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 ar #0" 63.1920 
 Garvie, Alfred Ernest, 
 
 1945. 
 The Christian doctrine of 
 
 the Godhead 
 
 1861- 
 
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 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
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THE CHRISTIAN. DOCTRINE 
 OF THE GODHEAD 
 
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 otro ee 
 
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 ao 
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THE 
 
 
 
 OF THE GODHEAD 
 OR 
 THE APOSTOLIC BENEDICTION 
 AS THE CHRISTIAN CREED 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED E. GARVIE, M.A. (Oxon.), D.D. (Gras.) 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF HACKNEY AND NEW COLLEGE, LONDON 
 
 
 
 NEW YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
TO THE SACRED MEMORY 
 AND BLESSED PRESENCE 
 
 OF 
 
 A WIFE BELOVED 
 
 Made and Printed in Great Britain. 
 T. and A Constasve Lrp., Printers, Edinburgh. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Tuis volume is an attempt to express in the language 
 of to-day the content of the Christian faith as the 
 writer has apprehended it, not only by the study during 
 many years of the relevant literature, especially ex- 
 amination of and meditation on the Holy Scriptures, 
 but also by personal experience of the truth and 
 grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, because he believes 
 profoundly that pectus facit theologum. He has passed 
 all he has read through his own mind, and has so assimi- 
 lated all that was congenial to, and congruous with 
 his own theological tendency and still more religious 
 disposition, that it is impossible for him now to trace 
 the varied content of his thought to its different 
 sources. The references to literature given in notes 
 represent a very small fraction of his indebtedness 
 to other thinkers. He owes more than he can express 
 to many minds; but he belongs to no school, and calls 
 no man master; and he cherishes the hope that he 
 may have something to say in his own way which he 
 ean claim as his own contribution to the interpretation 
 of the Christian faith to meet the needs of the present 
 hour. He has not only read theologically but also 
 lived religiously through the changes of the last forty 
 years; and thus this volume represents not merely a 
 doctrinal adventure, but a spiritual pilgrimage towards 
 the Zion of Christian vision, in which many a valley 
 of Baca has become a place of springs, and by God’s 
 blessing strength has been added on to strength 
 (Ps. Ixxxiv. 6-7). In the portions of this volume 
 which deal with the teaching of the Holy Scriptures 
 
vi THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 the fewest references to other writers will be found, 
 not because they have been ignored or neglected, 
 but because the writer has done as much independent 
 study of the sources, especially in the New Testament, 
 as he could in the hope that as ‘a scribe, who hath 
 been made a disciple to the Kingdom of heaven’ he 
 may have brought out of this treasure some things 
 new as well as the old (Matt. xii. 52). 
 
 ALFRED E. GARVIE. 
 
 Lonpon, 9th June 1925. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE : : ' : } V 
 INTRODUCTION:: THROUGH FACT TO FAITH .._. 1 
 Inrropuctory : The Predominance of Science To-day : 1 
 
 I. Materiats AND Meruops or Srupy: 
 
 (1) Religion and Contemporary eine 2 
 (2) The Sacred Scriptures . 3 
 (3) The Higher Criticism . ve ; : 4, 
 (4) The ‘ Religious-Historical ’ Method ; ‘ a 
 (5) The Judgments of Value. ‘ : 9 
 (6) Judgments of Value and Judgments of Fact.” 10 
 (7) The Venture and the Verification of Faith Ce oe 
 matism) : : A - 12 
 
 II. THe Mopern APoLocerics : 
 (1) The Challenge of the Ideals, and the Responseof Fact 13 
 (2) The Nature of the Facts needed . 14 
 (3) The Immanent and the Transcendent Deity We 
 (4) The Need of Facts for Faith: (i) Historical Truths 
 and Truths of Reason; (ii) Expression of God in 
 Man; (iii) Its Limitations; (iv) Its Supernatural 
 
 Character; (v) The Principle of Kenosis ar 
 (5) Christ as the Fact for Faith . : . rah! 
 (6) Christian Experience as based on that Fact crit 4 
 
 III. An ATTEMPT AT THE CoNSTRUCTIVE THEOLOGY : 
 (1) Constructive Theology : @ Its Content; (ii) Its 
 
 Srderic: 22 
 (2) The Apostolic Benediction as the Framework of 
 Constructive Theology . : : Nd Kee 
 (3) The Formal and the Material Principle ; NN, 
 (4) A Creed as a Benediction . } : BIA EAS 
 SECTION I 
 THE GRACE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST’ 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ’THE EVANGELICAL TESTIMONY: (4) THE PERSON OF CHRIST 
 
 IntropucTory : (i) The Synoptics; (ii) The Fourth Gospel . 29 
 I. Tue Manuoop or Jesus. Introductory: (i) The Person 
 and the Work; ce The Manhood and the God- 
 
 hood ° . ; Fah eee 
 
 vii 
 
viii THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 PAGE 
 (1) The Liability to Temptation : (i) Temptation not Sin ; 
 (ii) Possibility of Sin; (iii) Value of the Temptation 32 
 (2) The Limitation of Knowledge: (i) Instances of 
 Ignorance Confessed; (ii) Ignorance shared with 
 Contemporaries; (iii) Insight and Foresight ; (iv) 
 Knowledge of Fact and Insight into Truth: the 
 
 Vision of Reality . : : , : mah, 
 (3) The Subjection to Emotion: (i) Individual Emotions ; 
 (ii) Vicarious Emotions. : 42 
 
 Il. Tur Gopnoop or Jesus. Introductory : The Older Proofs : 
 (i) The Pre-existence ; (ii) The Virgin-birth ; (iii) 
 The Fulfilment of Law and Prophecy ; (iv) The Per- 
 formance of Miracles . : } > 43 
 (1) The Moral Character: (i) The Sinlessness and the 
 Virgin-birth ; (ii) The Evidence of the Sinlessness ; 
 (iii) The Perfection of the Character—Humuility, 
 Sympathy or Compassion, Exaltation or Originality, 
 Fidelity or Constancy . ; ; 45 
 (2) The Religious Consciousness: (i) The Synoptic 
 Evidence of the Sonship ; (ii) The Johannine Evi- 
 dence of the Sonship ; (iii) The Johannine Evidence 
 of Pre-existence . ; 53 
 (8) The Mediatorial Sufficiency and Efficacy in revealing 
 
 God and redeeming Man 56 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE EVANGELICAL TESTIMONY: (8) THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 Inrropucrory : The Person and the Work : , ; 59 
 (1) The Teacher: (i) Impression made on Hearers ; (ii) 
 The Content... ; , , 59 
 (2) The Example : (i) The Efficacy of the Example ; (ii) 
 The Value of the Miracles ; 68 
 (3) The Saviourhood : (i) The Messiah; (ii) The Son of 
 Man ; (iii) The Servant of Yahveh ; 77 
 (4) The Lordship: The Resurrection. 87 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE AND INTERPRETATION 
 I. Tur Pautine Tueotoey : Introductory : Two Errors to be 
 avoided : 
 (1) Paul’s Personal Communion with the Risen Lord : (i) 
 Distinctive Features; (ii) Essential Facts ; (iii) 
 This Experience as Faith-Mysticism 94 
 (2) His Theology as an Interpretation of his Experience . 96 
 
 (3) His Christology : (i) The Lordship of Christ as sub- 
 ordinate to God the Father; (ii) The Relation of 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Christ to God and the World ; (iii) The Kenosis ; (iv) 
 The Significance of the Earthly Life of Jesus 
 
 (4) His Soteriology : (i) The Righteousness of God ; (ii) 
 The Propitiation in the Blood of Christ; (iii) The 
 Legal and the Ritual Associations ; (iv) The Blood- 
 shedding and the Blood-sprinkling ; (v) The Re- 
 conciliation with God ; (vi) the Redemption of Man 
 from the Wrath of God, Death as the Penalty of Sin, 
 the Bondage of the Flesh, the Law ; (vii) The Per- 
 manent Elements of Paul’s Thought 
 
 II. Toe JouannineE THEOLOGY : 
 
 (1) The Characteristics of Jesus as presented in the 
 Fourth Gospel : (i) His Certainty of His Relation to 
 God as Father ; (ii) His Assurance of satisfying all 
 Human Needs; (ili) His Intimacy of Relation with 
 His Disciples ; (iv) The Necessity of His Death; (v) 
 The Resurrection and the Holy Spirit; (vi) The 
 Advance of Thought beyond the Common Tradition ; 
 (vii) The Teaching peculiar to the Fourth Gospel 
 
 (2) The Theological Explanations in the Fourth Gospel : 
 (i) Various Comments; (ii) Logos Doctrine ; (iii) The 
 Epistle to the Hebrews as complementary to the 
 Fourth Gospel 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE DOGMATIC FORMULATION REGARDING THE 
 PERSON OF CHRIST 
 
 InrropuctTory : (i) The Separation of the two Doctrines; (ii) The 
 Greek and the Latin Mind; aan The Catholic and 
 the Protestant Type 
 
 I. Tur FormMvuLaTIonN IN THE CREEDS : 
 (1) Historical Summary * (i) The Nicene Creed; (ii) The 
 ‘so-called ’ Nicene Creed; (iii) The Chalcedonian 
 Creed; (iv) The Athanasian Creed 
 (2) The Creeds and Personal Faith : (i) The Contents of 
 the Creeds ; (ii) The Vital Interest of Faith in the 
 Divinity of Christ ; (iii) The Vital Interest of Faith 
 in the Completeness of the Sarre eh and the 
 Unity of the Person ’ ? 
 (3) The Creeds and Historical Fact 
 (4) The Creeds and the Metaphysical Formulae : (i) The 
 most crucial Terms and Phrases; (ii) The Use of 
 the Term dvovs ; (iii) The Four Adverbs ; (iv) The 
 Terms for Person; (v) The use of Terms in the 
 Doctrine of the Trinity and of the Person of Christ 
 I]. Tue Mopirications 1v THE LUTHERAN AND REFORMED 
 ORTHODOXY : 
 (1) The Difference of the Lutheran and the Reformed 
 
 1X 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Q7 
 
 104 
 
 112 
 
 115 
 
 120 
 
 123 
 
 127 
 129 
 
 130 
 
x THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Positions : (i) General Differences ; (ii) Doctrine of 
 the Lord’s Supper _.. 
 
 (2) The Lutheran Christology : (i) The Br entz- Chemnitz 
 Controversy; (ii) The Tiibingen-Giessen Contro- 
 versy ; (iii) Comments 
 
 (3) The Reformed Christology : (i) Calvin on the Doctrine 
 of the Trinity ; HH The Admonitio Christiana ; un 
 Comments 
 
 IJ. Tue Kenoric THEORIES : 
 
 (1) The General Purpose and Character 
 
 (2) The Problems involved . 
 
 (3) Objections to the Solution 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT REGARDING THE 
 WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 Inrropuctory: (i) The Ancient Conception of Salvation; (ii) The 
 Restriction of the Scope of the Work of Christ : (iii) 
 The Conditions of the Doctrinal Development; (iv) 
 The Spirit and the Purpose of the Discussion . 4 
 
 (1) Christ’s Death as a Ransom to the Devil: (i) The 
 Contacts with the New Testament; (ii) The Modifica- 
 tions of Pagan Belief; (iii) The History of the Theory ; 
 (iv) The Estimate of the Theory . ; 
 
 (2) Christ’s Death as Satisfaction to God's Honour : (i) 
 Statement of the Argument of Cur Deus Homo ; 
 (ii) Criticism of the Argument; (iii) Denney’s 
 Estimate 
 
 (3) Christ’s Death as an Expression of God’s Love : (i) 
 Abilard’s View ; (ii) Criticism of the View 
 
 (4) Christ’s Death as owing its Value to God’s Acceptance 
 (Duns Scotus) 
 
 (5) Christ’s Death as Vicarious Endurance of Penalty : 
 (i) Luther’s a eaerns (ii) Calvin’s Doctrine ; (iii) 
 Criticism . : 
 
 (6) Christ’s Death as a ‘ ‘Penal Example’: : (i) The Creed of 
 Arminianism ; (ii) The Governmental or Rectoral 
 Theory ; (iii) Criticism 
 
 (7) Christ’s Death as Satisfaction through His Sympathy 
 with God and Man in His Sacrifice: (i) Jonathan 
 Edwards on Satisfaction ; (ii) Merits of his Treat- 
 ment. 
 
 (8) Christ’s Life and Death as ‘Sample ’ of Redemption : 
 (i) Schleiermacher’s Teaching; (ii) Other Similar 
 Tendencies 
 
 (9) Christ’s Death as an Expiatory Confession of Sins 
 on behalf of Humanity: (i) M‘Leod aie va S 
 Theory ; (ii) Estimate of the Theory ‘ 
 
 PAGE 
 
 136 
 
 1384 
 
 142 
 
 146 
 147 
 148 
 
 150 
 
 153 
 
 156 
 
 161 
 
 163 
 
 164 
 
 170 
 
 17% 
 
 172 
 
 174 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 (10) Christ's Death as the Seal of His Fidelity to His 
 Vocation as the Founder of the Kingdom of God : 
 (i) Ritschl’s Modification of the Doctrine of the three 
 Offices ; (ii) His view of the Relation of the Forgive- 
 ness of Sin to the Work of Christ ; (iii) Estimate of 
 this View . : 
 
 (11) Christ’s Death as ; Love’s Vicarious Sacrifice : (i) 
 Denney on Schleiermacher, M‘Leod rast eat, and 
 Ritschl ; (ii) Denney’s own Statement . 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT ON THE PERSON AND 
 WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 IntropuctTory: (i) The Advantage of the Modern Biblical Position; 
 (ii) The Advantage of the Modern Philosophical 
 Position ; (iii) The Theistic Assumptions: (iv) The 
 Treatment of the two Subjects as one; (v) The 
 Categories to be employed 
 
 (1) The Immanence of God : (i) The Tendency of Patristic 
 Thought ; (ii) The Demand of Thought To-day 
 
 (2) The Evolution of the Universe: (i) The two Concep- 
 tions of Evolution ; (ii) The Kenoszs and the Plerosis 
 in God 
 
 (3) The Personality of Man: (i) Personality in Man; 
 (ii) Objections to ascribing Personality to God met ; 
 (iii) Divine and Human Personality in Christ ; @) 
 The Progressive Incarnation 
 
 (4) Incarnation and Revelation and Redemption 
 
 (5) The Nature and the Effects of Sin: (i) The Nature ; ; 
 (ii) The Effects 
 
 (6) The Nature and the Effects of Forgiveness : (i) The 
 Nature ; (ii) The Effects 
 
 (7) The Sacrifice of Christ and the Forgiveness of Sin: 
 (i) The Exegetical Question ; (ii) The Psychological 
 Question ; (iii) The Theological Question 
 
 (8) The Presence of Christ in His ath to eobiSe His 
 Work in Man ! , ; 
 
 SECTION II 
 THE LOVE OF GOD 
 
 Inrropucrory : (i) Jesus as Revealer of God ; (ii) Mistakes of 
 Theology in the Past; (iii) The Implicit Theology 
 of Jesus; (iv) The Explicit Theology of the Apostles; 
 (v) The Dangers of Literalism and Modernism 
 
 x1 
 
 PAGE 
 
 176 
 
 177 
 
 182 
 
 184; 
 
 189 
 
 191 
 195 
 
 196 
 
 200 
 
 204 
 
 213 
 
 216 
 
xii THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 
 
 I. Tue Conception or Gop: 
 
 (1) God as Personal 
 
 (2) God as Transcendent and Immanent 
 
 (3) The Dynamic and not Static View of God 
 
 (4) The Modern Conception of the paisa of God 
 
 (5) ‘ Ethical Monotheism ’ 
 
 II. Tue Faruernoop or Gop: 
 
 (1) The Fatherhood Permanent and Universal 
 
 (2) The Love of God . 
 
 (3) Communicative and Reproductive Perfection 
 
 (4) God’s Forgiveness 
 
 Il. Tue Dirricu,Ties oF THE ConcePrion : 
 
 (1) Reason and Faith: (i) The Assurance Christ gives ; 
 (ii) The two Objections—Man’s Relative mice 
 cance and the Existence of Evil 
 
 (2) God’s Almightiness and All-Goodness 
 
 (3) The Opposition of Calvinism: (i) Exposition of the 
 Calvinist View of Election ; (ii) The Pauline Argu- 
 ment for Election; (iii) The Argument against 
 Calvinism — Foreordination and Foreknowledge ; 
 (iv) The Assurance of Faith in God’s Fatherhood 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 
 
 I. Creation, ConsERVATION, GOVERNMENT, PROVIDENCE : 
 (1) The Relation of Theology to Science and Philosophy . 
 (2) The Divine Attributes in relation to the World 
 (3) The Divine Kenosts and Plerosis in Creation 
 (4) Evolution as the Mode of Creation . 
 (5) Conservation, Government, Providence 
 (6) Errors regarding Providence : (i) Claim to a ‘ Private’ 
 Providence ; (ii) Expectation of Miracles 
 (7) Miracles in Relation to the Order of Nature 
 (8) Two Questions: (i) Why is Evolution the Mode of 
 Creation ? (ii) Has Time any Reality for God ? 
 II. Tue Nature, DrevELOPpMENT AND Destiny or Man: 
 (1) Biblical Anthropology and Psychology. 
 (2) Man and the Lower Animals: (i) Resemblances and 
 Differences ; (ii) Primitive Man; (iii) Human 
 Progress 
 (3) The Unity of the Human Race 
 (4) Heredity, Environment, and Individuality : (i) Hered- 
 ity ; (ii) Environment ; (iii) Individuality 
 
 PAGE 
 
 220 
 221 
 222 
 223 
 224: 
 
 225 
 227 
 228 
 229 
 
 232 
 234 
 
 236 
 
 24:4 
 245 
 246 
 247 
 249 
 
 250 
 251 
 
 252 
 255 
 256 
 259 
 
 261 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 (5) The Origin of the Soul: (i) Traducianism ; (ii) Theory 
 of Pre-existence ; (iii) Creationism : 
 
 (6) Human Personality: (i) Thought; (ii) Feeling ; 
 (iii) Action; (iv) Society; (v) ena : 
 (vi) Religion 
 
 (7) Human and Divine Personality : 0 Man’s ; Greatness ; 
 (ii) God’s Condescension 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 I. Puysica, Evin or Pain: 
 
 (1) The Sufferings of Animals: (i) General Considera- 
 tions ; (ii) Conclusion of Science . , 
 
 (2) The Sufferings of Man: © Physical ; (ii) Social ; (iii) 
 Individual ; 
 
 (3) The Attitude necessary . 
 
 II. Morar Evin or Sin: 
 
 (1) Definitions : (i) The Two Standards of Judgment ; (ii) 
 Blameworthiness and Guilt ; (iii) Sin as Conscious 
 and Voluntary ; : 
 
 (2) Theories of Origin: (i) The Old Testament and the 
 Apocrypha; (ii) The New Testament ; (iii) Later 
 Teaching ; (iv) Constructive Statement as regards 
 the Child and the Race ; 
 
 (3) God’s Permission and Tolerance of Sin: (i) Permission 
 of the Possibility of Sin; (ii) Justification of that 
 Permission ; (iii) Tolerance of Sin because of the 
 Fulfilment of a Purpose of Redemption 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 
 
 I, REVELATION : 
 (1) The Presence of God in and with Man 
 (2) The Progressiveness of God’s Revelation ; 
 (3) The Media of Revelation : 0) Nature ; (ii) History ; 
 (iii) Conscience . , ‘ 
 (4) The ‘ Special ’ Revelation in the Hebrew Nation : 
 (i) The Selection of the Nation; (ii) The Original 
 Activity of God; (iii) The Providential Dealing of 
 God ; (iv) The Personal Inspiration of the Prophets 
 (5) The ‘ Special ’ Revelation in Christ and the Church . 
 (6) The Inspiration of the Bible: (i) Mistaken Views ; 
 (ii); The True View ; Sy The ee of Mistaken 
 Views 
 
 286 
 
 296 
 
 299 
 
 312 
 
 316 
 317 
 
 319 
 
 324: 
 330 
 
 331 
 
xiv THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 II. RepDEMPTION : 
 (1) God as Redeemer : (i) Nature, History, Experience ; 
 (ii) Christ’s Cross; (iii) All His Self-revelation ; 
 
 (iv) His Eternal Nature 333 
 (2) Redemption by Sacrifice : (i) The Pr eparatory Revela- 
 tion; (ii) The Permanent Reality 335 
 
 (3) The Continuance of the Redemptive Revelation : 
 (i) The Contrast and the aera Eae : e) The 
 Essential Character. 338 
 
 SECTION III 
 THE COMMUNITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 INTRODUCTORY : 
 (1) Importance and Neglect of the Doctrine . P ou) eee 
 (2) The Course of the Discussion . : : . 3843 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 (1) The Old Testament Doctrine of the Spirit of God : 
 
 (i) Soul and Spirit in Man; (ii) The Spirit of God ; 
 
 (iii) The Spirit and the Word and God . 345 
 (2) The New Testament Doctrine of the Holy Spirit : 
 
 (i) The Synoptic Teaching ; (ii) The Johannine 
 
 Teaching ; (iii) The Teaching in Acts; (iv) The 
 
 Pauline Teaching ; (v) The Identification of Christ 
 
 with the Holy Spirit Scott’ S, Denney’ s, and Rees’ 
 
 View 349 
 (3) eine Development of the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit 
 
 in the Church : (i) The Receding of the Doctrine ; (ii) 
 
 Patristic Teaching; (iii) Teaching of the Creeds ; 
 
 (iv) Eastern and Western Tendencies ; (v) Protest- 
 
 ant Teaching. 363 
 (4) Constructive Statement : (i) The Present Opportunity ; 
 
 (ii) The Experimental Basis ; (iii) The Maintenance 
 
 of the Distinction of the Spirit and the Risen Christ ; 
 
 (iv) The Nature of the ee (v) The Functions of 
 
 the Spirit . t : . 869 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 
 
 (1) The Church as a Society: (i) The Unity (ii) ‘ The 
 Community ofthe Spirit’; (iii) ‘ The Body of Christ’ ; 
 (iv) The Ideal and the Actual ; (v) Inspiration and 
 Organisation ; (vi) Catholic and Protestant Tend- 
 ency ; (vii) The Recovery of Unity f a f° 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 (2) The Functions of the Church: (i) The Church’s Com- 
 mission; (ii) The Preaching of the Gospel; (iii) 
 The Administration of the Sacraments; (iv) The 
 Exercise of Discipline ‘ : ; 
 
 (3) The Ministry of the Church: (i) The Historical 
 Development ; (ii) The Constructive Doctrine 
 
 (4) The Church and the Kingdom of God : (i) The ao 
 of the Past ; (ii) The Duty of the Present 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 (1) The Dependence of the Christian Life on the Christian 
 pociety. ))/, 
 
 (2) The Need of Penitence : (i) Christianity as Redemp- 
 tive; (ii) Penitence produced by Love, and not Law; 
 (iii) The Permanence of Penitence 
 
 (3) The Power of Faith: (i) Nature of Faith ; (ii) Humil- 
 ity as its Necessary Accompaniment ; (iii) Prayer as 
 its Necessary Expression 
 
 (4) The Energy of Love : (i) Love to God as AMfotive arid 
 Pattern; (ii) Love to Man as Forgiveness and 
 Sacrifice ; (iii) Love as the Moral ee oe : ey) 
 Love as the Social Bond 
 
 (5) The Endurance of Hope 
 
 (6) The Christian Life as the Work of the Spirit : (i) 
 Regeneration and Sanctification; (ii) Life in the 
 Spirit 
 
 (7) The Pelagian and the Arminian Controversy : (i) 
 The Issues involved ; (ji) The General Conclusion . 
 
 (8) The Christian Life as Truth, Beauty, and Blessedness 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 
 
 (1) Its Antecedents: (i) The Animistic Background ; 
 (ii) The Individual and the National Hope in the Old 
 Testament . : : ; 
 
 (2) The Teaching of Jesus : : (i Personal Immortality ; 
 (ii) The Kingdom of God ; (iii) Second Advent ; (iv) 
 The Eager Expectation really fulfilled . : 
 
 (3) The Teaching of the Apostles : (i) The Apostle Paul ; 
 (ii) The Fourth Gospel 
 
 (4) The Apocalyptic Hope: (i) Transformation of the 
 Apocalyptic Hope ; (ii) Objections to this Trans- 
 formation ; (iii) Plea for this ‘Transformation 
 
 by 
 
 PAGE 
 
 387 
 
 401 
 
 406 
 
 410 
 
 411 
 
 413 
 
 417 
 4.25 
 
 4.26 
 
 432 
 435 
 
 438 
 
 44.0 
 
 443 
 
 4.45 
 
xvi THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (5) Individual Destiny: (i) The Doctrine of Eternal 
 Punishment ; (ii) ‘The Theory of Conditional Im- 
 mortality ; (iii) The Dogmatic Universalism ; (iv) 
 Constructive Statement 
 
 (6) The Relations of the Individual and the Universal 
 Hope: (i) The Individual Participation; (ii) The 
 Completing Triumph ; (iii) The Need of Restatement 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY: FATHER, SON AND 
 HOLY SPIRIT ONE GOD 
 
 1. Tue Economic Triniry ONTOLOGICAL : 
 
 (1) Religion and Reality. 
 (2) Two Objections to the Objectivity of Faith: (i) 
 Agnosticism ; (ii) Psychological Subjectivism 
 (3) The Progressive Apprehension of the Reality in 
 
 Religion: (i) New Testament ; (ii) Christian Church; 
 (iii) Constructive Statement : j 
 (4) The Ontological Inference 
 Il. Tur Uniry or THE ONTOLOGICAL TRINITY : 
 
 (1) Attempts to make the Doctrine intelligible: (i) 
 Unity of Subject and Object; (ii) Unity of Tran- 
 scendence and Immanence of God; (iii) Unity of 
 esse, nosse, and velle (Augustine); (iv) Unity of 
 amans, amatus, and amor mutuus (Augustine); (v) 
 The Orthodox Formula; Three Persons in one Sub- 
 stance 
 
 (2) The Approach through Modern (i) Psychology ; (ii) 
 Sociology . 
 
 (3) The Application to the Doctrine of the Trinity : (i) 
 God as Perfect Social Personality and Perfect 
 Personal car e) God as Perfect ae Aah in 
 ally ut 
 
 PostTscrRIPT . 
 
 InpEx: (i) General ; 
 (ii) Scripture References i 
 
 PAGE 
 
 4.48 
 
 458 
 
 462 
 
 463 
 
 4.66 
 A73 
 
 473 
 A476 
 
 4:78 
 482 
 
 483 
 491 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 
 
 ATTENTION is fixed on, and interest is absorbed in the 
 Social Problem to-day, and especially the economic 
 aspects, as it is generally considered that economic 
 conditions are the most potent factor in determin- 
 ing social relations. The prominence of the economic 
 aspect of the Social Problem, due to the importance 
 of the economic conditions as affecting social rela- 
 tions, can be accounted for by the startling changes 
 in society brought about by what has without any 
 exaggeration been called the Industrial Revolution 
 of the last half of the eighteenth and the nineteenth 
 century. The invention of ever more complicated 
 machinery, the use of steam as motive power, the 
 expansion of markets by geographical discovery, and 
 the improvement of the means of transport in railways 
 and steamships—these are but the most outstanding 
 conditions of this industrial revolution, the most 
 serious social consequence of which has been the 
 change in the relations of Capital and Labour, em- 
 ployer and employed. What in dealing with the 
 Social Problem, however, is often ignored, is that 
 these changes have been due to man’s increased power 
 over physical forces because of his improved know- 
 ledge of natural laws. Behind modern industry and 
 commerce is modern science. Here there has been no 
 less what may be described as a revolution. Not only 
 are men of science discovering the secrets and disclos- 
 ing the wonders of nature, but science is more widely 
 diffused by means of books, magazines, and news- 
 papers than it ever was. The common thought is 
 being influenced by it in often unsuspected ways, and 
 a habit of mind is being formed under its influence, 
 A 
 
2 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 which is by no means confined to those who follow 
 scientific pursuits. Ours is an age in which science 
 is a dominant factor of thought and life; for if the 
 theoretical conclusions modify the one, the practical 
 applications affect the other. 
 
 I 
 
 (1) As religion is not a department of thought and 
 life which can be separated from the rest, and culti- 
 vated in independence, but a quality of all human 
 activity, relating its manifold forms to that which is 
 beyond nature, and above man himself, it is evident 
 that religion cannot be unaffected by the predominant 
 interests and tendencies of any age. Theology cannot 
 talk about * philosophy and vain deceit’ (Col. ii. 8), 
 and ‘ knowledge falsely so called’ (1 Tim. vi. 20) ; 
 it must take account of and adapt its interpretation, 
 commendation, and defence of the beliefs of religion 
 to the current modes of thinking and speaking. While 
 religion lives, moves, and has its being in the regions 
 beyond and above the world, yet it is concerned with 
 the relations of what is in the world with what is 
 beyond and above. As a man thinks of nature and 
 of himself so will he think of God. Even if he have 
 an inheritance of belief from the past, and hold fast 
 to it, he will not hold it, and cannot hold it as those 
 did from whom he inherits. In the Old Testament 
 there is the literature of a progressive revelation of 
 God ; and even if the revelation in Christ be conceived 
 as final, and if the progressive and the final revelation 
 be enshrined in a permanent record, yet the way that 
 record is understood and used will vary as human 
 thought and life vary. ‘Jesus Christ is the same 
 yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever’ (Heb. xiii. 8), 
 and yet to-day we do not interpret Him as He was 
 interpreted yesterday; and in the ‘for ever’ we hope 
 that ‘ we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him even 
 as He is’ (1 John iii. 2), that ‘ we who now know in 
 part shall then know even as we are known’ (1 Cor. 
 xi, 12). As there is individual development, so is 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 3 
 
 there historical progress, and that progress is not in 
 one part alone, but in all the inter-related parts of the 
 whole of man’s activities, although the rate of pro- 
 eress is by no means uniform. The religion of an age, 
 because religion by its very character as relating man 
 to eternal reality is conservative, cannot believe itself 
 subject to change, may lag behind the morality and 
 the science; but in the long run and on the big scale, 
 it is proved that man moves, and moves as a whole. 
 (2) Among the many departments of human in- 
 ~ quiry in which there was a very great increase of 
 knowledge was that of the literature of religion. Not 
 only were the sacred scriptures of the East translated 
 into English, and studied as never before by scholars, 
 but travellers, missionaries, and, in more recent years, 
 anthropologists enlarged our knowledge of the re- 
 ligious beliefs, rites, and customs of the tribes or 
 races without any literature, and the archaeologists 
 are literally unearthing the monuments of the religions: 
 of ancient empires that now are dust. (Assyrian, 
 Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian.) In the psychology of 
 religion the endeavour is made to relate all this grow- 
 ing knowledge to the human soul, its characteristic 
 interests, aspirations, and purposes, and in the philo- 
 sophy of religion to give to it its proper place in the 
 thought and life of man, apprehending its meaning 
 and appraising its worth.1 There are two general 
 conclusions which emerge from all this research and 
 study : (i) Religion is a necessary function of the nature 
 of man. Unless Where he suppresses his impulses, he 
 does relate himself to what is beyond nature, and 
 above himself. (ii) The content of religion, in belief, 
 rite, and custom, is always relative to the total condi- 
 tions of thought and life. Although it be a relation 
 to the eternal, it always assumes temporal forms ; 
 although by it man may reach out to the infinite, it 
 shares his finitude in its expression; although the 
 object of belief and worship be God, God is appre- 
 hended in the likeness of man. Human limitations 
 1 See The Philosophy of Religion, by George Galloway; A Student's Philo- 
 sophy of Religion, by W. K. Wright ; Philosophy and Religion, by H. Rashdall. 
 
4 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and imperfections cleave to that aspiration and 
 endeavour of man by which he seeks and strives to 
 rise above himself. eae 
 
 (3) Can this conclusion be maintained in regard to 
 Christianity ? There are still those who seek to\ 
 defend the verbal inspiration of the Bible, treating | 
 it in all its parts as absolutely authoritative in morals | 
 and religion, nay even, entirely inerrant in history / 
 and science. Other religions make a similar claim 
 for their sacred scriptures, as the Hindu for the 
 Vedas, and the Moslem for the Koran. The Bible - 
 does not. make any such claim for itself. Apostles _ 
 and prophets do claim to speak the Word of the Lord : 
 but nowhere is it claimed that the whole collection — 
 of writings has been divinely dictated. A candid and | 
 yet reverent study of the writings themselves compels 
 the conclusion that, although the Bible is the literature 
 of divine revelation, yet it is human literature, and 
 must be studied as other literature is. The divine 
 communication is affected by the limitations of the 
 human channels. What the much-derided Higher 
 Criticism * does is but to exercise a trained literary 
 and historical judgment on these writings, to discover 
 from their own evidence, and not to accept from any — 
 traditions about them, how questions about date, 
 authorship, occasion, purpose, literary character, and 
 historical value are to be answered. The method of 
 the Higher Criticism is accepted in this volume, as 
 simply an extension with the necessary modifications 
 in a new sphere of inquiry, of these methods of 
 accurate observation, searching scrutiny, and tested 
 generalisation, to which modern science owes its 
 triumphs. With the conclusions of the Higher Criti- 
 cism, which are now generally accepted, it is not at all 
 necessary to deal in detail here, as such conclusions 
 as are assumed in the subsequent discussion will be 
 dealt with in their relevant connection. All that 
 
 1 The Old Testament in the Jewish, Church, by W. Robertson Smith; The 
 Oracles of God, by W. Sanday; The Bible, Its Origin and Nature, by Marcus 
 Dods; Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament, by G. A. 
 Smith ; A Guide tojBiblical Study, by A.S. Peake. 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 5 
 
 need be stated in general terms now is this, that we 
 cannot accept the Bible as a text-book of science, 
 astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, or psycho- 
 logy, as in all these departments the writers were 
 limited to the knowledge of their own age and sur- 
 roundings. Any discussion of the views of the writers 
 on the questions with which science alone is competent 
 to deal belongs to Biblical Theology, and has historical 
 interest, and not theological authority. Constructive 
 Christian theology is not concerned with what any 
 of the writers say upon any of these subjects; still 
 less is it the task of Christian apologetics to recognise 
 a conflict between the science of the Bible and modern 
 science, and to attempt a reconciliation of them. 
 
 (a) In the historical narratives we must recognise 
 that ancient methods differed from modern, and we 
 are at liberty, and it is our duty, to test the trust- 
 worthiness of every document, as to the sources on 
 which it is based, how near to the events recorded 
 are these sources, and how far the-historian is careful 
 in his use of his sources. Thus most scholars would 
 certainly prefer Samuel and Kings to Chronicles as 
 a record of the past. Even in respect of the morals 
 and the religion of the Old Testament we must 
 recognise a progressive revelation of the nature and 
 the purpose of God. The revelation of God is an 
 education of man, for man’s receptivity conditions 
 God’s communicativeness, and yet each human re- 
 ception of a divine communication develops the 
 receptivity. The light had to be tempered to the 
 sight, but the sight grew with the giving of the light. 
 Since God has not made man perfect, but only capable 
 of growing into perfection in fellowship with Himself, 
 there was no other way. The law of divorce was 
 allowed for the hardness of men’s hearts (Matt. xix. 8). 
 Jesus could not utter all the truth because the dis- 
 ciples were not yet ready to receive it (John xvi. 12). 
 We cannot claim finality for the doctrine or the 
 practice recorded in the Old Testament. 
 
 (6) The succession of the prophets developed under 
 the guidance and guardianship of God’s Spirit that 
 
6 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 ethical monotheism which Christianity has inherited. 
 Jesus the Christ our Lord was the consummation of 
 that progressive revelation: He fulfilled law and 
 prophecy by correcting their defects and by completing 
 what had remained incomplete (see Matt. v. 17-48). 
 As the revelation of the Son by the Father was under 
 temporal and local conditions, else He would have 
 been unintelligible and unpractical to His hearers, we 
 must in His words, by moral and spiritual discernment, 
 which is the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, distinguish the 
 permanent and universal truth and the Jewish forms 
 of thought and speech in which it was, and had to be 
 expressed, although it must be added Jesus Himself 
 in His moral conscience and religious consciousness 
 transcended these limitations, and thus in Himself has 
 significance and value for all lands in all ages. He has 
 indeed the words of eternal life (John vi. 68) because He 
 is the Truth of the eternal God ‘ embodied in a tale.’ 
 (c) As regards the New Testament, its authority for 
 us lies in the testimony it bears to, and the interpreta- 
 tion it offers of the person and work of Christ. Its 
 testimony is not due to any theoretical interest, 
 biographical or historical, but to a practical need that 
 men should so know Him as to find in Him the 
 Saviour and the Lord. Its interpretation is not that 
 of abstract philosophy or theology, but of a concrete 
 experience of what He was and did as Saviour and 
 Lord. The literary methods of the age were employed 
 and the religious ideas of the surroundings had an 
 influence; but there was such a guidance and guar- 
 dianship by God’s Spirit that testimony and inter- 
 pretation were then, are now, and still will be adequate 
 to bring sinful men to the forgiving God by the true 
 and living Way in the spirit of adoption. To some 
 of these questions it will be necessary to return here- 
 atter, but meanwhile enough has been said to indicate 
 the standpoint of the writer in regard to the authority 
 of the Holy Scriptures. The late Dr. Marcus Dods 
 in answering a question at a conference said: ‘If 
 you will follow the teaching of this book, it will 
 infallibly lead you to God.’ It is with the Bible as 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH Cin 
 
 the record of God’s approach and appeal to man in 
 grace and man’s response in faith, in Jesus Christ, the 
 Mediator between God and man, that this volume is 
 solely concerned, and the writer finds nothing in the 
 method of the Higher Criticism or its conclusions, 
 generally accepted among scholars, to lower its value, 
 or lessen its significance for that purpose. 
 
 (4) In recent years there has been a further develop- 
 ment in the method of study of the Bible. To the 
 criticism of the sources of the Higher Criticism, the 
 relugious-histortcal method has added two principles, 
 correlation and comparison. Science seeks to cor- 
 relate phenomena by the principle of causality, and 
 by comparing them to illustrate the principle of 
 uniformity; its task is to seek causes and laws. 
 That these two principles are applicable in the sphere 
 of human history must be fully conceded. Its course 
 becomes much more intelligible as we can _ trace 
 connections and resemblances in human activities. 
 But there must be a limitation in the application to 
 human history of these principles which does not 
 obtain in regard to nature. Human personality is an 
 incalculable and inexplicable factor: individuality, 
 liberty, responsibility must be allowed for: the 
 behaviour of men is not as uniform as the behaviour | 
 of atoris;° and event cannot be linkéd to event’ as 
 effect to cause, as rigidly as in natural processes. 
 In human religion especially there enters a factor 
 that baffles scientific manipulation. Man in fellow- 
 ship and as fellow-worker with God cannot be included 
 in the causalities and uniformities of nature. Even 
 if we admitted that God’s activity in nature was 
 rigidly fixed in the order of nature as science knows 
 it, but it is by no means a necessity of rational thought 
 that we should, yet in human history no such in- 
 variability can be asserted. God’s action by His 
 Spirit in His grace is selective of individuals and 
 nations for different functions, so that we cannot 
 affirm uniformity, especially of the great moral 
 and religious personalities. God’s action in man, 
 
 1 See the writer’s The Christian Certainty, chap. iil. 
 
8 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 supremely in those who are charged with a mission 
 and message for Him, so increases the free capacity 
 for action in fulfilment of His purpose, that we cannot 
 assert that the causality of heredity, environment, 
 and circumstance is the measure of their possible 
 achievement. It is assuredly both interesting and 
 rewarding to examine carefully how far Jesus was 
 in His teaching dependent on Jewish apocalyptic, or 
 Paul was in his doctrine of the sacraments affected 
 by the mystery-religions, or John in his interpretation 
 of Christ reproduced the speculations of Philo; but 
 in this study we must not start with the assumption 
 that dependence is to be made as complete as possible, 
 and originality has, as far as can be, to be denied. 
 Again, it is both interesting and rewarding to compare 
 Jesus with Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and to dis- 
 cover the resemblances, the evidence that it is one 
 human nature that is approaching the one divine 
 reality ; but this comparison should not begin with, 
 but, if it can, go on to the assertion that Jesus is 
 only one of the world’s great teachers, so comparable 
 with them, that the Church’s claims for Him are 
 unjustified. Criticism, correlation, and comparison 
 there must be, and it is the timidity of unbelief, and 
 not the courage of faith, that would escape from the 
 application of these tests to Christianity. But what 
 we may insist on is that the tests shall be applied 
 without prejudice or partiality, without any assump- 
 tions as to the credibility of the witnesses, the ex- 
 plicability of the events, or the originality of the 
 persons before all the relevant data have been sub- 
 jected to searching scrutiny; and the assumptions 
 of unbelief have no less to be excluded than those of a 
 faith that has not been fully tested. It is in this spirit 
 of candour and sincerity that the writer desires to 
 approach the treatment of his subject, confident as 
 his Christian experience has made him that Christian- 
 ity need not shun, but may seek the most searching 
 scrutiny. |! 
 
 * See The Originality of the Christian Message, by H. R. Mackintosh, and 
 Living Religions of the East, by Sidney Cave. 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 9 
 
 (5) 'The judgments which can be reached in regard 
 to historical questions are at best probable and not 
 certain, and from these judgments we cannot exclude 
 the personal equation.!. They are not only judgments 
 of fact, but also of value. While there are common 
 grounds of judgment among scholars adequately 
 equipped and properly trained, yet among these 
 there will be differences of judgment regarding the 
 trustworthiness of a literary source, and consequently 
 its historical value. These differences may be due 
 to unconscious bias, to untested assumptions. The 
 philosophy of one scholar may involve a denial of the 
 supernatural, of the possibility of a miracle in any 
 sense; the philosophy of another may make him 
 prepared to consider the evidence without any pre- 
 judice; a third may even hold a philosophy that 
 makes him ready to admit a miracle without much 
 scrutiny. What seems to the writer to be the proper 
 attitude is this: on the one hand, to admit the reality 
 of the supernatural, the immanent relation of God 
 to nature, and the possibility of miracle as an activity 
 of God in nature which, as yet at least, appears in- 
 explicable by physical forces and natural laws as we 
 know them; and on the other hand, to assume that 
 God will not in His activity depart from His usual 
 mode and His usual means without adequate reason, 
 and, accordingly, to examine very closely if the evi- 
 dence for the manifestation of the supernatural in 
 miracle is sufficient to convince. We must try to 
 steer our course between the Scylla of a credulity 
 which accepts any evidence, and the Charybdis of a 
 scepticism which rejects all. Whether the nature of 
 the miracle itself is such as we might expect God 
 as our moral conscience and religious consciousness 
 apprehends Him as being to perform, and whether 
 the occasion for and the purpose of the miracle are 
 such as to be congruous with that conception of 
 God, are questions which only a judgment of value 
 can answer. That an ass should rebuke a prophet 
 (Num. xxii. 28), that an iron axe-head should swim 
 
 1 See The Christian Certainty, chap. vi. 
 
10 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (2 Kings vi. 6), and that a fish should keep alive a 
 prophet in its belly for three days (Jonah 1. 17), are 
 assuredly incredible miracles for an intelligent faith, 
 and the context offers no justification for them. But 
 that He who as Son came to reveal the Father, and 
 as Saviour to redeem men, should not only preach 
 grace in the forgiveness of sins, but act that grace 
 in healing the sick, and even restoring the dead, is an 
 activity so congruous with the nature and the purpose 
 of God that a faith which seeks to be reasonable may 
 scrutinise the evidence without any bias against its 
 trustworthiness, if such it appear. 
 
 (6) This distinction between judgments of fact and 
 judgments of value is one that deserves further con- 
 sideration. (a) In the first place, a judgment of 
 value is not a judgment about the unreal, the imagined, 
 the invented. It is a judgment about reality; it 
 assumes that the object exists, but what is affirmed 
 in the judgment of value is affirmed, not on the ground 
 of sensible evidence, or logical demonstration, or 
 rational consistency, but on the ground of personal 
 valuation—what the object means for the person who 
 makes the judgment of value. (b) This ground cannot 
 be in contradiction of these other grounds; it may be 
 but their complement, giving just that personal con- 
 firmation which may raise probability to certainty. 
 While we may not be able to offer any sensible 
 evidence of God’s existence, yet just as from the 
 speech, and the looks, and the deeds of our fellow- 
 men we infer that they exist as minds that think, 
 hearts that feel, and wills that strive and achieve, so 
 may we infer from the existence, order, and progress 
 of the process of nature that wisdom, love, and power 
 are in that process manifested. It may be possible 
 to interpret the evidence otherwise, and to decline 
 to draw the inference; and yet for most thinkers 
 some form of theism has appeared a highly probable 
 interpretation of and inference from the world as 
 
 1 See The Ritschlian Theology, chap. vi.; Faith and Fact, by Edghill, 
 chaps. v. and vi.; Ritschlianism, by Mozley, chap. v.; Facts and Values, 
 by Halliday, chap. viii. 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 11 
 
 sense presents it and the understanding explains it. 
 (c) A philosophy may show that such a theism gives 
 a rational consistency to all the data of human know- 
 ledge such as no other conception can. The moral 
 conscience, which by its very nature asserts the 
 supremacy of the moral law, or the absoluteness of — 
 the moral ideal, confirms this conclusion. And the 
 religious consciousness brings its testimony to what 
 faith in God has done in enriching experience, forming 
 character, and solving the problems of the world and 
 life. (d) Man has ideals of beauty, truth, holiness, and 
 love, the complementary aspects of perfection, and 
 is persuaded that in their realisation alone can be 
 his blessedness.1. What faith does is to affirm in 
 belief, trust, and submission, in the committal of the 
 whole personality, that there is reality corresponding 
 to these ideals in God; and that because God is, these 
 ideals will be realised in man. ‘ Now faith is the 
 giving substance to (vméoctacis) of things hoped for, 
 the proving or test (€\eyyos) of things not seen’ 
 (Heb. xi. 1). Because faith proves or tests the reality 
 of God, it supports, underpins man’s hope of personal 
 perfection, the realisation of his ideals. It is the 
 judgment of value regarding these ideals, and the 
 God who is their reality and assures man of his 
 realisation of them, that gives faith a confirmation 
 which in such matters sensible evidence, logical 
 demonstration, and rational consistency cannot give. 
 He who does not, or will not, appreciate these values 
 cannot apprehend this assurance. ‘The secret of 
 the Lord is with them that fear Him’ (Ps. xxv. 14). 
 ‘The pure in heart shall see God’ (Matt. v. 8). The 
 judgment of value does not produce although it con- 
 firms the faith. 
 
 (e) We must affirm on the ground of religious history 
 and experience that there is an immediate contact 
 and an intimate communion of man with God. Many 
 would call this mysttctsm,? and under cover of such a 
 
 1 See Faith and its Psychology, by W. R. Inge. 
 2 See Christian Mysticism, by W. R. Inge; Studies in Mystical Religion, by 
 Rufus Jones; The Mystical Element in Religion, by Baron von Hiigel. 
 
12 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 meaning for the term justify many vagaries of thought 
 and life which have been characteristic of men and 
 women claiming to be in an exceptional measure at 
 home, or even one, with God. But surely it is spiritual 
 religion, and need not be described by a term that 
 has misleading associations. A distinction made by 
 Kucken may here be usefully mentioned.!_ There is 
 what he calls universal religion, and there is char- 
 acteristic religion. In universal religion the ideals 
 lead men to assert spiritual reality ; it is characteristic 
 religion which apprehends that reality as personal, 
 as God. His general philosophical standpoint has a 
 close likeness to the position here maintained. A 
 man must develop the spiritual life in himself before 
 he can be assured of not only the subjective spiritual 
 reality in himself, but of such an objective spiritual 
 reality as may in the language of religion be called 
 God. 
 
 (7) As the majority of men rely with greater con- 
 fidence on sensible evidence and logical demonstration, 
 as it requires some philosophical culture to apprehend 
 the rational consistency of a system of thought, as 
 the spiritual life needs nurture and exercise, which 
 most men are not prepared to give, common thinking 
 is largely determined by the first two modes of know- 
 ing, and neglects the second two. With philosophical 
 culture, and its value, if not to the Christian believer, 
 yet to the Christian theologian, we are not meanwhile 
 concerned, but only with religious faith. At first it 
 must seem a bold venture ; but the judgment of value 
 and the sense of the reality of God make it not a 
 rash adventure. Its verification can come only in 
 the course of time: the satisfaction which the re- 
 ligious experience gives, and the power that comes out 
 of it into the moral character and conduct, afford this 
 verification. As the satisfaction is known only to 
 him who has it, although it may be partially shown 
 in his disposition, his joy in the Lord, for others the 
 
 * Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion, p. 269 ; see Rudolf Eucken, his Philosophy 
 and Influence, by Meyrick Booth; An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken’s 
 Philosophy, by W. Tudor Jones. 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH | 13 
 
 verification is most convincingly shown in what the 
 man is made by his faith. Faith energises in love 
 (Gal. v. 6), and is known by its fruits. This is the 
 pragmatic test; the truth about God in Christ works 
 in giving religious satisfaction and moral excellence. 
 But it works because it is believed as truth, as the mind’s 
 apprehension of ultimate reality. It can continue 
 to work only as it is still regarded as truth. Let the 
 suspicion enter that there is no God, or that God is 
 not as He is for Christian faith in Christ, then the joy 
 will be quenched and the power be lost.t An illusion, 
 once discovered, only mocks the heart and weakens 
 the will. The venture of faith, confirmed in the 
 judgement of values, and verified in experience and 
 character, may be enough for some minds, or even 
 for one mind at some times. But even although 
 faith be further supported by the theistic interpre- 
 tation of the world, doubts, fears, and questions 
 may arise. There is much in the world and life 
 to challenge faith, even so confirmed, verified, and 
 supported. , 
 
 II 
 
 (1) Over against the ideals of truth, holiness, and 
 love, and the blessedness which their realisation would 
 bring, there is falsehood, wickedness, hate, and con- 
 sequent misery; over against the theistic interpreta- 
 tion of nature there is pain, disease, death. Can ideas 
 so obscurely expressed in the world, and ideals so 
 partially realised in man, maintain and assert them- 
 selves in face of these facts of man’s experience ? 
 Men to-day clamour for facts, and will not accept 
 ideas or ideals unsupported by facts.2, Neither an 
 idealism which asserts that the real is the rational, 
 nor an optimism which declares that this is the best 
 of all possible worlds, will by reasoning, however 
 consistent and cogent logically it may appear, con- 
 vince, if so many facts of experience challenge the 
 
 1 See Wright’s A Student’s’ Philosophy of Religion, pp. 355-8. 
 2 See The Fact of Christ, by P. Carnegie Simpson. 
 
14 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 argument, and may even in certain moods make 
 materialism or pessimism appear just as plausible 
 interpretations of things as they are. Faith for cer- _ 
 tainty, confidence, constancy needs facts that sustain 
 the argument and confute the challenge. 
 
 (2) What facts can convince that ideals can be 
 realised because God is reality? As these ideals 
 must be realised in human history under the condi- 
 tions of search, struggle, and suffering with the 
 hindrance of falsehood, wretchedness, and hate ever 
 to be overcome, God must be apprehended as present 
 and active in history. The static deity of the philo- 
 sopher who eternally contemplates his own perfection 
 must give place to the dynamic deity who is temporally 
 fulfillmg His purpose in and for men. It is not about 
 the eternal nature of God that sinning, struggling, 
 and suffering men are concerned; it is the temporal 
 purpose of God, and His activity in time to fulfil it, 
 that alone matter to them. Is He a fellow-sufferer 
 with them? are they fellow-workers with Him ? 
 Mr. Wells, in his book God the Invisible King, popular- 
 ised a tendency in theology which is not recent, but 
 may be said to be characteristic of the progressive 
 thought of the nineteenth century, even as the 
 conception of a God who holds aloof from men was 
 characteristic of the eighteenth. While we must be 
 on our guard against sweeping generalisations, and 
 must admit that the thought of an age cannot be 
 described in a phrase or term, yet it may be said with 
 enough justification to make it worth saying that 
 the tendency of the eighteenth century was deistic 
 with an emphasis on God’s transcendence, and the 
 tendency of the nineteenth century pantheistic with 
 the stress on the immanence. The God of Mr. Wells’ 
 thought is immanent in the world process, but not 
 transcendent of it; above and beyond there is an 
 inscrutable power, and God is saving Himself as well 
 as men, and men may help Him in His struggle. 
 Roman Catholic Modernism was based on a philosophy 
 of immanence, and the far less significant and much 
 more restricted New Theology undertook a restate- 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 15 
 
 ment of the Gospel on the basis of the principle of 
 the divine immanence.! 
 
 This tendency in theology is an illustration of what | 
 has already been insisted on, that religion cannot 
 be severed from the whole of life. The hypothesis 
 of evolution was the guiding principle of physical 
 science last century; and a cosmic evolution, if it is 
 to be interpreted theistically, demands not a tran- 
 scendent static but an immanent dynamic God, a God 
 who is present and active in His world. As nature 
 and history are parts of the one process of evolution, 
 creation is historical and history is creative. If the 
 physical universe has reached a stage of relative 
 permanence in respect of its recurring processes, 
 mankind is still in the progressive stage, and God is 
 making man in and through history. Culture, Art, 
 Civilisation, Morals, Religion are all developing, and 
 the individual man is within that development of 
 the race, being himself developed towards personality. 
 For man’s making or marring the temporal process 
 is all-important, and God’s creative, educative, re- 
 demptive activity must be in and by that process. 
 History is no less if even not more important, there- 
 fore, for theology than philosophy; for it is now 
 concerned not with conceiving God’s eternal nature, 
 but with perceiving His temporal purpose. Religion 
 is not the flight of the alone to the Alone—that 
 spiritual indulgence and luxury only a few may claim ; 
 it is the discovery in the full stream of history of those 
 divine currents that show the direction of the flow. 
 
 (3) Religion, however, would deny its very nature, 
 if it were to be ‘ cribb’d, cabin’d, and confined’ to 
 the immanent deity. The divine purpose can give 
 meaning and worth to the temporal process only 
 as it expresses the nature and commands the resources 
 of eternal reality. If God were immersed in history, 
 He could not direct nor control its course. He must 
 
 1 See Loisy, The Gospel and the Church; Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross 
 Roads, and Through Scylla and Charybdis; The Programme of Modernism, 
 translated from Italian by A. Leslie Lilley; and The New Theology, by the 
 Rev. R. J. Campbell. ~ 
 
16 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 be above as well as in and through all to give to the 
 soul of man the assurance that the purpose in the pro- 
 cess will be fulfilled. A God bounded and hindered 
 by an inscrutable power could not give the certainty 
 that trial will end in triumph, and labour not be in 
 vain. Unless God be ultimate reality, eternal, infinite, 
 absolute, the reality of the ideals in Him would not 
 guarantee their final realisation in men. Men need 
 and want a Fellow-sufferer, whose compassion and con- 
 solation belong to the very core of all reality, and a 
 Fellow-worker, whose co-operation commands all the 
 resources that will make all labour finally effective. 
 (4) While it has been necessary to add this caution, 
 as the present exaggeration of God’s immanence has 
 its perils for thought and life, in the present context 
 what it is crucial to the discussion to show is that for 
 men, being made in history, God must there also be 
 present and active. This thesis has been developed 
 with much conviction by Herrmann in his pamphlet 
 Warum bedurf unser Glaube geschichtlicher Thatsachen ? 
 (What need has our faith of historical facts ?) What 
 is there emphasised is this aspect of the subject. If 
 men are in history to fulfil the eternal law of righteous- 
 ness, they need events which will assure them that 
 He who gives the law also so guides history that those 
 who seek to fulfil that law will not perish but be 
 preserved.' This moral emphasis must be primary, 
 but need not be exclusive, as man needs for his whole 
 personal development in time such an assurance of pro- 
 tection and prevision for his good in the eternal God. © 
 What is needed is a fact or facts in human history 
 that will make men sure of God as willing their good, 
 as strengthening them in their struggles, as sustaining 
 them under their burdens, as securing that aspirations 
 shall be fulfilled and ideals realised; and especially, 
 as men know the greatest hindrance to be in them- 
 selves, in their moral failure and weakness, they crave 
 a God who forgives, renews, and saves. It is not 
 speculative curiosity as to the ultimate cause, essential 
 nature, and final purpose that is the dominant motive ; 
 
 * See The Ritschlian Theology, pp. 218-19. 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 17 
 
 it is practical necessity that man should be his best 
 and make the best of his world, that drives faith to 
 seek a strength and stay in fact. 
 
 Christian faith affirms that this need is met in the 
 fact of Christ. Some objections to this contention 
 must be considered before we discuss the significance 
 of the fact. 
 
 (1) In the dominant philosophy of the eighteenth 
 century, idea or ideal was exalted, and fact was 
 depreciated. ‘ Historical truth, which 1s accidental 
 in 1ts character, can never become the proof of the 
 truths of reason, which are necessary.’ (Lessing.) 
 Without committing ourselves to either all the con- 
 clusions of physical science or all the speculations of 
 idealist philosophy, we may appeal to both against 
 this dogmatic assertion. Nature for science is not a 
 fixed system, it is an evolving process, and the history 
 of that process is significant for the interpretation of 
 nature. The Universe is for idealism the realisation 
 of an Idea or Spirit, and it is in the real that the 
 rational is sought and found. The reason of man 
 which discovers reason in reality is itself not static 
 but dynamic. It develops with and by means of the 
 reality it understands. Man grows in intelligence 
 as his world becomes to him more intelligible. This 
 development may be illustrated by the difference 
 between deductive and inductive Logic; in the one 
 the category of substance and accident, in the other 
 that of causality is dominant. For Plato the world 
 of sense obscured rather than revealed the world of 
 ideas ; Hegel finds in the world not only the otherness 
 of the Idea, but the return of the Idea to itself, 
 enriched by that negation of itself, a synthesis which 
 takes up into its fulness both the thesis and antithesis. 
 It is not necessary here further to develop this line 
 of argument, as what has been stated should suffice 
 to show that for the thought of to-day that old 
 objection has lost force. 
 
 (11) The objection, however, may be modified and 
 stated in this form. How can infinitude be expressed 
 in finite existence, or eternity in a temporal process ? 
 
 B 
 
is THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 It may be admitted that God in His absoluteness 
 cannot be manifested in human history, that a human 
 personality could not, consistently with the conditions 
 of humanity, display omnipresence, omniscience, and 
 omnipotence. But what man needs and longs for 
 is not to discover God unto perfection, to fathom the 
 abysmal depths of the divine, to resolve the mystery 
 of God into a formula: man craves to be assured of 
 God as present and active in the process of history 
 for the common human good, God as not separated 
 from man but as related to man, God so proved in 
 the life of man as sharing man’s lot and caring for 
 man’s welfare and succour that the God who is above 
 and beyond shall be not an inscrutable mystery, or 
 ineluctable fate, but One to be trusted, although He 
 cannot be fully known. It is in the realm which is, 
 so to speak, common to God and man as reasonable, 
 moral, and spiritual, that man’s faith craves this 
 confirmation of ideas and ideals by facts. God’s 
 Fatherhood and man’s sonship means (in a theistic, 
 not to anticipate now the Christian, interpretation) 
 such affinity of God and man, making relation possible, 
 and yet such difference as the terms themselves 
 convey, within the relationship, that God is the 
 perfect communicative personality and man the im- 
 perfect receptive personality. 
 
 (11) That the divine manifestation and communica- 
 tion in fact to meet the human need and craving must 
 be within the limits and under the conditions of 
 human personality is a conclusion that this summary 
 discussion seems to justify. This conclusion does 
 not, however, involve that the human personality 
 must be in all respects what we know in common 
 experience as the average manhood of our fellows. 
 It is not unreasonable to expect that the human 
 development should be crowned by the realisation 
 of the ideal manhood, the presence and activity in 
 human history of the typical man, man as God meant 
 him to be in the final fulfilment of His purpose, not 
 as man by his sin has marred himself and become. 
 A perfect man, perfectly receptive for God, would 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 19 
 
 necessarily stand in another relation to the order of 
 nature even than ordinary sinful men can stand. 
 His insight into God’s purpose would give Him a 
 control over nature’s forces in His dependence on, 
 and obedience to God, such as we must ascribe to 
 God, if we put any real meaning into our belief in 
 God’s immanence, not passive, but active, in nature. 
 
 (iv) The possibility of such a relation cannot on 
 grounds of reason, then, be denied. It might seem 
 rash to affirm the necessity that the facts which 
 confirm faith should be supernatural or miraculous. 
 That the miracles were Christ’s credentials, giving 
 Him a claim to be believed, trusted, and obeyed, 
 is a view now superseded. But that the miracles 
 were constituents of His manifestation of God as 
 forgiving grace and saving love may still be reason- 
 ably maintained.t Whether His teaching by itself, 
 unaccompanied by any of His healing acts, would 
 have conveyed to men the assurance concerning the 
 Heavenly Father that they needed is at least doubtful. 
 That these acts were to men evidences not only of 
 God’s presence with Him, but even of the redemptive 
 character of God’s purpose, seems to be not at all 
 doubtful. We may approach the record of the facts 
 without any antecedent prejudice against super- 
 natural activity or miraculous events. In view of 
 our modern knowledge and thought we may be led 
 in the fuller discussion of the subject to modify the 
 current terminology, and define the supernatural and 
 miracle otherwise than has hitherto been done. All 
 that at this present stage needs affirming is that while 
 the facts must be within human history, we are not 
 warranted in demanding that they shall all be explic- 
 able by ordinary human agency. The human person- 
 ality receptive and communicative of God’s activity 
 in history need not be an average man. 
 
 (v) Ideal and typical as may be the human person- 
 alitv in whom God manifests Himself, yet such 
 manifestation does, and must, involve self-limitation 
 
 1 See The Miraculous Element in the Gospels, by A. B. Bruce, chaps. vil. 
 and yiil. 
 
290 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 on the part of God. But in this respect incarnation 
 is the supreme instance of an activity of God which 
 is illustrated by all creation; it is only by self- 
 limitation that the Infinite can create within time 
 and space a finite and changing world. Man’s 
 personal liberty and responsibility still more involves 
 God’s reserve and restraint in regard to the creatures 
 whom He has made. The principle of kenosis, as 
 theology calls it, is necessary for the interpretation 
 of nature and history no less than of the fact of Christ. 
 
 (5) Christ as Son realises manhood perfectly in 
 relation to God, and in this realised Sonship as man 
 He reveals the reality of God’s Fatherhood in relation 
 to men. Not by words and deeds alone, but by all 
 He was in relation to God, did He give the assurance 
 of God’s Fatherhood, and man’s sonship towards 
 God. And as He realised His Sonship and revealed 
 God’s Fatherhood under those very conditions of 
 struggle, sorrow, and suffering which challenge faith, 
 and make facts necessary for the support and succour 
 of faith, the challenge has in Him been fully met. 
 Sinless through all temptation, trustful in all trial, 
 He is not only Himself conqueror of the world, but 
 He can and does, by drawing men unto Himself, bring 
 them unto God in the same relationship as He Himself 
 holds. As must afterwards be fully shown, it is in 
 His Cross and His Resurrection especially that He 
 gives men the confidence that sin is forgiven, death 
 robbed of its terror, and that the victory over every 
 challenge of fact is with faith in God. And not to 
 His earthly life alone is this personal relation to Him 
 confined, for in Christian experience throughout the 
 centuries He ever liveth to save to the uttermost all 
 who come unto God through Him (Heb. vii. 25). 
 
 (6) The knowledge of God as Father which is 
 mediated by Christ is neither intuttional, as a native 
 endowment of the mind of man, nor inferential, as the 
 conclusion of a process of reasoning, nor yet mystical 
 as an immediate contact with God without any 
 historical mediation, but experimental and practical. 
 Salvation is experienced, not only in the religious 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 21 
 
 consciousness, but also in the moral character; the 
 man who through faith in the grace of Christ has 
 found forgiveness is renewed unto holiness. This 
 experience can be practically tested in what. the man 
 becomes and does as well as the Joy, peace, and hope 
 which come to him. ‘This witness is not in solitary 
 individuals, but in a continuous and expansive society. 
 Whenever and wherever men have put the fact of 
 Christ to the test, He has not been found wanting. 
 Such evidence can be confidently set against all the 
 contradictions of the fact of Christ which modern 
 knowledge and thought may offer. Except it be on 
 the question of miracle, science, when it minds its own 
 business and does not try to play the part of a philo- 
 sophy of all reality, can have no quarrel with this 
 fact, as has already been indicated in dealing with 
 the Bible. And we shall afterwards show that even 
 on the question of miracle, faith need not fear science. 
 Philosophy as an interpretation of all reality is 
 necessarily speculative in character, and cannot 
 assert its conjectures against the testimony of faith 
 for him who has known what faith has been to him, 
 and done for him. If it ignores faith’s testimony, 
 then it has wilfully neglected data of which it should 
 take full account to justify a claim to completeness. 
 If criticism could so discredit the literary sources of 
 our knowledge of the fact of Christ, as to bring into 
 doubt His historical reality, it would assuredly offer 
 faith its most serious challenge. While there are 
 tendencies in modern criticism of a negative character, 
 they discredit themselves by their mutual contradic- 
 tions. The total denial of the very existence of Jesus 
 finds its opponents even among critics of negative 
 tendency. The attempt to resolve the object of 
 Christian faith into a myth has been rejected by the 
 great majority of the critics. Although it may not 
 be possible to say with Dr. Dale? that the evidence 
 from experience would be adequate to support faith, 
 even were all other historical evidence to fail, yet the 
 existence of the Christian Church with its innumerable 
 
 1 The Living Christ and the Four Gospels, Lecture I. 
 
22 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 witnesses to this Christian experience is a historical 
 fact of such magnitude that faith need not fear 
 literary or historical criticism. 
 
 Til 
 
 (1) If Christian faith be based on the fact of Christ, 
 then Christian theology will be an exposition, com- 
 mendation, and appreciation of the significance and 
 value of that fact for faith. This will involve a 
 considerable change both in the content of theology, 
 and the order of the presentation of that content. 
 
 (i) Much that has hitherto been included in theology 
 when its content was derived both from the Bible and 
 the Church will now be left to Biblical and Historical 
 Theology, and Constructive Theology will confine 
 itself to what constitutes the object of Christian faith. 
 As has already been indicated, there is much in the 
 science, the history, and even the religion and morals 
 of the Old Testament which for the Christian believer 
 has now historical interest, but not religious or moral 
 authority. That historical interest is real, and he 
 who wants to be an instructed and intelligent Christian 
 will not be indifferent to any part of the literature 
 of the progressive revelation of God which is completed 
 in Jesus Christ. This consideration applies to the 
 New Testament in so far as it reproduces the current 
 knowledge and thought; but it is to a far greater 
 extent dominated by the fact of Christ with which 
 Christian faith is vitally concerned. There is in the 
 Old Testament a preparation for Christ, and in the 
 New Testament a testimony to the history of Christ, 
 and an interpretation of that history through the 
 experience of Christ—all of which belong, and must 
 belong, to Christian theology. The fact of Christ has 
 a twofold aspect, the revelation of God and the 
 redemption of man, and this redemption of man and 
 this revelation of God are mutually inclusive, for God 
 is revealed as redeeming man, and man is redeemed 
 by the revealing God. Thus in accordance with its 
 name, theology should be only a doctrine of God; 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 23 
 
 with all other doctrines which systematic theology 
 has added to the doctrine of God, and given imposing 
 names (anthropology, ponerology or hamartiology, 
 Christology, soteriology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, 
 and eschatology), it is concerned only as dealing with 
 the content of God’s redemptive revelation in Christ. 
 To give an instance, theology is concerned with man 
 as God’s creature, subject, and child, and with sin 
 as so affecting man’s relation to God that redemption 
 is necessary. The writer will at least make the 
 attempt to justify his growing conviction that this, 
 and this only, is the proper business of Constructive 
 Christian Theology. This simplification will, in his 
 judgment, be a great gain, as it will confine theology 
 to ‘ the things most surely believed,’ to what a believer 
 must hold if the fact of Christ is to have full meaning 
 and worth for him. 
 
 (11) Text-books of Christian dogmatics have usually 
 followed what appeared to be the logical order; and 
 Dr. Orr in his book, The Progress of Dogma, has sought 
 to prove the necessity of that order by showing its 
 correspondence with the providentially guided develop- 
 ment of dogma in the Church. A detailed criticism 
 of this book cannot be offered ; all that the writer can 
 now urge is that the correspondence is not so close as 
 Dr. Orr, by a rather arbitary handling of historical 
 data, makes it appear, and that historical conditions 
 so fully explain why certain questions emerged for 
 discussion at a particular time, that it does not seem 
 necessary, and appears even a little audacious to 
 assume a special providential guidance of the order. 
 Further, as the emphasis of the treatment in the 
 present volume falls on facts, a historical order is 
 more appropriate than a logical. There are pre- 
 suppositions of the fact of Christ, as He came in the 
 fulness of the times, and fulfilled law and prophecy, 
 and these presuppositions will emerge in the discussion 
 of the content of the fact. There are interpretations 
 of the fact of Christ which as experimental and 
 practical may be included in the fact, the total 
 historical reality which we seek to understand, 
 
24 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 There are inferences which may legitimately be 
 drawn from the fact of Christ, both theoretical and 
 practical, and for them also a place may be found. 
 The fact includes a revelation of God, and accordingly 
 there is a doctrine of God which is attached to the 
 exposition of what the historical personality was. 
 The fact also includes a redemption of man, and, 
 therefore, there is a doctrine of the new life for man 
 which comes through Christ, the life in the Spirit of 
 God. Thus there is indicated for us not only what must 
 be the content of our Constructive Theology, but also 
 the order in which that content should be developed. 
 (2) For this view of the content and order of 
 Christian theology, two facts in the New Testament 
 are significant. Christian baptism was in the earliest 
 days of the Church in the name of Jesus Christ (Acts 
 ili. 88) or the Lord Jesus (xix. 5); but later it was 
 ‘into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
 the Holy Ghost ’ (Matt. xxviil.19). The eternal reality 
 antecedent to, and the personal and corporate ex- 
 perience consequent on the fact of Christ are now 
 associated with that fact. In the closing benediction 
 in 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Galatians, and 1 Corinthians, 
 Paul mentions only ‘the grace of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ,’ but in 2 Corinthians there is added ‘ the love 
 of God . . . and the communion of the Holy Ghost,’ 
 the reason for and the result of the fact. Later creeds 
 follow this precedent in having three parts, but depart 
 from it in placing the section dealing with God the 
 Father before that dealing with the Lord Jesus Christ, 
 and in the section dealing with the Holy Spirit are 
 included a number of clauses not formally linked 
 with the Holy Spirit as the source of the Church, the 
 communion of saints, and the life everlasting, although 
 that may be implied. In accordance with the general 
 principle enunciated in the previous discussion, the 
 order of the apostolic benediction will be followed, 
 and the three divisions will be entitled by the phrases 
 of the apostolic benediction. First of all the his- 
 
 * An interesting justification of the order here adopted is afforded by 
 M‘Giffert’s book, The God of the Early Christians, in which he seeks to 
 
THROUGH FACT TO FAITH 25 
 
 torical personality of the Lord Jesus Christ will be 
 discussed under the title which will indicate the 
 dominating conception, ‘ the grace of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ.’ Next the doctrine of God as revealed in 
 Christ will be expounded with the title which indicates 
 its distinctiveness, ‘the love of God.’ Creation, Pro- 
 vidence, Sovereignty will all be dealt with from this 
 standpoint. What has to be said about man and sin, 
 judgment and forgiveness, will also be here included. 
 Then the life into which mankind is redeemed by the 
 love of God in the grace of Christ will be exhibited 
 under the like significant title, ‘ the communion of the 
 Holy Spirit.’ This will include the individual Chris- 
 tian life and the corporate Christian fellowship (the 
 Church), and the consummation of both in the blessed 
 and glorious immortality on the one hand and the 
 coming of the Kingdom of God on the other. Then 
 the organic unity of the triple manifestation of God 
 in human history will, so far as with our present 
 knowledge is possible, be demonstrated in a doctrine 
 of the Trinity under the title, ‘ Father, Son, and Holy 
 Spirit, one God.’ 
 
 (3) The Apostolic Benediction not only supplies the 
 distinctive titles of the sections of this volume, but 
 it also indicates the directive principle of the theology 
 to be here expounded. All that is inconsistent with 
 the conception of God as here presented will be ex- 
 cluded; only that will be included which is in accord. 
 The formal principle of the Reformation—the Holy 
 Scriptures—is too wide, for, as has already been 
 recognised, there are stages of moral and religious 
 development in the Old Testament which Christ has 
 corrected and superseded, and, therefore, no doctrine 
 can be claimed as distinctively Christian because it 
 can be supported by an array of texts. Neither, it 
 must be added, need a deduction from this directive 
 principle be denied because a text cannot be quoted 
 in proof of it. The guidance of God’s Holy Spirit 
 
 show that the Gentile converts did not begin with the God of the Jews as 
 the object of their faith, but with the Lord Jesus Christ, and that only later 
 theologians sought to relate the personal Saviour to the Divine Power. 
 
~ 
 
 26 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 is not withheld from the Christian thinker who seeks 
 to discover and display the unsearchable riches of 
 Christ. Care must of course be exercised lest the 
 individual judgment err in either exclusion of what 
 is expressly taught in any portion of the Scriptures, 
 or inclusion of what can be only regarded as implicit 
 in distinctively Christian truth. The material prin- 
 ciple of the Reformation—justification by faith alone 
 —is too narrow; for we must include all that is in- 
 volved in the revelation of God and the redemption of 
 man in Jesus Christ the Lord. To put the directive 
 principle in a simple, short phrase, God as Saviour 
 seems to be adequate; or, using the apostolic bene- 
 diction, but arranging the clauses so as to bring out 
 the mutual relations, we may affirm that Christian 
 theology is concerned with the love of God in the 
 grace of the Lord Jesus Christ unto the communion of 
 the Holy Spirit. This will afford a demonstration of 
 what the fact of Christ means and is worth to faith. 
 
 (4) There is a movement towards Christian reunion 
 with which the writer is in entire accord, and to 
 which it would be a deep satisfaction if his volume 
 could be accepted as a helpful contribution. What 
 creed shall be the basis of such reunion? The writer 
 would be wholly satisfied himself if such a creed were 
 found in the apostolic benediction, interpreted in 
 accordance with the teaching of the New Testament, 
 and with grateful regard for what the collective ex- 
 perience of the Christian Church can teach. Many 
 a creed has come to man as a burden to the mind. 
 Would not this creed, which this volume will attempt. 
 to expound in a spirit in accord with its content, 
 come as indeed a benediction to the thought and life 
 of men ? 
 
SECTION I 
 ‘THE GRACE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST’ 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 As this volume is not concerned with either Biblical 
 Theology or Church History, but with Constructive 
 Theology, the statement of the Christian Doctrine 
 of the Godhead, which in the writer’s judgment covers 
 the whole ground of Theology, for the thought and 
 in the terms of to-day, no attempt will be made to 
 deal exhaustively with the whole contents of the 
 New Testament relating to this theme; but an 
 endeavour will be made to present the object of 
 Christian faith—the fact of Christ—as that has been 
 simplified, clarified, and vitalised for the writer by 
 many years of study, meditation, and experience. 
 This essay does not profess to be more than the 
 writer’s own confession of faith, which, as it has been 
 shaped in the fellowship and ministry of the Christian 
 Church, it is to be hoped will have meaning and worth 
 for others. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE EVANGELICAL TESTIMONY: 4. THE 
 PERSON OF CHRIST 
 
 CRITICAL questions are not to be discussed in any 
 detail, but 1t is necessary to state what is here assumed 
 regarding the literary sources.! 
 
 (i) The distinction between the Synoptic Gospels 
 and the Fourth Gospel, and the interrelation of the 
 Synoptic Gospels, is recognised. The Gospel according 
 to Mark is accepted as the earliest Gospel, the content 
 of which is almost entirely reproduced in Matthew 
 and Luke. A second source of the common material 
 in Matthew and Luke, not derived from Mark, is also 
 accepted. This is usually referred to as Q, the initial 
 letter of the German word Quelle, source. The prob- 
 ability that Luke had a third source, the ‘ Travel 
 document,’ is also admitted. The interest in Mark 
 is the development of the faith of the disciples in 
 the Messiahship of Jesus, and their failure to respond, 
 after the Messiahship had been confessed, to their 
 Master’s teaching regarding the need of His Passion. 
 The interest of Matthew is in Christianity as a new 
 law superseding the Jewish, and of Luke in Chris- 
 tianity as a Gospel of grace, the Pauline standpoint 
 without the details of the Pauline theology. The 
 difference of interest determines the use of the 
 common material by Matthew and Luke. In regard 
 to Q, consisting mainly of sayings of Jesus, Matthew 
 collects sayings on different occasions into discourses, 
 while Luke gives them separately, generally in their 
 proper historical context. Mark was a companion of 
 
 ' See Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament, by Moffatt; The 
 Gospel History and its Transmission, by Burkitt; The Criticism of the Fourth 
 
 Gospel, by Sanday ; The Gospels as Historical Documents, by Stanton. 
 29 
 
30 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Peter, and reproduces his witness to the ministry of 
 Jesus. Luke, ‘ the beloved physician,’ was the com- 
 panion of Paul, and wrote the Book of Acts also. 
 Matthew the disciple probably collected the sayings 
 now forming the second source Q; hence his name 
 has been transferred to the First Gospel because it 
 so fully uses this material. After giving due con- 
 sideration to the views of Protestant Liberalism as 
 represented by Harnack, and Roman Catholic Modern- 
 ism as displayed in the writings of Loisy, and the more 
 recent representations of Kirsopp Lake and Foakes- 
 Jackson, the writer remains convinced, with Headlam, 
 of the substantial historical accuracy of the Synop- 
 tic Gospels without in any way committing himself 
 to any doctrine of inerrancy. This conclusion of 
 previous critical studies is the assumption of this 
 constructive effort, and the writer does not regard it 
 as incumbent on him to interrupt the course of his 
 exposition by any discussion in detail of these critical 
 views. It is not necessary for the present purpose 
 to deal with the probable dates of the Gospels; all 
 that need be said is that they are not so removed from 
 the events recorded as to be untrustworthy. 
 
 (ii) The Fourth Gospel stands between evangelical 
 testimony and apostolic interpretation. The recol- 
 lections of a personal disciple of Jesus have been 
 modified by subsequent meditation on them, and even 
 in the final presentation by philosophical and theo- 
 logical influences of the end of the first century ; and 
 it is a delicate and difficult task to disentangle these 
 three strands in what at first sight appears to be a 
 living unity.? The writer holds on grounds of historic 
 probability that there was a Judaean ministry at 
 successive feasts, and that in this respect the Fourth 
 Gospel corrects and supplements the one-sided repre- 
 sentation of Mark, dependent on Peter, which has — 
 determined that of Matthew and Luke. He feels 
 
 * See What is Christianity ? by Harnack; The Gospel and the Church, by — 
 Loisy ; The Beginnings of Christianity, by Foakes-Jackson and Kirsopp 
 Lake, Part 1. vol. i.; Life and Teaching of Christ, by Headlam. 
 
 * See the books of Sanday and Stanton already mentioned in a previous 
 note; and The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel, by Burney. 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST — 31 
 
 justified in asserting this position, only if the beloved 
 disciple, whose recollections and meditations may be 
 traced, can be regarded as a Judaean disciple whose 
 interest was confined to Judaea, as was Peter’s to 
 Galilee. How John the son of Zebedee, a Galilaean 
 disciple, could so ignore the ministry in Galilee, and 
 know so well the ministry in Judaea, appears an 
 insoluble problem. The writer is convinced that to 
 maintain his authorship is greatly to increase the 
 _ difficulty of maintaining the historical value of the 
 
 Gospel. While in dealing with this Gospel the writer 
 is always mindful that interpretation blends with 
 testimony, yet he holds that it may legitimately 
 be used to supplement the Synoptic representation, 
 which a study of the Gospels for many years has 
 convinced him is itself one-sided owing to the limita- 
 tions of understanding and sympathy of those from 
 whom their contents are derived. Details may need 
 critical examination in the course of the discussion, 
 but this brief critical introduction is in the writer’s 
 judgment adequate for his purpose. 
 
 I 
 
 (i) It has been usual to distinguish the person from 
 
 the work of Christ in the treatment of these subjects 
 in systematic theology, and even to confine the work 
 of Christ to His salvation of men by His sacrifice. 
 No such limitation on the work of Christ will here 
 be imposed, but the whole of His manifold activity 
 among and for men will be taken into account. 
 Although a man shows what he is in all he does, 
 and all a man does proves what he is, and in pro- 
 portion to the sincerity, transparency, and reality is 
 this unity of personality and activity, yet the dis- 
 tinction between person and work is convenient for 
 a clear and full treatment of the subject. 
 
 (ii) Christian theology has often begun with the 
 doctrine of the divinity of Christ, and then come 
 down from that speculative height to the levels of 
 history, and has failed to see clearly what was there, 
 
32 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 a real humanity. The manhood has not been con- 
 eeived in accordance with the historical evidence, but 
 to secure consistency with an abstract idea of God 
 which had no relevance to the facts. There was a 
 descent of Godhead to manhood, as we shall after- 
 wards recognise, but that is an inference from the 
 known facts, and not itself a fact known, and we 
 must follow in this exposition not the speculative 
 but the historical path, the ascent of faith from 
 the knowledge of the manhood to the belief in the 
 Godhead. There was a time when the preacher or 
 writer who laid stress on the humanity ran the risk 
 of being charged with a denial of the divinity, and 
 being called an Unitarian. But, although there are 
 still some reactionary theological circles for whom 
 the word divinity is not definite enough, but who will 
 speak about the deity of Christ, intending thereby 
 to aseribe to Christ, even in His earthly life, the 
 possession and exercise of divine attributes incon- 
 ceivable in combination with a real humanity, there 
 has been a decided change, and many are attracted 
 to the human personality, and find in that the 
 divine reality, who would at first be repelled by a 
 doctrine of divinity. And not only so: it is the 
 recognition of the real humanity, in which the true 
 divinity is manifest and communicative, which gives 
 the fullest content to the word grace as the alone 
 adequate descriptive epithet for what Jesus was and 
 did. Grace is love stooping, suffering, seeking that 
 it may save; and the love of God were not shown 
 and proved as grace, had not God in Him stooped 
 to share man’s life and bear man’s lot. But to 
 assert the real humanity is not to affirm that Jesus 
 was an ordinary man, and that we cannot believe of 
 Him what we cannot believe of men generally, or 
 that we must deny as facts whatever in the Gospels 
 goes beyond what might be said of an ordinary man. 
 We must allow the facts to modify our conception 
 of real humanity. 
 
 (1) What men most prize in the Gospel record is 
 the evidence it gives of a real moral experience of 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 38 
 
 Jesus (it is appropriate that we should use this 
 human name in dealing with the real humanity). 
 That *‘ He was tempted in all points even as we are’ 
 (Heb. iv. 15) gives Him such a value to men struggling 
 against temptation as no other fact could, for even 
 His Saviourhood from sin would mean less had He 
 never shared such an experience. To assume that 
 somehow His divinity removed all moral risk and 
 moral strain and stress would, more than any other 
 consideration, turn the Incarnation into a sham and 
 mockery for men. Here, if anywhere, God coming 
 to man as man must meet him, and stand with him 
 onthe same ground. We must so conceive the divinity 
 that it will allow reality to this liability to temptation. 
 _~ (i) Temptation is not itself sin, although it may 
 be an occasion for and even a provocation of sin. 
 Temptation may have its source in previous indulgence 
 in evil. The drunkard is so severely tempted because 
 he has voluntarily acquired the habit of drinking, 
 with the consequent crave for more drink. But 
 animal appetites and physical impulses, innocent in 
 themselves, and wrong only as they come into conflict 
 with the dictates of conscience, may be the sources of 
 temptation. The social environment may offer sug- 
 gestions and inducements to evil to one in these par- 
 ticular respects hitherto innocent. When we closely 
 examine the temptations of Jesus as recorded in the 
 Gospels, in the Wilderness, at Caesarea Philippi, and 
 in Gethsemane, we find that none springs out of 
 previous sin. Probably the story of the Temptation 
 in the Wilderness, as it appears in Matthew and 
 Luke—not in Mark, who mentions only the fact of 
 temptation without the details—was told by Jesus to 
 His disciples at Caesarea Philippi subsequently to His 
 rebuke of Peter as Satan (Matt. xvi. 23) and in 
 explanation of that rebuke, and even (may we add ?”) 
 in justification of its severity. In symbolic form He 
 presented the inward conflict in which He rejected 
 the popular expectations, based on prophetic pre- 
 dictions and apocalyptic speculations, of the Messiah- 
 ship, and chose the path of dependence on and 
 C 
 
34 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 submission to His heavenly Father, even although 
 that was a path of suffering. In the self-pleasing, 
 self-display, and self-advancement that such a 
 Messiahship involved He had first the moral insight 
 to discover a temptation, and then the moral strength 
 to reject it. At Caesarea Philippi the disciple whom 
 He had just commended tempted Him to self-sparing 
 in shunning suffering, and because it came from loved 
 lips the trial was the more severe. In Gethsemane 
 He was tempted to shrink from the cup (xxvi. 39) 
 not merely of bodily agony but of darkness and 
 desolation of spirit which He experienced on Calvary 
 (xxvii. 46), and there was no sin in the Son’s shrinking 
 from any separation from the Father, although there 
 would have been sin had the cup been refused, when 
 it was clearly known to be the Father’s will. ‘ He 
 learned obedience through the things that He suffered ’ 
 (Heb. v. 8)—not to obey, but how far the demand to 
 obedience might go, even that He who had always 
 rejoiced in the Father’s presence as His sacrifice for 
 man’s redemption must consent to forego that 
 blessing. His temptations thus came to Him be- 
 cause of His vocation, and were worthy of His 
 personality. For ‘ that He was tempted in all points ’ 
 (iv. 15) does not mean that He had just the same 
 temptations as all men have, but that temptation 
 was as real a factor in His experience as it is in that 
 of all men. 
 
 (ii) That there was a possibility of the wrong choice 
 we must maintain; had He been certain that He 
 could not fall, temptation would not have been a real 
 moral experience for Him, and so far the Incarnation 
 would have been a semblance. But living as He did 
 in immediate contact and intimate communion with 
 God as Father, there was no moral probability that 
 He would fall; and we need not concern ourselves 
 with the speculative question of how God would have 
 redeemed man apart from Him. Reverence and 
 adoration forbid our contemplating that possibility, 
 but we cannot deny it without sacrificing the reality 
 of the Incarnation, 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 35 
 
 (iii) That He was tempted, and yet ‘without sin,’ 
 does not lessen the value of His temptation to us. 
 For, firstly, His sympathy is no less perfect because 
 He remained sinless under temptation. It is entirely 
 an error to suppose that those who have fallen will 
 be most sympathetic to others who share their tempta- 
 tion. The work of rescue among fallen women is best 
 done by pure women, and it is not necessary to be 
 a converted drunkard to stand by those for whom 
 danger lies in taking liquor. The better a man is, if 
 his saintliness be that of holy love, the more pitiful 
 and helpful can he be to sinners. For not only does 
 sin blunt the sensibilities and weaken the affections, 
 but he who has carried the fight to a finish and has 
 overcome knows the severity of the struggle as he 
 who has yielded cannot know it. And, secondly, Jesus 
 is not merely an example whom we are to imitate 
 only with such resources as are at our command. He 
 gives the power as well as shows the pattern of the 
 good life. It was from His religious experience as 
 Son, knowing, trusting, and serving the Father in 
 holy love, that He drew the moral resources for His 
 victory over temptation. In His grace He mediates 
 for us the love of God, which comes to us in the 
 presence and power of God’s Holy Spirit, nN US, 
 too, more than conquerors. 
 
 (2) His moral experience is thus explicable only by 
 His religious experience, of which we may quite 
 reverently speak. The eighteenth century was not 
 so altogether wrong when it recognised a religion of 
 Jesus as well as a Christian religion, although it did 
 err in thinking that the one could replace the other. 
 Jesus Himself was the subject of faith, as well as the 
 object of faith for others; and surely His is both the 
 typical and creative faith (Heb. xn. 2). We believe 
 in God through Him, because He believed and as He 
 believed in God. We look unto Jesus as the pioneer 
 and the consummator of faith, as showing all that 
 faith can do and dare. He Himself endured and 
 achieved through faith in God all that we may be 
 called to endure and achieve through faith in Him, 
 
36 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 He is the object of our faith as Himself the subject of 
 faith. It is very significant that in the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews two of the proofs that He is not ashamed to 
 eall men brethren are these: ‘In the midst of the 
 congregation will I sing Thy praise’; and ‘ I will put 
 My trust in Him’ (11. 12, 13). 
 
 The knowledge that He claimed of God was not, 
 as has sometimes been asserted, a claim to share 
 God’s omniscience. He knew God as Father in the 
 dependence, confidence, and submission of a Son—that 
 is, by the exercise of faith. It will be necessary to 
 discuss the religious consciousness of Jesus as Son 
 very much more fully at a later stage, but its char- 
 acteristic faith is here insisted on for this reason. 
 Omniscience can neither exercise faith nor be tempted. 
 Temptation, to be real, involves that the issue of the 
 conflict is unknown ; and he who knew all the relevant 
 facts of a moral situation would not be exposed to 
 such a conflict. Such faith as belief is less than 
 knowledge because less certain; while as a psychic act 
 it is more, as by trust and surrender giving to the 
 belief, if not the certainty of knowledge, yet so high 
 a degree of probability as to justify action. The 
 religious experience no less than the moral compels 
 us, to preserve its reality, to admit the limitation of 
 knowledge as well as the liability to temptation. 
 
 (i) While there are in the Gospels instances of Jesus’ 
 asking questions, not as feigning ignorance, as some 
 of the Fathers maintained, but because He desired 
 information, two crucial proofs will suffice. He con- 
 fessed that ‘of that day or that hour knoweth no 
 one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, 
 but the Father’ (Mark xii. 32). There is surely an 
 intentional climax. That men should not know is 
 not surprising; that angels should not know is sur- 
 prising; most surprising it seemed to Him that He 
 as Son should not know, and that it had not been 
 delivered to Him as part of His knowledge of the 
 Father. Here He seems to be referring to His own 
 Second Coming. It is to the fall of Jerusalem as 
 God’s judgment on the nation and the city which had 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 37 
 
 rejected Him that He refers when He declares: ‘ This 
 generation shall not pass away until all these things 
 be accomplished’ (v. 30). Why that confession of 
 ignorance, and this confident prediction? The ex- 
 planation surely is this, that He did not know all the 
 conditions which must be fulfilled for His Second 
 Coming, but He did know with a historical foresight 
 due to His moral and religious insight that nation 
 and city were ripe for God’s judgment. Such a pre- 
 diction shows a prophetic consciousness, but not a 
 divine omniscience. Still more surprising is the con- 
 fession of ignorance implicit in the prayer in Geth- 
 semane: ‘O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup 
 pass away from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but 
 as Thou wilt’ (Matt. xxvi. 39). If we recall the 
 frequency and certainty with which Jesus foretold 
 His. Passion, it is altogether improbable that death 
 itself was the cup. Is it not probable that as death 
 approached He became more fully aware of all that 
 death would involve for Him, the darkness and 
 desolation which He experienced on Calvary ? 
 
 _ (11) If in two matters so closely concerning Himself 
 He confessed ignorance, then surely we are forced to 
 recognise that as regards facts and dates of history 
 regarding which information must be acquired, and 
 which no moral or religious insight can discover, He 
 shared the ignorance of His own age and surroundings. 
 On two questions especially must that ignorance be 
 recognised. (a) While He had a moral and spiritual 
 insight as regards the meaning of the Holy Scriptures 
 such as no other had, and His treatment of the Old 
 Testament shows a freedom from the defects of 
 Rabbinism, of which even St. Paul is not altogether 
 free, yet as to questions of authorship, ete., which 
 scholarship alone can answer after searching inquiry, 
 He shared the traditions of His time. For Him as 
 for His contemporaries the law was from Moses, and 
 the Psalms from David. He makes no claim to speak 
 with special authority on any of these matters. His 
 reference to Jonah has been used as authenticating 
 the historical character of that story ; but it may be 
 
38 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 pointed out that a comparison of Matt. xi. 39-41 and 
 Luke xi. 29-30 shows that v.40 in the first passage, which 
 deals with the experience of the prophet in the whale’s 
 belly and treats it as an analogue of Christ’s burial 
 and resurrection, has no parallel in the second passage, 
 and may be regarded as a later gloss. Jesus was not 
 three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 
 Such a blunder would not have been made when there 
 was still a vivid recollection that it was on the third 
 day that Jesus rose from the dead. It is a confusion 
 of things great and small to assume, as the defenders 
 of traditional views do, that it makes any difference 
 to the true enduring value of the Bible to abandon 
 these views for the critical. Jesus at least cannot be 
 cited as a witness in favour of tradition, speaking with 
 the same authority as that with which He revealed the 
 Father. : 
 (b) A second question on which we are justified in 
 assuming that He had only such knowledge as His 
 time and people had is that of ‘ demonic possession.’ 
 Whether there are or are not evil spirits is a question 
 on which it would be rash to dogmatise. We should 
 remember that the belief may be regarded as a survival 
 into a higher stage of religious thought of an almost 
 primitive animism, explicable both by the stage of 
 human development and by the conditions affect- 
 ing it, and that Zoroastrian influences had greatly 
 strengthened that belief in contemporary Judaism. 
 Whether Jesus shared that belief Himself, or only used 
 the current language in regard to it, it cannot surely 
 be claimed that either the correction or the confirma- 
 tion of the belief fell within His distinctive function 
 of Revealer of the Father. Unless where it is felt that 
 His authority imposes the belief, Christian experience 
 offers no convincing evidence for it. But even if it 
 were held that as regards the existence of good and 
 bad spirits Jesus’ speech must be final, yet surely the 
 same claim cannot be made for the belief in ‘ demon 
 possession.’ The causation of disease is a question 
 of scientific inquiry and not of religious conviction. It 
 is only where belief in the manifold activity of demons 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 39 
 prevails that such an explanation is offered. All the 
 evidence the Gospels supply justifies the conclusion 
 that the symptoms of demon possession coincide with 
 the symptoms of insanity. Even the belief of the 
 victims that they were so possessed is a symptom of 
 insanity, for the insane reproduce in distorted, ex- 
 travagant form current thought. When preachers 
 were in the habit of dealing with the subject of the 
 unpardonable sin, religious melancholia assumed the 
 form of believing that that sin had been committed. 
 The writer has himself had to deal with two such 
 cases. ‘That missionaries report that they have met 
 with such cases of demon possession in the foreign 
 field is but a confirmation of this conclusion. The 
 dominance of the belief in demons is an adequate 
 explanation of the delusions of the insane. ‘That some 
 of the insane, or demon-possessed, confessed Jesus 
 as Messiah is no proof that the demons possessed a 
 secret knowledge of what He was which good men 
 had not yet all reached; but that, without reserve 
 and restraint such as the sane practised, the insane 
 gave voice to surmises and questions that were being 
 repeated in their hearing. The belief in demonic 
 possession need not be an article of Christian faith.? 
 What has been said of demonic possession applies also 
 to the whole realm of physical science. On all 
 these questions Jesus knew only what others knew. 
 Whether as regards facts of history or causes and 
 laws in nature, there was limitation of knowledge. 
 
 (iii) There are two directions in which His know- 
 ledge seemed to reach beyond that of His contem- 
 poraries. He had on the one hand an insight into 
 the moral and spiritual condition of others, and on the 
 other a foresight regarding the course of events, which 
 may at first sight appear altogether supernatural. 
 (a) The perfection of His moral character, the absolute- 
 ness of His religious consciousness, the finality of His 
 mediatorial function, to all of which we shall return 
 in the next section of this chapter, do make it probable 
 that He did possess an insight and a foresight of the 
 
 1 See Alexander’s Demonic Possession. 
 
40 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 highest degree compatible with a real humanity. But 
 we should rashly cut the Gordian knot of the problem 
 of His personality if we simply regarded both as 
 evidence of divine omniscience, for there are human 
 analogues of both. <A sensitive, sympathetic nature 
 can transcend the limits of separate personality, and 
 can receive and respond to the inner life of others. 
 That Jesus knew how many husbands the woman 
 of Samaria had had is altogether improbable; and 
 we can explain the evangelist’s statement only by 
 assuming that, as no disciple was present at the inter- 
 view, the woman in subsequently repeating it trans- 
 ferred to the lips of Jesus the accusation of her own 
 conscience, stirred to activity by His presence, in her 
 quite honest belief that ‘ He told me all things that 
 ever I did’ (John iv. 18, 29). That He was aware 
 that He was in the presence of one with an uneasy 
 conscience is altogether probable. As the Physician 
 of souls He knew all which it was necessary He should 
 know to diagnose the disease. He might detect at 
 once when Judas began to be discontented and dis- 
 loyal (as John vi. 64 at least suggests) ; but when He 
 chose Judas He did not choose him to be traitor, 
 and His references to betrayal were surely appeals 
 to Judas to turn him from the way of perdition. 
 When He commended Peter, He did not know how 
 soon He was to be the Tempter (Matt. xvi. 18, 23). 
 This insight was not a complete knowledge such as 
 divine omniscience might be. It is love which gives 
 insight, and it was the perfection of the love of Jesus 
 which enabled Him to enter into the life of others 
 and to make it so fully His own. 
 
 (b) As regards His foresight, it must be related to 
 His insight. Because He so understood men, He 
 could foresee the tendency of events and foretell them. 
 This prediction was, like that of the prophets, condt- 
 tional. Had His appeals to Judas moved him from 
 his purpose, he at least would not have been the 
 betrayer. Had His appeals to Jerusalem found a 
 response of repentance and faith, its doom might have 
 been deferred, if not averted, for it was Jewish 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 41 
 
 fanaticism which hastened the end. As man 1s free, 
 and is in partnership with God in the making of 
 history, the future is not fixed by any divine decree, 
 and there is not, and cannot be, any unconditional 
 prediction. The prophet succeeds with this warning 
 of judgment, as his prediction fails. Only one prophet 
 —the peevish Jonah—is represented as displeased 
 because his warnings had been heeded, and so his 
 reputation for accurate prediction had been. lost. 
 Jesus spoke with such confidence of Judas’ betrayal 
 and of the doom of Jerusalem, because He knew what 
 was in man by His moral and religious insight. 
 
 (iv) But it may be urged, in view of this limitation 
 of knowledge, how can we accept Jesus as the authori- 
 tative Teacher? There is a distinction which we are 
 warranted in making which removes the difficulty. 
 We may distinguish knowledge of facts, and insight 
 into moral and religious truth, between learning and 
 wisdom. James 1. has been described as ‘ the most 
 learned fool in Christendom.’ A man may have much 
 knowledge and little understanding. The seer’s vision 
 of God and the saint’s submission to God are in no 
 way affected by the extent of knowledge which the 
 one or the other may possess. A scholar may be very 
 fallible in moral judgment, and a great man of science 
 may lack any sense of the reality of God. The insight 
 of Jesus into moral and religious truth was in no way 
 affected by His limitation of knowledge as regards 
 nature and history. Such knowledge may be acquired 
 by learning from others; but such insight is rooted 
 in the personality. What Jesus was concerned with 
 was the revelation of God and the redemption of man, 
 and His efficacy in that function did not in any way 
 depend on the extent of His knowledge, but on the 
 unerring insight He had because of His immediate 
 contact and intimate communion with God as Father. 
 He had an unclouded vision of the reality of God 
 as Father, and of all that that reality involved for 
 man’s relation as child to God, the duty that relation 
 imposed, and the destiny that relation promised. 
 He did not claim omniscience or infallibility in any 
 
42 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 sphere except this, and yet this is the sphere to which 
 man’s knowledge could never reach, and which all 
 man’s learning could never disclose. What is know- 
 ledge of nature and history such as man by his own 
 endeavours can acquire, compared with the knowledge 
 of God as Father which the Son alone possessed, and 
 alone could impart to men? To acknowledge limita- 
 tion of knowledge is not to deny or diminish the 
 revelation of God in Him as final and perfect. 
 
 (3) In view of the affirmation by many of the 
 Christian Fathers, borrowed from Greek philosophy, 
 of the impassibility of God, it 1s necessary to lay 
 very special emphasis on the quick sensibility, the 
 emotional intensity of Jesus. 
 
 (1) He was subject to quick and keen feeling. He 
 was moved to compassion for human need, sorrow, 
 and sin (Mark i. 41); to indignation against unbelief 
 and wrong (111.5). He was grieved as well as surprised 
 at the dulness and slowness of understanding of His 
 disciples (viii. 21). He wept over impenitent Jeru- 
 salem, and at the grave of Lazarus (Luke xix. 41; 
 John xi. 35). In Gethsemane He was exceeding 
 sorrowful, even unto death (Matt. xxvi. 38). Was there 
 ever sorrow like unto His sorrow on the Cross, where 
 He tasted death for every man, that is, entered fully 
 into the experience of dying? He was ‘ the man of 
 sorrows, acquainted with grief’ (Is. lili. 3). Common 
 as has been this representation, true as it is, it is yet 
 one-sided. He could and did rejoice as well as mourn. 
 ‘ He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit’ (Luke x. 21). His 
 knowledge of His own Sonship, and God’s Fatherhood, 
 and His calling to share that knowledge with others, 
 made Him blessed, a blessedness His disciples could 
 share with Him (v. 28). Finding here His own rest 
 from labour and burden, He could offer rest to others 
 (Matt. xi. 28-30). His meekness and lowliness of 
 heart, His dependence on and submission to His 
 Father, made for Him the yoke easy and the burden 
 light. He could leave to His disciples a legacy of 
 peace (John xiv. 27). It was for the joy that was set 
 before Him that He endured the Cross (Heb. xii. 2). 
 
 —— ee 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 43 
 
 He surely both fathomed the depths of agony, and 
 scaled the heights of ecstasy. 
 
 (11) As this emotion was not self-centred or self- 
 enclosed, but was made by His universal love expan- 
 sive, He shared with men their joys and their sorrows 
 as a selfish heart never can. The greatness of the 
 sacrifice which He endured and achieved for man’s 
 salvation was determined by this capacity to feel with 
 and for others. Gethsemane and Calvary bear witness 
 how He could bear upon His own heart the crushing 
 load of the shame, and sorrow, and suffering imposed 
 by human sin. He could not have shared with and 
 for man the consequences of human sin as He did had 
 there not been this expansive emotion, this loving 
 heart that could draw into its own inmost shrine the 
 woes and griefs of others. He felt as man the sorrow 
 of universal humanity. And as He was one with His 
 Father, so God felt in Him with and for man. In 
 His liability to temptation, in His limitation of know- 
 ledge, in His subjection to emotion He identified 
 . Himself with man, and so also God did in Him. 
 
 Il 
 
 Having noted these features of a real humanity, 
 we may now ask ourselves what are the proofs of a 
 true divinity. We must not rely to-day on proofs 
 such as were advanced in former days :—the pre- 
 existence, the virgin-birth, the fulfilment of prophecy, 
 or the performance of miracles; for this kind of 
 argument is ineffective for our age. About each 
 of these, however, a few words may be said. 
 
 (i) The references to pre-existence are so few, and 
 are all found in the Fourth Gospel. They cannot, 
 therefore, be the basis of a proof. As will afterwards 
 be shown, we may find a place for these references in 
 the exposition of Jesus’ religious consciousness as 
 Son, and need not now further discuss them. 
 
 (ii) The virgin-birth, disputed as the fact is, cannot 
 be relied on in any convincing argument for the 
 divinity of Jesus, and is indeed irrelevant, as it 
 
44 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 concerns the humanity and not the divinity, for God 
 is not born, but man. The writer himself does not 
 feel justified in a confident denial or affirmation of 
 the fact, although he leans to the latter. If it be a 
 fact, its significance can be exhibited in discussing 
 the moral character of Jesus. 
 
 (i111) Jesus Himself claimed to fulfil law and prophecy; 
 He came as the completion of the progressive revela- 
 tion of God in the Old Testament (Matt. v.17). He 
 corrected what was defective in its religion or morals. 
 He filled up that which was lacking in its truth and 
 grace. The ethical monotheism of the prophets He 
 crowned by making God known as Father, and man 
 as the child of God, called to be perfect even as the 
 Father is perfect (v. 48). He abolished the sacrificial 
 system of Judaism by giving mankind the good things, 
 of which these ordinances were but the shadow, for 
 He fully met the needs of the soul which these had 
 been discovered unfit to meet.1. He instituted the new 
 covenant, prophesied by Jeremiah (xxxi. 31-34), in 
 His blood; by His sacrifice men were brought into 
 a new relation to God (Matt. xxvi. 28; 1 Cor. xi. 25). 
 The hope of deliverance and blessing that had sus- 
 tained God’s saints in times of affliction He brought 
 to fruition by a salvation more excellent than they 
 had conceived or desired. He transformed the apoca- 
 lyptic expectations of the Resurrection in the manner 
 of His own Risen Life: the hope of immortality was 
 confirmed in the eternal life men can find in Him. It 
 is probable that in His triumphal entry into Jerusalem 
 (Matt. xxi. 1-9) He had the prediction of Zechariah 
 (ix. 9) in view; but what He did was done as a last 
 argument and appeal to the Jewish people to accept 
 the kind of Messiahship that prediction foreshadowed, 
 and not merely to fulfil a prediction literally. It is 
 not probable that on the Cross He said, ‘I thirst,’ to 
 fulfil prophecy, but because He really thirsted (John 
 xix. 28): and it was the evangelist who found in the 
 cry such a reference to prophecy. After the manner 
 of their own time the evangelists, Matthew especially, 
 
 1 This is the thesis of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 45 
 
 did use the argument from prophecy in emphasising 
 a correspondence between the events of the life of 
 Jesus and prophetic utterances, even such as were not 
 intended as predictions. Their procedure is, however, 
 so artificial and even arbitrary from the standpoint 
 of a historical interpretation of the Holy Scriptures as 
 to have no apologetic value for us. The reference in 
 Matt. 1. 23 to Is. vil. 14 rests on a mistranslation of 
 a Hebrew word in the Greek version. In the prophet’s 
 utterance no virgin-birth is predicted. The words 
 quoted in ii. 15 from Hos. xi. 1 are not a prediction 
 of the flight into Egypt, but a reminder of the people 
 by the prophet of God’s goodness to the nation in the 
 Exodus. ‘There is a vital connection between the 
 Old Testament and the New, the revelation of God 
 to the Hebrew nation and in Christ and His Church, 
 and the modern study of the Holy Scriptures makes 
 that connection clearer and surer; but the argument 
 from prophecy as it is presented in the Gospels does 
 not carry conviction to-day. 
 
 (iv) That Jesus performed miracles does not itself 
 prove His divinity, as a man with a message from God 
 might have been entrusted with that power. It is 
 because we believe in Him on other grounds as Saviour 
 and Lord that the miracles become at all intelligible 
 and credible to us. We may relate them vitally to 
 His person and His work, as will afterwards be 
 attempted, but we cannot advance them as evidence 
 of His claims, but must rest our argument on more 
 convincing grounds. These grounds are His moral 
 character, His religious consciousness, and His media- 
 torial efficacy. 
 
 (1) Just as it is the liability to temptation as 
 evidence of a real moral experience that many men 
 prize most in the real humanity of Jesus, so it is the 
 perfection of His moral character, the result of such 
 an experience that commands not only admiration, 
 but adoration, which for many men will prove the 
 most persuasive argument for the true divinity. The 
 more theology makes progress in conceiving God as 
 moral perfection, the more convincing will the moral 
 
46 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 character of Jesus be as a proof that He comes from 
 God, and makes God known. 
 
 (i) That, though tempted, He did not sin, does not 
 lessen, as has been shown, the reality of His humanity, 
 but it does point beyond humanity for an explanation. 
 In this sinful race heredity and environment do not 
 account for sinlessness. Even if we deny the doctrine 
 of inherited corruption and total depravity, and take 
 the more modern view that the individual moral 
 development begins with a handicap, in that animal 
 appetites and the natural impulse to self-assertion 
 gain a start of the control of the will by conscience, 
 Jesus is the only instance of sinlessness, and this 
 exception to common human experience needs in 
 some way to be accounted for. 
 
 Unless we take the extreme ascetic view that the 
 relation of the sexes is itself sinful; and that propaga- 
 tion by such a relation is itself a channel of moral 
 corruption—a libel on human love, and a blasphemy 
 on God who appointed this way for the continuance 
 of the race,—virgin-birth itself does not offer any 
 explanation. If the tendency to sin be inherited, 
 there is no reason, if we set aside the above assumption, 
 for supposing that the one parent is more likely to 
 transmit that inheritance than the other. If the 
 virgin-birth be accepted as fact, it can be brought 
 into relation to the sinlessness of Jesus as at least a 
 partial explanation in this way, that as His life as a 
 human personality began in an exercise of faith by 
 His mother in response to the communication of the 
 divine purpose concerning her motherhood (Luke i. 88), 
 so from the very beginning of His moral development 
 that divine grace, which his mother received, was alike 
 by heredity and environment a factor potent enough 
 to restrain those other factors of human nature that 
 impose the moral handicap already mentioned. It 
 was the faith of the human race, as represented by 
 His mother’s submission to the will of God, that 
 opened the door for the entrance into human history 
 of this new divine factor, an immediate contact of a 
 
 * See The Origin and Propagation of Sin, by Tennant. 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 47 
 
 developing human personality with the eternal reality 
 of God. Even before the consciousness of Sonship 
 emerged the relation to God subsisted, and sub- 
 consciously influenced the development. If we deny 
 the fact of the virgin-birth, such an explanation 
 remains probable; what the story of the virgin-birth 
 would add would be this, that it would disclose 
 certain moral and religious conditions in the mother 
 which would afford the points of contact within 
 humanity for this new relation of God to human 
 personality. Just as Jesus is represented as requiring 
 faith for His miraculous activity, so would the super- 
 natural act of God in the beginning of the Incarnation, 
 the manifestation of God as man, be conditioned by 
 human faith. Without any confident dogmatism in 
 regard to the matter, if the virgin-birth be fact, so 
 interpreted it does make incarnation more intelligible 
 and credible. In dealing with this question it has 
 been necessary to anticipate the conclusions of this 
 discussion of the true divinity, and we may, therefore, 
 sum up the immediate argument in a hypothetical 
 proposition. If it be proved that Jesus was sinless 
 and perfect, and that He was conscious of a unique 
 relation to God as Son to Father, then the fact of the 
 virgin-birth becomes more probable, and can be 
 interpreted in such a way as at least partially to 
 explain that sinlessness.? 
 
 (11) Can any evidence for the sinlessness of Jesus 2 
 be offered which will stand a close scrutiny? (a) 
 We need not be much disturbed by some specific 
 charges against His character and conduct which 
 have been suggested, as a candid and discriminating 
 examination proves that the vocation of Jesus, and 
 the circumstances, offer an adequate explanation. 
 That in His absorption in the pursuit of the Father’s 
 will He remained in the Temple, forgetful of the 
 anxiety of His parents (Luke i. 49), does not justify 
 
 1 See The Virgin Birth of Christ, by James Orr, with Appendix, giving 
 opinions of living scholars. 
 
 * A monograph on this subject, published more than half a century ago, 
 
 which is still of interest is The Sinlessness of Jesus, by Carl Ullmann, 
 translated by Sophia Taylor. 
 
48 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 a charge of inconsiderateness. ‘That He repelled with 
 emphasis His mother’s appeal at the marriage in 
 Cana shows that the same dominance of God’s will 
 in His consciousness compelled Him to set aside her 
 authority in the exercise of those powers of which, for 
 the fulfilment of His mission, He had become conscious 
 at His Baptism, and the method of using which had 
 been determined in His Temptation (John ii, 4). 
 That He at first refused the petition of the Syro- 
 phoenician mother in language which rebuked the 
 Jewish exclusiveness of His disciples, and yet by the 
 accompanying look or tone encouraged the mother 
 to press her request, is an incident which carries its 
 own justification (Mark vii. 27-29). That He called 
 Peter Satan at Caesarea Philippi shows, not bad temper, 
 only the strain He felt in resisting a temptation pressed 
 on Him by so highly favoured a disciple (vin. 33). Hf 
 we are to take the story of the withered fig-tree 
 literally as a miracle, and not as a misunderstood 
 parable, it can best be understood as a parable in act, 
 and not in words only, regarding the doom of un- 
 fruitfulness—a compassionate warning to the Jewish 
 nation (xi. 14). The cleansing of the Temple was a 
 legitimate challenge of an ecclesiastical authority, an 
 act of righteous zeal against impiety and also in- 
 humanity, as it was the Court of the Gentiles which 
 was being put to so base uses from the motive of 
 greed (vv, 15-17). The severity of His denunciation 
 of scribes and Pharisees was but the counterpart of 
 His solicitude for the salvation of the people; it was 
 love’s judgment on a lovelessness which was hindering 
 the grace of God to men (Matt. xxii.). Even could 
 we not explain each of these instances to our full 
 satisfaction, yet in view of all the evidence regarding 
 the moral character of Jesus, it would be more fitting 
 for us to distrust our own moral judgment than to 
 impute error or wrong to Him. 
 
 (6) The total impression of the historical personality 
 as presented to us in the Gospels is of One ‘ holy, 
 harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners’ (Heb. vu. 
 26), as regards any share in their guilt, but not as 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 49 
 
 regards His seeking that He might save the lost. If 
 it be said that the evangelists, or their sources, 
 concealed defects, and invented excellences, we can 
 answer that we must then ascribe an infallible moral 
 insight to them as the only possible explanation 
 of their success in their purpose. But it is not in 
 imperfect men to conceive such a perfection as Jesus 
 presents to us. If it be further urged that there may 
 have been secret sins, to them unknown, we may 
 insist that no hypocrite is ever so consummate that 
 his inward defects do not sometimes betray them- 
 selves in word and deed. But the most convincing 
 evidence of sinlessness is Jesus’ attitude to sin and 
 sinners. The saints have been marked by the in- 
 tensity of their penitence for their sins, and the 
 urgency of their prayers for forgiveness. This mark 
 of saintliness Jesus lacked. He never showed peni- 
 tence, nor craved pardon. Unless He suffered from 
 a moral insensibility, a deadness of conscience, which 
 His character and conduct as disclosed to us make it 
 quite impossible for us to aseribe to Him, the only 
 explanation possible is this: that He not only was 
 not conscious of any sin, but that there was not in 
 Him any sin, of which He could repent, and for which 
 He must seek pardon. His words to the rich young 
 ruler: *‘ Why callest thou Me good? none is good, 
 save one, even God’ (Mark x. 18), are not a solitary 
 confession of sinfulness, but are a humble acknow- 
 ledgment that so long as He was still lable to tempta- 
 tion, so long as He was learning obedience through 
 the things that He suffered, so long as He had not been 
 baptized with the appointed baptism, and had not 
 drunk the proffered cup of sacrifiee, He did not claim 
 the divine perfection. While He identified Himself 
 with the sorrows and sufferings of men, sharing even 
 the consequences of sin, which do fall most heavily 
 on vicarious love, He did not reckon Himself, al- 
 though in the world’s scorn He might be reckoned, 
 with transgressors. ‘Not ashamed to call men 
 brethren’ (Heb. ii. 11) in relation to the one Father- 
 God, in respect of this one thing—sin—He placed 
 D 
 
50 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Himself not on the side of sinful men but of holy God. 
 He claimed authority on earth to forgive sins (Mark un. 
 10); He declared that He was appointed Judge, so 
 that the destiny of men would be determined by their 
 relation to Him (John v. 22); He deemed Himself 
 capable of offering His life as a ransom for many 
 (Matt. xx. 28), and as the sacrifice of the new covenant 
 of grace between God and man (xxvi. 28). It is 
 inconceivable that One, conscious of sharing in man’s 
 sinfulness, could have taken this attitude towards sin 
 and sinners. While He suffered Himself to be treated 
 as a sinner that sinners might be made the righteous- 
 ness of God in Him, yet He knew no sin (2 Cor. v. 21). 
 If He was not altogether sinless, He either so deceived 
 Himself, or others, that we cannot admire moral 
 excellence in Him, not to speak of the adoration of 
 moral perfection. ‘To surrender His sinlessness is to 
 surrender entirely the only possible object of a faith, 
 reverence, and devotion such as the Christian Church 
 has believed itself justified in offering to Him. 
 
 (ii) Although sinlessness may appear only as a 
 negative conception, yet the actuality of it would 
 demand in a world with so many inducements and 
 provocations to sin an exceptional moral energy from 
 which we should expect abundant positive results of 
 goodness and grace. As human personality cannot 
 be a moral vacuum, the entire absence of sin is 
 conceivable only as due to the abounding presence 
 of holiness and love. To attempt to describe the 
 perfection of the holy love which we contemplate in 
 Jesus seems an impossibility. Only a few features 
 of His character can be mentioned which affect more 
 directly our conception of His person. (a) First 
 must be mentioned His humility, because’ we shall 
 never truly conceive the Incarnation unless we regard 
 it as the supreme instance of God’s humbling: of 
 Himself. » As an encouragement to the labouring and 
 heavy-laden, as a disclosure of the secret of rest, the 
 light burden and the easy yoke, Jesus described 
 Himself as ‘ meek and lowly in heart,’ and what He 
 meant by that the immediate context shows. He 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 51 
 did not resent His rejection by ‘ the wise and prudent,’ 
 and His acceptance only by the babes, the ignorant 
 and morally and religiously immature disciples, al- 
 though He was disappointed that He had not found 
 disciples among the labouring and heavy-laden, the 
 men who morally and religiously needed Him most, 
 and whom He could most fully help (men like Paul, 
 whom in His earthly ministry He did not reach). Nay, 
 He even submitted to the will of God. ‘ Yea, Father, 
 for so it 1s well-pleasing in Thy sight’ (Matt. x1. 25-30). 
 Luke even reports that * in that same hour He rejoiced 
 in the Holy Spirit’ (Luke x. 21). While the Fourth 
 Gospel is mainly concerned, as the Synoptics are not, 
 with the relation of Jesus to God, His Sonship, yet 
 that Sonship is represented throughout as an entire 
 dependence on, and a complete submission to God, 
 as well as an intimate communion and absolute 
 confidence in God as Father. It is an interesting 
 and even arresting fact, that that Gospel introduces 
 that beautiful instance of humility, the washing of 
 the disciples’ feet, by a statement emphasising Jesus’ 
 consciousness of His relation to God (John xii. 1-8). 
 Not only in His relations with men, in choosing for His 
 companions working men and women, in going to the 
 outcasts of Jewish society as objects of His loving 
 care, did He show His humility, but it is in His relation 
 to God—as Son to Father—that that grace is made 
 most manifest.» Theologians have often misrepre- 
 sented Him in writing so much about His claims, as 
 though ambition and arrogance were characteristic 
 of Him. The Sonship He claimed was such a relation 
 to God as could be adorned by meekness and lowliness 
 of heart; and His Saviourhood was a humbling of 
 Himself to be obedient unto death, even the death of 
 the Cross (Phil. 1. 6-8). 
 
 (b) Closely related to His humility was His sympathy ” 
 or compassion, taking both words in the fulness of 
 their meaning as feeling with others. His love was 
 vicarious love; it put Him in the place of those He 
 loved, to share their lot with them., While He could 
 and did rejoice with those that rejoiced, and at one 
 
52 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 stage of His ministry could say that it would be 
 unmeet for His disciples to fast while He, their 
 Bridegroom, was still with them (Mark u. 19), yet as 
 Saviour of a sinful race, His self-identification with 
 men was for the most part a sorrowing with them. 
 He was found among the suffering and sorrowing, 
 the sinners and outcasts of Jewish society. He cared 
 no less for women and children than for men, contrary 
 to the estimates of value of His age and people. The 
 despised Samaritan and the hated Gentile He em- 
 braced in His interest and affection, even although 
 He had to limit His. brief earthly ministry to the 
 people to whom in fulfilment of God’s promises He 
 had come. The agony of Gethsemane and the desola- 
 tion of the Cross witness how completely He could 
 make Himself one with sinful mankind so as to endure 
 as His own pain and grief the consequences of man’s 
 sin, even tasting death for every man (Heb. i. 9). 
 
