert with climatic emphasis that the supreme and eternal God himself is their peculiar possession? "Is he the God of the Jews only and not also of the Gentiles?" Paul asks in the same broad context (Rom. 3:29), and answers with emphasis, "Yes, of the Gentiles also"; and by that answer advertises to us that he could not have written here, in his enumeration of the distinctive privileges of the Jews, that "theirs is the God over all, blessed forever." The resort to textual emendation to ease the pressure of the passage fails, thus, as dismally as, according to Weiss's own confession, the more common resort to artificial exegesis of it fails—whether this follows the older methods of varying merely the punctuation so as to throw the obnoxious clause into innocuous isolation as an interjected doxology to God, or the new suggestion of F. C. Burkitt which would take the ὁ ὢν as the Tetragrammaton itself, and read the whole passage as not "description but ascription"—a protestation, calling the Eternal to witness the sincerity of Paul's great asseveration. It is at least a healthful sign of the times when Weiss discards all such artificial exegesis; we may even hope that the day has dawned when it is no longer possible.20 It is mere matter of fact that Paul, speaking distinctly οὐ κατὰ τιμήν, ἀλλὰ κατὰ φύσιν, as the contrast with τὸ κατὰ σάρκα shows, designates Christ here "God over all, blessed forever." It were well for us to adjust our theories to this plain fact and cease to endeavor to brush the fact out of the way of our theories.

Why so much zeal and ingenuity should be expended in attempting to vacate this declaration of its plain meaning, it is meanwhile a little difficult to comprehend. If it stood alone among Paul's utterances it might be natural for those who wish to contribute another doctrine to him to seek to set it in some way aside. But so far from standing alone, it is but one of many declarations running through his epistles, to the same effect. There is Phil. 2:6, for example, where, beyond question, Christ Jesus is asserted to be "on an equality with God" an assertion, one would think, not easy to reconcile with the notion that he was a being definitely lower than God. Lietzmann seems therefore to speak very sensibly when he writes in his comment on Rom. 9:5: "Since Paul represents Christ in Phil. 2:6 as ἴσα θεῷ there is no reason why he should not, on occasion, call him directly θεός." When he goes on, however, to say: "The decision here, as often, if we are not acting under dogmatic prejudices, is a matter of pure feeling; to me it seems that ὁ ὢν επὶ πάντων θεός is more suitable for the 'Almighty God' the Father of Jesus," he seems to forget that his former remark forbids him to say this feeling could be operative with Paul—which is the only matter ad rem. That the writer of Phil. 2:6 might very well "on occasion" call Christ directly God is made even more clear by the circumstance that he does this very thing in this very passage, and that in the most emphatic manner possible. For that the representation of Christ Jesus as ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων is precisely to call him God is evidenced not merely by the intimation which is immediately given that he who is "in the form of God" is "on an equality with God," but by the connotation of the phraseology itself. It is undeniable that in the philosophico-popular mode of speech here employed, "form" means just that body of characterizing qualities which makes anything the particular thing it is—in a word, its specific character. To say that Christ Jesus is25 "in the form of God" is then to say not less but more than to say shortly that he is "God": for it is to emphasize the fact that he has in full possession and use all those characterizing qualities which make God the particular Being we call "God"; and this mode of expression, rather than the simple term "God," is employed here precisely because it was of the essence of the Apostle's purpose to keep his reader's mind on all that Christ was as God rather than merely on the abstract fact that he was God.

By the side of Phil. 2:6 there stands also Col. 2:9, where it is declared that in Christ "there dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily," that is to say, in plain words, that Christ is an incarnation of the Godhead in all its fulness, which again is a statement rather difficult to harmonize with the notion that its author believed it was something less than God which was incarnated in Christ. And by the side of the whole series of such passages there stands the immense number of instances in which Christ is designated "Lord." For κύριος is not with Paul of lower connotation than θεός. Johannes Weiss does, indeed, in the passage we have quoted from him above, suggest that if only it were κύριος instead of θεός which we found in Rom. 9:5 we should experience no surprise at the declaration and, presumably, feel no inclination to correct the text; the implication being that Paul might very well call Christ "Lord over all" but not "God over all." "Lord over all" would have meant, however, precisely what "God over all" means, and it is singularly infelicitous to give the impression that Paul in currently speaking of Christ as "Lord" placed him on a lower plane than God. Paul's intention was precisely the opposite, viz., to put him on the same plane with God; and accordingly it is as "Lord" that all divine attributes and activities are ascribed to Christ and all religious emotions and worship are directed to him. In effect, the Old Testament divine names, Elohim on the one hand, and Jehovah and Adhonai on the other, are in the New Testament distributed between God the Father and God the Son with as little implication of difference in rank here as there. "Lord," in a word, is Paul's divine name for Christ; is treated by him as Christ's proper name—as, in fact, what can scarcely be called anything else than his inter-trinitarian name and, in this technical sense, his "personal" name. Accordingly Paul does not enumerate the Persons of the Trinity as our Lord is reported as doing (Mt. 28:19), according to their relations to one another, "Father, Son, and Spirit," but according to his own relation to each in turn, as God, the Lord, the Spirit: "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (2 Cor. 13:14). The only distinction which can be discerned between "God" and "Lord" in his usage of the terms is a distinction not in relative dignity, but in emphasis on active sovereignty. "God" is, so to speak, a term of pure exaltation; "Lord" carries with it more expressly the idea of sovereign rulership in actual exercise. It is probable that Paul's appropriation specifically of the divine designation "Lord" to Christ was in part at least occasioned by his conviction that he, as God-man, has become the God of providence in whose hand is the kingdom, to "reign until he hath put all his enemies under his feet" (1 Cor. 15:24, etc.; cf. Phil. 2:9 ff.), or, as it is expressed with great point and fulness in Eph. 1:20–23, He has been seated on the right hand of God, far above any conceivable power and made head over all things for his church. In a word, the term "Lord" seems to have been specifically appropriated to Christ not because it is a term of function rather than of dignity, but because along with the dignity it emphasizes also function.

All this is, of course, well known to Johannes Weiss. He writes:

"To expound the religious significance which the use of the name 'Lord' had for the early Christians, the whole New Testament would need to be transcribed. For in the formula 'our Lord Jesus Christ' the essence of the primitive religion is contained. Obedient subjection, reverence, and holy dread of offending him, a complete sense of dependence on him for all things ('if the Lord will!' 1 Cor. 4:19), gratitude and love and trust—in short, everything that man can feel in the presence of God—comes to expression in this term. We can best perceive this in the benedictions at the opening of the epistles. Here 'grace and peace' are invoked or desired 'from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.' What is looked for from God can also be granted by the Lord. This inclusion of God and Christ in a single view which corresponds precisely with their coenthronement is characteristic of the piety of primitive Christianity. As Christians cry 'Abba Father' and pray to him, so there can be no doubt that they also 'prayed' in the strict sense of the word to Christ, not only in loyal adoration, but also in the form of petition. We have particular instances of this 'calling on the Lord' (Rom. 10:12) in Paul (2 Cor. 12:8) and in Stephen (Acts 7:60). But such prayers were certainly made infinitely more often. Christians stand, therefore, in point of fact, over against Christ, as over against God (cf. 2 Clem. i. 1)."

And again, from Phil. 2:9 ff. as a starting-point:

"Now not only is this word (κύριος) known in the general language of Hellenisticism, but it has a special history in the peculiar region of Jewish Hellenisticism. The Jews were taught to substitute for the proper name of God, Jahwe, in the sacred text the expression Adonai (Lord). The Greek translators of the Old Testament were acting in the correct Jewish fashion when they replaced the name יהוה by κύριος, the frequently occurring combination יהיִה האלהם by κύριος ὁ θεός that is, exactly, 'Lord, the God' (so also, Luke 1:32, 68, etc.). The κύριος without an article is felt almost as a proper name. When Luther represents it by 'God, the Lord,' it is on the contrary 'God' that he feels as a proper name. It is from this that the passage in the Epistle to the Philippians may be understood—all the more that there is a reminiscence here of passages like Isa. 42:8, 45:23: 'I am κύριος ὁ θεός, this is my name, my honor will I not give to another': 'to me shall every knee bow and every tongue confess God.' This name which God jealously guards as his own prerogative, he has now ceded to Christ, and has thereby publicly proclaimed that all beings shall bow to him and acknowledge him Lord. The transference of the name signifies, according to ancient usage, endowment with the power which the name designates. This passage is only another declaration of the transference to him by God of sovereignty over the world, of His constitution as 'Lord of Lords and King of Kings.' Thus the content of this passage coalesces in substance with what is said in Acts 2:36 and intimated in 1 Cor. 8:5. But whereas it is there to be understood that Christ alone rightly bears the name of κύριος, there is this much more intimated here—that κύριος is not merely a general designation of honor but the name of God become almost Christ's proper name. By this Christ is not merely elevated into a generally divine region: He takes the very place of the omnipotent God. Here, accordingly, κύριος cannot in any case have a weaker meaning than θεός."

Despite, however, such a clear perception of the high connotation of κύριος in the case of Paul (and the whole primitive Christian community), Johannes Weiss endeavors to interpret it, on Paul's lips, as expressive of something short of "God." He asserts (quite in the teeth of the facts, as we have seen) that Paul carefully avoids using the term "God" to denote Christ. Forgetting that with Paul, Christ (because—as nobody doubts—he is a two-natured person) is not only all that God is, but also all that man is, he appeals to 1 Cor. 3:23 to prove that Christ is dependent on God specifically with respect to his divine nature. He even points to 1 Cor. 8:6 as implying this manner of subordination. Let us, however, hear him fully on this latter passage. He writes:

"What Paul understands [by the term 'Lord'] may be seen from 1 Cor. 8:5. When he here grants that there are, in point of fact, many (certainly only so-called) 'Gods and Lords,' he means to say that there exist many (in his view demonic) beings to whom men render worship and adoration, calling upon them as God or Lord. In contrast with these many 'lords,' particularly perhaps to emperor worship, Christians acknowledge and venerate only the one κύριος, Jesus Christ (cf. Deissmann, 'Licht von Osten,' pp. 233 ff.). It would not be impossible—though there is no way certainly to prove it—that in Paul's sense the predicate 'Lords' stands a grade lower than 'Gods,' that he would recognize it as applied only to deified men, heroes, and gods of lower degree. In any event, speaking from the point of view of style, to the word 'Gods' in vs. 5 the 'God the Father' of vs. 6 corresponds; and to the word 'Lords' the 'Lord Jesus Christ.' Now there can be no doubt (and precisely our passage gives a distinct proof of it) that what Paul seeks to do is, in spite of Christ's position by God's side, to subordinate him again to God (so, e.g., 2 Cor. 1:3 when he calls God not only the Father but also 'the God of our Lord Jesus Christ': cf. Eph. 1:17; Jno. 20:17). And thus it were possible that he took over all the more readily the name κύριος derived by him from the primitive community, because he could express by it, no doubt, the divine position of Christ and the divine veneration due to him, and yet draw a line by means of which the interval between Christ and God should remain protected."

It certainly is surprising to find Weiss suggesting here that Paul may be using the term "Lord" after a heathen fashion to designate only gods of lower degree; we have just seen him solidly proving that, in its application to Christ, at least, Paul employs it in a sense in which it is not capable of discrimination from "God." For the same reason it is surprising to find him suggesting here that one of Paul's motives in applying to Christ the term "Lord" may perhaps have been to avoid confounding him with God. And in view of Paul's doctrine of the Two Natures (which Weiss does not in the least question) it is still further surprising to find him adducing here the circumstance that Paul sometimes speaks of God as the "God," as well as the Father, "of our Lord Jesus Christ" as throwing doubt on his ascription of proper deity to Christ's divine nature—a procedure which one would think would have been rendered impossible by the circumstance (to which Weiss himself calls attention) that the same mode of speech occurs in John, where, at least, Weiss does not doubt Christ is simply God. Finally, how little 1 Cor. 8:5, 6 itself can be supposed to suggest the subordination of the "Lord" Jesus Christ as to His deity to "God" the Father, becomes evident at once on our noting that the two—the one Lord Jesus Christ and the one God the Father—are represented here as together constituting that God of which it is emphatically declared there is but one. For it is precisely in exposition of his energetic assertion in verse 4, in contradiction of all polytheistic points of view, that "there is no God, except one," that Paul declares that Christians recognize that there is only "one God the Father and one Lord Jesus Christ." By as much as it is certain that he did not intend to represent the Christians themselves as polytheists, worshiping, like the rest, deity in grades, but, in contrast with all polytheists, as worshipers of but one Deity, it is clear that he did not intend to assign to Christ the position of a secondary deity. Obviously to him the "one God the Father" and "the one Lord Jesus Christ" were in some high and true sense alike included in that one God who alone is recognized as existing.

This energetic assertion of monotheism by Paul, combined with a provision within it for at least some kind of dualism, leads us to revert for a moment to the closing clauses of the first extract we quoted from Johannes Weiss. There Weiss, having recognized for the Johannine writings and the Pastoral Epistles—what he would not recognize for Paul—that in them Christ is directly called "God" with the fullest meaning, seeks to account for this by suggesting that these "late New Testament writings" may have lapsed from the strictness of Jewish monotheism under the influence of Hellenistic modes of thought, and thus have been enabled to place a second God by the side of God the Father in a sense still impossible to Paul. On the face of it, however, it certainly does not appear that there has been any falling away from the highest monotheism in their case; monotheism is rather the presupposition of all their teaching (Jno. 5:44; 17:3; 1 Tim. 1:17; 2:5; 6:15). It is Weiss' method which is again at fault. Whatever conclusion may seem valid to him he obtrudes without more ado upon the New Testament writers, although their point of view obviously differs from his by a whole diameter. On his frankly Socinian postulates, it may seem clear that where two are God there cannot be one God only. He therefore at once declares that the monotheism of John and the author of the Pastoral Epistles, who recognize at least two as God, is clearly falling into decay. But the Socinian postulates, dear to Weiss, have not determined the point of view of these writers! Their ascription of proper deity to Christ, therefore, in no wise imperils the purity of their monotheism; no monotheism, however strict, could inhibit the fullest recognition of the proper deity of Christ with writers whose fundamental thought runs on the lines on which their thought runs, and the ascription of a purer monotheism than theirs to Paul, on the ground that they look upon the deity of Christ as proper and supreme, is nothing but a gratuitous prejudicing of the case. In point of fact, Paul stands precisely on the same level with them as with respect to the doctrine of God, so with respect to the doctrine of Christ. Every line of his epistles is vocal with the cry of Thomas, "My Lord and my God"; for the Epistle to the Romans as truly as for the Epistle to Titus, Christ is "our great God and Savior"; to the Epistle to the Philippians as fully as to the First Epistle of John, Christ is "the true God," that is to say, he fills out and perfectly satisfies the whole idea of God—for that is as distinctly the connotation of ὑπάρχων ἐν μορφῂ θεοῦ as it is of ὁ ἀληθινὸς θεός.

The attempt to separate Paul's doctrine of Christ from John's as something essentially different, therefore, utterly fails. It is much more plausible to expound John's doctrine as a mere copy of Paul's. There is considerable appearance of reasonableness, for example, in P. Wernle's representation that the significance of John's Gospel consists merely in its "bridging the chasm between Jesus and Paul and transferring the Pauline gospel back into the discourses and life-delineation of Jesus." Was it not precisely through this transposition, indeed, he asks, that Paulinism first attained to dominance in the church? The trouble with this representation, however, is twofold: it ascribes distinctively to Paul what was the common doctrine of the whole church; and it credits particularly to John a service which had already been rendered—if it needed to be rendered—by the Synoptics. For the difficulty of construing Paul's Christology in lower terms than that of John is fairly matched by the difficulty of construing the Christology of the other writers of the New Testament in lower terms than that of Paul. The attempt has most frequently been made with respect to the Synoptic Gospels, and among them probably most persistently with respect to Mark. We have often been told that in that "oldest of the Gospels"—the first attempt to sketch a narrative "life of Christ"—we have a portrait of the human Christ, unfalsified as yet by "dogmatic elements." From this ineptitude, it is to be hoped, we have now been conclusively delivered, more especially through its trenchant exposure by Wrede, who, whatever else he did, certainly made it abundantly clear that what we have in the Gospel of Mark is far from what has been called a "primitive document" presenting a "primitive" view of the Person of Christ. The highest astonishment is accordingly being now expressed from every quarter that it could ever have been imagined that documents written in "the sixties," or at least in "the fifties," could fail to reflect the high Christology which, as we know from Paul's letters, was at that time the established faith of the whole Christian community.36 In any event the Christology of the Synoptic Gospels is indistinguishable from that of Paul, and this is as true of the Christology of Mark as of that of Matthew or of Luke. We do not ourselves look upon Mark as "the primitive Gospel"; we do not even subscribe to the now almost universal opinion that it is the earliest of our three Synoptics; we agree with Johannes Weiss in assigning it to 64–68 A.D., but for reasons of our own we place it quite at the end of this period; we agree with Harnack in thinking Luke certainly as old as this and much more likely as old as 63 A.D., or even as 58–60 A.D.; and Matthew, we are sure, is as old as Mark and may very well be as old as Luke; we should find no serious difficulty, indeed, in placing both Matthew and Luke early in the "fifties." But the brevity, and, so to say, relative externality, of Mark naturally suggest it as the particular one of the Synoptics in which the Christology common to them all is likely to be expressed in, if not its lowest, yet at least its least-elaborated terms; and it is not unnatural, therefore, that it has been scrutinized with especial care with a view to determining the real nature of the synoptic conception of Christ. The result has been to make it perfectly plain that the Synoptic conception of the Person of Christ is just that doctrine of the Two Natures which, as we have seen, is given expression in Paul's Epistles and is everywhere presupposed in them as the established faith of the Christians of the middle of the first century, and of any earlier date to which the retrospective testimony of this body of Epistles may be allowed to extend.

"The Christology of the Gospel of Mark [writes Johannes Weiss] is already given expression in the title: his gospel treats of Jesus Christ (the Son of God, in case these last words are genuine).… The particularly designating names of Jesus are for him 'the Son of God' and 'the Son of Man.' When the evangelist so frequently places the latter of these in the mouth of Jesus as a self-designation, he thus betrays that he no longer possesses any sense of the suitability of this name exclusively for the heavenly Messiah, whether as pre-existent or as exalted. For him it is precisely the Jesus who walks the earth who is no other than the 'heavenly Man,' who came down from heaven, and has been again exalted to heaven (14:62), whence he is to come again in the clouds with great power and glory (13:26). Accordingly he makes Jesus call himself the Son of Man even when he is speaking of his earthly activity (2:10, 28; 10:45), of his sufferings (e.g., 8:31), and of his resurrection (9:9). He was in this already preceded by the Discourses-source (Mt. 11:9 = Lk. 7:34) and Matthew carried still farther this replacement of an 'I' in the mouth of Jesus by 'the Son of Man' (cf. Mt. 16:13 with Mk. 8:27). This use of the name is an altogether sufficient proof that, just like Paul, Mark looked upon Jesus as the 'Man' who came from heaven. Similarly it cannot be doubted that this post-Pauline writer understood, as Paul understood it, the name 'Son of God,' which stood perhaps in the title of his gospel as the most significant name of dignity—that is to say, not in the theocratic sense, examined above (pp. 19 ff.), of him who has been chosen and called to the messianic kingship, but (p. 34) of him who was the sole one among men that, of his nature, bears in himself the essence (Wesen) of God.

Of course Weiss would distinguish shades of view among the several writers—the authors of the Gospels severally and Paul—but his testimony to the main matter is quite distinct; that, in a word, to the author of Mark, as to all the others of these writers, Christ was, as he himself puts it, "a divine being 'incarnated'—we must already make use of this expression—in a man." And it will be found impossible to make this divine being, with Mark any more than with Paul, anything less than the supreme God himself. When Mark records our Lord himself as testifying that he is, in the hierarchy of being, above even the angels, he places him outside the category of created beings; and there is no reason to doubt that with him as truly as with all his Jewish compatriots the Son of God which he repeatedly calls Jesus connoted, as John defines the phrase for us (5:18), just "equality with God."

It is not necessary to labor the point. It is undeniable that the Christ of the whole body of New Testament writers, without exception, is a Two-Natured Person—divine and human; and indeed this is scarcely any longer denied. Whatever attempts are still made to discriminate between the Christologies of the New Testament writers fall within the limits of this common doctrine. Wilhelm von Schnehen does not go one whit beyond the facts of the case when he declares, no doubt after a fashion and with implications derived from his own point of view:

"Go back into the history of Christianity as far as you will, you will nowhere find the least support for the notion that Jesus was revered on the ground of his purely human activity and attributes, say as the founder of a religion, as teacher of morals, or even only as religious-ethical example. Understand the content of the word 'gospel' as you may, never has it to do with a mere 'man' Jesus, never does it give to this the central place in Christian worship. For the glad-tidings of the Rabbi of Nazareth, even the adorers of his human personality will not in the end deny this. That it is valid also for the Gospel-writings of the New Testament is equally indubitable. The Jesus of which these writings tell us is through and through not a man but at the very least a super-man. Yes, he is more than that; he is the unique Son of God; the Christ, the coming God-man of the orthodox church. For the Fourth Gospel this is, of course, universally recognized; the Johannine Jesus is an incarnate creative word, the human manifestation of the 'Logos,' who from the beginning was with God and himself was God, whose divine glory was continuously apparent to his disciples, beneath its earthly shell. But the other Gospels also think of nothing so little as telling us of a mere 'man' Jesus, and demanding a believing reverence for such a one. No, the miraculously begotten Son of the Virgin with Luke and Matthew, the Jesus who rose from the dead and ascended into heaven of the First and Third Gospels, is just as little a mere 'natural man' as the Johannine Christ. And as regards finally the Gospel of Mark, Professor Bousset, for example, remarks: 'It is already from the standpoint of faith that the oldest Gospel is written; already for Mark Jesus is not only the Messiah of the Jewish people but' (in consequence of the communication of the Spirit at the baptism!) 'the miraculous, eternal Son of God whose glory shines into this world. And it has been rightly emphasized that in this respect our three first Gospels differ from the Fourth only in degree.' "

The comment which is made on this and similar utterances of recent radicalism, by Richard Grützmacher is eminently justified:

"The immense significance of this acknowledgment can be measured only by one who knows the unnumbered theological and extra-theological attempts of the last century and a half from the extremest left to far into the circle of the mediating theology to obtain from the New Testament itself, or at least from the three first Gospels, a purely human portrait of Jesus, and to eliminate all metaphysical and supernatural content from their expressions. The 'modern' and the church interpretation of the New Testament at the beginning of the twentieth century—to which also in very large measure the later 'Liberalism' gives its adhesion—is in complete accord in this result: that the church-doctrine of the God-man Christ can appeal with full right to the New Testament in its entire compass, and any development beyond that which has taken place is only formal. The allegorizing-dogmatic exegesis of the last hundred and fifty years has been transcended."

That is to say, the doctrine of the Two Natures of Christ is not merely the synthesis of the teaching of the New Testament, but the conception which underlies every one of the New Testament writings severally; it is not only the teaching of the New Testament as a whole but of the whole of the New Testament, part by part. Historically, this means that not only has the doctrine of the Two Natures been the invariable presupposition of the whole teaching of the church from the apostolic age down, but all the teaching of the apostolic age rests on it as its universal presupposition. When Christian literature begins, this is already the common assumption of the entire church. If we wish to translate this into the terms of positive chronology, what must be said is that before the opening of the sixth decade of the first century (for we suppose that I Thess. must be dated somewhere about 52 A.D.), the doctrine of the Two Natures already is firmly established in the church as the universal foundation of all Christian thinking concerning Christ. Such a mere chronological statement, however, hardly does justice to the case. What needs to be emphasized is that there is no Christian literature in existence which does not base itself, as upon an already firmly laid foundation, on the doctrine of the Two Natures. So far as Christian literature can bear testimony, there never has been any other doctrine recognized in the church. This literature itself goes back to within twenty years or so of the death of Christ; and of course—since it did not create but reflects this faith—has a retrospective value as testimony to the faith of Christians.

Nevertheless, men still seek to posit an "earlier," "more primitive," "simpler" view of the Person of Christ, behind this oldest attested doctrine. In another article we shall ask whether it is possible thus to go back of the doctrine of the New Testament writings to a more "primitive" view of the Person of Christ.

II. THE NEW TESTAMENT JESUS THE ONLY REAL JESUS

In a former article we have pointed out that the doctrine of the "Two Natures" is the common presupposition of the whole body of the New Testament writings—a presupposition which is everywhere built upon, and which comes to clear enunciation wherever occasion calls for it. The literature gathered into the New Testament is not only the earliest Christian literature which has come down to us, but goes back to within twenty years or so of the death of Christ; and since it did not create but reflects the faith it expresses, it must be allowed to possess a retrospective significance in its unbroken testimony to the belief of Christians. What the whole Christian community is found to be resting in, with complete assurance, as the truth respecting the person of its founder in, say, 50 A.D.—a time when a large number of his personal followers were doubtless still living, and certainly the tradition of which they were bearers (cf. Lk. 1:2) cannot have become obscured—can scarcely fail to have been the aboriginal belief of the Christian body. Nevertheless, a determined effort is still made to discover an "earlier," "more primitive," "simpler" view of the person of Christ behind the oldest attested doctrine. There is confessedly no "direct" evidence of the existence of any such "earlier," "more primitive," "simpler" view. "Of the religion of the earliest Jewish-Christian community," says Johannes Weiss, as he enters upon the exposition of "the faith of the primitive community," "we have no direct witnesses; for we can, today, no longer consider the Epistles of Peter and James genuine works of the primitive apostles"—largely, it needs to be remembered, because they do not contain the "more primitive" Christology which it is assumed these "primitive apostles" must have cherished. But it is thought that by means of indirect evidence, the existence in the first age of Christianity of an earlier view of Christ than any which has found record in the New Testament may be established. The whole mass of expressions of which the New Testament writers make use in speaking of Christ, is subjected to a searching scrutiny with a view to discovering among them, if possible, "survivals" of an "earlier" mode of thinking of Christ. Weiss accordingly continues:

"For this pre-Pauline epoch also we are first of all directed to the letters of Paul. He occasionally speaks of having received something from the primitive community (1 Cor. 15:3 ff.). But more important still are the numerous elements of the oldest primitive-Christian conceptions which without expressly notifying the fact he carries along in his theology, and which betray themselves to the eye of the investigator as a universal-Christian stratum underlying the more Hellenistically colored specifically-Pauline doctrine. Similarly, all the other documents of the Apostolic and post-Apostolic age contain such old Christian traits, which point back to the standpoint of the oldest community. Thereto we reckon especially the discourses in the first part of Acts. Though they may have come from a later time, yet, precisely in their Christology, they contain very antique conceptions."

What is attempted, it will be seen, is on subjective grounds—there are, in the circumstances, none other available—to distinguish, among the New Testament deliverances concerning Christ, those which belong to the primitive age from those which belong to the age when the books were written. The whole New Testament is doubtless laid under contribution for this purpose, but the happy hunting-ground of the quest is found in the early chapters of the Acts and in the Synoptic Gospels.

It is not without the clearest justification that we have emphasized the purely subjective grounding of this quest. If we possessed a single Christian document earlier in date than those which constitute our New Testament, in which was taught the special Christology which it is proposed to extract from our New Testament as an earlier form of belief than that which the New Testament itself universally commends to us, there might be some excuse for gathering out of our New Testament books the sentences and forms of expression which semed to fall particularly in with the teachings of this earlier document and pronouncing them survivals of its earlier modes of thought. But in the absence of any such earlier document, what reason is there for pronouncing these forms of expression "survivals"? The touchstone by which their "earlier" character is determined, Weiss tells us, resides in "the searcher's eye." That is to say, shortly, in the critic's a priori paradigms. The critic comes to his task with a settled conviction, a priori established, that Jesus was a mere man, and must have been thought of by his followers as a mere man; and sets himself to search out in the extant literature—which is informed by a contrary conviction—modes of expression which he can interpret as "survivals" of such an "earlier" point of view. Meanwhile, there is no evidence whatever that these modes of expression are "survivals," or that there ever existed in the Christian community an "earlier" view of the person of Christ than that given expression in the New Testament writings. Reinhold Seeberg has quite accurately expounded the state of the case when, speaking more particularly of Harnack's unfortunate attempt to distinguish in primitive Christianity an "adoptionist" and a "pneumatic" Christology, he says:

"Investigators, in my opinion, are as a rule misled by this—that they make the 'historical Jesus' their starting-point by simple assumption, and treat all expressions which go beyond this as attributes added to him in gradual precipitation on the ground of faith in his resurrection. The historical starting-point is, however, in reality contained in three facts: (1) that Jesus in his earthly life manifested a superhuman self-consciousness; (2) that his disciples were convinced by him, after his resurrection, not precisely by it, that they had directly experienced and received proof of his divine nature; and (3) that they accordingly honored and proclaimed him as the heavenly Spirit-Lord. These facts are, in my opinion, indisputable, and from these facts as a starting-point—they are simply 'given' and not deducible—the entire thought-development can be fully explained."

When the study of historical records is approached with a fixed assumption of an opposite point of view to their own as instrument of interpretation, it is not strange if their representations are replaced by a set of contradictory representations. But the "results" thus reached are not in any recognizable sense "historical." They are the product of wresting history in order to fill in a foregone conclusion of abstract thought.

It should not pass without very particular notice that the forms of expression gathered from our New Testament books, out of which is to be fashioned an "earlier" Christology than that presupposed by this literature, do not lie on the face of the New Testament as alien fragments. It is not without significance that Johannes Weiss, after remarking that Paul occasionally puts forward statements as derived by him from "the primitive community," at once adds that, for the purpose of reconstructing the faith of this "earlier community" from Paul's writings, "survivals" in his writings not expressly notified as such are both more numerous and more important. In other words, our New Testament writers who have preserved for us the elements of this "earlier" Christology wholly different from their own, and indeed contradictory to it, have preserved them with the most engaging unconsciousness of their alien character: in point of fact, they have written down these contradictory sentences with no other thought than that they were the just expression of their own proper views; and they betray no sense of embarrassment whatever with respect to them. This is true even—or perhaps we should say, especially—of the extreme case of the record of Peter's christological utterances in the earlier chapters of the Book of Acts. It is quite clear that Luke is wholly unaware that he is recording views of his Lord which differ from his own, which, indeed, are in sharp conflict with his own and, to speak frankly, stultify his entire attitude toward his Lord, for the validation of which his whole great two-part work was written. We may well ask whether such unconscious naïveté can be attributed to such an alert writer as Luke shows himself to be. Or if with Schmiedel we deny these chapters to Luke and suppose the speeches of Peter "free compositions" of a later author, the tour de force which we attribute to this great nameless dramatist rises quite to the level of the miraculous. It is hardly worth while to ask similarly whether Paul, in his fervid expressions of reverence to Christ as "Lord," can be supposed with such simplicity to mix in with his own language, so vividly expressive of this reverence, other forms of speech standing in flat contradiction to all that he was proclaiming, merely because he found them in use in "the primitive community." Surely the Epistle to the Galatians does not encourage us to believe Paul to have been filled with such blind veneration for "the primitive community," that he would be likely to continue to repeat its language in devout subjection to the authority of its modes of statement, though it ran counter to his profoundest convictions and his most fervent religious feelings.

The general point we are endeavoring to make deserves some elaboration with special reference to the Synoptic Gospels. It is particularly behind their narrative that the traces of an earlier conception of the person of Christ than that presented by our whole New Testament—inclusive of these Gospels—are supposed to be discoverable. It is frankly allowed, as we have seen, that the Gospels as they stand present to our view a divine Christ, an incarnated Son of God, who came to earth on a mission, and whose whole earthly life is only an episode in the existence of a Heavenly Being. But it is immediately added that in the narrative put together from this standpoint, there are imbedded elements of an earlier tradition, to which Jesus was a mere man, bounded by all human limitations. And it is assumed to be precisely the task of criticism to identify and draw out these elements of earlier tradition, that we may recover from them the idea formed of Jesus by his real contemporaries and, therefore, presumably, the true conception of him before he was transformed by the reverent thought of his followers into an exalted Being, to be which he himself made no claim. We say nothing now of purely "literary criticism"—the attempt to ascertain the sources on which our Gospels as literary compositions rest, and from which they draw their materials. For this "literary criticism" in no way advances the discovery of a "more primitive" Christology lying behind that presented by the authors of our Gospels. It would have been a strange proceeding indeed had the authors of our Gospels elected to draw their materials, by preference, from earlier documents presenting a totally different, or, rather, sharply contrasting conception of Jesus from that which they had in heart and mind to commend to their readers; and they are obviously wholly unaware of doing anything of the kind. Happily, we are delivered from the necessity of considering the possibility of such a literary phenomenon. It is no doubt impossible to reconstruct any of the sources which "have found their graves" in our Gospels with full confidence, with respect either to the details of their contents or even to their general compass. But neither the "narrative source"—the so-called Urmarkus—which underlies all three of the Synoptics, nor the "discourses-source"—the so-called "Logia"—which underlies the common portions of Matthew and Luke not found also in Mark, on any rational theory of its compass and contents, differs in any respect in its christological point of view from that of the Gospels, so large a portion of which they constitute. We may remark in passing that this carries the evidence for the aboriginality in the Christian community of the two-natured conception of Christ back a literary generation behind the Synoptics themselves; and that surely must bring us to a time which can scarcely be thought to be wholly dominated by Paul's innovating influence. It is enough for us here to note, however, that "literary criticism" does not take us back to documents presenting a "pre-Pauline" Christology. If such a "pre-Pauline" Christology is to be found in the background of our Gospels, much coarser methods of reaching it than "literary criticism" must be employed.

The absurd attempt of P. W. Schmiedel to reverse the conception of Christ transmitted to us by the Gospels, by insisting that, in the first instance, we must trust only such passages as are—or rather, as, when torn from their contexts, may be made to seem—inconsistent with the main purpose of the evangelists in writing their Gospels, namely, to honor Christ, is only an unusually crass application of the method which from the beginning has been common to the whole body of those who, like him, are in search of evidence in the Gospels of the existence of a "more primitive" tradition than that which the Gospels themselves represent. The essence of this method is the attempt to discover in the Gospel-narrative elements in the delineation of Jesus which are inconsistent with the conception of Jesus which it is their purpose to convey; to which unassimilated elements of a different tradition, preference is at once given in point of both age and trustworthiness. This method is as freely in use, for instance, by Johannes Weiss, who seems to wish to separate himself from Schmiedel, as by Schmiedel himself. Let us note how Weiss deals with the matter:8

"The Christology of the evangelist himself [he is speaking of Mark] is very far advanced in the direction of the Johannine; there can be no doubt that Jesus is to him the Son of God, in the sense of a divine being with divine power and divine knowledge from the beginning on. Nothing is hidden from him: his own destiny, the denial, the betrayal, the fate of Jerusalem—he tells it all exactly beforehand. Nothing is impossible to him: the most marvelous healings, like the sudden cure of the withered hand, of leprosy, of blindness, are performed by him without any difficulty; he raises a dead person; he walks on the water, and feeds thousands with a few loaves; he makes the fig tree wither—it is all related as if nothing else could be expected; we see in these accounts neither the bold faith to which all is possible nor the enthusiasm of one beside himself, nor natural intermediation; Jesus can do just anything. And therefore, to the evangelist, it is nothing singular that at his death the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent; and that he left the grave on the third day—all this follows altogether naturally and of itself from his Christology. But alongside of these stand other traits: his power rests on the Spirit, which was communicated to him at baptism; we see how this Spirit struggles with the spirits (1:25, 3:11, 5:6, 8, 9:25 f.); his miraculous power is limited by unbelief (6:5), he must have faith himself and find faith in others if he is to help; his dominion over suffering and death has its limits; he trembles and is afraid, and feels forsaken by God; he is ignorant of the day and hour; he will not permit himself to be called 'Good Master'; he prays to the Father like a man, and is subject to all human emotions, even anger, and to mistake with reference to his disciples."

The whole art of the presentation is apparent. Weiss would make it appear that there are two Jesuses in Mark's narrative, a divine Jesus and a human Jesus; and if we take the one, he suggests, the other must be left. Mark himself believed in the divine Jesus; the human Jesus, which he places by His side, must therefore be the "earlier" Jesus, to which he has been so accustomed that he cannot away with him even when he would. The astonishing thing, however, is that Mark is entirely unconscious of the straits he is in. He records the human traits, which are supposed to refute the whole portraiture he is endeavoring to draw, with no sense of their incongruity. For, "we must … remember," as Dr. Percy Gardner admonishes us, "that the three Gospels are not mere colourless biographies, but collections of such parts of the Christian tradition as most impressed a society which had already begun to seek in the life of its founder traces of a more than human origin and nature." They are, to put it more accurately, presentations of the salient acts and sayings of Jesus by men who thoroughly believed in the divine Christ, and who wished—as Dr. Gardner says of Paul, the master of two of these evangelists—to "place the human life of Jesus between two periods of celestial exaltation." Why then did these men, of all men, preserve elements of an earlier tradition which contradict their own deepest convictions of the origin and nature of their Lord? Is it because they lacked literary skill to convey the picture they were intent on conveying, and so, as Dr. Gardner puts it, in their attempt to depict the Jesus they believed in, the "human legend was not effaced, but it was supplemented here and there with incongruous elements"? Surely, the day is long since past when our Gospels can be treated thus as naïve narratives by childlike hands endeavoring only to set down the few facts concerning Christ which had come to their knowledge. If these elements of "the human legend" were retained, it was, on the contrary, precisely because they presented to the consciousness of these writers no incongruity with their conceptions of the divine Christ; and that is as much as to say that the Jesus whom they were depicting was in their view no less truly human than truly divine. The life of the Master on earth, which they placed between the two periods of celestial exaltation, bore for them the traits of a truly human life.

But as soon as we say this, it is clear that we cannot appeal to the human traits which they ascribe to Jesus as evidence of the existence of an "earlier" Christology than theirs, which looked upon Jesus as merely human. These traits are congruous parts of their own Christology. They are not fragments of an earlier view of Christ's person, persisting as "survivals" in a later view; they are the other half of a consistent christological conception. They supply, therefore, no evidence that there ever existed an earlier Christology than that in which they occupy a necessary place. We may reject, if we please, the Christology of the evangelists, and, rejecting it, insist that Christ was not a divine-human, but simply a human being. But we can get no support for this private, and possibly pious, opinion of our own, from the writings of the evangelists. The human traits, which they all ascribe to Jesus, do not in the least suggest that they, in the bottom of their hearts, or others before them, believed in a merely human Jesus. They only make it manifest that they, and those from whom they derive, believed in a Jesus who was human. The attempt to distort the evidence that they believed in a Jesus who was human, as well as divine, into evidence that they had inherited belief in a merely human Jesus, and unconsciously lapsed into the language of their older and simpler faith, even when endeavoring to commend quite another conception, does violence to every line of their writings; it is not acute historical exposition, but the crassest kind of dogmatic imposition. Because from the critic's own point of view the doctrine of the "Two Natures" involves a psychological impossibility, when he finds the evangelists presenting in their narratives a Jesus who is both divine and human, he proclaims that there are clumsily mixed here two mutually inconsistent Christologies chronologically related to one another as earlier and later; and because from his own point of view a purely divine Jesus were as impossible as a divine-human one, he pronounces that one of these two warring Christologies which makes Jesus a mere man, the earlier, "historical" view, and that one which makes Him divine, a later, "mythical" view. For neither the one nor the other of these pronouncements, however, has he other ground than his own a priori prejudice. The divine and the human Jesus of the evangelists do not stand related to one another chronologically, as an earlier and a later view, but vitally, as the two sides of one complex personality; and had there been reason to interpret them as chronologically related there is no reason derivable from the evangelists themselves—or, we may add, from the history of thought in the first years of the Christian proclamation—why the human view of Christ's person should be supposed to be the earlier of the two. From all that appears in these narratives, and from whatever other records we possess, Jesus was, on the contrary, from the beginning understood by His followers to be very God, sojourning on earth. In a word, not only is the doctrine of the "Two Natures" the synthesis of the entire body of christological data embodied in the pages of the New Testament; and not only is it the teaching of all the writers of the New Testament severally; but the New Testament provides no material whatever for inferring that a different view was ever held by the Christian community. The entire Christian tradition, from the beginning, whatever that may be worth, is a tradition of a two-natured Jesus, that is to say, of an incarnated God. Of a one-natured Jesus, Christian tradition knows nothing, and supplies no materials from which He may be inferred.

This determination of the state of the case includes in it, it will be observed, Jesus' own self-testimony. We know nothing of Jesus' self-consciousness, or self-testimony, save as it has been transmitted to us by His followers. The Jesus whom the evangelists have given us testifies to the possession of a self-consciousness which matches perfectly the conception of Jesus which the evangelists are set upon conveying; indeed, the evangelists' conception of Jesus is embodied largely in terms of Jesus' self-testimony. Behind this we can get only by the method of criticism whose inconsequence we have been endeavoring to expose. That "historical Jesus," whom Johannes Weiss (in act of bearing his witness as a historian to the historical validity of the higher Christology) describes as, "so far as we can discern him, seeing his task in drawing his followers into the direct experience of sonship with God, without demanding any place for himself in their piety," has never existed anywhere except in the imaginations of Weiss and his "liberal" fellow-craftsmen. The evangelists know nothing of Him nor does He lurk anywhere in the background of their narratives. The only Jesus of which they have knowledge—or whose figure is traceable in any of their sources—is a Jesus who ranked Himself above all creatures (Mk. 13:32, one of Schmiedel's "pillar-passages," of which J. H. Moulton speaks as "that saying of uniquely acknowledged authenticity"); who represented Himself as living continuously in an intercourse with God which cannot be spoken of otherwise than as perfect reciprocity (Mt. 11:25; Lk. 10:22—a passage which has its assured place in the "discourses-source"); and who habitually spoke of Himself as the "Son of Man" (as witnessed in both the "narrative-source" and the "discourses-source"—of course, with all the implications of heavenly origin, ineffable exaltation, and judgeship of the world—divine traits all—which accompany that designation). It is pure illusion, therefore, for Karl Thieme to think of himself as faithful to the self-consciousness of Jesus, or as casting off only an "apostolical theologoumenon (Glaubensgedanke)"—which he considers no fault—when he attaches himself to a merely human Jesus and pronounces all that is more than this "mythological." This merely human "historical Jesus" is a pure invention of the wish that is father to the thought, and would have been, not merely to Paul, as Martin Brückner justly reminds us,13 but to all the New Testament writers as well, and to Jesus himself, as depicted by them and as discernible in any sense behind their portraiture—just "nonsense."

We cannot withhold a certain sympathy, nevertheless, from men who, caught in the toils of modern naturalism, and unable themselves to admit the intrusion of the supernatural into this world of "causative nexus," are determined to keep the merely human Jesus, whom alone they can allow to have existed, free from at least the grosser illusions concerning His person with which the thought of His followers has been (in their view) deformed. There surely is manifested in this determination—utterly unhistorical as it is, in both spirit and effect—a strong underlying wish to honor Jesus; to preserve to Him at least his sanity—for that is what it comes to in the essence of the matter. A merely human Jesus, who nevertheless believed Himself to be God, were a portentous figure on which to focus the admiring gaze of the Christian generations. We may well believe that a saving instinct underlies all the more extreme historical skepticism in the modern attempts to construe the figure of Jesus, as it is somewhat grotesquely phrased, "historically." The violence done to historical verity, for example, in denying that Jesus thought and proclaimed Himself the Messiah, receives a kind of—shall we say psychological, or shall we say sentimental?—if not justification, yet at least condonation, when we reflect what it would mean for Jesus, if, not being really the Messiah (and from this naturalistic point of view the whole body of messianic hopes were but a frenzied dream), He nevertheless fancied himself the Messiah and assumed the rôle of Messiah. There may even be pleaded a sort of historical condonation for it; it certainly were inconceivable that such a man as Jesus is historically authenticated as being—His whole life informed, for example, with a gracious humility before God—could have been the victim of such a megalomania.

It is into a perfect labyrinth of inconsistencies and contradictions, in fact, that the assumption that Jesus was a mere man betrays us; and from them there is no issue except by the correction of the primal postulate. The old antithesis aut Deus, aut non bonus need, indeed, no longer be pressed; none in these modern days (since Renan) is so lost to historical verisimilitude as to think of charging Jesus with coarse charlatanry (cf. Mt. 27:63). But His integrity is saved only at the cost of His intelligence. If none accuse Him of charlatanry, there are many who are ready to ascribe to Him the highest degree of fanaticism, and a whole literature has grown up in recent years around the matter. There is, indeed, no escape from crediting to Him some degree of "enthusiasm," if He is to be considered a mere man. And this, let us understand it clearly, is to ascribe to Him also, when the character of this "enthusiasm" is understood, some degree of what we are accustomed, very illuminatingly, to call "derangement." It is easy, of course, to cry out, as Hans Windisch, for example, does cry out, against the antithesis "Either Jesus Christ was mentally diseased, or He was God-man," as "frightful and soul-imperiling." It is that; but it offers us, nevertheless, the sole possible alternatives. Shall we not recognize it as a delusion which argues mental unsoundness when a mere man proclaims himself God? Even D. F. Strauss taught us this much two generations ago: "If he were a mere man" says he,16 "and, nevertheless, cherished that expectation "—the expectation, to wit, of quickly coming on the clouds of heaven to inaugurate the messianic kingdom—" we cannot help either ourselves or him. He was, according to our conceptions, a fanatic (Schwärmer)." It is possible, no doubt, sturdily to deny that Jesus could have harbored these high thoughts of Himself, or cherished these great expectations. But this is flatly in the face of the whole historical evidence. It is undeniable that the only Jesus known to history was both recognized by His followers and Himself claimed to be something much more than man, and to have before Him a career accordant with His divine being. Nor can this lowered view of Jesus be carried through: neither Harnack, nor Bousset, nor Hausrath, nor Otto has been able, with the best will in the world, to present to us a Jesus free from supernatural elements of self-consciousness. So that it is a true judgment, which Hermann Werner passes upon their efforts to depict a merely human Jesus: "The historical Jesus of the liberal theology is and abides a mentally diseased man—as Lepsius strikingly said, 'a tragedy of fanaticism' (Schwärmerei)." If these supernatural claims were "mythical," then either there was no real Jesus, and His very personality vanishes into the myth into which all that is historical concerning Him is sublimated, or the real Jesus was the subject of acute megalomania in His estimate of Himself.

And here we discover the significance in the history of thought of the new radicalism which has, in our day, actually raised the question—a question which has become a "burning" one in Germany, the home of the "merely human Jesus"—whether "Jesus ever lived." Men like Albert Kalthoff and Karl Kautsky, Wilhelm von Schnehen and Arthur Drews, emphasize the fact that the only Jesus known to history was a divine being become man for human redemption—not a deified man, but an incarnate God. If this Jesus is a mythological figure—why, there is no "historical Jesus" left. The zeal for vindicating the actual existence of a "historical Jesus," which has developed in the circles of German "liberalism" during the past two years, is most commendable. The task is easy, and the success with which it has been accomplished is correspondingly great. But the real significance, whether of the attack or the defense, seems to be only slowly becoming recognized, or at least to have been acknowledged by those involved most deeply in the conflict. It lies, however, very much on the surface. Arthur Drews is simply the reductio ad absurdum of David Friedrich Strauss. And the vindication of the actuality of a "historical Jesus," against the assault of which Drews has become the central figure, is the definitive refutation of the entire "mythical theory," which, inaugurated by Strauss, has been the common foundation on which the whole "liberal" school has built for two generations. There is, of course, nothing more certain than that "Jesus lived." But there is another thing which is equally certain with it; and that is expressed with irrefutable clearness and force by Arthur Drews when he declares that "the Jesus of the oldest Christian communities is not, as is commonly thought"—that is to say, in the circles of "liberalism"—"a deified man, but a humanized God." It is impossible to sublimate into myth the whole Jesus of the New Testament testimony, the Jesus of the evangelists, the Jesus of all the evangelical sources which can be even in part isolated and examined, the Jesus, in a word, of the entire historical witness, and retain any Jesus at all. The "mythical Jesus" is not the invention of Drews, but of Strauss, and it is common ground with Drews and all his "liberal" opponents. It is a mere matter of detail whether we say with Weinel that the historical Jesus was a mere man, but a man whom "we know right well—as well as if we could see him still before us today, and were able to hear his voice"; or with Pfleiderer, that He was certainly a mere man, but is so bound up with the legends that have grown up about Him that we can never know anything about His real personality; or with Drews, that there is no reason for supposing that He ever existed at all: a mere matter of detail, indifferent to history, which knows nothing of any Jesus but the divine Jesus. The advent of the new radicalism into the field of discussion cannot fail, however, greatly to clear the air; the merely human Jesus is really eliminated by it from the catalogue of possible hypotheses, and the issue is drawn sharply and singly: Is the divine-human Jesus, who alone is historically witnessed a reality, or a myth? Tertium non datur.

Thus we are brought to the final issue. The two-natured Christ is the synthesis of the whole mass of biblical data concerning Christ. The doctrine of the Two Natures underlies all the New Testament writings severally, and it is commended to us by the combined authority of all those primitive followers of Christ who have left written records of their faith. It is the only doctrine of Christ which can be discerned lying back of our formal records in pre-written tradition; it is the aboriginal faith of the Christian community. It is the only alternative to a non-existent Christ; we must choose between a two-natured Christ and a simply mythical Christ. By as much as "Jesus lived," by so much is it certain that the Jesus who lived is the person who alone is witnessed to us as having lived—the Jesus who, being Himself of heavenly origin and superior to the very angels, had come to earth on a mission of mercy, to seek and save those who are lost, and who, after He had given His life a ransom for many, was to come again on the clouds of heaven to judge the world. No other Jesus than this ever lived. No doubt He lived as man, His life adorned with all the gracious characteristics of a man of God. But He cannot be stripped of His divine claims. We have already had occasion to advert to the gross contradiction which is involved in supposing that such a man as He was could have preserved that fine flavor of humility toward God which characterized His whole life-manifestation and yet have falsely imagined Himself that exalted being in whose fancied personality He lived out His life on earth. The trait which made it possible for Him to put Himself forward as the Fellow of God would have made the humility of heart and demeanor which informed all His relations with God impossible. Our modern humanitarians, of course, gloze the psychological contradiction; but they cannot withhold recognition of the contrast of traits which must be accredited to any Jesus who can really be believed—even on their postulates—to have ever existed. Standing before this puzzle of his life-manifestation, Adolf Harnack writes:20

"Only one who has had a kindred experience could go to the bottom here. A prophet might perhaps attempt to lift the veil; such as we must be content to assure ourselves that the Jesus who taught self-knowledge and humility, yet gave to himself, and to himself alone, the name of the Son of God."

And again:

"But it is of one alone that we know that he united the deepest humility and purity of will with the claim that he was more than all the prophets who were before him, even the Son of God. Of him alone, we know that those who ate and drank with him glorified him, not only as the Teacher, Prophet, and King, but also as the Prince of Life, as the Redeemer, Judge of the world, as the living power of their existence—'It is not I that live, but Christ in me'—and that presently a band of the Jew and gentile, the wise and foolish, acknowledged that they had received from the abundance of this one man, grace for grace. This fact which is open to the light of day is unique in history; and it requires that the actual personality behind it should be honored as unique."

In similar vein Paul Wernle, having pointed out that the two elements found in the Gospels are also found in Jesus' own consciousness, exclaims:

"What is astonishing in Jesus is the co-existence of the superhuman self-consciousness with the most profound humility before God. It is the same man that cries, 'All things have been delivered unto me of my Father, and no one knoweth the Father save the Son,' and who replies to the rich young ruler, 'Why callest thou me good, there is none good save God.' Without the former, a man like us; without the latter, a fanatic."

By his last words Wernle apparently fancies that all is said which needs to be said in order to explain the anomaly, when it is said that Jesus takes up "the rôle of Mediator": we shall no longer be surprised that he claims something on both parts. But the astounding features of the case cannot be so lightly disposed of. When the two elements of it are given each its full validity; when the completeness of Jesus' humility before God is realized on the one side, and the height of His claim reaching to the supreme deity itself, on the other, it is safe to say that such a combination of mental states within the limits of a single nature will be acknowledged to be inconceivable. It is inconceivable that the same soul could have produced two such contradictory states of mind contemporaneously. Could have produced them, we say. Should we not add the question whether a single soul could even have harbored such contradictory states? Such contradictory states of consciousness could no more dwell together in one unitary conscious spirit than issue from it as its creation. The self-consciousness of Jesus is, in other words, distinctly duplex, and necessarily implies dual centers of self-consciousness. Only in such a conception of the person can the mind rest. If Jesus was both the Son of God, in all the majesty of true deity, and a true child of man, in creaturely humility—if, that is, He was both God and man, in two distinct natures united, however inseparably and eternally, yet without conversion or confusion in one person—we have in His person, no doubt, an inexhaustible mystery, the mystery surpassing all mysteries, of combined divine love and human devotion. If He was not both God and man in two distinct natures combined in one person, the mystery of His personality passes over into a mere mass of crass contradictions which cannot all be believed; which, therefore, invite arbitrary denial on the one side or the other; and which will inevitably lead to each man creating for himself an artificial Jesus, reduced in the traits allowed to Him to more credible consistency—if indeed, it does not directly tempt to His entire sublimation into a highly composite ideal.

It can scarcely be necessary to add that escape from these psychological contradictions, incident to the attempt to construct a one-natured Christ, cannot be had by fleeing to "the discoveries of the new psychology." It is vain to point, for example, to the phenomena of what is commonly spoken of as "multiple personality" as offering a parallel to the duplex consciousness manifested by our Lord. We need not insist on the pathological character of these phenomena, and their distressing accompaniments, marking as they do the disintegration of the normal consciousness; or on the lack of affinity of the special form of mental disease of which they are symptomatic with the paranoia from which Jesus must have suffered, on the hypothesis that He was no more than a man. It is doubtless enough to ask what kind of a super-divine nature this is that is attributed to Him under the guise of a human nature, which is capable of splitting up in its disintegration into supreme Godhood and perfect manhood as its aliquot, perhaps even as aliquant, parts. If the mere fragments of His personality stand forth as God in His essential majesty and man in the height of man's possibilities, what must He be in the unitary integration of His normal personality? Surely no remotest analogy to such a dualism of consciousness can be discovered in the pitiable spectacle of Dr. Morton Prince's "Miss Beaucamp" and her "Sally." If we have here a merely human personality, in dual dissociation, the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes is eclipsed; the fragments are in immeasurable overplus of the supply.

It may seem more hopeful, therefore, to call in "the new psychology" as an aid to the explanation of the mystery of our Lord's person, when the divine nature is not denied. Even if, however, the original nature be conceived as divine, and the man Jesus be interpreted as a dissociated section of the divine consciousness, which maintains itself in its full divinity by its side, what have we given us but a new Docetism, complicated with a meaningless display of contradictory attributes? A special form is sometimes given to this mode of conceiving the matter, however, which, perhaps, should not pass without particular notice. Appeal is made to the curious cases of "alternating personality," occasionally occurring, in which a man suddenly loses all consciousness of his identity and becomes for a time, longer or shorter, practically a different person. Thus, for example, Ansel Bourne, preacher, of Greene, R. I., became suddenly A. J. Brown, confectioner, of Norristown, Pennsylvania, and remained just A. J. Brown for some months with no consciousness whatever of Ansel Bourne, until just as suddenly he became Ansel Bourne again with no consciousness whatever of A. J. Brown.25 In the light of such instances, we are asked, what psychological obstacle forbids our supposing that the Divine Being who created the universe and has existed from eternity as the Son of God became for a season a man with all the limitations of a man? Why may we not, with psychological justification, look upon Jesus Christ as the infinite God "functioning through a special consciousness with limited power and knowledge"? Why not explain the man Jesus, in other words, just as the "alternative personality" of the Second Person of the Trinity? Such purely speculative questions may possess attractions for some classes of minds; but they certainly have no concernment with the Christ of history. The problem which the Christ of history presents is not summed up merely in the essential identity of the man Jesus with the God of heaven, but includes the co-existence in that one person, whom we know as Christ Jesus, of a double consciousness, divine and human. The solution which is offered leaves the actual problem wholly to one side. In proposing a merely human Jesus, with a divine background indeed, of which, however, He is entirely unconscious, it constructs a purely artificial Jesus of whom history knows nothing: the fundamental fact about the historical Jesus in His unoccultated divine consciousness.

For the same reason the suggestion which has been made that the phenomenal Jesus may be allowed to be strictly human, and the divine Jesus be sought in what it is now fashionable to call His "subliminal self," is altogether beside the mark. The "subliminal self" is only another name for the subconscious self; and the relegation of the divine in Jesus to the realm of the unconscious definitely breaks with the entire historical testimony. Even if the hypothesis really allowed for a two-natured Christ—which in the form, at least, in which it is put forward, it does not, but presents us with only a man-Christ, differing from His fellow-men only in degree and not at all in kind—it would stand wholly out of relation with the only Christ that ever existed. For the Christ of history was not unconscious, but continually conscious, of His deity, and of all that belongs to His deity. He knew Himself to be the Son of God in a unique sense—as such, superior to the very angels and gazing unbrokenly into the depths of the Divine Being, knowing the Father even as He was known of the Father. He felt within Him the power to make the stones that lay in His pathway bread for His strengthening, and the power (since He had come to save the lost) rather to bruise his feet upon them that He might give His life a ransom for many and afterward return on the clouds of heaven to judge the world. Of this Jesus, the only real Jesus, it cannot be said that His consciousness was "entirely human"; and a Jesus of whom this can be said has nothing in common with the only historical Jesus, in whom His divine consciousness was as constant and vivid as His human.

The doctrines of the Two Natures supplies, in a word, the only possible solution of the enigmas of the life-manifestation of the historical Jesus. It presents itself to us, not as the creator, but as the solvent of difficulties—in this, performing the same service to thought which is performed by all the Christian doctrines. If we look upon it merely as a hypothesis, it commands our attention by the multiplicity of phenomena which it reduces to order and unifies, and on this lower ground, too, commends itself to our acceptance. But it does not come to us merely as a hypothesis. It is the assertion concerning their Lord of all the primary witnesses of the Christian faith. It is, indeed, the self-testimony of our Lord Himself, disclosing to us the mystery of His being. It is, to put it briefly, the simple statement of "the fact of Jesus," as that fact is revealed to us in His whole manifestation. We may reject it if we will, but in rejecting it we reject the only real Jesus in favor of another Jesus—who is not another, but is the creature of pure fantasy. The alternatives which we are really face to face with are, Either the two-natured Christ of history, or—a strong delusion.

CHRISTLESS CHRISTIANITY

"The Christ Myth" by Arthur Drews was published early in 1909, and before the year was out its author was being requisitioned by dissidents from Christianity of the most incongruous types as a promising instrument for the general anti-Christian propaganda. Few more remarkable spectacles have ever been witnessed than the exploitation throughout Germany in the opening months of 1910 of this hyper-idealistic metaphysician, disciple of von Hartmann and convinced adherent of the "Philosophy of the Unconscious," by an Alliance the declared basis of whose organization is a determinate materialism. As, under the auspices of the Monistenbund, he made his progress from city to city, lecturing and debating, he drew a tidal-wave of sensation along with him. A violent literary war was inaugurated. It seemed as if all theological Germany were aroused.

In one quarter there was an ominous silence. The "conservative" theologians looked on at the whole performance with bitter contempt. When twitted with leaving to the "liberals" the whole task of defending the historicity of Jesus against Drews, they replied with much justice that it was none of their fight. The liberals had for two generations been proclaiming the only Jesus that ever existed a myth: why should it cause surprise if some at length were taking the proclamation seriously and drawing the inference—if such a simple recasting of the identical proposition can be called an inference—that therefore no Jesus ever existed? If the Christianity which flowed out from Palestine and overspread the world was not the creation of Jesus, but the spontaneous precipitation of old-world myths from a solution just now, as it happened, evaporated past the saturation point, why postulate behind it a shadowy figure, standing in no causal relation to it, without any effective historical connection with it, for whose existence there is therefore neither historical nor logical need? We may not think the language elegant, but we can scarcely pronounce the jibe unprovoked, when Herr Superintendent Doctor Matthes of Kolberg bursts forth in Hengstenberg's old Evangelical Church-Journal: "That the wasted, colorless phantom which alone the Liberal theology leaves over of Jesus could not have transformed a world,—that is clear to all the world except the Liberal theologians themselves, who are still always hoping to see their homunculus come forth from the Gilgameshmishmashmush-brine which alone is left in the pantry of the comparative-religionists and which Arthur Drews has served out afresh to the Berliners." That the liberal theology has travailed and brought forth a monstrous birth is not surprising; nor is it surprising that the fruit of its womb should turn and rend it. Let them fight it out; that is their concern; and if the issue is, as seems likely, the end of both, the world will be well rid of them. Why should sane people take part in such a "theological mill" in which "as-yet Christians" and "no-longer Christians" struggle together in the arena with nothing at stake,—for certainly the difference between the reduced Jesus of the one and the no Jesus of the other is not worth contending about? To deny the existence of Jesus is, of course, as Ernst Troeltsch puts it, "silly";5 to be asked to defend the actual existence of Jesus is, as Adolf Harnack phrases it, "humiliating." But the artillery which the liberal theologians have hurriedly trained upon the denial shows how little they can really let it go at that. It is only the conservative, secure in the possession of the real Jesus, who can look serenely upon this shameful folly and with undisturbed detachment watch the wretched comedy play itself out.

Only the conservative,—and, we may add, the extreme radical. For there is a radicalism, still calling itself Christian, so thoroughgoing as to fall as much below concernment with the question whether Jesus ever lived as conservatism rises above it. The conservative looks with unconcern upon all the pother stirred up by the debate on the historicity of Jesus, because he clearly perceives that it is all (if we may combine Harnack's and Troeltsch's phraseology) scandalous nonsense, unworthy of the notice of anyone with an atom of historical understanding. The radical looks upon it with unconcern because in his self-centered life Jesus has no essential place and no necessary part to play: the question whether Jesus ever lived is to him a merely academic one. An interesting episode in Drews' lecture tour through the Germanic cities brings this point of view before us with strong emphasis. A discussion was contemplated at Bremen also, and the Monistenbund there extended an invitation to the local Protestantenverein to take part in it. This invitation was decisively declined, and the Protestantenverein took a good deal of pains to make it perfectly plain why it was declined. The Protestantenverein was not quite clear in its own mind that the whole business was not merely an advertising scheme for the benefit of the Monistenbund; though, to be sure, it could not see what Monists as Monists have to do with the question whether Jesus ever lived, more than "whether Socrates ever lived, or Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays." The Protestantenverein, moreover, for itself felt entirely assured on good historical grounds of the historicity of Jesus, and had no interest in threshing out old straw. But it was on neither of these grounds that it declined to take part in the debate, but precisely because it was a matter of no importance to it whether Jesus ever lived or not. "All the theologians of the Bremen Protestantenverein," they formally explain, "are agreed that the question whether Jesus lived is, as such, not a religious but a historico-scientific question. It would be sad for Christianity as a religion if its right of existence hung on the question whether anybody whatever ever lived, or anything whatever ever occurred, even though it be the greatest personalities and the most important events which are in question. Every true religion lives not because of 'accidental truths of history,' but because of 'eternal truths of reason.' It lives not because of its past, more or less verifiable and always subject to the critical scrutiny of historical science; but because of the vital forces which it every day disengages afresh into the soul from the depths of the unconditioned." All the great religious forces of Christianity—trust in the Living God, elevated moral self-respect, sincere love of men—are quite independent today of all question of the historicity of Jesus, and therefore this question can without fear be left in the hands in which it belongs,—in the hands of untrammelled historical criticism. "Whether Jesus existed or not, is for our religious and Christian life, in the last analysis, a matter of indifference, if only this life be really religious and Christian, and preserve its vital power in our souls and in our conduct."

There is asserted here something more than that religion is independent of Jesus. That was being vigorously asserted by the adherents of the Monistenbund; and as for Drews, his "Christ Myth"—like the "Christianity of the New Testament" of his master, von Hartmann, before it—was written, he tells us, precisely in the interests of religion, and seeks to sweep Jesus out of the way that men may be truly religious. With the extremities of this view the members of the Bremen Protestantenverein express no sympathy: they are of the number of those who profess and call themselves Christians. What they assert, therefore, is not that religion merely, but distinctively that Christianity is independent of Jesus. They do not declare, indeed, that Christianity, as it has actually existed in the world, has had, in point of fact, nothing to do with Jesus; or that Christians of today—they themselves as Christians—have had or have no relations with Jesus. They are convinced on sound historical grounds of the historicity of Jesus; they recognize that he has played a part in setting the movement called Christianity going; they draw, no doubt, inspiration from his memory. What they cannot allow is that he is essential to Christianity. They are conscious of standing in some such relation to him as that in which an idealistic philosopher stands, say, to a Plato. In point of fact such a philosopher reverences Plato, and derives from him inspiration and impulse, perhaps even instruction. But had there been no Plato, he would be able to do very well without a Plato. So Christians may in point of fact owe not a little to Jesus, and they may be very willing to acknowledge their indebtedness. But Christianity cannot be dependent on Jesus. Though there had been no Jesus, Christianity would be; and were his figure eradicated from history—or even from the mind of man—tomorrow, Christianity would suffer no loss. The sources of its life, the springs of its vitality, lie in itself: it may owe much to a great personality, teaching it, embodying it; it cannot owe to him its being.

