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Library of The Theological Seminary
PRINCETON : NEW JERSEY
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PRESENTED BY
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446 The Divinity of Christ, cr. 8vo, cloth,
38 1869
A κε χ
BAMPTON LECTURES
FOR M.DCCC.LXVI
RIVINGTONS
2
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Che Mibimity of
Our Lord and Sabiour Jesus Christ;
EIGHT LECTURES
PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD,
IN THE YEAR 1866,
On the foundation of the late Rev. John Bampton, M.A.,
CANON OF SALISBURY.
Bye HENRY PARRY“ LIDDON, MA:
STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH,
AND CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF SALISBURY,
FOURTH EDITION
RIVINGTONS
Hondon, Oxford, and Cambridge
1869
‘Wenn Christus nicht wahrer Gott ist ; die mahometanische
Religion eine unstreitige Verbesserung der christlichen war, und
Mahomet selbst ein ungleich gréssrer und wiirdigerer Mann
gewesen ist als Christus.’
Lessing, Séimmil. Schriften, Bd. 9, p. 291.
‘Simul quoque cum beatis videamus
Glorianter vultum Tuum, Christe Deus,
Gaudium quod est immensum atque probum,
‘Seecula per infinita szculorum.’
Ehythn. Eee.
EXTRACT
FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
OF THE LATE
REV. JOHN BAMPTON,
CANON OF SALISBURY.
(1 give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the
“ Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford
“ for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the said Lands or
« Estates upon trust, and to the intents and purposes hereinafter
“ mentioned ; that is to say, I will and appoint that the Vice-
“ Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the time being shall
«take and receive all the rents, issues, and profits thereof, and
“(after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductions made)
“that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight
« Divinity Lecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the
“ said University, and to be performed in the manner following :
“ T direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in Easter
“ Term, a Lecturer may be yearly chosen by the Heads of Col-
“Jeges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining to the
« Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the morning and
“two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture
“ Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary’s in Oxford, between
“the commencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the
“ end of the third week in Act Term.
vi Lxtract from Canon Bampton’s Will.
“ Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture
“Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following
“ Subjects—to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and
“to confute all heretics and schismatics—upon the divine
“ authority of the holy Scriptures —upon the authority of the
“writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice
“of the primitive Church—upon the Divinity of our Lord and
“ Saviour Jesus Christ—upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost—
“upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in
“ the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed.
“ Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lec-
“ ture Sermons shall be always printed, within two months after
“they are preached ; and one copy shall be given to the Chan-
“ cellor of the University, and one copy to the Head of every
“ College, and one copy to the Mayor of the city of Oxford, and
“one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library; and the
“ expense of printing them shall be paid out of the revenue of
“ the Land or Estates given for establishing the Divinity Lecture
“Sermons ; and the Preacher shall not be paid, nor be entitled
“to the revenue, before they are printed.
“ Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified
“to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken
“the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of the two Uni-
“ versities of Oxford or Cambridge ; and that the same person
“ shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons twice.”
PREFACE
TO THE FIRST EDITION.
PerHars an apology may be due to the University for the
delay which has occurred in the appearance of this volume. If
so, the writer would venture to plead that he undertook the
duties of the Bampton Lecturer at a very short notice, and, it
may be, without sufficiently considering what they involved.
When, however, the accomplished Clergyman whom the Uni-
versity had chosen to lecture in the year 1866 was obliged by
a serious illness to seek a release from his engagement, the
vacant post was offered to the present writer with a kindness
and generosity which, as he thought, obliged him, although
entirely unprepared, to accept it and to meet its requirements as
well as he could.
Under such circumstances, the materials which were made
ready in some haste for use in the pulpit seemed to require
_a close revision before publication. In making this revision—
which has been somewhat seriously interrupted by other duties
—the writer has not felt at liberty to introduce alterations
except in the way of phrase and illustration. He has, however,
availed himself of the customary licence to print at length some
considerable paragraphs, the sense of which, in order to save
time, was only summarily given when the lectures were
delivered. And he has subjoined the Greek text of the more
important passages of the New Testament to which he has had
occasion to refer; as experience seems to prove that very many
viii Preface to the First Edition.
readers do not verify quotations from Holy Scripture for them-
selves, or at least that they content themselves with examining
the few which are generally thought to be of most importance.
Whereas, the force of the argument for our Lord’s Divinity, as
indeed is the case with other truths of the New Testament, is
eminently cumulative. Such an argument is to be appreciated,
not by studying the comparatively few texts which expressly
assert the doctrine, but that large number of passages which
indirectly, but most vividly, imply it.
It is perhaps superfluous to observe that eight lectures can
deal with little beyond the outskirts of a vast, or to speak more
accurately, of an exhaustless subject. The present volume
attempts only to notice, more or less directly, some of those
assaults upon the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity which have
been prominent or popular of late years, and which have,
unhappily, had a certain weight among persons with whom the
writer is acquainted.
Whatever disturbing influence the modern destructive criti-
cism may have exerted upon the form of the old argument for
the Divinity of Christ, the main features of that argument
remain substantially unchanged. The writer will have deep
reason for thankfulness, if any of those whose inclination or
duty leads them to pursue the subject, should be guided by his
references to the pages of those great theologians whose names,
whether in our own country or in the wider field of Catholic
Christendom, are for ever associated with the vindication of this
most fundamental truth of the Faith.
In passing the sheets of this work through the press,
the writer has been more largely indebted than he can well
say to the invigorating sympathy and varied learning of the
Rey. W. Bright, Fellow of University College ; while the Index
is due to the friendly interest of another Fellow of that College,
the Rev. P. G. Medd.
That in so wide and so mysterious a subject all errors have
been avoided, is much more than the writer dares to hope.
stain Haase ill
΄ —_— ον
Preface to the First Edition. ΠΧ
But at least he has not intentionally contravened the clear sense
of Holy Scripture, or any formal decision whether of the Undi-
vided Church or of the Church of England. May He to the
honour of Whose Person this volume is devoted, vouchsafe to
pardon in it all that is not calculated to promote His truth and
His glory! And for the rest, ‘quisquis hee legit, ubi pariter
certus est, pergat mecum ; ubi pariter hesitat, queerat mecum ;
ubi errorem suum cognoscit, redeat ad me; ubi meum, revocet
me. Ita ingrediamur simul charitatis viam, tendentes ad Kum
de Quo dictum est, Querite Faciem Ejus semper®.’
CHRIST CHURCH,
Ascension Day, 1867.
aS, Aug: de Trin. 1. 5.
;
ae
7 os
7
Εν
PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION.
Tun kindly welcome given to this volume, both at home and
in America, has led to a demand for another edition, which has
taken the writer somewhat by surprise. He has, however, availed
himself of the opportunity to make what use he could of the cri-
ticisms which have come, from whatever quarter, under his notice.
Some textual errors have been corrected. Some ill-considered
or misunderstood expressions have been modified. References
to authorities and sources of information, which were accidentally
omitted, have been supplied. To a few of the notes there has
been added fresh matter, of an explanatory or justificatory cha-
racter. The index, too, has been remodelled and enlarged. But
the book remains, it is needless to say, substantially unchanged.
And if it is now offered to the public in a somewhat altered
guise, this has been done in order to meet the views of friends,
who have urged, not perhaps altogether without reason, that ‘in
the Church of England, books on Divinity are so largely adapted
to the taste and means of the wealthier classes, as to imply that
the most interesting of all subjects can possess no attractions for
the intelligence and heart of persons who enjoy only a moderate
income.’
Of the topics discussed in this book, there is one which has
invited a larger share of attention than others, both from those
who share and from those who reject the Faith of the Church.
It is that central argument for our Saviour’s Deity, which is
based on His persistent self-assertion, taken in conjunction with
xii Preface to the Second Edition.
the sublimity of His Human character. The supreme importanc-
of this consideration is indeed obvious. Certainly, in the order
of historical treatment, the inferences which may be deduced
from Prophecy, and from Christ’s supernatural design to found
the ‘Kingdom of Heaven, naturally precede that which arises
from His language about Himself. But, in the order of the
formation of conviction, the latter argument must claim prece- .
dence. It is, in truth, more fundamental. It is the heart of
the entire subject, from which a vital strength flows into the
accessory although important topics grouped around it. Apart
from Our Lord’s personal claims, the language of prophecy would
have been only a record of unfulfilled anticipations, and the lofty
Christology of the Apostles only a sample of their misguided
enthusiasms; whereas the argument which appeals to Christ’s
claims, taken in conjunction with His character, is independent
of the collateral arguments which in truth it supports. If the
argument from prophecy could be discredited, by assigning new
dates to the prophetical books, and by theories of a cultured
political foresight; if the faith of the Apostles could be aecounted
for upon grounds which referred it to their individual peculiar-
ities of thought and temper ; there would still remain the unique
phenomenon of the sublimest of characters inseparably linked, in
the Person of Jesus, to the most energetic proclamation of self.
In this inmost shrine of Christian Truth, there are two courses
open to the negative criticism. It may endeavour to explain
away Our Lord’s self-assertion in the interests, as it conceives,
of His Human Character. The impossibility of really doing
this has been insisted upon in these lectures. For Christ’s self-
assertion is not merely embodied in statements which would be
blasphemy in the mouth of a created being; it underlies and
explains His entire attitude towards His disciples, towards His
countrymen, towards the human race, towards the religion of
Israel. Nor is Christ’s self-assertion confined to the records of —
one Evangelist, or to a particular period in His ministry. The
three first Evangelists bear witness to it, in different terms, yet
Preface to the Second Edition. xiii
not less significantly than does St. John; and it belongs as truly,
though not perhaps so patently, to Our Lord’s first great discourse
as to His last. From first to last He asserts, He insists upon
the acceptance of Himself. When this is acknowledged, a man
must either base such self-assertion on its one sufficient justifica-
tion, by accepting the Church's faith in the Deity of Christ ; or
he must regard it as fatal to the moral beauty of Christ's Human
character.—Christus, si non Deus, non bonus.
It is urged by persons whose opinions are entitled to great
respect that, however valid this argument may be, its religious
expediency must be open to serious question. And undoubtedly
such like arguments cannot at any time be put forward without
involving those who do so in grave responsibility. Of this the
writer, as he trusts, has not been unmindful. He has not used a
dangerous weapon gratuitously, nor, so far as he knows his own
motives, with any purpose so miserable as that of producing a
rhetorical effect.
What, then, are the religious circumstances which appear to
warrant the employment of such an argument at present ἢ
Speaking roughly, men’s minds may be grouped into three
classes with reference to the vital question which is discussed in
these lectures.
1. There are those who, by God’s mercy, have no doubt on
the subject of Our Lord’s Godhead. To mere dialecticians their
case may appear to be one of sheer intellectual stagnation. But
the fact is, that they possess, or at least that they have altogether
within their reach, a far higher measure of real ‘life’ than is
even suspected by their critics. They are not seeking truth ;
they are enjoying it. They are not like Alpine climbers still
making their way up the mountain side; they have gained the
summit, and are gazing on the panorama which is spread around
and beneath them. It is even painful to them to think of ‘ prov-
ing’ a truth which is now the very life of their souls. In their
whole spiritual activity, in their prayers, in their regular medita-
tions, in their study of Holy Scripture, in their habitual thoughts
xiv Preface to the Second Edition.
respecting the eternal Future, they take Christ's Divinity for
granted ; and it never occurs to them to question a reality from
which they know themselves to be continually gaining new
streams of light and warmth and power.
To such as these, this book may or may not be of service.
To some Christians, who are filled with joy and ‘peace in, be-
lieving, a review of the grounds of any portion of their faith
may be even distressing. To others such a process may be
bracing and helpful. But in any case it should be observed
that the foot-notes contain passages from unbelieving writers,
which are necessary to shew that the statements of the text
are not aimed at imaginary phantoms, but which also are not
unlikely to shock and distress religious and believing minds very
seriously. In such a matter to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
2. There are others, and, it is to be feared, a larger class than
is often supposed, who have made up their minds against the
claims of Divine Revelation altogether. They may admit the
existence of a Supreme Being, in some shadowy sense, as an In-
finite Mind, or as a resistless Force. They may deny that there
is any satisfactory reason for holding that any such Being exists
at all. But whether they are Theists or Atheists, they resent the
idea of any interference from on high in this human world, and
accordingly they denounce the supernatural, on ἃ priort grounds.
The trustworthiness of Scripture as an historical record is to
their minds sufficiently disproved by the undoubted fact, that its
claim to credit is staked upon the possibility of certain extra-
ordinary miracles. When that possibility is denied, Jesus Christ
must either be pronounced to be a charlatan, or a person of
whose real words and actions no trustworthy account has been
transmitted to us.
Whichever conclusion be: accepted by those who belong to
the class in question, it is plain that this book cannot hope to
assist them. For it treats as certain, facts of which they deny
even the possibility. It must of necessity appear to them to
be guilty of a continuous petitio principit ; since they dispute its
Preface to the Second Edition. XV
fundamental premises. If any such should ever chance to ex-
amine it, they would probably see in it ‘only another illustration
of the hopelessness of getting “orthodox” believers even to appre-
ciate the nature and range of the difficulties which are felt by
liberal thinkers.’
It may be replied that something should have been done
towards meeting those particular ‘difficulties.’ But, in point of
fact, this would have been to choose another subject for the lec-
tures of 1866. LOO
III. Christ’s Self-assertion viewed in its bearing upon
His Human Character :
His 1. Sincerity . : : . : 2, 202
2. Unselfishness . . . . ΤΌΣ
3. Humility . 195
all dependent upon the truth of His Divinity 195
The argument necessarily assumes the form of a
great alternative : : . ; . 20
LECTURE V.
THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST'S DIVINITY IN THE WRITINGS OF
ST. JOHN.
1 St. John i. 1-3,
St. John’s Gospel ‘the battle-field’ of the New Testament 208
I. Ancient and modern objections to its claims . - 208
Witness of the second century ᾿ : 210
Its distinctive internal features may be ernie
generally by its threefold purpose—
1. Supplementary . : 5 . ᾿ - 219
2. Polemical . ; : : ; ° > 220
3. Dogmatic . : ‘ : ° : - 222
Analysis of the Lectures. . XXV
PAGE
II. It is a Life of the Eternal Word made flesh.
Doctrine of the Eternal Word in the Prologue . 220
Manifestation of the Word, as possessing the Divine
Perfections
of 1. Life : ὃ ‘ : Ξ : 20
2. ον . : : é : : 290
em laiphtec : : : mao!
The Word identical with the ἜΠΟΣ ten Son. o 5293
III. It is in doctrinal and moral unison with—
1. The Epistles of St.John . : . τ DY
2. The Apocalypse . : : ° . ΠΕ 242
IV. Its Christology is in essential unison with that of the
Synoptists. Observe—
1. their use of the title ‘Son of God’ ‘ .“ 246
2. their account of Christ’s Nativity : 247
3. their report of His Doctrine and Work, and 249
4. of His eschatological discourses . ; #253
Summary : ξ : : : . 254
Ὑ. It incurs the objection that a God-Man 15 Bade
cally incredible . : 255
This objection to aaa the Septal Ae Ca.
tholic Doctrine . - 256
Mysteriousness of our sitindeita nature eae of
the Incarnation . : ; " : i . 264
VI. St. John’s writings oppose an insurmountable barrier
to the Theory of a Deification by Enthusiasm . 266
Significance of St. John’s witness to the ἀθέως οἵ
Christ 2 ‘ R72
Xxvi Analysis of the Lectures.
LECTURE VI.
OUR LORD’S DIVINITY AS TAUGHT BY ST. JAMES, ST. PETER,
AND ST. PAUL.
Gal. ii. Ὁ.
PAGE
St. John’s Christology not an intellectual idiosyncrasy . 277
The Apostles present One Doctrine under various forms . 278
I. St. James’s Epistle—
I. presupposes the Christology of St. Paul . 252
2. implies a high Christology by incidental ex-
pressions ; : - . : . eae
II. St. Peter—
1. leads his hearers up to understand Christ’s
true dignity, in his Missionary Sermons . 201
2. exhibits Christ’s Godhead more pal in his
Epistles . : eZ
III. St. Jude’s Epistle implies that Christ § is God Ὁ 130%
IV. St. Paul—
1. form of his ee apa apes with that
of St.John . 302
prominent place given ie fin to the ce,
a, of our Lord’s true Mediating Manhood 303
β. of the Unity of the Divine Essence . 307
2. Passages from St. Paul asserting the pia
of Christ in terms . : 310
3. A Divine Christ implied in the Fereral Ἔα
of St. Paul’s Missionary Sermons . 324
of St. Paul’s Epistles 328
4. And in some leading features of that ΠΥ Ὸ
ing, as in
a. his doctrine of Faith : . 1 550
β. his account of Regeneration . . 344
y. his attitude towards the Judaizers . 348
VY. Contrasts between the Apostles do but enhance the
force of their common faith in a Divine Christ . 350
Analysis of the Lectures. Xxvil
LECTURE VII.
THE HOMOOUSION.
itets Ge
PAGE
Vitality of doctrines, how tested . ᾿ . : - Bie
Doctrine of Christ’s Divinity strengthened by opposition . 357
Objections urged in modern times against the Homoousion 358
Real justification of the Homoousion—
I. The ante-Nicene Church adored Christ . 359
Adoration of Jesus Christ
1. during His earthly Life : 364
2. by the Church of the νος after His
Ascension 367
Characteristics of the dem tion of Christ 3 in the
Apostolic Age—
a. It was not combined with any worship
of creatures 376
με It was really the worship due to God 378
. It was nevertheless addressed to Christ’s
Manhood, as being united to His Deity 379
2. by the post-Apostolic Church,
in sub-Apostolic Age Ξ 379
in later part of Second Century 381
in Third Century : 383
expressed in hymns and doxologies 385
and signally at Holy Communion 389
assailed by Pagan sarcasms 391
embodied in last words of martyrs 398
inconsistently retained by Arians 403
and even by early Socinians 404
II. The ante-Nicene Church spoke of Christ as Divine 405
Value of testimony of martyrs . . 406
Similar testimony of theologians. . eat
Their language not mere ‘rhetoric’ . . AL?
Objection from doubtful statements of some ante-
Nicenes . 2 - 5 : ᾿ 418
Xxviil Analysis of the Lectures.
Answer: a. They had not grasped all the intellectual
bearings of the faith. :
8. They were anxious to put strongly for-
ward the Unity of God . .
y. The Church’s real mind not doubtful
III. The Homoousion
a. not a development in the sense of an enlarge-
ment of the faith . : : .
B. necessary I. in the Arian struggle . ; -
2. in our own times . . .
LECTURE VIII.
PAGE
419
422
424
426
434
436
SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE DOCTRINE OF OUR LORD'S DIVINITY.
Rom. viil. 32.
Theology must be, within limits, ‘inferential’ . 4
What the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity involves . .
I. Conservative force of the doctrine—
1. It protects the Idea of God in human thought,
a. which Deism cannot guard . : .
8. and which Pantheism destroys . .
2. It secures the true dignity of Man .
II. Illuminative force of the doctrine—
a. It implies Christ’s Infallibility as a Teacher .
Objections from certain texts . 5 :
1. St. Luke 1]. 52 considered 5 :
2. St. Mark xii. 32 considered
A single limitation of knowledge in Christ’s
Human Soul apparently indicated .
admitted by great Fathers . . .
does not involve Agnoetism . . .
nor Nestorianism
is consistent with the practical immensity
of Christ’s human knowledge 3
is distinct from, and does not imply fal-
libility, still less actual error
Application to our Lord’s sanction of the
Pentateuch . . . . . °
441
442
444
444
448
451
455
456
456
458
459
460
462
463
464
467
468
Analysis of the Lectures. χχὶχ
PAGE
β. It explains the atoning virtue of Christ’s Death 472
y. It explains the Aas power of the
Sacraments . 479
5. It irradiates the meaning of Christ’s kingly
office . : - ° ° - τς 485
III. Ethical fruitfulness of the doctrine—
Objection—that a Divine Christ Sa no standard
for our imitation : δ . 485
Answer—1. An approximate imitation of Christ
secured ‘
a. by the reality of His Manhood 4.00
β. by the grace which flows from Him
as God and Man : 487
2. Belief in Christ’s Godhead has propa-
gated virtues, unattainable by pagan-
ism and naturalism—
a. Purity . - . - . 488
β. Humility . . , . . 491
y. Charity . : : veges AO4
Recapitulation of the argument - ‘ ny
Faith in a Divine Christ, the coos of the Church
under present dangers . - 498
Conclusion . ‘ : : : oes . 499
LECTURE 1.
THE QUESTION BEFORE US.
When Jesus came into the coasts of Cesarea Philippi, He asked His
disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am? And
they said, Some say that Thou art John the Baptist: some, Llias ;
and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them,
But whom say ye that I am?—Sr. Marv. xvi. 13.
Tuus did our Lord propose to His first followers the mo-
mentous question, which for eighteen centuries has riveted the
eye of thinking and adoring Christendom. The material set-
ting, if we may so term it, of a great intellectual or moral
event ever attracts the interest and lives in the memory of
men ; and the Evangelist is careful to note that the question
of our Lord was asked in the neighbourhood of Cesarea Phi-
lippi. Jesus Christ had reached the northernmost point of His
journeyings. He was close to the upper source of the Jordan,
and at the base of the majestic mountain which forms a natural
barrier to the Holy Land at its northern extremity. His
eye rested upon a scenery in the more immediate foreground,
which from its richness and variety has been compared by
travellers to the Italian Tivoli®. Yet there belonged to this
spot a higher interest than any which the beauty of merely
inanimate or irrational nature can furnish; it bore visible
traces of the hopes, the errors, and the struggles of the human
soul. Around a grotto which Greek settlers had assigned
to the worship of the sylvan Pan, a Pagan settlement had
gradually formed itself. Herod the Great had adorned the
spot with a temple of white marble, dedicated to his patron
Augustus; and more recently, the rising city, enlarged and
beautified by Philip the tetrarch, had received a new name »
a Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, p. 397.
[ Lect. 1] B
ee στ τὺ -Ὸὕὕ----Ἐ---ς--ς-ςςς- .οἋοὐὐσὐσσυώἽνσσθου
2 Where the question was rarsed.
TAS RCE Oe συ
which combined the memory of the Cxsar Tiberius with that
of the local potentate. It is probable that our Lord at least
had the city in view, even if He did not enter it. He was
standing on the geographical frontier of Judaism and Heathen-
dom. Paganism was visibly before Him in each of its two
most typical forms of perpetual and world-wide degradation.
It was burying its scant but not utterly lost idea of an Eternal
Power and Divinity¢ beneath a gross materialistic nature-
worship ; and it was prostituting the sanctities of the human
conscience to the lowest purposes of an unholy and tyrannical
statecraft. And behind and around our Lord was that peculiar
people, of whom, as concerning the fiesh, He came Himself 4,
and to which His first followers belonged. Israel too was
there; alone in her memory of a past history such as no
other race could boast; alone in her sense of a present de-
gradation, political and moral, such as no other people could
feel; alone in her strong expectation of a Deliverance which
to men who were ‘aliens from’ her sacred ‘commonwealth’
seemed but the most chimerical of delusions. On such a spot
does Jesus Christ raise the great question which is before
us in the text, and this, as we may surely believe, not without
a reference to the several wants and hopes and efforts of man-
kind thus visibly pictured around Him. How was the human
conscience to escape from that political violence and from
that degrading sensualism which had riveted the yoke of
Pagan superstition? How was Israel to learn the true drift
and purpose of her marvellous past? How was she to be really
relieved of her burden of social and moral misery? How were
her high anticipations of a brighter future to be explained
and justified? And although that ‘middle wall of partition,’
which so sharply divided off her inward and outward life from
that of Gentile humanity, had been built up for such high
and necessary ends by her great inspired lawgiver, did not
such isolation also involve manifest counterbalancing risks
and loss? was it to be eternal? could it, might it be ‘broken
down?’ These questions could only be answered by some further
Revelation, larger and clearer than that already possessed by
Israel, and absolutely new to Heathendom. They demanded
some nearer, fuller, more persuasive self-unveiling than any
b Dean Stanley surmises that the rock on which was placed the Temple
of Augustus may possibly have determined the form of our Lord’s promise
to St. Peter in St. Matt. xvi. 18. Sinai and Palestine, p. 399.
¢ Rom. i. 20. ἃ Ibid. ix. 5.
[ LECT.
Religion and Theology. 3
which the Merciful and Almighty God had as yet vouchsafed
to His reasonable creatures. May not then the suggestive
scenery of Cesarea Philippi have been chosen by our Lord,
as well fitted to witness that solemn enquiry in the full answer
to which Jew and Gentile were alike to find a rich inheritance
of light, peace and freedom? Jesus ‘asked His disciples, saying,
Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?’
Let us pause to mark the significance of the fact that our
Lord Himself proposes this consideration to His disciples
and to His Church.
It has been often maintained of late that the teaching of
Jesus Christ Himself differs from that of His Apostles and
of their successors, in that He only taught religion, while
they have taught dogmatic theologye.
This statement appears to proceed upon a presumption that
religion and theology can be separated, not merely in idea
and for the moment, by some process of definition, but per-
manently and in the world of fact. What then is religion?
If you say that religion is essentially thought whereby man
unites himself to the Eternal and Unchangeable Being‘, it
is at least plain that the object-matter of such a religious
activity as this is exactly identical with the object-matter
of theology. Nay more, it would seem to follow that a re-
ligious life is simply a life of theological speculation. If you
make religion to consist in ‘the knowledge of our practical
duties considered as God’s commandmentsé, your definition
irresistibly suggests God in His capacity of universal Legis-
lator, and it thus carries the earnestly and honestly religious
man into the heart of theology. If you protest that religion
€ Baur more cautiously says: ‘Wenn wir mit der Lehre Jesu die Lehre
des Apostels Paulus zusammenhalten, so fallt sogleich der grosse Unter-
schied in die Augen, welcher hier stattfindet zwischen einer noch in der
Form eines allgemeinen Princips sich aussprechenden Lehre, und einem
schon zur Bestimmtheit des Dogma’s gestalteten Lehrbegriff.’ Vorlesungen
tiber N. T. Theologie, p. 123. But it would be difficult to shew that the
‘Universal Principle’ does not involve and embody a number of definite
dogmas. Baur would not admit that St. John xiv., xv., xvi. contain words
really spoken by Jesus Christ: but the Sermon on the Mount itself is
sufficiently dogmatic. Cf. St. Matt. vi. 4, 6, 14, 26, 30, vii. 21, 22.
fSo Fichte, quoted by Klee, Dogmatik, c. 2. With this definition those
of Schelling and Hegel substantially concur. It is unnecessary to remark
that thought is only one element of true religion.
& So Kant, ibid. This definition (1) reduces religion to being merely
an affair of the understanding, and (2) identifies its substance with that
of morality.
1] B2
:
i —
4 Religion and Theology.
has nothing to do with intellectual skill in projecting defini-
tions, and that it is at bottom a feeling of tranquil dependence
upon some higher Power), you cannot altogether set aside
the capital question which arises as: to the nature of that
Power upon which religion thus depends. Even if you should
contend that feeling is the essential element in religion, still
you cannot seriously maintain that the reality of that to which
such feeling relates is altogether a matter of indifference!.
For the adequate satisfaction of this religious feeling lies ποῦ
lin itself but in its object; and therefore it is impossible to
represent religion as indifferent to the absolute truth of that
object, and in a purely esthetical spirit, concerned only with —
the beauty of the idea before it, even in a case where the
reflective understanding may have condemned that idea as —
logically false. Religion, to support itself, must rest consciously
‘on its object: the intellectual apprehension of that object as —
true is an integral element of religion. In other words, religion
is practically inseparable from theology. The religious Ma-
hommedan sees in Allah a being to whose absolute decrees he
must implicitly resign himself; a theological dogma then is
the basis of the specific Mahommedan form of religion. A child —
reads in the Sermon on the Mount that our Heavenly Father
takes care of the sparrows, and of the lilies of the field),
and the child prays to Him accordingly. The truth upon
which the child rests is the dogma of the Divine Providence,
which encourages trust, and warrants prayer, and lies at the
root of the child’s religion. In short, religion cannot exist
without some view of its object, namely, God; but no sooner
do you introduce any intellectual aspect whatever of God, —
nay, the bare idea that such a Being exists, than you have ys
before you not merely a religion, but at least, in some sense, Pas
a theology*. .
7 a
ye SY a
Ϊ
Ι
l
h ¢ Abhingigkeitsgefiihl.’ Schleiermacher’s account of religion has been ~
widely adopted in our own day and country. But (1) it ignores the active —
side of true religion, (2) it loses sight of man’s freedom no less than of |
God’s, and (3) it may imply nothing better than a passive submission to
the laws of the Universe, without any belief whatever as to their Author. ¢
i Dorner gives an account of this extreme theory as maintained by De ~
Wette in his Religion und Theologie, 1815. De Wette appears to have ©
followed out some hints of Herder’s, while applying Jacobi’s doctrine of ©
feeling, as ‘the immediate perception of the Divine,’ and the substitute
for the practical reason, to theology. Cf. Dorner, Person Christi, Zw. Th.
p- 996, 566.
i St. Matt. vi. 25-30.
k Religion includes in its complete idea the knowledge and the worship ~
Place of Christ in His own doctrine. 5
Had our Lord revealed no one truth except the Parental
character of God, while at the same time He insisted upon
a certain morality and posture of the soul as proper to man’s
reception of this revelation, He would have been the Author
of a theology as well as of a religion. In point of fact, besides
teaching various truths concerning God, which were unknown
before, or at most only guessed at, He did that which in a
merely human teacher of high purpose would have been morally
intolerable. He drew the eyes of men towards Himself. He
claimed to be something more than the Founder of a new
religious spirit, or than the authoritative promulgator of a
higher truth than men had yet known. He taught true religion
indeed as no man had yet taught it, but He bent the religious
spirit which He had summoned into life to do homage to
Himself, as being its lawful and adequate Object. He taught
the highest theology, but He also placed Himself at the very
centre of His doctrine, and He announced Himself as sharing
the very throne of that God Whom He so clearly unveiled.
If He was the organ and author of a new and final revelation,
He also claimed to be the very substance and material of His
own message ; His most startling revelation was Himself.
These are statements which will be justified, it is hoped,
hereafter!; and, if some later portions of our subject are for
a moment anticipated, it is only that we may note the true and
extreme significance of our Lord’s question in the text. But
let us also ask ourselves what would be the duty of a merely
human teacher of the highest moral aim, entrusted with a great
spiritual mission and lesson for the benefit of mankind? The
example of St. John Baptist is an answer to this enquiry. Such
a teacher would represent himself as a mere ‘voice’ crying aloud
in the moral wilderness around him, and anxious, beyond aught
else, to shroud his own insignificant person beneath the majesty
of his message. Not to do this would be to proclaim his own
of God. (8. Aug. de Util. Cred. ο. 12. n. 27.) Cicero gives the limited
sense which Pagan Rome attached to the word: ‘Qui omnia que ad cultum
deorum pertinerent, diligenter retractarent et tanquam relegerent, sunt dicti
religiosi, ex relegendo.’ (De Nat. Deorum, ii. 28.) Lactantius gives the
Christian form of the idea, whatever may be thought of his etymology:
‘Vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo, et religati sumus, unde ipsa religio nomen
accepit.’ (Inst. Div. iv. 24.) Religion is the bond between God and man’s
whole nature: in God the heart finds its happiness, the reason its rule
of truth, the will its freedom.
1 See Lecture IV.
1]
6 The ‘Son of Man?
moral degradation ; it would be a public confession that he
could only regard a great spiritual work for others as furnishing
an opportunity for adding to his own social capital, or to his
official reputation. When then Jesus Christ so urgently draws
the attention of men to His Personal Self, He places us in a
dilemma. We must either say that He was unworthy of His
own words in the Sermon on the Mount™, or we must confess
that He has some right, and is under the pressure of some
necessity, to do that which would be morally insupportable in a
merely human teacher. Now if this right and necessity exist,
it follows that when our Lord bids us to consider His Personal
rank in the hierarchy of beings, He challenges an answer.
Remark moreover that in the popular sense of the term the
answer is not less a theological answer if it be that of the
Ebionitic heresy than if it be the language of the Nicene Creed.
The Christology of the Church is in reality an integral part of
its theology ; and Jesus Christ raises the central question of
Christian theology when He asks, ‘Whom do men say that I
the Son of Man am?’
It may be urged that our Lord is inviting attention, not to
His essential Personality, but to His assumed office as the Jewish
Messiah ; that He is, in fact, asking for a confession of His —
Messiahship.
Now observe the exact form of our Lord’s question, as given
in St. Matthew’s Gospel ; which, as Olshausen has remarked, is
manifestly here the leading narrative : ‘Whom do men say that
I the Son of Man am? This question involves an assertion,
namely, that the Speaker is the Son of Man. What did He
mean by that designation? It is important to remember that
with two exceptions" the title is only applied to our Lord in
the New Testament by His own lips. It was His self-chosen
Name: why did He choose it ?
First, then, it was in itself, to Jewish ears, a clear assertion of
Messiahship. In the vision of Daniel ‘One like unto the Son of
Man° had come with the clouds of heaven,.... and there was
given Him dominion and glory and a kingdom.’ This kingdom
succeeded in the prophet’s vision to four inhuman kingdoms,
correspondent to the four typical beasts ; it was the kingdom of
a prince, human indeed, and yet from heayen. In consequence
τὰ Observe the principle involved in St. Matt. vi. 1-8.
n Acts vii. 56; Rev. i. 13, xiv. 14.
© WIN II—ds υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου, LXX. Dan. vii. 13, sqq.
[ LECT.
The ‘Son of Man: ᾿
of this prophecy, the ‘Son of Man’ became a popular and
official title of the Messiah. In the Book of Enoch, which is
assigned with the highest probability by recent criticism to the
second century before our era?, this and kindred titles are
continually applied to Messiah. Our Lord in His prophecy over
Jerusalem predicted that at the last day ‘they shall see the Son
of Man coming in the clouds with power and great glory 4,
And when standing at the tribunal of Caiaphas He thus addressed
His judges: ‘I say unto you, hereafter shall ye see the Son of
Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming in the
clouds of heaven.’ In these passages there is absolutely no
room for doubting either His distinct reference to the vision in
Daniel, or the claim which the title Son of Man was intended to
assert. As habitually used by our Lord, it was a constant setting
forth of His Messianic dignity, in the face of the people of
Israel 8.
Why indeed He chose this one, out of the many titles of
Messiah, is a further question, a brief consideration of which lies
in the track of the subject before us.
It would not appear to be sufficient to reply that the title
Son of Man is the most unpresuming, the least glorious of the
titles of Messiah, and was adopted by our Lord as such. For if
such a title claimed, as it did claim, Messiahship, the precise
etymological force of the word could not neutralize its current
and recognised value in the estimation of the Jewish people.
The claim thus advanced was independent of any analysis of the
exact sense of the title which asserted it. The title derived its
popular force from the office with which it was associated. To
adopt the title, however humble might be its strict and intrinsic
meaning, was to claim the great office to which in the minds
of men it was indissolubly attached.
P Cf. Dillmann, Das Buch Enoch, 1853, Ρ- 157. Dillmann places the
book in the time of John Hyrcanus, Β.0. 130-109, Dr. Pusey would
assign to it a still earlier date. Cf. Daniel the Prophet, p. 390, note 2, and
391, note 3. ᾳ St. Matt. xxiv. 30. r Ibid. xxvi. 64.
® «Den Namen des vids τοῦ ἀνθρώπου gebraucht Jesus Selbst auf eine so
eigenthiimliche Weise von Sich, dass man nur annehmen kann, Er habe mit
jenem Namen, wie man auch seine Bedeutung genauer bestimmen mag, irgend
eine Bezichung auf die Messiasidee ausdriicken wollen.’ Baur, Das Christen-
thum, p. 37. Cf. also the same author’s Vorlesungen iiber Neutestamentliche
Theologie, p. 76, sqq. In St. Matt. x. 23, xiii. 37-41, the official force of the
title is obvious. That it was a simple periphrasis for the personal pronoun,
without any reference to the office or Person of the Speaker, is inconsistent
with Acts vii. 56, and St. Matt. xvi. 13.
1]
8 The ‘Son of Man.
As it had been addressed to the prophet Ezekielt, the title
Son of Man seemed to contrast the frail and shortlived life of
men with the boundless strength and the eternal years of the
Infinite Gop. And as applied to Himself by Jesus, it doubtless
expresses a real Humanity, a perfect and penetrating community
of nature and feeling with the lot of human kind. Thus, when
our Lord says that authority was given Him to execute judg-
ment because He is the Son of Man, it is plain that the point
of the reason lies, not in His being Messiah, but in His being
Human. He displays a genuine Humanity which could deem
nothing human strange, and could be touched with a feeling of
the infirmities of the race which He was to judge. But the
title Son of Man means more than this in its application to our
Lord. It does not merely assert His real incorporation with
our kind; it exalts Him indefinitely above us all as the repre-
sentative, the ideal, the pattern Man. He is, in a special sense,
the Son of Mankind, the genuine offspring of the race. His is
the Human Life which does justice to the idea of Humanity.
All human history tends to Him or radiates from Him. He is
the point in which humanity finds its unity; as St. lrenzus
says, He ‘recapitulates’ ity. He closes the earlier history of
our race; He inaugurates its future. Nothing local, transient,
individualizing, national, sectarian, dwarfs the proportions of
His world-embracing Character ; He rises above the parentage,
the blood, the narrow horizon which bounded, as it seemed,
His Human Life ; He is the Archetypal Man in Whose presence
distinctions of race, interyals of ages, types of civilization,
degrees of mental culture are as nothing. This sense of the
title seems to be implied in such passages as that in which
He contrasts ‘the foxes which have holes, and the birds of the
air which have nests,’ with ‘the Son of Man Who hath not
where to lay His Head%’ It is not the official Messiah, as
t ΘΝ ΤῚΣ ie. ‘mortal.’ (Cf Gesen. in voc. Ox.) It is so used eighty-
nine times in Ezekiel. Compare Num. xxiii. 19; Job xxv. 6, xxxv. 8. In
this sense it occurs frequently in the plural. In Ps. viii. 4, 5 and Ixxx. 17
it refers, at least ultimately, to our Lord.
u St. John v. 273; Heb. iv. 15.
x ¢Urbild der Menscheit.? Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, p. 130, sqq.
Mr. Keble draws out the remedial force of the title as ‘signifying that
Jesus was the very seed of the woman, the Second Adam promised to undo
what the first had done.’ Eucharistical Adoration, pp. 31-33.
y Adv. Her. IIT. 18. 1. ‘Longam hominum expositionem in Se Ipso
recapitulavit, in compendio nobis salutem preestans.’
z St. Matt. vill. 20; St. Luke ix. 58.
[ LECT.
Real force of our Lord’s question. 9
EE Se i ee
such ; but ‘the fairest among the children of men,’ the natural
Prince and Leader, the very prime and flower of human kind,
Whose lot is thus harder than that of the lower creatures, and
in Whose humiliation humanity itself is humbled below the
level of its natural dignity.
As the Son of Man then, our Lord is the Messiah ; He is| »
a true member of our human race, and He is moreover its |
Pattern and Representative ; since He fulfils and exhausts that
moral Ideal to which man’s highest and best aspirations have |
ever pointed onward. Of these senses of the term the first |
was the more popular and obvious ; the last would be discerned
as latent in it by the devout reflection of His servants. For the
disciples the term Son of Man implied first of all the Messiah-
ship of their Master, and next, though less prominently, His
true Humanity. When then our Lord enquires ‘Whom do
men say that I the Son of Man am?’ He is not merely asking
whether men admit what the title Son of Man itself imports,
that is to say, the truth of His Humanity or the truth of His
Messiahship. The point of His question is this :—what is He
besides being the Son of Man? As the Son of Man, He ts
Messiah ; but what is the Personality which sustains the
Messianic office? As the Son of Man, He ὁ truly Human ;
but what is the Higher Nature with which this emphatic claim
to Humanity is in tacit, but manifest contrast! What is He
in the seat and root of His Being? Is His Manhood a robe
which He has thrown around a Higher form of pre-existent
Life, or is it His all? Has He been in existence some thirty
years at most, or are the august proportions of His Life only
to be meted out by the days of eternity? ‘Whom say men
that I the Son of Man am?’
The disciples reply, that at that time, in the public opinion
of Galilee, our Lord was, at the least, a ν preternatural personage.
On this point there was, it would seem, a general consent. ‘The
ery of a petty local envy which had been raised at Nazareth,
‘Is not this the Carpenter’s Son?’ did not fairly represent the
matured or prevalent opinion of the people. ‘The people did
not suppose that Jesus was in truth merely one of themselves,
only endued with larger powers and with a finer religious
instinct. They thought that His Personality reached back
somehow into the past of their own wonderful history. They
took Him for a saint of ancient days, who had been re-invested
with a bodily form. He was the great expected miracle-working
Elijah ; or He was the disappointed prophet who had followed
1)
—_—
10 St. Peter's Confession.
His country to its grave at the Captivity; or He was the
recently-martyred preacher and ascetic John the Baptist; or
He was, at any rate, one of the order which for four
hundred years had been lost to Israel; He was one of the
Prophets.
Our Lord turns from these public misconceptions to the
judgment of that little Body which was already the nucleus
of His future Church : ‘But whom say ye that I am?’ St. Peter
replies, in the name of the other disciples4, ‘ Thou art the Christ,
the Son of the Living God.’ In marked contrast to the popular
hesitation which refused to recognise explicitly the justice of
the claim so plainly put forward by the assumption of the title
‘Son of Man,’ the Apostle confesses, ‘Thou art the Christ.’
But St. Peter advances a step beyond this confession, and
replies to the original question of our Lord, when he adds ‘The
Son of the Living God.’ In the first three Evangelists, as well
as in St. John, this solemn designation expresses something
more than a merely theocratic or ethical relationship to God >.
If St. Peter had meant that Christ was the Son of God solely
in virtue of His membership in the old Theocracy, or by reason
of His consummate moral glory’, the confession would have
a St. Chrysostom, in loc., calls St. Peter τὸ στόμα τῶν ἀποστόλων, 6
πανταχοῦ θερμός.
b See Lect. V. p. 246, 866:
ς The title of ‘sons’ is used in the Old Testament to express three
relations to God. (1) God has entered into the relation of Father to all
Israel (Deut. xxxii. 6; Isa. lxiii. 16), whence he entitles Israel ‘ My son,’
‘My firstborn’ (Exod. iv. 22, 23), when claiming the people from Pharaoh;
and Ephraim, ‘ My dear son, a pleasant child’ (Jer. xxxi. 20), as an earnest
of restoration to Divine favour. Thus the title is used as a motive to
obedience (Deut. xiv. 1); or in reproach for ingratitude (Ibid. xxxii. 5 ;
Isa. i. 2, xxx. I, Q; Jer. iii. 14); or especially of such as were God’s sons,
not in name only, but in truth (Ps. Ixxili. 15 ; Prov. xiv. 26; and perhaps
Isa. xliii. 6). (2) The title is applied once to judges in the Theocracy
(Ps. lxxxii. 6), ‘I have said, Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the
Most High.’ Here the title refers to the name Elohim, given to the judges
as representing God in the Theocracy, and as judging in His Name and by
His Authority. Accordingly to go to them for judgment is spoken of as
going to Elohim (Deut. xvii. 9). (3) The exact phrase ‘sons of God’ is, with
perhaps one exception (Gen. vi. 2), used of superhuman beings, who until
the Incarnation were more nearly like God than were any of the family
of men (Job i. 6, ii. 1, xxxviii. 7). The singular, ‘My Son,’ ‘The Son,’
is used only in prophecy of the Messiah (Ps. ii. 7, 12; and Acts xiii. 33;
Heb. i. 5, ν. 5), and in what is believed to have been a Divine manifestation,
very probably of God the Son (Dan. iii. 25). The line of David being the
line of the Messiah, culminating in the Messiah, as in David’s One perfect
Son, it was said in a lower sense of each member of that line, a. in its
LECT,
Modern interest 171 the subsect. II
involved nothing distinctive with respect to Jesus Christ,
nothing that was not in a measure true of every good Jew, and
that may not be truer far of every good Christian. If St. Peter
had intended only to repeat another and a practically equivalent
title of the Messiah, he would not have equalled the earlier
confession of a Nathanael4, or have surpassed the subsequent
admission of a Caiaphas*®. If we are to construe his language
thus, it is altogether impossible to conceive why ‘flesh and
blood’ could not have ‘revealed’ to him so obvious and trivial |
an inference from his previous knowledge, or why either the:
Apostle or his confession should have been solemnly designated
as the selected Rock on which the Redeemer would build His
imperishable Church.
Leaving however a fuller discussion of the interpretation of
this particular text, let us note that the question raised at
Cesarea Philippi is still the great question before the modern
world. Whom do men say now that Jesus, the Son of Man, is?
I. No serious and thoughtful man can treat such a subject
with indifference. I merely do you justice, my brethren, when
I defy you to murmur that we are entering upon a merely
abstract discussion, which has nothing in common with modern
human interests, congenial as it may have been to those whom
some writers have learnt to describe as the professional word-
warriors of the fourth and fifth centuries. You would not be
guilty of including the question of our Lord’s Divinity in your
catalogue of tolerabiles ineptice. There is that in the Form of
the Son of Man which prevails to command something more
than attention, even in an age so conspicuous for its boisterous
self-assertion as our own, and in intellectual atmospheres as far
as possible removed from the mind of His believing and adoring
Church. Never since He ascended to His Throne was He the
object of a more passionate adoration than now; never did He
encounter the glare of a hatred more intense and more defiant :
and between these, the poles of a contemplation incessantly di-!
rected upon His Person, there are shades and levels of thought and!
feeling, many and graduated, here detracting from the highest
full sense only of Messiah, ‘I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to
Me a Son’ (2 Sam. vii. 14; Heb. i. 5; Ps. Ixxxix. 27). The application
of the title to collective Israel in Hos. xi. 1, is connected by St. Matthew
(ii. 15) with its deeper force as used of Israel’s One true Heir and Repre-
sentative. Cf. Mill, Myth. Interp. p. 330. Compare too the mysterious |
intimations of Prov. xxx. 4, Ecclus. li. 10, of a Divine Sonship internal to |
the Being of God. 4$t. Johni. 49. e St. Matt. xxvi. 63. \
1]
12 Christ and modern culture.
expressions of faith, there shrinking from the most violent
extremities of blasphemy. A real indifference to the claims
of Jesus Christ upon the thoughts and hearts of men is scarcely
less condemned by some of the erroneous tendencies of our age
than by its characteristic excellences. An age which has a
genuine love of historical truth must needs fix its eye on that
august Personality which is to our European world, in point of
creative influence, what no other has been or can be. An age
which is distinguished by a keen esthetic appreciation, if not by
any very earnest practical culture of moral beauty, cannot but be
enthusiastic when it has once caught sight of that incomparable
Life which is recorded in the Gospels. But also, an anti-
dogmatic age is nervously anxious to attack dogma in its central
stronghold, and to force the Human Character and Work of the
Saviour, though at the cost of whatever violence of critical mani-
pulation, to detach themselves from the great belief with which
they are indissolubly associated in the mind of Christendom.
And an age, so impatient of the supernatural as our own, is
‘irritated to the highest possible point of disguised irritability by
\the spectacle of a Life which is supernatural throughout, which
‘positively bristles with the supernatural, which begins with
a supernatural birth, and ends in a supernatural ascent to
heaven, which is prolific of physical miracle, and of which the
moral wonders are more startling than the physical. Thus it is
‘that the interest of modern physical enquiries into the laws of
the Cosmos or into the origin of Man is immediately heightened
when these enquiries are suspected to have a bearing, however
indirect, upon Christ’s Sacred Person. Thus your study of the
mental sciences, aye, and of philology, ministers whether it will
or no to His praise or His dishonour, and your ethical specula-
tions cannot complete themselves without raising the whole
question of His Authority. And such is Christ’s place in
history, that a line of demarcation between its civil and its
ecclesiastical elements seems to be practically impossible ; your —
ecclesiastical historians are prone to range over the annals of
the world, while your professors of secular history habitually
deal with the central problems and interests of theology.
If Christ could have been ignored, He would have been
ignored in Protestant Germany, when Christian Faith had been
eaten out of the heart of that country by the older Rationalism.
Yet scarcely any German ‘thinker’ of note can be named who
Vas not projected what is termed a Christology. The Christ of
Kant is the Ideal of Moral Perfection, and as such, we are told,
[ LECT.
'
ἘΝ rca de = ho oer
tin tits ae swt ht ἐν τὰ
a ----...-.Ξ----τττ ΄ ΄ ΄ ΄-
Christ and recent philosophy. 13
er τ᾿ .- ς΄ σ“΄ὦ΄ἷἝὮἷὮὃἝ
he is to be carefully distinguished from the historical Jesus,
since of this Ideal alone, and in a transcendental sense, can the
statements of the orthodox creed be predicatedf. The Christ
of Jacobi is a Religious Ideal, and worship addressed to the
historical Jesus is denounced as sheer idolatry, unless beneath
the recorded manifestation the Ideal itself be discerned and
honoured g. According to Fichte, on the contrary, the real
interest of philosophy in Jesus is historical and not metaphysical ;
Jesus first possessed an insight into the absolute unity of the
being of man with that of God, and in revealing this insight He
communicated the highest knowledge which man can possess h,
Of the later Pantheistic philosophers, Schelling proclaims that
the Christian theology is hopelessly in error, when it teaches
that at a particular moment of time God became Incarnate,
since God is ‘external to’ all time, and the Incarnation of God
is an eternal fact. But Schelling contends that the man Christ
Jesus is the highest point or effort of this eternal incarnation,
and the beginning of its real manifestation to men : ‘none before
Him after such a manner has revealed to man the Infinite i)?
_ And the Christ of Hegel is not the actual Incarnation of God in
“Jesus of Nazareth, but the symbol of His incarnation in
- humanity at largej. Fundamentally differing, as do these con-
ceptions, in various ways, from the creed of the Church of
Christ, they nevertheless represent so many efforts of non-
f Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. Werke, Bd. x.
p- 73: esp. Ρ. 142.
& Schrift von den Gottl. Dingen, p. 62, 546.
h Anweisung zum seligen Leben Vorl. 6. Werke, Bd. v. p. 482.
i Vorlesungen iiber die methode des Akad. Studien. Werke, Bd. v.
Ρ. 298, sqq.
i Rel. Phil. Bd. ii. p. 263. This idea is developed by Strauss. See his
Glaubenslehre, ii. 209, 544. ; and Leben Jesu, Auf. 2, Bd. ii. p. 739, 566.
‘ Der Schliissel der ganzen Christologie ist, das als Subject der Pradikate,
welche die Kirche Christo beilegt, statt eines Individuums eine Idee, aber
_ eine reale, nicht Kantisch unwirkliche gesetzt wird.... Die Menscheit ist die
Vereinigung der beiden Naturen, der Menschgewordene Gott... . Durch
den Glauben an diesen Christus, namentlich an Seinen Tod und seine
Auferstehung wird der Mensch vor Gott gerecht, d. h., durch die Belebung
der Idee der Menscheit in sich,’ &c. Feuerbach has carried this forward into
pure materialism, and he openly scorns and denounces Christianity : Strauss
has more recently described Feuerbach as ‘the man who put the dot upon
the i which we had found, and he too insists upon the moral necessity of
rejecting Christianity ; Lebens und Characterbild Marklins, pp. 124, 125,
sqq., quoted by Luthardt, Apolog. p. 301. Other disciples of Hegel, such
as Marheinecke, Rosenkranz, and Géschel, have endeavoured to give to their
master’s teaching a more positive direction.
1)
14 Christ and the negative cretecism.
Christian thought to do such homage as is possible to its great
Object ; they are so many proofs of the interest which Jesus
Christ necessarily provokes in the modern world, even when it is
least disposed to own His true supremacy.
Nor is the direction which this interest has taken of late
years in the sphere of unbelieving theological criticism less
noteworthy in its bearings on our present subject. The earlier
Rationalism concerned itself chiefly with the Apostolical age.
It was occupied with a perpetual analysis and recombination
of the various influences which were supposed to have created
the Catholic Church and the orthodox creed. St. Paul was
the most prominent person in the long series of hypotheses
by which Rationalism professed to account for the existence
of Catholic Christianity. St.Paul was said to be the ‘author’
of that idea of a universal religion which was deemed to be
the most fundamental and creative element in the Christian
creed: St. Paul’s was the vivid imagination which had thrown
around the life and death of the Prophet of Nazareth a halo
of superhuman glory, and had fired an obscure Jewish sect
with the ambition of founding a spiritual empire able to
control and embrace the world. St. Paul, in short, was held
to be the real creator of Christianity; and our Lord was
thrown into the background, whether from a surviving instinct
of awe, or on the ground of His being relatively insignificant.
This studied silence of active critical speculation with respect
to Jesus Christ, might indeed have been the instinct of reve-:
rence, but it was at least susceptible of a widely different
interpretation.
In our day this equivocal reserve is no longer possible.
The passion for reality, for fact, which is so characteristic
of the thought of recent years, has carried critical enquiry
backwards from the consciousness of the Apostle to that on
which it reposed. The interest of modern criticism centres
in Him Who is ever most prominently and uninterruptedly
present to the eye of faith. The popular controversies around
us tend more and more to merge in the one great question
respecting our Lord’s Person: that question, it is felt, is
bound up with the very existence of Christianity. And a
discussion respecting Christ’s Person obliges us to consider
the mode of His historical manifestation; so that His Life
was probably never studied before by those who practically
or avowedly reject Him so eagerly as it is at this moment.
For Strauss He may be no more than a leading illustration
[ LECT.
Answers to Christ’s question, (1) the Ebtonttec, 15
of the applicability of the Hegelian philosophy to purposes
of historical analysis; for Schenkel He may be a sacred im-
personation of the anti-hierarchical and democratic temper,
which aims at revolutionizing Germany. Ewald may see in
Him the altogether human source of the highest spiritual life
of humanity ; and Renan, the semi-fabulous and somewhat
immoral hero of an oriental story, fashioned to the taste of
a modern Parisian public. And what if you yourselves are!
even now eagerly reading an anonymous writer, of far nobler
aim and finer moral insight than these, who has endeavoured,
by a brilliant analysis of one side of Christ’s moral action, to
represent Him as embodying and originating all that is best
and most hopeful in the spirit of modern philanthropy, but
who seems not indisposed to substitute for the creed of His
Church, only the impatient proclamation of His Roman judge.
Aye, though you salute your Saviour in Pilate’s words, Behold
the Man! at least you cannot ignore Him; you cannot resist
the moral and intellectual forces which converge in our day
with an ever-increasing intensity upon His Sacred Person ;
you cannot turn a deaf ear to the question which He asks
of His followers in each generation, and which He never asked
more solemnly than now: ‘Whom say men that I the Son
of Man amk?’
II. Now all serious Theists, who believe that God is a
Personal Being essentially distinct from the work of His hands,
must make one of three answers, whether in terms or in
substance, to the question of the text.
1. The Ebionite of old, and the Socinian now, assert that
Jesus Christ is merely man, whether (as Faustus Socinus himself
teaches) supernaturally born of a Virgin 1 or (as modern
Rationalists generally maintain) in all respects subject to ordi-
nary natural laws™, although of such remarkable moral
eminence, that He may, in the enthusiastic language of ethical
admiration, be said to be Divine. And when Sabellianism
would escape from the manifold self-contradictions of Patri-
passianism ®, it too becomes no less Humanitarian in its doctrine
as to the Person of our Lord, than Ebionitism itself. The
Monarchianism of Praxeas or of Noetus which denied the
k On recent ‘Lives’ of our Lord, see Appendix, Note A.
1 Chr. Rel. Brevissima Inst. i. 654: ‘De Christi essentia ita statue : Tilum
esse hominem in virginis utero, et sic sine viri ope Divini Spirits vi
conceptum.’
Ἢ Weegscheider, Instit. § 120, 546. n Cf, Tertull. adv. Prax. 6. 2.
I ;
/
τό (2) The Arian Answer.
distinct Personality of Christ® while proclaiming His Divinity
in the highest terms, was practically coincident in its popular
result with the coarse assertions of Theodotus and Artemon Ρ.
And in modern days, the phenomenon of practical Humani-
tarianism, disguised but not proscribed by very vehement pro-
testations apparently condemning it, is reproduced in the case of
such well-known writers as Schleiermacher or Ewald. They
use language at times which seems to do the utmost justice to
the truth of Christ’s Divinity: they recognise in Him the perfect
Revelation of God, the true Head and Lord of human kind; but
they deny the existence of an immanent Trinity in the Godhead ;
they recognise in God no pre-existent Personal Form as the
basis of His Self-Manifestation to man; they are really Monar-
chianists in the sense of Praxeas ; and their keen appreciation. of
the ethical glory of Christ’s Person cannot save them from con-
sequences with which it is ultimately inconsistent, but which are
on other grounds logically too inevitable to be permanently
eludeda. A Christ who is ‘the perfect Revelation of God,’ yet
who ‘is not personally God,’ does not really differ from the
altogether human Christ of Socinus ; and the assertion of the
Personal Godhead of Christ can only escape from the profane
absurdities of Patripassianism, when it presupposes the eternal
and necessary existence in God of a Threefold Personality. _
2. The Arian maintains that our Lord Jesus Christ existed
before His Incarnation, that by Him, as by an instrument, the
Supreme God made the worlds, and that, as being the most
ancient and the highest of created beings, He is to be wor-
shipped ; that, however, Christ had a beginning of existence
(ἀρχὴν ὑπάρξεως), that there was a time when He did not exist
(jv ὅτε οὐκ jv); that He has His subsistence from what once
was not (ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἔχει τὴν ὑπόστασιν r), and cannot therefore
ο ‘Hee perversitas, que se existimat meram veritatem possidere, dum
unicum Deum non alits putat credendum quam si ipsum eundemque et
Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum dicat. Quasi non sic quoque unus
sit omnia, dum ex uno omnia, per substantie scilicet unitatem, et nihilomints
custodiatur οἰκονομίας sacramentum, que unitatem in trinitatem disponit, tres
dirigens, Patrem et Filium, et Spiritum Sanctum.’ (Ibid.)
P Euseb. Hist. Eccl. v. 28: ψιλὸν ἄνθρωπον γενέσθαι τὸν Swrijpa. Tert. de
Prescr. Her. c. 53. App. ; Theodoret, Her. Fab. lib. ii. init.
a Cf. Dorner, Pers. Christi, Band ii. p. 153. Schleiermacher, although
agreeing with Schelling and Hegel in denying an immanent Trinity in the
Godhead, did not (Dorner earnestly pleads) agree in the Pantheistic basis of
that denial. P. C. ii. p. 1212. Compare Ewald, Geschichte Christus, p. 447,
quoted by Dorner.
τ Socrates, i. 5.
[ LECT.
(3) Auswer of the Catholic Church. 17
be called God in the sense in which that term is applied by
Theists to the Supreme Beings,
3. In contrast with these two leading forms of heresy stands
the faith, from the first and at this hour, of the whole Catholic
Church of Christ: ‘I believe in One Lord Jesus Christ, the
Only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of His Father before all
worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God,
Begotten not made, Being or ONE suBSTANCE wiTH the Father ;
ΒΥ Whom all things were made ; Who for us men and for our
salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the
- Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made Man.’
Practically indeed these three answers may be still further
reduced to two, the first and the third ; for Arianism, no less than
Sabellianism, is really a form of the Humanitarian or naturalist
reply to the question. Arianism does indeed admit the exist-
ence of a pre-existent being who became incarnate in Jesus, but it
parts company with the Catholic belief, by asserting that this
being is himself a creature, and not of the very Substance of the
Supreme God. Thus Arianism is weighted with the intellectual
difficulties of a purely supernatural Christology, while yet it
forfeits all hold upon the Great Truth which to a Catholic
believer sustains and justifies the remainder of his creed. The
real question at issue is not merely whether Christ is only a
man; it is whether or not He is only a created being. When
the question is thus stated, Arianism must really take its place
side by side with the most naked Deism ; while at the same time
it suggests, by its incarnation of a created Logos, the most dif-
ficult among the problems which meet a believer in the Hypo-
_ Static Union of our Lord’s Two Natures. In order to escape
from this position, it virtually teaches the existence of two Gods,
each of whom is an object of worship, one of whom has been
created by the Other; One of whom might, if He willed, anni-
hilate the other‘, Thus in Arianism reason and faith are equally
S Cf. further Waterland, Defence of Some Queries, Works (ed. Van-
Mildert), vol. i. pp. 402, 403.
ὁ Waterland, Works, vol. i. p. 78, note f. Bp. Van-Mildert quotes from
Mr. Charles Butler’s Historical Account of Confessions of Faith, chap. x.
_ Sec 2, ἃ remarkable report of Dr. Clarke’s conference with Dr. Hawarden
in the presence of Queen Caroline. After Dr. Clarke had stated his system
᾿ δύ great length and in very guarded terms, Dr. Hawarden asked his permission
to put one simple question, and Dr. Clarke assented. ‘Then,’ said Dr. Ha-
warden, ‘I ask, Can God the Father annihilate the Son and the Holy Ghost?
Answer me Yes or No.’ Dr. Clarke continued for some time in deep
thought, and then said, ‘It was a question which he had never considered.’
I] ο
18 The three Answers are practically two.
τὰ. το δ δ δ a
disappointed: the largest demands are made upon faith, yet the
Arian Christ after all is but ἃ. fellow-creature ; and reason is
encouraged to assail the mysteries of the Catholic creed in
behalf of a theory which admits of being reduced to an irrational
absurdity. Arianism therefore is really at most a resting-
point for minds which are sinking from the Catholic creed
downwards to pure Humanitarianism ; or which are feeling their
way upwards from the depths of Ebionitism, or Socinianism,
towards the Church. This intermediate, transient, and essen-
tially unsubstantial character of the Arian position was indeed
made plain, in theory, by the vigorous analysis to which the
heresy was subjected on its first appearance by St. Athanasius,
and again in the last century, when, at its endeavour to make a
home for itself in the Church of England, in the person of
Dr. Samuel Clarke, it was crushed out, under God, mainly by
the genius and energy of the great Waterland. And history
has verified the anticipations of argument. Arianism at this
day has a very shadowy, if any real, existence ; and the Church
of Christ, holding in her hands the Creed of Nica, stands
face to face with sheer Humanitarianism, more or less disguised,
according to circumstances, by the thin varnish of an admiration
yielded to our Lord on esthetic or ethical grounds. |
IIL At the risk of partial repetition, but for the sake of |
clearness, let us here pause to make two observations respecting
that complete assertion of the Divinity of our Lord for which
His Church is responsible at the bar of human opinion.
τ. The Catholic doctrine, then, of Christ’s Divinity in no
degree interferes with or overshadows the complemental truth —
of His perfect Manhood. It is perhaps natural that a greater
emphasis should be laid upon the higher truth which could
be apprehended only by faith than on the lower one which, |
during the years of our Lord's earthly Life, was patent ἰὸς
the senses of men. And Holy Scripture might antecedently —
be supposed to take for granted the reality of Christ’s Manhood, —
on the ground of there being no adequate occasion for full, |
precise, and reiterated assertions of so obvious a fact. But
nothing is more remarkable in Scripture than its provision for |
the moral and intellectual needs of ages far removed from
those which are traversed by the books included in the Sacred
On the ‘precarious’ existence of God the Son, according to the Arian
hypothesis, see Waterland’s Farther Vindication of Christ’s Divinity, ch, iii,
sect. 10. u See Lect. VII.
Reality of our Lord’s H: LEAS 19
Canon. In the present instance, by a series of incidental
although most significant statements, the Gospels guard us
with nothing less than an exhaustive precaution against the
fictions of a Docetic or of an Apollinarian Christ. We are
told that the Eternal Word σὰρξ ἐγένετο *, that He took human
nature upon Him in its reality and completenessy. The Gospel
narrative, after the pattern of His own words in the text,
exhibits Jesus as the Son of Man, while yet it draws us on
by an irresistible attraction to contemplate that Higher Nature
which was the seat of His eternal Personality. The superhuman
character of some most important details of the Gospel history
does not disturb the broad scope of that history as being
the record of a Human Life, with Its physical and mental
affinities to our own daily experience.
The great Subject of the Gospel narratives has a true human
Body. He is conceived in the womb of a human Mother”, He
is by her brought forth into the world*; He is fed at her
breast during infancy». As an Infant, He is made to undergo
the painful rite of circumcision’. He is a Babe in swaddling-
clothes lying in a manger4. He is nursed in the arms of
the aged Simeon’. His bodily growth is traced up to His
attaining the age of twelvef, and from that point to manhood §.
His presence at the marriage-feast in Cana), at the great
entertainment in the house of Levii, and at the table of Simon
the Phariseek; the supper which He shared at Bethany with
the friend whom He had raised from the grave}, the Paschal
festival which He desired so earnestly to eat before He sutf-
x St. John i. 14. Cf. Meyer in loc. for a refutation of Zeller’s attempt
to limit σὰρξ in this passage to the bodily organism, as exclusive of the
anima rationalis.
Υ St. John viii. 40 ; 1 Tim. ii. 5.
Z συλλήψη ἐν γαστρὶ, St. Luke 1, 31. πρὸ τοῦ συλληφθῆναι αὐτὸν ἐν
τῇ κοιλίᾳ, Ibid. ii. 21. εὐρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ Πνεύματος ᾿Αγίου,
St. Matt. i. 18. τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ Πνεύματός ἐστιν ᾿Αγίου, Ibid.
i. 20; Isa. vii. 14.
a St. Matt. i. 25; St. Luke ii. 7, 11; Gal. iv. 4: ἐξαπέστειλεν 6 Θεὸς
τὸν Tidy αὑτοῦ, γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικόξ.
b St. Luke xi. 27: μάστοι ods ἐθήλασαΞ. ¢ Tbid. ii. 21.
a-Thid. ii. 12: Βρέφος ἐσπαργανωμένον, κείμενον ἐν τῇ φάτνῃ.
e Ibid. ii. 28: καὶ αὐτὸς ἐδέξατο αὐτὸ εἰς τὰς ἀγκάλας αὑτοῦ.
f Thid. ii. 40: τὸ δὲ παιδίον ηὔξανε.
& Ibid. ii. 52 : Ἰησοῦς προέκοπτε ... ἡλικίᾳ.
b St. John ii. 2.
i St. Luke. v. 29: δοχὴν μεγάλην
k St. Luke vii. 36. 1$t. John xii. 2.
4 C2
20 Witness of Scripture to Οὐγίδές Ltuman Body.
fered™, the bread and fish of which He partook before the
eyes of His disciples in the early dawn on the shore of the
Lake of Galilee, even after His Resurrection ®,—are witnesses
that He came, like one of ourselves, ‘eating and drinking®.’
When He is recorded to have taken no food during the forty
days of the Temptation, this implies the contrast presented
by His ordinary habit». Indeed, He seemed to the men of
His day much more dependent on the physical supports of
life than the great ascetic who had preceded Him. He
knew, by experience, what are the pangs of hunger, after the
forty days’ fast in the wilderness", and in a lesser degree,
as may be supposed, when walking into Jerusalem on the
Monday before His Passion’. The profound spiritual sense
of His redemptive cry, ‘I thirst,’ uttered while He was hanging
on the Cross, is not obscured, when its primary literal meaning,
that while dying He actually endured that wellnigh sharpest
form of bodily suffering, is explicitly recognisedt. His deep
sleep on the Sea of Galilee in a little bark which the waves
threatened momentarily to engulf", and His sitting down at
the well of Jacob, through great exhaustion produced by a
long journey on foot from Judea, proved that He was subject
at times to the depression of extreme fatigue. And, not to
dwell at length upon those particular references to the several
parts of His bodily frame which occur in Holy Scripturey,
it is obvious to note that the evangelical account of His
physical Sufferings, of His Death% of His Burial®, and of
the Wounds in His Hands and Feet and Side after His Resur-
τὰ §t. Luke xxii. 8, 15. St. John xxi. 12, 13.
ο St. Luke vii. 34 : ἐλήλυθεν 6 Tids τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐσθίων καὶ πίνων.
P Tbid. iv. 2: οὐκ ἔφαγεν οὐδὲν ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις.
ᾳ Ibid. vii. 34: ἰδοὺ, ἄνθρωπος φάγος καὶ οἰνοπότη».
τ St. Matt. iv. 2: ὕστερον ἐπείνασε.
8 Ibid. xxi. 18: ἐπανάγων εἰς τὴν πόλιν, ἐπείνασε.
ὑ St. John xix. 28: διψῶ,
u St. Matt. viii. 24: αὐτὸς δὲ ἐκάθευδε.
x St. John iv. 6: 6 οὖν *Inoods κεκοπιακὼς ἐκ τῆς ὁδοιπορίας ἐκαθέζετο οὕτως
ἐπὶ τῇ πηγῇ.
Y τὴν κεφαλὴν, St. Luke vii. 46; St. Matt. xxvii. 29, 30; St. John xix.
30; τοὺς πόδας, St. Luke vii. 38; τὰς χεῖρας, St. Luke xxiv. 40 ; τῷ δακ-
τύλῳ, St. John viii. 6; τὰ σκέλη, St. John xix. 33; τὰ γόνατα, St. Luke
XXil. 41 ; τὴν πλευρὰν, St. John xix. 34; τὸ σῶμα, St. Luke xxii. 19, &e.
7 St. Luke xxii. 44, &c, xxiii.; St. Matt. xxvi., xxvii.; St. Mark xiv. 32,
seq., XV.
ἃ St. John xix. 39, 40: ἔλαβον οὖν τὸ σῶμα τοῦ Ἰησοῦ καὶ ἔδησαν αὐτὸ
ὀθονίοις μετὰ τῶν ἀρωμάτων : cf. ver. 42.
[ LECT. |
Witness of Scripture to Christ's Human Soul. 21
rection, are so many emphatic attestations to the fact of
His true and full participation in the material side of our
common nature.
Equally explicit and vivid is the witness which Scripture
affords to the true Human Soul of our Blessed Lord¢. Its
general movements are not less spontaneous, nor do Its affections
flow less freely, because no sinful impulse finds a place in It, and
each pulse of Its moral and mental Life is in conscious harmony
with, and subjection to, an all-holy Will. Jesus rejoices in spirit
on hearing of the spread of the kingdom of heaven among the
simple and the poor?: He beholds the young ruler, and forth-
with loves hime. He loves Martha and her sister and Lazarus
with a common, yet, as seems to be implied, with a discriminating
affection, His Eye on one occasion betrays a sudden movement
of deliberate anger at the hardness of heart which could steel
itself against truth by maintaining a dogged silences. The
scattered and fainting multitude melts Him to compassion :
He sheds tears of sorrow at the grave of Lazarus}, and at the
sight of the city which has rejected His Love’. In contem-
plating His approaching Passion! and the ingratitude of the
traitor-Apostle ™, His Soul is shaken by a vehement agitation
which He does not conceal from His disciples. In the garden
of Gethsemane He wills to enter into an agony of amazement
and dejection. His mental sufferings are so keen and piercing
that His tender frame gives way beneath the trial, and He sheds
b St. John xx. 27; St. Luke xxiv. 39: ἴδετε τὰς χεῖράς μου καὶ τοὺς
πόδας μου, ὅτι αὐτὸς ἐγώ εἰμι’ ψηλαφήσατέ με καὶ Were’ ὅτι πνεῦμα σάρκα
καὶ ὀστέα οὖις ἔχει καθὼς ἐμὲ θεωρεῖτε ἔχοντα.
© 1 St. Pet. iii. 18: θανατωθεὶς μὲν σαρκὶ, ζωοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι ἐν ᾧ
καὶ τοῖς ἐν φυλακῇ πνεύμασιν πορευθεὶς ἐκήρυξεν. The τῷ before πνεύματι in
the Textus Receptus being only an insertion by a copyist, πνεῦμα here means
our Lord’s Human Soul. No other passage in the New Testament places It
in more vivid contrast with His Body.
ἃ St. Luke x. 21: ἢγαλλιάσατο τῷ πνεύματι.
ὁ St. Mark x. 21: 6 δὲ Ἰησοῦς ἐμβλέψας αὐτῷ ἢγάπησεν αὐτόν.
f St. John xi. 5.
g St. Mark iii. 5: περιβλεψάμενος αὐτοὺς μετ᾽ ὀργῆς, συλλυπούμενος ἐπὶ τῇ
πωρώσει τῆς καρδίας αὐτῶν.
h St, Matt. ix. 36: ἐσπλαγχνίσθη περὶ αὐτῶν.
i St. John. xi. 33-35: Ἰησοῦς οὖν ὡς εἶδεν αὐτὴν κλαίουσαν καὶ τοὺς συνελθόντας
αὐτῇ ᾿Ιουδαίους κλαίοντας, ἐνεβριμήσατο τῷ πνεύματι, καὶ ἐτάραξεν ἑαυτόν. .
᾿Ἐδάκρυσεν 6 ᾿Ιησοῦς.
k St, Luke xix. 41: Ἰδὼν τὴν πόλιν, ἔκλαυσεν ἐπ᾽ αὐτῇ.
1 St. John xii. 27: νῦν ἢ ψυχή μου τετάρακται.
/
τὰ [bid. xiii. 21: 6 Ἰησοῦς ἐταράχθη τῷ πνεύματι καὶ ἐμαρτύρησε.
1]
20 Realty of Christ's Manhood not
His Blood before they nail Him to the Cross. His Human
Will consciously submits itself to a Higher Will°, and He learns
obedience by the discipline of painp. He carries His dependence
still further, He is habitually subject to His parents 4; He recog-
nises the fiscal regulations of a pagan statet; He places Himself
in the hands of His enemiess; He is crucified through weak-
ness‘. If an Apostle teaches that all the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge are hidden in Him», an Evangelist records that
He increases in wisdom as He increases in staturex, Conform-
ably with these representations, we find Him as Man expressing
creaturely dependence upon God by prayer. He rises up a
great while before day at Capernaum, and departs into a solitary
place, that He may pass the hours in uninterrupted devotion Y.
He offers to Heaven strong crying with tears in Gethsemane? ;
He intercedes majestically for His whole redeemed Church in
the Paschal supper-room@; He asks pardon for His Jewish and
Gentile murderers at the very moment of His Crucifixion ὃ ; tite
resigns His departing Spirit into His Father’s Handsc.
Thus, as one Apostle teaches, He took a Body of Flesh 4, and
His whole Humanity both of Soul and Body shared in the sin-
less infirmities which belong to our common naturee®, To deny
this fundamental truth, ‘that Jesus Christ is come in the Flesh,’
"St. Mark xiv. 33: ἤρξατο ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν, καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς,
“ Περίλυπός ἐστιν ἣ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου St. Luke Xxli. 44: γενόμενος ἐν
ἀγωνίᾳ ἐκτενέστερον προσηύχετο, ἐγένετο δὲ ὃ ἱδρῶς αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ θρόμβοι αἵ-
ματος καταβαίνοντες ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν. Cf. Heb. v. a
° St. Luke xxii. 42: μὴ τὸ θέλημά μου, ἀλλὰ τὸ σὸν γενέσθω.
P Heb. v. 8: ἔμαθεν ἀφ᾽ ὧν ἔπαθε τὴν ὑπακοήν.
4 δύ, Luke ii. 51: ἦν ὑποτασσόμενος αὐτοῖς. ᾿
τ St. Matt. xxii. 21, For our Lord’s payment of the Temple tribute, ef.
Thid. xvii. 25, 27.
5 Ibid. xvii. 223 St. John x. 18: οὐδεὶς αἴρει αὐτὴν [sc. τὴν ψυχήν μου]
ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλ᾽ ἐγὼ τίθημι αὐτὴν ἀπ᾽ ἐμαυτοῦ.
δ 2 Cor. xiii. 4: ἐσταυρώθη ἐξ ἀσθενείας.
“Col. ii. 3: ἐν ᾧ εἰσι πάντες of θησαυροὶ τῆς σοφίας καὶ τῆς γνώσεως ἀπόκρυφοι.
* St. Luke ii. 40 : ἐκραταιοῦτο πνεύματι. Ver. 52. προέκοπτε σοφίᾳ. See
Lect. VIII. Υ St. Mark i. 35.
7 Heb. v. 7: ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ, δεήσεις τε καὶ ixeTnpias ....
μετὰ κραυγῆς ἰσχυρᾶς καὶ δακρύων προσενέγκας.
8 δύ, John xvii. 1: ἐπῆρε τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτοῦ εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν, καὶ εἶπε.
> St. Luke xxiii. 34: πάτερ, ἄφες αὐτοῖς" ob γὰρ οἴδασι τί ποιοῦσι. That
this prayer referred to the J ews, as well as the Roman soldiers, is clear from
Acts iii. 17, ὁ St. Luke xxiii. 46.
ἃ Col. i. 22 : σώματι τῇς σαρκός.
° Heb. ii. 11: ὅ τε γὰρ ἁγιάζων καὶ οἱ ἁγιαζόμενοι ἐξ évds πάντες. Ver. ΤᾺ:
μετέσχε σαρκὸς καὶ αἵματος. Ver, 17: ἄφειλε κατὰ πάντα τοῖς ἀδελφοῖς ὁμοιω-
θῆναι. Ibid. iv. 15: πεπειρασμένον δὲ κατὰ πάντα κάθ᾽ ὁμοιότητα.
[ LECT.
eee νσινσ'σἝῆἃἭἋ' τ ο.------ς-ς-ςς-ς-ς-ς-ςς-ςςς-ς
forfeited by Its prerogative graces. 23
is, in the judgment of another Apostle, the mark of the Deceiver,
of the Antichrist, Nor do the prerogatives of our Lord’s
Manhood destroy Its perfection and reality, although they do
undoubtedly invest It with a robe of mystery, which Faith must
acknowledge, but which she cannot hope to penetrate. Christ’s
Manhood is not unreal because It is impersonal ; because in Him
the place of any created individuality at the root of thought and
feeling and will is supplied by the Person of the Eternal Word,
Who has wrapped around His Being a created Nature through
which, in its unmutilated perfection, He acts upon humankind .
Christ's Manhood is not unreal, because It is sinless ; because
the entail of any taint of transmitted sin is in Him cut off by a
supernatural birth of a Virgin Mother ; and because His whole
life of thought, feeling, will, and action is in unfaltering harmony
with the law of absolute Truth». Nor is the reality of His
Manhood impaired by any exceptional beauty whether of out-
ward form or of mental endowment, such as might become One
‘fairer than the children of meni,’ and taking precedence of
them in all things*; since in Him our nature does but resume
its true and typical excellence as the crowning glory of the
visible creation of God 1.
ἔα St. John iv. 2: πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ ὁμολογεῖ Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυ-
ϑότα, ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐστι. 2 St. John 7: πολλοὶ πλάνοι εἰσῆλθον εἰς τὸν κόσμον,
οἱ μὴ ὁμολογοῦντες Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐρχόμενον ἐν σαρκί" οὗτος ἐστιν ὃ πλάνος
καὶ ὃ ᾿Αντίχριστοϑβ.
5 The ἀνυποστασία of our Lord’s Humanity is a result of the Hypostatic
Union. Τὸ deny it is to assert that there are Two Persons in Christ, or else
it is to deny that He is more than Man. Compare Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 52. 3,
who appeals against Nestorius to Heb. ii. 16, οὐ yap δήπου ἀγγέλων ἐπιλαμ-
Bdverat, ἀλλὰ σπέρματος ᾿Αβραὰμ ἐπιλαμβάνεται. At His Incarnation the Eter-
nal Word took on Him Human Nature, not a Human Personality. Luther
appears to have denied the Impersonality of our Lord’s Manhood. But see
Dorner, Person Christi, Bd. ii. p. 540.
h The Sinlessness of our Lord’s Manhood is implied in St. Luke 1, 35.
Thus He is dv ὁ Πατὴρ ἡγίασε καὶ ἀπέστειλεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον, St. John x. 36 ;
and He could challenge His enemies to convict Him of sin, St. John viii. 46.
In St. Mark x. 18, St Luke xviii. 19, He is not denying that He is good;
but He insists that none should call Him so who did not believe Him to be
God. St. Paul describes Him as τὸν μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν, 2 Cor. v. 213; and
Christ is expressly said to be χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας, Heb. iv. 153 ὅσιος, ἄκακος,
ἀμίαντος, κεχωρισμένος ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτωλῶν, Heb. vil. 26; ἀμνὸς ἄμωμος καὶ
ἄσπιλος, τ St. Ροῦ. i. το ; 6 ἅγιος καὶ δίκαιος, Acts iii. 14. Still more em-
phatically we are told that ἁμαρτία ἐν αὐτῷ οὐκ ἔστι, τ St. John iii. 5 ; while
the same truth is indirectly taught, when St. Paul speaks of our Lord as sent
ἐν ὁμοιώματι σαρκὸς ἁμαρτίας, Rom. viil. 3. Mr. F. W. Newman does justice
to the significance of a Sinless Manhood, although, unhappily, he disbelieves
in It ; Phases of Faith, p. 141, sqq. i Ps. xlv. 3.
k Col. i, 18: ἐν πᾶσι πρωτεύων. 1 Psalm viii. 6-8. Cp. Heb. ii. 6--1ο.
1]
24 Wretness of the Church to Christ's true Manhood.
This reality and perfection of our Lord’s Manhood has been
not less jealously maintained by the Church than it is clearly
asserted in the pages of Scripture. From the first the Church
has taught that Jesus Christ is ‘Perfect Man, of a reasonable
Soul and Human Flesh subsisting ™.’ It is sometimes hinted
that believers in our Saviour’s Godhead must necessarily enter-
tain some prejudice against those passages of Scripture which
expressly assert the truth of His Manhood. It is presumed that
such passages must be regarded by them as so many difficulties to
be surmounted or evaded by a theory which is supposed to be
conscious of their hostility to itself Whereas, in truth, to a
Catholic instinct, each declaration of Scripture, whatever be its
apparent bearing, is welcome as being an unveiling of the Mind
of God, and therefore as certainly reconcileable with other sides
of truth, whether or no the method of such reconciliation be
immediately obvious. As a matter of fact, our Lord’s Humanity
has been insisted upon by the great Church teachers of antiquity
not less earnestly than His Godhead. They habitually argue
that it belonged to His essential Truth to be in reality what He
seemed to be. He seemed to be human; therefore He was
Human® Yet His Manhood, so they proceed to maintain,
would have been fictitious, if any one faculty or element of
human nature had been wanting to It. Therefore His Reason-
able Soul was as essential as His Bodily Frame®. Without a
Reasonable Soul His Humanity would have been but an animal
existence P ; and the intellectual side of man’s nature would have
been unredeemed4. Nor did the Church in her collective ca-
pacity ever so insist on Christ’s Godhead as to lose sight of the
m Athanasian Creed.
"St. Ireneeus, Adv. Her. v. 1. 2: εἰ δὲ μὴ dv ἄνθρωπος ἐφαίνετο ἄνθρωπος,
οὔτε ὃ ἣν ἐπ᾽ ἀληθείας, ἔμεινε πνεῦμα Θεοῦ, ἐπεὶ ἀόρατον τὸ πνεῦμα, οὔτε ἀλή-
θειά τις ἦν ἐν αὐτῷ, οὐ γὰρ ἦν ἐκεῖνα ἅπερ ἐφαίνετο. Tert. De Carne Christi,
cap. 5: ‘Si caro cum passionibus ficta, et spiritus ergo cum virtutibus falsus,
Quid dimidias mendacio Christum? Totus Veritas est. Maluit crede [non]
nasci quam ex aliqua parte mentiri, et quidem in Semet ipsum, ut carnem
gestaret sine ossibus duram, sine musculis solidam, sine sanguine cruentam,
sine tunica vestitam, sine fame esurientem, sine dentibus edentem, sine
lingua loquentem, ut phantasma auribus fuit sermo ejus per imaginem vocis.’
St. Aug. De Div. Qu. 83. qu. 14: ‘Si phantasma fuit corpus Christi, fefellit
Christus, et si fefellit, Veritas non est. Est autem Veritas Christus. Non
ergo phantasma fuit Corpus Ejus.’? Docetism struck at the very basis of
truth, by sanctioning Pyrrhonism, St. Iren. Adv. Her. iv. 33.
° St. Aug. Ep. 187, ad Dardan. ἢ. 4: ‘Non est Homo Perfectus, si vel
anima carni, vel anime ipsi mens humana defuerit.? Confess. vii. c. 19.
P St. Aug. De Div. Qu. 83, qu. 80. ἢ. 1.
ᾳ St. Cyr. Alex. De Inc. ὁ, 15,
[ LECT.
L[mportance of this truth to the life of the Soul. 25
truth of His Perfect Manhood. Whether by the silent force of
the belief of her children, or by her representative writers on
behalf of the faith, or by the formal decisions of her councils,
she has ever resisted the disposition to sacrifice the confession
of Christ’s created nature to that of His uncreated Godhead’.
She kept at bay intellectual temptations and impulses which
might have easily overmastered the mind of a merely human
society. When Ebionites were abroad, she maintained against
the Docetz that our Saviour’s body was not fictitious or appari-
tional. When the mutterings of that Humanitarian movement
which culminated in the great scandal of Paulus of Samosata
were distinctly audible, she asserted the truth of our Lord’s
Human Soul against Beryllus of Bostras. When Arianism had
not as yet ceased to be formidable, she was not tempted by
Apollinaris to admit that the Logos in Christ took the place of
the rational element in man. While Nestorianism was still
vigorous, she condemned the Monophysite formula which prac-
tically made Christ an unincarnate God: nor did she rest until
the Monothelite echo of the more signal error had been silenced
by her assertion of the reality of His Human Will.
Nor is the Manhood of our Saviour prized by the Church
only as a revealed dogma intellectually essential to the formal
integrity of the Creed. Every believing Christian knows that
it touches the very heart of his inner life. What becomes of
the one Mediator between God and man, if the Manhood
whereby He places Himself in contact with us men is but
unreal and fictitious? What becomes of His Human Example,
of His genuine Sympathy, of His agonizing and world-
redeeming Death, of His plenary representation of our race
in heaven, of the recreative virtue of His Sacraments, of the
‘touch of nature’ which makes Him, most holy as He is, in
very deed kin with us? Allis forthwith uncertain, evanescent,
unreal. If Christ be not truly Man, the chasm which parted
earth and heaven has not been bridged over. God, as before
the Incarnation, is still awful, remote, inaccessible. Tertullian’s
τ It may suffice to quote the language of the Council of Chalcedon, a.p.
451: τέλειον τὸν αὐτὸν ἐν Θεότητι καὶ τέλειον τὸν αὐτὸν ἐν ἀνθρωπότητι, Θεὸν
ἀληθῶς καὶ ἄνθρωπον ἀληθῶς, τὸν αὐτὸν ἐκ ψυχῆς λογικῆς καὶ σώματος, ὁμοού-
σιον τῷ Πατρὶ κατὰ τὴν Θεότητα καὶ ὁμοούσιον τὸν αὐτὸν ἡμῖν κατὰ τὴν
ἀνθρωπότητα, κατὰ πάντα ὅμοιον ἡμῖν χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας. Routh. Opuse. ii. 78.
When these words were spoken, the cycle of possible controversy on the
subject was complete. The Monothelite question had virtually been settled
by anticipation.
8 Socr. H. E. iii. 7: ἔμψυχον εἶναι τὸν ἐνανθρωπήσαντα. Syn. Bost. anno 244.
1)
οὁὁ6 Fesus Christ is God in no equivocal sense.
inference is no exaggeration: ‘Cum mendacium deprehenditur
Christi Caro,... omnia que per Carnem Christi gesta sunt,
mendacio gesta sunt..... Eversum est totum Dei opust.’ Or,
as St. Cyril of Jerusalem tersely presses the solemn argument :
εἰ φάντασμα ἣν ἡ ἐνανθρώπησις, φάντασμα καὶ 7 σωτηρίαῦ,
2. Let it be observed, on the other hand, that the Nicene
assertion of our Blessed Lord’s Divinity does not involve any
tacit mutilation or degradation of the idea conveyed by the
sacred Name of God. When Jesus Christ is said by His Church
to be God, that word is used in its natural, its absolute, its
incommunicable sense. This must be constantly borne in mind,
if we would escape from equivocations which might again and
again obscure the true point before us. For Arianism will
confess Christ’s Divinity, if, when it terms Him God, it may
really mean that He is only a being of an inferior and created
nature. Socinianism will confess Christ’s Divinity, if this con-
fession involves nothing more emphatic than an acknowledge
ment of the fact that certain moral features of God’s character
shone forth from the Human Life of Christ with an absolutely
unrivalled splendour. Pantheism will confess Christ’s Divinity,
but then it is a Divinity which He must share with the uni-
verse. Christ may well be divine, when all is divine, although
Pantheism too may admit that Christ is divine in a higher
sense than any other man, because He has more clearly recog-
nised or exhibited ‘the eternal oneness of the finite and the
Infinite, of God and humanity.’ The coarsest forms of unbelief
will confess our Lord’s Divinity, if they may proceed to add,
by way of explanation, that such language is but the echo of
an apotheosis, informally decreed to the prophet of Nazareth by
the fervid but uncritical enthusiasm of His Church.
No: the Divinity of Jesus Christ is not to be thus emptied
of its most solemn and true significance. It is no mere titular
distinction, such as the hollow or unthinking flattery of a mul-
titude might yield to a political chief, or to a distinguished
philanthropist. Indeed Jesus Christ Himself, by His own
teaching, had made such an apotheosis of Himself morally
impossible. He had, as no teacher before Him, raised, ex-
panded, spiritualized man’s idea of the Life and Nature of the
Great Creator. Baur has remarked that this higher exhibition
of the solitary and incommunicable Life of God is nowhere so
apparent as in that very Gospel the special object of which is to
t Adv. Mare. iii. 8. u Catech. iv. 9.
[ LECT.
Christ ἐς not the god of an Apotheosis. 27
exhibit Christ Himself as the eternal Word made Flesh*.
Indeed God was too vividly felt to be a living Presence by the
early Christians, to be transformed by them upon occasion into
a decoration which might wreathe the brow of any, though it
were the highest human virtue. In heathendom this. was
naturally otherwise. Yet animal indulgence and intellectual
scepticism must have killed out the sense of primary truths
which nature and conscience had originally taught, before
imperial Rome could feel no difficulty in decreeing temples and
altars to such samples of our race as were not a few of the men
who successively filled the throne of the Cesarsy. The Church,
with her eye upon the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisiblez,
could never have raised Jesus to the full honours of Divinity,
had He been merely Man. And Christianity from the first has
proclaimed herself, not the authoress of an apotheosis, but the
child and the product of an Incarnation.
She could not have been both. Speaking historically, an
apotheosis belongs strictly to the Greek world ; while a mimicry
of the Incarnation is characteristically oriental. Speaking phi-
losophically, the god of an apotheosis is a creation of human
thought or of human fancy; the God of an incarnation is
presupposed as an objectively existing Being, Who manifests
Himself by it in the sphere of sense. Speaking religiously,
belief in an apotheosis must be fatal to the primary movements
of piety towards its object, whenever men are capable of earnest
and honest reflection ; while it is incontestable that the doctrine
of an incarnation stimulates piety in a degree precisely pro-
portioned to the sincerity of the faith which welcomes it. Thus
the ideas of an apotheosis and an incarnation stand towards
each other in historical, philosophical, and religious contrast.
Need I add that religiously, philosophically, and historically,
Christianity is linked to the one, and is simply incompatible
with the other? |
x Vorlesungen ἴδον N. T. Theologie, p. 354.
¥Y On this subject see Déllinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. viii.
pt. 2. § 2 (apotheosis). The city of Cyzicus was deprived of its freedom for
being unwilling to worship Augustus (Tac. Ann. iv. 36). Thrasea Petus was
held guilty of treason for refusing to believe in the deification of Poppa
(Tac. Ann. xvi. 22). Caligula insisted on being worshipped as a god during
his lifetime (Suetonius, Caius, xxi. 22). On the number of cattle sacrificed
to Domitian, see Pliny, Panegyr. xi. The worship of Antinous, who had
lived on terms of criminal intercourse with Hadrian, was earnestly promoted
by that Emperor. Déllinger reckons fifty-three apotheoses between that of
Cesar and that of Diocletian, fifteen of which were those of ladies belonging
to the imperial family, 21 Tim, i. 17. -
1]
28 Christ ἐς not God in
No: the Divinity of Jesus is not such divinity as Pantheism
might ascribe to Him. In the belief of the Church Jesus
stands alone among the sons of men as He of Whom it can
be said without impiety, that He is not merely divine, but
God. Such a restriction in favour of a Single Personality,
contradicts the very vital principle of Pantheistic thought.
Schelling appropriately contends that the Indians with their
many incarnations shew more intelligence respecting the real
relations of God and the world than is implied by the doctrine
of a solitary incarnation, as taught in the Creed of Christendom.
Upon Pantheistic grounds, this is perfectly reasonable; although
it might be added that any limited number of incarnations,
however considerable, would only approximate to the real
demands of the theory which teaches that God is incarnate
in everything. But then, such divinity as Pantheism can
ascribe to Christ is, in point of fact, no divinity at all. When
God is nature, and nature is God, everything indeed is divine,
but also nothing is Divine; and Christ shares this phantom-
divinity with the universe, nay with the agencies of moral
evil itself. In truth, our God does not exist in the appre-
hension of Pantheistic thinkers; since, when such truths as
creation and personality are denied, the very idea of God is
fundamentally sapped, and although the prevailing belief of
mankind may still be humoured by a discreet retention of
its conventional language, the broad practical result is in reality
neither more nor less than Atheism.
You may indeed remind me of an ingenious distinction,
by which it is suggested that the idea of God is not thus
sacrificed in Pantheistic systems, and on the ground that
although God and the universe are substantially identical,
they are not logically so. Logically speaking, then, you pro-
ceed to distinguish between God and the universe. You look
out upon the universe, and you arrive at the idea of God by
a double process, by a process of abstraction, and by a process
of synthesis. In the visible world you come into sensible
contact with the finite, the contingent, the relative, the im-
perfect, the individual. Then, by a necessary operation of your
reason, you disengage from these ideas their correlatives; you
ascend to a contemplation of infinity, of necessity, of the
absolute, the perfect, the universal. Here abstraction has done
its work, and synthesis begins. By synthesis you combine
the general ideas which have been previously reached through
abstraction. These general ideas are made to converge in your
[ LECT.
the sense of Pantheism. 20
brain under the presidency of one central and unifying idea,
which you call God. You are careful to insist that this god
is not a real but an ideal being; indeed it appears that he
is so ideal, that he would cease to be god if he could be supposed
to become real. God, you say, is the ‘Idea’ of the universe ;
the universe is the ‘realization’ of God. The god ‘who is
enthroned in your thought must have abandoned all contact
with reality; let him re-enter but for a moment upon the
domain of reality, and, such are the exigencies of your doctrine,
that he must forthwith be compelled to abdicate his throne.
But meanwhile, as you contend, he is logically distinct from
the universe; and you repel with some warmth the orthodox
allegation, that to identify him substantially with the universe,
amounts to a practical denial of his existence.
Yet after all, let us ask what is really gained by thus
distinguishing between a logical and a substantial identity ?
What is this god, who is to be thus rescued from the
religious ruins which mark the track of Pantheistic thought ?
Is he, by the terms of your own distinction, anything more
than an ‘Idea ;’ and must he not vary in point of perfection
with the accuracy and exhaustiveness of those processes of
abstraction and synthesis by which you undertake to construct
him? And if this be so, is it worth our while to discuss
the question whether or not so precarious an ‘Idea’ was or
was not incarnate in Jesus Christ? Upon the terms of the
theory, would not an incarnation of God be fatal to His
‘logical,’ that is to His only admitted mode of existence?
or would such divinity, if we could ascribe it to Jesus Christ,
be anything higher than the fleeting and more or less imperfect
speculation of a finite brain ?
Certainly Pantheism would never have attained to so strong
ἃ position as that which it actually holds in European as well
as in Asiatic thought, unless it had embodied a great element
of truth, which is too often ignored by some arid Theistic
systems. To that element of truth we Christians do justice,
when we confess the Omnipresence and Incomprehensibility
of God; and still more, when we trace the gracious con-
sequences of His actual Incarnation in Jesus Christ. But we
Christians know also that the Great Creator is essentially
distinct from the work of His Hands, and that He is What
a Cf, M. Caro’s notice of Vacherot’s La Métaphysique et la Science,
Idée de Dieu, p. 265, 544. ; especially p. 289, 844.
1)
30 Christ ἐς not merely divine
He is, in utter independence of the feeble thought whereby
He enables us to apprehend His Existence. We know that
all which is not Himself, is upheld in being from moment
to moment by the fiat of His Almighty Will. We know that
His Existence is, strictly and in the highest sense, Personal.
Could we deny these truths, it would be as easy to confess the
Divinity of Christ, as it would be impossible to deny the
divinity of any created being. If we are asked to believe
in an impersonal God, who has no real existence apart from
creation or from created thought, in order that we may expe-
rience fewer philosophical difficulties in acknowledging our
Lord’s Divinity, we reply that our faith cannot consent thus
‘propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.” We cannot thus sgacri-
fice the substance of the first truth of the Creed that we
may retain the phraseology of the second. We dare not thus
degrade, or rather annihilate, the very idea of God, even for
the sake of securing a semblance (more it could not be) of
those precious consolations which the Christian heart seeks
and finds at the Manger of the Divine Child in Bethlehem, or
before the Cross of the Lord of Glory on Mount Calvary.
No: the Divinity of Jesus is not divinity in the sense of
Socinianism. It is no mere manifestation whether of the highest
human goodness, or of the noblest of divine gifts. It is not
merely a divine presence vyouchsafed to the soul; it is not
merely an intercommunion of the soul and God, albeit main-
tained even ceaseléssly—maintained in its fulness from moment
to moment. Such indeed was the high grace of our Lord’s -
sinless Humanity, but that grace was not itself His Divinity.
For a work of grace, however beautiful and perfect, is one thing ;
an Uncreated Divine Essence is another. In the Socinian sense
of the term, you all, my Christian brethren, are, or may be,
divine ; you may shew forth God’s moral glory, if less fully, yet
not less truly, than did Jesus. By adoption, you too are sons
of God; and the Church teaches that each of you was made
a partaker of the Divine Nature at his baptism. But suppose
that neither by act, nor word, nor thought, you have done aught
to forfeit that blessed gift, do I forthwith proceed to profess
my belief in your divinity? And why not? Is it not because
I may not thus risk a perilous confusion of thought, issuing
in a degradation of the Most Holy Name? Your life of grace
is as much a gift as your natural life; but however glorious
may be the gift, aye, though it raise you from the dust to the
very steps of God’s Throne, the gift is a free gift after all, and
[ LECT,
an the sense of Socintanism. 21
its greatness does but suggest the interval which parts the
recipient from the inexhaustible and boundless Life of the
Giver.
Most true indeed it is that the perfect holiness which shone
forth from our Lord’s Human Life, has led thousands of souls
to perceive the truth of His essential Godhead. When once it
is seen that His moral greatness is really unique, it is natural
to seek and to accept, as a basis of this greatness, His possession
of a unique relationship to the Fountain of all goodness». Thus
the Sermon on the Mount leads us naturally on to those dis-
courses in St. John’s Gospel in which Christ unveils His
Essential Oneness with the Father. But the ethical premiss
is not to be confused with the ontological conclusion. It is true
that a boundless love of man shone forth from the Life of
Christ ; it is true that each of the Divine attributes is com-
mensurate with the Divine Essence. It is true that ‘he that
dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.’ But_itis
not true that every moral being which God blesses by His
withdrawn. Such a Presence may indeed in a certain secondary
Ὁ ‘Je mehr sich so dem erkennenden Glauben die Ueberzeugung von der
Einzigkeit der sittlichen Hoheit Christi erschliesst, desto natiirlicher ja
nothwendiger muss es nun auch von diesem festen Punkte aus demselben
Glauben werden, mit Verstindniss Christo in das Gebiet Seiner Reden zu
folgen, wo Er Seiner eigenthiimlichen und einzigen Beziehung zu dem Vater
gedenkt. Jesu Heiligkeit und Weisheit, durch die Er unter den siindigen,
vielirrenden Menschen einzig dasteht, weiset so, da ste nicht kann noch will
als rein subjektives, menschliches Produkt angesehen werden, auf einen
dibernatiirlichen Ursprung Seiner Person. Diese muss, um inmitten der
Siinderwelt begreiflich zu sein, aus einer eigenthiimlichen und wunderbar
schipferischen That Gottes abgeleitet, ja es muss in Christus, wenn doch
Gott nicht deistisch yon der Welt getrennt sondern in Liebe ihr nahe und
wesentlich als Liebe zu denken ist, von Gott aus betrachtet eine Incarnation
gottlicher Liebe, also géttlichen Wesens gesehen werden, was Ihn als den
Punkt. erscheinen lisst, wo Gott und die Menscheit einzig und innigst
geeinigt sind. Freilich, man lisst sich in diesem Stiicke noch so oft
durch einen abstracten, subjectiven Moralismus irre machen, der die Tiefe
des Ethischen nicht erfasst. Aber wer tiefer blickend auch von einer
ontologischen und metaphysischen Bedeutung des LEthischen weiss, dem
muss die Einzigkeit der Heiligkeit und Liebe Christi ihren Grund in einer
Einzigkeit auch Seines Wesens haben, diese aber in Gottes Sich mittheil-
ender, offenbarender Liebe.’ (Dorner, Person Christi, Bd. ii. pp. 1211,
1212.) '
1)
32 Christ ὃς not the ‘inferior god’ of Arianism.
a ee
sense ‘divinize’ a created person’, robing him with so much of
moral beauty and force of deity as a creature can bear. But
this blessed gift does not justify us in treating the creature to
whom it is vouchsafed as the Infinite and Eternal God. When
Socinianism deliberately names God, it means equally with
ourselves, not merely a Perfect Moral Being, not merely Perfect
Love and Perfect Justice, but One Whose Knowledge and
Whose Power are as boundless as His Love. It does not mean
that Christ is God in this, the natural sense of the word, when
it confesses His moral divinity ; yet, beyond all controversy,
this full and natural sense of the term is the sense of the
Nicene Creed.
No: Jesus Christ is not divine in the sense of Arius. He
is not the most eminent and ancient of the creatures, decorated
by the necessities of a theological controversy with That Name
which a serious piety can dare to yield to One Being alone.
Ascribe to the Christ of Arius an antiquity as remote as you
will from the age of the Incarnation, place him at a height
as high as any you can conceive, above the highest archangel ;
still what, after all, is this ancient, this super-angelic being
but a creature who had a beginning, and who, if the Author of
his existence should so will, may yet cease to be? Such a being,
however exalted, is parted from the Divine Essence by a
fathomless chasm; whereas the Christ of Catholic Christendom
is internal to That Essence; He is of one Substance with the
Father—époovovs τῷ Πατρί: and in this sense, as distinct from
any other, He is properly and literally Divine.
This assertion of the Divinity of Jesus Christ depends on
a truth beyond itself. It postulates the existence in God of
certain real distinctions having their necessary basis in the
Essence of the Godhead. That Three such distinctions exist is
a matter of Revelation. In the common language of the
Western Church these distinct Forms of Being are named Per-
sons. Yet that term cannot be employed to denote Them,
without considerable intellectual caution. As applied to men,
Person implies the antecedent conception of a species, which is
determined for the moment, and by the force of the expression,
into a single incommunicable modification of being4, But the
¢ 2 St. Peter i. 4: ἵνα διὰ τούτων [sc. émayyeAudtwr] γένησθε θείας
κοινωνοὶ φύσεως.
4 So runs the definition of Boethius. ‘Persona est nature rationalis
individua substantia.’ (De Pers. et Duabus Naturis, c, 3.) Upon which
[ LECT,
ail a ia a an
Lhe doctrine implies Lypostatic distinctions in Gon. 33
ee ee
conception of species is utterly inapplicable to That One Supreme
Essence Which we name God; and, according to the terms of
the Catholic doctrine, the same Essence belongs to Each of the
Divine Persons. Not however that we are therefore to suppose
nothing more to be intended by the revealed doctrine than three
varying relations of God in His dealings with the world. On
the contrary, His Self-Revelation has for its basis certain eternal
distinctions in His Nature, which are themselves utterly anterior
to and independent of any relation to created life. Apart from
these distinctions, the Christian Revelation of an Eternal Father-
hood, of a true Incarnation of God, and of a real communication
of His Spirit, is but the baseless fabric of a dream’. These
three distinct ‘Subsistences £? which we name Father, Son, and
Spirit, while they enable us the better to understand the mystery
of the Self-sufficing and Blessed Life of God before He sur-
rounded Himself with created beings, are also strictly compatible
with the truth of the Divine Unityg. And when we say that
St. Thomas observes: ‘Conveniens est ut hoc nomen (persona) de Deo
dicatur ; non tamen eodem modo quo dicitur de creaturis, sed excellentiori
modo.’ (Sum. Th., τᾶ, qu. 29. a. 3.) When the present use of οὐσία and
ὑπόστασις had become fixed in the East, St. Gregory Nazianzen tells us that
in the formula ‘ula οὐσία, τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις, οὐσία signifies τὴν φύσιν τῆς
θειότητος, while ὑποστάσεις points to τὰς τῶν τριῶν ἰδιότητας. He observes
that with this sense the Westerns were in perfect agreement; but he deplores
the poverty of their theological language. They had no expression really equi-
valent to ὑπόστασις, as contrasted with οὐσία, and they were therefore obliged
to employ the Latin translation of πρόσωπον that they might avoid the ap-
pearance of believing in three οὐσίαι. (Orat. xxi. 46.) St. Augustine laments the
necessity of having to say ‘quid Tria sint, Que Tria esse fides vera pronuntiat.’
(De Trin. vii. n. 7.) ‘Cum ergo queritur quid Tria, vel quid Tres, conferimus
nos ad inveniendum aliquod speciale vel generale nomen, quo complectamur
hee Tria: neque occurrit animo, quia excedit supereminentia Divinitatis
. usitate eloguit facultatem.’ (Ibid.) “Cum conaretur humana inopia loquendo
proferre ad hominum sensus, quod in secretario mentis pro captu tenet de
Domino Deo Creatore suo, sive per piam fidem, sive per qualemcunque intel-
ligentiam, timuit dicere tres essentias, ne intelligeretur in Illd Summa Afquali-
tate ulla diversitas, Rursus non esse tria quedam non poterat dicere, quod
Sabellius quia dixit, in heresim lapsus est. . .. Quesivit quid Tria diceret, et
dixit substantias sive personas, quibus nominibus non diversitatem intelligt
voluit, sed singularitatem noluit.? (De Trin. vii. n. 9.) Cf. Serm. exvii. 7,
Cexv. 3, cexliv. 4. On the term Person, see further St. Athan. Treatises, i, 1 555
note f. (Lib. Fath.)
© Cf. Wilberforce on the Incarnation, p. 152.
f ¢Subsistentize, relationes subsistentes.’ Sum. Th. 18, qu. 29. a. 2; and
qu. 40. a. 2.
8 This compatibility is expressed by the doctrine of the περιχώρησι----- 6
safeguard and witness of the Divine Unity. St. John xiv.11; 1 Cor. ii. 11.
ie doctrine, as ‘ protecting the Unity of God, without entrenching on the
I D
34 Objectors. (1) The school of A:sthetical historians.
Jesus Christ is.God, we mean that in the Man Christ Jesus,
the Second ef these Persons or Subsistences, One in Essence
“First and with the Third, vouchsafed to become
sion will be cleared of difficulties which are at present more or
less distinctly supposed to obstruct it.
(a) One objection to our attempt in these lectures may be
expected to proceed from that graceful species of literary activity
which can be termed, without our discrediting it, Historical
Zstheticism. The protest will take the form of an appeal to
the sense of Beauty. True Beauty, it will be argued, is a
creation of nature; it is not improved by being meddled with.
The rocky hill-side is no longer beautiful when it has been
quarried ; nor is the river-course, when it has been straightened
and deepened for purposes of navigation; nor is the forest which
has been fenced and planted, and made to assume the disciplined
air of a symmetrical plantation. In like manner, you urge, that
incomparable Figure whom we meet in the pages of the New
Testament, has suffered in the apprehensions of orthodox |
Christians, from the officious handling of a too inquisitive
Scholasticism. As cultivation robs wild nature of its beauty,
even so, you maintain, is ‘definition’ the enemy of the fairest
creations of our sacred literature. You represent ‘definition’ as
ruthlessly invading’ regions which have been beautified by the —
freshness and originality of the moral sentiment, and as sub- —
stituting for the indefinable graces of a living movement, the —
grim and stiff artificialities of a heartless logic. You wonder αὖ
the bad taste of men who can bring the decisions of Niczea and —
Chalcedon into contact with the story of the Gospels. What 15.
perfections of the Son and the Spirit, may even be called the characteristic of |
Ἀ Catholic Trinitarianism, as opposed to all counterfeits, whether philosophical, —
Arian, or oriental.’ Newman’s ‘Arians, p.190, rsted. Cf. Athan. Treatises, —
ii. 403, note i.
[ LECT. |
4215 school rgnores the solemn question at issue. 35
there in common, you ask, between these dead metaphysical
formulz and the ever-living tenderness of that matchless Life 1
You protest that you would as readily essay to throw the text of
Homer or of Milton into a series of syllogisms, that you would
with as little scruple scratch the paint from a masterpiece
of Raffaelle with the intention of subjecting it to a chemical
analysis, as go hand in hand with those Church-doctors who
force Jesus of Nazareth into rude juxtaposition with a world of
formal thought, from which, as you conceive, He is severed by
the intervention of three centuries of disputation, and still more
by all which raises the highest forms of natural beauty above the
awkward pedantry of debased art.
Well, my brethren, if the object of the Gospel be attained
when it has added one more chapter to the poetry of human
history, when it has contributed one more Figure to the world’s
gallery of historical portraits, upon which a few educated persons
may periodically expend some spare thought and feeling ;—if
this be so, you are probably right. Plainly you are in pursuit
of that which may nourish sentiment, rather than of that which
can support moral vigour or permanently satisfy the instinct of
truth. Certainly your sentiment of beauty may be occasionally
shocked by those direct questions and rude processes, which are
necessary to the investigation of intellectual truth and to the
sustenance of moral life. You would repress these processes ;
you would silence these questions; or at least you would not
explicitly state your own answer to them. Whether, for instance,
the stupendous miracle of the Resurrection be or be not as cer-
tain as any event of public interest which has taken place in
Europe during the present year, is a point which does not affect,
as it seems, the worth or the completeness of your Christology.
Your Christ is an Epic; and you will suffer no prosaic scholiast
to try his hand upon its pages. Your Christ is a portrait ;
and, as we are all agreed, a portrait is a thing to admire, and not
to touch.
But there is a solemn question which must be asked, and
which, if a man is in earnest, he will inevitably ask; and that
question will at once carry him beyond the narrow horizon of
a literary estheticism in his treatment of the matter before us.
... My brethren, where is Jesus Christ now? and what is He?
Does He only speak to us from the pages which were traced by
His followers eighteen centuries ago? Is He no more.than the
first of the shadows of the past, the first of memories, the first of
biographies, the most perfect of human ideals? Is He only an
1] D2
Op νι τὸ ee
46 Where and What ἐς Our Lord now?
DE ee ee -.
Ideal, after all? Does He reign, only in virtue of a mighty
tradition of human thought and feeling in His favour, which
creates and supports His imaginary throne? Is He at this
moment a really living Being? And if living, is He a human
ghost, flitting we know not where in the unseen world, and
Himself awaiting an award at the hands of the Everlasting? or
is He a super-angelic Intelligence, sinless and invested with
judicial and creative powers, but as far separated from the
‘naccessible Life of God as must be even the first of creatures
from the everlasting Creator ? Does He reign, in any true sense,
either on earth or in heaven? or is His Regal Government in
any degree independent of the submission or the resistance which
His subjects may offer to it? Is He present personally as a living
Power in this our world? Has He any certain relations to you ?
Does He think of you, care for you, act upon you? Can He help
you? Can He save you from your sins, can He blot out their
stains and crush their power, can He deliver you in your death-
agony from the terrors of dissolution, and bid you live with Him
in a brighter world for ever? Can you approach Him now,
commune with Him now, cling to Him now, become one with
Him now, not by an unsubstantial act of your own imaginations,
but by an actual objective transaction, making you incorporate
with His Life? Or is the Christian answer to these most press-
ing questions a weakly delusion, or at any rate too definite a
statement ; and must we content ourselves with the analysis of
an historical Character, while we confess that the Living Per-
sonality which once created and animated It may or may not be
God, may or may not be able to hear us and help us, may or may
not be in distinct conscious existence at this moment, may or
may not have been altogether annihilated some eighteen hundred
years ago? Do you urge that it is idle to ask these questions,
since we have no adequate materials at hand for dealing with
them? That is a point which it is hoped may be more or less
cleared up during the progress of our present enquiry. But if
such questions are to remain unanswered, do not shut your eyes
to the certain consequence. A Christ who is conceived of as
only pictured in an ancient literature may indeed furnish you
with the theme of a magnificent poetry, but he cannot be the
present object of your religious life. A religion must have for
its object an actually Living Person: and the purpose of the
definitions which you deprecate, is to exhibit and assert the exact
force of the revealed statements respecting the Eternal Life of
Christ, and so to place Him as a Living Person in all His Divine —
[ LECT. |
Objectors. (2) The Anti-doctrinal Moratsés. 37
Majesty and all His Human Tenderness before the eye of the
soul which seeks Him. When you fairly commit yourself to
the assertion that Christ is at this moment living at all, you
leave the strictly historical and ssthetical treatment of the Gos-
pel record of His Life and character, and you enter, whether it
be in a Catholic or in an heretical spirit, upon the territory of
Church definitions. In your little private sphere, you bow to
that practical necessity which obliged great Fathers and Coun-
cils, often much against their will, to take counsel of the Spirit
Who illuminated the collective Church, and to give point and
strength to Christian faith by authoritative elucidations of Chris-
tian doctrine. Nor are you therefore rendered insensible to
the beauty of the Gospel narrative, because you have discovered
that thus to ascertain and bear in mind, so far as Revelation
warrants your effort, what is the exact Personal dignity and what
the enduring prerogatives of Him in Whom you have believed, is
in truth a matter of the utmost practical importance to your
religious life. .
(8) But the present enquiry may be objected to, on higher
grounds than those of literary and esthetic taste. ‘Are there
not,’ it will be pleaded, ‘moral reasons for deprecating such dis-
cussions? Surely the dogmatic and theological temper is suf-
ficiently distinct from the temper which aims, beyond everything
else, at moral improvement. Surely good men may be indifferent
divines, while accomplished divines may be false or impure at
heart. Nay more, are not morality and theology, not merely
distinct, but also more or less antagonistic interests? Does not
the enthusiastic consideration of dogmatic problems tend to
divert men’s minds from that attention which is due to the
practical obligations of life? Is not the dogmatic temper, you
ask, rightly regarded as a species of “intellectual ritualism” which
lulls men into the belief that they have true religion at heart,
when in point of fact they are merely gratifying a private taste
and losing sight of honesty and sober living in the intoxicating
study of the abstractions of controversy? On the other hand, will
not a high morality shrink with an instinctive reverence from
the clamorous and positive assertions of the theologians? In
particular, did Jesus Christ Himself require at the hands of His
disciples a dogmatic confession of belief in His Divinity? Was
He not content if they acted upon His moral teaching, if they
embraced that particular aspect of moral obligations which 15. of
Ὁ Ecce Homo, p. 69, 564.
ats.
38 Channing on the study of Christ's character.
ὅν. θα ἐς ts i τ ΣΝ
the highest importance to the well-being of society, and which
we have lately termed the Enthusiasm of Humanity!’ This is
what is urged ; and then it is added, ‘Shall we not best succeed
in doing our duty if we try better to understand Christ’s Human
Character, while we are careful to keep clear of those abstract
and transcendental questions about Him, which at any rate have
not promoted the cause of moral progress ?”
This language is notoriously popular in our day; but the sub-
stantial objection which it embodies has been already stated by
a writer whom it is impossible to name without mingled admi-
ration and sorrow,—admiration for his pure and lofty humanity,
—sorrow for the profound errors which parted him in life and
in death from the Church of Jesus Christ. ‘Love to Jesus
Christ,’ says William Channing, ‘depends very little on our con-
ception of His rank in the scale of being. On no other topic
have Christians contended so earnestly, and yet it is of secondary
importance. To know Jesus Christ is not to know the precise
place‘He occupies in the Universe ; it is something more: it
is to look into His mind; it is to approach His soul; to
comprehend His spirit, to see how He thought and felt and
purposed and loved...I am persuaded,’ he continues, ‘that
controversies about Christ’s Person have in one way done
great injury. They have turned attention from His character.
Suppose that, as Americans, we should employ ourselves in
debating the questions, where Washington was born, and from
what spot he came when he appeared at the head of our armies ;
and that in the fervour of these contentions we should overlook
the character of his mind, the spirit that moved within him,
......how unprofitably should we be employed? Who is it
that understands Washington? Is it he that can settle his rank
in the creation, his early history, his present condition ? or he to
whom the soul of that good man is laid open, who comprehends
and sympathizes with his generous purposes!’
Channing’s illustration of his position in this passage is im-
portant. It unconsciously but irresistibly suggests that indiffer-
ence to the clear statement of our Lord’s Divinity is linked to a
fundamental assumption of its falsehood. Doubtless Washing-
ton’s birthplace and present destiny is for the Americans an
altogether unpractical consideration, when placed side by side
with the study of his character. But the question had never
been raised whether the first of religious duties which a
i Works, vol. ii. p. 145.
[ LECT.
Moral obligation of facing the dogmatic question. 39
creature should pay to the Author and End of his existence was |
or was not due to Washington. Nobody has ever asserted that
mankind owes to the founder of the American Republic the
tribute of a prostrate adoration in spirit and in truth. Had it
occurred to Channing’s mind as even possible that Jesus Christ
was more than a mere man who lived and died eighteen cen-
turies ago, he could not have permitted himself to make use of
such an illustration. To do justice to Channing, he had much
too clear and fine an intellect to imagine that the fundamental
question of Christianity could be ignored on moral grounds.
Those who know anything of his works are aware that his own
opinion on the subject was a very definite one, and that he has
stated the usual arguments on behalf of the Socinian heresy with
characteristic earnestness and precision.
My brethren, all are agreed as to the importance of studying
and copying the Human Character of Jesus Christ. Whether it
be really possible to have a sincere admiration for the Character
of Jesus Christ without believing in His Divinity, is a question
which I shall not shrink from considering hereafterJ. Whether
a true morality does not embrace, as one part of it, an honest
acceptance and profession of all attainable religious Truth, is a
question which men can decide without being theologians. As
for reverence, there is a time to keep silence, and a time to
speak. Reverence will assuredly speak, and that plainly, when
silence would dishonour its Object : the reverence which is always
silent as to matters of belief may be but the drapery of a profound
scepticism, which lacks the courage to unveil itself before the
eyes of men. Certainly our Lord did not Himself exact from
His first followers, as an indispensable condition of discipleship,
any profession of belief in His Godhead. But why? Simply
because His requirements are proportioned to the opportunities
of mankind. He had taught as men were able to bear His
teaching k, Although His precepts, His miracles, His character,
His express language, all pointed to the Truth of His Godhead,
the conscience of mankind was not laid under a formal obligation
to acknowledge It until at length He had been defined! to be
‘the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of Holiness,
by the Resurrection from the dead.’ Our present moral relation,
then, to the truth of Christ’s Divinity differs altogether from
that in which His first disciples were placed. It is a simple
matter of history that Christendom has believed the doctrine for
i See Lecture IV. k St. John xvi. 12.
1 Rom. i. 4: τοῦ ὁρισθέντος υἱοῦ Θεοῦ.
1]
40 Moral relations of behef and worship.
eighteen centuries ; but besides this, the doctrine challenges at
our hands, as I have already intimated, a moral duty as its
necessary expression both in the sanctuary of our own thought
and before the eyes of men. .
Let us face this aspect of the subject in its concrete and
every-day form. Those whom I now see around me are without
exception, or almost without exception, members of the Church
of England. If any here have not the happiness to be commu-
nicants, yet, at least, my brethren, you all attend the ordinary
Sunday morning service of our Church. In the course of doing
so, you sing the Te Deum, you repeat several times the Gloria
Patri; but you also kneel down, or profess to kneel down, as
joining before God and man in the Litany. Now the second
petition in the Litany runs thus: ‘O God the Son, Redeemer
of the world, have mercy upon us miserable sinners.’ What do
you seriously mean to do when you join in that petition? Whom
are you really addressing? What is the basis and ground of
your act? What is its morality? If Jesus Christ is merely a
creature, 1s He in a position to have mercy upon you? Are you
doing dishonour to the Most High by addressing Christ in these
terms at all? Channing has said that the petition, ‘By Thine
agony and bloody sweat, by Thy cross and passion, Good Lord,
deliver us,’ is appalling™. On the Socinian hypothesis, Chan-
ning’s language is no exaggeration: the Litany is an ‘ appalling’
prayer, as the Gloria Patri is an ‘appalling’ doxology. Nor
would you escape from this moral difficulty, if unhappily you
should refuse to join in the services of the Church. Your
conscience cannot decline to decide in favour of the general
duty of adoring Jesus Christ, or against it. And this decision
presupposes the resolution, in one sense or the other, of the dog-
matic question on which it depends. Christ either is, or He is
not Gop. The worship which is paid to Christ either ought to
be paid to Him, or it ought to be, not merely withheld, but
denounced. It is either rigorously due from all Christians to
our Lord, or it is an outrage on the rights of God. In any case
to take part in a service which, like our Litany, involves the
prostrate adoration of Jesus Christ, without explicitly recognis-
ing His right to receive such adoration, is itself immoral. If to
be true and honest in our dealings with each other is a part of
mere natural virtue, surely to mean what we say when we are
dealing with Heaven is not less an integral part of morality 2,
m Unitarian Christianity, Works, vol. ii. p. 541.
» Bp. Butler, Analogy, ii. 1. p. 157. ‘Christianity, even what is ape
LECT.
~~
Objectors. (3) The school of Subjective Pretism. 4τ
I say nothing of that vast unseen world of thought and feeling
which in the soul of a Christian believer has our Blessed Saviour
for its Object, and the whole moral justification of which depends
upon the conception which we form of Christ’s ‘rank in the
scale of being.’ It is enough to point out to you that the dis-
cussion in hand has a practical, present, and eminently a moral
interest, unless it be consistent with morality to use in the presence
of God and man, a language which we do not believe, or as to
the meaning of which we are content to be indifferent.
(y) Once more. It may be urged, from a widely different
quarter, that our enquiry is dangerous, if not to literary or
moral interests, yet to the spirit of simple Christian piety.
‘Take care,’ so the warning may run, ‘lest, instead of preaching
the Gospel, you should be merely building up a theological
pyramid. Beware of sacrificing spiritual objects to intellectual
ones. Surely the great question for a sinner to consider is
whether or not he be justified before God: do not then let us
bury the simple Gospel beneath a heap of metaphysics.’
Now the matter to be considered is whether this absolute
separation between what is assumed to be the ‘simple Gospel’
and what is called ‘metaphysics’ is really possible. In point of
fact the simple Gospel, when we come to examine it, is neces-
sarily on one side metaphysical. Educated men, at least, will
not be scared by a term, which a scarcely pardonable ignorance
may suppose to denote nothing more than the trackless region
of intellectual failure. If the Gospel is real to you; if you
believe it to be true, and possess it spiritually and intellectually;
you cannot but see that it leads you on to the frontier of a
world of thought which you may yourselves shrink from entering,
but which it is not prudent to depreciate. You say that the
main question is to know that you are justified? Very well ;
but, omitting all other considerations, let me ask you one ques-
tion: Who is the Justifier? Can He really justify if He is only
Man? Does not His power to ‘save to the uttermost those that
come unto God by Him’ depend upon the fact that He is Him-
self Divine? Yet when, with St.John, you confess that He is
the Eternal Logos, you are dealing quite as distinctly with a
so called, as distinguished from natural religion, has yet somewhat very
important, even of a moral nature. For, the office of our Lord being made
known, and the relation He stands in to us, the obligation of religious regards
to Him is plainly moral, as much as charity to mankind is; since this obliga-
tion arises, before external commands, immediately out of that His office and
relation itself.’
1]
42 Christian prety requires a definite Christology.
question of ‘metaphysics,’ as if you should discuss the value of
οὐσία and ὑπόστασις in primitive Christian Theology. It is true
that such discussions will carry you beyond the region of Serip-
ture terminology ; but, at least to a sober and thoughtful mind;
can it really matter whether a term, such as ‘ Trinity,’ be or be
not in Scripture, if the area of thought which it covers be
identical with that contained in the Scripture statements®? And,
to undervalue those portions of truth which cannot be made
rhetorically or privately available to excite religious feeling, is to
accept a principle which, in the long run, is destructive of the
Faith. In Germany, Spener the Pietist held no mean place
among the intellectual ancestors of Paulus and of Strauss. In
England, a gifted intellect has traced the ‘ phases’ of its progres-
sive disbelief ; and if, in its downward course, it has gone so far
as to deny that Jesus Christ was even a morally righteous Man,
its starting-point was as nearly as possible that of the earnest
but shortsighted piety, which imagines that it can dare actively
to exercise thought on the Christian Revelation, and withal to
ignore those ripe decisions which we owe to the illuminated
mind of Primitive Christendom.
There is no question between us, my brethren, as to the
- supreme importance of a personal understanding and contract
between the single soul and the Eternal Being Who made and
Who has redeemed it. But this understanding must depend
upon ascertained Truths, foremost among which is that of the
Godhead of Jesus Christ. And in these lectures an attempt will
be made to lay bare and to re-assert some few of the bases upon
which that cardinal Truth itself reposes in the consciousness of
the Church, and to kindle perchance, in some souls, a fresh sense
of its unspeakable importance. It will be our object to examine
such anticipations of this doctrine as are found in the Old Testa-
ment P, to note how it is implied in the work of Jesus Christ 4,
and how inseparable it is from His recorded Consciousness of
His Personality and Mission’, to trace its distinct, although
varying assertion in the writings of His great Apostles 3, and in
the earliest ages of His Church t, and finally to shew how in-
timate and important are its relations to all that is dearest to
the heart and faith of a Christian %.
ο Sum. Th. τὸ, qu. 29. a. 2. Waterland, Works, iii, 632. Importance of
Doctrine of H. Trin. c. 7. ‘The sense of Scripture és Scripture.” Dr, Mill’s
Letter on Dr. Hampden’s Bampton Lectures, p. 14. See Lect. VILI.
P Lect. 11. 4 Lect. ITI. t Lect. LV.
® Lect. V, VI. t Lect. VII. x Lect. VIII.
[ LECT.
Warnings and hopes. 43
It must be a ground of rejoicing that throughout these lec-
tures we shall keep thus close to the Sacred Person of our Lord
Himself. And, if indeed, none of us as yet believed in His
Godhead, it might be an impertinence on the part of the preacher
to suggest any spiritual advice which takes for granted the
conclusion of his argument. But you who, thank God, are
Christians by living conviction as well as by baptismal privilege,
must already possess too strong and too clear a faith in the
truth before us, to be in any sense dependent on the success or
the failure of a feeble human effort to exhibit it. You at least
will endeavour, as we proceed, to bear steadily in mind, that He
of Whom we speak and think is no mere tale or portrait of the
ancient world, no dead abstraction of modern or of medieval
thought, but a living Being, Who is an observant witness alike
of the words spoken in His Name and of the mental and moral
response which they elicit. If we must needs pass in review the
erring thoughts and words of men, let us be sure that our final
object is not a criticism of error, but the clearer apprehension
and possession of truth. They who believe, may by reason of
the very loyalty and fervour of their devotion, so anxiously and
eagerly watch the fleeting, earth-born mists which for a moment
have threatened to veil the Face of the Sun of Righteousness, as
to forget that the true weal and safety of the soul is only assured
while her eye is persistently fixed on His imperishable glory.
They who have known the aching misery of earnest doubt, may
perchance be encouraged, like the once sceptical Apostle, to
probe the wounds with which from age to age error has lacerated
Christ’s sacred form, and thus to draw from a nearer contact
with the Divine Redeemer the springs of a fresh and deathless
faith, that shall win and own in Him to all eternity the
unclouded Presence of its Lord and God.
LECTURE 1].
ANTICIPATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE IN THE OLD
TESTAMENT.
The Scripture, foreseeing that God would. justify the heathen through
faith, preached before the Gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall
all nations be blessed.—GAt. iii. 8.
Ir we endeavour to discover how often, and by what modes
of statement, such a doctrine as that of our Lord’s Divinity
is anticipated in the Old Testament, our conclusion will be
materially affected by the belief which we entertain respecting
the nature and the structure of Scripture itself. At first sight,
and judged by an ordinary literary estimate, the Bible presents
an appearance of being merely a large collection of hetero-
geneous writings. Historical records, ranging over many
centuries, biographies, dialogues, anecdotes, catalogues of moral
maxims, and accounts of social experiences, poetry, the most
touchingly plaintive and the most buoyantly triumphant, pre-
dictions, exhortations, warnings, varying in style, in authorship,
in date, in dialect, are thrown, as it seems, somewhat arbitrarily
into a single volume. No stronger tie is supposed to have
bound together materials so various and so ill-assorted, than
the interested or the too credulous industry of some clerical
caste in a distant antiquity, or at best than such uniformity
in the general type of thought and feeling as may naturally
be expected to characterize the literature of a nation or of
a race. But beneath the differences of style, of language, and
of method, which are undeniably prominent in the Sacred
Books, and which appear so entirely to absorb the attention
of a merely literary observer, a deeper insight will discover in
Scripture such manifest unity of drift and purpose, both moral
and intellectual, as to imply the continuous action of a Single
Mind. To this unity Scripture itself bears witness, and
nowhere more emphatically than in the text before us. ἢ
[ LECT.
}
|
;
Principle of an Organic Unity in H. oly Scripture. 45
ee ee “ὁ --
Observe that St. Paul does not treat the Old Testament
as being to him what Hesiod, for instance, became to the
Jater Greek world. He does not regard it as a great reperto-
rium or storehouse of quotations, which might be accidentally
or fancifully employed to illustrate the events or the theories
of a later age, and to which accordingly he had recourse for
purposes of literary ornamentation. On the contrary, St. Paul’s
is the exact inverse of this point of view. According to
St. Paul, the great doctrines and events of the Gospel dis-
pensation were directly anticipated in the Old Testament. If
the sense of the Old Testament became patent in the New,
“+ was because the New Testament was already latent in the
Olda, προϊδοῦσα δὲ ἡ γραφὴ ὅτι ἐκ πίστεως δικαιοῖ τὰ ἔθνη ὁ Θεὸς,
προευηγγελίσατο τῷ ᾿Αβραάμ. Scripture is thus boldly identified
with the Mind Which inspires it; Scripture is a living
Providence. The Promise to Abraham anticipates the work of
the Apostle ; the earliest of the Books of Moses determines
the argument of the Epistle to the Galatians. Such a position
is only intelligible when placed in the light of a belief in the
fundamental Unity of all Revelation, underlying, and strictly
compatible with its superficial variety. And this true, internal
Unity of Scripture, even when the exact canonical limits of
Scripture were still unfixed, was a common article of belief
to all Christian antiquity. It was common ground to the
sub-apostolic and to the Nicene age; to the East and to the
West ; to the School of Antioch and to the School of Alex-
andria; to mystical interpreters like St. Ambrose, and to lite-
ralists like St. Chrysostom ; to cold reasoners, such as Theodoret,
and to fervid poets such as Ephrem the Syrian ; to those who,
with Origen, conceded much to reason, and to those who,
with St. Cyril or St.Leo, claimed much for faith. Nay, this
belief in the organic oneness of Scripture was not merely
shared by schools and writers of divergent tendencies within
the Church; it was shared by the Church herself with her
most vehement heretical opponents. Between St. Athanasius
and the Arians there was no question as to the relevancy of
the reference in the book of Proverbs> to the pre-existent
Person of our Lord, although there was a vital difference
between them as to the true sense and force of that reference.
Scripture was believed to contain an harmonious and integral
aSt. Aug. Quest. in Ex. qu. 73: ‘quanquam et in Vetere Novum lateat,
et in Novo Vetus pateat.’ b Prov, vill. 22.
11 |
46 Organic Unity of Scripture consistent with 7:5
body of Sacred Truth, and each part of that body was treated
as being more or less directly, more or less ascertainably,’
in correspondence with the rest. This belief expressed itself
in the world-wide practice of quoting from any one book
of Scripture in illustration of the mind of any other book.
Instead of illustrating the sense of each writer only from
other passages in his own works, the existence of a sense common
to all the Sacred Writers was recognised, and each writer
was accordingly interpreted by the language of the others.
To a modern naturalistic critic it might seem a culpable,
or at least an undiscriminating procedure, when a Father
illustrates the Apostolical Epistles by a reference to the Pen-
tateuch, or even one Evangelist by another, or the dogmatic
sense of St. Paul by that of St. John. And unquestionably,
in a merely human literature, such attempts at illustration
would be misleading. The different intellectual horizons, modes
of thought, shades and turns of feeling, which constitute the
peculiarities of different writers, debar us from ascertaining,
under ordinary circumstances, the exact sense of any one
writer, except from himself. In an uninspired literature, such
as the Greek or the English, it would be absurd to appeal
to a primitive annalist or poet with a view to determining
the meaning of an author of some later age. We do not
suppose that Hesiod ‘foresaw’ the political doctrines of
Thucydides, or the moral speculations of Aristotle. We do
not expect to find in Chaucer or in Clarendon a clue to or
a forecast of the true sense of Macaulay or of Tennyson.
No one has ever imagined that either the Greek or the English
literature is a whole in such sense that any common purpose
runs persistently throughout it, or that we can presume upon
the existence of a common responsibility to some one line
of thought in the several authors who have created it, or
that each portion is under any kind of obligation to be in
- some profound moral and intellectual conformity with the rest. _
But the Church of Christ has ever believed her Bible to be
throughout and so emphatically the handiwork of the Eternal
Spirit, that it’is no absurdity in Christians to cite Moses
as foreshadowing the teaching of St. Paul and of St. John.
According to the tenor of Christian belief, Moses, St. Paul,
and St. John are severally regarded as free yet docile organs
of One Infallible Intelligence, Who places them at different
points along the line of His action in human history; Who
through them and others, as the ages pass before Him, slowly
[ LECT.
character as a vecord of successive Revelations. 47
unveils His Mind; Who anticipates the fulness of later reve-
lations by the hints contained in His earlier disclosures ; Who
in the compass of His boundless Wisdom ‘reacheth from one
end to another mightily, and sweetly ordereth all things.’
Such a belief in the organic unity of Scripture is not fatal
to a recognition of those differences between its several portions,
upon which some modern critics would lay an exaggerated
emphasis. When St. Paul recognises an organic connection
between the distant extremities of the records of Revelation,
he does not debar himself from recognising differences in form,
in matter, in immediate purpose, which part the Law of Moses
from the writings of the New Testament¢. The unlikeness
which subsists between the head and the lower ‘Timbs” of ‘an
animal ig not fatal to their” ¢ommon share~in its nervous
system and in the circulation of its blood. Nay more, this
oneness of Scripture is a truth compatible with the existence
within its compass of different measures and levels of Revela-
tion. The unity of consciousness in a human life is not
forfeited by growth of knowledge, or by difference of cireum-
stances, or by varieties of experience. Novatian compares
the unfolding of the Mind of God in Revelation to the gradual
breaking of the dawn, attempered as it is to the human eye,
which after long hours of darkness could not endure a sudden
outflash of noonday sunlighte. The Fathers trace in detail the
application of this principle to successive revelations in Scrip-
ture, first, of the absolute Unity of God, and afterwards, of
Persons internal to that Unityf. The Sermon on the Mount
contrasts its own higher moral level with that of the earlier
dispensation’. Ethically and dogmatically the New Testament
is an advance upon the Old, yet both are within the Unity
of Inspiration. Different degrees of light do not imply any
intrinsic contrariety. If the Epistle to the Galatians points
out the moral incapacity of the Mosaic Law, the Epistle to
the Hebrews teaches us its typical and unfailing significance.
If Christian converts from Judaism had been ‘called out of
¢ Wisd. viii. I.
ἂρ, ρ΄. cf. Gal. iii. 23-25 ; Rom. x. 4; Heb. viii. 13.
e Novatian, de Trin. c. 26: ‘Gradatim enim et per incrementa fragilitas
humana nutriri debet, . . periculosa enim sunt que magna sunt, si repentina
sunt. Nam etiam lux solis subita post tenebras splendore nimio insuetis
oculis non ostendet diem, sed potius faciet caecitatem.’
τ St. Epiphanius, Heres. 74.10; St. Gregor. Nazianzen, Orat. xxxi. n. 26.
Cf. Kuhn, Dogmatik, Band'ii. p. 5.
8 St. Matt. v. 21, 22,27, 28, 33, 343 comp. Ibid. xii. 5-8.
ud
48 Larlest hints respecting the Divine Nature.
darkness into God’s marvellous light,’ yet still ‘ whatsoever
things were written aforetime,’ in the Jewish Scriptures, ‘ were
written for the learning’ of Christians’.
You will have anticipated, my brethren, the bearing of these
remarks upon the question before us. There are explicit refer-
ences to the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity in the Old Testa-
ment, which we can only deny by discrediting the historical
value of the documents which contain them. But there are also
occult references to this doctrine which we are not likely to
detect, unless, while seeking them, we are furnished with an
exegetical principle, such as was that of the organic unity of
Scripture, as understood by the Ancient Church. The geologist
can inform us from surface indications, where and at what depths
to find the coal-field or the granite ; but we can all recognise
granite or coal when we see them in the sunlight. Let us then
first place ourselves under the guidance of the great minds of
antiquity, with a view to discovering some of those more hidden
allusions to the doctrine which are found in earlier portions of
the Old Testament Scriptures ; and let us afterwards trace, how-
ever hastily, those clearer intimations of it which abound in the
later Messianic prophecies, and which are indeed so plain, that
‘whoso runs may read them.’
I. (a) At the beginning of the Book of Genesis there appear
to be intimations of the existence of a plurality of Persons
within the One Essence of God. It is indeed somewhat remark-
able that the full significance of the two wordsj, by which Moses
describes the primal creative act of God, was not insisted upon
by the primitive Church teachers. It attracted attention in the
middle ages, and it was more particularly noticed after the re-
vival of Hebrew Letters. When Moses is describing this Divine
action, he joins a singular verb to a plural noun. Language, it
would seem, thus submits to a violent anomaly, that she may the
better hint at the mystery of Several Powers or Persons, Who
not merely act together, but Who constitute a Single Agent.
We are indeed told that this Name of God, Elohim, was borrowed
from Polytheistic sources, that it was retained in its plural form
in order to express majesty or magnificence, and that it was
then united to singular verbs and adjectives in order to
make it do the work of a Monotheistic Creed‘. But on the
other hand, it is confessed on all sides that the promulgation
and protection of a belief in the Unity of God was the central
h 1 St. Pet. ii. Ὁ. i Rom. xv. 4. J Gen. i.1, ON NII.
k Herder, Geist der Hebr. Poésie, Bd.-i. p. 48.
[ LECT.
The Inner Life of God adumbrated in Genesis. 49
and dominant object of the Mosaic literature and of the Mosaic
legislation. Surely such an object would not have been im-
perilled for no higher purpose than that of amplification. There
must have been a truth at stake which demanded the risk. The
Hebrew language could have described God by singular forms
such as El, Eloah, and no question would have been raised as to
the strictly Monotheistic force of those words. The Hebrew
language might have ‘amplified’ the idea of God thus conveyed
by less dangerous processes than the employment of a plural
form. Would it not have done so, unless the plural form had
been really necessary, in order to hint at the complex mystery
of God’s inner Life, until that mystery should be more clearly
unveiled by the explicit Revelations of a later day? The analo-
gies of the language may indeed prove that the plural form of
the word had a majestic force; but the risk of misunderstanding
would surely have counterbalanced this motive for using it, un-
less a vital need had demanded its retention. Nor will the
theory that the plural noun is merely expressive of majesty in
tombs son, avail to account for the plural verb in the words,
‘Let Us make man!,’ In these words, which precede the final
act and climax of the Creation, the early Fathers detected a
clear intimation of a Plurality of Persons in the Godhead™.,
The supposition that in these words a Single Person is in a
dramatic colloquy with Himself, is less reasonable than the
opinion that a Divine Speaker is addressing a multitude of in-
ferior beings, such as the Angels. But apart from other con-
siderations, we may well ask, what would be the ‘likeness’ or
‘image’ common to God and to the Angels, in which man was to
be created ®? or why should created essences such as the Angels
be invited to take part in a Creative Act at all? ach of the
foregoing explanations is really weighted with greater difficulties
than the Patristic doctrine, to the effect that the verb, ‘Let Us
make,’ points to a Plurality of Persons within the Unity of the
One Agent, while the ‘ Likeness,’ common to All These Persons
and itself One, suggests very pointedly Their participation in an
Undivided Nature. And in such sayings as ‘ Behold the man
1 Gen i. 26.
m Cf. the references in Petavius, de Trinitate, ii. 7. 6.
n ‘Non raro etiam veteres recentioresque interpretes, ut oN>s de angelis
intelligerent, theologicis potius quam exegeticis argumentis permoti esse
videnter; cf... . Gen. i. 26, 27, ex quo Samaritani cum Abenezra
πῆξις ad angelorum, non ad Dei, similitudinem creatum esse probant.’
zesenius, Thesaur. in voc, D'%)x, 2.
1] E
so A Threefold Personality tn God, suggested by
is become like One of Us®,’ used with reference to the Fall, or
‘Go to; let Us go down and there confound their language P,’
uttered on the eve of the dispersion of Babel, it is clear that an
equality of rank is distinctly assumed between the Speaker and
Those Whom He is addressing. The only adequate alternative
to that interpretation of these texts which is furnished by the
Trinitarian doctrine, and which sees in them a preparation for
the disclosures of a later age, is the violent supposition of some
kind of pre-Mosaic Olympus, the many deities of which are upon
a level of strict equality with each other4. But if this supposi-
tion be admitted, how are we to account for the presence of such
language in the Pentateuch at all? How can a people, con-
fessedly religious and intelligent, such as were the Hebrews,
have thus stultified their whole religious history and literature,
by welcoming or retaining, in a document of the highest possible
authority, a nomenclature which contained so explicit a denial of
the first Article of the Hebrew Faith ?
The true sense of the comparatively indeterminate language
which occurs at the beginning of Genesis, is more fully explained
by the Priestly Blessing which we find to be prescribed for ritual
usage in the Book of Numbers’. This blessing is spoken of as a
putting the Name of Gods, that is to say, a symbol unveiling
His Naturet, upon the children of Israel. Here then we dis-
cover a distinct limit to the number of the Persons Who are
hinted at in Genesis, as being internal to the Unity of God.
The Priest is to repeat the Most Holy Name Three times. The
Hebrew accentuation, whatever be its date, shews that the Jews
themselves saw in this repetition the declaration of a mystery in
the Divine Nature. Unless such a repetition had been designed
to secure the assertion of some important truth, a single mention
of the Sacred Name would have been more natural in a system,
the object of which was to impress belief in the Divine Unity
upon an entire people. This significant repetition, suggesting
© Gen. iii. 22. oon NSD. LXX. ὡς εἷς ἐξ ἡμῶν.
P Gen. xi. 7.
4 Klose, De polytheismi vestigiis apud Hebraeos ante Mosen, Gotting. 1830,
referred to by Kuhn, Dogmatik, Bd. ii. p. το.
τ Num. vi. 23-26. 5. Tbid. ver. 27.
τ ‘Nach der biblischen Anschauung und inbesondere des A.T. ist tiberhaupt
der Zusammenhang zwischen Name und Sache ein sehr enger, und ein ganz
anderer als im modernen Bewusstein, wo sich der Name meist zu einem bloss
conventionellen Zeichen abgeschwicht hat ; der Name ist die Sache selbst,
sofern diese in die Erscheinung tritt und erkannt wird, der ins Wort gefasste
Ausdruck des Wesens.’ Kénig, Theologie der Psalmen, p. 266.
[ Lect.
the Priestly Blessing and by the Vision of Isaiah. 51
without distinctly asserting a Trinity in the Being of God, did
its work in the mind of Israel. It is impossible not to be struck
with the recurrence of the Threefold rhythm of prayer or praise,
again and again, in the Psalter¥. Again and again the poetical
parallelism is sacrificed to the practical and theological object of
making the sacred songs of Israel contain an exact acknowledg-
ment of that inner law of God’s Nature, which had been
shadowed out in the Pentateuch. And to omit traces of this
influence of the priestly blessing which are discoverable in Jere-
miah and Ezekiel*, let us observe the crowning significance of
the vision of Isaiahy. In that adoration of the Most Holy
Three, Who yet are One%, by the veiled and mysterious Sera-
phim; in that deep self-abasement and misery of the Prophet,
who, though a man of unclean lips, had yet seen with his eyes
the King, the Lord of Hosts®; in that last enquiry on the part
of the Divine Speaker, the very terms of which reveal Him as
One and yet more than One,—what a flood of almost Gospel
light¢ is poured upon the intelligence of the elder Church! If
we cannot altogether assert with the opponents of the Lutheran
Calixtus, that the doctrine of the Trinity is so clearly contained
in the Old Testament as to admit of being deduced from it with-
out the aid of the Apostles and Evangelists; enough at least has
been said to shew that the Old Testament presents us with a
doctrine of the Divine Unity which is very far removed from
_the hard and sterile Monotheism of the Koran. Within the
Uncreated and Unapproachable Essence, Israel could plainly
distinguish the shadows of a Truth which we Christians fully
express at this hour, when we ‘acknowledge the glory of the
Eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty worship
the Unity.’
(8) From these adumbrations of Personal Distinctions within
the Being of God, we pass naturally to consider that series of
remarkable apparitions which are commonly known as the Theo-
phanies, and which form so prominent a feature in the early
history of the Old Testament Scriptures. When we are told
that God spoke to our fallen parents in Paradise4, and appeared
u Cf. Ps. xxix. 4, 5, and 7, 8; xcvi. 1, 2, and 7 8; cxv. 9, 10,113 cxviii.
2-4, and 10-12, and Is, 16.
* On this subject, see Dr. Pusey’s Letter to the Bishop of London, p. 131.
Y Isaiah vi. 2-8. z Ibid. ver. 3. a [bid. ver. 5.
Ὁ Ibid. ver. 8. © Heb. i. 1.
ἃ Gen. iii. 8: ‘They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the
garden in the cool of the day.’
11 | E 2
en nS --ς-ςς-ς
52 The Theophanies.
to Abram in his ninety-ninth year, there is no distinct intima-
tion of the mode of the Divine manifestation. But when ‘Je-
hovah appeared’ to the great Patriarch by the oak of Mamref,
Abraham ‘lift up his eyes and looked, and lo, Three Men stood
by hims.’ Abraham bows himself to the ground ; he offers
hospitality; he waits by his Visitors under the tree, and they
eath, One of the Three is the spokesman ; he appears to bear
the Sacred Name Jehovahi; he is seemingly distinguished from
the ‘two angels’ who went first to Sodomi; he promises that
the aged Sarah shall have a son, and that ‘all the nations of the
earth shall be blessed in Abraham.’ With him Abraham
intercedes for Sodom!; by him judgment is afterwards executed
upon the guilty city. When it is said that ‘Jehovah rained
nnon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah
out of heaven™,’ a sharp distinction is established between a
visible and an Invisible Person, each bearing the Most Holy
Name. ‘This distinction introduces us to the Mosaic and later
representations of that very exalted and mysterious being, the
sit ἼΒΟΟ or Angel of the Lord. The Angel of the Lord is cer-
tainly distinguished from Jehovah; yet the names by which he
is called, the powers which he assumes to wield, the honour
which is paid to him, shew that in him there was at least a
special Presence of God. He seems to speak sometimes in his
own name, and sometimes as if he were not a created person-
ality, but only a veil or organ of the Higher Nature That spoke
and acted through him. Thus he assures Hagar, as if speaking
in the character of an ambassador from God, that ‘the Lord had
heard her affliction®.’ Yet he promises her, ‘I will multiply thy
seed exceedingly®,’ and she in return ‘called the Name of the
Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me?P.’ He arrests
Abraham’s arm, when the Patriarch is on the point of carrying
out God’s bidding by offering Isaac as a sacrificed ; yet he asso- |
ciates himself with Him from Whom ‘Abraham had not with-
held his son, his only son.’ He accepts for himself Abraham’s _
obedience as rendered to God, and he subsequently at a second
appearance adds the promise, ‘In thy seed shall all the nations of
® Gen. xvii. 1-3: ‘The Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I
am the Almighty God. . . And Abram fell on his face: and God talked
with him.’ f Thid. xviii. 1.
85. Ibid. ver. 2. h Tbid. ver. 8. i Ibid. ver. 17.
i Compare Gen. xviii. 22 and xix. 1. LXX. ἦλθον δὲ of δύο ἄγγελοι.
K Gen. xviii. Io, 18, 1 Tbid. vers. 23-33. m Ibid. xix. 24,
» Ibid. xvi. 11. © Thid. ver. Io. P Ibid. ver. 13.
4 Ibid. xxii. 11, 12.
[ LECT.
if
The iis heophantes. δ
the earth be blessed ; because thou hast obeyed My voicer.’ He
appears to Jacob in a dream, he announces himself as ‘the God
of Bethel, where thou anointedst the pillar, and where thou
vowedst a vow unto Mes.’ Thus he was ‘the Lord’ who in
Jacob’s vision at Bethel had stood above the ladder and said, ‘ I
am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaact.’
He was, as it seems, the Chief of that angel-host whom Jacob
met at Mahanaim"; with him Jacob wrestled for a blessing at
Peniel; of him Jacob says, ‘I have seen God face to face, and
my life is preserved.’ When blessing the sons of Joseph, the
dying Patriarch invokes not only ‘the God Which fed me all my
life long unto this day,’ but also ‘the Angel which redeemed me
from all evil. In the desert of Midian, the Angel of the Lord
appears to Moses ‘in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.’
The bush remains miraculously unconsumedy. ‘ Jehovah’ sees
that Moses turns aside to see, and ‘ Elohim’ calls to Moses out
of the midst of -the bush%. The very ground on which Moses
stands is holy ; and the Lawgiver hides his face, ‘for he was
afraid to look upon Goda.’ The Speaker from the midst of the
bush announces Himself as the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob®. His are the Mercy, the Wisdom,
the Providence, the Power, the Authority of the Most High? ;
nay, all the Divine attributes’. When the children of Israel are
making their escape from Egypt, the Angel of the Lord leads
them; in the hour of danger he places himself between the camp
of Israel and the host of Pharaoh4, How deeply Israel felt the
value of his protecting care, we may learn from the terms of the
message to the King of Edome. God promises that the Angel
shall keep Israel in the way, and bring the people to Canaan;
his presence is a guarantee that the Amorites and other idola-
trous races shall be cut offg. Israel is to obey this Angel, and
to provoke him not; for the Holy ‘Name is in him}. Even
after the sin of the Golden Calf, the promised guardianship of
the Angel is not forfeited ; while a distinction is clearly drawn
between the Angel and Jehovah Himselfi. Yet the Angel is
τ Gen. xxii. 18. 8 Thid. xxxi. 11, 13. ὁ Thid. xxviii. 13.
ἃ Tbid. xxxii. 1. x Thid. xlviii. 15, 16. y Exod. iii. I, 2.
z Thbid. ver. 4. a Jbid. ver. 6. b Ibid. vers. 7-14.
© Ibid. vers. 14-16. ἃ Exod. xiv. 10. e Num. xx. 16.
f Exod. xxiii. 20; compare xxxil. 34.
ὃ Ibid. xxiii. 23; cf. Joshua v. 13-15.
h Exod. xxiii. 21, 11 "Ὁ "5.
i Tbid. xxxiii. 2, 3: “1 will send an angel before thee . . . for J will not
go up in the midst of thee; for thou art a stiff-necked people’
11 |
54 Lhe Theophantes.
expressly called the Angel of God’s Presence*; he fully represents
God. God must in some way have been present in him. No
merely created being, speaking and acting in his own right,
could have spoken to men, or have allowed men to act towards
himself, as did the Angel of the Lord. Thus he withstands
Balaam, on his faithless errand, and bids him go with the mes-
sengers of Balak ; but adds, ‘Only the word that I shall speak
unto thee, that thou shalt speak.’ As ‘Captain of the host of
the Lord,’ he appears to Joshua in the plain of Jericho. Joshua
worships God in him!; and the Angel asks of the conqueror of
Canaan the same tokens of reverence as had been exacted from
Moses™, . Besides the reference in the Song of Deborah» to the
curse pronounced against Meroz by the Angel of the Lord, the
Book of Judges contains accounts of three appearances, in each
of which we are scarcely sensible of the action of a created per-
sonality, so completely is the language and bearing that of the
Higher Nature present in the Angel. At Bochim he expostu-
lates with the assembled people for their breach of the covenant
in failing to exterminate the Canaanites. God speaks by him as
in His own Name ; He refers to the covenant which He had
made with Israel, and to His bringing the people out of Egypt ;
He declares that, on account of their disobedience He will not
drive the heathen nations out of the land®. In the account of his
appearance to Gideon, the Angel is called sometimes the Angel
of the Lord, sometimes the Lord, or Jehovah. He bids Gideon
attack the Midianite oppressors of Israel, and adds the promise,
‘I will be with thee.’ Gideon places an offering before the
Angel, that he may, if he wills, manifest his character by some
sign. The Angel touches the offering with the end of his staff,
whereupon fire rises up out of the rock and consumes the offering.
The Angel disappears, and Gideon fears that he will die because
he has seen ‘the Angel of the Lord face to face?.’ When the
wife of Manoah is reporting the Angel’s first appearance to
herself, she says that ‘A man of God came’ to her, ‘and his
countenance was like the countenance of the Angel of God, very
terrible.’ She thus speaks of the Angel as of a Being already
k Exod. xxxiii. 14 ; compare Isaiah lxiii. 9.
1 In Josh. vi. 2 the captain of the Lord’s Host (cf. ch. v. 14) appears to
be called Jehovah. But cf. Mill, Myth. Int. p. 354.
m Josh. v. 13-15; Exod. iii. 5 ; compare Exod. xxiii. 23.
n Judges v. 23. ° Ibid. ii. 1-5. See Keil, Comm. in loc.
Ρ Judg. vi. 11-22. Keil, Comm. in loc. See Hengstenberg, Christol,
O. Test., vol. iv. append. iii. p. 292.
[ LECT.
Who was the ‘Angel of the Lord?’ 55
known to Israel. At his second appearance the Angel bids
Manoah, who ‘knew not that he was an Angel of the Lord,’ and
offered him common food, to offer sacrifice unto the Lord. The
Angel refuses to disclose his Name, which is ‘ wonderful 4.’
When Manoah offers a kid with a meat-offering upon a rock
unto the Lord, the Angél mounts visibly up to heaven in the
flame of the sacrifice. Like Gideon, Manoah fears death after
such near contact with so exalted a Being of the other world.
_£We shall surely die,’ he exclaims to his wife, ‘because we ee
seen God*,’
But you ask, Who was this Angel? The Jewish interpreters
vary in their explanationss. The earliest Fathers answer with
general unanimity that he was the Word or Son of God Himself.
For example, in the Dialogue with Trypho, St. Justin proves
against his Jewish opponent, that God did not appear to Abra-
ham by the oak of Mamre, before the appearance of the ‘three
men,’ but that He was One of the Threet. Trypho admits this,
but he objects that it did not prove that there was any God
besides Him Who had appeared to the Patriarchs. Justin re-
plies that a Divine Being, personally although not substantially
distinct from the supreme God, is clearly implied in the state-
ment that ‘the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah,
brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven¥.’ Trypho
yields the point. Here it is plain that St. Justin did not sup-
pose that a created being was called God on account of his
mission; St. Justin believes that One Who was of the substance
of God appeared to Abraham*®. Again, the Fathers of the first
Synod at Antioch, in the letter which was sent to Paulus of
Samosata before his deposition, state that the ‘Angel of the
|
Ϊ
}
|
Ϊ
|
a opdn, cf. Is. ix. 6.
r Judges xiii. 6-22. Cf. Keil, Comm. in loc. Hengst. ubi supra. Vi-
tringa de Angelo Sacerdote, obs. vi. 14.
5. Cf. the authorities quoted by Drach, Lettres d’un Rabbin Converti,
Lettre ii. p. 169. On the other side, Abenezra, in Exod. iii. 2.
t With St. Justin’s belief that the Son and two Angels appeared to Abra-
ham, cf. Tertullian, adv. Mare. ii. 27, iii. g; St. Hil. de Trina 1. 2: chat
three created Angels appeared to Abraham was the opinion of St. Augustine
(De Civ. Dei, x. 8, xvi. 29). St. Ambrose sees in the ‘ three men’ an adum-
bration of the Blessed Trinity: ‘Tres vidit, et unum Dominum appellavit.’
De Abraham, i. c. §; Prudent. Apotheosis, 28. This seems to be the sense
of the English Church. See First Lesson for Evensong on Trinity Sunday.
u Gen, xix. 24.
x Dial. cum Tryph. 8 56, sqq. On the appearance in the burning bush,
a § 59-61; cf. too ch. 127. Comp. St. Justin, Apol. i. ο. 63.
Il
56 Opinion of the earlier Fathers,
Father being Himself Lord and God, μεγάλης βουλῆς ἄγγελος 3,
appeared to Abraham, and to Jacob, and to Moses in the burning
bushz.’ It is unnecessary to multiply quotations in proof of a
fact which is beyond dispute ἃ,
The Arian controversy led to a modification of that estimate
of the Theophanies which had prevailed in the earlier Church.
The earlier Church teachers had clearly distinguished, as Scripture
distinguishes, between the Angel of the Lord, Himself, as they
believed, Divine, and the Father. But the Arians endeavoured
to widen this personal distinctness into a deeper difference, a —
difference of Natures. Appealing to the often-assigned ground >
of the belief respecting the Theophanies which had prevailed in
the ante-Nicene Church, the Arians argued that the Son had
been seen by the Patriarchs, while the Father had not been seen,
and that an Invisible Nature was distinct from and higher than
a nature which was cognizable by the senses®. St. Augustine
boldly faced this difficulty, and his great work on the Trinity
gave the chief impulse to another current of interpretation in
the Church. St. Augustine strenuously insists upon the Scrip-
tural truth4 of the Invisibility of God as Gode. The Son,
y This gloss of the LXX. in Is. ix. 6 was a main ground of the early
Patristic application of the title of the Angel to God the Son. ‘Although
Malachi foretells our Lord’s coming in the Flesh under the titles of ‘the
Lord,” “the Angel,” or ‘‘ Messenger of the Covenant,” (chap. iii. 1) there is
no proof that He is anywhere spoken of absolutely as “the Angel,” or that
His Divine Nature is so entitled.’ Dr. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, p. 516,
note I.
z Mansi, Conc. i. p. 1035. .
® Compare however St. Irenzeus adv. Her. iv. 7. § 4; Clem. Alex. Ped. i. 7 ;
Theophilus ad Autol. ii. 31 ; Constit. Apostol. v. 20; Tertullian. adv. Prax.
cap. 13, 14, and 15; St. Cyprian. adv. Judeos, ii. c. 5,6; St. Cyr. Hieros.
Catech. 10 ; St. Hil. de Trin. lib. 4 and 5; St. Chrysost. Hom. in Genes. 42, 48;
Theodoret, Interr. v. in Exod. (Op. i. p. 121), on Exod. iii. 2. Cf some
additional authorities given by P. Vandenbroeck, De Theophaniis, sub Vet.
Testamento, p. 17, 8qq; Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. lib. i. c. 1.
b e.g. cf. Tertullian. adv. Mare. il. c. 27.
¢ St. Aug. Serm. vii. ἢ. 4. The Arian criticism ran thus: ‘ Filius visus est
patribus, Pater non est visus: invisibilis autem et visibilis diversa natura est.’
ἃ δύ, John i. 18, &c.
e ¢Tpsa enim natura vel substantia vel essentia, vel quolibet alio nomine
appellandum est id ipsum, quod Deus est, quidquid illud est corporaliter vidert
non potest.’ De Trin. ii. c. 18, ἢ. 35. The Scotists, who opposed the general
Thomist doctrine to the effect that a created angel was the instrument of the
Theophanies, carefully guarded against the ideas that the substance of God
could be seen by mah in the body, or that the bodily form which they be-
lieved to have been assumed was personally united to the Eternal Word,
since this was peculiar to the Divine Incarnation. (Scotus in lib. ii. sent.
[ LECT.
how modified by St. Augustine. oy
therefore, as being truly God, was by nature as invisible as the
Father. If the Son appeared to the Patriarchs, He appeared
through the intermediate agency of a created being, who repre-
sented Him, and through whom He spoke and actedf. If the
Angel who represented Him spoke and acted with a Divine
authority, and received Divine honours, we are referred to the
force of the general law whereby, in things earthly and heavenly,
an ambassador is temporarily put in the place of the Master who
accredits himg. But Augustine further warns us against at-
tempting to say positively, Which of the Divine Persons mani-
fested Himself, in this or that instance, to Patriarchs or Prophets,
except where some remarkable indications determine our con-
clusion very decisivelyh. The general doctrine of this great
teacher, that the Theophanies were not direct appearances of a
Person in the Godhead, but Self-manifestations of God through
a created being, had been hinted at by some earlier Fathers i,
dist. 8.) Scotus explains that the being who asswmes a bodily form, need
only be “ intrinsecus motor corporis; nam tunc assumit, id est ad se sumit,
quia ad operationes proprias sibi explendas utitur illo sicut instrumento.’
(Ibid. Scholion i.)
f « Proinde illa omnia, que Patribus visa sunt, cum Deus illis secundum
suam dispensationem temporibus congruam presentaretur, per creaturam
facta esse, manifestum est ..... Sed jam satis quantum existimo ...
demonstratum est, . . . quod antiquis patribus nostris ante Incarnationem
Salvatoris, cum Deus apparere dicebatur, voces ille ac species corporales per
angelos facte sunt, sive ipsis loquentibus vel agentibus aliquid ex persona
Dei, sicut etiam prophetas solere ostendimus, sive assumentibus ex creatura
quod ipsi non essent, ubi Deus figurate demonstraretur hominibus ; quod
genus significationum nec Prophetas omisisse, multis exemplis docet Scrip-
tura.’ De Trin. iii. 11, n. 22, 27.
© Sed ait aliquis: cur ergo Scriptum est, Dixit Dominus ad Moysen; et
non potits, Dixit angelus ad Moysen? Quia cum verba judicis preeco pro-
nuntiat, non scribitur in Gestis, ille preeco dixit; sed ille judex; sic etiam
loquente prophet& sancto, etsi dicamus Propheta dixit, nihil aliud quam
Dominum dixisse intelligi volumus. Et si dicamus, Dominus dixit ; pro-
phetam non subtrahimus, sed quis per eum dixerit admonemus.’ De Trin. iii.
mort, τὶ. 22.
h Nihil aliud, quantum existimo, divinorum sacramentorum modesta et
cauta consideratio persuadet, nisi ut temer? non dicamus, Quenam ex Trini-
tate Persona cuilibet Patrum et Prophetarum in aliquo corpore vel simili-
tudine corporis apparuerit, nisi cum continentia lectionis aliqua probabilia
circumponit indicia. .. . Per subjectam creaturam non solum Filium vel
Spiritum Sanctum, sed etiam Patrem corporali specie sive similitudine mor-
talibus sensibus significationem Sui dare potuisse credendum est.’ De Trin. ii.
Snip, Ni. 35.
i Compare St.Ireneus adv. Her. iv. 20, n. 7 and 24. ‘Verbum naturaliter
quidem invisibile, palpabile in hominibus factum.? Origen (Hom. xvi. in
' δ.) speaking of the vision in Exod. iii. says, ‘ God was here beheld in the
ngel,’
11 |
58 Significance of the Theophanies.
and was insisted on by contemporary and later writers of the
highest authority’, This explanation has since become the
predominant although by no means the exclusive judgment of
the Church!; and if it is not unaccompanied by considerable
difficulties when we apply it to the sacred text, it certainly
seems to relieve us of greater embarrassments than any which it
creates ™,
But whether the ante-Nicene (so to term it) or the Augustinian
line of interpretation be adopted with respect to the Theophanies,
no sincere believer in the historical trustworthiness of Holy
Scripture can mistake the importance of their relation to the
doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity. If the Theophanies were not,
as has been pretended, mythical legends, the natural product of
the Jewish mind at a particular stage of its development, but
actual matter-of-fact occurrences in the history of ancient Israel, |
must we not see in them a deep Providential meaning? Whether
in them the Word or Son actually appeared, or whether God
made a created angel the absolutely perfect exponent of His
Thought and Will, do they not point in either case to a purpose
in the Divine Mind which would only be realized when man had
been admitted to a nearer and more palpable contact with God
than was possible under the Patriarchal or Jewish dispensations ?
Do they not suggest, as their natural climax and explanation,
some Pergonal Self-unveiling of God before the eyes of His
creatures? Would not God appear to have been training His
people, by this long and mysterious series of communications, at
length to recognise and to worship Him when hidden under, and
indissolubly one with a created nature? Apart from the specific
circumstances which may seem to have explained each Theophany
at the time of its taking place, and considering them as a series
of phenomena, is there any other account of them so much in
k St. Jerome (ed. Vall.) in Galat. iti. 19 : ‘Quod in omni Veteri Testa-
mento ubi angelus primum visus refertur et postea quasi Deus loquens
inducitur, angelus quidem ver’ ex ministris pluribus quicunque est visus, sed
in illo Mediator loquatur, Qui dicit ; Ego sum Deus Abraham, etc. Nec
mirum si Deus loquatur in angelis, cum etiam per angelos, qui in hominibus
sunt, loquatur Deus in prophetis, dicente Zaccharié: et ait angelus, qui
loquebatur in me, ac deinceps inferente ; hac dicit Deus Omnipotens.’ Cf.
St. Greg. Magn. Mag. Moral. xxviii. 2; St. Athan. Or. iii. c. Arian. § 14.
1 The earlier interpretation has been more generally advocated by English
divines. P. Vandenbroeck’s treatise already referred to shews that it still has _
adherents in other parts of the Western Church.
m See especially Dr. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, p. 515, note 20; p. 516,
566.
| LECT.
Doctrine of the Kochmah or Wisdom. 59
harmony with the general scope of Holy Scripture, as that they
were successive lessons addressed to the eye and to the ear of
ancient piety, in anticipation of a coming Incarnation of
God ?
(y) This preparatory service, if we may venture so to term it,
which had been rendered to the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity
by the Theophanies in the world of sense, was seconded by the
upgrowth and development of a belief respecting the Divine
Kochmah or Wisdom in the region of inspired ideas.
1. The ‘ Wisdom’ of the Jewish Scriptures is certainly more
than a human endowment ®, and even, as it would seem, more
than an Attribute of God. It may naturally remind us of the
Archetypal Ideas of Plato, but the resemblance is scarcely more
than superficial. The ‘Wisdom’ is hinted at in the Book of
Job. In a well-known passage of majestic beauty, Job replies to
-his own question, Where shall the Wisdom® be found? He re-
presents Wisdom as it exists in God, and as it is communicated in
the highest form to man. In God,‘ the Wisdom’ is that Eternal
Thought, in which the Divine Architect ever beheld His future
creation. In man, Wisdom is seen in moral growth ; it is ‘the
fear of the Lord,’ and ‘to depart from evil4.’ The Wisdom is
here only revealed as underlying, on the one side, the laws of the
physical universe, on the other, those of man’s moral nature.
Certainly as yet, ‘Wisdom’ is not in any way represented as
personal ; but we make a great step in passing to the Book of
Proverbs. In the Book of Proverbs the Wisdom is co-eternal
with Jehovah ; Wisdom assists Him in the work of Creation;
_ Wisdom reigns, as one specially honoured, in the palace of the
King of Heaven ; Wisdom is the adequate object of the eternal
joy of God; God possesses Wisdom, Wisdom delights in God.
2 The word nnn is, of course, used in this lower sense. It is applied to
an inspired skill in making priestly vestments (Exod. xxviii. 3), or sacred
furniture generally (Ibid. xxxi. 6 and xxxvi. I, 2); to fidelity to known truth
(Deut. iv.6 ; cf. xxxii. 6) ; to great intellectual accomplishments (Dan. i. 17).
Solomon was typically pom: his ‘ Wisdom’ was exhibited in moral pene-
tration and judgment (1 Kings iii. 28, x. 4, sqq.) ; in the knowledge of many
subjects, specially of the works of God in the natural world (Ibid. iv. 33, 34);
in the knowledge of various poems and maxims, which he had either composed
or which he remembered (Ibid. iv. 32; Prov.i. 1). Wisdom, as communi-
cated to men, included sometimes supernatural powers (Dan. v. 11), but
specially moral virtue (Ps. xxxvii. 30, li. 6; Prov. x. 31) ; and piety to God
(Ps. cxi. 10). In God πΏΣΓΙ is higher than any of these; He alone originally
possesses It (Job xii. 12, 13, xxviii. 12, sqq.).