 (c) While He thus identified Himself with men, He 
 was Himself solitary in His moral vision and purpose. 
 He told His disciples that if their righteousness did 
 not exceed the righteousness of the scribes and 
 Pharisees they could not enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven (Matt. v. 20), and that, unless they turned, and 
 became as little children, they, who were disputing 
 about the first place there, would no wise enter 
 therein (xvill. 3). He told Nicodemus, and through 
 him the Pharisees whom he was representing, that 
 without the birth from above they could not even see 
 that kingdom, or enter into it (John iii. 3-5). His 
 opponents were not the indifferent in morals and 
 religion, but the exponents and examples of the 
 godliness and goodness of contemporary Judaism. 
 
 ' In His holy love, forgiving sin, and suffering to save 
 from sin, He was original among men. In some 
 respects Gautama the Buddha approaches His per- 
 fection more than any other of the great teachers and 
 leaders of men, and yet at what a distance! Heredity 
 and environment cannot explain that moral tran- 
 scendence; and not even genius in the ordinary 
 acceptation of the term. As His character in this 
 
\ 
 
 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 58 
 
 particular corresponds so closely with what He taught 
 of God as Father, we must regard it as not only 
 human excellence, but as a revelation of the perfection 
 
 of.God. 
 
 ~ (d) This holy love in sympathy for man, and in 
 
 humility before God, had to be exercised and main- 
 tained under conditions of severest testing. ‘Tempted, 
 opposed, persecuted, rejected, betrayed, reviled, and 
 scorned, He endured, constant in His purpose, and 
 sealed His fidelity to God and man in His blood. 
 Only a holy love of inexhaustible resource could in 
 a sinful world have maintained its consistency as He 
 did. His life was surely a seamless garment of per- 
 fection, woven by holy love throughout. Such figur- 
 ative language must be used to suggest what plain 
 words could not express. 
 
 (2) In dealing with the moral character of Jesus 
 it has been impossible not to anticipate in some 
 statements the discussion of His religious conscious- 
 ness, for His morality was a religious morality ; His 
 character was rooted in, grew out of, and drew its 
 nourishment from His relation to God. 
 
 (i) As His was a real, if ideal and typical humanity, 
 we ought to speak of a religious consciousness of 
 relation to God. Whatever metaphysical explanation 
 we may be led by the facts to offer, we are bound first 
 to set forth those facts under that category of our 
 thought. He as Son knew Himself as distinct, and 
 yet as related to the Father; immediate as might be 
 the contact, it was not identity; intimate as might 
 be the communion, it was not absorption. That He 
 exercised faith, and used prayer towards God, warrants 
 our speaking of the religion of Jesus, and we should 
 lose much if we hid that fact under a metaphysical 
 explanation. While, as has already been shown, 
 Jesus’ attitude to sinful mankind places Him on the 
 side of God in dealing with sinners, and He made 
 claims in that relation which it would have been 
 arrogance and audacity for one who knew Himself 
 to be only man to make, yet His distinctive religious 
 consciousness of relation to God finds expression in 
 
54 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 only one passage in the Synoptics, to which already 
 in another connection reference has been made. This 
 passage (Matt. xi. 27= Luke x. 22) undoubtedly belongs 
 to the collection of sayings which supplies much 
 of the common material of these two Gospels. 
 There was a secret of His own nature which He as 
 Son knew that God as Father alone knew, and He as 
 Son alone knew and could reveal God as Father. 
 But this relation of Father and Son is on His part as 
 Son one of dependence and submission, for the words 
 ‘ All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father’ 
 are no claim of universal dominion, but a confession 
 of entire dependence, even as the words, ‘ Yea, Father, 
 for so it was well-pleasing in Thy sight,’ are an utter- 
 ance of complete submission. Jesus thus not only 
 gave God the name Father, and taught the care and 
 bounty, the mercy, pity, and grace of the divine 
 Fatherhood, but He revealed the Fatherhood most 
 fully and surely by living as Son. The kind of Son 
 He was shows the kind of Father God is. While He 
 did teach the universal Fatherhood of God, yet there 
 ean be no doubt that He was in Himself conscious of 
 an immediate relation to God, which for others could 
 only be mediated by Him. 
 
 (ii) While we must always remember that in the 
 Fourth Gospel recollection comes to us coloured by 
 meditation, that history is interpreted by theology, 
 yet we are justified in using that Gospel to supplement 
 what the Synoptics disclose regarding the Sonship 
 of Jesus. Dependence and submission are no less 
 asserted there. Only a few crucial sayings need be 
 taken. The defence of the Sabbath cure, ‘ My Father 
 worketh even until now, and I work’ (John v. 17), is no 
 claim to equality with God, as His opponents repre- 
 sented it to be, but simply an appeal to the divine 
 example. How absolute a dependence is expressed 
 in the words: ‘I can of Myself do nothing’ (v. 80)! 
 In freely laying down His life He is fulfilling a com- 
 mandment received of the Father (x. 18). If we 
 follow Moffatt’s rearrangement of passages in chapter 
 x. v. 80, ‘I and the Father are one’ would at once 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 55 
 
 follow v. 18, and what would be asserted would be a 
 unity of purpose, and not, as a dogmatic interpretation 
 would claim, of substance, importing categories of 
 thought unknown to the Gospel. What more striking 
 confession of dependence and subordination could 
 there be than the saying, ° If ye loved Me, ye would 
 have rejoiced, because I go unto the Father: for the 
 Father is greater than I’ (xiv. 28)? His earthly 
 life was relatively a separation from God, in which 
 He could not possess from His Father all that His 
 return would restore to Him. Sayings that seem to 
 contradict this representation of the relation, though 
 found in the Fourth Gospel, must be regarded as 
 interpretation rather than testimony.? 
 
 (iii) There are a few sayings in the Fourth Gospel 
 which carry the relation to God out of the temporal 
 process into the eternal reality. Again we confine 
 ourselves to what may be with good reason regarded 
 as words of Jesus Himself. ‘ Verily, verily, I say unto 
 you, Before Abraham was, I am’ (vill. 58). He was 
 justifying His claim to bestow eternal life against 
 the challenge of His opponents, who affirmed the 
 universal mortality even of the greatest men, such as 
 Abraham. At this challenge His thought soared 
 above the temporal process, to which their minds were 
 confined, to the eternal reality of His relation to God, 
 and He thought of the Father of those who believe 
 as anticipating with gladness His present manifesta- 
 tion of that reality. When His opponents again 
 dragged Him back into that temporal process, He 
 asserted the more emphatically His timelessness, but 
 as He was speaking to those whose thoughts could 
 move only in time, He represented that timelessness 
 as priority in time. Under very different conditions 
 did His mind again revert to His relation to the eternal 
 reality. ‘Now, O Father, glorify Thou Me, with Thine 
 own self, with the glory which I had with Thee before 
 the world was’ (xvii. 5). Harnack’s comment on 
 v. 24 is worth quoting.’ ‘ The confidence with which 
 
 1 Whatever use may be made in this volume of the Fourth Gospel is based 
 on a thorough critical study, if not always in agreement with critics, 
 
56 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 John lets Him speak to the Father, ‘‘ Thou lovedst Me 
 before the foundation of the world,” is surely over- 
 heard from Jesus’ own certainty.’ ! Pre-existence is 
 an inappropriate term, as it represents an eternal 
 relation as priority in the temporal process. To affirm, 
 as is done by Tholuck,? that these sayings mean ‘a 
 continuity of the consciousness of the historical Christ 
 with the Logos’ is both unnecessary and unreasonable. 
 In a developing human consciousness such a con- 
 tinuity is inconceivable. Did the babe in the mother’s 
 womb already possess it, or if not, when did it emerge ? 
 Seeing that the first distinct utterance of that con- 
 sciousness is found only towards the end of the earthly 
 ministry, when His controversy with His opponents 
 was being pressed to its final issue, a much more 
 probable explanation is that to meet the challenge of 
 His opponents, there came to Him, or (should we not 
 rather say) the Father gave to Him the certain assur- 
 ance that, as His work for men was not to be confined 
 to the temporal process of His earthly ministry, so the 
 relation to the Father of which He was conscious, and 
 which sustained Him in the fulfilment of His vocation 
 against all opposition, had not begun in that temporal 
 process, but was eternal as God Himself. He knew 
 Himself to be the object of the eternal love of God, 
 He knew that that involved eternal blessedness in 
 communion with God. He believed that the man 
 distinguished for his faith could not but have had 
 some anticipation of His present manifestation of 
 that eternal love and blessedness. It is in some such 
 way alone that we can make these sayings intelligible. 
 
 (3) Not only were Jesus’ moral character and religious 
 consciousness so unique that we cannot exhaust their 
 significance by describing them as human, and must 
 ascribe the quality of divinity, but both were creatvve, 
 an. added proof of His claim to be related to God as 
 Father as no other man has ever been.” The divine 
 Fatherhood does not mean only care and bounty in 
 providence ; it means primarily a creative fellowship 
 
 1 Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 81. 
 * Quoted by Dods in The Expositor’s Greek Testament, 1. p. 841, 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 57 
 
 with man, in which the likeness of the divine perfec- 
 tion is reproduced. Jesus was the perfect Son in that 
 in an unbroken fellowship with God He reflected 
 undimmed the glory of God. It is by the perfect 
 Son that the divine Fatherhood towards all men is 
 mediated. As mankind is sinful, this revelation of God 
 not only to, but in man, must needs be redemptive. 
 What were the means by which Jesus fulfilled His 
 calling in His revelation of God redemptive of man 
 the next section will discuss; but what is here to be 
 noted as completing the proof of the divinity of Jesus 
 as presented in the evangelical testimony is this, that 
 He has done for mankind what God alone could do. 
 Through Him there has been realised a fellowship with 
 God and a likeness to God in mankind, so that both 
 the Fatherhood of God and the sonship of man which 
 He revealed are real. By the forgiveness of sin He 
 restored the interrupted fellowship with God; by 
 His Spirit in men He produces in them a holiness in 
 which likeness to God is shown. It is in His Cross 
 that His revelation of God in the redemption of man 
 is consummated; and yet in His earthly ministry He 
 began His creative work of making sinners into chil- 
 dren of God and saints. There have been great 
 teachers and leaders of the souls of men, but none of 
 them claimed to do or did what Jesus has done. 
 Through Moses came a law to be obeyed ; Mohammed 
 was the prophet of a truth about God; Gautama 
 offered man the secret of a salvation which must be 
 secured by their own efforts. Christ brings men to 
 God and God to men in an immediacy of relation, in 
 an intimacy of communion, in a sufficiency and an 
 efficacy of divine grace through human faith which is 
 a new creation of man in his inmost, highest life. It 
 is because of the sufficiency and efficacy both of His 
 revelation of God, and His redemption of man, the 
 transcendence of what He has done for man over all 
 that other teachers and leaders of the soul have 
 accomplished, the absolute quality of the relation of 
 man to God through Him, that we must confess that 
 this work is not of man, even at his very best; but 
 
58 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 this God and God alone can have wrought. This 
 cannot, of course, be demonstrated by merely in- 
 tellectual arguments to those who have not had the 
 experience of what Christ has done; but for those 
 who have that experience, there need be no other 
 evidence. They have the witness in themselves that 
 
 He is God. 
 
CHAPTER IT 
 
 THE EVANGELICAL TESTIMONY: 8B. THE 
 WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 As the personality expresses itself in the activity, so 
 the work discloses the person of Christ. His person 
 in its blended loftiness and lowliness, God as man, is, 
 shows, and proves grace; so, as we shall see, does His 
 work, which we do not confine, as has often been 
 done, to His atoning death. There is a unity of 
 motive, purpose, and character in the whole of His 
 activity, so that the parts can be understood only 
 in the whole. 
 
 (1) Jesus began as a teacher, and it is this aspect 
 of His work which first claims attention. It is not 
 priority in time, however, that is the whole reason for 
 our considering the teaching first of all. Many false 
 theories of the atonement have been due to ignoring 
 the truth He taught about God and man, and their 
 mutual relation. We can understand His sacrifice 
 for our salvation only if His mind be in us, if we think 
 as He did. 
 
 (i) What was distinctive of that teaching is sug- 
 gested by the records of the impression made on 
 those who heard. (a) Mark records that * they were 
 astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as 
 having authority, and not as the scribes’ (i. 22). The 
 scribes were interpreters of the Holy Scriptures, and 
 even in their interpretation they were prone to quote 
 what others had said before them, rather than to 
 state what they themselves thought. Conscious of 
 the deficiency of their personal authority, they had 
 to rely on authorities. Jesus came not as a commen- 
 tator, but as a revealer. His forerunner had revived 
 the prophetic succession, and He came in that suc- 
 
 59 
 
60 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 cession as an agent of divine revelation and with a 
 freshness, fullness, and freedom so much the greater 
 as He was Himself greater. He did not need to 
 quote what men had said about God, for He Himself 
 knew God with the intimacy of the Son knowing the 
 Father. It was His moral and spiritual discernment 
 which enabled Him so to speak, that even those who 
 knew not the secret of His personality were brought 
 under His spell, recognising that He had a right to 
 command the assent of the mind, the constraint of 
 the heart, and the submission of the will. What His 
 first hearers felt, that the generations since have felt. 
 His authority cannot be ignored, it must be accepted 
 or rejected. That is an issue from which for those 
 who move at all in the moral and religious realm there 
 can be no escape. He is, and must be, either a stone 
 of stumbling, or the rock for building. 
 
 (b) The contrast between the teaching of Jesus and 
 that of the scribes indicates another difference; and 
 that also is noted in Mark’s Gospel: ‘ What is this ? 
 A new teaching’ (i. 27). Efforts have been made to 
 discredit the originality of Jesus by showing that 
 many of His characteristic sayings can be paralleled 
 elsewhere. For instance, it is said that the Golden 
 Rule is found in a negative form in Confucius, but 
 in a positive in Lao-tsze. There is a likeness between 
 the kind of life enjoined by Gautama the Buddha and 
 that presented in the moral teaching of Jesus. In the 
 Jewish fathers there are sayings about forgiveness 
 which very closely resemble what He taught. It is 
 assumed that in His teaching about the last things He 
 reproduced the apocalyptic ideas of His own age. 
 Regarding this argument three things may be said. 
 Firstly, it would be very strange if Jesus had never 
 said what had been said before Him. God had not 
 been without witness in other lands and former times, 
 speaking not through the succession of Hebrew 
 prophets alone ‘by divers portions and in divers 
 manners.’ ‘To be saying what nobody else has ever 
 thought of saying is proof of folly and vanity rather 
 than of wisdom and virtue, Jesus came, not to 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 61 
 
 startle the world with unheard-of novelties, but to 
 carry the moral and religious development of mankind 
 to a new stage, transcending and yet fulfilling the 
 previous stages, continuous with them as well as 
 contrasted to them. 
 
 Secondly, a comparison of the Sermon on the Mount 
 alone with the law of Moses and its scribal interpreta- 
 tions, and still more with the current practices and 
 motives of the Pharisees, who claimed that they made 
 morality and religion their chief concern, throws into 
 bold relief the indescribable difference. Jesus was 
 Himself conscious of that contrast. While He claimed 
 to fulfil the law and the prophets,yet the Sermon shows 
 that by fulfilment He meant ‘ filling full,’ completing 
 what was lacking, correcting what was defective. He 
 told His disciples, ‘except your righteousness shall 
 exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, 
 ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven ’ 
 (Matt. v. 20). This contrast meant opposition and 
 conflict. The undressed cloth will rend the old 
 garment; and the new wine burst the old wine-skins 
 (Mark 1. 21-22). To give only a few instances: in 
 respect of Sabbath observance, the distinction of 
 clean and unclean, the relative importance of cere- 
 monial and moral requirements, the association of the 
 righteous with sinners, Jesus came into conflict with 
 the custodians of the morality and religion of His 
 age and nation. It is true that He justified Himself 
 often by reverting to the older and better teaching 
 of the Scriptures; but so to detach oneself from 
 present standards and practices and to attach oneself 
 to what is discerned as truer and worthier in the past 
 to the degree Jesus did, proves originality. 
 
 Thirdly, if we take the teaching as a whole, the 
 association of morality with religion, of human duty 
 with the relation to God, the dominating principle of 
 love in both spheres, the maximum application of 
 that principle in unwearied forgiveness of others, and 
 unmeasured sacrifice for others, the harmony of 
 motive, purpose, and character, giving to all a unity 
 such as no other system has possessed, pervaded 
 
62 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 throughout by a finality and sufficiency which all 
 religious and moral thought have not superseded nor 
 exhausted, who can doubt that this was indeed ‘a 
 new teaching’ ? 
 
 (c) Its general character is described in what Luke 
 writes of the impression made in the synagogue at 
 Nazareth. ‘ All bore Him witness, and wondered at 
 the words of grace which proceeded out of His mouth * 
 (iv. 22). It may be impossible for us now to be 
 certain of the reference of the word grace: probably 
 it is to the matter, and the passage read supports this 
 view; for to Luke, the companion of Paul, what was 
 important was the revelation of grace in Christ. But 
 the evangelical records justify us, and the words allow 
 us to include manner and method. The manner of 
 the teaching was gracious in keeping with the message. 
 The teacher did not repel, but attracted the ignorant 
 and even the sinful. We may be sure that a look, a 
 smile, a tone, a gesture made what appeared severe 
 seem kind, and what in itself was unloving very rich 
 in its tenderness. The sinful woman would never 
 have dared to come so near to Him had not His 
 manner invited approach (Luke vii. 37, 38); and the 
 Syrophoenician mother would never have repeated 
 her request had not His manner interpreted the word 
 which sounded as a denial as an invitation to per- 
 severance (Mark vii. 27, 28). The method too was 
 gracious, for it always aimed at meeting the need, 
 and fitting the capacity of those to whom the speech 
 was addressed. ‘ By this method,’ says Wendt,* * of 
 meeting the want of the occasion, Jesus has been able 
 to impart two weighty qualities to His utterances 
 and His instruction, viz.: popular intelligibility and 
 impressive pregnancy. ‘The importance lies in_the 
 union of these two qualities. A mode of teaching 
 which aims at popular intelligibility is exposed to the 
 risk of degenerating into platitude and_ triviality ; 
 and one which aims at pregnant brevity easily becomes 
 stilted and obscure. But Jesus perfectly combined 
 the two qualities, and by this very means attained 
 
 1 The Teaching of Jesus, Eng. tr., 1. p. 109. 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 63 
 
 a peculiar and classic beauty of style.’ There was 
 grace in the aesthetic sense as well as the religious. 
 
 It hes beyond the scope of this volume to discuss 
 the method of Jesus in detail; and the writer just 
 quoted may with advantage be studied for this 
 purpose. But two observations must be added. 
 Firstly, the reason given by Jesus for speaking in 
 parables only in appearance and not in reality con- 
 tradicts the statement, ‘Unto you is given the 
 mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them 
 that are without, all things are done in parables: that 
 seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing 
 they may hear, and not understand ; lest haply they 
 should turn again, and it should be forgiven them ’ 
 (Mark iv. 11, 12). The words in v. 12 are a quota- 
 tion from Isaiah vi. 9. In accordance with Hebraic 
 modes of thought the human result of insensibility 
 and unresponsiveness to divine truth is there repre- 
 sented as the divine intention. What was meant 
 was that the attention of those who could not or even 
 would not receive His message in plain words must 
 be held by a story; a time might come when the 
 meaning of the story would unfold itself to them. 
 In the form of a parable Jesus lodged a truth in the 
 memory, when the understanding was not yet ready 
 to receive it. How suggestive the parables have 
 proved, revealing and not concealing truth! Secondly, 
 if the method of teaching in the Synoptics aims at 
 this popular intellgrbility, 1t is not a conclusive objec- 
 tion to the authenticity of the teaching presented in 
 the Fourth Gospel that it is not the same in form, if 
 most of it was addressed, on the one hand, to opponents 
 who challenged its truth, and on the other to a disciple, 
 or group of disciples, who could receive and respond 
 to the teaching as the multitudes, and even for the 
 most part the Twelve, could not. But even the 
 Fourth Gospel emphasises the reserve and restraint 
 of Jesus in that more intimate teaching. ‘I yet have 
 many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them 
 now’ (John xvi.12). There was grace in the withhold- 
 ing as well as the imparting. It must, however, be 
 
66 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 assigns to the Christian community of a later age all 
 those sayings about God and man, duty and destiny, 
 which the Christian Church hitherto has regarded as 
 most distinctive of His Gospel. The community is 
 represented as greater in its moral and religious in- 
 sight than the Founder, and less dependent than He 
 was on the contemporary apocalyptic thought. Har- 
 nack, in refusing to share this view, rightly states the 
 position. ‘ Surely it is a mistake in similar cases to 
 judge pre-eminent, truly epoch-making personalities 
 first of all in this respect, what they have shared with 
 their contemporaries,-and on the contrary to push 
 into the background what was distinctive and great 
 in them. The inclination as much as possible to level 
 down, and to eliminate what is special, may in some 
 persons spring from a sense of truth, deserving re- 
 cognition, but it is misguided. More frequently there 
 prevails here, conscious or unconscious, the endeavour 
 not to acknowledge the great, and to throw down the 
 lofty.’1 We are justified in affirming that for Jesus 
 the kingdom was not merely future, but in His 
 presence and activity among men already present 
 and active. He was not merely the herald of that 
 coming kingdom ; but the kingdom was being already 
 established in His revelation of God, and the truth and 
 grace which He Himself was already imparting to 
 men. His moral teaching was no interim ethics, and 
 His function no merely transitional and preparatory 
 one. For even Harnack does not do full justice to 
 the place Jesus gave Himself in His Gospel.2 Even 
 if it be true that He did not preach Himself, but the 
 Father, yet He alone knew and could reveal the 
 Father. He did require a more intimate personal 
 relation to and dependence on Himself than just 
 obedience to His commandments; and as has been 
 shown, while He was not ashamed to call men brethren, 
 yet as regards His consciousness of God’s Fatherhood 
 and His revelation of it to man He did distinguish 
 Himself from all others, and especially in regard to 
 
 1 Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 35. 
 * Ibid., p. 80. 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 67 
 
 sin He stood on the side of God and not of man. He 
 was not merely the messenger, but in His relation 
 alike to God and man He was included in the content 
 of His message. When we come to discuss how He 
 conceived His distinctive vocation, all that this state- 
 ment means will be made more plain. 
 
 (d) The eschatological school has, however, called 
 attention to a feature of Jesus’ teaching which 
 Christian theologians have often ignored. The Apos- 
 tolic Church lived, laboured, and suffered with a vivid, 
 eager expectation of a speedy Advent of Christ in 
 power and glory. Could it have cherished that hope 
 had there been no ground for it in the teaching of 
 Jesus ? ‘That is extremely improbable. Further, we 
 should need to do critical violence to the Gospels as 
 great as that of the eschatological school were we to 
 deny that Jesus gave any eschatological teaching. 
 There is no doubt that He foretold the doom of 
 Jerusalem, and placed the fulfilment of His prophecy 
 within that generation. There seems to be no doubt 
 that He also, as did other prophets, placed the 
 consummation of all things in close association with 
 the immediate judgment of God: but, as we have 
 already seen, He confessed ignorance of the day and 
 the hour of that event. It is probable that the 
 thought of the Apostolic Age has left its colour and 
 tone in the transmission of the teaching of Jesus on 
 the Last Things, and that probably a greater definite- 
 ness was given to some of His sayings than these at 
 first displayed. He believed that God could bring 
 the fulfilment of His purpose speedily, but He also 
 recognised that the unbelief of man might hinder 
 and delay this final consummation. He never affirmed 
 that the divine power would bring about God’s purpose 
 apart from the human process in history, which He 
 presented figuratively in such parables as the mustard 
 seed and the leaven (Matt. xiii. 31-33). Surely as man 
 He was subject to changing moods. When His faith 
 in God exalted Him above the conditions of the hour, 
 His manifestation in power and glory seemed not only 
 certain, but imminent; when His contact with men 
 
68 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 brought despondency, He was less confident that the 
 time was near. What is significant is that for the 
 future no less than the present, He was at the centre 
 of His message. 
 
 (2) Jesus lived what He taught alike in His religious 
 experience and His moral character, as well as the 
 grace of His dealings with men. 
 
 (i) His teaching was enforced by His example. 
 Those whom He enjoined to learn of Him were also 
 ealled to take His yoke upon them, that is, to serve 
 not Him, but as He served, to be His yoke-fellows 
 (Matt. xi. 29-80). What He said and did was not to 
 set an example, but because it was just what it was 
 most fit should then and there be said and done. 
 Jesus never assumed the moral pose which some men 
 do in trying to set an example; in fulfilling His calling 
 in word and deed He showed what moral perfection 
 is. On one occasion He is represented as doing some- 
 thing for the sake of example. When He had washed 
 the disciples’ feet, He enforced the meaning of His 
 deed in the words: ‘I have given you an example, 
 that ye also should do as I have done to you’ (John 
 xiii. 15). As the deed, however, was one of humble 
 service, there was in it no moral pose, which is often 
 so offensive in those who offer themselves as patterns 
 to their fellows. As the words to Peter show: ‘If 
 I wash thee not thou hast no part with Me’; the 
 example was not one merely to be imitated; it was 
 in itself one may even say sacramental, the channel 
 of the grace that cleansed the disciples from the 
 rivalry and ambition which so endangered their 
 personal relation to Himself. As it was necessary 
 for them, so it was a duty for Him as charged with 
 their training for His work. By its moral quality it 
 was morally efficacious. ‘This is essentially what the 
 moral example of Jesus means. His holy love gains 
 such influence over His disciples, that without con- 
 scious imitation they are gradually conformed to His 
 likeness. Literal reproduction of what He said and 
 did is not to follow His example; but vital participa- 
 tion in His motive, disposition, purpose is. His. 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 69 
 
 vocation on the one hand, and His circumstances on 
 the other, were so unlike ours, that such artificial 
 imitation would be a moral absurdity. His perfection, 
 while it humbles, also encourages us, for it is the 
 perfection of the grace that enables us to do what it 
 enjoins; it is a pattern which does not make us 
 despair, because it is also a power that is sufficient 
 according to our faith for every demand. We may 
 truly use of His example the words of Augustine, 
 Jube qued vis, Da quod jubes. 
 
 (11) It is in connection both with the teaching and 
 the example of Jesus that the miracles may be with 
 most advantage considered. (a) They must not be 
 regarded as external credentials of supernatural power 
 to enforce the authority of Jesus as teacher. That 
 teaching appeals to reason, conscience, affection, and 
 aspiration, and needs no such enforcement. The 
 miracles are necessary constituents of His message 
 and mission of grace, in which He revealed the love 
 of the Father to men, and showed the characteristics 
 of His own religious experience, moral character, and 
 mediatorial function. We shall not accordingly give 
 the miracles their due place in this work if we lay 
 stress on the supernatural power which may have 
 been displayed and not on their witness to His con- 
 fidence in God and compassion for man. At the 
 Temptation Jesus rejected the use of His supernatural 
 power on His own behalf or for the advancement of 
 His cause as a suggestion of evil. He not only refused, 
 but condemned the request for a sign from heaven in 
 proof of His claims. The statement in Matt. xvii. 27 
 about finding a shekel in the mouth of a fish does not 
 afford an instance of any use of supernatural power 
 for any personal end; for there is no record that a 
 miracle took place, and the words themselves bear 
 the construction of a playful command of Jesus to 
 Peter to go and earn by his fishing the money which 
 was wanted. If the record of the withering of the 
 barren fig-tree is to be regarded as the report of a 
 miracle, and not ag due to a misunderstanding of a 
 parable (a possible explanation, compare Mark xi. 
 
70 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 13-21 with Luke xiii. 6-9), it would at first sight appear 
 an exception to the general rule that the miracles were 
 beneficent, healing disease, relieving need, warding 
 off danger. But it may be understood, although it 
 must be admitted the context does not suggest that 
 interpretation, as a symbolic miracle, a prophecy in 
 act of the doom to fall on the Jewish nation, which 
 had not yielded to the Messiah the fruits of penitence 
 and faith. A critical study of the story of the 
 Gadarene demoniac shows that Jesus used His power 
 to heal the man believing himself possessed, but not 
 to destroy the swine, the panic which resulted in 
 their destruction being probably due to the violent 
 gestures and loud cries of the demoniac, for the word 
 Matthew reports as spoken by Jesus, ‘ Go’ (umdyere), 
 being addressed to the consciousness of the possessed 
 man, does not at all necessarily carry the interpretation 
 that Mark puts upon it, ‘ And He gave them leave’ 
 (Matt. viii. 82, Mark v. 13). While the beneficent 
 character is evident in the miracles of healing, it is 
 not so obvious in some of the nature-miracles. A 
 supply of wine towards the end of a feast does not 
 at first sight appear a necessary service of love; nor 
 can we at once see the imperative need of the stilling 
 of the storm, or the walking on the sea, unless indeed 
 the lives of the disciples were imperilled; but we 
 may find the motive of even such miracles in the 
 compassion of Jesus, His readiness to respond to any 
 human appeal. This we can say confidently, that 
 He never worked a miracle for show, to display His 
 power, or prove His claim. As the nature-miracles 
 present the greatest difficulty for our thought, we may 
 postpone their discussion until we have dealt with the 
 healing ministry of Jesus. 
 
 (b) Matthew Arnold suggested that the miracles of 
 healing were instances of what he called moral thera- 
 peutics, because of the close connection between 
 moral fault and disease.1 Harnack has advanced a 
 similar view: ‘ We see that a firm will and a con-. 
 vinced faith act even on the bodily life and cause 
 
 1 Literature and Dogma, pp. 143-4. 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 71 
 
 appearances which appeal to us as miracles. Who 
 has here hitherto with certainty measured the realm 
 of the possible and real? Nobody. Who can say 
 how far the influences of one soul on another soul and 
 of the soul on the body reach? Nobody. Who can 
 still affirm that all which in this realm appears as 
 striking rests only on deception and error ? Certainly 
 no miracles occur, but there is enough of the wonderful 
 and inexplicable.’! So far as assured medical know- 
 ledge goes, not all diseases can be treated by such 
 suggestion or influence, but only those due to nervous 
 disorder. Dr. Ryle? after a careful examination of 
 the records of the healing miracles asserted the con- 
 clusion that such an explanation was inadequate. ‘ If 
 the dropsy which was cured was real dropsy, and the 
 withered arm a real withered arm; if the blind old 
 men were not the subjects of hysteria, and the sick 
 folk who were laid in the streets were not all neurotics, 
 then we can no longer accept the works of healing as 
 historical, and reject the so-called cosmical miracles. 
 One who could rejuvenate at a word a strand of 
 atrophied nerve might bring about the wasting of a 
 fie-tree in a moment, and it would be rash to say that 
 He might not command the winds and the waves, and 
 raise the dead to life.’ The experience gained during 
 the War in hospitals in dealing with shell-shock and 
 other nervous disorders has, however, led some 
 medical men to modify their position, and to widen 
 the range of the possible physical consequences of 
 nervous disorders. One medical man has declared 
 that he has seen cures effected similar to those of 
 Jesus with only the one exception of the raising of 
 the dead. As regards cure by auto-suggestion, or 
 hetero-suggestion,® it has been contended that the 
 distinction between functional disorders and organic 
 diseases cannot be insisted on. Medical science 
 generally has not yet reached the conclusion that all 
 
 1 Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 18. 
 
 2 ¢The Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing,’ Hibbert Journal, v. 
 p- 585. 
 
 3 See Baudouin’s Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion. 
 
"2 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 diseases are curable by such methods. It would be 
 very unwise, however, for the Christian apologist to 
 take up a position on such a question which even 
 a slight advance in medical knowledge and_ skill 
 might soon prove to be untenable, and we are forced 
 to ask ourselves the question: if the miracles of 
 healing are explicable on the lines of this modern 
 method of treating disease, to what representation of 
 the healing ministry of Jesus must we resort ii 
 
 (c) It must be admitted that the Gospel records 
 themselves lend some support to this explanation. 
 Jesus required faith in the recipient of the benefit, 
 or those who interceded for him. He could not do 
 many mighty works in Nazareth because of the un- 
 belief of the people (Mark vi. 5). He told the father 
 of the epileptic boy that ‘ all things are possible to 
 him that believeth’ (Mark ix. 23), and He explained 
 the failure of the disciples to effect a cure in the words, 
 ‘This kind can come out by nothing, save by prayer ’ 
 (v. 29). At the grave of Lazarus He is reported as 
 lifting up His eyes and saying, ‘ Father, I thank Thee 
 that Thou heardest me. And I knew that Thou hearest 
 me always’ (John xi, 41-42). The requirement of 
 faith made His healing miracles a part of His ministry 
 of grace to man, a means of bringing man into closer 
 relation to God. That Jesus Himself exercised faith, 
 and even expressed His faith in prayer in connection 
 with His healing ministry, shows that that ministry 
 for Him also had its roots, not only in His moral 
 character—His compassion for man, but also in His 
 religious experience—His confidence in God. It is 
 the psychic energy, the will to cure, due to this com- 
 passion for man, and this confidence in God, which 
 offers some analogy to this modern method of cure. 
 Jesus was ignorant of this discovery of modern medical 
 science, and so did not consciously use a method of 
 natural cure. He Himself, as well as the witnesses of 
 the cures, ascribed them to the supernatural power 
 of God. But the possibility must at least be admitted 
 that His perfect compassion for man evoked such a 
 psychic energy of faith in others, and His perfect 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 73 
 
 confidence in God such a psychic energy of grace in 
 Himself, that auto- and hetero-suggestion were com- 
 bined in these cures. Even on this assumption, 
 however, the activity of God must not be excluded. 
 As in prayer the believer is conscious of benefit, 
 religious, moral, and even physical, which he could 
 not have secured for himself by his own aspiration 
 or endeavour, so both the faith of the recipients and 
 the faith of the agent in healing provided the conditions 
 for the divine working, to which the miracles of Jesus 
 were ascribed. There are persons who have in a high 
 degree a curative influence over the sick, and probably 
 Jesus did possess that pre-eminently. But that He 
 had an inherent power to work miracles is on the whole, 
 in view of all that has been said about the nature of 
 His relation as Son to God as Father, less probable 
 than that His miracles were instances of the divine 
 activity through Him. While maintaining this view, 
 the writer is not prepared to admit, however, that 
 this modern method of cure fully explains the healing 
 ministry. It is not proved that all the diseases He 
 cured could be so treated, and the most wonderful 
 events, the raising of the dead and the nature miracles, 
 are unexplained. 
 
 (d) Regarding the raising of the dead we cannot 
 dogmatise. If we could explain the narratives by 
 a confusion of recovery from trance with restoration 
 of life the difficulty would certainly be removed. We 
 know too little of the relation of body and soul to 
 affirm that such a restoration of life after death is 
 impossible, however improbable our general experience 
 makes it appear. What does seem in the highest 
 degree improbable is that a body already decaying 
 should have been restored to life; and we must 
 assume that there is some mistake in the narrative 
 in John xi. 39. Two of the nature-miracles (if such 
 they are) have already been dealt with—the coin in 
 the fish’s mouth, and the withering of the fig-tree. 
 It is not imperative to assume a miracle from the 
 narratives of the draught of fishes, for a surprisingly 
 abundant catch is not an unknown occurrence for 
 
74 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 fishermen. If Jesus’ command was not the result 
 of careful observation, it may be explained by a super- 
 natural intuition on His part that there was a shoal 
 of fish. But as the same kind of occurrence is told 
 in Luke v. 1-11, and John xxi. 1-8, in the one Gospel 
 in connection with Peter’s first call, and in the other 
 with his restoration, and there is nothing correspond- 
 ing in the record of Peter’s call in Matthew and even 
 Mark, who transmitted what Peter had reported 
 about the ministry of Jesus, we may have here a 
 vagrant tradition of uncertain origin. ‘The stilling 
 of the storm may be explained either as a supernatural 
 intuition of Jesus that the storm was abating, or as 
 an instant answer of God to the prayer of Jesus 
 implicit in the words ‘ Peace, be still,’ which could 
 not have been addressed to inanimate, senseless winds 
 and waves, but expressed His triumphant certainty. 
 The walking of Jesus on the water offers more serious 
 difficulty. Mark, Peter’s reporter, says nothing about 
 Peter’s attempt to join his master (Matt. xiv. 28-32), 
 and the Fourth Gospel does not reproduce that part 
 of the story. Only if we assume that the * beloved 
 disciple’? was John the son of Zebedee, can we claim 
 that that Gospel offers us an independent testimony 
 regarding the occurrence. The narrative itself shows 
 the state of terror in which the disciples were, so that 
 they mistook Jesus for an apparition (Mark vi. 49, 
 Matt. xiv. 26). As Mark reports that ‘ Jesus would 
 have passed by them’ (v. 48), the motive of the action 
 is obscured. If they were in such danger and terror, 
 that He must at once be in their midst, what was the 
 reason for such action? It must be conceded that 
 the condition of the disciples did not qualify them to 
 give a coherent account of what actually did take 
 place. We cannot pronounce the miracle impossible, 
 but the account is not convincing, and no adequate 
 reason is offered for Jesus’ thus raising Himself above 
 those human limitations which give reality to the 
 Incarnation. The story of the feeding of the four 
 thousand (Mark viii. 1-9, Matt. xv. 32-389) may be 
 
 oe 
 4 
 
 regarded as a doublet of the story of the feeding of 7 
 
 > a i eae 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST oD 
 
 the five thousand (Mark vi. 32-44, Matt. xiv. 13-21, 
 Luke ix. 10-17, John vi. 1-18). ‘It is,’ says Dr. 
 Headlam,! ‘another account of the same event. 
 There is a remarkable similarity between the two 
 stories, but that of the five thousand has all the 
 vividness which characterises a Marecan narrative, 
 while that of the four thousand is singularly bald. 
 Apart from this the two stories (except for the 
 numbers) are almost identical. Then we notice that 
 the second story is narrated as if there had been no 
 similar event previous to it, and that while the first 
 story takes its proper place in the narrative, the 
 second story seems quite unconnected with what 
 precedes it.’ The difficulty of this narrative lies for 
 us in conceiving what did take place. The report 
 seems circumstantial, but it fails us just where we 
 would like information most. When did the multi- 
 plication take place—in the hands of Jesus as He 
 blessed, of His disciples as they distributed, or of the 
 multitude as they received ? When was an increase 
 of the quantity observed ? If there was indeed such, 
 how does the witness fail to describe it? It is not 
 surprising that various solutions of the problem have 
 been offered, as that the people were so sustained and 
 satisfied with the teaching of Jesus that they forgot 
 their hunger, and felt that they had been fed, or that 
 Jesus and His disciples set so good an example of 
 generosity by sharing with others what they had that 
 other stores of food were produced and divided, so 
 that all got enough. The writer’s own standpoint in 
 this matter has been well expressed by Dr. Headlam.? 
 ‘A miracle and a wonderful event may have taken 
 place in many ways, and we need not disbelieve it 
 because our imagination cannot picture to ourselves 
 the way in which it could have happened. I would 
 venture to suggest, therefore, that, exercising a certain 
 amount of suspense of judgment, we should refuse 
 to rule out the story on a priori grounds, as necessarily 
 unnatural or impossible, and should recognise that 
 
 1 The Life and Teaching of Jesus the Christ, p. 15. 
 2 Op. cit., p. 278. 
 
“6 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 something occurred, so wonderful as to stir up the 
 people in a remarkable way.’ He adds with reference 
 to two narratives already considered: ‘1 would 
 suggest also that we should not be too anxious to 
 adopt a rationalistic explanation of the walking on 
 the waves and the stilling of the storm, and should 
 there also exercise a certain suspense of judgment. 
 It is quite easy to devise rationalistic explanations, 
 but they are really never convincing.’ One miracle 
 remains for consideration, the turning of the water 
 into wine at Cana (John ii. 1-11). That it is told only 
 in the Fourth Gospel need not itself excite suspicion. 
 That it lends itself to an allegorical interpretation as 
 a symbol of the transforming of human life by the 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ does not prove that the author 
 invented the story with that intention, as no such 
 meaning is in any way suggested. As there was no 
 multiplication of substance, but only transformation, 
 the same difficulty for our imagination does not exist 
 as in respect to the miracle just discussed. The 
 difficulty is rather here, that no adequate reason for 
 the performance of such a miracle is given in the 
 narrative. 
 
 (e) While the writer is not prepared to abandon 
 belief in the exercise of supernatural power by Jesus, 
 either inherent in His Person or derived from God 
 through prayer, in view of the difficulty which many 
 Christian believers now experience in accepting the 
 miracles as actual, valuable as the records are as 
 illustrating the character of Jesus, he is convinced 
 that it would be a mistake to treat belief in the 
 miracles as a test of Christian faith. If Jesus’ miracles 
 were answers of God to His prayers, they afford evi- 
 dence of the efficacy of His prayers in their perfect 
 accord with the Divine Will. What is involved in 
 such answers to prayer as regards the relation of God 
 to nature is a question which must be left unanswered 
 until the doctrine of God in the next section of this 
 volume is discussed, but the evidence in the Gospels 
 that such answers were given is a datum which must 
 not be overlooked in such a discussion. We may now 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 77 
 
 pass from the subject of the miracles as illustrative 
 of the teaching and example of Jesus to consider 
 another aspect of His work which the miracles also 
 illustrate—His Saviourhood. 
 
 (3) In dealing with Jesus’ Saviourhood we do not 
 exclude His teaching, example, or miracles. He saved 
 from error by His truth, from sin by His example, 
 from pain and grief and fear by His miracles. But 
 what we are now to concentrate our attention upon is 
 what He Himself conceived to be His distinctive 
 vocation. That He knew Himself as Son of God has 
 already been shown—that relation is primary in His 
 consciousness; but how did He think of the mission 
 from God to man, which was committed to Him as 
 Son, and for which His Sonship qualified Him ? 
 
 (i) At first He presented His universal vocation in 
 a local, national, historical form. He accepted from 
 Peter the confession of Messiahship (Matt. xvi. 17); He 
 offered Himself to the Jewish nation as Messiah or 
 Christ, the Anointed, in the significant act of the entry 
 into Jerusalem (xxi. 1-11); and He recognised that 
 He must die as Jewish Messiah, rejected by His people, 
 if He were to become the world’s Saviour (John xii. 
 24). As He did not think of the Messiahship as an 
 earthly kingship, a victorious, prosperous, and 
 righteous reign on the throne of David as a scion 
 of the house of David, we need not deal at all with 
 the Messianic hope in the strict sense of the term. 
 In His Temptation, and throughout His ministry, 
 He rejected the popular expectations, even though ~ 
 based on prophetic predictions of Messiahship. Owing 
 to these false views He did not proclaim His Messiah- 
 ship even to His disciples; and when Peter confessed 
 that he at least had found this hope fulfilled, Jesus 
 still enjoined silence, and at once began to present 
 an ideal of His vocation no way corresponding to the 
 expectations of even the disciples (Matt. xvi. 21-28). 
 Only at the very end, when the disclosure of Messiah- 
 ship would not involve the result He did not desire, 
 did He in His triumphal entry claim Messiahship, but 
 of a kind that disappointed all popular hopes. He 
 
“8 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 came to Jerusalem, not as conqueror delivering by 
 His power, but in all lowliness to save by sacrifice 
 (xxi. 1-11). 
 
 (ii) A more universal, permanent, and human con- 
 ception of His vocation is indicated by the title which 
 He chose for Himself, the Son of man. Much has 
 been written as to the source and the significance of 
 this title; but the writer can here only give his own 
 conclusion after careful consideration of what has 
 been written. The term Son of man is not merely a 
 synonym for man; by it Jesus meant to express 
 something distinctive. . It is in most of its applica- 
 tions to be explained by the eighth psalm. After a dis- 
 cussion of the relevant passages the writer has stated 
 elsewhere! that, just as in the psalm, ‘ Humiliation 
 is as prominent as exaltation, humility as dignity.’ 
 ‘Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that Jesus 
 meant by the use of this title so to assert His similarity 
 to other men as to deny His superiority. It was 
 because there was no natural identity that it was 
 necessary for Him thus to intimate His voluntary 
 identification with the race. A sense of difference 
 of moral character, of religious consciousness, of 
 historical position and function, is expressed, as well as 
 the desire for union with the race, so that He might 
 become to it the channel of divine grace.’ While 
 we recognise that the terms are inadequate, we may 
 say that in the use of this title Jesus claimed typical 
 and vicarious manhood. Realising in Himself man- 
 hood as it ought to be, He identified Himself with 
 mankind as it is. There can be no doubt that in His 
 answer to the High Priest’s challenge whether He 
 were the Christ or not (Mark xiv. 62), He had in view 
 the statement of Daniel (vil. 18, 14): ‘ I saw in the 
 night visions, and, behold, there came with the clouds 
 of heaven one like unto a son of man, and He came 
 even. to the Ancient of Days, and they brought Him 
 near before Him. And there was given Him dominion, 
 and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, 
 and languages should serve Him: His dominion is an 
 
 1 Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, pp. 805-7. 
 
 \ 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 79 
 
 everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and 
 His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.’ Son 
 of man is not here an individual title, but a description 
 of a symbolic figure, standing for a collective concep- 
 tion, the saints of God, whose human reign is to 
 succeed the brute reign of the oppressors of the saints, 
 symbolised by beasts. Even if Jesus was familiar 
 with the Similitudes of the Book of Enoch, we are not 
 warranted in determining the significance of the term 
 on His lips by that apocalyptic representation. It 
 may be it was that book which led Him to individualise 
 that collective conception of Daniel; but to assume 
 that Jesus took over into His own consciousness of 
 His vocation what that writing contains is altogether 
 unjustified. We should rather discover this secret 
 from His own words and deeds. | 
 
 (11) The writer is convinced that Jesus’ view of His 
 calling was determined by the ideal figure of the 
 servant of Yahveh, especially as depicted in Isaiah li. 
 When we read that passage the conclusion seems 
 inevitable that in Him alone that ideal was realised. 
 But what we must try to prove is that Jesus Himself 
 set this purpose before Him to be fulfilled from the 
 beginning of His ministry. (a) It is sometimes 
 assumed that He began His ministry with the hope 
 by His preaching to bring Israel to repentance and 
 faith, and that it was only afterwards, when His 
 popularity failed, that His thought turned towards 
 suffering as the means of salvation. It is true that 
 it was only after the confession of His Messiahship 
 by Peter that He began to disclose His purpose to 
 His disciples; but that fact is not a proof that it was 
 only then that the purpose was formed. As the 
 drama developed, it may well be that the tragedy 
 was more clearly discerned in all its details: but that 
 He looked for success, and was only led by failure to 
 try the way of sorrow, is incredible.“;, We need not 
 assume divine omniscience to explain His anticipa- 
 tions. As the lad’s reply in the Temple shows, He was 
 intent on the things of His Father (Luke i. 49, ev 
 Tols Tov Ilatpds pov). In those quiet years of study 
 
80 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and meditation in Nazareth till He began His work, 
 He must have pursued the same quest, to know His 
 Father’s will; and the Scriptures were available, if 
 not in His home, yet in the synagogue. It was His 
 insight that led Him to those passages which deal 
 with the servant of Yahveh; and when He began his 
 work, this was how He thought of it. Possible it is 
 that He expected a larger number in the nation to 
 believe, or even cherished the possibility of a national 
 movement towards God; but that expectation, even 
 if He had it, does not exclude the modified anticipa- 
 tion that He thought of the nation as with Himself a 
 martyr nation for the salvation of other peoples, as 
 the prophet of the Exile had thought of it. Had the 
 nation repented and believed, and then striven to 
 realise this ideal in its whole life, in the world as it 
 then was, could it have escaped martyrdom ? What 
 may have deepened the tragedy for Him in the course 
 of His ministry was the discovery that He would be 
 alone in His martyrdom, forsaken even by the few 
 disciples He had gathered around Him (Mark xiv. 27, 
 John xvi. 82). Whether in this or some other form 
 it does seem certain that His aim was to be the 
 servant of Yahveh, although His filial consciousness 
 rejected the term servant, and preferred to convey 
 His sense of His oneness with the race He came to 
 redeem by the title Son of man. 
 
 (b) We must now prove this conclusion in detail. 
 At His baptism He dedicated Himself to His vocation ; 
 and in the record of it there are two indications of 
 how He thought of it. He met the Baptist’s objec- 
 tion: ‘I have need to be baptized of Thee, and 
 comest Thou to me?’ with the words: ‘Suffer it 
 now; for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteous- 
 ness’ (Matt. ili. 14-15). The Servant who makes 
 many righteous is Himself righteous; and He shows 
 His righteousness in bearing their iniquities (Is. lin. 11). 
 This was the righteousness He was fulfilling: He 
 was, in vicarious love, being numbered with trans- 
 gressors in sharing the baptism of repentance, though 
 Himself sinless. As the Baptist’s remonstrance shows, 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST si 
 
 he had some knowledge of the character and purpose 
 of Jesus, derived probably from previous conversa- 
 tions. Only if Jesus had disclosed to Him His secret 
 can we understand the declaration ascribed to the 
 Baptist in the Fourth Gospel: ‘ Behold, the Lamb 
 of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’ 
 (John 1. 29), so unlike all else that he spoke about 
 Jesus. The Servant is described as ‘a lamb that is 
 led to the slaughter,’ and the words that follow 
 reproduce the thought of the following verses (Is. liu. 
 7-8). The voice from heaven that confirmed this 
 dedication, ‘ Thou art My beloved Son, in Thee I am 
 well pleased’ (Mark i. 11), recalls Isaiah xli. 1: ‘ Be- 
 hold My servant, whom I uphold; My chosen, in 
 whom My soul delighteth.? When Jesus began His 
 ministry in Nazareth, it was a passage in Isaiah 1x1. 
 1-2 which He read, and which He claimed to fulfil 
 (Luke iv. 18-21). When He gave the first indication 
 of coming separation from His disciples due to the 
 inherent antagonism between His mission and Judaism 
 (Mark i. 18-22), He used the figure of the Bridegroom 
 which is also used in Isaiah Ixii. 5. It is surely more 
 than a chance that He described Himself as the Good 
 Shepherd (John x. 14), even as the prophet described 
 God in His leading of His people (Is. xl. 11): * He shall 
 feed His flock like a shepherd, He shall gather the 
 lambs in His arm, and carry them in His bosom, and 
 shall gently lead those that give suck.’ When the 
 Baptist’s disciples came to ask Jesus if He were the 
 Messiah or not, He referred their master to Isaiah 
 xxxv. 6 and lxi. 1. In the healing ministry the First 
 Gospel (Matt. viii. 17) finds a fulfilment of Isaiah’s 
 words, ‘ Himself took our infirmities and bare our 
 diseases’ (lili. 4), and in Jesus’ enjoining of silence 
 on the healed a fulfilment of Isaiah xli. 1-4 (Matt. 
 xii. 18-21). The Fourth Gospel quotes Isaiah li. 1 
 as a prophecy of the unbelief of the people (John xii. 
 38). Hach Synoptist finds a prediction of some 
 detail of the Passion in the same portion of the 
 Scriptures, the entry into Jerusalem (Matt. xxi. 5, 
 Is. Ixii. 11), the crucifixion between two thieves 
 . 
 
80 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and meditation in Nazareth till He began His work, 
 He must have pursued the same quest, to know His 
 Father’s will; and the Scriptures were available, if 
 not in His home, yet in the synagogue. It was His 
 insight that led Him to those passages which deal 
 with the servant of Yahveh ; and when He began his 
 work, this was how He thought of it. Possible it is 
 that He expected a larger number in the nation to 
 believe, or even cherished the possibility of a national 
 movement towards God; but that expectation, even 
 if He had it, does not exclude the modified anticipa- 
 tion that He thought of the nation as with Himself a 
 martyr nation for the salvation of other peoples, as 
 the prophet of the Exile had thought of it. Had the 
 nation repented and believed, and then striven to 
 realise this ideal in its whole life, in the world as it 
 then was, could it have escaped martyrdom? What 
 may have deepened the tragedy for Him in the course 
 of His ministry was the discovery that He would be 
 alone in His martyrdom, forsaken even by the few 
 disciples He had gathered around Him (Mark xiv. 27, 
 John xvi. 32). Whether in this or some other form 
 it does seem certain that His aim was to be the 
 servant of Yahveh, although His filial consciousness 
 rejected the term servant, and preferred to convey 
 His sense of His oneness with the race He came to 
 redeem by the title Son of man. 
 
 (b) We must now prove this conclusion in detail. 
 At His baptism He dedicated Himself to His vocation ; 
 and in the record of it there are two indications of 
 how He thought of it. He met the Baptist’s objec- 
 tion: ‘I have need to be baptized of Thee, and 
 comest Thou to me?’ with the words: ‘Suffer it 
 now; for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteous- 
 ness’ (Matt. ii. 14-15). The Servant who makes 
 many righteous is Himself righteous; and He shows 
 His righteousness in bearing their iniquities (Is. li. 11). 
 This was the righteousness He was fulfilling: He 
 was, in vicarious love, being numbered with trans- 
 gressors in sharing the baptism of repentance, though 
 Himself sinless. As the Baptist’s remonstrance shows, 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 81 
 
 he had some knowledge of the character and purpose 
 of Jesus, derived probably from previous conversa- 
 tions. Only if Jesus had disclosed to Him His secret 
 can we understand the declaration ascribed to the 
 Baptist in the Fourth Gospel: ‘ Behold, the Lamb 
 of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’ 
 (John i. 29), so unlike all else that he spoke about 
 Jesus. The Servant is described as ‘a lamb that is 
 led to the slaughter,’ and the words that follow 
 reproduce the thought of the following verses (Is. liu. 
 7-8). The voice from heaven that confirmed this 
 dedication, ‘ Thou art My beloved Son, in Thee I am 
 well pleased’ (Mark i. 11), recalls Isaiah xhi. 1: ‘ Be- 
 hold My servant, whom I uphold; My chosen, in 
 whom My soul delighteth.’ When Jesus began His 
 ministry in Nazareth, it was a passage in Isaiah Ixi. 
 1-2 which He read, and which He claimed to fulfil 
 (Luke iv. 18-21). When He gave the first indication 
 of coming separation from His disciples due to the 
 inherent antagonism between His mission and Judaism 
 (Mark ii. 18-22), He used the figure of the Bridegroom 
 which is also used in Isaiah Ixil. 5. It is surely more 
 than a chance that He described Himself as the Good 
 Shepherd (John x. 14), even as the prophet described 
 God in His leading of His people (Is. xl. 11): ‘ He shall 
 feed His flock like a shepherd, He shall gather the 
 lambs in His arm, and carry them in His bosom, and 
 shall gently lead those that give suck.’ When the 
 Baptist’s disciples came to ask Jesus if He were the 
 Messiah or not, He referred their master to Isaiah 
 xxxv. 6 and lxi. 1. In the healing ministry the First 
 Gospel (Matt. viii. 17) finds a fulfilment of Isaiah’s 
 words, ‘ Himself took our infirmities and bare our 
 diseases’ (liii. 4), and in Jesus’ enjoining of silence 
 on the healed a fulfilment of Isaiah xli. 1-4 (Matt. 
 xii. 18-21). The Fourth Gospel quotes Isaiah lii. 1 
 as a prophecy of the unbelief of the people (John xu. 
 38). Hach Synoptist finds a prediction of some 
 detail of the Passion in the same portion of the 
 Scriptures, the entry into Jerusalem (Matt. xxi. 5, 
 Is. Ixii. 11), the crucifixion between two thieves 
 . 
 
82 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (Mark xv. 28, Is. lil. 12), so also Luke xxi. 37, 
 Is. liii. 12. The saying of Jesus in Matthew xx. 28, 
 ‘Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered 
 unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom 
 for many,’ gains fuller content from what is said 
 about the servant in Isaiah liii. 4-6. Owing to the 
 unbelief of the disciples even after the confession, 
 Jesus could not freely disclose what was in His heart 
 to them, and what He said was not accurately re- 
 membered in its details, as the very summary form 
 of the three specific announcements of the Passion 
 show (Mark viii. 81, ix. 31, x. 32-34). Had there 
 been fuller reports, we should probably find more 
 numerous connections than we have now indicated. 
 What has been proved, however, warrants us in using 
 Isaiah liii. as filling out the content of Jesus’ con- 
 sciousness of His vocation. 
 ~ (ce) How soon His mind was turned towards the 
 sacrifice which lay before Him has been shown in the 
 preceding paragraph. After the crisis at Caesarea 
 Philippi His mind was more constantly absorbed. The 
 Transfiguration, which may be regarded as an objective 
 vision, was a confirmation of Jesus’ purpose, and a 
 challenge to the unwilling disciples to submit them- 
 selves to that purpose. The appearances of the 
 representatives of law and prophecy in converse with 
 
 Him in regard to His ‘exodus which He was about to | 
 
 accomplish at Jerusalem ’ (Luke ix. 31), stamped the 
 divine seal on His announcement of His Passion, and 
 no less of the Resurrection which was to follow it. In 
 the voice from heaven the divine approval confirmed 
 the divine authority of Jesus (v. 35). Another pro- 
 
 phetic association for the death, although entirely 
 
 consistent with all the references to the Servant of 
 
 Yahveh, is found in the words of Jesus at the Last | 
 
 Supper, ‘ This is My blood of the covenant, which is 
 shed for many unto remission of sins ’ (Matt. xxvi. 28). 
 As the Covenant at Sinai was not a covenant of grace, 
 but of law, this must be another covenant; and, 
 whether the word new was used or not (as in 1 Cor, xi. 
 
 25), the reference was undoubtedly to Jeremiah’s 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 83 
 
 prophecy (xxxi. 82-384). The death is represented as 
 a covenant-sacrifice. In Isaiah li. 10 the death of 
 the servant is represented as a sin offering. We must 
 not commit the error, however, which the older 
 typology committed of attempting to interpret the 
 death of Christ by means of the Old Testament 
 sacrificial system. The Epistle to the Hebrews ought 
 to have warned us against the mistake of trying to 
 explain the substance by the shadow. There are 
 three other points of view from which Jesus presents 
 His death to us: as a martyrdom, a following of the 
 path of duty whithersoever it might lead (Matt. xvi. 
 24), as an offering of love—for Jesus surely saw more 
 than an external connection between Mary’s gift of 
 love and the Gospel of His death (xxvi. 13)—and as 
 a crime (xxi. 39-41). 
 
 All these allusions of Jesus to His death do help 
 us in some measure to understand how He thought 
 of it. The crime of the Jewish people in His death 
 weighed heavily upon His heart, for He knew that 
 it meant its doom. How revealing are the words 
 which He puts on the lips of the owner of the vine- 
 yard when sending his son to the husbandmen, 
 ‘They will reverence my son’ (v. 37)! It was a 
 surprise and wonder to Him that man’s sin could 
 thus refuse and resist God’s goodness and grace in 
 Him. In obedience to God, as the Cross appointed 
 to Him to bear, and in love to man, prodigal as was 
 Mary’s offering, He suffered Himself to be the victim 
 of the crime, nay, even He forced the issue upon the 
 Jewish people, while He grieved for the judgment 
 that His act was inflicting because He recognised a 
 necessity not to be avoided or escaped. Only by the 
 crowning act of ministry in His death as a ransom 
 (Matt. xx. 28) could men be delivered from their 
 bondage to evil; only in His death as a sacrifice 
 could the new relation of God and man, full forgive- 
 ness and free fellowship, be established. But the 
 words ransom and sacrifice (blood means that and can 
 mean nothing else here) do not themselves indicate 
 to us what His death meant to Him, and how to it 
 
84 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 were related man’s forgiveness, freedom, fellowship 
 with God, and we must turn to the records of Geth- 
 semane and Calvary to discover if they disclose the 
 secret to us. 
 
 (d) If we accept, as we may, as authentic history 
 the difference which in Matthew’s record is reported 
 in regard to the first and the second prayer, a doubt 
 was removed from the mind of Jesus, and a certainty 
 gained. What was the cup which His first prayer 
 assumes can be removed, and His second recognises 
 can not (Matt. xxvi. 39 and 42)? All He had said 
 before excludes the conjecture that it was death itself 
 that He shrank from and wanted to escape. The 
 conviction that He must die was too deeply rooted 
 to be shaken even by fierce gusts of emotion. It 
 would have been unworthy of Him to fear death as 
 a natural occurrence ; for He by His grace has enabled 
 men and women to face death in no less horrible 
 forms in fidelity to Him. It was because now He 
 realised what death might be to Him as a spiritual 
 experience that He shrank from it. In His agony 
 in Gethsemane He anticipated the darkness and 
 desolation of soul which fell on Him on Calvary. It 
 was worthy of Him as Son that He should shrink 
 from and even seek to avoid that interruption of His 
 filial communion with God which death now seemed 
 to Him to threaten. It is He who by His Resurrection 
 has taken from those who believe in Him the terror 
 of death as a spiritual experience ; but He in the days 
 of His flesh, in the realisation of human sin, and the 
 judgment of God on sin which came upon Him in 
 those last hours, thought of death as involving so 
 great a loss. He seems to have realised that to make 
 the sacrifice of His obedience to God and His com- 
 passion for man complete, He must experience death 
 at the worst which man had ever feared—the loss of 
 God’s presence. Only thus could He * taste death 
 for every man’ (Heb. ii. 9). No other writing in the 
 New Testament shows such insight into the content 
 of the sacrifice of Christ as the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
 What Jesus dreaded in Gethsemane and endured on 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 85 
 
 Calvary is truly interpreted in these words, ‘ Who in 
 the days of His flesh, having offered up prayers and 
 supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him 
 that was able to save Him out of death (é« davdrov), 
 and having been heard for His godly fear, though He 
 was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which 
 He suffered; and having been made perfect, He 
 became unto all them that obey Him the author of 
 eternal salvation’ (v. 7-9). It was indeed a godly 
 fear (amd 7s ev\aBelas) that He should dread this 
 interruption of His filial communion, and yet His 
 obedience as Son was tested to the uttermost, the 
 ereatest sacrifice for Him being accepted. He was 
 indeed heard and saved out of death, for the dread 
 experience had ended before death came, and He 
 passed into the unseen in self-committal to His 
 Father (Luke xxni. 46). Himself sinless, He yet 
 experienced death as God’s judgment on sin, and in 
 so enduring it He conveyed to ‘mankind sinners’ God’s 
 forgiveness of sin. The love which assures forgive- 
 ness of sin no less endures judgment on sin, and so 
 approves itself holy love. This to the writer seems 
 to be the meaning of the agony of the Garden and the 
 desolation of the Cross. Any less and lower interpre- 
 tation is not great enough for the moral and spiritual 
 greatness of Jesus Christ. To say that it was common 
 human emotion in the prospect and the endurance of 
 death which so overwhelmed Him, or, because He 
 used the words of a psalmist in His cry of dereliction, 
 to measure His experience by the psalmists, is to trifle 
 with reality. As Son of God and Son of man such an 
 experience was not individual, but must be inter- 
 preted in relation both to God and to man, and His 
 relationship to both. 
 
 (e) To discuss what doctrine of the Atonement may 
 be based on this experience of Jesus, in which His 
 fulfilment of His vocation was completed, belongs to 
 a later chapter; here we are concerned only with such 
 psychological interpretation of the experience as will 
 make it appear more intelligible. In this experience 
 there culminates His twofold relation to ‘mankind 
 
86 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 sinners,’ which can be traced throughout the whole of 
 His ministry. On the one hand He was the friend 
 of outcasts and sinners, and in His sympathy and 
 compassion identified Himself with them. Unlike 
 the righteous men of His own people, He made their 
 lot His own in love. Because He was not ashamed to 
 call the sinners His brethren, He was despised and 
 rejected of men who thought themselves good and 
 godly. On the other hand, however, He was Himself 
 ‘holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners,’ as 
 Himself knowing no sin. He never, identifying Him- 
 self with sinful mankind, shared signs of repentance, 
 made confession of sin, or prayed for forgiveness. 
 In respect of the fact of sin as personal act He stood 
 not on the side of man, but on the side of God, judging 
 and forgiving sin. In the tenderness of His forgive- 
 ness of the penitent we must not lose sight of the 
 severity of His condemnation of the self-righteous. 
 In forgiveness of and judgment on sin He identified 
 Himself with God, as in compassion and sympathy 
 He identified Himself with ‘mankind sinners.’ Because 
 love is by its very nature vicarious, 7.e. puts itself im 
 the place of the beloved, He both judged and forgave 
 sin as God does, and He endured the consequences 
 of sin, suffering, sorrow, shame, struggle, as man does. 
 In the Cross this self-identification with God and man 
 was brought to its highest intensity. The occasion, 
 on which man’s sin was exposed in its worst antagonism 
 to God’s holy love, made not only possible, but even 
 inevitable, that as the Son of God He should approve 
 God’s judgment on sin in death, and as Son of man 
 should Himself endure that judgment, not by any 
 artificial substitution, but by love’s self-identification 
 with God and with man. He so loved God that He 
 condemned sin with God; He so loved man that He 
 endured its doom with man; and His experience 
 with man was deeper than man can share, because 
 He saw in that experience what God sees. In peni- 
 tence man identifies himself with Christ in His judg- 
 ment of sin, both as approved and endured by Him, 
 and in faith He identifies Himself with Christ also in 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 87 
 
 accepting the forgiveness He conveys. We must 
 beware of saying that Jesus felt guilty, or was held 
 guilty, or was punished instead of us, for these terms 
 are inapplicable to the sinless and holy, and they 
 belong to the law-court, which by its analogies can 
 only mislead: all we dare say is that His vicarious 
 love endured all the consequences of sin, regarding 
 them not only as man may, but as God does. We 
 must not say that God’s wrath rested upon Him, or 
 that God forsook Him. He was the Son beloved and 
 approved, even when His intense, overwhelming 
 realisation of death as God’s judgment on sin excluded 
 from His immediate consciousness the sense of God’s 
 presence and favour: for, as human, His conscious- 
 ness was subject to the limitation that an absorbing 
 emotion excluded other contents. As soon as that 
 emotion was relieved, the sense of God’s relation to 
 Him was at once restored. As a historical occurrence 
 the death of Christ must first of all be psychologically 
 interpreted before we can attempt any theological 
 interpretation, and this is all the writer, acutely 
 conscious of the imperfection of his endeavour, has 
 here attempted to do. Im closing the treatment of 
 this subject he must express his conviction, a con- 
 viction that has been deepened by the meditation of 
 many years, that the fact of Christ 1s mutilated, and 
 the grace of Christ is obscured by any interpretation 
 of the Cross that does not recognise, as the writer’s 
 study of the Gospels has forced him to recognise, that 
 not in the teaching, example, or companionship, but 
 mainly in His sacrifice He fulfilled His vocation. 
 
 (4) This chapter would not be complete without a 
 brief statement regarding the Resurrection, and its 
 significance for the work of Jesus. 
 
 (i) When Jesus foretold His death, He also spoke of 
 His Resurrection. He did not contemplate His death 
 as an end of His relation to God or to man, but as a 
 condition of a wider activity for God among men. 
 This conviction He expressed in an analogy: ‘ Except 
 a erain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth 
 by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit’ 
 
38 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (John xii. 24). Even if reflection blend with remini- 
 scence in the report of the Discourse in the Upper 
 Room (John xiii.-xvil.) we are warranted in assuming 
 that the experience of the disciples was the fulfilment 
 of the promise of the Master. The Transfiguration, 
 in confirming His purpose to die, also gave Him a 
 prevision of the glory that should follow. Again the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews displays a truly inspired 
 insight, when it declares that He * for the joy that was 
 set. before Him endured the Cross, despising shame ’ 
 (xii. 2). It was not so clear and full a knowledge as 
 would lessen the trial, but it was a sure and strong 
 enough faith to make the trial endurable. For the 
 disciples the Resurrection brought a renewal of faith, 
 and a recovery of hope: it alone made the death 
 tolerable; and it was only in the light of the Risen 
 Lord that they began to discover its meaning. The 
 Cross would have remained an unrelieved tragedy 
 had not the Crucified risen and ‘showed Himself 
 alive after His passion by many proofs’ (Acts 1. 3). 
 Even those who deny the fact of the Resurrection 
 admit that the belief in the Resurrection was the 
 foundation of the Christian Church, and try by various 
 theories to explain the belief without accepting the 
 fact. To Paul the thought of the Messiah as having 
 died the accursed death of the Cross was a blasphemy 
 so intolerable that with utmost violence he sought to 
 stamp it out; and it was only the certainty of the 
 Resurrection that forcibly turned him from unbelief 
 to faith (1 Cor. xv. 8, ‘an abortive birth,’ oamepel ro 
 éxrpdépat.). As the purpose of this volume is not 
 critical or historical, but theological, the writer must 
 simply ask his readers to accept the assurance, that 
 after a candid and careful study of the relevant 
 literature he has reached the conviction that the- 
 evidence for the fact is adequate, and that the theories _ 
 which seek to explain away the fact are untenable. 
 The statement in 1 Cor. xv. 1-11 itself would suffice 
 for this conviction. How completely the reality of 
 the Christian faith and hope depended on the fact _ 
 is shown by Paul in vv, 12-384, | 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 89 
 
 (1) What must be here discussed, however, is the 
 nature of the Resurrection, for there is a common 
 tendency to-day to deny the complete resurrection 
 of Jesus, and to substitute for it what is miscalled 
 a spiritual resurrection, for it seems to amount to 
 no more than a survival of the soul, while the body 
 was left to perish. To insist on the completeness of 
 the victory over death is to expose oneself to a charge 
 of materialism. Regarding this charge the writer will 
 content himself with saying that to him it seems 
 materialism to assume that God had not the power to 
 transform a natural body into a spiritual (to use Paul’s 
 distinction), especially in the case of Him who is 
 typical ideal man, the first-fruits from the grave, the 
 first-born among many brethren, the beginning of the 
 new creation of God, and not materialism to believe 
 that matter is the creation, and so remains under the 
 control of spirit. The more recent theories of physics 
 should make us hesitate about setting rigid bounds 
 to the possible transformation of matter as our senses 
 apprehend it. To substitute the Greek idea of the 
 immortality of the soul for the Hebrew idea of the 
 complete restoration of the human personality, and 
 vet to continue using the word resurrection, is to palter 
 with words. On this view the appearances of Jesus 
 were deceptive, for they were corporeal appearances, 
 and by appeal to the senses of sight, hearing, and 
 touch were seemingly intended to give assurance of 
 corporeal reality. On this view, too, the appearances 
 must be regarded as subjective hallucinations, or as 
 manifestations similar to those that the spiritualists 
 claim to be able to secure from the dead. Such evi- 
 dence as we possess in the Gospels forbids the assump- 
 tion of an identity of physical attributes. It was the 
 Same person with a changed body. Mary mistook 
 Him for the gardener, and only recognised Him by 
 the tone of His voice (John xx. 15, 16). The two on 
 the way to Emmaus knew Him not until a familiar 
 gesture recalled Him (Luke xxiv. 31). He appeared 
 in the midst of the disciples when the doors were 
 closed (John xx. 19). To overcome unbelief and to 
 
90 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 ensure faith there seem to have been occasional 
 manifestations to sense which might be regarded as 
 not permanent characteristics. We move here in a 
 region of conjecture; and yet the conclusion seems 
 justified that the natural body had been transformed 
 into the spiritual body. Whether the transition was 
 gradual and completed at the Ascension, as the 
 records in the Gospels would at least suggest, or sudden, 
 as Paul anticipates for those who may be alive at the 
 final resurrection (1 Cor. xv. 51-53), we need not 
 attempt to decide. We must admit that we are here 
 seeking a way amid apocalyptic thought, which 
 Christianity inherited from Judaism, and in which 
 our minds cannot be thoroughly at home: but. of 
 this the writer himself is quite convinced, that to the 
 completeness of the Christian faith in Jesus the Christ 
 our Lord there does belong the belief, which the 
 historical evidence does not challenge, but to which 
 it gives some support, that the victory of Jesus was a 
 complete victory, that the whole personality lives as 
 the promise and pledge of the believer’s complete 
 deliverance from death. 
 
 (11) What the Resurrection means is that the work 
 of Jesus the Christ our Lord was not ended at death, 
 and is not merely continued by a posthumous tradi- 
 tion and influence, but that He Himself, and no other, 
 in the fulness of His real divine-human personality 
 works on. As it is not an activity of which there are 
 any sensible tokens, but only spiritual evidence, we 
 may say that it is by His Spirit or the Spirit of God 
 that He still teaches, succours, comforts, saves, and 
 blesses men. The record of His earthly ministry is 
 invaluable as indicating so clearly the content and 
 character of His person and work, that it can serve 
 as a test of every historical movement which claims 
 to be inspired by Him. While His activity is freed 
 from the conditions and limitations of the earthly life, 
 its purpose is the same as was that of His ministry 
 among men in the days of His flesh. It is through 
 His Church that the sensible manifestation of His 
 Presence and Power is now made; hence it is His 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST 91 
 
 body, His necessary complement, as He is Himself 
 in and by it completing His vocation (Eph. i. 23). 
 But it can serve as His body only as it is realising 
 that He, the Head, is diffusing His own hfe through 
 all the members of that body. There are various 
 stages in apprehending the meaning of Christ, vary- 
 ing degrees in appreciating His worth, but it can be 
 said confidently that the distinctive, typical, crucial 
 Christian conviction is that of personal experience of 
 a personally present and active Saviour and Lord. 
 Thus Jesus rises above, and reaches beyond the realm 
 of temporary history, and becomes a permanent and 
 universal reality, so immediately and intimately re- 
 lated to the infinite and eternal God, that by Christian 
 faith God is not apprehended apart from Him, but 
 in Him. The justification to reason of this faith must 
 be reserved to the constructive section of this volume, 
 but what must now be affirmed as an essential part 
 of the fact of Christ, which is the enduring and world- 
 wide object of faith in Him, is just this, that in His 
 person and work He is exalted above the limitations 
 of time and space. This is the meaning of the sym- 
 bolic phrases of His ascension, His exaltation, His 
 session at the right hand of God, His title as Lord, 
 ‘the name above every other name,’ the title which 
 pious Jews substituted in the reading of the Scriptures 
 for the covenant name, Yahveh, and which believing 
 Christians found no difficulty in bestowing on Jesus 
 the Christ, after His Resurrection. It is in this world- 
 wide and age-long Saviourhood and Lordship that the 
 work of Jesus is consummated. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE AND 
 INTERPRETATION 
 
 Ture work of Christ was completed in His continued 
 presence and power*in His community. The Resur- 
 rection was followed by Pentecost. When in medita- 
 tion and prayer the company of believers reached the 
 certainty that Jesus the Christ lived and reigned as 
 Lord, a holy enthusiasm and energy possessed it. 
 There were abnormal as well as normal manifestations 
 of this fulness of life in the Spirit of God, phenomena 
 similar to those which have been witnessed at religious 
 revivals. This enthusiasm and energy were accom- 
 panied by a very intense and confident expectation 
 of the Second Advent of Christ, His sensible mani- 
 festation on the clouds of heaven with hosts of angels 
 in glory and power as Judge of the world and Saviour 
 of His Church. These two features—the being filled 
 with the Spirit, and the looking for God’s Son from 
 heaven—were characteristic of the Apostolic Age, 
 and were even within that age being gradually trans- 
 formed. Paul without depreciating the spiritual gifts 
 finds ‘the more excellent way’ of Christian life in 
 love (1 Cor. xii. 31, xiii. 1), and for the hope of sur- 
 viving till the Second Advent (1 Cor. xv. 51) he finds 
 compensation when the fulfilment seemed less certain 
 to him, in the conviction that to be absent from the 
 body is to be at home with the Lord (2 Cor. v. 8). In 
 the Johannine writings this transformation of primi- 
 tive Christianity, as it was in the first generation of 
 believers, into its more permanent and universal form 
 is completed. As this volume is neither a History of 
 the Apostolic Church, nor a Theology of the New 
 
 Testament, but an attempt at a constructive state- 
 92 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 93 
 
 ment of the Christian faith for the thought and the 
 life of to-day, it is not at all necessary to deal any 
 further with these passing phases of Christian belief 
 and life; but as the Pauline and Johannine writings 
 do enshrine what has permanent and universal signi- 
 ficance and value for Christian faith, this chapter 
 must be restricted to an exposition and estimate of 
 the contribution of these two great Christians to our 
 understanding and our prizing of the grace of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ; and in regard to both of them, 
 what is to be insisted on is this, that we are dealing 
 ‘with a real personal experience of Christ’s activity 
 as Saviour and Lord, and not merely with a speculative 
 interpretation of the common Christian tradition. 
 From whatever source the terms used in setting forth 
 their thoughts may have been borrowed, both used 
 the terms to express what was real to them, the reality 
 of Christ as they knew Him in their own personal 
 experience; and accordingly the interpretation can 
 appear intelligible only as the experience is regarded 
 as credible. 
 
 I 
 
 Two errors in regard to Paul must be carefully 
 avoided. We must not, with orthodox dogmatics, 
 altogether ignore the temporal and local elements in 
 his theology, and seek to impose all he wrote as 
 authoritative at all times and places for Christian 
 thought and life; and we must not, with modernist 
 scholarship, treat him as merely a product of his own 
 age and surroundings, and resolve his theology into 
 a mixture of Jewish dogmatism and Greek speculation. 
 He did not cease to be a Jewish rabbi when he became 
 a Christian apostle, and his Gentile environment was 
 not without effect on his ideas and ideals; we must 
 not reject these influences on his theology as neces- 
 sarily valueless, but must test their value. What 
 makes him authoritative for the Christian Church 
 to-day is his real, original, typical experience of Christ 
 as Saviour and Lord; for what Christ was to him 
 
04 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Christ has been to other great Christian personalities 
 who stand in the Pauline succession of faith (Augustine, 
 Luther, Wesley) ; and even if the majority of Christian 
 believers cannot rise to the same height, the realisation 
 of the possibility in even a few must be accepted as 
 evidence of what Christ really is and does to those 
 whose faith responds adequately to His grace. 
 
 (1) What was distinctive of Paul’s experience was 
 his personal communion with the Risen Lord. 
 
 (i) It was as Risen that Christ manifested Himself 
 to him on the way to Damascus, and it was in the 
 light of that vision that he walked and worked. For 
 him the reality of his apostleship, his authority to 
 found and direct churches, depended on his having 
 seen Christ no less than the other apostles. On his 
 ecstatic visions we need not lay stress, as he himself 
 does not (2 Cor. xi. 1); but what was typical was his 
 vivid sense of the presence of Christ, and his confidence ' 
 of direct communion. His threefold prayer for de- 
 liverance from the stake in his flesh was answered in 
 what he claimed as an immediate communication 
 from the Lord (vv. 8-9). We must return to his 
 exposition of the Cross of Christ as propitiation, re- 
 demption, and reconciliation. That doctrine did 
 remove his own difficulties and perplexities, for he 
 too needed for not only the satisfaction of his mind, 
 but also the repose of his heart, the conviction that 
 God is righteous in reckoning righteous all who 
 have faith in Jesus (Rom. iii. 26); and we should 
 altogether misunderstand him if we supposed that 
 doctrine to be only an accommodation to Jewish ideas 
 he did not himself share. Nevertheless, what was 
 distinctive of him is expressed rather in his declaration: 
 ‘I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet 
 no longer I, but Christ liveth in me: and that life 
 which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith 
 which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave 
 Himself up for me’ (Gal. 11. 20). 
 
 (11) The two facts which were essential to his theology 
 were the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. By the 
 Resurrection Christ was ‘ instituted Son of God with 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 95 
 
 power’ (Rom. 1. 4), and received the name above 
 every other name, the title of Lord (Phil. u. 9-11). 
 It was the living Son of God in power who was the 
 object of Paul’s faith, a faith which was an intimate 
 personal union. The Resurrection also made the 
 Crucifixion tolerable for him; otherwise the death 
 on the Cross would have remained for him accursed, 
 and the assertion of the Messiahship of the Crucified 
 a blasphemy. Because it was the Risen Lord who 
 had so died, Paul had to find in the death a meaning 
 and a worth congruous with what, for his faith, the 
 living Christ was. These two facts also were the 
 moulds into which his own life was cast; its negative 
 aspect of repentance for, and renunciation of sin was 
 crucifixion with Christ, and its positive of aspiration 
 and achievement of holiness was resurrection with 
 Christ. It was his experience of union with Christ 
 that had its inevitable result in his character of con- 
 formity to Christ. 
 
 (ii) This characteristic of his Christian personality 
 has been often described as his faith - mysttcism. 
 Mysticism it is, if all immediate contact and intimate 
 communion of the soul with God is to be so described ; 
 but if mysticism is what Neo-Platonism or Indian 
 piety thinks it to be, a relation of the soul in ecstasy 
 or trance with the essence of deity in the realm of the 
 super-conscious, Paul is not a mystic. It was in the 
 conscious exercise of faith that he found God in the 
 no less real, because invisible, personality of Jesus 
 Christ, and this relation of dependence and submission 
 issued in such an activity of Christ by His Spirit as 
 conformed him in character to that personality. 
 Paul had what have often been claimed as the dis- 
 tinctively mystical experiences of visions and voices ; 
 but for him these were not primary, but altogether 
 subordinate to the personal relation of the sinner 
 saved by faith in the Lord and Saviour, who ever 
 mediated the love of God to him, and whose presence 
 was manifest in him in the enlightening and renewing 
 Spirit. That Paul had an exceptional receptivity for, 
 and responsiveness to the divine reality cannot be 
 
96 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 questioned. There has been none in the record of 
 Christian faith who excelled him in the certainty and 
 the confidence of his communion with Christ, and in 
 the effectiveness of that communion in the transfor- 
 mation of his personality. But it must not be, 
 therefore, assumed that in this respect he should be 
 regarded as solitary. If in less degree, yet still in 
 reality such a relation to Christ is the typical relation, 
 an aspiration for, if not an achievement of, all believers, 
 possible by God’s grace according to the measure of 
 faith. 
 
 (2) Paul’s theology is the interpretation of his 
 experience with such ideas and terms as his Jewish 
 inheritance and education and his Gentile environ- 
 ment provided. If it be remembered that in his 
 Kpistles he is combating error, it will be conceded 
 that that theology is not determined solely by his 
 experience seeking self-expression, but is influenced 
 not only as regards the language used, but also as 
 regards the conceptions so expressed, by the occasion. 
 In Galatians and Romans he is defending his Gospel 
 against Judaism, and in Colossians and Ephesians 
 against an incipient enosticism; accordingly we 
 cannot regard all in his theology as simply an in- 
 tellectual exposition of his own distinctive experience ; 
 in form at least his statement of truth was affected by 
 the error he was seeking to refute. His discussion 
 about the relation of the Law and the Gospel, while 
 of personal interest to him, does not express what was 
 vital in his experience. How far he shared the angel- 
 ology of Colossians and Ephesians we cannot deter- 
 mine, but what was alone vital to him was the absolute 
 supremacy of Christ in the realm of the spirit. The 
 writer is convinced that, although Paul could not 
 altogether escape the influence of the Gentile environ- 
 ment amid which he was educated as a boy and 
 youth, and afterwards moved as a preacher of the 
 Gospel, yet he was almost exclusively a Jew; and, 
 therefore, when an explanation of any feature of his 
 thought can be offered from the standpoint of his 
 Jewish inheritance and education, it seems to be 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 97 
 
 altogether a mistake to prefer recourse to his Gentile 
 environment. Able and scholarly as is the book of 
 Dr. W. Morgan on The Religion and Theology of Paul, 
 it fails in two respects: (i) it does not adequately 
 recognise the originality of Paul’s religion in the 
 distinctiveness of his personal experience ; and (1i) it 
 is too ready to resort to current pagan ideas of religion 
 to explain what the experience adequately accounts 
 for, or what can be traced to the Jewish influences. 
 Paul’s sense of union and communion with Christ is 
 not derived from the pagan mystery religions. His 
 use of the title Lord (xvp.os) is most easily and prob- 
 ably explained from the use of that title in the Jewish 
 synagogue instead of the covenant name Yahveh, 
 when the Scriptures were being read. Having 
 made this general statement regarding his attitude, 
 justified by an adequate study of the relevant litera- 
 ture, the writer will not interrupt the exposition of 
 Paul’s Christology and soteriology by any discussion 
 of the sources from which any idea or term may have 
 been derived. 
 
 (3) The starting-point of Paul’s Christology was his 
 vision of the Risen Lord in His corporeality (Col. 1. 9, 
 cwpatikos), the natural body having been trans- 
 formed into the spiritual (cf. 1 Cor. xv. 44), the body 
 of His glory (Phil. im. 21). 
 
 (i) The Risen Lord was to him in his inner life, life- 
 giving spirit (avedpa Cwomowvy, 1 Cor. xv. 45), a 
 cleansing, enlightening, and strengthening power. 
 While Paul does distinguish the Lord from the Spirit 
 (2 Cor. xii. 14), yet the Lord also does what the Spirit 
 effects, and so inseparable is the relation of the Lord 
 and the Spirit that in one passage he seems to 
 identify the one with the other (2 Cor. ii. 17-18); but 
 generally he preserves the distinction.! This glory 
 and power became Christ’s at His Resurrection. He 
 was then invested as Son of God with power (Rom. 
 1. 3-4), and this investiture was the reward of His self- 
 humbling or emptying (Phil. 11. 9-11). ‘Then also he 
 
 } This subject will be more fully discussed in the later chapter dealing 
 with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 G 
 
98 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 received ‘ the name which is above every other name,’ 
 the name of Lord (cf. 2 Cor. iv. 5). It is significant 
 that Paul, as in contrast with idolatry and polytheism, 
 expresses his confession of monotheism in these terms : 
 ‘To us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all 
 things, and we unto Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, 
 through whom are all things, and we through Him” 
 (1 Cor. viii. 6). The Lord Jesus Christ is here sub- 
 ordinated as the mediating agency of creation and 
 redemption to the Father as the ultimate source and 
 the final purpose. (Note the prepositions 6c’ in one 
 case, and é€ and eis in the other.) Other passages 
 in which this same subordination is taught are Col. 1. 
 19, Phil. ii. 9, 1 Cor. vi. 14, iti, 23, xv. 28. An utter- 
 ance of passionate emotion such as Romans 1x. 5, 
 even if the phrase ‘ who is over all, God blessed for 
 ever,’ is to be ascribed to Christ, cannot set aside this 
 clearly expressed doctrine. While so distinctly dis- 
 tinguishing Christ from the Father, Paul could preserve 
 his monotheism only by thus insisting on the sub- 
 ordination of Christ to the Father. This subordination 
 is entirely in accord with the testimony regarding the 
 self-consciousness of Jesus, even as presented to us 
 in the Fourth Gospel, as has already been shown. 
 It also accords with what we to-day must think ; 
 the Incarnate Son, or God as man, God under the 
 conditions and limitations of manhood, must be 
 subordinate to God as infinite and absolute reality. 
 Even if we assume the divine Sonship as real in the 
 Godhead antecedent to incarnation, and even creation, 
 the term Sonship itself connotes subordination. In 
 a later chapter we must return to a full discussion of 
 the doctrine of the Godhead, but all that need be 
 affirmed here is that the doctrine of subordination, 
 which Paul felt to be necessary to his own thought, 
 is no less necessary to ours. | 
 _-” (ii) Paul, however, is not content with this con- 
 fession of the Lordship of Christ in subordination to 
 God the Father; drawing inferences from his own 
 experience, he seeks to define more closely the relation 
 of Christ to God, and also to the world. In Colossians — 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 99 
 
 i. 18-17 he describes Christ as (1) ‘ the Son of His love,’ 
 (2) ‘the image of the invisible God,’ and (8) ‘ the 
 firstborn of all creation.’ God by His very nature 
 is love, and Christ is the object of that love, the 
 eternal object, and consequently the appropriate 
 historical medium of that same love to man. He is 
 the manifestation to men of God Himself, and as such 
 manifestation is the final purpose of the universe, 
 creation itself being a method of God’s self-revelation, 
 He is both prior to, and supreme in the universe, for 
 that seems to be the meaning of the phrase ‘ firstborn 
 of all creation.’ It corresponds to the phrase in 
 Hebrews, ‘ heir of all things,’ as does the phrase ‘ the 
 image of the invisible God’ correspond to ‘ the very 
 image of His substance,’ * the effulgence of His glory ’ 
 (Heb. 1. 2-3). As the manifestation of God, the 
 visibility of the invisible, He is the agent of creation 
 itself as a revelation of God. Translating this thought 
 into terms which may make it more intelligible to us, 
 we may say that Paul conceives Christ as Son of God 
 as the reality of self-expression and self-communica- 
 tion in God, in which lies the possibility and even 
 actualisation of the creation as well as redemption 
 of man. If man be the summit of the evolution of 
 the universe, if he be in his nature akin to, and capable 
 of fellowship with God, if the revelation of God to 
 man and the redemption of man unto God in Christ 
 Jesus be indeed the final purpose of the creation of 
 the world and man, then it is credible that He who 
 so reveals God and redeems man should have this 
 cosmic significance. It is not a merely speculative 
 interest that is the motive of this process of thought ; 
 it is the practical interest of asserting the absolute 
 value of Christ as Saviour and Lord, as Paul had 
 proved this in his own experience. 
 
 (in) A still more daring adventure of thought to 
 fathom the mystery of the person of Christ is the 
 passage in Phil. ii. 6-8. If we do not allow ourselves 
 to forget that here also Paul’s aim is practical, to 
 commend humility and mutual service by the example 
 of Christ, we shall avoid the error of many theologians 
 
100 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 who seek here authoritative doctrine expressed with 
 scholastic minuteness; we shall not attempt to read 
 into the words the developed conceptions of a later 
 age. Let us rather try to retrace the path of Paul’s 
 thought. It was the risen Christ, not the Jesus of 
 history, who was the object of his faith, and so 
 dominated all his thinking. As divine, he believed 
 Christ as necessarily pre-existent, and into this pre- 
 existent state he projects his vision of the risen 
 Lord, with only this difference, that the name above 
 every other name—the Lordship—is not yet His. 
 Although He might have claimed it, He chose to win 
 it as the reward of His humiliation. The earthly life, 
 between that pre-existent state in * the form of God,’ 
 and the post-resurrection Lordship, culminating as it 
 did in the death on the Cross, is so great a contrast 
 to both, that it cannot but be regarded as due to 
 a voluntary self-emptying and self-humbling. This 
 kenosis (v. 7, €avrov exévwoev) Paul probably did not 
 conceive as a surrender of the divine essence, but only 
 of such functions and privileges as must be given 
 up to make the human humiliation and _ sacrifice 
 possible. The metaphysical process which Paul here 
 describes presents insuperable difficulties to our 
 thought to-day. The historical personality of Christ 
 is assigned to the eternal Son of God, and thus the 
 unity of the Godhead is imperilled for our thought, 
 as we cannot think of Father and Son as separate 
 individuals. A temporal act, such as might be 
 ascribed to the incarnate Son in time, is ascribed to 
 the eternal Son beyond and above time. But it is 
 only the form of Paul’s thought that we cannot make 
 intelligible to ourselves ; we can preserve its substance 
 by the conception of an eternal activity in the Godhead 
 of self-limitation for self-communication as Word and 
 Son, which is the necessary condition, not only of the 
 Incarnation, but of the whole process of creation as 
 the manifestation of the Infinite in the finite, the 
 Kternal in the temporal. For us the moral glory of 
 the Incarnation, culminating in the Cross, as the self- 
 sacrifice of God, shines no less brightly than it did 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 101 
 
 for Paul. It is the same thought which is expressed 
 in 2 Cor. vii. 9. Ours is a different philosophy, but 
 the same faith that Jesus the Christ in His earthly 
 life does express the very nature of God as the holy 
 love which in His grace stoops to, and shares, the life 
 of man to lift man to partnership with God. 
 
 (iv) It has often been affirmed that the earthly life 
 of Jesus had no significance for Paul. That he did 
 not concern himself with the details in word and deed 
 as of primary importance may be conceded ;_ but that 
 he was interested in and attached importance to the 
 reality of this self-humiliation and self-sacrifice cannot 
 be questioned. It is as grace that he regards the 
 whole of the earthly life. He mentions the Davidic 
 descent (Rom. 1. 8) ‘ according to the flesh’ to dis- 
 parage that hope of political Messiahship which the 
 Jewish people desired, and Jesus refused. In his 
 phrase ‘ born of a woman’ (Gal. iv. 4) Paul may be 
 referring to the virgin-birth, as the word yevdpevov 1s 
 a neutral word, and does not call for a reference to 
 the mother, rather than the father, and this birth 
 ex yuvaikos is contrasted with the divine paternity 
 (0 eds tov viov avrov). The phrase which follows, 
 ‘under the law,’ suggests another association of ideas. 
 As by a woman sin came into the world (cf. 1 Tim. 
 li. 14, 15), so by a woman also came the Saviour from 
 sin. As the law ‘ came in beside’ (Rom. v. 20), so 
 the Saviour from sin was Himself *‘ under the law’ : 
 this was necessary for the completeness of the identi- 
 fication of the Saviour with sinners; He must become 
 all that man is, that man might become all He 1s; 
 this is an instance of His poverty by which alone 
 mankind can be made rich. Jesus did submit Him- 
 self to the code of laws of His people, and did experi- 
 ence this submission as a contradiction of His spirit 
 of Sonship (cf. Matt. xvii. 26, 27). That even His 
 filial obedience to God involved some strain on His 
 will, astrugele and a victory, another statement (Rom. 
 vill. 3) implies. ‘ For what the law could not do, in 
 that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His 
 own Son in the likeness of flesh of sin and for sin (as 
 
102 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 an offering for sin), condemned sin in the flesh.’ 
 Leaving for later consideration the phrase ‘for sin’ as 
 referring to the atoning death, we may examine the 
 phrase ‘ in the likeness of flesh of sin.’ Paul does not 
 deny a similarity of the flesh (the material organism) 
 of Christ to that of other men; but he does seem 
 to deny that the flesh in Him was the seat. and vehicle 
 of sin, as it is in other men, while regarding it as the 
 occasion of temptation without sin. He has not the 
 interest which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 has in the trials and temptations of Jesus (11. 18, iv. 15); 
 but here he must be regarded as dealing with the 
 moral experience of Jesus, as a condemnation of man’s 
 failure, and yet a promise of his victory. The sin- 
 lessness achieved ‘ in the likeness of the flesh of sin ’ 
 is referred to again in the phrase (2 Cor. v. 21) ‘ Him 
 who knew no sin.’ Nevertheless Him, though sinless, 
 he goes on to affirm, ‘ He (God) made to be sin on our 
 behalf, that we might become the righteousness of 
 God in Him.’ What does the phrase ‘ made to be 
 sin’ mean? What the context seems to demand is 
 a paraphrase such as this: ‘ He was treated as a 
 sinner,’ or ‘the consequences of sin fell on Him.’ 
 The abstract phrase was surely chosen by Paul because 
 of the difficulty he felt in stating the truth without 
 falling into error. We must carefully avoid saying 
 that ‘ He was held guilty,’ or ‘ He was punished’ by 
 God, for these terms are applicable to sinners only. 
 God did not regard Jesus, nor did Jesus regard Himself, 
 as a sinner ; such moral confusion would be impossible 
 to the Father knowing the Son, and the Son knowing 
 the Father. It was the Father’s will, accepted by 
 the Son, that He, the sinless, should experience the 
 consequences of sin. How was this possible? and 
 why was this necessary ?—these are questions which 
 must meanwhile be held over. That this experience 
 of the consequences of sin was complete, going as far 
 as 1s conceivable, Paul affirms in the startling saying 
 (Gal. i. 13), ‘ Christ redeemed us from the curse of 
 the law, having become a curse for us : for it is written, 
 Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’ Jesus 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 103 
 
 not only died, so sharing the human lot, but He 
 endured a death which was regarded among the Jews 
 as accursed (see Deut. xxi. 23 and xxvii. 26). As in 
 the previous passage Paul does not say ‘ was made a 
 sinner,’ but * was made sin,’ so here he does not say 
 ‘became accursed,’ but ‘ became a curse,’ seeking 
 evidently to maintain the distinction between personal 
 guilt and punishment and vicarious endurance of the 
 consequences of the sin of mankind. Doubtless Paul 
 was acquainted with the record of Gethsemane and 
 Calvary, and on the ground of the facts there given, 
 and not only as an inference from the texts quoted 
 by him, he regarded the death of Christ as invested 
 with unique horror and distress. Through all these 
 passages there runs the dominating thought of the 
 kenosis, the self-emptying and the self-humbling of 
 the Son of God in His identification of Himself with 
 all that constitutes the struggle, the sorrow, the 
 burden, and the desolation of the lot of ‘mankind 
 sinners.’ While this full sharing of the life of man 
 culminated in the Cross, the risen Christ was for Paul 
 still a partner with man. As faith for him was so 
 close a union that he had been crucified and had 
 risen, nay, rather, was being crucified and raised with 
 Christ, so Christ’s grace did mean such a union with 
 himself that his sorrows were the sufferings of Christ, 
 and thus were not uncomforted (2 Cor. 1.5). ‘ As the 
 sufferings of Christ abound unto us, even so also our 
 comfort aboundeth through Christ.’ The scars upon 
 his body left by stonings and scourgings were * the 
 marks of Jesus’ (Gal. vi. 17). He rejoiced in filling 
 up the measure of his sufferings for the sake of Christ’s 
 body, because Christ so shared them that he could 
 speak of them as ‘ the afflictions of Christ ’ (Col. 1. 24). 
 For Paul there is thus a continuity in disposition, pur- 
 pose, activity between the Son of God and the humilia- 
 tion in time, and again between that humiliation and 
 the exaltation of the risen Lord: and because of that 
 humiliation voluntarily endured, that exaltation is 
 something more than was the glory of the pre-existent 
 state of the Son of God, and not merely a return to 
 
104 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 it unchanged. The kenosis resulted in a plerosis, the 
 self-emptying in a self-fulfilment. Paul’s Christology 
 is, the writer is convinced, one that Christian thought 
 to-day cannot afford to ignore or neglect. Even 
 should we need to use other terms, yet the substance 
 of his thought has a permanent and universal value, 
 for it is the interpretation, necessary and appropriate, 
 of an inspired experience. 
 
 (4) It has been an incalculable loss to Christian 
 theology that Paul’s soteriology, or doctrine of the 
 work of Christ, has been separated from his Christ- 
 ology, or doctrine of the person of Christ ; for in 
 such separation it can very easily be subjected to a 
 legalistic explanation which does it grave injury. If 
 for him the love of God as shown and imparted in 
 the grace of Christ was real, no less real was the 
 righteousness of God ; and his doctrine of atonement 
 is his endeavour to show how the love of God through 
 the grace of Christ does not annul, but sustains the 
 righteousness of God. 
 
 (i) God’s righteousness is the reaction, and necessary 
 reaction, of God’s moral perfection—His holy love— 
 against sin, not exclusively in condemning and punish- 
 ing sin (that Paul describes as the wrath of God, Rom. 
 i. 18), but rather predominantly in securing for man 
 deliverance from that judgment on sin, for God 1s 
 righteous, not in spite of His reckoning righteous those 
 who have faith in Christ, but because He so reckons 
 them (iii. 26). It shows a lack of moral insight to 
 assume that righteousness must be punitive and 
 repressive, and cannot be also reformatory and re- 
 demptive. Righteousness must be expansive and 
 reproductive; and its fullest vindication is not in 
 making the bad suffer, but in making the bad good. 
 This, there can be no doubt, was how Paul thought. 
 It is this conception—the righteousness of God as 
 both a quality of God and a gift to man—which is his 
 guiding principle in dealing with the work of Christ. 
 It is not necessary for the present purpose to offer an 
 exegetical study of Paul’s use of this term, for enough 
 has been said above to indicate how we are to under- 
 
 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 105 
 
 stand its meaning. In the righteousness of God there 
 meet God’s judgment on sin and His forgiveness of 
 sinners, for God’s forgiveness comes in such a way 
 and by such means as show His judgment; and the 
 judgment on sin comes in such a way and by such 
 means as will ensure that forgiveness—the recovery 
 of the filial relation to God interrupted by sin—will 
 issue in holiness. God so reckons sinners righteous 
 in Christ as to make them righteous, for grace is such 
 a divine activity in man, and faith is such a human 
 receptivity towards God, that this recovered fellowship 
 of God and man in Christ becomes creative of, not 
 only a new relation to God, but a new character in man. 
 
 (11) The antecedent of this righteousness of God is for 
 Paul the propitiation of Christ's blood, and its con- 
 sequent reconciliation with God and redemption from 
 sin, law, death, and doom. For him the revelation of 
 the righteousness of God is in the Cross of Christ. 
 What is the necessity of this connection? In the 
 past God’s judgment on sin had been tempered with 
 mercy, there had been a ‘ passing over of the sins 
 done aforetime, in the forbearance of God’ (Rom. 11. 
 25). God’s righteousness as judging sin had thus 
 been obscured. Now that God offered forgiveness 
 of sins, which is more than showing mercy even, 
 without any judgment on sinners, it was the more 
 necessary that that judgment should be displayed in 
 some other way, even a more unmistakable way. On 
 the Cross the judgment was borne by Christ and did 
 not fall on men. Paul does not say that the sacrifice 
 of Christ propitiated God in changing God’s disposition 
 towards men, His displeasure into favour, His wrath 
 into grace. With the same care as in the passages 
 ‘already noted (that Christ was made sin, and became 
 a curse) he states that Christ was set forth propitiatory 
 (ttaorHpiov) ‘through faith, by His blood’ (Rom. i. 
 25). It is best to take the word thacrypioyv as a 
 neuter adjective, conveying the idea in the most 
 general way. Although God is eternally holy love, 
 and need not be changed in disposition towards man, 
 yet we do not do full justice to Paul’s thought, whether 
 
106 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 we can share it or not, unless we admit that for him, 
 at least, Christ’s death not only revealed God as 
 propitious towards men, but even rendered God pro- 
 pitious, as showing both God’s wrath against sin, and 
 the appeasement of that wrath—wrath not as a 
 passion inconsistent with His holy love, but as a 
 necessary reaction of His heart against the sin which 
 thwarts and hinders the purpose of that holy love. 
 
 (iii) This line of thought may be described as legal ; 
 but the use of the phrase ‘ by His blood,’ suggesting 
 sacrifice, introduces another circle of ideas which we 
 may describe as ritual. Many modern scholars deny 
 that the sacrifices of the Old Testament involved the 
 idea of penal substitution or satisfaction ; while we 
 may concede this as regards sacrifice generally, yet 
 the trespass offering had a reference to breaches of 
 God’s law, and was regarded as appointed by God as a 
 means of recovering His favour. In Isaiah li. 10 the 
 Servant of Yahveh is made ‘a guilt-offering,’ and, as 
 the rest of the chapter shows, that is understood to 
 mean. vicarious suffering, even penal substitution and 
 satisfaction. But that picture itself forbids our re- 
 garding that substitution from the standpoint of law, 
 and not of love. Love is by its very nature vicarious, 
 and takes the place of the loved. Christ in His grace 
 completely identified Himself with the lot of man, 
 sharing with man the consequences of his sin. How 
 far Paul consciously distinguished the legal and the 
 ritual associations, and combined them, we cannot 
 conjecture; what is certain is that, as his language 
 shows, he did think of Christ’s death both as a sacri- 
 ues and as a vicarious endurance of the consequences 
 of sin. 
 
 (iv) We must not attempt to weaken his thought 
 by introducing an idea which the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews makes prominent. It is urged by some 
 who cannot find themselves at home in this circle 
 of ideas, that what was important was not the blood- 
 shedding or death of the victim, but the blood-sprink- 
 ling, or the presentation of the life to God; but we 
 cannot separate the two ideas, for it was the blood- 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 107 
 
 shedding that made the blood-sprinkling possible.! 
 Christ did offer His life unto God in holy obedience, 
 but He learned obedience, proved what obedience 
 may require to the uttermost, in enduring death. 
 There is in Christ’s death a representative submission, 
 but there is also a vicarious suffering. A misunder- 
 standing that the clause ‘ through faith’ (Rom. 11. 
 25) might suggest must also be removed. Paul does 
 not mean that the death of Christ is by faith invested 
 with a meaning as propitiatory, which it does not in 
 fact possess ; but what he does mean is that the fact 
 is not disclosed to unbelief, but only to faith, and 
 only faith can claim God as in Christ propitiatory. 
 (v) The consequent of the righteousness of God 
 which judges in forgiving sin is reconciliation with God. 
 Doubt, distrust, disobedience are banished from the 
 heart of the sinner who becomes a child of God. 
 This is a consequent, however, which man must 
 realise by his own response of gratitude, confidence, 
 submission to God; hence Paul exhorts believers to 
 have peace with God (Rom.v.1). This reconciliation 
 involves the appropriation of all the blessings which 
 belong to the children of God. But a serious question 
 must be faced: is this reconciliation mutual? It is 
 true that the exhortation to be reconciled to God is 
 addressed to men; but the basis of the appeal is 
 ‘the word of reconciliation,’ namely, that God is 
 ‘not reckoning to men their trespasses ’ (2 Cor. v. 19), 
 and that surely means that God in Christ is reconciled. 
 God’s disposition and purpose towards men are not 
 changed, but His attitude to them is: the pain of 
 His judgment is changed to the joy of His favour. 
 Four reasons for this conclusion can be suggested :— 
 (1) In Romans xi. 28 ‘ enemies’ are so contrasted with 
 ‘ beloved’ that we must regard them as exposed to 
 God’s antagonism. (2) If ‘ while we were enemies, 
 we were reconciled to God through the death of His 
 Son’ (Rom. v. 10), the process of reconciliation must 
 have begun on God’s side before it began on man’s. 
 (3) If we may speak of God’s wrath, we may surely 
 
 1 See Westcott’s The Epistle to the Hebrews, Additional Note on ix. 12. 
 
108 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 speak of His reconciliation. (4) If God may be 
 spoken of as in Christ propitiatory, why may we not 
 speak of Him as reconciled? The two words, pro- 
 pitiatory and reconciled, must both be used with 
 caution; it must never be suggested that the death 
 of Christ wrought a change in God’s character, that 
 from being wrathful He was made merciful; 1t must 
 always be made plain that God’s holy love is the 
 motive of His reconciliation with man. 
 
 (vi) Redemption is the most comprehensive term to 
 express the consequences of Christ’s work for man in 
 revealing God as propitiatory, and in reconciling God 
 and man. In one of the few sayings of Jesus about 
 His death, He speaks of it as a ransom for many 
 (Matt. xx. 28); but the word redemption may mean 
 simply deliverance without any reference to a ransom 
 by which it is effected. It is not at all necessary for 
 us to ask the question, to whom was the ransom paid ; 
 still less should we answer it, as one of the earliest 
 theories of the Atonement did, that 1t was paid to the 
 devil, under whose dominion man had voluntarily 
 placed himself by sin.!_ Passing with a bare mention 
 one aspect of redemption, very important for Paul, 
 but without significance for us—the victory of Christ 
 on His Cross over ‘the principalities and powers,’ 
 angels or demons (Col. ii. 15)—the redemption as 
 Paul conceives it is fourfold. (a) Man is redeemed 
 from the wrath of God, God’s doom on sin, because 
 it has been taken up into the righteousness of God; 
 its necessity has been removed, because such pur- 
 pose as it sought in the moral order has been 
 fulfilled in a more excellent way by the manifesta- 
 tion of God’s judgment in the Cross of Christ. 
 (b) Man is redeemed from death as the penalty of sin 
 by the hope of resurrection rooted in the believer’s 
 relation to Christ as the living Lord, or the belief 
 that absent from the body he is at home with the 
 Lord (2 Cor. v. 8). This belief replaced the hope of 
 the resurrection, when Paul became less confident of 
 
 1 See A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ, Franks, vol. 1. 
 References in Index under ‘ Redemption from the devil.’ 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 109 
 
 his survival to the Second Coming of the Lord. 
 (c) Man is redeemed from the bondage to the flesh, 
 so vividly described by Paul in the autobiographical 
 passage (Rom. vil. 7-25), by his personal union in 
 faith to Christ, in whom he died unto sin, and lived 
 unto God. ‘The expulsive power of the new affection ’ 
 frees him from the appetites and passions which 
 hitherto had held him in thrall. (d) Man is redeemed 
 from the law—a matter of great importance to Paul 
 as a Jew and a Pharisee, because his life is brought 
 under grace and not law; the new commandment 
 of love to God and man is the fulfilling of the whole 
 law; and this commandment the saved man finds his 
 freedom and joy in keeping because of his new motive, 
 the constraining love of Christ (2 Cor. v. 14). Thus 
 reconciled to God, redeemed from the flesh and the 
 law, death and doom, the believer enjoys God’s favour, 
 has freedom of access to Him in prayer, rejoices in 
 hope, not only endures trials cheerfully, but finds in 
 that endurance a discipline of character (Rom. v. 1-4). 
 He possesses the Spirit of God not only. as the source 
 of manifold gifts, but as the power within that 
 sanctifies him, and so prepares him for the inheritance 
 of the saints in light. Amid all the sorrows, tempta- 
 tions, and trials of this earthly life he knows that all 
 things are working together for his good (Rom. vii. 
 28), and that there is nothing real or conceivable that 
 can separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus 
 our Lord (vv. 38-39). 
 
 (vii) The reconciliation and redemption thus de- 
 scribed Paul himself ewpertenced through his faith in 
 Christ as Saviour and Lord; and his experience 
 belongs to the fact of Christ, the historical reality of 
 the grace of Christ, which is the basis of the con- 
 structive theology being offered in these pages. When 
 he is expounding the righteousness of God as revealed 
 and realised in Christ propitiatory on His Cross, he is 
 going beyond religious and moral experience to theo- 
 logical explanation ; and we must ask ourselves how 
 far we can take up what he here offers into the con- 
 structive theology which we can to-day defend and 
 
110 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 commend: to the thought of our own time. The full 
 discussion of the doctrine of the atonement for our 
 own age must be reserved for a later chapter; but 
 here the writer may very briefly indicate how far he 
 is able to take up into his own convictions regarding 
 the work of Christ what Paul held. He believes that 
 there is a wrath of God, a displeasure of God against 
 sin, a necessary reaction of His perfection against 
 the contradiction and challenge thereof; that the 
 divine order of the world in the consequences— 
 physical, moral, social—of sin now inadequately mani- 
 fests that reaction, but anticipates a more adequate 
 manifestation either in the future life of the individual 
 or a future age of the race; that death in its totality, 
 not as a physical event merely, but as a personal 
 experience, may be regarded as the penalty of sin; 
 that to awaken man’s penitence as well as faith it 
 was necessary for God to show convincingly His 
 judgment on as well as forgiveness of sin, as He has 
 indeed done in the sacrifice of the Cross; that it was 
 necessary for God as eternally perfect in consistency 
 with His character, and in order to carry out His 
 purpose to make men sharers of His perfection, to 
 assert His own righteousness, His reaction against 
 sin, in a judgment on sin more authoritative for the 
 human conscience than could be the punishment of 
 ‘mankind sinners’; that for the moral community of 
 God with man, man’s penitence must respond to, 
 correspond with God’s condemnation of sin; that 
 the death of Christ does somehow express God’s con- 
 demnation, and evoke man’s penitence. Just how 
 Christ’s Cross does this Paul does not make altogether 
 clear; what is certain is that Christ did endure the 
 consequences of sin on our behalf, and, as He thus 
 delivers us from them, it may be added, instead of us. 
 What Christ did endure, how He could so endure, 
 why He must so endure, Paul does not fully disclose, 
 and these questions we must try to answer when 
 offering the constructive doctrine. Of one thing the 
 writer is quite certain, and has become more certain 
 with years of experience, study, and meditation, and, 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 111 
 
 he may even dare to add, of some illumination by the 
 Spirit: that to omit what Paul teaches regarding the 
 work of Christ from Christian doctrine, whatever 
 intellectual difficulties 1t may present, would be to 
 impoverish the religious experience and to enfeeble 
 the moral character of Christian believers. 
 
 II 
 
 It is generally recognised that there is a marked 
 difference between the Fourth and the other Gospels, 
 Into critical theories it is not necessary here to enter. 
 Sufficient for the present purpose is the statement 
 that in the Fourth Gospel there is not only evangelical 
 testimony, but also apostolic experience and interpre- 
 tation. There are the recollections of an eye-witness, 
 which supplement the testimony of the other Gospels 
 in respect to the number of visits paid to Jerusalem at 
 the great feasts, and the character of the teaching 
 there given—controversy with the teachers and rulers 
 of the nation in regard to the claims of the Son. 
 What is but mentioned in the other Gospels—the 
 consciousness of Sonship towards God—is often and 
 clearly asserted. Meditation on what was remem- 
 bered was added to these recollections, either by this 
 eye-witness or a disciple of his, and these meditations 
 were affected by a personal experience of the presence 
 of Christ and communion with Him, and also of the 
 guiding and the enlightening of the Spirit, giving a 
 fuller meaning to words which had been recalled. 
 Further, there are passages which are combined with, 
 and yet can be distinguished from, these recollections 
 and meditations, in which a more developed meta- 
 physics of the person of Christ is expounded than 
 would be appropriate in the historical situation on 
 the lips of Christ Himself. In the interpretation of 
 these passages throughout the Gospel care must be 
 taken not to read into them the philosophy of the 
 Prologue—the doctrine of the Logos or the Word of 
 God; as they are an expansion of the conception of 
 the Sonship, which is the dominant influence in the 
 
112 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Gospel. In dealing with the representation in this 
 Gospel of the person and work of Christ we cannot 
 with any certainty separate recollections and medita- 
 tions; in the mind of the disciple sayings of Jesus 
 expanded into statements of his own faith which he 
 could not himself distinguish from the facts which he 
 recalled. These metaphysical explanations and the 
 doctrine of the Logos we can, however, deal with 
 separately. 
 
 ~(1) Only the leading characteristics of Jesus as 
 presented in the Fourth Gospel need be indicated. 
 
 (i) First of all to be noted is His certainty of His 
 relation as Son to God as Father—His communion 
 with, dependence on, and submission to God, and 
 His consequent confidence in the sufficiency of His 
 resources from God for the fulfilment of His vocation. 
 This is a development of, but not in contradiction with, 
 the self-testimony of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. 
 
 (ii) Next must be mentioned His assurance that as 
 He can satisfy all the needs of men as the Bread from 
 Heaven (John vi. 82-58), the Living Water (iv. 13, 14, 
 vii. 37-38), the Light of the World (vill. 12, 1x. 5), 
 so in Him men by acceptance of what He offers gain 
 full salvation, the possession of the eternal life, but 
 by rejection in sin and unbelief bring on themselves 
 condemnation. He is thus the Judge of mankind 
 (v. 22). 
 
 (iii) In this Gospel there is exhibited as in no other 
 the intimacy of the personal relation between the 
 disciples and the Master as the Door (x. 7), the Good 
 Shepherd (v. 11), and the Vine (xv. 1-6). As He as 
 Son is related to the Father, so are they to be to Him, 
 trusting, loving, obeying, holding fellowship. Death 
 will not destroy this relationship, as He will still be 
 present to them, and they will be able to hold com- 
 munion with Him. That presence and communion 
 will be mediated by the other Paraclete, the Holy 
 Spirit, who will not supersede Him, but complete His 
 revelation in unfolding its meaning. This teaching 
 in the last discourse (xiv.-xvii.) is distinctive of this 
 Gospel; but it so closely corresponds with what 1s 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 1138 
 
 most typical of the deepest Christian experience that, 
 even if we have not before us a verbatim report, the 
 conviction is irresistible that this is the record of an 
 experience, in which the promises of the Master Him- 
 self were fulfilled, that the Jesus of history intended 
 to be to His disciples what the Christ of his faith 
 proved Himself to be to this disciple. Without 
 attempting to distinguish recollections and medita- 
 tions, we can accept this contribution to our Christian 
 thought, not as theological speculation, but as personal 
 experience, which may be added, even as Paul’s, to the 
 historical reality of Jesus as the Christ and the Lord. 
 
 (iv) While there is not a developed doctrine of the 
 Atonement, this Gospel no less definitely asserts the 
 necessity of the death of Christ not only as voluntarily 
 endured as a sign of the Shepherd’s devotion to His 
 sheep, and as a proof of the Son’s obedience to the 
 Father, but as the necessary condition of His universal 
 saving efficacy for man (ii. 14-15, xii. 24, 32). In the 
 First Epistle more prominence is given to the atoning 
 death, and the forgiving and cleansing grace of Christ. 
 * The blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin’ 
 (i. 7). ‘* We have a Paraclete with the Father, Jesus 
 Christ the righteous: and He is the propitiation for 
 our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole 
 world’ (i. 1-2). ‘If we confess our sins, God 1s 
 faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to 
 cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (1. 9). It may 
 be said confidently that there is substantial agreement 
 with the Pauline doctrine. 
 
 (v) This Gospel is very much more explicit than 
 are the Synoptics regarding the Resurrection (xiv.- 
 xvu.). It is a return to the Father, a recovery of the 
 glory which the Son had with the Father before the 
 world was; and yet after a temporary separation 
 there will be reunion with His disciples, and His 
 presence and power will again be experienced in the 
 inward working of the other Paraclete, the Holy 
 ‘Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. Here we have the be- 
 ginnings of the doctrine of the Trinity ; the Father 
 immanent in the Son, and the Son in the Holy Spirit. 
 
 H 
 
114 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (vi) What has been implicit hitherto must be now 
 made explicit. There is an advance of thought in 
 this Gospel beyond the common Christian tradition. 
 While the older eschatology, inherited by the Christian 
 Church from Judaism, is not absent, yet it is being 
 superseded. Even in His earthly life Jesus is Judge 
 (ix. 39), for by their attitude of faith or unbelief men 
 secure salvation or incur condemnation (ili, 18-21). 
 Apart from Him, men are already perishing under 
 death (v. 16, cf. 1 John iii. 14); in Him they now 
 possess eternal life, and cannot die; there has been a 
 spiritual resurrection. His is a universal and per- 
 manent presence with His Church, in His Spirit, and 
 thus He is ever coming into the world. If we trust the 
 record of the teaching of Jesus this development had 
 the authority of words of His, remembered but only 
 afterwards understood. As we have observed the 
 same tendency in Paul, we may for our constructive 
 theology now discard the older eschatology, and be 
 guided by this teaching instead. 
 
 (vii) We come to teaching which is altogether 
 peculiar to the Fourth Gospel, the utterances about 
 pre-existence. We can deal with these apart from 
 the metaphysical explanations and the doctrine of 
 the Logos. Some of them we must regard as com- 
 ments of the evangelist (i. 80, i. 13, vi. 38, 38, 50, 
 58-62). What remains is the response to the challenge 
 of His enemies in vili. 58: ‘ Before Abraham was, I 
 am.’ The contrast here between yevéofar and eipi 
 indicates a timeless existence. The term pre-existence 
 is contradictory, as expressing such timeless existence, 
 since it suggests priority in time, and to speak of a 
 continuity of consciousness between that timeless 
 existence and the whole of the life in time is to make 
 a development under human conditions and limita- 
 tions altogether inconceivable. The only intelligible 
 explanation of such a saying, accepting its authen- 
 ticity, is this, that the more Jesus’ claim was chal- 
 lenged the more certain He became of His relation 
 to God as Son to Father, and that this certainty 
 included a distinct intuition that this relation had not 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 115 
 
 and could not have begun in time, but was eternal as 
 God Himself. In the seventeenth chapter Jesus is 
 represented as regarding His Resurrection as a return 
 to the Father, and a recovery of the glory He had 
 with the Father before the world was (v. 5), and of 
 His Father’s love as ‘ before the foundation of the 
 world’ (v. 24). Such meditation on His relation to 
 God seems altogether appropriate to the occasion, 
 and the mood of Jesus in the Upper Room, and we 
 may accept this testimony that the consciousness of 
 Sonship did include the intuition of timeless relation 
 to God. 
 