The Protestantenverein of the good city of Bremen is, of course, not the inventor of this Christless Christianity. It is as old as Christianity itself; and has come to explicit assertion whenever and wherever men have thought of Christianity rather as universal human religion in more or less purity of expression—perhaps in the purest expression yet given to it, or even in its purest possible expression—than as a specific positive religion instituted among men in particular historical circumstances. The classical period of this point of view is, of course, the Enlightenment; and its classical expounder in that period, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; and the classical treatise in which Lessing propounds it, the tract written in response to Johann Daniel Schumann under the title, "Concerning the Proof of Spirit and Power" (1777); in which occurs accordingly its classical crystallization in a crisp proposition, the famous declaration (very naturally quoted by the theologians of the Bremen Protestantenverein) that "accidental truths of history can never be the proof of necessary truths of reason."

In Lessing's conception, as in that of some before him and of many after him, Christianity is in its essence simply what we have learned to know as altruism. He sums it up in what he calls "the Testament of John,"—"Little children, love one another"; and he refuses to believe that "dogmas," whatever may be said of their probability, or even of their truth, can enter into its essence. The proximate purpose of the tract, "Concerning the Proof of Spirit and Power,"10 is to show that the "dogmas" of the "Christian religion" cannot be put forward as essential truths, and so far as they are not intrinsically self-evidencing rest on evidence which is at best but probable. But the argument itself takes rather the form of an assault on the trustworthiness of historical testimony in general. Lessing does not deny, in this tract, that truths might conceivably be commended by authority. If a man actually witnessed miracles or fulfilments of prophecy, he might no doubt be brought to subject his understanding to that of him in whom the prophecies were visibly fulfilled and by whom the miracles were wrought. But this is not our case. We have no miracles or fulfilments to rest on; we have only accounts of miracles and fulfilments. And "accounts of the fulfilment of prophecies are not fulfilments of prophecies; accounts of miracles are not miracles." "Prophecies fulfilled before my eyes, miracles worked before my eyes," he explains, "work immediately. Accounts of fulfilments of prophecies and of miracles have to work through a medium which deprives them of all force." "How," he exclaims, "can it be asked of me to believe with the same energy, on infinitely less inducement, the very same incomprehensible truths which people from sixteen to eighteen hundred years ago believed on the strongest possible inducement?" "Or," he demands, with a show of outrage, "is everything that I read in trustworthy history, without exception, just as certain for me as what I myself experience?"

The argumentative force of the representation resides, of course, largely in its exaggerations,—"deprived of all force," "without exception." But Lessing skilfully proceeds to cover these exaggerations up by assuming at once an air of the sweetest reasonableness. "I do not know," he remarks, "that anyone ever maintained just that; what is maintained is only that the accounts which we have of these prophecies and miracles are just as trustworthy as any historical truths can be. And then it is added that no doubt historical truths cannot be demonstrated,—yet, nevertheless, we must believe them just as firmly as demonstrated truths." Surely, however, exclaims Lessing, "if no historical truth can be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated by means of historical truths, that is, accidental truths of history can never be the proof of necessary truths of reason." "I do not deny at all," he protests, "that prophecies were fulfilled in Christ; I do not deny at all that Christ wrought miracles: but I do deny that these miracles, since their truth has altogether ceased to be evinced by miracles which are still accessible today, since there exist nothing but accounts of miracles (no matter how undenied, how undeniable, they may be supposed to be), can or ought to bind me to the least faith in any other teachings of Christ."

The whole procedure involves at any rate a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος. To know that Christ raised a man from the dead,—how does that prove that God has a Son? Suppose I could prove that Christ rose from the dead? How does that prove that He is God's Son? "In what connection does my inability to advance anything decisive against the testimony to that fact stand with my duty to believe something which outrages my reason?" You tell me that the very Christ who rose from the dead declared that He was the Son of God, of the same nature with God. Of that declaration, too, we have nothing but historical evidence. If you say, No, we have inspired evidence, for the Bible is inspired,—of that, too, we have nothing but historical evidence! "This, this, is the nasty wide ditch, across which I cannot get, no matter how often and earnestly I have tried to leap it. If anybody can help me over it, let him do it, I beg him, I implore him. He will do me a great charity." Thus Leasing ends his sinuous argument with a round denial that "historical evidence" can ever place a fact beyond question. It is a case of general historical skepticism. The only evidence which can really establish a truth is the truth's own self-evidence. He breaks off suddenly, therefore, with a recommendation to his readers, divided by disputes over the Gospel of John, to come together on the Testament of John. "It is, no doubt, apocryphal, this Testament: but it is not the less divine for that." Truth is truth wherever we find it. And truth is truth to us for no other reason than that it finds us.

It was not to be expected that a point of view so natural to the Age of Reason should continue in the same measure to hold the minds of men in the Age of History. But neither was it to be expected that a point of view so deeply rooted in the popular philosophy of the eighteenth century should fail to project itself into the nineteenth, and color the thought of all who in any large degree draw their mental inheritance from the Enlightenment. We are not surprised to find Kant standing in his judgment of history wholly on the ground of Rationalism, or the lately resurrected Fries following closely in Kant's steps. Nor are we really surprised to observe Fichte still determined by the old point of view, and not even Hegel yet emancipated from it. What does surprise us is that at the end of the days a Rudolf Eucken, true child of the Age of History, and, if one could be permitted to judge only from his profound sense of sin and of the need of divine grace for its overcoming, almost persuaded to be a Christian, can still speak through much the same mask. There is a passage in the first edition of his book on "The Truth-contents of Religion,"13 which, though historical in form, fairly expresses his own attitude towards the relation of religious truth to historical fact. Historical criticism, he thinks, has very seriously shattered the historical foundations of Christianity; indeed, the very subjection of these foundations to criticism, he argues, disqualifies them for serving as foundations of faith, however this criticism issues. Then he proceeds:

"But the shaking of the historical foundations of the religious life goes still further: it is not merely that we are compelled to doubt particular items of their contents, it is that history itself no longer seems proper to serve as the foundation of religion. For the thought to which the modern world commits the guidance of life is not disposed to recognize history as a source of eternal truths. Such a truth must be capable of immediate realization; it must be verifiable by every one and at all times; that is possible, however, only where it is grounded in the timeless nature of reason, and is continually verifiable anew thence. An occurrence of the past, on the other hand, no matter how deeply it has been imbedded in the historical connection, and no matter how energetic it may still be in its effects, does not on that account at all become a portion of our life: we cannot experience it immediately, we cannot ourselves even test its validity, we cannot transform it into a personal possession. That, however, according to our conviction, is precisely what is required for fundamental truths of religion. Thus reason and history stand over against one another in sharp opposition, and the grounding, as of all spirituality, so also of religion, on history calls out the strongest opposition. 'Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason' (Lessing). If life, however, casts off this connection with history, it becomes nonsense and an unendurable burden to bind the health of man's soul to the voluntary acceptance of historical occurrences, or even of occurrences supported by history. 'That historical belief is a duty and belongs to salvation is superstition' (Kant). Can such a dissolution of the old blending of reason and history affect and shake any other religion more deeply than Christianity, which is the most historical of all religions?"

Some modifications have been introduced into this passage in the second edition of "The Truth-contents of Religion," but these do not alter its general bearing. It is allowed that the Enlightenment "differentiated too sharply reason and history, the individual life and tradition, and overestimated the power of any present moment of consciousness." But the contention that history can provide no foundation for religious convictions is still pronounced true, and the quotations from Lessing and Kant are still approved, and this from Fichte is added: "Let no one assert that it does no harm, to cling to such historical beliefs. It is injurious in that subsidiary facts are given equal validity with essential ones, or, indeed, are presented as the essential facts, and consequently the main facts are suppressed and the conscience tormented." With such a view of history in its relation to religion, of course Eucken cannot find the roots of his religion, which he would still call Christianity, in Christ. "We can honor him," he tells us, "as a leader, a hero, a martyr; but we cannot directly bind ourselves to him, or root ourselves in him: we cannot unconditionally submit to him. Still less can we make him the centre of a worship. To do so, from our point of view, would be nothing less than an intolerable deification of a human being." Eucken thus quite purely carries on the tradition of a non-historical, which is, of course, also in the nature of the case a Christless Christianity.

There is much in the mental state of our times to add strength to this traditional distrust of history as a basis for religious convictions. Modern thought is not yet emancipated from that ingrained individualism which is impatient of all "external authority," and wishes each soul to be a law to itself. The very preoccupation of the age with history has moreover brought with it its nemesis. A wide-spread impression has grown up that in the crucible of historical criticism all historical magnitudes have melted; that the whole past has become uncertain and conjectural, if not absolutely unknowable; and that nothing solid is left to offer a foundation for faith. Looking upon themselves and all that they have, instinctively, as the product of historical development, men's hold upon even their most precious spiritual possessions has relaxed; everything is in a flux, and all alike, as it is the product of change, so is held to be subject to change. Christianity itself in the universal flow comes to be thought of only as a passing phase of religious thought, as only one among many religions, rising above the rest, if at all, only in degree. Many have even become surfeited with history, and, suffocated by its load of facts, react from what Nietzsche girds at as "the hypertrophy of history" in the interests of "untrammelled thinking." Meanwhile the broadened historical horizon has dwarfed the significance of isolated historical events, which alone, it is said, are accessible to our observation. The imagination, fed on illimitable stretches of space and endless progressions of time, finds difficulty in attaching supreme importance to this or that historical incident, occurring at but a point of this boundless space and occupying but a moment of this measureless time. If men are disheartened by the uncertainties of history and irritated by its oppressive superfluity, they are even more dispirited by its littleness and insignificance as known to us. With what propriety, it is asked, "can a proposition about the happening of a particular incident at a certain time in a little corner of the earth" be represented as "one of the fundamental verities which every man ought to know and believe for his soul's health?"

This last sentence we have taken from an article by Arthur O. Lovejoy, which very fairly represents the manner in which this general point of view may still be advocated at the opening of the twentieth century. He calls his article, significantly, "The Entangling Alliance of Religion and History"; and, in the course of it, he advances most of the considerations in aversion to this alliance which we have just rapidly summarized from a statement, already doubtless sufficiently summary, by Ernst Troeltsch.18

"Since [he argues] religion constitutes a man's ultimate and definitive intellectual and moral reaction upon his experience, and since it presupposes the possession of truths valid and significant for all men, religious belief will naturally affirm only [why 'only'?] truths of a universal and cosmic bearing. It will deal exclusively [why 'exclusively'?] with the 'eternal' verities and ignore contingent and temporal matters-of-fact.… Its content will consist of propositions equally pertinent to the interests, and equally accessible to the knowledge [is the equality absolute?] of all such beings, at any time, in any place.… It will not make the belief in the occurrence or non-occurrence of specific local and temporal events any part of its essence."

The very spirit of Lessing is here,—even to Lessing's characteristic assumptions of definitions and characteristic exaggerations of statement. It is treated as axiomatic on the one hand that the whole truth-content of religion must be self-evident, and on the other that history can afford us only probabilities. The Deists, it is suggested, were in the essence of the matter right, when they contended that historical propositions are unfitted to enter into the truth-content of religion because, on the one hand, they cannot be universally known, and, on the other, they "do not strictly constitute knowledge at all." No beliefs about happenings, assuredly, can stand the test of the Quod semper, ubique, et ab omnibus—if we take the terms strictly; or can the actual occurrence of events be made more than probable, of remote and particularized events more than barely probable, of such events as are "contrary to the usual order" anything but improbable, so improbable that "it becomes at least debatable whether any amount of purely traditional or documentary evidence can offset" the presumption against them. It is recognized that Christianity is implicated, as is no other religion, with history; it is even allowed that its entanglement with historical facts was indispensable to its survival in the environment in which it first found itself struggling; but it is strenuously asserted that the historical elements which have thus become connected with it are not essential to it. The historical data with which it has been most intimately associated are gravely disputable; it is, indeed, "just those incidents which theology has attached the greatest dogmatic weight" which have most decisively "been removed from the sphere of the clearly ascertainable to that of the problematical." It is fortunate, therefore, that their reality is not of the highest importance from the religious point of view. Indeed, "religious history often becomes more available and more useful religiously when it is taken as poetry."

"If we take even the life and character of Jesus, and consider them solely with respect to their inspirational and exemplary value, it is not a question of primary religious importance whether that life and character existed in bodily incarnation upon the solid earth of Galilee, or chiefly in the devout imagination of earlier believers. There happen, just now, to be signs of a revival of the theory of the non-historicity of Jesus of Nazareth.… Suppose the theory established.… There would be some real gain. The Gospels would become more wonderful and more encouraging than before; for the profound wisdom and lofty character found in them would prove to be the expression, not of a single and unique religious genius, but of the spiritual idealism of many humble and unknown men. That a group of men should be able to conceive the hero of the Synoptic Gospels is more inspiring than that one wholly exceptional man should have been that hero—but, for the same reason, doubtless more improbable. In so far, then, as religious history simply affords ideals for our reverence and imitation, the ideals are no worse for their lack of past reality; they were at least the products of some other men's minds, and foreshadowings of possible realities to come, in the human nature of the future. Our feeling with respect to Jesus would undoubtedly be in significant ways altered.… But nothing of the deepest religious concernment can be at issue here."

There is much in these remarks which invites criticism. What it concerns us especially to note, however, is that they go beyond the assertion that matters of fact do not enter into the essence of religion, and that Christianity, as it is religion, may be indifferent to them. They seem to suggest that religion may thrive better in an atmosphere of fancy than of reality. Christianity could not only do very well without Jesus; it would perhaps be better off without Jesus. Jesus as a myth might make a stronger religious appeal, might be of a higher religious value, than Jesus as a fact. It would almost seem a pity, religiously speaking, that Jesus ever lived.

All cannot go quite so far as this. It does not appear that even the members of the Bremen Protestantenverein go so far. Most are satisfied with pronouncing Jesus unessential to Christianity, indifferent to Christianity, hardly noxious to it. The difference is rooted ultimately in a difference in point of departure. When the point of departure lies in a philosophical system, appeal to historical criticism is essentially in support of conclusions already attained. Most of those who nowadays pursue a line of reasoning substantially the same, begin nevertheless at the opposite pole. Their start is taken from historical criticism, and philosophical considerations are summoned only secondarily and subsidiarily, to give a basis to conclusions already adopted. Precisely the same philosophical assumptions are invoked, but they are not the primary presuppositions of the actual line of thought, and their logic is less prevalent. It is not so much in pride of pure reason and in contempt of history that these reasoners pronounce faith independent of Jesus, although they fall back on pure reason for a standing-ground, and express a hearty distrust in the trustworthiness of historical data. It is rather in timidity in the face of the processes of historical research, and in panic at the aspect of its results, that they seek and find a sheltered position in the independence of faith of historical entities. They are not so much tempted to despise Jesus because He is merely historical as they are tempted to despair of Him for fear He is not historical enough. The Christless Christianity which is springing more and more into view about us, is, in a word, the fruit less of a strong religious mysticism than of a weak historical scepticism, which has become anxious about the religious props on which it has hitherto depended.

It is the historical criticism of the Gospels "from Reimarus to Wrede" which has created the wide-reaching and deeply seated distrust in the historical tradition of Jesus that has of late become so evident. As Paul Wernle himself allows, in the very act of rebuking this distrust as excessive, "to us all it is more or less certain that the evangelists are not Jesus Himself, that they are all already dependent on tradition, and that this tradition has already suffered all kinds of changes, by which the spirit of the disciples has in manifold ways been mingled with the spirit of Jesus." This being so, it is widely felt that no other attitude towards the person of Jesus remains possible except one at best of skepticism. There are in effect a whole series of Jesuses presented to our consideration. There is the dogmatic Christ which the great Christian community has worshipped through the ages with no other thought than that He was assuredly the Jesus Christ of the biblical record. And there is this Jesus Christ of the biblical record which the scientific study of the Bible has split up into several mutually inconsistent personalities. And there is the "historical Jesus" which biblical criticism has hardly and with much variety of interpretation extracted from the presuppositions of the biblical records. Where among these differing Jesuses can faith find a firm footing? The dogmatic Christ, we are told, has evaporated into a myth; the biblical Jesus Christ has been disintegrated into the tesserae out of which its mosaic was formed; the "historical Jesus," itself the product of doubt, remains a doubtful and fluctuating figure. If we are to continue Christians, must we not at least seek for our Christianity a less unstable basis?

The air in critical circles is fairly palpitating with questions like these. The resulting state of mind finds a clearly argued expression in such a treatise as F. Ziller's Modern Biblical Science and the Crisis of the Evangelical Church. The thesis maintained is that the progress of scientific study of the Bible has hopelessly shattered the entire basis on which the faith of the Christian church has hitherto rested. The results even of textual criticism already bring certain of the most cherished church-doctrines into peril. Literary criticism renders it very difficult to repose any real confidence in the biblical writers. And material criticism has cast into the gravest doubt the facts related by these writers which are most indispensable to the established teaching. Finally, the science of comparative religion has reduced the foundations of the central doctrines and rites of the church to the level of heathen ideas and usages. The conceptions and ideas of the Bible have become only elements in the universal history of religions, and the biblical writings themselves only a particular section of general religious literature. The figure of Jesus has been well-nigh wiped off the page of history: the dogmatic Christ, the product of reflection, of course; and the biblical Jesus Christ, a composition of disparate materials, equally of course; but also in large measure the "historical Jesus" himself, which it has been the object of science to disinter. "The historical Jesus, as we have seen, has been set aside by the scientific study of the Bible down to meager remnants, and the foundation of the dogmatic Christ has been obliterated." Is there then anything left to rest upon except an "ideal Christ," a creation of fancy? Ziller, who, despite the ruin of historical Christianity which he sees about him, would fain remain a Christian, insists that there is. There is not, indeed, the "historical Jesus," doubt-born and incapable of sustaining faith, but there is the "historical Christ," which is not an ideal, but a fact. On this fact faith can stay itself.

"What the altruistic postulates of an inflated egoism, and what the postulates of pure reason cannot avail for, for that neither can those of the 'ideal Christ' avail. That there is such a thing as practised self-renunciation, in contrast to nature; that on the basis of such a self-renunciation there can develop a high world-overcoming life,—this conviction cannot be derived either from the pure reason or from our practical ideals with the certainty that is required by faith, face to face with the known laws of nature. Only a fact can give the certainty for it, and this fact is 'Christ.'

But how is this fact of Christ to be reached? The reply takes the form of an apologue. Ziller writes:

"All the day long, I have had before me a wide mountain-ridge. In the morning, it stood out, deep-blue, in almost menacing nearness; towards noon, in a like-shaped whitish-grey mist on the horizon; and now, in the evening, it throws over the whole landscape the splendor of a golden reflection. Is it really the same mountain through it all? I think so.… What I see is merely the effects which it works on my eye by means of the light straining through the changing atmosphere. What, then, if the mountain were no mountain; if it were only the boundless plain which seems to rise in the distance; if it were only cloud-forms deceiving my eyes? My glance sweeps over the meadows, through which my path runs. The brooks which water it come from yonder. The mountain itself I shall, indeed, not reach; its crags I shall not explore; but I believe in the existence of the mountain.

So, he would say, he believes in the existence of the Christ from whom flow the streams of blessing which gladden the plain of human life. Thus, though the "historical Jesus" has been set aside "down to meagre remnants," the "historical Christ abides unshaken for faith." We seek, and we find, Him, however, not in a book, much less in a creed, but "in the entire, constantly developing Christianity in which we believe."

"Out of faith in the Christ vitally active here today, there grows up for us faith in the Christ of the past. The predicates which the past ascribed to him, we can no longer ascribe to him in the same sense, but we know how to value them from the standpoint of our faith; and though we no longer connect the same meaning with them, or though we permit them to be supplanted by others which express for us what is highest—we do it in the consciousness that we are only carrying forward a process in which the oldest Christianity has preceded us, and which others in their own fashion will follow us."

Despairing of the "historical Jesus," Ziller, in other words, substitutes for Him, as he says, a "Christ who varies with the changes of human thought." Christianity, transforming itself ceaselessly from age to age, finds for itself ever a transformed Christ, suited to its changed needs. Christ, in a word, grows with His church; and it would be as impossible for the church of today to believe in the Jesus of the first Christians as it would be for us to live today the life of two thousand years ago. It is out of the whole history of Christianity that God speaks to us of today, and Christ would be dead, did He not live on in the life of human development.

We are not concerned for the moment with the validity of this representation. Paul Wernle is unhesitant in declaring it nonsense. It is nonsense, he asserts, to speak of modern critical research as having sapped our confidence in the "historical Jesus." There continue to be, no doubt, as there always have been, skeptical writers; in late years, for example, there are Wellhausen, Wrede, Schweitzer; but they must not be taken too seriously. "I do not find that, in its essential traits, the person of Jesus has even in the least become uncertain or controversial through the investigations of recent years." And how, indeed, could historical science, let us honor it ever so highly, "avail against the voice of a history of nearly two-thousand years' duration in which Jesus and faith in Jesus—I purposely bring them together—have been the greatest of impulsive and constructive forces?" It is greater nonsense still, Wernle declares, to pretend to retain Christ when the historical Jesus has been abandoned. Once convince him that the historical Jesus has been set aside by science, and faith in Christ has no further personal interest to him: faith in God without Christ would then be his only recourse. "This whole separation of Jesus and Christ," he adds, "abandoning the one and retaining the other, is nothing but a miserable product of opportunism. It was the weakest point in the old Liberal Christianity, and it has not been bettered by any new grounding. What we retain in our hands when the historical Jesus falls away is just myths and phantasms, which can afford no support to our faith."

Meanwhile, however, we observe Ziller abandoning the "historical Jesus" and clinging to the "historical Christ," who "still lives in the church." In this, he but follows an example set by Schleiermacher, and from his day on imitated by a long series of writers occupying essentially the same position, but differing immensely among themselves in the completeness or incompleteness, on the one hand, of their abandonment of the historical Jesus, and, on the other, of their clinging to a living Christ. At the one extreme we may discover—shall we say even a Martin Kähler? or shall we content ourselves with saying a Wilhelm Herrmann?28 At the other stand the theologians of the Bremen Protestantenverein. Those who gather around the former node, only sit loosely to the "historical Jesus" as He is presented to us in the Gospel narrative, and can in no way do without the "historical Christ," on whom, indeed, their whole religious system hangs. Those who gather around the latter, though they may or may not, for themselves, feel any real doubt that Jesus really lived, yet are quite able to get along wholly without Him in their religious system, whether we call Him Jesus or Christ. It is these latter, accordingly, who are express "Christless Christians."

Perhaps it may be well to keep near home here and select as examples of this truest Christless Christianity only certain prophets of our own.

A very good example is afforded by Douglas C. Macintosh. With the historicity of Jesus, Macintosh has for himself no difficulty; but neither does he feel any imperative need of the living Christ. He finds the historical Jesus useful; the loss of Him would be a great loss,—a sentimental loss, a pedagogical loss, above all a loss to the easy attainment of Christian certitude. He would even, it appears, allow that the Christ-ideal is indispensable—that it is, indeed, precisely the differentia of Christianity; and he does not see his way to accounting for the clearness at least of this ideal without assuming the historical Jesus, and in this sense, therefore, he is prepared to admit that the historicity of Jesus is "historically indispensable." Indispensable, that is, to the historian, not to the Christian. What the Christian must have is the Christ-ideal, not Christ. "Christian faith is trust in the Christ-like God; whether the Christ be regarded as historical fact or mere ideal, it is trust in the God of holy and unselfish love, whose purpose is the spiritual redemption of humanity and who is revealed in the Christ-like everywhere." Was not Jesus Himself—if He existed—a Christian, the first Christian? And was "the historical Jesus" needed for Him as the presupposition of His faith? We cannot distinguish between the "religion of Jesus" and the "gospel of Christ": the "gospel of Christ" is just the "religion of Jesus." He is not the content of our faith, but only, historically, the first of the series of believers of that particular kind which we call Christian. Say that the series began in another, in a later, than He, and that he is a myth. What essential difference does that make to our faith? The "Christian God-idea" in any case remains; and the "Christian God-idea" is constitutive of Christianity.

"So far as the content of Christianity is concerned, our religion would remain essentially the same, whatever judgment might be rendered upon questions of historical fact.

"The disproof, or rendering seriously doubtful, of the historicity of Jesus would not mean the disappearance of any essential content from the Christian religion.

"It is not incorrect to say that the essence of Christianity is Jesus Christ, if [Oh that 'if'!] it be recognized that it is also possible to set forth the essence of Christianity without reference to the historic Jesus.

"Granted the historicity of Jesus, was not his faith fully Christian? And yet he could not make that faith rest upon the historicity of a person of ideal character who had gone before him. If then we believe in the historicity of Jesus, we must admit that Christian faith has been possible in the case of one at least who did not believe in the historicity of any ideal Jesus before his day."

"Without the historical Jesus we may find ourselves with less verification of our faith than we thought." That is a loss; but it is not an irreparable loss, since we may find sufficient verification elsewhere. Meanwhile,

"Christianity, while enjoying the advantages of historical verification, has this qualification for being the 'absolute' and universal religion, that its fate is not bound up with the actuality of any one reputed fact of history, even when that 'fact' is the one which surpasses every other fact in its value to humanity."

In a single word, Christ does not form any part of the content of Christianity, and therefore His historicity cannot be indispensable to Christianity. "Spiritual religion is self-dependent," and finds all its resources in itself; it cannot therefore be dependent "on the religious experience and inner assurance of another, even though that other be the Jesus of history."

An almost equally good example is supplied by Frank H. Foster, the stress of whose argument is laid on the general consideration that our religious relation cannot rest on the uncertainties of history. His particular manner of phrasing his contention is that "in some important respects it makes no difference to the modern thinker whether Jesus was a historical person or not," because "no system of truth which shall dominate the mind and claim authority over the conduct of man can rest upon the reality of any historical person." "Salvation" is "an inner state of the soul," and therefore cannot be something " 'objectively' secured by the work of a historical person." "Truth is truth" only as it "shines to the mind by its own light," and therefore "cannot be something which depends upon the existence of the person who first spoke it." If "salvation," "truth," were thus dependent on the historicity of a person, they "would be exposed to every breath of criticism." They must not be left in that perilous condition.

"Though Jesus should be proved never to have existed, the truth which has come down to us, and which we have received because of its self-evidencing value, and which we have found to work out such great results in the liberation of our spirits from the thraldom of sin and the establishment of holy relations with our Heavenly Father, would still be true, and its effects would remain unaltered. In this sense, a historical Jesus is unnecessary."

For himself, Foster does not at all doubt that Jesus was an historical person. He confesses, indeed, that "of no single historical detail can we be absolutely sure, unless it be his death by crucifixion"; though, somewhat inconsistently, he at once draws up a tolerably detailed picture of the real Jesus and sets Him before us as "a realized ideal,"—"a realized ideal," moreover, let us note, so lofty that none of His followers could have invented the portraiture. His historicity remains nevertheless unessential, since our real ground, for example, for acknowledging Him sinless, is that this acknowledgment is useful to us—"our final reason for accepting it is its value"; and a "realized ideal" is after all fundamentally an ideal, and owes its existence as such and whatever power it may exert to its erection into an ideal, not to its historical embodiment, if it chances to be historically embodied, in a person. "No system of truth which shall dominate the mind and claim authority over the conduct of men," we will remember, "can rest upon the reality of any historical personality."

It is scarcely necessary to multiply examples further. We may pass from instance to instance; but do not escape from a common circle of ideas. R. Roberts assumes to speak for the class, and may be accepted as doing so, when he announces that "the supreme need of the hour in these matters is the disengagement of religion from its dependence on historical personalities." "Truth is truth," he declares, "whether uttered by Sophocles or Plato in Athens, by Hillel or Jesus in Palestine, by Seneca or Aurelius in Rome." "Religion, too, rests not on inspired or divine personalities, but on the order of the world." "And if, in the inevitable evolution of the not-distant future, Jesus too should disappear from the assured certainties of the world, man would not cease to be religious." P. W. Schmiedel—if we may take advantage of the vogue of his writings in their English form to refer to him here—speaks, with the greater caution of his better scholarship, of the prospect of the elimination of the figure of Jesus from "the assured certainties of the world": "As a critical historian I can only say that I see no prospect of this." And it is a deeper note of personal appreciation of Jesus—and of indebtedness to Him—which he sounds. But the purport of his declaration is the same.

"My inmost religious convictions would suffer no harm, even if I now felt obliged to conclude that Jesus never lived. It would, of course, be a loss to me, if I could no longer look back and up to him as a historical person; but I should feel assured that the measure of piety which had long become a part of my nature could not be lost, because I could no longer derive it from him."

Always there lie at the basis of the reasoning the twin assumptions of the old Rationalism: the assumption of the adequacy of pure reason to produce out of its own inalienable endowments the whole body of religious truth which it is necessary or possible for reasonable men to embrace, and the assumption of the inadequacy of history to lay a foundation of fact sufficiently assured to supply a firm basis on which the religious convictions and aspirations of reasonable men may rest. And always there is built upon these assumptions the denial that Christianity,—as it is a religion worthy of the acceptance of reasonable men, and actually exerting influence over reasonable men, and supplying the forms in which their religious life is expressed,—can possibly be dependent for its existence or power on any events or personalities in its past history, no matter how prominent a place these events or personalities may actually have occupied in its historical origination or its continued historical manifestation. The immediate motive which leads to this declaration of independence of historical events and personalities may differ from individual to individual: it is perhaps very commonly a feeling of uncertainty as to the actual historicity of the facts and personalities in question, and a desire to protect what is thought of as Christian faith from the danger incident to this uncertainty. The personal attitude of the reasoners towards Jesus may also differ greatly: most commonly, no doubt, a strong sense of indebtedness to Jesus and a deep feeling of reverence to him are preserved. But the general line of argument remains the same. History can give us only probabilities. Religion, therefore, which requires certainties, cannot be dependent on historical facts. Jesus is at best an historical fact. Christianity, therefore, as it is truly religion, cannot possibly be dependent on Jesus. So far accordingly as Christianity is truly religion, it must be independent of Jesus. What are we to say to these things?

It can scarcely be expected that at this time of day the ancient debate with Rationalism should be taken up afresh and threshed out over again. Butler's "Analogy" is still extant, with its initial insistence upon probability as the guide of life, and its solid proof of the reasonableness of an historical revelation. It might not even be amiss to invite those to whom matters of fact appear to be intrinsically doubtful, or at least to become at once on occurrence incapable of establishment beyond "reasonable doubt," to bring their philosophy down to earth by a course of reading in such primary text-books as Greenleaf "On Evidence" and Ram "On Facts." Of course man is a religious being, and by the very necessity of his nature will have a religion. We have not needed to wait for W. Bousset to tell us that religion has its seat in the aboriginal disposition of the reason, and we have only to look within ourselves to find it as the central fundamental law of our life. To name none other, John Calvin has told us long ago that, entering into the very constitution of man, and, above all else, distinguishing him from the brute, there is an ineradicable sensus deitatis, which—so far from lying inert within him—is a fertile semen religionis; and that accordingly all men have, and must needs have, religion. It is another question, however, whether this constitutional religion, which man cannot choose but have, is adequate to his need in the situation in which he actually finds himself, a situation which Eucken tells us has been most truly appreciated not by the optimists but the pessimists. It is not obvious, to say the least, that a provision of nature must be competent also for unnatural conditions; that a power of living implies also a vis naturae medicatrix which in the presence of disease renders the exhibition of remedies impertinent. Though "pure reason" be sufficient for the religion of pure nature, what warrants the assumption that its sufficiency is unimpaired when nature is no longer pure?

It was the fault of the eighteenth century, in its pride of intellect and virtue, to neglect in its religious theorizing the evil case of man, and to proclaim under the name of "natural religion" an abstract scheme of a few meagre truths of reason as the sum of all religion, and, as such, the whole religious content of Christianity, the presently dominant religion,—which was thus represented as, so far as it was truly religious, "as old as creation." We have passed beyond the possibility of such shallow intellectualism now; we all repeat with avidity Bernhard Pünjer's caustic jibe that the difficulty with this so-called "natural religion" was that it was neither natural nor a religion. But have we bettered things in the essence of the matter? The misery of humanity may be more poignantly present to our consciousness, and even, in a sense, its sin; religion may be more prevalently thought of as "faith," rather than as opinion; the goodness of God may fill the whole horizon of our thought of him, and loving trust in his love form the entire reaction of our souls in his presence. But are we doing justice to that inexpugnable sense of guilt which constitutes the most fundamental and persistent deliverance of our moral consciousness? Shall we hope to soothe it to sleep with platitudes about the goodness of God; assurances that God is love, and that love will not reckon with sin? That deep moral self-condemnation which is present as a primary factor in all truly religious experience protests against all attempts merely to appease it. It cries out for satisfaction. No moral deduction can persuade it that forgiveness of sins is a necessary element in the moral order of the world. It knows on the contrary that indiscriminate forgiveness of sin would be precisely the subversion of the moral order of the world. The annulment of guilt is the annulment of the law of righteousness, out of the breach of which guilt arises; and the law of righteousness is only another name for the moral order of the world. There is a moral paradox in the forgiveness of sins which cannot be solved apart from the exhibition of an actual expiation. No appeal to general metaphysical or moral truths concerning God can serve here; or to the essential kinship of human nature to God; or, for the matter of that, to any example of an attitude of trust in the divine goodness upon the part of a religious genius, however great, or to promises of forgiveness made by such a one, or even—may we say it with reverence—made by God himself, unsupported by the exhibition of an actual expiation. The sinful soul, in throes of self-condemnation, is concerned with the law of righteousness ingrained in his very nature as a moral being, and cannot be satisfied with goodness, or love, or mercy, or pardon. He cries out for expiation. And expiation, in its very nature, is not a principle but a fact, an event which takes place, if at all, in the conditions of time and space. A valid religion for sinful man includes in it, accordingly, of necessity an historical element, an actually wrought expiation for its sin. It is the very nerve of Christianity and the essence of its appeal to men—by virtue of which it has won its way in the world—that it provides this historical element and proclaims an actual expiation of human sin. As it has been eloquently put:

"Only the fact that Christ stands out in history as surety of the gracious will of God, that in God's name he punishes sin and calls the sinner to himself, that in holy suffering he endures the lot of sinners in order to convict them of their sin and free them from it, that as the Risen One he brings them the assurance of justification and of eternal life, is able to transform human seeking after salvation into finding. Severed from this fact which forms its very essence, faith is nothing, an empty desire, a question without an answer."

It would be sad for humanity, needing thus above all things an actual expiation that it may have warrant to trust in God's forgiving love, if no such warrant can be given it because of the inability of the human mind to attain certainty with reference to matters of fact. It is, indeed, difficult to see how man could sustain his being and prosecute his common tasks in the world, if matters of fact are intrinsically uncertain, or become immediately uncertain on their occurrence. Man is, after all said, a creature of time and space, and all that he does and all that he experiences takes place in the conditions of time and space, and becomes at once on taking place matter of history. He could acquire no knowledge whatever, the whole discipline of life would be lost to him, if uncertainty were really the mark of the historical. We deceive ourselves, for instance, if we fancy we may distinguish in principle between historical facts as uncertain and scientific facts as certain. As Lessing reminds us, we cannot base certainties on uncertainties; and the material of all the sciences is in point of fact historical. "Every science," observes Eberhard Vischer, "builds its conclusions on the particular experiences which men have had. Every observation in the natural sciences, every experiment, gives us in the first instance not knowledge of what is, but of what at the moment of the observation, of the experiment, the observer experiences.… An experience had by the scientific observer, therefore an historical fact, is the foundation-stone on which is grounded, as in general the entire conduct of man, so also all scientific attainment." If, then, historical facts are by their very nature uncertain,—"if nothing that befalls man can be certainly known, then all scientific certainty whatever passes into the realm of the impossible."

It may be suspected that the current assumption that historical facts cannot rise above probabilities, derives at least some of its force and persistency from a confusion of two senses of the word "probable." As the opposite of "demonstrative," "probable" refers to the nature of the ground on which the judgment of truth or reality rests; as the opposite of "certain" it refers to the measure of assurance which the grounds on which this judgment rests are adapted to produce. Historical facts may be "only probable" in the one usage and yet not less than "certain" in the other. This ambiguity of the term seems to be reflected in a certain embarrassment which is observable in its use in the present connection. Thus G. B. Foster talks of historical evidence as capable of producing only "probable certainty"; Otto Kirn of it as producing at best only "relative certainty"; while Heinrich von Sybel declares it able to produce "conclusive certainty,"—which he then explains by the further declaration that "historical science is capable of attaining to altogether exact knowledge." "Conclusive certainty" is of course pleonastic, and "probable certainty," "relative certainty," are contradictions in terms, the employment of which only bears witness to the feeling of the writers using them that after all historical facts are, or may be, "certain." Let it go at that. In point of fact, there is nothing more certain than a matter of fact: what is, certainly is; and the certainty of demonstration cannot be more sure than the certainty of experience. It is no more sure that two and two make four, than that the two nuts which I have in each hand when brought together are four,—though I arrive at my certainty in the one case a priori by demonstrative reasoning, and in the other a posteriori by actual experience. The ground of certainty in both cases is my confidence in my faculties.

It may be urged, to be sure, that history, as commonly spoken of, deals only with past experiences, and it is only present experience which is "certain." But experience does not cease to be experience with the passage of time: and (as it has been well phrased) "reality that has been made" is no less reality than "reality in the making"; "reality once 'made,' is 'made' for ever." If what is, certainly is, then what has been, just as certainly has been; and its actuality as matter of fact is not in the least disturbed by the irrelevant circumstance that it has occurred at one point of time rather than at another. Indeed, as the writer just cited playfully points out, distance of time may be neutralized by distance in space. To an observer on the dog-star, earthly events which to an observer on earth occurred a generation ago are present-day facts; and by merely stationing ourselves at the proper distance we may recover any occurrence of the past to "immediate perception." We cannot, to be sure, take our post of observation at will in Orion or the Pleiades, but we need not on that account cast the actuality of the actual into doubt or declare ourselves incapable of assuring ourselves of it. If free transportation through the immeasurable reaches of space is denied us, there are other ways of getting at the actualities of the past which we need not on that account deny ourselves.

For one thing, we need not persist in looking at past occurrences as each an isolated event, standing absolutely out of relation with all other events, up to which therefore no lines of approach lead. Past events still live in other vibrations also, besides those which, trembling through the ether, carry notification of their occurrence to the depths of space. Everything that occurs affects everything else that occurs, and history must be conceived not merely as a series of linked chains passing side by side through time; but as one woven network covering the whole past, and running with unbroken web through the present into the illimitable future. Not by one line only but by manifold lines, therefore, we can travel from any point which for the moment may chance to be the present, over the woven pattern of the fabric to any other point, which holds changelessly its proper position in the whole, and its fixed relations to all the other parts of it. Of course, such creatures as we are cannot contemplate the whole pattern in all its details; we are like insects climbing slowly along a thread of some tapestry. There are myriads of occurrences of even the recent past which are gone beyond all hope of recovery. At best we can know a few of the events that have occurred, and them only in part. But the past is not singular in this. We do not know the present, even that present with which we are most intimately concerned, in all of its details, or in any of its details perfectly. We know nothing except in part. Every sparklet of human knowledge shines out from a limitless surrounding of obscurity. But we can yet know truly where we can know only in part. And because we cannot know all the past, we must not therefore fancy that we can know nothing that is past. There are occurrences which stand out so brightly against the enveloping darkness, which have wrought so powerfully on the course of events that have succeeded them, which are connected with us by so many and so deeply marked lines of effects, that we might as well pretend not to be able to see the sun in the heavens as not to be able to perceive them looming in the past, however distant. There are no doubt some who do not see the sun. They are blind.

Whether the origins of the Christian religion belong to this class of outstanding facts—the great peaks rising out of the plain with such prominence that no observer looking over the field of history can miss them—is merely a question of the evidence. This evidence is, however, of the most compelling and varied kind. It is not merely documentary, subject to those processes of testing which we lump together under the name of criticism. It is institutional as well; and it is more than institutional. The seed out of which Christianity has grown may be known, like other seed, by that which has grown out of it: "by their fruits ye shall know them." Christianity itself is a witness to the nature of its origins; and to Christianity must be added the whole world in its development through two thousand years. It is futile to ask, as has been asked with the processes of historical criticism in mind: "Is any one entitled to believe, or to ask others to believe, in specific historical matters of fact except upon historical evidence?" The question is already answered by Lessing in that striking refutation of his own historical skepticism which he gives in his "Axiomata":41

"There is still one question over which I cannot wonder enough, which the Herr Pastor puts with a confidence that seems to imply that only one answer is possible. 'Had the New Testament books not been written, and had they not come down to us,' he asks, 'would there have remained in the world a trace of what Jesus did and taught?' God forbid that I should ever think so meanly of Christ's teaching as to dare to answer this question with a No. No, I would not repeat such a No, even had an angel from heaven dictated it to me, to say nothing of a case where it is only a Lutheran pastor who would put it into my mouth. All that occurs in the world leaves traces in the world behind it, even though men can not always point them out at once; and should Thy teaching only, divine Friend of man, which Thou didst command, not to be written but to be preached, have effected nothing, absolutely nothing, from which its origin might be recognized? Should Thy words have been words of life only when transformed into dead letters?"

We are not fleeing from the results of historical criticism to take refuge in the argument from effects. We shall appeal, indeed, from a naturalistically biased to an unbiased historical criticism; but we shall have no difficulty in trusting the latter to give us not only an actual Jesus, but a supernatural Christ, and in Him a supernatural redemption. We are only concerned now to point out that even such a vindication of the fact-basis of Christianity on historico-critical grounds does not exhaust the evidence for it; that there is still further evidence of the richest and most varied kind for the origin of Christianity in a supernatural founder; that there is, for example, the evidence from effects, which, resting as it does on the causal judgment, has much of the quality of demonstration. "What then is it," asks a recent writer,43 "which gives us knowledge of what has been?" "Three things," he answers, "monuments, traditions, effects"; and then he adds another well-known saying of Lessing's: "When the paralytic experiences the healing shocks of the electric spark, what does he care whether Nollet or Franklin, or neither of them, is right?"—and concludes: "So may the pious man be of good courage, while the learned are disputing over particular problems of the gospel-history. But as to the presence and as to the nature of the power which then came into the world, he too has a little word to say." He has. And though this "little word" may not be quite the same word which either this writer or Lessing might suggest, it is a word which has supreme value, and which combines with the abundant evidence from other quarters and of other orders to render the facts which belong to the origins of Christianity the most certain of all the facts which have occurred in the world.

We are not absurdly undertaking to prove the historicity of Jesus in ten words. Happily, our present task does not require this proof of us; and happily also, as has already been intimated, the work has been perhaps sufficiently done for us—though in many more than ten words—by a multitude of recent writers who have sprung to the defence of the historicity of Jesus against its denial by the new radicalism most prominently represented at present by Arthur Drews. One of the results of the promulgation of this denial for which we may be thankful has been that some check has been put upon the less guarded expression of historical skepticism on the part of the liberal theologians, and there has been called out some stronger assertion and fuller exposition of the more positive side of their conception of the historical origins of Christianity than it has been usual for them to give. This has been a gain. Much has, no doubt, been left to be desired, but it has been pleasant to see such writers as W. Bousset and Johannes Weiss take up even so far the role of "apologists." What we have been attempting to do is merely, by a brief statement of the actual state of the case with reference to the historicity of Jesus, to wash in a background against which the true character and significance of the Christless Christianity which is being exploited about us may be thrown up into clear relief. There really is no occasion for a panic with reference to the historicity of Jesus; and there is no need of such drastic measures as those pursued by the promulgators of our Christless Christianity to allay the rising panic with respect to it. It is only among the old Liberals and—on somewhat different grounds—the members of the school of Ritschl that panic here is natural. The mordant criticism of the evangelical history practised by the old liberals has left them without defence when this criticism is pressed a step further and the historicity of Jesus is denied,—requiring, though they do, the historicity of Jesus not only to account for the origin of Christianity according to their view of its origin, but to give distinctiveness and distinction to their conception of what Christianity is. It has been the peculiarity of the school of Ritschl, in its effort to preserve Christianity from destruction by the assaults of historical criticism no less than by those of philosophy and science, to proclaim the independence of faith of all historical facts as well as of all metaphysical notions. What defence have they when the fact of Christ is included in the facts of which Christianity is independent? Yet "the fact of Christ" bears with them the whole weight of Christianity. Our Christless Christians have passed beyond all this. Indifference to Christ may have much the same practical effects as denial of the existence of Jesus; but it is a specifically different attitude and throws into the foreground specifically different questions. It has no interest in the historicity of Jesus. It has no interest in the living Christ. Its sole interest is in Christianity. It does not follow, however, that the historicity of Jesus has no bearing on it; or the nature of the Jesus who is historical. Conceivably, a real Jesus may be more difficult to ignore than an imaginary one; especially if the Jesus that is real is a Jesus whom it is not easy to ignore, who has brought into the world influences and set at work forces which cannot be disregarded or escaped. In any event it is important to approach the consideration of Christless Christianity with a clear understanding that the Christ it would ignore is not a doubtful Christ but a real Christ, is not an inert Christ but an active Christ.48

The particular question raised meanwhile by Christless Christianity is not that of the historicity of Jesus but that of the nature of Christianity, or, as it is fashionable nowadays to phrase it, "the essence of Christianity." It is only when "Christianity" has come to be looked upon as little more than a modern man's "religious reaction upon the whole realm of reality—past and present—available for him," "the total embodiment of the actual religious attainments of modern men in a modern environment"—whatever this "reaction," these "attainments," may chance to be—as it has been described by a not wholly unsympathetic historian, that the question of the indifference of "Christianity" to Jesus can be seriously raised. Douglas C. Macintosh50 very frankly allows that to all that has hitherto borne the name of Christianity the historicity of Jesus has been indispensable, or, to speak more adequately, the living Jesus has stood at the very centre of thought and faith. To the "early disciples of Jesus," whose faith hinged on the messiahship of Jesus; to "the Greek Christian development," whose entire teaching and trust turned on the reality of a divine incarnation in humanity; to "Christian faith in its mediaeval form, whether Romanist or Protestant," which grounded all its hope in the substitutive sacrifice of the God-man—to all these alike Jesus forms the very core of Christianity. It is only when historical—or if the word pleases better, traditional—Christianity has suffered a sea-change and become "the Christianity of to-day," that it can be contented that "the disproof or rendering seriously doubtful of the historicity of Jesus need not mean the disappearance of any essential content from the Christian religion." The question thus concerns not Christianity in its historical sense, but "our religion," "of to-day"; and it might perhaps be better phrased, not, Is Christ essential to the Christian faith? but, Is the so-called Christianity of today to which Christ is not essential still Christian?

Ernst Troeltsch has treated the matter more at large and with his wonted thoroughness and candor in a lecture which he has recently published under the title of "The Significance of the Historicity of Jesus for Faith." The question which he here raises is twofold: first, whether it is "still" possible to speak of an inner essential significance of Jesus for faith; and secondly, whether, that being answered in the negative, the historicity of Jesus is therefore indifferent to the "Christianity" which alone remains possible for modern culture. This latter question also Troeltsch answers with a negative, and thus comes forward as the advocate of the indispensableness of Jesus to even the most attenuated faith which still cares to call itself Christian. "So long as there exists a Christianity in any sense whatever it will be bound up with the central place of Christ in worship."

The word "still" in the former member of Troeltsch's question intimates that in his view a change has taken place in men's conception of what Christianity is and imports, and that it is only because of this change that the question suggested can be raised. Troeltsch does not hesitate to speak of this change as a veritable "transformation of Christianity." Formerly Christians have believed in a divine Christ "propitiating God and thus freeing men from the consequences of their infection with original sin." To raise the question of the historicity of Jesus from this standpoint would be simply to call in question the right of Christianity to exist. It is only when we have learned, like David Friedrich Strauss (in his Christian period), to distinguish between the principle of Christianity and the person of Christ, and have come to see that what we call Christianity is just "a particular faith in God, a peculiar knowledge of God, with its corresponding mode of life, or, as it is called, a religious idea, a religious principle,"—so that there is no historical redemptive work postulated in the background,—that we may ask ourselves with any meaning whether there exists any necessity for the assumption of an historical Jesus. Even on this ground, however, a negative answer is not to be taken for granted. There even exist some who have come so far,—to whom therefore "redemption is not something once for all completed in the work of Christ, and thereafter only to be applied to individuals, but an occurrence continually completing itself afresh in the action of God on the soul by means of the knowledge of God" wrought by faith,—to whom a negative answer is still impossible. This is because they "connect this redeeming faith-knowledge with the knowledge and recollection of the historical personality of Jesus, although this comes into consideration with them, not in its miraculous element, nor in its particular teachings, but only in the total effect of the religious personality." It is "the later, ecclesiastical Schleiermacher" that Troeltsch has in view here, and especially Ritschl and Herrmann. With them "all notion of a historical redemptive miracle, occurring once for all," indeed, is lacking; but with them also the faith-knowledge that constitutes Christianity is "bound to the historical personality of Christ, by which alone power or certitude is lent it." In this, he contends, there is betrayed lurking at the back of the brain a remnant of the old doctrine of original sin; there persists a notion "of the essential incapacity of men who do not know Christ for hearty faith in God." To such a conception, questioning of the historicity of Jesus were as fatal as to the old orthodoxy itself. Only when we occupy ground which allows no inward necessity for the assumption of an historical Jesus, can we discuss with any meaning whether the historical Jesus is indispensable to Christianity.

Troeltsch himself occupies this ground, and therefore admits that the indispensableness of Jesus to Christianity is to him a legitimate matter of debate. He holds very decided views, however, in the matter. Even on this ground he argues—and it is the chief purpose of his lecture to argue this—that Christianity cannot get along without Jesus. His argument is based on considerations derived from the history of religions and religious psychology, and amounts in general to the contention that religion is, after all said, a social affair and cannot persist without cultus and communion; while these require a rallying-centre, which must be envisaged as real; and this rallying-centre in the present stage of culture cannot be anything but Jesus Christ. The persistence of even this type of religious belief hangs thus on the historicity of Jesus, and whenever, if ever (Troeltsch thinks they will never), the results of historical research shall prove unfavorable to the historicity of Jesus, then the death-knell of even this type of religious faith is sounded. This is, he assures us, the last word of social-psychological research in the realm of religion.

The question thus defined and debated is, however, little more than an academic one. Troeltsch does not pretend that the extremely attenuated "Christianity" to which alone the question of the indispensableness of the historical Jesus has meaning, possesses vitality as a religion. Individuals may profess it and do profess it; he professes it himself; but the churches in which religious life is rich and powerful, are, he tells us, of a very different faith. We may be interested to know that even in this, its most attenuated form, "Christianity" cannot, in the opinion of one of our chief masters in the psychology and phenomenology of religion, dispense with Jesus. But the real question which presses for an answer is whether this very attenuated "Christianity," in which alone the question of the indispensableness of Jesus to Christianity can with any meaning be raised, possesses any just claim upon the name of Christianity. Its adherents are no doubt prompt in asserting their right to the name. But the allowance of their claim depends upon the prior question of what precisely Christianity is, and what kinds of "transformation" it can suffer without ceasing to be Christianity. If Christianity is only a particular way of conceiving God, with the emotional and volitional accompaniments and consequences of this way of conceiving God, then no doubt a particular way of conceiving God may claim to be Christianity,—that is, if it be the particular way of conceiving God which Christianity is. If Christianity, however, be anything more than just a way of conceiving God, it is hard to see what just claim a mere way of conceiving God can put in to the name.

We should not omit to note in passing that Troeltsch goes a step further than contending that Jesus is indispensable to Christianity even in that attenuated form of so-called Christianity to which he gives his adhesion. He contends that no other form of religion than this attenuated Christianity with Jesus enshrined at its centre can exist in the conditions of modern life. In a word, Jesus is to him indispensable to religion in the conditions of modern life. This is not, to be sure, quite the same as saying with Heinrich Weinel, that "after Jesus it is his religion or none." Troeltsch is not prepared to declare Christianity "the eternal religion," which can never be transcended. But he is prepared to insist that Christianity—of course, in the interpretation of Christianity which commends itself to him—is so bound up with, and gives such competent expression to, the religious side of the civilization of the Mediterranean basin, that so long as that civilization endures, so long must Christianity remain the only religion possible to civilized humanity. It is possible, of course, that the civilization of the Mediterranean basin may after a while be replaced by a still higher civilization; and then, no doubt, there will arise a new form of religious expression conformable to the new civilization. Christianity is thus not pronounced by Troeltsch the final, the absolute religion, but merely the only religion possible to the highest civilization as yet known to man. His defence of the indispensableness of Jesus means, then, only that we cannot in his opinion get along at present without Jesus. After a while—who can tell?—as we advance beyond our present stage of culture, we may advance also beyond Christianity as a possible religion, and beyond the need of Jesus as the religious rallying-point of men.

The question of course springs at once into the mind whether, in thus representing Christianity as merely the natural and therefore necessary religion for the civilization of the Mediterranean basis, and Jesus as indispensable only for the religion belonging to that civilization,—which is not final but may pass away,—Troeltsch has not rendered this Christianity impossible as a religion for himself at least—if not for the Mediterranean basin—and thus emancipated himself from Jesus as the indispensable rallying-point of his religion. He himself certainly thus assumes a standpoint above the Christianity which he conceives as—at least possibly—only a stage in the journey of man towards the absolute religion, and he cannot possibly belong inwardly to its life-world. Can he, then, look to Jesus, the inspiring centre of this life-world, as really indispensable to his own faith? Must he not stand as much above the need of the inspiration of Jesus as he stands above the religious life which Jesus inspires, and so by his own definition exclude himself from the Christian name? In any event, by his refusal to recognize the Christianity to which, he argues, Jesus is indispensably, as "the eternal religion," Troeltsch certainly takes his place among those who deny that Jesus is indispensable to the religion, if not of today, yet of tomorrow.

Meanwhile why should the definition of the essence of Christianity be so vexed? Why should there be so much controversy over the application of the name? There surely ought to be little difficulty in determining what Christianity is. We need not disturb ourselves greatly about the debate which has been somewhat vigorously prosecuted as to whether its definition should be derived from its New Testament presentation or from its whole historical manifestation. Impure as the development of Christianity has been, imperfect as has always been its manifestation, corrupt as has often been its expression, it has always presented itself to the world, as a whole, substantially under one unvarying form. Unquestionably, Christianity is a redemptive religion, having as its fundamental presupposition the fact of sin, felt both as guilt and as pollution, and offering as its central good, from which all other goods proceed, salvation from sin through an historical expiation wrought by the God-man Jesus Christ. The essence of Christianity has always been to its adherents the sinner's experience of reconciliation with God through the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ. According to the Synoptic tradition Jesus Himself represented Himself as having come to seek and to save that which is lost, and described His salvation as a ransoming of many by the gift of His life, embodying this conception, moreover, in the ritual act which He commanded His disciples to perform in remembrance of Him. Certainly His first followers with single-hearted unanimity proclaimed the great fact of redemption in the blood of Christ as the heart of their gospel: to them Jesus is the propitiation for sin, a sacrificial lamb without blemish, and all their message is summed up in the simple formula of "Jesus Christ and Him as crucified." Nor has the church He founded ever drifted away from this fundamental point of view, as witness the central place of the mass in the worship of its elder branches, and the formative place of justification by faith in Protestant life. No doubt parties have from time to time arisen who have wished to construe Christianity otherwise. But they have always occupied a place on the periphery of the Christian movement, and have never constituted its main stream.

We can well understand that one swirling aside in an eddy and yet wishing to think of himself as travelling with the current—or even perhaps as breaking for it a new and better channel—should attempt to define Christianity so widely or so vaguely as to make it embrace him also. The attempt has never been and can never be successful. He is a Christian, in the sense of the founders of the Christian religion, and in the sense of its whole historical manifestation as a world-phenomenon, who, conscious of his sin, and smitten by a sense of the wrath of God impending over him, turns in faith to Jesus Christ as the propitiation for his sins, through whose blood and righteousness he may be made acceptable to God and be received into the number of those admitted to communion with Him. If we demand the right to call ourselves Christians because it is by the teaching of Jesus that we have learned to know God as He really is, or because it is by his example that we have been led into a life of faithful trust in God, or because it is by the inspiration of His "inner life," dimly discerned through the obscuring legends which have grown up about Him, that we are quickened to a like religious hope and aspiration,—we are entering claims that have never been recognized and can never be recognized as valid by the main current of Christianity. Christianity as a world-movement is the body of those who have been redeemed from their sins by the blood of Jesus Christ, dying for them on the cross. The cross is its symbol; and in its heart sounds the great jubilation of the Apocalypse: "Unto Him that loveth us and loosed us from our sins by his blood; and he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father; to Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen."

A Christianity without redemption—redemption in the blood of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for sin—is nothing less than a contradiction in terms. Precisely what Christianity means is redemption in the blood of Jesus. No one need wonder therefore that, when redemption is no longer sought and found in Jesus, men should begin to ask whether there remains any real necessity for Jesus. We may fairly contend that the germ of Christless Christianity is present wherever a proper doctrine of redemption has fallen away or even has only been permitted to pass out of sight. Of course in the meantime some other function than proper redemption may be found for Jesus. We are not insensible, for example, of the importance of the function assigned to Him in, say, the Ritschlian theology; and we quite agree when Troeltsch urges that to the proper Ritschlians, therefore, Jesus is indispensable. But we cannot close our eyes to the artificiality of the Ritschlian construction, and we cannot put away the impression that the indispensable rôle assigned to Jesus, as it rests rather on inherited reverence for His person than on the logic of the system, is, in a word, only an interim-measure. Why should an influence from Jesus be needed to awake man to faith-knowledge? And how could such a creative influence be exerted by a personality so slightly known, or an "inner life" so vaguely discerned through the mists of time? Herrmann, for example, expressly denies that there is any direct communion of the believer with the exalted Christ; everything is mediated through the "community." All this, therefore, will easily fall away and the actual influence which begets faith be assigned, as Otto Ritschl, for instance, does assign it, to the "community," while to Jesus there is left little more than the rôle of first Christian. And so soon as Jesus becomes merely the first Christian, He at once, as Macintosh justly urges, ceases to be indispensable for subsequent Christians. Why should not they, as well as He, rise out of the void? He may be the first of the series: that is an accident. Being the first of the series He may have set an example which works powerfully through all subsequent time; He may even have left precepts and directions which smooth the path of all who would adventure the Christian walk with Him; above all He may have by His "inner life" of perfect trust in His Father become an inspiration which throbs down all the years. He may, in other words, be exceedingly useful. But indispensable? To be indispensable He must be something more than a teacher, an example, an inspiration. He must be a creator. And to be a creator, He must be and do something far more than the first Christian, living in realization of the fatherhood of God. Whenever Jesus is reduced in His person or work to the level of His "followers," His indispensableness is already in principle subverted and the seeds of a Christless Christianity are planted.

The application of this principle will, no doubt, carry us far. When Auguste Sabatier, for example, tells us that the whole of Christianity is summed up in the parables of the prodigal son and of the publican, he is intent only on abolishing from Christianity the idea of satisfaction. But does he not by necessary consequence with it abolish also Jesus Himself, so far as His indispensableness to the Christian religion is concerned? In point of fact, these parables have a Jesus in them as little as a satisfaction. Sabatier very naturally teaches us, therefore, that there is no uniqueness in Christ's work, nothing in it "isolated and incomprehensible." "The sufferings and death of the righteous and the good operate in the same way as the passion of Christ upon the conscience of the wicked"; "all God's servants" have stood by the side of Jesus as, along with Him and in the same sense (though not in the same degree), our saviours. We need not, however, journey so far from home for an example. When Horace Bushnell expends the first Part of his "Vicarious Sacrifice" in proving that there is "nothing superlative in vicarious sacrifice, or above the universal principles of right and duty," that in what Christ did, He did "neither more nor less than what the common standard of holiness and right requires," and what was "no way peculiar to him, save in degree," he has already thrown the door wide open for a Christless Christianity.62 He may himself be preoccupied in vindicating to Jesus some kind of uniqueness, if not in the nature, yet in the effect of His work. But this is not intrinsic to the system, and easily falls away. The assimilation of Christ to His followers in the nature of His work and the kind of effect wrought by it is logically fatal to His indispensableness to the religion of which He is still thought of as the founder.

There are other forms of teaching, also, that have enjoyed great vogue, in which the indispensableness of Jesus is, to say the least, not explicit. One such, oddly enough, finds incidental expression in a criticism by Shailer Mathews of Macintosh's separation of Christianity from Christ. Mathews very properly questions whether the issue raised by Macintosh's reasoning "does not really involve the momentous question as to whether we are not in the process of evolving a new phase of religion from historic Christianity"; and as properly remarks that the retention of the name Christianity for "what we regard as ideal," even though it is not historically traceable to Jesus or to Paul, "would not be the first time that the effort has been made to submerge New Testament teaching in general culture, and in much the same fashion of substituting dehistoricalized, speculative systems for a Christianity with historical content." He expresses hearty agreement with Macintosh, however, in one thing. It is this: that "saving faith, in the personal religious sense, does not wait upon the verdict of the higher criticism as to the historicity of Jesus." Why? Because, apart from the higher criticism, that is, apart from all scientific scrutiny of the gospel records, there is reason enough for trusting our all to Jesus? No. Because Jesus is not necessary to "saving faith, in the personal religious sense"! "Men are not saved by mere orthodoxy or heterodoxy," Mathews remarks,—inconsequently, since nobody ever supposed they were. But then he adds positively: "In the sense that their wills are one with God's, men who have never heard of Jesus have been and are to be saved."

The doctrine here enunciated is practically the doctrine which has played a large part in theological controversy—witness the "Andover debate" of a quarter of a century ago—under the name of the "essential Christ." According to it, men can exercise "saving faith" without any knowledge of Christ; that is to say, as Mathews suggests, their "religious faith, however imperfect," may "possess a quality" that makes them "one with those who through the clearer revelation and deeper certainty given by Jesus also trust God as fatherly and so partake of the divine spirit." In this very prevalent doctrine, there is obviously a very express preparation for a Christless Christianity. In the form given it by Mathews it has indeed already fairly passed over into Christless Christianity. He conceives the function of Jesus to be to induce trust in God as fatherly; and he conceives that men can exercise and do exercise a faith which has this "quality," apart from any action upon them by Jesus. This is already the announcement that Jesus may be dispensed with—all that He is and all that He does—for some. Some attain saving faith without Jesus; some—no doubt, more easily—with Him. More commonly a higher function is attributed to Jesus. He has, it is said, made atonement for sin; on the basis of this atonement men may be saved. He has shed down His Spirit, quickening faith in men; their faith, therefore, though exercised in ignorance of Him, has its warrant, and its source, and its effect from Him. Their salvation is accordingly from Christ, and by Christ, and in Christ, though they are ignorant of all this. In proportion as this higher doctrine is approached, in that proportion is the preparation made for a Christless Christianity less explicit. But even in it, there is an implicit preparation for it. A Christ of whom you are unconscious is at best in some sense a Christ who does not exist for you: and if everything He may be for you depends upon your consciousness of him, a Christ of whom you are unconscious does not exist at all for you. A salvation apart from knowledge of Christ is always liable to be conceived as a salvation apart from Christ. In Mathews' construction, though he is in the act of repelling a Christless Christianity, it actually becomes salvation without Christ. He speaks of it only with reference to some. But if some may thus be saved without Christ, why not all? There seems no compelling reason, on Mathews' ground, why Jesus should be proclaimed, or why He should exist, at all.

We may learn from Otto Ritschl that a very similar line of thought may be developed on Ritschlian premises. Ritschl is examining W. Herrmann's doctrine of faith. According to Herrmann, man finds the living God not within himself, where mysticism bids him seek Him, but solely in the personal life of Jesus. Christian faith is thus made to carry with it "a clear consciousness of its conditioning through the personal life of Jesus." This, Ritschl thinks, is too narrow a view. He asks:

"What are we to hold respecting such Christians as lack a clear consciousness of the inner possessions for which they are indebted to Christ? Or is it also deficiency in complete faith when a Christian in prayer to his God and Father seeks and finds firm support in the cares and tasks and strifes of life, without at the same time recalling Christ as the sole revelation of this God; although he has failed in this perhaps only because he lacked the spiritual energy to grasp the religious conception of God and that of Christ in one and the same prayer-idea? Can we doubt that such Christians have faith in the full sense, because the theoretical consideration leads to conceiving Christian faith in general not apart from a clear consciousness of its conditioning through Christ's personal life?"

It is plain fact, he urges, that the fruits of faith are reaped where this clear consciousness is not present; and it is equally plain fact that this clear consciousness can be present and no fruits of faith show themselves: the question obtrudes itself "whether the conscious but unfruitful or the fruitful but unconscious faith is the more valuable." Clear consciousness must obviously be looked upon as only occasional, as "a special charism"; some have it, in others it is "latent or undeveloped."

"Wherever world-overcoming faith, recognizable in its fruits, is found, it must be referred back to the influence of Christ, whether the believing subject is conscious of this connection or not. On the other hand, it should be recognized, in opposition to Herrmann, that the faith which does not bring with it a clear consciousness of its conditioning through Christ, but which nevertheless is actually conditioned through Christ's operations, is only mediately grounded on the personal life of Jesus. Immediately, however, the ground of such faith is the Christian life practised in the sense of Christ in the community. And only in this also do the vital activities of Christ propagate themselves from generation to generation."