1 Job xxviii. 12, m2Nn. P Ibid. vers. 23-27. a Ibid. ver. 28.
II
60 Lhe ‘Wisdom’ in the Hebrew Scriptures,
‘ Jehovah (says Wisdom) possessed Me in the beginning of His way,
Before His works of old.
I was set up from everlasting,
From the beginning, or ever the earth was.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth ;
When there were no fountains abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills was I brought forth :
While as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields,
Nor the highest part of the dust of the world.
When He prepared the heavens, I was there :
When He set a compass upon the face of the depth:
When He established the clouds above :
When He strengthened the fountains of the deep :
When He gave to the sea His decree,
That the waters should not pass His commandment :
When He appointed the foundations of the earth :
Then I was by Him, as One brought up with Him:
And I was daily His Delight, rejoicing always before Him;
Rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth ;
And My delights were with the sons of men *.’
Are we listening to the language of a real Person or only of a
poetic personification? A group of critics defends each hypo-
thesis ; and those who maintain the latter, point to the picture
of Folly in the succeeding chapters. But may not a study of
that picture lead to a very opposite conclusion? Folly is there
no mere abstraction, she is a sinful woman of impure life, ‘ whose
guests are in the depths of hell.’ The work of Folly is the very
work of the Evil One, the real antagonist of the Divine Koch-
mah. Folly is the principle of absolute Unwisdom, of consum-
mate moral Evil. Folly, by the force of the antithesis, enhances
our impression that ‘the Wisdom’ is personal. The Arians
understood the word ὕ which is rendered ‘ possessed’ in our Eng-
lish Bible, to mean ‘ created,’ and they thus degraded the Wisdom
to the level of a creature. But they did not doubt that this
created Wisdom was a real being or person¥. Modern critics
* Prov. viii. 22-31. For Patristic expositions of this passage, see Petavius,
de Trin. ii. 1.
& Prov. (tx; ΤΠ 10:
* The Arians appealed to the LXX. reading ἔκτισε (not ἐκτήσατο). On
κτίζειν as meaning any kind of production, see Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. lib. ii.
c. 6, sec. 8. In a note on Athan. Treatises, ii. 342, Dr. Newman cites Aquila,
St. Basil, St. Gregory Nyss. and St. Jerome, for the sense ἐκτήσατο.
« As Kuhn summarily observes: ‘Das war iiberhaupt nicht die Frage in
christlichen Alterthum, ob hier yon einem Wesen die Rede sei, das war allge-
mein anerkannt, sondern von welcher Art, in welchem Verhiiltniss zu Gott
es gedacht sei.” Dogmatik, ii. p. 29, note (2).
[ LECT.
and in the Greek Sapiential Books. 61
know that if we are to be guided by the clear certain sense of
the Hebrew root x, we shall read ‘ possessed’ and not ‘ created,’
and they admit without difficulty that the Wisdom is uncreated
by, and co-eternal with the Lord Jehovah. But they resolve
Wisdom into an impersonal and abstract idea or quality. The
true interpretation is probably related to these opposite mistakes,
as was the Faith of the Church to the conflicting theories of the
Arians and the Sabellians. Each error contributes something to
the cause of truth; the more ancient may teach us that the
Wisdom is personal ; the more modern, that it is uncreated and
co-eternal with God.
2. But even if it should be thought, that ‘the personified idea
of the Mind of God in Creation,’ rather than the presence of ‘a
distinct HypostasisY,’ is all that can with certainty be discovered
in the text of the Book of Proverbs ; yet no one, looking to the
contents of those sacred Sapiential Books, which lie outside the
precincts of the Hebrew Canon, can well doubt that something
more had been inferred by the most active religious thought in
the Jewish Church. The Son of Sirach, for instance, opens his
great treatise with a dissertation on the source of Wisdom.
Wisdom is from all eternity with God ; Wisdom proceeds from
God before any finite thing, and is poured out upon all His
Worksz. But Wisdom, thus ‘created from the beginning before
the world, and having an unfailing existence ἃ, is bidden by God
to make her ‘dwelling in Jacob, and her inheritance in Israel >.’
Wisdom is thus the prolific mother of all forms of moral beauty ὁ ;
she is given to all of God’s true children‘; but she is specially
resident in the holy Law, ‘which Moses commanded for an
heritage unto the congregations of Jacob®.’ In that beautiful
chapter which contains this passage, Wisdom is conceived of as
all-operative, yet as limited by nothing ; asa physical yet also as
a spiritual power; as eternal, and yet having definite relations to
time ; above all, as perpetually extending the range of her fruitful
x This both in Hebrew and (with one exception) in Arabic. Cf. Gesenius,
Thesaurus, in 72) and L:3,. So, too, the Syr. ero, Neither Gen. xiv. 19
nor Deut. xxxii. 6 require that 1p should be translated ‘created,’ still less
Ps. cxxxix. 13, where it means ‘to have rights over.’ Gesenius quotes no
other examples. The current meaning of the word is ‘to acquire’ or
‘ possess,’ as is proved by its certain sense in the great majority of cases where
it is used.
¥ So apparently Déllinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. x. part iii,
sec. 2. ἡ
2 Ecclus. i. I-10. a Thid. xxiv. 9. Ὁ Tbid. vers. 8-12.
¢ Tbid. vers. 13-18. a [bid. 9 Tbid, ver. 23.
11 |
62 Identity of the Alexandrian ‘Wisdom’
self-manifestation f. Not to dwell upon language to the same
effect in Baruch, we may observe that in the Book of Wisdom
the Sophia is more distinctly personal h. If this Book is less
prominently theocratic than Ecclesiasticus, it is even more ex-
plicit as to the supreme dignity of Wisdom, as seen in its unique
relation to God. Wisdom is a pure stream flowing from the
glory of the Almightyi; Wisdom is that spotless mirror which
reflects the operations of God, and upon which He gazes as He
worksk; Wisdom is the Brightness of the Everlasting Light! ;
Wisdom is the very Image of the Goodness of God™, Material
symbols are unequal to doing justice to so spiritual an essence :
‘ Wisdom is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order
of the stars ; being compared with the light she is found before
itn.’ ‘Wisdom is more moving than any motion: she passeth
and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness®.’ Her
sphere is not merely Palestine, but the world, not this or that
age, but the history of humanity. All that is good and true in
human thought is due to her: ‘in all ages entering into holy
souls she maketh them friends of God and prophets.’ Is there
not here, in an Alexandrian dress, a precious and vital truth
sufficiently familiar to believing Christians? Do we not already
seem to catch the accents of those weighty formule by which
Apostles will presently define the pre-existent glory of their
Majestic Lord? Yet are we not steadily continuing, with no
very considerable measure of expansion, in that very line of
sacred thought, to which the patient servant of God in the
desert, and the wisest of kings in Jerusalem, have already, and
so authoritatively, introduced us ?
3. The doctrine may be traced at a stage beyond, in the
writings of Philo Judeeus. We at once observe that its form is
altered; instead of the Wisdom or Sophia we have the Logos or
Word. Philo indeed might have justified the change of phrase-
ology by an appeal even to the Hebrew Scriptures. In the
Hebrew Books, the Word of Jehovah manifests the energy of
f Cf. especially Ecclus. xxiv. 5-8, 10-18, 25-28, and i. 14-17.
8. Compare Baruch iii. 14, 15, 29-32, 35; 36, and the remarkable verse 37.
h Liicke, who holds that in the Book of Proverbs and in Ecclesiasticus
there is merely a personification, sees a ‘ dogmatic hypostatizing’ in Wisd. vii.
22, sqq. Cf. too Dahne, Alexandrinische Religionsphilosophie, ii. 134, το.
j Wisd. vii. 25.
k Jbid. 26: ἔσοπτρον ἀκηλίδωτον τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐνεργείας.
1 Thid. ἀπαύγασμα φωτὸς ἀϊδίου, compare Heb. i. 3.
m Tbid. εἰκὼν τῆς ἀγαθότητος τοῦ Θεοῦ, compare 2 Cor, iv. 4, Col. i. 15.
Ὁ Jbid. ver. 29. ° Ibid. ver. 24, compare ver. 27. P Ibid. ver. 27.
[ LECT.
with the Logos of Philo Fudacus. 63
God: He creates the heavens?; He governs the world’. Ac-
cordingly, among the Palestinian Jews, the Chaldee paraphrasts
almost always represent God as acting, not immediately, but
through the mediation of the Memra‘’ or Word. In the Greek
Sapiential Books, the Word is apparently identical with the
Wisdomt; but the Wisdom is always prominent, the Word is
rarely mentioned¥. Yet the Logos of KEcclesiasticus is the
organ of creation’, while in the Book of Wisdom the Logos is
clearly personified, and is a minister of the Divine Judgment *.
In Philo, however, the Sophia falls into the background Y, and
a Ps, xxxiii. 6. m7 107.
r Ps, cxlvii. 15; Isai. lv. 11. 8 9710" or 137.
t Thus in Ecclus. xxiv. 3 the σοφία Θεοῦ uses the language which might
be expected of the λόγος Θεοῦ, in saying that she came forth from the Mouth
of the Most High; while in chap. i. 5 we are told expressly that πηγὴ σοφίας
λόγος Θεοῦ. In the Book of Wisdom σοφία is identified on the one side
with the ἅγιον πνεῦμα παιδείας (chap. i. 4, 5), and the πνεῦμα Κυρίου (ver. 7);
πνεῦμα and σοφία are united in the expression πνεῦμα σοφίας (vii. 7; compare
ix. 17). On the other side σοφία and the λόγος are both instruments of
creation (Wisd. ix. 1,2; for the πνεῦμα, cf. Gen. i. 2, and Ps, xxxiil. 6),
they both ‘come down from heaven’ (Ibid. ver. 10, and xviii. 15, and the
πνεῦμα, ix. 17), and achieve the deliverance of Israel from Egypt (cf. xviii.
15 with x. 15-20). The representation seems to suggest no mere ascription
of identical functions to altogether distinct conceptions or Beings, but a
real inner essential unity of the Spirit, the Word, and the Wisdom. “ Es ist
an sich eine und dieselbe gittliche Kraft, die nach aussen wirksam ist, aber es
sind verschiedene Beziehungen und Arten dieser Wirksamkeit, wornach sie
Wort, Geist, Weisheit Gottes gennant wird.’ Kuhn, p. 27. That the
πνεῦμα really pointed to a distinct Hypostasis in God became plain only at a
later time to the mind of His people. On the relations of the m7 nn, the
mon, and the m7 417 to each other, see Kuhn, p. 24.
« Kuhn has stated the relation of the ‘Wisdom, ‘ Word,’ and ‘ Spirit’ to
God and to each other, in the Sapiential Books, as follows :—‘ Die Unter-
scheidung Gottes und Seiner Offenbarung in der Welt ist die Folie, auf der
sich ein innerer Unterschied in Gott abspiegelt, der Unterschied Gottes niim-
lich von Seinem Worte, Seiner Weisheit. Diese, wiewohl sie zunichst blosse
Eigenschaften und somit Sein an Sich seiendes Wesen, oder Krafte und
Wirksamkeiten Gottes nach aussen, somit dasselbe Wesen, sofern Hs Sich in
der Welt manifestirt, ausdriicken, erscheinen sofort tiefer gefasst als etwas fiir
sich, unter dem Gesichtspunkt eines eigenen gittlichen Wesens, einer gitt-
lichen Person. Unter einander verhalten sie sich aber so, dass einerseits
Wort und Geist, desgleichen andrerseits Wort und Weisheit Gottes theils
unterschieden, theils aber auch wieder wesentlich gleichbedeutend genommen
sind, so dass ausser dem Hauptunterschiede Gottes von Seinem Andern noch
ein weiterer, der Unterschied dieses Andern von einem Dritten hinzuzukom-
men, zugleich aber auch die Identitit des ihnen (unter Sich und mit Gott)
gemeinsamen Wesens angedeutet zu sein scheint.’ Lehre von Gottl.
Dreieinigkeit, p. 23.
VY Ecclus. xliii. 26. x Wisd. xviii. 15.
y Philo distinguishes between Wisdom and Philosophy: Philosophy or
a
ΒΟ δον νυ τ τ τ Ὁ“ --Ἕο
64 Double character of the mind of Philo.
ON a eee
the Logos is the symbol of the general doctrine, for other reasons
perhaps, but mainly as a natural result of Philo’s profound sym-
pathy with Stoic and Platonic thought. If the Book of Wisdom
adopts Platonic phraseology, its fundamental ideas are continuous
with those of the Hebrew Scriptures”. Philo, on the contrary,
is a hearty Platonist; his Platonism enters into the very marrow
of his thought. It is true that in Philo Platonism and the
Jewish Revelation are made to converge. But the process of their
attempted assimilation is an awkward and violent one, and it
involves the great Alexandrian in much involuntary self-contra-
diction. Philo indeed is in perpetual embarrassment between
the pressure of his intellectual Hellenic instincts on the one side,
and the dictates of his religious conscience as a Jewish believer
on the other. He constantly abandons himself to the currents
of Greek thought around him, and then he endeavours to set
himself right with the Creed of Sinai, by throwing his Greek
sdeas into Jewish forms. If his Logos is apparently moulded
after the pattern of the νοῦς βασιλικὸς ἐν TH τοῦ Διὸς φύσει----ἰ 6
Regal Principle of Intelligence in the Nature of Zeus—with
which we meet in the Philebus of Plato, Philo doubtless would
fain be translating and explaining the mm 10 of the Hebrew
Canon, in perfect loyalty to the Faith of Israel. The Logos of
Philo evidently pre-supposes the Platonic doctrine of Ideas ; but
then, with Philo, these Ideas are something more than the
models after which creation is fashioned, or than the seals which
wise living is the slave of Wisdom or Science ; σοφία is ἐπιστήμη θείων καὶ
ἀνθρωπίνων καὶ τῶν τούτων αἰτιῶν (Cong. Qu. Erud. Grat. § 14, ed. Mangey,
tom. i. p. 530). Philo explains Exod. xxiv. 6 allegorically, as the basis of a
distinction between Wisdom as it exists in men and in God, τὸ θεῖον γένος
ἀμιγὲς καὶ ἄκρατον (Quis Rer. Div. Her. § 38, 1. p. 498). Wisdom is the
mother of the world (Quod Det. Potiori Insid. § 16, i. p. 202); her wealth
is without limits, she is like a deep well, a perennial fountain, &c. But Philo
does not in any case seem to personify Wisdom ; his doctrine of Wisdom is
eclipsed by that of the Logos.
z Vacherot (Ecole d@’Alexandrie, vol. i. p. 134, Introd.) says of Wisdom
and Ecclesiasticus: ‘Ces monumens renferment peu de traces des idées
Grécques dont ils semblent avoir précédé Vinvasion en Orient.’ Ecclesiasticus
was written in Hebrew under the High-Priesthood of Simon I, B.c. 303-284,
by Jesus the Son of Sirach, and translated into Greek by his grandson, who
came to reside at Alexandria under Ptolemy Euergetes.
4 Plat. Philebus, p. 30. ‘There is not,’ says Professor Mansel, ‘the
slightest evidence that the’ Divine Reason was represented by Plato as having
a distinct personality, or as being anything more than an attribute of the
Divine Mind’ Cf. art. Philosophy, in Kitto’s Cycl. of Bibl. Literature,
new ed,
[ LECT.
Leelation of Philo’s Logos to his theosophy. 65
are impressed upon concrete forms of existenceb, The Ideas of
Philo are energizing powers or causes whereby God carries out
His plan of creation’. Of these energetic forces, the Logos, ac-
cording to Philo, is the compendium, the concentration. Philo’s
Logos is a necessary complement of his philosophical doctrine
concerning God. Philo indeed, as the devout Jew, believes in
God as a Personal Being Who has constant and certain dealings
with mankind ; Philo, in his Greek moods, conceives of God not
merely as a single simple Essence, but as beyond personality,
beyond any definite form of existence, infinitely distant from all
relations to created life, incapable of any contact even with a
spiritual creation, subtilized into an abstraction altogether trans-
cending the most abstract conceptions of impersonal being. It
might even seem as if Philo had chosen for his master, not Plato
.the theologian of the Timeus, but Plato the pure dialectician of
the Republic. But how is such an abstract God as this to be
also the Creator and the Providence of the Hebrew Bible? Cer-
tainly, according to Philo, matter existed before creation4 ; but
how did God mould matter into created forms of life? This,
Philo will reply, was the work of the Logos, that is to say, of
the ideas collectively. The Philonian Logos is the Idea of
ideas®; he is the shadow of God by which as by an instrument
He made the worldsf; he is himself the intelligible or Ideal
World, the Archetypal Type of all creations. The Logos of
Philo is the most ancient and most general of created things ;
> Cf. Philo, de Mundi Opif. § 44, tom. i. p. 30; Legis Allegor. i. § 9,
tom. i. p. 47.
© De Monarchi4, i. § 6, tom. ii. p. 219: ὀνομάζουσι δὲ αὐτὰς οὐκ ἀπὸ σκο-
ποῦ τινὲς τῶν Tap ὑμῖν ἰδέας, ἐπειδὴ ἕκαστον τῶν ὄντων ἰδιοποιοῦσι, τὰ ἄτακτα
τάττουσαι, καὶ τὰ ἄπειρα καὶ ἀόριστα καὶ ἀσχημάτιστα περατοῦσαι καὶ περιορί-
ζουσαι καὶ σχηματίζουσαι καὶ συνόλως τὸ χεῖρον εἰς τὸ ἄμεινον μεθαρμοζόμεναι.
Comp. the remarkable passage in De Vict. Offer. § 13, tom. ii. p. 261.
4 In one passage only does Philo appear to ascribe to God the creation of
matter. De Somn. i. § 13, tom. i. 632. If so, for once his Jewish conscience
is too strong for his Platonism. But even here his meaning is at best doubt-
ful. Cf. Dollinger, Heid. und Judenth. bk. x. pt. 3, ὃ 5.
€ De Mundi Opif. § 6; i. p. 5: ἰδέα τῶν ἰδεῶν ὁ Θεοῦ λόγος. i
f Legis Allegor. iii. 31; i. p. 106: σκιὰ Θεοῦ δὲ ὁ λόγος αὐτοῦ ἐστιν ᾧ
καθάπερ ὀργάνῳ προσχρησάμενος ἐκοσμοποίει. De Monarch. ii. § 5; tom. ii.
225; De Cherub. § 35, tom. i. p. 162.
& De Mundi Opif. § 6, i. p. 5: ἦ ἀρχέτυπος σφραγὶς, ὅν φαμεν εἶναι κόσμον
νοητὸν, αὐτὸς ἂν εἴη τὸ ἀρχέτυπον παράδειγμα. .. ὃ Θεοῦ λόγος. The λόγος
is dissociated from the παράδειγμα in De Conf. Ling. c. xiv. i. 414.
δ Legis Allegor. iii. 61, i. p. 121: Kal ὃ λόγος δὲ τοῦ Θεοῦ ὑπεράνω παντός
ἐστι τοῦ κόσμου, Kal πρεσβύτατος Kal γευικώτατος τῶν ὅσα γέγονε.
1 | F
ΡΠ -------------ςςςςς-ς--ς-- -
66 Is the Logos of Philo personal?
he is the Eternal Image of Godi; he is the band whereby all
things are held together‘ ; he fills all things, he sustains all
things}, Through the Logos, God, the abstract, the intangible,
the inaccessible God, deals with the world, with men. Thus the
Logos is mediator as well as creator ™ ; he is a high-priest and
intercessor with God; he interprets God to man; he is an am-
bassador from heaven®. He is the god of imperfect men, who
cannot ascend by an ecstatic intuition to a knowledge of the
supreme God°; he is thus the nutriment of human souls, and a
source of spiritual delights?. The Logos is the eldest angel or
the archangel4; he is God’s Eldest, His Firstborn Son"; and
we almost seem to touch upon the apprehension of that sublime,
that very highest form of communicated life, which is exclusive
of the ideas of inferiority and of time, and which was afterwards
so happily and authoritatively expressed by the doctrinal formula
of an eternal generation. But, as we listen, we ask ourselves
one capital and inevitable question : Is Philo’s Logos a personal
being, or is he after all a pure abstraction? Philo is silent ; for
on such a point as this the Greek and the Jew in him are hope-
1 De Conf. Ling. § 28, i. 427. ‘Although,’ says Philo, ‘we are not in a
position to be considered the Sons of God, yet we may be the children τῆς
ἀϊδίου εἰκόνος αὐτοῦ, λόγου τοῦ ἱερωτάτου.
k De Plantat. § 2, I. 331: δεσμὸν γὰρ αὐτὸν ἄῤῥηκτον τοῦ παντὸς ὃ γεννή-
σας ἐποίει πατήρ.
1 De Mundo, 8 2, ii. p. 604: τὸ ὀχυρώτατον καὶ βεβαιότατον ἔρεισμα τῶν
ὅλων ἐστίν. Οὗτος amd τῶν μέσων ἐπὶ τὰ πέρατα καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν ἄκρων εἰς μέσα
ταθεὶς δολιχεύει τὸν τῆς φύσεως δρόμον ἀήττητον, συνάγων πάντα τὰ μέρη καὶ
σφίγγων.
m Quis Rer. Div. Her. § 42, i. p. 501: τῷ δὲ ἀρχαγγέλῳ καὶ πρεσβυτάτῳ
λόγῳ δωρεὰν ἐξαίρετον ἔδωκεν ὃ τὰ ὅλα γεννήσας πατὴρ, ἵνα μεθόριος στὰς τὸ
γενόμενον διακρίνῃ τοῦ πεποιηκότος.
n Thid.: ὁ δ᾽ αὐτὸς ἱκέτης μέν ἐστι τοῦ θνητοῦ κηραίνοντος ἀεὶ πρὸς τὸ
ἄφθαρτον, πρεσβυτὴς δὲ τοῦ ἡγεμόνος πρὸς τὸ ὑπήκοον. Cf. De Somniis, § 37,
i. 653; De Migr. Abraham. § 18, i. 452. De Gigant. § 11: 6 ἀρχιερεὺς
Adyos.
© Legis Allegor. iii. § 73, 1. 128: οὗτος [sc. 6 λόγος] γὰρ ἡμῶν τῶν ἀτελῶν
ἂν εἴη eds, τῶν δὲ σοφῶν καὶ τελείων, 5 πρῶτος, i.e. God Himself. Cf. § 32
and § 33, 1. 107.
Ρ Legis Allegor. ili. § 59, i. 120: Ὁρᾷς τῆς ψυχῆς τροφὴν οἵα ἐστί; Λόγος
Θεοῦ συνεχὴς, ἐοικὼς δρόσῳ. Cf. also ὃ 62. De Somniis, § 37, 1. 691.: τῷ
γὰρ ὄντι τοῦ θείου λόγου ῥύμη συνεχὴς μεθ᾽ ὁρμῆς καὶ τάξεως φερομένη, πάντα
διὰ πάντων ἀναχεῖται καὶ εὐφραίνει.
a De Conf. Ling. § 28, i. 427: κἂν μηδέπω μέντοι τυγχάνῃ τις ἀξιόχρεως
dv υἱὸς Θεοῦ προσαγορεύεσθαι, σπουδαζέτω κοσμεῖσθαι κατὰ τὸν πρωτόγονον αὖ-
τοῦ Λόγον, τὸν ἄγγελον πρεσβύτατον ὡς ἀρχάγγελον πολυώνυμον ὑπάρχοντα.
r De Conf. Ling. § 14, i. 414: τοῦτον μὲν γὰρ πρεσβύτατον υἱὸν 6 τῶν
ὄντων ἀνέτειλε Πατὴρ, ὃν ἑτέρωθι πρωτόγονον ὠνόμασε.
: [ LECT.
SSS
Philo’s tndectsion. 67
a ο - -“ ' “ΠὀῸ- ς-ςὉ-Ὁ.-Ὁὃὃ ὃ ὃ ὃ
lessly at issue. Philo’s whole system and drift of thought must
have inclined him to personify the Logos; but was the personified
Logos to be a second God, or was he to be nothing more than a
created angel? If the latter, then he would lose all those lofty
prerogatives and characteristics, which, platonically speaking, as |
well as for the purposes of mediation and creation, were so en-
tirely essential to him. If the former, then Philo must break
with the very first article of the Mosaic creed; he must renounce
his Monotheism. Confronted with this difficulty, the Alexandrian
wavers in piteous indecision ; he really recoils before it. In one
passage indeed he even goes so far as to call the Logos a ‘second
Gods,’ and he is accordingly ranked by Petavius among the
forerunners of Arius. But on the whole he appears to fall back
upon a position which, however fatal to the completeness of his
system, yet has the recommendation of relieving him from an
overwhelming difficulty. After all that he has said, his Logos is
really resolved into a mere group of Divine ideas, into a purely
impersonal quality included in the Divine Beingt, That advance
5. Fragment quoted from Euseb. Prep. Evang. lib. vii. c. 13 in Phil. Oper.
ii. 625: θνητὸν γὰρ οὐδὲν ἀπεικονισθῆναι πρὸς τὸν ἀνωτάτω καὶ πατέρα τῶν
ὅλων ἐδύνατο, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὸν δεύτερον θεὸν, ὅς ἐστιν ἐκείνου Λόγος. But the
Logos is called θεός only ἐν καταχρήσει. Op. i. 655.
* That Philo’s Logos is not a distinct Person is maintained by Dorner,
Person Christi, Einleitung, p. 23, note i. 44, sqq. note 40; by Déllinger,
Heid. und Judenthum, bk. x. p. iii. § 5; and by Burton, Bampton Lectures,
note 93. The opposite opinion is that of Gfrérer (see his Philo und die
Jiidisch-Alexandrinische Theologie), and of Liicke (see Professor Mansel, in
Kitto’s Encycl., art. Philosophy, p. 526, note). Professor Jowett, at one
time, following Gfrérer, appears to find in Philo ‘the complete personification
of the Logos,’ although he also admits that Philo’s idea of the Logos ‘leaves
us in doubt at last whether it is not a quality only, or mode of operation in
the Divine Being.’ (Ep. of St. Paul, i. p. 510, 2nd ed.) He hesitates in-
deed to decide the question, on the ground that ‘the word “person” has now
a distinctness and unity which belongs not to that age.’ (p. 485.) Surely the
idea (at any rate) of personality, whether distinctly analyzed or no, is a
primary element of all human thought. It is due to Professor Jowett to call
attention to the extent (would that it were wider and more radical !) to which
he disavows Gfrirer’s conclusions. (Ibid. p. 454, note.) And I quote the
following words with sincere pleasure: ‘The object of the Gospel is real,
present, substantial,—an object such as men may see with their eyes and
hold in their hands. . . . But in Philo the object is shadowy, distant, indis-
tinct ; whether an idea or a fact we scarcely know. .. . Were we to come
nearer to it, it would vanish away.’ (Ibid. p. 413, 1st ed.; p. 509, 2nd ed.,
in which there are a few variations.) A study of the passages referred to in
Mangey’s index will, it is believed, convince any unprejudiced reader that
Philo did not know his own mind ; that his Logos was sometimes impersonal
and sometimes not, or that he sometimes thought of a personal Logos, and
never believed in one,
11] F 2
68 Philo and the New Testament.
toward the recognition of a real Hypostasis,—so steady, as it
seemed, so promising, so fruitful,—is but a play upon language,
or an intellectual field-sport, or at best, the effort which precedes
or the mask which covers a speculative failure. We were
tempted perchance for a moment to believe that we were listen-
ing to the master from whom Apostles were presently to draw
their inspirations ; but, in truth, we have before us in Philo
Judeus only a thoughtful, not insincere, but half-heathenized
believer in the Revelation of Sinai, groping in a twilight which
he has made darker by his Hellenic tastes, after a truth which
was only to be disclosed in its fulness by another Revelation, the
Revelation of Pentecost.
This hesitation as to the capital question of the Personality of
the Logos, would alone suffice to establish a fundamental dif-
ference between the vacillating, tentative speculation of the
Alexandrian, and the clear, compact, majestic doctrine concern-
ing our Lord’s Pre-existent Godhead, which meets us under a
somewhat similar phraseological form" in the pages of the New
Testament, When it is assumed that the Logos of St. John is
but a reproduction of the Logos of Philo the Jew, this assump-
tion overlooks fundamental discrepancies of thought, and rests
its case upon occasional coincidences of language’. For besides
the contrast between the abstract ideal Logos of Philo, and the
concrete Personal Logos of the fourth Evangelist, which has
already been noticed, there are even deeper differences, which
would have made it impossible that an Apostle should have sat
in spirit as a pupil at the feet of the Alexandrian, or that he
should have allowed himself to breathe the same general re-
ligious atmosphere. Philo is everywhere too little alive to the
presence and to the consequences of moral evil¥. The history
ἃ On the general question of the phraseological coincidences between Philo
and the writers in the New Testament, see the passages quoted in Professor
Mansel’s article ‘Philosophy’ (Kitto’s Encycl.), already referred to. I could
sincerely wish that I had had the advantage of reading that article before
writing the text of these pages.
Vv ‘ Gfrorer,’ Professor Jowett admits, ‘has exaggerated the resemblances
between Philo and the New Testament, making them, I think, more real and
less verbal than they are in fact.’ (Ep. of St. Paul, i. 454, note.) ‘Il est
douteux,’ says M. E, Vacherot, ‘que Saint Jean, qui n’a jamais visité
Alexandrie, ait connu les livres du philosophe 701 Histoire Critique de
Vécole d’Alexandrie, i. p. 201. And the limited circulation of the writings of
the theosophical Alexandrians would appear from the fact that Philo himself
appears never to have read those of his master Aristobulus. Cf. Valkenaer,
de Aristobulo, p. 95.
W See the remarks of M. E. de Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, p. 112.
[ LECT,
. Contrasts between Philo and the Gospel. 69
of Israel, instead of displaying a long, earnest struggle between
the Goodness of God and the wickedness of men, interests Philo
only as a complex allegory, which, by a versatile exposition,
may be made to illustrate various ontological problems. The
priesthood, and the sacrificial system, instead of pointing to
man’s profound need of pardon and expiation, are resolved by
him into the symbols of certain cosmical facts or theosophic
theories. Philo therefore scarcely hints at the Messiah, al-
though he says much concerning Jewish expectations of a
brighter future; he knows no means of reconciliation, of re-
demption ; he sees not the need of them. According to Philo,
salvation is to be worked out by a perpetual speculation upon
the eternal order of things; and asceticism is of value in assist-
ing man to ascend into an ecstatic philosophical reverie. The
profound opposition between such a view of man’s moral state,
and that stern appeal to the humbling realities of human life
which is inseparable from the teaching of Christ and His
Apostles, would alone have made it improbable that the writers
of the New Testament are under serious intellectual obligations
to Philo. Unless the preaching which could rouse the con-
science to a keen agonizing sense of guilt is in harmony with a
lassitude which ignores the moral misery that is in the world ;
unless the proclamation of an Atoning Victim crucified for the
sins of men be reconcilable with an indifference to the existence
of any true expiation for sin whatever ; it will not be easy to
believe that Philo is the real author of the creed of Christendom.
And this moral discrepancy does but tally with a like doctrinal
antagonism. According to Philo, the Divinity cannot touch that
which is material: how can Philo then have been the teacher of
an Apostle whose whole teaching expands the truth that the
Word, Himself essentially Divine, was made flesh and dwelt
among us? Philo’s real spiritual progeny must be sought else-
where. Philo’s method of interpretation may have passed into
the Church ; he is quoted by Clement and by Origen, often and
respectfully. Yet Philo’s doctrine, it has been well observed, if
naturally developed, would have led to Docetism rather than to
Christianity* ; and we trace its influence in forms of theosophic
Gnosticism, which only agree in substituting the wildest licence
of the metaphysical fancy, for simple submission to that historical
fact of the Incarnation of God, which is the basis of the Gospel.
But if Philo was not St. John’s master, it is probable that his
x Dorner, Person Christi, i. 57 (Hinleit.).
a]
70 Real function of the Alexandrian theosophy.
writings, or rather the general theosophic movement of which
they are the most representative sample, may have supplied
some contemporary heresies with their stock of metaphysical
material, and in this way may have determined, by an indirect
aptegonism, the providential form of St. John’s doctrine. Nor
can the general positive value of Philo’s labours be mistaken, if
he is viewed apart from the use that modern scepticism has
attempted to make of particular speculations to which he gave
such shape and impulse. In making a way for some leading
currents of Greek thought into the heart of the Jewish Revela-
tion, hitherto wellnigh altogether closed to it, Philo was not
indeed teaching positive truth, but he was breaking down some
intellectual barriers against its reception, in the most thoughtful
portion of the human family. In Philo, Greek Philosophy
almost stood at the door of the Catholic Church; but it was
Greek Philosophy endeavouring to base itself, however precari-
ously, upon the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Logos
of Philo, though a shifting and incomplete speculation, may well
have served as a guide to thoughtful minds from that region of
unsettled enquiry that surrounds the Platonic doctrine of a
Divine Reason, to the clear and strong faith which welcomes the
full Gospel Revelation of the Word made Flesh. Philo’s Logos,
while embodying elements foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures, is
nevertheless in a direct line of descent from the Inspired doc-
trine of the Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs; and it thus
illustrates the comprehensive vigour of the Jewish Revelation,
which could countenance and direct, if it could not absolutely
satisfy, those fitful guesses at and gropings after truth which
were current in Heathendom. If Philo could never have created
the Christian Doctrine which has been so freely ascribed to him,
he could do much, however unconsciously, to prepare the soil of
Alexandrian thought for its reception ; and from this point of
view, his Logos must appear of considerably higher importance
than the parallel speculations as to the Memra, the Shekinah,
the doctrine of the hidden and the revealed God, which in that
and later ages belonged to the tradition of Palestinian Judaismy.
¥ Compare Dorner, Person Christi, Einleit. p. 59, on the Adam Kadmon,
and p. 60, on the Memra, Shekinah, and Metatron. ‘Zu der Idee einer
Incarnation des wirklich Géttlichen aber haben es alle diese Theologumene
insgesammt nie gebracht.? They only involve a parastatic appearance of
God, are symbols of His Presence, and are altogether impersonal ; or if per-
sonal (as the Metatron), they are clearly conceived of as created personalities.
This helps to explain the fact that during the first three centuries the main.
[ LECT. ᾿
Relevancy of the foregoing considerations. 71
‘Providence,’ says the accurate Neander, ‘had so ordered it, that
in the intellectual world in which Christianity made its first
appearance, many ideas should be in circulation, which at least
seemed to be closely related to it, and in which Christianity could
find a point of connection with external thought, on which to
base the doctrine of a God revealed in Christ’ Of these ideas
we may well believe that the most generally diffused and the
most instrumental was the Logos of Alexandria, if not the exact
Logos of Philo.
It is possible that such considerations as some of the fore-
going, when viewed relatively to the great and vital doctrine
which is before us in these lectures, may be objected to on the
score of being ‘fanciful.’ Nor am I insensible, my brethren, to
the severity of such a condemnation when awarded by the
practical intelligence of Englishmen. Still it is possible that
such a criticism would betoken on the part of those who make
it some lack of wise and generous thought. ‘Fanciful,’ after
all, is a relative term; what is solid in one field of study may
seem fanciful in another. Before we condemn a particular line
of thought as ‘fanciful,’ we do well to enquire whether a pene-
tration, a subtlety, a versatility, I might add, a spirituality of
intelligence, greater than our own, might not convict the con-
demnation itself of an opposite demerit, which need not be more
particularly described. Especially in sacred literature the im-
putation of fancifulness is a rash one; since a sacred subject-
matter is not likely, ἃ priori, to be fairly amenable to the
coarser tests and narrower views of a secular judgment. It
may be that the review of those adumbrations of the doctrine
of our Lord’s Divinity, in which we have been engaged, is rather
calculated to reassure a believer than to convince a sceptic.
Christ’s Divinity illuminates the Hebrew Scriptures, but to read
them as a whole by this light we must already have recognised
the truth from which it radiates. Yet it would be an error to
suppose that the Old Testament has no relations of a more
independent character to the doctrine of Christ’s Godhead. The
Old Testament witnesses to the existence of a great national
belief, the importance of which cannot be ignored by any man
who would do justice to the history of human thought. And
we proceed to ask whether that belief has any, and what, bearing
upon the faith of Catholic Christendom as to the Person of her
Lord.
attacks on our Lord’s Godhead were of Jewish origin. Cf. Dorner, ubi sup.
note 14. z Kirchen Geschichte, i. 3, p. 989.
11]
78, flope in a Future, essential
II. There is then one element, or condition of national life,
with which no nation can dispense. A nation must have its eye
upon a future, more or less defined, but fairly within the appa-
rent scope of its grasp. Hope is the soul of moral vitality ; and
any man, or society of men, who would live, in the moral sense
of life, must be looking forward to something. You will scarcely
suspect me, my brethren, of seeking to disparage the great prin-
ciple of tradition ;—that principle to which the Christian Church
owes her sacred volume itself, no less than her treasure of formu-
lated doctrine, and the structural conditions and sacramental
sources of her life ;—that principle to which each generation οὗ
human society is deeply and inevitably indebted for the accumu-
lated social and political experiences of the generations before it.
Precious indeed, to every wise man, to every association of true-
hearted and generous men, must ever be the inheritance of the
past. Yet what is the past without the future? What is
memory when unaccompanied by hope? Look at the case of
the single soul. Is it not certain that a life of high earnest pur-
pose will die outright, if it is permitted to sink into the placid
reverie of perpetual retrospect, if the man of action becomes the
mere ‘laudator temporis acti? How is the force of moral life
developed and strengthened? Is it not by successive conscious
efforts to act and to suffer at the call of duty? Must not any
moral life dwindle and fade away if it be not reaching forward to
a standard higher, truer, purer, stronger than its own? Will
not the struggles, the sacrifices, the self-conquests even of a
great character in bygone years, if they now occupy its whole
field of vision, only serve to consummate its ruin? As it doat-
ingly fondles them in‘memory, will it not be stiffened by conceit
into a moral petrifaction, or consigned by sloth to the successive
processes of moral decomposition? Has not the Author of our
life so bound up its deepest instincts and yearnings with His
own eternity, that no blessings in the past would be blessings to
us, if they were utterly unconnected with the future? So it is
also in the case of a society. The greatest of all societies among
men at this moment is the Church of Jesus Christ. Is she sus-
tained only by the deeds and writings of her saints and martyrs
in a distant past, or only by her reverent trustful sense of the
Divine Presence which blesses her in the actual present? Does
she not resolutely pierce the gloom of the future, and confidently
reckon upon new struggles and triumphs on earth, and, beyond
these, upon a home in Heaven, wherein she will enjoy rest and
victory,—a rest that no trouble can disturb, a victory that no
[ LEcT.
to moral vigour and to national hfe. 73
reverse can forfeit? Is not the same law familiar to us in this
place, as it affects the well-being of a great educational institu-
tion? Here in Oxford we feel that we cannot rest upon the
varied efforts and the accumulated credit even of ten centuries.
We too have hopes embarked in the years or in the centuries
before us ; we have duties towards them. We differ, it may be,
even radically, among ourselves as to the direction in which to
look for our academical future. The hopes of some of us are
the fears of others. This project would fain banish from our
system whatever proclaims that God had really spoken, and that
it is man’s duty and happiness gladly and submissively to wel-
come His message; while that scheme would endeavour, if pos-
sible, to fashion each one of our intellectual workmen more and
more strictly after the type of a believing and fervent Christian.
The practical difference is indeed profound ; but we are entirely
agreed as to the general necessity for looking forward. On both
sides it is understood that an institution which is not struggling
upwards towards a higher future, must resign itself to the con-
viction that it is already in its decadence, and must expect
to die.
Nor is it otherwise with that conglomeration of men which
we call a nation, the product of race, or the product of cireum-
stances, the product in any case of a Providential Will, Which
welds into a common whole, for the purposes of united action
and of reciprocal influence, a larger or smaller number of human
beings. A nation must have a future before it; a future which
can rebuke its despondency and can direct its enthusiasm ; a
future for which it will prepare itself; a future which it will
aspire to create or to control. Unless it would barter away the
vigorous nerve of true patriotism for the feeble pedantry of a
soulless archeology, a nation cannot fall back altogether upon
the centuries which have flattered its ambition, or which have
developed its material well-being. Something it must propose
to itself as an object to be compassed in the coming time ; some-
thing which is as yet beyond it. It will enlarge its frontier ; or
it will develope its commercial resources ; or it will extend its
schemes of colonization ; or it will erect its overgrown colonies
into independent and friendly states; or it will bind the severed
sections of a divided race into one gigantic nationality that shall
awe, if it do not subdue, the nations around. Or perchance its
attention will be concentrated on the improvement of its social
life, and on the details of its internal legislation. It will extend
the range of civil privileges; it will broaden the basis of
1 |
74 A Future necessary to the Chosen People.
government ; it will provide additional encouragements to and
safeguards for public morality; it will steadily aim at bettering
the condition of the classes who are forced, beyond others, to
work and to suffer. Thankful it may well be to the Author of
all goodness for the enjoyment of past blessings ; but the spirit of
a true thankfulness is ever and very nearly allied to the energy
of hope. Self-complacent a nation cannot be, unless it would
perish. Woe indeed to the country which dares to assume that
it has reached its zenith, and that it can achieve or attempt no
more !
Now Israel as a nation was not withdrawn from the operation
of this law, which makes the anticipation of a better future
of such vital importance to the common life of a people. Israel
indeed had been cradled in an atmosphere of physical and
political miracle. Her great lawgiver could point to the
event which gave her national existence as to an event unique
in human history®. No subsequent vicissitudes would obliterate
the memory of the story which Israel treasured in her inmost
memory, the story of the stern Egyptian bondage followed
by the triumphant Exodus. How retrospective throughout
is the sacred literature of Israel! It is not enough that the
great deliverance should be accurately chronicled; it must
be expanded, applied, insisted on in each of its many bearings
and aspects by the lawgiver who directed and who described
it; it must be echoed on from age to age, in the stern
expostulations of Prophets and in the plaintive or jubilant
songs of Psalmists. Certainly the greater portion of the
Old Testament is history. Israel was guided by the contents
of her sacred books to live in much grateful reflection upon
the past. Certainly, it was often her sin and her condemnation
that she practically lost sight of all that had been done for
her. Yet if ever it were permissible to forget the future,
Israel, it should seem, might have forgotten it. She might
have closed her eyes against the dangers which threatened
her from beyond the Lebanon, from beyond the Eastern and
the Southern desert, from beyond the Western sea, from
within her own borders, from the streets and the palaces
of her capital. She might have abandoned herself in an
ecstasy of perpetuated triumph to the voices of her poets
and to the rolls of her historians. But there was One Who
had loved Israel as a child, and had called His infant people
& Deut. iv. 34.
[ LECT.
Its character, not secular but religious. 75
out of Egypt, and had endowed it with His Name and His
Law, and had so fenced its life around by protective institutions,
that, as the ages passed, neither strange manners nor hostile
thought should avail to corrupt what He had so bountifully
given to it. Was He forgetful to provide for and to direct
that instinct of expectation, without which as a nation it
could not live? Had He indeed not thus provided, Israel
might have struggled with vain energy after ideals such as
were those of the nations around her. She might have spent
herself, like the Tyrian or Sidonian merchant, for a large
commerce ; she might have watched eagerly, and fiercely, like
the Cilician pirate or like the wild sons of the desert, for
the spoils of adjacent civilizations; she might have essayed
to combine, after the Greek pattern, a discreet measure of
sensuality with a great activity of the speculative intellect ;
she might have fared as did the Babylonian, or the Persian,
or the Roman; at least, she might have attempted the estab-
lishment of a world-wide tyranny around the throne of a
Hebrew Belshazzar or of a Hebrew Nero. Nor is her history
altogether free from the disturbing influence of such ideals
as were these; we do not forget the brigandage of the days
of the Judges, or the imperial state and prowess of Solomon,
or the commercial enterprise of Jehoshaphat, or the union
of much intellectual activity with low moral effort which
marked more than one of the Rabbinical schools. But the
life. and energy of the nation was not really embarked, at
least in its best days, in the pursuit of these objects; their
attractive influence was intermittent, transient, accidental.
The expectation of Israel was steadily directed towards a
future, the lustre of which would in some real sense more
than eclipse her glorious past. That future was not sketched
by the vain imaginings of popular aspirations ; it was unveiled
to the mind of the people by a long series of authoritative
announcements. These announcements did not merely point
to the introduction of a new state of things; they centred
very remarkably upon a coming Person. God Himself vouch-
safed to satisfy the instinct of hope which sustained the national
life of His own chosen people ; and Israel lived for the expected
Messiah.
But Israel, besides being a civil polity, was a theocracy ;
she was not merely a nation, she was a Church. In Israel
religion was not, as with the peoples of pagan antiquity, a
mere attribute or function of the national life. Religion was
1]
76 Lsraelitic belief concerning Gop and sin,
the very soul and substance of the life of Israel; Israel was
a Church encased, embodied in a political constitution. Hence
it was that the most truly national aspirations in Israel were her
religious aspirations. Even the modern naturalist critics can-
not fail to observe, as they read the Hebrew Scriptures, that
the mind of Israel was governed by two dominant convictions,
the like of which were unknown to any other ancient people.
God was the first thought in the mind of Israel. The existence,
the presence of One Supreme, Living, Personal Being, Who
alone exists necessarily, and of Himself; Who sustains the
life of all besides Himself; before Whom, all that is not
Himself is but a shadow and vanity; from Whose sanctity
there streams forth upon the conscience of man that moral
law which is the light of human life; and in Whose mercy
all men, especially the afflicted, the suffering, the poor, may,
if they will, find a gracious and long-suffering Patron,—this
was the substance of the first great conviction of the people
of Israel. Dependent on that conviction was another. The
eye of Israel was not merely opened towards the heavens; it
was alive to the facts of the moral human world. Israel was
conscious of the presence and power of sin. The ‘healthy sen-
suality,’ as Strauss has admiringly termed it», which pervaded
the whole fabric of life among the Greeks, had closed up the
eye of that gifted race to a perception which was so familiar to
the Hebrews. We may trace indeed throughout the best Greek
poetry a vein of deep suppressed melancholy¢; but the secret
of this subtle, of this inextinguishable sadness was unknown
> See Luthardt, Apologetische Vortriige, νου]. vii. note 6. The expression
occurs in Schubart’s Leben, ii. 461. Luthardt quotes a very characteristic
passage from Goethe (vol. xxx. Winckelmann, Antikes Heidnisches, pp.
10-13) to the same effect. ‘If the modern, at almost every reflection, casts
himself into the Infinite, to return at last, if he can, to a limited point ; the
ancients feel themselves at once, and without further wanderings, at ease only
within the limits of this beautiful world. Here were they placed, to this
were they called, here their activity has found scope, and their passions
objects and nourishment.’ The ‘heathen mind,’ he says, produced ‘such a
condition of human existence, a condition intended by nature,’ that ‘both in
the moment of highest enjoyment and in that of deepest sacrifice, nay, of
absolute ruin, we recognise the indestructibly healthy tone of their thought.’
Similarly in Strauss’ Leben Marklin’s, 1851, p. 127, Mirklin says, ‘I would
with all my heart be a heathen, for here I find truth, nature, greatness.’
_ © See the beautiful passage quoted from Lasaulx, Abhandlung iiber den
Sinn der Cidipus-sage, p. 10, by Luthardt, ubi supra, note 7. Cf also
Dillinger, Heid. und Jud. bk. v. pt. 1, § 2; Abp. Trench, Huls. Lectures,
ed. 3, p. 305, also Comp. II. xvii. 446; Od. xi. 489, xviii. 130; Eurip. Hippol.
190, Med. 1224, Fragm. No. 454, 808.
[ LECT,
pots to a religious Deliverer. 77
to the accomplished artists who gave to it an involuntary ex-
pression, and who lavished their choicest resources upon the
oft-repeated effort to veil it beneath the bright and graceful
drapery of a versatile light-heartedness peculiarly their own.
But the Jew knew that sin was the secret of human sorrow.
He could not forget sin if he would; for before his eyes, the
importunate existence and the destructive force of sin were
inexorably pictured in the ritual. He witnessed daily sacrifices
for sin; he witnessed the sacrifice of sacrifices which was
offered on the Day of Atonement, and by which the ‘nation of
religion,’ impersonated in its High Priest, solemnly laid its sins
upon the sacrificial victim, and bore the blood of atonement into
the Presence-chamber of God. Then the moral law sounded in
his ears ; he knew that he had not obeyed it. If the Jew could
not be sure that the blood of bulls and goats really effected his
reconciliation with God; if his own prophets told him that
moral obedience was more precious in God’s sight than sacrificial
oblations ; if the ritual, interpreted as it was by the Decalogue,
created yearnings within him which it could not satisfy, and
deepened a sense of pollution which of itself it could not relieve ;
yet at least the Jew could not ignore sin, or think lightly of it,
or essay to gild it over with the levities of raillery. He could
not screen from his sight its native blackness, and justify it to
himself by a philosophical theory which should represent it as
inevitable, or as being something else than what it is. The
ritual forced sin in upon his daily thoughts ; the ritual inflicted
it upon his imagination as being a terrible and present fact ;
and so it entered into and coloured his whole conception alike of
national and of individual life. Thus was it that this sense of
sin moulded all true Jewish hopes, all earnest Jewish antici-
pations of the national future. A future which promised
political victory or deliverance, but which offered no relief to
the sense of sin, would have failed to meet the better aspirations,
and to cheer the real heart of a people which, amid whatever
unfaithfulness to its measure of light, yet had a true knowledge
of God, and was keenly alive to the fact and to the effects of
moral evil. And He Who, by His earlier revelations, had Him-
self made the moral needs of Israel so deep, and had bidden the
hopes of Israel rise so high, vouchsafed to meet the one, and to
offer a plenary satisfaction to the other, in the doctrine of an
expected Messiah.
It is then a shallow misapprehension which represents the
Messianic belief as a sort of outlying prejudice or superstition,
I |
78 {γε Period of Messianic prophecy.
incidental to the later thought of Israel, and to which Chris-
tianity has attributed an exaggerated importance, that it may
the better find a basis in Jewish history for the Person of its
Founder. The Messianic belief was in truth interwoven with
the deepest life of the people. The promises which formed and
fed this belief are distributed along nearly the whole range of
the Jewish annals ; while the belief rests originally upon sacred
traditions, which carry us up to the very cradle of the human
family, although they are preserved in the sacred Hebrew Books.
It is of importance to enquire whether this general Messianic
belief included any definite convictions respecting the personal
rank of the Being Who was its object.
In the gradual unfolding of the Messianic doctrine, three
stages of development may be noted within the limits of the
Hebrew Canon, and a fourth beyond it. (a) Of these the first
appears to end with Moses. The Protevangelium contains a
broad indeterminate prediction of a victory of humanity4 over
the Evil Principle that had seduced man to his fall. The ‘Seed
of the woman’ is to bruise the serpent’s heade. With the lapse
of years this blessing, at first so general and indefinite, is nar-
rowed down to something in store for the posterity of Shemf,
and subsequently for the descendants of Abraham’, In Abra-
ham’s Seed all the families of the earth are to be. blessed.
Already within this bright but generally indefinite prospect of
deliverance and blessing, we begin to discern the advent of a
Personal Deliverer. St. Paul argues, in accordance with the
Jewish interpretation, that ‘the Seed’ is here a personal Mes-
siahh; the singular form of the word denoting His individu-
ality, while its collective force suggests the representative
character of His Human Nature. The characteristics of this
personal Messiah emerge gradually in successive predictions.
The dying Jacob looks forward to a Shiloh as One to Whom of
right belongs the regal and legislative authorityi, and to Whom
4 So two of the Targums, which nevertheless refer the fulfilment of the
promise to the days of the King Messiah. The singular form of the collective
noun would here, as in Gen. xxii. 18, have been intended to suggest an indi-
vidual descendant.
© Gen. iii. 15 ; cf. Rom. xvi. 20; Gal. iv. 4; Heb. ii. 14; 1 St. John iii. 8.
f Gen. ix. 26. 8. Ibid. xxii. 18.
h Gal. iii. 16. See the Rabbinical authorities quoted by Wetstein, in
loc. On the objection raised from the collective force of σπέρμα, cf. Bishop
Ellicott, in loc. :
i Gen. xlix. Io. On the reading n>w see Pusey, Daniel the Prophet,
p. 252. The sense given in the text is supported by Targum eee
LECT,
Second Period of Messianic prophecy. 79
the obedient nations will be gathered. Balaam sings of the Star
That will come out of Jacob and the Sceptre That will rise out
of Israelk. This is something more than an anticipation of the
reign of David: it manifestly points to the glory and power of
a Higher Royalty. Moses! foretells a Prophet Who would in a
later age be raised up from among the Israelites, like unto him-
self. This Prophet accordingly was to be the Lawgiver, the
Teacher, the Ruler, the Deliverer of Israel. If the prophetic
order at large is included in this prediction™, it is only as being
personified in the Last and the Greatest of the Prophets, in the
One Prophet Who was to reveal perfectly the mind of God, and
Whose words were to be implicitly obeyed. During this primary
period we do not find explicit assertions of the Divinity of
Messiah. But in that predicted victory over the Evil One; in
that blessing which is to be shed on all the families of the earth ;
in that rightful sway over the gathered peoples ; in the absolute
and perfect teaching of that Prophet Who is to be like the great
Lawgiver while yet He transcends him,—must we not trace
a predicted destiny which reaches higher than the known limits
of the highest human energy? Is not this early prophetic lan-
guage only redeemed from the imputation of exaggeration or
vagueness, by the point and justification which are secured to it
through the more explicit disclosures of a succeeding age ?
(8) "The second stage of the Messianic doctrine Ἔσο in the
reigns of David and Solomon, The form of the prophecy here
as elsewhere is suggested by the period at which it is uttered.
When mankind was limited to a single family, the Hope of the
future had lain in the seed of the woman: the Patriarchal age
had looked forward to a descendant of Abraham ; the Mosaic to
a Prophet and a Legislator. In like manner the age of the
Jewish monarchy in its bloom of youth and prowess, was bidden
fix its eye upon an Ideal David Who was to be the King of the
future of the world. Not that the colouring or form of the
prophetic announcement lowered its scope to the level of a
Jewish or of a human monarchy. The promise of a kingdom to
David and to his house for ever, a promise on which, we know,
Jerusalem Targum, the Syr. and Arab. versions, those of Aquila and Sym-
machus, and substantially by the LX X. and Vulgate.
* Num. xxiv. 17.
1 Deut. xviii. 18, 19; see Hengstenberg’s Christologie des A. T. vol. i.
p. 90; Acts iii. 22, vii. 37; St. Joni. 21, vi. 14, xii. 48, 49.
m Cf, Deut. xviii. 15.
n 2 Sam. vii. 16 (Ps. Ixxxix. 36, 37; St. John xii. 34). ‘From David’s
address to God, after receiving the message by Nathan, it is plain that David
11 |
80 Wetness of the Messtanzte Psalins.
the great Psalmist rested at the hour of his death, could not be
fulfilled by any mere continuation of his dynasty on the throne
of Jerusalem. It implied, as both David and Solomon saw,
some Superhuman Royalty. Of this Royalty the Messianic
Psalms present us with a series of pictures, each of which
illustrates a distinct aspect of its dignity, while all either imply
or assert the Divinity of the King. In the second Psalm, for
instance, Messiah is associated with the Lord of Israel as His
Anointed SonP, while against the authority of Both the heathen
nations are rising in rebelliond. Messiah’s inheritance is to in-
clude all heathendomr; His Sonship is not merely theocratic or
ethical, but Divines. All who trust in Him are blessed; all
who incur His wrath must perish with a sharp and swift de-
structiont. In the first recorded prayer of the Church of
Christ¥, in St. Paul’s sermon at Antioch of Pisidiay, in the
argument which opens the Epistle to the Hebrews¥, this Psalm
is quoted in such senses, that if we had no Rabbinical text-
books at hand, we could not doubt the belief of the Jewish
Church respecting ity. The forty-fifth Psalm is a picture of the
understood the Son promised to be the Messiah in Whom his house was to
be established for ever. But the words which seem most expressive of this
are in this verse now rendered very unintelligibly “and is this the manner of
man?’ whereas the words DINT7 nn ont) literally signify “and this is (or
must be) the law of the man, or of the Adam,” i.e. this promise must relate
to the law, or ordinance, made by God to Adam concerning the Seed of the
woman, the Man, or the Second Adam, as the Messiah is expressly called by
St. Paul, 1 Cor. xv. 45-47..—Kennicott, Remarks on the Old Testament,
p. 115. He confirms this interpretation by comparing 1 Chron. xvii. 17 with
Rom. v. 14. ° 2 Sam. xxiii. 5.
PPsei.g7. a Ibid. ver. 2.
τ Thid. vers. 8, 9. S Ibid. ver. 7.
Ὁ Ibid. ver. 12. See Dr. Pusey’s note on St. Jerome’s rendering of
\21pH2, Daniel the Prophet, p. 478, note 2. ‘It seems to me that St. Jerome
preferred the rendering ‘the Son,” since he adopted it where he could
explain it, [viz. in the brief commentary,] but gave way to prejudice in
rendering “adore purely.”’ Cf. also Replies to Essays and Reviews, p. 98.
Also Delitzsch Psalmen, i. p. 15, note. ‘Dass 12 den Artikel nicht vertragt,
dient auch im Hebr. 6fter die Indetermination ad amplificandum (s. Fleischer
zu Zamachschari’s Gold. Halsbiindern Anm. 2 δ. 1 f.) indem sie durch die in
ihr liegende Unbegrenztheit die Einbildungskraft zur Vergrésserung des so
ausgedriickten Begriffs auffordert. Ein arab. Ausleger wiirde an u. St. erk-
laren: “ Kiisset einen Sohn, und was fiir einen Sohn !”?’
« Acts iv. 25, 26. V Ibid. xiii. 33.
x Heb. i. 5; cf. Rom. i, 4.
y The Chaldee Targum refers this Psalm to the Messiah. So the Bereshith
Rabba. The interpretation was changed with a view to avoiding the pressure
of the Christian arguments. ‘Our masters,’ says R. Solomon Jarchi, ‘have
expounded [this Psalm] of King Messiah; but, according to the a and
LECT.
(a pat aS - π΄ ς΄
Divine Royalty of Messiah in the Psalms. 81
peaceful and glorious union of the King Messiah with His
mystical bride, the Church of redeemed humanity. Messiah is
introduced as a Divine King reigning among men. His form is
of more than human beauty; His lips overflow with grace ;
God has blessed Him for ever, and has anointed Him with the
oil of gladness above His fellows. But Messiah is also directly
addressed as God; He is seated upon an everlasting throne2.
Neither of these Psalms can be adapted without exegetical vio-
lence to the circumstances of Solomon or of any other king of
ancient Israel ; and the New Testament interprets the picture of
the Royal Epithalamium, no less than that of the Royal triumph
over the insurgent heathen, of the one true King Messiaha, In
another Psalm the character and extent of this Messianic
Sovereignty are more distinctly picturedb, Solomon, when at
the height of his power, sketches a Superhuman King, ruling
an empire which in its character and in its compass altogether
transcends his own. The extremest boundaries of the kingdom
of Israel melt away before the gaze of the Psalmist. The new
kingdom reaches ‘from sea to sea, and from the flood unto the
world’s end¢.’ It reaches from each frontier of the Promised
Land, to the remotest regions of the known world, in the
opposite quarter. From the Mediterranean it extends to the
ocean that washes the shores of Eastern Asia; from the
for furnishing answer to the Minim [i.e. the Christian “ heretics”, it is better
to interpret it of David himself.” Quoted by Pearson on art. 2, notes;
Chandler, Defence of Christianity, p. 212 ; Pocock, Porta Mosis, note, p. 307.
See too Dr. Pye Smith, Messiah, vol. i. p. 1 07:
2 Dr. Pusey observes that of those who have endeavoured to evade the
literal sense of the words addressed to King Messiah (ver. 6), ‘Thy throne,
O God, is for ever and ever,’ ‘no one who thought he could so construct the
sentence that the word ZLlohim need not designate the being addressed,
doubted that Hlohim signified God; and no one who thought that he could
make out for the word Elohim any other meaning than that of ‘ God,”
doubted that it designated the being addressed. A right instinct prevented
each class from doing more violence to grammar or to idiom than he needed,
in order to escape the truth which he disliked. If people thought that they
might paraphrase “ Thy throne, O J udge” or “Prince,” or “image of God,”
or “who art as a God to Pharaoh,” they hesitated not to render with us “ Thy
throne is for ever and ever.” If men think that they may assume such an
idiom as “Thy throne of God” meaning ‘Thy Divine throne,” or “Thy
throne is God” meaning ‘‘Thy throne is the throne of God,” they doubt not
that Elohim means purely and simply God. . . . If people could persuade
themselves that the words were a parenthetic address to God, no one would
hesitate to own their meaning to be “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and
ever.”’ Daniel the Prophet, pp. 470, 471, and note 8, Rev. v. 1 ae CT,
Delitzsch in loc.
® Heb. i, 8. b Ps, xxii. ¢ Ibid. ver. 8.
1] G
-
82 Divine Royalty of Messiah in the Psalms.
Euphrates to the utmost West. At the feet of its mighty
Monarch, all who are most inaccessible to the arms or to the
influence of Israel hasten to tender their voluntary submission.
The wild sons of the desert‘, the merchants of Tarshish in the
then distant Spain®, the islanders of the Mediterranean, the
Arab chiefs’, the wealthy Nubiansh, are foremost in proffering
their homage and fealty. But all kings are at last to fall down
in submission before the Ruler of the new kingdom ; all nations
are to do Him servicei. His empire is to be co-extensive with
the world: it is also to be co-enduring with time*. His empire
is to be spiritual; it is to confer peace on the world, but by
righteousness. The King will Himself secure righteous judg-
ment™, salvation", deliverance®, redemption?, to His subjects.
The needy, the afflicted, the friendless, will be the especial
objects of His tender cared. His appearance in the world will
be like the descent of ‘the rain upon the mown grasst; the true
life of man seems to have been killed out, but it is yet capable
of being restored by Him. He Himself, it is hinted, will be out
of sight; but His Name will endure for ever; His Name will
‘propagates ;’ and men shall be blessed in Himt, to the end of
time. This King is immortal; He is also all-knowing and all-
mighty. ‘Ommniscience alone can hear the cry of every human
heart ; Omnipotence alone can bring deliverance to every human
sufferer¥.’ Look at one more representation of this Royalty,
that to which our Lord Himself referred, in dealing with his
Jewish adversaries*. David describes his Great Descendant
Messiah as his ‘Lordy.’ Messiah is sitting on the right hand of
Jehovah, as the partner of His dignity. Messiah reigns upon a
throne which impiety alone could assign to any human monarch ;
He is to reign until His enemies are made His footstool2; He is
ruler now, even among His unsubdued opponents®. In the day
of His power, His people offer themselves willingly to His
service; they are clad not in earthly armour, but ‘in the
beauties of holiness>.’ Messiah is Priest as well as Kinge; He
is an everlasting Priest of that older order which had been
a Ps, Ixxii. 9, ON. e Tbid. ver. Io. f Ibid.
& Ibid. h Tbid. xp. i Tbid. ver. rr.
K Ibid. ver. 17. 1 Tbid. ver. 3. m Ibid. vers. 2, 4.
Ὁ Thbid. vers. 4, 13. ο Ibid. ver. 12. P Ibid. ver. 14.
a Ibid. vers. 12, 13. r Ibid. ver. 6; cf. 2 Sam. xxiii. 4.
a Pe, 1 χχῖ 2%. t Tbid.
" Daniel the Prophet, p. 479.
x St. Matt. xxii. 41-45; Ps.cx.1. Y Ps, cx. 1. 2 Tbid.
@ Ibid. ver. 2. Ὁ Ibid. ver. 3. © Ibid. ver. 4.
[ LEcr.
Lhird Period of Messianic prophecy. 83
honoured by the father of the faithful. Who is this everlasting
Priest, this resistless King, reigning thus amid His enemies
and commanding the inmost hearts of His servants? He is
David’s Descendant ; the Pharisees knew that truth. But He
is also David’s Lord. How could He be both, if He was merely
human? The belief of Christendom can alone answer the
question which our Lord addressed to the Pharisees. The Son
of David is David’s Lord, because He is God ; the Lord of
David is David’s Son, because He is God Incarnate,
(y) These are but samples of that rich store of Messianic
prophecy which belongs to the second or Davidic period, and
much more of which has an important bearing on our present
subject. The third period extends from the reign of Uzziah to
the close of the Hebrew Canon in Malachi. Here Messianic
prophecy reaches its climax: it expands into the fullest par-
ticularity of detail respecting Messiah’s Human life ; it mounts
to the highest assertions of His Divinity. Isaiah is the richest
mine of Messianic prophecy in the Old Testamente. Messiah,
especially designated as ‘the Servant of God,’ is the central
figure in the prophecies of Isaiah. Both in Isaiah and in
Jeremiah, the titles of Messiah are often and pointedly ex-
pressive of His true Humanity. He is the Fruit of the earthf;
4 On Ps. r10, see Pusey on Daniel, p. 466, sqq. Delitzsch Psalmen ii.
. 639.
3 © With reference to the modern theory (Renan, Vie de Jésus, Ῥ. 37, a.
&c.) of ἃ “Ἰαΐϑυ Isaiah,’ or ‘Great Unknown,’ living at the time of the
Babylonish Captivity, and the assumed author of Is. xl.Ixvi., it may suffice
to refer to Professor Payne Smith’s valuable volume of University Sermons
on the subject. When it is taken for granted on ἃ priori grounds that bond
Jide prediction of strictly future events is impossible, the Bible predictions must
either be resolved into the far-sighted anticipations of genius, or, if their
accuracy is too detailed to admit of this explanation, they must be treated as
being only historical accounts of the events referred to, thrown with whatever
design into the form of prophecy. The predictions respecting Cyrus in the
latter part of Isaiah are too explicit to be reasonably regarded as the results
of natural foresight ; hence the modern assumption of a ‘ later Isaiah’ as their
real author. ‘Supposing this assumption,’ says Bishop Ollivant, ‘to be true,
this later Isaiah was not only a deceiver, but also a witness to his own fraud ;
for he constantly appeals to prophetic power as a test of truth, making it,
and specifically the prediction respecting the deliverance of the Jews by
Cyrus, an evidence of the foreknowledge of Jehovah, as distinguished from
the nothingness of heathen idols. And yet we are to suppose that when this
fraud was first palmed upon the Jewish nation, they were so simple as not to
have perceived that out of his own mouth this false prophet was con-
demned!’—Charge of Bishop of Llandaff, 1866, p. 99, note b. Comp.
Delitzsch, Der Prophet Jesaia, p. 23. Smith’s Dict. Bible, art, ‘ Isaiah.’
f Isa. iv. 2. :
1] , G2
. 84 Divine Royalty of Messiah in the prophets.
He is the Rod out of the stem of Jesse? ; He is the Branch or
Sprout of David, the Zemach. He is called by God from His
mother’s wombi; God has put His Spirit upon Him*, He is
anointed to preach good tidings to the meek, to bind up the
broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive. He is a
Prophet ; His work is greater than that of any prophet of
Israel. Not merely will He come as a Redeemer to them that
turn from transgression in Jacob™, and to restore the preserved
of Israel ; He is also given as a Light to the Gentiles, as the
Salvation of God unto the end of the earth®. Such is His
Spiritual Power as Prophet and Legislator that He will write
the law of the Lord, not upon tables of stone, but on the heart
and conscience of the true IsraelP. In Zechariah as in David
He is an enthroned Priest4, but it is the Kingly glory of
Messiah which predominates throughout the prophetic repre-
sentations of this period, and in which His Superhuman Nature
is most distinctly suggested. According to Jeremiah, the Branch
of Righteousness, who is to be raised up among the posterity of
David, is a King who will reign and prosper and execute judg-
ment and justice in the eartht. According to Isaiah, this
expected King, the Root of Jesse, ‘will stand for an ensign of
the people; the Gentiles will seek Him; He will be the
rallying-point of the world’s hopes, the true centre of its govern-
ment’, Righteousness, equity, swift justice, strict faithfulness,
will mark His administrationt; He will not be dependent like a
human magistrate upon the evidence of His senses ; He will not
judge after the sight of His eyes, nor reprove after the hearing
of His ears¥; He will rely upon the infallibility of a perfect moral
insight. Beneath the shadow of His throne, all that is by nature
savage, proud, and cruel among the sons of men will learn the
habits of tenderness, humility, and love*, ‘The wolf also shall
dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the
kid ; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together ;
and a little child shall lead them,’ The reign of moral power, of
spiritual graces, of innocence, of simplicity, will succeed to the
reign of physical and brute force. The old sources of moral
danger will become harmless through His protecting presence
and blessing ; ‘The sucking child shall play on the hole of the
& Tsa. xi. 1. h Jer. xxiii. §; xxxiii. 15. i‘ Isa. xlix. 1.
k bid. xlii. 1. 1 Tbid. lxi. 1. τὰ Jbid. lix. 20.
n [bid. xlix. 6. ο Ibid. P Jer, xxxi. 31-35,
4 Zech. vi. 13. ¥ Jer. xxiii. 5. 8 158. xi. 10.
t Ibid. vers. 4, 5. u Ibid. ver. 3. x Ibid. vers. 6-8.
[ LECT.
Messiah ἐς to win the world by His sufferings. 85
asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’
deny ;’ and in the end ‘the earth shall be full of the knowledge
of the Lord, as the waters cover the seaz’ Daniel is taught
that at the ‘anointing of the Most Holy’—after a defined
period—God will ‘finish the transgressions,’ and ‘make an end
of sins, and ‘make reconciliation for iniquity,’ and ‘bring in
everlasting righteousness?.’ Zechariah too especially points out
the moral and spiritual characteristics of the reign of King
Messiah. The founder of an eastern dynasty must ordinarily
wade through blood and slaughter to the steps of his throne,
and must maintain his authority by force. But the daughter of
Jerusalem beholds her King coming to her, ‘Just and having
salvation, lowly and riding upon an ass.’ ‘The chariots are cut
off from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem ; the King
‘speaks peace unto the heathen ;’ the ‘battle-bow is broken ;
and yet His dominion extends ‘from sea to sea, and from the
river to the ends of the earth.’
In harsh and utter contrast, as it seems, to this repre-
sentation of Messiah as a Jewish King, the moral conqueror and
ruler of the world, there is another representation of Him which
belongs to the Davidic period as well as to that of Isaiah.
Messiah had been typified in David persecuted by Saul and
humbled by Absalom, no less truly than He had been typified in
Solomon surrounded by all the glory of his imperial court.
If Messiah reigns in the forty-fifth or in the seventy-second
Psalms, He suffers, nay He is pre-eminent among the suffering,
in the twenty-second. We might suppose that the suffering Just
One who is described by David, reaches the climax of anguish ;
but the portrait of an archetypal Sorrow has been even more
minutely touched by the hand of Isaiah. In both writers, how-
ever, the deepest humiliations and woes are confidently treated
as the prelude to an assured victory. The Psalmist passes, from
what is little less than an elaborate programme of the historical
circumstances of the Crucifixion, to an announcement that by
these unexampled sufferings the heathen will be converted, and
all the kindreds of the Gentiles will be brought to adore the
true God The Prophet describes the Servant of God as
‘despised and rejected of men4;’ His sorrows are viewed with
general satisfaction ; they are accounted a just punishment for
y Isa. xi. 8. 2 Ibid. ver. 9. a Dan. ix. 24. > Zech. ix. 9, 10.
¢ Ps, xxii. 1-21, and 27. Phillips, on Ps. xxii., argues that the Messianic
sense is ‘the true and only true’ sense of it. ἃ 158. liii. 3.
11 |
86 Szenificance of the theory of a double Messiah.
His own supposed crimes*. Yet in reality He bears our in-
firmities, and carries our sorrows‘; His wounds are due to our
transgressions ; His stripes have a healing virtue for uss. His
sufferings and death are a trespass-offering) ; on Him is laid
the iniquity of alli If in Isaiah the inner meaning of the
tragedy is more fully insisted on, the picture itself is not less
vivid than that of the Psalter. The suffering Servant stands
before His judges; ‘His Visage is so marred more than any
man, and His Form more than the sons of men ;’ like a lamb],
innocent, defenceless, dumb, He is led forth to the slaughter ;
‘He is cut off from the land of the living™.’ Yet the Prophet
pauses at His grave to note that He ‘shall see of the travail of
His soul and shall be satisfied,’ that God ‘will divide Him a
portion with the great,’ and that He will Himself ‘divide the spoil
with the strong.’ And all this is to follow ‘because He hath
poured out His soul unto death.’ His death is to be the con-
dition of His victory; His death is the destined instrument
whereby He will achieve His mediatorial reign of glory.
Place yourselves, brethren, by an effort of intellectual sym-
pathy in the position of the men who heard this language
while its historical fulfilment, so familiar to us Christians,
was as yet future. How self-contradictory must it have
appeared to them, how inexplicable, how full of paradox!
How strong must have been the temptation to anticipate
that invention of a double Messiah, to which the later Jewish
doctors had recourse, that they might escape the manifest
cogency of the Christian argumentP. That our Lord should
actually have submitted Himself to the laws and agencies
of disgrace and discomfiture, and should have turned His
deepest humiliation into the very weapon of His victory, is
not the least among the evidences of His Divine power and
mission. And the prophecy which so paradoxically dared to
say that He would in such fashion both suffer and reign,
assuredly and implicitly contained within itself another and
a higher truth. Such majestic control over the ordinary con-
ditions of failure betokened something more than an extraor-
€ Isa. lili. 4. . f Tbid. 8 Ibid. ver. s.
h [bid. ver. 12. i Ibid. ver. 6. k Thid. lii. 14.
' Thbid. liii. 7. τὰ Ibid. ver. 8. Ὁ Ibid. ver. 11.
© Ibid. ver. 12.
P See Dr. Hengstenberg’s elaborate account of the successive Jewish
interpretations of Isaiah lii. 13-liii. 12, Christolog. vol. ii. pp. 310-319
(Clarke’s trans.). Dr. Payne Smith on Isaiah, p. 172.
[ LECT.
Divinity ascribed in terms to the Messiah. 87
dinary man, something not less than a distinctly Superhuman
Personality. Taken in connection with the redemptive powers,
the world-wide sway, the spiritual, heart-controlling teaching,
so distinctly ascribed to Him, this prediction that the Christ
would die, and would convert the whole world by death, pre-
pares us for the most explicit statements of the prophets
respecting His Person. It is no surprise to a mind which
has dwelt steadily on the destiny which prophecy thus assigns
to Messiah, that Isaiah and Zechariah should speak of Him
as Divine. We will not lay stress upon the fact, that in
Isaiah the Redeemer of Israel and of men is constantly asserted
to be the Creator4, Who by Himself will save His people’.
Significant as such language is as to the bent of the Divine
Mind, it is not properly Messianic. But in that great pro-
phecy’, the full and true sense of which is so happily suggested
to us by its place in the Church services for Christmas Day,
the ‘Son’ who is given to Israel receives a fourfold Name. He
is a Wonder-Counsellor, or Wonderful, above all earthly beings ;
He possesses a Nature which man cannot fathom; and He
thus shares and unfolds the Divine Mind'. He is the Father
of the Everlasting Age or of Eternity". He is the Prince
of Peace. Above all, He is expressly named, the Mighty Godv.
ᾳ Isa. xliv. 6; xlviii. 12, 13, 17.
¥ Ibid. xlv. 21-24; Hos. i. 7; cf. Rom. xiv. 11; Phil. ii. τὸ; Isa.
ΧΧΧΥ. 4, Χ]. 3, TO. 8 Isa. ix. 6.
t yyy xbp. These two words must clearly be connected, although they
do not stand in the relation of the status constructus. Gen. xvi. 12. yyy
designated the attribute here concerned, xp the superhuman Possessor
of it. usy-ax, Bp. Lowth’s Transl. of Isaiah in loc.
v This is the plain literal sense of the words. The habit of construing
sxx as ‘strong hero,’ which was common to Gesenius and the older
rationalists, has been abandoned by later writers, such as Hitzig and Knobel.
Hitzig observes that to render 112-x by ‘strong hero’ is contrary to the
usus loquendt. ‘x,’ he argues, ‘is always, even in such passages as
Gen. xxxi. 29, to be rendered “God.” In all the passages which are
quoted to prove that it means “‘princeps” “‘potens,” the forms are,’ he says,
‘to be derived not from 5x, but from 5x, which properly means ‘‘ram,”
then “leader,” or ‘ prince” of the flock of men.’ (See the quot. in Hengst.
Christ. ii. p. 88, Clarke’s transl.). But while these later rationalists
recognise the true meaning of the phrase, they endeavour to represent
it as a mere name of Messiah, indicating nothing as to His possessing a
Divine Nature. Hitzig contends that it is applied to Messiah ‘by way
of exaggeration, in so far as He possesses divine qualities ;? and Knobel,
that it belongs to Him as a hero, who in His wars with the Gentiles
will shew that He possesses divine strength. But does the word ‘El’
admit of being applied to a merely human hero? ‘El,’ says Dr. Pusey,
1 |
88 Divinity of Messiah in the prophets.
Conformably with this Jeremiah calls Him Jehovah Tsidkenu ™,
as Isaiah had called Him Emmanuel*. Micah speaks of His
eternal pre-existenceY, as Isaiah had spoken of His endless
reign, Daniel predicts that His dominion is an everlasting
dominion that shall not pass away®. Zechariah terms Him the
‘the name of God, is nowhere used absolutely of any but God. The
word is used once relatively, in its first appellative sense, the mighty of
the nations (Ezek. xxxi. 11), in regard to Nebuchadnezzar. Also once
in the plural (Ezek. xxxii. 21). It occurs absolutely in Hebrew 225 times,
and in every place is used of God.’ Daniel, p. 483. Can we then doubt
its true force in the present passage, especially when we compare Isa. x. 21,
where 7)12°58 is applied indisputably to the Most High God? Cf. Delitzsch,
Jesaia, p. 155.
w Jer. xxiii. 5, 6. This title is also applied by Jeremiah to Jerusalem
in the Messianic age, in other words, to the Christian Church. Jer. xxxiii.
15, 16. The reason is not merely to be found in the close fellowship
of Christ with His Church as taught by St. Paul, (Eph. v. 23, 30);
who even calls the Church, Christ (1 Cor. xii. 12). Jehovah Tsidkenu
expresses the great fact of which our Lord is the author, and Christendom
the result. That fact is the actual gift of God’s justifying, sanctifying
righteousness to our weak sinful humanity. As applied to the Church
then, the title draws attention to the reality of the gift; as applied to
Christ, to the Person of Him through Whom it is given. It cannot be
paralleled with names given to inanimate objects such as Jehovah Nissi,
nor even with such personal names as Jehoram, Jehoshaphat, and the
like. In these cases there is no ground for identifying the kings in
question with the Exalted Jehovah, or with Jehovah the Judge. The
title before us, of itself, may not necessarily imply the Divinity of Christ ;
it was indeed given in another form to Zedekiah. Its real force, as applied
to our Lord, is however shewn by other prophetic statements about Him,
just as He is called Jesus, in a fundamentally distinct sense from that
which the word bore in its earlier applications. But cf. Pye Smith,
Messiah, i. 271, sqq. Hengst. Christ. li. 415, sqq. Reinke, Messianischen
Weissagungen, iii. 510, sqq. Critici Sacri, vol. 4, p. 5638. Pearson on
Creed, ii. 181, ed. 1833.
x Isa. vii. 14; St. Matt. i. 23. Like Jehovah Tsidkenu, Emmanuel does
really point to our Lord’s Divine Person, as Isa. ix. 6, would alone imply.
That ποῦν means a literal virgin, that the fulfilment of this prophecy
is to be sought for only in the birth of our Lord, and that this announcement
of God’s mighty Salvation in the future, might well have satisfied Ahaz
that the lesser help against the two kings in the immediate present would
not be wanting, are points well discussed by Hengstenberg, Christ. ii. 43-66.
Reinke, Weissagung von der Jungfrau und von Immanuel, Miinster, 1848.
Even if it were certain that the Name Emmanuel was in the first instance
given to a child born in the days of Ahaz, it would still be true that
‘then did God in the highest sense become with us, when He was seen
upon earth.’ St. Chrys. in Isa. ch. vii. s. 6, quoted by Hengst. Christol. ubi
supra. See too, Smith’s Dict. of Bible, art. ‘Isaiah,’ i. p. 879; Dr. Payne
Smith, Proph. of Isaiah, pp. 21-27.
y Mic. v. 2. See Chandler's Defence of Christianity, p. 124; Mill on
Mythical Interpr. p. 318. 5 Isa. ix. 6. 8. Dan. vii. 14.
[ LECT,
Attitude of the Naturalistic criticism. 89
Fellow or Equal of the Lord of Hosts; and refers in the
clearest language to His Incarnation and Passion as being
that of Jehovah Himself¢. Haggai implies His Divinity
by foretelling that His presence will make the glory of the
second temple greater than the glory of the firstd. Malachi
points to Him as the Angel of the Covenant, Jehovah,
Whom Israel was seeking, and Who would suddenly come
to His temple 5,
Read this language as a whole; read it by the light of the
great doctrine which it attests, and which in turn illuminates
it, the doctrine of a Messiah Divine as well as Human ;—all
is natural, consistent, full of point and meaning. But divorce
it from that doctrine in obedience to a foregone and arbitrary
placitum of the negative criticism, to the effect that Jesus
Christ shall be banished at any cost from the scroll of prophecy ;
—how full of difficulties does such language forthwith become,
how overstrained and exaggerated, how insipid and disappoint-
ing! Doubtless it is possible to bid defiance alike to Jewish
and to Christian interpreters, and to resolve upon seeing in
the prophets only such a sense as may be consistent with
the theoretical exigencies of Naturalism. It is possible to
suggest that what looks like supernatural prediction is only
a clever or chance farsightedness, and that expressions which
literally anticipate a distant history are but the exuberance of
poetry, which, from its very vagueness, happens to coincide
with some feature, real or imagined, of the remote future.
It is possible to avoid any frank acknowledgment of the im-
posing spectacle presented by converging and consentient lines
Ὁ Zech. xiii. 7. my does not mean only an associate of any kind,
or aneighbour. ‘The word rendered “ My fellow” was revived by Zechariah
from the language of the Pentatench. It was used eleven times in Leviticus,
and then was disused. There is no doubt then that the word, being
revived out of Leviticus, is to be understood as in Leviticus; but in
Leviticus it is used strictly of a fellow-man, one who is as_ himself.
Lev. vi. 2, xviii. 20, xix. 11, 15, 17, xxiv. 19, xxv. 14,15, 17... The name
designates not one joined by friendship or covenant, or by any voluntary
act, but one united indissolubly by common bonds of nature, which a
man may violate, but cannot annihilate. ... When then this title is applied
to the relation of an individual to God, it is clear that That Individual can
be no mere man, but must be one united with God by an Unity of Being.
The “Fellow” of the Lord is no other than He Who said ‘in the Gospel,
“41 and My Father are One.’ Pusey, Daniel, pp. 487, 488. Hengst.
Christ. iv. pp. 108-112.
¢ Zech. ii. 10-13, xii. 10; St. John xix. 34, 37; Rev. i. 7.
ἃ Hag. ii. 7, 9. 6 Mal. iii. 1.
11 |
go Last Perwd of Messianic prophecy.
of prophecy, and to refuse to consider the prophetic utterances,
except in detail and one by one; as if forsooth Messianic
prophecy were an intellectual enemy whose forces must be
divided by the criticism that would conquer it. It is possible,
alas! even for accomplished scholarship so fretfully to carp
at each instance of pure prediction in the Bible, to nibble
away the beauty and dim the lustre of each leading utterance
with such persevering industry, as at length to persuade itself
that the predictive element in Scripture is insignificantly small,
or even that it does not exist at all. That modern criticism
of this temper should refuse to accept the prophetic witness
to the Divinity of the Messiah, is more to be regretted than
to be wondered at. And yet, if it were seriously supposed
that such criticism had succeeded in blotting out all reference
to the Godhead of Christ from the pages of the Old Testament,
we should still have to encounter and to explain that massive
testimony to the Messianic belief which lives on in the Rab-
binical literature; since that literature, whatever be the date
of particular existing treatises, contains traditions, neither few
nor indistinct, of indisputable antiquity. In that literature
nothing is plainer than that the ancient Jews believed the
expected Messiah to be Divine£ It cannot be pretended that
this belief came from without, from the schools of Alexandria,
or from the teaching of Zoroaster. It was notoriously based
upon the language of the Prophets and Psalmists. And we
of to-day, even with our improved but strictly mechanical
apparatus of grammar and dictionary, can scarcely pretend to
correct the early unprejudiced interpretation of men who read
the Old Testament with at least as much instinctive insight
into the meaning of its archaic language, and of its older
forms of thought and of feeling, as an Englishman in this
generation can command when he applies himself to the study
of Shakespeare or of Milton.
(5) The last stage of the Messianic doctrine begins only after
the close of the Hebrew Canon. Among the Jews of Alexandria,
the hope of a Messiah seems to have fallen into the background.
This may have been due to the larger attractions which doctrines
such as those of the Sophia and the Logos would have possessed
for Hellenized populations, or to a somewhat diminished interest
in the future of Jewish nationality caused by long absence from
f For the Rabbinical conception of the Person of Messiah, see Schéttgen,
Hor. Hebr. vol. ii. de Messia, lib. i. c. 1, 566.
[ LECT.
Popular degradation of the Messianic Ideal. 91
Palestine, or to a cowardly unwillingness to avow startling reli-
gious beliefs in the face of keen heathen critics. The two latter
motives may explain the partial or total absence of Messianic
allusions from the writings of Philo and Josephus; the former
will account for the significant silence of the Book of Wisdom.
Among the peasantry, and in the schools of Palestine, the Mes-
sianic doctrine lived on. The literary or learned form of the
doctrine, being based on and renewed by the letter of Scripture,
was higher and purer than the impaired and debased belief which
gradually established itself among the masses of the people. The
popular degradation of the doctrine may be traced to the later
political circumstances of the Jews, acting upon the secular and
materialized element in the national character. The Messianic
belief, as has been shewn, had two aspects, corresponding re-
spectively to the political and to the religious yearnings of the
people of Israel. If such a faith was a relief to a personal or
national sense of sin, it was also a relief to a sense of political
disappointment or degradation. And keen consciousness of
political failure became a dominant sentiment among the Jewish
people during the centuries immediately preceding our Lord’s
Incarnation. With some fitful glimpses of national life, as under
the Asmoneans, the Jews of the Restoration passed from the
yoke of one heathen tyranny to that of another. As in succes-
sion they served the Persian monarchs, the Syrian Greeks, the
Idumzan king, and the Roman magistrate, the Jewish people
cast an eye more and more wistfully to the political hopes which
might be extracted from their ancient and accepted Messianic
belief. They learned to pass more and more lightly over the
prophetic pictures of a Messiah robed in moral majesty, of a
Messiah relieving the woes of the whole human family, of a
Messiah suffering torture and shame in the cause of truth. They
dwelt more and more eagerly upon the pictures of His world-
wide conquest and imperial sway, and they construed those
promises of coming triumph in the most earthly and secular
sense; they looked for a Jewish Alexander or for a Jewish
Cesar. The New Testament exhibits the popular form of the
Messianic doctrine, as it lay in the minds of Galileans, of
Samaritans, of the men of Jerusalem. It is plain how deeply,
when our Lord appeared, the hope of a Deliverer had sunk into
the heart both of peasant and townsman; yet it is equally plain
how earthly was the taint which had passed over the popular
apprehension of this glorious hope, since its first full proclamation
ms days of the Prophets. Doubtless there were saints like
II
92 Chrost claimed to be the Messiah of prophecy.
the aged Simeon, whose eyes longed sore for the Divine Christ
foretold in the great age of Hebrew prophecy. But generally
speaking, the piety of the enslaved Jew had become little else
than a wrong-headed patriotism. His religious expectations had
been taken possession of by his civic passions, and were liable at
any moment to be placed at the service of a purely political
agitation. Israel as a theocracy was sacrificed in his thought to
Israel as a state; and he was willing to follow any adventurer
into the wilderness or across the Jordan, if only there was a
remote prospect of bringing the Messianic predictions to bear
against the hated soldiery and police of Rome. . God was the one true King of ancient Israel.
He was felt to be present in Israel as a Monarch living among
His subjects. The temple was His palace ; its sacrifices and
ritual were the public acknowledgment of His present but in-
visible Majesty. But the Jewish polity, considered as a system,
was an external rather than an internal kingdom of God.
Doubtless there were great saints in ancient Israel ; doubtless
Israel had prayers and hymns such as may be found in the
Psalter, than which nothing more searching and more spiritual
has been since produced in Christendom. Looking however to
the popular working of the Jewish theocratic system, and to
what is implied as to its character in Jeremiah’s prophecy of a
profoundly spiritual kingdom which was to succeed it Ὁ. may we
* βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν occurs thirty-two times in St. Matthew’s Gospel, to
which it is peculiar; βασιλεία Tod Θεοῦ five times. The latter term occurs
fifteen times in St. Mark, thirty-three times in St. Luke, twice in St. John,
seven times in the Acts of the Apostles. In St. Matt. xiii. 43, XXvi. 29, we
find ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Πατρός. Our Lord speaks of ἡ βασιλεία ἣ ἐμὴ three times,
St. John xviii. 36. > St. Matt. xxi. 43.
¢ Jer. xxxi. 31-34, quoted in Heb. viii. 8-11.
m1 | H 2
100 Laws of the Kingdom of fTeaven, as given
not conclude that the Royalty of God was represented rather to
the senses than to the heart and intelligence of at least the mass
of His ancient subjects? Jesus Christ our Lord announced a
new kingdom of God; and, by terming it the Kingdom of God,
He implied that it would first fully deserve that sacred name, as
corresponding with Daniel’s prophecy of a fifth empired. Let
us moreover note, in passing, that when using the word ‘king-
dom,’ our Lord did not announce a republic. Writers who carry
into their interpretation of the Gospels ideas which have been
gained from a study of the Platonic dialogues or of the recent
history of France, may permit themselves to describe our Lord
as Founder of the Christian republic. And certainly St. Paul,
when accommodating himself to political traditions and aspira-
tions which still prevailed largely throughout the Roman world,
represents and recommends the Church of Christ as the source
and home of the highest moral and mental liberty, by speaking
freely of our Christian ‘citizenship,’ and of our coming at baptism
to the ‘city’ of the living Gode. Not that the Apostle would
press the metaphor to the extent of implying that the new
society was to be a spiritual democracy ; since he very earnestly
taught that even the inmost thoughts of its members were to be
ruled by their Invisible King£. This indeed had been the claim
of the Founder of the kingdom Himselfg; He willed to be King, .
absolutely and without a rival, in the new society; and the
nature and extent of His legislation plainly shews us in what
sense He meant to reign.
The original laws of the new kingdom are for the most part
set forth by its Founder in His Sermon on the Mount. After a
preliminary statement of the distinctive character which was to
mark the hfe and bearing of those who would fully correspond
to His Mind and Will}, and a further sketch of the nature and
depth of the influence which His subjects were to exert upon
other meni, He proceeds. to define the general relation of the
new law which He is promulgating to the law that had preceded
itk, The vital principle of His legislation, namely, that moral
obedience shall be enforced, not merely in the performance of or
ἃ Dan. vii. 9-15.
€ Phil. iii. 20: ἡμῶν yap τὸ πόλίτευμα ἐν οὐρανοῖς ὑπάρχει. Cf. Acts xxili.1:
πεπολίτευμαι τῷ Θεῷ. Phil. i. 27: ἀξίως τοῦ εὐαγγελίου πολιτεύεσθε. Heb.
xiii. 14. In Heb. xi. 10, xii. 22, πόλις apparently embraces the whole Church
of Christ, visible and invisible; in Heb. xi. 16, xiii. 14, it is restricted to the
latter. f 2 Cor. x. 5- & St. Matt. xxii. 8.
h Tbid. v. 1-12. i Ibid. vers. 13-16. k Tbid. vers. 17-20.
[ LECT.
an the Sermon on the Mount. ΤΟΙ
in the abstinence from outward acts, but in the deepest and most
secret springs of thought and motive, is traced in its application
to certain specific prescriptions of the older Law!; while other
ancient enactments are modified or set aside by the stricter
purity ™, the genuine simplicity of motive and character ἢ, the
entire unselfishness 9, and the superiority to personal prejudices
and exclusiveness P which the New Lawgiver insisted on. The
required life of the new kingdom is then exhibited in detail; the
duties of almsgiving4, of prayer’, and of fasting’, are successively
enforced ; but the rectification of the ruling motive is chiefly
insisted on as essential. In performing religious duties, God’s
Will, and not any conventional standard of human opinion, is to
be kept steadily before the eye of the soul. The Legislator
insists upon the need of a single, supreme, unrivalled motive in
thought and action, unless all is to be lost. The uncorruptible
treasure must be in heaven ; the body of the moral life will only
be full of light if ‘the eye is single ;’ no man can serve two
masters *, The birds and the flowers suggest the lesson of trust
in and devotion to the One Source and End of life; all will
really be well with those who in very deed seek His kingdom
and His righteousness". Charity in judgment of other men¥,
circumspection in communicating sacred truth Y, confidence and
constancy in prayer, perfect consideration for the wishes of
others, yet also a determination to seek the paths of difficulty
and sacrifice, rather than the broad easy ways trodden by the
mass of mankind» ;—these features will mark the conduct of
loyal subjects of the kingdom. They will beware too of false
prophets, that is, of the movers of spiritual sedition, of teachers
who are false to the truths upon which the kingdom is based and
to the temper which is required of its real children. The false
prophets will be known by their moral unfruitfulness°, rather
than by any lack of popularity or success. Finally, obedience to
the law of the kingdom is insisted on as the one condition of
safety ; obedience 4,—as distinct from professions of loyalty ;
obedience,—which will be found to have really based a man’s
life upon the immoveable rock at that solemn moment when all
that stands upon the sand must utterly perish ὁ,
1 St. Matt. v. 21-30. m JTbid. vers. 31, 32. n Tbid. vers. 33-37.
© Ibid. vers. 38-42. Ρ Ibid. vers. 43-47. a Ibid. vi. 1-4.
τ Ibid. vers. 5-8. s Tbid. vers. 16-18. t Ibid. ver. 24.
ἃ Thid. vers, 25-34. x Ibid. vii. 1-5. y Ibid. ver. 6.
2 Ibid. vers, 7-11. a Tbid. ver. 12. Pb Ibid. vers. 13, 14.
¢ Ibid. vers. 15-20. ἃ Tbid. vers. 21-23. © Ibid. vers. 24-27.
ur]
-- τ 99]ὸ EE ΘΝ
102 Lhe Kingdom both visible and invtstble,
Such a proclamation of the law of the kingdom as was the
Sermon on the Mount, already implied that the kingdom would
be at once visible and invisible. On the one hand certain out-
ward duties, such as the use of the Lord’s Prayer and fasting,
are prescribed‘; on the other, the new law urgently pushes its
claim of jurisdiction far beyond the range of material acts into
the invisible world of thought and motive. The visibility of the
kingdom lay already in the fact of its being a society of men,
and not a society solely made up of incorporeal beings such as
the angels. The King never professes that He will be satisfied
with a measure of obedience which sloth or timidity might con-
fine to the region of inoperative feelings and convictions ; He
insists with great emphasis upon the payment of homage to His
Invisible Majesty, outwardly, and before the eyes of men. Not
to confess Him before men is to break with Him for ever δ. it
is to forfeit His blessing and protection when these would most
be needed. The consistent bearing, then, of His loyal subjects
will bring the reality of His rule before the sight of men ; but,
besides this, He provides His realm with a visible government,
deriving its authority from Himself, and entitled on this account
to deferential and entire obedience on the part of His subjects.
To the first members of this government His commission runs
thus :—‘ He that receiveth you, receiveth Meh,’ It is the King
Who will Himself reign throughout all history on the thrones of
His representatives; it is He Who, in their persons, will be
acknowledged or rejected. In this way His empire will have an
external and political side; nor is its visibility to be limited to
its governmental organization. The form of prayer! which the
King enjoins on His subjects, and the outward visible actions by
which, according to His appointment, membership in His king-
dom is to be begunj and maintained k, make the very life and
movement of the new society, up to a certain point, visible.
But undoubtedly the real strength of the kingdom, its deepest
life, its truest action, are veiled from sight. At bottom it is to
be a moral, not a material empire ; it is to be a realm not merely
of bodies but of souls, of souls instinct with intelligence and love.
Its seat of power will be the conscience of mankind. Not ‘here’
or ‘there’ in outward signs of establishment and supremacy, but
in the free conformity of the thought and heart of its members
St. Matt. vi. 9-13, 16. 8 Ibid. x. 32; St. Luke xii. 8,
St. Matt. x. 40; comp. St. Luke x. 16. i St. Matt. vi. 9-13.
1 Ibid. xxviii. 19; St. John iii. 5.
* St. Luke xxii. 19; 1 Cor. xi. 24; St. John vi. 53.
[ LEcT,
Parables of the Kingdom. 103
to the Will of their Unseen Sovereign, shall its power be most
clearly recognised. Not as an oppressive outward code, but as
an inward buoyant exhilarating motive, will the King’s Law
mould the life of His subjects. Thus the kingdom of God will
be found to be ‘within’ men!; it will be set up, not like an
earthly empire by military conquest or by violent revolution, but
noiselessly and ‘not with observation™.’ It will be maintained by
Weapons more spiritual than the sword. ‘If,’ said the Monarch,
‘My kingdom were of this world, then would My servants fight,
but now is My kingdom not from hence ®.’
The charge to the twelve Apostles exhibits the outward
agency by which the kingdom would be established®°; and
the discourse in the supper-room unveils yet more fully the
secret sources of its strength and the nature of its infiuenceP.
But the ‘plan’ of its Founder with reference to its establish-
ment in the world is perhaps most fully developed in that
series of parables, which, from their common object and from
their juxtaposition in St. Matthew’s Gospel, are commonly
termed Parables of the Kingdom.
How various would be the attitudes of the human heart
towards the ‘word of the kingdom,’ that is, towards the
authoritative announcement of its establishment upon the
earth, is pointed out in the Parable of the Sower. The seed
of truth would fall from His Hand throughout all time by
the wayside, upon stony places, and among thorns, as well
as upon the good ground4. It might be antecedently supposed
that within the limits of the new kingdom none were to be
looked for save the holy and the faithful. But the Parable
of the Tares corrects this too idealistic anticipation ; the king-
dom is to be a field in which until the final harvest the
tares must grow side by side with the wheatt. The astonishing
expansion of the kingdom throughout the world is illustrated
1 St. Luke xvii. 21. τὰ Jbid. ver. 20. n St. John xviii. 36.
ο St. Matt. x. 5-42. Ρ St. John xiv. xv. xvi.
ᾳ St. Matt. xiii. 3-8, 19-23.
r St. Matt. xiii. 24-30, 36-43. ‘In catholic& enim ecclesia, que non in
sol& Afric& sicut pars Donati, sed per omnes gentes, sicut promissa est,
dilatatur atque diffunditur, in universo mundo, sicut dicit Apostolus, fruc-
tificans et crescens, et boni sunt et mali.” St. Aug. Ep. 208, n. 6. ‘Si
boni sumus in ecclesia Christi, frumenta sumus; si mali sumus in ecclesia
Christi, palea sumus, tamen ab area non recedimus. Tu qui vento tenta-
tionis foris volasti, quid es? Triticum non tollit ventus ex ared. Ex eo
ergo, ubi es, agnosce quid es.’ In Ps. Ixx. (Vulg.) Serm. ii. n. 12. Civ.
Dei, i. 35, and especially Retract. ii. 18.
rir |.
104 Parables of the Kingdom.
by ‘the grain of mustard seed, which indeed is the least of
all seeds, but when it is grown it is the greatest among herbss,’
The principle and method of that expansion are to be observed
in the action of ‘the leaven hid in the three measures of meal t,’
A secret invisible influence, a soul-attracting, soul-subduing
enthusiasm for the King and His work, would presently pene-
trate the dull, dense, dead mass of human society, and its
hard heart and stagnant thought would expand, in virtue of
this inward impulse, into a new life of light and love. Thus
the kingdom is not merely represented as a mighty whole,
of which each subject soul is a fractional part. It is exhibited
as an attractive influence, acting energetically upon the inner
personal life of individuals. It is itself the great intellectual
and moral prize of which each truth-seeking soul is in quest,
and to obtain which all else may wisely and well be left behind.
The kingdom is a treasure hid in a field¥, that is, in a line
of thought and enquiry, or in a particular discipline and mode
of life; and the wise man will gladly part with all that he
has to buy that field. Or the kingdom is like a merchant-man
seeking ‘goodly pearlsv;’ he sells all his possessions that he
may buy the ‘one pearl of great price.’ Here it is hinted that
entrance into the kingdom is a costly conquest and mastery
of truth, of that one absolute and highest Truth, which is
contrasted with the lower and relative truths current among
men. The preciousness of membership in the kingdom is
only to be completely realized by an unreserved submission
to the law of sacrifice; the kingdom flashes forth in its
full moral beauty before the eye of the soul, as the merchant-
man resigns his all in favour of the one priceless pearl. In
these two parables, then, the individual soul is represented
as seeking the kingdom; and it is suggested how tragic in
many cases would be the incidents, how excessive the sacrifices,
attendant upon ‘pressing into it.’ But a last parable is added
in which the kingdom is pictured, not as a prize which can
be seized by separate souls, but as a vast imperial system,
as a world-wide home of all the races of mankind. Like
a net* thrown into the Galilean lake, so would the kingdom
extend its toils around entire tribes and nations of men;
the vast struggling multitude would be drawn nearer and
nearer to the eternal shore; until at last the awful and final
® St. Matt. xiii. 31, 32. t Ibid. ver. 33. ἃ Tbid. ver. 44.
Vv Ibid. vers. 45, 46. x Ibid. vers. 47-50.
[ LECT.
Lwo characteristics of the‘ plaw’ of Fesus Christ. 105
separation would take place beneath the eye of Absolute Justice ;
the good would be gathered into vessels, but the bad would
be cast away.
The proclamation of this kingdom was termed the Gospel,
that is, the good news of God. It was good news for mankind,
Jewish as well as Pagan, that a society was set up on earth
wherein the human soul might rise to the height of its original
destiny, might practically understand the blessedness and the
awfulness of life, and might hold constant communion in a
free, trustful, joyous, childlike spirit with the Author and
the End of its existence. The ministerial work of our Lord
was one long proclamation of this kingdom. He was per-
petually defining its outline, or promulgating and codifying
its laws, or instituting and explaining the channels of its
organic and individual life, or gathering new subjects into
it by His words of wisdom or by His deeds of power, or
perfecting and refining the temper and cast of character which
was to distinguish them. When at length He had Himself
overcome the sharpness of death, He opened this kingdom of
heaven to all believers on the Day of Pentecost. His ministry
had begun with the words, ‘Repent ye, for the kingdom of
heaven is at handy;’ He left the world, bidding His followers
carry forward the frontier of His kingdom to the utmost limits
of the human family4, and promising them that His presence
within it would be nothing less than co-enduring with time ἃ,
Let us note more especially two features in the ‘plan’ of
our Blessed Lord.
(a) And, first, its originality. Need I say, brethren, that
real originality is rare? In this place many of us spend our
time very largely in imitating, recombining, reproducing existing
thought. Conscious as we are that for the most part we are
only passing on under a new form that which in its substance
has come to us from others, we honestly say so; yet 1t may
chance to us at some time to imagine that in our brain an
idea or a design has taken shape, which is originally and
in truth our own creation—
‘Libera per vacuum posui vestigia princeps ;
Non aliena meo pressi pede.’
Those few, rapid, decisive moments in which genius consciously
enjoys the exhilarating sense of wielding creative power, may
y St. Matt. iv. 17. 1 Ibid. xxviii. το ; St. Luke xxiv. 47; Acts i. 8.
@ St. Matt. xxviii. 20. b Hor. Ep. i. 19. 21.
m1 |
106 ‘ Originality’ of our Lord’s ‘ plan, as
naturally be treasured in-memory; and yet, even in these,
how hard must it be to verify the assumed fact of an absolute
originality! We of this day find the atmosphere of human
thought, even more than the surface of the earth, preoccupied
and thronged with the results of man’s activity in times past
and present. In proportion to our consciousness of our real
obligations to this general stock of mental wealth, must we
not hesitate to presume that any one idea, the immediate origin
of which we cannot -trace, is in reality our own? Suppose
that in this or that instance we do believe ourselves, in perfect
good faith, to have produced an idea which is really entitled
to the merit of originality. May it not be, that if at the right
moment we could have examined the intellectual air around
us with a sufficiently powerful microscope, we should have
detected the germ of our idea ‘floating in upon our personal
thought from without¢?’? We only imagine ourselves to have
created the idea because, at the time of our inhaling it, we
were not conscious of doing so. The idea perhaps was suggested
indirectly ; it came to us along with: some other idea upon
which our attention was mainly fixed; it came to us so dis-
guised or so undeveloped, that we cannot recognise it, so as
to trace the history of its growth. It came to us during the
course of a casual conversation ; or from a book the very name
of which we have forgotten; and our relationship towards it
has been after all that of a nurse, not that of a parent. We
have protected it, cherished it, warmed it, and at length
it has grown within the chambers of our mind, until we have
recognised its value and led it forth into the sunlight, shaping
it, colouring it, expressing it after a manner strictly our own,
and believing in good faith that because we have so entirely
determined its form, we are the creators of its substance 4.
At any rate, my brethren, genius herself has not been slow to
confess how difficult it is to say that any one of her triumphs
is certainly due to a true originality. In one of his later
recorded conversations Goethe was endeavouring to decide
what are the real obligations of genius to the influences which
inevitably affect it. ‘Much,’ said he, ‘is talked about originality ;
but what does originality mean? We are no sooner born than
the world around begins to act upon us; its action lasts to
the end of our lives and enters into everything. All that we
¢ This illustration was suggested to me, some years ago, by a well-known
Oxford tutor. It is developed, with his usual force, by Félix, Jésus-Christ
p. 128. 4 Bautain, Etude sur l’art de parler en public.
[ LECT.
guaranteed by the tsolation of His Early Life. 107
can truly call our own is our energy, our vigour, our will. If
I, he continued, ‘could enumerate all that I really owe to
the great men who have preceded me, and to those of my
own day, it would be seen that very little is really my own.
It is a point of capital importance to observe at what time of
life the influence of a great character is brought to bear on us.
Lessing, Winkelmann, and Kant, were older than I, and it
has been of the greatest consequence to me that the two first
powerfully influenced my youth and the last my old age®.’
On such a subject, Goethe may be deemed a high authority,
and he certainly was not likely to do an injustice to genius,
or to be guilty of a false humility when speaking of himself,
But our Lord’s design to establish upon the earth a kingdom
of souls was an original design. Remark, as bearing upon this
originality, our Lord’s isolation in His early life. His social
obscurity is, in the eyes of thoughtful men, the safeguard and
guarantee of His originality. It is not seriously pretended,
on any side, that Jesus Christ was enriched with one single
ray of His thought from Athens, from Alexandria, from the
mystics of the Ganges or of the Indus, from the disciples of
Zoroaster or of Confucius. The centurion whose servant He
healed, the Greeks whom He met at the instance of St. Philip,
the Syro-pheenician woman, the judge who condemned and the
soldiers who crucified Him, are the few Gentiles with whom
He is recorded to have had dealings during His earthly life.
But was our Lord equally isolated from the world of Jewish
. Speculation? M. Renan, indeed, impatient at the spectacle of
an unrivalled originality, suggests, not without some hesitation,
that Hillel was the real teacher of Jesus‘. But Dr. Schenkel
ὁ. Conversations de Goethe, trad. Delerot, tom. ii. p. 342, quoted in
the Rev. des Deux Mondes, 15 Oct. 1865.
f ‘Hillel fut le vrai maitre de Jésus, s’il est permis de parler de maitre
quand il s’agit d’une si haute originalité.? Vie de Jésus, p. 35. As an
instance of our Lord’s real independence of Hillel, a single example may
suffice. A recent writer on ‘the Talmud’ gives the following story. ‘One
day a heathen went to Shammai, the head of the rival academy, and asked
him mockingly to convert him to the law while he stood on one leg. The
irate master turned him from the door. He then went to Hillel, who gave
him that reply—since so widely propagated—‘ Do not unto another what
thou wouldest not have another do unto thee. This is the whole law:
the rest is mere commentary.’ Quarterly Review, Oct. 1867, p. 441. art.
‘The Talmud.’ Or, as Hillel’s words are rendered by Lightfoot: ‘Quod
tibi ipsi odiosum est, proximo ne feceris: nam hee est tota lex.’ Hor.
Hebr. in Matt. p. 129. The writer in the Quarterly Review appears to
assume the identity of Hillel’s saying with the precept of our Blessed Lord.
St. Matt. vii. 12; St. Luke vi. 31. Yet in truth how wide is the interval
ur |
108 ‘Originality’ of our Lord’s ‘plan, as
will tell us that this suggestion rests on no historical basis
whatever ὃ, while we may remark in passing that it is at issue
with a theory which you would not care to notice at length,
but which M. Renan cherishes with much fondness, and which
represents our Lord’s ‘tone of thought’ as a psychological
result of the scenery of north-eastern Palestineh, The kindred
assumption that when making His yearly visits to Jerusalem
for the Feast of the Passover, or at other times, Jesus must
have become the pupil of some of the leading Jewish doctors
of the day, is altogether gratuitous. Once indeed, when He
was twelve years old, He was found in a synagogue, hard by
the temple, in close intellectual contact with aged teachers
of the Law. But all who hear Him, even then, in His early
Boyhood, are astonished at His understanding and answers ;
and the narrative of the Evangelist implies that the occurrence
was not repeated. Moreover there was no teaching in Juda
at that era, which had not, in the true sense of the expression,
a sectarian colouring. But what is there in the doctrine or
in the character of Jesus that connects Him with a Pharisee
or a Sadducee, or an Herodian, or an Essene type of education 4
Is it not significant that, as Schleiermacher remarks, ‘of all
the sects then in vogue none ever claimed Jesus as representing
it, none branded Him with the reproach of apostasy from its
tenetsi?’ Even if we lend an ear to the precarious conjecture
that He may have attended some elementary school at Nazareth,
between the merely negative rule of the Jewish President, (which had already
been given in Tobit iv. 15.) and the positive precept—ioa ἂν θέλητε ἵνα
ποιῶσιν ὑμῖν of ἄνθρωποι, οὕτω καὶ ὑμεῖς ποιεῖτε av’TOts—of the Divine Master.
On Gibbon’s citation from Isocrates of a precept equivalent to Hillel’s,
see Archbishop Trench, Huls. Lect. p. 157.
& ‘Ganz unbewiesen ist es,’ Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 39, note.
When however Dr.Schenkel himself says, ‘Den Einblick, den Er [sc. Jesus]
in das Wesen und Treiben der religidsen Richtungen und Parteiungen
seines Volkes in so hohem Masse befass, hat Er aus persénlicher Wahrneh-
mung und unmittelbarem Verkehr mit den Hiuptern und Vertretern der
verschiedenen Parteistandpunkte gewonnen’ (ibid.), where is the justification
of this assertion, except in the Humanitarian and Naturalistic theory of the
writer, which makes some such assumption necessary ?
h Vie de Jésus, p. 64: ‘Une nature ravissante contribuait ἃ former
cet esprit.” Then follows a description of the flowers, the animals, the
insects, and the mountains (p. 65), the farms, the fruit-gardens, and the
vintage (p. 66), of Northern Galilee. M. Renan concludes, ‘cette vie
contente et facilement satisfaite . . se spiritualisait en réves éthérés, en
une sorte de mysticisme poétique confondant le ciel et la terre... . Toute
Vhistoire du Christianisme naissant est devenue de la sorte une délicieuse
pastorale.’ p. 67. i Leben Jesu, vorl. xvi.
| LECT. ©
guaranteed by the isolation of His Early Life. 109
it is plain that the people believed Him to have gone through
no formal course of theological training. ‘How knoweth This
Man letters, having never learned‘? was a question which
betrayed the popular surprise created by a Teacher Who spoke
with the highest authority, and Who yet had never sat at
the feet of an accredited doctor. It was the homage of public
enthusiasm which honoured Him with the title of Rabbi;
since this title did not then imply that one who bore it had
been qualified by any intellectual exercises for an official teaching
position. Isolated, as it seemed, obscure, uncultivated, illiterate,
the Son of Mary did not concern Himéelf to struggle against
or to reverse what man would deem the crushing disadvantages
of His lot. He did not, like philosophers of antiquity, or like
the active spirits of the middle ages, spend His Life in perpetual
transit between one lecturer of reputation and another, between
this and that focus of earnest and progressive thought. He
was not a Goethe, continually enriching and refining his con-
ceptions by contact with a long succession of intellectual friends,
reaching from Lavater to Eckermann. Still less did He,
during His early Manhood, live in any such atmosphere as
that of this place, where interpenetrating all our differences
of age and occupation, and even of conviction, there is the
magnificent inheritance of a common fund of thought, to which,
whether we know it or not, we are all constantly and inevitably
debtors. He mingled neither with great thinkers who could.
mould educated opinion, nor with men of gentle blood who
could give its tone to society; He passed those thirty years
as an under-workman in a carpenter’s shop; He lived in what
might have seemed the depths of mental solitude and of social
obscurity ; and then He went forth, not to foment a political
revolution, nor yet to found a local school of evanescent sen-
timent, but to proclaim an enduring and world-wide Kingdom
of souls, based upon the culture of a common moral character,
and upon intellectual submission to a common creed.
Christ’s isolation, then, is the guarantee of His originality ;
yet had He lived as much in public as He lived in obscurity,
where, let me ask, is the kingdom of heaven anticipated as a
practical project in the ancient world? What, beyond the inter-
change of thought on moral subjects, has the kingdom proclaimed
by our Lord in common with the philosophical schools or coteries
which grouped themselves around Socrates and other teachers
k St. John vii. 15.
HI |
110 Who could have suggested Christ’s ‘plan’?
of classical Greece!? These schools, indeed, differed from the
kingdom of heaven, not merely in their lack of any pretensions
to supernatural aims or powers, but yet more, in that they only
existed for the sake of a temporary convenience, and that their
members were bound to each other by no necessary ties ™,
Again, what was there in any of the sects of Judaism that could
have suggested such a conception as the kingdom of heaven?
Each and all they differ from it, I will not say in organization
and structure, but in range and compass, in life and action, in
spirit and aim. Or was the kingdom of heaven even traced in
outline by the vague yearnings and aspirations after a better
time, which entered so mysteriously into the popular thought of
the heathen populations in the Augustan age” ? Certainly it was
an answer, complete yet unexpected, to these aspirations. They
did not originate it; they could not have originated it ; they
primarily pointed to a material rather than to a moral Utopia,
to an idea of improvement which did not enter into the plan of
the Founder of the new kingdom. But you ask if the announce-
ment of the kingdom of heaven by our Lord was not really a
continuation of the announcement of the kingdom of heaven by
1 Mr. Lecky makes an observation upon the originality of our Lord’s moral
teaching, considered generally, which is well worthy of attention. Rational-
ism in Europe, i. p. 338. ‘Nothing too, can, as I conceive, be more er-
roneous or superficial than the reasonings of those who maintain that
the moral element in Christianity has in it nothing distinctive or peculiar.
The method of this school, of which Bolingbroke may be. regarded as the
type, is to collect from the writings of different heathen writers, certain
isolated passages embodying precepts that were inculcated by Christianity ;
and when the collection had become very large the task was supposed to be
accomplished. But the true originality of a system of moral teaching depends
not so much upon the elements of which it is composed, as upon the manner
in which they are fused into a symmetrical whole, upon the proportionate
value that is attached to different qualities, or, to state the same thing by a
single word, upon the type of character that is formed. Now it is quite
certain that the Christian type differs, not only in degree, but in kind from —
the Pagan one. This general observation might legitimately include the
vital differences which sever all merely human schemes of moral association
and co-operation from that of the Founder of the Christian Church. See also
Tulloch on The Christ of the Gospels, p. 190.
™ This point is well stated in Ecce Homo, p. 91, sqq. The writer observes
that if Socrates were to appear at the present day, he would form no society,
as the invention of printing would have rendered it unnecessary. But the
formation of an organized society was of the very essence of the work of
Christ. I heartily rejoice to recognise the fulness with which this vital
truth is set forth by one from whom serious Churchmen must feel themselves
to be separated by some deep differences of belief and principle.
Ὁ Virgil, Hcl. iv., Zen. vi. 793, and Suetonius, Vespasianus, iv. 5.
[ LECT.
sa aa ES ea SS τ
Lis ‘ originality’ substantial, not verbal. 111
St. John the Baptist? You might go further, and enquire, whether
this proclamation of the kingdom of heaven is not to be traced
up to the prophecy of Daniel respecting a fifth empire? For the
present of course I waive the question which an Apostle ° would
have raised, as to whether the Spirit That spoke in St. John and
in Daniel was not the Spirit of the Christ Himself. But let us
enquire whether Daniel or St.John do anticipate our Lord’s
plan in such a sense as to rob it of its immediate originality.
The Baptist and the prophet foretell the kingdom of heaven.
Be it so. But a name is one thing, and the vivid complete
grasp of an idea is another. We are accustomed to distinguish
with some wholesome severity between originality of phrase and
originality of thought. An intrinsic poverty of thought may at
times succeed in formulating an original expression ; while a
true originality will often, nay generally, welcome a time-
honoured and conventional phraseology, if it can thus secure
currency and acceptance for the truth which it has brought to
light and which it desires to set forthr. The originality of our
Lord’s plan lay not in its name, but in its substance. When
St. John said that the kingdom of heaven was at hand 4, when
Daniel represented it as a world-wide and imperishable empire,
neither prophet nor Baptist had really anticipated the idea; one
furnished the name of a coming system, the other a measure of
its greatness. But what was the new institution to be in itself ;
what were to be its controlling laws and principles; what the
οὐ St. Peter i. 11.
P Pascal, Pensées, art. vii. 9. (ed. Havet. p. 123) ‘Qu’on ne dise pas
que je n’ai rien dit de nouveau; la disposition des matiéres est nouvelle.
Quand on joue & la paume, c’est une méme balle dont on joue l’un et l’autre;
mais Yun la place mieux. J’aimerais autant qu’on me dit que je me
suis servi des mots anciens. Et comme si les mémes pensées ne formaient
.pas un autre corps de discours par une disposition différente, aussi bien que
les mémes mots forment d’autres pensées par leur différente disposition,
4 The teaching of St. John Baptist centred around three points: (1) the
call to penitence (St. Matt. iii. 2, 8-10; St. Mark i. 4; St. Luke iii. 3,
10-14); (2) the relative greatness of Christ (St. Matt. iii. 11-14 ; St. Mark i.
73 St. Luke iii. 16; St. John i. 5, 26, 27, 30-34); (3) the Judicial (06 τὸ
πτύον ἐν τῇ χειρὶ αὐτοῦ, St. Matt. iii. 12; St. Luke iii. 17) and Atoning (δε
6 ἀμνὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ, ὃ αἴρων thy ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου, St. John i. 29, 36) Work
of Christ. In this way St. John corresponded to prophecy as preparing the
way of the Lord (St. Matt. iii. 3; St. Mark i. 3; St. Luke iii. 4; St. John i.
233; Isa. xl. 3); but beyond naming the kingdom, the nature of the prepara-
tion required for entering it, the supernatural greatness, and two of the
functions of the King, St. John did not anticipate our Lord’s disclosures.
St. John’s teaching left men quite uninformed as to what the kingdom of
heaven was to be in itself.
it |
112 Wotes of ‘ originality’ in our Lord’s ‘ plan,
animating spirit of its inhabitants; what the sources of its life;
what the vicissitudes of its establishment and triumph? These
and other elements of His plan are exhibited by our Lord Him-
self, in His discourses, His parables, His institutions. That
which had been more or less vague, He made definite ; that which
- had been abstract, He threw into a concrete form; that which had
been ideal, He clothed with the properties of working reality ;
that which had been scattered over many books and ages,
He brought into a focus. If prophecy supphed Him with some
of the materials which He employed, prophecy could not have
enabled Him to succeed in combining them. He combined them
because He was Himself; His Person supplied the secret of
their combination. His originality is indeed seen in the reality
and life with which He lighted up the language used by men
who had been sent in earlier ages to prepare His way; but
if His creative thought employed these older materials, it did
not depend on them. He actually gave a practical and ener-
getic form to the idea of a strictly independent society of
spiritual beings, with enlightened and purified consciences,
cramped by no national or local bounds of privilege, and destined
to spread throughout earth and heaven’. When He did this,
¥ Guizot, Essence de la Religion chrétienne, p. 307: ‘Je reprends ces
deux grands principes, ces deux grandes actes de Jésus-Christ, abolition de
tout privilége dans les rapports des hommes avec Dieu, et la distinction de
la vie religieuse, et de la vie civile; je les place en regard de tous les faits, de
tous les états sociaux antérieurs & la venue de Jésus-Christ, et je ne puis
découvrir ἃ ces caractéres.essentiels de la religion chrétienne, aucune filiation,
aucune origine humaine. Partout, avant Jésus-Christ, les religions étaient
nationales, locales, établissant entre les peuples, les classes, les individus, des
distances et des inégalités énormes. Partout aussi avant Jésus-Christ, la vie
civile et la vie religieuse étaient confondues et s’opprimaient mutuellement ;
la religion ou les religions étaient des institutions incorporées dans I’ état, et
que l'état réglait ou réprimait selon son intérét. Dans l’universalité de la
foi religieuse, et ’indépendance de la société religieuse, je suis contraint de
voir des nouveautés sublimes, des éclairs de la lumiére divine!’ Even Chan-
ning, who understates our Lord’s ‘ plan,’ is alive to the originality and great-
ness of that part of it which he recognises, Works, 11. 57. ‘The plans and
labours of statesmen sink into the sports of children, when compared with
the work which Jesus announced...... The idea of changing the moral
aspect of the whole earth, of recovering all nations to the pure and inward
worship of the one God, and to a Spirit of Divine and fraternal love (our
Lord proposed much more than this), was one of which we meet not a trace
in philosopher or legislator before Him. The human mind had given no
promise of this extent of view...... We witness a vastness of purpose, a
grandeur of thought and feeling, so original, so superior to the workings of
all other minds, that nothing but our familiarity can prevent our contempla-
tion of it with wonder and profound awe.’
[ LECT.
te Τ -ὸὔοτ “᾿Ξ ὃ...
Loldness of the ‘plan’ of Fesus Christ. τι 3
prophets were not His masters ; they had only foreshadowed
His work. His plan can be- traced in that masterful com.
pleteness and symmetry, which is the seal of its intrinsic
originality, to no source beyond Himself. Well might we ask
with His astonished countrymen the question which was indeed
prompted by their jealous curiosity, but which is natural to a
very different temper, ‘Whence hath this Man this wisdom 57
(8) And this opens upon us the second characteristic of our
Lord’s plan, I mean that which in any merely human plan, we
should call its audacity. This audacity is observable, first of all,
in the fact that the plan is originally proposed to the world with
what might appear to us to be such hazardous completeness.
The idea of the kingdom of God issues almost ‘as if in a single
jet’ and with a fully developed body from the thought of Jesus
Christ. Put together the Sermon on the Mount, the Charge to
the Twelve Apostles, the Parables of the Kingdom, the Discourse
in the Supper-room, and the institution of the two great Sacra-
ments, and the plan of our Saviour is before you. And it is
enunciated with an accent of calm unfaltering conviction that it
will be realized in human history.
This is a phenomenon which we can only appreciate by con-
trasting it with the law to which it is so signal an exception.
Generally speaking, an ambitious idea appears at first as a mere.
outline, and it challenges attention in a tentative way. It is put
forward enquiringly, timidly, that it may be completed by the
suggestions of friends or modified by the criticism of opponents.
The highest genius is always most keenly alive to the vicissitudes
which may await its own creations ; it knows with what difficulty
a promising project is launched safely and unimpaired out of the
domain of abstract speculation into the region of practical human
life. Even in art, where the materials to be moulded are, as
compared with the subjects of moral or political endeavour, so
much under command, it is not prudent to presume that a design
or a conception will be carried out without additions or without
curtailments. In this place we all have heard that between the
θεωρία and the γένεσις of art there may be a fatal interval. The
few bold strokes by which a Raffaelle has suggested a new form
* See Félix, Jésus-Christ et la Critique Nouvelle, pp. 127-133; Bushnell,
Nature and the Supernatural, pp. 237-8. Keim has exaggerated the influence
of Pharisaism upon the language and teaching of our Lord, which only
resembled Pharisaism as being addressed to the Jewish mind in terms which
it understood, Geschichtliche Christus, pp. 18-22.
Ὁ Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, p. 325.
1117 Ι
114ἀ Chrost’s ‘plan’ complete from the first.
of power or of beauty, may never be filled up upon his canvass.
The working-drawings of a Phidias or a Michael Angelo may
never be copied in stone or in marble. As has been said of 8. T.
Coleridge, art is perpetually throwing out designs which remain
designs for ever ; and yet the artist possesses over his material,
and even over his hand and his eye, a control which is altogether
wanting to the man who would reconstruct or regenerate human
society. For human society is an aggregate of human intelli-
gences and of human wills, that is to say, of profound and mys-
terious forces, upon the direction of which under absolutely new
circumstances it is impossible for man to calculate. Accordingly,
social reformers tell us despondingly that facts make sad havoe
of their fairest theories ; and that schemes which were designed
to brighten and to beautify the life of nations are either forgotten
altogether, or, like the Republic of Plato, are remembered only
as famous samples of the impracticable. For whenever a great
idea, affecting the well-being of society, is permitted to force its
way into the world of facts, it is liable to be carried out of its
course, to be thrust hither and thither, to be compressed, exag-
gerated, disfigured, mutilated, degraded, caricatured. It may
encounter currents of hostile opinion and of incompatible facts,
upon which its projector had never reckoned ; its course may be
forced into a direction the exact reverse of that which he most
earnestly desired. In the first French Revolution some of the
most humane sociological projects were distorted into becoming
the very animating principles of wholesale and extraordinary
barbarities. In England we are fond of repeating the political
maxim that ‘constitutions are not made, but grow;’ we have a
proverbial dread of the paper-schemes of government which from
time to time are popular among our gifted and volatile neigh-
bours. It is not that we English cannot admire the creations of
political genius; but we hold that in the domain of human life
genius must submit herself to the dictation of circumstances, and
that she herself seems to shade off into erratic folly when she
cannot clearly recognise the true limits of her power.
Now Jesus Christ our Lord was in the true and very highest
sense of the term a social reformer; yet He fully proclaimed
the whole of His social plan before He began to realize it. Had
He been merely a ‘great man,’ He would have been more pru-
dent. He would have conditioned His design ; He would have
tested it ; He would have developed it gradually ; He would
have made trial of its working power ; and then He would have
re-fashioned, or contracted, or expanded it, before finally pro-
[ LECT.
No evidence of change in our Lord’s ‘plan? τι 5
ee eae
posing it to the consideration of the world. But His actual
course must have seemed one of utter and reckless folly, unless
the event had shewn it to be the dictate of a more than human
wisdom. He speaks as One Who is sure of the compactness and
faultlessness of His design ; He is certain that no human obstacle
can baulk its realization. He produces it simply without effort,
without reserve, without exaggeration; He is calm, because He
is in possession of the future, and sees His way clearly through
its tangled maze. There is no proof, no distant intimation of a
change or of a modification of His plan. He did not, for instance,
first aim at a political success, and then cover His failure by
giving a religious turn or interpretation to His previous mani-
festoes ; He did not begin as a religious teacher, and afterwards
aspire to convert His increasing religious influence into political
capital. No attempts to demonstrate any such vacillation in
His purpose have reached even a moderate measure of success".
Certainly, with the lapse of time, He enters upon a larger and
larger area of ministerial action; He developes with majestic
assurance, with decisive rapidity, the integral features of His
work ; His teaching centres more and more upon Himself as its
central subject ; but He nowhere retracts, or modifies, or speaks
or acts as would one who feels that he is dependent upon events
or agencies which he cannot control*. A poor woman pays Him
« Dr. Schenkel, in his Charakterbild Jesu, represents our Lord as a pious
Jew, wlio did not assume to be the Messiah before the scene at Cxsarea
Philippi. Kap. xii. § 4, p. 138: *‘ Dadurch, dass Jesus Sich nun wirklich zu
dem Bekenntnisse des Simon bekannte, trat er mit einem Schlage aus der
verworrenen und verwirrenden Lage heraus, in welche Er, durch die Unklar-
heit seiner Jiinger und den Meinungstreit in seiner Umgebung gebracht war.
Kin Stichwort war jetzt gesprochen.’ This theory is obliged to reject the
evangelical accounts of our Lord’s Baptism and Temptation, and to distort
from their plain meaning the narratives of our Lord’s sermon in the synagogue
at Nazareth (St. Luke iv. 16), of His call of the twelve Apostles, and of His
claim to forgive sin. See the excellent remarks of M. Pressensé, J ésus-Christ,
pp- 326, 327.
* Channing, Works, ii. 55. ‘ We feel that a new Being, of a new order of
mind, is taking part in human affairs. There is a native tone of grandeur and
authority in His teaching. He speaks as a Being related to the whole human
race. A narrower sphere than the world never enters His thoughts. He
speaks in a natural spontaneous style of accomplishing the most arduous and
important change in human affairs. This unlaboured manner of expressing
great thoughts is particularly worthy of attention. You never hear from
Jesus that swelling, pompous, ostentatious language, which almost necessarily
springs from an attempt to sustain a character above our powers. He talks
of His glories, as one to whom they were familiar. . .. . He speaks of saving
and judging the world, of drawing all men to Himself, and of giving everlast-
ing life, as we speak of the ordinary powers which we exert.’
II | I2
116 Boldness of Christ’s plan, considered
ceremonial respect at a feast, and He simply announces that
the act will be told as a memorial of her throughout the world ¥;
He bids His Apostles do all things whatsoever He had com-
manded them; He promises them His Spirit as a Guide into
all necessary truth®: but He invests them with no such dis-
cretionary powers, as might imply that His design would need
revision under possible circumstances, or could be capable of
improvement. He calmly turns the glance of His thought upon
the long and chequered future which lies clearly displayed before
Him, and in the immediate foreground of which is his own
humiliating Death >. Other founders of systems or of societies
have thanked a kindly Providence for shrouding from their gaze
the vicissitudes of coming time ;
‘ Prudens futuri temporis exitum
Caliginos4 nocte premit deus ὃ ;’
but the Son of Man speaks as One Who sees beyond the most
distant possibilities, and Who knows full well that His work is
indestructible. ‘The gates of hell,” He calmly observes, ‘shall
not prevail against it4;’ ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but
My words shall not pass away °&’
Nor is the boldness of Christ’s plan less observable in its
actual substance, than in the fact of its original production in
such completeness. Look at it, for the moment, from a political
point of view. Here is, as it seems, a Galilean peasant, sur-
rounded by a few followers taken like Himself from the lowest
orders of society; yet He deliberately proposes to rule all
human thought, to make Himself the Centre of all human
affections, to be the Lawgiver of humanity, and the Object
of man’s adoration f. He founds a spiritual society, the thought
and heart and activity of which are to converge upon His
Person, and He tells His followers that this society which
He is forming is the real explanation of the highest visions
of seers and prophets, that it will embrace all races and extend
y St. Matt. xxvi. 13; St. Mark xiv. 9.
z St. Matt. xxviii. 20. a St. John xvi. 13.
Ὁ St. Matt. xx. 19 ; St. Mark viii. 31. ὁ Hor. Od. iii. 29. 29.
4 St. Matt. xvi. 18. e Tbid. xxiv. 35.
f Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, p. 232. ‘To Jesus alone, the
simple Galilean carpenter, it happens ... that, having never seen a map
of the world in His whole life, or heard the name of half the great nations
on it, He undertakes, coming out of His shop, a scheme as much vaster
and more difficult than that of Alexander, as it proposes more, and what
is more Divinely benevolent.’
[ LECT.
as a religious and social enterprise. 117
throughout all time. He places Himself before the world as
the true goal of its expectations, and He points to His
proposed work as the one hope for its future. There was to
be a universal religion, and He would found it. A universal
religion was just as foreign an idea to heathenism® as to Judaism.
Heathenism held that the state was the highest form of social
life; religious life, like family life, was deemed subordinate
to political interests. Morality was pretty nearly dwarfed down
to the measure of common political virtue; sin was little else
than political misdemeanour ; religion was but a subordinate
function of national life, differing in different countries according
to the varying genius of the people, and rightly liable to being
created or controlled by the government. A century and a
half after the Incarnation, in his attack upon the Church,
Celsus ridicules the idea of a universal religion as a manifest
follyh; yet Jesus Christ has staked His whole claim to respect
and confidence upon announcing it. Jesus Christ made no
concessions to the passions or to the prejudices of mankind.
The laws and maxims of His kingdom are for the most part
in entire contradiction to the instincts of average human nature ;
yet He predicts that His Gospel will be preached in all the
world, and that finally there will be one fold and One Shepherd
of meni, ‘Go,’ He says to His Apostles, ‘make disciples
of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to
observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and,
lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world *’
He founds a world-wide religion, and He promises to be the
present invigorating force of that religion to the end of time.
Are we not too accustomed to this language to feel the full
force of its original meaning? How startlingly must it not
have fallen upon the ears of Apostles! Words like these are
not accounted for by any difference between the Hast and
the West, between ancient and modern modes of speech. They
will not bear honest translation into any modern phrase that
would enable good men to use them now. Can we imagine
such a command as that of our Lord upon the lips of the
best, of the wisest of men whom we have ever known? Would
it not be simply to imagine that goodness or wisdom had been
& Origen. contr. Celsum, ii. 46. h St. John x. 16.
i The Stoic ‘cosmopolitanism’ (Sir A. Grant’s Ethics of Aristotle,
vol. i. 255; Merivale on Conversion of Roman Empire, p. 60) did not
amount to a religion. k St. Matt. xxviii. 19, 20.
UI |
118 Reaksation of our Lord’s ‘plan.
exchanged for the folly of an intolerable presumption? Such
language as that before us is indeed folly, unless it be something
else; unless it be proved by the event to have been the highest
wisdom, the wisdom of One, Whose ways are not our ways,
nor His thoughts our thoughts 1.
IT. But has the plan of Jesus Christ been carried out? Does
the kingdom of heaven exist on earth ἢ
(1.) The Church of Christ is the living answer to that
question. Boileau says somewhere that the Church is a great
thought which every man ought to study. It would be more
practical to say that the Church is a great fact which every
man ought to measure. Probably we Christians are too fami-
liarized with the blessed presence of the Church to do justice
to her as a world-embracing institution, and as the nurse
and guardian of our moral and mental life. Like the air
we breathe, she bathes our whole being with influences which
we do not analyse; and we hold her cheap in proportion
to the magnitude of her unostentatious service. The sun rises
on us day by day in the heavens, and we heed not his surpassing
beauty until our languid sense is roused by some observant
astronomer or artist. The Christian Church pours even upon
those of us who love her least, floods of intellectual and moral
light ; and yet it is only by an oévasional intellectual effort
that we detach ourselves sufficiently from the tender monotony
of her influences, to understand how intrinsically extraordinary
is the double fact of her perpetuated existence and of her
continuous expansion.
Glance for a moment at the history of the Christian Church
from the days of the Apostles until now. What is it but a
history of the gradual, unceasing self-expansion of an institution
which, from the first hour of its existence, deliberately aimed,
as it 1s alming even now, at the conquest of the world™? Com-
pare the Church which sought refuge and which prayed in the
upper chamber at Jerusalem, with the Church of which St. Paul
is the pioneer and champion in the latter portion of the Acts of
the Apostles, or with the Church to which he refers, as already
making its way throughout the world, in his Apostolical
Epistles®, Compare again the Church of the Apostolical age
with the Church of the age of Tertullian. Christianity had then
* Isa. Iv. 8. Cf. Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, pp. 231-233.
Félix, ubi supra, pp. 134-139.
m St. Luke xxiv. 47; Acts i. 8, ix. 15; Mark xvi. 20,
" Rom. i. 8, x. 18, xv. 18-21; Col. i. 6, 23; cf. 1 St. Peter i. 1, &c.
[ LECT.
Continuous growth of the Church. [19
already penetrated, at least in some degree, into all classes of
Roman society°, and was even pursuing its missionary course in
regions far beyond the frontiers of the empire?, in the forests of
Germany, in the wilds of Scythia, in the deserts of Africa, and
among the unsubdued and barbarous tribes who inhabited the
northern extremity of our own island. Again, how nobly con-
scious is the Church of the age of St. Augustine of her world-
wide mission, and of her ever-widening area! how sharply is
this consciousness contrasted with the attempt of Donatism to
dwarf down the realization of the plan of Jesus Christ to the
narrow proportions of a national or provincial enterprise4! In
the writings of Augustine especially, we see the Church of
Christ tenaciously grasping the deposit of revealed unchanging
doctrine, while liturgies the most dissimilar, and teachers of
many tongues’, and a large variety of ecclesiastical customs’,
ο Tert. Apol. 37: ‘Hesterni sumus, et vestra omnia implevimus, urbes,
insulas, castella, municipia, conciliabula, castra ipsa, tribus, decurias, pala-
tium, senatum, forum, sola vobis relinquimus templa.’ Cf. de Rossi, Roma
Sotteranea, i. p. 309. :
P Tert. adv. Judeos, c. 7: ‘Jam Getulorum varietates, et Maurorum multi
fines, Hispaniarum omnes termini, et Galliarum diversz nationes, et Britan-
norum imaccessa Romanis loca, Christo vero subdita, et Sarmatarum, et
Dacorum, et Germanorum, et Scytharum, et abditarum multarum gentium et
provinciarum, et insularum multarum nobis ignotarum, et que enumerare
minus possumus. In quibus omnibus locis, Christi nomen, qui jam venit,
regnat, utpote ante Quem omnium civitatum portze sunt aperte.’
a St. Aug. Ep. xlix. ἢ. 3: ‘Querimus ergo, ut nobis respondere non
graveris, quam causam forte noveris qué factum est, ut Christus amitteret
hereditatem Suam per orbem terrarum diffusam, et subito in solis Afris, nec
ipsis omnibus remaneret. Etenim ecclesia Catholica est etiam in Afric’ quia
per omnes terras eam Deus esse voluit et predixit. Pars autem vestra, quee
Donati dicitur, non est in omnibus illis locis, in quibus et literze et sermo et
facta apostolica cucurrerunt.’ In Ps. lxxxv. n. 14: ‘Christo enim tales
maledicunt, qui dicunt, quia periit ecclesia de orbe terrarum, et remansit in
solé Africé.” Compare S. Hieron. adv. Lucifer. tom. iv. pt. 11. p. 298: ‘Si
in Sardinia tantum habet [ecclesiam Christus] nimium pauper factus est.’
And St. Chrys. in Col. Hom. i. ἢ. 2; in 1 Cor. Hom. xxxii. n. 1. _
* In Ps. xliv. (Vulg.) Enarr. n. 24: ‘Sacramenta doctrine in linguis
omnibus variis. Alia lingua Afra, alia Syra, alia Greeca, alia Hebreea, alia
illa et illa; faciunt iste linguz varietatem vestis regine hujus; quomodo
autem omnis varietatis vestis in unitate concordat, sic et omnes lingue ad
unam fidem.’
s Ep. liv. ad Januar. n. 2: ‘Alia vero [sunt] que per loca terrarum
regionesque variantur, sicuti est quod alii jejunant sabbato, alii non; alii
quotidit communicant Corpori et Sanguini Domini, alii certis diebus ac-
cipiunt ; alibi nullus dies pretermittitur, quo non offeratur, alibi sabbato
tantum et dominico, alibi tantum dominico; et si quid aliud hujusmodi
animadverti potest, totwm hoc genus rerum liberas habet observationes ; nec
11
120 Actual area and prospects of the Church.
find an equal welcome within her comprehensive bosom. Yet
contrast the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries with the
Church of the middle ages, or with the Church of our own
day. In the fourth and even in the fifth century, whatever may
have been the activity of individual missionaries, the Church
was still for the most part contained within the limits of the
empire; and of parts of the empire she had scarcely as yet
taken possession. She was still confronted by powerful sections
of the population, passionately attached for various reasons to
the ancient superstition: nobles such as the powerful Sym-
machus, and orators like the accomplished Libanius, were among
her most earnest opponents. But it is now scarcely less than a
thousand years since Jesus Christ received at least the outward
submission of the whole of Europe; and from that time to this —
His empire has been continually expanding. The newly-dis-
covered continents of Australia and America have successively
acknowledged His sway. He is shedding the light of His
doctrine first upon one and then upon another of the islands of
the Pacific. He has beleaguered the vast African continent on
either side with various forms of missionary enterprise. And
although in Asia there are vast,“ancient, and highly organized
religions which are still permitted to bid Him defiance, yet
India, China, Tartary, and Kamschatka have within the last few
years witnessed heroic labours and sacrifices for the spread of
His kingdom, which would not have been unworthy of the
purest and noblest enthusiasms of the Primitive Church. Nor
are these efforts so fruitless as the ruling prejudices or the lack
of trustworthy information on such subjects, which are so com-
mon in Western Europe, might occasionally suggest.
Already the kingdom of the Redeemer may be said to em-
brace three continents ; but what are its prospects, even if we
measure them by a strictly human estimate? Is it not a simple
matter of fact that at this moment the progress of the human
race is entirely identified with the spread of the influence of the
nations of Christendom? What Buddhist, or Mohammedan, or
Pagan nation is believed by others, or believes itself, to be able to
disciplina ulla est in his melior gravi prudentique Christiano, quam ut ¢o
modo agat, quo agere viderit ecclesiam, ad quam forte devenerit. Quod enim
neque contra fidem, neque bonos mores esse conyincitur, indifférenter est
habendum et propter eorum, inter quos vivitur, societatem servandum est.’
* As to the Russian Missions, see Boissard, Eglise de Russie, tom. i. pp. 100-
104; Voices from the East, by Rev. J. M. Neale, London, Masters, 1859,
pp. 81-113.
[ LECT.
Objection; Losses and divisions of Christendom. 121
affect for good the future destinies of the human race? The
idea of a continuous progress of humanity, whatever perversions
that idea may have undergone, is really a creation of the
Christian faith. The nations of Christendom, in exact pro-
portion to the strength, point, and fervour of their Christianity,
seriously believe that they can command the future, and in-
stinctively associate themselves with the Church’s aspirations
for a world-wide empire. Such a confidence, by the mere fact
of its existence, is already on the road to justifying itself by
success. It never was stronger, on the whole, than it is in our
own day. If in certain districts of European opinion it may
seem to be waning, this is only because such sections of opinion
have for the moment rejected the empire of Christ. Their
aberrations do not set aside, they rather act as a foil to that
general belief in a moral and social progress of mankind which
at bottom is so intimately associated with the belief of Christian
men in the coming triumph of the Church.
(2.) But long ere this, my brethren, as I am well aware, you
have been prepared to interrupt me with a group of objections.
Surely, you will say, this representation of the past, of the
present, and of the future of the Church may suffice for an ideal
picture, but it is not history. Is not the verdict of history a
different and a less encouraging one? First of all, do Church
annals present this spectacle of an ever-widening extension of
the kingdom of Christ? What then is to be said of the spread
of great and vital heresies, such as the mediseval Nestorianism,
through countries which once believed with the Church in the
One Person and two Natures of her Lord™? Again, is it not
a matter of historical fact that the Church has lost entire pro-
vinces both in Africa and in the East, since the rise of Moham-
medanism? And are her losses only to be measured by the
territorial area which she once occupied, and from which she
has been beaten back by the armies of the alien? Has she not,
by the controversies of the tenth and of the sixteenth centuries,
been herself splintered into three great sections, which still con-
tinue to act in outward separation from each other, to their own
extreme mutual loss and discouragement, and to the immense
and undisguised satisfaction of all enemies of the Christian
name? Are not large bodies of active and earnest Christians
living in separation from her communion? Do not our mis-
sionary associations perpetually lament their failures to achieve
ἃ See Gibbon, Decl. and Fall, ch. xlvii.
lil |
122 Losses and divisions of Christendom.
uny large permanent conquests for Christ? Once more, is it
not a matter of notoriety that the leading nations of Christian
Europe are themselves honeycombed by a deadly rationalism,
which gives no quarter in its contemptuous yet passionate on-
slaughts on the faith of Christians, and which never calculated
more confidently than it does at the present time upon achieving
the total destruction of the empire of Jesus Christ ?
My brethren, you do a service to my argument in stating
these apparent objections to its force. The substance of your
plea cannot be ignored by any who would honestly apprehend
the matter before us. You point, for instance, to the territorial
losses which the Church has sustained at the hands of heretical
Christians or of Moslem invaders. True: the Church of Christ
has sustained such losses. But has she not more than redressed
them in other directions? Is she not now, in India and in
Africa, carrying the banner of the Cross into the territory of
the Crescent? You insist upon the grave differences which form
a barrier at this moment between the Eastern and the Western
Churches, and between the two great divisions of the Western
Church itself. Your estimate of those differences may be a
somewhat exaggerated one. The renewed harmony and co-
operation of the separated portions of the family of Christ may
not be so entirely remote as you would suggest. Yet we must
undoubtedly acknowledge that existing divisions, like all ha-
bitual sin within the sacred precincts of the Church, are a
standing and very serious violation of the law of its Founder.
Nor is this disorder summarily to be remedied by our ceding to
the unwarrantable pretensions of one section of the Church,
which may endeavour to persuade the rest of Christendom, that
it is itself co-extensive with the whole kingdom of the Saviour.
The divisions of Christ’s family, lamentable and in many ways
disastrous as they are, must be ended, if at all, by the warmer
charity and more fervent prayers of believing Christians. But
meanwhile, do not these very divisions afford an indirect illus-
tration of the extraordinary vitality of the new kingdom? Has
the kingdom ceased to enlarge its territory since the troubled
times of the sixteenth century? On the contrary, it is simply a
matter of fact that, since that date, its ratio of extension has
been greater than at any previous period. The philosopher who
supposes that the Church is on the point of dying out because of
her divisions must be strangely insensible to the higher con-
victions which are increasingly prevailing in the minds of men.
And the confessions of failure on the part of some of our
[ LECT.
:
|
Strength and weakness of modern unbelief. 123
missionaries are certainly balanced by many and thankful nar-
ratives of great results accomplished under circumstances of the
utmost discouragement.
But you insist most emphatically upon the spread and upon
the strength of modern rationalism. You say that rationalism
is enthroned in the midst of civilizations which the Church her-
self has formed and nursed. You urge that rationalism, like
the rottenness which has seized upon the heart of the forest oak,
must sooner or later arrest the growth of branch and foliage,
and bring the tree which it is destroying to the ground. Now
we cannot deny, what is indeed a patent and melancholy fact,
that some of the most energetic of the intellectual movements
in modern Europe frankly avow and enthusiastically advocate
an explicit and total rejection of the Christian creed. Yet it is
possible to overrate the importance and to mistake the true sig-
nificance of this recent advance of unbelief. Of course Christian
faith can be daunted or surprised by no form or intensity of
opposition to truth, when there are always so many reasons for
opposing it. We Christians know what we have to expect from
the human heart in its natural state; while on the other hand
we have been told that the gates of hell shall not prevail against
the Church of the Redeemer. But, in speculating on the future
destinies of the Church, as they are affected by rationalism, this
hopeful confidence of a sound faith may be seconded by the
calm estimate of the reflective reason. For, first, it may fairly
be questioned whether the publicly proclaimed unbelief of
modern times is really more general or more pronounced than
the secret but active and deeply penetrating scepticism which
during considerable portions of the middle ages laid such hold
upon the intellect of Europex. Yet the medieval sceptics cannot
be said to have permanently hampered the progress of the
Church. Again, modern unbelief may be deemed less formid-
able when we steadily observe its moral impotence for all con-
structive purposes. Its strength and genius lie only in the
direction of. destruction. It has shewn no sort of power to
build up any spiritual fabric or system which, as a shelter and a
discipline for the hearts and lives of men, can take the place of
that which it seeks to destroy. Leaving some of the deepest,
most legitimate, and most ineradicable needs of the human
soul utterly unsatisfied, modern unbelief can never really hope
x Cf. Newman, Lectures on University Subjects, pp. 296, 297. Milman,
Latin Christianity, vi. 444. See too St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, i. 4.
111 |
124 Unbeltef, undesignedly the servant of the Church.
permanently to establish a popular ‘religion of humanityy.’ Thus
the force of its intellectual onset upon revealed dogma is con-
tinually being broken by the consciousness, that it cannot long
maintain the ground which it may seem to itself for the moment
to have won. Its highest speculative energy is more than
counterbalanced by the moral power of some humble teacher of
a positive creed for whom possibly it entertains nothing less
than a sovereign contempt. Thirdly, unbelief resembles social
or political persecution in this, that, indirectly, it does an
inevitable service to the Faith which it attacks. It forces
earnest believers in Jesus Christ to minimize all differences
which are less than fundamental. It compels Christian men to
repress with a strong hand all exaggeration of existing motives
for a divided action. It obliges Christians, sometimes in spite
of themselves, to work side by side for their insulted Lord.
Thus it not only creates freshened sympathies between tem-
porarily severed branches of the Church; it draws toward the
Church herself, with an increasingly powerful and comprehensive
attraction, many of those earnestly believing men, who, as is the
case with numbers among our nonconformist brethren in this
country, already belong, in St. Augustine’s language, to the soul,
although not to the body, of the Catholic Communion. Lastly,
it unwittingly contributes to augment the evidential strength of
Christianity, at the very moment of its assault upon Christian
doctrine. The fierceness of man turns to the praise of Jesus
Christ, by demonstrating, each day, each year, each decade of
years, each century, the indestructibility of His work in the
world ; and unbelief voluntarily condemns itself to the task of
maintaining before the eyes of men that enduring tradition of
an implacable hostility to the kingdom of heaven, which it is the
glory of our Saviour so explicitly to have predicted, and so con-
sistently and triumphantly to have defied.
3- For these and other reasons, modern unbelief, although
formidable, will not be deemed so full of menace to the future of
the kingdom of our Lord as may sometimes be apprehended by
the nervous timidity of Christian piety. This will appear more
y The attempt of M. Auguste Comte, in his later life, to elaborate a kind
of ritual as a devotional and esthetical appendage to the Positivist Phi-
losophy, implies a sense of this truth. M. Comte however does not appear
to have carried any large section of the Positivist school with him in this
singular enterprise. But a like poverty of moral and spiritual provision for
the soul of man is observable in rationalistic systems which stop very far
short of the literal godlessness of the Positive Philosophy.
[ LECT.
« Lntensity of our Lord’s work in souls. 125
certain if from considering the extent of Christ’s realm we turn
to the intensive side of His work among men. For indeed the
depth of our Lord’s work in the soul of man has ever been more
wonderful than its breadth. The moral intensity of the life of a
sincere Christian is a more signal illustration of the reality of
the reign of Christ, and of the success of His plan, than is the
territorial range of the Christian empire. ‘The King’s daughter
is all glorious within.’ Christianity may have conferred a new
sanction upon civil and domestic relationships among men;
and it certainly infused a new life into the most degraded
society that the world has yet seen”. Still this was not its pri-
mary aim ; its primary efforts were directed not to this world,
but to the next®. Christianity has changed many of the out-
ward aspects of human existence ; it has created a new religious
language, a new type of worship, a new calendar of time. It has
furnished new ideals to art; it has opened nothing less than a
new world of literature; it has invested the forms of social
intercourse among men with new graces of refinement and
mutual consideration. Yet these are but some of the superficial
symptoms of its real work. It has achieved these changes in the
outward life of Christian nations, because it has penetrated to
the very depths of man’s heart and thought; because it has
revolutionized his convictions and tamed his will, and then ex-
pressed its triumph in the altered social system of that section
of the human race which has generally received it. How com-
plete at this moment is the reign of Christ in the soul of a
sincere Christian! Christ is not a limited, He is emphatically
an absolute Monarch. Yet His rule is welcomed by His subjects
with more than that enthusiasm which a free people can feel for
its elected magistracy. Every sincere Christian bows to Jesus
Christ as to an Intellectual Master. Our Lord is not merely
2 St. Aug. Ep. cxxxviii. ad Marcellin. n. 15: ‘Qui doctrinam Christi
adversam dicunt esse reipublice, dent exercitum talem, quales doctrina
Christi esse milites jussit, dent tales provinciales, tales maritos, tales con-
juges, tales parentes, tales filios, tales dominos, tales servos, tales reges, tales
judices, tales denique debitorum ipsius fisci redditores et exactores, quales
esse precipit doctrina Christiana, et audeant eam dicere adversam esse rei-
public, immd verd non dubitent eam confiteri magnam, si obtemperetur,
salutem esse reipublice.’
® δύ, Hieronymus adv. Jovin. lib. ii. tom. iv. pars ii. p. 200, ed. Martian :
‘Nostra religio non πυκτὴν, non athletam (St. Jerome might almost have in
his eye a certain well-known modern theory) non nautas, non milites, non
fossores, sed sapientiz erudit sectatorem, qui se Dei cultui dedicavit, et scit
cur creatus sit, cur versetur in mundo, quo abire festinet.’
III |
126 Lntensity of our Lord’s work in souls,
listened to as a Teacher of Truth; He is contemplated as the
absolute Truth itself. Accordingly no portion of His teaching is
received by true Christians merely as a ‘view,’ or as a ‘tenta-
tive system,’ or as a ‘theory,’ which may be entertained, dis-
cussed, partially adopted, and partially set aside. Those who
deal thus with Him are understood to have broken with Chris-
tianity, at least as a practical religion. For a Christian, the
Words of Christ constitute the highest criterion and rule of truth.
All that Christ has authorized is simply accepted, all that He
has condemned is simply rejected, with the whole energy of the
Christian reason. Christ’s Thought is reflected, it is reproduced,
in the thought of the true Christian. Christ’s authority in the
sphere of speculative truth is thankfully acknowledged by the
Christian’s voluntary and unreserved submission to the slightest
known intimations of his Master’s judgment. High above the
claims of human teachers, the tremendous self-assertion of Jesus
Christ echoes on from age to age,—‘I am the Truth.” And
from age to age the Christian mind responds by a life-long
endeavour ‘to bring every thought into captivity unto the obe-
dience of Christ¢.’ But if Jesus Christ is Lord of the Christian’s
thought, He is also Lord of the Christian’s affections. Beauty
it is which provokes love; and Christ is the highest Moral
Beauty. He does not merely rank as an exponent of the purest
morality. He is absolute Virtue, embodied in a human life, and
vividly, energetically set forth before our eyes in the story of
the Gospels. As such, He claims to reign over the inmost
affections of men. As such, He secures the first place in the
heart of every true Christian. To have taken the measure of
His Beauty, and yet not to love Him, is, in a Christian’s judg-
ment, to be self-condemned. ‘If any man love not the Lord
Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha4.’ And ruling
the affections of the Christian, Christ is also King of the
sovereign faculty in the Christianized soul ; He is Master of the
Christian will. When He has tamed its native stubbornness,
He teaches it day by day a more and more pliant accuracy of
movement in obedience to Himself. Nay, He is not merely its
rule of action, but its very motive power ; each act of devotion
and self-sacrifice of which it is capable is but an extension of the
energy of Christ’s Own moral Life. ‘Without Me,’ he says to
His servants, ‘ye can do nothing¢;’ and with St. Paul His
> St. John xiv. 6. © 2 Cor.x. 5,
ἃ 1 Cor. xvi. 22. € St. John xy. 5,
[ Lect.
Sy ee cc ὁπ ͵οὃ“ἷ᾿᾽
‘Christ ἐς Christianity? 127
iy a SL
servants reply, ‘I can do all things through Christ Which
strengtheneth Me f,’
This may be expressed in other terms by saying that, both
intellectually and morally, Christ is Christianity. Christianity
is not related to our Lord as a philosophy might be to a philo-
sopher, that is, as a moral or intellectual system thrown off from
his mind, resting thenceforward on its own merits, and implying
no necessary relation towards its author on the part of those
who receive it, beyond a certain sympathy with what was at
one time a portion of his thoughts. A philosophy may be thus
abstracted altogether from the person of its originator, with
entire impunity. Platonic thought would not have been
damaged, if Plato had been annihilated ; and in our day men
are Hegelians or Comtists, without believing that the respective
authors of those systems are in existence at this moment, nay
rather, in the majority of cases, while deliberately holding that
they have ceased to be. The utmost stretch of personal alle-
giance, on the part of the disciple of a philosophy to its founder,
consists, ordinarily speaking, in a sentiment of devotion ‘to his
memory. But detach Christianity from Christ, and it vanishes
before your eyes into intellectual vapour. For it is of the
essence of Christianity that, day by day, hour by hour, the
Christian should live in conscious, felt, sustained relationship to
the Ever-living Author of his creed and of his life. Christianity
is non-existent apart from Christ; it centres in Christ; it
‘radiates, now as at the first, from Christ. It is not a mere
doctrine bequeathed by Him to a world with which He has
ceased to have dealings ; it perishes outright when men attempt
to abstract it from the Living Person of its Founder. He is felt
by His people to be their Living Lord, really present with them
now, and even unto the end of the world. The Christian life
springs from and is sustained by the apprehension of Christ
present in His Church, present in and with His members as a
πνεῦμα ζωοποιοῦν ἢ), Christ is the quickening Spirit of Christian
humanity ; He lives in Christians; He thinks in Christians :
He acts through Christians and with Christians; He is indis-
solubly associated with every movement of the Christian’s deepest
life. ‘I live,’ exclaims the Apostle, ‘yet not I, but Christ liveth
inmei’ This felt presence of Christ it is, which gives both its
f Phil. iv. 13.
8. Luthardt, Grundwahrheiten des Christenthums, p. 227; ‘Er ist der
Inhalt seiner Lehre.’ bh 1 Cor. xv. 45. i Gal. ii. 20.
11]
128 7ς the Sermon on the Mount a dead letter?
form and its force to the sincere Christian life. That life is a
loyal homage of the intellect, of the heart, and of the will, to a
Divine King, with Whom will, heart, and intellect are in close
and constant communion, and from Whom there flows forth,
through the Spirit and the Sacraments, that supply of light, of
love, and of resolve, which enriches and ennobles the Christian
soul. My brethren, I am not theorizing or describing any
merely ideal state of things; I am but putting into words the
inner experience of every true Christian among you; I am but
exhibiting a set of spiritual circumstances which, as a matter of
course, every true Christian endeavours to realize and make his
own, and which, as a matter of fact, blessed be God! very many
Christians do realize, to their present peace, and to their eternal
welfare.
Certainly it is not uncommon in our day to be informed, that
‘the Sermon on the Mount is a dead letter in Christendom.’
In consequence (so men speak) of the engrossing interest which
Christians have wrongly attached to the discussion of dogmatic
questions, that original draught of essential Christianity, the
Sermon on the Mount, has been wellnigh altogether lost sight
of. Perhaps you yourselves, my brethren, ere now have repeated
some of the current commonplaces on this topic. But have you
endeavoured to ascertain whether it is indeed as you say? You
remark that you at least have not met with Christians who
seemed to be making any sincere efforts to turn the Sermon on
the Mount into practice. It may be so. But the question is,
where have you looked for them? Do you expect to meet them
rushing hurriedly along the great highways of life, with the
keen, eager, self-asserting multitude? Do you expect, that with
their eye upon the Beatitudes and upon the Cross, they will
throng the roads which lead to worldly success, to earthly
wealth, to temporal honour? Be assured that those who know
where moral beauty, aye, the highest, is to be found, are not
disappointed, even at this hour, in their search for it. Until
you have looked more carefully, more anxiously than has
probably been the case, for the triumphs of our Lord’s work in
Christian souls, you may do well to take upon trust the testi-
mony of others. You may at least be sufficiently generous, aye,
and sufficiently reasonable, to believe in the existence at this
present time of the very highest types of Christian virtue. It is
a simple matter of fact that in our day, multitudes of men and
women do lead the life of the Beatitudes ; they pray, they fast,
they do alms to their Father Which seeth in secret. These are
[ LECT.
“Ξ ὩΞ’ΕΡ-Ἕ Ἡ Θ ΟΝΎςῬΧῬΘΤ Ἕ.
Ls the Sermon on the Mount a dead letter? 129
Christians who take no thought for the morrow. These are
Christians whose righteousness does exceed that worldly and
conventional standard of religion, which knows no law save the
corrupt public opinion of the hour, and which inherits in every
generation the essential spirit of the Scribes and Pharisees.
These are Christians who shew forth the moral creativeness of
Jesus Christ in their own deeds and words ; they are living
witnesses to His solitary and supreme power of changing the
human heart. They were naturally proud; He has enabled
them to be sincerely humble. They were, by the inherited
taint of their nature, impure ; He has in them shed honour upon
the highest forms of chastity, They too were, as in his natural
state man ever is, suspicious of and hostile to their fellow-men,
unless connected with them by blood, or by country, or by interest.
But Jesus Christ has taught them the tenderest and most
practical forms of love for man viewed simply as man; He has
inspired them with the only true, that is, the Christian, huma-
nitarianism. Think not that the moral energy of the Christian
life was confined to the Church of the first centuries, At this
moment, there are millions of souls in the world, that are pure,
humble, and loving. But for Jesus Christ our Lord, these
millions would have been proud, sensual, selfish. At this very
day, and even in atmospheres where the taint of scepticism dulls
the brightness of Christian thought, and enfeebles the strength
of Christian resolution, there are to be found men, whose intel-
ligence gazes on Jesus with a faith so clear and strong, whose
affection clings to Him with so trustful and so warm an embrace,
whose resolution has been so disciplined and braced to serve
Him by a persevering obedience, that, beyond a doubt, they
would joyfully die for Him, if by shedding their blood they could
better express their devotion to His Person, or lead others to
know and to love Him more. Blessed be God, that portion of
His one Fold in which He has placed us, the Church of England,
has not lacked the lustre of such lives as these. Such assuredly
was Ken ; such was Bishop Wilson ; such have been many whose
names have never appeared in the page of history. Has not one
indeed quite lately passed from among us, the boast and glory of
this our University, great as a poet, greater still, it may be, as
a scholar and a theologian, greatest of all as a Christian saint?
Certainly to know him, even slightly, was inevitably to know
that he led a life distinct from, and higher than, that of common
men. ΤῸ know him well, was to revere and to love in him the
manifested beauty of his Lord’s presence ; it was to trace the
II | K
130 Social results of Christiantty.
sensibly perpetuated power of the Life, of the Teaching, of the
Cross of Jesus *.
4. On the other hand, look at certain palpable effects of our
Lord’s work which lie on the very face of human society. If
society, apart from the Church, is more kindly and humane than
in heathen times, this is due to the work of Christ on the hearts
of men. ‘The era of ‘humanity’ is the era of the Incarnation.
The sense of human brotherhood, the acknowledgment of the
sacredness of human rights, the recognition of that particular
stock of rights which appertains to every human being, is a cre-
ation of Christian dogma. It has radiated from the heart of the
Christian Church into the society of the outer world. Chris-
tianity is the power which first gradually softened slavery, and
is now finally abolishing it. Christianity has proclaimed the
dignity of poverty, and has insisted upon the claims of the poor,
with a success proportioned to the sincerity which has welcomed
her doctrines among the different peoples of Christendom. The
hospital is an invention of Christian philanthropy!; the active
charity of the Church of the fourth century forced into the Greek
language a word for which Paganism had had no occasion. The
degradation of woman in the Pagan world has been exchanged
for a position of special privilege and honour, accorded to her
by the Christian nations. The sensualism which Pagans mistook
for love has been placed under the ban of all true Christian
feeling ; and in Christendom, love is now the purest of moral
impulses ; it is the tenderest, the noblest, the most refined of
the movements of the soul. The old, the universal, the natural
feeling of bitter hostility between races, nations, and classes of
men is denounced by Christianity. The spread of Christian
truth inevitably breaks down the ferocities of national prejudice,
and prepares the world for that cosmopolitanism which, we are
told, is its most probable future. International law had no real
existence until the nations, taught by Christ, had begun to feel
the bond of brotherhood. International law is now each year
becoming more and more powerful in regulating the affairs of the
civilized world. And if we are sorrowfully reminded that the
prophecy of a world-wide peace within the limits of Christ’s
kingdom has not yet been realized; if Christian lands, in our
k The author of the Christian Year had passed to his rest during the in-
terval that elapsed between the delivery of the second and the third of these
lectures, on March 30, 1866.
1 Hallam’s Middle Ages, chap. ix. part i. vol. ii. p. 365.
[ LECT.
a
Perpetuity of the Church. 131
day as before, are reddened by streams of Christian blood ; yet
the utter disdain of the plea of right, the high-handed and
barbarous savagery, which marked the wars of heathendom, have
given way to sentiments in which justice can at least obtain
a hearing, and which compassion and generosity, drawing their
inspirations from the Cross, have at times raised to the level of
chivalry.
But neither would any improvements in man’s sotial life, nor
even the regenerate lives of individual Christians, of themselves,
have realized our Lord’s ‘plan’ in its completeness™, His design
was to found a society or Church ; individual sanctity and social
amelioration are only effects radiating from the Church. The
Church herself is the true proof of His success. After the lapse
of eighteen centuries the kingdom of Christ is here, and it is
still expanding. How fares it generally with a human under-
taking when exposed to the action of a long period of time? The
idea which was its very soul is thrown into the shade by some
other idea; or it is warped, or distorted, or diverted from its
true direction, or changed by some radical corruption. In the
end it dies out from among the living thoughts of men, and
takes its place in the tomb of so much forgotten speculation, on
the shelves of a library. Within a short lifetime we may follow
many ἃ popular moral impulse from its cradle to its grave.
From the era of its young enthusiasm, we mark its gradual
entry upon the stage of fixed habit ; from this again we pass to
its day of lifeless formalism, and to the rapid progress of its de-
cline. But the Society founded by Jesus Christ is here, still
animated by its original idea, still carried forward by the moral
impulse which sustained it in its infancy. If Christian doctrine
m A reviewer, who naturally must dissent from parts of the teaching of
these lectures, but of whose generosity and fairness the lecturer is deeply
sensible, reminds him that ‘Our Lord came to carry out the counsel of the
Eternal Father ; and that counsel was, primarily, to establish, through His
sacrificial death, an economy of mercy, under which justification and spiritual
and eternal life should be realized by all who should penitently rely on Him?
St. John iii. 16, vi. 38-40. Undoubtedly. But this ‘economy of mercy?
included the establishment of a world-embracing church, within which it was
to be dispensed. Col. i. 10-14. Our Lord founded His Church, not by way
of achieving a vast social feat or victory, but with a view to the needs of the
human soul, which He came from heaven to save. Nevertheless the Church
is not related to our Lord’s design as an ‘inseparable accident.’ It is that
design itself, viewed on its historical and social side; it is the form which,
so far as we know, His redemptive work necessarily took, and which He Him-
self founded as being the imperishable result of His Incarnation and Death.
‘St. Matt. xvi. 18. Cf. Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, Dec. 1867, p. 1086.
II | K 2
132 How to account for the success of Christ's ‘ plan.
has, in particular branches of the Church, been overlaid by an
encrustation of foreign and earthly elements, its body and sub-
stance is untouched in each great division of the Catholic
Society; and much of it, we rejoice to know, is retained by com-
munities external to the Holy Fold. If intimate union with the
worldly power of the State (as especially in England during
the last century) has sometimes seemed to chill the warmth of
Christian love, and to substitute a heartless externalism for the
spiritual life of a Christian brotherhood ; yet again and again
the flame of that Spirit Whom the Son of Man sent to ‘glorify’
Himself, has burst up from the depths of the living heart of the
Church, and has kindled among a generation of sceptics or sen-
sualists a pure and keen enthusiasm which confessors and martyrs
might have recognised as their own. The Church of Christ in
sooth carries within herself the secret forces which renew her
moral vigour, and which will, in God’s good time, visibly re-
assert her essential unity. Her perpetuated existence among
ourselves at this hour bears a witness to the superhuman powers
of her Founder, not less significant than that afforded by the
intensity of the individual Christian life, or by the territorial
range of the Christian empire.
III. The work of Jesus Christ in the world is a patent fact,
and it is still in full progress before our eyes. The question
remains, How are we to account for its success ?
1. If this question is asked with respect to the ascendancy
of such a national religion as the popular Paganism of Greece,
it is obvious to refer to the doctrine of the prehistoric mythus.
The Greek religious creed was, at least in the main, a creation of
the national imagination at a period when reflection and ex-
perience could scarcely have existed. It was recommended to
subsequent generations, not merely by the indefinable charm of
poetry which was thrown around it, not merely by the antiquity
which shrouded its actual origin, but by its accurate sympathy
with the genius as with the degradations of the gifted race which
had produced it. But of late years we have heard less of the
attempt to apply the doctrine of the mythus to a series of well-
ascertained historical events, occurring in the mid-day light of
history, and open to the hostile criticism of an entire people.