 (2) ‘The representation of the person and work thus 
 sketched we may regard as historical testimony (in- 
 cluding therein that of Christian experience). There 
 are, however, in the Fourth Gospel, theological ex- 
 planations which can easily be distinguished from 
 what we can reckon as testimony; and the value of 
 these as a contribution to a constructive theology 
 must be tested with care, as even an apostle’s in- 
 ferences cannot be as authoritative for us as his witness 
 
 to history or experience. 
 (i) The disclosures of the Messiahship by Jesus 
 Himself and the confession of it by others are ante- 
 dated (i. 41, etc.). There is a tendency to exaggerate 
 the supernaturalness of the knowledge of Jesus (1. 48, 
 li. 24-25, iv. 17, 18, vi. 6). The apologetic interest of 
 the evangelist ascribes to Jesus what cannot be 
 described otherwise than-as an artificial pose (vi. 5-6, 
 x1. 42, xii. 30, xiv. 29), and results in a disproportion 
 in the presentation of the teaching as more polemical 
 than it really was. Hither the witness or his disciple 
 in several passages develops his own doctrine. The 
 first passage (v. 19-29, except v. 24), on the relation of 
 Father and Son, emphasises the absolute dependence, 
 complete knowledge, and entire resemblance of the 
 Son, and insists on equal honour. The functions of 
 quickening the dead and judgment—to be understood 
 either spiritually or eschatologically—are entrusted 
 by, and exercised in dependence on the Father. In 
 the second passage (vi. 51, 52-57) there seems to be 
 
116 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 an expansion of the words used at the Supper to affirm 
 the believer’s absolute dependence by faith on Jesus, 
 and most of all on His sacrifice, for the maintenance 
 of his life and its satisfaction. In the third passage 
 a still more experimental note is struck (John i. 
 16-21). Eternal life depends on faith in the Son as 
 the gift of the Father’s love; while the divine in- 
 tention in that gift is salvation, man’s unbelief can 
 turn it into condemnation. While we thus distinguish 
 the reminiscences and the reflections, the sayings in 
 the Gospel about the Holy Spirit (xiv. 16-20, 26, xv. 
 26-27, xvi. 7-15) show that for the author that dis- 
 tinction would have been meaningless. It was the 
 Spirit in whom Christ continued His presence who 
 unfolded the meaning of His works and words. The 
 Johannine and the Pauline theology are thus in sub- 
 stantial agreement as regards both the relation of 
 Christ as Son to God as Father, and the relation 
 of the believer to Christ as Saviour and Lord, some- 
 times represented as immediate, at others as mediated 
 by the Holy Spirit. If we follow the rendering of the 
 R.V. in John iil. 34, then it is Christ who is repre- 
 sented as giving to believers the Spirit, not by 
 measure; but elsewhere (xiv. 16) the Spirit is repre- 
 sented as the Father’s gift in response to the prayer 
 of the Son: and this seems to accord more closely 
 with the Johannine doctrine on the relation of the 
 Father and the Son. If we follow the A.V. rendering, 
 however, which represents Christ Himself as the 
 recipient of the Spirit without measure from God, 
 then the Spirit would be conceived as mediating not 
 only the relation of the believer to Christ, but even that 
 of the Son to the Father. There would be here the 
 germ of a doctrine of the Trinity. But His bestowal 
 of the Spirit might refer only to the Son incarnate as 
 a condition of the Incarnation, but not the ‘inner life’ 
 of the Godhead. 
 
 (ii) The most distinctive contribution of the Fourth 
 Gospel to Christology is the Logos doctrine of the 
 Prologue. The writer does not believe that the 
 Prologue was written by the disciple who was the 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 117 
 
 witness of the works and words of Jesus in the flesh, 
 but by a disciple of his who reported his teaching. 
 He holds with Harnack! as against Scott 2 that the 
 doctrine of the Logos does not dominate the whole 
 representation of Jesus in the Gospel. It is the truth 
 of the divine Sonship which runs through the rest of 
 the Gospel, and affects, so far as it does affect, the 
 record of the facts. Whether the doctrine of the 
 Prologue be derived from the system of Philo, or has 
 a Palestinian origin, or can be directly traced to the 
 ‘Wisdom’ literature, is a question which for the 
 present purpose it is not necessary to decide, although 
 the writer, after weighing the arguments pro and 
 con each view, inclines to believe that the Philonic 
 influence cannot be excluded, whether it was direct 
 or not. A brief comparison between the Philonic and 
 the Johannine doctrine will serve the end in view, 
 the estimate of the value of the Logos conception for 
 Christian constructive theology. 
 
 (a) While for Philo the Logos is not a person dis- 
 tinct from God, the Fourth Gospel identifies the Logos 
 with the historical personality of Jesus; and thus, 
 as also does Paul in Phil. ii. 1-11, mentally projects 
 the historical personality into the eternal reality of 
 the Godhead. To identify the concrete individuality 
 of Jesus with the Logos within the Godhead is to 
 be involved in metaphysical difficulties from which 
 Christology in later developments has been making 
 vain attempts to escape. 
 
 (b) This identification, instead of being a solution, 
 was rather a problem for speculative thought in the 
 Church. If the Logos be regarded as not only 
 personal, but a person, as was the historical Jesus, 
 the divine unity is sacrificed to tritheism. Only if 
 we so far modify the identification as to conceive the 
 Logos as by Incarnation acquiring the concrete in- 
 dividuality of the historical Jesus, and not as eternally 
 a person distinct from God the Father, can we preserve 
 the divine unity. Where the unity of the Godhead 
 
 1 The History of Dogma, vol. i. p. 329. 
 2 The Fourth Gospel, pp. 163-75. 
 
118 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and the equality of Father and Son were emphasised 
 in subsequent theological thought, the doctrine of a 
 distinct personal Logos fell into the background. 
 Where that doctrine was emphasised, the subordina- 
 tion of the Logos to God was insisted on. In the 
 Athanasian teaching the Logos doctrine is modified 
 in the interests of the divine unity; the logical 
 development of that doctrine results in the Arian 
 heresy. 
 
 (c) The Logos doctrine in Philo was the solution of 
 a cosmic problem, not a moral or a religious—the 
 relation of the infinite, eternal, perfect God to an 
 imperfect world in space and time. While the Pro- 
 logue passes quickly from a reference to the making 
 of the world by the Word (v. 3) to the moral and 
 religious interest of the Gospel, yet the tendency in 
 later developments of the doctrine was to emphasise 
 the metaphysical instead of the ethical and theological. 
 The taking over of this philosophical idea has not been 
 by any means an unmixed blessing to the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 (d) A difference between the Philonic and the 
 Johannine conception must, however, be noted. It 
 was because Philo conceived God as so transcendent of 
 the world as to be unrelated to and unrevealed in the 
 world, that he had to conceive the Logos as mediating 
 the relation of God to, and the revelation of God in, 
 the world. It is because for him God and the world 
 are so apart that he needs to think of the Logos to 
 come between them, and bring them together. In 
 the Fourth Gospel it is immanence which is the ruling 
 idea. The Father so dwells in the Son and the Son 
 in believers as the children of God, that in and by the 
 Logos God Himself is brought to men, and men to 
 God. It is only when so modified by Christian ex- 
 perience that the doctrine of the Logos can have any 
 value for Christian theology. What use can be made 
 of it will afterwards be shown. This may now be— 
 said, however, that it is in the representation of the 
 immediate and intimate relation of Father and Son, 
 and then of the Son with believers, that the distinctive 
 
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 119 
 
 value of the Fourth Gospel lies, not as a contribution 
 to speculative thought, but as a stimulus to spiritual 
 experience. 
 
 (ii) While the Fourth Gospel does not deny the 
 manhood, and does give indications that the Word 
 did become /lesh, yet the Epistle to the Hebrews may 
 be regarded as complementary to it in the way in 
 which it brings out the significance of the human 
 experience, and not merely the human nature, as the 
 creeds assert. In discussing the evangelical testimony 
 reference has been frequently made to that Epistle 
 as affording what can truly be regarded as an inspired 
 commentary on such facts as the Temptation in the 
 Wilderness, the Agony in Gethsemane, and the 
 Desolation of Calvary. It is, therefore, not necessary 
 to deal with that Epistle as part of the Apostolic 
 testimony in a separate discussion. [If the Apostolic 
 interpretation in some of its more speculative aspects 
 exposes our thought to the peril of losing our firm 
 hold of the historical reality, this Epistle always 
 brings us back to it; and this is an invaluable service, 
 for Christian faith must always strike deep its roots 
 into, and draw freely its nourishment from, the soil 
 of fact both in the history of the earthly life and the 
 experience by believers of the heavenly power of 
 Jesus the Christ our Lord. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE DOGMATIC FORMULATION REGARDING 
 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 
 
 Tuis chapter and the-next will not attempt to give 
 the history of the doctrines of the Person and the 
 Work of Christ, for these have unfortunately been 
 separated in Christian theology, and in the Christian 
 Church. That is not necessary to, and would not 
 serve the purpose of, this volume. Only those sub- 
 jects will be discussed that can further the object of a 
 constructive theology. 
 
 (i) A remarkable difference in the lot of the two 
 doctrines must first of all be noted. The doctrine 
 of the person of Christ has found a dogmatic formula- 
 tion in a series of cecumenical creeds ; and the Chris- 
 tian Church may be said to have expressed its mind 
 authoritatively upon it. The doctrine of the work 
 of Christ, on the other hand, has not had that good or 
 ill fortune. There have been various theories of the 
 Atonement expounded, and generally accepted at 
 different times; but it cannot be said that the Church 
 has come to any accord on this subject as it has on 
 the other. Accordingly, it will be necessary to deal 
 with the two doctrines differently : it will suffice in 
 this chapter to consider how far the dogmatic formula- 
 tion of the doctrine of the person of Christ in the 
 cecumenical creeds can be regarded as adequate to 
 meet the demands of modern thinking; it will be 
 necessary to discuss a number of theories of the 
 Atonement in the next chapter to discover what 
 truth they may contain for our thought to-day. It 
 is true that the separation of the two doctrines cannot 
 be absolute, as it was a definite conception of the work 
 
 of Christ which affected the conception which was 
 120 ) 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 121 
 
 formed of the person of Christ; and a definite theory 
 of the Atonement must assume some view of. the 
 nature of Him who effects that Atonement. Never- 
 theless, a relative separation there has been, greatly 
 to the injury of both the doctrines. 
 
 (11) While there is danger in historical generalisa- 
 tions, there are some which are not only justified, but 
 even necessary. The course of Christian theology 
 has been affected in a very remarkable manner by 
 the difference of the Greek and the Latin mind. The 
 first was speculative and consequently metaphysical ; 
 the second was practical and as a result ethical or 
 legal. The doctrine of the person of Christ as dog- 
 matically formulated is the product of the Greek 
 genius. The Roman ethos restored to prominence 
 in the thought of the Church, and gave its character 
 to what was thought about the work of Christ. 
 There is a Greek and a Latin type of theology clearly 
 distinguishable, since these differences between the 
 Greek and the Latin mind do correspond to diverging 
 tendencies of human interest and activity. There 
 will always be those to whom the Incarnation makes 
 more of an appeal than does the Atonement, and 
 vice versa. But Christian constructive theology must 
 aim at wholeness, and shun one-sidedness. To lay 
 emphasis, as did the Greek theology, on Christ’s human 
 nature is to move from the region of practice to that 
 of theory; to lay stress on His human ewperience as 
 giving the meaning of the Incarnation, is to pass from 
 the realm of speculation into that of morality and 
 religion, is to find the point of contact between the 
 doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement. 
 Accordingly, the writer entirely disagrees with those 
 who advocate a return from the Latin to the Greek 
 type of theology. We must advance beyond both 
 to such a conception of the Incarnation as will make 
 Atonement its characteristic activity, and such a 
 conception of the Atonement as will make the Incar- 
 nation the necessary source of it. In dealing with 
 the two doctrines separately, as their history compels 
 us to do, we must never allow ourselves to forget that 
 
122 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 while they are distinguishable, yet they are not 
 separable, for the content of the work depends on the 
 character of the person of Christ, and the meaning of 
 the work shows the worth of the person. 
 
 (iii) To these two theological types correspond the 
 two dominant tendencies in the Christian Church 
 to-day, the Catholic and the Protestant, or the sacra- 
 mental and the evangelical. The close connection 
 between the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation 
 and the sacramental tendency is not always adequately 
 emphasised. Where stress is laid on a union of 
 natures rather than on a personal activity, and 
 especially where great importance is attached to the 
 assumption of a body as part of human nature, the 
 belief in material channels of spiritual gifts follows 
 with logical consistency. To anticipate the subse- 
 quent discussion by way of illustrating this we may 
 note that monophysitism and_ transubstantiation 
 theories have a close mental kinship. Protestantism 
 has always concerned itself more with theories of the 
 Atonement than has Catholicism; for while at the 
 Reformation the orthodox Christology was taken over, 
 although developed in different directions in the 
 Lutheran and the Reformed Churches, yet apart from 
 the kenotic theories Protestantism has not concerned 
 itself greatly with the doctrine of the Incarnation. 
 And the kenctic theories, inasmuch as they aimed 
 at so conceiving the Incarnation as to allow for a 
 human ewperience, are true to the Protestant tendency 
 with its stress not so much on what Christ was as on 
 what Christ did. If there is to be a reunion of the 
 Christian Churches—even of the Catholic and the 
 Protestant—it will be necessary to harmonise these 
 two theological tendencies, for unity in thought re- 
 garding the person and work of Christ is a necessary 
 condition of union of spirit in Him. 
 
 I 
 
 We are not at all concerned here with the ancient 
 creeds as standards of orthodoxy, or as weapons 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 123 
 
 against heresy, nor with the question whether the 
 truth of the Gospel needs to be so defended, or ought 
 to be so commended. As the keynote of this volume 
 is ‘ through fact to faith,’ our primary questions are : 
 
 ‘Does the dogmatic formulation express personal faith 
 in Jesus Christ the Lord as we to-day conceive it ? 
 Does it correspond with historical fact as modern 
 scholarship establishes it? A subordinate question, 
 important for constructive theology, which must use 
 the philosophy of the age in interpreting the history 
 and giving intellectual form to the faith, is this: 
 Can the metaphysical formulae employed meet the 
 demands of the philosophical thought of our own 
 time? Before these questions can be answered, a 
 summary of the history must be given. 
 
 (1) The Apostles’ Creed does not come from the 
 Apostolic Age; but its beginnings can be traced back 
 to Irenaeus, a.pD. 185, as an expansion of the Roman 
 Baptismal Creed, and in its present form it is first 
 found in 750 a.p. Its clauses were inserted at different 
 times to assert the belief of the Church against various 
 heresies. For our present purpose it need not be 
 more closely examined. 
 
 (i) Much more important for constructive theology 
 is the creed adopted by the Council of Nicaea in 
 A.D. 825 in condemnation of the heresy of Arius. 
 This was an expansion of the creed of Caesarea 
 presented to the Council by its bishop, Eusebius. 
 The most important changes made are these: the 
 clause mpwrdroxov waons xtioews was left out as 
 an Arian sense could be put upon it, and there 
 were added the explanatory clauses touréorw €k THs 
 ovgias Tov watpos, yevvynbérvta, ov mounbévTa, dfroov- 
 owuyv tm matpi. Christ was raised above the cate- 
 gory of the creature, and declared to be begotten, 
 not made, and consubstantial with the Father. It 
 was the word époovc.wv which was the bone of 
 contention in the subsequent controversies. The full 
 and real divinity of Christ was asserted as the universal 
 belief of the Church. 
 
 (ii) What is now known as the Nicene Creed is, 
 
124 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 however, of later date. It is not certain that this 
 can claim even to be the creed of the Council of 
 Constantinople (A.D. 381), although the Council of 
 Chalcedon (a.D. 451) did accept it as the creed of that 
 Council. The difference between this and the former 
 creed lies in the expansion of the eighth article, cai 
 cis 7d Tvedpa Td “Aywov, to condemn the heresy of 
 Macedonius and his followers, nicknamed ‘ Pheuaumato- 
 machians,’ who repeated the heresy of Arius in regard 
 to the Spirit, regarding Him as a creature subordinate 
 to the Son. The following clauses were added: 70 
 Kvpiov cat 7d Cworotoy, 7 ex Tod Harpos exmopevduevor 
 7d oop Marpi Kal Tia cvpmrpooKvvovpevov kal ouvdoka- 
 Cduevov, TO hartjoav bia tov mpopyntoav. There were 
 also added clauses on the Church, baptism, the 
 resurrection, and eternal life. The statement in 
 this creed that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the 
 Father, was afterwards at an uncertain date 
 modified in the West by the addition of the Filioque 
 clause, placing the Son on an equality with the Father. 
 This was the most serious theological difference be- 
 tween the East and the West, as the East in accordance 
 with its Logos Christology tended always to the sub- 
 ordination of the Son to the Father. It may be added 
 that alike in the Macedonian heresy as in this, the 
 orthodox condemnation of it, there was no independ- 
 ent experimental interest in the doctrine of the Holy 
 Spirit ; both were but a logical consequence of the 
 Christological differences.* 
 
 (iii) The Christological development was completed 
 in the Creed of Chalcedon (a.p. 451). The perfect 
 divinity of Christ is reasserted against Arianism, 
 which was condemned at Nicaea in 325. The perfect 
 humanity is maintained against Apollinaris, whose 
 doctrine was condemned without mention of his name 
 at the Synod of Alexandria in 362, the Synod of Rome 
 in 377, and the Council of Constantinople in 381. 
 Desiring to safeguard the unity of the person of Christ, 
 
 1 The subject is dealt with in The Humiliation of Christ, by Bruce, The 
 
 Doctrine of the Incarnation, by Ottley, The Person of Christ, by Mackintosh, 
 and Dorner’s monumental work, The Doctrine of the Person of Christ. 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 125 
 
 and the immutability of His will, Apollinaris denied 
 that Christ had the human spirit or rational soul, 
 the third constituent of human nature according 
 to the current psychology: its place was taken by 
 the divine Logos Himself. This, however, was con- 
 demned as a heresy in the following clauses of the 
 Chaleedonian formulae : Téhevov TOV QUTOV eV av Opuro- 
 wyTt.. . avOpewrrov an Gas, TOV avr ov €k buxys hoyucns Kab 
 OOpaTos... 0pL00UC LOY TOV avTov mpey Kara THY avOpwro- 
 THTA, KATA TAVTA OmoLov HuLY Ywplis apaptias. The paral- 
 lelism of the clauses referring to the humanity 
 and the divinity shows that the Council was re- 
 solved to assert the reality of the humanity. But 
 granted complete manhood and complete Godhood, 
 how can these be combined and function in one 
 person ? Nestorius had attempted to deal with that 
 problem, but his attempt had been condemned as a 
 division of the person of Christ. Against him is 
 directed the clause in the creed,! &a kat tov avrov 
 Xpiorov, Titov rov Kvpuov, and the two adverbs, advaipérws 
 (without division) and aywpiorws (never to be separ- 
 ated). While the historical evidence and theological 
 consistency demanded the maintenance of the com- 
 pleteness of the two natures (human and divine) in 
 the unity of the person, the tendency of piety was 
 to let the humanity be absorbed in the divinity. 
 This tendency found expression in Eutyches, who 
 taught that Christ, while of two natures, is not i 
 two, as after the Incarnation there 1s but one nature, 
 the human being so absorbed into the divine that 
 even His body was not consubstantial with ours. 
 This monophysitism, as it was called, was condemned 
 by the Council of Chalcedon ; but there is some doubt 
 about the text of the clause directed again Eutyches. 
 The Greek text in the record of the Councils runs 
 ex Ovo dvcewy, a phrase Kutyches would have accepted 
 readily. The text generally adopted is év 600 diceow, 
 which asserts the permanence of the two natures. It 
 has been conjectured that probably both clauses were 
 
 * The text of these creeds will be found in a very handy form in the 
 volume entitled De Fide et Symbole, edited by Heurtley. 
 
f 
 
 126 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 used, Against Eutyches also are directed the two 
 adverbs, acvyyvrws (without confusion) and arperres 
 (without conversion). For our present purpose it is 
 not at all necessary to follow the later developments 
 of doctrine in the East in detail, except to call atten- 
 tion very briefly to two questions of interest. The 
 first was this: Does the will belong to the nature or 
 tothe person? If to the former, then it logically follows 
 that Christ had two wills (Dyothelitism) ; if the latter, 
 then there was only one will (Monothelitism). But 
 an intermediate position was possible; the will of each 
 nature might be regarded as only a possibility, be- 
 coming actuality only in the activity of the one person, 
 and concurring therein. ‘The second was this: Must 
 the human nature to be complete be personal, or can 
 it become personal only in its union with the personal 
 Logos? John of Damascus, whose name is usually 
 associated with the solution of this problem, was 
 anticipated by Leontius of Byzantium, who ‘* was the 
 first who definitely maintained that the human nature 
 of Christ is not dvutdararos (impersonal), nor on the 
 other hand an independent izdaracis (person), but 
 that it has its troornva: év TO doyo. + This view 
 John developed, and he drew the consequences from 
 this position, that there is an interchange of attributes, 
 a circumincession (zepiyepyois), so that the human 
 nature is deified (Ogacus tHs capkds). It must be 
 observed, however, that the interchange is one-sided : 
 the human nature is deified, the divine remains un- 
 changed. ‘These are suggestive efforts to escape the 
 dualism of natures which, despite the assertion of the 
 unity of person, remained unresolved by the Creed of 
 Chalcedon. 
 
 (iv) One other creed, although it contributes nothing 
 new, deserves notice. The Athanasian Creed elabor- 
 ates the doctrine of the Trinity. No certainty can 
 be reached as to its date and origin. It was probably 
 composed in Gaul by one single author as a sermon. 
 It makes the doctrine of the Incarnation and the 
 Trinity appear as unintelligible as it can be made, 
 
 1 Harnack’s History of Dogma, Eng. tr, iv. p. 233 note 3. 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 127 
 
 and nevertheless it represents salvation as depending 
 on the acceptance of its complicated and elaborate 
 doctrine. It is scholastic theology, and not living 
 religion. It has no connection with Athanasius, but 
 shows the influence of the teaching of Augustine. 
 Its details do not need to be discussed. 
 
 (2) From the standpoint of Christian faith the 
 ereeds are profoundly disappointing as regards both 
 what is included and what is excluded. 
 
 (i) The Apostles’ Creed is expressly an individual 
 confession; and the Athanasian Creed declares that 
 ‘Whosoever would be saved, before all things it is 
 necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which 
 Faith, except any one do keep whole and undefiled, 
 without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’ The 
 Catholic Faith is not the personal relation to Christ 
 of the believer ; it is an ordinance of the Church which 
 must be obeyed without any use of the individual 
 intelligence, solely on the Church’s authority. In the 
 Apostles’ Creed, a recital of facts past, present, and 
 future about Jesus Christ, there are included articles 
 which are difficulties for Christian faith to-day. ‘The 
 virgin-birth, the descent to Hades, and the Second 
 Advent, even if accepted, do not influence Christian 
 thought and life to-day as when the creeds were framed. 
 Each does indicate an essential element in Christian 
 truth, the absolute sinlessness of Jesus, the complete 
 efficacy of His sacrifice for the salvation of all the 
 generations of men, whatever be the way in which the 
 divine grace is brought within the reach of all, and 
 the final triumph of Christ as the consummation of 
 the present order of human history; but we do not 
 express the truth in the same way as this creed. The 
 Nicene and Chalcedonian Creeds are bishops’ and not 
 laymen’s creeds, custodians of theology rather than 
 guardians of faith. The doctrines of the unity-in- 
 difference of the Godhead (the tri-unity), and of 
 the unity of the real divinity and the real human- 
 ity in the person of Christ, are truths for Christian 
 faith; but the metaphysical formulae of the Athan- 
 asian Creed cannot be enforced as a condition of 
 
128 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 salvation, if salvation depends on intelligent personal 
 faith. 
 
 (ii) The Nicene symbol does assert theologically 
 what is an essential interest of faith. If the Christian 
 salvation is real, God’s own act to save men, then 
 Christ must be so immediately and intimately related 
 to God that what He does God does in Him; and it 
 is this assurance to faith that the formula about the 
 oneness in substance of the Father and the Son seeks 
 to give. Later the fitness of the metaphysical terms 
 will be discussed ; but it must be here affirmed that 
 the dispute was not merely about a diphthong, a verbal 
 nicety, or a mental subtlety, as critics of the Christian 
 Church have sometimes misrepresented it as being, 
 but the issue was whether Christian theology was to 
 become one of the mythologies, or the adequate inter- 
 pretation of the final revelation of God and redemption 
 of man. 
 
 _~ (iii) No less of interest for Christian faith are the 
 ‘yeality and completeness of the manhood of Jesus 
 Christ and the unity of His person. We must sym- 
 pathise with Apollinaris in his attempt to make more 
 real the unity of the person of Christ, even although 
 his inadequate psychology led him in so doing to 
 sacrifice the completeness of the manhood. With 
 Nestorius too, we must sympathise in his endeavour 
 to maintain the completeness of the manhood, even 
 although the ambiguity of the terms he used exposed 
 him, it would now seem wrongly, to the charge of 
 denying the unity of the person. His inadequate 
 conception of personality, however, prevented his 
 stating that unity in such a way as would satisfy our 
 thought to-day. But the creed which condemned 
 him was no more successful in solving the problem. 
 Eutychianism was really a greater danger to Chris- 
 tian faith than either Apollinarianism or Nestorianism, 
 for it would have severed the metaphysical creed from 
 the historical basis in the actual life of Christ on earth, 
 or faith from fact. Nevertheless, he was carrying to 
 its logical conclusion the dominant tendency of the 
 Christian piety of his age. Cyril’s defence against 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 129 
 
 Nestorius of the term @eordxos as applied to the 
 mother of Jesus shows how completely the humanity 
 was being absorbed in the divinity—the historical 
 in the metaphysical. Eutychianism endangered a 
 vital interest of Christian thought and life that God 
 was manifest as man, even as Arius brought into peril 
 no less a concern for Christianity, that it was God 
 Himself who was so manifest for the salvation of man. 
 The failure of the creeds to present concretely the 
 personal unity of God and man in Christ was due on 
 the one hand to their ignoring the facts of the earthly 
 life of Jesus, His moral character and religious con- 
 sciousness—which give content to the abstract con- 
 ceptions of divinity and humanity, and in that 
 content also indicate the actuality of the personal 
 unity—and on the other hand to the inadequate 
 conception of personality. Historically and philo- 
 sophically alike we are in a better position to-day in 
 our Christology to meet the demands of faith for an 
 intelligible and credible presentation of the person 
 of Christ. 
 
 (3) The creeds include what is doubtful from the 
 historical standpoint, and omit what is certain. The 
 writer has already expressed his view in dealing with 
 the fact of Christ regarding the virgin-birth and the 
 resurrection. As regards the descent into Hades and 
 the Second Advent, while it is impossible to take 
 either conception with prosaic literalness, yet each, 
 as has been indicated, expresses a truth for Christian 
 faith. A problem which this recital of historical facts 
 in the Apostles’ Creed raises has already been fully 
 dealt with. In the Introduction of this volume it has 
 been shown that Christian faith is not concerned solely 
 with religious ideas and moral ideals, divorced from 
 historical facts; but that the redemptive revelation 
 of God is by the historical personality of Jesus Christ. 
 It is not the defect, but the merit of the Apostles’ 
 Creed, therefore, that it deals with historical facts. 
 It asserts those facts which were being challenged or 
 denied; but the omissions show that there was one 
 aspect of the historical reality of Jesus Christ for which 
 
 I 
 
130 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 the age from which the creed has come had little 
 appreciation, and yet it is that aspect which most 
 potently appeals to-day—the earthly ministry of 
 Jesus, and the grace and truth therein manifested. 
 While the completeness of the human nature was 
 asserted in metaphysical terms, the living image of 
 Jesus was not present to faith, for His personal ex- 
 perience as man was not being explored by Christian 
 thought, because the soteriology of the time required 
 only a human nature, and did not need to discover 
 the meaning of the Wilderness, Gethsemane, and 
 Calvary. 
 
 (4) As the purpose of this volume is to offer a Christ- 
 ology and a soteriology acceptable to modern thinking, 
 reason must be shown why the metaphysical formulae 
 of the creeds cannot satisfy us to-day. We must 
 closely examine the terms used, which were borrowed 
 from ancient philosophy, but had also their meaning 
 modified in being so used. What follows will, how- 
 ever, not be a merely verbal discussion, as words 
 stand for thoughts, and the scrutiny of language will 
 make clearer the thought to which it gives expression. 
 
 (i) The most crucial of all the terms is opoovevor, 
 which is explained in the phrase €« 77s ovoias Tov 
 Ilarpés. (a) The term époovo.v means of the same 
 ousia. The term ovoia is itself ambiguous. It 
 may mean either an entity, the subject of attributes, 
 or a class, species, or genus. As applied to man, for 
 instance, it may mean this or that man, or man (in- 
 cluding all men). Athanasius did not mean that 
 Christ was an individual divine being, belonging to 
 the same class of divine beings as the Father. That 
 would have been polytheism, and he was combating 
 polytheism in resisting Arianism. Neither did he 
 mean that Christ and God the Father were one in- 
 dividual subject, for that would have been a relapse 
 into the modalism which had been condemned as a 
 heresy, and which by conservative theologians was 
 thought to lurk in the term 6poovo.rv. He meant 
 neither separation from nor identity with the Father ; 
 but a relation of difference in unity. His meaning 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 131 
 
 was intermediate between a qualitative similarity and 
 a quantitative identity, between belonging to the 
 same class and being the one subject. Accordingly, 
 neither of the meanings of the word ovcia is carried 
 over unchanged in his use of the word dépoovctov. 
 The rival word, opovovawv, would serve no better, 
 as it would not affirm even that Christ belonged to 
 the divine class. 
 
 (b) Without intention the Creed of Chalcedon takes 
 advantage of the ambiguity of the term in using it 
 for Christ’s relation to man as well as to God. Here 
 it cannot mean identity of subject, 1t can mean only 
 inclusion in one class, as the subsequent phrase xara 
 TAVTA Gpotov Huty xywpis apaptias clearly indicates. 
 Christ is not one with us as He is with the Father, 
 but like us as belonging to the same species. That 
 the term in both cases means exactly the same 
 can be maintained only on the basis of a highly 
 speculative theory of the relation of mankind to Christ, 
 namely that He as Son of God, the image of God, the 
 firstborn of the Creation, is the transition from God to 
 man, and as such the root out of which, as it were, 
 mankind grows. It is to be noted, however, that the 
 New Testament does not teach a metaphysical unity, 
 but a moral and religious union of the Vine and the 
 branches. 
 
 (c) Does the phrase é« 77s ovotas tov Tarpds in any 
 way remove the ambiguity ? The Chalcedon Creed 
 offers this further explanation : 7p6 aidvar éx Tod Tatpos 
 yervyPévra kata THY OedTyTa, and é€x Mapias THs Tapbévov 
 TS BeotoKov Kata THY avOpwmotyra. The statement of 
 the Athanasian Creed runs: * Deus est ex substantia 
 Patris ante saecula genitus: Homo ex substantia 
 Matris in saeculo natus.’ While there is here again 
 the same endeavour to preserve a parallelism between 
 the relation to the Father and to man, the same term 
 is used in twosenses. Generation out of the substance 
 of the Father expresses, in the intention of the creed, 
 distinction, but not separation: generation out of 
 the substance of the mother involves separation. The 
 language itself does not guard the unity of the Father 
 
182 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and the Son. Again, the term generation, even when 
 qualified by eternal, does suggest separation of one 
 individual from another. The term substance in the 
 Athanasian Creed, when applied to the mother, means 
 something more distinctly physical than its proper 
 meaning as applied to God can bear. If we may use 
 physical analogies, the relation of Christ to God is 
 like that of a branch to a plant rather than of an off- 
 spring to a parent, for the branches abide in the plant 
 as the offspring does not in the parent. If the relation 
 of Christ to His mother was only according to the 
 manhood, the phrase trys SeordKov is manifestly 
 inconsistent, as she bore man, not God. Even if the 
 explanation be offered that she bore man so closely 
 united to God that He could be called God, never- 
 theless the term is a concession to the monophysite 
 tendency not in accord with the general intention of 
 the creeds, which is to distinguish Godhood and man- 
 hood in Christ, while maintaining a parallelism of 
 relation to the one and the other by a use of terms 
 which a closer scrutiny proves to be ambiguous. 
 
 (ii) Another ambiguous term used in the creeds is 
 dio. In the phrase év dvo0 diceou, or éx dv0 dicewr, 
 it seems to mean the same as ovoia. In popular 
 speech nature and substance are not clearly dis- 
 tinguished, but there is a difference, as between man- 
 hood and mankind or the man, to use an illustration. 
 The substance is that which exists; the nature is the 
 sum of the qualities of the person or the thing. It 
 was easy to substitute the what for the that, to use 
 a distinction Greek thought made. Owing to this 
 ambiguity we may deceive ourselves into thinking 
 that we are in closer agreement with the creeds than 
 we really are. When we speak of ‘two natures in 
 one person,’ we think of one subject combining the 
 qualities of God and man; they meant, until later 
 refinements sought to meet the difficulty, two sub- 
 stances or subjects in one person, as the dispute about 
 one or two wills showed. We so identify substance 
 or subject and person that we cannot, therefore, think 
 of two subjects—God and man functioning in one 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 133 
 
 person, although we can think of one person function- 
 ing both as God and as man, owing to the affinity of 
 nature and community of purpose between God and 
 man. ‘This interpretation of the Chalcedonian Creed 
 is confirmed by the Athanasian, ‘ Unus omnino, non 
 confusione substantiae, sed Unitate Personae.’ It is 
 two substances or subjects, and not two natures, that 
 the Creed of Chalcedon intends to describe as united, 
 unmixed, unchanged, undivided, not to be separated. 
 
 (111) Hach of these adverbs deserves study. (a) By 
 the first, avvyyvrws, we are forbidden to think of any 
 blending of the qualities of the two natures, Godhood 
 and manhood, for the two subjects, God and man, 
 stand apart. The contrary view would involve a 
 heresy, ‘by this confusion teaching the monstrous 
 doctrine that the divine nature of the only-begotten 
 is passible.’ While the man in Christ suffered, it is 
 regarded by these fathers as monstrous to believe 
 that the God in Him suffered with the man. This is 
 a survival of Greek philosophy which hindered an 
 understanding of the Gospel story. 
 
 (b) The second adv erb, atpérrws, forbids our think- 
 ing that the Incarnation made any difference in God 
 or man, involved any humiliation of the one, any 
 exaltation of the other. Paul’s words in Phil. i. 7, 
 cavtov éxevwoev, ‘ He emptied Himself,’ would be rank 
 error. This is the static view of Greek philosophy, 
 while the Scriptural and the modern view is dynamic. 
 We can and must think of God, not as fixed substance, 
 but as living Spirit. 
 
 (c) The third and fourth adverbs, aé.aipérws and 
 axwpiotws, may be taken together as emphasising one 
 idea—the unity of Christ’s person against Nestorius, 
 or at least what Nestorius was supposed to teach. 
 The framers of the creed, in thus asserting the two 
 unchanged, unmixed natures against Hutyches and 
 Apollinaris, make it very difficult for us to under- 
 stand how they can have conceived concretely the 
 unity of the person, on which against Nestorius they 
 also insist. We can think of Christ as one only as we 
 recognise the resemblance and communion between 
 
134 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 God and man, the communicativeness of divine grace 
 and the receptiveness of human faith. The incon- 
 sistencies of the creed show that abstract philosophical 
 formulae cannot do justice to concrete historical 
 reality. 
 
 (iii) We can learn still more the inadequacy of this 
 dogmatic formulation if we study the two words used 
 for person, mpdcwmov aud bréaracts. Ancient philo- 
 sophy, which was objective, asking what do we know, 
 and not, as modern is subjective, inquiring how we 
 know, had not forméd any proper conception of 
 personality. It was Christianity which so developed 
 the moral conscience and the religious consciousness 
 as to make the new conception necessary ; and in the 
 creeds we find the attempt to get the fit words for the 
 new thought. (a) The term zpocw7ov means face, 
 
 countenance, or expression of the face, appearance 
 
 as regards condition or circumstance; it may mean 
 
 ,/also the actor’s mask or réle, a function or an office 
 ‘ discharged. Sabellianism applied the term to the 
 
 Ne 
 
 three modes of the revelation of the Godhead, Father, 
 Son, and Holy Spirit. ~Nestorius was prepared to 
 confess that Christ in His Godhood and His manhood 
 was one prosopon. Bethune-Baker accordingly main- 
 tains that he was not guilty of the heresy for which 
 he was condemned; but Loofs has properly pointed 
 out that when he used the term he did not mean what 
 a modern thinker would mean when using the term 
 person, nor what his orthodox opponents meant, for 
 they were putting a new content into the term.!' This 
 term, when applied in the doctrine of the Godhead 
 to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, has not advanced so 
 far in its change of meaning as when used of Christ. 
 (b) To avoid the old associations of the term zpocwzor, 
 and to assert the new meaning which was being put 
 into it, the opponents of Nestorius insisted on the use 
 of the term wrdcracis as its equivalent, and this 
 Nestorius refused to do, and in so doing was un- 
 doubtedly justified by the older usage of the term. 
 
 1 See Nestorius and his Teaching, by Bethune-Baker, and Nestorius and 
 his Place in the history of Christian Doctrine, by Loofs. 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 135 
 
 He used_it as equivalent to ovata for substance. It 
 is so used in the anathemas attached to the Nicene 
 Creed in the phrase ¢€ érépas vroortdcews 7) ovoias, 
 and Athanasius asserted the identity of the meaning 
 of the two terms. Some of the Greek theologians 
 had come to use the term as equivalent to tpdcwrov 
 in the doctrine of the Godhead, and this use had 
 found general, if not universal, acceptance. Nestorius 
 himself recognises it. It had not, however, been 
 previously used of the person of Christ, and Nestorius, 
 therefore, was not an innovator, but a conservative, 
 in his refusal to use it in this new sense. Cyril, 
 Nestorius’ opponent, was not himself above reproach 
 in respect of his use; and it may be he served his 
 own purpose in using a term of ambiguous meaning 
 to cover his own monophysite tendency, as ¢vo.s and 
 UmoaTacis very nearly coalesced in meaning. It was 
 this covert monophysitism which Nestorius believed 
 himself to be combating in refusing to use the term. 
 For this he is not to be blamed. He had not, 
 however, reached a conception of the person of 
 Christ which would include the full recognition of the 
 unity which the creed, however imperfectly, aimed 
 at affirming. 
 
 (v) It is interesting to observe that the same terms 
 came to have different meanings as they were used 
 in the doctrine of the Trinity or of the person of 
 Christ. Identical as the terms hypostasis and ousta 
 (Latin subsistentia and substantia) were in meaning 
 to begin with, owsta came to be used to express the 
 unity of the Godhead, and hypostasis the unity of 
 the person of Christ. Hypostasis expresses the trinity 
 in the Godhead, and owsza the duality in the person 
 of Christ. In the one case we have three hypostases 
 in the one ousia: in the other two ousiai in one 
 hypostasis. Or, using the equivalent of hypostasts, 
 person, we are asked, nay, even required, by the 
 Athanasian Creed, on pain of damnation if we don’t, 
 to confess three persons in one substance in the 
 Godhead, and two substances (modified usually to 
 natures) in one person in Christ. If we use the word 
 
186 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 person in the same sense as regards the Godhead as 
 we do as regards Christ, we deny the divine unity 
 and fall into tritheism. If we use the word substance 
 in the same sense as regards Christ as we do as regards 
 the Godhead, we deny the unity of His person, and 
 fall into dualism. The creeds maintain an unstable 
 equilibrium between the differences and the unity 
 alike in the Godhead and in Christ. 
 
 Il 
 
 Without following the history of the doctrine of 
 Christ in the subsequent centuries, it will serve the 
 purpose of this volume to prepare for the constructive 
 statement which the writer intends to attempt by a 
 consideration of the modifications of these creeds in 
 the Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxy, and also the 
 attempts so to modify this dogmatic formulation as 
 to bring it into closer harmony with modern historical 
 scholarship in the kenotic theories. | 
 
 (1) While Socianism challenged the teaching of the 
 creeds regarding the nature of God and the person of 
 Christ, the Reformers accepted the cecumenical creeds. 
 Their religious standpoint did not require any change ; 
 they could fit their fresh apprehension of the Christian 
 salvation into this old framework. Their historical 
 position also made it politic that they should claim 
 to be ‘ orthodox’ according to the definition of these 
 cecumenical Councils, while rejecting the accretions 
 of Roman Catholicism. It was impossible, however, 
 to avoid all modification in the restatement of the 
 old dogmas, for that restatement must needs be 
 affected by the new thought and life. The difference 
 between the Lutheran and the Reformed type of 
 Protestantism, both as regards the dominant religious 
 interest, and especially as regards the view taken of 
 the Lord’s Supper, affected the Christology, so that 
 we can distinguish the Lutheran and the Reformed.* 
 
 (i) While there is danger in generalisations, the 
 
 1 A very valuable account of the Lutheran and Reformed Christologies is 
 given in Lecture III. in Dr. A. B. Bruce’s The Humiliation of Christ. 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 137 
 
 contrast may be described as follows: For Lutheran- 
 ism the question was, How can I be saved? for 
 Calvinism, the dominant force in the Reformed 
 Churches, it was rather, How is God’s will fulfilled ? 
 Although both assigned absolute authority to the 
 Bible, for Luther it was the tutor unto Christ, for 
 Calvin it was the legislator, revealing the purpose of 
 God. Luther kept from Roman Catholicism all that 
 did not conflict with his original experience of the 
 grace of Christ; Calvin gave up all that could not be 
 justified from the Holy Scriptures. The one laid 
 stress on the Gospel, and subordinated the Law to 
 the Gospel; the other tended to conceive the Gospel 
 even as Law. The one was conservative, moving 
 only under the compulsion of personal conviction ; 
 the other was radical, following whithersoever the 
 word of the Lord might lead. The one met individual 
 needs; the other claimed social authority. Conse- 
 quently Calvinism has been a much more potent factor 
 in modern history than Lutheranism. 
 
 (11) It is one of the tragedies of the Christian Church 
 that when unity was most necessary to Protestantism 
 it was sacrificed to a dispute about the doctrine of 
 the Eucharist. It was the scholastic dogmatist, sur- 
 viving in Luther despite his conversion, that made 
 him take the words of institution with a prosaic 
 literalness, and insist on the real presence of the body 
 and blood of Christ in, with, and wnder the bread and 
 the wine. His doctrine is called that of consubstantva- 
 tion : the elements are not changed, the body and blood 
 of Christ are not included in the bread and the wine, 
 nor are the bread and wine mixed with the body and 
 blood; but during the administration there is such 
 a union that the whole Christ is received by the 
 communicant. Zwingli admitted a presence of Christ 
 ‘in the contemplation of faith.’ The Eucharist is 
 not merely a memorial, it is also a pledge of the grace 
 of Christ, even as a ring is in marriage. Calvin tried 
 to get nearer the Lutheran position. He rejected the 
 doctrine of consubstantiation, the objective presence 
 of the body and blood of Christ in, with, and under 
 
138 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 the elements, as he held that the glorified body was 
 in heaven. But he maintained that Christ is received 
 spiritually by the believer as he partakes of the 
 elements ; Christ presents His body and blood to the 
 believer, and by the energy of His Spirit communicates 
 power, a power which is the mysterious source of a 
 spiritual body which will appear at the Resurrection. 
 Without attempting to discuss these theological subtle- 
 ties, the difference of the two doctrines may be thus 
 stated. Luther had to affirm the ubiquity of the body 
 of Christ so as to secure that objective presence in the 
 sacraments. Calvin, although in his desire to con- 
 ciliate the Lutherans he does not maintain his position 
 consistently, could not admit such a presence, as he 
 thought of the body of Christ as subject to the condi- 
 tions of space, as localised in heaven. Luther’s posi- 
 tion involved a deification of even the body of Christ, 
 a transference to it of the divine quality of omni- 
 presence; and his Christology was a reversion to 
 Kutychianism or Monophysitism. Calvin’s position, 
 with its insistence on the continuance of the human 
 qualities, even after the glorification, was a movement 
 rather towards Nestorianism. However extravagant 
 may seem some of the assertions of the Lutheran 
 Christology, it can be understood only as we always 
 recognise that it was an attempt to find a metaphysic 
 which would justify the view of the Lord’s Supper, a 
 view which Luther honestly and passionately believed 
 he must maintain to preserve his own assurance of 
 the forgiveness of sin. 
 
 (2) The presence of the body and blood of Christ in, 
 with, and under the elements involved its ubiquity. 
 This Luther explained by the theory of the com- 
 munication of the attributes of one nature to another. 
 Christ is at the right hand of God, which means 
 everywhere; and wherever He is present, His whole 
 humanity is. Luther introduced in stating this view 
 the scholastic distinction of the threefold mode of 
 presence: the local or circumspective, a presence in 
 one place and not elsewhere, the definitive, or a 
 presence wherever willed, and the repletive, equi- 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 139 
 
 valent to ubiquity or omnipresence. Lutheran Christ- 
 ology advanced from this starting point. 
 
 (1) The first problem discussed was the consequences 
 of the union of the two natures in one person. Brentz 
 and Chemnitz both started from the assumption of 
 the communication to the human nature of divine 
 attributes, but Brentz carried out this principle with 
 logical consistency, regardless of consequences, whereas 
 Chemnitz, having some regard to the historical reality, 
 carried it out only partially, and so with less con- 
 sistency. 
 
 (a) Brentz asserted the mutual communication of 
 attributes without any such qualification ‘as far as 
 he is capable,’ for Christ was made capable of receiving 
 all divine properties without any exception whatever. 
 He developed only one side of this mutual communica- 
 tion, the deifying of the humanity. It is true that 
 he conceded that the humanity possessed only a 
 communicated divinity, and was made equal to God, 
 not in being (ovata), but only in authority (é€ovcig). 
 As regards the body of Jesus he maintained that a 
 body can exist locally, but also illocally, and that to 
 be tn loco is not essential, but accidental to body. 
 During the earthly life His body existed both in loco, 
 here and there, and in Logo, that is, everywhere. 
 The humanity of Christ was invested with divinity 
 from the moment of incarnation, which was itself an 
 invisible ascension. The earthly Christ combined 
 two humanities, a humbled one and an exalted one; 
 but the omnipresence was invisible, and the omni- 
 science and omnipotence were dissimulated. ‘ Majes- 
 tatem humanitas, tempore exinanitionis, suo modo 
 dissimulavit.’ 
 
 (b) Chemnitz maintained that the communication 
 of the divine attributes to the human nature was 
 limited by the principle that each nature must pre- 
 serve its essential properties, that jfinitum non est 
 capax infiniti. Not only the earthly but even the 
 heavenly body must be in loco, and Christ is not 
 usually present in His Church bodily. The human 
 nature was not endowed with divine properties, but 
 
140 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 rather pervaded by the divine, which used it as its 
 organ, and exerted energy in, with, and through it. 
 ‘ Divina virtus et potentia majestatis et omnipotentiae 
 suae opera in assumpta natura cum illa, et per illam 
 exerceat et perficiat.’ His watchword is that of John 
 of Damascus, wepyydpyois, and his image the mass of 
 heated iron. How scholastic this Lutheran develop- 
 ment became is shown by the way in which he works 
 out in detail the modes of communication. In the 
 genus idiomaticum the subject is the whole person, 
 in concreto, and the predicate the property of either 
 nature, e.g. Christ knew and revealed the Father, or 
 Christ died. In the genus apotelismaticum, the sub- 
 ject is either nature and the predicate an activity 
 pertaining to the work of redemption in which both 
 natures concur, e.g. the Son of God endured the Cross. 
 In the genus majestaticum or auchematicum the divine 
 perfection is ascribed realiter to the human nature, 
 e.g. the Son of man sits at God’s right hand. It has 
 been noted that one mode is lacking, what might be 
 called the genus tapeinoticum, the acceptance by the 
 divine of human properties, such as suffering and 
 death as stated in Phil. 11. 6-8. It was about the third 
 genus that there was difference between the Lutheran 
 and the Reformed theologians. Chemnitz does not 
 affirm ubiquity in the unqualified way of Brentz. 
 He holds that Christ is able to be present when, where, 
 and how He pleases, even in invisible form. He 
 teaches, not a necessary omnipresence, but a hypo- 
 thetical or optional multipresence. He grounds this 
 teaching not only on the words, ‘This is My body,’ 
 but also on a legitimate deduction from the union of 
 natures, Logos non eatra carnem et caro non extra logon ; 
 this for the Lutherans was essential to the reality of 
 incarnation. The doctrine of Chemnitz may be dis- 
 tinguished from that of Brentz as follows. For 
 Brentz the state of exinanition consisted in possession, 
 with habitual furtive use, of majesty ; for Chemnitz in 
 possession with occasional use and prevailing non-use. 
 The latter even inclines to adopt Ambrose’s idea of the 
 retraction of the Logos, that is, a defective possession. 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 141 
 
 (c) The Formula of Concord (a.p. 1580) tried to 
 settle the controversy by a compromise. The ex- 
 altation of the human nature to divine majesty from 
 thevery conception is asserted (the birth beinginviolata 
 ipsius virginitate). Possession without use (kenosis) 
 and possession with furtive use (krypsis), and also 
 a hypothetical and a necessary omnipresence, are 
 taught. No notice is taken of the distinction between 
 the presence of the human nature to the Logos, and 
 to the world. Such a compromise settled nothing, 
 and so the quarrel went on till the Tibingen-Giessen 
 controversy broke out. 
 
 (11) The watchwords of this controversy were kenosis 
 and krypsis, and the combatants were concerned 
 about the nature of the humiliation in an endeavour 
 to harmonise Christology with historical fact. While 
 possession of the divine majesty even in the state of 
 humiliation was admitted, the difference lay in the 
 question of use or non-use of divine properties; the 
 Giessen theologians held the kenotic, the Tiibingen 
 the kryptic position. The Giessen theologians con- 
 tended for the distinction between the two kinds of 
 presence of the body, to the Logos and to the world, 
 and maintained that the second depended on the first. 
 The Tiibingen school held that the distinction was 
 imaginary, and that potential omnipresence was an 
 absurdity. The Giessen school tried to meet this 
 objection by distinguishing the operative and the 
 inoperative attributes, and applied this distinction 
 to the ubiquity. God is free in His action, and is, 
 therefore, free to be present in the world or not as 
 He pleases. The use of presence is a matter of free 
 will, ‘usurpatio praesentiae est liberrimae voluntatis.’ 
 The Tiibingen school following Brentz were dominated 
 by theory ; the Giessen following Chemnitz had more 
 regard to fact, and tried by such assumptions to bring 
 theory nearer fact. The assumption of voluntary 
 absence or presence involves the principle of God’s 
 free self-limitation, a principle of primary importance 
 for modern theology. 
 
 (ii) A few comments on this Lutheran Christology 
 
142 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 may be offered. Furst of all, the principle of the 
 communication of properties (¢dtomata) is arbitrarily 
 applied: the divine majesty is communicated to the 
 humanity, but not the human limitations to the 
 divinity. Secondly, although this was not the in- 
 tention the logical consequence of the theory is the 
 extinction of the reality of the humanity. The com- 
 munication should have been limited to the gifts and 
 graces which human nature is capable of receiving. 
 Thirdly, while the humiliation is admitted as necessary 
 from the standpoint of soteriology, it being needful 
 that the Saviour of men should become like unto His 
 brethren, the Christology makes it virtually impos- 
 sible, as the distinction between the possession and 
 the use of the divine attributes does not safeguard 
 the reality of the humiliation. Fourthly, while the 
 fact of exinanition is in theory admitted, it remains 
 an effect without a cause, for from the beginning the 
 Logos is united to a humanity endowed with the 
 divine attributes. The only way in which a cause 
 for this effect could be found would be in the theory of 
 a pre-existent divine humanity voluntarily humbling 
 itself to a state of exinanition. Fifthly, while this 
 doctrine aims at the deification of the humanity, it 
 really denies the Incarnation, for it makes the humanity 
 unreal. Svaihly, the attempts made by Chemnitz and 
 his followers to modify the dominant conceptions in 
 order to get nearer historical reality were ineffective, 
 because the starting-point is not from history, as it 
 should be, but from a theory, and a very arbitrary 
 and artificial theory, as to the presence of Christ in 
 the Eucharist. Lastly, the Lutheran Christology has 
 an interest and importance for the constructive 
 theology inasmuch as it works out in detail with 
 logical consistency the dogmatic formulation of the 
 doctrine of the Incarnation. In its extreme form it 
 may be taken even as a reductio ad absurdum of the 
 principles of the creeds, and so a call to a recon- 
 sideration of these. 
 
 (3) The Reformed Christology is not so speculative as 
 the Lutheran, and keeps nearer to the facts of history. 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 1438 
 
 (1) Calvin did not insist on terms, if only the essential 
 elements of doctrine were retained. He would gladly 
 have given up the terms person and trinity so long as 
 the truth was affirmed that Father, Son, and Holy 
 Spirit are one God, yet each distinguished by some 
 peculiar property. Since the original cause—prin- 
 cipium et origo—is in the Father, the name God is 
 specially appropriate to the Father ; and this pre- 
 serves the order of persons without taking anything 
 from the deity of the Son and the Spirit. He was 
 anxious to steer a straight course between Arianism 
 and Sabelhanism. That he gave the attention to the 
 doctrine of the Trinity which he did shows the greater 
 theological thoroughness of Calvinism. 
 
 (11) For the Reformed Christology incarnation was 
 itself humiliation, while it was admitted that there 
 might have been an incarnation in exaltation. The 
 theory is well stated in the Admonitio Christiana 
 (1581), which was an answer to the Formula of Concord. 
 (a) For man’s salvation the eternal Son of God 
 assumed into the unity of His person a nature truly 
 human, consisting of a rational soul and a human body. 
 (b) While thus closely related these natures are not 
 changed, or mixed, or confused, but remain distinct 
 while united, and retain their respective essential 
 properties. (c) The union endows the human mind 
 and will with gifts surpassing those of all men and 
 angels, yet it ever remains finite in the divine view, 
 and can never be equal to the essential power, wisdom, 
 and virtue of God. (d) Because of this union, what- 
 ever is said of Christ is said truly and really of the 
 whole undivided person, sometimes in respect of both 
 natures, sometimes in respect of the one or the other. 
 The former holds when the predicate has reference 
 to Christ’s office, as He is Mediator, Redeemer, Inter- 
 cessor, King, Priest, Prophet, in respect both of the 
 Deity and the Humanity, and each nature performs 
 its proper part in all official acts. The latter holds 
 when the predicate has reference to a peculiar property 
 or operation of one of the natures. Thus it can be 
 said that God was born, died, etc., only in respect of 
 
144 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 the human nature, and again that the man Christ 
 Jesus is omnipotent, omnipresent, in virtue, not of 
 His humanity, but of His divinity. The predication, 
 however, is real and not verbal in consequence of 
 the union. (e) The distinction between the two states 
 is, as regards the divinity, that of partial concealment 
 and of open manifestation, but as regards the human- 
 ity the state of exaltation involves the loss of some 
 accidental properties possessed in the state of humilia- 
 tion, the perfect development of others, and the 
 retention of the essential properties, e.g. the glorified 
 body as a body is localised in heaven. 
 
 (iii) This statement calls for some comment. (a) 
 The natures appear to be placed in juxtaposition — 
 without any real union (gemina substantia, mens, 
 robur et virtus). The act of union by the Logos is 
 described as a secret and inscrutable vinculum. It 
 is the divine person of the Logos who unites Himself 
 to the human nature. (b) The effort was indeed made 
 to make the communication between the natures a 
 reality by two media. rst, there was the ascription 
 to the Son of God on the one hand, in virtue of the 
 personal union, of participation in the sufferings of 
 the humanity ; and on the other hand there was the 
 doctrine adopted from Aquinas, of the communication 
 of charisms to the human nature, fitting it to be the 
 companion and the organ of deity. The latter was, 
 however, limited by the axiom /finttum non capax 
 infiniti. While valuable religiously as supporting the 
 truth of the homoousia of Christ with His brethren. 
 it has its theoretical difficulties. Why should the 
 operation of the Spirit be necessary to effect what 
 from the Lutheran point of view seemed a necessary 
 effect of the union? An attempt to meet the objec- 
 tion is found in the phrase, ‘ by the Logos through the 
 Spirit,’ which seeks to express a moral influence rather 
 than a physical result. ‘The influence was not 
 physical,’ says Schneckenburger,' ‘but moral, de- 
 pending on the will, but the will of the Logos was to 
 give room for a purely human development and 
 
 1 Vergleichende Darstellung, ii. 239-40, quoted by Bruce, op. cit., p. 125. 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 145 
 
 activity.’ (c) The exinanition applied to the divine 
 nature ; the Son of God emptied Himself in becoming 
 man; but this kenosis was an emptying as to use 
 and manifestation, not as to possession: it was an 
 occultatto. Whether the occultation was to the world 
 only, or to the consciousness of Jesus also, is not made 
 clear. If the latter, a double life of the Logos would 
 be involved. Some retraction of divine power is 
 recognised. (d) The likeness of Christ’s humanity to 
 that of man in all respects, sin excepted, is affirmed 
 distinctly. Some of the earlier theologians were not 
 quite consistent here. Zanchius, for instance, as- 
 cribed to Jesus’ soul the perfect vision of all things 
 in God. Hulsius, however, thought that on earth 
 Jesus was vialor, not comprehensor. This is the char- 
 acteristic Reformed doctrine. (e) Had the Reformed 
 Christology not been committed to certain categories 
 of thought by the dogmatic formulation, its greater 
 historic sense and its soteriological interest would have 
 led it towards a much more satisfactory doctrine of the 
 Incarnation than the Lutheran, with its distinctive 
 presuppositions, could have reached. As it 1s, to use 
 its own terms, it remained viator, and did not attain 
 as comprehensor of the Truth. 
 
 Lil 
 
 The Lutheran and the Reformed Christologies 
 developed the ecclesiastical dogma of the person of 
 Christ in dealing with the problem of the relation of 
 the two natures or substances in the one person. 
 The Creed of Chalcedon had affirmed the reality, 
 completeness, and differences of the two natures, and 
 the unity of the persons, but had not attempted to 
 show how natures ew hypothest so different could 
 remain real and complete within such a unity. The 
 Kutychian and the Nestorian tendencies were inevi- 
 table with these presuppositions. John of Damascus, 
 following Leontius of Byzantium, did endeavour to 
 make the unity intelligible in a monophysite direc- 
 tion, for an impersonal humanity assumed by the 
 
 K 
 
146 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 divine person of the Logos is God rather than man. 
 This same tendency Lutheranism followed under the 
 influence of its view of the presence of Christ in the 
 Eucharist. Calvinism, on the other hand, with its 
 emphasis on the difference of God and man, moved in 
 the Nestorian direction, but was also affected by its 
 ereater regard for historical reality. 
 
 (1) This too was one of the motives of the movement 
 to modify the orthodox Christology by the theory of 
 the kenosis, for which Scriptural authority was found 
 in Phil. 11. 6-8.1. A more immediate motive was found 
 in the desire to harmonise the Lutheran and Reformed 
 Christologies to facilitate efforts at ecclesiastical re- 
 union. Regarding this movement two considerations 
 must be kept in view. Firstly, the orthodox Christ- 
 ology was assumed, and the modifications attempted 
 used its categories. Secondly, these kenotic theories 
 differed from the earlier kenotic views in asserting 
 not only a non-use in the state of humiliation of the 
 divine prerogatives, etc., as did the Giessen theologians, 
 but even a partial or complete non-possession. An 
 examination of these theories is important for our 
 present purpose, as the unsatisfactory solution of the 
 problem in these theories will force on us the question 
 whether a constructive theology must not frankly 
 and fully abandon the metaphysical conceptions and 
 terms of the orthodox Christology. The motive and 
 the method of this movement have been well stated 
 by Faut.? ‘ Essentially under the influence of the 
 Biblical witness to Jesus, the real man, there resulted 
 the new forms of the Christological dogma in the 
 doctrine of the kenosis of the God-man. This, re- 
 jected as a heresy by the confessions, was generally 
 recognised as churchly because Biblical. It was not 
 a systematic interest to add the genus tapeinoticum 
 to the genus majestatucum in the Lutheran doctrine 
 of the communicatio rdiomatum that led to this 
 modification, but the desire to do justice to the his- 
 torical person of Jesus. Not rationalism only but 
 
 * See Lecture IV. in Bruce’s The Humiliation of Christ. 
 * Die Christologie seit Schleiermacher, p. 7. 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 147 
 
 Christian piety fixed attention on history. The 
 question put was, How can the God-man be real 
 man? The answer was the doctrine of the kenosis 
 of the Logos. The doctrine of the God-man as 
 the second person of the Godhead was assumed as 
 a changeless truth of faith. There seemed to be no 
 other possibility of understanding the earthly human 
 life of Jesus than the assumption of a self-emptying 
 of the God-man for the end of the Incarnation. ‘The 
 Formula of Concord had rejected this thought as a 
 blasphemy with regard to the changelessness of God. 
 It was a serious step which churchly theologians took, 
 and it is to be understood only as a proof of the helpless 
 condition in which the assumption of the ecclesiastical 
 dogma places us.’ 
 
 (2) What were the problems for thought involved 
 could not be better stated than they have been by 
 Dr. Bruce.t. ‘When this general idea has been 
 announced, three questions may be asked regarding 
 it. Furst, is the depotentiation relaivve or absolute ? 
 That is to say, does it take place simply as far as the 
 Incarnation is concerned, leaving the Logos per se 
 still in possession of His divine attributes; or does 
 it take place without restriction or qualification, so 
 that pro tempore at least, from the moment of birth 
 till the moment of exaltation, the second person of 
 the Trinity is denuded of everything pertaining to 
 deity but its bare, naked, indestructible essence ? 
 Second, in what relation does the depotentiated Logos 
 stand to the man Jesus? Is He the soul of the man, 
 or is there a human soul in the man over and above ? 
 Is the Logos metamorphosed into a human soul, or 
 is He simply self-reduced to the dimensions of a human 
 soul in order that, when placed side by side with a 
 human soul, He may not by His majesty consume the 
 latter and render all its functions impossible ? Third, 
 how far does the depotentiation or metamorphosis, as 
 the case may be, go within the person of the Incarnate 
 One? Is it partial, or is it complete ? Does it make 
 Christ to all intents and purposes a mere man, or 
 
 1 The Humiliation of Christ, p. 137. 
 
148 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 does it leave Him half man, half God, in some respects 
 human, in other respects superhuman? All these 
 questions have been variously answered by different 
 writers.’ 
 
 (3) Into the details of the varying theories it 1s not 
 at all necessary to enter, as all of them must be 
 rejected on the following grounds :— 
 
 (a) The use of the word kevdw by Paul in Phil. i. 7 
 is far too slender a basis for such a structure of 
 speculation. In the-discussion of that passage in 
 a previous chapter the intellectual difficulties which 
 Paul’s own presentation involves have already been 
 indicated. It affords a very shaky foundation for 
 any theological theory which may be built upon it. 
 
 (b) The theory of the depotentiation of the Logos by 
 His own temporal act is a speculation which 1s too 
 high for us; we cannot attain it. It is one thing to 
 start from the historical facts, which demand that we 
 should lay stress on the human limitations of the 
 person of Christ, and justify us in inferring that in the 
 Incarnation there must be involved a self-limitation 
 on the part of God; and quite another to begin with 
 the orthodox dogma of the Trinity, and, using the 
 term person in a much more individual sense than 
 any just interpretation of the intentions of the creeds 
 allows, to ascribe speculatively to one person of the 
 Godhead a surrender, total or partial, of the divine 
 prerogatives belonging to Him. Rightly does Ritschl* 
 say, ‘It is nothing else than mythology, what is 
 taught under the name of the kenosis of the divine 
 Logos,’ and this mythology exposes its own futility. 
 ‘It confesses openly,’ says Ritschl, * that we cannot 
 express the humanity and the divinity in the same 
 relation and in the same time regarding the person 
 of Christ; that is, that both predicates mutually 
 exclude each other.’ God in this school is so thought 
 of that He must cease to be God in so far as He 
 becomes man. We need to revise the conception of 
 God assumed so that the self-limitation necessarily 
 involved in incarnation shall not be a depotentiation, 
 
 1 Rechtfertigung und Verséhnung, iii. pp. 886-88. 
 
DOGMATIC FORMULATION 149 
 
 but a self-fulfilment. The conception of kenosis we 
 shall use in our constructive theology, and _ shall 
 conceive the nature and purpose of God with reference 
 to it: it is the use of the conception in the kenotic 
 theories alone which is here condemned. 
 
 (c) The theories do prove that, starting from the 
 ecclesiastical dogma, it is impossible to reach and 
 to hold the historical reality of Jesus without specula- 
 tions which can appear intelligible and credible only 
 to their authors. They serve to expose the dogma in 
 all its contradictions, and so challenge and justify 
 an attempt to safeguard the interests of Christian 
 faith in regard to the person of Christ by means of 
 other categories of thought, and other methods of 
 presentation. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT REGARDING 
 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 CLosELy related as the person and work of Christ 
 are, the treatment of the two subjects in the Christian 
 Church involves their separation. 
 
 (i) That a soteriological interest was involved in 
 the Christological development must be recognised. 
 The apprehension of salvation affected the conception 
 of the Saviour. If what man needed was deliverance 
 from corruption, or mortality, consequent on sin, a 
 deification of his nature, then the Incarnation must 
 be regarded as a deification of human nature typical 
 and creative for the race; the leaven of divinity must 
 be introduced into the lump of humanity so that the 
 whole might be leavened. The Atonement here is a 
 mysterious transformation of human nature in the 
 race consequent on such transformation by the pres- 
 ence of God Hin‘self in the representative person of 
 the race. What was done in Adam for man’s destruc- 
 tion was undone in Christ for man’s salvation. God 
 became man, that man might become God, incor- 
 ruptible, immortal. It is this conception of salvation 
 which is the doctrinal basis of sacramentarianism. 
 The sacrament of the Eucharist is the physical channel 
 by which this transformation is communicated. This 
 whole mode of thought and life is so alien to the spirit 
 of the writer, that this conception of salvation need 
 not for the present purpose be pursued any further. 
 
 (11) In the doctrinal development to be traced in 
 these pages it is the death of Christ which is the central 
 interest. What is the significance and value of His 
 sacrifice for the salvation of men? Here there 
 
 is a restriction of the scope of the work of Christ, 
 150 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 151 
 
 Although He was fulfilling His calling in His earthly 
 ministry, that for the most part falls out of account. 
 His life, His teaching, His example, His companion- 
 ship, His dealing with sinful, sorrowing, and dying 
 men to impart God’s grace, are ignored, and great is 
 the loss; for the Cross becomes an abstraction about 
 which there can be a great deal of speculation divorced 
 from reality, unless the concrete context of this earthly 
 ministry is carried forward into the conception of the 
 Crucified. No theory of the Atonement can be true 
 and right which is not consistent with the spirit and 
 purpose of Him who atones, as revealed to us in the 
 earthly life. Let this be accepted at the outset as a 
 criticism applicable to this doctrinal development as 
 a whole. 
 
 (iii) The doctrine of the Atonement thus restricted 
 has had many vicissitudes in the course of its develop- 
 ment. Often it has been allowed to fall into the 
 background of the life and thought of the Church. 
 Often has a religious revival brought it again to the 
 central position. (a) It does not owe so much to 
 the collective judgment of the Church, as to individual 
 experience and interpretation. Its history is not 
 associated with universal councils, but with great 
 personalities. All doctrine does and must reflect the 
 life and thought of the time and the place; but no 
 doctrine has been more sensitive to this influence, and 
 in this doctrine we can see as in a mirror what beliefs 
 and habits were dominant. Instances of this tendency 
 will recur again and again in the course of the follow- 
 ing discussion. (6) If the doctrinal development has 
 been thus affected by temporal and local conditions, 
 may we not be compelled to acknowledge a like 
 influence on the presentation of the data for the 
 doctrine in the New Testament? We cannot think 
 and feel about sacrifice as the godly in Israel did. We 
 cannot put ourselves again into Paul’s attitude as a 
 Pharisee to the Law, an attitude which the Christian 
 apostle had not altogether abandoned. On the other 
 hand, we should fall into serious error if we supposed 
 that there was nothing permanent nor universal in 
 
152 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 the doctrine. The persistency with which men have 
 returned to the interpretation of it because of the 
 constancy of its challenge to the religious conscious- 
 ness and moral conscience proves that it does corre- 
 spond with something that endures in the inner life 
 of man, that it does answer a question man must 
 ask, and meet a need he cannot set aside. That 
 among those who have wrestled with this truth have 
 been some of the greatest personalities in the Christian 
 Church shows that it has a hold on what is worthiest 
 in the soul of man. (c) In no other doctrine is there 
 so intimate a relation, and so direct an influence, of 
 the religious consciousness and the moral conscience, 
 and, what till we consider it closely seems most in- 
 explicable, nowhere does the religious consciousness 
 come into more acute conflict with the moral con- 
 science than with regard to this doctrine. Religion 
 seems to demand what morality is not prepared to 
 concede. Two considerations can be offered in ex- 
 planation of this contradiction. Religion as dealing 
 with eternal reality is more conservative than morality 
 which deals with the temporal relations of. men in 
 human society. Not only must morality be more 
 immediately responsive to change of the total condi- 
 tions of life than religion is forced to be, but man has 
 a sense of liberty in this moral conscience, whereas in 
 his religious consciousness he has rather the sense of 
 dependence. It seems much less reasonable and 
 righteous that man’s thoughts about God should 
 change than that he should modify his view as to what 
 is his duty to his fellow-men. 
 
 (iv) These considerations show the spirit in which, 
 and the purpose for which, we must address ourselves 
 to a study of the history of the doctrine.1 However 
 uncongenial and even repugnant to us some of the 
 theories may appear to be, we must not forget that 
 they met a present need, that through them as 
 
 1 The following books among others may be specially mentioned: Franks’ 
 A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ, 2 vols.; Mozley’s The Doc- 
 trine of the Atonement; Bruce’s The Humiliation of Christ; Denney’s The 
 Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT | 153 
 
 adapted to the thought and life of the time the grace 
 of God did bring comfort and succour to the hearts of 
 men. We must try to understand them, and even 
 recognise their worth for their immediate purpose. 
 This, however, does not involve that we are to make 
 the attempt to take up these theories into our con- 
 structive theology, forcing our minds to assimilate 
 what must remain for us alien, and even, it may be, 
 offensive. We must try to discover what fact about 
 man, or what truth about God, they may contain, 
 however imperfectly expressed, so that we may take 
 due account of the one or the other in making a state- 
 ment as comprehensive as possible. 
 
 (1) We may begin with that theory which is most 
 remote from our thinking to-day, viz. that the death 
 of Christ was a ransom paid by God to the devil. 
 
 (1) We have the conception of redemption in the 
 New Testament as deliverance from sin and law, death 
 and doom; but the metaphor of the ransom is not 
 there developed into a theory. This theory has, how- 
 ever, its points of contact with the New Testament in 
 regard to the place of angelology and demonology in 
 the primitive Christian beliefs. In dealing with Paul’s 
 teaching in a previous chapter, mention was merely 
 made of Paul’s reference to the relation of the death 
 of Christ to the rule of angels, good and bad. The 
 passage may here be recalled. ‘ Having put off from 
 Himself the principalities and the powers, He made a 
 show of them openly, triumphing over them in it’ 
 (Col. 1. 15). ‘ Till recently,’ says Peake,! ‘ the prin- 
 cipalities and powers have been explained as hostile 
 demoniacal spirits, and this view is held by Meyer, 
 Ellicott, Lightfoot, Oltramare, and Weiss.’ As the 
 preceding verse refers, however, to the abolition of the 
 law for Christian believers, Peake considers that the 
 context requires us to think here of the angels by 
 whose mediation, according to Jewish belief, the law 
 was given. ‘ This law that has been abolished was 
 given by angels, its abolition implies their degrada- 
 tion.’ This interpretation seems forced, and is justi- 
 
 * The Expositor’s Greek Testament, ii. pp. 528-30. | 
 
154 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 fied only on the ground of the continuity of Paul’s 
 argument. But Paul was not always a strictly logical 
 thinker, and having shown what the death of Christ 
 meant to the Jew he may have turned abruptly to 
 show what it meant to the Gentile. Be the inter- 
 pretation what it may, it is certain that Gentile 
 readers would regard the passage as teaching Christ’s 
 triumph over demons. 
 
 (u) This vivid and intense belief in demons, their 
 power to inflict physical as well as moral and religious 
 injury on man, was a survival in the Church of pagan- 
 ism, of the animism which is a very early form of 
 religious belief. It introduced a very real dread of 
 untold mischief which might befall any man. This 
 belief was modified by the Christian faith in two 
 respects. Just as polytheism yielded to monotheism, 
 so the multitude of demons, while their existence was 
 not denied, were concentrated as regards malevolent 
 purpose and power in one, their ruler, Satan, the devil, 
 who, where monotheism did not assert itself, was 
 almost a counter-god. So also it was not by natural 
 necessity that men were subject to this dominion of 
 the devil; as a result of Adam’s fall mankind had 
 subjected itself to that dominion voluntarily, but 
 was not able by its own efforts to cast off that yoke. 
 It is not so surprising as it at first appears to us 
 that an attempt should be made to include in the 
 Christian salvation deliverance from the devil’s dom- 
 inion, and the use of the word ransom suggested the 
 
 way in which the connection was made. 
 (il) This theory is anticipated in Marcion’s state- 
 ment that the death of Christ was ‘ the price by which 
 the God of love purchased men from the creator of the 
 world,’ for his demiurge shows a marked likeness to 
 the devil of orthodox theology. It is not probable 
 that Irenaeus had the devil m view when he speaks 
 of God as redeeming men, not by force, but by per- 
 suasion. Origen was the first Christian theologian 
 who affirmed distinctly that the death of Christ was 
 a ransom paid to the devil for the souls of men brought 
 under his dominion by sin, that the devil could not 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 155 
 
 keep the price he had received because of Christ’s 
 perfect purity, and that Christ both for Himself and 
 ali who follow Him won the victory over the devil. 
 He does not, however, suggest any deliberate decep- 
 
 tion on the part of God. It was Gregory of Nyssa 
 (who died about a.p. 394) who fully developed this 
 doctrine. As man had freely surrendered himself to 
 Satan, God could not deliver by force, but must pay 
 a price. Satan coveted the miraculous power of 
 Christ and wanted to get possession of it. That the 
 power was divine had to be concealed by the flesh. 
 ‘ Goodness is displayed in God’s will to save, justice 
 in the giving of a guid pro quo, wisdom in devising that 
 Satan might take what he could not retain.’ ‘ Satan 
 was taken as a greedy fish by the hook concealed in 
 the bait.’ ‘ Was not guile used in the Incarnation ? 
 Yes, but this is a mark of wisdom, justice, and good- 
 ness--justice in that the devil is rewarded after his 
 desert; wisdom in that by this retribution a better 
 thing is brought about; goodness in that the guile 
 ends in human salvation.’! Gregory of Nazianzum 
 does regard the death of Christ as a victory over Satan 
 and death, in which Satan was deceived, yet he will 
 not admit that a ransom was paid to Satan, since Satan 
 had no claim for compensation, as his power was 
 usurped. Ambrose held the theory of a ransom paid 
 to the devil, including a fraud practised upon him ; 
 
 but he also represents Christ’s death as the payment 
 of a debt due to the devil, and acknowledged by God. 
 Augustine recognised the devil’s rights, but did not 
 teach any ‘ pious fraud’ on him. Anselm decisively 
 rejected this theory. But Bernard maintained that 
 although the right of Satan over mankind is not based 
 on any obligation to him, yet this bondage, however 
 irregularly secured, is righteously permitted by God 
 as a just retribution for sin. He is the executor of 
 the divine justice, and Christ makes deliverance from 
 his control harmonise with the justice of God. Peter 
 the Lombard states the theory in a most offensive 
 form. ‘ What did the Redeemer to our captor? He 
 
 + Franks, op. cit., 1. p. 76. 
 
156 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 extended to him His cross as a mouse-trap: He set 
 there as a bait His blood.’ } 
 
 (iv) However offensive such a theory may appear to 
 us, we should not be content with condemning it, we 
 should ask ourselves rather: How did men find any 
 satisfaction in it? It must be conceded that the 
 moral ideas involved are to us repugnant; that God 
 should be under obligation to make a bargain with 
 the devil for the recovery of man from his dominion, 
 and that nevertheless He was wise, righteous, and 
 good in cheating the devil of his due, is a combination 
 of ideas which our conscience must condemn as im- 
 moral. What gave the theory its hold was that the 
 fear of the devil’s dominion was a real fear, and that 
 in this theory there seemed to be assured to men a 
 real deliverance. This has marked all theories of 
 the Atonement, that they have represented the death 
 of Christ as saving from what was there and then 
 deemed one of man’s greatest evils. If we attempt 
 to find some counterpart for this theory in the con- 
 structive theology at which we aim, it would seem to 
 be this, that in Christ we are brought into such a 
 relation to God that for us in the love of God there is 
 an assurance that nothing works for our hurt, and 
 all works together for our good. 
 
 (2) Having dealt with the patristic view of salvation 
 in which the emphasis was put on the Incarnation 
 rather than the Atonement of the Cross, and having 
 passed judgment on the theory of the death as a 
 ransom paid to the devil, we need not dwell on the 
 varied views of the Fathers, in which many different 
 tendencies appear but there is no systematic treat- 
 ment of the subject. We may pass at once to a clear- 
 cut theory in Anselm’s answer to the question Cur 
 Deus Homo ? the title of his treatise. 
 
 (i) He feels it incumbent to answer that question 
 in vindication both of the wisdom and the power of 
 God. He aims at showing that this was the only way 
 in which mankind could be saved from the doom of 
 sin. He sets aside the ‘ ransom to Satan’ theory on 
 
 1 Franks, op. cit., i. p. 220. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT Lov 
 
 the ground that Satan has no legal claim on God, 
 as he is God’s creature even as man is. (a) The 
 Atonement was necessary because of sin. Sin is 
 nothing else than failing to render to God what is 
 His due, for every creature owes to Him absolute 
 obedience, and even the slightest disobedience would 
 not be justified, were it to rescue the Universe from total 
 destruction. Sin can therefore be atoned for only by 
 something more valuable than the whole universe. 
 (b) Though God cannot lose His honour, yet sin is a 
 personal insult to God, and God’s honour must be 
 vindicated, not simply by the future obedience of 
 the transgressor, but by an adequate compensation 
 for the injury done to God’s honour. (c) Man cannot 
 render this compensation, and yet he cannot be 
 excused on account of his inability, for that 1s due to 
 his own fault, It is impossible that God should let 
 His honour be affronted without vindicating it, since 
 that would be permitting an incongruity in the 
 government of the universe. This necessity is not 
 imposed on God, but rises out of His own nature, 
 since by a single sin a debt is incurred which the aha 
 universe would be insufficient to meet. (d) God alone 
 can make the satisfaction, but it must be made by 
 man, since it was he who incurred the debt. Therefore 
 the case can be met only by a God-man. Thus the 
 Word became flesh. (e) He is impeccable, and death 
 is only properly due to sin as its consequence. He 
 being sinless was not compelled to die. His death 
 was due to His unswerving fidelity to God. It was 
 thus a supreme act of honour to God, which out- 
 weighed the whole sin of the race. (f) But 1t would 
 be unjust of God to let this act go unrewarded. He 
 could give nothing to Christ, since He as God possessed 
 everything. So Christ transferred His merit to us, 
 and thus we receive salvation. Christ pays our debt 
 in satisfying God’s honour by dying, and transfers 
 to us the merit which falls to Him for dying volun- 
 tarily. 
 
 (1) This theory has such importance in the history 
 of the doctrine, that it claims closer examination. 
 
158 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (a) Although there is in Anselm a deep sense of 
 the enormity of sin—Denney insists that this is the 
 final merit of his theory—yet his view of it is un- 
 satisfactory. It is the dishonouring of the Creator 
 by the disobedience of the creature. It is not related 
 either to an eternal law of righteousness or to the 
 eternally perfect character and purpose of God. It 
 is as a moral agent in a moral community with God 
 that man should be regarded to estimate his sin 
 adequately, and not merely as a creature related to 
 the Creator. It is true that the other view is not 
 altogether absent. God must vindicate His honour, 
 since Deum non deceit aliquid in suo regno mordinatum 
 demitiere. Had this subordinate thought been made 
 primary there would have resulted a more satisfactory 
 theory. 
 
 (b) While making sin a robbery of God’s honour, 
 Anselm spoils his argument by admitting that God 
 cannot be robbed of His honour. Sin is an affront 
 to God, who cannot thus be affronted. It might be 
 argued that men had the intention to affront, although 
 that intention could not take effect. To this the reply 
 might be given that their sin should be measured 
 by the finitude of man, and not the infinitude of God. 
 Anselm’s admission does lessen the reality of the sin, 
 and makes less real the need of expiation, although 
 he does not himself recognise this consequence. 
 
 (c) If sin is only a personal affront to God it is 
 difficult to see why God might not remit the penalty 
 of His choice,'as a matter that concerned only His 
 own honour. God demands an atonement to vindi- 
 cate His personal honour, which after all has suffered 
 no affront. Denney! is not altogether successful in his 
 defence of Anselm in regard to this matter. * It may 
 be that it carries with it some flavour of ideas of per- 
 sonal rank and dignity, such as lay at the root of the 
 feudal system. But this is certainly not the main 
 thing, and it is absurd to say that Anselm, or those 
 to whom his thoughts appealed, conceived of God as 
 a feudal baron, and not as the Father of our Lord 
 
 1 The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 67. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 159 
 
 Jesus Christ.’ But what is there in Anselm’s argu- 
 ment turning our minds from the feudal baron to 
 the Father ? 
 
 (d) If this view is replaced by Anselrn’s assertion 
 that the vindication of God’s honour is a necessity of 
 His nature, then atonement is represented as made 
 for God’s sake rather than man’s, and does not appear 
 as an act of free grace or love. 
 
 (ec) Anselm’s view of the consequence of sin as an 
 affront to God’s honour made satisfaction or punish- 
 ment necessary. The difference between these is thus 
 expressed by Denney: ‘In the case of satisfaction the 
 offender makes good his offence, in the case of punish- 
 ment it is made good upon him by the act of the 
 offended.’ ‘ According to Anselm it is inconceivable 
 that God’s purpose in creating man should be finally 
 frustrated in this fashion; and as this is an assump- 
 tion of reason, it is rationally necessary that not the 
 easy way of punishment, but the hard way of satis- 
 faction, should be followed in dealing with human sin.’ ! 
 Man could offer no satisfaction, but Christ as the 
 God-man could. The next step in the argument 
 should surely be that Christ owed it to God and man 
 to offer the satisfaction He alone could offer. But 
 Anselm does not so reason. ‘The God-man must 
 do something for the honour of God to which He is 
 not obliged upon other grounds.’ ? ‘ He is not obliged 
 to die—for death is the wages of sin, and He has not 
 sinned—and hence His death, the surrender of His 
 infinitely precious life, may be offered to God by way 
 of satisfaction.’* This gift is entitled to a reward. 
 As a work of supererogation it had a merit which 
 ought to be recognised. The flaw in this argument is 
 the denial that God could claim Christ’s death, and 
 Christ owed His death to God, since the claim of God 
 on man and the debt of man to God are absolute. 
 What God’s glory might require, it was Christ’s duty 
 to render. 
 
 (f) Consequently, the next step in the argument is 
 invalid. As justice does not require that any reward 
 
 1 Op. cit., p, 69. i Fh’, B P. 72. 
 
160 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 be given to Christ for being more obedient to God than 
 was necessary, Christ cannot claim our salvation as 
 a reward due to Him. 
 
 (g) Suppose, however, the reward was earned, in 
 transferring His merits to us He makes over to us a 
 boon of which He has no need, for which He has no 
 other use. The relation is thus altogether external. 
 Anselm knows nothing of Paul’s experience of that 
 mystical union with Christ, in which Christ's death 
 and resurrection are reproduced i in the believer’s death 
 unto sin, and becoming alive unto God. Christ does 
 not by the self- identification of His love assume our 
 sins, and His merits are quite arbitrarily and exter- 
 nally transferred to us. We are moving here among 
 the contemporary ideas of honour, insult, satisfaction, 
 works of supererogation, merit, and not amid moral 
 and religious experiences. 
 
 (iii) Denney shows a very high appreciation of 
 Anselm in three respects: (a) the serious view he 
 takes of sin, (b) his recognition that the death of Christ 
 meets a divine demand and not merely a human need, 
 and (c) the connection he insists on between forgive- 
 ness and the redemptive work of Christ: and these 
 merits may be admitted. Denney, however, recognises 
 four defects. (a) ‘Anselm gives no prominence to 
 the love of God as the source of the satisfaction for 
 sin, or to the appeal which that love makes to the 
 heart of sinful men.’ (6) ‘ The death of Christ is 
 treated merely as a thing, a quantum of some kind.’ 
 ‘Ex hypothesi (as a work of supererogation, above God’s 
 claim and man’s duty) it is outside of the world of 
 moral obligation, and is therefore not susceptible of 
 moral construction.’ (c) °No real connection is 
 established by Anselm between the death of Christ 
 and the sin of the world, which sin, nevertheless, 
 can only be remitted on the ground of that death. 
 This is due to the entire arbitrariness of the idea of 
 satisfaction. It seems fairly certain that the word 
 satisfactto—though commonly enough applied, in con- 
 nection with the penitential system of the Church, to 
 the acts or sacrifices by which the Christian who had 
 
 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 161 
 
 fallen into sin made good his fault, and was reconciled 
 to God and His people—was never before Anselm 
 expressly applied to the work of Christ.’ ‘ Anselm, 
 by defining Christ’s death merely as an alternative 
 to the punishment of sin (necesse est ut omne peccatum 
 satisfactio aut poena sequatur), and by refusing to 
 define it in relation to His life, as something which 
 ~ He owed to God, and which therefore entered into 
 His vocation and could be morally understood, has 
 practically made it meaningless.’ (d) ‘ Anselm gives 
 no real account of the way in which the work of Christ 
 comes to benefit men. Christ is left standing, so to 
 speak, with the merit of His death in His hand, and 
 looking round to see what He can do with it. What 
 is more suitable and becoming (convenientius) than 
 that He should give it to those who in virtue of the 
 Incarnation are His kindred? Nothing could be less 
 like than this to all we know about how the work of 
 Christ takes effect in human lives.’! Notwithstanding 
 all these defects Anselm’s essay has a very great 
 historical significance as the first attempt at a system- 
 atic statement of the reason for and the meaning of 
 the death of Christ as an atonement for sin, in which 
 incarnation is subordinated to atonement. 
 
 (3) Anselm’s is an objective doctrine of the Atone- 
 ment; it is concerned with the death of Christ in 
 relation to God as meeting the divine demand for 
 satisfaction for His honour affronted by man’s sin. 
 Abialard’s is a subjective doctrine ; it exhibits the death 
 of Christ as it affects man, in the influence it exerts 
 over man. This is commonly spoken of as the moral 
 view, a description that does injustice to other views 
 which are no less concerned with morality, and does not 
 bring out what distinguishes this view from others. A 
 more accurate phrase would be the moral influence view. 
 
 (i) Abalard very decisively rejects the ransom to 
 Satan theory, but also the view that God is appeased 
 by the death of His Son. (a) For him the work of 
 Christ, including the suffering and death, is a mani- 
 festation of the divine love to the unworthy which is 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 75-7. 
 L 
 
162 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 adapted to kindle gratitude in their hearts, and to 
 win them back to obedience to God. It is this aspect 
 or interpretation of the office of Christ which most 
 impresses him. Of this redeeming work of Christ 
 only the elect are the objects, only in regard to them 
 God’s disposition need not be changed, there is no 
 wrath to be assuaged, but it is their disposition to God 
 which needs to be changed: and Christ by giving the 
 highest proof of love wins their trust in and surrender 
 to God. (b) This statement, however, leaves the 
 question unanswered: Why was the love shown in 
 just this way? A sacrifice can be justified only if 
 its necessity can be proved. ‘ The death of Christ,’ 
 says Denney, ‘can only be regarded as a demonstration 
 of love to sinners, if it can be defined or interpreted 
 as having some necessary relation to their sins.’ 
 Abdlard in some of his utterances shows that he had 
 a sense of the insufficiency of his view. ‘ Hence it is 
 not astonishing to find Abdlard saying that ours was 
 the guilt for which He had to die, and that we com- 
 mitted the sin whose penalty He endured: though 
 these are manifestly forms of speech which belong 
 to another order of thought than that which is con- 
 scious and predominant in him. So also, while he 
 gives predominance to the love of Christ, as the 
 stimulus of love in man, he admits that it never does 
 everything in sinners that they need to have done; 
 their justification or righteousness is always imperfect, 
 and what is wanting in this respect has to be supple- 
 mented by the righteousness of Christ, and especially 
 by His intercession for them.’! By the introduction 
 of this new point of view, the theory loses its con- 
 sistency. (c) God forgives us in Christ’s deed of dying 
 for us in so far as He reckons to us the merit of Christ, 
 because Christ stands before God as the head of 
 humanity. God is satisfied by the obedience of Christ 
 and lets the merit of the perfect righteousness of Christ 
 fall to our advantage. Christ keeps on working on 
 our behalf, for His constant intercession for us is 
 reckoned to us as merit. This merit lies not in a 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 79-81. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 163 
 
 number of acts, but in the fullness of love dwelling in 
 Christ. The love of Christ calls forth our love, and 
 in loving Christ a man has forgiveness of sin granted 
 to him—nay, the forgiveness is in the interchange of 
 love. This theory has a wavering outline, as Abalard 
 was forced to recognise aspects of truth beyond his 
 dominant idea. 
 
 (ii) The defect of the view is that Abalard fails to 
 show the necessity of the death of Christ ; and if this 
 is not shown, the death ceases to be an evidence of 
 love to the uttermost, as love shows itself not in 
 superfluous but in inevitable sacrifice. There is some- 
 thing spectacular and not real in an exhibition of 
 love in sacrifice for which no moral necessity can -be 
 shown. ‘To have full moral effect the sacrifice must 
 be shown to have full moral content, to be an absolute 
 moral necessity. The most worthy and mighty love 
 morally for the sinful is the love which so suffers for 
 the sin as to show the greatness of the sin forgiven 
 as well as the greatness of the love forgiving. A 
 sinner cannot be saved from guilt until he has fully 
 discovered his guilt, as he does in the sacrifice of 
 Christ only when in it is seen sin’s judgment as well 
 as love’s gift. The merit of Abalard’s view, however, 
 is that he recovered the New Testament conception of 
 the living fellowship of the believer with Christ, and 
 so recalled the forgotten apostolic thought of Christ’s 
 perpetual intercession ; and this sense of the love of 
 Christ led him to seek for that love not only in the 
 death, but also in the earthly life. Inadequate as the 
 theory is, the spirit in Him is evangelical as Anselm’s 
 is not. Had Anselm sought the ultimate motive of 
 the death of Christ in the love of God, and had Abalard 
 sought the final purpose of the death of Christ in God’s 
 judgment on, while forgiving, the sin of man, the 
 defects of each would have been corrected, and a 
 more adequate theory of the Atonement might have 
 emerged. 
 
 (4) Into the elaborate combination of almost all 
 former points of view which we find in Thomas 
 Aquinas we need not for our purpose enter; but 
 
164 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 mention may be made of an idea asserted by Duns 
 Scotus. The value of the death of Christ does not 
 lie in anything in its nature, but only in the divine 
 acceptance. The divine will can estimate whatever 
 is done or suffered just as it pleases. A thing is good 
 because God loves it. Had God pleased, man might 
 have been redeemed by acts of love done by Adam 
 or an angel. Since Christ merits as Man and not as 
 God, His merits are finite and cannot be reckoned as 
 infinite, or taking the place of the infinite. For the 
 extrinsic reason of the dignity of Christ, God accepts 
 His merits as infinite. It is a merit of congruity, and 
 not of condignity. God decides to consider the merits 
 of Christ as full atonement, to accept them for more 
 than their inherent value apart from this acceptance. 
 This theory has been called the theory of acceptilation,! 
 and has evidently no meaning, but is the bankruptcy 
 of thought on the subject. 
 
 (5) Anselm regarded punishment and satisfaction 
 as alternatives: Christ did not endure punishment 
 instead of us, but He rendered satisfaction on our 
 behalf. The idea of punishment endured was not 
 absent from Mediaeval thought, and we find it in 
 Abalard, however inconsistently with his dominant 
 conception. In the theology of the Reformation the 
 conception of substitutionary penalty assumes a 
 prominence it had not had before. The relation 
 between Christ and the believer becomes more in- 
 timate and immediate. Instead of Christ rendering a 
 satisfaction to God and transferring His merits to us, 
 there is a personal exchange. Christ takes our sins, 
 and suffers their penalty ; we take His righteousness, 
 and are reckoned righteous. 
 
 (i) ‘ Luther, introducing into the traditional struc- 
 ture his new doctrine of justification by faith, intro- 
 duces it not as another block to be built in with the 
 rest, but rather as a solvent, before which some 
 elements of the older theology disappear as alien 
 philosophical accretions not belonging to Christian- 
 
 2 ¢ Acceptilation signifies in Roman law the dissolution of an obligation by 
 mere words.’ Franks, op. cit., ii. p. 25. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 165 
 
 ity, while those that remain begin to be transmuted 
 each into the other, and all into the doctrine of 
 justification by faith.’! (a) Whatever difficulty the 
 statement of the doctrine of the Atonement by the 
 Reformers may now present to us, we should not 
 ignore the fact that all the changes of doctrine 
 resulted from a fresh apprehension of the personal 
 relation of the believer to Christ, a relation of mutual 
 identification. ‘ The believer is so cemented to Christ,’ 
 says Luther, ‘ that he can say, ‘‘ I am Christ—that is, 
 His righteousness, victory, life are mine”; and in 
 turn Christ can say, ‘‘ I am that sinner because he 
 cleaves to me, and I to him,” for we are joined by 
 faith as members of His body, of His flesh and bones ’ 
 (Ad Eph., v. 80). The foundation of all the blessings 
 the believer receives through faith is the atoning work 
 of Christ, and not any merit of his own works. In 
 virtue of his union with the Righteous One, his faith 
 is imputed unto him for righteousness. This is the 
 earlier and simpler statement; it was afterwards 
 modified as follows: the righteousness of Christ is 
 imputed to him, and God deals with him as if he 
 had gained this righteousness for himself. Still later 
 Lutheran theology made a further distinction be- 
 tween Christ’s passive righteousness in enduring the 
 penalty of sin, and His active righteousness in fulfilling 
 the requirements of the law; and both are imputed 
 to the believer. 
 
 (b) In dealing with the Atonement, Luther often 
 represents Christ as conquering sin, and death, and 
 Satan. He strongly asserts Christ’s vicarious endur- 
 ance of the curse of the law. ‘In His innocent, tender 
 heart He was obliged to taste for us eternal death 
 and damnation, and, in short, to suffer everything 
 that a condemned sinner has merited and must suffer 
 for ever. ‘‘Sensit poenam infernalem.’’ Christ took 
 all my sins upon Him, and for them died upon the 
 Cross; therefore it behoved that He should become 
 a transgressor, and, as Isaiah the prophet saith, “ be 
 reckoned and accursed among transgressors and tres- 
 
 1 Franks, History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ, i. p. 887-88. 
 
166 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 99°97 
 
 passers. ‘Christ 1s innocent as concerning His 
 own person, and, therefore, He ought not to have 
 been hanged on a tree. ... But Christ sustained 
 the person of a sinner and a thief, not of one but of 
 all sinners and thieves’ (Ad Gal., ili. 18). He bears 
 our penalty, and in bearing it He secures a righteous- 
 ness which accords with the divine righteousness. 
 
 (c) “ Luther,’ says Denney, ‘ had no enthusiasm for 
 the term’ satisfaction. ‘ The idea of satisfaction was 
 bound up with the penitential system of the Mediaeval 
 Church, which more than anything else roused the 
 indignation of Luther as concealing, disguising, and 
 corrupting the Gospel.’ ? In later Protestant theology 
 ‘the satisfaction is not the Anselmic one, which has 
 no relation to punishment, nor that of the penitential 
 system, which is only quasi-penal, but that of Roman 
 law, which is identical with punishment. ... Mel- 
 anchthon is as explicit as words can be: ‘‘ Deus 
 justitiae suae puniendo satisfecit; justitia servatur 
 in recipienda poena.”’3 The righteousness of God 
 takes the place of His honour, and sin is conceived 
 not as an affront to that honour, but as disobedience 
 to the law of God, which expresses that righteousness. 
 The defect of this view of satisfaction is that, as Denney 
 points out, ‘it left no significance for salvation to 
 anything in Jesus except His death.’ As has already 
 been indicated, the later theology found a signifi- 
 cance and value for His active as well as His passive 
 obedience. 
 
 (dq) This Christ who thus suffers for us and offers 
 Himself to us as our righteousness is given us by 
 God, who is well pleased with all Christ says and 
 does for us. ‘Grace,’ says Denney, ‘ceased to be a 
 thing or quantum which could be “ infused’’ in man, 
 or administered in appropriate quantities or qualities — 
 through the sacraments; it became the attitude 
 of God to sinners as exhibited in Christ.?4 Luther 
 puts this truth with his usual vehemence. ‘ God’s 
 
 * Quoted by Fisher, op. cit., p. 276. 
 * The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, pp. 92-3. 
 SP AOA; tu Bao 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 167 
 
 good pleasure and His whole heart thou seest in 
 Christ, in all His words and works. . . . Thinkest thou 
 not that, if a human heart truly felt that good pleasure 
 which God has in Christ when He thus saves us, it 
 would for very joy burst into a hundred thousand 
 pieces ? For then it would see into the abyss of the 
 fatherly heart, yea into the fathomless and eternal 
 goodness and love of God, which He feels towards us 
 and has felt from eternity.’! It is clear from these 
 words that for Luther Christ expresses and does not 
 procure the love of God for sinful men. | 
 
 (e) Luther’s doctrine affirms so complete an identi- 
 fication by Christ of Himself with sinful mankind, 
 that He sorrows and suffers for sin as if He Himself 
 had been a sinner; and so complete an identification 
 of the sinner by faith with Christ, that he has Christ’s 
 righteousness as accepted by God in Him, and is 
 changed to the likeness of the Son. He does dis- 
 tinguish, as does Paul, between the absolute religious 
 assurance and the relative moral progress. The 
 believer ‘has begun to be justified and healed,’ so 
 that what is left of sin ‘ by reason of Christ’ is not 
 imputed to him (Ad Gal., 1. 17)." If there is not an 
 external, arbitrary substitution of Christ for us, Christ 
 substitutes Himself for us in the endurance of the 
 penalty of sin because in His love He has identified 
 Himself with us as sinners. His salvation avails for 
 us not by our merely believing that He is our sub- 
 stitute, but by our identifying ourselves so with Him 
 that He becomes in us the motive and the power 
 of a new life. Luther must not be held responsible 
 for the later Lutheran scholasticism. Recklessly as 
 he sometimes expressed himself, laying himself open 
 to misunderstanding, he did recover the Pauline ex- 
 perience of the grace of God in Christ. 
 
 (11) Calvin is in substantial agreement with Luther. 
 (a) We are saved by the imputation to us of Christ’s 
 righteousness, not on the ground of anything, not 
 
 * Festpostill, Von der Taufe Christi, quoted by Fisher, History of Christian 
 Doctrine. 
 
 * Quoted by Fisher, op. cit., p. 274. 
 
168 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 even of faith in ourselves. While faith includes in 
 it the ecertitudo salutis, Calvin allows for the imper- 
 fection of faith, for the struggle with remaining sin, 
 and the consequent occasional or partial dulling of 
 the believer’s confidence. While justification as the 
 forgiveness of sin is distinguished, it is never separated 
 from sanctification or the process of becoming holy. 
 Christ has satisfied for our sins in sustaining the 
 punishment. He has appeased God by His obedience, 
 not only in His death, but also in His life. What 
 gives value to His death is His voluntary submission. 
 ‘He makes much,’ says Denney, ‘ of the Descensus ad 
 inferos, “that invisible and incomprehensible judg- 
 ment which He underwent at the bar if God; that 
 we might know that not only was the body of Christ 
 given up as the price of our redemption, but that there 
 was another greater and more excellent price—namely, 
 that He endured in His soul the dreadful torments 
 of a condemned and lost man” (Calvin, Institutes, 11. 
 xvi. 10).’1 This statement must, however, be qualified 
 by this other: ‘ We do not indeed insinuate that God 
 was either ever opposed to or angry with Him. For 
 how could He be angry with His beloved Son, in whom 
 His mind rested ? or how could Christ, by His inter- 
 cession, propitiate for others a Father whom He had 
 as an enemy to Himself? This we say, that He 
 sustained the gravity of divine severity ; since, being 
 stricken and afflicted by the hand of God, He ex- 
 er eens all the signs of an angry and punishing 
 pdx? 
 
 (5) There are two peculiar opinions worth mention- 
 ing. First, while he regards the main purpose of the 
 Incarnation to be redemptive, yet he does not regard 
 this as the only possible reason. God so far tran- 
 scends and excels man that even if he had remained 
 sinless he would have needed a Mediator in order to 
 attain to union with God. Secondly, in one place he 
 seems to accept Duns Scotus’ view: ‘The merit of 
 
 ' Denney, op. cit., p. 49. 
 2 Calvin, Jnst., 1. xvi. 11. (Juoted in Bruce’s The Humiliation of Christ, 
 pp. 334-35. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 169 
 
 Christ by which we are saved depends merely on 
 the good pleasure of God which appointed the method 
 of salvation for us’ (In., I. xviii. 1). The theory of 
 acceptilatio would, however, be inconsistent with what 
 he says about the death of Christ, and what he means 
 here to assert is probably the freedom of God’s grace 
 in redemption. God was under no necessity to pro- 
 vide salvation: but this salvation He provided had 
 an intrinsic value. ‘In a certain ineffable manner, 
 at the same time as He loved us He was nevertheless 
 angry with us until He was reconciled in Christ’ 
 (II. xvi. 2). 
 
 (11) We need not consider the vulgarisation of this 
 doctrine in later evangelical theology—such as the 
 attempt to prove a qualitative and a quantitative 
 equivalence of the sufferings of Christ and those which 
 sinners would have had to endure—that they were the 
 same in amount as well as in kind, and that the tem- 
 poral agony of an infinite person is equal to the eternal 
 torments of finite persons. The position of the Re- 
 formers was an advance on the Mediaeval one. The 
 conceptions of righteousness, moral law, and order are 
 more adequate than those of satisfaction and merit. | 
 But the conception of God has not been entirely 
 transformed by the revelation of -His love and grace 
 in Jesus Christ. A dualism remains between His 
 righteousness and His love and grace which the 
 theory of the Atonement does not resolve. The 
 conception of a transference of guilt and penalty 
 is neither sound law nor good morality. The sinless 
 cannot be held guilty, or punished instead of the 
 sinful, although love in self-sacrifice may share the 
 sufferings which are the results of sin. The categories 
 of the law courts, and human government generally, 
 are quite inadequate to express the moral and religious 
 relation of man to God. The Reformers did appre- 
 hend moral and religious reality, but inadequately 
 expressed what they apprehended; and we must 
 now try to find a more adequate expression of that 
 same reality. The subsequent developments both in 
 the Lutheran and in the Reformed Churches show 
 
170 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 that, great as Luther and Calvin were, they had not 
 given a final expression to Protestant theology. 
 Many of the controversies have only a_ historical 
 interest, and no direct bearing on the problems of 
 the constructive theology of the day, and we may at 
 once pass to Arminianism and the theory of the 
 Atonement it offers us in the treatise of Grotius. 
 
 (6) Arminianism was a revolt against Calvinism. 
 (1) Its creed was set forth in the Remonstrance of 1610 
 in five articles.! ‘ The first asserts conditional election, 
 or election dependent on the foreknowledge of faith. 
 The second asserts universal atonement, in the sense 
 that it is intended, although it is not actually efficient 
 for all. The third affirms the inability of man to 
 exercise saving faith or to accomplish anything really 
 good without regeneration through the Holy Spirit. 
 The fourth declares that although grace at every 
 step of the spiritual life is indispensable, it 1s yet not 
 irresistible. The fifth pronounces the perseverance 
 of all believers doubtful. Later, the Arminians went 
 farther on this last point, maintaining that believers 
 may fall from grace finally.’ Grotius, in defending 
 the orthodox doctrine against Faustus Socinus in his 
 treatise Defence of the Catholic Faith concerning the 
 Satisfaction of Christ against Faustus Socinus of Siena, 
 1617, formulated a new theory which is generally 
 known as the governmental or rectoral theory. 
 
 (ii) For the assumption of Anselm that man is 
 related to God as debtor to creditor he substitutes the 
 conception of the relation of the subject to the Ruler 
 (Rector). As the end of punishment in the State is 
 the preservation of order and deterrence from future 
 transgressions, a penalty may be remitted if some 
 other means of gaining the same end can be found. 
 The death of Christ serves this end as being a ‘ penal 
 example.’ It shows impressively what sin deserves ; 
 what its punishment, if inflicted, would be; for it 
 reveals the Lawgiver’s hatred of sin. It is not the 
 reality, but the symbol of punishment. Accordingly 
 God may fix what other conditions are necessary for 
 
 1 Fisher, op. cit., p. 338. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 171 
 
 pardon. While the Scottist conception of the liberty 
 of the divine will as regards inflicting or remitting the 
 penalty of sin is affirmed, the term acceptilation is 
 rejected on the ground that it cannot be said that 
 God receives the endurance of suffering by Christ. 
 The Calvinists considered that Grotius had surren- 
 dered the doctrine, as he had failed to represent the 
 divine wrath against sin as a necessity of the divine 
 nature, and had reduced God’s treatment of sin as 
 due to His goodness, regulated by His wisdom, with 
 a view: to the happiness of His creatures. 
 
 (11) The analogy of the relation of Ruler and subject 
 is an inadequate basis for any doctrine dealing with 
 the relation of God to man, even if less inadequate 
 than that of creditor and debtor. We are not shown 
 by Grotius what it was that Christ suffered as the 
 equivalent of man’s punishment, nor wherein lay the 
 virtue of His suffering. The theory is arbitrary and 
 artificial, unrelated to the experience of Christ or of 
 the believer. Nevertheless, it did mark an advance, 
 as it ‘helped to remove the ban of individualism, and 
 to revive the idea of the Kingdom of God by its 
 emphasis on the idea of a common good.’ ! 
 
 (7) Jonathan Edwards opposed to Arminianism the 
 modified Calvinism known as the New England 
 Theology. 
 
 (i) He wrote a profound treatise on Satisfaction. 
 His argument is as follows : There must be compensa- 
 tion for sin—punishment or repentance, humiliation 
 and sorrow proportionate to the guilt incurred. As 
 man’s guilt is infinite, no repentance adequate is 
 possible to man. But Christ does for man what he 
 cannot do for himself. As Intercessor for man He 
 must have perfect sympathy: He must identify 
 Himself entirely with God and man. His sympathy 
 was perfected by His death, for there He understood 
 fully what guilt involves. He appreciated both God’s 
 holy resentment and man’s criminality and misery. 
 The substitution was in His heart, but this led to, 
 and was completed in, the final act of self-sacrifice. 
 
 1 Denney, op. cit., p. 113. 
 
172 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 By His voluntary submission to death Christ showed 
 His absolute approval of the righteousness of the law 
 as penal as well as preceptive. He gave the strongest 
 possible proof of the justice of the divine administra- 
 tion in assigning death to the sinner, by Himself, 
 though sinless, sharing in that experience. 
 
 (ii) The value of this essay lies in the endeavour to 
 set forth those elements of Christ’s own experience, 
 moral and religious, which give value to His sacrifice 
 and make it significant.as atoning. While Edwards 
 still insists that Jesus endured the penalty of sin, 
 he is careful to set aside the thought that Jesus 
 was in fact, or in His own consciousness, the object 
 of God’s wrath. When this is conceded, the term 
 penalty ceases to be appropriate. Edwards was thus 
 preparing the way for an abandonment of the con- 
 ception of the death of Christ as penal satisfaction. 
 His importance in the doctrinal development has been 
 well summed up by Franks:! ‘ Edwards’ discourse is 
 no mere reproduction of the traditional Protestant 
 theology. It contains the following germinal thoughts, 
 all of which have resulted in important developments 
 in modern theology :—(1) A perfect repentance on 
 man’s part might have sufficed to satisfy for sin: of 
 such a repentance sinful man was, however, incapable. 
 (2) Christ’s sufferings in bearing the divine wrath 
 and the burden of human sin are to be understood 
 psychologically through His sympathy with and pity 
 for men. It was not, however, possible for Him, as 
 an infinitely holy person, to bear the very pains of 
 hell to be endured by the damned. (8) Christ Himself 
 was perfected by His sufferings, ‘‘the exercise of His 
 obedience or holiness tending to increase the root of 
 it in His nature.” ’ 
 
 (8) No theologian wielded a greater influence on 
 theology in the nineteenth century than Schleier- 
 macher. 
 
 (1) For him redemption consists in the deliverance 
 of the consciousness of God in man from his lower 
 consciousness, and its enthronement in the soul. Not 
 
 1 Op. cit., ii. p. 189. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 173 
 
 only was there the supremacy of the consciousness 
 of God in Christ from the beginning, but through 
 His personal influence in the historical channel of 
 His Church He produces this redemption in others. 
 Schleiermacher distinguishes this redemption from 
 reconciliation thus: ‘ The Redeemer receives believers 
 into the power of His consciousness of God, and this 
 is His redemptive activity.’ ‘The Redeemer receives 
 believers into the fellowship of His undisturbed 
 beatitude, and this is His reconciling activity.’ ! 
 Ritschl criticises Schleiermacher on the ground that 
 it is contrary to the principles of the Reformation 
 to make redemption primary and_ reconciliation 
 secondary. But we cannot so rigidly determine the 
 order in which the sense of power and the feeling of 
 blessedness shall come in the Christian experience. 
 Schleiermacher calls his view the mystical as con- 
 trasted with the orthodox, which he described as 
 ‘magical,’ and the Socinian, which he spoke of as 
 ‘ empirical.’ 
 
 (11) Bruce includes Schleiermacher’s view in what 
 he calls ‘the theory of redemption by sample,’ and 
 thus describes the tendency generally :— Common 
 to all forms of this so-called mystical theory is the 
 position, that what Christ did for men He did also 
 for Himself, and that He did it for us by doing it 
 for Himself, acting as the Head and representative 
 of humanity before God.’ As modern instances of 
 this tendency he mentions Menken and Irving, whose 
 theory he regards as the same in principle with that 
 taught by the Fathers. ‘ The Sanctifier makes the 
 lump of humanity holy, by taking a portion of the 
 corrupt mass tainted with the vice of original sin and 
 subject to sinful bias, and by a desperate lifelong 
 struggle sanctifying it, subduing all temptations to 
 sin arising out of its evil proclivities, and at last 
 consuming the body of death as a sin-offering on the 
 Cross.’2 While the Fathers recognised the superi- 
 ority of Christ’s human nature, Menken and Irving 
 insisted on the similarity of Christ’s nature to man’s. 
 
 1 Op. cit., ii. p. 283. 2 Op. cit., pp. 308-10. 
 
174 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 As we cannot to-day assume the doctrine of original 
 sin and total depravity, we cannot accept the theory 
 as it is stated. The reality of Christ’s moral and 
 religious experience we must affirm, no less than the 
 fulfilment of His own vocation, the perfecting of His 
 own personality in life and death. But our sense of 
 the difference between ourselves as imperfect and 
 Him as perfect forbids the assertion that He did 
 and needed to do for us, only what He did and needed 
 to do for Himself. Himself He sanctified ; us He must 
 not only sanctify, but also justify. While this theory 
 emphasises an aspect of the work of Christ which 
 should be recognised, and is recognised by Edwards, 
 it does not give a complete account of Christ’s 
 work. 
 
 (9) To another element in Edwards’ statement the 
 exposition of the doctrine of the Atonement by M*Leod 
 Campbell attached itself. His treatise on The Nature 
 of the Atonement, and its Relation to the Remission of 
 Sins and Eternal Life, Denney reckons with Schleier- 
 macher’s and Ritschl’s works as one of the three 
 original contributions to the subject made in recent 
 times. | 
 
 (i) Of the alternatives insisted on by Jonathan 
 Edwards as the necessary consequence of sin—punish- 
 ment or adequate repentance—Campbell rejects the 
 former, and considers that Atonement was effected 
 by an adequate repentance in the consciousness of 
 Christ. The ingredient of personal remorse was 
 absent, but present were all the spiritual elements 
 which Edwards finds in the experience of Christ. 
 In this experience Christ made an expiatory con- 
 fession of our sins, which was ‘a perfect Amen in 
 humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.’ + 
 Faith is our Amen to this condemnation in the soul 
 of Christ. Christ enters fully into the mind of God 
 respecting sin, into His condemnation of it, and into 
 His love to the sinner. This was the equivalent 
 repentance which Edwards makes the alternative of 
 punishment. With this sanction of His judgment 
 
 1 Op, cit., p. 136. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 175 
 
 on sin, reproduced in its essential elements in the 
 believer through His connection with Christ, God is 
 satisfied. Campbell regards the death of Christ as 
 necessary to the realisation by Him of God’s feeling 
 and man’s need. Without ‘the perfect experience 
 of the enmity of the carnal mind to God,’ an adequate 
 confession of man’s sin ‘ could not have been offered 
 to God in expiation of man’s sin, nor intercession have 
 been made according to the extent of man’s need of 
 forgiveness.’ 1 He endured, and it was necessary that 
 He should endure, death in the sense of the wages of 
 sin. ‘As our Lord alone truly tasted death, so to 
 Him alone had death its perfect meaning as the wages 
 of sin, for Him alone was there full entrance into the 
 mind of God towards sin and perfect unity with that 
 mind.’ ? As man is both capable of and lable to 
 death, not only sin had to be dealt with, but ‘an 
 existing law with its penalty of death, and that death 
 as already incurred.’ Hence a response was necessary 
 to ‘that expression of the divine mind which was 
 contained in God’s making death the penalty of sin.’ 
 Thus the death of Christ was necessary that He might 
 in this respect also enter into the mind of God, and 
 complete the expiatory confession which is the moral 
 essence of the Atonement. 
 
 (11) The development of the theory shows how in- 
 evitable is the transition from the new presentation 
 to what was essential to the older doctrines. What 
 must be included in Christ’s expiatory confession to 
 make it complete is His actual experience of death 
 as the penalty of sin. An analysis of the conception 
 of penitence which goes deep enough into moral and 
 religious reality leads inevitably to the idea of penalty. 
 Abdlard, as we have seen, starting from a different 
 assumption, is led to recognise, if inconsistently, this 
 element in Christ’s death. An objection to Campbell’s 
 theory which must be reserved for fuller discussion 
 in the next chapter is whether such terms as repent- 
 ance and confession can be used any more appro- 
 priately than the term penalty in regard to the 
 
 1 P. 289. 2 P. 302. 
 
176 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 experience and consciousness of the Sinless and Holy, 
 or should be used only of the sinful. Apart from the 
 question of terms, this theory contributes an essential 
 element to the doctrine. 
 
 (10) Albrecht Ritschl in his monumental work 
 Rechifertigung und Verséhnung (Justification and Re- 
 conciliation) ! strikes out a new path. 
 
 (i) He starts with the traditional doctrine of the 
 work of Christ as fulfilling the offices of prophet, 
 priest, and king, and insists on the need of modifying 
 it in four respects :—(a) For the idea of office must be 
 substituted the more ethical conception of vocation, 
 in which the personality realises itself in discharging 
 its tasks. (b) The similarity of Christ and believers 
 must be more fully recognised. MRitschl does not 
 intend to deny the originality or uniqueness of Christ ; 
 only to affirm very strongly that Christ reproduces 
 in the community which He has founded His own 
 relation to God. (c) In His prophetic function Christ 
 represents God to man, and in His priestly man to God ; 
 but both of these functions are subordinate to His 
 kingly as founder of the Kingdom of God on earth, 
 as establishing for Himself and His Church dominion 
 over the world, a transcendence and independence 
 of personal life in communion with God above all the 
 threats and hindrances the world may offer, or, as 
 Paul puts it, the assurance that ‘all things work 
 together for good to those who love God,’ that nothing 
 can separate the believer from the love of God (Rom. 
 vill. 28, 38, 39). (d) As the kingly function was 
 exercised in the humiliation, so are the priestly and 
 prophetic functions still exercised in the exaltation ; 
 the change of state does not affect the continuity of 
 the vocation. All these are undoubtedly theological 
 refinements to be approved. 
 
 (ii) Ritschl denies that there is any hindrance in 
 God or man to forgiveness which needs to be removed. 
 On the one hand, man’s sin is regarded by God as due 
 to ignorance, and so forgivable; on the other, God’s 
 
 1 English translation of vol. iii. by H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay, 
 1900. See The Ritschlian Theology, by the writer, pp. 271-77, 285-86, 316-33. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 177 
 
 wrath is an eschatological conception, and is directed 
 only against those who finally resist His purpose, who 
 refuse forgiveness. The positive motive of God in 
 forgiving men is His intention to establish the King- 
 dom of God among men, as the religious good of 
 fellowship with God and the moral task of the life 
 of love among men. The realisation of this forgive- 
 ness depends on Christ as the founder of the Kingdom, 
 who maintains unbroken His religious unity with God 
 in His trust and surrender even unto death. This He 
 does as the representative of His community before 
 God, since He can and does reproduce in it that same 
 attitude towards God. The believer who is both 
 historically and logically dependent on the com- 
 munity appropriates by faith what Christ has done 
 for him and will do in him. 
 
 (iu) A valuable thought is that the work of Christ 
 must be related to the fulfilment of God’s purpose, 
 the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, as 
 both a religious good and a moral task; to His own 
 personal development in carrying out His vocation ; 
 and to the believer’s own experience and character. 
 As will afterwards be more fully urged, he sets aside 
 far too easily the punitive aspect of God’s dealings 
 with man. He takes out of the experience of Christ 
 what has been most precious to the believer, when 
 he denies the vicarious character of the sufferings of 
 Christ. He contradicts the teaching of Jesus in its 
 stress on the worth of every soul to God, when he 
 so entirely subordinates the individual to the com- 
 munity. It may be added that some of his school 
 stand nearer to the common evangelical position than 
 he does. 
 
 (11) Dr. Denney’s The Christian Doctrine of 
 Reconciliation (1917) may be regarded as the latest 
 contribution of primary importance on the sub- 
 ject. 
 
 (1) His comparison of the three works which have 
 just been discussed deserves quotation. ‘ One char- 
 acteristic of all these books is that, to a far greater 
 degree than those which preceded them, they rest 
 
 M 
 
178 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 on the basis of history and experience. They are 
 all conscious of Jesus as well as of Christ, and con- 
 scious that, whatever the work of Christ may be, it 
 must arise naturally out of the life of Jesus. He is 
 not conceived as here to carry out any plan of salva- 
 tion, but He is the Saviour by being what He is, 
 doing what He does, and suffering what He suffers, 
 as the relations in which He finds Himself require. 
 There is nothing artificial in the work of the Saviour ; 
 it is ethical in its inspiration and achievement from 
 beginning to end. It is ethical also in the mode of its 
 appropriation. The two German writers, to avoid 
 risks in different directions, lay stress here on the idea 
 of the Church. Perhaps what Schleiermacher is most 
 afraid of is magic, the kind of appropriation of Christ 
 and His grace which is taught in the sacramental 
 doctrines of the Church of Rome. . . . Mysticism, on 
 the other hand, in the sense of a direct and immedi- 
 ate contact between Christ and the believing soul, is 
 Ritschl’s bugbear; and the Church, in the ethical life 
 of which the Christianity of the individual is kept 
 within sound moral limits, is part of His defence 
 against it.’ ‘M‘Leod Campbell distinguishes more 
 emphatically than either Schleiermacher or Ritschl 
 Christ’s dealing with men on the part of God and His 
 dealing with God on the part of men.’ He, following 
 Jonathan Edwards, restores the connection of Christ’s 
 work as substitute or representative of man with love. 
 ‘ Vicariousness is seen to be only another name for 
 love: under the influence of love men make the case 
 of others their own; and even if we speak of Christ as 
 our substitute, it is because love has impelled Him to 
 make our situation His. Side by side with the altered — 
 emphasis at this point comes a new sense that what 
 Christ does for us must be more definitely related to 
 what He produces in us. His identification of Him- 
 self with us must have as its aim and issue an identi- 
 fication on our part of ourselves with Him. The 
 vocabulary of imputation, if not displaced by that 
 of identification, is interpreted through it... . It 
 
 will not be denied that in such thoughts as these 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 179 
 
 personality gets the place, or something like the place, 
 which is its due.’ # 
 
 (ii) Dr. Denney’s own exposition of the subject may 
 now be briefly summarised :—(a) His experimental 
 basis is shown in his choosing the conception of re- 
 conciliation as his governing idea. While reconcilia- - 
 tion in some form is indispensable for every religion, 
 Christian reconciliation is inseparable from Christ, 
 both in His historical actuality and as He is now 
 present by His Spirit. The initiative in reconciliation 
 is with God, but the reconciliation is mutual. It is 
 a reconciled God to whom man is reconciled. For- 
 giveness is no less a real experience for God than for 
 man, for to forgive makes a difference as well as to 
 be forgiven. (b) Denney fully recognises that Christ 
 was already doing His reconciling work in His treat- 
 ment of sinners in His earthly life; yet he concen- 
 trates his thought on the Cross. Accepting in sub- 
 stance the view of M‘Leod Campbell, he rejects the 
 use of the term repentance for the experience of Christ, 
 as he rightly recognises that it is morally confusing 
 to speak of the repentance or the punishment of the 
 sinless. But, insisting that there is a real relation 
 between death and sin, as the consummation of the 
 divine reaction against sin in the moral order of the 
 world, and that the Scriptures insist on something 
 dreadful and mysterious in the death of Christ, he 
 puts his conclusion in the form of a question: ‘ Can 
 we say anything else than this: That while the Agony 
 and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming 
 upon Jesus through a bad conscience, or making Him 
 the personal object of divine wrath, they were penal 
 in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise 
 to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race 
 in which He was incorporated, and that without doing 
 so to the uttermost He could not have been the 
 Redeemer of that race from sin, or the Reconciler 
 of sinful men to God?’? The crux of the problem 
 lies just here: Is the inexorable reaction of God 
 against sin in death a necessity of the very perfection 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 115-19. 2 Op. cit., p. 273. 
 