Jesus may have been needed, then, to set the course of Christian life going in the world. After that He may safely be forgotton. There is no obvious reason why He may not be forgotten by the whole Christian community,—why the memory of Him may not fade entirely out of the world,—and still faith be continued through the influence of the faith-exercising community; just as motion once induced in the first of a series of balls in contact with one another may be transmitted to the last ball, though it is touched actually only by the penultimate one. A fully developed Christless Christianity may thus grow out of Christ Himself; if you will only permit us to think of Christ as providing merely the initial impulse and then withdrawing out of sight.

It has been thought worth while to bring into view these remoter tendencies of thought making towards Christless Christianity, that the numerous pathways may be kept in mind along which men may travel, from depreciation of the function of Christ in "redemption," through neglect or forgetfulness of Him, to actual denial of His indispensable place in the religious life of Christians. These pathways, while very direct, are also no doubt often somewhat long. That is to say, the passage from unconsciousness to conscious disregard of Christ is made logically much more quickly than it is practically. From the practical point of view the distance that separates the conscious from the merely virtual denial of the indispensableness of Jesus to faith is beyond doubt immense. The phenomenon which now faces us is that this immense space has been actually overstepped by many about us. There are many still calling themselves Christians who have come to the pass that, not inadvertently or by way of logical implication merely, but in the most heedful manner in the world, and by express declaration, they turn away from Jesus as no longer possessing supreme significance for their religious life. They deliberately pronounce Him unnecessary for their faith, and seek its source and ground and content elsewhere. No doubt, they exhibit differences among themselves. George B. Foster, who surely ought to know, distinguishes two varieties. He says:

"To-day there are two kinds of spirits which dream of a Christianity without Christ: the weak and the strong. The weak are those who have received all the priceless blessings which we possess in Christianity, only at third or fourth hand. They have been refreshed, nourished, led by these blessings—whence they came is of little concern to them.… The others are the strong. They know very well that Christianity sprang from Christ. But one does not now need him longer. Were they to be quite frank, they would say that he, not entirely unlike miracles, had come to be something of a hindrance.… But would it not poorly serve the expansion of Christianity, the pervasion of the world with Christianity, and one's own peace and joy in Christianity, to drain off the fountain? Is not their view much the same as if we were to sever the connection of our arteries with the heart whence the blood comes?"

The criticism is apt, from the Christian point of view: apt, though not quite adequate. From the Christian point of view it may very properly be said (though this is far from all that needs to be said) that those who are advising us that Christianity can get along very well without Christ are very much like men sitting by a brookside and reasoning that since we have the brook we do not need the spring from which it flows, and may readily admit the doubt whether there is a spring. If even this criticism does not seem valid to our Christless Christians, that can only be because they no longer occupy the Christian point of view.

The point which needs particular pressing lies, indeed, just here,—that in thus separating themselves from Jesus as the source and ground and content of their faith, they sever themselves from Christianity and proclaim themselves of another religion. By some odd tangle of thought they may still declare themselves Christians, though they no longer hold to Christ or look to Him for redemption from their sins. They have learned, we are told, from David Friedrich Strauss (in his Christian period) to distinguish between the principle of Christianity and the person of Christ. The discovery of this distinction was, we know, with Strauss "the first step which counts" towards we know what end. May we not commend to those who follow him in this first step the example which he set them when he opened his eyes at last and saw whither it really had conducted him?

"Therefore, my conviction is that, if we are not dealing in evasion, if we do not wish to tack and trim, if we do not desire to say Yea, yea, and Nay, nay,—in short, if we speak like honest and candid men, we must confess that we are no longer Christians."

Why should there be any hesitation in the matter? A Christianity to which Christ is indifferent is, as a mere matter of fact, no Christianity at all. For Christianity, in the core of the matter, consists in just, "Jesus Christ and Him as crucified." Can he be of the body who no longer holds to the Head?

What is, after all, the fundamental difference between Christianity and other "positive" religions? Does it not turn just on this—that the founders of the other religions point out the way to God while Christ presents Himself as that Way? It is primary teaching that we receive, when we are told:

"Buddha and Confucius, Zarathustra and Mohammed are no doubt the first confessors of the religions which have been founded by them, but they are not the content of these religions, and they stand in an external and to a certain extent accidental relation to them. Their religions could remain the same even though their names were forgotten, or their persons replaced by others. In Christianity, however, it is altogether different. To be sure the notion is occasionally given expression that Christ too does not desire to be the only mediator and He would be quite content that His name should be forgotten, if only His principles and spirit lived on in the community. But others who for themselves have wholly broken with Christianity have in an unpartisan fashion denied and refuted these notions. Christianity stands to the person of Christ in a wholly different relation from that of the religions of the peoples to the persons by whom they have been founded. Jesus is not the first confessor of the religion which bears His name. He was not the first and most eminent Christian, but He holds in Christianity a wholly different place.… Christ is Christianity itself; He stands not outside of it but in its centre; without His name, person and work, there is no Christianity left. In a word, Christ does not point out the way to salvation; He is the Way itself."

PART II:

THE WORK OF CHRIST AS REDEEMER

Redeemer and Redemption

There is no one of the titles of Christ which is more precious to Christian hearts than "Redeemer." There are others, it is true, which are more often on the lips of Christians. The acknowledgment of our submission to Christ as our Lord, the recognition of what we owe to Him as our Saviour, - these things, naturally, are most frequently expressed in the names we call Him by. "Redeemer," however, is a title of more intimate revelation than either "Lord" or "Saviour." It gives expression not merely to our sense that we have received salvation from Him, but also to our appreciation of what it cost Him to procure this salvation for us. It is the name specifically of the Christ of the cross. Whenever we pronounce it, the cross is placarded before our eyes and our hearts are filled with loving remembrance not only that Christ has given us salvation, but that He paid a mighty price for it.

It is a name, therefore, which is charged with deep emotion, and is to be found particularly in the language of devotion. Christian song is vocal with it. How it appears in Christian song, we may see at once from old William Dunbar's invocation, "My King, my Lord, and my Redeemer sweit." Or even from Shakespeare's description of a lost loved-one as "The precious image of our dear Redeemer." Or from Christina Rossetti's,

"Up Thy Hill of Sorrows

Thou all alone,

Jesus, man's Redeemer,

Climbing to a Throne."

Best of all perhaps from Henry Vaughan's ode which he inscribes "To my most merciful, my most loving, and dearly loved REDEEMER; the ever blessed, the only HOLY and JUST ONE, JESUS CHRIST, The Son of the living God, and the Sacred Virgin Mary," and in which he sings to

"My dear Redeemer, the world's light,

And life too, and my heart's delight."

Terms of affection gather to it. Look into your hymns. Fully eight and twenty of those in our own "Hymnal" celebrate our Lord under the name of "Redeemer."2

Let our whole soul an offering be

To our Redeemer's Name;

While we pray for pardoning grace,

Through our Redeemer's Name;

Almighty Son, Incarnate Word,

Our Prophet, Priest, Redeemer, Lord;

To that dear Redeemer's praise

Who the covenant sealed with blood;

O for a thousand tongues to sing

My dear Redeemer's praise;

To our Redeemer's glorious Name

Awake the sacred song;

Intercessor, Friend of sinners,

Earth's Redeemer, plead for me;

All hail, Redeemer, hail,

For Thou hast died for me;

Let us learn the wondrous story

Of our great Redeemer's birth;

Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid;

My dear Redeemer and my Lord;

All glory, laud and honor

To Thee Redeemer, King;

Your Redeemer's conflict see;

Maker and Redeemer,

Life and Health of all;

Our blest Redeemer, ere He breathed

His tender, last farewell;

Here the Redeemer's welcome voice

Spreads heavenly peace around;

The church our blest Redeemer saved

With His own precious blood;

The slain, the risen Son,

Redeemer, Lord alone;

The path our dear Redeemer trod

May we, rejoicing, tread;

Till o'er our ransomed nature

The Lamb for sinners slain,

Redeemer, King, Creator,

In bliss returns to reign;

O the sweet wonders of that cross

Where my Redeemer loved and died;

Once, the world's Redeemer, dying,

Bore our sins upon the Tree;

Redeemer, come: I open wide

My heart to thee;

I know that my Redeemer lives;

For, every good

In the Redeemer came;

A heart resigned, submissive, meek,

My great Redeemer's throne;

Jesus, merciful Redeemer;

Father, and Redeemer, hear.

From our earliest childhood the preciousness of this title has been impressed upon us. In "The Shorter Catechism," as the most precise and significant designation of Christ, from the point of view of what He has done for us, it takes the place of the more usual "Saviour," which never occurs in that document. Thus there is permanently imprinted on the hearts of us all, the great fact that "the only Redeemer of God's elect is the Lord Jesus Christ"; through whom, in the execution of His offices of a Prophet, of a Priest, and of a King, God delivers us out of the estate of sin and misery and brings us into an estate of salvation.3 The same service is performed for our sister, Episcopalian, communion by its "Book of Common Prayer." The title "Redeemer " is applied in it to Christ about a dozen times:4

O God the Son, Redeemer of the world;

Our blessed Saviour and Redeemer;

Joyfully receive Him for our Redeemer;

Jesus Christ, our Mediator and Redeemer;

The merits of our Saviour and Redeemer;

O Lord, our Saviour and Redeemer;

Jesus Christ, our only Saviour and Redeemer;

Our Redeemer and the author of everlasting life;

Our Redeemer and the author of everlasting life;

O Lord our strength and our Redeemer;

Only Mediator and Redeemer.

This constant pregnant use of the title "Redeemer" to express our sense of what we owe to Christ, has prevailed in the Church for, say, a millennium and a half. It comes with a little shock of surprise to learn that it has not always prevailed. In the first age of the Church, however, the usage had not become so characteristic of Christians as to stamp itself upon their literary remains. So far as appears, the first occurrence of the epithet "Redeemer" as applied to Christ in extant Christian literature is in Justin Martyr's "Dialogue with Trypho the Jew," which was written about the middle of the second century.5 And it does not seem to occur frequently for a couple of centuries more. This is not to say that it was not in use among Christians during this early period. When Eusebius opens the tenth Book of his "Church History" with the words, "Thanks for all things be given unto God the omnipotent Ruler and King of the universe, and the greatest thanks to Jesus Christ, the Saviour and Redeemer of our souls," it is quite clear that he is not describing Christ by an unwonted name. Even more clear is it that Justin is not inventing a new name for Christ when he tells Trypho that Christians depend upon Jesus Christ to preserve them from the demons which they had served in the time of their heathenism, "for we call Him Helper and Redeemer, the power of whose hame even the demons do fear." Indeed, he explicitly tells us that the Christians were accustomed to employ this name of Christ: "we call Him Redeemer" he says. Nevertheless it seems hardly likely that so little trace of the use of this designation would have been left in the extant literature of the day, if it had occupied then quite the place it has occupied in later ages. This applies also to the New Testament. For, despite the prominence in the New Testament of the idea of redemption wrought by Christ, the designation "Redeemer" is not once applied to Christ in the New Testament. The word "Redeemer" occurs, indeed, only a single time in the New Testament, and then as a title of Moses, not of Christ, - although it is applied to Moses only as a type of Christ and presupposes its employment of Christ.6

The comparative rarity of the use of this title of Christ in the first age of the Church is probably due, in part at least, to the intense concreteness of the Greek term (Lutrwth,j) which our "Redeemer" represents, and the definiteness with which it imputes a particular function to our Lord, as Saviour. This gave it a sharply analytical character, which, perhaps, militated against its adoption into wide devotional use until the analytical edges had been softened a little by habit. A parallel may perhaps be found in the prevalence in the New Testament of the locution, "He died in our behalf" over the more analytically exact, "He died in our stead." The latter occurs; occurs frequently enough to show that it expresses the fact as it lay in the minds of the New Testament writers. But these writers expressed themselves instinctively rather in the former mode because it was a more direct expression of the sense of benefit received, which was the overpowering sentiment which filled their hearts. That Christ died instead of them was the exact truth, analytically stated; that He died for their sake was the broad fact which suffused their hearts with loving emotion.

The word "Redeemer" is of course of Latin origin, and we owe it, together with its cognates "redemption," "redeem," "redeemed," to the nomenclature of Latin theology, and ultimately to the Latin Bible. These Latin words, however, do not, at their best, exactly reproduce the group of Greek words which they represent in the New Testament, although they are underlaid by the same fundamental idea of purchase. Etymologically, redimo, 'redeem,' means to buy back, while the Greek term which it renders in the New Testament (lutrou/sqai) means rather to buy out, or, to employ its exact equivalent, to ransom. Our English word "ransom" is, of course, philologically speaking, only a doublet of "redemption." But, in losing the significant form of that word, it has more completely than that word lost also the suggestion that the purchase which it intimates is a re-purchase. It might have been better, therefore, if, instead of "redemption," "to redeem," "redeemed," "redeemer," we had employed as the representatives of the Greek terms (lutrou/sqai( lu,trwsij( avpolu,trwsij( lutrwth,j) "ransom," "to ransom," "ransomed," "ransomer."

Of these, only the noun, "ransom" has actually a place in the English New Testament, - in the great passage in which our Lord Himself declares that He "came, not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many" (Mt. xx. 28 = Mk. x. 45), and in its echo in the scarcely less great declaration of Paul that the one mediator between God and men, Himself man, Christ Jesus, "gave Himself a ransom for all" (I Tim. ii. 6). Nevertheless these terms, emphatically defining, like the Greek terms which they represent, the work of Christ in terms of ransoming, have made a place for themselves in the language of Christian devotion only a little inferior to that of those which somewhat less exactly define it in terms of redeeming. The noun of agent, "Ransomer," is used, it is true, comparatively rarely; although its use, as a designation of Christ, seems actually to have preceded in English literature that of "Redeemer," or even of its forerunner, the now obsolete "Redemptor." The earliest citation for "Redeemer" given by the "Oxford Dictionary," at all events, comes from the middle of the fifteenth century7 - of "Redemptor" from the late fourteenth8 - while "Ransomer" is cited from the "Cursor Mundi," some half a century earlier: "Christ and king and ransconer . . ." "Ransomer" is found side by side with "Redeemer" in William Dunbar's verses at the opening of the sixteenth century: "Thy Ransonner with woundis fyve"; and is placed literally by its side by John Foxe in the "Book of Martyrs" in the middle of that century, apparently as more closely defining the nature of the saving act of Him whom Foxe calls "the onlie sauior, redeemer and raunsomer of them which were lost in Adam our forefather."

The other forms have, however, been more widely used in all ages of English literature. The character of their earlier use may be illustrated again from William Dunbar who tells us that "the heaven's king is clad in our nature, Us from the death with ransom to redress"; or from a couple of very similar instances from even earlier verses. In one, Christ is described as Him "that deyid up on the rood, To raunsoun synfull creature."9 In the other He is made Himself to say

"Vpon a crosse nayled I was for the,

Soffred deth to pay the rawnison."10

Milton, our theological poet by way of eminence, not only speaks of Christ as, in rising, raising with Himself, "His brethren, ransom'd with His own dear life," but discriminatingly describes Him as "man's friend, his mediator, his design'd both ransom and redeemer voluntarie." "We learn with wonder," says Cowper, almost in Milton's manner, "how this world began, who made, who marr'd, and who has ransom'd man." Or, coming at once to our own days Tennyson can put upon the lips of a penitent sinner, the desire to minister (as he expresses it) "to poor sick people, richer in His eyes who ransom'd us, and haler too, than I" Let us appeal, however, again to our hymns.

Surprisingly few instances appear, in the hymns gathered in our own "Hymnal" at least, of the use of the noun "ransom," for which direct warrant is given in the text of our English New Testament. Only, it appears, these three:11

Father of heaven, whose love profound

A ransom for our souls hath found;

I'd sing the precious blood He spilt

My ransom from the dreadful guilt

Of sin and wrath divine;

Jesus, all our ransom paid,

All Thy Father's will obeyed,

Hear us, Holy Jesus.

But as over against the dozen times that the word "redeemed" occurs12 in this "Hymnal" we have counted no fewer than twenty-two times in which the word "ransomed" occurs. In a couple of these instances, the two words stand together:13

He crowns thy life with love,

When ransomed from the grave;

He that redeemed my soul from hell,

Hath sovereign power to save.

And when, redeemed from sin and hell,

With all the ransomed throng I dwell.

The others run as follows:14

Then be His love in Christ proclaimed

With all our ransomed powers;

Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,

Who like me His praise should sing;

Sing on your heavenly way,

Ye ransomed sinners, sing;

Ye ransomed from the fall,

Hail Him who saves you by His grace;

Bring our ransomed souls at last

Where they need no star to guide;

One, the light of God's own presence

O'er His ransomed people shed;

A wretched sinner, lost to God,

But ransomed by Emanuel's blood;

Thy ransomed host in glory;

My ransomed soul shall be

Through all eternity

Offered to thee;

Our ransomed spirits rise to Thee;

Let none whom He hath ransomed fail to greet Him;

When we, a ransomed nation,

Thy scepter shall obey;

Till o'er our ransomed nature

The Lamb for sinners slain,

Redeemer, King, Creator,

In bliss returns to reign;

Till all the ransomed number

Fall down before the throne;

Blessed are the sons of God,

They are bought with Christ's own blood,

They are ransomed from the grave;

Till all the ransomed church of God

Be saved to sin no more;

Thy blood, O Lord, was shed

That I might ransomed be;

Where streams of living water flow

My ransomed soul He leadeth;

His laud and benediction

Thy ransomed people raise.

It does not appear, then, that Christian emotion would have found any more difficulty in gathering about the term "ransom" and its derivatives, and consecrating them as the channel of its expression, than it has found in gathering around and consecrating "redeem" and its derivatives. Had these terms taken their proper place in our English New Testament as the exact renderings of the Greek terms now less precisely rendered by "redeem" and its derivatives, and had they from the English New Testament entered into our familiar Christian speech, there is no reason to doubt that "Christ our Ransomer" would now be as precious to the Christian heart as " Christ our Redeemer" is. There is certainly no one who will not judge with old John Brown that "a Ransomer," especially one who has ransomed us "at such a rate," "will be most tender" of His ransomed ones;15 and His ransomed ones, realizing what His ransoming of them involved, may be trusted - if we may take the language of our hymns as indications - to speak of Him with the deepest gratitude and love. Nor should we consider it a small gain that then the sense of the New Testament representations would have been conveyed to us more precisely and with their shades of meaning and stresses of emphasis more clearly and sharply presented. After all is said, the New Testament does not set forth the saving work of Christ as a redemption, but as a ransoming; and does not present Him to us therefore so much as our Redeemer as our Ransomer; and it is a pity that we have been diverted by the channels through which we have historically received our religious phraseology from the adoption and use in our familiar speech of the more exact terminology.

One of the gains which would have accrued to us had this more exact terminology become our current mode of speech concerning our Lord's saving action, is that we should then have been measurably preserved from a danger which has accompanied the use of "redeem" and its derivatives to describe it - a danger which has nowadays become very acute - of dissipating in our thought of it all that is distinctive in our Lord's saving action. We are not saying, of course, that "ransom," any more than other terms, is immune from that disease of language by which, in the widening application of terms, they suffer a progressive loss of their distinctive meaning. But "ransom" has, in point of fact, retained with very great constancy its intrinsic connotation of purchase. It may possibly be that, in an extreme extension of its application, it is occasionally employed in the loose sense of merely "to rescue." The "Standard Dictionary" gives that as one of its definitions, marking it as "archaic"; though the "Oxford Dictionary" supplies no citations supporting it. At all events, the word does not readily lend itself to evacuating extensions of application; and when we say "to ransom" our minds naturally fix themselves on a price paid as the means of the deliverance intimated. The word is essentially a modal word; it emphasizes the means by which the effect it intimates is accomplished, and does not exhaust itself merely in declaring the effect. The same, of course, may be said in principle of "redeem." But this word has suffered far more from attrition of meaning than "ransom," and indeed had already lost the power inevitably to suggest purchase before it was adopted into specifically Christian use. We shall not forget, of course, what we have just noted, that "ransom" and "redeem" are at bottom one word; that they are merely two English forms of the Latin redimo. It is, no doubt, inexact, therefore, to speak of the usage of the Latin redimo and its derivatives as if it belonged to the early history of "redeem" more than to that of "ransom." Nevertheless it is convenient and not really misleading to do so, when we have particularly in mind the use of the two words in Christian devotional speech. "To redeem" has come into our English New Testament and our English religious usage in direct and continuous descent from its previous usage in Latin religious speech and the Latin Bible; while "to ransom" has come in from without, bringing with it its own set of implications, fixed through a separate history. And what needs to be said is that "to ransom" has quite firmly retained its fixed sense of securing a release by the payment of a price, while "to redeem" had already largely lost this sense when it was first applied in the Latin New Testament to render Greek terms, the very soul of which was this intimation of the payment of a price, and needed to reacquire this emphasis through the influence of these terms shining through it; and that it moreover continues to be employed in general usage today in very wide and undistinctive senses which naturally react more or less injuriously upon the particular meaning which it is employed in Christian usage to convey.16

The Latin verb redimo already in its classical usage was employed not only, in accordance with its composition, in the sense of "to buy back," and not merely more broadly in the sense of "to buy," - whether to "buy off" or "to buy up"; but, also in more extended applications still, in the senses simply of "to release" or "rescue," "to acquire" or "obtain," or even "to obviate" or "avert." It had acquired, indeed, a special sense of "to undertake," "to contract," "to hire" or "to farm." In accordance with this special sense, its derivative, redemptor, in all periods of the language, was used, as the synonym of the less common conductor, of a contractor, undertaker, purveyor, farmer, - as when Cicero speaks of the redemptor who had contracted to build a certain column, or Pliny of the redemptor who farmed the tolls of a bridge. When Christ was called the Redemptor, then, there was some danger that the notion conveyed to Latin ears might be nearer that which is conveyed to us by a Sponsor or a Surety (the seventeenth century divines spoke freely of Christ as our "Undertaker") than that of a Ransomer; and this danger was obviated only by the implication of the Greek terms which this and its companion Latin terms represented and by which, and the contexts natural to them, they were held to their more native significance, not, indeed, of buying back, but of buying off. The persistence of the secular use of these terms, parallel with the religious, but with a more or less complete neglect of their original implication of purchase - through the whole period of their use in Latin, and later of the use of their descendants in English - has constituted a perpetual danger that they would, by assimilation, lose their specific implication of purchase in their religious usage also. Obviously in these circumstances they cannot throw up an effective barrier against the elimination from them of the idea of purchase even in their religious applications, on the setting in of any strong current of thought and feeling in that direction. Men who have ceased to think of the work of Christ in terms of purchasing, and to whom the whole conception of His giving His life for us as a ransom, or of His pouring out His blood as a price paid for our sins, has become abhorrent, feel little difficulty, therefore, in still speaking of Him as our Redeemer, and of His work as a Redemption, and of the Christianity which He founded as a Redemptive Religion. The ideas connected with purchase are not so inseparably attached to these terms in their instinctive thought that the linguistic feeling is intolerably shocked by the employment of them with no implication of this set of ideas. Such an evacuation of these great words, the vehicles thus far of the fundamental Christian confession, of their whole content as such, is now actually going on about us. And the time may be looked forward to in the near future when the words "Redeemer" "redemption" "redeem" shall have ceased altogether to convey the ideas which it has been thus far their whole function in our religious terminology to convey.

What has thus been going on among us has been going on at a much more rapid pace in Germany, and the process has reached a much more advanced stage there than here. German speech was much less strongly fortified against it than ours. It has been the misfortune of the religious terminology of Germany, that the words employed by it to represent the great ransoming language of the New Testament are wholly without native implication of purchase. Redeem, redemption, Redeemer, at least in their fundamental etymological suggestion, say purchase as emphatically as the Greek terms, built up around the notion of ransom, which they represent; and they preserve this implication in a large section of their usage. The German erlösen, Erlösung, Erlöser, on the contrary, contain no native suggestion of purchase whatever; and are without any large secular usage in which such an implication is distinctly conveyed.17 They mean in themselves just deliver, deliverance, Deliverer, and they are employed nowhere, apart from their religious application, with any constant involvement of the mode in which the deliverance is effected. One of their characteristic usages, we are told by Jacob Grimm, is as the standing expression in the Märchen for the act of disenchanting (equivalent to entzaubern) ; in such phrases, for example, as "the princess is now erlöst," "the serpent can be erlöst by a kiss," "at twelve o'clock they were all erlöst."18 If you will turn over the pages of the brother Grimm's "Kinder und Haus-Märchen," you will come about the middle of the book upon the tale of "The King of the Golden Mountain," and may read in it of how a young merchant's son comes one day to a magnificent castle and finds in it nothing but a serpent. "The serpent, however," we read on, "was a bewitched maiden, who rejoiced when she saw him and said to him, 'Art thou come, my Erlöser? I have already waited twelve years for thee, this kingdom is bewitched and thou must erlösen it."' A still more instructive passage may be met with a few pages earlier, in the tale of "The Lark." There, when the traveller found himself in the clutches of a lion, he begged to be permitted to ransom (loskaufen) himself with a great sum, and so to save (retten) himself; but the lion himself, who was, of course, an enchanted prince, was - at the proper time and by the proper means - neither ransomed nor saved, but simply erlöst. Erlösen, Erlösung, Erlöser of themselves awaken in the consciousness of the hearer no other idea than that of deliverance; and although, in religious language, they may have acquired suggestions of purchase by association - through their employment as the representatives of the Greek terms of ransoming and the contexts of thought into which they have thus been brought, - these do not belong to them intrinsically and fall away at once when external supports are removed.

We cannot feel surprise accordingly, when we meet in recent German theological discussion - as we repeatedly do - an express distinction drawn between Loskaufung, "ransoming," as a narrow term intimating the manner in which a given deliverance is effected, and Erlösung, "deliverance," as a broad term, declaring merely the fact of deliverance, with no intimation whatever of the mode by which it is effected. Thus, for example, Paul Ewald commenting on Eph. i. 7, remarks19 that there is no reason why avpolu,trwsij should be taken there as meaning, "ransoming" (Loskaufung), rather than "in the more general sense of Erlösung," that is to say, of "deliver ance." Similarly A. Seeberg speaks20 of avpolu,trwsij as having lost in the New Testament its etymological significance, and come to mean, as he says, "nothing more than Erlösung," that is, "deliverance." And again G. Hollmann declares21 that the Hebrew verb hd'p' while meaning literally "to ransom" (loskaufen), yet, in the majority of the passages in which it occurs, means simply "to liberate," "to deliver" (befreien, erlösen); that is to say, "to free," "to liberate," and not "to ransom," are in his mind synonymous with erlösen. We are not concerned for the moment with the rightness, or the wrongness, of the opinions expressed by these writers with respect to the meaning of the Biblical terms which they are discussing. What concerns us now is only that, in endeavoring to fix their meaning, these writers expressly discriminate the term erlösen from loskaufen, and expressly assign to it the wide meaning "to deliver," and thus bring it into exact synonymy with such other non-modal words as "to free," "to liberate." We may speculate as to what might have been the effect on the course of German religious thought if, from the beginning, some exact reproductions of the Greek words built up around the idea of ransom - such as say loskaufen, Loskaufung, Loskaufer, - had been adopted as their representatives in the pages of the German New Testament, and, consequent upon that, in the natural expression of the religious thought and feeling of German Christians. But we can scarcely doubt that it has been gravely injurious to it, that, in point of fact, a loose terminology, importing merely deliverance, has taken the place of the more exact Greek terms, in the expression of religious thought and feeling; and thus German Christians have been habituated to express their conceptions of Christ's saving act in language which left wholly unnoted the central fact that it was an act of purchase.

The way to the reversion which has thus taken place of late in German religious speech, from the narrower significance which had long been attached in Christian usage to the word Erlösen, "ransoming," to its wider, native sense, "deliverance," was led - like the way to so many other things which have acted disintegratingly upon Christian conceptions - by Schleiermacher. So, at least, Julius Kaftan tells us. "Schleiermacher," says he,22 "explained the peculiar nature of Christianity by means of the notion of Erlösung. Christianity is the religion in which every thing is related to the Erlösung accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth. It dates from this that the word is employed by us in a comprehensive sense. We say of the Lord that He is our Erlöser. We sum up what He has brought us in this word, Erlösung." Kaftan himself is of the opinion that justice is scarcely done to the definition of Christianity when it is thus identified with Erlösung, deliverance, taken in the wide, undifferentiated sense given it by Schleiermacher, and after him by the so-called "Liberal theology." A closer definition, he thinks, is needed. But it is very significant that he seeks this closer definition by emphasizing not the mode in which the deliverance is wrought, but rather the thing from which the deliverance is effected. "The word Erlösung," he says, "is of a formal nature. That it may have its full sense, there must be added that from which we are erlöst." This he declares is, in the Christian, the New Testament conception, the world. And so, he goes on to assert with great emphasis, "The fundamental idea of Christianity is Erlösung from the world."

We are not concerned here with the justice of the opinion thus expressed. We are not even concerned for the moment with the assimilation which results from this opinion of Christianity with certain other religions, the fundamental idea of which is deliverance from the world. We pause only in passing to note that Kaftan explicitly admits that it was "the history of religion which opened his eyes to the fact that in Christianity as in other religions of deliverance (Erlösungsreligionen) Erlösung from the world is the chief and fundamental conception." What we are for the moment interested in is the clearness with which Kaftan ascribes to the word Erlösung the wide sense of "deliverance," with no implication whatever of "ransoming." Christianity, it is said, like other religions of high grade, is an Erlösungsreligion, a religion of deliverance. "We have today," we read,23 "attained a wider survey of the religious life of humanity, a wider one, I mean, than that of the older teachers. We have learned that even outside of Christianity, whether really or supposedly, there is something like Erlösung (deliverance.) From this the arrangement has resulted, in the classification of religions, that we designate the highest stage of the religious life, that of the spiritual religions, also that of the Erlösungsreligionen (religions of deliverance)." That is to say, there is a class of religions, - no doubt, it embraces only the highest, the spiritual, religions, - which may justly be called Erlösungsreligionen, religions of deliverance, and Christianity belongs to this class. When we speak of Erlösung with reference to Christianity, we mean the same kind of a thing which we mean when we speak of it with reference to these other religions. As one of the Erlösungsreligionen (religions of deliverance) Christianity like the rest offers man deliverance. In point of fact, the deliverance which Christianity offers, according to Kaftan, is just a subjective change of mind and heart; he can write currently such a phrase as "Erlösung oder Wiedergeburt" (deliverance or regeneration.24) Erlösung (deliverance) in other words, as applied to describe the benefits conferred by Christianity, has come to mean for him just the better ethical life of Christians.

The classification of religions of which Kaftan avails himself in this discussion is derived ultimately from Hermann Siebeck, whose "Hand-book of the Philosophy of Religion" enjoys great vogue among Germans of Ritschlian tendency. This classification has not, however, commended itself universally. Many, like C. P. Tiele for example, strongly object to the distinguishing of a class of Erlösungsreligionen (religions of deliverance), which is placed at the apex of the series of religions. In reality, they say, all religions are Erlösungsreligionen (religions of deliverance). Precisely what religion is, always and everywhere, is a means of deliverance from some evil or other, felt as such. Does not the proverb say, not lehrt beten - a sense of need is the mother of all religion?25 The designation Erlösungsreligionen (religions of deliverance) has, however, evidently come to stay, whether it be taken discriminatingly as the designation of a particular class of religions, or merely descriptively as a declaration of the essential nature of all religions. And it is rapidly becoming the accepted way of speaking of Christianity to call it an Erlösungsreligion - a religion of deliverance, - whether it is meant thereby to assign it to a class or merely to indicate its nature. The point to be noted is that Erlösung is employed in these phrases in its looser native sense of deliverance, not in its narrower, acquired sense of ransoming. When Christianity is declared to be an Erlösungsreligion all that is meant is that it offers like all other religions, or very eminently like some other religions, a deliverance of some kind or other to men.

What gives this importance for us, is that these phrases have passed over from German into English, partly through the translation into English of the German books which employ them, partly by the adoption of the phrases themselves by native English writers for use in their own discussions. And in passing over into English, these phrases have not been exactly rendered with a care to reproducing their precise sense in unambiguous English, but have been mechanically transferred into what are supposed to be the corresponding conventional English equivalents for the terms used.26 Thus we have learned in these last days to speak very freely of "redemptive religions" or "religions of redemption," and it has become the fashion to describe Christianity as a "redemptive religion" or a "religion of redemption," - while yet the conception which lies in the mind is not that of redemption in the precise sense, but that of deliverance in its broadest connotation. This loose German usage has thus infected our own, and is cooperating with the native influences at work in the same direction, to break down the proper implications of our English redemptive terminology.27

You see, that what we are doing today as we look out upon our current religious modes of speech, is assisting at the death bed of a word. It is sad to witness the death of any worthy thing, - even of a worthy word. And worthy words do die, like any other worthy thing - if we do not take good care of them. How many worthy words have already died under our very eyes, because we did not take care of them! Tennyson calls our attention to one of them. "The grand old name of gentleman," he sings, "defamed by every charlatan, and soil'd with all ignoble use." If you persist in calling people who are not gentlemen by the name of gentleman, you do not make them gentlemen by so calling them, but you end by making the word gentleman mean that kind of people. The religious terrain is full of the graves of good words which have died from lack of care - they stand as close in it as do the graves today in the flats of Flanders or among the hills of northern France. And these good words are still dying all around us. There is that good word "Evangelical." It is certainly moribund, if not already dead. Nobody any longer seems to know what it means. Even our Dictionaries no longer know. Certainly there never was a more blundering, floundering attempt ever made to define a word than "The Standard Dictionary's" attempt to define this word; and the "Century Dictionary" does little better. Adolf Harnack begins one of his essays with some paragraphs animadverting on the varied and confused senses in which the word "Evangelical" is used in Germany.28 But he betrays no understanding whatever of the real source of a great part of this confusion. It is that the official name of the Protestant Church in a large part of Germany is "The Evangelical Church." When this name was first acquired by that church it had a perfectly defined meaning, and described the church as that kind of a church. But having been once identified with that church, it has drifted with it into the bog. The habit of calling "Evangelical" everything which was from time to time characteristic of that church or which any strong party in that church wished to make characteristic of it - has ended in robbing the term of all meaning. Along a somewhat different pathway we have arrived at the same state of affairs in America. Does anybody in the world know what "Evangelical" means, in our current religious speech? The other day, a professedly evangelical pastor, serving a church which is certainly committed by its formularies to an evangelical confession, having occasion to report in one of our newspapers on a religious meeting composed practically entirely of Unitarians and Jews, remarked with enthusiasm upon the deeply evangelical character of its spirit and utterances.

But we need not stop with "Evangelical." Take an even greater word. Does the word "Christianity" any longer bear a definite meaning? Men are debating on all sides of us what Christianity really is. Auguste Sabatier makes it out to be just altruism; Josiah Royce identifies it with the sentiment of loyalty; D. C. Macintosh explains it as nothing but morality. We hear of Christianity without dogma, Christianity without miracle, Christianity without Christ. Since, however, Christianity is a historical religion, an undogmatic Christianity would be an absurdity; since it is through and through a supernatural religion, a non-miraculous Christianity would be a contradiction; since it is Christianity, a Christless Christianity would be - well, let us say lamely (but with a lameness which has perhaps its own emphasis), a misnomer. People set upon calling unchristian things Christian are simply washing all meaning out of the name. If everything that is called Christianity in these days is Christianity, then there is no such thing as Christianity. A name applied indiscriminately to everything, designates nothing.

The words "Redeem," "Redemption," "Redeemer" are going the same way. When we use these terms in so comprehensive a sense - we are following Kaftan's phraseology - that we understand by "Redemption" whatever benefit we suppose ourselves to receive through Christ, - no matter what we happen to think that benefit is - and call Him "Redeemer" merely in order to express the fact that we somehow or other relate this benefit to Him - no matter how loosely or unessentially - we have simply evacuated the terms of all meaning, and would do better to wipe them out of our vocabulary. Yet this is precisely how modern Liberalism uses these terms. Sabatier, who reduces Christianity to mere altruism, Royce who explains it in terms of loyalty, Macintosh who sees in it only morality - all still speak of it as a "Redemptive Religion," and all are perfectly willing to call Jesus still by the title of "Redeemer," - although some of them at least are quite free to allow that He seems to them quite unessential to Christianity, and Christianity would remain all that it is, and just as truly a "Redemptive Religion," even though He had never existed.

I think you will agree with me that it is a sad thing to see words like these die like this. And I hope you will determine that, God helping you, you will not let them die thus, if any care on your part can preserve them in life and vigor. But the dying of the words is not the saddest thing which we see here. The saddest thing is the dying out of the hearts of men of the things for which the words stand. As ministers of Christ it will be your function to keep the things alive. If you can do that, the words which express the things will take care of themselves. Either they will abide in vigor; or other good words and true will press in to take the place left vacant by them. The real thing for you to settle in your minds, therefore, is whether Christ is truly a Redeemer to you, and whether you find an actual Redemption in Him, - or are you ready to deny the Master that bought you, and to count His blood an unholy thing? Do you realize that Christ is your Ransomer and has actually shed His blood for you as your ransom? Do you realize that your salvation has been bought, bought at a tremendous price, at the price of nothing less precious than blood, and that the blood of Christ, the Holy One of God? Or, go a step further: do you realize that this Christ who has thus shed His blood for you is Himself your God? So the Scriptures teach:29

The blood of God outpoured upon the tree!

So reads the Book. O mind, receive the thought,

Nor helpless murmur thou hast vainly sought

Thought-room within thee for such mystery.

Thou foolish mindling! Do'st thou hope to see

Undazed, untottering, all that God hath wrought?

Before His mighty "shall," thy little "ought"

Be shamed to silence and humility!

Come mindling, I will show thee what 'twere meet

That thou shouldst shrink from marvelling, and flee

As unbelievable, - nay, wonderingly,

With dazed, but still with faithful praises, greet:

Draw near and listen to this sweetest sweet, -

Thy God, 0 mindling, shed His blood for thee!

Endnotes:

1. From The Princeton Theological Review, vol. xiv, 1916, pp. 177-201. Opening Address, delivered in Miller Chapel, Princeton Theological Seminary, September 17, 1915. Some references and explanatory notes have been added.

2. The references are (by Hymns and Verses): 52. 3; 54. 2; 59. 2; 73. 3; 147.1; 148. 1; 150. 3; 162. 4; 172. 6; 190. 1,5; 197.1; 216. 1; 218. 1; 239. 3; 276. 1; 293. 3; 300. 1; 311.2; 331. 3; 401.4; 445.3; 454.3; 476.5; 555. 1; 569.3; 593.2;649.2; 651.1.

3. Questions, 20 and 21.

4. According to the concordance of the (American) "Book of Common Prayer," published by the Rev. J. Courtney Jones, 1898. The actual number, as will be seen, is eleven.

5. "Dial.," 30. 3: "For we call Him Helper (Bohqo,n) and Redeemer (Lutrwth,n), the power of whose name even the Demons do fear"; cf. 83.3 Justin is applying to Christ the language of Pa. xviii. 14 (LXX: E. V. xix. 14). Lutrwth,j occurs in the LXX only at Pa. xviii. 14 and Ps. hcvii. (lxxviii) 35.

6. Acts vii. 35; cf. H. A. W. Meyer and J. A. Alexander in loc. Christ is called "Deliverer" only once in the New Testament (Rom. xi. 26) and then by an adaptation of an Old Testament passage.

7. 1432-1450, tr. Higden (Rolls) viii, 201: 'A man . . . havynge woundes in his body lyke to the woundes of Criste, seyenge that he was redemer of man."'

8. "1377, Langland: 'And after his resurrecioun Redemptor was his name."'

9. "Oxford Dictionary," sub voc.: "1414, Brampton, Penit. Ps. (Percy Society), 28."

10. "Political Poems," etc. (ed. Furnivale), p. 111.

11. 59. 1; 159. 2; 227. vi, 1. The verb "ransom," of course, also occurs (e. g. 141. 6); see below, note 14, for the form "ransomed."

12. Redeemed, 55. 5; 88. 2; 130. 4; 150. 4; 172. 3; 236. 4; 336. 1; 383. 5; 396. 2; 453. 5; 546. 1; 642. 1. Consult, however, the following also: Redeeming, 81.1; 179. 3; 223. 5; 332. 2; 402. 2; 441. 4; 470. 2; 609. 1; Redemption, 141. 4; 152. 2; 258. 4; 259. 1; 264. 1; 265. 4; 394. 1; 395. 1; 406. 2; 435. 4.

13. 130. 4; 453. 5.

14. 132. 4; 134. 1; 154. 4; 157. 4; 189. 4; 303. 2; 325. 2; 354. 4; 375. 4; 390. 4; 395. 5; 399. 2; 401. 4; 420. 3; 421. 1; 441. 3; 444. 1; 512. 2; 636. 4.

15. John Brown, "Life of Faith in Time of Trial and Affliction," etc., 1678 (ed. 1726, p. 161; ed. 1824, p. 129): "And sure a Ransomer who hath purchased many persons to himself, at such a Rate, will be most tender of them, and will not take it well, that any wrong them."

16. When R. C. Trench, "The Study of words," ed. 15, 1874, p. 312, counsels the school-teacher to insist both on the idea of purchase, and on that of purchasing back, in all usages of Redemption, he is indulging in an etymological purism which the general use of the word will not sustain.

17. Kluge, in his etymological dictionary of the German language, under "er-," tells us it is the new-high-German equivalent of the old-high-German "ir-," "ar-," "ur-," and refers us to the emphasized "ur-" for information. Under that form, he tells us that "er-" is the unemphasized form of the prefix, and adds: "The prefix means aus, ursprünglich, anfänglich." Thus it appears that erlösen is a weaker way of saying auslösen; and the usage bears that out, auslösen tending to suggest "extirpation," erlösen, "deliverance." By this feeling, apparently, G. Hollmann, "Die Bedeutung des Todes Jesu," 1901, pp. 108-109, is led to parallel Auslösung with Loskaufung as strong terms in contrast with Erlösung paralleled with Befreiung. The Greek equivalents of erlösen and auslösen are avpolu,ein and evklu,ein, both of which are found in the New Testament, but elsewhere in senses more significant for our purposes. In the Iliad avpolu,ein (like the simple lu,ein) bears even the acquired sense of "to ransom." It is interesting to note that in Job xix. 25, for "my Redeemer" (laeGO), the LXX reads o` evklu,ein me.

18. "Deutsches Wörterbuch," iii, 1862, sub voc.

19. "Kommentar zum N. T. herausgegeben von T. Zahn," x, 1905, p. 7 note. So also Zahn himself in vol. vi1-2z, p. 181, note 52 (cf. also p. 179, note 50): "Accordingly, lu,trwsij, Loskaufung, Lev. xxv. 48, Plut. "Aratus," 11; in the wider sense, 'deliverance,' Erlösung, Ps. cx. (cxi.) 9, Lk. i. 68, ii. 38, Heb. ix. 12; 1 Clem. xii. 7."

20. "Der Tod Christi," etc., 1905, p. 218.

21. "Die Bedeutung des Todes Jesu," etc., 1901, pp. 102, 108-109.

22. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 1908, 18, p. 238.

23. P. 239.

24. "Dogmatik3-4," p. 459.

25. According to Rudolf Eucken, "Christianity and the New Idealism," E. T., 1909, p. 115, "That which drives men to religion is the break with the world of their experience, the failure to find satisfaction in what this world offers or is able to offer." It is probably something like this that Henry Osborn Taylor, "Deliverance," 1915, p. 5, means, when he says: "Evidently every 'religion' is a means of adjustment or deliverance." According to this all religions represent efforts of men to adjust themselves "to the fears and hopes of their natures," thus attaining peace or even "freedom of action in which they accomplish their lives." This "adjustment," Taylor speaks of as a "deliverance," that is to say, no doubt, deliverance from the discomfort of non-adjustment with its clogging effects on life. In this view religion is deliverance from conscious maladjustment of life. The implication is, apparently, that all men are to this extent conscious of being out of joint, in one way or another, with themselves or the universe in which they live, and struggle after adjustment. Thus religion arises, or rather the various religions, since they differ much both in the maladjustments they feel and their methods of correcting them. And there are even modes of adjustment which have been tried that cannot be called "religions."

26. Thus, for example, Paul Wernle writes, "Die Anfänge unserer Religion1," p. 106, of Paul's view of Christianity: "Es war ihm ganz Erlösungareligion "; "Jesus Erlöser, nicht Gesetzgeber, das war seine Parole." W. M. Macgregor, "Christian Freedom," 1914, p. 85, knowing what he is about, rightly translates: "To Paul Christianity was altogether a religion of deliverance." But the English translation of Wernle's book ("The Beginnings of Christianity," 1903, i, p. 176) renders: "Christianity was entirely a religion of redemption for him": "Jesus the Redeemer, not the lawgiver, was his watchword." This is, of course, a truer description of Paul's actual point of view; but it is not what Wernle means to say of him. Similarly Rudolf Eucken constantly speaks of Christianity as an "ethical" or "moral" "Erlösungsreligion" and of the particular "Erlösungstat" to which, as such, it points us (e. g. "Hauptprobleme der Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart4-5," 1912, pp.124,126,129). His translators ("Chriatianity and the New Idealism," 1909, pp. 114, 117, 119, 120) render as constantly "the religion of moral redemption," "act of redemption," although Eucken has no proper "redemption" whatever in mind, - as indeed the adjective "ethical," "moral " shows sufficiently clearly. An ethical revolution may be a deliverance but it is not properly a "redemption."

27. For example, on the basis of this note: "Beyschlag ('N. T. Theol.' II. 157) frankly takes avpolutrou/n( evlenqerou/n( evxairei/n (Gal. i. 4), avgora,zein as synonymous," W. M. Macgregor, "Christian Freedom," 1914, p. 276. He retires into the background of all of them, all other notion than that of "Emancipation," that is, the notion of the weakest and least modal of them all.

28. "Aus Wissenschaft und Leben," 1911, ii, pp. 213 ff.

29. Acts xx. 28, "Feed the church of God which He hath purchased with His own blood." The reading "God" is, as F. J. A. Hort says, "assuredly genuine," and the emphasis upon the blood being His own is very strong. There is no justification for correcting the text conjecturally, as Hort does, to avoid this. If the reading "Lord " were genuine, the meaning would be precisely the same: "Lord " is not a lower title than "God." in such connections. I Cor. ii. 8, "They would not have crucified the Lord of Glory," is an exact parallel.

Chief Theories of the Atonement

I. SIGNIFICANCE AND HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE

The replacement of the term "satisfaction" (q.v.), to designate, according to its nature, the work of Christ in saving sinners, by "atonement," the term more usual at present, is somewhat unfortunate. "Satisfaction" is at once the more comprehensive, the more expressive, the less ambiguous, and the more exact term. The word "atonement" occurs but once in the English New Testament (Rom. v. 11, A. V., but not R. V.) and on this occasion it bears its archaic sense of "reconciliation," and as such translates the Greek term katallagē. In the English Old Testament, however, it is found quite often as the stated rendering of the Hebrew terms kipper, kippurim, in the sense of "propitiation," "expiation." It is in this latter sense that it has become current, and has been applied to the work of Christ, which it accordingly describes as, in its essential nature, an expiatory offering, propitiating an offended Deity and reconciling Him with man.

1. THE NEW TESTAMENT PRESENTATION

In thus characterizing the work of Christ, it does no injustice to the New Testament representation. The writers of the New Testament employ many other modes of describing the work of Christ, which, taken together, set it forth as much more than a provision, in His death, for canceling the guilt of man. To mention nothing else at the moment, they set it forth equally as a provision, in His righteousness, for fulfilling the demands of the divine law upon the conduct of men. But it is undeniable that they enshrine at the center of this work its efficacy as a piacular sacrifice, securing the forgiveness of sins; that is to say, relieving its beneficiaries of "the penal consequences which otherwise the curse of the broken law inevitably entails." The Lord Himself fastens attention upon this aspect of His work (Matt. xx. 28, xxvi. 28); and it is embedded in every important type of New Testament teaching - as well in the Epistle to the Hebrews (ii. 17), and the Epistles of Peter (I. iii. 18) and John (I. ii. 2), as currently in those of Paul (Rom, viii. 3; I Cor. v. 7; Eph. v. 2) to whom, obviously, "the sacrifice of Christ had the significance of the death of an innocent victim in the room of the guilty" and who therefore "freely employs the category of substitution, involving the conception of imputation or transference" of legal standing (W. P. Paterson, article "Sacrifice" in Hastings, "Dictionary of the Bible," iv. 1909, pp. 343-345). Looking out from this point of view as from a center, the New Testament writers ascribe the saving efficacy of Christ's work specifically to His death, or His blood, or His cross (Rom. iii. 25; v. 9; I Cor. x. 16; Eph. i. 7; ii. 13; Col. i. 20; Heb. ix. 12, 14; I Pet. i. 2, 19; I John i. 7; v. 6-8; Rev. i. 5), and this with such predilection and emphasis that the place given to the death of Christ in the several theories which have been framed of the nature of our Lord's work, may not unfairly be taken as a test of their Scripturalness. All else that Christ does for us in the breadth of His redeeming work is, in their view, conditioned upon His bearing our sins in His own body on the tree; so that "the fundamental characteristic of the New Testament conception of redemption is that deliverance from guilt stands first; emancipation from the power of sin follows upon it; and removal of all the ills of life constitutes its final issue" (O. Kirn, article "Erlösung" in Hauck-Herzog, "Realencyklopadie," v. p. 464; see "Redemption").

2. DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE

The exact nature of Christ's work in redemption was not made the subject of scientific investigation in the early Church. This was due partly, no doubt, just to the clearness of the New Testament representation of it as a piacular sacrifice; but in part also to the engrossment of the minds of the first teachers of Christianity with more immediately pressing problems, such as the adjustment of the essential elements of the Christian doctrines of God and of the person of Christ, and the establishment of man's helplessness in sin and absolute dependence on the grace of God for salvation. Meanwhile Christians were content to speak of the work of Christ in simple Scriptural or in general language, or to develop, rather by way of illustration than of explanation, certain aspects of it, chiefly its efficacy as a sacrifice, but also, very prominently, its working as a ransom in delivering us from bondage to Satan. Thus it was not until the end of the eleventh century that the nature of the Atonement received at the hands of Anselm (d. 1109) its first thorough discussion. Representing it, in terms derived from the Roman law, as in its essence a "satisfaction" to the divine justice, Anselm set it once for all in its true relations to the inherent necessities of the divine nature, and to the magnitude of human guilt; and thus determined the outlines of the doctrine for all subsequent thought. Contemporaries like Bernard and Abelard, no doubt, and perhaps not unnaturally, found difficulty in assimilating at once the newly framed doctrine; the former ignored it in the interests of the old notion of a ransom offered to Satan; the latter rejected it in the interests of a theory of moral influence upon man. But it gradually made its way. The Victorines, Hugo and Richard, united with it other elements, the effect of which was to cure its onesidedness; and the great doctors of the age of developed scholasticism manifest its victory by differing from one another chiefly in their individual ways of stating and defending it. Bonaventura develops it; Aquinas enriches it with his subtle distinctions; Thomist and Scotist alike start from it, and diverge only in the question whether the "satisfaction" offered by Christ was intrinsically equivalent to the requirements of the divine justice or availed for this purpose only through the gracious acceptance of God. It was not, however, until the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith threw its light back upon the "satisfaction" which provided its basis, that that doctrine came fully to its rights. No one before Luther had spoken with the clarity, depth, or breadth which characterize his references to Christ as our deliverer, first from the guilt of sin, and then, because from the guilt of sin, also from all that is evil, since all that is evil springs from sin (cf. T. Harnack, "Luthers Theologie," Erlangen, ii. 1886, chaps. 16-19, and Kirn, ut sup., p. 467). These vital religious conceptions were reduced to scientific statement by the Protestant scholastics, by whom it was that the complete doctrine of "satisfaction" was formulated with a thoroughness and comprehensiveness of grasp which has made it the permanent possession of the Church. In this, its developed form, it represents our Lord as making satisfaction for us "by His blood and righteousness"; on the one hand, to the justice of God, outraged by human sin, in bearing the penalty due to our guilt in His own sacrificial death; and, on the other hand, to the demands of the law of God requiring perfect obedience, in fulfilling in His immaculate life on earth as the second Adam the probation which Adam failed to keep; bringing to bear on men at the same time and by means of the same double work every conceivable influence adapted to deter them from sin and to win them back to good and to God - by the highest imaginable demonstration of God's righteousness and hatred of sin and the supreme manifestation of God's love and eagerness to save; by a gracious proclamation of full forgiveness of sin in the blood of Christ; by a winning revelation of the spiritual order and the spiritual world; and by the moving example of His own perfect life in the conditions of this world; but, above all, by the purchase of the gift of the Holy Spirit for His people as a power not themselves making for righteousness dwelling within them, and supernaturally regenerating their hearts and conforming their lives to His image, and so preparing them for their permanent place in the new order of things which, flowing from this redeeming work, shall ultimately be established as the eternal form of the Kingdom of God.

3. VARIOUS THEORIES

Of course, this great comprehensive doctrine of "the satisfaction of Christ" has not been permitted to hold the field without controversy. Many "theories of the atonement" have been constructed, each throwing into emphasis a fragment of the truth, to the neglect or denial of the complementary elements, including ordinarily the central matter of the expiation of guilt itself (cf. T. J. Crawford, "The Doctrine of Holy Scripture respecting the Atonement," Edinburgh, 1888, pp. 395-401; A. B. Bruce, "The Humiliation of Christ," Edinburgh, 1881, lecture 7; A. A. Hodge, "The Atonement," Philadelphia, 1867, pp. 17 ff.). Each main form of these theories, in some method of statement or other, has at one time or another seemed on the point of becoming the common doctrine of the churches. In the patristic age men spoke with such predilection of the work of Christ as issuing in our deliverance from the power of Satan that the false impression is very readily obtained from a cursory survey of the teaching of the Fathers that they predominantly conceived it as directed to that sole end. The so-called "mystical" view, which had representatives among the Greek Fathers and has always had advocates in the Church, appeared about the middle of the last century almost ready to become dominant in at least Continental Protestantism through the immense influence of Schleiermacher. The "rectoral or governmental theory," invented by Grotius early in the seventeenth century in the effort to save something from the assault of the Socinians, has ever since provided a half-way house for those who, while touched by the chilling breath of rationalism, have yet not been ready to surrender every semblance of an "objective atonement," and has therefore come very prominently forward in every era of decaying faith. The "moral influence" theory, which in the person of perhaps the acutest of all the scholastic reasoners, Peter Abelard, confronted the doctrine of "satisfaction" at its formulation, in its vigorous promulgation by the Socinians and again by the lower class of rationalists obtained the widest currency; and again in our own day its enthusiastic advocates, by perhaps a not unnatural illusion, are tempted to claim for it the final victory (so e.g. G. B. Stevens, "The Christian Doctrine of Salvation," New York, 1905; but cf. per contra, of the same school, T. V. Tymms, "The Christian Idea of Atonement," London, 1904, p. 8). But no one of these theories, however attractively they may be presented, or however wide an acceptance each may from time to time have found in academic circles, has ever been able to supplant the doctrine of "satisfaction," either in the formal creeds of the churches, or in the hearts of simple believers. Despite the fluidity of much recent thinking on the subject, the doctrine of "satisfaction" remains to-day the established doctrine of the churches as to the nature of Christ's work of redemption, and is apparently immovably entrenched in the hearts of the Christian body (cf. J. B. Remensnyder, "The Atonement and Modern Thought," Philadelphia, 1905, p. xvi.).

II. THE FIVE CHIEF THEORIES OF THE ATONEMENT

A survey of the various theories of the Atonement which have been broached, may be made from many points of view (cf. especially the survey in T. G. Crawford, ut sup., pp. 285-401; Bruce, ut sup., lecture 7; and for recent German views, F. A. B. Nitzsch, "Lehrbuch der evangelischen Dogmatik," Freiburg, 1892, part 2, §§ 43-46; O. Bensow, "Die Lehre von der Versöhnung," Gütersloh, 1904, pp. 7-153; G. A. F. Ecklin, "Erlösung und Versöhnung," Basel, 1903, part 4). Perhaps as good a method as any other is to arrange them according to the conception each entertains of the person or persons on whom the work of Christ terminates. When so arranged they fall naturally into five classes which may be enumerated here in the ascending order.

1. Theories which conceive the work of Christ as terminating upon Satan, so affecting him as to secure the release of the souls held in bondage by him. These theories, which have been described as emphasizing the "triumphantorial" aspect of Christ's work (Ecklin, ut sup., p. 113) had very considerable vogue in the patristic age (e.g. Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil, the two Gregories, Cyril of Alexandria, down to and including John of Damascus and Nicholas of Methone; Hilary, Rufinus, Jerome, Augustine, Leo the Great, and even so late as Bernard). They passed out of view only gradually as the doctrine of "satisfaction" became more widely known. Not only does the thought of a Bernard still run in this channel, but even Luther utilized the conception. The idea runs through many forms - speaking in some of them of buying off, in some of overcoming, in some even of outwitting (so e.g. Origen) the devil. But it would be unfair to suppose that such theories represent in any of their forms the whole thought as to the work of Christ of those who made use of them, or were considered by them a scientific statement of the work of Christ. They rather embody only their author's profound sense of the bondage in which men are held to sin and death, and vividly set forth the rescue they conceive Christ has wrought for us in overcoming him who has the power of death.

2. Theories which conceive the work of Christ as terminating physically on man, so affecting him as to bring him by an interior and hidden working upon him into participation with the one life of Christ; the so-called "mystical theories." The fundamental characteristic of these theories is their discovery of the saving fact not in anything which Christ taught or did, but in what He was. It is upon the Incarnation, rather than upon Christ's teaching or His work that they throw stress, attributing the saving power of Christ not to what He does for us but to what He does in us. Tendencies to this type of theory are already traceable in the Platonizing Fathers; and with the entrance of the more developed Neoplatonism into the stream of Christian thinking, through the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius naturalized in the West by Johannes Scotus Erigena, a constant tradition of mystical teaching began which never died out. In the Reformation age this type of thought was represented by men like Osiander, Schwenckfeld, Franck, Weigel, Boehme. In the modern Church a new impulse was given to essentially the same mode of conception by Schleiermacher and his followers (e.g. C. I. Nitzsch, Rothe, Schöberlein, Lange, Martensen), among whom what is known as the "Mercersburg School" (see "Mercersburg Theology") will be particularly interesting to Americans (e.g. J. W. Nevin, "The Mystical Presence," Philadelphia, 1846). A very influential writer among English theologians of the same general class was F. D. Maurice (1805-1872), although he added to his fundamental mystical conception of the work of Christ the further notions that Christ fully identified Himself with us and, thus partaking of our sufferings, set us a perfect example of sacrifice of self to God (cf. especially "Theological Essays," London, 1853; "The Doctrine of Sacrifice," Cambridge, 1854; new edition, London, 1879). Here, too, must be classed the theory suggested in the writings of the late B. F. Westcott ("The Victory of the Cross," London, 1888), which was based on a hypothesis of the efficacy of Christ's blood, borrowed apparently directly from William Milligan (cf. "The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord," London, 1892), though it goes back ultimately to the Socinians, to the effect that Christ's offering of Himself is not to be identified with His sufferings and death, but rather with the presentation of His life (which is in His blood, set free by death for this purpose) in heaven. "Taking that Blood as efficacious by virtue of the vitality which it contains, he [Dr. Westcott] holds that it was set free from Christ's Body that it might vitalize ours, as it were by transfusion" (C. H. Waller, in the Presbyterian and Reformed Review, iii. 1892, p. 656). Somewhat similarly H. Clay Trumbull ("The Blood Covenant," New York, 1885) looks upon sacrifices as only a form of blood covenanting, that is, of instituting blood-brotherhood between man and God by transfusion of blood; and explains the sacrifice of Christ as representing communing in blood, that is, in the principle of life, between God and man, both of whom Christ represents. The theory which has been called "salvation by sample," or salvation "by gradually extirpated depravity," also has its affinities here. Something like it is as old as Felix of Urgel (d. 818; see "Adoptionism"), and it has been taught in its full development by Dippel (1673-1734), Swedenborg (1688-1772), Menken (1768-1831), and especially by Edward Irving (1792-1834), and, of course, by the modern followers of Swedenborg (e.g. B. F. Barrett). The essence of this theory is that what was assumed by our Lord was human nature as He found it, that is, as fallen; and that this human nature, as assumed by Him, was by the power of His divine nature (or of the Holy Spirit dwelling in Him beyond measure) not only kept from sinning, but purified from sin and presented perfect before God as the first-fruits of a saved humanity; men being saved as they become partakers (by faith) of this purified humanity, as they become leavened by this new leaven. Certain of the elements which the great German theologian J. C. K. von Hofmann built into his complicated and not altogether stable theory - a theory which was the occasion of much discussion about the middle of the nineteenth century - reproduce some of the characteristic language of the theory of "salvation by sample."

3. Theories which conceive the work of Christ as terminating on man, in the way of bringing to bear on him inducements to action; so affecting man as to lead him to a better knowledge of God, or to a more lively sense of his real relation to God, or to a revolutionary change of heart and life with reference to God; the so-called "moral influence theories." The essence of all these theories is that they transfer the atoning fact from the work of Christ to the response of the human soul to the influences or appeals proceeding from the work of Christ. The work of Christ takes immediate effect not on God but on man, leading him to a state of mind and heart which will be acceptable to God, through the medium of which alone can the work of Christ be said to affect God. At its highest level, this will mean that the work of Christ is directed to leading man to repentance and faith, which repentance and faith secure God's favor, an effect which can be attributed to Christ's work only mediately, that is, through the medium of the repentance and faith it produces in man. Accordingly, it has become quite common to say, in this school, that "it is faith and repentance which change the face of God"; and advocates of this class of theories sometimes say with entire frankness, "There is no atonement other than repentance" (Auguste Sabatier, "La Doctrine de l'expiation et son evolution historique," Paris, 1901, E.T. London, 1904, p. 127).

Theories of this general type differ from one another, according as, among the instrumentalities by means of which Christ affects the minds and hearts and actions of men, the stress is laid upon His teaching, or His example, or the impression made by His life of faith, or the manifestation of the infinite love of God afforded by His total mission. The most powerful presentation of the first of these conceptions ever made was probably that of the Socinians (followed later by the rationalists, both earlier and later, - Töllner, Bahrdt, Steinbart, Eberhard, Löffler, Henke, Wegscheider). They looked upon the work of Christ as summed up in the proclamation of the willingness of God to forgive sin, on the sole condition of its abandonment; and explained His sufferings and death as merely those of a martyr in the cause of righteousness or in some other non-essential way. The theories which lay the stress of Christ's work on the example He has set us of a high and faithful life, or of a life of self-sacrificing love, have found popular representatives not only in the subtle theory with which F. D. Maurice pieced out his mystical view, and in the somewhat amorphous ideas with which the great preacher F. W. Robertson clothed his conception of Christ's life as simply a long (and hopeless) battle against the evil of the world to which it at last succumbed; but more lately in writers like Auguste Sabatier, who does not stop short of transmuting Christianity into bald altruism, and making it into what he calls the religion of "universal redemption by love," that is to say, anybody's love, not specifically Christ's love - for every one who loves takes his position by Christ's side as, if not equally, yet as truly, a saviour as He ("The Doctrine of the Atonement in its Historical Evolution," ut sup., pp. 131-134; so also Otto Pfleiderer, "Das Christusbild des urchristlichen Glaubens in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung," Berlin, 1903, E.T. London, 1905, pp. 164-165; cf. Horace Bushnell, "Vicarious Sacrifice," New York, 1865, p. 107: "Vicarious sacrifice was in no way peculiar"). In this same general category belongs also the theory which Albrecht Ritschl has given such wide influence. According to it, the work of Christ consists in the establishment of the Kingdom of God in the world, that is, in the revelation of God's love to men and His gracious purposes for men. Thus Jesus becomes the first object of this love and as such its mediator to others; His sufferings and death being, on the one side, a test of His steadfastness, and, on the other, the crowning proof of His obedience ("Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung," iii. §§ 41-61, ed. 3, Bonn, 1888, E.T. Edinburgh, 1900). Similarly also, though with many modifications, which are in some instances not insignificant, such writers as W. Herrmann ("Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott," Stuttgart, 1886, p. 93, E.T. London, 1895), J. Kaftan ("Dogmatik," Tübingen, 1901, pp. 454 ff.), F. A. B. Nitzsch ("Lehrbuch der evangelischen Dogmatik," Freiburg, 1892, pp. 504-513), T. Häring (in his "Ueber das Bleibende im Glauben an Christus," Stuttgart, 1880, where he sought to complete Ritschl's view by the addition of the idea that Christ offered to God a perfect sorrow for the world's sin, which supplements our imperfect repentance; in his later writings, "Zu Ritschl's Versöhnungslehre," Zurich, 1888, "Zur Versöhnungslehre," Göttingen, 1893, he assimilates to the Grotian theory), E. Kühl ("Die Heilsbedeutung des Todes Christi," Berlin, 1890), G. A. F. Ecklin (" Der Heilswert des Todes Jesu," Gütersloh, 1888; "Christus unser Bürge," Basel, 1901; and especially "Erlösung und Versöhnung," Basel, 1903, which is an elaborate history of the doctrine from the point of view of what Ecklin calls in antagonism to the "substitutional-expiatory" conception, the "solidaric-reparatory" conception of the Atonement - the conception, that is, that Christ comes to save men not primarily from the guilt, but from the power of sin, and that "the sole satisfaction God demands for His outraged honor is the restoration of obedience," p. 648). The most popular form of the "moral influence" theories has always been that in which the stress is laid on the manifestation made in the total mission and work of Christ of the ineffable and searching love of God for sinners, which, being perceived, breaks down our opposition to God, melts our hearts, and brings us as prodigals home to the Father's arms. It is in this form that the theory was advocated (but with the suggestion that there is another side to it), for example, by S. T. Coleridge ("Aids to Reflection"), and that it was commended to English-speaking readers of the last generation with the highest ability by John Young of Edinburgh ("The Life and Light of Men," London, 1866), and with the greatest literary attractiveness by Horace Bushnell ("Vicarious Sacrifice," New York, 1865; see below, § 7; see also article "Bushnell, Horace"); and has been more recently set forth in elaborate and vigorously polemic form by W. N. Clarke ("An Outline of Christian Theology," New York, 1898, pp. 340-368), T. Vincent Tymms ("The Christian Idea of Atonement," London, 1904), G. B. Stevens ("The Christian Doctrine of Salvation," New York, 1905), and C. M. Mead ("Irenic Theology," New York, 1905).