The historical imagination, steadily applied to the problem, re-
fuses to picture the unimaginable process by which such stupen-
dous ‘myths’ as those of the Gospel.could have been festooned
around the simple history of a humble preacher of righteousness”.
n Luthardt, Grundwahrheiten des Christenthums, p. 234.
[ LECT.
Not parallel to the Success of ‘false religions. 133
The early Christian Church does not supply the intellectual
agencies that could have been equal to any such task. As
Rousseau has observed, the inventor of such a history would
have been not less wonderful than its Subject ®; and the utter
reversal of the ordinary laws of a people’s mental development
would have been itself a miracle. Nor was it to be anticipated
that a religion which was, as the mythical school asserts, the
‘creation of the Jewish race,’ would have made itself a home, at
the very beginning of its existence, among the Greek and the
Roman peoples of the Western world. If however we are re-
ferred to the upgrowth and spread of Buddhism, as to a pheno-
menon which may rival and explain the triumph of Christianity,
it may be sufficient to reply that the writers who insist upon this
parallel are themselves eminently successful in analysing the
purely natural causes of the success of Cakya-Mouni. They
dwell among other points on the rare delicacy and fertility of
the Aryan imagination?, and on the absence of any strong
counter-attraction to arrest the course of the new doctrine in
Central and South-eastern Asia. Nor need we fear to admit,
that, mingled with the darkest errors, Buddhism contained
elements of truth so undeniably powerful as to appeal with
great force to some of the noblest aspirations of the soul of
man4, But Buddhism, vast as is the population which professes
it, has not yet made its way into a second continent; while the
religion of Jesus Christ is to be found in every quarter of the
globe. As for the rapid and widespread growth of the religion
of the False Prophet, it may be explained, partly by the practical
genius of Mohammed, partly by the rare qualities of the Arab
race. If it had not claimed to be a new revelation, Moham-
medanism might have passed for a heresy adroitly constructed
out of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Its doctrine re-
specting Jesus Christ reaches the level of Socinianism ; and, as
against Polytheism, its speculative force lay in its insistance upon
the truth of the Divine Unity. A religion which consecrated
© The well-known words of the Emile are these : ‘Jamais des auteurs juifs
n’eussent trouvé ce ton ni cette morale; et l’Evangile a des caractéres de
vérité si grands, si frappants, si parfaitement inimitables, que Vinventeur en
serait plus étonnant que le héros.’
P Cf. on this point the interesting Essay of M. Taine, Etudes Critiques,
p. 321.
4 Cf, Saint-Hilaire, Le Bouddha et sa Religion, pp. 142-148. Yet M. St.
Hilaire describes Buddhism as presenting ‘un spiritualisme sans 4me, une
_ vertu sans devoir, une morale sans liberté, une charité sans amour, un monde
sans nature et sans Dieu.’ Ib. p. 182.
UI |
134 Success of false religions and of Christianity.
sensual indulgence could bid high for an Asiatic popularity
against the Church of Christ; and Mohammed delivered the
scymetar, as the instrument of his apostolate, into the hands of
a people whose earlier poetry shews it to have been gifted with
intellectual fire and strength of purpose of the highest order.
But it has not yet been asserted that the Church fought her
way, sword in hand, to the throne of Constantine ; nor were the
first Christians naturally calculated to impose their will forcibly
upon the civilized world, had they ever desired to do so. Still
less is a parallel to the work of Jesus Christ to be found in that
of Confucius. Confucius indeed was not a warrior like Moham-
med, nor a mystic like Cakya-Mouni; he appealed neither to
superior knowledge nor to miraculous power. Confucius col-
lected, codified, enforced, reiterated all that was most elevated in
the moral traditions of China ; he was himself deeply penetrated
with the best ethical sentiments of Chinese antiquity’ His
success was that of an earnest patriot who was also, as a patriot,
an antiquarian moralist. But he succeeded only in China, nor
could his work roll back that invasion of Buddhism which took
place in the first century of the Christian era. Confucianism
is more purely national than Buddhism and Mohamme-
danism ; and in this respect it contrasts more sharply with
the world-wide presence of Christianity. Yet if Confucianism is
unknown beyond the frontiers of China, it is equally true that
neither Buddhism nor Mohammedanism haye done more than
spread themselves over territories contiguous to their original
homes. Whereas, almost within the first century of her exist-
ence, the Church had her missionaries in Spain on one hand,
and, as it seems, in India on the other; and her Apostle pro-
claimed that his Master’s cause was utterly independent of all
distinctions of race and nations’. In our own day, Christian
charity is freely spending its energies and its blood in efforts to
carry the work of Jesus Christ into regions where He has been
so stoutly resisted by these ancient and highly organized forms
of error. Yet in the streets of London or of Paris we do not
hear of the labours of Moslem or Buddhist missionaries, instinct
with any such sense of a duty and mission to all the world in the
name of truth, as that which animates, at this very hour, those
heroic pioneers of Christendom whom Europe has sent to Delhi
or to Pekin t,
τ Cf. Max Miiller, Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i. p. 308,
5. ΟἹ]. Π|. τι; Rom; ita.
* We are indeed told that ‘if we were to judge from the history of the last
[ LECT.
Gibbon’s account of the success of Fesus Christ. 135
2. From the earliest ages of the Church, the rapid progress
of Christianity in the face of apparently insurmountable diffi-
culties, has attracted attention, on the score of its high evidential
valuet. The accomplished but unbelieving historian of the De-
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire undertook to furnish the
scepticism of the last century with a systematized and altogether
natural account of the spread of Christianity v. The five ‘ causes’
which he instances as sufficient to explain the work of Jesus
Christ in the world are, the ‘zeal’ of the early Christians, the
‘doctrine of a future life, the ‘miraculous powers ascribed to
the primitive Church,’ the ‘pure and austere morals of the first
Christians,” and ‘the union and discipline of the Christian
republic.’ But surely each of these causes points at once and
irresistibly to a cause beyond itselfx. If the zeal of the first
Christians was, as Gibbon will have it, a fanatical habit of mind
inherited from Judaism, how came it not merely to survive, but
to acquire a new intensity, when the narrow nationalism which
provoked it in the Jew had been wholly renounced? What was
it that made the first Christians so zealous amid surrounding
lassitude, so holy amid encompassing pollution? Why should
the doctrine of a life to come have had a totally different effect
when proclaimed by the Apostles from any which it had had
when taught by Socrates or by Plato, or by other thinkers of the
Pagan world? How came it that a few peasants and tradesmen
could erect a world-wide organization, sufficiently elastic to
adapt itself to the genius of races the most various, sufficiently
uniform to be everywhere visibly conservative of its unbroken
identity ? If the miracles of the early Church, or any one of
them, were genuine, how can they avail to explain the natural-
ness of the spread of Christianity? If they were all false, how
thousand years, it would appear to shew that the permanent area of Chris-
tianity is conterminous with that of Western civilization, and that its doctrines
could find acceptance only among those who, by incorporation into the Greek
and Latin races, have adopted their system of life and morals.’ International
Policy, p. 508. The Anglo-Positivist school however is careful to explain
that it altogether excludes Russia from any share in ‘ Western civilization ;’
Russia, it appears, is. quite external to ‘the West.’ Ibid. pp. 14-17, 58,
ens,
og St. Justin. Dialog. cum Tryph. 117, 121; St. Irenzeus, adv. Her. i. 6. 10,
§ 2; Tertull. adv. Judzos, vii; Apolog. 37; Orig. contr. Celsum, i. 26,
ii. 79. Cf. Freppel, Examen Critique, p. 110.
¥ No reader of Gibbon will be misled by the sarcasm of the opening para-
graphs of Decl. and Fall, c. xv. Would that Gibbon had really supposed
himself to be describing only the ‘secondary causes’ of the progress of Chris-
tianity ! x Eclipse of Faith, p. 186.
11]
A
136 LRecent theory of the success of our Lord.
extraordinary is this spectacle of a moral triumph, such as even
Gibbon acknowledges that of Christianity to be, brought about by
means of a vast and odious imposition ! Gibbon’s argument would
have been more conclusive if the ‘causes’ to which he points
could themselves have been satisfactorily accounted for in a
natural way. As it was, the historian of Lausanne did an in-
direct service to Christendom, of that kind for which England
has sometimes been indebted to the threatening preparations of
a great military neighbour. Gibbon indicated very clearly the
direction which would be taken by modern assailants of the
faith ; but he is not singular in having strengthened the cause
which he sought to ruin, by furnishing an indirect demonstration
of the essentially supernatural character of the spread of the
Gospel. '
3. But you remind me that if the sceptical artillery of Gibbon
is out of date, yet the ‘higher criticism’ of our day has a more
delicate, and, as is presumed, a more effective method of stating
the naturalistic explanation of the work of Jesus Christ in the
world. Jesus Christ, you say, was born at a time when the
world itself forced victory upon Him, or at least ensured for
Him an easy triumphy. The wants and aspirations of a worn-
out civilization, the dim but almost universal presentiment of
a coming Restorer of mankind, the completed organization of a
great world-empire, combined to do this. You urge that it is
possible so to correspond to the moral and intellectual drift of
a particular period, that nothing but a perverse stupidity can
escape a success which is all but inevituble. You add that Jesus
Christ ‘had this chance’ of appearing at a critical moment in
the history of humanity ; and that when the world was ripe for
His religion, He and His Apostles had just adroitness enough
not to be wholly unequal to the opportunity. The report of His
teaching and of His Person was carried on the crest of one of
those waves of strange mystic enthusiasm, which so often during
the age of the Cesars rolled westward from Asia towards the
capital of the world; and though the Founder of Christianity, it
is true, had perished in the surf, His work, you hold, in the
nature of things, could not but survive Him.
y Renan, Les Apdtres, pp. 302, 303. M. Renan is of opinion that ‘la
conversion du monde aux idées juives(!) et chrétiennes était inévitable 33
his only astonishment is that ‘cette conversion se soit fait si lentement et si
tard.’ On the other hand, the new faith is said to have made ‘de proche en
proche d’étonnantes progres’ (Ibid. p. 215); and, with reference to Antioch,
“on sétonne des progres accomplis en si peu de temps.’ Ibid. p. 236.
[ LECT.
Was our Lord’s triumph due to Fudarsm? 137
(2) In this representation, my brethren, there is a partial
truth which I proceed to recognise. It is true that the world
was weary and expectant ; it is true that the political fabric of
the great empire afforded to the Gospel the same facilities for
self-extension as those which it offered to the religion of Osiris,
or to the fable of Apollonius Tyaneus. But those favourable
circumstances are only what we should look for at the hands of
a Divine Providence, when the true religion was to be introduced
into the world; and they are altogether unequal to account for
the success of Christianity. It is alleged that Christianity cor-
responded to the dominant moral and mental tendencies 2 of the
time so perfectly, that those tendencies secured its triumph.
But is this accurate? Christianity was cradled in Judaism ;
but was the later Judaism so entirely in harmony with the
temper and aim of Christianity? Was the age of the Zealots, of
Judas the Gaulonite, of Theudas, likely to welcome the spiritual
empire of such a teacher as our Του ἃ ὁ. Were the moral dispo-
sitions of ‘the Jews, their longings for a political Messiah, their
fierce legalism, their passionate jealousy for the prerogatives of
their race, calculated—I do not say to further the triumph of
the Church, but—to enter even distantly into her distinctive
spirit and doctrines? Did not the Synagogue persecute Jesus
to death, when it had once discerned the real character of His
teaching? It may be argued that the favourable dispositions in
question which made the success of Christianity practically
inevitable were to be found among the Hellenistic Jews». The
Hellenistic Jews were less cramped by national prejudices, less
strictly observant of the Mosaic ceremonies, more willing to
welcome Gentile proselytes than was the case with the Jews of
Palestine. Be it so. But the Hellenistic Jews were just as
opposed as the Jews of Palestine to the capital truths of Chris-
tianity. A crucified Messiah, for instance, was not a more wel-
come doctrine in the synagogues of Corinth or of Thessalonica
than in those of Jerusalem. Never was Judaism broader, more
elastic, more sympathetic with external thought, more disposed
to make concessions than in Philo Judeus, the most representa-
tive of Hellenistic Jews. Yet Philo insists as stoutly as any
Palestinian Rabbi upon the perpetuity of the law of Moses. As
long, he says, as the human race shall endure, men shall carry
z Renan, Les Apétres, c. 19, pp. 366, sqq.
® Freppel, Examen Critique, p. 114.
b Renan, Les Apdtres, c. 19, Ρ. 113.
11 |
138 Was Christ's triumph due to Fewish sympathy ?
their offerings to the temple of Jerusalem¢. Indeed in the first
age of Christianity the Jews, both Palestinian and Hellenistic,
illustrate, unintentionally of course, but very remarkably, the
supernatural law of the expansion of the Church. They perse-
cute Christ in His members, and yet they submit to Him; they
are foremost in enriching the Church with converts, after en-
riching her with martyrs. Wherever the preachers of the Gospel
appear, it is the Jews who are their fiercest persecutors4; the
Jews rouse against them the passions of the Pagan mob, or
appeal to the prejudice of the Pagan magistrate®. Yet the
synagogue is the mission-station from which the Church’s action
originally radiates; the synagogue, as a rule, yields their first
spiritual conquests to the soldiers of the Cross. In the Acts of
the Apostles we remark on the one hand the hatred and opposi-
tion with which the Jew met the advancing Gospel, on the other,
the signal and rapid conquests of the Gospel among the ranks of
the Jewish populationf. The former fact determines the true
significance of the latter. Men do not persecute systems which
answer to their real sympathies; St. Paul was not a Christian
at heart, and without intending it, before his conversion. The
Church triumphed in spite of the dominant tendencies and the
fierce opposition of Judaism, both in Palestine and elsewhere ;
she triumphed by the force of her inherent and Divine vitality.
The process whereby the Gospel won its way among the Jewish
people was typified in St. Paul’s experience; the passage from
the traditions of the synagogue to the faith of Pentecost cost
nothing less than a violent moral and intellectual wrench, such
as could be achieved only by a supernatural force, interrupting
¢ De Monarchi4, lib. ii. § 3, ii. 224: ἐφ᾽ ὅσον γὰρ τὸ ἀνθρώπων γένος δια-
μενεῖ, del Kal αἱ πρόσοδοι τοῦ ἱεροῦ φυλαχθήσονται συνδιαινωνίζουσαι παντὶ τῷ
κόσμῳ : quoted by Freppel.
4 How far St. Paul thought that Judaism contributed to the triumph of
the Church might appear from 1 Thess. ii. 15, 16. Compare Acts xiii. 50,
XIV. 5. 10. Xvil.‘5, 13, ΧΨΗΙ 12, ΧΙΣ. 0, XXl1. 21, 22.
® Renan, Les Apdtres, p. 143 : ‘Ce qu’il importe, en tout cas, de remar-
quer, c’est qu’ ’époque ot nous sommes, les persécuteurs du Christianisme
ne sont pas les Romains; ce sont les Juifs orthodoxes. . . C’était Rome,
ainsi que nous l’avons déji plusieurs fois remarqué, qui empéchait le Judaisme
de se livrer pleinement & ses instincts d’intolérance, et d’étouffer les dé-
veloppements libres qui se produisaient dans son sein. Toute diminution de
Pautorité juive était un bienfait pour la secte naissante.’ (p. 251.) See
Martyr. St. Polye. c. 13.
f Acts vi. 7. This one text disposes of M. Renan’s assertion as to the
growth of the Church, that ‘les orthodoxes rigides s’y prétaient peu.’
Apotres, p. 113.
[ LECT.
:
Was Christ's triumph due to Pagan aspirations? 139
the old stream of thought and feeling and introducing a new
one.
(8) But if success was not forced upon the Christian Church
by the dispositions and attitude of Judaism ; can it be said that
Paganism supplies us with the true explanation of the triumph
of the Gospel? What then were those intellectual currents,
those moral ideals, those movements, those aspirations, discover-
able in the Paganism of the age of the Cesars, which were in
such effective alliance with the doctrine and morality of the New
Testament? What was the general temper of Pagan intellect,
but a self-asserting, cynical scepticism? Pagan intellect speaks
in orators like Cicero’, publicly deriding the idea of rewards and
punishments hereafter, and denying the intervention of a higher
Power in the affairs of men; or it speaks in statesmen like
Cesar, proclaiming from his place in the Roman senate that the
soul does not exist after deathi; or in historians like Tacitus,
repudiating with self-confident disdain the idea of a providential
government of the worldj; or in poets like Horace, making
profession of the practical Atheism of the school of Epicurus, it
is hard to say, whether in jest or in earnest*; or in men of
science like Strabo! and Pliny™, maintaining that religion is
a governmental device for keeping the passions of the lower
orders under restraint, and that the soul’s immortality is a mere
dream or nursery-story. ‘ Unbelief in the official religion,’ says
M. Renan, ‘was prevalent throughout the educated class. The very
statesmen who most ostentatiously upheld the public worship of
the empire made very amusing epigrams at its expense®.’ What
was the moral and social condition of Roman Paganism 7
Modern unbelief complains that St. Paul has characterized the
social morality of the Pagan world in terms of undue severity °.
& Cicero however, in his speculative moods, was the ‘only Roman who
undertook to rest a real individual existence of souls after death on philo-
sophical grounds.’ Dillinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. viii. § 3.
h Cic. pro Cluentio, c. 61; De Nat. Deor. iii. 32; De Off. ii. 28; De
Divin. ii. 17.
i Sallust. Catilin. 50-52.
i Tacitus, Ann. xvi. 33, vi. 22. Yet see Hist. i. 3, iv. 78.
k Hor. Sat. i. 5, 100, sq. ; cf. Lucret. v. 83, Vi. 57, 56:
1 Geogr. i. c. 2; cf. Polyb. Hist. Gen. vi. 56.
m Plin. vii. 55.
n Renan, Les Apdtres, pp. 340, 341.
_ © Tbid. p. 309, note 1: ‘L’opinion beaucoup trop sévére de Saint Paul
(Rom. i. 24 et suiv.) s’explique de la méme manitre. Saint Paul ne connais-
sait pas la haute société Romaine. Ce sontla, d’ailleurs, de ces invectives
II |
140 Moral characteristics of the Pagan world
Yet St. Paul does not exceed the specific charges of Tacitus, of
Suetonius, of Juvenal, of Seneca, that is to say, of writers who,
at least, had no theological interest in misrepresenting or exagge-
rating the facts which they deploreP. When Tacitus summarizes
the moral condition of Paganism by his exhaustive phrase
‘corrumpere et corrumpi, he more than covers the sorrowing
invective of the Apostle. Indeed our modern historian of the
Apostolic age, who sees nothing miraculous in the success of the
Gospel 4, has himself characterized the moral condition of the
Pagan world in terms yet more severe than those of the Apostle
whom he condemns. According to M. Renan, Rome under the
Ceesars ‘became a school of immorality and cruelty';’ it was a
‘very hells ;’ ‘the reproach that Rome had poisoned the world
at large, the Apocalyptic comparison of Pagan Rome to a prosti-
tute who had poured forth upon the earth the wine of her
immoralities, was In many respects a just comparisont,’ Nor
was the moral degradation of Paganism confined to the capital
comme en font les prédicateurs, et qu'il ne faut jamais prendre ἃ la lettre.’
Do the Satires of Juvenal lead us to suppose that if St. Paul had ‘known
the high society of Rome,’ he would have used a less emphatic language?
And is it a rule with preachers, whether Apostolic or post-Apostolic, not to
mean what they say ?
Ρ Juvenal, Sat. i. 87, ii. 37, iii. 62, vi. 293. Seneca, Epist. xcvii.; De
Benefic. i. 9, iii. 16. Tacitus, Hist. i. 2; Germ. xix. See other quotations
in Wetstein, Nov. Test. in loc. It may be that Tacitus, in his affection for
the old regime of the republic, was tempted to exaggerate the sins of the
empire, and that Juvenal dwelt upon the vices of the capital with somewhat
of the narrow prejudice of provincialism. Still, after allowing for this, there
is a groundwork of fact in these representations which amply justifies
St. Paul.
a Renan, Les Apétres, p. 366: ‘Tel était le monde que les missionaires
chrétiens entreprirent de convertir. On doit voir maintenant, ce me semble,
qu’une telle entreprise ne fut pas une folie, et que sa réussite ne fut pas un
miracle.’
τ Ibid. p. 305.
8 Ibid. p.310: ‘ L’esprit de vertige et de cruauté débordait alors, et faisait
de Rome un yéritable enfer.’ P. 317: ‘A Rome, il est vrai, tous les vices
s’affichaient avec un cynisme révoltant ; les spectacles surtout avaient intro-
duit une affreuse corruption.’ This statement is not an exaggeration. See
Dollinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. ix. pt. ii. § 3, 4, pp. 704-721.
t Ibid. p. 325: ‘Le reproche d’avoir empoisonné la terre, lassimilation de
Rome & une courtisane qui a versé au monde le vin de son immoralité était
juste ἃ beaucoup d’égards.’ Yet M. Renan is so little careful about contra-
dicting himself that he elsewhere says, ‘ Le monde, ἃ l’époque Romaine, ac-
complit un progrés de moralité et subit une décadence scientifique.’ (p. 326.)
The nature of this progress seems to have been somewhat Epicurean: ‘Le
monde s’assouplissait, perdait sa rigeur antique, acquérait de la mollesse, et
de la sensibilité.’ (p. 318.)
[ Lect.
contrasted with the teaching of the Gospel. 141
of the great empire. The provinces were scarcely purer than
the capital. Each province poured its separate contribution of
moral filth into the great store which the increasing centraliza-
tion of the empire had accumulated in the main reservoir at
Rome ; each province in turn received its share of this recipro-
cated corruption¥. In particular, the East, that very portion of
the empire in which the Gospel took its rise, was the main
source of the common infection’. Antioch was itself a centre of
moral putrefactionW. Egypt was one of the most corrupt
countries in the world; and the same account might be given
generally of those districts and cities of the empire in which the
Church first made her way, of Greece, and Asia Minor, and
Roman Africa, of Ephesus and Corinth, of Alexandria and Car-
thage. ‘The middle of the first century of our era was, in point
of fact, one of the worst epochs of ancient history *.’
But was such an epoch, such a world, such a ‘civilization’
as this calculated to ‘force success’ on an institution like
‘the kingdom of heaven, or on a doctrine such as that of
the New Testament? If indeed Christianity had been an ‘idyll’
or ‘pastoral,’ the product of the simple peasant life and of
the bright sky of Galilee, there is no reason why it should
not have attracted a momentary interest in literary circles,
although it certainly would have escaped from any more serious
trial at the hands of statesmen than an unaffected indifference
to its popularity. But what was the Gospel as it met the
eye and fell upon the ear of Roman Paganism? ‘We preach,’
said the Apostle, ‘Christ Crucified, to the Jews an offence,
and to the Greeks a folly y.’ ‘I determined not to know any-
thing among you Corinthians, save Jesus Christ, and Him
" Les Apdtres, p. 326: ‘La province valait mieux que Rome, ou plutét
les éléments impurs qui de toutes parts s’amassaient & Rome, comme en un
égotit, avaient formé Ἰὰ wn foyer d'infection.’
v Ibid. p. 305 : ‘ Le mal venait surtout de l’Orient, de ces flatteurs de bas
étage, de ces hommes infaémes que 1 Egypte et la Syrie envoyaient a Rome.’
P. 306: ‘Les plus choquantes ignominies de l’empire, telles que Papothéose
de Yempereur, sa divinisation de son vivant, venaient de l’Orient, et surtout
de ’Egypte, qui était alors un des pays les plus corrumpus de V univers.’
w Ibid. p. 218: ‘ La légéreté Syrienne, le charlatanisme Babylonien, toutes
les impostures de l’Asie, se confondant ἃ cette limite des deux mondes avaient
fait d’Antioche la capitale du mensonge, la sentine de toutes les infamies.’
P. 219: ‘L’avilissement des Ames y était effroyable. Le propre de ces foyers
de putréfaction morale, c'est d’amener toutes les races au méme niveau.’
x Ibid. p. 343.
γα Cor. i. 23: ἡμεῖς δὲ κηρύσσομεν Xpiordv ἐσταυρουμένον, Lovdalois μὲν
σκάνδαλον, Ἕλλησι δὲ μωρίαν.
m1 |
142 Lhe Spirit of Paganism and Fesus Crucified.
Crucified 2.” Here was a truth linked inextricably with other
truths equally ‘foolish’ in the apprehension of Pagan intellect,
equally condemnatory of the moral degradation of Pagan life.
In the preaching of the Apostles, Jesus Crucified confronted the
intellectual cynicism, the social selfishness, and the sensualist _
degradation of the Pagan world. To its intellect He said,
‘I am the truth®;’ He bade its proud self-confidence bow
before His intellectual Royalty. To its selfish, heartless society,
careful only for bread and amusement, careless of the agonies
which gave interest to the amphitheatre, He said, ‘A new
commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another,
as I have loved you.’ Disinterested love of slaves, of bar-
barians, of political enemies, of social rivals, love of man as
man, was to be a test of true discipleship. And to the sen-
suality, so gross, and yet often so polished, which was the
very law of individual Pagan life, He said, ‘If any man will
come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross
daily, and follow Mec;’ ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it
out and cast it from thee; it is better for thee that one of
thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body
should be cast into hell 4,’ Sensuality was to be dethroned,
not by the negative action of a prudential abstinence from
indulgence, but by the strong positive force of self-mortification,
Was such a doctrine likely, of its own weight and without
any assistance from on high, to win its way to acceptance e?
Is it not certain that debased souls are so far from aspiring
naturally towards that which is holy, elevated and pure, that
they feel towards it only hatred and repulsion ? Certainly Rome
was unsatisfied with her old national idolatries ; but if she
turned her eyes towards the East, it was not to welcome
the religion of Jesus, but the impure rites of Isis and Serapis,
of Mithra and Astarte. The Gospel came to her unbidden,
in obedience to no assignable attraction in Roman society,
but simply in virtue of its own expansive, world-embracing
force. Certainly Christianity answered to the moral wants
of the world, as it really answers at this moment to the
* 1 Cor. ii. 2: οὐ γὰρ ἔκρινα τοῦ εἰδέναι τι ἐν ὑμῖν, εἰ μὴ Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν,
καὶ ταῦτον ἐσταυρωμένον. ἃ St. John xiv. 6.
> Thid. xiii. 34. ¢ St. Matt. xvi. 24; St. Mark viii. 34.
4 St. Matt. xviii. 9; St. Mark ix. 47.
° M. Renan himself observes that ‘la dégradation des Ames en Egypte
y rendait rares, dailleurs, les aspirations qui ouvrirent partout (!) au
christianisme de si faciles δοοὺβ. Les Apétres, p. 284.
[ LECT.
Attitude of Pagan Soctety towards the Church. 143
true moral wants of all human beings, however unbelieving
or immoral they may be. The question is, whether the world
so clearly recognised its real wants as forthwith to embrace
Christianity. The Physician was there; but did the patient
know the nature of his own malady sufficiently well not to
view the presence of the Physician as an intrusion? Was it
likely that the old Roman society, with its intellectual pride,
its social heartlessness, and its unbounded personal self-indul-
gence, should be enthusiastically in love with a religion which
made intellectual submission, social unselfishness, and personal
mortification, its very fundamental laws? The history of the
three first centuries is the answer to that question. The
kingdom of God was no sooner set up in the Pagan world
_ than it found itself surrounded by all that combines to make
the progress of a doctrine or of a system impossible. The
thinkers were opposed to it: they denounced it as a dream
of follyf. The habits and passions of the people were opposed
to it: it threatened somewhat rudely to interfere with them.
There were venerable institutions, coming down from a distant
antiquity, and gathering around them the stable and thoughtful
elements of society: these were opposed to it, as to an audacious
innovation, as well as from an instinctive perception that it
might modify or destroy themselves. National feeling was
opposed to it: it flattered no national self-love; it was to
be the home of human kind; it was to embrace the world ;
and as yet the nation was the highest conception of associated
life to which humanity had reached. Nay, religious feeling
itself was opposed to it; for religious feeling had been enslaved
by ancient falsehoods. There were worships, priesthoods, be-
liefs, in long-established possession; and they were not likely
to yield without a struggle. Picture to yourselves the days
when the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter was still thronged
with worshippers, while often the Eucharist could only be
celebrated in the depths of the Catacombs. It was a time
when all the administrative power of the empire was steadily
concentrated upon the extinction of the Name of Christ. What
were then to a human eye the future prospects of the kingdom
of God? It had no allies, like the sword of the Mahommedan,
f Tac. Ann. xv. 44: ‘Repressa in presens exitiabilis superstitio rursus
erumpebat. Suetonius, Claudius, xxv. ; Nero, xvi.: ‘Christiani, genus
hominum superstitionis nove ac malefice. Celsus apud Origenem, iii. 17.
Celsus compared the Church’s worship of our Lord with the Egyptian
worship of cats, crocodiles, &c.
11]
144 LheChurch triumphs through persistent suffering.
eee eee
or like the congenial mysticism which welcomed the Buddhist,
or like the politicians who strove to uphold the falling Paganism
of Rome. It found no countenance even in the Stoic moral-
ists ; they were indeed among its fiercest enemies. If, as
M. Renan maintains, it ever was identified by Pagan opinion,
with the cetus dliciti, with the collegia ulicita, with the burial-
clubs of the imperial epoch; this would only have rendered
it more than ever an object of suspicion to the government },
Between the new doctrine and the old Paganism there was
a deadly feud; and the question for the Church was simply
whether she could suffer as long as her enemies could persecute.
Before she could triumph in the western world, the soil οὗ
the empire had to be reddened by Christian blood. Ignatius —
of Antioch given to the lions at Rome?; Polycarp of Smyrna —
condemned to the flames*; the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne,
and among them the tender Blandina], extorting by her for-
titude the admiration of the very heathen; Perpetua and
Felicitas at Carthage ™ conquering a mother’s love by a stronger
love for Christ ;—these are but samples of the ‘noble army’
which vanquished heathendom. ‘Plures eficimur,’ cries Ter-
tullian, spokesman of the Church in her exultation and in
her agony, ‘quoties metimur a vobis 3 semen est saneuis
& Dellinger, Heidenth. und Judenth., bk. ix, pt. 2. 8. 6. has some very
interesting remarks on the characteristics of the later Stoicism. It was
a recoil from the corruption of the time. ‘Wie die Aerzte in Zeiten grosser
Krankheiten ihre besten Studien machen, so hatten auch die Stoiker in
dem allgemein herrschenden Sittenverderben ihren moralischen Blick
geschirft,’ p. 729. Seneca’s knowledge of the -human heart, the pathos
and solemnity of M. Aurelius, the self-control, patience, and self-denying
courage preached by Epictetus and Arrian, are fully acknowledged. But
Stoicism was virtue upon paper, unrealized except in the instance of a
few coteries of educated people. It was virtue, affecting Divine strength
in the midst of human weakness. Nothing could really be done for
humanity by ‘diesen selbstgefilligen Tugendstolz, der alles nur sich selbst
verdanken wollte, der sich der Gottheit gleich setzte, und bei aller men-
schlichen Gebrechlichkeit doch die Sicherheit der Gottheit fiir sich in
Anspruch nahm.’ (Sen. Ep. 53.)' Stoicism had no lever with which
to raise man as man from his degradations: and its earlier expositors
even prescribed suicide as a means of escape from the miseries of life, and
from a sense of moral failure. (Déll. ubi supra, p. 728; comp. Sir A. Grant’s
Ethics of Arist. vol. i. p. 272.) Who can marvel at its instinctive hatred
of a religion which proclaimed a higher code of Ethics than its own, and
which, moreover, possessed tke secret of teaching that code practically to
all classes of mankind ?
h Les Apétres, pp. 355, 361, 362. 1 A.D. 107.
Ka. D. 169. TASD. ΤῊΣ ™ A.D. 202.
[ LECT.
Christ's Person the stay of the suffering Church. 145
ΝΠ ΜΘΜΝΨΡΨΡΨ Ὀ ee eee
Christianorum®.’ To the heathen it seems a senseless obstinacy;
but with a presentiment of the coming victory, the Apologist
exclaims, ‘ Illa ipsa obstinatio quam exprobatis, magistra est ©.’
Who was He That had thus created a moral force which could
embrace three centuries of a protracted agony, in the confidence
that victory would come at lastp? What was it in Him, so
fascinating and sustaining to the thought of His followers, that
for Him men and women of all ages and ranks in life gladly
sacrificed all that is dearest to man’s heart and nature? Was it
only His miracles? But the evidential force of miracle may be
easily evaded. St. John’s Gospel appears to have been written
with a view to furnishing, among other things, an authoritative
explanation of the moral causes which actually prevented the
Jews from recognising the significance of our Lord’s miracles.
Was it simply His character? But to understand a perfect
character you must be attracted to it, and have some strong
sympathies with it. And the language of human nature in the
presence of superior goodness is often that of the Epicurean in
the Book of Wisdom: ‘Let us lie in wait for the righteous,
because he is not for our turn, and he is clean contrary to our
MOIngas: ys. He was made to reprove our thoughts; he is
grievous unto us even to behold; for his life is not like other
men’s, his ways are of another fashion4.’ Was it His teaching?
True, never man spake like this Man; but taken alone, the
highest and holiest teaching might have seemed to humanity to
be no more than ‘the sound of one that had a pleasant voice,
and could play well upon an instrument.’ His Death? Certainly
He predicted that in dying He would draw all men unto Him ;
but Who was He That could thus turn the instrument of His
humiliation into the certificate of His glory? His Resurrection 1
His Resurrection indeed was emphatically to be the reversal of
a false impression, but it was to witness to a truth beyond itself;
our Lord had expressly predicted that He would rise from the
grave, and that His Resurrection would attest His claims’.
None of these things taken separately will account for the power
of Christ in history. In the convergence of all these ; of these
majestic miracles; of that Character, which commands at once
» Apol. 1. ο Thid.
ΡΜ, Renan observes scornfully, ‘Il n’y a pas eu beaucoup de martyrs
_ trés-intelligents.’ Apdtres, p. 382. Possibly not, if intelligence is but another
name for scepticism. Certain it is that martyrdom requires other and higher
qualities than any which mere intelligence can supply.
a Wisd. ii. 12, 15. τ St. Matt. xii. 39; Rom. i. 4.
rr | L
146 Christendom imples the Divinity of Chrest.
our love and our reverence; of that teaching, so startling, so
awful, so searching, so tender ; of that Death of agony, encircled
with such a halo of moral glory ; of that deserted tomb, and the
majestic splendour of the Risen One ;—a deeper truth, underlying
all, justifying all, explaining all, is seen to reveal itself. We
discern, as did the first Christians, beneath and beyond all that
meets the eye of sense and the eye of conscience, the Eternal
Person of our Lord Himself. It is not the miracles, but the
Worker; not the character, but its living Subject; not the
teaching, but the Master ; not even the Death or the Resurrec-
tion, but He Who died and rose, upon Whom Christian thought,
Christian love, Christian resolution ultimately rest. The truth
which really and only accounts for the establishment in this our
human world of such a religion as Christianity, and of such an
institution as the Church, is the truth that Jesus Christ was
believed to be more than Man, the truth that Jesus Christ is
what men believed Him to be, the truth that Jesus Christ
is God.
It is here that we are enabled duly to estimate one broad
feature of the criticism of Strauss. Both in his earlier and
scientific work, published some thirty years ago for scholars, and
in his more recent publication addressed to the German people,
that writer strips Jesus Christ our Lord of all that makes Him
superhuman. Strauss eliminates from the Gospel most of Christ’s
discourses, all of His miracles, His supernatural Birth, and His
Resurrection from the grave. The so-termed ‘historical’ resi-
duum might easily be compressed within the limits of a newspaper
paragraph, and it retains nothing that can rouse a moderate
measure, I do not say of enthusiasm, but even of interest. And
yet few minds on laying down either of these unhappy books
can escape the rising question: ‘Is this hero of a baseless legend,
this impotent, fallible, erring Christ of the “higher criticism,” in
very deed the Founder of the Christian Church?’ The difficulty
of accounting for the phenomenon presented by the Church, on
the supposition that the ‘historical’ account of its Founder is
that of Dr. Strauss, does not present itself forcibly to an Hege-
lian, who loses himself in ἃ priori theories as to the necessary
development of a thought, and is thus entranced in a sublime
forgetfulness of the actual facts and laws of human life and his-
tory. But here M. Renan is unwittingly a witness against the
writer to whom he is mainly indebted for his own critical appa-
ratus. The finer political instinct, the truer sense of the necessary
proportions between causes and effects in human history, which
[ LECT.
Lhe Christ of Strauss, and Christendom. 147
might be expected to characterize a thoughtful Frenchman, will
account for those points in which M. Renan has departed from
the path traced by his master. He feels that there is an impas-
sable chasm between the life of Jesus according to Strauss, and
the actual history of Christendom. He is keenly alive to the
absurdity of supposing that such an impoverished Christ as the
Christ of Strauss, can have created Christendom. Although
therefore, as we have seen, he subsequently endeavours to account
for the growth of the Church in a naturalistic way, his native
sense of the fitting proportions of things impels him to retouch
the picture traced by the German, and to ascribe to Jesus of
Nazareth, if not the reality, yet some shadowy semblance of
Divinity *. Hence such features of M.Renan’s work as his
concessions in respect of St. John’s Gospel. In making these
concessions, he is for the moment impressed with the political
absurdity of ascribing Christendom to the thought and will of a
merely human Christ. Although his unbelief is too radical to
allow him to do adequate justice to such a consideration, his
indirect admission of its force has a value, to which Christian
believers will not be insensible.
But a greater than M. Renan is said to have expressed the
common-sense of mankind in respect of the Agency which alone
can account for the existence of the Christian Church. If the
first Napoleon was not a theologian, he was at least a man whom
vast experience had taught what kind of forces ean really produce
a lasting effect upon mankind, and under what conditions they
may be expected to do so. A time came when the good Provi-
dence of God had chained down that great but ambitious spirit
to the rock of St. Helena ; and the conqueror of civilized Europe
had leisure to gather up the results of his unparalleled life, and
to ascertain with an accuracy, not often attainable by monarchs
or conquerors, his own true place in history. When conversing,
as was his habit, about the great men of the ancient world, and
comparing himself with them, he turned, it is said, to Count
Montholon with the enquiry, ‘Can you tell me who Jesus Christ
was?’ The question was declined, and Napoleon proceeded,
‘Well, then, I will tell you. Alexander, Cesar, Charlemagne,
and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did
these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone
founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions
would die for Him..... I think I understand something of
5. In his later work, Les Apétres. t Vie de Jésus, pp. 250, 426, 457.
III | L2
148 Opinion of Napoleon the First respecting the
human nature; and I tell you, all these were men, aad I am a
man: none else is like Him; Jesus Christ was more than man.
ον L have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion
that they would have died for me,.. but to do this it was ne-
cessary that I should be visibly present with the electric influence
of my looks, of my words, of my voice. When I saw men and
spoke to them, I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in their
hearts... . Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of
man towards the Unseen, that it becomes insensible to the
barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred
years, Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others
difficult to satisfy ; He asks for that which a philosopher may
often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his
children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He
asks for the human heart ; He will have it entirely to Himself.
He demands it unconditionally ; and forthwith His demand is
granted. Wonderful! In defiance of time and space, the soul of
man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to
the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in Him, ex-
perience that remarkable supernatural love towards Him. This
phenomenon is unaccountable ; it is altogether beyond the scope
of man’s creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless
to extinguish this sacred flame; time can neither exhaust its
strength nor put a limit to its range. This is it which strikes
me most; I have often thought of it. This it is which proves
to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus Christ ¥.’
u This is freely translated from the passages quoted by Luthardt, Apolo-
getische Vortrige, pp. 234, 293; and Bersier, Serm. p. 334. The same con-
versation is given substantially by Chauvelot, Divinité du Christ, pp. 11-13,
Paris 1863; in a small brochure attributed to M. le Pasteur Bersier, and
published by the Religious Tract Society, Napoléon, Meyrueis, Paris, 1859;
by M. Auguste Nicolas, in his Etudes Philosophiques sur le Christianisme,
Bruxelles, 1849, tom. ii. pp. 352-356; and by the Chevalier de Beauterne in
his Sentiment de Napoléon sur le Christianisme, édit. par M. Bathild Bouniol,
Paris 1864, pp. 87-118. In the preface to General Bertrand’s Campagnes
d’Egypte et de Syrie, there is an allusion to some reported conversations of
Napoleon on the questions of the existence of Gop and of our Lord’s Divinity,
which, the General says, never took place at all. But M. de Montholon, who
with General Bertrand was present at the conversations which are recorded
by the Chevalier de Beauterne, writes from Ham on May 30, 1841, to that
author: ‘ J’ai lu avec un vif intérét votre brochure: Sentiment de Napoléon
sur la Divinité de Jésus- Christ, et je ne pense pas qu’il soit possible de mieux
exprimer les croyances religieuses de l’empereur.’ Sentiment de Napoléon,
Avertissem. p. viii. Writing, as it would seem, in ignorance of this testimony,
M. Nicolas says: ‘ Cité plusieurs fois et dans des circonstances solennelles,
ce jugement passe généralement pour historique.’ Etudes, ii. p. 352. note (1).
[ LECT.
witness of our Lord’s work to His Divinity. 149
Here surely is the common-sense of humanity. The victory
of Christianity is the great standing miracle which Christ has
wrouglit. Its significance is enhanced if the miracles of the
New Testament are rejected *, and if the Apostles are held to
have received no illumination from on highy. Let those in
our day who believe seriously that the work of Christ may be
accounted for on natural and human grounds, say who among
themselves will endeavour to rival it. Who of our contem-
poraries will dare to predict that eighteen hundred years hence
his ideas, his maxims, his institutions, however noble or philan-
thropic they may be, will still survive in their: completeness and
in their vigour? Who can dream that his own name and history
will be the rallying-point of a world-wide interest and enthu-
siasm in some distant age? Who can suppose that beyond
the political, the social, the intellectual revolutions which lie
in the future of humanity, he will himself still survive in the
memory of men, not as a trivial fact of archeology, but as a
moral power, as the object of a devoted and passionate affection ?
What man indeed that still retains, I will not say the faith of a
Christian, but the modesty of a man of sense, must not feel that
there is a literally infinite interval between himself and that
Majestic One, Who, in the words of Jean Paul Richter, ‘being ον
the Holiest among the mighty, and the Mightiest among the
holy, has lifted with His pierced Hand empires off their hinges,
has turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still
governs the ages 2 2”
The work of Jesus Christ is not merely a fact of history, it 1s
a fact, blessed be God! of individual experience. If the world
is one scene of His conquests, the soul of each true Christian is
another. The soul is the microcosm within which, in all its
strength, the kingdom of God is set up. Many of you know,
x ¢Se il mondo si rivolse al cristianesmo
Diss’ io, senza miracoli, quest’ uno
ἘΣ tal, che gli altri non sono il centesmo ;
Che tu entrasti povero e digiuno
In campo, a seminar la buona pianta,
Che fu gia vite, ed ora ἃ fatta pruno.’
Dante, Paradiso, xxiv. 106-111.
y* Apres la mort de Jésus-Christ, douze pauvres pécheurs et artisans en-
treprirent d’instruire et de convertir le monde....le succes fut prodigieux
.... Tous les chrétiens couraient au martyre, tous les peuples couraient au
baptéme ; Vhistoire de ces premiers temps était wn prodige continuel.’ Rous-
seau, Réponse au Roi de Pologne, Paris, 1829, Discours, pp. 64, 65.
2 Jean Paul: ‘Ueber den Gott in der Geschichte und im Leben.’ Saimmtl.
Werke, xxxiii. 6; Stirm. p. 194.
III ]
150 Lhe redeemed soul owns a Divine Saviour.
from a witness that you can trust, Christ’s power to restore to
your inward life its original harmony. You are conscious that
He is the fertilizing and elevating principle of your thought, the
purifying principle of your affections, the invigorating principle
of your wills. You need not to ask the question ‘whence hath
this Man this wisdom and these mighty works?’ Man, you are
well assured, cannot thus from age to age enlarge the realm of
moral light, and make all things new; man cannot thus endow
frail natures with determination, and rough natures with tender-
ness, and sluggish natures with keen energy, and restless natures
with true and lasting peace. These every-day tokens of Christ’s
presence in His kingdom, of themselves answer the question of
the text. If He Who could predict that by dying in shame He
would secure the fulfilment of an extraordinary plan, and assure
to Himself a world-wide empire, can be none other than the
Lord of human history ; so certainly the Friend, the Teacher, the -
Master Who has fathomed and controlled our deepest life of
thought and passion, is welcomed by the Christian soul as some-
thing more than a student exploring its mysteries, or than a
philanthropic experimentalist alleviating its sorrows. He is
hailed, He is loved, He is worshipped, as One Who possesses a
knowledge and a strength which human study and human skill
fail to compass ; it is felt that He is so manifestly the true
Saviour of the soul, because He is none other than the Being
Who made it.
[LEcT.
LECTURE ΤΥ,
OUR LORD’S DIVINITY AS WITNESSED BY HIS
CONSCIOUSNESS.
The Jews answered Him, saying, For a good work we stone Thee not; but
for blasphemy ; and because that Thou, being a Man, makest Thyself
God.—St. JOHN x. 33.
Iv is common with some modern writers to represent the ques-
tions at issue between the Faith and its opponents, in respect of
the Person of our Lord, as being substantially a question between
the ‘historical spirit’ and the spirit of dogmatism. The dog-
matic temper is painted by them as a baseless but still powerful
superstition, closely pressed by the critical enquiries and negative
conclusions of our day, but culpably shutting its eyes against the
advancing truth, the power of which nevertheless it cannot but
instinctively feel, and clinging with the wrong-headed obstinacy
of despair to the cherished but already condemned formule: of
its time-honoured and worn-out metaphysics. Opposed to it,
we are told, is the ‘historical spirit,’ young, vigorous, fearless,
truthful, flushed with successes already achieved, assured of suc-
cesses yet to come. The ‘ historical spirit’ is thus said to repre-
sent the cause of an enlightened progress in conflict with a stupid
and immoral conservatism. The ‘historical spirit’ is described
as the love of sheer reality, as the longing for hard fact, deter-
mined to make away with all ‘idols of the den,’ however ancient,
venerated, and influential, in the sphere of theology. The ‘his-
torical spirit’ accordingly undertakes to ‘disentangle the real
Person of Jesus from the metaphysical envelope’ within which
theology is said to have ‘encased’ Him. The Christ is to be
rescued from that cloud-land of abstract and fanciful speculation,
to which He is stated to have been banished by the patristic and
scholastic divines ; He is to be restored to Christendom in mani-
fest subjection to all the actual conditions and laws of human
history. ‘Look,’ it is said, ‘at that figure of the Christ which
you see traced in mosaics in the apsis of a Byzantine church.
IV |
152 Lhe Chrost of dogma and the Christ of history.
That Countenance upon which you gaze, with its rigid, unalter-
able outline, with its calm, strong mien of unassailable majesty ;
that Form from which there has been stripped all the historic
circumstance of life, all that belongs to the changes and chances
of our mortal condition ; what is it but an artistic equivalent
and symbol of the Catholic dogma’? Elevated thus to a world
of unfading glory, and throned in an imperturbable repose, the
Byzantine Christos Pantocrator must be viewed as the expression
of an idea, rather than as the transcript of a fact. A certain
interest may be allowed to attach to such a representation, from
its illustrating a particular stage in the development of religious
thought. But the “historical spirit” must create what it can
consider a really “ historical” Christ, who will be to the Christ of
St. Athanasius and St. John what a Rembrandt or a Rubens is
to a Giotto or a Cimabue.’ If the illustration be objected to, at
any rate, my brethren, the aim of the so-termed ‘historical’
school is sufficiently plain. It proposes to fashion a Christ
who is to be esthetically graceful and majestic, but strictly
natural and human. This Christ will be emancipated from the
bandages which ‘supernaturalism has wrapped around the Pro-
phet of Nazareth.’ He will be divorced from any idea of incar-
nating essential Godhead ; but, as we are assured, He will still
be something, aye more than the Christ of the Creed has ever
been yet, to Christendom. He will be at once a living man, and
the very ideal of humanity ; at once a being who obeys the in-
vincible laws of nature, like ourselves, yet of moral proportions
so mighty and so unrivalled that his appearance among men
shall adequately account for the phenomenon of an existing and
still expanding Church.
Accordingly by this representation it is intended to place us
ina dilemma. ‘ You must choose,’ men seem to say, ‘ between
history and dogma ; you must choose between history which can
be verified, and dogma which belongs to the sphere of inaccessible
abstractions. You must make your choice; since the Catholic
dogma of Christ’s Divinity is pronounced by the higher criticism
to be irreconcileable with the historical reality of the Life of
Jesus.” And in answer to that challenge, let us proceed, my
brethren, to choose history, and as a result of that choice, if it
may be, to maintain that the Christ of history is either the God
Whom we believers adore, or that He is far below the assumed
moral level of the mere man, whose character rationalism still,
at least generally, professes to respect in the pages of its
mutilated Gospel.
[ LECT.
The Catholic dogma really historical. 153
For let us observe that the Catholic doctrine has thus much
in its favour :—1it takes for granted the only existing history of _
Jesus Christ. It is not compelled to mutilate or to enfeeble it,
or to do it critical violence. It is in league with this history; it is
at home, as is no other doctrine, in the pages of the Evangelists.
Consider, first of all, the general impression respecting our
Lord’s Person, which arises upon a survey of the miracles
ascribed to Him in all the extant accounts of His Life. To a
thoughtful Humanitarian, who believes in the preternatural
elements of the Gospel history, our Lord’s miracles, taken as
a whole, must needs present an embarrassing difficulty. The
miraculous cures indeed, which, more particularly in the earlier
days of Christ’s ministry, drew the eyes of men towards Him, as
to the Healer of sickness and of pain, have been ‘ explained,’
however unsatisfactorily, by the singular methods generally ac-
cepted among the older rationalists. A Teacher, it used to be
argued, of such character as Jesus Christ, must have created a
profound impression ; He must have inspired an entire confi-
dence ; and the cures which He seemed to work were the imme-
diate results of the impression which He created ; they were the
natural consequences of the confidence which He inspired. Now,
apart from other and many obvious objections to this theory, let
us observe that it is altogether inapplicable to the ‘miracles of
power,’ as they are frequently termed, which are recorded by
the three first Evangelists, no less than by St. John. ‘ Miracles
of this class,” says a freethinking writer, ‘are not cures which
could have been effected by the influence of a striking sanctity
acting upon a simple faith. They are prodigies; they are, as it
seems, works which Omnipotence Alone could achieve. In the
case of these miracles it may be said that the laws of nature are
simply suspended. Jesus does not here merely exhibit the
power of moral and mental superiority over common men; He
upsets and goes beyond the rules and bounds of the order of the
universe. A word from His mouth stills a tempest. A few
loaves and fishes are fashioned by His Almighty hand into an
abundant feast, which satisfies thousands of hungry men. At
His bidding life returns to inanimate corpses. By His curse a
fic-tree which had no fruit on it is withered up*’ The writer
® Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 21. Dr. Schenkel concludes: ‘ Sonst
erscheint Jesus in den drei ersten Evangelien durchgingig als ein wahrer,
innerhalb der Grenzen menschlicher Beschrankung sich bewegender Mensch ;
durch Seine Wunderthiitigkeit werden diese Grenzen durchbrochen; All-
machtswunder sind menschlich nicht mehr begreiflich.’
IV |
154 The Resurrection, and the truth of Christianity.
proceeds to argue that such miracles must be expelled from any
Life of Christ which ‘ criticism’ will condescend to accept. They
belong, he contends, to that ‘torrent of legend, with which,
according to the rationalistic creed, Jesus was surrounded after
His Death by the unthinking enthusiasm of His disciples >, But
then a question arises as to how much is to be included within
this legendary ‘torrent.’ In particular, and above all else, is the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave to be regarded as a
part of its contributions to the Life of Christ? Here there is a
division among the rationalizing critics. There are writers who
reject our Lord’s miracles of power, His miraculous Conception,
and even His Ascension into heaven, and who yet shrink from
denying that very fundamental fact of all, the fact that on ‘the
third day He rose from the dead, according to the Scriptures °.’
A man must have made up his mind against Christianity more
conclusively than men are generally willing to avow, if he is to
speculate with M. Renan in the face of Christendom, as to the
exact spot in which ‘the worms consumed the lifeless body’ of
Jesus 4, This explicit denial of the literal Resurrection of Jesus
from the grave is not compensated for by some theory identical
with, or analogous to, that of Hymenzeus and Philetus ὃ respecting
the general Resurrection, whereby the essential subject of Christ’s
Resurrection is changed, and the idea of Christianity, or the soul
of the converted Christian, as distinct from the Body of the Lord
Jesus, is said to have been raised from the dead. For such a
denial, let us mark it well, of the literal Resurrection of the
Human Body of Jesus involves nothing less than an absolute and
total rejection of Christianity. All orthodox Churches, all the
great heresies, even Socinianism, have beliéved in the Resurrec-
tion of Jesus. The literal Resurrection of Jesus was the cardinal
b Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 21: ‘ Dass ein Lebensbild, wie dasjenige
des Erlésers, bald nach dessen irdischem Hinscheiden von einem reichen Sa-
genstrom umflossen wurde, liegt in der Natur der Sache.’ It may be asked—
Why? If these legendary decorations are the inevitable consequences of a
life of devotion to moral truth and to philanthropy, how are we to explain
their absence in the cases of so many moralists and philanthropists ancient
and modern ?
¢ Cf. Hase, Leben Jesu, p. 281, compared with p. 267.
4 Les Apotres, p. 38: ‘ Pendant que la conviction inébranlable des Apdtres
se formait, et que la foi du monde se préparait, en quel endroit les vers con-
sumaient-ils le corps inanimé qui avait été, le samedi soir, déposé au sépulcre?
On ignorera toujours ce détail; car, naturellement, les traditions chrétiennes
ne peuvent rien nous apprendre la-dessus.’
e 2 Tim. ii. 18: ὙμέναιοΞς καὶ Φίλητος, οἵτινες περὶ τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἠστόχη-
σαν, λέγοντες τὴν ἀνάστασιν ἤδη γεγονέναι. 1 Tim. i. 20.
[ LECT.
The Resurrection, and other Christian miracles. 155
fact upon which the earliest preachers of Christianity based their
appeal to the Jewish people * St. Paul, writing to a Gentile
Church, expressly makes Christianity answer with its life for the
literal truth of the Resurrection. ‘If Christ be not risen, then
is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. . . Then they
also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished*.’ Some
modern writers would possibly have reproached St. Paul with
offering a harsh alternative instead of an argument. But St.
Paul would have replied, first, that our Lord’s honour and credit
were entirely staked upon the issue, since He had foretold His
Resurrection as the ‘sign’ which would justify His claims? ;
and secondly, that the fact of the Resurrection was attested by
evidence which must outweigh everything except an ἃ priort
conviction of the impossibility of miracle, since it was attested by
the word of more than two hundred and fifty living persons who
had actually seen the Risen Jesusi. As to objections to miracle
of an ἃ priori character, St. Paul would have argued, as most
Theists, and even the French philosopher, have argued, that such
objections could not be urged by any man who believed seriously
in a living God at allk. But on the other hand, if the Resur-
rection be admitted to be a fact, it is puerile to object to the other
miracles of Jesus, or to any other Christian miracles, provided
1 Acts i. 22, ii. 24, 32, iii. 15, iv. 10, v. 30, X. 40, xili. 30, 33, 34, XVil. 31.
& 1 Cor, xv. 14, 18. h St. Matt. xii. 39, 40.
i 1 Cor. xv. 6: ἔπειτα ὥφθη ἐπάνω πεντακοσίοις ἀδελφοῖς ἐφάπαξ, ἐξ ὧν ot
πλείους μένουσιν ἕως ἄρτι, τινὲς δὲ καὶ ἐκοιμήθησαν. It is quite arbitrary to
say that ‘the Resurrection with Paul is by no means a human corporeal re-
surrection as with the Evangelists,’ that ‘his ὥφθη κἀμοί implies no more
than a flash and a sound, which he interpreted as a presence of Christ.’
(Westm. Rev. Oct. 1867, p. 529.) On this shewing, the ὥφθη Σίμωνι in St.
Luke xxiv. 34 might similarly be resolved into an illusion. The ἑωράκαμεν
of St. John xx. 25 might be as unreal as the ἑώρακα of 1 ΟΟΥ. ἰχΧ. 1. It is
also a mere assumption to say that a ‘ palpable body’ could not be seen at
once by 500 persons; and the suggestion that St. Paul’s own belief in ‘a
continued celestial life of Christ,’ and in the moral resurrection of Christians
was ‘afterwards materialized’ into ‘the history of a bodily resurrection of
Christ, and the expectation of a bodily resurrection of mankind from the
grave,’ is nothing less than to fasten upon the Apostle the pseudo-spiritual-
istic error, against which in this chapter he so passionately contends. On
this subject, see ‘ The Resurrection of Jesus Christ,’ by R. Macpherson, D.D.,
pp. 127, 346.
k «Dieu peut-Il faire des miracles, c’est ἃ dire, peut-il déroger aux lois,
quill a établies? Cette question s¢érieusement traitée serait impie, si elle
n’était absurde. Ce serait faire trop d’honneur a celui, qui la resoudrait nega-
tivement, que de le punir; il suffirait de Penfermer. Mais aussi, quel homme
a jamais nié, que Dieu pat faire des miracles?’ Rousseau, Lettres écrites de
la Montagne, Lettre iii.
Iv ]
156 Christ’s miracles how related to Hrs Divinity.
they be sufficiently attested. To have admitted the stupendous
truth that Jesus, after predicting that He would be put to a violent
death, and then rise from the dead, was actually so killed, and
then did actually so rise, must incapacitate any thoughtful man
for objecting to the supernatural Conception or to the Ascension
into heaven, or to the more striking wonders wrought by Jesus,
on any such ground as that of intrinsic improbability. The
Resurrection has, as compared with the other miraculous occur-
rences narrated in the Gospels, all the force of an ἃ fortiori
argument ; they follow, if we may use the term, naturally from
it; they are fitly complemental incidents of a history in which
the Resurrection has already made it plain, that we are dealing
with One in Whose case our ordinary experience of the limits
and conditions of human power is altogether at fault.
But if the miracles of Jesus be admitted in the block, as by a
‘rational’ believer in the Resurrection they must be admitted ;
they do point, as I have said, to the Catholic belief, as distinct
from any lower conceptions respecting the Person of Jesus Christ.
They differ from the miracles of prophets and Apostles in that,
instead of being answers to prayer, granted by a Higher Power,
they manifestly flow forth from the majestic Life resident in the
Worker!. And instead of presenting so many ‘difficulties’
which have to be surmounted or set aside, they are in entire
harmony with that representation of our Saviour’s Personal
glory which is embodied in the Creeds. St. John accordingly
calls them Christ’s ‘works,’ meaning that they were just such
acts as might be expected from Him, being such as He was.
For indeed our Lord's miracles are not merely evidences that
He was the organ of a Divine revelation. They do not merely
secure a deferential attention to His disclosures respecting the
nature of God, the duty and destiny of man, His own Person,
mission, and work. Certainly they have this properly evidential
force ; ‘He Himself appealed to them as having it™. But it
would be difficult altogether to account for their form, or for
their varieties, or for the times at which they were wrought, or
for the motives which were actually assigned for working them,
on the supposition that their value was “only evidential. They
are like the kind deeds of the wealthy, or the good advice of the
wise ; they are like that debt of charity which is due from the
possessors of great endowments to suffering humanity. Christ
} Wilberforce on the Incarnation, p. 91, note 11. Christian Remem-
brancer, Oct. 1863, p. 274. τὰ St. John x. 38,
[ LECT.
Their value not merely evidential. 157
as Man owed this tribute of mercy which His Godhead had
rendered it possible for Him to pay, to those whom (such was
His love) He was not ashamed to call His brethren. But
besides this, Christ’s miracles are physical and symbolic repre-
sentations of His redemptive action as the Divine Saviour of
mankind. Their form is carefully adapted to express this
action. By healing the palsied, the blind, the lame, Christ
clothed with a visible form His plenary power to cure spiritual
diseases, such as the weakness, the darkness, the deadly torpor
of the soul. By casting out devils from the possessed, He
pointed to His victory over the principalities and powers of evil,
whereby man would be freed from their thraldom and restored
to moral liberty. By raising Lazarus from the corruption of
the grave, He proclaimed Himself not merely a Revealer of the
Resurrection, but the Resurrection and the Life itself. The
drift and meaning of such a miracle as that in which our Lord's
‘Ephphatha’ brought hearing and speech to the deaf and dumb
is at once apparent when we place it in the light of the Sacra-
ment of baptism®. The feeding of the five thousand is remark-
able as the one miracle which is narrated by all the Evangelists ;
and even the least careful among readers of the Gospel cannot
fail to be struck with the solemn actions which precede the
wonder-work, as well as by the startling magnificence of the
result. Yet the permanent significance of that extraordinary
scene at Bethsaida Julias is never really understood, until our
Lord’s great discourse in the synagogue of Capernaum, which
immediately follows it, is read as the spiritual exposition of the
physical miracle, which is thus seen to be a commentary, pal-
pable to sense, upon the vital efficacy of the Holy Communion®,
n St. Mark viii. 34, 35-
° Compare St. John vi. 26-59; and observe the correspondence between
the actions described in St. Matt. xiv. 19, and xxvi. 26. The deeper Lutheran
commentators are noticeably distinguished from the Calvinistic ones in re-
cognising the plain Sacramental reference of St. John vi. 53, sqq. See Stier,
‘Reden Jesu,’ in loc. ; Olshausen, Comm. in loc. ; Kahnis, H. Abendmahl,
Ῥ. 104, sqq. For the ancient Church, see St. Chrys. Hom. in loc. ; Tertull.
De Orat. 6; Clem. Alex. Pedagog. I. vi. p. 1233 St. Cyprian, De Oratione
Dominica, p. 192; St. Hilary, De Trin. viii. 14, cited in Wilb. H. Euch, p. 199.
The Church of England authoritatively adopts the sacramental interpretation
of the passage by her use of it in the Exhortation at the time of the cele-
bration of the Holy Communion. ‘The benefit is great, if with a true
penitent heart and lively faith we receive that Holy Sacrament: for then we
spiritually eat the Flesh of Christ and drink His Blood; then we dwell in
Christ and Christ in us; we are one with Christ and Christ with us.’ Cf. too
the ‘ Prayer of Humble Access.’
Iv |
158 Lhe mysteries of our Lord’s Earthly Life
In our Lord’s miracles then we have before us something
more than a set of credentials ; since they manifest forth His
Mediatorial Glory. They exhibit various aspects of that re-
demptive power whereby He designed to save lost man from sin
and death ; and they lead us to study, from many separate points
of view, Christ’s majestic Personality, as the Source of the various
wonders which radiate from it. And assuredly such a study can
have but one result for those who honestly believe in the literal
reality of the wonders deseribed ; it must force upon them a
conviction of the Divinity of the worker?.
But the miracles which especially point to the Catholie doc-
trine as their justification, and which are simply incumbrances
blocking up the way of a Humanitarian theorist, are those of
which our Lord’s Manhood is Itself the subject. According to
P It may be urged that Socinians have been earnest believers in the
Resurrection and other preternatural facts of the Life of Christ, while ex-
plicitly denying His Godhead. This is true; but it is strictly true only of
past times, or of those of our contemporaries who are more or less inacces-
sible, happily for themselves, to the intellectual influences of modern
scepticism. It would be difficult to find a modern Socinian of high edu-
cation who believed in the literal truth of all the miraculous incidents
recorded in the Gospels. This is not merely a result of modern objections
to miracle; it is a result of the connexion, more clearly felt, even by sceptics,
than of old, between the admission of miracles and the obligation to admit
attendant dogma. In his Essay on Channing, M. Renan has given expression
to this instinct of modern sceptical thought. ‘Il est certain,’ he observes,
“que si esprit moderne a raison de vouloir une religion, qui, sans exclure le
surnaturel, en diminue la dose autant que possible, la religion de Channing
est la plus parfaite et la plus épurée qui ait paru jusquw’ici. Mais est-ce Ἰὰ
tout, en vérité, et quand le symbole sera réduit & croire 2 Dieu et au Christ,
qu’y aura-t-on gagné? Le scepticisme se tiendra-t’il pour satisfait? La
formule de Punivers en sera-t-elle plus complete et plus claire? La destinée
de ’homme et de Phumanité moins impénétrable? Avec son symbole épuré,
Channing évite-t-il mieux que les théologiens catholiques les objections de
Vinerédulité? Hélas! non. ΠῚ admet la résurrection de Jésus-Christ, et
n’admet pas sa Divinité; il admet le Bible, et n’admet pas l’enfer. Il déploie
toutes les susceptibilités d’un scholastique pour établir contre les Trinitaires,
en quel sens le Christ est fils de Dieu, et en quel sens il ne l’est pas. Or, si
Von accorde qwil y a eu une Existence réelle ct miraculeuse d’un bout ἃ Vautre,
pourquoi ne pas franchement Vappeler Divine? L’un ne demande pas un
plus grand effort de croyance que l’autre, En vérité, dans cette voie, il n’y a
que le premier pas qui coute ; il ne faut pas marchander avec le surnaturel;
la foi va d’une seule piéce, et, le sacrifice accompli, il ne sied pas de réclamer
en détail les droits dont on a fait une fois pour toutes l’entitre cession.’
Etudes d’Histoire Religieuse, pp. 377, 378. Who would not rather, a
thousand times over, have been Channing than be M. Renan? Yet is it not
clear that, half a century later, Channing must have believed much less, or,
as we may well trust, much more, than was believed by the minister of
Federal-street Chapel, Boston ὃ
[LECT.
imply that FIis Person 1s Superhuman. 159
the Gospel narrative, Jesus enters this world by one miracle, and
He leaves it by another. His human manifestation centres in
that miracle of miracles, His Resurrection from the grave after
death. The Resurrection is the central fact up to which all
leads, and from which all radiates. Such wonders as Christ’s
Birth of a Virgin-mother, His Resurrection from the tomb, and
His Ascension into heaven, are not merely the credentials of our
redemption, they are distinct stages and processes of the re-
demptive work itself. Taken in their entirety, they interpose a
measureless interval between the Life of Jesus and the lives of
the greatest of prophets or of Apostles, even of those to whom it
was given to still the elements and to raise the dead. To expel
these miracles from the Life of Jesus is to destroy the identity
of the Christ of the Gospels; it is to substitute a new Christ for
the Christ of Christendom. Who would recognise the true
Christ in the natural son of a human father, or in the crucified
prophet whose body has rotted in an earthly grave? Yet on the
other hand, who will not admit that He Who was conceived of
the Holy Ghost and born of a Virgin-mother, Who, after being
crucified, dead, and buried, rose again the third day from the
dead, and then went up into heaven before the eyes of His
Apostles, must needs be an altogether superhuman Being? The
Catholic doctrine then is at home among the facts of the Gospel
narrative by the mere fact of its proclaiming a superhuman
Christ, while the modern Humanitarian theories are ill at ease
among those facts. The four Evangelists, amid their dis-
tinguishing peculiarities, concur in representing a Christ Whose
Life is encased in a setting of miracles. The Catholic doctrine
meets these representations more than half-way; they are in
sympathy with, if they are not admitted to anticipate, its as-
sertion. The Gospel miracles point at the very least to a Christ
Who is altogether above the range of human experience ; and
the Creeds recognise and confirm this indication by saying that
He is Divine. Thus the Christ of dogma is the Christ of
history: He is the Christ of the only extant history which
describes the Founder of Christendom at all. He may not be
the Christ of some modern commentators upon that history ;
but these commentators do not affect to take the history as it
has come down to us. As the Gospel narratives stand, they
present a block of difficulties to Humanitarian theories ; and
these difficulties can only be removed by mutilations of the
narratives so wholesale and radical as to destroy their sub-
stantial interest, besides rendering the retention of the fragments
Iv |
a
160 Can our Lord’s miracles be denied or ignored ?
Ce as Oe oe ee
which may be retained, a purely arbitrary procedure. The
Gospel narratives describe the Author. of Christianity as the
Worker and the subject of extraordinary miracles; and these
miracles are such as to afford a natural lodgment for, nay, to
demand as their correlative, the doctrine of the Creed. That
doctrine must be admitted to be, if not the divinely authorized
explanation, at least the best intellectual conception and réswme
of the evangelical history. A man need not be a believer in
order to admit, that in asserting Christ’s Divinity we make a
fair translation of the Gospel story into the language of abstract
thought ; and that we have the best key to that story when we
see in it the doctrine that Christ is God, unfolding itself in a
series of occurrences which on any other supposition seem to
wear an air of nothing less than legendary extravagance.
It may—it probably will—be objected to all this, that a large
number of men and women at the present day are on the one
hand strongly prepossessed against the credibility of all miracles
whatever, while on the other they are sincere ‘admirers’ of the
moral character of Jesus Christ. They may not wish explicitly
and in terms to reject the miraculous history recorded in the
Gospels ; but still less do they desire to commit themselves to
an unreserved acceptance of it. Whether from indifference to
miraculous occurrences, or because their judgment is altogether
in suspense, they would rather keep the preternatural element
in our Lord’s Life out of sight, or shut their eyes to it. But
they are open to the impressions which may be produced by the
spectacle of high ethical beauty, if only the character of Christ
can be disentangled from a series of wonders, which, as trans-
cending all ordinary human experience, do not touch the motives
that compel their assent to religious truth. Accordingly we are
warned, that if it is not a piece of spiritual thoughtlessness, and
even cruelty, it is at any rate a rhetorical mistake to insist upon
a consideration so opposed to the intellectual temper of the
time.
This is what may be urged: but let it be observed, that the
objector assumes a point which should rather have been proved.
He assumes the possibility of putting forward an honest picture
of the Life of Jesus, which shall uphold the beauty, and even the
perfection of His moral character, while denying the historical
reality of His miracles, or at any rate while ignoring them.
Whereas, if the only records which we possess of the Life of
Jesus are to be believed at all, they make it certain that Jesus
Christ did claim to work, and was Himself the embodiment, of
| LECT: :
Our Lord’s references to His Person. 161
startling miracles4. How can this fact be dealt with by a modern
disbeliever in the miraculous? Was Christ then the ignorant
victim and promoter of a crude superstition? Or was He, as
M. Renan considers, passive and unresisting, while credited with
working wonders which He knew to be merely thaumaturgic
trickst? On either supposition, is it possible to uphold Him as
‘the moral ideal of humanity,’ or indeed as the worthy object of
any true moral enthusiasm? We cannot decline this question ;
it is forced upon us by the subject-matter. A neutral attitude
towards the miraculous element in the Gospel history is impos-
sible. The claim to work miracles is not the least prominent
element of our Lord’s teaching ; nor are the miracles which are
said to have been wrought by Him a fanciful or ornamental
appendage to His action. The miraculous is inextricably inter-
woven with the whole Life of Christ. The ethical beauty, nay
the moral integrity of our Lord’s character is dependent, whether
we will it or not, upon the reality of His miracles. It may be
very desirable to defer as far as possible to the mental pre-
possessions of our time ; but it is not practicable to put asunder
two things which God has joined together, namely, the beauty of
Christ’s character and the bond fide reality of the miracles which
He professed to work.
But let us nevertheless follow the lead of this objection by
turning to consider what is the real bearing of our Lord’s moral
character upon the question of His Divinity. In order to do
this, it is necessary to ask a previous question. What position
did Jesus Christ, either tacitly or explicitly, claim to occupy in ~
His intercourse with men? What allusions did He make to the
subject of His Personality? You will feel, my brethren, that it
is impossible to overrate the solemn importance of such a point
as this. We are here touching the very heart of our great
subject: we have penetrated to the inmost shrine of Christian
truth, when we thus proceed to examine those words of the
a Ecce Homo, p. 43: ‘On the whole, miracles play so important a part in
Christ’s scheme, that any theory which would represent them as due entirely
to the imagination of His followers or of a later age, destroys the credibility
of the documents, not partially, but wholly, and leaves Christ a personage as
mythical as Hercules.’ : τ.
* Cf. Vie de Jésus, p. 265 : ‘Il est donc permis de croire qu’on lui imposa
sa réputation de thaumaturge, qu'il n’y résista pas beaucoup, mais qu'il ne fit
rien non plus pour y aider, et qu’en tout cas, il sentait la vanité de l’opinion
ἃ cet égard. Ce serait manquer ἃ la bonne méthode historique d’écouter trop
ici nos répugnances,.’ See M. Renan’s account of the raising of Lazarus,
ibid.pp: 361, g632.. ."
Iv | M
Se
162 First stage of Christ’s teaching, maily ethical.
aE ON δία ig a τσ σαν
Gospels which exhibit the consciousness of the Founder of
Christianity respecting His rank in the scale of being. With
what awe, yet with what loving eagerness, must not a Christian
enter on such an examination !
No reader of the Gospels can fail to see that, speaking gene-
rally, and without reference to any presumed order of the events
and sayings in the Gospel history, there are two distinct stages
or levels in the teaching of Jesus Christ our Lord.
I. Of these the first is mainly concerned with primary funda-
mental moral truth. It is in substance a call to repentance, and
the proclamation of a new life. It is summarized in the words,
‘Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hands. A change
of mind, both respecting self, and respecting God, was necessary
before a man could lead the new life of the kingdom of heaven.
In a previous lecture we have had occasion to consider the king-
dom of heaven as the outline or plan of a world-wide institution
which was to take its place in history. But viewed in its relation
to the life of the soul, the kingdom of heaven is the home and the
native atmosphere of a new and higher order of spiritual exist-
ence, This new life is not merely active thought, such as might
be stimulated by the cross-questioning of a Socrates ; nor is it
moral force, the play of which was limited to the single soul that
possessed it. It is moral and mental life, having God and men
for its objects, and accordingly lived in an organized society, as
the necessary counterpart of its energetic action. Of this stage
of our Lord’s preaching, the Sermon on the Mount is the most
representative document. The Sermon on the Mount preaches
penitence by laying down the highest law of holiness. It con-
trasts the externalized devotion, the conventional and worldly
religion, of the time, created and sanctioned by the leading cur-
rents of public opinion, and described as the righteousness of the
Qaribes and Pharisees, with a new and severe ideal of morality,
embodied in the new law of Christian perfection. It stimulates
and regulates penitence, by proposing a new conception of
plessedness ; by contrasting the spirit of the new law with the
literalism of the old; by exhibiting the devotional duties, the
ruling motives, the characteristic temper, and the special dangers
of the new life. Incidentally the Sermon on the Mount states
certain doctrines, such as that of the Divine Providence, with
great explicitnesst; but, throughout it, the moral element is
predominant, This great discourse quickens and deepens a
5 St. Matt. iv. 17. ὁ Ibid. vi. 25-33.
[ LECT.
0 Ἥςως ὁ ΄΄’ὗὔὖΓΓ{[΄ρῇὕἤῆς ΓΌΘΌΟῬὍῬὌῸΓᾷΚΨῷῸΨ...''ὃ᾽ὃ8
ΔΙῸ confession of personal shortcomings. 163
sense of sin by presenting the highest ideal of an inward holi-
ness. In the Sermon on the Mount our Lord is laying broad
and deep the foundations of His spiritual edifice. A pure and
loving heart; an open and trustful conscience ; ὃ freedom of
communion with the Father of spirits ; ἃ love of man as man,
the measure of which is to be nothing less than a man’s love of
himself ; above all a stern determination, at any cost, to be true,
true with God, true with men, true with self j—such are the
pre-requisites for genuine discipleship ; such the spiritual and
subjective bases of the new and Absolute Religion ; such the
moral material of the first stage of our Lord’s public teaching.
In this first stage of our Lord’s teaching let us moreover note
two characteristics.
(a) And first, that our Lord’s recorded language is absolutely
wanting in a feature, which, on the supposition of His being
merely human, would seem to have been practically indispensable.
Our Lord does not place before us any relative or lower standard
of morals. He proposes the highest standard ; He enforces the
absolute morality. ‘Be ye therefore perfect,’ He says, ‘even as
your Father Which is in heaven is perfect.’ Now in the case
of a human teacher of high moral and spiritual attainments,
what should we expect to be a necessary accompaniment of this
teaching? Surely we should expect some confession of personal
unworthiness thus to teach. We should look for some trace of
a feeling (so inevitable in this pulpit) that the message which
must be spoken is the rebuke, if not the condemnation, of the
man who must speak it. Conscious of many shortcomings, a
human teacher must at some time relieve his natural sense of
honesty, his fundamental instinct of justice, by noting the dis-
crepancy between his weak, imperfect, perhaps miserable self,
and his sublime and awful message. He must draw a line, if I
may 80 speak, between his official and his personal self ; and in
his personal capacity he must honestly, anxiously, persistently
associate himself with his hearers, as being before God, like each
one of themselves, a learning, struggling, erring soul. But Jesus
Christ makes no approach to such a distinction between Himself
and His message. He bids men be like God, and He gives not
the faintest hint that any trace of unlikeness to God in Himself
obliges Him to accompany the delivery of that precept with a
protestation of His own personal unworthiness. Do you say
that this is only a rhetorical style or mood derived by tradition
ἃ St. Matt. v. 48,
Iv ] M 2
Seinen ΕΠ - erm mamma νν
τό4 The sense of sin commonly guickened by sanctity.
OBS SEE ee re
from the Hebrew prophets, and natural in any Semitic teacher
who aspired to succeed them ἢ I answer, that nothing is plainer
in the Hebrew prophets than the clear distinction which is con-
stantly maintained between the moral level of the teacher and
the moral level of His message. The prophetic ambassador
represents the Invisible King of Israel; but the holiness of the
King is never measured, never compromised by the imperfec-
tions of His representative. The prophetic writings abound in
confessions of weakness, in confessions of shortcomings, in
confessions of sin. The greatest of the prophets is permitted
to see the glory of the Lord, and he: forthwith exclaims in agony,
‘Woe is me! for I am undone; because Tam a man of unclean
lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for
mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts *.’
But the silence of Jesus respecting any such sense of personal
unworthiness has been accounted for by the unrivalled closeness
of His life-long communion with God. Is it then certain that
the holiest souls are least alive to personal sin ἢ Do they whose
life of thought is little less than the breath of a perpetual prayer,
and who dwell continuously in the presence-chamber of the King
of kings, profess themselves insensible to that taint of sin, from
which none are altogether free? Is this the lesson which we
learn from the language of the best of the servants of God? My
brethren, the very reverse is the case. Those who have lived
nearest to God, and have known most about Him, and have been
most visibly irradiated by the light of His countenance, have
been foremost to acknowledge that the ‘burden’ of remaining
imperfection in themselves was truly ‘intolerable.’ Their eager
protestations have often seemed to the world to be either the
exaggerations of fanaticism, or else the proof of a more than
ordinary wickedness. For blemishes which might have passed
unobserved in a spiritual twilight, are lighted up with torturing
clearness by those searching, scorching rays of moral truth, that
stream from the bright Sanctity of God upon the soul that
beholds It. In that Presence the holiest of creatures must own
with the Psalmist, ‘Thou hast set our misdeeds before Thee, and
our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance y. Such self-
accusing, broken-hearted confessions of sin have been the utter-
ances of men the most conspicuous in Christendom for holiness
of life; and no true saint of God ever supposed that by a con-
stant spiritual sight of God the soul would lose its keen truthful
sense of personal sinfulness. No man could presume that this
x Isa. vi. 5. ¥ Ps. xc, 8.
[ LECT.
Szgnificance of Christ's sense of perfect sinlessness. 165
sense of sinfulness, as distinct from the sense of unpardoned
guilt, would be banished by close communion with God, unless
his moral standard was low, and his creed imperfect. Any such
presumption is utterly inconsistent with a true sight of Him
Whose severe and stainless beauty casts the shadow of failure
upon all that is not Himself, and Who charges His very angels
with moral folly.
Yet Jesus Christ never once confesses sin; He never once
asks for pardon. Is it not He, Who so sharply rebukes the
self-righteousness of the Pharisee? Might He not seem to ignore
all human piety that is not based upon a broken heart? Does
He not deal with human nature at large as the true prodigal, who
must penitently return to a Father’s love as the one condition of
its peace and bliss. Yet He Himself never lets fall a hint, He
Himself never breathes a prayer, which implies any, the slightest
trace, of a personal remorse. From no casual admission do we
gather that any, the most venial sin, has ever been His. Never
for one moment does He associate Himself with any passing
experience of that anxious dread of the penal future with which
His own awful words must needs fill the sinner’s heart. If His
Soul is troubled, at least His moral sorrows are not His own,
they are a burden laid on Him by His love for others. Nay,
He challenges His enemies to convince Him of sin. He declares
positively that He does always the Will of the Father Even
when speaking of Himself as Man, He always refers to eternal
life as His inalienable possession. It might, so perchance we
think, be the illusion of a moral dullness, if only He did not
penetrate the sin of others with such relentless analysis. It
might, we imagine, be a subtle pride, if we did not know Him
to be so unrivalled in His great humility®. This consciousness
z St. John viii. 46, ibid. ver. 20, cf. ver. 26.
a Hollard, Caractére de Jésus-Christ, p.150. Cf. also Ullmann, Stindlo-
sigkeit, Th. I. Kap. 3. 84. The frivolous objections to our Lord’s sin-
lessness which are urged from St. Luke ii. 41-52, St. Matt. xxi. 12-17,
and 17-22, and from His relation to Judas, are discussed in this work,
Th. III. Kap. i. § 4. This interesting writer however, while asserting non
peccasse of our Lord, falls short of Catholic truth in denying to Him the
‘non posse peccare. The objections advanced by M. F. Pecant in his Le
Christ οὐ la Conscience, 1859, are plainly a result of that writer’s Humani-
tarianism. Our Lord’s answers to His Mother, His cursing the barren fig-
tree, His sending the devils into the herd of swine, His driving the money-
changers from the temple, and His last denunciations against the Pharisees,
present no difficulty to those who see in Him the Lord, as well as the Son of
Mary, the Maker and Owner of the world of nature, the Searcher and Judge
of human hearts. Cf. also note C.
Iv |
166 Authoritative character of Christ’s teaching.
of an absolute sinlessness in such a Soul as that of Jesus Christ,
points to a moral elevation unknown to our actual human expe-
rience. It is, at the very least, suggestive of a relation to the
Perfect Moral Being altogether unique in human history P.
(8) The other characteristic of this stage of our Lord’s teach-
ing is the attitude which He at once and, if I may so say,
naturally assumes, not merely towards the teachers of His time,
but towards the letter of that older, divinely-given Revelation
which they preserved and interpreted. The people early remarked
that Jesus ‘taught as One having authority, and not as the
Scribes¢.’ The Scribes reasoned, they explained, they balanced
argument against argument, they appealed to the critical or
verifying faculty of their hearers. But here is a Teacher, Who
b Cf. Mr. F. W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, p. 143: ‘We have a
very imperfect history of the Apostle James; and I do not know that I
could adduce any fact specifically recorded concerning him in disproof of his
absolute moral perfection, if any of his Jerusalem disciples had chosen to set
up this as a dogma of religion. Yet no one would blame me as morose, or
indisposed to acknowledge genius and greatness, if I insisted on believing
James to be frail and imperfect, while admitting that I knew almost nothing
about him. And why? Singly and surely, because we know him to be ὦ
man : that suffices. To set up James or John or Daniel as my model and
my Lord; to be swallowed up in him, and press him upon others as a uni-
versal standard, would be despised as a self-degrading idolatry, and resented
as an obtrusive favouritism. Now why does not the same equally apply
if the name Jesus be substituted for these? Why, in defect of all other
knowledge than the bare fact of his manhood, are we not unhesitatingly to
take for granted that he does not exhaust all perfection, and is at best only
one amongst many brethren and equals?’? The answer is that we have to
choose between believing in Christ’s moral perfection, and condemning Him
of being guilty either of spiritual blindness or hypocrisy (see Ullmann ubi
sup.); and that His teaching, His actions, and (Mr. Newman will allow us to
add) His supernatural credentials, taken together, make believing Him to be
sinless the easier alternative. But Mr. Newman’s remarks are of substantial
value, as indirectly shewing, from a point of view much further removed from
Catholic belief than Socinianism itself, how steadily a recognition of our
Lord’s moral perfection as Man tends to promote an acceptance of the truth
that He is Gop. ‘If,’ says Mr. Newman, ‘I were already convinced that this
person (he means our Lord) was a great Unique, separated from all other
men by an impassable chasm in regard to his physical origin, I (for one)
should be much readier to believe that he was unique and unapproachable in
other respects ; for all God’s works have an internal harmony. It could not
be for nothing that this exceptional personage was sent into the world.
That he was intended for head of the human race in one or more senses,
would be a plausible opinion ; nor should I feel any incredulous repugnance
against believing his morality to be, if not divinely perfect, yet separated from
that of common men so far that he might be a God to us, just as every parent
is to a young child.’ Ibid. p. 142. ο St. Matt. vii. 29.
[ LECT.
—
Fits claim to revise the Sinartic Revelation. 167
sees truth intuitively, and announces it simply, without con-
descending to recommend it by argument. He is a Teacher,
moreover, not of truth obvious to all, but of truth which might
have seemed to the men who first heard it to be what we should
call paradoxical. He condemns in the severest language the
doctrine and the practice of the most influential religious au-
thorities among His countrymen. He takes up instinctively a
higher position than He assigns to any who had preceded Him
in Israel. He passes in review, and accepts or abrogates not
merely the traditional doctrines of the Jewish schools, but the
Mosaic law itself. His style runs thus: ‘It was said to them
of old time, ... but I say unto you 4’
Here too, it is necessary to protest against statements which
imply that this authoritative teaching of Jesus was merely a
continuation of the received prophetical style. It is true that
the prophets gave prominence to the moral element in the
teaching of the Pentateuch, that they expanded it, and that so
far they anticipated one side of the ministry of Jesus Himself.
But the prophets always appealed to a higher sanction; the
prophetic argument addressed to the conscience of Israel was
ever, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ How significant, how full of im-
port as to His consciousness respecting Himself is our Lord’s
substitute, ‘ Verily, verily, J say unto you.’ What prophet ever
set himself above the great Legislator, above the Law written
by the finger of God on Sinai? What prophet ever undertook to
ratify the Pentateuch as a whole, to contrast his own higher
morality with some of its precepts in detail, to imply even
remotely that he was competent to revise that which every
Israelite knew to be the handiwork of God? What prophet ever
thus implicitly placed himself on a line of equality, not with
Moses, not with Abraham, but with the Lord God Himself? So
momentous a claim requires explanation if the claimant be
only human. This impersonation of the source of moral law’
must rest upon some basis: what is the basis on which it rests ἢ
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus Christ does not deign to
justify His lofty critical and revisionary attitude towards the
ancient Law. He neither explains nor exaggerates His power
to review the older revelation, and to reveal new truth. He
simply teaches ; He abrogates, He establishes, He sanctions, He
unfolds, as the case may be, and in a tone which implies that
His right to teach is not a matter for discussion.
ἃ St. Matt. v. 27. For the translation of τοῖς ἀρχαίοις, see Archbishop
ve on Auth. Vers. of New Testament, p. 79.
IV
168 Why Christ provoked unfriendly scrutiny.
It was inevitable that the question should be asked, anxiously,
earnestly, fiercely, ‘Who is This Teacher? I say, it was inevit-
able: for if you teach the lowest moral truth, in the humblest
sphere, your right to do so will sooner or later be called in
question. ΤῸ teach moral truth is to throw down a challenge
to human nature, human nature being such as it actually is,
that is to say, conscious of more or less disloyalty to the moral
light which it already possesses, and indisposed to become re-
sponsible for knowledge of a yet higher standard of moral truth,
the existence of which it may already suspect. Accordingly the
challenge which is thus made is generally met by a sharp counter-
scrutiny into the claims, be they personal or official, of the
teacher who dares to make it. This penalty of teaching can
only be escaped either in certain rare and primitive conditions
of society, or else when the teacher fails to do his duty. Mis-
sionaries have described. savage tribes whose sense of ignorance
was too sincere, and who were too grateful for knowledge, to
take umbrage at the practical bearings of a new doctrine. Poets
have sung of ancestors
“Qui preeceptorem sancti voluere parentis
Esse loco °.’
Generally speaking, however, an immunity from criticism is to
be secured by signal inefficiency, feebleness, or disloyalty to prin-
ciple, on the part of the teacher. A teacher of morals may have
persuaded his conscience that the ruling worldly opinion of his
time can safely be regarded as its court of final appeal. He may
have forced his thought to shape itself with prudent docility into
those precise conventionalities of expression which are understood
to mean nothing, or which have lost their power. In such a
case too it may happen that the total failure to achieve moral
and spiritual victories will not necessarily entail on the teacher
complete social or professional obscurity, while it will certainly
protect him against any serious liability to hostile interference.
Picture to yourselves, on the contrary, a teacher who is not
merely under the official obligation to say something, but who is
morally convinced that he has something to say. Imagine one
who believes alike in the truth of his message and in the reality
of his mission to deliver it. Let his message combine those
moral contrasts which give permanency and true force to a
doctrine, and which the Gospel alone has combined in their per-
fection. Let this teacher be tender, yet searching ; let him win
e Juy.. vii. 209.
[ LECT.
Second stage of our Lord s teaching. 169
the hearts of men by his kindly humanity, while he probes, aye
to the quick, their moral sores, Let him be uniformly calm, yet
manifestly moved by the fire of repressed passion. Let him be
stern yet not unloving, and resolute without sacrificing the
elasticity of his sympathy, and genial without condescending to
be the weakly accomplice of moral mischief. Let him pursue
and expose the latent evil of the human heart through all the
mazes of its unrivalled deceitfulness, without sullying his own
purity, and without forfeiting his strong belief in the present
capacity of every human being for goodness./Let him ‘know
what is in man,’ and yet, with this knowledge clearly before
him, let him not only not despair of humanity, but respect it,
nay love it, even enthusiastically. Above all, let this teacher be
perfectly independent. Let him be independent of the voice of
the multitude; independent of the enthusiasm and promptings
of his disciples ; independent even when face to face with the
bitter criticism and scorn of his antagonists ; independent of all
save God and his conscience, fin a word, conceive a case in
which moral authority and moral beauty combine to elicit a
simultaneous tribute of reverence and of love. Clearly such
a teacher must be a moral power; and as a consequence, his
claim to teach must be scrutinized with a severity proportioned
to the interest which he excites, and to the hostility which he
cannot hope to escape provoking. And such a Teacher, or
rather much more than this, was Jesus Christ our Lord.
Nor is this all. The scrutiny which our Lord thus necessarily
encountered from without was responded to, or rather it was
anticipated, by self-discovery from within. ‘The soul,’ it has
been said, ‘like the body, has its pores ;’ and in a sincere soul
the pores of its life are always open. Instinctively, uncon-
sciously, and whether a man will or not, the insignificance or
the greatness of the inner life always reveals itself. In our
Lord this self-revelation was not involuntary, or accidental, or
forced ; it was in the highest degree deliberate. He knew the
thoughts of those about Him, and He anticipated their ex-
pression. He placed beyond a doubt, by the most explicit
statements, that which might have been more than suspected, if
He had only preached the Sermon on the Mount.
11. It is characteristic then of what may be termed the
second stage of our Lord’s public teaching, that He distinctly,
repeatedly, energetically preaches Himself. He does not leave
men to draw inferences about Himself from the power of His
moral teaching, or from the awe-inspiring nature of His miracles.
IV |
170 Forms of our Lord’s Self-assertion.
ee
He does not content Himself with teaching primary moral truths
concerning God and our duties towards God and towards one
another. He does not bequeath to His Apostles the task of
elaborating a theory respecting the Personal rank of their
Master in the scale of being. On the contrary, He Himself
persistently asserts the real character of His position relatively
to God and man, and of His consequent claims upon the thought
and heart of mankind. Whether He employs metaphor, or plain
unmetaphorical assertion, His meaning is too clear to be mis-
taken. He speaks of Himself as the Light of a darkened worldf,
as the Way by which man may ascend to heaveng, as the Truth
which can really satisfy the cravings of the soul}, as the Life
which must be imparted to all who would live in very deed, to
all who would really live for everi. Life is resident in Him in
virtue of an undefined and eternal communication of it from the
Fatherk, He is the Bread of Lifel, He is the Living Bread
That came down from heaven™ ; believers in Him will feed on
Him and will have eternal lifes. He points to a living water of
the Spirit, which He can give, and which will quench the thirst
of souls that drink ito, All who came before Him He cha-
racterizes as having been, by comparison with Himself, the
thieves and robbers of mankind?, He is Himself the One Good
Shepherd of the souls of men4; He knows and He is known of
His true sheep’. Not only is He the Shepherd, He is the very
Door of the sheepfold; to enter through Him is to be safe’.
He is the Vine, the Life-tree of regenerate humanity, All that
is truly fruitful and lovely in the human family must. branch
f St. John viii. 12: Ἐγώ εἰμι τὸ φῶς τοῦ κόσμου" ὃ ἀκολουθῶν ἐμοὶ οὐ μὴ
περιπατήσει ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ, ἀλλ᾽ ἕξει τὸ φῶς τῆς (ωῆς.
& Tbid. xiv. 6: ᾿Εγώ εἰμι ἡ δδός.
h [bid. : Ἐγώ εἰμι... ἣ ἀλήθειας. Mark xiii. 31 : 6 οὐρανὸς καὶ ἣ γῆ παρε-
λεύσονται" οἱ δὲ λόγοι μου ov μὴ παρέλθωσι. [παρελεύσονται. Tisch.]
i St. John xiv. 6: Ἐγώ εἰμι... .. 7) ζωή.
k Tbid. v. 26: ὥσπερ γὰρ ὃ Πατὴρ ἔχει ζωὴν ἐν ἑαυτῷ, οὕτως ἔδωκε καὶ τῷ
υἱῷ ζωὴν ἔχειν ἐν ἑαυτῷ.
1 Tbid. vi. 35: Ἐγώ εἶμι ὃ ἄρτος τῆς ζωῆς. Ibid. ver. 48.
m [Tbid. ver. 31: Ἐγώ εἰμι 6 ἄρτος 6 (ζῶν ὁ ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καταβάς.
n Tbid.ver. 47: ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, 6 πιστεύων εἰς ἐμὲ, ἔχει ζωὴν αἰώνιον.
Ibid. v. 40: οὐ θέλετε ἐλθεῖν πρός με, ἵνα ζωὴν ἔχητε.
ο Thid. iv. 14: ὃς δ᾽ ἂν πίῃ ἐκ τοῦ ὕδατος οὗ ἐγὼ δώσω αὐτῷ, οὐ μὴ διψήσει
εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα.
P Tbid. x. 8: πάντες ὅσοι πρὸ ἐμοῦ ἦλθον, κλέπται εἰσὶ καὶ λῃσταί.
a Ibid. ver. 11: Ἐγώ εἰμι ὃ ποιμὴν 6 καλός. Ibid. ver. 14.
τ Tbid. ver. 14: γινώσκω τὰ ἐμὰ, καὶ γινώσκομαι ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν.
5. Ibid. ver. 9: Ἐγώ εἰμι ἣ θύρα" δὲ ἐμοῦ ἐάν τις εἰσέλθῃ, σωθήσεται.
t Ibid. xv. 1: Ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ἄμπελος ἡ ἀληθινή, ͵
[ LecT.
forms of our Lord’s Self-assertion. 171
forth from Him™; all spiritual life must wither and die, if it be
severed from His*. He stands consciously between earth and
heaven. He claims to be the One Means of a real approach to
the Invisible God: no soul of man can come to the Father but
through Himy. He promises that all prayer offered in His
Name shall be answered: ‘If ye ask anything in My Name J
will do it%.” He contrasts Himself with a group of His country-
men as follows: ‘Ye are from beneath, I am from above; ye
are of this world, I am not of this world.’ He anticipates His
Death, and foretells its consequences: ‘I, if I be lifted up from
the earth, will draw all men unto Myself>. He claims to be
the Lord of the realm of death; He will Himself wake the
sleeping dead ; all that are in the graves shall hear His voice ;
nay, He will raise Himself from the dead¢4. He proclaims, ‘I am
the Resurrection and the Life*.’ He encourages men to trust in
Him as they trust in Godf; to make Him an object of faith
just as they believe in Gods; to honour Him as they honour
the Father. To love Him is a necessary mark of the children
of God: ‘If God were your Father, ye would have loved Mei’
It is not possible, He rules, to love God; and yet to hate Him-
u St. John xv.5: 6 μένων ἐν ἐμοὶ, κἀγὼ ἐν αὐτῷ, οὗτος φέρει καρπὸν πολύν"
ὅτι χωρὶς ἐμοῦ οὐ δύνασθε ποιεῖν οὐδέν.
x Ibid. ver. 6: ἐὰν μή τις μείνῃ ἐν ἐμοὶ, ἐβλήθη ἔξω ὡς τὸ κλῆμα, καὶ
ἐξηράνθη.
Υ Ibid. xiv. 6: οὐδεὶς ἔρχεται πρὸς τὸν Πατέρα, εἰ μὴ δι᾿ ἐμοῦ.
z Ibid. ver. 14: ἐάν τι αἰτήσητε ἐν τῷ ὀνόματί μου, ἐγὼ ποιήσω.
ἃ [bid. viii. 23: ὑμεῖς ἐκ τῶν κάτω ἐστὲ, ἐγὼ ἐκ τῶν ἄνω εἰμί" ὑμεῖς ἐκ τοῦ
κόσμου τούτου ἐστὲ, ἐγὼ οὐκ εἰμὶ ex τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.
b Tbid. xii. 32: κἀγὼ ἐὰν ὑψωθῷ ἐκ τῆς γῆς, πάντας ἑλκύσω πρὸς ἐμαυτόν.
¢ Thid. v. 28, 29: ἔρχεται ὥρα, ἐν ἣ πάντες οἱ ἐν τοῖς μνημείοις ἀκούσονται
τῆς φωνῆς αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐκπορεύσονται. Ibid. vi. 39, Xi. 25.
ἃ Thid. ii. 19: λύσατε τὸν ναὸν τοῦτον, καὶ ἐν τρισὶν ἡμέραις ἐγερῶ αὐτόν.
5" > ΄ “, as > fe \ U 3 / xv
Thid. x. 18: ἐξουσίαν ἔχω θεῖζαι αὐτήν [τὴν ψυχήν μου], καὶ ἐξουσίαν ἔχω
πάλιν λαβεῖν αὐτήν.
98 Thid. xi. 25 : Ἐγώ εἶμι ἡ ἀνάστασις καὶ ἣ ζωή.
f [bid. xiv. 1: μὴ ταρασσέσθω ὑμῶν ἣ καρδία" πιστεύετε εἰς τὸν Θεὸν, καὶ
εἰς ἐμὲ πιστεύετε. Ibid. xvi. 33: ταῦτα λελάληκα ὑμῖν, ἵνα ἐν ἐμοὶ εἰρήνην
ἔχητε. ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ θλίψιν ἕξετε" [ἔχετε, Tisch.] ἀλλὰ θαρσεῖτε, ἐγὼ νενί-
κηκα τὸν κόσμον.
8. Ibid. vi. 29: τοῦτό ἐστι τὸ ἔργον τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἵνα πιστεύσητε εἰς ὃν ἀπέ-
στειλεν ἐκεῖνος. Ibid. ver. 40: τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν τὸ θέλημα τοῦ Πατρός μου"
ἵνα πᾶς ὃ θεωρῶν τὸν Ὑἱὸν καὶ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν, ἔχῃ (ωὴν αἰώνιον. Ibid.
ver. 47: 6 πιστεύων εἰς ἐμὲ, ἔχει ζωὴν αἰώνιον. Cf. Acts xxvi. 18: τοῦ λαβεῖν
αὐτοὺς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν, καὶ κλῆρον ἐν τοῖς ἡγιασμένοις, πίστει τῇ εἰς ἐμέ.
h St. John v. 23: ἵνα πάντες τιμῶσι τὸν Ὑἱὸν, καθὼς τιμῶσι τὸν Πατέρα.
i Ibid. viii. 42: εἰ 6 Θεὸς πατὴρ ὑμῶν ἦν, ἠγαπᾶτε ἂν éué. Cf, Ibid.
Xvi. 27.
rv |
re
172. All the Gospels record Christ's Self-assertion.
δ NE περι οτος OE πσΘ ϑ ..
self: ‘He that hateth Me, hateth My Father alsoJ’ The proof
of a true love to Him lies in doing His bidding: ‘If ye love
Me, keep My commandments*.’
Of this second stage of our Lord’s teaching the most
representative document is the Discourse in the supper-room.
How great is the contrast between that discourse and the
Sermon on the Mount! In the Sermon on the Mount, which
deals with questions of human character and of moral obilgation,
the reference to our Lord’s Person is comparatively indirect.
It lies, not in explicit statements, but in the authority of His
tone, in the attitude which He tacitly assumes towards the
teachers of the Jewish people, and towards the ancient Law.
In the last discourse it is His Person rather than His teaching
which is especially prominent; His subject in that discourse is
Himself. Certainly He preaches Himself in His relationship to
His redeemed ; but still He preaches above all and in all, Him-
self. All radiates from Himself, all converges towards Himself.
The sorrows and perplexities of His disciples, the mission and
work of the Paraclete, the mingling predictions of suffering and
of glory, are all bound up with the Person of Jesus, aS mani-
fested by Himself. In those matchless words all centres so con-
sistently in Jesus, that it might seem that Jesus alone is before
us; alone in the greatness of His supramundane glory ; alone
in bearing His burden of an awful, fathomless sorrow.
It will naturally occur to us that language such as that which
has just been quoted is mainly characteristic of the fourth
Gospel ; and you will permit me, my brethren, to consider the
objection which may underlie that observation somewhat at
length in a future lecture!, For the present the author of
‘Ecce Homo’ may remind those who, for whatever reasons,
refuse to believe Christ to have used these words, that ‘we
cannot deny that He used words which have substantially the
same meaning. We cannot deny that He called Himself King,
Master, and Judge of men ; that He promised to give rest to the
weary and the heavy-laden ; that He instructed His followers to
hope for life from feeding on His Body and His Blood™,’
Indeed so entirely is our Lord’s recorded teaching penetrated
by His Self-assertion, that in order to represent Him as simply
i St. John xv. 23: 6 ἐμὲ μισῶν, καὶ τὸν Πατέρα μου μισεῖ.
k Ibid. xiv. 15: ἐὰν ἀγαπᾶτέ με, τὰς ἐντολὰς τὰς ἐμὰς τηρήσατε. 2 St.
John 6: καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἀγάπη, ἵνα περιπατῶμεν κατὰ τὰς ἐντολὰς αὐτοῦ.
1 See Lecture V.
m Ecce Homo, p. 177. Cf. also Mill, Myth. Interpret. p. 59.
[ LECT.
Christ proclaims Himself the Fudge of all men. 173
teaching moral truth, while keeping Himself strictly in the back-
ground of His doctrine, it would be necessary to deny the trust-
worthiness of all the accounts of His teaching which we possess.
To recognise the difference which has been noticed between the
two phases of His teaching merely amounts to saying that in the
former His Self-proclamation is implied, while it is avowed in
the latter. For even in that phase of Christ’s teaching which
the three first Evangelists more particularly record, the public
assumption of titles and functions such as those of King,
Teacher, and Judge of the human race, implies those statements
about Himself which are preserved in the fourth Gospel.
Consider, for instance, what is really involved in a claim to
judge the world. That Jesus Christ did put forward this claim
must be conceded by those who admit that we have in our hands
any true records of Him whatever. Men who reject that account
of the four Gospels which is given us by the Catholic Church,
may perhaps consent to listen to the opinion of Mr. Francis W.
Newman. ‘I believe,’ says that writer, ‘that Jesus habitually
spoke of Himself by the title Son of Man, [and] that in assum-
ing that title He tacitly alluded to the seventh chapter of Daniel,
and claimed for Himself the throne of judgment over all mankind.
I know no reason to doubt that He actually delivered in sub-
stance the discourse in the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew.’
That our Lord advanced this tremendous claim to be the Judge
of all mankind is equally the conviction of foreign critics, who
are as widely removed as possible from any respect whatever for
the witness of the Church of Christ to Holy Writ, But let us
reflect steadily on what Christ is thus admitted to have said about
Himself by the most advanced representatives of the destructive
criticism. Christ says that He will return to earth as Judge of all
mankind. He will sit upon a throne of glory, and will be attended
by bands of obedient angels. Before Him will be gathered all the
‘nations of the world, and He will judge them. In other words,
He will proceed to discharge an office involving such spiritual
insight, such discernment of the thoughts and intents of the
n Phases of Faith, p. 149; cf. St. Matt. xxv. 31-40.
ο Baur, Vorlesungen iiber N. T. Theologie, p. 109: ‘Dass Jesus Sich
Selbst als den kiinftigen Richter betrachtete, und ankiindigte, lasst sich auch
nach dem Evangelium Matthius nicht in Zweifel ziehen. Fasst man die
Lehre und Wirksamkeit Jesu auch nur nach dem sittlichen Gesichtspunkt
auf, unter welchen sie der Bergrede und den Parabeln zufolge zu stellen ist,
so gehdrt dazu wesentlich auch die Bestimmung, dass sie dev absolute Maasstab
eur Beurtheilung des sittlichen Werthes des Thuns und Verhaltens der Men-
schen ist.’
wri |
174 Force of the claim to be Universal Fudge.
heart of each one of the millions at His feet, such awful, unshared
supremacy in the moral world, that the imagination recoils in
sheer agony from the task of seriously contemplating the assump-
tion of these duties by any created intelligence. He will draw
a sharp trenchant line of eternal separation through the dense
throng of all the assembled races and generations of men. He
will force every individual human being into one of the two
distinct classes respectively destined for endless happiness and
endless woe. He will reserve no cases as involving complex moral
problems beyond His own power of decision. He will sanction
no intermediate class of awards, to meet the neutral morality of
souls whom men might deem ‘too bad for heaven, yet too good
for hell.’ If it should be urged that our Lord is teaching truth
in the garb of parable, and that His words must not be taken
too literally, it may be answered that, supposing this to be the
case (a supposition by no means to be conceded) the main features,
the purport and drift of the entire representation cannot be mis-
taken. The Speaker claims to be Judge of all the world. When-
ever, or however, you understand Him to exercise His function,
Christ claims in that discourse to be nothing less than the Un1-
versal Judge. You cannot honestly translate His language into
any modern and prosaic equivalent, that does not carry with it
this tremendous claim. Nor is it relevant to observe that Mes-
siah had been pictured in prophecy as the Universal Judge,
and that in assuming to judge the world Jesus Christ was only
claiming an official consequence of the character which He had ~
previously assumed. Surely this does not alter the nature of
the claim. It does indeed shew what was involved in the
original assertion that He was the Messiah ; but it does not
shew that the title of Universal Judge was a mere idealist
decoration having no practical duties attached to it. On the con-
trary, Jesus Christ asserts the practical value of the title very
deliberately ; He insists on and expands its significance; He
draws out what it implies into a vivid picture. It cannot be
denied that He literally and deliberately put Himself forward as
Judge of all the world ; and the moral significance of this Self-
exaltation is not affected by the fact that He made it, as a part
of His general Messianic claim. If He could not claim to be
Messiah without making it, He ought not to have claimed to be
Messiah unless He had a right to make it. It may be pleaded
that He Himself said that the Father had given Him authority
to execute judgment because He is the Son of ManP. But this,
P St. John v. 27.
[ LECT.
-
Demands of Christ upon the human soul. 175
as has already been shewn, means simply that He is the Uni-
versal Judge because He is Messiah. True, the chosen title of
Messiahship implies His real Humanity ; and His Human Nature
invests Him with special fitness for this as for the rest of His
mediatorial work. But then the title Son of Man, as implying
His humanity, is in felt contrast to a higher Nature which it
suggests. He is more than human; but He is to judge us,
because He is also Man. On the whole it is impossible to reflect
steadily on this claim of Jesus Christ without feeling that either
such a claim ought never to have been made, or that it carries us
forward irresistibly to a truth beyond and above itself.
In dealing with separate souls our Lord’s tone and language
are not less significant. We will not here dwell on the fact of
His forgiving sins 4, and of transmitting to His Church the power
of forgiving them’. But it is clear that He treats those who
come to Him as literally belonging to Himself, in virtue of an
existing right. He commands, He does not invite, discipleship.
To Philip, to the sons of Zebedee, to the rich young man, He
says simply, ‘ Follow Mes.’ In the same spirit His Apostles are
bidden to resent resistance to their Master’s doctrine : ‘When ye
come into an house, salute it. And if the house be worthy, let
your peace come upon it: but if it be not worthy, let your
peace return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you,
nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city,
shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall
be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the
day of judgment, than for that city t’ And as His message is to
be received upon pain of eternal loss, so in receiving it, men are
to give themselves up to Him simply and unreservedly. No
rival claim, however strong, no natural affection, however legiti-
mate and sacred, may interpose between Himself and the soul of
His follower. ‘He that loveth father or mother more than Me
is not worthy of Me; and he that loveth son or daughter more
than Me is not worthy of Me";’ ‘If any man come to Me, and
hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and
4 St. Matt. ix. 6; St. Mark ii. 10. M. Salvador represents in our own
day the Jewish feeling respecting this claim of our Lord. ‘ Voila pourquoi
les docteurs se recriérent de nouveau en entendant le Fils de Marie s’arroger
ἃ lui-meme, et transmettre A ses délégués le droit du pardon: ils y voyaient
une autre maniére de prendre la place de Dieu.’ Jésus-Christ, tom. ii, p. 83.
τ St. Matt. xvi. 19; St. John xx. 23.
s St. Matt. iv. 19, viii. 22, ix. 9, xix.21; St. Mark ii, 14; St. Luke v. 27;
St. John i. 43, x. 27. * St. Matt. x. 12-15, u Thid. 37.
I |
"
176. An intolerable claim, if Christ be only Man.
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My
disciples.’ Accordingly He predicts the painful severance be-
tween near relations which would accompany the advance of the
Gospel : ‘Suppose ye that Iam come to give peace on earth ?
I tell you, Nay ; but rather division: for from henceforth there
shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two
against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and
‘the son against the father; the mother against the daughter,
and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against
her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother
in lawy.’ And the Gospel narrative itself furnishes us with a
remarkable illustration, of our Lord’s application of His claim.
‘He said unto another, Follow Me. But he said, Lord, suffer
me first to go and bury my father. Jesus said unto him, Let the
dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of
God. And another algo said, Lord, I will follow Thee; but let
me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house.
And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the
plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God *.’
It is impossible to ignore this imperious claim on the part
of Jesus to rule the whole soul of man. Other masters may
demand a man’s active energies, or his time, or his purse, or
his thought, or some large share in his affections ; but here is
a claim on the whole man, on his very inmost self, on the
sanctities of his deepest life. Here is a claim which sets aside _
and ignores the dearest ties of family and kindred, if perchance
they interfere with it. Does any who is merely man dare to
advance such a claim as this? If so, is it possible that, believing
him to be only a fellow-creature, we can listen to the claim with
respect, with patience, without earnest indignation? Do not our
souls belong only and wholly to Him Who made them? Can we
not bury ourselves out of the sight and reach of every fellow-crea-
ture, in the hidden recesses of the spirit which we carry within ?
Can we not escape, if we will, from al] eyes save One, from all
wills save One, from all voices save One, from all beings excepting
Him Who gave us life? How then can we listen to the demand
which is advanced by Jesus of Nazareth? Is it tolerable if He
is only man? If He does indeed share with ourselves the great
debt of creation at the hand of God; if He exists, like ourselves,
from moment to moment merely upon sufferance ; or rather, if
He is upheld in being in virtue of a continuous and gratuitous
ministration of life, supplied to Him by the Author of all life ;
x St. Luke xiv. 26. Σ Ibid. xii. 51-53. z Ibid. ix. 59-62.
᾿ [ LECT...
!
Se
Our Lord reveals His Godhead explicitly. 177
is it endurable that He should thus assume to deal with us as
His own creatures, as beings who have no rights before Him,
and whom He may command at will? Doubtless He speaks of
certain souls as given Him by His Father a; but then He claims
the fealty, the submission of all. And even if souls are only
‘given’ to Christ, how are we to account for this absolute
gift of an immortal soul to a human Lord ? What, in short,
is the real moral justification of a claim, than which no larger
could be urged by the Creator? How can Christ bid men live
for Himself as for the very End of their existence? How can He
rightly draw towards Himself the whole thought and love, I do
not say, of a world, but of one single human being, with this
imperious urgency, if He be indeed only the Christ of the Hu-
manitarian teachers, if He be anything else or less than the
supreme Lord of life 2
It is then not merely an easy transition, it is a positive
moral relief, to pass from considering these statements and
claims to the declarations in which Jesus Christ explains them
by explicitly asserting His Divinity. For although the solemn
sentences in which He makes that supreme revelation are com-
paratively few, it is clear that the truth is latent, in the entire
moral and intellectual posture which we have been considering,
unless we are prepared to fall back upon a fearful alternative
which it will be my duty presently to notice.
Every man who takes a public or stirring part in life may
assume that he has to deal with three different classes of men.
He must face ‘his personal friends, his declared opponents, and
a large neutral body which is swayed by turns in the opposite
directions of friendliness and opposition.’ Towards each of these
classes he has varying obligations; and from their different
points of view they form their estimate of his character and
action. Now our Lord, entering as He did perfectly into the
‘eactual conditions of our human and social existence, exposed
_ Himself to this triple scrutiny, and met it by a correspondingly
threefold revelation. He revealed His Divinity to His disciples,
to the Jewish people, and to His embittered opponents, the chief
_ priests and Pharisees.
Bearing in mind His acceptance of the confessions of Na-
thanael> and of St. Peter c, as well as His solemn words to
Nicodemus 4, let us consider His language in the supper-room to
St. Philip. It may have been Philip’s restlessness of mind, taking
“St.John x.29. >Ibid.i.49. 5 St. Matt. xvi.16. ἃ St. John iii, 18.
Iv ] N
ee ee σὺ
178 Christ reveals 1715 Godhead to the Apostles.
wT Se λον τ τυ ριξον οἰ ξαειιλίειλδει εν Ἴς--- --- --
pleasure, as men will, in the mere starting a religious difficulty
for its own sake; it may have been an instinctive wish to find
some excuse for escaping from those sterner obligations which,
on the eve of the Passion, discipleship would threaten presently
to impose. However this was, Philip preferred to our Lord the
peremptory request, ‘ Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth
us.” Well might the answer have thrilled those who heard it.
‘Have I been so long time with you, and yet thou hast not
known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father ;
and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? Believest thou
not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Mee?’? Now
what this indwelling really implied is seen in our Lord’s answer
to a question of St. Jude. St. Jude had asked how it was that
Christ would manifest Himself to His servants, and not to the
world. Our Lord replies that the heavenly revelation is made
to love; but the form in which this answer is couched is of the
highest significance. ‘If a man love Me, he will keep my words ;
and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and
make Our abode with him’ ‘We will come unto him and
make Our abode? Reflect: Who is This Speaker That pro-
mises to dwell in the soul of man? And with Whom does He
associate Himself? It may be true of any eminent saint, that
‘God speaks not to him, as to one outside Himself ; that God is
in him; that he feels himself with God ; that he draws from his
own heart what he tells us of the Father; that he lives in the
bosom of God by the intercommunion of every moment 8.’ . But
such an one could not forget that, favoured as he is by the Divine
Presence illuminating his whole inner life, he still lives at an
immeasurable distance beneath the Being Whose condescension
has so enriched him. In virtue of his sanctity, he would surely
shrink with horror from associating himself with God ; from
promising, along with God, to make a dwelling-place of the
souls that love himself; from representing his presence with.
men as a blessing co-ordinate with the presence of the Father ;
from attributing to himself oneness of will with the Will of
God ; from implying that side by side with the Father of spirits,
e St. John xiv. 9, 10; Williams on Study of the Gospels, p. 403.
f St. John xiv. 23.
& Quoted in Dean Stanley’s Lectures on the Jewish Church, part ii. p. 161,
from. Renan (Vie de Jésus, p. 75), who is speaking of our Lord. M. Renan,
in using this language, is very careful to explain that he does not mean to
assert that our Lord is God: ‘Jésus n’énonce pas un moment Vidée sacri-
lege (!) qwil soit Dieu.’ Ibid.
[ LECT.
Christ reveals His Godhead to the Fewish people. 179
he was himself equally a ruler and helper of the life of the souls
of men. )
The most prominent statements however which our Lord
made on the subject of His Divinity occur in those conversations
with the Jews which are specially recorded in the fourth Gospel.
Our Lord discovers this great truth to the Jewish people by
three distinct methods of statement.
(a) In the first place, He distinctly places Himself on terms
of equality with the Father, by a double claim. He claims a
parity of working power, and He claims an equal right to the
homage of mankind. Of these claims the former is implicitly
contained in passages to which allusion has been already made.
We have seen that it is contained in the assumption of a judicial
authority equal to the task of deciding the final condition of
every individual human being. Although this office is delegated
to and exercised by our Lord as Man, yet so stupendous a task
is obviously not less beyond the reach of any created intelligence
than the providential government of the world. In like manner,
this claim of an equality in working power with the Father is
inseparable from our Lord’s statements that He could confer
animal lifeh, and that the future restoration of the whole human
race to life would be effected by an act of His Willi. These
statements were made by our Lord after healing the impotent
man at the pool of Bethesda. They are in fact deductions from
a previous and more comprehensive one. Our Lord had healed
the impotent man on the Sabbath day, and had bidden him take
up his bed and walk. The Jews saw an infraction of the Sab-
bath, both in the command given to the impotent man, and in
the act of healing him. They sought to slay our Lord; but He
justified Himself by saying, ‘My Father worketh hitherto, and I
workJ,.’ ‘Therefore,’ continues the Evangelist, ‘the Jews sought
h St. John v. 21: 6 Ὑἱὸς obs θέλει ζωοποιεῖ, The quickening the dead is a
special attribute of God (Deut. xxxii. 39; 1 Sam. ii. 6). If our Lord’s
power of quickening whom He would had referred only to the moral life of
man, the statement would not have been less significant. ‘To raise a soul
from spiritual death is at least as great a miracle, and as strictly proper to
God Almighty, as to raise a dead body. But the ζωοποίησις here in question,
if moral in ver. 25, is physical in ver. 28; our Lord is alluding to His re-
cently-performed miracle as an illustration of His power. Ibid. vers. 8, 9.
i St. Johnv. 28, 29: ἔρχεται ὥρα, ἐν ἣ πάντες οἱ ἐν τοῖς μνημείοις ἀκούσονται
τῆς φωνῆς αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐκπορεύσονται, οἱ τὰ ἀγαθὰ ποιήσαντες, εἰς ἀνάστασιν
ζωῆς, οἱ δὲ τὰ φαῦλα πράξαντες, εἰς ἀνάστασιν κρίσεως. ᾿
i St. John ν. 17: 6 Πατήρ μου ἕως ἄρτι ἐργάζεται, κἀγὼ ἐργάζομαι. ‘Wie
der Vater seit Anbeginn nicht aufgehdrt habe, zum Heil der Welt zu
Iv | N 2
180 Our Lord’s claim to work on the Sabbath
the more to kill Him, because He not only had broken the Sab-
bath, but said also that God was His Own Father, making Him-
self equal with God.’ Now the Jews were not mistaken as to
our Lord’s meaning. They knew that the Everlasting God
‘neither rests nor is weary;’ they knew that if He could slumber
but for a moment the universe would collapse into the nothing-
ness out of which He has summoned it. They knew that He
‘rested on the seventh day’ from the creation of new beings ;
but that in maintaining the life of those which already exist, He
‘worketh hitherto.’ They knew that none could associate him-
self as did Jesus with this world-sustaining energy of God, who
was not himself God. They saw clearly that no one could cite
God’s example of an uninterrupted energy in nature and provi-
dence as a reason for setting aside God’s positive law, without
also and thereby claiming to be Divine. It did not occur to them
that our Lord’s words need have implied no more than a resem-
blance between His working and the working of the Father. If
indeed our Lord had meant nothing more than this, He would
not have met the objection urged by the Jews against His break-
ing the Sabbath. It would have been no argument against the
Jews to have said, that because God’s incessant activity is ever
working in the universe, therefore a holy Jew might work on
uninterruptedly, although he thereby violated the Sabbath day.
With equal reason might it have been urged, that because God
wirken, sondern immer fortwirke bis zur jetzigen Stunde, so mit Nothwen-
digkeit und Recht, ungeachtet des Sabbathsgesetzes, auch Er, als der Sohn,
Welcher als Solcher in dieser Seiner Wirksamkeit nicht dem Sabbathsgesetze
unterthan sein kann, sondern Herr des Sabbaths ist. (St. Matt. xii. 8;
St. Mark ii. 28.) Meyer in loc.
k §t. John v. 18: Πατέρα ἴδιον ἔλεγε τὸν Θεὸν, ἴσον ἑαυτὸν ποιῶν τῷ Θεῷ.
M. Salvador points out the abiding significance of our Lord’s language in the
opinion of his co-religionists. ‘Si lon ne s’attaquait qu’aux traditions et
interprétations abusives, c’était s’en prendre ἃ la jurisprudence du jour, aux
docteurs, aux hommes; c’ était user simplement du droit commun en [5188], et
provoquer une réforme. Mais si l’on se mettait au dessus de Vinstitution en
elle-méme, si, comme Jésus devant les docteurs, on se proclamait le Maitre
absolu du sabbath, dans ce cas, entre circoncis, c’était attaquer a la loi, en
renverser une des pierres angulaires; c’était imposer au grand Sacrificateur
le devoir de faire entendre une voix accusatrice; enfin c’était s’élever au
dessus du Dieu des Juifs, ow tout-au-moins se prétendre son Egal. Aussi une
temoignage éclatant vient 4 ’appui de cette distinction, et ajoute une preuve
& la conformité générale des quatres Evangiles. ‘‘ Les Juifs,” dit judicieuse-
ment l’apdtre et évangéliste Jean, ‘‘ne poursuivirent pas Jésus, par ce seul
motif qwil violait les ordonnances relatives au sabbath. On lui intenta une
action par cette autre raison ; qu'il se faisait égal ἃ Dieu.”’’ Salvador, Jésus-
Christ, ii. pp. 80, 81.
[ LECT.
7γυοΐσος Fes true Divinity. 181
sees good to take the lives of His creatures, in His mercy no less
than in His justice, therefore a religious man might rightfully
put to death His tempted or afflicted brother. The Sabbath was
a positive precept, but it rested on a moral basis. It had been
given by God Himself. Our Lord claims a right to break the
Sabbath, because God’s ever active Providence is not suspended
on that day. Our Lord thus places both His Will and His Power
on the level of the Power and Will of the Father. He might
have parried the Jewish attack by. saying that the miracle of
healing the impotent man was a work of God, and that He was
Himself but the unresisting organ of a Higher Being. On the
Socinian hypothesis He ought to have done so. But He repre-
sents the miracle as His own work. He claims distinctly to be
Lord of nature, and thus to be equal with the Father in point of
operative energy. He makes the same assertion in saying that
‘whatsoever things the Father doeth, those things the Son also
doeth in like manner!.’ To narrow down these words so as to
make them only refer to Christ’s imitation of the moral nature
of God, is to take a liberty with the text for which it affords no
warrant; it is to make void the plain meaning of Scripture bya
sceptical tradition. Our Lord simply and directly asserts that
the works of the Father, without any restriction, are, both as to
their nature and mode of production, the works of the Son.
Certainly our Lord insists very carefully upon the truth that
the power which He wielded was derived originally from the
Father. It is often difficult to say whether He is speaking, as
Man, of the honour of union with Deity and of the graces which
flowed from Deity, conferred upon His Manhood ; or whether,
as the Everlasting Son, He is describing those natural and
eternal Gifts which are inherent in His Godhead, and which He
receives from the Father, the Fountain or Source of Deity, not
as a matter of grace or favour, but in virtue of His Eternal
Generation. As God, ‘the Son can do nothing of Himself,’ and
this, ‘not from lack of power, but because His Being is insepar-
able from That of the Father™.’ It is true of Christ as God in
one sense—it is true of Him as Man in another—that ‘as the
Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to
have life in Himself.’ But neither is an absolute harmony of
the works of Christ with the Mind and Will of the Father, nor a
derivation of the Divine Nature of Christ Itself from the Being
1 St. John v. 19: & γὰρ ἂν ἐκεῖνος ποιῇ, ταῦτα καὶ ὃ Tids ὁμοίως ποιεῖ.
m Euthym.
Iv |
182 Our Lord claims to be One with the Father.
of the Father by an unbegun and unending Generation, destruc-
tive of the force of our Lord’s representation of His operative
energy as being on a par with that of the Father.
For, our Lord’s real sense is made plain by His subsequent
statement that ‘the Father hath committed all judgment unto
the Son; that all should honour the Son even as they honour
the Father®.’ This claim is indeed no more than He had
already advanced in bidding His followers trust Him and love
Him. The obligation of honouring the Son is defined to be just
as stringent as the obligation of honouring the Father. What-
ever form that honour may take, be it thought, or language, or
outward act, or devotion of the affections, or submission of the
will, or that union of thought and heart and will into one
complex act of self-prostration before Infinite Greatness, which
we of the present day usually mean by the term ‘adoration,’
such honour is due to the Son no less than to the Father. How
fearful is such a claim if the Son be only human ; how natural,
how moderate, how just, if He is in very deed Divine !
(8) Beyond this assertion of an equal operative Power with
the Father, and of an equal right to the homage of mankind, is
our Lord’s revelation of His absolute Oneness of Essence with
_ the Father. The Jews gathered around Him at the Feast of
Dedication in the Porch of Solomon, and pressed Him to tell
them whether He was the Christ or not®. Our Lord referred
them to the teaching which they had heard, and to the miracles
which they had witnessed in vainP ; but He proceeded to say
that there were docile and faithful souls whom He terms His
‘sheep,’ and whom He ‘knew,’ while they too understood and
followed Him. He goes on to insist upon the blessedness of
these His true followers. With Him they were secure; no
power on earth or in heaven could ‘pluck them out of His
Hand,’ A second reason for the blessedness of His sheep
2 St. John v. 22,23. Meyer in loc.: ‘In dem richtenden Sohne erscheint
der beauftragte Stellvertreter des Vaters, und er ist in so fern (also immer
relativ) zu ehren wie der Vater.’ But if the honour paid to the Son be merely
relative, if He be merely honoured as an Ambassador or delegated Judge, then
men do not honour Him as they honour the Father. No identity of language
or of outward reverence can atone for a vital difference of principle in this
tribute of honour. Moses had been ‘as a Gop unto Pharaoh?’ he had been
Gop’s ambassador and judge among the children of Israel. Does he there-
fore claim a ‘relative’ honour, equal in its outward symptoms, to that paid to
Gop? And if not, why not?
© St. John x. 22, 23. P Ibid. ver. 25.
a Ibid. ver. 27. t Ibid. ver. 28.
[ LECT.
Nature of this Unity. 183
follows: ‘My Father which gave them Me is a Greater Power
(μεῖζον) than all: and no man is able to pluck them out of My
Father’s Hands,’ In these words our Lord repeats His previous
assurance of the security of His sheep, but He gives a different
reason for it. He had represented them as ‘in His own Hand ;
He now represents them as in the Hand of the Almighty Father.
How does He consolidate these two reasons which together
assure His ‘sheep’ of their security? By distinctly asserting
His own oneness with the Father: ‘I and My Father are One
Thingt’ Now what kind of unity is that which the context
obliges us to see in this solemn statement? Is it such a unity
as that which our Lord desired for His followers in His in-
tercessory prayer ; ἃ unity of spiritual communion, of reciprocal
love, of common participation in an imparted, heaven-sent
Naturet? Is it a unity of design and co-operation, such as
that which, in varying degrees, is shared by all true workers for
Godv? How would either of these lower unities sustain the
full sense of the context, which represents the Hand of the Son
as one with the Hand—that is, with the Love and Power—of
the Father, securing to the souls of men an effectual preservation
from eternal ruin? A unity like this must be a dynamic unity,
as distinct from any mere moral and intellectual union, such as
might exist in a real sense between a creature and its God.
Deny this dynamic unity, and you destroy the internal con-
nexion of the passage*. Admit this dynamic unity, and you
admit, by necessary implication, a unity of Essence. The Power
of the Son, which shields the redeemed from the foes of their |
® St. John x. 29.
ὁ Ibid. ver. 30: ᾿Εγὼ καὶ ὃ Πατὴρ ἕν ἐσμεν. Fora full explanation of this
text see Bishop Beveridge’s noble sermon on the Unity of Christ with Go
the Father, Works, vol. ii. Serm. xxv. See also note D. :
u Asin St. John xvii. 11, 22, 23. v r Cor. iii. 8.
= Meyer in Joh. x. 29: ‘ Der Vater in dem Sohne ist und wirkt, und daher
dieser, als Organ und Triiger [He is, of course, much more than this] der
gottlichen Thitigkeit bei Ausfiihrung des Messianischen Werks, nicht ge-
schieden von Gott [i.e. the Father] nicht ein zweiter ausser un d neben Gott ist,
sondern nach dem Wesen jener Gemeinschaft Hins mit Gott. Gottes Hand
ist daher seme Hand in der Vollziehung des Werkes, bei welchem Er Gottes
Macht, Liebe u. s. w. handhabt und zur Ausfiihrung bringt. Die Einheit ist
mithin die der dynamischen Gemeinschaft, wornach der Vater im Sohne ist,
und doch grisser als der Sohn, [i.e. as man,] weil Er ihn geweiht und gesandt
hat. Die Arianische Fassung von der ethischen H armonie geniigt nicht, da die
Argumentation, ohne die Einheit der Macht (welche Chrys. Euth, Zig. u. V.
auch Liicke mit Recht urgiren) zu verstehen, nicht zutreffen wiirde.’ This
interpretation is remarkable for its scholarly fairness in a writer who sits so
loosely to the Catholic belief in our Lord’s Godhead as Meyer.
IV |
18 Our 7, ογαῖς reference to Psalm \xxxii. 6.
salvation, is the very Power of the Father; and this identity of
Power is itself the outflow and the manifestation of a Oneness
of Nature. Not that at this height of contemplation the Person
of the Son, so distinctly manifested just now in the work of
guarding His redeemed, melts away into any mere aspect or
relation of the Divine Being in His dealings with His creatures.
As St. Augustine observes on this text, the ‘unum’ saves us
from the Charybdis of Arianism ; the ‘sumus’ is our safeguard
against the Scylla of Sabellius. The Son, within the incom-
municable unity of God, is still Himself; He is not the Father,
but the Son. Yet this personal subsistence is in the mystery of
the Divine Life strictly compatible with Unity of Essence ;—the
Father and the Son are one Thing.
‘Intellexerunt Judzei, quod non intelligunt Ariani.’ The Jews
understood our Lord to assume Divine honours, and proceeded
to execute the capital sentence decreed against blasphemy by
the Mosaic lawy. His words gave them a fair ground for saying
that ‘being Man, He made Himself God.’ Now if our Lord
had been in reality only Man, He might have been fairly ex-
pected to say so. Whereas He proceeds, as was often His wont,
to reason with His opponents upon their own real or assumed
grounds, and so to bring them back to a point at which they
were forced to draw for themselves the very inference which had
just roused their indignation. With this view our Lord points
out the application of the word Elohim, to the wicked judges
under the Jewish theocracy, in the eighty-second Psalma,
Surely, with this authoritative language before their eyes, His
countrymen could not object to His calling Himself the Son of
God. And yet He irresistibly implies that His title to Divinity
is higher than, and indeed distinct in kind from, that of the
Jewish magistrates. If the Jews could tolerate that ascription
of a lower and relative divinity to the corrupt officials who,
theocratically speaking, represented the Lord Jehovah ; surely,
looking to the witness of His works, Divinity could not be
denied to One Who so manifestly wielded Divine power as did
Jesusb, Our Lord’s argument is thus ἃ minori ad majus ; and
He arrives a second time at the assertion which had already
given such offence to His countrymen, and which He now
repeats in terms expressive of His sharing not merely a dy-
namical but an essential unity with the Father: ‘The Father is
y St. John x. 31. 2 Thid. 33: Σὺ, ἄνθρωπος ὧν, ποιεῖς σεαυτὸν Θεόν.
8 Ps, Ixxxii. 6. Ὁ St. John x. 37, 38.
[ LECT.
Lhe Fews understood our Lord’s meaning. τ8ς
in Me, and I in Hime” What the Father is to the Son, the
Son is to the Father. The context again forbids us to compare
this expression with the phrases which are often used to express
the indwelling of God with holy souls, since no moral quality is
here in question, but.an identity of Power for the performance
of superhuman works. Our Lord expresses this truth of His
wielding the power of the Father, by asserting His identity of
Nature with the Father, which involves His Omnipotence. And
the Jews understood Him. He had not retracted what they
δερυδαϊαὶ blasphemy, and they again endeavoured to take His
lifed,
It will probably be said that the Church’s interpretation of
Christ’s language in the Porch of Solomon is but an instance of
that disposition to materialize spiritual truth, which seems to be
so unhappily natural to the mind of man. ‘What grossness of
apprehension,’ it will be urged, ‘is here! How can you thus
confound language which merely asserts the sustained inter-
communion of a holy soul with God, and those hard formal
scholastic assertions of an identity of essence?’ But it is
obvious to rejoin that in cases like that before us, language
must be morally held to mean what it is understood to mean by
those to whom it is addressed. After all, language is designed
to convey thought ; and if a speaker perceives that his real mind
has not been conveyed by one statement, he is bound to correct
the deficiencies of that statement by another. Had our Lord
been speaking to populations accustomed to Pantheistic modes
of thinking, and insensible to the fundamental distinctness of
the Uncreated from all forms of created life, His assertion of
His oneness with the Father might perhaps have passed for
nothing more than the rapture of a subjective ecstasy, in which
the consciousness of the Speaker had been so raised above its
ordinary level, that He could hyperbolically describe His sensa-
tions as Divine. Had our Lord been an Indian, or an Alex-
_ andrian, or a German mystic, some such interpretation might
have been reasonably affixed to His language. Had Christ been
a Christian instead of the Author of Christianity, we might,
after carefully detaching His words from their context, have
even supposed that He was describing the blessed experience of
millions of believers ; it being certain that, since the Incarnation,
the soul of man is capable of a real union with the All-holy
God. Undoubtedly writers like St. Augustine, and many of
ς St. John x. 38: ἐν ἐμοὶ ὃ Πατὴρ, κἀγὼ ἐν αὐτῷ.
ἃ Thid. ver. 39: ἐζήτουν οὖν πάλιν αὐτὸν πιάσαι.
Iv |
186 Our Lord refers to His Pre-existence.
later date’, do speak of the union between God and the Chris-
tian in terms which signally illustrate the loving condescension
of God truly present in holy souls, of God’s gift of Himself to
His redeemed creatures. But the belief of these writers re-
specting the Nature of the Most High has placed the phrases
of their mystical devotion beyond the reach of a possible
misunderstanding. And our Lord was addressing earnest
monotheists, keenly alive to the essential distinction between
the Life of the Creator and the life of the creature, and re-
ligiously jealous of the Divine prerogatives. The Jews did not
understand Christ’s claim to be One with the Father in any
merely moral, spiritual, or mystical sense. Christ did not en-
courage them so to understand it. The motive of their in-
dignation was not disowned by Him. They believed Him to
mean that He was Himself a Divine Person; and He never
repudiated that construction of His language.
(y) In order however to determine the real sense of our
Saviour’s claim to be One with the Father, let us ask a simple
question. Does it appear that He is recorded to have been con-
scious of having existed previously to His Human Life upon this
earth? Suppose that He is only a good man enjoying the highest
degree of constant spiritual intercommunion with God, no refer-
ences to a Pre-existent Life can be anticipated. There is nothing
to warrant such a belief in the Mosaic Revelation, and to have
professed it on the soil of Palestine would simply have been
taken by the current opinion of the people as a proof of mental
derangement. But believe that Christ is the Only-begotten Son ~
of God, manifested in the sphere of sense and time, and clothed
in our human nature; and some references to a consciousness
extending backwards through the past into a boundless eternity
are only what would naturally be looked for at His hands.
Let us then listen to Him as He is proclaiming to His
countrymen in the temple, ‘Ifa man keep J/y saying, He shall
never see death,’ The Jews exclaim that by such an announce-
ment He assumes to be greater than Abraham and the prophets.
They indignantly ask, ‘Whom makest Thou Thyself?’ Here as
elsewhere our Lord keeps both sides of His relation to the
Eternal Father in full view: it is the Father that glorifies His
® e.g. Thomas & Kempis. Of his teaching respecting the union between Gop
and the devout soul, there is a good summary in Ullmann’s Reformers before
‘the Reformation, vol. ii. pp. 139-149. Clarke’s transl.
f St. John viii. 52: ἐάν τις τὸν λόγον τὸν ἐμὸν τηρήσῃ, θάνατον ov μὴ θεω-
ρήσῃ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα.
[ LECT.
ee 4
‘Before Abraham was, 7 am. 187
_ Manhood, and the Jews would glorify Him too if they were the
Father’s true children. But it was not their Heavenly Father
alone, with whom the Jews were at variance. The earthly
ancestor of the Jewish race might be invoked to rebuke his
recreant posterity. ‘Your Father Abraham rejoiced to see My
day, and he saw it and was glad.’ Abraham had seen the day of
Messiah by the light of prophecy, and accordingly this statement
was a claim on the part of Jesus to be the true Messiah. Of
itself such a claim would not have shocked the Jews; they
would have discussed it on its merits. They had latterly looked
for a political chief, victorious but human, in their expected
Messiah ; they would have welcomed any prospect of realizing
their expectations. But they detected a deeper and to them a
less welcome meaning in the words of Christ. He had meant,
they thought, by His ‘Day’ something more than the years of
His Human Life. At any rate they would ask Him a question,
which would at once justify their suspicions or enable Him to
clear Himself. ‘Thou,’ they said to Him, ‘art not yet fifty years
old, and hast Thou seen Abraham?’ Now if our Lord had only
- claimed to be a human Messiah, such as the Jews of later years
had learned to look for, He must have earnestly disavowed any
such inference from His words. He might have replied that if
Abraham saw Him by the light of prophecy, this did not of itself
imply that He was Abraham’s contemporary, and so that He
had Himself literally seen Abraham. But His actual answer
more than justified the most extreme suspicions of His examiners
as to His real meaning. ‘Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, 1
say unto you, Before Abraham was, [ am.’ In these tremendous
words the Speaker institutes a double contrast, in respect both
of the duration and of the mode of His existence, between Him-
self and the great ancestor of Israel. Πρὶν ᾿Αβραὰμ γενέσθαι.
Abraham, then, had come into existence at some given point of
time. Abraham did not exist until his parents gave him birth.
But, Ἐγώ εἰμι. Here is simple existence, with no note of
beginning or endg. Our Lord says not, ‘Before Abraham
g St. John viii. 58. Meyer in loc.: ‘Ehe Abraham ward, bin Ich, alter
als Abraham’s Werden ist meine Existenz.’ Stier characterizes our Lord’s
words as ‘a sudden [not to Himself] flash of revelation out of the depths of
His own Eternal Consciousness.’ That Christ should finally have spoken
thus, is not, Stier urges, to be wondered at, on the supposition of this Eternal
Consciousness ever abiding with Him. Rather is it wonderful, that He
‘should ordinarily, and as a rule, have restrained it so much. Here too,
indeed, He restrains Himself., He does not go on to say, as afterwards in the
Great Intercession—mpd τοῦ τὸν κόσμον εἶναι (St. John xvii. 5).
Iv ]
188 Christ speaks of having come down from heaven,
was, I was,’ but ‘I am.’ He claims pre-existence indeed, but He
does not merely claim pre-existence ; He unveils a conscious-
ness of Eternal Being. He speaks as One on Whom time has no
effect, and for Whom it has no meaning. He is the I AM of
ancient Israel ; He knows no past, as He knows no future; He |
is unbeginning, unending Being; He is the eternal ‘Now.’
This is the plain sense of His language, and perhaps the most
instructive commentary upon its force is to be found in the
violent expedients to which Humanitarian writers have been
driven in order to evade it }.
Here again the Jews understood our Lord, and attempted to
kill Him ; while He, instead of explaining Himself in any sense
which would have disarmed their anger, simply withdrew from
the temple i.
With this statement we may compare Christ’s references to
His pre-existence in His two great sacramental Discourses.
Conversing with Nicodemus He describes Himself as the Son of
Man Who had come down from heaven, and Who while yet
speaking was in heavenk, Preaching in the great synagogue of
Capernaum, He calls Himself ‘the Bread of Life Which had
come down from heaven.’ He repeats and expands this descrip-
tion of Himself. His pre-existence is the warrant of His life-
giving power}, The Jews objected that they knew His father
and mother, and did not understand His advancing any such
claim as this to a Pre-existent Life. Our Lord replied by saying
that no man could come to Him unless taught of God to do so,
and then proceeded to re-assert His pre-existence in the same
terms as before™. He pursued His former statement into its
mysterious consequences. Since He was the heaven-descended
Bread of Life, His Flesh was meat indeed and His Blood was
drink indeed®. They only would have life in them who should
h Cf. Meyer on St. John viii. 58: ‘Das ἐγώ εἶμι ist aber weder: Ich bin
es (der Messias) zu deuten (Faustus Socinus, Paulus, ganz contextwidrig),
noch in den Rathschluss Gottes, zu verlegen (Sam. Crell, Grotius, Paulus,
B. Crusius), was schon durch das Praes. verboten wird. Nur noch
geschichtlich bemerkenswerth ist die von Faustus Socinus auch in das
Socinianische Bekenntniss (s. Catech. Racov. ed. Oeder, p. 144, f.) tiberge-
gangene Auslegung: ‘‘ Khe Abraham, Abraham, ἃ. i. der Vater vieler Volker,
wird, bin Ich es, nimlich der Messias, das Licht der Welt.” Damit ermahne
Er die Juden, an Ihn zu glauben, so lange es noch Zeit sei, ehe die Gnade
von ihnen genommen und auf die Heiden iibergetragen werde, wodurch dann
Abraham der Vater vieler Volker werde.’
i St. John viii. 59. « Ibid. iii. 13. 1 Ibid. vi. 33.
τὰ Jbid. vers. 44-51. n Ibid. ver. 55.
[ LEcr.
and of ascending up to where He was before. 1869
eat this Flesh and drink this Blood®. Life eternal, Resurrection
at the last dayP, and His own Presence even now within the
soul 4, would follow upon a due partaking of that heavenly food.
When the disciples murmured at this doctrine as a ‘hard say-
ingt, our Lord met their objections by predicting His coming
Ascension into heaven as an event which would justify His allu-
sions to His pre-existence, no less than to the life-giving virtue
of His Manhood. ‘What and if ye shall see the Son of Man
ascend up where He was befores?’ Again, the reality of our
Lord’s pre-existence lightens up such mysterious sayings as the
following : ‘I know whence I came, and whither I go; but ye
cannot tell whence I come, and whither I got;’ ‘I am from
above: .. . 1 am not of this world"; ‘If ye believe not that I
am He, ye shall die in your sins*;’ ‘I came forth from the
Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the
world, and go to the Fathery.’ Once more, how full of solemn
significance is that reference to ‘the glory which I had with
Thee before the world was2,’ in the great intercession which our
- Incarnate Saviour offered to the Eternal Father on the eve of
His agony !
Certainly taken alone, our Lord’s allusions to His Pre-existence
need not imply His true Divinity. There is indeed no ground
for the theory of a Palestinian doctrine of metempsychosis ; and
even Strauss shrinks from supposing that the fourth Evangelist
makes Jesus the mouthpiece of Alexandrian theories of which a
Jewish peasant would never have heard. Arianism however
would argue, and with reason, that in some of the passages just
ο St. John vi. 53. P Ibid. ver. 54.
4 Ibid. ver. 56. τ [bid. ver. 60.
8 Ibid. ver. 62. Strauss thinks it ‘difficult but admissible’ to interpret
St. John viii. 58, with the Socinian Crell, ofa purely ideal existence in the
predetermination of God. He considers it however ‘scarcely possible to view
the prayer to the Father (St. John xvii. 5) to confirm the δόξα which Jesus
had with Him before the world was, as an entreaty for the communication of
a glory predestined for Jesus from eternity.’ He adds that the language of
Jesus (St. John vi. 62) where He speaks of the Son of Man re-ascending
where He was before, ἀναβαίνειν ὅπου ἦν τὸ πρότερον, is ‘in its intrinsic mean-
ing, as well as in that which is reflected on it from other passages, unequivo-
cally significative of actual, not merely of ideal pre-existence.’ Leben Jesu,
pt. ii. kap. 4. § 65.
Here, as sometimes elsewhere, Strauss incidentally upholds the natural and
Catholic interpretation of the text of the Gospels ; nor are we now concerned
with the theory to which he eventually applies it. It may be further ob-
served, that Strauss might have at least interpreted St. John viii. 58 by the
light of St. John vi. 62, t Ibid. vill. 14. ἃ Ibid. ver. 23.
* Ibid. ver. 24. 5 Ibid. xvi. 28. 2 [bid. xvii. 5.
Iv |
190 Our Lora’s testimony when before the S anhedrin.
οὐδενί... πρόεσις... ὃ ὃ ὃ ὁ ὁ
referred to, though not in all, our Lord might conceivably have
been speaking of a created, although pre-existent, life. Yet if
we take these passages in connexion with our Lord’s assertion of
His being One with the Father, each truth will be seen to sup-
port and complete the other. On the one hand, Christ asserts _
His substantial oneness with Deity, onthe other, His distinct
pre-existent Personality. He might be an inferior and created
Being, if He were not thus absolutely One with God. He might
be only a saintly man, and, as such, described as an ‘aspect,’ a
‘manifestation’ of the Divine Life, if His language about His
pre-existence did not clearly imply that before His birth of
Mary He was already a living and superhuman Person.
If indeed, in His dealings with the multitude, our Lord had
been really misunderstood, He had a last opportunity for ex-
plaining Himself when He was arraigned before the Sanhedrin.
Nothing is more certain than that, whatever was the dominant
motive that prompted our Lord’s apprehension, the Sanhedrin
condemned Him because He claimed Divinity. The members of
the court stated this before Pilate. ‘We have a law, and by our
law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of Goda,’
Their language would have been meaningless if they had under-
stood by the ‘Son of God’ nothing more than the ethical or
theocratic Sonship of their own ancient kings and saints. If the
Jews held Christ to be a false Messiah, a false prophet, a blas-
phemer, it was because He claimed literal Divinity. True, the
Messiah was to have been Divine. But the Jews had secularized
the Messianic promises; and the Sanhedrin held Jesus Christ
to be worthy of death under the terms of the Mosaic law, as ex-
pressed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy». After the witnesses
had delivered their various and inconsistent testimonies, . the
high priest arose and said, ‘I adjure Thee by the living God,
that Thou tell us whether Thou be the Christ, the Son of God.
Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto
you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right
hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then the
high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy°.’
a St. John xix. 7. ‘Devant ce procurateur, observes M. Salvador, ‘chacune
des parties émit une parole capitale. Telle fut celle du conseil ou de ses
déiégués: “ Nous avons une loi; d’apres cette loi il doit mourir,” non parce-
qwil s’est fait Fils de Dieu, selon l’expression familitre ἃ notre langue et ἃ nos
prophttes ; mais parcequ’il se fait égal ἃ Dieu, et Dieu méme.’ Salvador,
Jésus-Christ, ii. p. 204.
Ὁ Lev. xxiv. 16; Deut. xiii. 5 ; cf. Wilson, Illustration of the Method of
Explaining the New Testament, p. 26. ¢ St. Matt. xxvi. ee
LECT.
276 ts condemned for claiming to be Divine. 191
The blasphemy did not consist, either in the assumption of the
title Son of Man, or in the claim to be Messiah, or even, except-
ing indirectly, in that which by the terms of Daniel’s prophecy
was involved in Messiahship, namely, the commission to judge
the world. It was the further claim4 to be the Son of God,
not in any moral or theocratic, but in the natural sense, at which
the high priest and his coadjutors professed to be so deeply
shocked. The Jews felt, as our Lord intended, that the Son of
Man in Daniel’s prophecy could not but be Divine; they knew
what He meant by appropriating such words as applicable to
Himself. Just as one body of Jews had endeavoured to destroy
Jesus when He called God His Father in such sense as to claim
Divinity 9 ; and another when He contrasted His Eternal Being
with the fleeting life of Abraham in a distant past’; and another
when He termed Himself Son of God, and associated Himself
with His Father as being dynamically and so substantially Oneg;
—just as they murmured at His pretension to ‘have come down
from heaven 4,’ and detected blasphemy in His authoritative re-
mission of sinsi;—so when, before His judges, He admitted that
He claimed to be the Son of God, all further discussion was at
anend. The high priest exclaimed ‘Ye have heard His blas-
phemy ;’ and they all condemned Him to be guilty of death.
And a very accomplished Jew of our own day, M, Salvador, has
shewn that this question of our Lord’s Divinity was the real
point at issue in that momentous trial. He maintains that
a Jew had no logical alternative to belief in the Godhead of
Jesus Christ except the imperative duty of putting Him to
death *.
ἃ Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, pp. 341, 615. e St. John v. 17, 18.
f Thid. viii. 58, 59. & Thid. x. 30, 31, 39- Tbid. vi. 42.
i St. Matt. ix. 3; St. Luke v. 20, 21.
k Salvador, Jésus-Christ, ii. pp. 132, 133, 195: ‘La question avait un cété
politique ou national juif: c’était la résistance du Fils de Marie, dans Jéru-
salem méme, aux ordres et avertissements du grand Conseil. Au point de
vue religieux, selon la loi, Jésus se trouvait en cause pour s’étre déclaré égal
>» Dieu et Dieu lui-méme.’ See also the Rev. W. Wilson’s Illustration of the
Method of Explaining the New Testament, p. 77, 566. Mr. Wilson shews
that the Sanhedrin sincerely believed our Lord to be guilty of the crime of
blasphemy, as inseparable, to a Jewish apprehension, from His claim to be
Divine. ‘This is argued (1) from the regularity of the proceedings of the
Sanhedrin, the length of the trial, and the earnestness and unanimity of the
judges. The false witnesses were considered as such by the Sanhedrin: our
Lord was condemned on the strength of His Own confession ; (2) from the
language of the members of the Sanhedrin before Pilate: ‘By our law He
ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God;’ (3) from the fact
Iv ]
aan “Φορος σου
192 Christ's Self-assertion and [715 character.
IIL. In order to do justice to the significance of our Lord’s
language about Himself, let us for a moment reflect on our very
fundamental conceptions of His character. There is indeed a
certain seeming impropriety in using that word ‘ character’ with
respect to Jesus Christ at all. For in modern language
‘character’ generally implies the predominance or the absence
of some side or sides of that great whole, which we picture to
ourselves in the background of each individual man as the true
and complete ideal of human nature. This predominance or
absence of particular traits or faculties, this precise combination
of active or of passive qualities, determines the moral flavour of
each individual life, and constitutes character. Character is
that whereby the individual is marked off from the presumed
standard or level of typical manhood. Yet the closest analysis
of the actual Human Life of Jesus reveals a moral Portrait not
only unlike any that men have witnessed before or since, but
especially remarkable in that it presents an equally balanced and
entirely harmonious representation of all the normal elements of
our perfected moral nature! Still, we may dare to ask the
question: What are the features in that perfectly harmonious
moral Life, upon which the reverence and the love of Christians
dwells most constantly, most thankfully, most enthusiastically ?
τ. If then on such a subject I may utter a truism without
irreverence, I say first of all that Jesus Christ was sincere. He
possessed that one indispensable qualification for any teacher,
specially for a teacher of religion: He believed in what He said,
without reserve ; and He said what He believed, without regard
to consequences. Material error is very pardonable, if it be
error which in good faith believes itself to be truth. But evident
insincerity we cannot pardon ; we cannot regard with any other
that the members of the Sanhedrin had no material object to gain by pro-
nouncing Jesus guilty, without being persuaded of His criminality in claiming
to be a Divine Person. Mr. Wilson fortifies these considerations by appeal-
ing to our Lord’s silence, to St. Peter’s address to his countrymen in Acts iii.
14-17, and to the general conduct of the Jewish people.
1 Young, Christ of History, p. 217: ‘The difficulty which we chiefly feel
in dealing with the character of Christ, as it unfolded itself before men,
arises from its absolute perfection. On this very account it is less fitted to
arrest observation. A single excellence unusually developed, though in the
neighbourhood of great faults, is instantly and universally attractive. Per-
fect symmetry, on the other hand, does not startle, and is hidden from
common and casual observers. But it is this which belongs emphatically to
the Christ of the Gospels ; and we distinguish in Him at each moment that
precise manifestation which is most natural and most right,’
[ LECT.
Ne
Sencerity of Fesus Christ. 193
sentiment than that of indignation the conscious propagation of
what is known to be false, or even to be exaggerated. If however
the sincerity of our Lord could be reasonably called in question,
it might suffice, among the various facts which so irresistibly
establish it, to point to His dealings with persons who followed
and trusted Him. It is easy to denounce the errors of men who
oppose us; but it is difficult to be always perfectly outspoken
with those who love us, or who look up to us, or whose services
may be of use to us, and who may be alienated by our out-
spokenness. Now Jesus Christ does not merely drag forth to
the light of day the hidden motives of His powerful adversaries,
that He may exhibit them with so mercifully implacable an
accuracy, in all their baseness and pretension. He exposes, with
equal impartiality, the weakness, or the unreality, or the self-
deception of others who already regard Him with affection or
who desire to espouse His cause. A disciple addresses Him as
‘Good Master.’ The address was in itself sufficiently justifiable ;
but our Lord observed that the speaker had used it in an unreal
and conventional manner. In order to mark His displeasure He
sharply asked, ‘Why callest thow Me Good? There is none good
but One, that is, God™.’ A multitude which He has fed miracu-
lously returns to seek Him on the following day ; but instead
of silently accepting this tacit proof of His popular power, He
observes, ‘ Ye seek Me, not because ye saw the miracles, but
because ye did eat of the loaves and were filled.’ On another
occasion, we are told, ‘there went great multitudes with Him,’
He turns, warns them that all human affections must be sacrificed
to His service, and that none could be His disciple who does not
take up the cross®, He solemnly bids men ‘count the cost’ before
_ they ‘build the tower’ of discipleshipp. He is on the point of being
deserted by all, and an Apostle protests with fervid exaggeration
that he is ready to go with Him to prison or to death. But our
Lord, instead of at once welcoming the affection which dictated
this protestation, pauses to shew Simon Peter how little he really
knew of the weakness of his own heart4. With the woman of
_ Samaria, with Simon the Pharisee, with the Jews in the temple,
_ with the rich young man, it is ever the same; Christ cannot
flatter, He cannot disguise, He cannot but set forth truth in its
limpid purity". Such was His moral attitude throughout : sin-
τὰ St. Mark x. 18. Ὁ St. John vi. 26. ο St. Luke xiv. 26, 27.
P Tbid. ver. 28. 4 St. John xiii. 37, 38.
* Cf. Newman, Parochial Sermons, vol. v. p. 37, serm. 3: ‘Unreal Words.’
Iv | O
194 Unselfishness of Fesus Christ.
cerity was the mainspring of His whole thought and action ; and
when He stood before His judges He could exclaim, in this as in
a wider sense, ‘To this end was I born, and for this cause came
T into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truths.’
Surely this sincerity of our Holy Saviour is even at this hour
a main secret of His attractive power. Men, we know, may
flatter and deceive, till at length the soul grows sick and weary
of a world, which Truth in her stern simplicity might some-
times seem to have abandoned. But Jesus Christ, speaking to us
from the Gospel pages, or speaking in the secret chambers of
conscience, is a Monitor Whom we can trust to tell us the un-
welcome but wholesome truth ; and could we conceive of Him
as false, He would no longer be Himself in our thought; He
would not be changed; He would simply have disappeared *.
2. A second moral truism: Jesus Christ was unselfish. His
Life was a prolonged act of Self-sacrifice ; and sacrifice of self is
the practical expression and measure of unselfishness. It might
have seemed that where there was no sin to be curbed or worn
away by sorrow and pain, there room might have been found for
a lawful measure of self-satisfaction. But ‘even Christ pleased
not Himself’ He ‘sought not His Own glory ;’ He ‘came not
to do His Own will¥.’ His Body and His Soul, with all the
faculties, the activities, the latent powers of each, were offered
to the Divine Will. His friends, His relatives, His mother and
His home, His pleasure, His reputation, His repose, were all
abandoned for the glory of God and for the good of His
brethren. His Self-sacrifice included the whole range of His
human thought and affection and action; it lasted throughout
His Life; its highest expression was His Death upon the Cross.
Those who believe Him to have been merely a man endowed
with the power of working miracles, or even only with the
power of wielding vast moral influence over masses of men,
cannot but recognise the rare loveliness and sublimity of a Life
in which great powers were consciously possessed, yet were
s St. John xviii. 37.
t Félix, Jésus-Christ, p. 316; Channing, Works, ii. 55: ‘When I trace
the unaffected majesty which runs through the life of Jesus, and see Him
never falling below His sublime claims amidst poverty, and scorn, and in His
last agony, I have a feeling of the reality of His character which I cannot ex-
press. I feel that the Jewish carpenter could no more have conceived and
sustained this character under motives of imposture, than an infant’s arm
could repeat the deeds of Hercules, or his unawakened intellect comprehend
and rival the matchless works of genius.’
u Rom. xv. 3; St. John v. 30, vi. 38; St. Matt. xxvi. 39.
[ LECT.
>" See ο΄
flumilsty of Fesus Christ. 195
never exercised for those objects which the selfish instinct of
ordinary men would naturally pursue. It is this disinterested-
ness; this devotion to the real interests of humankind ; this
radical antagonism of His whole character to that deepseated
selfishness, which in our better moments we men hate in our-
selves and which we always hate in others ;—it is this complete
renunciation of all that has no object beyond self, which has won
to Jesus Christ the heart of mankind. In Jesus Christ we hail
the One Friend Who loves perfectly ; Who expresses perfect
love by the utter surrender of Self ; Who loves even unto death.
In Jesus Christ we greet the Good Shepherd of humanity ; He
is the Good Shepherd under Whose care we can lack nothing,
and Whose glory it is that He ‘giveth His Life for the sheeps.’
3. A third moral truism: Jesus Christ was humble. He might
have appeared, even to human eyes, as ‘One naturally con-
tented with obscurity ; wanting the restless desire for eminence
and distinction which is so common in great men; hating to
put forward personal claims; disliking competition and dis-
putes who should be greatest ; ...fond of what is simple and
homely, of children, and poor peopley.’ It might have almost
seemed as if His preternatural powers were a source of distress
and embarrassment to Him; so eager was He to economize
their exercise and to veil them from the eyes of men. He was
particularly careful that His miracles should not add to His repu-
tation’. Again and again He very earnestly enjoined silence
on those who were the subjects of His miraculous cures. He
would not gratify persons whose motive in seeking His com-
pany was a vain curiosity to see the proofs of His power».
By this humility is Jesus Christ most emphatically distinguished
from the philosophers of the ancient world. Whatever else
they may have been, they were not humble. But Jesus Christ
loses His individuality if you separate Him in thought for one
moment from His ‘ great humility.’ His humility is the key to
His whole life; it is the measuring-line whereby His actions, His
sufferings, His words, His very movements must be meted in
order to be understood. ‘ Learn of Me,’ He says, ‘for I am meek
and lowly of heart ; and ye shall find rest unto your souls¢,’
But what becomes of these integral features of His character
x St. John x. 11. y Ecce Homo, pp. 178, 179.
2 St. Luke viii. 51.
® St. Matt. ix. 30: ἐνεβριμήσατο ; xii. 16: ἐπετίμησεν αὐτοῖς.
Ὁ St. Mark viii. 11, 12; St. Matt. xvi. 1, 4; St. Luke xi. 16; St. John
Vi. 30. ¢ St. Matt. xi. 29.
Saxe 02
(196 Ls Fesus Christ humble, tf Fle ἐς not Gon?
if, after considering the language which He actually used about
Himself, we should go on to deny that He is God?
Is He, if He be not God, really humble? Is that reiterated
Self-assertion, to the accents of which we have been listening
this morning, consistent with any known form of creaturely
humility? Can Jesus thus bid us believe in Him, love Him,
obey Him, live by Him, live for Him; can He thus claim to
be the universal Teacher and the universal Judge, the Way, the
Truth, the Life of humanity,—if He be indeed only man?
What is humility but the honest recognition of truth respect-
ing self? Could any mere man claim that place in thought,
in society, in history, that authority over conscience, that rela-
tionship to the Most High; could he claim such powers and
duties, such a position, and such prerogatives as are claimed
by Jesus Christ, and yet be justly deemed ‘meek and lowly
of heart? If Christ is God as well as Man, His language falls
into its place, and all is intelligible; but if you deny His
Divinity, you must conclude that some of the most precious
sayings in the Gospel are but the outbreak of a preposterous
self-laudation ; they might well seem to breathe the very spirit
of another Lucifer 4,
If Jesus Christ be not God, is He really unselfish? He bids
men make Himself the centre of their affections and their
thoughts ; and when God does this He is but recalling man
to that which is man’s proper duty, to the true direction and
law of man’s being. But deny Christ’s Divinity, and what will
you say of the disinterestedness of His perpetual self-assertion¢?
ad Mr. F. W. Newman, Phases of Faith, p. 154: ‘When I find his high
satisfaction at all personal recognition and bowing before his individuality, I
almost doubt whether, if one wished to draw the character of a vain and
vacillating pretender, it would be possible to draw anything nearer to the
purpose than this.’ (p.158), ‘I can no longer give the same human reverence
as before to one who has been seduced into vanity so egregious [as to claim
to be the Son of Man].’ So our Lord’s parabolical sayings are said (p. 153)
to ‘indicate vanity and incipient sacerdotalism ;’ (p.157), His tone, in dealing
with the rich young man, is ‘magisterial, decisive, and final,’ so as to keep up
‘his own ostentation of omniscience ; His precept bidding men receive
those whom He sent (Matt. x. 40) suggests the observation that inasmuch
as the disciples ‘had no claims whatever, intrinsic or extrinsic, to reverence,
it appears to me a very extravagant and fanatical sentiment thus to couple
the favour or wrath of Gop with their reception or rejection’ (p. 157).
Compare Félix, Jésus-Christ, pp. 301-322.
° M. Renan accounts for our Lord’s self-assertion in the following manner.
‘Il ne préchait pas ses opinions, il se préchait lui-méme. Souvent des Ames
tres-grandes et trés-désintéressées présentent, associé & beaucoup d’élévation,
[ LECT.
Ts F$esus Christ unselfish, tf Hers not Gov? 197
What matters it that He teaches the ‘enthusiasm of humanity,’
if that enthusiasm was after all to centre in a merely human
self, and to surround His human presence with a tribute of
superhuman honour? What avails it that He proclaims the law
of self-renouncement, if He is Himself thus guilty of its signal
infraction? Nay, for what generous purpose can He still be held
to have died upon the Cross? The Cross is indeed for Christians
the symbol and the throne of a boundless Love ; but it is only
such to those who believe in the Divinity of the Crucified.
Deny the truth of Christ’s account of Himself ; deny the over-
whelming moral necessity for His perpetual Self-assertion ; and
His Death may assume another aspect. For He plainly courted
death by His last denunciations against the Pharisees, and by
His presence at a critical moment in Jerusalem. That He was
thus voluntarily slain and has redeemed us by His Blood is indeed
the theme of the praises which Christians daily offer Him on
earth and in paradise. But if He be not the Divine Victim
freely offering Himself for men upon the altar of the Cross, may
He not be what Christian lips cannot force themselves to utter?
You urge that in any case He would be a man freely devoting
himself for truth and goodness. But it is precisely here that
His excessive self-assertion would impair our confidence in the
purity of His motive. Is not self-sacrifice, even when pushed
to the last extremity, a suspected and tainted thing, when it
goes hand in hand with a consistent effort to give unwarranted
prominence to self? Have not men ere now even risked death
for the selfish, albeit unsubstantial, object of a posthumous
renownf? If Jesus was merely man, and His death no more
ce caracttre de perpétuelle attention ἃ elles-mémes, et d’extréme susceptibilité
personnelle, qui en général est le propre des femmes. Leur persuasion que
Dieu est en elles et s’occupe perpétuellement d’elles est si forte qu’elles ne
craignent nullement de s’imposer aux autres.’ (Vie de Jésus, p. 76.) Ac-
cordingly, we are told that ‘Jésus ne doit pas étre jugé sur la regle de nos
petites convenances. L’admiration de ses disciples le débordait et Pentrai-
nait. Il est évident que le titre de Rabbi, dont il s’était d’abord contenté,
ne lui suffisait plus ; le titre méme de prophéte ou d’envoyé de Dieu ne ré-
pondait plus & sa pensée. La position qwil s’attribuait était celle d’un étre
surhumain, et il voulait qu’on le regardat comme ayant avec Dieu un rapport
plus élevé que celui des autres hommes.’ (Vie de Jésus, p. 246.)
f Newman, Phases, p. 158: ‘When he had resolved to claim Messiahship
publicly, one of two results was inevitable, if that claim was ill-founded :—
viz., either he must have become an impostor in order to screen his weak-
ness; or he must have retracted his pretensions amid much humiliation and
have retired into privacy to learn sober wisdom. From these alternatives there
was escape only by death, and upon death Jesus purposely rushed.’ (p. 161.)
Iv ]
198 Ls Fesus Christ sincere, tf Hers not Gon ?
than the fitting close, the supreme effort of a life consistently
devoted to the assertion of self, has He not ‘succeeded beyond
the dreams of the most delirious votary of fame? If the blood
of a merely human Christ was the price which was deliberately
paid for glory on Mount Calvary, then it is certain that the
sufferer has had his reward. But at least he died, only as others
have died, who have sought and found at the hands of their
fellow-men, in death as in life, a tribute of sympathy, of ad-
miration, of honour. And we owe to such a sufferer nothing
beyond the compassionate silence wherewith charity would fain
veil the violence of selfishness, robed in her garments, and
seeking to share her glory and her power, while false to the very
vital principle which makes her what she is.’
Once more, if Jesus Christ is not God, can we even say that
He is sincereh? Let us suppose that it were granted, as it is by
no means granted, that Jesus Christ nowhere asserts His literal
Godheadi. Let us suppose that He was after all merely man,
and had never meant to do more than describe, in the language
of mysticism, the intertwining of His human Soul with the Spirit
‘Does my friend deny that the death of Jesus was wilfully incurred? The
*‘orthodox”’ not merely admit but maintain it. Their creed justifies it by
the doctrine that his death was a “ sacrifice” so pleasing to Gop as to expiate
the sins of the world. This honestly meets the objections to self-destruction ;
for how better could life be used than by laying it down for such a prize.’
5. Félix, Jésus-Christ, p. 314; Young, The Christ of History, p. 229.
h Newman, Phases, p. 154: ‘It sometimes seems to me the picture of a
conscious and wilful impostor. His general character is too high for this ;
and I therefore make deductions from the account. Still I do not see how
the present narrative could have grown up, if he had been really simple and
straightforward and not perverted by his essentially false position.? Mr. New-
man is complaining that our Lord ‘does not honestly and plainly renounce
pretension to miracle, as Mr. Martineau would,’ but his language obviously
suggests a wider application. (p.158.) ‘I feel assured, ἃ priori, that such
presumption [as that of claiming to be the Son of Man of Dan. vii.] must
. have entangled him into evasions and insincerities, which naturally end in
crookedness of conscience and real imposture, however noble a man’s com-
mencement, and however unshrinking his sacrifice of goods and ease and
life.’
i M. Renan indeed says, ‘Jésus n’énonce pas un moment l’idée sacrilége
4} soit Dieu.’ (Vie de Jésus, p. 75.) Yet, ‘on ne nie pas qwil y eat dans
les affirmations de Jésus le germe de la doctrine qui devait plus tard faire de
lui une hypostase divine.’ (Ibid. p. 247.) M. Renan even explains our
Lord’s language as to His Person on the ground that ‘ Vidéalisme transcend-
ant de Jésus ne lui permit jamais d’avoir une notion bien claire de sa propre
personnalité. 7 est son Pére, son Pére est lui.? (p. 244.) In other words,
our Lord did affirm His Divinity, but only because He was, unconsciously
perhaps, a Pantheist !
[ LEcT.
Did Christ explain away Fits claims ? τος
of God, in a communion so deep and absorbing as to obliterate
His sense of distinct human personality. Let this, I say, be
supposed to have been His meaning, and let His sincerity be
taken for granted. Who then shall anticipate the horror of His
soul or the fire of His words, when He is once made aware of
the terrible misapprehension to which his language has given
rise in the minds around Him? ‘Thou being a man, makest
Thyself God.’ The charge was literally true: being human, He
did make Himself God. Christians believe that He only ‘made’
Himself that which He is. But if He is not God, where does
He make any adequate repudiation of a construction of His
words so utterly derogatory to the great Creator, so necessarily
abhorrent to a good man’s thought ?