180 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 of God? Is it so inexorable that in bringing to men 
 the forgiveness of God, the Son of Man could not, and 
 would not even if He could, escape the reaction ? 
 Was it a necessity for love itself to share with as well 
 as for man that reaction to its very consummation 
 in death, and death apprehended as divine judgment ? 
 It is impossible to offer any logical demonstration ; 
 all that we can do is to confess an ultimate moral 
 intuition which it would be as perilous to challenge 
 as the authority of conscience itself. The writer 
 must confess his entire concurrence with the state- 
 ment by Denney just quoted. ‘The concrete view 
 of Christ’s death and the conception of it as in some 
 sense substitutionary cover the truth that there is 
 something from which the death of Christ saves the 
 sinner,’ namely, ‘from dying in our sins.’ * But for 
 His death we should have died in our sins: we should 
 have passed into the blackness of darkness with the 
 condemnation of God abiding upon us.’? It is this 
 conviction which explains the ‘ deep and ever present 
 sense of debt to Christ,’ and ‘ the initzal assurance of 
 a completed salvation which pervades the New Testa- 
 ment.’ (c) The new theological standpoint is shown in 
 the fact that Dr. Denney gives almost as much space 
 to showing reconciliation as realised in human life 
 as in proving reconciliation as achieved by Christ, 
 to Christ’s work by His Spirit in us as to His work 
 on His Cross for us. It is faith, and faith alone, 
 which he recognises as the condition of salvation. 
 While the writer agrees with him in his estimate 
 of the efficacy and sufficiency of faith, he cannot 
 but regret that Dr. Denney is not more sympathetic 
 in his treatment of those who do not understand 
 faith as comprehensively as he does. For it must be 
 admitted that the doctrine of justification by faith 
 alone has often been so stated as to justify the con- 
 tention that faith must be supplemented by union 
 with Christ, good works, the fellowship of the Church, 
 and the grace of the sacraments. A more adequate 
 conception of grace as Christ Himself acting savingly, 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 282-83. 
 
DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT 181 
 
 and of faith as man’s full personal response to Christ’s 
 action, such as Dr. Denney insists on, would correct 
 all such errors, and would assign to all such means 
 their proper function in the life of faith in the grace 
 of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT ON THE PERSON 
 AND WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 Tue two chapters preceding have shown that however 
 adequate or appropriate to the time the ecclesiastical 
 dogma of the person of Christ or the theological 
 theory of His work may have been, we cannot be 
 satisfied with the ideas or the terms which have been 
 used; but, having learned from the past on the one 
 hand what is essential to Christian faith, and on the 
 other what defects there have been in the presentation 
 of the truth about Christ, we must express our own 
 thoughts in our own words so as to commend and 
 defend to our own age the fact on which faith rests. 
 (i) The modern method of the study of the Bible 
 enables us to interpret the significance and estimate 
 the value of Christ as no previous generation could. 
 Giving Him the place which rightfully belongs to Him 
 as the consummation of the divine revelation, assigning 
 to Him the supreme authority as the Son knowing 
 and making the Father known and correcting or 
 completing all other divine oracles by His truth, we 
 are to-day reaching a conception of God more fully, 
 purely, and surely Christian than the Christian Church 
 has ever possessed before. And it is this conception 
 of God which Christ Himself gives to us which makes 
 possible for us a constructive statement about His 
 Person and Work such as could not be given before, 
 just because the conception of God had hitherto been 
 mixed up with elements of Jewish and Gentile thought 
 that were not only not Christian, but even incon- 
 sistent with what we have learned about the Father 
 from the Son. First we see God in the light of the 
 
 revelation in Jesus Christ, and then we seek to see 
 182 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 183 
 
 Christ Himself in the hight of the God so revealed 
 to us. 
 
 (11) Modern philosophy and modern psychology, 
 influenced as their development has been more or less 
 directly by the Christian reason and the Christian 
 conscience, afford us categories of thought and corre- 
 sponding terms which are much more adequate and 
 appropriate, not only to our own time but for all time, 
 to the essence of the Christian Faith. The framers 
 of the creeds used the conceptions and the terminology 
 of a philosophy which was not only not Christian, but 
 was alien to what is most distinctive of Christianity. 
 It is Christianity which has discovered personality 
 by making possible a realisation of its promise and 
 potency, undiscovered and untested before; and that 
 makes the difference between Ancient and Modern 
 thought. 
 
 (111) Although it is in the next division of the present 
 volume that the conception of God which Christ has 
 given us will be expounded, and applied to the solution 
 of many problems of thought and life, it will be neces- 
 sary here to anticipate in some measure that discussion 
 by dealing with such modifications of the idea of God 
 as this modern way of looking at the world and life 
 forces upon us—modifications which we shall find 
 accord with the revelation which Christ has given us. 
 Whether apart from Him the mind of man would have 
 reached such conclusions or not we need not now 
 decide. For our purpose this suffices, that philo- 
 sophical theism is being led to a conception of God 
 which is not only more in accord with His teaching 
 than any other has been, but also enables us to reach 
 a conception of His person and work that is more 
 intelligible and credible than any hitherto offered 
 to us. 
 
 (iv) In dealing with the history in the two previous 
 chapters, the separation there made between the 
 person and the work of Christ was for convenience 
 of treatment accepted, with the caution, however, 
 that such a separation could not be regarded as 
 satisfactory. In this constructive statement it is 
 
184 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 hoped to restore the unity, to interpret the person 
 and the work by the one conception of God, the one 
 conception of man, and the one conception of the 
 relation of God and man, which illumines both the 
 Incarnation and the Atonement.* It is because of 
 what God eternally is, man is historically becoming ; 
 and the relation between God and man should accord- 
 ing to the will of God be, that not only did the 
 Word become flesh, but the Captain of Salvation 
 tasted death for every’man. Any conception of the 
 Incarnation which does not see its fulfilment in 
 Atonement is a structure left incomplete; and any 
 conception of Atonement which does not find its 
 potency and promise in Incarnation is a structure 
 without foundations. How far the writer will succeed 
 in convincing others he knows not, but this is his 
 intention and aspiration. 
 
 (v) The categories of thought to be used may be 
 very briefly indicated. We must start with the idea 
 of the divine immanence in the world, which in 
 relation to man means the affinity and community 
 of God and man. Next, we must use the idea of 
 evolution as indicating that the method of that 
 divine immanence is a progressive revelation of God, 
 and a progressive realisation of a relation to God 
 corresponding to that revelation. Lastly, it is only 
 as we adequately explore the idea of personality in 
 God and man that these two other ideas will gain 
 their full moral and religious content. 
 
 (1) Ancient pagan thought was pervaded by dualism, 
 matter and mind, image and idea, world and God. 
 This dualism is not overcome in Plato or Aristotle, 
 and the conception of God which Christian theology 
 took over from Greek philosophy was deistic, separ- 
 ating the eternal and infinite perfect God from the 
 imperfect world in time and space. Later Jewish 
 thought felt the same influence, and, as has already 
 been shown, the conception of the Logos in Philo 
 assumed such a difference between God and the world 
 that some such mediation appeared necessary. Media- 
 tion may assert separation as well as relation. As 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 185 
 
 used in the Fourth Gospel the conception of the Logos 
 asserts a mediated immediacy of God in nature and 
 history, as the mediating agency or activity is so 
 entirely divine. The Word is not other than God, 
 but God Himself in nature and history, and as man. 
 -—~(i) The tendency of patristic thought was so to 
 assert the difference between God and man that 
 relation became an inscrutable mystery, an inex- 
 plicable miracle. The attributes of God which philo- 
 sophy affirms were emphasised to the exclusion of 
 those activities of God with which religion is concerned. 
 God was incomprehensible, indefinable, to be reached 
 only by the way of negation. One of the heresies 
 most severely condemned was Patripassianism, which 
 affirmed that the Father Himself suffered. The meta- 
 physics of this theory was crude enough, but it did 
 stand for a truth which was being ignored. The 
 Council of Chalcedon denounced as heresies both 
 Nestorianism and Monophysitism or Eutychianism. 
 ‘Some daring to pervert the mystery of the dispensa- 
 tion, which for our sakes the Lord undertook, and 
 denying the propriety of the name Mother of God 
 (@eotdxos), aS applied to the Virgin, and others bring- 
 ing in a confusion and blending of natures, and fondly 
 feigning that there is but one nature of the flesh and 
 Godhead, and by this confusion teaching the monstrous 
 doctrine that the divine nature of the Only-begotten 
 is passible.’ 1 The Fathers do not recognise the in- 
 consistency of their own position. Ifthe divine nature 
 had no part in the Passion, neither had it in the 
 being born, and therefore the mother of the human 
 nature should not be described as the Mother of 
 God. What for our present argument concerns us 
 is the assertion that the divine nature could have no 
 share in the sufferings of the human. For their 
 thought God is so exalted above the world and man 
 that He cannot be thought of as a fellow-sufferer 
 with man. The difference of nature excludes com- 
 munity of life. 
 (ii) With such presuppositions it was quite impossible 
 1 On Faith and the Creed, p. 214, 
 
186 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 to reach a satisfactory doctrine of the Incarnation. 
 The creeds may have served the purpose which is the 
 utmost that some of their defenders now claim for 
 them, of having fixed the boundaries within which 
 Christian thought may roam, but beyond which it 
 may not stray—what must be affirmed and what 
 must not be denied; but they certainly in their 
 denials and affirmations have not provided thought 
 with the data for a concrete conception of the person 
 of Christ, the content of which can be made intelligible. 
 And from the nature of the case it was impossible 
 that they should. If we start from the difference 
 of the natures we can never reach the unity of their 
 relation. If we start from the unity of their relation 
 and then ask how the natures are to be conceived, 
 if the unity of relation is to be intelligible, we may 
 hope for a solution of the problem. We do not then 
 begin with God as infinite and eternal, but with God 
 as present and active in the world of time and space. 
 How this immanence is consistent with that tran- 
 scendence is a question to which we must return when 
 we deal with the nature of God: but we are entitled 
 so to begin ; as we rise from facts to faith, our thought 
 must pass from the immanent to the transcendent 
 God. Not only is such an advance necessary for our 
 understanding of the doctrine of the Incarnation: 
 two reasons for it may be offered in the thought of 
 to-day. 
 (a) We do not and cannot think of the world as a 
 completed machine, so constructed that, having once 
 been started, it goes on of itself; we have to think 
 of it rather as a growing organism, inadequate as _ 
 the analogy is, or, what is more nearly adequate, an 
 unfolding purpose. There is not only continuity of — 
 movement, there is progress. The rigid atom has 
 slipped out of the grasp of the man of science, and 
 what he is now laying hold of by his hypothesis 1s 
 force, ever active force. (The deism of the eighteenth 
 century is an impossible mode of thought in_ the 
 twentieth.) Were it not for other considerations which 
 need not be discussed at this point, pantheism would 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 187 
 
 be a much more timely way of looking at the world. 
 It is in the realm of morals and religion that the 
 defects of pantheism are discovered ; in the sphere of 
 nature we must affirm an immanent God if we are 
 to believe in God at all—a God constantly present 
 and active in nature. If we think consistently we, 
 cannot put a long series of secondary causes between 
 the present order of nature and the First or Ultimate 
 Cause; a system of nature.does not.exclude God from 
 the world. Physical forces are God’s infinite power 
 exercised in finite forms; natural laws are God’s. 
 infinite wisdom expressed in finite forms. Because 
 there is constancy and consistency in God’s presence 
 and activity—His fidelity to His purpose and His 
 promise, on which men can rely and with which they 
 can co-operate—the effects of these physical forces 
 are in accord with the natural laws man has dis- 
 covered. Natural laws.are God’s habits of action _ 
 in the world, the order of nature His character as so 
 disclosed to us. As we shall see, in considering the 
 next category of thought, that order of nature is not 
 a rigid uniformity, but a continuous progress. There 
 is no break in the divine action, as God does relate 
 the present activity to the past: in creating the new 
 He preserves the old, and the creation of the new is 
 conditioned by the preservation of the old; He is 
 not for ever extemporising the strange and unrelated. 
 Physical and chemical conditions are preserved in 
 the vital process, and the development of mind is 
 conditioned by the growth of the organism. Yet, as 
 these illustrations at once suggest, there are marked 
 stages in the cosmic evolution, or the divine creation. 
 We may describe this process as progress, because life 
 has values matter alone has not, and mind values 
 which do not belong to life alone. In the personal 
 development of man, who is the consummation of 
 the evolution as we know it, values emerge—truth, 
 holiness, blessedness, love—which in the reason and 
 conscience of man claim to be absolute. In human 
 religion the Universe becomes, as it were, self-con- 
 scious, for man, the creature, becomes conscious of 
 
188 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and seeks to relate Himself to the Creator—nay, even 
 in religion a divine revelation is apprehended, in 
 which God makes Himself known and relates Himself 
 to man as Father to child. The progress of the 
 Universe lies in its becoming always more and more 
 expressive of God, who at last discloses His secret 
 in the ideals of man and the relation which through 
 revelation is in religion established between God and 
 man. The divine immanence is expressed in the 
 words of the apostle, ‘im Him we live, and move, and 
 have our being’ (Acts xvil. 28), but still more ade- 
 quately in the doctrine of God with us in the living 
 Christ and within us by His own Spirit. The most 
 - mystical piety and the most speculative thought are 
 of one accord as regards the immanence of God in 
 nature and history, but more expressively in the inner 
 life of the seer and the saint. 
 
 (>) Mr. Wells is moved by the Zeitgeist, the spirit 
 of the age, in his search for a God who will meet the 
 human need, because He is a fellow-sufferer with man, 
 and man may be a fellow-worker with Him. Political 
 conditions do affect religious thinking, and the God 
 of the older theology, enthroned in heaven, reproduced 
 the Eastern despot. The democratic spirit of this 
 
 age demands a God who is one of us. There is, it — 
 must be granted, a great deal which is very crude) 
 
 in all this thinking; but democracy is nearer truth 
 
 than despotism, as it recognises the inherent, in- | 
 
 alienable value of human personality. That the God 
 
 in and through all must also be over all, even in order 
 that He may be all to man which man needs and 
 craves of God, is the complementary truth which we 
 neglect at peril to our thought, with loss to our life. 
 The agony and desolation through which the world 
 passed in what is generally called the Great War, 
 but we may hope and pray will one day be known as 
 the Last War, made urgent and insistent the demand 
 for the God whom, as Mr. Wells has discovered, he him- 
 
 self needs—God who suffers and struggles with and | 
 
 forman. The impassible God would be the monstrous 
 heresy for the religious thought and life of to-day. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 189 
 
 God’s immanence finds its highest expression in His 
 participation in love in the whole life and lot of man; 
 and that is realised and revealed, not in Incarnation 
 apart from the Cross, but in Incarnation as completed 
 in the Cross. For these two reasons we may approach 
 the problem of Christology from the standpoint of 
 this demand for the divine immanence as a guiding 
 principle. ? 
 
 (2) As has already been indicated, the method of_ 
 divine creation, as we know and understand it, is 
 evolution. 
 
 (i) There are two conceptions of evolution which at 
 once confront us. On the assumption that nothing 
 can be in the effect that is not in the conditions, that 
 the principle of causality demands an exact equival- 
 ence of antecedents and consequents, it is sometimes 
 asserted that nothing can be evolved that is not 
 already involved, that all nature and history were 
 latent in the diffused matter with which the process 
 began. Mr. Herbert Spencer was a past master in 
 the verbal jugglery by which he reduced morality, 
 religion, science, art, society to be nothing more nor 
 other than matter-in-motion. Matter may have 
 ‘the promise and the potency of life and mind,’ but 
 is fulfilment no more nor other than promise, or 
 actuality than potency ? If the Universe be a closed 
 system, then we are driven to the conclusion that the 
 evolution must be explicable by the resident forces 
 under inherent laws; but then the explanation must 
 escape us altogether: how can the always-the-same 
 be producing the ever-different ? A machine repeats 
 the same operation, however complicated that may 
 be; it does not so alter its structure that it becomes 
 capable of still more complicated operations. We are 
 driven to the other conception of evolution, which 
 Ward,! following Harvey, describes as epigenesis, and 
 Bergson as creative evolution. ‘The new is not simply 
 educed from the old; it is produced, but is other and 
 more than the old. The élan vital of Bergson is 
 creative. Such a conception of a finite Universe 
 
 1 Realm of Ends, p. 98. 
 
190 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 self-enclosed is a self-contradiction. The only way 
 we can make it intelligible to ourselves at all is to 
 think of the finite Universe as so related to the 
 Infinite God that His activity is not only preserving 
 what already is, but is ever creating what is yet to be. 
 For the ends of chemical and physical science it may 
 be altogether legitimate to assume that the matter 
 and the force in the Universe are a fixed quantum, 
 although more recent speculations seem to be breaking 
 down the rigid barriers of a closed system ; for philo- 
 sophy as an endeavour to make the total reality in- 
 telligible it is imperative to recognise that evolution 
 as we know and understand it is creative, that the 
 finite universe involves the constant activity of the 
 infinite God. 
 
 (11) We have now, ‘ greatly daring,’ to try and con- 
 ceive more distinctly that creative activity. That 
 activity involves both self-limitation and _ self-fulfil- 
 ment, or, to use words suggested by the New Testa- 
 ment, kenosis (Phil. 11. 7) and plerosis (Eph. 1. 28).1 
 
 (a) God must limit infinite power in finite forces, 
 infinite wisdom in finite laws. As the work expresses 
 the worker, He limits Himself in the measure in 
 which the work is inadequately expressive of Himself. 
 Matter is less expressive of God than life, and life 
 than mind, and mind as instinct than as reason and 
 conscience. God limits Himself in so far as life has a 
 spontaneity of its own, and mind a liberty, so that 
 there may be a development of life—as seems to be 
 the case for instance in parasites—and of mind, as in 
 the sin of man, which is contrary to the divine in- 
 tention. God may so limit Himself in the creature, 
 in bestowing spontaneity of life or liberty of mind, 
 that the creature may oppose itself to the Creator. 
 God has accepted the limitation of an opposition in 
 His Universe to Himself. The writer is convinced 
 that human liberty can be harmonised with divine 
 sovereignty only as a voluntary self-limitation by God 
 is admitted in the making of man as he is. Further, 
 
 1 See The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, by P. T. Forsyth, Lectures XI. 
 and XII. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 1oT 
 
 the self-limitation of power to let man be free seems 
 to involve also a self-limitation of knowledge, so 
 that God knows free acts before the choice is made 
 only as possible and not as actual. v That the Creation 
 might culminate in ‘ self-knowledge, self-reverence, 
 self-control’ in personality freely willing the reality 
 of its ideals, God set bounds to His infinitude in His 
 creative activity in a finite Universe, and most of all 
 in man as free to oppose or to co-operate with God 
 in the fulfilment of His purpose. Our thought must 
 recognise a Sself-limitation (a kenosis, or self-empty- 
 ing) in God. 
 
 (b) This self-emptying is, however, for a self- 
 ~ expression which is a self-fulfilling. God is manifest- 
 ing more and more of Himself in the creative evolution. 
 When in man a creature becomes capable of receiving 
 the revelation of God in the ideals which are reality 
 in God, and in a personal relation, conscious and 
 voluntary, is realising these ideals, the self-expression 
 is distinct and the self-fulfilment certain. When in 
 Jesus the Christ our Lord the human development 
 culminated in One who knew Himself Son of God, 
 and God as Father, and who perfectly did the will 
 of God as He abode in intimate communion with 
 God, that self-expression within the Universe was 
 adequate and the self-fulfilment complete. If we 
 take the view of evolution which treats the Universe 
 as a closed system, then we must not affirm that 
 evolution accounts for Him. But if we accept the 
 more adequate view that evolution is epigenesis, that 
 it is creative, then we can regard Him as man as the 
 highest stage of that progress of God’s self-expression 
 and self-fulfilment in His Universe. He is the promise 
 and the potency of that family of God perfect as 
 is the Father in Heaven, and possessing eternal life 
 in Him, which is the goal of the long course of nature 
 and of history. He came in ‘the fullness of the 
 times,’ when the conditions were prepared for that 
 consummating creative act of God. 
 
 (3) How God can express and fulfil Himself in man, 
 and finally and perfectly in Christ, is a matter that 
 
192 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 demands fuller inquiry.” There must be a close 
 affinity and community between God and man, if 
 the perfect man could also be verily God. 
 
 (1) Modern philosophy as contrasted with ancient 
 is subjective and not objective, and the development 
 of psychology during the last century has given to 
 the category of personality an importance it had not 
 before. By personality we mean the conscious subject 
 thinking, feeling, willing; the self-conscious subject 
 aware of these activities, and seeking self-satisfaction, 
 self-expression, self-realisation in them; the subject 
 which can compare its own actuality with the ideals, 
 truth, holiness, blessedness, love, for which it strives 
 and in which it can find its fulfilment. In man 
 personality is hampered and hindered in fulfilling 
 itself by conditions imposed upon it which it cannot 
 control. It is externally limited and internally in- 
 complete. But it not only has the desire for and 
 makes the effort after * self-knowledge, self-reverence, 
 self-control,’ but regards its ideals, not as illusions, 
 but as promises of what yet will be. Even in man 
 personality reaches beyond and rises above actuality 
 with its limitations and imperfections. Hence it is 
 an unjustified assumption that such finitude is a 
 necessary condition of personality, and that we cannot 
 therefore ascribe personality to God. 
 
 (11) If self-consciousness in man emerges along with 
 consciousness of not-self, that does not prove that 
 God cannot be personal, since there is no not-self 
 for Him, as He is total reality: for, in the first 
 place, there must even in man be a sense of self, how- 
 ever vague, before the contrast with the not-self can 
 emerge at all; and, in the second place, as man 
 develops personality, it is his own inner life more than 
 the outer world that gives content to his conscious- 
 ness, and it is the aspiration of the developing self 
 to be thus more and more self-sufficing, rich in its 
 own inward treasures; thirdly, just because God is 
 God, He can and does constitute Himself that inner 
 life in which the contrast of self and not-self is possible 
 without an external reality not dependent on Him. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 193 
 
 If instead of taking the words infinite and absolute 
 in their literal sense, unlimited and unrelated, a sense 
 which would compel us to think of God only in 
 negations, we define them as self-limited and self- 
 related, and if man as personal aims so to determine 
 himself, then these two attributes of God are not only 
 consistent with personality, but we can give them 
 meaning only as attributes of a personal subject. 
 Once more, if man does hold the place in the process 
 of creation which he seems to hold, as the consumma- 
 tion of its progress, and if the ideals which command 
 his aspiration and effort claim absolute value, then 
 his relative insignificance physically is no adequate 
 ground for charging him with folly and audacity if 
 he conceives God, not in his own likeness, limited and 
 imperfect, but as infinitely and perfectly the reality 
 of his ideals, the source of these absolute values.! 
 
 (iii) This conclusion becomes an assurance of faith 
 in religion. Man can and does realise God’s presence, 
 holds communion with Him, and gains satisfaction 
 in Him. Man’s personality as imperfect is receptive 
 of and responsive to God’s perfect personality as 
 communicative. Unless the whole religious thought 
 and life of mankind be an illusion and a mockery, 
 there is communion between God and man. Earthly 
 goods are often sought in religion, and moral goodness 
 is sometimes the dominant desire; but the core of 
 religion is the hunger and the thirst of the soul for 
 God, the living God, in whom alone man fully lives. 
 Just as there has been evolution in nature and history, 
 so has there been development in religion.” The 
 unique significance and value of the Hebrew religion 
 is that there we can trace as in no other a development 
 of religion which was the channel of a progressive 
 divine revelation. There was a correspondence in a 
 Godward movement of man, and a manward move- 
 ment of God, faith receiving and responding to grace. 
 Historically that double movement is completed in 
 Jesus Christ. The immanent activity of God in the 
 Universe was consummated in that perfect human 
 
 1 See Lotze’s Philosophy of Religion, Eng. trans., ch. ii. 
 N 
 
194 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 receptivity for and responsiveness to God. But that 
 was met by a transcendent act of God communicative 
 of such fullness of light, life, and love from the very 
 being of God Himself, that the secret of what God is 
 ~ was at last disclosed, the eternal reality of God was 
 revealed. “ When we come in a later section to discuss 
 the doctrine of the Trinity, 1t will be necessary to 
 consider how we must conceive the eternal reality of 
 God Himself. At the present stage it will suffice that 
 the argument here developed enables us to conceive 
 Christ as the perfect human. personality, perfectly 
 receptive of and Peas to the perfect communica- 
 tion of God. 
 
 (iv) For the static conception of natures we sub- 
 stitute the dynamic conception of personality. In- 
 stead of conjoining in one person the differences of 
 these two natures, we show the concurrence of the 
 divine activity manward and the human activity 
 Godward—an affinity that fitly issues in community. 
 Imperfect but receptive and responsive human per- 
 sonality becomes the channel of the manifestation 
 and operation in history of the communicative perfect 
 personal God. We must think of human personality 
 as individual, a person, and so must give up the notion 
 of an impersonal nature. We must think of the Logos 
 or Son as personal, but we cannot think of Him as 
 individual, a person in the modern sense of the word, 
 which, it need not be added, is not the sense of the 
 creeds. In the view here presented human person- 
 ality is completed in this relation to the personal 
 God, because it was for such community of life with 
 God that man was made.” But this is not the same 
 as the doctrine of Leontius and John of Damascus, 
 the enhypostasis of the impersonal human nature by 
 the personal Logos. As the conception of personality 
 is dynamic, and not static, we must conceive the 
 Incarnation as itself progressive, a developing human 
 receptivity and responsiveness, the condition of an 
 increasing communicativeness on the part of God. 
 Jesus became more certain of His Sonship as His 
 claim was challenged by human unbelief. As has 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 195 
 
 been shown in a previous chapter, the intuition of His 
 eternal relation to God (pre-existence) came to Him 
 as He was exposed to the derision of His foes. His 
 human experience of trial, temptation, sorrow, struggle, 
 disappointment, and opposition disciplined and de- 
 veloped the faith of the Son to receive more abund- 
 antly the grace of the Father. These two terms both 
 affirm a relation and a difference of each in the relation. 
 The Father teaches, gives, approves; the Son learns, 
 accepts, and submits. ‘ He learned obedience through 
 the things that He suffered’ (Heb. v. 8). Such an 
 experience was necessary to perfect the relation of 
 dependence and surrender of the Son to the Father. 
 We are in the Gospels in the realm of morals and 
 religion, of personal relationship, and not of abstract 
 metaphysics, in which the creeds move and so fail 
 to do justice either to historical reality or religious 
 and moral interests. As the previous argument has 
 shown, the conception here offered is not humanitarian 
 nor Unitarian. The immanent divine activity in 
 nature and history is completed in the human per- 
 sonality ; there is the transcendent divine act which 
 all that went before does not explain in the perfect 
 divine content which is given to this personality... 
 
 (4) Calvin’s view that even apart from the purpose 
 of redemption there might have been a divine In- 
 carnation has already been mentioned. The previous 
 argument leads to that conclusion. The relation of 
 God to the world and man would be incomplete with- 
 out such a consummation. The Creation can be 
 completed in the Creator, God as love must give His 
 life to and find His life in man as perfectly as can be 
 conceived. Without in any way making light of what 
 sin means in the world, it is to the writer incredible 
 that it should be the decisive factor in determining 
 that God should become man. The fact with which 
 we are concerned, however, is not Incarnation in a 
 sinless race, but Incarnation not only for the revelation 
 of God to man but for the redemption of man from 
 sin. It is a very serious error to confine the work of 
 Christ to the sacrifice of the Cross, or in that work to 
 
196 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 separate the revelation of God and the redemption 
 of man. If we do not narrow the meaning of revela- 
 tion, as an intellectualist theology tends to do, to a 
 communication of knowledge about God, and mean 
 by it the manifestation of God in deed as in word, 
 n passion as in action, we may affirm that the revela- 
 tion of God in Christ is the redemption of man through 
 Him. To know the Father is to be forgiven, and to 
 become a child of God. Nor must we isolate the 
 revelation of God and redemption of man in Christ 
 from the permanent and universal activity of God. 
 ‘O Israel, hope in the Lord, for with the Lord there 
 is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption. 
 And He shall redeem Israel from all his imiquities ’ 
 (Ps. cxxx. 7, 8). Rightly did Dr. Bruce, in his book 
 on The Chief End of Revelation, insist that it was 
 redemption. In controversy Paul opposes the Law 
 and the Gospel, but law did not exhaust the content 
 of the divine revelation in the Old Testament. The 
 Holy One of Israel is the Saviour (Is. xlii. 3). ° Christ 
 Himself was not Redeemer on the Cross alone. The 
 truth He taught, the holiness He lived, the grace He 
 showed to sinners, the love He bestowed on all, were 
 redemptive, wherever faith was receptive of and re- 
 sponsive to Him. He forgave and He saved during 
 His earthly ministry, and His Cross came not as a 
 contradiction of that ministry but as its completion, 
 having the same motive, purpose, and method of 
 redemption. 
 
 (5) What we have to interpret is the Incarnation 
 as redemptive, as affected by the fact of sm. We 
 must, but only as far as is necessary for the immediate 
 purpose, consider what sin is and how it affects the 
 relation of God and man. 
 
 (i) We are not here concerned, as we shall be in 
 a later section, with the origin of sin in the race, or 
 its beginnings in the individual, but simply with its 
 nature. Moral evil in man as the violation of the 
 laws of his own nature is vice, as the violation of the 
 laws of human society is crime, as the disturbance of 
 the relation to God is sin. It has both its moral and 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 197 
 
 its religious aspect in this relation. As disobedience 
 to God’s law as written in the human conscience, it is 
 an offence against God, a challenge of His authority, 
 a resistance of His purpose. As distrust of God’s 
 love as that love makes its appeal to man both in 
 His goodness and His grace, it is an injury to God, 
 it is a withholding from Him of what He desires, of 
 that for which God made man, for He made him for 
 fellowship with as well as likeness to Himself. | 
 ~ (11) What are the effects of sin? (a) First of all, 
 there is guilt and the sense of guilt. By guilt we 
 mean not only that man is hable to punishment, 
 exposed to the consequences of his wrong-doing, 
 physical, social, personal, but that God’s judgment 
 rests upon him: the holy love of God is not only 
 distressed, but disapproves. God’s relation to man is 
 so intimate that He cannot be indifferent to man’s 
 sin: He is, and must be, affected by it in this twofold 
 way. He is not only grieved by the injury and loss 
 which man brings on himself by his sin. Against the 
 sin itself there is a reaction, an inevitable reaction, of 
 the perfection of God—not a mild displeasure, but a 
 severe disapprobation. We shall be quite incapable 
 of understanding the truth of the Atonement unless we 
 have ourselves experienced this reaction against sin, 
 this judgment on sin, and, having felt its necessity in 
 ourselves, cannot but hold that it is inevitable for 
 God. If a man believes that God as love forgives 
 sin easily at no cost, because there is no such inevit- 
 able reaction against sin, he cannot be made to under- 
 stand what the Cross means. This guilt is a fact for 
 God in the relation between God and man, and not 
 merely a feeling in man about that relation. In man 
 there is the sense of guilt, the apprehension, more 
 or less adequate, of the fact of guilt. Man becomes 
 aware that his relation to God has been thus affected. 
 _ This sense of guilt brings to the religious man an acute 
 distress. 
 
 (b) Man is so constituted that for every action there 
 is a reaction on himself. In acting he forms habits, 
 and his habits fix his character. We can maintain 
 
198 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 man’s continued liberty and responsibility only as 
 we recognise, as the facts of experience warrant us in 
 doing, that the character does not exhaust the per- 
 sonality, but that there are reserves of psychic energy 
 which can with an adequate stimulus be so evoked 
 as to make a fresh start—reformation or conversion— 
 actual, even where there is apparently a fixity of 
 character in evil. Nevertheless, the common conse- 
 quence of sin, and continuance in sin, is enslavement 
 to sin. It is in regard to the vices of drunkenness and 
 uncleanness that this bondage is most glaringly seen ; 
 but a man may also be a slave of selfishness, temper, 
 greed. Paul has most vividly described this tragedy 
 in Romans vii. 7-25. The temptation grows stronger 
 and the will becomes weaker, and the contest becomes 
 so unequal that defeat seems inevitable, unless other 
 forces can be brought into the field, such as the grace 
 of God. The sense of guilt will intensify this feeling 
 of bondage. Estranged from God, the man feels him- 
 self alone with his sin and cast on his own resources. 
 An uneasy conscience will mean an enfeebled will. 
 If forgiveness remove the sense of guilt it will also be 
 a freeing and strengthening of the will. It is because 
 of this bondage to sin that the law of God is a burden. 
 The contrast between desire and duty does emerge 
 in every moral consciousness, but it becomes a con- 
 flict only when desire has broken bounds, has become 
 rebellious, and has established a tyranny over the 
 will. Setting aside such commandments of men as 
 are arbitrary and provoke disobedience, the law of 
 God, the ideal of what man should be, will approve 
 its worth to the conscience, and obedience will be 
 not bondage but freedom. Given, however, on the 
 one hand this estrangement from God, and on the 
 other this enslavement to sin, then the claims of the 
 law will appear grievous, and the inability to meet 
 them and the self-reproach which failure will bring 
 will make the law burdensome. The yoke of obedi- 
 ence can be made easy and the burden of submission 
 light only as the love of Christ becomes the constrain- 
 ing motive, and the power of His Spirit brings the 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 199 
 
 deliverance of the will from its enslavement. When 
 the guilt of sin is removed and the bondage is broken, 
 then also there is emancipation from the law as itself 
 a bondage. 
 
 (c) When Shakespeare put on the lips of Hamlet 
 the confession, ‘ conscience doth make cowards of 
 us all,’ he uttered the common human experience. 
 Unless a man has reasoned himself out of the belief, 
 there is a dread of judgment to come. Death so 
 bounds the human horizon, that it is at the gates 
 of death that that dark shadow lingers. There are 
 consequences of sin in this life, but they are not 
 exhausted here. Many transgressors do seem to evade 
 the penalty which they deserve. The belief in God 
 as holy and righteous deepens this dread. God will 
 hereafter deal with men more exactly according to 
 their deeds than He does here. The writer cannot 
 regard these ideas as superstitions which can be dis- 
 carded. «If for Christians this dread has been removed, 
 it is not because it has been disproved as an illusion, 
 but because in the new relation to God, into which 
 Christ brings men, the old things have passed away 
 and all things have become new. It is the love of 
 God which has cast out the fear.v The writer agrees 
 with Dr. Denney! that Jesus Himself did regard 
 death as the penalty of sin, and that the agony and 
 desolation of Gethsemane and Calvary can be under- 
 stood only as we recognise that for Him death was 
 not merely natural occurrence, but really divine 
 judgment. We may freely admit that as physical 
 dissolution death is a natural occurrence, and that 
 man as a living organism is necessarily subject to it. 
 We need not assume that death as such was introduced 
 into the world as a consequence of man’s sin, for we 
 know it was here long before man’s coming. We need 
 not indulge in any speculation as to whether sinless 
 man would have escaped the common lot altogether, 
 or what it might have been for him. For man the 
 natural occurrence becomes a personal experience, 
 the content of which must be determined by what 
 
 1 The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 268. 
 
200 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 he has made himself, how he stands related to God, 
 and how it affects even human relationships. It is 
 a goal which is believed to be the starting-point of a 
 fresh course. It is not merely man’s sense of guilt 
 which subjectively invests death with darkness and 
 terror; as the sense of guilt corresponds with the 
 fact of guilt now, so it is only reasonable to think that 
 in death or after death God does deal with man, if 
 unredeemed, to bring home to him, as life has not yet 
 brought home, the reality of the divine judgment on 
 sin. That itself may be an act of grace and may 
 prove to him who so receives and responds to it a 
 means of grace, but even then the joy of salvation 
 will come only through the pain of Judgment. 
 
 (6) This is the disease: what isthe remedy? This 1s 
 the need: how can it be met? The writer himself is at 
 homein the language of the New Testament and of Chris- 
 tian theology ; but as he desires to reach those to whom 
 some of that language is a difficulty, he will try to set 
 out all that is essential in the language of common life. 
 
 (i) The word forgiveness is a familiar word, as in 
 human relations there is occasion and demand for 
 it. What do we mean by it? (a) It is not primarily 
 the prevention of the consequences of sin, physical, 
 social, and personal, nor the suspension of such further 
 judgment as may be anticipated. A man who by his 
 vice has injured his health does not recover it as 
 soon as he turns from his evil ways and is forgiven. 
 A man who by dishonesty has forfeited the confidence 
 of his fellows does not at once recover his reputation 
 when he returns to the ways of uprightness. A man 
 when he becomes a Christian does not always at once 
 break off all the habits which had hitherto enslaved 
 him. But, nevertheless, forgiveness does affect even 
 these consequences: not only would continuance in 
 sin have aggravated these consequences, but the 
 changed man changes the effect of these consequences 
 upon himself. Even if the experience of God’s grace 
 does not by the peace of mind it brings promote health 
 better than it would have been, he bears it in such a 
 way as makes his experience other than it would 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 201 
 
 have been. His fellows may be slower in restoring 
 him than they should be, but, the genuineness of the 
 change having been proved, he may regain his position 
 in society, and, even if he does not, he will bear what 
 falls on him meekly, and it will be to him a means of 
 grace. As we shall show, one of the effects of forgive- 
 ness is deliverance from sin’s bondage, not at once 
 complete, but progressive, so that the reaction on a 
 man’s nature of his former sin will be counteracted 
 by the reaction of his nature by faith to God’s grace. 
 It is as untrue as it is cruel to say that forgiveness 
 does not in any way affect the consequences of sin ; 
 for where it does not modify them, it changes the man 
 so that they are not the same to him. As regards 
 the judgment to come, that has been made far too 
 prominent in a great deal of preaching about forgive- 
 ness. ‘To escape hell and to get into heaven matters 
 little in comparison with being right with God. If 
 that relation be restored to what it should be, then 
 the best that hope can look for is assured. Even to 
 the Christian death and the Unseen World may bring 
 home judgment, but that will be for the reconciled 
 unto fuller salvation. ‘ There is now no condemnation 
 to them that are in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. viii. 1). 
 
 (b) What forgiveness primarily is, is the restoration 
 of the personal relation to God which sin has disturbed. 
 As on God’s part it is the removal of the guilt, so on 
 man’s part it is relief from the sense of guilt. The 
 sin remains, and God’s judgment of disapproval on 
 the sin remains ; and where there is no such judgment, 
 there is a passing over of sin, but not a forgiveness 
 of it (Rom. in. 25). In forgiveness the sinner is so 
 disassociated from his sin that the judgment of it 
 does not fall on him as a continuance of that divine 
 displeasure which hinders the loving communion with 
 God which God wills for man. God’s grace wills so 
 to disassociate the sinner from His sin, and so seeks 
 and strives with men that they will disassociate them- 
 selves from their sin; and when by repentance and 
 faith this disassociation has taken place, then the for- 
 giveness God intends and makes it His endeavour 
 
202 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 to effect becomes actual. As the displeasure of God 
 is removed, so the distrust of man passes away. God 
 delights in instead of being grieved with the sinner, 
 now the child; and man, instead of feeling estranged 
 from God, has the joy of God’s Fatherhood. 
 
 (c) It seems necessary at this point in the argument 
 to remove a misconception which is very common 
 in regard to forgiveness. To blunt the edge of the 
 insistent teaching of the New Testament on the duty 
 of men to forgive one another, it is often insisted 
 that there must be repentance before there can be 
 forgiveness; and no sign or offer of forgiveness 1s 
 made to call forth the repentance. As forgiveness 
 affects the mutual relation of persons, it cannot be 
 one-sided. It is not actualised when only offered, 
 but only when also accepted. But the person who 
 has been wronged need not wait till forgiveness is 
 sought ; if he always did, there would be much less 
 experience of forgiveness than there is. It is not only 
 the privilege but the duty of the wronged to offer that 
 forgiveness, and even to urge it with love’s importunity, 
 so that he who has done the wrong may be shamed 
 out of the moral indifference or defiance that continues 
 in sin unforgiven. It is the duty of the good man to 
 lessen the evil that is in the world, and sin unrepented 
 and unforgiven is an evil that even at a great cost 
 should be removed. God does not wait for man’s 
 repentance: He takes the initiative in freely and fully 
 offering forgiveness, in beseeching men to be forgiven. 
 It is only thus that men are brought to the repentance 
 and the faith that makes forgiveness a blessed ex- 
 perience. While there are passages in the Old Testa- 
 ment which give the impression that God will forgive 
 if men repent, yet even the sacrifices which had to 
 be offered in token of penitence and with prayer for 
 pardon were regarded as gifts of grace, a way God 
 Himself had appointed by which He might show His 
 grace to men. It is true that their efficacy was 
 limited to offences which were not a defiance of God’s 
 authority. But the highest teaching in the Old 
 
 1 See Old Testament Theology, by Schultz, ii. pp. 87-89. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 2038 
 
 Testament is this, that judgment is God’s strange 
 work (Is. xxvii. 21), and that in mercy is His delight 
 (Mic. vii. 18). In Jesus, in His earthly ministry even 
 as in the Cross, God takes the initiative, makes the 
 approach and the appeal, proclaims forgiveness, calls 
 for penitence and faith. Those ‘ righteous ’ men know 
 not Christ who are unbending in judgment on sin 
 until forgiveness is sought in penitence and faith, and 
 who even do not welcome the beginnings of penitence 
 with encouragement, and insist on a self-humiliation 
 of the penitent which may leave behind seeds of 
 bitterness. It must be confessed that the nations 
 calling themselves Christian have not since the end 
 of the War stood the test of forgiving as God forgives, 
 spontaneously, magnanimously. Christ’s death we 
 shall not understand if we suppose that it procures 
 forgiveness instead of recognising that it conveys 
 forgiveness in such a way as evokes the penitence and 
 faith in which it is received. 
 
 (11) The first effect of forgiveness offered is the re- 
 pentance and faith which are the conditions of its 
 full actuality. Just as the action of the light on a 
 sensitive part of the organism resulted in the develop- 
 ment of the eye, so the conviction that forgiveness is 
 possible produces that inward condition in which it 
 becomes actual. God’s judgment on sin which the 
 forgiveness conveys is reproduced in the sinner’s own 
 judgment on his sin in his penitence. He severs 
 himself from his sin even as God in forgiving wills 
 to separate him. God’s judgment passes away as 
 the penitent makes that judgment his own. The 
 offer of forgiveness inspires man’s faith in the goodwill 
 of God, not in forgiving only, but in imparting all 
 other gifts which may be needed to restore the rela- 
 tion to Him.’ Faith in the sufficiency of God’s grace 
 relieves fear, fills with courage, and so the bondage of 
 sin is broken. A new motive enters into the life to 
 exclude all other conflicting motives. ‘The love of 
 Christ constraineth us’ (2 Cor. v. 14). There is ‘ the 
 expulsive power of the new affection.’ A new power 
 is experienced: ‘I can do all things through Him 
 
204 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 which strengtheneth me’ (Phil. iv. 13). Now ‘all 
 things work together for good to those who love God,’ 
 because loved of God. Nothing can now separate 
 from that love (Rom. viii. 28). 
 
 (7) While Jesus in His earthly ministry conveyed 
 to men the forgiveness of God, He Himself looked 
 forward to His death as the highest service He could 
 render, the giving of His life as a ransom for many 
 (Matt. xx. 28); and at the Supper He described His 
 death as the sacrifice of the new covenant of forgive- 
 ness (Matt. xxvi. 28; cf. 1 Cor. xi. 25). Christian 
 faith has linked together the forgiveness of sin and 
 the sacrifice of the Cross. As has been shown in a 
 previous chapter, the writer accepts Paul’s inter- 
 pretation not merely on his apostolic authority, but 
 as personal convictions to which his religious experi- 
 ence and his moral conscience give a hearty assent. 
 It is not necessary to repeat here what has already 
 been said, but the conclusion of that discussion may 
 be recalled. In Paul’s teaching the Cross of Christ 
 does somehow express God’s condemnation of sin 
 more impressively and effectively than man’s endur- 
 ance of its penalties could, and yet also convincingly 
 conveys the assurance of God’s forgiveness, and thus 
 so evokes both penitence and faith that the sinner 
 forgiven becomes a child of God, called to be a saint, 
 an heir with Christ of the inheritance of the saints 
 in light. Paul does not clearly answer three questions, 
 and with these we must now try to deal. What did 
 Christ endure? How could He so endure? Why 
 must He so endure? Or, putting the matter another 
 way, we must try to show the actuality, the possibility, 
 and the necessity of the sacrifice of Christ. The first 
 answer must be exegetical, the second psychological, 
 and the third theological. 
 
 (i) As the record of Gethsemane and Calvary shows, 
 the agony of the one was an anticipation of the desola- 
 tion of the other. What He shrank and prayed to 
 be delivered from, if it were possible, was that ex- 
 perience of being forsaken by God. He regarded 
 death as the penalty of sin, as involving the possi- 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 205 
 
 bility of the loss of the unbroken fellowship with 
 God which He as Son had enjoyed with the Father. 
 He so identified Himself with sinful mankind as to 
 feel all the consequences of sin, including this its 
 ultimate consequence, for Him the worst that He 
 could experience. We must not say that He felt 
 Himself guilty, or that He was punished, or that He 
 was exposed to God’s wrath, for all such language 
 involves an intolerable confusion of what is possible 
 for the sinful and the Sinless. But in His own heart 
 He felt the consequences as no sinner could do; for 
 on the one hand He loved the sinful race as no other 
 has done, and so felt with and for it as no other 
 could do, and on the other He so loved God that He 
 saw sin and all it involves as God sees it. Sinless, 
 He could suffer for sin as much more as His love for 
 God and for man excelled all other love. To this 
 strain was His faith put, that He as Son of God should 
 as Brother of man lose, if only for a moment of 
 uttermost desolation, the comfort and joy of the love 
 of the Father. In that experience He tasted death 
 for every man; but before He gave up the ghost, 
 faith was once more confident, and it was into His 
 Father’s hands that He committed His spirit. This 
 to the writer seems the least we can dare to say of the 
 actuality of the Sacrifice upon the Cross. 
 
 (11) The actuality as thus described compels us to 
 explore the possibility. How on the one hand could 
 the Sinless so identify Himself with the sinful as to 
 endure the consequences of sin to the uttermost ? 
 How on the other hand could the well-beloved Son, 
 on whom God’s approval ever rested, endure this 
 utmost consequence, that He should feel Himself for- 
 saken of God? Christ’s experience was unique as 
 He Himself was, and yet human experience offers 
 analogies. (a) The innocent suffer with and for the 
 guilty, not only in outward lot, but also in inward 
 life. The mother of a drunken son suffers the shame 
 of his sin, even if her outward circumstances may be 
 in no way injuriously affected. There are Geth- 
 semanes and Calvarys within the loving heart. The 
 
206 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 more intense the affection, the more complete is the 
 participation in another’s life. Those who carp and 
 eavil at substitution as a theological fiction show 
 only their ignorance of or insensibility to what is 
 noblest and most heroic in human life. Love by its 
 very nature is vicarious; it freely takes another’s 
 place to share his struggle and bear his burden. It 
 was because the love of Christ excelled all human 
 love, that His self-identification with the sinful race 
 exceeded what the common mind and heart can 
 comprehend. It is only as we learn to love with 
 Him that we reach the fellowship of His sufferings, 
 being in our own experience conformed to His death 
 (Phil. iti. 10). 
 
 (b) The religious consciousness does not apprehend 
 the total reality of God even in His immediate in- 
 dividual relation to the subject. If Christ was subject 
 to human limitations, His sense of Sonship did not 
 always completely reproduce the total reality of God’s 
 Fatherhood toward Him. There were moments of 
 depression as well as of exaltation. Without claiming 
 that in the Last Discourse as given in the Fourth 
 Gospel we have His tpsissima verba, yet that report 
 justifies us in the conclusion that the earthly life was 
 a separation from the Father relatively to the closer 
 communion desired and anticipated when He returned 
 to the Father. If the sense of Sonship did vary, if 
 the communion was not always as confident and 
 satisfying, we can understand that the depression 
 might be so intensified that the certainty of nearness 
 and dearness to God might waver, and even fail. 
 And surely on the Cross there were the conditions 
 for such an experience. There are limits to the 
 content of human consciousness; the mind may be 
 so absorbed in one impression, experience, effort, as 
 to drive all competing interests into the subconscious- 
 ness. When Jesus was undergoing the strain of 
 temptation He did not feel the pangs of hunger (Matt. 
 iv. 2). He forgot His bodily needs in the joy of giving 
 the Living Water to a soul athirst (John iv. 32). 
 When He was feeling with and for man what sin means, 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 207 
 
 that apocalypse of iniquity obscured for Him the 
 vision of God. On His Cross He was realising, not 
 only because of the physical pain which man’s hate 
 and cruelty were inflicting upon Him, but still more 
 because of the manifold forms of human weakness 
 and wickedness exposed to His searching gaze, the 
 enormity of sin and the awful consequences it in- 
 volves. Is it not intelligible that He felt Himself 
 alone with that sin, and apart from God as Father ? 
 It cannot be too strongly insisted, however, that God 
 had not forsaken Him, although He felt forsaken, and 
 that as soon as the overstrained emotion had found 
 relief in words of Scripture (Matt. xxvii. 46) which 
 were words of faith still, though out of the depths, He 
 again realised that Presence, and in it found peace. 
 (ii) More difficult than either of these questions 
 is the last. If in Gethsemane Jesus Himself at first 
 prayed that if it were possible the cup might pass 
 from Him, and only, bowed in prayer before God, 
 discovered that it could not pass (Matt. xxvi. 89 and 
 42), it would be irreverent for us to assume that we 
 can offer a logical demonstration which would satisfy 
 those who bring only an inquiring intellect to the 
 subject. Itis only to the submissive spirit, depending 
 on God’s illumination, that there can come the cer- 
 tainty that thus it must be. This condition does 
 not, however, forbid any further inquiry ;* for it may 
 be that for Christ Himself the experience could be 
 all that God meant it to be only if the cup was ac- 
 cepted in the obedience of love, and as a venture of 
 faith and not merely an assent of the understanding, 
 and that to the saved in communion with the living 
 Lord may be disclosed a meaning in that sacrifice that 
 the Saviour Himself, while enduring it, did not dis- 
 cover, and could not discover if the sacrifice were to 
 be complete. (a) It is not necessary to estimate the 
 value of the theories discussed in a previous chapter. 
 In this constructive statement such reference will be 
 made as is necessary for the development of the argu- 
 ment. We may begin with the discussion of the 
 distinction made betweeen subjective theories, such 
 
208 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 as that of Abalard, and objective theories, such as 
 Anselm’s—that is, theories in which the impression 
 on man is the guiding thought, and theories in which 
 the attempt is made to show how Christ’s death affects 
 God. The writer is convinced that this is a false 
 antithesis. There is such moral affinity and com- 
 munity between God and man, that that Cross of 
 Christ can impress man truly, rightly, worthily, only 
 as it affects God. What the Cross means for God, 
 or God means in the Cross, is the meaning and the 
 sole meaning that man should find in it. As for- 
 giveness is actualised as renewed fellowship between 
 God and man only when there is repentance and faith, 
 there must be a correspondence between the human 
 conditions of receiving and the divine content which 
 is received in forgiveness. In repentance man con- 
 demns his own sin, and in so condemning morally 
 annuls it, or, if that seem too strong a phrase, at least 
 severs himself from it, so that it is no longer his act. 
 Must there not have been in the Cross which conveys 
 forgiveness also judgment on the sin that is forgiven, 
 and God’s judgment ? Must not God disclose His 
 mind concerning the world’s sin even as He unfolds 
 His will concerning the sinner whom He forgives ? 
 There might be an emotional reaction against sin as 
 a result of the contemplation of the suffering which 
 man’s wickedness imposed upon Christ; but the moral 
 reaction which alone has value in repentance demands 
 that it is God’s estimate of sin which is discovered in 
 and conveyed by the Cross. 
 
 (6) We may next assign the place which may be 
 given in a constructive statement to the idea which 
 M‘Leod Campbell has expounded. As has already 
 been said, we cannot in strict propriety use the words 
 repentance and confession of the Sinless. But we 
 can say this, that not only does the Cross impress 
 repentance on the sinner, but that the Cross expresses 
 repentance and confession of sin typically, repre- 
 sentatively, inasmuch as Christ so identified Himself 
 with sinful mankind that He felt the sorrow and 
 shame and curse of sin as His very own. In Him was 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 209 
 
 the accusing and condemning conscience of the race 
 concentrated. He bears the sins of the world upon 
 His own heart. His agony and desolation show how 
 great a burden the world’s sin ought to be to mankind. 
 
 (c) But M‘Leod Campbell had to recognise that 
 this confession was an assent to and approval of the 
 divine condemnation of sin. The passage in which 
 he states this view is of such crucial importance 
 that it must be quoted in full; it states better than 
 the writer himself could the very core of the whole 
 matter: ‘That oneness of mind with the Father, 
 which towards man took the form of condemnation 
 of sin, would, in the Son’s dealing with the Father 
 in relation to our sins, take the form of a perfect 
 confession of our sins. This confession, as to its own 
 nature, must have been a perfect Amen in humanity 
 to the judgment of God on the sin of man. . . . Let us 
 consider this Amen from the depths of the humanity 
 of Christ to the divine condemnation of sm. What 
 is it in relation to God’s wrath against sin? What 
 place has it in Christ’s dealing with that wrath ? 
 I answer: He who so responds to the divine wrath 
 against sin, saying, “‘ Thou art righteous, O Lord, 
 who judgest us,’ is necessarily receiving the full 
 apprehension and realisation of that wrath, as well 
 as of that sin against which it comes forth, into His 
 soul and spirit, into the bosom of the divine humanity, 
 and, so receiving it, He responds to it with a perfect 
 response—a response from the depths of that divine 
 humanity—and in thai perfect response He absorbs it. 
 For that response has all the elements of a perfect 
 repentance in humanity for all the sin of man—a 
 perfect sorrow—a perfect contrition—all the elements 
 of such a repentance, and that in absolute perfection, 
 all,—excepting the personal consciousness of sin ;— 
 and by that perfect response in Amen to the mind of 
 God in relation to sin is the wrath of God rightly 
 met, and that is accorded to divine justice which is its 
 due and could alone satisfy it.’1 Again it must be 
 
 1 The Nature of the Atonement, 5th ed., p. 116 ff., quoted in Denney’s 
 op. cit. pp. 117-118. 
 
 O 
 
210 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 repeated, but the misrepresentation of the evangelical 
 position is so common that repetition seems necessary 
 wherever misconception might arise: Christ is not 
 punished instead of man; there is no quantitative 
 equivalence between what He suffered and what man- 
 kind would suffer if sin’s full curse fell upon it. 
 
 (d) There is a moral order of the world which we 
 believe expresses the holy love of God; which attaches 
 consequences, physical, social, moral, and_ religious, 
 to sin; which attaches death—so Jesus believed, and 
 the common conscience confirms that belief—to sin 
 as the crucial consequence. Jesus identified Himself 
 with sinful mankind not only in sharing death with 
 men, but, on behalf of mankind as its concentrated 
 conscience, in approving, in submitting to it, as the 
 judgment of sin. Even if, with Ritschl,' we reserve 
 the term wrath for the final dealing of God with defiant 
 and resistent sin despite all His grace can do, and do 
 not use it as M‘Leod Campbell does in relation to 
 the present order, even if we regard that moral order 
 as not merely penal, but as disciplinary, reformatory, 
 even redemptive in the divine intention, nevertheless 
 we can regard Jesus’ submission to death as expressive 
 of the divine condemnation of sin, and of the assent 
 of the human conscience to this judgment as righteous. 
 It expresses that judgment in and with the appeal of 
 the holy love of God for man’s repentance and faith, 
 and the assurance of the divine forgiveness. The 
 love of God, which in Christ so cleaves to sinful man- 
 kind as to share the consequences of man’s sin, makes 
 such an appeal and offers such an assurance as is 
 fitted as no other means could be conceived to be 
 to overcome man’s distrust and disobedience, and so 
 to bring him into that fellowship with God which 
 grace offers fully and freely ; but it 1s so fitted because 
 it no less expresses God’s judgment on the sin forgiven 
 than assures that forgiveness. 
 
 (e) The Cross expresses the divine judgment as it 
 assures the divine forgiveness, and for moral com- 
 pleteness the one is necessary to the other. God 
 
 1 Justification and Reconciliation, Eng. trans., p. 323. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 211 
 
 does not merely pass over sin, treating *‘ mankind 
 sinners’ with moral indifference, as though their sin 
 were of no consequence to Him. He forgives sin— 
 that is, He condemns it, and in condemning it shows 
 _ the necessary moral reaction of His perfect character 
 and purpose against it; and His holy love in forgive- 
 ness separates the sinner from that condemnation, 
 if he will by echoing the divine judgment separate 
 himself from his sin. With God mercy does not 
 merely temper justice, but grace so deals with sin 
 that forgiveness absorbs (to use M‘Leod Campbell’s 
 term) judgment. It is at this point of the argument 
 that we may recognise what truth there is in the 
 governmental theory. God as the Ruler of mankind, 
 responsible for the maintenance and vindication of 
 the moral order of the world, must command the 
 respect of mankind for that moral order in the method 
 of His forgiveness. 
 
 (f) Such a forgiveness conjoined with judgment the 
 Cross conveys to men—it does not procure it. It 
 cannot be stated too definitely or emphatically that 
 the Cross does not change God’s nature, disposition, 
 purpose. God is eternally holy love. It is ever His 
 purpose to redeem mankind from sin. The Lamb 
 was slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. xiii. 
 8). Righteousness and Mercy, Holiness and Love, 
 Wrath and Grace, Judgment and Forgiveness, have 
 often been represented as successive states or moods 
 of God; but they are complementary, and necessarily 
 complementary, aspects of the divine perfection. All 
 this harmonising of conflicting attributes in God in 
 which theology has often indulged is irreverent. 
 What the Cross does is to present as harmonised what 
 to imperfect human judgment appears conflicting. 
 - This is not to minimise the significance of the Cross, 
 for it is in the Cross that the eternal reality of God 
 in His estimate and treatment of sin is finally and 
 perfectly disclosed. ‘There is a change, a crisis in the 
 moral and religious history of mankind in its relations 
 to God. There is through the Cross revealed to and 
 realised in man, as never before, what God eternally 
 
212 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 wills in His holy love—redemption from sin, recon- 
 ciliation unto Himself. Can any moment in human 
 history compare with that in which God in Christ is 
 finally and perfectly revealed as Saviour, except that 
 in which the Saviourhood shall gain the Sovereignty ? 
 
 (g) Again, Christ does not propitiate God, but God 
 sets forth Christ as propitiatory (Rom. ii. 25): in 
 Christ He reveals and realises His goodwill to men. 
 What has been previously said about the Incarnation 
 as about the relation of Christ to God is necessary 
 to an understanding of the Atonement. It is the 
 God immanent in the whole evolution of nature and 
 history, in personal unity with mankind in Christ, 
 as God-man, God as man, who is reconciling the world 
 unto Himself. What Christ did, God did in Him; 
 what Christ suffered, God suffered in Him. To 
 identify the Father with righteousness and the Son 
 with grace, and then to represent the Son’s grace as 
 prevailing over the Father’s righteousness, 1s pagan 
 mythology and not Christian theology. The whole 
 historical reality of Jesus Christ from the cradle to 
 the Cross is the divine deed of revelation to and 
 redemption of ‘ mankind sinners.’ 
 
 (h) If the question be pressed, Why was it necessary 
 that God should save man by such a sacrifice ?—to 
 justify the interpretation of the sacrifice here offered 
 the reason for the necessity must, however diffidently, 
 be stated. That it was necessary to impress man 
 is generally admitted. Does it express God, and was 
 such an expression necessary to God? Conscious of 
 the intellectual difficulties involved, the writer had 
 searched his own conscience, and had reached the 
 conviction which now many years of concern with the 
 subject have confirmed, that it is a necessity of moral 
 perfection to react on sin in condemnation, and to 
 react in such a way as will adequately express what 
 to this perfection sin is. Even a good man cannot 
 be indifferent to sin: it must be repugnant to him. 
 It may not be his duty to express that condemnation 
 to others; but if he has any responsibility for the 
 character and conduct of others, that obligation also 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT 213 
 
 follows. The moral order, purpose, and ideal centre 
 in God: He cannot be acquiescent, silent, inactive, 
 at sin’s challenge. That challenge must be met. 
 Could any response of holy love be more adequate 
 not only to meet the challenge before men, but to 
 satisfy that holy love itself, than God’s own sacrifice 
 in bearing in Christ’s Cross His own judgment on 
 the world’s sin? All the divine judgments in human 
 history pale before the splendour of that vision of 
 the Judge and Ruler of mankind as Saviour. As one 
 muses on this theme, the fire within burns ; argument 
 must sink into silence, and adoration and gratitude 
 alone can have voice. ‘ Thanks be unto God for His 
 unspeakable gift.’ 
 
 (8) Much as one might desire to close the interpreta- 
 tion of the fact of Christ here, we must not see Him 
 only on His Cross. It is because He lives that He 
 saves to the uttermost all who come unto God through 
 Him (Heb. vii. 25). What Christ has done for us has 
 meaning and worth only from what He does in us. 
 It is as with Him we die unto sin and live unto God 
 that our repentance and faith as the conditions of 
 our salvation grow to completeness. His atonement 
 on the Cross can become a reality for us as by His 
 Spirit we are being made a new creation, the old things 
 having passed away and all things having become new. 
 Belief in a plan of salvation or a theory of the Atone- 
 ment becomes a moral and religious scandal apart 
 from the life in the Spirit.” God’s forgiveness is not 
 for man’s safety, comfort, ease, and happiness here 
 or hereafter, but for his becoming perfect as the child 
 of God even as the Father in heaven is perfect. This 
 task of sanctification will be a grievous yoke and a 
 heavy burden if it be attempted as the fulfilment of 
 a law; the yoke is easy and the burden light only in 
 personal dependence on, communion with, and sub- 
 mission to the Living Lord ; it is by the contemplation 
 of His glory that there can be any transformation into 
 that glory (2 Cor. iii. 18).“ If that sounds too mystical 
 for the ordinary Christian experience, a human ana- 
 logy may help. In human relations example and 
 
214 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 influence are more potent morally than precept. 
 Even if we do not vividly realise the presence and 
 activity of Christ, yet to know by faith’s assurance 
 that He is with us, and works in us by His Spirit, that 
 His grace is sufficient for us (2 Cor. xn. 9), is a 
 deliverance from weakness and an enduement with 
 power. Weneed not discriminate between Christ 
 and the Spirit (this subject belongs to the last section 
 of this volume). It is God, Father, Son, and Holy 
 Spirit, who completes the revelation and redemption 
 in the fact of Christ. God is more intimately immanent 
 by His Spirit than in nature or history. He is complet- 
 ing the evolution of the world and of mankind in 
 the progressive manifestation of the sons of God. 
 Every believer can to-day complete his own person- 
 ality by receiving and responding to the communi- 
 eativeness of God in His grace, even as the Son on 
 earth knew, trusted, loved, and obeyed the Father 
 in heaven. 
 
 Te a a, 
 
 oe 
 
Le i 
 pate: ‘4 “penal a) 
 wy i, ; 
 
 Mit 
 ees ’ 
 . ¥i ie 
 , THE iE 
 é ; Ay 
 role ao 
 
 OF GOD | 
 
 Yon tb i? 
 
 j 
 
 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 (i) Tur Christian Church acknowledges Jesus as the 
 Revealer of God as Father; through the grace of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ the love of God is mediated. It 
 has nevertheless allowed its theology to be injuriously 
 affected by two influences—the imperfect conceptions 
 of the Old Testament on the one hand, and the in- 
 adequate apprehension of the revelation of Christ 
 - even in parts of the New Testament on the other hand. 
 Jesus came to fulfil law and prophecy (Matt. v. 17); 
 but His fulfilment was not simply confirmation, but 
 correction and completion, for He was the perfect 
 consummation of the progressive revelation of God 
 to the Hebrew nation. The contrasts of the old law 
 and the new life in the Sermon on the Mount illustrate 
 a principle of much wider applicability. What He 
 said about God was also in contrast to what had been 
 said of old times. Dominant as was the influence 
 of Christ in His apostles, great as was the change 
 wrought in them, yet even in Paul the Jewish Rabbi 
 survives in the Christian apostle, and in his argu- 
 ments with Judaisers he often remains partially in 
 the Jewish standpoint, and does not pass completely 
 to the Christian point of view. 
 
 (ii) This has had very serious consequences, not for 
 Christian theology and ethics alone, but even for 
 religious experience and moral character. The atti- 
 tude of many Christians has been that of the bondage 
 of the law, and not that of the freedom of grace. An 
 imperfect tribal morality has often determined the 
 conduct of Christians rather than the perfect universal 
 ‘moral ideal of Christ. {As men think, so they live; 
 \and as they live, sothey tins} God has often been 
 conceived, not as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, 
 but as the covenant god of a nomad people. If 
 
 216 
 
JESUS AS REVEALER OF GOD 217 
 
 Christianity is to hold the thought and rule the life 
 of to-day, it is only Christ’s revelation of God, and 
 what in prophet or apostle is consistent with it, which 
 can be commended and defended by Christian theo- 
 logy. Whether this volume succeeds in the attempt 
 or not, the intention is, not to include anything that 
 any part of the Bible may assert about God unless it 
 accords with the mind of Christ; and not to exclude 
 inferences about the nature and purpose of God for 
 which no statement of the Scriptures may be quoted, 
 so long as they follow logically from a courageous 
 and consistent development of the teaching of Jesus 
 about the Father. 
 
 (iii) We must not, however, assume that Jesus 
 believed about God as Father only what He explicitly 
 
 stated. He stood in the prophetic succession, and ~ 
 
 the ‘ ethical monotheism ’ of the prophets is the back- 
 eround of His distinctive revelation of God as Father. 
 That inestimable gain of the moral and réligious 
 development of His people He did not throw away ; 
 but in it He lived His own inner life with God. This 
 at the present moment needs some emphasis, as there 
 has been a tendency to isolate the teaching of Jesus 
 from its presuppositions, and so to give what must 
 be regarded as a one-sided representation. Like 
 every great teacher, He emphasised what was being 
 forgotten or neglected in the truth of the past as well 
 as the truth which was His distinctive message. One 
 may have a great deal of sympathy with the pacifist 
 position, and hold that the Christian Church should 
 take up a very different attitude to war from what 
 it has generally held, and yet be forced to the con- 
 clusion that the pacifist teaching ignores much that 
 is of permanent value in the prophetic teaching about 
 the divine providence, and the judgment of sin by 
 God in human history. 
 
 (iv) We must not further assume that the apostles 
 are not interpreting the Christian revelation when 
 they make statements about God’s attitude to and 
 dealing with sin for which no explicit warrant can 
 be found in the teaching of Jesus, Much of the 
 
 r- 
 
218 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 apostolic teaching is interpretation of the Cross of 
 Christ; and although there are, as we have seen, 
 words of Jesus bearing on His death, yet the teach- 
 ing could not be complete, for three reasons. First of 
 all, had Jesus Himself understood all, the necessary 
 experience of His sacrifice would not have been 
 possible to Him, for here He had to walk by faith 
 and not by sight, trusting and obeying the Father’s 
 will when He did not fully understand it. In Geth- 
 semane He prayed that, if it were possible, the cup 
 might pass from Him (Matt. xxvi. 39), and on Calvary 
 He asked, ‘ Why hast Thou forsaken Me ? ’ (xxvii. 46). 
 Secondly, the disciples were so opposed even to the 
 thought of His death, that they were neither willing 
 nor able to receive all the teaching that their Master 
 might have given them. Observe how summary are 
 the reports of the announcements of the Passion. 
 Thirdly, it was only after the sacrifice had been 
 endured, and its effects experienced as saving grace, 
 that the saved could understand from their own 
 standpoint as well as that of the Saviour all that 
 the sacrifice might mean. To dismiss the teaching 
 of Paul, grounded in experience, on the atonement 
 in Christ’s blood, because there is no mention of 
 atonement in the parable of the Prodigal Son, is 
 entirely unreasonable. Assuredly no doctrine of the 
 Atonement can claim to be Christian which offers a 
 representation of God inconsistent with what that 
 parable teaches about God’s attitude to sinners. 
 But, as the companion parables which Luke (xv. 1-10) 
 has put in front of that parable show, it does not give 
 the complete account of God’s action for the salva- 
 tion of men. 
 
 (v) It would certainly be easier to take one or other 
 of two courses different from that here adopted. 
 Hither we might from the standpoint of Biblical 
 literalism try to combine in our conception of God 
 whatever statements on the subject may claim 
 Scripture warrant. This is the dogmatic method of 
 the past which, as has already been indicated, has 
 had so disastrous an influence on Christian thought 
 
JESUS AS REVEALER OF GOD 219 
 
 and life, and which still promotes, happily in very 
 restricted circles, an uncharitableness and censorious- 
 ness which are lamentable. These, despite all that 
 modern knowledge has taught us, ‘still hold by the 
 old position, imagining that by so doing they are 
 proving themselves the defenders of the faith, whereas 
 in truth they are making faith to some almost im- 
 possible. Or we might follow the easy path of a 
 theological modernism which confines itself almost 
 entirely to the teaching of Jesus, and even in that 
 teaching finds much uncongenial to the modern mind, 
 as these exponents regard it. Reason has been shown 
 why we should not confine ourselves to the teaching 
 of Jesus; and in judging that teaching it is well 
 for us to remember that our age too has its prejudices 
 and limitations, and that it would be an irretrievable 
 loss if we cut down the permanent and universal 
 revelation of God in Christ to the restricted measure 
 of rationality which much of this modernism alone 
 would leave to us. Some of these modern tendencies 
 need the correction of ‘ the truth as it is in Jesus,’ 
 and cannot be accepted as fixing the standard of 
 judgement for His authoritative message for our day. 
 To keep a straight and steady course between that 
 Sceylla of literalism and this Charybdis of modernism 
 demands an insight into the mind of Christ which 
 learning alone cannot give, but which comes in 
 communion with the Living Lord in dependence on 
 His Spirit. It is thus, and thus alone, that one can 
 dare to approach this perilous enterprise. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 
 
 WE must first of all endeavour to set forth simply 
 and clearly the conception of God given by Christ 
 in deed as well as in word, and then consider some 
 difficulties for our thought that the acceptance of 
 that conception involves. 
 
 i 
 
 (1) Christian theology has from its beginnings been 
 hampered as well as helped by philosophy; philo- 
 sophical assumptions about the nature of God have 
 sometimes stood in the way of an acceptance of the 
 revelation of God in Christ and all that it involves ; 
 and we cannot go far in the exposition of Christ’s 
 conception without encountering some of these 
 hindrances. It is the writer’s intention in another 
 volume to deal with the philosophical vindication 
 of the religious belief in God, or the harmonising with 
 the other products of the thought of man of the dis- 
 tinctive contribution of religion. Here these matters 
 will be referred to only in so far as may be necessary 
 for the immediate purpose. It is the assumption of 
 the Old Testament that God is personal, thinking 
 mind, feeling heart, and acting will. Jesus in know- 
 ing God as Father and Himself as Son assumed such 
 affinity of nature and community of relation between 
 God and man as can be described as personal; and 
 consequently the God He knew and made known 
 must be conceived as personal. Whatever other and 
 more than man God may be, for such relation to man 
 He must be thought of as personal. The terms Jesus 
 
 used in regard to God and Himself, Father and Son, 
 220 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 221 
 
 while affirming both affinity of nature and community 
 of relation, were a confession of a difference within this 
 unity, the dependence of the Son upon the Father, 
 the subordination of the Son to the Father. In the 
 passage (Matt. x1. 25-27, Luke x. 21-22) in which the 
 unique relation to God is claimed, entire dependence 
 (° All things have been delivered unto Me of My 
 Father’) and complete submission (v. 26) are ex- 
 pressed. When He asked the young ruler, *‘ Why 
 callest thou Me good? none is good save one, even 
 God’ (Mark x. 18), or assured the disciples, ‘ The 
 Father is greater than I’ (John xiv. 28), He recognised 
 limitations in Himself that He did not assign to God. 
 ‘Entirely in accord with this teaching, then, is Lotze’s 
 position, already referred to in the previous section, 
 that God alone is perfect personality, and that man 
 is progressively personal. The Incarnate Son was 
 truly man. That God is personal is an affirmation 
 which we may make on the authority of Christ. 
 
 (2) To such an assertion the objection is offered that 
 the divine attributes of infinitude and absoluteness 
 are incompatible with the necessary limitations and 
 relations of personality. This objection has already 
 been dealt with in the discussion on personality in 
 God and man. What here remains to be added is 
 that, while Jesus thought of God as personal, He, - 
 without using philosophical terms, thought of God 
 in a way which would involve both these ideas. God 
 was for Him not merely the process in nature and 
 history, but always the power over nature and history. 
 While He was ever conscious that He dwelt in God 
 and God in Him, His attitude, already noted, of 
 dependence on, submission to, and confidence in 
 God showed that for Him God was above and beyond 
 as well as within. To use the language of philosophy, 
 God for Him was no less transcendent than immanent. 
 These abstract conceptions He clothed with concrete 
 reality. For Him there was no long series of second- 
 ary causes removing to a distance God as First Cause. 
 As He Himself lived in the immediate presence of 
 God, so He saw God feeding the birds of the air and 
 
222 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 clothing the flowers of the field (Matt. vi. 26-30), nay, 
 even taking count of every sparrow and every hair 
 of the head of man (x. 29-30). For Him there was 
 no order of nature, apart from God, mediating and 
 limiting the activity of God. He did not distinguish 
 the natural and the supernatural, since for Him there 
 was always and everywhere the one activity of God, 
 as in the sunshine and the shower (v. 45); and He 
 set no bounds to what God would do. For His faith 
 with God all things are possible (xix. 26). It is only 
 man’s unbelief which hinders a more wonderful work- 
 ing of God in man and for man. In dealing with the 
 miracles of Jesus in a-previous chapter, this matter 
 has been already more fully discussed. When we 
 come to discuss the relation of God to nature the 
 difference of natural and supernatural will be con- 
 sidered. Meanwhile, only two considerations need to 
 be emphasised : (1) Jesus was expressing the religious 
 consciousness in its simplicity and intensity, and not 
 formulating any philosophical theory ; and neverthe- 
 less (2) the testimony of His religious consciousness 
 is a datum to which justice must be done in framing 
 any philosophical theory. The immediacy of the 
 divine presence and activity which the religious 
 consciousness affirms must be fully taken account of 
 in any conception offered of the relation of God to 
 nature for which the authority of Christ can be 
 claimed. 
 
 “(8) To apply to the teaching of Jesus another 
 distinction familiar to the thought of to-day, we may 
 ascribe to Him a dynamic and not a static view of 
 God. It was not the divine nature but the divine 
 purpose with which He was concerned. * My Father 
 worketh even until now, and I work’ (John v. 17). 
 In His ministry He was an agent of that purpose. 
 He assumed what all His countrymen assumed, that 
 God had been active in the history of the nation ; 
 and with them He was expecting a still more manifest 
 activity of God in the coming of the kingdom of 
 God, or the kingdom of heaven. So extensive has 
 been the discussion among scholars as to the meaning 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 223 
 
 of this term on the lips of Jesus, that it would be 
 quite impossible to reproduce any part of it here. 
 The conclusions which have resulted from a study of 
 the relevant literature as well as of the evidence in 
 the Gospels must be briefly stated. For Jesus the 
 kingdom had a twofold aspect : it was already present 
 in Himself and those who attached themselves to 
 Him as an expansive, pervasive, illuminating, and 
 preserving influence in the world; it was mustard- 
 seed and leaven (Matt. xii. 31-33), light and salt 
 (v. 13-16). It was coming in the fullness of its power, 
 glory, and blessing by an act of divine intervention 
 in human history in connection with His return to 
 the world from which He was soon withdrawing His 
 visible and audible presence (Matt. xvi. 28, xxiv.). 
 But divine omnipotence could not inaugurate the 
 kingdom apart from human penitence and faith, and 
 yet the kingdom would not be consummated by any 
 merely human historical process. The mind of Jesus 
 Himself seems to have wavered between confidence 
 in the sufficiency of the Father’s power, and de- 
 spondency due to the hindrance offered by human 
 sin and unbelief. The subject has already been more 
 fully discussed in the previous section, but must be 
 here as briefly as possible recalled. 
 
 (4) We do not and we cannot confess our hope 
 to-day in exactly the same terms as did Jesus and 
 His contemporaries. How far His language was an 
 accommodation to the understanding of His age, and 
 imperfectly expressed His own convictions, we cannot 
 confidently assert. But inasmuch as in His revelation 
 of the Father He rose so far above the thought of 
 His time, may we not at least conjecture that the 
 apocalyptic language of His contemporaries but im- 
 perfectly expressed His inmost meaning, and that 
 that is to be found not in hopes which history has 
 left unfulfilled, but rather in the ideals of which history 
 is offering us the evidence of a realisation? We must 
 judge what is obscure by what is distinct in His words. 
 His conception of God as Father is our guide to the 
 character of the purpose of God in history. Under 
 
294 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 such guidance Christian thinkers have been led to 
 the conclusion which may be briefly summarised in 
 the words that the kingdom of God is both the good 
 God offers and the duty He lays upon man, the 
 sovereignty of His grace in all mankind and the 
 obedience of the children of God to the law of love. 
 In the last section of this volume the subject will be 
 further considered in dealing with the Christian hope, 
 and the writer projects another volume on ‘The 
 Kingdom of God as the Christian Ideal,’ in which He 
 will fully discuss the subject of Christian ethics, 
 individual and social. Meanwhile, the conviction that 
 this teaching of Jesus leaves with us is that God is 
 working in history, not apart from but with and by 
 man for the fulfilment of His purpose; that human 
 progress is assured not by what man is and does, 
 but only by what He will suffer God to do in and with 
 Him; that so intimately and inseparably 1s Christ 
 related to that purpose that the fulfilment of the 
 purpose will be the vindication and triumph of Christ 
 Himself; and that the rapidity with which the kingdom 
 may come is not to be measured by the capacity of 
 man to bring about its coming, but rather by the 
 receptivity and responsiveness of the faith of man to 
 the grace of God which will give Him the opportunity 
 of Himself completing His own purpose. 
 
 (5) As has already been indicated, Jesus assumed 
 “the prophetic teaching about God, and we must accept 
 that on His authority so far as it is consistent with 
 His revelation of the Father. If we give due heed to 
 the whole of His teaching, we shall find that more of 
 the apostolic teaching is in accord with that revelation 
 than a superficial view of the Fatherhood might lead 
 us to suppose. God is true, wise, faithful, righteous, 
 holy, good, merciful, and gracious. The teaching of 
 Jesus is not without the terror of the Lord as well as 
 the tenderness. Only a few instances need be given. 
 For those who cause little ones to stumble there is 
 Gehenna, the unquenchable fire (Mark ix. 42-48). 
 The wicked husbandmen are to be destroyed (xu. 9). 
 The unfaithful servant is to be cut asunder and have 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 225 
 
 his portion with the hypocrites (Matt. xxiv. 51). 
 Those who did not do good to the least of His brethren 
 are bidden depart into ‘the eternal fire which is 
 prepared for the devil and his angels’ (xxv. 41). 
 There is a sin which never has forgiveness, for it is 
 ‘an eternal sin’ (Mark in. 29). While much of the 
 language is figurative, and we must not interpret 
 eternal as necessarily meaning everlasting, there can 
 be no doubt that Jesus does teach a righteous judg- 
 ment of God in His providence in the present life as 
 well as in His dealing with men in the hereafter. He 
 does not so separate God from or exalt God above 
 the moral order in the world as to justify our regard- 
 ing the consequences of sin as natural and inevitable 
 apart from His will: for Jesus the will of God was 
 ultimate and supreme. If, however, we do admit that 
 Jesus did regard these consequences of sin as willed 
 by God, it does not follow that this teaching is in- 
 consistent with the teaching of the Fatherhood. The 
 holy love of God seeks to reproduce the character of 
 God Himself in man, and uses many means, righteous 
 judgment as well as forgiving mercy. As has already 
 been shown in a previous chapter in dealing with the 
 work of Christ, the Cross is a revelation of judgment 
 as well as of mercy. The love of God in Christ suffers 
 with and for man in the grace which conjoins the 
 condemnation of sin and the forgiveness of the sinner. 
 The discussion in that chapter must now be recalled ; 
 and the conclusions there reached must be included 
 in the conception of God for which the authority of 
 the Son in revealing the Father may be claimed. We 
 may now, however, concentrate on what is distinctive 
 in the teaching of Jesus—the Fatherhood of God. 
 
 {I 
 
 (1) Jesus claimed that He as Son was known by the 
 Father alone, and that He alone knew the Father 
 and could make the Father known (Matt. xi. 27, 
 Luke x. 22). He thus distinguishes His relation to 
 God from that of other men. His is an immediate 
 
 I 
 
226 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 relation, that of other men is mediated by Him. 
 According to the Fourth Gospel, He gives to those 
 who believe on His name the right to become children 
 of God (John i. 12). He is Son by an eternal relation, 
 men become sons by a temporal experience.t But 
 apart from this difference, which has already been 
 dealt with in the discussion of the person of Christ, 
 He did offer to men the same privileges and blessings 
 of the Divine Fatherhood as He used and enjoyed. 
 There seems to be no doubt that Jesus taught a 
 permanent and universal Fatherhood of God. God, 
 whose nature and purpose do not change, is eternally 
 and infinitely Father, and His Fatherhood is the 
 motive of Creation and Providence as well as Re- 
 demption. God made man, and cares for him as the 
 object of His eternal and infinite love. God does not 
 become Father only to those who repent and believe, 
 as some writers have asserted as a logical inference 
 from the parallelism of the relation of God to man 
 and of man to God. But such an exact parallelism 
 cannot be insisted on when we are concerned with the 
 eternal God and man made in time.?. The Fatherhood 
 of God does not involve the actual, only the potential 
 sonship of all men at birth. Men are not sons of God 
 by nature, but become sons by grace. The relation 
 is not a physical one, but a spiritual, although it does 
 rest on the relation of God as Creator to man as His 
 creature, made with the promise of and the capacity 
 for such a higher relation. As a moral and religious 
 relation it has to be realised personally by each man. 
 Even apart from sin, by the very character of this 
 sonship each man needs to become a son, receiving 
 and responding to the Fatherhood of God. It shows 
 a lack of moral insight and spiritual discernment to 
 affirm that because God is eternally and infinitely 
 Father in His grace, all men are by nature sons of 
 God. God loves and cares for all, and is ever willing 
 —nay, eager—that all should so become sons as in 
 
 1 Here difference of sex is irrelevant, and therefore the term ‘ son’ is used 
 to maintain the analogy with ‘ the Son.’ 
 2 See Our.Growing Creed, by W. D. M‘Laren, pp. 379-80. 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 227 
 
 experience to realise all that His Fatherhood wills for 
 their good. The prodigal in the far country was not 
 morally and religiously any longer son; the physical 
 fact remained, but the spiritual relation was for the time 
 suspended, and could be restored only by his return 
 home. If Jesus does not explicitly make this dis- 
 tinction, it is implicit in His conception of Fatherhood 
 as a spiritual and not a physical relation, and as, 
 therefore, a relation which, while perfect on God’s 
 side, must on man’s be realised in the process of moral 
 and religious development. Paul is not contradicting 
 the teaching of Jesus in his doctrine of adoption 
 (Rom. viii. 15), or John in what he writes about. be- 
 coming the sons of God (John i. 12). 
 
 (2) God’s Fatherhood is His relation with man as 
 constituted by His love. While Jesus does not give 
 us a definition of the love of God, He gives us the data 
 for a description of its elements. It is a mistake in 
 psychology to regard love as only emotion or senti- 
 ment, as belonging only to the affective aspect of 
 human personality. It is this error which has led 
 some theologians astray into contrasting God’s love 
 with His holiness or righteousness, into assuming that 
 God’s Fatherhood needs qualification by various epi- 
 thets, and that, so unqualified, the truth is a danger- 
 ous doctrine. If we conceive love aright, we need 
 not fear to declare that love alone. For in love it is 
 the whole personality—thought, feeling, will—which 
 is directed towards another, giving itself that it may 
 find itself in another. It is self-communication for 
 self-realisation in and with another. Love as thought ~ 
 is a judgment of value, as feeling a sense of interest, 
 as will a purpose of good. That God in Christ reveals 
 Himself as Father sets an estimate on man in corre- 
 spondence with the value of God Himself. Great as 
 is the difference between God and man, this relation- 
 ship exalts man above mere creaturehood. Jesus’ 
 teaching on man as lost lays the stress not on what 
 man. loses by his sin, but on the loss God feels when 
 man is estranged from Him; and every man has this 
 value for God. The necessary inference from the 
 
298 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Fatherhood of God is the infinite value to God of 
 every man as potential son. Because man has such 
 value to God, God has an interest in man. The 
 etymology of the word (Latin interesse, to be among) 
 may help our thought. God is so much mixed up 
 with men (if such a phrase may be forgiven as best 
 conveying the meaning), so identified with man, that 
 - He has both pain and pleasure in and with man. He 
 is grieved by man’s sin, and made glad by his recovery. | 
 God is not impassible, and to affirm that He is passible 
 is not the monstrous heresy that the Creed of Chalee- 
 don represents it as being. God can and does feel 
 with and for man. As-God sets on man such a value, 
 and has in man such an interest, He wills for man a 
 corresponding good, that man shall become so worthy 
 of his worth that God will have joy and not grief in 
 Him. What that good is, the term Fatherhood itself 
 indicates. This analysis of the love of God is based 
 solidly on the exposition of the parables in Luke xv., 
 and in no particular or degree goes beyond what is 
 there taught. 
 (3) God’s Fatherhood is His communicatwe and 
 “ reproductive perfection. God as Father wills that men 
 should live in fellowship with Himself, and grow in 
 likeness to Himself. God made man in His image, ~ 
 not as actuality, but as promise and potency. Son- 
 ship consists of communion with and conformity to 
 God—likeness which comes from loving. Communion 
 is not the reward but the source of conformity. Man 
 is perfected by faith, and not by works. It is aS men 
 love God as Father that they as sons become like God. 
 Christian morality depends on Christian religion. We 
 love God because He first loved us, and as we love 
 God we come to love our fellow-men as also loved of 
 God (1 John iv. 19-21), and love is the fulfilling of 
 the law (Rom. xiii. 10). It is as God is known and 
 loved as Father that His will is freely willed, not by 
 the compulsion of law, but by the constraint of love. 
 Even in the life of Jesus there were times of temptation 
 and trial, when obedience was a struggle and a sorrow; 
 but for the most part He gives the impression of a 
 
 
 
 ; 
 
 ee ee a ee ne - 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 229 
 
 spontaneous goodness, a likeness to His Father which 
 freely came from His fellowship with the Father. 
 As God’s love is holy and imparts holiness, the anti- 
 thesis of holiness and love is theological rhetoric, and 
 not moral and religious reality. 
 
 (4) So far we have been describing God’s Fatherhood 
 towards men without taking account of man’s sin- 
 fulness, although some reference has been unavoidable. 
 In dealing with sinful man God’s love shows itself 
 as grace, for grace is love which will not be overcome 
 by unworthiness, but seeks to recover and restore the 
 worth of the unworthy. As God deals with man’s 
 sinfulness decisively in Jesus Christ, we may say, as 
 is implied in the apostolic benediction, that God’s love 
 shows itself and works as the grace of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ. To what has already been said about that 
 grace in the first section of this volume, something 
 remains to be added here. (a) The simple but great 
 word for God’s dealing with sin is forgiveness. While 
 for the object he had in view, and the opponents he 
 had to meet, Paul truly and rightly used the phrases 
 * the righteousness of God,’ or ‘ justification by faith,’ 
 and even we to-day cannot leave out of consideration 
 the relation of love to law, mercy to judgment, yet it 
 has been a loss that Christian theology has not con- 
 fined itself more to the use of the word forgiveness, 
 which goes right home to the heart. While God does 
 not and cannot deceive Himself as to the condition 
 of men, yet His holy love wills so to distinguish and 
 separate the sin which He condemns from the sinners 
 whom as lost sons He loves, as to offer to them the 
 restoration of the personal relation to Himself which 
 they have interrupted by their distrust and disobedi- 
 ence, if only they will in penitence and faith accept 
 His judgment of condemnation on that sin and His 
 judgment of favour on themselves. It does seem an 
 inexact use of language to speak of the forgiveness 
 _of sin, for sin is ever under God’s judgment. It is 
 sinners who are forgiven, because their sin is no longer 
 reckoned unto them, and they themselves have dis- 
 owned it. It is not a theological subtlety to dis- 
 
230 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 tinguish between hatred of an act and hatred of the 
 actor. Were the actor so exhausted in, so identified 
 with his act that no distinction and separation were 
 possible, then assuredly he must be condemned with 
 his sin. It is surely such a condition which Jesus calls 
 the unpardonable sin (Mark iii. 29). As long as the 
 man is not lost in the sin, and can disown the sin, 
 he can be forgiven his sin—it need no longer be put 
 to his account. The unworthiness which sin_has 
 brought on a man does not exhaust his worth. That 
 worth God recognises, and in forgiveness He deals 
 with man according to that worth, despite that 
 unworthiness. In His-dealing God does not wait till 
 man confesses his unworthiness and seeks to re@over 
 his worth, He does not wait for penitence and faith, 
 but by the offer and even pleading of His grace He 
 evokes the penitence and faith without which for- 
 giveness as the fully restored personal relationship 
 cannot be actualised. God’s forgiveness is a creative 
 act of God, by which He makes in man the conditions 
 of its full realisation. 
 
 (b) A forgiveness which followed on penitence and 
 faith was expected by the Psalmist (li. 17). That 
 falls within the Old Testament revelation. What is 
 new in the revelation of God in Christ is that God 
 Himself takes the initiative, and this is an initiative 
 of such a kind as will so secure man’s reception of 1t 
 and response to it as fully to maintain the holy love 
 of God in its condemnation of sin, and to satisfy the 
 conscience of man that sin deserves condemnation. 
 The forgiveness in Christ is no passing over of sins in 
 divine forbearance (Rom. iii. 25), leaving in doubt 
 His attitude to sin. It is forgiveness, which means 
 the restoration of the personal relation to God in 
 accordance with the personal perfection which God 
 ever is, and which in that relation is again to be a 
 possibility for man. There is no contrast and con- 
 tradiction, as thinkers more shallow morally and 
 religiously than intellectually often affirm, between 
 the truth of the Fatherhood of God and the doctrine 
 of the Atonement. The Fatherhood is revealed in 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 231 
 
 Christ’s Cross as the holy love which imparts itself _ 
 both as holy and as love to sinful man in a forgiveness 
 which judges the sin which the man is forgiven. God 
 shows Himself most and best as Father in the gift 
 of His Son in sacrifice for man’s salvation. 
 
 (c) As Father, God wills the salvation of all men. 
 God does all His holy love can do in Christ to seek and to 
 save the lost, whether in this life or another, for we 
 have no right to affirm that death ends the dealings 
 of His grace with any. We dare not, however, affirm 
 that all will be saved. As has already been suggested, 
 the sinner may so identify himself with his sin that 
 forgiveness will be impossible. That God should 
 remit penalties even for the impenitent is conceivable ; 
 but that God should forgive—that is, restore to full 
 personal relationship to Himself—those who continue 
 distrusting or disobeying Him is a moral and religious 
 impossibility. To invoke God’s omnipotence is an 
 irrelevance, even an impertinence. That God may 
 have resources of appeal and persuasion in reserve 
 which at last will prevail we dare not affirm, for Chris- 
 tian faith must ask, What more can even God do than 
 He has done in Jesus Christ ? We dare to believe 
 and hope, however, that men may in another life 
 apprehend, appreciate, and accept the truth and the 
 erace of the Lord Jesus Christ as they may not have 
 been able to do in this life. But we must admit the 
 possibility that some may remain impenitent and 
 unbelieving despite all God has done, or will yet do. 
 Whether many, or even any, shall commit the un- 
 pardonable sin of rejecting God’s every appeal we 
 know not; but even with those, if such there should 
 be, we may be confident that God will deal according 
 to His love. It may be that as human personality 
 has been created for sonship, for fellowship with and 
 likeness to God as Father, he who refuses to become 
 that for which he was created shall by a process of 
 moral, mental, and spiritual deterioration at last lose 
 that personality the ideal of which he has refused 
 to realise. As human personality has emerged out 
 of animal consciousness and vital organism, so it is 
 
232 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 conceivable that it may again relapse to a lower 
 phase of reality, and at last even pass out of existence. 
 This conjecture will need to be considered more fully 
 in a subsequent chapter dealing with man’s destiny. 
 It is here mentioned only as bearing on the permanence 
 of God’s Fatherhood as holy love towards all men. 
 
 iil 
 
 (1) To this conception of God as Father there are 
 
 several objections which can be urged. The attract- 
 
 iveness of such a conception will be generally conceded; 
 but to some thinkers it seems to be too good to be true. 
 They would believe if they could; but the facts of 
 the world and of life appear to some, as these facts 
 are seen to and are understood by them, to make such 
 a faith impossible. Others there are to whom even 
 the teaching of Scripture presents an obstacle. How 
 can this difficulty be removed ? 
 
 (i) Jesus taught as one having authority, and not 
 as the scribes (Mark i. 22); and many believers have 
 so realised that authority in reason and conscience 
 alike, that they have not felt anything else necessary 
 to commend the truth to them. The writer of this 
 volume must confess that Jesus Christ makes such 
 an impression on him, not only of subjective con- 
 fidence, but even of objective certainty, that where 
 Christ affirms he cannot doubt. Were the difficulties 
 of faith even greater than they are, he feels that Christ 
 would Himself overcome them by the assurance that 
 His personality inspires. And there are moments 
 when the mind is so perplexed, that it is on Christ, 
 and Christ alone, the soul must fall back as its only 
 refuge. 
 
 (ii) While the venture of faith must be made when 
 the resources of reason fail, yet the reason may rein- 
 force faith. The mind has a right to have its questions 
 answered, as the heart to have its needs met. We 
 must, therefore, deal with the objections to the con- 
 ception of God’s Fatherhood, so far as our reason can. 
 Two of these objections must be here mentioned— 
 
 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 233 
 
 the comparative insignificance of man in the Universe, 
 and the reality of pain and sin, although the full 
 treatment of those subjects must be reserved for a 
 more appropriate context in subsequent chapters. 
 (a) As to the first, all that need here be said is that 
 the objection, if it is valid, must receive a general 
 application as challenging equally the truth of science 
 and philosophy, morals and religion. Man’s insig- 
 nificance must depreciate the value of all his activities, 
 and not only this one conception. In dealing with 
 man’s place in the Universe an argument will be offered 
 to show how significant man is, not only as the final 
 product of the evolution of the Universe, but as the 
 subject who knows and understands the Universe 
 and his own place in it, and who in his ideals rises to 
 a reality above the actuality of the Universe. 
 
 (6b) As to the second objection, the proper place for 
 dealing with the problem of evil is when the relation 
 of God to nature and man is under discussion; but 
 here an evasion of the difficulty must be considered. 
 The Apostles’ Creed affirms the belief in God the 
 Father Almighty. Some thinkers, J. S. Mill for 
 instance,! maintain that this assertion involves a 
 dilemma. Either God is not altogether good, or He 
 is not almighty. Hither the Fatherhood must be 
 sacrificed to the Almightiness, or vice versa. And the 
 argument by which this conclusion is sustained is as 
 follows: As good, God wills and cannot but will 
 good only; were He also almighty, He would prevent 
 all evil. As the evil is not being prevented, God 
 cannot be almighty as well as good. If as almighty 
 He could prevent evil and did not, He would not be 
 good. Either the goodness or the almightiness of 
 God must be surrendered. The almightiness is re- 
 
 1 This is Mill’s conclusion regarding the nature of God from the facts of 
 the world as he estimates them: ‘ A Being of great but limited power, how 
 or by what limited we cannot even conjecture; of great and perhaps un- 
 limited intelligence, but perhaps also more narrowly limited than His power ; 
 who desires and pays some regard to the happiness of His creatures, but who 
 seems to have other motives of action which He cares more for, and who can 
 hardly be supposed to have created the universe for that purpose alone.’ 
 (Three Essays on Religion, p. 194.) 
 
234 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 jected, and the goodness retained. We must resolve 
 the problem into two questions: What do we mean 
 by almightiness ? What do we mean by all-goodness ? 
 For this argument involves an unproved assumption 
 regarding each; and by correcting the error in each 
 case we may get such a conception of these two 
 attributes of God as to be able to show that the 
 existence of evil does not involve their opposition. 
 
 (2) Many misunderstandings have arisen in theology 
 because the loose popular use of terms has been 
 accepted, instead of the endeavour being made to 
 define the meaning exactly; and we may, therefore, 
 be enabled to resolve.a problem by means of more 
 exact definitions. 
 
 (i) Almightiness does not mean that God can do 
 anything or everything that we can imagine, con- 
 ceive, or desire that He should do. God Himself is 
 not an indefinite, undetermined potency of anything 
 and everything. We may frankly accept Spinoza’s 
 principle—Omynis determinatio est negatio ; but instead 
 of avoiding determination to escape negation we must 
 be ready to affirm what God is, even if that excludes 
 a multitude of possibilities for speculative thought. 
 God has a nature, a character, and a purpose, and He 
 gives to the reality He creates a definite and deter- 
 mined actuality, and not an unlimited possibility. 
 Even the potency of the evolution of the Universe 
 and the promise of progress of man are within limits 
 of possibility appointed by God, not arbitrarily, but 
 in accordance with what He is and, therefore, wills. 
 Our thought would be plunged in confusion if we could 
 imagine that A could be both A and not-A, that two 
 and two could be five, that hatred could be better 
 than love by the mere fact of the divine omnipotence. 
 There are necessities and limitations in the creative 
 reality and the created actuality which we must fully 
 recognise. God can do only what can be done. 
 Further, He can act only in accordance with His own 
 perfection. There are impossibilities for wisdom, 
 holiness, and love which reason and conscience in 
 interpreting the Universe must recognise. All that 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 235 
 
 we must insist on in opposition to the conception of a 
 limited God, such as Mr. Wells offers us in God the 
 Invisible King, are these two considerations which 
 are involved in the attributes of God’s infinitude and 
 absoluteness. First, there is no fate or force external 
 to or different from God Himself which determines 
 what God can and God cannot do. God is self- 
 limited, for it is by His will that any actuality other 
 than Himself is created by which His action could 
 in any way be conditioned. Secondly, God has in 
 Himself all the resources by the use of which in 
 accordance with His own perfection He can fulfil 
 His own purpose, for the fact that He has willed to 
 create is a guarantee that what He has begun He can 
 bring to an end harmonious with His own perfection. 
 Surely the Universe displays such power that it 1s 
 unreasonable to assume that the power will not avail 
 to finish what has once been begun, and reasonable 
 to believe that the perfecting of His work is not beyond 
 the resources of Him who has carried that work so 
 far. Still more do God’s wisdom and goodness 
 give the assurance that what God has promised. He 
 can perform. These convictions are essential to the 
 confidence and courage of faith, for a God who had 
 to contend against a fate or force beyond His control, 
 and who could not fulfil His purpose, would not give 
 to man the certainty and the security that he needs 
 and finds in faith that all will be well with the world 
 because God is in His heaven. A God who needs our 
 help cannot give us the help we need, although He 
 wills to fulfil His purpose with us as His fellow-workers. 
 With these explanations of what 1s meant by God’s 
 almightiness, the problem we are considering resolves 
 itself into this: Is God’s action, conditioned as it is, 
 contrary to or consistent with goodness ? 
 
 (1) If God’s goodness means the pleasure or even 
 the happiness of all His creatures, that and that alone, 
 then it must be conceded that the facts of life do 
 challenge faith in God’s Fatherhood. But if these 
 same facts themselves point to a larger purpose, then 
 we may conclude that the challenge can be met. We 
 
236 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 must neither minimise nor exaggerate the amount 
 or the intensity of the evil in the world. We cannot 
 be either optimists, affirming that this 7s the best of 
 all possible worlds, or pessimists, deploring that this 
 is the worst of all possible worlds; we may be 
 meliorists, admitting that the world is partly bad, but 
 believing that it is becoming better, and hoping that 
 at last it will become the best. A closer scrutiny of 
 all the relevant facts leading to such a solution of the 
 problem must meanwhile be reserved ; but the Chris- 
 tian conception of God’s Fatherhood as His com- 
 municative and reproductive perfection, His purpose 
 to restore man to His own fellowship and likeness, 
 answers the question as to what God’s purpose is, 
 and we must judge the world not as it meets our 
 wishes, or furthers our ends, but as it is fitted to 
 make men sons of God. If it can be shown, as will be 
 shown in the fully-developed argument in a subse- 
 quent chapter, that the world can be so interpreted, 
 then we may conclude that only on an inadequate 
 conception both of God’s almightiness and God’s 
 goodness are we confronted with the dilemma that 
 God is either all good or almighty, but that He cannot 
 be both, since there is evil (pain and sin) in the world. 
 
 (3), What may seem a very much more serious 
 difficulty for many minds is the doctrine of God 
 which has been dominant in the Christian Church, 
 and which is specially associated with the names of 
 Augustine and Calvin, but has also support in texts 
 of the Holy Scriptures and the teaching of Paul 
 especially. The writer of this volume must quite 
 frankly confess that, trained though he was in the 
 tenets of a strict Calvinism, not only the study and 
 thought of many years, but still more his own ex- 
 perience of the love of God in the grace of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ by the dwelling and working in him of 
 God’s Holy Spirit, has led him to a theology radically 
 opposed to Calvinism, but based on a broader and 
 firmer foundation than the biblical scholarship of the 
 day afforded to Arminianism. ‘The contrast between 
 the position here reached and Calvinism may be stated 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 237 
 
 in this way. Calvinism started from the divine nature 
 and attributes, speculatively construed on often a 
 very slender basis of Scripture proof, using such texts 
 as gave support to its contentions, and ignoring such 
 teaching as would have modified its conclusions, while 
 maintaining the supreme authority and the sole 
 sufficiency for doctrine of the whole Bible. What 
 is here being attempted is an interpretation of the 
 character and the purpose of God, as disclosed in the 
 progressive revelation consummated in Christ, not 
 for the ends of speculative completeness and con- 
 sistency, but for the solution of the moral and religious 
 problems of human experience and history. 
 _~ (1) We must do justice to the older view. While it 
 is a speculative contention that God must be absolute 
 will, foreseeing all, foreordaining all, directing and 
 controlling all, it must be admitted that there are 
 texts of Scripture which can be quoted in its support ; 
 and we must add that it is a view that man by his 
 reverence for God, his sense of insufficiency in him- 
 self and of his dependence on God’s sufficiency, is 
 naturally led to take. The very serious difficulties 
 which this view presents could be set aside as mysteries 
 which it would be presumption in man to claim that 
 he could penetrate. (a) For the doctrine of election, 
 which is the most conspicuous instance of this theo- 
 logical tendency, there is a truly religious motive. 
 Man not only desires salvation, but the assurance of 
 the reality of that salvation. Were that salvation 
 based on the variable will of man, that assurance 
 would be gone. Were it even based on a varying 
 purpose of God, certainty would be beyond reach. 
 For the full confidence of faith there must be the belief 
 that the salvation is God’s work and not man’s, and 
 that the purpose of God to save is not a temporary 
 response to a human need and appeal, but has its 
 roots in the very nature of God Himself—that it is an 
 _ eternal purpose which is finding its fulfilment in time. 
 This conviction is expressed, with all the power and 
 charm which Spurgeon could command, in a sermon, 
 ‘Songs in the Night.’ ‘ My beloved brethren,’ he 
 
238 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 says, ‘ you will find it a sweet subject for song at 
 times, to begin to sing of electing love and covenanted 
 mercies. When thou thyself art low, it is well to sing 
 of the fountainhead of mercy, of that blest decree 
 wherein thou wast ordained to eternal life, and of that 
 glorious Man who undertook thy redemption ; of that 
 solemn covenant signed, and sealed, and ratified, in 
 all things ordered well; of that everlasting love 
 which, ere the hoary mountains were begotten, or 
 ere the aged hills were children, chose thee, loved thee 
 firmly, loved thee first, loved thee well, loved thee 
 eternally.’ (b) Where this legitimate demand of the 
 soul is abandoned, and.a precarious assumption takes 
 its place, is where this purpose is not conceived as 
 universal, embracing all mankind, but as particular, 
 discriminating the one man from the other, electing 
 the one, reprobating the other. In the same sermon 
 Spurgeon speaks of ‘ electing love’ and ‘ discrimin- 
 ating mercy.’ But can a love which is partial be as 
 full of comfort and assurance to the soul as a love that 
 is universal? Can I be surer of my salvation if I 
 believe that God only loves some, than if I am con- 
 vinced that He loves all eternally ? This doctrine, 
 however, also suffers from a moral defect. A senti- 
 ment which is contrary to the spirit of Christ enters 
 in when the man rejoices in the certainty of his own 
 salvation, and acquiesces, even if he does not find 
 some satisfaction, in the fact that others have not been 
 so favoured as he has been. That He might save 
 others Jesus would not save Himself (Mark xv. 31). 
 Paul was willing to be anathema from Christ for his 
 brethren’s sake (Romans ix. 3). This is the Christian 
 sentiment. If reprobation is the necessary counter- 
 part of election, then to find joy in being elected out 
 of a race the majority of which has been reprobated 
 is a selfish feeling, and selfishness is not less but even 
 more offensive when it invades the relation of man 
 to God. If we have really seen God in the face of 
 Jesus Christ, it should be impossible for us to believe, 
 unless in deference to the Holy Scriptures we silence 
 both conscience and reason within us, that God wills 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 239 
 
 the damnation of any creature of His hand and child 
 of His heart. 
 
 (11) A passage which is claimed as a sure foundation 
 for the doctrine of election is that in which Paul is 
 explaining the refusal of his own nation to accept the 
 Gospel (Rom. ix. 1-29). He does undoubtedly, with 
 almost brutal ruthlessness, declare God’s right to do 
 as He will with His creatures, to save some, to damn 
 others ; and he supports his contention by quotations 
 from the Scriptures which it must be admitted do 
 indicate facts of history, whether the explanation of 
 them be adequate or not. (a) What has been ignored 
 by Calvinism in its use of this passage is that it is 
 what the logicians call an argumentum ad hominem. 
 Paul is rebuking Jewish arrogance, which was claiming 
 a privileged position towards God. If God had a 
 right to choose Israel, He has no less a right to reject 
 Israel. On the level of Jewish thought the argument 
 was strictly valid. But Paul cannot himself remain 
 on that level. He rises first to the merely moral 
 and then to the Christian solution of the problem with 
 which he is dealing. Israel has been rejected because 
 it deserved to be rejected on account of its unbelief 
 (ix. 30, x. 21). But the rejection is only temporary, 
 and has the salvation of Jew and Gentile alike as its 
 end (xi. 1-31). °*God hath shut up all unto dis- 
 obedience, that He might have mercy upon all’ (v. 32). 
 It would be well if the whole argument were always 
 considered, and not one part of it only. In Paul 
 there is, not a dogmatic universalism, but at least a 
 hope for mankind, in which the doctrine of particular 
 election passes out of sight altogether. 
 
 (b) It has often been contended that history proves 
 that God’s dealings with men are discriminative. 
 That there are differences of natural endowment and 
 historical circumstances among men may be frankly 
 admitted. But it is too rash an inference that these 
 are directly due to any arbitrary exercise of the 
 divine will. Just as we come to understand nature 
 do we recognise that God works in and through an 
 order of nature, not setting it aside, not interfering 
 
240 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 with its operations. So also as we study history do 
 we find sequence, reason, purpose. We recognise 
 more fully man’s responsibility for the course of 
 events. Wedo not exclude God; but He comes into 
 the course of history not as absolute Will above and 
 beyond, but as Holy Love within and through, the 
 reason, the conscience, and the spirit of man. As 
 psychology will disclose to us more fully the working 
 of the mind of man, we shall have a fuller under- 
 standing of the differences among men. We shall 
 then abandon the conception of a God whose will 
 cannot be understood by the reason and approved 
 by the conscience of man, but must be accepted as 
 inscrutable mystery ; but we shall find the Father of 
 our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who discloses 
 Himself to us in His works and ways as holy love, to 
 which our hearts respond. Paul’s own illustration 
 of the potter and the clay (Rom. ix. 21) forbids the 
 assumption of an arbitrary action of God in history. 
 The potter can do with the clay what he will only as 
 he takes account of the quality of the clay. He will 
 not use the better clay to make what could be made 
 out of clay less good. He makes the best and the 
 most of his material if he is a master of his craft and 
 not a bungler init. Shall we ascribe less wisdom and 
 skill to God ? +Thus Paul’s argument, closely scruti- 
 nised, does not support the doctrine of election, as has 
 often been assumed. 
 
 (iii) The argument against Calvinism from the 
 standpoint of God’s revelation in Christ is conclusive. 
 With this revelation the doctrine of foreknowledge 
 and foreordination alike is inconsistent. The passages 
 in the Holy Scriptures which teach these doctrines, 
 or in some instances are supposed to teach them, 
 involve the conception of God as Almighty Will, 
 and not as Holy Love. (a) If God made man free 
 that he might realise the ideal of personality, He 
 did commit to man the decision of his own destiny, 
 and did not anticipate that decision by any divine 
 decree. If it was in holy love that God created man, 
 what He desires and purposes for all is eternal life 
 
 
 
 a 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 241 
 
 and not death. Men may hinder and thwart God’s 
 purpose; and human history is the record of man’s 
 working alongside of God, both against and for His 
 purpose. ‘To interpret history as merely the carrying 
 out in time of a complete divine programme, fixed 
 in eternity in all its details, is to empty it of all mean- 
 ing and worth by reducing it to a mere puppet-show, 
 and to make God a showman who pulls the strings 
 responsible for all the movements of the puppets. 
 A logically consistent Calvinism ends in a pantheism 
 in which God must be identified no less with all the 
 evil than with all the good. The fulfilment of God’s 
 purpose depends on the free acts of man. God by 
 His Spirit does morally and religiously direct and 
 control the spirit of man, but always consistently with 
 his freedom. ‘To make God directly responsible for 
 every event is to charge Him with willing evil as well 
 as good. It is not piety to ascribe to God the results 
 of human sin, unless as the inevitable consequences 
 in the moral order of the free acts of men. What the 
 Great War has brought home to many thoughtful 
 men is the reality of man’s liberty and consequent 
 responsibility. God does not prevent war or promote 
 peace by His omnipotence, although He does by His 
 Spirit in the human reason and conscience restrain 
 from evil and constrain to good. Itis by His personal 
 activity in man, and thus alone, that God through 
 man is fulfilling His purpose. 
 
 (b) If God does not foreordain it is no less necessary . 
 for man’s freedom that He should not foreknow. 
 How a foreknown act can be a free act is inconceivable. 
 How can what in God’s mind is already fixed as 
 actual be for man’s choice only possible? This 
 dilemma cannot be escaped by saying that the relation 
 of God to man is inscrutable, for the difficulty is the 
 creation of man’s own speculative thought about God. 
 The assertion of God’s foreknowledge is no datum of 
 experience: it isan inference from a certain conception 
 of God. Granted that God knows all, He knows the 
 actual as actual, and the possible as possible; other- 
 wise His knowledge would not correspond with reality 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 just as it is. Further, such teaching as is given by 
 Jesus about God’s relation to man, His pain in man’s 
 sin, His joy in man’s recovery, would be meaningless 
 if God foreknew each human choice before it was made. 
 If the shepherd knew that he would find the lost sheep, 
 would his sorrow at the loss be as great? Such an 
 analogy on the lips of Jesus can be confidently used 
 against all speculative conjecture. Human history 
 would lose its interest for God if He were eternally 
 contemplating all that occurs. God can be man’s 
 fellow-sufferer, as man is God’s fellow-worker in 
 history only as it is for God the unfolding of His 
 purpose, not according to a fixed, timed programme, 
 but with hindrances, delays, recoveries, triumphs 
 unforeseen due to the varying activity of man as 
 partner with God, and God’s varying activity in 
 guiding man’s actions as partner with man. We 
 must set aside all speculative conclusions about God, 
 and frankly and boldly render explicit all that is im- 
 plicit in Christ’s teaching about God’s Fatherhood. 
 (iv) What can be offered in place of the assurance 
 of salvation that the doctrine of election gave to 
 those who believed themselves the elect ? -What 
 certainty is there that God will accomplish the work 
 of saving mankind? All security would be taken 
 from religion if we were to think of God as with man 
 engaged in a conflict, uncertain of victory, needing 
 man’s help, and not sure of His own strength. As 
 has already been shown, Christ was absolutely con- 
 fident as regards not only God’s goodwill but also 
 Mis power to give effect to that goodwill. The more 
 fully we recognise the reality of history, the depend- 
 ence of the fulfilment of God’s purpose on man’s free 
 acts, the more necessary is it for us to cherish Christ’s 
 confidence in the sufficiency of God, not as physical 
 omnipotence but as personal perfection. Unless we 
 are to be put to moral and religious confusion, God’s 
 Fatherhood must mean to us that God can do what 
 He wills. ‘ Hope putteth not to shame, because the 
 love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts 
 through the Holy Ghost which was given unto us’ 
 
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 243 
 
 (Rom. v. 5). We may say boldly that if God is 
 Father, He would never have created a race that He 
 could not redeem. These are responsibilites of a 
 Creator—not to begin a work which He cannot finish, 
 not to make an experiment which He has not the 
 resources to make a success. Though God neither 
 foreordains nor foreknows man’s free acts, and man’s 
 freedom has full unhindered scope, He knows the 
 limits within which that freedom, its use or abuse, 
 can affect, to help or to hinder, the fulfilment of His 
 purpose, and He knows what are His resources to 
 meet every emergency. While we may not confidently 
 affirm that every man will be saved, yet we may be 
 sure that all the ways and works of God as Creator 
 will at last find their vindication in God as Redeemer, 
 the Father of all reconciling the world unto Himself 
 in His Son. We may share with Paul the exultant 
 and triumphant assurance of having been chosen of 
 God, not out of but with the race, for salvation from 
 the foundation of the world, for it was for this very 
 end that, as far as we can construe the meaning of 
 the world, the world was made and is kept in being by 
 God. ‘The Lamb hath been slain from the founda- 
 tion of the world ’ (Rev. xi. 8) that He might redeem 
 ‘unto God with His blood men of every tribe, and 
 tongue, and people, and nation,’ and might make 
 them ‘to be unto our God a kingdom and priests ’ 
 (v. 9-10). 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD 
 AND MAN 
 
 I 
 
 (1) Curist1an theology is not primarily concerned 
 with the world as the object of the explanations of 
 science, the interpretations of philosophy, but almost 
 exclusively with the relation of the world to God, and 
 with other aspects only as they bear on that relation. 
 The Biblical cosmology has for it an interest and value 
 as showing how men inspired of God, but limited to 
 the knowledge of the world of their own age and 
 surroundings, conceived that relation ; but it has not 
 an authority which would supplant that of science 
 in its own sphere. If it knows its own proper business 
 it will not attempt to reconcile geology and Genesis 1., 
 or confront biology and anthropology with the account 
 of man’s origin in Genesis ii. While with the writers 
 in the Holy Scriptures it will affirm the truth that 
 God is Creator, as regards the process of the Creation 
 of both the world and man it will ungrudgingly and 
 even heartily accept the light that science may throw | 
 upon the subject. Only..when science trespasses — 
 beyond its own proper territory, and attempts ‘to 
 answer those ultimate questions which neither its” : 
 methods nor its results*make it competent to deal 
 with, or when theology, ignoring its own limitations, 
 tries to impose answers to questions with which | 
 science alone can deal;~can there be any Conflict 
 between science and theology. Even if it be a counsel 
 
 of perfection, it would be well if scientists knew enough 
 about theology, and theologians enough about science, 
 
 not to invade the one the other’s province. The 
 244 
 
 
 
 
 " 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 245 
 
 theologian needs to remember always that the Bible ) 
 was given to make men wise unto salvation and not_ 
 unto science, and the man of science that there are 
 things in heaven and earth not dreamed of in his 
 philosophy. Theology must challenge any philosophy — 
 which, based exclusively on the conclusions of science, 
 ignores the testimony of the moral conscience and the 
 religious consciousness, and most of all the fact of 
 Christ, on the ground that it has not taken due account 
 of all the data for an interpretation of total reality. 
 Theology, on the other hand, cannot ignore either 
 science or philosophy, in so far as any of their con- 
 clusions have any bearing on the subject which 1s its 
 dominant interest. As to the mode of Creation it 
 will gladly go to school with science; as regards the 
 categories of thought which it must employ it will 
 give heed to any scrutiny to which philosophy may 
 have subjected them. It will not meet them ‘as 
 enemies in the gate,’ but work with them as allies in 
 the one common task of discovering the truth. 
 
 (2) In the previous chapter reference has already 
 been made to the divine attributes of infinitude 
 and absoluteness, transcendence and immanence. As 
 transcendent, above and beyond the world, God is 
 infinite and absolute, not without limits or relations, 
 but self-limited and self-related, He has what theo- 
 logians have called aseity and proseity: ultimate 
 cause of the world, He is His own cause; final purpose 
 of the world, He is His own purpose. He has suffi- 
 ciency in Himself, and does not depend on His relation 
 to the world for His reality. He is eternal as not in 
 His own existence subject to time, and He is immense 
 as not subject to space. While the religious con- 
 sciousness itself may not be aware of these conceptions, 
 they are legitimate speculative deductions from what 
 religion believes God to be. God’s eternity and im- 
 mensity are thoughts familiar to all profound religious 
 experience. God must be so conceived when we make 
 explicit all that is implicit in man’s sense of God’s 
 sufficiency and his own dependence. As immanent, 
 God is in the world, and one of the most crucial 
 
246 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 problems of theology is the relation between this 
 immanence and this transcendence. This transcend- 
 ence in the immanence is expressed in the three terms 
 familiar to religious thought generally—omnipresence, 
 omniscience, and omnipotence ; the first part of each 
 of these words indicates the transcendence and the 
 second the immanence. God is not present, diffused 
 throughout space, as is the hypothetical ether ; He 
 is wholly present in every point of space and moment 
 of time. He knows all that is as itis. (This does not 
 necessarily involve foreknowledge of free acts, as has 
 been shown in the previous chapter.) He can do all 
 that can be done. (This does not, however, mean 
 that He does all that is done; man’s free acts are 
 excepted, and, if even in living organisms there is 
 any spontaneity, the process of life is not directly and 
 exclusively God’s activity.) There is a universal 
 activity of God in the Universe sustaining in existence 
 what God has created; and this activity is con- 
 ditioned by the nature of the reality God has brought 
 into being. Each event is not separately, independ- 
 ently willed by God, but there is an order of nature 
 in which is the immediate cause of this effect, although 
 it is God’s activity which is the ultimate cause of this 
 system. To these three terms we should, in accord 
 with the revelation in Christ, add a fourth, omni- 
 patience. God feels with and in all His sentient 
 creatures. It is thus the whole of God as personal 
 which is wholly present in the Universe. 
 