In a volume of essays published first in the Andover Review (iv. 1885, pp. 56 ff.) and afterward gathered into a volume under the title of "Progressive Orthodoxy" (Boston, 1886), the professors in Andover Seminary made an attempt (the writer here being, as was understood, George Harris) to enrich the "moral influence" theory of the Atonement after a fashion quite common in Germany (cf. e.g. Häring, ut sup.) with elements derived from other well-known forms of teaching. In this construction, Christ's work is made to consist primarily in bringing to bear on man a revelation of God's hatred of sin, and love for souls, by which He makes man capable of repentance and leads him to repent revolutionarily; by this repentance, then, together with Christ's own sympathetic expression of repentance God is rendered propitious. Here Christ's work is supposed to have at least some (though a secondary) effect upon God; and a work of propitiation of God by Christ may be spoken of, although it is accomplished by a "sympathetic repentance." It has accordingly become usual with those who have adopted this mode of representation to say that there was in this atoning work, not indeed "a substitution of a sinless Christ for a sinful race," but a "substitution of humanity plus Christ for humanity minus Christ." By such curiously compacted theories the transition is made to the next class.

4. Theories which conceive the work of Christ as terminating on both man and God, but on man primarily and on God only secondarily. The outstanding instance of this class of theories is supplied by the so-called "rectoral or governmental theories." These suppose that the work of Christ so affects man by the spectacle of the sufferings borne by Him as to deter men from sin; and by thus deterring men from sin enables God to forgive sin with safety to His moral government of the world. In these theories the sufferings and death of Christ become, for the first time in this conspectus of theories, of cardinal importance, constituting indeed the very essence of the work of Christ. But the atoning fact here too, no less than in the "moral influence" theories, is man's own reformation, though this reformation is supposed in the rectoral view to be wrought not primarily by breaking down man's opposition to God by a moving manifestation of the love of God in Christ, but by inducing in man a horror of sin, through the spectacle of God's hatred of sin afforded by the sufferings of Christ - through which, no doubt, the contemplation of man is led on to God's love to sinners as exhibited in His willingness to inflict all these sufferings on His own Son, that He might be enabled, with justice to His moral government, to forgive sins.

This theory was worked out by the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius ("Defensio fidei catholicae de satisfactione Christi," Leyden, 1617; modern edition, Oxford, 1856; E.T. with notes and introduction by F. H. Foster, Andover, 1889) as an attempt to save what was salvable of the established doctrine of satisfaction from disintegration under the attacks of the Socinian advocates of the "moral influence" theories (see "Grotius, Hugo"). It was at once adopted by those Arminians who had been most affected by the Socinian reasoning; and in the next age became the especial property of the better class of the so-called supranaturalists (Michaelis, Storr, Morus, Knapp, Steudel, Reinhard, Muntinghe, Vinke, Egeling). It has remained on the continent of Europe to this day, the refuge of most of those, who, influenced by the modern spirit, yet wish to preserve some form of "objective," that is, of God-ward atonement. A great variety of representations have grown up under this influence, combining elements of the satisfaction and rectoral views. To name but a single typical instance, the commentator F. Godet, both in his commentaries (especially that on Romans) and in a more recent essay (published in "The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought," by various writers, London, 1900, pp. 331 ff.), teaches (certainly in a very high form) the rectoral theory distinctly (and is corrected therefor by his colleague at Neuchatel, Professor Gretillat, who wishes an "ontological" rather than a merely "demonstrative" necessity for atonement to be recognized). Its history has run on similar lines in English-speaking countries. In Great Britain and America alike it has become practically the orthodoxy of the Independents. It has, for example, been taught as such in the former country by Joseph Gilbert ("The Christian Atonement," London, 1836), and in especially wellworked-out forms by R. W. Dale ("The Atonement," London, 1876) and Alfred Cave ("The Scriptural Doctrine of Sacrifice," Edinburgh, 1877; new edition with title, "The Scriptural Doctrine of Sacrifice and Atonement," 1890; and in "The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought," ut sup., pp. 250 ff.). When the Calvinism of the New England Puritans began to break down, one of the symptoms of its decay was the gradual substitution of the rectoral for the satisfaction view of the Atonement. The process may be traced in the writings of Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790), Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), John Smalley (1734-1820), Stephen West (1735-1819), Jonathan Edwards, Jr. (1745-1801), Nathanael Emmons (1745-1840); and Edwards A. Park was able, accordingly, in the middle of the nineteenth century to set the rectoral theory forth as the "traditional orthodox doctrine" of the American Congregationalists ("The Atonement: Discourses and Treatises by Edwards, Smalley, Maxcy, Emmons, Griffin, Burge, and Weeks, with an Introductory Essay by Edwards A. Park," Boston, 1859; cf. Daniel T. Fisk, in the Bibliotheca Sacra, xviii. 1861, pp. 284 ff., and further N. S. S. Beman, "Four Sermons on the Doctrine of the Atonement," Troy, 1825, new edition with title "Christ, the only Sacrifice: or the Atonement in its Relations to God and Man," New York, 1844; N.W. Taylor, "Lectures on the Moral Government of God," New York, 1859; Albert Barnes, "The Atonement, in its Relations to Law and Moral Government," Philadelphia, 1859; Frank H. Foster, "Christian Life and Theology," New York, 1900; Lewis F. Stearns, "Present Day Theology," New York, 1893). The early Wesleyans also gravitated toward the rectoral theory, though not without some hesitation, a hesitation which has sustained itself among British Wesleyans until to-day (cf. e.g. W. B. Pope, "Compendium of Christian Theology," London, 1875; Marshall Randles, "Substitution: a Treatise on the Atonement," London, 1877; T. O. Summers, "Systematic Theology," 2 vols., Nashville, Tenn., 1888; J. J. Tigert, in the Methodist Quarterly Review, April, 1884), although many among them have taught the rectoral theory with great distinctness and decision (e.g. Joseph Agar Beet, in the Expositor, Fourth Series, vi. 1892, pp. 343-355; "Through Christ to God," London, 1893). On the other hand, the rectoral theory has been the regnant one among American Methodists and has received some of its best statements from their hands (cf. especially John Miley, "The Atonement in Christ," New York, 1879; "Systematic Theology," New York, ii. 1894, pp. 65-240), although there are voices raised of late in denial of its claim to be considered distinctively the doctrine of the Methodist Church (J. J. Tigert, ut sup.; H. C. Sheldon, in The American Journal of Theology, x. 1906, pp. 41-42).

The final form which Horace Bushnell gave his version of the "moral influence" theory, in his "Forgiveness and Law" (New York, 1874; made the second volume to his revised "Vicarious Sacrifice," 1877), stands in no relation to the rectoral theories; but it requires to be mentioned here by their side, because it supposes like them that the work of Christ has a secondary effect on God, although its primary effect is on man. In this presentation, Bushnell represents Christ's work as consisting in a profound identification of Himself with man, the effect of which is, on the one side, to manifest God's love to man and so to conquer man to Him, and, on the other, as he expresses it, "to make cost" on God's part for man, and so, by breaking down God's resentment to man, to prepare God's heart to receive man back when he comes. The underlying idea is that whenever we do anything for those who have injured us, and in proportion as it costs us something to do it, our natural resentment of the injury we have suffered is undermined, and we are prepared to forgive the injury when forgiveness is sought. By this theory the transition is naturally made to the next class.

5. Theories which conceive the work of Christ as terminating primarily on God and secondarily on man. The lowest form in which this ultimate position can be said to be fairly taken, is doubtless that set forth in his remarkably attractive way by John McLeod Campbell ("The Nature of the Atonement and its Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life," London, 1856; ed. 4, 1873), and lately argued out afresh with even more than Campbell's winningness and far more than his cogency, depth, and richness, by the late R. C. Moberly ("Atonement and Personality," London, 1901). This theory supposes that our Lord, by sympathetically entering into our condition (an idea independently suggested by Schleiermacher, and emphasized by many Continental thinkers, as, for example, to name only a pair with little else in common, by Gess and Häring), so keenly felt our sins as His own, that He could confess and adequately repent of them before God; and this is all the expiation justice asks. Here "sympathetic identification" replaces the conception of substitution; "sodality," of race-unity; and "repentance," of expiation. Nevertheless, the theory rises immeasurably above the mass of those already enumerated, in looking upon Christ as really a Saviour, who performs a really saving work, terminating immediately on God. Despite its insufficiencies, therefore, which have caused writers like Edwards A. Park, and A. B. Bruce ("The Humiliation of Christ," ut sup., pp. 317-318) to speak of it with a tinge of contempt, it has exercised a very wide influence and elements of it are discoverable in many constructions which stand far removed from its fundamental presuppositions.

The so-called "middle theory" of the Atonement, which owes its name to its supposed intermediate position between the "moral influence" theories and the doctrine of "satisfaction," seems to have offered attractions to the latitudinarian writers of the closing eighteenth and opening nineteenth centuries. At that time it was taught in John Balguy's "Essay on Redemption" (London, 1741), Henry Taylor's "Apology of Ben Mordecai" (London, 1784), and Richard Price's "Sermons on Christian Doctrine" (London, 1787; cf. Hill's "Lectures in Divinity," ed. 1851, pp. 422 ff.). Basing on the conception of sacrifices which looks upon them as merely gifts designed to secure the good-will of the King, the advocates of this theory regard the work of Christ as consisting in the offering to God of Christ's perfect obedience even to death, and by it purchasing God's favor and the right to do as He would with those whom God gave Him as a reward. By the side of this theory may be placed the ordinary Remonstrant theory of acceptilatio, which, reviving this Scotist conception, is willing to allow that the work of Christ was of the nature of an expiatory sacrifice, but is unwilling to allow that His blood any more than that of "bulls and goats" had intrinsic value equivalent to the fault for which it was graciously accepted by God as an atonement. This theory may be found expounded, for example, in Limborch ("Theologia Christiana," ed. 4, Amsterdam, 1715, iii. chaps. xviii.-xxiii.). Such theories, while preserving the sacrificial form of the Biblical doctrine, and, with it, its inseparable implication that the work of Christ has as its primary end to affect God and secure from Him favorable regard for man (for it is always to God that sacrifices are offered), yet fall so far short of the Biblical doctrine of the nature and effect of Christ's sacrifice as to seem little less than travesties of it.

The Biblical doctrine of the sacrifice of Christ finds full recognition in no other construction than that of the established church-doctrine of satisfaction. According to it, our Lord's redeeming work is at its core a true and perfect sacrifice offered to God, of intrinsic value ample for the expiation of our guilt; and at the same time is a true and perfect righteousness offered to God in fulfillment of the demands of His law; both the one and the other being offered in behalf of His people, and, on being accepted by God, accruing to their benefit; so that by this satisfaction they are relieved at once from the curse of their guilt as breakers of the law, and from the burden of the law as a condition of life; and this by a work of such kind and performed in such a manner, as to carry home to the hearts of men a profound sense of the indefectible righteousness of God and to make to them a perfect revelation of His love; so that, by this one and indivisible work, both God is reconciled to us, and we, under the quickening influence of the Spirit bought for us by it, are reconciled to God, so making peace - external peace between an angry God and sinful men, and internal peace in the response of the human conscience to the restored smile of God. This doctrine, which has been incorporated in more or less fullness of statement in the creedal declarations of all the great branches of the Church, Greek, Latin, Lutheran, and Reformed, and which has been expounded with more or less insight and power by the leading doctors of the churches for the last eight hundred years, was first given scientific statement by Anselm (q.v.) in his "Cur Deus homo" (1098); but reached its complete development only at the hands of the so-called Protestant Scholastics of the seventeenth century (cf. e.g. Turretin, "The Atonement of Christ," E.T. by J. R. Willson, New York, 1859; John Owen, "The Death of Death in the Death of Christ" (1648), Edinburgh, 1845). Among the numerous modern presentations of the doctrine the following may perhaps be most profitably consulted. Of Continental writers: August Tholuck, "Die Lehre von der Sünde und vom Versöhner," Hamburg, 1823; F. A. Philippi, "Kirchliche Glaubenslehre" (Stuttgart and Gütersloh, 1854-1882), IV. ii. 1863, pp. 24 ff.; G. Thomasius, "Christi Person und Werk," ed. 3, Erlangen, 1886-1888, vol. ii.; E. Böhl, "Dogmatik," Amsterdam, 1887, pp. 361 ff.; J. F. Bula, "Die Versöhnung des Menschen mit Gott durch Christum," Basel, 1874; W. Kolling, "Die Satisfactio vicaria," 2 vols., Gütersloh, 1897-1899; Merle d'Aubigné, "L'Expiation de la croix," Geneva, 1867; A. Gretillat, "Exposé de théologie systématique" (Paris, 1885-1892), iv. 1890, pp. 278 ff.; A. Kuyper, "E Voto Dordraceno," Amsterdam, i. 1892, pp. 79 ff., 388 ff.; H. Bavinck, "Gereformeerde Dogmatick," Kampen, iii. 1898, pp. 302-424. Of writers in English: The appropriate sections of the treatises on dogmatics by C. Hodge, A. H. Strong, W. G. T. Shedd, R. L. Dabney; and the following separate treatises: W. Symington, "On the Atonement and Intercession of Jesus Christ," New York, 1853 (defective, as excluding the "active obedience" of Christ); R. S. Candlish, "The Atonement: its Efficacy and Extent," Edinburgh, 1867; A. A. Hodge, "The Atonement," Philadelphia, 1867, new edition, 1877; George Smeaton, "The Doctrine of the Atonement as Taught by Christ Himself," Edinburgh, 1868, ed. 2, 1871; idem, "The Doctrine of the Atonement as Taught by the Apostles," 1870; T. J. Crawford, "The Doctrine of Holy Scripture respecting the Atonement," Edinburgh, 1871, ed. 5, 1888; Hugh Martin, "The Atonement: in its Relations to the Covenant, the Priesthood, the Intercession of our Lord," London, 1870. See " Satisfaction."

BIBLIOGRAPHY: The more important treatises on the Atonement have been named in the body of the article. The history of the doctrine has been written with a fair degree of objectivity by Ferdinand Christian Baur, "Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung," Tübingen, 1838; and with more subjectivity by Albrecht Ritschl in the first volume of his "Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung," ed. 3, Bonn, 1889, E.T. from the first edition, 1870, "A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation," Edinburgh; 1872. Excellent historical sketches are given by G. Thomasius, in the second volume of his "Christi Person und Werk," pp. 113 ff., ed. 3, Erlangen, 1888, from the confessional, and by F. A. B. Nitzsch, in his "Lehrbuch der evangelischen Dogmatik," pp. 457 ff., Freiburg, 1892, from the moral influence standpoint. More recently the history has been somewhat sketchily written from the general confessional standpoint by Oscar Bensow as the first part of his "Die Lehre von der Versöhnung," Gütersloh, 1904, and with more fullness from the moral influence standpoint by G. A. F. Ecklin, in his "Erlösung und Versöhnung," Basel, 1903. Consult also E. Ménégoz, "La Mort de Jésus et le dogme de l'expiation," Paris, 1905. The English student of the history of the doctrine has at his disposal not only the sections in the general histories of doctrine (e.g. Hagenbach, Cunningham, Shedd, Harnack) and the comprehensive treatise of Ritschl mentioned above, but also interesting sketches in the appendices of G. Smeaton's "The Doctrine of the Atonement as Taught by the Apostles," Edinburgh, 1870, and J. S. Lidgett's "The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement," London, 1897, from the confessional standpoint, as well as H. N. Oxenham's "The Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement," London, 1865, ed. 3, 1881, from the Roman Catholic standpoint. Consult also: J. B. Remensnyder, "The Atonement and Modern Thought," Philadelphia, 1905; D. W. Simon, "The Redemption of Man," Edinburgh, 1889; C. A. Dinsmore, "Atonement in Literature and Life," Boston, 1906; L. Pullan, "The Atonement," London, 1906. An interesting episode is treated by Andrew Robertson, "History of the Atonement Controversy in the Secession Church," Edinburgh, 1846.

Modern Theories of the Atonement

We may as well confess at the outset that there is no such thing as a modern theory of the Atonement, in the sense in which there is a modern theory, say, of the Incarnation - the kenosis theory to wit, which is a brand-new conception, never dreamed of until the nineteenth century was well on its course, and likely, we may hope, to pass out of notice with that century. All the theories of the Atonement now current readily arrange themselves under the old categories, and have their prototypes running back more or less remotely into the depths of Church history.

The fact is, the views men take of the atonement are largely determined by their fundamental feelings of need - by what men most long to be saved from. And from the beginning three well-marked types of thought on this subject have been traceable, corresponding to three fundamental needs of human nature as it unfolds itself in this world of limitation. Men are oppressed by the ignorance, or by the misery, or by the sin in which they feel themselves sunk; and, looking to Christ to deliver them from the evil under which they particularly labor, they are apt to conceive His work as consisting predominantly in revelation of divine knowledge, or in the inauguration of a reign of happiness, or in deliverance from the curse of sin.

In the early Church, the intellectualistic tendency allied itself with the class of phenomena which we call Gnosticism. The longing for peace and happiness that was the natural result of the crying social evils of the time, found its most remarkable expression in what we know as Chiliasm. That no such party-name suggests itself to describe the manifestation given to the longing to be delivered from the curse of sin, does not mean that this longing was less prominent or less poignant: but precisely the contrary. The other views were sloughed off as heresies, and each received its appropriate designation as such: this was the fundamental point of sight of the Church itself, and as such found expression in numberless ways, some of which, no doubt, were sufficiently bizarre - as, for example, the somewhat widespread representation of the atonement as centering in the surrender of Jesus as a ransom to Satan.

Our modern Church, you will not need me to tell you, is very much like the early Church in all this. All three of these tendencies find as full representation in present-day thought as in any age of the Church's life. Perhaps at no other period was Christ so frequently or so passionately set forth as merely a social Saviour. Certainly at no other period has His work been so prevalently summed up in mere revelation. While now, as ever, the hope of Christians at large continues to be set upon Him specifically as the Redeemer from sin.

The forms in which these fundamental types of thinking are clothed in our modern days, differ, as a matter of course, greatly from those they assumed in the first age. This difference is largely the result of the history of thought through the intervening centuries. The assimilation of the doctrines of revelation by the Church was a gradual process; and it was also an orderly process - the several doctrines emerging in the Christian consciousness for formal discussion and scientific statement in a natural sequence. In this process the doctrine of the atonement did not come up for formulation until the eleventh century, when Anselm gave it its first really fruitful treatment, and laid down for all time the general lines on which the atonement must be conceived, if it is thought of as a work of deliverance from the penalty of sin. The influence of Anselm's discussion is not only traceable, but has been determining in all subsequent thought down to to-day. The doctrine of satisfaction set forth by him has not been permitted, however, to make its way unopposed. Its extreme opposite - the general conception that the atoning work of Christ finds its essence in revelation and had its prime effect, therefore, in deliverance from error - was advocated in Anselm's own day by perhaps the acutest reasoner of all the schoolmen, Peter Abelard. The intermediate view which was apparently invented five centuries later by the great Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, loves to think of itself as running back, in germ at least, to nearly as early a date. In the thousand years of conflict which has raged among these generic conceptions each has taken on protean shapes, and a multitude of mixed or mediating hypotheses have been constructed. But, broadly speaking, the theories that have divided the suffrages of men easily take places under one or other of these three types.

There is a fourth general conception, to be sure, which would need to be brought into view were we studying exhaustive enumeration. This is the mystical idea which looks upon the work of Christ as summed up in the incarnation; and upon the saving process as consisting in an unobserved leavening of mankind by the inworking of a vital germ then planted in the mass. But though there never was an age in which this idea failed entirely of representation, it bears a certain aristocratic character which has commended it ordinarily only to the few, however fit: and it probably never was very widely held except during the brief period when the immense genius of Schleiermacher so overshadowed the Church that it could hardly think at all save in the formulas taught by him. Broadly speaking, the field has been held practically by the three theories which are commonly designated by the names of Anselm, Grotius, and Abelard; and age has differed from age only in the changing expression given these theories and the relative dominance of one or another of them.

The Reformers, it goes without saying, were enthusiastic preachers of the Anselmic conception - of course as corrected, developed, and enriched by their own deeper thought and truer insight. Their successors adjusted, expounded, and defended its details, until it stood forth in the seventeenth century dogmatics in practical completeness. During this whole period this conception held the field; the numerous controversies that arose about it were rather joined with the Socinian or the mystic than internal to the circle of recognized Church teachers. It was not until the rise of Rationalism that a widely spread defection became observable. Under this blight men could no longer believe in the substitutive expiation which is the heart of the Anselmic doctrine, and a blood-bought redemption went much out of fashion. The dainty Supranaturalists attained the height only of the Grotian view, and allowed only a "demonstrative" as distinguished from an "ontological" necessity for an atonement, and an "executive" as distinguished from a "judicial" effect to it. The great evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, swept away all that. It is probable that a half-century ago the doctrine of penal satisfaction had so strong a hold on the churches that not more than an academic interest attached to rival theories.

About that time a great change began to set in. I need only to mention such names as those of Horace Bushnell, McLeod Campbell, Frederick Dennison Maurice, Albrecht Ritschl, to suggest the strength of the assault that was suddenly delivered against the central ideas of an expiatory atonement. The immediate effect was to call out an equally powerful defense. Our best treatises on the atonement come from this period; and Presbyterians in particular may well be proud of the part played by them in the crisis. But this defense only stemmed the tide: it did not succeed in rolling it back. The ultimate result has been that the revolt from the conceptions of satisfaction, propitiation, expiation, sacrifice, reinforced continually by tendencies adverse to evangelical doctrine peculiar to our times, has grown steadily more and more widespread, and in some quarters more and more extreme, until it has issued in an immense confusion on this central doctrine of the gospel. Voices are raised all about us proclaiming a "theory" of the atonement impossible, while many of those that essay a "theory" seem to be feeling their tortuous way very much in the dark. That, if I mistake not, is the real state of affairs in the modern Church.

I am not meaning to imply that the doctrine of substitutive atonement - which is, after all, the very heart of the gospel - has been lost from the consciousness of the Church. It has not been lost from the hearts of the Christian community. It is in its terms that the humble Christian everywhere still expresses the grounds of his hope of salvation. It is in its terms that the earnest evangelist everywhere still presses the claims of Christ upon the awakened hearer. It has not even been lost from the forum of theological discussion. It still commands powerful advocates wherever a vital Christianity enters academical circles: and, as a rule, the more profound the thinker, the more clear is the note he strikes in its proclamation and defense. But if we were to judge only by the popular literature of the day - a procedure happily not possible - the doctrine of a substitutive atonement has retired well into the background. Probably the majority of those who hold the public ear, whether as academical or as popular religious guides, have definitely broken with it, and are commending to their audiences something other and, as they no doubt believe, something very much better. A tone of speech has even grown up regarding it which is not only scornful but positively abusive. There are no epithets too harsh to be applied to it, no invectives too intense to be poured out on it. An honored bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church tells us that "the whole theory of substitutional punishment as a ground either of conditional or unconditional pardon is unethical, contradictory, and self-subversive."2 He may rightly claim to be speaking in this sweeping sentence with marked discretion and unwonted charity. To do justice to the hateful theme requires, it seems, the tumid turmoil and rushing rant of Dr. Farrar's rhetoric. Surely if hard words broke bones, the doctrine of the substitutional sacrifice of the Son of God for the sin of man would long ago have been ground to powder.

What, then, are we offered instead of it? We have already intimated that it is confusion which reigns here: and in any event we cannot go into details. We may try, however, to set down in few words the general impression that the most recent literature of the subject makes.

To obtain a just view of the situation, I think we ought to note, first of all, the wide prevalence among the sounder thinkers of the Grotian or Rectoral theory of the atonement - the theory, that is, that conceives the work of Christ not as supplying the ground on which God forgives sin, but only as supplying the ground on which He may safely forgive sins on the sole ground of His compassion. The theory of hypothetical universalism, according to which Christ died as the proper substitute for all men on the condition, namely, that they should believe - whether in its Remonstrant or in its Amyraldian form - has in the conflict of theories long since been crushed out of existence - as, indeed, it well deserved to be. This having been shoved out of the way, the Grotian theory has come to be the orthodox Arminian view and is taught as such by the leading exponents of modern Arminian thought whether in Britain or America; and he who will read the powerful argumentation to that effect by the late Dr. John Miley, say, for example, will be compelled to agree that it is, indeed, the highest form of atonement-doctrine conformable to the Arminian system. But not only is it thus practically universal among the Wesleyan Arminians. It has become also, under the influence of such teachers as Drs. Wardlaw and Dale and Dr. Park, the mark also of orthodox Nonconformity in Great Britain and of orthodox Congregationalism in America. Nor has it failed to take a strong hold also of Scottish Presbyterianism: it is specifically advocated by such men of mark and leading as, for example, Dr. Marcus Dods. On the Continent of Europe it is equally widespread among the saner teachers: one notes without surprise, for example, that it was taught by the late Dr. Frederic Godet, though one notes with satisfaction that it was considerably modified upward by Dr. Godet, and that his colleague, Dr. Gretillat, was careful to correct it. In a word, wherever men have been unwilling to drop all semblance of an "objective" atonement, as the word now goes, they have taken refuge in this half-way house which Grotius has builded for them. I do not myself look upon this as a particularly healthful sign of the times. I do not myself think that, at bottom, there is in principle much to choose between the Grotian and the so-called "subjective" theories. It seems to me only an illusion to suppose that it preserves an "objective" atonement at all. But meanwhile it is adopted by many because they deem it "objective," and it so far bears witness to a remanent desire to preserve an "objective" atonement.

We are getting more closely down to the real characteristic of modern theories of the atonement when we note that there is a strong tendency observable all around us to rest the forgiveness of sins solely on repentance as its ground. In its last analysis, the Grotian theory itself reduces to this. The demonstration of God's righteousness, which is held by it to be the heart of Christ's work and particularly of His death, is supposed to have no other effect on God than to render it safe for Him to forgive sin. And this it does not as affecting Him, but as affecting men - namely, by awaking in them such a poignant sense of the evil of sin as to cause them to hate it soundly and to turn decisively away from it. This is just Repentance. We could desire no better illustration of this feature of the theory than is afforded by the statement of it by one of its most distinguished living advocates, Dr. Marcus Dods.3 The necessity of atonement, he tells us, lies in the "need of some such demonstration of God's righteousness as will make it possible and safe for Him to forgive the unrighteous" (p. 181). Whatever begets in the sinner true penitence and impels him toward the practice of righteousness will render it safe to forgive him. Hence Dr. Dods asserts that it is inconceivable that God should not forgive the penitent sinner, and that Christ's work is summed up in such an exhibition of God's righteousness and love as produces, on its apprehension, adequate repentance. "By being the source, then, of true and fruitful penitence, the death of Christ removes the radical subjective obstacle in the way of forgiveness" (p. 184). "The death of Christ, then, has made forgiveness possible, because it enables man to repent with an adequate penitence, and because it manifests righteousness and binds men to God" (p. 187). There is no hint here that man needs anything more to enable him to repent than the presentation of motives calculated powerfully to induce him to repent. That is to say, there is no hint here of an adequate appreciation of the subjective effects of sin on the human heart, deadening it to the appeal of motives to right action however powerful, and requiring therefore an internal action of the Spirit of God upon it before it can repent: or of the purchase of such a gift of the Spirit by the sacrifice of Christ. As little is there any hint here of the existence of any sense of justice in God, forbidding Him to account the guilty righteous without satisfaction of guilt. All God requires for forgiveness is repentance: all the sinner needs for repentance is a moving inducement. It is all very simple; but we are afraid it does not go to the root of matters as presented either in Scripture or in the throes of our awakened heart.

The widespread tendency to represent repentance as the atoning fact might seem, then, to be accountable from the extensive acceptance which has been given to the Rectoral theory of the atonement. Nevertheless much of it has had a very different origin and may be traced back rather to some such teaching as that, say, of Dr. McLeod Campbell. Dr. Campbell did not himself find the atoning fact in man's own repentance, but rather in our Lord's sympathetic repentance for man. He replaced the evangelical doctrine of substitution by a theory of sympathetic identification, and the evangelical doctrine of expiatory penalty-paying by a theory of sympathetic repentance. Christ so fully enters sympathetically into our case, was his idea, that He is able to offer to God an adequate repentance for our sins, and the Father says, It is enough! Man here is still held to need a Saviour, and Christ is presented as that Saviour, and is looked upon as performing for man what man cannot do for himself. But the gravitation of this theory is distinctly downward, and it has ever tended to find its lower level. There are, therefore, numerous transition theories prevalent - some of them very complicated, some of them very subtle - which connect it by a series of insensible stages with the proclamation of human repentance as the sole atonement required. As typical of these we may take the elaborate theory (which, like man himself, may be said to be fearfully and wonderfully made) set forth by the modern Andover divines. This finds the atoning fact in a combination of Christ's sympathetic repentance for man and man's own repentance under the impression made upon him by Christ's work on his behalf - not in the one without the other, but in the two in unison. A similar combination of the revolutionary repentance of man induced by Christ and the sympathetic repentance of Christ for man meets us also in recent German theorizing, as, for example, in the teaching of Häring. It is sometimes clothed in "sacrificial" language and made to bear an appearance even of "substitution." It is just the repentance of Christ, however, which is misleadingly called His "sacrifice," and our sympathetic repentance with Him that is called our participation in His "sacrifice"; and it is carefully explained that though there was "a substitution on Calvary," it was not the substitution of a sinless Christ for a sinful race, but the substitution of humanity plus Christ for humanity minus Christ. All of which seems but a confusing way of saying that the atoning fact consists in the revolutionary repentance of man induced by the spectacle of Christ's sympathetic repentance for man.

The essential emphasis in all these transition theories falls obviously on man's own repentance rather than on Christ's. Accordingly the latter falls away easily and leaves us with human repentance only as the sole atoning fact - the entire reparation which God asks or can ask for sin. Nor do men hesitate to-day to proclaim this openly and boldly. Scores of voices are raised about us declaring it not only with clearness but with passion. Even those who still feel bound to attribute the reconciling of God somehow to the work of Christ are often careful to explain that they mean this ultimately only, and only because they attribute in one way or other to the work of Christ the arousing of the repentance in man which is the immediate ground of forgiveness. Thus Dean Fremantle tells us that it is "repentance and faith" that "change for us the face of God." And then he adds, doubtless as a concession to ingrained, though outgrown, habits of thought: "If, then, the death of Christ, viewed as the culminating point of His life of love, is the destined means of repentance for the whole world, we may say, also, that it is the means of securing the mercy and favour of God, of procuring the forgiveness of sins."4 And Dr. (now Principal) Forsyth, whose fervid address on the atonement at a great Congregationalist gathering a few years ago quite took captive the hearts of the whole land, seems really to teach little more than this. Christ sympathetically enters into our condition, he tells us, and gives expression to an adequate sense of sin. We, perceiving the effect of this, His entrance into our sinful atmosphere, are smitten with horror of the judgment our sin has thus brought on Him. This horror begets in us an adequate repentance of sin: God accepts this repentance as enough; and forgives our sin. Thus forgiveness rests proximately only on our repentance as its ground: but our repentance is produced only by Christ's sufferings: and hence, Dr. Forsyth tells us, Christ's sufferings may be called the ultimate ground of forgiveness.5

It is sufficiently plain that the function served by the sufferings and death of Christ in this construction is somewhat remote. Accordingly they quite readily fall away altogether. It seems quite natural that they should do so with those whose doctrinal inheritance comes from Horace Bushnell, say, or from the Socinian theorizing of the school of Ritschl. We feel no surprise to learn, for example, that with Harnack the sufferings and death of Christ play no appreciable part. With him the whole atoning act seems to consist in the removal of a false conception of God from the minds of men. Men, because sinners, are prone to look upon God as a wrathful judge. He is, on the contrary, just Love. How can the sinner's misjudgment be corrected? By the impression made upon him by the life of Jesus, keyed to the conception of the Divine Fatherhood. With all this we are familiar enough. But we are hardly prepared for the extremities of language which some permit themselves in giving expression to it. "The whole difficulty," a recent writer of this class declares, "is not in inducing or enabling God to pardon, but in moving men to abhor sin and to want pardon." Even this difficulty, however, we are assured is removable: and what is needed for its removal is only proper instruction. "Christianity," cries our writer, "was a revelation, not a creation." Even this false antithesis does not, however, satisfy him. He rises beyond it to the acme of his passion. "Would there have been no Gospel," he rhetorically demands - as if none could venture to say him nay - "would there have been no Gospel had not Christ died?"6 Thus "the blood of Christ" on which the Scriptures hang the whole atoning fact is thought no longer to be needed: the gospel of Paul, which consisted not in Christ simpliciter but specifically in "Christ as crucified," is scouted. We are able to get along now without these things.

To such a pass have we been brought by the prevailing gospel of the indiscriminate love of God. For it is here that we place our finger on the root of the whole modern assault upon the doctrine of an expiatory atonement. In the attempt to give effect to the conception of indiscriminate and undiscriminating love as the basal fact of religion, the entire Biblical teaching as to atonement has been ruthlessly torn up. If God is love and nothing but love, what possible need can there be of an atonement? Certainly such a God cannot need propitiating. Is not He the All-Father? Is He not yearning for His children with an unconditioned and unconditioning eagerness which excludes all thought of "obstacles to forgiveness"? What does He want but - just His children? Our modern theorizers are never weary of ringing the changes on this single fundamental idea. God does not require to be moved to forgiveness; or to be enabled to pardon; or even to be enabled to pardon safely. He raises no question of whether He can pardon, or whether it would be safe for Him to pardon. Such is not the way of love. Love is bold enough to sweep all such chilling questions impatiently out of its path. The whole difficulty is to induce men to permit themselves to be pardoned. God is continually reaching longing arms out of heaven toward men: oh, if men would only let themselves be gathered unto the Father's eager heart! It is absurd, we are told - nay, wicked - blasphemous with awful blasphemy - to speak of propitiating such a God as this, of reconciling Him, of making satisfaction to Him. Love needs no satisfying, reconciling, propitiating; nay, will have nothing to do with such things. Of its very nature it flows out unbought, unpropitiated, instinctively and unconditionally, to its object. And God is Love!

Well, certainly, God is Love. And we praise Him that we have better authority for telling our souls this glorious truth than the passionate assertion of these somewhat crass theorizers. God is Love! But it does not in the least follow that He is nothing but love. God is Love: but Love is not God and the formula "Love" must therefore ever be inadequate to express God. It may well be - to us sinners, lost in our sin and misery but for it, it must be - the crowning revelation of Christianity that God is love. But it is not from the Christian revelation that we have learned to think of God as nothing but love. That God is the Father of all men in a true and important sense, we should not doubt. But this term "All-Father" - it is not from the lips of Hebrew prophet or Christian apostle that we have caught it. And the indiscriminate benevolencism which has taken captive so much of the religious thinking of our time is a conception not native to Christianity, but of distinctly heathen quality. As one reads the pages of popular religious literature, teeming as it is with ill-considered assertions of the general Fatherhood of God, he has an odd feeling of transportation back into the atmosphere of, say, the decadent heathenism of the fourth and fifth centuries, when the gods were dying, and there was left to those who would fain cling to the old ways little beyond a somewhat saddened sense of the benignitas numinis. The benignitas numinis! How studded the pages of those genial old heathen are with the expression; how suffused their repressed life is with the conviction that the kind Deity that dwells above will surely not be hard on men toiling here below! How shocked they are at the stern righteousness of the Christian's God, who loomed before their startled eyes as He looms before those of the modern poet in no other light than as "the hard God that dwelt in Jerusalem"! Surely the Great Divinity is too broadly good to mark the peccadillos of poor puny man; surely they are the objects of His compassionate amusement rather than of His fierce reprobation. Like Omar Khayyam's pot, they were convinced, before all things, of their Maker that "He's a good fellow and 'twill all be well."

The query cannot help rising to the surface of our minds whether our modern indiscriminate benevolencism goes much deeper than this. Does all this one-sided proclamation of the universal Fatherhood of God import much more than the heathen benignitas numinis? When we take those blessed words, "God is Love," upon our lips, are we sure we mean to express much more than that we do not wish to believe that God will hold man to any real account for his sin? Are we, in a word, in these modern days, so much soaring upward toward a more adequate apprehension of the transcendent truth that God is love, as passionately protesting against being ourselves branded and dealt with as wrath-deserving sinners? Assuredly it is impossible to put anything like their real content into these great words, "God is Love," save as they are thrown out against the background of those other conceptions of equal loftiness, "God is Light," "God is Righteousness," "God is Holiness," "God is a consuming fire." The love of God cannot be apprehended in its length and breadth and height and depth - all of which pass knowledge - save as it is apprehended as the love of a God who turns from the sight of sin with inexpressible abhorrence, and burns against it with unquenchable indignation. The infinitude of His love would be illustrated not by His lavishing of His favor on sinners without requiring an expiation of sin, but by His - through such holiness and through such righteousness as cannot but cry out with infinite abhorrence and indignation - still loving sinners so greatly that He provides a satisfaction for their sin adequate to these tremendous demands. It is the distinguishing characteristic of Christianity, after all, not that it preaches a God of love, but that it preaches a God of conscience.

A somewhat flippant critic, contemplating the religion of Israel, has told us, as expressive of his admiration for what he found there, that "an honest God is the noblest work of man."7 There is a profound truth lurking in the remark. Only it appears that the work were too noble for man; and probably man has never compassed it. A benevolent God, yes: men have framed a benevolent God for themselves. But a thoroughly honest God, perhaps never. That has been left for the revelation of God Himself to give us. And this is the really distinguishing characteristic of the God of revelation: He is a thoroughly honest, a thoroughly conscientious God - a God who deals honestly with Himself and us, who deals conscientiously with Himself and us. And a thoroughly conscientious God, we may be sure, is not a God who can deal with sinners as if they were not sinners. In this fact lies, perhaps, the deepest ground of the necessity of an expiatory atonement.

And it is in this fact also that there lies the deepest ground of the increasing failure of the modern world to appreciate the necessity of an expiatory atonement. Conscientiousness commends itself only to awakened conscience; and in much of recent theologizing conscience does not seem especially active. Nothing, indeed, is more startling in the structure of recent theories of atonement, than the apparently vanishing sense of sin that underlies them. Surely, it is only where the sense of guilt of sin has grown grievously faint, that men can suppose repentance to be all that is needed to purge it. Surely it is only where the sense of the power of sin has profoundly decayed, that men can fancy that they can at will cast it off from them in a "revolutionary repentance." Surely it is only where the sense of the heinousness of sin has practically passed away, that man can imagine that the holy and just God can deal with it lightly. If we have not much to be saved from, why, certainly, a very little atonement will suffice for our needs. It is, after all, only the sinner that requires a Saviour. But if we are sinners, and in proportion as we know ourselves to be sinners, and appreciate what it means to be sinners, we will cry out for that Saviour who only after He was perfected by suffering could become the Author of eternal salvation.

Endnotes:

1. An address delivered at the "Religious Conference," held in the Theological Seminary, Princeton, on October 13, 1902. Reprinted from The Princeton Theological Review, i. 1903, pp. 81-92.

2. Bishop Foster, in his "Philosophy of Christian Experience": 1891, p. 113.

3. In an essay in a volume called "The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought: A Theological Symposium" (London: James Clarke & Co., 1900). In this volume seventeen essays from as many writers are collected, and from it a very fair notion can be obtained of the ideas current in certain circles of our day.

4. "The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought," as cited: pp. 168 f.

5. Ibid., pp. 61 ff.

6. Mr. Bernard J. Snell, in "The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought": pp. 265, 267.

7. Cf. Mr. Edward Day's "The Social Life of the Hebrews," 1901, p. 207. He is quoting apparently the late Mr. Ingersoll.

Christ our Sacrifice

"ACCORDING to the New Testament, primitive Christianity, when it used the words 'Jesus redeems us by His blood,' was thinking of the ritual sacrifice, and this conception is diffused throughout the whole New Testament; it is a fundamental idea, universal in primitive Christianity, with respect to the significance of Jesus' death." So remarks Paul Fiebig;2 and W. P. Paterson, summarizing Albrecht Ritschl,3 emphasizes the assertion. "The interpretation of Christ's death as a sacrifice," says he,4 "is imbedded in every important type of New Testament teaching." By the limitation implied in the words, "every important type," he means only to allow for the failure of allusions to this interpretation in the two brief letters, James and Jude, the silence of which, he rightly explains, "raises no presumption against the idea being part of the common stock of Apostolic doctrine." It was already given expression by Jesus Himself (Mt. xxvi. 28, Mk. xiv. 24, I Cor. xi. 25, Mt. xx. 28, Mk. x. 45),5 and it is elaborated by the Apostles in a great variety of obviously spontaneous allusions. They not only expressly state that Christ was offered as a sacrifice.6 They work out the correspondence between His death and the different forms of Old Testament sacrifice.7 They show that the different acts of the Old Testament sacrificial ritual were repeated in Christ's experience.8 They ascribe the specific effects of sacrifice to his death.9 They dwell particularly, in truly sacrificial wise, on the saving efficacy of His out-poured blood.10 William Warburton did not speak a bit too strongly when he wrote, more than a hundred and fifty years ago: "One could hardly have thought it possible that any man who had read the Gospels with their best interpreters, the authors of the Epistles, should ever have entertained a doubt whether the death of Christ was a real sacrifice."11

It would be strange in these circumstances if, in attempting to determine the Biblical conception of the nature of the work of Christ, appeal were not made to the sacrificial system; and it were not argued that the nature of Christ's work is exhibited in the nature of the sacrificial act. Whatever a sacrifice is, that Christ's work is. It will be obvious, however, that we are liable to fall into a certain confusion here. Jesus Himself and the Apostles speak of Christ's work as sacrificial, and it is clear (as Paterson duly points out12) that this is on their lips no figure of speech or mere illustration, but is intended to declare the simple fact. It is quite plain, then, that His work was conceived by them to be of precisely that nature which a sacrifice was understood by them to be. But it is by no means so plain that they conceived His work to be of the nature which we may understand a sacrifice to be. Failure to regard this very simple distinction has brought untold confusion into the discussion. If we would comprehend the teaching of the writers of the New Testament when they call Christ a sacrifice, we must, of course, not assume out of hand that their idea of a sacrifice and ours are identical. The investigation of the previous question of the notion they attached to a sacrifice must form our starting-point. So little is this mode of procedure always adopted, however, that it is even customary for writers on the subject to go so far afield at this point as to introduce a discussion not of the idea of sacrifice held by the founders of the Christian religion, or even current in the Judaism of their day, or even embodied in the Levitical system; but of the idea of sacrifice in general, conceived as a world-wide mode of worship. The several theories of the fundamental conception which underlies sacrificial worship in the general sense are set forth; a choice is made among them; and this theory is announced as ruling the usage of the term when applied to Christ. Christ is undoubtedly our sacrifice, it is said: but a sacrifice is a rite by which communion with God is established and maintained, or by which a complete surrender to God is symbolized, or by which recognition is made of the homage we owe to Him as our God, or by which God's suffering love is manifested. As if the question of importance were what we mean by a sacrifice, and not what the New Testament writers mean by it.

It is manifestly of the highest importance, therefore, that we should keep separate three very distinct questions, to each of which a great deal of interest attaches, although they have very different bearings on the determination of the nature of Christ's work. These three questions are: (1) What is the fundamental idea which underlies sacrificial worship as a world phenomenon? (2) What is the essential implication of sacrifice in the Levitical system? (3) What is the conception of sacrifice which lay in the minds of the writers of the New Testament, when they represented Jesus as a sacrifice and ascribed to His work a sacrificial character, in its mode, its nature and its effects? The distinctness of these questions is strikingly illustrated by the circumstance that not infrequently a different response is given to each of them by the same investigator. It may be said in general that few doubt that the conception of sacrifice at least dominant among the Jews of Christ's time was distinctly piacular: and, although it is more frequently questioned whether all the writers of the New Testament were in agreement with this conception, it is practically undoubted that some of them were, and generally admitted that all were. The majority of scholars agree also that the piacular conception informs sacrificial worship in the Levitical system. On the other hand speculation has as yet found no common ground with - respect to the fundamental conception which is supposed to underlie sacrificial worship in general, and in this field hypothesis still jostles with hypothesis in what seems an endless controversy.

Question may even very legitimately be raised whether the assumption can be justified which is commonly (but of course not universally) made that a single fundamental idea underlies all sacrificial worship the world over. There seems no reason in the nature of things why a similar mode of worship may not have grown up in various races of men, living in very different circumstances, to express differing conceptions; and it certainly cannot be doubted that very diverse conceptions, in the long practice of the rite by these various races in their constantly changing circumstances, attached themselves, from time to time and from place to place, to the sacrificial mode of worship common to all. The Biblical narrative may lead us to suppose, to be sure, that sacrificial worship began very early in the history of the human race: it may seem to be carried back, indeed, to the very dawn of history, and to be definitely assigned in its origin to no later period than the second generation of men. But at the same time we seem to be advertized that at the very inception of sacrificial worship different conceptions were embodied in it by its several practitioners. It is difficult to believe at least that we are expected to understand that the whole difference in the acceptability to Jehovah of the two offerings of Cain and Abel hung on the different characters of the two offerers:13 we are told that Jehovah had respect not merely unto Abel and not unto Cain, but also to Abel's offering and not to Cain's. The different characters of the two men seem rather to be represented as expressing themselves in differing conceptions of man's actual relation to God and of the conditions of approval by Him and the proper means of seeking His favor.

It can scarcely be reading too much between the lines to suppose that the narrative in the fourth chapter of Genesis is intended on the one hand to describe the origin of sacrificial worship, and on the other to distinguish between two conceptions of sacrifice and to indicate the preference of Jehovah for the one rather than the other. These two conceptions are briefly those which have come to be known respectively as the piacular theory and the symbolical, or perhaps we should rather call it the gift, theory. In this view we are not to suppose that Cain and Abel simply brought each a gift to the Lord from the increase which had been granted him, to acknowledge thereby the overlordship of Jehovah and to express subjection and obedience to Him: and that it is merely an accident that Cain's offering, as that of a husbandman, was of the fruit of the ground, while Abel's, as that of a shepherd, was of the firstlings of the flock. There is no reason apparent why Jehovah should prefer a lamb to a sheaf of wheat.14 The difference surely goes deeper, for it was "by faith" that Abel offered under God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain -which seems to suggest that the supreme excellence of his sacrifice is to be sought not in the mere nature of the thing offered, but in the attitude of the offerer.15 What seems to be implied is that Cain's offering was an act of mere homage; Abel's embodied a sense of sin, an act of contrition, a cry for succor, a plea for pardon. In a word, Cain came to the Lord with an offering in his hand and the Homage theory of sacrifice in his mind: Abel with an offering in his hand and the Piacular theory of sacrifice in his heart. And it was therefore, that Jehovah had respect to Abel's offering and not to Cain's. If so, while we may say that sacrifice was invented by man, we must also say that by this act piacular sacrifice was instituted by God.16 In other modes of conceiving it, sacrifice may represent the reaching out of man towards God: in its piacular conception it represents the stooping down of God to man. The fundamental difference is that in the one case sacrifice rests upon consciousness of sin and has its reference to the restoration of a guilty human being to the favor of a condemning God: in the other it stands outside of all relation to sin and has its reference only to the expression of the proper attitude of deference which a creature should preserve towards his Maker and Ruler.17

The appearance of two such sharply differentiated conceptions side by side in the earliest Hebrew tradition does not encourage us to embark on ambitious speculations which would seek the origin of all sacrificial doctrines in a single primitive idea out of which they have gradually unfolded in the progress of time and through many stages of increasing culture. We have been made familiar with such genetic constructions by the writings especially of E. B. Tylor, W. Robertson Smith, and Smith's follower and improver, J. G. Frazer.18 In Tylor's view the beginning of sacrifice is to be found in a gift made by a savage to some superior being from which he hoped to receive a benefit. The gods grew gradually greater and more distant; and the gift was correspondingly spiritualized, until it ended by becoming the gift of the worshipper's self. Thus out of the offer of a bribe there gradually evolved its opposite - an act of self-abnegation and renunciation. The start is taken, according to W. Robertson Smith, rather from a common meal in which the totem animal, which is also the god, is consumed with a view to the assimilation of it by the worshippers and their assimilation to it. When the animal eaten came to be thought of as provided by the worshipper, the idea of gift came in; as all totemistic meals had for their object the maintenance or renewal of the bond between the worshipper and the god, the conception of expiation lay near - for what is expiation but the restitution of a broken bond?19 H. Hubert and M. Mauss are certainly wise in eschewing this spurious geneticism, and contenting themselves with seeking merely to isolate the common element discoverable in all sacrificial acts. It must be confessed, however, that we are not much advanced even by their less ambitious labors. Sacrifices, they tell us, are, broadly, rites designed by the consecration of a victim, to modify the moral state, or, as they elsewhere express it, to affect the religious state, of the offerers.20 This is assuredly the most formal of formal definitions. All that differentiates sacrifices from other religious acts, so far as appears from it, is that they, as the others do not, seek their common end "by the consecration of a victim." Nor are we carried much further, when, at the end of their essay, we are told21 that what binds together all the divers forms of sacrifice into a unity, is that it is always one process which is employed for their varied ends. "This process," it is then said, "consists in establishing a connection between the sacred world and the profane world by the intervention of a victim, that is to say, by something destroyed in the course of the ceremony." Sacrifice, we thus learn, is just - sacrifice. But what this sacrifice is, in its fundamental meaning, we seem not to be very clearly told. An impression is left on the mind that the word "sacrifice" embraces so great a variety of differing transactions that only a very formal definition can include them all.

Our guides having left us thus in the lurch, perhaps we cannot do better than simply survey the chief theories which have been suggested as to the fundamental idea embodied in sacrificial worship, quite in the flat. In doing so, we may take a hint from the two forms of conception brought before us in the narrative of the sacrifices of Cain and Abel and derive from them our principle of division. The theories part into two broad classes, which look upon sacrifices respectively as designed and adapted to express the religious feelings of man conceived merely as creature, or as intended to meet the needs of man as sinner. The theories of the first class are by far the more numerous, and, nowadays at least, by far the more popular. Perhaps, thinking of sacrifices as a world-wide usage as at this point we are, we may say also that these theories are very likely to embody the true account of the meaning of much of the sacrificial worship, at least, which has overspread the globe. For man, even in the formation of his religious rites is doubtless no more ready to remember that he is a sinner craving pardon than that he is a creature claiming protection. Deep-rooted as the sense of sin is in every normal human conscience, and sure as it is sporadically to express itself and to color all serious religious observances, the pride of man is no less ready to find manifestation even in his religious practices. Let us look at the chief varieties of these two great classes of theories in a rapid enumeration.

The chief theories of sacrifice which allow no place to sin in its essential implications, may perhaps be collected into three groups to which may be assigned the names of theories of Recognition, of Gift and of Communion.

The theories to which we have given the name of theories of Recognition are also known as Homage or Symbolical theories. Their common characteristic is that they conceive sacrifices to be at bottom symbolical rites by means of which the worshipper gives expression to his religious feelings or aspirations or needs: "acts go before words." At their highest level these theories represent the worshipper as expressing thus his recognition of the deity, his own relation of dependence upon Him and subjection to Him, and his readiness to act in accordance with this relation and to render the homage and obedience due from him. The name of William Warburton is connected with these theories in this general form.22 A slightly different turn is given to the general conception by Albrecht Ritschl.23 According to him, even in the case of the later sacrificial system of Israel, the sacrifices express (with no reference whatever to sin in the symbolism) only the awe and religious fear which the creature in his inadequacy feels in the presence of deity: man seeks "to cover" his weakness in the face of the destroying glory of God (Gen. xxxii. 31, Judges vi. 23, xiii. 22). There are others, to be sure, who are not so careful to exclude a reference to sin and, in speaking of the sacrifices of Israel at least, suppose that what is symbolized includes a hatred of sin, as well as self-surrender to God: in their hands the theory passes therefore upward into the other main class. On the other hand, in their lowest forms, theories of this group tend to pass downward into conceptions which look upon sacrifices as merely magical rites. The thing symbolized may be supposed to be not a spiritual attitude at all but a physical need. Primitive worshippers only exhibited before the deity the object they required, and this was supposed to operate upon the deity (something after the fashion of sympathetic magic) as a specimen, securing from Him the thing desired. Theorists of this order do not scruple to point to the "shew-bread" displayed in the temple of Israel and the offering of first-fruits as instances in point.

The theories which look upon sacrifices as essentially gifts, presents, intended to please the deity,24 and thus to gain favor with Him, part into two divisions according as the gifts are conceived more as bribes or more as fines, that is according as they are conceived as designed more to curry favor with the deity, or more to make amends for faults - or, from the point of view of the deity, as a sort of police regulation, to punish or check wrong doing. In either case the idea of sin may come into play and the theory pass upward into the other main class. The chief representative of this type of theory among the old writers is J. Spencer, who looks upon it as seli-evident that this was the primitive view of sacrifice.25 The anthropologists (E. B. Tylor, Herbert Spencer) have given it great vogue in our day; and it is doubtless the most commonly held theory of the fundamental nature of sacrifice at present (e. g., H. Schultz, B. Stade, A. B. Davidson, G. F. Moore).26 In one of the lower forms of this general theory the gifts are conceived as food supplied to the deity - who is supposed to share in the human need of being fed.27 It is an advance on the crudest form of this conception when it is the savour or odor of the sacrifice which is supposed to be pleasing to the deity, and the food is thought to be conveyed to Him through the medium of burning. When the food is supposed to be shared between the offerer and the deity, an advance is made to the next group of theories.

This group of theories looks upon sacrifices as essentially formal acts of communion with the deity - a common meal, say, partaken of by worshipper and worshipped, the fundamental motive being to gratify the deity by giving or sharing with Him a meal.28 This general view is often improved upon by a reference to the custom of establishing covenants by common meals, and becomes thereby a "meal-covenant" or "tablebond" theory. In this form it was already suggested by A. A. Sykes who speaks of sacrifices as joint meals, which are, he says, " acts of engaging in covenants and leagues."29 It is a further addition to this theory to say that it was conceived that a physical union was induced between the deity and the worshipper, by the medium of the common meal.30 And the notion has reached its height when the meal is thought of as essentially a feeding on the God Himself whether by symbol, or through the medium of a totem animal, or by magical influence.31 H. C. Trumbull actually utilizes this conception to explain the mode of action of the Lord's Supper.32

One of the things which strikes us very sharply as we review these three groups of theories is the little place given in them to the slaughter, or more broadly the destruction, of the victim, or, more broadly, the offering. This comes forward in them all as incidental to the rite, rather than as its essence. In the third group the sacrificial feast - which follows on the sacrifice itself - assumes the main place; in the second it is the oblation which is emphasized as of chief importance; even in the first the slaughter is not cardinal, - at the best it is a prerequisite that the blood may be obtained, which is represented as the valuable thing, to present to the deity. This cirsumstance alone is probably fatal to the validity of these theories as accounts whether of sacrifice in general or sacrifice in Israel; and very certainly as providing an explanation of the meaning of the New Testament writers when they speak of our Lord as a sacrifice. There is reason to believe that the slaughter of the victim or destruction of the offering constitutes the essential act of sacrifice; and certainly in the New Testament it is precisely in the blood of Christ or in His cross, symbols of His death, that the essence of His sacrificial character is found.33

When we turn to the theories of sacrifice in which a reference to sin is made fundamental, we meet first with that form of the Symbolical theory in which the sacrifice is supposed to be the vehicle for the expression of the worshipper's "confession, his regret, his petition for forgiveness,"34 -- that is to say, in one word, his repentance and his engagement to give back his life to God. Influential advocates of this view are K. C. W. F. Bahr, G. F. Oehler and F. D. Maurice.35 By its side we meet also that form of the Gift theory in which the sinning worshipper is supposed to approach his judge with (on the lower level) a bribe, or (on the higher level) the fine for his fault in his hand. The former view is appropriate only to lower stages of culture, in which justice is supposed to go by favor. Even in the higher heathen opinion, so to think of the gods was held to be degrading to them: "Even a good man," says Cicero, "will refuse to accept presents from the wicked."36 When the gift is thought of as amends for a fault, however, we have entered upon more distinctly ethical ground. It is, nevertheless, only in the Piacular or Expiatory view that theories of sacrifice reach their ethical culmination. In this view the offerer is supposed to come before God burdened with a sense of sin and seeking to expiate its guilt. The victim which he offers is looked upon as his substitute, to which is transferred the punishment which is his due; and the penalty having been thus vicariously borne, the offerer may receive forgiveness for his sin. Among the older writers W. Outram is usually looked upon as the type of this view: he explains the death of the victim as "some evil inflicted on one party in order to expiate the guilt of another in the sense of delivering the guilty from punishment and procuring the forgiveness of sin."37 The general view has been held not only by such writers as P. Fairbairn, J. H. Kurtz, E. W. Hengstenberg, but also by such others as W. Gesenius, W. M. L. de Wette and even Bruno Bauer. E. Westermarck himself defines "the original idea in sacrifice a piaculum, a substitute for the offerer."38

A matter of importance which it may be well to observe in passing is that in no one of these theories are sacrifices supposed to terminate immediately upon the offerer and to have their direct effect upon him. The offerer offers them; but it is to the deity that he offers them; and their direct effect, whatever it may be, is naturally upon the deity. Of course the offerer seeks a benefit for himself by his offerings, and in this sense ultimately they terminate on him; and in some instances their operation upon him is conceived quite mechanically.39 Nevertheless it is always through their effect on the deity that they are supposed to affect men, and their immediate effect is upon the deity himself. The nearest to an exception to this is provided by those theories in which the stress is laid on the sacrificial feast, or rather, among these, by those theories in which the worshipper is supposed to "eat the God" and thereby to become sharer in his divine qualities. Even this notion, however, is an outgrowth of the general conception which rules all sacrificial worship, that the purpose of the sacrifice is so to affect the deity as to secure its favorable regard for the worshipper or its favorable action in his behalf or upon him. This conception is no doubt extended in this special case to a great extreme, in representing the benefit hoped for, sought and obtained, to be the actual transfusion of the deity's powers into the worshipper's person. Even so, however, the fundamental idea of sacrifices is retained - the securing of something from the deity for the worshipper; and this is something very different from a transaction intended directly to call out action on the part of the worshipper himself. It is in effect subversive of the whole principle of sacrificial worship to imagine that sacrifices are offered directly to affect the worshippers and to secure action from them: their purpose is to affect the deity and to secure beneficial action on its part. "The purpose of sacrifice," says J. Jeremias justly,40 "is invariably to influence the deity in favour of the sacrificer." Every time the writers of the New Testament speak of the work of Christ under the rubric of a sacrifice, therefore, they bear witness - under any theory of sacrifice current among scholars - that they conceive of His work as directed Godward and as intended directly to affect God, not man.

It must be borne steadily in mind that the theories of sacrificial worship which we have been enumerating do not necessarily represent the judgment of their adherents on the nature and implications of sacrificial worship in the developed ritual of Israel, and much less in the decadence of Israelitish religion which is thought to have been in progress when the New Testament books were written. These theories are general theories and are put forward as attempts to determine the ideas which gave birth to and in this sense underlie all sacrificial worship. The adherents of these theories for the most part recognize that in the course of the history of sacrificial worship many changes of conception took place, here, there, and elsewhere; many new ideas were incorporated and many old ones lost. They are quite prepared to look for and to trace out in the history of sacrificial worship, therefore, at least a "development," and this "development" is not thought of as necessarily running on the same lines - certainly not pari passu - in every nation. Though these theorists are inclined, therefore, to conceive all sacrificial worship as rooting in one notion, they are ordinarily willing to recognize that the "development" of sacrificial worship may have taken, or actually did take, its own direction in each region of the earth and among each people, as the conditions of its existence and modifying influences may have varied from time to time or from place to place. The history of sacrificial worship in Israel becomes thus a special subject of investigation; and scholars engaged upon it have wrought out their schemes of "development," beginning, each, with his own theory of the origin and essential presuppositions of sacrificial worship, and leading up through the stages recognized by him to the culmination of Israelitish sacrificial worship in the Levitical system. When we say that the sacrificial worship of Israel culminated in the Levitical system, this has a special significance for the investigations in question, seeing that they ordinarily proceed more or less completely on the assumption of the schematization of the development of religion in Israel which has been worked out by the Graf-Wellhausen school. This places the Levitical system at the end of the long development, and looks upon it as the final outcome of the actual religious effort of Israel. From this point of view we are apt to have, therefore, successively, discussions of sacrificial worship in the primitive Semitic ages, in the early Israelitish times, in the prophetic period, and in the prescriptions of the Levitical law. Thus a long course of development is interposed between the origin of sacrifices and the enactments of the Levitical legislation; and the theorists are free from all embarrassment when they find sacrifices bearing a very different meaning and charged with very different implications in the Levitical system from what they had conceived their fundamental, that is, speaking historically, their primitive meaning and implication to be. It is not surprising, therefore, that in point of fact, the theorizers do ordinarily find the conceptions expressed in the Levitical system different from the fundamental ideas which they suppose to have been originally embodied in sacrificial worship.

It is quite common for them to find this difference precisely in this, - that the Levitical system is the elaborate embodiment of the piacular idea, while in earlier times some one of the other conceptions of sacrifice prevailed. On this view it is customary to say that the idea of expiation is first elaborated in the post-exilic period, in which the sin-offering takes the first place among types of sacrifices, and that special expiatory sacrifices are mentioned first in Ezekiel (xl. 39, xlii. 13, xliii. 19). The assumptions in this construction, to be sure, are challenged on both sides.

It is pointed out, on the one side, that the rise of special expiatory sacrifices is not the same thing as the rise of the conception of expiation in connection with sacrifices. A. Kuenen notes,41 for example, that the burnt-offering, which is thought the oldest of all sacrifices, was offered in earlier times in those cases for which, in the completed legislation, the expiatory sacrifices proper were required; and indeed it is clear that the whole burnt-offering can still be expiatory in the late document which is isolated as P (Lev. i. 4, xiv. 20, xvi. 24). And Robertson Smith does not hesitate to declare42 that "the atoning function of sacrifice is not confined to a particular class of oblation, but belongs to all sacrifices." Of course this declaration is made from his own point of view; but it is not valid merely from his point of view. For him all sacrifices go back to a primitive form in which the object is to maintain or to reinstate communion with the God. Expiation is in his view only the re-establishment of the broken bond: the original totemistic sacrifice had all the effects of an expiatory rite; and in all the developments which have followed, this element in their significance has never been lost. All trace of totemism is effaced; but the sense of expiation always abides and thus becomes the constant feature of sacrifices. Hubert and Mauss arrive at the same result along another pathway.43 In all sacrifices there is a thing offered - the victim, we may call it for brevity's sake. This victim is an intermediary. When we say intermediary, however, we say representative. And when we say representative, we say broadly, substitute. "This is why the offerer inserts between the religious forces and himself intermediaries, the chief of which is the victim. If he went through this rite to the end himself, he would find in it death and not life. The victim takes his place. It alone enters into the dangerous region of the sacrifice, it succumbs there, and it is there in order to succumb. The offerer remains under cover; the gods take the victim instead of taking him. It ransoms him." "There is no sacrifice," they add emphatically, "in which there does not intervene some idea of ransom." We may take it to be sufficiently clear, then, that, whatever conceptions may have from time to time and from place to place dominated the minds of sacrificial worship, the one constant idea which has always been present in it is precisely that of piacular mediation. And it is very plain indeed that we cannot look upon the Levitical legislation as the introduction of the piacular conception into the sacrificial system of Israel.