Is it urged that on one occasion He ‘explained His claim to
Divinity by a quotation which implied that He shared that claim
with the chiefs of the theocracy?’ It has already been shewn
that by that quotation our Lord only deprecated immediate
violence, and claimed a hearing for language which the Jews
themselves regarded as not merely allowable, but sacred. The
quotation justified His language only, and not His full meaning,
which, upon gaining the ear of the people, He again proceeded
to assert. Is it contended that in such sayings as that addressed
to His disciples, ‘My Father is greater than ΓΚ,’ He abandoned
any-pretension to be a Person internal to the Essential Life of
God? It may suffice to reply, that this saying can have no
such force, if its application be restricted, as the Latin Fathers
do restrict it, and with great apparent probability, to our Lord’s
Manhood. But even if our Lord is here speaking, as the
Greeks generally maintain, of His essential Deity, His Words
still express very exactly a truth which is recognised and re-
quired by the Catholic doctrine. The Subordination of the
Everlasting Son to the Everlasting Father is strictly compatible
with the Son’s absolute Divinity ; it is abundantly implied in
our Lord’s language; and it is an integral element of the
ancient doctrine which steadily represents the Father as Alone
k §t. John xiv. 28: πορεύομαι πρὸς τὸν Πατέρα" ὅτι ὃ Πατήρ μου μείζων μου
ἐστί. For Patristic arguments against the Arian abuse of this text, see Suicer,
Thes. ii. p. 1368. The pecCovdrns of the Father is referred by St. Athana-
sius, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Chrysostom, St. Basil, and St. Hilary, to
His being the Unbegotten One; by St. Cyril, St. Augustine (in loc.; de
Trin. i. 7 ; Enchiridion, x.), St. Ambrose (tom. iii. p. 795), St. Leo (Ep. ad
Flay. xxviii. c. 4), to the Son’s humiliation as incarnate. See the very full
but unsatisfactory note of Meyer in loc.
Iv |
200 Fesus Christ not sincere, tf Fe ἐς not Goo.
Unoriginate, the Fount of Deity in the Eternal Life of the
Ever-blessed Trinity].
But surely an admission on the part of one in whom men saw
nothing more than a fellow-creature, that the Everlasting God
was ‘greater’ than himself, would fail to satisfy a thoughtful
listener that no claim to Divinity was advanced by the speaker.
Such an admission presupposes some assertion to which it stands
in the relation of a necessary qualification. If any good man of
our acquaintance should announce that God was ‘greater’ than
himself, should we not hold him to be guilty of something worse
than a stupid truism™? Would he not seem to imply that he
was not really a creature of God’s hand? Would not his words
go to suggest that the notion of his absolute equality with God
was not to be dismissed as altogether out of the question?
Should we not peremptorily remind him that the life of man is
related to the Life of God, not as the less to the greater, but as
the created to the Uncreated, and that it is an impertinent
irreverence to admit superiority of rank, where the real truth can
only be expressed by an assertion of radical difference of natures?
And assuredly a sane and honest man, who had been accused of
associating himself with the Supreme Being, could not content
himself with admitting that God was greater than himself.
Knowing himself to be only human, would he not insist again and
again, with passionate fervour, upon the incommunicable glory
of the great Creator? Would not a purely human Christ have
anticipated the burning words of the indignant Apostles at the
gate of Lystra? Far more welcome to human virtue most surely
it would have been, to be accused of blasphemy for meaning what
1 Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. iv. i. 1: ‘Decretum illud Synodi Nicene, quo
statuitur Filium Dei esse Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ, Deum de Deo, suo calculo com-
probarunt doctores Catholici, tum qui ante cum qui post Synodum illam
scripsére. Nam illi omnes uno ore docuerunt naturam perfectionesque
divinas, Patri Filioque competere non collateraliter aut coordinat®, sed sub-
ordinaté ; hoc est, Filium eandem quidem naturam divinam cum Patre com-
munem habere, sed & Patre communicatam ; ita scilicet ut Pater solus naturam
illam divinam a se habeat, sive 3 nullo alio, Filius autem i Patre ; proinde
Pater, Divinitatis que in Filio est, fons, origo ac principium sit. See Bull’s
remarks on the fundamental character of the error of calling the Son αὐτόθεος,
as though He were not begotten of the Father, Ibid. iv.i.7. Also Petavius,
De Deo Deique proprietatibus, ii. 3, 6. Compare Hooker’s Works, vol. i.,
Keble’s Preface, p. Ixxxi. When St. Athanasius calls our Lord αὐτόθεος,
αὐτοσοφία, &c., αὐτὸς has the sense of ‘full reality’ as distinct from that of
‘Self-origination ;” the idea is excluded that He had only a measure of Wisdom
or Divinity. See Petavius de Trin. vii. rr.
™ Coleridge, Table-talk, p. 25.
[ LECT.
L[nsincerity of the Christ of M. Renan. 201
was never meant, than to be literally supposed to mean it. For
indeed there are occasions when silence is impossible to a sincere
soul". Especially is this the case when acquiescence in falsehood
is likely to gain personal reputation, when connivance at a mis-
apprehension may aggrandize self, ever so slightly, at the cost of
others. How would the sincerity of a human teacher deserve
the name, if, passively, without repudiation, without protest, he
should allow language expressive whether of his moral elevation
or of his mystical devotion to be popularly construed into a
public claim to share the Rank and Name of the great God in
heaven ?
It is here that the so-termed historical Christ of M. Renan,
who, as we are informed, is still the moral chief of humanity °,
avould appear even to our natural English sense of honesty to be
involved in serious moral difficulties. M. Renan indeed assures
us, somewhat eagerly, that there are many standards of sincerity P;
2 See Dean Alford on St. John xix. 9.
© Renan, Vie de Jésus, p. 457: ‘Cette sublime personne, qui chaque
jour préside encore au destin du monde, il est permis de l’appeler divine, non
en ce sens que Jésus ait absorbé tout le divin, ou lui ait été adéquat (pour
employer Vexpression de la scolastique) mais en ce sens que Jésus est
Vindividu qui a fait faire ἃ son espéce le plus grand pas vers le divin.
L’humanité dans son ensemble offre un assemblage d’étres bas, égoistes,
supérieurs & l’animal en cela seul que leur égoisme est plus réfléchi. Mais,
au milieu de cette uniforme vulgarité, des colonnes s’élévent vers le ciel et
attestent une plus noble destinée. . Jésus est la plus haute de ces colonnes
qui montrent ἃ homme d’ov il vient, et ou il doit tendre. En lui s’est con-
densé tout ce qu’il y a de bon et d’élevé dans notre nature.’ On the other
hand, M. Renan is not quite consistent with himself, as he is of opinion that
certain Pagans and unbelievers were in some respects superior to our Lord.
‘L’honnéte et suave Marc-Auréle, Phumble et doux Spinoza, n’ayant pas
eru au miracle, ont été exempts de quelques erreurs que Jésus partagea.’
(Ibid. p. 451.) Moreover, this superiority to our Lord seems to be shared
by that advanced school of sceptical enquirers to which M. Renan himself
belongs. ‘ Par notre extréme délicatesse dans l’emploi des moyens de con-
viction, par notre sincérité absolue et notre amour désintéressé de Pidée pure,
nous avons fondé, nous tous qui avons voué notre vie ἃ la science, un nouvel
idéal de moralité.’ (Ibid.) Indeed, as regards our Lord, M. Renan suggests
that ‘il est probable que beaucoup de ses fautes ont été dissimulées.’ (Ibid.
. 458.
: : Tb. Ῥ. 252: ‘Pour nous, races profondément sérieuses, la conviction
signifie la sincérité avec soi-méme. Mais la sincérité avec soi-méme n’a pas
beaucoup de sens chez les peuples orientaux, peu habitués aux délicatesses
de l’esprit critique. Bonne foi et imposture sont des mots qui, dans notre
conscience rigide, s’opposent comme deux termes inconciliables. En Orient,
il ya de lun ἃ Vlautre mille fuites et mille détours. Les auteurs de livres
apocryphes (de ‘‘ Daniel,” d’‘‘ Hénoch,” par exemple), hommes si exaltés,
commettaient pour leur cause, et bien certainement sans ombre de scrupule,
IV |
202 Moral defects of the Humanitarian Christ.
that is to say, that it is possible, under certain circumstances, to
acquiesce knowingly in what is false, while yet being, in some
transcendental sense, sincere. Thus, just as the Christ of
M. Renan can permit the raising of Lazarus to look like a
miracle, while he must know that the whole episode has been
a matter of previous arrangement, so he can apparently use
language which is generally understood to claim Divinity, with-
out being bound to explain that he is altogether human’. The
‘ideal of humanity’ contents himself, it appears, with a lower
measure, 80 to call it, of sincerity ; and while we are scarcely
embarrassed by the enquiry whether such sincerity is sincere or
un acte que nous appellerions un faux. La vérité matérielle a trés-peu de
prix pour Voriental; il voit tout & travers ses idées, ses intéréts, ses passions.
L’histoire est impossible, si l’on n’admet hautement qwily a pour la sincérité
plusieurs mesures.’
a M. Renan introduces his account of the resurrection of Lazarus by ob-
serving that ‘les amis de Jésus désiraient un grand miracle qui frappat vive-
ment Vincrédulité hiérosolymite. La résurrection d’un homme connu ἃ
Jérusalem dut paraitre ce qu’il y avait de plus convaincant. Tl faut se rap-
peler ici que la condition essentielle de la vraie critique est de comprendre la
diversité des temps, et de se dépouiller des répugnances instinctives qui sont
le fruit d’une éducation purement raisonnable. TI faut se rappeler aussi que
dans cette ville impure et pesante de Jérusalem Jésus n’étatt plus lui-méme.
Sa conscience, par la faute des hommes, et non par la sienne, avait perdu
quelque chose de sa limpidité primordiale.’ (Vie de Jésus, p. 359.) Under
these circumstances, ‘il se passa ἃ Béthanie quelque chose qui fut regardé
comme une résurrection.’ (p. 360.) ‘ Peut-étre Lazare, pale encore ἧς 88
maladie, se fit-il entourer de bandelettes comme un mort, et enfermer dans
son tombeau de famille. . . Jésus désira voir encore une fois celui qu'il avait
aimé, et, la pierre ayant été écartée, Lazare sortit avec ses bandelettes et la
téte entourée d’un suaire. Cette apparition dut naturellement étre regardée
par tout le monde comme une résurrection. La foi ne connait d’autre loi que
Vintérét de ce qu’elle croit le vrai... . . Quant & Jésus, il n’était pas plus
maitre que saint Bernard, que saint Frangois d’Assise de modérer l’avidité de
la foule et de ses propres disciples pour le merveilleux. La mort, d’ailleurs,
allait dans quelques jours lui rendre sa liberté divine, et Varracher aux
fatales nécessités d'un réle qui chaque jour devenait plus exigeant, plus dificile
ἃ soutentr.’ (p. 363.)
τ Sometimes M.Renan endeavours to avoid this conclusion by representing
our Lord’s self-proclamation as being in truth the result of a vain self-sur.
render to the fanatical adulation of His followers, the reiteration of which in
the end deceived Himself. (Vie de Jésus, p. 139): ‘ Naturellement, plus on
croyait en lui, plus il croyait en lui-méme.’ Accordingly (p. 240) ‘sa légende
(i.e. the account given of Him in the Gospels and in the Apostles’ Creed,
and specially the doctrine of His Divinity) était le fruit d’une grande conspi-
ration toute spontanée οὐ s’élaborait autour de lui de son vivant’ Thus
(p. 238) the Christ of ΔΙ. Renan first allows himself to be falsely called the
Son of David, and then ‘ il finit, ce semble, par y prendre plaisir.’ Cf. p. 297,
note.
[ LECT.
‘ Christus, st non Deus, non bonus? 203
not, we cannot hesitate to observe that it is certainly consistent
neither with real humility nor with real unselfishness 5.
Thus our Lord’s human glory fades before our eyes when we
attempt to conceive of it apart from the truth of His Divinity.
He is only perfect as Man, because He is truly God. If He is
not God, He is not a humble or an unselfish man. Nay, He is
not even sincere ; unless indeed we have recourse to a supposi-
tion upon which the most desperate of His modern opponents
have not yet ventured, and. say with His jealous kinsmen in the
early days of His ministry, that He was beside Himself t. Cer-
tainly it would seem that there must have been strange method
in a madness which could command the adoration of the eivilized
world ; nor would any such supposition be seriously entertained
by those who know under what conditions the very lowest forms
of moral influence are at all possible. The choice really lies
between the hypothesis of conscious and culpable insincerity,
and the belief that Jesus speaks literal truth and must be taken
at His word ¥.
You complain that this is one of those alternatives which
orthodoxy is wont to substitute for less violent arguments, and
from the exigencies of which you piously recoil? But under
certain circumstances such alternatives are legitimate guides to
truth, nay, they are the only guides available. Certainly we
cannot create such alternatives by any process of dialectical
manufacture, if they do not already exist. If they are not mat-
ters of fact, they can easily be convicted of inaccuracy. We who
stand in this pulpit are not makers or masters of the eternal
_ harmonies ; we can but exhibit them as best we may. Truth,
even in her severer moods, must ever be welcome to sincerity ;
and she does us a service by reminding us that it is not always
possible to embrace within the range of our religious negations
8 Félix, Jésus-Christ, p. 321.
* Channing, Works, ii. 56: ‘The charge of an extravagant, self-deluding
enthusiasm is the last to be fastened on Jesus. Where can we find traces of
it in His history? Do we detect them in the calm authority of His pre-
the different classes of men with whom He acted? . . . . The truth is, that,
remarkable as was the character of Jesus, it was distinguished by nothing
more than by calmness and self-possession.” ι
α Cf. Guizot, Méditations sur l’Essence de la Religion Chrétienne. Paris,
1864, pp. 324-326.
Ve} 3
204 Our Lord’s claim to be Divine
just so much dogma as we wish to deny, and to leave the rest
really intact. It is no hardship to reason that we cannot deny
the conclusion of a proposition of Euclid, without impugning
the axioms which are the basis of its demonstration. It is no
hardship to faith that we cannot deny the Divinity of Jesus,
without casting a slur upon His Human Character. There are
fatal inclines in the world of religious thought; and even if men
deem it courteous to ignore them, such courtesy is scarcely
charitable. If our age does not guide anxious minds by its
loyal adherence to God’s Revelation, its very errors may have
their uses ; they may warn us off ground, on which Reason can-
not rest, and where Faith is imperilled, by enacting before our
eyes a reductio ad absurdum or a reductio ad horribile.
Of a truth the alternative before us is terrible; but can
devout and earnest thought falter for a moment in the agony
of its suspense ? Surely it cannot. The moral Character of
Christ, viewed in connexion with the preternatural facts of His
Human Life, will bear the strain which the argument puts upon
it*%, It is easier for a good man to believe that, in a world
where he is encompassed by mysteries, where his own being
itself is a consummate mystery, the Moral Author of the wonders
around him should for great moral purposes have taken to Him-
self a created form, than that the one Human Life which realizes
the idea of humanity, the one Man Who is at once perfect
strength and perfect tenderness, the one Pattern of our race in
Whom its virtues are combined, and from Whom its vices are
eliminated, should have been guilty, when speaking about Him-
self, of an arrogance, of a self-seeking, and of an insincerity
which, if admitted, must justly degrade Him far below the moral
level of millions among His unhonoured worshippers. It is
easier, in short, to believe that God has consummated His works
of wonder and of mercy by a crowning Self-revelation in which
mercy and beauty reach their climax, than to close the moral
x Channing, Works, ii. 61. ‘I know not what can be added to heighten
the wonder, reverence, and love, which are due to Jesus. When I consider
Him, not only as possessed with the consciousness of an unexampled and
unbounded majesty, but as recognising a kindred nature in all human beings,
and living and dying to raise them to a participation of His divine glories ;
and when I see Him under these views allying Himself to men by the
tenderest ties, embracing them with a spirit of humanity which no insult,
injury, or pain could for a moment repel or overpower, I am filled with
wonder as well as reverence and love. I feel that this character is not of
human invention, that it was not assumed through fraud or struck out by
enthusiasm ; for it is infinitely above their reach.’
[ LECT.
warranted by His Works and Character. 205
eye to the brightest spot that meets it in human history, and—
since a bare Theism reproduces the main difficulties of Chris-
tianity without any of its compensations—to see at last in man’s
inexplicable destiny only the justification of his despair. Yet
the true alternative to this frightful conclusion is in reality a
frank acceptance of the doctrine which is under consideration in
these lecturesY. For Christianity, both as a creed and as a life,
depends absolutely upon the Personal Character of its Founder.
Unless His virtue was only apparent, unless His miracles were
nothing better than a popular delusion, we must admit that His
Self-assertion is justified, even in the full measure of its blessed
and awful import. We must deny the antagonism which is said
to exist between the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity and the history
of His human manifestation. We must believe and confess that
the Christ of history is the Christ of the Catholic Creed.
Eternal Jesus! it is Thyself Who hast thus bidden us either
despise Thee or worship Thee. Thou wouldest have us despise
Thee as our fellow-man, if we will not worship Thee as our God.
Gazing on Thy Human beauty, and listening to Thy words, we
cannot deny that Thou art the Only Son of God Most High ;
disputing Thy Divinity, we could no longer clearly recognise
Thy Human perfections. But if our ears hearken to Thy
revelations of Thy greatness, our souls have already been won
to Thee by Thy truthfulness, by Thy lowliness, and by Thy love.
Convinced by these Thy moral glories, and by Thy majestic
exercise of creative and healing power, we believe and are sure
that Thou hast the words of eternal life. Although in unveiling
y Channing might almost seem to have risen for a moment to the full
faith of the Church of Christ in the following beautiful words. Works, ii. 57:
‘I confess when I can escape the deadening power of habit, and can receive
the full import of such passages as the following: ‘‘Come unto Me all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest ;” “ I am come to
seek and to save that which was lost;” ‘* He that confesseth Me before men,
him will I confess before My Father in Heaven;” ‘‘Whosoever shall be
ashamed of Me before men, of him shall the Son of Man be ashamed when
He cometh in the glory of the Father with the holy angels;” “In My
Father’s house are many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you ;” I say,
when I can succeed in realising the import of such passages, I feel myself
listening to a being such as never before and never since spoke in human
language. I am awed by the consciousness of greatness which these
simple words express; and when I connect this greatness with the proofs of
Christ’s miracles, I am compelled to speak with the centurion, ‘‘ Truly this
was the Son of God.”’ Alas! that this language does not mean what we
might hope, is too certain from other passages in his writings, See e.g.
Works, ii. 510: ‘Christ is a being distinct from the one Gop.’
Iv |
206 Lhe Christ of history ἐς the Christ of dogma.
Thyself before Thy creatures, Thou dost stand from age to age
at the bar of hostile and sceptical opinion; yet assuredly from
age to age, by the assaults of Thine enemies no less than in the
faith of Thy believing Church, Thou art justified in Thy sayings
and art clear when Thou art judged. Of a truth, Thou art the
King of Glory, O Christ ; Thou art the Everlasting Son of the
Father.
[ LEecT.
Ey lg el Sd ay ἀρ
LECTURE Υ.
THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST’S DIVINITY IN THE
WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN.
That Which was from the beginning, Which we have heard, Which we have
seen with our eyes, Which we have looked upon, and owr hands have
handled, of the Word of Life; (for the Life was manifested, and we have
seen It, and bear witness, and shew unto you that Eternal Life, Which
was with the Father, and was manifested unto us ;) That Which we have
seen and heard declare we unto you.—1 St. JOHN 1. I-3.
ΑΝ attempt was made last Sunday to determine, from the re-
corded language of Jesus Christ, what was the verdict of His
Own consciousness, expressed as well as implied, respecting the
momentous question of His higher and Eternal Nature. But
we were incidentally brought face to face with a problem, the
fuller consideration of which lies naturally in the course of the
present discussion. It is undeniable that the most numerous
and direct claims to Divinity on the part of our Lord are to be
found in the Gospel of St. John. While this fact has a signi-
ficance of a positive kind which will be noticed presently, it
also involves the doctrine before us in the entanglement of a
large critical question. To leave this question undiscussed
would, under existing circumstances, be impossible. To discuss
it, within the limits assigned to the lecturer, and even with a
very moderate regard to the amount of details which it neces-
sarily involves, must needs make a somewhat unwonted demand,
as you will indulgently bear in mind, upon the patience and
attention of the audience.
If the Book of Daniel has been recently described as the
battle-field of the old Testament, it is not less true that
St. John’s Gospel is the battle-field of the New. It 15 well
understood on all sides that no question of mere dilettante
vd
208 Earliest objections to St. ¥ohn’s Gospel.
criticism is at stake when the authenticity of St. John’s Gospel
is challenged. The point of this momentous enquiry lies close
to the very heart of the creed of Christendom ;
‘Neque enim levia aut ludicra petuntur
Premia; sed Turni de vita et sanguine certant?.’
Strange and mournful it may well seem to a Christian that the
pages of the Evangelist of Divine love should have been the
object of an attack so energetic, so persevering, so inventive, so
unsparing! Strange indeed such vehement hostility might be
deemed, if only it were not in harmony with that deep instinct
of our nature which forbids neutrality when we are face to face
with high religious truth ; which forces us to take really, if not
avowedly, a side respecting it ; which constrains us to hate or
to love, to resist or to obey, to accept or to reject it. If St.
John’s Gospel had been the documentary illustration of some
extinct superstition, or the title-deed of some suppressed founda-
tion, at best capable of attracting the placid interest of studious
antiquarianism, the attacks which have been made on it might
well have provoked our marvel. As it is, there is no room for
legitimate wonder, that the words of the Evangelist, like the
Person of the Master, should be a stone of stumbling and a rock
of offence. For St. John’s Gospel is the most conspicuous
written attestation to the Godhead of Him Whose claims upon
mankind can hardly be surveyed without passion, whether it be
the passion of adoring love, or the passion of vehement and
determined enmity.
I. From the disappearance of the obscure heretics called
Alogi, in the later sub-apostolic age, until the end of the seven-
teenth century, the authenticity of St. John’s Gospel was not
questioned. The earliest modern objections to it seem to have
been put forward in this country, and to have been based on the
assumption of a discrepancy between the narrative of St. John
and those of the first three Gospels. These objections were
combated by the learned Leclerc ; and for well-nigh a century
the point was thought to have been decided». The brilliant
reputation of Herder secured attention for his characteristic
theory that St. John’s Gospél describes, not the historical, but _
an ideal Christ. Herder was followed by several German writers,
@ Virg. Ain. xii. 764, 765.
Ὁ It ought perhaps to have been added that Evanson’s attack upon
St. John in 1792 was answered by Dr, Priestley.
[ LECT.
ag ἸἸἘἸεεἂὸ:ς .ς“Ἕ ὁ οϑοῬοέσιο.ὁ ὁ “ὁ
Lhe‘ Probabilia’ of Bretschnetder. 209
aS ES eae tenant Ena 4
who accepted conclusions which he had implied, and who
expressly rejected the authenticity of the fourth Gospel*. But
these negative criticisms were met in turn by the arguments of
Roman Catholic divines like Hug, and of critics who were by no
means loyal even to Lutheran orthodoxy, such as Eichhorn and
Kuinoel. By their labours the question was again held to have
_ been set at rest in the higher regions of German scholarship and
free-thinking. This second settlement was rudely disturbed by
the publication of the famous ‘ Probabilia’ of Bretschneider, the
learned superintendent of Gotha, in the year 18204. Repro-
ducing the arguments which had been advanced by the earlier
hegative speculation, and adding others of his own, Bretschneider
rekindled the discussion. He exaggerated the contrast between
the representation of our Lord’s Person in St. John and that in
the synoptists into a positive contradiction. Protestant Ger-
many was then fascinated by the school of Schleiermacher,
which, by the aid of a combination of criticism and mysticism 9,
was groping its way back towards the creeds of the Catholic
Church. Schleiermacher, as is well known, not only accepted
the Church-belief respecting the fourth Gospel, but he found
in that Gospel the reason for his somewhat reckless estimate of
the other three. The sharp controversy which followed resulted
in Bretschneider’s retractation of his thesis, and the impression
produced by this retractation was not violently interfered with
until 1835, when Dr. Strauss shocked the conscience of all that
was Christian in Europe by the publication of his first ‘Life of
Jesus.’ Dr. Strauss’ position in respect of St. John’s Gospel
was a purely negative one. He confined himself to asserting
that St. John’s Gospel was not what the Church had always
believed it to be, that it was not the work of the son of Zebedee.
The school of Tiibingen aspired to supplement this negative
criticism of Strauss by a positive hypothesis. St. John’s Gospel
was held to represent a highly-developed stage of an orthodox
gnosis, the growth of which presupposed the lapse of at least a
© Especially by Dr. Ammon, preacher and professor of theology at Erlangen
and Dresden successively. es
ἃ Probabilia de Evangelii et Epistolarum Johannis Apostoli indole et
origine. Lipsie, 1820.
᾿ © See more especially Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslchre, and compare Pro-
fessor Auberlen’s account of the process through which, at Tiibingen, he ‘was.
led back, among other things, mainly by Schleiermacher’s mysticism, so full
of life and spirit, to the sanctuary of religion, and learnt to sit again at the
feet of the Redeemer.’ On Divine Revelation, pref.
Vv ] 4 P
210, Theory of the later Tiibingen school.
century since the age of the Apostles. It was decided by the
leading writers of the school of Tubingen, by Drs. Baur,
Schwegler, and Zeller, that the fourth Gospel was not composed
until after the year A.D. 160. And, although this opinion may
have been slightly modified by later representatives of the
Tiibingen school, such as Hilgenfeld ; the general position, that
the fourth Gospel was not written before the middle of the
second century, is held by disciples of that school as one of
its very fundamental tenets.
Here then it is necessary to enquire, what was the belief of
the second century itself, as to the date and authenticity of
St. John’s Gospel.
Now it is scarcely too much to assert that every decade of the
second century furnishes its share of proof that the four Gospels
as a whole, and St. John’s in particular, were to the Church of
that age what they are to the Church of the present. Beginning
at the end of the century, we may observe how general at that
date was the reception of the four Gospels throughout the
Catholic Church.. Writing at Lyons, in the last decade of the
century, St. Irenzeus discourses on various cosmical and spiritual
analogies to the fourfold form of the Gospel narrative (εὐαγγέλιον
τετράμορφον) in a strain of mystical reflection which implies that
the co-ordinate authority of the four Gospels had been already
long established‘. St. Irenzeus, it is well known, had sat at the
feet of St. Polycarp, who was himself a disciple of St. John.
St. Irenzeus, in his letter to the erring Florinus, records with
reverent affection what Polycarp had told him of the lessons
which he had personally learnt from John and the other disciples
of Jesus&. Now is it barely probable that Irenzus should have
f St. Treneus, adv. Her. iii. 11. 8: ἐξ ὧν φανερὸν, ὅτι ὃ τῶν ἁπάντων
τεχνίτης Λόγος, ὃ καθήμενος. ἐπὶ τῶν Χερουβὶμ καὶ συνέχων τὰ πάντα, φανερω-
θεὶς τοῖς a hae ἔδωκεν ἦ ἡμῖν τετράμορφον τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, ἑνὶ δὲ πνεύματι
συνεχόμενον. a Ay Καὶ γὰρ τὰ Χερουβὶμ τετραπρόσωπα" καὶ τὰ πρόσωπα αὐ-
τῶν, εἰκόνες tis πραγματείας τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ... . Καὶ τὰ “εὐαγγέλια οὖν
τούτοις σύμφωνα, ἐν οἷς ἐγκαθέζεται Χριστός. Τὸ μὲν γὰρ κατὰ Ἰωάννην, τὴν
ἀπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἡγεμονικὴν αὐτοῦ... « . « καὶ ἔνδοξον γενεὰν διηγεῖται, λέγων"
ἐν ἀρχῇ ἣν ὃ Λόγος.
δ St. ᾿τϑηδθβ, fragment, vol. i. p. 822, ed. Stieren: εἶδον γάρ σε, παῖς dv
ἔτι ἐν τῇ κάτω ᾿Ασίᾳ παρὰ τῷ Πολυκάρπῳ, λαμπρῶς πράττοντα ἐν τῇ βασιλικῇ
αὐλῇ, καὶ πειρώμενον εὐδοκιμεῖν map" αὐτῷ" μᾶλλον yap τὰ τότε διαμνημονεύω
τῶν ἔναγχος γινομένων" (αἱ γὰρ ἐκ παίδων μαθήσεις, συναύξουσαι τῇ ψυχῇ,
ἑνοῦνται αὐτῇ) ὥστε με δύνασθαι εἰπεῖν καὶ τὸν τόπον, ἐν ᾧ ᾧ καθεζόμενος διε-
λέγετο ὃ μακάριος Πολύκαρπος, καὶ τὰς προσόδους αὐτοῦ καὶ τὰς εἰσόδους καὶ τὸν
χαρακτῆρα τοῦ βίου καὶ τὴν τοῦ σώματος ἰδέαν καὶ τὰς διαλέξεις ἃς ἐποιεῖτο
πρὸς τὸ πλῆθος, καὶ τὴν μετὰ Ἰωάννου συναναστροφὴν ὡς ἀπήγγελλε, καὶ τὴν
[ LECT,
ee
Saint Fohn’s Gospel in the Second Century, 21%
imagined that a literary forgery, which is asserted to have been
produced at a date when he was himself a boy of twelve or four-
teen years of age, was actually the work of the Apostle John b 4
At Carthage, about the same time, Tertullian wrote hig great
work against the heretic Marcioni, Tertullian brought to the
discussion of critical questions great natural acuteness, which
had been sharpened during his early life by his practice at the
African bar. Tertullian distinguishes between the primary, or
actually apostolical rank of St. Matthew and St. J ohn, and the
lower standing of St. Mark and St. Luke, as being apostolical
men of a secondary degree* ; but he treats all four as inspired
writers of an authority beyond discussion |, Against Marcion’s
mutilations of the sacred text Tertullian fearlessly appeals to the
witness of the most ancient apostolical Churches. Tertullian’s
famous canon runs thus: ‘Si constat id verius quod prius, id
prius quod et ab initio, id ab initio quod ab apostolis, pariter
ubique constabit, id esse ab apostolis traditum, quod apud eccle-
sias apostolorum fuerit sacrosanctum™, But what would have
been the worth of this appeal if it could have been even suspected
that the last Gospel was really written when Tertullian was a
boy or even a young man? At Alexandria, aimost contempo-
raneously with Tertullian, St. Clement investigated the relation
τῶν λοιπῶν τῶν ἑωρακότων τὸν Κύριον, καὶ ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευε τοὺς λόγους αὖ-
τῶν" καὶ περὶ τοῦ Κυρίου τίνα ἦν ἃ παρ᾽ ἐκείνων ἀκηκόει, καὶ περὶ τῶν δυνάμεων
αὐτοῦ, καὶ περὶ τῆς διδασκαλίας, ὡς παρὰ τῶν αὐτοπτῶν τῆς ζωῆς τοῦ Λόγου
παρειληφὼς ὁ Πολύκαρπος, ἀπήγγελλε πάντα σύμφωνα ταῖς γραφαῖς. Cf. Eus.
Hist. Eccl. v. 20. St. Irenzeus succeeded St. Pothinus in the see of Lyons,
Pothinus was martyred a.p. 177, and Ireneus died A.D. 202.
h Adv. Her. iii. 1. St. Irenzeus was probably born about a.D. 140.
‘ Tertullian was born at Carthage about a.p. 160. Cave places his con-
version to Christianity at a.p. 185, and his lapse into the Montanist heresy
at A.D. 199. Dr, Pusey (Libr. of Fathers) makes his conversion later,
A.D. 195, and his secession from the Church Α. Ὁ. 201.
k Adv. Marc. iv. 6. 2: ‘Constituimus imprimis evangelicum instrumentum
apostolos auctores habere, quibus hoc munus evangelii promulgandi ab Ipso
Domino sit impositum. Si et apostolicos, non tamen solos, sed cum apostolis
et post apostolos, quoniam predicatio discipulorum suspecta fieri posset de
gloriz studio, si non adsistat illi auctoritas magistrorum, immo Christi, que
magistros apostolos fecit. Denique nobis fidem ex apostolis Joannes et
Matthzeus insinuant, ex apostolicis Lucas et Marcus instaurant.’
+ Adv. Mare. iv. c. 5: ‘ Hadem auctoritas ecclesiarum apostolicarum ceteris
quoque patrocinabitur Evangeliis, que proinde per illas et secundum illas
habemus, Joannis dico et Matthei, licet et Marcus quod edidit Petri
affirmetur, cujus interpres Marcus. Nam et Luc digestum Paulo adscribere
solent, Capit magistrorum videri que discipuli promulgarint,’
m Ady. Marcion. iv. 5.
vi P 2
21. Waetness borne to Saint Fohn’s Gospel
of the synoptic Gospels to St. John4, and he terms the latter
the εὐαγγέλιον πνευματικόνο, It is unnecessary to say that the
intellectual atmosphere of that famous Greeco-Egyptian school
would not have been favourable to any serious countenance of a
really suspected document. . At Rome St. John’s Gospel was
certainly received as being the work of that Apostle in the year
170. ‘This is clear from the so-termed Muratorian fragment? ;
and if in receiving it the Roman Church had been under a delu-
sion so fundamental as is implied by the Tiibingen hypothesis,
St. John’s own pupil Polycarp might have been expected to have
corrected his Roman brethren when he came to Rome in the
year 163. In the farther East, St. John’s Gospel had already
been translated as a matter of course into the Peschito Syriac
version?, It had been translated in Africa into the Latin Versio
Italat. At or soon after the middle of the century two works
n Westcott, Canon of the New Testament, 2nd ed. p.104. See Mr.
Westcott’s remarks on St. Clement’s antecedents and position in the Church,
ibid. pp. 298, 299. St. Clement lived from about 165 to 220. He flourished
as a Christian Father under Severus and Caracalla, 193-220.
° Kus. Hist. Eccl. vi. 14, condensing Clement’s account, says, τὸν μέντοι
᾿Ιωάννην ἔσχατον συνιδόντα ὅτι τὰ σωματικὰ ἐν τοῖς εὐαγγελίοις δεδήλωται,
προτραπέντα ὑπὸ τῶν γνωρίμων, Πνεύματι θεοφυρηθέντα, πνευματικὸν ποιῆσαι
εὐαγγέλιον.
P Westcott on the Canon, p.170. The Muratorian fragment claims to
have been written by a contemporary of Pius I., who probably ruled the
Roman Church from about a.p. 142 to 157. ‘ Pastorem vero nuperrimé
temporibus nostris in urbe Roma Hermas conscripsit, sedente cathedra urbis
Rome ecclesiz Pio episcopo fratre ejus.’ Cf. Hilgenfeld, Der Kanon und die
Kritik des N. T., p. 39, sqq.
a On the difficulty of fixing the exact date of the Peschito, see Mr.
Westcott’s remarks, Canon of New Testament, pp. 206-210. Referring
(1) to the Syriac tradition of its Apostolic origin at Edessa, repeated by .
Gregory Bar Hebreeus; (2) to the necessary existence of an early Syriac
version, implied in the controversial writings of Bardesanes; (3) to the quo-
tations of Hegesippus from the Syriac, related by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. iv.
22); (4) to the antiquity of the language of the Peschito as compared with
that of St. Ephrem, and the high authority in which this version was held by
that Father ; (5) to the liturgical and general use of it by heretical as well as
orthodox Syrians; and (6) to the early translations made from it ;—Mr.
Westcott concludes that in the absence of more copious critical resources
which might serve to determine the date of this version on philological
grounds, ‘there is no sufficient reason to desert the opinion which has ob-
tained the sanction of the most competent scholars, that its formation is to
be fixed within the first half of the second century. (p. 211.) That it was
complete then in A.D. 150-160, we may assume without risk of serious error.
τ This version must have been made before A.p. 170. ‘How much more
ancient it really is cannot yet be discovered. Not only is the character of the
version itself a proof of its extreme age, but the mutual relation of different
c% | LECT. i“
¥
by Catholics of the Second Century. 213
“were published which implied that the four Gospels had long
been received as of undoubted authority : I refer to the Harmo-
nies of Theophilus’, Bishop of Antioch, and of Tatian t, the hete-
rodox pupil of St. Justin Martyr. St.John is quoted by either
writer independently, in the work which was addressed by Theo-
philus to Autolycus¥, and in the Apology of Tatian*. When,
about the year 170, Apollinaris of Hierapolis points out the
bearings of the different evangelical narratives upon the Quarto-
deciman controversy, his argument implies a familiarity with
St. John. Apollinaris refers to the piercing of our Lord’s Sidey,
and Polycrates of Ephesus speaks of John as the disciple who
lay on the bosom of Jesus%. Here we 566 that the last Gospel
must have been read and heard in the Christian Churches with
a care which dwells upon its distinctive peculiarities. It is
surely inconceivable that a work of such primary claim to speak
on the question of highest interest for Christian believers could
have been forged, widely circulated, and immediately received
by Africans, by Romans, by Gauls, by Syrians, as a work of an
Apostle who had passed to his rest some sixty years before.
And, if the evidence before us ended here, we might fairly infer
that, considering the difficulties of communication between
Churches in the sub-apostolic age, and the various elements of
moral and intellectual caution, which, as notably in the case of
the Epistle to the Hebrews, were likely to delay the cecumenical
parts of it shew that it was made originally by different hands; and if so, it
is natural to conjecture that it was coeval with the introduction of Chris-
tianity into Africa, and the result of the spontaneous effort of African
Christians.’ (Westcott on the Canon of the New Testament, pp. 224, 225.)
Mr. Westcott shews from Tertullian (Ady. Prax. c. 5; De Monog. c. 11)
that at the end of the century the Latin translation of St. John’s Gospel had
been so generally circulated in Africa, as to have moulded the popular theo-
logical dialect. (Ibid. pp. 218, 219.)
5. At latest Theophilus was bishop from a.p. 168 to 180. St. Jerome
says: ‘Theophilus . . . quatuor evangelistarum in unum opus dicta com-
pingens, ingenii sui nobis monumenta dimisit.’? Epist. 121 (al. 151) ad
Algas. c. 6 ¥
τ Kus. Hist. Eccl. iv. 29: ὁ Τατιανὸς συνάφειάν τινα καὶ συναγωγὴν ovK οἵδ᾽
ὅπως τῶν εὐαγγελίων συνθεὶς τὸ Διὰ τεσσάρων τοῦτο προσωνόμασεν. Theo-
doret, Her. Fab. i. 20; Westcott, Canon, pp. 279, 280, 566.
u Ad Autol. ii. 31. p.174, ed. Wolf. Cf. St. John i. 1, 3. Theophilus is
the first writer who quotes St. John by name.
x Orat. contr. Grec. c. 4 (St. John iv. 24); c 5 (Ibid. i. 1); ὁ. 13
(Ibid. i. 5); c. 19 (Ibid. i. 3).
y Chron. Pasch. p. 14; cf. St. John xix. 34; Routh, i. 160, sq.; Westcott,
Canon of New Testament, pp. 198, 199.
z Apud Ehus, v. 24. Cf. St. John xili, 23, xxi. 20.
Vv]
21. Wetness borne to Saint Fohn’s Gospel
reception of a canonical book, St. John’s Gospel must have been
in existence at the beginning of the second century.
But the evidence does not desert us at this point. Through
Tatian we ascend into the earlier portion of the century as
represented by St. Justin Martyr. It is remarkable that
St. Justin’s second Apology, written in 161, contains fewer
allusions to the Gospels than the earlier Apology written in
138, and than the intermediate composition of this Father, his
Dialogue with the Jew Trypho. Now passing by recent theories
respecting a Gospel of the Hebrews? or a Gospel of Peter, by
which an endeavour has been made to weaken St. Justin’s
witness to the synoptic Evangelists, let us observe that hig
testimony to St. John is particularly distinct. Justin’s emphatic
reference of the doctrine of the Logos to our Lord», not to
mention his quotation of John the Baptist’s reply to the mes-
sengers of the Jews¢, and of our Saviour’s language about the
new birthd, makes his knowledge of St. John’s Gospel much
more than a probabilitye. Among the great Apostolic fathers,
St. Ignatius alludes to St. John in his Letter to the Romans,
and St. Polycarp quotes the Apostle’s first Epistles. In these
sub-apostolic writings there are large districts of thought and
a On the identity of the ‘Gospel of the Hebrews’ with the original Hebrew
draught of the Gospel of St. Matthew, see the remarks of Tischendorf in his
pamphlet, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? pp. 17-19. To that
admirable compendium I am indebted for several remarks in the text of this
and the following pages. ᾽
> Cf. Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst ? p- 16: ‘Die
Uebertragung des Logos auf Christus, von der uns keine Spur weder in der
Synoptikern noch in den iltesten Parallelschriften derselben vorliegt, an
mehreren Stellen Justins von Johannes abzuleiten ist.’
¢ Tbid. Dialog. cum Tryph. 88. Cf. St. John i. 20.
d Apolog. i. 61: καὶ yap 6 Χριστὸς efrev? “Ay μὴ ἀναγεννηθῆτε, ov μὴ
εἰσέλθητε εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν" Ὅτι δὲ καὶ ἀδύνατον εἰς τὰς μήτρας
τῶν τεκουσῶν τοὺς ἅπαξ γενομένους ἐμβῆναι φανερὺν πᾶσίν ἐστι. CE. Westcott,
Canon of the New Testament, p. 130.
© Cf. however Mr. Westcott’s remarks (Canon of the New Testament,
p- 145) on the improbability of St. John’s being quoted in apologetic writings
addressed to Jews and heathen. St. Justin nevertheless does ‘ exhibit types
of language ‘and doctrine which, if not immediately drawn from St. John (why
not?), yet mark the presence of his influence and the recognition of his
authority.” Westcott, Ibid. Besides the passages already alluded to, St.
Justin appears to refer to St. John xii. 49 in Dialog. cum Tryph. c. 56; to
St. John i. 13 in Dialog. c. 63; to St. John vii. 12 in Dialog. c. 69; to St.
John i, 12 in Dialog. ο. 123. Cf. Liicke, Comm. Ev. Joh, Ρ- 34, sqq.
' St. Ign. ad. Rom.c. 7. Cf. St. John vi. 32, 48, 53, xvi. 11.
8 Ep. ad Phil. c. 7. Cf. 1 St. John iv. 3.
[ LECT.
|
}
by Catholics of the Second Century. 215
expression, of a type unmistakeably Johannean}, which, like
St. Justin’s doctrine of the Logos, witness no less powerfully to
the existence of St. John’s writings than direct citations. The
Tiibingen writers lay emphasis upon the fact that in the short
fragment of Papias which we possess, nothing is said about
St. John’s Gospeli, But at least we have no evidence that
Papias did not speak of it in that larger part of his writings
which has been lostj; and if his silence is a valid argument
against the fourth Gospel, it is equally available against the
Gospel of St. Luke, and even against each one of those four
Epistles which the Tiibingen writers themselves recognise as the
work of St. Paul.
The testimony of the Catholic Church during this century is
supplemented by that of the contemporary heretics. St. Irenzeus
has pointed out how the system of the celebrated Gnostic,
h Cf. St. Barn. Ep. v. vi. xii. (cf. St. John iii. 14); Herm. Past. Simil. ix. 12
(cf. Ibid. x. 7, 9, xiv. 6); St. Ignat. ad Philad. 7 (cf. Ibid. iii. 8); ad Tral. 8
(cf. Ibid. vi. 51) ; ad Magnes. 7 (cf. Ibid. xii. 49, x. 30, xiv. 11); ad Rom. 7
(cf. Ibid. vi. 32).
i Meyer, Evan. Johann. Einl. p. 14: ‘ Die Continuitit [i.e. of the evidence
in favour of the fourth Gospel] geht sowohl von Irenzus tiber Polycarp, als
auch von Papias, sofern diesem der Gebrauch des ersten Briefs Joh. bezeugt
ist, iiber den Presbyter Johannes, auf den Apostel selbst zuriick. Dass aber
das Fragment des Papias das Evangel. Joh. nicht erwahnt, kann nichts
verschlagen, da es iiberhaupt keine schriftlichen Quellen, aus welchen er seine
Nachrichten geschépft habe, auffiihrt, vielmehr das Verfahren des Papias
dahin bestimmt, dass er bei den Apostelschiilern die Aussagen der Apostel
erkundet habe, und dessen ausdriicklichen Grundsatz ausspricht: οὐ yap τὰ
ἐκ τῶν βιβλίων τοσοῦτόν με ὠφελεῖν ὑπελάμβανον, ὅσον TA παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς
καὶ μενούσης. Papias wirft hier die damals vorhandenen evangelischen
Schriften (τῶν βιβλίων) deren eine Menge war (Luk. i, 1) alle ohne Auswahl
zusammen, und wie er das Evangel. Matthei und das des Marcus mit
darunter begriffen hat, welche beide er spiiter besonders erwahnt, so kann er
auch das Evangel. Joh. mit bei τῶν βιβλίων gemeint haben, da Papias einen
Begriff von kanonischen Evangelien als solchen offenbar noch nicht hat (vergl.
Credn. Beitr. i. p. 23), und diese auszuzeichnen nicht veranlasst ist. Wenn
aber weiterhin Eusebius noch zwei Aussagen des Papias iiber die Evangelien
des Mark. und Matthius anfiihrt, so wird damit unser Evangelium nicht
ausgeschlossen, welches Papias in anderen Theilen seines Buchs erwihnt
haben kann, sondern jene beiden Aussagen werden nur deshalb bemerklich
gemacht, weil sie iiber die Hntstehung jener Evangelien etwas Absonderliches,
besonders Merkwiirdiges enthalten, wie auch das als besonders bemerkens-
werth von Eusebius angefiihrt wird, dass Papias aus zwei epistolischen
Schriften (1 Joh. u. x Petr.) Zeugnisse gebrauche, und eine Erzihlung habe,
welche sich im Hebriier-Evangel. finde.’ Cf. also Westcott, Canon, p. 65.
i It should be added that Papias is stated by Eusebius (iii. 39) to have
quoted St. John’s First Epistle. This he could hardly have done, without
acknowledging St. John’s Gospel.
Υ]
216 Whotness borne to Saint Fohn’s Gospel
Valentinus, was mainly based upon a perversion of St. John’s
Gospelk, This assertion is borne out by that remarkable work,
the Philosophumena of St. Hippolytus, which, as we in Oxford
well remember, was discovered some few years since at Mount
Athos!, Of the pupils of Valentinus, Ptolemzus quotes from
the prologue of St. John’s Gospel in his extant letter to Flora™.
Heracleon, another pupil, wrote a considerable commentary
upon St. John®, Heracleon lived about 150; Valentinus was
a contemporary of Marcion, who was teaching at Rome about
140. Marcion had originally admitted the claims of St. John’s
Gospel, and only denied them when, for the particular purposes
of his heresy, he endeavoured at a later time to demonstrate an
opposition between St. Paul and St. Johno. Basilides taught
at Alexandria under Adrian, apparently about the year 120.
Basilides is known to have written twenty-four books of com-
mentaries on the Gospel? ; but if it cannot be certainly affirmed
that some of these commentaries were on St. J ohn, it is certain
from St. Hippolytus that Basilides appealed to texts of St. John
in favour of his system4, Before Basilides, in the two first
* St. Irenzeus (Heer. iii. 11, 7) lays down the general position: ‘Tanta est
circa Evangelia hec firmitas, ut et ipsi heeretici testimonium reddant eis, et
ex ipsis egrediens unusquisque eorum conetur suam confirmare doctrinam.’
After illustrating this from the cases of the Ebionites, Marcion, and the Ce-
rinthians, he proceeds, ‘ Hi autem qui a Valentino sunt, eo [86. evangelio]
quod est secundum Johannem plenissimé utentes, ad ostensionem conjuga-
tionum suarum ; ex ipso detegentur nihil recta dicentes.’ Ὁ Gewiss war (says
Meyer) die ganze Theosophie des Valentin mit auf Johanneischem Grund
und Boden erwachsen. . . . Die Valentinianische Gnosis mit ihren Aeonen,
Syzygien u. s. w. verhilt sich zum Prolog des Joh. wie das kiinstlich Gemachte
und Ausgesponnene zum EHinfachen und Schépferischen.’ (Hinl. in Joh. p. 12,
note.) For an illustration of the truth of this, cf. St. Tren. adv. Her. 1.8, 5.
1 Cf. Refut. Heer. vi. 35, init., for the use made by Valentinus of St. John x. 8.
m Apud St. Epiph. adv. Heer. lib. i. tom. i. Heer. 33; Ptol. ad Flor. Cf,
St. John i. 3; also Stieren’s St. Trenzus, vol. i. p. 924.
n Fragments of Heracleon’s Commentary on St. John, collected from
Origen, are published at the end of the first vol. of Stieren’s edition of
St. Irenzeus, pp. 938-971. St. John iy. is chiefly illustrated by these remains
of the great Valentinian commentator. Two points strike one on perusal of
them: (1) that before Heracleon’s time St. John’s Gospel must have acquired,
even among heretics, the highest authority ; (2) that Heracleon has con-
tinually to resort to interpretations so forced (as on St. John i. 3, i. 18,
li. 17; cited by Westcott, Canon, p. 266, note) as ‘to prove sufficiently that
St. John’s Gospel was no Gnostic work,’
° Tertullian. adv. Marcion. iv. 3; De Carne Christi, c. 2; quoted by
Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst ? pp. 25, 26.
P Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iv. 7, 7.
1 Refut. Heer. vii. 22 (quoted by Tischendorf, ubi supr.), where Basilides
uses St. John i. 9, ii. 4. .
[ LECT.
by Fleretics of the Second Century. 217
decades of the century, we find Ophitic Gnostics, the Naase-
nians', and the Peratzs, appealing to: passages in St. John’s
Gospel, which was thus already, we may say in the year 110,
a recognised authority among sects external to the Catholic
Church.
It may further be observed that the whole doctrine of the
Paraclete in the heresy of Montanus is a manifest perversion of
the treatise on that subject in St. John’s Gospel, the wide
reception of which it accordingly presupposest. The Alogi,
who were heretical opponents of Montanism, rejected St. John’s
Gospel for dogmatic reasons, which are really confirmatory of
the general tradition in its favour". Nor may we forget Celsus,
the keen and satirical opponent of the Christian faith, who
wrote, even according to Dr. Hilgenfeld, between 160 and 170,
but more probably, as is held by other authorities, as early as
150. Celsus professes very ostentatiously to confine himself
to the writings of the disciples of Jesus*; but he refers to
St. John’s Gospel in a manner which would be utterly incon-
ceivable if that book had been in his day a lately completed, or
indeed a hardly completed forgeryy.
This evidence might be largely reinforced from other quarters,
and especially by an examination of that mass of apocryphal
literature which belongs to the earlier half of the second century,
τ Refut. Her. v. 6 sqq., 8 (St. John i. 3, 4); c.g (Ibid. iv. 21, and iv. 10):
quoted by Tischendorf.
5. Ibid. v. 12 sqq., 16 (St. John iii. 17, i. 1-4); c. 17 (Ibid. viii. 44).
t See however Meyer, Hinl. in Joh. p. 13, for the opinion that Montanism
originally grew out of belief in the Parousia of our Lord. Baur, Christenthum,
p- 213. The Paraclete of Montanus was doubtless very different from the
Paraclete of St. John’s Gospel. Still St. John’s Gospel must have furnished
the name ; and it is probable that the idea of the Montanistic Paraclete is
originally due to the same source, although by a rapid development, con-
tortion, or perversion, the Divine Gift announced by our Lord had been ex-
changed for Its heretical caricature. The rejection of the promise of the
Paraclete alluded to by St. Irenzeus (adv. Her. iii. 11. 9) proceeded not from
Montanists, but from opponents to Montanism, who erroneously identified
the teaching of St. John’s Gospel with that heresy.
ἃ St. Epiph. Heer. li. 3. Cf. Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, p. 227.
= Origen, contr. Celsum, ii. 74.
y Ibid. i. 67; cf. St. John ii. 18. Contr. Celsum, ii. 31, 36, 553 cf.
St. John xx. 27.
z H.g. the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, Eus. v. 1, which
quotes St. John xvi. 2 as an utterance of our Lord Himself. Athenagoras,
Leg. pro Christianis, 10: cf. St. John i. 1-11, xvii. 21-23. The Clementine
Homilies, xix. 22; cf. St. John ix. 2, 3, iii. 52, x. 9, 27. Recognitions,
vi. 9; cf. St. John iii. 3-5, ii. 48, v. 23. Ibid. v. 12 ; cf. St. John viii. 34.
SS -
EE EE eee
218 Lhe Fourth Gospel certainly Saint ¥ohn’s.
and the relation of which to St. John’s Gospel has lately
been very clearly exhibited by an accomplished scholar@. But
we are already in a position to admit that the facts before us
force back the date of St. John’s Gospel within the lines of the
first century>, And when this is done the question of its
authenticity is practically decided. It is irrational to suppose
that a forgery claiming the name and authority of the beloved
disciple could have been written and circulated beneath his very
eyes, and while the Church was still illuminated by his oral
teaching. Arbitrary theories about the time which js thought
necessary to develope an idea cannot rightly be held to counter-
balance such a solid block of historical evidence as we have been
considering. This evidence shews that, long before the year
160, St. John’s Gospel was received throughout orthodox and
heretical Christendom, and that its recognition may be traced
up to the Apostolic age itself. Ewald shall supply the words
with which to close the foregoing considerations. ‘Those who
since the first discussion of this question have been really con-
versant with it, never could have had and never have had a
moment's doubt. As the attack on St. John has become fiercer
and fiercer, the truth during the last ten or twelve years has
been more and more solidly established, error has been pursued
into its last hiding-places, and at this moment the facts before
us are such that no man who does not will knowingly to choose
error and to reject truth, can dare to say that the fourth Gospel
is not the work of the Apostle Johne,
Certainly Ewald here expresses himself with vehemence.
Some among yourselves may possibly be disposed to complain
® Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? p. 35, 866.
That the Acta Pilati in particular were composed at the beginning of the
second century, appears certain from the public appeal to them which
St. Justin makes in his Apology to the Roman Emperor. The Acta Pilati
‘presuppose not only the synoptists, but particularly and necessarily the
Gospel of St. John. It is not that we meet with a passage here and there
quoted from that Gospel. If that were the case we might suspect later
interpolation, The whole history of the condemnation of Jesus is based
essentially upon St. John’s narrative; while in the accounts of the Cruci-
fixion and the Resurrection, it is rather certain passages of the synoptists
which are particularly suggested.’
> Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, p. 232. ‘Rien n’est plus vain que de vouloir
faire sortir du mouvement des idées au second siécle Evangile, qui a pré-
cisément donné le branle ἃ ce mouvement, et le domine aprés l’avoir
enfanté.’
© Review of Renan’s Vie de Jésus, in the Gottingen Scientific Journal,
5 Aug. 1863; quoted by Gratry, Jésus-Christ, p. 110.
[ LECT.
(1) 72 2s supplementary to the first three. 219
a ὁὁὁ»ο
of him as being too dogmatic. For it may be that you have
made impatience of certainty a part of your creed; and you
may hold that a certain measure of cautious doubt on all sub-
jects, is inseparable from true intellectual culture. You may urge
in particular that the weight of external testimony in favour of
St. John’s Gospel does not silence the difficulties which arise
upon an examination of its contents. You point to the use of
a mystical and metaphysical terminology, to the repetition of
abstract expressions, such as Word, Life, Light, Truth, Para-
clete. You remark that St. John’s Gospel exhibits the Life of
our Lord under an entirely new aspect. Not to dwell im-
moderately upon points of detail, you insist that the plan of our
Lord’s life, the main scenes of His ministry, all His exhibitions
of miraculous power save two, the form and matter of His dis-
courses, nay, the very attitude and moral physiognomy of His
opponents, are so represented in this Gospel as to interfere with
your belief in its Apostolical origin.
But are not these peculiarities of the Gospel explained when
we consider the purpose with which it was written ?
1. St. John’s Gospel is in the first place an historical sup-
plement. It was designed to chronicle discourses and events
which had been omitted in the narratives of the three preceding
Evangelists. Christian antiquity attests this design with re-
markable unanimity4, It is altogether arbitrary to assert that
if St. John had seen the works of earlier Evangelists he would
have alluded to them; and that if he had intended to supply
the omissions of their narratives he would have formally an-
nounced his intention of doing so®. It is sufficient to observe
that the literary conventionalities of modern Europe were not
those of the sacred writers, whether of the Synagoguef or of the
Church. An inspired writer does his work without the self-
consciousness of a modern composer; he is not necessarily
careful to define his exact place in literature, his precise obliga-
tions to, or his presumed improvements upon, the labours of his
predecessors. He is the organ of a Higher Intelligence; he
ἃ See especially the remarkable passage in Eus. Hist. Eccl. iii. 24, St. Epiph.
Heer. ii. 51.
€ These arguments of Liicke are noticed by Dr. Wordsworth, New Test.
part i. p. 206.
f ‘The later prophets of the Old Testament enlarge upon and complete
the prophecies of the earlier. But they do not mention their names, or
detlare their own purpose to do what they do,’ Townson, pp. 134-1473
quoted by Dr. Wordsworth, ubi supr.
Vv]
----- π΄ ον
220 (2) Saent Fohn’s Gospel ἐς
owes both what he borrows and what he is believed to originate
to the Mind Which inspires him to originate, or Which guides
him to select. While the stream of sacred truth is flowing forth
from his entranced and burning soul, and is being forthwith
crystallized in the moulds of an imperishable language, the
eagle-eyed Evangelist does not stoop from heaven to earth for
the purpose of guarding or reserving the rights of authorship,
by displaying his care to acknowledge its obligations. Certainly
St. John does repeat in part the narratives of his predecessorsé.
But this repetition does not interfere with the supplementary
character of his work as a wholeh. And yet his Gospel is not
only or mainly to be regarded as an historical supplement. It
exhibits the precision of method and the orderly development of
ideas which are proper to a complete doctrinal essay or treatise,
It is indeed rather a treatise illustrated by history, than a history
written with a theological purpose. Viewed in its historical
relation to the first three Gospels, it is supplemental to them ;
but this relative character is not by any means an adequate
explanation of its motive and function. ΤῈ might easily have
been written if no other Evangelist had written at all; it
has a character and purpose which are strictly its own; it
is part of a great whole, yet it is also, in itself, organically
perfect.
2. St. John’s Gospel is a polemical treatise. Tt is addressed
to an intellectual world widely different from that which had
been before the minds of the earlier Evangelists. The earliest
forms of Gnostic thought are recognisable in the Judaizing
theosophists whom St. Paul has in view in his Epistles to the
Ephesians and the Colossians. These Epistles were written at
the least some thirty years before the fourth Gospel. The
fourth Gospel confronts or anticipates a more developed Gno-
sticism ; although we may observe in passing that it certainly
does not contain references to any of the full-grown Gnostic
& As in chaps. vi. and xii.
h M. Renan admits the supplementary character of St. John’s Gospel, but
attributes to the Evangelist a motive of personal pique in writing it. He was
annoyed at the place assigned to himself in earlier narratives! ‘On est tenté
de croire, que Jean, dans sa vieillesse, ayant lu les récits évangéliques qui
circulaient, d’une part, y remarqua diverses inexactitudes, de Vautre, fut
froissé de voir qu’on ne lui accordait pas dans Vhistoire du Christ une assez
grande place ; qu’alors il commenga & dicter une foule de choses qwil savait
mieux que les autres, avec V’intention de montrer que, dans beaucoup de Cas ow
on ne parlait que de Pierre, il avait Jiguré avec et avant lui? Vie de J ésus,
pp. XXvii. xxviii.
[ LECT.
a polenucal treatese. 70}
systems which belong to the middle of the second century. The
fourth Gospel is in marked opposition to the distinctive po-
sitions of Ebionites, of Docete, of Cerinthians. But among
these the Cerinthian gnosis appears to be more particularly
contemplated. In its earlier forms especially, Gnosticism was
as much a mischievous intellectual method as a formal heresy.
The Gnostic looked upon each revealed truth merely in the
light of an addition to the existing stock of materials ready to
his hand for speculative discussion. He handled it accordingly
with the freedom which was natural to a belief that it was in no
sense beyond the range of his intellectual grasp. He com-
mingled it with his cosmical or his psychological theories ; he
remodelled it; he submitted it to new divisions, to new com-
binations. Thus his attitude toward Christianity was friendly
and yet supercilious. But he threatened the faith with utter
destruction, to be achieved by a process of eclectic interpretation.
-Cerinthus was an early master of this art. Cerinthus as a
Chiliastic Judaizer was naturally disposed to Humanitarianism.
As an eclectic theorist, who had been trained in the ‘teaching of
the Egyptiansi,’ he maintained that the world had been created
by ‘some power separate and distinct from Him Who is above
all.” Jesus was not born of a virgin; He was the son of Joseph
and Mary; He was born naturally like other men. But the
Zon Christ had descended upon Jesus after His baptism, in the
form ef a dove, and had proclaimed the unknown Father, and
had perfected the virtues of Jesus. The spiritual impassible
Christ had fiown back to heaven on the eve of the Passion of
Jesus; the altogether human Jesus of Cerinthus had suffered
and had risen alone’, To this fantastic Christ of the Cerinthian
i St. Hippolytus, Refut. Her. vii. 33.
k St. Ireneus, i. 26: ‘Et Cerinthus autem quidam in Asia non a primo
Deo factum esse mundum docuit, sed a virtute quidam valde separata et
distante ab δᾶ principalitate, que est super universa, et ignorante eum qui
est super omnia, Deum. Jesum autem subjecit, non ex virgine natum
(impossibile enim hoc ei visum est); fuisse autem Eum Joseph et Mariz
filium similiter ut reliqui omnes homines, et plus potuisse justitia et prudentia
et βαρ θη ἃ ab hominibus. Et post baptismum descendisse in eum ab ea
principalitate qu est super omnia, Christum figura columbe; et tunc an-
nuntiasse incognitum Patrem et virtutes perfecisse ; in fine autem revolasse
iterum Christum de Jesu, et Jesum passum esse et resurrexisse ; Christum
autem impassibilem perseverdsse, existentem spiritalem.’ When St. Epi-
phanius represents Cerinthus as affirming that Jesus would only rise at the
general resurrection, he seems to be describing the logical results of the
heresy, not the actual doctrine which it embraced. (Her, xxviii. 6.)
Jd
i συ
222 (3) Sacut Fohn’s Gospel teaches positive dogma.
gnosis St. John opposes the counteracting truth of our Lord’s
Divine and Eternal Nature, as manifested in and through His
human life. This Nature was united to the Manhood of Jesus
from the moment of the Incarnation. It was not a transient
endowment of the Person of Jesus ; since it was Itself the seat
of His Personality, although clothed with a human form. This
Divine Nature was ‘glorified’ in Christ’s Passion, ‘as also in
His miracles and His Resurrection. St. John disentangles the
Catholic doctrine from the negations and the speculations of
Cerinthus ; he proclaims the Presence among men of the Divine
Word, Himself the Creator of all things, incarnate in Jesus
Christ.
3. Thus St. John’s Gospel has also a direct, positive, dogmatic
purpose. It is not merely a controversial treatise, as it is not
merely an historical appendix. Its teaching is far deeper and
wider than would have been necessary, in order to refute the
errors of Cerinthus. It teaches the highest revealed truth con-
cerning the Person of our Lord. Its substantive and enduring ~
value consists in its displaying the Everlasting Word or Son of
God as historically incarnate, and as uniting Himself to His
Church.
The peculiarities of St. John’s Gospel are explained, when
this threefold aspect of it is kept in view. As a supplementary
narrative it presents us, for the most part, with particulars
concerning our Blessed Lord which are unrecorded elsewhere,
It meets the doubts which might naturally have arisen in the
later Apostolical age, when the narratives of the earlier Evan-
gelists had been for some time before the Church. If the
question was raised, why, if Jesus was so holy and so super-
natural a Person, His countrymen and contemporaries did not
believe in Him, St. John shews the moral causes which account
for their incredulity. He pourtrays the fierce hatred of the
Jews against the moral truth which they had rejected; he
exhibits this hatred as ever increasing in its intensity as the
sanctity of Jesus shines out more and more brightly. If men
asked anxiously for more proof that the Death and Resurrection
of Jesus were real events, St. John meets that demand by
recording his own experience as an eye-witness, and by carefully
accumulating the witness of others. If it was objected that
Christ’s violent Death was inconsistent with His Divine claims,
St. John points out that it was strictly voluntary, and even
that by it Christ’s true glorification was achieved. If the
authority of the Apostles and of those who were succeeding
[ LEcT,
Peculrarities in Saint Fohn explained. 223
them was popularly depreciated on the score of their being
rude and illiterate men, St. John shews from the discourse
in the supper-room that the claims of Apostles upon the
dutiful submission of the Church did not depend upon any
natural advantages which they possessed. Jesus had promised
a Divine Comforter, Who was to guide them into the whole
truth, and to bring to their minds whatever He had said
to them |,
As a polemical writer, St. John selects and marshals his
materials with a view to confuting, from historical data, the
Humanitarian or Docetic errors of the time. δύ. John is
anxious to bring a particular section of the Life of Jesus to
bear upon the intellectual world of Ephesus™, He puts for-
ward an aspect of the original truth which was certain to
command present and local attention; he is sufficiently in
correspondence with the age to which he ministers, and with
the speculative temper of the men around him. He had been
led to note and to treasure up in his thought certain phases
of the teaching and character of Jesus with especial care. He
had remembered more accurately those particular discourses,
in which Jesus speaks of His eternal relation to the Father,
and of the profound mystic communion of life into which He
would enter with His followers through the Holy Spirit and
the Sacraments. These cherished memories of St. John’s earlier
years, unshared in their completeness by less privileged Apo-
stles, were well fitted to meet the hard necessities of the Church
during the closing years of the beloved disciple. To St. John
the gnosis of Cerinthus must have appeared to be in direct
contradiction to the sacred certainties which he had heard from
the lips of Jesus, and which he treasured in his heart and
memory. In order to confute the heresy which separated the
man Jesus from the ‘ Aon’ Christ, he had merely to publish what
he remembered of the actual words and works of Jesus™. His
translation of those divine words may be coloured, by a phrase-
ology current in the school which he is addressing, sufficiently
to make them popularly intelligible. But the peculiarities of
his language have been greatly “exaggerated by criticism, while
they are naturally explained by the polemical and positively
doctrinal objects which he had in view. To these objects, the
1Cf. Alford, Greek Test. vol. i. Prolegom. p. 60.
m St. Ireneus adv. Her. iii. 1. See Ebrard’s discussion of the objections
which have been urged against this statement. Gospel History, pt. 2,
div. 2, § 127. Ὁ Cf, Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, p. 246,
Vv]
224 Peculharities tn Saint Sohn eaplarned,
a ee eee
language, the historical arrangement, the selection from con-
versations and discourses before unpublished, the few deeply
significant miracles, the description of opponents by a generic
name —the ‘ Jews’— which ignores the differences of character,
class, and sect among them, and notices them only so far as
they are in conflict with the central truth manifested in J esus,
—all contribute. But these very peculiarities of the fourth
Gospel subserve its positive devotional and didactic aim even
more directly than its controversial one®. The false gnosis
° The internal difficulties urged against St. John’s Gospel appear to be
overborne by the weight of the external testimony, taken in conjunction
with the characteristics and necessities of the later Apostolical age. These
difficulties may however be very briefly summarized as follows :—
1. As to time:
(a) ‘The fourth Gospel implies a long Ministry, with festivals for its
landmarks.’ But the three, (Westcott, Study of Gospels, 267,) at
least allow of a ministry as long as the fourth can require ; while
reference to the festivals was natural in a narrative, the main scene
of which is laid at Jerusalem,
(8) ‘The fourth Gospel appears to place the crucifixion on Nisan 14,
the three on Nisan 152 This real difficulty has been explained
by various hypotheses, as
e.g. (1) Of an anticipated passover, kept by our Lord, on Nisan 13. Bp.
Ellicott, Huls. Lect. p. 322, and others. This is perhaps most satis-
factory. The objection drawn from the observance of Nisan 14, by
those churches in the second eentury which inherited St. John’s
traditions, assumes that such observance was commemorative of the
Last Supper, and not, as is probable, of our Lord’s Death. Cf.
Meyer, Ev. Joh. Einl. p. 18.
(2) Of a passover postponed by the chief priests. St. Chrys. Estius.
Wordsworth.
(3) Of a difference of computation, as to the true day of the Pass-
over, owing to the variation between the Solar and Lunar
reckonings. Petavius, qu. by Neale, Int. East. ch. ii. 1054.
(4) Of a possible explanation of St. John’s language, (xviii. 28, &c.,)
which would make it consistent with the date of Nisan 1 5, as that of the
crucifixion. Dict. of Bible, vol. ii.720; St. Tho. Sum. p- iil. q.46.a. 9.
If none of these explanations be quite unobjectionable, they may fairly
warn us against concluding with our present knowledge that the difficulty
is by any means insuperable.
2. As to the scene of Christ’s teaching :—< St. John places it chiefly in
Judza; the three in Galilee.? But no Gospel professes to be a complete
history of our Lord’s actions, and records of a Galilean and of a Judean
erate respectively leave room for each other. Westcott on the Gospels,
Pp. 205.
3- As to the style of Christ’s teaching :—‘ Si Jésus parlait comme le veut
Matthieu, il n’a pu parler comme le veut Jean.’ But, the difference of
subjects, hearers, and circumstances in the two cases, taken in conjunction
with the differing mental peculiarities of the Apostles who report our Lord’s
words, will account for the difference of style. The phrases assumed to be
[ Lecr.
““--- ΠΤ ὁ Φ Φ ΦΦΨ᾽ὈἩ '''᾽ϑ᾽ϑ᾽ΒἙἙ
Saimt Fohn's depth and semplicity. 225
is refuted by an exhibition of the true. The true is set forth
for the sake of Christian souls. These things ‘are written that
ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and
that believing ye might have life through His Name P.’
We may perhaps have wondered how a Galilean fisherman
could have been the author of a subtle and sublime theosophy,
how the son of Zebedee could have appropriated the language
of Athens and of Alexandria to the service of the Crucified.
The answer is that St. John knew from experience the blessed
and tremendous truth that his Lord and Friend was a Divine
Person. Apart from the guidance of the Blessed Spirit,
St. John’s mental strength and refinement may be traced to
the force of his keen interest in this single fact. Just as a
desperate moral or material struggle brings to light forces and
resources unused before, so an intense religious conviction fer-
tilizes intellect, and developes speculative talent, not unfrequently
in the most unlearned. Every form of thought which comes
even into indirect contact with the truth to which the soul
clings adoringly, is scanned by it with deep and anxious interest,
whether it be the interest of hope or the interest of apprehen-
sion. St. John certainly is a theosophic philosopher, but he
is only a philosopher because he is a theologian; he is such
a master of abstract thought because he is so devoted to the
Incarnate God. The fisherman of Galilee could never have
written the prologue of the fourth Gospel, or have guided
the religious thought of Ephesus, unless he had clung to this
sustaining Truth, which makes him at once so popular and so
profound. For St. John is spiritually as simple, as he is
intellectually majestic. In this our day he is understood by
peculiar to, and really of frequent occurrence in St. John are by no means
unknown to the Synoptists. E.g. The antithesis between Light and darkness.
4. As to the matter of Christ’s teaching :—Baur begs the whole question
by saying that ‘the discourses in St. John could not be historical, since
they are essentially nothing more than an explanation of the Logos-idea
put forth by that writer.” This might be true if the doctrine of the
Logos had been the product of Gnostic speculations. But if Jesus was
really the Divine Son, manifesting Himself as such to men, such language
as that reported by St. John is no more than we should expect. St. John
never represents our Lord as announcing His Divinity in the terms in
which it is announced in the Prologue to the Gospel; he would have
done so, had he really been creating a fictitious Jesus designed to illus-
trate a particular theosophic speculation. This is discussed hereafter,
Ῥ. 364. See Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, p. 244; Luthardt, das Johanneische
Evangelium, pp. 26-35. P St. John xx. 31.
vi . Q
“26 Doctrine of the Eternal Word
the religious insight of the unlettered and the poor, while the
learned can sometimes see in him only the weary repetition of
metaphysical abstractions. The poor understand this sublime
revelation of God, the Creator of the world, as pure Light and
Truth. They understand the picture of a moral darkness which
commits and excuses sin, and which hates the light. They
receive gratefully and believingly the Son of God, made Man,
and conquering evil by the laying down His Life. They follow,
with the experience of their own temptations, or sins, or hopes,
or fears, those heart-searching conversations with Nicodemus,
with the Samaritan woman, with the Jews. In truth, St. John’s
language and, above all, the words of Christ in St. John, are
as simple as they are profound. They still speak peace and joy
to little children; they are still a stumbling-block to, and a
condemnation of, the virtual successors of Cerinthus.
11. If there were nothing else to the purpose in the whole of
the New Testament, those first fourteen verses of the fourth
Gospel would suffice to persuade a believer in Holy Scripture of
the truth that Jesus Christ is absolutely Gop. It is a mistake
to regard those fourteen verses as a mere prefatory attack upon
the gnosis of Cerinthus, having no necessary connexion with the
narrative which follows, and representing nothing essential to
the integrity of the Apostle’s thought. For, as Baur very truly
observes, the doctrine of the prologue is the very fundamental
idea which underlies the whole ‘ Johannean theology4.’ It is not
enough to say that between the prologue and the history which
follows there exists an intimate organic connexion. The pro-
logue is itself the beginning of the history. ‘It is impossible,’
says Baur, ‘to deny that “the Word made flesh™” is one and
the.same subject with the Man Christ Jesus on the one hand,
and with the Word Who “was in the beginning, Who was with
God, and Who was God,” on the others.’
Taking then the prologue of St. John’s Gospel in connexion
with the verses which immediately succeed it, let us observe that
St. John attaches to our Lord’s Person two names which to-
gether yield a complete revelation of His Divine glory. Our
Lord is called the ‘Word,’ and the ‘ Only-begotten Son.’ Τὺ is
doubtless true, as Neander observes, that ‘the first of these
names was’ put prominently forward at Ephesus, ‘in order to
lead those who busied themselves with speculations on the
a Vorlesungen, p. 351. r St. John i. 14.
s Baur, ubi sup. St. John i. 1. |
[ LECT. Ὁ
27: the Prologue of Saint ¥ohn’s Gospel. 224
Logos as the centre of all theophanies, from a mere religious
idealism to a religious realism, to lead them in short to a
recognition of God revealed in Christt” I¢ has already been
‘shewn that the Logos of St. John differs materially from the
Logos of later Alexandrian speculation, while it is linked to
great lines of teaching in the Old Testament. No reason can
be assigned why St. John had recourse to the word Logos at
all, unless he was already in possession of the underlying fact
to which this word supplied a philosophical form. If the word
did express, in a form familiar to the ears of the men of Ephe-
sus, a great truth which they had buried beneath a heap of
errors, that truth, as Bruno Bauer admits, must have been
held independently and previously by the Apostlet, The
direct expression of that truth was St. John’s primary motive
in using the word; his polemical and corrective action upon
the Cerinthian gnosis was a secondary motive.
By the word Logos, then, St. John carries back his history of
our Lord to a point at which it has not yet entered into the
sphere of sense and time. ‘In the four Gospels,’ says St. Augus-
tine, ‘or rather in the four books of the one Gospel, the Apostle
St. John, deservedly compared to an eagle, by reason of his
spiritual understanding, has lifted his enunciation of truth to a
far higher and sublimer point than the other three, and by this
elevation he would fain have our hearts lifted up likewise. For
the other three Evangelists walked, so to speak, on earth with
our Lord as Man. Of His Godhead they said but a few things.
But John, as if he found it oppressive to walk on earth, has
opened his treatise as it were with a peal of thunder; he has
_ raised himself. not merely above the earth, and the whole com-
pass of the air and heaven, but even above every angel-host, and
_ every order of the invisible powers, and has reached even to Him
by Whom all things were made, in that sentence, “In the begin-
ning was the Wordx.”’
Instead of opening his narrative at the Human Birth of our
Lord, or at the commencement of His ministry, St. John places
himself in thought at the starting-point (as we should conceive
it) of all timey, Nay rather, it would seem that if nw at the
* Neander, Kirchengeschichte, p. 549; quoted by Tholuck, Ev. Johan.
kap. I.
“ Kritik der Evangel. Geschichte des Joh. p- 5; quoted by Tholuck, ubi
supra. x St. Aug. tr. 36 in Johan.
¥ Meyer in loc. note: ‘ Véllig unexegetisch ist die Fassung der Socinianer
(s. Catech, Racov. p. 135, ed. Oeder): ἐν ἀρχῇ heisse in initio evangelii,
vi]. Q 2
228 Doctrine of the Eternal Word
beginning of Genesis signifies the initial moment of time itself ;
ἐν ἀρχῇ rises to the absolute conception of that which is anterior
to, or rather independent of, time?. Then, when time was not,
or at a point to which man cannot apply his finite conception of
time, there was—the Logos or Word. When as yet nothing had
been made, He was. What was the Logos? Such a term, in a
position of such moment, when so much depends on our rightly
understanding it, has a moral no less than an intellectual claim
upon us, of the highest order. We are bound to try to under-
stand it, just as certainly as we are bound to obey the command
to love our enemies. No man who carries his morality into the
sphere of religious thought can affect or afford to maintain, that
the fundamental idea in the writings of St. John is a scholastic
conceit, with which practical Christians need not concern them-
selves. And indeed St. John’s doctrine of the Logos has from
the first been scrutinized anxiously by the mind of Christendom.
Tt could not but be felt that the term Logos denotes at the very
least something intimately and everlastingly present with God,
something as internal to the Being of God as thought is to the
soul of man. In truth the Divine Logos is God reflected in His
own eternal Thought; in the Logos, God is His own Object.
This Infinite Thought, the reflection and counterpart of God,
subsisting in God as a Being or Hypostasis, and having a ten-
dency to self-communication,—such is the Logos. The Logos
is the Thought of God, not intermittent and precarious like
human thought, but subsisting with the intensity of a personal
form. The very expression seems to court the argument of
Athenagoras, that since God could never have been adoyos®, the
Logos must have been not created but eternal. It suggests
z Meyer in loc.: ‘ Johannes parallelisirt zwar den Anfang seines Evangel.
mit dem Anfange der Genesis ; aber er steigert den historischen Begriff
nwa, welcher (Gen. i. 1) den Anfangsmoment der Zeit selbst bedeutet,
zum absoluten Begriffe der Vorzeitlichkeit.’ This might suffice to refute the —
assertion of a modern writer that St. John does not teach the Eternity of the —
Divine Word. ‘ Une des théses fondamentales de la spéculation ecclésiastique, —
c’est idée de l’éternité du Verbe. Depuis que le concile de Nicée en a fait
une des pierres angulaires de la théologie Catholique, sa décision est restée
Vhéritage commun de tous les systémes orthodoxes. Eh bien! les écrits de
Jean n’en parlent pas.’ Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. 438. The author is mis- |
taken in attributing to ἐν ἀρχῇ a merely relative force, and thence arguing
that if the Word is eternal, the world is eternal also (Gen. i. 1). Besides,
Θεὸς ἣν ὁ Λόγος. How is the Word other than eternal, if He is thus iden-
tified with the ever-existing Being?
@ Athenag. Suppl. pro Christ. 10 (46 Ὁ. ed. Otto): εἶχεν αὐτὸς ἐν ἑαυτῷ τὸν
Λόγον, aidiws AoyiKds ὥν. '
[ LECT. .
νων νυ δι. 4.5. α΄... «ἀν ονλ
an the Prologue of Saint Fohn's Gospel. 229
the further inference that since reason is man’s noblest faculty,
the Uncreated Logos must be at least equal with God. In any
case it might have been asked why the term was used at all, if
these obvious inferences were not to be deduced from it; but as
a matter of fact they are not mere inferences, since they are
warranted by the express language of St. John. St. John says
that the Word was ‘in the beginning.’ The question then
arises : What was His relation to the Self-existent Being? He
was not merely παρὰ τῷ Θεῷν, along with God, but πρὸς τὸν Θεόν.
This last preposition expresses, beyond the fact of co-existence
or immanence, the more significant fact of perpetuated inter-
communion. The face of the Everlasting Word, if we may dare
so to express ourselves, was ever directed towards the face of the
Everlasting Fathere. But was the Logos then an independent
being, existing externally to the One God? To conceive of an
independent being, anterior to creation, would be an error at
issue with the first truth of monotheism ; and therefore Θεὸς ἢν
ὁ Λόγος. The Word is not merely a Divine Being, but He is in
the absolute sense God4, Thus from His eternal existence we
ascend first to His distinct Personality, and then to the full truth
of His substantial Godhead.
Yet the Logos necessarily suggests to our minds the further
idea of communicativeness; the Logos is Speech as well as
Thought®. And of His actual self-communication St. John
> St. John xvii. 5.
e Meyer in loc.: “πρός bezeichnet das Befindlichsein des Logos bei Gott
im Gesichtspunkte der Richtung der Gemeinschaft.’ Bernhardy, Syntax,
p. 265.
ἃ Here is the essential difference between the Logos of St. John and the
Logos of Philo. Meyer, who apparently holds Philo to have definitely con-
sidered his Logos as a real hypostasis, states it as follows, in his note on the
words καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὃ Λόγος. ‘Wie also Johannes, mit dem nichtartikulirten
θεός kein niedrigeres Wesen, als Gott Selbst hat, bezeichnen will; so unter-
scheidet sich die Johanneische Logos-Idee bestimmt von derjenigen bei Philo,
welcher θεός ohne Artikel im Sinne wesentlicher Unterordnung, ja, wie Er
Selbst sagt, ἐν καταχρήσει (i. p. 635, ed. Mangey) vom Logos pradicirt ;—
wie denn auch der Name 6 δεύτερος θεός, welchen er ihm giebt, nach ii.
p. 625. Euseb. prep. Ev. vii. 13, ausdriicklich den Begriff emes Zwischen-
wesens zwischen Gott und dem Menschen bezeichnen' soll, nach dessen
Bilde Gott den Menschen geschaffen hat. Dieser Subordinatianismus, nach
welchem der Logos zwar μεθόριός τις θεοῦ Φύσις, aber τοῦ μὲν ἐλάττων,
ἀνθρώπου δὲ κρείττων ist (i. p. 683) ist nicht der neu-testamentliche, welcher
vielmehr die ewige Wesenseinheit des Vaters und des Sohnes zur Vorausset-
zung hat (Phil. ii.6; Kol. i. 15 f.), und die Unterordnung des letztern in
dessen Abhiingigkeit vom Vater setzt.’
e Cf. Delitzsch, System der Biblischen Psychologie, p. 1 38.
on
EE Eee
230 LheDivine Nature, how represented in St. F ohn.
mentions two phases or stages ; the first creation, the second
revelation. The Word unveils Himself to the soul through the
mediation of objects of sense in the physical world, and He also
unveils Himself immediately. Accordingly St. John says that
‘all things were made’ by the Word, and that the Word Who
creates is also the Revealer: ‘the Word was made flesh, and
dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.’ He possesses δόξα,
that is, in St. John, the totality of the Divine attributes. This
‘glory’ is not merely something belonging to His Essential
Nature ; since He allows us to behold It through His veil of
Flesh.
What indeed this δόξα or glory was, we may observe by con-
sidering that St. John’s writings appear to bring God before us,
at least more particularly, under a threefold aspect.
1. God is Life (ζωή). The Father is ‘living f;’ He ‘has life
in Himself&” God is not merely the living God, that is, the
real God, in contrast to the non-existent and feigned deities of
the heathen: God is Life, in the sense of Nelf-existent Being ;
He is the Focus and the Fountain of universal life. In Him
life may be contemplated in its twofold activity, as issuing from
its source, and as returning to its object. The Life of God
passes forth from Itself ; It lavishes Itself throughout the realms
of nothingness ; It summons into being worlds, systems, intelli-
gences, orders of existences unimagined before. In doing this
Tt obeys no necessary law of self-expansion, but pours Itself
forth with that highest generosity that belongs to a perfect
freedom. That is to say, that God the Life is God the Creator.
On the other hand, God is Being returning into Itself, finding
In Itself Its perfect and consummate satisfaction. God is thus
the Object of all dependent life; He is indeed the Object of His
own Life; all His infinite powers and faculties turn ever inward
with uncloyed delight upon Himself as upon their one adequate
End or Object. We cannot approach more nearly to a definition
of pleasure than by saying that it is the exact correspondence
between a faculty and its object. Pleasure is thus a test of
vitality ; and God, as being Life, is the one Being Who is
supremely and perfectly happy.
2. Again, God is Love (ἀγάπη) , Love is the relation which
Γ St. John vi. 57: ἀπέστειλέ με ὃ ζῶν Πατήρ.
& Ibid. ν. 26: ὁ Πατὴρ ἔχει (why ἐν ἑαυτῷ.
δ 1 St. John iv. 8: 6 μὴ ἀγαπῶν, οὐκ ἔγνω τὸν Θεόν' Bri ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν.
Ibid. ver. 16: ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστὶ, καὶ ὃ μένων ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ, ἐν τῷ Θεῷ μένει,
καὶ 6 Θεὸς ἐν αὐτῷ. Ὶ
[ LECT.
Relation between God and the Incarnate Word. 231
subsists between God and all that lives as He has willed. Love
is the bond of the Being of God. Love binds the Father to that
Only Son Whom He has begotten from all eternity’, Love
itself knows no beginning; it proceeds from the Father and
the Son from all eternity. God loves created life, whether in
nature or in grace ; He loves the race of men, the unredeemed
worldk; He loves Christians with a special love!. In beings thus
external to Himself, God loves the life which He has given them ;
‘He loves Himself in them; He is still Himself the ultimate,
rightful, necessary Object of His love. Thus love is of His
essence; it is the expression of His necessary delight in His
own existence. :
3. Lastly, God is Light (pas). That is to say, He is absolute
intellectual and moral Truth; He is Truth in the realms of
thought, and Truth in the sphere of action. He is the All-
knowing and the perfectly Holy Being. No intellectual igno-
rance can darken His all-embracing survey of actual and possible
fact ; no stain can soil His robe of awful Sanctity. Light is not
merely the sphere in which He dwells: He is His own sphere
of existence ; He is Himself Light, and in Him is no darkness
at all™,
These three aspects of the Divine Nature, denoted by the
terms Life, Love, and Light, are attributed in St. John’s writings
with abundant explicitness to the Word made flesh.
Thus, the Logos is Light. He is the Light, that is, the Light
Which is the very essence of God. The Baptist indeed preaches
truth ; but the Baptist must not be confounded with the Light
Which he heralds. The Logos is the true Light® All that
i St. John ili. 35: 6 Πατὴρ ἀγαπᾷ τὸν Ὑἱὸν καὶ πάντα δέδωκεν ἐν TH χειρὶ
αὐτοῦ. Ibid. ν. 20: 6 γὰρ Πατὴρ φιλεῖ τὸν Ὑἱὸν, καὶ πάντα δείκνυσιν αὐτῷ ἃ
ee ποιεῖ. Ibid. x. 17, xv. 9. Ibid. xvii. 24: ἠγάπησάς με πρὸ καταβολῆς
: Y St John iii. 16: οὕτω yap ἠγάπησεν ὃ Θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν Ὑὸν
αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν. 1 St. John iv. Io: αὐτὸς ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς, καὶ
ἀπέστειλε τὸν Ὑἱὸν αὐτοῦ ἱλασμὺν περὶ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν. Ibid. ver. 19:
ἡμεῖς ἀγαπῶμεν αὐτὸν, ὅτι αὐτὸς πρῶτος ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς.
1§t. John xiv. 23, xvi. 27.
my St. John. i. 5: 6 Θεὸς φῶς ἐστι, καὶ σκοτία ἐν αὐτῷ οὐκ ἔστιν οὐδεμία.
Ibid. ver. 7: αὐτός ἐστιν ἐν τῷ φωτί. Here ἐν does not merely point to the
sphere in which God dwells. In St. John this preposition is constantly used
to denote the closest possible relationship between two subjects, or, as here,
between a subject and its attribute. Cf. Reuss, Théologie Chrétienne, ii.
p- 434, for this as well as many of the above observations and references.
2 St. John i. 7: οὗτος ἦλθεν εἰς μαρτυρίαν, ἵνα μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ Tod φωτός.
Ibid. ver. 8: οὐκ ἣν ἐκεῖνος τὸ φῶς, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ τοῦ φωτός.
© Ibid. ver. 9: ἦν τὸ φῶς τὸ ἀληθινόν.
Υ]
232 Gop revealed by the Word Incarnate.
has really enlarged the stock of intellectual truth or of moral
goodness among men, all that has ever lighted any soul of man,
has radiated from Himp. He proclaims Himself to be the Light
of the world4, and the Truth"; and His Apostle, speaking of
the illumination shed by Him upon the Church, reminds Chris-
tians that ‘the darkness is passing, and the true Light now
shineth §,’
The Logos is Love. He refracts upon the Father the fulness
of His love. He loves the Father as the Father loves Himself.
The Father’s love sends Him into the world, and He obeys out
of lovet. It is love which draws Him together with the Father
to make His abode in the souls of the faithful Σ,
The Logos is Life. He is the Lifey, the eternal Life, the
Life Which is the Essence of God. It has been given Him to
have life in Himself, as the Father has life in Himselfa, He
can give lifeb; nay, life is so emphatically His prerogative gift,
that He is called the Word of Lifec.
Thus the Word reveals the Divine Essence; His Incarnation
makes that Life, that Love, that Light, which is eternally resident
in God, obvious to souls that steadily contemplate Himself.
These terms, Life, Love, Light—so abstract, so simple, so sug-
P St.John i. ο: ὃ φωτίζει πάντα ἄνθρωπον ἐρχόμενον εἰς τὸν κόσμον. ‘Das
φωτίζειν πάντα ἄνθρωπον, als charakteristische Wirksamkeit des wahren Lichts,
bleibt wahr, wenngleich empirisch diese Erleuchtung von Vielen nicht emp-
fangen wird. Das empirische Verhiiltniss kommt darauf zuriick : quisquis illu-
minatur, ab hac luce illuminatur. (Beng.)” Meyer in Joh. i. 9. The Evan-
gelist means more than this: no human being is left without a certain mea-
sure of natural light, and this light is given by the Divine Logos in all cases.
4 Ibid. viii. 12: ἐγώ εἶμι τὸ φῶς τοῦ κόσμου" ὃ ἀκολουθῶν ἐμοὶ, οὐ μὴ περι-
πατήσει ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ, ἀλλ᾽ ἕξει τὸ φῶς τῆς ζωῆς. Ibid. iii, 19: τὸ φῶς
ἐλήλυθεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον, that is, in the Incarnate Word. Ibid. ix. 5: ὅταν ἐν
τῷ κόσμῳ ὦ, φῶς εἶμι τοῦ κόσμου. Ibid. xii. 46: ἐγὼ φῷς εἰς τὸν κόσμον
ἐλήλυθα, ἵνα πᾶς ὃ πιστεύων εἰς ἐμὲ, ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ μὴ μείνῃ. ᾿
τ Ibid. xiv. 6.
51 St. John ii. 8: 4 σκοτία παράγεται, καὶ τὸ φῶς τὸ ἀληθινὸν ἤδη φαίνει.
ὁ St. John xiv, 21.
“1 St. John iii. 16: ἐν τούτῳ ἐγνώκαμεν τὴν ἀγάπην (the absolute charity),
ὅτι ἐκεῖνος ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἔθηκε. CF. St. John iii. 16.
* St. John xiv. 23: ἐάν τις ἀγαπᾷ με, τὸν λόγον μου τηρήσει, καὶ ὃ Πατήρ
μου ἀγαπήσει αὐτόν, καὶ πρὸς αὐτὸν ἐλευσόμεθα, καὶ μονὴν παρ᾽ αὐτῷ ποιήσομεν.
Ibid. xiii. 1, xv. 9.
Y Ibid. xi. 25: ἐγώ εἰμι... ἡ ζωή. Ibid. xiv. 6.
71 St.John v. 20: οὗτός ἐστιν... ἦ Cwh αἰώνιος. The οὗτος is referred
to the Father by Liicke and Winer. But see p- 239, note στ,
ἃ St.John v. 26: ἔδωκε καὶ τῷ Tid ζωὴν ἔχειν ἐν ἑαυτῷ.
ὈΣΓ λα τ 3, ia;
δα δύ, Johni. 1: 6 λόγος τῆς ζωῆς. Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. p. 445.
[ LECT.
The Word ts the Only-begotten Son. 233
᾿ gestive—meet in God; but they meet also in Jesus Christ.
They do not only make Him the centre of a philosophy. They
belong to the mystic language of faith more truly than to the
abstract terminology of speculative thought. They draw hearts
to Jesus ; they invest Him with a higher than any intellectual
beauty. The Life, the Love, the Light, are the ‘glory’ of the
Word Incarnate which His disciples ‘beheld,’ pouring its rays
through the veil of His human tabernacle4, The Light, the
Love, the Life, constitute the ‘fulness’ whereof His disciples
received®. Herein is comprised that entire body of grace and
truth §, by which the Word Incarnate gives to men the right to
become the sons of God 8.
But, as has been already abundantly implied, the Word is also
the Son. As applied to our Lord, the title ‘Son of God’ is
protected by epithets which sustain and define its unique sig-
nificance. In the synoptic Gospels, Christ is termed the
‘well-beloved’ Sonh, In St. Paul He is God’s ‘Own’ Soni.
In St. John He is the Only-begotten Son, or simply the Only-
begotten k, This last epithet surely means, not merely that God
has no other such Son, but that His Only-begotten Son is, in
virtue of this Sonship, a partaker of that incommunicable and
imperishable Essence, Which is sundered from all created life by
an impassable chasm. If St. Paul speaks of the Resurrection as
ἃ St. Johni.14: 6 Adyos σὰρξ ἐγένετο, kal ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ ἐθεασάμεθα
τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ.
6 Ibid. ver. 16: καὶ ἐκ τοῦ πληρώματος αὐτοῦ ἡμεῖς πάντες ἐλάβομεν.
f Tbid. ver. 14: πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας.
& Ibid. i, 12: ὅσοι δὲ ἔλαβον αὐτὸν, ἔδωκεν αὐτοῖς ἐξουσίαν τέκνα Θεοῦ
γενέσθαι. ᾿
h ἀγαπητός, St. Matt. iii. 17, xii. 18, xvii. 5; St. Mark i. 11, ix. 7, xii. 6;
St. Luke iii. 22, ix. 35. Cod. Alex. reads ἐκλελεγμένον, xx. 133 οἵ,
2 St. Peter i. 17.
i Rom. viii. 32: τοῦ ἰδίου Ὑἱοῦ οὐκ ἐφείσατο. Ibid. ver. 3: τὸν ἑαυτοῦ Ὑἱὸν
πέμψας.
ΠΑ St.John i. 14: ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ
Πατρός. Ibid. i. 18: 6 μονογενὴς Ὑἱὸς, 6 dv εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ Πατρός. Ibid.
iii. 16: [6 Θεὸς] τὸν Ὑἱὸν αὑτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν. Ibid. ver. 18: ὁ δὲ μὴ
πιστεύων ἤδη κέκριται, ὅτι μὴ πεπίστευκεν εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ μονογενοῦς Tiod
τοῦ Θεοῦ. Cf.1 St. John iv.g: τὸν Ὑἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἀπέσταλκεν ὃ
Θεὸς εἰς τὸν κόσμον, ἵνα ζήσωμεν δι’ αὐτοῦ. The word μονογενής is used by
St. Luke of the son of the widow of Nain (vii. 12), of the daughter of Jairus
(viii. 42), and of the lunatic son of the man who met our Lord on His coming
down from the mount of the transfiguration (ix. 38). In Heb. xi. 17 it is
applied to Isaac. μονογενής means in each of these cases ‘that which exists
once only, that is, singly in its kind.’ (Tholuck, Comm. in Joh, 1, 14.) God
has one Only Son Who by nature and necessity is His Son.
v]
-
234 ‘Word’ and ‘Son’ complete and guard each other.
manifesting this Sonship to the world!, the sense of the word
μονογενής remains in St. John, and it is plainly ‘defined by its
context to relate to something higher than any event occurring
in time, however great or beneficial to the human race™, The
Only-begotten Son” is in the bosom of the Father (ὁ dy eis τὸν
κόλπον τοῦ Πατρός) just as the Logos is πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, ever con-
templating, ever, as it were, moving towards Him in the ceaseless
activities of an ineffable communion. The Son is His Father’s
equal, in that He is partaker of His nature: He is His Subordi-
nate, in that this Equality is eternally derived. But the Father
worketh hitherto and the Son works; the Father hath life in
Himself, and has given to the Son to have life in Himself; all
men are to honour the Son even as they honour the Father °.
Each of these expressions, the Word and the Son, if taken
_alone, might have led to a fatal misconception. In the language
of Church history, the Logos, if unbalanced by the idea of Sonship,
might have seemed to sanction Sabellianism. The Son, without
the Logos, might have been yet more successfully pressed into
the service of Arianism. An Eternal Thought or Reason, even
although constantly tending to express itself in speech, is of itself
too abstract to oblige us to conceive of it as of a personal Sub-
sistence. On the other hand the filial relationship carries with
it the idea of dependence and of comparatively recent origin,
even although it should suggest the reproduction in the Son of
all the qualities of the Father. Certainly St. John’s language in
his prologue protects the Personality of the Logos, and unless
he believed that God could be divided or could have had a
beginning, the Apostle teaches that the Son is co-eternal with
the Father. Yet the bare metaphors of ‘Word’ and ‘Son,’ taken
separately, might lead divergent thinkers to conceive of Him to
Whom they are applied, on the one side as an impersonal quality
or faculty of God, on the other, as a concrete and personal but in-
ferior and dependent being. But combine them, and each corrects
the possible misuse of the other. The Logos, Who is also the
Son, cannot be an impersonal and abstract quality ; since such
an expression as the Son would be utterly misleading, unless it
implied at the very least the fact of a personal subsistence dis-
tinct from that of the Father. On the other hand, the Son, Who
1 Acts xiii. 32, 33 ; Rom.i. 4. Compare on the other hand, Heb. v. 8.
τὰ Newman’s Arians, p. 174.
. St. Johni. 18, 6 μονογενὴς Tids, where however the Vatican and Sinaitic
MSS. and Cod. Ephr. read 6 μονογενὴς ΘΕΟΣ. For the Patristic evidence
on the subject, see Alford in loc, ° St. John. v. 17, 23, 26.
[ LECT.
Mantfestation of the Word in history. 235
is also the Logos, cannot be of more recent origin than the
Father ; since the Father cannot be conceived of as subsisting
without that Eternal Thought or Reason Which is the Son. Nor
may the Sen be deemed to be in any respect, save in the order of
Divine subsistence, inferior to the Father, since He is identical
with the eternal intellectual Life of the Most High. Thus each
metaphor reinforces, supplements, and protects the other. Taken
together they exhibit Christ before His Incarnation as at once
personally distinct from, and yet equal with, the Father; He is
That personally subsisting and ‘Eternal Life, Which was with
the Father, and was manifested unto usP.’
St. John’s Gospel is a narrative of that manifestation. It
is a Life of the Eternal Word tabernacling in Human Nature
among men The Hebrew schools employed a similiar ex-
pression to designate the personal presence of the Divinity
in this finite world. In St. John’s Gospel the Personality of
Christ makes Itself felt as Eternal and Divine at wellnigh every
step of the narrativet. Each discourse, each miracle, nay, each
Separate word and act, is a fresh ray of glory streaming forth
from the Person of the Word through the veil of His assumed
Humanity. The miracles of the Word Incarnate are frequently
called His works*. The Evangelist means to imply that ‘the
wonderful is only the natural form of working for Him in Whom
all the fulness of God dwells.’ Christ’s Divine Nature must
P St. John i. 2. Cf. Newman’s Arians, ch. ii. sect. 3.
4 St. John i. 14: ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν. The image implies both the reality
and the transient character of our Lord’s manifestation in the flesh. Ols-
hausen, Meyer, and Liicke see in it an allusion to the ‘Shekinah,’ in which
the Divine glory or radiance (1122) dwelt enshrined.
* Baur, Dogmengeschichte, i. 602: ‘Was das johanneische Evangelium
betrifft, so versteht es sich ohnediess von selbst, dass das eigentliche Subject
der Persénlichkeit Christi nur der Logos ist, die Menschwerdung besteht
daher nur in dem σὰρξ γενέσθαι; dass der Logos Fleisch geworden, im
Fleisch erschienen ist, ist seine menschliche Erscheinung.’ It will be borne
in mind that σάρξ, in its full New Testament meaning, certainly includes
ψυχή as well as the animal organism (see Olshausen on Rom. vii. 14),
and St. John attributes to the Word Incarnate spiritual experiences which
must have had their seat in His human Soul (xi. 33, 38, xiii. 21). But
Baur’s general position, that in St. John’s Gospel the ‘Personality of the
Eternal Word is perpetually before us, is unquestionably true.
8 épya, St. John.v. 36, vii. 21, x. 25, 32, 38, xiv. 11, 12, xv. 23.
Cf. too St. Matt. xi. 2. The word is applied to the Old Testament miracles
in Heb. iii.9 ; Ps. xciv. 9, LXX. Cf. Archbishop Trench on the Miracles,
p. 7. That, notwithstanding the wider use of ἔργον in St. John xvii. 4,
ἔργα in the fourth Gospel do mcan Christ’s miracles, cf. Trench, Mir. p. 8,
note +.
hh
236 Manifestation of the Word cn history.
of necessity bring forth works greater than the works of man.
The Incarnation is the one great wonder; other miracles follow
as a matter of course. The real marvel would be if the In-
carnate Being should work no miraclest; as it is, they are
the natural results of His presence among men, rather than
its higher manifestation. His true glory is not perceived except
by those who gaze at it with a meditative and reverent intent-
ness". The Word Incarnate is ever conscious of His sublime
relationship to the Father. He knows whence He is*. He
refers not unfrequently to His pre-existent Lifey. He sees
into the deepest purposes of the human hearts around Him”
He has a perfect knowledge of all that concerns God. His
works are simply the works of God». To believe in the Father
is to believe in Him. To have seen Him is to have seen the
Father. To reject and hate Him is to reject and hate the
‘ Father. He demands at the hands of men the same tribute
of affection and submission as that which they owe to the
Person of the Father.
ὃ Trench, ubi supra, p. 8.
α St. John uses the words θεωρεῖν, θεάσασθαι to describe this.
x St. John vill. 14: οἶδα πόθεν ἦλθον.
y St; John iii. 13, vi. 62, viii. 58, xvi. 28, xvil. 5.
z Ibid. ii. 24, iv. 17, v. 14, 42, Vi. 15. ἃ ΤΌ, viii. 55, X. 18.
BT bid:. 1x. 45eX013'75/S0q.,, X1Vou 0;
¢ As M. Reuss admits: ‘Il résulte (from the prerogatives ascribed to the
Word Incarnate in St. John’s Gospel) que le Verbe révélateur pouvait
demander pour lui-méme, de la part des hommes, les mémes sentiments,
et les mémes dispositions, qu’ils doivent avoir ἃ légard de la personne du
Pere. Ces sentiments sont exprimés par un mot, qui contient la notion
d’un respect professé pour un supérieur, la reconnaissance d’une dignité
devant laquelle on s’incline. A cet égard, il y a égalité des deux personnes
divines vis-a-vis de Vhomme. On ne croit pas a lune sans croire ἃ l’autre;
qui voit l'une voit l’autre ; rejeter, hair le Fils, c’est rejeter et hair le Pere.
(St. Jean iii, 33, 34, xii. 44, xv. 23). Mais dans tout ceci (proceeds
M. Reuss) il ne s’agit pas de ce qu’on appele le culte dans le langage pra-
tique de l’Eglise. Le culte appartient ἃ Dieu le Pére, et lui sera offert
désormais avec d’autant plus d’empressement qu'il est mieux révélé, et que
rien ne sépare plus de lui les croyants.’ (Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. 455.) How
inconsequent is this restriction! If the Incarnate Word has a right to
demand for Himself the same ‘sentiments’ and ‘ dispositions ’ as those which
men cherish towards the Almighty Father, He has a right to the same
tribute of an adoration in spirit and in truth as that which is due to the
Father. What is worship but a complex act of such ‘sentiments’ and
‘dispositions’ as faith, love, self-prostration, self-surrender before the Most
Holy? If τιμᾶν (St. John v. 23), within the general meaning of due acknow-
ledgment, includes much else besides adoration, it cannot be applied to the
duties of man to God without including adoration. Our Lord’s words place
Himself and the Father simply on a level; if the Son is not to be adored,
[ LECT.
This explains St. Fohn’s point of view. 237
In St. John’s Gospel, the Incarnation is exhibited, not a’
the measure of the humiliation of the Eternal Word, but as
the veil of His enduring and unassailable glory. The angels of
God ascend and descend upon Him. Nay, He is still in heaven.
Certainly He has taken an earthly form; He has clothed himself
with a human frame. But He has thereby raised humanity rather
than abased Himself. In St. John the status inanitionis, the
intrinsic humiliation of Christ’s Incarnate Life, is thrown into the
background of the reader’s thought. The narrative is throughout
illuminated by the never-failing presence of the Word in His
glory4, Even when Jesus dies, His Death is no mere humilia-
tion ; His Death is the crisis of His exaltation 9, of His glory ἢ,
Not that He can personally increase in glory. He is already
the Son; He is the Word. But He can glorify and exalt that
Manhood which is the robe through which His movements are
discernible: He can glorify Himself, as God is glorified, by
drawing towards His Person the faith and love and reverence
of men. It were folly to conceive of Him as enhancing His
Divinity ; but He can make larger and deeper that measure
of homage which ascends towards His throne from human
understandings and from human hearts.
ΠῚ. 1. But does St. John’s teaching in his earlier writings on
the subject of our Lord’s Person harmonize with the representa-
neither is the Father; if the Father is to be adored, then must the Son
be adored in the same sense and measure. This is certainly not interfered
with by St.John iv. 20, 864. ; while the best practical comment upon it
is to be found in the confession of St. Thomas, xx. 28; on which see
Lect. VII.
‘This may seem inconsistent with (1) St. John xiv. 28: ὁ Πατὴρ μείζων
μου ἐστίν. But such a statement would be ‘unmeaning’ in a mere man.
See Lect. IV. pp. 199-201 ; (2) St. John xvii. 3: αὕτη δέ ἐστιν ἣ αἰώνιος
(woh, va γινώσκωσίν σε τὸν μόνον ἀληθινὸν Θεὸν, καὶ ὃν ἀπέστειλας ᾿Ιησοῦν
Χριστόν. But here a Socinian sense is excluded, (1) by the consideration
that ‘the knowledge of Gop and a creature could not be Eternal Life?
(see Alford in loc.); (2) by the plain sense of verse 1, which places the
Son and the Father on a level : ‘ What creature could stand before his Creator
and say, ‘Glorify me, that I may glorify thee?’ Stier apud Alf. ; (3) by
verse 5, which asserts our Lord’s pre-existent δόξα. It follows that the
restrictive epithets μόνον ἀληθινόν must be held to be exclusive, not of the
Son, but of false gods, or creatures external to the Divine Essence. See
Estius in loc.
° St. John ili, 14: ὑψωθῆναι δεῖ τὸν Ὑἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. Ibid viii. 28,
mi. 32:
f 1014. xii. 23:. ἐλήλυθεν ἡ ὥρα ἵνα δοξασθῇ ὁ Ὑἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου.
Ibid. xiii. 31.
& Cf. Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. 456; although the statements of this writer
cannot. be adopted without much qualification.
vi
238 Christology of St. Fohn's Furst Episttle.
tions placed before us in the fourth Gospel? The opening
words of his first Epistle might go far to answer that question.
St. John’s position in this Epistle is, that the Eternal immaterial
Word of Life resident in God had become historically manifest,
and that the Apostles had consciously seen, and heard, and
handled Him, and were now publishing their experience to the
world!, The practical bearing of this announcement lay in the
truth that ‘he that hath the Son hath the Life, and he that hath
not the Son hath not the Lifes.’ For ‘God hath given to us the
Eternal Life, and this, the Life, is in His Sonk. If then the
soul is to hold communion with God in the Life of Light and
Righteousness and Love, it must be through communion with
His Divine Son. Thus all practically depends upon the attitude
of the soul towards the Son. Accordingly, ‘whosoever denieth
the Son, the same hath not the Father!;’ while on the other
hand, whosoever sincerely and in practice acknowledges the Son
of God in His historical manifestation, enjoys a true communion
with the Life of God. ‘Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is
the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God™,’
St. John constantly teaches that the Christian’s work in this
state of probation is to conquer ‘the world», It is, in other
h On the question of the authorship of the three Epistles, see Dean Al-
ford’s exhaustive discussion, Greek Test. vol. iv., Prolegomena, chaps. 5, 6.
See too Appendix, note E. it St. John i. 1-3.
ἡ Ibid. v. 12: 6 ἔχων τὸν Tidy ἔχει τὴν ζωήν" ὃ wh ἔχων τὸν Ὑἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ
τὴν ζωὴν οὖικ ἔχει.
Κ Tbid. νοῦ. τα : καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἣ μαρτυρία (i.e. the revealed doctrine resting
on a Divine authority) ὅτι ζωὴν αἰώνιον ἔδωκεν ἡμῖν ὃ Θεὸς, καὶ αὕτη ἣ ζωὴ ἐν
τῷ Tig αὐτοῦ ἐστιν.
' Ibid. ii. 22: οὗτός ἐστιν ὃ ἀντίχριστος, ὃ ἀρνούμενος τὸν Πατέρα καὶ τὸν
Υἱόν. A Humanitarian might have urged that it was. possible to deny the
Son, while confessing the Father. But St. John, on the ground that the Son
is the Only and the Adequate Manifestation of the Father, denies this: πᾶς
ὃ ἀρνούμενος τὸν Tidv οὐδὲ τὸν Πατέρα ἔχει.
m [hbid. iv. 15 : ὃς ἂν ὁμολογήσῃ ὅτι Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὃ Ὑἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ, ὁ Θεὸς ἐν
αὐτῷ μένει, καὶ αὐτὸς ἐν τῷ Θεῷ.
n [bid. ii. 15: ἐάν τις ἀγαπᾷ τὸν κόσμον, οὐκ ἔστιν ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐν
αὐτῷ. Compare Martensen, Christl. Dogmat. ὃ 96: ‘If we consider the
effects of the Fall upon the course of historical development, not only in the
case of individuals but of the race collectively, the term “ world” (κόσμος)
bears a special meaning different from that which it would have, were the de-
velopment of humanity normal. The cosmical principle having been emanci-
pated by the Fall from its due subjection to the Spirit, and invested with a
false independence, and the universe of creation having obtained with man
a higher importance than really attaches to it, the historical development of
the world has become one in which the advance of the kingdom of God is
retarded and hindered. The created universe has, in a relative sense, life in
[ LECT.
=
Christology of St. Fohn’s First Epistle. 239
words, to fight successfully against that view of life which
ignores God, against that complex system of attractive moral
evil and specious intellectual falsehood, which is marshalled and
organized by the great enemy of God, and which permeates and
inspires non-Christianized society. The world’s force is seen
especially in ‘the lust of the flesh, in the lust of the eyes, and in
the pride of life.’ These three forms of concupiscence manifest
the inner life of the world®; if the Christian would resist and
beat them back, he must have a strong faith, a faith in a Divine
Saviour. ‘Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that
believeth that Jesus is the Son of GodP?’ This faith, which
introduces the soul to communion with God in Light, attained
through communion with His Blessed Son, exhibits the world
in its true colours. The soul spurns the world as she clings
believingly to the Divine Son.
St. John’s picture of Christ’s work in this first Epistle, and
especially his pointed and earnest opposition to the specific
heresy of Cerinthus4, leads us up to the culminating statement
that Jesus Himself is the true God and the Eternal Lifer.
itself, including, as it does, a system of powers, ideas, and aims, which
possess a relative value. This relative independence, which ought to be sub-
servient to the kingdom of God, has become a fallen ‘‘ world-autonomy.” Hence
arises the scriptural expression ‘‘this world” (6 κόσμος ovTos). By this ex-
pression the Bible conveys the idea that it regards the world not only
ontologically but in its definite and actual state, the state in which it has
been since the Fall. ‘‘ This world”? means the world content with itself, in its
own independence, its own glory ; the world which disowns its dependence
on God as its Creator. “ This world” regards itself, not as the κτίσις, but only
as the κόσμος, as a system of glory and beauty which has life in itself, and
can give life. The historical embodiment of ‘this world” is heathendom,
which honoureth not God as God.’
° 1 St. John ii. 16: πᾶν τὸ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ, ἡἣ ἐπιθυμία τῆς σαρκὸς, καὶ ἣ
ἐπιθυμία τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν, καὶ ἡ ἀλαζονεία τοῦ βίου, odK ἔστιν ἐϊς τοῦ Πατρὸς,
GAN ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου ἐστί.
P Ibid. ν. 4, 5: αὕτη «ἐστὶν ἣ νίκη ἣ νικήσασα τὸν κόσμον, ἣ πίστις ἡμῶν"
τίς ἐστιν ὃ νικῶν τὸν κόσμον, εἰ μὴ 6 πιστεύων ὅτι Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν 6 Tis τοῦ
Θεοῦ;
ᾳ Specially 1 St. John iv. 2, 3, where the Apostle’s words contain a double
antithesis to the Cerinthian gnosis, which taught that the Aton Christ entered
into the Man Jesus at His baptism, and remained with Him until His
Passion, Jesus being a mere man. St. John asserts in opposition (1) that
Jesus and the Christ are one and the same Person, (2) that the one Lord
Jesus Christ came ‘in’ not ‘into the flesh,’ He did not descend into an
already existing man, but He appeared clothed in Human Nature. See the
exhaustive note of Ebrard, Die Briefe Johannis, in loc.
r 1 St. John v. 20: aE ἐστιν ὃ ἀληθινὸς Reds; kal ἣ ζωὴ αἰώνιος. After
having distinguished the ἀληθινός from His Ὑἱός, St. John, by a characteristic
Υ]
240 Characteristic temper of St. Fohn.
Throughout this Epistle the Apostle has been writing to those
‘who believe on the Name of the Son of God,’ that is to say, on
the Divine Nature of Jesus which the verbal symbol guards and
suggests. Throughout this Epistle St. John’s object has been
to convince believers that by that faith they had the Eternal
Life, and to force them to be true to Its.
In each of St. John’s Epistlest we encounter that special
temper, at once so tender and so peremptory, which is an ethical
corollary to belief in an Incarnate God. St. John has been
named the Apostle of the Absolute. Those who would concede
to Christianity no higher dignity than that of teaching a relative
and provisional truth, will fail to find any countenance for their
doctrine in the New Testament Scriptures. But nowhere will
they meet with a more earnest opposition to it than in the
pages of the writer who is pre-eminently the Apostle of charity.
St. John preaches the Christian creed as the one absolute cer-
tainty. The Christian faith might have been only relatively
true, if it had reposed upon the word of a human messenger.
But St. John specially insists upon the fact that God has re-
vealed Himself, not merely through, but in, Christ. The Abso-
lute Religion is introduced by a Self-revelation of the Absolute
turn, simply identifies the Son with the ἀληθινὸς Θεός. To refer this sentence
to the Father, Who has been twice called 6 ἀληθινός, would be unmeaning
repetition. Moreover the previous sentence declared, not that we are in God
as Father, Son and Spirit, but that we are in God as being in His Son Jesus
Christ. This statement is justified when οὗτος is referred to Tie. As to the
article before ἀληθινός, it has the effect of stating, not merely What, but Who
our Lord is ; it says not, Christ is Divine, but, Christ is God. This does not
really go beyond what the Apostle has already said about the Adyos at the
beginning of this Epistle. To object with Diisterdieck that this interpreta-
tion obscures the distinction between the Father and the Son, is inaccurate ;
St. John does not say, This is the Father, but, This is the true God. ‘O dan-
θινὸς Θεός is the Divine Essence, in opposition to all creatures. The question
of hypostatic distinctions within that Essence is not here before the Apostle.
Our being in the true God depends upon our being in Christ, and St. John
clenches this assertion by saying that Christ is the true God Himself. See
St. Ath. Or. c. Ar. iv. 26; St. Cyril. Thes. p. 302; Waterland, Works, ii. 130.
51 St. John v. 13: ταῦτα ἔγραψα ὑμῖν [τοῖς πιστεύουσιν eis τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ
Ὑἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ, Rec.| ἵνα εἰδῆτε ὅτι ζωὴν ἔχετε αἰώνιον, καὶ ἵνα πιστεύητε [οἱ
πιστεύοντες, Tisch.] εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ.
* In St. John’s second Epistle observe (1) the association of Christ with the
Father as the source of χάρις, ἔλεος. and εἰρήνη (ver. 3); (2) the denunciation
of the Cerinthian doctrine as anti-Christian (ver. 7); (3) the significant state-
ment that a false progress (6 προάγων, A.B., not as rec. 6 παραβαίνων) which
did not rest in the true Apostolic διδαχὴ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, would forfeit all com-
munion with God. We know Him only in Christ His Blessed Son, and to
reject Christianity is to reject the only true Theism (vers. 8, 9).
[ LECT.
Union of tenderness with decision in St. ¥ohn. 241
Being Himself. God has appeared, God has spoken ; and the
Christian faith is the result. St. John then does not treat
Christianity as a phase in the history even of true religion, nor
as a religion containing elements of truth, even though it were
more true than any religion which had preceded it. St. John
proclaims that ‘we “Christians” are in Him that is True.’ Not
to admit that Jesus Christ has come in the Flesh, is to be a de-
ceiver and an antichrist. St. John presents Christianity to the
soul as a religion which must be its all, if it is not really to be
worse than nothing¥. The opposition between truth and error,
between the friends and the foes of Christ, is for St. John as
sharp and trenchant a thing as the contrast between light and
darkness, between life and death*. This is the temper of a man
who will not enter the public baths along with the heretic who
has dishonoured his Lordy. This is the spirit of the teacher
who warns his flock to beware of eating with a propagator of
false doctrine, and of bidding him God speed, lest they should
partake of his ‘evil deeds%.’ Yet this is also the writer whose
pages, beyond any other in the New Testament, beam with the
purest, tenderest love of humanity. Side by side with this
resolute antagonism to dogmatic error, St. John exhibits and
inculcates an enthusiastic affection for humankind as such, which
our professed philanthropists could not rival. The man who
loves not his brother man, whatever be his spiritual estimate of
himself, abideth in death». No divorce is practically possible
between the first and the second parts of charity: the man who
« 1 St. John ii. 21: οὐκ ἔγραψα ὑμῖν ὅτι οὐκ οἴδατε τὴν ἀλήθειαν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι
οἴδατε αὐτὴν, καὶ ὅτι πᾶν ψεῦδος ἐκ τῆς ἀληθείας οὐκ ἔστι. Ibid. v. 10: ὅ μὴ
πιστεύων τῷ Θεῷ ψεύστην πεποίηκεν αὐτόν.
* 1014. ii. 15: ἐάν τις ἀγαπᾷ τὸν κόσμον οὐκ ἔστιν ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐν
αὐτῷ. Ibid. ver. το : ἐξ ἡμῶν ἐξῆλθον [5361]. οἱ ἀντίχριστοι] ἀλλ᾽ ovK ἦσαν ἐξ
ἡμῶν " εἰ γὰρ ἦσαν ἐξ ἡμῶν, μεμενήκεισαν ἂν μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα φανερωθῶσιν
ὅτι οὐκ εἰσὶ πάντες ἐξ ἡμῶν. Ibid. ver. 22: οὗτός ἐστιν 6 ἀντίχριστος, 6
ἀρνούμενος τὸν Πατέρα καὶ τὸν Tidy.
¥ St. Irenzeus, adv. Her. iii. 3, 4: καὶ εἰσὶν οἱ ἀκηκοότες αὐτοῦ (τοῦ Πολυ-
κάρπου) ὅτι ᾿Ιωάννης 6 τοῦ Κυρίου μαθητὴς, ἐν τῇ ᾿Εφέσῳ πορευθεὶς λούσασθαι,
καὶ ἰδὼν ἔσω Κήρινθον, ἐξήλατο τοῦ βαλανείου μὴ λουσάμενος ἄλλ᾽ ἐπειπὼν,
“Φύγωμεν, μὴ καὶ τὸ βαλανεῖον συμπέσῃ, ἔνδον ὄντος Κηρίνθου, τοῦ τῆς
ἀληθείας ἐχθροῦ. Cf. Eus. Hist. Eccl. iii. 28.
* 2 St. John το, 11: ef tis ἔρχεται πρὸς ὑμᾶς, καὶ ταύτην τὴν διδαχὴν ov
φέρει, μὴ λαμβάνετε αὐτὸν εἰς οἰκίαν, καὶ χαίρειν αὐτῷ μὴ λέγετε" ὃ γὰρ λέγων
αὐτῷ χαίρειν, κοινωνεῖ τοῖς ἔργοις αὐτοῦ τοῖς πονηροῖς.
8.1 St. John iii. 11,
Ὁ Tbid. ver. 14: ἡμεῖς οἴδαμεν ὅτι μεταβεβήκαμεν ἐκ τοῦ θανάτου εἰς τὴν
ζωὴν, ὅτι ἀγαπῶμεν τοὺς ἀδελφούς" 6 μὴ ἀγαπῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν μένει ἐν τῷ
θανάτῳ.
Υ] Β
ana - - ὸς τ στον
242 St. Fohn’s temper a product of his doctrine.
τ GS SS ia i
loves his God must love his brother also®t. Love is the moral
counterpart of intellectual light4.
It is a modern fashion to represent these two tempers, the
dogmatic and the philanthropic, as necessarily opposed. This
representation indeed is not even in harmony with modern ex-
perience ; but in St.John it meets with a most energetic con-
tradiction. St. John is at once earnestly dogmatic and earnestly
philanthropic ; for the Incarnation has taught him both the
preciousness of man and the preciousness of truth. The Eternal
Word, incarnate and dying for the truth, inspires St.John to
cuard it with apostolic chivalry ; but also, this revelation of the
Heart of God melts him into tenderness towards the race which
Jesus has loved so welle. To St. John a lack of love for men
seems sheer dishonour to the love of Christ. And the heresy
which mutilates the Person or denies the work of Christ, does
not present itself to St. John as purely speculative misfortune,
as clumsy negation of fact, as barren intellectual error. Heresy
is with this Apostle a crime against charity ; not only because
heresy breeds divisions among brethren, but yet more because it
kills out from the souls of men that blessed and prolific Truth,
which, when sincerely believed, cannot but fill the heart with
love to God and to man. St. John writes as one whose eyes had
looked upon and whose hands had handled the sensibly present
form of Light and Love. That close contact with the Absolute
Truth Incarnate had kindled in him a holy impatience of an-
tagonist error ; that felt glow of the Infinite Charity of God had
shed over his whole character and teaching the beauty and
pathos of a tenderness, which, as our hearts tell us while we
read his pages, is not of this world.
2. This ethical reflection of the doctrine of God manifest in
the flesh is perhaps mainly characteristic of St. John’s first
Epistle ; but it is not wanting in the Apocalypsef. The repre-
ὁ x St.John iv. 20, 21: 6 wh ἀγαπῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ ὃν ἑώρακε, τὸν Θεὸν
ὃν οὐχ ἑώρακε πῶς δύναται ἀγαπᾶν ; καὶ ταύτην τὴν ἐντολὴν ἔχομεν ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ,
ἵνα ὁ ἀγαπῶν τὸν Θεὸν ἀγαπᾷ καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ. :
ἃ Ibid. ii. 9, 10: ὅ λέγων ἐν τῷ φωτὶ εἶναι, καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ μισῶν, ἐν
τῇ σκοτίᾳ ἐστὶν ἕως ἄρτι. ὁ ἀγαπῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν τῷ φωτὶ μένει.
e [bid. iii. 16: ἐν τούτῳ ἐγνώκαμεν τὴν ἀγάπην (i.e. absolute charity), ὅτι
ἐκεῖνος ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἔθηκε" καὶ ἡμεῖς ὀφείλομεν ὑπὲρ τῶν
ἀδελφῶν τὰς ψυχὰς τιθέναι. Ibid. iv. g: ἐν τούτῳ ἐφανερώθη ἣ ἀγάπη τοῦ
Θεοῦ ἐν ἡμῖν, ὅτι τὸν Υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἀπέσταλκεν ὃ Θεὸς εἰς τὸν
κόσμον, ἵνα ζήσωμεν δι’ αὐτοῦ.
f On the Johannean authorship of the Apocalypse, see Alford, Gk. Test.
vol. iv. pp. 198-229 ; and Dr. Wait’s remarks in the pref. to Hug’s Intro-
duction, pp. 145-177.
[ LECT.
Divinity of Fesus Christ in the A ‘pocalypse. 243
ee eee et
sentation of the Person of our Saviour in the Apocalypse is
independent of any indistinctness that may attach to the in-
terpretation of the historical imagery of that wonderful book.
In the Apocalypse, Christ is the First and the Last ; He is the
Alpha and the Omega; He is the Beginning and the End of all
existence’. He possesses the seven spirits or perfections of
God», He has a mysterious Name which no man knows save
He Himselfii His Name is written on the foreheads of the
faithful ; His grace is the blessing of Christians! In the
Apocalypse, His Name is called the Word of God™; as in
the first Epistle He is the Word of Life, and in the Gospel
the Word in the beginning. As He rides through heaven on
His errand of triumph and of judgment, a Name is written on
His vesture and on His thigh; He is ‘ King of kings, and Lord
of lords®.’ St. John had leaned upon His breast at supper in
the familiarity of trusted friendship. St. John sees Him but for
_ ὃ moment in His supramundane glory, and forthwith falls at His
feet as dead®. In the Apocalypse especially we are confronted
_ with the startling truth that the true Lord of Heaven is none
other than the Crucified One. The armies of heaven follow
Him, clothed as He is in a vesture dipped in blood, the symbol
and token of His Passion and of His VictoryP. But of all the
teachings of the Apocalypse on this subject, perhaps none is so
full of significance as the representation of Christ in Hig
_wounded Humanity upon the throne of the Most High. The
_ Lamb, as It had been slain, is in the very centre of the court of
heaven’; He receives the prostrate adoration of the highest
intelligences around the thronet; and as the Object of that
solemn, uninterrupted, awful worship’, He is associated with the
8 Rev. i, 8: ἐγώ εἶμι τὸ A καὶ τὸ O, ὃ πρῶτος καὶ 6 ἔσχατος. Cf. Ibid.
Gi. 8, xxi. 6, xxii. 13: ἀρχὴ καὶ τέλος.
h Ibid. iii. 1: ὁ ἔχων τὰ ἑπτὰ πνεύματα τοῦ Θεοῦ.
i Tbid. xix. 12: ἔχων ὄνομα γεγραμμένον ὃ οὐδεὶς οἶδεν εἰ μὴ αὐτός.
Κ ΤΡΊΑ. ii. 12, cf. 11, 17.
1 Tbid. xxii. 21.
τὰ Thid. xix. 13 : καλεῖται τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ὁ Λόγος τοῦ Θεοῦ.
® Ibid. ver. 16: ἔχει ἐπὶ τὸ ἱμάτιον καὶ ἐπὶ τὸν μηρὸν αὐτοῦ τὸ ὄνομα γε-
γραμμένον, Βασιλεὺς βασιλέων καὶ Κύριος κυρίων. Cf. 1 Tim. vi. 15.
° Ibid. i. 17: ὅτε εἶδον αὐτὸν, ἔπεσα πρὸς τοῦς πόδας αὐτοῦ ὡς νεκρός.
P Ibid. xix. 13, 14.
4 Ibid. v.6: ἐν μέσῳ τοῦ θρόνου... ᾿Αρνίον ἑστηκὸς ὡς ἐσφαγμένον.
* Ibid. ν. 8: τὰ τέσσαρα ζῶα καὶ οἱ εἰκοσιτέσσαρες πρεσβύτεροι ἔπεσον
ἐνώπιον τοῦ ᾿Αρνίου.
δ Ibid. ver. 12: ἄξιόν ἐστι τὸ ᾿Αρνίον τὸ ἐσφαγμένον λαβεῖν τὴν δύναμιν καὶ
πλοῦτον καὶ σοφίαν καὶ ἰσχὺν καὶ τιμὴν καὶ δόξαν καὶ εὐλογίαν.
Υ] R 2
. ΠῤΦἷδΦΠππΠΠΠ τ’ σὺ -- “5 55--- ΘΝ
244 Ts the Divine Christ of St. Fohn
oe τ ΡΥ ΞΘ ΞΘ ΞΘ ΘΘΞΘΘΘΘ Θ Θ..
Father, as being in truth one with the Almighty, Uncreated,
Supreme Godt.
IV. Considerable, then, as may have been the interval be-
tween the composition of the Apocalypse and that of the fourth
Gospel, we find in the two documents one and the same doc-
trine, in substance if not in terms, respecting our Lord’s Eternal
Person; and further, this doctrine accurately corresponds with
that of St. John’s first Epistle. But it may be asked whether
St. John, thus consistent with himself upon a point of such
capital importance, is really in harmony with the teaching of the
earlier Evangelists? It is granted that between St. John and
the three first Gospels there is a broad difference of characteristic
phraseology, of the structure, scene, and matter of the several
narratives. Does this difference strike deeper still? Is the
Christology of the son of Zebedee fundamentally distinct from
that of his predecessors? Can we recognise the Christ of the
earlier Evangelists in the Christ of St. John?
Now it is obvious to remark that the difference between the
three first Evangelists and the fourth, in their respective repre-
sentations of the Person of our Lord, is in one sense, at any
rate, a real difference. There is a real difference in the point of
view of the writers, although the truth before them is one and
the same. Each from his own stand-point, the first three Evan-
gelists seek and pourtray separate aspects of the Human side of
the Life of Jesus. They set forth His perfect Manhood in all Its
regal grace and majesty, in all Its Human sympathy and beauty,
in all Its healing and redemptive virtue. In one Gospel Christ
is the true Fulfiller of the Law, and withal, by a touching con-—
trast, the Man of Sorrows. In another He is the Lord of Nature —
and the Leader of men; all seek Him; all yield to Him; He
moves forward in the independence of majestic strength. Ina
third He is active and all-embracing Compassion ; He is the
Shepherd, Who goes forth as for His Life-work, to seek the
sheep that was lost; He is the Good Samaritan. Thus the
obedience, the force, and the tenderness of His Humanity are
successively depicted ; but room is left for another aspect of His
t Rev. v.13: τῷ καθημένῳ ἐπὶ τοῦ θρόνου καὶ τῷ ᾿Αρνίῳ ἡ εὐλογία καὶ n
τιμὴ καὶ ἣ δόξα Kal τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς aidvas τῶν αἰώνων. Cf. Ibid. xvil. 14:
τὸ ᾿Αρνίον νικήσει αὐτοὺς, ὅτι Κύριος κυρίων ἐστὶ καὶ Βασιλεὺς βασιλέων. See
also the remarkable expression χχ. 6 : ἔσονται ἱερεῖς τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ τοῦ Χριστοῦ,
which clearly associates Christ with the Father in the highest honour which
man can render to God, namely, the offering of sacrifice.
u Cf, Holtzmann, Die Synoptischen Evangelien.
[ LECT.
identical with the Christ of the Synoptists ? 245
Life, differing from these and yet in harmony with them. If we
may dare so to speak, the synoptists approach their great Sub-
ject from without, St. John unfolds it from within. St. John
has been guided to pierce the veil of sense; he has penetrated
far beyond the Human features, nay even beyond the Human
thought and Human will of the Redeemer, into the central
depths of His Eternal Personality. He sets forth the Life of
our Lord and Saviour on the earth, not in any one of the aspects
which belong to It as Human, but as being the consistent and
adequate expression of the glory of a Divine Person, manifested
to men under a visible form. The miracles described, the dis-
courses selected, the plan of the narrative, are all in harmony
with the point of view of the fourth Evangelist, and it at once
explains and accounts for them.
Plainly, my brethren, two or more observers may approach
the same object from different points of view, and may be even
entirely absorbed with distinct aspects of it ; and yet it does not
follow that any one of these aspects is necessarily at variance
with the others. Still less does it follow that one aspect alone
represents the truth. Socrates does not lose his identity, because
he is so much more to Plato than he is to Xenophon. Each of
yourselves may be studied at the same time by the anatomist
and by the psychologist. Certainly the aspect of your complex
nature which the one study insists upon, is sufficiently remote
from the aspect which presents itself to the other. In the eyes
of one observer you are purely spirit ; you are thought, affection,
memory, will, imagination. As he analyses you he is almost in-
different to the material body in which your higher nature is
_ encased, upon which it has left its mark, and through which it
expresses itself. But to the other observer this your material
body is everything. Its veins and muscles, its pores and nerves,
its colour, its proportions, its functions, absorb his whole atten-
tion. He is nervously impatient of any speculations about you
which cannot be tested by his instruments. Yet is there any
real ground for a petty jealousy between the one study of your
nature and the other? Is not each student a servant whom true
science will own as doing her work? May not each illustrate,
supplement, balance, and check the conclusions of the other ?
Must you necessarily view yourselves as being purely mind, if
you will not be persuaded that you are merely matter? Must
you needs be materialists, if you will not become the most tran-
scendental of mystics? Or will not a little physiology usefully
restrain you from a fanciful supersensualism, while a study of
v
246 The title “ Son of Gon’ in the Synoptists.
the immaterial side of your being forbids you to listen, even
for a moment, to the brutalizing suggestions of consistent ma-
terialism ?
These questions admit of easy reply ; each half of the truth
is practically no less than speculatively necessary to the other.
Nor is it otherwise with the general relation of the first three
Gospels to the fourth. Yet it should be added that the Synop-
tists do teach the Divine Nature of Jesus, although in the main
His Sacred Manhood is most prominent in their pages. More-
over the fourth Gospel, as has been noticed, abundantly insists
upon Christ’s true Humanity. Had we not possessed the fourth
Gospel, we should have known much less of one side of His Hu-
man Character than we actually know. For in it we see Christ
engaged in earnest conflict with the worldly and unbelieving
spirit of His time, while surrounded by the little company of His
disciples, and devoting Himself to them even ‘unto the end.’ The
aspects of our Lord’s Humanity which are thus brought into
prominence would have remained, comparatively speaking, in
the shade, had the last Gospel not been written. But that
‘symmetrical conception’ of our Lord’s Character, which modern
critics have remarked upon, as especially distinguishing the
fourth Gospel, is to be referred to the manner in which St. John
lays bare the eternal Personality of Jesus. For in It the scattered
rays of glory which light up the earlier Evangelists find their
point of unity. By laying such persistent stress upon Christ’s
Godhead, as the true seat. of His Personality, the fourth Gospel
is doctrinally complemental (how marvellous is the complement !)
to therother three ; and yet these three are so full of suggestive —
implications that they practically anticipate the higher teaching —
ofthe fourth.
1. For in the synoptic Gospels Christ is called the Son of
God in a higher sense than the ethical or than the theocratic, —
In the Old Testament an anointed king or a saintly prophet is —
a son of God. Christ is not merely one among many sons, He
is the Only, the Well-beloved Son of the Father *. His relation-
ship to the Father is unshared by any other, and is absolutely
unique. It is indeed probable that of our Lord’s contemporaries
x Compare the voice from heaven at our Lord’s baptism, οὗτός ἐστιν 6
Υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητὸς, St. Matt. iii. 17, repeated at His transfiguration (Ibid.
xvii. 5); the profound sense of His question to the Pharisees, τίνος υἱός
ἐστιν; [sc. ὁ Χριστὸς] (Ibid. xxii. 41). And that as the Yids τοῦ Θεοῦ,
Christ is superhuman, seems to be implied in the questions of the tempter.
(Ibid. iv. 3, 6; St. Luke iv. 3, 9.)
[ LECT.
Szgnificance of the history of the Nativity. 247
many applied to Him the title ‘Son of God’ only as an official
designation of the Messiah ; while others used it to acknowledge
that surpassing and perfect character which proclaimed Jesus of
Nazareth to be the One Son, Who had appeared on earth, wor-
thily showing forth the moral perfections of our Heavenly
Father. But the official and ethical senses of the term ate
rooted in a deeper sense, which St. Luke connects with it at the
beginning of his Gospel. ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon
thee, so ran the angel-message to the Virgin-mother, ‘and the
power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that
Holy Thing Which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son
of Gody.’ This may be contrasted with the prediction respecting
St.John the Baptist, that he should be filled with the Holy Ghost
even from his mother’s womb. St. John then is in existence
before his sanctification by the Holy Spirit; but Christ’s Hu-
manity Itself is formed by the agency of the Holy Ghost. In
like manner St. Matthew’s record of the angel’s words asserts
that our Lord was conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost 8,
But St. Matthew’s reference to the prophetic name Emmanuel,
points to the full truth, that Christ is the Son of God as being
of the Divine Essence.
2. Indeed the whole history of the Nativity and its attendant
circumstances, guard the narratives of St. Matthew and St. Lukee
against the inroads of Humanitarian interpreters. Our Lord’s
Birth of a Virgin-mother is as irreconcileable with ‘an Ebionitic
as it is with a Docetic conception of the entrance of the God-man
into connexion with humanity4’ The worship of the Infant
y St. Luke i. 35.
z Tbid. ver. 15: Πνεύματος ᾿Αγίου πλησθήσεται ἔτι ex κοιλίας μητρὸς αὐτοῦ.
@ St. Matt. i. 20: τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ Πνεύματός ἐστιν “Αγίου.
b Tbid. ver. 22. This prophecy was fulfilled when our Lord was called
Jesus. Cf. Pearson on the Creed (ed. Oxf. 1847), art. ii. p. 89, and note.
¢ For a vindication of these narratives against the mythical theory of
Strauss, see Dr. Mill’s Christian Advocate’s Publications for 1841, 1844,
reprinted in his work on the ‘Mythical Interpretation.’
ἃ Martensen, Christl. Dogm. § 39 (Clark’s transl.): ‘Christ is born, not
of the will of a man, nor of the will of the flesh ; but the holy Will of the
Creator took the place of the will of man and of the will of the flesh. That
is, the Creating Spirit, Who was in the beginning, fulfilled the function of
the plastic principle. Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, the chosen woman
of the chosen people. It was the task of Israel to provide, not, as has often
been said, Christ Himself, but the mother of the Lord; to develope the
susceptibility for Christ to a point where it might be able to manifest itself
as the profoundest unity of nature and spirit—an unity which found expres-
sion in the pure Virgin. In her the pious aspirations of Israel and of
Vv]
248 Szgntficance of the Evangelical Canticles.
Christ, in St. Matthew by the wise men, in St. Luke by the
shepherds of Bethlehem, represents Jesus as the true Lord of
humanity, whether Jewish or Gentile, whether educated or un-
lettered. Especially noteworthy are the greetings addressed to
the Mother of our Lord by heavenly as well as earthly visitants.
The Lord is with her; she is graced and blessed among women®.
Her Son will be great; He will be called the Son of the Highest;
His kingdom will have no endf. Elizabeth echoes the angel’s
words; Mary is blessed among women, and the Fruit of her
womb is Blessed. Elizabeth marvels that such an one as herself
should be visited by the Mother of her Lord 8,
The Evangelical canticles, which we owe to the third Gospel,
remarkably illustrate the point before us. They surround the
cradle of the Infant Saviour with the devotional language of
ancient Israel, now consecrated to the direct service of the In-
carnate Lord. Mary, the Virgin-mother, already knows that all
generations shall call her blessed ; for the Mighty One has done
great things unto her, And as the moral and social fruits of
the Incarnation unfold themselves before her prophetic eye, she
proclaims that the promises to the forefathers are at length ful-
filled, and that God, ‘remembering His mercy hath holpen His
servant Israeli’ Zacharias rejoices that the Lord God of Israel
has in the new-born Saviour redeemed His people*. This
Saviour is the Lord, whose forerunner has been announced by
prophecy! ; He is the Day-star from on high, bringing a new
mankind, and their faith in the promises, are centred. She is the purest
point in history and in nature, and she therefore becomes the appointed
medium for the New Creation. And while we must confess that this Virgin
Birth is enveloped in a veil impenetrable to physical reasonings, yet we affirm
it to be the only one which fully satisfies the demands of religion and theo-
logy. This article of our Creed, ‘conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the
Virgin Mary,’ is the only sure defence against both the Ebionitic and the
Docetic view of the entrance of the God-man into connexion with humanity.’
e St. Luke i. 28: χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη" 6 ἸΚύριος μετὰ σοῦ, εὐλογημένη
σὺ ἐν γυναιξίν.
f Tbid. ver. 32: οὗτος ἔσται μέγας, καὶ vils ὑψίστου κληθήσεται. Ver. 33:
τῆς βασιλείας αὐτοῦ οὐκ ἔσται τέλος.
g Ibid. ver. 42: εὐλογημένη σὺ ἐν γυναιξὶ, καὶ εὐλογημένος ὃ καρπὸς τῆς
κοιλίας σοῦ. Ver. 43: καὶ πόθεν μοι τοῦτο, ἵνα ἔλθῃ ἣ μήτηρ τοῦ Κυρίου μου
πρός με;
h Thid. ver. 48: ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν μακαριοῦσί με πᾶσαι αἱ γενεαί' ὅτι ἐποίησέ μοι
μεγαλεῖα ὃ δυνατός.
i Ibid. vers. 51-55. k Tbid. ver. 68.
1 Ibid. i. 69, Christ is the κέρας σωτηρίας. Ibid. ver. 76; to St. John it is
said, προπορεύσῃ yap πρὸ προσώπου Kuplov, ἑτοιμάσαι ὁδοὺς αὐτοῦ. Cf. Mal.
iii. I, iv. 5.
[LEcT.
Our Lord’s Doctrine, according to the Synoptists. 249
morning to those who sat in the darkness and death-shadows of
the world™. Simeon desires to depart in peace, since his eyes
have seen his Lord’s Salvation. The humble Babe Whom the
old man takes in his arms belongs not to the lowly scenes of
Bethlehem and Nazareth; He isthe destined inheritance of the
world. He is the Divine Saviour ; all nations are interested in
His Birth; He is to shed light upon the heathen ; He is to be
the pride and glory of the new Israel 2.
The accounts then of our Lord’s Birth in two of the synoptic
Evangelists, as illustrated by the sacred songs of praise and
thanksgiving which St. Luke has preserved, point clearly to the
entrance of a superhuman Being into this our human world.
Who indeed He was, is stated more explicitly by St. John; but
St. John does not deem it necessary to repeat the history of His
Advent. The accounts of the Annunciation and of the Mi-
raculous Conception would not by themselves imply the Divinity
of Christ. But they do imply that Christ is superhuman ; they
harmonize with the kind of anticipations respecting Christ’s
appearance in the world, which might be created by St. John’s
doctrine of His pre-existent glory. These accounts cannot be
forced within the limits, and made to illustrate the laws, of
nature. But at least St. John’s narrative justifies the mysteries
of the synoptic Gospels which would be unintelligible without
it; and it is a vivid commentary upon hymns the lofty strains
of which might of themselves be thought to savour of exag-
geration.
3. If the synoptists are in correspondence with St. John’s
characteristic doctrine when they describe our Lord’s Nativity
and its attendant circumstances, that correspondence is even
more obvious in their accounts of His teaching, and in the
pictures which they set before us of His Life and work. They
present Him to us mainly, although not exclusively, as the Son
of Man. As has already been hinted, that title, besides its
direct signification of His true and representative Humanity, is
itself the ‘product of a self-consciousness, for which the being
human is not a matter of course, but something secondary and
m St. Luke i. 78: ἐπεσκέψατο ἡμᾶς ἀνατολὴ ἐξ ὕψους, ἐπιφᾶναι τοῖς ἐν
σκότει καὶ σκιᾷ θανάτου καθημένοις" τοῦ κατευθῦναι τοὺς πόδας ἡμῶν εἰς ὁδὸν
εἰρήνης. Isa. ix. 1, xlii. 7, xlix. 9, lx. 2, are thus applied in a strictly
spiritual sense.
» St. Luke ii. 30-32: τὸ σωτήριόν cov, ὃ ἡτοίμασας κατὰ πρόσωπον πάντων
τῶν λαῶν φῶς εἰς ἀποκάλυψιν ἐθνῶν, καὶ δόξαν λαοῦ σου Ἰσραήλ. CE. Isa.
Χχν. 7, xliv. 4.
Vv]
250 716 teaching of Christ according to the Synoptists
superinduced °.’ In other words, this title implies an original
Nature to Which Christ’s Humanity was a subsequent accretion,
and in Which His true and deepest Consciousness, if we may
dare so to speak, was at home. Thus, often in the synoptic
Gospels He is called simply the SonP. He is the true Son of
Man, but He is also the true Son of God. In Him Sonship
attains its archetypal form ; in Him it is seen in its unsullied
perfection. Accordingly He never calls the Father, owr Father,
as if He shared His Sonship with His followers. He always
speaks of I/y Father4. To this Divine Sonship He received
witness from heaven both at His Baptism and at His Trans-
figuration. In the parable of the vineyard, the prophets of the
old theocracy are contrasted with the Son, not as His predeces-
sors or rivals, but as His slavest. Thus He lives among men as
the One True Son of His Father’s home. He is Alone free by
birthright among a race of born slaves. Yet instead of guard-
ing His solitary dignity with jealous exclusiveness, He vouch-
safes to raise the slaves around Him to an adopted sonship ; He
will buy them out of bondage by pouring forth His Blood; He
will lay down His Life, that He may prove the generosity of
His measureless love towards them 5,
The synoptic Gospels record parables in which Christ is
Himself the central Figure. They record miracles which seem
to have no ascertainable object beyond that of exhibiting the
superhuman might of the Worker. ‘They tell us of His claim to
forgive sins, and that He supported this claim by the exercise of
ο Cf. Dorner, Person Christi, Einl. p. 82: ‘ Von einem Selbstbewusstseyn
aus muss diese Bezeichnung ausgepragt seyn, fiir welches das Mensch-oder-
Menschensohnseyn nicht das Niachstliegende, sich von selbst unmittelbar
Verstehende, sondern das Secundiare, Hinzugekommene, war. Ist aber
Christi Selbstbewusstseyn so geartet gewesen, dass das Menschseyn ihm als
das Secundire sich darstellte: so muss das Primire in Seinem Bewusstseyn
ein Anderes seyn, dasjenige, was sich, z. B. bei Johannes xvii. 5 ausspricht ;
und das Urspriingliche, worin Sein Selbstbewusstseyn sich unmittelbar
heimisch weiss (vgl. Luc. ii. 49) muss wenigstens von der Zeit an, wo Er
sich selbst ganz hat, wo sein Innerstes Wirklichkeit geworden ist, das
Gottliche gewesen seyn.’
P St. Matt. xi. 27, xxviii. 20.
a Ibid. xviii. 10, 19, 35, xx. 23, xxvi. 53; cf. St. Luke xxiii. 46.
τ St. Matt. xxi. 34; ἀπέστειλε τοὺς δούλους αὐτοῦ πρὸς τοὺς γεωργούς. Ibid.
ver. 36: πάλιν ἀπέστειλεν ἄλλους δούλους. Ibid. ver. 27: ὕστερον δὲ ἀπέ-
στειλε πρὸς αὐτοὺς τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ, λέγων, “ Εντραπήσονται τὸν υἱόν μου."
5. Ibid. xx. 28: ἦλθε... δοῦναι τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν. Ibid.
XXVi. 28: τὸ αἷμά μου, τὸ τῆς καινῆς διαθήκης, τὸ περὶ πολλῶν ἐκχυνόμενον εἰς
ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν.
[ LECT.
considered as implying His Divinity. 251
His miraculous powers‘, Equally with St. John they represent
Him as claiming to be not merely the Teacher but the Object of
His religion. He insists on faith in His own Person¥. He*
institutes the initial Sacrament, and He deliberately inserts His
own Name into the sacramental formula; He inserts it between
that of the Father and that of the Spirit*. Such self-intrusion
into the sphere of Divinity would be unintelligible if the synop-
tists had really represented Jesus as only the teacher and founder
of a religious doctrine or character. But if Christ is the Logos
in St John, in these Gospels He is the Sophiay. Thus He
ascribes to Himself the exclusive knowledge of the Highest.
No statement in St. John really goes beyond the terms in which,
according to two synoptists, He claims to know and to be known
of the Father. ‘No man knoweth the Son but the Father,
neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to
whomsoever the Son will reveal Himz.’ Here then is a recipro-
cal relationship of equality: the Son Alone has a true knowledge
of the Father ; the Son is Himself such, that the Father Alone
understands Him. In these Gospels, moreover, Christ ascribes
to Himself, sanctity ; He even places Himself above the holiest
thing in ancient Israel®. He and His people are greater than
the greatest in the old covenant». He scruples not to proclaim
His consciousness of having fulfilled His mission. He asserts
that all power is committed to Him both on earth and in
heaven’, All nations are to be made disciples of His religion 4,
When we weigh the language of the first three Evangelists, it
will be found that Christ is represented by it as the Absolute
Good and the Absolute Truth not less distinctly than in St.
John. It is on this account that He is exhibited as in conflict
t St. Matt. ix. 2-6; St. Luke v. 20, 24. u Thid. xvi. 16, 17.
x Tbid. xxviii. 19. Cf. Waterland’s Eighth Sermon at Lady Moyer’s Lec-
ture, Works, vol. ii. p. 171.
Υ St. Luke vii. 35: ἐδικαιώθη ἣ σοφία ἀπὸ τῶν τέκνων αὐτῆς πάντων. St.
Matt. xi. 19, and apparently St. Luke xi. 49, where 7 σοφία τοῦ Θεοῦ corres-
ponds to éy# in St. Matt. xxiii. 34.
* St. Matt. xi. 27: οὐδεὶς ᾿ἐπιγινώσκει τὸν Tidy εἰ μὴ ὃ Πατήρ’ οὐδὲ τὸν
Πατέρα τὶς ἐπιγινώσκει, εἰ μὴ 6 Ὑἱὸς, καὶ ᾧ ἐὰν βούληται 6 Ὑἱὸς ἀποκαλύψαι.
St. Luke x. 22: οὐδεὶς γινώσκει τίς ἐστιν 6 Ὑἱὸς εἰ μὴ ὃ Πατὴρ, καὶ τίς
ἐστιν 6 Πατὴρ, εἰ μὴ 6 Vids, καὶ ᾧ ἐὰν βούληται 6 Ὑἱὸς ἀποκαλύψαι. See
Mill on Myth. Interp. p. 59.
a St. Matt. xii. 6: λέγω δὲ ὑμῖν ὅτι τοῦ ἱεροῦ μεῖζόν [Tisch.] ἐστιν ὧδε.
b ΤΌΙΑ. xi. 11, xii. 41, 42, xxi. 33, sqq.; St. Luke vii. 28.
¢ St. Matt. xi. 27; St. Luke x. 22; St. Matt. xxviii. 18: ἐδόθη μοι πᾶσα
ἐξουσία ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς. 4 St. Matt. xxviii. 19.
vi]
252 Our Lord’s claims to rule the souls of men,
not with subordinate or accidental forms of evil, but with the
evil principle itself, with the prince of evil®. And, as the
Absolute Good, Christ tests the moral worth or worthlessness of
men by their acceptance or rejection, not of His doctrine but of
His Person. It is St. Matthew who records such sentences as
the following : ‘Be not ye called Rabbi; for One is your Master,
even Christf;’ ‘He that loveth father or mother more than
Me is not worthy of Mes; ‘Whosoever shall confess Me before
men, him will I confess also before My Father};’ ‘Come unto
Me, all ye that labour, and I will give you resti; ‘Take My
yoke upon you, and learn of Mek.’ In St. Matthew then Christ
speaks as One Who knows Himself to be a universal and infallible
Teacher in spiritual things; Who demands submission of all
men, and at whatever cost or sacrifice; Who offers to man-
kind those deepest consolations which are sought from all others,
in vain. Nor is it otherwise with St. Luke and St. Mark. It
is indeed remarkable that our Lord’s most absolute and peremp-
tory claims! to rule over the affections and wills of men are
recorded by the first and third, and not by the fourth Evan-
gelist. These royal rights over the human soul can be justified
upon no plea of human relationships between teacher and
learner, between child and elder, between master and servant,
between friend and friend. If the title of Divinity is more
explicitly put forward in St. John, the rights which imply it are
insisted on in words recorded by the earlier Evangelists. The
synoptists represent our Lord, Who is the object of Christian
faith no less than the Founder of Christianity, as designing the
whole world for the field of His conquests™, and as claiming the
submission of every individual human soul. All are to be
brought to discipleship. Only then will the judgment come,
when the Gospel has been announced to the whole circle of the
nations®. Christ, the Good and the Truth Incarnate, must
reign throughout all time®. He knows, according to the synop-
e St. Luke x. 18: ἐθεώρουν τὸν Σατανᾶν ὡς ἀστραπὴν ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ
πεσόντα. St. Matt. iv. 1-11, xii. 27-29, xiil. 28, 30.
τ St. Matt. xxiii. 8. e’Tbid. x. 37.
h bid. ver. 32; St. Luke xii. 8. i St. Matt. xi. 28.
k Ibid. ver. 20. 1 Tbid. x. 39; St. Luke xiv. 26.
m St. Matt. xxviii. 19: πορευθέντες οὖν μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη. St. Mark
xvi. 15; St. Luke xxiv. 47. Cf. St. Matt. xiii. 32, 38, 41, xxiv. 14.
n St. Matt. xxiv. 14: καὶ κηρυχθήσεται τοῦτο τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας
ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ οἰκουμένῃ, εἰς μαρτύριον πᾶσι τοῖς ἔθνεσι" καὶ τότε ἥξει τὸ τέλος.
ο §t. Luke xxii. 69: ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν ἔσται ὃ Tids τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καθήμενος ἐκ
δεξιῶν τῆς δυνάμεως τοῦ Θεοῦ.
[ LECT.
are especially prominent in the Synoptists. 253
tists no less than St. John, that He is a perfect and final Reve-
lation of God. He is the Centre-point of the history and of the
hopes of man. None shall advance beyond Him: the preten-
sion to surpass Him is but the symptom of disastrous error
and reaction P.
The Transfiguration is described by all the synoptists ; and it
represents our Lord in His true relation to the legal and pro-
phetic dispensations, and as visibly invested for the time being
with a glory which was rightfully His. The Ascension secures
His permanent investiture with that glory; and the Ascension
is described by St. Mark and St. Luke. The Resurrection is
recorded by the first three Evangelists as accurately as by the
fourth; and it was to the Resurrection that He Himself appealed
as being the sign by which men were to know His real claim
upon their homage. In the first three Gospels, all of Christ’s
humiliations are consistently linked to the assertion of His power,
and to the consummation of His victory. He is buffeted, spat
upon, scourged, crucified, only to rise from the dead the third
day 4; His Resurrection is the prelude to His ascent to heaven.
He leaves the world, yet He bequeaths the promise of His
Presence. He promises to be wherever two or three are gathered
in His Namet; He institutes the Sacrament of His Body and
His Bloods; He declares that He will be among His people even
to the end of the world t.
4. But it is more particularly through our Lord’s discourses
respecting the end of the world and the final judgment, as re-
corded by the synoptists, that we may discern the matchless
dignity of His Person. It is reflected in the position which He
claims to fill with respect to the moral and material universe,
and in the absolute finality which He attributes to His religion.
The Lawgiver Who is above all other legislators, and Who
revises all other legislation, will also be the final Judge, At
P St. Matt. xxiv. 23-26, &c.
4 Ibid. xx.19 ; St. Mark x. 34; St. Luke xviii. 33.
τ St. Matt. xviii. 20: οὗ γάρ εἰσι δύο ἢ τρεῖς συνηγμένοι εἰς τὸ ἐμὸν ὄνομα,
ἐκεῖ εἰμὶ ἐν μέσῳ αὐτῶν.
5. Ibid. xxvi. 26 ; St. Mark xiv. 22; St. Luke xxii. 19.
Ὁ St. Matt. xxviii. 20: ἐγὼ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν εἰμι πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας ἕως τῆς συντε-
λείας τοῦ αἰῶνος.
ἃ Ibid. vii. 22: πολλοὶ ἐροῦσί μοι ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ, “ Κύριε, Κύριε, οὐ
τῷ σῷ ὀνόματι προεφητεύσαμεν, καὶ τῷ σῷ ὀνόματι δαιμόνια ἐξεβάλομεν, καὶ
τῷ σῷ ὀνόματι δυνάμεις πολλὰς ἐποιήσαμεν Ψ καὶ τότε ὁμολογήσω αὐτοῖς, ὅτι
“οὐδέποτε ἔγνων ὑμᾶς. ἀποχωρεῖτε am ἐμοῦ οἱ ἐργαζόμενοι τὴν ἀνομίαν.
St. Luke xiii. 25. St. Matt. xiii. 41: ἀποστελεῖ 6 Ὑἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου τοὺς
Vv)
254. Christ the Lord of the world’s future.
that last awful revelation of His personal glory, none shall be
able to refuse Him submission. Then will He put an end to the
humiliations and the sorrows of His Church; then, out of the
fulness of His majesty, He will clothe His despised followers
with glory ; He will allot the kingdom to those who have be-
lieved on Him; and at His heavenly board they shall share for
ever the royal feast of life. Certainly the Redeemer and Judge
of men, to Whom all spiritual and natural forces, all earthly and
heavenly powers must at last submit, is not merely a divinely
gifted prophet. His Person ‘has a metaphysical and cosmical
significance x.’ None could preside so authoritatively over the
history and destiny of the world who was not entitled to share
the throne of its Creator.
The eschatological discourses in the synoptists do but tally
with the prologue of St. John’s Gospel. In contemplating the
dignity of our Lord’s Person, the preceding Evangelists for the
most part look forward ; St. John looks backward no less than
forward. St. John dwells on Christ’s Pre-existence ; the synop-
tists, if we may so phrase it, on his Post-existence. In the
earlier Evangelists His personal glory is viewed in its relation to
the future of the human race and of the universe; in St. John
it is viewed in its relation to the origin of created things, and to
the solitary and everlasting years of God. In St. John, Christ
our Saviour is the First; in the synoptists He is more especially
the Last.
In the synoptic Gospels, then, the Person of Christ Divine
and Human is the centre-point of the Christian religion. Christ
is here the Supreme Lawgiver ; He is the Perfect Saint; He is
the Judge of all men. He controls both worlds, the physical and
the spiritual ; He bestows the forgiveness of sins, and the Holy
Spirit; He promises everlasting life. His Presence is to be
perpetuated on earth, while yet He will reign as Lord of heaven.
‘The entire representation,’ says Professor Dorner, ‘ of Christ
which is given us by the synoptists, may be placed side by side
with that given by St. John, as being altogether identical with
it. For a faith moulded in obedience to the synoptic tradition
ἀγγέλους αὐτοῦ, καὶ συλλέξουσιν ἐκ τῆς βασιλείας αὐτοῦ πάντα τὰ σκάνδαλα
καὶ τοὺς ποιοῦντας τὴν ἀνομίαν, καὶ βαλοῦσιν αὐτοὺς εἰς τὴν κάμινον τοῦ πυρόΞ.
Ibid. x. 32; St. Mark viii. 38. St. Matt. xxiv. 31: ἀποστελεῖ τοὺς ἀγγέλους
αὐτοῦ μετὰ σάλπιγγος φωνῆς μεγάλης, καὶ ἐπισυνάξουσι τοὺς ἐκλεκτοὺς αὐτοῦ
ἐκ τῶν τεσσάρων ἀνέμων, am ἄκρων οὐρανῶν ἕως ἄκρων αὐτῶν. Ibid. xxv.
34-46; St. Luke xii. 35, xvii. 30, 31.
x Martensen, Christl. Dogm. § 128,
[ LECT.
:
Summary of the Synoptical Christology. 255
concerning Christ, must have essentially the same features in
its resulting conception of Christ as those which belong to the
Christ of St. Johny.’ In other words, think over the miracles
wrought by Christ and narrated by the synoptists, one by one.
Think over the discourses spoken by Christ and recorded by the
synoptists, one by one. Look at the whole bearing and scope of
His Life, as the three first Evangelists describe It, from His
supernatural Birth to His disappearance beyond the clouds of
heaven. Mark well how pressing and tender, yet withal how
full of stern and majestic Self-assertion, are His words! Con-
sider how merciful and timely, yet also how expressive of imma-
nent and unlimited power, are His miracles! Put the three
representations of the Royal, the Human, and the Healing
Redeemer together, and deny, if it is possible, that Jesus is
Divine. If the Christ of the synoptists is not indeed an unreal
phantom, such as Docetism might have constructed, He is far
removed above the Ebionitic conception of a purely human
Saviour. If Christ’s Pre-existence is only obscurely hinted at
in the first three Gospels, His relation to the world of spirits is
brought out in them even more clearly than in St. John by the
discourses which they contain on the subject of the Last Judg-
ment. If St. John could be blotted out from the pages of the
New Testament, St. John’s central doctrine would still live on
in the earlier Evangelists as implicitly contained within a history
otherwise inexplicable, if not as the illuminating truth of a
heavenly gnosis. There would still remain the picture of a Life
Which belongs indeed to human history, but Which the laws
that govern human history neither control nor can explain.
It would still be certain that One had lived on earth, wielding
miraculous powers, and claiming a moral and intellectual place
which belongs only to the Most Holy ; and if the problem pre-
sented to faith might seem for a moment to be more intricate,
its final solution could not differ in substance from that which
meets us in the pages of the beloved disciple.
V. But what avails it, say you, to shew that St. John is con-
sistent with himself, and that he is not really at variance with
the Evangelists who preceded him, if the doctrine which he
Υ Dorner, Person Christi, Einl. p. 89: ‘Das synoptische Totalbild von
Christus dem johanneischen insofern vollkommen an die Seite setzen kaan,
als der durch Vermittlung der synoptischen Tradition gebildete Glaube
wesentlich ganz dieselben Ziige in seinem Christusbegriff haben musste, wie
sie der johanneische Christus hat.’ For the preceding remarks, see Person
Christi, Einl. pp. 80-89,
v]
256 Christ, thus Gop and Man, wn One Person.
teaches, and which the Creed re-asserts, is itself incredible? You
object to this doctrine that it ‘involves an invincible contradic-
tion.’ It represents Christ on the one hand as a Personal Being,
while on the other it asserts that two mutually self-excluding
Essences are really united in Him. How can He be personal,
you ask, if He be in very truth both God and Man? If He is
thus God and Man, is He not, in point of fact, a ‘double Being;’
and is not unity of being an indispensable condition of person-
ality ? Surely, you insist, this condition is forfeited by the very
terms of the doctrine. Christ either is not both God and Man,
or He is not a single Personality. To say that He is One Person
in Two Natures is to affirm the existence of a miracle which is
incredible, if for no other reason, simply on the score of its
unintelligibility 2.
This is what may be said ; but let us consider, first of all,
whether to say this does not, however unintentionally, caricature
the doctrine of St. John and of the Catholic Creed. Does it not
seem as if both St. John and the Creed were at pains to make
it clear that the Person of Christ in His pre-existent glory, in
His state of humiliation and sorrow, and in the majesty of His
mediatorial kingdom, is continuously, unalterably One? Does
not the Nicene Creed, for instance, first name the Only-begotten
Son of God, and then go on to say how for us men and for our
salvation He was Himself made Man, and was crucified for us
under Pontius Pilate? Does not St. John plainly refer to One
z Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p.2: ‘Es gehért vor Allem zum Begriffe
einer Person, dass sie im Kerne ihres Wesens eine Einheit bildet ; nur unter
dieser Voraussetzung lisst sie sich geschichtlich begreifen. Diese Einheit
wird durch die herkémmliche Lehre in der Person des Welterlésers aufge-
hoben. Jesus Christus wird in der kirchlichen Glaubenslehre als ein Doppel-
Wesen dargestellt, als die persdnliche Vereinigung zweier Wesenheiten, die
an sich nichts mit einander gemein haben, sich vielmehr schlechthin wider-
sprechen und nur vermége eines alle Begriffe tibersteigenden Wunders in die
engste und unaufléslichste Verbindung mit einander gebracht worden sind.
Er ist demzufolge Mensch wnd Gott in einer und derselben Person. Die
kirchlichen Theologen haben grosse Anstrengungen gemacht, um die unauf-
lésliche Verbindung von Gott und Mensch in einer Person als begreiflich
und méglich darzustellen ; sie haben sich aber zuletzt doch immer wieder zu
dem Gestiindniss genédthigt gesehen, dass die Sache unbegreiflich sei, und
dass ein undurchdringliches Geheimniss tiber dem Personleben Jesu Christi
schwebe. Allein eine solche Berufung auf Geheimnisse und Wunder ist, wo
es auf die Erklirung einer geschichtlichen Thatsache ankommt, fur die
Wissenschaft ohne allen Werth; sie offenbart uns die Unfahigkeit des theo-
logischen Denkens, das in sich Widersprechende vorstellbar, das geschichtlich —
Unbegreifliche denkbar zu machen.’ Cf. Strauss, Leben Jesu, § 146;
Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, ii. § 96-98.
[ LECT.
a,
Nestorians deny the unity of Christ's Person. 2 57
ee ee ee
and the Same Agent in such verses as the following? < All
things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything
made that was madea” “δ riseth from supper, and laid aside
His garments; and took a towel, and girded Himself. After
that He poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the
disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He
was girded.’ If St. John or the Creed had proceeded to intro-
duce a new subject to whom the circumstances of Christ’s earthly
Life properly belonged, and who only maintained a mysterious,
even although it were an indissoluble connexion with the Eternal
Word in heaven, then the charge of making Christ a ‘double
Being’ would be warrantable. Nestorius was fairly liable to
that charge. He practically denied that the Man Christ Jesus
was One Person with the Eternal Word. In order to heighten
the ethical import of the Human Life of Christ, Nestorianism
represents our Lord as an individual Man, Who, although He is
the temple and organ of the Deity to which He is united, yet
has a separate basis of personality in His Human Nature. The
individuality of the Son of Mary is thus treated as a distinct
thing from that of the Eternal Word ; and the Christ of Nesto-
rianism is really a ‘double Being, or rather He is two distinct
persons, mysteriously joined in one*. But the Church has
formally condemned this error, and in go doing she was merely
throwing into the form of a doctrinal proposition the plain
import of the narrative of St. John’s Gospel 4,
Undoubtedly, you reply, the Church has not allowed her doc-
® St.John i. 3. Ὁ ΤΡΙά. χΙ. 4, 5.
© Ap. Marium Mere. p. 54: * Non Maria peperit Deum. Non peperit
creatura increabilem, sed peperit hominem Deitatis instrumentum. Divido
naturas, sed conjungo reverentiam.’ Cf. Nestorii Ep. iii. ad Ccoelestin,
(Mansi, tom. iv. 1197): τὸ προελθεῖν τὸν Θεὸν Λόγον ἐκ τῆς χριστοτόκου
παρθένου παρὰ τῆς θείας ἐδιδάχθην γραφῆς" τὸ δὲ γεννηθῆναι Θεὸν ἐξ αὐτῆς,
οὐδαμοῦ ἐδιδάχθην. And his ‘famous’ saying, ‘I will never own a child of
two months old to be God.’ (Labbe, iii. 506.)
ἃ St. Leo in Epist. ad Leonem Aug. ed. Ballerino, 165 : “ Anathematizetur
ergo Nestorius, qui beatam Virginem non Dei, sed hominis tantummodo cre-
didit genitricem, ut aliam personam carnis faceret, aliam Deitatis ; nec unum
Christum in Verbo Dei et carne sentiret, sed separatum atque sejunctum
alterum Filium Dei, alterum hominis predicaret.? See Confession of the
Easterns, accepted by St. Cyril, Labbe, iii. 1107. Ὁμολογοῦμεν τὸν Κύριον
ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν, τὸν Ὑἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ, Θεὸν τέλειον καὶ ἄνθρωπον τέλειον ἐκ
ψυχῆς λογικῆς καὶ σώματος, πρὸ αἰώνων μὲν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα κατὰ
τὴν Θεότητα, ἐπ’ ἐσχάτων δὲ τῶν ἡμερῶν τὸν αὐτὸν ἐϊς Μαρίας κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρω-
πότητα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρὶ κατὰ τὴν Θεότητα, ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρω-
πότητα' δύο γὰρ φύσεων ἕνωσις γέγονε. Κατὰ ταύτην τὴν τῆς ἀσυγχύτου
ἑνώσεως ἔννοιαν ὁμολογοῦμεν τὴν ἁγίαν Παρθένον Θεοτόκον, διὰ τὸ τὸν Θεὸν
vi 5
Sass EN can ee nes re
2.58 The ‘Comimunicatio tdiomatum,
ee
trine to be stated in terms which would dissolve the Redeemer into
two distinct agents, and would so altogether forfeit the reality of
redemption. But the question is whether the orthodox state-
Λόγον σαρκωθῆναι καὶ ἐνανθρωπῆσαι, καὶ ἐξ αὐτῆς τῆς συλλήψεως ἑνῶσαι ἑαυτῷ
τὸν ἐξ αὐτῆς ληφθέντα ναόν. Tas δὲ εὐἀγγελικὰς περὶ τοῦ Κυρίου φωνὰς ἴσμεν
τοὺς θεολόγους ἄνδρας τὰς μὲν κοινοποιοῦντας ὡς ἐφ᾽ ἑνὸς προσώπου, τὰς δὲ
διαιροῦντας ὡς ἐπὶ δύο φύσεων, καὶ τὰς μὲν θεοπρεπεῖς κατὰ τὴν Θεότητα τοῦ
Χριστοῦ, τὰς δὲ ταπεινὰς κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα αὐτοῦ παραδιδόντας. The
definition of Chalcedon is equally emphatic on the subject of the Hypostatic
Union. Routh, Scr. Op. ii. 78. Bright, Hist. Ch. p. 409. The title Theo-
tokos, assigned to the Blessed Virgin by eminent Fathers before the Nestorian
controversy (see Bright, ib. p. 302), and by the whole Church ever since the
Council of Ephesus, is essentially a tribute to Christ’s personal glory. It is
in exact accordance with that well-known Scriptural wsus loquendt, whereby
Gop is said to have ‘ purchased the Church with His own Blood’ (Acts xx.