 (8) These terms state the problem, and do not solve 
 it.” How can we get from the One to the many, from 
 the Infinite to the finite, from the Absolute to the 
 dependent, from the Eternal to the temporal? The 
 Incarnation is the clue to Creation and Conservation. 
 Paul in giving the Lord Jesus Christ as an example 
 of humility and consideration (Phil. ii. 5-8) has stated 
 a cosmic principle. It is by kenosis, self-emptying, 
 that God reaches self-fulfilment, plerosis, in His 
 ‘universe. This is not intended to be understood in 
 the Hegelian sense that God Himself as God evolves 
 with the Universe, and reaches full self-consciousness 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 247 
 
 in the Hegelian philosophy: it does not mean even 
 that God realises Himself as God in the Christian 
 revelation and redemption. To the transcendence of 
 God we must hold fast as an anchor of our thought 
 without which we should drift into all kinds of specu- 
 lations perilous to morality and religion. It is God 
 as immanent in the Universe in whom we may 
 recognise self-limitation for self-expression and self- 
 communication. It is love which can so find itself 
 in losing itself. From the Christian standpoint we 
 may boldly affirm that it was love which was the 
 motive of Creation. God is not such uncontrolled 
 fullness of reality that it must overflow into the 
 Universe, God is not such unsatisfied desire that He 
 needs to make a world to meet His needs. We may 
 not ascribe to God any need except love’s need of 
 loving and of freely giving of its fullness. If it be 
 objected that such a view makes God dependent on 
 the Universe, and that before the world was there 
 must have been an incompleteness in God, we may 
 give a twofold answer. According to the Christian 
 doctrine of the Trinity, the exposition of which must, 
 however, be reserved to the very end of this volume, 
 God is in Himself both subject and object of love: 
 the love of the Father and of the Son is perfected in 
 the unity of the Spirit. And further, although the 
 world as we know it gives indications of a commence- 
 ment and also of a consummation of its evolution, the 
 creative, preservative, and perfective process in space 
 and time, we must not affirm that God’s love was not 
 active in worlds other than this. We must not with 
 Greek dualism affirm an eternal matter, which the 
 divine mind brings from potentiality to actuality ; but 
 Christian faith does not demand any denial of the possi- 
 bility of other worlds dependent for existence on God. 
 
 (4) As love is that in which man is most akin to 
 God, we may use the analogy of human love in trying 
 to conceive the divine kenosis. Human love, especi- 
 ally of the mother for the child, needs and shows 
 self-limitation for self-expression and self-communica- 
 tion. The mother must become a child to teach and 
 
x 
 
 248 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 train her child. She must limit herself to the capacity 
 of the child to respond and to receive. We cannot 
 imagine the process of Creation, but we can conceive 
 its principle. Physical forces are God’s infinite power 
 in finite exercise; natural laws are God’s infinite 
 wisdom in finite expression. Whatever God thus 
 brings into existence has reality for God, and the 
 further process of Creation is conditioned by that 
 reality. Evolution as the mode of this process is 
 much more intelligible and credible than successive 
 acts of creation not continuous with one another. 
 Evolution means continuity with change. The suc-. 
 cession is not mere succession, but progress. Theistic 
 thought should not insist on breaks or pauses in the 
 divine activity. It recognises stages, in each of which 
 something new comes into existence, not unrelated 
 to but dependent on what already is. We need not 
 for our purpose concern ourselves with the physicist’s 
 speculations about the ultimate nature of matter, 
 atoms or electrons, except to point out that the 
 matter of the old materialism is fast dissolving into 
 something which presents a less absolute contrast to 
 mind. Nevertheless, matter, however we may con- 
 ceive it, is that which is furthest removed from the 
 conception of God; may we express it thus: it is the. 
 furthest. limit of God’s self-emptying? Life more. 
 fully expresses what God is than does matter. While 
 physical conditions and chemical processes are in- 
 volved in the continuance of life, yet life is not ex- 
 plicable in terms of matter and force only. Physics 
 
 and chemistry do not solve the problems of biology ; — 
 this we may emphasise without committing ourselves ~ 
 
 to any theory of vitalism. Whether we can dis- 
 tinguish life and mind is very doubtful; there seems_ 
 to be a mental factor in all organic development : } 
 but we need not commit ourselves to panpsychism. 
 Certain it is that the physiology of the brain and 
 nervous system does not remove the need of the 
 psychology of the mind. When mind becomes con- 
 
 “1 See Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism, ii., Lecture X. 
 * See Tansley’s The New Psychology and its Relation to Life. 
 
 : 
 j 
 
 | 
 
 { 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 249 
 
 scious, and still more when consciousness becomes 
 self-consciousness, fresh stages of evolution are reached. 
 If the whole process be divine activity, at these marked 
 stages in the process, we may venture to speak of a 
 divine initiative. The self-expression becomes clearer, 
 and the self-communication fuller. As far as our 
 knowledge can carry us, this evolution has its con- 
 summation in man. What must be said about man’s 
 place in Creation must be reserved for another section ; 
 but here it will suffice to state that in man’s de- 
 velopment rationally, aesthetically, morally, socially, 
 religiously, the creative process is continued, although 
 its content is now changed; it is not from matter 
 through life to mind: it is within mind. Christ as 
 the firstborn of many brethren marks a new stage in 
 that creative process, the stage which will be con- 
 summated in the redeemed family of God in perfection, 
 glory, blessedness, the plerosis of God accomplished 
 by His kenosis. So may we conceive Creation from 
 the Christian standpoint in accord with the conclu- 
 sions of science. 
 
 (5) There are other conceptions of God’s relation to 
 the world which need explication in the same way. 
 The creative process is continuous; but what has 
 been created remains real for God, and conditions 
 that process. Thus life is dependent on physical 
 conditions and chemical processes, and mind as we 
 now know it in man is conditioned by the living 
 organism. The continuance of what is as the con- 
 dition of what is coming to be is usually described 
 as conservation. Paul expresses this truth in relation 
 to man in the words, ‘In Him we live, and move, 
 and have our being’ (Acts xvii. 28). To the creature 
 God gives a permanent reality not independent of 
 His activity, and yet preserved in its distinctive 
 nature. When we come to man, that conservation 
 allows a relative independence; so that while God is 
 sustaining the existence of the human personality, 
 there is an activity which is not directly God’s, but 
 
 1 A very full discussion of this subject will be found in The Spiritual Inter- 
 pretation of Nature, by J. Y. Simpson. 
 
250 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 has its source in the personality God has created as 
 free will. That freedom is within the limits set to 
 the capacity of human personality, and the control 
 which man can exercise over nature. The conse- 
 quences of man’s activity in his own character, and 
 circumstances, further circumscribe that activity. He 
 who sows to the flesh cannot from the flesh reap any- 
 thing else than corruption, as he that soweth to the 
 Spirit will from the Spirit reap life everlasting (Gal. 
 vi. 8). There is a physical order and a moral order. 
 which man can discover by his reason and conscience, 
 which sets the bounds to his activity. It is thus that 
 God conserves man; and as this conservation is not 
 apart from but through man, it may be called govern- , 
 ment. As God has a personal relation to each man, 
 a purpose for mankind which He is fulfilling in and by 
 each man, there is an activity of God, both through 
 the system of nature and the course of history, which 
 is named His Providence. 
 
 (6) There are few subjects on which there is so much 
 crudity of thought among Christian people as on the 
 subject of providence. The Hebrew prophets inter- 
 preted the history of their nation as divine providence. 
 God used the great empires, into contact with which 
 His people came, as the instruments of His purposes 
 of judgment or mercy. Jesus taught very clearly 
 God’s constant activity in caring for His children. 
 There is a universal impartial beneficence in sunshine 
 and shower (Matt. v. 45); and there is an individual 
 guidance and guardianship (x. 29-31). God provides 
 for all and for each. As the Hebrew prophets recog- 
 nised a divine purpose, so did Jesus; God controls 
 nature and directs history for that purpose. 
 
 (1) It is as men relate themselves to that purpose 
 that the divine providence (Luke xn. 32) becomes 
 more manifest in their lives. If their interests and 
 pursuits are remote from that purpose, they cannot 
 have the same assurance of God’s keeping and leading. 
 The man who follows his own wishes and sets aside 
 God’s claim has no right to expect God to shield him 
 from the consequences of his own acts, or assure him 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 251 
 
 of the satisfaction of his own desires. To claim that 
 every occurrence is of God’ S appointment is to make 
 God responsible for man’s sin and its consequences. 
 God’s providence does not mean that every man will | 
 get what he wants; even the saint may suffer, but 
 get gain by the way he endures it, while for the wicked 
 the same suffering may result in hardening of heart 
 (Rom. ix..18). God is not a means to man’s ends, 
 and only as a man makes God’s ends his own in love 
 for God can he be sure that all things will work to- 
 gether for good (Rom. viii. 28). 
 
 (1) It is through nature and history that God’s 
 providence is realised ; and it is an error that only in 
 occurrences which are strange and seemingly inex- 
 plicable is God’s providence recognised. This is not 
 Christian theism, but a survival of the deism of the 
 eighteenth century. God is for the most part regarded 
 as absent or inactive in the world, with only occasional 
 incursions into a world that otherwise goes on without 
 Him. ‘To believe in God aright is to believe that He 
 is always and everywhere present and active in nature 
 and history. It is from the standpoint of belief in 
 the constant and efficient immanence of God that 
 we must regard the problem of miracles. It is not 
 strength but weakness of faith to look for God’s care 
 and bounty, guidance and guardianship, only in events 
 which can be regarded as miracles, and to overlook 
 His goodness in the order of nature or the course of 
 history. So common, however, is this attitude, that 
 the subject of miracles demands a close scrutiny. 
 
 (7) We may at once set aside the older definitions 
 of miracles as interferences with or suspensions of 
 the order of nature, for there is no order of nature 
 apart from God’s conserving activity. God does not 
 contradict or oppose Himself. The regularity of the 
 order of nature is the constancy of God. As that 
 order shows His wisdom and goodness as well as His 
 power, to assume that He sets it aside to bring about 
 His ends is to charge Him with fickleness. What 
 mental confusion and physical disaster would result 
 if men could not rely on the regularity of that order ! 
 
252 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Men can control physical forces as they understand 
 and conform to natural laws; and man’s culture and 
 civilisation would fall in ruins were God not constant 
 in His activity in nature. But consistently with that 
 order we may conceive an activity of God which is not 
 explicable by that order as our science has got to 
 know it. For the ends of the revelation of God or 
 the redemption of man such activity may be necessary, 
 as the natural order, adequate as it is for most of God’s 
 dealings with man, may be insufficient for the more 
 intimate relation of God to man in revelation and 
 redemption. If a human analogy may with due 
 reserve be used in illustration, we may describe the 
 laws of nature as showing God’s habits, and miracles 
 as original acts, not inconsistent with but not con- 
 forming to those habits, to meet an emergency. No 
 man is so much a slave of habit that he cannot in a 
 crisis do what may be a surprise to himself as well as” 
 to others. The relation of God to the world is so 
 immediate and so constant, on the view here held, 
 that a miracle must be regarded only as a variation 
 in the mode of God’s activity, and not as an increase 
 in the amount of that activity. God is not more 
 active in a miracle than in the order of nature, al- 
 though man’s attention to that activity may be more 
 quickly arrested by the miracle. That may be one 
 of the functions of miracle in the economy of revela- 
 tion and redemption, and its beneficent character may 
 impress as no ordinary occurrence could what is the 
 character of God so revealing Himself and redeeming 
 man. Such a view does not justify the expectation 
 of frequent miracles, or excuse any neglect to scrutinise 
 with all possible candour the evidence which is offered 
 for any miracle, and to demand that each miracle 
 shall authenticate itself by its relation to the purpose 
 of God. Unless the Christian sources are to be 
 regarded as unhistorical, Christian faith cannot aban- 
 don the belief in miracle, or Christian theology the 
 effort to offer an intelligible theory. 
 
 (8) There are two questions raised by what has been 
 stated regarding the relation of God to the world, 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 253 
 
 The first is this: Why has the mode of the divine 
 activity been evolution? and the second: Has this 
 time-process reality for God Himself ? 
 
 (i) To our limited intelligence it may sometimes 
 seem strange that God did not at once make the world 
 perfect, conforming entirely from the beginning to 
 the divine intention as disclosed at the end. Why 
 should matter precede life by so many aeons? Why 
 should life evolve from protisia along the line of the 
 protophyia to the oak, and the line of the protozoa to 
 the man? Why should mind, as it were, slumber in 
 the plant, be half awake in the instinct of the animal, 
 and only be fully aroused in the conscience and the 
 reason of man? Why should human development 
 in knowledge, art, morals, society, religion have been 
 so gradual, even if we assume that primitive man was 
 less degraded than the savage is? (This instance 
 must be mentioned to complete the series, although 
 the full discussion belongs to the next section.) The 
 only answer that can be suggested is, that whether 
 the necessity for such a mode of creation lies in the 
 very nature of finite reality or not, 1t may be that God 
 Himself finds fuller satisfaction in such a method than 
 in any other we could imagine. A product of our 
 human activity has more worth and meaning for us, 
 if it has cost us toil and time. There may be a joy 
 for the Creator in the increasing variety of His creation. 
 It may be, too, that in His condescension He thus 
 obtains the co-operation of His creations in the creative 
 process itself, the lower stage of the evolution being 
 the condition of the higher stage, until in man that co- 
 operation becomes fully conscious and freely exercised, 
 and thus discloses the secret of the whole process. 
 
 (11) We are thus led to the answer to our second 
 question. In the discussion of God’s attributes as 
 eternal and immense, it is affirmed, and rightly, that 
 God in His own reality is not subject to the limitations 
 of time and space. This does not, however, justify 
 the rash inference that for God there is no reality, 
 relative though it be, in the here and there, the 
 then and the now. If the Christian doctrine of the 
 
254 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Incarnation be true, if there be a real participation of 
 God in human history, then the time-process at least 
 has reality for God. The past of history is in some 
 sense past for God, and the future future; all is not 
 an indistinguished present. Although in His char- 
 acter God may be without variation or shadow that 
 is cast by turning (James i. 17), yet in the fulfilment 
 of His purpose the defeat or the triumph is real 
 enough for Him to bring Him sorrow or joy. The 
 time-process is invested with greater worth for man 
 if it is not without meaning even for God. Would 
 God be for our thought in every deed a living, working, 
 suffering, and loving God did He in eternal reality 
 abide above and beyond the time-process ? Because 
 ancient thought regarded God as so transcendent that 
 He could be described only by negations, it sought 
 and found a connection between Him and the world 
 in the mediating agency of the Logos. That concep- 
 tion is, however, capable of being regarded in two 
 ways. If it is used to emphasise the separation of 
 God from the world, then it becomes a hindrance 
 and not a help to Christian thought. Only when 
 understood as bringing God into immediate contact 
 with and immanent activity in the world does it 
 make the conception of the Incarnation intelligible 
 and credible. The use of the term Word in the Fourth 
 Gospel prepares us for the representation of the 
 immanence of the Father in the Son, and of the Son 
 in those to whom He gives the right to become children 
 of God. The use of the term Logos in the subsequent 
 developments of Christology tended to assert such a 
 separation of God and man as made the doctrine of 
 the Incarnation a mystery. If the earthly life of 
 Jesus had such reality for God that we may regard 
 God as in Him sharing the life of man, then the time- 
 process must have reality for God Himself. An 
 analogy may help to suggest the relation between 
 time and eternity in the divine mind. A biography, 
 a drama, a poem, a symphony may be held in the 
 human mind both in the variety of its details and the 
 unity of its distinctive character. | 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 255 
 
 (iii) Recognising fully that we must not unduly 
 press the analogy between divine and human father- 
 hood so as to ignore the difference between Creator 
 and creature, we are justified in urging that the 
 conception of fatherhood enables us to understand 
 why evolution was the divine method of creation, | 
 and why the time-process has reality for God. Would 
 any human father who has accepted the responsibility 
 and used the opportunity of fatherhood in the de- 
 velopment of his child desire that child to be given 
 to him full grown? How great a good is there in 
 the guiding of that development, and the watching of 
 it from stage to stage! How much more is the grown- 
 up son to the father because he has thus shared his 
 child’s growth from infancy to maturity! If God 
 made man in His likeness, and human fatherhood is. 
 a teproduction of the divine, then we may recognise 
 the significance for God Himself of the time-process, 
 and the value for Him of the evolution of the universe 
 as the mode of creation. 
 
 If 
 
 It has been impossible in discussing the relation 
 of God to the world to leave man out of account 
 altogether; but we must now concentrate all our 
 attention on the relation of God to man, and in this 
 connection offer a fuller reply to the objection made 
 to the belief in God’s fatherhood on the ground of 
 the insignificance of man in the world.! (1) In the dog- 
 matics of former times there was included an anthro- 
 pology, or doctrine of man, which on the authority 
 of Scripture included a great deal which does not 
 properly belong to theology at all. We do not now,. 
 and we cannot from the standpoint of modern know- | 
 ledge, accept as literal history the record of the creation 
 of man in Genesis i. or ii., whatever religious signifi- ~ 
 cance and moral value we may discover in it. That 
 at the end of the creative process man was made by 
 God, that he has a likeness to God and can hold a 
 
 1 The subject is discussed in its manifold bearings in J. Arthur Thomson’s 
 What is Man ? 
 
256 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 fellowship with God such as no other creature can, 
 that he has, therefore, a position of sovereignty among 
 other creatures, that he has personal liberty and 
 responsibility—these are truths suggested by these 
 narratives, which we must include in our doctrine of 
 man. Neither need we accept what has been called 
 biblical psychology! as a scientific account or philo- 
 sophical interpretation of human personality; the 
 old controversy as to whether that psychology is 
 iripartite—body, soul, and spirit—or bipartite—body 
 and soul or spirit—has now only a historical interest. 
 The truth this psychology conserves is that man, pos- 
 sessing his own individuality (soul) is related on the 
 one hand to the lower creation, sharing their creaturely 
 weakness (flesh), and on the other to God, dependent 
 on Him (spirit). God breathed into the dust (flesh) 
 His Spirit, and man became a living soul (Gen. il. 7). 
 This statement of the making of man enshrines the 
 truth that in man creature and Creator meet, that 
 man, linked on the one hand to all living creatures, 
 is on the other hand joined to God by affinity of nature | 
 and community of interest and purpose. The Hebrew 
 conception that it is body and spirit which constitute 
 the man, neither without the other, comes nearer 
 the reality than the Greek conception of man as soul 
 buried or imprisoned in body and escaping therefrom 
 at death. The Hebrew conception of resurrection 
 is also, as will afterwards be shown, relatively truer 
 than the Greek idea of immortality. 
 
 (2) While this is all that we need now to consider 
 in regard to biblical anthropology and psychology, it 
 is the biblical estimate of man which we must seek 
 to justify in the terms of our modern knowledge. 
 
 (1) As far as we can read the records of the universe, 
 man is the consummation of the process of evolution. - 
 There are animals which are bigger and stronger than” 
 he; instinct in animals is capable of achievement 
 which may fill us with wonder; some means of com- 
 munication with one another gregarious animals have ; 
 what look to our observation very like processes of 
 
 1 See The Christian Doctrine of Man, by H. Wheeler Robinson, M.A. 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 257 
 
 reasoning there are; but animals do not seem to go 
 beyond perceptual inference, the association of im- 
 pressions of sense, to conceptual inference, reasoning 
 with ideas; some moral qualities, too, can be dis- 
 cerned, as in parental care, and the affection of 
 domestic animals for those with whom they often 
 come into contact. There are anticipations in the 
 lower animals of powers and qualities which appear 
 in man. Man himself shows traces of an animal 
 ancestry ; and his inheritance includes animal neces- 
 sities, appetites, and instincts ; and to these the ‘ new’ 
 psychology is very persistent in calling our attention. 
 While Darwin held that the descent of man from the 
 lower animals could be traced, Wallace, who had 
 discovered the principle of natural selection independ- 
 ently, before Darwin gave his discovery to the world, 
 held that the distinctively human qualities could not 
 be so derived, but demanded a special ‘ spiritual 
 influx.’ Whether we should speak of a special creation 
 of man or not is a question the answer to which 
 depends on the conception we form of the relation 
 of God to the world in the creative process. If the 
 divine activity be continuous, as we should probably 
 have to regard it, then we must not think of, as it were, 
 a fresh start, or a break with what went before; and 
 yet we may think of a divine initiative, a fuller com- 
 munication of the mental, moral, and _ spiritual 
 resources of God in and to man in the creative process 
 than had gone before. That man’s brain weighs far 
 more than twice that of any animal and continues 
 growing very much longer than that of the apes is 
 a subordinate consideration in the proof of man’s 
 difference from all his fellow-creatures; it is what 
 man has become in his historical development, which 
 is the proof that at his creation he had a promise 
 and a potency such as no other animal possessed. 
 Man may within limits train the lower animals to 
 do what of themselves they would never have done, 
 so that some capacity for improvement does exist ; 
 but progress is not found among even the highest 
 species of animals, and it is characteristic of man. 
 R 
 
258 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (ii) Those who would minimise the difference be- 
 tween man and the lower animals assume that the 
 savage of to-day represents what primitive man was. 
 That assumption of much of the current anthropology 
 must be challenged. Granted even that the savage is 
 as bestial as he is sometimes represented as being by 
 the superficial observer, although a closer scrutiny 
 contradicts that hasty conclusion, there is no evidence 
 that the savage at his worst is what primitive man 
 was at his beginning. That primitive traits may be 
 more easily discovered in the savage than in the 
 civilised man, that relatively there has been less 
 change in the savage than in the civilised man, may 
 be admitted. But evolution may mean deterioration 
 as well as improvement; and accordingly the un=~ 
 favourable conditions of life may have made the 
 savage worse, as the more favourable conditions may 
 have made the civilised man better, than was the 
 primitive man. That man at the beginning had that 
 perfection which Christian theology has assigned to 
 him, or as Milton describes Adam as having, we cannot 
 maintain. What can be insisted on is this: that as 
 primitive man is the common ancestor of savage and 
 civilised man alike, he was so endowed that the 
 subsequent progress was possible. 
 
 (111) The argument has been summarised as follows 
 by Dr. Fairbairn:! ‘ In the face, then, of their con- 
 trasted histories, let us now put man and the man-like 
 ape together and ask, What is the problem they offer 
 to science ? Do the eloquently minimised differences 
 which we find in the structure of the man as distin- 
 euished from the man-like ape explain the differences 
 in their histories? If they do, then we ought to be 
 told how such small differences in structure have 
 become causes of effects so wondrously and vastly 
 opposite. If they do not, then why speak as if man 
 and the man-like ape stood in the same system, and 
 were in any tolerable sense related as ancestor and 
 progeny ? When their respective histories are viewed 
 together and honestly compared, is it true that man 
 
 * The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 45. 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 259 
 
 is in faculty as in structure one with the brutes ? 
 Must it not rather be affirmed that man starts with 
 some endowment which the brute has not? If 
 Darwin. needed his first form before he could trace 
 the genesis of species, so not less is it true that we 
 must have mind before the history of man becomes 
 possible or capable of intellectual realisation. But 
 if it be mind that constitutes the differentiation of 
 man from brute, then to imagine that the distance 
 between them is reduced by the discovery of simil- 
 arities in their organic structure is a mere irrelevance 
 of thought.’ Mind is evidently used in this statement 
 in the restricted sense of mind as it is in man, and what 
 it has achieved in human history. We do not deny, 
 as has already been shown, that wherever there is life 
 there seems to be mind, that in the lower animals a 
 rudimentary intelligence is to be found, and that not 
 in the form of instinct alone; but it is developed 
 mind as_ self-consciousness, reason and conscience, 
 science, art, literature, civilisation, morals and religion 
 which so distinguishes man from all other living 
 creatures that his advent marks a fresh stage in the 
 evolution of the world. That the living organism, 
 which is the organ of the mind, has been gradually 
 developed out of lower forms need not be denied, 
 indeed cannot, as the human embryo recapitulates 
 the organic development. But a problem does remain. 
 The mind and its organ are so closely related, that it 1s 
 difficult, if not impossible, to understand how, apart 
 from the gradual impartation of the higher endowment 
 which belongs to man, an organism could be gradually 
 developed capable of receiving that higher endow- 
 ment. The conviction that man is so immeasurably 
 different from the lower animals has a solid basis, 
 and does not rest on this or that solution of any 
 biological problem.? 
 
 (3) It has been assumed in the previous discussion 
 
 1 Thomson, who maintains the continuity of the process of creation, states 
 the difference between man and animal as follows: ‘The big differences 
 seem to us to be man’s capacity for looking at himself objectively, for framing 
 and experimenting with general ideas and controlling conduct in relation to 
 them, and for expressing judgment in language ’ (op. cit. p. 76). 
 
260 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 that mankind is one, and that we can assume a common 
 ancestry for all mankind, irrespective of colour, ete. 
 It is true that one French school of anthropology, 
 that of Lévy Brihl, tries to prove that the savage has 
 another mentality from the civilised man; but when 
 we examine the processes of thought of other races, 
 black, brown, or yellow, unlike as their results may 
 be to our own thoughts, we can make intelligible to 
 ourselves from what data of experiences, and by what 
 association of ideas, these conclusions have been 
 reached. With a fair measure of success we can 
 school ourselves to ‘ think black’ as well as ‘ white.’ 
 Again, among the peasantry of the more backward 
 European nations we can find similar ways of think- 
 ing. And in the civilised religions there are survivals 
 of kindred modes of belief.t It was assumed that the 
 aborigines of Australia were savages so degraded that 
 they had no religion, but closer inquiry has revealed 
 a most complex system of religious belief and culture. 
 The story is well known of how Darwin was convinced 
 that the Patagonians could be raised out of their low 
 condition to Christian belief and life. When we con- 
 sider the marvellous monuments which the buried 
 civilisations and cultures of the past, Egyptian, Baby- 
 lonian, Assyrian, Persian, have left behind, we dare 
 not claim that the European peoples have some inborn 
 superiority to other races. The ancient civilisations 
 of India, China, and Japan also survive to rebuke any 
 such conceit. There are some races, it is true, such as 
 the Red Indians, who seem to be unable to survive 
 the contact with the white race; but it is a serious 
 
 1 At the first Universal Races Congress, held in London, July 26-29, 1911, 
 Dr. Charles 8. Myers of Cambridge submitted and proved the four following 
 propositions :— 
 
 ‘I. That the mental characters of the majority of the peasant class through- 
 out Europe are essentially the same as those of primitive communities. 
 
 ‘Il. That such differences between them as exist are the result of differences 
 in environment and in individual variability. 
 
 ‘III. That the relation between the organism and its environment (con- 
 sidered in its broadest sense) is the ultimate cause of variation, bodily and 
 mental. 
 
 ‘IV. That this being admitted, the possibility of the development of all 
 
 primitive peoples must be conceded, if only the environment can be appro- 
 priately changed.’ (Inter-Racial Problems, p. 73.) 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 261 
 
 consideration whether that is due to any native in- 
 feriority on their part, or to the unwisdom and even 
 unrighteousness of their treatment by white peoples. 
 Probably it is as regards the negro race that inferiority 
 by nature is most confidently asserted. But if we 
 give due weight to the influence of environment we 
 shall hesitate about accepting such a_ conclusion. 
 Climatic conditions in Africa itself go far to explain 
 the stagnation or even retrogression of the black 
 peoples. The negro in America, who is descended 
 from a slave ancestry, has not yet had his full oppor- 
 tunity for a long enough time to show what his race 
 is capable of, although there are outstanding indi- 
 viduals who rebuke such race prejudice. It must be 
 admitted that in America as in Africa the black 
 people, even when converted to Christianity, still need 
 the tutelage of white men, and often show an emotional 
 excitability and moral instability which necessitates 
 such guardianship. It is not at all necessary to deny 
 that there are psychical as well as physical differences 
 of the races which may offer some ground for the 
 objection to ‘ mixed marriages’ apart from colour 
 prejudice altogether, or to desire that these differ- 
 ences did not exist, in order to affirm the ultimate 
 unity of the human race, the capacity of all men to 
 respond in sonship to the universal fatherhood of 
 God. 
 
 (4) This discussion has already involved the use of 
 three terms which need to be more fully explored— 
 heredity, environment, and individuality. These are 
 the factors which go to the making of human per- 
 sonality. 
 
 (i) It is commonly assumed that children will re- 
 semble their parents in physical features, menta! 
 capacity, and even moral character. The popular 
 phrase, ‘a chip of the old block,’ expresses this common 
 assumption. But in accounting for the facts which 
 justify this assumption we must carefully distinguish 
 physical heredity and social inheritance. By physical 
 heredity we mean the transmission from parents to 
 children by the vital organism, including such mental 
 
262 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 modifications as are dependent on that organism. 
 Tastes, habits, vices or virtues it is certain are not 
 transmitted in this way. The Darwinian theory 
 assumes that ‘ acquired characters’ are transmitted 
 from parents to offspring. This is denied by the school 
 of Weismann; and ‘it is in this direction that the bulk 
 of the scientific evidence points.’! However it may 
 be accounted for, there are good stocks and bad stocks, 
 in which excellences or defects are dominant. While 
 the embryo in the womb is protected from most in- 
 fections, there are racial poisons, due to alcoholism 
 and venereal disease, which do injure the unborn babe. 
 Within narrower limits than theology has often taken 
 for granted, science does confirm the statement that 
 God in the natural order even does visit * the iniquity 
 of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and 
 upon the fourth generation of them that hate’ Him, 
 and does show ‘ mercy unto thousands of them that 
 love’ Him ‘ and keep’ His ‘ commandments’ (Exod. 
 xx. 5,6). But that Adam’s sin should have involved 
 all mankind in total depravity, the modern scientific 
 view of heredity does not allow us to affirm. (To this 
 subject we must return in the next chapter.) The 
 two objections to this doctrine the writer has stated 
 elsewhere.? ‘Two considerations may make us pause 
 before we ascribe moral resemblances to physical 
 heredity. Firstly, unless organism determines per- 
 sonality to a greater extent than appears probable, 
 we cannot even conceive the vital mechanism by which 
 moral character could be transmitted from parent to 
 offspring. The Mendelian theory is based on physical 
 characteristics, such as size, colour, etc., andit is arash 
 and bold assumption that vices and virtues can be 
 accounted for similarly. Secondly, the environment 
 affects the development of the child most potently in 
 the earliest years, and the moral resemblances may 
 be due to parental influence after birth, rather than 
 to heredity before. It has been proved again and 
 
 1 Thomson, op. cit., p. 140. 
 2 A Handbook of Christian Apologetics, pp. 169-70. The second considera- 
 tion above holds if the stock itself is not bad. 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 263 
 
 again that if the child of evil parents be removed 
 in infancy or early childhood to a good moral en- 
 vironment, there is no moral resemblance to them. 
 Heredity cannot be proved an inescapable moral fate. 
 Just as the great majority of children are born 
 physically healthy, and infantile mortality is due to 
 evil conditions, so we may maintain that as regards 
 moral heredity children are born without any moral 
 determination for good or evil.’ Heredity is seen 
 more in the primary instincts than in the individual 
 characteristics. 
 
 (ii) The environment, especially in the earliest years, 
 is a potent factor. The disposition, temper, character, 
 and conduct of the parents are moulding the person- 
 ality of the child from the very beginning ; the mother 
 is the child’s earliest and in many ways most in- 
 fluential environment, as she influences even the 
 unborn babe. A mother may be punishing her own 
 bad temper as reproduced in her babe. It is through 
 the environment that the social inheritance comes to 
 the child, the opinions and beliefs, the moral habits 
 and standards, the religious disposition and aspiration 
 of a society, the product of the development of past 
 generations. By these the child is moulded for good 
 or evil, weal or woe. It is not at all probable that 
 human nature as such has been to any great extent 
 modified in the course of human development; the 
 civilised man, when the restraints of a civilised society 
 are removed, if he be not constrained by the moral 
 principles and the religious convictions which have 
 come to him in his social inheritance, but which he 
 has made his own, will very readily relapse to the 
 savage. War lets loose the wild beast in many a man. 
 As has just been indicated, the social inheritance may 
 affect the personality in two ways, either as only an 
 outward restraint, or as also an inward constraint. 
 The aim of education should be to transform the one 
 into the other. Only when a man has assimilated 
 that social inheritance, made it his very own, in- 
 separable from himself, has it had its full mfluence 
 upon him. Nurture is of great importance in the 
 
264 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 making of personality, environment counts as well as 
 heredity; this is a hopeful view, as nurture is more 
 flexible than nature, and we can control environment 
 to a greater extent than we can heredity. But even 
 environment is not finally decisive of character. 
 Potent moral influences on personality can secure a 
 triumph over an adverse heredity or environment. 
 As it would be a dangerous cruelty to make the moral 
 
 struggle for any man more severe than in any case 
 
 it must be, the recognition of this fact should not make 
 us indifferent to any efforts to modify the heredity, 
 so far as that may be possible, or to improve the 
 environment, which is in so many ways practicable. . 
 
 (iii) No human being is merely the product of 
 heredity and environment; even if with the biologist 
 we could sum up all that belongs to his heredity, or 
 with the sociologist all that has affected his environ- 
 ment, we should not have fully explained the man. 
 There may be striking physical resemblances, on which 
 literary genius may base a Comedy of Errors ; we may 
 describe the children of the same parents as being 
 ‘ like two peas in a pod,’ even although the two. peas 
 in a pod are not exactly alike; nevertheless, no two 
 persons are complete copies of one another. We must 
 recognise as a third factor in the development of 
 personality individuality. Each man is not a product 
 only, he is a producer. He makes himself what he is, 
 and in his own way. Heredity and environment may 
 provide much of the raw material, it is individuality 
 which determines the pattern of the fabric of life. 
 And in this individuality we may distinguish two 
 elements, one constant and one variable. (a) Each 
 man has his own capacities and characteristics, 
 peculiar to himself and constant, although he must 
 develop, and in that development may modify them. 
 The common saying, ‘ You can’t make a silk purse out 
 of a sow’s ear,’ indicates that individuality, even as 
 heredity and environment, is a limitation on human 
 development. A stupid man cannot be made, or 
 make himself, into a genius; it is doubtful whether 
 a melancholy temperament can be changed into a 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 265 
 
 sanguine; the tendency to quick temper may be 
 controlled, but probably cannot be suppressed al- 
 together. 
 
 (6) But what also belongs to individuality is 
 liberty within the limits which have already been 
 indicated. It is not needful for the present purpose 
 to go over the old battle between determinism and 
 indeterminism. The determinist assumption that it 
 is the strongest motive which determines the choice 
 can on a careful psychological analysis of the relation 
 between desire and volition be shown to be false.! 
 It is because the self identifies itself and seeks its 
 satisfaction in the fulfilment of one of the conflicting 
 desires that that desire becomes the motive of the 
 action. It is the exclusive concentration of the 
 attention on the object desired that results in the 
 action necessary for its attainment, and this attention 
 is directed by the selective interest of the person making 
 the choice; he is attracted to and fixes his attention 
 on what he thinks will satisfy him. The indeterminist 
 is no less in error in his analysis, when he assumes 
 motiveless volition, or when he treats the will as a 
 separate entity, and talks about the will choosing. 
 It is the self that chooses, and its choice is its willing. 
 The self chooses what at the time it regards as its 
 good—this is what we mean by the freedom of the will. 
 We may carry our analysis a little further. There is 
 the good chosen, and there is the self choosing. Now, 
 the self may be mistaken as to its good ; it may choose 
 what it regards as its good but what is only a partial 
 or momentary good, not the complete, permanent 
 satisfaction of the whole enduring personality. It 
 may thus bring itself into subjection to appetites and 
 passions which limit its freedom, in hindering it from 
 becoming really the self it was meant to be. By such 
 mistaken choice man may freely will his own bondage, 
 from which, however, he cannot so freely will his own 
 deliverance, as in so doing he has lessened his freedom. 
 If the self were the product only of heredity and 
 environment, and the constant individuality, then 
 
 * See The Elements of Ethics, by Muirhead, pp. 48-61, 
 
266 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 self-determination would still be a negation of free- 
 dom. We must then conclude that the self is not 
 merely a measurable actuality, but an incalculable 
 possibility. We get beyond the region of quantitative 
 relations of cause and effect. In the exercise of its 
 freedom the self is above and beyond the phenomenal, 
 and has risen into the noumenal order, as Kant 
 affirmed.’ The categories of the understanding which 
 we may apply to the data of our experience do not 
 apply to the subject of this experience. Psychology 
 may trace a continuity of desire, motive, volition as 
 the successive contents of our consciousness; but it 
 cannot apply the category of causality to that free 
 act of the self by which the desire becomes the motive 
 of the volition. The character which has already 
 been formed as the result of previous conduct does 
 not exhaust the self, and so from a man’s character 
 we cannot infallibly predict what his conduct in any 
 situation will be. There are reserves of personality 
 which appear in conversion, for instance. The only 
 way in which we can conceive this freedom is as the 
 delegated creative power of God in man. Man is 
 always making himself, and is always more than he 
 has already made himself. Just as the physical 
 conditions and the chemical processes in the organism 
 do not explain life, but life transcends while using 
 them, just as the nervous system and the brain do 
 not explain mind, but mind transcends while using 
 them, so heredity, environment, individuality as con- 
 stant, and even character as formed, do not explain 
 the free act, but the free self is master of them all. 
 We are thus led out of the region of physiology and 
 even psychology into the realm of metaphysics, the 
 nature of ultimate, essential reality, even to theology, 
 the relation of God Himself to each self which in its 
 freedom is exercising, even if within limits, creative 
 power. 
 
 (5) We are thus confronted with the question of the 
 origin of the soul. On this matter there were in the 
 
 * The Critique of the Practical Reason, Book u. chap. ii. See The Critical 
 Philosophy of Kant, by Caird, 11. chap. iii. 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 267 
 
 patristic period three theories held, which Harnack 
 has briefly summarised.! ‘ The different psychological 
 views of the Fathers are reflected in the various 
 theories as to the origin of individual souls. The 
 oldest of these was the traducian theory of Tertullian, 
 which was also represented by a few Greeks—Gregory 
 of Nyssa, Anastasius Sinaita. According to it the 
 soul was begotten along with the body. Its extreme 
 opposite was Origen’s idea of pre-eatstence, which had 
 still many adherents in the fourth century, but fell 
 more and more into discredit, until, finally, it was 
 expressly condemned at the Synod of Constantinople, 
 A.D. 553. According to this doctrine, all souls were 
 created at once by God along with the upper world, 
 and fell successively into the lower world and into 
 their bodies. The middle view—an expedient of per- 
 plexity—was the creatian, which gradually gained 
 eround all through the fourth century, and can be 
 characterised as the most widespread, at least in the 
 West, from the beginning of the fifth. It taught that 
 God was ever creating souls and planting them in the 
 embryos. The East contented itself with disowning 
 Origen’s theory. Augustine, the greatest theologian 
 of the West, was unable to come to any fixed views 
 regarding the origin of the soul.’ If we are to reach 
 any intelligible conception we must abandon the old 
 category of substance, and accept the new category 
 of subject as regards the soul. Or, to use another 
 contrast, our view must be dynamic and not static : 
 we must think of the soul, not as a fixed thing but as 
 a progressive activity. Much would be gained if 
 everywhere in the New Testament where psyche is 
 used, the term were rendered life, and not soul. We 
 can think of a continuity of life from sensibility to 
 self-consciousness, and we must not think of soul in 
 the embryo as self-consciousness. 
 
 (i) The facts of heredity would give support to 
 traducianism, although much modified from Tertul- 
 lian’s statement. What is transmitted from parents 
 to offspring is not inorganic matter, but organic life 
 
 1 History of Dogma, Eng. trans., iil. pp. 259-60, 
 
268 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 itself; and as the development of life can be under- 
 stood only as directed by mind, not matter and life 
 only but mind also seems to be transmitted in how- 
 ever rudimentary a form as subconscious. Mental as 
 well as physical characteristics are inherited. That 
 does not mean that the soul of the older metaphysics, 
 the indivisible unity, is transmitted, for the question 
 would then arise, does the father or the mother trans- 
 mit the soul, or does each contribute a part? To ask 
 such a question is the reductio ad absurdum of the 
 theory of a soul being begotten as well as a body. 
 
 (11) While the theory of Origen regarding the pre- 
 existence of the soul as spirit, and its lapse and 
 entrance into the bedy, is a speculative conjecture, 
 a mythological fancy one might almost call it, and 
 the reproduction of it in modified form by Julius 
 Miller’ adds nothing to commend it, yet the idea of 
 pre-existence is not to be so easily dismissed. (a) If 
 the soul continues after death, did it commence at 
 birth, or conception ? We may approach the subject 
 first of all from the standpoint of physical science. 
 ‘There are grades of incarnation,’ says Lodge; 2 ‘the 
 most thorough kind is that illustrated by our bodies : 
 in them we are incarnate, but probably not even in 
 that case is the incarnation complete. It is quite 
 credible that our whole and entire personality is never 
 terrestrially manifest.’ If this be so, need we assume 
 that the soul begins to be when it becomes incarnate, 
 or ceases when that incarnation, partial as that may 
 be, is ended at death? Again, from the standpoint 
 of philosophy or psychology, the relation of the 
 brain to thought is not productive, but permissive or 
 transmissive, according to William James.? The body 
 is the organ of the mind for its self-expression, as the 
 instrument is of the musician; but in the one case 
 no more than the other is the agent produced by 
 the organ, or identical with it. A piano does not 
 bring Paderewski into existence, although it may be 
 
 ' The Christian Doctrine of Sin, Eng. trans., ii. pp. 857-401. 
 * Life and Matter, p. 123. 
 * Human Immortality, pp. 32-48, 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 269 
 
 the best medium of his self-expression. James seems 
 even in his exposition of this relation of mind to brain 
 to commit himself definitely to the idea of pre-exist- 
 ence. ‘° Just how the process of transmission may be 
 carried on, is indeed unimaginable; but the outer 
 relations, so to speak, of the process encourage our 
 belief. Consciousness in this process does not have 
 to be generated de novo in a vast number of places. 
 It exists already behind the scenes, coeval with the 
 world. The transmission theory not only avoids in 
 this way multiplying miracles, but it puts itself in 
 touch with general idealistic philosophy better than 
 the production theory does. It should always be 
 reckoned a good thing when science and philosophy 
 thus meet.’ If the soul or life does not end with 
 death, if the incarnation is partial, and there may be 
 a reserve of personality for progressive manifestation 
 and activity through the body, need it be affirmed 
 that the soul begins at birth or conception ? 1 
 
 (b) The poets have been attracted by this idea of 
 pre-existence. Wordsworth’s ode, ‘ Intimations of 
 Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,’ 
 is probably the most familiar expression of that belief : 
 
 ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
 The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 And cometh from afar. 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory, do we come 
 From God, who is our home: 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy !’ 
 
 1 Thomson inclines to the monistic view, but he does not rule out the 
 dualistic on the ground of science. ‘ It is not difficult to find men of scientific 
 distinction and noble outlook who are convinced dualists, who believe that 
 the psyche is the dominant partner throughout, and a reality that may last 
 after the dissolution of partnership. Similarly it is not difficult to find men 
 of scientific distinction and noble outlook who are convinced monists, who 
 believe that all psychosis has its counterpart in biosis, that increasing complexity 
 of organisation has allowed the emergence of an aspect of reality which in 
 the simple forms of life is seen only, as it were, in sparks, whereas in man it 
 expands into daylight, in some into a more or less perfect day ’ (op. cit., p. 79). 
 These views are not so antagonistic as to exclude reconciliation. If ‘ the 
 emergence of an aspect of reality,’ the inner life of man, is conditioned by, 
 
 
 
270 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 This idealisation of childhood goes beyond experience ; 
 and memories of a previous state are fancy and not fact. 
 Less definite, but similar, is the thought of Tennyson : 
 
 ‘A soul shall draw from out the vast, 
 And strike his being into bounds, 
 
 And, moved thro’ life of lower phase, 
 Result in man, be born and think, 
 And act and love, a closer link 
 Betwixt us and the crowning race.’ 
 (In Memoriam, Epilogue.) 
 
 (c) Against the theory of a succession of incarnations 
 there may be urged the following considerations. As 
 there is no remembrance of that previous state, no 
 advantage can be gained from such lessons as might 
 have been learned. The realisation of the ideal of 
 personality in truth, beauty, blessedness, holiness, 
 love, loses its absolute value, if it is but one life in a 
 succession of states of existence unrelated for self- 
 consciousness. The development towards personality 
 in this life loses its significance, if it is only a repetition 
 of previous processes, that have left behind no sense 
 of gain or loss which can now be used for encourage- 
 ment or warning. When to the theory is added the 
 Hindu doctrine of Karma, the determination of each 
 life by the resultant of the works of the previous life, 
 the soul is involved in a bondage from which its one 
 desire must be to find relief! Such relief Hinduism 
 offers in the soul’s discovery of its identity with 
 Brahma, the sense of individuality being but a 
 delusion; and Buddhism in Nirvana, non-existence, or 
 non-conscious existence, or existence with no definite 
 content (whichever be the true interpretation of that 
 term). 
 
 (d) The rejection of this theory does not, however, 
 exclude the view that the soul may have existed, not, 
 it may be, as individually conscious, but as part of 
 the universal life pre-existent as created by God, a 
 but not itself the result of ‘the increasing complexity of organisation,’ Thom- 
 son’s view can be harmonised with Lodge’s and James’. The position — 
 which is taken in this volume seems to be quite reconcilable with all the facts 
 
 which science can produce as the data on which we must base our conclusion. 
 * See Redemption, Hindu and Christian, by Cave. 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 271 
 
 reserve from which, the conditions for a fresh person 
 having otherwise been fulfilled, the individual soul 
 may be drawn: or that universal life may even be 
 regarded not as created in the same sense as we may 
 speak of the creation of matter, but as a communica- 
 tion of life under conditions of finitude from the 
 fullness of life in God Himself. This second concep- 
 tion would give more than a moral and religious 
 content to the conception of God’s fatherhood and 
 man’s sonship. Men may become the sons of God 
 morally and religiously because that relation is already 
 potential in this impartation of the life of God even 
 in what is described as natural life. Such impartation 
 need not be in a single act, but in a continuous process, 
 even as we now conceive the creation of the world as 
 having been. We could then put the full Christian 
 content into Paul’s words at Athens, ‘in Him we live, 
 and move, and have our being; as certain even 
 of your own poets have said, For we are also His 
 offspring’ (Acts xvii. 28). Because the Son was so 
 intimately related to the Father, as none of those who 
 by His grace alone become fully sons is, He alone had 
 the intuition of His pre-existence, the consciousness 
 that His relation to the Father was eternal. When 
 we become fully sons, it may be the certainty of an 
 eternal relation to God will come to us also. To many 
 this may seem only idle speculation, but it does offer 
 a solution of the problem of the human soul con- 
 sonant with the Christian estimate of the value and 
 sacredness of man. 
 
 (iii) The theory of creationism in its crude form can 
 be dismissed, but it does present a truth which must 
 not be ignored. And it is this, that the process of 
 creation is continuous; whether the soul comes from 
 reserves of already created life, or is imparted from 
 the life of God Himself, it 1s God’s activity which 
 brings each new personality into existence, not in- 
 dependently of, but in concurrence with, the continuous 
 evolution of the life already in this world existent. 
 We need not suppose a distinct volition on the part 
 of God at each conception, but such a permanent 
 
272 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 relation of this transcendent life and the life already 
 immanent in the world that, given the necessary 
 conditions in the one, the other at once takes place. 
 This saves us from the conclusion, which to many 
 seems incongruous, that even when the conception 
 of the child is the result of illicit intercourse, of sinful 
 passion, God intervenes to create a soul to be attached 
 to the body, the life of which is thus begun. He so 
 limits His own independent volition, that it is by the 
 will of man, from whatever motive, that the initiation 
 of a new personality is begun. With all reverence 
 we may say that while God’s creative and conserving 
 activity does not cease, He makes man a partner in 
 His creative purpose, and man may will that another 
 life be begun. | 
 
 (6) It is desirable that we should distinguish soul 
 in the sense of the promise and potency conceived and 
 born, and personality as the product of the whole 
 development. To recall Lotze’s distinction,! God 
 alone is perfect personality, man is only personality 
 in the making. What are the characteristics of per- 
 sonality which man in his development should seek 
 and strive to acquire ? 
 
 (i) Man is rational as contrasted with animals. In 
 the new psychology ” reason is treated as a by-product 
 of human development, and all the stress is laid on 
 the instincts (self, sex, and herd). Thomson objects 
 to this wide use of the term, for what should rather 
 be called appetites or impulses, which man has in 
 common with the lower animals, and maintains that 
 man. has very little in his life corresponding to instincts 
 as seen in animals.? His definition of instincts is as 
 follows: ‘ There are inborn or hereditary capacities 
 for doing apparently clever things—they need no 
 learning ; they are shared equally by all members of 
 the species, except that there may be differences 
 between the two sexes; they are always related to 
 particular circumstances which are of vital importance, 
 
 1 Lotze’s Mikrokosmus, Book rx. chap. iv. 
 2 See Tansley’s The New Psychology and its Relation to Life. 
 3 Op. cit.,-p. 107. 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 2738 
 
 and thus they are apt to be futile if the circumstances 
 are slightly altered. . . . Instinctive behaviour con- 
 sidered physiologically corresponds to a long chain of 
 reflex actions ; but there are facts which suggest that 
 in many cases at least, there is dim awareness and a 
 strong background of endeavour—in other words, 
 cognitive and conative factors.’! Instinct is not to 
 be regarded as either ‘ a rudimentary form of intelli- 
 gence’ or due to ‘ the lapsing of intelligence in regard 
 to a routine often performed.’ It is another path 
 of mental development than intelligence. Among 
 animals, however, we may observe intelligent be- 
 haviour also. ‘It differs from instinctive behaviour 
 in requiring to be learned, in not being as such 
 hereditary, in varying notably among individuals of 
 the same species, and in being plastic.’2 Animals 
 seem to be able to form associations of impressions, 
 e.g. a dog who has been thrashed for stealing a bone 
 associates the pain of the thrashing with the taking 
 of the bone. Man alone has reason. He can form 
 general ideas from his particular perceptions, such as 
 man, etc. He has categories of thought, such as 
 substance, subject, quality, number, cause, and law. 
 He can thus bring an intelligible unity into the mani- 
 fold of his experience. Because he can reason, his 
 thoughts can pass from one datum of his knowledge 
 to another. Some thinkers have distinguished reason- 
 ing as the activity of the understanding from reason in 
 the narrower sense of the word, the capacity for ideas 
 which unify knowledge, and ideals which harmonise 
 life. Kant distinguished the pure or the mere reason 
 from the practical reason, which we generally speak 
 of as conscience. After the data of experience have 
 been connected together in the intuitions of tume and 
 space, and by the categories of the understanding, 
 quantity, quality, relation, etc., knowledge is unified 
 by the ideas of the reason, the world as a totality, self 
 as a unity, and God as the possibility of all existence. 
 It is true that he held that these ideas of the reason 
 were only regulative, but not constitutive of know- 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 61-62. 2 Pp. 63-64. 
 Ss 
 
274 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 ledge, namely, that as no datum of experience could 
 be claimed for these ideas, we must not assume any 
 reality corresponding to them. Sut it is sheer scepti- 
 cism to assert that what is a necessity for thought 
 is no more than a possibility of existence. Kant’s 
 successors, the German idealists, assumed, and truly, 
 that as man thinks, if he thinks as he must think, 
 he does not get further away from but nearer truth. 
 Kor man as thinking there is an end, a goal, an ideal, 
 iruth, to reach which he gathers knowledge and 
 exercises judgment. We cannot say that truth is 
 correspondence between our thought and reality, for 
 we know reality only as the content of our conscious- 
 ness, and so cannot-test the correspondence. It is 
 rather the coherence of all the parts of our knowledge 
 in a whole of thought, which makes reality intelligible 
 to us. There can be no doubt that the three ideas of 
 the reason do give such coherence to the world on 
 the one hand and self on the other, and the relation 
 of the one to the other in God as the final unity. 
 Despite this inclination of the new psychology to treat 
 reasoning In man as a comparatively insignificant 
 by-product of the organic process, we are warranted 
 in affirming that. man is rational personality capable 
 of realising the ideal of truth, of knowing God, and of 
 understanding the world and self more fully because 
 of that knowledge. 
 
 * (11) Between cognition and conation lies feeling, often 
 the result of the first, and the occasion for the second. 
 Man feels pleasure or pain; he hopes for the one, he 
 fears the other; he likes what brings the one, he dis- 
 likes what causes the other; he seeks the one, he 
 shuns the other. Into the psychological niceties we 
 need not now enter. We may, however, distinguish 
 three phases of man’s feeling: the sensuous, the 
 _ aesthetic, and the spiritual. The senswous is the 
 satisfaction of man’s physical necessities, his animal 
 appetites, his individual desires (as for wealth, fame, 
 power). That need not sink to the sensual, although 
 it fails to be spiritual. To use the distinction Paul 
 makes, it may be sarkinos, and not sarkikos. Such 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 275 
 
 satisfaction we may call happiness, and its opposite 
 misery. The aesthetic is the satisfaction of man’s 
 sense of beauty. That is transitional from the sen- 
 suous to the spiritual. Colour, shape, sound are its 
 sensuous material; there must be such a unity-in- 
 variety, such a blending into oneness of the manifold 
 for the senses, that there is repose and not disturbance 
 of feeling. ‘There are organic conditions, no doubt, 
 for such aesthetic satisfaction, and these we need not 
 discuss. But this is not all, although probably those 
 who clamour for art for art’s sake might claim that 
 it is all. There belongs to beauty also expressiveness. 
 An exact imitation of a beautiful object will not 
 satisfy the aesthetic sense, unless through picture or 
 statue or symphony the artist expresses not only 
 what is individual to himself, but what is universally 
 human. Art is the expression through the sensuous 
 of the spiritual, the image which conveys the idea. 
 This does not mean that the expression of common- 
 place thought, shallow sentiment, is beautiful. But 
 that the beautiful must have meaning to have worth 
 as such. There are realities of the spiritual which 
 the senses cannot express ; and here art must become 
 symbolical, conveying the reality, the influence of 
 what it cannot express. A symphony may bring the 
 soul into a holy of holies. This sense of beauty is also 
 one of the marks of God the potter on man the clay, 
 which He has made, and not marred, as a vessel of 
 honour. The spiritual satisfaction is in the realisa- 
 tion of the ideals, in the possession of Him who is the 
 reality of all these ideals. This may be called blessed- 
 ness in distinction from the happiness that the grati- 
 fication of lower, even although legitimate, interests 
 brings. This spiritual satisfaction may include the 
 aesthetic: there is a beauty of truth, the harmony of 
 all knowledge; there is a beauty of holiness, the 
 harmony of all endeavour; there is a beauty of love, 
 the harmony of personal relations; there is a beauty 
 of God, the harmony of all perfections of truth, 
 holiness, and love. A man lives as made by God, 
 and for likeness to and fellowship with God fully 
 
276 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 only as he cherishes beauty and experiences blessed- 
 ness, whether happiness be his lot or not. Jesus had 
 a sense of the beauty of nature; in His own teaching 
 He was the artist in imagery and words; His life 
 was a masterpiece in the art of living; and blessed 
 was the life that ended on the Cross, for to do the 
 Father’s will was His meat and drink. 
 
 (iii) Man acts as well as thinks and feels; and 
 although his action is free, it is under law, it is a 
 means to an end. In other words, man is moral. 
 We do not only know our own acts as facts; we judge 
 them as to their quality, as right or wrong, as good 
 or bad. The use of these two sets of terms indicates 
 that there are two standards of judgment applied, 
 although it is only by reflection that we are led to 
 recognise their difference. When we call an action 
 right or wrong, our standard is a rule, law, or norm, 
 to which the action conforms, or which it violates, 
 keeps, or breaks. When we call an action good or 
 bad we think of an end, or purpose, the attainment 
 of which it helps or hinders. We usually think of 
 conscience as an inward law or norm, which goes 
 beyond the outward law of human society, and yet 
 only partially and inadequately reproduces the law 
 of God. This, however, is not the highest conception 
 of morality. God has a purpose or end for man, of 
 which morality as conformity to law is an essential 
 part, but not the necessary whole. The human good, 
 which God wills for man, includes truth, happiness, 
 beauty, blessedness, as well as holiness or moral 
 perfection. While we may for one of the higher 
 interests of life endure pain, and even inflict pain, 
 yet we do judge an action wrong as well as bad which 
 needlessly causes pain to ourselves or to others. The 
 conduct of the man who wantonly defaces beauty 
 and exposes ugliness is also wrong and bad. To 
 pursue truth through knowledge is both right and 
 good. Christ has taught us that love is the fulfilling 
 of the law, and love aims at the whole good of self 
 and of others according to the whole will of God for 
 man. Although love is not under law, yet it is not 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 277 
 
 without law, for if we want an end we must use the 
 means adequate and appropriate. Moral law is the 
 necessary means towards the human good, but it is 
 not a mere means, as the good is a moral good, and 
 includes necessarily moral conduct and character. 
 Just as conscience does not completely and perfectly | 
 reproduce the law of God, but is only gradually gaining — 
 the full and clear knowledge of that law, the moral 
 perfection God Himself is, and wills for man, so the | 
 good for man is only gradually being disclosed in | 
 human. history; that process is for the Christian the / 
 coming of the Kingdom of God. To this theme we’ 
 
 must returiy ity subsequent chapters in which we shall 
 deal with the Christian life and Christian society. 
 
 (b) Morality presupposes freedom, man can do what 
 he ought to do. That generalisation, however, goes 
 beyond experience. A man’s reach does always 
 exceed his grasp. His ideal; 1f-at all worthy, excels 
 his achievement... We must allow time for develop- 
 ment. A man is morally blameworthy only for the 
 good he could do, and did not do, not for the whole 
 good which he can conceive, but cannot yet attain. 
 As Kant! taught, freedom is a postulate of the moral 
 consciousness as the condition of obedience to the 
 categorical imperative of duty. This freedom, how- 
 ever, is always a limited freedom, but also an expand- 
 ing freedom. By the right or good action a man not 
 only expands his grasp, but he also extends his reach ; 
 the categorical imperative gains a wider and higher 
 content in the measure in which it is obeyed. Will a 
 man’s freedom ever fully correspond in its exercise 
 with his duty ? Kant’s answer was: not in this life ; 
 and therefore for him immortality was another pos- 
 tulate of the moral consciousness. We must be 
 careful, however, in stating this postulate. To say 
 that man will survive death because he has failed 
 in this life to become what he ought to have become 
 does not sound a convincing argument. What we 
 should state is that the good for man is so great that 
 
 1 The Critique of the Practical Reason, Book 1. pataite ii. See Abbot’s Kant’s 
 Lheory of Ethics, pp. 206-80. | 
 
278 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 this life does not afford either the time or the condi- 
 tions for its full realisation. So put, it is a valid 
 argument for immortality. Another assumption that 
 has been often made by the moral consciousness also 
 goes beyond experience: it is this, that the good are 
 happy, and the bad miserable, as God in His provi- 
 dence always conforms circumstances to character. 
 This is the conviction expressed in the first Psalm ; 
 the problem with which the book of Job wrestles, and 
 for which the prophecy in Isaiah li. of the Servant 
 of God who saves by His sufferings finds the solution 
 in the sufferings of the righteous. A man may here 
 lose happiness, and find blessedness, nay, for the sake 
 of blessedness he may surrender happiness, and find 
 that ‘ sweet are the uses of adversity.’ Kant, how- 
 ever, tried a solution on lower ground. The moral 
 consciousness, he argues, postulates the existence of. 
 God, who, as the Ruler of nature, will, if not in this 
 life, yet in the next, bring about the harmony of 
 circumstance and character. To this solution two 
 objections hold. A man can rise from happiness to 
 blessedness, and thus even now find the problem 
 solved, although he may hope for a still fuller solution, 
 when man attains a life in which sensuous pleasure 
 or pain exists no more. As an argument for the exist- 
 ence of God it is inadequate, and artificial. The whole 
 nature of man bears witness that God is. 
 
 (iv) In such an analysis of human personality it 
 is impossible to treat each aspect separately without 
 some reference to or anticipation of another aspect. 
 Thus morality presupposes society. For, although 
 man has a duty to himself to love himself, yet that 
 self is an unreal abstraction apart from other selves, 
 and it is in relation to other selves that morality is 
 for the most part realised. Whatever rudimentary 
 self-feeling consciousness may begin with,’ the con- 
 sciousness of the world around and of others comes 
 before self-consciousness, such as a reflective morality 
 which distinguishes duties to self and duties to others 
 involves. Man belongs to the gregarious animals, 
 
 1 See Lotze’s Philosophy of Religion, Eng. trans., pp. 55-8. 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 279 
 
 and in him survives the herd instinct or impulse. 
 It is tribal custom which is the beginning of morality 
 before the individual conscience has emerged. What 
 is usually done is what ought to be done, and fear of 
 the displeasure or hope for the favour of the other 
 clansmen or the chief is the motive of so doing. 
 The organic basis of human affection is the relation 
 of the sexes, and of parents to children; and this is 
 anticipated among the lower animals.! It is not at. 
 all probable that human society began with pro- 
 miscuity, but with monogamy, again also anticipated 
 among some animals.2 How the family expanded 
 into the tribe, and tribes combined in nations, and 
 nations were subjugated in empires, is an interesting 
 story which cannot here be retold. What must here 
 be asserted is that the making of woman was not 
 an after-thought of God’s, as the more primitive story 
 of the Creation in Gen. tu. 18-25 states, but that from 
 the beginning God made man male and female that 
 they might multiply and replenish the earth (Gen. 1. 
 27-28). Man by his very nature is social. The ideal 
 of social relations is love, which is not feeling only, 
 but thought and deed as well; it is, as has already 
 been shown, a judgment of value, a sentiment of 
 interest, a purpose of good. Human persons have 
 worth for one another, suffer or rejoice together, seek 
 the good the one of the other. The individualism 
 which last century invaded morals and religion no 
 less than economics and politics is a misrepresenta- 
 tion of human personality, which is essentially social, 
 and can fully realise itself only in society. The 
 teaching of Jesus (Matt. xvi. 25) that a man finds his 
 life only as he loses it has its confirmation in the latest 
 conclusions of sociological inquiry that there is no 
 real conflict of egoism and altruism, but that in- 
 dividuation and socialisation go para passu, that a 
 man becomes most himself as he lives most fully 
 and freely in and with others.® 
 
 1 See The Ascent of Man, by Henry Drummond. 
 2 What is Man? by J. Arthur Thomson, pp. 35-9. 
 3 This is admirably worked out in Community, by M‘Iver. 
 
930 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (v) Human personality is only partially realising 
 its ideals, truth, happiness, beauty, blessedness, holi- 
 ness, love, now; but as it is progressively realising 
 them, it postulates its own continuance in order to 
 realise them completely. Must this postulate remain 
 without any confirmation? Are there any other 
 arguments for immortality? It has already been 
 shown that intimate as is the relation of body and 
 soul, it is not a productive relation, and life may, and 
 probably does, transcend its material organ. Physical 
 science cannot prove the fact of immortality, but it 
 cannot forbid the hope. While we cannot to-day 
 argue as did the philosophers ! formerly, for immor- 
 tality from the nature of the soul as an indivisible 
 entity ; yet the development of personality in ‘ self- 
 knowledge, self-reverence, self-control,’ in clearer 
 consciousness and fuller command of self, in greater 
 detachment from outward circumstances, and greater 
 concentration on the inner life, at least suggests that 
 there is being created a permanent reality, less and 
 less dependent on the world and the body, and so 
 capable of continuance under different conditions 
 from those of this present incarnation. We may set 
 aside the judicial argument that there must be a 
 future life to readjust the injustices and inequalities 
 of the present; if we take the position that judgment 
 is not a future event, but a present process, that a 
 man already here and now is reaping as he has sown. 
 The holy man is blessed, whether his lot be happy or 
 not, and the wicked is cursed even in his prosperity, 
 for he is losing what alone has an enduring value. 
 With such qualification, the argument is valid, for 
 we may assume that in the next life the whole good 
 of man will be realised with more helps and fewer 
 hindrances than here and now. One of the most 
 persuasive reasons for the hope of immortality is love, 
 its value postulates its duration. ‘That the personal 
 relationship, which has developed through many years 
 of mutual devotion, service, and sacrifice, should be 
 
 1 For instance, Berkeley : Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, p. 141; 
 Fraser’s Selections from Berkeley, pp. 131-2. 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 281 
 
 severed by death is incredible if this be a universe 
 in which values are conserved. All in the last analysis 
 depends on faith in God. If God is, and is as faith 
 believes and trusts Him to be—Father, then immor- 
 tality is sure. Even in the Old Testament the hope 
 dawns that God’s companions cannot be death’s 
 victims, and that hope Jesus confirmed when he said 
 that God is ‘the God not of the dead, but of the 
 living ’ (Mark xii. 27). 
 (vi) The crown of manhood is religion, for in it man 
 raises himself above and reaches beyond the world 
 and himself to believe and trust in, and to surrender 
 himself to God. Lowly as may have been the be- 
 ginnings of religion in the human race, it is in its 
 highest form, Christian faith, hope, love, that its 
 true meaning and full worth are to be seen. While 
 it was at one time held that there were savage tribes 
 without religion, it is now generally recognised that 
 religion is universal in mankind, and necessary to 
 manhood.!.. Human personality is completed only in 
 dependence on, and submission to God, and faith as 
 man’s receptivity for, and responsiveness to God so 
 unites man to the ultimate source, the essential 
 reality, the final purpose of himself and his world, 
 that only in God can the course of man’s aspiration 
 and endeavour reach its goal and reward. While 
 religion does answer the questions of the mind, and 
 meet the longings of the heart, it is mainly concerned 
 with the needs of the life. It is the reply from the 
 heights to the cry from the depths, Who will show 
 us any good? The good has been variously con- 
 ceived; in the first phase of religion, man seeks 
 earthly goods by the aid of the spirits or gods; ata 
 higher phase he seeks divine support in the struggle 
 for moral goodness: this is taken up and changed 
 from struggle into victory in the highest phase, where 
 man’s hunger and thirst for the living God 1s satisfied 
 by the realised presence and experienced communion 
 of God Himself. Religion casts many roots into the 
 human personality, emotion, imagination, intellect, 
 1 Introduction to the History of Religion, by F. B. Jevons, p. 7. 
 
282 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 desire, aspiration, purpose; its very core, however, 
 is what many would call the mystical experience, but 
 as mysticism is an ambiguous term, and connotes 
 many experiences which belong to the byways rather 
 than the highway to God, we had better call it the 
 spiritual experience, the immediate contact and the 
 intimate communion with God, direct dependence 
 on Him, and entire submission to Him, in whom ‘ we 
 live and move, and have our being.’ This relation to 
 God is mutual; God gives Himself to those who, 
 seeking, find Him; nay, rather, their search is in re- 
 sponse to His approach and appeal. Religion thus 
 implies revelation: there is real revelation wherever 
 there is sincere religion. But as the revelation with 
 which this volume is concerned is redemptive, con- 
 ditioned by the fact of sin and pain, the discussion 
 of the subject must be reserved for a later chapter. 
 
 (7) We have now gained a vantage ground from 
 which to attack a problem which had to be left 
 partially unsolved in the previous chapter. 
 
 (i) Against the Christian belief in God as personal 
 and as Father, it is often argued that man is so in- 
 significant a portion of the Universe, since his home is 
 but a speck, and his history but a span, that to think 
 of God as related to man so intimately is an audacity 
 of thought and an arrogance of feeling. But the 
 same objection would hold against any kind of belief 
 in God, even against any sort of interpretation of the 
 universe which the mind of man can offer, against 
 science and philosophy no less than theology, for the 
 one uses the categories of the human understanding 
 and the other the ideas of the human reason. If man 
 be so insignificant, what presumption to suppose 
 that his science can in any sense reach truth, his 
 philosophy interpret reality! That man knows at all 
 raises him at once above this insignificance. He is 
 not merely one object among many other objects ; 
 he is the subject for whom these objects not only exist, 
 but can be made intelligible. In all his science and 
 philosophy he is finding mind in the Universe; he 
 can and must conceive the immeasurable energy as 
 
RELATION OF GOD TO THE WORLD AND MAN 283 
 
 will, and the marvellous law, order, adaptation as 
 expressing intelligence. It is he who thinks himself 
 insignificant because he has discovered the vastness, 
 the wonder, and the glory of the Universe, and he can 
 compare himself with it. He contemplates two sub- 
 limities, the starry heavens above, and the moral 
 law within. If the first makes him feel insignificant, 
 the second discloses his own value.t— Even physically 
 man is not insignificant, for by discovering the laws 
 he can control the forces of nature. The snow-clad 
 Alps are in view as these words are being written ; 
 but not only have men scaled these heights by climb- 
 ing, they have carried railways almost to their 
 summits. Still less insignificant is man, who can 
 not only make the world intelligible and available 
 for his need, but can cherish ideals of truth, beauty, 
 holiness, love, and amid sorrow and with struggle 
 can realise them increasingly. These things cannot 
 be numbered, measured, weighed, and are incom- 
 parable with material reality in time and space. A 
 mother’s love or a martyr’s sacrifice has value, be 
 the dimensions and the duration of the physical 
 Universe what they may. Man, as far as our know- 
 ledge reaches, is the consummation of the cosmic 
 evolution ; and his progress continues and completes 
 that process, and gives it a meaning and a worth 
 it would not otherwise have. In man the Universe 
 comes to self-consciousness, and in some measure to 
 self-direction, and in his religion that consciousness 
 reaches, because it is raised to the consciousness of 
 that reality which is in all, and through all, and over 
 all, even God Himself. 
 
 (ii) If God’s Fatherhood means, as has been already 
 shown, not that man in his pride lifts himself to 
 claim equality with God, but that God in His grace 
 stoops to raise man into fellowship with and likeness 
 to Himself, then that relation, offered in grace and 
 accepted in faith, seems to be the most fitting com- 
 pletion of the Universe. God has been giving Himself 
 as Creator in matter, life, mind, and finding Himself 
 
 1 Cf. Psalms viii. and xix. 
 
284 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 in the common life of love as Father with mankind 
 as His family. Within this consummating creative 
 act of God the personality of Jesus Christ is not only 
 supreme, but originative. It is in Him and through 
 Him that this family of God is constituted. The 
 place of man in the universe warrants our thinking 
 of Him in this filial relation to God, and the place of 
 Jesus Christ in human history warrants our accepting 
 His convincing testimony, not in word only, but in 
 hife also, as authoritative in regard to all that this 
 relation means. As this chapter has tried to show, 
 neither science nor philosophy contradicts the con- 
 ception of man, or challenges the estimate of man 
 of the Christian revelation. Whatever other diffi- 
 culties for our thought the facts of the world and of 
 life offer, we may approach them with the confidence 
 that in Christ’s revelation of God and redemption 
 of man we can, if we will, find the solution of problems 
 which apart from Him reason could not so adequately 
 solve. We must now address ourselves to the most 
 serious difficulty for theistic belief or Christian faith : 
 the problem of evil—pain and sin. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 We have already discussed in a previous chapter 
 the opposition which some thinkers have discovered 
 between God’s almightiness and God’s all-goodness, 
 and tried to show that we are not forced, as has been 
 too rashiy concluded, to abandon the one or the other 
 attribute of God. The argument was there left in- 
 complete inasmuch as the problem of evil could not 
 be fully discussed until the relation of God to the 
 world had been dealt with, as it has been in the 
 previous chapter. We must first of all distinguish 
 evil as physical and evil as moral, or as pain and as 
 sin. While they are closely related, they must be 
 dealt with separately, as there 1s pain in the universe 
 which is not connected with sin. Facts do not allow 
 the solution that physical evil. was consequent on, 
 or anticipatory of moral evil; for physical evil 
 existed before man was made, and before sin entered 
 into the world; and the view of foreknowledge and 
 fore-ordination advanced in a previous chapter forbids 
 what theologians formerly assumed, that God, knowing 
 that man would sin, so created the Universe that the 
 appropriate punishment for sin, as soon as it emerged, 
 was provided. Jesus has once for all forbidden the 
 assumption of an exclusive and inevitable connection 
 of physical and moral evil (Luke xii. 4-5, John ix. 
 2, 3). As we shall show, there are some physical 
 evils which have served for man’s personal discipline 
 and development, and there are others which are the 
 consequences of sin, although the severest and surest 
 penalty of sin is inward, and not outward. Never- 
 theless, a separate treatment is necessary to avoid 
 
 confusion of thought and perversion of judgment. 
 285 
 
286 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 . 
 
 (1) We must first deal with what was prior in time, 
 and is much more widely diffused, as 1t embraces the 
 lower animals as well as man—physical evil. 
 
 (i) What impresses us, as we go out into the world, 
 is the abundance of life, and its variety. On the 
 bare mountain-side, wherever a little soil can rest, 
 seeds fall and plants spring up; between the flag- 
 stones of a street the tender blade of grass shows itself. 
 Even if we may not endow the vegetable realm with 
 any sensibility, the luxuriance, beauty, and fragrance 
 which greet us, wherever the physical conditions give 
 what seems even the least opportunity, suggest that 
 life is good. When Gray wrote in his Elegy, 
 
 ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 
 And waste its sweetness on the desert air,’ 
 
 he wrote bad science; for the beauty and the frag- 
 rance of the flower exist not for man’s delight alone, 
 but serve a vital function for the plant, as attracting 
 the insects which are ministers of its life in securing 
 its fertilisation. In the animal realm, in the activities 
 of bird and beast, and even insect, are we guilty of 
 the pathetic fallacy if we detect signs of the joy of 
 living ? We do encounter decay and death, struggle 
 and pain; but if we examine all the facts we are 
 justified in our conclusion that suffering and cruelty 
 do not so abound as a misunderstood Darwinism has 
 led many to assume. 
 
 Even if one animal inflicts pain and death on 
 another, we are anthropomorphising if we speak of 
 cruelty, for cruelty is the conscious and voluntary 
 infliction of pain, and that we are not justified in 
 ascribing to the lower animals. ‘ The struggle for 
 existence’ has no resemblance to a human battle- 
 field; ‘the survival of the fittest’ does not mean 
 always the violent removal of the unfit. The living 
 organism which cannot adapt itself to its environment 
 may die, and is not necessarily killed by another, 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 287 
 
 and the elimination of the unfit is a condition of 
 organic progress. Nature is not nearly as ‘red in 
 tooth and claw’ as highly imaginative writers may 
 depict it. There are many species of animals which 
 are herbivorous. That many species are carnivorous 
 and prey upon other species, proves neither ferocious 
 cruelty on the part of the devourer, nor awful suffering 
 on the part of the devoured. As the animals which 
 are the prey of others do not remember past dangers 
 or anticipate future ones, their lives are not lives of 
 constant terror. The fear of danger, with consequent 
 flight if it is possible, comes suddenly upon them. 
 When caught it is even probable that such sensibility 
 as they possess is lessened. When we see a cat 
 playing with a mouse, we must not charge the cat 
 with the cruelty which we should ascribe to a human 
 being, nor think that the mouse is suffering as we 
 should in the same position. So fertile are most 
 living organisms, that the earth would very soon be 
 overstocked with life, were not this constant process 
 of removal going on. Can we say that a few long lives 
 would be a higher good than many short lives ? 
 Death is thus the minister of life, and life more 
 abundant.! There is struggle for the life of others 
 as well as for self among animals. In recent years 
 several writers, among whom may specially be men- 
 tioned Henry Drummond and Prince Kropotkin, have 
 shown us nature as not only or chiefly a battlefield, 
 but as a home and a workshop, in which are seen 
 parental solicitude and mutual co-operation. In- 
 stinct even guides insects in a life with and for others. 
 What a marvel of concerted effort is a beehive! 
 What an idyll of family life is a bird’s nest! Even 
 a beast otherwise timid will fight for her young, and 
 the she-wolf grows fiercer when she has cubs, If 
 Drummond was sometimes poet rather than man of 
 science in finding love in the process of evolution, 
 as the term should be reserved for conscious and 
 voluntary affection towards others, Huxley did give 
 a distorted view in the Romanes Lecture when he 
 1 See A Study of Religion, by Jas. Martineau, il. pp. 58-76, 87-91. 
 
288 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 found altogether another law in the cosmic process 
 than in the moral progress of mankind. Care for 
 others as well as care for self has been a necessary 
 factor in the preservation and improvement of living 
 organisms. Facts as they are do not warrant the 
 optimist’s contention that this is the best of all 
 possible worlds, if universal happiness be the test of 
 what is best. There is pain, much pain, great pain 
 among animals as well as men, even if we allow that 
 animals are much less sensitive than men. We 
 cannot find an adequate solution of this problem, 
 unless we apply some other test than that of happiness. 
 
 (ii) To these general considerations there may be 
 added a summary of the statement of a man of 
 science on this theme, Prof. Jas. Y. Simpson, in his 
 book on The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature.} 
 He offers with ample illustrations four conclusions : 
 
 (a) ‘ The comparative study of the nervous system 
 in the animal kingdom seems to show a varying 
 capacity for pain which in the highest animals even 
 is very different from the capacity in savage man ; 
 and as we descend the animal scale, the capacity 
 lessens.’ ‘ Susceptibility to pain reaches a maximum 
 in the case of those who have the greatest capacity 
 of mental power... .’ ‘In relation to the alleged 
 cruelty of the struggle many additional data have 
 been collected tending to show that imsensibility to 
 pain attends the most characteristic methods of feral 
 warfare and execution.’ 
 
 (b) ‘Kxamination of the conditions of organic 
 progress shows that it has always been the outcome 
 of a certain saving discontent. Progress follows 
 acute organic dissatisfaction.’ 
 
 (c) ‘No account of the struggle for existence can 
 pretend to be complete which fails to take notice of 
 the mutual service or self-sacrifice that enter into 
 it so objectively.’ 
 
 (d) ‘ When we have estimated the real worth of 
 the charges of cruelty against nature, have realised 
 the price of progress, and considered the place of 
 
 1 Pp, 131-42. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 289 
 
 altruism, we may return to ponder the fundamental 
 place of suffering and of service in the world... .’ 
 ‘ Sacrifice and suffering are means for perfecting the 
 adjustment of living things to the world around them, 
 and, as so increasing the sum of life, are a good.’ 
 
 (2) In dealing with human suffermg, we may 
 distinguish three sources—nature, society, and the 
 constitution of the individual man.} 
 
 (1) There are great catastrophes of nature—earth- 
 quake, volcano, flood, tempest, famine—which bring 
 widespread misery in their train. It may be that 
 in such calamities no individual suffers more than 
 he might from disease and that the number of deaths 
 falls short of the number of preventable deaths within 
 a year in a civilised community. What attracts 
 attention to these tragedies, and makes many persons 
 challenge the ways of God’s providence, is that they 
 are unusual, that often they come suddenly, that a 
 large number of persons is involved in the one ex- 
 perience of pain. These outbreaks of nature, although 
 they are often cited in impeachments of God’s good- 
 ness, or almightiness, do not involve any greater 
 problem than do disease and death, so familiar that 
 most men are not moved to think about them at all. 
 Regarding these assaults of nature on man’s safety 
 and happiness, two things can be said, ‘in relief of 
 doubt ’ and in support of faith. 
 
 (a) First of all, these catastrophes are the results 
 of physical forces in accord with natural laws in an 
 order of nature which is, with only such exceptions, 
 uniformly beneficent. Men ask an explanation of 
 these occurrences, just because they are infrequent 
 and unexpected. The ordinary course of nature, 
 which is ever bringing good to man, passes unheeded : 
 and thus an altogether disproportionate estimate is 
 formed of the extent of physical evil resulting from 
 nature. If men were as grateful for all the good that 
 nature brings to them daily, as they are rebellious 
 against any evil, they would admit that in com- 
 parison to the good the evil is almost negligible. 
 
 1 See The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, by A. M. Fairbairn, pp. 136-50. 
 
 < 
 
290 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 But it may be retorted, why did God not create an 
 order of nature wholly beneficent? This is a vain 
 question, for what we can imagine and desire may 
 be beyond the bounds of possibility. So far as our 
 science can penetrate the mystery we seem to be 
 confronted with an impossibility in the very nature 
 of reality itself; and God’s omnipotence, as has 
 already been shown, is that He can do what can be 
 done. 
 
 (b) We are not, however, left with unrelieved 
 mystery, for in the second place it is just the less 
 beneficent aspect of nature which has had most 
 significance for man. It is in his struggle with 
 nature, to understand its laws, and to control its 
 forces, that man has developed in knowledge, strength, 
 and skill, in sympathy and co-operation with his 
 fellows. If fully developed human personality, and 
 not happiness merely, be the end, a justification can 
 be found fer nature’s seeming hardness to man. As 
 it is also in the struggle with nature that men are 
 drawn together, society is at least partially (for we 
 must recognise other factors) a product of this struggle. 
 Take, for instance, the earthquake in Japan; it has 
 diverted the energies of that able and ambitious people 
 into channels of reconstruction instead of preparation 
 for war, and it has evoked such a spontaneous and 
 generous sympathy in other nations, especially the 
 United States of America, as to have improved inter- 
 national relations. It has been said with truth that 
 man languishes under nature’s motherly smile, and 
 prospers under her stepmotherly frown. We should 
 not say that these calamities are * special providences ’ 
 of God, else the first consideration offered would fall 
 to the ground, and the difficulty for faith would be 
 increased, and not relieved. But we may say that 
 God has so made the world, and so made man, that 
 man can wrest his best out of what seems the world’s 
 worst. Without any irreverence we may modify the 
 saying that man’s extremity of suffering, pain, or 
 loss is also his opportunity, or God’s through him, 
 of wisdom, courage, generosity, and sacrifice. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 291 
 
 (ii) Just as the order of nature, generally beneficent, 
 sometimes involves physical evils, even so the order 
 of society. And asin nature our attention is attracted 
 to the injuries we suffer, and not the benefits we 
 receive, so we complain of social wrongs much more 
 loudly than we praise, if ever we do, social good. The 
 debt that the individual man owes to society is in- 
 calculable. Robinson Crusoe is not a picture of what 
 man would be without society, for he came to the 
 desert island with resources of manhood which the 
 society he had left behind had already conferred upon 
 him. So helpless is human infancy that no babe 
 would survive, were he not born into a family. Lay- 
 ing all proper stress on that fact, we must admit that 
 society has been an agent of misery as well as of 
 happiness for man. ‘ Man’s inhumanity to man 
 makes countless thousands mourn’; and still ‘ more 
 harm is wrought by want of thought than even want 
 of heart.’ Ignorance, indifference, indolence are re- 
 sponsible for more misery and suffering than even 
 selfishness, greed, or cruelty as conscious motives of 
 inaction or action. Sins of omission are more abun- 
 dant even than sins of commission. Here the physical 
 evil is due to moral evil. This misery or pain is a 
 constant and not a futile challenge to moral endea- 
 vour; ignorance is corrected by knowledge, sympathy 
 takes the place of indifference, and indolence is 
 stirred to activity. Selfishness, greed, and cruelty 
 are condemned by the common conscience, and even 
 the transgressors are often made ashamed, and 
 brought to repentance and amendment. Thus the 
 evil in society becomes, even as the struggle with 
 nature, a condition of man’s self-discipline and self- 
 development, and of more intimate relations with 
 his fellows. Great as are the wrongs which in society 
 men inflict upon one another, and urgent as is the 
 need of and imperative the call to social reform, who, 
 in view of man’s social progress, especially the de- 
 velopment of his social conscience, can maintain that 
 the balance is more injury than benefit ? God is not 
 responsible directly for what men do in society ; and 
 
292 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 yet we may find a token of His good purpose in that 
 He has so made man, that he is not only capable, 
 but has need of such intimate relations with his 
 fellows. Heredity and environment, the two social 
 factors in man’s development, are often channels of 
 evil, but still more channels of good, else there had 
 not been any progress; and they could not be the 
 one without the other. That a man may by his 
 conduct inflict pain on his descendants or his neigh- 
 bours, or confer good, is a means of moral discipline, 
 restraining from the course that is wrong, and con- 
 straining to the way that is right. Thus the problem 
 of physical evil, of which the channel is society, is 
 insoluble apart from the solution of the moral problem. 
 A consideration which bears on the present situation 
 especially may be added. There is a tendency to 
 hypostatise, almost to personalise society, and to 
 talk about social wrongs and social reforms abstract- 
 edly, apart from individual responsibility for the 
 wrongs and individual obligation for the reforms. 
 What causes social wrongs is individual sin, and 
 what can bring about social reforms is individual 
 righteousness and goodness, acting corporately, as 
 the wrongs are often too great to be reformed by 
 individual effort. 
 
 (iii) In the constitution of the individual man 
 physical evil comes as disease and at last as death. 
 (a) As disease is largely due to man’s disregard of the 
 laws of health, sometimes even to conduct of which 
 disease is the penalty, and as much of it is com- 
 municated from one person to another, it is so far 
 avoidable by knowledge and care. Much is the result 
 of conditions for which society is responsible. The 
 connection between disease and sin is most evident 
 in the venereal diseases, which can be prevented only 
 by chastity. Many plagues can be avoided by atten- 
 tion to sanitation. By notification and segregation 
 the spread of infectious diseases can be arrested. 
 That modern pestilence, cancer, is probably due to 
 unnatural habits of life in respect of food and exercise, 
 and we may hope that as the causation is discovered, 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 298 
 
 so the remedy will be successfully applied. Did men 
 know how to live normally, and did they act as they 
 knew, the greater part of ‘ the ills that flesh is heir 
 to’ (a phrase which expresses a mistaken view of 
 the matter) would cease. We are not entitled to say 
 that God wills disease. When all this has been duly 
 weighed in our judgment, we must admit that there 
 does exist an amount and an acuteness of suffering 
 which remains inexplicable. All who love must have 
 been racked with grief as they witnessed the pain, 
 sometimes excruciating, of a loved one. It may be 
 _ said that pain is a warning of physical danger; but 
 why such a terrible warning in diseases in which 
 escape seems now impossible? Human science may 
 yet discover and remove the mysterious causes of 
 these maladies, which fall on their victims without 
 any apparent fault. But why the lesson should be 
 learned at so great a cost is a question which can be 
 answered only partially. To witness the perfecting 
 of the character of the sufferer under such an affliction, 
 and of those who by sympathy share the suffering in 
 mind, if not in body, is to find some relief of the 
 burden. The greatness of the soul is often most fully 
 disclosed on the bed of pain under the shadow of 
 death, and a home is hallowed for the after years by 
 sharing such an experience. As the Son of God was 
 Himself perfected to be the Saviour of men by His 
 sufferings (Heb. ul. 18), as He learned obedience by 
 the things which He thus suffered (v. 8), so do, those 
 whom He is not ashamed to call His brethren (1. 11) 
 become partakers of His perfection by treading the 
 same via dolorosa. 
 
 (b) To dismiss the problem of death by describing 
 it as a natural necessity, since a living organism 
 must needs be dissolved, is to ignore the fact that 
 man is not merely a living organism, and _ that, 
 therefore, death means something more for him than 
 for other animals. We know that death was in. the 
 world before man was made, and had sinned. Death 
 as a physical event is not the consequence of sin; and 
 when Paul tells us that ‘ the wages of sin is death ’ 
 
294 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (Rom. vi. 23), meaning as he doubtless did the 
 physical event, we cannot follow him. But if by 
 death is meant a personal experience on occasion of 
 the physical event we may agree that for mankind 
 generally death has been invested with a dread which 
 holds many in bondage (Heb. ii. 15), and is regarded 
 as doom because of sin (1 Cor. xv. 56). Death may 
 be, for man as he is, a moral and a spiritual crisis, or 
 judgment. It is only flippaney to dismiss this as 
 superstition, for, as has been shown in a previous 
 chapter, Christ in His agony in Gethsemane and His 
 desolation on the Cross seems so to have regarded 
 death, because in His vicarious love He made Himself 
 one with ‘mankind sinners.’ Deliverance from the 
 fear of death belongs to the salvation which Christ 
 offers to mankind, and in His resurrection He has 
 brought immortality to light, as He has brought men 
 by His grace into the eternal life with God. Because 
 we rejoice in His light, we must not ignore how dark 
 are the shadows that apart from Him fall on death. 
 It is the hope of immortality which scatters its shadows. 
 Apart even from this fear of death, where there is 
 not the hope in Christ death must often appear the 
 arrest of a mental, moral, and spiritual development. 
 It means the severance of personal relationships, 
 hallowed by love, and that ideals cherished and 
 striven for have remained unrealised. To go home, 
 as did John Clifford, having fought the good fight, 
 having finished his course, having kept the faith, 
 assured of the crown laid up for him (2 Tim. iv. 8), 
 is no mystery, but a revelation. When we do feel 
 the mystery is in what with our limited outlook we 
 call premature death, the cutting off in the fresh- 
 ness of youth of a life of promise, or in the fullness 
 of manhood of a life of achievement. It was the 
 number of such lives cut off durmg the Great War 
 which for the common thought made the problem 
 of death so insistent. Apart from the Christian hope 
 some light does fall on the darkness. Even were 
 continuance of life a natural possibility, it is better 
 that there should be a constant succession of fresh 
 
 0 ee a a oe 
 
 _ ee ae ee 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 295 
 
 life in the race than the continuance of the same 
 lives; for there must be death in order that for those 
 born into the world there may be room and work. 
 A man may leave what his life has achieved as an 
 inheritance to enrich the lives which will follow his, 
 and may not they make more of that inheritance than 
 he could have made himself? There are limits to 
 individual development under present conditions, and 
 so a succession of lives seems to be a condition of 
 progress. Even if Christ had not given us the cer- 
 tainty, might we not conjecture that another life 
 will hold out to those who have passed into the 
 unseen further and fuller opportunities than earth 
 could have offered them? As regards those who are 
 left behind, human. affection need not be destroyed, 
 but can be consecrated by bereavement. A solemnity 
 and responsibility is given to the present life by the 
 consciousness that it must inevitably pass to its 
 close. The Epicurean conclusion (Kee. vii. 15, Luke 
 xl. 19) is by no means that which the serious-minded 
 man will draw from man’s mortality. ‘Work while 
 it is day: for the night cometh when no man can 
 work’ (John ix. 4) is rather the challenge to conscience 
 that the brevity and uncertainty of life offers. For 
 even what we call premature death there is a compen- 
 sation in the influence which such an experience of 
 bereavement may have on those who most feel the 
 loss, in inspiring zeal, devotion, consecration of life to 
 high ends, so that they may in some measure take 
 the place and fulfil the task of him who has been taken 
 from them to the world’s loss. A personal confession 
 in which Dr. Fairbairn clinches his general argument 
 must here be quoted:! ‘ He who writes these things 
 once knew a man who was to him companion, friend, 
 and more than brother. They lived, they thought, 
 they argued together; together they walked on the 
 hillside and by the seashore . . . and together they 
 had descended into the slums of a great city, where 
 no light was nor any fragrance, and had faced the 
 worst depravity of our kind. Each kept hope alive 
 ! The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, pp. 145-6. 
 
| 
 
 296 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 in the other and stimulated him to high endeavour 
 
 and better purpose; but though the same week saw 
 the two friends settled in chosen fields of labour, 
 the one settled only to be called home, the other to 
 remain and work his tale of toil until his longer day 
 be done. But the man who died seemed to leave his 
 spirit behind in the breast of the man who survived ; 
 and he has lived ever since and lives still, feeling as 
 if the soul within him belonged to the man who died. 
 And may we not say, this experience is common and 
 interprets the experience of the race? Death has 
 to be viewed not as a matter of a single person, but 
 of collective man; and it works out the good of 
 collective man by doing no injustice to the individual, 
 but rather using him to fulfil the highest function it 
 is granted to mortal man to perform. So let us say 
 that however man may conceive death, it belongs to 
 those sufferings by which mankind learns obedience, 
 and is made perfect.’ 7 
 (3) It is true that death may have none of these 
 consolations and compensations for a great multitude ; 
 but their insensibility to the problem of death is in 
 many cases the reason for their indifference to its 
 solution, and even where there is no insensibility the 
 refusal to accept the solution is not itself a proof of 
 its inadequacy, if only tried. When we are dealing, 
 however, with such a problem, we are entitled to 
 consider, not those who make the least worthy use 
 of life, or who refuse what good it offers, but those 
 who are making the best use that can be made, and 
 are claiming all its good. We are seeking for the 
 divine intention, and ‘ the secret of the Lord is with 
 them that fear Him’ (Ps. xxv. 14). The shadows of 
 evil which fall over the lot and life of man may thus 
 be in a measure relieved, not sufficiently to silence 
 all doubt, but sufficiently to justify faith. Not in 
 a logical demonstration can the goodness of God over 
 against the evil of the world be proved, but in a 
 personal experience of forgiving love and redeeming 
 grace. What can be set over against the pain and 
 grief in the world is the fact of Jesus Christ and His 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 297 
 
 Cross, in which through vicarious, sacrificial love God 
 draws nearest to man, makes Himself most fully 
 known, and gives Himself ungrudgingly to man as 
 Father. In that Christian experience the proof of 
 God’s Fatherhood is so persuasive and so convincing 
 that faith can pass above the shadow to the sunshine 
 of His Presence. And the shadow itself is made 
 radiant, for suffermg and grief gain a new meaning 
 and a fresh worth when we see that God shares with 
 men, and saves men by sharing all that seems most 
 to challenge His Fatherhood. Pain is taken up into 
 the very heart of the ever-blessed God: and so it too 
 can be made good. 
 
 II 
 
 The problem of physical evil is, as has just been 
 indicated, closely related to that of moral evil, for 
 sin often brings pain both on the innocent and on the 
 guilty ; and were sin to cease, much of the pain of 
 mankind would cease also. The existence of moral 
 evil is on first view even a more serious problem for 
 Christian faith than the existence of physical evil, 
 because it is more directly a contradiction and a 
 challenge of the moral perfection of God. But on 
 the other hand, to Christian faith there is offered a 
 more convincing solution of this problem than of 
 that. In the mode of God’s solution of the problem 
 of sin, some light falls on the shadows of the problem 
 of pain. The doctrine of sin has had so large a place 
 in Christian theology, and the change in Christian 
 thought in regard to it has been so far-reaching, that 
 it will demand a much fuller treatment. 
 
 (1) We may regard moral evil from three points 
 of view. As an offence against human society it 1s 
 crume ; aS an injury to the nature of the doer it is 
 vice; as affecting the relation of man to God it is sin. 
 These three aspects can be distinguished but not 
 separated: for the individual is so bound up with 
 society that he injures himself in wronging of others ; 
 and as God is the ultimate cause, the essential reality, 
 
298 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and the final purpose of all things, nothing which 
 affects a man or his fellows is unrelated to God: an 
 injury to self or neighbour is an insult to God. The 
 conception of sin, then, is the most comprehensive 
 of the three conceptions. 
 
 (1) We can apply to it the two standards already 
 mentioned, law and end; it is violation of law and 
 frustration of end. As God is the source of moral 
 authority, and His purpose for man is his highest 
 good, fellowship with and likeness to Himself, sin is 
 distrust of God’s love as well as defiance of God’s 
 law. Accordingly, a man might be from the Christian 
 standpoint even more sinful, whose conduct was more 
 correct than another’s, but whose heart was cold 
 towards God. The common saying that what a man 
 does, and not what he believes, alone matters, is not 
 a truism as is often assumed; it is not true at all. 
 The fruit of religion is morality, but religion is the 
 root of morality in the Christian judgment: a man 
 ought to love God as well as do right in order to be- 
 come all that God wills that he should be as His son. 
 We must think of sin, if we are to think in the dis- 
 tinctively Christian way, not in the atmosphere of 
 the law-court, but in the spirit of the home, for to 
 miss the fellowship of God is no less sin for man than 
 to mar the likeness. 
 
 (11) Again, we must apply to sin in the judgment of 
 it not the human but the divine standard. Morally 
 a man is blameworthy or praiseworthy as his conduct 
 does not or does conform to the standard that he 
 knows, or could know, not merely the standard that 
 he chooses for himself, for in that case a man could 
 evade his moral obligations by lowering his moral 
 profession. Religiously this is not enough; in re- 
 ligion a man is not an end in himself: he must relate 
 himself to God, not as a means to God’s end, but as 
 finding his own highest good only in God. The guilt 
 of a man before God is not measured by his blame- 
 worthiness, but by his coming short of the glory of 
 God (Rom. iii. 23), God’s manifested purpose for 
 him; and this is the measure of his need of redemp- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 299 
 
 tion. That is the reason why the saint is penitent 
 and humble. While others praise his virtues and 
 graces, he confesses that he has not yet attained, 
 nor is yet made perfect (Phil. ii. 12). While we thus 
 distinguish the subjective human and the objective 
 divine standard of judgment, and insist that man’s 
 sin is not to be measured by his own thoughts of 
 
 himself, but by God’s knowledge of him, we must. 
 
 always remember that God judges men as the Father 
 who forgives, saves, and blesses. He reckons our 
 euilt not as the measure of the punishment we deserve, 
 but as the measure of the grace which we need, the 
 redemption which His love is seeking and striving to 
 bestow upon us. ‘ Because God is greater than our 
 heart, and knoweth all things’ (1 John iv. 20), He is 
 not a more severe judge, but a more gracious Saviour.! 
 
 (111) Lastly, we must recognise that sin 1s a conscious, 
 voluntary act, even although a man’s own conscience is 
 not the final measure of it, and that consequently to 
 speak of an inheritance of sin, or a transfer of guilt, or 
 a punishment of the innocent is to use language incor- 
 rectly, and tends to confusion of thought. Qualities 
 may be inherited which are the occasions of sin; one 
 man may feel the shame of another’s wrongdoing, but 
 he cannot share the guilt unless he is responsible for 
 the temptation which led to the sin; the innocent 
 suffer physical and social consequences of transgres- 
 sion, but for them these consequences are not penal, 
 nor can be. These are considerations it is necessary 
 to insist on. 
 ~ (2) As this is not a volume either on bablical theology 
 or on history of doctrine, but a constructive essay in 
 theology, only those of the many questions which have 
 been. raised in the Christian Church can be dealt with 
 which are immediately relevant to that purpose. 
 
 (i) While the Old Testament teaches the reality, 
 the universality, and the natural inherence of sin, 
 apart from the story in Genesis i. of the Fall, it has 
 no theory of its origin, and that story is nowhere 
 
 1 In the matter of the standard of judgment to be applied to sin, Tennant’s 
 treatment in The Concept of Sin must be regarded as defective. 
 
 a 
 
300 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 referred to in any other part of the Old Testament. 
 It is only in the Apocryphal writings that the explana- 
 tion is sought. ‘ Before the Old Testament was com- 
 pleted, Jewish thought had arrived at the truth of 
 the absolute universality of human sinfulness, and 
 had come to regard it as a state which was inherent 
 in man and received by him at birth as part of the 
 nature he inherits; no cause for such uncleanness or 
 corruption, where it is regarded as prior to habit 
 established by voluntary acts, is definitely assigned, 
 though the writer of Job, at least, seems to have seen 
 its source in the necessary and normal infirmity which 
 pertains to the finite creature. The identification of 
 this inherent tendency to sin with a corruption of 
 human nature wrought once and for all by Adam, and 
 thence naturally engendered in his posterity, alone is 
 wanting of the constituent elements whose union is 
 essential to the later doctrine of the Fall. The in- 
 creasing sense of individual moral personality, which 
 is conspicuous in certain later books of the Old Testa- 
 ment, is a tendency which might be supposed to make 
 against the acquisition of such a doctrine of solidarity 
 in a “first father” of the race, or in the effects of his 
 transgression, but indirectly it aided the formation 
 of such a view, by adding point to the individual’s 
 sense of personal sin, and so fertilising the soil in which 
 the doctrine of hereditary acquired corruption has 
 its root.’1 Of special interest in this connection is the 
 book of Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Ben Sirach, 
 as it serves as a connecting link between the Old 
 Testament and Jewish teaching in the time of our 
 Lord. Although his attitude on the subject is gener- 
 ally individualistic, recognising ‘ moral solidarity ’ as 
 regards the sufferings of children for their parents’ 
 sin, and the influence of example only, and insisting 
 on personal liberty and responsibility, he does quite 
 explicitly refer to the Genesis story, as recording the 
 first sin, and as explaining the origin of death. ‘ From 
 a woman was the beginning of sin; and because of 
 her we all die’ (xxv. 24). (Cf. xl. 1, ‘ Great travail 
 * Tennant’s The Mall and Original Sin, pp. 104-5. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 301 
 
 is created for every man, and a heavy yoke is upon 
 the sons of Adam.’) Without following the details of 
 the discussion, Tennant’s conclusion may be quoted: 
 ‘The author of Ecclesiasticus taught that death was 
 a consequence of the sin of the first parents of the 
 race: and whilst seeing in this transgression the first 
 of a series of human sins, he suspected no causal 
 connection between the first and the succeeding 
 members of that series.’' Individual sin he traced 
 to the evil inclination (yezer). ‘He Himself made 
 man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of 
 his own counsel’ (xv. 14). The existence of such a 
 tendency to sin within man seems to be recognised 
 in xxi. 27: ‘When the ungodly curseth Satan, he 
 curseth his own soul.’ Probably it is not physical 
 but spiritual death of which the writer of the Book of 
 Wisdom is thinking, when he states how the divine 
 intention was thwarted : 
 
 ‘God created man for incorruption, 
 
 And made Him an image of His own proper being ; 
 
 But by envy of the devil death entered into the world, 
 
 And they that are of his portion make trial thereof, 
 
 But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, 
 
 And no torment shall touch them.’ 
 (ii. 23-111. 1.) 
 
 An element here added is the reference to the agency 
 of Satan, ‘the envy of the devil.’ But there is no 
 doctrine of an inherited corruption of nature from 
 Adam, for Solomon is represented as saying of himself : 
 
 ‘Now I was a child of parts, and a good soul fell to my lot, 
 Nay rather, being good, I came into a body undefiled.’ 
 (vill. 19-20.) 
 
 A corrupted nature is, however, assigned to the Canaan- 
 ites as a result of Noah’s curse on their ancestor. 
 ‘They were a seed accursed from the beginning ’ 
 (xi. 11). The Jewish teaching which comes nearest 
 to and may have been influenced by the Christian 
 teaching is that of 2 Esdras (4 Ezra). ‘° The first 
 Adam bearing a wicked heart transgressed, and was 
 
 1 Op. cit., p. 121. 
 
302 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 overcome; and not he only, but all they also that are 
 born of him. Thus disease was made permanent ; 
 and thus the law was in the heart of the people along 
 with the wickedness of the root ; so the good departed 
 away, and that which was wicked abode still’ (iu. 
 21-22). It is to be noted, however, that the evil heart 
 preceded and did not result from Adam’s transgression ; 
 it was the occasion of the Fall, and not the Fall the 
 cause of it. Again, to quote Tennant,’ ‘ the disease 
 of infirmity which is here stated to have been made 
 permanent in the race is not said to have been made 
 so by the Fall: the permanent infirmity seems to be 
 simply the transmitted evil inclination or the universal 
 ‘following of Adam’s-example in yielding to it.’ It 
 recognised that there has been an increase of this 
 tendency in human history. ‘An evil heart hath 
 erown up in us, which hath led us astray from these 
 statutes, and hath brought us into corruption and into 
 the ways of death, hath showed us the paths of 
 perdition and removed us far from life; and that 
 not a few only, but wellnigh all that have been 
 created’ (vii. 48). In one passage spiritual as well 
 as physical consequences are assigned to Adam’s 
 transgression. ‘It had been better that the earth 
 had not given thee Adam; or else, when it had given 
 him, to have restrained him from sinning. For what 
 profit is it for all that are in this present time to live 
 in heaviness, and after death to look for punishment ? 
 O thou Adam, what hast thou done? for though it 
 was thou that sinned the evil is not fallen on thee 
 alone, but upon all of us that come of thee. For what 
 profit is it unto us, if there be promised us an im- 
 mortal time, whereas we have done the works that 
 bring death ?’ (viii. 46-49). While Adam’s sins and 
 our sins are thus associated, yet it is not expressly 
 asserted that we sin because Adam sinned; the same 
 ambiguity is left us by Paul in Romans v. 12. In the 
 Apocalypse of Baruch individual liberty and responsi- 
 bility are maintained; but in one passage (xlviii. 
 42-43) there is agreement with 4 Ezra: ‘O Adam, 
 1 Idem, pp. 227-8. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 303 
 
 what hast thou done to all those who are born of 
 thee? And what will be said to the first Eve who 
 hearkened to the serpent? For all this multitude 
 are going to corruption, nor is there any numbering 
 of those whom the fire devours’ (Charles’ rendering). 
 Dr. Charles inclines to treat this passage as an inter- 
 polation; but if it be accepted as authentic, what must 
 be insisted on is that while the book admits ‘ con- 
 ditional liability to punishment for imputed sin, it 
 argues, on the whole, for undiminished individual 
 responsibility ; and in no case does it sanction a 
 doctrine of hereditary corruption of human nature, 
 though in one particular it approaches such a doctrine.’! 
 While there was a preparation in the Jewish teaching 
 for Paul’s doctrine, yet the later ecclesiastical dogma 
 of inherited corruption as a result of Adam’s trans- 
 gression is nowhere taught. 
 
 (ii) Jesus did not in any way concern Himself with 
 the origin of sin, but, calling men to repentance, He 
 offered forgiveness. He described it as a disease, of 
 which He was the physician (Mark 11. 17), asa bondage, 
 to deliver from which He was going to give His life 
 as a ransom (Matt. xx. 28). Sinners are lost to God, 
 and *‘ the Son of man came to seek and to save the 
 lost’ (Luke xix. 10). A characteristic feature of His 
 teaching is the inwardness of sin, its source in the 
 appetites, desires, inclinations. ‘ The things Which 
 proceed out of the man are those that defile the man ’ 
 (Mark vii. 15). It is Paul who has fully developed the 
 doctrine of sin. By an an inductive proof he shows the 
 universality of sin, and consequent guilt (Rom. 1.- 
 i.), in order that he may assert the necessity of a 
 no less universal salvation, since man’s guilt incurs 
 the wrath of God. By a personal confession of his 
 own experience (Rom. vil. 7-25) he traces the develop- 
 ment of sin in the individual. Stn as a power in the 
 world objective to man brings him into bondage, and 
 has its seat and vehicle in the flesh, which is not | 
 identical either with the body or even sensuous 
 impulses, but with the whole of man’s nature, asserting 
 
 1 Tennant, op. cit., p. 220. 
 
304 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 its independence of God, opposing its will to God’s, 
 and withstanding the influences of the Spirit of God. 
 The law which is intended to restrain sin provokes 
 sin rather, and man, approving God’s law, is impotent 
 because of the flesh to obey it. He cannot deliver 
 himself, and so needs the deliverance God offers in 
 Christ. The flesh in Paul has some likeness to the 
 yezer of Jewish thought ; but he does not make clear 
 whether he regarded it as a natural inclination to 
 evil in man, or as a result of Adam’s transgression, 
 yet it is possible that he did associate, as did Ezra 
 before him, the development of sin in the individual 
 with the history of sin in the race. The passage 
 (Rom. v. 12-21) in which he refers to the story of the 
 | Fall is not part of his argument for the universality 
 of sin, nor does he introduce it as an explanation of 
 that universality. It is introduced at a later stage 
 _ of the discussion in Romans to prove that just as Christ 
 is greater than Adam, so is the efficacy of grace 
 ereater than the influence of sin. The conclusion of 
 the argument is in the words, ‘ Where sin abounded, 
 _grace did abound more exceedingly.’ Paul did un- 
 _doubtedly teach that death as the penalty of sin came 
 on the race as a result of Adam’s disobedience. It 
 is certain, however, that he did not teach an imputa- 
 tion of the guilt of Adam’s sin to his descendants : 
 but he, with a certain inconsequence of thought, 
 explains their participation in the penalty of death 
 as due to their own transgressions (v. 12), and later 
 (v. 18) declares that sin is not imputed where there 
 is no law. The clause éd’ @ mavres yuaprov cannot 
 be rendered to mean that in Adam all sinned (omnes 
 peccarunt, Adamo peccante, Bengel), either because all 
 were included physically in Adam (as Levi ‘ was yet 
 in the loins of his father,’ Heb. vii. 10), or because 
 Adam as the moral representative of the race was 
 acting on behalf of it, as the Federal theology after 
 taught. He seems to have held by the principle that, 
 while the penalty is racial, the guilt is personal. He 
 hus combines the older idea which runs through 
 most of the Old Testament of the solidarity of the 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 305 
 
 tribe or nation (here extended to the race), and the 
 later individualism which is found in Jeremiah and 
 Ezekiel. He does not anywhere expressly teach that 
 Adam ’s transgression so changed his own nature that 
 he transmitted a corrupted nature to his descendants, 
 although his doctrine of the flesh does undoubtedly 
 suggest this. 
 
 (111) As far as Paul’s teaching is concerned the teach- 
 ing of Augustine, Luther, Calvin on original sin and 
 total depravity rests on a very uncertain foundation.) 
 The teaching of Augustine may be very briefly sum- 
 marised. (1) Mankind is a mere massa perditionis, 
 and the virtues of the heathen are only splendid sins. 
 (2) Adam by his transgression lost his freedom to do 
 right, and in him mankind also has become unfree, 
 though still morally responsible. (8) There is from 
 Adam a transmission both of guilt, so that even babes 
 are responsible for Adam’s transgression, and of a 
 corrupt nature, so that men are born totally depraved ; 
 this inheritance is connected in a most unsavoury 
 way with the facts of sexual reproduction, for even 
 regenerate parents reproduce in concupiscence with 
 the remains of their unregenerate nature. (4) The 
 grace, which is the remedy of sin, is sacramental, as 
 what is begun in baptism is continued in other sacra- 
 ments. (5) Despite his doctrine of predestination, 
 Augustine is led by this sacramentalism to affirm the 
 possibility of a lapse from a state of grace.t Protes- 
 tantism took over this doctrine of man substantially, 
 with less sacramentalism, and more emphasis on 
 justifying faith. The Federal theology found a justi- 
 fication for the connection with Adam asserted by 
 teaching that he was representative of the race in 
 both accepting and then violating the covenant of 
 works. We may assent to Tennant’s conclusion,? 
 that ‘the development of the highly complicated 
 doctrine of Original Sin was less the outcome of 
 strict exegesis than due to the exercise of speculation ; 
 speculation working indeed on the lines laid down in 
 
 1 See Mackintosh, Christianity and Sin, pp. 99-105. 
 2 The Origin and Propagation of Sin, p. 41. 
 U 
 
ee a 
 
 306 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Scripture, but applied to such material as current 
 science and philosophy were able to afford.’ 
 | (iv) The previous discussion justifies us in feeling 
 entirely free to inquire what science has to teach us 
 as to the origin of sin, its development in the individual 
 'and its history in the race. It is much to be regretted 
 that men speculated about the origin of sin in the 
 ‘race before they had observed how it begins in the 
 ‘individual. The study of the child will teach us 
 more than the study of the savage, for on the one 
 hand within limits the development of the child not 
 only physically, as embryology teaches, but even 
 mentally and morally, recapitulates the evolution of 
 the race, and on the other hand it is an unwarranted 
 
 assumption that the savage represents primitive 
 
 man without any deterioration. (a) We shall there- 
 
 fore begin with the child. The child starts with a 
 double burden or boon, physical heredity and social 
 inheritance. The promise and potency of its in- 
 dividuality are helped or hindered by the past of the — 
 race as it comes to it along these two channels. It 
 is highly improbable that there is a transmission of 
 acquired character, and still less probable that moral 
 traits can be so transmitted than that physical 
 features should be. ‘ If,’ says Thomson,! ‘ individu- 
 ally acquired modifications, the direct results of 
 peculiarities in nurture, are not transmissible, then 
 modifications have no direct racial importance, and 
 
 it is in this direction that the bulk of the scientific 
 
 evidence points. There are only a few cases that 
 suggest the other answer, so that we cannot count 
 on this. Without foreclosing the question, we must 
 act as if individually acquired modifications were 
 not transmissible as such or in any representative 
 degree.’ The biologist is concerned with physical 
 features; but the moralist may here add, that as 
 sin lies in the region of individuality, personal liberty, 
 and responsibility, there is still less reason for assum- 
 ing any transmission by physical heredity of moral 
 character. There are vices, such as impurity and 
 1 What is Man ?, p. 140. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 307 
 
 intemperance, which may have physical consequences | 
 which may be transmitted to offspring as racial 
 poisons ; but this transmission does not involve the 
 transmission also of the moral defects. The drunk- 
 
 ard’s child does not inherit the father’s craving for 
 drink directly, but it may be an enfeebled frame, 
 
 which may weaken the power of resistance to the same 
 temptation. We may dismiss from consideration the 
 possibility of the transmission of moral depravity or 
 corruption by physical heredity. What alone can 
 be transmitted is physical and consequent mental 
 incapacity, which is the occasion in an unfavourable 
 environment of moral degradation. There are good 
 and bad stocks, but we are not warranted in affirming 
 that this difference is due to the transmission of any 
 acquired characters, good or bad. What is demon- 
 strable as a potent factor in individual develop- 
 ment is the social inheritance, which through the 
 environment is exercising a constant influence. Moral 
 conduct results not only in moral character in the 
 individual, but in moral customs, standards, and 
 institutions in society. The parents and teachers of 
 the child in their moral character and conduct are 
 always either making or marring his character. If 
 we remember that such influence begins with the 
 unborn babe, we shall be readier to recognise that the 
 resemblance of children to parents can be more 
 reasonably explained by this social inheritance than 
 by any physical heredity. The child is born into 
 the world, not an actuality, but a possibility of good 
 or evil; which possibility shall become actuality , 
 depends largely on the influence of the earliest/ 
 environment. What is included in this possibility 
 as the raw material out of which morality is to be 
 formed ? Man as a race has an animal ancestry, 
 
 including instincts, appetites, and impulses, the vital 
 purpose of which is self-protection, self-preservation, 
 
 and. self-satisfaction ; and there is nothing morally 
 wrong or bad in any of them. Man as a race did not 
 start merely on the animal level, for as has been 
 
 shown the final difference of man’s development and 
 
—— 
 — 
 
 308 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 animal evolution does indicate an initial difference. 
 We are not justified, then, in assuming that even this 
 animal inheritance comes to the child as it does to 
 one of the lower animals, or as it sometimes shows 
 itself as developed in the savage. It is already 
 modified by the distinctively human endowment of 
 reason, conscience, and affection, although the animal 
 inheritance does show itself in the child’s behaviour 
 earlier than the human endowment. With this quali- 
 fication, that the human child is not born a mere 
 animal, we may accept Dr. Tennant’s conclusion.* 
 ‘ We have seen that the inborn tendencies of the child 
 are natural and non-moral. We may add that they 
 are likewise neutral as regards promise of subsequent 
 ethical outcome. They are the raw material out of 
 which good as well as evil, virtue as well as vice, may 
 be hewn and shaped. They are indifferent stuff, 
 awaiting moralisation. The fear that is natural to 
 all men is the basis alike of cowardice and of the 
 highest courage, which is by no means identical with 
 fearlessness ; the natural emotion of anger is the source 
 of righteous wrath as well as of vindictive passion. 
 Our virtues and vices have common roots; and what 
 shall grow from those roots depends on the action of 
 the will alone.’ This last sentence needs qualification, 
 even in the light of what Tennant himself says after- 
 wards; for before the will is or can be exercised, a 
 right or a wrong direction can be, and is, given to 
 the development by the education. As we have 
 
 ‘learned from the contribution to our knowledge of 
 
 human personality recently made by psycho-analysis, 
 there may be a repression of impulses which is a 
 hindrance, or a sublimation which is a help in the 
 formation of moral character. As conscience is not 
 awakened till about the age of three, and usually by 
 
 _ obedience to commands enforced by punishment, and 
 
 is not reinforced by affection till somewhat later; as 
 
 ' much later comes any independent reflection, or 
 
 formation of an individual moral standard,—these 
 instincts, appetites, and impulses get a start before 
 1 The Child and Religion, p. 171. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 309 
 
 the moral restraints or constraints can affect the will. 
 ‘The moral life,’ says Tennant, ‘is a race in which 
 every child starts handicapped. The pleasures of 
 forms of conduct which are destined to be forbidde 
 him have been tasted and known; pleasure-givin 
 actions have already become forged into chains o 
 habit ; the expulsive power of the new affection which 
 is to establish another rule cannot at first be One 
 felt. When will and conscience enter, it is into a land’ 
 already occupied by a powerful foe. And, in the 
 opening stages of the moral life, higher motives cannot, 
 from the very circumstances of the case, appeal so 
 strongly as the lower and more accustomed already in 
 possession. Into the “‘ seething and tumultuous life 
 of natural tendency, of appetite and passion, affection 
 and desire ”’ is introduced the new-born moral purpose, 
 which must struggle to win the ascendancy.’ This 
 is probably a correct account of the moral develop- 
 ment of the majority of children; it needs to be 
 qualified where the environment is decisively good or 
 bad. Christian nurture, through which the grace of 
 Christ reaches the young life, may greatly strengthen 
 both moral restraints and constraints, and make the 
 development predominantly good. On the contrary, 
 in an evil environment the development may be almost 
 hopelessly bad, although, as has already been shown, 
 unexhausted moral reserves may afterwards be dis- 
 closed. 
 
 (b) The moral development of the child is affected 
 by the social inheritance, where what Ritschl? has called 
 the Kingdom of Sin has been formed. ‘ The subject 
 of sin is hwmanity as the sum of all individuals, in so 
 far as the selfish action of each person, involving him 
 as it does in illimitable interactions with all others, 
 is directed in any degree whatsoever towards the 
 opposite of the good, and leads to the association of 
 individuals in common evil.’ We may then speak 
 of mankind as a sinful race; and we must investigate 
 the moral history of the race. It is, as has already 
 been indicated in several connections, an unwarranted 
 
 ' Op. cit., p. 178, 2 Justification and Reconcifiation, p. 335. 
 