The criticism directed from the other side against the assumptions of the theory in question cannot be held to be so successful. The general contention of this criticism is that, while it is to be admitted that the drift in Israel was towards the piacular conception, yet that drift had not reached its goal in the Levitical system, which thus at best marks only a stage in the progress towards it. There are some indeed who will not grant even so much as this. They see very definitely expressed in the Levitical system too some quite different conception of sacrificial worship, the Homage conception, say, or the Communion conception, according to which respectively the sacrifices are thought of as analogous to prayers or to sacraments. Others find it more convenient simply to deny that any definite conception whatever informs the Levitical system. The framers of this legislation were not clear in their own minds what was the real nature of sacrificial worship, but were content to practice it as an ordinance of God and to leave the mode of its operation in that mystery which probably enhanced rather than curtailed its influence upon the awe-stricken consciousness of the worshipper.44 This extreme view has obtained a very considerable vogue, but need scarcely be taken seriously. It is plain enough that the Levitical system is something more than a series of blind rites, the whole value of the performance of which lies in the manifestation of implicit obedience to God. And it is generally allowed that the sacrificial conception of Israel, one stage in the development of which is marked by the Levitical system, was moving towards the idea of expiation to which it ultimately attained. Rudolf Smend, for instance, who supposes that the earliest sacrificial ideas of Israel saw in the sacrifices only acts of homage, yet considers that these ideas were steadily modified in later ages until they had run through all the stages up to that of reparation of sin - although he thinks it doubtful if the Israelites ever attained to a truly substitutionary theory.45 H. J. Holtzmann, while insisting that the penal interpretation is not that of the law, feels compelled to admit that it was nevertheless the popular doctrine of the Jews and that traces of it found their way into the code itself.46 A. B. Davidson, who believes that the earliest idea connected with sacrifice in Israel was that of "a gift to placate God," considers that this idea still underlies the law, and yet "in later times the other side was more prominent, that the death of the creature was of the nature of penalty, by the exaction of which the righteousness of Jehovah was satisfied."47 "This idea," he adds, "seems certainly expressed in Isa. liii; at least these two points appear to be stated there, that the sins of the people, i.e., the penalties for them, were laid on the servant and borne by him; and secondly, that thus the people were relieved from the penalty, and their sins being borne were forgiven." That there was a substitution in the law itself is recognized, on the other hand, by A. Dillmann, although he insists that this was not a substitution in kind, but of something not itself sin-bearing.48

W. Robertson Smith is well known as the powerful advocate of one of the lowest possible theories of the meaning of the primitive sacrifices of the Semites - that which sees the origin of sacrifice in a meal in which the worshipper was supposed to become physically imbued with the God on whom he fed in symbol. But he did not imagine that the Semitic peoples continued permanently to be sunk in this crass notion. Following Robertson Smith's guidance, W. P. Paterson adopts the common-meal conception of primitive sacrifice - "the fundamental motive was to gratify God by giving or sharing with Him a meal" - but fully recognizes that such changes had taken place in the progress of time that the Levitical system was just an elaborate embodiment of the piacular idea. In his view the whole system - in all its elements, and that not merely of animal but even of vegetable offerings - "contemplated the community as being in a state of guilt, and requiring to be reconciled to God." In it, in short, sacrifices "have in fact become - not excepting the Peace-offering in its later interpretation - piacular sacrifices which dispose God to mercy, procure the forgiveness of sin and avert punishment."49 Accordingly he expounds the matter thus:50 "The expiation of guilt is the leading purpose of the Levitical sacrifices. Their office is to cover or make atonement for sin. The word employed to describe this specific effect is rK,Ki. This efficacy is connected with all four kinds of principal offerings; the objects of the covering are persons and sins; the covering takes place before God, and it stands in a specially close relation to the sprinkling of the blood and the burning of the sacrificial flesh (Lev. i. 4, etc.)." It is not to be doubted, of course, that elements of adoration and of sacramental communion also enter into the sacrificial rites of the Levitical system: nothing could be clearer than that in the several sacrificial ordinances, a variety of religious motives find appropriate expression, and a variety of religious impressions are aimed at and produced. But it would seem quite impossible to erect these motives and impressions into the main, and certainly not into the sole, notion expressed or object sought in these ordinances. It may be confidently contended that, present as they undoubtedly are, they are present as subsidiary and ancillary to the fundamental function of the sacrifice, which is to propitiate the offended deity in behalf of sinful man. Any unbiased study of the Levitical system must issue, as it seems to us, in the conviction that this system is through and through, in its intention and effect, piacular.

It is, naturally, quite possible to contend that it is not of the first importance for the interpretation of the New Testament writers, when they represent our Lord as a sacrifice, to determine what the conception of sacrifice was which underlay the Levitical legislation. It may be urged that the ideas of the writers of the New Testament were not influenced so much by the Levitical system, as by the notion of sacrifice current in the Jewish thought of their time. As we have seen, however, there are very few who doubt that the Jews in the time when the New Testament was in writing held the doctrine of substitutive expiation in connection with the sacrificial system. George F. Moore is one of these few.51 He is quite sure that the idea of poena vicaria is a pure importation into the Old Testament, the prevailing conception of sacrifice in which he conceives to be that of " gift." And he seems to imply that the later Jewish doctors were of a quite indefinite mind as to how the sacrifice operated in expiating sin. "The theory that the victim's life is put in place of the owner's," he remarks, " is nowhere hinted at"; and he adds that this is "perhaps because the Jewish doctors understood better than our theologians what sin-offerings and trespass offerings were, and what they were for." We must leave it to him to make clear to himself - he has not made it clear to us - how such offerings could have been understood to "atone" - to make expiation for sin and to propitiate the offended deity - by the interposition of a slain victim, without any idea of vicarious penalty creeping in.

Even G. B. Stevens will not go the lengths of this. He apparently agrees with Moore, indeed, that the idea of the poena vicaria is absent from Old Testament sacrifices. But he seems to allow it even a determining place in the later Judaism. His prime contention at this point is, indeed, that it was from this later Judaism that Paul, for example, derived this conception. For he admits that in Paul, at least, "we have here the idea of satisfaction by substitution";52 and the precise thing on which he insists is that "this legalistic scheme which Paul wrought out of the materials of current Jewish thought."53 He never tires in fact of scoring this teaching of Paul's as a mere remnant of Phariseeism,54 in which, therefore, Christians are not bound to follow him. He is clearly so far right in this that this conception was part of Pharisaic belief. There are two conceptions indeed which beyond question - and probably no one questions it - lay together in the minds of the men of the New Testament times, forming the presuppositions of their thought concerning sin and its forgiveness. The one is that atonement for sin was wrought by the sacrifices; the other that vicarious sufferings availed for atonement. The former conception is crisply expressed by Heinrich Weinel thus: "At that time almost the only thought connected with sacrifice was that of a propitiatory rite, accompanied by the shedding of blood."55 With respect to the latter H. H. Wendt points out the currency in the time of Jesus of "the idea of the expiatory significance of sufferings for guilt, and of the substitutionary significance of the excessive sufferings of the righteous for the sins of others."56

Needless to say both facts thus expressed are fully recognized even by, say, G. F. Moore. He tells us that in the Palestinian schools of the first and second Christian centuries, "the effect of sacrifice is expressed as in the Pentateuch, by the verb kipper, 'make propitiation,' 'expiation,"' and that "the general principle is that all private sacrifices atone, except peace offerings (including thank offerings), with which no confession of sin is made."57 And he tells us as explicitly not only that an expiatory character was attributed to suffering, but that "the suffering and death of righteous men" were held "to atone for the sins of others."58 It would seem inconceivable that such relatable ideas could be kept apart in the mind which gave harborage to both: it is inhuman for us to imagine that men, merely because they lived a few hundred years ago, were incapable of putting even one and one together. And as we read over, say, the ceremonial for the Day of Atonement in the Mishnah tractate Yoma we can scarcely fail to see that this one and one were put together. Paul Fiebig occupies a general position very similar to that of G. F. Moore: he is eager to make it clear that the men of old time in their religious rites troubled themselves very little about ideas, and lived much more in usages and ceremonies carried out with painful exactness. Yet he cannot refuse to add:59 "This is not to say that the ritual of the Day of Atonement did not suggest a variety of ideas, - this idea for example: 'You, a sinner, have really deserved death, but this sacrificial animal now bears the punishment of your sin.' Or this: 'The sacrificial animal now bears the sin away into the wilderness; so soon as the goat which is sent to Azazel (cf. Lev. xvi.) into the wilderness is gone, the sins have also disappeared.' Ideas of substitution and reparation, of bearing the curse of sin, - and also of a gift by means of which the deity is to be propitiated - are suggested here. The sacrificial animal might also be thought of as a purchase price, as ransom-money, and the whole sacrifice be placed under the point of view of ransoming. All these ideas were suggested and were simply and easily to be read out of the ritual." We think it necessary to say, not merely that such ideas as these might be suggested by the ceremonial of the Day of Atonement, and - each in its own measure - by the several varieties of sacrifice which were in use; but that they were inevitably suggested by them and, in point of fact, formed the circle of ideas which make up in their entirety what we may justly think of as the sacrificial conception of the time.60

Whether, then, we look to the Levitical system or to the conceptions current at the time when the New Testament was written as determining the sense of the writers of the New Testament when they spoke of Christ as a sacrifice, the most natural meaning that can be attached to the term on their lips is that of an expiatory offering propitiating God's favor and reconciling Him to guilty man. An attempt may be made, to be sure, to break the force of this finding by representing sacrificial worship to have fallen so much into the background in the time of our Lord that it no longer possessed importance for the religious thought of the day. Martin Briickner tells us that there is no exposition of the Jewish theory of sacrifice given in W. Bousset's book on the "Religion of Judaism" because "there wasn't any."61 Supposing, however, the fact to be as stated - that the doctrine of sacrifice played so small a part in the religion of the later Judaism that it may be treated as negligible in a summary of the religious conceptions of the time, - that would only add significance to the employment of it by the New Testament writers as a paradigm into which to run their conception of the work of Christ. The further they must be supposed to have gone afield to find this rubric, the more importance they must be supposed to have attached to it as a vehicle of their doctrine. We are not inquiring into the abstract likelihood of the New Testament writers making use of a rare rubric: their use of it is not in dispute.62 We are estimating the measure of significance which must be attributed to their use of a rubric which they actually employ. The less a mere matter-of-course their employment of it can be shown to be, the more it must be recognized that they had a distinct purpose in using it and the more weight must be assigned to its implications in their hands. Bruckner's remark, therefore, that sacrificial worship had become in the time of Christ "without importance" for Jewish theology reacts injuriously upon his main contention in the passage where it occurs - namely that it was without importance for Paul.

It has become almost a fashion to speak minimizingly of Paul's employment of the category of sacrifice in his explanation of Christ's work, and it is interesting to observe how hard Nemesis treads on the heels of the attempt to do so. Bruckner's instance affords a very good example. What he wishes to do is to lower the importance of the conception of sacrifice in Paul's system of thought concerning the work of Christ. He seeks to do this by suggesting that the sacrificial language served with Paul little further purpose than to express the notion of sub stitution. "The idea of a sacrifice," he remarks, "came into consideration for Paul only as an illustration of a conception: the thing which he intended lies in the theory of substitution" - a substitution which, he proceeds to show, includes in it the idea of "a substitutive punishment." Paul, in other words, calls Christ a sacrifice only with a view to showing that Christ too offered Himself as a substitutive expiation of our sins. What more could he be supposed to have intended? The contrast between the minimizing tone adopted and the effect of the facts adduced to support it, is perhaps even more striking in the remarks of A. E. J. Rawlinson, writing in the collection of Oxford essays published under the title of "Foundations."63 With Paul, he tells us, Christ is spoken of as a sacrifice only by way of "an occasional illustration or a momentary point of comparison." He refers to Christ as "our Passover, sacrificed for us," as "making peace by his blood," as in some sense a "propitiation." "Apart from the three phrases quoted in the text," he adds in a note, "and the statement in Ephesians v. 2, 'Even as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God, for an odour of a sweet smell' -where the self-oblation of Christ is compared not to a sin-offering, but to a burnt-offering, - there do not appear to be any passages in St. Paul which interpret the work of Christ in sacrificial terms." Not Gal. iii. 13 (Deut. xxi. 23), since "sacrificial victims were never regarded as 'accursed."' Not in the idea of vicarious suffering - which is not a sacrificial idea - only the scapegoat being a sin-bearer (Lev. xvi.) and the scape-goat not being sacrificed. The reader will scarcely escape the impression that a great deal of unavailing trouble is being expended here in an effort to remove unwelcome facts out of the way. And it will not be strange if he wonders what advantage is supposed to be gained from insisting that Paul has made little use of the category of sacrifice for expounding his view of the nature of Christ's work, so long as it is recognized that he does employ it, and that therefore it must be understood to be a suitable expression of his view. "St. Paul does not appear to have made great use of Old Testament ideas of sacrifice," remarks J. K. Mozley:64 "Ritschl indeed in the second volume of his great work, lays stress on the importance of the sacrificial system for Paul's doctrine, but we can hardly go beyond the balanced statement of Dr. Stevens ("Christian Doctrine of Salvation," p. 63): 'While Paul has made a less frequent and explicit use of sacrificial ideas than we should have expected, it is clear that the system supplied one of the forms of thought by which he interpreted Christ's death."' That allowed, however, and all is allowed: agree that the rubric of sacrifice lent itself naturally to the expression of what Paul would convey concerning the death of Christ,65 and we might as well say frankly with Paterson that to Paul, "the sacrifice of Christ had the significance of the death of an innocent victim in the room of the guilty," and add with him, with equal frankness: "It is vain to deny that St. Paul freely employs the category of substitution, involving the conception of the imputation or transference of moral qualities" - although it might perhaps be well to use some more exact phraseology in saying it than Paterson has managed to employ.

There is one book of the New Testament of which it has proved impossible for even the hardiest to deny that Christ's death is presented in it as a sacrifice. We refer, of course, to the Epistle to the Hebrews. In it not only is Christ's death directly described as a sacrifice, but all the sacrificial language is gathered about it in the repeated allusions which are made to it as such.66 Nor is it doubtful that it is distinctly of expiatory sacrifices that the author is thinking when he presents Christ as dying a sacrificial death. He even uses of it "that characteristic term inseparably associated in the Old Testament with these sacrifices" (i`la,skomai, ii. 17) the absence of which from the allusion to Christ's sacrifice in other parts of the New Testament has been made a matter of remark - although it is not really absent from them, but is present in its derivatives (i`lasth,rion, Rom. iii. 25; i`lasmo,j, I John ii. 2, iv. 10) justifying fully Paterson's remark67 that "the idea of cancelling guilt, of which a vital moment is liability to punishment, is associated with Christ's sacrifice in Heb. ii. 17, I John ii. 2 (i`la,skesqai with avmarti,aj as object, and so 'to expiate')." The Epistle to the Hebrews does not, however, really stand apart from the rest of the New Testament in these things, as, indeed, we have just incidentally pointed out with reference to the Levitical term for sacrificial expiation, employed as it is by Paul and John as well as by this author. It only has its own points to make and distributes the emphasis to suit them. Even in such a peculiar matter as the ascription to Christ at once of the functions of priest and sacrifice, it may possibly have a parallel in Eph. v. 2.68 The fact is, as Paterson broadly asserts in words which were quoted from him at the opening of this discussion, that every important type of New Testament teaching, including the teaching of Christ Himself, concurs in representing Christ as a sacrifice, and in conceiving of the sacrifice which it represents Christ as being, as a substitutive expiation. We say, including Christ Himself; and we may say that with our eye exclusively on the Synoptic Gospels. The language of Mt. xx. 28, Mk. x. 45 is sacrificial language; and it is very distinctly substitutive language, - "In the place of many." That of Mt. xxvi. 28, Mk. xiv. 24, Lk. xxii. 20 (the critical questions which have been raised about these passages are negligible) is sacrificial language; and it is equally distinctly expiatory language - "Blood shed for many," "For the remission of sins."69

The possibility of underrating the wealth and importance of the allusions of the writers of the New Testament to the death of Christ as sacrificial, in the sense of expiatory, appears to depend upon a tendency to recognize such allusions only when express references to sacrifices are made in connection with it, if we should not even say only when didactic expositions of it as a sacrifice are developed. Nothing can be more certain, for example, than that the references to the "blood" of Jesus are one and all ascriptions of a sacrificial character and effect to His death.70 Nevertheless, we meet with attempts to explain these ascriptions away. Thus, for example, G. F. Moore writes as follows, having more particularly in mind Paul's usage:71 "Evidence of a more pervasive association of Christ's death with sacrifice has been sought in the references to his blood as the ground of the benefits conferred by his death (Rom. iii. 25, v. 9): the thought of sacrifice is so constantly associated with his death, it is said, that the one word suffices to suggest it. But in view of the infrequency, to say the least, of sacrificial metaphors in the greater epistles, it is doubtful whether ai[ma is not used merely in allusion to Jesus' violent death. Nor is the case clearer in Col. i. 20, Eph. i. 7, ii. 13; the really noteworthy thing is that the context contains no suggestion of sacrifice either in thought or phrase." Such argumentation seems to us merely perverse. The discovery of allusions to the sacrificial character of Christ's death in the reiterated mention of His blood is not a mere assumption deriving color only from the frequency of other references to His sacrificial death; it has its independent ground in the nature of these allusions themselves. In every instance mentioned, so far from the context containing no suggestion of sacrifice, it is steeped in sacrificial suggestions. Is there no sacrificial suggestion in such language as this: "Whom God set forth as a propitiation, through faith, in His blood"? Or in such language as this: "While we were yet sinners Christ died for us: much more then having been now justified by His blood, we shall be saved by Him from the wrath"? Or as this: "And by Him to reconcile all things unto Him, having made peace through the blood of His cross"? Or as this: "In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins"? Or as this: "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been made nigh in the blood of Christ"? This is the very language of the altar: "propitiation," "reconciliation," "redemption," "forgiveness." It passes all comprehension how it could be suggested that the word "blood" could be employed in such connections "merely in allusion to Jesus' violent death." And that particularly when Jesus' death was not actually an especially bloody death. "Another remarkable thing," says Paul Fiebig.72 "is this: why is precisely the 'blood' of Jesus so often spoken of? Why is the redemption and the forgiveness of sins so often connected with the 'blood' of Jesus? This is remarkable; for the death on the cross was not so very bloody that it should be precisely the blood of Jesus which so impressed the eye-witnesses and the first Christians. The Evangelists moreover (except John xix. 35 f.) say nothing about it. This special emphasis on the blood cannot be explained therefore from the kind of death Jesus died." If we really wish to know what the New Testament writers had in mind when they spoke of the blood of Jesus we have only to permit them to tell us themselves. They always adduce it in the sacrificial sense. In his survey of the passages Fiebig begins73 not unnaturally with I Pet. i. 17-19. "Knowing that ye were redeemed, not with corruptible things, with silver or gold, from your vain manner of life handed down from your fathers: but with precious blood as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, Christ." His comment runs thus: "Here the clause 'as of a pure and unspotted lamb' makes quite clear what the popular and at that time wholly clear conception is which provides the key to the problem of the redemptive significance of the blood of Jesus. This conception is the sacrifice; and of course the sacrifice such as every Jew (and in corresponding fashion, every heathen) knew it from his daily life and from the festivals and duties of his religion." This is of course only one passage; but in this case the adage is true, ab uno disce omnes, - we may spare ourselves the survey of the whole series.

The theology of the writers of the New Testament is very distinctly a "blood theology." But their reiterated reference of the salvation of men to the blood of Christ is not the only way in which they represent the work of Christ as in its essential character sacrificial. In numerous other forms of allusion they show that they conceived the idea of sacrifice to supply a suitable explanation of its nature and effect. We may avail ourselves of words of James Denney to sum up the matter briefly, - words which are in certain respects over-cautious, but which contain the essence of the matter. "We have every reason to believe," says he,74 "that sacrificial blood universally, and not only in special cases, was associated with propitiatory power. 'The atoning function of sacrifice,' as Robertson Smith put it, speaking of primitive times, 'is not confined to a particular class of oblation, but belongs to all sacrifices.'75 Dr. Driver has expressed the same opinion with regard to the Levitical legislation. . . . Criticizing Ritschl's explanation of sacrifice and its effect, he says,76 it seems better to suppose that though the burnt-, peace- and meat-offerings were not offered expressly, like the sin- and guilt-offerings, for the forgiveness of sin, they nevertheless (in so far as kipper is predicated of them) were regarded as 'covering' or neutralizing, the offerer's unworthiness to appear before God and so, though in a much less degree than the sin- or guilt-offering, as effectively Kappārā in the sense ordinarily attached to the word, viz. 'propitiation.' Instead of saying 'in a much less degree' I should prefer to say 'with a less specific reference or application,' but the point is not material. What it concerns us to note is that the New Testament, while it abstains from interpreting Christ's death by any special prescriptions of the Levitical law, constantly uses sacrificial language to describe that death, and in doing so unequivocally recognizes in it a propitiatory characterin other words, a reference to sin and its forgiveness." What this fundamentally means is that the New Testament writers, in employing this language to describe the death of Christ, intended to represent that death as performing the functions of an expiatory sacrifice; wished to be understood as so representing it; and could not but be so understood by their first readers who were wonted to sacrificial worship.

An interesting proof that they were so understood is supplied by a remarkable fact emphasized in a striking passage by Adolf Harnack.77 Wherever the Christian religion went, there blood-sacrifice ceased to be offered - just as the tapers go out when the sun rises. Christ's death was recognized everywhere where it became known as the reality of which they were the shadows. Having offered His own body once for all and by this one offering perfected forever them that are sanctified, it was well understood that there remained no more offering for sin. "The death of Christ," says Harnack - "of this there can be no doubt - made an end to blood-sacrifices in the history of religion." "The instinct which led to them found its satisfaction and therefore its end in the death of Christ." "His death had the value of a sacrificial death; for otherwise it would not have had the power to penetrate into that inner world out of which the blood-sacrifices proceeded," - and, penetrating into it, to meet, and to satisfy all the needs which blood-sacrifices had been invented to meet and satisfy.

The whole world thus adds its testimony to the sacrificial character of Christ's death as it has received it, and as it rests upon it. As to the world's need of it, and as to the place it takes in the world, we shall let a sentence of C. Bigg's teach us. "The study of the great Greek and Roman moralists of the Empire," he tells us,78 "leaves upon my own mind a strong conviction that the fundamental difference between heathenism of all shades and Christianity is to be discovered in the doctrine of Vicarious Sacrifice, that is to say, in the Passion of our Lord." This is as much as to say that not only is the doctrine of the sacrificial death of Christ embodied in Christianity as an essential element of the system, but in a very real sense it constitutes Christianity. It is this which differentiates Christianity from other religions. Christianity did not come into the world to proclaim a new morality and, sweeping away all the supernatural props by which men were wont to support their trembling, guilt-stricken souls, to throw them back on their own strong right arms to conquer a standing before God for themselves. It came to proclaim the real sacrifice for sin which God had provided in order to supersede all the poor fumbling efforts which men had made and were making to provide a sacrifice for sin for themselves; and, planting men's feet on this, to bid them go forward. It was in this sign that Christianity conquered, and it is in this sign alone that it continues to conquer. We may think what we will of such a religion. What cannot be denied is that Christianity is such a religion.

Endnotes:

1. From The Princeton Theological Review, v. xv, 1917, pp. 385-422.

2. "Jesu Blut ein Geheimnis? " 1906, p. 27.

3. "Die Christliche Lehre der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung3," 1889, v. ii, pp. 161 ff.

4. Hastings' " Dictionary of the Bible," v. iv, 1902, p. 343 b.

5. Fiebig, as cited, p. 19, remarks on the connection in the Jewish mind of the idea of purchasing, ransoming, with sacrifice, - referring to F. Weber, "Jüdische Theologie," etc3., 1897, pp. 313, 324.

6. E. g., prosfora,, Eph. v. 2, Heb. x. 10, 14 (for the meaning of prosfora, See Heb. x. 18), qusi,a, Eph. v. 2, Heb. ix. 26; cf. Rom. iii. 25, i`lasth,rion; viii. 3, peri. a`martiaj.

7. Paterson (from whom we are taking this summary), as cited, notes: "esp. the Sin-offering (Rom. viii. 3, Heb. xiii. 11, I Pet. iii. 18), the Covenant-sacrifice (Heb. ix. 15-22), the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement (Heb. ii. 17, ix. 12 ff.), and of the Passover (I Cor. v. 7)." Cf. Sanday-Headlam, "Romans1," p. 92.

8. Paterson enumerates: "the slaying of the immaculate victim (Rev. v. 6, xiii. 8), the sprinkling of the blood both in the sanctuary as in the Sin-offering (Heb. ix. 13 ff.), and on the people as in the Covenant-sacrifice (I Pet. i. 2), and the destruction of the victim, as in the Sin-offering, without the gate (Heb. xiii. 13) " - referring to Ritschl ii. 157 ff.; and Sanday-Headlam, " Romans," p. 91.

9. E. g.: "Expiation, or pardon of sin," says Paterson. Sanday-Headlam mention as examples of passages in which the death of Christ is directly connected with forgiveness of sin: Mt. xxvi. 28; Acts v. 30 f., apparently; I Cor. xv. 3; II Cor. v. 21; Eph. i. 7; Col. i. 14 and 20; Tit. ii. 14; Heb. i. 3, ix. 28, x. 12, al.; I Pet. ii. 24, iii. 18; I John ii. 2, iv. 10; Rev. i. 5.

10. Paterson: "A saving efficacy is ascribed to the blood of the cross of Christ, and in these cases the thought clearly points to the forms of the altar (Rom. iii. 25, v. 9, I Cor. x. 16, Eph. i. 7, ii. 13, Col. i. 20, Heb. ix. 12, 14; I Pet. i. 2, 19; I John i. 7, v. 6, 8; Rev. i. 5)." Cf. Sanday-Headlam, "Romans," p. 91 f. The matter is very interestingly presented by Fiebig, as cited, pp. 11-27 under the title: "What, according to the New Testament, did primitive Christianity think in connection with the words, 'Jesus has redeemed us by His blood'?" He takes his start, for the survey of a conception which he says is diffused throughout the whole New Testament, from I Pet. i. 17-19, the only key to which he declares to be "sacrifice, and indeed sacrifice as it was known to every Jew (and in a corresponding way to every heathen) from his daily life and from the festivals and duties of his religion, that is ritual sacrifice." From this passage he then proceeds through the New Testament and shows that the blood of Christ is used throughout the volume in a sacrificial sense, so that whenever we meet with an allusion to the blood of Jesus we meet with a reference to His death as a sacrifice.

11. "The Divine Legation of Moses," Book ix, chapter ii, quoted in a note at the end of his excellent chapter on "The New Testament Description of the Atoning Work of Christ as Sacrificial," by Alfred Cave, "The Scriptural Doctrine of Sacrifice and Atonement2, " 1890, pp. 274-289. Cave himself says (p. 289): "Not only portions but the whole New Testament - not only the New Testament teaching but any type of that teaching - must be cast aside unless the work of Christ be in some sense or other regarded as a sacrifice."

12. As cited: "Nor for the apostolic age was the description of Christ's death as a sacrifice of the nature of a mere illustration. The apostles held it to be a sacrifice in the most literal sense of the word." Paterson goes on to assign reasons. George F. Moore, "Encyclopaedia Biblica," v. iv. 1903, col. 4232 f. interposes a caveat: "To begin with, it is necessary to say that in describing the death of Christ as a sacrifice the New Testament writers are using figurative language. Some modern theologians, indeed, still affirm that 'the apostles held it to be a sacrifice in the most literal sense of the word'; but such writers do not expect us to take their 'literal' literally. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, regarded the death of Christ as the true sacrifice, because by it was really effected what the Old Testament sacrifices only prefigured; but he was too good an Alexandrian to identify 'true' with 'literal.'" What Moore maintains is that the death of Christ was not believed to be expiatory because it was known to be a sacrifice, but that it was spoken of as a sacrifice because it was recognized to be expiatory. He does not doubt that the death of Christ was believed actually to have wrought the expiation which the sacrifices were understood to figure. "The association of expiation with sacrifice in the law and in the common ideas of the time leads to the employment of sacrificial figures and terms in speaking of the work of Christ; and even in Hebrews, where the idea of the death of Christ as a sacrifice is most elaborately developed, it is plain that the premise of the whole is that Christ by His death made a real expiation for the sins of men, by which they are redeemed." We take it that it is just thisthat Paterson means by speaking of Christ's death as a "literal" sacrifice.

13. This nevertheless is the common view. Driver supposes that the different treatment of the sacrifices can hardly have had its ground in "anything except the different spirit and temper actuating the two brothers": but he recognizes (without comment) that there is "another view," namely, "that there underlies the story some early struggle between two theories of sacrifice, which ended by the triumph of the theory that the right offering to be made consisted in the life of an animal." Dillmann says: "The reason must therefore lie in the dispositions presupposed in the offerings"; but quotes Hofmann, "Schriftbeweis2," i, p. 585 for the view that "Abel had in mind the expiation of sin, while Cain had not" - "of which," says Dillmann, "there is no indication whatever." Similar ground is taken, for example, by Kaliach, Keil, Delitzsch ("New Commentary"), Lange, W. P. Pateraon (Articles "Abel" and "Cain" in Hastings' B.D.).

14. Gunkel thinks there is: Jehovah is the God of nomads. The old narrator, he says, would be surprised that anyone should wonder why Jahve had respect to Abel's offering and not to Cain's: he means just that Jahve loved the shepherd and flesh-offerings but would have nothing to do with the cultivator and fruit-offerings. Similarly Tuch: the story comes from nomads.

15. The allusion in Heb. xii. 24 is taken by some commentators as a reference to Abel's offering rather than to his death. Bleek (p. 954) says: "It may be mentioned merely in a historical interest that with the Erasmian reading (to.  ;Abel), by Hammond, Akersloot, and Snabel (Amoenitatt theologiae emblematicae et typicae, p. 109 ff.), the blood of Abel is understood of the blood of the sacrificial animal offered by him; and that the first, with the received reading (to.n  ;Abel), wishes to refer the to.n to the r`antismo.n in order to obtain the same sense." This interpretation has had great vogue in America, owing to its advocacy by the popular commentaries of Albert Barnes, 1843, F. S. Sampaon, 1856, George Junkin 1873. Its significance for the matter of the nature of Abel's sacrifice may be perceived from the comment of Joseph B. McCaul, 1871, p. 317 f., who combines the two views: "Abel, being dead, can speak only figuratively. He does so by his faith, manifested by his bringing a vicarious sacrifice according to the Divine will. He therefore speaks, not only by the blood of his martyrdom, but also by the blood of his sacrifice, which latter obtained testimony from God that it was acceptable and accepted. It was then that God openly expressed his Divine selection of blood, to the exclusion of all other means of ransom, for the redemption of the soul. In the term 'the blood of Abel,' therefore, may be included the blood of all vicarious victims afterwards offered, in accordance with God's appointment, until the sacrifice of the death of Christ superseded them."

16. Here perhaps is to be found the reply to the representation made for example by J. K. Mozley, "The Doctrine of the Atonement," 1916, p. 13, note 2, to the effect that writers of the school "which ignores or rejects modern criticism of the Old Testament" - represented by P. Fairbairn, "Typology of the Scriptures," w. L. Alexander, "Biblical Theology," A. Cave, "Scriptural Doctrine of Sacrifice" - had to explain how it is that the first sacrifices mentioned (those of Cain and Abel) "are not said to have been in any way ordered by God." The question of the origin of sacrifice, human or divine, Mozley says is no longer discussed. For a hint as to its literature see Cave, p. 41, note 2.

17. This explanation of the narrative of "the first sacrifices" is not popular with the critical commentators. Skinner (in accordance with the alternative view of the passage mentioned by Driver) thinks that "the whole manner of the narrative" suggests that we here have "the initiation of sacrifice," and that, if this be accepted, it follows "that the narrative proceeds on a theory of sacrifice; the idea, viz. that animal sacrifice alone is acceptable to Yahwe." Why this should be so, he does not say. Franz Delitzach, who in his "New Commentary on Genesis," will not look further for the reason of the difference in the treatment of the offerings than the different dispositions of the offerers, in his earlier "Commentary on Genesis," amid much inconsistent matter, has this to say: "The unbloody offering of Cain, as such, was only the expression of a grateful present, or, taken in its deepest significance, a consecrated offering of self: but man needs, before all things, the expiation of his death-deserving sins, and for this, the blood obtained through the slaying of the victim serves as a symbol." J. C. K. Hofmann, "Schriftbeweis2," i, pp. 584-585 remarks that the cultivation of the soil and the keeping of beasts were employments alike open to men: but he who adopted the one, dealing with a soil which was cursed, had to thank God for the yield it made despite sin, while he who adopted the other, in view of the provision God had made for hiding man's nakedness, had before him God's grace in hiding sin. If, now, Cain was satisfied to bring of the fruit of the earth to God, he was thanking God only for a prolongation of this present life, which he had gained by his own labor: while Abel, bringing the best beasts of his flock, gave Him thanks for the forgiveness of sin, the abiding symbol of which was the clothing given by God. "A grateful attitude such as Abel's had as its presupposition, however, the penitent faith in the word of God which saw in this divine clothing of human nakedness an approach to the forgiveness of sins which rests on the gracious will of God to man." Because Abel's sacrifice embodied this idea, it was acceptable to God and he received the witness that he was righteous. J. J. Murphy comments: "The fruit of the soil offered to God is an acknowledgment that the means of this earthly life are due to Him. This expresses the barren faith of Cain, not the living faith of Abel. The latter had entered deeply into the thought that life itself is forfeited to God by transgression, and that only by an act of mercy can the Author of life restore it to the penitent, trusting, submissive, loving heart." The remarks of "C. H. M." on the passage are very clear and pointed to the same effect. See them cited by A. H. Strong, " Syst. Theol.," ed. 1907, p. 727. J. C. Jones, "Primeval Revelation," 1897, p. 313 ff. gives a glowing popular expression to the same view. J. S. Candlish, "The Christian Salvation," 1899, p. 15, thinks that Abel's sacrifice plainly involves the confession of sin and compares his worship with that of the Publican in the parable, and Cain's to that of the Pharisee. T. J. Crawford, "Doctrine of Holy Scripture Respecting the Atonement2," 1875, p.280, says that Abel's faith may have had respect not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to a promised Redeemer; this sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifice.

18. We are abstracting in this account the illuminating survey by MM. Hubert and Mauss in the "L'Annee Sociologique," II, 1897-1898, pp. 29 ff. They tell us, that Robertson Smith has been followed by E. Sidney Hartland, "The Legend of Perseus," 1894-1896, and "with theological exaggeration" by F. B. Jevons, "Introduction to the History of Religion," 1896.

19. After threatening to become the dominant theory, this theory has recently lost ground, chiefly on account of the totemistic elements connected with it. See the criticisms by B. Stade, "Biblische Theologie des Alten Testaments," v. i, pp. 156-159; and M. J. Lagrange, "Études sur les religions Semitiques," pp. 246 ff. The "gift" theory accordingly holds the field. W. R. Inge, "Christian Mysticism," 1899, p. 355, appears to prefer to suppose that neither conception is the source of the other: "There have always been two ideas of sacrifice, alike in savage and civilized cults, - the mystical in which it is a communion, the victim who is slain and eaten being himself the god, or a symbol of the god; and the commercial, in which something valuable is offered to the god in the hope of receiving some benefit in exchange." This is very likely true as a general proposition.

20. As cited, pp. 41 and 89.

21. P. 133.

22. Cf. "The Divine Legation of Moses," etc. iv. 4.

23. Cf. "Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung3," ii. 201-203.

24. J. Jeremias, "Encyclopaedia Biblica," v. iv. col. 4119 says, in a representative assertion: "Sacrifice rests ultimately on the idea that it gives pleasure to the deity (cf. Dillmann, "Leviticus," 376)." So A. Dillmann, "Exodus und Leviticus3," p. 416: "The characteristic of sacrifice is a gift; that which differentiates it from other gifts is that it is enjoyed by the divinity."

25. J. Spencer, " De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus," 1727, v. ii. p. 762.

26. Hubert and Mauss, as cited, p. 30, remark that "it is certain that sacrifices were generally in some degree gifts, conferring on the believer rights upon his God." They add in a note: "See a somewhat superficial brochure by Nitzsch, 'Idee und Stufen des Opferkultus,' Kiel, 1889"; and then, that "at bottom" this theory is held by Wilken, "Over eene Nieuwe Theorie des Offers" in "De Gids," 1891, pp. 535 ff. and by L. Marillier in the Revue d'Histoire des Religions, 1897-1898. Marillier connects sacrifices, however, with magical rites by which the deity is bent to the worshipper's will by the liberation of a magical force through the effusion of the victim's blood. The idea of "gift" grew out of this, through the medium of the cult of the dead.

27. E. G. Piepenbring, " Théologie de l'ancien Testament," p. 56.

28. W. P. Paterson, Hastings' "Dictionary of the Bible," iv. p. 331 b.

29. A. A. Sykes, "Essay on the Nature etc. of Sacrifices," 1748, p. 75.

30. J. Wellhausen, "Skizzen und Vorarbeiten," 1897; W. R. Smith, "Religion of the Semites2," 1894; as applied to Israel, H. Schultz, American Journal of Theology, 1900, p. 269.

31. J. G. Frazer, "The Golden Bough2," 1900.

32. "The Blood Covenant," 1888, at the end; see also his "The Covenant of Salt," 1899.

33. Hubert and Mauss, as cited, p. 74. On the usage of the Hebrew word Zebach as a generic term for sacrifice, see Cave, as cited, pp. 511ff.

34. H. Sehultz, American Journal of Theology, 1900, p. 310.

35. See Paterson (as cited, p. 341 a), who gives this form of the Symbolical Theory the not very satisfactory name of The Prayer Theory.

36. "De Leg.," ii. 16.

37. "De Sacrificiis libri duo," 1677 (E. T., "Two Dissertations on Sacrifices" . . . 1828) P. 248.

38. J. J. Reeve, in the "International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia," p. 2640 quoting from "The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas," 1906. For Westermarck'a notions as to expiating sacrifice at large, see v. i. pp. 61-72.

39. Hubert and Mauss, as cited, p. 41, seeking a comprehensive definition, fix on this: "Sacrifice is a religious act which, by the consecrating of a victim, modifies the state of the moral person who offers it or of certain objects in which that person is interested." The meaning of this is amplified in an earlier passage (p. 37): "In sacrifice on the contrary" - as distinguished, that is, from such acts, as, say, anointing - "the consecration extends beyond the thing consecrated; it extends among others, to the moral person who defrays the coat of the ceremony. The believer who has supplied the victim, the object consecrated, is not at the end of the operation what he was at its beginning. He has acquired a religious character which he did not have, or he is relieved from an unfavorable character by which he was afflicted: he is elevated to a state of grace, or he has issued from a state of sin. In either case he is religiously transformed." In a note on the same page, on the basis of certain Hindu texts, they add: "These benefits from the sacrifice are, in our view, necessary reactions (contrecoups) of the rite. They are not due to a free divine will which theology interpolates little by little between the religious act and its sequences." On this view sacrifices are assimilated to magical acts, and their effects are conceived somewhat on the analogy of what is known as the reflex action of prayer. But if the deity is thought of merely as the object from which the sacrifices rebound to the offerer, it is on it nevertheless that they must first strike that they may rebound.

40. "Encyclopaedia Biblica," col. 4120.

41. "The Religion of Israel," ii. p. 263.

42. "Religion of the Semites2," p. 237.

43. As cited, p. 134.

44. R. Smend, "Lehrb. d. A. T. Religionsgeschichte," p. 324, cf. G. F. Moore, "Encyclopaedia Biblica," col. 4226. Compare also A. B. Davidson, "Theology of the Old Testament," pp. 352-354, where he says that the author of Leviticus has contented himself with stating the fact that the offering of a life atones, suggesting no explanation of why or how it atones. But he proceeds to remark that we can scarcely agree with Riehm that the blood atones merely because it is ordained that it shall, but should no doubt assume that there was a reason for the ordination, understood or not by the worshipper but no doubt at least dimly felt.

45. As cited, p. 128.

46. "Lehrbuch der Neutestamentlichen Theologie'," 1897, v. i, pp. 67-68.

47. "Theology of the Old Testament," p. 355, cf. 353. The use made of Davidson by W. L. Walker, "The Gospel of Reconciliation," 1909, p. 21, seems scarcely justified.

48. "A. T. Theologie," pp. 488-489.

49. Hastings' "Dictionary of the Bible," v. iv, p. 338 b: "The Meat-offering also covered from sin and delivered from its consequences."

50. As cited, p. 339 a. Cf. p. 342 a, where he sums up: "More likely is it that the step deemed by Holtzmann inevitable at a later stage was already taken, and that the chaos of confused ideas resulting from the discredit of old views was averted by the assertion of the substitutionary idea - 'the most external indeed, but also the simplest, the most generally intelligible, and the readiest answer to the question as to the nature of expiation."'

51. "Encyclopaedia Biblica," v. iv, coll. 4223-4226.

52. "The Christian Doctrine of Salvation," p. 62, cf. p. 65.

53. As cited, p. 66.

54. As cited, pp. 73-75.

55. "Saint Paul," E. T., p. 302.

56. "Teaching of Jesus," E. T., v. ii, p. 243. He refers in support to F. Weber, "Jüdische Theologie2," 1897, §70, p. 326 ff. and to E. Schürer, "Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes," v. ii, p. 466 (E. T. Div. II. v. ii, p. 186).

57. As cited, col. 4223.

58. As cited, col. 4226, cf. col. 4232.

59. "Jesu Blut ein Geheimnis?" 1906, p. 33.

60. It is by a misapprehension that J. K. Mozley, "The Doctrine of Atonement," 1916, p. 20, supporting himself on G. B. Stevens, seems to deny the sacrificial character of the scape-goat: "As to the ritual of the Day of Atonement, here also the old opinion is not as firmly established as might appear at first sight. The culminating point is the sending away of the goat 'for Azazel,' but we must remember that 'the flesh of this goat was not burned; atonement was not made by its blood; it was not a sacrifice at all."' The quotation is from Stevens, as cited, p. 11. On the other hand Hugo Gressmann, "Der Ursprung der israelitisch-jüdischen Eschatologie," 1905, pp. 328-329 sees the sacrificial idea at its height represented in the scape-goat. He is speaking of the Ebed and adverting to the ascription of "a substitutive expiatory character" to his sufferings and death, and remarks: "The sacrificial idea stands in the background. We have materially an exact parallel in the goat of Azazel which was offered as an expiatory sacrifice on the great Day of Atonement. . . . The goat is burdened with the sin of the congregation and offered substitutionally for it. For the expulsion of the goat is only a specific form of sacrifice (Hubert et Mauss, "Essai sur la nature et Ia fonction du sacrifice" in L'Annee Sociologique Second quar., Paris, 1898, p. 75). The expiatory significance which is attached to the death of the Ebed fully corresponds with the expiatory character which is ascribed here to the goat." At the place cited, supplemented at pp. 78f. and 92, Hubert and Mauss assign the scape-goat to its right category and expound convincingly its character as an expiatory sacrifice, thus supplying a corrective to the exposition of W. R. Smith on which Stevens supports himself.

61. "Die Entstehung des paulinischen Chriatologie," 1903, p. 231.

62. Of course nothing is ever absolutely undisputed. Paterson, as cited, p. 343, b, very properly remarks: "It has been denied that Paul adopts the category (Schmidt, "Die paul. Christologie," p. 84) but the denial rests on dogmatic rather than on exegetical grounds (Ritschl, ii. p. 161)."

63. "Foundations," 1912, p. 194.

64. "The Doctrine of the Atonement," 1916, p. 79, note.

65. Is perhaps part of the difficulty which so many writers feel on this matter due to approaching it from a wrong angle, and thinking not so much of Paul's expressing his convictions concerning Christ's death in terms of sacrifice as of his imposing on the death of Christ mechanically ideas derived from the sacrifices? Paul's conviction that Christ had died for our sins, bearing them in His own body on the tree, is the primary thing: the sacrificial language he applies to it is one of his modes of stating this fundamental fact. He begins always with the great fact of the expiatory death of Christ. "Ménégoz has admirably remarked," says Orello Cone justly in a parallel matter, "that Paul's faith in the expiatory sacrifice of Christ was not the conclusion of a process of reasoning on the relation between the mercy and justice of God, but, on the contrary, the apostle's ideas on the justice and mercy of God were founded on his faith in the expiatory death of Christ."

66. B. F. Westcott, "Epistle to the Hebrews," p. 299, speaks of Christ's sacrifice as being presented in the Epistle to the Hebrews "in three distinct aspects," "(1) as a Sacrifice of Atonement (ix. 14, 15); (2) as a Covenant Sacrifice (ix. 15-17); and (3) as a Sacrifice which is the ground-work of a Feast (xiii. 10, 11)." This is true; but it is possible to press analysis over-far. The "Sacrifice which is the ground-work of a Feast" is the sacrifice of which we hear in the institution of the Lord's Supper, and this is distinctly a "Covenant Sacrifice." The "Covenant Sacrifice" (ix. 15, 17) is a sacrifice for sin (ix. 12, 26), and is therefore fundamentally piacular and atoning, as indeed its relation to the passover-lamb sufficiently intimates. In His sacrifice Christ fulfilled all the functions of sacrifice, and thus there are varied aspects in which His sacrifice may be looked upon. But above all else, He made expiation for the sins of His people by immolating Himself on the altar - thus putting away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.

67. As cited, p. 344 a.

68. Cf. J. K. Mozley, "The Doctrine of the Atonement," 1916, p. 82, note 1: "Eph. 1, 7 also refutes Pfleiderer's statement (ii. 175) that in this Epistle Christ is not the expiatory sacrifice, but the sacrificing priest. The latter idea is certainly that of v. 2, but St. Paul may as easily have united the two conceptions as did the writer to the Hebrews."

69. Cf. the discussion of these passages by Mozley, as cited, chapter ii.

70. In general these references comprise: (1) certain general passages, Heb. ix. 14, 20, x. 29, xii. 24, I Pet. i. 19, I John i. 7; (2) certain eucharistic passages, Mt. xxvi. 28, Mk. xiv. 24, Luke xxii. 20, I Cor. xi. 25; John vi. 53, 54, 55, 56, I Cor. x. 16; (3) the formula, dia. th.j ai[matoj (or its equivalent), Acts xx. 28, Eph. i. 7, Col. i. 20, Heb. ix. 12, xiu. 12 (I John v. 6), Rev. xii. 11; and (4) the formula evn th/| ai[mati (or its equivalent) Rom. iii. 25, v. 9, I Cor. xi. 25 (27) Eph. ii. 13, Heb. x. 19 (xiii. 25), I John v. 6, Rev. i. 5, v. 9, vii. 14.

71. "Encyclopaedia Biblica," coll. 4229-4230.

72. As cited, p. 11.

73. P. 13.

74. "The Death of Christ," ed. 1903, pp. 53-54.

75. "Religion of the Semites," p. 219.

76. Hastings' "Dictionary of the Bible," s.v. "Propitiation," p. 132.

77. "Das Wesen des Christentums," ed. 1900, pp. 98-99: E. T., "What is Christianity?" 1901, pp. 157 ff.

78. "The Church's Task under the Roman Empire," pp. x.-xi.

The New Testament Terminology of "Redemption

The most direct, but not the exclusive, vehicle in the Greek of the New Testament of the idea which we commonly express in our current speech by the term "redeem" and its derivatives, is provided by a group of words built up upon the Greek term λύτρον, "ransom." The exact implications of this group of words as employed by the writers of the New Testament have been brought into dispute.4 It seems desirable therefore to look afresh into their origin and usage sufficiently to become clear as to the matter, and the inquiry may perhaps be thought to possess enough intrinsic interest to justify going a little farther afield in it, and entering somewhat more into details, than would be necessary for the immediate purpose in hand.

I

To begin at the beginning, at any rate, the ultimate base to which this group of words goes back seems to be represented by the Sanscrit LÛ, which bears the meaning of "to cut," or "to clip"; hence it is inferred that the earliest implication of the general Indo-European root LU was to set free by cutting a bond. The Greek primitive of this base, λύειν, has the general meaning of "to loose," which is applied and extended in a great variety of ways. When applied to men, its common meaning is " 'to loose, release, set free,' especially from bonds or prison, and so, generally, from difficulty, or danger." It developed a particular usage with reference to prisoners, which is of interest to us. In this usage, it means, in the active voice, "to release on receipt of ransom," "to hold to ransom"; and in the middle voice, "to secure release by payment of ransom," "to ransom" in the common sense of that word, passing on to a broader usage of simply "to redeem" (in which it is applied not merely to prisoners but to animals and landed property) and even "to buy."8 It also acquired the sense of paying debts, and, when used with reference to wrong-doings, a sense of "undoing" or "making up for," which is not far removed from that of making atonement for, them.

Naturally, the usual derivatives and compounds are formed from λύειν. Among the former the abstract active substantive, λύσις, is especially interesting to us because among its various senses it reflects both of the usages of its primitive to which we have just called attention. It is used of a release, deliverance, effected by the payment of a ransom—a "ransoming." And it is used of a cleansing from guilt by means of an expiation—an "atonement."11 Little less interesting, however, are the nouns of agent, of which several are formed, bearing the general sense of "deliverer"—λύσιος (λύσειος), λυτήρ (λύτειρα), λύτωρ. Λύσιος was used in the Dionysiac myth as an epithet of Dionysus, and in the Orphics a great part was played by the θεοὶ λύσιοι. In the Second Book of the "Republic,"14 Plato makes Adeimantos, performing the office of advocatus diaboli, urge in favor of being wicked and reaping its gains, that the penalties of wickedness may very easily be escaped: the gods can be propitiated, and so we can sin and pray, and then sin and pray some more,—and if you talk of a dread hereafter, why, are there not mysteries and λύσιοι θεοί to whom we can look for deliverance? The form λυτήρ obtained sufficient currency to render it possible for the Christian poet Nonnus, the paraphrast of John, to employ it as a designation of our Lord, whom he calls "the Deliverer of the whole human race (ὅλης Λυτῆρα γενέθλης)." But Nonnus was somewhat precious in his choice of words.

The prepositional compounds are numerous and appear to have been in wide use to express the many modifications which the general notion of "loosing" was capable of receiving from them. We are naturally most interested in those of them which are employed of releasing men from chains or bondage, or broadly from other evils. Among these the special implication of ἀναλύειν is that the release effected is a restoration. In ἐκλύειν—the exact etymological equivalent of the German Auslösung (or its doublet Erlösung, which has become the standing German designation of the Christian Redemption)—the emphasis falls on the deliverance which is wrought by the release in question, and this form tends to be employed when the idea of relief is prominent. It is, however, with ἀπολύειν—in itself a close synonym of ἐκλύειν—that we are most nearly concerned. It is employed alternatively with the simple λύειν, and like that term developed a discriminating use of the active and middle voices to express respectively releasing on the receipt or releasing by the payment of a ransom. Thus, like λύειν, it came to mean not merely releasing but distinctively ransoming, and is used in that sense of the action of both of the parties involved.

The particular derivative of λύειν with which we are at the moment directly concerned—λύτρον—belongs to that class of derivatives usually spoken of as "instrumental," which denote the instrument or means by which the action of the verb is accomplished. The particular actions expressed by the verb λύειν for the performance of which λύτρον denotes the instrument are those to which we have called especial attention above,—ransoming and atoning—the former regularly and the latter by way of exception. It commonly means just a ransom; infrequently, however, it means an expiation; and very rarely it passes over into the general sense of a recompense.20 "Λύτρον 'means of deliverance' (Lösemittel)," says Franz Steinleitner quite accurately, "is employed by the old writers almost universally (mostly in the plural) in the sense of the ransom (Lösegeld) paid or to be paid for prisoners, in accordance with the use of λύειν for the liberation (Auslösung) of prisoners, especially by ransoming (Loskauf)." It is only a special application of this general sense when the word is found in use in inscriptions and papyri as the technical term for the manumission-price of slaves. Its occurrence on two late inscriptions of a piacular character found near Könes in Lydia, on the other hand, illustrates its less common use of a means, an instrument, of expiation.23 Both of these are, however, only special applications serving rather to illustrate than to qualify the essential meaning of the term as just the price paid as a ransom in order to secure release.

The formation of λύτρον was not due to any serious need of a term of its significance. It has synonyms enough. Its formation must be traced to the natural influence of its primitive, λύειν, dominating the mind when the idea of ransoming occupied it, and leading to the framing from it of derived vocables expressive of that idea. It "came natural" to a Greek, in other words, when he wished to say ransom, to say λύτρον, because when he thought of ransoming he thought in terms of λύειν. This is an indication of the strength of the association of the idea of ransoming with λύειν; but, after all, the idea of ransoming was connected with λύειν only by association. It was not the intrinsic sense of that verb but only a signification which had—however firmly—been attached to it by usage. Accordingly the process of word-formation which began with λύτρον did not stop with it. It went on and built upon it a new verb with the distinctive meaning of just ransoming,—λυτροῦν, λυτροῦσθαι,—which meant and could mean nothing but to release for or by a ransom. If λύειν, by a convention of speech, had come to express the idea of ransoming, this remained a mere convention of speech: the word intrinsically meant nothing more than to loose, to release, and was used in this wider sense side by side with its employment in the sense of ransoming. But λυτροῦν meant intrinsically just to ransom and nothing else, and could lose, not the suggestion merely, but the open assertion of specifically ransoming as the mode of deliverance of which it spoke, only by suffering such a decay of its native sense as to lose its very heart. He who said λυτροῦν, λυτροῦσθαι said λύτρον, and he who said λύτρον not merely intimated but asserted ransom. The only reason for the existence of this verb was to set by the side of the ambiguous λύειν (ἀπολύειν) an unambiguous term which would convey with surety, and without aid from the context or from the general understanding ruling its use, the express sense of ransoming. We are not surprised to observe therefore that throughout the whole history of profane Greek literature λυτροῦν, λυτροῦσθαι maintained this sense unbrokenly. Its one meaning is just "to ransom"; in the active voice in the sense of to release on receipt of a ransom, and in the middle voice in the sense of to release by the payment of a ransom. We could ask no better proof of this than that neither H. Oltramare nor Th. Zahn,28 both of whom have sought diligently, has been able to discover an instance to the contrary.

Of course the derivatives and compounds of λυτροῦν, λυτροῦσθαι continue to convey the idea of ransoming. Impulse for forming them could arise only from a feeling out for unambiguous terms to express this idea. For the wider notion of deliverance the derivatives and compounds of the primitive, λύειν, λύεσθαι lay at hand. Not many derivatives and compounds of λυτροῦν, λυτροῦσθαι seem, it is true, to have been formed, and those that were formed appear to occur only sparsely in profane Greek literature. Of the derivatives we need concern ourselves only with λύτρωσις; of the compounds only with ἀπολυτροῦν, ἀπολυτροῦσθαι and its derivative, ἀπολύτρωσις.

Λύτρωσις is so rare in profane Greek that it appears to have turned up heretofore only in a single passage, Plutarch, "Aratus" XI. There we read of Aratus that "having a present of five and twenty talents sent him from the king, he took them, it is true, but gave them all to his fellow-citizens who wanted money, among other purposes for the ransoming of those who had been taken prisoners (εἴς τε τἆλλα καὶ λύτρωσιν αἰχμαλώτων)."

Ἀπολυτροῦν (active voice) occurs somewhat more frequently, but ἀπολυτροῦσθαι (middle voice) and ἀπολύτρωσις are again very rare. How the active, ἀπολυτροῦν is employed, may be seen from the following examples, which are all that the lexicographers adduce. Plato, "Laws," XI, § 919 A (Jowett, iv, p. 430): He "treats them as enemies and captives who are at his mercy, and will not release (ἀπολυτρώσῃ) them until they have paid the highest, most exorbitant and base price." The Epistle of Philip to the Athenians in Demosthenes 159, 15: "He put Amphilochus to ransom (ἀπολύτρωσε) for nine talents." Polybius 2.6.6: "They made a truce with the inhabitants to deliver up all freemen and the city of Phoenice for a fixed ransom (ἀπολυτρώσαντες)." Polybius 22.21.8: "On a large sum of gold being agreed to be paid for the woman, he led her off to put her to ransom (ἀπολυτρώσαν)." Stephanus adds that Lucian somewhere says of Achilles that "he ransomed (ἀπολύτρωσας) the body of Hector for a small sum."

For the middle, ἀπολυτροῦσθαι, only late passages are cited. Th. Zahn, however, remarks very properly, that while "the middle ἀπολυτροῦσθαι is very rare, and is not to be found in the Bible," it nevertheless "lies in essentially the same sense as the middle λυτροῦσθαι at the basis of the use of the passive in Zeph. 3:1 (3:3), and in Plutarch, 'Pompey,' 24." In this passage of Plutarch33 we read that Helo who had been taken captive by pirates "was ransomed (ἀπελυτρώθη) with a great sum." In these passages ἀπολυτροῦσθαι is the passive of the middle, not of the active, sense. The lexicographers cite only two passages in which the middle is actually found. Polyaenus, a Macedonian rhetorician of the time of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, relates how Aristocrates the Athenian, entering a Spartan port in a ship disguised as peaceful, was able by this ruse to slay some and to abduct others as prisoners, which last, he adds, "Aristocles ransomed with a great sum (οὓς πολλῶν χρημάτων Ἀριστοκλῆς ἀπολυτρώσατο)." That is the manuscript reading. Nevertheless the modern editors, adopting an emendation of Casaubon's, print Ἀριστοκράτης for Ἀριστοκλῆς. By this correction the meaning of ἀπολυτρώσατο is transformed, and we are made to read it, "Extorted a great sum for their ransom": that is to say, the middle is given the active sense. This result is unacceptable in view of the regular middle sense preserved in λύεσθαι, ἀπολύεσθαι, λυτροῦσθαι implied for ἀπολυτροῦσθαι in the passive use noted above, and actually appearing in the middle ἀπολυτροῦσθαι elsewhere. It must be held questionable, therefore, whether the text of the passage has been rightly settled by the editors: we need a different subject or else a different voice for the verb. There can be no question that in the only remaining passage in which it is cited, the Emperor Julian uses ἀπολυτροῦσθαι in its expected middle sense, and as the general equivalent of λυτροῦσθαι. "Whom, then," he says, "are we to regard as a slave? Shall it be him whom we buy for so many silver drachmas, for two minae, or for ten staters of gold? Probably you will say that such a man is truly a slave. And why? Is it because we have paid down money for him to the seller? But in that case the prisoners of war whom we ransom (λυτρούμεθα) would be slaves. And yet the law on the one hand grants these their freedom when they have come safe home, and we on the other hand ransom (ἀπολυτρούμεθα) them not that they may become slaves, but that they may be free. Do you see then that in order to make a ransomed man (λυτρωθέντα) a slave it is not enough to pay down a sum of money …?"

The noun ἀπολύτρωσις is might express the action of either the active or the middle of the verb from which it is formed. Zahn remarks:38 "For the corresponding use of ἀπολύτρωσις"—that is to say for the use of it in a sense corresponding to the middle sense of the verb, "to secure release by paying ransom"—"it seems that undoubted examples are lacking. Polybius, 6.58.11; 27.11.3, uses διαλύτρωσις is in its stead, and most writers content themselves with λύτρωσις." This is already to say that the use of ἀπολύτρωσις in this sense has the support of its cognates; and certainly there is nothing in its own very rare usage to object. The lexicons give, it is true, only a single instance of the word's occurrence—Plutarch, "Pompey," 24—and in this instance it expresses the action of the active voice of the verb.40 "Music," we read, "and dancing and banquets all along the shore, and seizings of officers and ransomings of captured cities (καὶ πόλεων αἰχμαλώτων ἀπολυτρῶσεις) were a reproach to the Roman supremacy." Another instance, however, has turned up in an inscription from Kos of the first or second Christian century, in which the word expresses the action of the middle voice. The inscription is speaking of that form of manumission of slaves, very widely current after the period of the Diadochi and illustrated by a great number of inscriptions at Delphi, in which the slave really purchased his own liberty, but did so through the intermediation of priests so as ostensibly to be purchased by a god. The purchase money deposited in the temple for the purpose is called the λύτρον or λύτρα. In the inscription in question, those who perform the ἀπελευθέρωσις are instructed "not to make formal record of the ἀπολύτρωσις until the priests have reported that the necessary sacrifice has been made." Both Deissmann and Zahn apparently suppose that the paralleling of ἀπολύτρωσις here with ἀπελευθέρωσις empties it of its specific meaning. This is obviously unjustified: the transaction was a manumission (ἀπελευθέρωσις) which took place by means of a payment (λύτρον, λύτρα) and was therefore, more exactly described, a ransoming (ἀπολύτρωσις). We are clearly to interpret: those who make the manumission are not to record the sale until the whole transaction is actually completed; and the two terms are respectively in their right places.

Throughout the whole history of the profane usage of the derivatives of λύτρον, we perceive, the intrinsic significance of λύτρον continuously determines their meaning. This was to be expected. The case is not similar to that of such a word as, say, "dilapidated" in English which readily loses in figurative usages all suggestion of its underlying reference to stones; or even to that of such a word as "redeem" itself in English, which easily rubs off its edges and comes to mean merely to buy out and even simply to release. The bases of these words are foreign to English speech and do not inevitably obtrude themselves on the consciousness of every one who employs them, Λύτρον was a distinctively Greek word, formed from a Greek primitive in everyday use, according to instinctively working Greek methods of word-formation, carrying with them regular modifications of sense. No Greek lips could frame it, no Greek ear could hear it; in any of its derivatives, without consciousness of its intrinsic meaning. This is, of course, not to say that the word could not conceivably lose its distinctive sense. But in words of this kind the processes of such decay are difficult, and illustrations of it are comparatively rare; especially when as in this instance, the terms in question stand out on a background of a far more widely current use of their primitive in the broader sense. A Greek might well be tempted to use λύειν and its derivatives in the sense of λυτροῦν and its derivatives; and in point of fact he did so use them copiously. But it would not be natural for him to reverse the process and use λυτροῦν and its derivatives in the sense of λύειν. It may be natural for us, standing at a sales-counter, to say "I will take that," meaning to "buy"; but it would never be natural for us to say, "I will buy that," meaning merely to "take." In the group of words built up around λύτρον the Greek language offered to the New Testament a series of terms which distinctly said "ransom"; and just in proportion as we think of the writers of the New Testament as using Greek naturally we must think of them as feeling the intrinsic significance of these words as they used them, and as using them only when they intended to give expression to this their intrinsic significance. It is safe to say that no Greek, to the manner born, could write down any word, the center of which was λύτρον, without consciousness of ransoming as the mode of deliverance of which he was speaking.

The fact is not to be obscured, of course, that the writers of the New Testament were not in the strict sense Greeks. At the most Luke enjoys that unique distinction; and even he may have been in the wide sense a Hellenist rather than in the strict sense a Hellene. The rest were Jews: even Paul, coming out of the Diaspora, yet was able to speak in Aramaic; and apart from him and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, they were all of immediate Palestinian origin and traditions. Moreover they all had in their hands the Septuagint version of the Old Testament and may be thought to have derived their Greek religious terminology from it. We must, therefore, ascertain, we are told, how the group of words built up on λύτρον are employed in the Septuagint before we can venture to pass upon the sense in which they are used in the New Testament. And in turning to the Septuagint, it must be confessed, a surprising thing confronts us. Words of this group are certainly employed in the Septuagint without clear intimation of ransoming. This remarkable phenomenon is worthy of our careful and discriminating attention.

II

A considerable number of words of this group occur in the Septuagint—λύτρον, [ἀντιλύτρον], λυτροῦσθαι, λύτρωσις, λυτρωτής, λυτρωτός, ἀπολυτροῦν, ἀπολύτρωσις, ἐκλύτρωσις. Some of these, however, occur very seldom, and only one, λυτροῦσθαι, is copiously employed.

Ἀντιλύτρον was printed in some of the early editions at Ps. 48 (49):9, but has been eliminated in the modern critical texts.

Λύτρον occurs nineteen times and always, of course, in the quite simple sense of a ransom-price. H. Oltramare gives a very good account of its usage. "Λύτρον, usually in the plural λύτρα, (= כפר, פדיון, גאלה) designates an indemnification, a pecuniary compensation, given in exchange for a cessation of rights over a person or even a thing, ransom. It is used for the money given to redeem a field, Lev. 25:24—the life of an ox about to be killed, Ex. 21:30—one's own life in arrest of judicial proceedings, Num. 35:31, 32, or of vengeance, Prov. 6:35,—the first-born over whom God had claims, Num. 3:46, 48, 51, Lev. 18:15, etc. It is ordinarily used of the ransom given for redemption from captivity or slavery, Lev. 19:20, Isa. 45:13, etc."

The adjective λυτρωτός occurs only twice, in a single connection (Lev. 25:31, 32), in which we are told that the houses in unwalled villages and in the Levitical cities were alike at all times redeemable (λυτρωταὶ διαπαντὸς ἔσονται: representing גאלא).

The compound active noun, ἐκλύτρωσις, occurs only a single time (Num. 3:49): "And for τὰ λύτρα … thou shalt take five shekels apiece … and thou shalt give the money to Aaron and to his sons as λύτρα of the supernumerary among them; … and Moses took the money, τὰ λύτρα of the supernumerary, for the ἐκλύτρωσις of the Levites … and Moses gave τὰ λύτρα of the supernumeraries to Aaron and his sons."

The compound verb, ἀπολυτροῦν occurs twice, once in the active voice (Ex. 21:8 for the Hiphil of פדה) and once in the passive voice (Zeph. 3:1 (3) for the Niphal of גאל). In both instances the idea of ransoming is express; and, as Th. Zahn points out, the sense in which the passive is used in Zeph. 3:1 (3) presupposes the middle, ἀπολυτροῦσθαι, in the sense of "to deliver by the payment of a ransom." Thus this verb bears the distinctive active and middle senses in the Septuagint which it and its congeners bear in profane Greek.