28, see Lect. VI. ; and compare I Cor. ii. 8), as conversely, ‘the Son of Man,’
while yet on earth, is said to have been ‘in heaven’ (St. John iii. 13). This
‘communicatio idiomatum,’ κοινοποίησις or ἀντίδοσις (St. John Dam. Orth.
Fid. iii. 4), as it is technically termed, is only intelligible on the principle
that whatever belongs to our Lord in either of His two spheres of Existence
belongs to Him as the One Christ, Who is, and is to be spoken of as, both
Gop and Man. In other words, the properties of both His Natures are the
properties of His Person. (Hooker, Εἰ. P. v. 53; St. Thom. Summ. iii. 16, 4.)
In the same sense then as that in which St. Paul could attribute ‘crucifixion,’
and ‘ shedding His Blood,’ to ‘ Gop,’ that is to say, to our Divine Saviour in
His Manhood, the Church could attribute to Him Birth of a human Mother.
The phrase θεοτόκος is implicitly sanctioned by the phrase αἷμα Θεοῦ. It
presupposes the belief that Jesus Christ, the Son of Mary, is our Lord and
Gop; that ‘the Son which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlast-
ing of the Father, very and eternal Gop, took Man’s Nature upon Him in the
womb of the Blessed Virgin, of her substance,’ art. 2. In sub-apostolic language,
ὃ γὰρ Θεὸς ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦς 6 Χριστὸς ἐκυοφορήθη ἀπὸ Μαρίας. Ign. ad Eph. 18.
e Jackson on the Creed, Works, vol. vii. p. 294: ‘That proper blood
wherewith Good is said to have purchased the church, was the blood of the
Son of God, the second Person in Trinity, after a more peculiar manner than
it was the blood either of God the Father or of God the Holy Ghost. It was
the blood of God the Father or of God the Holy Ghost, as all other creatures
are, by common right of creation and preservation. It was the blood of
God the Son alone by personal union. If this Son of God, and High Priest
of our souls, had offered any other sacrifice for us than Himself, or the Man- ,
hood thus personally united unto Him, His offering could not have been
satisfactory, because in all other things created, the Father and the Holy
Ghost had the same right or interest which the Son had, He could not have
offered anything to Them which were not as truly Theirs as His. Only the
Seed of Abraham, or Fruit of the Virgin’s womb Which He assumed into the
Godhead, was by the assumption made so His own, as it was not Theirs, His
own by incommunicable property of personal union. By reason of this
incommunicable property in the woman’s seed, the Son of God might truly
have said unto His Father, ‘Lord, Thou hast purchased the church, yet
with My blood:’ but so could not the Man Christ Jesus say unto the Son
of God, ‘Lord, Thou hast paid the ransom for the sins of the world, yet
with My blood, not with Thine own,’
[ LECT.
Christ’s Manhood an instrument of His Deity. 259
ment be really successful in avoiding the error which it depre-
cates. Certainly the Church does say that ‘although Christ be
God and Man, yet He is not two, but one Christ.’ But is this
possible? How can Godhead and Manhood thus coalesce without
forfeiture of that unity which is a condition of personality 2
The answer to this question lies in the fact, upon which
St. John insists with such prominence, that our Lord’s Godhead
is the seat of His Personality. The Son of Mary is not a distinct
human person mysteriously linked with the Divine Nature of
the Eternal Word£ The Person of the Son of Mary is divine
and eternal; It is none other than the Person of the Word.
When He took upon Him to deliver man, the Eternal Word did
not abhor the Virgin’s womb. He clothed Himself with man’s
bodily and man’s immaterial nature ; He united it to His Own
Divinity. He ‘took man’s Nature upon Him in the womb of
the Blessed Virgin, of her substance, so that two whole and per-
fect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were
joined together in One Person, never to be divided, whereof is
One Christ&.’ Thus to speak of Christ as a Man, at least with-
out explanation, may lead to a serious misconception ; He is the
Man, or rather He is Man. Christ’s Manhood is not of Itself an
individual being ; It is not a seat and centre of personality ; It
has no conceivable existence apart from the act whereby the
Eternal Word in becoming Incarnate called It. into being and
made It His Own}, It is a vesture which He has folded around
His Person ; It is an instrument through which He places Him-
self in contact with men, and whereby He acts upon humanity i,
f St. Ful. de Fide ad Petr. c. 17: ‘Deus Verbum non accepit personam
hominis, sed naturam ; et in zternam personam divinitatis accepit tempora-
lem substantiam carnis.’ St. Joh. Damasc. de Fid. Orthod, iii. 11: 6 Θεὸς
Adyos σαρκωθεὶς od τὴν ἐν τῷ εἴδει θεωρουμένην, οὐ γὰρ πάσας τὰς ὑποστάσεις
ἀνέλαβεν" ἀλλὰ τὴν ἐν ἀτόμῳ, ἀπαρχὴν τοῦ ἡμετέρου φυράματος, οὐ κάθ᾽ ἕαυ-
τὴν ὑποστᾶσαν καὶ ἄτομον χρηματίσασαν πρότερον, καὶ οὕτως ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ προσ-
ληφθεῖσαν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν τῇ αὐτοῦ ὑποστάσει ὑπάρξασαν, αὕτη γὰρ ἣ ὑπόστασις τοῦ
Θεοῦ Λόγου ἔγένετο τῇ σαρκὶ ὑπύστασις, He states this in other terms (6. 9)
by saying that our Lord’s Humanity had no subsistence of itself. It was not
ἰδιοσύστατος, nor was it strictly ἀνυπόστατος, but ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγου
ὑποστάσει ὑποστᾶσα, ἐνυπόστατος. He speaks too of Christ’s ὑπόστασις σύν-
eros. Hooker, E. P. v. 52. 35 8 Art. ii.
Ὁ St. Aug. ὁ. Serm. Arian. c. 6: ‘Nec sic assumptus est [homo] ut pritis
crearetur, post assumeretur, sed ut in ips& assumptione crearetur.’ Newman’s
Par. Sermons, vi. 68.
' Jackson on the Creed, Works, vol. vii. p. 289: ‘The Humanity of
Christ is such an instrument of the Divine Nature in His Person, as the
hand of man is to the person or party whose hand it is. And it is well
observed, whether by Aquinas himself or no I remember not, but by
vi 5.2
ES
260 Analogy from the composite nature of man.
Oe NS On a τ τ τς τ δαθαεσθασασο
He wears It in heaven, and thus robed in It He represents, He
impersonates, He pleads for the race of beings to which It
belongs. In saying that Christ ‘took our nature upon Him,’
we imply that His Person existed before, and that the Manhood
which He assumed was Itself impersonal. Therefore He did not
make Himself a ‘double Being’ by becoming incarnate. His
Manhood no more impaired the unity of His Person than each
human body, with its various organs and capacities, impairs the
unity of that personal principle which is the centre and pivot of
each separate human existence, and which has its seat within
the soul of each one of us. ,
‘As the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and _
man is one Christ.’ As the personality of man resides in the
“soul, after death has severed soul and body, so the Person of
Christ had Its eternal seat in His Godhead before His Incarna-
tion. Intimately as the ‘I,’ or personal principle within each
of us, is associated with every movement of the body, the ‘I’
itself resides in the soul. The soul is that which is conscious,
which remembers, which wills, and which thus realizes person-
ality. Certainly it is true that in our present state of existence
we have never as yet realized what personal existence 18, apart
from the body. But the youngest of us will do this, ere many
years have passed. Meanwhile we know that, when divorced
from the personal principle which rules and inspires it, the body
is but a lump of lifeless clay. The body then does not superadd
a second personality to that which is in the soul. It supplies
the personal soul with an instrument; it introduces it to a
sphere of action; it is the obedient slave, the plastic ductile
form of the personal soul which tenants it. The hand is raised,
the voice is heard ; but these are acts of the selfsame personality
Viguerius, an accurate summist of Aquinas’ sums, that albeit the intellectual
part of man be a spiritual substance, and separated from the matter or bodily
part, yet is the union betwixt the hand and intellectual part of man no less
firm, no less proper, than the union between the feet or other organical
parts of sensitive creatures, and their sensitive souls or mere physical forms.
For the intellectual part of man, whether it be the form of man truly, though
not merely physical, or rather his essence, not his form at all, doth use his
own hand not as the carpenter doth use his axe, that is, not as an external
or separated, but as his proper united instrument: nor is the union between
the hand as the instrument and intellective part as the artificer or commander
of it an union of matter and form, but an union personal, or at the least
such an union as resembles the hypostatical union between the Divine and
Human Nature of Christ much better than any material union wherein
philosophers or school-divines can make instance.’ Cf. Viguerius, Institu-
tiones, c. 20. introd. p. 259, commenting on St. Thom. 35. q. 2. a. 1.
[ LECT.
Alleged danger of Apollinarian error. 261
as that which, in the invisible voiceless recesses of its immaterial
self, goes through intellectual acts of inference, or moral acts of
aversion or of love. In short, man is at once animal and spirit,
but his personal unity is not thereby impaired: and Jesus Christ
is not other than a Single Person, although He has united the
Perfect Nature of Man to His Divine and Eternal Being.
Therefore, although He says ‘I and the Father are One,’ He
never says ‘I and the Son’ or ‘I and the Word are One.’ For
He is the Word; He is the Son. And His Human Life is not
a distinct person, but the robe which is folded around His
Eternal Personality Κ,
But if the illustration of the Creed is thus suggestive of the
unity of Christ’s Person, is it, you may fairly ask, altogether in
harmony with the Scriptural and Catholie doctrine of His
Perfect Manhood? If Christ’s Humanity stands to His God-
head in the relation of the body of a man to his soul, does not
this imply that Christ has no human Soul], or at any rate no
distinct human Will? You remind me that ‘the truth of our
Lord’s Human Will is essential to the integrity of His Manhood,
to the reality of His Incarnation, to the completeness of His
redemptive work. It is plainly asserted by Scripture ; and the
error which denies It has been condemned by the Church. Τῇ
Nestorius errs on one side, Apollinaris, Eutyches, and finally the
Monothelites, warn us how easily we may err on the other.
Christ has a Human Will as being Perfect Man, no less than He
has a Divine Will as being Perfect God. But this is not sug-
gested by the analogy of the union of body and soul in man.
And if there are two Wills in Christ, must there not also be two
Persons? and may not the Sufferer Who kneels in Gethsemane
be another than the Word by Whom all things were made 1᾽
Certainly, the illustration of the Creed cannot be pressed
closely without risk of serious error. An illustration is gene-
rally used to indicate correspondence in a single particular ; and
it will not bear to be erected into an absolute and consistent
k On the objection that the illustration in the Athanasian Creed favours
Nestorianism, cf. St. Tho. 3%. 2. 5.
1 This preliminary form of the objection is thus noticed by the Master of
the Sentences, Petr. Lomb. 1. iii. ἃ. 5 (858). ‘Non accepit Verbum Dei
personam hominis, sed naturam. E: A quibusdam opponitur, quod persona
assumit personam. Persona enim est substantia rationalis individue nature,
hoc autem est anima. Ergo si animam assumsit, et personam. Quod ideo
non sequitur, quia anima non est persona, quando alii rei unita est perso-
naliter, sed quando per se est. Illa autem anima (our Lord’s) nunquam fuit,
quia esset alii rei conjuncta.’
v]
262 Reality of our Lord’s Human Will consistent
parallel, supposed to be in all respects analogous to that with
which it has a single point of correspondence. But the Creed
protects itself elsewhere against any such misuse of this par-
ticular illustration. The Creed says that as body and soul meet
in a single man, so do Perfect Godhead and Perfect Manhood
meet in one Christ. The Perfect Manhood of Christ, not His
Body merely but His Soul, and therefore His Human Will, is
part of the One Christ. Unless in His condescending love our
Eternal Lord had thus taken upon Him our fallen nature in its
integrity, that is to say, a Human Soul as well as a Human
Body, a Human Will as an integral element of the Human Soul,
mankind would not have been really represented on the cross or
before the throne. We should not have been truly redeemed or
sanctified by a real union with the Most Holy.
Yet in taking upon Him a Human Will, the Eternal Word
did not assume a second principle of action which was de-
structive of the real unity of His Person. Within the precincts
_ of a single human soul may we not observé two principles of
volition, this higher and that lower, this animated almost en-
tirely by reason, that as exclusively by passion? St. Paul has _
described the moral dualism within a single will which is cha-—
racteristic of the first stage of the regenerate life, in a wonderful
passage of his Epistle to the Romans™. The real self is loyal to
God ; yet the Christian sees within him a second self, warring
against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to
that which his central being, in its loyalty to God, energetically
rejects". Yet in this great conflict between the old and the new
self of the regenerate man, there is, we know, no real schism of
an indivisible person, although for the moment antagonist ele-
ments within the soul are so engaged as to look like separate
hostile agencies. The man’s lower nature is not a distinct
person, yet it has what is almost a distinct will, and what is
thus a shadow of the Created Will which Christ assumed along
with His Human Nature. Of course in the Incarnate Christ,
the Human Will, although a proper principle of action, was not,
m Rom. vii. 14-25. Origen, St. Chrysostom, and Theodoret understand
this passage of the state of man before regeneration. St. Augustine was of
this mind in his earlier theological life (Confess. vii. 21; Prop. 45 in Ep. ad
Rom., quoted by Meyer, Romer. p. 246), but his struggle with the Pelagian
heresy led him to understand the passage of the regenerate (Retractat. 1. 23,
ii. I; contr. duas Ep. Pelag. i. 10; contr. Faust. xv. 8). This judgment was
accepted by the great divines of the middle ages, St. Anselm and Aquinas,
and generally by the moderns; although of late there have been some earnest
efforts to revive the Greek interpretation. 2 Rom. vii. 17, 22, 23.
[ LECT.
with the Impersonality of Fis Manhood. 263
could not be, in other than the most absolute harmony with the
Will of God°. Christ’s sinlessness is the historical expression of
this harmony. The Human Will of Christ corresponded to the
Eternal Will with unvarying accuracy ; because in point of fact
- God, Incarnate in Christ, willed each volition of Christ's Human
Will. Christ’s Human Will then had a distinct existence, yet
Its free Volitions were but the earthly echoes of the Will of the
All-holyp. At*the Temptation It was confronted with the per-
sonal principle of evil; but the Tempter without was seconded
by no pulse of sympathy within. The Human Will of Christ
was incapable of willing evil. In Gethsemane It was thrown
forward into strong relief as Jesus bent to accept the chalice of
suffering from which His Human sensitiveness could not but
shrink. But from the first It was controlled by the Divine Will
to which It is indissolubly united ; just as, if we may use the
comparison, in a holy man, passion and impulse are brought
entirely under the empire of reason and consciences. As God
and Man, our Lord has two Wills; but the Divine Will origi-
nrates-ant tiles “His Action ; the Human’ Will is but the docile
servant of that Will of God which has its seat in Christ’s Divine
and Eternal Persont. Here indeed we touch upon the line at
which revealed truth shades off into inaccessible mystery. We
may not seek to penetrate the secrets of that marvellous θεανδρικὴ
ἐνέργεια: but at least we know that each Nature of Christ is
perfect, and that the Person which unites them is One and in-
dissolubles.
° This was the ground taken in the Sixth General Council, A.p. 680,
when the language of Chalcedon was adapted to meet the error of the Mono-
thelites. Avo φυσικὰς θελήσεις ἤτοι θελήματα ἐν αὐτῷ καὶ δύο φυσικὰς
ἐνεργείας ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀμερίστως, ἀσυγχύτως, κατὰ τὴν τῶν ἁγίων
πατέρων διδασκαλίαν κηρύττομεν, καὶ δύο φυσικὰ θελήματα οὐκ ὑπεναντία, μὴ
γένοιτο, καθὼς οἱ ἀσεβεῖς ἔφησαν αἱρετικοὶ, ἀλλ᾽ ἑπόμενον τὸ ἀνθρώπινον αὐτοῦ
θέλημα, καὶ μὴ ἀντιπίπτον, ἢ ἀντιπαλαῖον μᾶλλον μὲν οὖν καὶ ὑποτασσόμενον
τῷ θείῳ αὐτοῦ καὶ πανσθενεῖ θελήματι. Mansi, tom. xi. p. 637. Routh, Scr.
Op. ii. 236. Hooker, E. P. v. 48. 9
P ‘In ancient language, a twotold voluntas is quite compatible with a single
volitio.” Klee Dogmengesch. ii. 4. 6
a St. Maximus illustrates the two harmonious operations of the Two Wills ΄
in Christ, by the physical image of a heated sword which both cuts and burns.
Disp. cont. Pyrrh. apud Klee ubi sup.
r St. Ambros. de Fide, v. 6: “ Didicisti, quod omnia sibi Ipsi subjicere possit
secundum operationem utique Deitatis ; disce nunc quod secundum carnem
omnia subjecta accipiat.’
8 St. Leo, Ep. ad Flavianum, c. 4: ‘Qui verus est Deus, idem verus est
Homo; et nullum est in hic unitate mendacium, dum invicem sunt et hu-
militas hominis et altitudo deitatis. Agit enim utraque forma cum alterius
Υ]
264 Mystery, no reasonable bar to faith.
For the illustration of the Creed might at least remind us
that we carry about with us the mystery of a composite nature,
which should lead a thoughtful man to pause before pressing
such objections as are urged by modern scepticism against the
truth of the Incarnation. The Christ Who is revealed in the
Gospels and Who is worshipped by the Church, is rejected as
being ‘an unintelligible wonder!’ True, He is, as well in His
condescension as in His greatness, utterly beyond the scope of
our finite comprehensions. ‘Salva proprietate utriusque Nature,
et in unam coeunte personam, suscepta est a majestate humilitas,
a virtute infirmitas, ab eternitate mortalitast.’ We do not pro-
fess to solve the mystery of that Union between the Almighty,
Omniscient, Omnipresent Being, and a Human Life, with its
bounded powers, its limited knowledge, its restricted sphere.
We only know that in Christ, the finite and the Infinite are thus
united. But we can understand this mysterious union at least
as well as we can understand the union of such an organism as
the human body to a spiritual immaterial principle like the
human soul. How does spirit thus league itself with matter ?
Where and what is the life-principle of the body? Where is the
exact frontier-line between sense and consciousness, between
brain and thought, between the act of will and the movement of
muscle? Is human nature then so utterly commonplace, and
have its secrets been so entirely unravelled by contemporary
science, as entitle us to demand of the Almighty God that
when He reveals Himself to us He shall disrobe Himself of
mystery? If we reject His Self-revelation in the Person of
Jesus Christ on the ground of our inability to understand the
difficulties, great and undeniable, although not greater than we
might have anticipated, which do in fact surround it; are we
also prepared to conclude that, because we cannot explain how a
spiritual principle like the soul can be robed in and act through
a material body, we will therefore close our eyes to the argu-
ments which certify us that the soul is an immaterial essence,
and take refuge from this oppressive sense of mystery in some
doctrine of consistent materialism ?
communione quod proprium est ; Verbo scilicet operante quod Verbi est, et
carne exsequerte quod carnis est. Unum horum coruscat miraculis, alterum
succumbit injuriis.’ St. Joh. Damase. iii. 19: Θεοῦ ἐνανθρωπήσαντος, καὶ ἡ
ἀνθρωπίνη αὐτοῦ ἐνέργεια θεία ἦν, ἤγουν τεθεωμένη, καὶ οὐκ ἄμοιρος τῆς θείας
αὐτοῦ ἐνεργείας" καὶ ἡ θεία αὐτοῦ ἐνέργεια οὐκ ἄμοιρος τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης αὐτοῦ
ἐνεργείας" ἀλλ᾽ ἑκατέρα σὺν τῇ ἑτέρᾳ θεωρουμένη. He urges, here and in
iii. 15, that Two Natures imply Two Energies co-operating, for no nature is
avevepyntos. See St. Tho. 38, 19. 1. Ὁ St. Leo, Ep. ad Flavianum, c. 3.
[ LECT.
L[ncarnation, how related to Creation. 265
Certainly St. John’s doctrine of the Divinity of the Word
Incarnate cannot be reasonably objected to on the score of its
mysteriousness by those who allow themselves to face their real
ignorance of the mysteries of our human nature. Nor does that
doctrine involve a necessary internal self-contradiction on such a
ground as that ‘the Word by Whom all things were made, and
Who sustains all things, cannot become His Own creature.’ Un-
doubtedly the Word Incarnate does not cease to be the Word ;
but He can and does assume a Nature which He has created,
and in which He dwells, that in it He may manifest Himself.
Between the processes of Creation and Incarnation there is no
necessary contradiction in Divine revelation, such as is presumed
to exist by certain Pantheistic thinkers. He who becomes In-
carnate creates the form in which He manifests Himself simul-
taneously with the act of His Self-manifestation. Doubtless
when we say that God creates, we imply that He gives an exist-
ence to something other than Himself. On the other hand, it is
certain that He does in a real sense Himself exist in each created
object, not as being one with it, but as upholding it in being. He
is in every such object the constitutive, sustaining, binding force
‘which perpetuates its being. Thus in varying degrees the
creatures are temples and organs of the indwelling Presence of
the Creator, although in His Essence He is infinitely removed
from them. If this is true of the irrational and, in a lower
measure, even of the inanimate creatures, much more is it true
of the family of man, and of each member of that family. In
vast inorganic masses God discovers Himself as the supreme,
creative, sustaining Force. In the graduated orders of vital
power which range throughout the animal and vegetable worlds,
God unveils His activity as the Fountain of all life. In man, a _
creature exercising conscious reflective thought and free self-
determining will, God proclaims Himself a free Intelligent
Agent. Man indeed may, if he will, reveal much more than
this of the beauty of God. Man may shed abroad, by the free
movement of his will, rays of God’s moral glory, of love, of
mercy, of purity, of justice. Whether a man will thus declare
the glory of his Maker depends not upon the necessary con-
stitution of his nature, but upon the free co-operation of his will
with the ‘designs of God. God however is obviously able to
create a Being who will reveal Him perfectly and of necessity,
as expressing His perfect image and likeness before His creatures.
All nature points to such a Being as its climax and consumma-
tion. And such a Being is the Archetypal Manhood, assumed
my |
266 Origin of belief in the Godhead of Christ.
ce OE ee το τ εν. ΟΝ
by the Eternal Word. It is the climax of God's creation ; It is
the climax also of God’s Self-revelation. At this point God’s
creative activity becomes entirely one with His Self-revealing
activity. The Sacred Manhood is a creature, yet It is indis-
solubly united to the Eternal Word. It differs from every other
created being, in that God personally tenants It. So far then
are Incarnation and Creation from being antagonistic concep-
tions of the activity of God, that the absolutely Perfect Creature
only exists as a perfect reflection of the Divine glory. In the
Incarnation, God creates only to reveal, and He reveals perfectly
by That which He creates. ‘The Word was made flesh and
dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory™.’
VI. But if belief in our Lord’s Divinity, as taught by St. —
John, cannot be reasonably objected to on such grounds as have
been noticed, can it be destroyed by a natural explanation of its
upgrowth and formation? Here, undoubtedly, we touch upon a
suspicion which underlies much of the current scepticism of the
day ; and with a few words on this momentous topic we may
conclude the present lecture.
Those who reject the doctrine that Christ is God are con-
fronted by the consideration that, after the lapse of eighteen
centuries since His appearance on this earth, He is believed in
and worshipped as God by a Christendom which embraces the
most civilized portion of the human family. The question arises
how to account for this fact. There is no difficulty at all in
accounting for it if we suppose Him to be, and to have pro-
claimed Himself to be, a Divine Person. But if we hold that,
as a matter of history, He believed Himself to be a mere man,
how are we to explain the world-wide upgrowth of so extra-
ordinary a belief about Him, as is this belief in His Divinity?
Scepticism may fold its arms and may smile at what it deems
the intrinsic absurdity of the dogma believed in ; but it cannot
ignore the existing prevalence of the belief which accepts the
dogma, The belief is a phenomenon which at least challenges
attention. How has that belief been spread? How is it that
for eighteen hundred years, and at this hour, a conviction of the
truth of the Godhead of Jesus dominates over the world of
| Christian thought? Here, if scepticism would save its intellec-
tual credit, it must cease from the perpetual reiteration of doubts
and negations, unrelieved by any frank assertions or admissions
of positive truth. It must make a venture; it must commit
itself to the responsibilities of a positive position, however inexact
w On this subject, see Martensen, Christl. Dogmat. ὃ 132.
[ LECT,
Theory of ‘Deification by enthusiasm. 267
and shadowy ; it must hazard an hypothesis and ue prepared to
defend it.
Accordingly the theory which proposes to ες the belief
of Christendom in the Godhead of Christ maintains that Christ
was ‘deified’ by the enthusiasm of His first disciples. We are
told that ‘man instinctively creates a creed that shall meet the
wants and aspirations of his understanding and of his heart v.’
The teaching of Christ created in His first followers a passionate
devotion to His Person, and a desire for unreserved submission to
His dictatorship. Not that Christ’s Divinity was decreed Him by
any formal act of public honour ; it was the spontaneous and
irregular tribute of a passionate enthusiasm. Could any expres-
sion of reverence seem exaggerated to an admiration and a love
which knew no bounds? Could any intellectual price be too
high to pay for the advantage of placing the authority of the
Greatest of teachers upon that one basis of authority which is
beyond assault? Do not love and reverence, centring upon a
friend, upon a memory, with eager intensity, turn a somewhat
impatient ear to the cautious protestations of the critical reason,
when any such voice can make itself heard? Do they not pass
by imperceptible degrees into adoration? Does not adoration
take for granted the Divinity of the object which it has learned
imperceptibly and unreflectingly to adore? The enthusiasm
created by Jesus Christ in those around Him, thus comes to be
credited with the invention and propagation of the belief in His
Divinity. ‘So mighty was the enthusiasm, that nothing short
of that stupendous belief would satisfy it. The heart of
Christendom gave law to its understanding. Christians wished
Christ to be God, and they forthwith thought that they had
sufficient reasons for believing in His Godhead. The feeling of
a society of affectionate friends found its way in process of time
Into the world of speculation. It fell into the hands of the dia-
lecticians, and into the hands of the metaphysicians; it was
analysed, it was defined, it was coloured by contact with foreign
speculations ; it was enlarged by the accretion of new intellectual
material. At length Fathers and Councils had finished their
graceless and pedantic task, and that which had at first been the
fresh sentiment of simple and loving hearts was duly hardened
and rounded off into a solid block of repulsive dogma.’
Now St. John’s writings are a standing difficulty in the way
of this enterprising hypothesis.. We have seen that the fourth
Gospel must be recognised as St. John’s, unless, to use the words
v Feuerbach, Geist. 4, Christenth. Hinl.
v
268 St. “οληἷς writings fatal to the theory.
of Ewald, ‘we are prepared knowingly to receive falsehood and
to reject truth.” But we have also seen that in the fourth
Gospel, Jesus Christ is proclaimed to be God by the whole drift
of the argument, and in terms as explicit as those of the Nicene
Creed. We have not then to deal with any supposed process of
deification, whereby the Person of Jesus was ‘ transfigured ἡ in
the apprehension of sub-apostolic, or post-apostolic Christendom.
It is St. John who proclaims that Jesus is the Word Incarnate,
and that the Word is God. How can we account for St. John’s
conduct in representing Him as God, if He was in truth only
man? It will not avail to argue that St. John wrote his Gospel
in his old age, and that the memories of his youthful companion-
ship with Jesus had been coloured, heightened, transformed,
idealized, by the meditative enthusiasm of more than half a
century. It will not avail to say that the reverence of the
beloved disciple for his ascended Master was fatal to the accuracy
of the portrait which he drew of Him. For what is this but to
misapprehend the very fundamental nature of reverence? Truth
is the basis, as it is the object of reverence, not less than of
every other virtue. Reverence prostrates herself before a great-
ness the reality of which is obvious to her; but she would cease
to be reverence if she could exaggerate the greatness which pro-
vokes her homage, not less surely than if she could depreciate
or deny it. The sentiment which, in contemplating its object,
abandons the guidance of fact for that of imagination, is disloyal
to that honesty of purpose which is of the essence of reverence ;
and it is certain at last to subserve the purposes of the scorner
es the spoiler. St. John insists that he teaches the Church
only that which he has seen and heard. Even a slight swerving
from truth must be painful to genuine reverence; but what
shall we say of an exaggeration so gigantic, if an exaggeration
it be, as that which transforms a human friend into the Almighty
and Everlasting God? If Jesus Christ is not God, how is it
that the most intimate of His earthly friends, came to believe
and to teach that He really is God ?
Place yourselves, my brethren, fairly face to face with this
difficulty ; imagine yourselves, for the moment, in the position
of St. John. Think of any whom you have loved and revered,
beyond measure, as it has seemed, in past years. He has
gone; but you cling to him more earnestly in thought and
affection than while he was here. You treasure his words, you
revisit his haunts, you delight in the company of his friends, you
represent to yourself his wonted turus of thought and phrase,
[ LECT.
Could St. Fohn have ‘defied’ a human friend? 269
you con over his handwriting, you fondle his likeness. These
things are for you precious and sacred. Even now, there are
times when the tones of that welcome voice seem to fall with
living power upon your strained ear. Even now, the outline
of that countenance, upon which the grave has closed, flits, as
if capriciously, before your eye of sense. The air around you
yields it perchance to your intent gaze, radiant with a higher
beauty than it wore of old. Others, you feel, may be forgotten
as memory grows weak, and the passing years bring with them
the quick succession of new fields and objects of interest, press-
ing importunately upon the heart and thoughts. But one such
memory as I have glanced at, fades not at the bidding of time.
It cannot fade ; it has become a part of the mind which clings
to it. Some who are here may have known those whom they
thus remember ; a few of us assuredly have known such. But can
we conceive it possible that, after any lapse of time, we should
ever express our reverence and love for the unearthly goodness,
the moral strength, the tenderness of heart, the fearlessness, the
justice, the unselfishness of our friend, by saying that he was
not an ordinary human being, but a superhuman person? Can
we imagine ourselves incorporating our recollections about hin
with some current theosophic doctrine elevating him to the ran
of a Divine hypostasis? While he lies in his silent grave, can
we picture ourselves describing him as the very absolute Light
and Life, as the Incarnate Thought of the Most High, as stand-
ing in a relationship altogether unique to the Eternal and Self-
existent Being, nay, as being literally God? To say that ‘St.John
lived in a different intellectual atmosphere from our own,’ does
not meet the difficulty. If Jesus was merely human, St. John’s
statements about Him are among the most preposterous fictions
which have imposed upon the world. They were advanced with
a full knowledge of all that they involved. St.John was at least
as profoundly convinced as we are of the truth of the unity of
the Supreme Being. St.John was at least as alive as we can
be to the infinite interval which parts the highest of creatures
from the Great Creator. If we are not naturally lured on by
some irresistible fascination, by the poetry or by the credulity of
our advancing years, to believe in the Godhead of the best man
whom we have ever known, neither was St. John. If Jesus had
been merely human, St. John would have felt what we feel about
a loved and revered friend whom we have lost. In proportion
to our belief in our friend’s goodness, in proportion to our loving
aa for his character, is the strength of our conviction that
γ
“70 Mankind not prone to ‘defy’ human virtue.
we could not now do him a more cruel injury than by entwining’
a blasphemous fable, such as the ascription of Divinity would
be, around the simple story of his merely human life. This
‘ deification of Jesus by the enthusiasm’ of St. John would have
been consistent neither with St. John’s reverence for God, nor
with his real loyalty to a merely human friend and teacher.
St. John worshipped the ‘jealous’ God of Israel; and he has
recorded the warning which he himself received against wor-
shipping the angel of the Apocalypse*. If Christ had not really
been Divine, the real beauty of His Human Character would have
been disfigured by any association with such legendary exagge-
ration, and Christianity would assuredly have perished within the
limits of the first century.
The theory that Jesus was deified by enthusiasm assumes the
existence of a general disposition in mankind which is unwar-
ranted by experience. Generally speaking men are not eager to’
believe in the exalted virtue, much less in the superhuman origin
or dignity, of their fellow-men. And to do them justice, the
writers who maintain that Jesus was invested with Divine
honours by popular fervour, illustrate the weakness of their own
principle very conspicuously. While they assert that nothing
| was more easy and obvious for the disciple of the apostolic age
‘than to believe in the Divinity of his Master, they themselves
reject that truth with the greatest possible obstinacy and deter-
mination ; well-attested though it be, now as then, by historical
miracles and by overwhelming moral considerations ; but also
proclaimed now, as it was not then, by the faith of eighteen cen-
turies, and by the suffrages of all that is purest and truest in our
existing civilization.
But, it is suggested that the apostolic narrative itself bears
out the doctrine that Jesus was deified through enthusiasm by
its account of the functions which are ascribed, especially in
St. John’s Gospel, to the Comforter. Was not the Comforter
sent to testify of Jesus? Is it not said, ‘ He shall glorify Me?’
Does not this language look like the later endeavour of a
religious phrenzy, to account for exaggerations of which it is
conscious, by a bold claim to supernatural illumination ?
Now this suggestion implies that the last Discourse of our
Lord is in reality a forgery, which can no more claim to repre-
sent His real thought than the political speeches in Thucydides
can be seriously supposed to express the minds of the speakers
to whom they are severally attributed. Or, at the least, it im-
= Rev. xxil. 9.
[ LECT.
ee
--- “απο ἀπ ee
Llluminative Office of the Floly Ghost. 271
plies that a purely human feeling is here clothed by language
ascribed to our Lord Himself with the attributes of a Divine
Person. Of course, if St. John was capable of deliberately
attributing to his Master that which He did not say, he was
equally capable of attributing to Him actions which He did not
do; and we are driven to imagine that the closest friend of
Jesus was believed by apostolical Christendom to be writing a
history, when in truth he was only composing a biographical
novel. But, as Rousseau has observed in words which have
been already quoted, the original inventor of the Gospel history
would have been as miraculous a being as its historical Subject.
And the moral fascination which the last discourse possesses for
every pure and true soul at this hour, combines with the testi-
mony of the Church to assure us that it could have been spoken
by no merely human lips, and that it is beyond the inventive
scope of even the highest human genius. Those three chapters
which M. Renan pronounces to be full of ‘the dryness of meta-
physics and the darkness of abstract dogmas’ have been, as a
matter of fact, watered by the tears of all the purest love and
deepest sorrow of Christian humanity for eighteen centuries.
Never is the New Testament more able to dispense with external
evidence than in those matchless words; nowhere more than-
here is it sensibly divine.
Undoubtedly it is a fact that in these chapters our Lord does
promise to His apostles the supernatural aid of the Holy Spirit.
It is true that the Spirit was to testify of Christ ¥ and to glorify
Christ 4, and to guide the disciples into all @truth. But how?
‘He shall take of Mine and shall shew it unto you?;’ ‘ He shall
teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance
whatsoever 1 have said unto you’. The Holy Spirit was to
bring the words and works and character of Jesus before the
illuminated intelligence of the Apostles. The school of the
Spirit was to be the school of reflection. But it was not to be
the school of legendary invention. Acts, which, at the time of
their being witnessed, might have appeared trivial or common-
place, would be seen, under the guidance of the Spirit, to have
had a deeper interest. Words, to which a transient or local
y St. John xv. 26: ἐκεῖνος μαρτυρήσει περὶ ἐμοῦ.
2 Tbid. xvi. 14: ἐκεῖνος ἐμὲ δοξάσει.
5 Thid. ver. 13: ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν.
Ὁ Ibid. vers. 14. 15: ἐκ τοῦ ἐμοῦ λήψεται, καὶ ἀναγγελεῖ ὑμῖν.
© Tbid. xiv. 26: ἐκεῖνος Suds διδάξει πάντα, καὶ ὑπομνήσει ὑμᾶς πάντα ἃ
+ εἶπον ὑμῖν.
v]
242 Guidance of the Spirit and natural observation.
value had been assigned at first, would now be felt to invite
a world-wide and eternal meaning. ‘These things understood
not His disciples at the first,’ is true of much else besides the
entry into Jerusalem 4, Moral, spiritual, physical powers which,
though unexplained, could never have passed for the product of
purely human activity, would in time be referred by the Invisible
Teacher to their true source ; they would be regarded with awe
as the very rays of Deity.
Thus the work of the Spirit would but complete, systematize,
digest the results of previous natural observation, Certainly it
was always impossible that any man could ‘say that Jesus is
the Lord but by the Holy Ghost®.’ The inward teaching of the
Holy Ghost alone could make the Godhead of Jesus a certainty
of faith as well as a conclusion of the intellect. But the intel-
lectual conditions of belief were at first inseparable from natural
contact with the living Human Form of Jesus during the years
of His earthly life. Our Lord implies this in saying ‘ Ye also
shall bear witness, because ye have been with Me from the
beginning.’ The Apostles lived with One Who combined an
exercise of the highest miraculous powers with a faultless human
character, and Who asserted Himself, by implication and ex-
pressly, to be personally God. The Spirit strengthened and
formalized that earlier and more vague belief which was created
by His language ; but it was His language which had fallen on
the natural ears of the Apostles, and which was the germinal
principle of their riper faith in His Divinity.
The unbelief of our day is naturally anxious to evade the
startling fact that the most intimate of the companions of Jesus
is also the most strenuous assertor of His Godhead. There is a
proverb to the effect that no man’s life should be written by his
private servant. That proverb expresses the general conviction
of mankind that, as a rule, like some mountain scenery or ruined
castles, moral greatness in men is more picturesque when it is
viewed from a distance. The proverb bids you not to scrutinize
even a good man too narrowly, lest perchance you should dis-
cover flaws in his character which will somewhat rudely shake
your conviction of his goodness. It is hinted that some un-
obtrusive weaknesses which escape public observation will be
obvious to a man’s everyday companion, and will be fatal to the
higher estimate which, but for such close scrutiny, might have
been formed respecting him, But in the case of Jesus Christ
ἃ St. John xii. 14-16.
© 1 Cor. xii. 3 : οὐδεὶς δύναται εἰπεῖν Κύριον Ἰησοῦν, εἰ μὴ ἐν Πνεύματι ᾿Αγίῳ.
[ LECT.
ἘΞ ὈὨἨὨλὈἈὈἐήὀςοςςἨςὈωυοοοο)υ;υρυ͵ξσ͵σοτπτπτπ͵π͵ῆ͵τ͵Ἢ͵ . .:.Ῥ͵ὄὄ ΦῤἐΦὁἘ --
Szenijicance of St.F ohn’s intimacy with ourLord 273
a I
the moral of this cynical proverb is altogether at fault. Jesus
Christ chooses one disciple to be the privileged sharer of a
nearer intimacy than any other. The son of Zebedee lies upon
His bosom at supper; he is ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’
Along with St. Peter and St. James, this disciple is taken to the
holy mount, that he may witness the glory of his Transfigured
Lord. He enters the empty tomb on the morning of the Resur-
rection. He is in the upper chamber when the risen Jesus
blessed the ten and the eleven. He is on the mount of the
Ascension when the Conqueror moves up visibly into heaven.
But he also is summoned to the garden where Jesus kneels in
agony beneath the olive-trees ; and alone of the twelve he faces
the fierce multitude on the road to Calvary, and stands with
Mary beneath the cross, and sees Jesus die. He sees more of
the Divine Master than any other, more of His glory, more too
of His humiliation. His witness is proportioned to his nearer
and closer observation. Whether he is writing Epistles of en-
couragement and warning, or narrating heavenly visions touch-
ing the future of the Church, or recording the experiences of
those years when he enjoyed that intimate, unmatched com-
panionship,—St. John, beyond any other of the sacred writers,
is the persistent herald and teacher of our Lord’s Divinity.
How and by what successive steps it was that the full truth
embodied in his Gospel respecting the Person of his Lord made
its way into and mastered the soul of the beloved disciple, who
indeed shall presume to say? Who of us can determine the
exact and varied observations whereby we learn to measure and
to revere the component elements even of a great human cha-
racter? The absorbing interest of such a process is generally
fatal to an accurate analysis of its stages. We penetrate deeper
and deeper, we mount higher and higher, as we follow the
complex system of motives, capacities, dispositions, which, one
after another, open upon us. We cannot, on looking back, say
when this or that feature became distinctly clear to us. We
know not now by what additions and developments the general
impression which we have received took its shape and outline.
St. John would doubtless have learnt portions of the mighty
truth from definite statements and at specified times. The real
sense of prophecy‘, the explicit confessions of disciplese, the
* St. John xii. 41: ταῦτα εἶπεν Ἡσαΐας, ὅτε εἶδε τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, καὶ
ἐλάλησε περὶ αὐτοῦ. Isa. vi. 9.
8. St.John i. 49. After our Lord’s words implying His omnipresence,
Nathanael says, ῬῬαββὶ, σὺ ef ὁ Ὑἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ.
τ
~
274 The most intimate companionship with F esus
assertions by which our Lord replied to the malice or to the
ignorance of His opponents), were doubtless distinct elements
of the Apostle’s training in the school of truth. St. John must
have learned something of Christ’s Divine power when, at His
word, the putrid corpse of Lazarus, bound with its grave-clothes,
moved forward into air and life. St. John must have learned
yet more of his Master’s condescension when, girded with a
towel, Jesus bent Himself to the earth, that He might wash the
feet of the traitor Judas. Each miracle, each discourse supplied
a distinct ray of light ; but the total impression must have been
formed, strengthened, deepened, by the incidents of daily inter-
course, by the effects of hourly, momentary observation. For
every human soul, encased in its earthly prison-house, seeks and
finds publicity through countless outlets. The immaterial spirit
traces its history with an almost invisible delicacy upon the
coarse hard matter which is its servant and its organ. The un-
conscious, involuntary movements of manner and countenance,
the unstudied phrases of daily or of casual conversation, the
emphasis of silence not less than the emphasis of speech, help in
various ways to complete that self-revelation which every indi-
vidual character makes to all around, and which is studied by
all in each. Not otherwise did the Incarnate Word reveal Him-
self to the purest and keenest love which He found and chose
from among the sons of men. One flaw or fault of temper, one
symptom of moral impotence, or of moral perversion, one hasty
word, one ill-considered act, would have shattered the ideal for
ever. But, in fact, to St. John the Life of Jesus was as the light
of heaven; it was as one constant unfailing outflow of beauty,
ever varying its illuminating powers as it falls upon the leaves of
the forest oak or upon the countless ripples of the ocean. In the
eyes of St. John the Eternal Person of Jesus shone forth through
His Humanity with translucent splendour, and wove and folded
around itself, as the days and weeks passed on, a moral history
of faultless grandeur. It was not the disciple who idealized the
Master ; it was the Master Who revealed Himself in His majestic
glory to the illumined eye and to the entranced touch of the
disciple. No treachery of memory, no ardour of temperament,
no sustained reflectiveness of soul, could have compassed the
transformation of a human friend into the Almighty and Ever-
lasting Being. Nor was there room for serious error of judg-
ment after a companionship so intimate, so heart-searching, so
h St. John viii. 58, &c,
[ LECT.
i .
a ὺὖΠὖὁλὁλὁ ΒΒ ΒΘΦΘΦΘΦ Φ ῦ ῦ ῇῇ ῇΦ Φ ΦὋΦὋΦὋΦὋΦὋΦὋΦῬῬ''''
essues in the strongest assertions of [11s Divinity. 275
π ΠΉΈΌ ἝΞΡ θὀθθθοσοο ς΄
true, as had been that of Jesus with St. John. And thus to the
beloved disciple the Divinity of his Lord was not a scholastic
formula, nor a pious conjecture, nor a controversial thesis, nor
the adaptation of a popular superstition to meet the demands of
a strong enthusiasm, nor a mystic reverie. It was nothing less
than a fact of personal experience. ‘That Which was from the
beginning, Which we have heard, Which we have seen with our
eyes, Which we have looked upon and our hands have handled,
of the Word of Life ; (for the Life was manifested, and we have
seen It, and bear witness, and shew unto you that Eternal Life,
Which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us ;) That
Which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.’
LECTURE VI.
OUR LORD’S DIVINITY AS TAUGHT BY ST. JAMES,
ST. PETER, AND ST. PAUL.
And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived
the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the
right hands of fellowship ; that we should go unto the heathen, and they
unto the circumcision.—GAL. ii. 9.
Tie meditative temper of thought and phrase, which is so ob-
servable in St. John, may be thought to bear in two different
manners upon the question before us in these lectures. On the
one hand, such a temper, regarded from a point of view entirely
naturalistic, must be admitted to be a guarantee against the pre-
sumption that St. John, in his enthusiastic devotion to Jesus,
committed himself to hasty beliefs and assertions respecting the
Person of his Friend and Master. An over-eager and undis-
criminating admiration would not naturally express itself in
metaphysical terminology of a reflective and mystical character.
But on the other hand, it may be asked whether too much stress
has not been laid by the argument of the last lecture upon the
witness of St.John? Can the conclusions of a mind of high-
strung and contemplative temper be accepted as little less, if at
all less, than a sufficient basis for a cardinal point of belief in the
religion of mankind? May not such a belief be inextricably
linked to the moral and intellectual idiosyncrasies of the single
soul? The belief may indeed be the honest and adequate result
of that particular measure and kind of observation and reflection
which a single mind has achieved. As such the belief may be
a. worthy object of philosophical interest and respect ; but is not
this respect and interest due to it on the precise ground that it
is the true native product of a group of conditions, which co-
exist nowhere else save in the particular mind which generated
it? Will the belief, in short, bear transplantation into the moral
and mental soil around? Can it be nourished and handed on
[ LECT.
=
St. Fohn’s Christology, shared by the other apostles. 277
by minds of a different calibre, by characters of a distinct cast
from that in which it originally grew? Dr. Samuel Johnson,
for instance, had private beliefs which were obviously due to the
tone and genius of his particular character. These beliefs go far
to constitute the charm of the picture with which we are familiar
in the pages of Boswell. But our respect for Dr. Johnson does
not force us to accept each and all of his quaint beliefs. They
are peculiar to himself, being such as he was. We admire them
as belonging to the attractive and eccentric individuality of the
man. We do not suppose that they are capable of being domes-
ticated in the general and diversified mind of England.
Now, if it be hinted that some similar estimate should be
formed respecting St. John’s doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity, the
present, for obvious reasons, is not the moment to insist upon a
consideration which for us Christians must have paramount
weight, namely, that St. John was taught by .an infallible
Teacher, by none other than God the Holy Ghost. But let us
remark, first of all, the fact that St. John did convey to a large
circle of minds his own deep conviction that his Friend and
Master was a Divine Person; paradoxical as that conviction
must at first have seemed to them. If we could have travelled
through Asia Minor at the end of the first century of our era,
we should have fallen in with a number of persons, in various
ranks of society, who so entirely believed in St. John’s doctrine,
as to be willing to die for it without any kind of hesitationa,
But it would have been a mistake to suppose that the prevalence
of the doctrine was due only to the activity of St. John. While
St. John was teaching this doctrine under the form which he
had been guided to adopt, a parallel communication of the sub-
stance of the doctrine was taking place in several other quarters.
St. John was supported, if I may be allowed to use such an ex-
pression, by men whose minds were of a totally distinct natural
cast, and who expressed their thoughts in a religious phraseology
which had little enough in common with that which was current
in the school of Ephesus. Nevertheless it will be our duty this
8 The Apocalypse was probably written immediately after Domitian’s
persecution of the Church. Antipas had been martyred at Pergamos.
(Rey. ii. 13.) St. John saw the souls of martyrs who had been beheaded
with the axe; εἶδον τὰς ψυχὰς τῶν πεπελεκισμένων διὰ THY μαρτυρίαν ᾿Ιησοῦ.
(Rev. xx. 4.) This was the Roman custom at executions. In the perse-
cution under Nero other and more cruel kinds of death had been inflicted.
The Bishops of Pergamos (Ibid. ii. 13) and Philadelphia (1bid. iii. 8) had
confessed Christ. St. Clement of Rome alludes to the violence of this perse-
cution. (Ep. ad Cor. 6.) The Apostle himself was banished to Patmos.
vi |
“78 Doctrinal bearings of the meeting at Ferusalem.
morning to observe, how radical was their agreement with
St. John, in urging upon the acceptance of the human race the
doctrine that Jesus Christ is God.
Very ingenious theories concerning a supposed division of the
Apostolical Church into schools of thought holding antagonistic
beliefs, have been advanced of late years. And they have had
the effect of directing a large amount of attention to the account
which St. Paul gives, in his Epistle to the Galatians, of his inter-
view with the leading Apostles at Jerusalem. The accuracy of
that account is not questioned even by the most destructive of
the Tiibingen divines. According to St. Irenzeus and the great
majority of authorities, both ancient and modern, the interview
took place on the occasion of St. Paul’s attendance at the Apo-
stolical Council of Jerusalem. St. Paul says that St. James,
St. Peter, and St. John, who were looked upon as ‘pillars’ of
the Church, among the Judaizing Christians as well as among
Christians generally, gave the right hands of fellowship to him-
self and to Barnabas. ‘It was agreed,’ says St. Paul, ‘that we
should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision.’
Now the historical interest which attaches to this recorded
division of labour among the leading Apostles, is sufficiently
obvious ; but the dogmatic interest of the passage, although less
direct, is even higher than the historical. This passage warrants
us in inferring at least thus much ;—that the leading Apostles
of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ were not hopelessly at
issue with each other on a subject of such central and primary
importance as the Divine and Eternal Nature of their Master.
It might well seem, at first sight, that to draw such an
inference at all within the walls of a Christian church was itself
an act for which the faith of Christians would exact an apology.
But those who are acquainted with the imaginative licence of
recent theories will not deem our inference altogether im-
pertinent and superfluous. Of late years St. James has been
represented as more of a Jew than a Christian, and as holding
in reality a purely Ebionitic and Humanitarian belief as to the
Person of Jesus. St. Paul has been described as the teacher of
such a doctrine of the Subordination of the Son as to be prac-
tically Arian. St. Peter is then exhibited as occupying a feeble
undecided dogmatic position, intermediate to the doctrines of
St. Paul and St. James; while all the three are contrasted with
the distinct and lofty Christology, said to be proper to the gnosis
of St. John. Now, as has been already remarked, the historical
trustworthiness of the passage in the Galatians has not been
[ LECT.
|
.
re ’’“ - “ὁ ὁ
Lhe Apostles not indifferent to doctrinal truth. 279
disputed even by the Tiibingen divines. That passage repre-
sents St. John as intimately associated, not merely with St. Peter
but with St. James. It moreover represents these three apostles
as giving pledges of spiritual co-operation and fellowship, from
their common basis of belief and action, to the more recent con-
vert St. Paul. Is it to be supposed that St. Paul could have
been thus accepted as a fellow-worker on one and the same
occasion by the Apostle who is said to be a simple Humani-
tarian, and by the Apostle whose whole teaching centres in Jesus
considered as the historical manifestation of the Eternal Word ?
Or are we to imagine that the apostles of Christ anticipated
that indifference to doctrinal exactness which is characteristic
of some modern schools? Did they regard the question of our
Lord’s Personal Godhead as a kind of speculative curiosity ; as
a scholastic conceit; as having no necessary connexion with
vital, essential, fundamental Christianity? And is St. Paul, in
his Epistle to the Galatians, only describing the first great ec-
clesiastical compromise, in which truths of primary importance
were sacrificed for an immediate practical object, more ruthlessly
than on any subsequent occasion ?
My brethren, the answer to these questions could not be
really doubtful to any except the most paradoxical of modern
theorists. To say nothing of St. Peter and St. Jude, St. Paul’s
general language on the subject of heresy», and St. John’s parti-
cular application of such terms as ‘the liar’ and ‘antichrist δ᾽’ to
Cerinthus and other heretics, make the supposition of such in-
difference as is here in question, in the case of the apostles,
utterly inadmissible. If the apostles had differed vitally respect-
_ ing the Person of Christ, they would have shattered the work of
Pentecost in its infancy. And the terms in which they speak of
each other would be reduced to the level of meaningless or
Ὁ He speaks of αἱρέσεις in the sense of sectarian movements tending to or
resulting in separation from the Church, as a form of evil which becomes the
unwilling instrument of good (1 Cor. xi. 19). And αἱρέσεις are thus classed
among the works of the flesh (Gal. v. 20). Using the word in its sense of
dogmatic error on vital points, St. Paul bids Titus reject a ‘heretic’ after
two warnings from the communion of the Church: αἱρετικὸν ἄνθρωπον μετὰ
μίαν καὶ δευτέραν νουθεσίαν παραιτοῦ (Tit. iii. 10). On the inviolate sacred-
ness of the apostolical doctrine, cf. Gal. i. 8: ἐὰν ἡμεῖς ἢ ἄγγελος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ
εὐαγγελίζηται ὑμῖν παρ᾽ ὃ εὐηγγελισάμεθα ὑμῖν, ἀνάθεμα ἔστω. Cf. 2 Pet. ii. 1.
~ ¢ 1 St. John ii. 22: τίς ἐστιν ὃ ψεύστης, εἰ μὴ ὁ ἀρνούμενος ὅτι Ἰησοῦς οὐκ
ἔστιν ὁ Χριστός ; οὗτός ἐστιν ὃ ἀντίχριστος, ὃ ἀρνούμενος τὸν Πατέρα καὶ τὸν
Yidv. πᾶς 6 ἀρνούμενος τὸν Tidy, οὐδὲ τὸν Πατέρα ἔχει, Cf. Ibid. iv. 3;
2 St. John 7.
VI |
280 The Apostles preach one Divine Christ.
insincere conventionalities 4. Considering that the Gospel pre-
sented itself to the world as an absolute and exclusive draught
of Divine truth, contrasted as such with the perpetually-shifting
forms of human thought around it; we may deem it ante-
cedently probable, that those critics are mistaken, who profess
estion as the Personal Rank of Christ in the scale of being.
Undoubtedly it is true that as the Evangelists approach the
Person of our Lord from distinct points of view, so do the
writers of the apostolic epistles represent different attitudes of
the human soul towards the one evangelical truth ; and in this
way they impersonate types of thought and feeling which have
ever since found a welcome and a home in the world-embracing
Church of Jesus Christ. St. James insists most earnestly on the
moral obligations of Christian believers ; and he connects the Old
Testament with the New by shewing the place of the law, now
elevated and transfigured into a law of liberty, in the new life of
Christians. He may indeed for a moment engage in the refuta-
tion of a false doctrine of justification by faithe. But this is
because such a doctrine prevents Christians from duly recogniz-
ing those moral and spiritual truths and obligations upon which
the Apostle is most eagerly insisting. Throughout his Epistle,
doctrine is, comparatively speaking, thrown into the background;
he is intent upon practical considerations, to the total, or well-
nigh total, exclusion of doctrinal topics. St. Paul, on the other
hand, abounds in dogmatic statements. Still, in St. Paul, doc-
ἃ St, Paul associates himself with the other apostles as bearing the stress
of a common confessorship for Christ (2 Cor. xii. 12). The apostles are,
together with the prophets, the foundations of the Church (Eph. ii. 20).
The apostles are first in order (Eph. iv. 11). Although the grace of God in
himself had laboured more abundantly than all the apostles, St. Paul terms
himself the least of the apostolic college (1 Cor. xv. 9). The equality of the
Gentile believers in Christ with the Jewish believers was a truth made known
to St. Paul by special revelation, and he called it his Gospel; but it implied
no properly doctrinal difference between himself and the apostles of the
circumcision. The harmonious action of the apostles as a united spiritual
corporation is implied in such passages as 2 Pet. iii. 2, St. Jude 17; and neither
of these passages affords ground for Baur’s inference respecting the post-
apostolic age of the writer. In 2 St. Pet. iii. 15, 16, St. Peter distinguishes
between the real mind of ‘our beloved brother Paul’ as being in perfect
agreement with his own, and the abuse which had been made by teachers of
error of certain difficult truths put forward in the Pauline Epistles: δυσνόητά
τινα, ἃ of ἀμαθεῖς Kal ἀστήρικτοι στρεβλοῦσιν ὡς καὶ Tas λοιπὰς γραφὰς, πρὸς
τὴν ἰδίαν αὐτῶν ἀπώλειαν. © St. James ii. 14-26.
[ LECT.
Lhey exhibit distinct types of the one doctrine. 281
trine is, at least, generally brought forward with a view to
some immediate practical object. Only in five out of his four-
teen Epistles can the doctrinal element be said very decidedly to
predominatef. St. Paul assumes that his readers have gone
through a course of oral instruction in necessary Christian doc-
trine& ; he accordingly completes, he expands, he draws out into
its consequences what had been already taught by himself or by
others. St. Paul’s fiery and impetuous style is in keeping with
his general relation, throughout his Epistles, to Christian dogma.
The calm enunciation of an enchained series of consequences
flowing from some central or supreme truth is perpetually in-
terrupted, in St. Paul, by the exclamations, the questions, the
parentheses, the anacoloutha, the quotations from liturgies, the
solemn ascriptions of glory to the Source of all blessings, the
outbursts by which argument suddenly melts into stern denun-
ciation, or into versatile expostulation, or into irresistible appeals
to sympathy, or into the highest strains of lyrical poetry. Thus
it is that in St. Paul primary dogma appears, as it were, rather
in flashes of light streaming with rapid coruscations across his
pages, than in highly elaborated statements such as might
abound throughout a professed doctrinal treatise of some later
age ; and yet doctrine, although it might seem to be introduced
incidentally to some general or special purpose, nevertheless is
inextricably bound up with the Apostle’s whole drift of practical
thought. As for St. John, he is always a contemplative and
f And yet in these five Epistles an immediate practical purpose is generally
discernible. In the Romans the Apostle is harmonizing the Jewish and
Gentile elements within the Catholic Church, by shewing that each section is
equally indebted to faith in Jesus Christ for a real justification before God.
In the Galatians he is opposing this same doctrinal truth to the destructive
and reactionary theory of the Judaizers. In the Ephesians and Colossians
he is meeting the mischievous pseudo-philosophy and Cabbalism of the ear-
liest Gnostics, here positively and devotionally, there polemically, by insist-
ing on the dignity of our Lord’s Person, and the mystery of His relation to
the Church. In the Hebrews, written either by St. Paul himself or by
St. Luke under his direction, our Lord’s Person and Priesthood are exhibited
in their several bearings as a practical reason against apostasy to Judaism (it
would seem) of an Alexandrian type.
8 1 Thess. iii. 10: νυκτὸς καὶ ἡμέρας ὑπὲρ ἐκ περισσοῦ δεόμενοι εἰς τὸ ἰδεῖν
ὑμῶν τὸ πρόσωπον, καὶ καταρτίσαι τὰ ὑστερήματα τῆς πίστεως ὑμῶν. The
Apostle desires to see the Roman Christians, not that he may teach them any
supplementary truths, but to confirm them in their existing belief (εἰς τὸ
στηριχθῆναι ὑμᾶς, Rom.i. 11) by the interchange of spiritual sympathies with
himself. See 1 Cor. xv. 1; Gal. i. 11, 12, iv. 13, 14; 1 Thess. ii. 2;
2 Thess. ii. 15. Compare 1 St. John ii. 21: οὐκ ἔγραψα ὑμῖν, ὅτι οὐκ οἴδατε
Thy ἀλήθειαν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι οἴδατε αὐτήν.
vi |
282 St. Fames erroneously deemed E:bronrtiec.
mystical theologian. The eye of his soul is fixed on God, and
on the Word Incarnate. St. John simply describes his intui-
tions. He does not argue; he asserts. He looks up to heaven,
and as he gazes he tells us what he sees. He continually takes
an intuition, as it were, to pieces, and recombines it ; he resists
forms of thought which contradict it; but he does not engage
in long arguments, as if he were a dialectician, defending or
attacking a theological thesis. Nor is St. John’s temper any
mere love of speculation divorced from practice. Each truth
which the Apostle beholds, however unearthly and sublime, has
a directly practical and transforming power; St. John knows
nothing of realms of thought which leave the heart and con-
science altogether untouched. Thus, speaking generally, the
three Apostles respectively represent the moralist, the practical
dogmatist, and the saintly mystic; while St. Peter, as becomes
the Apostle first in order in the sacred college, seems to blend
in himself the three types of apostolical teachers. His Epistles
are not without elements that more especially characterize
St. John; while they harmonize in a very striking manner
those features of St. Paul and St. James which seem most nearly
to approach divergence. It may be added that St. Peter’s
second Epistle finds its echo in St. Jude.
I. 1. The marked reserve which is observable in St. James’
Epistle as to matters of doctrine, combined with his emphatic
allusions to the social duties attaching to property and to class
distinctions, have been taken to imply that this Epistle repre-
sents what is assumed by some theories of development to have
been the earliest form of Christianity. The earliest Christians
are sometimes referred to, as having been, both in their Christ-
ology and in their sociological doctrines, Ebionites. But St.
James’ Epistle is so far from belonging to the teaching of the
earliest apostolical age, that it presupposes nothing less than a
very widespread and indirect effect of the distinctive teaching
of St.Paul. St. Paul’s emphatic teaching respecting faith as the
receptive cause of justification must have been promulgated long
enough and widely enough to have been perverted into a parti-
cular gnosis of an immoral Antinomian type. With that gnosis
St. James enters into earnest conflict. Baur indeed maintains
that St. James is engaged in a vehement onslaught upon the
actual teaching, upon the ipsissuema verba, of St. Paul himself},
h Baur, Vorlesungen, tiber N. T. Theologie, p. 277: ‘In dem Brief
Jacobi dagegen begegnet uns nun eine auf den Mittelpunkt der paulinischen
[ LECT.
flis Epistle belongs to the later A postolical age. 283
Now even if you should adopt that paradox, you would still
obviously be debarred from saying that St. James’ Epistle is a
sample of the earliest Christianity, of the Christianity of the pre-
Pauline age of the Churchi. But in point of fact, as Bishop Bull
and others have long since shewn, St. James is attacking an
evil which, although it presupposes and is based upon St. Paul’s
teaching, is as foreign to the mind of St. Paul as to his own.
The justification by faith without works which is denounced by
St. James is a corruption and a caricature of that sublime truth
which is taught us by the author of the Epistles to the Romans
and the Galatians. Correspondent to the general temper of mind
which, in the later apostolical age, began to regard the truths of
faith and morals only as an addition to the intellectual stock of
human thinkers, there arose a conception of faith itself which de-
graded it to the level of mere barren consent on the part of the
speculative faculty. This ‘faith’ had no necessary relations to
holiness and moral growth, to sanctification of the affections, and
subdual of the will‘. Thus, for the moment, error had imposed
upon the sacred name of faith a sense which emptied it utterly of
its religious value, and which St. Paul would have disavowed as
_ vehemently as St. James. St. James denies that this mere con-
sent of the intellect to a speculative position, carrying with it no
_ necessary demands upon the heart and upon the will, can justify
_ Lehre losgehende Opposition. Dem paulinischen Hauptsatz Rém. iii. 28 :
᾿ δικαιοῦσθαι πίστει ἀνθρώπον, χωρὶς ἔργων νόμου wird nun hier der Satz entge-
gengestellt, Jac. il. 24: ὅτι ἐξ ἔργων δικαιοῦται ἄνθρωπος, καὶ οὐκ ex πίστεως
μόνον. Alle Versuche, die man gemacht hat, um der Anerkennung der
Thatsache zu entgehen, dass ein directer Widerspruch zwischen diesen beiden
_ Lehrbegriffen stattfinde und der Verfasser des Jacobusbriefs die paulinische
_ Lehre zum unmittelbaren Gegenstand seiner Polemik mache, sind villig ver-
_ geblich.” In his Christenthum (p.122) Baur speaks in a somewhat less
| peremptory sense. St. James ‘ bekiimpft eine einseitige, fiir das praktische
_ Christenthum nachtheilige Auffassung der paulinischen Lehre.’
i Baur, Christenthum, p. 122: ‘Der Brief des Jacobus, wie unméglich
_verkannt werden kann, die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre voraussetzt, so
_ kann er auch nur eine antipaulinische, wenn auch nicht unmittelbar gegen
_ den Apostel selbst gerichtete Tendenz haben.’
Kk Messmer, Erkl. des Jacobus-briefes, p. 38: ‘Der glaube ist bei Jacobus
nichts anders als die Annahme, der Besitz oder auch das leere Bekenntniss
der christlichen Wahrheiten (sowohl der Glaubens-als-Sitten-wahrheiten, )
Resultat des blossen Hérens und eigentlich bloss in der Erkenntniss liegend.
-... Hin solcher Glaube kann fiir sich, wie ein unfruchtbarer Keim, véllig
wirkungslos fiir das Leben in Menschen liegen, oder auch in leeren Gefiihlen
bestehen; er ist nichts als N amen-und-Scheinchristenthum, das keine Heilig-
keit hervorbringt..... Das, was diesem Glauben erst die Seele einhaucht,
ist die gottliche Liebe, durch welche der Wille und alle Kriifte des Menschen
zum Dienste des Glaubens gefangen genommen werden,’
1]
“84 St. Fames teaching on gustification
a man before God. But when St. Paul speaks of justifying ©
faith, he means an act of the soul, simple indeed at the moment
and in the process of its living action, but complex in its real
nature, and profound and far-reaching in its moral effect. The
eye of the soul is opened upon the Redeemer : it believes. But
in this act of living belief, not the intellect alone, but in reality,
although imperceptibly, the whole soul, with all its powers of
love and resolution, goes forth to meet its Saviour. This is
St. Paul’s meaning when he insists upon justifying faith as being
πίστις δὶ ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη]. Faith, according to St. Paul,
when once it lives in the soul, is all Christian practice in the
germ. The living apprehension of the Crucified One, whereby
the soul attains light and liberty, may be separable in idea,
but in fact it is inseparable from a Christian life. If the ©
apprehension of revealed truth does not carry within itself the
secret will to yield the whole being to God’s quickening grace
and guidance, it is spiritually worthless, according to St. Paul.
St. Paul goes so far as to tell the Corinthians, that even a faith
which was gifted with the power of performing stupendous
miracles, if it had not charity, would profit nothing™. Thus
between St. Paul and St. James there is no real opposition.
When St. James speaks of a faith that cannot justify, he means
a barren intellectual consent to certain religious truths, a philo-
sophizing temper, cold, thin, heartless, soulless, morally impo-
tent, divorced from the spirit as from the fruits of charity.
When δύ. Paul proclaims that we are justified by faith in Jesus
Christ, he means a faith which only realizes its life by love, and
which, if it did not love, would cease to live. When St. James
contends that ‘by works a man is justified, and not by faith
only,’ he implies that faith is the animating motive which gives
to works their justifying power, or rather that works only
justify as being the expression of a living faith. When St. Paul
argues that a man is justified neither by the works of the Jewish
law, nor by the works of natural morality, his argument shews
that by a ‘ work’ he means a mere material result or product, a
soulless act, unenlivened by the presence of that one supernatural —
motive which, springing from the grace of Christ, can be indeed
1 Gal. v. 6.
m 1 Cor. xiii. 2: ἐὰν ἔχω πᾶσαν τὴν πίστιν, ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάνειν, ἀγάπην
δὲ μὴ ἔχω, οὐδέν εἰμι. The γνῶσις of 1 Cor. viii. 1 seems to be substantially
identical with the bare πίστις denounced by St. James, although the former —
was probably of a more purely scientific and intellectual character. The
ἀγάπη of I Cor. viii. 1 is really the πίστις δι’ ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη of Gal.v. 6.
[ Lect.
presupposes the Christology of St.Paul. 285
acceptable to a perfectly holy God. But if on the question of
justification St. James’ position is in substance identical with
that of St. Paul, yet St. James’ position, viewed historically, does
undoubtedly presuppose not merely a wide reception of St. Paul’s
teaching, but a perverse development of one particular side of it.
In order to do justice to St. James, we have to contemplate first,
the fruitless ‘faith’ of the Antinomian, with which the Apostle
is immediately in conflict, and which he is denouncing ; next,
the living faith of the Christian believer, as insisted upon by
St. Paul, and subsequently caricatured by the Antinomian per-
version ; lastly, the Object of the believer’s living faith, Whose
Person and work are so prominent in St. Paul’s teaching. It is
not too much to say that all this is in the mind of St. James.
But there was no necessity for his insisting upon what was well
understood ; he says only so much as is necessary for his imme-
diate purpose. His Epistle is related to the Pauline Epistles in
the general scheme of the New Testament, as an explanatory
codicil might be to a will. The codicil does not the less repre-
sent the mind of the testator because it is not drawn up by the
same lawyer as the will itself. The codicil is rendered necessary
by some particular liability to misconstruction, which has be-
come patent since the time at which the will was drawn up.
Accordingly the codicil defines the real intention of the testator;
it guards that intention against the threatened misconstruction.
But it does not repeat in detail all the provisions of the will, in
order to protect the true sense of a single clause. Still less does
it revoke any one of those provisions; it takes for granted the
entire document to which it is appended.
The elementary character of parts of the moral teaching of
St. James is sometimes too easily assumed to imply that that
Apostle must be held to represent the earliest stage of the sup-
posed developments of apostolical Christianity. But is it not
possible that in apostolical as well as in later times, ‘advanced’
Christians may have occasionally incurred the danger of forget-
_ ting some important precepts even of natural morality, or of
supposing that their devotion to particular truths or forms of
thought, or that their experience of particular states of feeling,
constituted a religious warrant for such forgetfulness"? If this
= After making reference to Luther’s designation of this Epistle as an
‘Epistle of straw,’ a modern French Protestant writer proceeds as follows :
“ Nous-mémes, nous ne pouvons considérer la doctrine de Jacques ni comme
bien logique, ni comme suffisante ; nous y voyons la grande pensée de Jésus
rétrécie et appauvrie par le principe 1égal du mosaisme. ' Le christianisme de
γι]
Seer
286 Moral truth the basis of dogmatic faith.
was indeed the case, St. James’ Epistle is placed in its true light
when we see in it a healthful appeal to that primal morality,
which can never be ignored or slighted without the most certain
risk to those revealed truths, such as our Lord’s plenary Satis-
faction for sin, in which the enlightened conscience finds its final
relief from the burden and misery of recognized guilt. If the
sensitiveness of conscience be dulled or impaired, the doctrines
which relieve the anguish of conscience will soon lose their
power. St. Paul himself is perpetually insisting upon the nature
and claims of Christian virtue, and on the misery and certain
consequences of wilful sin. St. James, as the master both of
natural and of Christian ethics, is in truth reinforcing St. Paul,
the herald and exponent of the doctrines of redemption and
justification. Thus St. James’ moral teaching generally, not less
than his special polemical discussion of the question of justifica-
tion, appears to presuppose St. Paul. It presupposes St. Paul
as we know him now in his glorious Epistles, enjoining the
purest and loftiest Christian sanctity along with the most perfect
acceptance by faith of the Person and work of the Divine
Redeemer. But it also: presupposes St. Paul, as Gnostics who
preceded Marcion had already misrepresented him, as the
idealized sophist of the earliest Antinomian fancies, the sophist
who had proclaimed a practical or avowed divorce between the
sanctions of morality and the honour of Christ. There is at
times a flavour of irony in St. James’ language, such as might
force a passage for the voice of truth and love through the dense
tangle of Antinomian self-delusions. St. James urges that to
listen to Christian teaching without reducing it to practice is
but the moral counterpart of a momentary listless glance in a
polished mirror®; and that genuine devotion is to be really
tested by such practical results as works of mercy done to the
afflicted and the poor, and by conscientious efforts to secure the
inward purity of an unworldly life p,
Jacques n’était qu’h demi émancipé des entraves de la loi; c’était un degré
inférieur du Christianisme, et qui ne contenait pas en germe tous les déve-
loppements futurs de la vérité chrétienne. Tl est douteux que cette Epitre
ait jamais converti personne.’ Premitres Transformations du Christianisme,
par A. Coquerel fils, Paris, 1866. (p. 65.)
° St. James i. 23 : εἴ τις ἀκροατὴς λόγου ἐστὶ καὶ od ποιητὴς, οὗτος ἔοικεν
a
ἀνδρὶ κατανοοῦντι τὸ πρόσωπον τῆς γενέσεως αὑτοῦ ἐν ἐσόπτρῳ" κατενόησε γὰρ
ἑαυτὸν, καὶ ἀπελήλυθε, καὶ εὐθέως ἐπελάθετο ὁποῖος ἦν.
P Ibid. ver. 27: θρησκεία καθαρὰ καὶ ἀμίαντος παρὰ τῷ Θεῷ καὶ Πατρὶ αὕτη
ἐστὶν, ἐπισκέπτεσθαι ὀρφανοὺς καὶ χήρας ἐν τῇ θλίψει αὐτῶν, ἄσπιλον ἑαυτὸν
τηρεῖν ἀπὸ τοῦ κόσμου.
Ϊ LECT,
Christianity considered as the New Law. 287
2. In his earnest opposition to the Antinomian principle
St. James insists upon the continuity of the New dispensation
with the Old. Those indeed who do not believe the representa-
tions of the great Apostles given us in the Acts to have been a
romance of the second century, composed with a view to recon-
ciling the imagined dissensions of the sub-apostolical Church,
will not fail to note the significance of St. James’ attitude at the
Council of Jerusalem. After referring to the prophecy of Amos
as confirmatory of St. Peter’s teaching respecting the call of the
Gentiles, St. James advises that no attempt should be made to
impose the Jewish law generally upon the Gentile converts 4.
Four points of observance were to be insisted on, for reasons of
very various kindst; but the general tenor of the speech proves
how radically the Apostle had broken with Judaism as a living
system. Yet in his Epistle the real continuity of the Law and
the Gospel is undeniably prominent. Considering Christianity
as a rule of life based upon a revealed creed, St. James terms it
also a Law. But the Christian Law is no mere reproduction of
the Sinaitic. The New Law of Christendom is distinguished by
epithets which define its essential superiority to the law of the
Synagogue, and which moreover indirectly suggest the true
dignity of its Founder, The Christian law is the law of liberty
—vopos τῆς €hevOepias§, To be really obeyed it must be obeyed
in freedom. A slave cannot obey the Christian law, because it
demands not merely the production of certain outward acts, but
the living energy of inward motives, whose soul and essence is
love. Only a son whom Christ has freed from slavery, and
whose heart would rejoice, if so it might be, to anticipate or to
go beyond his Father’s Will, can offer that free service which is
exacted by the law of liberty. That service secures to all his
faculties their highest play and exercise; the Christian is most
conscious of the buoyant sense of freedom when he is most
eager to do the Will of his Heavenly Parent. The Christian law,
which is the law of love, is further described as the royal law—
4 Acts xv. 14-19. Τ᾿ Tbid. ver. 20.
7 c \ Ud > / > > ,
* St. James i. 25: 6 δὲ παρακύψας εἰς νόμον τέλειον τὸν THs ἐλευθερίας, καὶ
πα ί ὗ ὑκ ἃ hs ἐπιλ ἣς γενόμενος, ἀλλὰ ποιητὴς ἔ
παραμείνας, οὗτος οὐκ ἀκροατὴς ἐπιλησμονῆς γενόμενος, ιητὴς ἔργου,
οὗτος μακάριος ἐν τῇ ποιήσει αὑτοῦ ἔσται. Ibid. ii. 12: οὕτω λαλεῖτε καὶ οὕτω
ποιεῖτε, ὡς διὰ νόμου ἐλευθερίας μέλλοντες κρίνεσθαι. Messmer in 1ο06.:
* Gesetz der Freiheit, weil es nicht mehr ein bloss aiisserliches knechtendes
Gebot ist, wie das alte Gesetz, sondern mit dem innerlich umgewandelten
Willen uebereinstimmt, wir also nicht mehr aus Zwang, sondern mit freier
Liebe dasselbe erfiillen.’
VI |
288 Christianity both a Law and a Doctrine.
νόμος Bucwikds t, Not merely because the law of love is specifi-
cally the first of laws, higher than and inclusive of all other
laws"; but because Christ, the King of Christians, prescribes
this law to Christian love. To obey is to own Christ’s legislative
supremacy. Once more, the Christian law is the perfect law—
νόμος tédevos*, It is above human criticism. It will not, like
the Mosaic law, be completed by another revelation. It can
admit of no possible improvement. It exhibits the whole Will
of the unerring Legislator respecting man in his earthly state.
It guarantees to man absolute correspondence with the true idea
of his life, in other words, his perfection ; if only he will obey it.
In a like spirit St. James speaks of Christian doctrine as the
word of truth—)dyos ἀληθείας γ. Christian doctrine is the abso-
lute truth; and it has an effective regenerating force in the
spiritual world, which corresponds to that of God’s creative
word in the region of physical nature. But Christian doctrine is
also the engrafted word—édyos ἔμφυτος 5, It is capable of being
taken up into, and livingly united with, the life of human souls.
It will thus bud forth into moral foliage and fruits which,
Ὁ St. James ii. 8: εἰ μέντοι νόμον τελεῖτε βασιλικὸν, κατὰ τὴν γραφὴν,
᾿Αγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον σου &s σεαυτὸν, καλῶς ποιεῖτε. This compendium of
the Christian’s whole duty towards his neighbour, as enjoined by our Blessed
Lord (St. Matt. xxii. 39; St. Mark xii. 3 1), is not a mere republication of
the Mosaic precept (Lev. xix. 18). In the latter the ‘neighbour’ is appa-
rently ‘one of the children of thy people ;’ in the former it includes any
member of the human family, since it embraced even those against whom the
Jew had the strongest religious prepossessions. (St. Luke x. 29, sqq.) This
injunction of a love of man as man, according to the measure of each man’s
love of self, is the law of the true King of humanity, Jesus Christ our Lord.
" Rom. xiii. 9. x St. James i. 25.
y St. James i. 18: βουληθεὶς ἀπεκύησεν ἡμᾶς λόγῳ ἀληθείας, els τὸ εἶναι
ἡμᾶς ἀπαρχήν τινα τῶν αὑτοῦ κτισμάτων. ἀποκύειν is elsewhere used of the
female parent. Hence it indicates the tenderness of the Divine love, as
shewn in the new birth of souls ; just as βουληθείς points to the freedom of
the grace which regenerates them, and ἀπαρχήν τινα τῶν κτισμάτων to the
end and purpose of their regeneration. Compare St. John i. 12,13: ὅσοι δὲ
ἔλαβον αὐτὸν... ἐϊς Θεοῦ ἐγεννήθησαν. ι
2. St. James i. 21: ἐν πραᾳὕτητι δέξασθε τὸν ἔμφυτον λόγον, τὸν δυνάμενον
σῶσαι τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν. Messmer in loc.: ‘Die Offenbarung heisst hier das
eingepflanzte, eingewachsene Wort; namlich bei der Wiedergeburt durch die
ee
christliche Lehre eingepflanzt. - Wenn nun von einem Aufnehmen der ein- ὦ
gepflanzten Lehre die Rede ist, so ist das natiirlich nicht die erste Aufnahme,
sondern vielmehr das immer innigere Insichhineinnehmen und Aneignen der-
selben und das Sichhineinleben in dieselbe.’ See too Dean Alford in loc. :
‘The Word whose attribute and ἀρετή it is to be ἔμφυτος, and which is
ἔμφυτος, awaiting your reception of it, to spring up and take up your’ being
into it and make you new plants.’ ;
[ LECT.
St. Fames direct references toour Blessed Lord. 280
without it, human souls are utterly incapable of yielding. - This
Adyos is clearly not the mere texture of the language in which
the faith is taught. It is not the bare thought of the believer
moulded into conformity with the ideas suggested by the lan-
guage. It is the very substance and core of the doctrine ; it is
He in Whom the doctrine centres ; it is the Person of Jesus
Christ Himself, Whose Humanity is the Sprout, Shoot, or
Branch of Judah, engrafted by His Incarnation upon the old
stock of humanity, and sacramentally engrafted upon all living
Christian souls. Is not St. James here in fundamental agree-
ment not merely with St. Paul, but with St.John? St. James’
picture of the new law of Christendom harmonizes with St. Paul’s
teaching, that the old law of Judaism without the grace of
Christ does but rouse a sense of sin which it cannot satisfy, and
that therefore the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has
made Christians free from the law of sin and death ἃ, St. James’
doctrine of the Engrafted Word is a compendium of the first,
third, and sixth chapters of St. John’s Gospel; the word written
or preached does but unveil to the soul the Word Incarnate, the
Word Who can give a new life to human nature, because He is
Himself the Source of Life.
It is in correspondence with these currents of doctrine that
St. James, although our Lord’s own first cousinb, opens his
Epistle by representing himself as standing in the same relation
to Jesus Christ as to God. He is the slave of God and of our
Lord Jesus Christ¢. In like manner, throughout. his Epistle,
he appears to apply the word Κύριος to the God of the Old
Testament and to Jesus Christ, quite indifferently. Especially
noteworthy is his assertion that the Lord Jesus Christ, the
Judge of men, is not the delegated representative of an absent
Majesty, but is Himself the Legislator enforcing His own laws.
The Lawgiver, he says, is One Being with the Judge Who can
* Baur admits that ‘dem Verfasser des Briefs auch die paulinische Verin-
nerlichung des Gesetzes nicht fremd, indem er nicht blos das Gebot der Liebe
als konigliches Gesetz bezeichnet, sondern auch von einem Gesetze der Frei-
heit spricht, zu welchem ihm das Gesetz nur dadurch geworden sein kann,
dass er, der Aeusserlichkeit des Gesetzes gegeniiber sich innerlich ebenso frei
von ihm wusste, wie der Apostel Paulus von seinem Standpunkt aus.’
Christenthum, p. 122.
> Comp. St. Matt. xxvii. 56, St. Mark xv. 40, with St. John xix. 2 5. See
Pearson on Creed, Art. iii. ; Mill on Myth. Int. p- 226; Bp. Ellicott, Huls.
Lect. pp. 97, 354. é Jy es
© St. James i, 1: Ἰάκωβος Θεοῦ καὶ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος.
VI | U
290 Reverential reserve of St. ames.
save and can destroy® ; the Son of man, coming in the clouds of
heaven, has enacted the law which He thus administers. With
a reverence which is as practical as his teaching is suggestive,
St. James in this one short Epistle reproduces more of the
words spoken by Jesus Christ our Lord than are to be found in
all the other Epistles of the New Testament taken together f.
He hints that all social barriers between man and man are as
nothing when we place mere human eminence in the light of
Christ’s majestic Person ; and when he names the faith of Jesus
Christ, he terms it with solemn emphasis the ‘faith of the Lord
of Glory,’ thus adopting one of the most magnificent of St. Paul’s
expressions 8, and attributing to our Lord a Majesty altogether
above this human world. In short, St. James’ recognition of
the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity is just what we might expect
it to be if we take into account the mainly practical scope of
his Epistle. Our Lord’s Divinity is never once formally proposed
as a doctrine of the faith ; but it is largely, although indirectly,
implied. It is implied in language which would be exaggerated
and overstrained on any other supposition. It is implied in a
reserve which may be felt to mean at least as much as the most
demonstrative protestations. A few passing expressions of the
lowliest reverence disclose the great doctrine of the Church
respecting the Person of her Lord, throned in the background of
the Apostle’s thought. And if the immediate interests of his
ministry oblige St. James to confine himself to considerations
which do not lead him more fully to exhibit the doctrine, we are
© St. James iv. 12: εἷς ἐστιν ὃ νομοθέτης καὶ κριτὴς 6 δυνάμενος σῶσαι καὶ
ἀπολέσαι. (καὶ κριτής is omitted by text recept., inserted by Α. B.x.) So
De Wette: ‘ Hiner ist der Gesetzgeber und Richter, der da vermag zu retten
und zu verderben.’ Cf. Alford in loc., who quotes this.
! The following are his references to the Sermon on the Mount. St.James
i. 2; St. Matt. v. to-12. St, James i. 4; St. Matt. v. 48. St. Jamesi. 5;
St. Matt. vii. 7. St. James 1. 9; St. Matt. v.3. St.James i. 20; St. Matt.
v. 22. St. James ii. 13 ; St. Matt. vi. 14,15, v. 7. St. James ii. 14 sqq.;
St. Matt. vii. 21 sqq. St. James iii. 17, 18; St. Matt. v.9. St. James iv. 4;
St. Matt. vi. 24. St. James iv. 10; St. Matt. v. 3, 4. St. James iv. 11;
St. Matt. vii. 1 sqq. St.James v. 2; St. Matt. vi. 19, St. James ν, 10;
St. Matt. v.12. St. James v. 12; St. Matt. v. 33 sqq. And for other dis-
courses of our Lord: St.Jamesi. 14; St. Matt. xv. 19. St. James iv. 12;
St. Matt. x. 28. Again, St. James v. 1-6 ; St. Luke vi. 24 sqq. See reff.;
and Alford, vol. iv. p. 107, note. Β΄ 1 Cor. ii. 8.
h St. James ii. 1: ἀδελφοί μου, μὴ ἐν προσωποληψίαις ἔχετε τὴν πίστιν τοῦ
Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τῆς δόξης. Here τῆς δόξης must be regarded as
a second genitive governed by Kupiov, Or, as Dean Alford suggests, it may
bs an epithetal genitive, such as constantly follows the mention of the Divine
vame.
[ LECT.
Missionary Sermons of St. Peter. 201
not allowed, as we read him, to forget the love and awe which
veil and treasure it, so tenderly and go reverently, in the inmost
sanctuary of his illuminated soul.
II. Of St. Peter’s recorded teaching there are two distinct
stages in the New Testament. The first is represented by his
missionary sermons in the Acts of the Apostles ; the second by
his general Epistles.
1. Although Jesus Christ is always the central Subject in the
Sermons of this Apostle, yet the distinctness with which he
exhibits our Lord in the glory of His Divine Nature seems to
vary with the varying capacity for receiving truth on the part
of his audience. Like Jesus Christ Himself, St. Peter teaches as
men are able to bear his doctrine; he does not cast pearls before
swine. In his missionary sermons he is addressing persons who
were believers in the Jewish dispensation, and who were also
our Lord’s contemporaries. Accordingly, his sermons contain a
double appeal; first, to the known facts of our Lord’s Life and
Death, and above all, of His Resurrection from the dead ; and
secondly, to the correspondence of these facts with the predictions
of the Hebrew Scriptures. Like St. James, St. Peter lays
especial stress on the continuity subsisting between Judaism and
the Gospel. But while St. James insists upon the moral element
of that connexion, St. Peter addresses himself rather to the pro-
phetical. Even before the Day of Pentecost, St. Peter points
to the Psalter as foreshadowing the fall of Judasi. When
preaching to the multitude which had just witnessed the Pente-
costal gifts, St. Peter observes that these wonders are merely a
realization of the prediction of Joel respecting the last days k ;
and he argues elaborately that the language of David in the
sixteenth Psulm could not have been fulfilled in the case of the
prophet-king himself, still lying among his people in his
honoured sepulchre, while it had been literally fulfilled by
Jesus Christ}, Who had notoriously risen from the grave. In
his sermon to the multitude after the healing of the lame man:
in the Porch of Solomon, St. Peter contends that the sufferings
of Christ had been ‘shewed before’ on the part of the God of
Israel by the mouth of all His prophets™, and that in Jesus
Christ the prediction of Moses respecting a coming Prophet, to
Whom the true Israel would yield an implicit obedience, had
received its explanation®, When arraigned before the Council®,
i Acts i. 16, 20. Cf. Ps, xli. 9, lxix.25. * Acts ii. 14-21; Joel ii, 28-31.
? Acts ii. 24-36. τὰ [bid. iii, 18.
ἃ Ibid, iii. 22-24; Deut. xviii. 15, 18, 19, © Acts iv. 11,
vi] U2
292 Chrest the chief theme of Hebrew prophecy.
the Apostle insists that Jesus is that true ‘Corner-stone’ of the
temple of souls, which had been foretold both by Isaiah P, and by
a later Psalmist4; and that although He had been set at nought
by the builders of Israel, He was certainly exalted and honoured
by God. In the instruction delivered to Cornelius before his
baptism, St. Peter states that ‘all the prophets give witness’ to
Jesus, ‘that through His Name, whosoever believeth on Him
shall receive remission of sins'.’ And we seem to trace the
influence of St. Peter, as the first great Christian expositor of
prophecy, in the teaching of the deacons St. Stephen and
St. Philip. St. Philip’s exposition of Christian doctrine to the
Ethiopian eunuch was based upon Isaiah’s prediction of the
Passion’, St. Stephen’s argument before his judges was cut
short by a violent interruption, while it was yet incomplete.
But St. Stephen, like St. Peter, appeals to the prediction in
Deuteronomy of the Prophet to Whom Israel would hearken t,
And the drift of the protomartyr’s address goes to shew, that
the whole course of the history of Israel pointed to the advent
of One Who should be greater than either the law or the temple,
—of One in Whom Israel’s wonderful history would reach its
natural climax,—of that ‘Just One’ Who in truth had already
come, but Who, like prophets before Him, had been betrayed
and murdered by a people, still as of old, ‘ stiffnecked and un-
circumcised in heart and ears *.’
It is not too much to say that in the teaching of the earliest
Church, as represented by the missionary discourses of St. Peter
and the deacons, Jesus Christ is the very soul and end of Jewish
prophecy. This of itself suggests an idea of His Person which
rises high above any merely Humanitarian standard. St. Peter
indeed places himself habitually at the point of view which
would enable him to appeal to the actual experience of the
generation he was addressing. He begins with our Lord’s
Humiliation, which men had witnessed, and then he proceeds to
describe His Exaltation as the honour put by God upon His
Human Nature. He speaks of our Lord’s Humanity with fearless
plainnessy. The Man Christ Jesus is exhibited to the world as
P Isa. xxviii. 16.
a Ps, exviii. 22. Our Lord Himself claimed the prophecy, St. Matt.
Xxi. 42. r Acts x. 43. 5. Ibid. viii. 32-35.
t Ibid. vii. 37. 1 Ibid. vi. 13. x Ibid. vii. 51-53.
¥ Acts ii, 22: "Incoty τὸν Ναζωραῖον, ἄνδρα [not here the generic ἄνθρωπον
ἀπὸ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἀποδεδειγμένον εἰς ὑμᾶς δυνάμεσι καὶ τέρασι καὶ σημείοις, οἷς
ἐποίησε δι᾽ αὐτοῦ ὁ Θεὸς ἐν μέσῳ ὑμῶν.
[ LECT.
Christ's HumanLifesuggestsH1is Higher Nature. 293
a miracle-worker ; as Man, He is anointed with the Holy Ghost
and with power2; as the true Servant of God, He is glorified by
the God of the patriarchs#; He is raised from the dead by
Divine Power»; He is made by God both Lord and Christ ¢ ;
and He will be sent by the Lord at ‘the times of refreshing 4’ as
the ordained Judge of quick and dead®. But this general repre-
sentation of the Human Nature by Which Christ had entered
into Jewish history, is interspersed with glimpses of His Divine
Personality Itself, Which is veiled by His Manhood. Thus we
find St. Peter in the porch of Solomon applying to our Lord a
magnificent title, which at once carries our thoughts into the very
heart of the distinctive Christology of St. John. Christ, although
crucified and slain, is yet the Leader or Prince of life—’Apynyos
τῆς Const, That He should be held in bondage by the might of
death was not possibles. The heavens must receive Him}, and
He is now the Lord of all thingsi, It is He Who from His
heavenly throne has poured out upon the earth the gifts of
Pentecost *«. His Name spoken on earth has a wonder-working
power!; as unveiling His Nature and office, it is a symbol which
faith reverently treasures, and by the might of which the ser-
vants of God can relieve even physical suffering™. ΑΒ a refuge
for sinners the Name of Jesus stands alone; no other Name has
been given under heaven whereby the one true salvation can be
guaranteed to the sons of men®. Here St. Peter clearly implies
that the religion of Jesus is the true, the universal, the absolute
2 Acts: x. 38... a Thid. iii. 13.
b Ibid. ii. 24, iii. 15, iv. 10, Vv. 31, X. 40. ¢ Ibid. ii. 36.
ἃ Thid. iii. 19, 20. e Ibid. x. 42. f Ibid. iii. 15.
& Ibid. ii. 24: ὃν ὁ Θεὸς ἀνέστησε, λύσας τὰς ὠδῖνας τοῦ θανάτου, καθότι
οὐκ ἣν δυνατὸν κρατεῖσθαι αὐτὸν ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ. This ‘impossibility’ depended
not merely on the fact that prophecy had predicted Christ’s resurrection, but
on the dignity of Christ’s Person, implied in the existence of any such pro-
phecy respecting Him.
h Tbid. iii. 21: ὃν δεῖ οὐρανὸν μὲν δέξασθαι ἄχρι χρόνων ἀποκαταστάσεως
πάντων.
i Thid. x. 36: οὗτός ἐστι πάντων Κύριος.
k Thid. ii. 33: ἐξέχεε τοῦτο ὃ νῦν ὑμεῖς βλέπετε καὶ ἀκούετε.
1 bid. iii. 6: ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ Ναζωραίου, ἔγειραι καὶ περι-
πάτει.
m JTbid. ver. 16: καὶ ἐπὶ τῇ πίστει τοῦ ὀνόματος αὐτοῦ, τοῦτον ὃν θεωρεῖτε
καὶ οἴδατε, ἐστερέωσε τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ. Ibid. iv. 10: γνωστὸν ἔστω πᾶσιν
ὑμῖν καὶ παντὶ τῷ λαῷ Ἰσραὴλ, ὅτι ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ Ναζωραίου,
ὃν ὑμεῖς ἐσταυρώσατε, ὃν ὁ Οεὺς ἤγειρεν ex νεκρῶν, ἐν τούτῳ οὗτος παρέστηκεν
ἐνώπιον ὑμῶν ὑγιής.
n Thid. iv. 12: οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν ἄλλῳ οὐδενὶ ἣ σωτηρία" οὔτε yap ὄνομά ἐστιν
ἕτερον ὑπὺ τὸν οὐρανὸν τὸ δεδομένον ἐν ἀνθρώποις, ἐν ᾧ δεῖ σωθῆναι ἡμᾶς.
γι}
294 Christology of St. Peter's general Epistles.
religion. This implication of itself suggests much beyond as to
the true dignity of Christ’s Person. Is it conceivable that He
Who is Himself the sum and substance of His religion, Whose
Name has such power on earth, and Who wields the resources
and is invested with the glories of heaven, is notwithstanding in
the thought of His first apostles only a glorified man, or only a
super-angelic intelligence? Do we not interpret these early dis-
courses most naturally, when we bear in mind the measure of
reticence which active missionary work always renders necessary,
if truth is to win its way amidst prejudice and opposition ? And
will not this consideration alone enable us to do justice to those
vivid glimpses of Christ’s Higher Nature, the fuller exhibition of
Which is before us in the Apostle’s general Epistles ?
2. In St. Peter’s general Epistles it is easy to trace the same
mind as that which speaks to us in the earliest missionary ser-
mons of the Acts. As addressed to Christian believers °, these
Epistles exhibit Christian doctrine in its fulness, but incidentally
to spiritual objects, and without the methodical completeness
of an oral instruction. Christian doctrine is not propounded as
a new announcement: the writer takes it for granted as furnish-
ing a series of motives, the force of which would be admitted by
those who had already recognized the true majesty and propor-
tions of the faith. St. Peter announces himself as the Apostle
of Jesus Christ ; he is Christ’s slave as well as His Apostle. In
his Epistles, St. Peter lays the great stress on prophecy which is
so observable in his missionary sermons. Thus, as in his speech
before the Council, so in his first Epistle, he specially refers 4 to
the prophecy of the Rejected Corner-stone, which our Lord had
applied to Himself. But St. Peter’s general doctrine of our
Lord’s relation to Hebrew prophecy should be more particularly
noticed. In our day theories have been put forward on this
subject which appear to represent the Hebrew prophetical Scrip-
tures as little better than a large dictionary of quotations, to
which the writers and preachers of the New Testament are said
to have had recourse when they wished to illustrate their subject
by some shadowy analogy, or by some vague semblance of a
happy anticipation. St. Peter is as widely removed from this
° I St. Pet. i. 1, 2: ἐκλεκτοῖς παρεπιδήμοις διασπορᾶς,. . .. . κατὰ
πρόγνωσιν Θεοῦ Πατρὸς, ἐν ἁγιασμῷ Πνεύματος, εἰς ὑπακοὴν καὶ ῥαντισμὸν
αἵματος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 2 St. Pet. i. 1: τοῖς ἰσότιμον ὑμῖν λαχοῦσι πίστιν.
PI St. Pet. i. 1: ἀπόστολος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 2 St. Pet. i. 1: δοῦλος
καὶ ἀπόστολος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ.
4 δύ, Pet. ii. 6, Cf. Acts iv. 11; Isa. xxviii, 16; Ps, exviii, 22.
[LECT,
A Divine Christ implied in the Christian life. 295
position, as it is possible to conceive. According to St. Peter,
the prophets of the Old Testament did not only utter literal pre-
dictions of the expected Christ, but in doing this they were
Christ’s own servants, His heralds, His organs. He Who is the
subject of the Gospel story, and the living Ruler of the Church,
had also, by His Spirit, been Master and Teacher of the pro-
phets. Under His guidance it was that they had foretold His
sufferings. It was the Spirit of Christ Who was in the pro-
phets, testifying beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the
glories that would followr. The prophets did not at first
learn the full scope and meaning of the words they uttered 5,
but they spoke glorious truths which the Church of Jesus
understands and enjoyst. Thus the proclamation of Christian
doctrine is older than the Incarnation: Christianity strikes its
roots far back into the past of ancient Israel. The pre-existent
Christ, moulding the utterances of Israel’s prophets to proclaim
their anticipations of His advent, had indeed reigned in the old
theocracy ; and yet the privileged terms in which the members
of God’s elder kingdom upon earth described their prerogatives
were really applicable, in a deeper sense, to those who lived
within the kingdom of the Divine Incarnation™. Indeed,
St. Peter’s language on the nature and privileges of the Chris-
tian life is suggestive of the highest conception of Him Who is
its Author and its Object. St. Peter speaks of conversion from
Judaism or heathendom as the ‘being called out of darkness into
God’s marvellous light *.’ It is the happiness of Christians to
suffer and to be reviled for the Name of Christy. The Spirit of
τι St. Pet. i. 11: τὸ ἐν αὐτοῖς Πνεῦμα Χριστοῦ, προμαρτυρόμενον τὰ
εἰς Χριστὸν παθήματα, καὶ τὰς μετὰ ταῦτα δόξας. Here Χριστοῦ is clearly
a genitive of the subject.
5. Ibid. vers. 10, 11: περὶ ἧς σωτηρίας ἐξεζήτησαν καὶ ἐξηρεύνησαν
προφῆται of περὶ τῆς εἰς ὑμᾶς χάριτος προφητεύσαντες, ἐρευνῶντες εἰς τίνα
ἢ ποῖον καιρὸν ἐδήλου τὸ ἐν αὐτοῖς Πνεῦμα Χριστοῦ. Ibid. ver. 12: οἷς
ἀπεκαλύφθη ὅτι οὐχ ἑαυτοῖς, ἡμῖν δὲ διηκόνουν αὐτὰ, ἃ νῦν ἀνηγγέλη ὑμῖν.
t 2 St. Pet. i. 20: πᾶσα προφητεία γραφῆς ἰδίας ἐπιλύσεως οὐ γίνεται.
The Spirit in the Church understands the Spirit speaking by the prophets.
ἃ χ St. Pet. ii. 9, 10: ὑμεῖς δὲ γένος ἐκλεκτὸν, βασίλειον ἱεράτευμα, ἔθνος
ἅγιον, λαὺς εἰς περιποίησιν, ὅτως τὰς ἀρετὰς ἐξαγγείλητε τοῦ ἐκ σκότους ὑμᾶς
καλέσαντος εἰς τὸ θαυμαστὸν αὑτοῦ φῶ" οἱ ποτὲ οὐ λαὺς, νῦν δὲ λαὸς Θεοῦ"
οἱ οὐκ ἠλεημένοι, νῦν δὲ ἐλεηθέντες. Ibid. ver. 5: ὡς λίθοι ζῶντες οἰκοδο-
μεῖσθε, οἶκος πνευματικὺς, ἱεράτευμα ἅγιον, ἀνενέγκαι πνευματικὰς θυσίας
εὐπροσδέκτους τῷ Θεῷ διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. x Ubi supra.
γι St. Pet. iv. 13; καθὸ κοινωνεῖτε τοῖς τοῦ Χριστοῦ παθήμασι, χαίρετε,
ἵνα καὶ ἐν τῇ. ἀποκαλύψει τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ χαρῆτε ἀγαλλιώμενοι. Ei ὀνειδιζεσθε
ἐν ὀνόματι Χριστοῦ, μακάριοι.
vi |
296 Dignity of Christ’s Person suggested by
glory and of God rests upon them. The Spirit is blasphemed
by the unbelieving world, but He is visibly honoured by the
family of God’s children% It is the Person of Jesus in Whom
the spiritual life of His Church centres®. The Christians whom
St. Peter is addressing never saw Him in the days of His flesh ;
they do not see Him now with the eye of sense. But they love
Him, invisible as He is, because they believe in Him. The eye
of their faith does see Him. The Lord Christ is present in
their hearts; they are to ‘sanctify’ Him there, as God was
‘sanctified’ by the worship of Israel>, They rejoice in this
clear constant inward vision with a joy which language cannot
describe, and which is radiant with the glory of the highest
spiritual beauty. They are in possession of a spiritual sense ὃ
whereby the goodness of Jesus may be even tasted ; and yet the
truths on which their souls are fed are mysteries so profound as
to rouse the keen but baffled wonder of the intelligences of hea-
ven4. Such language appears to point irresistibly to the exist-
ence of a supernatural religion with a superhuman Founder;
unless we are to denude it of all spiritual meaning whatever, by
saying that it only reflects the habitual exaggeration of Eastern
fervour. Why is the intellectual atmosphere of the Church
described as ‘marvellous light?’ Why is suffering for Jesus so
much a matter for sincere self-congratulation? Why does the
Divine Spirit rest so surely upon Christian confessors ἢ Why is
the Invisible Jesus the Object of such love, the Source of such
inexpressible and glorious joy; if, after all, the religion of Jesus
is merely a higher phase of human opinion and feeling, and His
Church a human organization, and His Person only human, or
at least not literally Divine? The language of St. Peter respect-
ing the Christian life manifestly points to a Divine Christ. If
the Christ of St. Peter had been the Christ, we will not say of
a Strauss or of a Renan, but the Christ of a Socinus, nay, the
Christ of an Arius, it is not easy to understand what should
51 St. Pet. iv. 14: ὅτι τὸ τῆς δόξης καὶ τὸ τοῦ Θεοῦ Πνεῦμα ἐφ᾽ ὑμᾶς dva-
παύεται" κατὰ μὲν αὐτοὺς βλασφημεῖται, κατὰ δὲ ὑμᾶς δοξάζεται.
@ Ibid. i. 7, 8: Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ" ὃν οὖκ εἰδότες ἀγαπᾶτε, εἰς ὃν ἄρτι μὴ
ὁρῶντες, πιστεύοντες δὲ, ἀγαλλιᾶσθε χαρᾷ ἀνεκλαλήτῳ καὶ δεδοξασμένῃ.
Ὁ Ibid. iii. 15: Κύριον δὲ τὸν Χριστὸν ἁγιάσατε ev ταῖς καρδίαις ὑμῶν.
That Χριστὸν and ποῦ Θεὸν is the true reading here, see Scrivener, Introduc-
tion to Crit. N. T. p. 456. Compare Isaiah viii. 13. Isaiah is quoted again
in I St. Pet. ii. 8.
¢ Ibid. ii. 3: εἴπερ ἐγεύσασθε ὅτι χρηστὸς ὁ Κύριος. Cf. Ps. xxxiv. 8.
Cf. Heb. vi. 4: γευσαμένους τε τῆς δωρεᾶς τῆς ἐπουρανίου. There is possibly
in both passages an indirect reference to sacramental communion.
δα St. Pet. i. 12: εἰς ἃ ἐπιθυμοῦσιν ἄγγελοι παρακύψαι.
[ LECT.
i
\
St. Peter’s references to the Passion 207
have moved the angels with that strong desire to bend from
their thrones above, that they might gaze with unsuccessful
intentness at the humiliations of a created being, their peer or
their inferior in the scale of creation. Surely the Angels must
be longing to unveil a transcendent mystery, or a series of mys-
teries, such as are in fact the mystery of the Divine Incarnation
and the consequences which depend on it in the kingdom of
grace. St. Peter’s words are sober and truthful if read by the
light of faith in an Incarnate God; divorced from such a faith,
they are fanciful, inflated, exaggerated.
St. Peter lays especial stress both on the moral significance
and on the atoning power of the Death of Jesus Christ. Here
he enters within that circle of truths which are taught most
fully in the Epistle to the Hebrews; and his exhibition of the
Passion might almost appear to presuppose the particular Christ-
ological teaching of that Epistle. St. Peter says that ‘Christ
has once suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust, that He might
bring us to God®,’ This vicarious suffering depended upon the
fact that Jesus, when dying, impersonated sinful humanity. ‘He
bare our sins in His own Body on the treef. Stricken by the
anguish of His Passion, the dying Christ is the consummate
Model8 for all Christian sufferers, in His innocence h, in His
silencei, in His perfect resignation’. But also the souls of men,
wounded by the shafts of sin, may be healed by the virtue of that
sacred Pain!; and a special power to wash out the stains of moral
guilt is expressly ascribed to the Redeemer’s Blood. The Chris-
tian as such is predestined in the Eternal Counsels, not merely
to submission to the Christian faith, but also to ‘a sprinkling of
the Blood of Jesus Christ™,” The Apostle earnestly insists that
it was no mere perishable earthly treasure, no silver or golden
wares, whereby Christians had been bought out of their old
bondage to the traditional errors and accustomed sins of Judaism
δα St. Pet. iii. 18: Χριστὸς ἅπαξ περὶ ἁμαρτιῶν ἔπαθε, Δίκαιος ὑπὲρ ἀδίκων,
᾿ ἵνα ἡμᾶς προσαγάγῃ τῷ Θεῷ.
f Ibid. ii, 24. : ὃς τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν αὐτὸς ἀνήνεγκεν ἐν τῷ σώματι αὑτοῦ
᾿ ἐπὶ τὸ ξύλον.
8 1014. ver. 21: Χριστὸς ἔπαθεν ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν, ἡμῖν ὑπολιμπάνων ὑπογραμμὸν,
ἵνα ἐπακολουθήσητε τοῖς ἴχνεσιν αὐτοῦ.
» Ibid. ver. 22: ὃς ἁμαρτίαν οὐκ ἐποίησεν, οὐδὲ εὑρέθη δόλος ἐν τῷ στόματι
αὐτοῦ. Isa. liii. 9; 2 Cor. v. 21; 1 St. John iii. 5.
* 1 St. Pet. ii. 23: ὃς λοιδορούμενος οὐκ ἀντελοιδόρει, πάσχων ovK ἠπείλει.
In the ἠπείλει there lies the consciousness of power.
k Ibid.: παρεδίδου δὲ τῷ κρίνοντι δικαίως.
1 Ibid. ver. 24: οὗ τῷ μώλωπι αὐτοῦ ἰάθητε.
τὰ Ibid. i. 2: εἰς ὑπακοὴν καὶ ῥαντισμὸν αἵματος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ,
VI |
298 St. Peter on the ever-iving Word of Goo.
or of heathendom. The mighty spell of moral and intellectual
darkness had indeed been broken, but by no less a ransom than
the Precious Blood of Christ, the Lamb without blemish and
Immaculate®, Are we to suppose that while using this burning
language to extol the Precious Blood of redemption, St. Peter is
recklessly following a rhetorical impulse, or that he is obscuring
the moral meaning of the Passion, by dwelling upon its details
in misleading language which savours too strongly of the sacri-
ficial ritual of the temple? Is he not even echoing the Baptist°?
Is he not in correspondence with his brother apostles? Is he not
summarizing St. Paulp? Is he not anticipating St. John?
Certainly this earnest recognition of Christ’s true Humanity as
the seat of His sufferings is a most essential feature of the Apo-
stle’s doctrine’; but what is it that gives to Christ’s Human acts
and sufferings such preterhuman value? Is it not that the truth
of Christ’s Divine Personality underlies this entire description of
His redemptive work, rescuing it from the exaggeration and
turgidity with which it would be fairly chargeable, if Christ
were merely human or less than God? That this is in fact the
case is abundantly manifest; and indeed the Person of Christ
appears to be hinted at in St. Peter’s Epistle, by the same august
expression which has been noticed as common to St. James and
to St. John. The Logos or Word of God, living and abid- |
ing for ever’, is the Author of the soul’s new birth ; and Christ |
nt St. Pet. 1. 18, 19: εἰδότες ὅτι ov φθαρτοῖς, ἀργυρίῳ ἢ χρυσίῳ, ἐλυ-
τρώθητε ἐκ τῆς ματαΐας ὑμῶν ἀναστροφῆς πατρυπαραδότου, ἀλλὰ τιμίῳ αἵματι
ὡς ἀμνοῦ ἀμώμου καὶ ἀσπίλου Χριστοῦ.
ο St. John i. 29: ἴδε 6 ἀμνὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ, ὃ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου.
It is impossible to doubt that the sacrificial rather than the moral ideas
associated with the ‘Lamb’ are here in question. See Alford in loc.
P Acts xx. 28: ποιμαίνειν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἣν περιεποιήσατο διὰ
τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος. 1 Οοτ. γν. 7: τὸ πάσχα ἡμῶν ἐτύθη Χριστός. Heb. ix. 12:
διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος εἰσῆλθεν ἐφάπαξ εἰς τὰ ἅγια, αἰωνίαν λύτρωσιν εὑράμενος.
aI St. John 1. πὸ αἷμα Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ αὐτοῦ καθαρίζει ἡμᾶς
ἀπὸ πάσης ἁμαρτίας. Rev. i. 5: τῷ ἀγαπήσαντι ἡμᾶς καὶ λούσαντι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ
τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν ἐν τῷ αἵματι αὑτοῦ... .. αὐτῷ ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος
εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. ἀμήν. Ibid. ν. 9: ἄξιος εἶ λαβεῖν τὸ Βιβλίον,
καὶ ἀνοῖξαι τὰς σφραγῖδας αὐτοῦ" ὅτι ἐσφάγης καὶ ἠγόρασας τῷ Θεῷ ἡμᾶς
ἐν τῷ αἵματί σου.
τ St. Peter expressly alludes to our Lord’s Human Body (1 St. Pet. ii. 24,
iii. 18, iv. 1), and to His Human Soul, after Its separation from the Body
of Jesus on the cross, as descending to preach to the spirits in prison
(Ibid. iii. 18).
8 1 St. Pet. i. 23: ἀναγεγεννημένοι οὐκ ἐκ σπορᾶς φθαρτῆς, ἀλλὰ ἀφθάρτου,
διὰ λόγου ζῶντος Θεοῦ καὶ μένοντος εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα. By understanding the
λόγος here to mean only the written word, Baur maintains his paradox, ~
[LECT.-
The ‘higher knowledge’ of Fesus Christ. 299
Jesus our Lord does not only bring us this Logos from heaven ;
He is this Logos. And thus in His home of glory, angels and
authorities and powers are made subject unto Himt; and He is
not said to have been taken up into heaven, but to have gone
up thither, as though by His own deed and will". And when
St. Peter exhorts Christians to act in such a manner that God
in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, he pauses
reverently at this last most precious and sacred Name, to add,
‘to Whom is the glory and the power unto ages beyond ages.’
St. Peter’s second Epistle w, like his first, begins and ends
with Jesus*. Its main positive theme is the importance of
the higher practical knowledge y of our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ % Jesus is not set before Christians as a revered and
departed Teacher whose words are to be gathered up and
studied; He is set forth rather as an Invisible and Living Person
Who is to be spiritually known by souls. Along with this
practical knowledge of Jesus, as with knowledge of God, there
will be an increase of grace, and of its resultant inward evidence,
spiritual peace*., For this practical knowledge of Jesus is the
crowning point of other Christian attainments». It is the
consummate result both of faith and practice, both of the
intellectual and of the moral sides of the Christian life. In
the long line of graces which this special knowledge implies, are
faith and general religious knowledge on the one hand, and on
the other, moral strength, self-restraint, patience, piety, brotherly
love, and, in its broadest sense, charity®. In this higher know-
ledge of Jesus, all these excellences find their end and their
completion. On any other path, the soul is abandoned to
that in St. Peter’s Epistles the written word is substituted for, and does
the work of, the Person of Christ in St. Paul’s writings. Vorlesungen,
p- 296.
t Γ St. Pet. iii. 22: ὑποταγέντων αὐτῷ ἀγγέλων καὶ ἐξουσιῶν καὶ δυνάμεων.
«Ibid. : ὅς ἐστιν ἐν δεξιᾷ τοῦ Θεοῦ πορευθεὶς εἰς οὐρανόν.
Υ Ibid. iv. 11: ἵνα ἐν πᾶσι δοξάζηται 6 Θεὸς διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, ᾧ
ἐστιν ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. ἀμήν.
~ For an examination of the arguments which have been urged against
the genuineness and authenticity of this Epistle, see Olshausen, Opuscula
Theologica, pp. 1-88, and Canon Cook’s art. ‘Peter,’ in Smith’s Dict. Bibl.
Χ 2 8, bet. 1.1, 111. 18. Υ ἐπίγνωσις.
ΕΒ ΤΟΙ: 1. 2, 3, 8, ii. 20, iii. 18.
® Ibid. i. 2: χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη ἐν ἐπιγνώσει τοῦ Θεοῦ, Kat
Ἰησοῦ τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν.
> Ibid. ver. 8: ταῦτα γὰρ (that is, the eight graces previously enumerated)
ὑμῖν ὑπάρχοντα καὶ πλεονάζοντα, ovK ἀργοὺς οὐδὲ ἀκάρπους καθίστησιν εἰς τὴν
τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐπίγνωσιν.
me ibid. i. 5,6, 7.
wi] -
300 Characteristics of St. Peter's later Christology.
spiritual blindness, tending more and more to utter forgetfulness
of all past purifications from sin4, For this higher -practical
knowledge of Jesus Christ is the means whereby Christians
escape from the polluting impurities of the life of the heathen
worlde. It raises Christian souls towards the Unseen King in
His glory ; it secures their admission to His everlasting realm
If Christians would not be carried away from their stedfast
adherence to the truth and life of Christianity by the errors of
those who hate all law, let them endeavour to grow in this
blessed knowledge of Jesus&. The prominence given to the
Person of Christ, in this doctrine of an ἐπίγνωσις of which His
Person is the Object, leads us up to the truth of His real Di-
vinity. If Jesus, thus known and loved, were not accounted
God, then we must say that God is in this Epistle thrown
utterly into the background, and that His human messenger
has taken His place.
Nor is the negative and polemical side of the Epistle much
less significant than its constructive and hortatory side. The
special misery of the false teachers of whom the Apostle speaks
as likely to afflict the Church, will consist in their ‘denying the
Sovereign that bought them, and so bringing on themselves
swift destruction», Unbelievers might contend that the apo-
stolical teachings respecting the present power and future coming
of Jesus were cleverly-invented mythsi; but St. Peter had
himself witnessed the majesty of Jesus in His Transfiguration J,
The Apostle knows that he himself will quickly die; he has
had a special revelation from the Lord Jesus to this effect *,
ἃ 2 St. Pet. i. 9.
e Ibid. ii. 20: ἀποφυγόντες τὰ μιάσματα τοῦ κόσμου ἐν ἐπιγνώσει τοῦ
Κυρίου καὶ σωτῆρος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Cf. Ibid. i. 4: ἀποφυγόντες τῆς ἐν
κόσμῳ ἐν ἐπιθυμίᾳ φθορᾶς.
f Ibid. i. 11: οὕτω γὰρ πλουσίως ἐπιχορηγηθήσεται ὑμῖν ἣ εἴσοδος εἰς τὴν
αἰώνιον βασιλείαν τοῦ Kuplov ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ.
5 Ibid. iii. 17,18: φυλάσσεσθε, ἵνα μὴ τῇ τῶν ἀθέσμων πλάνῃ συναπαχθέν-
τες, ἐκπέσητε τοῦ ἰδίου στηριγμοῦ' αὐξάνετε δὲ ἐν χάριτι καὶ γνώσει τοῦ
Κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ.
h Tbid. ii. 1: παρεισάξουσιν αἱρέσεις ἀπωλείας, καὶ τὸν ἀγοράσαντα αὐτοὺς —
Δεσπότην ἀ ἀρνούμενοι, ἐπάγοντες ἑαυτοῖς ταχινὴν ἀπώλειαν.
i Tbid. i. 16: od γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες ἀρνία δ
ὑμῖν τὴν τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δύναμιν καὶ παρουσίαν.
1 Ibid.: ἐπόπται γενηθέντες τῆς ἐκείνου μεγαλειότητος. Ibid. ver. 18: ἐν
τῷ Oper τῷ ἁγίῳ.
k Tbid. ver. 14: εἰδὼς ὅτι ταχινή ἐστιν ἣ ἀπόθεσις τοῦ σκηνώματός μου,
καθὼς καὶ ὁ Κύριος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐδήλωσέ μοι. Here ταχινὴ seems to '
mean ‘soon,’ ‘not distant,’ rather than ‘rapid.’ Cf. St. John xxi. 18; but —
[ LECT.
φ' —— σακσο,,... a
Christology of St. Fude. 301
Throughout this Epistle the Person of Jesus is constantly before
us. As He is the true Object of Christian knowledge, so He is
the Lord of the future kingdom of the saints. He is mocked at
and denied by the heretics ; His Coming it is which the scoffing
materialism of the age derides; His judgments are foreshadowed
by the great destructive woes of the Old Testament. Again
and again, as if with a reverent eagerness which takes pleasure
in the sacred words, the Apostle names his Master’s Name and
titles. He is Jesus our Lord!; He is our Lord Jesus Christ ™;
He is the Lord and Saviour"; He is our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ ®° ; He is our God and Saviour Jesus Christ ?. His
power is spoken of as Divine4 ; and through the precious things
promised by Him to His Church (must we not here specially
understand the sacraments?) Christians are made partakers of
the Nature of Godt. To Christ, in His exalted majesty, a
tribute of glory is due, both now and unto the day of eternity 5,
Throughout this Epistle Jesus Christ is constantly named where
we should expect to find the Name of God. The Apostle does
not merely proclaim the Divinity of Jesus in formal terms; he
everywhere feels and implies it.
111. Akin to St. Peter’s second Epistle in its language and
purpose is the short Epistle of St. Jude. Like his brother
St. James, St. Jude, although our Lord’s first cousin, introduces
himself as the slave of Jesus Christ. St. Jude does not also
term himself the slave of Godt. If believing Christians are
sanctified in God the Father, they are preserved in a life of
faith and holiness by union with Jesus Christ". The religion
of Jesus, according to St. Jude, is the final revelation of God,
the absolute truth, the true faith. Men should spare no efforts
some independent revelation, made shortly before these words were written,
is probably alluded to. Hegesippus, de Excidio Hierosol. lib. iii. 2 ; St. Am-
bros. Serm. contra Auxentium, de Basilicis tradendis, n. 13 in Epist. 21.
1 2 St. Pet.i. 2. This occurs elsewhere only at Rom. iv. 24.
m 2 Nt. Pet. i. 14, τό. Ibid. iii. 2. © Ibid. i. 11, ii. 20, ii. 18,
P Ibid. i. 1. Cf. Bp. Middleton on Gr. Art. p. 433.
4 Ibid. i. 3: τῆς θείας δυνάμεως αὐτοῦ τὰ πρὸς ζωὴν καὶ εὐσέβειαν δεδωρη-
μένης. αὐτοῦ apparently refers to Ἰησοῦ (ver. 2), and is so distinguished from
the Eternal Father τοῦ καλέσαντος ἡμᾶς (ver, 3).
ΟΣ Tbid. ver. 4: τίμια ἐπαγγέλματα δεδώρηται, va διὰ τούτων γένησθε θείας
κοινωνοὶ φύσεως.
§ Ibid. iii. 18 : αὐτῷ ἡ δόξα καὶ νῦν καὶ εἰς ἡμέραν αἰῶνος. ‘Tota externitas
una dies est.’ Estius.
t St. Jude ver. I: Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος, ἀδελφὸς δὲ ᾿Ιακώβου.
ἃ Tbid.: τοῖς ἐν Θεῷ πατρὶ ἡγιασμένοις καὶ Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ τετηρημένοιϑ8
κλητοῖς.
vi]
202 Christology of St. Paul.
on behalf of the true faith. It is the faith once for all delivered
to the saints*. The Gnostics alluded to in this Epistle, like
those foretold by St. Peter, are said to ‘deny our only Sovereign
and Lord, Jesus Christy.’ They are threatened with the punish-
ments awarded to unbelieving Israel in the wilderness, to the
rebel angels, to Sodom and Gomorrha2z. The Book of Enoch
is cited to describe Jesus coming to the universal judgment,
surrounded by myriads of saints®, The authors of all unholy
deeds will then be convicted of their crimes; the hard things
spoken against the Judge by impious sinners will be duly
punished. Christians, however, are to build themselves up upon
their most holy faith>: their life is fashioned in devotion to
the Blessed Trinity. It is a life of prayer: their souls live in
the Holy Spirit as in an atmosphere’. It is a life of persevering
love, whereof the Almighty Father is the Object4. It is a life
of expectation: they look forward to the indulgent mercy which.
our Lord Jesus Christ will shew them at His cominge. Christ
is the Being to Whom they look for mercy; and the issue of
His compassion is everlasting life. Could any merely human
Christ have had this place in the heart and faith of Christians,
or on the judgment-seat of God ?
IV. But it is time that we should proceed to consider, how-
ever briefly, the witness of that great Apostle, whose Epistles
form so much larger a contribution to the sacred volume of the
New Testament than is supplied by any other among the inspired
servants of Christ. :
τ, In comparing St. Paul with St. John, a modern author has
remarked that at first sight two objects stand out prominently
in the theological teaching of the beloved disciple, while three
immediately challenge observation in the writings of the Apostle
of the Gentiles. At first sight, St. John’s doctrine appears to
place us face to face only with God and the human world, Christ
x St. Jude ver. 3: παρακαλῶν ἐπαγωνίζεσθαι τῇ ἅπαξ παραδοθείσῃ τοῖς
ἁγίοις πίστει.
Υ Ibid. ver. 4: τὸν μόνον Δεσπότην καὶ Κύριον ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν
ἀρνούμενοι. 2 Ibid. vers. 5-7,
® Ibid. ver. 14: ἦλθε Κύριος ἐν μυριάσιν ἁγίαις αὐτοῦ, ποιῆσαι κρίσιν κατὰ ὁ
πάντων.
> Tbid. ver. 20: ὑμεῖς δὲ, ἀγαπητοὶ, τῇ ἁγιωτάτῃ ὑμῶν πίστει ἐποικοδο-
μοῦντες ἑαυτούς.
© Ibid. : ἐν Πνεύματι ᾿Αγίῳ προσευχόμενοι.
ἃ Ibid. ver. 21: ἑαυτοὺς ἐν ἀγάπῃ Θεοῦ τηρήσατε.
© Ibid.: προσδεχόμενοι τὸ ἔλεος τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, εἰς ζωὴν
αἰώνιον. ᾿ ;
[ LECT.
4
Its distinctive form. Christ’s Manhood. 303
as the Eternal Logos is in St. John plainly identical with God ;
although when we contemplate the life of the Godhead He is dis-
cerned to be personally distinct from the Father. But we cannot
really understand St. John, and withal establish in our thought
an essential separation between God and the Word Incarnate.
Although Jesus is a manifestation of God’s glory in the world
of sense, He is ever internal to that Divine Essence Whose glory
He manifests ; He is with God, and He is God. In St. Paul,
on the other hand, we are confronted more distinctly with three
objects. These are, God, the human world, and between the
two, Jesus Christ, Divine and Human, the One Mediator between
God and man. Of course the prima facie impression produced
on the mind by the sacred writers is all that is here in question,
and this impression is not to be confounded with their real
relations to each other. The Christ of St.John is as truly
Human as the Christ of St. Paul is literally Divine; St. John
exhibits the Mediator not less truly than St. Paul, St. Paul the
Divine Son of the Father not less truly than St.John. But the
observation referred to enables us to do justice to the form of
St. Paul’s Christology ; and we may well observe in his writings
the prominence which is given to two truths which supply the
foil, on this side and on that, to the doctrine of our Lord’s
essential Godhead.
(a) St. Paul insists with particular earnestness upon the truth
of our Lord’s real Humanity. This truth is not impaired by
such expressions as the ‘form of a servant‘, the ‘fashion of a
man &,’ the ‘likeness of sinful flesh },’ which are employed either
to describe Christ’s Humanity as a mode of being, or to hint at
Its veiling a Higher Nature undiscerned by the senses of man,
or to mark the point at which, by Its glorious inaccessibility to
sin, It is in contrast with the nature of that frail and erring race
to which It truly belongs. Nor is our Lord’s Humanity con-
ceived of as a phantom, when the Apostle has reached a point
of spiritual growth at which the outward circumstances of Christ’s
Life are wellnigh forgotten in an overmastering perception of
His spiritual and Divine glory’ St. Paul speaks plainly of our
Lord as being manifest in the flesh*; as possessing a Body of
£ Phil. ii. 7: μορφὴν δούλου.
& Ibid. ver. 8: σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος.
h Rom. viii. 3: ἐν ὁμοιώματι σαρκὸς ἁμαρτίας.
i 2 Cor. v. 16: εἰ δὲ καὶ ἐγνώκαμεν κατὰ σάρκα Χριστὸν, ἀλλὰ νῦν οὐκ ἔτι
γινώσκομεν.
Κα Tim. iii. 16: ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί.
VI |
---------.-5..----.-.-.-.Ξ:-.:ε erence ee oe
304 St. Paul on our Lords Manhood.
a το τ τ να...
material flesh! : as being ‘made of a woman™;’ as being ‘born
of the seed of David according to the flesh2;’ as having drawn
the substance of His Flesh from the race of Israelo. As a Jew,
Jesus Christ was born under the yoke of the Law?. His Hu-
man Life was not merely one of self-denial4 and obedience ; it
was pre-eminently a life of sharp sufferingt. The Apostle uses
energetic expressions to describe our Lord’s real share in our
physical human weakness’, as well as in those various forms
of pain, mental and bodily, which He willed to undergo, and
which reached their climax in the supreme agonies of the Pas-
sion*. If however Christ became obedient unto death, even the
death of the cross¥, this, as is implied, was of His own free
condescension ; and St. Paul dwells with rapture upon the glory
of Christ’s risen Body, to which our bodies of humiliation will
hereafter in their degrees, by His Almighty Power, be assimi-
latedY. Upon two features of our Lord’s Sacred Humanity
does St.Paul lay especial stress. First, Christ’s Manhood was
clearly void of sin, both in Soul and Body ; and in this respect
It was unlike any one member of the race to which It belonged x,
This sinlessness, however, did but restore humanity ‘in Christ’
to its original type of perfection. Thus, secondly, Christ’s Man-
hood is representative of the human race; it realizes the arche-
typal idea of humanity in the Divine Mind. Christ, the Second
Adam, according to St. Paul, stands in a relation to the regene-
rate family of men analogous to that ancestral relationship in
which the first Adam stands to all his natural descendants. But
this correspondence is balanced by a contrast. In two great
1 Col. i. 22. ἐν τῷ σώματι τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ.
™ Gal. iv. 4: γενόμενον ex γυναικός.
" Rom. i. 3: τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαβὶδ κατὰ σάρκα.
° Ibid. ix. 5: ἐξ ὧν ὁ Χριστὺς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα.
P Gal. iv. 4: γενόμενον ὑπὸ νόμον. |
4 Rom. xv. 3: καὶ γὰρ ὃ Χριστὸς οὐκ ἑαυτῷ ἤρεσεν.
* Heb. v. 8: καίπερ ὧν υἱὸς, ἔμαθεν ἀφ᾽ ὧν ἔπαθε τὴν ὑπακοήν.
5.2 Cor. xiii. 4: ἐσταυρώθη ἐξ ἀσθενείας.
* Ibid. i. § : τὰ παθήματα τοῦ Χριστοῦ. Phil. iii. 10: τὴν κοινωνίαν τῶν
παθημάτων αὐτοῦ. Col. i. 24: τὰ ὑστερήματα τῶν θλίψεων τοῦ Χριστοῦ.
“ Phil. ii, 8: ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν, γενόμενος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου,
θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ.
Y Phil. ili, 21: ὃς μετασχηματίσει τὸ σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως ἡμῶν ς 20
σύμμορφον τῷ σώματι τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ, κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν τοῦ δύνασθαι αὐτὸν
καὶ ὑποτάξαι ἑαυτῷ τὰ πάντα. 1 Cor. xv. 44: σῶμα πνευματικόν.
* 2 Cor. v. 21: τὸν γὰρ μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν, ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν ἁμαρτίαν ἐποίησεν.
Gal. ii. 17: ἄρα Χριστὸς ἁμαρτίας διάκονος; μὴ γένοιτο. Rom. viii. 3 ; cf.
Art. xv.
[ LECT.
St. Paul on our Lord’s Manhood. 305
passages St. Paul exhibits the contrast which exists between the
Second Adam and the firstY. This contrast is physical, psycho-
logical, moral, and historical. The body of the first Adam is
corruptible and earthly; the Body of the Second Adam is
glorious and incorruptiblez. The first Adam enjoys natura
life; he is made a living soul. The Second Adam is a super-
natural Being, capable of communicating His Higher Life to
- others; He is a quickening Spirit*. The first Adam is a sinner,
and his sin compromises the entire race which springs from
him. The Second Adam sins not ; His Life is one mighty act
of righteousness >; and they who are in living communion with
Him share in this His righteousness®. The historical conse-
quence of the action of the first Adam is death, the death of the
body and of the soul. This consequence is transmitted to his
descendants along with his other legacy of transmitted sin.
The historical consequence of the action and suffering of the
Second Adam is life; and communion with His living right-
eouness is the gauge and assurance to His faithful disciples
of a real exemption from the law of sin and death4. Such a
contrast, you observe, might well suggest that the Second Adam,
Representative of man’s race, its true Archetype, its Restorer
and its Saviour, is Himself more than man. Certainly; but
nevertheless it is as Man that Christ is contrasted with our first
“ee ; and it is in virtue of His Manhood that He is our
ediator, our Redeemer 9, our Saviour from Satan’s power, our
Intercessor with the Father’. Great stress indeed does St. Paul
y Rom. v. 12-21; 1 Cor. xv. 45-49.
2 1 Cor. xv. 47: 6 πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ἐκ γῆς, χοϊκός᾽" ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος
[6 Κύριος], ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. Οἷος 6 χοϊκὸς, τοιοῦτοι καὶ οἱ χοϊκοί" καὶ οἷος ὃ ἐπου--
ράνιος, τοιοῦτοι καὶ οἱ ἐπουράνιοι.
ἃ Ibid. ver. 45: ἐγένετο ὃ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ᾿Αδὰμ εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν" 6
ἔσχατος ᾿Αδὰμ εἰς πνεῦμα ζωοποιοῦν.
Ὁ δικαίωμα, Rom. v. 18.
© Rom.v. 18, 19: ἄρα οὖν ὡς δι᾽ ἑνὸς παραπτώματος, eis πάντας ἀνθρώπους,
εἰς κατάκριμα: οὕτω καὶ δι᾽ ἑνὸς δικαιώματος, εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους, εἰς
δικαίωσιν ζωῆς. ὥσπερ γὰρ διὰ τῆς παρακοῆς τοῦ ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἁμαρτωλοὶ
κατεστάθησαν οἱ πολλοὶ, οὕτω καὶ διὰ τῆς ὑπακοῆς τοῦ ἑνὸς δίκαιοι καταστα-
θήσονται οἱ πολλοί.
ἃ Tbid. ver. 12: δι ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἣ ἁμαρτία εἰς τὸν κόσμον εἰσῆλθε, καὶ
διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὃ θάνατος. Ibid. ver. 17: εἰ γὰρ ἐν ἑνὶ [τῷ τοῦ ἑνὸς, text.
rec.| παραπτώματι ὃ θάνατος ἐβασίλευσε διὰ τοῦ Evds, πολλῷ μᾶλλον οἱ τὴν
περισσείαν τῆς χάριτος καὶ τῆς δωρεᾶς τῆς δικαιοσύνης λαμβάνοντες, ἐν ζωῇ
βασιλεύσουσι διὰ τοῦ ἑνὸς Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Cf. Ibid. ver. 21.
— © 1 Tim. ii. 5, 6: ἄνθρωπος Χριστὸς Ἰησοῦς, 6 δοὺς ἑαυτὸν ἀντίλυτρον ὑπὲρ
f
πάντων.
€ Heb. ii. 14: ἐπεὶ οὖν τὰ παιδία κεκοινώνηκε σαρκὸς καὶ αἵματος, καὶ αὐτὸς
VI | x
306 Christ ἐς the Mediator as being truly Man.
lay upon the Manhood of Christ as the instrument of His media-
tion between earth and heaven, as the channel through which
intellectual truth and moral strength descend from God into
the souls of men, as the Exemplar wherein alone human nature
has recovered its ideal beauty, as entering a sphere wherein the
Sinless One could offer the perfect, world-representing sacrifice
of a truly obedient Will. So earnestly and constantly does
St. Paul’s thought dwell on our Lord’s mediating Humanity,
that to unreflecting persons his language might at times appear
to imply that Jesus Christ is personally an inferior being, ex-
ternal to the Unity of the Divine Essence. Thus he tells the
Corinthians that Christians have one Lord Jesus Christ as well
as One Gods. Thus he reminds St. Timothy that there is One
God and One Mediator between God and man, the Man
Christ Jesus, Who gave Himself a ransom for all». Thus he
looks forward to a day when the Son Himself also, meaning
thereby Christ’s sacred Manhood, shall be subject to Him That
put all things under Him, that God may be all in alli. It is at
παραπλησίως μετέσχε τῶν αὐτῶν, ἵνα διὰ τοῦ θανάτου καταργήσῃ τὸν τὸ κράτος
ἔχοντα τοῦ θανάτου, τουτέστι, τὸν διάβολον. Ibid. τ. 1.
» 81 Cor. viii. 6: εἷς Κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός. Here however (1) Κύριος, as
contrasted with Θεὸς, implies no necessary inferiority ; else we must say that
the Father is not Κύριος 5 34 οἱ: St. Chrys. de Incompr. Dei Nat. v. 2; while (2)
the clause δι᾽ οὗ τὰ πάντα, καὶ ἡμεῖς δ αὐτοῦ, which cannot be restricted to
our Lord’s redemptive work without extreme exegetical arbitrariness, and
which certainly refers to His creation of the universe, places Jesus Christ on
a level with the Father. Compare the position of διὰ between ἐξ and εἰς,
Rom. xi. 36; cf. Col. i.16. Our Lord is here distinguished from the ‘One
God,’ as being Human as well as Divine; cf. the relation of μεσίτης to Θεὸς
in 1 Tim. ii. 5. Baur’s remarks on 1 Cor. viii. 6 (Vorlesungen, p. 193),
which proceed upon the assumption that only four Epistles of St. Paul are
extant, and therefore that Col. i. 16, 17 is nothing to the purpose, and which
moreover endeavour to impose the plain redemptive reference of 2 Cor. v,
17, 18 upon this passage, are so capricious as to shew very remarkably the
strength and truth of the Catholic interpretation.
h τ Tim. ii. 5,6: εἷς yap Θεὸς, εἷς καὶ μεσίτης Θεοῦ καὶ ἀνθρώπων, ἄνθρωπος
Χριστὸς Ἰησοῦς.
i x Cor. xv. 28: ὅταν δὲ ὑποταγῇ αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα, τότε καὶ αὐτὸς ὃ Ὑἱὸς
ὑποταγήσεται τῷ ὑποτάξαντι αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα, ἵνα ἢ ἢ) ὁ Θεὸς τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν.
That our Lord’s Humanity is the subject of ὑποταγήσεται is the opinion of
St. Augustine (de Trin. i. c. 8), St. Jerome (adv. Pelag. i. 6), Theodoret (in
loc.). If αὐτὸς 6 Ὑἱὸς means the Divine Son most naturally, the predicate
ὑποταγήσεται is an instance of communicatio idiomatum (cf. Acts xx. 28;
1 Cor. ii. 8; Rom. viii. 32; ix. 5 ; St. John iii. 13); since it can only apply
to a created nature. A writer who believed our Lord to he literally God
(Rom. ix. 5) could not have supposed that, at the end of His mediatorial
reign as Man, a new relation would be introduced between the Persons of
the Godhead. The subordination (κατὰ τάξιν) of the Son is an eternal fact
[ LECT.
St. Paul on the Divine Unity. 307
least certain that no modern Humanitarian could recognise the
literal reality of our Lord’s Humanity with more explicitness
than did the Apostle who had never seen Him on earth, and to
whom He had been manifested in visions which a Docetic en-
thusiast might have taken as sufficient warrant for denying His
actual participation in our flesh and blood ¥.
. (8) On the other hand, St. Paul is as strict a monotheist as
any unconverted pupil of Gamaliel ; he does not merely retain
his hold upon the primal truth of God’s inviolate Unity ; he is
especially devoted to it.
God is parted from the very highest forms of created life by
a measureless interval, and yet the universe is a real reflection
of His Nature}, The relation of the creatures to God is three-
fold. Nothing exists which has not proceeded originally from
God’s creative Hand. Nothing exists which is not upheld in
being and perfected by God’s sustaining and working energy.
Nothing exists which shall not at the last, whether mechanically
or consciously, whether willingly or by a terrible constraint, sub-
serve God’s high and resistless purpose. For as He is the
Creator and Sustainer, so He is the One last End of all created
existences. Of Him, and through Him, and unto Him, are all
things™, §So absolute an idea of God excludes all that is local,
transient, particular, finite. God’s supreme Unity is the truth
which determines the universality of the Gospel; since the Gospel
unveils and proclaims the One supreme, world-controlling God.
in the inner Being of God. But the visible subjection of His Humanity
(with Which His Church is so organically united as to be called ‘ Christ’
1 Cor. xii. 12) to the supremacy of God will be realized at the close of the
present dispensation. Against the attempt to infer from this passage an
ἀποκατάστασις of men and devils, cf. Meyer in loc.; and against Pantheistic
inferences from τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν, cf. Julius Miiller, Lehre von ἃ. Siinde, i.
p- 157, quoted ibid.
k There seems, however, to be a distinction between such visions and
trances as those of 2 Cor. xii. 1-4; Acts xviii. 9g; xxii. 17, and the appearance
of Jesus Christ at midday, at St. Paul’s conversion, Acts ix. 17. Of this
last St. Paul appears to speak more especially in 1 Cor, ix. 1, and xv. 8. Cf.
Macpherson on the Resurrection, p. 330.
1 Rom. i. 20: τὰ yap ἀόρατα αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ κτίσεως κόσμου τοῖς ποιήμασι
νοούμενα καθορᾶται.
m Ibid. xi. 36: ὅτι ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν τὰ πάντα. ‘Alles ist
aus Gott (Urgrund), in sofern Alles aus Gottes Schépferkrafte hervorgegangen
ist; durch Gott (Vermittelungsgrund), in sofern nichts ohne Gottes Ver-
mittelung (continuirliche Einwirkung) existirt ; fii Gott (teleologische Be-
stimmung), in sofern Alles den Zwecken Gottes dient.’ Meyer in loc.
2 Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 205: ‘ Auf dieser Auffassung der Idee Gottes
beruht der Universalismus des Apostels, wie er diess in dem Satz ausspricht,
VI | x 2
308 Ground of St. Paul’s judgment of Paganism.
Hence the Apostle infers the deep misery of Paganism. The
Pagan representation of Deity was ‘a lie’ by which this essential
truth of God’s Being® was denied. The Pagans had forfeited —
that partial apprehension of the glory of the incorruptible God
which the physical universe and the light of natural conscience
placed within their reach. They had yielded to those instincts
of creature-worship P which mere naturalism is ever prone to
indulge. The Incarnation alone subdues these instincts by
consecrating them to the service of God Incarnate; while beyond
the Church they perpetually threaten naturalistic systems with
an utter and disastrous subjection to the empire of sense. When
man then had fairly lost sight of the Unity and Spirituality of
God, Paganism speedily allowed him to sink beneath a flood of
nameless sensualities ; he had abandoned the Creator to become,
in the most debased sense, the creature’s slave 4.
At another time the Apostle’s thought rests for an instant
upon the elegant but impure idolatries to which the imagination
and the wealth of Greece had consecrated those beautiful temples
which adorned the restored city of Corinth. ‘To us Christians,’
he fervently exclaims, ‘there is but one God, the Father; all
things owe their existence to Him, and we live for His purposes
and His glory" In after years, St. Paul is writing to a fellow-
labourer for Christ, and he has in view some of those Gnostic
imaginations which already proposed to link earth with heaven
by a graduated hierarchy of Atons, thus threatening the re-
introduction either of virtual polytheism or of conscious creature-
worship. Against this mischievous speculation the Apostle
utters his protest; but it issues from his adoring soul upwards
dass Gott sowohl der Heiden als der Juden Gott sei. Rom. ii. 11, iii. 20,
x. 12. Das Christenthum ist selbst nichts anderes (it ἐ8 this, but it is
a great deal more) als die Aufhebung alles Particularistischen, damit die
reine absolute Gottes-Idee in der Menschheit sich verwirkliche, oder in ihr
zum Bewusstsein komme.’ The Pantheistic touch of the last phrase does
not destroy the general truth of the observation.
° Rom. i. 25: μετήλλαξαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν τῷ ψεύδει.
Ρ Ibid. vers. 18-25; especially 23: ἤλλαξαν τὴν δόξαν τοῦ ἀφθάρτου
Θεοῦ ἐν ὁμοιώματι εἰκόνος φθαρτοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ πετεινῶν καὶ τετραπόδων
καὶ ἑρπετῶν, κιτ.λ.
4 Ibid. ver. 24: παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὃ Θεὸς ἐν ταῖς ἐπιθυμίαις τῶν καρδιῶν
αὐτῶν εἰς ἀκαθαρσίαν. Ibid. ver. 26: εἰς πάθη ἀτιμίας. Ibid. ver. 28: εἰς
ἀδόκιμον νοῦν. See the whole context.
* 1 Cor, vill. 5,6: καὶ γὰρ εἴπερ εἰσὶ λεγόμενοι θεοὶ, εἴτε ἐν οὐρανῷ, εἴτε
ἐπὶ γῆς (the two spheres of polytheistic invention) ὥσπερ εἰσὶ θεοὶ πολλοὶ,
καὶ κύριοι πολλοί: ἀλλ᾽ ἡμῖν εἷς Θεὸς 5 Πατὴρ, ἐξ οὗ τὰ πάντα, καὶ ἡμεῖς
εἰς αὐτόν.
[ LECT.
Bearing of his monotheism on his Christology. 309
to the footstool of the One Supreme and Almighty Being in the
richest and most glorious of the doxologies which occur in his
Epistles. God is the King of the ages of the world ; He is the
imperishable, invisible, only wise Beings. God is the Blessed
and Only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords ; He
only has from Himself, and originally, immortality ; He dwells
in the light which is inaccessible to creatures ; no man has seen
Him; no man can see Him; let honour and power be for
ever ascribed to Him ἵ.
St. Paul is, beyond all question, an earnest monotheist; his faith
is sensitively jealous on behalf of the supremacy and the rights
of God. What then is the position which he assigns to Jesus
Christ in the scale of being? That he believed Jesus Christ to
be merely a man is a paradox which could be maintained by no
careful reader of his Epistles. But if, according to St. Paul,
Christ is more than man, what is He? Is He still only an Arian
Christ? or is He a Divine Person? In St. Paul’s thought this
question could not have been an open one. His earnest, sharply-
defined faith in the One Most High God must force him to say
either that Christ is a created being, or that He is internal to
the Essence of God. Nor is the subject of such a nature as to
admit of accommodation or compromise in its treatment. In
practical matters, and where the law of God permits, St. Paul
may become all things to all men that he may by all means save
some", But he cannot, as if he were a pagan politician of old,
or a modern man of the world, compliment away his deepest
faith*. He cannot ascribe Divinity to a fellow-creature by way
of panegyrical hyperbole ; his belief in God is too powerful, too
exacting, too keen, too real. St. Paul may teach the Athenians
that we live and move and have our being in the all-present, all-
encompassing Life of God ¥; he may bid the Corinthians expect
a time when God shall be known and felt by every member of
sy Tim. i.17: τῷ δὲ βασιλεῖ τῶν αἰώνων, ἀφθάρτῳ, ἀοράτῳ μόνῳ σοφῷ Θεῷ,
τιμὴ καὶ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. Here μόνῳ σοφῷ Θεῷ, excludes
current Gnostic claims on behalf of AZons; in Rom. xvi. 27, (with which
compare St. Jude 25,) it contrasts the Divine Wisdom manifested in the
plan of Redemption through Jesus Christ with human schemes and theories,
whether Jewish or Gentile.
ty Tim. vi. 15, 16: 6 μακάριος καὶ μόνος δυνάστης, 6 βασιλεὺς τῶν βασι-
λευόντων, καὶ Κύριος τῶν κυριευόντων, 6 μόνος ἔχων ἀθανασίαν, φῶς οἰκῶν
ἀπρόσιτον, ὃν εἶδεν οὐδεὶς ἀνθρώπων, οὐδὲ ἰδεῖν δύναται, ᾧ τιμὴ καὶ κράτος
αἰώνιον, ἀμήν.
u 1 Cor. ix. 22. x 2 Cor. i. 18, ii. 17. y Acts xvii. 28.
VI }
310 St. Paul’s devotion to our Lord’s condescension.
His great family to be all in 4115, But St. Paul cannot merge the
Maker and Ruler of the universe, so gloriously free in His creative
and providential action®, in any conception which identifies Him
with the work of His hands, or which reduces Him to the level
of an impersonal quality or force. The Apostle may contemplate
the vast hierarchy of the blessed angels, ranging in their various
degrees of glory between the throne of God and the children of
menb. But no heavenly intelligence, however exalted, is seen
in his pages to trench for one moment upon the incommunicable
prerogatives of God. St. Paul may describe the regenerate life
of Christians in such terms as to warrant us in saying that
Christ’s true members become divine by spiritual communion
with God in His Blessed Son’ But the saintliest of men, the
most exalted and majestic of seraphs, are alike removed by an
infinite interval from the One Uncreated, Self-existent, Incor-
ruptible Essenced. There is no room in St. Paul’s thought for
an imaginary being like the Arian Christ, hovering indistinctly
between created and Uncreated life; since, where God is be-
lieved to be so utterly remote from the highest creatures beneath
His throne, Christ must either be conceived of as purely and
simply a creature with no other than a creature’s nature and
rights, or He must be adored as One Who is for ever and neces-
sarily internal to the Uncreated Life of the Most High.
2. It has been well observed by the author of ‘Ecce Homo’
that ‘the trait in Christ which filled St. Paul’s whole mind was
His condescension ;’ and that ‘the charm of that condescension
lay in its being voluntary®.’ Certainly. But condescension is
the act of bending from a higher station to a lower one; and
the question is, from what did Christ condescend ? If Christ was
merely human, what was the human eminence from which
St. Paul believed Him to be stooping? Was it a social emi-
nence? But as the favourite of the synagogue, and withal as pro-
tected by the majesty of the Roman franchisef, St. Paul occupied
a social position not less widely removed from that of a Galilean
peasant leading a life of vagrancy, than are your circumstances,
my brethren, who belong to the middle and upper classes of this
country, removed from the lot of the homeless multitudes who
day by day seek relief in our workhouses. Was it an intellec-
z τ Cor. xv. 28. ® Rom. ix. 21.
> Col. i. 16. These hierarchical distinctions appear to have been pre-
served among the fallen angels (Eph, vi. 12).
ovr Cor. it 16, 17; Υἱ. 10, 20. 4 Rom. xi. 34-36.
€ Ecce Homo, p. 49. f Acts xxii. 29.
[ LECT.
ee ee ee | a
From what position did Christ condescend? 311
tual eminence? But the Apostle who had sat at the feet of
Gamaliel, and had drawn largely from the fountains of Greek
thought and culture, had at least enjoyed educational advantages
which were utterly denied to the Prophet of Nazareth. Was it
then a moral eminence? But, if Jesus was merely Man, was He, I
do not say morally perfect, but morally eminent at all! Was not
His Self-assertion such as to be inconsistent with any truthful
recognition whatever of the real conditions of a created exist-
ence? But was the eminence from which Christ condescended
angelical as distinct from human? St. Paul has drawn the sharp-
est distinction between Christ and the angels ; Christ is related
to the angels, in the belief of the Apostle, simply as the Author
of their beingg; while the appointed duties of the angels are to
worship His Person and to serve His servants h,
What then was the position from which Christ condescended?
Two stages of condescension are indeed noted, one within and
one beyond the limits of our Lord’s Human Life. Being found
in fashion as a Man, He voluntarily humbled Himself and became
obedient unto deathi, But the earlier and the greater act of
condescension was that whereby He had become Man out of
a state of pre-existent glory *. St. Paul constantly refers to the
pre-existent Life of Jesus Christ. The Second Adam differs
from the first in that He is ‘from heaven!’ When ancient
Israel was wandering in the desert, Christ had been Him-
self invisibly present as Guardian and Sustainer of the Lord’s
people™. St. Paul is pleading on behalf of the poor Jewish
Churches with their wealthier Corinthian brethren; and he
points to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, when He
was rich, for our sakes became poor, that we through His
poverty might be rich». Here Christ’s eternal wealth is in
contrast with His temporal impoverishment. Tor His poverty
began with the manger of Bethlehem ; He became poor by the
& Col. i. 16. h Heb. i. 6, 14.
i Phil. ii. 8: σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος, ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν, γενόμενος
ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου, θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ.
k Ibid. vers. 6, 7: ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων, - - ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσε, μορφὴν
δούλου λαβών.
1 1 Cor. xv. 47: ὃ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος [ὁ ΚύριοΞ5] ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. Cf. Tert. adv.
Mare. v. 10.
m 1 Cor.x. 4: ἧ δὲ wérpa[the πέτρα ἀκολουθοῦσα commemorated by Jewish
traditions] ἦν ὁ Χριστός. Ibid. ver. g: μηδὲ ἐκπειράζωμεν τὸν Χριστὸν, καθὼς
καί τινες αὐτῶν ἐπείρασαν.
n 2 Cor. viii. 9: γινώσκετε γὰρ τὴν χάριν τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ,
ὅτι δ ὑμᾶς ἐπτώχευσε πλούσιος ὧν, ἵνα ὑμεῖς τῇ ἐκείνον πτωχείᾳ πλουτήσητε.
VI]
412 Christ ts ‘over all
act of His Incarnation ; being rich according to the unbegun,
unending Life of His Higher Nature, He became poor in time 9,
When St. Paul says that our Lord was ‘ manifested in the fleshp,’
he at least implies that Christ existed before this manifestation ;
when St. Paul definitely ascribes to our Lord the function of a
Creator Who creates not for a Higher Power but for Himself, we
rise from the idea of pre-existence to the idea of a relationship
towards the universe, which can belong to One Being alone.
This will presently be considered.
Certainly St. Paul used the terms ‘form of God,’ ‘image of
God,’ when speaking of the Divinity of Jesus Christa. But
these terms do not imply that Christ’s Divinity only resembles
or is analogous to the Divinity of the Father. They do not
mean that as Man, He represents the Divine Perfections in
an inferior and partial manner to our finite intelligence
which is incapable of raising itself sufficiently to contem-
plate the transcendent reality. They are necessary in order to
define the personal distinction which exists between the Divine
Son and the Eternal Father. Certainly it is no mere human
being or seraph Whom St. Paul describes as being ‘over all,
God blessed for evert.’ You remind me that these words are
° Baur suggests that ἐπτώχευσε need mean no more than that Christ was
poor. (Vorlesungen, p. 193.) But ‘der Aorist bezeichnet das einst gesche-
hene Lintreten des Armseins (denn πτωχεύειν heisst nicht arm werden,
sondern arm sein), nicht das von Christo gefiihrte ganze Leben in Armuth
und Niedrigkeit, wobei er gleichwohl reich an Gnade gewesen sei.’ (Meyer
in 2 Cor. viii. 9.)
P I Tim. iii. 16: ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί. Cf. Bishop Ellicott in loc. The
bishop pronounces ds to be the reading of the Codex A, ‘after minute
personal inspection,’ and has adopted it in his text. Mr. Scrivener however
has examined the Codex more recently, and with a different result. ‘On hold-
ing the leaf,’ he says, ‘up to the light one singularly bright hour, February 7,
1861, and gazing at it with and without a lens, with eyes which have some-
thing of the power and too many of the defects of a microscope, I saw clearly
the tongue of the € through the attenuated vellum, crossing the circle about
two thirds up, (much above the thick modern line), the knob at its extremity
falling without the circle. On laying down the leaf I saw immediately after
(but not at the same moment) the slight shadow of the real ancient diameter,
only just above the recent one.’ Still, upon a review of the whole mass of
external proof, particularly of the verdict of Codex x, and of the versions
and Fathers, Mr. Scrivener decides for ds as the probable reading of the text.
See the very full statement in his ‘ Introduction to the Criticism of the New
Testament,’ pp. 452-455. If then it be admitted that the reading ΘΣ is too
doubtful to be absolutely relied on ; in any case our Lord’s Pre-existence lies
in the ἐφανερώθη (1 St. John i. 2), which cannot without violence be watered
down into the sense of Christ’s manifestation in the teaching and belief
of the Church, as distinct from His manifestation in history.
4. Phil. ii. 6; Col. i. 15. r Rom. ix. 5.
[ LECT.
| Gop blessed for ever.’ 313
referred by some modern scholars to the Eternal Father. Cer-
tainly they are: but on what grounds? Of scholarship? What
then is St. Paul’s general purpose when he uses these words ἢ
He has just been enumerating those eight privileges of the race
of Israel, the thought of which kindled in his true Jewish heart
the generous and passionate desire to be made even anathema
for his rejected countrymen. ΤῸ these privileges he subjoins a
climax. The Israelites were they, ἐξ ὧν ὁ Χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα, ὁ
dv ἐπὶ πάντων Θεὸς εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. It was from the
blood of Israel that the true Christ had sprung, so far as His
Human Nature was concerned ; but Christ’s Israelitic descent 1s,
in the Apostle’s eyes, so consummate a glory for Israel, because
Christ is much more than one of the sons of men, because
by reason of His Higher Pre-existent Nature He is ‘over all,
God blessed for ever.’ This is the naturals sense of the pas-
sage. If the passage occurred in a profane author and there
were no anti-theological interest to be promoted, few critics
would think of overlooking the antithesis between Χριστὸς τὸ
κατὰ σάρκα and Θεὸς εὐλογητός ὁ, Still less possible would it be
® Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. 76, note. M. Reuss says that the Catholic inter-
pretation of Rom. ix. 5 is ‘l’explication la plus simple et la plus naturelle.’
‘Man hat hier verschiedene Auswege gesucht, der Nothwendigkeit zu entge- .
hen, [4] ὧν ἐπὶ πάντων Θεός auf Christum zu beziehen ; aber bei jedem bieten
sie solche Schwierigkeiten dar, die immer wieder auf die einfachste und von
der Grammatik gebotene Auslegung zuriickfihren.’ (Usteri, Entwickelung
des Paulinischen Lehrbegriffes, p. 309.) That the text was understood in
the early Church to apply to Jesus Christ will appear from St. Iren. 111. 10:5:
Tert. adv. Prax. 13; St. Hipp. c. Noet. 6. So Origen; St. Athan. Orat.c. Ar.
i. 10; Theodoret ; St»Chrys. de Incompr. Dei Nat. v. 2; in Joan. hom. xxxiii.
1; in 1 Cor. hom. xx. 3. It seems probable that any non-employment of so
striking a passage by the Catholics during their earlier controversial struggles
with the Arians is to be attributed to their fear of being charged with con-
struing it in a Sabellian sense. (Cf. Olsh. in loc.; Reiche, Comm. ii. 268,
note.) The language of the next age was unhesitating: εἶπεν αὐτὸν “ ἐπὶ
πάντων"... “Θεὸν᾽.. .“ εὐλογητὸν"... ἔχοντες οὖν τὸν Χριστὸν καὶ ὄντα Θεὸν
καὶ εὐλογητὸν, αὐτῷ προσκυνήσωμεν. St. Procl. ad Arm. (Labbe, iii. 1231.)
Wetstein erroneously assumed that those early fathers who refused to apply
6 ἐπὶ πάντων Θεὸς to Christ, would have objected to the predicate actually
employed by the Apostle, ἐπὶ πάντων Θεός. (Cf. Fritzsche, Comm. in Rom.
i. p. 262 sqq.) And indeed Socinus himself (see Tholuck in loc.) had no
doubt of the reference of this passage to Christ; although he explained it of
a conferred, not of a ‘natural’ Divinity. (Cat. Rac. 159 sqq.) See too Dr.
Vaughan, Comm. in loc. against the ‘ harsh, evasive and most needless inter-
pretation,’ which applies it to the Father.
t Observe Rom. i. 3, where ἐκ σπέρματος Δαβὶδ κατὰ σάρκα is in contrast
with Ὑἱοῦ Θεοῦ... κατὰ Πνεῦμα ᾿Αγιωσύνης.
vi |
31 Christ ἐς ‘over all Gon blessed for ever?
to destroy this antithesis outright, and to impoverish the climax
of the whole passage, by cutting off the doxology from the clause
which precedes it, and so erecting it into an independent ascrip-
tion of praise to God the Father¥. If we should admit that the
doctrine of Christ’s Godhead is not stated in this precise form
elsewhere in St. Paul’s writings *, that admission cannot be held
" As to the punctuation of this passage the early MSS. themselves of
course determine nothing ; but the citations and versions to which Lachmann
generally appeals for the formation of his text are decisively in favour of re-
ferring ὁ ὧν to Χριστός. The Sabellian use of the text to prove that the Father
became Man, and the orthodox replies shewing that this was not the sense of
the passage, equally assume that the doxological clause refers to Christ.
Nothing can with safety be inferred as to the received reading in the Church
from the general and of course prejudiced statement of the Emperor Julian,
that τὸν γοῦν Ἰησοῦν οὔτε Παῦλος ἐτόλμησεν εἰπεῖν Θεόν. St. Cyril. cont. Jul.
X. init., Op. tom. vi. p. 327. Two cursive MSS. of the twelfth century (5
and 47, cf. Meyer), are the first which distinctly interpose a punctuation after
σάρκα, and so erect the following clause into an independent doxology
addressed to God the Father. But the construction which is thus rendered
necessary (1) makes the participle ὧν altogether superfluous. In 2 Cor. xi. 31,
6 ὧν εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας is an exactly parallel construction to that of
Rom. ix. 5. Nothing but strong anti-theological bias can explain the facility
with which the natural force of the passage is at once recognised in the
former and denied in the latter case (see Prof. Jowett in loc., and Baur, Vor-
lesungen, p. 194, who begs the question,—‘ Christus ist noch wesentlich
Mensch, nicht Gott’). It need scarcely be added that there is no authority
for transposing ὁ ὧν into ὧν 6, in order to evade the natural force of the
participle. (2) The construction which the isolation of the clause renders
necessary violates the invariable usage of Biblical Greek. ‘If the Apostle
had wished to express ‘“‘God, Who is over all, be blessed for ever,”’ he must,
according to the unvarying usage of the New Testament and the LXX.
(which follows the use of 72), have placed εὐλογητὸς first, and written
εὐλογητὸς ὃ ὧν x.7.A. There are about forty places in the Old Testament
and five in the New in which this formula of doxology occurs, and in every
case the arrangement is the same, ‘‘ Blessed be the God Who is over all, for
ever.”’’ (Christ. Rem. April 1856, p. 469.) It may be added that in Ps. Ixvii.
19, LXX. (cited by Winer, N. T. Gr. Eng. Tr. Ῥ. 573), Κύριος 6 Θεὸς εὐλο-
γητὸς, εὐλογητὸς Κύριος, the first εὐλογητὸς has no corresponding word in
the Hebrew text, and appears to be interpolated. Dean Alford observes that
I Kings x. 6; 2 Chron. ix. 8; Job i. 21; Ps. exii. 2, are not exceptions ;
“since in all of them the verb εἴη or γένοιτο is expressed, requiring the sub-
stantive to follow it closely.” We. may be very certain that, if ἐπὶ πάντων
Θεὸς could be proved to be an unwarranted reading, no scholar, however
Socinianizing his bias, would hesitate to say that 6 dv εὐλογητὸς κ.τ.λ.
should be referred to the proper name which precedes it.
x Our Lord is not, we are reminded, called εὐλογητὸς elsewhere in the
New Testament. But εὐλογημένος is certainly applied to Him, St. Matt.
xxi. 9; St. Luke xix. 28 ; and as regards εὐλογητὸς, the remarkable fewness
of doxologies addressed to Him might account for the omission. The predi-
cate could only be refused to Him on the ground of His being, in the belief of
St. Paul, merely a creature. It is arbitrary to maintain that no word can
[ LECT.
Christ is ‘our great Gop and Saviour’ 515
to justify us in violently breaking up the passage, in order to
escape from its natural meaning, unless we are prepared to deny
thet St. Paul could possibly have employed an ἅπαξ λεγόμενον.
Nor in point of fact does St. Paul say more in this famous text
than when in writing to Titus he describes Christians as ‘looking
for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God
and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who gave Himself for usy.’ Here the
grammar apparently, and the context certainly, oblige us to
recognise the identity of ‘our Saviour Jesus Christ’ and ‘our
Great God.’ As a matter of fact, Christians are not waiting for
any manifestation of the Father. And He Who gave Himself
for us can be none other than our Lord Jesus Christ.
Reference has already been made to that most solemn passage
in the Epistle to the Philippians, which is read by the Church
possibly be applied to a given subject because there is not a second instance
of such application within a limited series of books. Against ἐπὶ πάντων
Θεὸς, besides the foregoing objection, it is further urged that it cannot be
applied to our Lord, Who, although consubstantial with, is subordinate to,
the Eternal Father, and withal personally distinct from Him ; cf. Eph. iv. 5;
1 Cor. viii. 6, where, however, His Manhood, as being essential to His media-
tion, is specially in the Apostle’s eye. But St. Paul does not call our Lord 6
ἐπὶ πάντων @cds—the article would lay the expression open to a direct Sabel-
lian construction ; St. Paul says that Christ is ἐπὶ πάντων Θεὸς, where the
Father of course is not included among τὰ πάντα, I Cor. xvii. 27; and the
sense corresponds substantially with Acts x. 36, Rom. x. 12. It asserts that
Christ is internal to the Divine Essence, without denying His personal dis-
tinctness from, or His filial relation to, the Father. Cf. Alford in loc. ;
Usteri, Entwickelung des Paulinischen Lehrbegriffes, p. 309 sqq.; Olshausen,
Comm. in loc.
y Tit. ii. 13: προσδεχόμενοι Thy μακαρίαν ἐλπίδα καὶ ἐπιφάνειαν τῆς δόξης
τοῦ μεγάλου Θεοῦ καὶ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ͵ ὃς ἔδωκεν ἑαυτὸν ὑπὲρ
ἡμῶν. ‘Nicht Gott und Christus, sondern bloss Christus gemeint ist ; denn
es ist von der herrlichen Wiederkunft Christi die Rede, und eine Erscheinung
Gottes (of the Father) anzunehmen, wiire ausser aller Analogie ; auch bediirfte
Gott der Vater nicht erst des erhebenden und preisenden Epithets μέγας,
vielmehr deutet auch dieses auf Christum.’ (Usteri, Lehrbegriff, p. 310.)
To these arguments Bishop Ellicott adds that the subsequent allusion to our
Lord’s profound Self-humiliation accounts for St. Paul’s ascribing to Him, by
way of reparation, ‘a title, otherwise unusual, that specially and antithetically
marks His glory,’ and that two ante-Nicene writers, Clemens Alexandr.
(Protrep. 7) and St. Hippolytus, together with the great bulk of post-Nicene
fathers, although not all, concur in this interpretation. And the bishop holds
that grammatically there is a presumption in favour of this interpretation, but,
on account of the defining genitive ἡμῶν, nothing more. Nevertheless, taking
the great strength of the exegetical evidence into account, he sees in this text
a ‘direct, definite, and even studied declaration of the Divinity of the Eternal
Son.’ See his note, and Wordsworth in loc.; Middleton, Greek Article, ed.
Rose, p. 393+
vi]
316 Christ ‘in the form of’ and ‘equal with’ Goo.
elena ic Ae ὃς δ δ συ
in the Communion Service on Palm Sunday 2, in order, as it
would seem, to remind Christians of the real dignity of their
suffering Lord. Our Lord’s Divine Nature is here represented
as the seat of His Eternal Personality ; His Human Nature is a
clothing which He assumed in time. Ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων,
εὐ ν ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσε, μορφὴν δούλου λαβώνᾶ, It ig impossible not to
be struck by the mysterious statement that Christ, being in the
form of God, did not look upon equality with God (τὸ εἶναι ἶσα
Θεῷ) as a prize to be jealously grasped at Ὁ (οὐκ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο).
Τὸ has been maintained that St. Paul is here contrasting the
apostolic belief in our Lord’s condescending love with an early
Gnostic speculation respecting an Aon. This AZon desired to
compass directly, and by a violent assault, the invisible and in-
comprehensible God ; whereas God could only be really known
to and contemplated by the Monogenes. The ambition of the
fabled Aion is thus said to be in contrast with the ‘self-empty-
ing’ of the Eternal Christ. Such a contrast, if it had been in
the Apostle’s mind, would have implied the Absolute Pre-existent
Divinity of Christ. Christ voluntarily lays aside the glory
which was His; the fabled Aon would violently grasp a glory
which could not rightfully belong to him. But if this explana-
tion of the energetic negative phrase of the Apostle should not
be accepted, it is in any case clear that the force of St. Paul’s
moral lesson in the whole passage must depend upon the real
Divinity of the Incarnate and Self-immolating Christ. The
= See Epistle for Sunday next before Easter.
ἃ Phil. ii. 6, 7. ‘Die Gnostiker sprachen von einem Aeon, welcher das
absolute Wesen Gottes auf unmittelbare Weise erfassen wollte, und weil er
so das an sich Unmdgliche erstrebte aus dem πλήρωμα in das κένωμα herabfiel.
Dieser Aeon begieng so gleichsam einen Raub, weil er, der in der Qualitat
eines gittlichen Wesens an sich die Fahigkeit hatte, sich mit dem Absoluten
zu vereinigen, diese Identitit, welche erst durch den ganzen Weltprocess
realisirt werden konnte, gleichsam sprungweise, mit Einem Male, durch einen
gewaltsamen Act, oder wie durch einen Raub an sich reissen wollte. So
erhilt erst die bildliche Vorstellung eines ἁρπαγμός ihre eigentliche Bedeu-
tung.’ (Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 266.) Compare, however, Meyer, Philipper-
brief, p. 68, Anmerkung. Baur has spun a large web out of St. Irenzus,
Adv. Her. I. 2.1.2. The notion that the Avon sought to attain an identity
with God,—and this assumption is necessary in order to construct a real
parallel with St. Paul’s words,—has no foundation in the text of St. Irenzeus.
» Cf. Bp. Ellicott in loc. ; and in Aids to Faith, p. 436; Dollinger, First Age
of the Church, p. 163. E.T. renders ἁρπαγμὸν as ‘a spoil which was not His
by right, and of which He might be deprived.’ dpz. is clearly a thing or
state, not an action. Thus the description of the glory from which our Lord
stooped ends at ὑπάρχων : the description of His condescension begins with
οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν and ἀλλ᾽ has its full force.
[ LECT.