310 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 assumption that mankind began in the condition of 
 barbarism or savagery, and that its evolution has 
 been a continuous upward movement. Progress there 
 has on the whole been, but there has also been de- 
 terioration. ‘ We fancy,’ says Thomson,! ‘ that the 
 happy moments of primitive man were many, for we 
 entirely disagree with reflecting modern slum condi- 
 tions or depressed savage conditions on primitive man. 
 ie enjoyed himself when he had a comfortable cave 
 with pleasant neighbours. He liked a sunbath, as 
 his very distant relations, the monkeys, do. A swim, 
 too, for he was punctiliously cleanly. He kept in 
 good heart and in good fettle, else he would never 
 have succeeded, even with all his wits, in the battle 
 {Tomo versus Mundum—won. not by us, but by primi- 
 tive man.’ Thomson disagrees from James’ extreme 
 view of the rough animality of primitive man. We 
 may at once set aside the extravagances of theologians 
 who represented Adam as a paragon of human per- 
 fection, and Paradise as the home of a culture and a 
 virtue which humanity has since failed to attain; or 
 the attempt recently made by Dr. Hall 2 to reconcile 
 scientific theory with Catholic dogma by assuming 
 that ‘ as man’s primitive state was partly supernatural, 
 an original righteousness was made possible by grace,’ 
 and that only after the Fall was man left to that 
 natural development which science describes for us. 
 We may, however, turn to a modern man of science 
 who is also a Christian believer to discover what can 
 be said about the Fall to reconcile faith and reason. 
 Dr. James Y. Simpson agrees with Dr. J. Arthur 
 Thomson in refusing to recognise the savage as the 
 representative of primitive man, to whom he assigns 
 a capacity for progress which the savage lacks, unless 
 an external stimulus is applied. He also seeks in the 
 individual moral development a clue as to what the 
 racial history may have been. This is what he 
 tentatively offers to us.? ‘ Any external descriptive 
 account can, however, in no way even summarise the 
 
 1 What is Man ?, p. 52. ° Evolution and the Fall, pp. 128-48. 
 * The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, p: 287. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 311 
 
 inward process in virtue of which advance took place. 
 Even could we be sure of the particular initial moment 
 in which an individual became first aware of alter- 
 natives of conduct as higher and lower, and volun- 
 tarily chose the lower, it would be difficult to affirm 
 that sin definitely entered at that moment. The 
 action was certainly sinful, but the entrance and 
 victory of sin has never been a momentary affair; it 
 is an age-long process, alike in its origin, its persistence, 
 its elimination. Yet is there nothing necessary or 
 inevitable about it. We may discuss the origin and 
 implications of sin, never its origin and function. It 
 was no necessary stage in the development of man. 
 The struggle is inevitable, not the fall. He might | 
 have overcome in the beginning; he might have 
 followed the gleam. The instinctive impulse and 
 appetite, strong in some cases because of their basal 
 utility to life, the conscious desire when faced with 
 the dawning recognition of a higher if more difficult 
 way, present the arena for struggle and resistance. 
 As when the electric current is turned on, and the 
 are lights flicker and burn unsteadily till the power 
 avails to transfuse the recalcitrant material, so the 
 darkness of man’s early life was only gradually and 
 fitfully illumined ; that there was a return to darkness 
 at all after the initial flash is the statement of ‘“‘ the 
 Fall.”?’ The evolution of the race has not been, 
 just as the development of the individual is not what 
 it ought to have been; and we can therefore speak of 
 a racial as well as an individual sin. The raw material 
 of the animal ancestry and the distinctively human 
 endowment, the influence of the environment and 
 the social inheritance, combine in helping or hindering y 
 the free will in its obedience to conscience. Moral 
 liberty and responsibility are not only preserved on 
 this view, while limitations are recognised, but more 
 securely preserved than on the older view of the in- 
 heritance of a nature so corrupt as a result of Adam’s 
 fall that man is free only to do evil, and incapable of 
 good. His need of redemption from actual sin in the 
 race and himself is no less asserted. 
 
$12 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (3) Small as may have appeared the beginnings of | 
 
 sin, in view of what it has grown to in human history, — 
 ‘a kingdom of sin,’ claiming as its subjects all born 
 
 into this world, using as its agency social customs, 
 standards and institutions, opposing itself to, hinder- 
 ing, delaying, and even sometimes appearing to prevail 
 over the Kingdom of God, the question must be asked, 
 Why did God permit the entrance of sin into the 
 world, why does He tolerate its continuance ? While 
 the problem of moral evil is more acute, its solution 
 by the divine grace also is more adequate. It has 
 already been shown to how great an extent pain is 
 related to sin. Were men wiser, better, and more 
 loving the amount of suffering would be so greatly 
 reduced that what remained could more easily be 
 understood as consistent with God’s goodness as a 
 necessary condition of man’s personal development. 
 The answer to the question raised is twofold: God 
 permitted the possibility of sin in the making of man, 
 because not otherwise could His purpose concerning 
 man be fulfilled. While the actuality of sin was not 
 necessary for the fulfilment of God’s purpose He 
 tolerated that actuality, and tolerates it, because 
 by His method of grace He is dealing with sin 
 more effectively in accordance with His purpose for 
 man than He could in any other way which can be 
 imagined or conceived. 
 
 (i) If man is to develop into moral and religious 
 personality, doing the right and loving God, he must 
 be free to choose the wrong instead of the right or 
 to be as God unto himself. Without freedom no 
 morality and no religion are conceivable, because no 
 personality. God willed to have as the consummation 
 of the process of creation a family of sons, freely 
 choosing fellowship with and likeness to Himself. 
 God as Father could communicate, and reproduce 
 His own perfection, only in free human personalities. 
 No possibility of holy love without freedom, and no 
 freedom without the possibility of sin; to prevent 
 sin would be to destroy freedom. God’s omnipotence 
 does not mean that God could have created man 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 313 
 
 free, and yet have excluded the possibility of the ~ 
 wrong choice being made. The theology which repre- 
 sents God as absolute will, free and able to do anything 
 that can be conceived, cannot use such an argument 
 legitimately; for such a view of God, sin must ever 
 remain an inscrutable mystery. But, if we recognise 
 that God’s own character and purpose, and the nature 
 of the reality He creates, involve lmitations on the 
 exercise of His omnipotence, then we are entitled to 
 offer this solution of the problem of why God per- 
 mitted the possibility of sin. 
 
 (ii) As in a previous section it has been argued that 
 God foresees free acts not as actual, but as possible, 
 we need not meet the further objection, that God 
 not only in creating knew the possibility of sin, but 
 foreknew the actuality; all we need affirm is that 
 He knew sin as a possibility inherent in freedom. 
 Did God then in creating take an incalculable risk, 
 was creation a reckless speculation? ‘There are the 
 responsibilities of the Creator not to create a world 
 that should finally disappoint His hopes, and defeat 
 His aims. The fact that God has created the world 
 should for Christian faith, which believes in God as 
 Father, be a proof, a convincing proof, that God knew 
 Himself to possess all the resources, rational, moral, 
 and spiritual, to deal with any emergency. We may 
 say with all reverence that it would have been wrong 
 for God to create a world with the possibility of sin 
 entering in, unless He had abundant grace to redeem 
 that world from sin. We are not entitled to assert 
 a dogmatic universalism, on the ground that the 
 salvation of every soul is essential to the completeness 
 of that redemption, which will satisfy the heart of 
 the Father, and fulfil the purpose He had in creating 
 man. We are entitled, however, to hope that the 
 redemption will be very much more nearly if not 
 altogether universal than a survey of the moral and“ 
 religious condition of mankind as it now is might lead 
 us to expect. There are wonders and surprises of 
 the divine grace for which faith in God should prepare 
 us. The solution of the problem, then, les partly in 
 
‘ Vy 
 
 314 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 the future. We shall know why God allowed sin to 
 enter when we know how He has cast it out from 
 mankind. 
 
 (i) Even if, withdrawing our gaze from the begin- 
 ning of sin in the past, and the ending of sin in the 
 future, we fix our eyes on the present, and what God 
 is now doing in the world, we shall gain the confidence 
 that the problem is being solved in fact, and thus also 
 for thought. God is tolerating the continuance of 
 sin in the race because He is in His own method of 
 erace working out its redemption. Those who de- 
 mand divine interferences in the course of human 
 history, to put an end to sin and its consequences, 
 those who expect a fimal divine interference in a 
 supernatural manifestation of Christ at His Second 
 Advent, do not, be it said with all respect for many 
 good men, understand God’s ways. If God were 
 forced to use omnipotence to put an end to the sin 
 and consequent misery of the world, He would have 
 suffered moral and spiritual defeat at the hands of 
 
 sin, for He would have shown Himself incapable of 
 winning the victory by moral and spiritual means, 
 ‘the only means congruous with the nature of the 
 conflict and the character and the purpose of God. 
 It is disbelief in the sufficient and sovereign efficacy 
 of grace to desire and to expect any other method of 
 dealing with the sin of the world. Such an expecta- 
 tion, however dishonouring to God on close scrutiny 
 it proves to be, might have some excuse, if history 
 afforded proof that the method of grace has failed 
 ‘and is failing. But is there any justification for the 
 belief that Christ is not seeing of the travail of His 
 soul, and is not being satisfied with a race that is 
 being by His Cross and Holy Passion as well as His 
 sovereignty of grace redeemed from sin unto God ? 
 To assert this is to indulge in a pessimism which the 
 evidence does not warrant, Sin abounds, but does 
 not grace abound more exceedingly, or at least is there 
 not promise of its so abounding ? The possibility of 
 the right choice for the race has not been excluded by 
 the wrong. Mankind is not merely a massa perditionis. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 315 
 
 That there has been human_progress, if not in in- 
 dividual capacity and character, yet in the inheritance 
 of good which one generation passes on to another, 
 not constant nor certain, but real, is evidence that the 
 possibility of good is becoming more fully actuality 
 than the possibility of evil. In that progress human 
 endeavour is not the only factor; it is the witness of 
 religion that God is working with and for man. The 
 confidence of faith is not in what man can and will 
 achieve, but in what God is in His grace doing in and 
 by man. In Jesus Christ and His Cross and Reign 
 God’s counter-working of evil for good reaches its 
 completion. Man as redeemed from sin in Christ 
 Jesus has a value for God such as a puppet, however 
 endowed in other respects, could never have had. 
 We dare not with Augustine speak of the beata culpa, 
 the sin which has made grace so to abound, although 
 we cannot imagine that the world without the Cross 
 would have had as great value for God as the world 
 saved by His sacrifice. When God’s purpose is ful- 
 filled in the redeemed race, then, and only then, will 
 be fully disclosed God’s reason for allowmg sin to 
 enter the world, and bearing so patiently with it when 
 it had entered. In no other way, consistent with holy 
 love, it would seem, could mankind become a free 
 and redeemed family of God. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 
 
 I 
 
 In a previous chapter religion as the highest function 
 of human personality was dealt with; and it was 
 then indicated that religion involves revelation, since 
 it is a mutual relation between God and man, and the 
 core of it is in the immediate contact and intimate 
 communion of man with God. In this mutual rela- 
 tion we cannot conceive man as alone active in his 
 search after God, and God passive, waiting to be 
 found. The parables of the lost sheep and the lost 
 coin illustrate the truth about this relation better than 
 the parable of the prodigal son (Luke xv.). 
 
 (1) Mysticism is justified in claiming that there is 
 an immediate contact of God with man, that ‘in Him 
 we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts xvii. 28), 
 although those forms of mysticism are mistaken which 
 think that the immediate contact can best be realised 
 in a condition of ecstasy, when, consciousness lost, the 
 soul swoons into oneness with God,—a God empty 
 of definite content,—or which seeks the exclusive 
 privilege of individual visions or voices to convey the 
 assurance of God’s present reality. When the soul is 
 alive to God, it will ask the question of the Psalmist, 
 
 ‘Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit ? 
 Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ?’ 
 (CXxXXixgge) 
 In that presence it will find a refuge in time of trouble. 
 
 ‘In the covert of Thy presence shalt Thou hide them that fear 
 Thee from the plottings of man.’ (xxx. 20.) 
 
 In that presence it will find its source of gladness. 
 
 ‘In Thy presence is fulness of joy ; 
 In Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.’ 
 (xvi. 11.) 
 316 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 317 
 
 And therefore the greatest evil it can conceive is the 
 loss of that presence. 
 
 ‘Cast me not away from Thy presence ; 
 And take not Thy holy Spirit from me.’ 
 ia ay 
 
 It will be observed that in two of these passages the 
 Spirit is mentioned as the equivalent of the presence. 
 The activity of God in man is so conceived in the 
 Old Testament ; it is in the New Testament, however, 
 that the truth that God Himself is present in man 
 by His Spirit finds its clearest and fullest expression, 
 because it was through faith in Christ that believers 
 most certainly and adequately experienced the pres- 
 ence and power of the Spirit of God. The discussion 
 of the doctrine of the Spirit must, therefore, be 
 reserved for the last section of the present volume. 
 (2) The presence of God is real; the contact is 
 immediate; but man’s consciousness of God is 
 mediated through his personal activities in contact 
 and commerce with the world which is his home. 
 Why is this? It is in order that man may preserve 
 his individuality, exercise his liberty, realise his 
 responsibility, achieve his personality, that God, as 
 it were, stands afar off, and hides Himself, so that 
 man to find Him must seek Him. God’s communi- 
 cativeness is conditioned by man’s receptivity and 
 responsiveness, and his capacity for God is developed 
 in his intercourse with God. God’s revelation is 
 measured by man’s religion; and hence His revela- 
 tion must be progressive, corresponding to man’s 
 religious development. The psychology of religion 
 is the study not only of human processes, but also 
 of divine methods. Just as the most learned scholar 
 must begin with the ABC, so has mankind learned 
 of God * precept upon precept, precept upon precept ; 
 line upon line, line upon line; here a little, there a 
 little’ (Is. xxvii. 13). God hath spoken ‘ by divers 
 portions and in divers manners’ (Heb. 1. 1). Nor 
 need we assume that this gradualness of God’s 
 revelation is the result of sin, that it is man’s false- 
 
318 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 hood and error which alone hinder God’s full revela- 
 tion of Himself at once. Evolution is God’s method 
 of creation of the world and man, and it is no less the 
 method of His revelation, for a communication beyond 
 the capacity of man to receive and respond would be 
 idle and vain. We may say that human development 
 is by divine education. Hosea, the tenderest of all 
 the prophets, describes God’s chosen people at the 
 beginning of its history as a child. * When Israel 
 was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out 
 of Egypt’ (xi. 1). And as we read the Old Testament 
 we discover that God taught Israel as a child. God 
 has not been like the pedant who can talk to an infant 
 only in polysyllables; He is like the mother who has 
 her baby-talk. The beginnings of religion are so 
 crude, appearing to us now so superstitious, that 
 it is not easy for us to accustom ourselves to the 
 thought that these were the glimpses of the dawn of 
 the day of divine revelation, of which the Son of God 
 as man was the noontide splendour. Yet even in 
 what Christian scholars have called the ethnic re- 
 ligions, the religions of the Gentiles as distinguished 
 from the religion of the Hebrews and the Jews, of 
 which Christianity is the completion, we can trace a 
 progress from the primitive philosophy of animism 
 through the religion of polydaemonism and polytheism 
 to varied forms, which approach, although they do 
 not attain, the ‘ethical monotheism’ of the prophets. 
 Irom the belief in and worship of a countless host of 
 unnamed spirits (polydaemonism) man advanced to 
 the recognition and adoration of a more measurable 
 multitude of gods, named because more distinctly 
 conceived, and more intimately related to men 
 (polytheism) ; and even in monolatry he confined his 
 regular worship to one god, while acknowledging 
 the existence of many, or in kathenothetsm he in the 
 act of worship was absorbed in contemplation and 
 adoration of only the one god at the moment ad- 
 dressed, or in monarchy he exalted one god in the 
 pantheon as ruler of gods and men, or in pantheism 
 he thought of God as the one reality, and all distine- 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 319 
 
 tion from that God as illusive.t| Only among the 
 Hebrews was monotheism reached; but in other 
 religions we may observe this movement toward a 
 recognition and confession of the divine unity. While 
 there was deterioration in doctrine and practice in 
 paganism, such as Paul condemns in Romans 1. and ii., 
 it was not so deliberately false and wicked as it must 
 have appeared to a Jew like Paul, to whom this 
 ‘ethical monotheism’ was an inheritance; and there 
 was progress also, as any appreciative study of the 
 history of religions will prove. Such a _ general 
 revelation of God to mankind is recognised by Paul 
 in his speeches at Lystra and Athens (Acts xiv. 15, 17, 
 XVli. 22-31), and in his argument regarding the 
 universality of sinfulness (Rom. 1. 18-23, i. 14-16). 
 We must recognise this general revelation of God as 
 the background of that special revelation of which 
 our Bible is the record; but before we can deal with 
 this there are some considerations to be offered re- 
 garding the universal media of revelation. 
 
 (3) While God approaches man in many ways, we 
 may specially mention three media of revelation, 
 nature, history, conscience. 
 
 (i) The psalms, which are so full of the realisation 
 of the presence of God, often express the manifestation 
 of God in nature : | 
 is ‘The heavens declare the glory of God ; 
 
 And the firmament sheweth His handywork. 
 
 Day unto day uttereth speech, 
 
 And night unto night sheweth knowledge. 
 
 There is no speech nor language ; 
 
 Their voice cannot be heard. 
 
 Their line is gone out through all the earth, 
 
 And their words to the end of the world.’ 
 
 (xix. 1-4.) 
 
 The voice of God in nature uses no language that can 
 be heard by the hearing of the ears (v. 3), but it is 
 understood by the mind of man. ‘There follows in this 
 same psalm a passage which may be described as 
 mythology, converted to monotheism (vv. 5-6). 
 
 1 See Jevons’ Introduction to the History of Religion; and Moore’s The 
 History of Religions. 
 
 F 
 
320 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Iilsewhere the processes of nature are described as 
 the immediate activities of God. So in paganism all 
 natural operations are conceived and described as 
 the actions of gods. Sol drives his fiery chariot across 
 the heavens; Aeolus releases his winds from the 
 cavern in which he holds them captive; Neptune 
 rules the waves. Illustrations need not be multiplied. 
 Paul, as has already been shown, recognises this 
 manifestation of God’s power, wisdom, and goodness 
 in nature. Jesus (Matt. vi. 26-28) saw the care and 
 the bounty of the Heavenly Father in the food of the 
 birds of the air and the clothing of the flowers of the 
 field. It is measureless power, unfathomable wisdom, 
 abounding goodness which nature discloses. But it 
 surely discloses the glory of God in its beauty and its 
 sublimity, where beauty breaks the bounds of finite 
 comprehension and soars to infinite suggestiveness. It 
 is through the beauty of nature that poets and artists 
 have often found God. The prophet of this divine 
 revelation in nature is pre-eminently Wordsworth: 
 
 ‘I have felt 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things.’ 
 
 (Tintern Abbey.) 
 
 While morality is the function of man most closely 
 related to religion, because goodness reveals more of 
 the nature of God than beauty, yet art as the en- 
 deavour to capture the spirit of beauty has been too 
 much ignored as also an interpretation of the perfec- 
 tion of God. What the poet feels as a presence, the 
 philosopher tries to reach as the conclusion of an 
 argument. Recognising fully that the existence, 
 nature, character, and purpose of God cannot be 
 proved by rigidly logical reasoning, as the conclusion 
 must needs contain as much more than the premises 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 321 
 
 as God transcends all that He has made, yet the 
 ‘ theistic proofs’ have this measure of validity, that 
 they show that the world appears more intelligible, 
 rational, purposive, significant, valuable in a theistic 
 than in any other setting.1 Reason so far justifies 
 religious faith and aesthetic vision. 
 
 ~~(ii) As in history the activity of man plays a much 
 larger part than in the operations of nature, which 
 man can direct and control only in a very limited 
 degree, the revelation of God is more often and to a 
 greater extent obscured by the folly and wickedness 
 of man. It would be an altogether distorted repre- 
 sentation of history which would ignore the agency 
 of man, and ascribe all events directly to the inter- 
 vention of God ; but it would be no less an inadequate 
 interpretation of history which would ascribe all the 
 merit to man, as did Comte in his Positive Polity, 
 his religion of humanity, and ignore the providence 
 of God. It is not piety to ascribe to God’s will, and 
 to acquiesce in and submit to the consequences of 
 man’s sin. A view of Providence which ignores 
 historical causality tends to superstition, and away 
 from religion. While this may be fully not only con- 
 ceded, but even in the interests of a reasonable religion 
 insisted on, yet a consideration of the history of man- 
 kind does justify the belief in Providence, a divine 
 guidance and guardianship of the race in its onward 
 march. The divine purpose has been hindered and 
 hampered by human ignorance, indifference, indolence, 
 or even hostility and defiance, but nevertheless 
 
 ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 
 Rough-hew them how we will.’ 
 (Zamlet.) 
 
 We cannot from human history exclude contingency 
 and find in it all, as Hegel ? strives to do, the necessary 
 evolution of Idea or Spirit ; but there is a philosophy 
 of history which can find a wider meaning in it than 
 the actors themselves conceived. We may agree with 
 
 1 See Balfour’s Theism and Humanism. 
 2 The Philosophy of History, Eng. trans., by Sibree. 
 x 
 
322 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Matthew Arnold! that there is ‘the Eternal, not 
 ourselves, which makes for righteousness.’ The rise 
 and the fall of empires do illustrate or demonstrate 
 a moral order in the world. In the long run and on 
 the big scale, though not immediately in individual 
 experience, righteousness prospers, and wickedness 
 perishes. Human agency is not set aside; but God 
 is so immanent in man, that the consequences of 
 human conduct negate sin and affirm goodness, and 
 that men are restrained from evil and constrained to 
 good as God’s fellow-workers. It is in the history of 
 the Hebrew nation itself, and from the standpoint of 
 its records, that this interpretation of human history 
 as divine providence is most convincing; but every 
 nation, if it had a succession of inspired prophets, 
 might in its own experiences trace such divine dealing 
 in mercy or in judgment, and might thus discover a 
 revelation of God in history. 
 
 (ii) The Hebrew language has no word for con- 
 science, as Old Testament psychology had not yet 
 reached an adequate analysis of human personality. 
 That does not mean, however, that there was no 
 recognition of the voice within. From Greek ethical 
 thought the New Testament with its more developed 
 psychology borrowed the word, although the word is 
 not always used when that function of human per- 
 sonality is referred to. In both parts of our Bible 
 the word heart is more frequently used. Morality 
 among the Hebrews was so dependent on and 
 dominated by religion, that man’s capacity for moral 
 judgment was not investigated.2 It was Socrates 
 who first started on this ethical inquiry. By discus- 
 sion he believed men could discover the general 
 principles which should regulate individual conduct ; 
 from just acts might be inferred what justice is, and 
 then the standard might be applied to determine 
 in case of doubt whether acts were just or unjust. 
 Practice, be it observed, afforded the data for theory. 
 Yet Socrates did not rely on reasoning only; there 
 
 1 Literature and Dogma; and God and the Bible. 
 * See Wheeler Robinson’s The Christian Doctrine of Man, chaps. i. and ii. 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 323 
 
 survived some of the religion which he had inherited 
 in his belief in his davmon, or guardian spirit, who 
 restrained him from actions which he ought not to 
 take.t It may be that the content of any individual 
 conscience may be proved to be a reproduction of 
 social customs which have been invested with the 
 authority of social standards, and are enforced by 
 social sanctions of reward or ‘punishment, And the 
 conscience of most men is little, if anything, more 
 than what public opinion or popular sentiment con- 
 demns or approves. But this is far from being all 
 that can or need be said about conscience. Conscience 
 is a capacity to receive a content of moral judgments, 
 and to recognise their authority and assert their 
 demands; and these judgments may generally be 
 received from the society to which a man belongs ; 
 but it is also a capacity to receive a content from God, 
 to be the channel of God’s revelation of His character 
 and purpose. All moral progress depends on the 
 measure in which an individual conscience can become 
 independent of social standards, so as to rise above 
 them, and in course of time to raise them. Kant 
 asserted the autonomy of the categorical imperative 
 in each man, and yet he admitted that religion is the 
 recognition of our human duties as divine commands.? 
 We need not accept his antithesis, but may say that 
 a man realises himself morally as he receives and 
 responds to this revelation of God’s character and 
 purpose. There have been reformers who were guided 
 by the moral conscience, uninfluenced by the religious 
 consciousness — men who did not think of what 
 seemed right to them as God’s will, and thus as in- 
 vested with a higher than human authority; the 
 greater number, however, of those who have led the 
 race morally have been inspired for the arduous and 
 often even perilous task by the religious conscious- 
 ness: ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ When the moral 
 conscience thus functions it becomes a channel of 
 
 1 See Socrates, by J. T. Forbes, chaps. v. and vill. 
 2 Compare his Critique of the Practical Reason and his Religion within the 
 Bounds of Reason alone. 
 
324 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 divine revelation explicitly ; it is this implicitly even 
 when, as in Socrates, the reason of man is exercised to 
 determine what is right and good. We recognise 
 then gratefully that God has not left Himself without 
 witness in any land or age; but that in nature, history, 
 and conscience He has revealed Himself as well as in 
 what has been already described as the core of all 
 religion, the consciousness of immediate contact and 
 intimate communion with God. 
 
 (4) We do not deny the reality nor depreciate the 
 value, although we admit the insufficiency of this 
 wider revelation, when we recognise that in the 
 revelation through the Hebrew nation and the Jewish 
 people by a succession of prophets God has more 
 distinctly and certainly manifested His nature, char- 
 acter, and purpose. While our judgment of paganism 
 may not be as severe as was Paul’s in view of the 
 aspects which came under his notice, yet we may 
 recognise that human sin has perverted the develop- 
 ment even of religion in man, that the light of God 
 shone in a darkness which comprehended it not. 
 Without regarding all pagan piety and morals as 
 altogether due to artful wickedness, we must admit 
 both degradation and inadequacy. What the pro- 
 eress of the divine revelation might have been in a 
 sinless race, we cannot now conjecture. For man as 
 he is, the wider revelation has not been sufficient. 
 
 (i) It was needful that there should be a revelation, 
 from its beginning in the widest sense redemptive 
 and reconciling, recovering men from error, wicked- 
 ness, and hate, to truth, holiness, and love in com- 
 munion with God. That it should be given through 
 one people is quite in accord with God’s method as 
 we can observe it elsewhere. The human good has 
 not been achieved universally, equally in all human 
 beings. Within each society individual men have 
 been selected for the furtherance of the common good, 
 and so also societies in the human community. 
 Limitation of interest and concentration of effort are 
 the conditions of highest achievement in all spheres. 
 The jack-of-all-trades is master of none. He would 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 325 
 
 be all things in general without being anything in 
 particular. This principle applies no less to nations. 
 The common illustration of this principle, because the 
 most convincing, is the contribution of the Ancient 
 to the Modern world in the Hebrew religion, the Greek 
 culture, and the Roman law. When the world has 
 been Christianised, doubtless India, China, and Japan 
 will have a distinctive contribution to make to the 
 application and interpretation of Christianity. No 
 theist would deny that God was revealing Himself, 
 some part of His nature, character, and purpose, in 
 Greek culture and Roman law; but because the 
 Hebrew contribution was religion, the conscious and 
 voluntary relation of man to God, that revelation is 
 explicit as in the other spheres it was rather implicit. 
 Neither Greek sage nor Roman jurist said as did the 
 prophet: ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ There was not the 
 certainty of communion with and communication 
 from God. It is the same God of infinite fullness and 
 absolute perfection who is revealing Himself, but He 
 does not reveal the same content by the same method. 
 
 (11) If it be said that the difference is only subjective, 
 and not objective, that there is only an increase of 
 human receptivity and responsiveness, and not of 
 divine communicativeness, it may be urged that the 
 analogy of the human intercourse contradicts that 
 assumption. A man lays bare his heart in his home 
 as he does not in the world; he gives himself more 
 freely to his friends than to strangers: his most 
 sacred confidences are reserved for only a few, it may 
 be only one, and poor is his life if he has not even one 
 to whom he can thus turn. As Browning says, a man 
 has a soul-side with which to face the world, and 
 another to show a woman when he loves her. God’s 
 Fatherhood is universal, but His love is individually 
 discriminating; with sinners He is grieved, His 
 delight is in the excellent of the earth. God does 
 surely impart His secret to them that fear Him; it 
 is not merely that they are quicker than others to 
 detect it. If we may use a physical analogy, it was 
 the action of light on a more sensitive part of the 
 
326 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 organism which gradually developed the eye. It is 
 by the imparting of His light to select souls that their 
 sight is developed as in no others. God is not passive, 
 but active; it is His communication which develops 
 man’s receptivity and responsiveness. To say that 
 the Hebrews had a genius for religion, or a tendency 
 to monotheism, is to try to solve a problem by a phrase, 
 and a phrase which does not correspond to fact. 
 The Semitic kinsmen of Israel were not monotheistic, 
 and the Israelites themselves were constantly lapsing 
 into polytheism and idolatry. They were ‘a dis- 
 obedient and gainsaying people,’ and God had to 
 ‘ hew them by the prophets.’ If we follow the history 
 of prophecy from the eighth to the fifth century, we 
 cannot regard the development of ‘ ethical mono- 
 theism’ as simply a natural process; we must 
 recognise an activity of God by His Spirit, and an 
 activity which is different in its method from the 
 universal activity of God in religion generally. As 
 in a man’s life there are habits in the common ways 
 of intercourse with. and influence on his fellows, and 
 original acts in which he meets a new situation, or 
 discloses himself more fully than he has ever done, 
 so may we see that God in this nation by His prophets 
 did act as nowhere else in human history to disclose 
 His mind, unbare His heart, and assert His will. , 
 (ili) The distinctive features of that activity are in 
 God’s providential dealing with that people, and in 
 His inspiration of the succession of prophets. God’s 
 providence is over all nations, and each nation might 
 write its own Bible. The defeat of the Spanish 
 Armada in 1588 is, for instance, a parallel to the relief 
 of the siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.c. But when we 
 have allowed all this, the difference between the 
 history of the Hebrew nation and that of any other 
 nation is not simply that in the one case the human 
 experiences were interpreted by the prophets as divine 
 providences, and not in the other. We do not ignore 
 or deny historical sequence or human agency ; we do 
 not assert continuous or frequent miracle; and 
 nevertheless, as we watch this small nation, and the 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 327 
 
 contact of greater nations or mighty empires with it, 
 and the influence of that contact on its moral and 
 religious development, we cannot escape the impres- 
 sion of the Guiding and Guarding Hand of God. It 
 was not an exaggerated patriotism or piety which led 
 the prophets to interpret that history as the fulfilment 
 of a divine purpose; theirs was no subjective illusion, 
 but an objective illumination. ‘ Surely the Lord God 
 will do nothing, but He revealeth His secret unto 
 His servants the prophets’ (Amos i. 7). It is not on 
 the records of miracles that this conclusion rests, but 
 on the impression of the whole course of events. 
 The records of miraculous occurrences are for the 
 most part of so much later date than the events, that 
 we are warranted in scrutinising them closely, and 
 coming to the conclusion that the narrative can 
 usually be explained by a misconception of a natural 
 occurrence, ¢.g. the parting of the waters of the Red 
 Sea, the provision of manna (Ex. xiv., xvl., etc.), or 
 by a misinterpretation of a poetic phrase (as, for 
 instance, the standing still of the sun, Joshua x. 12). 
 The stories of Elijah and Elisha, it is clear, rest on 
 popular tradition and are not as trustworthy as the 
 historical narrative into which they have been fitted. 
 It is not because of miracles, even should our studies 
 lead us to admit their actuality—a question on which, 
 in many cases, there must be suspension of judgment— 
 but because the history itself is so significant morally 
 and religiously that we include it as a medium of 
 divine revelation. The record is undoubtedly prag- 
 matic; sin and its punishment, repentance and its 
 reward, do not so rapidly and invariably follow one 
 another as the pious writers assume; but in the 
 history as a whole a moral and religious purpose of 
 God, which the events subserve, does disclose itself. 
 The prophecy which interprets events as divine mercy 
 or judgment, in so far as it is predictive, 1s conditional. 
 God threatens a judgment which penitence may avert, 
 or promises a mercy which unbelief may refuse. As 
 has been already argued in another connection, we 
 must not assume either foreknowledge or fore- 
 
328 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 ordination by God of man’s free acts. While God’s 
 intention is constant, His method is variable, adapted 
 at each stage to man’s response, whether of defiance 
 or of submission. When we view the whole progress 
 from Abraham and Moses to the prophets, and then 
 its consummation in Jesus Christ, the Revealer of 
 God and the Redeemer of men, we cannot doubt 
 nor deny that this is ‘the Lord’s doing; it is 
 marvellous in our eyes’ (Ps. exviii. 22). To think of 
 all this movement of human history to such a goal as 
 accidental is unreasonable. To ascribe it all to 
 natural causality and human agency does not satisfy 
 the reason. ‘The moral conscience and the religious 
 consciousness demand the recognition of the direction 
 and control of the movement by God Himself. Such 
 a view of revelation is much more impressive and 
 convincing than the view that God dictated the record 
 of it, defective as historical inquiry proves that record. 
 in many particulars to be; for God here teaches man 
 in facts, and not in words, to lead, to succour, and t 
 bless. | 
 What makes the preparatory revelation in history 
 so congruous with its consummation in the fact of 
 Christ is that it is redemptive. Paul for the purpose 
 of his argument and in relation to his opponents was 
 entirely justified in contrasting Law and Gospel; but 
 we should do grievous injustice to the previous history 
 if we interpreted it as revealing God as Lawgiver 
 primarily, and not as Saviour. The Exodus from 
 Kgypt and the Return from the Exile in Babylon are 
 instances of national salvation wrought by God, and 
 in between these are recorded many deliverances. 
 And what is still more significant than the outward 
 salvation of events is the inward salvation of ex- 
 perience. The ‘ ethical monotheism ’ of the prophets 
 is a redemption of the mind and soul of man from 
 error and sin. Forgiveness is not an unfamiliar word 
 in the Old Testament. The relation of God becomes 
 more individual than national, as the revelation 
 progresses, and the Psalms contain confessions which 
 Christian faith can still use of individual experiences 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 329 
 
 of the Saving God. It is a redemptive revelation in 
 national history and individual experience that runs 
 as a golden thread throughout the Old Testament 
 records. 
 
 (iv) As we read the prophetic interpretation of the 
 history as divine providence, we must ask ourselves : 
 how could these men speak with such certainty and 
 authority ? They claimed to be the messengers of 
 God, because God Himself had given them their 
 message. Was theirs a ‘vaulting ambition which 
 o’erleaps itself,’ or did they speak the words of truth 
 and soberness? The moral and religious quality of 
 their teaching, so great a contrast to the religious and 
 moral traditions and customs of their surroundings, 
 assures us that they were not mistaken as to its source ; 
 it was not of man, and the will of man alone, but of 
 God. They were inspired men, men conscious of 
 God’s presence with them, God’s Spirit bringing en- 
 hightenment to their minds, enthusiasm to their 
 hearts, energy to their wills, consecration to the one 
 end of their lives. They were saved and consecrated 
 men, and so their whole personality was not sup- 
 pressed, but expanded and liberated as the channel 
 of God’s truth and grace. To say that God dictated 
 their words would be to lower and not to heighten 
 their claim. It was they who spake or wrote, each 
 in his individual way, according to his talent, tempera- 
 ment, character, spirit; but it was God who by His 
 Spirit made them the men they were. To transform 
 human personality so that it becomes capable of 
 conveying a divine message in human utterances is 
 a greater thing than to dictate the message itself. 
 That what now appear to us abnormal psychical 
 conditions—visions and voices—accompanied the 
 mood of exaltation in the prophet when in the pres- 
 ence of God we cannot doubt. These features have 
 reappeared in religious revivals at different times 
 and places. Necessary they may have been to the 
 prophet himself to assure him that it was God’s 
 message which he was conveying in the moral and 
 the spiritual intuitions which came to him. The 
 
330 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 value of the prophetic inspiration for us now does not 
 lie in any of these accompaniments, but in the 
 prophet’s moral and religious discernment, a dis- 
 cernment which was a quickening and a heightening 
 of his personal capacities, and not a suppression of 
 them. To attach importance to the abnormal as a 
 proof of God’s activity more convincing than this 
 elevation and expansion of human personality is not 
 religion, but superstition. God’s activity is most 
 manifest where He reproduces in men His own per- 
 fection in the measure in which they can receive it. 
 That there was a succession of prophets, that we can 
 discern a progressive revelation in their utterances, 
 that these utterances were related to the signs of 
 their times, is a concurrent argument, a threefold cord 
 which cannot be broken, that’God was indeed in this 
 nation fulfilling a purpose central to human history. 
 
 (5) The fulfilment of this purpose is in Jesus Christ. 
 We best understand the revelation recorded in the 
 Old Testament as a Godward movement of man 
 and a manward movement of God, coming to a unity 
 in the God-man, perfect realisation of manhood, and 
 perfect revelation of God. In the first section of 
 this volume the fact of Christ has already been dealt 
 with. The New Testament is the literature of the 
 revelation of God in Christ, either the testimony to 
 what He was, did, suffered, and achieved in His 
 earthly manifestation, or the confession of what He 
 proved in the living experience of believers as the 
 living Saviour and Lord in His heavenly presence 
 and power. ‘To all believers was given in measure of 
 their receptivity the Spirit of God. An inspired 
 succession of solitary prophets is followed by an 
 inspired community. There is no repetition of that 
 objective manifestation of the divine truth and grace 
 in the historical activity of Jesus Christ, but there is a 
 continuation of that redemptive revelation of God in 
 the subjective experience of believers within the 
 community of the Spirit of God. It will be the 
 purpose of the last section of this volume to show how 
 God’s purpose is being fulfilled until the end. 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 331 
 
 (6) {t is necessary in view of current controversies 
 to consider the question of the inspiration of the 
 Bible, although it is a misfortune that that term has 
 ever come to be used; for inspiration is personal, 
 and writings are inspired only as they are written 
 by inspired persons. 
 
 (1) In view of differences of readings in different 
 Mss., and renderings in different versions (as, for 
 instance, the Massoretic Hebrew, and the Septuagint 
 Greek), it is simply impossible to maintain the theory 
 of verbal inspiration. To fall back on the inspiration 
 of the original autograph is a counsel of despair, as 
 we do not possess it, and are not likely ever to recover 
 it. To insist on inerrancy in the record of fact is to 
 ignore the discrepancies that the historical documents 
 themselves disclose, as between Kings and Chronicles, 
 and between the Synoptic and the Johannine reports ; 
 the methods of composition which an examination 
 of the writings makes evident; and the improbability 
 of the continuous miracle which would have been 
 necessary to preserve the writers from error in the 
 conditions under which their work was accomplished. 
 To claim that the whole Bible is infallible in practice 
 or doctrine is not only to involve the believer in 
 mental, moral, and religious confusion, but to deny 
 what is not a defect, but a merit of God’s method of 
 revelation, that it 1s progressive, adapted to the stage 
 of human development reached. Polygamy and 
 slavery are not expressly condemned in the records 
 of these practices, and yet the Christian conscience 
 has learned by the enlightening of God’s Spirit to 
 condemn them. Christendom has suffered incalcul- 
 able injury by assigning equal authority to the pre- 
 paratory and to the consummating revelation. Christ 
 alone had the Spirit without measure, and He alone 
 is infallible as Revealer of God and Redeemer of men. 
 By Him must the worth of every part of the Bible be 
 tested, and if this is done it will be impossible to 
 maintain that every part is of equal authority for 
 thought and life. 
 
 (1) What we mean by the inspiration of the Bible 
 
332 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 is that it is fully adequate to make wise unto salvation 
 (2 Tim. i. 15), to equip the man of God for every 
 good work (v. 17), to lead him who seeks salvation 
 to the Saviour, and to nourish the eternal life in the 
 saved through closer intimacy with the living Lord. 
 It is inspired as it inspires, as it becomes the medium 
 of the Spirit of God to enlighten, quicken, renew, 
 purify, and perfect the soul. It is the literary channel 
 through which the redemptive revelation in Christ is 
 permanently preserved and universally diffused in 
 the world; but precious as the vessel may be, we 
 must not confuse it with the treasure which it contains 
 and conveys, the Living and Mighty Word of God, 
 the self-manifestation and self-communication of God 
 to men. We must not substitute an inspired book 
 for inspired men, nor inspired men for the God who 
 inspires them. If all Christians were themselves more 
 inspired by the Spirit of God, the Spirit of truth and 
 wisdom, of confidence and courage, of holiness. and, 
 most of all, love, the nature, character, and purpose 
 of God, they would not contend as they unhappily 
 do about theories of inspiration. A theory, however 
 tenaciously or even pugnaciously asserted, which is 
 not sustained by and does not give evidence of an 
 experience of the Spirit’s presence and power, and a 
 corresponding character in the fruits of the Spirit, 
 has no convincing force. 
 
 (iii) The theories which have been briefly touched 
 upon and which have been rejected must be so dealt 
 with because they can bring only confusion and con- 
 flict into Christian thought and life. It is such 
 theories, and such theories alone, which bring the 
 Bible into antagonism to science and history, reason 
 and conscience. To oppose Genesis to geology is to 
 court defeat for the religion which offers such a chal- 
 lenge to assured knowledge. To harmonise by mental 
 violence records that are discordant is only to irritate 
 those who know and use approved historical methods 
 of inquiry into the records of the past. To assert 
 on the basis of a number of texts a conception of God 
 which a sound reason must reject is to turn an ally 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 333 
 
 into an enemy of religion. To justify conduct which 
 offends conscience on the ground that it is recorded 
 without condemnation in the Bible is to provoke the 
 man of sound moral judgment into unbelief. Many 
 of the difficulties which a popular scepticism puts 
 forward to the distress of anxious inquirers after 
 truth disappear altogether when the true purpose 
 of revelation, and consequently the real nature of 
 inspiration, have been recognised. What has here 
 been written has not been written to depreciate the 
 Bible, but rather that the Bible may be properly 
 appreciated as the human literature, which does not 
 supersede any of the manifold activities of the per- 
 sonality of man, but is the channel of that gift of God 
 to man which man by no search or striving could 
 for himself attain, the knowledge of and the life in 
 God. 
 
 II 
 
 (1) Because there is evil in the world the revelation 
 of God must be redemptive, in the widest sense of 
 redeeming men from pain as well as sin, error as well 
 as hate, social wrong as well as individual vice. The 
 redemptive revelation of God is consummated in 
 Christ and His Cross. This transcendent saving act 
 of God has already been fully discussed in the first 
 section of this volume. But regarding it some things 
 may here be added. 
 
 (1) Christ must not be separated even in His Cross 
 from the previous history which finds its fulfilment 
 in Him. As has already been indicated, the process 
 of redemption had been going on from the beginning, 
 and God had again and again proved Himself the 
 Saviour God. In nature there are redemptive pro- 
 cesses: there is the vis medicatrix naturae; how 
 speedily does nature restore the ruin which earthquake, 
 fire, or tempest have wrought! whenever a living 
 organism is injured the process of healing is begun ; 
 when this process fails, the failure attracts our atten- 
 tion; but we do not realise how many bodily hurts 
 are cured, how many a danger to health is escaped. 
 
aa 
 
 334 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Pain itself is a signal of a danger against which pre- 
 cautions may be taken, or a disease for which the 
 means of cure must be used. If, as reason conjec- 
 tures, but faith affirms, there is immortality for man, 
 then even out of death God saves into life, and we 
 have ground for hoping into more abundant life. In 
 history there are redemptive events, the deliverance 
 of a nation or nations from cruelty, oppression, 
 bondage, despair. The Bible is the record of the 
 succouring hand of God. But it is in the personal 
 life of man, his recovery from sin and its consequences 
 by penitence and faith, which the Spirit of God inspires, 
 that there is the clearest proof that it is not God’s will 
 that any should perish, but that all should be saved, 
 that judgment is His strange work, and that in mercy 
 is all His delight, that He has joy in forgiving. 
 
 (11) Christ on His Cross must not be separated from 
 God, the Son from the Father. That the sacrifice 
 might be complete, that the Saviour might experience 
 the final consequence of sin, it was needful that He 
 should pass through that desolation of soul which 
 was uttered in the cry of dereliction; but we should 
 not so understand that experience as. to infer that 
 because He felt forsaken by His Father, God had 
 forsaken Him. In that hour the Father was suffering 
 in and with the Son. Any theory of the Atonement 
 which represents Christ as doing something for man’s 
 salvation apart from God, or to bring about a change 
 in God, is false. “ Christ’s Cross is not a sacrifice man 
 offers to God, but a sacrifice endured by God that by 
 it man might be saved. God is a fellow-sufferer with 
 man, centrally, supremely in Christ and His Cross, 
 but always and everywhere also where men suffer. 
 Even the sorrow sin brings God shares, and surely 
 because it is brought by sin it is the greater sorrow 
 to God. And also, because God shares it, when man 
 realises what it costs God, as is most clearly and fully 
 shown on the Cross, God’s passion becomes redemptive, 
 restoring man through penitence and faith to Himself. 
 
 (iii) If we thus see God in Christ sharing the Cross, 
 we shall put a far deeper meaning into the redemptive 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 335 
 
 character of God’s revelation. It has sometimes been 
 understood as meaning that it is the communication 
 of the truth that God as Father loves and forgives, 
 which, when believed, saves. But’ the truth of God’s 
 eternal nature is revealed, not in words, but in action 
 and passion in history, in the grace of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ.» God’s revelation redeems, because God in 
 Christ is revealed as doing and suffering all that is 
 needed to change the heart of man by disclosing God’s 
 judgment on sin in the sacrifice by which forgiveness 
 is conveyed. This subject need not be pursued 
 further in this connection, as it has been adequately 
 discussed, but so much must be said to ward off a 
 shallow and narrow intellectualist conception of revela- 
 tion and redemption. ‘The sacrifice which saves is a 
 real experience to God, as He is immanent in the 
 history of man as fellow-sufferer with men. 
 
 (iv) What is thus revealed in history is what belongs 
 to the eternal nature of God. He is ever sacrificial 
 and redemptive love; to use the symbolic language 
 of Scripture, ‘the Lamb was slain from the founda- 
 tion of the world,’ ‘ in the midst of the throne there 
 is a Lamb as it had been slain’ (Rev. xii. 8, v. 6). 
 It was this sacrificial and redemptive love, sufficient 
 to solve the problem of sin and pain in the world, that 
 was the motive of creation. God could create a race 
 that could fall into sin and bring on itself the curse 
 of sin, because He could redeem by a love more 
 effective in the realm of the spirit than any creative 
 power, wisdom, or goodness.» As we gaze on the 
 Cross of Christ, the heavens are opened, and we 
 discover as ultimate and final in the world Love, which 
 saves because it suffers. 
 
 (2) A new light is thrown on the mystery of pain ; , 
 salvation is by sacrifice; and we must not assume) 
 that the sole reason for this is sin. For it is in sacrifice | 
 that what is best in man and (in reverence even we 
 dare to add) in God is exercised and expressed. 
 
 (i) It is worth while to consider how in the pre- 
 paratory revelation this truth was reached. The 
 assumption common in morality and religion is this, 
 
 Se eae 
 ae 
 
336 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 that the righteous prosper, because God rewards them, 
 and that the wicked perish, because God punishes 
 them. This is the assumption of the _ historical 
 records, and this is the problem of the Book of Job. 
 The Psalter (Ps. i.) begins with an unqualified asser- 
 tion of it. When it was discovered that it was not 
 so in fact, God was invoked to take vengeance on 
 sinners: ‘ Men of the world, whose portion is in this 
 life, And whose belly Thou fillest with Thy treasure : 
 They are satisfied with children, And leave the rest 
 of their substance to their babes’ (Ps. xvn. 14). A 
 solution of the problem was sought in two directions. 
 The last verse of this psalm suggests a solution, or 
 rather, as the language is ambiguous, one or other of 
 two closely related solutions. The words (v. 15, * As 
 for me, I shall behold Thy face in righteousness: I 
 shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness ’) 
 mean either that the inner life of communion with 
 God compensates for all outer sorrows or sufferings, 
 or that in a future life there will be compensation 
 for the ills of the present. It depends on the date 
 which we assign to the psalm whether we can adopt 
 the first or the second interpretation. These are 
 related to one another, for it is the present communion 
 with God which gives assurance of future blessedness. 
 The other fact in which a solution was sought was 
 expressed in the popular proverb the use of which both 
 Jeremiah and Ezekiel rebuke : ‘ The fathers have eaten 
 sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge ’ 
 (xxxi. 29 and xviil. 2). Both oppose to it an un- 
 qualified individualism, inadequate in itself to solve 
 the problem, but in the circumstances needing to be 
 emphasised. If the fathers do not suffer for their 
 sins, their children will. In Psalm li. a significance 
 is found in suffering. The sorrow of penitence secures 
 God’s forgiveness: ‘The sacrifices of God are a 
 broken spirit : a broken and a contrite heart, O God, 
 Thou wilt not despise’ (v. 17). But in Isaiah lin. the 
 highest solution is found; the righteous saves by his 
 sufferings. That prophetic vision became; historical 
 reality in Jesus Christ. These previous solutions 
 
 i i i 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 337 
 
 were part of the truth. ‘There is a moral order in the 
 world, sin has its consequences for the individual, his 
 descendants, and the society to which he belongs. 
 Alike in the inner life with God and in the hope of 
 blessedness hereafter there is compensation for present 
 sufferings. Good is the grief of the penitent, but best 
 for sin’s judgment and the sinner’s deliverance is the 
 vicarious suffering of the holy and loving. 
 
 (ii) The suffering does not profit only the sinners : 
 the saint who so suffers is made the more a saint 
 thereby. In sacrifice personality finds itself in losing 
 itself. Were there no pain in the world, where were 
 endurance, courage, heroism, venture, sacrifice, com 
 passion, sympathy, the finest qualities of the soul o 
 man? Pain is not in the world solely because of sy 
 as its consequence or its remedy. It was in the world 
 before sin entered, it may still be when sin has passed. 
 It is more deeply rooted in the constitution of the| 
 world than sin is, because it is in the very nature of 
 God as sin is not, and cannot be. Even in a sinless 
 world there might have been an Incarnation, and an 
 Incarnation which was also a participation in such 
 pain as might have been in a sinless world. So long 
 as we think of pain as an unmitigated evil as sin is, we 
 shall not be able to see clearly in the world the revela- 
 tion of God, which by the very constitution of the world, 
 and in the very nature of God, must be redemptive, 
 salvation if not from sin, yet from pain, by sacrifice, 
 from an unblessed pain by a sacrifice thrice blessed. 
 We must go to the most Christian of the poets of 
 last century for the best expression of this truth: — 
 
 ‘Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst Thou—so wilt 
 
 Thou! 
 
 So shall crown Thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost Crown— 
 
 And Thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
 
 One spot for the creature to standin! It is by no breath, 
 
 Turn of eye, wave of hand, that Salvation joins issue with death ! 
 
 As Thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 
 
 Thy power, that exists with and for it, of Being beloved ! 
 
 He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand 
 the most weak. 
 
 "Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek 
 
 >" 
 
338 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
 
 A Face like my face shall receive thee : a Man like to me 
 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever! a Hand like this hand 
 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ 
 stand ! ’ 
 
 Browning’s Saul. 
 What the poet represents as alone sufficient to meet 
 Saul’s desperate necessity, that all mankind needs. 
 (3) The revelation of God is not yet ended. God 
 has not withdrawn into indifference and inactivity. 
 (i) There is not, it is true, a chosen people with a 
 history which a succession of prophets is interpreting 
 as divine providence. All humanity is now elect of 
 God unto salvation, if faith receive the grace freely 
 offered; and to all believers the Spirit is given accord- 
 ing to their faith. The Son of Man, and Son of God, 
 Saviour and Lord, has not been excelled, cannot be 
 superseded; He is the universal presence and the 
 supreme authority (Matt. xxvii. 18-20). A revela- 
 tion more adequate, or a redemption more effective 
 than His is not to be desired or expected, indeed cannot 
 be conceived. But with Him as Head there is being 
 formed on earth a body in which He by His Spirit 
 lives, a temple for God worthier and fitter than any 
 temple which human hands could fashion (Eph. 1. 23, 
 ii. 21). As the Son was manifested, so through Him 
 there shall yet be the manifestation of the sons of 
 God (Rom. viii. 19). That is being actualised univers- 
 ally which was in promise and potency individually 
 realised in Jesus Christ, the firstborn among many 
 brethren. Just because God is by His Spirit so 
 immanent in men, this revelation of God has not the 
 objectivity which the revelation consummated in the 
 historical manifestation in Christ had, but it is not 
 on that account the less real. For a succession of 
 inspired prophets there is an inspired community of 
 believers. or the providence then discovered in the 
 history of their nation there is a universal purpose of 
 God, the Kingdom of God, being fulfilled. For the 
 solitary Son there is that Son as the Captain of 
 salvation leading many sons unto glory (Heb. i. 10). 
 According to the teaching of Jesus Himself the mission 
 
REVELATION AND REDEMPTION 339 
 
 of the Spirit is subordinate to the mission of the Son, 
 the interpretation and application of the revelation 
 in Him (John xvi. 13-14), but it is no less a continua- 
 tion of His mission, a completion of the revelation of 
 God in the world to men. * The love of the Father 
 revealed in word and deed, action and passion, life 
 and death, sacrifice and salvation in the grace of the 
 Son is being progressively realised in mankind by the 
 community of the Holy Spirit.. This subject will be 
 dealt with in the next section. What alone needs 
 at this point to be emphasised is that*there is con- 
 tinuity of revelation. God has not ceased to reveal 
 Himself, and it is the same God who is being by His 
 Spirit revealed in individual and collective Christian 
 experience as was revealed by the prophets, and in 
 the Son.» He is realising His Fatherhood towards 
 mankind in reproducing His perfection in His sons. 
 (11) With change of method there is the same 
 essential character ; the revelation is still redemptive. 
 The sacrifice of the Cross was offered once for all; 
 it need not be repeated, nor can it be added to; 
 but the grace which it conveys must be appropriated 
 by faith. Believers must be crucified with Christ in 
 their penitence, so as to die unto sin, and be raised 
 again in their faith, so as with Him to be alive unto 
 God (Rom. vi. 3-10). While that Cross stands 
 solitary in its supremacy as the manifestation of the 
 holy love of God, judging and forgiving sin, and thus 
 atoning for it, the eternal nature of God, which is 
 there temporally expressed, and the historical process 
 of which this is the culmination continue. God is 
 still suffering with man as He is saving man: and 
 He is suffering in His saints, whose sacrifice is making 
 that sacrifice of Christ universally and permanently 
 effective unto salvation. God has no other method, 
 and it is to depreciate the method of salvation by 
 sacrifice to desire or expect God to substitute any 
 other. Second Adventism, when we examine it closely, 
 really involves unbelief in God and man, unbelief that 
 God can save in this method, and unbelief that man 
 can be so saved. Whatever the consummation of 
 
340 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 human history may be, it will not be by a miraculous 
 interference of the divine omnipotence, but by the 
 completion of the redemptive revelation of God, the 
 Saviour seeing of the travail of His soul and being 
 satisfied (Is. li. 11). Here again we must insist on 
 the consistent and courageous application of the 
 regulative theological principle, that we must interpret 
 God in His nature, character, and purpose through 
 Christ and Christ alone, as Father, as holy love, as 
 love sacrificial and redemptive, active only for the 
 ends and by the means congruous with what the 
 Iather is seen to be in the Son. Thus and thus alone 
 can we have a genuinely and distinctively Christian 
 theology. To possess such a theology is not merely 
 an intellectual interest; it is a practical necessity. 
 We can have the Christian experience, the Christian 
 character, the Christian society, the Christian con- 
 summation, as all thought and life are guarded by 
 Christ’s revelation as Son of God as Father. The 
 love of the Father through the grace of the Son ean 
 alone issue in the community of the Spirit. 
 
SECTION III 
 THE COMMUNITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 (1) ‘fue third clause in the Apostolic Benediction 
 has not received the attention in Christian thought 
 and life which should properly be assigned to it. 
 . The love of God (the eternal reality) revealed in the 
 erace of the Lord Jesus Christ (the historical media- 
 tion) is realised in the community of the Spirit (the 
 social personal experience). The movement of God 
 manwards in revelation and the movement of man 
 Godwards in religion unite in the typical divine- 
 human personality, Jesus Christ; the purpose of 
 God in Him, however, is not completed until through 
 His mediation the community of the Spirit, the family 
 of God on earth, is fully constituted.v To the historical 
 facts and the doctrinal truths of Christianity much 
 more attention has been given than to the Christian 
 experience, character, and society which are the 
 results of the manifestation of Godin history. Ececlesi- 
 astical controversy has on the one hand been con- 
 cerned about the doctrine of the Church; individual 
 pietism has on the other hand concerned itself about 
 the doctrine of the Spirit with good intent, but not 
 sound judgment. In the theological development of 
 the Church an adequate importance has not been 
 attached to the doctrine, and it has not been so 
 exhaustively treated as the other themes. The con- 
 tinuity of the doctrine of the Spirit with the doctrines 
 of God and Christ has not been sufficiently emphasised, 
 and the doctrines which are usually mentioned in the 
 third section of the historical creeds have not been 
 unified as they should have been in the doctrine of 
 the Spirit. Two recent writers, Dr. Denney! and 
 Dr. Thomas Rees,? so identify the Spirit with the 
 
 1 The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, pp. 807-12. 
 * The Holy Spirit in Thought and Experience, pp. 210-11. 
 
 2 
 
 o4! 
 
THE COMMUNITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 348 
 
 Living Christ as virtually to deny the necessity of a 
 separate treatment of the two doctrines. The writer 
 of this volume is convinced that this tendency is 
 altogether mistaken, and that Christian life no less 
 than Christian thought loses because the doctrine of 
 the Holy Spirit is neglected. All that belongs to the 
 experimental, practical, social realisation of the Chris- 
 tian revelation and redemption is bound up with the 
 ‘presence and activity of the Spirit of God in the 
 individual, the Church, and the world. A recognition 
 of the truth that God is continuing and completing 
 His revelation and redemption of man in Jesus Christ 
 by the Spirit is a necessary condition for such a state- 
 ment of the doctrine of the Trinity as will make it 
 not a burden on the thought, but a boon to the life 
 of Christians. Whether he succeed or not the writer 
 will at least endeavour so to deal with this theme as 
 to give effect to this conviction. 
 
 (2) The consideration of the subject must be begun 
 with a statement regarding the nature and operation 
 of the Holy Spirit, based on the Holy Scriptures, but 
 also illustrated by the history of the Church. In the 
 next place must come the doctrine of the Church, 
 treated not controversially, but constructively, not 
 primarily as an historical organisation, but as a 
 spiritual community, invisible in its essence, but 
 made visible in its witness, worship, and work. This 
 rightly 1s placed before the treatment of individual 
 experience and character, as it is by the testimony 
 and influence of the Church that the Christian life 
 is individually begun, the personal relation to Christ 
 as Saviour and Lord being historically mediated by 
 the Christian community ; and as it is continued and 
 completed in the fellowship and service of that com- 
 munity. Since the Christian experience and character 
 do not fulfil their promise, or realise their possibility 
 in this earthly life, Christian faith and love reach 
 beyond ‘ the bourn from which no traveller returns,’ 
 in Christian hope, the earnest of which is the presence 
 and working of the Spirit in the individual experience 
 and character (2 Cor. 1. 22, v. 5; Eph. 1. 14). As, 
 
344 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 however, Christian personality is by its very nature 
 and ideal social, dependent on and contributory to 
 the Christian society, and as the Christian society 
 is in the world to make all mankind one family of 
 God, the Christian hope is not and cannot be merely 
 individual. It must expand into the expectation of 
 the Kingdom of God, established on earth, and yet 
 only consummated in heaven, the temple of humanity, 
 a habitation for God by His Spirit (Eph. ii. 21-22). 
 Kcclesiastical and eschatological questions about which 
 there has been so much debate will be approached 
 from “his highest standpoint, God’s fulfilment by His 
 Spirit of His purpose in Christ. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 (1) Ir this volume dealt with Biblical Theology it 
 would be necessary to treat fully the doctrine of the 
 Spirit in the Old and the New Testament; but for 
 this essay in Constructive Theology a brief summary 
 must suffice. 
 
 (i) The Old Testament doctrine has as its back- 
 eround the animism which is an almost universal 
 element in man’s religious beliefs. Whether it is, 
 as was once assumed, the most primitive philosophy, 
 or explanation of the world and man, or there lie 
 behind it still simpler modes of thought, as is now 
 maintained, such as animatism, the consciousness of 
 being alive in a world alive, or dynamism, the sense of 
 power in self and things around, or teratism, the feeling 
 of wonder or mystery, need not now be determined.! 
 It is enough for us to begin with anamism, the belief 
 in a soul or spirit resident in, active through, and yet 
 separable from the body, temporarily in sleep, per- 
 manently at death. This view is assumed in the 
 earlier account of the creation of man, and brought 
 into relation with the monotheistic belief. ‘ And 
 Yahweh shaped man from dust out of the ground, 
 and blew into his nostrils breath of life, so that man 
 became a living soul’ (Gen. 11. 7). The term here 
 used is nephesh. A similar term, although it came 
 to be used afterwards with a different shade of 
 meaning, is ruach. Man in his creatureliness and 
 weakness is flesh ; as an individual living being he is 
 soul (nephesh) ; as related to, and dependent on God 
 
 1 See The Threshold of Religion, by R. R. Marrett. 
 345 
 
346 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 he is spirit (ruach) ; but we must beware of supposing © 
 that man is thought of as composed of ‘three parts, 
 and not as presenting three aspects of one whole. 
 The term ruach claims closer consideration. ‘ The 
 remaining term, ruach,’ says Wheeler-Robinson,! . 
 * covers a wider range of usage, in a development less 
 easy to trace. It occurs 378 times, denoting (a) wind, 
 natural or figurative (131) ; (b) supernatural influences 
 acting on man, rarely on inanimate objects (1384) ; 
 (c) the principle of life (like nephesh) or of its energies 
 (39);  (d) the resultant psychical life (74). The 
 classification itself, with the proportion of usage, shows 
 that we have to do with something more than a mere 
 synonym of nephesh, and this is corroborated by 
 certain details of the process of its development.’ 
 In the later literature the use of the term is kept ‘ at 
 a higher plane of meaning than that of nephesh,’ and 
 relates man more closely to God as having his life 
 from God. While man is living soul because God has 
 breathed spirit into body, God Himself is Spirit with- 
 out body. We must now consider the doctrine of 
 the Spirit of God. 
 
 (11) ‘ It was enough for Hebrew faith,’ says Wheeler- 
 Robinson,” ‘that Nature and history alike are at 
 God’s disposal, and for Hebrew experience that man 
 is able to rebel against God, though he cannot escape 
 from God. The conception of the Spirit of God 
 initiates a deeper conception of the relation of man — 
 to Him. The term “ spirit”? (ruwach) occurs about — 
 134 times in the Old Testament in regard to super- 
 natural influences, acting on man in almost every 
 case; it is rarely used, as in Genesis i. 2, of influence 
 on inanimate objects. The idea of the specific in- 
 fluence develops with the idea of God Himself. In — 
 its personal use we may trace at least five stages, | 
 according to the effect produced, the classification — 
 being broadly chronological as well as conceptual. — 
 (1) In the earliest literature such phenomena as 
 
 The Christian Doctrine of Man, pp. 17-18. Cf. Rees, op. cit., pp. 1-18. 
 * Op. cit., pp. 64-5. 
 
 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 347 
 
 madness (1 Sam. xvi. 14), ecstatic prophesying (xix. 
 20), or superhuman strength (Judges xiv. 6), are 
 ascribed to divine influence. (2) This is also seen in 
 remarkable events (Judges vi. 34), or lives (Gen. xli. 
 38). (3) To the ruach of God is ascribed the prophetic 
 consciousness (Num. xxiv. 2; Ezek. ii. 2), though the 
 prophets of the eighth century avoid a term probably 
 discredited by some of its alleged manifestations. 
 Later on, however, revelation in general is thought 
 to be mediated by the ruach of God (Zech. vii. 12 ; 
 Neh. ix. 30). (4) To the same source are ascribed 
 technical skill (Ex. xxvii. 3) and practical ability 
 (Deut. xxxiv. 9) when exhibited In some marked 
 degree. (5) Finally, we reach a group of cases in 
 which the effect of the rwach of God is seen in more 
 general conduct and character, as when the Psalmist 
 prays, “ Take not thy holy ruach from me” (hi. 11); 
 or the ruach of Yahweh is said to be on one who gives 
 himself to the proclamation of the Old Testament 
 Gospel (Is. lxi. 1f.).. In this group we reach a direct 
 point of contact with the New Testament doctrine of 
 the Spirit of God; the outpouring of the Spirit on 
 all flesh declared by Joel (1. 28f., ef. Is. xxxii. 15, 
 xliv. 8, lix. 21; Zech. xii. 10) is said by Peter to be 
 fulfilled in the era inaugurated by Pentecost (Acts il. 
 16). The connection in this case is more than verbal ; 
 the Old Testament doctrine of the Spirit of God is in 
 closest genetic relation to the New Testament doctrine 
 of man’s renewal by the Spirit of Christ, and divine 
 providence fitly culminates in the experience of 
 Christian salvation.’ In some of the uses of the term 
 we see the tendency of religious thought to regard 
 the abnormal, or extraordinary, as supernatural, and 
 so to ascribe it to the direct action of God, as we should 
 not do to-day. The illumination of the prophet or 
 the purification of the saint we should still regard as 
 the work of the Spirit of God in man. This distinc- 
 tion is, aS we shall afterwards show, of very great 
 importance. J. G. Simpson?! has tabulated the 
 
 1 Hastings’ one-volume Dictionary of the Bible, p. 358. 
 
348 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 activities ascribed in the Old Testament to the 
 Spirit of God : 
 Spirit=The life of God 
 | 
 
 Manifested in nature Manifested in man 
 
 
 
 In reason In righteousness In revelation 
 
 (Israel) 
 
 ate a Dadi | | 
 As intelligence As skill | By the prophets By Messiah 
 
 (iii) We must ask this further question: What is 
 the relation to God of-the Spirit of God, and of the 
 parallel conception of the Word of God? This is 
 Schultz’s answer:! ‘ God’s vital force, which is re- 
 presented in a concrete way as His breath, proceeds 
 from Him, and becomes the source of created life in 
 whatever it breathes upon. . .. His word creates 
 the world—that is, God’s inner world of thought 
 becomes, through his will, the source of life outside 
 of Himself. The Spirit and the Word of God are 
 represented as forces locked up in God. The Spirit 
 appears as very independent, just like a hypostasis 
 or person.’ The Old Testament, however, has no 
 doctrine of personal distinctions within God Himself. 
 The Spirit and the Word are God’s immanent activity 
 in the world, often so spoken of as to be distinguished 
 from one another, and even from God as He is in 
 Himself in His transcendent being. In the later 
 conception of Wisdom there seems to be even more 
 the tendency to hypostatise, that is, to assign a 
 separate existence distinct from God Himself, but 
 it remains only a tendency. As the term Spirit of 
 God is used in the Old Testament it cannot be regarded 
 as due to a separation of God from the world, an 
 emphasis on His transcendence; it rather asserts 
 God’s connection with nature and man, an emphasis 
 on His immanence. But thought has not gone so far 
 as to raise the problem of the relation of the tran- 
 
 * Old Testament Theology, Eng. trans., ii. p. 184. 
 
 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 349 
 
 scendence and the immanence, the function of the 
 Spirit of God in the inner life of God Himself. The 
 fuller revelation of the New Testament was necessary 
 to challenge the mind of man with this problem. 
 
 (2) The features of the Old Testament representa- 
 tion are continued in that of the New Testament. 
 
 (i) The descent of the Spirit on Jesus at the Baptism 
 means, as the subsequent Temptation shows, that 
 He then became fully conscious of His Sonship, and 
 of the accompanying endowment of supernatural 
 power (Matt. i. 13-iv. 11). As was the community 
 of believers at Pentecost, so was He filled with en- 
 thusiasm for His calling, and it was with this enthusi- 
 asm He entered on His ministry (Luke iv. 14). He 
 claimed to preach as endowed by the Spirit, even as 
 did the prophet of old (v.18). His was the Spirit- 
 filled life ; the Spirit was not given to Him by measure 
 (John i, 34, A.V.), or without measure He could 
 impart that gift (R.V.). It was by the Spirit of God 
 that He cast out devils (Matt. xi. 28). Thus the 
 immanent activity of God was even in the Incarnate 
 Son as in other men conceived as the presence and 
 activity of the Spirit of God. The significance of 
 this truth for the doctrine of the Trinity will need 
 to be considered at a later stage of the discussion. 
 Jesus promised the Spirit to the disciples as their 
 inspiration, when defending themselves against their 
 persecutors (x. 20), and bade them wait in Jerusalem 
 till ‘ clothed with power from on high ’ (Luke xxiv. 49), 
 the baptism of the Holy Ghost (Acts 1. 5). 
 
 (ii) This promise is presented with much greater 
 detail in the Fourth Gospel. Here the reminiscences 
 of the eye-witness are developed in reflections which 
 he believed to be the unfolding by the promised Spirit 
 of the meaning of the words of Jesus. It is impossible 
 to discuss the passages in John xiv.-xvi. in detail, but 
 a summary based on a minute exegesis may be given 
 to throw into relief the main truths presented. By 
 prayer the Master, in view of His separation from 
 His disciples, secured for them another Counsellor 
 and Helper (a\\ov mapakdynrov), who will be present 
 
350 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 to them, and Christ in Him, while unseen by the 
 world (xiv. 16-20). (The Spirit is both the Spirit of 
 Truth and the Holy Spirit, truth being the means 
 used and holiness the aim attained.) As coming in 
 Christ’s name the Spirit will continue the revelation 
 of God in Him by recalling the teaching already given, 
 and adding such teaching as the disciples may need 
 (v. 26). This continuation of the work of Jesus by the 
 Spirit is to extend to the world, as the disciples who 
 have known the whole of the earthly ministry will 
 bear a witness which will be confirmed by the Spirit 
 (xv. 26-27). Jesus must Himself depart before the 
 Spirit can come. (The new phase of the disciples’ 
 experience cannot begin till the present phase is over. 
 And the new phase will be possible only when the 
 work of Christ—His death and resurrection—is ac- 
 complished.) The world will be convicted by the 
 Spirit in three respects. He will expose the world’s 
 sin, its unbelief in the Messiah. He will demonstrate 
 the righteousness of the exalted Son of God. He 
 will make manifest that it is, not Christ, but the power 
 of evil that has been tried and condemned. (The 
 convictions of the human conscience in regard to 
 the significance of Christ’s death are here represented 
 as the Spirt’s work.) In contrast to the work of 
 the Spirit ia the world is His work in the disciples. 
 Because of their immaturity the Master has left His 
 work unfinished. ‘The Spirit will both show them the 
 meaning of truths which they have not understood, 
 and teach them truths they have not been able to 
 receive at all. Not a new revelation is to be given, 
 but the revelation already given will be unfolded. 
 The Spirit’s function is throughout this passage (xvi. 
 7-15) subordinated to the person and work of Christ. 
 The clause in verse 18, ‘ He shall declare unto you the 
 things that are to come,’ expresses the older view of 
 the predictive function of the Spirit, and is probably 
 an editorial addition which is inconsistent with the 
 context. ‘The Fourth Gospel marks the highest stage 
 in the development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit 
 in the New Testament. Except in the one reference 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 351 
 
 to prediction, what may be called the supernatural 
 elements of knowledge or power disappear; and the 
 Spirit’s function is to continue the work of Christ as 
 ilumining the minds of the disciples so that they 
 should remember and understand the teaching of 
 Jesus. The Spirit does not supersede Christ, but 
 makes His invisible and inaudible presence real. He 
 does not supplant or add to the revelation in Christ, 
 but interprets and applies its truths according to 
 the disciples’ need. As we shall see, the develop- 
 ment of the doctrine in Paul lays emphasis on the 
 Spirit’s work of sanctification ; here the stress is on 
 illamination. 
 
 * (iti) In the Acts of the Apostles we have a return 
 to the more primitive type of representation. (qa) 
 The Spirit comes upon and fills the company of 
 believers; there is a fresh enthusiasm and a new 
 energy ; there are what are regarded as supernatural 
 manifestations, some of which we should to-day regard 
 as abnormal psychical conditions due to intense ex- 
 citement and similar to those which have been 
 witnessed at other religious revivals (Acts ii. 1-13). 
 The apostles showed a boldness and readiness of 
 speech such as was not expected from men not trained 
 in the Rabbinic schools (iv. 13), and performed 
 miracles in the name of Christ (i. 6, etc.). The 
 preaching was with such convincing and converting 
 power that large numbers were added to the company 
 of believers (11. 40-42). The‘ holy contagion ’ spread ; 
 for on the believers in Samaria, won by the preaching 
 of Philip, the Holy Ghost fell, when Peter and John 
 laid their hands upon them (vii. 14-17). We need 
 not assume anything magical; the receptivity for 
 the common gift would be stimulated by this contact 
 with the representatives of the primitive community 
 in Jerusalem. We need not now give the explanation 
 of this inward change that at the time these believers 
 themselves held. 
 
 (b) As we read the record we frequently meet the 
 phrase ‘ filled with the Holy Ghost’ or ‘ filled with 
 Holy Ghost’ (with or without the article). Whether 
 
352 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Dr. Bartlet’s! explanation that the absence of the 
 article indicates that not the divine agency but the 
 human condition is being described be correct or not, 
 yet what is referred to is well expressed by the phrase 
 he suggests, ‘holy enthusiasm.’ A religious revival 
 with an intense emotional character is the nearest 
 analogy to enable us to understand what, consequent 
 on Pentecost, the condition of the primitive com- 
 munity was. In endeavouring thus to understand 
 the subjective condition we are not denying or de- 
 preciating the divine agency, the presence and the 
 work of the Holy Spirit. There came a certain and 
 confident consciousness that the promise of Christ 
 had been fulfilled, and that His visible presence was 
 being replaced by this invisible Companion and 
 Helper. Such a consciousness was accompanied by 
 intense emotion, emotion so intense as to break 
 down habitual control, and to burst forth in abnormal 
 psychic states. That our psychology can offer an 
 explanation of the genesis of these states in the intense 
 emotion is no challenge of the truth of the conscious- 
 ness, its correspondence with reality. Why this ex- 
 perience came as and when it did, is also capable of 
 psychological explanation. Pentecost was consequent 
 on the Resurrection. But time was needed for the 
 conviction of the witnesses that Christ was not dead, 
 but risen, and was living and reigning, to get firm 
 root in their own minds, and to spread to and get 
 rooted in other minds, until the certainty possessed 
 the whole of the community. He who has been 
 engaged in the pursuit of truth knows with what 
 glow of feeling he passes from doubt to assurance. 
 It was when faith in the Risen Lord was fixed, that 
 there was the necessary receptivity for and responsive- 
 ness to the divine reality, the Spirit of God promised 
 by Christ Himself. It was as believers continued 
 together in prayer and meditation and converse that 
 this consciousness was spread to all and was strength- | 
 ened in each. It is now recognised that a crowd: 
 thinks, feels, and acts together, as individuals in it 
 
 1 Acts, in Century Bible, pp. 386-8. 
 
 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 353 
 
 would not act alone. It was because they tarried 
 together that the promise was fulfilled in this common 
 experience. 
 
 (c) There is one feature of the manifestation at 
 Pentecost which claims closer consideration, the 
 speaking with tongues, * other tongues’ (v. 4). The 
 explanation that the writer of Acts gives that foreign 
 languages were spoken (v. 11) is now generally set 
 aside by even conservative scholars, mainly because 
 Paul’s explanation of the phenomenon is so different 
 and very much more intelligible (1 Cor. xiv). Jesus 
 always refused to work a miracle as a sign from 
 heaven to overcome unbelief (Matt. xu. 39, xvi. 4). 
 He only used His power when there was adequate 
 occasion for it. His were miracles of compassion and 
 succour, not of ostentation; such a use of His en- 
 dowment He set aside in His refusal to cast Himself 
 down from the pinnacle of the ‘Temple (Matt. iv. 5-7). 
 Had the apostles on this occasion spoken in foreign 
 languages, there would have been a miracle of show 
 and not of need. These ‘ Jews, devout men, from 
 every nation under heaven’ (v. 5), all spoke Greek, 
 the lingua franca of the Jews scattered among the 
 Gentiles, even if they had not acquired Aramaic, the 
 language commonly spoken in Palestine. Even if 
 they knew another language, spoken in the country 
 from which they had come, how could they distinguish 
 it in the confusion of sound, when in their intense 
 excitement the whole company of believers was 
 uttering praise at the same time? There is not a 
 trace of evidence in the subsequent history that the 
 messengers of the Gospel were helped in the discharge 
 of their task by a knowledge of the language locally 
 spoken. Barnabas and Paul did not understand the 
 language of Lycaonia (xiv. 11). It is not God’s 
 method to supersede human labour by miracle. 
 Peter in his speech makes no reference to any such 
 miracle, and the other references to the gift of tongues 
 in Acts (x. 46, x1. 15, xix. 6) require no such explana- 
 tion. Would the use of foreign languages understood 
 by the hearers lead to the charge of drunkenness 
 
 “ 
 
354 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (v. 13)? In Paul’s letters there are references to this 
 gift of tongues as ‘ ecstatic prayer, song, or blessing 
 by inspiration, but without the full co-operation of 
 the understanding (1 Cor. xiv. 14-17).’? In verse 2 
 Paul shows what this speech was: ‘ He that speaketh 
 in a tongue speaketh not unto men, but untoGod . . . 
 in (a) spirit he speaketh mysteries.’ The tongues to 
 be made intelligible to others needed to be interpreted, 
 and the ability to do this was also regarded as a gift 
 of the Spirit (xii. 80). The impression on the un- 
 believing of the speaking with tongues is described 
 by Paul in the words: ‘ Will they not say that ye are 
 mad ?’ (xiv. 23). It is clearly the same phenomenon 
 Paul is describing. ) 
 
 (iv) In regard to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit 
 Paul has given an explanation, offered a contribution, 
 and set a problem. He has enabled us to understand 
 the spiritual gifts as the record of Acts does not. He 
 has developed the doctrine of sanctification by the 
 Spirit. He has raised the difficulty for our thought 
 of the relation of the living Christ to the Spirit. 
 (a) We can almost feel grateful for the difficulties and 
 perplexities which Paul met with in his ‘ cure of souls,’ 
 ‘his care of all the churches,’ because in dealing with 
 these he has cast light on many dark places in the 
 history of the early Church. Had not abuse in the 
 exercise of the spiritual gifts in Corinth led to disorder 
 in the assemblies for worship, we should not have had 
 an explanation of the gift of tongues. 1 Corinthians 
 xii. gives us a fuller account of the spiritual gifts than 
 any other passage. Paul insists on the unity of their 
 source in the diversity of their modes, and the con- 
 sequent duty of harmony and not discord in their exer- 
 cise. Not individual conceit is to be gratified, but the 
 
 e : ° . | 
 common edification promoted. As love is superior to | 
 
 them all, so love is to be the motive, and determine 
 
 the manner and the measure of their exercise. These 
 
 gifts seem to fall into three classes for our thinking. 
 
 (1) There are natural gifts which are stimulated by 
 
 the Spirit; wisdom, knowledge, faith are all normal 
 1 Bartlet, The Acts, p. 140. 
 
 ee a 
 
 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 355 
 
 activities of human personality ; (2) there are ab- 
 normal psychic states, as divers kinds of tongues 
 (ecstatic utterances); (3) there are what from the 
 description of them we should describe as super- 
 natural endowments, such as gifts of healings and 
 workings of miracles and prophecy as prediction. It 
 may be that modern psychology will enable us to offer 
 an explanation of the third class, which will bring them 
 more within the range of normal human endowments, 
 even if only exceptionally possessed. Paul included 
 the governments (or ‘ wise counsels,’ R.V. marg.) as 
 well as apostles, prophets, and teachers as spiritually 
 endowed. The Christian Church was a community 
 of the Spirit, and all members were qualified for their 
 respective functions by their diverse gifts. None of 
 these gifts was depreciated by Paul; in all he re- 
 cognised the presence and power of the Spirit of God ; 
 but he showed his discernment in valuing more highly 
 the gifts that were used in service than the gifts which 
 could be used for show, whereas many of the Corinth- 
 ians thought more highly of display than of duty. 
 It is a misfortune that the thirteenth chapter has been 
 cut off from the twelfth, as it is the climax of the 
 argument. The way more excellent than the exercise 
 of any gifts is the way of love. This leads us to con- 
 sider Paul’s contribution to the doctrine of the Spirit. 
 
 (b) The tendency in the record in Acts, as in the 
 churches generally, was to identify the work of the 
 Spirit with the abnormal or supernatural manifesta- 
 tions. Paul saw the danger, and sought to meet it 
 by his doctrine of sanctification by the Spirit. He 
 recognised that his own exposition of justification by 
 faith in Christ and His atoning death alone might be 
 so misunderstood and misrepresented as to be an 
 encouragement to moral laxity. The objection to 
 his view expressed by him as a question, ‘ Shall we 
 continue in sin, that grace may abound ?’ (Rom. vi. 1), 
 was no man of straw, set up to be knocked down. 
 There was a real danger, and the history of the 
 Christian Church has shown the reality of the danger. 
 He meets it in that passage by asserting that faith 
 
356 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 is so immediate a contact and so intimate a relation 
 with Jesus Christ that there is identity of interest, 
 purpose, and effort. The believer dies with Christ 
 unto sin, and rises with Christ to live unto God (vv. 
 1-14). This process of inward change is by him called 
 sanctification, and the divine agency in the process 
 is the Spirit. In the next paragraph we shall con- 
 sider how the Living Christ and the Spirit are related 
 for Paul’s thought. What now claims emphasis is 
 that Paul saw the work of the Spirit more clearly and 
 fully in Christian character than in any spiritual gifts, 
 and the determining principle of Christian character 
 was for him as for Christ, love, which ‘ worketh no 
 ill to his neighbour: ove therefore is the fulfilment 
 of the law’ (Rom. xii. 10). This love itself, however, 
 is not obedience to commandments; conduct follows 
 from motive, purpose, aspiration. It is not conformity 
 to an outward law; it is transformation by an inner 
 life. ‘ The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long- 
 suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, 
 temperance; against such there is no law’ (Gal. v. 
 22-23). Romans xii., after dealing with the exercise 
 of spiritual gifts, expounds what is involved in human 
 relations by the activity of love unfeigned. In the 
 chapter dealing with the Christian life, Christian 
 ethics will be discussed more fully, as also the sub- 
 jective aspect of this process of sanctification by the 
 Spirit. What here demands notice is that in Paul’s 
 theology there is a development of the primitive 
 doctrine of the Spirit, parallel to that in the Johannine 
 writings, but here the stress is on sanctification, and 
 there on illumination. But both developments have 
 their roots in the Old Testament teaching. The 
 prophets spoke the Word of the Lord as illumined 
 by the Spirit ; the Psalmist (li. 11) prays that God’s 
 Holy Spirit may not be taken from him. 
 
 (c) The problem which Paul’s treatment of the 
 doctrine of the Spirit presents is this: Does he con- 
 sistently distinguish the Spirit from the Living Christ, 
 or is there an occasional identification ? And if he 
 distinguishes, how is the immediate contact and 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 357 
 
 intimate communion with the Risen Lord which he 
 claims related to the operation of the Spirit within ? 
 That he does generally distinguish is apparent. In the 
 Apostolic Benediction the community of the Spirit is 
 distinguished from the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 and the love of God (2 Cor. xii. 14). In 1 Corinthians 
 xii. the diversities of workings are ascribed to the 
 same God who worketh all things in all, the diversities 
 of ministrations to the same Lord (¢.e. Jesus Christ) 
 and the diversities of gifts to the same Spirit (vv. 4-6). 
 In the passage which follows dealing with the gifts 
 the one Spirit alone is mentioned (vv. 7-11, 18-14). 
 As all the members of the body are one with and one 
 in Christ, He is the body, and the Spirit pervades the 
 body (v. 12). It is through Christ as our peace, who 
 through His Cross reconciles to God, that we have 
 access in one Spirit unto the Father (Eph. un. 18). 
 Again, Jesus Christ is the chief corner-stone of the 
 holy temple in the Lord, which is a habitation of 
 God in the Spirit (vv. 20-22). From these passages it 
 is evident that Paul does discriminate the functions 
 of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in man’s salvation. 
 But he does not always express himself with such 
 care. For instance, in 1 Cor. vi. 11 he places sanctifica- 
 tion before justification, and does not assign, as con- 
 sistently with his general treatment he should, justi- 
 fication to Christ and sanctification to the Spirit, 
 but conjoins both in both processes. ‘ But ye were 
 washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified 
 in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit 
 of our God.’ In Romans viii. 9-11 the Spirit of God 
 and the Spirit of Christ and Christ Himself are used 
 as interchangeable terms. Compare ‘Christ is in 
 you’ (v. 10) and ‘the Spirit . . . dwelleth in you’ 
 (v. 11). He comes nearest to an identification in 
 2 Cor. i. 17-18, ‘ Now the Lord is the Spirit: and 
 where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But 
 we all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the 
 glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same 
 image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord 
 the Spirit.” We cannot evade the difficulty as Dr, 
 
358 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Bernard ! does by identifying the Lord with Jehovah, 
 for Paul does habitually use the term Lord for Christ, 
 even when he has used a quotation from the Old 
 Testament, in which the reference is to Jehovah 
 (Rom. x. 12-18; 1 Cor. x. 22). The Lord whose glory 
 believers behold or reflect, and into whose likeness 
 they are changed, is no other and can be no other than 
 Christ. What Paul does here state, with an emphasis 
 which may lead to misunderstanding, is that faith in 
 Christ is so invariably followed by the inward re- 
 newal by the Spirit, that the consequence of that 
 faith may be directly ascribed to Him who is its object. 
 In view of the other passages referred to, we may 
 conclude that while there is an occasional ambiguity 
 in his language, yet the general tendency of his 
 theology is to distinguish Christ and the Spirit. In 
 support of this conclusion three considerations may 
 be offered. In the Old Testament the Messiah is 
 distinguished from the Spirit of God; Jesus Himself 
 always spoke of the Spirit as another; and the 
 primitive community made the distinction between 
 the risen Christ and the Spirit. 
 
 Starting from this conclusion we must, however, 
 try to conceive as clearly as we can how Paul distin- 
 guished, if indeed he ever thought of distinguishing, 
 his life in Christ, or Christ’s life in him, from the in- 
 dwelling and inworking of the Spirit. He lives, but 
 not he, Christ liveth in him (Gal. 11. 20); to him to 
 live is Christ (Phil. 1. 21); he is crucified and risen 
 with Christ (Rom. vi. 3-10); he lives and walks by 
 the Spirit (Gal. v. 25). We cannot, with Deissmann,? 
 relieve ourselves of the task of dealing with Paul as 
 a theologian, who was expressing distinctions in his 
 own mind when he used different words or phrases. 
 First of all we may conjecture that when Paul was 
 vividly conscious of the objective reality of Jesus 
 Christ the Lord as present with Him in immediate 
 contact and intimate communion, he used the terms 
 regarding his relation to Christ. When that con- 
 
 1 Expositor’s Greek Testament, ili. p. 58. 
 * The Religion of Jesus and the Faith of Paul, pp- 154-5, 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 359 
 
 sclousness was not so vivid, and yet he knew that 
 what he was experiencing was of God, he used the 
 terms about the Spirit. The historical record, in- 
 cluding the vision on the way to Damascus (Acts ix. 
 1-9), gave to the Risen Lord a distinct personal reality 
 which the Spirit did not and could not possess. 
 Christ was objective to Paul as the Spirit was not, 
 nor indeed could be. For, secondly, we seem justified 
 in inferring that it was by the subjective operation 
 of the Spirit in the personal activities of Paul that 
 he was enabled with such certainty and intensity 
 to realise the objective presence of Christ in and with 
 him. A physical analogy may make this plainer. 
 The presence of Christ was the Light, and the opera- 
 tion of the Spirit so quickened the inward sight of 
 Paul that he could behold the Light. God’s Spirit 
 in him made Christ so real to him. 
 
 (v) This is a matter of so great importance for 
 Christian theology that it demands fuller treatment. 
 (a) Dr. Ernest F. Scott! has stated the position 
 clearly and fully : ‘ It cannot be made out that Paul 
 anywhere identifies the Spirit and Christ. His aim, 
 on the contrary, is to keep them distinct, and his very 
 phrase, “the Spirit of Christ,’’ which brings them so 
 closely together, implies an effort to distinguish. .. . 
 Probably it never occurred to him that they could 
 be thought of as identical. When he spoke of Christ 
 he had before his mind a personal being, the apoca- 
 lyptic Messiah who had been manifested in Jesus. 
 When he spoke of the Spirit he thought of a divine 
 power which had been vouchsafed to men in conse- 
 quence of the work of Christ. Nevertheless, he is 
 unable to keep the two conceptions entirely separate. 
 The functions which he ascribes to the Spirit are 
 similar to those of Christ, and sometimes in the same 
 sentence he passes almost unconsciously from the 
 one idea to the other. This confusion is the more 
 inevitable as the Christ of Pauline thought is the risen 
 and indwelling Christ.’ The two conceptions, accord- 
 ing to Scott, are merged, because for Paul the indwell- 
 
 * The Spirit in the New Testament, pp- 182-6, 
 
360 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 ing Christ as a divine being discharges all the functions 
 usually assigned to the Spirit. Nevertheless, Paul 
 retains the distinction because (1) the belief in the 
 Spirit was included in the primitive Christian tradi- 
 tion; and (2) he was himself exceptionally endowed 
 with the spiritual gifts. While there seems to be only 
 a confusion, Scott maintains that ‘on a deeper view 
 the effect of his virtual identification of Christ and 
 the Spirit is to make both of them infinitely more 
 significant. The historical Christ becomes a universal 
 presence, dwelling in the hearts of men; while the 
 Spirit ceases to be a vague supernatural principle, 
 and is one, in the last resort, with the living Christ.’ 
 While we cannot separate Father, Son, and Holy 
 Spirit in our faith in the one God in all, through all, 
 and over all, the question still remains whether we 
 cannot enrich our conception of that one God by 
 distinguishing, as far as our thought can, the functions 
 and activities of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in 
 revelation and redemption. This question is answered 
 with a very decisive negative by two recent theological 
 writers, Dr. Denney and Dr. Thomas Rees. 
 
 (b) Dr. Denney ? states his position with his usual 
 decisiveness. ‘As has often been pointed out, in 
 Romans viii. 9-11 the Spirit of God, the Spirit of 
 Christ, and Christ Himself are practically indistin- 
 cuishable. It is all one if we can say of people that 
 the Spirit of God dwells in them, or that they have 
 the Spirit of Christ, or that Christ is in them. All 
 these are ways in which we can describe the life of 
 reconciliation as it is realised in men. They make it 
 plain that the explanation of that life is divine, and 
 they prevent any misapprehension about the Divine 
 Spirit by frankly indentifying the indwelling of the 
 Spirit in the Christian sense with the spiritual in- 
 dwelling of Christ Himself. But there is no justifica- 
 tion in this for representing the Spirit as a third 
 person in the same sense as God and Christ. Paul 
 never knew Christ except as Spirit, except as a being 
 who could enter into and tell upon his life as God 
 
 ' The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 311, 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 361 
 
 Himself entered; and his whole concern in this 
 passage is not to distinguish Christ and the Spirit, 
 but to show that nothing is entitled to be recognised 
 as really Spirit among Christians if it is distinguish- 
 able from Christ and from the divine power with 
 which He acts in the souls and in the life of men.’ 
 As the statement by Dr. Scott and the previous 
 discussion have shown, Dr. Denney, with his char- 
 acteristic impatience, and almost intolerance to ideas 
 not congenial to his own type of piety, evangelical 
 but not mystical, is not accurate either in his exegesis 
 or his theology. As the last chapter of this book will 
 try to show, the use of the word * person’ in the 
 doctrine of the Trinity is open to misconception, as 
 the term has acquired a connotation to-day which it 
 had not for those who framed the creeds, and tends 
 to substitute a tritheism for the belief in the triune 
 God. It need not be maintained, then, that we are 
 to speak of the Holy Spirit as a ‘ person.’ The one 
 God is personal for our thought, though not a * person ’ 
 as an individual among others, seeing He as Life, 
 Light, Love is in all and through all and over all, 
 because the Universe can be most intelligibly ex- 
 plained in terms of personal nature, purpose, and 
 activity. The Risen Christ as continuing personally 
 the historical reality of the earthly Jesus is even more 
 definitely personal for our thought than God. We 
 cannot think of the Holy Spirit so definitely as personal, 
 but He as the Spirit of God must be conceived as 
 personal as God is. That there can be no separation 
 of the Spirit from Christ, His activities from Christ’s 
 presence, is no adequate reason for not taking up into 
 our constructive theology the distinctions which the 
 writers of the New Testament make. The writer 
 himself, as will afterwards be shown, attaches very 
 ereat significance and value to these distinctions in 
 attempting to construct a doctrine of the Godhead. 
 (c) Dr. Rees! is even more emphatic, not to say 
 dogmatic. ‘If the Spirit is conceived as another 
 divine presence, distinct and different from Christ, 
 1 The Holy Spirit, p. 211, 
 
362 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 operating as a distinct activity and in a different 
 province of religious experience, it so far ceases to 
 be the Spirit of Christ, and the presence and activity 
 of Christ are therefore neither universal nor co- 
 extensive with religious experience. If, on the other 
 hand, Christianity is the universal and final religion, 
 if all knowledge and communion and action of God 
 are mediated to men through Jesus Christ, then the 
 Holy Spirit for Christian thought and experience 
 cannot be separate or distinct from Christ Himself, 
 in His living presence and power in the hearts of men, 
 and the Church burdens itself in vain with the formula 
 of three hypostases which it inherited from Greek 
 theology.’ 
 
 What the author of this passage confuses is the 
 dogmatic formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 for which the writer of this volume does not here 
 enter any defence, and the experimental basis of the 
 doctrine as it is presented in the New Testament, 
 which should be the starting-point of any constructive 
 theology. The presence and activity of Jesus in His 
 earthly life was of one kind ; His presence and activity 
 now is of another kind: the one sensible, the other 
 spiritual. It is the Spirit of God dwelling and working 
 within the soul who makes the soul receptive for and 
 responsive to that spiritual activity of Christ. We do 
 not separate and yet we distinguish: Christ, objec- 
 
 tively manifest as Revealer of God and Redeemer of © 
 
 men, is subjectively experienced in illumination, re- 
 generation, sanctification by the Spirit of God. Again, 
 we may believe that Christianity, as it 1s the final, 
 so it will be one day the universal religion; but it is 
 not yet. known to all men, and ‘all knowledge and 
 communion and action of God’ are not yet mediated 
 to men through Jesus Christ, unless we use the term 
 in a less definite sense than the names themselves 
 demand, namely for the historical reality, whom faith 
 confesses as God Incarnate. God by His Spirit is 
 
 enlightening and cleansing men, even beyond the ~ 
 
 : 
 : 
 | 
 
 reach of the Christian Gospel, although where Christ | 
 
 is known as Saviour and Lord that inward experience . 
 
 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 368 
 
 is so much surer and wider and deeper. We may 
 limit the term Holy Spirit to the Spirit of God as 
 active within Christian experience; but we must not 
 deny, as Dr. Rees does, or appears to do, by ambiguous 
 use of language, the operation of the Spirit in the 
 religious experience, to which Jesus Christ is not yet 
 known. 
 
 (3) In the preceding pages no attempt has been 
 made to give a complete account of the teaching of 
 the Bible on this subject. Only the main features 
 have been noticed, which are directly relevant to a 
 constructive theology for to-day. The development 
 of the doctrine in the Church may be even more 
 briefly treated. 
 
 (i) As the Church passed more and more from the 
 Jewish environment to the Gentile, its theology was 
 more and more affected by the intellectual influences 
 of that environment. The doctrine of the Logos dis- 
 placed the doctrine of the Messiah for two reasons : 
 (1) The significance of Christ was thereby widened ; 
 it became cosmic as well as human (Col. 1. 15, 16 and 
 John 1. 3-5 already show this expansion of thought) ; 
 (2) The relation of Christ to God was made more 
 immediate; He by nature belongs not to the creatures 
 but to the Creator. This development not only met 
 an intellectual demand for a rational creed, but also 
 a religious need, the certainty of a universal salvation 
 for manin Him. Asin Paul and John the conception 
 of the Risen Christ in His manifold activities cannot 
 be rigidly distinguished from the operations of the 
 Spirit, so to the Logos-Christ are attracted many of 
 the functions hitherto assigned to the Spirit. *° The 
 theology of the Church,’ says Dr. Scott,! ° attached 
 itself in increasing measure to the foreign conception, 
 and one by one the attributes of the Spirit as creative, 
 revealing, life-giving, were transferred to the Logos. 
 How are we to account for this surrender ? For one 
 thing, the idea of the Spirit, in the course of its long 
 history, had acquired a well-defined meaning and 
 could not be readily adapted to the new theological 
 
 1 The Spirit in the New Testament, pp. 190-1. 
 
364 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 needs. . . . But there was a further and more cogent 
 reason for the preference given to the Logos doctrine. 
 It came into Christian thought with a philosophical 
 background. It had gathered into itself the results 
 of centuries of Greek speculation on the mystery of 
 the world. By the adoption of this doctrine it was 
 possible to link the Christian message with the whole 
 religious movement of the time, and thereby to deepen 
 its significance and strengthen its appeal to the 
 Gentile mind.’ The reason for the waning of the 
 doctrine of the Spirit was not merely theological; it 
 was religious also. The enthusiasm of the early days 
 passed away; believers became less conscious of the 
 Spirit’s presence and-power; the doctrine fell into 
 the background with the experience. The Church 
 was consolidated as an institution, and tradition and 
 convention took the place of the freshness and fullness 
 of life. Prophets even came to be regarded with 
 some suspicion, as the Didache (chapter xi.) shows, 
 and in some cases there was ground for the suspicion 
 that they were ‘ making merchandise of Christ.’ The 
 local officers of the Church gradually strengthened 
 their position, and asserted their authority. The hope 
 of the Second Advent faded into ‘ the light of the 
 common day.’ The Christian Chureh settled down 
 to a permanent existence in this world, and began 
 to adapt itself to its environment. The ebb-tide 
 followed the full; and the doctrine of the Spirit 
 always comes into prominence in a time of religious 
 revival, and recedes when the experience of such a 
 period passes away. 
 
 _ (i) This general statement may be illustrated in 
 some details.1 Hermas identifies the Son of God and 
 ‘the Holy Pre-existent Spirit.” But Ignatius main- 
 tains the distinction. ‘ Have we not one God, and 
 one Christ, and one Spirit of Grace that was shed 
 upon us?’ asks Clement of Rome (1 Cor. 46). As 
 in Matthew xxvii. 19, baptism in the Didache is 
 
 1 The History of Christian Doctrine, by G. P. Fisher, may be consulted for 
 further details. See also Harnack’s History of Dogma, Eng. trans., iv. pp. 
 108-37, | 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 365 
 
 ‘into the name of the Father and of the Son and of 
 the Holy Ghost’ (vii. 1). The Apologists were so 
 influenced by the conception of the Logos, that no 
 distinctive function was left in their theology for the 
 Holy Spirit. While Justin distinguishes the Spirit 
 from the Father and Son as subordinate, the activities 
 of the Logos are so described as to leave no room for 
 the Spirit ; even the conception by the Virgin Mother 
 is included (Apology, 1. 33). Irenaeus too subordinates 
 the Spirit to the Son, as the Son to the Father; but 
 is vague about the Spirit’s work. Clement of Alex- 
 andria uses the phrase‘ the Holy Triad’ (Strom., v. 14), 
 and speaks of the Spirit as a distinct hypostasis, but 
 does not define His relation to the Father and the Son. 
 ‘Origen leaves the question open whether the Spirit 
 has been created or not, assigns divine dignity to Him, 
 but subordinates Him to the Son. A peculiarity of 
 Origen’s teaching is that he confines the activity of 
 the Spirit to the souls which He renews and sanctifies 
 (De Princip., 1. i. 5), \The Father’s sphere is universal 
 ‘existence, the Son’s the rational realm, and the 
 Spirit’s the Christian community. It was Tertullian 
 who supplied the Latin termimology for the doctrine 
 of the Trinity, a term which he 1s the first to use. He 
 has, however, a descending Trinity. ‘ The Spirit is 
 third from God and the Son, as the fruit out of the 
 tree is third from the root, and as the branch from the 
 river is third from the fountain, and as the apex of 
 the sunbeam is third from the sun’ (Adv. Prazw., 8). 
 The Spirit was generally conceived either as a divine 
 power, or if regarded as personal, then as entirely 
 subordinate. The existence of the Spirit was recog- 
 nised on the authority of the Scriptures, but the 
 doctrine had no basis in present experience. | 
 (iii) Even Athanasius in the first decade of the 
 Arian controversy never thought about the Spirit. 
 It was when the Arians used the general agreement 
 regarding the inferiority of the Spirit to the Son as 
 well as the Father as an argument for the subordina- 
 tion of the Son to the Father, that he was forced to 
 face the question. After 358 Athanasius affirmed 
 
366 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 that the Spirit was Oeds époovous, not that he had 
 any interest in the doctrine of the Spirit, but because 
 such a declaration seemed necessary to give logical 
 consistency to the doctrine about the Godhead, and 
 the Son’s relation to the Father. This view was 
 affirmed at the Alexandrian Synod of 362. Mace- 
 donius, the Bishop of Constantinople, was regarded 
 as heretical because he taught that the Holy Spirit 
 was a creature subordinate to the Son, and his followers 
 received the nickname of Pneumatomachians. But 
 even the Cappadocians (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory 
 Nazianzen, and Basil), although they advocated 
 Athanasius’ formula, confessed the absence of any 
 available tradition, advised the greatest caution, and 
 maintained that the formula should be kept as a 
 secret doctrine. The exposition of the doctrine in 
 this school tended to tritheism: the Gregories, for 
 instance, compared the relation of the persons in the 
 Godhead to that of three men to their common 
 humanity. This statement must be qualified as 
 regards Gregory of Nyssa, however, since, as a Plato- 
 nist, the common humanity is for him not a mere 
 class name, but a reality. The relation of the Father 
 to the Son was described by the term generation ; 
 for the relation of the Spirit to the Father the termin- 
 ology of the Fourth Gospel is adopted, exeuyus or 
 éxmépevors. The Father alone is cause (atror) ; 
 the Son and the Spirit are effects (aimuara). Never- 
 theless, for Gregory of Nyssa, there is a mutual per- 
 vasion (zepiyepnows) of the persons, so that there is 
 an inseparable unity. In later Greek thought sub- 
 ordination was more insisted on, and thus the differ- 
 ences were emphasised. The apy7 in the Kast always 
 remains with the Father. The Creed of Constantin- 
 ople (although it did not originate in the Council, 
 held 381, but was developed out of a confession 
 composed by Cyril of Jerusalem before 350) formulates 
 the othodox belief in the East on the doctrine of the 
 Holy Spirit. It is now generally known as the Nicene 
 Creed, of which it is an enlargement. The article — 
 dealing with the Holy Spirit may be quoted. ‘8. Kat — 
 

 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT 367 
 
 els TO Ilvevpa To “Aywov, TO KUpLov, Kat TO CworroLoy, TO 
 Ek TOL TATpPOS EKTropEvopmeEvoV, TO oY Hatpi kat Ti@ cupTpo- 
 okuvovpevov Kat ouvdogalomevov, TO Twatnoav dia Tov 
 mpopytav. It is to be observed that, following the 
 Scriptures, functions are again assigned to the Spirit 
 which the Apologists had transferred to the Logos. 
 (iv) John of Damascus tried to bring the Eastern 
 doctrine nearer the Western by minimising the differ- 
 ences of the persons and emphasising the unity of 
 nature, but the subordinationism and the consequent 
 tendency to tritheism remained. For where differ- 
 ences are emphasised, the unity of the Godhead has 
 to be preserved by an insistence on the subordination 
 of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, in whom the 
 monarchy inheres. Where the unity is put in the 
 forefront, the differences must fall into the back- 
 sround. This is the difference between the Greek 
 and the Latin formulations of this doctrine. In 
 Augustine’s De Trinitate it is the divine unity which 
 is made most of, and the persons are distinguished 
 only in their relations to one another. He would 
 gladly have left all exposition of the subject alone, 
 had not the common faith of the Church required the 
 recognition of the differences of the three persons 
 within the divine unity. ‘ Dictum est tres personae, 
 non ut illud diceretur, sed ne taceretur’ (De Trin., 
 v.c. 9). With the theology of the West he affirmed 
 the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the 
 Son. This difference between the Kast and West 
 became matter of acute controversy. Photius in 867 
 charged the Western theologians with an innovation, 
 and even with the falsification of the Constantino- 
 politan creed by the addition of the word filioque. 
 This addition was first made in Spain. The Greeks 
 became suspicious even of the modification 61a rod 
 Tiov. The Athanasian Creed marks the full develop- 
 ment of the doctrine in the West. It has now become 
 a mystery of the faith, which has to be accepted on 
 
 _ the authority of the Church as the condition of salva- 
 tion. The differences in the conception of the relation 
 of the persons in the Godhead may be summarised 
 
368 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 as follows. The earlier doctrine was that the Spirit 
 was subordinate to the Son as the Son was to the 
 Father ; and the later Greek that both Son and Spirit 
 were dependent on the Father, the one as generated, 
 the other as proceeding. The later Latin affirmed an 
 equality of the three persons in insisting that the 
 Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as the Father. 
 These differences may be represented in the following 
 
 Way -— 
 Father Father Father 
 | ho hee 
 , tag fh ta 
 Son Son Holy / \ 
 | Spirit WAG 
 Oc Son Holy Spirit 
 Holy Spirit 
 
 Although the doctrine will be discussed constructively 
 afterwards, this comment may here be added. All 
 the Scripture statements would lead us to say that 
 the Holy Spirit comes from the Father through the 
 Son. The revelation of the Father in the Son is 
 realised in individual and collective experience through 
 the Spirit. 
 
 (v) At the Reformation there was a movement 
 comparable to Montanism. Carlstadt with his fol- 
 lowers, carfied away by their fanaticism, made the 
 Spirit independent of the Word, and claimed His 
 authority for the innovations they proposed. Calvin 
 based the authority of the Scriptures as of divine 
 origin, not on external proofs, but on ‘the testimony 
 of the Holy Spirit.’ This inward witness certifies 
 the inspiration of these writings. The Reformers 
 accepted the doctrine of the Trinity as formulated in 
 the creeds, but of the Athanasian Creed Calvin says 
 that no legitimate church would have accepted it, 
 since on this subject ‘ we ought to philosophise with 
 
 great sobriety and moderation’ (Jnst., 1. xiii. 21). — 
 The Arminians, opposed though they were to Calvin’s — 
 
 theology, did insist on the necessity of regeneration 
 by the Holy Spirit. The Synod of Dort limited the 
 
 a . 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 369 
 
 operation of the Holy Spirit, described as inscrutable, 
 to the elect only, so that in them only does the Atone- 
 ment become efficacious. There was much discussion 
 in the theological schools about the nature of this 
 operation of the Holy Spirit. John Cameron excited 
 opposition, though his substantial orthodoxy was after- 
 wards admitted, by teaching that the Spirit acts not 
 directly on the will, but through enlightening of the 
 intellect ; and somewhat later Pajon further developed 
 this view, by adding to the Spirit’s use of the Gospel 
 as influencing the intellect, also the circumstances of 
 the individual’s life as providentially appointed for 
 the purpose of his regeneration. The Quakers gave 
 a central position to the doctrine of the Spirit. It is 
 by the working of the Spirit that the truth in the 
 Scriptures is made effective; and further truth may 
 be added by the Spirit which illumines all men. 
 Wesley, whose theology was Arminian, insisted on 
 the necessary agency of the Spirit in conversion and 
 sanctification, the attainment of the Christian perfec- 
 tion, which he held was possible for all believers. 
 James Morison in 1840, in opposition to Calvinism, 
 asserted what were known as the three universalities : 
 God’s love for all, Christ’s death for all, and the 
 Spirit’s working in all. With this declaration this 
 historical sketch may fitly end. 
 
 (4) It is much to be regretted that the doctrine of 
 the Spirit has not received the attention which it 
 deserves from instructed and competent theologians, 
 and that so much of the literature of the subject 
 comes from a narrow pietism. The attitude of the 
 two writers already referred to, Dr. Denney and 
 Dr. Rees, is greatly to be regretted, as there is at 
 present a favourable opportunity for giving to the 
 doctrine its rightful place in Christian theology. 
 Simply to substitute for the operations of the Spirit, 
 as the Holy Scriptures and Christian theology have 
 usually described them, the activity of the Risen 
 Christ, would be to deprive us of data, valuable not 
 only to theology, but even to religion. 
 
 (i) As has already been indicated, the reason why 
 
 2A 
 
870 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 the doctrine of the Spirit fell into the background in 
 the second century was that Christian experience 
 relapsed from the enthusiasm of the Apostolic Age 
 into a traditional and conventional profession, real 
 but not intense. That it has had so little place in 
 Christian thought is due to this, that the presence and 
 power of the Spirit have not been greatly prized in a 
 great deal of Christian life. In the Eastern Church 
 speculative interests replaced the experimental, and 
 even salvation was metaphysically conceived; in the 
 West ecclesiastical authority became too dominant 
 to allow the free movements of the Spirit, except 
 sporadically. At the Reformation the spiritual move- 
 ment was only too soon caught and held in the fetters 
 of a Scriptural dogmatism. The historical interest 
 which was so characteristic of last century concen- 
 trated attention, needfully and rightly at the time, 
 on the historical personality of Christ, His revelation 
 of God and redemption of man as fact; and the whole 
 course of the discussion in this volume shows that 
 the writer fully appreciates the value of this tendency. 
 There is a danger, however, of externalising the 
 Christian religion, unless to the historical interest 
 there is added as its complement the experiential ; 
 the historical reality must be appropriated and assimi- 
 lated as personal experience, individual and collective. 
 Psychology and sociology are the two mental sciences 
 of greatest interest to-day, and the aid of both can 
 be invoked in developing the doctrine of the Spirit. 
 As Christian theology should be quickly responsive 
 to the intellectual tendencies of the age so as to 
 commend its Gospel to thoughtful men, there seems 
 to be need both for a revival of interest in the doctrine 
 of the Spirit, and encouragement to the theologian 
 to use the mental resources of the age to make the 
 doctrine more intelligible. Accordingly, the following 
 constructive considerations are offered. 
 
 (ii) As the starting-point is experience, individual 
 and collective, we are concerned here with the economic 
 and not the ontological Trinity, not with God as He 
 is in Himself, but with God as revealing and imparting 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 371 
 
 Himself to man. In the last chapter of this volume 
 an attempt will be made to state what seems pos- 
 sible with our human limitations about the nature 
 of God, as we can infer that from the revelation of 
 God to man, and the activities of God in that 
 relation. 
 
 (iii) In that activity it does seem to the writer that 
 we ought still to distinguish the operations of the 
 Spirit and the activities of the Risen Christ. We 
 should follow the older tradition of the Holy Scriptures 
 and not the development in the Early Church of the 
 doctrine of the Logos by which the functions of the 
 Spirit were transferred to the Logos. For in the 
 first place there was a living experience behind that 
 tradition about the Spirit, both individual and col- 
 lective; and the change of emphasis, which was 
 partly the result of the waning of that experience, 
 was also partly the cause of that experience waning 
 still more. 
 
 Secondly, the substitution of the Risen Christ even 
 for the Spirit, toward which there is a tendency in 
 the Pauline and Johannine theology, seems to be 
 beset by some theoretical as well as practical dis- 
 advantages. There is often a confusion of the sphere 
 of activity of the Christ and the Word or Logos. 
 The term Christ should not be used of the pre-existent 
 Son in the Godhead, but of the historical personality, 
 the God-Man, who historically revealed God and 
 redeemed man; and we should not speak as if the 
 Christ were present and active before the Incarnation, 
 or since the Ascension, where the Gospel of His revela- 
 tion and redemption has not yet been preached. The 
 more general activity of God in the thought and life 
 of man should be described as the work of the Spirit 
 of God. This is urged not in depreciation of the 
 function of the Christ, but in order that the distinc- 
 tiveness of His work as Revealer of God and Redeemer 
 of man should not be merged in and confused with 
 this less adequate manifestation of God by His Spirit 
 apart from the Christ, and that the latter should not 
 be regarded as a substitute for the former, and so the 
 
372 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 motive of evangelisation of the world be weakened. 
 Whatever the heathen had, or now have, of enlight- 
 ening and quickening by the Divine Spirit, they have 
 not the truth and the grace of the Word Incarnate, 
 the Crucified Saviour, the Risen Lord. But even 
 in Christian experience it is desirable to maintain 
 the distinction between the objective revelation of 
 God in His redeeming love, completed in its essential 
 import in the historical reality of Jesus the Christ 
 our Lord, and the interpretation and application of 
 that revelation subjectively in the experience and 
 character of believers; for this carries with it the 
 danger of our placing on a level of the same authority 
 our subjective impressions and the objective com- 
 munication of the character and purpose of God. 
 For the sake of Christian life as well as thought it 
 is well to maintain the distinction. 
 
 Thirdly, the Johannine teaching about the Spirit 
 asserts what we should not forget, that the revelation 
 of the Spirit does not complete the revelation of the 
 Son in adding to it new truth or fresh duty, still less 
 in any way superseding it, but only in making its 
 content intelligible, and its influence effective in the 
 individual believer and the community. There is 
 permanence and finality in the revelation of Christ, 
 there is adaptability and progressiveness in the Spirit’s 
 interpretation and application. Is it not well for us 
 to keep the two aspects of a truly and fully divine 
 activity apart in our thought, though they blend in 
 our experience? It is not suggested that the in- 
 dividual believer should attempt to distinguish in- 
 himself what is the work of the Risen Lord and what 
 the work of the Spirit; but Christian theology not 
 only may, but should do so. : 
 
 Fourthly, by this distinction we enlarge our con-— 
 ception of God. God is the eternally and infinitely 
 transcendent, yet in His relation to man immanent, 
 because in the Son God reveals Himself to us as 
 Father and redeems us unto Himself as children in 
 the objective historical reality of Jesus the Christ 
 our Lord; and that is not all, because in the Spirit’ 
 

 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT 373 
 
 He dwells and works in our innermost life, so that 
 our faith, hope, and love are not merely a human 
 response to that revelation and redemption in Christ, 
 but God’s own activity in us. If we leave out the 
 doctrine of the Spirit there is the danger of our 
 thinking of our Christian life as only the impression 
 and the influence upon us of the historical reality, 
 and not as the expression of the divine life imparted 
 to us by the Spirit. 
 
 (iv) It has already been indicated how ambiguous 
 is the sense of the term ‘ person’ as applied to the 
 Godhead, and how much more difficult it is for us to 
 think of the Holy Spirit as person, as we can think of 
 the Father or Christ; for when we think of the Father 
 as personal we are really thinking of God in His entire 
 manifestation and activity in nature and _ history, 
 revelation and redemption, and not of the Father as 
 individually distinguished from the Son or the Spirit ; 
 and when we think of the Son as personal we are not 
 thinking of Him as individually distinguished from 
 the Father, but we are thinking of the historical 
 person Jesus Christ our Lord. But just because the 
 Spirit is God most immediately related to our own 
 inner life, and most intimately communicating His 
 own eternal life to us, we cannot so objectify God to 
 ourselves as Spirit, apart from Father and Son, and 
 even apart from ourselves in whom He dwells. This 
 does not mean, however, that we make the Spirit a 
 power or an influence that is impersonal, for what 
 can spiritual power or influence be but personal ? 
 Impersonal spirit is a vague abstraction. Godi as 
 Spirit dwelling and working in us is just as personal 
 as God or Christ, for He is God’s activity within, and 
 it is the things of Christ He takes and imparts to us. 
 ~What must constantly be insisted on is that we do 
 not separate what we distinguish. We do distinguish 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as complementary modes, 
 activities, or ‘ persons’ (in the sense of the creeds and 
 theologians who know their business, and not the 
 vulgar sense of the popular tritheism); but we do 
 not separate them, for it is the one God who acts, 
 
374 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and He alone is perfect personality. This subject 
 must be further pursued in the last chapter. 
 
 (v) This chapter does not complete the doctrine of 
 the Spirit, as this whole section deals with the work 
 of the Spirit. The Church is the community of the 
 Spirit, and the believer as sharing the common life 
 is a member of the Church. In the Christian life, 
 the Spirit is ever active, whether it be in experiences 
 which come ‘ with observation,’ such as religious 
 revivals and individual conversions, or in the un- 
 observed development of Christian faith, hope, and 
 love. It is this Christian life which is the basis of 
 the Christian hope, both in affording assurance of it 
 and indication of the character of what is to be hoped. 
 Lastly, it is by the Spirit, transforming individuals 
 and societies, that the Kingdom of God will come, and 
 at last God shall be all in all. 
 
CHAPTER Il 
 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 
 
 THis chapter is not in any way concerned with 
 ecclesiastical organisation, with creeds, codes, polities, 
 rituals, orders, although reference may be made to 
 these matters when relevant to the subject. So far 
 as the distinction can be maintained, it 1s not the 
 historical institution but the spiritual creation with 
 which we are here concerned. It is the spiritual 
 creation which must always be the standard of judg- 
 ment for the historical institution, for 1t cannot be 
 maintained that the latter has always and everywhere 
 been ‘a copy of the pattern in the Mount,’ and that 
 leaders and teachers in the Church have never been 
 blind or disobedient to the heavenly vision. But on 
 the other hand, it is from the imperfect image that we 
 can rise to the perfect idea, and that as the image 
 becomes less imperfect the perfect idea will be more 
 clearly apprehended and fully appreciated. It is, 
 then, with the Church as the body of Christ, the 
 community of the Spirit, that we have primarily to 
 do, but we must base doctrine on history. 
 
 (1) The fact that the word éxxdyoia (ecclesia) is the 
 Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Kahal (oop) reminds 
 us that the Christian Church has Jewish as well as 
 Gentile antecedents. The Greek Kcclesia was a gather- 
 ing of citizens called out from their homes to some 
 public place for common counsel or action. The 
 Hebrew Kahal was a gathering of the Israelites 
 especially for some sacred purpose. The preparatory 
 revelation was to a nation, chosen and called and 
 separated from other nations for the fulfilment of 
 
 the divine purpose. The perfective revelation is also 
 376 
 
376 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 to a society, gathered out of the nations, and united 
 not by one blood, but by one Spirit. 
 
 (a) When Jesus called men it was not to be individual 
 disciples, indifferent to, or separated from one another, 
 but into a company of disciples. Individual teaching 
 and dealing there was; but the message and the 
 mission were entrusted to the company. The distress 
 which the jealousies and rivalries of the disciples 
 caused Jesus, and the solicitude He showed in rebuking 
 and removing these (e.g. the washing of the disciples’ 
 feet, John xiii. 1-17), prove how much importance 
 and urgency He attached to the unity of the disciples. 
 It was to the assembled believers that the experience 
 of Pentecost came; and belief was followed by bap- 
 tism, the initiation into a society separated from the 
 world; and after baptism, by the laying on of hands, 
 there was a consciousness of the possession of the 
 common treasure of the Christian Church, the fullness 
 of the Spirit, the enthusiasm and the energy of the 
 new life. Even when the Christian Church expanded 
 beyond Jerusalem and Christian societies were formed 
 in other cities, the unity was maintained ; 1t was the 
 same Spirit which was the common possession. In- 
 dependency or Congregationalism has insisted on the 
 independence of the local congregation; and in so 
 doing has seized on the historical accident, and lost 
 hold of the spiritual substance. The Church is not 
 made up of a voluntary association of a number of 
 separate churches; the local congregation can call 
 itself a church, possessing the privileges and dis- 
 charging the functions of the Church, only because 
 it is the Church in local manifestation and activity. 
 Its rights and duties are not derived from its separate- 
 ness, but from its unity with all Christian congrega- 
 tions in the one Church. Sohm,! than whom there 
 is not a greater authority on these questions, states 
 the New Testament position very distinctly. ‘ The 
 faith of Christians sees in every assembly of Christians 
 gathered together in the Spirit the whole of Christen- 
 
 ! Kirchenrecht, pp. 20-1, quoted by Dr. Mason in Essays on the Early 
 History of the Church and the Ministry, p. 20. 
 
 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 377 
 
 dom, the people of God, the universal society. Upon 
 these grounds every assembly of Christians, great or 
 little, which meets in the name of the Lord, is called 
 Ecclesia, the gathering of the New Testament people 
 of Israel. The general assembly of all the Christians 
 of the same place bears the name Ecclesia because it re- 
 presents, not an assembly of this local community, but 
 an assembly of all Christendom (Israel). In the same 
 way, an assembly of the community belonging to one 
 house. Thus there is but one Ecclesia, the assembly 
 of all Christendom; though this one Church has 
 innumerable manifestations.’ Spatial separation was 
 not, however, allowed to destroy the spiritual unity. 
 There was the faith in the one Saviour and Lord ; 
 there was the common possession of the one Spirit ; 
 there was the universal itinerant ministry of the Word 
 —the apostles, prophets, teachers, evangelists (as well 
 as the local oftices—elders or bishops and deacons) ; 
 there were the apostolic letters of counsel and com- 
 mand, assurance and comfort; there was the collec- 
 tion (also called the kxowwvia, 2 Cor. vill. 4) among 
 the Gentile churches for the poor in Jerusalem, to 
 which Paul attached such importance that he was 
 willing to risk his life in Jerusalem that he might 
 present it in person; there were the letters of com- 
 mendation of the Christian brother from one con- 
 eregation to another; there was the generous hos- 
 pitality to any Christian visitor. The Council in 
 Jerusalem is an evidence of the determination to 
 preserve unity in maintaining liberty (Acts xv.). 
 There was only one Church even as regards external 
 organisations, so far as there was any organisation, 
 and still more as regards inward inspiration. Whether 
 the words are the words of the historical Jesus or not 
 (the writer believes they are), the aspiration of the 
 Church as well as the purpose of its Head is expressed 
 in them: ‘ Holy Father, keep them in Thy name which 
 Thou hast given Me, that they may be one, even as 
 we are’ (John xvii. 11). 
 