So far the Septuagint usage shows no modification of that of profane Greek. No modification can be assumed even with reference to ἀπολύτρωσις, the active substantive derived from ἀπολυτροῦν, ἀπολυτροῦσθαι. This term occurs only in Dan. 4:32 (29 or 30) LXX in a context which at first sight might mislead us into giving it the undifferentiated signification of just "deliverance." "And at the end of the seven years," we read, "the time of my ἀπολυτρώσεως came, and my sins and my ignorance were fulfilled in the sight of the God of heaven." The "deliverance" here spoken of, however, must be held to be defined by the preceding context as resting on a "ransoming." There is a manifest reference back from this verse to 4:24 where the king is exhorted to pray God concerning his sins and "to redeem (λύτρωσαι) all his iniquities with almsgiving." No doubt the emphasis is thrown on the result of the ransoming, on the deliverance in which it has at last issued. This is doubtless the reason why the compound term is used here—ἀπολύτρωσις,—the ἀπό in which, signifying "away from," shifting the emphasis from the process to the effects. The two terms, λυτροῦσθαι, verse 24, and ἀπολύτρωσις, verse 32, are respectively in their right places.

When we turn to the verb λυτροῦσθαι itself and its two substantival derivatives, λύτρωσις and λυτρωτής, we find ourselves in deeper water.

Λύτρωσις occurs eight times, representing the Hebrew bases גאל and פדה, each four times. In four of its occurrences, it is employed in the simple literal sense of ransoming or redeeming (Lev. 25:29, 29, 48; Num. 18:16); and in yet another (Ps. 48 [49]:8),—"the price of the redemption of his soul"—it is used equally of ransoming by a price, although now in the higher, spiritual sphere. In the remaining three instances an implication of a ransom-price is less clear: Ps. 110 (111):9, "He sent redemption to His people; He commanded His covenant forever"; Ps 129 (130):7, "For with the Lord is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption"; Isa. 63:4, "For the day of recompense (ἀνταποδόσεως) is upon them, and the year of redemption is at hand." Passages like these will naturally receive their precise interpretation from the implication of the usage of their more copiously employed primitive, λυτροῦσθαι.

Similarly the noun of agent, λυτρωτής, which occurs only twice (Ps. 18 [19]:14, Ps. 77 [78]:35, representing גאל)—in both instances as an epithet of God, "our Redeemer"—will necessarily receive its exact shade of meaning from the general usage of its primitive, λυτροῦσθαι.

This verb, λυτροῦσθαι, occurs some hundred and five times. It usually has at its base either גאל (about forty-two times) or פדה (about forty times), and rarely פרק (five times). Sometimes, of course, there is no Hebrew base (Sir. 48:20, 49:10, 50:24, 51:2, 3; Zech 3:15; 1 Macc. 4:11). It is employed in more than one shade of meaning.

First, it is used quite literally to express the redeeming of a thing by the payment for it of a ransom price. Thus, for example: Ex. 13:13, "Every one of an ass that openeth the womb, thou shalt exchange for a sheep; but if thou wilt not exchange, thou shalt redeem it; every firstborn of a man of thy sons, thou shalt redeem"; Levit. 19:20, "If any one lie carnally with a woman, and she is a house-slave, kept for a man, and she has not been redeemed with a ransom (λύτροις) and freedom has not been given to her, … they shall not be put to death, because she was not set free"; Num. 18:15–17, "And everything which openeth the womb of all flesh, whatsoever they offer unto the Lord, from man unto beast, shall be thine; nevertheless the firstborn of men shall be redeemed with a ransom (λύτροις), and the firstborn of unclean beasts thou shalt redeem. And its redemption (λύτρωσις) is from a month old; the valuation (συντίμησις) is five sheckels, according to the sacred sheckel—there are twenty obols." In this simple literal usage the word occurs about twenty-seven times; but it seems to be confined to Exodus (six times), Leviticus (eighteen times) and Numbers (three times).

Sharply differentiated from this literal usage is a parallel one in which λυτροῦσθαι is applied to the deliverance from Egypt. Here there is at least no emphasis placed on the deliverance being in mode a ransoming. The stress is thrown rather on the power exerted in it and the mind is focussed on the mightiness of the transaction. This is so marked that B. F. Westcott is led by it to declare, too broadly, of the use of λυτροῦσθαι and its derivatives in the Septuagint, that "the idea of the exertion of a mighty force, the idea that the 'redemption' costs much, is everywhere present." It is at least clear that the idea that the redemption from Egypt was the effect of a great expenditure of the divine power and in that sense cost much, is prominent in the allusions to it, and seems to constitute the central idea sought to be conveyed. The earliest passage in which this usage occurs is typical of the whole series: Ex. 6:6, "Go, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, I am the Lord, and I will lead you forth from the tyranny of the Egyptians, and deliver (ῥύσομαι) you from your bondage and redeem (λυτρώσομαι) you with a high hand and a great judgment; and I will take you to myself for my people, and I will be to you a God and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God which bringeth you out from the oppression of the Egyptians." Other examples are: Deut. 9:26, "And I prayed to God and said, O Lord, king of the Gods, destroy not thy people and thy portion which thou didst redeem, and didst lead forth out of Egypt by thy great might and by thy strong hand and by thy high hand"; Neh. 1:10, "And these are thy children and thy people, whom thou didst redeem by thy great power and by thy strong hand"; Ps. 76 (77):15, 16, "Thou art the God that doest wonders, thou didst make known among the peoples thy power, thou didst redeem with thine arm thy people, the sons of Jacob and Joseph." This usage of the deliverance out of Egypt in might lies in the Pentateuch side by side with the former, occurring in Exodus (three times), and Deuteronomy (six times), and occurs on occasion in the later books.

Similarly to its employment to express the fundamental national deliverance from Egypt in the divine might, λυτροῦσθαι is used of other great national deliverances in which the power of Jehovah was manifested. In "the praise of famous men and of our fathers which begat us," that fills the later chapters of Sirach, the word is employed repeatedly in this sense: (48:20), "But they called upon the Lord which is merciful and stretched out their hands towards him; and immediately the Holy One heard them out of heaven, and delivered them by the ministry of Esay"; (49:10), "And of the twelve prophets let the memorial be blessed, and let their bones flourish again out of their place; for they comforted Jacob, and delivered them by assured hope"; (50:22, 24), "Now, then bless ye the God of all, which only doeth wondrous things everywhere.… That he would confirm his mercy with us and deliver us at his time." The general point of view finds clear expression in 1 Macc 4:10, 11, "Now, therefore, let us cry unto heaven, if peradventure the Lord will have mercy upon us, and remember the covenant of our fathers, and destroy this host before our face this day: that so all the heathen may know that there is one that delivereth and saveth (σώζειν) Israel."

Among these great deliverances wrought for Israel, the chief place is taken, of course, by its second great cardinal emancipation—that from the Babylonian captivity. The employment of λυτροῦσθαι to express this deliverance is naturally comparatively frequent, and as naturally it shades insensibly into the expression of the Messianic deliverance of which this liberation (along with that from Egypt) is treated as the standing type. We may find the key-note struck, perhaps, in Jer. 27 (50):33, 34: "Thus saith the Lord, Oppressed have been the children of Israel and the children of Judah: all they that have taken them captive, together oppress them because they refuse to let them go. And their redeemer is strong, the Lord Almighty is his name; he shall judge judgment with his adversary, that he may destroy the land and disquiet the inhabitants of Babylon. A sword is upon the Chaldeans and upon the inhabitants of Babylon!…" How close the eschatological application lies may be illustrated by Isa. 51:11–13 (9–11): "Awake, awake Jerusalem and put on the strength of thine arm; awake as in the beginning of day, as the generation of eternity. Art thou not she that dried the sea, the deep waters of the abyss? that madest the depths of the sea a way for the delivered (ῥυομένοις) and the redeemed to pass through? For by the Lord shall they return, and shall come into Zion with joy and eternal exultation." And we seem fairly on eschatological ground in Isa. 35:9–10: "And there shall be no lion there, neither shall any of the evil beasts go up upon it, nor be found there, but the redeemed and the gathered on account of the Lord shall walk in it, and they shall return and come into Zion with joy and everlasting joy shall be over their heads."

Not essentially different is the employment of the word to express the intervention of God for the deliverance of an individual either from some great specific evil or from evil in general—the term rising in the latter case fully into the spiritual region. A couple of very instructive instances occur in the Septuagint: Daniel 3:28, "Bless ye the Lord, Ananias, Adzarias and Misaelhymn and exalt him forever; because he liberated (ἐξείλατο) us from hades, and saved (ἔσωσεν) us from the bonds of death, and delivered (ἐῤῥύσατο) us from the midst of the burning flame, and redeemed (ἐλυτρώσατο) us from the fire"; 6:27), "I, Darius, will worship and serve him all my days, for the idols made with hands cannot save (σῶσαι) as the God of Daniel redeemed Daniel." Quite similarly we read in 2 Sam. 4:9 (and 1 Kings 1:29): "And David answered Rechab and Baanah his brother, … and said unto them, As the Lord liveth, who hath redeemed my soul out of all adversity"; and in Ps. 143 (144):9–10: "O God, I will sing a new song to thee, … who giveth salvation unto kings, who redeemeth David his servant from the hurtful sword" (cf. 7:2–3). "I will thank thee, O Lord King," says the son of Sirach in his concluding prayer (51:1 ff.), "and I will praise thee, O God my Savior (σωτῆρα), I give thanks to thy name, because thou hast become my defender and helper, and hast redeemed my body from destruction, and from the snare of the slanderous tongue, from the lips that forge a falsehood, and hast become my helper against my adversaries and hast redeemed me, according to the multitude of thy mercies and name, from the teeth of them that were ready to devour me, from the hand of those that seek my life, from the manifold afflictions which I had.…" The Psalms afford a number of examples in which this individual redemption in the region of the spirit is spoken of. The note that sounds through them is struck in Ps. 33 (34):23. "The Lord will redeem the souls of his servants, and none of them that hope in him shall go wrong."

The redeeming power in all this range of applications of λυτροῦσθαι is uniformly conceived as divine. It is to God, the Lord God Almighty, alone that redemption is ascribed, whether it be the redemption of Israel or of the individual, or whether it be physical or spiritual. God and God alone is the Redeemer alike of Israel and of the individual, in every case of deliverance of whatever order. We hear in Sirach, it is true, of the Holy One redeeming Israel by the hand of Isaiah (48:20); and indeed, in a somewhat confused sentence, of the twelve prophets, or of their bones, redeeming Jacob (49:10)—or are we to assume that God is understood as the nominative of the verbs and read: "But God comforted Israel and redeemed them by the faith of hope"? There are besides two negative statements which may seem to imply the possibility of a human redeemer. The one is found in Ps. 7:2–3, and the other,—a very instructive passage—in Lam. 5:8. In Ps. 7:2–3 David prays: "O Lord, my God, in thee do I put my hope, save (σῶσον) me from all that persecute me, and deliver (ῥῦσαι) me; let him not seize my soul, like a lion, while there is none to redeem (λυτρουμένου) or to save (σώζοντος)." In Lam. 5:8 we read: "Slaves, have ruled over us: there is none to redeem (λυτροῦμενος) out of their hand." In neither instance is it intimated, however, that a human redeemer could be found: despair is rather expressed, and the cry is for the only Redeemer that can suffice. It is only in Dan. 4:24 that we find a clear reference to a human redeemer. "Entreat him concerning thy sins and redeem thine iniquities with alms" (LXX); "redeem thy sins with alms" (Theod.). Here the king is exhorted to ransom his own soul by his good works. This conception, however, cuts athwart the whole current of the usage of λυτροῦσθαι in the Septuagint elsewhere when it is a matter of spiritual redemption. How little such a point of view accords with that elsewhere connected with λυτροῦσθαι may be learned from Ps. 48 (49):8–10: "A brother redeemeth (λυτροῦται) not: shall a man redeem (λυτρώσεται)? He shall not give to God an expiation (ἐξίλασμα) for himself or the price of the redemption (τὴν τιμὴν τῆς λυτρώσεως) of his soul though he labor forever and live to the end, so that he should not see corruption." The sense of ὁ λυτρούμενος in Prov. 23:10–11: "Remove not the ancient landmarks and enter not into the possession of orphans, for he that redeemeth them is a powerful Lord, and judgeth thy judgment with thee," may be open to some question. It is probably the intention of the Septuagint translators to intimate that the poor are under the especial protection of the God who is the "redeemer" by way of eminence of the needy.

The emphasis put upon the power of God manifested in redemption which accompanies the entire usage of λυτροῦσθαι except in its literal sense, may tempt us to suppose that the notion of ransoming has been altogether lost in this usage. This is in point of fact widely taken for granted. B. F. Westcott, for example, writes: "It will be obvious from the usage of the LXX. that the idea of a ransom received by the power from which the captive is delivered is practically lost in λυτροῦσθαι &c." Such a statement is in any case fatally defective. It takes no account of the large use of λυτροῦσθαι in the Pentateuch in the purely literal sense (cf. Dan. 4:24). It is doubtful, however, whether it can be fully sustained even with respect to the use of λυτροῦσθαι of the divine deliverance. No doubt, as has already been pointed out, the sense of the power of God exerted in the deliverances wrought by Him comes so forcibly forward as to obscure the implication of ransoming. This is pushed so far into the background as to pass out of sight; and not infrequently it seems to be pushed not only out of sight but out of existence. In a passage like Dan 3:28 LXX, for example, there seems no place left for ransom-paying; and the same may appear to be true of such passages as Dan. 6:27 LXX, Lam. 5:8, Ps. 7:2. Nor does the synonymy in which the word sometimes stands encourage seeking for it such an underlying idea: Ex. 6:6, ῥύσομαι, λυτρώσομαι; Ps. 7:2–3, σῶσον, ῥῦσαι, λυτρουμένου, σώζοντος; Ps. 58 (59):2–3, ἐξελοῦ, λύτρωσαι, ῥῦσαι; Ps. 105 (106):10, ἔσωσεν, ἐλυτρώσατο; Hos. 13:14, ῥύσομαι, λυτρώσομαι; Dan 3:28 LXX, ἐξείλετο, ἔσωσεν, ἐῤῥύσατο, ἐλυτρώσατο; Dan. 6:27 LXX, σῶσαι, ἐλυτρώσατο; 1 Macc. 4:10, 11, λυτρούμενος, σώζων.

Nevertheless, as Westcott himself perceives, there is an abiding implication that the redemption has cost something: "the idea that the redemption costs much," says he, "is everywhere present." Perhaps we may say that, in this underlying suggestion, the conception of price-paying intrinsic in λυτροῦσθαι is preserved, and in this the reason may be found why it appears to be employed only when the mind is filled with the feeling that the redemption wrought has entailed the expenditure of almighty power.

It is going too far, in any case, however, to say that the idea of ransoming "is practically lost in λυτροῦσθαι, &c." in their Septuagint usage—as, to be sure the insertion of the word "practically" may show that Westcott himself felt. Whatever may be the implications of λυτροῦσθαι when used to designate the intervention of God in His almighty power for the deliverance of His people, there is evidence enough to show that the feeling of ransoming as the underlying sense of the word remained ever alive in the minds of the writers. That could not in any event fail to be the fact, because of the parallel use of λυτροῦσθαι in its literal sense; we must not permit to fall out of memory that λυτροῦσθαι is employed in its literal sense in more than a fourth of all its occurrences in the Septuagint. Every now and then moreover the consciousness of the underlying sense of ransoming is thrown up to observation. This may be the case in a passage like Ps. 73 (74):2: "Remember thy synagogue which thou didst acquire (ἐκτήσω = purchase) of old; thou didst redeem (ἐλυτρώσω) the rod of thine inheritance." It is more clearly the case in a passage like Isa. 52:3: "Ye were sold for nought (δωρεάν) and ye shall not be redeemed (λυτρωθήσεσθε) with money." There is an intimation here that no ransom price (in the sense intended) is to be paid for Israel; its redemption is to be wrought by the might of Jehovah. But it is equally intimated that a redemption without a price paid is as anomalous a transaction as a sale without money passing. That is to say, here is an unexceptionable testimony that the term λυτροῦσθαι in itself was felt to imply a ransom price. Another passage in point is provided by Ps. 48 (49):8: "A brother redeemeth (λυτροῦται) not: shall a man redeem (λυτρῶσεται)? He shall not give to God an expiation (ἐξίλασμα) for himself, and the price of the redemption (τὴν τιμὴν τῆς λυτρώσεως) of his soul, though he labor forever." To redeem is distinctly set forth here as the giving of a price which operates as an expiation: and the inability of a man to redeem a man out of the hand of God turns precisely on his inability to pay the price. Perhaps the most instructive passage, however, will be found in Isa. 43:1 ff.: "Fear not," Jehovah here says to His people, "because I have redeemed (ἐλυτρωσάμην) thee.… I have made Egypt thy price (ἄλλαγμα) and Ethiopia and Soene in thy stead (ὑπὲρ σοῦ).… And I will give men for thee (ὑπὲρ σοῦ) and rulers for thy head." Such passages as these, it surely does not require to be said, could not have been written by and to men in whose minds the underlying implication of ransoming had faded out of the terms employed. They bear witness to a living consciousness of this implication, and testify that, though λυτροῦσθαι and its derivatives may be employed to describe a redemption wrought in the almighty power of God, that was not in forgetfulness that redemption was properly a transaction which implies paying a price.

III

The broader use of λυτροῦσθαι (λύτρωσις, λυτρωτής) by the Septuagint of God's deliverance of His people, may not unfairly be said to throw the emphasis so strongly on the almightiness of the power manifested as to obscure, if not to obliterate, intimation of its mode as a ransoming. The assumption is frequently made that this usage is simply projected into the New Testament and determines the sense of all the terms of this group which are found in the New Testament.

This assumption is met, however, by the initial difficulty that the usage of the New Testament is not even formally a continuation of that of the Septuagint. The usage of the Septuagint in question is distinctly a usage of λυτροῦσθαι, and affects only it and, to a limited extent, its two immediate derivatives, λύτρωσις (Ps. 110 [111]:9, 129 [130]:7, Isa. 63:4) and λυτρωτής (Ps. 18 [19]:15, 77 [78]:35), which could not fail to be drawn somewhat into the current of any extended usage of λυτροῦσθαι. The more proper usage of other members of the group, and indeed even of these members of it in a large section of their employment, remains untouched. On the other hand, the usage of the New Testament is characteristically a usage of ἀπολύτρωσις, an otherwise rare form, which appears never to occur—itself or its primitive, ἀπολυτροῦν, ἀπολυτροῦσθαι,—whether in profane Greek, or in the Septuagint,60 or in writers directly dependent on the Septuagint, in any other than its intrinsic sense of ransoming. It would be plausible to suggest that the Septuagint usage in question is continued in the λύτρωσις of Luke 1:68, 2:38 and λυτροῦσθαι of Luke 24:21 where redemption is spoken of on the plane of Old Testament expectation. But the suggestion loses all plausibility when extended beyond this. It would be more plausible to argue that the form ἀπολύτρωσις was selected by the New Testament writers in part purposely to avoid the ambiguities which might arise from the Septuagint associations clinging to λυτροῦσθαι. The simple fact, however, is that the characteristic terminology in the two sets of writings is different.

This formal difference in the usages of the two sets of writers is immensely reinforced by a material difference in the presuppositions underlying what they severally wrote. Whatever may have been the nature of the expectations which the Old Testament saints cherished as to the mode of the divine deliverance to which they looked forward, the New Testament writers wrote of it, as a fact lying in the past, under the impression of a revolutionary experience of it as the expiatory death of the Son of God. It would have been unnatural to the verge of impossibility for them to speak of it colorlessly as to this central circumstance, especially when using phraseology with respect to it which in its intrinsic connotation emphasized precisely this circumstance. We must not obscure the fact that something had happened between the writing of the Old Testament and the New, something which radically affected the whole conception of the mode of the divine deliverance, and which set the development of Jewish and Christian ideas and expressions concerning it moving thenceforward on widely divergent pathways. It may sound specious when the Jewish eschatological conceptions are represented as supplying an analogy, according to which the New Testament phraseology may be understood. We may be momentarily impressed when it is explained that, as the Jews have set the Messiah as the great Deliverer (גואל) by the side of Moses, the first Deliverer (גואל הראשון), and expect him, as Moses led Israel out of Egypt, to achieve the final Deliverance (גאלה) and bring Israel home, without any interruption by an expiatory suffering and death, and merely by the power of his own personal righteousness,—so we must understand the New Testament writers, borrowing their language from the Jewish eschatology, to ascribe to Christ merely the Messianic deliverance, without any implication that it is wrought by an act of ransoming. But we can be only momentarily impressed by such representations. Between the Jewish and the New Testament conceptions of the Messianic deliverance there is less an analogy than a fundamental contradiction. There had taken place, first of all, on the part of the Christians what it is fashionable to speak of as a "predating" of the Messianic expectations: the redemption of God's people does not wait, with them, for the end-time, but has already been in principle wrought and awaits only its full realization in all its effects, in the end-time. And precisely what has already been wrought, contributing the very hinge on which the whole conception of the Messianic deliverance turns, is just that act of expiation which is wholly absent from the Jewish representation. If, in other words, the Jews looked only for a Deliverance, wrought by sheer power, the Christians put their trust precisely in a Redemption wrought in the blood of Christ. Of course so fundamental a difference could not fail to reflect itself in the language employed to give expression to the divergent conceptions. And that, again, may be, in part, the account to give of the adoption by the New Testament writers of the rare form ἀπολύτρωσις instead of the more current λυτροῦσθαι colored by Septuagint conceptions, to describe the redemption in Christ. That they conceived this redemption in terms of ransoming is made clear in any event by repeated contextual intimations to that effect.

The attempts which have been made to construe the terms derived from λυτροῦσθαι, employed by the writers of the New Testament of the deliverance wrought by Christ, as inexpressive of their intrinsic implication that the deliverance intimated was in the mode of a ransoming, were foreordained to failure in the presence of general considerations like this. H. Oltramare's extended discussion in his comments on Rom. 3:24 is often referred to as a typical instance of these attempts. This, however, is rather unfair to them. Oltramare's argument is vitiated from the beginning by failure to discriminate between the differing usages of the active and middle voices of the whole series of verbs, λύειν, ἀπολύειν, λυτροῦν, ἀπολυτροῦν by which the active means "to put to ransom" and the middle "to ransom." It loses itself speedily accordingly in mere paradoxes. Of course he cites no passages from the Greek authors in which any of these terms is employed without intimation of a ransom-paying: to all appearance such passages do not exist. He is compelled to rely entirely therefore on the Septuagint usage of λυτροῦσθαι mechanically treated. He allows, of course, that λυτροῦσθαι (with which he confounds also λυτροῦν "signifies properly and etymologically to release, to liberate an object by giving to its holder or to one who has rights in it, a sum in return for which he desists from his possession, or from his rights, to ransom, to redeem." He very strangely, because it thus signifies "to secure a release by paying a ransom," sets it in contrast with ἀπολυτροῦν which he represents as meaning "to put to ransom," without observing that he has thus set the purely middle use of the one over against the purely active use of the other. Thus he parcels out between the two verbs the distinctive usages which obtain between the active and middle of each of them. "Ἀπολυτρόω," he says, "does not have the sense of the simple verb, 'to ransom' = redimere: we do not know a single example of it. The prefix ἀπό (as in ἀπολύω, ἀφίημι) so emphasizes the idea of liberating, delivering, that in profane authors, ἀπολυτροῦν signifies properly to release for a ransom, to hold to ransom." Even this is not all. For he now proceeds to conclude that "ἀπολύτρωσις designates therefore the action of releasing for a demanded ransom." "Its meaning is such," he continues gravely, "that if we absolutely insist on giving to ἀπολύτρωσις the sense of 'deliverance for ransom,' the expression διὰ τῆς ἀπολυτρώσεως τῆς ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ signifies 'by the release, the ransom-taking which is found in Jesus Christ'—that is to say that Jesus delivers us by demanding a ransom of us, far from by paying it for us." He sees but one way of escape from this conclusion. "Very happily," he concludes, "ἀπολύτρωσις is also used in the sense of deliverance, liberation, without any accessory idea of ransoming. All that it seems to have preserved of the radical is that it speaks principally of releasing from that which binds, confines, impedes, or shuts up." He has no evidence to present for this cardinal assertion, however, except the fact that Schleusner cites from the Old Testament the passage "χρόνος τῆς ἀπολυτρώσεως ἤλθε." As we know, this passage comes from Dan. 4:32 LXX, where the context suggests that the deliverance had been purchased by almsgiving. To it Oltramare can add only certain New Testament passages in which he finds no accessory idea of ransoming notified. This is all quite incompetent.

Th. Zahn's discussion, distributed through his notes on the same passage, is free, of course, from such eccentricities, and constitutes in its several parts a careful presentation of all the evidence which can possibly be brought together for taking ἀπολύτρωσις in Rom. 3:24 in the undifferentiated sense of deliverance. No evidence, of course, for this sense of the term is adduced from the usage of any derivative of λύτρον by a profane author: and no decisive instance is adduced from any quarter of the use of the term itself in this undifferentiated sense. The force of the argument is dependent wholly on the cumulative effect of the discussion of the several terms λυτροῦσθαι, λύτρωσις, ἀπολυτροῦν, ἀπολύτρωσις successively. In these discussions the more utilizable passages from the Septuagint are skilfully marshalled; certain New Testament passages in which there is no express intimation in the context that the deliverance in question is a ransoming (as if the form of the word itself and its appropriate usage elsewhere counted for nothing!) are added; and a few Patristic passages are subjoined. Despite the thoroughness of the research and the exhaustive adduction of the material, the whole discussion remains unconvincing. The reader rises from it with the conviction that an unnatural meaning is being thrust upon the term on insufficient grounds, and that, after all is said, "redemption" continues to mean redemption.

Much more formidable than either Oltramare's or Zahn's argument is that which is developed with his usual comprehensiveness and vigor by Albrecht Ritschl in the second volume of his great work on "Justification and Reconciliation." Ritschl begins by speaking of the use of λυτροῦν and its derivatives by the Septuagint to render the Hebrew stems גאל and פדה. These stems, he remarks, had originally, like the Greek terms, the sense of delivering specifically by means of purchase. This implication of purchase had been lost, however, in usage. Their etymological implication was similarly lost, of course, by the Greek terms which were employed to render them, through an assimilation to the Hebrew terms which they rendered. These Greek terms came to the New Testament writers, therefore, with this broadened sense; and the New Testament writers naturally continued to employ them in it. If they are sometimes used by the New Testament writers in connections in which the original sense of purchasing might seem to be intimated, it is nevertheless not to be assumed that their original sense has reasserted itself. It is more natural to read them in these passages too in the broadened sense in which they have been inherited from the Septuagint. Paul, for example, must be supposed to have had the Hebrew in mind when he cited from the Septuagint, and to have taken from it his religious phraseology. This would hold him, when he used the Greek words, to the sense which they have as renderings of the broadened Hebrew terms. Of course, it may be argued that the Apostolic use of these words is rather controlled by our Lord's declaration that He came into the world to give His life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). But there is really no proof that this saying was known to Paul, to say nothing of its having determined the sense in which he employed terms only remotely related to the word used. The impression is left on the mind, rather, that Paul has chosen the compound term ἀπολύτρωσις instead of the simple λύτρωσις of the Septuagint, because by it the idea of separation from, or liberation, is thrown into great emphasis: he wishes, in a word, to say not ransoming but deliverance.

The steps in this argument are the successive assertions that: (1) The Hebrew words גאל and פדה had lost their original connotation of purchase; (2) The Greek words used to translate them must as a consequence have lost theirs; (3) The Septuagint usage of these Greek words must have extended itself into the New Testament; (4) The ordinary usage of these terms in the New Testament is in point of fact of this undifferentiated sort; (5) The instances of their use which do not seem of this sort must be nevertheless interpreted in harmony with this usage.

No one of these propositions is, however, unqualifiedly true. (1) Though the original senses of גאל and פדה—to redeem and to ransom—are sometimes submerged in their figurative use, they are so far from being wholly obliterated that the words are copiously employed quite literally, and it is repeatedly made clear that even in the most extreme extension of their figurative use their etymological significance does not wholly cease to be felt. (2) The Greek terms fitted to these Hebrew terms seem to have been selected to render them because they were their closest Greek representatives in their literal sense. The use of these Greek terms to render the Hebrew is evidence therefore that they retained their fundamental meaning of redemption, ransoming; and though they naturally acquired from the Hebrew terms their figurative meanings when they were used to express them, there is no evidence that they ever really lost their native implications. It is misleading to speak of "the Septuagint usage" of these Greek terms, as if this "extended" usage were the only usage they have in the Septuagint. Λυτροῦσθαι, the most important of the Septuagint terms, is used in twenty-seven out of the one hundred and five instances in which it occurs in its literal sense of ransoming, redeeming; λύτρωσις is used in five out of its eight occurrences in the sense of redemption, ransoming; all the compounds derived from λυτροῦν are used solely in this sense. (3) In point of fact, the New Testament usage is not a "projection" of the Septuagint usage. The terminology of the New Testament is different from that of the Septuagint, and therefore the terminology of the New Testament was very certainly not derived from that of the Septuagint. Are we to suppose that the New Testament writers carried over the senses of the Septuagint terms without carrying over the terms which were the vehicles of those senses? The fundamental assumption, moreover, that the New Testament writers derived their whole phraseology from the Septuagint—Ritschl even speaks of Paul's "Greek speech, formed from the Septuagint"—cannot be justified. The Greek speech of the New Testament writers is the common speech of their day and generation and their terminology more naturally reflects a popular usage of the time. (4) It is not the fact that the ordinary usage of the derivatives of λύτρον in the New Testament is without modal implications. The contextual implications rather show ordinarily that the modal implications are present. (5) There is not only no reason why a broadened sense should be made normative for these derivatives and imposed upon them in defiance of their natural implication to the contrary, but in several instances they are so recalcitrant to it that it cannot be imposed upon them without intolerable violence.

A brief survey of the New Testament passages seems to be desirable in order to justify the last two of these remarks.

Despite Ritschl's protest we must take our starting-point from our Lord's own description of His mission on earth as to give His life a ransom for many (Mt. 20:28, Mark 10:45). This could not fail to determine for His followers their whole conception of the nature of His redemptive work. We cannot be surprised, therefore, to find one of them, echoing His very words, describing His work as a giving of Himself as a ransom (ἀντίλυτρον) for all (1 Tim. 2:6). Nor can we profess to be doubtful of his meaning when the same writer, writing at nearly the same time, but using now the verbal form, tells us that "our great God and Savior gave Himself for us that He might redeem (λυτροῦσθαι) us from all iniquity and purify unto Himself a people for His own possession, zealous of good works" (Tit.1:14); or when another of the New Testament writers, closely affiliated with this one, and writing at about the same time, reminds the Christians that they "were redeemed (λυτροῦσθαι), not with corruptible things, with silver or gold, from their vain manner of life handed down from their fathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ" (1 Pet. 1:18). There is in these passages an express intimation that the deliverance described by the verb λυτροῦσθαι as wrought by our Lord, was wrought in the mode of a ransoming. He gave Himself in working it. He gave His blood, as a lamb's blood is given at the altar. We cannot fail to hear here the echoes of His own declaration, that He came to give His life a ransom for many, or to perceive that the verb λυτροῦσθαι is employed in its native etymological sense of a deliverance by means of a price paid. It is not less clear that the noun λύτρωσις is used in the same natural sense in Heb. 9:12, where, as in 1 Pet. 1:18, the blood of Jesus is compared with less precious things—here with the blood of goats and calves—and He is asserted, by means of this His own blood, to have "procured eternal redemption." No subtlety of interpretation can rid such passages of their implication of ransoming.

The specialty of the New Testament usage lies, however, not in these simple forms, but in the large use made of the rare compound substantive, ἀπολύτρωσις. This unusual form occurs seven times in the Epistles of Paul, twice in the Epistle to the Hebrews and once in the Gospel of Luke. The preposition ἀπό ("away from") with which it is compounded, no doubt, calls especial attention to the deliverance wrought by the ransoming intimated; and we are prepared, therefore, to see this form used when the mind is directed rather to the effects than to the process of the ransoming. That does not justify us, however, in supposing the term to declare the effects alone, with a total neglect of the process, namely ransoming, by which they are attained. In point of fact, in a number of instances the deliverance declared is in one way or another distinctly defined by the context as having been obtained by the payment of a price. Thus, in Heb. 9:15, we are told that this deliverance was wrought by a death; in Eph. 1:7 by the blood of Christ; in Rom. 3:24 by His being offered as a propitiatory sacrifice.

The implications of the term being fixed by its usage in such passages, it is necessarily interpreted in accordance with them on the other occasions where it occurs. Some of these are so closely connected with these normative passages, indeed, as to be inevitably carried on with them in the same sense. Thus Eph. 1:14 must be read in connection with Eph. 1:7; and Col. 1:14 but repeats Eph. 1:14 and cannot bear a different meaning. From these passages, however, we learn that the effects of the ransoming intimated by ἀπολύτρωσις stretch into the far future and are not all reaped until the end itself. Thus the key is given us for the understanding of it in its "eschatological" application, as it occurs in Luke 21:28, Rom. 8:33, Eph. 4:30. In such passages the ultimate effects of the ransoming wrought by Jesus in His death are spoken of, not some new and different deliverance, unconnected with that ransoming or with any ransoming, and most certainly not some ransoming distinct from that. The mind of the writer is on the death of Christ as the procuring cause of the deliverance which he is representing by his employment of this term as obtained only at such a cost.

No doubt there are a couple of passages in which there is less to go upon. There is nothing in 1 Cor. 1:30, for example, which would independently fix the sense of the term as there used. But it is unnecessary that there should be, in the presence of so firmly established a significance for it. We must, of course, read it here in accordance with its etymological implications supported by its usage elsewhere: particularly in a writer like Paul whose whole thought of "redemption" is coloured through and through with the blood of Christ.75 And there is certainly no reason why we should not conceive the deliverance spoken of in Heb. 11:35 as one to be purchased by some price which the victims were unwilling to pay. That is indeed implied in the declaration that they would not accept deliverance, because they were looking for a better resurrection. Does it not mean that they would not accept deliverance, on the terms, say, apostasy, on which alone it could be had? It is quite clear in sum that ἀπολύτρωσις in the New Testament is conceived, in accordance with its native connotation, and its usage elsewhere, distinctly as a ransoming; and that that implication must be read in it on every occasion of its occurrence.

There remain, to be sure, three or four instances of the occurrence of the simple forms—λυτροῦσθαι Luke 14:21, λύτρωσις Luke 1:68, 2:38, λυτρωτής Acts 7:35—all in writings of Luke—which have the peculiarity of standing on the plane of the Old Testament dispensation, and of being consequently unaffected in their suggestions by the new revelation which had come in the ransoming death of Christ. When Zacharias blessed the Lord, the God of Israel, because in the promise to him of a son, He had "visited and brought redemption for His people" (Luke 1:68); when Anna spoke of God "to all those that were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem" (Luke 2:38); when the two disciples, on their journey to Emmaus, bewailed to one another the death of Jesus, because they had hoped that "it was He that should redeem Israel"—it is clear enough that we are still on Old Testament ground. The redemptive "death which Jesus was to accomplish at Jerusalem" is not in sight to illuminate and give precision to the ideas which inform the language. In these passages, belonging to the dawn of the new dispensation, the usage of the Septuagint may not unnaturally be thought to prolong itself. And this point of view may, no doubt, not unnaturally be extended to such a passage as Acts 7:35, where Moses, thought of as a type of Christ, is called a "redeemer." Even this is not to say, however, that λυτροῦσθαι, λύτρωσις, λυτρωτής stand in these passages wholly without implication of ransoming. As they were written down by Luke, they doubtless were written down with Calvary read into their heart. As they were originally spoken they were doubtless informed with longings which though surer of the deliverance promised than instructed in the precise manner in which it should be wrought, were not without some premonitions, vague and unformed, perhaps, that it would be costly. Those who spoke these words were not mere Jews (as we might say); they were the "quiet in the land" whose hearts were instructed above their fellows. After all, the main fact is that in the Old Testament, and in these few echoes of the Old Testament usage "in the beginnings of the Gospel," before the light of the cross had shined upon the world, the great deliverance which was longed for from God, was spoken of, not in the use of terms which expressed merely deliverance—of which plenty to choose from lay at hand—but in the use of terms which enshrined in their heart the conception of ransoming.

Whatever we may think, however, of these few phrases preserved by Luke from the speech of men still only looking forward to the Gospel, they obviously stand apart from the general New Testament usage. That usage, whether of λυτροῦσθαι (Tit. 2:14, 1 Pet. 1:18), λύτρωσις (Heb. 9:12), or of ἀπολύτρωσις (Luke 21, Rom. 3:24, 8:23, 1 Cor. 1:30, Eph. 1:7, 14, 4:30, Col. 1:14, Heb. 9:15, 11:35), is very distinctly a usage in which the native sense of this group of words—the express sense of ransoming—is clearly preserved. We shall not do justice to the New Testament use of these terms unless we read them in every instance of their occurrence as intimating that the deliverance which they assert has been accomplished, in accordance with the native sense of the words in which it is expressed, by means of a ransom-paying.

IV

It is not of large importance, but it is not without an interest of its own to observe how this group of terms is used in the earliest Patristic literature. Three currents of inheritance unite here, and the effect is naturally to impart to the resultant usage a certain lack of consistency and sureness. There was the general Greek tradition, which gave to all the members of the group the uniform connotation of ransoming. There was the Septuagint modification of the simple terms, which wrought the more powerfully because the Septuagint supplied a rich body of quotable passages that were everywhere employed as vehicles of Christian faith and hope. And there was the New Testament usage in which the deliverance wrought by Christ is distinctly presented as a ransoming, but in which also a certain tendency is manifested to throw the emphasis on the effects of this ransoming and especially on its ultimate effect in delivering us from the wrath of God at the end-time. We can observe the influence of all these currents at work.

In the first age, to be sure, there is no very copious use made of this group of terms. Only λύτρον, λυτροῦσθαι and λύτρωσις occur, for example, in the Apostolic Fathers; and they only sparingly.

Λύτρον occurs twice and in both instances, of course, in its natural sense of "ransom." "Thou shalt work with thy hands," says Barnabas (xix. 10), commanding diligence in business, "for a ransom for thy sins." And in the Epistle to Diognetus, the greatness and power of God in our salvation is beautifully praised because "in pity He took upon Himself our sins and Himself parted with His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy for the lawless, the guiltless for the evil, the just for the unjust, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal for the mortal."

Λυτροῦσθαι occurs nine times. In some of these occurrences, it has reference to human rather than divine acts. One of these is 1 Clem. lv. "Many among ourselves have delivered themselves to bondage that they might ransom others." The native notion of ransoming intrinsic to the verb is here expressed very purely. This note is less clearly struck in Hermas, "Mand.," viii. 10. Hermas is giving a catalogue of Christian duties. "Hear now what follow upon these," he says: "To minister to widows, to visit the orphans and the needy, to ransom the servants of God from their afflictions, to be hospitable." And the note of ransoming appears to have sunk into silence in another passage of Hermas ("Vis.," iv. 1, 7). Pursued by a dreadful beast, he says, "And I began to cry and to beseech the Lord that He would deliver me from him." Dependence appears to be put on the might of God.

In none of these instances is there reference to the great normal deliverance which the redemption of God is. This is spoken of, however, in Ignatius' Christ-like prayer for the persecutors of his friends (Phil. 2:1): "May those who treated them with dishonor be redeemed through the grace of Jesus Christ." And it is spoken of also in Barnabas' exhortation (xix. 2): "Thou shalt glorify Him that redeemed thee from death." Neither passage gives clear intimation of how the redemption spoken of is supposed to be wrought. Nor indeed does the earlier passage in Barnabas (xiv. 4–8) in which, within the space of a few lines, he uses λυτροῦσθαι of the saving work of our Lord no less than four times. We quote Lightfoot's version with its odd variations in the rendering of the term: "Even the Lord Jesus, who was prepared beforehand hereunto, that, appearing in person, He might redeem out of darkness our hearts which had already been paid over unto death.… For it is written how the Father chargeth Him to deliver us from darkness.… We perceive, then, whence we are ransomed. Again the prophet saith, … 'Thus saith the Lord that ransomed thee, even God.' " The citation at the end is from Isa. 49:6 ff. where the Septuagint has ὁ ῥυσαμένος. Why Barnabas substitutes ὁ λυτρωσαμένος is a matter of conjecture. Possibly it was inadvertent. Possibly it was due to his having already written λυτροῦσθαι three times, and he adjusts his text to the language of the passage into which he brings it. Possibly he substitutes a term which more exactly describes what Christ actually did—Christianizes Isaiah's language, in a word. In the only remaining passage in which λυτροῦσθαι occurs in the Apostolic Fathers, 2 Clem. xvii. 4, it is used in the so-called "eschatological sense," illustrated in the New Testament by Luke 21:28, Rom. 8:23, Eph. 1:14, 4:30, Col. 1:14: "The Lord said, 'I will come to gather together all the peoples, tribes and tongues.' And He means by this the day of His epiphany, when, coming, He shall redeem us, each according to his works."

The only other form which occurs in the Apostolic Fathers is λύτρωσις and it occurs only twice (1 Clem. xii. 7, Did. iv. 6, cf. Barn. xix. 10 as v.r. for λύτρον). In Did. iv. 6, the Christians are being exhorted to almsgiving, and quite after the Jewish fashion (cf. Dan. 4:24 Theod.) the exhortation takes the form: "If thou hast aught passing through thy hands, thou shalt give a ransom for thy sins." Almsgiving is a means of securing deliverance: it is the purchase-price paid for immunity from deserved punishment. In 1 Clem. xii. 7, the scarlet thread which Rahab hung out of the window is declared to have showed beforehand that "through the blood of the Lord there shall be redemption unto all them that believe and hope in God." Here also the sense is distinctly that of ransoming, and the price paid for redemption is noted as Christ's blood.

This is rather a meagre showing for the currency of the language of redemption in the first age of the Church. The Apostolic Fathers are notable, however, for poverty of doctrinal content: perhaps it is only natural that this doctrine too finds only occasional allusion in them. We receive no impression that λυτροῦσθαι and its derivatives are employed as technical terms, as established vehicles of a definite doctrine. They appear to be cursorily used in the several senses and applications in which they would naturally suggest themselves to writers of the varied inheritance of these first Christians. The term which comes nearest to a technical term in the New Testament—Paul's ἀπολύτρωσις—does not occur here at all. And the terms that do occur are dealt with freely and librate in their suggestion between the two extremes of a strict ransoming and an undifferentiated deliverance—with the balance falling, as was natural, in the direction of the stricter signification.

When we advance to the next age—the age of the Apologists—we meet with similar phenomena, though for a different reason. Apologies are no more natural receptacles of doctrinal terms than practical letters. No single term of our group of words occurs in a single Apology of this epoch. The whole period would be barren of these terms were it not that the Dialogue between Justin and Trypho happens to have been written in it. It this Dialogue, λυτροῦσθαι appears seven times, and λύτρωσις, λυτρωτής and ἀπολύτρωσις each once. Here it will be observed, first in Christian literature, is our Lord called "Redeemer" (λυτρωτής). And here first in uninspired Christian literature does Paul's ἀπολύτρωσις reappear—and it does not appear here of Christ's redemption of His people to which usage Paul had consecrated it, but only of the redemption of Israel through Moses.

It is clear that the mind of this writer is not on these terms as technical terms for the Christian salvation, described in its mode. Of the ten passages in which they occur six are citations from the Old Testament: xix. 6 (Ez. 20:12, 20), "That ye may know that I am God who redeemed you" (LXX: "who sanctifieth you"); xxvi. 3 (Isa. 62:12), "And he shall call it a holy nation, redeemed by the Lord"; xxxiv. 5 (Ps. 72:14); "He shall redeem their souls from usury and injustice"; cxix. 3 (Isa. 62:12), "And they shall call them the holy people, redeemed of the Lord"; xxvi. 4 (Isa. 63:4), "For the day of retribution has come upon them, and the year of redemption (λύτρωσις) is present"; xxx. 3 (Ps. 18 [19]:15), "For we call him Helper and Redeemer (λυτρωτής)." In two more of them the allusion is not to the Christian redemption but to the Deliverance of Israel from Egypt: cxxxi. 3, "Ye who were redeemed from Egypt with a high hand and a visitation of great glory, when the sea was parted for you"; lxxxvi. 1, "Moses was sent with a rod to effect the redemption (ἀπολύτρωσις) of the people; and with this in his hands at the head of the people he divided the sea."

Only two passages remain in which Justin uses λυτροῦσθαι at his own instance of the Christian redemption.

The first of these is lxxxiii. 3. Here Justin is commenting on the Jewish attempt to interpret Ps. 110:1 ff. of Hezekiah: "The Lord saith to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make thine enemies my footstool. He shall send forth a rod of power over Jerusalem, and it shall rule in the midst of thine enemies. In the splendor of the saints before the morning star have I begotten thee. The Lord hath sworn and will not repent, Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek." He asks scornfully, "Who does not admit then, that Hezekiah is no priest after the order of Melchizedek? And who does not know that he is not the redeemer (λυτρούμενος) of Jerusalem? And who does not know that he neither sent a rod of power over Jerusalem, nor ruled in the midst of her enemies; but that it was God who averted from him the enemies after he mourned and was afflicted? But our Jesus.…" The reference to Jesus here is only indirect and the exact nature of the redemption spoken of is not clear.

The other passage, lxxxvi. 6, is clearer. It runs: "Our Christ by being crucified on the tree, and by purifying us with water, has redeemed us, though plunged in the direst offences which we have committed, and has made us a house of prayer and adoration." Here it is from sin that we are said to have been redeemed, both from its guilt and from its pollution. The redeeming act is seen in the crucifixion; while the cleansing by baptism is associated with that as co-cause of the effect. The whole process of salvation is thus included in what is called redemption; the impetration and application of salvation alike. There is a price paid; and there is a work wrought. So broadly does Justin conceive of the scope of λυτροῦσθαι.

We need not pursue the matter further. With Justin we are already a hundred years later than the New Testament usage. We perceive that, under the varied influences moulding its usage, the idea of redemption in the early fathers is at once very deep and very broad. It has not lost the implication of ransoming with which it began, but it embraces the whole process of salvation, which, beginning with our ransoming by the precious blood of Jesus, proceeds with our purification from sin, to end only with our deliverance from the final destruction and our ushering into the eternal glory. The breadth of the reference is interestingly illustrated in the opening words of the beautiful letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne in Gaul. It is the New Testament word ἀπολύτρωσις which is used here. "The servants of Christ residing at Vienne and Lyons in Gaul," the letter begins, "to the brethren throughout Asia and Phrygia who hold with us the same faith and hope of redemption, peace and grace and glory from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord." "Who have the same faith and hope in the redemption that we have"—οἱ αὐτὴν τῆς ἀπολυτρώσεως ἡμῖν πίστιν καὶ ἐλπίδα ἔχοντες.

Adolf Harnack warns us against supposing that the terms σωτηρία, ἀπολύτρωσις and the like refer always—or regularly—to deliverance from sin. "In the superscription of the Epistle from Lyons, for example," he says, "it is manifestly the future redemption that is to be understood by ἀπολύτρωσις." Harnack's fault lies in introducing an illicit alternative. It is not a matter of either the redemption from sin or the future deliverance from wrath. Both are embraced. The writers of the letter speak not only of the common hope of redemption, but before that of the common faith in redemption: "to all that have the same faith and hope in redemption that we have." It is a redemption that has taken place in the past and that extends in its effects into the farthest future, of which they speak.

It was just this comprehensiveness of redemption, meeting all our needs here and hereafter, that filled the hearts of the fathers with adoring gratitude. They did not think of eliminating the fundamental ransoming in which it consisted on the one side, because their outlook on its effects extended on the other to the final deliverance from the wrath of God. There is therefore a marked tendency among the fathers to speak of Christ's work as double, past and future. Christ came, says Origen, "in order that λυτρωθῶμεν καὶ ῥυσθῶμεν from the enemy"—not for the one or the other, but for both. "Christ endured death for our sakes," says Eusebius, "giving Himself as a λύτρον καὶ ἀντίψυχον for those who are to be saved by Him." He died as a ransom certainly: but the salvation purchased by this ransom-price works itself out steadily in its successive stages unto the very end. This is the key to the "broad" use of λυτροῦσθαι and its derivatives of the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE CROSS OF CHRIST

In a recent number of The Harvard Theological Review, Professor Douglas Clyde Macintosh of the Yale Divinity School outlines in a very interesting manner the religious system to which he gives his adherence. For "substance of doctrine" (to use a form of speech formerly quite familiar at New Haven) this religious system does not differ markedly from what is usually taught in the circles of the so-called "Liberal Theology." Professor Macintosh has, however, his own way of construing and phrasing the common "Liberal" teaching; and his own way of construing and phrasing it presents a number of features which invite comment. It is tempting to turn aside to enumerate some of these, and perhaps to offer some remarks upon them. As we must make a selection, however, it seems best to confine ourselves to what appears on the face of it to be the most remarkable thing in Professor Macintosh's representations. This is his disposition to retain for his religious system the historical name of Christianity, although it utterly repudiates the cross of Christ, and in fact feels itself (in case of need) quite able to get along without even the person of Christ. A "new Christianity," he is willing, to be sure, to allow that it is—a "new Christianity for which the world is waiting"; and as such he is perhaps something more than willing to separate it from what he varyingly speaks of as "the older Christianity," "actual Christianity," "historic Christianity," "actual, historical Christianity." He strenuously claims for it, nevertheless, the right to call itself by the name of "Christianity."

It is, no doubt, a kind of tribute to Christianity—this clinging to its name to designate a religious system which retains so little of what that name has heretofore been used to express. Clearly, the name "Christianity" has become an honorable one under its old connotation, and has acquired secondary implications which do it credit. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has lately called our attention in his serio-comic way to the extent to which such secondary implications have attached themselves to it in the speech of the common people. The apple-women and charwomen, the draymen and dustmen, it seems, are accustomed to employ it in a sense of which we can only say that it lies somewhere between "sane" and "civilized"; which "signifies that which is human, normal, social, and self-respecting." "Where can I get Christian food?" "Where can I find a Christian bed?" These are natural forms of popular speech with which we are all familiar. And, adds Mr. Chesterton, when the modern idealist puts away wine and war and dons peasants' clothes in imitation of Tolstoy, and parts his hair in the middle as he has seen it parted in paintings of Christ, the democracy will most likely pass its scornful judgment on him by simply demanding, "Why can't he dress like a Christian?" By some such immanent logic "Christianity" has apparently come to mean to Professor Macintosh, "rational," "ethical"; and we can observe him, when wishing to express his vigorous rejection of "a particular theory of redemption"—this "particular theory of redemption" being the Christian doctrine of the Atoning Sacrifice of Christ—merely declaring of it roundly that it is "not only not essential to Christianity, because contrary to reason, but moreover essentially unchristian because opposed to the principles of sound morality."

We certainly feel no impulse to deny that whatever is Christian is rational and moral. And we are profoundly interested in such indications as are supplied by the form of Professor Macintosh's declaration, that the general mind has been so thoroughly imbued with this fact that men instinctively reason on the subaudition that when we say, "Christian," we say "rational," "moral." But surely it cannot be necessary to point out that we may not determine the contents of a historical system after this fashion. Shall we deal so with Buddhism or Mohammedanism or Mormonism, with Romanism or Calvinism or the new "Liberalism"? If we find doctrines taught by these systems repugnant to reason and morality, we (so far) reject these systems. We do not forthwith declare that these (alleged) irrational and immoral doctrines can therefore have no place in these systems. We can deal differently with Christianity only on the assumption that Christianity is through and through and in all its parts in complete accordance with right reason and sound morality. The assumption is, no doubt, accordant with fact. But we are not entitled to make it prior to examination. And the first step in this examination cannot be taken until the contents of Christianity have been ascertained.

To argue that a doctrine is not Christian because it is not reasonable or moral, in a word, is to argue in a manifestly vicious circle. It is to confuse the historical question, What is Christianity? with the rational question, What is true? And it can result in nothing other than replacing historical Christianity by a "rational" system of our own, or, to phrase it in Mr. Chesterton's language, in "turning the Christians into a new sect, with new doctrines hitherto unknown to Christendom." Nietzsche, Mr. Chesterton reminds us, insisted that there never was but one Christian, and He was crucified; the improvement now offered, Mr. Chesterton hints, may consist in suggesting that perhaps even that single Christian was not a "Christian." Certainly, the "Christianity" which is constructed on the principle, not that it consists in the religion founded by Jesus Christ and practised ever since by His followers, taught of Him, but that it shall contain only what commends itself to our ideas of "reason" and accords with our ideas of "morality" runs a considerable risk of becoming a Christianity which stands out of all relation to Christ and to whatever has heretofore passed for Christianity. It offers us, in point of fact, merely a Rationalistic system—taking the term in its broader historical and not in its narrow philosophical significance.

Clearly, Christianity being a historical religion, its content can be determined only on historical grounds. The matter scarcely requires arguing; and we may be permitted, perhaps, at this point to content ourselves with simply referring to the very lucid statement of its elements made by H. H. Wendt in the opening pages of his "System of Christian Doctrine," as also in an earlier pamphlet devoted to the subject. "The Christian religion," remarks Wendt with admirable point—

"is a historically given religion. We cannot by an ideal construction or by deduction from a general notion of religion, determine what constitutes its genuine essence. We must rather seek to determine this essence by such an objective historical examination as we should give it were we dealing with the determination of the essence of some other historical religion."

Again:

"In a scientific presentation of Christian doctrine, as we have already seen, one side of its criticism and positive justification must be directed to the proof that the doctrine presented is also genuinely Christian doctrine. How is this proof to be made? The recognition of the fact that Christianity is an entity which is historically given, and is not to be ideally constructed, is of fundamental importance for answering this question.… The question of the genuine Christianity of the Christian doctrine to be presented is, as a matter of principle, not to be confused with the question of the truth and the value of this doctrine. From our incidental conviction of the truth and indispensableness of Christianity there easily arises the assumption that a religious conception, if it is true and valuable, must also be genuinely Christian. But from the scientific standpoint it is self-evident that it must first be proved what conceptions are genuinely Christian, and only then the truth of these Christian conceptions be tested. Even when a capacity for ever-advancing development is recognized for Christianity and for Christian doctrine, the question of the authentic Christianity of any conception presented as Christian remains at bottom a historical one. For the question of what constitutes the ground-type of Christianity and of Christian doctrine, by which it is to be determined whether anything can still pass as Christian or not, is just as certainly to be answered historically as, for example, the question of what belongs to the ground-type of the Buddhist religion and doctrine."

There is really no mystery about the matter. The process by which it is determined what is a truly Christian doctrine (something very different from what is a true Christian doctrine), or what the Christian religion really is, differs in principle in no respect from the process by which we determine what is an old Hellenic doctrine or what Ritschlism really teaches, what is the nature of Islam or what is the essence of the Pragmatic philosophy. In the very nature of the case such questions are purely historical and purely objective in their character, and the answers to them are not in the least advanced by any judgments we may pass upon the rationality or morality of the several doctrines or systems which come under our survey.

The justification which Professor Macintosh offers for permitting his subjective judgments of rationality and ethical value to intrude into the determination of the purely objective question of "What is Christianity?" he draws from a theory, which he very earnestly advocates, of the proper method of procedure in determining "the essence" of "any historical quantum." This theory might well have been derived, by the simple process of transferring it to historical quantities, from the metaphysical doctrine of "essence" propounded of late by our Pragmatic philosophers. Out of the general Pragmatic doctrine that "reality must be defined in terms of experience"—or, as even more sharply expressed, that "reality is experience"7—these thinkers have evolved the notion that the "essence" of anything is not what it is, but what it is, not merely to but for me; not that which makes the thing precisely the thing it is, but that in the thing, whatever it may be, which I find needful for the realization of a purpose of my own. "The essence of a thing," says William James, "is that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that, in comparison with it, I may neglect the rest." Applying this astonishing doctrine to historical entities, and especially to Christianity, which is the historical entity in which at the moment he is interested, Professor Macintosh feels able to argue that the essence of Christianity is not that in Christianity which makes it the particular thing which we call Christianity, but that in Christianity which he finds it desirable to preserve in constructing what he considers the ideal religion. Since the essence, as he tells us with the emphasis of italics, "is necessarily what is essential for a purpose," and the right purpose is, of course, the realization of the true ideal, the essence of the Christian religion is necessarily "that in the totality of the religious phenomena of Christianity which is a necessary factor in the realization of the true ideal for humanity, and of the true ideal for human religion in particular"; or, varying the language slightly without altering the sense, "whatever in actual phenomenal Christianity is necessary for the realization of the true ideal of human spiritual life in general and of human religion in particular."

The odd thing is that Professor Macintosh does not betray any consciousness of the outstanding fact that, in the process of his reasoning, he has transmuted the question which he started out to discuss, namely, What is essential to the retention of Christianity? into the fundamentally different one, in which he is himself perhaps more deeply interested, of What in Christianity is it essential that we retain?—namely in order that we may build up "the ideal religion." Unless we judge it to be still odder that he does not seem to have considered what would be the effect of the application of this method of determining the essence of a religious system to other religions besides Christianity—although he expressly presents it broadly as the proper method of determining "the essence of the Christian religion, or, for that matter, the essence of any historical quantum." If the discovery "in the totality of the religious phenomena of Christianity" of something which we judge "necessary for the realization of the true ideal of human spiritual life in general and of human religion in particular" justifies our calling that particular thing the "essence of Christianity" and ourselves, on the strength of our retention of it, "Christians"; would not the discovery of such an element in "the totality of the religious phenomena" of, say, Mormonism, equally justify us in declaring that element the "essence" of Mormonism and ourselves Mormons on the strength of our retention of it in our ideal religion? And surely we cannot doubt that Mormonism does possess in its composite system, however deeply buried beneath its own bizarreries, some truly religious and even some truly Christian elements—from which, indeed, we may believe, it derives whatever vitality it exhibits as a religious system; and certainly we cannot avoid retaining these elements as we build up our ideal religion. Or, if we seem to go too far afield in adducing Mormonism as an example, let us think for a moment of that active Christian sect known as the Seventh-Day Adventists. Undoubtedly, in the "totality of the religious phenomena" exhibited in the life of the members of this sect, there are many elements which must abide in any ideal system of religion. Do these elements therefore constitute the "essence" of Seventh-Day Adventism? And does our retention of them in our ideal construction justify our calling ourselves Seventh-Day Adventists?

It may not be an unpleasing thought to Professor Macintosh that, discerning something of value in each of the great religious movements which have stirred the waters of humanity, and preserving for the purposes of his ideal religion all that he sees in them of value, he may conceive himself to have therefore embraced "the essence" of each of them in turn, and to have thus acquired the right to claim for himself the name of every one of them. It may please him thus to think of himself as at once a Fetishist and a Shamanist, a Brahmanist and a Buddhist, a Confucian and a Mussulman, as well as a Jew and a Christian; perhaps also at once a Romanist and a Protestant, a Pelagian and an Augustinian, an Arminian and a Calvinist—for surely there is something of permanent value even in Calvinism, and if so, that is its "essence," and he who holds to the "essence" of Calvinism is surely a Calvinist. We have no wish to deny that Professor Macintosh's claim upon the one name may be as sound as upon another. But we confess to a doubt of the value of so diffused a claim upon names representing movements historically so distinct. And we confess to something more than a doubt of the validity of the method of determining "the essence" of historical entities whieh may lead to results so very embarrassing.

It must be admitted that the notion of "essence" has not always been dealt with lucidly by the metaphysicians. Cicero, indeed, who introduced the term into the Latin language, defined it very sensibly as "the whole of that by which a thing is, and is what it is"—a definition happily echoed in Locke's "the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is." And that essentially this remains the meaning of the term until today in general philosophical usage, we may be assured by Rudolf Eisler's definition of it. "Essence (οὐσία, essentia)," says he, "is, ontologically speaking, that which constitutes the reality (Selbst-Sein) of a thing, its most proper, abiding nature, in distinction from its time-and-space-conditioned, changeable existence." Even an activist like the late Borden P. Bowne10 without hesitation speaks in the same sense of "essence" as just "the nature of a thing": "We believe that everything is what it is because of its nature, and that things differ because they have different natures.… The nature of a thing expresses the thing's real essence; and we hold that we have no true knowledge of the thing until we grasp its nature." To him, of course, as Being is just action, and a thing as conceived just a "conceived formula of action," the essence of a thing consists in a law "which gives both its coexistent and its sequent manifestations." But this concerns only his ontology. Under its guidance he writes:

"Now this rule or law which determines the form and sequence of a thing's activities, represents to our thought the nature of a thing, or expresses its true essence. It is in this law that the definiteness of a thing is to be found; and it is under this general form of a law determining the form and sequence of activity that we must think of the nature of the thing." "In the metaphysical sense, the nature of a thing is that law of activity whereby it is not merely a member of a class, but also, and primarily, itself in distinction from all other things." "When then we speak of the nature of a thing under the form of a law, we regard this law as entirely specific and individual and not as universal. The nature has the form of a law but applies only to the single case."

In one word, to Bowne too, the "essence" means just the specific quality of a thing.

Nevertheless already a half-century ago James McCosh could write of "essence": "It is a very mystical word, and a whole aggregate of foolish speculation has clustered round it." He had perhaps been reading the section on "essence" in Hegel's "Phaenomenologie," without the assistance of William Wallace. "Still," he adds hopefully, "it may have a meaning." Whether he could have spoken so hopefully, had he had the discussions of our Twentieth-century Pragmatists before him, we can only conjecture. Certainly they have done what they could to confuse the matter, and it may be a fair question whether under their definitions the term "essence" retains any meaning at all. What is called its "essence" certainly ceases to have any significance for the object whose "essence" it is said to be; and, being transmuted into merely whatever the changing observer in his changing moods may find from time to time in an object utilizable for his varying purposes, has whatever significance it may retain rather for him than for it. We observe in the mean time that the Pragmatists have great difficulty in carrying their discussions of "essence" through consistently on these lines. The real meaning of the term is continually making itself felt, and advertising to the reader the artificiality of the construction which is being commended to him.

William James's discussion is particularly instructive in this respect. Every object, he explains, has an indefinite number of attributes. But we, being finite, cannot attend to all these attributes at once. We must, by the necessity of the case, make a selection. And we shall inevitably make our selection according to our interests. The attribute to which we attend under the influence of an interest at the moment governing our attention, is not more "essential" to the object than any other attribute to which another observer, led by another interest, or ourselves at another time, governed by another interest, may attend. The object "is really all that it is"—a statement which seems to assure us that the essence of an object is "really" all that by virtue of which it is what it is, and that is very much the old definition of "essence." But we must "attack it piecemeal, ignoring the solid fulness in which the elements of Nature exist, and stringing one after another of them together in a serial way, to suit our little interests as they change from hour to hour." Thus the "essence" of the object may seem to us to be a different attribute at each successive moment. And that leads James to declare with the emphasis of underscoring: "There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to any one thing. The same property which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes a very unessential feature upon another." This, however, can only mean that there is no single property among the many which belong to the object "really" which is "absolutely," that is to say, always and in every contingency, essential—to us, for our interests and purposes. Our interests change, and with the change of interest the quality of the object to which we attend also changes. This is not to say, of course, that there are no properties of an object which are absolutely, that is indispensably, essential—to it, that is to say to the preservation of its integrity as the very thing that it is. That this cannot be said is already made plain when it is declared that the object "is really all that it is." That little word "really" has confounded all of James's reasoning. And so he proceeds to tell us that "the elements of Nature exist" "in solid fulness"; and that it is only our partial, piecemeal dealing with them that hides this fact from us from time to time. Things, then, have "really" a "solid fulness" of properties by virtue of which they are objectively what they are; and this fact cannot be altered, though it may be obscured, by our habit—it may be a necessary habit—of attending to this "solid fulness" of elements one by one, and emphasizing each as it may meet a transient (or permanent) interest of our own. What things "really" are—that is what is essential to them; what in them meets an interest of ours (transient or permanent)—that is what we find essential for our (transient or permanent) purposes.

It is quite proper for James to say, therefore, that those properties which we are accustomed to select out of an object in accordance with "our usual purpose," "characterize us more than they characterize the thing." They are, no doubt, properties of the thing, and so far characterize it. But they need not be the particular properties of the thing which are most characteristic of it and form its specific quality. They are only the particular qualities of the thing by virtue of which it is most usually serviceable for us, and which therefore most constantly attract our attention. It is not implied, therefore, that there are no qualities which particularly characterize the thing, make it the thing it is, and so constitute its "essence." It is only recognized that we do not always, or commonly, select these properties for contemplation. When we are making selections of properties in accordance with our interests, we rather commonly, or always, select elements in the object which, because they are essential to our purposes, characterize us rather than the object. It is passing strange, therefore, that James should now go on to define the "essence of a thing," as "that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest." This, he has told us, is not "really" "the essence of the thing"; that lies elsewhere, and this is only the element in the thing which is essential to my purpose—which surely is a very different matter; unless, indeed, our particular purpose at the moment happens to be to determine what the "essence of the thing" is, in which case we may perhaps select out the particular properties which, constituting the essence of the thing, meet also our present purpose.