Christ ‘the Image of the Invisible Gov’ 417
point of our Lord’s example lies in His emptying Himself of the
glory or ‘form’ of His Eternal Godhead. Worthless indeed
would have been the force of His example, had He been in
reality a created Being, who only abstained from grasping
tenaciously at Divine prerogatives which a creature could not
have arrogated to himself without impious folly*. Christians
are to have in themselves the Mind of Christ Jesus ; but what
that Mind is they can only understand, by considering what His
Apostle believed Christ Jesus to have been, before He took on
Him the form of a servant and became obedient unto death.
Perhaps the most exhaustive assertion of our Lord’s Godhead
which is to be found in the writings of St. Paul, is that which
occurs in the Epistle to the Colossians4. This magnificent dog-
matic passage is introduced, after the Apostle’s manner, with a
strictly practical object. The Colossian Church was exposed to
the intellectual attacks of a theosophic doctrine, which degraded
Jesus Christ to the rank of one of a long series of inferior beings,
supposed to range between mankind and the supreme God.
Against this position St. Paul asserts that Christ is the εἰκὼν rod
Θεοῦ τοῦ dopdrov—the Image of the Invisible Gode. The ex-
pression εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ supplements the title of ‘the Son.’ As
‘the Son’ Christ is derived eternally from the Father, and He is
of One Substance with the Father. As ‘the Image,’ Christ is,
in that One Substance, the exact likeness of the Father, in all
things except being the Father. The Son is the Image of the
Father, not as the Father, but as God: the Son is ‘the Image
of God.’ The εἰκὼν is indeed originally God’s unbegun, unending
reflection of Himself in Himself; but the εἰκὼν is also the Organ
whereby God, in His Essence invisible, reveals Himself to His
creatures. Thus the εἰκὼν is, so to speak, naturally the Creator,
since creation is the first revelation which God has made of
Himself. Man is the highest point in the visible universe ; in
© The Arian gloss upon this text was this: ὅτι θεὸς dv ἐλάττων οὐχ ἥρπασε
τὸ εἶναι ἴσα τῷ Θεῷ τῷ μεγάλῳ καὶ μείζονι. St. Chrysostom comments thus :
Καὶ μικρὸς καὶ μέγας Θεὸς ἔνι; καὶ τὰ Ἑλληνικὰ τοῖς τῆς ἐκκλησίας δόγμασιν
ἐπεισάγετε; ... Ei γὰρ μικρὸς, πῶς καὶ Θεός ; (Hom. vi. in loc.) The μορφὴ
Θεοῦ is apparently the manifested glory of Deity, implying of course the
reality of the Deity so manifested. Compare δόξα, St. John xvii. 5. Of this
μορφὴ (as distinct from Deity Itself) our Lord ἐκένωσεν ἑαυτόν. The word
ὑπάρχων points to our Lord’s ‘ original subsistence’ in the splendour of the
Godhead. The expression ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων is virtually equivalent to
τὸ εἶναι ἶσα Θεῷ. See Dean Alford’s exhaustive note upon this passage.
4 Col. i. 15-17. 9. Cf. 2 Cor. iv. 4: ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ.
vi |
28:8 Chrost, ‘ Begotten before every creature?
man, God’s attributes are most luminously exhibited ; man is the
image and glory of God But Christ is the Adequate Image
of God, God’s Self-reflection in His Own thought, eternally pre-
sent with Himself. As the εἰκὼν, Christ is the πρωτότοκος πάσης
κτίσεως : that is to say, mot the First in rank among created
beings, but begotten before any created beings. That this is a
true sense of the expression is etymologically certain’; but it
is also the only sense which is in real harmony with the relation
in which, according to the context, Christ is said to stand to the
created universe», That relation, according to St. Paul, is
threefold. Of all things in earth and heaven, of things seen and
unseen, of the various orders of the angelic hierarchy, of thrones,
of dominions, of principalities, of powers—it is said that they
were created in Christ, by Christ, and for Christ. Ἐν αὐτῷ,
£ 1 Cor. xi. 7: εἰκὼν καὶ δόξα Θεοῦ.
8. As εἰκὼν here defines our Lord’s relation to God the Father, so πρωτό-
τόκος defines His relation to the creatures. βούλεται δεῖξαι ὅτι πρὸ πάσης τῆς
κτίσεώς ἐστιν ὃ Ὑἱός᾽ πῶς ὥν; διὰ γεννήσεως" οὐκοῦν καὶ τῶν ἀγγέλων πρό-
τερος; καὶ οὕτως, ὥστε καὶ αὐτὸς ἔκτισεν αὐτούς. (Theophyl. in loc.) Christ
is not the first of created spirits; He exists before them, and as One
‘begotten not made.’ ‘Der genit. πάσης κτίσεως ist nicht Genit. partitiv.
(obwohl diess noch de Wette fiir unzweifelhaft halt), weil πᾶσα κτίσις nicht
die ganze Schipfung heisst, mithin nicht die Kategorie oder Gesammtheit
aussagen kann, zu welcher Christus als ihr erstgebornes Individuum gehore :
es heisst, jedwedes Geschipf ; vrgl. z. πᾶσα oixodouh, Eph. ii. 21.), sondern
es ist der Genit. comparat.: der Erstgeborne in Vergleich mit jedem Geschipfe
(s. Bernhardy, p. 139), ἃ. h. eher geboren als jedes Geschipf. Vrel.
Bahr z. St.u. Ernesti Ursprung ἃ. Siinde, p. 241. Anders ist das Ver-
haltniss Apoc. i. 5. : πρωτότοκος τῶν νεκρῶν, Wo τῶν νεκρῶν die Kategorie
anzeigt, vrgl. πρωτότοκος ἐν πολλοῖς ἀδελφοῖς (Rom. viii. 29). Unser Genit.
ist ganz zu fassen wie der vergleichende Genit. bei πρῶτος Joh. i. 1 5, 30;
Winer, p. 218 ; Fritzsche ad Rom. ii. p. 421. Das Vergleichungs-M oment
ist das Verhiltniss der Zeit, und zwar in Betreff des Ursprungs: da aber
letzterer bei jeder κτίσις anders ist als bei Christo, so ist nicht πρωτόκτιστος
oder πρωτόπλαστος gesagt, welches von Christo eine gleiche Art der Entste-
hung wie von der Creatur anzeigen wiirde, sondern πρωτότοκος gewihlt,
welches in der Zeitvergleichung des Ursprungs die absonderliche Art der
Entstehung in Betreff Christi anzeigt, dass er nimlich von Gott nicht
geschaffen sei, wie die anderen Wesen, bei denen diess in der Benennung
κτίσις liegt, sondern geboren, aus dem Wesen Gottes gleichartig hervorge- |
gangen. Richtig Theodoret: οὐχ ὡς ἀδελφὴν ἔχων τὴν κτίσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς
πρὸ πάσης κτίσεως γεννηθείς. Wortwidrig ist daher die Arianische Erkli-
rung, dass Christus als das erste Geschipf Gottes bezeichnet werde.’ Meyer,
Kolosserbrief, p. 184.
» Schleiermacher’s desire to apply to the new creation, what is here said
of the natural, is alluded to by Auberlen as an illustration of his tendency
“to expound the Bible by the verdict of his devout consciousness, instead of
permitting his consciousness to be regulated by the Bible. On the Divine
Revelation, pt. 2. iv. 2. a.
[ LEcT.
Christ, the Author and the End of created life. 319
ἐκτίσθη. . .. δ αὐτοῦ, καὶ eis αὐτὸν ἔκτισταιϊ. In Him. There
was no creative process external to and independent of Him ;
since the archetypal forms after which the creatures are modelled,
and the sources of their strength and consistency of being, eter-
nally reside in Himk. By Him. The force which has sum-
moned the worlds out of nothingness into being, and which
upholds them in being, is His; He wields it; He is the One
Producer and Sustainer of all created existence. or Hun.
He is not, as Arianism afterwards pretended, merely an inferior
workman, creating for the glory of a higher Master, for a God
superior to Himself. He creates for Himself ; He is the End of
created things as well as their immediate Source ; and in living
for Him every creature finds at once the explanation and the
law of its being. For ‘He is before all things, and by Him all
things consist!’ After such a statement it follows naturally
that the πλήρωμα, that is to say, the entire cycle of the
Divine attributes, considered as a series of powers or forces,
dwells in Jesus Christ; and this, not in any merely ideal or
transcendental manner, but with that actual reality which men
attach to the presence of material bodies which they can feel
and measure through the organs of sense. Ἐν αὐτῷ κατοικεῖ πᾶν τὸ
i Compare Rom. xi. 36: ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ 5° αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν τὰ πάντα.
As in this passage the Apostle is speaking of God, without hinting at any
distinction of Persons within the Godhead, he writes ἐξ αὐτοῦ, not ἐν αὐτῷ.
The Eternal Father is the ultimate Source of all life, both intra and extra
Deum; while the production of created beings depends immediately upon
the Son. The other two prepositions—the last being theologically of most
import—correspond in the two passages.
k ἐκτίσθη describes the act of creation; ἔκτισται points to creation as
a completed and enduring fact. In ἐν αὐτῷ, the preposition signifies that
‘in Christo beruhete (ursiichlich) der Act der Schépfung, so dass die Vollzie-
hung derselben in Seinen Person begriindet war, und ohne ihn nicht
geschehen wiire.’ Cf. St. John i. 3: χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν, ὃ γέγονεν.
But although the preposition immediately expresses the dependence of
created life upon Christ as its cause, it hints at the reason of this depend-
ence, namely, that our Divine Lord is the causa exemplaris of creation, the
κόσμος νοητὸς, the Archetype of all created things, ‘die Dinge ihrer Idee
nach, Selbst, er trigt ihre Wesenheit in sich.” (Olshausen in loc.)
1 Col. i. 17: καὶ αὐτός ἐστι πρὸ πάντων, καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκε.
Meyer in loc. ‘Und Er (Er eben), durch welchen und fiir welchen τὰ
πάντα ἔκτισται, hat eine friihere Existenz als Alles, und das Simmtliche
besteht in ihm... . . πρὸ πάντων wie πρωτότοκος von der Zeit, nicht vom
Range; wiederholt und nachdriicklich betont wird von P. die Priexistenz
Christi. Statt ἔστι hatte er ἣν sagen kénnen (Joh. i. 1); jenes aber ist
gesagt, weil Er die Permanenz des Seins Christi im Auge hat und darstellt,
nicht aber historisch iiber ihn berichten will, was nur in den Hiilfssatzen
mit ὅτι vers. 16. ἃ. 19. geschieht.’ Cf. St. John viii. 58.
vr]
OEE
320 Christ's Divinity x Heb. i. 5-14.
a EE EE eee
πλήρωμα τῆς θεότητος σωματικῶς ™, Although throughout this
Epistle the word λόγος is never introduced, it is plain that the
εἰκὼν of St. Paul is equivalent in His rank and functions to the
λόγος of St. John. Lach exists prior to creation; each is the
one Agent in creation; each is a Divine Person ; each is equal
with God and shares His essential Life; each is really none
other than God.
Indeed with this passage in the Colossians only two others
in the entire compass of the New Testament, can, on the whole,
be compared. Allusion has already been made to the prologue
of St. John’s Gospel; and it is no less obvious to refer to the
opening chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Most of those
writers who earnestly reject the Pauline authorship of that
Epistle admit that it is of primary canonical authority, and
assign to its author the highest place of honour in ‘the school
of St. Paul.’ There are reasons for believing that, at the utmost,
it is not more distantly related to his mind than is the Gospel of
St. Luke ; if indeed it does not furnish a crowning instance of
the spiritual versatility of the great Apostle, addressing himself
to a set of circumstances unlike any other of which the records
of his ministry have given us -information. Throughout the
Epistle to the Hebrews a comparison is instituted between
Christianity and Judaism ; and this comparison turns partly on
the spiritual advantages which belong to the two systems respec-
tively, and partly on the relative dignity of the persons who
represent the two dispensations, and who mediate accordingly,
in whatever senses, between God and humanity. Thus our
Incarnate Lord as the one great High-priest is contrasted with
Aaron” and his successors. Thus too as the one perfect Re-
vealer of God, He is compared with Moses° and the Jewish
m Col. ii. 9: πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα. Meyer in loc. ¢Wird durch τῆς θεότητος
naher bestimmt, welches angiebt, was seiner ganzen Fiille nach, d. i. nicht
etwa blos theilweise, sondern in seiner Gesammtheit, in Christo wohne. ....
ἡ θεότης die Gottheit (Lucian, Icarom. 9; Plut. Mor. p. 415, C.) das
Abstractum von 6 Θεός, ist zu unterscheiden von ἡ θειότης dem Abstractum
von θεῖος (Rom. i. 20; Sap. xviii. 9; Lucian de Calumn. 17). Jenes ist
Deitas, das Gottsein, d.i. die gottliche Wesenheit, Gottheit; dieses aber
die Divinitas, ἃ. i. die gittliche Qualitdt, Géttlichkeit? See too Abp.
Trench, Syn. N. T. i. p. 8. Thus in this passage the πλήρωμα must be
understood in the metaphysical sense of the Divine Essence, even if in
Col. i. 19 it is referred to the fulness of Divine grace. Contrast too the
permanent fact involved in the present κατοικεῖ of the one passage with
the historical aorist εὐδόκησε of the other.
a. Hebavi oxen, ο Ibid. iii. 1-6.
[ LECT.
Christ obeyed and worshipped by the A mgels. 321
a a ltl Salad I Fl)
prophets. As the antitype of Melchisedec, Christ is a higher
Priest than AaronP; as a Son reigning over the house of God,
Christ is a greater Ruler than the legislator whose praise it was
that he had been a faithful servant4. As Author of a final,
complete, and unique revelation, Christ stands altogether above
the prophets by whom God had revealed His Mind in many
modes and in many fragments, in revelations very various as to
their forms, and, at certain epochs, almost incessant in their
occurrence’, But if the superiority of Christianity to Judaism
was to be completely established, a further comparison was
necessary. The later Jewish theologians had laid much stress
upon the delivery of the Sinaitic Law through the agency
of angels acting as delegates for the Most High Gods, The
Author of Christianity might be superior to Moses and the
prophets, but could He challenge comparison with those pure
and mighty spirits compared with whom the greatest of the
sons of Israel, as beings of flesh and blood, were insignificant
and sinful? The answer is, that if Christ is not the peer of the
angels, this is because He is their Lord and Master. The angels
are ministers of the Divine Will; they are engaged in stated
Services enjoined on them towards creatures lower than them-
selves, yet redeemed by Christ t. But He, in His glory above
the heavens, is invested with attributes to which the highest
angel could never pretend. In His crucified but now enthroned
Humanity, He is seated at the right hand of the Majesty on
hight; He is seated there, as being Heir of all things * ;
P Heb. vii. 1-22.
4 Ibid. iii. 5,6: καὶ Μωσῆς μὲν πιστὸς ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ οἴκῳ αὐτοῦ, ὡς θεράπων,
- ++. Χριστὸς δὲ, ὡς υἱὸς ἐπὶ τὸν οἶκον αὑτοῦ, οὗ οἶκός ἐσμεν ἡμεῖς. The
preceding words are yet more noteworthy: Moses and the house of Israel
stand to Jesus Christ in the relation of creature to the Creator. πλείονος
γὰρ δόξης οὗτος παρὰ Μωσῆν ἠξίωται, καθ᾽ ὅσον πλείονα τιμὴν ἔχει τοῦ οἴκου 6
κατασκευάσας αὐτόν. πᾶς γὰρ οἶκος κατασκευάζεται ὑπό Tivos ὃ δὲ τὰ πάντα
κατασκευάσας (sc. Jesus Christ), Θεός. So too the ἀπὸ Θεοῦ ζῶντος of ver. 12
_ refers most naturally to our Lord, not to the Father.
τ Ibid. i, 1: πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως πάλαι 6 Θεὸς λαλήσας τοῖς πατράσιν
ἐν τοῖς προφήταις.
5 Ibid. ii. 2: 6 δ ἀγγέλων λαληθεὶς λόγος. Acts vii. 38: μετὰ τοῦ
ἀγγέλου τοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτῷ ἐν τῷ ὄρει Σινᾶ. Ibid. ver. 53: οἵτινες ἐλάβετε
τὸν νόμον εἰς διαταγὰς ἀγγέλων. Gal. iii. 19: ὁ νόμος... προσετέθη...
διαταγεὶς δι᾽ ἀγγέλων.
* Heb. 1. 14: λειτουργικὰ πνεύματα, εἰς διακονίαν ἀποστελλόμενα διὰ τοὺς
μέλλοντας κληρονομεῖν σωτηρίαν.
ἃ Ibid. ver. 3: ἐκάθισεν ἐν δεξιᾷ τῆς μεγαλωσύνης ἐν ὑψηλοῖς,
x Thid. ver. 2: κληρονόμον πάντων.
VI | Υ
4222 How Christ differs from the Angels.
the angels themselves are but a portion of His vast inheritance.
The dignity of His titles is indicative of His essential rank Y.
Indeed He is expressly addressed as God?; and when He
is termed the Son of God, or the Son, the full sense of that
term is drawn out in language adopted, as it seems, from the
Book of Wisdom®, and not less explicit than that which we
have been considering in the Epistle to the Colossians, although
of a distinct type. That He is One with God as having
streamed forth eternally from the Father’s Essence, like a
ray of light from the parent fire with which it is unbrokenly
joined, is implied in the expression ἀπαύγασμα τῆς d6éys>, That
He is both personally distinct from, and yet literally equal
to, Him of Whose Essence He is the adequate imprint, is
taught us in the phrase χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως, By Him,
therefore, the universe was made4; and at this moment all
things are preserved and upheld in being by the fiat of His
almighty word®. What created angel can possibly compare
with Him? In the Name which He bears and which unveils
His Naturef; in the honours which the heavenly intelligences
themselves may not refuse to pay Him, even when he is enter-
ing upon His profound Self-humiliation’; in the contrast be-
tween their ministerial duties and His Divine and unchanging
Royalty»; in His relationship of Creator both to earth and
heaveni; and in the majestic certainty of His triumph over
y Heb. i. 4: τοσούτῳ κρείττων γενόμενος τῶν ἀγγέλων, ὅσῳ διαφορώτερον
παρ᾽ αὐτοὺς κεκληρονόμηκεν ὄνομα. ΑΒ to γενόμενοκ, it will be borne in mind
that the subject of the whole passage is the Word now truly Incarnate,
and not, as is sometimes assumed, the pre-existent Logos alone. The
γενόμενος would therefore refer to the exaltation of our Lord’s Humanity.
(See Ebrard, Comm. in loc.) St. Cyril observes that it does not imply
that in Christ’s superior nature, He could be made superior to angels.
Thes. p. 199.
2 Ibid. ver. 8: πρὸς δὲ τὸν Ὑἱὸν, “ὃ θρόνος cov, ὃ Θεὺς, εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα
τοῦ αἰῶνος. Ps. χὶν. 6.
a Wisd. vii. 263 cf. p. 62. © Heb. i. 3.
> Ibid. A.V. ‘Express image of His Person.’ So Beza, who dreaded
Arianism, and accordingly used ‘Person’ instead of ‘Substance,’ from
an apprehension that the latter rendering would here imply something
inconsistent with the Homoousion.
ἃ Heb. i. 2: δὲ οὗ καὶ τοὺς αἰῶνας ἐποίησεν.
© Ibid. ver. 3 : φέρων τε τὰ πάντα τῷ ῥήματι τῆς δυνάμεως αὑτοῦ.
1 Ibid. ver. 5: Yids μου εἶ σύ.
& Ibid. ver. 6: προσκυνησάτωσαν αὐτῷ πάντες ἄγγελοι Θεοῦ. Psalm
xcvii. 7. h Heb. i. 7-9, 14.
i Ibid. ver ro: σὺ κατ᾽ ἀρχὰς, Κύριε, τὴν γῆν ἐθεμελίωσας, καὶ ἔργα τῶν
χειρῶν σον εἰσὶν οἱ οὐρανοί,
{ LECT,
Christ's Deity boundup with St.Paul’s wholemind 323
all who shall oppose the advance of Hig kingdom k,—we recog-
nise a Being, for Whose Person, although It be clothed in a
finite Human Naturel, there is no real place between humanity
and God. While the Epistle to the Hebrews lays even a
stronger emphasis than any other book of the New Testament
upon Christ’s true Humanity ™, it is nevertheless certain that
no other book more explicitly asserts the reality of His Divine “
prerogatives.
3. Enough will have been said, to shew that the Apostle Paul
believed in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, not in the moral sense
of Socinianism, nor in the ditheistic Sense, so to speak, of
Arianism, but in the literal, metaphysical, and absolute sense
of the Catholic Church. Those passages in his writings which
may appear to interfere with this conclusion are certainly to
be referred either to his anxiety to insist upon the reality of
our Lord’s Manhood, or to his recognition of the truth that
Christ’s Eternal Sonship is Itself derived from the Person
of the Father. From the Father Christ eternally receives an
equality of life and power, and therefore, as being a recipient,
He is so far subordinate to the Father. We have indeed
already seen that Christ’s eternal derivation from the F ather is
set forth nowhere more fully than in the Gospel of St. John,
and by the mouth of our Lord Himself, But the doctrine
before us, as it lies in the writings of St. Paul, is not to be
measured only by an analysis of those particular texts which
proclaim it in terms. The evidence for this great doctrine
is not really in suspense until such time as the critics may
have finally decided by their microscopical and chemical ap-
paratus, whether the bar of the © in a famous passage of
St. Paul’s first Epistle to Timothy is or is not really discernible
in the Alexandrian manuscript. The doctrine lies too deep in the
mind of the Apostle, to be affected by such contingencies. It is
indeed, as we have seen, asserted by St. Paul with sufficient
explicitness ; but it is implied more widely than it is asserted.
Just as it is inseparable from the whole didactic activity of
our Lord Himself, so is it inextricably interwoven with the
central and most vital teaching of His great ambassador. You.
cannot make St. Paul a preacher of Humanitarianism, without
k Heb. i. 13: πρὸς τίνα δὲ τῶν ἀγγέλων εἴρηκέ ποτε, “Κάθου ἐκ δεξιῶν μου,
ἕως ἂν 08 τοὺς ἐχθρούς σου ὑποπόδιον τῶν ποδῶν σου ;"
1 Ibid. iii. 2: πιστὸν ὄντα τῷ ποιήσαντι αὐτόν.
m Ibid. ii. 14, 18, iv. 155 Y. 7-
mer]: - ¥ 2
hy
|
324 Christology of St. Paul’s Missionary Sermons.
warping, mutilating, degrading his whole recorded mind. Par-
ticular texts, when duly isolated from the Apostle’s general
teaching, may be pressed with plausible effect into the service
of Arian or Humanitarian theories ; but take St. Paul’s doctrine
as a whole, and it must be admitted to centre in One Who
is af“once and truly God as well as Man.
»» Paul never speaks of Jesus Christ as a pupil of less
originality and genius might speak of a master in moral truth, :
whose ideas he was recommending, expanding, defining, defend-
ing, popularizing, among the men of a later generation. St. Paul
never professes to be working on the common level of human
power and knowledge with a master from whom he differed, as
an inferior teacher might differ, only in the degree of his capacity
and authority. St. Paul always writes and speaks as becomes
the slave of Jesus. He is indeed a most willing and enthusiastic
slave, reverently gathering up and passionately enforcing all
that touches the work and glory of that Divine Master to Whom ~
ee freely consecrated his liberty and his life.
In St. Paul’s earliest sermons, we do not find the moral
precepts of Jesus a more prominent element than the glories —
of His Person and of His redemptive work. That the reverse
is the case is at once apparent from a study of the great dis-
course which was pronounced in the synagogue of the Pisidian
Antioch. The past history of Israel is first summarized from a
point of view which regards it as purely preparatory to the
manifestation of the anticipated Saviour®; and then the true
Messiahship of Jesus is enforced by an appeal to the testimony —
of John the Baptist®, to the correspondence of the circumstances —
of Christ’s Death with the prophetic announcements?, and to —
the historical fact of His Resurrection from the grave4, which —
had been witnessed by the apostles as distinctly? as it had been
foretold by the prophets’. Thus the Apostle reaches his prac- —
tical conclusion. To believe in Jesus Christ is the one condition
of receiving remission of sins and (how strangely must such —
words have sounded in Jewish ears!) justification from all
things from which men could not be justified by the divinely- |
given law of Mosest. To deny Jesus Christ is to incur those
penalties which the Hebrew Scriptures denounced against scornful
n Acts xiii. 17-23. © Thid. vers. 24, 25. P Ibid. vers. 26-30.
4 Ibid. ver. 30. r [bid. ver. 31. 8 Ibid. vers. 32-37.
ὁ Ibid. vers. 38, 39: διὰ τούτου ὑμῖν ἄφεσις ἁμαρτιῶν καταγγέλλεται" καὶ ὁ
ἀπὸ πάντων ὧν οὐκ ἠδυνήθητε ἐν τῷ νόμῳ Μωσέως δικαιωθῆναι, ἐν τούτῳ πᾶσ
6 πιστεύων δικαιοῦται.
[ LECT,
Discourses at A nttoch, Athens, and Miletus. 325
indifference to the voice of God and to the present tokens of
His Love and Power.
At first sight, St. Paul’s sermon from the steps of the Areo-
pagus might seem to be rather Theistic than Christian. St. Paul
had to gain the ear of a ‘philosophical’ audience which imagined
that ‘Jesus and the Resurrection’ were two ‘strange demons3,’
who might presently be added to the stock of deities already
venerated by the Athenian populace. St. Paul is therefore eager
to set forth the lofty spirituality of the God of Christendom ;
but, although he insists chiefly on those Divine attributes which
are observable in nature and Providence, his sermon ends with
Jesus. After shewing what God is in Himself, and what are
the natural relations which subsist between God and mankind 5,
St. Paul touches the conscience of his Athenian audience by a
sharp denunciation of the vulgar idolatry which it despised ἃ, and
he calls men to repent by a reference to the coming judgment,
which conscience itself foreshadowed. But the certainty of that
judgment has been attested by the historical fact of the resurrec-
tion of Jesus ; the risen Jesus is the future Judge Ὁ,
Or, listen to St. Paul as with fatherly authority and tender-
ness he is taking his leave of his fellow-labourers in Christ, the
presbyters of Ephesus, on the strand of Miletus. Here the
Apostle’s address moves incessantly round the Person of Jesus.
He protests that to lead men to repentance towards God and
faith towards the Lord Jesus Christ©, had been the single object
of his public and private ministrations at Ephesus. He counts
not his life dear to himself, if only he can complete the mission
which is so precious to him because he has received it from:the
Lord Jesus¢. The presbyters are bidden to ‘shepherd the
Church of God which He has purchased with His Own Bloode;’
ἃ Acts xiii. 40: βλέπετε οὖν μὴ ἐπέλθῃ ἐφ᾽ ὑμᾶς τὸ εἰρημένον ἐν τοῖς
προφήταις" “Ἴδετε, of καταφρονηταὶ, καὶ θαυμάσατε καὶ ἀφανίσθητε" ὅτι ἔργον
ἐγὼ ἐργάζομαι ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ὑμῶν. Hab. 1. 5.
x Acts xvii. 18: ξένων δαιμονίων δοκεῖ καταγγελεὺς εἶναι.
Υ Ibid. vers. 24, 25. z Ibid. vers. 26-28.
a Ibid. vers. 29, 30. Ὁ Ibid. ver. 31:
© Ibid. xx. 21: διαμαρτυρόμενος .... τὴν εἰς τὸν Θεὸν μετάνοιαν, καὶ πίστιν
τὴν εἰς τὸν Κύριον ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν.
ἃ Tbid. ver. 24.
8 Ibid. ver. 28: ποιμαίνειν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ [Κυρίου, Tisch. al.] ἣν
περιεποιήσατο διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου. See Dr. Wordsworth’s note in loc.
In the third edition of his Greek Testament, Dean Alford restored the
reading τοῦ Θεοῦ, which he had abandoned for Κυρίου in the two former
editions. Nothing can be added to the argument of the note in his fifth
edition. For Κυρίου are A, C, D, EL; for Θεοῦ, B, δὲ, Syr., Vulg.
vi |
326 Christology of St. Paul’s apologetic speeches.
and the Apostle concludes by quoting a saying of the Lord
Jesus which has not been recorded in the Gospels, but which
was then reverently treasured in the Church, to the effect that
‘it is more blessed to give than to receive f.’
In the two apologetic discourses delivered, the one from the
stairs of the tower of Antonia before the angry multitude, and
the other in the council-chamber at Cesarea before King
Agrippa IT. of Chalcis, St. Paul justifies his missionary activity
by dwelling upon the circumstances which accompanied and
immediately followed his conversion. Everything had turned
upon a fact which the Apostle abundantly insists upon ;—he
had received a revelation of Jesus Christ in His heavenly glory.
It was Jesus Who had spoken to St. Paul from heaven £ ; 1 was
Jesus Who had revealed Himself as persecuted in His suffering
Church; it was to Jesus that St.Paul had surrendered his
moral liberty i; it was from Jesus that he had received specific
orders to go into Damascusk ; Jesus had commissioned him to
be a minister and witness both of what he had seen, and of the
truths which were yet to be disclosed to him!; it was by
Jesus that he was sent both to Jews and Gentiles, ‘to open
their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from
the power of Satan unto God, that,’ continued the Heavenly
Speaker, ‘they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance
among them which are sanctified by faith that isin Mem,” Tj
was Jesus Who had appeared to St.Paul when he was in an
ecstasy in the Temple, had bidden him leave Jerusalem suddenly,
and had sent him to the Gentiles". The revelation of Jesus had
been emphatically the turning-point of the Apostle’s life ; it had
first determined the direction and had then quickened the
intensity of his action. He could plead with truth before Agrippa
that he had not been disobedient unto the heavenly vision 9,
But who can fail to see that the Lord Who in His glorified
Manhood thus speaks to His servant from the skies, and Who
is withal revealed to him in the very centre of his soul P, is no
f Acts xx. 35: μνημονεύειν τε τῶν λόγων τοῦ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ, tt αὐτὸς εἶπε"
‘Makdpidy ἐστι μᾶλλον διδόναι ἢ λαμβάνειν.
& Ibid. xxii. 7; xxvi.14. 4 Ibid. xxii. 8; χχγὶ. 15. i Thid. xxii. ro,
k bid. 1 Tbid. xxvi. 16. m Ibid. vers. 17, 18.
n Ibid. xxii. 17: éyévero..... προσευχομένου μου ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ, γενέσθαι
με ἐν ἐκστάσει, καὶ ἰδεῖν αὐτὸν λέγοντά μοι, Σπεῦσον καὶ ἔξελθε ἐν τάχει ἐξ
Ἱερουσαλήμ. Ibid. ver. 21: εἰς ἔθνη μακρὰν ἐξαποστελῶ σε.
° Ibid. xxvi. 19: οὐκ ἐγενόμην ἀπειθὴς τῇ οὐρανίῳ ὀπτασίᾳ.
P Gal. i. 15, 16: εὐδόκησεν ὁ Ocds.... ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν Tidy αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐμοί.
[ LECT.
St, Paul teaches Christ's Deity implicitly. 327
created being, is neither saint nor seraph, but in very truth, the
Master of consciences, the Monarch Who penetrates, inhabits,
and rules the secret life of spirits, the King Who claims the
fealty and Who orders the ways of men ἢ
St. Paul’s popular teaching then is emphatically a ‘ preaching
of Jesus Christ 4.’ Our Lord is always the Apostle’s theme ;
but the degree in which His Divine glory is unveiled varies with
the capacities of the Jewish or heathen listeners for bearing the
great discovery. The doctrine is distributed, if we may so speak,
in a like varying manner over the whole text of St. Paul’s
Epistles. It lies in those greetings' by which the Apostle
associates Jesus Christ with God the Father, as being the source
no less than the channel of the highest spiritual blessings. It is
pointedly asserted when the Galatians are warned that St. Paul
is ‘an Apostle not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ
and God the Fathers.’ It is implied in the benedictions which
the Apostle pronounces in the Name of Christ without naming
the Name of Godt. It underlies those early apostolical hymns,
sung, as it would seem, in the Redeemer’s honour" ; it justifies
a Acts ix. 20; xvii. 3, 18; xxviii. 21 : διδάσκων τὰ περὶ τοῦ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ.
Cf. Ibid. v. 42 ; 2 Cor. iv. 5.
r Rom.i. 7: χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη ἀπὸ Θεοῦ Πατρὸς ἡμῶν καὶ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ
Χριστοῦ. 1 Cor.i. 3; 2 Οογ, ἷ. 2; Gal. i. 3; Eph.i. 2;.Phil.i. 2; Coli.
2; 1 Thess. i. 1; 2 Thess. i. 2; Philemon 3. In 1 Tim. i. 2; 2 Tim.i.2;
Tit. i. 4, ἔλεος is inserted between χάρις and εἰρήνη, probably because the
_~ clergy, on account of their great responsibilities, need the pitying mercy of
God more than Christian laymen.
8 Gal. i. 1: οὐκ ἀπ᾽ ἀνθρώπων οὐδὲ BV ἀνθρώπου, ἀλλὰ διὰ ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ
καὶ Θεοῦ Πατρός.
t Rom. xvi. 20, 24: ἧ χάρις τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ μετὰ πάντων
ὑμῶν. 1 Cor. xvi. 23; 2 Cor. xiii. 13. In Gal. vi. 18, μετὰ τοῦ πνεύματος
ὑμῶν. Phil. iv. 23; 1 Thess. v. 28. 2 Thess.ii. 16: αὐτὸς δὲ 6 Κύριος ἡμῶν
Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς, καὶ 6 Θεὸς καὶ Πατὴρ ἡμῶν, 6 ἀγαπήσας ἡμᾶς καὶ δοὺς παρά-
κλησιν αἰωνίαν καὶ ἐλπίδα ἀγαθὴν ἐν χάριτι, παρακαλέσαι ὑμῶν τὰς καρδίας, καὶ
στηρίξαι ὑμᾶς ἐν παντὶ λόγῳ καὶ ἔργῳ ἀγαθῷ.
ἃ Such are 1 Tim. i. 15, from a hymn on redemption.
Χριστὸς ᾿Ιησοῦς
ἦλθεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον
ἁμαρτωλοὺς σῶσαι.
And Ibid. iii. 16, from a hymn on our Lord’s Incarnation and triumph.
ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκὶ,
ἐδικαιώθη ἐν πνεύματι,
ὥφθη ἀγγέλοις, ͵
ἐκηρύχθη ἐν ἔθνεσιν,
ἐπιστεύθη ἐν κόσμῳ,
ἀνελήφθη ἐν δόξῃ.
428 δι 7ηη φέρε Christology of the Epistles
the thanksgivings and doxologies poured forth to His praise Σ,
It alone can explain the application of passages, which are used
in the Old Testament of the Lord Jehovah, to the Person of
Jesus Christ Y; such an application would have been impossible
unless St. Paul had renounced his belief in the authority and
sacred character of the Hebrew Scriptures, or had explicitly
recognised the truth that Jesus Christ was Jehovah Himself
visiting and redeeming His people.
Mark too how the truth before us enters into the leading
topics of St. Paul’s great Epistles ; how it is presupposed even
where it is not asserted in terms. Does that picture of the
future Judge Whose Second Coming is again and again brought
before us in the Epistles to the Thessalonians befit one who is
not Divine2? Is it possible that the Justifier of humanity in
the Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians can be only a
human martyr after all? Why then is the effect of His Death so
distinct in kind from any which has followed upon the martyr-
dom of His servants?? How comes it that by dying He has
And 2 Tim. ii. 11-13, from a hymn on the glories of martyrdom.
εἰ συναπεθάνομεν, καὶ συζήσομεν'
εἰ ὑπομένομεν, καὶ συμβασιλεύσομεν"
εἰ ἀρνούμεθα, κἀκεῖνος ἀρνήσεται ἡμᾶς"
εἰ ἀπιστοῦμεν, ἐκεῖνος πιστὸς μένει"
ἀρνήσασθαι ἑαυτόν οὐ δύναται.
And Tit. iii. 4-7, from a hymn on the way of salvation; cf. Keble’s Sermons
Acad. and Occ., p. 182.
ὅτε δὲ ἡ χρηστότης καὶ ἣ φιλανθρωπία ἐπεφάνη τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν ΘΕΟΥ͂,
οὐκ ἐξ ἔργων τῶν ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ ὧν ἐποιήσαμεν ἡμεῖς,
ἀλλὰ κατὰ τὸν αὑτοῦ ἔλεον, ἔσωσεν ἡμᾶς,
διὰ λουτροῦ παλιγγενεσίας, καὶ ἀνακαινώσεως ΠΝΕΥΜΑΤΟΣ ‘ATIOY,
οὗ ἐξέχεεν ἐφ᾽ ἡμᾶς πλουσίως, διὰ ἸΗΣΟῪ XPISTOY τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν,
ἵνα δικαιωθέντες τῇ ἐκείνου χάριτι,
κληρονόμοι γενώμεθα κατ᾽ ἐλπίδα ζωῆς αἰωνίου.
Although in Tit. iii. 4 Σωτῆρος Θεοῦ refers to the Father, it is Jesus Christ
our Saviour through Whom He has given the Spirit and the sacraments, the
grace of justification, and an inheritance of eternal life. Jesus is the more
prominent Subject of the hymn. Compare the fragment of a hymn on
penitence, based on Isa. lx. 1, and quoted in Eph. νυ. 14.
ἔγειραι 6 καθεύδων
καὶ ἀνάστα ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν,
καὶ ἐπιφαύσει σοι ὃ Χριστός.
* Rom. ix. 5; and perhaps xvi. 27, see Ols. in loc.; 1 Tim. i. 12: χάριν ἔχω
τῷ ἐνδυναμώσαντί με Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν κ.τ.λ.
Σ e.g. Joel ii. 32 in Rom. x. 13; Jer. ix. 23, 24 in 1 Cor. i. 31, ete.
7 1 Thess. iv. 16,173; 2 Thess. i. 7, 8; ii. 8.
* Rom. iii. 25, 26; Gal. ii. 16, etc. St. Paul’s argument in Gal. iii. 20
implies our Lord’s Divinity ; since, if Christ is merely human, He would be
[ LECT.
to the Thessalonians and the Romans. 529
achieved that restoration of the rightful relations of man’s being
towards God and moral truth, which the law of nature and
the Law of Sinai had alike failed to secure? Does not the whole
representation of the Second Adam in the Epistle to the Romans
and in the first Epistle to the Corinthians point to a dignity
more than human? Can He, Who is not merely a living soul,
but a quickening Spirit ; from Whom life radiates throughout
renewed humanity ; from Whom there flows a stream of grace
more abundant than the inheritance of sin which was bequeathed
by our fallen parent,—can He be, in His Apostle’s mind, merely
one of the race which He thus blesses and saves? And if Jesus
Christ be more than man, is it possible to suggest any interme-
diate position between humanity and the throne of God, which
St. Paul, with his earnest belief in the God of Israel, could have
believed Him to occupy ?
In the Epistles to the Corinthians St. Paul is not especially
maintaining any one great truth of revelation; he is entering
with practical ver satility into the varied active life and pressing
wants of a local Church. Yet these Epistles might alone suffice
to shew the high and unrivalled honour, paid to Jesus Christ in
the Apostle’s heart and thought. Is the Apostle contrasting his
preaching with the philosophy of the Greek and the hopes of
the Jewish world around him? Jesus crucified¢ is his central
subject ; Jesus crucified is his whole philosophy4. Is he pre-
scribing the law of apostolic labours in building up souls or
Churches? ‘Other foundation can no man lay’ than ‘Jesus
Christ¢.’ Is he unfolding the nature of the Church? It is not
a self-organized multitude of religionists who agree in certain
tenets, but ‘the Body of Christf.’ Is he arguing against sins
of impurity? Christians have only to remember that they are
members of Christ &. Is he deepening a sense of the glory and
a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator. Of the two
parties, God and Israel, the μεσίτης of the Law could properly represent
Israel alone. The μεσίτης of 1 Tim. ii. 5 is altogether higher.
b δικαιοσύνη.
© 1 Cor. i. 23, 24: ἡμεῖς δὲ κηρύσσομεν Χριστὸν ἐσταυρωμένον . . . . Θεοῦ
δύναμιν καὶ Θεοῦ σοφίαν.
4 Ibid. ii. 2: οὐ γὰρ ἔκρινα τοῦ εἰδέναι τι ἐν ὑμῖν, εἰ μὴ ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστὸν,
καὶ τοῦτον ἐσταυρωμένον.
6 [bid. iii, 11: θεμέλιον γὰρ ἄλλον οὐδεὶς δύναται θεῖναι παρὰ τὸν κείμενον,
ὅς ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς ὃ Χριστός. Isa. xxviii. 16; Eph. ii. 20.
f x Cor. xii. 27: ὑμεῖς δέ ἐστε σῶμα Χριστοῦ καὶ μέλη ἐκ μέρους. Thus he
even identifies the Church with Christ. Ibid. ver. 12: καθάπερ γὰρ τὸ σῶμα
ἕν ἐστι, καὶ μέλη ἔχει πολλὰ... .. οὕτω καὶ ὃ Χριστός.
8 Ibid. vi. 15: οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν μέλη Χριστοῦ ἐστιν ;
xr}. *
330 Linplhed Christology of the Epistles
of the responsibility of being a Christian? Christians are re-
minded that Jesus Christ is in them except they be reprobates }.
Is he excommunicating or reconciling a flagrant offender against
natural law? He delivers to Satan in the Name of Christ ; he
absolves in the Person of Christi. Is he rebuking irreverence
towards the Holy Eucharist? The broken bread, and the cup of
blessing are not picturesque symbols of an absent Teacher, but
veils of a gracious yet awful Presence ; the irreverent receiver is
guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord Which he does not
‘discern.’ Is he pointing to the source of the soul’s birth
and growth in the life of light? It is the ‘illumination of the
Gospel of the Glory of Christ, Who is the Image of God;’
it is the ‘illumination of the knowledge of the glory of God
in the Person of Jesus Christ!’ Is he describing the spirit
of the Christian life? It is perpetual self-mortification for the
love of Jesus, that the moral life of Jesus may be manifested
to the world in our frail human nature™ Is he sketching
out the intellectual aim of his ministry? Every thought is
to be brought as a captive into submission to Christ®. Is he
unveiling the motive which sustained him in his manifold suf-
ferings? All was undergone for Christo. Is he suffering from
a severe bodily or spiritual affliction? Thrice he prays to Jesus
Christ for relief. And when he is told that the trial will not be
removed, since in possessing Christ’s grace he has all that he
h 2 Cor. xiii. 5: ἢ οὐκ ἐπιγινώσκετε ἑαυτοὺς, ὅτι Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐν ὑμῖν
ἐστιν ; εἰ μή τι ἀδόκιμοί ἐστε.
ἦι Cor. v. 4, 5: ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ, ... σὺν τῇ
δυνάμει τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ παραδοῦναι τὸν τοιοῦτον τῷ Σατανᾷ.
2 Cor.ii. 10: καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼ εἴ τι κεχάρισμαι, ᾧ κεχάρισμαι, δι᾽ ὑμᾶς, ἐν προσώπῳ
Χριστοῦ, ἵνα μὴ πλεονεκτηθῶμεν ὑπὸ τοῦ Σατανᾶ.
K Ibid. x. 16: τὸ ποτήριον τῆς εὐλογίας ὃ εὐλογοῦμεν, οὐχὶ κοινωνία τοῦ
αἵματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐστι; τὸν ἄρτον ὃν κλῶμεν, οὐχὶ κοινωνία τοῦ σώματος
τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐστι; Ibid. xi. 27 : ὃς ἂν ἐσθίῃ τὸν ἄρτον τοῦτον ἢ πίνῃ τὸ ποτή-
ριον τοῦ Κυρίου ἀναξίως, ἔνοχος ἔσται τοῦ σώματος καὶ αἵματος τοῦ Κυρίου.
Tbid. ver. 29: 6 γὰρ ἐσθίων καὶ πίνων ἀναξίως, κρίμα ἑαυτῷ ἐσθίει καὶ πίνει, μὴ
διακρίνων τὸ σῶμα τοῦ Κυρίου.
‘2 Cor. iv. 4. The god of this world has blinded the thoughts of the
unbelievers, εἰς τὸ μὴ αὐγάσαι αὐτοῖς τὸν φωτισμὸν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου τῆς δόξης
τοῦ Χριστοῦ, bs ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ. On the other hand, God, Who bade
light shine out of darkness, has shined in the hearts of believing Christians,
πρὸς φωτισμὸν Tis γνώσεως τῆς δόξης τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν προσώπῳ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ
(ver: 6). ;
m Ibid. ver. 10: ἵνα καὶ ἣ (wh τοῦ Ἰησοῦ ἐν τῷ σώματι ἡμῶν φανερωθῇ.
n Tbid. x. 5: αἰχμαλωτίζοντες πᾶν νόημα εἰς τὴν ὑπακοὴν τοῦ Χριστοῦ.
° Ibid. xii. 10: εὐδοκῶ ἐν ἀσθενείαις, ἐν ὕβρεσιν, ἐν ἀνάγκαις, ἐν διωγμοῖς,
ἐν στενοχωρίαις ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ.
[ LECT.
to the Corinthians. 331
needs, he rejoices in the infirmity against which he had prayed,
‘that the power of Christ may tabernacle upon himp.’ Would
he summarize the relations of the Christian to Christ ? To Christ
he owes his mental philosophy, his justification before God, his
progressive growth in holiness, his redemption from sin and
death 4. Would he mark the happiness of instruction in that
‘hidden philosophy’ which was taught in the Church among the
perfect, and which was unknown to the rulers of the non-Chris-
tian world? It might have saved them from crucifying the Lord
of Glory. Would he lay down an absolute criterion of moral
ruin? ‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be
Anathema Maran-atha’.’ Would he impart an apostolical bene-
diction? In one Epistle he blesses his readers in the Name of
Christ alonet; in the other he names the Three Blessed Persons:
but ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ’ is mentioned, not only
before ‘the fellowship of the Holy Ghost,’ but even before ‘ the
love of God,’
Here are texts, selected almost at random from those two
among the longer Epistles of St. Paul, which are most entirely
without the form and method of a doctrinal treatise, dealing
as they do with the varied contemporary interests and contro-
versies of a particular Church. Certainly some of these texts,
taken alone, do not assert the Divinity of Jesus Christ. But
put them together ; add, as you might add, to their number ;
and consider whether the whole body of language before you,
however you interpret it, does not imply that Christ held
a place in the thought, affections, and teaching of St. Paul,
higher than that which a sincere Theist would assign to any
creature, and, if Christ be only a creature, obviously inconsistent
with the supreme and exacting rights of God. In these Epistles,
it is not the teaching, but the Person and work of Jesus Christ,
upon which St. Paul’s eye appears to rest. Christ Himself is, in
St. Paul’s mind, the Gospel of Christ ; and if Christ be not God,
St. Paul cannot be acquitted of assigning to Him generally a
P 2 Cor. xii. 7-9: ἐδόθη μοι σκόλοψ τῇ σαρκὶ... . ὑπὲρ τούτου τρὶς τὸν
Κύριον παρεκάλεσα, ἵνα ἀποστῇ ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ" καὶ εἴρηκέ μοι, “᾿ Ἀρκεῖ σοι ἣ χάρις
μου" 7 γὰρ δύναμίς μου ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ τελειοῦται. ἥδιστα οὖν μᾶλλον καυχήσομαι
ἐν ταῖς ἀσθενείαις μου, ἵνα ἐπισκηνώσῃ ἐπ᾽ ἐμὲ ἡ δύναμις τοῦ Χριστοῦ. ;
4 I Cor. i. 30: ὃς ἐγενήθη ἡμῖν σοφία ἀπὸ Θεοῦ, δικαιοσύνη τε καὶ ἁγιασμὸς
καὶ ἀπολύτρωσις-. " ΟΕ
τ Tbid. ii. 8: εἰ γὰρ ἔγνωσαν, οὐκ ἂν τὸν Κύριον τῆς δόξης ἐσταύρωσαν.
5 Ibid. xvi. 22: εἴ τις οὐ φιλεῖ τὸν Κύριον ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστὸν, ἤτω ἄναθεμα,
μαρὰν abd. t Tbid. ver. 23. * 2 Cor. xiii. 13.
wad!
332 Implied Christology of the Epistles
prominence which is inconsistent with serious loyalty to mono-
theistic truth.
Still more remarkably do the Epistles of the First Imprison-
ment present us with a picture of our Lord’s Work and Person
which absolutely presupposes, even where it does not in terms
assert, the doctrine of His Divinity. The Epistles to the Ephe-—
sians and the Colossians are even more intimately related to
each other than are those to the Romans and the Galatians. They
deal with the same lines of truth; they differ only in method
of treatment. That to the Ephesians is devotional and expository ;
that to the Colossians is polemical. In the Colossians the dignity
of Christ’s Person is put forward most explicitly as against the
speculations of a Judaizing theosophy which degraded Christ
to the rank of an archangel*, and which recommended, as a
substitute for Christ’s redemptive work, ascetic observances,
grounded on a trust in the cleansing and hallowing properties
and powers of naturey. In the Epistle to the Ephesians our
Lord’s Personal dignity is asserted more indirectly. It 18
implied in His reconciliation of Jews and heathens to each
other and to God, and still more in His relationship to the pre-
destination of the saints%. In both Epistles we encounter two
prominent lines of thought, each, in a high degree, pointing to
Christ’s Divine dignity. The first, the absolute character of
the Christian faith as contrasted with the relative character of
x Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 274: ‘Die im Colosserbrief gemeinten Engels-
verehrer setzten ohne Zweifel Christus selbst in die Classe der Engel, 815.
ἕνα τῶν ἀρχαγγέλων, wie diess Epiphanius als einen Lehrsatz der Ebioniten
angibt, wogegen der Colosserbrief mit allem Nachdruck auf ein solches κρατεῖν
τὴν κεφαλὴν dringt, dass alles, was nicht das Haupt selbst ist, nur in einem
absoluten Abhingigkeits-verhdltniss zu Ihm stehend gedacht wird, ii. 19.”
y Ibid. ‘Hine Lehre, welche den Menschen in religiéser Hinsicht von
seinem natiirlichen biirgerlichen Sein, von der materiellen Natur abhingig
machte, und sein religidses Heil durch die reinigende und heiligende Kraft,
die man den Elementen und Substanzen der Welt zuschrieb, den Einfluss
der Himmels-coérper, das natiirlich Reine im Unterschied von dem fiir unrein
Gehaltenen vermittelt werden liess, setzte die στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου an dieselbe
Stelle, welche nur Christus als Erliser haben sollte. In diesem Sinne werden
V. 8 die στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου und Christus einander gegeniibergestellt. Das
ist die Philosophie in dem Sinne in welchem das Wesen der Philosophie als _
Weltweisheit bezeichnet wird, als die Wissenschaft, die es mit den στοιχεῖα '
τοῦ κόσμου zu thun hat. Als solche ist sie auch nur eine κενὴ ἀπάτη, eine —
blosse παράδοσις τῶν ἀνθρώπων. ἱ
5 Ibid. p. 270: ‘ Der transcendenten Christologie dieser Briefe und ihrem i
darauf beruhenden Anschauung von dem alles umfassenden und iiber alles —
tibergreifenden Charakter des Christenthums ist es ganz gemiiss, dass sie in —
der Lehre von der Beseligung der Menschen auf eine ete Vorher-
bestimmung zuriickgehen, Eph. i. 4, f.’
[ LEoT. |
of the first Imprisonment. 333
heathenism and Judaism?; the second, the re-creative power
of the grace of Christ». In both Epistles the Church is con-
sidered as a vast spiritual society © which, besides embracing as
its heritage all races of the world, pierces the veil of the unseen,
and includes the families of heaven4 in its majestic compass.
Of this society Christ is the Head®, and it is ‘His Body, the
fulness of Him That filleth all in all.’ Christ is the predestined
point of unity in which earth and heaven, Jew and Gentile,
meet and are onef, Christ’s Death is the triumph of peace in
the spiritual world. Peace with God is secured through the
taking away of the law of condemnation by the dying Christ,
Who nails it to His Cross and openly triumphs over the powers
of darkness8.. Peace among men is secured, because the Cross
is the centre of the regenerated world, as of the moral universe }.
Divided races, religions, nationalities, classes, meet beneath the
Cross ; they embrace as brethren ; they are fused into one vast
society which is held together by an Indwelling Presence, re-
flected in the general sense of boundless indebtedness to a
transcendent Lovei, Hence in these Epistles such marked
a Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 273: ‘So ist... auch die absolute Erhabenheit
des Christenthums iiber Judenthum und Heidenthum ausgesprochen. Beide
verhalten sich gleich negativ (but by no means in the same degree) zum Chris-
tenthum, das ihnen gegeniiber 6 λόγος τῆς ἀληθείας ist Eph. i. 13, oder φῶς
im Gegensatz von σκότος (v. 8). Die Juden und die Heiden waren wegen der
allgemeinen Siindhaftigkeit dem gittlichen Zorn verfallen, Eph. ii. 3. Der
religiése Charakter des Heidenthums wird noch besonders dadurch bezeichnet,
dass die Heiden ἄθεοι ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ sind (ii. 12), ἐσκοτωμένοι TH διανοίᾳ ὄντες
(iv. 18), ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι τῆς ζωῆς TOD Θεοῦ διὰ τὴν ἄγνοιαν τὴν οὖσαν ἐν
αὐτοῖς (iv. 18), περιπατοῦντες κατὰ τὸν αἰῶνα τοῦ κόσμου τούτου κατὰ τὸν
ἄρχοντα τῆς ἐξουσίας τοῦ ἀέρος (ii. 2). Beiden Religionen gegeniiber ist das
Christenthum die absolute Religion. Der absolute Charakter des Christen-
thums selbst aber ist bedingt durch die Person Christi.’
Ὁ Col. iii. g; Eph. iv. 21 sqq.; cf. Ibid. ii. 8-10. Baur, Vorlesungen,
Ῥ. 270: ‘Die Gnade ist das den Menschen durch den Glauben an Christus
neu schaffende Princip. Etwas Neues muss nimlich der Mensch durch
das Christenthum werden.’
ο Col. i. 5,6: τοῦ εὐαγγελίου, τοῦ παρόντος εἰς ὑμᾶς, καθὼς καὶ ἐν παντὶ
τῷ κόσμῳ, καὶ ἔστι καρποφορούμενον. Eph. i. 13. d Eph. iii. 15.
e Eph. i. 22, 23: αὐτὸν ἔδωκε κεφαλὴν ὑπὲρ πάντα τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ, ἥτις ἐστὶ
τὸ σῶμα αὐτοῦ, τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ πάντα ἐν πᾶσι πληρουμένου. V. 30.
f Ibid. ver. 10: ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ, τά τε ἐν τοῖς
οὐρανοῖς καὶ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς᾽ ἐν αὐτῷ, ἐν ᾧ καὶ ἐκληρώθημεν.
& Col. ii. 14, 15.
h Col. i. 20, 21: 8¢ αὐτοῦ ἀποκαταλλάξαι τὰ πάντα εἰς αὑτὸν, εἰρηνοποιήσας
διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ σταυροῦ αὐτοῦ, δι᾽ αὐτοῦ, εἴτε τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, εἴτε τὰ ἐν
τοῖς οὐρανοῖς.
i [bid. iii, 11: οὐκ ἔνι Ἕλλην καὶ ᾿Ιουδαῖος, περιτομὴ καὶ ἀκροβυστία, βάρ-
Bapos, Σκύθης, δυῦλος, ἐλεύθερος" ἀλλὰ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἐν πᾶσι Χριστός. Ob-
VI |
0 ῆ ὠφ4ἁὠ προ πρ“«“Ἕπ“ ““ρρρρ«πΦοΠΔΦ«“Ὕτππὐὐουξεεει σι
234 Limpled Christology of the Epistles
emphasis is laid upon the unity of the Body of Christ ; since
the reunion of moral beings shews forth Christ’s Personal Glory.
Christ is the Unifier. As Christ in His Passion ig the Combiner
and Reconciler of all things in earth and heaven 3 so He ascends
to heaven, He descends to hell on His errand of reconciliation
and combination], He institutes the hierarchy of the Church ™ ;
He is the Root from which her life springs, the Foundation on
which her superstructure rests; He is the quickening, organ-
izing, Catholicizing Principle within hero, The closest of natural
ties is the chosen symbol of His relation to her ; she is His
bride. For her, in His love, He gave Himself to death, that
He might sanctify her by the cleansing virtue of His baptism,
and might so present her to Himself, her Lord,—blameless,
serve the moral inferences in vers. 12-14, the measure of charity being
καθὼς καὶ ὃ Χριστὸς ἐχαρίσατο ὑμῖν. Especially Jews and Gentiles are re-
conciled beneath the Cross, because the Cross cancelled the obligatoriness of
the ceremonial law. Eph. ii. 14-17: αὐτὸς γάρ ἐστιν ἣ εἰρήνη ἡμῶν, ὁ ποιήσας
τὰ ἀμφότερα ἕν, καὶ τὸ μεσότοιχον τοῦ φραγμοῦ λύσας, τὴν ἔχθραν ἐν τῇ σαρκὶ
αὐτοῦ, τὸν νόμον τῶν ἐντολῶν ἐν δόγμασι, καταργήσας" ἵνα τοὺς δύο κτίσῃ ἐν
ἑαυτῷ εἰς ἕνα καινὸν ἄνθρωπον, ποιῶν εἰρήνην, καὶ ἀποκαταλλάξῃ τοὺς ἀμφοτέρους
ἐν ἑνὶ σώματι τῷ Θεῷ διὰ τοῦ σταυροῦ, ἀποκτεΐνας τὴν ἔχθραν ἐν αὐτῷ.
k Baur, Christenthum, p. 119: ‘ Die Hinheit ist das eigentliche Wesen der
Kirche, diese Hinheit ist mit allen zu ihr gehorenden Momenten durch das
Christenthum gegeben, es ist Ein Leib, Ein Geist, Ein Herr, Ein Glaube, Eine
Taufe u.s. w. Eph. iv. 4, f..... Von diesem Punkte aus steigt die Anschauung
hoher hinauf, bis dahin, wo der Grund aller Einheit liegt. Die einigende,
eine allgemeine Gemeinschaft stiftende Kraft des Todes Christi lasst sich nur
daraus begreifen, dass Christus iiberhaupt der alles tragende wnd zusam-
menhaltende Centralpunkte des ganzen Universums ist..... Die Christologie
der Beiden Briefe hingt aufs Innigste zusammen mit dem in der unmittel-
baren Gegenwart gegebenen Bediirfniss der Hinigung in der Idee der Einen,
alle Unterschiede und Gegensiitze in sich aufhebenden Kirche. Es ist, wenn
wir uns in die Anschauungsweise dieser Briefe hineinversetzen, schon ein
aicht katholisches Bewusstsein das sich in ihnen ausspricht.’ This may be
fully admitted without accepting Baur’s conclusions as to the date and
authorship of the two Epistles.
1 Eph. iv. 10: 6 καταβὰς, αὐτός ἐστι καὶ ὃ ἀναβὰς ὑπεράνω πάντων τῶν
οὐρανῶν, ἵνα πληρώσῃ τὰ πάντα.
m Ibid. vers. 11-13: καὶ αὐτὸς ἔδωκε τοὺς μὲν ἀποστόλους, τοὺς δὲ προ-
φήτας, τοὺς δὲ εὐαγγελιστὰς, τοὺς δὲ ποιμένας καὶ διδασκάλους, πρὸς τὸν
καταρτισμὸν τῶν ἁγίων, εἰς ἔργον διακονίας, εἰς οἰκοδομὴν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ
Χριστοῦ" μέχρι καταντήσωμεν οἱ πάντες εἰς τὴν ἑνότητα τῆς πίστεως καὶ
τῆς ἐπιγνώσεως τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ, εἰς ἄνδρα τέλειον, εἰς μέτρον ἡλικίας τοῦ
πληρώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ.
Ὁ Col. ii. 7: ἐρριζωμένοι καὶ ἐποικοδομούμενοι ἂν αὐτῷ.
° Eph. iv. 15,16: 6 Χριστὸς, ἐξ οὗ πᾶν τὸ σῶμα συναρμολογούμενον καὶ
συμβιβαζόμενον διὰ πάσης ἁφῆς τῆς ἐπιχορηγίας, κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν ἐν μέτρῳ
ἑνὸς ἑκάστου μέρους, τὴν αὔξησιν τοῦ σώματος ποιεῖται εἰς οἰκοδομὴν ἑαυτοῦ
ἐν ἀγάπῃ. Col. ii, 10.
[LECT.
of the First Imprisonment. 335
immaculate, glorious®, And thus He is the Standard of per-
fection with which she must struggle to correspond. Her mem-
bers must grow up unto Him in all things. Accordingly, not
to mention the great passage, already referred to, in the Epistle
to the Colossians, Jesus Christ is said in that Epistle to possess
the intellectual as well as the other attributes of Deity. In
the allusions to the Three Most Holy Persons, which so remark-
ably underlie the structure and surface-thought of the Epistle
to the Ephesians, Jesus Christ is associated most significantly
with the Father and the Spirit. He is the Invisible King,
Whose slaves Christians are, and Whose Will is to be obeyed.
The kingdom of God is His kingdomt; the Church is subject
to Him. He is the Object of Christian study, and of Christian
hope*. In the Epistle to the Philippians it is expressly said
that all created beings in heaven, on earth, and in hell, when
His triumph is complete, shall acknowledge the majesty even of
His Human Naturey. The preaching of the Gospel is described
as the preaching Christ% Death is a blessing for the Christian,
since by death he gains the eternal presence of Christ® The
Philippians are specially privileged in being permitted, not
merely to believe on Christ, but to suffer for Him». The Apostle
P Eph. v. 25-27: ὃ Χριστὸς ἢγάπησε τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, καὶ ἑαυτὸν παρέδωκεν
ὑπὲρ αὐτῆς" ἵνα αὐτὴν ἁγιάσῃ, καθαρίσας τῷ λουτρῷ τοῦ ὕδατος ἐν ῥήματι, ἵνα
παραστήσῃ αὐτὴν ἑαυτῷ ἔνδοξον, τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, μὴ ἔχουσαν σπίλον. ἢ putida
ἥ τι τῶν τοιούτων, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα ἢ ἁγία καὶ ἄμωμος“.
4 Col. ii. 3: ἐν ᾧ εἰσὶ πάντες οἱ θησαυροὶ τῆς σοφίας καὶ τῆς γνώσεως
᾿ἀπόκρυφοι. Ibid. i. 19, ii. 9.
ΠΤ Eph. i. 3: Πατὴρ τοῦ Κυρίου. Ibid. ver. 6: ἐν τῷ ἠγαπημένῳ. Ibid.
ver.13: ἐσφραγίσθητε τῷ Πνεύματι. Ibid. ii. 18: δὲ αὐτοῦ ἔχομεν τὴν προσ-
᾿ αγωγὴν οἱ ἀμφότεροι ἐν ἑνὶ Πνεύματι πρὸς τὸν Mdrepa. Ibid. 111. 6 : συγ-
᾿Κληρόνομα, καὶ σύσσωμα, καὶ συμμέτοχα, where the Father Whose heirs we
are, the Son of Whose Body we are members, the Spirit of Whose gifts we
partake, seem to be glanced at by the adjectives denoting our relationship
to the ἐπαγγελία. Cf. Ibid. iii. 14-17.
5. Ibid. vi. 6: μὴ κατ᾽ ὀφθαλμοδουλείαν ὧς ἀνθρωπάρεσκοι, GAN ὡς δοῦλοι
τοῦ Χριστοῦ.
ὁ Tbid. v. 5: ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ Χριστοῦ καὶ Θεοῦ. Col. i. 13: τὴν βα-
σιλείαν τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ τῆς ἀγάπης αὐτοῦ.
u Eph. ν. 24: 4 ἐκκλησία ὑποτάσσεται τῷ Χριστῷ.
x Ibid. iv. 20; i. 12.
¥Y Phil. ii. 10: ἵνα ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ πᾶν γόνυ κάμψῃ ἐπουρανίων καὶ
ἐπιγείων καὶ καταχθονίων. Cf. St. Cyril Alex. Thes. p. 128.
* Thid. i. 16: τὸν Χριστὸν καταγγέλλουσιν. Ibid. ver. 18: Χριστὸς καταγΎ-
γέλλεται.
@ Ibid. ver. 23 : ἐπιθυμίαν ἔχων εἰς τὸ ἀναλῦσαι, καὶ σὺν Χριστῷ εἶναι.
> Ibid. ver. 29: ὑμῖν ἐχαρίσθη τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ, οὐ μόνον τὸ εἰς αὐτὸν πισ-
τεύειν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ ὑπὲρ αὐτοῦ πάσχειν.
vr J
336 Linplied Christology of the
trusts in Jesus Christ that it will be possible to send Timothy
to Philippi®. He contrasts the selfishness of ordinary Chris-
tians with a disinterestedness that seeks the things (it is not
said of God, but) of Christ4, The Christian ‘boast’ or ‘glory’
centres in Christ, as did the Jewish in the Lawe; the Apostle
had counted all his Jewish privileges as dung that he might win
Christ; Christ strengthens him to do all thingsg; Christ will
one day change this body of our humiliation, that it may become
of like form with the Body of His glory, according to the energy
of His ability even to subdue all things unto Himself, In this
Epistle, as in those to the Corinthians, the Apostle is far from
pursuing any one line of doctrinal statement: moral exhor-
tations, interspersed with allusions to persons and matters of
interest to himself and to the Philippians, constitute the staple
of his letter. And yet how constant are the references to Jesus
Christ, and how inconsistent are they, taken as a whole, with
any conception of His Person which denies His Divinity !
The Pastoral Epistles are distinguished, not merely by the
specific directions which they contain respecting the Christian
hierarchy and religious societies in the apostolical Church i,
but also and especially by the stress which they lay upon the
vital distinction between heresy and orthodoxy *. Each of these
© Phil. ii, 19: ἐλπίζω δὲ ἐν Κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ, Τιμόθεον ταχέως πέμψαι ὑμῖν.
* Ibid. ver. 21: οἱ πάντες γὰρ τὰ ἑαυτῶν (ητοῦωιν, οὐ τὰ τοῦ Χριστοῦ.
Ἰησοῦ.
9. Ibid. ili. 3: καυχώμενοι ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ.
ΓΤΟΙά. ver. 8: 80 ὃν τὰ πάντα ἐζημιώθην' καὶ ἡγοῦμαι σκύβαλα εἶναι, ἵνα
Χριστὸν κερδήσω, καὶ εὑρεθῷ ἐν αὐτῷ.
8. Ibid. iv. 13: πάντα ἰσχύω ἐν τῷ ἐνδυναμοῦντί με Χριστῷ.
h [bid. iii. 21: ὃς μετασχηματίσει τὸ σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως ἡμῶν, εἰς τὸ
γενέσθαι αὐτὸ σύμμορφον τῷ σώματι τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ, κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν τοῦ
δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καὶ ὑποτάξαι ἑαυτῷ τὰ πάντα.
it Tim. iii. iv. v.; Tit. i. 5-9; ii. 1-10, &e,
* St. Paul’s language implies that the true faith is to the soul what the
most necessary conditions of health are to the body. ὑγιαίνουσα διδασκαλία
(τ Tim. i. 10; Tit. i. 9; ii. 1); so λόγος ὑγιὴς (Tit. ii. 8), λόγοι ὑγιαίνοντες.
(2 Tim. i. 13). Thus the orthodox teaching is styled ἡ καλὴ διδασκαλία
(1 Tim. iv. 6), or simply 4 διδασκαλία (Ibid. vi. 1), as though no other
deserved the name. Any deviation (ἑτεροδιδασκαλεῖν, Ibid. i. 3; Vi. 3) is
self-condemned as being such. The heretic prefers his own self-chosen
private way to the universally-received doctrine; he is to be cut off, after
two admonitions, from the communion of the Church (Tit. iii. 10) on the
ground that ἐξέστραπται ὃ τοιοῦτος, καὶ ἁμαρτάνει, dv αὐτοκατάκριτος (Ibid.).
Heresy is spoken of by turns as ἃ crime and a misfortune, περὶ τὴν πίστιν.
ἐναυάγησαν (τ Tim. i. 10); ἀπεπλανήθησαν ἀπὸ τῆς πίστεως (Ibid. vi. 10);
περὶ τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἠστόχησαν (2 Tim. ii. 18). Deeper error is characterized
in severer terms, ἀποστήσονται τῆς πίστεως, προσέχοντες πνεύμασι πλάνοις.
[ LECT.
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:
Pastoral Epistles. , 337
lines of teaching radiates from a most exalted conception of
Christ’s Person, whether He is the Source of ministerial power],
or the Sun and Centre-point of orthodox truth™. In stating
the doctrine of redemption these Epistles insist strongly upon
its universality®. The whole world was redeemed in the inten-
tion of Christ, however that intention might be limited in effect
by the will of man. As the theories, Judaising and Gnostic,
which confined the benefits of Christ’s redemptive work to races
or classes, were more or less Humanitarian in their estimate
of His Person; so along with the recognition of a world-
embracing redemption was found the belief in a Divine Re-
deemer. Accordingly in the Pastoral Epistles the Divinity
of our Lord is taught both in express terms® and by tacit
implication. His functions as the Awarder of indulgence and
mercy P, His living invisible Presence in the Church4, His
active providence over His servants, and His ready aid in
καὶ διδασκαλίαις δαιμονίων. ... κεκαυτηριασμένων τὴν ἰδίαν συνείδησιν K.T.A.
qr" Lim. iv. τ, 2); οὗτοι ἀνθίστανται τῇ ἀληθείᾳ, ἄνθρωποι κατεφθαρμένοι τὸν
νοῦν, ΜΕΝ περὶ τὴν πίστιν (2 Tim. iii. 8); ἀπὸ τῆς ἀληθείας τὴν ἀκοὴν
ἀποστρέψουσιν, ἐπὶ δὲ τοὺς μύθους ἐκτραπήσονται (14, iv. 4): _Heresy eats
its way into the spiritual body like a gangrene, 6 λόγος αὐτῶν ws γάγγραινα
νομὴν ἕξει (Ibid. ii. 17). It is observable that throughout these Epistles
πίστις is not the subjective apprehension, but the objective body of truth;
not fides qud creditur, but the Faith. And the Church is στύλος καὶ ἑδραίωμα
τῆς ἀληθείας (1 Tim. iii. I 5). This truth, which the Church supports, is
already embodied in a ὑποτύπωσις ὑγιαινόντων are Ag Tim. i. 13).
1 y Tim. i. 12: θέμενος εἰς διακονίαν. 2 Tim. ii. 3: στρατιώτης ᾿Ιησοῦ
Χριστοῦ. So when the young widows who ἘΠῚῚ entered into the Order
of widows wish to marry again, this is represented as an offence against
Christ, with Whom they have entered into a personal engagement, ὅταν
γὰρ καταστρηνιάσωσι τοῦ Χριστοῦ, γαμεῖν θέλουσιν, ἔχουσαι κρίμα, ὅτι τὴν
πρώτην πίστιν ἠθέτησαν (1 Tim. v. II, 12).
m J Tim. vi. 3, where moral and social truth is specially i in question.
n ΤΡΊΑ. ii. 3. Intercession is to be offered for all. τοῦτο yap καλὸν καὶ
ἀπόδεκτον ἐνώπιον τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Θεοῦ, ὃς πάντας “ἀνθρώπους θέλει σωθῆναι
καὶ εἰς ἐπίγνωσιν ἀληθείας ἐλθεῖν. εἷς yap Θεὸς, εἷς καὶ μεσίτης Θεοῦ καὶ
ἀνθρώπων, ἄνθρωπος Χριστὸς ᾿ Ιησοῦς, ὁ δοὺς ἑαυτὸν ἀντίλυτρον ὑπὲρ πάντων.
Cf. Ibid. iv. 10; Tit. ii. 11.
ο Tit. ii. 13: τοῦ μεγάλου Θεοῦ καὶ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.
Pr Tim. i. τό: διὰ τοῦτο ἠλεήθην, ἵνα ἐν ἐμοὶ πρώτῳ ἐνδείξηται ᾿Ιησοῦς
Χριστὸς τὴν πᾶσαν μακροθυμίαν. Cf. ver. 13. Compare the intercession for
the (apparently) deceased Onesiphorus : δῴη αὐτῷ ὁ Κύριος εὑρεῖν ἔλεος παρὰ
Κυρίου ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ (2 Tim. i. 18); where the second Κύριος also must
be Jesus Christ the Judge, at Whose Hands St. Paul himself expects to
receive the crown of righteousness (Ibid. iv. 8).
4 Observe the remarkable adjurations, διαμαρτύρομαι ἐνώπιον τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ
Κυρίου ’ Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ καὶ τῶν ἐκλεκτῶν ἀγγέλων (1 Tim. v. 21); παραγγέλλω
σοι ἐνώπιον τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ (ὠοποιοῦντος τὰ πάντα, καὶ Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ τοῦ
μαρτυρήσαντος ἐπὶ Ποντίου Πιλάτου τὴν καλὴν ὁμολογίαν (Ibid. vi. 13).
VI | Z
428 Why can no human name be substituted for
trouble", are introduced naturally as familiar topics. And if
the Manhood of the One Mediator is prominently alluded to
as being the instrument of His Mediation’, His Pre-existence
in g Higher Nature is as clearly intimated *.
After what has already been said on the prominence of the
doctrine of Christ’s Divinity in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
it may suffice here to remark that the power" of His Priestly
Mediation as there insisted on, although exhibited in His
glorified Humanity, does of itself imply a superhuman Person-
ality. This indeed is more than hinted at in the terms of
the comparison which is instituted between Melchisedec and
His Divine Antitype. History records nothing of the parents,
of the descent, of the birth, or of the death of Melchisedec ;
he appears in the sacred narrative as if he had no beginning
of days or end of life. In this he is ‘made like unto the Son
of God,’ with His eternal Pre-existence and His endless days Ὁ.
This Eternal Christ can save to the uttermost, because He
has a Priesthood that is unchangeable, since it is based on
His Own Everlasting Being *.
In short, if we bear in mind that, as the Mediator, Christ is
God and Man, St. Paul’s language about Him is explained by
its twofold drift. On the one hand, the true force of the
distinction between ‘One God’ and ‘One Lord’ or ‘One Mediator’
becomes apparent in those passages, where Christ in His as-
sumed Manhood is for the moment in contrast with the Un-
incarnate Deity of the Fathery. On the other hand, it is
only possible to read the great Christological passages of the
Apostle without doing violence to the plain force of his lan-_
guage, when we believe that Christ is God. Doubtless the
Christ of St. Paul is shrouded in mystery; but could any real
intercourse between God and man have been re-established
which should be wholly unmysterious? Strip Christ of His
r 2 Tim. iv. 17: 6 δὲ Κύριός μοι παρέστη, καὶ ἐνεδυνάμωσέ με, Ibid.
ver. 18: ῥύσεταί με ὃ Κύριος ἀπὸ παντὸς ἔργου πονηροῦ.
5.1 Tim. ii. 5.
ὁ Ibid. iii. 16. | Baur, Vorlesungen, Ὁ. 351: ‘Mensch wird zwar Christus
ausdriicklich genannt (1 Tim. ii. 5) aber von einem menschlichen Subject
kann doch eigentlich nicht gesagt werden ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί. Es passt
diess nur fiir ein héheres iibermenschliches Wesen.’
a Heb. vii. 25: od ew εἰς τὸ παντελὲς δύναται.
v Heb. vii. 3: ἀπάτωρ, ἀμήτωρ, ayeveadoyntos μήτε ἀρχὴν ἡμερῶν, μήτε
ζωῆς τέλος ἔχων: ἀφωμοιωμένος δὲ τῷ Ὑἱῷ τοῦ Θεοῦ,
x Thid. vers. 24, 25: 6 δὲ, διὰ τὸ μένειν αὐτὸν εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, ἀπαράβατον
ἔχει τὴν ἱερωσύνην" ὅθεν καὶ σώζειν εἰς τὸ παντελὲς δύναται.
y 1 Cor, viii. 6; Eph. iv. 5; 1 Tim. ii. 5.
[ LECT.
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Ι
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the Name of Fesus, in the writings of St. Paul? 339
re eee eee στον OEE S39
Godhead that you may denude Him of mystery, and what
becomes, I do not say of particular texts, but of all the most
characteristic teaching of St. Paul? Substitute, if you can,
throughout any one Epistle the name of the first of the saints
or of the highest among the angels, for the Name of the Divine
Redeemer, and see how it reads. Accept the Apostle’s implied
challenge. Imagine for a moment that Paul was crucified for
you; that you were baptized in the name of Paulz; that
wisdom, holiness, redemption, come from an Apostle who, saint
though he be, is only a brother-man, Conceive that the Apostle
ascends fora moment his Master’s throne; that he says ana-
thema to any who loves not the Apostle Paul; that he is
bent upon bringing every thought captive to the obedience
of Paul; that he announces that in Paul are hid all the treasures
of wisdom and knowledge; that instead of protesting ‘We
preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves
your servants for Jesus’ sake,’ he could say, ‘Paul is the end
of the law to every one that believeth.’ Can you conceive it?
What then is it in the Name of Christ which renders this
language, when it is applied to Him, other than unintelligible
or intolerable? Why is it that when coupled with any
other name, however revered and saintly, the words of Paul
respecting Jesus Christ must seem not merely strained, but
exaggerated and blasphemous? It is not that truth answers
to truth, that all through these Epistles, and not merely in
particular assertions, there is an underlying idea of Christ’s
Divinity which is taken for granted, as being the very soul
and marrow of the entire series of doctrines? that when this
is lost sight of, all is misshapen and dislocated ? that when
this is recognised, all falls into its place as the exhibition of
infinite Power and Mercy, clothed in a vesture of humiliation
and sacrifice, and devoted to the succour and enlightenment
of man ?
4. lt is with the prominent features of St. Paul’s charac-
teristic teaching as with the general drift of his great Epistles ;
they irresistibly imply a Christ Who is Divine. _
(a) Every reader of the New Testament associates St. Paul
with a special advocacy of the necessity of faith as the indis-
pensable condition of man’s justification before God. What is
this ‘faith’ of St. Paul? It is in experience the most simple of
2 τ Cor.i. 13: μὴ Παῦλος ἐσταυρώθη ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν ; 7) εἰς τὸ ὄνομα Παύλου
ἐβαπτίσθητε ;
vr | Z 2
a
340 A Duwvine Christ impled
the movements of the soul; and yet, if analysed, it turns out
to be one of the most complex among the religious ideas in
the New Testament. The word πίστις implies, first of all, both
faithfulness and confidence ἃ ; but religious confidence is closely
allied to belief, that is to say, to a persuasion that some unseen
fact is true>. And this belief, having for its object the unseen,
is opposed by St. Paul to ‘sight©’ It is fed by, or rather
it is in itself, a higher intuition than any of which nature 15
capable ; it is the continuous exercise of a new sense of spiritual
truth with which man has been endowed by grace. It is indeed
a spirittial second-sight ; and yet reason has ancillary duties
vomits it. Reason may prepare the way of faith in the soul
y removing intellectual obstacles to its claims; or she may —
arrange, digest, explain, systematize, and so express the intui-
tions of faith in accordance with the needs of a particular locality
or time. This active intellectual appreciation of the object-
matter of faith, which analyses, discusses, combines, infers, is —
by no means necessary to the life of the Christian soul. It is |
a special grace or accomplishment, which belongs only to a ©
small fraction of the whole body of the faithful. Their faith
is supplemented by what St. Paul terms, in this peculiar sense,
‘knowledge4’ Faith itself, by which the soul lives, is mainly
passive, at least in respect of its intellectual ingredients: the
believing soul may or may not apprehend with scientific accuracy
that which its faith receives. The ‘word of knowledge,’ that is,
the power of analysis and statement which is wielded by theo-
logical science, is thus a distinct gift, of great value to the —
Church, although certainly not of absolute necessity for all —
ἃ Rom. iii. 2. πίστις Θεοῦ is the faithfulness of God in accomplishing’ —
His promises. Cf. πιστὸς ὃ Θεός, τ Cor. i. 9; 1 Thess. v. 24. πίστις is
confidence in God, Rom. iv. 19, 20; as πεπίστευμαι, ‘I have been entrusted
with’ (Gal. ii. 7; 1 Tim. i. 11). .
b The transition is observable in Rom. vi. 8: εἰ δὲ ἀπεθάνομεν σὺν Χριστῷ,
πιστεύομεν ὅτι καὶ συζήσομεν αὐτῷ. For belief in the truth of an unseen
fact upon human testimony, cf. 1 Cor. xi. 18: ἀκούω σχίσματα ἐν ὑμῖν ©
ὑπάρχειν, καὶ μέρος τι πιστεύω. 8
¢2 Cor. ν. 7: διὰ πίστεως γὰρ περιπατοῦμεν, οὐ διὰ εἴδους. 4
ἃ τ Cor. xii. 8: ἄλλῳ δὲ [δίδοται] λόγος γνώσεως, κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ Πνεῦμα.
2 Cor. viii. 7: ἐν παντὶ περισσεύετε, πίστει, καὶ λόγῳ, καὶ γνώσει. So in Ἷ
t Cor. xiii. 2 πᾶσα ἣ γνῶσις evidently means intellectual appreciation οὗ
the highest revealed truths, of which it is said in ver, 8 that καταργηθήσεται. —
Of course this γνῶσις was from the first capable of being abused ; only, when
it is so abused, to the hindrance of Divine truth, the Apostle maintains —
that it does not deserve the name (ἀντιθέσεις τῆς ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως. —
1 Tim. vi. 20). 4
[ LECT. ᾿
an St. Paul’s account of Farth. 341
Christians. But ‘ without faith’ itself, ‘it is impossible to please
God ;’ and in its simplest forms, faith pre-supposes a procla-
mation of its object by the agency of preaching®. Sometimes
indeed the word preached does not profit, ‘not being mixed
with faith in them that hear it f’? But when the soul in
very truth responds to the message of God, the complete re-
sponsive act of faith is threefold. This act proceeds simul-
taneously from the intelligence, from the heart, and from the
will of the believer. His intelligence recognises the unseen
object as a facts. His heart embraces the object thus present
to his understanding; his heart opens instinctively and un-
hesitatingly to receive a ray of heavenly light And his
will too resigns itself to the truth before it; it places the
soul at the disposal of the object which thus rivets its eye
and conquers its affections. The believer accordingly merges
his personal existence in that of the object of his faith; he
lives, yet not he, but Another lives in him’. He gazes o
truth, he loves it, he yields himself to it, he loses himself in it.
So true is it, that in its essence, and not merely in its con-
sequences, faith has a profoundly moral character. Faith is not
merely a perception of the understanding; it is a kindling
of the heart, and a resolve of the will; it is, in short, an act
of the whole soul, which, by one simultaneous complex move-
ment, sees, feels, and obeys the truth presented to it.
Now, according to St. Paul, it is Jesus Christ Who is emi-
nently the Object of Christian faith. The intelligence, the
heart, the will of the Christian unite to embrace Him. How
versatile and many-sided a process this believing apprehension
of Christ is, might appear from the constantly varied phrase
of the Apostle when describing it. Yet of faith in all its aspects
Christ is the legitimate and constant Object. Does St. Paul
9 Rom. x. 14-17: 7 πίστις ἐξ ἀκοῆς. Cf. λόγος ἀκοῆς, τ Thess. 11
f Heb. iv. 2.
1 Thess. iv. 14, πιστεύειν is used of recognising two past historical facts ;
Rom. vi. 8, of recognising a future fact; 2 Thess. ii. 11, of believing that
to be a fact which is a falsehood.
h Rom. x. 9, 10: ἐὰν ὁμολογήσῃς ἐν τῷ στόματί σου Κύριον ᾿Ιησοῦν, καὶ
πιστεύσῃς ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ σου ὅτι 6 Θεὸς αὐτὸν ἤγειρεν ἐκ νεκρῶν, σωθήσῃ" καρδίᾳ
γὰρ πιστεύεται εἰς δικαιοσύνην. Thus coincidently with the act of faith, 7
ἀγάπη τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐκκέχυται ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡμῶν (Rom. v. 5). The love of
God is infused into the heart at the moment when His truth enters the
understanding ; and it is in this co-operation of the moral nature that the
essential power of faith resides: hence faith is necessarily δι ἀγάπης
ἐνεργουμένη.
i Gal. ii. 20: (@ δὲ οὐκ ἔτι ἐγὼ, (ἢ δὲ ἐν ἐμοὶ Χριστός.
vi |
342 A Divine Christ implied
speak as if faith were a movement of the soul towards an end ?
That end is Christk. Does he hint that faith is a repose of
the soul resting upon a support which guarantees its safety ?
That support is Christ! Does he seem to imply that by faith
the Christian has entered into an atmosphere which encircles
and protects, and fosters the growth of his spiritual life? That
atmosphere is Christ™. Thus the expression ‘the faith of
Christ’ denotes the closest possible union between Christ and
the faith which apprehends Him. And this union, effected
on man’s side by faith, on God’s by the instrumentality of
the sacraments Ὁ, secures man’s real justification. The believer
is justified by this identification with Christ, Whose perfect
obedience and expiatory sufferings are thus transferred to him.
St. Paul speaks of belief in Christ as involving belief in the
Christian creedP; Christ has warranted the ventures which
faith makes, by assuring the believer that He has guaranteed
the truth of the whole object-matter of faitha. Faith then
is the starting-point and the strength of the new life; and
this faith must be pre-eminently faith in Christ". The precious
Blood of Christ, not only as representing the obedience of His
Will, but as inseparably joined to His Majestic Person, is itself
* This seems to be the force of εἰς with πιστεύειν. Col. ii. 5: τὸ στερέωμα
τῆς εἰς Χριστὸν πίστεως ὑμῶν. Phil. i. 29; Rom. x. 14. The preposition
mpos indicates the direction of the soul’s gaze, without necessarily implying
the idea of movement in that direction. In Philem. 5 : τὴν πίστιν, ἣν ἔχεις
πρὸς τὸν Κύριον Ἰησοῦν. Cf. 1 Thess. i. 8.
11 Tim. i. 16: πιστεύειν ἐπ’ αὐτῷ (sc. Jesus Christ) εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον.
Πιστεύειν ἐπὶ is used with the aec. of trust in the Eternal Father. Cf.
Rom. iv. 5, 24.
™ Gal. iii. 26: πάντες γὰρ viol Θεοῦ ἐστε διὰ τῆς πίστεως ev Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ.
Eph, i. 15: ἀκούσας τὴν καθ᾽ ὑμᾶς πίστιν ἐν τῷ Κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ. 2 Tim. iii. 15.
The Old Testament can make wise unto salvation, διὰ πίστεως τῆς ἐν
Χριστῷ ᾿Ἰησοῦ.
" Rom. iii. 22: διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Gal. ii. τ6. This genitive
seems to have the force of the construct state in Hebrew.
© ‘Tit -ill.: 545 1/Cor.x; 20.
Py Tim, tii. 16: ἐπιστεύθη ἐν κόσμῳ. Christ’s Person is here said to have
been believed in as being the Centre of the New Dispensation.
12 Tim, 1. 12: οἶδα yap ᾧ πεπίστευκα, καὶ πέπεισμαι ὅτι δυνατός ἐστι
τὴν παραθήκην μου φυλάξαι εἰς ἐκείνην τὴν ἡμέραν. ;
τ Gal, ii. 16: ἡμεῖς εἰς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν ἐπιστεύσαμεν, ἵνα δικαιωθῶμεν ἐκ
πίστεως Χριστοῦ. So Rom. i. 17: δικαιοσύνη γὰρ Θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ (Christ’s
Gospel) ἀποκαλύπτεται ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν. In like manner the Christian
is termed 6 ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ: his spiritual life dates from, and depends
upon his faith. Rom. iii. 26. So, of ἐκ πίστεως (Gal. iii. 7); and, with
an allusion to the Church as the true home of faith, οἰκείους τῆς πίστεως
(Gal. vi. Io).
[ LECT.
in St. Paul’s account of Fazth. 343
an object in which faith finds life and nutriment ; the baptized
Christian is bathed in it, and his soul dwells on its pardoning
and cleansing power. It is Christ’s Blood; and Christ is
the great Object of Christian faiths. For not Christ’s teaching
alone, not even His redemptive work alone, but emphatically
and beyond all else the Person of the Divine Redeemer is set
forth by St. Paul before the eyes of Christians, as being That
upon Which their souls are more especially to gaze in an
ecstacy of chastened and obedient love.
Now if our Lord had been, in the belief of His Apostle, only
a created being, is it conceivable that He should have been thus
put forward as having a right wellnigh to engross the vision,
the love, the energy of the human soul? For St. Paul does
expressly, as well as by implication, assert that the hope and
the lovet-of the soul, no less than its belief, are to centre in
Christ. He never tells us that a bare intellectual realization of
Christ’s existence or of Christ’s work will avail to justify the
sinner before God. By faith the soul is to be moving ever
towards Christ, resting ever upon Christ, living ever in Christ.
Christ is to be the end, the support, the very atmosphere of its
life. But how is such a relation possible, if Christ be not God?
Undoubtedly faith does perceive and apprehend the existence of
invisible creatures as well as of the Invisible God. Certainly the
angels are discerned by faith ; the Evil One himself is an object
of faith. That is to say, the supernatural sense of the soul per-
ceives these inhabitants of the unseen world in their different
spheres of wretchedness and bliss. But angels and devils are
not objects of the faith which saves humanity from sin and
death. The blessed spirits command not that loyalty of heart
and will which welcomes Christ to the Christian soul. The soul
loves them as His ministers, not as its end. No creature can
be the legitimate satisfaction of a spiritual activity so complex
in its elements, and so soul-absorbing in its range, as is the
faith which justifies. No created form can thus be gazed at,
loved, obeyed in that inmost sanctuary of a soul, which is con-
secrated to the exclusive glory of the great Creator. If Christ
were a creature, we may dare to affirm that St. Paul’s account
of faith in Christ ought to have been very different from that
5. Rom. iii. 25: διὰ τῆς πίστεως ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι. We might have ex-
pected ἐπὶ ; and St. Paul would doubtless have used it, if he had meant to
express no more than confidence in the efficacy of Christ’s Blood.
ὁ τ Tim. i. 1; 1 Cor. xv. 19; Col. i. 27.
ἃ I Cor. xvi. 22.
vi]
344 A Divine Christ implied
which we have been considering. If, in the belief of St. Paul,
Christ is only a creature; then it must be said that St. Paul,
by his doctrine of faith in Christ, does lead men to live for the
creature rather than for the Creator. In the spiritual teaching
of St. Paul, Christ eclipses God if He is not God; since it is
emphatically Christ’s Person, as warranting the preciousness of
His work, Which is the Object of justifying faith. Nor can it
be shewn that the intellect and heart and will of man could *
conspire to give to God a larger tribute of spiritual homage
than they are required by the Apostle to give to Christ.
(8) Again, how much is implied as to the Person of Christ
by the idea of Regeneration, as it is brought before us in the
writings of St. Paul! St. Paul uses the word itself only once*.
But the idea recurs continually throughout his writings; it is
not less prominent in them than is the idea of faith. This idea
of regeneration is sometimes expressed by the image of a change
of vesturey. The regenerate nature has put off the old man,
with his deeds of untruthfulness and lust, and has put on the
new or ideal man, the Perfect Moral Being, the Christ. Some-
times the idea of regeneration is expressed more closely by the
image of a change of form% The regenerate man has been
metamorphosed. He is made to correspond to the Form of
Christ ; he is renewed in the Image of Christ ; his moral being
is reconstructed. Sometimes, however, and most emphatically,
regeneration is paralleled with natural birth. Regeneration is
a second birth. The regenerate man is a new creature®; he is
a work of Godb; he has been created according to a Divine
standard¢, . But—and this is of capital importance—he is also
said to be created in Christ Jesus4; Christ is the sphere of the
Σ παλιγγενεσία, Tit. iii. 5. In St. Matt. xix. 28, the word has a much
wider and a very distinct sense.
¥ Col. iii. 9, 10: ἀπεκδυσάμενοι τὸν παλαιὸν ἄνθρωπον... .... καὶ évduc-
duevot τὸν νέον. Eph. iv. 22-24: ἀποθέσθαι....... τὸν παλαιὸν ἄνθρωπον
τὸν φθειρόμενον κατὰ τὰς ἐπιθυμίας τῆς ἀπάτης" ἀνανεοῦσθαι δὲ τῷ πνεύματι
τοῦ vods ὑμῶν, καὶ ἐνδύσασθαι τὸν καινὸν ἄνθρωπον τὸν κατὰ Θεὸν κτισθέντα
ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ ὁσιότητι τῆς ἀληθείας. Gal. iii. 27: Χριστὸν ἐνεδύσασθε.
Rom. xiii. 14.
* Rom. xii. 2: μεταμορφοῦσθε τῇ ἀνακαινώσει τοῦ vods ὑμῶν. Ibid. viii.
29: obs προέγνω, καὶ προώρισε συμμόρφους τῆς εἰκόνος τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ αὑτοῦ. CF.
Col. iii. 10: κατ᾽ εἰκόνα τοῦ κτίσαντος αὐτόν.
@ Gal. vi. 15: καινὴ κτίσις.
> Eph. ii. 10: αὐτοῦ γάρ [sc. Θεοῦ] ἐσμεν ποίημα.
© Ibid. iv. 24: τὸν κατὰ Θεὸν κτισθέντα.
ἃ Ibid. ii, 10: κτισθέντες ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ ἐπὶ ἔργοις ἀγαθοῖς,
[LECT.
am St. Paul’s account of Regeneration. 545
new creation®. The instrument of regeneration on Christ’s
part, according to St. Paul, is the sacrament of baptism’, to
which the Holy Spirit gives its efficacy, and which, in the case .of
an adult recipient, must be welcomed to the soul by repentance
and faith. Regeneration thus implies a double process, one
destructive, the other constructive ; by it the old life is killed,
and the new life forthwith bursts into existence. This double
process is effected by the sacramental incorporation of the
baptized, first with Christ crucified and dead, and then with
Christ rising from the dead to life; although the language of
the Apostle distinctly intimates that a continued share in the
resurrection-life depends upon the co-operation of the will of
the Christian, But the moral realities of the Christian life,
to which the grace of baptism originally introduces the Chris-
tian, correspond with, and are effects of, Christ’s Death and
Resurrection. Regarded historically, these events belong to the
irrevocable past. But for us Christians the Crucifixion and the
Resurrection are not merely past events of history ; they are
energizing facts from which no lapse of centuries can sever us ;
they are perpetuated to the end of time within the kingdom
of the Redemptioni. The Christian is, to the end of time,
e 2 Cor. v. 17; and perhaps 1 Cor. viii. 6, where ἡμεῖς means ‘we re-
generate Christians,’
f Tit. iii. 5: ἔσωσεν ἡμᾶς, διὰ λουτροῦ παλιγγενεσίας Kal ἀνακαινώσεως
Πνεύματος ᾿Αγίου. Gal. iii. 27: ὅσοι γὰρ εἰς Χριστὸν ἐβαπτίσθητε, Χριστὸν
ἐνεδύσασθε. τ Cor. xii. 12.
& Rom. vi. 3, 4: ἢ ἀγνοεῖτε ὅτι ὅσοι ἐβαπτίσθημεν εἰς Χριστὸν ᾿Ιησοῦν, εἰς
τὸν θάνατον αὐτοῦ ἐβαπτίσθημεν ; συνετάφημεν οὖν αὑτῷ διὰ τοῦ βαπτίσματος
εἰς τὸν θάνατον.
bh Tbid. vers. 4, 5: ἵνα ὥσπερ ἠγέρθη Χριστὸς ἐκ νεκρῶν διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ
Πατρὺς, οὕτω καὶ ἡμεῖς ἐν καινότητι ζωῆς περιπατήσωμεν. Et γὰρ σύμφυτοι
γεγόναμεν τῷ ὁμοιώματι τοῦ θανάτου αὐτοῦ, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῆς ἀναστάσεως ἐσόμεθα.
i Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. 140 : ‘La régénération en tant quelle comprend
ces deux éléments d’une mort et d’une renaissance, est tout naturellement
mise en rapport direct avec la mort et la résurrection de Jésus-Christ. — Ce
rapport a été compris par quelques théologiens comme si le fait historique
était un symbole du fait psychologique, pour lequel il aurait fourni la ter-
minologie figurée. Mais assurément la pensée de lapdtre va au dela dun
simple rapprochement idéal et nous propose le fait d'une relation objective
et réelle. Nous nous trouvons encore une fois sur le terrain du mysticisme
évangélique; il est question trés-positivement d’une identification avec la
mort ct la vie du Sauveur, et il n’y a ict de figurée que V expression, puisqu’au
fond il ne s’agit pas de l’existence physique du Chrétien. Oui, d’aprés Paul,
le croyant meurt avec Christ, pour ressusciter avec lui; et cette phrase ne
s’explique pas par ce que nous pourrions appeler un jeu de mots spirituel,
ou un rapprochement ingénieux; elle est Vapplication du grand principe
de Vunion personnelle, d@aprés lequel Vexistence propre de Vhomme cesse
réellement, pour se cunfondre avec celle du Christ, qui répete, pour ainsi
vi]
446 A Divine Christ emplied
crucified with Christ * ; he dies with Christ!; he is buried with
Christ™ ; he is quickened together with Christ™; he rises with
Christ°; he lives with ChristP. He is not merely made to sit
together in heavenly places as being in Christ Jesus4, he is a
member of His Body, as out of His Flesh and out of His Bones’.
And of this profound incorporation baptism is the original
instrument. The very form of the sacrament of regeneration,
as it was administered to the adult multitudes who in the early
days of the Church pressed for admittance into her communion,
harmonizes with the spiritual results which it effects. As the
neophyte is plunged beneath the waters, so the old nature is
slain and buried with Christ. As Christ, crucified and entombed,
rises with resistless might from the grave which can no longer
hold Him, so, to the eye of faith, the Christian is raised from
the bath of regeneration radiant with a new and supernatural
life. His gaze is to be fixed henceforth on Christ, Who, being
raised from the dead, dieth no more. The Christian indeed may
fail to persevere ; he may fall from this high grace in which he
stands. But he need not do so; and meanwhile he is bound to
account himself as ‘dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God
through Jesus Christ our Lords.’
dire, la sienne, avec ses deux faits capitaux, dans chaque individualité se
donnant ἃ lui.” O si sic omnia!
Kk Rom. vi. 6: 6 παλαιὸς ἡμῶν ἄνθρωπος συνεσταυρώθη. Gal. ii. 20: Χριστῷ
συνεσταύρωμαι.
1.2 Tim. ii. 11: συναπεθάνομεν. Rom. vi. 8: ἀπεθάνομεν σὺν Χριστῷ.
m Rom. vi. 4: συνετάφημεν οὖν αὐτῷ διὰ τοῦ βαπτίσματος. Col. ii. 12:
συνταφέντες αὐτῷ ev τῷ βαπτίσματι.
n Eph. ii. 5: συνεζωοποίησε τῷ Χριστῷ. Col. ii. 13: συνεζωοποίησε σὺν
QuTW.
© Eph. ii. 6: συνήγειρε [τῷ Χριστῷ]. There is no sufficient reason for
understanding Eph. ii. 5, 6 of the future resurrection alone; although in that
passage the idea of the future resurrection (cf. ver. 7) is probably combined
with that of the spiritual resurrection of souls in the kingdom of grace.
We have been raised with Christ here, that we may live with Him hereafter.
Col. ii. 12: ἐν ᾧ καὶ (sc. ἐν Χριστῷ] συνηγέρθητε διὰ τῆς πίστεως τῆς ἐνερ-
γείας τοῦ Θεοῦ. Ibid. iii. 1.
P Rom. vi. 8: συζήσομεν αὐτῷ. 2 Tim. ii. 11: εἰ γὰρ συναπεθάνομεν, καὶ
συζήσομεν. Γ
a Eph. ii. 6: συνεκάθισεν ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις ἐν Χριστῷ ᾿Ἰησοῦ.
τ Thid. v. 30: μέλη ἐσμὲν τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ, ἐκ τῆς σαρκὺς αὐτοῦ, καὶ ex
τῶν ὀστέων αὐτοῦ. Cf. Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 56, 7: ‘We are of Him and
in Him, even as though our very flesh and bones should be made continuate
with His.’
5. Rom. vi. 10, 11: ὃ yap ἀπέθανε [sc. ὁ Χριστὸς], τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ ἀπέθανεν
ἐφάπαξ᾽ ὃ δέ ζῇ, Gi τῷ Θεῷ. οὕτω καὶ ὑμεῖς λογίζεσθε ἑαυτοὺς νεκροὺς μὲν
εἶναι τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ, ζῶντας δὲ τῷ Θεῷ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν.
[ LECT.
272 St. Paul’s account of Regeneration. 547
This regenerate or Christian life is further described by two
most remarkable expressions. The Apostle speaks sometimes
of Christians being in Christ *; sometimes of Christ being in
Christians". The most recent criticism refuses to sanction the
efforts which in former years have been made to empty these
expressions of their literal and natural force. Hooker has ob-
served that it is ‘too cold an interpretation whereby some men
expound being in Christ to import nothing else but only that
the selfsame nature which maketh us to be men is in Him, and
maketh Him man as we are. For what man in the world is
there which hath not so far forth communion with Jesus Christv?’
Nor will it suffice to say that in such phrases as are here in
question, ‘Christ’ means only the moral teaching of Christ, and
that a Christian is ‘in Christ’ by the force of a mere intellectual
loyalty to the Sermon on the Mount. The expression is too
energetic to admit of this treatment ; it resists any but a literal
explanation. By a vigorous metaphor an enthusiastic Platonist
might perhaps speak of his ‘living in’ Plato, meaning thereby
that his whole intellectual activity is absorbed by and occupied
with the recorded thought of that philosopher. But he would
scarcely say that he is ‘in’ Plato; since such a phrase would
imply not merely an intellectual communion with Plato’s mind,
but an objective inherence in his nature or being. Still less
possible would it be to adopt the alternative phrase, and say that
Plato is ‘in’ the student of Plato. When St. Paul uses these
expressions to denote a Christian’s relation to Christ, he plainly
is not recording any subjective impression of the human mind ;
he is pointing to an objective and independent fact, strictly pecu-
liar to the kingdom of the Incarnation. The regenerate Chris-
tian is as really ‘in’ Christ, as every member of the human family
is ‘in’ our first parent Adam*. Christ is indeed much more
to the Christian than is Adam to his descendants; Christ is the
sphere in which the Christian moves and breathes; but Christ is
also the Parent of that new nature in which he shares ; Christ is
the Head of a Body, whereof he is really a member; nay, the Body
of which he is a member is itself Christy. From Christ, risen,
ΕΟ τι Ἐς 1 Cor. 1. 2* xv. 22; 2 Cor. ii. 17; v. 173 xu, 19; Gal. 1.
22; iii. 26; Eph. i. 3, 10; iii. 6; Phil. i. 1; 1 Thess. iv. 16.
« Gal. ii. 20; Eph. iii. 17; 2 Cor. xiii. 5 ; Col. i. 27.
Y Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 56, 7.
* See Olshausen on the Epistle to the Romans, ὃ 9, ‘ Parallel between
Adam and Christ,’ chap. v. 12-21, Introductory Remarks.
Υ τ Cor. xii. 12.
vi |
4248 «faith in a Divine Christ the motive of
ascended, glorified, as from an exhaustless storehouse, there flow
powers of unspeakable virtue ; and in this life-stream the believ-
ing and baptized Christian is bathed and lives. And conversely,
Christ lives in the Christian; the soul and body of the Chris-
tian are the temple of Christ ; the Christian is well assured that
Jesus Christ is in him, except he be reprobate 2.
My brethren, what becomes of this language if Jesus Christ be
not truly God? No conceivable relationship to a human teacher
or to a created being will sustain its weight. If it be not a mass
of crude, vapid, worthless, misleading metaphor, it indicates rela-
tionship with One Who is altogether higher than the sons of men,
altogether higher than the* highest archangel. It is true that we
are in Him, by being joined to His Human Nature; but what is it
which thus makes His Human Nature a re-creative and world-
embracing power? Why is it that if any man be in Christ, there
is a new creation® of his moral being? And how can Christ
really be in us, if He is not one with the Searcher of hearts?
Surely He only Who made the’ soul can thus sound its depths,
and dwell within it, and renew its powers, and enlarge its capa-
cities. If Christ be not God, must not this renewal of man’s
nature rest only on an empty fiction, must not this regeneration
of man’s soul be but the ecstacy of an enthusiastic dreamer ?
(y) It would, then, be a considerable error to recognise the
doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity only in those passages of St. Paul’s
writings which distinctly assert it. The indirect evidence of the
Apostle’s hold upon the doctrine is much wider and deeper than
to admit of being exhibited in a given number of isolated texts ;
since the doctrine colours, underlies, interpenetrates the most
characteristic features of his thought and teaching. The proof
of this might be extended almost indefinitely ; but let it suffice
to observe that the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity is the key to
the greatest polemical struggle of the Apostle’s whole life. Of
themselves, neither the importation of Jewish ceremonial, nor
even the disposition to sacrifice the Catholicity of the Church to
a petty nationalism, would fully account for the Apostle’s attitude
of earnest hostility to those Judaizing teachers whom he encoun-
tered at Corinth, in Galatia, and, in a somewhat altered guise, at
Colossee and at Ephesus. For, in point of fact, the Judaizers
implied more than they expressly asserted. They implied that
Christ’s religion was not of so perfect and absolute a character
as to make additions to it an irreverent impertinence. They
= 2 Cor. xiii. 5. 8. Ibid. v. 17: εἴ τις ἐν Χριστῷ, καινὴ κτίσις.
[ LECT.
|
|
4
St. Paul’s opposition to the Fudaizers. 449
implied that they did its Founder no capital wrong, when, instead
of recognising Him as the Saviour of the whole human family,
they practically purposed to limit the applicability of His work
to a narrow section of it. They implied that there was nothing
in His majestic Person which should have forbidden them to
range those dead rites of the old law, which He had fulfilled
and abolished, side by side with the Cross and Sacraments of
Redemption. The keen instinct of the Apostle detected the
wound thus indirectly but surely aimed at his Master’s honour ;
and St. Paul’s love for Christ was the exact measure of his
determined opposition to the influence and action of the Juda-
izers. If the Judaizers had believed in the true Divinity of
Jesus, they could not have returned to the ‘weak and beggarly
elements’ of systems which had paled and died away before the
glories of His Advent. If they had fully and clearly believed
Jesus to be God, that faith must have opposed an insurmountable
barrier to these reactionary yearnings for ‘the things which had
been destroyed.’ Their attempt to re-introduce circumcision
into the Galatian Churches was a reflection upon the glory of
Christ’s finished work, and so, ultimately, upon the transcendent
dignity of His Person. They knew not, or heeded not, that
they were members of a kingdom in which circumcision and
uncircumcision were insignificant accidents, and in which the
new creation of the soul by the atoning and sacramental grace
of the Incarnate Saviour was the one matter of vital import.
Although they had not denied Christ in terms, yet He had
become of no effect to them; and the Apostle sorrowfully pro-
claimed that as many of them as were justified by the law had
fallen from grace®, They had practically rejected the plenary
efficacy of Christ’s saving and re-creating power; they had
implicitly denied that He was a greater than Moses. Their
work did not at once perish from among men. For the Juda-
izing movement bequeathed to the Churches of the Lesser Asia
many of those theological influences which were felt by later
ages in the traditional temper of the School of Antioch ; while
b Gal. vi. 15: ἐν yap Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ οὔτε περιτομή τι ἰσχύει οὔδε ἀκροβυστία.
ἀλλὰ καινὴ κτίσις. Here regeneration is viewed from without, on the side of
the Divine Energy Which causes it; in Gal. v. 6, where it is equally con-
trasted with legal circumcision, it is viewed from within the soul, as consisting
essentially in πίστις δι᾽ ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη.
ο Gal. v. 4: κατηργήθητε ἀπὸ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, οἵτινες ἐν νόμῳ δικαιοῦσθε, τῇϑ
χάριτος ἐξεπέσατε. Cf. Ibid. v. 2: ἐὰν περιτέμνησθε, Χριστὸς ὑμᾶς οὐδὲν
ὠφελήσει.
v1]
350 Contrasts between the Apostles enhance the force
outside the Church it was echoed in the long series of Humani-
tarian mutterings which culminated in the blasphemies of Paulus
of Samosata. It must thus be admitted to figure conspicuously
in the intellectual ancestry of the Arian heresy ; and St. Paul,
not less than St. John, is an apostolical representative of the
cause and work of Athanasius.
Although the foregoing observations may have taxed your
indulgent patience somewhat severely, they furnish at best only
a sample of the evidence which might be brought to illustrate
the point before us. But enough will have been urged to dispose
of the suspicion, that St.John’s belief and teaching respecting
the Divinity of Jesus Christ was only an intellectual or spiritual
peculiarity of that Apostle. If the form and clothing of St. John’s
doctrine was peculiar to him, its substance was common to all
the Apostles of Jesus Christ. Just as the titles and position
assigned to Jesus Christ in the narrative of the fourth Gospel
are really in harmony with the powers which He wields and with
the rights which He claims in the first three Evangelists, so
St. John’s doctrine of the Eternal Word is substantially one with
St. Paul’s doctrine of the ‘Image of the Father,’ and with his -
whole description of the redemptive work of Christ, and of the
attitude of the Christian soul towards Him. St. John’s fuller
statements do but supply the key to the fervid doxologies of
St. Peter, and to the profound and significant reverence of
St. James. Indeed from these Apostles he might seem to differ
in point of intellectual temper and method, even less than he
differs from St.Paul. Between St. Paul and St. John how great
is the contrast! In St. Paul we are struck mainly by the wealth
of sacred thought ; in St. John by its simplicity. St. Paul is
versatile and discursive; St.John seems to be fixed in the
entranced bliss of a perpetual intuition. St. Paul is a dialectician
who teaches us by reasoning; he refutes, he infers, he makes
quotations, he deduces corollaries, he draws out his demonstra-
tions more or less at length, he presses impetuously forward,
reverently bending before the great, dogmas which he proclaims,
yet moving in an atmosphere of perpetual conflict. St. John
speaks as if the highest life of his soul was the wondering study
of one vast Apocalypse: he teaches, not by demonstrating truths,
but by exhibiting his contemplations ; he states what he sees ;
he repeats the statement, he inverts it, he repeats it once more ;
he teaches, as it seems, by the exquisite tact of scarcely disguised
but uninterrupted repetition, which is justified because there is
no higher attainable truth than the truth which he repeats.
| LECT,
of their common witness to Christ’s Divinity. 551
St. Paul begins with anthropology, St. John with theology ;
St. Paul often appeals to theology that he may enforce truths
of morals; St. John finds the highest moral truth in his most
abstract theological contemplations. St. Paul usually describes
the redemptive gift of Christ as Righteousness, as the restoration
of man to the true law of his being; St. John more naturally
contemplates it as Life, as the outflow of the Self-existent Being
of God into His creatures through the quickening Humanity of
the Incarnate Word. In St. Paul the ethical element predomi-
nates, in St. John the mystical. St. John is more especially the
spiritual ancestor of such fathers as was St. Gregory Nazianzen ;
St. Paul of such as St. Augustine. It may be said, with some
reservations, that St. Paul is the typical Apostle of Western, as
St. John is of Eastern Christendom; that the contemplative side
of the Christian life finds its pattern in St. John, the active in
St.Paul. Yet striking as are such differences of spiritual method
and temper, they are found in these great apostles side by side
with an entire unity of teaching as to the Person of our Lord.
‘Certainly,’ says Neander, with deep truth, ‘it could be nothing
merely accidental which induced men so differently constituted
and trained as Paul and John to connect such an idea [as that
of Divinity] with the doctrine of the Person of Christ. This
must have been the result of a higher necessity, which is founded
in the nature of Christianity, in the power of the impression
which the Life of Christ had made on the lives of men, in the
reciprocal relation between the appearance of Christ and the
archetype that presents itself as an inward revelation of God in
the depths of the higher self-consciousness. And all this has
found its point of connexion and its verification in the manner
in which Christ, the Unerring Witness, expressed His conscious-
ness of the indwelling of the Divine Essence with Him 4’
ἃ Planting and Training, i. 505, Bohn’s edit, Neander adds: ‘ Had the
doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship, when it was first promulgated by Paul,
been altogether new and peculiar to himself, it must have excited much
opposition as contradicting the common monotheistic belief of the Jews, even
among the apostles, to whom, from their previous habits, such a speculative
theosophic element must have remained unknown, unless it had found a
point of connexion in the lessons received from Christ, and in their ’Christian
knowledge.’ Of such opposition, direct and avowed, there is no trace, Cr
Meyer. Ev. Joh. p. 49. Die Materie der Lehre war bei Johannes, ehe er in
jener gnostischen Form die entsprechende Darstellung fand, das Fundament
seines Glaubens und der Inhalt seiner Erkenntniss, wie sie bei Paulus und
bei allen anderen Aposteln es war, welche nicht, (ausser dem Verf. des He-
brierbriefs) von der Logos-Speculation beriihrt wurden; diese Materie der
γι]
352 Lath in a Divine Christ, the strength of A postles.
This is indeed the only reasonable explanation of the re-
markable fact before us, namely, that the persecutor who was
converted on the road to Damascus, and the disciple who had
laid on Christ’s breast at supper, were absolutely agreed as to
the Divine prerogatives of their Master. And if we, my bre-
thren, have ever been tempted to think that a creed like that
of St. John befits only a contemplative or mystic life, alien to
the habits of our age and to the necessities of our position, let
us turn our eyes towards the great Apostle of the Gentiles. It
would be difficult, even in this busy day, to rival St. Paul’s
activity ; and human weakness might well shrink from sharing
his burden of pain and care. It is given to few to live ‘in
journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in
perils from a man’s own countrymen, in perils by the heathen,
in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the
sea, in perils among false brethren¢,’ for a purely unselfish object.
Few rise to the heroic scope of a life passed ‘in weariness and
painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings
often, in cold and nakedness’ But this is certain,—that at
much lower levels of moral existence, there is much to be done,
and much, sooner or later, to be endured, which we can only do
manfully and bear meekly in the strength of the Apostle’s great
conviction. If St. Paul can suffer the loss of all things that at
the last he may win Christ, if he can do all things through
Christ that strengtheneth him, it is because he is consciously
reaching towards or leaning on the arm of a Saviour Who is God
as well as Man. And if we, looking onward to the unknown
changes and chances of this mortal life, and beyond them, to
death, would fain live and die like Christians, we too must see
to it that we fold to our inmost souls that central truth of the
Christian creed which was the strength and joy of the first
servants of Christ. We too must believe and confess, that that
Human Friend Whose words enlighten us, Whose Blood cleanses
us, Whose Sacraments have renewed and even now sustain us,
is in the truth of His Higher Nature none other and no less
than the Unerring, the All-merciful, the Almighty God.
Lehre ist schlechthin auf Christum selbst zuriickzufiihren, dessen Eréffnun-
gen an seine Jiinger und dessen unmittelbarer Hindruck auf diese (Joh. 1. 14)
ihnen den Stoff gab, welcher sich spiter die verschiedenen Formen der Dar-
stellung dienstbar machte.
° 2 Cor. xi. 25, 26. Ibid. ver. 27. Cf. Ibid. vi. 4-10, and xi. 5 sqq.
[ LECT.
:
:
.
LECTURE. VII.
THE HOMOOUSION.
Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be
able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.
TG TG.
A GREAT doctrine which claims to rule the thought of men and
to leave its mark upon their conduct, must of necessity encounter
some rude and probing tests of its vitality as it floats along the
stream of time. The common speech of mankind, embodying
the verdict of man’s experience, lays more emphasis upon the
‘ravages’ than upon the conservative or constructive effects of
time ;—
‘Tempus edax rerum, tuque invidiosa vetustas,
Omnia destruitis, vitiataque dentibus svi
Paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte @.’
The destructive force of time is no less observable in the sphere
of human ideas and doctrines than in that of material and social
facts. Time exposes every doctrine or speculation to the action
of causes which, if more disguised and subtle, are not less cer-
tainly at work than those which threaten political systems or
works of art with decay and dissolution.
A doctrine is liable to suffer with the lapse of time from
without and from within. From within it is exposed to the risk
of decomposition by analysis. When once it has been launched
into the ocean of our public intellectual life, it is forthwith sub-
jected, as a condition of its acceptance, to the play and scrutiny
of many and variously constituted minds. The several ingre-
dients which constitute it, the primary truths to which it appeals
® Ovid, Met. xv. 234.
VII | A a
354 The vitality of a doctrine, how tested.
and upon which it ultimately reposes, are separately and con-
stantly examined. It may be that certain elements of the doc-
trine, essential to its perfect representation, are rejected altogether.
It may be that all its constitutive elements are retained, while the
proportions in which they are blended are radically altered. It
may be that an impulse is given to some active intellectual sol-
vent, hitherto dormant, but from the first latent in the constitu-
tion of the doctrine, and likely, according to any ordinary human
estimate, to break it up. Or some point of attraction between
the doctrine and a threatening philosophy outside it is discovered
and insisted on; and the philosophy, in a patronizing spirit,
proposes to meet the doctrine half way, and to ratify one half of
it if the other may be abandoned. Or some subtle intellectual
poison is injected into the doctrine; and while men imagine that
they are only adapting it to the temper of an age, or to the
demands of a line of thought, its glow and beauty are forfeited,
or its very life and heart are eaten out. Then for awhile its
shell or its skeleton lies neglected by the side of the great highway
of thought ; until at length some one of those adventurers who
in every age devote themselves to the manufacture of eclectic
systems, assigns to the intellectual fossil a place of honour in his
private museum, side by side with the remains of other extinct
theories, to which in its lifetime it was fundamentally opposed.
But even if a doctrine be sufficiently compact and strong to
resist internal decomposition, it must in any case be prepared to
encounter the shock of opposition from without. To no doctrine
is it given to be absolutely inoffensive ; and therefore sooner or
later every doctrine is opposed. Every doctrine, however frail
and insignificant it may be, provokes attacks by the mere fact of
its existence. It challenges a certain measure of attention which
is coveted by some other doctrines. It takes up a certain amount
of mental room which other doctrines would fain appropriate, if
indeed it does not jostle inconveniently against them, or contra-
dict them outright. Thus it rouses against itself resentment, or,
at any rate, opposition ; and this opposition is reinforced by an
appetite which is shared in by those who hold the opposed doce-
trine no less than by those who oppose it. The craving for
novelty is by no means peculiar to quickwitted races like the Athe-
nians of the apostolical age or the French of our own day. It is
profoundly and universally human; and it enters into our appre-
ciation of subject-matters the most various. Novelty confers a
charm upon high efforts of thought and enquiry as well as upon ©
works of art or of imagination, or even upon fashions in amuse- —
[ LECT. ©
Lhe vitality of a doctrine, how tested. 555
ment orin dress. To treat this yearning for novelty as though it
were only a vicious frivolity is to overlook its profound signifi-
cance. For, even in its lowest and unloveliest forms, it is a living
and perpetual witness to the original nobility of the soul of man.
It is the restlessness of a desire which One Being alone can
satisfy ; it reminds us that the Infinite One has made us for
Himself, and that no object, person, or doctrine that is merely
finite and earthly, can take His place in our heart and thought,
and bid us finally be still. And therefore as man passes through
life on his short and rapid pilgrimage, unless his eye be fixed on
that treasure in heaven which ‘neither moth nor rust doth cor-
rupt,’ he is of necessity the very slave of novelty. Each candi-
date for his admiration, wins from him, it may be, a passing
glance of approval ; but, unsatisfied at heart, he is ever seeking
for some new stimulant to his evanescent sympathies. He casts
to the winds the faded flower which he had but lately stooped to
gather with such eager enthusiasm ; he buries beneath the waves
the useless pebble which, when his eye first detected it sparkling
on the shore, had yielded him a moment of such bright enjoy-
ment. Nothing human can insure its life against the attractions
of something more recent than itself in point of origin; no
doctrine of earthly mould can hope to escape the sentence of
superannuation when it is fairly confronted with the intellectual
creations of an age later than its own. A human doctrine may
live for a few years, or it may live for centuries. Its duration will
depend partly upon the amount of absolute truth which it em-
bodies, and partly upon the strength of the rivals with which it
is brought into competition. But it cannot always satisfy the
appetite for novelty ; its day of extinction can only be deferred.
οὐκ ἔχω προσεικάσαι,
πάντ᾽ ἐπισταθμώμενος,
πλὴν Διὸς, εἰ τὸ μάταν ἀπὸ φροντίδος ἄχθος
χρὴ βαλεῖν ἐτητύμως.
οὐδ᾽ ὅστις πάροιθεν ἦν μέγας,
παμμάχῳ θράσει βρύων,
οὐδὲν ἂν λέξαι πρὶν ὧν,
ὃς δ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽ ἔφυ, τρια-
κτῆρος οἴχεται τυχών b,
So it must ever fare with a religious dogma of purely hu-
‘man authorship. In obedience to the lapse of time it must of
b Asch. Ag. 163-171.
200 ee Aa2
+
356 Doctrine of Christ's Divinity, how tested.
necessity be modified, corrupted, revolutionized, and then yield
to some stronger successor.
‘Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be.’
This is the true voice of human speculation on Divine things,
conscious that it is human, conscious of its weakness, and mind-
ful of its past and ever-accumulating experience. He Only,
‘with Whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning,’ can
be the Author of a really unchanging doctrine ; and, as a matter
of historical fact, ‘His truth endureth from generation to genera-
tion.’
When the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity entered into the
world of human thought, it was not screened from the operation
of the antagonistic and dissolvent influences which have just
been noticed. It was confronted with the passion for novelty
beneath the eyes of the apostles themselves. The passion for
novelty at Colossse appears to have combined a licentious fertility
of the religious imagination with a taste for such cosmical specu-
lations as were current in that age; while in the Galatian
Churches it took the form of a return to the discarded cere-
monial of the Jewish law. In both cases the novel theory was
opposed to the apostolical account of our Lord’s personal dig-
nity ; and in another generation the wild imaginings of a Basilides
or of a Valentinus illustrated the attractive force of a new
fashion in Christological speculation still more powerfully.
Somewhat later the dialectical method of the Alexandrian
writers subjected the doctrine to acute internal analysis, while
the neo-Platonic philosophy brought a powerful intellectual
sympathy to bear upon it, which, as an absorbing or distorting
influence, might well have been fatal to a human dogma.
Lastly, the doctrine was directly opposed by a long line of
Humanitarian teachers, reaching, with but few intermissions,
from the Ebionitic period to the Arian.
In the history of the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity the Arian
heresy was the climax of difficulty and of triumph; it tested the
doctrine at one and the same time in each of the three modes
which have been noticed. Arianism was ostentatiously anxious
to appear to be an original speculation, and accordingly it
taunted the Nicene fathers with their intellectual poverty ; it
branded them as ἀφελεῖς καὶ ἰδιῶται because they adhered to the
ground of handing on simply what they had received. Its dia-
lectical method was inherited from the Alexandrian eclectic
[ LECT.
|
Liffects of Opposition. — 357
school ; and by this method, as well as by the assumption that
certain philosophical placita were granted, Arianism endeavoured
to kill the doctrine from within by a destructive analysis. And
it need scarcely be added that Arianism inherited and intensified
the direct opposition which had been offered to the doctrine by
earlier heresies ; Arianism is immortalized, however ingloriously,
in those sufferings, in those struggles, in those victories of the
great Athanasius, of which its own bitter hostility to our Lord’s
Essential Godhead was the immediate cause.
That such a doctrine as our Lord’s Divinity should be thus
opposed was not unnatural. It is in itself so startling, so awful ;
it endows the man who honestly and intelligently believes it
with a conception of the worth and drift of Christianity, so
altogether unique ; it is so utterly intolerable if you admit a
suspicion of its being false ; it is so necessarily exacting when
once you have recognised it as true; it makes such large and
immediate demands, not merely upon the reason and the imagi-
nation, but also upon the affections and the will; that a spe-
cific opposition to it, as distinct from a professed general
opposition to the religion of which it is the very heart and soul,
is only what might have been expected. Certainly, such a doc-
trine could not at first bring peace on earth ; rather it could not
but bring division. It could not but divide families, cities,
nations, continents ; it could not but arm against itself the edge
and point of every weapon that might be forged or whetted by
the ingenuity of a passionate animosity. It could not but have
collapsed utterly and vanished away when confronted with the
heat of opposition which it provoked, had it not descended from
the Source of Truth, had it not reposed upon an absolute and
indestructible basis. The Arian controversy broke upon it as an
intellectual storm, the violence of which must have shattered any
human theory. But when the storm had spent itself, the doc-
trine emerged from the conciliar decisions of the fourth century
as luminous and perfect as it had been when it was proclaimed
by St. Paul and St.John. Resistance does but strengthen truth
which it cannot overthrow: and when the doctrine had defied
the craving for novelty, the disintegrating force of hostile
analysis, and the vehement onslaught of passionate denunciation,
it was seen to be vitally unlike those philosophical speculations
which might have been confused with it by a superficial observer.
Its exact area was unaltered; it now involved and excluded pre-
cisely what it had excluded and involved from the first. But
henceforth it was to be held with a clearer recognition of its real
vit |
358 Lreumph of the Doctrine. The Homoousion.
frontier, and with a stronger sense of the necessity for insisting
upon that recognition. In the Homoousion, after such hesitation
as found expression at Antioch, the Church felt that she had
lighted upon a symbol practically adapted to tell forth the truth
that never had been absent from her heart and mind, and withal,
capable of resisting the intellectual solvents which had seemed to
threaten that truth with extinction. The Homoousion did not
change, it protected the doctrine. It clothed the doctrine in a
vesture of language which rendered it intelligible to a new world
of thought while preserving its strict unchanging identity. It
translated the apostolical symbols of the Image and the Word of
God into a Platonic equivalent ; and it remains with us to this
hour, in the very heart of our Creed, as the complete assertion
of Christ’s absolute oneness with the Essence of Deity, as the
monument which records the greatest effort and the greatest
defeat of its antagonist error, as the guarantee that the victorious
truth maintains and will maintain an unshaken empire over the
thought of Christendom.
We are all sufficiently familiar with the line of criticism to
which such a formula as the Homoousion is exposed in our day
and generation. A contrast is depicted and insisted upon with
more vehemence than accuracy, between the unfixed popular
faith of Christians in the first age of the Church and the keen
theological temper of the fourth century. It is said that the
Church’s earliest faith was unformed, simple, vague, too full of
childlike wonder to analyse itself, too indeterminate to satisfy
the requirements of a formalized theology. It is asserted that at
Alexandria the Church learned how to fix her creed in precise,
rigid, exclusive moulds; that she there gradually crystallized
what had once been fluid, and cramped and fettered what had
before been free. And it is insinuated that in this process,
whereby the fresh faith of the infant Church ‘ was hardened into
the creed of the Church of the Councils,’ there was some risk, or
more than risk, of an alteration or enlargement of the original
faith. ‘How do you know,’ men ask, ‘that the formulary which
asserts Christ’s Consubstantiality with the Father is reallysex-
pressive of the simple faith in which the first Christians lived
and died? Do not probabilities point the other way? Is it not
likely that when this effort was made to fix the expression of
the faith in an unchanging symbol, there was a simultaneous
growth, however unsuspected and unrecognised, in the subject-
matter of the faith expressed? May not the hopes and feelings
of a passionate devotion, as well as the inferential arguments of
[ LECT.
Theworshipof Christawitness tothe Llomoousion. 359
an impetuous logic, have contributed something to fill up the
outline and to enhance the significance of the original and revealed
germ of truth? May not the Creed of Nicza be thus in reality
a creed distinct from, if not indeed more extensive than, the
creed of the apostolic age?’ Such is the substance of many a
whispered question, or of many a confident assertion, which we
hear around us; and it is necessary to enquire, whether the
admitted difference of form between the apostolic and Nicene
statements does really, or only in appearance, involve a deeper
difference—a difference in the object of faith.
I. Let it then be considered that a belief may be professed
either by stating it in terms, or by acting in a manner which
necessarily implies that you hold it. A man may profess a creed
with which his life is at variance ; but he may also live a creed,
if I may so speak, which he has not the desire or the skill to
put into exact words. There is no moral difference between the
sincere expression of a conviction in language, and its consistent
reflection in action. There is, for example, no difference be-
tween my saying that a given person is not to be relied upon
when dealing with money matters, and my pointedly declining
to act with him on this particular trust, when I am asked to
do so. It is not necessary that I should express my complete
opinion of his character, until I am obliged to express it. I
content myself with acting in the only manner which is prudent
under the circumstances. Meanwhile my line of action speaks
for itself; its meaning is evident to all who are practically
interested in the subject. Until I am challenged for an expla-
nation ; until the assumption upon which I act is denied ; there
is no necessity for my putting into words an opinion which has
already been stated in the language of action and with such
unmistakeable decision.
Did then the ante-Nicene Church as a whole—did its con-
gregations of worshippers as well as its councils of divines—
did its poor, its young, its unlettered multitudes, as well as its
saints and doctors, so act and speak as to imply a belief that
Jesus Christ is actually God?
A question such as this may at first sight seem to be difficult
to answer, by reason of the one-sidedness and caprice of history.
History for the most part concerns herself with the actions and
opinions of the great and the distinguished, that is to say, of
the few. Incidentally, or on particular occasions, she may glance
at what passes beyond the region of courts and battle-fields ;
but it is not her wont to enable us readily to ascertain the real
VII | :
360 Fesus Christ not only ‘admired’ but ‘adored. ἢ
currents of thought and feeling which have swayed the minds οἱ
multitudes in a distant age. |
Such at any rate is the rule with secular history ; but the
genius of the Church of Christ is of a nature to limit the force
of the observation. In her eyes, the interests of the many, the
customs, the deeds, the sufferings of the illiterate and of the
poor, are, to say the least, not less precious and noteworthy than
those of kings and prelates. For the standard of aristocracy
within her borders is not an intellectual or a social, but a
moral standard; and her Founder has put the highest honour not
upon those who rule and are of reputation, but upon those who
serve and are unknown. ‘The history of the Christian Church
does therefore serve to illustrate the point before us ; and it
proves the belief of Christian people in the Godhead of Jesus by
its witness to the early and universal practice of adoring Him.
The early Christian Church did not content herself with
‘admiring’ Jesus Christ. She adored Him. She approached
His Glorious Person with that very tribute of prayer, of self-
prostration, of self-surrender, by which all serious Theists,
whether Christian or non-Christian, are accustomed to express
their felt relationship as creatures to the Almighty Creator.
For as yet it was not supposed that a higher and truer know-
ledge of the Infinite God would lead man to abandon the sense
and the expression of complete dependence upon Him and of
unmeasured indebtedness to Him, which befits a reasonable
creature whom God has made, and whom God owns and can
dispose of, when such a creature is dealing with God. Ag yet
it was not imagined that this bearing would or could be ex-
changed for the more easy demeanour of an equal, or of one
deeming himself scarcely less than an equal, who is intelligently
appreciating the existence of a remarkably wise and powerful
Being, entitled by His activities to a very large share of specu-
lative attention. The Church simply adored God 3 and she
¢ Cf. Lecky, History of Rationalism, i. 309. Contrasting the Christian
belief in a God Who can work miracles with the ‘scientific’ belief in a
god who is the slave of ‘law,’ Mr. Lecky remarks, that the former ‘ pre-
disposes us most to prayer,’ the latter to ‘reverence and admiration,’
Here the antithesis between ‘reverence’ and ‘ prayer’ seems to imply that
the latter word is used in the narrow sense of petition for specific blessings,
instead of in the wider sense which embraces the whole compass of the soul’s
devotional activity, and among other things, adoration. Still, if Mr. Lecky
had meant to include under ‘ reverence’ anything higher than we yield to the
highest forms of human greatness, he would scarcely have coupled it with
‘admiration.’
[ LECT.
f
᾿
: Fase | dmiration’ and ‘ Adoration? 361
wdored Jesus Christ, as believing Him to be God. Nor did she
destroy the significance of this act by conceiving that admi-
ration differs from adoration only in degree; that a sincere
admiration is practically equivalent to adoration ; that adoration
after all is only admiration raised to the height of an en-
thusiasm.
You will not deem it altogether unnecessary, under our
present intellectual circumstances, to consider for a moment
whether this representation of the relationship between admi-
ration and adoration be strictly accurate. So far indeed is
this from being the case, that adoration and admiration are at
one and the same moment and with reference to a single object,
mutually exclusive of each other. Certainly, in the strained
and exaggerated language of poetry or of passion, you may
speak . οὗ ‘adoring that on which you lavish an unlimited ad-
miration, But the common sense and judgment of men refuses
to regard admiration as an embryo form of adoration, or as
other than a fundamentally distinct species of spiritual activity.
Adoration may be an intensified reverence, but it certainly is
not an intensified admiration. The difference between admi-
ration and adoration is observable in the difference of their
respective objects ; and that difference is immeasurable. For,
speaking strictly, we admire the finite; we adore the Infinite.
Why is this? It is because admiration requires a certain as-
sumption of equality with the object admired, an assumption of
ideal, if not of literal equalityd. Admiration such as is here
in question is not a vague unregulated wonder ; it involves a
judgment ; it is a form of criticism. And since it is a criticism,
it consists in our internally referring the object which we ad-
mire to a criterion. That criterion is an ideal of our own,
and the act by which we compare the admired object with the
ideal is our own act. We may have borrowed the ideal from
another ; and we do not for a moment suppose that we our-
selves could give it perfect expression, or even could produce a
rival to the object which commands our critical admiration.
Yet, after all, the ideal is before us ; it is, by right of possession,
our own. We take credit to ourselves for possessing it, and for
comparing the object before us with it; nay, we identify our-
ἃ It is on this account that the apotheosis of men involves the capital sin
of pride in those who decree or sanction not less than in those who accept it.
The worshipper is himself the ‘fountain of honour ;’ and in ‘deifying’ a
fellow-creature, he deifies human nature, and so by implication himself.
Wisd. xiv. 20; Acts xii. 22, 23 ; xiv. 11-15; xxvili. 6; Rom. i. 23.
vil |
462 ‘Admiration’ and ‘ Adoration:
selves more or less with this ideal when we compare it with
the object before us. When you, my brethren, express your
admiration of a good painting, you do not mean to assert that
you yourselves could have painted it. But you do imply that
you have before your mind an ideal of what a good painting
should be, and that you are able to form an opinion as to the
correspondence of a particular work of art with that ideal.
Thus it is that, whether justifiably or not, your admiration of the
painting has the double character of self-appreciation and of
patronage. Indeed it may be questioned whether as art-crities,
intent upon the beauty of your ideal, you are not much more
disposed secretly to claim for yourselves a share of merit than
would have been the case if you had been the artist himself
whose success you consent to admire ; since the artist, we may
be sure, is at least conscious of some measure of failure, and
is humbled, if not depressed, by a sense of the difficulty of trans-
lating his ideal into reality, by the anxieties and struggles which
always accompany the process of production.
Now this element of self-esteem, or at any rate of approving
reflection upon self, which enters so penetratingly into admira-
tion, is utterly incompatible with the existence of genuine
adoration. For adoration is no mere prostration of the body ;
it is a prostration of the soul. It is reverence carried to the
highest point of possible exaggeration. It is mental self-annjhj]-
ation before a Greatness Which utterly transcends all human
and finite standards. In That Presence self knows that it has
neither plea nor right to any consideration ; it is overwhelmed
by the sense of its utter insignificance. The adoring soul bends
thought and heart and will before the footstool of the One Self.
existing, All-creating, All-upholding Being ; the soul wills to
be as nothing before Him, or to exist only that it may recognise
His Glory as altogether surpassing its words and thoughts. If
any one element of adoration be its most prominent character-
istic, it is this heartfelt uncompromising renunciation of the
claims of self.
Certainly admiration may lead up to adoration ; but then
real admiration dies away when its object is seen to be entitled
to something higher than and distinct from it. Admiration
ceases when it has perceived that its Object altogether trans-
cends any standard of excellence or beauty with which man can
compare Him. Admiration may be the ladder by which we
mount to adoration ; but it is useless, or rather it is an im-
pertinence, when adoration has been reached. Every man of
[ LECT.
Lhe Adoration of Fesus coeval with the Church. 363
intelligence and modesty meets in life with many objects which
call for his free and sincere admiration, and he himself gains
both morally and intellectually by answering to such a call. But
while the objects of human admiration are as various as the
minds and tastes of men,
‘Denique non omnes eadem mirantur amantque,’
One Only Being can be rightfully adored. To ‘admire’ God
would involve an irreverence only equal to the impiety of ador-
ing a fellow-creature. It would be as reasonable to pay Divine
worship to our every-day associates, as to substitute for that
incommunicable honour which is due to the Most High some
one of the tranquil and self-satisfied forms of a favourable
notice with which we greet accomplishments or excellence in
our fellow-men. ‘When I saw Hin,’ says St. John, speaking
of Jesus in His glory, ‘I fell at His feet as deade.’ That was
something more than admiration, even the most enthusiastic ;
it was an act, in which self had no part ; it was an act of adoration.
If Jesus Christ had been only a morally perfect Man, He
would have been entitled to the highest human admiration ;
although it may be questioned, as’ we have seen, whether He can
be deemed morally perfect if He is in reality only human. But
the historical fact before us is, that from the earliest age of
Christianity, Jesus Christ has been adored as God. This adora-
tion was not yielded to Him in consequence of the persuasions
of theologians who had pronounced Him to be a Divine Person.
It had nothing in common with the fulsome and servile insin-
cerities which ever and anon rose like incense around the
throne of some pagan Cesar who had received the equivocal
honour of an apotheosis. It was not the product of a spiritual
fascination, too subtle or too strong to be analyzed by those who
felt its power, but easy of explanation to a later age. You can-
not trace the stages of its progressive development. You cannot
name the time at which it was regarded only as a pious custom
or luxury, and then mark this off from a later period when it: had
become, in the judgment of Christians, an imperious Christian
duty. Never was the adoration of Jesus protested against in the
Church as a novelty, derogatory to the honour and claims of God.
Never was there an age when Jesus was only ‘invoked’ as if He
had been an interceding saint, by those who had not yet learned
© Rev. i. 17: ὅτε εἶδον αὐτὸν, ἔπεσα πρὸς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ ws νεκρό.
vir J
364 Worship of Fesus during His Earthly Life.
to prostrate themselves before His throne as the throne of the
Omnipotent and the Eternal. In vain will you endeavour to
establish a parallel between the adoration of Jesus and some
modern ‘ devotion, unknown to the early days of Christendom,
but now popularized largely in portions of the Christian Church ;
since the adoration of Jesus is as ancient as Christianity. Jesus
has been ever adored on the score of His Divine Personality,
of Which this tribute of adoration is not merely a legitimate but
a necessary acknowledgment.
1. During the days of His earthly life our Lord was surrounded
by acts of homage, ranging, as it might seem, so far as the
intentions of those who offered them were concerned, from the
wonted forms of Eastern courtesy up to the most direct and
conscious acts of Divine worship. As an Infant, He was ‘ wor-
shipped’ by the Eastern sagesf; and during His ministry He
constantly received and welcomed acts and words expressive of
an intense devotion to His Sacred Person on the part of those
who sought or who had received from Him some supernatural
aid or blessing. The leper worshipped Him, crying out, ‘Lord,
if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean’. Jairus worshipped
Him, saying, ‘My daughter is even now dead: but come and
Jay Thy hand upon her, and she shall live}. The mother
of Zebedee’s children came near to Him, worshipping Him,
and asking Him to bestow upon her sons the first places of
honour in His kingdomi, The woman of Canaan, whose
daughter was ‘grievously vexed with a devil,’ ‘came and wor-
shipped Him, saying, Lord, help mek,’ The father of the poor
lunatic, who met Jesus as He descended from the Mount of
Transfiguration, ‘came, kneeling down to Him, and saying,
Lord, have merey on my son}.’ These are instances of worship
accompanying prayers for special mercies. And did not the —
dying thief offer at least a true inward worship to Jesus Cru-
cified, along with the words, ‘Lord, remember me when Thou —
comest into Thy kingdom ™?’
f St. Matt. ii, 11: πεσόντες προσεκύνησαν αὐτῷ.
& Ibid. viii. 2: Κύριε, ἐὰν θέλῃς, δύνασαί με καθαρίσαι.
h [bid. ix. 18: προσεκύνει αὐτῷ, λέγων, “Ὅτι ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύ-
τῆσεν" ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ᾽ αὐτὴν, καὶ ζήσεται.
' Ibid. xx. 20: προσῆλθεν αὐτῷ ἢ μήτηρ τῶν υἱῶν Ζεβεδαίου μετὰ τῶν υἱῶν
αὐτῆς, προσκυνοῦσα καὶ αἰτοῦσά τι παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ.
* Ibid. xv. 25: ἧ δὲ ἐλθοῦσα προσεκύνει αὐτῷ, λέγουσα, “Κύριε βοήθει por.’
1 Ibid. xvii. 14, 15: προσῆλθεν αὐτῷ ἄνθρωπος γονυπετῶν αὐτῷ, καὶ λέγων,
aes
“Κύριε, ἐλέησόν μου τὸν υἱόν."
m St. Luke xxiii. 42: ἔλεγε τῷ Ἰησοῦ, “Μνήσθητί μου, Κύριε, ὅταν ἔλθῃς ev |
τῇ βασιλείᾳ σου.
[ LECT. ,
Worship of Fesus during His Earthly Life. 365
At other times such visible worship of our Saviour was an
act of acknowledgment or of thanksgiving for mercies received.
Thus it was with the grateful Samaritan leper, who, ‘when he
saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice
glorified God, and fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him
thanks, Thus it was when Jesus had appeared walking on
the sea and had quieted the storm, and ‘they that were in the
ship came and worshipped Him, saying, Of a truth Thou art
the Son of God.’ Thus too was it after the miraculous
draught of fishes, that St. Peter, astonished at the greatness of
the miracle, ‘fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, Depart from me;
for I am a sinful man, O Lord®.’ Thus the penitent, ‘when
she knew that Jesus sat at neat in the Pharisee’s house, brought
an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at His feet behind
Him weeping, and began to wash His feet with tears, and did
wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His feet, and
anointed them with the ointment?’ Thus again when the man
born blind confesses his faith in ‘the Son of God,’ he accompa-
nies it by an undoubted act of adoration. ‘And he said, Lord,
I believe. And He worshipped Him4.’ Thus the holy women,
when the Risen ‘Jesus met them, saying, “All hail,” came...
and held Him by the feet, and worshipped Him’ Thus
apparently Mary of Magdala, in her deep devotion, had motioned
to embrace His feet in the garden, when Jesus bade her ‘Touch
Me nots,” Thus the eleven disciples met our Lord by appoint-
ment on a mountain in Galilee, and ‘when they saw Him,’ as it
St. Luke xvii.15, 16: εἷς δὲ ἐξ αὐτῶν, ἰδὼν ὅτι ἰάθη, ὑπέστρεψε, μετὰ
φωνῆς μεγάλης δοξάζων τὸν Θεόν" καὶ ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον παρὰ τοὺς πόδας
αὐτοῦ, εὐχαριστῶν αὖτ
: ’ @.
ο St. Matt. xiv. 32, 33: ἐκόπασεν ὃ ἄνεμος" of δὲ ἐν TH πλοίῳ ἐλθόντες
προσεκύνησαν αὐτῷ, λέγοντες, “᾿Αληθῶς Θεοῦ Ὑἱὸς ci.’ St. Luke ν. 8: ἰδὼν δὲ
Σίμων Πέτρος προσέπεσε τοῖς γόνασι τοῦ ᾿Ιησοῦ, λέγων, "Ἔξελθε ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ, ὅτι
ἀνὴρ ἁμαρτωλός εἰμι, Κύριε.;
Ρ St. Luke vii. 37, 28 : κομίσασα ἀλάβαστρον μύρου, καὶ στᾶσα παρὰ τοὺς
πόδας αὐτοῦ ὀπίσω κλαίουσα, ἤρξατο βρέχειν τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ τοῖς δάκρυσι, καὶ
ταῖς θριξὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτῆς ἐξέμασσε, καὶ κατεφίλει τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ, καὶ
ἤλειφε τῷ μύρῳ. These actions were expressive of a passionate devotion ;
they had no object beyond expressing it.
a St. John ix. 35-38: ἤκουσεν 6 ᾿Ιησοῦς ὅτι ἐξέβαλον αὐτὸν ἔξω" καὶ εὑρὼν
> nan “ Μ᾿, 4.5 / “
‘auToy, εἶπεν αὐτῷ, “Σὺ πιστεύεις εἰς τὸν Ὑἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ ;’ ᾿Απεκρίθη ἐκεῖνος καὶ
εἶπε, ‘Tis ἐστι, Κύριε, ἵνα πιστεύσω εἰς αὐτόν :᾿ Εἶπε δὲ αὐτῷ ὁ ᾿Ιησοῦς, ‘Kad
ἑώρακας αὐτὸν, καὶ ὁ λαλῶν μετὰ σοῦ, ἐκεῖνός ἐστιν’ ῳὋὉ δὲ ἔφη, “ Πιστεύω,
Κύριε" καὶ προσεκύνησεν αὐτῷ.
τ St. Matt. xxviii. 9: ὅ Ἰησοῦς ἀπήντησεν αὐταῖς, λέγων, “Χαίρετε.᾽ Αἱ δὲ
προσελθοῦσαι ἐκράτησαν αὐτοῦ τοὺς πόδας, καὶ προσεκύνησαν αὐτῷ.
5. St. John xx. 17.
vir |
366 Gradations in the worship offered to Fesus.
would seem, in their joy and fear, ‘they worshipped Him δ, 4
Thus, pre-eminently, St. Thomas uses the language of adoration,
been bidden to probe the Wounds of Jesus, he burst forth inté
the adoring confession, ‘My Lord and my God¥ Thus, when
the Ascending Jesus was being borne upwards into heaven, the 4
disciples, as if thanking Him for His great glory, worshipped
Him ; and then ‘returned to Jerusalem with great joy x.’ ,
It may be that in some of these instances the ‘worship’ paid —
to Jesus did not express more than a profound reverence,
Sometimes He was worshipped as a Superhuman Person, wield- |
ing superhuman powers; sometimes He was worshipped by —
those who instinctively felt His moral majesty, which forced. |
them, they knew not how, upon their knees. But if He had |
been only a ‘good man,’ He must have checked such worship ¥,
He had Himself re-affirmed the foundation-law of the religion
of Israel: ‘Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him
* St. Matt. xxviii. 17: καὶ ἰδόντες αὐτὸν, προσεκύνησαν αὐτῷ" of δὲ ἐδίστα-
σαν. If some doubted, the worship offered by the rest may be presumed to
have been a very deliberate act.
« St. John xx. 28: καὶ ἀπεκρίθη ὃ Θωμᾶς, καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ, “Ὃ Κύριός μου
καὶ ὁ Θεός μου’ Against the attempt of Theodore of Mopsuestia and others
to resolve this into an ejaculation addressed to the Father, see Alford in loc.;
Pye Smith on Messiah, ii. 53. The αὐτῷ is of itself decisive.
* St. Luke xxiv. 51, 52: καὶ ἀνεφέρετο εἰς τὸν οὐρανόν. καὶ αὐτοὶ προσ-
κυνήσαντες αὐτὸν, ὑπέστρεψαν εἰς Ἱερουσαλὴμ μετὰ χαρᾶς μεγάλης.
¥ This consideration is remarkably overlooked by Channing, who might
have been expected to feel its force. Channing is ‘sure’ that ‘the worship
paid to Christ during His public ministry was rendered to Him only as a
Divine Messenger.’ But prophets and Apostles were messengers from God.
Why were they not worshipped ? Channing insists further that such titles
as ‘Son of David,’ shew that those who used them had no thought of Christ’s
being ‘the Self-existent Infinite Divinity” It may be true that the full
truth of His Divine Nature was not known to these first worshippers ; but
it does not hold good that a particular title employed in prayer exhausts the
idea which the petitioner has formed of the Person whom he addresses.
Above all Channing urges the indifference of the Jews ‘to the frequent
prostrations of men before Jesus.’ He thinks this indifference unintelligible
on the supposition of their believing such prostrations to involve the payment
of divine honours. That many of these prostrations were not designed to
involve anything so definite is freely conceded. That the Jews suspected
the intention to honour Christ’s Divinity in none of them would not prove
that none of them were designed to honour It. The Jews were not present
at the confession of St. Thomas after the Resurrection ; but there is no
reasonable room for questioning either the devotional purpose or the theo-
logical force of the Apostle’s exclamation, ‘My Lord and my God.’ But
see Channing Works, ii. 104.
[LEct. §
Adoration of $ esus Glorified. 367
only shalt thou serve,’ Yet he never hints that danger lurked
in this prostration of hearts and wills before Himself; He wel-
comes, by a tacit approval, this profound homage of which He
is the Object. His rebuke to the rich young man implies, not
that He himself had no real claim to be called ‘Good Master,’
but that such a title, in the mouth of the person before Him,
was an unmeaning compliment. He seems to invite prayer
to Himself, even for the highest spiritual blessings, in such
words as those which He addressed to the woman of Samaria:
‘If thou knewest the gift of God, and Who it is that saith unto
thee, Give me to drink ; thou wouldest have asked of Him, and
He would have given thee living water®’ He predicts indeed
a time when the spiritual curiosity of His disciples would be
satisfied in the joy of perfectly possessing Him; but He nowhere
hints that He would Himself cease to receive their prayers Ὁ,
He claims all the varied homage which the sons of men, in
their want and fulness, in their joy and sorrow, may rightfully
and profitably pay to the Eternal Father; all men are to
‘honour the Son even as they honour the Father.’
2. Certain it is that no sooner had Christ been lifted up from
the earth, in death and in glory, than He forthwith began
to draw all men unto Hime. This attraction expressed itself,
not merely in an assent to His teaching, but in the worship
of His Person. No sooner had He ascended to His throne than
there burst upwards from the heart of His Church a tide
of adoration which has only become wider and deeper with
the lapse of time. In the first days of the Church, Christians
were known as ‘those who called upon the Name of Jesus
Christ4” Prayer to Jesus Christ, so far from being a devotional
z St. Matt. iv. 10.
8. St.John iv. 10: εἰ ἤδεις τὴν δωρεὰν τοῦ Θεοῦ, καὶ τίς ἐστιν ὃ λέγων σοι,
“Δός μοι πιεῖν, σὺ ἂν ἤτησας αὐτὸν, καὶ ἔδωκεν ἄν σοι ὕδωρ ζῶν.
> Ibid. xvi. 22: πάλιν δὲ ὄψομαι ὑμᾶς, καὶ χαρήσεται ὑμῶν ἣ καρδία, καὶ τὴν
χαρὰν ὑμῶν οὐδεὶς αἴρει ἀφ᾽ ὑμῶν" καὶ ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐμὲ οὐκ ἐρωτήσετε
οὐδέν. Here ἐρωτήσετε clearly means “ question.’
¢ Ibid. xii. 32.
ἃ Thus Ananias pleads to our Lord that Saul ‘hath authority from the
chief priests to bind πάντας τοὺς ἐπικαλουμένους τὸ ὄνομά cov.’ (Acts ix. 14.)
On St. Paul’s first preaching in Jerusalem, ‘All that heard him were amazed,
and said, Is not this he that destroyed in Jerusalem τοὺς ἐπικαλουμένους
τὸ ὄνομα Tovro;’ (Ibid. ver. 21.) Thus the title was applied to Christians
both by themselves and by Jews outside the Church. In after years St. Paul
inserts it at the beginning of his first Epistle to the Corinthians, which
is addressed to the Church of God at Corinth σὺν πᾶσ! τοῖς ἐπικαλουμένοις τὸ
ὄνομα τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. (1 Cor. i. 2.) The expression is
vil }
368 Larly apostole prayers to Fesus Glorified.
eccentricity, was the universal practice of Christians; it was
the act of devotion which specially characterized a Christian.
It would seem more than probable that the prayer offered
by the assembled apostles at the election of St. Matthias,
was addressed to Jesus glorified®. A few months later the
dying martyr St. Stephen passed to his crown. His last cry
was a prayer to our Lord, moulded upon two of the seven
sayings which our Lord Himself had uttered on the Cross.
Jesus had prayed the Father to forgive His executioners. Jesus
had commended His Spirit into the Father’s Handsf. The
words which are addressed by Jesus to the Father, are by
St. Stephen addressed to Jesus. To Jesus Stephen turns in
that moment of supreme agony; to Jesus he prays for pardon
on his murderers; to Jesus, as to the King of the world of
illustrated by the dying prayer of St. Stephen, whom his murderers stoned
ἐπικαλούμενον καὶ λέγοντα, “ Κύριε Ἰησοῦ, δέξαι τὸ πνεῦμά mov.’ (Acts vii. 59.)
It cannot be doubted that in Acts xxii. 16, 2 Tim. ii. 22, the Κύριος Who
is addressed is our Lord Jesus Christ. ᾿Επικαλεῖσθαι is not followed by
an accusative except in the sense of appealing to God or man. Its meaning
is clear when it is used of prayer to the Eternal Father, 1 St. Pet. i. 17;
Acts ii. 21 (but cf. Rom. x. 13); or of appeal to Him, 2 Cor. i. 23; or of
appeal to a human judge, Acts xxv. II, 12, 21, 25; xxvi. 32; xxviii. Ig.
Its. passive use occurs in texts of a different construetion: Acts iv. 36;
x. 18; xii. 12; xv. 173 Heb. xi. 16; St. James ii. ἢ.
9. Acts i. 24: καὶ προσευξάμενοι εἶπον, “Σὺ Κύριε καρδιογνῶστα πάντων,
ἀνάδειξον ἐκ τούτων τῶν δύο ἕνα ὃν ἐξελέξω᾽ κιτ.λ. The selection of the twelve
apostles is always ascribed to Jesus Christ. Acts i. 2: ods ἐξελέξατο.
St. Luke vi. 13: προσεφώνησε τοὺς μαθητὰς αὐτοῦ" καὶ ἐκλεξάμενος am αὐτῶν
δώδεκα, ods καὶ ἀποστόλους ὠνόμασε. St. John vi. 70: οὐκ ἐγὼ ὑμᾶς τοὺς
δώδεκα ἐξελεξάμην ; Ibid. ΧΙ. 18: ἐγὼ oida ods ἐξελεξάμην. Ibid. xv. 16:
οὐχ ὑμεῖς με ἐξελέξασθε, GAN ἐγὼ ἐξελεξάμην ὑμᾶς. Ibid. ver. 19: ἐγὼ
ἐξελεξάμεν ὑμᾶς ex τοῦ κόσμου. Meyer quotes Acts xv. 7: ὃ Θεὸς ἐξελέξατο
διὰ τοῦ στόματός μου ἀκοῦσαι τὰ ἔθνη τὸν λόγον τοῦ εὐαγγελίου, in order to
shew that the Eternal Father must have been addressed. But this assumes
that Θεός can have no reference to our Lord. Moreover St. Peter is clearly
referring, not to his original call to the apostolate, but to his being directed
to evangelize the Gentiles. St. Paul was indeed accustomed to trace up his
apostleship to the Eternal Father as the ultimate Source of all authority
(Gal. i. 15; 2 Cor. 1. 1; Eph. 1.1; 2 Tim. i. 1); but this is not inconsistent
with the fact that Jesus Christ chose and sent each and all of the apostles.
The epithet καρδιογνώστης, and still more the word Κύριος, are equally
applicable to the Father and to Jesus Christ. For the former, see St. John
i. 50, li. 25, vi. 64, xxi. 17. It was natural that the apostles should thus
apply to Jesus Christ to fill up the vacant chair, unless they had believed
Him to be out of the reach of prayer or incapable of helping them, See
Alford and Olshausen in loc.; Baumgarten’s Apost. History in loc.
f Acts vii. 59, 60: ἐλιθοβόλουν τὸν Στέφανον, ἐπικαλούμενον καὶ λέγοντα,
“Κύριε Ἰησοῦ, δέξαι τὸ πνεῦμά μου. Θεὶς δὲ τὰ γόνατα, ἔκραξε φωνῇ μεγάλῃ,
“ Κύριε, μὴ στήσῃς αὐτοῖς τὴν ἁμαρτίαν ταύτην.
[ LECT.
The dying prayer of St. Stephen. 369
spirits, he commends his parting soul. It is suggested that
St. Stephen’s words were ‘only an ejaculation forced from him
in the extremity of his anguish, and that as such they are
‘highly unfitted to be made the premiss of a theological in-
ference?’ But the question is, whether the earliest apostolical
Church did or did not pray to Jesus Christ. And St. Stephen’s
dying prayer is strictly to the point. An ‘ejaculation’ may
shew more clearly than any set formal prayer the ordinary
currents of devotional thought and feeling; an ejaculation is
more instinctive, more spontaneous, and therefore a truer index
of a man’s real mind, than a prayer which has been used for years.
And how could the martyr’s cry to Jesus have been the product
of a ‘thoughtless impulse?’ Dying men do not cling to devotional
fancies or to precarious opinions; the soul in its last agony
instinctively falls back upon its deepest certainties. Nor can
the unpremeditated ejaculation of a person dying in shame and
torture be credited with that element of dramatic artifice which
may in rare cases have coloured parting words and actions
when, alas! on the brink of eternity, men have thought more
of a ‘place in history’ than of the awful Presence into which
they were hastening. Is it hinted that St. Stephen was a
recent convert, not yet entirely instructed. in the complete faith
and mind of the apostles, and not unlikely to exaggerate par-
ticular features of their teaching? But St. Stephen is expressly
described as a man ‘full of faith and of the Holy Ghosts.’
As such he had recently been chosen to fill an important office
in the Church ; and as a prominent missionary and apologist
of the Gospel he might seem almost to have taken rank with the
apostles themselves. Is it urged that St. Stephen’s prayer was
offered under the exceptional circumstances of a vision of Christ
vouchsafed in mercy to His dying’ servanth? But it does not
enter into the definition of prayer or worship that it must
of necessity be addressed to an invisible Person. And the vision
of Jesus standing at the right hand of God may have differed
in the degree of sensible clearness, but in its general nature it
did not differ, from that sight upon which the eye of every dying
Christian has rested from the beginning. St. Stephen. would
not have prayed to Jesus Christ then, if he had never prayed
to Him before; the vision of Jesus would not have tempted
him to innovate upon the devotional law of his life ; the sight of
8. Acts vi. 5: ἄνδρα πλήρη πίστεως καὶ Πνεύματος ‘Aylov.
h So apparently Meyer in loc. : ‘ Das Stephanus Jesum anrief, war hichst
natiirlich, da er eben Jesum fiir ihn bereit stehend gesehen hatte.’
Vil | Bb
370 Prayer of Ananias to Fesus Christ.
Jesus would have only carried him in thought upwards to the
Father, if the Father alone had been the Object of the Church’s
earliest adoration. St. Stephen would never have prayed to
Jesus, if he had been taught that such prayer was hostile to
the supreme prerogatives of God; and the apostles, as mono-
theists, must have taught him thus, unless they: had believed
that Jesus is God, who with the Father is worshipped and
glorified.
Indeed St. Stephen’s prayer may be illustrated, so far as this
point is concerned, by that of Ananias at Damascus. To Ananias
Jesus appeared in a vision, and desired him to go to the newly-
converted Saul of Tarsus ‘in the street that is called Straight.’
The reply of Ananias is an instance of that species of prayer in
which the soul trustfully converses with God even to the verge
of argument and remonstrance, while yet it is controlled by the
deepest sense of God’s awful greatness: ‘Lord, I have heard by
many of this man, how much evil he hath done to Thy saints at
Jerusalem: and here he hath authority from the chief priests
to bind all that call on Thy Namei”’ Our Lord overrules the
objections of His servant. But what man has not at times
prayed for exemption, when God has made it plain that He wills
him to undertake some difficult duty, or to embrace some sharp
and heavy cross? Who has not pleaded with God the claims
of His interests and His honour against what appears to be
His Will, so long as it has been possible to doubt whether
His Will is really what it seems to be? Ananias’ ‘remonstrance’
is a prayer; it is a spiritual colloquy ; it is a form of prayer
which imphes daily, hourly familiarity with its Object; it
is the language of a soul habituated to constant communion
with Jesus. It shews very remarkably how completely Jesus
occupies the whole field of vision in the soul of His servant.
The ‘saints’ whom Saul of Tarsus has persecuted at Jerusalem,
are the ‘saints,’ it is not said of God, but of Jesus; the Name
which is called upon by those whom Saul has authority to
bind at Damascus, is the Name of Jesus. Ananias does not
glance at One higher than Jesus, as if Jesus were lower than
God; Jesus is to Ananias his God, the Recipient of his worship,
and yet the Friend before Whom he can plead the , secret
thoughts of his heart with earnestness and freedom.
i Acts ix. 13, 14: Κύριε, ἀκήκοα ἀπὸ πολλῶν περὶ Tod ἀνδρὸς τούτου, ὅσα
κακὰ ἐποίησε τοῖς ἁγίοις σου ἐν Ἱερουσαλήμ᾽ καὶ ὧδε ἔχει ἐξουσίαν παρὰ τῶν
ἀρχιερέων, δῆσαι πάντας τοὺς ἐπικαλουμένους τὸ ὄνομά σου.
[ LECT.
St. Paul’s first prayers to Fesus. 371
But he to whom, at the crisis of a far greater destiny, Ana-
nias brought consolation and relief from Jesus, was himself
conspicuous for his devotion to the adorable Person of our Lord.
At the very moment of his conversion, Saul of Tarsus sur-
rendered himself by a prayer to Christ, as to the lawful Lord
of his being. ‘Lord,’ he cried, ‘what wilt Thou have me to
dok?’ And when afterwards in the temple our Lord bade
St. Paul, ‘Make haste and get thee quickly out of J erusalem,’ we
find the Apostle, like Ananias, unfolding to Jesus his secret
thoughts, his fears, his regrets, his confessions ; laying them
out before Him, and waiting for an answer from Jesus in the
secret chambers of his soul! Indeed St. Paul constantly uses
language which shews that he habitually thought of Jesus as of
Divine Providence in a Human Form, watching over, befriending,
consoling, guiding, providing for him and his, with Infinite fore-
sight and power, but also with the tenderness of a human sym-
pathy. In this sense Jesus is placed on a level with the Father
in St. Paul’s two earliest Epistles. ‘Now God Himself and our
Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, direct our way unto you ™ ;’
‘Now our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and God, even our Father,
Which hath loved us, and hath given us everlasting consolation
and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts, and stablish you
in every good word and work 4.’ Thus Jesus is associated with
the Father, in one instance as directing the outward movements
of the Apostle’s life, in another as building up the inward life
of the recent converts to Christianity. In other devotional ex-
pressions the Name of Jesus stands alone. ‘I trust in the Lord
Jesus,’ so the Apostle writes to the Philippians, ‘to send Timo-
theus shortly unto you®.’ ‘I thank Christ Jesus our Lord,’ so
he assures St. Timothy, ‘Who hath given me power, for that He
k Acts ix. 6: τρέμων τε καὶ θαμβῶν εἶπε, “ Κύριε, τί με θέλεις ποιῆσαι οἷν
1 Tbid. xxii. 19, 20: Κύριε, αὐτοὶ ἐπίστανται, ὅτι ἐγὼ ἤμην φυλακίζων καὶ
δέρων κατὰ τὰς συναγωγὰς τοὺς πιστεύοντας ἐπὶ o€ καὶ ὅτε ἐξεχεῖτο τὸ αἷμα
Στεφάνου τοῦ μάρτυρός σου, καὶ αὐτὸς ἤμην ἐφεστὼς καὶ συνευδοκῶν τῇ ἄναι-
ρέσει αὐτοῦ, καὶ φυλάσσων τὰ ἱμάτια τῶν ἀναιρούντων αὐτόν.
m™ I Thess. iii, 11: Αὐτὸς δὲ 6 Θεὸς καὶ Πατὴρ ἡμῶν, καὶ 6 Κύριος ἡμῶν
᾿Ιησοῦς Χριστὸς, κατευθύναι τὴν ὁδὸν ἡμῶν mpds ὑμᾶς.
n 2 Thess. ii. 16,17: αὐτὸς δὲ 6 Κύριος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς, καὶ ὃ Θεὸς
καὶ Πατὴρ ἡμῶν, ὃ ἀγαπήσας ἡμᾶς καὶ δοὺς παράκλησιν αἰωνίαν καὶ ἐλπίδα
ἀγαθὴν ἐν χάριτι, παρακαλέσαι ὑμῶν τὰς καρδίας, καὶ στηρίξαι ὑμᾶς ἐν παντὶ
λόγῳ καὶ ἔργῳ ἀγαθῷ.
9 Phil. ii. 19: ἐλπίζω δὲ ἐν Κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ, Τιμόθεον ταχέως πέμψαι. ‘This
hope was ἐν Κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ: it rested and centred in Him; it arose from no
extraneous feelings or expectations, and so would doubtless be fulfilled.’
Bp. Ellicott in loc.
vit ] Bb2
372 Prayer to Fesus Christ, how recognised
counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry?.’ Is not
this the natural language of a soul which is constantly engaged
in communion with Jesus, whether it be the communion of
praise or the communion of prayer? Jesus is to St. Paul, not
a deceased teacher or philanthropist, who has simply done his
great work and then has left it as a legacy to the world; He is
God, ever living and ever present, the Giver of temporal and of
spiritual blessings, the Guide and Friend of man both in man’s
outward and in his inward life. If we had no explicit records of
prayers offered by St. Paul to Jesus, we might be sure that such
prayers were offered, since otherwise the language which he
employs could not have been used. But, in point of fact, the
Apostle has not left us in doubt as to his faith or his practice
in this respect. ‘If, he asserts, ‘thou shalt confess with
thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart
that Ged hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.
For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness ; and with
the mouth confession is made to salvation. For the Scripture
saith, Whosoever believeth on Him shall not be ashamed. For
there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the
Same is Lord over all, rich unto all that call upon Him. For
whosoever shall call upon the Name of the Lord shall be
saved 4.’ The prophet Joel had used these last words of prayer
to the Lord Jehovah. St. Paul, as the whole context shews
beyond reasonable doubt, understands them of prayer to Jesus".
And what are the Apostle’s benedictions in the Name of Christ
but indirect prayers offered to Christ that His blessing might be
vouchsafed to the Churches which the Apostle is addressing ?
‘Grace be to you from God our Father, and from the Lord
PI Tim. i. 12: καὶ χάριν ἔχω τῷ ἐνδυναμώσαντί με Χριστῷ ᾿Ιησοῦ τῷ
Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν, ὅτι πιστόν με ἡγήσατο, θέμενοξ εἰς διακονίαν.
a Rom. x. 9-13: ἐὰν ὁμολογήσῃς ἐν τῷ στόματί σου Κύριον ᾿Ιησοῦν, καὶ
πιστεύσῃς ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ σου ὅτι ὃ Θεὸς αὐτὸν ἤγειρεν ἐκ νεκρῶν, σωθήσῃ" καρδίᾳ
γὰρ πιστεύεται εἰς δικαιοσύνην, στόματι δὲ ὁμολογεῖται εἰς σωτηρίαν. Λέγει
γὰρ ἣ γραφὴ, " Πᾶς 6 πιστεύων ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ οὐ καταισχυνθήσεται. Οὐ γάρ ἐστι
διαστολὴ ᾿Ιουδαίου τε καὶ “Ἑλληνος᾽ 6 γὰρ αὐτὸς Κύριος πάντων, πλουτῶν εἰς
πάντας τοὺς ἐπικαλουμένους αὐτόν. “Πᾶς γὰρ ὃς ἂν ἐπικαλέσηται τὸ ὄνομα
Κυρίου, σωθήσεται. Cf. Isa. xxviii. 16; Joel ii. 22. Here St. Paul applies
to Jesus the language which prophets had used of the Lord Jehovah.
Cf. Acts ii. 21.
τ Cf. Meyer in Rom. x. 12: 6 yap αὐτὸς Κύριος πάντων. ‘Dieser Κύριος
ist Christus, der αὐτός ver. ΤΙ und der mit diesem αὐτός nothwendig iden-
tische Κύριος ver. 13. Wiire Gott (i.e. the Father) gemeint, so miisste man
grade den christlichen Charakter der Beweisfiihrung erst hinzutragen (wie
Olsh.: ‘Gott in Christo’), was aber willkiirlich wire. For Κύριος πάντων,
see Phil. ii. 11, Cf. St. Chrys. in loc,
[ LECT.
an St. Paul’s Epistles. 373
Jesus Christ’. ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be
with you allt.” Or what shall we say of St. Paul’s entreaties
that he might be freed from the mysterious and humiliating
infirmity which he terms his ‘thorn in the flesh?’ He tells
us that three times he besought the Lord Jesus Christ that
it might depart from him, and that in mercy his prayer was
refused ἃ; Are we to imagine that that prayer to Jesus was
an isolated act in St. Paul’s spiritual life? Does any such
religious act stand alone in the spiritual history of an ear-
nest and moderately consistent man? Apostles believed that
when the First-begotten was brought into the inhabited world,
the angels of heaven were bidden to worship Him*®. They
8 x Cor. i. 3.
t Rom. xvi. 24; and almost in the same words, ver. 20.