 There is one revelation of God and one redemption 
 of man in Jesus Christ, and that can be made actual 
 
378 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and effective and victorious in the world in one Church, 
 the body of Christ, the community of the Spirit. It 
 is to be observed, then, that the New Testament gives 
 warrant for the use of the term Church only of the 
 one body, the one community, and of the local con- 
 gregations only as its local manifestations and activi- 
 ties. In the Apostolic Age there was the Jewish and 
 the Gentile type of Christianity ; but the Jews who 
 observed the Law and the Gentiles who were free of 
 the Law did not separate and form denominations. 
 For the use of the term Church for a denomination 
 the New Testament offers no justification. It may 
 be claimed, however, that as local separation did 
 not destroy the unity, neither does theological or 
 ecclesiastical, and that each denomination is a dis- 
 tinctive manifestation and activity of the one Church. 
 Although it may now be impossible to alter common 
 usage, yet the writer thinks it would be a great 
 advantage to clearness of thought if the term Church 
 were reserved for the spiritual unity of all believers, 
 the term congregation were used for the local associa- 
 tion, and the term communion for the denomination. 
 To call Nonconformist denominations bodies, as 
 Anglicans in England sometimes do, is not only 
 offensive, but it is a denial of the central conception 
 of the Church as necessarily one body. According 
 to the New Testament, then, faith in Christ means 
 and cannot but mean inclusion in the one society ; 
 all who were in the spiritual community were also 
 within the organisation for witness, worship, and 
 work, in which that community was manifest and 
 active in the world. The individual relation to Christ 
 and the Spirit was mediated by the Christian society. 
 
 (11) The one Church was the community of the Spirit. 
 The Spirit was the common possession of the believers 
 
 in Christ ; the gifts of the Spirit were for the common _ 
 
 good, not for individual exaltation or ostentation ; 
 all the activities of the Church were directed and 
 controlled by that Spirit ; and ‘ the fruit of the Spirit 
 was love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, good- 
 hess, faithfulness, meekness, temperance’ (Gal. v. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 379 
 
 22-23), nearly all virtues with a distinctly social 
 reference ; in the exercise of all the gifts love showed 
 ‘ the more excellent way’ (1 Cor. xii. 31). While on 
 the one hand the national limitations of the Jewish 
 religion had been set aside, and on the other the 
 individualism of the later prophets (Jeremiah and 
 Kizekiel) in asserting the value of each soul had been 
 confirmed, yet from the very beginning Christian life 
 showed itself to be by its very nature social; there 
 was not a subjugation of the individual to the society, 
 as in Plato’s Republic, but a realisation of the 
 individual in the society. It was as brethren and 
 sisters in Christ Jesus that believers realised their 
 relation to God as His children. Two consequences 
 flowed from this mutual relation of men as determined 
 by their common relation to God. 
 
 Firstly, the differences which had before been the 
 occasions of division were transcended in the common 
 life in the Spirit. The agelong antagonism of Jew 
 and Gentile was removed (Rom. 1.16; Eph. u. 11-22). 
 While the institution of slavery was not at once 
 abolished, yet master and slave came into such a 
 mutual relation as brothers in Christ, that its abolition 
 was in principle and motive assured (Philemon). It 
 would have brought moral scandal in the Church had 
 traditions and conventions in regard to the relation 
 of the sexes, especially the position of women, been 
 at once disregarded (2 Cor. xi. 2-16, xiv. 34-36) ; but 
 the spiritual equality recognised held the promise and 
 the power of the purification of the relation from 
 pagan corruption, and the elevation of women to a 
 liberty and dignity which, without the safeguard of 
 Christian character, would have been impossible (Eph. 
 v. 22-88). 
 
 Secondly, the differences of capacity, disposition, 
 and character, conditioning the variety of endowment 
 as regards the spiritual gifts, contributed to the unity 
 of the Church; it became the more a body, in which 
 the members were able by the variety of their gifts to 
 discharge not only different, but even complementary 
 functions. In Romans xii. and 1 Corinthians xu. 
 
380 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Paul works out in some detail this analogy of the 
 body. There is what may be called a common con- 
 sciousness in this body in the mutual love, interest, 
 sympathy, solicitude of the members for one another. 
 The one Spirit inspiring all in their individual life 
 and work constitutes them not only into an organism 
 of mutually dependent parts, but into a community 
 in which the parts are conscious of their relation to 
 one another in the whole. 
 
 ‘When we ask what made possible this transcend- 
 ence of the divisions so persistent in human society, 
 and this exaltation to conscious unity, characteristics 
 so often and largely absent from the Christian Church 
 in its subsequent history, the answer must be given 
 in the terms of the New Testament; believers were 
 ‘ filled with the Holy Spirit.’ There was a vivid 
 consciousness of the Spirit’s presence and power, and 
 the accompanying intense enthusiasm and abounding 
 energy. The body because of this consciousness of 
 community in the Spirit had a vitality and vigour 
 such as has seldom, alas! marked the history of the 
 Christian Church since. A physical analogy may be 
 of some use here. The form of energy, heat, can 
 be transformed into the form of energy, power, 
 
 which does work, as the steam in the engine. So a. 
 
 high spiritual temperature is a condition of. a_strong 
 
 spiritual activity. “Distinct vision, intense emotion,” 
 
 and vigorous action go together. There must be 
 certainty of truth if there is to be abundance of grace, 
 and abundance of grace is necessary for victorious 
 power. We need to learn the lesson the New Testa- 
 ment 1s fitted to teach us that a cold or a lukewarm 
 
 Church can never rise to the height of its calling ;~it™ 
 must be aglow with conviction and courage. This™> 
 description of the Christian Church of the Apostolic 
 
 Age at its best, as the greatest of the apostles con- 
 ceived it, and as its worthiest members strove to make 
 it, is an ideal which the Christian Church needs to 
 keep before itself in all ages. ) The fullness of the Holy 
 Spirit, and the human certainty, confidence, and con- 
 secration which He inspires, alone can make the Church 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 381 
 
 the society in its unity transcending all that divides 
 men from one another, and in that unity also pre- 
 senting an example of what human society should be 
 as the community of which love is the law. 
 
 (111) In Romans xii. and 1 Corinthians xu. Paul is ad- 
 dressing himself to a church, and it is of a local congre- 
 gation that he uses the analogy of the body, although 
 as is evident the one Church is also present to his mind ; 
 indeed, he probably never made the distinction which 
 the history of the Church has unfortunately compelled 
 us to make. In 1 Corinthians xu. 12 he identifies the 
 body with Christ; it is Christ Himself who is present 
 and active in the one body through all its members filled 
 with the Spirit. In Ephesians i. 22-23 the Church is 
 described as ‘the body of Christ, the fullness of Him 
 that filleth all in all,’ or rather, the fulfilment of Him 
 that fulfilleth all in all, for the conception is not static, 
 but dynamic, not astate, but a process. (We may com- 
 pare John xv. 1-8.) In the activity of the members 
 of the Church, moved and equipped by the Spirit, 
 Christ Himself is active. He has no other organ for 
 the expression of His truth, or the communication of 
 His grace, but the Church. It must be Voice, Hands, 
 and Feet to Him, to speak His words, do His work, and 
 bear His wide-world message. There are religious and 
 moral influences in the world apart from the Church, 
 as the community of the Holy Spirit continuing the 
 historical revelation and redemption; but the dis- 
 tinctively Christian salvation for men is mediated, and 
 ean be mediated only, by the Church. (The reference 
 here is not to any ecclesiastical organisation as the 
 exclusive channel of truth and grace, for we are still 
 dealing with the community of believers.) The moral 
 and religious transformation of mankind can be ac- 
 complished by personal testimony, influence, service, 
 and in no other way. Hence we may say with all 
 reverence that God has willed that the enthronement 
 of Jesus Christ as Head over all things to His Church 
 can only be effected by His Church, which as His body 
 shares, and will still more share, His exaltation. 
 Central as Christ Himself is to the divine purpose in 
 
382 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 nature and history, significant as He is for the inter- 
 pretation of the universe as the manifestation of the 
 perfection of God, essential as He is to the redemption 
 of mankind to become the temple of God, His habi- 
 tation by His Spirit, so as His body His Church is 
 inseparable from Him in His sovereignty. According 
 to the will of God it is also enthroned with Him. 
 The Church is the human society, by which and in 
 which the purpose of God in Christ and through 
 Christ must and shall find its fulfilment. The King- 
 dom of God is the supreme end, but the Church is the 
 essential means. 
 
 (iv) This is the ideal; how far did the actual fall 
 short ? Paul’s letters with their rebukes and ex- 
 hortations show that in the churches there were 
 erievous defects, crying scandals. The moral corrup- 
 tion of paganism and its superstitions affected the 
 new converts. But Paul does not, as we do, dis- 
 tinguish the actual and the ideal; he sees, despite 
 all imperfections, the ideal in the actual. In two 
 respects there was a correspondence of ideal and 
 actual: all Christians were within the community 
 in personal participation in its life and work, and there 
 was unity, despite all differences of previous ante- 
 cedents. Since the Apostolic Age, to the imperfections 
 of experience and character which distinguished the 
 actual from the ideal there have been added these 
 two defects: not all Christians associate themselves 
 with the Church in its witness, worship, and work, 
 and divisions have marred the unity of its testimony, 
 communion, and influence. Hence the Reformers 
 were led to distinguish the invisible Church, the 
 community of all believers, and the visible Church, 
 as represented by Rome.’ We must admit this dis- 
 tinction as a fact; but we should not acquiesce in 
 it as necessary or desirable. Christ meant His Church 
 to be one, embracing all believers, and realising the 
 Christian perfection in all its members, both as visible 
 and invisible. We should no more readily acquiesce 
 in the exclusion of any believer, or the divisions in 
 
 1 Augsburg Conf., vii. ; Calvin’s Inst., iv. 1-10. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 383 
 
 the Church, than in the inconsistency of life of profess- 
 ing Christians. It is surely the will of Christ that 
 the invisible ideal should become the visible actual. 
 _~ (v) Just as soul needs body, so does the Spirit need 
 organs of activity in the world. The community of 
 the Spirit must be expressed in the association of 
 believers with one another for their common ends, 
 in the institutions which will give permanent expres- 
 sion to the purposes. While the inspiration must 
 remain primary, yet organisation is necessary to the 
 effectiveness of the inspiration, and should in char- 
 acter correspond as closely to the inspiration as can 
 be. A distinction is sometimes made between the 
 power and the machinery of the Church in order to 
 depreciate the latter, or, as it is sometimes put, the 
 dynamics and the mechanics. But any such opposi- 
 tion is absurd. Machinery is necessary to make power 
 effective for work : it is only steam in an engine that 
 has driving power. There is undoubtedly the danger 
 of the machinery being more complicated than is 
 needful for the full use of the power available, or the 
 machinery may remain when the power is gone. 
 Organisation may outrun inspiration. In the Apos- 
 tolic Church there was organisation as an effect of the 
 inspiration ; the new soul grew for itself a new body. 
 It was flexible and expansive, not uniform, but 
 adaptable; the intense expectation of the Second 
 Advent in that generation kept organisation in the 
 background. It is doubtful whether, even if the 
 Apostolic Church had had a larger and wider historical 
 prospect, the organisation would have been made 
 more rigid; for the consciousness of possessing the 
 inspiration of the Spirit to meet each emergency as 
 it arose would probably have prevented any un- 
 necessary limitation of the freedom of the Spint. It 
 seems to the writer to be a reading back into the past 
 of the conceptions and interests of a later age to 
 suppose, as Bishop Gore! does, that either Christ 
 Himself or any of the apostles concerned themselves 
 about devising an organisation which would be auth- 
 1 See The Church and the Ministry. 
 
384 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 oritative for all time. It was when the inspiration 
 waned that the organisation waxed. It was in the 
 second century that there were developed the external 
 bonds of unity and continuity in the Christian Church, 
 the Apostolic Rule of Faith, the Collection of Apostolic: 
 Writings, and the Episcopate as an Apostolic Office, 
 which in the earliest period the community of the 
 Spirit rendered less necessary. . 
 (vi) There have thus emerged in the history of the 
 Christian Church two tendencies, which are still 
 dominant to-day, and are the most difficult problem 
 to be solved in the interests of Christian reunion ; 
 they may be described in a general way by the terms 
 Catholic and Protestant, although in churches claiming 
 to be Catholic the Protestant tendency may appear, 
 and in churches named Protestant the Catholic. The 
 contrast is by no means absolute; it 1s one of more 
 or less emphasis, and not of bare affirmation or nega- 
 tion. In the Catholic tendency the need of the Spirit. 
 is not denied, but stress is laid on historical unity and 
 continuity. In the Protestant tendency the need of 
 some organisation is admitted, but the unity and 
 continuity insisted on is one of the indwelling Spirit. 
 The one stands for authority, which may degenerate 
 to tyranny; the other for liberty, which may lapse 
 into licence. In each party there is more acute 
 consciousness of the defects of the other than of its 
 own. Geneva, as it were, charges Rome with tyranny, 
 and Rome Geneva with licence. It is evident that 
 these tendencies are not opposed, but complementary, 
 as human history does not present the picture of a 
 steadily advancing river, but rather of the ebb and 
 flow of the tide. It may have been necessary that 
 in the Jewish nation the scribal age should come after 
 the prophetic to conserve and distribute the moral 
 and religious gains of the prophetic movement. It 
 may have been necessary that Fathers should follow 
 Apostles to secure for all mankind in subsequent ages 
 the apostolic treasures of thought and life. It may 
 have been necessary that the period of subjugation 
 1 Harnack’s History of Dogma, Eng. trans., ii. pp. 18-93. ti 
 
 y 
 
 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 385 
 
 of the new peoples of Europe to the discipline of the 
 Roman Church should prepare for the period of 
 emancipation which has resulted in the many sects 
 of Protestantism. Although prophecy is dangerous, 
 may we not dare to believe that thesis need not always 
 be followed by antithesis, but that there may yet 
 be discovered the synthesis of the two tendencies, 
 Catholic and Protestant ? Attempting to approach the 
 New Testament without prejudice or preference, the 
 writer by his studies has been led to the conviction 
 that the Catholic tendency cannot find justification 
 for the claims it puts forward for a sacrosanct organ- 
 isation bequeathed by Christ and His apostles. The 
 evidence has to be distorted to force the Catholic 
 system back into the Apostolic Age.! If the brief 
 period covered by the New Testament is to be decisive, 
 exclusively authoritative for every subsequent age, 
 then undoubtedly many of the developments in the 
 Church must be condemned as corruptions, as many 
 zealous reformers have done. No Protestant Church, 
 however, can or does reproduce exactly apostolic 
 precepts and practices; and if any make that boast, 
 it is convicted of ignorance of history, for the past 
 cannot thus be reproduced, as changed conditions 
 will affect and thwart any attempt at mere repro- 
 duction. But if Protestantism stands for the unity 
 and the continuity of the Spirit, it needs neither to 
 confess as fault the failure so to reproduce the past, 
 nor to impute blame to Catholicism for any new 
 departures. As in the process of the evolution of the 
 universe there is creation and conservation, so in the 
 history of the Church we may expect the creative 
 and the conservative moments. What needs to be 
 sought and striven for is the reconciliation of these 
 complementary tendencies. Inspiration need not be 
 breaking up organisation, nor organisation be putting 
 bonds on inspiration. As God made His world a 
 sphere of law and order, so will His Spirit in the 
 
 1 See Lightfoot’s ‘ Essay on the Christian Ministry’ in his Philippians ; 
 Hutch’s The Organisation of the Early Christian Churches ; Hort’s The Chris- 
 tian Ecclesia. 
 
 2B 
 
386 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Church sustain authority so far as conservation is 
 needed, and stimulate liberty so far as creation is 
 desirable. It cannot surely be necessary that these 
 tendencies should alternate in history or appear in 
 opposed societies; but what the present hour calls 
 for is the spirit of reconciliation, not of controversy, 
 to approach all differences with a view, not to aggra- 
 vate discord, but to restore harmony. 
 
 (vii) The Catholic may still maintain that a historical 
 unity and continuity is in his judgment necessary, 
 but that does not justify him in refusing a place 
 within the one Church of Jesus Christ to the ministries 
 and sacraments of communions which can show the 
 fruit of the Spirit. The Protestant may still assert 
 that what is alone essential is the community of the 
 Spirit, and yet recognise as desirable that this com- 
 munity be made manifest in the world in the outward 
 organisation, so far as is practicable. If the first 
 refuse this, he is refusing, wittingly or unwittingly, 
 to follow the Spirit’s leading; for where the Spirit is, 
 there the Church is. If the second refuse this, he is 
 refusing that same guidance in history which has 
 shown how much the Church has lost by division, and 
 would gain by unity. On the basis of such mutual 
 recognition in common faith, hope, and love, there 
 could be secured a reunion of comprehension and not — 
 compromise. In the history of the Church three types 
 of polity have appeared, the congregational, the 
 presbyteral, and the episcopal. 
 
 It would be unreasonable to expect the episcopal 
 communions to give up the episcopate, which has 
 had a continuous history in the Church since the 
 second century, and the value of which is estimated 
 highly in the communions which possess it. The 
 corruption of episcopacy—prelacy—the other Chris- 
 tian communions could not be expected to accept, 
 as that would exclude all that is distinctive in their 
 historical witness, and it was against this corruption 
 that their protest was directed. A representative 
 and constitutional episcopate could, however, be com- 
 bined in one polity with presbyteral councils and — 
 
 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 387 
 
 congregational liberty in the essential functions of 
 the Church, the preaching of the Gospel, the obser- 
 vance of the sacraments, and the administration of 
 discipline, as both these types have proved their value 
 in history, and are too highly prized by the com- 
 munions to which they belong to be surrendered. 
 Kach type of polity has a contribution to make to 
 the common good, and until this comprehensive re- 
 union 1s secured each communion should, with charity 
 to all, consistently maintain its own witness. If amid 
 all these divisions the community of the Spirit has 
 persisted, would not the comprehension of differences 
 in this more varied unity make more manifest that 
 community ; and might not the Church, restored to 
 unity, hope for the fullness of life in the Spirit as at 
 Pentecost ? 
 
 (2) Having thus endeavoured to describe the nature 
 
 of the Church as the body of Christ, and the com- 
 munity of the Spirit as the necessary organ of the 
 continuation of the divine revelation and human 
 redemption in Christ, as the human society in which 
 God discloses His nature as Father, Son, and Holy 
 Spirit as well as fulfils His purpose for the world and 
 man, we may now consider the functions of the 
 Church. 
 _~ (i) The charter of the Church is given in the com- 
 -mission in Matthew xxviii. 18-20: ‘ All authority hath 
 been given unto Me in heaven and on earth. Go ye 
 therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, 
 baptizing them into the name of the Father and of 
 the Son and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to 
 observe all things whatsoever I commanded you : 
 and lo, 1 am with you alway, even unto the end of 
 the world.’ Even if, as many scholars now maintain, 
 these words were not literally spoken by the Risen 
 Christ, but express the consciousness of the Church, 
 inspired by His Spirit, of its vocation, their value is 
 undiminished. 
 
 (a) There are here three functions, the preaching of 
 the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments, 
 (although only one is mentioned), and the mainten- 
 
388 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 ance of discipline, the observance of all the things 
 commanded. John Knox in the ‘ Scots Confession ’ 
 of 1560 mentions all three. ‘ The notes of the true 
 Kirk of God, we believe, confess, and avow to be— 
 First, the true preaching of the Word of God, in the 
 which God has revealed Himself to us. Secondly, the 
 right administration of the Sacraments, which must 
 be annexed to the word and promise of God, to seal 
 and confirm the same in our hearts. Lastly, ecclesi- 
 astical discipline uprightly ministered, as God’s Word 
 prescribed, whereby vice is repressed and_ virtue 
 nourished.’ In 1530 Luther and the Saxon Reformers 
 in the ‘ Augsburg Confession’ described the Church 
 as ‘ the congregation of saints (or general assembly of 
 the faithful) wherein the Gospel is rightly taught and 
 the Sacraments are rightly administered.’ Article 
 XIX. of the Church of England runs thus: ‘ The 
 visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful 
 men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, 
 and the Sacraments be duly ministered according 
 to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of 
 necessity are requisite to the same.’ In all these 
 statements the preaching of the Gospel is put in the 
 forefront. Knox’s Confession quite expressly sub- 
 ordinates the Sacraments to the Gospel, as Paul very 
 emphatically did: ‘Christ sent me not to baptize, 
 but to preach the Gospel’ (1 Cor. 1.17). Knox alone 
 adds the maintenance of discipline. If in fulfilment 
 of that function the Reformed Churches often showed 
 more of the legal spirit of the Old Testament than of 
 the gracious spirit of the New, it does not follow that 
 the Christian experience and character of the members 
 of the Church need not be looked after, not with legal 
 severity, but with evangelical solicitude. 
 
 -(b) As the Commission was addressed to the Eleven, 
 it might be maintained that the functions only of 
 the officers of the Church are therein described. But 
 what has been said in the previous paragraphs about 
 the Church as a society makes such a conclusion 
 unjustified. It 1s the whole community of believers 
 to whom spiritual gifts are given, and to whom 
 
 —s,. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 389 
 
 corresponding ministries are entrusted for the common 
 God; all believers are members of the one body, 
 sharing in its life and its work. While there was the 
 universal ministry, there were also special ministries— 
 the apostles, prophets, evangelists or teachers going 
 from church to church, and the elders or bishops and 
 deacons, administering the affairs of the local con- 
 eregation. It was a fluid and not a rigid organisation, 
 although the apostles preserved their unique position. 
 It is evident that whatever equality and liberty of 
 all believers there might be within the community 
 of the Spirit, yet as a visible society the Church 
 needed officers endowed with authority to regulate 
 the life and the work of the society. The functions 
 are committed not to the special ministers exclusively, 
 but to the whole body; and yet, while there is room 
 for abundant and varied individual ministry, what 
 may be called the corporate functions, what is done 
 in the name and by the authority of the whole body 
 cannot be discharged by any member as and when 
 he pleases, but only by those members whom the whole 
 body appoints as its representatives. Accordingly we 
 must recognise in dealing with the functions of the 
 Church the practical necessity of a representative 
 ministry to discharge these functions as corporate, 
 and not only individual. We must not assert a 
 separation of clergy and laity, or a superiority of the 
 one over the other, or still less identify the Church 
 with the clergy, but to recognise the ministry which 
 represents the Church in its corporate functions is 
 not to exalt the minister above the members, but to 
 assert the authority of the Church to determine who 
 shall, as representative of it, discharge these corporate 
 functions. 
 
 (ii) Following the lead of the Confessions of the 
 Reformation, we must put in the forefront of the 
 functions of the Church the preaching of the Gospel. 
 (a) It is regarded by some persons as a proof of their 
 intellectual superiority or their greater devoutness 
 that they depreciate preaching. The preacher cannot 
 say anything good enough to make it worth while 
 
390 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 for them to hear him, or they go to church to worship 
 God and not to hear a man talk. So runs their 
 challenge. So far as the preacher justifies by his 
 intellectual poverty or his spiritual feebleness such 
 a charge, he is failmg in his vocation, and his failure 
 is the Church’s reproach that it does not guard its 
 pulpits more carefully against incompetence. But 
 individual failure does not justify the general attitude. 
 Kivery religion which has been founded by a great 
 religious personality has spread and grown by the 
 preaching of its founder, although that preaching has 
 assumed different forms according to the historical con- 
 ditions. Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed 
 all preached the truth with which they believed them- 
 selves charged. Jesus began His Church by preach- 
 ing to the multitudes and teaching His disciples. It 
 was the preaching of Paul and other apostles which 
 carried Christianity from city to city in the Roman 
 Kimpire. The modern missionary must also preach. 
 Men must believe before they can worship, and they 
 will worship as they believe. Worship without the 
 faith which the truth and grace of Christ, as pro- 
 claimed in the Gospel, awaken, would be a mere 
 formality, and sacraments, unless meaning is given 
 to them by the Gospel, would sink into a magical 
 performance. Ifthe Gospel be a communication from 
 God to men by men, it is not to be despised intellectu- 
 ally ; the man who looks down on the preacher should 
 be prepared to show that the Gospel is not of God, 
 and has not God’s authority over reason and con- 
 science. As speech is the most effective mode of 
 communication among men, God has made it the 
 organ of His revelation, and a better we cannot 
 conceive. When it is maintained that Catholicism 
 prefers sacraments to preaching as a means of grace, 
 and Protestantism preaching to sacraments, we cannot 
 agree that this is merely a question of preference. 
 The Church has decayed when preaching has been 
 neglected ; and religious revival and moral reforma- 
 tion have followed on the restoration of preaching 
 to its foremost place in the functions of the Church. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 391 
 
 What value the sacraments have for devout souls 
 depends on the knowledge they have of the truth and 
 erace of Christ through the Gospel, which enables them 
 in faith to receive Christ Himself in the Eucharist. 
 The sacraments are not depreciated here, as a later 
 paragraph will show, but it is the depreciation of 
 preaching that is deprecated. 
 
 _~ (6) The most effective argument against this de- 
 - preciation is to show what is meant by the preaching 
 of the Gospel. First of all, preaching is not a man 
 talking, giving his own opinions. It is, as Bishop 
 Phillips Brooks defines it, ‘the bringing of truth 
 through personality.’! The personality must be 
 made what he is himself by the truth; and in preach- 
 ing, all he is must be under the dominion of the truth. 
 The personality is a representative of the community, 
 and speaks in its name and with its authority; and 
 therefore only as he is expressing its common faith 
 is he discharging its corporate function. We are here 
 defining the ideal, and not describing the actual. 
 Secondly, the truth is the Gospel. Anglicans often 
 find a difficulty in understanding why English Non- 
 conformists lay such stress on the Gospel, and ask 
 why the stress should not be laid on Christ. If by 
 the Gospel be meant a narrow plan of salvation, a 
 rigid theory of the Atonement, or even any doctrinal 
 statement about the Person and the Work of Christ, 
 this reproach would be justified. One reason why 
 Nonconformists love the word Gospel is that it throws 
 into prominence the evangelical interpretation of 
 Christianity—salvation from sin by the sacrifice of 
 Christ—rather than the metaphysical, the sacramental, 
 or the mystical. But the chief reason is that they 
 believe themselves to be following the usage of Paul 
 in regarding the Gospel not as speech about Christ, 
 but rather as Christ’s speech to men by men. It is 
 true that Christ alone is the power and wisdom of 
 God (1 Cor. i. 24) unto salvation, but He can be most 
 effectually presented to men for their acceptance and 
 appropriation in the preaching of the Gospel. Evan- 
 
 1 Lectures on Preaching, pp. 5-6. 
 
392 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 gelicals have sometimes been too narrow in recognising 
 that to a complete presentation of Christ the other 
 interpretations are also necessary, that He is the Word 
 by whom all things were made (John i. 1-4), that He 
 as the Life of God gives Himself to faith in the sacra- 
 ments when received in faith (vi. 48-51), that He by 
 His Spirit is the presence which brings comfort, peace, 
 and joy within the soul (xv. 1-11). But to the writer 
 they seem altogether right in insisting on these two 
 things, that the Saviourhood by sacrifice is central, 
 essential, crucial, and that the most effective means 
 of exalting Christ so that He may draw all men unto 
 Himself is the preaching of the Gospel (xii. 32). The 
 Gospel is itself sacramental; through the physical 
 activities of speech and hearing the spiritual good of 
 the truth and grace of Jesus Christ is conveyed and 
 received. 
 
 (c) The preaching of the Gospel is here used not in 
 the narrow sense which is sometimes attached to the 
 phrase, but to include all that is done by the Christian 
 Church in the way of instructing and influencing men 
 by presenting the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. 
 The preparatory revelation in the Old Testament and 
 the interpretative revelation in the New are both in- 
 cluded. It is the total reality of the nature, character, 
 and purpose of God, and His relation to man, that is 
 the content of the Church’s message ; and it may use 
 any means of human communication that will prove 
 most efficacious. The theological implications of the 
 Gospel and its social applications, Christian experi- 
 ence and Christian character, must all be dealt with 
 if the whole human personality is to be reached by 
 the whole divine reality. Wide, however, as may be 
 the circumference, there is, and can be, only one centre, 
 Christ as Saviour and Lord; or to change the figure, 
 varied as the body of teaching as presented may 
 appear, it must have one vitalising soul, and that 
 life should be felt in all the parts. In dealing in the 
 succeeding chapters with the Christian life, the Chris- 
 tian hope, the Kingdom of God, we shall be further 
 determining the content of the Church’s message. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 393 
 
 (iii) The sacraments are signs and seals, and may 
 become to the believing recipient channels of grace. 
 (a) It may be that many Protestants have failed to 
 give to the sacraments the place which belongs to 
 them as instituted by Christ Himself, for, despite the 
 challenge by some scholars, the authority for their 
 observance can be traced to Him, and as having 
 served in the Christian Church as a means of spiritual 
 blessing. But the Catholic position, in so far as it 
 detaches their efficacy from the faith of the recipient, 
 and invests them with a mysterious virtue to com- 
 municate the benefits of Christ to the recipients apart 
 from faith, must be regarded as superstitious, as 
 introducing magic rather than mystery. Much is 
 made by Catholics of the sacramental principle, the 
 conveyance of spiritual good by material channels ; 
 and grace is treated as a thing, a medicine and a 
 nourishment of the soul, which can be so conveyed. 
 But what has already been insisted on must here be 
 again affirmed: grace is God’s personal activity in 
 our personal experience and character, and material 
 channels can convey grace only as faith receives and 
 responds to grace. A sunset can convey the beauty of 
 God only as the poet or artist is in contact with God. 
 He for whom God has no meaning or worth may 
 find aesthetic satisfaction, but not spiritual benefit. 
 The sacramental principle, rightly understood, does 
 not justify the claims made for the sacraments of 
 the Church. There are minds in which imagination 
 is more dominant than intellect, to whom a symbol 
 is more persuasive than a syllogism. As many prob- 
 ably are more deeply impressed through the eye than 
 through the ear, sacraments have their distinctive 
 value. But that the writer can explain only psycho- 
 logically as regards their subjective influence, and 
 not metaphysically as regards their objective efficacy. 
 God cannot give us anything more or better than 
 Christ as Saviour and Lord, than His Spirit as dwelling 
 and working in our inner life ; and in this respect what 
 other can the sacrament offer than does the Gospel ? 
 The difference is surely subjective in the apprehension 
 
394 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 of the recipient, not objective in the communication 
 by the Giver. The writer has never yet been able to 
 get from those who make these claims for the sacra- 
 ments of a mysterious virtue an answer to him in- 
 telligible of what the difference is, wherein lies the 
 superiority of the sacraments. Bread and wine can 
 claim no higher quality materially than the air which 
 conveys the sound, and the latter is even more vital 
 than the former; and eating and drinking are not 
 better than speaking and hearing as physical activities. 
 As Christ commanded the preaching and hearing of 
 the Gospel no less than the observance of the sacra- 
 ments, their superiority cannot lie in their being of 
 His appointment. As-one baptized in childhood, the 
 writer cannot bear witness to what the experience of 
 baptism may mean to those for whom it is the seal 
 of a public confession of Christ. For Paul it.meant 
 very much, and He assumed that it would mean as 
 much for other believers (Rom. vi. 1-11). Of the 
 ordinance of the Lord’s Supper the writer can speak 
 from experience; it has been to him a means of grace, 
 enabling him to realise more vividly the presence of 
 Christ, to receive in faith the gifts of His grace, and 
 to respond in aspiration, contrition, and consecration 
 to the constraint of His love as shown in His sacrifice. 
 Far be it from him to depreciate the use of the sacra- 
 ments as a means of grace; but what he cannot 
 understand is how the sacraments can be regarded 
 as superior to the Gospel spoken and heard as bringing 
 Christ near, and making Him more real to faith. 
 That God’s contact with us passes our comprehension, 
 that communion with Him becomes indescribable, 
 that a symbol may seem less inadequate to the in- 
 effable than a definition—all this may be fully con- 
 ceded; but what cannot be admitted is that the 
 personal relation of God and man can be mediated 
 more effectively by material channels than by the 
 channel of the Gospel in which Christ is presented to 
 reason, conscience, heart. 
 
 (6) On the question of baptism there is a cleavage 
 of opinion. The great majority of Christian com- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 395 
 
 munions have adopted the practice of infant baptism, 
 while all over the world there is a numerous and 
 important communion which rejects infant baptism, 
 and insists on believers’ baptism (not adult baptism 
 only, for a boy or girl may be baptized as soon as a 
 personal confession of faith can be intelligently made). 
 Baptism by sprinkling is the more common practice, 
 while most Baptists insist on immersion. The ques- 
 tion of mode is of quite secondary importance. That 
 immersion was the probable mode in the Apostolic 
 Church may be conceded; but the Christian Church 
 need not be bound as regards the outward form. A 
 more important issue is raised by infant baptism. 
 The Apostolic Church as missionary grew by the 
 addition of converts, who were baptized on confession 
 of faith. There is no conclusive evidence that when 
 the baptism of a household is mentioned in Acts 
 (e.g. xvi. 15, 32-34), any children were included. It 
 has been argued, however, that it would have been 
 in accordance with Jewish custom, which treated the 
 family as a unit, that children should be baptized 
 with their parents, and that the way in which Paul 
 writes about the relation of parents and children 
 justifies such an assumption. Be that as it may, 
 infant baptism can be justified on broader grounds. 
 The children born and bred, taught and trained within 
 a Christian home are not to be regarded, as Jews or 
 Gentiles could be in the Apostolic Age, as outside of 
 the Christian community. They are within its range 
 of influence, and may be expected to respond in a 
 eradual development, guided and guarded by the 
 erace of Christ, mediated by their Christian environ- 
 ment till they can themselves consciously and volun- 
 tarily receive that grace for themselves in personal 
 trust, love, and obedience towards Jesus Christ. The 
 parents in their dedication of their children in bringing 
 them to be baptized, and the Church in administering 
 the ordinance, enter into a mutual pledge to make that 
 environment so Christian that the development shall 
 at each stage be Christian. Recent psychological 
 inquiry has shown the value of such srowth in grace, 
 
396 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 and in the knowledge and love of the Lord Jesus Christ 
 from the earliest years. This is in many Churches 
 probably the more general experience than that of 
 conscious conversion. Christian faith is reinforced by 
 Christian hope in the expectation that the prophetic 
 ordinance will find its fulfilment in the after life of 
 the child. The ordinance declares symbolically both 
 that the child belongs to a race that needs cleansing 
 from sin, and that there is grace available for every 
 child born into that race, and further that this grace 
 can not only be made effective in immediate personal 
 relation to Christ, but can be mediated through the 
 influence of a Christian environment. The two in- 
 cidents which may -be reckoned amongst the most 
 beautiful in the Gospels—Jesus receiving the babes 
 and blessing them, and Jesus setting the child in the 
 midst (Matt. xix. 13-15 and xviii. 1-6)—afford ample 
 warrant for such a view of His relation to children. 
 If not according to the letter of the Apostolic Age, 
 infant baptism is assuredly according to the Spirit 
 of Christ. What is here stated is not the Catholic 
 doctrine of baptismal regeneration. The ordinance 
 works no hidden miracle. But in accord with the 
 recognised conditions of the child’s growth, Christian 
 influences may guard and guide the child in the 
 Christian way. Against this doctrine the Baptist 
 protest was justified. The practice of believers’ bap- 
 tism has also its full justification. There are many 
 Christian lives which begin with a conscious conversion; 
 there may be a deliberate and voluntary turning from 
 darkness to God’s ‘ marvellous light,’ a passing in a 
 crisis of the soul from death in sin unto life in God. 
 In such an experience the mode of immersion has 
 symbolical appropriateness (Rom. vi. 1-11). Such 
 conversion, even apparently sudden, is no less real 
 than the gradual development: and the two kinds 
 of baptism represent these two types of experience. 
 Should there be a reunion of churches—Baptist and 
 Non-Baptist—this might be the basis, that that form 
 shall be followed which best represents the individual’s 
 position, whether born in a Christian home, or con- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 397 
 
 verted. While the child born within the Christian 
 community cannot enter into full fellowship until 
 confession is made in seeking membership, until by 
 personal decision the dedication of infancy is con- 
 firmed, it would be well if there were an ordinance 
 to mark that stage; the writer believes that con- 
 firmation, which in the Apostolic Church followed 
 baptism, should be generally accepted, even in non- 
 episcopal churches, as it need not be reserved for 
 administration by the bishop. In believers’ baptism 
 confirmation might at once follow on baptism. Thus 
 would be affirmed the truth that baptism stands not 
 only for cleansing but also for renewal by the Spirit 
 of God, that the life in the Christian Church is a Spirit- 
 filled life. Attaching the importance which the writer 
 himself does to the full recognition of the Spirit’s 
 presence and action, such an ordinance as confirmation 
 would appear to him not an empty form, but a most 
 significant witness to a reality too much ignored. 
 
 (c) There does not seem adequate reason for accept- 
 ing the contention of a few scholars that Christ Himself 
 did not institute the ordinance of the Eucharist as of 
 permanent obligation in the Church. Without enter- 
 ing on disputed critical questions, it is not at all likely 
 that Paul, great as was his authority, could have 
 imposed a new practice for which Christ’s command 
 could not be claimed. What more beautiful and 
 gracious than that He should desire to be remembered 
 by His followers in His sacrificial, redemptive grace, 
 whenever they met together for their fellowship in 
 Him? Itis one of the tragedies of the Christian Church 
 that this rite, intended to be a bond of union, has 
 become a cause of division. The Roman Catholic 
 doctrine of transubstantiation involves both a meta- 
 physic and a conception of the Person of Christ which 
 is unintelligible and incredible to those who think in 
 modern ways. The Lutheran doctrine of consub- 
 stantiation, which denies that the elements are changed 
 into the body and blood of Christ, and yet maintains 
 that blood and body are given in, with, and under 
 the elements is also, if less, objectionable, and led the 
 
398 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Lutheran scholastics into a Christology which is a maze 
 
 of absurdities. On the other hand, the view to which 
 many Protestants commit themselves, that the ordin- 
 ance is only a commemoration of the death of Christ, 
 and that the elements are only symbols of His sacrifice, 
 
 is quite inadequate to the experience which many — 
 
 Protestant believers, among whom the writer reckons 
 himself gratefully and gladly, enjoy as they sit, the 
 Lord’s guests, at His table. This is the conception 
 to which the writer has himself been led. First of all, 
 it would be well to banish the ideas of material flesh 
 and blood, even if glorified, as that leads us into a 
 
 region of profitless speculation. Secondly, it would — 
 
 be well to avoid speaking of the spiritual presence 
 of Christ as excluding a corporeal. If the Resurrec- 
 tion means anything, it means that the whole person- 
 ality of Christ conquered death, and has entered into 
 the unseen world, not with the natural but with the 
 spiritual body. We know nothing of the conditions 
 to which such a spiritual body is subject, and specula- 
 tions are vain. We must not then affirm a corporeal 
 presence, neither are we entitled to exclude it. Let 
 
 us be content with saying that it is the whole Christ — 
 in all the fullness of His grace who is present. The — 
 
 ordinance then is not merely commemoration of an 
 absent Saviour and Lord, it is communion with One 
 who is present. But just as the communion of two 
 
 loving human hearts is dependent on and sustained — 
 
 by the common life of the past days, so surely into 
 the communion with Christ enters the remembrance 
 
 of all He suffered and achieved for our salvation. Ags q 
 
 we remember all our salvation cost, as well as all our 
 salvation won, we realise the Saviour with us. Just 
 as in a human communion which has any worth, each 
 loving heart communicates to the others whatever it 
 has to give, so assuredly the present Christ bestows 
 gifts on the believer as there is faith to receive. 
 Hence the ordinance is more than symbolical; for 
 as the faith which in commemoration and communion 
 receives the communications of the present Christ, it 
 is surely a channel of grace. To the writer it seems 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 399 
 
 that the stress should be laid, not on the elements, but 
 on the acts; for the elements are material, and as such 
 have no spiritual quality, but the acts are personal, 
 and so can express a spiritual content. It is the 
 giving and the receiving which express divine grace 
 and human faith, and as symbols may accompany 
 what they signify. Christ may be giving Himself, and 
 may be received by the believer, as the bread is broken 
 and the cup passed. What response can faith make 
 to such grace besides receiving it? Surely consecra- 
 lion is what the believer brings as his thank-offering 
 for the atoning sacrifice. It is a pity that the term 
 Eucharist is so often associated with the sacramen- 
 talist view, for what it means is thanksgiving. In 
 Scotland the term Sacrament is commonly used of 
 the Lord’s Supper; that too expresses dedication, 
 the renewal of the vows of devotion and _ service. 
 Such an experience in observing the ordinance surely 
 yields all the religious and moral good that any 
 sacramentalist theory could claim for the special 
 grace conveyed in sacraments. 
 
 (d) There is one aspect of the sacraments which 
 very often does not get the attention which it deserves. 
 The sacraments are social acts, the acts of the Chris- 
 tian community through its representatives in their 
 administration. The Lord’s Supper is still more dis- 
 tinctively social, as it is a common meal in which 
 the members of the Church enter into fellowship with 
 one another in their communion with the one Saviour 
 and Lord of all. Hence it seems a departure from 
 the intention that baptism is sometimes administered 
 in a private house, or at an after-service. It ought 
 to be part of the regular worship, the welcome by the 
 whole Christian community into the circle of its moral 
 and religious influence, for baptism is an initiation 
 into the Christian society. So also the administration 
 of the Eucharist by the officiating minister to each 
 communicant separately seems much less significant 
 than when the elements are passed from hand to hand, 
 each receiving and each giving, for it is surely in the 
 mutual helpfulness of the members of the Church in 
 
400 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 the things of the Spirit that the grace of Christ is 
 mediated, as well as by His immediate gift to each. 
 To be introduced into and to maintain one’s standing 
 within the community, which is the body of Christ, 
 is a condition of enjoying fully the gifts of the Spirit. 
 As God is Father of all, Christ is Saviour of all, and 
 the Spirit works and dwells in all; and as the supreme 
 law is love, to ignore the social aspect of these sacra- 
 ments as marking entrance into and continuance in 
 fellowship is to narrow and impoverish the Christian 
 experience and character. There is a further con- 
 sideration which follows from this. As there is only 
 one Church of Jesus Christ, it is a loss incalculable 
 that there is not fullest and freest intercommunion 
 among the Churches. A grave responsibility is as- 
 sumed by those who set up barriers between Christians 
 approaching the same Table of the Lord, unless con- 
 science inexorably forbids, and the writer cannot 
 understand how the Christian conscience can forbid, 
 while cherishing respect for the scruples of others. 
 One of the worthiest motives of the movement towards 
 reunion is just the desire that all Christians should 
 be able, without let or hindrance, in love to one 
 another to remember the love of the Saviour in dying, 
 and to receive more fully the love of the Living Lord. 
 Thus best of all could the spiritual unity of the Church 
 be made visible to the world. 
 
 (iv) The term discipline, which John Knox used 
 to describe the third function of the Church, suggests 
 law rather than love, and belongs to a fashion of 
 thought in which the Old Testament was held as of 
 equal authority with the New, so that the distinctive- 
 ness of the Christian Gospel found inadequate re- 
 cognition. We should rather use the phrase ‘ the 
 cure of souls,’ the interest in and the solicitude for 
 the Christian character and experience of the members 
 of the Church, which not only the minister should 
 show, but which should be mutual among the members. 
 This does not mean uncharitable interference, prying 
 into and calling attention to the faults of others, a 
 grievous defect which has been found in small fellow- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 401 
 
 ships. But it does mean the desire and the purpose 
 that the light shall shine, and that the salt shall not 
 lose its savour. A merely official supervision of the 
 conduct of members is not adequate; there must be 
 heart-interest, and loving effort to help one another 
 in fulfillimg the Christian calling. Except in very 
 flagrant lapses which even the common conscience 
 condemns, formal suspension from membership is 
 undesirable and impracticable ; and even with notori- 
 ous offenders there should be the patience of love, 
 doing all that can be done to restore. For the primary 
 consideration is not the reputation of the Church for 
 the severity of its standards, as was sometimes thought, 
 but the duty of the followers of Christ to follow Him 
 in seeking in order to save the lost. What, however, 
 is the obligation of each Church is by its testimony and 
 its influence to maintain the highest Christian stand- 
 ards both of religious experience and of moral char- 
 acter. The preacher, if his preaching is not to be 
 vain, must embody the truth he teaches in the tale 
 of his own life. The pastoral function of the Christian 
 ministry is often depreciated in comparison with his 
 preaching and administrative activities; but while 
 the cure of souls is not entrusted to him alone, he has 
 a special responsibility to come into personal contact 
 with all committed to his charge, and to make his 
 own personality as fully a channel of the gifts of the 
 Spirit as he can. Only as the members of the Church 
 suffer and rejoice together, does it become the local 
 manifestation and activity of the One Church, the 
 body of Christ, the community of the Spirit. 
 
 (3) In the New Testament conception of the Church 
 as a body, it is assumed that all the members have 
 some gift of the Spirit, which enables them to share 
 in its ministry, discharging the function which corre- 
 sponds with the spiritual endowment. But, as has 
 already been mentioned, there was also recognised 
 the inspired ministry of the itinerant preachers and 
 teachers, and the officers of the local church. 
 
 (i) Although the history is obscure, the local 
 ministry in due time took over the function of the 
 
 Ap & 
 
402 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 itinerant, and one of the elders (presbyters) became 
 bishop of the local church (primus inter pares), and 
 thus the three orders of bishops, presbyters, and 
 deacons came to be. In Ignatius the bishop is the 
 bond of unity in the Church; in Irenaeus he is the 
 custodian, because of his representative character, 
 of the apostolic tradition preserved in his Church, if 
 regarded as of apostolic foundation. It is only in 
 Cyprian that the sacerdotal ideas of the Old Testa- 
 ment and paganism begin to affect the conception of 
 the ministry, and the bishop comes to be invested 
 with an authority as the local organ of the universal 
 Church, which had not been claimed for him as the 
 representative of the local Church. Into this develop- 
 ment it is not necessary to enter further. Although 
 the writer belongs to a non-episcopal Church, and feels 
 no need of the bishop, yet for the sake of the reunion 
 of the Christian Churches he is quite prepared to 
 accept the episcopate, yet not a prelatic, but a con- 
 stitutional and representative, such as has developed 
 in Anglican communions outside of England. Such 
 an episcopate can be combined with all that is essential 
 in the other types of polity, the presbyteral and the 
 congregational. It would appear that the one func- 
 tion which the High Anglican feels compelled to 
 reserve for the bishop is that of ordination, although 
 a participation of presbyters is accepted; whether 
 confirmation should also be so reserved is a question 
 on which there seems to be greater difference of | 
 opinion. The practice of episcopacy without any 
 theory could be accepted by the non-episcopal Churches 
 to end the scandal of a divided Christendom. The 
 writer feels bound to reject the theory of the * apostolic 
 succession ’ in the episcopate, and of the sacerdotal 
 character of the ministry. The New Testament knows 
 neither of these theories. The unity and continuity 
 of the Church does not depend on any succession of 
 its officers, but on the continued presence and activity 
 of Christ by His Spirit, and there is only one Mediator 
 between God and man—the Saviour and the Lord. 
 (ii) The constructive doctrine of the ministry may 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 403 
 
 now be stated. (a) A view not uncommon among 
 English Nonconformists may at once be dismissed. 
 The minister is not just one of the members who is 
 paid by the other members to make his preaching, 
 organising, and visiting ‘a whole-time job.’ In their 
 revolt against Anglicanism, English Nonconformists 
 have often denied what is itself true, and rejected 
 what is itself right. The Christian people is the 
 Spirit-filled body, and each member can have im- 
 mediate access to God, and discharge such individual 
 services in the fellowship as the Spirit’s gifts enable 
 him. ‘There are, however, corporate functions of the 
 local Church, the conduct of its worship, the adminis- 
 tration of its sacraments, the declaration of its Gospel, 
 the confession of its faith, the direction of its common 
 activities, which cannot be left to any individual 
 member to be discharged as and when he pleases. 
 The Church must have a representative, chosen, called, 
 equipped, and appointed for the discharge of these 
 corporate functions. This the minister is. He has 
 no authority apart from the Church; he derives his 
 authority in the name and on behalf of the Church, 
 from the Church; but his authority is not that of one 
 of the members only, but that of the representative 
 of all the members, and in respecting him the members 
 show their reverence for the fellowship of believers 
 of which he is the representative. 
 
 (b) A position so responsible and influential demands 
 ‘special qualifications. The first of these, which is 
 rightly insisted on in many communions as primary, 
 is that the man has the consciousness of the call of 
 God to dedicate himself to this service. The call 
 may come in a personal crisis, in which necessity is 
 laid upon him: ‘ Woe is unto me if I preach not the 
 Gospel’ (1 Cor. 1x. 16). Or the conviction may 
 eradually be deepened that this is the will of God for 
 him. But however the call may come, no man 
 should take this office unto himself. It is not a 
 profession a man may accept or refuse; it is a voca- 
 tion which he can only obey. A man is not, however, 
 the best judge of his own fitness; and accordingly 
 
404 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 it is necessary that the inward call be confirmed by 
 the approval of those competent to judge. The 
 minister and members of the church to which a 
 candidate for the ministry belongs should kindly, 
 and yet wisely and justly, test his fitness before 
 recommending him to go on to get the further neces- 
 sary educational equipment. Experience has con- 
 clusively proved that natural gifts, without rigorous 
 training, are not enough ; accordingly, most denomina- 
 tions insist on a theological course, although the re- 
 quirements vary almost incredibly. This is not the 
 place to sketch an ideal course; but what must be 
 insisted on is, that in the long run the more thorough 
 the training the more efficient the service afterwards 
 is likely to be. It must be practical as well as theo- 
 retical, so that the minister can use most effectively 
 in preaching, or any other function, the knowledge 
 which he has gathered. It is the responsibility, again, 
 of the authorities of the theological college, not only 
 on entrance, but also throughout the course, to be 
 constantly testing fitness, and to turn aside from the 
 ministry any man manifestly unfit. If a man thus 
 shows himself unfit, we may conclude that he was 
 mistaken in thinking himself called, and his unfitness 
 warrants the assumption that he was likely to be 
 mistaken. If he prove his fitness, that itself justifies 
 the confidence of himself and others that he has 
 indeed been called. Should a man stand the test of — 
 the theological course, his acceptableness must be | 
 tested by those to whom he seeks to minister. Im- 
 perfect as is the method of choosing a minister in 
 many churches, and inadequate as the grounds often 
 are on which the choice is made, yet there seems to 
 be no other way of giving effect to the principle that 
 it is not apart from the church, but through it, that 
 any man can become its minister. Cana man imposed 
 on a church fulfil this vocation as acceptably as he 
 whom a church has itself chosen? If the Church be 
 the body of Christ, and as such Spirit-filled, what 
 organ more fitted for the discharge of this responsi- 
 bility can be conceived ? In this call of the Church ~ 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 405 
 
 the inward call finds its final confirmation. May it 
 not then be said that God gives to the church the 
 minister chosen by it ? 
 
 (c) As the local congregation is but a local mani- 
 festation and activity of the one Church, although 
 that one Church is divided into denominations, the 
 ministry thus begun is wider than that of a local 
 congregation. The man is called to be a minister 
 of Jesus Christ for His universal Church; and ordina- 
 tion is the method by which since the Apostolic times 
 a man is set apart to this ministry. To him who 
 receives this ordinance worthily in aspiration, con- 
 secration, and dependence, the symbol of the Spirit’s 
 endowment will also become the channel; and he will 
 receive a gift to fit him more fully for his calling. As 
 ecclesiastical barriers to the exercise of this universal 
 ministry still exist, the local congregation will seek 
 to be associated with the other churches of its order 
 at least in this ordinance. A man may be inducted 
 to the pastorate of a church in a denomination, but 
 his ordination means, and cannot but mean, that he 
 becomes a minister of Jesus Christ in His Church. 
 The insistence in episcopal churches on ordination 
 by a bishop now hinders the recognition of the fact 
 that ordination is not to a congregation or a de- 
 nomination, but to the universal Church. How this 
 difficulty will be removed does not yet appear, but a 
 step towards it has been taken by the recognition by 
 representative Anglicans that the Free Churches of 
 Kingland have a ministry of the Word and the Sacra- 
 ments within the one universal Church of Christ. 
 The practical consequences of such a position have 
 yet to be drawn. | 
 
 (d) Experience can be here set against theory. 
 Ministers in non-episcopal churches have at their 
 ordination been conscious of the presence of the Head 
 of the Church laying His invisible hands upon them, 
 breathing upon them His Spirit. That ineffable 
 experience they dare not doubt nor deny, and with 
 all the faults and failures which they contritely confess 
 their subsequent ministry has in some measure at 
 
406 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 least fulfilled the promise of that solemn and sacred 
 hour: it has not been altogether without the fruit of 
 the Spirit. To them their ordination has proved a 
 valid sacrament; and they cannot conceive the 
 possibility of being re-ordained in order that some- 
 thing might be added of authority to their ministry 
 that 1t does not by the gift of Christ already possess. 
 The life and work of the minister after his ordination 
 is a continued test, and, if the test be met, a repeated 
 confirmation of the call of God. The insufficiency 
 of his fulfilment of his calling he may need to confess 
 constantly, but of the reality of his vocation his 
 experience in his ordination may reassure him in times 
 of disappointment and despondency. This view of 
 ordination assumes no mysterious value in the ordin- 
 ance itself, only that for divine grace and human 
 faith the symbolic act may be the occasion of a real 
 imparting and a real receiving of the gifts of the 
 Spirit. Having been begun in the Spirit, the ministry 
 must be continued in the Spirit ; and it is only by a 
 ministry dowered with the enthusiasm and energy 
 of Pentecost that the Church can, amid all that tends 
 to lessen its vitality and vigour in the world, prove 
 itself the body of Christ, the visible organ of His 
 presence and activity, by becoming to the world the 
 channel of the enlightening, quickening, and renewing 
 Spirit of God. Thus the Church, the Ministry, the 
 Gospel may be to the world sacramental, conveying 
 the life of God to men.} 
 
 (4) The definitions of the Church in the Protestant 
 Confession omit one of its functions which to-day is 
 regarded as of primary importance. 
 
 (1) The conception of the Kingdom of God had 
 fallen into the background. It was Roman Catholi- 
 cism which after the Reformation carried on foreign 
 mission work: for the most part Protestantism 
 ignored and neglected the Great Commission to 
 ‘make disciples of all the nations’ (Matt. xxviii. 
 
 * These questions about church, sacraments, ministry, and ordination have 
 been discussed in a volume of essays, Towards Reunion, by Church of England 
 and Free Church writers. 
 
 SS - 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 407 
 
 19). It was only at the beginning of last century 
 that the foreign missionary campaigns captured the 
 allegiance of the Churches generally. The parable 
 of the growth of the kingdom from the small seed 
 to the great plant only then again came into the 
 living thought of Christian men (Matt. xiii, 31-32). 
 Still less was the lesson of the parable of the leaven 
 (v. 33) appreciated. Lutheranism taught that a man 
 may attain Christian perfection by faith in God and 
 the fulfilment of his earthly calling, and denied that 
 the monastic life was the distinctively ‘ religious ’ 
 life. But from the beginning it has been too prone 
 to acquiesce in the things that are as ‘ ordained of 
 God’; and has failed to be a motive to social reform. 
 Calvin did recognise the duty of the Church to re- 
 mould human society to the pattern of the will of 
 God, but unfortunately he interpreted that will in 
 commands of law and not a purpose of love. While 
 during last century the missionary obligation was 
 more generally recognised, the social obligation of 
 the Church was to a large extent overlooked. In- 
 dividualism dominated thought and life in the Church 
 as well as in the world around. With the exception 
 of a few pioneer thinkers, most Christian teachers 
 took for granted that all the Church owed to society 
 around was by the cultivation of individual character 
 to fit men to take a worthy Christian part in the world’s 
 affairs. That it had a corporate function by its testi- 
 mony and influence towards society to transform its 
 standards, customs, and institutions in accordance 
 with the mind of Christ was a conviction which only 
 very gradually won its way. The Conference on 
 Christian Politics, Economics, and Citizenship, held 
 in April 1924 in Birmingham, marks a stage in the 
 Church’s progress. 
 
 (11) In the saying about the Church in Matthew xvi. 
 18, Peter is entrusted with the ‘ keys of the kingdom 
 of heaven.’ This phrase is generally regarded as a 
 symbol for stewardship. The concerns of the Kingdom 
 are to be the charge of the Church. We need not 
 now discuss the attempt to impose an exclusively 
 
408 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 eschatological sense on the term the Kingdom of God 
 or heaven. Whether the word Baoweta means rule 
 or realm makes little difference to the sense of the 
 phrase. The Kingdom of God is God’s sovereignty 
 in human society, in all realms of human interest or 
 activity. How can it be distinguished from the 
 Chureh, and what is the relation of the Church to it ? 
 The Church is the community of the Spirit, the body 
 of Christ ; it is distinctively the religious society, it is 
 concerned with man’s conscious and voluntary rela- 
 tion to God in Christ. The Kingdom, on the other 
 hand, brings all human relations under the authority 
 and direction of the purpose of God. Morality, in- 
 dustry, art, science, culture, and civilisation are all 
 concerns of the Kingdom. The mission of the Church 
 is first of all to bring all men into this personal relation 
 to God, and then to make this personal relation 
 dominant in all other relations. The Church wins 
 men to God, and then through them seeks to win all 
 human life for God. Ritschl’s conception is some- 
 what narrower. As worshipping, the Christian com- 
 munity is the Church; as fulfilling the law of love, 
 and thus changing human society, it is the Kingdom.! 
 There are men outside of the Church who are furthering 
 the interests of the Kingdom, and there are members 
 of the Church who fall very far short in meeting the 
 demands of the Kingdom. When all men are drawn 
 into personal relation to Ged in Christ, a hope we must 
 cherish, Church and Kingdom will be co-extensive ; 
 all in the Kingdom will be in the Church also. When 
 all who are in the Church are realising the ideal of 
 the Kingdom, will the Church and the Kingdom be 
 identical ? Even then the two conceptions will re- 
 main distinguishable as the distinctively religious and 
 the universally human aspect of God’s relation to 
 man. We must not regard the Church as only a 
 means towards the Kingdom as an end, because the 
 personal relation to God is an essential element in 
 the human good which the term Kingdom of God 
 describes ; it is a part and a necessary part of the end, 
 * Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, p. 7. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 409 
 
 and yet it is also a means by which the whole end must 
 be reached. 'To emphasise the priority of the personal 
 relation to God is at all times necessary, but not less 
 necessary is it to insist that this personal relation is 
 itself incomplete until it dominates the whole of life. 
 This is the Church’s double task, to win disciples, and 
 through them to hasten the Kingdom of God. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 (1) So individualistic has Protestant Christianity 
 become that it may seem strange that the subject 
 of Christian Life is being treated after, and not before 
 that of the Christian Church ; and yet that is not only 
 the historical, but also the theological order. A 
 number of isolated individuals do not come together 
 to form the society ; the society gathers individuals 
 into its fellowship. » The Church is based not on any 
 human intentions in time, but on the eternal purpose 
 of God. Related as it is to human history, it is 
 not a product of any human development; it was 
 established on earth by Jesus the Christ our Lord in 
 fulfilment of the purpose of God; it is sustained not 
 merely by human volitions, but by the presence and 
 power of the Head, who by His Spirit is the bond of 
 unity. For Christ alone was the relation of Son to 
 God as Father unmediated by heredity or environ- 
 ment; His alone was an immediate communion with 
 God; for all Christians the relation to God is mediated 
 by His grace. Even the first disciples discovered and 
 confessed His Messiahship in companionship with 
 Him and with one another. Since His Ascension His 
 invisible Presence and intangible Power is mediated 
 by the Christian society. It is His body, and His 
 Spirit is its common possession. Accordingly, the 
 Christian life must be thought of as dependent on 
 and realised within the Christian society. The truth 
 and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ come to the in- 
 dividual through the Christian Church, and it is in 
 its membership that he can more fully experience 
 and express that truth and grace. It is not to an 
 isolated relation to Himself that Christ calls in His 
 410 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 411 
 
 Gospel, and draws by His Spirit, but to a relation 
 which can be received and realised only in fellowship 
 within the Christian society. As the fullness of the 
 Godhead dwells in Him bodily (Col. ii. 9), not only 
 in. His personal incarnation, but even now in His 
 continued incarnation in the Church, the habitation 
 of the Spirit, it is as a member of that body that the 
 believer receives of that fullness, and grace for grace. 
 If in the believer’s consciousness the body be confined 
 to the congregation to which he belongs, or even to 
 the denomination to which he adheres, how much is 
 his life impoverished, because he does not discern 
 the whole body (1 Cor. x1. 29), the unity of all believers, 
 the communion of all the saints in the one Spirit! It 
 is from the one Church the individual receives the 
 oifts of Christ; it is in the one Church he makes full 
 use of these gifts. 
 
 (2) The relation of the Christian life to the Christian 
 Church as mediated by it and realised in it having 
 thus been defined, its characteristics may now be 
 described. 
 
 (1) While in the pearl of great price (Matt. xi. 45- 
 46) the worth of all the goodly pearls is not only 
 recovered but enhanced, or, to speak without meta- 
 phor, while in the relation to Christ all human needs 
 can be met, all human interests preserved, and all 
 human aspirations fulfilled, while the human ideals 
 of truth, beauty, holiness, and love can in the Christian 
 life be realised (Phil. iv. 8), yet Christianity is not to 
 be thought of as first of all and most of all perfective 
 of all that is good in man: it is that, all that, but it 
 is more, for it meets the human extremity as a religion 
 which could only perfect the good could not; it is 
 redemptive, reconciling, restorative. Jesus did not 
 so to the respectable morally and religiously—the 
 scribes and Pharisees—-who deeming themselves right- 
 eous did not own their need of salvation; but He 
 became the companion of the sinners and the outcasts 
 of Jewish society, for not only great was their need, 
 but they might be more readily brought to a sense of 
 their need (Mark ii. 16, 17). Whether in a sinless 
 
412 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 world there would have been an Incarnation or not 
 is a speculative inquiry, which the writer himself 
 would answer affirmatively. But the Incarnation as 
 it was, was in all its activities and results redemptive; 
 it was God’s dealing with sin that He might put an 
 end to sin. He who has no sense of sin, and feels no 
 need of forgiveness, offers no points of contact for the 
 truth and grace of Christ. He compels Christ to leave 
 him alone, as He did the ‘ righteous’ of His own 
 earthly ministry. 
 
 (ii) Hence the first characteristic of Christian ex- 
 perience is penitence, not only a feeling of regret at 
 the sin committed, but also a judgment of its un- 
 mitigated moral evil, and a resolve to be done with it : 
 a man must put away in aversion the evil of which he 
 is ashamed, and for which he grieves. The emotional 
 intensity of this experience is no measure of its moral 
 reality, for that depends on temperament; what 
 alone determines the value is the degree in which the 
 sin is denied and renounced. The theology of a 
 former age demanded ‘law-work’ before ‘ Gospel- 
 work ’; it required the sinner to discover at Sinai the 
 sin of which Calvary offered the forgiveness. But 
 this was a legal and not an evangelical standpoint. 
 Calvary is God’s clearest exposure and severest con- 
 demnation of sin; for resistance of love is far more 
 heinous than defiance of law. Sin as disobedience 
 of law is not the distinctively Christian judgment of 
 it; it is sin as distrust of love which is in the Christian 
 view the greater wrong to God. It is not the trans- 
 gression of commandments which will concern the 
 Christian penitent most of all; it is the withholding 
 from God of filial confidence and submission, for 
 estrangement of heart is the inner motive of perver- 
 sion of will. It is the Saviour in His teaching and 
 example, His grace towards sinners, His sacrifice on 
 the Cross, who makes the conscience sensitive to the 
 sin in the inward parts, and brings about a penitence 
 which is the ending of the old life and the beginning 
 of the new. 
 
 (111) This experience will not be exactly the same 
 
 4 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 413 
 
 for the man who turns from a life of sin and unbelief 
 to God in a conscious conversion, and the child or the 
 youth who from earliest years has received and re- 
 sponded to Christian influences. Yet even he whose 
 life has been in the judgment of men blameless must 
 have a sense of shortcoming, of failure always to 
 be the best which he knows, and wishes himself to be. 
 Some who have been Christian from their earliest 
 years do pass through a crisis, in which they realise 
 acutely how far short they have fallen, and resolve 
 more strenuously and persistently to fulfil their Chris- 
 tian calling. This penitence is not a solitary act in 
 the Christian life; it is rather a constant process. 
 All unreality is abhorrent in the Christian life, and a 
 man must not charge himself with positive trans- 
 eressions of which he is not guilty, and of which it 
 may be he is morally incapable. By the grace of 
 Christ a man may be enabled to live a life without 
 moral reproach; and yet if he scrutinises himself 
 in the searching light of the moral glory of Jesus 
 Christ he will ever have a sense of imperfection. 
 Even if the good purpose is dominant in his acts, 
 and these acts spring from a pure motive—love to 
 God and love to man—he must ever feel that he has 
 not yet apprehended all for which he was apprehended 
 by Christ (Phil. ii. 12). Without any morbidness 
 the saint will still confess himself a sinner repenting 
 of his sin, and seeking for forgiveness. The dis- 
 tinctively Christian life is thus always far removed 
 from self-conceit, self-righteousness, and self-satisfac- 
 tion; for the perfection of God, disclosed in Jesus 
 Christ, will ever be exposing its imperfection. 
 
 (3) What distinguishes repentance from remorse 
 is that repentance is not merely sin’s consequence, 
 but God’s gift. There is a sorrow for sin, which 
 follows on sin which is unto death, and not life (2 Cor. 
 vii. 9-10). In the sorrow that is unto life there is, 
 and must be, the beginnings of faith, the assurance that 
 forgiveness and deliverance are available. It is faith 
 that changes a hopeless grief into a hopeful sorrow for 
 sin. When Judas discovered that he had betrayed 
 
414 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 the innocent blood he ‘ repented himself,’ but his was 
 not the godly repentance, for when his fellow-sinners 
 scorned his appeal he went and hanged himself 
 (Matt. xxvii. 3-10). When Jesus looked upon Peter 
 (Luke xxii. 61, 62), he went out and wept bitterly, 
 because that look of Jesus brought reproach; but 
 his grief was not unto death, for that same look 
 assured forgiveness. Woe to the man who discovers 
 himself without discovering the Saviour. It is only 
 in the Saviour’s presence that self-discovery will lead 
 to self-recovery. Hence faith is the root of the 
 Christian life, for even penitence for sin must spring 
 out of that root. 
 
 (i) The function of faith is not confined to the re-— 
 
 ception of the divine grace in the forgiveness of sin, 
 and deliverance from its bondage, although that is 
 primary in the Christian experience, for man as 
 creature, subject, and child of God is dependent upon 
 God; in no respect in his higher life is there any 
 sufficiency in himself, he is always finding his suffi- 
 ciency in God alone (2 Cor. iii. 5). Faith is not merely 
 in contrast to sense a realisation of God whom no 
 sense can perceive (Heb. xi. 1), it is a determination of 
 the whole of life by the reality of God. It is the 
 exercise of the whole personality in relation to God ; 
 it is the belief of the mind, the trust of the heart, the 
 submission of the will. It is a receptivity, not a 
 
 passive but an active; the whole self must go out to. 
 
 and lay hold on God and His gifts. For God’s com- 
 municative perfection is not a suppression of man’s 
 imperfect capacities, but a liberation, stimulation, 
 exaltation. A man is most himself, his truest and 
 best self, as in faith he commits himself to God, and 
 accepts all that God in grace through Jesus Christ 
 offers. Such faith is not a temporary but a constant 
 activity, for on the one hand man’s necessity to 
 receive from God is never removed, and on the other 
 hand God’s capacity to bestow is never exhausted. 
 As faith receives grace it is the more developed to 
 receive the still more abounding grace; the depths 
 of that grace faith never fathoms. The penitence 
 
 a a Oe a 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE ALS 
 
 which turns from sin, and the faith which lays hold 
 on God, are the two aspects of conversion, the conscious 
 voluntary turning of man from sin to God; it is 
 dying to sin, and becoming alive to God. 
 
 (ii) Faith is the activity distinctive of religion, and 
 faith as directed towards God in Christ as Saviour 
 and Lord of the Christian religion. This is what 
 distinguishes religion from morality, unless the moral- 
 ity feels its need of, and so is led to religion. ‘ The 
 categorical imperative ’ postulates man’s liberty, that 
 he can do what he ought to do. If a man’s ideal is 
 lofty and wide enough, he will probably soon discover 
 his own limitations in realising it. But we must 
 admit that there are men who in their own estimate 
 of themselves do live in accordance with their own 
 standards, and so have a mind conscious of its own 
 uprightness. Morality without religion tends to self- 
 sufficiency and self-satisfaction. But because religion, 
 and pre-eminently the Christian religion, on the one 
 hand presents the divine perfection as the ideal to 
 be realised (Matt. v. 48; Eph. v. 1), and on the other 
 offers men conscious of how far short they fall the 
 assurance of forgiveness and deliverance, it forbids 
 such self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction. A pagan 
 moralist might think of a good man as pleased with 
 himself, as conscious of his own superiority. But the 
 Christian thinker must insist on the grace of humility 
 as the adornment of Christian goodness. Humility 
 is a distinctively Christian grace, and inseparably 
 accompanies Christian faith. It is not a feeling of 
 worthlessness ; it is not abject nor servile; the man 
 marked by humility does not despise himself or despair 
 of himself. It is his recognition of his own worth to 
 God as by God’s grace a forgiven child of God, that 
 makes him ever conscious of his unworthiness, as 
 falling short of his calling. God’s condescension in 
 setting so high a value on man as His child is the 
 source of the humility of the child aware of ever prov- 
 ing himself as less than that value to God. Because 
 all that he is, or hopes to be, is of grace through faith, 
 the Christian man cannot be high-minded, conceited, 
 
416 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 proud, or vain; in lowliness of mind he will prefer 
 others to himself and think more generously of their 
 attainments than of his own (Rom. xii. 8, 10, 16). 
 If salvation were of works done by man, he might 
 have somewhat whereof to boast; but since salvation 
 is God’s free gift, all boasting is excluded (iii. 27). 
 Pharisaism in any and every form is opposed to the 
 Christian attitude; it is so deadly because it is the 
 disease which most easily assails those who seek to 
 be good and godly. Inward health of soul can only 
 be preserved by the humility which glories only in 
 the gifts of God’s grace. 
 
 (111) As faith is the characteristic activity of religion 
 with humility as its necessary accompaniment, prayer 
 may be said to be its necessary expression. In the 
 personal relation between God and man there must 
 be communion ; love that never spoke or heard would 
 soon languish. That communion will include study 
 of and meditation on the Holy Scriptures; it will 
 include the inward vision and the ineffable adoration 
 of God as present, as revealed in Jesus Christ ; it will 
 include a glad and quick submission to all the workings 
 of the Spirit of God within the soul; it will find its 
 spontaneous expression in prayer. Prayer must not 
 be thought of primarily as petition, as asking God to 
 give what we want. It must begin in gratitude for 
 all God is, and does; it must end in submission to 
 the will of God as alone good.! If we fully realised 
 God’s goodness, and that in His will alone is our good, 
 we should be less eager to utter our own wishes and 
 be content to leave all to His good will. Nevertheless, 
 the childike communion with God would lack freedom 
 if we could not bring to God, that we may trustfully 
 and obediently leave with Him, what our hearts most 
 desire. An anxious scrutiny of every petition as 
 to whether we should or should not present it would 
 make prayer a burden and a yoke, and not a relief and 
 a refuge. We must not say that prayer should be 
 confined to spiritual blessings only, for our spiritual 
 life is affected by our cares and desires regarding 
 
 * See Matt. xi. 25-27, xxvi. 39-44, for Christ’s attitude in prayer. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 417 
 
 earthly goods, regarding the health and happiness of 
 our loved ones, and God is in His providence caring 
 for all His creatures in nature as well as history.! 
 But all petitions must always be offered not merely in 
 passive resignation, but in active co-operation with 
 God’s will. Then prayer itself becomes a fan winnow- 
 ing the chaff from the wheat of our desires, and in 
 prayer we learn what to pray for, and to give up the 
 wishes which we cannot offer to God in prayer. While 
 childlike prayer must not be childish, just as an 
 earthly parent trains the child not to be childish, 
 God is in the communion of His children with Him 
 training them for spiritual maturity, when their 
 petitions will be assured of an answer, because by 
 the enlightening of His Spirit more and more con- 
 formed to His holy and blessed will (John xv. 7). 
 
 (4) The second of the Christian graces is love. 
 
 (1) Ritschl has maintained that the relation to God 
 and Christ is contained in faith, and that we must 
 not speak of love.2 There is a sentimentality: in 
 human affection which has no place in love for God. 
 To use the language of the Song of Songs regarding 
 Christ Himself is offensive to a reverent spirit. Paul 
 never uses terms of endearment in regard to Christ, 
 intimate as was his communion. But we can surely 
 regard God as our highest good, we can share God’s 
 sorrow for man’s sin and God’s joy in man’s recovery, 
 we can live and labour for the coming of God’s King- 
 dom and the doing of His will, we can give our life to 
 God and find our life in God—that is love at its truest 
 and best. We can adore and delight in God. As 
 God has come so near to our humanity in Jesus Christ, 
 God in Christ can be the object of an intense personal 
 affection and devotion. Faith united Paul so closely 
 to Christ, that for him to live was Christ (Phil. 1. 21) ; 
 he experienced his renunciation of sin as crucifixion 
 with Christ, and his sanctification to God as resurrec- 
 tion with Christ (Rom. vi. 1-11; Gal. 1. 20). If 
 this is not the usual Christian experience, it is not, 
 
 1 Of. Matt. vi. 25-34. 
 2 See Justification and Reconciliation, pp. 598-5. 
 2D 
 
418 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 however, to be regarded as abnormal, but rather as 
 typical of what that experience may at its highest and 
 fullest be. This love of God in Christ is blended of 
 many elements—gratitude for grace, the forgiveness 
 of and deliverance from sin, adoration of the perfec- 
 tion of God, dedication to the service of God, and 
 satisfaction in communion with God. A Christian 
 life is incomplete, however worthy may be the charac- 
 ter, which does not include this experience of personal 
 relation to God in Christ. As love is communicative 
 as well as receptive, God’s love, to which man’s love 
 so responds, will be shed abroad in the human heart ; 
 man will become a partaker in the life which is dis- 
 tinctive of God.! The love of God thus received in 
 love by man becomes the motive and the purpose 
 of the Christian life even in relation tomen. The love 
 of Christ (not ours for Christ, but Christ’s for us) 
 constraineth us, becomes as it were the channel in 
 which the currents of human aspiration and en- 
 deavour are confined (2 Cor. v. 14). Jesus joined 
 together love for God and love for man (Mark xii. 29- 
 31). For Paul love was a more excellent way than 
 the exercise of spiritual gifts (1 Cor. xi. 31). In the 
 Epistles of John the test and proof of love to God is 
 love to man. Hence the same principle is distinctive 
 of Christian character as of Christian experience. 
 
 (ii) The definition of love already given may be 
 recalled ; it is a judgment of value, a sentiment of 
 interest, and a purpose of good. If we love God, we 
 seek and strive to value men as God does, to be inter- 
 ested in men (sharing their grief or joy) as He is, to 
 work for their good according to His purpose. From 
 the reality of God’s love may be deduced the ideal 
 for man’s. First of all, God’s love is a universal love; 
 the differences of sex, class, culture, nation, race, 
 colour which divide men from one another do not 
 affect His love for all (Matt. v. 45; ef. Gal. ii. 28). 
 Kven character does not determine His general bene- 
 ficence: His sun shines and His showers fall for 
 good and bad alike; although it must be added He 
 
 1 See 1 John iv. 7-21. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 419 
 
 is not indifferent to the moral differences, for sinners 
 are a sorrow to Him, and in saints is His delight. 
 While Christianity does not abolish these differences, 
 it transcends them in love’s claim and call. Christian 
 love overleaps all the artificial barriers which human 
 society may setup. Class conflicts, national enmities, 
 racial prejudices it condemns. This characteristic of 
 Christian morality has so far been only partially 
 realised, as the divisions among men still persist, 
 causing strife and war. How the ideal of Christian 
 universalism may be realised it is the province of 
 Christian ethics to explore and expound, but lies 
 beyond the bounds of the purpose of this volume. 
 Secondly, God’s love is a redemptive love. God 
 forgives sins, and saves from sin. Accordingly, no 
 moral demand is so insistently and persistently made 
 by Jesus in the Gospels as forgiveness (Matt. v. 38-48, 
 vi. 14-15, xvii. 21-35; Luke xxii. 84). As the divine 
 forgiveness does not wait for man’s penitence to make 
 its approach and appeal, but by its generosity evokes 
 penitence, so the Christian duty is not merely to 
 forgive after penitence, but to offer forgiveness, if 
 need be even with earnest entreaty, to the impenitent 
 that they may be moved to contrition. Here again 
 the Christian ideal is far from realisation. Where 
 equal authority is given to the Old Testament as to 
 the New, where the distinctiveness of the revelation of 
 God in Christ is not appreciated, the attitude of even 
 good men towards sinners is that of law and not of 
 love. Forgiveness does not necessarily involve the 
 annulment of all the consequences of wrong-doing ; 
 it may be even for the transgressor’s good that he 
 should suffer; but it does mean willingness to restore 
 the interrupted personal relationship, the fellowship 
 of love, as soon as that is desired and accepted. If 
 a man shows in his own character the grace of for- 
 giveness, he will in like measure in his own experience 
 enjoy the gift of God’s forgiveness; for the unfor- 
 giving cannot be forgiven, he cannot receive from 
 God what he refuses to men. Nothing would so 
 exhibit to the world the reality of God’s forgiveness 
 
420 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 as the whole Christian society distinguished by the 
 practice of this obligation. For nothing is so severe 
 a test and so sure a proof of love as is forgiveness. 
 * Thirdly, God’s love is sacrificial ; forgiveness costs. 
 What has been said about the Cross of Christ should 
 here be recalled. The morally indifferent may find 
 it easy to pass over a transgression, but that is not 
 forgiveness. There is forgiveness only as the wrong 
 done is morally judged as what it is, as there is in- 
 dignation against it, aversion to it, condemnation of 
 it. Love may need to go far beyond all ordinary 
 social obligations to make the effective approach and 
 appeal to the impenitent. Love may need to endure 
 the contradiction of -sinners (Heb. xii. 3), to make 
 itself of no reputation, to be despised and rejected 
 that it may move the sinner to contrition (Is. liii.). 
 The call to sacrifice—great as in such a case it is— 
 is not confined to the exercise of forgiveness. Life’s 
 pains and perils are such that love is called to suffer 
 in many ways. While the self realises itself in self- 
 sacrifice, as in no other way, the cross being the way 
 to the crown, yet the sacrifice may be not of earthly 
 goods only. Mental, moral, and spiritual good may 
 need to be surrendered. A man may need to limit 
 his pursuit of culture that he may render service to 
 others. The cultivation of personal character may 
 have to be subordinated to social obligations. Even 
 communion with God may be less frequent because 
 the need of man is so insistent. Even Jesus in the 
 agony of Gethsemane accepted the desolation of the 
 Cross—the loss of His joy in God’s Fatherhood—as 
 the completion of His sacrifice. On the other hand, 
 no man can give the world a better gift than his best 
 self, and so the sacrifice must be so measured that the 
 service will be the fullest the man can render. No 
 selfish interest may set bounds to the sacrifice, but 
 the obligation to become what God means must be 
 the guiding principle as to the good for self which is to 
 be surrendered to secure the good of others. a 
 (iii) While these are the distinctive features of 
 Christian love, God’s love reproduced in man’s, love 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 421 
 
 is the motive of the moral life, but it is not the whole 
 content. That must be defined in relation to the 
 actual conditions and relations of life. Distinctive 
 as the teaching of Jesus was, He entered into a moral 
 inheritance, for the Old Testament is the record of a 
 moral progress. And the Christian Church when it 
 went out into the Gentile world found not only moral 
 practice, but even moral theory, for Socrates is the 
 founder of the science of ethics, reflection on what 
 morality means and demands. So complex is the 
 life of man, that it would be impossible to give an 
 exhaustive account of virtue or vice, right or wrong, 
 bad or good. Plato, the great thinker, summed up 
 the moral life as a basis of social order, in four virtues, 
 wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Christian 
 ethics adopted these as the cardinal virtues and con- 
 joined them with the three graces, the theological 
 virtues, faith; hope, and love. We should not, how- 
 ever, place them alongside of the three graces, but 
 rather regard them as exercises of love. 
 
 (a) It is hard to do one’s duty; it 1s often as hard, if 
 not harder, to know what is duty. Hence the need 
 of moral insight or wisdom. No complete code of 
 duties can ever be devised, and it is not desirable 
 that there should be : for the exercise of the individual 
 conscience, with counsel and guidance when necessary, 
 is itself an element in the good life. Less developed 
 morally would be the personality, the actions of which 
 were all prescribed by rules imposed by others. The 
 Roman Catholic confessional has this disadvantage, 
 that it hinders moral maturity through the dependence 
 on another’s judgment which it imposes. Wisdom is 
 the quality of the conscience which can distinguish 
 right and wrong, good and bad, which even when there 
 is no guiding rule can discover what in any given 
 situation the moral obligation is. There is a large 
 body of moral experience, by which the wise in an 
 emergency will usually be guided; but he shows his 
 wisdom by detecting at once a situation for which there 
 is no assured guidance, and by examining all the 
 conditions, so that the proper moral principle may 
 
422 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 be properly applied. If indeed ‘ more harm is wrought 
 by want of thought than even want of heart,’ it is 
 evident that wisdom must take a first place among the 
 virtues. Christian wisdom is love’s insight, and love 
 is not blind, but sees more clearly than the loveless can. 
 
 (b) The greatest hindrance to love of others is not 
 love of self, which is ‘ self-knowledge, self-reverence, 
 self-control,’ the recognition of one’s own worth for 
 God with the desire to prove worthy, but selfishness, 
 and selfishness may be directed towards either the 
 pleasures or the pains of life; it may be either self- 
 seeking or self-sparing. A man may make it his aim 
 to get as much of his own happiness out of life, or to 
 shun as far as he can any sorrow or peril which may 
 beset his path. He may be the slave of his wishes 
 or of his fears, and not master of himself so as to 
 suppress any desire which should not be gratified, 
 or to endure any evil which may come upon him. 
 Temperance is self-control in respect of the pleasures, 
 and courage of the pains or perils of life. It is a 
 misfortune that both words have in common speech 
 been so narrowed in their use. Temperance is not 
 merely abstinence from the use of intoxicating drinks, 
 nor even moderation in the satisfaction of physical 
 desires. It includes self-mastery in the inner as well 
 as the outer life, control of temper and mood as well 
 as appetite. It is moral proportion, the harmony of 
 all personal interests and activities. For the Christian 
 it has a very much wider range than it had for the 
 Greek gentleman, who might indulge without reproach 
 in forms of sexual vice which it would be a shame even 
 to name. The lustful look is no less condemned than 
 the unchaste deed ; the angry word than the vengeful 
 blow (Matt. v. 27-82). Thus temperance must be 
 shown not merely that the personality may be properly 
 developed, but still more that the self under complete 
 command may be fit for any service of others which 
 love may require, for he who indulges himself will not 
 be so able to succour and sustain others; while the 
 man temperate in all things (1 Cor. ix. 25) has a moral 
 strength which can be a stay to others in their struggles. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 423 
 
 Courage is not only the readiness to face physical 
 dangers—as such it is often more a natural endow- 
 ment than a moral achievement: it is moral constancy 
 and endurance ; to do right despite the world’s frown ; 
 to refuse to sin even if companions scorn; to stand 
 alone, if need be, for a moral principle against the 
 world ; to shrink only from sin, and to stand in awe 
 only of God—that is what Christian courage involves. 
 As Christian it cannot be self-regarding ; it must be 
 concerned about others. One brave man can rally 
 the waverers in the crusade against evil; he can be 
 a strength to weakness. Not alone on the battle- 
 field, or amid the perils of the mine or the sea, is there 
 the call for heroism ; for Christian life in a sinful world 
 is a constant adventure and campaign. 
 
 (c) It is in the virtue of justice that the relation 
 of the individual to society is realised as 1t ought to 
 be. To love one’s neighbour as oneself, to do unto 
 others as one wishes to be done unto (Matt. vii. 12)— 
 this is the Christian rule of justice. It does not mean 
 quantitative equality, for another man’s good is not 
 necessarily identical with one’s own. A wife's good 
 is not the same as a husband’s, or a child’s as a parent’s, 
 or a scholar’s as a teacher’s. Accordingly, the Golden 
 Rule does not prescribe as a duty conduct to others 
 exactly the same as the conduct which one desires 
 for oneself. It is not a teacher’s duty to desire to be 
 taught by his scholars, or a parent’s to render the 
 obedience to his child which he requires of him. 
 Here the analogy of the body is helpful: not all the 
 members have the same functions, and obligation 
 must depend on function. What justice does require 
 is that a man shall fill his own and not another’s 
 place, and carry his own burden while he also as far 
 as he can bears the burdens of others who have need 
 of such support. In many cases justice will involve 
 mercy. There are those who must make far greater 
 demands on others than any return which they can 
 make. It is not the mistake, but the glory of man 
 not to let ‘ the weakest go to the wall,’ ° perish in the 
 struggle for existence.’ The Christian love demands, 
 
424 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 even more than the Golden Rule requires, that a man 
 shall require from others only as much service as he 
 must, and render to others as much service as he can. 
 Kquality here has no meaning as a measure of what 
 justice transformed by love requires. ‘The Son of 
 man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, 
 and to give His life a ransom for many’ (Matt. xx. 28). 
 Sacrifice is the fulfilment of love’s demand. But 
 sacrifice involves alike temperance, the control of all 
 desires, and courage, the acceptance of all perils and 
 pains, and wisdom to discern whether to render or to 
 withhold service of this kind is more for the good of 
 another. It would be possible to deal with other 
 virtues in the same way, as Plato’s enumeration is not 
 exhaustive; but these illustrations will serve to show 
 how morality is transformed when the love for man, 
 which has God’s love as its motive and its pattern, 
 becomes the regulative principle. There is a new 
 moral creation, the old things pass away and all things 
 become new (2 Cor. v. 17). 
 
 (iv) The discussion of virtues may be described as 
 the psychological approach to morality; what has 
 come into greater prominence in recent years is the 
 sociological. Man realises himself as a personality 
 in society; social institutions are the permanent 
 modes of his moral activity. There is not a uniform 
 duty in all human relationships, and even love as the 
 regulative principle finds varied expression in different 
 relations. These relations are of ever widening scope ; 
 within the narrower range are developed the moral 
 capacities which will find exercise in the wider. The 
 earliest, most enduring, and most influential social 
 institution is the family—marriage and parenthood. 
 Here love finds its earliest exercise, and learns its 
 most enduring lessons. From the family the child 
 passes to the school, in which not only intellectual 
 capacities may be developed, but moral character 
 may also be formed. The theory of education has 
 in recent years become most truly Christian, less law 
 and more love, less claim of authority for the teacher 
 and more right of liberty for the child. When the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 425 
 
 child as boy or girl, as youth or maiden, passes from 
 school into industry (manufacture, commerce, pro- 
 fessions), it seems as though he had passed beyond the 
 region where the principle of Christian love can find 
 application. Nevertheless, it is being recognised more 
 than ever before that ruthless competition (regard 
 only for self, and disregard of others) even here can 
 secure only a temporary success, and leaves behind 
 irreparable injury. Accordingly, even practical men 
 are beginning to advocate co-operation instead of 
 competition, a partnership of Capital and Labour for 
 the service of the community. The duties of citizen- 
 ship, into which the man or the woman passes beyond 
 the earthly calling, are finding fuller recognition; and 
 in more advanced social thinking, the organic nature 
 of human society is being not only insisted on, but 
 a community of interest among all classes is slowly 
 winning recognition. The Christian truth that in 
 one body the members suffer or rejoice together is 
 affecting political theory, if it has not yet adequately 
 influenced political practice. Even in citizenship love 
 needs to be exercised. The Great War, and still more 
 the consequences of the peace, of vengeance and not 
 magnanimity, have made men realise that ruin alone 
 awaits mankind, unless in international relations the 
 spirit of reconciliation gains mastery over all the forces 
 which make for war. It is in all relations being 
 demonstrated that the application of the principle of 
 love alone can avert disaster, and secure the progress 
 OliLnesrace, * 
 
 (5) We can distinguish faith and love as the grace 
 of dependence and the grace of generosity, the getting 
 and the giving of good. It is not so easy to distinguish 
 faith and hope, as hope is not so much different from 
 faith; it is faith under one aspect, faith as directed 
 towards the future, faith receiving and responding 
 in confident expectation to the good which the future 
 holds. If we will we may say that it is faith in God 
 
 ! Christian morality is discussed from this sociological standpoint in the 
 Reports (I. to XII.) of the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics, and 
 Citizenship, which is commonly spoken of as C.O.P.E.C. 
 
426 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 which gives hope assurance of that future good. 
 Iaith gives substance to things hoped for, for it is 
 the evidence of the unseen reality of God (Heb. i. 1). 
 Great as is the Christian’s present possession in Jesus 
 Christ, greater still is his future inheritance. In the 
 next chapter the content of the Christian hope will 
 be dealt with. All that here needs to be done is to 
 indicate the place of hope inthe Christian life. Both 
 in his experience of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, 
 and in his character as conforming to that grace, the 
 Christian has a sense of his own incompleteness, and 
 desires to apprehend that for which he has been 
 apprehended by the Lord Jesus. Still more in the 
 world around does he find the authority of Christ 
 challenged, sin still abounding, and abounding grace 
 restrained. His faith would not be so confident and 
 his love less satisfying did not hope give the assurance 
 that God’s purpose of love in himself and the world 
 will find fulfilment. The Christian is thus being saved 
 by hope (Rom. vi. 24) from despondency and the 
 indifference and indolence that despondency would 
 breed, saved unto constancy, endurance, courage, and 
 sacrifice. The sneer against ‘ other-worldliness,’ justi- 
 fied though it may be by some of the hymns about 
 heaven, has no ground to rest on against this attitude. 
 It is not a depreciation of all the good that the present 
 life holds; it is an appreciation of the greatness of 
 man as God has made him and wills him to be, since 
 within the bounds of time and sense he cannot realise 
 all his possibilities and become all that he will yet be. 
 If the ideals of truth, blessedness, holiness, and love 
 found only their partial realisation in this life, and 
 held no promise of perfect fulfilment, they would mock 
 human Aspiration and endeavour. The man will live 
 the worthiest life on earth who lives not on the scale 
 of threescore years and ten, or a little more, but only 
 on the scale of the eternal life, to which death sets no 
 bounds. Without hope the Christian life could not 
 be lived at its best, for it calls man to a good so great 
 that life here is too brief to enter into its full possession. 
 
 (6) Because penitence and faith are the initial 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 427 
 
 activities in the Christian life, it is seen to be a life 
 in which human failure and insufficiency are changed 
 into victory and achievement by the divine power. 
 
 (i) From beginning to end the Christian life is 
 human activity, and not passivity, and yet it is not 
 man acting alone, apart from God. Man can work 
 out his own salvation only as it is God who worketh 
 in him by His Spirit (Phil. 1. 12-13). Having looked 
 at the characteristics of the Christian life in the human 
 activities which are essential to it, we may now turn 
 to consider how God works. ‘There are different types 
 of Christian experience, the sudden conversion from 
 sin to God, the deliberate decision which confirms 
 the previous development towards God, the gradual 
 development which knows no crisis. But in none of 
 these types is man alone active; God’s Spirit is 
 energising in all. The term regeneration should not 
 be restricted to describe the divine energy in the 
 sudden conversion ; the regeneration, the making fully 
 and truly spiritual the natural life of man, may be a 
 very slow process, but on that acccount not the less 
 real. The new birth from above (John 1. 3, 5) may 
 seem sudden, or appear slow, but its reality does not 
 depend on the mode of our apprehension. There may 
 have been long preparation for the sudden conversion, 
 what theologians called prevenient grace; within the 
 oradual development there may have been unobserved 
 moments of the intenser energy of the Spirit. This 
 alone needs to be insisted on, that the Christian life 
 is no natural product of heredity, environment, and 
 individuality, but is and must ever be the work of 
 God. If we cannot, then, regard regeneration as a 
 solitary act, but must admit that it may be a continu- 
 ous process, we cannot distinguish, still less separate, 
 regeneration and _ sanctification. The analogy of 
 physical birth cannot be pressed here; enough for us 
 to know that the commencement and the continuance 
 of the Christian life are both alike from God. 
 
 (ii) According to the Fourth Gospel, Jesus Himself 
 did distinguish the life in the flesh and the life in the 
 Spuit. ‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and 
 
428 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 that which is born of the Spirit is spirit’ (John 
 ll. 6). 
 
 (a) The respectable Pharisee, moral and religious, the 
 ruler of the Jews, was still living the life of the flesh, 
 and could not either understand or enter into the 
 Kingdom of God, the new order of life in the Spirit 
 (cf. vv. 3 and 5). The flesh does not mean a sensual or 
 immoral life; it means a life in which God as shown 
 and offered unto men as their highest good has not 
 yet been received. It does not mean a life without 
 God, but it does mean a life in which the love of God 
 as Father in the grace of Christ as Saviour and Lord 
 by the community (common possession) of the Spirit 
 has not yet been experienced. A life beginning in 
 penitence and faith, receiving forgiveness, deliverance, 
 peace, and power, energetic in love and inspired by 
 hope, is a life in the Spirit, and not the flesh. How 
 many there are who make the Christian profession 
 who by such tests are still living in the flesh, and not 
 the Spirit! It has been to the Church’s loss that this 
 contrast has been often so disregarded and neglected ; 
 and men still in the flesh have been allowed, because 
 they made the Christian profession, to assume to their 
 own hurt and loss that theirs was the life in the Spirit. 
 There is a morality, and even a religion, which is still 
 natural, the product of human endeavour, and not 
 spiritual, the receiving and the responding to the life 
 of God in man by His own Spirit. 
 
 (6) Paul makes a further distinction; the flesh for 
 him means the sinful life, not necessarily or exclu- 
 sively sensual, the life in which sin is so dominant 
 that there is a bondage of the will (Rom. vii. 7 -25). 
 The man in such a state is carnal (sarkikos, sometimes 
 sarkinos). But there is also the psychical or natural 
 man (1 Cor. xv. 44-49), a man such as Nicodemus, 
 who may in his own way be good and godly, but who 
 has not had the experience of enlightening, quicken- 
 ing, and renewing by the Spirit of God. He may be 
 a very fine specimen of humanity in intellectual 
 capacity and moral character, but he still lacks ‘ the 
 one thing needful,’ the immediate contact, the in- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 429 
 
 timate communion with God, the constant depend- 
 ence on and entire submission to God. He may be 
 virtuous and conscientious (and we shall not dare to 
 say that he is all that he is without God), but he has 
 not consciously or voluntarily realised this relation 
 to God. He may accept the testimony of others 
 concerning God’s existence, and on that testimony 
 he may himself confess that God is, but he has not 
 in his own life had any experience of God. He may 
 be in Tertullian’s phrase an anima naturaliter Chris- 
 tiana;* but he is still soulish, psychical, and not 
 spiritual (pneumatic). This distinction is not a theo- 
 logical subtlety ; it is a discriminating analysis of the 
 facts of human life in its relation to God. It is a 
 serious error, often made, to assume that the posses- 
 sion of virtues which are marks of the Christian 
 character is itself a proof of life in the Spirit. It is 
 said often that it does not matter what a man believes; 
 what matters is what he does. If by belief is meant 
 acceptance of doctrines, then assuredly the possession 
 of character is more important. But Christian faith 
 is not merely belief; it is as the typical Christians 
 have understood it, such a personal union with Christ 
 that there is both conscious communion with Him, and 
 consequent conformation to His character (2 Cor, i. 
 18). And as man was made for such conscious and 
 voluntary relation to God, and Christ lived, taught, 
 wrought, suffered, died, rose again, and liveth for 
 ever more to mediate that relation, it does matter, and 
 very much, whether the character has its motive and 
 power in such a relation to God. Morality is com- 
 pleted in religion, and the moral character is at its 
 best as it has spiritual sustenance. The natural or 
 psychical man, however excellent morally, is not yet 
 man at his very best, or man as God wants him to be, 
 for God wants not only obedience to His law, but also 
 communion with His love. The Christian Church 
 often lacks vitality and vigour because it acquiesces 
 in an outward conformity to Christian standards, and 
 does not constantly pursue as its distinctive object the 
 1 De Test. An., 1,2. 
 
430 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 inward transformation of the life in the Spirit. Not 
 only is the natural man incomplete in regard to his 
 personal relation to God, the finest Christian graces 
 are dependent on that relation; contrition and 
 humility are not likely to mark the man who while 
 doing justly, and loving mercy, does not walk with 
 God at all. There are flowers of goodness, beautiful 
 and fragrant, which can grow only in a heavenly air. 
 Further, the man who for his goodness relies on his 
 own sufficiency of strength will not only limit his 
 aspiration to his own possibility of achievement, but 
 will be much more liable to relapse even from the 
 standard which he has set himself. There is a wide 
 range of character and conduct represented by the 
 natural or psychical man; at his worst he may sink 
 to the man who is in bondage to the flesh ; at his best 
 he may rise to resemble as regards his outward life very 
 closely the spiritual man; but the difference remains 
 between the man who lives by and for himself, and 
 the man whose inner life God fills with His own Spirit. 
 
 (c) What are the characteristics of the spiritual 
 man? In his achievement, while the grace of God 
 is not yet in full possession, he may as regards conduct 
 and character fall short morally of the natural man, 
 who by heredity, environment, and education has had, 
 as it were, a moral start of him; but in aspiration and 
 purpose he will be seeking and striving for such a 
 perfection of life as becomes a child of the perfect 
 Father. A spirituality which is indifferent to sancti- 
 fication is a hollow sham. Only he is Christ’s who has 
 Christ’s Spirit (Rom. viii. 9), and the fruit of the Spirit 
 is love, which is the fulfilment of all law, which does 
 no ill to a neighbour, but seeks to do all the good that 
 it can (Gal. v. 22; Rom. xiii. 10). If we are to be 
 guided in our thought by the disclosures of Christian 
 experience in the New Testament, we may recognise 
 two distinctive features of the spiritual life as the 
 evidence of the presence and operation of the Spirit 
 of God.' The first is fervour, zeal, enthusiasm. The 
 
 * See the volume of Essays by various writers entitled The Spirit, especially 
 iii. and iv. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 431 
 
 experience of the reality of God as love and the grace 
 of Christ as Saviour and Lord moves the emotions ; 
 even when the first excitement subsides, there 1s a 
 steady inward glow. Coldness and deadness of feeling 
 depart. There are joy, comfort, peace, confidence, 
 courage. <A life which shows these qualities is an 
 attractive life; it is a persuasive witness of the reality 
 of salvation; and it is because the life of so many 
 professing Christians is so tepid and timid that many 
 are repelled, and not attracted, to Christ. To force 
 feeling, to keep up excitement, is not wholesome; but 
 there should be an exaltation of feeling as a constant 
 tone of the Christian life of the Spirit as God within 
 is realised in experience. Some may call this fanati- 
 cism; the eighteenth century was afraid of any en- 
 thusiasm ; but then the Evangelical Revival came, 
 and the Spirit’s presence and operation were again 
 experienced. This is the need, and also the promise, 
 of to-day; there is a stirrmg among the dry bones, 
 and the breath of God is abroad (Ezek. xxxvii. 1-14). 
 The second mark (and the two are closely related) is 
 power, might, energy. When the feelings are moved, 
 the will is strengthened. Recent psychology has 
 shown how much the mind can do in relieving pain, 
 releasing from weakness, and restoring strength. 
 When the human will, surrendered to God, becomes 
 the channel of the activity of God by His Spirit, 
 then divine strength is perfected in human weakness 
 (2 Cor. xii. 9-10). The language of Paul must seem 
 extravagant to many Christians, who have not fully 
 trusted and so have not fully proved the sufficiency 
 of the grace of Christ. We can be more than con- 
 querors through Him who loves us, and in love imparts 
 Himself to us (Rom. viii. 37). We can do all things 
 through Him who strengthens us (Phil. iv. 13). We 
 ean gain the victory which overcometh the world 
 through faith in Him who Himself overcame (1 John 
 v. 4; John xvi. 33). Divine resources are at human 
 disposal in the fully surrendered life. As an inspired 
 life, enthusiasm and energy may be constant features, 
 distinguishing the Christian life from every other in 
 
432 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 which the same presence and power of the Spirit of 
 God is not experienced. 
 
 It is the writer’s conviction that what the Church 
 needs is not a second Pentecost as regards the divine 
 gift, but as regards the human receiving and respond- 
 ing to that gift, which has never been withdrawn. 
 Not only occasionally in religious revivals, but con- 
 tinuously in the religious life of all Christians, may the 
 Pentecostal blessing be claimed. Whether it be a 
 law or not of the religious life that there should be a 
 rise and a fall, a rhythmic movement of emotion, it 
 is certain that the ebb of the tide goes far further 
 than need be, and so the flow has to be more marked. 
 Surely there need not-be such extremes of depression 
 and exaltation; but there might be, if Christians 
 lived and walked more by the Spirit, a constant eleva- 
 tion in the zeal and the power of Christian experience 
 and character. To fall under the dominion of the 
 flesh is a danger that mature Christians should have 
 outgrown; but even they run the peril of sinking from 
 the spiritual (pneumatic) to the natural (psychical) 
 level; that spiritual life needs to be nourished by the 
 means of grace, prayer, study of the Scriptures, 
 meditation, public worship, the use of the sacrament 
 of thanksgiving and fellowship, the preaching of the 
 Gospel, the communion of saints, and no less does it 
 need to be exercised in consecration, service, and 
 sacrifice. If the Church were ever thus distinguished 
 from the world in the experience and character of all 
 its members, so that the Spirit’s presence and power 
 were made manifest, Jesus Christ as Saviour and 
 Lord would be so lifted up before men that He would 
 draw all men unto Himself out of the carnal, and even 
 the natural, into the spiritual life. 
 
 (7) The bearing of the description of the Christian 
 life, its characteristics and its source, on some of 
 the controversies of the past may very briefly be 
 indicated. 
 
 (i) The Pelagian and the Arminian controversy 
 were both concerned with the relation between human 
 freedom and divine grace; although it would be an 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 433 
 
 injustice to regard Arminianism as only Pelagianism 
 revived, for the Arminians did recognise, while 
 emphasising human liberty and responsibility, the 
 necessity of the divine grace to salvation as the 
 Pelagians did not. As is likely to be the case in 
 controversy, each side was guilty of exaggeration. 
 Man is not in so helpless and hopeless a bondage to 
 sin as Augustine represented; he is not so free to 
 choose and do any and every good as Pelagius con- 
 tended. Heredity, environment, education, character 
 as the result of previous conduct—all limit and restrain 
 hberty, and so hamper the good choice. To affirm, 
 however, that man can do no good by the exercise of 
 his will, and that the grace of God is irresistible when 
 it is imparted to any man, is to ignore and deny the 
 facts of life. In Augustinianism we may see the 
 tendency of religion carried to an extreme, and in 
 Pelagianism the tendency of morality. The one 
 emphasises man’s dependence until it reduces him to 
 impotence; the other emphasises man’s liberty until 
 it exalts him to sufficiency. The truth which corrects 
 the error is that his dependence, if it is to be moral, 
 must be free, and his freedom, if it is to be religious, 
 must be dependent. He works out his own salvation 
 not in spite, but because of God’s working in him. 
 Freedom must appropriate grace, and grace must 
 sustain freedom. God and man are so immediately 
 and intimately related that God’s activity does not 
 exclude man’s, or man’s God’s. What led Augustine 
 and those who followed in his steps astray, was that 
 they thought of grace as quasi-physical, as power, and 
 since it was God’s power it must needs be regarded 
 as omnipotent. But if God’s grace be His personal 
 activity in a personal relation to man, in which man 
 is not merely passive, but must be active, then grace 
 will be conditioned by the receptive and the responsive 
 faith, and never will suppress but always will support 
 freedom; for where the Spirit of God is, there is the 
 liberty and not the bondage of man.! 
 
 1 A recent admirable treatment of this problem is Oman’s Grace and 
 Personality. 
 
 2E 
 
434 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (ii) This controversy is only one instance of the 
 necessity of basing doctrine on experience and not on 
 inferences from texts often misunderstood. Modern — 
 psychology enables us to examine and estimate that 
 experience much more accurately than was possible 
 before, and we have, therefore, always to bring all 
 dogmas to the test of actuality. Undoubtedly, Augus- 
 tine’s theology was an interpretation of his own ex- 
 perience, as was that of Pelagius, but in both cases it 
 was experience not adequately scrutinised, and even 
 recklessly generalised. When we do examine ex- — 
 perience, individual and collective, we are led to the 
 conclusion that man has always enough liberty left — 
 to accept or to reject the grace of God which is offered 
 to him, and so is responsible, if he is not saved by that 
 erace, granted that the offer of salvation has been 
 effectively presented to him, and that many men do 
 attain good moral character without any conscious 
 and voluntary dependence on the grace of God, but 
 that the finest type of character, marked by contrition, 
 humility, sacrificial love, is not attained unless as 
 faith is ever receiving and responding to grace. The 
 Christian life in its distinctive features is impossible 
 without the activity of the Spirit of God, and may be 
 regarded as the fruit of that Spirit, the divine power 
 within expressing itself through human aspiration and 
 endeavour in fullness, freedom, quietness, and charm ~ 
 in the Christian graces and virtues. It belongs to 
 Christian dogmatics to deal with the Christian life 
 as the work of the Spirit of God in man; as a human 
 task, from the standpoint of duties rather than graces 
 and virtues as the fruit of the Spirit, the Christian 
 life has to be dealt with by Christian ethics. And 
 since, as has already been indicated, the approach | 
 to-day is sociological rather than psychological, what 
 Christian ethics has to do is not so much to determine 
 what the Christian character ought to be as to describe 
 the ideal of what society should be to be fully Christian. 
 It is now current usage to speak of this ideal as the 
 Kingdom of God. It is the writer’s intention to - 
 complete this series of three volumes on Christian 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE © 485 
 
 theology with a volume on the Christian Ideal of the 
 IXingdom of God. The subject cannot be further 
 pursued here. 
 
 (8) In the preceding pages the two ideals which have 
 been dealt with are holiness and love. The Christian 
 life should also be related to the other three, truth, 
 beauty, and blessedness. 
 
 (1) By truth in the Christian life we mean generally 
 truthfulness and faithfulness, honesty of conduct, and 
 sincerity of motive. Besides this we should emphasise 
 what the beatitude about the pure in heart means 
 (Matt. v. 8). The Christian has a single motive, and 
 not mixed motives. He is not good to gain anything 
 else than goodness itself, praise, fame, safety, comfort, 
 not even happiness, nor heaven. The fruit is good 
 because the tree is good (vii. 16-20). The inner man 
 is what the outer man shows. This is subjective 
 truth, moral reality in the whole personality. But 
 we must go deeper than that. ‘ The pure in heart 
 shall see God,’ because his moral reality is itself the 
 revelation of what God is. The Christian life in 
 fellowship with God and in likeness to God is repro- 
 ducing the ultimate, essential, final reality. The 
 actual has only temporary existence; the ideal has 
 eternal reality. The Christian life is at the secret 
 source of things. His conduct is often regarded as 
 unpractical ; and so it is and should be according to 
 merely social standards, temporary expediencies, 
 fleeting fashions of an hour, worldly and selfish in- 
 terests. Given time and scope, however, it alone is 
 practical, because it 1s in accordance with the nature 
 of things, as determined by the will of God. God 1s 
 not on ‘ the side of the big battalions ’ of force, greed, 
 selfishness, and worldliness; He is with the good and 
 godly man. If God is the ultimate cause and final 
 purpose of the universe, if Christ reveals God, and if 
 the Christian life reproduces Christ, then that life 
 is, both subjectively as regards its motive and‘objec- 
 tively as regards its content, truth: 1t corresponds with 
 reality.! | 
 
 ‘This is the conception which dominates the Fourth Gospel. 
 
436 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (ii) As the Christian life is truth, it will also be 
 beauty. There are ugly things in the world, especially 
 where man’s wasteful methods of using nature’s 
 resources have marred and soiled its face, and there 
 are ugly creatures in colour and shape, at least for 
 our taste, but the world as a whole is beautiful, a 
 unity of many differences, a harmony of many dis- 
 cords, a reconciliation of many contrasts. It gives 
 aesthetic satisfaction, the emotions are not distracted 
 but unified in pleasure. Not only so, a higher in- 
 tellectual satisfaction accompanies the aesthetic ; 
 nature is expressive, it has meaning and worth for 
 human personality. It is a symbol of eternal and 
 infinite perfection. Men have truly spoken of the 
 Beauty of God:? that is one element at least in the 
 Biblical phrase, the glory of God, the perfection of 
 God as manifested. Mistranslation though the phrase 
 itself may be, there is a ‘ beauty of holiness ’ (Ps. ex. 
 3). A character may be more than a rival of a work 
 of art in offering even the aesthetic satisfaction of a 
 consistency of manifold interests and activities.? The 
 word grace itself means charm as well as goodness. 
 There is a legal righteousness which repels, and does 
 not attract. But a life shaped to harmony by love 
 will be beautiful, as was the life of Jesus. The nearer 
 the life gets to truth, the divine reality, the more will 
 it show beauty, the glory of God. The manner will 
 surely be gracious as the motive is grace (Phil. iv. 8). 
 
 (iii) A Christian life in which the ideals of holiness 
 and love, truth and beauty are realised cannot fail 
 in attaining blessedness; not the pleasure of the 
 moment, not the happiness of the outward lot, it may 
 be, but the peace of God which passeth all understand- 
 ing (Phil. iv. 7), which the world cannot give and the 
 world cannot take away, the peace which Jesus claimed 
 as His (John xiv. 27), the rest of soul (Matt. x1. 29), the 
 joy of the Lord (Matt. xxv. 21), that joy for which 
 He endured the Cross, despising shame (Heb. xii. 2), a 
 
 1 This attribute of God is recognised by the Cambridge Platonists. 
 2 Ruskin has analysed the conception of beauty, Modern Painters, Part ILL, 
 Section 1., chap. xii. 1. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 437 
 
 share in the life of the blessed God (1 Tim. i. 11). 
 Thus in Christian life alone is human personality 
 being perfected, all its ideals realised, not by human 
 endeavour alone, but by divine grace, by participa- 
 tion in the perfection of God in the indwelling and 
 inworking of His Spirit; and that perfecting is not 
 individual, but collective, because that Spirit is the 
 common possession of those who believe, who b 
 faith are members of the body of Him who is fulfill- 
 ing all the human ideals in all the human persons 
 (Eph. 1. 23). 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 
 
 (1) Many religions look backwards to a Golden Age. 
 Confucius sought to remedy the evils of his own time 
 by recovering the wisdom of the past. The Old 
 Testament has a forward look, to the day of Yahweh, 
 or to the coming of the Messiah, to the resurrection 
 of the righteous and the judgment of the wicked. 
 Christianity took over this Jewish inheritance, but 
 transformed it, and in the New Testament we can 
 trace a development of thought from an eschatology 
 closely conforming to that of Judaism to a Christian 
 hope more consistent with the distinctiveness of the 
 revelation of God and the redemption of man in Jesus 
 Christ. If Christianity had no answer to the question 
 about future destiny, individual and racial, it would be 
 incomplete as a religion, as failmg to meet an in- 
 sistent demand of the spirit of man. The earlier 
 Buddhism (the Hinayana) offered Nirvana, either non- 
 existence or non-conscious existence; but the later 
 Buddhism (the Mahayana) had to define the future 
 life much more distinctly. Confucianism avoided the 
 question, and so the Chinese add Buddhism to meet 
 a demand Confucianism fails to satisfy.? 
 
 (i) From the beginnings of religion in the doctrine 
 of animism a survival of the soul is believed; but 
 this is not a hope but a dread, as in the abode of the 
 dead life is cheerless, hopeless, powerless, vain. It 
 is this belief that is the background of the Old 
 ‘Testament. 
 
 ‘In death there is no remembrance of Thee : 
 In Sheol who shall give Thee thanks?’ (Ps. vi. 5.) 
 
 * See The Three Religions of China, by W. E. Soothill, 
 
 
 
 435 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 439 
 
 * Let the wicked be ashamed, let them be silent in Sheol.’ 
 (xxx1. 17.) 
 * Wilt Thou shew wonders to the dead ? 
 Shall they that are deceased arise and praise Thee ? 
 Shall Thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave ? 
 Or Thy faithfulness in Destruction (feb. Abaddon) ? 
 Shall Thy wonders be known in the dark ? 
 And Thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness ? ’ 
 (Ixxxviit. 10-12.) 
 
 Kven the relation to God is ended in the unseen world. 
 The interest of the Old Testament is almost entirely 
 centred on the earthly life as the scene of God’s 
 providence, as the sphere of man’s duty. It is not 
 concerned for the most part with individual destiny 
 at all, but with the character and condition of 
 a nation here on earth. It is here that God is 
 dealing with men, it is here that men must serve 
 Him. 
 
 (11) It is admitted by most scholars that there are a 
 few passages which indicate a dawning hope of in- 
 dividual immortality. When after the fall of the 
 nation the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel began to 
 teach the truth of an individual relation to God, such 
 a hope became a possibility. The passages in which 
 it is found are obscure and uncertain. To the writer 
 it seems probable that Psalms xvi. 10-11 and xvii. 15 
 do express the hope, but many scholars deny this. 
 Most scholars do admit that Psalm Ixxii. 28-26 does 
 rise to the hope. What may be said is that the hope 
 was not general, even if now and then a saint in the 
 fervour of his devotion and the strength of his faith 
 soared above the common view, and dared to believe 
 that his fellowship with God, his highest good, would 
 not, and could not, be severed by death. The more 
 generally held hope for the individual came by way 
 of the hope for the nation. There was the expec- 
 tation of a Golden Age in the future for the nation : 
 but it seemed unrighteous and unreasonable that 
 only the generation alive at the time of its coming 
 should enjoy its good, and thus the hope arose 
 that the righteous would be brought back to this 
 
 earthly life to experience what they had expected. 
 
440 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 At first the eager longing is expressed by the 
 prophet : 
 
 * May thy dead live, may thy corpses arise.’ 
 
 Then comes the confident assurance : 
 
 * Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust : 
 For thy dew is as the dew of light, 
 And the earth will bring forth shades.’ (Is. xxvi. 19).1 
 
 In the Apocalypse of Daniel a resurrection of the 
 wicked is also declared: ‘And many of them that 
 sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to 
 everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting 
 contempt. And they~that be wise shall shine as the 
 brightness of the firmament; and they that turn 
 many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever ’ 
 (xii. 2-3). In this Apocalyptic literature of which 
 the Book of Daniel is an example the eschatology of 
 the Old Testament was further developed. The 
 supernatural features were introduced; individuals 
 were included in God’s dealings; the judgment was 
 extended to other nations, and made general; and a 
 system of symbolism was elaborated. Into the details 
 it is not necessary for our purpose to enter; but we 
 must remember that it was not the Old Testament 
 teaching alone which the Christian Church inherited, 
 but also this Jewish Apocalyptic. 
 
 (2) It is noteworthy that Jesus rebuked the gross, 
 materialistic doctrine of the Pharisees regarding the 
 Resurrection, the absurdity of which was exhibited 
 in the Sadducees’ illustration of the woman who had 
 been the wife of seven husbands (Mark xii. 18-27), 
 and at the same time He affirmed the individual hope 
 of immortality on the same ground as that given in 
 the Old Testament. 
 
 (i) The physical conditions and the social relations 
 of this earthly life will not be restored, but the fellow- 
 ship of the saints with God will not be interrupted ; 
 because God enters into personal relations with men, 
 they are assured of immortality. The crude notion 
 
 * Schultz, Old Testament Theology, ii. pp. 386-7. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 441 
 
 which has sometimes been put forward in the theology 
 of the Christian Church of a material identity of the 
 resurrection body with the present ‘ vesture of our 
 mortality ’ is set aside, as it is by Paul (1 Cor. xv. 
 42-49), in the contrast he makes between the natural 
 and the spiritual body. This hope of continued 
 fellowship with God in the unseen world is more fully 
 developed in the Fourth Gospel, where the emphasis 
 is laid on personal communion with Christ, yet also 
 with God in Him (xiv.-xvii.). Those who believe in 
 Him have eternal life here and now, and cannot come 
 under the power of death. To this we must after- 
 wards return when dealing with the later develop- 
 ments in the New Testament. 
 _—(i1) In the Synoptic Gospels what holds the fore- 
 eround is the conception of the Kingdom of God. 
 What Jesus meant by the term has been much dis- 
 puted, and to follow this discussion in detail would 
 lead us far afield. It is maintained that He conceived 
 that Kingdom as future, transcendent, yet near at 
 hand, to be ushered in by a supernatural intervention 
 of God in human history. It 1s even contended that 
 Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah in the earthly 
 life, but only the herald of the Kingdom, at the 
 coming of which He would assume that office.t There 
 are, however, a number of passages which indicate 
 that the Kingdom is already present, that it will grow, 
 and that its progress depends not on God only, but 
 also on the activities of men (Luke xvu. 21; the 
 parables in Matt. xii, ete.). If Jesus did believe 
 Himself to be the Messiah, and accepted the confession 
 of Peter that He was the Messiah (Matt. xvi. 16)—and 
 the writer sees no adequate reason for doubting the 
 fact—then in His presence in the world and His 
 activity in and with men the Kingdom had come 
 already, although it might yet be made more manifest 
 in its power and glory. 
 
 (i) That Jesus did anticipate such a manifestation 
 is a conclusion from the available evidence which 
 
 1 See The Quest of the Historical Jesus, by Schweitzer, and The Gospel and 
 the Church, by Loisy. 
 
442 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 it is difficult, even impossible, to evade. He fore- 
 told not only His own Resurrection, but also His 
 Return, His Second Advent from heaven (Matt. xvi. 
 28; Mark xii. 26-27, xiv. 62). Regarding this escha- 
 tological teaching several considerations need to be 
 taken into account. As in the Apostolic Age the 
 expectation was very confident and intense, it is 
 not improbable that the teaching of Jesus has been 
 coloured by the channel of its transmission, and made 
 more definite and certain than it at first was. The 
 prophetic language regarding the future must neces- 
 sarily be to a large extent figurative, poetry and not 
 prose, and the Apocalyptic literature was marked by 
 an abundant and even sometimes extravagant sym- 
 bolism. Even if we have the ipsissima verba of Jesus 
 we need not interpret them literally ; He may have 
 been conveying moral and religious truth in this 
 borrowed eschatological form. Again, the promise 
 of the future cannot be fulfilled to the letter, since 
 freedom is a factor in all human history which God’s 
 providence does not suppress, but recognises. Even if 
 Jesus in the exercise of His function as a prophet 
 Himself at the time envisaged the future more nearly 
 as it is represented in His teaching, it is no deprecia- 
 tion of His truth and wisdom to admit, as facts compel 
 us to admit, that the subsequent course of history did 
 not closely correspond with the expectations as so 
 expressed. He did definitely anticipate the fall of 
 Jerusalem within the lifetime of some of his hearers, 
 and that expectation was fulfilled (Mark xiii. 30). 
 While He appears to connect His Second Advent 
 with that event, He does expressly confess ignorance 
 of the exact date. ‘ Of that day or that hour knoweth 
 ho one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, 
 but the Father’ (Mark xiii. 32). If He knew not the 
 date, did He, and under the conditions of the Incarna- 
 tion could He, literally foretell the manner of His 
 Second Advent ? 
 