It is, of course, the Pragmatic point of view which, intruding here so many years before its formal announcement, forces this logical saltation upon James. From this point of view, he despises all questions of "inner essence" as mere hairsplitting abstractions, and insists that "we carve out everything" "to suit our human purposes."14 Accordingly he suddenly asserts here, without any justification in the preceding discussion, that "the only meaning of essence is teleological." A thing is just what it is good for, and, let us add, just what it is good for to me—and now. He has given us no reason, however, to believe that this is the case. He has only given us reason to believe that our interest in things is apt to be focussed on whatever we find serviceable to us, for the moment or permanently. That this is not all that the things are, however, he tells us himself, when he tells us not only that "the properties which are important vary from man to man and from hour to hour" in accordance with the purposes which dominate observation, but in express words that "the reality overflows these purposes at every pore." Surely it cannot be pretended that the properties which constitute the "concrete fact" "vary from man to man and from hour to hour," and are never more than what meets our purposes, which the reality that they constitute "overflows at every pore." And surely it is legitimate to inquire what then these properties are which enter into and constitute this "concrete fact," from the richness of which men may select what suits their purposes from time to time, but which in its richness "overflows" these purposes "at every pore." On the face of it this is the problem of "the essence" of the "concrete fact" in question.

Except that it seems to show a somewhat more formal respect for objectivity, F. C. S. Schiller's definition of "essence" does not differ essentially from James's. He speaks, of course, from his activistic standpoint, to which "the activity is the substance; a thing is only in so far as it is active." "So it is the activity," he explains, "which makes both the 'essence' and the 'accidents,' both of which are as it were 'precipitated' from the same process of active functioning." "The 'essence,' " therefore, he proceeds, "is merely such aspects of the whole behavior as are selected from among the rest by reason either of their relative permanence or of their importance for our purposes." He is recognizing nothing but activities. Some of these "activities" are "relatively" more permanent than others. Some of them are more important for us than others. We are to call either the one or the other of these sets of "activities" the "essence" of the object under consideration. Which? The former give us an objective criterion; the latter, a subjective one. Both are activities; but the latter only are conceived Pragmatically. If the latter be employed as our criterion, we are fully on William James's ground. If the former, we seem to be as fully off of it; we seem to be allowing that the "essence" of a thing is what makes it persistently (at least "relatively") the thing that it is, not what we discover in it serviceable to us—which is what we shall have if the latter criterion be employed.

How the two criteria—objective and subjective—can be conciliated, does not appear. Schiller does indeed tell us that they "are, of course, convergent." And he explains this by remarking that "a permanent aspect is naturally one which it is important for us to take into account, while an important aspect is naturally one which we try to render permanent." We shall have to take his word for both declaration and explanation. An aspect taken into account because it is permanent is surely one selected on grounds relative to the object; it tells us what the object itself is, or, if we prefer that mode of statement, how the object itself behaves. And an aspect taken into account because it is important for us (we assume that it is not significant that the "for us" has dropped out of the second clause) is one selected on grounds relative to us, to "our purposes"; it tells us what we find in the object (or its behavior) which is serviceable to us. How these two criteria can be said to "converge" passes our comprehension—unless indeed we are to think circularly as well as activistically, and conceive that motions in diametrically opposite directions will meet—on the other side of the circle. It must be admitted that Schiller's statement is not free from suggestions of such a circular movement. If an aspect of the behavior of an object under our contemplation is to be held "important for us" because it is permanent, one would think that its observed permanence would precede our interest and determine it; and that, in such a case, we could scarcely say that the "essence" of the object, identified with this permanent aspect of its behavior, is determined by our interest. And yet we are immediately told that we can render permanent an aspect of the behavior of such an object in which we chance to be interested; or at least that we may try to do so, presumably hopefully. One would like to know how he is to go about trying to make permanent an aspect of the behavior of an object under his observation; and if we can render an aspect of it permanent because it is important for us that it should be so, why cannot we create this aspect for ourselves in the first instance, that it may serve our purposes?

We may take it that Schiller's disjunctive is merely another illustration of the difficulty of carrying out the programme of the subjectivation of the "essence," and that it therefore bears witness only to the fact that the "essence" of an object cannot really be conceived merely as that in it which is essential for me—which is of importance for my purposes—but will continue to present itself as that in the object which is essential for it—which is necessary to its integrity, to its remaining the precise thing it is. That is to say, those aspects of the whole behavior of an object which are permanent constitute its "essence," and that quite independently of their "importance for us." It is important, of course, that we should take cognizance of them and adjust our behavior to them, for they constitute reality, that actual environment upon which we react. Hardness, for example, does not enter into the essence of a stone-wall because it serves an interest of ours and can be made serviceable to us. It enters into its essence because it is "there," quite independently of its serving an interest of ours; and it is important for us to recognize that it is "there" because the recognition of realities serves interests of ours, and realities have a very unpleasant fashion of revenging themselves on those who do not recognize them. It is the hardness of the stone-wall which determines our interests, not our interests which determine its hardness: and it would be very difficult to understand how we should go about rendering its hardness permanent, because we found it important for us. We may discover many good reasons, on the other hand, why it would be well for us to render permanent our recognition that a stone-wall is hard. The assumption of an "external world" which ordinary experience makes, as Schiller himself allows, "works splendidly."

It is upon some such flimsy philosophical basis that Professor Macintosh, transferring the matter to the sphere of historical entities, develops his method of determining the "essence" of historical movements. It must be allowed that, in applying to this new class of objects the principles laid down by the metaphysicians, he proceeds with a consistency which fairly puts the metaphysicians to the blush. He is seeking what he indifferently speaks of as a valid "definition," "the real nature," the "essence" of the Christian religion. In order to obtain this, he lays down with great firmness and with the emphasis of italics the general proposition that "the essence," that is, the essence of any "historical quantum," "is necessarily what is essential for a purpose." The "unrelieved subjectivity" of this proposition is obvious, and he seeks to mitigate it, but only by insisting that "the controlling purpose" which is to determine the essence of an object "must be the right purpose in the given situation." He explains this to mean that it must be "the purpose to realize what under the circumstances is the true ideal." Thus we obtain what he regards as two "normative principles" which it is necessary to observe in extracting "the essence" from any historical entity. They are: "in the first place, the essence must be in the total actuality"; "and in the second place, the controlling purpose must be the right purpose." "In short," we read (again in the emphasis of italics), "the essence is whatever is both present in the actual and demanded by the ideal."

Why the essence of any historical entity must be something found not only in it but also in our ideal, is not made clear to us, and we profess ourselves unable to divine. We appear only to be given a formula by means of which we may get rid of the historical entity and substitute for it our own ideal; we are to recognize as the essence of the historical entity nothing that we do not find in our ideal. Shall Protestant investigators then declare that the essence of Romanism must be identified with what is common to Romanism and their ideals? Or Rationalistic investigators declare that the essence of Protestantism is what is common to Protestantism and their ideals? In that case Romanism is merely defined as really Protestantism, and Protestantism as really Rationalism. The matter is not relieved by the expedient taken to guard against error. "To guarantee that what is taken as essential is the real essence," we read, "what is taken as the ideal must be the true ideal." What is to guarantee that what is taken as the ideal is the true ideal, we are not told here, but afterwards it is intimated that "what this true ideal is, must be determined by a critical philosophy of values," which leaves us in great concern to know whose "critical philosophy of values" is to have this decisive function committed to it.

A third normative principle is now, however, invoked. What is under these rules extracted as the essence of any historical entity must, we are told, "be able to maintain itself after it has been selected and separated from all that is unessential"—that is, we infer, from all that to the investigator seeking the "true ideal" seems harmful to that ideal. Accordingly, "in addition to being the highest common factor of the actual and the ideal, the essence must be vital enough to persist in separation from all that must be eliminated." "The essence of the actual, then"—we reach now the final summing up—"is that element in the actual whose continued existence is demanded by the true ideal, and which can retain its actuality and vitality after the elimination of all objectionable elements from the actual at the demand of that same ideal."

The process of extracting the essence of any historical entity which is commended to us by Professor Macintosh is now before us. It is in brief the following. First, by "a critical philosophy of values," determine independently for yourself what is the true ideal. Next, go to the historical entity in question with this "true ideal" in your hand, and select from this historical entity whatever seems to you fitted to promote the "true ideal." This is "the essence"of that historical entity—provided only that when you discard all in it which is not in your judgment fitted to promote your "true ideal," enough is left to call the essence of anything. If not enough is left, then say that that entity has no "good essence" and discard it in toto. Clearly, in this process, the historical entity is nothing; our ideal is everything. We have simply sunk the historical entity in our ideal; and it almost has the look of a concession that it is still allowed that what is called its essence shall actually be found in the historical entity.

Applying this method of extracting the essence of historical entities to the Christian religion, Professor Macintosh has naturally no difficulty in moulding Christianity to his own taste. He tells us that the result reached is that "the Christian religion" must be in essence whatever in actual phenomenal Christianity is necessary for the realization of the true ideal of human spiritual life in general and of human religion in particular." Obviously, then, the contents of "the Christian religion" are not determined by the contents of "actual phenomenal Christianity"—and by this must be understood not merely the Christianity which happens to be actual at any one moment, but any and all Christianity which has ever been actual in the course of its entire history—but by the contents of "the true ideal of human spiritual life in general and of human religion in particular." The "true ideal" of religion—that is, of course, the investigator's ideal of what religion ought to be, determined, no doubt, by his "critical philosophy of values"—is thus simply substituted for Christianity, and given its name. The only connection which this ideal can claim with "actual phenomenal Christianity"—that is, any Christianity which has ever actually existed—will be dependent on the presence in "actual phenomenal Christianity" of elements which are in harmony with it and may, therefore, be preserved. Whatever in "actual phenomenal Christianity" agrees with "the true ideal" of religion is preserved; the rest is discarded; and the total ideal religion,—inclusive, of course, of the elements thus "taken over" from "actual phenomenal religion" because already present in the ideal religion, and also, of course, of all else that is contained in the ideal religion which was not present in "actual phenomenal Christianity,"-recieves the name of "the Christian religion." The process is exceedingly simple. "Our religion" is certainly Christianity, because real Christianity is, of course, just "our religion." Everything else in "actual phenomenal Christianity" is to be discarded because it is not included in "our religion."

The particular religion to which, under the name of "the ideal religion," Professor Macintosh reduces Christianity by this process, proves, as has been already intimated, to be indistinguishable from that which is generally professed in the circles of so-called "Liberal Christianity." How he arrives at the conviction that this is "the ideal religion" and therefore essential Christianity, he does not fully explain to us. It emerges as such in his pages as the culmination of an exposition of the fundamentally moral character of Christianity as he conceives it—a moral character attributed to his "Christianity" because it is an element "common to actual Christianity and to ideal religion." If we understand Professor Macintosh at this point, he defines Christianity on this ground as the "religion of moral redemption," and then distinguishes it from other religions of moral redemption by the particular quality of the morality of which the redemption wrought by it consists. Christianity, he says, "is the religion whose 'miracle' or 'revelation' consists in the experience of moral 'salvation' or 'redemption.' " To the objection that "a moral element is to be found in other historical religions also," he seems to reply that this need not invalidate the claim of Christianity to be the moral religion by way of eminence—if, that is, the quality of the morality brought by it to its votaries may be shown to be superior to that offered by other moral religions. This he affirms to be the fact, and he fixes on the term "Christlike" to express the specific quality of specifically Christian morality. Accumulating emphasis upon this quality he declares, then, that "Christianity is the religion of deliverance from unchristlikeness to a Christlike morality, through a Christlike attitude towards a Christlike superhuman reality." Repeating this with further elaboration, he declares again: "There is good ground to suppose, then, we take it, that redemption from unchristlikeness to a Christlike morality and ultimately to a Christlike fellowship with God, accomplished in the life of men by the activity of the Christlike God in response to a Christlike dependence and filial attitude on the part of the individual, is the essence of the Christian religion."

It is important to observe that these statements contain much more than was prepared for by the preceding argument. We have travelled very rapidly and very far and have arrived very unexpectedly at a very definite dogmatic result. Not only is the character of the morality involved in the Christian "redemption" defined as "Christlike" without sufficient justification or even explanation, so that we get a particular standard of morality, and one, be it observed, quite external to the subjects of religion, and wholly dependent on the truth of history for its validity and its very meaning. But we also have a particular manner—and that a very astonishing manner-in which the moral revolution asserted to take place in the subjects of the Christian religion, is wrought, made, without any, we do not say merely justification, but preparation in the preceding discussion, a part of the definition of that religion. It is wrought, we are now suddenly told, "through a Christlike attitude towards a Christlike superhuman reality"; "by the activity of the Christlike God in response to a Christlike dependence and filial attitude on the part of the individual." The essence of the Christian religion is thus made to consist not merely in the fact that it brings a moral redemption, and not merely in the specific character of the morality which it brings, but still further in the particular manner in which this moral redemption is produced. We do not stop now to press the question of what is involved with respect to the relation of Christianity to the historic Christ in the definition of this morality—and everything else significantly Christian—as "Christlike." We merely ask the warrant for the particular manner in which the moral revolution which is declared to be the essence of Christianity is asserted to be accomplished. Professor Macintosh gives us none. At a later point, it is true, we are told that this is involved in "the essence of the Christian gospel," and that this is derived from "the religious example of Jesus." "The Christian evangel," we read, "is the gospel of the power of God manifesting itself in a Christlike morality on condition of the cultivation of a life of Christlike religious devotion. It is the gospel of the universal possibility of redemption as a human religious experience, through following the religious example of Jesus, taking the attitude of sonship towards the 'God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.' " We have difficulty, however, in accepting mere repetition as justification. And we observe that Professor Macintosh can only profess in any case to be "practically certain" that the attitude here declared to be of the essence of Christianity on the ground that it was the attitude of Jesus, was really "the religious attitude of Jesus"; and indeed contends strenuously that it is not absolutely necessary for the validation of his "Christianity," thus made to hang entirely on the example of Jesus, that there ever should have been any Jesus to set this example. Nor have we discovered any reason given by him justifying the belief that if there was a Jesus and this was His attitude to God, it is capable of being imitated by us; or indeed whether, if it were imitable by us, it would have the effects asserted for it. The upshot of it all is merely that it is dogmatically declared to us, with no reasons rendered, that the ordinary "Liberal" construction of Christianity is the only true Christianity, and its fundamental postulates constitute "the essence of Christianity." On the face of it this declaration rests on nothing more solid than that the ordinary "Liberal" construction of Christianity seems to Professor Macintosh the "ideal religion," and it pleases him to call what he thinks the "ideal religion," "Christianity."

Even Adolf Harnack did better than that. It is quite true, as Alfred Loisy points out, that Harnack does not speak really as a historian but as a dogmatician, in those brilliant lectures in which he advocates his personal religious opinions19 under the name of "the essence of Christianity," and which, Ernst Troeltsch tells us, have become "to a certain degree the Symbolical Book of all those who follow the historical tendency in theology." But he had at least the grace to profess to derive his idea of what Christianity is from historical Christianity, and his argument at least formally runs, that this and nothing else is the essence of the Christianity which was launched into the world by Jesus and has been lived by His followers. He tells us accordingly that it is "a purely historical question" which he undertakes, and that therefore it is to be dealt with absolutely objectively; we are simply to ask what Christianity is without regard to what "position the individual who examines it may take up in regard to it, or whether in his own life he values it or not." His historical point of view is so marked, indeed, that he even declares that though we must start from "Jesus Christ and His Gospel," it is impossible to get "a complete answer to the question, What is Christianity?" "so long as we are restricted to Jesus Christ's teaching alone"; we must look upon Him merely as the root out of which the tree of Christianity has grown. "We cannot form any right estimate of the Christian religion unless we take our stand upon a comprehensive induction which shall cover all the facts of its history." "What is common to all the forms which it has taken, corrected by reference to the Gospel, and, conversely, the chief features of the Gospel, corrected by reference to history, will, we may be allowed to hope, bring us to the kernel of the matter."

We could not easily have fairer historical professions. The pity is that Harnack's actual procedure corresponds so ill with them. He certainly does not approach his task in a purely historical spirit. He brings with him to the investigation of the teaching of Jesus, for example, a whole body of presuppositions, under the influence of which he forces his material into preconceived moulds. And he certainly does not derive his conception of Christianity from an induction from its entire phenomenal manifestation; he simply makes his reconstructed version of Jesus' Christianity the sole Christianity which he will recognize. Troeltsch accordingly is compelled to pronounce Harnack's critics right when they declare that "his Wesen is no purely empirical-inductive work, but includes in it strong religio-philosophical preconceptions by which it is deeply influenced"; nor can he deny that Harnack treats the gospel of Jesus alone as the essence of Christianity and "works up the details of Jesus' preaching into an idea of Christianity, which he then merely illustrates from the later history of the Church, partly by pointing to departures from it, partly by emphasizing what is consonant with it in further developments." What Harnack invites us to do is thus in point of fact merely to recognize as "the essence of Christianity" the "religion of Jesus" as he has reconstructed it under the influence of his own naturalistic postulates. Before we can follow him we must be assured that what he presents as such was really "the religion of Jesus," and that "the religion of Jesus," in his sense of that phrase, is really Christianity. We do not need to adopt Loisy's standpoint to perceive the justice of his criticisms at these points. And surely a remark like this cuts to the bottom:

"If what is desired is to determine historically the essence of the gospel, the canons of a sound criticism do not permit us to resolve in advance to consider as unessential what we are now inclined to think uncertain or unacceptable. What is essential to the gospel of Jesus is what holds the first and the most considerable place in His authentic teaching, the ideas for which He strove and for which He died, not that merely which we believe to be still vital today.… In order to determine the essence of Islam we shall not take, in the teaching of the Prophet and in the Mussulman tradition, what we may consider true and fertile, but what was actually of most importance to Mahomet and his followers, in point of belief, ethics, and worship. Otherwise with a little good will we might discover that the essence of the Koran is the same as that of the Gospels—faith in the clement and merciful God."

It is interesting and not uninstructive to observe in passing the diametrical opposition of the methods by which Harnack and Loisy, each, seek to extract the essence of Christianity. If Harnack, having reconstructed from the evangelical narratives a Jesus to fit his naturalistic presuppositions, sees in this reconstructed Jesus at once the entirety of Christianity and will allow nothing to enter into its essence but what he finds in Him, Loisy perceives in the Jesus to which he looks back through the stretches of history only the germ out of which his Christianity has expanded. It is Harnack, it is true, who writes:

"Just as we cannot obtain a complete knowledge of a tree without regarding not only its root and its stem but also its bark, its branches, and the way in which it blooms, so we cannot form any right estimate of the Christian religion unless we take our stand upon a eomprehensive induction that shall cover all the facts of its history."

But it is not Harnack's but Loisy's method which this figure suggests. "Why," demands Loisy—

"Why ought the essence of the tree be thought to be contained in a single particle of the germ from which it has proceeded, and why will it not be just as truly and more perfectly realized in the tree as in the seed? Is the process of assimilation by which it makes its growth to be regarded as a change in the essence, virtually contained in the germ; or is it not rather the indispensable condition of its existence, of its preservation, of its advance in a life always the same and incessantly renewed?"

Harnack, he contends,

"does not conceive of Christianity as a seed which has grown—first a potential plant, then an actual plant, identical with itself from the beginning of its evolution to the present moment, and from its root to the tip of its trunk; but as a ripe, or rather, a decayed, nut which must be shelled if its incorruptible kernel is to be reached. And Harnack tears off the shell with so much perseverance that the question arises whether anything will remain at the end."

Perhaps with a little idealization, we may represent to ourselves the fundamental ideas embodied in the divergent views as involving essentially some such conceptions as the following. Harnack wishes to see the essence of Christianity in what is constant in the entire history of the Church, and just on that account seeks it in the primitive beginnings of Christianity—in those primitive beginnings, no doubt, as reconstructed by him on the basis of his postulates. He therefore makes primitive Christianity, the Christianity of Jesus Himself (as he reconstructs it), the standard of all Christianity; that alone is Christianity which is to be found in the preaching of Jesus. Loisy wishes to view Christianity as a constant development, as finding its reality not in its germ but in its full growth. The gospel of Jesus is merely to him the root of the Church; the Church is the living development of the gospel; the essence of Christianity is its historical evolution, which in every part is the necessary outcome of the complex of circumstances in which it lives.

When he lays aside figures and speaks plainly, Loisy, it is true, finds difficulty in maintaining himself at these high levels. At one point, indeed, he seems to work rather with the ordinary logical conception of "essence" in his mind, according to which "it denotes the common quality or qualities which are found in all the members of the class." He makes in effect a genus of Christianity by cutting it up into periods; and, extracting the characteristic quality of each period in turn, he compares these together and concludes that what is common to all is the essence of Christianity and what is peculiar to each is the differentiation of each period.30 No doubt there may be obtained thus a conception of what has persisted through all ages of Christian history; and this may, in a sense, be called "common Christianity." But what will be the result, if perchance Christianity has become apostate in any one age and has recovered itself ("come to itself" like the Prodigal Son) only after a period of general corruption? Obviously, at the best, such a method must confound "the essence of Christianity" with the minimum of Christianity, and presents no great advantage in this respect over that thoroughly misleading method of determining what is essential to Christianity, dear to the hearts of all "indifferentists," which seeks it in what is common to all those who in any age "profess and call themselves Christians"—extension through space taking here the place of Loisy's extension through time. What is common to all who call themselves Christians, whether as extended through time or space, is, of course, just the minimum of Christianity; otherwise those forms of professed Christianity or those periods of Christian history in which only the minimum of Christianity is or has been confessed would be excluded. The "essence of Christianity" and the minimum of Christianity are not, however, synonymous expressions. If choice were confined to these two, it would be better to follow Loisy in his ecclesiastical evolutionism and discover the essence of Christianity in the maximum of Christianity, in Christianity in its fullest growth and vigor.

The evolutionism of Loisy is reproduced in Ernst Troeltsch, though of course with all the involved temperamental and environmental differences. Troeltsch bids us32 keep in mind that the conception involved in the phrase "the essence of Christianity" is historically inseparably wrapped up with the modern critical evolutionary point of view. The Romanist, he says, does not speak of "the essence of Christianity," but of the faith of the Church, and distinguishes only between the complete knowledge of that faith which is expected of the clergy and the less explicit knowledge of it which may be tolerated in the laity. Nor would old orthodox Protestantism have used the phrase. It would have said, "the revelation of the Bible," and have distinguished only between fundamental and non-fundamental articles. Even for the Enlightenment, the phrase would have had no significance. It spoke with Locke of "the reasonableness of Christianity" and rationalized the Bible, making the post-Apostolic Church responsible for all untenable dogmas. It is with Chateaubriand and his Génie du Christianisme that the notion first emerges into sight; that is to say, it is a product of Romanticism. And it is to the German Idealists and especially to the Hegelians that we owe its development. By it is not meant Christianity as a whole—this is external appearance—but that which unfolds itself in the phenomena of Christianity, "the idea and power" which has dominated Christianity through all its history and determined its varied phenomenal forms. It is "the internal spiritual unity" which binds all these phenomenal forms together and which can be reached only by a process of historical abstraction. Serving himself heir to the Hegelians (with the necessary corrections), Troeltsch accordingly looks upon Christianity as, like other great coherent complexes of historical occurrences, the development of an idea which effloresces progressively, incorporating into itself and adapting to its uses all alien material which lies in its path. The isolation of this idea to thought is, in his view, the discovery of the essence of Christianity. The essence of Christianity is, therefore, an abstract notion by means of which the whole body of the phenomena which constitute Christian history is reduced to unity and explained.

It must not be imagined, however, that this wonderful informing idea which is to be distilled from phenomenal Christianity can, in the opinion of Troeltsch, "be simply abstracted from the whole course and the totality of the manifestations of Christianity in its historical development." A distinction, it is asserted, must be drawn between the phenomena which express the essence and those in which it is suppressed. The historical forms must be subjected to a criticism according "to the ideal which informs the chief tendency." This ideal may most conveniently be discovered, Troeltsch thinks, in the classical expression of Christianity in its origins.36 But even there distinctions must be drawn. The primitive age must not be assumed to be a perfectly unitary complex. We must ask, What in the primitive age contains what is really classic? No doubt we shall find this in the figure and preaching of Jesus. But we must not forget that the figure and preaching of Jesus must be reconstructed. And for this reconstruction we need something more than the Synoptic Gospels. We need Paul and John, and more. "We do not find our foundation in the historical Christ, the Christ after the flesh, but in the spirit of Christ, which was disengaged by the destruction of the earthly manifestation in death." The "words of Christ" are not Christianity; rather faith in Christ and the spirit which proceeds from this faith and operates in the community—this is Christianity. This spirit, however, did not exhaust its efficiency in the Pauline and Johannine Gospels; the totality of the Christian development is involved. In it elements continually present themselves, which were, no doubt, present in the primitive age, and in the light of the later development may be recognized as having been present in it, but which certainly only manifest themselves later and in particular circumstances. "We must recognize them as contained in the essence of Christianity and as important for the determination of that essence; we must look upon them as effects of the spirit of Christ: but we do not find them expressed in the primitive form in itself alone, and indeed cannot even directly attribute them to it."38 So clear is it that we cannot derive the essence of Christianity exclusively from its primitive form; this essence "cannot be an unchangeable idea which is given once for all in the teaching of Jesus." Rather—

"the essence must be a somewhat which contains in itself energy and mobility, productive power of continuous reproduction. It can certainly not be denoted by a word or a doctrine, but only by an idea which includes in itself from the first mobility and fulness of life; it must be a self-developing spiritual principle, a 'germinative principle' or a seed-thought, as Caird has it, a historical idea in Ranke's sense, that is, not a metaphysical or dogmatic conception, but a spiritual force which contains in itself a life-aim and a life-value, and which unfolds in its consistency and power of adaptation."

The continuity—the unity binding the multiplicity of forms together—is, Troeltsch admits, no doubt, difficult to trace. It cannot lie simply in the preaching of Jesus, as persisting in all forms of Christianity as their basal element; nor yet in an abstract, generic idea common to all varieties of Christianity. It does not consist in any formulated conception, but in a spiritual power embracing in itself many ideas. Nor are we done with it when we are done with historical Christianity. In determining the essence of Christianity we must take in present Christianity as well as past Christianity; yes, and future Christianity too—if we believe in any future for Christianity. Thus from an abstraction, the essence of Christianity becomes an ideal. We cannot avoid transforming it thus if we stand in any vital relation to Christianity. We study its history that we may learn from it. What we thus learn must be applied to the present, and must be projected also into the future. Thus the "divinatorial imagination" of abstraction necessarily passes into that "prognosticational imagination" which presages the further unfolding of the basal idea.

"Determination of essence is modification of essence. It is the extraction of the essential idea of Christianity from history in such a fashion that it shall illuminate the future; and at the same time a vital survey of the present and future world together in this light. The repeated determination of the essence is the repeated historical reorganization of Christianity. This can be avoided by none who seeks the essence of Christianity in a purely historical manner, and at the same time believes in the progressive power of the essence. Only those can take a different course who look upon Christianity as an outworn and transcended historical organism or who understands Christianity from an exclusively supernatural revelation in the Bible."

This apparently means that Troeltsch is aware that in the process of extracting "the essence" of Christianity from its phenomenal manifestation, he is moulding it to his own ideals, and that he considers this natural to one in his position—one, that is, who looks upon Christianity as a growth and yet is concerned for its continuance in the world. We find him a little later, accordingly, speaking not merely of "the essential elements of Christianity" but rather of "the abiding and essential elements of Christianity." The notions of "abidingness" and "essentialness" have, however, in themselves nothing in common; and we only confuse ourselves, when we are seeking to discover the essence of Christianity, if we insist that what we find "essential" must be what we consider will be "abiding." We are here very near to employing the term "essential" again in the sense of "essential to us."

Troeltsch does not glose the essentially subjective character of the method of determining the essence of Christianity which he proposes, nor does he fail to perceive the danger which accompanies it of passing, without observing it, beyond the limits of Christianity into a new religion only loosely connected with Christianity. These things, he says, simply must be recognized and faced. Then he continues.43

"These remarks show our attitude towards one of the strongest assaults made of late years upon the Christianity of the essence of Christianity, as Harnack and his friends understand it. Eduard von Hartmann, who already somewhat earlier called the so-called Liberal theology the self-decomposition of Protestantism, will not permit the left-wing Ritschlians—therefore, above all, Harnack and those of like mind with him—to pass any longer as Christians. Their essence of Christianity is, he intimates, the abandonment of Christianity; and their Christianity is a self-deception due to their training and sentiment. What they maintain to be Christianity is their modern religious conviction, which has only a loose connection with the real spirit of Christianity, and which clings all the more anxiously to a few accidental historical supports. The proof which Hartmann offers of this view is as instructive for the whole question of the essence of Christianity as for the question of the maintenance of its continuity. For him, in a purely historical sense, the essence of Christianity lies in the conception of God-manhood; and he explains this conception in a Pantheistic sense of the unity of the Divine and human spirits; and declares it the great idea of Christianity, which only needs to be separated from the myth of the incarnation of God in Jesus, and to be freed from all theistic-personal traits in the idea of God, to be able to enrich the religion of the future. That means, however, very clearly that Hartmann too will recognize as essence only what has in his eyes a relatively abiding importance; with him too the essential is what is valuable for the future, as he understands it. But because this abiding element can obtain for him its full further significance only by elimination of essential conceptions of historical Christianity, the revelation-significance of Jesus and the personality of God, therefore Christianity, despite it, is for him in its entirety a transcended epoch, and those are already fallen out of the continuity of Christianity who do not make the conception of God-manhood central, but by giving it an externally historical connection with some words of Jesus persuade themselves that an ethical Deism, without significance either for itself or for the future, is the essence of Christianity."

The question raised here, says Troeltsch, cannot be argued; the difference lies in the point of view. But the reader will scarcely be able to agree that a mere strong counter-assertion on the part of Troeltsch and his friends that they know themselves to possess a better objective-historical conception of Christianity than Hartmann, and to preserve with it a personal religious continuity precisely in what is essential to it, is a sufficient refutation of Hartmann's strictures. Their "Christianity" is confessedly not the Christianity of the past; as Troeltsch elsewhere acknowledges, it is not the vital Christianity of the present; and it can become the "Christianity" of the future (as he also allows) only if Christianity may suffer a sea-change into something possibly richer, but assuredly exceedingly strange—and yet remain Christianity. Whether it can perform this feat is the real question of "the essence of Christianity" as expounded by Troeltsch.

It is, of course, precisely Troeltsch's evolutionism which commends his presentation of "the essence" of Christianity to our evolution-obsessed generation. And a purer evolutionist than he, Edward Caird, reminds us in more direct language that "evolution in human history includes revolution." If we are to distort (as Caird does) Tertullian's anima naturaliter Christiana into a prophetic pronouncement that what we call Christianity is the natural production of the human soul, as man struggles slowly towards the "consciousness of himself and of his relation to God," there is no reason why we should not understand that this so-called Christianity, as it reacts on its changing environment, takes on many forms and passes through many phases, connected only as the successive, though varying, expressions of the "growing idea of humanity." And there is no reason why these phases, as they succeed one another, should not advance by a zig-zag motion, which may often seem (and indeed be) retrogression, or should not sometimes even bring contiguous phases into a relation of direct opposition to one another; Caird tells us that the condition of development "is rebellion against the immediate past." Only, then, let it be distinctly understood, Christianity has lost all content. It is no longer a religion, but religion, finding its expression through varied forms: and the forms through which it finds its expression, whether of thought or of sentiment or of practice, are indifferent to it, so only the underlying religious impulse is there. It is only natural, therefore, that Jean Réville, for example, in endeavoring to tell us what "Liberal Protestantism" is—he might just as well have said "Liberal Christianity," he tells us himself—takes much this line. It is not to be denied, of course, that there is a sense in which it may very properly be said that the essence of all religious movements is just religion. It is this primal instinct of human nature which gives its vitality to every form of religion from Fetishism up to—well, just short, let us say, of the religions of revelation, if it be allowed that there is such a thing as revelation. Here we have the thing which all religions have in common, and by virtue of which they live in the world. We may abstract everything else from each of them in turn, and, leaving to each only the pure religious impulse and its products, may plausibly maintain that in this we have "the essence" of every religion which has ever existed or which can ever exist. Only, in that case, it is clear, we must allow that there never has been and never will be at bottom more than one religion. The "essence" of Christianity, so conceived, and the "essence" of Fetishism are the same; and we may, on the ground of holding to its "essence" call ourselves with equal right by either name. In holding the "essence" of one, we hold the "essence" of all. It was under the influence of some such conception that the late Auguste Sabatier lost himself in rapture over what he seemed to himself to see, in the way of real unity in the midst of apparent diversity, in any average congregation of "Christian" worshippers. There is the aged woman who has no other conception of God than the white-bearded old man with eyes like coals of fire she has seen in the pictures in the big Bible on the parlor-table. And there is the young collegian imbued with a pure Deism by his philosophical course at the university. And there is the disciple of Kant who holds that all positive ideas of God are contradictory and who can allow of God only that He is the Unknowable. And there is the proud Hegelian who knows all about God, and knows Him to be the All. Moved by a common piety all these bow down together and adore. I do not know, says Sabatier, if there is a spectacle on earth which is more like heaven!

From such a standpoint, the cry Back to Christ! can have, as Caird does not fail to remind us, little meaning. The adjective "Christian" is employed to describe the movement which goes by this name only because that particular movement of religious development is supposed, in point of fact, to have taken its temporal beginning in Christ, or to have reached in the rise of Christianity a decisive—or at least an important—stage of its development, or merely perhaps to have received from Christ or from the rise of Christianity some impulse, more or less notable, the memory of which is preserved in the name by which it thus is accidentally designated. It is in any case an illusion to suppose that we can find in Christ "the true form" of the movement which is thus more or less loosely connected with His name; that would be, Caird suggests, "seeking the living among the dead." If we speak of Him as the "seed" out of which the "plant" of Christianity has grown, we are merely using tropical language which very easily may be deceptive. We may imagine that "there is an implicit fulness in the seed which is not completely repeated in any subsequent stage in the life of the plant"; but then we must allow that this fulness in the seed is very "implicit" indeed; and we should not do amiss to bear in mind that "we can know what is in the germ only by seeing how it manifests itself in the plant." We must, in plain words, interpret Christ from Christianity, not Christianity from Christ. It strikes the reader with a sense of unreality, therefore, when writers like Troeltsch, committed to an evolutionary view of Christianity, are found laying great stress on primitive Christianity and particularly on the personality and teaching of Jesus. No sooner does Troeltsch establish the "classical" place of primitive Christianity and especially of Jesus for the interpretation of Christianity, to be sure, than he forthwith sets himself to unravelling the coil in which he has thus involved himself. We do not say he succeeds in unravelling it. But that only shows that his evolutionary conception of Christianity is not only inconsistent with the significance he has established for Jesus as not merely the germ out of which it has grown but its Founder; but, being inconsistent with it, is untenable. We can look upon the stress laid upon primitive Christianity, and on the person and teaching of Jesus, by writers of this class, in a word, only as concessions to undeniable fact; fatal concessions to a fact which, when fairly allowed for, refutes their entire point of view. Christianity, clearly, is not a natural evolution of the religious spirit of man, with a more or less accidental connection with the man Jesus; it is a particular religion instituted by Christ and given once for all its specific content by His authority.

The manner in which Troeltsch establishes the "classical" significance of "the person and preaching of Jesus" for the determination of the "essence" of Christianity, is meanwhile worth observing somewhat more closely on its own account. His acknowledgment of the universal recognition of "primitive Christianity and behind primitive Christianity the person and preaching of Jesus" as bearing this "classical" significance is itself a concession of the highest importance. He is, no doubt, dissatisfied with the manner in which the classical significance of primitive Christianity and the person and preaching of Jesus is ordinarily established, because of the involution in it of, as he explains, "the presuppositions of the popular antique supernaturalism" and because of the position of absolute authority in which it leaves primitive Christianity and Jesus. He desiderates, therefore, a new grounding for the acknowledged fact, a grounding which will invoke and issue in nothing which is unacceptable to "the purely human-historical conception." He explains:

"What is in question is a purely historically grounded significance of primitive Christianity for the determination of the essence. Such an one is, of course, actually at hand in the fullest sense, and is easy to point to. The authentic meaning of a historical phenomenon is contained most strongly and purely in its origins; and if such a statement can apply only in a qualified sense to complicated culture-forms like, say, the Renaissance, it certainly applies without qualification to the prophetic-ethical religions, which receive their entire life from the personalities of their founders, require their adherents constantly to renew their vitality from the primitive sources, and therefore connect their names and essence in the closest way with their personalities; it especially applies in an unqualified sense to Christianity, which prescribes to its adherents more rigidly than any other religion the continual nourishment of their religious life from contact with the Founder, and in its Christ-mysticism has produced a unique phenomenon which corresponds with especial clearness with this circumstance. Accordingly, it is self-evident that the determination of the essence should adhere before all to the primitive period, and look upon it as the classical age."

We may look askance at some of the things that are said in this extract, but one thing emerges with great emphasis. Christianity certainly did not just "grow up"; it was founded. And subsequently to its founding, it has not "run wild," gone off in this or that direction according as some contentless "informing spirit" or "germinal life" within it may have chanced to lead it; it has been held strictly, more strictly than any other religious movement, to its fundamental type, by constant references back to its foundations. For whatever reason, on whatever ground, it has kept a constant check upon itself lest it should depart from type, and has shown an amazing power, after whatever aberrations, continually to return to type. Its eye has been fixed not merely in forward gaze but in backward as well. It has manifested a unique capacity of growth, justifying its Founder's comparison of it to the mustard-seed and to the leaven; but, after all is said as to the transformations it has suffered, its slacknesses, its degenerations, its failures, its growth has lain not in the gradual development of a content for itself, but in the steadily increasing assimilation of its environment to itself. In this respect too it has been like the mustard-seed and the leaven to which its Founder compared it; it has grown at the expense of its environment, not being moulded by it, but moulding it. It has accordingly remained amid its changing surroundings, and through all the forms which it has occasionally taken, essentially the same; and its "nature" is to be ascertained, therefore—like the "nature" of other stable entities—simply by looking at it. "Divinational imagination," and "prognosticational imagination" are all very well in their place, and we have no wish to deny that there is a place for them even in estimating the meaning and movements of Christianity. But observation is the proper instrument for the ascertainment of the nature of stable entities, and in spite of the "varieties of Christianity" in time and in space, it will broadly suffice for the ascertainment of what Christianity is.

It is clear then, and it may be taken as generally acknowledged, that Christianity is not merely a form which religion has spontaneously taken in the course of developing culture, but a specific religion which has been "founded," and the specific content of which has been once for all imposed upon it at its foundation. It is in the strictest sense of the terms, a "positive religion," a "historical religion"; and its content is to be ascertained not by reference to what we may think "the ideal religion," but by reference to the character given it by its Founder. This is the real meaning of a procedure like Harnack's, when, after proposing to determine the nature of Christianity from its total historical manifestation, he really seeks and finds it solely in what he has brought himself to look upon as "the religion of Jesus." His procedure here is not in itself wrong. His fault lies primarily in the critical method by which he ascertains the "religion of Jesus"; or, to speak more exactly, by which he imposes his own ideal of religion upon Jesus as "the religion of Jesus." Thus he is led to present as "the religion of Jesus" a religion which is as different as possible from the actual religion of Jesus, and the result of that is that he completely separates "the religion of Jesus" from the religion which He founded, and is compelled, therefore, to treat Christianity in its entire historical manifestation as a radical departure from "the religion of Jesus"; or, to put it brusquely, as a religion quite distinct from that which had been introduced into the world by Jesus, although it has usurped its place and name. In these circumstances, naturally, he could not fulfil his promise to present Christianity from "a comprehensive induction that should cover all the facts of its history." He could only present what he had determined to be "the religion of Jesus" as genuine Christianity, and illustrate from the subsequent history the greatness of its departure from the original type, and the occasional efforts which have been made to return more or less fully to it; perhaps also the abiding presence throughout its whole history of a persistent, if vague, apprehension that some such religion lay in the background, until at last at the end of the accumulating centuries, through great throes of labor, the "Liberal" theology has thrown off the superincumbent accretions and recovered the pure gospel; or, at least, recovered it in its essence; for the acknowledgment is inevitable that "the religion of Jesus" in its completeness, just as it lay in His own mind and heart, was His own, belonged to His time and circumstances, and cannot be brought back again, in its completeness, in our day. All we can do is to recover what in it is of "permanent validity."

In thus setting "the religion of Jesus" and historical Christianity over against one another in a relation which can be called nothing less than antipodal (whatever larger or smaller qualifications may be insisted upon) Harnack is speaking, of course, as the representative of the "Liberal" theology in general. It has become the traditional historical postulate of the "Liberal" construction of the early history of Christianity that the "religion of Jesus" was at once overlaid by the "faith of the primitive community," and this in turn by the dogmatic constructions of Paul. Thus Paul emerges to view as "the second founder" of Christianity, and the Christianity which has propagated itself through the ages is held to derive from him rather than from Jesus. Two deep clefts—between Paul and the primitive community and between the primitive community and Jesus—are imagined to separate historical Christianity from the teaching of Jesus; and across these, we are told, we must somehow find our way if we are to recover the teaching of Jesus, as across them the teaching of Jesus would have had to find its way if it were to determine the development of historical Christianity. It is to this conception of the course of early Christian history that William Wrede gives perhaps somewhat extreme expression when he declares—we avail ourselves of Harnack's words here—that "the second gospel," that is, the teaching of Paul over against "the first gospel," that is, the teaching of Jesus, "is something entirely new, that it, as far as it contains what we call historical Christianity, presents a new religion, in which Jesus Christ Himself has no, or only a most remote, part, and that the Apostle Paul is the founder of this religion."53 And it is from this point of sight that Wilhelm Bousset, for example, twits "the orthodox" with "basing the truth of their whole system and the form of their faith on a fantastic mythical-dogmatic interpretation of the life of Jesus by Paul."

One great difficulty-certainly not the only one nor even the greatest one—which stands in the way of this reading of the course of primitive Christian history, arises from Paul's vigorous repudiation of the honor thrust upon him. He emphatically denies that he is the teacher of a new gospel and explicitly represents himself as in his teaching but repeating the common gospel of Christ which had been taught from the beginning; and that especially in those very items in which he is declared to be most violently the innovator. To adduce but a single instance—that with which we are at the moment most immediately concerned—Paul, in the most natural way in the world and with a simplicity which confounds every effort to discredit it, declares that he did not invent but received from his predecessors in the teaching of Christ's gospel the great central fact—it is made the head and front of his offending-"that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures," that is to say, the Christian doctrine of atonement in the blood of Jesus.56 We may believe, however, that it is rather the insuperable general difficulties which spring at once into sight when an attempt is made to construe Christianity as rather Paulinism—with its involved relegation of Jesus, as Wrede puts it, "utterly into the background" (though He is still inconsequently declared the greater person of the two)—which has caused this construction of primitive Christian history, long dallied with, to begin to crumble just so soon as it has been given clear and unvarnished statement and its logical consequences exhibited. It is not without its significance that a single recent number of a theological journal contains side by side two articles in which the attempt is made to close up again the yawning gulf that has been opened by the speculations of the "Liberal" theology between Jesus and Paul. The circumstance that the two writers proceed to their common end by precisely opposite methods—the one by denying that Paul was a "Paulinist,"58 and the other more reasonably by pointing out that Jesus was Himself very much of a "Paulinist"—only exhibits the more clearly the precise nature of the difficulty which is created by attempting to set Paul in opposition to Jesus and emphasizes the more strongly the intolerableness of the situation induced.

We need not, however, go beyond Harnack himself to learn both the intolerableness and the untenableness of this construction of primitive Christian history. In an address delivered before the Fifth International Congress of Free Christianity and Religious Progress, held at Berlin in the early days of August 1910, under the title of "The Double Gospel in the New Testament," Harnack as decisively as von Dobschütz repels the notion that Paul was the author of a new gospel, and shows as clearly as von Dobschütz that the germ of Paul's teaching is to be found also in that of Jesus, although he still rests rather more than von Dobschütz under the illusion that the gospel of Paul differs from that of Jesus in important particulars. He therefore speaks of "a double gospel" lying side by side in the teaching of the New Testament writers, and indeed persisting side by side throughout the entire history of the Church. The problem of the origin of what he calls "the second gospel," that is, "the preaching that the Son of God descended from heaven, was known as man, through His death and resurrection brought to believers redemption from sin, death, and devil, and thus realized God's eternal counsel of salvation"—just "Paulinism" in the tradition of the "Liberal" theology—he carries back with complete confidence to the beginnings of the Christian community. He says:62

"The declaration that Christ 'died for our sins according to the Scriptures' Paul calls a traditional, therefore a universal Christian article of belief of the first rank; and he says the same of the resurrection of Christ. It is accordingly certain that the original apostles and the Jerusalem community shared this belief and doctrine. This is also attested by the first chapters of the Book of Acts, the trustworthiness of which in this respect is incontestable. The problem must therefore be carried back chronologically from Paul to Jesus' first disciples. They already preached the atoning death (Sühnetod) and resurrection of Christ. If they preached them, however, they also of course recognized them as the principle articles, therefore as 'the gospel' in the gospel, and this is evident in point of fact in the oldest written Gospel which we possess, that is, in that of Mark. The whole work of Mark is so disposed and composed that death and resurrection appear as the aim of the entire presentation. Mark may certainly have been influenced by the Pauline preaching; but the same structure has been given to the Palestinian Gospel of Matthew too; it will not have been new then to the Palestinian Christians."

If Harnack's eyes are still so far holden, that he does not yet see that what Paul found in the primitive disciples they in turn found in Jesus Himself, he is still able to go a certain distance towards the recognition of this great fact also. We find him saying:

"Jesus' proclamation comes so far into consideration here as He preached not only the necessity and actuality of forgiveness of sins, but undoubtedly placed His Person and His Work in relation to it. He not only laid claim to the power to forgive sins, but at the celebration of the Last Supper He brought His death into connection with the deliverance of souls. This may indeed be disputed, but this much is at any rate certain, that attachment to His Person, that is, discipleship, was His own provision. He, however, who attached himself to Him must have found and known Him as somehow 'the Way' to the Father and to all the benefits of the Kingdom ('Come unto me')."

Why these utterances of Harnack's should have aroused the wide-spread interest which they have is a little difficult to understand. Not only do they seem very much a matter of course—and Harnack himself reminds us that they have always been common property (not even Strauss, says he, disputed them, and Baur fully acknowledged them)—but he had himself years ago set them in a clear light and partly in even more suggestive form, in his lectures on What is Christianity. "If we also consider," says he there, "that Jesus Himself described his death as a service which he was rendering to many, and that by a solemn act he instituted a lasting memorial of it—I see no reason to doubt the fact—we can understand how this death and the shame of the cross were bound to take the central place." He even calls attention there to that very significant fact, that the death of Christ, being looked upon as a sacrifice—as it confessedly was by His very earliest disciples—"put an end to all blood-sacrifices"66; surely not (as Harnack inconsequently suggests) because it showed that blood-sacrifices were in themselves meaningless (it was itself looked upon as a blood-sacrifice), but because (as is implied in Harnack's own words) this was to Jesus' followers the only true blood-sacrifice and left no room for any other. "This death," he is impelled himself to write, "had the value of a sacrificial death; for otherwise it would not have possessed the power to penetrate into that inner world out of which blood-sacrifices have issued"—which surely is as much as to say, with the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that it actually cleansed the consciences of men while other sacrifices did not avail to cleanse them, that it satisfied the demands of the uneasy consciences of those who were suffering under a sense of their guilt.

That there is something still lacking in these acknowledgments is of course true. Something of what is lacking is supplied by von Dobschütz's somewhat more hearty recognition of the saving value which Jesus Himself attached to His death. That He looked upon His death, not as an untoward accident befalling Him or as a hard necessity breaking off His work but as an instrument for the accomplishment of His mission, von Dobschütz shows with sufficient solidity. And

"We have still three declarations in which Jesus expresses Himself to His disciples—certainly only to them-with respect to the redemptive significance of His death, suggestively, figuratively, yet sufficiently distinctly; I mean the declaration about ministering and giving His life λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν (Mk. 10:45), the declaration about the Body and Blood as symbols of the New Covenant (Mk. 14:24), and the declaration, transmitted to be sure only in the Fourth Gospel but certainly original, about the hazarding of His life in conflict with the adversary who menaces His people (Jno. 10:11); three varying figures, all of which come at last to the recognition by Jesus of His death as necessary for the completion of His work, viz., for uniting men again with God, by an expiation removing the guilt which separated them, overcoming the Evil One, establishing the indissoluble covenant relation predicted by the prophets. I can find no decisive reason for exscinding these three declarations from the genuine tradition of Jesus. What has been adduced against them proceeds from a priori presuppositions which seem to me unjustified, such as that Jesus could not foresee His death, to say nothing of predicting it. Neither His own dismay at Gethsemane, nor the conduct of the disciples, their flight and their despair, gives any justification to such a contention. They remain psychologically thoroughly intelligible, even with respect to the perception and salutariness of His death. And then these declarations are, so to say, necessary for explaining the fact that the Apostolical preaching from the beginning deals with the redemptive significance of Jesus' death as with a settled fact, while yet remaining entirely without clarity as to the 'how' and seeking after varying explanations, all of which, however, ultimately move in directions more intimated than inculcated by these declarations of the Lord."

In order to reach the truth we need only take one step more and frankly recognize that these declarations are central to Jesus' conception of His mission. And this step we must take not less on account of the declarations themselves (Jesus says expressly that He "came" for the distinct purpose of "giving His life as a ransom for many" and with great explicitness declares the sacrificial character of His death) than on account of numerous other less direct but no less real references to the significance of His mission as redemptive, and in order that the whole subsequent historical development may not be rendered unintelligible (the very disposition of the matter of the Gospels is determined by this presupposition, and the whole preaching of the disciples turns on it as its hinge). No doubt Jesus is thus implicated in the presentation of Christianity as specifically a redemptive religion; "an appearance is created," to use Paul Wernle's phrase in an analogous connection, "that Jesus Himself is responsible for the momentous dogmatic development, and encumbered the simple, eternal will of God with a minimum of dogma and ecclesiasticism"; an appearance, we may add, which is not deceptive, as Wernle would have us believe, and with an amount of "dogma" which cannot justly be called a "minimum." This is, however, only to permit Jesus to come to His rights in the matter of His teaching; and to allow Him to found the religion which He tells us He came to found, and not to insist on thrusting an essentially different one upon Him because we happen ourselves to like it better.72 These declarations of Jesus as to the redemptive significance of His death cannot be denied to Him; their meaning cannot be eviscerated by studiously minimizing expositions, and they cannot be deprived of their cardinal position in the religion which He founded.74 In point of fact, Jesus announced His mission as not to the righteous but sinners; and what He offered to sinners was not mere exemption—or if even that word retains too much reminiscence of a price paid, say immunity—but specifically redemption.

In the mind of Jesus as truly as in the minds of His followers, the religion which He founded was by way of eminence the religion of redemption. Perhaps we could have no better evidence of this than the tenacity with which those who would fain retain the name of Christianity while yet repudiating its specific character, cling to the term "redemptive" also as descriptive of the nature of their new Christianity, identified by them with the religion of Jesus. Professor Macintosh, for example, wishes still to describe his new religion as "the religion of moral redemption"; though he discriminates the notion which the term connotes with him as its broad sense, as over against "the narrow sense" which it bears in its customary application to Christianity. By "redemption" he means, however, merely "reformation"; and these are not only the narrow and the broad of it; they are specifically different conceptions, and the employment of the two terms as synonyms cannot fail to mislead. For our part, we prefer the perhaps brutal but certainly more unambiguous frankness of William Wrede. He conceives "the religion of Jesus" on the same lines as Professor Macintosh's "Christianity," and roundly denies on that very account that it can strictly be called a religion of redemption, contrasting it with Paul's precisely on this score. He does not deny that "redemption" may have a wider meaning also, according to which we "may say of all real religion that it is and intends to be redemptive." But he knows very well that "it is not of this general truth that we are thinking when we characterize particular religions as religions of redemption." And since in his view the emphasis in the religion of Jesus "falls on individual piety and its connection with future salvation," he remarks simply, that "no one who set out to describe the religion which lives in the sayings and similitudes of Jesus could hit by any chance on the phrase 'religion of redemption,' " while on the other hand, with respect to Paul, "everything … is said when we say that he made Christianity the religion of redemption." It tends to obscure the fact that a religion is being ascribed to Jesus which is not in the accepted ("narrow") sense of the word "redemptive," to characterize the religion which is ascribed to Him so emphatically as "redemptive" (in the "wider" sense of the word), especially when it lies on the face of the record that the religion which Jesus founded is a redemptive religion in the narrow sense, that is to say, has the Cross set in its centre.

Its redemptive character has not, then, been imported into Christianity from without, in the course of its development in the world—whether through the instrumentality of Paul or of some other one. It has constituted its essence as a specific religion from the beginning; without which it would cease to be the religion that Jesus founded, and that, retaining the specific character impressed on it by Him, has borne His name through the centuries known from it as Christian. Precisely what Christianity was in the beginning, has ever been through all its history, and must continue to be so long as it keeps its specific character by virtue of which it is what it is, is a redemptive religion; or rather that particular redemptive religion which brings to man salvation from, his sin, conceived as guilt as well as pollution, through the expiatory death of Jesus Christ.

So clear is this that even an observer who approaches the matter from a very general point of view, and seeks only, as a student of philosophy, to determine from the outstanding facts what the real nature of Christianity is, cannot miss it. Josiah Royce asks himself "what is vital in Christianity?" using the term "vital" much in the sense which is ordinarily attached to the term "essential." "That is vital for an organic type," he explains, illustratively, "which is so characteristic of that type that, were such vital features changed, the type in question, if not altogether destroyed, would be changed into what is essentially another type." In seeking an answer, he naturally brings the "Liberal" and what he calls the "Traditional" answers into comparison. "Is Christianity essentially a religion of redemption," he inquires, "in the sense in which tradition defines redemption? Or is Christianity simply that religion of the love of God and the love of man which the sayings and the parables so richly illustrate?" For the former view, he notes, is pleaded "the whole authority, such as it is, of the needs and religious experience of the church of Christian history; the church early found, or at least felt, that it could not live at all without thus interpreting the person and work of Christ." For the latter is pleaded that "the doctrine in view seems to be, at least in the main, unknown to the historic Christ, in so far as we can learn what he taught." Nevertheless he has no hesitation in rejecting the latter view, or in ascribing the former to Jesus. "As a student of philosophy, coming in no partisan spirit," he declares, "I must insist that this reduction of what is vital in Christianity to the so-called pure gospel of Christ, as he preached it and as it is recorded in the body of the presumably authentic sayings and parables, is profoundly unsatisfactory." The historic church was led to support the opposite view, he asserts, by "a sense of religious values which was a true sense." And despite what he (erroneously) believes to be the testimony of the records, he refuses to believe that the "Liberal" view can fully represent our Lord's own conception of His religion. He argues:

"For one thing, Christ can hardly be supposed to have regarded his most authentically reported religious sayings as containing the whole of his message, or as embodying the whole of his mission. For, if he had so viewed the matter, the Messianic tragedy in which his life work culminated would have been needless and unintelligible. For the rest, the doctrine that he taught is, as it stands, essentially incomplete. It is not a rounded whole. It looks beyond itself for a completion, which the master himself unquestionably conceived in terms of the approaching end of the world, and which the church later conceived in terms of what has become indeed vital for Christianity."

That one who does not profess to approach the question with which he deals "as an authority in matters which are technically theological," and who has accordingly been led astray by those upon whom he was compelled to depend for the statement of the facts—and whose own interpretation, we must add, of the significance of the conclusion that he reaches leaves so much to be desired—should yet have seen thus clearly, and been led to assert thus strongly, that Christianity is, in its essence, "a redemptive religion" and that "what is most vital in Christianity is contained in whatever is essential and permanent about the doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement," seems a notable testimony to the obviousness of the main facts. Had Royce understood that these elements in the Christian religion which he finds vital to it were not introduced into it by the followers of Christ in their interpretation of His religion, but were inserted into it as its very heart by the Master Himself, we may fancy with what increased emphasis he would have insisted upon them as the very essence of this religion.

Professor Macintosh tells us, to be sure, that if this is Christianity, "he would have to confess not only that he is not a Christian, but that he does not see how he ever could be a Christian." It is a sad confession, but by no means an unexampled one. Every Inquiry Room supplies its contingent of like instances, and Christianity had not grown very old before it discovered that the preaching of Christ crucified was unto the Jews a stumbling-block and unto the Greeks foolishness. The only novel feature in the present situation lies in the proposal that if one cannot or will not accept the Christianity of the crucified Son of God, we shall just call what he can or will accept "Christianity"and let it go at that. This may seem an easy adjustment; but it is attended with the inconvenience of transferring our interest from things to mere names. The thing which has hitherto been known as Christianity appears to remain the same, however we deal with the name by which it has hitherto been known. And that thing enshrines the Cross in its heart. Paul Feine does not in the least exaggerate when, in the opening words of the section in his "Theologie des Neuen Testaments" which speaks of Jesus' own teaching as to His death, he writes:

"It has been the belief and the teaching of the Christian Church of all ages and of all Confessions, that Jesus, the Son of God, in His sacrificial death on the cross wrought the reconciliation of men with God, and by His resurrection begot anew those who believe in Him unto a living hope of eternal life. This belief forms the content of the hymns and prayers of Christian devotion through all the centuries. It filled with new life the dying civilization of Greece and Rome and conquered to Christianity the youthful forces of the Germanic stock. In the proclamation of Jesus the Divine Saviour who died for us on the Cross, still lies even today the secret of the successes of Christian missions among the heathen. The symbol of this belief greets us in the form of the Cross from the tower of every church, from every Christian grave-stone and in the thousands of forms in which the Cross finds employment in daily life; this belief meets us in the gospel of the great Christian festivals and in the two sacraments of the church."

Enough; there can be no doubt what Christianity has been up to today; and there can be no doubt that what it is now proposed to transfer the name to is an essentially different religion. Have we not had it for a generation past dinned into our ears that it is an essentially different religion? that precisely what Paul did, when he substituted "the religion about Jesus," that is, the religion of the Cross, for "the religion of Jesus," that is, the "Liberal" reconstruction of what Jesus Himself taught, was to introduce a new religion, a religion, to recall Wrede's characterization, more unlike the religion of Jesus than the religion of Jesus was unlike Judaism?

It seems merely frivolous to declare in one and the same breath that Paul introduced an essentially new religion when he supplanted "the simple gospel of Jesus" with the religion of the Cross, and that this new religion of the Cross is not essentially deserted when a return is made from it to "the simple religion of Jesus." The two religions are, in point of fact, essentially different, and no attempt to confuse them under a common designation can permanently conceal this fact. He who looks to be perfected through his own assumption of what he calls a Christlike attitude towards what he calls a Christlike superhuman reality—though he considers that the term "Christlike" may without fatal loss be a merely conventional designation—is of a totally different religion from him who feels himself a sinner redeemed by the blood of a divine Saviour dying for him on the Cross. It may be, as Troeltsch seems to suggest, that "Liberal Christianity" lacks the power to originate a church and can live only as a kind of parasitical growth upon some sturdier stock. It may be that it is not driven by internal necessity to separate itself off from other faiths, on which it rather depends for support. It is otherwise with those who share the great experience of reconciliation with God in the blood of His dear Son. They know themselves to be instinct with a life peculiar to themselves and cannot help forming a community, distinguished from all others by this common great experience. We have quoted the opening words of Feine's remarks on Jesus' teaching as to His sacrificial death. The closing words are worth pondering also. They run:81

"Let it be said in closing that in the two declarations of the ransom-price and the cup of the Lord's Supper there lies church-building power. Jesus did not organize His community; He founded no church in His earthly labors. But the Christian Church is an inevitable product of the declaration of the expiatory effect of His death for many. For those who have experienced redemption and reconciliation through the death of Jesus must by virtue of this gift of grace draw together and distinguish themselves over against other communities."

There is indeed no alternative. The redeemed in the blood of Christ, after all is said, are a people apart. Call them "Christians," or call them what you please, they are of a specifically different religion from those who know no such experience. It may be within the rights of those who feel no need of such a redemption and have never experienced its transforming power to contend that their religion is a better religion than the Christianity of the Cross. It is distinctly not within their rights to maintain that it is the same religion as the Christianity of the Cross. On their own showing it is not that.

APPENDIX SERMONS

THE RISEN JESUS

2 TIMOTHY 2:8:—Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.

THE opening verses of the second chapter of the Second Epistle to Timothy are in essence a comprehensive exhortation to faithfulness. The apostle Paul was lying imprisoned at Rome, with expectation of no other issue than death. The infant Church had fallen upon perilous times. False teachers were assailing the very essence of the Gospel. Defection had invaded the innermost circle of the apostle's companions. Treachery had attacked his own person. Over against all these dreadful manifestations of impending destruction, he strenuously exhorts his own son in faith, Timothy, to steadfast faithfulness. Faithfulness to himself, faithfulness to the cause he had at heart, faithfulness to the truth as he preached it, faithfulness to Jesus Christ, their common Redeemer and Lord.

The temptations to unfaithfulness by which Timothy was assailed were very numerous and very specious. Many good men had fallen and were falling victims to them. The perverted teachings of the errorists of the day were urged with a great show of learning and with eminent plausibility. And they were announced with a fine scorn which openly declared that only dull wits could rest in the crude ideas with which Paul had faced the world—and lost. The sword of persecution had been ruthlessly unsheathed, and sufferings and a cruel death watched in the way of those who would fain walk in the path Paul had broken out. It seemed as if the whole fabric which the apostle had built up at such cost of labour and pain was about to fall about his ears.

Paul does not for a moment, however, lose courage, either for himself, or for his faithful followers. But neither does he seek to involve Timothy unwittingly in the difficulties and dangers in which he found himself. He rather bids him first of all to count the whole cost. And then he points him to a source of strength which will supply all his needs. We called the passage an exhortation. We might better call it, more specifically, an encouragement. And the encouragement culminates in a very remarkable sentence. This sentence is pregnant enough to reveal at once the central thought of Paul's Gospel and the citadel of his own strength. Amid all the surrounding temptations, all the encompassing dangers, Paul bids Timothy to bear in mind, as the sufficing source of abounding strength, the great central doctrine,—or rather, let us say, the great central fact—of his preaching, of his faith, of his life. And he enunciates this great fact, in these words: Jesus Christ raised from the dead, of the seed of David.

It is, of course, to the glorified Jesus that Paul directs his own and Timothy's gaze. Or, to be more specific, it is to the regal lordship of the resurrected Jesus that he points as the Christian's strength and support. The language is compressed to the extremity of conciseness. It is difficult to convey its full force except in diluted paraphrase. Paul bids Timothy in the midst of all the besetting perplexities and dangers which encompassed him to strengthen his heart by bearing constantly in remembrance, not Jesus Christ simpliciter, but Jesus Christ conceived specifically as the Lord of the Universe, who has been dead, but now lives again and abides for ever in the power of an endless life; as the royal seed of David ascended in triumph to His eternal throne. It is not from the exaltation of Jesus alone, let us observe, that Paul draws and would have Timothy draw strength to endure in the crisis which had fallen upon their lives. It is to the contrast between the past humiliation and the present glory of the exalted Lord that he directs his eyes. He does not say simply, "Bear in mind that Jesus Christ sits on the throne of the universe and all things are under His feet," although, of course, it is the universal dominion of Jesus which gives its force to the exhortation. He says, "Bear in mind that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, of the seed of David—that it is He that died who, raised from the dead, sits as eternal king in the heavens." No doubt a part of the apostle's object in his allusion to the past humiliation of the exalted Lord is to constitute a connection between Jesus Christ and his faithful followers, that they may become imitators of Him. They, the viatores, may see in Him, the consummator, one who like them had Himself been viator, and may be excited to follow after Him that they too may in due time become consummatores. But the nerve of the exhortation, obviously, does not lie in this, as the very language in which it is couched sufficiently avouches. How could Timothy imitate our Lord in being of the seed of David? How could he imitate Him by ascending the throne of the universe? Fundamentally the apostle is pointing to Christ not as our example, but as our almighty Saviour. He means to adduce the great things about Him. And the central one of the great things he adduces about Him is that He has been raised from the dead.

It is not to be overlooked, of course, that Paul adverts to the resurrection of Christ here with his mind absorbed not so much in the act of His rising as in its issues. "Bear in mind," he says, "Jesus Christ, as one who has been raised from the dead": that is to say, as one who could not be holden of the grave, but has burst the bonds of death, and lo! He lives for evermore. But neither can it be overlooked that it is specifically to the resurrection, which is an act, that he adverts; and that he adverts to it in such a manner as to make it manifest that the fact of the resurrection of Christ held a place in his Gospel which deserves to be called nothing less than central. The exalted Christ is conceived by him distinctly as the resurrected Jesus; and it is clear that, had there been no resurrection of Jesus, Paul would not have known how to point Timothy to the exalted Christ as the source of his strength to face with courage the hardships and defeats of life. From this great fact, he derives, therefore, the very phraseology with which he exhorts Timothy, with rich reference to all that is involved in Christ our Forerunner, to die with his Lord that he might also live with Him, to endure with Him that he might also reign with Him. To Paul, it is clear, the resurrection of Christ was the hinge on which turned all his hopes and all his confidence, in life and also in death.