ἃ 2 Cor. xii. 8,9: ὑπὲρ τούτου τρὶς τὸν Κύριον παρεκάλεσα, ἵνα ἀποστῇ am
ἐμοῦ" καὶ εἴρηκέ pot, “᾿Αρκεῖ σοι ἢ χάρις μου ἣ γὰρ δύναμίς μου ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ
τελειοῦται. ἥδιστα οὖν μᾶλλον καυχήσομαι ἐν ταῖς ἀσθενείαις μου, ἵνα ἐπι-
σκηνώσηῃ ἐπ᾽ ἐμὲ ἡ δύναμις τοῦ Χριστοῦ. Meyer in loc.: “ τὸν Κύριον, nicht
Gott (the Father), sondern Christum (5. v. 9, 7 δύναμις τοῦ Χριστοῦ), der
ja der michtige Bezwinger des Satan’s ist..... Wie Paulus die Antwort,
den χρηματισμός (Matt. ii. 12; Luk. ii, 6; Act. x. 22) von Christo emp-
fangen habe, ist uns vollig unbekannt.’
x Heb. i. 6: ὅταν δὲ πάλιν εἰσαγάγῃ τὸν πρωτότοκον εἰς τὴν οἰκουμένην,
λέγει, ‘Kal προσκυνησάτωσαν αὐτῷ πάντες ἄγγελοι Θεοῦ. On this passage
see the exhaustive note of Delitzsch, Comm. zum. Br. an die Hebraer, pp.
24-29. ‘Die LXX. iibers. hier ganz richtig προσκυνήσατε, denn ONL ist
ja kein praet. consec., und Augustin macht die den rechten Sinn treffende
schéne Bemerkung: “adorate Eum;” cessat igitur adoratio angelorum, qui
non adorantur, sed adorant; mali angeli volunt adorari, boni adorant nec se
adorari permittunt, ut vel saltem eorum exemplo idolatriz cessent.’ Hs fragt
sich nun aber: mit welchem Rechte oder auch nur auf welchem Grunde
bezieht der Verf. eine Stelle, die von Jehova handelt, auf Christum ?’ After
discussing some unsatisfactory replies, he proceeds: ‘Der Grundsatz, von
welchem der Verf. ausgeht, ist... . dieser: Ueberall wo im A. T. von einer
endzeitigen letztentscheidenden Zukunft (Parusie), Erscheinung und Erweis-
ung Jehova’s in seiner zugleich richterlichen und heilwirtigen Macht und
Herrlichkeit die Rede ist, von einer gegenbildlich zur mosaischen Zeit sich
verhaltenden Offenbarung Jehova’s, von einer Selbstdarstellung Jehova’s als
Koénigs seines Reiches: da ist Jehova=Jesus Christus; denn dieser ist
Jehova, geoffenbaret im Fleisch; Jehova, eingetreten in die Menscheit und
ihre Geschichte; Jehova, aufgegangen als Sonne des Heils tiber seinem
Volke. Dieser Grundsatz ist auch unumstisslich wahr; auf ihm ruht der
heilsgeschichtliche Zusammenhang, die tiefinnerste Einheit beider Testa-
mente. Alle neutest. Schriftsteller sind dieses Bewusstseins voll, welches
sich gleich auf der Schwelle der evangelischen Geschichte ausspricht ; denn
dem ἵΠ oY soll Elia vorausgehn Mal. iii. 23 f. und πρὸ προσώπου Κυρίου
Johannes Le. i. 76, vgl. 17. Darum sind auch alle Psalmen in welchen die
Verwirklichung des weltiiberwindenden Konigthums Jehova’s besungen wird,
messianisch und werden von unserem Verf. als solche betrachtet, denn die
Vil |
374 St. Fohn on prayer to the Son of Goo.
declared Him y, when His day of humiliation and suffering had
ended, to have been so highly exalted that the Name which He
had borne on earth, and which is the symbol of His Humanity,
was now the very atmosphere and nutriment of all the upward
torrents of prayer which rise from the moral world beneath His
throne ; that as the God-Man He was worshipped by angels, by
men, and by the spirits of the dead. The practice of the Apostles
did but illustrate their faith ; and the prayers offered to Jesus
by His servants on earth were believed to be but a reflection of
that worship which is offered to Him by the Church of heaven.
If this belief is less clearly traceable in the brief Epistles of
St. Peter 2, it is especially observable in St. John. St. John is
speaking of the Son of God, when he exclaims, ‘This is the con-
fidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask anything according
to His Will, He heareth us: and if we know that He hear us,
....We know that we have the petitions that we desired of
Him*, These petitions of the earthly Church correspond to the
adoration above, where the wounded Humanity of our Lord is
throned in the highest heavens. ‘I beheld, and lo, in the midst
of the throne.... stood a Lamb as It had been slain>.’ Around
schliessliche Glorie der Theokratie ist nach heilsgeschichtlichem Plane keine
andere als die der Christokratie, das Reich Jehova’s und das Reich Christi
ist Hines.’ ;
¥ Phil. ii. 9, 10: 6 Θεὸς αὐτὸν ὕπερύψωσε, καὶ ἐχαρίσατο αὐτῷ ὄνομα τὸ
ὑπὲρ πᾶν ὄνομα" ἵνα ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ πᾶν γόνυ κάμψῃ ἐπουρανίων καὶ
ἐπιγείων καὶ καταχθονίων" καὶ πᾶσα γλῶσσα ἐξομολογήσηται ὅτι Κύριος Ἰησοῦς
Χριστὸς εἰς δόξαν Θεοῦ Πατρός. See Alford in loc.: ‘The general aim of
the passage is... .the exaltation of Jesus. The εἰς δόξαν Θεοῦ Πατρός
below is no deduction from this, but rather an additional reason why we
should carry on the exaltation of Jesus until this new particular is in-
troduced. 'This would lead us to infer that the universal prayer is to be
to Jesus. And this view is confirmed by the next clause, where every tongue
is to confess that Jesus Christ is Κύριος, when we remember the common
expression, ἐπικαλεῖσθαι τὸ ὄνομα Κυρίου, for prayer. Rom. x. 12; 1 Cor.
1: 5; 2/Timeii, 22.
z Yet 1 St. Pet. iv. 11 is a doxology ‘ framed, as it might seem, for com-
mon use on earth and in heaven.’ See also 2 St. Pet. iii. 18.
δια St. John v. 13-15: ἵνα πιστεύητε eis τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Tiod τοῦ Θεοῦ. Καὶ
αὕτη ἐστὶν ἣ παῤῥησία ἣν ἔχομεν πρὸς αὐτὸν, ὅτι ἐάν τι αἰτώμεθα κατὰ τὸ
θέλημα αὐτοῦ, ἀκούει ἡμῶν" καὶ ἐὰν οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἀκούει ἡμῶν, ὃ ἂν αἰτώμεθα,
οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἔχομεν τὰ αἰτήματα ἃ ἠτήκαμεν παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ. The natural con-
struction of this passage seems to oblige us to refer αὐτοῦ and τὸ θέλημα to
the Son of God (ver. 13). The passage 1 St. John iii. 21, 22 does not forbid
this; it only shews how fully, in St. John’s mind, the honour and prerogatives
of the Son are those of the Father.
» Rev. v. 6: καὶ εἶδον, καὶ ἰδοὺ ἐν μέσῳ Tod θρόνου καὶ τῶν τεσσάρων ζώων
καὶ ἐν μέσῳ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων, ἀρνίον ἑστηκὸς ὧς ἐσφαγμένον.
[ LECT.
The Adoration of the Lamb. 375
Him are three concentric circles of adoration. The inmost pro-
ceeds from the four mysterious creatures and the four and twenty
elders who ‘have harps, and golden vials full of odours, which
are the prayers of the saints¢.’ These are the courtiers who are
placed on the very steps of the throne; they represent more
distant worshippers. But they too fall down before the throne,
and sing the new song which is addressed to the Lamb slain and
glorified 4: ‘Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by
Thy Blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and
nation ; and hast made us unto our God kings and priests, and
we shall reign on the earthe.” Around these, at a greater
distance from the Most Holy, there is a countless company of
worshippers: ‘I heard the voice of many angels round about the
throne and the creatures and the elders: and the number of
them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of
thousands ; saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb That
was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength,
and honour, and glory, and blessing.’ Beyond these again, the
entranced Apostle discerns a third sphere in which a perpetual
worship is maintained. Lying outside the two inner circles of
conscious adoration offered by the heavenly intelligences, there
is in St. John’s vision an assemblage of all created life, which,
whether it wills or not, lives for Christ’s as for the Father’s
glory: ‘And every creature which is in heaven, and on the
earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all
that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and
glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne,
and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.’ This is the hymn of
the whole visible creation, and to it a response comes from
the inmost circle of adoring beings, ratifying and harmonizing
this sublime movement of universal life: ‘And the four creatures
ο Rev. ν. 8: ἔχοντες ἕκαστος. κιθάρας, καὶ φιάλας χρυσᾶς γεμούσας θυ-
μιαμάτων, αἵ εἰσιν al προσευχαὶ τῶν ἁγίων.
ἃ [hid. : ἔπεσον ἐνώπιον τοῦ ἀρνίου . . . . καὶ ἄδουσιν φδὴν καινήν.
9 Ibid. ver. 9 : ἐσφάγης, καὶ ἠγόρασας τῷ Θεῷ ἡμᾶς ἐν τῷ αἵματί σου, ἐκ
πάσης φυλῆς καὶ γλώσσης καὶ λαοῦ καὶ ἔθνους, καὶ ἐποίησας ἡμᾶς τῷ Θεῷ ἡμῶν
βασιλεῖς καὶ ἱερεῖς" καὶ βασιλεύσομεν ent τῆς γῆ.
f Ibid. vers. 11, 12: καὶ εἶδον, καὶ ἤκουσα φωνὴν ἀγγέλων πολλῶν κυκλόθεν
τοῦ θρόνου καὶ τῶν ζώων καὶ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων. . . .- - καὶ χιλιάδες χιλιάδων,
λέγοντες φωνῇ μεγάλῃ, “"Αξιόν ἐστι τὸ ἀρνίον τὸ ἐσφαγμένον λαβεῖν τὴν
δύναμιν καὶ πλοῦτον καὶ σοφίαν καὶ ἰσχὺν καὶ τιμὴν καὶ δόξαν καὶ εὐλογίαν.
8 Ibid. ver. 13: καὶ πᾶν κτίσμα ὅ ἐστιν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ, καὶ ἐν τῇ γῇ, καὶ
ὑποκάτω τῆς γῆ", καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης“ & ἐστι, καὶ τὰ ἐν αὐτοῖς πάντα, ἤκουσα
λέγοντας, ‘TS καθημένῳ ἐπὶ τοῦ θρόνου καὶ τῷ ἀρνίῳ ἢ εὐλογία καὶ ἣ τιμὴ καὶ
ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων.᾽
vit |
376 Characteristics of the worship of Fesus in N.T.
said, Amen,’ And how does the redeemed Church on earth
bear her part in this universal chorus of praise? ‘Unto Him
That loved us, and washed us from our sins in His Own Blood,
and hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Father ;
to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Ameni.” You
will not, my brethren, mistake the force and meaning of this
representation of the adoration of the Lamb in the Apocalypse.
This representation cannot be compared with the Apocalyptic
pictures of the future fortunes of the Church, where the imagery
employed frequently leaves room for allusions so diverse, that no
interpretation can be positively assigned to a particular symbol
without a certain intellectual and spiritual immodesty in the
interpreter who essays to do so. You may in vain endeavour
satisfactorily to solve the questions which encompass such points
as the number of the beast or the era of the millennium ; but
you cannot doubt for one moment Who is meant by ‘the Lamb,’
or what is the character of the worship that.is so solemnly
offered to Him.
But upon this worship of Jesus Christ as we meet with it in
the apostolical age, let us here make three observations.
a. First, then, it cannot be accounted for, and so set aside, as
being part of an undiscriminating cultus of heavenly or super-
human beings in general. Such a cultus finds no place in the
New Testament, except when it, or something very much re-
sembling it, is expressly discountenanced. By the mouth of our
Lord Jesus Christ the New Testament reaffirms the Sinaitic law
which restricts worship to the Lord God Himself *. St. Peter
will not sanction the self-prostrations of the grateful Cornelius,
lest Cornelius should think of him ag more than human!.
When, at Lystra, the excited populace, with their priest, desired
to offer sacrifice to St. Paul and St. Barnabas, as to “ deities
who had come down to them in the likeness of men,’ the
Apostles in their unfeigned distress protested that they were but
men of like feelings with those whom they were addressing, and
claimed for the living God that service which was His exclusive
h Rev. v. 14: καὶ τὰ τέσσαρα (a ἔλεγον, ᾿Αμήν.
i Tbid Ω 6 é ~ > , i ones Ν / 2. “εᾷ > d ~ ε ~
Id. 1. 5, Θ: τῷ ἀγαπήσαντι ἡμᾶς καὶ λούσαντι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν
Lue ὡς Ξ a a a a = al
ἡμῶν ἐν τῷ αἵματι αὑτοῦ" καὶ ἐποίησεν ἡμᾶς βασιλεῖς καὶ ἱερεῖς τῷ Θεῷ καὶ
Πατρὶ αὑτοῦ: αὐτῷ ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. ἀμήν.
K St. Matt. iv. το; Deut. vi. 12; x. 20.
‘Acts x. 25: συναντήσας αὐτῷ ὃ Κορνήλιος, πεσὼν ἐπὶ τοὺς πόδας προσε-
“4 Xi / > , ς᾽ Ul -" > \ ai & ,
κύνησεν. ὃ δὲ Πέτρος αὐτὸν ἤγειρε λέγων, “᾿Ανάστηθι: κἀγὼ αὐτὸς ἄνθρωπός
εἰμι."
[LEcT.
(1) Vo tustances of secondary worship in the N.T. 377
ee EM NA δ ἢ
right™. When St. John fell at the feet of the angel of the
Apocalypse, in profound acknowledgment of the marvellous
privileges of sight and sound to which he had been admitted, he
was peremptorily checked on the ground that the angel too was
only his fellow-slave, and that God was the one true Object. of
worship®. One of the most salient features of the Gnostico-
Jewish theosophy which threatened the faith of the Church of
Colosse was the worshipping of angels; and St. Paul censures
it because it tended to loosen men’s hold upon the incommu-
nicable prerogatives of the great Head of the Churcho. Cer-
tainly the New Testament does teach that we Christians have
close communion with the blessed angels and with the sainted
dead, such as would be natural to members of one great and
really undivided family. The invisible world is not merely
above, it is around us; we have come into it ; and ‘Christ’s
kingdom on earth and in heaven? forms one supernatural whole.
But the worship claimed for, accepted by, and paid to Jesus,
stands out in the New Testament in the sharpest relief. This
relief is not softened or shaded off by any instances of an in-
ferior homage paid, whether legitimately or not, to created beings.
We do not meet with any clear distinction between a primary
and a secondary worship, by which the force of the argument
might have been more or less seriously weakened. Worship is
m Acts xiv. 14,15: διαῤῥήξαντες τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτῶν εἰσεπήδησαν εἰς τὸν ὄχλον,
κράζοντες καὶ λέγοντες, “ἴΑνδρες, τι ταῦτα ποιεῖτε; καὶ ἡμεῖς ὁμοιοπαθεῖς
ἐσμεν ὑμῖν ἄνθρωποι, εὐαγγελιζόμενοι ὑμᾶς ἀπὸ τούτων τῶν ματαίων ἐπιστρέφειν
ἐπὶ τὸν Θεὸν τὸν ζῶντα.
Ὁ Rey. xxii. 8: καὶ ἐγὼ Ἰωάννης ὃ βλέπων ταῦτα καὶ ἀκούων" καὶ ὅτε ἤκουσα
καὶ ἔβλεψα, ἔπεσα προσκυνῆσαι ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ποδῶν τοῦ ἀγγέλου τοῦ δεικ-
νύοντός μοι ταῦτα. καὶ λέγει μοι, “Ὅρα μή" σύνδουλός σου γάρ εἶμι καὶ τῶν
ἀδελφῶν σου τῶν προφητῶν, καὶ τῶν τηρούντων τοὺς λόγους τοῦ βιβλίου τού-
του" τῷ Θεῷ προσκύνησον.᾽
° Col. ii. 18: μηδεὶς ὑμᾶς καταβραβευέτω θέλων ἐν ταπεινοφροσύνῃ καὶ
θρησκείᾳ τῶν ἀγγέλων. The Apostle condemns this (1) on the moral ground
that the Gnostic teacher here alluded to claimed to be in possession of truths
respecting the unseen world of which he really was ignorant, ἃ μὴ ἐώρακεν
ἐμβατεύων, εἰκῆ φυσιούμενος ὑπὸ τοῦ vods τῆς σαρκὸς αὑτοῦ: (2) On the
dogmatic ground of a resulting interference with due recognition of the
Headship of Jesus Christ, the One Source of the supernatural life of the
Church, καὶ οὐ κρατῶν τὴν κεφαλὴν, ἐξ οὗ πᾶν τὸ σῶμα διὰ τῶν ἁφῶν καὶ
συνδέσμων ἐπιχορηγούμενον καὶ συμβιβαζόμενον, αὔξει τὴν αὔξησιν τοῦ
Θεοῦ.
P Heb. xii. 22: προσεληλύθατε Σιὼν ὄρει, καὶ πόλει Θεοῦ ζῶντος, Ἵερου-
σαλὴμ ἐπουρανίῳ, καὶ μυριάσιν ἀγγέλων, πανηγύρει καὶ ἐκκλησίᾳ πρωτοτόκων
ἐν οὐρανοῖς ἀπογεγραμμένων, καὶ κριτῇ Θεῷ πάντων, καὶ πνεύμασι δικαίων
τετελειωμένων, καὶ διαθήκης νέας μεσίτῃ ᾿Ιησοῦ, :
VII |
378 (2) Kesus worshipped with adoration due to God.
claimed for, and is given to, God alone; and if Jesus is wor-
shipped, this is simply because Jesus is God4.
8. The worship paid to Jesus in the apostolic age was cer-
tainly in many cases that adoration which is due to the Most
High God, and to Him alone, from all His intelligent creatures.
God Himself must needs have been, then as ever, the One
Object of real worship. But the Eternal Son, when He became
Man, ceased not to be God. As God, He received from those
who believed in Him the only worship which their faith could
render?. This is clear from the representations of heavenly wor-
ship in the Apocalypse, which we have been considering, even
if we take no other passages into account. The Apocalyptic
worship of our glorified Lord is not any mere honorary acknow-
ledgment that His redemptive work is complete. Even at the
moment’ of His Incarnation worship is addressed to Christ’s
Divine and Eternal Person. Doubtless the language of devotion
to Him which we find in the Gospels represents many postures
of the human soul, ranging between that utter self-prostration
which we owe to the Most High, and that trustful familiarity
with which we pour our joys and sorrows, our hopes and fears
into the ear of a human friend. Such ‘lower forms’ of worship
lead up to, and are explained by, the higher. They illustrate
the condescension and purpose of the Incarnation. But the
a The ‘worship’ of Buddha has sometimes been compared to that of
our Divine Lord, as if Buddha were regarded as a real divinity by his fol-
lowers. But ‘le Bouddha reste homme, et ne cherche jamais & dépasser les
limites de ’humanité, au dela de laquelle il ne congoit rien. L’enthousiasme
de ses disciples a été aussi réservé que lui-méme: dans le culte innocent
qwils lui rendaient, leur ferveur s’adressait ἃ un souvenir consolateur et
fortifiant ; jamais leur superstition intéressée ne s’adressait d sa puis-
sance . ... Ni Vorgueil de Cakyamouni, ni le fanatisme des croyants, n’a
concu un sacrilége; le Bouddha, tout grand quw il se croit, n’a point risqué
’apothéose; . .. . jamais personne n’a songé ἃ en faire un dieu.’ Saint-
Hilaire, Le Bouddha, p. 168.
τ Meyer’s remarks are very far from satisfactory. ‘Das Anrufen Christi
ist nicht das Anbeten schlechthin, wie es nur in Betreff des Vaters, als des
einigen absoluten Gottes (!) geschieht, wohl aber die Anbetung nach der durch
das Verhiltniss Christi zwm Vater (dessen wesensgleicher Sohn, Ebenbild,
Throngenosse, Vermittler, und Fiirsprecher fiir die Menschen u. s. w. er ist)
bedingten Relativitit im betenden Bewusstsein . .. . Der Christum Anru-
fende ist sich bewusst, er rufe ihn nicht als den schlechthinigen Gott, sondern
als den gottmenschlichen Vertreter und Mittler Gottes an.’ In Rom. x.
12 our Lord is represented as being equal with the Father, and as therefore
equally entitled to adoration. Adoration is strictly due to the Uncreated
Substance of God, and to Jesus Christ as being personally of It. The me-
diatorial functions of His Manhood cannot affect the bearings of this truth.
® Cat. Rac. p. 164.
[ LECT.
(3) Adoration of the Sacred Manhood of Fesus. 379
familiar confidence which the Incarnation invites cannot be
pleaded against the rights of the Incarnate God. A free, trust-
ful, open-hearted converse with Christ is compatible with the
lowliest worship of His Person; Christian confidence even ‘leans
upon His breast at supper,’ while Christian faith discerns His
Glory, and ‘falls at His feet as dead.’
γι The apostolic worship of Jesus Christ embraced His
Manhood no less than it embraced His Godheadt. According to
St. Paul His Human Name of Jesus, that is, His Human Nature,
is worshipped on earth, in heaven, and among the dead. It
is not the Unincarnate Logos, but the wounded Humanity of
Jesus, Which is enthroned and adored in the vision of the
Apocalypse. To adore Christ’s Deity while carefully refusing
to adore His Manhood would be to forget that His Manhood
is for ever joined to His Divine and Eternal Person, Which is
the real Object of our adoration. Since He has taken the
Manhood into God, It is an inseparable attribute of His Per-
sonal Godhead; every knee must bend before It; henceforth the
angels themselves around the throne must adore, not as of yore
the Unincarnate Son, but ‘the Lamb as It had been slain.’
3. Thus rooted in the doctrine and practice of the apostles,
the worship of Jesus Christ was handed down to succeeding ages
as an integral and recognised element of the spiritual life of the
Church. The early Fathers refer to the worship of our Lord as
to a matter beyond dispute. Even before the end of the first
century St. Ignatius bids the Roman Christians ‘put up sup-
plications to Christ’ on his behalf, that he might attain the
distinction of martyrdom". St. Polycarp’s Epistle to the
t Cf. Pearson, Minor Theological Works, vol. i. 307: ‘Christus sive
Homo Ille Qui est Mediator, adoratus est. Heb. i. 6; Apoc. v. 11, 12.
Hec est plenissima descriptio adorationis. Et hic Agnus occisus erat Homo
ille, Qui est Mediator; Ergo Homo 1116, Qui est Mediator est adorandus.
St. Greg. Nazianzen. Orat. li.: Εἴτις μὴ προσκυνεῖ τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον, ἀνάθεμα
ἔστω, καὶ τετάχθω μετὰ τῶν θεοκτόνων. Cf. also Ibid. p. 3098 : “ Christus,
qua est Mediator, est unic& adoratione colendus. Concil. Gen. V. Collat.
vill. can. 9. Si quis adorari in duabus naturis dicit Christum, ex quo duas
adorationes introducat, semotim Deo Verbo, et semotim Homini: aut si
ae adorat Christum, sed non und adoratione Deum Verbum Incar-
natum cum Ejus Carne adorat, extra quod sancte Dei ecclesiz ab initio
traditum est ; talis anathema sit.’ See the whole of this and the preceding
‘ Determination.” And compare St. Cyril’s 8th Anathema; Damasc., iv. 3;
Hooker, E. P. v. 54, 9.
u St. Ign. ad Rom. 4: λιτανεύσατε τὸν Χριστὸν [τὸν Κύριον ed. Dressel,
which, however, must here mean our Lord] ὑπὲρ ἐμοῦ, Wa διὰ τῶν ὀργάνων
τούτων [Θεῷ ed. Dressel] θυσία εὑρεθῶ. Cf. ad Magn. 7.
VII]
380 The worship of Fesus in the subapostole Fathers;
OE i ere
Philippians opens with a benediction which is in fact a prayer
to Jesus Christ, as being, together with the Almighty Father, the
Giver of peace and mercy*. Polycarp prays that ‘the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Eternal Priest
Himself, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, would build up his
readers in faith and truth and in all meekness, . . . and would
give them a part and lot among the saintsy.” And at a later
day, standing bound at the pyre of martyrdom, he cries, ‘ For all
things, O God, do I praise and bless and glorify Thee, together
with the Eternal and Heavenly Jesus Christ, Thy well-beloved
Son, with Whom, to Thee and the Holy Ghost, be glory, both
now and for ever. Amen’ After his death, Nicetas begged
the proconsul not to deliver up his body for burial, ‘lest the
Christians should desert the Crucified One, and should begin to
worship this new martyr?’ The Jews, it appears, employed an
argument which may have been the language of sarcasm or of
a real anxiety. ‘They know not, continues the encyclical
letter of the Church of Smyrna, ‘ that neither shall we ever be
able to desert Christ Who suffered for the salvation of all who
are saved in the whole world, nor yet to worship any other.
For Him indeed, as being the Son of God, we do adore ; but
the martyrs, as disciples and imitators of the Lord, we worthily
love by reason of their unsurpassed devotion to Him their own
King and Teacher. God grant that we too may be fellow-
partakers and fellow-disciples with them».’ The writers of this
remarkable passage were not wanting in love and honour to the
martyr of Christ. ‘Afterward,’ say they, ‘we, having taken
up his bones, which were more precious than costly stones, and
of more account than gold, placed them where it was fitting®.’
x St. Polyc, ad Phil. 1: ἔλεος ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη παρὰ Θεοῦ παντοκράτορος
καὶ Κυρίου ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν πληθυνθείη. ,
y Ibid. 12: ‘ Deus autem et Pater Domini nostri Jesu Christi, et ipse
Sempiternus Pontifex, Dei Filius Jesus Christus, edificet vos in fide et veri-
tate et in omni mansuetudine, ..... et det vobis sortem et partem inter
sanctos suos.’
z Mart. St. Polyc. c. 14.
a [bid. c. 17: μὴ, φησὶν, ἀφέντες τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον, τοῦτον ἄρξωνται
σέβεσθαι.
b Tbid.: ἀγνοοῦντες, ὅτι οὔτε τὸν Χριστόν ποτε καταλιπεῖν δυνησόμεθα τὸν
ὑπὲρ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς κόσμου τῶν σωζομένων σωτηρίας παθόντα, οὔτε ἕτερόν
τινα σέβεσθαι. τοῦτον μὲν γὰρ Ὑἱὸν ὄντα τοῦ Θεοῦ προσκυνοῦμεν" τοὺς δὲ
μάρτυρας, ὡς. μαθητὰς καὶ μιμητὰς τοῦ Κυρίου, ἀγαπῶμεν ἀξίως, ἕνεκα εὐνοίας
ἀνυπερβλήτου τῆς εἰς τὸν ἴδιον βασιλέα καὶ διδάσκαλον" ὧν γένοιτο καὶ ἡμᾶς
συγκοινωνούς τε καὶ συμμαθητὰς γενέσθαι.
¢ Mart. St. Polyc. c. 18,
[ LECT.
i ὁ ὁ ὁ ὁ
272. SS. Fustin, Ireneus, and Clement Alex. 381
a ΞΞΒ τ lll “ΠῚ Ae i
But they draw the sharpest line between such a tribute of
affection and the worship of the Redeemer; Jesus was wor-
shipped as ‘being the Son of God. The Apologists point to
the adoration of Jesus Christ, as well as to that of the F ather,
when replying to the heathen charge of atheism. St. Justin
protests to the emperors that the Christians worship God
aloned, Yet he also asserts that the Son and the Spirit share in
the reverence and worship which is offered to the Fathere ; and
in controversy with Trypho he especially urges that prophecy
foretold the adoration of Messiahf. St. Irenseus insists that the
miracles which were in his day of common occurrence in the
Church were not to be ascribed to any invocation of angels, nor
yet to magical incantations, nor to any form of evil curiosity.
They were simply due to the fact that Christians constantly
prayed to God the Maker of all things, and called upon the
Name of His Son Jesus Christg. Clement of Alexandria has
d Apol. i. § 17, p. 44, ed. Otto. After quoting St. Luke xx. 22-25 he
proceeds: ὅθεν Θεὸν μὲν μόνον προσκυνοῦμεν, ὑμῖν δὲ πρὸς τὰ ἄλλα χαίροντες
ὑπηρετοῦμεν.
© Ibid. i. § 6, p. 14, ed. Otto. : Καὶ ὁμολογοῦμεν τῶν τοιούτων νομιζομένων
θεῶν ἄθεοι εἶναι, ἀλλ᾽ οὐχὶ τοῦ ἀληθεστάτου καὶ πατρὸς δικαιοσύνης καὶ σωφρο-
σύνης καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἀρετῶν, ἀνεπιμίκτου τε κακίας θεοῦ" ἀλλ᾽ ἐκεῖνόν τε, καὶ
τὸν παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ Ὑἱὸν ἐλθόντα καὶ διδάξαντα ἡμᾶς ταῦτα καὶ τὸν τῶν ἄλλων,
ἑπομένων καὶ ἐξομοιουμένων ἀγαθῶν ἀγγέλων στρατὸν, Πνεῦμά τε τὸ προφητι-
κὸν σεβόμεθα καὶ προσκυνοῦμεν λόγῳ καὶ ἀληθείᾳ τιμῶντες. With regard to
the clause of this passage which has been the subject of so much controversy
(tal τὸν τῶν ἄλλων... ἀγγέλων otpardv), (I) it is impossible to make
στρατὸν depend upon σεβόμεθα καὶ προσκυνοῦμεν without involving St. Justin
in self-contradiction (cf. the passage quoted above), and Bellarmine’s argu-
ment based on this construction (de Beatitud. Sanctor. lib. i. c. 1 3) proves,
if anything, too much for his purpose, viz. that the same worship was paid to
the angels as to the Persons of the Blessed Trinity. Several moderns (quoted
by Otto in loc.) who adopt this construction use it for a very different object.
(2) It is difficult to accept Bingham’s rendering (Ant. bk. 13, 0. 2, § 2) which
joins ἀγγέλων στρατὸν and ὑμᾶς with διδάξαντα, and makes Christ the Teacher
not of men only but of the angel host. This idea, however, seems to have
no natural place in the passage, and we should have expected ταῦτα ἡμᾶς not
ἡμᾶς ταῦτα. (3) It seems better, therefore, with Bull, Chevallier (Transl.
Ῥ. 152), Mohler (Tiibing. Theol. Quartalsch. 1833, Fasc. i. p. 53 sqq., quoted
by Otto) to make ἀγγέλων στρατὸν and ταῦτα together dependent upon
διδάξαντα: ‘the Son of God taught us not merely about these (viz. evil
spirits, cf. § 5) but also concerning the good angels,’ &c.; τὸν ἀγγέλων
στρατὸν being elliptically put for τὰ περὶ τοῦ... ἀγγέλων στρατοῦ.
f Dial. cum Tryph. c. 68: γραφὰς, αἱ διαῤῥήδην τὸν Χριστὸν καὶ παθητὸν
καὶ προσκυνητὸν καὶ Θεὸν ἀποδεικνύουσιν. Ibid. c. 76: Καὶ Δαυὶδ...
Θεὸν ἰσχυρὸν καὶ προσκυνητὸν, Χριστὸν ὄντα, ἐδήλωσε.
& Her. ii. § 32: ‘Ecclesia. .,.. nomen Domini nostri Jesu Christi
invocans, virtutes ad utilitates hominum, sed non ad seductionem, perficit,’
Observe too the argument which follows,
VII |
382 References to the worship of Fesus in Tertullian.
left us three treatises, designed to form a missionary trilogy.
In one he is occupied with converting the heathen from idola-
try to the faith of Christ’; in a second he instructs the new
convert in the earlier lessons and duties of the Christian faith ;
while in his most considerable work he labours to impart the
higher knowledge to which the Christian is entitled, and so to
render him ‘the perfect Gnostic.’ In each of these treatises,
widely different as they are in point of practical aim, Clement
bears witness to the Church’s worship of our Lord. In the
first, his Hortatory Address to the Greeks, he winds up a long
argumentative invective against idolatry with a burst of fervid
entreaty : ‘ Believe, O man,’ he exclaims, ‘in Him Who is both
Man and God ; believe, O man, in the living God, Who suffered
and Who is adoredh.’ The Peedagogus concludes with a prayer
of singular beauty ending in a doxology, and in these the Son
is worshipped and praised as the Equal of the Father. In the
Stromata, as might be expected, prayer to Jesus Christ is rather
taken for granted; the Christian life is to be a continuous
worship of the Word, and through Him of the Father*. Ter-
tullian in his Apology grapples with the taunt that the Chris-
tians worshipped a Man Who had been condemned by the
Jewish tribunals! Tertullian does not deny or palliate the
charge ; he justifies the Christian practice. Whatever Christ
might be in the opinion of the pagan world, Christians knew
Him to be of one substance with the Father™. The adoration
of Christ, then, was not a devotional eccentricity ; it was an
absolute duty. In one passage Tertullian argues against mixed
marriages with the heathen, because in these cases there could be
h Protrept. c. x. p. 84, ed. Potter: πίστευσον, ἄνθρωπε, ἀνθρώπῳ καὶ Θεῷ"
πίστευσον, ἄνθρωπε, τῷ παθόντι Kal προσκυνουμένῳ Θεῷ ζῶντι: πιστεύσατε of
δοῦλοι τῷ νεκρῷ" πάντες ἄνθρωποι, πιστεύσατε μόνῳ τῷ πάντων ἀνθρώπων Θεῷ"
πιστεύσατε καὶ μισθὸν λάβετε σωτηρίαν K.T.A.
i Pedagog. lib. iii. c. 7, p. 311, ed. Potter: ὅπερ οὖν λοιπὸν ἐπὶ τοιαύτῃ
πανηγύρει τοῦ Λόγου, τῷ Λόγῳ προσευξώμεθα' Ἵλαθι τοῖς σοῖς, παιδαγωγὲ,
παιδίοις, Πατὴρ, ἡνίοχε ᾿Ισραὴλ, Tit καὶ Πατὴρ, “Ev ἄμφω Κύρ'ε. δὸς δὲ ἡμῖν
τοῖς σοῖς ἑπομένοις παραγγέλμασι τὸ ὁμοίωμα πληρῶσαι... ... αἰνοῦντας εὐ-
χαριστεῖν, [εὐχαριστοῦνταΞ5] αἰνεῖν, τῷ μόνῳ Πατρὶ καὶ Ὑἱῷ, Tig καὶ Πατρὶ,
παιδαγωγῷ καὶ διδασκάλῳ Ὑἱῷ, σὺν καὶ τῷ ἁγίῳ Πνεύματι, πάντα τῷ Ἕνὶ, ἐν ᾧ
τὰ πάντα, δι᾽ ὃν τὰ πάντα ev,... ᾧ ἡ δόξα καὶ νῦν καὶ εἰς αἰῶναϑ.
k See the fine passage, Stromat. lib. vii. c. 7, ad init. p. 851, ed. Potter.
1 Apolog. c. 21: ‘Sed et vulgus jam scit Christum ut hominum aliquem,
qualem Judei judicaverunt, quo facilius quis nos hominis cultores existim-
averit. Verum neque de Christo erubescimus, cum sub nomine ejus deputari
et damnari juvat.’
™ Apolog. c. 21: ‘Hunc ex Deo prolatum didicimus, et prolatione gene-
ratum, et idcirco Filium Dei et Dewm dictum, ex unitate Substantic.’
[ LECT.
heferences to the worship of Fesus tn Origen. 383
no joint worship of the Redeemer; elsewhere he implies that the
worship of Jesus was co-extensive with faith in Christianity.
Origen’s erratic intellect may have at times betrayed him, on
this as on other subjects, into language?, more or less incon-
sistent with his own general line of teaching, by which it must
in fairness be interpreted. Origen often insists upon the worship
of Jesus Christ as being a Christian duty4; he illustrates this
duty, especially in his Homilies, by his personal example? ; he
n Ad Uxor. lib. ii. c. 6: ‘Audiat ... de ganed. Qu Dei mentio? que
Christi invocatio ?
° Adv. Jud. c. 7: ‘Ubique creditur, ab omnibus gentibus supra’ enumer-
atis colitur, ubique regnat, ubique adoratur.’
P Particularly in the treatise, De Oratione, c. 15, vol. i. ed. Ben. p. 223:
πῶς δὲ οὐκ ἔστι κατὰ τὸν εἰπόντα “ Τί με λέγεις ἀγαθόν ; οὐδεὶς ἀγαθὸς εἰ μὴ
εἷς ὃ Θεὸς, ὁ Πατήρ" εἰπεῖν ἄν: Τί ἐμοὶ προσεύχῃ : Μόνῳ τῷ Πατρὶ προσ-
εύχεσθαι χρὴ, ῳ κἀγὼ προσεύχομαι: ὅπερ διὰ τῶν ἁγίων γραφῶν μανθάνετε"
᾿Αρχιερεῖ γὰρ τῷ ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν κατασταθέντι ὑπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς, καὶ παρακλήτῳ
ὑπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς εἶναι λαβόντι, εὔχεσθαι ἡμᾶς οὐ δεῖ, ἀλλὰ OL ἀρχιερέως καὶ
παρακλήτου κιτ.λ. This indefensible language was a result of the line taken
by Origen in opposing the Monarchians. ‘ As the latter, together with the
distinction of substance in the Father and the Son, denied also that of the
Person, so it was with Origen a matter of practical moment, on account of the
systematic connexion of ideas in his philosophical system of Christianity, to
maintain in opposition to them the personal independence of the Logos.
Sometimes in this controversy he distinguishes between wnity of substance
and personal unity or unity of subject, so that it only concerned him to con-
trovert the latter. And this certainly was the point of greatest practical
moment to him; and he must have been well aware that many of the
Fathers who contended for a personal distinction held firmly at the same time
to a unity of substance. But according to the internal connexion of his own
system (Neander means his Platonic doctrine of the τὸ ὃν) both fell together;
wherever he spoke, therefore, from the position of that system, he affirmed
at one and the same time the ἑτερότης τῆς οὐσίας and the ἑτερότης τῆς ὗπο-
στάσεως OY TOU ὑποκειμένου. Neander, Ch. Hist. ii. 311, 312. From this
philosophical premiss Origen deduces his practical inference above noticed :
ei yap ἕτερος, ws ἐν ἄλλοις δείκνυται, κατ᾽ οὐσίαν καὶ ὑποκείμενός ἐστιν 6 Ὑἱὸς
τοῦ Πατρὸς, ἤτοι προσκυνητέον τῷ Ὑἱῷ καὶ οὐ τῷ Πατρὶ, ἣ ἀμφοτέροις, ἢ τῷ Πατρὶ
μόνῳ. De Orat. c. 15, sub init. p. 222. Although, then, Origen expresses
his conclusion in Scriptural terminology, it is a conclusion which is traceable
to his philosophy as distinct from his strict religious belief, and it is entirely
contradicted by a large number of other passages in his writings.
4 Contr. Cels. v. 12, sub fin. vol. i. p. 587. Also Ibid. viii. 12, p. 750:
ἕνα οὖν Θεὸν, ὡς ἀποδεδώκαμεν, τὸν Πατέρα καὶ τὸν Tidy θεραπεύομεν" καὶ
μένει ἡμῖν 6 πρὸς τοὺς ἄλλους ἀτενὴς λόγοΞ" καὶ ov τὸν ἔναγχός γε φανέντα,
ὡς πρότερον οὖκ ὄντα, ὑπερθρησκεύομεν. Ibid. viii. 26: μόνῳ γὰρ προσευκτέον
τῷ ἐπὶ πᾶσι Θεῷ, καὶ προσευκτέον γε τῷ Μονογενεῖ, καὶ Πρωτοτόκῳ πάσης
κτίσεως, Δόγῳ Θεοῦ.
τ See his prayer on the furniture of the tabernacle, as spiritually explained,
Hom. 13 in Exod. xxxyv. p. 176: ‘Domine Jesu, presta mihi, ut aliquid
monumenti habere merear in tabernaculo Tuo. Ego optarem (si fieri
vir |
384 The worship of Fesus in Origen and Novatian.
bases it upon the great truth which justifies and demands such
a practical acknowledgments. It is in keeping with this that
Origen explains the frankincense offered by the wise men to
our Infant Saviour as an acknowledgment of His Godhead ; since
such an action obviously involved that adoration which is due
only to God. This explanation could not have been put for-
ward by any but a devout worshipper of Jesus. In the work on
the Trinity¥, ascribed to Novatian, in the treatises and letters *
posset), esse aliquid meum in illo auro, ex quo propitiatorium fabricatur,
vel ex quo arca contegitur, vel ex quo candelabrum fit luminis et lucerne.
Aut si aurum non habeo, argentum saltem aliquid inveniar offerre, quod
proficiat in columnas, vel in bases earum. Aut certe vel eris aliquid.....
Tantum ne in omnibus jejunus et infecundus inveniar.’ Cf. too Hom. i
in Lev., Hom. v. in Lev., quoted by Bingham, Ant. xiii. 2, § 3.
5. Comm. in Rom. x. lib. viii. vol. 4, p. 624, ed. Ben., quoted by Bingham,
ubi supra: ‘[Apostolus] in principio Epistole quam ad Corinthios scribit,
ubi dicit, ‘Cum omnibus qui invocant nomen Domini nostri Jesu Christi, in
omni loco ipsorum et nostro” eum cujus nomen invocatur, Dominum Jesum
Christum esse pronuntiat. Si ergo et Enos, et Moyses, et Aaron, et Samuel,
‘‘invocabant Dominum et ipse exaudiebat eos,” sine dubio Christum Jesum
Dominum invocabant; et si invocare nomen Domini et orare Dominum
unum atque idem est; sicut invocatur Deus, invocandus est Christus; et
sicut oratur Deus, ita et orandus est Christus; et sicut offerimus Deo Patri
primo omnium orationes, ita et Domino Jesu Christo; et sicut offerimus
postulationes Patri, ita offerimus postulationes et Filio; et sicut offerimus
gratiarum actiones Deo, ita et gratias offerimus Salvatorii Unum namque
utrique honorem deferendum, id est Patri et Filio, divinus edocet sermo, cum
dicit: “ Ut omnes honorificent Filium, sicut honorificant Patrem.” ’
t Contr. Cels. i. Go, p. 375: φέροντες μὲν δῶρα, ἃ. (iv οὕτως ὀνομάσω)
συνθέτῳ τινὶ ἐκ Θεοῦ καὶ ἀνθρώπου θνητοῦ προσήνεγκαν, σύμβολα μὲν, ὡς
βασιλεῖ τὸν χρυσὸν, ὡς δὲ τεθνηξομένῳ τὴν σμύρναν, ὡς δὲ Θεῷ τὸν λιβανωτόν"
προσήνεγκαν δὲ, μαθόντες τὸν τόπον τῆς γενέσεως αὐτοῦ. ᾿Αλλ᾽ ἐπεὶ Θεὸς
ἦν, ὁ ὑπὲρ τοὺς βοηθοῦντας ἀνθρώποις ἀγγέλους ἐνυπάρχων Σωτὴρ τοῦ γένους
τῶν ἀνθρώπων, ἄγγελος ἠμείψατο τὴν τῶν μάγων ἐπὶ προσκυνῆσαι τὸν ᾿Ιησοῦν
εὐσέβειαν, χρηματίσας αὐτοῖς ‘un ἥκειν πρὸς τὸν Ἡρώδην, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπανελθεῖν
ἄλλῃ ὁδῷ εἰς τὰ οἰκεῖα. Cf. St. Iren. adv. Her. iii. 9. 2.
ἃ Novat. de Trin. c. 14, quoted by Bingham: ‘Si homo tantummodo
Christus, quomodo adest ubique invocatus, quum hec hominis natura non
sit, sed Dei, ut adesse omni loco possit?’
x St. Cyprian. de Bono Patientiz, p. 220, ed. Fell.: ‘Pater Deus precepit
Filium suum adorari: et Apostolus Paulus, divini preecepti memor, ponit et
dicit: ‘* Deus exaltavit illum et donavit illi nomen quod est super omne
nomen; ut in nomine Jesu omne genu flectatur, coelestium, terrestrium, et
infernorum :” et in Apocalypsi angelus Joanni volenti adorari se resistit et
dicit: ‘‘Vide ne feceris, quia conservus tuus sum et fratrum tuorum; Jesum
Dominum adora.” Qualis Dominus Jesus, et quanta patientia ejus, ut qui
in coelis adoratur, necdum vindicetur in terris?? In Rev. xx. 9, St. Cyprian
probably read τῷ Κυρίῳ instead of τῷ Θεῷ. See his language to Lucius,
Bishop of Rome, who had recently been a confessor in a sudden persecution
of Gallus, aA,D. 252 (Ep. 61, p. 145, ed. Fell.): ‘Has ad vos literas mit-
[ LECT.
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ΤᾺ:
Value of Flymns as expressing Christiandoctrine. 385
of St. Cyprian, in the apologetic works of Arnobiusy and Lac-
tantius%, references to the subject are numerous and decisive.
But our limits forbid any serious attempt to deal with the
materials which crowd upon us as we advance into the central
and later decades of the third century ; and at this point it may
be well'to glance at the forms with which the primitive Church
actually approached the throne of the Redeemer.
It is clear that Christian hymnody has ever been prized and
hated for its services in popularising the worship of Jesus
Christ. Hymnody actively educates, while it partially satisfies,
the instinct of worship ; it is a less formal and sustained act of
worship than prayer, yet it may really involve transient acts
of the deepest adoration. But, because it is less formal ;_be-
cause in using it the soul can pass, as it were, unobserved and
at will from mere sympathetic states of feeling to adoration, and
from adoration back to passive although reverent sympathy ;—
hymnody has always been a popular instrument for the ex-
pression of religious feeling. And from the first years of
Christianity it seems to have been especially consecrated to the
honour of the Redeemer. We have already noted traces of such
apostolical hymns in the Pauline Epistles; but some early
Humanitarian teachers did unintentional service, by bringing
into prominence the value of hymns as witnesses to Christian
doctrine, and as efficient means of popular dogmatic teaching.
When the followers of Artemon maintained that the doctrine
of Christ’s Godhead was only brought into the Church during
the episcopate of Zephyrinus, a Catholic writer, quoted by Euse-
bius, observed, by way of reply, that ‘the psalms and hymns
of the brethren, which, from the earliest days of Christianity,
had been written by the faithful, all. celebrate Christ, the Word
of God, proclaiming His Divinity.’ Origen pointed out that
hymns were addressed only to God and to His Only-begotten
timus, frater carissime, et representantes vobis per epistolam gaudium
nostrum, fida obsequia caritatis expromimus ; hic quoque in sacrificiis atque
in orationibus nostris non cessantes Deo Patri, et Christo Filio jus Domino
nostro gratias agere, et orare pariter ac petere, ut qui perfectus est atque
perficiens, custodiat et perficiat in vobis confessionis vestre gloriosam
coronam.’
y Arnobius adv. Gentes, i. 36: ‘ Quotidianis supplicationibus adoratis.’
And Ibid. i. 39: ‘Neque [Christus] omni illo qui vel maximus potest
excogitari divinitatis afficiatur cultu?’ [ed. Oehler].
2 Lactantius, Div. Inst. iv. 16.
@ Kus. Hist. Eccl. v. 28: ψαλμοὶ δὲ ὅσοι καὶ φδαὶ ἀδελφῶν am ἀρχῆς ὑπὸ
πιστῶν γραφεῖσαι, τὸν Λόγον τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν Χριστὸν ὑμνοῦσι θεολογοῦντες.
vu | cc
386 Christ adored in the Gloria in Excelsis,
Word, Who is also God». And the practical value of these hymns
as teaching the doctrine of Christ’s Deity was illustrated by the
conduct of Paulus of Samosata. He banished from his own
and neighbouring churches the psalms which were sung to our
Lord Jesus Christ ; he spoke of them contemptuously as being
merely modern compositions. This was very natural in ἃ
prelate who ‘did not wish to confess with the Church that the
Son of God had descended from heaven® ;’ but it shews how
the hymnody of the primitive Church protected and proclaimed
the truths which she taught and cherished.
Of the early hymns of the Church of Christ some remain to
this day among us as witnesses and expressions of her faith in
Christ’s Divinity. Such are the Tersanctus and the Gloria in
Excelsis. Both belong to the second century ; both were intro-
duced, it is difficult to say how early, into the Eucharistic Office ;
both pay Divine honours to our Blessed Lord. As each morning
dawned, the Christian of primitive days repeated in private the
Gloria in Excelsis ; it was his hymn of supplication and praise
to Christ. How wonderfully does it blend the appeal to our
Lord’s human sympathies with the confession of His Divine
prerogatives! ‘O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,
That takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.’
How thrilling is that burst of praise, which at last drowns
the plaintive notes of entreaty that have preceded it, and hails
Jesus Christ glorified on His throne in the heights of heaven !
‘For Thou only art holy; Thou only art the Lord; Thou
only, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory
of God the Father.’ Each evening too, in those early times, the
Christian offered another hymn, less known among ourselves,
but scarcely less beautiful. It too was addressed to Jesus in
His majesty :—
» Contr. Cels. viii. 67: ὕμνους γὰρ εἰς μόνον τὸν ἐπὶ πᾶσι λέγομεν Θεὸν, καὶ
τὸν μονογενῇ αὐτοῦ Λόγον καὶ Θεόν" καὶ ὑμνοῦμέν γε Θεὸν καὶ τὸν Μονογενῆ
αὐτοῦ.
ce Eus. Hist. Eccl. vii. 30: ψαλμοὺς δὲ τοὺς μὲν εἰς τὸν Κύριον ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦν
Χριστὸν παύσας, ὡς δὴ νεωτέρους καὶ νεωτέρων ἀνδρῶν συγγράμματα. The
account continues: εἰς ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἐν μέσῃ τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ, τῇ μεγάλῃ τοῦ πάσχα
ἡμέρᾳ ψαλμῳδεῖν γυναῖκας παρασκευάζων, ὧν καὶ ἀκούσας ἄν τις φρίξειεν.
They seem to have sung in this prelate’s own presence, and with his appro-
bation, odes which greeted him as ‘an angel who had descended from
heaven,’ although Paulus denied our Lord’s pre-existence. Vanity and un-
belief are naturally and generally found together. The historian adds ex-
pressly: τὸν μὲν γὰρ Tiby Tod Θεοῦ οὐ βούλεται συνομολογεῖν ἐξ οὐρανοῦ
κατεληλυθέναι.
[LECT.
and tn the Primitive Evening Hymn. 587
‘Hail! gladdening Light, of His pure glory poured,
Who is th’ Immortal Father, heavenly, blest,
Holiest of Holies—Jesus Christ our Lord!
Now we are come to the sun’s hour of rest,
The lights of evening round us shine,
We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Divine!
Worthiest art Thou at all times to be sung
With undefiled tongue,
Son of our God, Giver of life, Alone!
Therefore in all the world, Thy glories, Lord, they own".’
A yet earlier illustration is afforded by the ode with which the
Alexandrian Clement concludes his Pedagogus. Although its
phraseology was strictly adapted to the ‘perfect Gnostic’ at
Alexandria in the second century, yet it seems to have been
intended for congregational use. It celebrates our Lord, as
‘the Dispenser of wisdom,’ ‘the Support of the suffering,’ the
‘Lord of immortality,’ the ‘Saviour of mortals,’ ‘the Mighty
Son,’ ‘the God of peace.’ It thrice insists on the ‘ sincerity’ of
the praise thus offered Him. It concludes :—
‘Sing we sincerely
The Mighty Son;
We, the peaceful choir,
We, the Christ-begotten ones,
We, the people of sober life,
Sing we together the God of peace®.’
Nor may we forget a hymn which, in God’s good providence,
4 Cf. Lyra Apostolica, No. 63. The original is given in Routh’s Reliquice
Sacr. ili. p. 515 :—
Φῶς ἱλαρὸν ἁγίας δόξης ἀθανάτου Πατρὸς
οὐρανίου, ἁγίου, μάκαρος,
Ἰησοῦ Χριστὲ,
ἐλθόντες ἐπὶ τοῦ ἡλίου δύσιν,
ἰδόντες φῶς ἑσπερινὸν,
ὑμνοῦμεν Πατέρα, καὶ Ὑἱὸν, καὶ “Αγιον Πνεῦμα Θεοῦ.
ἄξιος εἶ ἐν πᾶσι καιροῖς ὑμνεῖσθαι φωναῖς ὁσίαις,
Υἱὲ Θεοῦ, ζωὴν ὃ διδούς"
διὸ ὁ κόσμος σε δοξάζει.
St. Basil quotes it in part, De Spir. Sanct. 73. It is still the Vesper Hymn
of the Greek Church.
® Clem. Alex. Ped. iii. 12, fin. p. 313; Daniel, Thesaurus Hymnologicus,
tom. iii. p. 3. ‘Der Ton des Liedes ist .... gnostisch versinnlichend.’ -
(Fortlage Gesiinge Christlicher Vorzeit, p. 357, qu. by Daniel) :—
μέλπωμεν ἁπλῶς
παῖδα κρατερόν,
χορὸς εἰρήνης
οἱ χριστόγονοι,
λαὸς σώφρων,
; _ Ψάλλωμεν ὁμοῦ Θεὸν εἰρήνης.
vil | Cc2
388 Adoration of Chrest in the Te Deum.
has been endeared to all of us from childhood. In its present
form, the Te Deum is clearly Western, whether it belongs to the
age of St. Augustine, with whose baptism it is connected by the
popular tradition, or, as is probable, to a later period. But we
can scarcely doubt that portions of it are of Eastern origin, and
that they carry us up wellnigh to the sub-apostolic period. The
Te Deum is at once a song of praise, a creed, and a supplication.
In each capacity it is addressed to our Lord. In the Te Deum
how profound is the adoration offered to Jesus, whether as One
of the Most Holy Three, or more specially in His Personal dis-
tinctness as the King of Glory, the Father’s Everlasting Son!
How touching are the supplications which remind Him that
when He became incarnate ‘He did not abhor the Virgin’s
womb,’ that when His Death-agony was passed He ‘ opened the
kingdom of heaven to all believers!’ How passionate are the
pleadings that He would ‘help His servants whom He has re-
deemed with His most precious Blood,’ that He would ‘make
them to be numbered with His saints in glory everlasting !’
Much of this language is of the highest antiquity ; all of it is
redolent with the fragrance of the earliest Church ; and, as we
English Christians use it still in our daily services, we may rejoice
to feel that it unites us altogether in spirit, and to a great extent
in the letter, with the Church of the first three centuriesf.
The Apostolical Constitutions contain ancient doxologies
which associate Jesus Christ with the Father as ‘inhabiting the
praises of Israel,’ after the manner of the Gloria Patrig. And
the Kyrie Eleison, that germinal type of supplication, of which
the countless litanies of the modern Church are only the varied
expansions, is undoubtedly sub-apostolic. Together with the
f On this subject, see Daniel. Thesaur. Hymnolog. tom. ii. pp. 279-299.
¢ Constitutiones, Vili. 12 (vol. i, p. 482, ed. Labbe), quoted by Bingham:
παρακαλοῦμέν σε... .. ὅπως ἅπαντας ἡμᾶς διατηρήσας ἐν τῇ εὐσεβείᾳ, ἐπι-
συναγάγῃς ἐν τῇ ἢ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ Χριστοῦ σου τοῦ Θεοῦ πάσης αἰσθητῆς καὶ νοητῆς
φύσεως, τοῦ βασιλέως ἡμῶν, ἀτρέπτους, ἀμέμπτους, ἀνεγκλήτου»" ὅτι σοι πᾶσα
δόξα, σέβας καὶ εὐχαριστία, τιμὴ καὶ “προσκύνησις τῷ Πατρὶ, καὶ τῷ Ὑἱῷ, καὶ τῷ
᾿Αγίῳφ. Πνεύματι καὶ νῦν καὶ ἀεὶ καὶ εἰς τοὺς ἀνελλειπεῖς καὶ ἀτελευτήτους αἰῶνας
τῶν αἰῶνων. Ibid. 13 (p. 483): διὰ τοῦ Χριστοῦ σου" μεθ᾽ οὗ, σοι δόξα, τιμὴ, αἶνος,
δοξολογία, εὐχαριστία, καὶ τῷ ᾿Αγίῳ Πνεύματι, εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν. Ibid. :
εὐλογημένος ὃ ) ἐρχόμενος ἐν ὀνόματι ἸΚυρίου Θεὸς, Κύριος, καὶ ἐπέφανεν ἡμῖν"
Ὡσαννὰ ἐν τοῖς ὑψίστοις. Ibid. 14 (p. 486): ἑαυτοὺς τῷ Θεῷ τῷ μόνῳ & ἀγεν-
νήτῳ Θεῷ, καὶ τῷ “Χριστῷ αὐτοῦ παραθώμεθα. Ibid. 15 (p. 486): πάντας ἡμᾶς
ἐπισυνάγαγε εἰς τὴν τῶν οὐρανῶν βασιλείαν, ἐν Χριστῷ᾽ Ιησοῦ τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν"
μεθ᾽ οὗ σοι δόξα, τιμὴ καὶ σέβας καὶ τῷ ᾿Αγίῳ Πνεύματι εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν.
Ibid. (p. 487): ὅτι σοι δόξα, αἶνος, μεγαλοπρέπεια, σέβας, προσκύνησις, καὶ τῷ
σῷ παιδὶ Ἰησοῦ τῷ Χριστῷ σον τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν καὶ Θεῷ καὶ “βασιλεῖ, καὶ τῷ
᾿Αγίῳ Πνεύματι, νῦν καὶ ἀεὶ καὶ εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων, ἀμήν.
[ LECT.
Eucharistic prayers to Fesus Christ. 480
Tersanctus and the Gloria in Excelsis it shews very remarkably,
by its presence in the Eucharistic Office, how ancient and deeply
rooted was the Christian practice of prayer to Jesus Christ.
For the Eucharist has a double aspect : it is a gift from heaven
to earth, but it is also an offering from earth to heaven. In the
Eucharist the Christian Church offers to the Eternal Father the
‘merits and Death of His Son Jesus Christ;’ since Christ
Himself has said, ‘Do this in remembrance of Me.’ The
canon of Carthage accordingly expresses the more ancient law
and instinct of the Church: ‘Cum altari adsistitur, semper ad
Patrem dirigatur oratioh.’ Yet so strong was the impulse to
offer prayer to Christ, that this canon is strictly observed by no
single liturgy, while some rites violate it with the utmost con-
sistency. The Mozarabic rite is a case in point: its collects
witness to the Church’s long struggle with, and final victory
over, the tenacious Arianism of Spaini. It might even appear
h Cone. Carth. iii. c. 23, Labbe, vol. ii. p. 1170.
* Taking a small part of the Mozarabic Missal, from Advent Sunday to
Epiphany inclusive, we find sixty cases in which prayer is offered, during the
altar service, to our Lord. These cases include (1) three ‘Illations’ or Pre-
faces, for the third Sunday in Advent, Circumcision, and Epiphany (and part
at least of this Mass for the Epiphany is considered by Dr. Neale in his
Essays on Liturgiology, p. 138, to be at least not later ‘than the middle of
the fourth century’) ; also (2) several prayers in which our Lord’s agency in
sanctifying the Eucharistic sacrifice, or even in receiving it, is implied—e. g.
“Jesu, bone Pontifex ...... sanctifica hance oblationem;’ or, in a ‘ Post
Pridie’ for fifth Sunday in Advent: ‘ Hec oblata Tibi . . . . benedicenda
assume libamina (... . tui Adventds gloriam, &c.).’? (Miss. Moz. p. 17.)
So again, on Mid-Lent Sunday: ‘Ecce, Jesu . . . deferimus Tibi hoc sacri-
ficium nostre redemptionis . ... . accipe hoc sacrificium;’ on which
Leslie quotes St. Fulgentius, de Fide, c. 19: ‘Cui (i.e. to the Incarnate
Son) cum Patre et Spiritu Sancto . . . . sacrificium panis et vini . . . . Ec-
clesia . . . . offerre non cessat.? Again, in the Mass for Easter Friday, in
an ‘ Alia Oratio:’ ‘Ecce, Jesu Mediator . ... hance Tibi afferimus victi-
mam sacrificii singularis.” From Palm Sunday to Easter Day inclusive, the
prayers offered to Christ, according to this Missal, are twenty-nine. The zeal
of the Spanish Church for the Divinity of the Holy Spirit is remarkably
shewn in a ‘Post Pridie’ for Whitsunday: ‘Suscipe ..... Spiritus
Sancte, omnipotens Deus, sacrificia ; on which Leslie’s note says, ‘ Ariani
negabant sacrificium debere Dei Filio offerri, aut Spiritui Sancto. . . . contra
quos Catholici Gotho-Hispani Filio et Spiritui Sancto sacrificium Eucharisti-
cum distincté offerunt ; and he proceeds to quote another passage from Ful-
gentius that worship and sacrifice were offered alike to all the Three Persons,
‘hoc est, Sancte Trinitati.’ The Gallican Liturgies, though in a less degree,
exhibit the same feature of Eucharistic prayer to our Lord. In the very old
series of fragmentary Masses, discovered by Mone, and edited by the Rev.
G. H. Forbes and Dr. Neale (in Ancient Liturgies of the Gallican Church,
ay i.), as the ‘Missgle Richenovense’ (from the abbey of Reichenau,
VII
390 Lucharistic prayers to Fesus Christ.
ὍΣ, OE a SS σα σον
to substitute for the rule laid down at Carthage, the distinct
but (considering the indivisible relation of the Three Holy
Persons to each other) perfectly consistent principle that the
Eucharist is offered to the Holy Trinity. This too would seem
to be the mind of the Eastern Church*. It is unnecessary to
observe that at this day, both in the Eucharistic Service and
elsewhere, prayer to Jesus Christ is as integral a feature of the
devotional system of the Church of England, as it was of the
where they were found), there are four cases of prayer to Christ ; one of
them, in the ninth Mass, being in a ‘ Contestatio’ or Preface. In the
‘Gothic’ (or southern-Gallic) Missal, prayer is made to Him about seventy-
six times. Some of these cases are very striking. Thus on Christmas Day,
‘Suscipe,.... Domine Jesu, omnipotens Deus, sacrificium landis ob-
latum.’ (Muratori, Lit. Rom. ii. 521; Forbes and Neale, p. 35.) The
‘TImmolatio’ (another term for the Contestatio) of Palm Sunday is ad-
dressed to Christ. The ‘Old Gallican’ Missal, belonging to central Gaul,
has sixteen cases of prayer to Him, including the ‘ Immolatio’ of Easter
Saturday. The ‘Gallican Sacramentary’ (called also the Sacramentarium
Bobiense, and by Mr. Forbes, the Missal of Besangon) has twenty-eight
such cases, including three Contestations. The Canon of the Ambrosian Rite
has prayers to Chrrist.
k The principle affirmed in the old Spanish rite, that the Eucharist was to
be offered to the whole Trinity, and therefore to the Son, is also affirmed in
the daily Liturgy of the Eastern Church. The prayer of the Cherubic
Hymn, which indeed was not originally a part of St. Chrysostom’s Liturgy,
having been inserted in it not earlier than J ustinian’s reign, has this con-
clusion: Σὺ γὰρ ef ὃ προσφέρων καὶ προσφερόμενος, Kal προσδεχόμενος, καὶ
διαδιδόμενος, Χριστὲ ὃ Θεὸς ἡμῶν, καὶ σοὶ τὴν δόξαν ἀναπέμπομεν κ.τ.λ.
About 1155 a dispute arose as to προσδεχόμενος, and Soterichus Panteugenus,
patriarch-elect of Antioch, who taught that the sacrifice was not offered to the
Son, but only to the Father and the Holy Spirit, was condemned in a council
at Constantinople, 1156. ‘This,’ says Neale (Introd. to East. Church,
i. 434), ‘ was the end of the controversy that for more than seven hundred
years had vexed the Church on the subject of the Incarnation.’ Between
this event and the condemnation of Monothelitism, Neale reckons the con-
demnation of Adoptionism, in 794. Compare also, in the present Liturgy
of St. James, a prayer just before the ‘Sancta Sanctis,’ addressed to our
Lord, in which the phrase occurs, ‘ Zhy holy and bloodless sacrifices.” The
same Liturgy has other prayers addressed to Him. In St. Mark’s Liturgy,
among other prayers to Christ, one runs thus, ‘Shew Thy face on this bread
and these cups.’ After the Lord’s Prayer, the Deacon says, ‘ Bow your heads
to Jesus,’ and the response is, ‘To Thee, O Lord.’ In fact, the East seems
never to have acepted the maxim that Eucharistic prayer was always addressed
to the Father. Our ‘ Prayer of St. Chrysostom,’ addressed to the Son, is the
‘prayer of the third Antiphon’ in Lit. St. Chrys. ; and the same rite, and the
Armenian, have the remarkable prayer, ‘ Attend, O Lord Jesus Christ our
ρα e eter ee and come to sanctify us,’ &c. In the Coptic Liturgy of
St. Basil, our Lord is besought to send down the Spirit on the elements.
The present Roman rite has three prayers to Christ between the ‘ Agnus Dei’
and the ‘ Panem ccelestem.’
5 | LECT.
Pagan observations on the worship of Fesus. 391
ancient, or as it is of the contemporary Use of Western
Christendom].
Nor was the worship of Jesus Christ by the early Christians
an esoteric element of their religious activity, obvious only to
those who were within the Church, who cherished her creed, and
who took part in her services. It was not an abstract doctrine,
but a living and notorious practice, daily observed by, and
recommended to, Christians. As such it challenged the ob-
servation of the heathen from a very early date. It is probable
indeed that the Jews, as notably on the occasion of St. Poly-
carp’s martyrdom™, drew the attention of pagan magistrates to
the worship of Jesus, in order to stir up contempt and hatred
against the Christians. But such a worship was of itself calcu-
lated to strike the administrative instincts of Roman magistrates
as an unauthorized addition to the registered religions of the
empire, even before they had discovered it to be irreconcileable
with public observance of the established state ceremonies, and
specially with any acknowledgment of the divinity of the reign-
ing emperor. The younger Pliny is drawing up a report for the
eye of his imperial master Trajan ; and he writes with the cold
impartiality of a pagan statesman who is permitting himself to
take a distant philosophical interest in the superstitions of the
lower orders. Some apostates from the Church had been
brought before his tribunal, and he had questioned them as to
the practices of the Christians in Asia Minor. It appeared that
on a stated day the Christians met before daybreak, and sang
among themselves, responsively, a hymn to Christ as God”.
Here it should be noted that Pliny is not recording a vague
report, but a definite statement, elicited from several persons in
cross-examination, moreover touching a point which, in dealing
with a Roman magistrate, they might naturally have desired
to keep in the background®. Again, the emperor Adrian, when
1 See Note F in Appendix. m Martyr. St. Polyc. c. 17.
n Plin. Ep. lib. x. ep. 97: ‘Alii ab indice nominati esse se Christianos
dixerunt, et mox negaverunt; fuisse quidem sed desiisse ; quidam ante
triennium, quidam ante plures annos, non nemo etiam ante viginti quoque.
Omnes et imaginem tuam, deorumque simulacra venerati sunt, li et Christo
maledixerunt. Adfirmabant autem, hanc fuisse summam vel culpe sue vel
erroris, quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire, carmenque Christo,
quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem, seque sacramento non in scelus aliquod
obstringere, sed ne furta, ne latrocinia, ne adulteria committerent.’
° That the ‘carmen’ was an incantation, or that Christ was saluted as a
hero, not as a Divine Person, are glosses upon the sense of this passage, rather
than its natural meaning. See Augusti, Denkwiirdigkeiten, tom. v. p. 33.
vil |
392 Sarcastic remarks of Lucian.
writing to Servian, describes the population of Alexandria as
divided between the worship of Christ and the worship of
Serapis?. That One Who had been adjudged by the law to
death as a criminal should receive Divine honours, must have
been sufficiently perplexing to the Roman official mind ; but it
was much less irritating to the statesmen than to the philoso-
phers. In his life of the fanatical cynic and apostate Christian,
Peregrinus Proteus, whose voluntary self-immolation he himself
witnessed at Olympia in A.D. 165, Lucian gives vent to the con-
temptuous sarcasm which was roused in him, and in men like
him, by the devotions of the Church. ‘The Christians,’ he
says, ‘are still worshipping that great man who was gibbeted
in Palestine4.’ He complains that the Christians are taught
that they stand to each other in the relation of brethren, as soon
as they have broken loose from the prevailing customs, and
have denied the gods of Greece, and have taken to the adoration
of that impaled Sophist of theirst. The Celsus with whom we
meet in the treatise of Origen may or may not have been the
friend of Lucian’. Celsus, it has been remarked, represents
a class of intellects which is constantly found among the
opponents of Christianity ; Celsus has wit and acuteness without
moral earnestness or depth of research ; he looks at things only
on the surface, and takes delight in constructing and putting
forward difficulties and contradictionst. The worship of our
Lord was certain to engage the perverted ingenuity of a mind of
this description ; and Celsus attacks the practice upon a variety
of grounds which are discussed by Origen. The general position
taken up by Celsus is that the Christians had no right to
denounce the polytheism of the pagan world, since their own
worship of Christ was essentially polytheistic. It was absurd
in the Christians, he contends, to point at the heathen gods as
idols, whilst they worshipped One Who was in a much more
wretched condition than the idols, and indeed was not even an
P Apud Lamprid. in vita Alex. Severi: ‘ab aliis Serapidem, ab aliis adorari
Christum.’
4 De Morte Peregrini, c. 11: τὸν μέγαν οὖν ἐκεῖνον ἔτι σέβουσιν ἄνθρωπον,
τὸν ἐν Παλαιστίνῃ ἀνασκολοπισθέντα.
τ Thid. c. 13: ἐπειδὰν ἅπαξ παραβάντες, θεοὺς μὲν Ἑλληνικοὺς ἀπαρνήσων-
ται, τὸν δ᾽ ἀνεσκολοπισμένον ἐκεῖνον σοφιστὴν αὐτῶν προσκυνῶσι.
* Neander decides in the negative (Ch. Hist. i. 225 sqq.), (1) on the
ground of the vehemence of the opponent of Origen, as contrasted with the
moderation of the friend of Lucian ; (2) because the friend of Lucian was
an Epicurean, the antagonist of Origen a neo-Platonist.
τ See the remarks of Neander, Ch. Hist. vol. i. p. 227, ed. Bohn.
[ LECT.
fierce indignation of Celsus. 393
idol at all, since He was a mere corpse%. The Christians, he
urges, worshipped no God, no, not even a demon, but only
a dead man*. If the Christians were bent upon religious in-
novations ; if Hercules, and sculapius, and the gods who had
been of old held in honour, were not to their taste; why could
they not have addressed themselves to such distinguished mortals
as Orpheus, or Anaxarchus, or Epictetus, or the Sybil? Nay,
would it not have been better to have paid their devotions to
some of their own prophets, to Jonah under the gourd, or to
Daniel in the lion’s den, than to a man who had lived an infa-
mous life, and had died a miserable deathy? In thus honouring
a Jew Who had been apprehended and put to death, the Chris-
tians were no better than the Getee who worshipped Zamolxis,
than the Cilicians who adored Mopsus, than the Acarnanians
who prayed to Amphilochus, than the Thebans with their cultus
of Amphiaraus, than the Lebadians who were so devoted to
Trophonius?. Was it not absurd in the Christians to ridicule
the heathen for the devotion which they paid to Jupiter on the
score of the exhibition of his sepulchre in Crete, while they
themselves adored One Who was Himself only a tenant of the
tomb2? Above all, was not the worship of Christ fatal to the
Christian doctrine of the Unity of God? If the Christians
really worshipped no God but One, then their reasoning against
the heathen might have had force in it. But while they offer an
excessive adoration to this Person Who has but lately appeared
in the world, how can they think that they commit no offence
against God, by giving these Divine honours to His Servant? ἢ
ἃ Contr. Cels. vii. 40, p. 722: ἵνα μὴ παντάπασιν ἦτε καταγέλαστοι τοὺς
μὲν ἄλλους, τοὺς δεικνυμένους θεοὺς, ὧς εἴδωλα βλασφημοῦντες' τὸν δὲ καὶ
αὐτῶν ὡς ἀληθῶς εἰδώλων ἀθλιώτερον, καὶ μηδὲ εἴδωλον ἔτι, ἀλλ᾽ ὄντως νεκρὸν,
σέβοντες, καὶ Πατέρα ὅμοιον αὐτῷ ζητοῦντες.
x bid. vii. 68, p. 742: διελέγχονται σαφῶς οὐ Θεὸν, ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ δαίμονα
ἀλλὰ νεκρὸν σέβοντες.
Υ Ibid. vii. 53, p. 732: πόσῳ δ᾽ ἦν ὑμῖν ἄμεινον, ἐπειδή γε καινοτομῆσαί
τι ἐπεθυμήσατε, περὶ ἄλλον τινὰ τῶν γενναίως ἀποθανόντων, καὶ θεῖον μῦθον
δέξασθαι δυναμένων, σπουδάσαι ; Φέρε, εἰ μὴ ἤρεσκεν Ἡρακλῆς, καὶ ᾿Ασκλη-
mids, καὶ οἱ πάλαι δεδοξασμένοι, ᾿᾽Ορφέα εἴχετε κιτ.λ. Cf. 57.
2. Tbid. iii. 34, p. 469: μετὰ ταῦτα “παραπλήσιον ἡμᾶς οἴεται “πεποιηκέναι,"
τὸν (ὥς φησιν 6 Κέλσος) ἁλόντα καὶ ἀποθανόντα θρησκεύοντας,᾽ τοῖς Γέταις
σέβουσι τὸν Ζάμολξιν, καὶ Κίλιξι τὸν Μόψον, καὶ ᾿Ακαρνᾶσι τὸν ᾿Αμφίλοχον,
καὶ Θηβαίοις τὸν ᾿Ασφιάρεων, καὶ Λεβαδίοις τὸν Τροφώνιον.
ἃ Tbid. iii. 43, p. 475: μετὰ ταῦτα λέγει περὶ ἡμῶν “ ὅτι καταγελῶμεν
τῶν προσκυνούντων τὸν Δία, ἐπεὶ τάφος αὐτοῦ ἐν Κρήτῃ δείκνυται" καὶ οὐδὲν
ἧττον σέβομεν τὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ τάφου᾽ K.T.A.
Ὁ Ibid. viii. 12, p. 750: δόξαι δ᾽ ἄν τις ἐξῆς τούτοις πιθανόν τι καθ᾽ ἡμῶν
vit |
394 The worshtp of Christ defended by Origen,
In his replies Origen entirely admits the fact upon which
Celsus comments in this lively spirit of raillery. He does not
merely admit that prayer to Christ was the universal practice of
the Church ; he energetically justifies it. When confronting the
heathen opponent of his Master’s honour, Origen writes as the
Christian believer, rather than as the philosophizing Alex-
andrian®. He deals with the language of Celsus patiently and
in detail. The objects of heathen worship were unworthy of
worship ; the Jewish prophets had no claim to it; Christ was
worshipped as the Son of God, as God Himself. ‘If Celsus,’
he says, ‘had understood the meaning of this, “ I and the Father
are One,” or what the Son of God says in His prayer, “As I and
Thou are One,” he would never have imagined that we worship
any but the God Who is over all ; for Christ says, ‘The Father
is in Me and I in Him4,”’ Origen then proceeds, although by
a questionable analogy, to guard this language against a Sabellian
construction : the worship addressed to Jesus was addressed to
Him as personally distinct from the Father. Origen indeed, in
vindicating this worship of our Lord, describes it elsewhere as
prayer in an improper sense®, on the ground that true prayer is
offered to the Father only. This has been explained to relate
only to the mediatorial aspect of His Manhood as our High
Priestf; and Bishop Bull further understands him to argue that
the Father, as the Source of Deity, is ultimately the Object of
all adorations. But Origen entirely admits the broad fact that
Jesus received Divine honours ; and he defends such worship of
Jesus as being an integral element of the Church’s life).
λέγειν ἐν τῷ, “ Εἰ μὲν δὴ μηδένα ἄλλον ἐθεράπευον οὗτοι πλὴν ἕνα Θεὸν, ἣν ἄν
τις αὐτοῖς ἴσως πρὸς τοὺς ἄλλους ἀτενὴς λόγος᾽ νυνὶ δὲ τὸν ἔναγχος φανέντα
τοῦτον ὑπερθρησκεύουσι, καὶ ὕμως οὐδὲν πλημμελεῖν νομίζουσι περὶ τὸν Θεὸν, εἰ
καὶ ὑπηρέτης αὐτοῦ θεραπευθήσεται.᾽
ς See however Contr. (615. v.11, sub fin. p. 586, where, nevertheless, the con-
clusion of the passage shews his real mind in De Orat. c. 15, quoted above.
ἃ Contr. Cels. viii. 12, p. 750: εἴπερ νενοήκει 6 Κέλσος τό" “᾿Εγὼ καὶ ὃ
Πατὴρ ἕν ἐσμεν" καὶ τὸ ἐν εὐχῇ εἰρημένον ὑπὸ τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν τῷ" “Ὡς
ἐγὼ καὶ σὺ ἕν ἐσμεν, οὐκ ἂν deta ἡμᾶς καὶ ἄλλον θεραπεύειν, παρὰ τὸν ἐπὶ
πᾶσι Θεόν. “ Ὁ γὰρ Πατὴρ, φησὶν, ‘ev ἐμοὶ, κἀγὼ ἐν τῷ Πατρί.᾽
6 Ibid. v. 4: τῆς περὶ προσευχῆς κυριολεξίας καὶ καταχρήσεως.
ἢ [bid. viii. 13, 16. ‘ Loquitur de Christo,’ says Bishop Bull, ‘ ut Summo
Sacerdote.” Def. Fid. Nic. ii. 9, 15.
g Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. sect. ii. c. 9, ἢ. 15: ‘Sin Filium intueamur relate,
qua Filius est, et ex Deo Patre trahit originem, tum rursus certum est,
cultum et venerationem omnem, quem ipsi deferimus, ad Patrem redundare,
in ipsumque, ut πηγὴν θεότητος ultimo referri.’
h See Reading’s note on Orig. de Orat. § 15.
[ LECT.
by Lactantius and Arnobius. 395
The stress of heathen criticism, however, still continued to
be directed against the adoration of our Lord. ‘Our gods,’ so
ran the heathen language of a later day, ‘are not displeased
with you Christians for worshipping the Almighty God. But
you maintain the Deity of One Who was born as a man, and
Who was put to death by the punishment of the cross (a mark
of infamy reserved for criminals of the worst kind) ; you believe
Him to be still alive, and you adore Him with daily suppli-
cationsi,” ‘The heathen,’ observes Lactantius, ‘throw in our
teeth the Passion of Christ ; they say that we worship a Man,
and a Man too Who was put to death by men under circum-
stances of ignominy and torture.’ Lactantius and Arnobius
reply to the charge in precisely the same manner. They admit
the truth of: Christ’s Humanity, and the shame of His Passion ;
but they earnestly assert His literal and absolute Godhead.
However the heathen might scorn, the Godhead of Christ was
the great certainty upon which the eye of His Church was
persistently fixed ; it was the truth by which her practice of
adoring Him was necessarily determined |,
If the Gospel had only enjoined the intellectual acceptance of
some philosophical theistic theory, its popular impotence would
have earned the toleration which is easily secured by cold,
abstract, passionless religions. In that case it would never
have provoked the earnest scorn of a Lucian or of a Celsus.
They would have condoned or passed it by, even if they had
i Arnob. adv. Gentes, i. 36: ‘ Sed non idcirco Dii vobis infesti sunt, quod
omnipotentem colatis Deum: sed quod hominem natum, et (quod personis
infame est vilibus) crucis supplicio interemptum, et Deum fuisse contenditis,
et superesse adhuc creditis, et quotidianis supplicationibus adoratis.’
k Lact. Div. Inst. iv. 16: ‘ Venio nunc ad ipsam Passionem, que velut
opprobrium nobis objectari solet, quod et hominem, et ab hominibus insigni
supplicio adfectum et excruciatum colamus: ut doceam eam ipsam Passionem
ab Eo cum magn et divind ratione susceptam, et in δὰ sola et virtutem, et
veritatem, et sapientiam contineri.’
1 Arnob. adv. Gentes, i. 42: ‘Natum hominem colimus. LEtiamsi esset
id verum, locis ut in superioribus dictum est, tamen pro multis et tam liber-
alibus donis, quze ab eo profecta in nobis sunt, Deus dici appellarique deberet.
Cum vero Deus sit re certa, et sine ullius rei dubitationis ambiguo, inficiaturos
arbitramini nos esse, quam maxime illum a nobis coli, et presidem nostri
corporis nuncupari? Ergone, inquiet aliquis furens, iratus, et percitus, Deus
ille est Christus? Deus, respondebimus, et interiorum potentiarum Deus ;
et quod magis infidos acerbissimis doloribus torqueat, rei maxime causa
a summo Rege ad nos missus.’ Lact. Div. Inst. iv. 29: ‘Quum dicimus
Deum Patrem et Deum Filium, non diversum dicimus, nec utrumque secer-
nimus: siquidem nec Pater sine Filio nuncupari, nec Filius potest sine Patre
generari.’
VII |
396 Pagan caricature of the adoration of Fesus.
not cared to patronize it. But the continuous adoration of
Jesus by His Church made the neutrality of such men as these
morally impossible. They knew what it meant, this worship of
the Crucified ; it was too intelligible, too soul-enthralling, to be
ignored or to be tolerated. And the lowest orders of the popu-
lace were for many long years, just as intelligently hostile to it
as were the philosophers. Witness that remarkable caricature
of the adoration of our crucified Lord, which was discovered not
long since beneath the ruins of the Palatine palace™. It is a
rough sketch, traced, in all probability, by the hand of some
pagan slave in one of the earliest years of the third century of
our era®, A human figure with an ass’s head is represented as
m See ‘Deux Monuments des Premiers Siécles de l’Eglise expliqués, par
le P. Raphaél Garrucci,’ Rome, 1862. He describes the discovery and
appearance of this ‘Graffito Blasfemo’ as follows:—‘ Comme tant d’autres
ruines, le palais des Césars récélait aussi de nombreuses inscriptions dictées
par le caprice. Aprés avoir recueilli celles qui couvraient les parois de toute
une salle, nous arrivimes ἃ trouver quelques paroles grecques, inscrites au
sommet d’un mur enseveli sous les décombres. Ce fut 14 un précieux indice
qui nous fit poursuivre nos recherches. Bientét apparut le contour d’une téte
d’animal sur un corps humain, dont les bras étaient étendus comme ceux des
orantes dans les Catacombes. La découverte paraissait avoir un haut intérét:
aussi Mgr. Milesi, Ministre des travaux publics, nous autorisa-t-il, avec sa
bienveillance accoutumée, ἃ faire enlever la terre et les débris qui encom-
braient cette chambre, le rr Novembre, 1857. Nous ne tard&mes point ἃ
contempler une image que ces ruines avaient conservée intacte 4 travers les
siécles, et dont nous pimes relever un calque fidéle.
‘Elle réprésente une croix, dont la forme est celle du Taw grec, surmonté
@une cheville qui porte une tablette. Un homme est attaché & cette croix,
mais la téte de cette figure n’est point humaine, c’est celle du cheval ou
plutot de Yonagre. Le crucifié est revétu de la tunique de dessous, que les
anciens désignaient sous le nom d’interula, et d’une autre tunique sans
ceinture ; des bandes appelées crurales enveloppent la partie inférieure des
jambes. A la gauche du spectateur, on voit un autre personnage, qui sous le
méme vétement, semble converser avec la monstrueuse image, et éléve vers
elle sa main gauche, dont les doigts sont separés. A droite, au dessus de la
croix, se lit la lettre Ὑ ; et au dessous, l’inscription suivante :
AAEZAMENOZ SEBETE (pour SEBETAI)
©EON
Alexamenos adore son Dieu.’
For the reference to this interesting paper I am indebted to the kindness
of Professor Westwood. See also Archdeacon Wordsworth’s Tour in Italy,
li, p. 143.
« P. Garucci fixes this date on the following grounds: (1) Inscriptions on
tiles and other fragments of this part of the Palatine palace shew that it was
constructed during the reign of the Emperor Adrian. The dates 123 and 126
are distinctly ascertained. (Deux Monuments, &c., p. 10.) The inscription
therefore is not earlier than this date. (2) The calumny of the worship of
the ass’s head by the Christians is not mentioned by any of the Apologists
[ LECT.
Lhe ‘ graffito blasfemo’ of the Palatine. 397
fixed to a cross ; while another figure in a tunic stands on one
side. This figure is addressing himself to the crucified monster,
and is making a gesture which was the customary pagan. ex-
pression of adoration. Underneath there runs a rude inscrip-
tion: Alexamenos adores his God. Here we are face to face with
a touching episode of the life of the Roman Church in the days
of Severus or of Caracalla. As under Nero, so, a century and a
half later, there were worshippers of Christ in the household of
the Cesar. But the paganism of the later date was more in-
telligently and bitterly hostile to the Church than the paganism
which had shed the blood of the Apostles. The Gnostic invec-
tive which attributed to the Jews the worship of an ass, was
applied by the pagans with facile indifference both to Jews and
Christians. Tacitus attributes the custom to a legend respecting
services rendered by wild asses to the Israelites in the desert o ;
‘and so, I suppose,’ observes Tertullian, ‘it was thence presumed
that we, as bordering on the Jewish religion, were taught to
worship such a figure.’ A story of this kind once current, was
who precede Tertullian, nor by any who succeed Minucius Felix ; which may
be taken to prove that this misrepresentation of Christian worship was only
in vogue among pagan critics in Rome and Africa at the close of the second
and at the beginning of the third century. (3) It is certain from Tertullian
that there were Christians in the imperial palace during the reign of the
_ Emperor Severus: ‘Even Severus himself, the father of Antoninus, was
mindful of the Christians ; for he sought out Proculus a Christian, who was
surnamed Torpacion, the steward of Euodia, who had once cured him by
means of oil, and kept him in his own palace, even to his death: whom also
Antoninus very well knew, nursed as he was upon Christian milk.’ Ad Scapu-
lam, 6. 4. Caracalla’s playmate was a Christian boy; see Dr. Pusey’s note
on Tertull. p. 148, Oxf. Tr. Libr. Fath. (4) ‘Rien dans le monument du
Palatin ne contredit cette opinion, ni la paléographie, qui trahit la méme
époque, tant ἃ cause de l’usage simultané de l’r carré et de l’e semicirculaire
dans la méme inscription, que par la forme générale des lettres; ni moins
encore lortographe, car on sait que le changement de Par en E a plus d’un
exemple ἃ Rome, méme sur les monuments grecs du régne d’Auguste. Enfin
les autres inscriptions grecques de cette chambre, qui sans préjudice pour
notre thése, pourraient étre d’une autre temps, ne font naitre aucune difficulté
sérieuse, étant parfaitement semblables ἂν celle dont nous nous occupons.’
Garucci, Ibid. p. 13.
° Tac. Hist. v.c. 4. He had it probably from Apion; see Josephus, c.
Ap. ii. 10. It is repeated by Plutarch, Symp. iv. 5: τὸν ὄνον ἀναφήναντα
αὐτοῖς πηγὴν ὕδατος τιμῶσι. And by Democritus: Χρυσῆν ὄνου κεφαλὴν
προσεκύνουν. Apud Suidas, voc. *Iovdds.
P Apolog. 16. Tertullian refutes Tacitus by referring to his own account
of the examination of the Jewish temple by Cn. Pompeius after his capture of
Jerusalem ; Pompey ‘found no image’ in the temple. For proof that the
early Christians were constantly identified with the Jews by the pagan world,
see Dr. Pusey’s note on Tert. ubi supra, in the Oxf, Tr. Libr. Fath,
vit |
98. Sesus Christ adored by early Martyrs.
easily adapted to the purposes of a pagan caricaturist, Whether
from ignorance of the forms of Christian worship, or in order to
make his parody of it more generally intelligible to the pagan
public, the draughtsman has ascribed to Alexamenos the gestures
of a heathen devotee 4, But the real object of this coarse cari-
cature is too plain to be mistaken. Jesus Christ, we may be sure,
had other confessors and worshippers in the imperial palace
who knelt side by side with Alexamenos. The moral pressure
of the advancing Church was making itself felt throughout
all ranks of pagan society; ridicule was invoked to do the
work of argument ; and the social persecution which crowned
all true Christian devotion was often only the prelude to a
sterner test of that loyalty to a crucified Lord, which could meet
heathen scorn with the strength of patient faith, and heathen
cruelty with the courage of heroic endurance.
The death-cry of the martyrs must have familiarized the
heathen mind with the honour paid to the Redeemer by Chris-
tians. Of the worship offered in the Catacombs, of the stern
yet tender discipline whereby the early Church stimulated,
guided, moulded the heavenward aspirations of her children,
paganism knew, could know, nothing. But the bearing and
the exclamations of heroic servants of Christ when arraigned
before the tribunals of the empire, or when exposed to a death
of torture and shame in the amphitheatres, were matters of
public notoriety. The dying prayers of St. Stephen expressed
the instinct, if they did not provoke the imitation, of many a
martyr of later days. What matters it to Blandina of Lyons
that her pagan persecutors have first entangled her limbs in
the meshes of a large net, and then have exposed her to the
fury of a wild bull? She is insensible to pain ; she is entranced
in a profound communion with Christ’. What matters it to
that servant-boy in Palestine, Porphyry, that his mangled body
is ‘committed to a slow fire?’ He does but call more earnestly
in his death-struggle upon Jesus’. Felix, an African bishop,
after a long series. of persecutions, has been condemned to be
beheaded at Venusium for refusing to give up the sacred books
4 Job xxxi. 27. St. Hieronym. in Oseam, c. 13: ‘Qui adorant solent
deosculari manum suam.’ Comp. Minuc. Fel. Oct. c. 2.
r Kus. Hist. Ecc. v. 1: εἰς γύργαθον βληθεῖσα, ταύρῳ παρεβλήθη" καὶ ἱκανῶς
ἀναβληθεῖσα πρὸς τοῦ ζώου, μηδὲ αἴσθησιν ἔτι τῶν συμβαινόντων ἔχουσα διὰ
τὴν ἐλπίδα καὶ ἐποχὴν τῶν πεπιστευμένων καὶ ὁμίλιαν πρὸς Χριστόν.
8 Tbid. Mart. Pal. 11: καθαψαμένης αὐτοῦ τῆς φλογὸς ἀπέῤῥηξε φωνὴν, τὸν
Tidy τοῦ Θεοῦ ᾿Ιησοῦν βοηθὸν émiBodmeve..
[ LEcT.
The Martyrs pray to Fesus in thetr agony. 3099
to the proconsul. ‘Raising his eyes to heaven, he said with a
clear voice .. . “O Lord God of heaven and earth, Jesu Christ,
to Thee do I bend my neck by way of sacrifice, O Thou Who
abidest for ever, to Whom belong glory and majesty, world
without end. Ament.”’ Theodotus of Ancyra has been betrayed
by the apostate Polychronius, and is joining in a last prayer with
the sorrowing Church. ‘Lord Jesu Christ,’ he cries, ‘Thou
Hope of the hopeless, grant that I may finish the course of my
conflict, and offer the shedding of my blood as a libation and
sacrifice, to the relief of all those who suffer for Thee. Do Thou
lighten their burden ; and still this tempest of persecution, that
all who believe in Thee may enjoy rest and quietness¥,’ And
afterwards, in the extremity of his torture, he prays thus: ‘Lord
Jesu Christ, Thou Hope of the hopeless, hear my prayer, and
assuage this agony, seeing that for Thy Name’s sake I suffer
thus*.’ And when the pain had failed to bend his resolution,
and the last sentence had been pronounced by the angry judge,
‘O Lord Jesu Christ,’ the martyr exclaims, ‘Thou Maker of
heaven and earth, Who forsakest not them that put their hope
in Thee, I give Thee thanks for that Thou hast made me meet
to be citizen of Thy heavenly city, and to have a share in Thy
kingdom. I give Thee thanks, that Thou hast given me strength
to conquer the dragon, and to bruise his head. Give rest unto
Thy servants, and stay the fierceness of the enemies in my
* Ruinart, Acta Martyrum Sincera, ed. Verone, 1731, p. 314. Acta
S. Felicis Episcopi, anno 303: ‘Felix Episcopus, elevans oculos in coelum,
clara voce dixit, Deus, gratias Tibi. Quinquaginta et sex annos habeo in hoc
seculo. Virginitatem custodivi, Evangelia servavi, fidem et veritatem pree-
dicavi. Domine Deus celi et terre, Jesu Christe, Tibi cervicem meam ad
victimam flecto, Qui permanes in ceternum ; Cui est claritas et magnificentia
in seecula seculorum. Amen.
ἃ Ibid. p. 303, Passio S. Theodoti Ancyrani, et septem virginum: ‘Theo-
dotus, valedicens fratribus, jubensque ne ab oratione cessarent, sed Deum
orarent ut corona ipsi obtingeret, preeparavit se ad verbera sustinenda. Simul
igitur perstiterunt in oratione cum martyre, qui prolixe precatus, tandem ait:
Domine Jesu Christe, spes desperatorum, da mihi certaminis cursum perficere,
et sanguinis effusionem pro sacrificio et libatione offerre, omnium eorum caust
qui propter Te afliguntur. Alleva onus eorum ; et compesce tempestatem, ut
requie et profundd tranquillitate potiantur omnes qui in Te credunt.’
x Ibid. p. 307: ‘ Videns ergo Preses se frustra laborare, et fatigatos
tortores deficere ; depositum de ligno jussit super ignitas testulas collocari.
Quibus etiam interiora corporis penetrantibus gravissimum dolorem sentiens
Theodotus, oravit dicens, Domine Jesu Christe, spes desperatorum, exaudi
orationem meam, et cruciatum hune mitiga ; quia propter Nomen Sanctum
Tuum ἰδέα patior?
VII |
“δου αν σε π΄ “ι΄ στὰ SS STS: νυν τ τ - -----. -- .΄
400 The Martyrs pray to Fesus mm ther agony.
person. Give peace unto Thy Church, and set her free from
the tyranny of the devil ¥’
Thus it was that the martyrs prayed and died. Their voices
reach us across the chasm of intervening centuries ; but time
cannot impair the moral majesty, or weaken the accents of their
strong and simple conviction. One after another their piercing
words, in which the sharpest human agony is so entwined with
a superhuman faith, fall upon our ears. * O Christ, Thou Son
of God, deliver Thy servants’. ‘O Lord Jesu Christ, we are
Christians ; Thee do we serve; Thou art our Hope; Thou art
the Hope of Christians; O God Most Holy, O God Most
Hich, Ὁ God Almighty®’ ‘O Christ,’ cries a martyr again
and again amidst his agonies, ‘O Christ, let me not be con-
foundedb, ‘Help, I pray Thee, O Christ, have pity. Pre-
serve my soul, guard my spirit, that I be not ashamed. I pray
Thee, O Christ, grant me power of endurance®.’ ‘I pray Thee,
Christ, hear me. I thank Thee, my God ; command that I be
y Ruinart, Acta, p. 307: ‘Cumque ad locum pervenissent, orare coepit
Martyr in hee verba: Domine Jesu Christe, cali terraeque conditor, qui non
derelinquis sperantes in Te, gratias Tibi ago, quia fecisti me dignum coclestis
Tuce Urbis civem, Tuique regni consortem. Gratias Tibi ago, quia donasti
mihi draconem vincere, et caput ejus conterere. Da requiem servis Tuis, atque
in me siste violentiam tnimicorum. Da Ecclesie Tuc pacem, eruens eam a
tyrannide diabolt.’
z Ibid. p. 340; Acta SS. Saturnini, Dativi, et aliorum plurimorum
martyrum in Africa, a. 304: ‘Thelica martyr, media de ips& carnificum rabie
hujusmodi preces Domino cum gratiarum actione effundebat : Deo gratias.
In Nomine Tuo, Christe Dei Fili, libera servos Tuos.’
a [bid.: ‘Cum ictibus ungularum concussa fortius latera sulcarentur, proflu-
ensque sanguinis unda violentis tractibus emanaret, Proconsulem sibi dicentem
audivit: Incipies sentire que vos pati oporteat. Et adjecit: Ad gloriam. Gra-
tias ago Deo regnorum. Apparet regnum eternum, regnum incorruptum. Do-
mine Jesu Christe, Christiani sumus ; Tibi servimus ; Tu es spes nostra; Tues
spes Christianorum ; Deus sanctissime ; Deus altissime ; Deus omnipotens.’
Ὁ Ibid. p. 341: ‘ Advolabant truces manus jussis velocibus leviores, secre-
taque pectoris, disruptis cutibus, visceribusque divulsis, nefandis adspectibus
profanorum adnexa crudelitate pandebant. Inter hac Martyris mens immo-
bilis perstat: et licet membra rumpantur, divellantur viscera, latera dissi-
pentur, animus tamen martyris integer, inconcussusque perdurat. Denique
dignitatis suze memor Dativus, qui et Senator, tali voce preces Domino sub
carnifice rabiente fundebat: O Christe Domine, non confundar.’ Ibid. p. 342:
‘At martyr, inter vulnerum cruciatus seevissimos pristinam suam repetens
orationem : Rogo, ait, Christe, non confundar.’
ὁ Ibid. p. 342: ‘Spectabat interea Dativus lanienam corporis sui potius
quam dolebat: et cujus ad Dominum mens animusque pendebat, nihil dol-
orem corporis estimabat, sed tantum ad Dominum precabatur, dicens ; Sub-
vent, rogo, Christe, habe pietatem. Serva animam meam ; custodi spiritum
mewm ut non confundar. Rogo, Christe, da sufferentiam.’
[ LECT.
Lhe Martyrs pray to $esus in their agony. 401
beheaded. I pray Thee, Christ, have mercy ; help me, Thou
Son of God4’ {1 pray Thee, O Christ : all praise to Thee.
Deliver me, O Christ ; I suffer in Thy Name. I suffer for a
short while ; I suffer with a willing mind, O Christ my Lord:
let me not be confoundede,’
Or listen to such an extract from an early document as the
following :—‘ Calvisianus, interrupting Euplius, said, “Let Eu-
plius, who hath not in compliance with the edict of the emperors
given up the sacred writings, but readeth them to the people, be
put to the torture.” And while he was being racked, Euplius
said, “I thank Thee, O Christ. Guard Thou me, who for Thee
am suffering thus.” Calvisianus the consular said, “Cease, Eu-
plius, from this folly. Adore the gods, and thou shalt be set
at liberty.” Euplius said, “I adore Christ ; I utterly hate the
demons. Do what thou wilt: I am a Christian. Long have
I desired’ what now I suffer. Do what thou wilt. Add yet
other tortures : I am a Christian.” After he had been tortured
a long while, the executioners were bidden hold their hands,
And Calvisianus said, “Unhappy man, adore the gods. Pay
worship to Mars, Apollo, and Asculapius.” Euplius said,
“1 worship the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. I adore
the Holy Trinity, beside Whom there is no God. Perish the
gods who did not make heaven and earth, and all that is in
them. I ama Christian.” Calvisianus the prefect said, “ Offer
sacrifice, if thou wouldest be set at liberty.” Euplius said, “I
sacrifice myself only to Christ my God: more than this I can-
not do. Thy efforts are to no purpose; I am a Christian.”
Calvisianus gave orders that he should be tortured again more
severely. And while he was being tortured, Euplius said,
“Thanks to Thee, O Christ. Help me, O Christ. For Thee do
I suffer thus, O Christ.” And he said this repeatedly. And as
his strength gradually failed him, he went on repeating these
or other exclamations, with his lips only—his voice was gone f)’
4 Acta, p. 342: ‘ Ne inter moras torquentium exclusa anima corpus supplicio
pendente desereret, tali voce Dominum presbyter precabatur : Rogo Christe,
exaudt me. Gratias Tibi ago, Deus: jube me decollari. ogo Christe,
miserere. Det Fili, subveni.
© Ibid. p. 343: ‘Emeritus martyr ait: ..... Rogo, Christe, Tibi lau-
gles: libera me Christe, patior in Nomine Tuo. Breviter patior, libenter
vir | pd
402 Prayers of the martyrs not chance ‘ejaculations.
You cannot, as I have already urged, dismiss from your con-
sideration such prayers as these, on the ground of their being
‘mere ejaculations.’ Do serious men, who know they are dying,
‘ejaculate’ at random? Is it at the hour of death that a man
would naturally innovate upon the devotional habits of a life-
time? Is it at such an hour that he would make hitherto un-
attempted enterprises into the unseen world, and address himself
to beings with whom he had not before deemed it lawful or
possible to hold spiritual communion? Is not the reverse of
this supposition notoriously the case? Surely, those of us who
have witnessed the last hours of the servants of Christ cannot
hesitate as to the answer. As the soul draws nigh to the gate
of death, the solemnities of the eternal future are wont to cast
their shadows upon the thought and heart ; and whatever is
deepest, truest, most assured and precious, thenceforth engrosses
every power. At that dread yet blessed hour, the soul clings
with a new intensity and deliberation to the most certain truths,
to the most prized and familiar words. The mental creations of
an intellectual over-subtlety, or of a thoughtless enthusiasm, or
of an unbridled imagination, or of a hidden perversity of will,
or of an unsuspected unreality of character, fade away or are
discarded. Τὸ gaze upon the naked truth is the one necessity ;
to plant the feet upon the Rock Itself, the supreme desire, in
that awful, searching, sifting moment. Often, too, at a man’s
last hour, will habit strangely assert its mysterious power of
recovering, as if from the graye, thoughts and memories which
seemed to have been lost for ever. Truths which have been
half forgotten or quite forgotten since childhood, and prayers
which were learned at a mother’s knee, return upon the soul
with resistless persuasiveness and force, while the accumula-
tions of later years disappear and are lost sight of Depend
Dixit Calvisianus Consularis : Desiste, Eupli, ab insania hac. Deos adora
et liberaberis. Euplius dixit: Adoro Christum, detestor demonia. Fae
quod vis, Ohristianus swum. Hec diu optavi. Fac quod vis. Adde alia,
Christianus sum. Postquam diu tortus esset, jussi sunt cessare carnifices.
Et dixit Calvisianus: Miser, adora deos: Martem cole, Apollinem et discu-
lapium. Dixit Euplius: Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum adoro:
Sanctam Trinitatem adoro, preter quam non est Deus. Pereant dit qui non
fecerunt celum et terram, et que im ets sunt. Christianus sum. Calvisi-
anus prefectus dixit: Sacrifica, si vis liberari. Euplius dixit: Sacrifico,
modo CHRISTO DEO me ipsum : quid ultra faciam, non habeo. Frustra
conaris: Christianus sum. Calvisianus precepit iterum torqueri acrits.
Cumque torqueretur, dixit Euplius: Gratias Tibi, Christe. Succurre Christe.
Propter Te hee patior Christe. Et dixit sepius. Et deficientibus viribus,
dicebat labiis tantum, absque voce hzec vel alia,’
[LECT,
Lhe Arian invocation of Christ 403
upon it, the martyrs prayed to Jesus in their agony because they
had prayed to Him long before, many of them from infancy ;
because they knew from experience that such prayers were
blessed and answered. They had been taught to pray to Him ;
they had joined in prayers to Him ; they had been taunted and
ridiculed for praying to Him ; they had persevered in praying
to Him ; and when at last their hour of trial and of glory came,
they had recourse to the prayers which they knew full well to be
the secret of their strength, and those prayers carried them on
through their agony, to the crown beyond it.
And, further, you will have remarked that the worship of
Jesus by the martyrs was full of the deepest elements of
worship. It was made up of trust, of resignation, of self-
surrender, of self-oblation. Nothing short of a belief in the
absolute Godhead of Jesus could justify such worship. The
Homoousion was its adequate justification. Certainly the Arians
worshipped our Lord, although they rejected the Homoousion,
So clear were the statements of Scripture, so strong and so
universal was the tradition of Christendom, that Arianism could
not resist the claims of a practice which was nevertheless at
variance with its true drift and principle. For, as St. Atha-
nasius pointed out, the Arians did in reality worship one whom
they believed to be a being distinct from the Supreme God.
The Arians were creature-worshippers not less than the heathen δ.
Some later Arians appear to have attempted to retort the charge
of creature-worship by pointing to the adoration of our Lord’s
Humanity in the Catholic Church. But, as St. Athanasius
explains, our Lord’s Manhood was adored, not as a distinct and
individual Being, but only as inseparably joined to the ador-
able Person of the Everlasting Word). ΤῸ refuse to adore
Christ’s Manhood was to imply that after the incarnation men
could truly conceive of It as separate from Christ’s Eternal
Personi, There was no real analogy between this worship and
5. St. Athanas. Epist. ad Adelphium, § 3: od κτίσμα προσκυνοῦμεν, μὴ
γένοιτο, ἐθνικῶν γὰρ καὶ ᾿Αρειανῶν ἣ τοιαύτη πλάνη" ἀλλὰ τὸν Κύριον τῆς κτί-
σεως σαρκωθέντα τὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγον προσκυνοῦμεν.
Ὁ Ibid.: εἰ γὰρ καὶ ἡ σὰρξ αὐτὴ καθ᾽ ἑαυτὴν μέρος ἐστὶ τῶν κτισμάτων, ἀλλὰ
Θεοῦ γέγονε σῶμα. καὶ οὔτε τὸ τοιοῦτον σῶμα καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸ διαιροῦντες ἀπὸ τοῦ
Λόγου προσκυνοῦμεν, οὔτε τὸν Λόγον προσκυνῆσαι θέλοντες μακρύνομεν αὐτὸν
ἀπὸ τῆς σαρκός" ἀλλ᾽ εἰδότες, καθὰ προείπομεν, τὸ “ ὁ Λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο."
τοῦτον καὶ ἐν σαρκὶ γενόμενον ἐπιγινώσκομεν Θεόν.
1 Ibid. : τίς τοιγαροῦν οὕτως ἄφρων ἐστὶν ὡς λέγειν τῷ Κυρίῳ, ἀπόστα ἀπὸ
τοῦ σώματος ἵνα σε προσκυνήσω; K.T.A. Compare Ibid. § 5: ἵνα καὶ τολ-
μῶσι λέγειν (sc. Ariani), οὐ προσκυνοῦμεν ἡμεῖς τὸν Κύριον μετὰ τῆς σαρκὺς,
ἀλλὰ διαιροῦμεν τὸ σῶμα καὶ μόνῳ τούτῳ λατρεύομεν.
vir | Ddz
404 Early Socinian worship of Christ
the Arian worship of a being who was in no wise associated
with the Essence of God; and Arianism was either virtually
ditheistic or consciously idolatrous. It was idolatrous, if Christ
was a created being ; it was ditheistic, if He was conceived of
as really Divine, yet distinct in essence from the Essence of the
Father .
The same phenomenon of the vital principle of a heresy being
overridden for a while by the strength of the tradition of
universal Christendom was reproduced, twelve centuries later, in
the case of Socinianism, ‘The earliest Socinians taught that the
Son of God was a mere man, who was conceived of the Holy
Ghost, and was therefore called the Son of God. But they also
maintained that on account of His obedience, He was, after
finishing His work of redemption, exalted to Divine dignity and
honour! Christians were to treat Him as if He were God:
they were to trust Him implicitly ; they were to adore Him™,
Faustus Socinus® zealously insisted upon the duty of adoring
Jesus Christ; and the Racovian Catechism expressly asserts
that those who do not call upon or adore Christ are not to be
accounted Christians®. But this was only the archeology, or at
k St. Athanas. contr. Arian. Orat. ii. § 14, sub fin. p. 482. Orat. iii. ὃ 16,
τῳ > \ x as 5 5 ΘΑ» 3 » > / \
Ῥ. 565, εἰ yap μὴ οὕτως ἔχει, AAA ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἐστὶ κτίσμα καὶ ποίημα 6
Adyos, ἢ οὐκ ἔστι Θεὸς ἀληθινὺς, διὰ τὸ εἶναι αὐτὸν ἕνα τῶν κτισμάτων, ἢ εἰ
Θεὸν αὐτὸν ὀνομάζουσιν ἐντρεπόμενοι παρὰ τῶν γραφῶν, ἀνάγκη λέγειν αὐτοὺς
δύο θεοὺς, ἕνα μὲν κτίστην, τὸν δὲ ἕτερον κτιστὸν, καὶ δύο κυρίοις λατρεύειν,
ἑνὶ μὲν ἀγενήτῳ, τῷ δὲ ἑτέρῳ γενητῷ καὶ κτίσματι. « + + - οὕτω δὲ φρονοῦντες
πάντως καὶ πλείονας συνάψουσι θεούς" τοῦτο γὰρ τῶν ἐκπεσόντων ἀπὸ τοῦ ἑνὸς
Θεοῦ τὸ ἐπιχείρημα. διατί οὖν οἱ ᾿Αρειανοὶ τοιαῦτα λογιζόμενοι καὶ νοοῦντες
οὐ συναριθμοῦσιν ἑαυτοὺς μετὰ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ;
1 Socin. de Justif. Bibl. Fr. Pol. tom. i. fol. 601, col. 1.
τὰ Cat. Racov.: ‘Qu. 236. Quid preterea Dominus Jesus huic precepto
addidit? Resp. Id quod etiam Dominum Jesum pro Deo agnoscere tenemur,
id est, pro eo, qui in nos potestatem habet divinam, et cui nos divinum exhibere
honorem obstricti sumus. Qu. 237. In quo is honor divinus Christo debitus con-
sistit? Resp. In eo, quod quemadmodum adoratione divind eum sprosequi tene-
mur, ita in omnibus necessitatibus nostris ejus opem implorare possumus,
Adoramus verd eum propter ipsius sublimem et divinam ejus potestatem.’ Cf.
Mohler, Symbolik. Mainz. 1864, p. 609.
n The tenacity of the Christian practice may be still more remarkably
illustrated from the death-cry of Servetus, as given in a MS. account of his
execution, cited by Roscoe, Life of Leo X, c. 19. ‘Ipse horrenda voce cla-
mans; Jesu, Fili Det ceterni, miserere met.’
© Cat. Racov.: ‘Qu. 246. Quid verd sentis de tis hominibus, qui Christum non
invocant, nec adorandum censent ? Resp. Prorsis non esse Christianos sentio,
cum Christum non habeant. Et licet verbis id negare non audeant, reips&
negant tamen.” In bis sermon on ‘ Satan Transformed,’ South quotes Socinus
as saying that ‘Prestat Trinitarium esse, quam asserere Christum non esse
adorandum.’
[ LECT.
atl τ Ἠ“’“ π᾿
abandoned, as resting on antiquarian Seeling. 405
most the better feeling of Socinianism. Any such mere feeling
was destined to yield surely and speedily to the logic of a strong
destructive principle. In vain did Blandrata appeal to Faustus
Socinus himselfP, when endeavouring to persuade the Socinians
of Transylvania to adore Jesus Christ: the Transylvanians
would not be persuaded to yield an act of adoration to any
creature’, In vain did the Socinian Catechism draw a dis-
tinction between a higher and a lower worship, of which the
former was reserved for the Father, while the latter was paid to
Christ". Practically this led on to a violation of the one
positive fundamental principle of Socinianism ; it obscured the
incommunicable prerogatives of the Supreme Being. Accord-
ingly, in spite of the texts of Scripture upon which their
worship of Christ was rested by the Socinian theologians, such
worship was soon abandoned ; and the later practice of So-
cinians has illustrated the true doctrinal force and meaning of
that adoration which Socinianism refuses, but which the Church
unceasingly offers to Jesus, the Son of God made Man. Of
this worship the only real justification is that full belief in
Christ’s Essential Unity with the Father which is expressed by
the Homoousion.
II. But the Homoousion did not merely justify and explain
the devotional attitude of the Church towards Jesus Christ: it
was, in reality, in keeping with the general drift and sense of
her traditional language.
Reference has already been made to the prayers of the
P See Socinus’ tractates, Bibl. Frat. Pol. ii. p. 709, Sqq.
a Cf. Mohler, Symbolik, p. 609 ; Bp. Pearson, Minor Works, vol. i. Pp. 300,
and note. Coleridge’s Table Talk, 2nd ed. p. 304: “ Faustus Socinus wor-
shipped Jesus Christ, and said that God had given Him the power of being
omnipresent. Davidi, with a little more acuteness, urged that mere audition
or creaturely presence could not possibly justify worship from men;—that
a man, how glorified soever, was no nearer God than the most vulgar of the
race. Prayer therefore was inapplicable.’ For himself Coleridge says (Ibid.
p- 50), ‘In no proper sense of the term can I call Unitarians and Socinians
believers in Christ ; at least not in the only Christ of Whom I have read or
know anything.’
* Cat. Rac.: ‘ Qu. 245. Ergo is honor et cultus ad eum modum tribuitur,
ut nullum sit inter Christum et Deum hoc in genere discrimen? Resp. I mo,
permagnum est. Nam adoramus et colimus Deum, tanquam causam primam
salutis nostre ; Christum tanquam causam secundam ; aut ut cum Paulo
loquamur, Dewm tanquam Eum ex quo omnia, Christum ut eum per quem
omnia.’ Cf. Bibl. Frat. Pol. tom. ii. fol. 466, qu. by Mohler, Symbolik, p. θου.
Mohler observes that ‘man sieht dass an Christus eine Art von Invocation
gerichtet wird, die mit der Katholischen Anrufung der Heiligen einige
Aehnlichkeit hat.’
vi |
1
406 Explicit confessions of Christ's Divinity
primitive martyrs; but.the martyrs professed in terns thei
belief in Christ’s divinity, as frequently as they implied that
belief by their adorations of Christ. This is the more observ-
able because it is at variance with the suggestions bv which
those who do not share the faith of the martyrs, sometimes
attempt to account for the moral spectacle which martyrdom
presents. It has been said that the martyrs did not bear witness
to any definite truth or dogma ; that the martyr-temper, so to
term it, was composed of two elements, a kind of military en-
thusiasm for an unseen Leader, and a strange unnatural desire
to brave physical suffering ; that the prayers uttered by the
martyrs were the product of this compound feeling, bit that
such prayers did not imply any defined conceptions respecting
the rank and powers of Him to Whom they were addressed.
Now, without denying that the martyrs were sustained by
a strictly supernatural contempt for pain, or that their devotion
to our Lord was of the nature of an intense personal attach-
ment which could not brook the least semblance of slight or
disloyalty, or that they had not analysed their intellectual appre-
hension of the truth before them in the manner of the divines
of the Nicene age, I nevertheless affirm that the martyrs did
suffer on behalf of a doctrine which was dearer to them than
life. The Christ with Whom they held such close and passionate
communion, and for Whose honour they shed their blood, was
not to them a vague floating idea, or a being of whose rank and
powers they imagined themselves to be ignorant. If there be
one doctrine of the faith which they especially confessed at
death, it is the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity. This truth was
not only confessed by bishops and presbyters. Philosophers,
like Justin’; soldiers, such as Mauricet, and Tarachus", and
8 Ruinart, Acta, p. 49: ‘Ego quidem ut homo imbecillis sum, et longé
minor quam ut de infinita illius Deitate aliquid magnum dicere possim :
Prophetarwm munus hoc esse fateor.’
t Ibid. p. 243: ‘ Milites swmus, Imperator, tui: sed tamen servi, quod
liberé confitemur, Det. ....... Habes hic nos confitentes Deum Patrem
auctorem omnium ; et Filiwm Ejus Jesum Christum DEUM credimus.’
ἃ Ibid. p. 377: Tdpaxos εἶπεν" “Νῦν ἀληθῶς φρονιμώτερόν με ἐποίησα, ταῖς
πληγαῖς ἐνδυναμώσας με, ἔτι μᾶλλον πεποιθέναι με ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ
τοῦ Χριστοῦ αὐτοῦ.᾽ Μάξιμος ἡγεμὼν εἶπεν" “᾿Ανοσιώτατε καὶ τρισκατάρατε, πῶς
δυσὶ θεοῖς λατρεύεις, καὶ αὐτὸς ὁμολογῶν, τοὺς θεοὺς ἀρνῇ ;; Τάραχος εἶπεν"
“᾿Εγὼ Θεὸν ὁμολογῶ τὸν ὄντως bvTa.’ Μάξιμος ἡγεμὼν εἶπεν" “ Καὶ μὴν καὶ
Χριστόν τινα ἔφης εἶναι Θεόν’ Τάραχος εἶπεν᾽ “ Οὕτως exer’ αὐτὸς γάρ ἐστιν
6 Χριστὸς ὃ Ὑἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ ζῶντος, ἣ ἐλπὶς τῶν Χριστιανῶν, Se ὃν καὶ
πάσχοντες σω(ζόμεθα.᾽
[ LECT.
by the primitive martyrs. 407
BY
can. exteorus X; young men of personal beauty like Peter of Lamp-
sacusy,! or literary friends of high mental cultivation as were
Epipodius and Alexander2 ; widows, such as Symphorosa?; and
poor y‘omen like Domnina?; and slaves such as Vitalis¢; and
young boys such as Martialis4;—the learned and the illiterate,
* Ruinart, Acta, p. 425 : ‘Vos autem erratis qui demonas fallaces et impos-
tores Det appellatione honoratis ; mihi vero Deus est Christus, Det Unigenitus
Filius,. Pro pietate igitur atque confessione Istius, et qui vulnerat incidat ;
et qui verberat laceret ; et qui cremat flammam admoveat ; et qui his vocibus
mers offenditur, linguam eximat.’
y Ibid. p. 135 : ‘Comprehensus est quidam, Petrus nomine, valdé quidem
fortis «n fide ; pulcher animo et speciosus corpore. Proconsul dixit: Habes
ante.rculos decreta imvictissimorum principum. Sacrifica ergo magne dee
Vener. Petrus respondit: Miror, st persuades mihi, optime Proconsul,
sacrificare impudice muliert et sordide, que talia opera egit ut confusto sit
enarrare. .... « Oportet ergo me magis Dro vivo et vero, Regi seculorum
omnium Christo sacrificium offerre orationis deprecationis, compunctionis et
laudis. Audiens hec Proconsul jussit eum adhuc etate adolescentulum tendi
in rota, et inter ligna in circuitu posita, vinculis ferreis totum corpus ejus
fecit constringi : ut contortus et confractus [?] minutatim ossa ejus commi-
nuerentur. Quanto autem plus torquebatur famulus Dei, tanto magis fortior
apparebat. Constans vero aspectu, et ridens de ejus stultitid, conspiciens in
coclum ait: 7%bt ago gratias, Domine Jesu Christe, qui mihi hance toleran-
tiam dare dignatus es ad vincendum nequissimum tyrannum. Tune Pro-
consul’ videns tantam ejus perseverantiam, et nec his quidem defecisse
tormentis, jussit eum gladio percuti.’
2 Acta, p. 65, circ. a. 178: ‘Ita literis eruditissimi, concordia crescente,
adeo provecti sunt: ...... ad hec beatus Epipodius..... . Sempi-
ternum vero Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum quem crucifixum memoras,
resurrexisse non nosti, qui ineffabili mysterio homo pariter et Deus, famulis
suis tramitem immortalitatis institut, ...... Christum cum Patri ac
Spiritu Sancto Deum esse confiteor, dignumque est ut ili animam meam
refundam, qui mihi et Creator est et Redemptor.’
@ 1014. p. 21, a, 120: ‘St pro nomine Christi Det mei incensa fuero, illos
demones tuos magis exuro.’
Ὁ Ibid. p. 235: ‘ Ne in ignem eternam incidam, et tormenta perpetua,
Deum colo et Christum ejus, qui fecit celum et terram.
© Ibid. p. 410 (cf. St. Ambr. de Exh. Virgin. c. 1), circ. a. 304: ‘Martyri
nomen Agricola est, cui Vitalis servus fuit ante, nunc consors et collega mar-
tyrii. Preecessit servus, ut provideret locum ; secutus est dominus .... .
cumque sanctus Vitalis cogeretur a persequentibus ut Christum negaret, et
ille amplits profiteretur Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, omnia torment-
orum genera in eum exercentes, ut non esset in corpore ejus sine vulnere
locus, orationem fudit ad Dominum dicens ; Domine Jesu Christe, Salvator
meus, et Deus meus; jube suscipi spiritum meum; quia jam desidero ut
acctpiam coronam, quam angelus twus sanctus mihi ostendit. Et completa
oratione emisit spiritum.’
4 Tbid., Passio S. Felicitatis et Septem Filiorum Ejus, p.23: ‘Hoc quoque
amoto, jussit septimum Martialem ingredi, eique dixit: Crudelitatis vestre
factores effecti, Augustorum instituta contemnitis, et in vestra pernicie per-
manetis, Respondit Martialis: O si nosses que pene idolorum cultoribus
vit |
\
——
408 Lxplicct confessions of Christ's Divinity
the young and the old, the noble and the lowly, the slats tae?
his master, united in this confession. Sometimes it is wrung
from the martyr reluctantly by cross-examination ; sometimes it
is proclaimed as a truth with which the Christian heart is full
to bursting, and which, out of the heart’s abundance, the Chris-
tian mouth cannot but speak. Sometimes Christ’s Divinity is
professed as belonging to the great Christian contradiction of
the polytheism of the heathen world around; sometimes it is
explained as involving Christ’s Unity with the Father, against
the pagan imputation of ditheism¢ ; sometimes it is proclaimed
as justifying the worship which, as the heathens knew, Chris-
tians paid to Christ. The martyrs look paganism in the face,
and maintain that, although Christ was crucified, yet nevertheless
Christ is God; that even while His very Name is cast out as
evil, Christ is really Master of the fortunes of Rome and Dis-
poser of the events of history ; that the pagan empire itself
did but unwittingly subserve His purposes and prepare His
triumphf; that He Who is the Creator of heaven and earth,
parate sunt! Sed adhuc differt Deus tram suam in vos et idola vestra demon-
strare. Omnes enim qui non confitentur CHRISTUM VERUM esse Drum in
agnem ceternum mittentur.’
© Ruinart, Acta, p. 122: ‘ Post heec cum adstante haud procul Asclepiade,
quis diceretur inquireret [Polemon scilicet] respondit Asclepiades, Christianus.
Polemon: Cujus ecclesie? Asclepiades: Catholice. Polemon: Quem
Deum colis? Respondit: Christum. Polemon: Quid ergo? iste alter
est? Respondit : Non, sed ipse quem et ipsi paullo ante confessi sunt.’
Cf. Prudentius, Peristeph. Hymn. 10. 671 :—
‘ Arrisit infans, nec moratus retulit :
Est quidquid illud, quod ferunt homines Deum
Unum esse oportet, et quod uni est unicum.
Cum Christus hoc sit, Christus est verus Deus.
Genera deorum multa nec pueri putant.’
f Prudentius has given a poetical amplification of the last prayer of
St. Laurence, which, whatever its historic value, at any rate may be taken. to
represent the primitive Christian sentiment respecting the relation of Jesus
Christ to the pagan empire. It should be noticed that neither St. Ambrose
nor St. Augustine, in their accounts of the martyrdom, report anything of
this kind ; Prudentius may have followed a distinct and trustworthy tradition.
The martyr is interceding for Rome :—
“Ὁ Christe, numen unicum,
O splendor, O virtus Patris,
O factor orbis et poli,
Atque auctor horum mecenium!
Qui sceptra Rome in vertice
Rerum locasti, sanciens
Mundum Quirinali toge
Servire, et armis cedere
{LEcT.
ee ee
by the primitive martyrs. 4C9
can afford to wait, and is certain of the future. This was the
faith which made any compromise with paganism impossibles.
‘What God dost thou worship?’ enquired the judges of the
Christian Pionius. ‘I worship,’ replied Pionius, ‘Him Who
made the heavens, and Who beautified them with stars, and
Who has enriched the earth with flowers and trees,’ ‘ Dost
thou mean,’ asked the magistrates, ‘Him Who was crucified 1’
‘Certainly,’ replied Pionius ; ‘Him Whom the Father sent for
the salvation of the world,’
The point before us notoriously admits of the most copious
illustration': and it is impossible to mistake its significance.
Ut discrepantum gentium
Mores, et observantiam,
Linguasque et ingenia et sacra
Unis domares legibus.
En omne sub regnum Remi
Mortale concessit genus:
Idem loquuntur dissoni
Ritus, id ipsum sanciunt.
Hoc destinatum quo magis
Jus Christiani nominis,
Quodcumque terrarum jacet
Uno illigaret vinculo.
Da, Christe, Romanis tuis
Sit Christiana ut civitas:
Per quem dedisti, ut ceteris
Mens una sacrorum foret.’
Peristeph. 2, 413.
& Prud. Peristeph. Hymn. 5. 57; qu. by Ruinart, Acta, p. 330. De S. Vin-
centii martyrio :-—
‘Vox nostra que sit accipe.
Est Christus et Pater Deus:
Servi hujus ac testes sumus ;
Extorque si potes fidem.
Tormenta, carcer, ungule
Stridensque flammis lamina
Atque ipsa poenarum ultima;
Mors Christianis ludus est.’
Ὁ Ruinart, p. 125: ‘Judices interim dixerunt: Quem Deum colitis?
Pionius respondit: Hune qui celum fecit, et sideribus ornavit, qui terram
statuit, et floribus arboribusque decoravit ; qui ordinavit circumflua terre et
maria, et statuta terminorum vel litorum lege signavit. Tumilli: Illwm
dicts qui crucificus est? Et Pionius: Illwm dico quem pro salute orbis Pater
misit.’
' Ibid., Acta Sincera, p. 210, for the confession of Sapricius, who after-
wards fell; p. 235; p. 256 for that of Victor at Marseilles ; pp. 274, 314,
ae 438, 439, 467, 470, 479, 483, 506, 513, 514, 521.
VII
410 Did the ‘higher minds acceptthe faith of the people?
If the dying words of this or that martyr are misreported, or
exaggerated, or coloured by the phraseology of a later age, the
general phenomenon cannot but be admitted, as a fact beyond
dispute. The martyrs of the primitive Church died, in a great
number of cases, expressly for the dogma of Christ’s Divinity.
The confessions of the martyrs explain and justify the prayers
of the martyrs; the Homoousion combines, summarizes, fixes
the sense of their confessions. The martyrs did not pray to or
confess a creature external to the Essence of God, however
dignified, however powerful, however august. They prayed to
Christ as God, they confessed that Christ is God, they died for
Christ as God. They prayed to Him and they spoke of Him as
of a distinct Person, Who yet was one with God. Does not this
simple faith of the Christian people cover the same area as the
more clearly defined faith of the Nicene fathers? Or could it be
more fairly or more accurately summarized by any other symbol
than it is by the Homoousion ?
But you admit that the Nicene decision did very fairly embody
and fix in a symbolical form the popular creed of earlier cen-
turies. ‘This,’ you say, ‘is the very pith of our objection; it
was the popular creed to which the Council gave the sanction of
its authority.’ You suggest that although a dying martyr may
be an interesting ethical study, yet that the moral force which
carries him through his sufferings is itself apt to be a form of
fanaticism hostile to any severely intellectual conception of the
worth and bearings of his creed. You admit that the martyr
represents the popular creed; but then you draw a distinction
between a popular creed, as such, and the ‘ideas’ of the ‘thinkers.’
‘What is any and every creed of the people,’ say you, ‘but the
child of the wants and yearnings of humanity, fed at the breast
of mere heated feeling, and nursed in the lap of an ignorance
more or less profound?’ A popular creed, you admit, may have
a restricted interest, as affording an insight into the intellectual
condition of the people which holds it; but you deem it worth-
less as a guide to absolute truth. The question, you maintain,
is not, What was believed by the primitive Christians at large?
The question is, What was taught by the well-instructed teachers
of the early Church? Did the creed of the people, with all its
impulsiveness and rhetoric, keep within the lines of the grave,
reserved, measured, hesitating, cautious language of the higher
minds of primitive Christendom ?
Now here, my brethren, I might fairly take exception to your
distinction between a popular and an educated creed, as in fact
[ LECT,
Christ's Divinity taught by sub-apostolic Fathers. 411
inapplicable to the genius and circumstances of early Christianity.
Are not your criteria really derived from your conceptions of
modern societies, political and religious? It was once said of an
ancient state, that each of its citizens was so identified with the
corporate spirit and political action of his country, as to be in
fact a statesman. And in the primitive Church, it was at least
approximately true that every Christian, through the intensity
and intelligence of the popular faith, was a sound divine. Men
did not then die for rhetorical phrases, any more than they
would do so now; and if the martyrs were, as a rule, men of the
people, it is also notorious that not a few among them were
bishops and theologians of repute. But that we may do justice
to the objection, let us enquire briefly what the great Church
teachers of the first three centuries have taught respecting the
Higher and Eternal Nature of Jesus Christ.
And here let us remark, first of all, that a chain of representa-
tive writers, reaching from the sub-apostolic to the Nicene age,
does assert, in strong and explicit language, the belief of the
Church that Jesus Christ is God.
Thus St. Ignatius of Antioch dwells upon our Lord’s Divine
Nature as a possession of the Church, and of individual Chris-
tians ; he calls Jesus Christ ‘my God,’ ‘our God.’ ‘Jesus Christ
our God,’ he says, ‘was carried in the womb of Maryk” The
Blood of Jesus is the Blood of Godl. Ignatius desires to
imitate the sufferings of his God™. The sub-apostolic author of
the Letter to Diognetus teaches that ‘the Father hath sent to
men, not one of His servants, whether man or angel, but the
very Architect and Author of all things, by Whom all has been
ordered and settled, and on Whom all depends. ... He has sent
Him as being God»,’ And because He is God, His Advent is
a real revelation of God; He has shewn Himself to men, and
by faith men have seen and known their Godo. St. Polycarp
K Ad Eph. 18: 6 γὰρ Θεὸς ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦς ὃ Χριστὸς ἐκυοφορήθη ὑπὸ Μαρίας.
Cf. Ibid. 7: ἐν σαρκὶ γενόμενος Θεός.
1 Eph. 1: ἀναζωπυρήσαντες ἐν αἵματι τοῦ Θεοῦ.
™ Rom. 6: ἐπιτρέψατέ μοι μιμητὴν εἶναι τοῦ πάθους τοῦ Θεοῦ μου.
n Ep. δὰ Diogn. 7: αὐτὸς 6 παντοκράτωρ καὶ παντοκτίστης καὶ ἀόρατος
Θεὸς... οὐ καθάπερ ἄν τις εἰκάσειεν, ἀνθρώποις ὑπηρέτην τινὰ πέμψας ἢ
ἄγγελον, ἢ ἄρχοντα, ἢ τινὰ τῶν διεπόντων τὰ ἐπίγεια, ἢ τινὰ τῶν πεπιστευμένων
τὰς ἐν οὐρανοῖς διοικήσεις, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτὸν τὸν τεχνίτην καὶ δημιουργὸν τῶν ὅλων
++ ++. ὡς Θεὸν ἔπεμψεν, ὧς πρὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔπεμψεν, ὡς σώζων ἔπεμψεν.
° Ep. ad Diogn. c. 8: τίς γὰρ ὅλως ἀνθρώπων ἠπίστατο τί ποτ᾽ ἐστὶ Θεὸς,
πρὶν αὐτὸν ἐλθεῖν... ἀνθρώπων δὲ οὐδεὶς οὔτε εἶδεν οὔτε ἐγνώρισεν, αὐτὸς δὲ
ἑαυτὸν ἐπέδειξεν, ἐπέδειξε δὲ διὰ πίστεως, ἣ μόνῃ Θεὸν ἰδεῖν συγκεχώρηται,
vir} >
412 Christ's Detty how taught by fathers of —
appeals to Him as to the Everlasting Son of God ; all things on
earth and in heaven, all spirits obey Him4; He is the Author
of our justification; He is the Object of our hope’. Justin
Martyr maintains that the Word is the First-born of God, and so
Gods; that He appeared in the Old Testament as the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacobt; that He is sometimes called the
Glory of the Lord, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Wisdom,
sometimes the Angel, sometimes God™. St. Justin argues
against Tryphon that if the Jews had attentively considered what
the prophets have written, they would not have denied that
Christ is God, and the Only Son of the Unbegotten God*. He
maintains that the Word is Himself the witness to His own
Divine Generation of the FatherY; and that the reality of His
Sonship is itself a sufficient evidence of His True Divinity 2.
Tatian is aware that the Greeks deem the faith of the Church
utter folly; but he nevertheless will assert that God has ap-
peared on earth in a human form®, Athenagoras proclaims
with special emphasis the oneness of the Word with the Father,
as Creator and Ruler of the universe». Melito of Sardis speaks
of Jesus as being both God and Man°: ‘Christians,’ he says,
‘do not worship senseless stones, as do the heathen, but God and
» Epist. Eccl. Smyrn. de Mart. 8. Polyc. n. 14.
a Ad Phil. 2: Ὧι ὑπετάγη τὰ πάντα ἐπουράνια καὶ ἐπίγεια; ᾧ πᾶσα πνοὴ
λατρεύει. In Phil. 6: τοῦ Κυρίου καὶ Θεοῦ apparently refers to Christ.
r Ibid. 8: ἀδιαλείπτως οὖν προσκαρτερῶμεν TH ἐλπίδι ἡμῶν καὶ τῷ ἀῤῥαβῶνι
τῆς δικαιοσύνης ἡμῶν, ὅς ἐστι Χριστὸς ᾿Ιησοῦς.
5. Apol. i. n. 63: ὃς Λόγος καὶ πρωτότοκος dy τοῦ Θεοῦ, καὶ Θεὸς ὑπάρχει.
ὑ Ibid.
u See the argument of the whole passage, Contr. Tryph. 57-61: ἀρχὴν πρὸ
πάντων τῶν κτισμάτων ὃ Θεὸς γεγέννηκε δύναμίν τινα ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ λογικὴν, ἥτις
καὶ δόξα Κυρίου ὑπὸ τοῦ Πνεύματος τοῦ ᾿Αγίου καλεῖται, ποτὲ δὲ Ὑἱὸς, ποτὲ δὲ
Σοφία, ποτὲ δὲ ΓΑΎγελος, ποτὲ δὲ Θεός.
x Ibid. 126: εἰ νενοήκατε τὰ εἰρημένα ὑπὸ τῶν προφητῶν, οὐκ ἂν ἐξηρνεῖσθε
αὐτὸν εἶναι Θεὸν τοῦ μόνου καὶ ἀγεννήτου Θεοῦ Ὑἱόν. Cf. Ibid. 63: προσκυνη-
τός---καὶ Θεός. Justin expresses the truth of our Lord’s distinct Personality
by the phrase Θεὸς ἕτερος ἀριθμῷ ἀλλ᾽ οὐ γνώμῃ (Ibid. 56).
y Ibid. 61: μαρτυρήσει δέ μοι ὃ Λόγος τῆς σοφίας αὐτὸς ὧν οὗτος ὃ Θεὸς
ἀπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς τῶν ὅλων γεννηθείς.
z Ibid. 126; Apolog. i. 63.
@ Ady. Gree. 6. 21: ov γὰρ μωραίνομεν, ἄνδρες “Ἕλληνες, οὐδὲ λήρους amary-
γέλλομεν, Θεὸν ἐν ἀνθρώπου μορφῇ γεγονέναι. Cf. Ibid. n. 13; τοῦ πεπόν-
θοτος Θεοῦ.
Ὁ Legat. n. 10: πρὸς αὐτοῦ γὰρ καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ πάντα ἐγένετο, ἑνὸς ὄντος τοῦ
Πατρὸς καὶ τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ.
¢ See Eus. Hist. Eccl. v. 28. Compare the magnificent passage from St.
Melito’s treatise on Faith, given in Cureton’s Spicilegium Syriacum, pp. 53,
54, and quoted by Westcott on the Canon, p. 196.
[ LECT.
Ν᾿ ϑϑἘΞσἐ ἐὀ᾽᾿- “ὁ ὁ“
the second and third centuries. 413
eee Τύ
His Christ, Who is God the Word4’ St. Irenxus perhaps re-
presents the purest and deepest stream of apostolic doctrine
which flowed from St. John through Polycarp into the Western
Church. St. Irenzeus speaks of Christ as sharing the Name of @
the only true God. He maintains against the Valentinians that
the Divine Name in its strictest sense was not given to any
angel ; and that when in Scripture the Name of God is given to
any other than God Himself there is always some explanatory
epithet or clause in order to shew that the full sense of the word
is not intended®. None is directly called God save God the
Father of all things and His Son Jesus Christ. In both Testa-
ments Christ is preached as God and Lord, as the King Eternal,
as the Only-begotten, as the Word Incarnates. If Christ is
worshipped }, if Christ forgives sinsi, if Christ is Mediator be-
tween God and man, this is because He is really a Divine
Person.
And if from Gaul we pass to Africa, and from the second to
the third century, the force and number of primitive testimonies
to the Divinity of our Lord increase upon us so rapidly as to
render it impossible that we should do more than glance at a
few of the more prominent. At Alexandria we find Clement
speaking of That Living God Who suffered and Who is adored! :
of the Word, Who is both God and man, and the Author of all
blessings ™; of God the Saviour», Who saves us, as being the
@ Apol. apud Auct. Chron. Pasch. (Gall. tom. i. p- 678): οὐκ ἐσμὲν λίθων
οὐδεμίαν αἴσθησιν ἐχόντων θεραπευταὶ, ἀλλὰ μόνου Θεοῦ τοῦ πρὸ πάντων καὶ
ἐπὶ πάντων, καὶ ἔτι τοῦ Χριστοῦ αὐτοῦ ὄντος Θεοῦ Λόγου πρὸ αἰώνων ἐσμὲν
θρησκευταί, Routh, Rel. Sacr. i. 118, 133.
© Adv. Har. iii. 6, n. 3.
* Ibid. iii. 6, π, 2: ‘Nemo igitur alius Deus nominatur, aut Dominus
appellatur nisi qui est omnium Deus et Dominus, qui et Moysi dixit, Ego
‘sum Qui sum, .....et Hujus Filius Jesus Christus.’ Cf. iii. 8, n. 3: ‘Deus
Solus.’
8 Ibid. iii. 19, n, 2: *‘Quoniam autem Ipse propri’ preter omnes qui
fuerunt tunc homines, Deus, et Dominus, et Rex AEternus et Unigenitus, et
Verbum Incarnatum predicatur, et a prophetis omnibus et apostolis, et ab
ipso Spiritu, adest videre omnibus qui vel modicum veritatis attigerint,’
Ὁ Thid. iii. 9, 2, ‘Thus [obtulerunt magi] quoniam Deus,’
ΤΡΙᾺ. ν. 17, π. 3. k Ibid. iii. 18, 7.
' Protrept. 10: πίστευσον, ἄνθρωπε, ἀνθρώπῳ καὶ Θεῷ, τῷ παθόντι καὶ προσ-
κυνουμένῳ Θεῷ ζῶντι.
m [bid. i.: αὐτὸς οὗτος ὃ Λόγος, ὃ μόνος ἄμφω, Θεός τε καὶ ἄνθρωπος,
ἅπάντων ἡμῖν αἴτιος ἀγαθῶν.
® Strom. ii. 9: Θεῷ τῷ Σωτῆρι ; Ibid. v. 6: 5 Θεὸς Σωτὴρ κεκλημένος, 7
τῶν ὅλων ἀρχὴ, ἥτις ἀπεικόνισται μὲν ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου πρώτη καὶ πρὸ
αἰώνων, τετύπωκεν δὲ τὰ μέθ᾽ ἑαυτὴν ἅπαντα γενόμενα.
Vil |
414 ‘Christ's Deity taught by Origen,
Author and Archetype of all existing beings. Clement alludes
to our Lord’s Divinity as explaining His equality with the
Father °, His prescience during His Human Life?, His revela-
tion of the Father to men4% Origen maintains Christ’s true
Divinity against the contemptuous criticisms of Celsust. Origen
more than once uses the expression ‘the God Jesuss.’ He
teaches that the Word, the Image of God, is Godt; that the
Son is as truly Almighty as the Father"; that Christ is the
Very Word, the Absolute Wisdom, the Absolute Truth, the
Absolute Righteousness Itself*. Christ, according to Origen,
possesses all the attributes of DeityY; God is contemplated in
the contemplation of Christ% Christ’s Incarnation is like the
economical language of parables which describe Almighty God
as if He were a human being. So real is Christ’s Deity, that
His assumption of our Nature, like the speech of a parable, is
to be looked upon as only a condescension to finite intelligences?.
There is no Highest Good in existence which is superior to
Christ >; as Very God, Christ is present in all the world; He
is present with every man® Origen continually closes his
Ὁ Protrept. 10: 6 φανερώτατος ὄντως Θεὸς, ὃ τῷ Δεσπότῃ τῶν ὅλων ἐξισωθείς.
P Quis Div. Salv. 6: προεῖδε ὡς Θεὸς, ἃ μέλλει διερωτηθήσεσθαι.
a Ῥᾳά. 1, 8. We know God from our knowledge of Jesus—éx τρυτάνης
ἰσοσθενοῦς.
τ Contr. Cels. ii. 9, 16 sqq. ; vii. 53, &c.
8 Θεὸν Ἰησοῦν, Ibid. v. 51; vi. 66. t Select. in Gen. In Gen. ix. 6.
ἃ Princ. I. ii. n. τος: ‘ Ut. autem. unam eandemque Omnipotentiam Patris
et Filii esse cognoscas, sicut unus atque idem est cum Patre Deus et Domi-
nus, audi hoc modo Johannem in Apocalypsi dicentem: Hee dixit Dominus
Deus, qui est et qui erat, et qui venturus est, Omnipotens ; qui enim ven-
turus est, quis est alius nisi Christus.’
x Contr. Cels. iii. 41: αὐτόλογος, αὐτοσοφία, αὐτοαλήθεια. Ibid. v. 39:
αὐὑὐτοδικαιοσύνης.
y In Jerem. Hom. viii. n. 2: πάντα γὰρ ὅσα τοῦ Θεοῦ, τοιαῦτα ἐν αὐτῷ
ἔστι, ὁ Χριστός ἐστι σοφία τοῦ Θεοῦ... αὐτὸς ἀπολύτρωσις, αὐτὸς φρύόνησίς ἐστι
Θεοῦ.
z In Joan. t. xxxii. n. 18: θεωρεῖται γὰρ ἐν τᾷ Λόγῳ, ὄντι Θεᾷ καὶ εἰκόνι
τοῦ Θεοῦ ἀοράτου.
a In Matt. t. xvii. n. 20: ὥσπερ ὃ Θεὸς ἀνθρώπους οἰκονομῶν ὡς ἐν παρα-.
βολαῖς ἄνθρωπος λέγεται, τάχα δέ πως καὶ γίνεται" ov IT ws kal ὁ Σωτὴρ προηγου-
μένως Tids ὧν τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ Θεός ἐστιν, καὶ Ὑἱὸς τῆς ἀγάπης αὐτοῦ, καὶ εἰκὼν
τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ ) ἀοράτου" οὗ μένει δὲ ἐν ᾧ ἐστι προηγουμένως, ἀλλὰ γίνεται κατ᾽
οἰκονομίαν τοῦ ἐν παραβολαῖς λεγομένου ἀνθρώπου ὄ ὄντως δὲ Θεοῦ, Υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου
κατὰ τὸ μιμεῖσθαι, ὅταν ἀνθρώπους οἰκονομῇ; τὸν Θεὸν λεγόμενον ἐν παραβολαῖς
καὶ γινόμενον ἄνθρωπον.
Ὁ In Joan. t. i. n. IT: οὐ σιωπητέον. .. τὸν μετὰ τὸν Πατέρα τῶν ὅλων
Θεὸν Λόγον, οὐδενὸς γὰρ ἔλαττον ἀγαθοῦ bal τοῦτο τὸ ἀγαθόν.
¢ Ibid. t. vi. n. 15: δοξολογίαν περὶ τῆς προηγουμένης οὐσίας see διη-
LECT,
- x : Z |
Tertullian, St. Cyprian and others. 415
Homilies with a doxology to our Lord ; and he can only account
for refusal to believe in His Divinity by the hypothesis of some
kind of mental obliquityd Tertullian’s language is full of
Punic fire, but in speaking of Christ’s Divinity he is dealing
with opponents who would force him to be accurate, even if
there were not a higher motive for accuracy. Tertullian antici-
pates the Homoousion in terms: Christ, he says, is called God,
by reason of His oneness of substance with Gode. . Christ alone
is begotten of Godf; He is God and Lord over all meng. Ter-
tullian argues at length that an Incarnation of God is possible b ;
he dwells upon its consequences in language which must appear
paradoxical to unbelief or half-belief, but which is natural to a
sincere and intelligent faith in its reality. ‘Tertullian speaks of
a Crucified Godi; of the Blood of God, as the price of our re-
demptionk, Christians, he says, believe in a God Who was dead,
and Who nevertheless reigns for everl St. Cyprian argues
that those who believe in Christ’s power to make a temple of
the human soul must needs believe in His Divinity ; nothing
but utter blindness or wickedness can account for a refusal to
admit this truth™. St. Hippolytus had urged it against Jews
and Sabellians"; Arnobius determines to indent it upon the
γεῖται, ὅτι δύναμιν τοσαύτην ἔχει, ds καὶ ἀόρατος εἶναι τῇ θειότητι αὐτοῦ,
παρὼν παντὶ ἀνθρώπῳ, παντὶ δὲ καὶ τῷ Aw κόσμῳ συμπαρεκτεινόμενο.
4 Contr. Cels. iii. 29.
5 Apol. 6. 21: ‘Hunc ex Deo prolatum didicimus, et prolatione genera-
tum, et idcirco Filium Dei, et Deum dictum unitate substantic.’ Ibid.:
‘Quod de Deo profectum est, Deus est, et Dei Filius, et Unus ambo. Adv.
Prax. 4: ‘ Filium non aliunde deduco, sed de substantia Patris.’? Ibid. oe
“ Consortibus [Filio et Spiritu Sancto] substantie Patris.’
f Adv. Prax. 7: ‘Solus ex Deo genitus.’
& Adv. Jud. 7: ‘Christus omnibus Deus et Dominus est.’ Cf. c. 12.
h Cf. De Carne Christi, c. 3, 4.
i Adv. Mare. ii. 27: Deum crucifixum.’
k Ad Uxor. ii. 3: ‘Non sumus nostri, sed pretio empti, et quali pretio?
Sanguine Dei.’
1 Adv. Marc. ii. 16: ‘ Christianorum est etiam Deum mortuum credere, et
tamen viventem in evo zvorum.’
m Ep. 73, ad Jubaianum, 12: ‘Si peccatorum remissam consecutus est....
et templum Dei factum est, quero cujus Dei? Si Creatoris, non potuit in
eum qui non credidit. Si Christi, nec ejus fieri potest templum qui negat
Deum Christum.’ Cf. Ep. 74, c. 6: ‘Que verd est anime cecitas, que
pravitas, fidei unitatem de Deo Patre, et de Jesu Christi Domini et Dei
nostri traditione venientem nolle agnoscere,’ &c.
n Adv. Jud. c. 6: Θεὸς dv ἀληθινῶς. Contr. Noet. c. 6: οὗτος ὃ dv ἐπὶ
πάντων Θεός ἐστιν" λέγει γὰρ οὕτω μετὰ παῤῥησίας" Πάντα μοι παραδέδοται
ὑπὸ τοῦ Πατρός. “ ὃ ὧν ἐπὶ πάντων Θεὸς εὐλογητὸς, γεγένηται, καὶ ἄνθρωποϑ
VII ]
416 Various tndirect testimonies of the third century.
pagan mind by dint of constant repetition®. Theonas of Alex-
andria instructs a candidate for the imperial librarianship how
he may gradually teach it to his pagan masterP. Dionysius
of Alexandria vehemently repudiates as a cruel scandal the
report of his having denied ita. St. Peter of Alexandria would
prove it from an examination of Christ’s miraclest. For the
rest, St. Methodius of Tyre may represent the faith of western
Asia’; the martyred Felix that of the Roman chairt; and,
to omit other illustrations, the letter of the council to Paulus
of Samosata summarizes the belief both of eastern and western
Christendom during the latter half of the third century *.
This language of the preceding centuries does in effect and
substance anticipate the Nicene decision. When once the
question of Christ’s Divinity had been raised in the metaphysical
form which the Homoousion presupposes, no other answer was
possible, unless the Nicene fathers had been prepared to renounce
γενόμενος, Θεός ἐστιν εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. Apud Routh, Opuse. i. p. 59. And
Cc. 17: Θεὸς Λόγος an’ οὐρανῶν κατῆλθεν εἰς τὴν ἁγίαν παρθένον. Adv.
Beron. et Helic. n. 2: γέγονεν ἄνθρωπος 6 τῶν ὅλων Θεός. So in Eus. v. 28,
He is called our εὔσπλαγχνος Θεός.
° Adv. Gent. ii. 60: ‘Ideo Christus, licet vobis invitis, Deus; Deus
inquam Christus—hoc enim spe dicendum est, ut infidelium dissiliat et
disrumpatur auditus—Dei principis jussione loquens sub hominis forma.’
Ibid. i. 53 : ‘ Deus ille sublimis fuit ; Deus radice ab intima, Deus ab incog-
nitis regnis, et ab omnium principe Deus sospitator est missus.’
P Apud Routh, Rel. Sacr. iii. p. 443; Ep. ad Lucian. Cubicul. Prapos. c.
7: ‘Interdum et divinas scripturas laudare conabitur..... laudabitur et
interim Evangelium Apostolusque pro divinis oraculis: insurgere poterit
Christi mentio, explicabitur paullatim ejus sola Divinitas,’
4 Ep. ad Dionys. Rom. apud 5. Athan. Op. tom. i. p. 255: καὶ δ ἄλλης
ἐπιστολῆς ἔγραψα, ἐν ois ἤλεγξα καὶ ὃ προφέρουσιν ἔγκλημα Kat’ ἐμοῦ, ψεῦδος
ὃν, ὡς οὐ λέγοντος τὸν Χριστὸν ὁμοούσιον εἶναι τῷ Θεῷ.
τ Apud Routh, Rel. Sac. iv. 48: τὰ δὲ σημεῖα πάντα ἃ ἐποίησε καὶ αἱ
δυνάμεις δεικνῦσιν αὐτὸν Θεὸν εἶναι ἐνανθρωπήσαντα. τὰ συναμφότερα τοίνυν
δείκνυται" ὅτι Θεὸς ἣν φύσει, καὶ γέγονεν ἄνθρωπος φύσει.
® De Symeon. et Anna, n. 6: Σὺ Θεὸς πρῶτος, ἔμπροσθέν σου οὐκ ἐγεννήθη
θεὸς ἄλλος ἐκ Θεοῦ Πατρὸς, καὶ μετὰ σοῦ οὐκ ἔσται ἄλλος Ὑἱὸς τᾷ Πατρὶ
ὁμοούσιος καὶ ὁμότιμος. n. 8: διὰ τοῦ μονογενοῦς καὶ ἀπαραλλάκτου καὶ
ὁμοουσίου Παιδός σου τὴν λύτρωσιν ἡμῖν ποιησάμενος. n. 14: φῶς ἀληθινὸν ἐκ
φωτὸς ἀληθινοῦ, Θεὸς ἀληθινὸς ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ. Quoted by Klee.
t Ep. ad Maximin. Epp. et Cler. Alex.: ‘De Verbi autem Incarnatione et
fide credimus in Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, ex Virgine Maria
natum, quod Ipse est sempiternus Dei Filius et Verbum, non autem homo a
Deo assumptus, ut alius sit ab Ilo; neque enim hominem assumpsit Dei
Filius, ut alius ab ipso exsistat. Sed cum perfectus Deus esset, factus est
simul Homo Perfectus ex Virgine Incarnatus.’ Labbe et Coss. Cone. iii. 511.
« Cf. more especially St. Greg. Thaumaturgi, Orat. Panegyr. in Origenem,
n. 4; Lact. Div. Inst. iv. 22, 29. x Labbe, i. 845-850.
[ LECT.
nS vn
Is the language of the Fathers ‘mere rhetoric? 417
the most characteristic teaching of their predecessors. Certainly
it did not occur to them that the Catholic language of earlier
writers had been ‘mere rhetoric, and could, as such, be disre-
garded. What is the real meaning of this charge of ‘rhetoric’
which is brought 50 freely against the early Christian fathers 2
It really amounts to saying that a succession of men who were
at least intelligent and earnest, were nevertheless, when writing
upon the subject which lay nearest to their hearts, wholly unable
to command that amount of jealous self-control, and cautious
accuracy in the use of language, which might save them from
misrepresenting their most fundamental convictions, Let us
ask ourselves whether this judgment be morally probable ?
Doubtless the fathers felt strongly, and, being sincere men, they
wrote as they felt. But they were not always exhorting or
declaiming or perorating : they wrote, at times, in the temper of
cold unimpassioned reasoners, who had to dispute their ground
inch by inch with pagan or heretical opponents. Tertullian is
not always ‘fervid ;’ St. Chrysostom is not always eloquent ;
Origen does not allegorize under all circumstances ; St. Ambrose
can interpret Scripture literally and morally as well as mystically.
The fathers were not a uniform series of poets or transcenden-
talists. Many of them were eminently practical, or, if you will,
prosaic ; and they continually wrote in view of hostile criticism,
as well as in obedience to strong personal convictions. To men
like Justin, Origen, and Cyprian the question of the Divinity of
our Lord was one of an interest quite as pressing and practical
as any that moves the leaders of political or commercial or scien.
tific opinion in the England of to-day. And when men write
with their lives in their hands, and moreover believe that the
endless happiness of their fellow-creatures depends in no slight
degree upon the conscientious accuracy with which they express
themselves, they are not likely to yield to the temptation of
writing for the miserable object. of mere rhythmical effect ;—they
may say what others deem strong and startling things without
being, in the depreciatory sense of the term, ‘rhetorical.’
But,—to be just,—those who insist most eagerly upon the
‘rhetorical’ shortcomings of the fathers, are not accustomed to
deny to them under all circumstances the credit of writing with
intelligence and upon principle. If, for example, a father uses
expressions, however inadvertently or provisionally, which appear
to contradict the general current of Church teaching, he is at
once welcomed as a serious writer who is entitled to marked and
respectful attention. Critics who lay most. stress upon the
VII | Ee
418 Doubtful statements in ante-Nicene writers.
charge of unprincipled rhetoric as brought against the fathers
are often anxious to take advantage of the argument which
screens the fathers and which they themselves reject. ‘Give
that argument,’ they say, ‘its full and honest scope. Ifthe Nicene
fathers were not mere rhetoricians, neither were the ante-Nicene.
If Athanasius, Basil, and the Gregories are to be taken at their
word, so are Justin Martyr, Clement, Origen, and their contem-
poraries. Ifthe orthodox language of one period is not rhetoric,
then the doubtful or unorthodox language of another period is
not rhetoric. If for the moment we admit the principle upon
which you are insisting, we claim that it shall be applied impar-
tially,—to the second century as to the fourth, to the language
which is said to favour Arius, no less than to the language which
is insisted upon by the friends of Athanasius.’
‘Ts it not notorious,’ men ask, ‘that some ante-Nicene writers
at times use language which falls short of, if it does not contra-
dict, the doctrine of the Nicene Council? Does not St. Justin
Martyr, for instance, speak of the Son as subserving the Father's
Willy? nay, as being begotten of Him at His Will2? Does not
Justin even speak of Christ as “another God under the Creator®?”
Do not Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus, and St. Hippolytus
apply the language of Scripture respecting the generation of the
Word to His manifestation at the creation of the world, as a dis-
tinct being from God? Do they not so distinguish between the
λόγος ἐνδιάθετος and the λόγος προφορικὸς as to imply that the
Word was hypostatized only at the creationb? Does not Clement
of Alexandria implicitly style the Word the Second Principle of
things ¢? Does he not permit himself to say that the Nature of
the Son is most close to the Sole Almighty One4? Although
Origen first spoke of the Saviour as being “ ever-begotten °,” has
he not, amidst much else that is questionable, contrasted the
Son, as the immediate Creator of the world, with the Father as
the original Creatorf? Did not Dionysius of Alexandria use
y Tryph. 126: ὑπηρετῶν τῇ βουλῇ αὐτοῦ. Cf. Athan. Treat. i. 118, note n.
z Ibid. 128. But cf. Athan. Treat. ii. p. 486, note g.
® Dial. contr. Tryph. c. 56: Θεὸς ἕτερος ὑπὸ τὸν ποιητήν.
Ὁ Petav. 3.6; Newman’s Arians, p. τού, But see Athan. Treat. i. 113,
note z; and Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. iii. 5. 6. 7, 8.
ὁ Strom. lib. vii. 3, p. 509, apud Pet.: δεύτερον αἴτιον.
ἃ Tbhid. 2, p. 504: ἡ Υἱοῦ φύσις, ἣ τῷ μόνῳ Παντοκράτορι προσεχεστάτη.
Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. ii. 6, 6.
9. 6 Σωτὴρ ἀεὶ γεννᾶται. Apud Routh, Rel. Sacr. iv. 354.
τ Orig. contr. Cels. vi. 60, apud Petav. de Trin. i. 4, 5: τὸν μὲν προσεχῶς
δημιουργὸν εἶναι τὸν Tidv τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγον καὶ ὡσπερεὶ αὐτουργὸν τοῦ κόσμου"
τὸν δὲ Πάτερα. ... εἶναι πρώτως δημιουργόν.
[ LECT.
Sa ere a ὁὦὁὁὁὁὁὋ Ἐπ
Doubtful statements in ante-Nicene writers. 419
language which he was obliged to account for, and which is re-
pudiated by St. Basil? Was not Lucian of Antioch excommu-
nicated, and, martyr though he was, regarded as the founder of
an heterodox sect»? Is not Tertullian said to be open to the
charge that he combated Praxeas with arguments which did
the work of Ariusi? Has he not, in his anxiety to avoid the
Monarchianist confusion of Persons, spoken of the Son as a
“derivation from, and portion of, the whole Substance of the
Father ,” or even as if once He was notl? Does any Catholic
writer undertake to apologise for the expressions of Lactantius 1
Has not recent criticism tended somewhat to enhance the repu-
tation of Petavius at the expense of Bishop Bull™? Nay, is not
Bulls great work itself an illustration of what is at least the
prima facie state of the case? Does it not presuppose a consider-
able apparent discrepancy between some ante-Nicene and the
post-Nicene writers? Is it not throughout explanatory and apo-
logetic ? Can we deny that out of the long list of writers whom
Bull reviews, he has, for one cause or another, to explain the
language of nearly one-half?’
This line of argument in an earlier guise has been discussed
so fully by a distinguished predecessor® in the present Lecture,
that it may suffice to notice very summarily the considerations
which must be taken into account, if Justice is to be done, both
to its real force and to the limits which ought to be, but which
are not always, assigned to it.
(2) Undoubtedly, it should be frankly granted that some of
the ante-Nicene writers do at times employ terms which, judged
by a Nicene standard, must be pronounced unsatisfactory. You
might add to the illustrations which have already been quoted ;
and you might urge that, if they admit of a Catholic interpreta-
tion, they do not always invite one. For in truth these ante-
8. Cf. Pet. de Trin. i. 4, το; St. Bas. Ep. 9. But cf. Athan. Sent. Dion.
* Alexander ap. Theodoret. Hist. lib. i. 6. 4; Pet. de Trin. i. 4, 13.
* Petavius attacks him especially on the score of this treatise. De Trin. i.
5,2: ‘Opinionem explicat suam,’ says Petavius, ‘ que etiam Arianorum
heresim impietate et absurditate superat.’ For a fairer estimate, see Klee,
Dogmengeschichte, ii. c. 2.
* Adv. Prax. c, 9: ‘Pater enim tota Substantia est, Filius verd derivatio
totius et portio.’ See the remarks of Baur, Dogmengeschichte, i. 444, to
which, however, a study of the context will yield a sufficient answer err.
ce. 8: ‘Sermo in Patre semper..... nunquam separatus a Patre.’
1 Ady. Hermog. c. 3. See Bull, Def. iii. το. Comp. Ibid. ii. 7.
m The writer himself would on no account be understood to assent to this
opinion. Even in criticizing Bull, Dr. Newman admits that he does his
work ‘triumphantly.’ Developm. p. 159. » Dr. Burton.
Vir | Ee2
J πὸ δ Πρ ΠΟ εν
420 Someante-Nicenewriters who held theperfect faith
Ce eg ALO GOREN RAE HGS 1-210 ee aaa
Nicene fathers were feeling their way, not towards the substance
of the faith, which they possessed in its fulness, but towards
that intellectual mastery both of its relationship to outer forms
of thought, and of its own internal harmonies and system, which
is obviously a perfectly distinct gift from the simple possession
of the faith itself. As Christians they possessed the faith itself.
The faith, delivered once for all, had been given to the Church
in its completeness by the apostles. But the finished interlectual
survey and treatment of the faith is a superadded acquirement ;
it is the result of conflict with a hostile criticism, and of devout
reflections matured under the guidance of the Spiritual Truth.
Knowledge of the drift and scope of particular lines of specula-
tion, knowledge of the real force and value of a new terminology,
comes, whether to a man or to a society, in the way of education
and after the discipline of partial and temporary failure. Heresy
indirectly contributed to form the Church’s mind : it gave point
and sharpness to current conceptions of truth by its mutilations
and denials ; it illustrated the fatal tendencies of novel lines of
speculation, or even of misleading terms ; it unwittingly forced
on an elucidation of the doctrines of the Church by its subtle
and varied opposition. But before heresy had thus accomplished
its providential work, individual Church teachers might in per-
fect. good faith attempt to explain difficulties, or to win op-
ponents, by enterprising speculations, in this or that direction,
which were not yet shewn to be perilous to truth. Not indeed
that the Universal Church, in her collective capacity, was ever
committed to any of those less perfect statements of doctrine
which belong to the ante-Nicene period. Particular fathers or
schools of thought within her might use terms and illustrations
which she afterwards disavowed ; but then, they had no Divine
guarantee of inerrancy, such as had been vouchsafed to the entire
body of the faithful. They were in difficult and untried circum-
stances; they were making experiments in unknown regions of
thought ; their language was tentative and provisional. Com-
pared with the great fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries,
who spoke when collective Christendom had expressed or was
expressing its mind in the (Ecumenical Councils, and who there-
fore more nearly represented it, and were in a certain sense its
accepted organs, such ante-Nicene writers occupy a position
inferior, if not in love and honour, yet certainly in weight of
authority. If without lack of reverence to such glorious names
the illustration is permissible, the Alexandrian teachers of the
second and third centuries were, relatively to their successors of
| LECT.
—————— τσ τὺ“-ἷ“ἵἴ τ ὺ ἑ ἷ““ἕἷἕΠἕΠἕἷἕἷἷἕ ΘῸἷῸἷῸῸῤῤ΄ἷὖὃὃὃὃ ᾽΄᾽΄΄᾽Ἕ'ϑ
had not mastered all its intellectual bearings. 421
ee ee eee eile
the age of the Councils, in the position of young or half-educated
persons, who know at bottom what they mean, who know yet
more distinctly what they do not mean, but who as yet have not
so measured and sounded their thoughts, or so tested the instru-
ment by which thought finds expression, as to avoid misrepre-.
senting their meaning more or less considerably, before they
succeed in conveying it with accuracy. When, for example,
St. Justin, and after him Tertullian, contrast the visibility of the
Son with the invisibility of the Father, all that their language is
probably intended to convey is that the Son had from everlasting
designed to assume a nature which would render Him visible.
When again St. Justin speaks of the Son as a Minister of God,
this expression connects Him without explanation with the
ministering Angel of the Old Testament. Yet it need involve
nothing beyond a reference to His humiliation in the days of His
Flesh. A like interpretation may fairly be put upon the ultra-
subordinationist terms used by Origen and Tertullian in dealing
with two forms of heretical Monarchianism ; and upon the mis-
construed phrases of the saintly Dionysius which expressed
his resistance to a full-blown Sabellianism °. Language was
employed which obviously admitted of being misunderstood. It
would not have been used at a later period. ‘It may be,’ says
St. Jerome, with reference to some of the ante-Nicene fathers,
‘that they simply fell into errors, or that they wrote in a sense
distinct from that which lies on the surface of their writings,
or that the copyists have gradually corrupted their writings.
Or at any rate before that Arius, like “the sickness that de-
stroyeth in the noonday,” was born in Alexandria, these writers
spoke, in terms which meant no harm, and which were less
cautious than such as would be used now, and which accord-
ingly are open to the unfriendly construction which ill-disposed
persons put upon them P.’
Indeed it is observable that the tentative and perplexing
Christological language which was used by earlier fathers, at
a time when the quicksands of religious thought had not yet
been explored by the shipwrecks of heresy, does not by any
° Petav. de Trin. i. 4, Το.
P Apolog. adv. Ruffin. ii. Oper. tom. iv. p. ii. p. 409, apud Petav. de Trin.
i, I: ‘ Fieri potest, ut vel simpliciter erraverint, vel alio sensu scripserint, vel
a librariis imperitis eorum paullatim scripta corrupta sint. Vel cert®, ante-
quam in Alexandria, quasi demonium meridianum, Arius nasceretur, inno-
center quedam et nimis cauté locuti sunt, et que non possint perversorum
hominum calumniam declinare. Cf. St. Athan. contr, Ar. iii. 59.
vi].
422 Ante-Nicene subordinationistlanguage explained
means point, as is sometimes assumed, in an Arian direction
exclusively. If, for instance, a few phrases in St. Justin may
be cited by Arianism with a certain plausibility, a similar appeal
to him is open from the opposite direction of Sabellianism, In
his anxiety to discountenance Emanatist conceptions of the
relation of the Logos to the Father, Justin hastily refers the
beginning of the Personal Subsistence of the Word to revelation
or to the creation, and he accordingly speaks of the Word as
being caused by the Will of God. But Justin did not place the
Son on the footing of a creature; he did not hold a strict
subordinationism4; since he teaches distinctly that the Logos
is of the Essence of God, that He is potentially and eternally in
Godt. Thus St. Justin’s language at first sight seems to em-
braceivo opposite and not yet refuted heresies: both can appeal
ve with equal justice, or rather with equal want of its.
(8) Reflect further that a doctrine may be held in its integrity,
and yet be presented to men of two different periods, under
aspects in many ways different. So it was with the doctrine of
Christ’s Divinity, in the ante-Nicene as compared with the post-
Nicene age of its promulgation. While the Gospel was still
struggling with paganism throughout the empire, the Church
undoubtedly laid the utmost possible stress upon the Unity of »
the Supreme Being. For this was the primal truth which she
had to assert most emphatically in the face of polytheism. In
order to do this it was necessary to insist with particular em-
phasis upon those relations which secure and explain the Unity
of the Divine Persons in the Blessed Trinity. That, in the
ineffable mystery of the Divine Life, the Father is the Fount or
Source of Godhead, from Whom by eternal Generation and
Procession respectively, the Son and the Spirit derive their
Personal Being, was the clear meaning of the theological state-
ments of the New Testament. When, then, Origen speaks of
the Father as the ‘ first Godt,’ he means what the Apostle meant
by the expression, ‘One God and Father of all, Who is above
all.’ He implicitly means that, independently of all time and
inferiority, the Son’s Life was derived from, and, in that sense,
subordinate to the Life of the Father. Now it is obvious that
to speak with perfect accuracy upon such a subject, so as to
a Dorner, Person Christi, Erster Theil, p. 426, n. 22.
r Contr. Tryph. c. 61: 6 Θεὸς γεγέννηκε δύναμίν τινα ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ λογικήν.
s Dorner, Person Christi, Erster Theil, p. 426. See the whole passage, in
which this is very ably argued against Semisch.
t Contr. Cels. vi. 47: ὁ πρῶτος καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶσι Θεός.
[ LECT.
ag pa SS
by the Church's duties towards Polytheism. 423
express the ideas of derivation and subordinateness, while avoiding
the cognate but false and disturbing ideas of posteriority in
time and inferiority of nature, was difficult. For as yet the
dogmatic language of the Church was comparatively unfixed,
and a large discretion was left to individual teachers. They used
material images to express what was in their thoughts. These
images, drawn from created things, were of course not adequate
to the Uncreated Object Which they were designed to illustrate.
Yet they served to introduce an imperfect conception of It¥.