 (iv) Only in the Fourth Gospel is the resurrection 
 of the wicked to judgment connected with the Second 
 Advent. ‘Marvel not at this: for the hour cometh, 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 443 
 
 in which all that are in the tombs shall hear His voice, 
 and shall come forth ; they that have done good, unto 
 the resurrection of life; and they that have done ill, 
 unto the resurrection of judgment’ (v. 28-29). In view 
 of the fact that Paul in 1 Corinthians xv. in expound- 
 ing the doctrine of the Resurrection makes no mention 
 of the wicked, that the language here expresses the 
 doctrine in the materialistic form which Jesus ex- 
 pressly rebuked, and that this statement is incon- 
 sistent with the general teaching of the discourse in 
 which it occurs, dealing as that does with the spiritual 
 resurrection through faith in Christ, the present judg- 
 ment of Christ, and the eternal life already possessed 
 in Him, we may reject this and such like statements 
 elsewhere as later editorial insertions, reproducing 
 current beliefs, and not the teaching of Jesus. What 
 is certain is that Jesus did expect a speedy Second 
 Advent. This is a proof of His confident faith in 
 God, and His eager desire to accomplish the task 
 entrusted to Him. He did not fully take into account 
 the delays and hindrances which sin and unbelief 
 might interpose, although at times He did recognise 
 that the lack of faith in man might frustrate the grace 
 of God. ‘The view of the Incarnation expounded in 
 this volume not only permits but demands such an 
 explanation. As the New Testament proves, Jesus 
 
 did come again to His disciples as the constant and 
 sovereign presence (Matt. xxviii. 20); He did con- 
 tinue His activity in His Spirit; He is coming ever 
 more fully into the world in the conquests of His 
 truth and grace. What more there may be in the 
 future as fulfilment of this hope of the Kingdom will 
 be discussed later. 
 
 v (8) The Christian Church took over the Apocalyptic 
 teaching of Judaism, with this difference. It con- 
 fessed that Jesus as the Christ had already come, 
 and He in His Second Coming became the centre 
 of the Apocalyptic drama. He would come again in 
 power and glory as Judge of the wicked, and as 
 Saviour of believers; their salvation would be com- 
 pleted in their resurrection, and the resurrection of 
 
444 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 those who had fallen asleep in Jesus in their participa- 
 tion in His Kingdom. | 
 
 (1) Paul did represent the common Christian attitude 
 in the confident expectation he often expresses of sur- 
 vival to the Second Advent. How he conceives the re- 
 surrection is fully set forth in 1 Corinthians xv. 42-49, 
 although there is some dispute as to the exact meaning, 
 Is the sowing referred to the burial in the grave, or is 
 it In this earthly life of which the grave is the goal ? 
 Whichever it may be, what Paul emphasises is the 
 contrast of the natural body (corruption, dishonour, 
 weakness) and the spiritual body (incorruption, glory, 
 power). Those who are alive at the Second Advent, 
 too, must be changed suddenly from the natural to 
 the spiritual body. He, however, recognises the 
 possibility that he may die, and not be alive to ex- 
 perience this change. He does not expect, however, 
 to be disembodied spirit, but to have a body, a 
 heavenly; he will not be unclothed, but clothed 
 upon (2 Cor. v. 1-10). He is willing to be absent from 
 this body, that he may be at home with the Lord. 
 We cannot say that he changed his mind, but he 
 wavered between the two expectations according to 
 the mood in which the state of his health placed him. 
 For even after this utterance he reverts to the common 
 apostolic hope (Phil. iii. 20-21). With that hope his 
 faith-mysticism, as it has been called, is also incon- 
 gruous. He is conscious of an immediate personal 
 contact and intimate personal communion with the 
 living Christ; to him to live is Christ, and therefore 
 to die gain (Phil. i. 21), as bringing him still nearer 
 to his Lord. Why then, we may ask, should he desire 
 the visible Return? There lie in his mind together 
 the Jewish inheritance and the Christian experience, 
 not only unharmonised but probably for him not 
 needing to be brought into accord (ef. 2 Tim. iv. 6-8). 
 We may, however, prefer as his contribution to a 
 constructive theology these two elements: (1) the 
 present union of the believer with Christ, and (2) the 
 entrance of the believer at death into a still fuller 
 life with Christ, | 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 4A5 
 
 (11) Although in the Fourth Gospel there appear 
 references to the Apocalyptic hope, these are probably 
 to be regarded as editorial additions; the distinctive 
 teaching of the Gospel is similar to that of Paul: the 
 presence of Christ with the believer as the source of 
 his eternal life, and the consequent exemption from 
 death of the possessor of that eternal life in Him 
 (John v. 21-24, 26-27, vi. 47-51). The question arises, 
 how far is this teaching a report of what Jesus did 
 teach, and how far is it a later development in the 
 mind of the evangelist? The writer after a minute 
 study of the Gospel! has reached the conclusion that 
 this Gospel does preserve a type of teaching reserved 
 for a few select disciples in advance of what is re- 
 corded by the Synoptists ; but that pregnant sayings, 
 remembered by one of these disciples, have been 
 developed into more explicit statements. Both Paul 
 and the writer of the Fourth Gospel bring Christian 
 experience to correct the Jewish inheritance; and 
 we need not retain what they were themselves out- 
 growing. 
 
 (4) The Christian Church has never formally 
 abandoned this Jewish Apocalyptic. In every age 
 the book of Daniel and of the Revelation have 
 found their interpreters, who have by ingenious 
 calculations been able to prove to their own satis- 
 faction the literal fulfilment of the supposed predic- 
 tions in these writings, and to fix the precise date of 
 the Second Advent. Asa result of the War there has 
 been a recrudescence of this superstition, and many 
 Christians are to-day anticipating the Lord’s Second 
 Advent very soon. As this anticipation has century 
 after century been falsified, and the calculations by 
 which it is supported have constantly to be revised 
 when the alleged date is passed, we may confidently 
 assert that a theology which desires to be intelligent 
 and intelligible can disregard it. 
 
 (i) Christ is here and now present (Matt. xxviii. 
 18-20) ; but His presence may be made more manifest 
 in the world through His Church, which as His body 
 
 1 See Lhe Beloved Disciple, pp. 202-204. 
 
446 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 speaks and acts for Him in the fulfilment of the 
 redemptive purpose of God (Eph. i. 15-23). In His 
 truth and grace as Saviour and Lord He is coming 
 more fully into the thought and life of mankind. 
 There are hindrances and delays in the progress of 
 His Sovereign Saviourhood. But it does seem to 
 Christian faith that He is subduing the kingdoms of 
 the world to Himself. We are not warranted in 
 assuming that the progress will be necessarily gradual ; 
 there may be crises, years more significant for the 
 manifestation of Him than centuries have been; but 
 it would be contrary to the expectation, to which a 
 study of the method of the divine providence as dis- 
 closed in history leads us to assume that the moral 
 and religious process will be interrupted by a super- 
 natural divine intervention. It does seem more 
 reasonable to suppose that the consummation of the 
 progress will be achieved by the same means as are 
 now being used in winning the world for Christ as 
 Saviour and Lord. On this assumption, what would 
 take the place of the Apocalyptic hope of the Second 
 Advent would be the confident expectation that 
 the redemption of the human race will at last be 
 accomplished. 
 
 (ii) To this expectation, which is probably very 
 widely cherished as the inspiration of manifold forms 
 of Christian service for human betterment, there are 
 three objections to be considered. First of all, as 
 has already been indicated, we are not warranted in 
 assuming that every human soul will repent and be- 
 heve, and that God can in any way compel man, if 
 unwilling, to receive salvation. This possibility tfor- 
 bids a too confident hope of the whole race being 
 completely redeemed from sin unto God. Secondly, 
 it may be doubted whether this earthly life is by its 
 very conditions fitted to be the scene of the perfect 
 manifestation of the truth and grace of God in Christ 
 Jesus. In view of the faults and failures even of the 
 saints, can we be sure that there will ever be on earth 
 a period when a sinless race will inhabit the old scene 
 of so tragic a fall from goodness and God? Can man 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 44.7 
 
 in this natural body attain to the full stature of man- 
 hood in Christ (Eph. iv. 13)? Are not other con- 
 ditions necessary for man’s perfect personal develop- 
 ment ? Thirdly, science foretells a physical change 
 for this earth which will make it no longer habitable 
 by men.’ Can we be confident that the progress of 
 mankind will be completed before that close to earth’s 
 evolution ? Can we suppose that a purpose of God 
 could be interrupted by such a physical catastrophe ? 
 Can faith confidently meet any such challenge by 
 asserting that, as God is Creator as well as Redeemer, 
 the process of nature and the progress of history must 
 both be so ordered by Him that the one subserves 
 the other? Here we are in the region of conjecture. 
 We must admit as an alternative view, less probable 
 it may be, but not improbable, that the Kingdom of 
 God will never in all its glory be manifest here, but 
 that the history of man on earth is preparatory for 
 a consummation of the Kingdom in the unseen world, 
 when a redeemed race shall have been gathered home. 
 This admission does not, however, rob us of the hope 
 that the Kingdom of God can be advanced on earth, 
 that by the truth and grace of Christ the race can be 
 prepared here for that consummation though it may 
 be in the unseen world. One advantage this alter- 
 native view may claim. The Kingdom of God may 
 be conceived too narrowly as earthly goods and not 
 as a heavenly good, as material advantage and not as 
 personal perfection. And this peril would certainly 
 be avoided by our recognition that this earth for 
 God’s purpose has a value subordinate to that unseen 
 world for which we are here preparing. 
 
 (iii) The writer cannot himself escape the feeling 
 (conviction would be too definite a word) that it 
 would be fitting that this earth which has witnessed 
 the tragedy of man’s sin, and the tragedy of Christ’s 
 sacrifice, should also be the scene of the triumph of 
 the grace of God. As regards the three objections 
 this at least may be said. Do men who refuse the 
 
 ! Jn view of the most recent developments of physics, this prediction is 
 now less contidently maintained. 
 
448 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Gospel now have the love of God so presented to them 
 as to constrain, not compel, their faith and surrender ? 
 In the unseen world, or in a future age, may not 
 that Gospel yet be so presented as to overcome all 
 resistance by its appeal? Again, since society is 
 still so un-Christian, may not saints even be hindered 
 from being the best that they can be? In a world 
 more pervaded by the Spirit of Christ what possi- 
 bilities of saintliness might there not be! It is a 
 subtle dualism to assume that life on earth must 
 necessarily be imperfect. The sin of the race would 
 then appear as a natural necessity, and not a voluntary 
 departure from the possibility of a sinless development. 
 As to the relation of the moral and spiritual progress 
 of mankind to the physical changes on the earth we 
 can say nothing confidently except that God as Re- 
 deemer is one and the same with God as Creator, and 
 so between the two orders there will be harmony. If 
 this should all appear theological speculation, the 
 motive of it is to find a rational justification for the 
 religious conviction that Christ is supreme in the 
 realms of nature and of grace alike as the Son revealing 
 the Father and the Saviour redeeming men. Which- 
 ever of the two alternatives we may prefer, the duty 
 is plain to do all that can be done to secure the mani- 
 festation of the truth and grace of Christ, the Kingdom 
 of God, as fully as can be, not in isolated individuais 
 only, but in mankind in all human relations and 
 activities. Accordingly, it is not only in what is often 
 called religious work distinctively that this end is to 
 be furthered. It is the whole manhood of all mankind 
 which is to be redeemed; and while the conscious 
 and voluntary relation to God is the decisive, crucial 
 interest, religion must never be only a department of 
 life, it must be a quality given to the whole of life. 
 The dominance of Christ in the domestic, economic, 
 and political spheres belongs to the Kingdom of God on 
 earth as well as to His rule within the soul of each man. 
 
 (5) Although according to the Apocalyptic hope 
 in its Jewish forms the general judgment of men was 
 connected with the day of Yahweh or the advent of 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE AAO 
 
 the Messiah, and in its Christian form with the Second 
 Advent of Christ, even when the fulfilment of that 
 hope was deferred, the question was not distinctly 
 answered as to the condition of the dead until the 
 resurrection of all mankind. Paul’s phrase about 
 those ‘ which are fallen asleep in Christ’ (1 Cor. xv. 
 18) has sometimes been made the basis of teaching 
 about an intermediate state of reduced vitality, a 
 continuation of the common view in heathenism.? 
 Paul does not make any conjectures about the con- 
 dition of the wicked; but as regards himself in the 
 passage already discussed (2 Cor. v. 1-10) he antici- 
 pates an immediate entrance to the heavenly life with 
 Christ. Without explaining the contradiction to the 
 Apocalyptic view, in the common belief of the Church 
 it has been assumed that men do in the next life 
 receive reward or punishment for the deeds done in 
 
 this. 
 ~~ (i) While Roman Catholicism has a doctrine of a 
 purgatory, in which souls not good enough for heaven 
 are purified for entrance there, Protestantism has 
 assumed generally that sinners go at death to hell, 
 and saints to heaven. A doctrine of eternal punish- 
 ment, of unceasing torment, not only for the very 
 wicked, but for all who die unsaved by the grace of 
 Christ, was till about fifty years ago assumed to be the 
 only orthodox view; and there are still many Chris- 
 tians with whom it is an article of faith, against which 
 their heart may protest, but which they feel they 
 must accept as the teaching of Scripture. In this 
 doctrine metaphors are turned into dogmas. The 
 differences of religious condition and moral character, 
 of personal development, in sinners as in saints in- 
 dividually, is ignored when the one or the other 
 destiny is assigned to all. It is unwarrantably 
 assumed that a physical event such as death irrevoc- 
 ably fixes the personality, and thus also its destiny, 
 that there can be no recovery from sin, and no pro- 
 gress in goodness hereafter, that to each soul this 
 
 1 For a speculative treatment of the intermediate state, as it has been 
 called, see Christian Dogmatics, by Martensen, Eng. trans., pp. 457-62. 
 
 2F 
 
450 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 earthly life has offered an adequate probation, a 
 sufficient opportunity for receiving or rejecting the 
 grace of God, that the love of God the Father has thus 
 arbitrarily fixed the term of His dealing with men 
 for their salvation. The writer on the contrary be- 
 lieves that the love of God as revealed and realised 
 in the grace of Christ does and will exhaust all the 
 resources it can command to recover the son who was 
 lost, and restore the dead in sin ; and that this earthly 
 life for many has not offered the adequate opportunity 
 for the pleading and the striving of the love of God, 
 or for such a personal development as could be re- 
 garded as a final rejection and resistance of the grace 
 of Christ. The obscure passages (1 Peter iii. 19, 
 iv. 6) which are the basis of the statement in the 
 Apostles’ Creed regarding the descent into hell do 
 indicate a belief, even in the Apostolic Age, that in 
 the unseen world Christ still continues His work. 
 The writer would base no doctrine on these texts, 
 but finds a broad and sure foundation for the view 
 that God’s dealing with men for their salvation in 
 Christ does not end in death, on the one hand in God’s 
 Fatherhood, which is surely love to the uttermost 
 and to the end, and on the other hand in the in- 
 completeness of personal development in this life. 
 What truth there is in the doctrine of reward or 
 punishment hereafter will be considered at a later 
 stage of this discussion. 
 y (it) In revolt against this view of eternal punish- 
 ment there was strenuously advocated by a few 
 theologians the theory of conditional immortality.! 
 To state the theory as briefly as possible, it is this. 
 Man has no natural immortality. He can attain 
 immortality only as through faith in Christ he re- 
 ceives eternal life from God. But here the theory 
 may diverge in two directions. It may be main- 
 tained that the spiritual death coincides with the 
 physical death, and that only believers survive the 
 death of the body. A more gracious view of God may, 
 
 ' See Life in Christ, by Edward White; Our Growing Creed, by W. D. 
 M‘ Laren. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 451 
 
 however, lead to the modification of the theory, that 
 even in the unseen world there may be for a time a 
 continued opportunity of receiving the eternal life, 
 and that the eternal death will come only when grace 
 is finally refused. ‘To the cruder form of the theory 
 the two objections already offered to the doctrine of 
 eternal punishment apply; the physical event re- 
 gardless of the stage of personal development reached 
 eannot be decisive of eternal destiny, and the im- 
 portunities of God’s love cannot be confined to this 
 earthly life so long as there is any possibility of the 
 response which brings salvation. In the more refined 
 form the theory does not seem to stress enough the 
 conviction that God will not abandon any soul He 
 has made until His grace can do no more. In support 
 of the theory reliance has been placed on taking 
 literally the word death wherever it occurs in the New 
 Testament as including spiritual as well as physical 
 death, and in citing texts, and not enough on the 
 general considerations as to the nature of God and 
 His purpose for man as revealed in Christ, by which 
 Christian theology should always be guided. While 
 eternal life is made to depend on relation to Christ, 
 yet what seems to be ignored is the Father-heart of 
 God as laid bare in Jesus Christ. 
 
 (iii) Speculatively dogmatic universalism is the most 
 satisfactory solution of the problem; and there are 
 texts which can be quoted in support of it, such as 
 among others the following: ‘God hath shut up all 
 unto disobedience that He might have mercy upon 
 all’ (Rom. xi. 32). ‘ When all things have been 
 subjected unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself 
 be subjected to Him that did subject all things unto 
 Him, that God may be all in all’ (1 Cor. xv. 28). 
 ‘God put all things in subjection under His feet, and 
 gave Him to be head over all things to the church, 
 which is His body, the complement of Him that com- 
 pleteth all in all’ (Eph. 1, 22-23). ‘It was the good 
 pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the 
 completeness dwell ; and through Him to reconcile all 
 things unto Himself, having made peace through the 
 
452 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things 
 upon the earth, or things in the heavens’ (Col. i. 19- 
 20). Such an inspired vision of the end is entirely 
 congruous with the completeness of the revelation 
 of God as Father, and of the redemption of man as 
 son which is claimed by faith for Christ as Saviour 
 and Lord. Such a hope, too, meets the yearnings of 
 the Christian heart for the salvation of all. The two 
 difficulties already mentioned alone forbid our assert- 
 ing it dogmatically although we may cherish the hope 
 confidently ;1 first, God cannot force any man to be 
 saved, and second, man may refuse salvation. It 
 may be we are not warranted in transporting into the 
 unseen world conditions which we must recognise in 
 this; it may be that ‘ within the veil’ God’s con- 
 straint of love may prove irresistible, because faith 
 will be freed from entanglements of this earthly life. 
 This, however, we must affirm, that in the unseen 
 world, as on earth, God saves only in His grace, and 
 man is saved only by faith. 
 
 (iv) Although in criticising these views the writer’s 
 own position has been indicated, a fuller constructive 
 statement may be offered. (a) While recognising fully 
 the right of science to investigate all psychic pheno- 
 mena, even the most obscure and remote from ordinary 
 experience, and prepared to accept thoroughly verified 
 evidence, the writer must confess himself quite un- 
 convinced that spiritualism can offer a proof of 
 survival of death which can be the foundation of a 
 confident hope of immortality. The results, such as 
 they are, do not offer a very attractive picture of the 
 unseen world and the future life. If God who is love, 
 and hallows and blesses human affection, had willed 
 that we should have such communion with our 
 beloved dead, He surely would have provided a 
 highway through what is truest and best in us, and 
 not confined us to these dubious, if not suspicious, 
 byways. Our human love is purified and elevated 
 because it is, not by sense, but by faith, relying on the 
 
 1 See Dr. Cox’s Salvator Mundi; Farrar’s Mercy and Judgment; also 
 Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, pp. 237-44. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 453 
 
 reality of God in Jesus Christ, that we are sure that 
 our loved ones are a spiritual and not a sensuous 
 presence with us, real to our unquenched affection, 
 even when we long for ‘ the touch of a vanished hand, 
 and the sound of a voice that is still.’ We are sure of 
 God, not by sense, but by spirit, and our knowledge 
 of our beloved dead is of the same kind, and value, 
 because it is rooted in our faith in God. Spiritualism 
 as such need have no moral or religious influence on 
 him who in these devious ways seeks to communicate 
 with the unseen. The Christian hope depends on a 
 belief in the conservation of values, and that springs 
 from faith in the reality of God as the absolute value. 
 As the psalmist believed that death could not destroy 
 the saint’s fellowship with God (Ixxili. 23-26), so to 
 the Christian, to whom to live is Christ, death is gain 
 (Phil. 1, 21), as assuring to him the clearer vision, the 
 closer communion, and the greater resemblance to 
 Christ. Even if the words refer to the Second Advent 
 primarily, for the Christian to-day they hold true of 
 his entrance into the world beyond the veil of death. 
 ‘It is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We 
 know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like 
 Him, for we shall see Him even as He is’ (1 John. in. 
 2). We have this hope set on Christ (v. 3) because 
 ‘now we are the children of God.’ ‘ And if children, 
 then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ ’ 
 (Rom. vii. 17). Because He triumphed over death, 
 it has for us no terrors; because He ever liveth, we 
 shall live also with Him. Such a faith can stand 
 upright and needs no crutch of spiritualism for Its 
 support. 
 
 (6) While the Christian hope is set on Christ, we 
 must not ignore the testimony which the human 
 reason, conscience, and heart also offer in confirma- 
 tion, a subject which in a previous chapter has been 
 touched on. The theory of conditional immortality 
 iynores this testimony when it so confidently denies 
 man’s immortality. We must, however, get away 
 from the static to the dynamic view; immortality 
 is not an inalienable possession of man; it is not a 
 
454 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 sift of nature, but a gain of development. God 
 destined man for immortality as the consequent of 
 his achievement of personality ; and God is doing all 
 He can to assure man of immortality in enabling him 
 by His grace to achieve his personality. As man grows 
 in truth, holiness, love, doth he attain the blessedness 
 of immortality. Man’s quest of truth, his attainment 
 of holiness, his giving and getting love, is never com- 
 pleted here on earth in this life, yet these ideals by 
 their very nature demand full realisation, and thus, 
 to use Kant’s term, postulate immortality as the only 
 adequate opportunity for their realisation. It is not 
 man’s failure to be what he ought to be that is the 
 proof of immortality, but it is his promise of becoming 
 what in the short span of life he had not yet become 
 that points to the Beyond of his hope, where he shall 
 be all that God made him to be. Now man sees the 
 truth as ‘in a mirror darkly ; but then face to face.’ 
 Now he ‘ knows in part, but then shall he know even 
 as also he has been known’ (1 Cor. xiii. 12). Now 
 he does not behold, or reflect as in a mirror, the 
 glory of the Lord perfectly, but then he will perfectly 
 be transformed into the same image from glory to 
 glory (2 Cor. iii. 18). The purer and truer human 
 love becomes, the more impossible is acquiescence in 
 the severance of death. Souls have not through a 
 common life of joy or sorrow, achievement or struggle, 
 erown into a oneness that death can sever. While 
 Jesus did rebuke the gross materialism of the Pharisaic 
 view of the Resurrection, and did deny that earthly 
 relationships as such continue unchanged (Mark xu. 
 24-26), He did not destroy this hope; for within 
 marriage or any other human relationship there may 
 develop a human affection angelic in quality, fit for 
 and worthy of heaven. If this earthly life is not com- 
 pleted in the heavenly, whatever fleeting happiness 
 the years may bring, that blessedness, that permanent 
 and dominant inner harmony of the spirit of man, can 
 never be attained. God made man for perfect per- 
 sonality, and so immortality; and his development 
 now holds the pledge thereof. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 455 
 
 yA 
 
 / (ce) This proof of immortality, depending as it does 
 on the worth of personality, is no proof of the survival 
 of those who refuse to become perfect persons by the 
 realisation of the ideals. It has already been shown 
 that in the Old Testament there is only one passage, 
 and also in the New, in which the resurrection to © 
 judgment of the wicked is taught. Eternal life is 
 conditioned on faith in Christ, and eternal death is 
 the wages of sin (Rom. vi. 23). Where the theory of 
 conditional immortality in its recent forms has often 
 failed is in making spiritual coincident with physical 
 death, and in not allowing adequate opportunity for 
 the acceptance of the eternal life, the achievement 
 of immortality in the unseen world. Even for the 
 wicked the probation is not necessarily ended at death, 
 for God will do to the utmost all His love can do to 
 save. While we recognise this promise of the future 
 life, we must also maintain the possibility of a final 
 refusal of grace, a fixity in sin and unbelief. For such 
 souls, if any such there should be when God has done 
 all He can, it is incredible that there should be con- 
 tinuance of being in the misery which their character 
 must bring with it. The writer at least is forced to 
 the conclusion that there will be the forfeiture of 
 immortality. Biology may here afford us an analogy. 
 If an organism does not adapt itself to its environ- 
 ment, it is not suddenly killed, it dies slowly ; so we 
 need not assume any annihilation of the persistently 
 wicked by a supernatural act of God, but only the 
 inevitable consequence in decreasing vitality and 
 vigour of personality, until it cease to be.? If re- 
 demption be the end of creation, then the creature 
 who refuses redemption annuls the very end of his 
 creation. Why we cannot affirm the alternative of 
 universal salvation has already been shown. The 
 other alternative, that God continues creatures in 
 existence for their everlasting torment, is a supposition 
 
 1 What does Jesus mean when He speaks of the loss or the forfeit of life 
 (Matt. xvi. 25-26) P 
 
 2 See The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, by Simpson, for the statement 
 of the problem from the biological standpoint, chap. xvii. 
 
456 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 quite incredible for any who have seen God the Father 
 in the face of Jesus Christ. It is only by some such 
 view as this that we can do justice both to the revela- 
 tion of God’s Fatherhood and the solemn warnings 
 and passionate appeals of Christ Himself to the sinful 
 to turn and live. There is an optimism regarding 
 the future life which is not Christian. The wages of 
 sin is death ; there is no peace to the wicked (Is. xlviil. 
 22). Only faith in Christ assures the blessed and 
 glorious immortality. 
 
 (d) We may now look. a little more closely at what 
 we may assume will be the conditions of the future life. 
 First of all, we must affirm continuity amid change. 
 The man will be mentally, morally, and spiritually 
 one and the same as he was in this life, as an event 
 such as physical death will not of itself convert the 
 sinner or perfect the saint. There will, however, be 
 change. The change of conditions may be judgment ; 
 it may allow the man to see himself as amid the 
 shows and shams of earth he has never seen himself. 
 It may be the moment when he is shown whether the 
 way he is pursuing will lead to his triumph or to 
 his undoing. The sinner’s self-discovery may lead 
 to his self-recovery as God’s grace is more clearly 
 disclosed to him. The saint’s self-discovery may 
 bring a contrition and amendment which will set him 
 with unimpeded feet on the upward path. Degrada- 
 tion through continuance in sin there may be; but 
 surely there will be progress in the realisation of the 
 ideals. The saint may dare to hope that sin will no 
 longer easily beset him, that he will be able to run 
 the race towards perfection more freely and speedily 
 (Heb. xii. 1-3). Especially may we dare to hope for 
 a clearer manifestation of Christ in His glory, and a 
 closer conformity to what He is as a result of the more 
 intimate communion (1 John i. 2). As symbolic the 
 poetry of many of our hymns may suggest a blessedness 
 which words cannot define, but the figurative lan- 
 guage of the Holy Scriptures must not be taken with 
 prosaic literalness. This clearer manifestation of 
 Christ to the unbelieving may prove for their deepen- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE AST 
 
 ing condemnation, if they will not suffer it to be for 
 their growing salvation (cf. John ix. 39-41). Where 
 sin continues the consequences of sin will continue, 
 intensified it may be by a more distinct consciousness 
 of them as the judgment of God, resulting in a more 
 inveterate defiance instead of a penitent submission. 
 There may thus be a widening gulf between the 
 righteous and the wicked, who in their earthly life 
 may not have appeared to be so far apart. Only the 
 Christian can look forward to death with assured hope ; 
 for the unbelieving it should have a salutary fear. 
 Nothing in the revelation of God’s Fatherhood 
 warrants an assumption that moral differences and 
 their consequences will be obliterated in the unseen 
 world, or that men will not there reap the fruit of their 
 sowing here, corruption to those who have sowed to 
 the flesh, and only to those who have sowed to the 
 Spirit eternal life (Gal. vi. 8). 
 
 -~ Secondly, we should prefer the Christian idea of 
 resurrection as modified by Paul to the Greek idea of 
 the disembodied soul. Necessarily his language 1s 
 very figurative : ‘ We know that if the earthly house 
 of our tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building 
 from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in 
 the heavens’ (2 Cor. v. 1). This he elsewhere de- 
 scribes as the spiritual body (1 Cor. xv. 42-49), by 
 which he means a body fit for and worthy of the 
 renewed spirit of man as its organ of expression and 
 activity. Such a conception is not so difficult for 
 our thought to-day as 1t was for a former age when 
 the rigid atomic theory prevailed. Matter and spirit 
 seemed so opposed to one another that a spiritual 
 body seemed a contradiction in terms. The hypo- 
 thesis of the indestructibility of matter and of the 
 transmutation of energy is now under revision. It 
 is conceded that energy may be transmuted into 
 matter, and matter may be resolved again into energy ; 
 and the most intelligible conception we can form of 
 energy is energy as we ourselves exercise it when we 
 will to act. Life is ever realising energy, and we 
 cannot now conceive life without the direction of mind. 
 
458 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Panpsychism is a philosophy which commends itself 
 to many minds. Without laying stress on this possi- 
 bility of making more intelligible the spiritual body, 
 what the doctrine of the Resurrection stands for as 
 permanent truth is that it is the whole personality 
 in full activity and manifold relations which survives 
 death, not an attenuated, devitalised manhood. While 
 physical and social relations of this life will not be 
 reproduced, yet the continuity of the entire person- 
 ality surely involves that all the human relations 
 which have fostered the development of the person- 
 ality here will be continued hereafter. The Christian 
 hope would lose much of its value for us did it not in- 
 clude the expectation ‘that the affections which have 
 made life so good here will be continued hereafter. 
 Interests and activities which have personal value will 
 be carried on in the unseen world, however changed 
 may be the conditions. In more intimate communion 
 with God al! the children of God will be brought into 
 more intimate communion with one another; and just 
 as here the common love for all mankind does not ex- 
 clude the distinctive love of husband and wife, parent 
 and child, friend and friend, so there these differences 
 of relationship transformed will not disturb, but con- 
 tribute to the vast harmony of the one family of God. 
 
 (6) Can we bring the transformed Apocalyptic hope 
 and the view here offered of individual destiny into 
 closer relation to one another? Is heaven so severed 
 from earth that it has no share in the trial and the 
 triumph of the Kingdom of God on earth ? 
 
 (i) Refusing to accept as convincing the evidence 
 which spiritualism offers of communications from 
 the dead, we do not need to deny their presence with 
 us, their interest in us, their activity for us. If Christ 
 be as He has proved to be in Christian experience a 
 living, loving, and gracious presence, there is no 
 ground for denying the possibility at least of such 
 a participation of the saints with us as shall be for 
 our help and comfort, and shall not disturb their 
 blessedness. It need not be that they know all that 
 we say and do, so that our sins should be their grief, 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 459 
 
 even though that we cannot deny; it may be that 
 their receptivity and responsiveness are determined by 
 their character and condition now, so that only what 
 is truest, best, and worthiest in human history finds 
 access to their loving hearts. It is surely not merely 
 a fond fancy, but the heart’s deepest craving, which has 
 found expression in this anonymous poem, written 
 in imitation of Swinburne’s series of roundels on ‘ A 
 Baby’s Death,’ but referring to a beloved wife : 
 
 ‘ The tender eyes that looked in love 
 On me before, so meekly wise ; 
 But from my sight death did remove 
 The tender eyes. 
 What glories now upon them rise 
 Beyond the brightness of these skies ? 
 But surely they do earthward move 
 To rest on me. Love never dies, 
 Which faithful by their ight approve 
 The tender eyes. 
 
 ‘ The gentle hands that smoothed my brow 
 With soothing touch, that loosed the bands 
 Which bound my soul, where are they now, 
 The gentle hands ? 
 As ceaseless working God’s commands, 
 With unseen fingers weaving strands 
 *T ween earth and heaven. I know not how 
 I’m heavenward drawn. Her love demands : 
 The mastery I will allow 
 The gentle hands. 
 
 ‘The willing feet that joyous sped 
 To give me help, by love made fleet, 
 Are now for ever from me fled, 
 The willing feet ? 
 Now find they work that is more sweet, 
 Gives larger joy, makes bliss complete ? 
 Ah, yet I think they sometimes tread 
 The room again, and still repeat 
 Their former work, by love still led, 
 The willing feet.’ 
 
 (ii) Generalising this idea, we may ask, are the saints 
 in heaven watching the progress of the Kingdom of 
 God onearth? That thought is suggested by Hebrews 
 xii. 1, and Westcott adopts it.! ‘ The writer regards 
 
 1 The Epistle to the Hebrews, in loco. 
 
460 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 himself and his fellow-Christians as placed in an 
 arena and contending for a great prize. The image 
 of the amphitheatre with the rising rows of spectators 
 seems to suggest the thought of an encircling cloud. 
 The witnesses of whom the cloud is composed are 
 unquestionably the countless heroes of faith whose 
 deeds have been summarised in chapter xi.’ There is an 
 interest not only of compassion, but their own blessed- 
 ness 1s being completed as they see the fulfilment of 
 the promise given to them in the better thing God has 
 provided for those who follow them (xi. 39-40). We 
 may apply the thought to the saints now in heaven, 
 and the completion of the world’s redemption in 
 Christ. When the Kingdom of God comes in its 
 fullness of power and glory, either here on earth, or 
 in the unseen world, then will even the saints in heaven 
 be perfected. ‘There is joy,’ as Jesus tells us, ‘in 
 the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that 
 repenteth’ (Luke xv. 10). Their full blessedness 
 surely waits till all the prodigals are gathered home. 
 Can Paul who was willing to be ‘ anathema from Christ 
 for his brethren’s sake, his kinsmen according to the 
 flesh > (Rom. ix. 3) be perfected in glory until ‘ all 
 Israel shall be saved’ (xi. 26)? The universal con- 
 summation will also be the individual completion for 
 the saints; will it also be the final judgment of the 
 wicked who still oppose themselves to that fulfilled 
 purpose of God? It would be fitting that it should 
 so be. Such a solution of the problem has a double 
 advantage. It does first of all retain the essential 
 content of the Apocalyptic hope of a consummation 
 of all things in Christ, and harmonises it with the 
 development of Christian thought regarding individual 
 destiny. What may be beyond that consummation, 
 if we may be so bold as to make a conjecture, is sug- 
 gested by 1 Corinthians xv. 28; but the consideration 
 of that saying must be deferred for the conclusion of 
 this volume. It secondly corrects a too common error 
 of popular Christian thought. Individual destiny is 
 detached from the universal consummation, and in 
 some forms of pietism a man is allowed and encouraged 
 
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 461 
 
 to rejoice in his own salvation, while indifferent to 
 the damnation of a large portion of mankind. We 
 cannot and we ought not to separate ourselves from 
 our race; humanity is a body of which the members 
 suffer or rejoice together (1 Cor. xi. 26). How could 
 one man be completely saved himself in a world 
 for the most part damned! How could he rejoice 
 in his own salvation, unmoved by compassion for 
 his lost brethren! What Christian love does demand 
 in the Christian hope is that the consummation shall 
 be relatively so complete that the loving heart can be 
 satisfied, and find its share in the satisfaction of the — 
 heart of God. The grace of Christ shall accomplish 
 all that the love of God desires in the redeemed race, 
 the community of the Spirit, the temple of God filled 
 with His presence. 
 
 (iii) In no department of theology is there a greater 
 need of restatement, of abandoning the old paths of 
 tradition and authority, and of venturing on new 
 ways of moral and religious insight in the light of the 
 revelation of God in Jesus Christ.t. This the writer 
 has in this chapter ventured to do, impelled thereto 
 not only by the interest of the mind in truth, but also 
 by the affections of the heart for men, the love which 
 the love of God inspires, which craves, and prays, and 
 hopes for the salvation of all men. In what has been 
 written here no moral or religious interest has been 
 sacrificed. Judgment on sin so long as it is impenitent 
 has been affirmed as a necessity of the perfection of 
 God Himself; but grace unto the uttermost has also 
 been asserted, a grace which will not triumph over 
 judgment, but may even in judgment secure its 
 triumph. Not retribution, but redemption, is God’s 
 final purpose, although retribution may serve the 
 ends of redemption, and, with sad heart must the 
 admission be made, retribution may be final where 
 redemption is finally refused. Still do we cling to 
 the hope that the victory of grace over sin shall be 
 complete, when God shall be all in all. 
 
 1 A recent book which attempts a restatement on similar lines is The Other 
 Side of Death, by R. G. Macintyre. 
 
CONCLUSION : 
 
 THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY 
 FATHER, SON AND HOLY SPIRIT ONE GOD 
 
 In the preceding pages an endeavour has been made 
 to expound the Christian Revelation and Redemption 
 in its historical trinitarian presentation. We have 
 been concerned with what has been described as the 
 economic in contrast to the ontological Trinity, with 
 God as He has made Himself known and given Himself 
 to men in history. We must raise the further ques- 
 tion: Is God in His eternal nature as He has revealed 
 Himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? For any 
 ‘ ethical monotheism ’ God as He is in Himself must 
 be unity, and so we must press the question. Can 
 God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be conceived as 
 one God? To use Kant’s distinction, is the Trinity 
 only phenomenal and the Unity alone noumenal, or 
 is the one only historical appearance and the other 
 alone eternal reality; or if both are alike noumenal 
 and real, how is the Trinity related to the Unity? 
 Each of these questions demands an answer, not 
 merely to gratify a theological curiosity, but to meet 
 the religious need of possessing God Himself as He 
 is in Himself. 
 
 { 
 
 (1) Man in his religion seeks to reach reality, the 
 ultimate cause, the essential nature, and the final 
 purpose of this Universe. He cannot rest in what 
 seems, but only in what is. Even a revelation of 
 God which gave man less or other than God Himself 
 would mock his need, and blight his hopes. Im- 
 
 perfect as he knows his apprehension to have been, 
 462 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY 163 
 
 yet he believes that it is not semblance, but substance, 
 that he apprehends. Illusive he may admit some of 
 his religious ideas to have been as reality imperfectly 
 apprehended, but not delusive as apprehension of 
 unreality. As-the man of science is seeking to know 
 the world as it is, and yet is ever ready to replace one 
 hypothesis which has guided his research so far that 
 he discovers its inadequacy, by another hypothesis 
 more adequate to what he now knows, so the believer 
 is prepared to pass from one conception to another 
 because he is confident that he is pressing nearer to 
 the inmost shrine of what God is. If God has revealed 
 Himself, the believer cannot admit that the revelation 
 is concealment, that God makes Himself appear to man 
 other than He 7s. That the revelation cannot be 
 complete, that he now knows only in part, and sees 
 in a mirror darkly (1 Cor. xii. 12, R.V. marg., Gr., in 
 a riddle), he admits; but that there is as close corre- 
 spondence between what he knows and what God is 
 as the difference between God and man allows, he must 
 maintain. If God made man for His fellowship and 
 likeness, the affinity between God and man is close 
 enough to allow man to know God as He is, since God 
 has made him capable of such knowledge, and desires 
 toimpart itto man. Ifthe relation between God and 
 man be as it is realised in Christian experience the 
 economic is not a concealment, but a revelation, of the 
 ontological trinity. 
 
 (2) Before passing further in our argument we must 
 recognise two objections to this claim of religion, 
 although the one has been discredited, and the other 
 has not yet been generally recognised. 
 
 (i) Agnosticism as an epistemology or theory of 
 knowledge maintains that man can know only what 
 appears, not what is—phenomena, and not noumena. 
 In order to clear the ground for a naturalistic explana- 
 tion of the world in his Synthetic Philosophy, which is 
 merely a generalisation of the science of the time, 
 Herbert Spencer sought to relegate God to the region 
 of the Unknown or Unknowable.! It is interesting 
 
 1 First Principles, Part 1. 
 
464 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 to observe that in his argument he had to rely on 
 Hamilton and Mansel, both of whom believed them- 
 selves to be abating the proud claims of philosophy in 
 the interests of revealed religion. Much of the reason- 
 ing is but verbal jugglery. That man’s knowledge 
 is relative to man’s capacity to know is a truism ; 
 what is false is the assumption that the relation of 
 the subject knowing to the object known necessarily 
 involves that the object is not, and cannot be, as it is 
 known. Agnosticism arbitrarily restricts its scepti- 
 cism to the knowledge of God, but if the relativity of 
 knowledge forbids our knowing God it no less forbids 
 our knowing the world. Science, no less than philo- 
 sophy or theology, must be declared invalid on this 
 assumption. All human thought on the last questions 
 is a protest against this attempt to limit its activity 
 to the data of sense, and philosophy no less than 
 religion asserts that the world can be made intelligible 
 because the intelligence of man is akin to the intelli- 
 gence which is its cause and end. 
 
 (ii) Agnosticism is not now the intellectual fashion 
 of the hour, and need not detain us any longer. 
 What is much more likely to prove a formidable 
 opponent is the recent development of psychology. 
 (a) Theology had withdrawn from the basis of auth- 
 ority of Church and Bible, and was building on the 
 foundation of Christian experience. But what remains 
 if Christian, even all religious experience be merely 
 subjective, due to suggestion (auto- and hetero-)?? 
 If people can cure themselves, or be cured by others, 
 by being led to believe that they are cured, may not 
 prayer be simply auto-suggestion, the answer due not 
 to God but the result of the faith of him who prays ? 
 If a man can physically invigorate himself by thinking 
 that he is strong, may not the enthusiasm and energy 
 which the Christian Church ascribes to the Spirit of 
 God be self-induced ? These questions involve an 
 assumption that is itself false. It is assumed that 
 the activity must be either man’s or God’s, and that 
 if we can describe the psychical process we have got 
 
 1 Suggestion and Auto-suggestion, by Baudouin. 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY 465 
 
 rid of any cause other than man. But if God be 
 immanent, if in God ‘ we live and move and have our 
 being’ (Acts xviii. 28), then is there divine activity 
 in the psychical process. God no less works because 
 He works in us. For its full efficacy the religious 
 experience requires the belief in the objectivity of 
 God’s working. If a man be fully persuaded that he 
 is alone, left to himself, without God, his religious 
 experience will lose its power. We are not justified 
 in assuming that man involuntarily is practising a 
 fraud upon himself in this assumption of objectivity. 
 Religion is too deep-rooted and wide-spread a fact 
 in human history to be dismissed as a universal 
 illusion. If faith in God rested only on individual 
 religious experience, and were contradicted by the 
 other facts of the world and life, it might be difficult 
 for it to hold its own; but the interpretation theistic- 
 ally of all that is, is more satisfying to reason and to 
 conscience than any other explanation which can be 
 offered. The proof of this belongs to Apologetics, 
 and not Dogmatics, and thus falls outside of the 
 present purpose. When the man conscious of his own 
 moral weakness to withstand temptation falls back 
 on God, prays for His Spirit, and is made more than 
 conqueror, the case of the psychologist would need to 
 be much stronger to persuade him that all is due to 
 himself.? 
 
 “ (b) The whole subject has been treated very sanely 
 by a competent psychologist, Dr. William Kelley 
 Wright.? Discussing the relation of the subconscious, 
 as recent psychology has been exploring it, to prayer, 
 he states :. *‘ Only to a@ certain extent are the psycho- 
 logical principles similar, while there 1s a profound 
 ethical and moral difference between prayer and. the 
 other cases. In every spiritual religion appeal is 
 always to a higher and more ideal self. ... The 
 prayers of spiritual religion effect moral reinforce- 
 ments of character through the action of the Alter, 
 
 ! For a Christian interpretation of the conclusions of recent psychology 
 see the volume of Essays entitled The Spirit, especially II. 
 _ ? A Student’s Philosophy of Religion, pp. 266-7. 
 2G 
 
466 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 such as would be impossible to the same extent 
 through any other agency. It follows that in some 
 important respects prayer involves unique psycho- 
 logical principles. In effecting such a synthesis of 
 moral sentiments, prayer psychologically has a different 
 function from other means of tapping subconscious 
 energy. The influx of energy due to prayer effects 
 a more extensive and permanent co-ordination of 
 springs to action. ...’ ‘We shall have to admit a 
 measure of truth and moral worth in all religions, and 
 that prayer is answered in them all. But as humanity 
 has advanced, we have found that its conception of 
 God has advanced also. { All religions contain some 
 ‘measure of goodness “and truth; but those religions 
 that make effective the ethically best and logically most 
 rationally conceived Alter are best and truest.’ Chris- 
 tianity stands the test as the truest of all the religions 
 in tworespects. First of all, its conception of God, the 
 ‘ethical monotheism’ of the Hebrew prophets com- 
 pleted in the revelation of God as Father by Christ as 
 Son, answers the questions of the reason, meets the 
 demands of the conscience, and satisfies the longings 
 of the heart as no other conception can, This is a 
 legitimate application of the pragmatic test, what_s 
 lrue_works. Secondly, the experience of the Christian 
 of the presence and power of God by His Spirit makes 
 that revelation of God effective in the transformation 
 of human personality, so that the creature becomes 
 the child of God, the sinner the saint. Christian 
 faith receives and responds to reality as truth— 
 the revelation of the Father in the Son; and as 
 erace—the transformation of man so that he lives 
 with God, and God in Him, and grows in like- 
 ness to God. Thus it works practically as well as 
 theoretically. 
 
 (3) Having asserted the objectivity of Christian faith 
 —its contact with reality—-we must now consider its 
 progressiveness. 
 
 (i) The New Testament does not confront us with 
 the Athanasian Creed as a condition of salvation. 
 The disciples were only gradually led to confess Jesus 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY — 467 
 
 as the Christ (the Messiah). Even if the words * the 
 son of the living God ’ were added (Matt. xvi. 16) they 
 must be understood in a Messianic sense. Jesus did 
 claim to be the Son alone known by and knowing the 
 Father, and alone able to reveal the Father to men 
 (xi. 27), but the full significance of the saying does not 
 appear to have been apprehended during the earthly 
 life. After the Resurrection the official title Christ 
 passed into a personal name, and the title Lord was 
 added. The Christology of the early chapters in Acts 
 has been described as Adoptionist.t. It was Paul and 
 the author of the Fourth Gospel who without going 
 beyond the implications of Christian faith so developed 
 them as to give us a Christology in which Jesus the 
 Christ the Lord, without departing from the human 
 region, is exalted into the divine. Christian faith has 
 confirmed that exaltation as inevitable.” What Christ 
 means and is worth for man in his relation to God 
 demands the confession that He is God as man. The 
 grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is identical with the 
 love of God as its manifestation in human history. 
 Similarly the inward and outward change wrought 
 in believers could not be otherwise explained than as 
 the work of God Himself. Accordingly, the love of 
 God, identical with and manifest in the grace of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, was realised in the life of the be- 
 liever in the Koinonia, the common possession or the 
 community of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. xii. 14).~ Here 
 we are concerned, not with speculative theology, but 
 with personal experience. The present and potent 
 reality of God is apprehended in the Holy Spirit 
 within Christian life, as the reality of God’s Father- 
 hood was apprehended in the Sonship and Saviour- 
 hood of Jesus Christ. It is the one God whois Father, 
 Son, and Holy Spirit. 
 
 (ii) The problem of theology is how to recognise 
 adequately these differences, and yet preserve abso- 
 lutely the unity. In dealing with the Dogmatic 
 Formulation regarding the Person of Christ (Section J, 
 
 The ae of the Apostles,’ by H.'T. Andrews, Westminster New Testa- 
 ment, p. = 
 
468 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Chapter IV), the inadequacy of the philosophical 
 categories used in the creeds has been discussed ; as 
 the treatment of the doctrine of the Spirit followed on 
 the same lines (Section III, Chapter I), the same 
 criticism applies there. The categories of substance 
 and subsistence, nature and person are the best the 
 thought of the time could offer, but can be only mis- 
 leading for us and hinder our reaching the truth. 
 We do not desire to affirm the divinity of Christ or 
 the reality of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit 
 less than the framers of the creeds, but we want to 
 do this even more positively and intelligibly, less 
 ambiguously and mysteriously. To take one illus- 
 tration, Athanasius was right when he insisted on the 
 homoousion to assert the unity of Christ with God, 
 the Cappadocian fathers wrong when they allowed the 
 term to be used with a tendency to tritheism. Much 
 of the popular religious speech to-day, even in the 
 pulpit, is tritheistic. There is a divine class to which 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit belong, not a divine 
 personal unity existing and manifested as Father, 
 / Son, and Holy Spirit. The task for constructive 
 theology to-day is to récover the unity while not 
 _ losing the reality of the differences within God which 
 . these descriptive historical terms express.) What we 
 “have to do is to show how we can apprehend Christ 
 as God, and the Holy Spirit as God, indicating the 
 reasons for which the Church hitherto has often failed 
 in this apprehension. 
 
 (111) The failure of the creeds is due to the fact that 
 while affirming the divinity of Christ they retain a 
 conception of God inconsistent with, and even con- 
 tradictory of, what Christ shows God to be. (a) 
 Theologians who, like the Chalcedonian, regarded it as 
 _a ‘monstrous doctrine’ to teach that ‘the divine nature 
 of the Only Begotten is passible,’ and in general 
 emphasised after the manner of Greek philosophy 
 the differences of the divine and the human nature, 
 apart from the inadequacy of their categories, were 
 quite incapable of thinking intelligently on the In- 
 carnation. It is Christ’s own consciousness of God as 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY 469 
 
 lather which we must fully accept if we are to under- 
 stand the reality of His Sonship, His unity with God. 
 Not only has Greek philosophy intruded into Christian 
 theology, but Old Testament ideas being accepted as 
 authoritative have prevented a conception of God 
 
 distinctively and consistently Christian. If God be | 
 
 conceived as love, the Incarnation ceases to be a 
 mystery, as piety has often felt it to be, or a puzzle, 
 as theology has sometimes done its worst to make it; 
 it becomes a necessity. Love must give itself and 
 find itself in the giving. It is God who gives Himself 
 and finds Himself as man in Christ, not an inferior 
 deity, or a being partly divine; and the humanity, 
 so far from being a limitation of the divinity, is the 
 very condition of God’s most fully giving and finding 
 Himself. There are three implications in this state- 
 ment which must be made more explicit. They have 
 
 already been dealt with more fully, but must here be | 
 
 repeated (Section I, Chapter VI). In the first place, 
 God must be personal, and personality in God and 
 
 man must have so close an affinity that the personal | 
 God can live, suffer, and act as personal man. Hi | 
 
 God’s nature be other than personal, then the Incar- 
 nation is inconceivable. In the second place, as 
 personal, human experience must have reality for God, 
 else how could God share it, as He did in Christ? 
 That means that human development in time must 
 be real for God. If God’s eternity means that time 
 for Him is only appearance, and not reality, God 
 cannot have been really in Christ as He lived, suffered, 
 and acted on earth. Or’ widening our vision, and 
 recalling that the Incarnation is the consummation 
 of a progressive divine revelation, we may argue that 
 cosmic evolution and human history must have reality 
 for God. God was coming into His world in full 
 expression of His character and purpose, and finally 
 came in Jesus Christ; God was so immediately in 
 Christ that Christ’s experience belongs to the very 
 reality of God Himself.» This and nothing less is 
 what the divine immanence must mean, if it be an 
 immanence of love. God might be in the world as 
 
470 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 wisdom, power, and goodness, and yet not so fully 
 identify Himself with the life of man; but love means 
 self-identification. While in the human development 
 the Son distinguished Himself from the Father, 
 depended on Him, held communion with Him, sub- 
 mitted to Him, yet God as Son was in the human 
 experience, and, in the intimacy of the relation of 
 Father and Son, God as Father shared that experience. 
 Thirdly, there must be in God eternally the capacity 
 for such self-limitation of His infinitude and absolute- 
 ness as makes such a personal immanence in human 
 personality possible and actual; and as it is the selt- 
 limitation of love it is also self-realisation, for love's 
 kenosis is also love’s plerosis, to use a couple of terms 
 that it would be well to give a permanent place mn 
 our theological vocabulary. Shall we venture to say 
 that this kenosis for plerosis of God is the Son, as 
 God in His infinitude and absoluteness is the Father ; 
 but as in the historical revelation in the consciousness 
 of Christ the Son always knew Himself one with the 
 Father, so the transcendence and the immanence of 
 God, His infinitude and absoluteness on the one side 
 and His kenosis and plerosis on the other, are In- 
 separably related, for infinitude means not unlimited- 
 ness, but self-limitation, and absoluteness does not 
 mean unrelatedness, but self-relating? The writer is 
 persuaded from his own experience that we can 
 apprehend the reality of God in Christ, the unity of 
 the Father and the Son, as we cease thinking of God 
 in any other ways than we learn from Christ. As we 
 know God as Father in Christ as Son will the Incar- 
 nation become to us luminous; if at times we feel 
 dazzled, it is only by the excess of light that shines 
 from that fact upon our darkness.” We believe that 
 Christ is God not because He mysteriously possessed 
 a divine nature united to a human, but because as He 
 is as man we find God in Him, and God finds us 
 through Him. We behold the glory of the Only 
 Begotten of the Father in the Word incarnate, and 
 find Him full of grace and truth (John i. 14), God 
 making Himself known and even giving Himself in 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY 471 
 
 love to us. This and nothing less is what believing _ 
 
 in the divinity of Christ means. 
 
 _“ (b) How shall we apprehend the reality of God in 
 the Holy Spirit? This apprehension is even more 
 hindered than is the apprehension of God in Christ, 
 both practically and theoretically. We must live 
 the life of the Spirit, if we are to know God in the 
 Spirit. It is in no way uncharitable to say that the 
 religion of the Christian Church as a whole is not life 
 in the Spirit; it is largely second-hand tradition and 
 custom, and not first-hand experience. It may pos- 
 sibly be that there are many men under their present 
 conditions incapable of that experience, and, there- 
 fore, necessarily dependent on the mediation of the 
 doctrine and the ordinances of the Christian Church 
 as an organisation visible and active in the world. 
 What, however, is certain is that typical Christian 
 life, which we should aspire and strive for, is a life 
 in which Pentecost is not a tale of long ago, but a 
 present fact. Without desiring any of the abnormal 
 spiritual gifts, to which Paul with his characteristic 
 wisdom assigned a secondary value, we should desire 
 
 the holy enthusiasm and the holy energy of the’ 
 Apostolic Church in its best representatives. Such 
 
 a freedom from sin, such a fullness of holiness, such a 
 certainty of truth, such a power for service, such a 
 confidence of hope may come to the believer, who 
 fulfils the conditions of dependence and submission, 
 that he will know assuredly that this is not his achieve- 
 ment, that it is God’s bestowal, that he is not drawing 
 on the limited resources of his own personality, but 
 on the inexhaustible resources of God Himself. As 
 we must become more Christian in thought to appre- 
 hend God in Christ, so we must live more spiritually to 
 apprehend God as Spirit. 
 
 This life in the Spirit of God distinguishes itself 
 from much which goes by the name of mysticism in 
 four respects. Furst, it is objective. God is not sought 
 and found in the depths of human personality. It is 
 as faith receives and responds to the truth and grace 
 of the Lord Jesus Christ that there is the experience 
 
 pee eT 
 
 ee 
 
472 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 of the presence and power of the Spirit. Pentecost 
 followed on the certainty of the resurrection of Christ 
 the Lord. The distinctively Christian experience of 
 the Spirit of God depends on the historical revelation 
 and redemption. Second, it is normal. The visions 
 and voices, the raptures and trances of which much has 
 sometimes been made as evidence of contact with God 
 are not necessary to him who sees the Father in the 
 Son, and is saved from sin by the Son. Third, it is 
 practical. It does not mean withdrawal from the 
 world for study and meditation, for any artificial 
 process of getting nearer to God than the common 
 life of man affords. It.is amid the daily business, in 
 the common duties of life, the service of the Kingdom, 
 that the fruit of the Spirit is seen. Where love is as 
 the motive and principle of life, there is the Spirit of 
 God who is love. Accordingly, fourth, it is social: the 
 Spirit as the common possession of believers makes 
 them a community, a body of many members with 
 diverse functions according to the diversity of the 
 cifts of the Spirit. On this last feature is it specially 
 necessary to dwell, for it is the absence of the desire 
 for and the effort after unity which is one of the main 
 causes of the Church’s failure to continue Pentecost in 
 its experience. The duty of Christian reunion need 
 not be based as exclusively as it often is on the prayer 
 in John xvii. 22-23, for unity is of the very essence 
 of the Church as the body of Christ, and the realisation 
 in thought, feeling, and deed of that unity, the con- 
 dition of the possession in fullness of the Spirit who 
 gives life to that body. If God be by His very nature 
 love, if His Spirit be the Spirit of community, the 
 divisions among the churches are hindering the com- 
 pletion of the revelation of God in His Spirit. The 
 differences in creed, ritual, and polity which have 
 emerged in history, and which many Christians regard 
 it as a matter of conscience to preserve, would never 
 have come to be regarded as important enough in 
 themselves to destroy the manifest unity, unless there 
 had been a failure to realise in experience the presence 
 and power of the Spirit as the common possession. 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY AT3 
 
 A Church possessed by the Spirit would be a Church 
 in which the sense of unity would transcend and 
 transform differences. As the churches realise the 
 unity of the Church, will they also apprehend the 
 reality of God in His Spirit. As long as the differences 
 dominate Christian thought and life, so long will the 
 experience of the Spirit fall short of the certainty that 
 God, God Himself in His very life of love, is dwelling 
 and working in man.~ The Spirit’s incarnation in 
 the body of Christ, the Church, continues and com- 
 pletes the incarnation of the Son, and the revelation 
 of the Father in the Son, and that incarnation is not 
 yet completed since individually and_ collectively 
 Christians are not fully living the life in the Spirit. 
 
 (4) When we have thus apprehended the reality of 
 God as Father, Son, and Spirit in unity, the Father 
 revealed in the Son, and as so revealed realised in 
 human experience in the Spirit, then surely we are 
 entitled to draw the inference that as God is so known 
 to us He is and must needs be in Himself. So absolute 
 is the value of this revelation of the love which gives 
 itself as ight to illumine and as life to inspire man, 
 that we cannot conceive God as other than this. Not 
 only may we infer from the fact of revelation that 
 there is not concealment of what God is, but from the 
 content of the revelation that it is inconceivable that 
 God can be other in His reality than He is revealed. 
 We may then confidently pass from the economic to 
 the ontological Trinity, and dare to make the attempt 
 at least to conceive what God in Himself is. 
 
 II 
 
 (1) While our conception of God must ever be 
 dependent on the revelation which has been given us, 
 we do want to make that conception as luminous to 
 our minds as we can make it. Many attempts have 
 been made to give a rational demonstration of the 
 necessity of the doctrine of the Trinity for our 
 thought. 
 
474 THK CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (i) In our consciousness there is the duality of sub- 
 ject and object within the unity, the self who thinks, 
 feels, wills, and what is thought, felt, and willed as the 
 content of our consciousness. We cannot think of 
 God as personal, without so thinking of His conscious- 
 ness. ‘To us most of the object is, as it were, given 
 by the world, of which we are a part, though a part 
 conscious of it as a whole. But unless there is an 
 eternal world as the object for the eternal God as the 
 subject, God must within His own consciousness be 
 both subject and object. As we realise our person- 
 ality in ‘ self-knowledge, self-reverence, and _ self- 
 control’ we do become less dependent on the world 
 around, and the self gives itself a growing content, and 
 so constitutes its own content as object ; our memory 
 of the past, our purpose for the future, our religious 
 ideas and moral ideals become an inner world objective 
 to ourselves. We may then conceive God as subject 
 and object in the unity of His own consciousness, not 
 in a temporal realisation, but as eternal reality. To 
 many minds this will seem an abstraction of thought, 
 very unconvincing to the religious consciousness. Ithas 
 its value, however, as warding off the objection that the 
 conception of God as difference-in-unity is irrational. 
 
 (11) Another line of argument depends on the relation 
 of God’s immanence and God’s transcendence. God 
 is in all and through all, and yet also above all. He 
 creates in time and space, but Himself is immense 
 and eternal. His will is in the natural forces in a 
 finite form, and His mind also in natural laws; yet 
 He is Himself infinite. But we must not think God 
 as divided in His transcendence and immanence, for 
 the difference is within the unity of His nature. 
 Hegel’s statement of the doctrine of the Trinity ! 
 may here be mentioned. God in Himself as tran- 
 scendent is the Father; God as going out of Himself 
 as immanent is the Son; God as returning to Himself 
 in the unity of transcendence and immanence is the 
 Spirit. That too is a mode of thinking which will 
 appeal only to a few minds. 
 
 | 1 Eneykl., § 566. 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY AT 
 
 (ii) Augustine finds an analogy to the Trinity in 
 the human consciousness. ‘ Dico haec tria: esse, 
 nosse, velle. Sum enim et novi, et volo; sum sciens 
 et volens; et scio esse me, et velle; et volo esse, et 
 scire. In his igitur tribus quam sit inseparabilis vita, 
 et una vita, et una mens, et una essentia quam 
 denique inseparabilis distinctio, et tamen distinctio 
 videat qui potest.?' This analogy does show that 
 if we are to conceive God as personal, we must con- 
 ceive Him as having difference-in-unity, but would 
 quite exclude the conception of three persons within 
 that unity in the common acceptation of the term 
 person to-day. It does fall short, however, in ade- 
 quately indicating the differences which the revelation 
 of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit does suggest, 
 and the original use of the term person tried to 
 convey. 
 
 (iv) Much more attractive as well as helpful to our 
 thought is the analogy from love which Augustine * 
 also offers, amans, amatus, and mutuus amor. In 
 love there must be the loving and the loved in mutual 
 relation, and in that relation the difference is not 
 submerged, but harmonised in the unity of a common 
 life. Is amor mutuus a fuller reality than the amans 
 and the amatus each by himself would be? If so, this 
 would be more than a human analogy of God as Father, 
 Son, and Holy Spirit, since God is love. Does the 
 love of Father and Son issue in the fullness of the life 
 of the Spirit, the common life more than the sum of 
 the life of each apart would be? The separation 
 which the incarnation of human personality involves 
 may make it difficult for us to conceive the common 
 life as having the same degree of reality as each of 
 the lives so made one in love. Father and Son must’ 
 be thought as different enough to be subject and object 
 of love in the unity of the divine consciousness, and 
 yet not so separate as to appear as two individuals | 
 in a society. 
 
 (v) Accordingly, the orthodox terminology must be 
 dismissed, as not only not helpful, but even a hindrance 
 
 1 Confessio, xiii. 11. * De Trinitate, xiv. and xv. 
 
476 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 to any intelligible conception. One substance may 
 mean one entity, but it is a static conception, and 
 suggests no difference-in-unity. It carries our thought 
 no further, as does the conception of God as personal, 
 giving and finding Himself as love. The conception 
 of God as personal may then offer some aid to our 
 mind in thinking Him as triune. But if we make 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each a person, we must, 
 to conceive each separately, repeat this differentiation 
 of subject and object in the unity of consciousness, 
 and so on endlessly. The framers of the creeds never 
 did intend person to be understood as individual, as 
 it has come to be regarded in popular religious thought, 
 and to-day by retaining their term with the meaning 
 now imported into it we do not honour but defeat 
 
 their intention. God is personal unity as Father, 
 
 Son, and Holy Spirit; but to express these differences, 
 since we should not use the term person, we have 
 not yet found a term of general acceptance. 
 
 (2) The creeds approach the theological problem 
 from the side of metaphysics: we may approach it 
 from the side of psychology and sociology, and may 
 find the categories we thus reach more adequate to 
 make the doctrine of the Trinity more intelligible. 
 
 (1) In the First Section, Chapter VI, the modern 
 conception of personality has been applied to the 
 doctrine of the Incarnation. There is one aspect of 
 that conception which may prove helpful to us in 
 dealing with the doctrine of the Trinity. The mech- 
 anical mode of thought, dealing with reality as a 
 whole made up of parts, was responsible for an 
 inadequate conception. Human personality was 
 divided into faculties, and there was a dispute early 
 last century as to whether three or four faculties 
 Should be recognised. Was the person made up of 
 thought, feeling, will, or must desire be added as 
 intermediate between feeling and will? It was on 
 the false assumption that will was a separate faculty 
 that the dispute between determinism and indeter- 
 minism rested. It was because it was taken for 
 granted that thought and feeling could be separated 
 
 Oe oe 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY 477 
 
 that the popular contrast was made between the 
 religion of the head and of the heart. Now we 
 recognise that personality is a unity, thinking, feeling, 
 and willing, and that there is no state of consciousness 
 which is entirely one of the three apart altogether 
 from the other two. There is a trinity in unity, or 
 a tri-unity. But this illustration, while preserving 
 the unity, does not seem adequately to recognise the 
 differences in the Godhead. We must go further in 
 our analysis. The mechanical way of looking at 
 reality also affected the conception of the relation of 
 one person to another; each was complete as a unit 
 in itself, and relations were external. Rousseau’s 
 doctrine of the social contract and Hobbes’ account 
 of the origin of government illustrate this phase of 
 thought. In the battle-cry of the French Revolution, 
 liberty and equality were the ruling conceptions, and 
 what fraternity involved as regards man’s relation 
 to society was not adequately recognised. Herbert 
 Spencer, while recognising the analogy between society 
 and a body, stopped short at a physical interdepend- 
 ence, and in his denial of the common consciousness 
 relapsed to this individualism in his contention that 
 individual happiness must be the guide for social 
 action. But, defective as was his exposition, it did 
 assert the interdependence of individuals in a society. 
 When we compare society to an organism, however 
 imperfectly, the mechanical view of man as individual 
 unit is abandoned, and we begin to think of him as 
 complete only within the unity of society. We are 
 learning that the individual is an abstraction of 
 thought, as personality is realised only in social 
 relations, and the more completely the more varied 
 the relations are. Man as son, brother, husband, 
 father, worker, citizen develops his own personality 
 as apart from such relations it could not be developed. 
 If love be, as Christianity holds, the religious and 
 mori! principle of conduct and character, we may 
 assert that personality is by its very nature social. 
 (ii) We may now approach the subject from the 
 
 1 Principles of Sociology, 1. 475 ff. 
 
478 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 side of sociology. It has already been necessary to 
 refer to the displacement of the mechanical by the 
 organic view. Mackenzie in his Introduction to Social 
 Philosophy had already advanced beyond Spencer in 
 that, while still using the conception of organism, he 
 moved from the biological to the psychological stand- 
 point in insisting that rational personality needs and 
 seeks to create a rational environment.! M(‘Iver in 
 his book on Community offers us a much more adequate 
 conception. Men by their very nature have a com- 
 munity of interests which lead to co-operation in 
 action; accordingly, they gather together in associa- 
 tions, and form institutions, or permanent modes of 
 co-operation, to realise the community of their interests. 
 The society has not a nervous system or a brain, but 
 in the consciousness of each member of the society 
 there is realised in greater or lesser degree this com- 
 munity. The members of the body know themselves 
 as members and suffer or rejoice together. The in- 
 dividual becomes most himself as he realises in himself 
 this community with others. The wider the range 
 of interests in which this community is recognised, 
 and the higher the quality of the interests, the more 
 fully is the personality of each member completed i in 
 the society. As the community gains in distinctively 
 personal content—art, literature, science, morals, 
 religion—does it become a varied yet harmonised 
 unity. Thus we may say that a society tends to 
 become personal in its unity, to acquire personality. 
 Personality is social and society is personal as the 
 two develop together. 
 
 (8) There is thus seen to be a convergence of the 
 two conceptions of personality as social and society 
 as personal. 
 
 (1) If we apply these conceptions to the doctrine of 
 the Trinity, the first may help us to conceive the 
 unity-in-differences, and the second the differences- 
 in-unity. We get the counterpart of the one sub- 
 stance of the creeds in social personality, and of the 
 three persons in society as personal (as community). 
 
 1 Op. cit., p. 180. 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY 479 
 
 In the one case unity is completed in differences, in 
 the other differences are completed in unity. As 
 applied to God each of these conceptions must be 
 raised to the height of perfection, God perfectly 
 social in His personal activity, and God perfectly 
 personal in His social relations, God perfect person- 
 ality and society in Himself, and the one because of 
 the other. Because human personality and human 
 society are both so imperfect, the two conceptions 
 for us still he apart; but even we in an ideal can 
 observe their convergence, and they meet in the 
 perfection of God. It is the Christian life in its 
 distinctiveness as individual and collective in which 
 both ideals should find their realisation. As the 
 individual Christian loves others, he gives his life to 
 them, and finds his life in them, and his personality 
 becomes increasingly social. As in the Christian 
 Church the community of the Spirit is realised in the 
 virtues and graces, the society will become more 
 personal, with a unity and a continuity of life which 
 raise it above all atomic individualism, and give it a 
 common aspiration, purpose, and activity. The 
 Christian is perfected in his unity in the Spirit with 
 all other believers; and the Church is perfected into 
 unity through the fullness of its personal life. To 
 speak of the Church personally as the community of 
 the Spirit is more than mere poetic personification. 
 As the Christian perfects himself in love, and as the 
 Church has a universal destiny and obligation, the 
 ideal can be realised only as all men become one in 
 love, and the Church becomes the society which 
 embraces all mankind. The revelation of God as 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can be completed only 
 as humanity is redeemed to be the temple of God, 
 filled with His Spirit; and until that consummation 
 we shall not realise in experience so as to be lumin- 
 ous to our thought the ideal of social personality 
 and personal society, the two converging con- 
 ceptions which are leading our thought into the 
 holy of holies—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one 
 God. 
 
480 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 (11) In the economic trinity or trinity of revelation 
 the Father is mediated to us by the Son in His his- 
 torical personality, and the Father-in-the-Son through 
 the Holy Spirit in personal experience. What we 
 primarily apprehend is difference, although the effort 
 has been made to show how we may reach the con- 
 viction of the unity of the Father with the Son, and 
 of both with the Spirit. Two statements of Paul’s 
 seem to carry our thought beyond the stage of media- 
 tion to a stage of immediacy. ‘ Now a mediator,’ 
 says Paul, ‘is not a mediator of one, but God is one’ 
 (Gal. i. 20). Does mediation so obtrude difference 
 as to obscure unity ?- Is that the reason why many 
 Christians substitute Christ for God, and do not 
 always rise through the Son to the Father? In one 
 of his boldest flights of thought Paul seems to expect an 
 end to the mediation of Christ Himself. ‘ And when all 
 things have been subjected unto Him, then shall the 
 Son also Himself be subjected to Him that did subject 
 all things unto Him, that God may be all in all’ 
 (mavra ev maow, 1 Cor. xv. 28). Christ in His 
 mediatorial sovereignty is fulfilling all in all in order 
 that God may be all in all, perfect personality in 
 perfect society, qualitative and quantitative com- 
 pleteness. What does this speculation mean? We 
 cannot be sure that we can recapture the vision that 
 glowed in the mind of Paul of that final glory. What 
 can it mean to us? It can lead us a little further 
 along the path we are now treading. In the historical 
 revelation (the economic trinity) the difference is more 
 prominent than the unity. In the eternal revelation, 
 which will consummate the historical, the unity will 
 be dominant. There will not be absorption in a 
 unity without any difference, but a unity in which 
 all differences will at last be so harmonised as to make 
 the unity perfect. The beatific vision will be a vision 
 of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one God; the 
 blessed communion will be not absorption, but the 
 realisation of the whole manhood (zdvra) of all man- 
 kind (waow) as the one redeemed and _ perfected 
 family of God. While we still walk amid the shadows, 
 
THROUGH FAITH TO REALITY 481 
 
 and wage the warfare of the Kingdom on earth, we 
 can thus get glimpses of the coming glory and victory. 
 To this reality faith in the fact of Jesus Christ our 
 Lord leads us, for He and He alone brings God as 
 Father to us, and us as children to God. 
 
POSTSCRIPT 
 
 As the writer looks back upon the path along which 
 he has led the reader, the conviction with which he 
 began is deepened, that however far short he may 
 have himself fallen in carrying out his own intentions, 
 and however defective his work may appear to others, 
 yet the principle and the method have been vindicated. 
 Theology is not concerned with the world and man 
 (cosmology, anthropology, etc.) unless as related to 
 God; Christian theology is concerned only with God 
 as revealed in Christ; God is revealed in Christ as 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and consequently no 
 theology can be adequately and distinctively Christian 
 that does not make this conception of God dominant ; 
 this trinitarian conception as presented in the New 
 Testament is not a perplexity for the intellect, nor a 
 burden on the conscience, as it is made in the Athan- 
 asian Creed, but a blessing to the soul. The Christian 
 Creed, the Apostolic Benediction, interpreted not 
 through an alien philosophy, but by the Christian 
 history and by the Christian experience, is fitted 
 to inspire aspiration, adoration, and consecration. 
 * Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain to receive 
 the power, and riches, and wisdom, and might, and 
 honour, and glory, and blessing. . . . Unto Him 
 that sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb, be 
 the blessing, and the honour, and the glory, and the 
 dominion, for ever and ever. And the four living 
 creatures said, Amen. And the elders fell down and 
 worshipped ’ (Rev. v. 12-14). 
 
 
 
 ss rr ST 
 
INDEX 
 (2) GENERAL 
 
 AsAnarD, 161-164, 175, 208. 
 
 Abbot, 277. 
 
 Acceptilation, 164, 168, 171. 
 
 Acts, 28. 
 
 Adam, 150, 154, 164, 
 301, 304, 310. 
 
 Admonitio Christiana, 143. 
 
 Adoption, 227. 
 
 Adoptionist, 467. 
 
 Affection, 308, 453, 458. 
 
 Agnosticism, 463. 
 
 Alexander, 39. 
 
 Alexandria, 124, 366. 
 
 Altruism, 279, 289. 
 
 Ambrose, 140, 155. 
 
 Andrews, 467. 
 
 Angelology, 96, 153. 
 
 Animatism, 346. 
 
 Animism, 38, 154, 318, 346. 
 
 Anselm, 155-164, 170, 206. 
 
 Anthropology, 8, 244, 255, 258, 482. 
 
 Anthropomorphism, 286. 
 
 Apocalypse of Baruch, 303. 
 
 Apocalyptic, 8, 60, 228, 440, 442, 
 445, 458. 
 
 Apocrypha, 300. 
 
 Apollinaris, 124, 128, 133. 
 
 Apologists, 365, 367. 
 
 Apostles’ Creed, 123, 129, 233. 
 
 Aquinas, 144, 163. 
 
 Archaeology, 3 
 
 Aristotle, 184. 
 
 Arius, 118, 123, 129, 130, 143, 365. 
 
 Arminianism, 170, 236, 368, 432. 
 
 Arnold (M.), 70, 322 
 
 Art, 320. 
 
 Athanasian Creed, 126, 131, 133, 135, 
 367, 368, 466. 
 
 Athanasius, 118, 127, 130, 135, 365, 
 468. 
 
 Atonement, 85, 102, 108, 120, 150, 
 151, 156, 161, 169, 184, 218, 230, 
 334, 3538, 369. 
 
 Augustine, 68, 94, 127, 155, 236, 
 267, 305, 315, 367, 433, 475. 
 
 Authority, 384. 
 
 258, 262, 300, 
 
 
 
 | 
 
 | Batrour, 321. 
 
 Baptism, 305, 376, 395, 399. 
 
 Bartlet, 352, 354. 
 
 Basil, 366. 
 
 Baudouin, 71, 464. 
 
 Beauty, 275, 486. 
 
 Bengel, 304. 
 
 Bergson, 189. 
 
 Berkeley, 280. 
 
 Bernard (8.), 155. 
 
 Bernard, 358. 
 
 Bethune-Baker, 134. 
 
 Bible. See Scriptures. 
 
 Biology, 244, 248, 306, 455. 
 
 Bishop, 402. 
 
 Bondage, 265. 
 
 Blessedness, 275, 436, 464. 
 
 Blood, 106. 
 
 Body, 444. 
 
 Booth (M.), 12. 
 
 Brentz, 139. 
 
 Brooks (P.), 391. 
 
 Browning, 325, 337. 
 
 Bruce, 19, 124, 136, 144, 146, 147, 
 168, 173, 196. 
 
 Brihl, 260, 
 
 Buddhism, 8, 52, 57, 270, 390, 488. 
 
 Burkitt, 29. 
 
 Burney, 30. 
 
 Carrp (E.), 266. 
 
 Calvary, 84, 103, 119, 180, 179, 199, 
 204, 218, 294, 420. 
 
 Calvinism, 137, 146, 167, 170, 195, 
 236, 305, 368, 382, 407. 
 
 Cameron (John), 369. 
 
 Campbell (M‘L.), 174, 176, 178, 179, 
 208, 210. 
 
 Campbell (R. J.), 15. 
 
 Cappadocian Fathers, 366, 468. 
 
 Carlstadt, 368. 
 
 Catholic, 122, 136, 384, 385, 390, 
 396, 406. 
 
 Causality, 266. 
 
 Cave, 8, 270. 
 
 483 
 
484 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Chalcedon Creed, 124, 1381, 133, 1438, 
 
 185, 228, 468. 
 
 Character, 197, 266, 277, 308, 332, 
 356, 401. 
 
 Characters, acquired, 262. 
 
 Charles, 303. 
 
 Chemnitz, 139. 
 
 Child, 306. 
 
 Christ— 
 
 Ascension, 90, 139. 
 
 Authority, 41, 59, 224, 232. 
 
 Baptism, 349. 
 
 Character, 45-50. 
 
 Descent into Hades, 129, 168, 
 450. 
 
 Divinity, 31, 43, 143. 
 
 Exaltation, 138, 144, 176, 381. 
 
 Example, 68. 
 
 Faith, 53. 
 
 Foresight, 39. 
 
 Generation, 131, 366. 
 
 Humanity, 32, 143. 
 
 Humiliation, 133, 141, 144. 
 
 Humility, 50. 
 
 Identification, 178, 205. 
 
 Ignorance, 37, 67, 442. 
 
 Insight, 39. 
 
 Intercession, 162, 163, 171. 
 
 Kingship, 143, 176. 
 
 Knowledge, 41, 115. 
 
 Lordship, 97. 
 
 Mediation, 57, 118, 143, 168, 226, 
 362. 
 
 Merit, 157. 
 
 Messiahship, 33, 44, 77, 88-95, 
 101, 105, 350, 358, 363, 441, 
 449, 467. 
 
 Miracles, 43, 45, 69, 77, 155, 222. 
 
 Originality, 60. 
 
 Person, 31, 130, 135, 150. 
 
 Prayers, 76. 
 
 Pre-existence, 43, 56, 100, 114, 
 195. 
 
 Priesthood, 143, 176. 
 
 Prophethood, 143, 176. 
 
 Resurrection, 87, 352, 356, 371, 
 442. 
 
 Righteousness, 162, 167. 
 
 Sacrifice, 31, 57, 150, 172, 180, 
 195, 203, 205, 207, 212, 217, 334. 
 
 Saviourhood, 33, 77. 
 
 Second Advent, 67, 92, 129, 383, 
 449, 
 
 Sinlessness, 35, 47, 205, 208. 
 
 Sonship, 20, 36, 54, 206. 
 
 Subordination, 98. 
 
 Sympathy, 171, 172. 
 
 Teaching, 59, 77, 217. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Christ—continued. 
 Temptation, 33, 77, 102, 119, 120, 
 349. 
 Transfiguration, 82, 88. 
 Virgin-birth, 48, 46, 101, 129. 
 Church, 90, 114, 139, 178, 178, 182, 
 342, 355, 375. 
 Citizenship, 425. 
 
 | Clement (Alexandria), 365. 
 | Clement (Rome), 364. 
 | Communicatio, 138, 141, 146. 
 
 Community, 279, 478. 
 Comparison, 7. 
 
 Competition, 425. 
 
 Comte, 321. 
 
 Condignity, 164. 
 
 Conduct, 266, 277, 311. 
 Confession, 175, 208, 421. 
 Confirmations, 397, 402. 
 Confucianism, 8, 60, 390, 438. 
 Congruity, 164. 
 
 | Conscience, 11, 46, 152, 179, 197, 
 
 199, 204, 230, 
 250, 259, 273, 
 323, 328, 331, 
 421, 453. 
 
 Conservation, 246, 249, 272, 385. 
 
 Constantinople, 124, 267, 366, 367. 
 
 Consubstantiation, 137, 397. 
 
 Continuity, 259. 
 
 Conversion, 198, 266, 369, 396, 418, 
 415, 427. 
 
 Co-operation, 425. 
 
 Copec, 407, 425. 
 
 Correlation, 7. 
 
 Cosmology, 244, 482. 
 
 Courage, 421-423. 
 
 Covenant, 82, 238, 304, 305, 310, 
 385. 
 
 Cox, 452. 
 
 Creatian Theory, 267, 271. 
 
 Creation, 15, 189, 190, 195, 226, 
 244, 245, 246, 272, 277, 288, 
 291, 308. 
 
 Creeds, 24, 122, 129, 342, 368, 468, 
 476. 
 
 Crime, 196, 297. 
 
 Criticism, 4, 21. 
 
 Cruelty, 288. 
 
 Curse, 165. 
 
 Custom, 279. 
 
 Cyprian, 402. 
 
 Cyril (Alexandria), 128, 135. 
 
 Cyril (Jerusalem), 366. 
 
 232, 
 276, 
 332, 
 
 238, 
 319, 
 350, 
 
 245, 
 322, 
 390, 
 
 Daimon, 323. 
 Dale, 21. 
 Darwin, 257, 260, 262, 283. 
 
 
 
 a See eee l—Eeeee eee Ce 
 
INDEX 
 
 Deacon, 402. | 
 
 Death, 108, 175, 199, 204, 281, 283, | 
 289, 292, 293, 449, 456. 
 
 Deism, 14, 184, 186, 251. 
 
 Deissmann, 358. 
 
 Demonic possession, 38. 
 
 Demonology, 153, 154. 
 
 Denney, 152, 159, 160, 
 168 0724 277, 184; 
 342, 360, 369. 
 
 Determinism, 265, 476. 
 
 Development, 255, 2638, 
 308, 309, 427. 
 
 Devil, 108, 153-5, 301. 
 
 Didache, 364. 
 
 Discipline, 388, 400. 
 
 Disease, 38, 292, 303. 
 
 Dods, 4, 6, 56. 
 
 Dorner, 124. 
 
 Dort, 368. 
 
 Drummond, 279, 287. 
 
 Dualism, 169, 184, 247. 
 
 Duns Scotus, 164-8. 
 
 Dynamism, 345. 
 
 Dyotheletism, 125. 
 
 162, 165, 
 199, 209, 
 
 Ecclesia, 375. 
 
 Economic (Trinity), 370, 462. 
 
 Economics, 279. 
 
 Kestasy, 355. 
 
 Edgehill, 10. 
 
 Education, 268, 308. 
 
 Edwards, (J.), 171, 178, 174. 
 
 Elder, 402. 
 
 Election, 237, 240, 369. 
 
 Ellicott, 153. 
 
 Energy, 4381. 
 
 Enhypostasis, 194. 
 
 Enoch (Similitudes), 79. 
 
 Enthusiasm, 4380. 
 
 Environment, 46, 52, 260, 261, 263, | 
 292, 307, 309, 395. 
 
 Epigenesis, 191. 
 
 Episcopate, 384, 386. 
 
 Equality, 423. 
 
 Erskine, 452. ‘ 
 
 Eschatology, 65, 114, 177, 408, 4388. 
 
 Eternal life, 225, 457. 
 
 Ethics, 356, 421. 
 
 Eucharist, 136, 137, 391, 395. 
 
 Eucken, 12. 
 
 Eusebius (C.), 123. 
 
 Eutyches, 125, 128, 138, 138, 146, 
 185. 
 
 Evangelical revival, 431. 
 
 Evangelical type, 391. 
 
 294, 306, | 
 
 
 
 
 
 Evil, 285. 
 Evolution, 15, 184, 189, 214, 233, 
 
 A85 
 
 248, 256, 283, 308, 318, 385, 
 447. 
 
 Experience, 20, 109, 173, 
 236, 293, 329, 332, 
 372, 401, 421, 471. 
 
 Ezekiel, 305, 379, 439. 
 
 202, 205, 
 
 352, 362, 
 
 Fact, 9, 18, 16, 91, 129, 182, 186, 
 214, 245, 330, 369. 
 
 Fairbairn, 258, 289, 295. 
 
 Faith, 11, 12, 35, 47, 53, 62, 95, 
 129, 174, 180, 182, 186, 203, 
 208, 223, 230, 232, 384, 355, 
 358, 373, 378, 396, 447, 4538. 
 
 Fall, 299-302, 310. 
 
 | Family, 424. 
 | Farrar, 452. 
 
 Fate, 235. 
 
 Faut, 146. 
 
 Federal theology, 304-5. 
 
 Feeling, 274. 
 
 Filioque, 124, 367. 
 
 Finitude, 192. 
 
 Fisher, 166, 167, 170, 364. 
 
 Flesh, 109, 256, 313, 345, 427. 
 
 Foakes-Jackson, 30. 
 
 Forbes, 323. 
 
 Force, 235. 
 
 Foreknowledge, 240, 246. 
 
 Foreordination, 240. 
 
 Forgiveness, 162, 176, 179, 198, 200, 
 220, 308, 328, 419. 
 
 Formula of Concord, 141, 143. 
 
 Forsyth, 190. 
 
 Fourth Gospel, 27, 28, 92, 98, 111, 
 185, 206, 254, 349, 427, 435, 
 467. 
 
 Franks, 108, 152, 155, 164. 
 
 Fraser, 280. 
 
 GALLOWAY, 3. 
 Gentile, 154, 182, 318, 363, 375, 
 878, 395, 421. 
 Gethsemane, 84, 103, 119, 180, 179, 
 199, 204, 218, 294, 420. 
 Giessen, 141, 146. 
 Gnosticism, 96. 
 God— 
 Absoluteness, 193, 221, 245, 470. 
 Aseity, 245. 
 Constancy, 251. 
 Eternity, 17, 245. 
 Fatherhood, 18, 20, 54, 206, 225, 
 230, 242, 271, 283, 325, 339. 
 Holiness, 211, 227. 
 Honour, 157, 166. 
 Immanence, 14, 118, 184, 186, 195, 
 
486 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 God—continued. 
 
 212, 221, 246, 261j4254,"272, 
 348, 372, 469, 474. 
 
 Immensity, 225. 
 
 Impassibility, 42, 228. 
 
 Infinitude, 17, 191, 193, 221, 245, 
 470. 
 
 Knowledge, 191. 
 
 Limitation, 190, 235, 272. 
 
 Love, 104, 159, 160, 169, 178, 195, 
 211, 225, 227, 2380, 469. 
 
 Nature, 15, 133, 182, 183, 220, 
 232, 236, 332, 473. 
 
 Omnipotence, 18, 139, 223, 231, 
 233, 240, 242, 246, 289, 312, 
 340. 
 
 Omnipresence, 18, 138, 246. 
 
 Omniscience, 18, 36, 189, 246, 364. 
 
 Passibility, 185, 228, 468. 
 
 Perfection, 228, 234, 242. 
 
 Proseity, 245. 
 
 Righteousness, 104, 166, 169, 211, 
 212, 229. 
 
 Transcendence, 14, 118, 186, 195, 
 221, 245, 272, 348, 372, 474. 
 
 Wrath, 87, 104, 106, 107, 172, 
 LR 2O5 S210. 2 
 
 Gore, 383. 
 
 Gospel, 1387, 528, 391. 
 
 Government, 250. 
 
 Grace, 7, 32, 62, 101, 104, 137, 159, 
 166, 180, 212, 216, 225, 229, 
 310, 381, 436. 
 
 Gray, 286. 
 
 Greek, 121, 247, 325, 367, 422. 
 
 Gregory (Nazianzum), 155, 366. 
 
 Gregory (Nyssa), 155, 366. 
 
 Grotius, 170-171. 
 
 Guilt, 197, 298, 305. 
 
 Hapsit, 197, 200, 300. 
 
 Hall, 310. 
 
 Halliday, 10. 
 
 Hamilton, 4, 64. 
 
 Happiness, 235, 275, 436, 454. 
 
 Harnack, 30, 55, 65, 66, 70, 117, 
 126, 364, 384, 
 
 Harvey, 189. 
 
 Hatch, 385. 
 
 Headlam, 30, 75. 
 
 Hebrew, 198, 318, 322, 324, 325. 
 
 Hebrews, 119. 
 
 Hegel, 17, 246, 321, 474. 
 
 Heredity, 46, 52, 261, 267, 292, 306. 
 
 Herrmann, 16. 
 
 Heurtley, 125, 185. 
 
 Hinduism, 270. 
 
 History, 15, 17, 129, 187, 191, 214, 
 
 
 
 217, 223, 237, 239, 251, 258, 
 284, 302, 306, 309, 321, 329, 
 332, 346. 
 
 Hobbes, 477. 
 
 Holiness, 421, 435. 
 
 Homoousion, 130, 144, 468. 
 
 Hope, 224, 343, 373, 396, 425. 
 
 Hort, 385. 
 
 Hiigel (von), 11. 
 
 Hulsius, 145. 
 
 Humility, 415. 
 
 Huxley, 287. 
 
 Hypostasis, 134-135. 
 
 Inrauism, 274. 
 
 Ideals, 11, 13, 193, 223, 233, 
 280, 283, 426, 455. 
 
 Ignatius, 364, 402. 
 
 Ignorance, 176. 
 
 Illumination, 347, 351, 356. 
 
 Immortality, 89, 256, 278, 280, 440. 
 
 Imputation, 165, 167, 178, 304. 
 
 Incarnation, 20, 33, 47, 100, 
 141, 145, 150, 156, 161, 
 185, 194, 246, 253, 254, 
 3387, 371, 412, 469. 
 
 Independency, 376, 386. 
 
 Indeterminism, 265. 
 
 Individualism, 279, 305, 
 477. 
 
 Individuality, 261, 264, 289, 306. 
 
 Inerrancy, 331. 
 
 Infallibility, 331. 
 
 270, 
 
 120, 
 184, 
 270, 
 
 336, 439, 
 
 | Inge, 11. 
 
 Inheritance, 261, 263, 299, 306, 307. 
 Insignificance, 233, 255, 282. 
 Inspiration, 329, 383, 385. 
 
 Instincts, 263, 272, 307. 
 Intercommunion, 400. 
 
 Interest, 242. 
 
 Interim Ethics, 66. 
 
 Intermediate state, 449. 
 
 Irenaeus, 123, 154, 365, 462. 
 Irving, 173. 
 
 James (W.), 268, 310. 
 
 Jeremiah, 305, 379, 439. 
 
 Jevons (T. B.), 281, 319. 3 
 
 Jew, 96, 154, 182, 318, 324, 363, 
 375, 378, 395. 
 
 John (Damascus), 126, 145, 194, 367. 
 
 Jones (Rufus), 11. 
 
 Jones (W. T.), 12. 
 
 Judaisers, 216. 
 
 Judas, 40, 413. 
 
 Judgment, 10, 199, 201, 208, 217, 
 225, 294, 448, 456. 
 
 Justice, 421-3. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Justification, 164, 168, 180, 229, 
 305, 355, 357. 
 Justin Martyr, 365. 
 
 Kant, 266, 273, 277, 323, 464. 
 
 Karma, 270. 
 
 Kathenotheism, 318. 
 
 Kenosis, 20, 100, 103, 122, 133, 141, 
 146, 149, 190, 246, 247, 249, 470. 
 
 Kingdom of God, 65, 171, 177, 222, 
 277, 312, 344, 382, 406, 434. 
 
 Kingdom of Sin, 309. 
 
 Knox, 388, 400. 
 
 Koinonia, 377, 467. 
 
 Kropotkin, 283. 
 
 Krypsis, 141. 
 
 Lagpour, 1, 425. 
 
 Lake (K.), 30. 
 
 Laotsze, 60. 
 
 Latin, 367. 
 
 Law, 109, 137, 151, 166, 175, 198, 
 216, 228, 328, 378, 390, 407, 412, 
 419, 
 
 Leontius, 126, 145, 194. 
 
 Lessing, 17. 
 
 Liberty, 198, 241, 265, 277, 311, 312, 
 384. 
 
 Life, 248, 267. 
 
 Lightfoot, 158, 385. 
 
 Lilley, 15. 
 
 Lodge, 268. 
 
 Logos, 56, 111, 116, 117, 140, 141, 
 145-8, 157, 184, 194, 254, 3382, 
 348, 368, 371. 
 
 Loisy, 15, 28, 65, 441. 
 
 Loofs, 134. 
 
 Lotze, 193, 221, 272, 278. 
 
 Love, 279, 354, 373, 390, 417, 435, 
 475. 
 
 Luke, 2, 9. 
 
 Lutheranism, 94, 136, 141, 146, 167, 
 169, 170, 305, 388, 397, 407. 
 
 Macauray, 176. 
 Macedonius, 124, 366. 
 M‘Giffert, 24. 
 Macintyre, 461. 
 M‘Iver, 279, 478. 
 Mackenzie, 478. 
 Mackintosh (H. R.), 8, 124, 176. 
 Mackintosh (R.), 305. 
 M‘Laren, 226, 450. 
 Magic, 351, 393. 
 Man, 249. 
 
 Mansel, 464. 
 
 Marcian, 154. 
 
 Mark, 29. 
 
 
 
 
 
 A487 
 
 Marrett, 345. 
 Marriage, 424. 
 Martensen, 449. 
 Martineau, 287. 
 Mason, 376. 
 Materialism, 89. 
 
 | Matter, 248. 
 
 Matthew, 29. 
 
 Mediation, 184, 471. 
 
 Melanchthon, 166. 
 
 Meliorism, 236. 
 
 Mendel, 262. 
 
 Menken, 173. 
 
 Merit, 157, 160, 162, 164. 
 
 Metaphysics, 266, 391, 476. 
 
 Meyer, 158. 
 
 Mill (J. S.), 238. 
 
 Milton, 258. 
 
 Mind, 248. 
 
 Ministry, 389, 401. 
 
 Miracle, 9, 19, 21, 69, 
 353. 
 
 Modalism, 130. 
 
 Modernism, 14, 219. 
 
 Moffatt, 29, 54. 
 
 Mohammed, 57, 390. 
 
 Monarchy, 318, 367. 
 
 Monism, 269. 
 
 Monogamy, 279. 
 
 Monolatry, 318. 
 
 Monophysitism, 125, 182, 135, 138, 
 145, 
 
 Monotheism, 44, 154, 217, 318, 326, 
 345, 462. 
 
 Monotheletism, 126. 
 
 Montanism, 368. 
 
 Moore, 319. 
 
 Morality, 3, 152, 163, 187, 195, 228, 
 233, 247, 259, 276, 279, 298, 
 312, 320, 322, 415, 428. 
 
 Morgan, 97. 
 
 Morison, 369. 
 
 Mozley, 152. 
 
 Muirhead, 265. 
 
 Miller, 268. 
 
 Myers, 260. 
 
 Mystery, 18, 290, 398. 
 
 Mysticism, 11, 20, 95, 160, 178, 188, 
 213, 282, 316, 361, 391, 471. 
 
 251, 326, 351, 
 
 Nature, 7, 17, 187, 214, 222, 2265, 
 263, 289, 319, 346. 
 
 | Neo-Platonism, 95. 
 
 Nestorius, 125, 128, 129, 133-5, 145, 
 185. 
 
 Nicaea, 123. 
 
 Nicene Creed, 123, 128, 135, 366. 
 
 Nirvana, 270. 
 
488 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Nonconformity, 403, 417. 
 Nurture, 264, 309. 
 
 Ossectivity, 465, 471. 
 Occultatio, 145. 
 Oltramare, 153. 
 
 Oman, 433. 
 
 Ontological, 370, 462. 
 Optimism, 236, 288, 456. 
 Ordination, 402, 405. 
 Organisation, 383, 385. 
 Origen, 154, 267, 268, 365. 
 Orr, 23, 47. 
 
 Ottley, 124. 
 
 Ousia, 130, 135. 
 
 Pain, 233, 285, 337. 
 
 Pajon, 369. 
 
 Panpsychism, 248, 458. : 
 
 Pantheism, 14, 185, 318. 
 
 Parasites, 190. 
 
 Parenthood, 424. 
 
 Patripassianism, 185. 
 
 Paul, 29, 37, 62, 88, 90, 98, 151, 160, 
 167, 204, 218, 236, 243, 274, 
 293, 303, 319, 324, 351, 417, 428, 
 443, 460, 467, 480. 
 
 Peake, 4, 153. 
 
 Pelagian, 432. 
 
 Penitential system, 160, 166. 
 
 Pentecost, 92, 349, 376, 387, 482, 
 471, 
 
 Perfection, 369, 407, 480, 447. 
 
 Person, 194, 360, 373, 475. 
 
 Personality, 7, 18, 129, 170, 183, 188, 
 192, 214, 227, 231, 246, 249, 261, 
 265, 272, 290, 329, 337, 421, 
 469, 474, 476. 
 
 Pessimism, 236, 314. 
 
 Peter, 30, 79, 414. 
 
 Peter (Lombard), 155. 
 
 Pharisees, 61, 151, 411, 416, 428, 
 440, 454. 
 
 Philo, 84117, 184. 
 
 Philosophy, 8-15, 21, 129, 183, 192, 
 220, 233, 268, 282, 464. 
 
 Photius, 367. 
 
 Physics, 132, 248. 
 
 Physiology, 248, 266. 
 
 Plato, 70, 184, 379, 421. 
 
 Platonists (Cambridge), 436. 
 
 Plerosis, 104, 190, 246, 249, 470. 
 
 Pneumatic, 429, 457. 
 
 Polydaemonism, 318. 
 
 Polytheism, 130, 154, 318, 326. 
 
 Pragmatism, 13, 466. 
 
 Prayer, 416. 
 
 Preaching, 389-92. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Predestination, 305. 
 
 Prediction, 40, 327, 350, 355. 
 
 Pre-existence, 267, 270. 
 
 Presbyterian, 386. 
 
 Primitive man, 253, 258. 
 
 Probation, 455. 
 
 Procession, 366-367. 
 
 Progress, 3, 186, 193, 214, 234, 248, 
 257, 283, 288, 292, 310, 315, 
 317, 323, 421, 456, 466. 
 
 Prophecy, 45, 216, 326, 442. 
 
 Prophet, 5, 41, 217, 250, 322, 324, 
 347. 
 
 Propitiation, 105, 212. 
 
 Proseity, 245. 
 
 Prosopon, 134. 
 
 Protestant, 122, 384, 385. 
 
 Providence, 23, 217, 225, 250, 289, 
 321, 326, 417, 446. 
 
 | Psychic, 428-429. 
 Psychology, 3, 172, 182, 192, 227, 
 
 240, 248, 256, 267, 268, 808, 
 317, 352, 355, 370, 424, 465. 
 Punishment, 159, 162, 164, 175, 179, 
 200, 204, 230, 299, 304, 308, 
 
 449, 
 
 (JuAKERS, 369. 
 
 RaBBINISM, 39, 93, 351. 
 
 Ransom, 83, 108, 158, 204. 
 
 Rashdall, 3. 
 
 Reason, 232, 238, 250, 259, 272, 273, 
 308, 332, 390, 453. 
 
 Recapitulation, 306. 
 
 Reconciliation, 107, 173, 179. 
 
 Redemption, 26, 108, 129, 133, 172, 
 196, 238, 247, 252, 282, 310, 
 313, 328, 339, 446. 
 
 Rees (T.), 342, 346, 361, 369. 
 
 Reformation, 25, 164, 173, 368-70, 
 382, 406. 
 
 Reformed Christology, 136. 
 
 Regeneration, 396, 427. 
 
 Religion, 2, 12, 15, 152, 185, 187, 
 193, 195, 220, 228, 238, 246, 
 9247, 259, 279, 281, 298, 428. 
 
 | Repentance, 172, 174, 175, 179, 203, 
 
 208, 223, 
 419. 
 Reprobation, 288. 
 Resurrection, 129, 1388, 256, 440, 
 428, 454. 
 Revelation, 5, 22, 24, 129, 182, 196, 
 217, 220, 223, 230, 247, 252, 282. 
 Revival, 92, 329, 351, 390, 432. 
 Ritschl, 10, 148, 173, 176-8, 180, 
 210, 309, 417. 
 
 281, 308, 334, 412, 
 
 — ees es ee DL St 
 
INDEX 
 
 Robinson (H. W.), 256, 322, 346. 
 Rousseau, 477. 
 
 Ruskin, 436. 
 
 Ryle, 71. 
 
 SABELLIANISM, 134, 143. 
 
 Sacrament, 166, 180, 305, 387, 393. 
 
 Sacramentarian, 150, 391, 399. 
 
 Sacrifice, 83, 106, 151, 162-8, 202, 
 337, 420. 
 
 Sanctification, 168,173, 213,347, 351, 
 354, 357, 369, 427, 430. 
 
 Sanday, 4, 29, 30. 
 
 Satan. See Devil. 
 
 Satisfaction, 158, 160, 164, 171. 
 
 Savage, 258, 263, 281, 288, 306, 
 308. 
 
 Schleiermacher, 172, 174, 178. 
 
 Schneckenburger, 144. 
 
 Schultz, 202, 348, 440. 
 
 Schweitzer, 65, 441. 
 
 Science, 1, 5,7, 17, 21, 244, 252, 282, 
 306, 332, 452. 
 
 Scott (E. T.), 117, 359, 363. 
 Scriptures, 137, 182, 216, 232, 236, 
 238, 290, 306, 343, 368, 416. 
 
 Second Adventism, 339, 364. 
 
 Servant, 79-82. 
 
 Sex, 279, 305, 379. 
 
 Shakespeare, 199, 321. 
 
 Sibree, 321. 
 
 Simpson, J. G,, 347. 
 
 Simpson, J. Y., 249, 288, 310, 455. 
 
 Simpson, P. C., 138. 
 
 Sin, 39, 157, 173, 176, 195, 196, 225, 
 229, 283, 285, 292, 297, 309, 
 412, 
 
 Slavery, 379. 
 
 Smith (G. A.), 4. 
 
 Smith (W. R.), 4. 
 
 Society, 1, 276, 278, 289, 291, 307, 
 323, 410, 424, 476. 
 
 Socinianism, 136, 170, 178. 
 
 Sociology, 370, 424, 476. 
 
 Socrates, 8, 322, 421. 
 
 Sohm, 376. 
 
 Son of Man, 78. 
 
 Sonship, 226, 271. 
 
 Soothill, 488. 
 
 Soul, 256, 266, 345. 
 
 Spencer (H.), 189, 468, 477. 
 
 Spinoza, 234. 
 
 Spirit, 256, 346. 
 
 Spirit, Holy, 90, 109, 112, 114, 144, 
 179, 188, 198, 218, 214, 241, 
 317, 326, 329, 339, 342. 
 
 Spiritualism, 452, 458. 
 
 Spurgeon, 237. 
 
 
 
 
 
 489 
 
 Stanton, 29-30. 
 Sublimation, 308. 
 Substance, 132, 185, 476. 
 Substitution, 110, 164, 167, 171, 178, 
 205. 
 Suffering, 286-97. 
 Suggestion, 71. 
 Supererogation, 159-60. 
 Supernatural, 9, 19, 347. 
 Swinburne, 459. 
 Synopties, 29, 445. 
 
 TANSLEY, 248, 272. 
 
 Temperance, 421, 422. 
 
 Temptation, 36, 198, 206, 228. 
 
 Tennant, 46, 299, 300, 303, 308. 
 
 Tennyson, 270. 
 
 Teratism, 345. 
 
 Tertullian, 267, 365, 429. 
 
 Theism, 183, 251, 321, 465. 
 
 Theology, 244, 252, 266. 
 
 Therapeutics, 70. 
 
 Tholuck, 56. 
 
 Thomson (J. A.), 255, 259, 262, 269, 
 272, 279, 306, 310. 
 
 | Time, 253. 
 
 Tongues, 353. 
 
 Tradition, 38. 
 
 Traducianism, 267. 
 
 Transubstantiation, 397. 
 
 Trinity, 118, 116, 126, 185, 148, 
 147, 148, 194, 247, 343, 349, 
 361, 365, 368, 462. 
 
 Tritheism, 117, 361, 367, 468. 
 
 Truth, 274, 381, 435. 
 
 Tubingen school, 141. 
 
 Uzgiquirty, 138. 
 
 Ulimann, 47. 
 
 Unity, 261, 400, 472. 
 
 Universalism, 2389, 
 451. 
 
 Universe, 233, 246, 283. 
 
 DAS S18 ala: 
 
 Vatue, 9, 187, 227, 233, 280, 315, 
 330, 415, 453, 473. 
 
 | Variation, 260. 
 
 
 
 Verbal inspiration, 331. 
 Vice, 196, 198, 297, 388. 
 Virgin Mother, 365. 
 Virtue, 388. 
 
 Vocation, 176, 
 
 Wawuace, 257. 
 Ward, 189, 248. 
 Weismann, 262. 
 
490 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 
 
 Weiss, 153. | Worship, 390. 
 
 Wells, 14, 188, 235. Wright (W. K.), 3, 18, 465. 
 Wendt, 62. 
 
 Wesley, 94, 369. YezErR, 301, 304. 
 
 Westcott, 107, 459. 
 
 White (E.), 450. ZANCHIUS, 145. 
 
 Wisdom, 117, 348, 421. Zoroastrianism, 38, 390. 
 Wordsworth, 269, 320. Zwingli, 137. 
 
Genesis— 
 
 Exodus 
 XIV. 
 XV1.. 
 xx. 5-6 
 
 
 
 XYXVill, 3. . 
 
 _ Numbers— 
 
 rag thts ae 
 
 xxiv. 2 
 
 Deuteronomy— 
 
 xxi. 23 
 
 xxvii. 26. 
 xxxiv. 9 . 
 
 Joshua— 
 od dl 
 Judges— 
 vi. 34 
 xiv. 6 
 1 Samuel— 
 xvi. 14 
 xix. 20 
 1 Kings— 
 vi. 6 
 
 Nehemiah— 
 
 ix. 30 
 
 Psalms— 
 - 
 vi. 5 
 Vill. 
 
 er 10511 
 XVii. 14-15 
 <Vill'oo . 
 
 xX1X 
 
 ix hG: . 
 xxy. 14 
 
 IN 
 
 DEX 
 
 (b) SCRIPTURE PASSAGES 
 
 PAGE | 
 
 255 
 346 
 279 
 255 
 345 
 
 279 | 
 347 | 
 
 327 | 
 327 | 
 
 262 
 347 
 
 9 
 347 
 
 103 
 103 
 347 
 
 327 
 
 347 | 
 
 347 
 
 347 
 347 
 
 10 
 347 
 
 336 
 
 439 
 4) 283 
 316, 489 
 386, 439 
 . 828 
 
 283 
 
 319 | 
 296 | 
 
 ¢:@ 1A vey: 
 sxe 0 
 Hert 
 
 He? ; 
 Ixxiii. 23-26 
 
 CX. © 
 
 = 
 cxxx,. /-8 
 OXSXLX. 7 
 
 | Ecclesiastes— 
 vili. 15 
 Isaiah— 
 vi. 1 
 vi. 9 
 vil. 14 
 NVI LUO, 
 xxvill. 13 
 XxvVili, 21 
 xxxH, 15 
 ee ee 
 Sha 
 Xi : 
 xl. 1-47. 
 xlili. 3 
 xliv. 3 
 xlviii. 22. 
 itive 
 liii. 3-4 
 liii. 4-6 
 liii. 10 
 liii. 11 
 Hilece 
 liii. 7-8 
 hx 21 
 rahe! 
 xii. 5 
 
 | Jeremiah— 
 Xx xhce ts 
 Xxxill. 31-34 
 Ezekiel— 
 ees 
 
 hod 
 
 xviii, 2 
 
 
 
 | Psalms— continued. 
 317, 347, 356 
 
 lxxxviili. 10-12. 
 
 _ 62, 83, 106 
 
 64, 81, 347 
 
 230, 336 
 489, 453 
 
 80, 340 
 MG 
 81 
 347 
 
 81 
 
 Un aee 
 . 44, 83 
 
 347 
 336 
 491 
 
492 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 Daniel— 
 Vil, 13414 
 
 xii. 2-5 
 
 Hosea— 
 Oa Ba | 
 
 Joel— 
 
 ii, 28 
 Amos— 
 
 lity 7 
 Jonah— 
 
 Luke 
 Micah— 
 
 vil. 18 
 Zechariah— 
 
 vil. 12 
 
 ix. 9 
 
 xii. 10 
 Ecclesiasticus— 
 
 ii, 23-31. 
 
 viii. 9-20, 
 
 xii. 11 
 
 xy. 14 
 
 sg € ba Ary 
 
 xxv. 24 
 
 > IR | 
 
 4 Ezra— 
 Hiro -ee 
 Vie 26 
 Vili. 46-49 
 Matthew— 
 ins 
 i. 38 
 ii. 15 ; 
 MoiGela 3, 
 iii, 13-17. 
 iii, 14-15. 
 iv. I-11 
 Va 2 
 iv. 5-7 
 8-11 
 LBATG. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Matthew—continued. 
 
 vill. 17 
 vill. 32. 
 x. 19-31. 
 x. 20 ; 
 x. 29-30 . 
 xi. 6 t 
 xi. 25-30. 
 xi, 25-27 ; 
 X1.t27 : 
 xi. 28-30 . 
 xi. 29-30 . 
 xil. 18-21 
 et Re aN 
 xil, 39-4] 
 xii. 39 
 <ili.. : 
 xiii, 31-33 
 xili. 45-46 
 xiv; 13-21 
 ZIVi2Z6. 
 xiv. 28-32 
 XV. 32-39 
 xvi. 4 
 xvi. 16 
 VIO T ahs 
 xvi. 18-23 
 Vi, Von. 
 xvi. 21-28 
 xvi, 23-25 
 xvi. 25-26 
 Xvii. 26-27 
 XvVil. 27 
 XVili. 1-6. 
 XVlii. 3 
 xvili. 21-35 
 7 oa: Se 
 xix. 13-15 
 xix. 20 
 xx. 28 
 
 pd Bee On Be he 
 xxi. 5 ' 
 xxl. 39-41 
 
 X€vil. 3-10 
 xxvii. 46. 
 
 XXvilil. 18-20 
 
 PAGE 
 
 eg ey, 
 54, 225, 467 
 42, 416 
 
 68, 436 
 
 81 
 
 349 
 
 38 
 
 353 
 
 Se a: 
 67, 228, 407 
 Neer bt 
 
 Aes 
 279, 455 
 101 
 
 222 
 
 - 50, 82, 108, 204, 
 
 305, 424 
 44,77, 78 
 
 it eae 
 
 Epesigeal tes 
 
 . 48, 65 
 
 225 
 
 436 
 
 225 
 Mra 
 . 44, 50, 204 
 34, 87, 42, 84, 
 218, 416 
 
 i. deere 
 34, 207, 218 
 24, 338, 364, 
 387, 407, 443, 
 445 
 
il. 17 
 
 li. 18-22 . 
 
 iil. 5 
 iii. 29 
 
 WF41-12.. 
 
 v. 138 
 vi. 6 
 
 Wi 82-44 
 PEAD-AD. 
 
 vil. 15 
 
 vii. 27-29 
 vill. 1-9 . 
 
 viii. 21 
 viil. 31 
 vill. 33 
 
 ix. 23-29. 
 
 ix. 31 
 
 ie AQESS 
 
 x,.18 
 
 ee aati 
 
 xi. 13-21 
 xi. 14 
 xil. 9 
 
 xii. 18-27 
 
 xii. 24-26 
 <3, 27 
 
 xii, 29-31 
 xiii. 30-32 
 
 xiv. 27 
 xiv. 62 
 xu 17 
 xv. 28 
 xv. 31 
 
 Luke— 
 
 ii. 49 
 
 Pe heal. 
 
 iv. 14 
 iv. 22 
 v. 1-11 
 vii. 37-38 
 vii. 36-50 
 
 ix. 10-17. 
 
 x: 14 
 
 x. 21-23 . 
 
 xi. 29 
 
 xi, 31-35. 
 
 xii. 19 
 xli. 32 
 
 Kui. 4-6. 
 xili. 6-9 . 
 
 xv. 
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ; 81 
 59, 232 
 59 
 
 42 
 
 50 
 
 ; 303 
 52, 61, 81 
 42 
 
 225, 230 
 
 418 
 
 2, 50, 64, 221, 225 
 . 38 
 
 82 
 
 295 
 
 250 
 
 285 
 
 . 70 
 
 64, 228, 316 
 
 Luke—continued. 
 xv. 1-10. 
 
 xvil. 21 
 
 xix. 1-10. 
 
 xix, 41 
 xxii. 37 
 
 xxii. 61-62 
 Xxill. 34. 
 xxili. 46. 
 sxive Gb . 
 xxiv. 49 . 
 
 | John— 
 
 
 
 
 
 i, 1-4 
 i 5 
 Py 
 7 be 
 i 
 i 
 i 
 
 ii. 1-1] 
 il. 4 
 
 ii. 2 
 ili. 1-6 
 iu. 3-5 
 ii. 15 
 
 vi. 38-50. 
 vi. 45-51. 
 vi. 51-57 . 
 vi. 58-62 . 
 
 vi. 64 
 vi. 68 
 
 vil. 37-38 
 
 viii. 12 
 
 4.98 
 
 PAGE 
 
 218, 460 
 441 
 
 50, 112, 445 
 
 115, 443 
 75 
 
 115 
 
 112 
 
 55, 114 
 
 112, 285, 295 
 
 114, 457 
 112 
 
 112 
 
 54 
 
 54 
 
 42 
 
 73 
 72, 73 
 
494 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 John—continued. 
 
 Xv i. 32 
 
 xvi. 5 
 xvii. 1] 
 KV 22-20 
 SVile cas 
 xix. 28 
 xx. 
 
 #41-8 : 
 
 Acts— 
 i. 3-5 
 li. 1-13 
 li4 to 
 ii. 38 3 
 11. 40-42 
 ili. 6 
 hd 
 viii. 14-17 
 ix. 1-9 
 x. 46 
 xi. 15 
 xiv. 11 
 xiv, L5-1'7 
 xVe 
 xvi.15 . 
 Xvi. 382-34 
 XVi1,,/ 22-31 
 Xvii. 28 
 eh PP ALE 
 xix. 5 
 xix. 6 
 
 Romans— 
 l. 3-4 
 alo 
 pe be: , 
 i. 18-23 
 li. 14-16 . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Bo ip Bs ' 
 ae 88 
 
 
 
 88, 349, 441 
 
 113, 116, 350 
 . 116, 350 
 350, 436 
 
 55, 221 
 
 112, 381, 392 
 
 116, 350 
 5, 63, 339 
 
 ‘55; 115 
 
 55, 116 
 
 88, 349 
 
 350, 351 
 
 188, 249, 271, 316 
 
 95, 97, 98, 101 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 Romans—continued. 
 iii. 23 eS 
 ili, 25 105, 201, 230 
 ili. 26 94, 104 
 Hila, Ae ee iy 
 v. 1-4 107, 109 
 ge he 302, 304 
 v. 20 101 
 V.408 : ar a fb. 
 vi. 1-14 . 339, 355, 356, 358, 417 
 Vin gesth ls ; 294, 455 
 vil, 7-25 . 109, 198, 308, 428 
 Vill : 201 
 Ville) Pals 107 
 viii. 9-11. 307, 360, 430 
 Willi Los say 247, 
 ‘vill. 17 453 
 vill. 19 338 
 viii, 24 ei 426 
 vill. 28 109, 204 
 Vill. 37 243] 
 Viil. 38-39 109, 176 
 ix. 1-29 ; 239 
 ix. 3 238, 251, 460 
 25 : 98 
 ix. 18 251 
 iXc 240 
 ix. 80 239 
 XilZ-1s 358 
 Kc21 239 
 x1. 1:31 239 
 xi. 26 460 
 Sees 107 
 FI. 2 451 
 xii. 356, 379 
 Tiles 416 
 we thei OW 416 
 sab hte ee 416 
 MUISR Le 228, 356, 430 
 1 Corinthians— 
 
 “17 388 
 i. 24 391 
 Hi. 23 98 
 vi. 11 357 
 vi. 14 98 
 Vili. 6 98 
 ix. 16 403 
 ib aps 5 422 
 x, 22 ; 358 
 5 Oa A EY, : : ay 
 pa urls . 44, 82, 
 xi. 29 : te 
 xii 354, 357, 381 
 xii. 26 3 s 461 
 xii. 30 13) (Spee 
 xii. 31 "92, 379, 418 
 
INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1 Corinthians—continued. 
 
 xiii. 
 xiii. 1 
 S14 12 
 XIV. 
 
 xiv. 14-17 
 
 xiv. 25 
 
 XIV. 34-86 
 xy: 1-34. 
 
 sy 18 
 xv. 28 
 
 xv, 42-49 
 
 Virol 
 xv. 56 
 
 xvi. 23-24 
 2 Corinthians— 
 
 ae 
 i, 22 
 ili. 5 
 
 iii. 17-18 
 
 iv. 5 
 Vv. 
 
 vii. 9-10 . 
 
 Vili. 4 
 vill. 9 
 Daa ee | 
 
 xii. 9-10. 
 
 xili, 14 
 Galatians— 
 ii. 20 
 lil. 3 
 iii, 20 
 lil. 28 
 iv. 4 
 v. 6 
 
 Misaerce. 
 
 Ephesians— 
 i. 14 
 
 iso 
 i. 22-23 . 
 
 li, 11-22 . 
 
 ii, 18 
 
 ” 353 
 
 449 
 
 . 98, 450, 460, 480 
 
 97, 428, 441, 
 
 414 
 97, 213, 357, 
 429, 454 
 
 2 108 
 "424 
 
 214, 431 
 
 24, 97, 357, 467 
 
 94, 358, 417 
 102 
 
 343 
 446 
 
 91, 190, 338, 381, 
 
 437, 451 
 379 
 357 
 
 
 
 Ephesians—continued. 
 li. 20-22 . 
 
 iva 
 5b yf | 
 
 v. 22-23 
 te ete 
 
 21 
 i 1-11 
 ie7, 
 li. 9-1] 
 
 4219-13 
 
 ia) 
 ili, 12 
 
 ili. 20-21 . 
 
 V7 
 
 iv. 8 
 
 iv. 13 
 Colossians— 
 
 ee =F bras 
 Pib-16.), 
 i 19620 1% 
 
 i, 24 
 Eee, 
 Lig 
 ii. 15 
 
 1 Thessalonians— 
 
 Vue 
 
 2 Thessalonians— 
 
 ili. 18 
 1 Timothy— 
 ish 
 
 asia 
 
 vi. 20 
 
 2 Timothy— 
 iil. 15-17 
 iv. 6-8 
 
 Hebrews— 
 
 Vil. | 25-26 
 xi) 
 
 xi, 39-40. 
 
 xii. 1-3 
 
 . 52, 84, 338 
 
 495 
 
 PAGE 
 
 338, 357 
 447 
 415 
 379 
 
 358, 417 
 
 19, 51, 117, 140, 146 
 
 148, 190 
 24, 97, 98 
 427 
 
 206 
 
 . 299 
 97, 444 
 436 
 
 411, 436 
 204, 431 
 
 99 
 ee 
 98, 452 
 
 103 
 
 9”) 
 
 97, 411 
 108, 153 
 
 332 
 444 
 
 317, 426 
 99 
 
 49, 293 
 
 36 
 . 294 
 102, 293 
 
 . 88, 34, ie 
 
 85 
 
 84, 195, 298 
 
 304 
 
 . 20, 48, 213 
 
 11, 414 
 460 
 
 35, 42, 88, 420, 
 436, 456, 459 
 
496 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 PAGE PAGE 
 
 James— 1 John—continued. 
 wil] : ; ; oA be boy © rues . é ine Le 
 Vind -oh ; ' ‘ 418 
 LiPeter~~ iv, 10-21 o>. 
 il. 19 : 4 , : 450 vy. 4 : : / ; 431 
 
 iv. 6 : : é : 450 : 
 Revelation— 
 
 1 John— v. 6 ] ; : ; 335 
 i, 7-9 } : , 113 vi'9-10 ‘ F : 243 
 7% ae : 113 v. 12-14 . : , é 3385 
 
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