Now, there is a sense in which it is of no special importance to lay stress on the place which the resurrection of Christ held in Paul's thought and preaching. In this sense, to wit: that nobody doubts that it was central to Paul's Gospel. It would seem impossible, in fact, to read the New Testament and miss observing that not only to Paul, but to the whole body of the founders of Christianity, the conviction of the reality of Christ's bodily resurrection entered into the very basis of their faith. The fact is broadly spread upon the surface of the New Testament record. Our Lord Himself deliberately staked His whole claim to the credit of men upon His resurrection. When asked for a sign He pointed to this sign as His single and sufficient credential. The earliest preachers of the Gospel conceived witnessing to the resurrection of their Master to be their primary function. The lively hope and steadfast faith which sprang up in them they ascribed to its power. Paul's whole gospel was the gospel of the Risen Saviour: to His call he ascribed his apostleship; and to His working, all the manifestation of the Christian faith and life.

There are in particular two passages in Paul's Epistles, which reveal, in an almost startling way, the supreme place which was ascribed to the resurrection of Christ by the first believers in the Gospel.

In a context of very special vigour he declares roundly that "if Christ hath not been raised" the apostolic preaching and the Christian faith are alike vanity, and those who have believed in Christ lie yet unrelieved of their sins. His meaning is that the resurrection of Christ occupied the centre of the Gospel which was preached alike by him and all the apostles, and which had been received by all Christians. If, then, this resurrection should prove to be not a real occurrence, the preachers of the Gospel are convicted of being false witnesses of God, the faith founded on their preaching is proved an empty thing, and the hopes conceived on its basis are rendered void. Here Paul implicates with him the whole Christian community, teachers and taught alike, as suspending the truth of Christianity on the reality of the resurrection of Christ. And so confident is he of universal agreement in the indispensableness of this fact to the integrity of the Christian message, that he uses it for his sole fulcrum for prying back the doctrine of the resurrection of believers into its proper place in the faith of his sceptical readers. "If dead men are not raised, neither hath Christ been raised," is his sole argument. And he plies this argument with the air of a man who knows full well that no one who calls himself a Christian will tolerate that conclusion. The fact that Christ has been raised lay firmly embedded in the depths of the Christian consciousness.

In some respects even more striking are the implications of such phraseology as meets us in another passage. Here the apostle is contrasting all the "gains" of the flesh with the one great "gain" of the spirit—Christ Jesus the Lord. As over against "the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, his Lord," he declares that he esteems "all things" as but refuse,—the heap of leavings from the feast which is swept from the table for the dogs,—if only he may "gain Christ and be found in Him," if only, he repeats, he may "know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed into His death; if by any means he may attain to the resurrection from the dead." The structure of the sentence requires us to recognize the very essence of the saving efficacy of Christ as resident in "the power of His resurrection." It is through the power exerted by His resurrection that His saving work takes effect on men. That is to say, Paul discovers the centre of gravity of the Christian hope no less than of the Christian faith in the fact of the resurrection of Christ. And of the Christian life as well. From the great fact that Christ has risen from the dead, proceed all the influences by which Christians are made in life and attainments, here and hereafter, like Him.

In the face of such evidence, spread broadcast over the New Testament, no one has been able to question that the founders of Christianity entrenched themselves in the fact of Christ's resurrection as the central stronghold of their hope, faith, and proclamation. We do not need to lay stress, therefore, on this implication in such a passage as that before us, as if we were seeking proof for a doubtful or even for a doubted fact. The importance of our laying stress on its implication here and its open assertion throughout the New Testament, is that we may be able to estimate the real significance of a very wide-spread tendency which has arisen in our own time to question the importance of this event on which the founders of Christianity laid such great emphasis, and to which they attached such palmary consequence. If nobody doubts that the first preachers of the Gospel esteemed the resurrection of Christ the foundation-stone of their proclamation, the chief stay of their faith and hope alike, there are nevertheless many who do not hesitate to declare roundly that the first preachers of the Gospel were grossly deceived in so esteeming it. This is an inevitable sequence, indeed, of the chariness with respect to the supernatural which so strongly characterizes our modern world. The "unmiraculous Christianity" which has, in one or another of its modes of conception, grown so fashionable in our day, as it could scarcely allow that the most stupendous of all miracles really lay at the basis of Christianity in its historical origins, so cannot possibly allow that confidence in the reality of this stupendous miracle lies to-day at the foundation of the Christian's life and hope. To allow these things would be to confess that Christianity is through and through a supernatural religion—supernatural in its origin, supernatural in its sanctions, supernatural in its operations in the world. And then,—what would become of "unmiraculous Christianity"?

Accordingly, we have now for more than a whole generation, been told over and over again, and with ever-increasing stridency of voice, that it makes no manner of difference whether Jesus rose from the dead or not. The main fact, we are told, is not whether the body that was laid in the tomb was resuscitated. Of what religious value, we are asked, can that purely physical fact be to any man? The main fact is that Jesus—that Jesus who lived in the world a life of such transcendent attractiveness, going about doing good, and by His unshaken and unshakable faith in providence revealed to men the love of a Father-God,—this Jesus, though He underwent the inevitable experience of change which men call death, yet still lives. Lives!—lives in His Church; or at least lives in that heaven to which He pointed us as the home of our Father, and to which we may all follow Him from the evils of this life; or in any event lives in the influence which His beautiful and inspiring life still exerts upon His followers and through them in the world. This, this, we are told, is the fact of real religious value; the only fact upon which the religious emotions can take hold; by which the religious life can be quickened; and through which we may be impelled to religious effort and strengthened in religious endurance.

The beauty of the language in which these assertions are clothed and the fervour of religious feeling with which it is suffused, must not be permitted to blind us to the real issue that is raised by them. This is not whether our faith is grounded in a mere resuscitation of a dead man two thousand years ago; or rather in a living Lord reigning in the heavens. It is not the peculiarity of this new view that it focuses men's eyes on the glorified Jesus and bids them look to Him for their inspiration and strength. That is what the apostles did, and what all, since the apostles, who have followed in their footsteps, have done. Paul did not say to Timothy merely, "Remember that Jesus Christ, when He died, rose again from the dead,"—although to have said that would have been to have said much. Directing Timothy's eyes to the glorified Jesus, reigning in power in the heavens, he said, "Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, of the seed of David." It is not, then, the peculiarity of this new view that it has discovered the living and reigning Christ. The living and reigning Christ has always been the object of the adoring faith of Christians. It is its peculiarity that it neglects or denies the resurrected Christ.

It does not pretend that in neglecting or denying the resurrected Christ it does not break with the entirety of historical Christianity. It freely allows that the apostles firmly believed in a resurrected Christ, and that, following the apostles, Christians up to to-day have firmly believed in a resurrected Christ. And it freely allows that this firm belief in a resurrected Christ has been the source of much of the enthusiasm of Christian faith and of the Christian propaganda through all the ages. But it hardily affirms that this emphasis on the resurrected Christ nevertheless involves a gross confusion—no less a confusion than that of the kernel with the husk. And it stoutly maintains that the time has come to shell off the husk and keep the kernel only. Religious belief, we are told, cannot possibly rest on or be inseparably connected with a mere occurrence in time and space. What others have seen in a different age from ours—what is that to us? That Jesus rose from the dead two thousand years ago and was seen of men—how can that concern us to-day? All that can possibly be of any significance to us is that He was "not swallowed up in death, but passed through suffering and death to glory, that is, to life, power, and honour." "Faith has nothing to do with the knowledge of the form in which Jesus lives, but only with the conviction that He is the living Lord."

Here now is a brand-new conception of the matter, standing in express contrast, and in expressly acknowledged contrast, with the conception of the founders, and hitherto of the whole body of the adherents, of Christianity. It is the outgrowth, as we have already hinted, of a distaste for the supernatural. To get rid of the supernatural in the origins of Christianity, its entire historical character is surrendered. The Christianity now to be proclaimed is to be confessedly a "new Christianity"—a different Christianity from any which has ever heretofore existed on the face of the earth. And its novelty consists in this, that it is to have no roots in historical occurrences of any kind whatsoever. Religious belief, we are told, must be independent of all mere facts.

We must not forget that the professed purpose of this new determination of the relation of Christianity to fact is to save Christianity. If Christianity is independent of all historical facts, why, it is clear that it cannot be assailed through the medium of historical criticism. Let criticism reconstruct the historical circumstances which have been connected with its origin as it may; it cannot touch this Christianity which stands out of relation with all historical occurrences whatever. Doubtless it would be a great relief to many minds to be emancipated from all fear of historical criticism. But it is certainly a great price we are asked to pay for this emancipation. The price indeed is no less an one than Christianity itself. For the obvious effect of the detachment of Christianity from all historical fact is to dismiss Christianity out of the realm of fact.

Christianity is a "historical religion," and a "Christianity" wholly unrelated to historical occurrences is just no Christianity at all. Religion,—yes, man may have religion without historical facts to build upon, for man is a religious animal and can no more escape from religion than he can escape from any other of his persistent instincts. He may still by the grace of God know something of God and the soul, moral responsibility and immortality. But do not even the heathen know the same? And what have we more than they? We may still call by the name of "Christianity" the tattered rags of natural religion which may be left us when we have cast away all the facts which constitute Christianity,—the age-long preparation for the coming of the Kingdom of God; the Incarnation of the Son of God; His atoning death on the Cross; His rising again on the third day and His ascension to heaven; the descent of the Spirit on the Pentecostal birthday of the Church. But to do so is to outrage all the proprieties of honest nomenclature. For "Christianity" is not a mere synonym of "religion," but is a specific form of religion determined in its peculiarity by the great series of historical occurrences which constitute the redemptive work of God in this sinful world, among which occurrences the resurrection of Christ holds a substantial and in some respects the key position.

The impossibility of sustaining anything which can be called "Christianity" without embracing in it historical facts, may be illustrated by the difficulty in carrying out their programme which is experienced by men who talk of freeing Christianity from its dependence on facts. For do they not bid us to abstract our minds, indeed, from that imagined resuscitation that occurred in Palestine (if it occurred at all) two thousand years ago, but to focus them nevertheless on the living Jesus, who has survived death and still lives in heaven? Do they forget that when they say "Jesus" they already say "history"? Who is this "Jesus" who still lives in heaven, and the fact of whose still living in heaven, having passed through death, is to be our inspiration? Did He once live on earth? And, living on earth, did He not manifest that unwavering faith in providence which reveals the Father-God to us? Otherwise what is it to us that He "still" lives in heaven? To be free from the entanglements of history; to-be immune from the assaults of historical criticism; it is not enough to cease to care for such facts as His resurrection: we must cease to care for the whole fact of Jesus. Jesus is a historical figure. What He was, no less than what He did, is a matter of historical testimony. When we turn our backs on historical facts as of no significance to our "Christianity," we must turn our backs as well on Jesus—any Jesus we choose to rescue for ourselves from the hands of historical criticism. He who would have a really "unhistorical Christianity" must know no Jesus whether on earth or in heaven. And surely a Christianity without Jesus is just no Christianity at all.

Christianity then stands or falls with the historical facts which, we do not say merely accompanied its advent into the world, but have given it its specific form as a religion. These historical facts constitute its substance, and to be indifferent to them is to be indifferent to the substance of Christianity. In these circumstances it is a dangerous proceeding to declare this or that one of them of no significance to the Christian religion. Especially is it a dangerous proceeding to single out for this declaration, one in which the founders of Christianity discovered so much significance as they discovered in the resurrection of Christ. When Paul says to us, not "Remember Jesus Christ enthroned in heaven," but "Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, of the seed of David," we surely must pause before we allow ourselves to say, "It is of no importance whether He rose from the dead or not." And if we pause and think but a moment, we certainly shall not fail to set our seal to Paul's judgment of the significance of His rising from the dead to the Christian religion. For once let us cast our minds over the real place which the resurrection of Christ holds in the Christian system and we shall not easily escape the conviction that this fact is fundamental to its entire message.

Let us recall in rapid survey some of the various ways in which the resurrection of Jesus evinces itself as lying at the basis of all our hope and of all the hope of the world.

It is natural to think, first of all, of the place of this great fact in Christian apologetics. Opinions may conceivably differ whether it would have been possible to believe in Christianity as a supernaturally given religion if Christ had remained holden of the grave. But it is scarcely disputable that the fact that He did rise again, being once established, supplies an irrefragable demonstration of the supernatural origin of Christianity, of the validity of Christ's claim to be the Son of God, and of the trustworthiness of His teaching as a Messenger from God to man. In the light of this stupendous miracle, all hesitation with respect to the supernatural accompaniments of the life that preceded it, or of the succeeding establishment of the religion to which its seal had been set,—nay, of the whole preparation for the coming of the Messenger of God who was to live and die and rise again, and of the whole issue of His life and death and resurrection—becomes at once unreasonable and absurd. The religion of Christ is stamped at once from heaven as divine, and all marks of divinity in its preparation, accompaniments, and sequences become at once congruous and natural. From the empty grave of Jesus the enemies of the cross turn away in unconcealable dismay. Christ has risen from the dead! After two thousand years of the most determined assault upon the evidence which establishes it, that fact stands. And so long as it stands, Christianity too must stand as the one supernatural religion. The resurrection of Christ is the fundamental apologetical fact of Christianity.

But it holds no more fundamental place in Christian apologetics than in the revelation of life and immortality which Christianity brings to a dying world. By it the veil was lifted and men were permitted to see the reality of that other world to which we are all journeying. The whole relation they bore to life and death, and the life beyond death, was revolutionized to those who saw Him and companied with Him after He had risen from the dead. Death had no longer any terrors for them: they no longer needed to believe, they knew, that there was life on the other side of death, that the grave was but a sojourning place, and, though their earthly tent-dwelling were dissolved, they had a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. And we who have come later may see with their eyes and handle with their hands the Word of Life. We can no longer speak of a bourne from which no traveller e'er returns. The resurrection of Christ has broken the middle wall of partition down and only a veil now separates earth from heaven. That He who has died has been raised again and ever lives in the completeness of His humanity is the fundamental fact in the revelation of the Christian doctrine of immortality.

Equally fundamental is the place which Christ's resurrection occupies relatively to our confidence in His claims, His teachings, and His promises. The Lord of Life could not succumb to death. Had he not risen, could we have believed Him when He "made Himself equal with God"? By His resurrection He set a seal on all the instructions which He gave and on all the hopes which He awakened. Had the one sign which He chose failed, would not His declarations have all failed with it? Is it nothing to us that He who said, "Come unto Me and I will give you rest;" who has promised to be with those who trust Him "always even unto the end of the world;" who has announced to us the forgiveness of sins; has proved that He has power to lay down His life and to take it again? Whether is it easier to say, "Thy sins be forgiven thee," or "I will arise and walk"? That He could not be holden of death, but arose in the power of a deathless life, gives us to know that the Son of Man has power to forgive sins.

And there is a yet deeper truth: the resurrection of Christ is fundamental to the Christian's assurance that Christ's work is complete and His redemption is accomplished. It is not enough that we should be able to say, "He was delivered up for our trespasses." We must be able to add, "He was raised for our justification." Else what would enable us to say, He was able to pay the penalty He had undertaken? That He died manifests His love and His willingness to save. It is His rising again that manifests His power and His ability to save. We cannot be saved by a dead Christ, who undertook but could not perform, and who still lies under the Syrian sky, another martyr of impotent love. To save, He must pass not merely to but through death. If the penalty was fully paid, it cannot have broken Him, it must needs have been broken upon Him. The resurrection of Christ is thus the indispensable evidence of His completed work, of His accomplished redemption. It is only because He rose from the dead that we know that the ransom He offered was sufficient, the sacrifice was accepted, and that we are His purchased possession. In one word, the resurrection of Christ is fundamental to the Christian hope and the Christian confidence.

It is fundamental, therefore, to our expectation of ourselves rising from the dead. Because Christ has risen, we no more judge that "if one died for all, then all died," "that the body of sin might be done away," than that having died with Him "we shall also live with Him." His resurrection drags ours in its train. In His rising He conquered death and presented to God in His own person the first-fruits of the victory over the grave. In His rising we have the earnest and pledge of our rising: "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will He bring with Him." Had Christ not risen could we nourish so great a hope? Could we believe that what is sown in corruption shall be raised in incorruption; what is sown in dishonour shall be raised in glory; what is sown in weakness shall be raised in power; what is sown a body under the dominion of a sinful self shall be raised a body wholly determined by the spirit of God?

Last of all, to revert to the suggestion of the words of Paul with which we began, in the resurrection of Christ we have the assurance that He is the Lord of heaven and earth whose right it is to rule and in whose hands are gathered the reins of the universe. Without it we could believe in His love: He died for us. We could believe in His continued life beyond the tomb: who does not live after death? It might even be possible that we should believe in His victory over evil: for it might be conceived that one should be holy, and yet involved in the working of a universal law. But had he not risen, could we believe Him enthroned in heaven, Lord of all? Himself subject to death; Himself the helpless prisoner of the grave; does He differ in kind from that endless procession of the slaves of death journeying like Him through the world to the one inevitable end? If it is fundamental to Christianity that Jesus should be Lord of all; that God should have highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and every tongue confess Him Lord: then it is fundamental to Christianity that death too should be subject to Him and it should not be possible for Him to see corruption. This last enemy too He must needs, as Paul asserts, put under His feet; and it is because He has put this last enemy under His feet that we can say with such energy of conviction that nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,—not even death itself: and that nothing can harm us and nothing take away our peace.

O the comfort, O the joy, O the courage, that dwells in the great fact that Jesus is the Risen One, of the seed of David; that as the Risen One He has become Head over all things; and that He must reign until He shall have put all things under His feet. Our brother, who has like us been acquainted with death,—He it is who rules over the ages, the ages that are past, and the ages that are passing, and the ages that are yet to come. If our hearts should fail us as we stand over against the hosts of wickedness which surround us, let us encourage ourselves and one another with the great reminder: Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, of the seed of David!

The Saving Christ

"Faithful is the saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." - 1 Tim. 1:15. (R. V.)

IN these words we have the first of a short series of five "faithful sayings," or current Christian commonplaces, incidentally adduced by the apostle Paul in the course of his letters to his helpers in the gospel - Timothy and Titus - i.e., in what we commonly call his Pastoral Epistles. They are a remarkable series of five "words," and their appearance on the face of these New Testament writings is almost as remarkable as their contents.

Consider what the phenomenon is that is brought before us in these "faithful sayings." Here is the apostle writing to his assistants in the proclamation of the gospel, little more than a third of a century, say, after the crucifixion of his Lord - scarcely thirty-three years after he had himself entered upon the great ministry that had been committed to him of preaching to the Gentiles the words of this life. Yet he is already able to remind them of the blessed contents of the gospel message in words that are the product of Christian experience in the hearts of the community. For just what these "faithful sayings" are, is a body of utterances in which the essence of the gospel has been crystallized by those who have tasted and seen its preciousness. Obviously the days when this gospel was brought as a novelty to their attention are past. The church has been founded, and in it throbs the pulses of a vigorous life. The gospel has been embraced and lived; it has been trusted and not found wanting; and the souls that have found its blessedness have had time to frame its precious truths into formulas. Formulas, I do not say, merely, that have passed from mouth to mouth, and been enshrined in memory after memory until they have become proverbs in the Christian community. Formulas rather, which have embedded themselves in the hearts of the whole congregation, have been beaten there into shape, as the deeper emotions of redeemed souls have played round them, and have emerged again suffused with the feelings which they have awakened and satisfied, and molded into that balanced and rhythmic form which is the hallmark of utterances that come really out of the living and throbbing hearts of the people.

If we were to judge of the spiritual attainments of the primitive Church solely by these specimens of its Christian thought, we should assuredly conceive exceedingly highly of them. Where can we go to find a truer or deeper insight into the heart of the gospel - a richer or fuller expression of all that the religious life at its highest turns upon? Certainly not to the apocryphal fragments of so-called "utterances of Jesus" raked out of the trash-heaps of some Oxyrhynchus or other. But just as truly not to the authentic remains of the early ages of the Church; which witness, indeed, to a living, vitalizing Christianity ordering all its life, but which distinctly reach to no such level of Christian thinking and feeling as these fragments point to. We are thus bidden to remember that in these five "sayings" we have, not the total product of the Christian thought of the age, perhaps not even a fair sample of it, but such items of it only as commended themselves to the mind and heart of a Paul, and rose joyously to his lips when he would fain exhort his fellows in the gospel to embrace and live by its essence. They come to us accordingly not merely as valuable fragments of the Christian thinking of the first period - of absorbing interest as they would be even from that point of view - but with the imprimatur of the apostle upon them as consonant with the mind of the Holy Spirit. They are dug from the mine of the Christian heart indeed, but they come to us stamped in the mintage of apostolic authority. The primitive Christian community it may have been that gave them form and substance, but it is the apostle who assures us that they are "faithful sayings, and worthy of all acceptation."

And surely, when we come to look narrowly at the particular one of these "sayings" which we have chosen as our text, it is a great assertion that it brings us - an assertion which, if it be truly a "faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation," is well adapted to become even in this late and, it would fain believe itself, more instructed age, the watchword of the Christian Church and of every Christian heart. On the face of it, you will observe, it simply announces the purpose or, we may perhaps say, the philosophy, of the incarnation: "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." But it announces the purpose of the incarnation in a manner that at once attracts attention. Even the very language in which it is expressed is startling, meeting us here in the midst of one of Paul's letters. For this is not Pauline phraseology that stands before us here; as, indeed, it professes not to be - for does not Paul tell us that he is not speaking in his own person, but is adducing one of the jewels of the Church's faith? At all events, it is the language of John that here confronts us, and whoever first cast the Church's heart-conviction into this compressed sentence had assuredly learned in John's school. For to John only belongs this phrase as applied to Christ: "He came into the world." It is John only who preserves the Master's declarations: "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world"; "I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on Me should not abide in darkness." It is he only who, adopting, as is his wont, the very phraseology of his Master to express his own thought, tells us in his prologue that "the true Light - that lighteth every man - was coming into the world," but though He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, yet the world knew Him not.

Hence emerges a useful hint for the interpretation of our passage. For in the Johannean phraseology which we have before us here - though certainly not in the Johannean phraseology only - the term "the world" does not express a purely local idea, but is suffused with a deep ethical significance. When we read accordingly of Christ Jesus coming into the "world," we are not reading of a mere change of place on the part of our Lord - of a mere descent on His part from heaven to earth, as we may say. We are reading of the light coming into the darkness: "the world" is the sphere of darkness and shame and sin. It is, in a word, the great ethical contrast that is intended to be brought prominently before us, and in this lies the whole point of the incarnation as conceived by John, and as embodied in our passage. Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, came into "the world" - into the realm of evil and the kingdom of sin. In our present passage this idea is enhanced by the sharp collocation with it of the term "sinners." For, in the original, the word "sinners" stands next to the word "world," with the effect of throwing the strongest possible emphasis on the ethical connotation. This is the faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that the apostle commends to us - that "Christ Jesus came into the world, sinners to save." What else, indeed, could He have come into "the world," the sphere of evil, for - except to save sinners?

Surely, there meets us here a point that is worthy of our closest attention. We might have heard of Christ coming into the world, if the term could be taken in a merely local sense, with but a languid interest. But when we catch the ethical import of the term an explanation is at once demanded. What could such an one as Christ have to do in coming to such a place as the world? The incongruity of the thing requires accounting for. It is much as if we saw a fellow Christian in some compromising position. We might meet with him here, there, and elsewhere, and no remark be aroused. But by some chance swing of the shutter as we pass by we see him standing in the midst of a drinking-saloon; we see him emerge from the door of a well-known gambling hell, or of some dreadful abode of shame. At once the need of an explanation rises within our puzzled minds, and the whole stress of the situation turns on the explanation. What was his purpose there? we anxiously inquire. So it is with Christ Jesus coming into the world; and so we feel in proportion as we realize the ethical contrariety suggested by the term. Thus it comes about that the primary emphasis of the passage is felt to rest on the account it gives of the situation it brings before us - on its explanation of how it happens that Christ Jesus could and did come into the world.

We despair of finding an English phraseology which will reproduce with exactitude the nice distribution of the stress. Suffice it to say that the strong emphasis falls on the fact that it was specifically to save sinners that Christ Jesus came, and that the way for this strength of emphasis is prepared by the use of phraseology which implies that there was no other conceivable end that He could have had in view in coming into such a place as the world except to deal with sinners, of which the world consists. He might indeed have come to judge the world; and in contrast with that the emphasis falls on the word "to save." But He could not conceivably, being what He was, the Holy One and the just, have come to such a place as the world is - the seat of shame and evil - save to deal with sinners. The essence of the whole declaration, therefore, is found in the joyful cry that it was specifically to save sinners that Christ Jesus came into this world of evil. And if that be true - simply true, broadly true, true just as it stands, and in all the, reach of its meaning - why, then, from that alone we may learn what man is and what God is - what Christ Jesus is and His work in this world of ours - what hopes may illumine our darkness here below, and what joys shall be ours when this darkness passes away.

It would naturally be impossible for us to dip out all the fullness of such a great declaration in a half-hour's meditation. It will be profitable for us, accordingly, to confine ourselves to bringing as clearly before us as may prove to be practicable two or three of its main implications. And may God the Holy Spirit help us to read it aright and to apply its lessons to our souls' welfare!

First of all, then, let us observe that this "faithful saying" takes us back into the counsels of eternity and reveals to us the ground, in the decree of God, for the gift of His Son to the world, and the end sought to be obtained by His entrance into the likeness of sinful flesh. "Faithful is the saying;" says the apostle, "and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world in order to save sinners." That is to say, the occasion of the incarnation is rooted in sin, and, the end of it is found in salvation from sin. And that is to say again, translating these facts into the terms of the decree, that the determination of God to send His Son and the determination of the Son to come into the world are grounded, in the counsel of God, on the contemplated fact of sin, and have as their design to provide a remedy for sin.

This, it need hardly be said, is in accordance with the uniform representation of Scripture. Scripture always speaks of the incarnation as the hinge of a great remedial scheme. Our Lord Himself, in language closely parallel to that before us, says, "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." And everywhere in Scripture the incarnation is conceived distinctly, if we may be permitted the use of these technical terms, soteriologically rather than ontologically, or even cosmologically. Under the guidance of Scripture, and preeminently of our present passage, therefore, we must needs deny that the proximate account of the incarnation is to be sought either ontologically or ethically in God, or in the nature of the Logos, or in the idea of creation, or in the character of man as created; and affirm that it is to be found only in the needy condition of man as a sinner before the face of a holy and loving God.

The incarnation, to be sure, is so stupendous an event that it is big with consequences, and reaches out on every side to relations that may seem at first glance even to stand in opposition to its fundamental principle. It is certainly true that all that is, is the product of God's power, and, as coming from Him, has somewhat of God in it and may be envisaged by us as a vehicle of the Divine. And surely it is only true that He has imprinted Himself on the works of His hands; and that, as the Author of all, He will not be content with the product of His power until it has been made to body forth all His perfections; and it cannot be wrong to say that so far as we can see it is only in an incarnation that He could manifest Himself perfectly to His creatures. A similar remark will apply naturally at once also to the Logos as the Revealer, who must be supposed to desire to make known to man all that God is, and preeminently His love, which undoubtedly lies at the basis of the incarnation, and may be properly represented as its very principle and impulsive cause. Nor can it be doubted that only in his union with God in Christ, which is the result of Christ's incarnated work, does man reach his true destiny - the destiny designed for him from the beginning of the world, and without which in prospect, so far as we can see, man would never have been created at all.

But it is of the utmost importance for us to observe that these truths, great and fundamental as they are, yet do not penetrate to the basal fact as to the end of the incarnation. Nor can they safely be treated atomistically as so many independent truths unrelated to one another or to the real principle of the incarnation. They rather form parts of one complete sphere of truth whose center lies in the soteriological incarnation of the Bible. And only as each finds its proper place as a segment of this sphere of truth formed about that great fact does it possess validity, or even attain the height of its own idea. It is only, for example, because Christ Jesus came to save sinners that all that God is is manifested in Him, that love finds its completest exhibition in Him, that through Him at last man attains his primal destiny. Eliminate sin as the proximate occasion and redemption as the prime end of the incarnation, and none of these other effects will follow from it at all, or at least not in the measure of their rights. So that it is only true to say that in order that each may attain its proper place in our contemplation, as we seek to gather together the ends served by the incarnation, it is essential that they be conceived not apart from salvation from sin, the primary end of the incarnation, as its substitutes, but along with it, as its complements.

But this great declaration not only takes us back into the counsels of the eternal God that we may learn what from the ages of ages He purposed for sinful man, but it also throws an intense emphasis on the nature of the work which the incarnate Son of God came to perform. We require only to adjust the stress that falls on the separate words a little more precisely to catch a new meaning in its inspiring words, which declare that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

What, after all, are we looking for in Christ? Perhaps very divergent replies might be returned to this query did we but probe our hearts deeply enough and question our hopes resolutely enough. At all events, from the very earliest ages of Christianity, men have approached Him with very varied needs prominent in their minds, and have sought in Him satisfaction for very diverse necessities. They have felt the need of a teacher, an example, a revealer of God, a manifestation of the Divine love, an unveiling of the mysteries of the spiritual world, or of the life that lies beyond the grave. Or they have felt the need of a protector, a strong governor on whose arm they could rest, a bulwark against the evils of this life, and a tower of strength for their support and safety, whether in this life or in that to come. Or they have felt the need of a ransom from sin, of a redeemer, an expiation, a reconciler with God, a sanctifier. In the opulent provision for all that man can require made in the work of the Son of man, we can find all this, and more, in Him. But it makes every difference where, amid the rich profusion of His mercies, we discover the center of gravity of the benefits conferred on us, and what we ascribe more to the periphery.

In particular, in the first age of the gospel declaration it appealed to men more especially along three lines of deeply felt needs. Some, oppressed chiefly by their sense of the ignorance of God and of spiritual realities in which they had languished in the days of their heathendom, and dazzled by the light of the glorious gospel He brought to them, looked to Christ most eagerly as the Logos, the great Revealer, who had brought the knowledge of God to them, and with the knowledge of God the knowledge of themselves also as the sons of God. Others, oppressed rather by the miseries of life, turned from the dreadful physical and social conditions in which humanity itself had nearly been ground out of them, to hail in Christ the founder of a new social order; and permitted their quickened hopes to play almost exclusively round the promises of the kingdom He had come to establish and the joys it would bring. We call the one class "Gnostics" and the other "Chiliasts"; and by the very attribution to them of these party names indicate our clear perception that in neither of these channels did the great stream of Christian faith run. For from the beginning it has been true of Christians at large that the evils they have looked to Christ primarily to be relieved from have been neither intellectual nor social, but rather distinctly moral and spiritual. There have arisen from time to time one-sided and insufficient modes of expressing even this deeper longing and truer trust in Christ. Early Christians were apt, for example, to speak of themselves too exclusively as under bondage to Satan, and to look to Christ as a ransom to Satan for their release. But, however strangely they may now and again have expressed themselves, the essence of the matter lay clearly revealed in their thought - this, namely, in the words of the text, that Christ Jesus had come into the world to save sinners; that sin is the evil from which we need deliverance, and that it was to redeem from sin that the Son of God left His throne and companied with wicked men for a season.

The two thousand years of Christian life that have been lived since the gospel of salvation was brought into the world have not availed to eliminate from His Church these insufficient conceptions of our Lord's work. Even in this twentieth century of ours there still exist Christian intellectualists as extreme as any Gnostic of old: men who look to Christ for nothing but instruction, manifestation, revelation, teaching, example; and who still discover the essence of Christianity in the higher and better knowledge it brings of what is true and good and beautiful. And by their side there still exist to-day Christian socialists as extreme as any Chiliast of old: men whose whole talk is of the amelioration of life brought about by Christ, of the salvation of society, of the establishment on Christian principles of a new social order and the upbuilding of a new social structure; and whose prime hope in Christ is for the relief of the distresses of life and the building up of a kingdom of well-being in the world.

We shall be in no danger, of course, of neglecting the truth that is embodied in the intellectualistic and the socialistic gospels. Christ is our Prophet and our King. He did come to make us know what God is, and what His purposes of mercy are to men; and where the light of that knowledge is shut out from men's sight how great is the darkness and how great is the misery of that darkness! He is our wisdom, our teacher beyond compare. So far from minimizing either the extent or the value of His revelations, we must rather acknowledge that we cannot magnify them enough. And Christ did come to implant in human society a new principle of social health and organization, and the leaven which He has thus imbedded in the mass is working, and is destined to continue to work, every conceivable improvement in the structure of society until the whole is leavened. In a word, Christ did come to found a kingdom, and in that kingdom men shall dwell together in amity and peace, and love shall be its law, and happiness its universal condition. It is with no desire to minimize the intellectual and social blessings that Christ has brought the world, therefore, that we would insist that the center of His work lies elsewhere. We all the more heartily hail Him as our Prophet and our King, that we must insist that He is also, and above all, our Priest. He has saved us from ignorance; He has saved us from pain; but these are not the evils on which the hinge of His saving work turns. Above all and before all He has saved us from sin. "Faithful is the saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners."

And it is only by saving us from sin, we must further remark, that He saves us from ignorance and from misery. There is a high and true sense, valid here too, in the saying that faith precedes reason: that it is only he that is in Christ Jesus who can know God and acquire any effective insight into spiritual truth. And equally in that other maxim that the regeneration of the individual is the condition of the regeneration of society: that it is only he that is in Christ Jesus who can have added to him even these lesser benefits. Apart from the central salvation from sin, knowledge can but puff up, and society at best is a whited sepulchre, full of dead men's bones. And it is only by His prime work of saving from sin - that sin which is the root of all our ignorance and of all our bitterness alike - that He makes the tree good that its fruits may be good also. In the penetrating declaration of our text, therefore, we perceive the heart of Christianity uncovered for us. The saying that it was to save sinners that Christ Jesus came into the world is a faithful one, and worthy of all acceptation. And that means that it is not the primary function of Christianity in the world to educate men, though we shall not get along without teaching; or to ameliorate their physical and social condition, though we shall not get along without charity; but to proclaim salvation from sin. It exists in the world not for making men wise, nor for making them comfortable, but for saving them from sin. That done and all is done - each result following in its due course. That not done, and nothing is done. All the wisdom of the ages, all the delights of life, are of no avail so long as we are oppressed with sin. The core of the gospel is assuredly that Christ Jesus came to save sinners.

We need, however, once more to adjust the emphasis more precisely in order to gain the whole message of our passage. What Paul declares to be a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, is that Christ Jesus came to save sinners. Put the emphasis now on the one word "save" - Christ Jesus came to save sinners.

Not, then, merely to prepare salvation for them; to open to them a pathway to salvation; to remove the obstacles in the way of their salvation; to proclaim as a teacher a way of salvation; to introduce as a ruler conditions of life in which clean living becomes for the first time possible; to bring motives to holy action to bear upon us; to break down our enmity to God by an exhibition of His seeking love; to manifest to us what sin is in the sight of God, and how He will visit it with His displeasure. All these things He undoubtedly does. But all these things together touch but the circumference of His work for man. Under no interpretation of the nature or reach of His work can it be truly said that Christ Jesus came to do these things. For that we must penetrate deeper, and say with the primitive Church, in this faithful saying commended to us by the apostle, that Christ Jesus came to save sinners.

We must take the great declaration in the height and depth of its tremendous meaning. Jesus did all that is included in the great word "save." He did not come to induce us to save ourselves, or to help us to save ourselves, or to enable us to save ourselves. He came to save us. And it is therefore that His name was called Jesus - because He should save His people from their sins. The glory of our Lord, surpassing all His other glories to usward, is just that He is our actual and complete Saviour; our Saviour to the uttermost. Our knowledge, even though it be His gift to us as our Prophet, is not our saviour, be it as wide and as deep and as high as it is possible to conceive. The Church, though it be His gift to us as our King, is not our saviour, be it as holy and true as it becomes the Church, the bride of the Lamb, to be. The reorganized society in which He has placed us, though it be the product of His holy rule over the redeemed earth, is not our saviour, be it the new Jerusalem itself, clothed in its beauty and descended from heaven. Nay, let us cut more deeply still. Our faith itself, though it be the bond of our union with Christ through which we receive all His blessings, is not our saviour. We have but one Saviour; and that one Saviour is Jesus Christ our Lord. Nothing that we are and nothing that we can do enters in the slightest measure into the ground of our acceptance with God. Jesus did it all. And by doing it all He has become in the fullest and widest and deepest sense the word can bear - our Saviour. For this end did He come into the world-to save sinners; and nothing short of the actual and complete saving of sinners will satisfy the account of His work given by His own lips and repeated from them by all His apostles.

It is in this great fact, indeed, that there lies the whole essence of the gospel. For let us never forget that the gospel is not good advice, but good news. It does not come to us to make known to us what we must do to earn salvation for ourselves, but proclaiming to us what Jesus has done to save us. It is salvation, a completed salvation, that it announces to us; and the burden of its message is just the words of our text - that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

Now Paul could never write of this tremendously moving truth in a cold and dry spirit. There was nothing that so burned in his soul as his profound sense of his indebtedness to his Redeemer for his entire salvation. We cannot be surprised, therefore, to note that as he repeats these great words, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners," his thought reverts at once to his own part in this great salvation; and he cries aloud with swelling heart, "Of whom I am chief." Says an old Anglican writer: "The apostle applies the worst word in the text to himself." But we must punctually note, Paul is not, therefore, boasting of his sin. He is, on the contrary, glorying in his salvation. If Christ came just to save sinners, he says, in effect, Why that means me; for that is what I am. There is a sense, then, no doubt, in which he can be said to be glad that he can claim to be a sinner. Not because he delights in wickedness, but because that places him within the reach of the mission of Him who Himself declared that He came not to call the righteous, but sinners. Paul knows there is deep-seated evil within him; he knows his own inability to remedy it - for does not that long life of legalistic struggle, when after the straitest sect of his religion he lived a Pharisee, witness to his agonizing efforts to heal his deadly hurt? In Christ Jesus, who came to save sinners, he sees the one hope of sinners like himself; and with deep revulsion of feeling he takes his willing place among sinners that he may take his place also among saved sinners. His only comfort in life and death is found in the fact that Christ Jesus came just to save sinners.

Brethren, it is there only also that our comfort can be found, whether for life or for death. Perhaps even yet we hardly know, as we should know, our need of a saviour. Perhaps we may acknowledge ourselves to be sinners only in languid acquiescence in a current formula. Such a state of self-ignorance cannot, however, last for ever. And some day - probably it has already come to most of us - some day the scales will fall from our eyes, and we shall see ourselves as we really are. Ah, then, we shall have no difficulty in placing ourselves by the apostle's side, and pronouncing ourselves, in the accents of the deepest conviction, the chief of sinners. And, then, our only comfort for life and death, too, will be in the discovery that Christ Jesus came into the world just to save sinners. We may have long admired Him as a teacher sent from God, and have long sought to serve Him as a King re-ordering the world; but we shall find in that great day of self-discovery that we have never known Him at all till He has risen upon our soul's vision as our Priest, making His own body a sacrifice for our sin. For such as we shall then know ourselves to be, it is only as a Saviour from sin that Christ will suffice; and we will passionately make our own such words as these that a Christian singer has gut into our mouths: -

"I sought thee, weeping, high and low,

I found Thee not; I did not know

I was a sinner-even so,

I missed Thee for my Saviour.

"I saw Thee sweetly condescend

Of humble men to be the friend,

I chose Thee for my way, my end,

But found Thee not my Saviour,

"Until upon the cross I saw

My God, who died to meet the law

That man had broken; then I saw

My sin, and then my Saviour.

"What seek I longer? let me be

A sinner all my days to Thee,

Yet more and more, and Thee to me

Yet more and more my Saviour.

* * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * *

"Be Thou to me my Lord, my Guide,

My Friend, yea, everything beside;

But first. last, best, whate'er betide

Be Thou to me my Saviour!"

IMITATING THE INCARNATION

PHILIPPIANS 2:5–8:—Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man. He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

"CHRIST our Example." After "Christ our Redeemer," no words can more deeply stir the Christian heart than these. Every Christian joyfully recognizes the example of Christ, as, in the admirable words of a great Scotch commentator, a body "of living legislation," as "law, embodied and pictured in a perfect humanity." In Him, in a word, we find the moral ideal historically realized, and we bow before it as sublime and yearn after it with all the assembled desires of our renewed souls.

How lovingly we follow in thought every footstep of the Son of Man, on the rim of hills that shut in the emerald cup of Nazareth, on the blue marge of Gennesaret, over the mountains of Judea, and long to walk in spirit by His side. He came to save every age, says Irenæus, and therefore He came as an infant, a child, a boy, a youth, and a man. And there is no age that cannot find its example in Him. We see Him, the properest child that ever was given to a mother's arms, through all the years of childhood at Nazareth "subjecting Himself to His parents." We see Him a youth, labouring day by day contentedly at His father's bench, in this lower sphere, too, with no other thought than to be "about His father's business." We see Him in His holy manhood, going, "as His custom was," Sabbath by Sabbath, to the synagogue,—God as He was, not too good to worship with His weaker brethren. And then the horizon broadens. We see Him at the banks of Jordan, because it became Him to fulfil every righteousness, meekly receiving the baptism of repentance for us. We see Him in the wilderness, calmly rejecting the subtlest trials of the evil one: refusing to supply His needs by a misuse of His divine power, repelling the confusion of tempting God with trusting God, declining to seek His Father's ends by any other than His Father's means. We see Him among the thousands of Galilee, anointed of God with the Holy Ghost and power, going about doing good: with no pride of birth, though He was a king; with no pride of intellect, though omniscience dwelt within Him; with no pride of power, though all power in heaven and earth was in His hands; or of station, though the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in Him bodily; or of superior goodness or holiness: but in lowliness of mind esteeming every one better than Himself, healing the sick, casting out devils, feeding the hungry, and everywhere breaking to men the bread of life. We see Him everywhere offering to men His life for the salvation of their souls: and when, at last, the forces of evil gathered thick around Him, walking, alike without display and without dismay, the path of suffering appointed for Him, and giving His life at Calvary that through His death the world might live.

"Which of you convinceth Me of sin?" is too low a question. Who can find in all His life a single lack, a single failure to set us a perfect example? In what difficulty of life, in what trial, in what danger or uncertainty, when we turn our eyes to Him, do we fail to find just the example that we need? And if perchance we are, by the grace of God, enabled to walk with Him but a step in the way, how our hearts burn within us with longing to be always with Him,—to be strengthened by the almighty power of God in the inner man, to make every footprint which He has left in the world a stepping-stone to climb upward over His divine path. Do we not rightly say that next to our longing to be in Christ is our corresponding longing to be like Christ; that only second in our hearts to His great act of obedience unto death by which He became our Saviour, stands His holy life in our world of sin, by which He becomes our example?

Of course our text is not singular in calling upon us to make Christ our example. "Be ye imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ Jesus," is rather the whole burden of the ethical side of Paul's teaching. And in this, too, he was but the imitator of his Lord, who pleads with us to "learn of Him because He is meek and lowly in heart." The peculiarity of our present passage is only that it takes us back of Christ's earthly life and bids us imitate Him in the great act of His incarnation itself. Not, of course, as if the implication were that we were equal with Christ and needed to stoop to such service as He performed. "Why art thou proud, O man?" Augustine asks pointedly. "God for thee became low. Thou wouldst perhaps be ashamed to initiate a lowly man; then at least imitate the lowly God. The Son of God came in the character of man and was made low.… He, since He was God, became man: do thou, O man, recognize that thou art man. Thy entire humility is to know thyself." The very force of the appeal lies, in a word, in the infinite exaltation of Christ above us: and the mention of the incarnation is the apostle's reminder to us of the ineffable majesty which was by nature His to whom he would raise our admiring eyes. Paul prises at our hearts here with the great lever of the deity of our exemplar. He calls upon us to do nothing less than to be imitators of God. "What encouragement is greater than this?" cries Chrysostom, with his instinctive perception of the motive-springs of the human heart. "Nothing arouses a great soul to the performance of good works so much as learning that in this it is likened to God." And here, too, Paul is but the follower of his Lord: "Be ye merciful, as your Father which is in heaven is merciful," are words which fell from His divine lips, altogether similar in their implication to Paul's words in the text: "Let it be this mind that is in you, which also was in Christ Jesus." It is the spirit which animated our Lord in the act of His incarnation which His apostle would see us imitate. He would have us in all our acts to be like Christ, as He showed Himself to be in the innermost core of His being, when He became poor, He that was rich, that we by His poverty might be made rich.

We perceive, then, that the exhortation of the apostle gathers force for itself from the deity of Christ, and from the nature of the transaction by which He, being God, was brought into this sphere of dependent, earthly life in which we live by nature. It is altogether natural, then, that he sharpens his appeal by reminding his readers somewhat fully who Christ was and what He did for our salvation, in order that, having the facts more vividly before their minds, they may more acutely feel the spirit by which He was animated. Thus, in a perfectly natural way, Paul is led, not to inform his readers but to remind them, in a few quick and lively phrases which do not interrupt the main lines of discourse but rather etch them in with a deeper colour, of what we may call the whole doctrine of the Person of Christ. With such a masterly hand, or let us rather say with such an eager spirit and such a loving clearness and firmness of touch, has he done this, that these few purely incidental words constitute one of the most complete statements of an essential doctrine to be found within the whole compass of the Scriptures. Though compressed within the limits of three short verses, it ranks in fulness of exposition with the already marvellously concise outline of the same doctrine given in the opening verses of the Gospel of John. Whenever the subtleties of heresy confuse our minds as we face the problems which have been raised about the Person of our Lord, it is pre-eminently to these verses that we flee to have our apprehension purified, and our thinking corrected. The sharp phrases cut their way through every error: or, as we may better say, they are like a flight of swift arrows, each winged to the joints of the harness.

The golden-mouthed preacher of the ancient Church, impressed with this fulness of teaching and inspired himself to one of his loftiest flights by the verve of the apostle's crisp language, pictures the passage itself as an arena, and the Truth, as it runs burning through the clauses, as the victorious chariot dashing against and overthrowing its contestants one after the other, until at last, amid the clamour of applause which rises from every side to heaven, it springs alone towards the goal, with coursers winged with joy sweeping like a single flash over the ground. One by one he points out the heresies concerning the Person of Christ which had sprung up in the ancient Church, as clause by clause the text smites and destroys them; and is not content until he shows how the knees of all half-truths and whole falsehoods alike concerning this great matter are made by these searching words to bow before our Saviour's perfect deity, His complete humanity, and the unity of His person. The magic of the passage has lost none of its virtue with the millennium and a half which has fled by since John Chrysostom electrified Constantinople with his golden words: this sword of the Spirit is as keen to-day as it was then, and happy is the man who knows its temper and has the arm to wield it. But we must not lose ourselves in a purely theological interest with such a passage before us. Rather let us keep our eyes, for this hour, on Paul's main purpose, and seek to feel the force of the example of Christ as he here advances it, for the government of our lives. But to do this, as he points it with so full a reference to the Person of Christ, following him we must begin by striving to realize who and what our Lord was, who set us this example.

Let us observe, then, first, that the actor to whose example Paul would direct our eyes, is declared by him to have been no other than God Himself. "Who was before in the form of God," are his words: and they are words than which no others could be chosen which would more explicitly or with more directness assert the deity of the person who is here designated by the name of Christ Jesus. After the wear and tear of two thousand years on the phrases, it would not be surprising if we should fail to feel this as strongly as we ought. Let us remember that the phraseology which Paul here employs was the popular usage of his day, though first given general vogue by the Aristotelian philosophy: and that it was accordingly the most natural language for strongly asserting the deity of Christ which could suggest itself to him. As you know, this mode of speech resolved everything into its matter and its form,—into the bare material out of which it is made, and that body of characterizing qualities which constitute it what it is. "Form," in a word, is equivalent to our phrase "specific character." If we may illustrate great things by small, we may say, in this manner of speech, that the "matter" of a sword, for instance, is steel, while its "form" is that whole body of characterizing qualities which distinguish a sword from all other pieces of steel, and which, therefore, make this particular piece of steel distinctively a sword. In this case, these are, of course, largely matters of shape and contour. But now the steel itself, which constitutes the matter of the sword, has also its "matter" and its "form:" its "matter" being metal, and its "form" being the whole body of qualities that distinguish steel from other metals, and make this metal steel. Going back still a step, metal itself has its "matter" and "form;" its "matter" being material substance and its "form" that body of qualities which distinguish metallic from other kinds of substance. And last of all, matter itself has its "matter," namely, substance, and its "form," namely, the qualities which distinguish material from spiritual substance, and make this substance what we call matter. The same mode of speech is, of course, equally applicable to the spiritual sphere. The "matter" of the human spirit is bare spiritual substance, while its "form" is that body of qualities which constitute this spirit a human spirit, and in the absence of which, or by the change of which, this spirit would cease to be human and become some other kind of spirit. The "matter" of an angel, again, is bare spiritual substance, while the "form" is the body of qualities which make this spirit specifically an angel. So, too, with God: the "matter" of God is bare spiritual substance, and the "form" is that body of qualities which distinguish Him from all other spiritual beings, which constitute Him God, and without which He would not be God. What Paul asserts then, when he says that Christ Jesus existed in the "form of God," is that He had all those characterizing qualities which make God God, the presence of which constitutes God, and in the absence of which God does not exist. He who is "in the form of God," is God.

Nor is it without significance that, out of the possible modes of expression open to him, Paul was led to choose just this mode of asserting the deity of our Lord. His mind in this passage was not on the bare divine essence; it was upon the divine qualities and prerogatives of Christ. It is not the abstract conception that Christ is God that moves us to our deepest admiration for His sublime act of self-sacrifice: but rather our concrete realization that He was all that God is, and had all that God has,—that God's omnipotence was His, His infinite exaltation, His unapproachable blessedness. Therefore Paul is instinctively led to choose an expression which tells us not the bare fact that Christ was God, but that He was "in the form of God,"—that He had in full possession all those characterizing qualities which, taken together, make God that all-holy, perfect, all-blessed being which we call God. Thus the apostle prepares his readers for the great example by quickening their apprehension not only of who, but of what Christ was.

Let us note, then, secondly, that the apostle outlines for us very fully the action which this divine being performed. "He took the form of a servant by coming into the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming subject even unto death, and that the death of the cross." There is no metamorphosis of substance asserted here: the "form of God" is not said to have been transmuted into the "form of a servant"; but He who was "in the form of God" is declared to have taken also to Himself "the form of a servant." Nor is there, on the other hand, any deceptive show of an unreal humiliation brought before us here: He took, not the appearance, mere state and circumstances, or mere work and performance, but veritably "the form of a servant,"—all those essential qualities and attributes which belong to, and constitute a being "a servant." The assumption involved the taking of an actually servile nature, as well as of a subordinate station and a servant's work. And therefore it is at once further explained in both its mode and its effects. He took the form of a servant "by coming into the likeness of men:" He did not become merely a man, but by taking the form of a servant He came into a state in which He appeared as man. His humanity was real and complete: but it was not all,—He remained God in assuming humanity, and therefore only appeared as man, not became only man. And by taking the form of a servant and thus being found in fashion as a man, He became subject to obedience,—an obedience pressed so far in its humiliation that it extended even unto death, and that the shameful death of the cross. Words cannot adequately paint the depth of this humiliation. But this it was,—the taking of the form of a servant with its resultant necessity of obedience to such a bitter end,—this it was that He who was by nature in the form of God,—in the full possession and use of all the divine attributes and qualities, powers and prerogatives,—was willing to do for us.

Let us observe, then, thirdly, that the apostle clearly announces to us the spirit in which our Lord performed this great act. "Although He was in the form of God, He yet did not consider His being on an equality with God a precious prize to be eagerly retained, but made no account of Himself, taking the form of a servant." It was then in a spirit of pure unselfishness and self-sacrifice, that looked not on its own things but on the things of others, that under the force of love esteemed others more than Himself,—it was in this mind: or, in the apostle's own words, it was as not considering His essential equality with God as a precious possession, but making no account of Himself,—it was in this mind, that Christ Jesus who was before in the form of God took the form of a servant. This was the state of mind that led Him to so marvellous an act,—no compulsion from His Father, no desires for Himself, no hope of gain or fear of loss, but simple, unselfish, self-sacrificing love.

Now it is not to be overlooked that some of the clauses the meaning of which we have sought to fathom, are differently explained among expositors. Nevertheless, although I have sought to adduce them so as to bring out the apostle's exact meaning, and although I believe that his appeal acquires an additional point and a stronger leverage when they are thus understood, it remains true that the main drift of the passage is unaffected by any of the special interpretations which reasonable expositors have put upon the several clauses. These divergent expositions do seriously affect our doctrine of the Person of Christ. In particular, all the forms of the popular modern doctrine of kenosis or exinanition, which teaches that the divine Logos in becoming man "emptied Himself," and thus, that the very God in a more or less literal sense contracted Himself to the limits of humanity, find their chief, almost their sole Biblical basis in what appears to me a gratuitously erroneous interpretation of one of these clauses,—that one which the Authorized Version renders, "He made Himself of no reputation," and which I have ventured to render, "He made no account of Himself," that is, in comparison with the needs of others; but which the theologians in question, followed, unfortunately as I think, by the Revised Version, render with an excessive literality, "He emptied Himself," thereby resurrecting the literal physical sense of the word in an unnatural context. We have many reasons to give why this is an illegitimate rendering; chief among which are, that the word is commonly employed in its figurative sense and that the intrusion of the literal sense here is forbidden by the context. But it is unnecessary to pause to argue the point. Whatever the conclusion might be, the main drift of the passage remains the same. No interpretation of this phrase can destroy the outstanding fact that the passage at large places before our wondering eyes the two termini of "the form of God "and" the form of a servant," involving obedience even unto a shameful death; and "measures the extent of our Lord's self-denying grace by the distance between equality with God and a public execution on a gibbet." In any case the emphasis of the passage is thrown upon the spirit of self-sacrificing unselfishness as the impelling cause of Christ's humiliation, which the apostle adduces here in order that the sight of it may impel us also to take no account of ourselves, but to estimate lightly all that we are or have in comparison with the claims of others on our love and devotion. The one subject of the whole passage is Christ's marvellous self-sacrifice. Its one exhortation is, "Let it be this mind that is also in you." As we read through the passage we may, by contact with the full mind and heart of the apostle, learn much more than this. But let us not fail to grasp this, his chief message to us here,—that Christ Jesus, though He was God, yet cared less for His equality with God, cared less for Himself and His own things, than He did for us, and therefore gave Himself for us.

Firmly grasping this, then, as the essential content and special message of the passage, there are some inferences that flow from it which we cannot afford not to remind ourselves of.

And first of these is a very great and marvellous one,—that we have a God who is capable of self-sacrifice for us. It was although He was in the form of God, that Christ Jesus did not consider His being on an equality with God so precious a possession that He could not lay it aside, but rather made no account of Himself. It was our God who so loved us that He gave Himself for us. Now, herein is a wonderful thing. Men tell us that God is, by the very necessity of His nature, incapable of passion, incapable of being moved by inducements from without; that He dwells in holy calm and unchangeable blessedness, untouched by human sufferings or human sorrows for ever,—haunting

The lucid interspace of world and world,

Where never creeps a cloud, nor moves a wind,

Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,

Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,

Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar

His sacred, everlasting calm.

Let us bless our God that it is not true. God can feel; God does love. We have Scriptural warrant for believing, as it has been perhaps somewhat inadequately but not misleadingly phrased, that moral heroism has a place within the sphere of the divine nature: we have Scriptural warrant for believing that, like the old hero of Zurich, God has reached out loving arms and gathered into His own bosom that forest of spears which otherwise had pierced ours.

But is not this gross anthropomorphism? We are careless of names: it is the truth of God. And we decline to yield up the God of the Bible and the God of our hearts to any philosophical abstraction. We have and we must have an ethical God; a God whom we can love, and in whom we can trust. We may feel awe in the presence of the Absolute, as we feel awe in the presence of the storm or of the earthquake: we may feel our dependence in its presence, as we feel our helplessness before the tornado or the flood. But we cannot love it; we cannot trust it; and our hearts, which are just as trustworthy a guide as our dialectics, cry out for a God whom we may love and trust. We decline once for all to subject our whole conception of God to the category of the Absolute, which, as has been truly said, "like Pharaoh's lean kine, devours all other attributes." Neither is this an unphilosophical procedure. As has been set forth renewedly by Andrew Seth, "we should be unfaithful to the fundamental principle of the theory of knowledge" "if we did not interpret by means of the highest category within our reach." "We should be false to ourselves, if we denied in God what we recognize as the source of dignity and worth in ourselves." In order to escape an anthropomorphic God, we must not throw ourselves at the feet of a zoomorphic or an amorphic one.

Nevertheless, let us rejoice that our God has not left us by searching to find Him out. Let us rejoice that He has plainly revealed Himself to us in His Word as a God who loves us, and who, because He loves us, has sacrificed Himself for us. Let us remember that it is a fundamental conception in the Christian idea of God that God is love; and that it is the fundamental dogma of the Christian religion that God so loved us that He gave Himself for us. Accordingly, the primary presupposition of our present passage is that our God was capable of, and did actually perform, this amazing act of unselfish self-sacrifice for the good of man.

The second inference that we should draw from our passage consists simply in following the apostle in his application of this divine example to our human life: a life of self-sacrificing unselfishness is the most divinely beautiful life that man can lead. He whom as our Master we have engaged to obey, whom as our Example we are pledged to imitate, is presented to us here as the great model of self-sacrificing unselfishness. "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus," is the apostle's pleading. We need to note carefully, however, that it is not self-depreciation, but self-abnegation, that is thus commended to us. If we would follow Christ, we must, every one of us, not in pride but in humility, yet not in lowness but in lowliness, not degrade ourselves but forget ourselves, and seek every man not his own things but those of others.

Who does not see that in this organism which we call human society, such a mode of life is the condition of all real help and health? There is, no doubt, another ideal of life far more grateful to our fallen human nature, an ideal based on arrogance, assumption, self-assertion, working through strife, and issuing in conquest,—conquest of a place for ourselves, a position, the admiration of man, power over men. We see its working on every side of us: in the competition of business life,—in the struggle for wealth on the one side, forcing a struggle for bare bread on the other; in social life,—in the fierce battle of men and women for leading parts in the farce of social display; even in the Church itself, and among the Churches, where, too, unhappily, arrogant pretension and unchristian self-assertion do not fail to find their temporal reward. But it is clear that this is not Christ's ideal, nor is it to this that He has set us His perfect example. "He made no account of Himself:" though He was in the form of God, He yet looked not upon His equality with God as a possession to be prized when He could by forgetting self rescue those whom He was not ashamed, amid all His glory, to call His brethren.

Are there any whom you and I are ashamed to call our brethren? O that the divine ideal of life as service could take possession of our souls! O that we could remember at all times and in all relations that the Son of Man came into the world to minister, and by His ministry has glorified all ministering for ever. O that we could once for all grasp the meaning of the great fact that self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice express the divine ideals of life.

And thus we are led to a third inference, which comes to us from the text: that it is difficult to set a limit to the self-sacrifice which the example of Christ calls upon us to be ready to undergo for the good of our brethren. It is comparatively easy to recognize that the ideal of the Christian life is self-sacrificing unselfishness, and to allow that it is required of those who seek to enter into it, to subordinate self and to seek first the kingdom of God. But is it so easy to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that this is to be read not generally merely but in detail, and is to be applied not only to some eminent saints but to all who would be Christ's servants?—that it is required of us, and that what is required of us is not some self-denial but all self-sacrifice? Yet is it not to this that the example of Christ would lead us?—not, of course, to self-degradation, not to self-effacement exactly, but to complete self-abnegation, entire and ungrudging self-sacrifice? Is it to be unto death itself? Christ died. Are we to endure wrongs? What wrongs did He not meekly bear? Are we to surrender our clear and recognized rights? Did Christ stand upon His unquestioned right of retaining His equality with God? Are we to endure unnatural evils, permit ourselves to be driven into inappropriate situations, unresistingly sustain injurious and unjust imputations and attacks? What more unnatural than that the God of the universe should become a servant in the world, ministering not to His Father only, but also to His creatures,—our Lord and Master washing our very feet? What more abhorrent than that God should die? There is no length to which Christ's self-sacrifice did not lead Him. These words are dull and inexpressive; we cannot enter into thoughts so high. He who was in the form of God took such thought for us, that He made no account of Himself. Into the immeasurable calm of the divine blessedness He permitted this thought to enter, "I will die for men!" And so mighty was His love, so colossal the divine purpose to save, that He thought nothing of His divine majesty, nothing of His unsullied blessedness, nothing of His equality with God, but, absorbed in us,—our needs, our misery, our helplessness—He made no account of Himself. If this is to be our example, what limit can we set to our self-sacrifice? Let us remember that we are no longer our own but Christ's, bought with the price of His precious blood, and are henceforth to live, not for ourselves but for Him,—for Him in His creatures, serving Him in serving them. Let all thought of our dignity, our possessions, our rights, perish out of sight, when Christ's service calls to us. Let the mind be in us that was also in Him, when He took no account of Himself, but, God as He was, took the form of a servant and humbled Himself,—He who was Lord,—to lowly obedience even unto death, and that the death of the cross. In such a mind as this, where is the end of unselfishness?

Let us not, however, do the apostle the injustice of fancying that this is a morbid life to which he summons us. The self-sacrifice to which he exhorts us, unlimited as it is, going all lengths and starting back blanched at nothing, is nevertheless not an unnatural life. After all, it issues not in the destruction of self, but only in the destruction of selfishness; it leads us not to a Buddha-like unselfing, but to a Christ-like self-development. It would not make us into

deedless dreamers lazying out a life

Of self-suppression, not of selfless love,

but would light the flames of a love within us by which we would literally "ache for souls." The example of Christ and the exhortation of Paul found themselves upon a sense of the unspeakable value of souls. Our Lord took no account of Himself, only because the value of the souls of men pressed upon His heart. And following Him, we are not to consider our own things, but those of others, just because everything earthly that concerns us is as nothing compared with their eternal welfare.

Our self-abnegation is thus not for our own sake, but for the sake of others. And thus it is not to mere self-denial that Christ calls us, but specifically to self-sacrifice: not to unselfing ourselves, but to unselfishing ourselves. Self-denial for its own sake is in its very nature ascetic, monkish. It concentrates our whole attention on self—self-knowledge, self-control—and can therefore eventuate in nothing other than the very apotheosis of selfishness. At best it succeeds only in subjecting the outer self to the inner self, or the lower self to the higher self; and only the more surely falls into the slough of self-seeking, that it partially conceals the selfishness of its goal by refining its ideal of self and excluding its grosser and more outward elements. Self-denial, then, drives to the cloister; narrows and contracts the soul; murders within us all innocent desires, dries up all the springs of sympathy, and nurses and coddles our self-importance until we grow so great in our own esteem as to be careless of the trials and sufferings, the joys and aspirations, the strivings and failures and successes of our fellow-men. Self-denial, thus understood, will make us cold, hard, unsympathetic,—proud, arrogant, self-esteeming,—fanatical, overbearing, cruel. It may make monks and Stoics,—it cannot make Christians.

It is not to this that Christ's example calls us. He did not cultivate self, even His divine self: He took no account of self. He was not led by His divine impulse out of the world, driven back into the recesses of His own soul to brood morbidly over His own needs, until to gain His own seemed worth all sacrifice to Him. He was led by His love for others into the world, to forget Himself in the needs of others, to sacrifice self once for all upon the altar of sympathy. Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world. And self-sacrifice will lead us, His followers, not away from but into the midst of men. Wherever men suffer, there will we be to comfort. Wherever men strive, there will we be to help. Wherever men fail, there will be we to uplift. Wherever men succeed, there will we be to rejoice. Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our fellows: it means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means entering into every man's hopes and fears, longings and despairs: it means manysidedness of spirit, multiform activity, multiplicity of sympathies. It means richness of development. It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives,—binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours. It means that all the experiences of men shall smite our souls and shall beat and batter these stubborn hearts of ours into fitness for their heavenly home. It is, after all, then, the path to the highest possible development, by which alone we can be made truly men. Not that we shall undertake it with this end in view. This were to dry up its springs at their source. We cannot be self-consciously self-forgetful, selfishly unselfish. Only, when we humbly walk this path, seeking truly in it not our own things but those of others, we shall find the promise true, that he who loses his life shall find it. Only, when, like Christ, and in loving obedience to His call and example, we take no account of ourselves, but freely give ourselves to others, we shall find, each in his measure, the saying true of himself also: "Wherefore also God hath highly exalted him." The path of self-sacrifice is the path to glory.

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MONERGISM BOOKS

The Person and Work of Christ by B. B. Warfield, Copyright © 2023

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Table of Contents

FOREWORD

PART I: THE PERSON OF CHRIST

The Historical Christ

The Person Of Christ According To The New Testament

The Christ that Paul Preached

The Emotional Life of our Lord

Jesus Alleged Confession of Sin

The Humanitarian Christ

The "Two Natures" and Recent Christological Speculation

Christless Christianity

PART II: THE WORK OF CHRIST AS REDEEMER

Redeemer and Redemption

Chief Theories of the Atonement

Modern Theories of the Atonement

Christ our Sacrifice

The New Testament Terminology of Redemption

The Essence of Christianity and the Cross of Christ

APPENDIX SERMONS

The Risen Jesus

The Saving Christ

Imitating the Incarnation