The fathers who employed them, having certain Emanatist
theories in view, repeatedly urged that the Son is derived from
the Father in accordance with the Divine attributes of Will and
Power. Looking to our human experience, we conceive of will
as prior to that which it calls into being; but in God the
Eternal Will and the Eternal Act are coincident ; and the
phrase of St. Justin which refers the existence of the Logos to
the Divine Will is only misunderstood because it is construed in
an authropomorphiec sense. In like manner the Alexandrian dis-
tinction between the λόγος ἐνδιάθετος and the λόγος προφορικὸς
fell in naturally with the subordinationist teaching in the ante-
Nicene Church. It could, in a sense, be said that the Son left the
Bosom of the Father when He went forth to create, and the act
of creation was thus described as a kind of second generation of
the Son. But the expression did not imply, as it has been un-
derstood to imply, a denial of His eternal Generation, and of His
unbegotten, unending Subsistence in God. This indeed is plain
from the very writers who use it*. Generally speaking, the
early fathers are bent on insisting on the subordination (κατὰ
τάξιν) of the Son, as protecting and explaining the doctrine of
the Divine Unity. If some of these expressed themselves too
incautiously or boldly, the general truth itself was never dis-
ἃ *In some instances [of ante-Nicene language] which are urged, it is
quite obvious on the surface that the writer is really wishing to express the
idea of the Son’s generation being absolutely coeval with the Eternal Being
of the Father, and is using the examples from the natural world, where
the derivation is most immediately consequent upon the existence of the
thing derived from, in order broadly to impress that idea of coeval upon
the reader’s mind. ‘‘The Son,” says St. Clement of Alexandria, “ issues
from the Father quicker than light from the sun.” Here, however, the very
aim of the illustration to express simultaneousness is turned against it, and
special attention is called to the word “quicker,” as if the writer had only
degrees of quickness in his mind, and only made the Son’s generation from His
source “‘quicker”’ than that of light from its source, and not absolutely coeval.’
Christian Remembrancer, Jan. 1847, Art. Newman on Development, P2347.
a the examination of passages in Newman’s Arians, pp. 215-218.
VII
424 Leal mind of the ante-Nicene Church declared,
credited in the Church. Subordinationism was indeed allowed
to fall somewhat into the shade, when the decline of paganism
made it possible, and the activities of Arianism made it
necessary, to contemplate Jesus Christ in the absoluteness of
His Personal Godhead rather than in that relation of a: sub-
ordinate, in the sense of an eternally derived subsistence, in
which He also stands to the Eternal Father. But Bishop Bull has
shewn how earnestly such a doctrine of subordination was also
taught in the Nicene period; and at this day we confess it in
the Nicene Creed itself. And the stress which was laid upon it
in the second and third centuries, and which goes far to explain
much of the language which is sometimes held to be of doubtful
orthodoxy, is in reality perfectly consistent with the broad fact
that from the first the general current of Church language pro-
claims the truth that Jesus Christ is God.
(y) For that truth was beyond doubt the very central feature
of the teaching of the ante-Nicene Church, even when Church
teachers had not yet recognised all that it necessarily involved,
and had not yet elaborated the accurate statement of its rela-
tionship to other truths around it. The writers whose less-
considered expressions are brought forward in favour of an |
opposite conclusion do not sustain it. If, as we have seen,
Justin may be quoted by those who push the Divinity of Christ
to the denial of His Personal distinction from the Fathery, no
less than by Arianizers ; so also, as Petavius himself admits2, do
both Origen and Tertullian anticipate the very language of the
Nicene Creed. Nor, when their expressions are fairly examined,
can it be denied that the writers who imported the philo-
sophical category of the λόγος evdidberos and προφορικὸς into
Christian theology did really believe with all their hearts in the
eternal Generation of the Word. For it should especially be
remarked that when the question of our Lord’s Divinity was
broadly proposed to the mind of the ante-Nicene Church, the
answer was not a doubtful or hesitating one. Any recognised
assault upon it stirred the heart of the Church to energetic
protest. When Victor of Rome excommunicated the Quarto-
decimans, his censures were answered either by open remon-
strance or by tacit disregard, throughout Gaul and the Easta,
When he cut off Theodotus from the communion of the Church,
the act commanded universal acquiescence ; the Christian heart
thrilled with indignation at ‘the God-denying apostasy’ of the
Y Petav. de Trin. i. 6, 6. * Ibid. νὰ ΟῚ ἘΠῚ
® Eus. Hist. Eccl. v. 24.
[ LECT.
A ᾿ ᾿β8Ππ
whenever Christ's Godhead was called in question. 425
tanner of Byzantium>. When Dionysius of Alexandria, writing
with incautious zeal against the Sabellians, was charged with
heterodoxy on the subject of our Lord’s Divine Nature, he at once
addressed to Dionysius of Rome an explanation which is in fact
an anticipation of the language of Athanasius®. When Paulus
of Samosata appeared in one of the first sees of Christendom,
the universal excitement, the emphatic protests, the final, mea-
sured, and solemn condemnation which he provoked, proved how
deeply the Divinity of Jesus Christ was rooted in the heart of the
Church of the third century. Moreover, unless Christ’s absolute
Godhead had been thus a matter of Catholic belief, the rise
of such a heresy as that of Sabellianism would have been im-
possible. Sabellianism overstates that which Arianism denies,
Sabellianism presupposes the truth of Christ’s Godhead, which,
if we may so speak, it exaggerates even to the point of rejecting
His Personal distinctness from the Father. If the belief of the
ante-Nicene Church had been really Arianizing, Noetus could
not have appealed to it as he did, while perverting it to a denial
of hypostatic distinctions in the Godhead; and Arius himself
might have only passed for a representative of the subordina-
tionism of Origen, and of the literalism of Antioch, instead of
being condemned as a sophistical dialectician who had broken
altogether with the historical tradition of the Church, by
daring to oppose a central truth of her unchanging faith.
The idea that our Lord’s Divinity was introduced into the
belief and language of the Church at a period subsequent to the
death of the apostles, was indeed somewhat adventurously put
forward by some early Humanitarians. Reference has alpeady
been made in another connection to an important passage, which
is quoted by Eusebius from an anonymous writer who appears
to have flourished in the early part of the third century. This
passage enables us to observe the temper and method of treat-
ment encountered by any such theory in ante-Nicene times.
The Humanitarian Artemon seems to have been an accom-
plished philosopher and mathematician; and he maintained that
the Divinity of Christ was imported into the Church during the
episcopate of Zephyrinus, who succeeded Victor in the Roman
chair. Now if this story could have been substantiated, it would
have been necessary to suppose, either that the Church was the
> Eus. Hist. Eccl. v. 28: τῆς ἀρνησιθέου ἀποστασίας. Epiphan, Her. 54.
© See St. Athan. de Sent. Dionysii, c. 4, sqq.
ἃ St. Hippol. contr. Her, Noeti,c. 1: ὁ δὲ ἀντίστατο λέγων, “Τί οὖν κακὸν
ποιῶ δοξάζων τὸν Χριστόν ; See also Epiphanius, Her. 57.
VII |
426 Argument of ‘the Little Labyrinth,
organ of a continuous and not yet completed revelation, or else
that the doctrine was a human speculation unwarrantably added
to the simpler creed of an earlier age. But the writer to whom
I have referred meets the allegation of Artemon by denying
it point-blank. ‘Perchance,’ he archly observes, ‘what they
[the Artemonites] say might be credible, were it not that the
Holy Scriptures contradict them ; and then also there are works
of certain brethren, older than the days of Victor, works
written in defence of the truth, and against the heresies then
prevailing. I speak of Justin and Miltiades, and Tatian and
Clement, and many others, by all of whom the Divinity of
Christ is asserted. For who, he continues, ‘knows not the
works of Irenzus and Melito, and the rest, in which Christ is
announced as God and Mane? ‘This was the argument upon
which the Church of those ages instinctively fell back when she
was accused of adding to her creed. Particular writers might
have understated truth ; or they might have ventured upon ex-
pressions requiring explanation ; or they might have written
economically as in view of particular lines of thought, and have
been construed by others without the qualifications which were
present to their own minds. But there could be no mistake
about the continuous drift and meaning of the belief around
which they moved, and which was always in the background of
their ideas and language. There could be no room for the
charge that they had invented a new dogma, when it could be
shewn that the Church from the beginning, and the New Testa-
ment itself, had taught what they were said to have invented.
ΠῚ. Of the objections to which the Homoousion is exposed
in the present day, there are two which more particularly
demand our attention.
(a) ‘Is not the Homoousion,’ it is said, ‘a development? Was
it not rejected at the Council of Antioch sixty years before it
was received at Nica? Is not this fact indicative of a forward
movement in the mind of the Church? Does it not shew that the
tide of dogmatic belief was rising, and that it covered ground
in the Nicene age which it had deliberately left untouched in
the age preceding? And, if this be so, if we admit the prin-
ciple of a perpetual growth in the Church’s creed ; why should
we not accept the latest results of such a principle as un-
equivocally as we close with its earlier results? If we believe
° Eus, Hist. Eccl. v. 28. It is probable that St. Hippolytus wrote ‘The
Little Labyrinth.’
[ LECT.
Was the Flomoousion a ‘development?’ 427
that the Nicene decision is an assertion of the truth of God,
why should we hesitate to adopt a similar belief respecting that
proclamation of the sinless conception of the Blessed Virgin
which startled Christendom twelve years ago, and which has
since that date been added to the official creed of the largest
section of the Christian Church 1
Here, the first point to be considered turns on a question of
words. What do we mean by a doctrinal development? Do we
mean an explanation of an already existing idea or belief, pre-
sumably giving to that belief greater precision and exactness in
our own or other minds, but adding nothing whatever to its
real area‘? Or do we mean the positive substantial growth of
the belief itself, whether through an enlargement from within,
just as the acorn developes into the oak, or through an accretion
from without of new intellectual matter gathered around it, like
the aggrandisements whereby the infant colony developes into
the powerful empire ?
f In this sense a Development of Doctrine must necessarily be admitted:
When the life of the individual soul is vigorous and healthy, there must be
a continuously increasing knowledge of Divine Truth. St. Aug. in Joan. Ev.
Tract. xiv. c. 3. ἢ. 5: ‘Crescat ergo Deus qui semper perfectus est, crescat
in te. Quantd enim magis intelligis Deum, et quantd magis capis, videtur in
te crescere Deus ; in se autem non crescit, sed semper perfectus est. Intel-
ligebas heri modicum; intelligis hodié ampliis, intelliges cras multd ampliis:
lumen ipsum Dei crescit in te; ita velut Deus crescit, qui semper perfectus
manet. Quemadmodum si curarentur alicujus oculi ex pristina cecitate, et
inciperet videre paululum lucis, et alia die plus videret, et tertia die amplits,
vid-retur illi lux crescere: lux tamen perfecta est, sive ipse videat, sive non
videat. Sic est et interior homo: proficit quidem in Deo, et Deus in illo
videtur crescere ; ipse tamen minuitur, ut A gloria sua decidat, et in gloriam
Dei surgat. A somewhat analogous progress in the knowledge of Truth,
received from Christ and His Apostles, is found in the collective Christian So-
ciety. Vincent. Lerinens. Commonit. c. 28: ‘Nullusne ergd in Ecclesia Dei
profectus? Habeatur plane et maximus: nam quis ille est tam invidus homi-
nibus, tam exosus Deo, qui illud prohibere conetur? Crescat igitur oportet, et
multum vehementerque proficiat tam singulorum quam omnium, tam unius
hominis quam totius ecclesiz etatum ac seculorum gradibus, intelligentia,
scientia, sapientia.’ Not that this increasing apprehension of the true force and
bearings of the truth revealed in its fulness once for all involves any addition
to or subtraction from that one unchanging body of truth. Commonit. e. 30:
‘Fas est enim ut prisca illa coelestis philosophiee dogmata processu temporis
excurentur, limentur, poliantur; sed nefas est ut commutentur, nefas ut
detruncentur, nefas ut mutilentur. Accipiant licet evidentiam, lucem, dis-
tinctionem ; sed retineant necesse est plenitudinem, integritatem, proprieta-
tem.’ There is then no real increase in the body of truth committed to the
Church, but only a clearer perception on the part of the Church of the force
and bearings of that truth which she had possessed in its completeness
from the first. With some few drawbacks, this is fairly stated by Stauden-
maier, Wetzer and Welte’s Diction. Encycl.; art Dogme.
vi]
428 Lrue sense of the New Testament
Now if it be asked, which is the natural sense of the word
‘development,’ I reply that we ordinarily mean by it an actual
enlargement of that which is said to be developed. And in that
sense I proceed to deny that the Homoousion was a develop-
ment. It was not related to the teaching of the apostles as an
oak is related to an acorn. Its real relation to their teaching
was that of an exact and equivalent translation of the language
of one intellectual period into the language of another. The
New Testament had taught that Jesus Christ is the Lord of
natures and of men}, of heaven, and of the spiritual worldi;
that He is the world’s Legislator, its King and its Judge; that
He is the Searcher of hearts}, the Pardoner of sins ™, the Well-
spring of life"; that He is Giver of true blessedness and salva-
tion®, and the Raiser of the deadP; it distinctly attributed to
Him omnipresence, omnipotence', omnisciences; eternity t,
absolute likeness to the Father, absolute oneness with the
Fatherx, an equal share in the honour due to the Fathery, a like
claim upon the trust% the faith, and the love> of humanity.
The New Testament had spoken of Him as the Creator¢ and
Preserver of the world 4, as the Lord of all things, as the King
of kings¢, the Distributor of all gracesf, the Brightness of the
5. St.John v. 17; St. Matt. viii. 3, 13; ix. 6, 22, 25, 29; St. John iv. so;
v. 8. This power over nature He delegated to others: St. Matt. x. 1, 8;
St. Mark xvi. 17; St. Luke x. 17; St. John xiv. 12; Acts iii. 6, 12, ΤΟΙΣ
34; xvi. 18. h St. Matt. xxviii. 18-20; St. John v. 21, 22; xvii. 2.
i St. Matt. vii. 21, 235 xviii. 18; xxvi. 64; St.John. i. 51s sz ΤΣ τοι
k St. Matt. v.—vii.; xi. 29, 30; xv. 18; xviii. 19 ; xxv. 34,40; St. John
viii. 36 ; xiv. 21; xv. 12; xx. 23, &c.
1 St. John i. 47-50; ii. 24,253 iv. 17,18; vi. 18, 703 xvi. 19, 32; Rev.
ii. 23.
m St. Matt. ix. 2,6; St. Luke v. 20, 24; vii. 48; xxiv. 47; and St. John
xx. 23, where He delegates the absolving power to others.
Ὁ St. John iv. 13, 14; v. 21, 26, 403 vi. 47, 51-58; x. 28.
° St. Matt. vii. 21 sq.; St. John vi. 39, 403; x. 28; Acts iv. 12; Heb. ii.10,14.
P St. John v. 21, 25; xi. 25. Christ raises Himself from death: St. John
Hs 2G ΣΧ ΤΩΣ 4 Ibid. iii. 13 ; St. Matt. xviii. 20.
τ St. Matt. xxviii. 18 ; Phil. iii. 21; Heb. i. 3.
® St. Matt. xi. 27; St. John iii. 11-13 ; vi. 46; x. 15; Col. ii. 3.
t St. John viii. 58; xvii. 5 ; Rev. i. 8; ii. 8; xxii. 12, 13.
Ὁ St. John v. 17, 19, 21, 26; x. 28, 20; Χῖν. 7.
= ΤΟΙ" Χ. 28,.320; Σὶν, ΤΟΣ y Ibid. ν. 23.
2 Ibid. xiv. 1; xvi. 33; Col. i. 27; St. Matt. xii. 21,
@ St. John vi. 27; 1 St. John iii. 23 ; Acts xvi. 31; xx. 21.
> I Cor. xvi. 22; St. John xiv. 23.
¢ St. John i. 3; Col. i. 16; Heb. i. 2, 10. 4 Col. i. 17; Heb. i. 3.
© Acts x. 36; Jude 4; Rev. xvii. 14; xix. 16.
f St. John i. 12, 14, 16, 17; 2 Thess. ii. 16.
[ LECT.
encbodied tn the Llomoousion. 429
Father's Glory and the Impress of His Beings; as being in the
form of God}, as containing in Himself all the fulness of the
Godheadi, as being Godk. This and much more to the same
purpose had been said in the New Testament. When therefore
the question was raised whether Jesus Christ was or was not
‘of one substance with’ the Father, it became clear that of two
courses one must be adopted. Either an affirmative answer
must be given, or the teaching of the apostles themselves must
be explained away!. As a matter of fact the Nicene fathers
only affirmed, in the philosophical language of the fourth
century, what our Lord and the apostles had taught in the
popular dialects of the first. If then the Nicene Council
developed, it was a development by explanation. It was a deve-
lopment which placed the intrinsically unchangeable dogma,
committed to the guardianship of the Church, in its true relation
to the new intellectual world that had grown up around Chris-
tians in the fourth century. Whatever vacillations of thought
might have been experienced here or there, whatever doubtful
expressions miglt have escaped from theologians of the inter-
vening period, no real doubt could be raised as to the meaning
of the original teachers of Christianity, or as to the true drift
_ and main current of the continuous traditional belief of the
Church. The Nicene divines interpreted in a new language the
belief of their first fathers in the faith. They did not enlarge
it ; they vehemently protested that they were simply preserving
and handing on what they had received. The very pith of their
objection to Arianism was its novelty: it was false because it
was of recent origin™. They themselves were forced to say what
they meant by their creed, and they said it. Their explanation
added to the sum of authoritative ecclesiastical language, but it
did not add to the number of articles in the Christian faith: the
area of the creed was not enlarged. The Nicene Council did not
vote a new honour to Jesus Christ which He had not before
& Heb. i. 3; Col. i. 15; 2 Cor. iv. 4.
h Phil. ii. 6. i Col. ii. g ; St. John i. 14, 16.
k St.John i. 1; Acts xx. 28; Rom. ix. §; Titus ii. 13; 1 St. John v. 20,
Compare Rom. viii. g-11 with Rom. xiv. 10-12.
1 Mohler, Symbolik, p. 610: ‘Waren sie (the Socinians) schiirfere Denker
gewesen, so mussten sie zur Einsicht gelangen, dass, wenn das Evangelium
den Sohn als ein persénliches Wesen, und zugleich als Gott darstellt, wie
die Socinianer nicht laiigneten (Christ. Relig. institut. bibl. frat. Pol. tom. i.
p- 655. Es wird Joh. i. 1; xx. 21 citirt.), kein anderes Verhiiltniss zwischen
ihm und dem Vater denkbar sei, als jenes, welches die katholische Kirche von
Anfang an geglaubt hatte,’ m Socr. Hist. Eccl. i. 6.
VII |
----- Ὄ ὁ Ὁ ELEN σε
430 Why the Flomoousion was rejected
------:ἨἈ --- -Ξ ει οοιοΘΕἘ.-ἔ ον
possessed : it defined more clearly the original and unalterable
_ bases of that supreme place which from the days of the apostles
He had held in the thought and heart, in the speculative and
active life of Christendom.
The history of the symbol Homoousion during the third
century might, at first sight, seem to favour the position, that
its adoption at Niczea was of the nature of an accretive develop-
ment. Already, indeed, Dionysius and others (perhaps Origen)
had employed it to express the faith of the Church ; but it had
been, so to speak, disparaged and discoloured by the patronage
of the Valentinians and the Manicheans. In the Catholic theo-
logy the word denoted full participation in the absolute self-
existing Individuality of God. Besides this, the word suggested
the distinct personality of its immediate Subject ; unless it had
suggested this, it would have been tautologous. In ordinary
language it was applied to things which are only similar to each
other, and are considered as one by an abstraction of our minds.
No such abstraction was possible in the contemplation of God.
His οὐσία is Himself, peculiar to Himself, and One; and there-
fore to be ὁμοούσιος with Him is to be internal to that Uncreated
Nature Which is utterly and necessarily separate from all created
beings. But the Valentinians used the word to denote the
relation of their Zions to the Divine Pleroma ; and the Mani-
cheeans said that the soul of man was ὁμοούσιον τῷ Θεῷ, In a
materialistic sense. When then it was taken into the service of
these Emanatist doctrines, the Homoousion implied nothing
higher than a generic or specific bond of unity°. These uses of
the word implied that οὐσία itself was something beyond God,
and moreover, as was suggested by its Manichean associations,
something material. Paulus of Samosata availed himself of this
depreciation of the word to attack its Catholic use as being really
Ὁ St. Cyril of Alexandria defines οὐσία as mpayua αὐθύπαρκτον, μὴ δεόμενον
ἑτέρου πρὸς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ σύστασιν. Apud Suicer. in voc. οὐσία.
° Ὁμοούσιος properly means of the same nature—i. e. under the same
general nature or species. It is applied to things which are but similar to
each other, and are considered as one by an abstraction of our minds. Thus
Aristotle speaks of the stars being ὁμοούσια with each other? Newman,
Arians, p. 203. ‘Valentinianism,’ he says (p. 206), ‘applied the word to
the Creator and His creatures in this its original philosophical sense. The
Manichees followed .... they too were Emanatists,’ &c. But sucha usage
offends against ‘the great revealed principle’ of ‘the incommunicable:. .
Individuality of the Divine Essence :’ according to which principle ὁμοούσιος,
as used of the Son, defined Him as ‘necessarily included in That Individuality,’
See Dr. Newman’s valuable note on St. Athanasius’ Treatises, i. 152, note a
(Libr. Fath.); Ibid. 35, note ¢; and Soe. i. 8.
[ LECT.
>
ee --Ὃὃ“ἝὋἝὋὁὁὁἤῬρνργνσἔΕεἝ΄ὁὃὁ ὁ ὀΣΣΒἝΘἙϑΘῬϑ.
at Antioch and adopted at Nicca, 431
materialistic. Paulus argued that ‘if the Father and the Son
were ὁμοούσιοι, there was some common οὐσία in which they
partook,’ higher than, and ‘distinct from, the Divine Persons
themselves?’ Firmilian and Gregory were bent, not upon the
philological object of restoring the word ὁμοούσιος to its real
sense, but upon the religious duty of asserting the true relation
of the Son to the Father, in language the meaning of which
would be plain to their contemporaries. The Nicene Fathers,
on the other hand, were able, under altered circumstances, to
vindicate for the word its Catholic meaning, unaffected by any
Emanatist gloss; and accordingly, in their hands it protected
the very truth which at Antioch, sixty years earlier, it would
have obscured. St. Athanasius tells us that ‘the fathers who
deposed the Samosatene took the word Homoousion in a
corporeal sense. For Paulus sophisticated by saying thatif....
Christ was consubstantial with the F ather, there must necessarily
be three substances, one which was prior and two others spring-
ing from it. Therefore, with reason, to avoid that sophism of
Paulus, the fathers said that Christ was not consubstantial, that
is, that He was not in that relation to the Father which Paulus
had in his mind. On the other hand,’ continues St. Athanasius,
‘those who condemned the Arian heresy saw through the cunning
of Paulus, and considered that in things incorporeal, especially
in God, “consubstantial” did not mean what he had supposed ;
so they, knowing the Son to be begotten of the Substance, ....,
with reason called Him consubstantial 4. Paulus, as a subtle
and hardheaded dialectician, had contrived to impose upon the
term a sense, which either made the Son an inferior being or
else destroyed the Unity of God. He used the word, as St.
Hilary says, as mischievously as the Arians rejected the use of itr;
while the fathers at Antioch set it aside from a motive as loyal
P Newman, Arians, p. 209. See the whole passage.
4 St. Athan. De Synodis, § 45; cf. Cave, Hist. Lit. i. 134. Non aliud
dicit Athanasius quam Paulum ex detorto Catholicorum vocabulo sophisticum
argumentum contra Christi Divinitatem excogitasse; nempe, nisi confiteremur
Christum ex homine Deum factum esse, sequeretur ipsum Patri esse ὁμοούσιον,
ac proinde tres esse substantias, unam quidem primariam, duas ex ill4 deri-
vatas : σωματικῶς enim et crasso sensu vocabulum accepit, quasi in essentia
divina, perinde ac in rebus corporeis usu venit, ut ab un& substantia altera,
eaque diversa, derivetur. Quocirca, ne hac voce heretici ulterids abuterentur,
silentio supprimendam censuerunt patres Antiocheni: non quod Catholicum
vocis sensum damnarent, sed ut omnem sophisticé cavillandi occasionem
hereticis preriperent, ut ex Athanasio, Basilio, aliisque, abunde liquet.’
* St. Hil. de Syn. 86: ‘Mal Homoousion Samosatenus confessus est, sed
nunquam melits Ariani negaverunt.’
vil |
432 Adoption of the Homoousion not to be paralleled
to Catholic truth as was that which led to its adoption at Nicza’.
Language is worth, after all, just what it means to those who
use it. Origen had rejected and Tertullian had defended the
προβολὴ from an identical theological motive ; and the opposite
lines of action, adopted by the Councils of Antioch and Nicea
respectively, are so far from proving two distinct beliefs respect-
ing the higher Nature of Jesus Christ, that when closely examined, —
they exhibit an absolute identity of creed and purpose brought
face to face with two distinct sets of intellectual circumstances.
The faith and aim of the Church was one and unchanging. But
the question, whether a particular symbol would represent her
mind with practical accuracy, received an answer at Antioch
which would have been an error at Nicea. The Church looked
hard at the Homoousion at Antioch, when heresy had perverted
its popular sense ; and she set it aside. She examined it yet
more penetratingly at Niceea ; and from then until now it has
been the chosen symbol of her unalterable faith in the literal
Godhead of her Divine Head.
Therefore between the imposition of the Homoousion and the
recent definition of the Immaculate Conception, there is no real
correspondence. It is not merely that the latter is accepted only
by a section of the Christian Church, and was promulgated by
an authority whose modern claims the fathers of Nicwa would
have regarded with sincere astonishment. The difference between
the two cases is still more fundamental ; it lies in the substance
of the two definitions respectively. The Nicene fathers did but
assert a truth which had been held to be of primary, vital import
from the first ; they asserted it in terms which brought it vividly
home to the intelligence of their day. They were explaining old
truth ; they were not setting forth as truth that which had before
been matter of opinion. But the recent definition asserts that an
hypothesis, unheard of for centuries after the first promulgation
of the Gospel, and then vehemently maintained and as vehe-
mently controvertedt by theologians of at least equal claims
to orthodoxy, is a fact of Divine revelation, to be received by all
who would receive the true faith of the Redeemer. In the one
case an old truth is vindicated by an explanatory reassertion ; in
the other the assertion of a new fact is added to the Creed. The
5. Routh, Rel. Sacr. iii. 360, ed. 1846. See too Dr. Newman’s note 2, in
St. Athanasius’ Select Treatises, i. p. 166. (Oxf. Libr. Fath.),
Ὁ Cf. especially the treatise of the Dominican, John de Torquemada,
Cardinal de Turrecremata, entitled, Tractatus de Veritate Conceptionis B.
Virginis. Rome, 1547, 4to. It is exceedingly rare. Cf. note G in App.
[ LECT.
wth the definition of the Immaculate C onception. 433
Nicene fathers only maintained in the language of their day
the original truth that Jesus Christ is God: but the question
whether the Conception of Mary was or was not sinless is a
distinct question of fact, standing by itself, with no necessary
bearing upon her office in the economy of the Incarnation, and
not related in the way of an explanatory vindication to any
originally revealed truth beyond it. It is one thing to reassert
the revealed Godhead of Jesus ; it is, in principle, a fundament-
ally distinct thing to ‘decree a new honour’ to Mary. The Ni-
cene decision is the act of a Church believing itself commissioned
to guard a body of truth which had been delivered from heaven
in its integrity, once for all. The recent definition appears to
presuppose a Church which can do more than guard the ancient
faith, which is empowered to make actual additions to the num-
ber of revealed certainties, which is the organ no less than the
recipient of a continuous revelationt, It js one thing to say
that language has changed its value, and that a particular term
which was once considered misleading will now serve to vindicate
an acknowledged truth; it is another thing to claim the power of
transfiguring a precarious and contradicted opinion, resting on
ἃ T have been reminded that Roman Catholics do not admit this (see the
‘Month,’ Nov. 1867,) and, at the instance of my reviewer, I quote with plea-
sure the following language of the Bull Ineffabilis, which is substantially that
of Vincent of Lerins, and which will command the assent of English Church-
men. The Church of Christ, says the Bull, ‘sedula depositorum apud se
dogmatum custos, et vindex, nihil in his unquam permutat, nihil minuit,
nihil addit, sed omni industria vetera fideliter sapienterque tractando si qua
antiquittis informata sunt, et Patrum fides sevit, ita limare expolire studet,
ut prisca illa coelestis doctrine dogmata accipiant evidentiam, lucem, distine-
tionem, sed retineant plenitudinem, integritatem, proprietatem, ac in suo
‘tantum genere crescant, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eddemque
sententia,’ p. 11. But the question is whether, if the principle thus stated
had been really adhered to, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin
Mary could have been defined to be an article of necessary faith. It is one
thing to propose a new and necessary definition or explanation of a truth
which has been confessed from the first ; it is another thing to say that a fact,
the truth of which has been controverted by a series of writers of the highest
authority, is now so certain that it must be received as matter of faith. Should
not the ‘nihil addit’ of the Bull, alone have sufficed to render the definition
impossible ? See Observations d’un Théologien sur la Bulle de Pie IX, relative
& la Conception de la Sainte Vierge, Paris, 1855, pp. 28-38 ; La Croyance &
P’Immaculée Conception de la Sainte Vierge ne peut devenir dogme de foi,
par M. Abbé Laborde, Paris, 1854, pp. 77-83. _ Can the assertion that
the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin is a certainty of faith, be
really rested upon any other ground, than an assumption in the modern
Church of some power to discern and proclaim truths which were altogether
unknown to the Church of the Apostles ?
vir | Ff
434 Was a definition of the Faith really needed?
no direct scriptural or primitive testimony, and impugned in
terms by writers of the date and authority of Aquinas, into a
certainty, claiming submission from the faith of Christendom on
nothing less than a Divine authority. There is then no real rea-
son for the statement that those who now reject the Immaculate
Conception would of old have rejected the Homoousion. There
is nothing to shew that those who bow with implicit faith before
the Nicene decision are bound, as a matter of consistency, to
yield the same deference of heart and thought to the most
modern development of doctrine within the Latin portion of
Catholic Christendom.
(8) But it may be rejoined: ‘Why was a fresh definition
deemed needful at Niczea at all? Why could not the Church of
the Nicene age have contented herself with saying that Jesus
Christ is God, after the manner of the Church of earlier days ?
Why was the thought of Christendom to be saddled with a
metaphysical symbol which at least transcends, if it does not
destroy, the simplicity of the Church’s first faith in our Lord’s
Divinity ?
(1) Now the answer is simply as follows. In the Arian age
it was not enough to say that Jesus Christ is God, because the
Arians had contrived to impoverish and degrade the idea con-
veyed by the Name of God so completely as to apply that sacred
word to ἃ creaturey. Of course, if it had been deemed a matter
of sheer indifference whether Jesus Christ is or is not God, it
would have been a practical error to have insisted on the truth
of His real Divinity, and an equivocal expression might have
been allowed to stand. If the Church of Christ had been, not
the school of revealed truth, in which the soul was to make
knowledge the food and stimulant of love, but a world-wide de-
bating club, ‘ever seeking and never coming to the knowledge
of the truth,’ it would then have been desirable to keep this and
all other fundamental questions open%. Perhaps in that case
* Sum. Th. iii, a. 27, 4. 2: ‘B. Virgo contraxit quidem originale peccatum,
sed ab eo fuit mundata antequam ex utero nasceretur.’ Cf. St. Bernard. Ep.
174; Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, vii. 7. 4; St. Bonaventur.
Sent. iii. Dist. 3, pars i. art. i. quest. 2.
y In the same way modern Socinians ‘ believe in the Divinity of Christ.’
Channing, Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered, Works, vol. ii. p.
361. Yet they also believe that Christ ‘is a Being distinct from the one
God.’ Ibid. p. 510. Sucha confession of Christ’s ‘Divinity’ implies of course
no more than might be said of St. John, and shews how completely language
may be emptied of its original value.
* See the letter addressed in Constantine’s name to St. Alexander and to
[ LECT. —
ΜΝ ΟοβὈὈυῊῆ]ᾷἷλἼοόοηςσὀθθίὈὈιΓΕρἌἭετἝτυ:λῬὠῆητττοοι τϑ͵οσσ -. ς
Vital importance of the question at tssue. 435
the Nicene decision might with truth have been described as the
‘greatest misfortune that has happened to Christendom.’ But
the Church believed herself to possess a revelation from God,
essential to the eternal well-being of the soul of man. She
further believed that the true Godhead of Jesus Christ was a
clearly-revealed truth of such fundamental and capital import,
that, divorced from it, the creed of Christendom must perish
outright. Plainly therefore it was the Church’s duty to assert
this truth in such language as might be unmistakably expressive
of it. Now this result was secured by the Homoousion. It
was at the time of its first imposition, and it has been ever since,
a perfect criterion of real belief in the Godhead of our Lord. Tz
excluded the Arian sense of the word God, and on this account
it was adopted by the orthodox. How much it meant was
proved by the resistance which it then encountered, and by the
subsequent efforts which have been made to destroy or to evade
it. The sneer of Gibbon about the iota which separates the
semi-Arian from the Catholic symbol (Homoiousion from Homo-
ousion) is naturally repeated by those who believe that nothing
was really at stake beyond the emptiest of abstractions, and who
can speak of the fourth century as an age of meaningless logo-
machies. But to men who are concerned, not with words, but
with the truths which they enshrine, not with the mere historic
setting of a great struggle, but with the vital question at issue
in it, the full importance of the Nicene symbol will be sufficiently
obvious. The difference between Homoiousion and Homoousion
convulsed the world for the simple reason, that in that difference
lay the whole question of the real truth or falsehood of our
Lord’s actual Divinity. If in His Essence He was only like God,
He was still a distinct Being from God, and therefore either
created, or (per umpossibile) a second God. In a great engage-
ment, when man after man is laid low in defence of the colours
of his regiment, it might seem to a bystander, unacquainted with
the forms of war, a prodigious absurdity that so great a sacrifice
of life should be incurred for a piece of silk or cotton of a parti-
cular hue; and he might make many caustic epigrams at the
expense of the struggling and suffering combatants. But a
soldier would tell him that the flag is a symbol of the honour
and prowess of his country ; and that he is not dying for a few
Arius (Soc. i. 7), in which the writer—probably Eusebius of Nicomedia—
insists ‘that the points at issue are minute and trivial.’ Bright’s Hist. Ch.
p. 20. Neale, Hist. Alex. i. 134,
vil ] Ff2
436 St. Athanasius a man of realities not of words.
yards of coloured material, but for the moral and patriotic idea
which the material represents. If ever there was a man who
was not the slave of language, who had his eye upon ideas,
truths, facts, and who made language submissively do their
work, that man was the great St. Athanasius. He advocated
the Homoousion at Niceea, because he was convinced that it was
the sufficient and necessary symbol and safeguard of the treasure
of truth committed to the Church: but years afterwards, he
declined to press it upon such of the semi-Arians as he knew to
be at heart sincerely loyal to the truth which it protected @.
And during a period of fifteen centuries experience has not
shewn that any large number of real believers in our Saviour’s
Godhead have objected to the Nicene statement; while its
efficacy in guarding against a lapse into Arian error has amply
confirmed the far-sighted wisdom, which, full of jealousy for the
rightful honour of Jesus», and of charity for the souls of men,
has incorporated it for ever with the most authoritative profes-
sion of faith in the Divinity of Christ which is possessed by
Christendom.
(2) It may indeed be urged that freedom from creeds is
ideally and in the abstract the highest state of Christian com-
munion. It may be pleaded that a public confession of faith
will produce in half-earnest and superficial souls a formal and
mechanical devotion; that the exposure of the most sacred
truth in a few condensed expressions to the scepticism and
irreverence of those who are strangers to its essence will lead to
inevitable ribaldry and scandal. But it is sufficient to reply
that these liabilities do not outweigh the necessity for a clear
‘form of sound words,’ since formalists will be formal, and
sceptics will be irreverent, with or without it. And those who
depreciate creeds among us now, do not really mean to recom-
mend that truth should be kept hidden, as in the first centuries,
in the secret mind of the Church: they have far other purposes
a De Synod. 41: Πρὸς δὲ τοὺς ἀποδεχομένους τὰ μὲν ἄλλα πάντα τῶν ἐν
Νικαίᾳ γραφέντων, περὶ δὲ μόνον τὸ “Ὁμοούσιον ἀμφιβάλλοντας, χρὴ μὴ ws
πρὸς ἐχθροὺς διακεῖσθαι .... .. ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἀδελφοὶ πρὸς ἀδελφοὺς διαλεγόμεθα, τὴν
αὐτὴν μὲν ἡμῖν διάνοιαν ἔχοντας, περὶ δὲ τὸ ὄνομα μόνον διστάζοντας.. ... Οὐ
μακράν εἶσιν ἀποδέξασθαι καὶ τὴν τοῦ “Ομοουσίου λέξιν. He repeatedly declares
that the Homoousion in its Nicene sense is intended to guard the reality
of the Divine Sonship as being uncreated. Ibid. 39, 45, 48, 54.
Ὁ St. Athanasius’ ‘zeal for the Consubstantiality had its root in his loyalty
to the ConsussTANTIAL. He felt that in the Nicene dogma were involved
the worship of Christ and the life ‘of Christianity.’ Bright’s Hist. Ch.
Pp. 149.
[ LECT.
Ee ae er ΄9'9θ'ὺὴπαΑ͂ἝἝἕἐἝ-ΦΦ''Ὃ του
Value of Creeds at the present day. 437
in view. Rousseau might draw pictures of the superiority of
simple primitive savage life to the enervated civilization of
Paris ; but it would not have been prudent in the Parisians at
the end of the last century to have attempted a return to the
barbaric life of their ancestors, who had roamed as happy
Savages in the great forests of Europe. The Latitudinarians
who suggest that the Church might dispense with the Catholic
creeds, advise us to revert to the defencelessness of ecclesiastical
childhood. But, alas! they cannot guarantee to us its innocence,
or its immunities. We could not, if we would, reverse the
thought of centuries, and ignore the questions which heresy has
opened, and which have been cecumenically decided. We might
not thus do despite to the kindly providence of Him, Who, with
the temptations to faith that came with the predestined course
of history, has in the creeds opened to us such ‘a way to escape
that we may be able to bear them.’
Certainly if toil and suffering confer a value on the object
which they earn or preserve ; if a country prizes the liberties
which were baptized in the blood of her citizens ; if a man
rejoices in the honour which he has kept unstained at the risk
of life ; then we, who are the heirs of the ages of Christendom,
should cling with a peculiar loyalty and love to the great Nicene
confession of our Lord’s Divinity. For the Nicene definition
was wrung from the heart of the agonized Church by a denial of
the truth on which was fed, then as now, her inmost life. In
the Arian heresy the old enemies of the Gospel converged as for
a final and desperate effort to achieve its destruction. The
carnal, gross, external, Judaizing spirit, embodied in the frigid
literalism of the school of Antioch ; the Alexandrian dialectics,
substituting philosophical placita for truths of faith; nay,
Paganism itself, vanquished in the open field, but anxious to
take the life of its conqueror by private assassination ;—these
were the forces which reappeared in Arianism¢. It was no mere
exasperation of rhetoric which saw Porphyry in Arius, and
which compared Constantius to Diocletian. The life of Athana-
sius after the Nicene Council might well have been lived before
the Edict of Milan. Arianism was a political force ; it ruled at
© St. Greg. Nyssa, contr, Eunom. xii. p. 728. Arianism is ἡ τῆς Ἰουδαϊκῆς
ἀπάτης συνήγορος, ἐχουσά τι καὶ THs Ἑλληνικῆς ἀθεΐας. So St. Gregory
Nazianz. (Orat. i. vol. i. p. 16) describes the Arian conception of the Divine
Nature as marked by an Ἰουδαϊκὴ πενία, meaning the hard abstract mono-
theism of the later Jewish creed. Quoted by Baur, Lehre von der Dreieinig-
keit. i. pp. 352, 353, note. ;
vil |
4.8. L£special claims of the Nicene Creed.
court. Arianism was a philosophical disputant, and was at
home in the schools. Arianism was, moreover, a proselytizer ;
it had verses and epigrammatic arguments for the masses of
the people ; and St. Gregory of Nyssa, in a passage 4 which is
classical, has described its extraordinary success among the
lower orders. Never was a heresy stronger, more versatile,
more endowed with all the apparatus of controversy, more sure,
as it might have seemed, of the future of the world. It was a
long, desperate struggle, by which the original faith of Christ
conquered this fierce and hardy antagonist. At this day the
Creed of Nica is the living proof of the Church’s victory@; and
as we confess it we should, methinks, feel somewhat of the fire
of our spiritual ancestors, some measure of that fresh glow of
thankfulness, which is due to God after a great deliverance,
although wrought out in a distant age. To unbelief this creed
may be only an ecclesiastical ‘ test,’ only an additional ‘incubus’
weighing down ‘honest religious thought.’ But to the children
of faith, the Nicene confession must ever furnish the welcome
expression of their most cherished conviction. Let us hence-
forth repeat it, at those most solemn moments when the Church
puts it into our mouths, with a renewed and deepened sense of
gratitude and joy. Not as if it were the mere trophy of a con-
troversial victory, or the dry embodiment of an abstract truth
in the language of speculation, should we welcome this glorious
4 See Dr. Newman’s translation of it in Athan. Treatises, i. 213, notea:
‘Men of yesterday and the day before, mere mechanics, off-hand dogmatists
in theology, servants too, and slaves that have been flogged .. 04...
are solemn with us and philosophical about things incomprehensible... Ask
about pence, and he will discuss the Generate and Ingenerate ; inquire
the price of bread, he answers, ‘‘ Greater is the Father, and the Son is sub-
ject ;”’ say that a bath would suit you, and he defines that the Son is out
of nothing.’ See also St. Athan. Orat. Ari. i. 22, on the profane questions
put to boys and women in the Agora; and Ibid. 4 sqq. on the ‘ Thalia’ of
Arius.
* The stress here laid upon the Nicene Creed will not be supposed to
imply forgetfulness of the great claims, in its due place, of the symbol
Quicunque. Coleridge, indeed, has said that the Athanasian Creed is, in his
judgment, ‘heretical in the omission or implicit denial of the Filial subordina-
tion in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed.’ (Table-Talk,
Ρ- 41.) But when the Athanasian Creed asserts that the Son is ‘of the
Father,’ it virtually affirms the Subordination ; and when the Nicene Creed
calls the Son ‘ Very God’ and ‘Consubstantial,’ it emphatically confesses the
Coequality. Coleridge’s judgment can only be sustained by supposing that
the Nicene Creed teaches a doctrine of Subordination in which the Nicene
Council would assuredly have detected Arianism. See Bright, Sermons of St.
Leo, note, 99.
[ LECT.
Especial claims of the Nicene Creed. 439
creed to our hearts and lips. Rather let us greet it, as the
intellectual sentinel which guards the shrine of faith in our in-
most souls from the profanation of error; as the good angel
who warns us that since the Incarnation we move in the very
ante-chamber of a Divine Presence; as a mother’s voice re-
minding us of that tribute of heartfelt love and adoration,
which is due from all serious Christians to the Lord Jesus
Christ our Saviour and our God.
vit |
LECTURE VIII.
SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE DOCTRINE OF OUR
LORD’S DIVINITY.
He That spared not His Own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how
shall He not with Him also freely give us all things ?—Rom. viii. 32.
OF late years we have been familiarized with cautions and
protests against what has been termed by way of disparagement
‘Inferential Theology.’ And no one would deny that in all
ages of the Church, the field of theology has been the scene of
hasty, unwarrantable, and misleading inferences. False con-
clusions have been drawn from true premisses ; and very doubt-
ful or false premisses have been occasionally assumed if not
asserted to be true. Moreover, some earnest believers have
seemed to forget that in a subject-matter such as the creed of
Christendom, they are confessedly below truth and not above it,
They have forgotten that it is given us here to see a part only,
and not the whole. In reality we can but note the outskirts of
a vast economy, whose body and substance stretch far away from
our gaze into infinitude. Many an intercepting truth, not the
less true because unseen and unsuspected, ought to arrest the
hardy and confident logic, which insists upon this or that
particular conclusion as following necessarily upon these or
those premisses of which it is already in possession. But this
caution has not always been kept in view. And when once
pious affection or devout imagination have seized the reins of
religious thought, it is easy for individuals or schools to wander
far from the beaten paths of a clear yet sober faith, into some
theological wonderland, the airiest creation of the liveliest fancy,
where, to the confusion and unsettlement of souls, the wildest
fiction and the highest truth may be inextricably intertwined in
an entanglement of hopeless and bewildering disorder.
[ LEcT.
ΠΝ ΞΟ͵ΤΥῸ συν. 6 πΠΠΠπΠ ὃ ὃ προς
‘Lnferential’ Theology. 441
But if this should be admitted, it would not follow that
theology is in no sense ‘inferential.’ Within certain limits, and
under due guidance, ‘inference’ is the movement, it is the life of
theology. The primal records of revelation itself, as we find
them in Scripture, are continually inferential ; and it is at least
the business of theology to observe and marshal these revealed
inferences, to*draw them out, and to make the most of them.
The illuminated reason of the collective Church has for ages
been engaged in studying the original materials of the Christian
revelation. It thus has shaped, rather than created, the science
of theology. What is theology, but a continuous series of ob-
served and systematized inferences, respecting God in His
Nature and His dealings with mankind, drawn from premisses
which rest upon God’s authority? Do you say that no ‘in-
ference’ is under any circumstances legitimate ; that no one
truth in theology necessarily implies another; that the Christian
mind ought to preserve in a jealous and sterile isolation each
proposition that can be extracted from Scripture? Do you
suppose that the several truths of the Christian creed are so
many separate, unfruitful, unsuggestive dogmas, having no
traceable relations towards each other? Do you take it for
granted that each revealed truth involves nothing that is not
seen plainly to lie on the very surface of the terms which
express it? Do you, in your inmost thought, regard the doc-
trines of the Church as so many barren abstractions, which a
merely human speculation on divine things has from age to age
drawn out into form and system? If so, of course it is natural
that you should deprecate any earnest scrutiny of the worth and
consequences of these abstractions; you deprecate it as in-
terfering with moral and practical interests; you deem an
inferential theology alike illusory and mischievous. If here I
touch the bottom of your thought, at least, my brethren, I admit
its consistency ; but then your original premiss is of a character
to put you out of all relations with the Christian Church, except
those of fundamental opposition. The Christian Church believes
that God has really spoken; and she assumes that no subject
can have a higher practical interest for man than a consideration
of the worth and drift of what He has said. Of course no one
would waste his time upon systematizing what he believed to be
only a series of abstract phantoms. And if a man holds a doc-
trine with so slight and doubtful a grasp that it illuminates
nothing within him, that it moves nothing, that it leads on to
nothing beyond itself, he is in a fair way to forfeit it altogether.
VIII |
442 What does faith in Christ's Divinity involve?
We scan anxiously and cross-question keenly only that which we
really possess and cherish as solid truth: a living faith is pretty
certain to draw inferences. The seed which has not shrivelled
up into an empty husk cannot but sprout, if you place it beneath
the sod; the living belief, which has really been implanted in
the soil of thought and feeling, cannot but bear its proper flower
and fruit in the moral and intellectual life of a thoughtful and
earnest man. If you would arrest the growth of the seed, you
must cut it off from contact with the soil, and so in time you
must kill it: you may, for awhile, isolate a religious conviction
by some violent moral or intellectual process ; but be sure that
the conviction which cannot germinate in your heart and mind
is already condemned to death.
If theology is inferential, she infers under guidance and within
restricted limits. If the eccentric reasonings of individual minds
are to be received with distrust, the consent of many minds, of
many ages, of many schools and orders of thought, may com-
mand at least a respectful attention. If we reject conclusions
drawn professedly from the substance of revelation, but really
enlarging instead of explaining it, it does not follow that we
should reject inferences which are simply explanatory, or which
exhibit the bearing of one revealed truth upon another. This
indeed is the most fruitful and legitimate province of inference
in theological enquiry. Such ‘inference’ brings out the meaning
of the details of revelation. It raises this feature to pro-
minence ; it throws that into the shade. It places language to
which a too servile literalism might have attributed the highest
force, in the lower rank of metaphor and symbol; it elicits
pregnant and momentous truths from incidents which, in the
absence of sufficient guidance or reflection, may have been
thought to possess only a secondary degree of significance.
To-day we reach the term of those narrow limits within which
some aspects of a subject in itself exhaustless have been so
briefly and imperfectly discussed. And it is natural for any
earnest man to ask himself—‘If I believe in Christ’s Divinity,
what does this belief involve? Is it possible that such a faith
can be for me a dead abstraction, having no real influence upon
my daily life of thought and action? If this great doctrine be
true, is there not, when I am satisfied of its truth, still some-
thing to be done besides proving it? Can it be other than a
See, on this point, University Sermons, by Rev. R. Scott, D.D., Master
of Balliol College, pp. 174-176. The rejection of ‘inferential theology’ was
a characteristic feature of Sadduceeism.
[ LECT.
Lruitfulness of the Doctrine of Christ's Divinity. 445
practical folly, to have ascertained the truth that Jesus is God,
and then to consign so momentous a conclusion to a respectful
oblivion in some obscure corner of my mind, as if it were a well-
bound but disused book that could only ornament the shelves of
a library? Must I not rather enshrine it in the very centre of
my soul’s life? Must I not contemplate it, nay, if it may be,
penetrate it, feed on it by repeated contemplation, that it may
illuminate, sustain, transfigure my whole inward being? Must
1 not be reasonably anxious till this great conviction shall have
moulded all that it can bear on, or that can bear on it—all that
1 hold in any degree for religious truth? Must not such a faith
at last radiate through my every thought? Must it not in-
vigorate with a new and deeper motive my every action? If
Jesus, Who lived and died and rose for me, be indeed God, can
my duties to Him end with a bare confession of His Divinity 1
Will not the greatness of His Life and of His Death, will not
the binding force of His commands, will not the nature and
reality of His promises and gifts, be felt to have a new and
deeper meaning, when I survey them in the light of this glo-
rious truth? Must not all which the Divine Christ blesses and
sanctions have in some sense about it, the glory and virtue of
His Divinity ?”
Undoubtedly, brethren, the doctrine of Christ’s Godhead is,
both in the sphere of belief and in that of morals, as fruitful and
as imperious as you anticipate. St. Paul’s question in the text
is in substantial harmony with the spirit of your own. St. Paul
makes the doctrine of a Divine Christ, given for the sins of men
to a Life of humiliation and to a Death of anguish, the premiss
of the largest consequences, the warrant of the most unbounded
expectations. ‘He That spared not His Own Son, but gave
Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give
us all things?’ Let us then hasten to trace this somewhat in
detail; and let us remark, in passing, that on the present oc-
casion we shall not be leaving altogether the track of former
lectures. For in studying the results of a given belief, we may
add to the number of practical evidences in its favour ; we may
approach the belief itself under conditions which are more fa-
vourable for doing justice to it than those which a direct
argument supplies. To contemplate such a truth as the God-
head of our Lord in itself, is like gazing with open eyelids at
the torturing splendour of the noon-day sun. We can best.
admire the sun of the natural heavens when we take note of the
beauty which he sheds over the face of the world, when we mark|
vil! |
444 The doctrine protects Theistic truth.
the floods of light which stream from him, and the deep
shadows which he casts, and the colours and forms which he
lights up and displays before us. In like manner, perchance,
we may most truly enter into the meaning of the Divinity of the
Sun of Righteousness, by observing the truths which depend
more or less directly on that glorious doctrine,—truths on which
it sheds a significance so profound, so unspeakably awful, so un-
speakably consoling.
There are three distinct bearings of the doctrine of our Lord’s
Divinity which it is more especially of importance to consider.
/ This doctrine protects truths prior to itself, and belonging both
to natural and to revealed theology. It also illuminates the
+, meaning, it asserts the force of truths which depend upon itself,
which are, to speak humanly, below it, and which can only be
duly appreciated when they are referred to it as justifying and
4 explaining them. Lastly, it fertilizes the Christian’s moral and
spiritual life, by supplying a motive to the virtues which are
most characteristically Christian, and without which Christian
ethics sink down to the level of Pagan morality.
I. Observe, first, the conservative force of the doctrine. It
protects the truths which it presupposes. Placed at the centre
of the faith of Christendom, it looks backward as well as
forward ; it guards in Christian thought the due apprehension
of those fundamental verities without which no religion what-
ever is possible, since they are the postulates of all religious
thought and activity. |
1. What, let us ask, is the practical relation of the doctrine
before us to the primal truth that a_Personal God really exists ?
Both in the last century and in our own day, it has been the
constant aim of a philosophical Deism to convince the world
that the existence of a Supreme Being would be more vividly,
constantly, practically realized, if the dogma of His existence
were detached from the creed of Christendom. The pure
Theistic idea, we are told, if it were only freed from the earthly
and material accessories of an Incarnation, if it were not em-
barrassed by the ‘metaphysical conception’ of distinct personal
Subsistencies within the Godhead, if it could be left to its native
force, to its spirituality of essence, to its simplicity of form,—
would exert a prodigious influence on human thought, if not on
human conduct. This influence is said to be practically im-
possible, so long as Theistic truth is overlaid by the ‘thick
integument’ of Christian doctrine. Accordingly a real belief in~
God is to be deepened and extended, and atheism is to be
é [ LECT.
Lhe τάφα of (σοῦ not really guarded by Deism. 445
expelled from the minds of men, by the destruction of dogmatic
Christianity. But has any such anticipation as yet been realized
by Deism? Is it in the way to be realized at this hour? Need I
remind you, that throughout Europe, the most earnest assaults of
infidelity upon the Christian creed within the last ten years
have been directed against its Theistic, as distinct from its
peculiarly Christian elements? When the possibility of miracle
is derided ; when a Providence is scouted as the fond dream of
man’s exaggerated self-love ; when belief in the power of prayer
is treated as a crude superstition, illustrative of man’s ignorance
of the scientific conception of law; when the hypothesis of
absolutely invariable law, and the cognate conception of nature
as a self-evolved system of self-existent forces and self-existent
matter, are advancing with giant strides in large departments of
the literature of the day ;—it is not Christianity as such, it is
Theism, which is really jeopardized and insulted. Among the
forces arrayed against Christianity at this hour, the most for-
midable, because the most consistent and the most sanguine,
is that pure materialism, which has been intellectually or-
ganized in the somewhat pedantic form of Positivism. To {Π6|
Positivist the most etherealized of deistic theories is just as|
much an object of pitying scorn as the creed of a St. John and δ᾽
St. Athanasius. Both are relegated to ‘the theological period’ |
of human development. And if we may judge from the present
aspect of the controversy between non-Christian spiritualists and
the -apostles of Positivism, it must be sorrowfully acknowledged
that the latter appear to gain steadily and surely on their op-
ponents. This fact is more evident on the continent of Europe
than in our own country. It cannot be explained by supposing
that the spiritualistic writers are intellectually inferior to the
advocates of materialism. Still less is an explanation to be
sought in the intrinsic indefensibility of the truth which the
spiritualists defend; it is really furnished by the conditions
under which they undertake to defend it. A living, energetic,
robust faith, a faith, as it has been termed, not of ether, but of
flesh and blood, is surely needed, in order to stand the reiterated
attacks, the subtle and penetrating misgivings, the manifold
wear and tear of a protracted controversy with so brutal an
antagonist. Can Deism inspire this faith? The pretension of
deists to refine, to spiritualize, to etherealize the idea of God
almost indefinitely, is fatal to the living energy of their one con-
viction. Where an abstract deism is not killed out by the
violence of atheistic materialism, it is apt, although left to itself,
Vu |
446 Lrue rdea of Gon, whith Deism cannot guard,
to die by an unperceived process of evaporation. For a living
faith in a Supreme Being, the human mind requires motives,
corollaries, consequences, supports. These are not supplied by
the few abstract considerations which are entertained by the
philosophical deists. Whatever may be the intellectual strength
of their position against atheism, the practical weakness of that
position is a matter of notoriety ; and if this weakness is ap-
parent in the case of the philosophers themselves, how much
more patent is it when deism attempts to make itself a home in
the heart of the people! That abstract and inaccessible being
who is placed at the summit of deistic systems is too subtle for
the thought and too cold for the heart of the multitudes of the
‘human family. When God is regarded less as the personal
Object of affection and worship than as the necessary term of an
intellectual equation, the sentiment of piety is not really satis-
fied; it hungers, it languishes, it dies. And this purely in-
tellectual manner of apprehending God, which kills piety, is so
predominant in every genuine. deistic system as to bring about,
in no long lapse of time, its impotence and extinction as a
popular religious force. The Supreme Agent, without whom
the deist cannot construct an adequate or satisfactory theory of
being, is gradually divested of all personal characteristics, and is
resolved into a formula expressing only supreme agency. His
moral perfections fall into the background of thought, while he
is conceived of, more and’ more exclusively, as the Universal
Mind. And his intellectual attributes are in turn discarded,
when for the Supreme Mind is substituted the conception of the
Mightiest Force. Long before this point is reached, deistic phi-
losophy is nervously alarmed, lest its God should still be sup-
posed to penetrate as a living Providence down into this human
world of suffering and sin. Accordingly, professing much
anxiety for his true dignity and repose, deism weaves around
his liberty a network of imaginary law; and if he has not been
previously destroyed by the materialistic controversialists, he is
at length conducted by the cold respect of deistic thinkers to the
utmost frontier of the conceivable universe, where, having been
enthroned in a majestic inaction, he is as respectfully abandoned.
As suggesting a problem which may rouse a faint spasmodic in-
tellectual interest, his name may still be mentioned from time to
time in the world of letters. But the interest which he creates _
is at the best on a level with that of the question whether the —
planets are or are not inhabited. As an energetic, life-controlling, —
life-absorbing power, the God of Deism is extinct.
[ LECT. !
ΜΝ ΑΕ SE a .---ο-ς.
protected by farth in the Divine Incarnation. 447
EAD EIS eG ene rien {{π ὑσ. 44,
Now the doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth is the Incarnate
God protects this primal theistic truth which non-Christian
deism is so incapable of popularizing, and even of retaining.
The Incarnation bridges over the abyss which opens in our
thought between earth and heaven ; 10 brings the Almighty,
Allwise, Illimitable Being down to the mind and heart of His
reasonable creatures. The Word made Flesh is God con-
descending to our finite capacities ; and this condescension has
issued in a clear, strong sense of the Being and Attributes of
God, such as is not found beyond the bounds of Christendom.
The last prayer of Jesus, that His redeemed might know the
only true God, has been answered in history. How profound,
how varied, how fertile is the idea of God, of His Nature and of
His attributes, in St. John, in St. Paul, in St. Gregory Nazianzen,
in St. Augustine! How energetic is this idea, how totally is it
removed from the character of an impotent speculation! How
does this keen, strong sense of God’s present and majestic Life
leave its mark upon manners, literatures, codes of law, national
institutions, national characters ! How utterly does its range of
energy transcend any mere employment of the intellect; how
does it, again and again, bend wills, and soften hearts, and change
the current and drift of lives, and transfigure the souls of men!
And why is this? It is because the Incarnation rivets the
apprehension of God on the thought and heart of the Church,
so that within the Church theistic truth bids defiance to those
influences which tend perpetually to sap or to volatilize it else-
where. Instead of presenting us with some fugitive abstraction :
inaccessible to the intellect and disappointing to the heart, the
Incarnation points to Jesus. Jesus is the Almighty, restraining \
His illimitable powers; Jesus is the Incomprehensible, volun-
tarily submitting to bonds ; Jesus is Providence, clothed in our
own flesh and blood ; Jesus is the Infinite Charity, tending us
with the kindly looks and tender handling of a human love ;
Jesus is the Eternal Wisdom, speaking out of the depths of
infinite thought in a human language. Jesus is God making
Himself, if I may dare so to speak, our tangible possession ; He
is God brought ‘ very nigh to us, in our mouth and in our heart,’
we behold Him, we touch Him, we cling to Him, and lo! we
are θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως", partakers of the Nature of Deity,
through our actual membership in His Body, in His Flesh, and
in His Bones¢ ; we dwell, if we will, evermore in Him, and He
in us.
ba StaPetsi.4. ¢ Eph. v. 30.
VIII |
448 Lhe doctrine a safeguard against Pantheism.
This then is the result of the Divine Incarnation: it brings
God close to the inmost being of man, yet without forfeiting, ᾿
nay, rather while guarding most carefully, in man’s thought, the
spirituality of the Divine Essence. Nowhere is the popular
idea of God more refined, more spiritual, than where faith in
the Divinity of Jesus is clearest and strongest. No writers
have explained and asserted the immateriality, the simplicity,
the indivisibility of the Essence of God more earnestly, than
those who have most earnestly asserted and explained the
doctrines of the Holy Trinity and of the Divine Incarnation.
For if we know our happiness in Christ, we Christians are
united to God, we possess God, we consciously live, and move,
and have our being in God. Our intelligence and our heart
alike apprehend God in His majestic and beautiful Life 50 truly
and constantly, because He has taken possession of our whole
nature, intellectual, moral, and corporeal, and has warmed
and illuminated and blessed it by the quickening Manhood
of Jesus. We cannot reflect upon and rejoice in our union
with Jesus, without finding ourselves face to face with the
Being and Attributes of Him with Whom in Jesus we are made
‘one. Holy Scripture has traced the failure and misery of all
| attempts on the part of a philosophical deism to create or to
maintain in the soul of man a real communion with our
_ heavenly Parent. ‘Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath
not the Father 4.’ And the Christian’s practical security against
those speculative difficulties to which his faith in a living God
may be exposed, lies in that constant contemplation of and
communion with Jesus, which is of the essence of the Christian
life. ‘God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness,
hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of
ie glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christe.’
2. But if belief in our Saviour’s Godhead protects Christian
thought against the intellectual dangers which await an arid
Deism, does it afford an equally effective safeguard against
Pantheism? In conceiving of God, the choice before a pan-
theist lies between alternatives from which no genius has as yet ©
devised a real escape. God, the pantheist must assert, is
literally everything ; God is the whole material and spiritual
universe ; He is humanity in all its manifestations; He is by
inclusion every moral and immoral agent ; and every form and
exaggeration of moral evil, no less than every variety of moral
4 x St. John ii. 23. 9 2 Cor. iv. 6.
[ LECT.
ae ee ὁ Ἕ
Lhe rdea of Gon destroyed by Pantheism. 449
excellence and beauty, is part of the all-pervading, all-compre-
hending movement of His Universal Life. If this revolting
blasphemy be declined, then the God of pantheism must be the
barest_abstraction of abstract being; He must, as with the
Alexandrian thinkers, be so exaggerated an abstraction as to
transcend existence itself; He must be conceived of as utterly
unreal, lifeless, non-existent ; while the only real beings are
these finite and determinate forms of existence whereof ‘nature’
is composed£, This dilemma haunts all the historical transform-
ations of pantheism, in Europe as in the East, to-day as two
thousand years ago. Pantheism must either assert that its God
is the one only existing being whose existence absorbs and igs
identified with the universe and humanity ; or else it must
admit that he is the rarest and most unreal of conceivable ab-
stractions ; in plain terms, that he is no being at all. And the
question before us is, Does the Incarnation of God, as taught
by the Christian doctrine, expose Christian thought to this
dilemma? Is God ‘brought very nigh to us’ Christians in
such sort, as to bury the Eternal in the temporary, the Infinite
in the finite, the Absolute and Self-existent in the transient and
the relative, the All-holy in the very sink of moral evil, unless,
in order to save His honour in our thought, we are prepared to
attenuate our idea of Him into nonentity ἢ
Now, not merely is there no ground for this apprehension ;
but the Christian doctrine of an Incarnate God is our most solid
protection against the inroads of pantheistic error.
The strength of pantheistic systems lies in that craving both
of the intellect and of the heart for union with the Absolute
Being, which is the most legitimate and the noblest instinct of
our nature. This craving is satisfied by the Christian’s union
with the Incarnate Son. But while satisfying it, the Incar-
nation raises an effective barrier _against its abuse after the
fashion of pantheism. Against the dogma of an Incarnate God,
rooted in the faith of a Christian people, the waves of panthe-
istic thought may surge and lash themselves and break in
vain. For the Incarnation presupposes that master-truth which
pantheism most passionately denies. It presupposes the truth
that between the finite and the Infinite, between the Creator
and the Cosmos, between God and man, there is of necessity a
measureless abyss. On this point its opposition to pantheism
is as earnest as that of the most jealous deism ; but the
f Saisset, Philosophie Religieuse, i. 181; ii, 268,
VIII | Gg
450Christ’s Divinity thesafeguardagainstPanthersm.
Christian creed escapes from the deistic conception of an omni-
potent moral being, surveying intelligently the vast accumu-
lation of sin and misery which we see on this earth, yet withal
remaining unmoved, inactive, indifferent. The Christian creed
spans this gulf which yawns between earth and heaven, by pro-
claiming that the Everlasting Son has taken our nature upon
Him. In His Person a Created Nature is joined to the
Uncreated, by a union which is for ever indissoluble. But
what is that truth which underlies this transcendent mystery ?
What sustains it, what even enhances it, what forbids it to melt
away in our thought into a chaotic confusion out of which nei-
ther the Divine nor the Human could struggle forth into the
light for distinct recognition? It is, I reply, the truth that the
Natures thus united in the Person of Jesus are radically, by
their essence, and for ever, distinct. It is by reason of this
ineffaceable distinctness that the union of the Godhead and
Manhood in Jesus is such an object of wondering and thankful
contemplation to Christians. Accordingly, at the very heart of
the creed of Christendom, we have a guarantee against the
cardinal error of pantheism ; while yet by our living fellowship
as Christians with the Divine and Incarnate Son, we realize the
aspiration which pantheism both fosters and perverts. Chris-
tian intellect, so long as it is Christian, can never be betrayed
into the admission that God is the universe ; Christian faith
can never be reduced to the extremity of choosing between a
denial of moral distinctions and an assertion that God is the
parent of all immoral action, or to the desperate endeavour to
escape this alternative by volatilizing God into non-existence.
And yet Christian love, while it is really Christian, cannot for
one moment doubt that it enfolds and possesses and is united to
its Divine Object. But this intellectual safeguard and this
moral satisfaction alike vanish, if the real Deity of Jesus be
denied or obscured : since it is the Deity of our truly human
Lord which satisfies the Christian heart, while it protects the
Christian intellect against fatal aberrations. Certainly a deism
which would satisfy the heart, inevitably becomes pantheistic
in its awkward attempts to become devotional ; and although
pantheism should everywhere breathe the tenderness which
almost blinds a reader of Spinosa’s ethics to a perception of
their real character, still pantheism is at bottom and in its
results not other than a graceful atheism. But to partake of
the Divine Nature incarnate in Christ is not to bury God in the
filth of moral pollution, nor is it to transcendentalize Him into
[ LECT.
προ ----- ἕ ἔ ὖὋ6ὖὖὋΦὅὃἋῇὉϑ»οΡοϑο᾽ ὃ ὃ
Christ's Divinity guards man’s true dignity. 451
an abstraction, which mocks us, when we attempt to grasp it, as
anvunsubstantial phantoms,
3. One more sample shall be given of this protective efficacy
of the doctrine before us. If it guards in our thought the
honour, the majesty, the Life of God, it also protects the true
dignity and the rights of man. The unsettled spirit of our
time, when it has broken with the claims of faith, oscillates,
whether from caprice or in bewilderment, between the most
inconsistent errors. If at one while its audacity would drive
the Great God from His throne in heaven to make way for the
lawless intellect and will of His creature, at another it seems
possessed by an infatuated passion for the degradation of man-
kind. It either ignores such features of the higher side of our
complex being as are the powers of reflection and of inference,
or it arbitrarily assumes that they are only the products of
civilization. It fixes its attention exclusively upon the gradu-
ated variety of form perceptible in a long series of crania which
it has arranged in its museum, and then it proclaims with
enthusiasm that a Newton or a Herschel is after all only the
cultivated descendant of a grotesque and irrational ape. It even
denies to man the possession of any spiritual nature whatever ;
thought is asserted to be inherent in the substance of the brain ;
belief in the existence of an immaterial essence is treated as an
unscientific and superstitious prejudice; virtuous and vicious
actions are alluded to as alike results of purely physical agen-
ciesh ; man is to all intents and purposes a soulless brute. My
brethren, you will not suppose that I am desiring to derogate,
however indirectly, from the claims of that noble science which
patiently investigates the physiology of our animal nature; I
am only protesting against a rash and insulting hypothesis, for
which science, if her sons could speak with one voice, would be
loath to make herself responsible, since by it her true utterances
5. M. Renan’s frequent mention of ‘God’ in his ‘ Vie de Jésus’ does not
imply that he believes in a Supreme Being. ‘ God’ means with M. Renan
only ‘the category of the ideal,’ and not any existing personal being whatever.
Questions contemporaines, p. 224 : ‘Les sciences historiques ne différent en
rien par la méthode des sciences physiques et mathématiques: elles sup-
posent qu’aucun agent surnaturel ne vient troubler la marche de ’humanité ;
que cette marche est la résultante immédiate de la liberté qui est dans
Yhomme et de la fatalité qui est dans la nature ; quwil n’y a pas d’étre libre
supérieur & ’homme auquel on puisse attribuer une part appréciable dans la
conduite morale, non plus que dans la conduite matérielle de univers.’
h Cf. M. Taine, Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise, Introduction, p. xv:
“Le vice et la vertu sont des produits comme le sucre et le vitriol.’
vill | Gg2
452 Chris?s Divinity guards man’s true dignity.
are piteously caricatured. It cannot he said that such a theory
is a harmless eccentricity of over-eager speculation; for it
destroys that high and legitimate estimate of God’s natural
gifts to man which is an important element of earnest and
healthy morality in the individual, and which is still more
essential to the onward march of our social progress.
But so long as the Christian Church believes in the true
Divinity of our Incarnate Lord, it is not probable that theories
which deny the higher aspects of human nature will meet with
large acceptance. We Christians can bear to be told that the
skull of this or that section of the human family bears this or
that degree of resemblance to the skull of a gorillas We know,
indeed, that as receivers of the gift of life we are simply on a
level with the lowest of the lower creatures ; we owe all that we
are and have to God. Do we not thank Him for our creation,
preservation, and all the blessings of this life? Might He not
have given us less than we have? Might He not have given us
nothing? What have we, what are we, that we have not
received? The question of man’s place in the universe touches
not any self-achieved dignity of our own, but the extent and
the nature of the Divine bounty. But while we believe the
creed of Christendom, we cannot view such a question as open,
or listen with any other feelings than those of sorrow and
repugnance to the arguments of the apostles of human degrada-
tion. We cannot consent to suppose ourselves to be mere
animal organisms, without any immaterial soul or future des-
tiny, parted by no distinctive attribute from the perishing beasts
around us. For the true nobility of our nature has received the
seal of a recognition, which forbids our intellectual complicity
with the physics or the ‘psychology’ of materialism. Do not
we Christians call to mind, often, every day of our lives, that
God has put such high and distinctive honour upon our common
humanity as to clothe Himself in it, and to bear it to heaven
in its glorious and unsullied perfection, that for all eternity
it may be the partner of His throne ?
Tremunt videntes angeli
Versam vicem mortalium ;
Peccat caro, mundat Caro,
Regnat Deus Dei Caro.
But this exaltation of our human nature would be the wildest
dream, unless Jesus were truly God as well as Man. His ©
Divinity is the warrant that in Him our race is ‘crowned with —
glory and honour,’ and that in taking upon Him ‘not the nature
[ LECT.
| -“-“------ ς΄...
Christ, as being Gon, ἐς infallible. 453
of angels, but the seed of Abraham,’ He was vindicating our
individual capacity for the highest greatness. Apart from the
phenomena of reflection and reason, the hopes which are raised
by the Incarnation utterly forbid speculations that would de-
grade man to the level of a brute incapable of any real morality.
If we are told that such hopes are not direct replies to the
arguments of physiology; we answer that physiology can and
does often correct by her scientific demonstrations, the eccen-
tricities of those who would force her to take part against |
man’s best hopes and instincts. But, as a practical matter of
fact, Christendom maintains its faith in the dignity of man|
amidst the creatures of God by its faith in the Incarnation of
the Divine Son. ‘Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it |
doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that,
when He shall appear, we shall be like Him ; for we shall see
Him as He igi,’
II. These are but a few out of many illustrations of the
protection afforded by the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity to sun-
dry imperilled truths of natural religion. Let us proceed to
consider the illuminative or explanatory relation in which the
doctrine stands to truths which are internal to the Christian
_ revelation, and which themselves presuppose some definite belief
respecting the Person of Christ.
Now our Lord’s whole Mediatorial work, while it is dis-
charged through His assumed Humanity, is efficacious and
complete, simply because the Mediator is not merely Man but
God. As a Prophet, His utterances are infallible. As a Priest,
He offers a prevailing sacrifice. As a King, He wields an autho-
rity which has absolute claims upon the conscience, and a power /
which will ultimately be proved to be resistless. iv
(a) A sincere and intelligent belief in the Divinity of Jesus
Christ obliges us to believe that Jesus Christ, as a Teacher, is
infallible. His infallibility is not a gift, it is an original and
hecessary endowment of His higher Nature. If indeed Christ. }
had been merely man, He might still have been endowed A Ps
an infallibility such as was that of His own apostles. As it i |
to charge Him with error is to deny that He is God. Unles
God’s wisdom can be foolishness, or His veracity can be sullied
by the suspicion of deceit ; unless God can Himself suecumb to
error, or can consent to deceive His reasonable creatures; a
sincere believer in the true Divinity of Jesus Christ will bow
before His words in all their possible range of significance,
δ χ St. John iii, 2,
vu |
454 Modern denial of our Lord’s Infatlhorlty.
as before the words of a literally infallible Master. So obvious
an inference would only be disputed under circumstances of an
essentially transitional character, such as are those which have
perplexed the Church of England during the last few years.
Deny that Jesus Christ is God, and you may or may not pro-
ceed to deny that He is infallible. But confess His Godhead,
and the common sense of men of the world will concur with the
judgment of divines, in bidding you avoid the irrational as
well as blasphemous conception of a fallible Deity. To main-
tain, on the one hand, that Jesus Christ is God, and, on the
other, that He is a teacher and propagator, not of trivial and
unimportant, but of far-reaching and substantial errors ;—this
would have appeared to ancient Christendom a paradox so sin-
gular as to be absolutely incredible. But we have lived to hear
men proclaim the legendary and immoral character of con-
siderable portions of those Old Testament Scriptures, upon
which our Lord has set the seal of His infallible authority*,
And yet, side by side with this rejection of Scriptures so
deliberately sanctioned by Christ, there is an unwillingness
which, illogical as it is, we must sincerely welcome, to profess
any explicit rejection of the Church’s belief in Christ’s Divinity.
Hence arises the endeavour to intercept a conclusion, which
might otherwise have seemed so plain as to make arguments in
its favour an intellectual impertinence. Hence a series of sin-
gular refinements, by which Christ is presented to the modern
world as really Divine, yet as subject to fatal error ; as Founder
of the true religion, yet as the credulous patron of a volume
replete with worthless legends; as the highest Teacher and
Leader of humanity, yet withal as the ignorant victim of the
prejudices and follies of an unenlightened age.
It will be urged by those who impugn the trustworthiness
of the Pentateuch without denying in terms the Divinity of
Christ, that such a representation as the foregoing does them ἃ
certain measure of injustice. They do not wish to deny that
k Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. iii. p. 623: ‘[In Matt. iv. 4, 7, 10] we ©
have quotations from Deut. viii. 3; vi. 16; vi. 13; x. 20. And it is well
known that there are many other passages in the Gospels and Epistles,
in which this book is referred to, and in some of which Moses is expressly
mentioned as the writer of the words in question, 6. g. Acts iil. 22;
Rom. x. 19. And, though it is true that, in the texts above quoted, the
words are not, indeed, ascribed to Moses, but are merely introduced with
the phrase ‘It is written,’ yet in Matt. xix. 7 the Pharisees refer to a passage
in Deut. xxiv. 1 as a law of Moses; and our Lord in His reply, v. 8, repeats
their language, and practically adopts it as correct, and makes it His own.’
[ LECT.
Our Lord said to be fallible ὡς Man. 455
Christ, as the Eternal Son of God, is infallible. But the Christ
Who speaks in the Gospels is, they contend, ‘a Son of man,’
and as such He is subject to the human infirmities of ignorance
and error!, ‘Does He not profess Himself,’ they ask, ‘in the
plainest words, ignorant of the day of the last judgment? Does
not His Evangelist assure us that He increased in “wisdom” as
well as in stature? This being so, was not His human know-
ledge limited; and was not error possible, if not inevitable,
when He passed beyond the limits of such knowledge as He
possessed? Why should He be supposed to speak of the Pen-
tateuch with a degree of critical acumen, to which the foremost
learning of His day and country had not yet attained? Take
care, so they warn us, ‘lest in your anxiety to repudiate Arius
and Nestorius, you deny the reality of Christ’s Human Soul, and
become the unconscious associate of Apollinaris or of Eutyches.
Take care, lest you make Christianity answer with its life for
the truth of a “theory” about the historical trustworthiness of
the Old Testament, which, although it certainly was sanctioned
and put forward by Jesus Christ, yet has been as decidedly con-
demned by the “higher criticism” of the present day.’
Let us remark in this position, first of all, the indirect ad-
mission that Christ, as the Eternal Son of God, is strictly
infallible. Obvious as such a truth should be to Christians,
Arianism, be it remembered, did not confess it. Arianism held
that the Word Himself was ignorant of the day of judgment.
Such a tenet was perfectly consistent with the denial that the
1 Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. i. p. xxxi: ‘It is perfectly consistent
with the most entire and sincere belief in our Lord’s Divinity to hold,
as many do, that, when He vouchsafed to become a ‘Son of Man,’ He
took our nature fully, and voluntarily entered into all the conditions of
humanity, and, among others, into that which makes our growth in all
ordinary knowledge gradual and limited. We are expressly told, in Luke
ii, 52, that “Jesus increased in wisdom,” as well as in “stature.” It is
not supposed that, in His human nature, He was acquainted, more than
any educated Jew of the age, with the mysteries of all modern sciences ;
nor, with St. Luke’s expressions before us, can it be seriously maintained
that, as an infant or young child, He possessed a knowledge surpassing
that of the most pious and learned adults of His nation, upon the subject
of the authorship and age of the different portions of the Pentateuch. At
what period, then, of His life upon earth, is it to be supposed that He had
granted to Him, as the Son of Man, supernaturally, full and accurate
information on these points, so that He should be expected to speak about
the Pentateuch in other terms than any other devout Jew of that day would
have employed? Why should it be thought that He would speak with
certain Divine knowledge on this matter, more than upon other matters
of ordinary science or history ?’
Vill |
SAE EN
456 St. Luke ii. 52, conszdered.
--- τ τ τ τ ----τ- τ ἀνα
Word was consubstantial with the Omniscient God 3 bakit
was utterly at variance with any pretension honestly to believe
in His Divinity™. Yet it must be recorded with sorrow, that
some writers who would desire nothing less than to uphold
the name and errors of the opponent of Athanasius, do never-
theless seera to speak at times as if it were seriously possible
that the Infallible could have erred, or that the boundless
knowledge of the Eternal Mind could be really limited. Let
us then note and welcome the admission that the Eternal Son
of God is literally infallible, even though it be made in quarters
where His authority, as the Incarnate Christ, teaching unerringly
substantial truth, is directly impugned and repudiated.
It is of course urged that our Lord’s Human Soul is the seat
of that ‘fallibility’ which is insisted upon as being so fatal to
His authority as a Teacher. Let us then enquire what the
statements of Scripture on this mysterious subject would really
pear to affirm.
τ. When St. Luke tells us that our Lord increased in wisdom
and stature, we can scarcely doubt that an intellectual develop-
ment of some kind in Christ’s human soul is indicated. This de-
velopment, it is implied, corresponded to the growth of His bodily
frame. The progress in wisdom was real and not merely apparent,
just as the growth of Christ’s Human Body was ἃ real growth. If
only an increasing manifestation of knowledge had been meant, it
might have been meant also that Christ only manifested increase
of stature, while His Human Body did not really grow. But
on the other hand, St. Luke had previously spoken of the Child
m St. Athanasius comments as follows upon St. Mark xiii. 32, οὐδὲ ὁ Tids.
Contr. Arian. Or. iii. c. 44: διὰ τοῦτο καὶ περὶ ἀγγέλων λέγων οὐκ εἴρηκεν
ἐπαναβαίνων, ὅτι οὐδὲ τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον, GAN ἐσιώπησε, δεικνὺς κατὰ δύο
ταῦτα, ὅτι εἰ τὸ Πνεῦμα οἶδεν, πολλῷ μᾶλλον ὃ Λόγος ἣ Λόγος ἐστὶν οἶδε, παρ᾽
οὗ καὶ τὸ Πνεῦμα λαμβάνει, καὶ ὅτι περὶ τοῦ Πνεύματος σιωπήσας φανερὸν
πεποίηκεν, ὅτι περὶ Τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης αὐτοῦ λειτουργίας ἔλεγεν" οὐδὲ 6 Ὑἱός" καὶ
τούτου τεκμήριον, ὅτι ἀνθρωπίνως εἰρηκὼς, οὔδε 6 Ὑἱὸς olde, δείκνυσιν ὅμως
θεϊκῶς ἑαυτὸν τὰ πάντα εἰδότα. ὃν γὰρ λέγει Tidy τὴν ἡμέραν μὴ εἰδέναι, τοῦτον
εἰδέναι λέγει τὸν Πατέρα' οὐδεὶς γὰρ, φησὶ, γινώσκει τὸν Πατέρα εἰ μὴ 6 Ὑἱός.
πᾶς δὲ πλὴν τῶν ᾿Αρειανῶν συνομολογήσειεν, ὡς ὃ τὸν Πατέρα γινώσκων πολλῷ
μᾶλλον oldev τῆς κτίσεως τὸ ὅλον, ἐν δὲ τῷ ὅλῳ καὶ τὸ τέλος ἐστὶ ταύτης.
Olshausen observes, in Ey. Matt. xxiv. 36, Comm. i. p- 909: ‘Ist aber
vom Sohne Gottes hier die Rede, so kann das von ihm pradicirte Nichtwissen
| der ἡμέρα und ὥρα kein absolutes seyn indem die Wesenseinheit des Vaters
Lund des Sohnes das Wissen des Sohnes und des Vaters nicht specifisch zu
| trennen gestattet; es muss vielmehr nur von dem Zustande der κένωσις des
Herrn in Stande seiner Niedrigkeit verstanden werden.’
> St. Luke ii. 52: Ἰησοῦς προέκοπτε σοφίᾳ καὶ ἡλικίᾳ.
[ LECT.
Our Lord’s ‘growth in knowledge. 457
Jesus as ‘being filled with wisdom ο,᾽ and St. John teaches that
as the Word Incarnate, Jesus was actually ‘full of truth.’ St.
John means ποῦ only that our Lord was veracious, but that He
was fully in possession of objective truth». It is clearly implied
that, according to St. John, this fulness of truth was an element
of that glory which the first disciples beheld or contemplated 4.
This statement appears to be incompatible with the supposition
that the Human Soul of Jesus, through spiritual contact with
which the disciples ‘beheld’ the glory of the Eternal Word,
was Itself not ‘full of truth. St. John’s narrative does not
admit of our confining this ‘fulness of truth’ to the later days
of Christ’s ministry, or to the period which followed His Re-
surrection. There are then two representations before us, one
suggesting a limitation of knowledge, the other a fulness of
knowledge in the human soul of Christ. In order to harmonize
these statements, we need not fall back upon the vulgar ration-
alistic expedient of supposing that between St. John’s represen-
tation of our Lord’s Person, and that which is given in the three
first Gospels, there is an intrinsic and radical discrepancy. If
we take St. John’s account together with that of St. Luke,
might it not seem that we have here a special instance of that
tender condescension, by which our Lord willed to place Him-
self in a relation of real sympathy with the various experiences
of our finite existence? If by an infused knowledge He was,
even as a Child, ‘full of truth,’ yet that He might enter with
the sympathy of experience into the various conditions of our
intellectual life, He would seem to have acquired, by the slow
labour of observation and inference, a new mastery over truths
which pete _Biother sense, “possessed. Such a co-
existence of growth in knowledge with a possession of all its
ultimate results would not be without a parallel in ordinary
human life. In moral matters, a living example may teach
with a new power some law of conduct, the truth of which we
have before recognised intuitively. In another field of know-
ledge, the telescope or the theodolite may verify a result of
which we have been previously informed by a mathematical
calculation’. We can then conceive that the reality of our
© St. Luke ii. 40: πληρούμενον σοφίας.
P St. John i. 14: πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ddnOelas.
{ @ Ibid.: ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ.
τ In the same way, every man’s stock of opinions is of a twofold character ;
it is partly traditional and partly acquired by personal investigation and
thought. The traditionally received element in the mind, may be held, as
such, with the utmost tenacity ; and yet there is a real ‘increase in wis-
vi]
458 Our Lord’s statement in St. Mark xiii. 32,
Lord’s intellectual development would not necessarily be in-
consistent with the simultaneous perfection of His knowledge.
As Man, He might have received an infused knowledge of all
truth, and yet have taken possession through experience and in
detail of that which was latent in His mind, in order to corre-
spond with the intellectual conditions of ordinary human life. But,
let us suppose that this explanation be rejected 58, that St. John’s
statement be left out of sight, and that St. Luke’s words be
understood to imply simply that our Lord’s Human Soul ac-
quired knowledge which It did not in any sense possess before.
Does even any such ‘increase in wisdom’ as this during Christ’s
early years, warrant our saying that, in the days of His min-
istry, our Lord was still ignorant of the real claims and worth
of the Jewish Scriptures? Does it enable us to go further, and
to maintain that, when He made definite statements on the
subject, He was both the victim and the propagator of serious
error? Surely such inferences are not less unwarranted by the
statements of Scripture than they are destructive of Christ’s
character and authority as a teacher of truth!
2. But it may be pleaded that our Lord, in declaring His
ignorance of the day of the last judgment, does positively assign
a specified limit to the knowledge actually possessed by His
Human Soul during His ministry. ‘Of that day,’ He says, ‘and
that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in
heaven, neither the Son, but the Father t. ‘If these words,’ you
dom,’ when this element is, so to speak, taken possession of a second time
by means of personal inquiry and reflection. This is, of course, a very
remote analogy to the Sacred Subject discussed in the text, but it may
serve to suggest how the facts of an infused knowledge and a real προέκοπτε
σοφίᾳ in our Lord’s Human Soul may have been compatible.
* The following remarks of Dr. Klee will be read with interest. Dogmatik,
p. 511: ‘Der Menschheit Christi kann keine absolute Vollendung und
Imperfectibilitit der Erkenntniss von Anfang an zugelegt werden, weil dann
Christus im Eingange in seine Glorie in Bezug auf sie unverherrlicht geblie-
ben wire, was nicht wohl angenommen werden kann; weil ferner dann in
Christo eine wahrhafte Allwissenheit angenommen werden musste, was mit
der menschlichen Natur und dem menschlichen Willen nicht wohl zu verein-
baren ist; und wenn Einige sich damit helfen zu kénnen glaubten, dass
diese Allwissenheit immer nur eine aus Gnade mitgetheilte wire, so ist
dagegen zu bemerken, dass die Menschheit dann aus Gnade auch die andern
gottlichen Attribute, z. B. Allmacht haben kénnte, und wenn man dieses mit
der Entgegnung aus dem Felde zu schlagen glaubt, dass die Allmacht die
Gottheit selbst, mithin absolut incommunicabel ist, so muss erwidert werden,
dass die Allwissenheit ebenso Gottes Wesen selbst, somit unmittheilbar ist.
Ὁ St. Mark xiii, 32: περὶ δὲ τῆς ἡμέρας ἐκείνης καὶ τῆς ὥρας, οὐδεὶς οἶδεν,
οὐδὲ οἱ ἄγγελοι οἱ ἐν οὐρανῷ, οὐδὲ ὁ Tids, εἰ μὴ ὁ Πατήρ.
[ LECT.
how understood by great Western Fathers. 459
urge, ‘do not refer to His ignorance as God, they must refer to
His ignorance in the only other possible sense, that is to say, to
His ignorance as Man.’
Of what nature then is the ‘ignorance’ to which our Lord
alludes in this much-controverted text? Is it a real matter-of-
fact ignorance, or is it an ignorance which is only ideal and
hypothetical? Is it an ignorance to which man, as man, is na-
turally subject, but to which the Soul of Christ, the Perfect Man,
was not subject, since His human intelligence was always illu-
minated by an infused omniscience¥? or is it an economical as
distinct from a real ignorance? Is it the ignorance of the
Teacher, who withholds from His disciples a knowledge which
He actually possesses, but which it is not for their advantage
to acquirex? or is it the ignorance which is compatible with
implicit knowledge? Does Christ implicitly know the date of
the day of judgment, yet, that He may rebuke the forwardness
of His disciples, does He refrain from contemplating that which
is potentially within the range of His mental vision? Is He
deliberately turning away His gaze from the secrets which are
open to it, and which a coarse, earthly curiosity would have
greedily and quickly investigated y ἢ
With our eye upon the literal meaning of our Lord’s words,
must we not hesitate to accept any of these explanations? It is
indeed true that to many very thoughtful and saintly minds,
the words, ‘neither the Son,’ have not appeared to imply any
‘ignorance’ in the Son, even as Man. But antiquity does not
furnish any decisive consent in favour of this belief; and it
might seem, however involuntarily, to put a certain force upon
the direct sense of the passage. There is no sufficient ground
for questioning the correctness of the text”; and here, as always,
‘if a literal explanation will stand, the furthest from the letter
is commonly the worst.’ If elsewhere, in the course of these
lectures, we have appealed to the literal force of the great texts in
u St. Greg. Magn. Epist. lib. x. 39. ad Eulog.: ‘In natur& quidem humanitatis
novit diem et horam judicii, sed tamen hunc non ex natura humanitatis novit.’
x St. Aug. de Trin. i. 12: “ Hoc enim nescit, quod nescientes facit, id est,
quod non ita sciebat ut tunc discipulis indicaret.” St. Ambros. de Fide, v. ὃ
222: *‘Nostrum assumpsit affectum, ut nostra ignoratione nescire se diceret,
non quia aliquid ipse nesciret.’ St. Hil. de Trin. ix. 62. See the passages
accumulated by Dr. Newman, Select Treatises of St. Athanasius, p, 464, note
7, Lib. Fath.
Υ So Lange, Leben Jesu, ii. 3, p. 1280.
z St. Ambr. de Fid. v. § 193: ‘ Primum veteres non habent codices Greci,
quia nec Filius scit.’
VIII |
ee
460 Our Lord’s statement in St. Mark xiii. 32,
St. John and St. Paul, as yielding a witness to the Catholic doc-
trine, can we substitute for the literal sense of the passage before
us, a sense which, to say the least, is not that suggested by the
letter? If then we should understand that our Lord in His
Human Soul was, at the time of His speaking, actually ignorant
of the day of the last judgment, we shall find ourselves sheltered
by Fathers of unquestioned orthodoxy. St. Irenseus discovers
in our Lord’s Human ignorance a moral argument against the
intellectual self-assertion of his own Gnostic contemporaries > ;
while he attributes Omniscience to the Divine Nature of Christ
in the clearest terms. St. Athanasius insists that the explanation
which he gives, restricting our Lord’s ignorance to His Human
Soul, is a matter in which the faithful are well instructed ¢.
He is careful to assert again and again our Lord’s omniscience
as God the Word; he attributes Christ’s ‘ignorance’ as Man
to the condescending love by which He willed to be like unto
us in all things4, and compares it, accordingly, to His hunger
* Klee says: ‘It was impossible, in virtue of the Hypostatic Union, to as-
cribe to the Human Soul of Christ an absolute science and a perfect know-
ledge. On this subject, however, there is a very marked difference between
the Fathers.’ Dogmengeschichte, ii. 4. 7. Of the Fathers cited by Klee the
majority assert a limitation of knowledge in our Lord’s Human Soul.
> St. Iren. adv. Her. ii. 28,6: <‘Irrationabiliter autem inflati, audaciter
inenarrabilia Dei mysteria scire vos dicitis ; quandoquidem et Dominus, ipse
Filius Dei, ipsum judicii diem et horam concessit scire solum Patrem, mani-
festée dicens, “" De die autem illé et hor nemo scit, neque Filius, sed Pater
solus.” (Mare. xiii. 32.) Si igitur scientiam diei illius Filius non erubuit
referre ad Patrem, sed dixit quod verum est; neque nos erubescamus, que
sunt in questionibus majora secundum nos, reservare Deo. Nemo enim super
Magistrum est.’ That St. Irenzus is here referring to our Lord’s humanity
is clear from the appeal to His example. Of His Divinity he says (ii. 28, 7):
‘Spiritus Salvatoris, qui in eo est, scrutatur omnia, et altitudines Dei. Cf.
Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. ii. 5, 8.
¢ St. Athan. contr. Arian. Orat. iii. c. 45: of δὲ φιλόχριστοι καὶ χριστο-
φόροι γινώσκωμεν, ὡς οὐκ ἀγνοῶν ὃ Λόγος ἣ Λόγος ἐστὶν ἔλεγεν, “ οὐκ οἶδα,
οἶδε γὰρ, ἀλλὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον δεικνὺς, ὅτι τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἴδιόν ἐστι τὸ ἀγνοεῖν,
καὶ ὅτι σάρκα ἀγνοοῦσαν ἐνεδύσατο, ἐν ἢ dv σαρκικῶς ἔλεγεν. Dr. Mill resents
the suggestion ‘that when even an Athanasius could speak (with the Scrip-
tures) of the limitation of human knowledge in the Incarnate Son, the im-
proved theology of later times is entitled to censure the sentiment, as though
impeaching His Divine Personality.? On the Nature of Christianity, p. 18.
4 Ibid. c. 43: ἀμέλει λέγων ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ περὶ τοῦ κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον
αὐτοῦ" Πάτερ, ἐλήλυθεν ἣ ὥρα" δόξασόν σου τὸν Ὑἱόν- δῆλός ἐστιν ὅτι καὶ τὴν
περὶ τοῦ πάντων τέλους ὥραν ὡς μὲν Λόγος γινώσκει, ὡς δὲ ἄνθρωπος ἀγνοεῖ"
ἀνθρώπου γὰρ ἴδιον τὸ ἀγνοεῖν, καὶ μάλιστα ταῦτα. ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῦτο τῆς φιλαν-
θρωπίας ἴδιον τοῦ Σωτῆρος. ἐπειδὴ γὰρ γέγονεν ἄνθρωπος, οὐκ ἐπαισχύνεται διὰ
τὴν σάρκα τὴν ἀγνοοῦσαν εἰπεῖν, οὐκ οἶδα, ἵνα δείξῃ ὅτι εἰδὼς ὡς Θεὸς ἀγνοεῖ
σαρκικῶς. οὐκ εἴρηκε γοῦν, οὐδὲ ὃ Ὑἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ οἴδεν, ἵνα μὴ ἡ θεότης ἀγνο-
[ Lect.
explained by SS. Athanasius and Cyril Alex. 461
and thirst®. ‘To whom,’ exclaims St. Gregory Nazianzen, ‘ can
it be a matter of doubt that Christ has a knowledge of that hour
as God, but says that He is ignorant of it as Manf?’ St. Cyril
of Alexandria argues that our Lord’s ‘ignorance’ as Man is in
keeping with the whole economy of the Incarnation. As God,
Christ did know the day of judgment; but it was consistent
with the law of self-humiliation prescribed by His infinite love
that He should assume all the conditions of real humanity, and
therefore, with the rest, a limitation of knowledge. There would
be no reasonable ground for offence at that which was only a
consequence of the Divine Incarnation’, You will remark, my
brethren, the significance of such a judgment when advanced by
this great father, the uncompromising opponent of Nestorian
error, the strenuous assertor of the Hypostatic Union, the chief
inheritor of all that is most characteristic in the theological
οὔσα φαίνηται" GAN ἁπλῶς, “ οὐδὲ ὁ Tids,’ ἵνα τοῦ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων γενομένου Ὑἱοῦ
ἡ ἄγνοια ἢ.
ὁ St. Athan. contr. Arian. Orat. iii. c. 46: ὥσπερ γὰρ ἄνθρωπος γενόμενος
μετὰ ἀνθρώπων πεινᾷ καὶ διψᾷ καὶ πάσχει, οὕτως μετὰ μὲν τῶν ἀνθρώπων ὡς
ἄνθρωπος οὐκ οἶδε, θεϊκῶς δὲ ἐν τῷ Πατρὶ dv Λόγος καὶ Σοφία οἶδε, καὶ οὐδέν
ἐστιν ὃ ἀγνοεῖ. Cf. ad Serap. ii. 9,
f St. Greg. Naz. Orat. xxx. 15: καίτοι πῶς ἀγνοεῖ τι τῶν ὄντων ἣ Σοφία ὃ
ποιητὴς τῶν αἰώνων, 6 συντελεστὴς καὶ μεταποιητὴς, τὸ πέρας τῶν γενομένων ;
“νον ἢ πᾶσιν εὔδηλον, ὅτι γινώσκει μὲν, ds Θεὸς, ἀγνοεῖν δέφησιν, ὡς ἄνθρωπος,
ἄν τις τὸ φαινόμενον χωρίσῃ τοῦ νοουμένου;. ..... ὥστε τὴν ἄγνοιαν ὑπολαμ-
βάνειν ἐπὶ τὸ εὐσεβέστερον, τῷ ἀνθρωπίνῳ, μὴ τῷ Θείῳ ταύτην λογιζομένους.
85. St. Cyril. Alex. Thesaurus, Op. tom. v. p.221: ὥσπερ οὖν συγκεχώρηκεν
ἑαυτὸν ὡς ἄνθρωπον γενόμενον μετὰ ἀνθρώπων Kal πεινᾶν καὶ διψῇν καὶ τὰ ἄλλα
πάσχειν ἅπερ εἴρηται περὶ αὐτοῦ, τὸν αὐτὸν δὴ τρόπον ἀκόλουθον μὴ σκανδαλίζε-
σθαι κἂν ὡς ἄνθρωπος λέγῃ μετὰ ἀνθρώπων ἀγνοεῖν, ὅτι τὴν αὐτὴν ἡμῖν ἐφόρεσε
σάρκα" οἷδε μὲν γὰρ ὡς Σοφία καὶ Λόγος dv ἐν Πατρί" μὴ εἰδέναι δέ φησι δι’ ἡμᾶς
καὶ ue? ἡμῶν ὡς ἄνθρωπος. But see the whole discussion of the bearing of
St. Mark xiii. 32, upon the Homoousion (Thesaurus, pp. 217-224). Certainly
St. Cyril refers to the οἰκονομία, and he speaks of Christ’s ‘ saying that He
did not know, on our account,’ and of His professing not to know ‘humanly.’
But this language does not amount to saying that Christ really did know, as
Man, while for reasons of His Own, which were connected with His love and
φιλανθρωπία, He said He knew not. St. Cyril’s mind appears to be, that our
Lord did know as God, but in His love He assumed all that belongs to real
manhood, and, therefore, actual limitation of knowledge. The word οἰκονομία
does not seem to mean here simply a gracious or wise arrangement, but the
Incarnation, considered as involving Christ’s submission to human limitations,
The Latin translator renders it ‘administrationi sive Incarnationi.’ St. Cyr.
Op. νυ. p. 218. St. Cyril does not say that Christ really did know as Man; he
must have said so, considering the bearing of his argument, had he believed
it. He thus states the principle which he kept in view: οὕτω yap ἕκαστον
τῶν λεγομένων ἐν TH οἰκείᾳ τάξει κείσεται" οὔτε THY ὅσα πρέπει γυμνῷ τῷ
Λόγῳ καταφερομένων εἰς τὸ ἀνθρώπινον, οὔτε μὴν τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων ἀναβαινόντων
εἰς τὸν τῆς θεότητος λόγον. Thes, p. 253.
VIII |
462 The heresy of the A gnoete.
mind of St. Athanasius. It is of course true that a different belief
was already widely received within the Church: it is enough to
point to the ‘retractation’ of Leporius, to which St. Augustine
was one of the subscribing bishops. But although a contrary
_ Judgment subsequently predominated in the West, it is certain
that the leading opponents of Arianism did not shrink from re-
cognising a limitation of knowledge in Christ’s Human Soul, and
that they appealed to His own words as a warrant for doing soi.
‘But have we not here,’ you ask, ‘albeit disguised under and
recommended by the sanction of great names, the old heresy of
the Agnoetze?’ No. The Agnoete attributed ignorance not
merely to our Lord’s Human Soul, but to the Eternal Word.
They seem to have imagined a confusion of Natures in Christ,
after the Eutychian pattern, and then to have attributed igno-
rance to that Divine Nature into which His Human Nature, as
they held, was absorbed*, They were thus, on this point, in
agreement with the Arians: while Eulogius of Alexandria, who
wrote against them, admitted that Catholic fathers before him
had taught that, as Man, Christ had been subject to a certain
limitation of knowledge.
h Quoted by Petavius, De Incarn. xi.; c. 1, § 14. Leporius appears to
have answered the Arian objections by restricting the ignorance to our Lord’s
Human Soul, after the manner of St. Athanasius. He retracts as follows:
‘Ut autem et hinc nihil cuiquam in suspicione derelinquam, tune dixi, immd
ad objecta respondi, Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum secundum hominem
ignorare: sed nunc non solum dicere non presumo, verum etiam priorem
anathematizo prolatam in hac parte sententiam.’ Leporius, however, seems
really to have anticipated Nestorius in teaching a complete separation of our
Lord’s Two Natures. Klee, Dogmengesch. ii. 4. 4.
i Compare Bishop Forbes on Nic. Creed, p. 146, 2nd ed. And see St.
Hil. in Matt. Comm. c. 26, n. 4; Theodoret in Ps, xv. § 7, quoted by Klee.
K See Suicer in voc. ᾿Αγνοηταὶ, i. p. 65: ‘Hi docebant divinam Christi
naturam (hanc enim solam post Unionem agnoscebant, tanquam absorpta
esset plane humana), quedam ignordsse, ut horam extremi judicii.” Eulogius
of Alexandria, who wrote against them, denied any actual limitation of
knowledge in Christ’s Manhood, but admitted that earlier Fathers had taught
this, πρὸς τὴν τῶν ᾿Αρειανῶν μανίαν ἀντιφερόμενοι ; but, as he thinks, because
οἰκονομικώτερον ἐδοκίμασαν ἐπὶ τῆς ἀνθρωπότητος ταῦτα φέρειν ἢ παραχωρεῖν
ἐκείνους μεθέλκειν ταῦτα κατὰ τῆς θεότητος. Apud Photium, Cod. 230, ed.
Bekker. p. 284, 6, sub fin. Klee distinguishes between the teaching of those
Fathers who denied that the Human Soul of Christ possessed unlimited
knowledge, and that of the Agnoete, who ‘speaking of the Person of Christ
without any limitations, maintained that He did not know the day of judg-
ment. Dogmengeschichte, ii. 4. § 7.
‘ It is remarkable’ that ‘die Ansicht dass Christi Menschheit gleich nach
der Vereinigung mit dem Logos Alles wusste, als Irrthum des Arnold von
Villanova 1309 formlich verurtheilt worden.’ Klee, Dogmatik, p. 511. Arnold
attempted to maintain that his opinion was a necessary consequence of the
| LECT.
Ommniscience and limited knowledge. 463
‘At any rate,’ you rejoin, ‘if our Lord’s words are to be taken
literally, if they are held to mean that the knowledge of His
Human Soul is in any degree limited, are we not in danger of
Nestorian error? Does not this conjunction of “knowledge” and
“jonorance” in one Person, and with respect to a single cata,
dissolve the unity of the God-man™? Is not this intellectual
dualism inconsistent with any conception we can form of a single
personality? Cannot we understand the indisposition of later
theologians to accept the language of St. Athanasius and.others
without an explanation, even although a sense which it does not
of itself suggest is thereby forced upon it ?”
The question to be considered, my brethren, is whether such
an objection has not a wider scope than you intend. Is it not
equally valid against other and undisputed contrasts between
the Divine and Human Natures of the Incarnate Son? For
example, as God, Christ is omnipresent; as Man, He is present
at a particular point in space®. Do you say that this, however
mysterious, is more conceivable than the co-existence of igno-
rance and knowledge, with respect to a single subject in a single
personality ? Let me then ask whether this co-existence of igno-
rance and knowledge is more mysterious than a co-existence of
literally, without establishing Nestorianism; why are we in
danger of Nestorianism if we understand Him to be speaking of
His Manhood, when He asserts that the Son is ignorant of the
day of judgment? If Jesus, as Man, did not enjoy the Divine
attribute of perfect blessedness, yet without prejudice to His
full possession of it, as God; why could He not, in like manner,
as Man, be without the Divine attribute of perfect knowledge ?
If as He knelt in Gethsemane, He was in one sphere of existence
All-blessed, and in another ‘sore amazed, very heavy, sorrowful
even unto death ;’ might He not with equal truth be in the
one Omniscient, and in the other subject to limitations of know-
Hypostatic Union. ‘Quantum citd anima Christi fuit unita Divinitati,
statim ipsa anima scivit omnia, que Deus scit ; quia alias, ut dicebat, non
fuisset cum δῷ una persona, precipueé quia scire est circumstantia pertinens
ad suppositum individuale, et non ad naturam.’ Eimeric. Direct. inquis. ii.
qu. 11. qu. by Klee, Dogmengesch. ii. 4, 8.
m Stier, Reden Jesu in Matt. xxiv. 36.
πὶ Scotus Erigena first taught the ubiquity of our Lord’s Manhood ; in more
recent times it was prominently put forward by Luther, as an explanation of
his teaching on the Eucharist. See Hooker, Εἰ. P. v. 55. 2-7.
vir |
464 Superhuman range of our Lord’s knowledge.
ledge? The difficulty ὁ is common to all the contrasts of the
Divine Incarnation ; but these contrasts, while they enhance our
sense of our Lord’s love and condescension, do not destroy our
apprehension of the Personal Unity of the Incarnate Christ P.
His Single Personality has two spheres of existence: in the one
It is all-blessed, undying, and omniscient ; in the other It meets
with pain of mind and body, with actual death, and with a cor-
respondent liability to a limitation of knowledge. No such limi-
tation, we may be sure, can interfere with the completeness of His
redemptive office. It cannot be supposed to involve any ignorance
of that which the Teacher and Saviour of mankind should know;
while yet it suffices to place Him as Man in a perfect sympathy
with the actual conditions of the mental life of His brethren 4,
If then this limitation of our Lord’s human knowledge be
admitted, to what does the admission lead? It leads, properly
speaking, to nothing beyond itself. It amounts to this : that at the
particular time of His speaking, the Human Soul of Christ was
restricted as to Its range of knowledge in one particular direction.
For it is certain from Scripture that our Lord was constantly
giving proofs, during His earthly life, of an altogether super-
human range of knowledge. There was not merely in Him the
quick and penetrating discernment of a very holy soul,—not
merely ‘that unction from the Holy One’ whereby Christians
instinctively ‘know all things’ that concern their salvation. It
was emphatically a knowledge of hard matters of fact, not
° Bishop Ellicott, in Aids to Faith, p. 445: ‘Is there really any greater
difficulty in such a passage [as St. Mark xiii. 32] than in John xi. 33, 35,
where we are told that those holy cheeks were still wet with human tears,
while the loud Voice was crying, ‘‘ Lazarus, come forth! ” ’
P See Leibnitz’s reply to Wissowatius, quoted by Lessing, Sammtl. Schrift.
ix. 277: ‘ Potest quis ex nostra hypothesi simul esse ille qui nescit diem
judicii, nempe homo, et ille qui est Deus Altissimus. Qué hypothesis nostra,
quod idem simul possit esse Deus et homo, quamdiu non evertitur, tamdiu
contrarium argumentum petit principium.’
4 See Klee, Dogmatik, p. 511: ‘Auch das kann nicht gesagt werden, dass
die menschliche Natur, wenn sie nicht absolut vollkommen und imperfectibel
ist, dann mit Unwissenheit behaftet ist ; denn nicht-allwissend ist nicht un-
wissend, sonst war Adam vor seinem Falle schon, und sind die Engel und
Heiligen in ihrer Glorie immerfort in der Unwissenheit. Unwissenheit ist
Negation des nothwendigen und ziemenden Wissens, und solche ist in der
Menschheit Christi nicht, in welche die ihr verbundene Gottheit alles zu
ihrem Berufe gehérige und durch sie alles zum Heile der Menschheit ge-
horige tiberstromte. Darum war auch die Steigerung der Wissenschaft der
Menschheit keine Erlésung derselben, und fiallt der Einwand, dass, wenn die
Menschheit etwas nicht gewusst hiitte, sie eine erlosungsbediirftige gewesen
ware, was doch nicht angenommen werden kinne, weg.’
[ LECT.
a ΓΘ θΟθΘθΟθ Φ ΦΘθΘθΘθΘῸΘῸΘὋῸὋ ὃ Φ ΦὋΦὋΦὋΦὋὁ''
Superhuman range of Christ's knowledge as Man. 465
revealed to Him by the senses, and beyond the reach of sense.
Thus He knows the exact coin which will be found in the mouth
of the first fish which His apostle will presently taker. He
bases His discourse on the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, on
an accurate knowledge of the secret communings in which His
conscience-stricken disciples had indulged on the road to Caper-
naum’. He gives particular instructions to the two disciples .
as to the finding of the ass on which He will make His entry
into Jerusalemt. He is perfectly cognizant of the secret plot-
tings of the traitor, although no human informant had disclosed
them", Nor is this knowledge supernaturally communicated at:
the moment ; it is the result of an actual supra-sensuous sight.
of that which He describes. ‘Before that Philip called thee,’ '
He says to Nathanael, ‘when thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw
thee.’ Do you compare this to the knowledge of secrets
ascribed to Elishay, to Daniel?, to St. Peter2? In these in-
stances, as eminently in that of Daniel, the secret was revealed
to the soul of the prophet or apostle. In the case of Christ we
hear of no such revelation ; He speaks of the things of heaven.
with a calm familiarity, which is natural to One Who knows |
them as beholding them ‘in Himself b.’
Indeed, our Lord’s knowledge embraced two districts, each
of which really lies open only to: the Eye of the Most High,
We will not dwell on His knowledge of the unsuspected future,
a knowledge inherent in Him, as it was imparted to those
prophets in whom His Spirit had dwelt. We will not insist on.
His knowledge of a strictly contingent futurity, such as is
involved in His positive assertion that Tyre and Sidon would
have repented of their sins, if they had enjoyed the opportunities
of Chorazin and Bethsaida ¢ ; although such knowledge as this,
considering the vast survey of motives and circumstances which
it implies, must be strictly proper to God alone. But He knew
the secret heart of man, and He knew the hidden thought and
purpose of the Most High God. Such a ‘discerner’ was He
‘of the thoughts and intents’ of human hearts4, so truly did His
Apocalyptic title, the ‘Searcher of the reins and hearts®,’ belong
τ St. Matt. xvii. 27.
5 St. Luke ix. 47: ἰδὼν τὸν διαλογισμὸν τῆς καρδίας αὐτῶν.
ἡ St. Matt. xxi. 2; St. Mark xi. 2; St. Luke xix, 30.
ἃ St. John xiii. 11. x Ibid. i. 49. Y 2 Kings vi. 9, 32.
2 Dan. ii. 19. S Acta v. 2. » St. John vi. 61: ἐν ἑαυτῷ.
¢ St. Matt. xi. 21.
ἃ Heb. iv. 12: κριτικὸς ἐνθυμήσεων καὶ ἐννοιῶν καρδίας.
° Rev. ii, 23. The message from Jesus to each of the angels of the seven
VIII ] Hh
|
466 Superhuman range of Christ's knowledge.
Nm GN Ma TR LSA TTI τ ς΄ ῸὋὋὋ
to Him in the days of His historical manifestation, that ‘ He
needed not that any should testify to Him of men, for He knew
what was in manf” This was not a result of His taking careful
note of peculiarities of action and character manifested to the
eye by those around Him, but of His ‘ perceiving in His Spirit’
and ‘knowing in Himselfs’ the unuttered reasonings and voli-
tions which were taking shape, moment by moment, within the
secret souls of men, just as clearly as He saw physical facts not
ordinarily appreciated except by sensuous perception. This was
the conviction of His apostles. ‘We are sure, they said, ‘that
Thou knowest all things). ‘Lord, Thou knowest all things,’
cries St. Peter, ‘Thou knowest that I love Theei” Yet more,
in the Eternal Father Jesus encounters no impenetrable mys-
teries; for Jesus no clouds and darkness are round about Him,
nor is His way in the sea, nor His path in the deep waters, nor
His footsteps unknown. On the contrary, our Lord reciprocates
the Father’s knowledge of Himself by an equivalent knowledge
εἰ the Father. ‘As the Father knoweth Me, even so know I
the Fatherk” ‘No man knoweth Who the Son is, but the
| Father ; and Who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom
‘the Son will reveal Him!.’ Even if our Lord should be speak-
ing, in this passage, primarily at least, of His Divine omniscience,
He is also plainly speaking: of a knowledge infused into and
possessed by His Human Soul, and thus His words supply the
true foil to His statement respecting the day of judgment. If
that statement be construed literally, it manifestly describes, not
the normal condition of His Human Intelligence, but an excep-
tional restriction. For the Gospel history implies that the
knowledge infused into the Human Soul of Jesus was ordinarily
and practically equivalent to omniscience. ‘We may conjecture,’
says Hooker, ‘how the powers of that Soul are illuminated,
Which, being so inward unto God, cannot choose but be privy
unto all things which God worketh, and must therefore of
necessity be endued with knowledge so far forth universal,
though not with infinite knowledge peculiar to Deity Itself™.’
St. Paul’s assertion that ‘in Christ are hidden all the treasures
Churches begins with the word οἶδα, as if in order to remind these bishops
of His soul-penetrating omniscience.
f St. John ii. 25: οὐ χρείαν εἶχεν ἵνα τὶς μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου"
αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐγίνωσκε τί ἣν ἐν τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ. 5. St. Mark ii. 8; v. 30.
h St. John xvi. 30: νῦν οἴδαμεν ὅτι oldas πάντα.
i [bid. xxi. 17: Κύριε, σὺ πάντα οἶδας" σὺ γινώσκεις ὅτι φιλῶ σε.
k Ibid. x. 15. 1 St. Luke x. 22. m Kccl. Pol. v. 54. 7.
| LECT,
ΝΞ Ξεοςες.ρτ--"- -- τ΄ ὃ τ
Limitation of knowledge ἐς not fallibility. 467
of wisdom and knowledge,’ may practically be understood of
Christ’s earthly life, no less than of His life of glory. If then His
Human Intellect, flooded as it was by the infusion of boundless
light streaming from His Deity, was denied, at a particular
time, knowledge of the date of a particular future event, this
may well be compared with that deprivation of the consolations
of Deity, to which His Human Affections and Will were
exposed when He hung dying on the Cross. If ‘the Divine
Wisdom,’ as Bishop Bull has said, ‘impressed its effects upon
the Human Soul of Christ pro temporum ratione, in the degree
required by particular occasions or emergencies®,’ this would be
only one application of the principle recognised by St. Ireneeus
and Theodoret, and rendered familiar to many of us in the
language of Hooker. ‘As the parts, degrees, and offices of that
mystical administration did require, which He voluntarily
undertook, the beams of Deity did in operation always accord-
ingly restrain or enlarge themselves?, We may not attempt
rashly to specify the exact motive which may have determined
our Lord to deny to His Human Soul at one particular date
the point of knowledge here in question ; although we may
presume generally that it was a part of that condescending love
which led Him to become ‘in all things like unto His brethren.’
That He was ever completely ignorant of aught else, or that He
was ignorant on this point at any other time, are inferences for
which we have no warrant, and which we make at our peril.
But it is not on this account alone that our Lord’s Human
ignorance of the day of judgment, if admitted, cannot be made
the premiss of an argument intended to destroy His authority,
when He sanctions the Mosaic authorship and historical trust-
worthiness of the Pentateuch. That argument involves a con-
fusion between limitation of knowledge and liability to error ;
whereas, plainly enough, a limitation of knowledge is one thing,|_
and fallibility is another. St. Paul says that ‘we know in
2 Col. li. 3: ἐν @ εἰσι πάντες οἱ θησαυροὶ τῆς σοφίας καὶ τῆς γνώσεως
ἀπόκρυφοι. “" ᾿
ο Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. ii. 5, 8: ‘Quippe divinam Sapientiam menti humanze
Christi effectus suos impressisse pro temporum ratione, Christumque, qua
Homo fuit, προκόψαι σοφίᾳ, profecisse sapientia (Luc. ii. 52) adeoque pro
tempore suz ἀποστολῆς, quo ist scientié opus non habebat (this seems to
hint at morethan anything which the text of the New Testament warrants)
diem judicii universalis ignorare potuisse, nemini sano absurdum videbitur.’
P Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 54. 6. See Mr. Keble’s references from Theodoret
(Dial. iii. t, 4, pars. i, 232) and St. Iren, Her. iii. c. 19. 3.
viii | Hh 2
468 Recent assailants of the Pentateuch make Our
part4, and that ‘ we see through a glass darklyt’ Yet St. Paul
is so certain of the truth of that which he teaches, as to exclaim,
‘Tf we or an angel from heaven preach any other Gospel to you
than that which we have preached unto you, let him be
accursed,’ St. Paul clearly believed in his own infallibility as
a teacher of religious truth ; and the Church of Christ has ever
since regarded his Epistles as part of an infallible literature.
But it is equally clear that St. Paul believed his knowledge of
religious truth to be limited. Infallibility does not imply omni-
science, any more than limited knowledge implies error. _Infal-
libility may be conferred on a human teacher with very limited
knowledge, by a special endowment preserving him from error.
When we say that a teacher is infallible, we do not mean that his
knowledge is encyclopsdaic, but merely that, when he does
teach, he is incapable of propounding as truth that which, in
point of fact, is not truet.
Now the argument in question assumes that Christ our Lord,
when teaching religious truth, was not merely fallible, but °
actually in serious error. If indeed our Lord had believed
Himself to be ignorant of the authorship or true character of
the Book of Deuteronomy, we may presume that He would not
have fallen below the natural level of ordinary heathen honesty,
by speaking with authority upon a subject with which He was
consciously unacquainted. It is admitted that He spoke as
believing Himself to be teaching truth. But was He, in point
of fact, not teaching truth? Was that which He believed to be
knowledge nothing better than a servile echo of contemporary
ignorance? Was His knowledge really limited on a subject-
matter, where He was Himself unsuspicious of the existence of
a limitation? Was He then not merely deficient in information,
a 1 Cor. xiii. g: ἐκ μέρους yap γινώσκομεν. ;
r Tbid. ver. 12: βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι.
8 Gal. i. 8, 9.
t Cf. Bishop H. Browne, Pentateuch and Elohistic Psalms, p. 13: ‘ Igno-
rance does not of necessity involve error. Of course in our present state of
being, and with our propensity to lean on our wisdom, ignorance is extremely
likely to lead to error. But ignorance is not error: and there is not one
word in the Bible which could lead us to suppose that our blessed Lord was
liable to error in any sense of the word or in any department of knowledge.
I do not say that we have any distinct statements to the contrary, but there
is nothing like a hint that there was such a liability : whereas His other
human infirmities, weakness, weariness, sorrow, fear, suffering, temptation,
ignorance, all these are put forward prominently, and many of them fre-
quently.’
[ LECT.
Lord both fallible, and a teacher of actual error. 469
but fallible ; not merely fallible, but actually in error? and has
it been reserved for the criticism of the nineteenth century to
set Him right? It must be acknowledged that our Lord’s state-
ment respecting the day of judgment will not avail to sustain a
deduction which supposes, not an admitted limitation of know-
ledge, but an unsuspected self-deception of a character and
extent which, in the case of a purely human teacher, would be
altogether destructive of any serious claim to teach substantial
truth 4,
Nor is this all. The denial of our Lord’s infallibility, in the
form in which it has come before us of late years, involves an
unfavourable judgment, not merely of His intellectual claims,
but of the penetration and delicacy of His moral sense. This is
the more observable because it is fatal to a distinction which
has been projected, between our Lord’s authority as a teacher of
spiritual or moral truth, and His authority when dealing with
those questions which enter into the province of historical
criticism. If in the latter sphere He is said to have been lable
and subject to error, in the former, we are sometimes told, His
instinct was invariably unerring. But is this the case, if our
Lord was really deceived in His estimate of the Book of Deuter-
onomy, and if further the account of the origin and composition
of that book which is put forward by His censors be accepted as
satisfactory? Our Lord quotes Deuteronomy as a work of the
highest authority on the subject of man’s relations and duties
to Godx. Yet we are assured that in point of fact this book
was nothing better than a pious forgery of the age of Jeremiah,
if indeed it was not a work of that prophet, in which he em-
ployed the name and authority of Moses as a restraint upon the
increasing polytheism of the later years of king Josiahy. That
u ΤΑ human teacher were to decline to speak on a given subject, by say-
ing that he did not know enough about it, this would not be a reason for
disbelieving him when he proceeded to speak confidently on a totally dis-
tinct subject, thereby at least implying that he did know enough to warrant
his speaking. On the contrary, his silence in the one case would be a
reason for trusting his statements in the other. The argument which is
under consideration in the text would have been really sound, if our Saviour
had fixed the date of the day of judgment, and the event had shewn Him
to have been mistaken.
x St. Matt. iv. 4, Deut. viii. 3; St. Matt. iv. 7, Deut. vi. τό ; St. Matt.
iv. 10, Deut. vi. 13, and x. 20.
y Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. ii. p. 427: ‘Supposing (to fix our ideas)
that Jeremiah really wrote the book, we must not forget that he was a
prophet, and, as such, habitually disposed to regard all the special impulses
vult |
470 Could our Lord detect a pious fraud?
hypothesis has been discussed elsewhere and by others on its
own critical merits. Here it may suffice to observe, that if it
could have been seriously entertained it would involve our Lord
in something more than intellectual fallibility. If Deuter-
onomy is indeed a forgery, Jesus Christ was not merely ignorant
of a fact of literary history. His moral perceptions were at
fault. They were not sufficiently fine to miss the consistency,
the ring of truth, in a document which professed to have come
from the great Lawgiver with a Divine authority ; while, ac-
cording to modern writers, it was only the ‘pious’ fiction of a
later age, and its falsehood had only not been admitted by its
‘author, lest its ‘ effect’ should be counteracted 2.
When, in the middle of the ninth century, the pseudo-
Isidorian decretals were first brought from beyond the Alps to
of his mind to religious activity as direct inspirations from the Divine Source
of Truth. To us, with our inductive training and scientific habits of mind,
the correct statement of facts appears of the first necessity ; and consciously
to misstate them, or to state as fact what we do not know or believe from
external testimony to be fact, is a crime against truth. But to a man who
believed himself to be in immediate communication with the Source of all
Truth, this condition must have been reversed. The inner voice, which he
believed to be the voice of the Divine Teacher, would become all-powerful—
would silence at once all doubts and questionings. What it ordered him to
do, he would do without hesitation, as by direct command of God, and all
considerations as to morality or immorality would either not be entertained
at all, or would only take the form of misgivings as to whether, possibly, in
any particular case, the command itself was really Divine.
‘Let us imagine, then, that Jeremiah, or any other contemporary seer,
meditating upon the condition of his country, and the means of weaning his
people from idolatry, became possessed with the idea of writing to them an
address, as in the name of Moses, of the kind which we have just been con-
sidering, in which the laws ascribed to him, and handed down from an earlier
age, which were now in many respects unsuitable, should be adapted to the
present circumstances of the times, and re-enforced with solemn prophetical
utterances. This thought, we may believe, would take in the prophet’s mind
the form of a Divine command. All question of deception or fraus pia would
vanish.’
2. Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. ii. p. 429: ‘Perhaps, at first, it was
felt to be difficult or undesirable to say or do anything which might act as a
check upon the zeal and energy which the king himself exhibited, and in
which, as it seems, he was generally supported by the people, in putting
down by force the gross idolatries which abounded in his kingdom. That im-
pulsive effort, which followed immediately the reading of the ‘* Book,” might
have been arrested, if he had been told at once the true origin of those awful
words which had made so strong an impression on him. They were not less
awful, indeed, or less true, because uttered in the name of Moses by such a
prophet as Jeremiah. But still it is obvious that their effect was likely to be
greatly intensified under the idea that they were the last utterances of Moses
himself.’
[ LECT.
One proved error fatal to Christ’s authority. 471
Rome, they were almost immediately cited by Nicholas I. in
reply to an appeal of Hincmar of Rheims, in order to justify
and extend the then advancing claims of the Roman Chair2.
We must then either suppose that this Pope was really incapable
of detecting a forgery, which no Roman Catholic writer would
now think of defending», or else we must imagine that, in order
to advance an immediate ecclesiastical object, he could con-
descend to quote a document which he knew to have been
recently forged, as if it had been of ancient and undoubted
authority. The former supposition is undoubtedly most wel-
come to the common sense of Christian charity ; but it is of
course fatal to any belief in the personal infallibility of Pope
Nicholas I. A like dilemma awaits us in the Gospel history, if
those unhappy theories respecting the Pentateuch to which I
have alluded are seriously adopted. Before us is no mere
question as to whether Christ’s knowledge was or was not
limited ; the question is, whether as a matter of fact He taught
or implied the truth of that which is not true, and which a finer
moral sense than His might have seen to be false. The question
is plainly, whether He was a trustworthy teacher of religious no
less than of historical truth. The attempted distinction between
a critical judgment of historical or philological facts, and a moral
judgment of strictly spiritual and moral truths, is inapplicable
to a case in which the moral judgment is no less involved than
the intellectual; and we have really to choose between the in-
fallibility, moral no less than intellectual, of Jesus Christ our
Lord on the one hand, and the conjectural speculations of critics,
of whatever degree of critical eminence, on the other.
Indeed, as bearing upon this vaunted distinction between
spiritual truth, in which our Lord is still, it seems, to be an
authority, and historical truth, in which His authority is to be
set aside, we have words of His Own which prove how truly He
made the acceptance of the lower portions of His teaching a pre-
liminary to belief in the higher. ‘If I have told you earthly
things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of
heavenly things¢?’ How indeed? If, when He sets the seal
of His authority upon the writings of Moses as a whole, and
upon the most miraculous incidents which they relate in detail,
He is really only the uneducated Jew who ignorantly repeats
@ Dean Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. ii. p. 379.
Ὁ Compare Walter, Lehrbuch des Kirchenrechts, pp. 206-210.
¢ St. John iii. 12.
vulr |
472 Christ's Detty tlluminates Fis Passion.
and reflects the prejudice of a barbarous age ; how shall we be
sure that when He reveals the Character of God, or the precepts
of the new life, or the reality and nature of the endless world,
He is really trustworthy—trustworthy as an Authority to whom
we are prepared to cling in life and in death? You say that
here your conscience ratifies His teaching,—that the ‘ enthusiasm
of humanity’ which is in you sets its seal upon this higher
teaching of the Redeemer of men. Is then your conscience in
very truth the ultimate and only teacher? Have you anticipated,
and might you dispense with, the teaching of Christ? And
what if your conscience, as is surely not impossible, has itself
_ been warped or misled? What if, in surveying even the moral
matter of His teaching, you still assume to exercise a ‘ verifying
faculty,’ and object to this precept as ascetic, and to that
command as exacting, and to yonder most merciful revelation of
an endless woe as ‘Tartarology!’ Alas! brethren, experience
proves it, the descent into the Avernus of unbelief is only too
easy. There are broad highways in the life of faith, just as in
\the life of morality, which a man cannot leave without certain
Fa of losing his way in a trackless wilderness. To deny our
Lord’s infallibility, on the precarious ground of a single known
limitation of knowledge in His human intellect, is not merely an
inconsequence, it is inconsistent with any serious belief in His
real Divinity. The common sense of faith assures us that if
Christ is really Divine, His infallibility follows as a thing of
course. The man who sincerely believes that Jesus Christ is
God will not doubt that His every word standeth sure, and that
whatever has been sealed and sanctioned by His supreme
authority is independent of, and unassailable by, the fallible
judgment of His creatures respecting it.
(3) If the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity implies that as a
teacher of truth He is infallible, it also illuminates His suffering
death upon the Cross with an extraordinary significance.
The degrees of importance which are attributed to the several
events and stages of our Lord’s Life on earth, will naturally vary
with the variations of belief respecting His Person. With the
Humanitarian, for instance, the dominant, almost the exclusive,
interest will be found to centre in Christ’s Ministry, as affording
the largest illustrations of His Human Character and of His
moral teaching. The mysteries which surround His entrance
into and His departure from our human world, will have been
thrown into the background as belonging to questions of a very
inferior degree of importance, or possibly, as at best. serving to
[ uecr.
Flumanitarian estimate of the Passion. 473
illustrate the legendary creativeness of a subsequent age. Per-
haps a certain historical and chronological value will still be
allowed to attach to Christ’s Birth. Perhaps, if His Resurrection
be admitted to have been a matter of historical occurrence, a high
evidential significance will continue to be assigned to it, such
as was recognised by Priestley and by all Socinians of the last
generation. And to a Humanitarian, the interest of Christ’s
Death will be of a yet higher kind. For Christ’s Death enters
into His moral Self-manifestation ; it is the heroic climax of His
devotion to truth ; it is the surest seal which a teacher can set
upon his doctrine. Thus a Humanitarian will admit that the
dying Christ saves the world by enriching its stock of moral life,
by setting before the eyes of men, for all future time, the
example of a transcendent sacrifice of self. But in the bare
fact that Jesus died, Humanitarianism sees no mystery beyond
that which attaches to the death of any ordinary man. The
Crucifixion is simply regarded as a practical appendix to the
Sermon on the Mount. And thus to the Socinian pilgrim, the
mountain of the beatitudes and the shores of the Sea of Galilee
will always and naturally appear more worthy of reverence and
attention, than the spot on which Mary brought her Son into the
world, or than the hill on which Jesus died.
Far otherwise must it ever be with a sincere believer in our
Saviour’s Godhead. Not that he can be insensible to the com-
manding moral interest which the Life and teaching of the
Perfect Man ever rouses in the heart of Christians. That Life
and that teaching have indeed for him a meaning into which the
Humanitarian cannot enter ; since the believer knows that it is
God Who lives and speaks in Jesus. But contemplating Jesus
as the Incarnate God, he is necessarily attracted by those points
in our Lord’s earthly Life, at which the contrast is most vividly
marked between His Divine and Eternal Nature and His state
of humiliation as Man.
This attraction is reflected in the believer's religious thought,
in his devotions, in the instinctive attitude of his interest towards
the Life of Jesus. The creed expresses the thought of the whole
company of the faithful. After stating that the Only-begotten
Son, consubstantial with the Father, for us men and for our
salvation came down from heaven and was made Man, the creed
proceeds to speak of His Crucifixion, Sufferings, Burial, Resur-
rection, and Ascension. The creed makes no allusion to His
example, or to the nature and contents of His doctrine. In an
analogous sense the Litany gives utterance to the devotion of the
Vill |
τῶ. ee
474 Christ’s Person the measure of 1715 Passion.
collective Church. In the Litany, Jesus, our ‘Good Lord,’ is
entreated to deliver us ‘by’ the successive mysteries of His
earthly Self-manifestation. Dependent on the mystery of His
holy Incarnation are His ‘holy Nativity and Circumcision,’
His ‘Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation, His ‘Agony and
Bloody Sweat,’ His ‘Cross and Passion,’ His ‘precious Death
and Burial,’ His ‘glorious Resurrection and Ascension.’ Here
again there is no reference to His sinless example, or to His
words of power. Why is this? Is it not because the thought
of the Church centres most persistently upon the Person of
Jesus? His teaching and His example, although they pre-
suppose His Divinity, yet in many ways appeal to us indepen-
dently of it. But the significance of His birth into the world,
of His varied sufferings, of His death, of His rising from the
tomb, and of His ascent to heaven, resides chiefly, if not al-
together, in the fact that His Person is Divine. That truth
illuminates these features of His earthly Self-manifestation,
which else might be thrown into the shade by the moral beauty
of His example or of His doctrine. The birth and death of a
mere man, and even the resurrection and glorification of a mere
man, would only be the accessories of a higher interest centring
in the range and influence of his ideas, in the force and con-
sistency of his conduct, in the whole bearing of his moral and
intellectual action upon the men of his time. But when He
Who is born, Who suffers, Who dies, Who rises and ascends, is
known to be personally and literally God, it is inevitable that
the interest of thought and devotion should take a direction in
which the ‘mystery of godliness’ is most directly and urgently
felt. Christian devotion necessarily hovers around those critical
turning-points in the Self-manifestation of the Infinite and Al-
mighty Being, at which His gracious and immeasurable Self-
humiliation most powerfully illustrates His boundless love, by
the contrast which it yields to the majesty of His Divine and
Eternal Person. No one would care for the birthplace or grave
of the philosopher, when he could visit the scene of his in-
tellectual victories ; but the Christian pilgrim, in all ages of the
Church, is less riveted by the lake-side and mountains of Galilee,
than by those sacred sites, where his God and Saviour first
drew human breath and where He poured forth His Blood upon
the Cross of shame.
Let us imagine, if we can, that our Lord’s life had been
written, not by the blessed Evangelists, but by some modern
Socinian or Humanitarian author. Would not the relative pro-
[ Lect.
All the Evangelists describe the Passion in detarl. 475
portions assigned to the several parts of His life have been very
different from those which we find in the New Testament? We
should have been presented with an analytical exposition of the
moral greatness of Christ, in its several bearings upon the individual
and social life of man; and His teaching would have been in-
sisted upon as altogether eclipsing in importance any questions
which might be raised as to His ‘origin’ or His ‘place in the
world of spirits.” As for His Death, it would of course have
been introduced as the natural result of His generous conflict
with the great evils and corruptions of His day. But this
closing episode would have been treated hurriedly and with re-
serve. The modern writer would have led us to the foot of
Calvary. There he would have left us to our imagination, and
all that followed would have been summarized in a couple of
sentences. The modern writer would have avoided all semblance
of giving prominence to the ‘ physical aspects’ of the tragedy, to
the successive insults, cruelties, cries, which indicated so many
distinct phases of mental or bodily agony in the sufferer. He
would have argued that to dwell intently on these things was
unnecessarily harrowing to the feelings, and moreover, that it
might distract attention from the general moral interest to which
the Death of Jesus was, in his judgment, only subsidiary. Clearly
he would not have followed in the track of the Evangelists.
For the four Evangelists, while the plan and materials of their
several narratives present many points of difference, yet concur -
in assigning an extraordinary importance, not merely to the\
general narrative of the Passion, but to its minute details. This
is more in harmony with the genius of St. Mark and St. Luke
than with that of St. Matthew ; but considering the scope and
drift of the fourth Gospel, it is at first sight most remarkable in
St.John. For instead of veiling the humiliations of the Word
Incarnate, St. John regards them as so many illustrations of His
‘glory; and, indeed, each of the four evangelical narratives,
however condensed may be its earlier portions, expands into the
minute particularity of a diary, as it approaches the foot of the
Cross.
Now this concurrent disposition of the four Evangelists is
eminently suggestive. It implies that there is a momentous
interest attaching, not merely to the Death of Christ as a whole,
but to each stage and feature of the great agony in detail. It
implies that this interest is not merely moral and human, but of
a higher and distinct kind. The moral requirements of the
history would have been satisfied, had we been compendiously
vill | . ,
476 Christ's Divinity explains A postohical language
informed that Christ died at last in attestation of the moral
truth which He taught; but this detailed enumeration of the
successive stages and shades of suffering, both physical and
mental, leads the devout Christian insensibly to look beneath
the varying phases of protracted agony, at the unrufiled, august,
eternal Person of the insulted Sufferer; and thus Christian
thought rests with more and more of anxious intensity upon
the possible or probable results of an event so stupendous as
' the Death of Christ.
Upon such a problem, human reason, left to itself, could shed
no light whatever. It could only be sure of this :—that much
more must be involved in the Death of Christ than in the death
of the best of men. Had Christ been merely human, greater
love among men, greater enthusiasm for truth as truth, greater
devotion to the sublimest of moral teachings and to the Will of
the Universal Father, greater contempt for pleasure when plea-
sure is in conflict with duty, and for pain when pain is recom-
mended by conscience, would certainly have followed upon His
Death. These effects follow in varying degrees upon every
sincere and costly act of human self-renouncement; and the
moral kingdom: of God is a vast treasure-house of saintly and
living memories, in which the highest place of honour is for
ever assigned to those who exhibit the most perfect sacrifice of
self. Nor, most assuredly, is any the least and lowest act of
sacrifice destined to perish: it thrills on in its undying force
through the ages; it kindles, first in one and then in another
unit of the vast company of moral beings, a new devotion to
truth, to duty, to man, to God. But when we know that Jesus
Christ is God, we are prepared to hear that something much
more stupendous than any moral impulse, however strong and
enduring, must have resulted from His Death—something (as
yet we know not what) reaching far beyond the sphere and laws
of history, beyond the world of sense and of time, of natural
moral sequence, and of those ascertainable or hidden influences
jwhich pass on from man to man and from age to age.
Nowhere is the illuminative force of Christ’s Divinity more
felt than here. The tremendous premiss, that He Who died
upon the Cross is truly God, when seriously and firmly believed,
avails to carry the believer forward to any representation of the
efficacy of His Death which rests upon an adequate authority.
‘No person,’ says Hooker 4, ‘was born of the Virgin but the
Son of God, no person but the Son of God baptized, the Son of
ἃ Eccl. Pol. v. 52. 3.
[ LECT.
respecting the efficacy of His Death. 477
God condemned, the Son of God and no other person crucified ;
which one only point of Christian belief, the infinite worth of the
Son of God, is the very ground of all things believed concerning
life and salvation by that which Christ either did or suffered
as man in our behalf.’ ‘That,’ says Bishop Andrewes, ‘which
setteth the high price upon this Sacrifice is this, that He which
offereth it to God, is Gode’ ‘Marvel not,’ says St. Cyril of
Jerusalem, ‘if the whole world has been redeemed, for He Who
has died for us is no mere man, but the Only-begotten Son of
God” ‘Christ,’ says St. Cyril of Alexandria, ‘would not have
been equivalent [as a sacrifice] for the whole creation, nor would
He have sufficed to redeem the world, nor have laid down His
life by way of a price for it, and poured forth for us His precious
Blood, if He be not really the Son, and God of God, but a
creature 8,’
This, as has been already noticed, is St. Peter’s meaning when
he says that we were not redeemed with corruptible things, as
silver and gold, but with the precious Blood of Christ, as of a
Lamb without blemish and immaculate», This underlies St.
Paul’s contrast between the blood of bulls and goats and the
Blood of Christ offering Himself without spot to Godi. This
is the substance of St. John’s announcement that the Blood
of Jesus Christ the Son of God cleanseth us from all sink,
Apart from this illuminating doctrine of the Godhead of Jesus
Christ crucified, how overstrained and exaggerated are the
New Testament representations of the effects of His Death!
€ Second Sermon on the Passion. For other references, see Rev. W.
Bright’s Sermons of St. Leo, p. 80. P
f Catech. 13. 2: μὴ θαυμά(ῃς εἰ κόσμος ὅλος ἐλυτρώθη, od γὰρ ἦν ἄνθρωπος
ψιλὸς, GAN Ὑἱὸς Θεοῦ μονογενὴς 6 ὑπεραποθνήσκων. St. Proclus, Hom. in
Incarn. c. 5: ἔδει τοίνυν δυοῖν θάτερον, ἢ πᾶσιν ἐπαχθῆναι τὸν ἐκ THs καταδίκης
θάνατον, ἐπειδὴ καὶ πάντες ἥμαρτον" ἢ τοιοῦτον δοθῆναι πρὸς ἀντίδοσιν τίμημα,
ᾧ πᾶν ὑπῆρχε δικαίωμα πρὸς παραίτησιν. ἼΑνθρωπος μὲν οὖν σῶσαι οὐκ ἠδύνατο,
ὑπέκειτο γὰρ τῷ χρέει τῆς ἁμαρτίας. ΓΑΎγελος ἐξαγοράσασθαι τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα
οὖς ἴσχυεν, ἠπόρει yap τοιούτου A’Tpov. Λοιπὸν οὖν ὁ ἀναμάρτητος Θεὸς ὑπὲρ
τῶν ἡμαρτηκότων ἀποθανεῖν ὥφειλεν᾽ αὕτη γὰρ ἐλείπετο μόνη τοῦ κακοῦ 7 λύσις.
ὁ. 6: ὦ τῶν μεγάλων πραγμάτων ! ἄλλοις ἐπραγματεύσατο τὸ ἀθάνατον, αὐτὸς
γὰρ ὑπῆρχεν ἀθάνατος. τοιοῦτος γὰρ ἄλλος κατ᾽ οἰκονομίαν οὔτε γέγονεν, οὔτε
ἦν, οὔτε ἔσται ποτὲ, ἢ μόνος ex τῆς παρθένου τεχθεὶς Θεὸς καὶ ἄνθρωπος" οὐκ
ἀντιταλαντεύουσαν μόνον ἔχων τὴν ἀξίαν τῷ πλήθει τῶν ὑποδίκων, ἀλλὰ καὶ
πάσαις ψήφοις ὑπερέχουσαν. Cc. 9: ἄνθρωπος ψιλὸς σῶσαι οὐκ ἴσχυε, Θεὸς
γυμνὸς παθεῖν οὐκ ἠδύνατο. τί οὖν; αὐτὸς ὧν Θεὸς ὁ ᾿Εμμανουὴλ, γέγονεν
ἄνθρωπος. (Labbe, iii. 13 sq.)
5 St. Cyril Alex. de Sancta Trinitate, dial. 4, tom. v. pp. 508, 509. See
too Ad Reginas, i. c. 7; Labbe, iii. 112. h | St. Pet. i. 10."
1 Heb. ix. 13. Kk 1 St. John i, 7.
vu |
478 Christ's Deity explains the power of His Death.
Eee σσ
He has redeemed man from a moral and spiritual slavery!;
He has made a propitiation for our sins™; He has really recon-
ciled God and His creatures». But how is such a redemption
possible, unless the price be infinitely costly? How could such
a propitiation be offered, save by One Whose intrinsic worth
might tender some worthy offering from a boundless Love to a
perfect Justice? How was a real reconciliation between God
and His creatures to be effected, unless the Reconciler had
some natural capacity for mediating, unless He could represent
God to man no less truly than man to God? How could He
‘exchange’ Divine glory for human misery, or raise man in
his misery to companionship with God, unless He were Him-
self Divine? Alas! brethren, if Jesus Christ be not God, the
promises of redemption to which penitent and dying sinners
cling with such thankful tenacity, forthwith dissolve into the
evanescent forms of Jewish modes of thought, and unsubstantial
misleading metaphors. If Jesus be not God, we stand face to
face in the New Testament, not with the unsearchable riches,
the boundless mercy of a Divine Saviour, able ‘to save to the
uttermost those that come unto God by Him,’ but only with
the crude and clinging prejudices of His uneducated or semi-
educated followers. But if it be certain that ‘in this was mani-
fested the love of God towards us, because that God sent His
Only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through
Him °,’ then the disclosures of revelation respecting the efficacy
of His Death do not appear to be excessive. Vast as is the con-
clusion of a world of sinners redeemed, atoned for, reconciled, the
premiss that Jesus Crucified is truly God more than warrants it.
And the accompaniments of the Passion are such as might have
been anticipated by the faith of the Church. Why those darkened
heavens? Why that rent veil in the temple? Why those shattered
1 ᾿Απολύτρωσις presupposes the slavery of humanity, from which Christ
our Lord redeems us by the λύτρον of His precious Blood. St. Matt. xx. 28;
1 Cor. i. 30; Eph. i. 7, 14; iv. 30. The idea of purchase out of bondage is
vividly expressed by the verb ἐξαγοράζειν, Gal. iii. 13 ; iv. ἘΠ
™ ἱλασμός presupposes the unexpiated sin of humanity, for which Christ
makes a propitiation. 1 St.John ii. 2; iv. 10; Heb. ii. 17. Our Lord
Himself is the θυσία, the προσφορά (Eph. v. 2; Heb. x. 12); He is the πάσχα
(1 Cor. v. 7); He is the sacrificial ἀμνός (St. John i. 29, 36; 1 St. Peter i,
19); He is the slain ἀρνίον (Rev. v. 6, 8, 12, 13 ; vi. I).
" καταλλαγή presupposes the existence of an enmity between God and
man, which is done away by Christ’s ‘exchanging’ His glory for our misery
and pain, while He gives us His glory. Rom. y. 10; 2 Cor. y. 18, 19.
° x St. John iv. 9.
[ LECT,
Bearing of Christ's Divinity on the Sacraments. 479
rocks? Why do those ‘bodies of the saints which slept’ return
from the realms of death to the city of the living? Nature, could
she speak, would answer that her Lord is crucified. But her
convulsive homage before the Cross of Christ is as nothing when
compared to a moral miracle of which the only sensible symp-
toms are an entreaty and a promise, uttered alike in human
words. ‘Not when Christ raised the dead, not when He rebuked
the sea and the winds, not when He expelled the devils,—but
when He was crucified, pierced with the nails, insulted, spit
upon, reproached, reviled,—had He strength to change the evil
disposition of the robber, to draw to Himself that soul, harder
though it were than the rocks around, and to honour it with the
promise, ‘To-day shalt thou be with Me in ParadiseP,’ That
promise was a revelation of the depth and height of His redemp-
tive power ; it was a flash of His Godhead, illuminating the true
meaning of His humiliations as Man. If then we believe Him
to be God, we bow our heads before His Cross, as in the presence
of fathomless mystery, while we listen to His apostles as they
unfold the results of His Death. If we are perplexed with some
difficulties in contemplating these results, we may remember that
we are but hovering on the outskirts of a vast economy of mercy
reaching far away beyond our furthest sight, and that the seen will
one day be explained by the unseen. But at least no magnitude of
redemptive mercies can possibly surprise us, when the Redeemer
is known to be Divine; we say to ourselves with ‘St. Paul, ‘If
God spared not His Own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all,
how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things Τ᾽
(γ) As our Lord’s Divinity is the truth which illuminates and
sustains the world-redeeming virtue of His death; so in like
manner it explains and justifies the power of the Christian
Sacraments, as actual channels of supernatural grace.
To those who deny that Jesus Christ is God, the Sacraments
are naturally nothing more than ‘badges or tokens’ of social co-
operation4, The one Sacrament is only ‘a sign of profession
and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned
from others that be not christenedt.’ The other is at best ‘only
a sign of the love that Christians ought to have one towards
another 8.’ Thus sacraments are viewed as altogether human
acts; God gives nothing in them; He has no special relation to
P St. Chrysost. De Cruce et Latrone, Hom. i. § 2. tom. ii. 404.
a Art. XXV. condemns this Zwinglian account of Sacraments generally.
r Art. XXVII. condemns this Zwinglian account of Baptism.
s Art. XXVIII. condemns this Zwinglian account of the Holy Communion.
vill |
480 Sacraments not only signs, but means, of Grace.
them t. They are regarded as purely external ceremonies, which
may possibly suggest certain moral ideas by recalling the memory
of a Teacher who died many centuries agzo%. They help to save
His name from dying out among men. Thus they discharge the
functions of a public monument, or of a ribbon or medal imply-
ing membership in an association, or of an anniversary festival
instituted to celebrate.the name of some departed historical
worthy. It cannot be said that in point of effective moral power
they rise to the level of a good statue or portrait; since a merely
outward ceremonial cannot recall character and suggest moral
sympathy as effectively as an accurate rendering of the human
countenance in stone, or colour, or the lines of an engraving.
Rites, with a function so purely historical, are not likely to
survive any serious changes in human feelings and associations.
Men gradually determine to commemorate the object of their
regard in some other way, which may perhaps be more in har-
mony with their personal tastes ; they do not admit that this
particular form of commemoration, although enjoined by the
Author of Christianity, binds their consciences with the force of
any moral obligation; they end by deciding that it is just as well
to neglect such commemorations altogether.
If the Socinian and Zwinglian estimate of the Sacraments had
been that of the Church of Christ, the Sacraments would long
ago have been abandoned as useless ceremonies. But the
Church has always seen in them not mere outward signs
addressed to the taste or to the imagination, nor even signs
(as Calvinism asserts) which are tokens of grace received inde-
pendently of them *, but signs which, through the power of the
promise and words of Christ, effect what they signify. They
are ‘ effectual signs of grace and God’s good-will towards us, by
the which He doth work invisibly in usy.’ Thus in baptism
t Cat. Rac. Qu. 202: ‘Quomodo confirmare potest nos in fide id, quod
nos ipst facimus, quodque, licet a Domino institutum, opus tamen nostrum est,
nihil prorsus miri in se continens 2?”
* Ibid. Qu. 334: ‘Christi institutum ut fideles ipsius panem frangant et
comedant, et ὃ calice bibant, mortis ipsius annuntiande causa.’ Ibid. 337:
‘Nonne alia causa, ob quam ccenam instituit Dominus, superest? Nulla
prorsus. Ktsi homines multas excogitarint.’
x See Cartwright, quoted by Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 60. 3, note.
y Art. XXV. Cf. P. Lombard, lib. iv. ἃ. 1.2: ‘ Sacramentum est invisibilis
gratice visibilis forma. .... Ita signum est gratiz Dei, et invisibilis gratiz
forma, ut ipsius imaginem gerat et causa existat.? Church Catechism : ‘An
outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained
by Christ Himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to
assure us thereof.’ See Martensen, Christ. Dogm. p. 418, Clark’s Transl. :
[ LECT.
Christ’sGodhead warrants thegraceofSacraments.481
the Christian child is made ‘a member of Christ, a child of
God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heavenz,” And < the
Body and Blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and
received by the faithful in the Lord’s Supper,’
This lofty estimate of the effective power of the Christian
Sacraments is intimately connected with belief in the Divinity
of the Incarnate Christ. The importance attached to the words
in which Christ institutes and explains the Sacraments, varies
concomitantly with belief in the Divinity of the Speaker. Τῇ
the Speaker be held to be only man, then, in order to avoid
imputing to him the language of inflated and thoughtless folly,
it becomes necessary to empty the words of their natural and
literal force by violent exegetical processes which, if applied
generally, would equally destroy the witness of the New Testa-
ment to the Atonement or to the Divinity of Christ. But if
Christ be in very truth believed to be the Eternal Son of God,
then the words in which He provides for the communication of
His life-giving Humanity in His Church to the end of time may
well be allowed to stand in all the force and simplicity of their
natural meaning. Baptism will then be the laver of a real
regeneration»; the Eucharist will be a real ‘communion of the
Body and Blood’ of the Incarnate Jesusc. If, with our eye
‘ The essential difference’ [between Prayer and Sacraments] ‘ consists in this:
the sacred tokens of the New Covenant contain also an actual communication
of the Being and Life of the risen Christ, Who is the Redeemer and Per-
fecter, not only of man’s spiritual, but of man’s corporeal nature. In Prayer
there is only a unio mystica, a real, yet only spiritual, psychological union :
but in the Sacraments the deepest mystery rests in the truth that in them
Christ communicates Himself, not only spiritually, but in His glorified cor-
poreity.’ 2 Church Catechism.
* Ibid. Mr. Fisher observes that ‘ out of twenty-five questions of which
the Catechism now consists, no less than seventeen relate exclusively to the
nature and efficacy of the Sacraments.’ Liturgical Purity, p. 293, Ist ed.
te ΤῊ ΜΠ ΠΡ : διὰ λουτροῦ παλιγγενεσίας. Common Prayer-book, Office of
Private Baptism: “ This child, who being born in original sin and in the
wrath of God, is now by the laver of regeneration in Baptism received into
the number of the children of God.’ For the connection between Baptismal
grace and our Lord’s Divinity, see St. Cyril Alex. de Recta Fide, c. 37 ἢ
δρᾷς, ὦ οὗτος, κατακομίζων ἡμῶν eis γῆν τὴν ἐλπίδα ; βεβαπτίσμεθα γὰρ οὐκ εἰς
ἄνθρωπον ἁπλῶς, ἀλλ᾽ εἰς Θεὸν ἐνηνθρωπηκότα, καὶ ἀνιέντα ποινῆς καὶ τῶν
ἀρχαίων αἰτιαμάτων τοὺς τὴν εἰς αὐτὸν πίστιν ἐκδεδεγμένους.... ἀπολύων
γὰρ ἁμαρτίας τὸν αὐτῷ προσκείμενον, τῷ ἰδίῳ λοιπὸν καταχρίει πνεύματι: ὅπερ
ἐνίησι μὲν αὐτὸς, ὡς ἐκ Θεοῦ Πατρὸς Λόγος, καὶ ἐξ ἰδίας ἡμῖν ἀναπηγάζει φύσεως.
He quotes Rom. viii. 9, 10.
© 1 Cor. x. 16: κοινωνία τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ... κοινωνία τοῦ σώ-
ματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ. St. Just. Mart. Apol. i. 66: Οὐ γὰρ ws κοινὸν ἄρτον οὐδὲ
κοινὸν πόμα ταῦτα λαμβάνομεν" ἀλλ᾽ ὃν τρόπον διὰ Λόγου Θεοῦ σαρκοποιηθεὶς
VIII] I1
482 faith in -Christ’s Divinity forbids
upon Christ’s actual Godhead, we carefully weigh the momen-
tous sentences in which He ordained4, and the still more
explicit terms in which He explained ¢, His institutions; if we
ponder well His earnestly enforced doctrine, that they who
would have part in the Eternal Life must be branches of that
Living Vinef whose trunk is Himself; if we listen to His
Apostle proclaiming that we are members of His Body, from
His Flesh ,and from His Boness ; then in a sphere, so inacces-
sible to the measurements of natural reason, so absolutely
controlled by the great axioms of faith, it will not seem incre-
dible that’‘as many as have been baptized into Christ’ should
really ‘have put on Christ}, or that ‘the Body of Jesus Christ
which was given for us’ should now, when received sacramen-
tally, ‘preserve our bodies and souls unto everlasting lifei’ In
view of our Lord’s Divinity, we cannot treat as so much
profitless and vapid metaphor the weighty sentences which
᾿Ιησοῦς Χριστὸς ὁ:;Σωτὴρ ἡμῶν καὶ σάρκα καὶ αἷμα ὑπὲρ σωτηρίας ἡμῶν ἔσχεν, οὕτως
καὶ τὴν δι’ εὐχῆς λόγου τοῦ παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ εὐχαριστηθεῖσαν τροφὴν, ἐξ ἧς αἷμα καὶ
σάρκες κατὰ μεταβολὴν τρέφονται ἡμῶν, ἐκείνου τοῦ σαρκοποιηθέντος ᾿Ιησοῦ καὶ
σάρκα καὶ αἷμα ἐδιδάχθημεν εἶναι. Cf. Dorner, Person Christi, Erster Theil,
p- 435, note 47: ‘Justin denkt sich den ganzen Christus in Verbindung mit
dem Abendmahl. Auch so kann er sich diese unter dem Bilde der Incar-
nation denken, indem Christus die Elemente zum sichbaren Organ seiner
Wirksamkeit und Selbstmittheilung macht, und das durch seine Erhéhung
verlorne Moment der Sichtbarkeit seiner objectiven Erscheinung sich in
jedem Abendmahl durch Assumtion der sichtbaren Elemente wieder her-
stellt.’ For the connection between the Holy Eucharist and our Lord’s
Divinity, see St, Cyril Alex. Epist. Synod. ad Nestorium, c. 7: Thy ἀναίμακ-
Tov ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις τελοῦμεν θυσίαν, πρόσιμέν τε οὕτω ταῖς μυστικαῖς EvAC-
γίαις καὶ ἁγιαζόμεθα, μέτοχοι γενόμενοι τῆς τε ἁγίας σαρκὸς, καὶ τοῦ τιμίου
αἵματος τοῦ πάντων ἡμῶν Σωτῆρος Χριστοῦ" καὶ οὐχ ὡς σάρκα κοινὴν δεχόμενοι
(μὴ γένοιτο) οὔτε μὴν ὡς ἀνδρὸς ἡγιασμένου καὶ συναφθέντος τῷ Λόγῳ κατὰ
τὴν ἑνότητα τῆς ἀξίας, ἤγουν ὡς θείαν ἐνοίκησιν ἐσχηκότος, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ζωοποιὸν
ἀληθῶς καὶ ἰδίαν αὐτοῦ τοῦ Λόγου. Ζωὴ γὰρ dv κατὰ φύσιν ὡς Θεὺς, ἐπειδὴ
γέγονεν ἕν πρὸς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ σάρκα, ζωοποιὸν ἀπέφηνεν αὐτήν. This epistle,
given in Routh, Scr. Οραβο. ii. 17, ed. 3, was written Nov. 430, and read
with tacit approval, as it seems, at the General Council of Ephesus in 431.
(See Bright’s Hist. Ch. pp. 326, 333.) A similar passage is in St. Cyril’s
Explanatio xii. Capitum, (tom. vi. p. 156,) to the effect that the Body and
Blood in the Holy Eucharist are οὐχ ἑνὸς τῶν Kal? ἡμᾶς καὶ ἀνθρώπου κοινοῦ,
but ἴδιον σῶμα καὶ αἷμα τοῦ τὰ πάντα ζωογονοῦντος Λόγου" κοινὴ γὰρ σὰρξ
ζωοποιεῖν οὐ δύναται, καὶ τούτου μάρτυς αὐτὸς ὁ Σωτὴρ, λέγων, “ Ἢ σὰρξ οὐκ
ὠφελεῖ οὐδὲν, τὸ πνεῦμά ἐστι τὸ ζωοποιοῦν.᾽ So in his Comm. in Joan. lib. iv.
(tom. iv. p. 361) he says that as Christ’s Flesh, by union with the Word,
' Who is essentially Life, ζωοποιὸς γέγονε, therefore ὅταν αὐτῆς ἀπογευσόμεθα,
τότε τὴν ζωὴν ἔχομεν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς. 4 St. Matt. xxviii. το ; xxvi. 26.
¢ St. John iii. 5; vi. 53 866. f 1 St. John xv. 1 sqq. & Eph. v. 30.
bh Gal. iii. 27; + Communion Service.
[ LECT.
Ι
depreciation of the Christian Sacraments. 483
Apostles have traced around the Font and the Altar, any more
than we can deal thus lightly with the precious hopes and
promises that are graven by the Divine Spirit upon the Cross.
The Divinity of Christ warrants the realities of sacramental
grace as truly as it warrants the cleansing virtue of the Atoning
Blood. If it forbids our seeing in the Great Sacrifice for sin,
nothing higher than a moral exemplar; it also forbids our
degrading the august institutions of the Divine Redeemer to the
level of the dead ceremonies of the ancient law. And con-
versely, belief in the reality of sacramental grace protects belief
in a Christ Who is really Divine. Sacraments, if fully believed
in, furnish outworks in the religious thought and in the daily
habits of the Christian, which necessarily and jealously guard
the prerogatives and honour of his adorable Lord.
That depreciation of the Sacraments has often been followed
by depreciation of our Lord’s Eternal Person is a simple matter
of history), True, there have been and are earnest believers in
our Lord’s Divinity who deny the realities of sacramental grace.
But experience appears to shew that their position may be only
a transitional one. History illustrates the tendency to Huma-
nitarian declension even in cases where sacramental belief, al-
though imperfect, has been far nearer’ to the truth than is the
bare naturalism of Zwinglik. Many English Presbyterian congre-
1 Mill, University Sermons, p.190 ; Gladstone on Church Principles, p. 185.
k Zwingli de Vera et Fals& Relig. Op. iii. p. 263. n. A: ‘Est ergo sive
eucharistia sive synaxis, sive coena dominica nihil aliud quam commemoratio,
qua ii, qui se Christi morte et sanguine firmiter credunt patri reconciliatos
esse, hanc vitalem mortem annunciant, hoc est laudant, gratulantur et
predicant. Jam ergo sequitur, quod qui ad hunc usum aut festivitatem
conveniunt mortem domini commemoraturi, hoc est annunciaturi, sese unius
corporis esse membra, sese unum panem esse ipso facto testentur......
Qui ergo cum Christianis commeat, quum mortem domini annuntiant, qui
simul symbolicum panem aut carnem edit, is nimirum posted secundum
Christi przescriptum vivere debet, nam experimentum dedit aliis, quod
Christo fidat.’ Here God does and gives nothing ; the ceremony described
is not a ‘means of grace’ but only and simply an act of man, a human
ceremonial action, expressive of certain ideas and convictions, shared by
those who take part in it. It is substantially the same account as that
which is given in the formal documents of early Socinianism. (Cat. Rac.
qu. 334, 335, 337-) It would be an extreme injustice to Calvin to identify
his belief on the subject with these unspiritual errors. Calvin even says:
*Quicquid ad exprimendam veram substantialemque corporis ac sanguinis
Domini communicationem, qu sub sacris coene symbolis fidelibus exhi-
betur, libenter recipio; atque ita ut non imaginatione duntaxat aut mentis
intelligentia percipere, sed ut re ipsa frut in alimentum vite eterne intelli-
gantur.’ Instit.iv.17, 19. The force of this language was, however, prac-
tically destroyed by Calvin’s doctrine of Divine decrees, which made
vu | 1:2
484 Sacraments preserve faith in Christ's Divinity.
Bee atte ine Ae 6): ΠΠὀὋ}.
gations, founded by men who fell away from the Church in the
seventeenth century, were, during the eighteenth, absorbed into
Arianism or Socinianism!, The pulpit and the chair of Calvin
are filled by teachers who have, alas! much more in common
with the Racovian Catechism than with the positive elements of
the theology of the Institutes™. The restless mind of man cannot
but at last press a principle to the real limit of its application,
even although centuries should intervene between the premiss
and the conclusion. If we imagine that the Sacraments are only
picturesque memorials of an absent Christ, we are already in
a fair way to believe that the Christ Who is thus commemorated
as absent by a barren ceremony is Himself only and purely
human. Certainly if Christ were not Divine, the efficacy of
Sacraments as channels of graces that flow from His Manhood
would be the wildest of fancies. Certainly if Sacraments are
not thus channels of His grace, it is difficult to shew that they
have any rightful place in a dispensation, from which the dead
forms and profitless shadows of the synagogue have been
banished, and where all that is authorized is instinct with the
power of a heavenly life. The fact that such institutions as the
Sacraments are lawful in such a religion as the Gospel, of itself
implies their real efficacy : their efficacy points to the Godhead
of their Founder. Instead of only reviving the thought of a
distant past, they quicken all the powers of the Christian by
sacramental grace wholly dependent upon the sense of election, that is to
say, upon the subjective state, upon the feelings, of the believer, instead of upon
the promise and word of Christ. Thus it happened that humble minds among
Calvinists would naturally, in virtue of their very self-distrust, tend to adopt
a Zwinglian estimate of the Eucharist: and, historically speaking, Calvinism
has in this matter shewn a consistent disposition to degenerate in a
Zwinglian direction. Belief in the reality of Sacramental grace is only
secured, when men believe that such grace depends not on themselves but on
the promise and words of their Saviour, in other words, that it is objective.
And the objectivity of Sacramental grace implies of necessity an Omnipotent
Saviour, Whose grace it is. St. Augustine’s famous saying, ‘Accedit verbum
ad elementum, et fit Sacramentum,’ is hopelessly unintelligible, unless He who
institutes the Sacrament and warrants its abiding efficacy be indeed Divine.
1 See Bogue and Bennett’s History of Dissenters, ili. 240, 319; iv. 319,
383; and the Law Magazine, vol. xv. (May, 1836,) p. 348. In our own
country, other Calvinistic communions have in general been happily preserved
from such a fall. But the case of English Presbyterianism finds parallels in
Geneva, in Holland, in France, and in America. Such loss of truth by others
can never give Churchmen any ‘controversial’ satisfaction ; the more truth
is held by Dissenters, the better both for them, and for the honour of Christ.
But the subject may suggest warnings to ourselves.
m Laing’s Notes of a Traveller, pp. 324-5, quoted in Chr. Rem. July, 1863,
Ρ 247.
[ LECT.
Priesthood and Royalty of the Divine Christ. 485
union with a present and living Saviour ; they assure us that
Jesus of Nazareth is to us at this moment what He was to
His first disciples eighteen centuries ago; they make us know
and feel that He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever,
unchanging in His human tenderness, because Himself the
unchanging God. It is the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity to
which they point, and which in turn irradiates the perpetuity
and the reality of their power.
(5) It is unnecessary for us to dwell more at length upon the
light which our Lord’s Divinity sheds upon His Priestly office.
We know that as His promise and presence make poor human
words and simple elements the channels of His mercy, by taking
them up into His kingdom and giving them a power which of
themselves they have not, so it is His Divinity which makes
His Intercession in Heaven so omnipotent a force. He inter-
cedes above, by His very presence; He does not bend as a
suppliant before the Sanctity of God ; He is a Priest upon His
Throne». Nor may we linger over the bearings of His Divinity
upon His Kingly office. The fact that He rules with a bound-
less power, may assure us that, whether willingly or by con-
straint, yet assuredly in the end, all moral beings shall be put
under Him?®, But you do not question the legitimacy of this
obvious inference. And time forbids us to linger upon the
topic, suggestive and interesting as it is. We pass then to
consider an objection which will have been taking shape in
many minds during the course of the preceding discussion.
III. You admit that the doctrine of Christ’s Godhead illumi-
nates the force of other doctrines in the Christian creed, and
that it explains the importance attributed to her sacramental
ordinances by the Christian Church. But you have the interests
of morality at heart ; and you are concerned lest this doctrine
should not merely fail to stimulate the moral life of men, but
should even deprive mankind of a powerful incentive to moral
energy. The Humanitarian Christ is, you contend, the most
precious treasure in the moral capital of the world. He is the
Perfect Man ; and men can really copy a life which a brother
man has lived. But if Christ’s Godhead be insisted on, you
contend that His Human Life ceases to be of value as an
2 Zech. vi. 13. Christ’s perpetual presentation of Himself before the
Father is that which constitutes His Intercession. It lasts until the Judg-
ment, as the enduring antitype to the High Priest’s presentation of the
victim’s blood in the Holy of Holies. Heb. viii. 3; ix. 24.
ΡΣ Cor. xv..25; Heb. ii. 8.
VIII |
486 Otjection to Christ's Divinity on moral grounds.
ethical model for humanity. An example must be in some
sense upon a level with those who essay to imitate it. A model
being, the conditions of whose existence are absolutely distinct
from the conditions which surround his imitators, will be
deemed to be beyond the reach of any serious imitation. If
then the dogma of Christ’s Godhead does illuminate and sup-
port other doctrines, this result is, in your judgment, purchased
at the cost of practical interests. A merely human saviour
would at least be imitable; and he would thus better respond
to the immediate moral necessities of man. For man is, after
all, the child of common sense; and before he embarks upon a
serious enterprise, he desires to be reasonably satisfied that he
is not aiming at the impracticable.
1. Now this objection is of an essentially & priori character.
It contends that, if Christ is God, His Manhood must be out of
the reach of human imitation. It does not deny the fact that
He has been most closely imitated by those who have believed
most entirely in His true Divinity. In fact it seems to leave
out of sight two very pertinent considerations,
(a) The objector appears to forget, on the one hand, that
according to the terms of the Catholic doctrine, our Lord is
truly and literally Man, and that it is His Human Nature which
is proposed to our imitation. His Divinity does not destroy
the reality of His Manhood, by overshadowing or absorbing it.
Certainly the Divine attributes of Jesus are beyond our imita-
tion ; we can but adore a boundless Intelligence or a resistless
Will. But the province of the imitable in the Life of Jesus is
not indistinctly traced. As the Friend of publicans and sinners,
as the Consoler of those who suffer, and as the Helper of those
who want, Jesus Christ is at home among us. We can copy
Him, not merely in the outward activities of charity, but in its
inward temper; we can copy the tenderness, the meekness, the
patience, the courage, which shine forth from His Perfect
Manhood. His Human Perfections constitute indeed a fault-
less Ideal of Beauty,.which, as moral artists, we are bound to
keep in view. What the true and highest model of a human
life is, has been decided for us Christians by the appearance of
Jesus Christ in the flesh. Others may endeavour to reopen
that question. For us it is settled, and settled irrevocably.
Nor are Christ’s Human Perfections other than human ; they
are not, after the manner of Divine attributes, out of our reach ;
they are not designed only to remind us of what human nature
should, but cannot, be. We can approximate to them, even
[ LECT.
Christ's Manhoodimitable, butonly through Grace.487
indefinitely. That in our present state of imperfection we
should reproduce them in their fulness is indeed impossible ;
but it is certain that a close imitation of Jesus of Nazareth is at
once our duty and our privilege. For God has ‘predestinated
us to be conformed’ by that which we do, not less than by that
which we endure, to the Human Image of His Blessed Son,
‘that He might be the Firstborn among many brethren?.’
(8) Nor, on the other hand, may it be forgotten that if we can
thus copy our Lord, it is not in the strength of our fallen nature.
Vain indeed would be the effort, if in a spirit of Pelagian self-re-
liance, we should endeavour to reproduce in our own lives the like-
ness of Christ. Our nature left to itself, enfeebled and depraved,
cannot realize the ideal of which it is a wreck, until a higher
power has entered into it, and made it what of itself it cannot be.
Therefore the power of imitating Jesus comes from Jesus through
His Spirit, His Grace, His Presence. Now, as in St. Paul’s day,
‘Jesus Christ is in us’ Christians, ‘except we be reprobates 4.’
The ‘power that worketh in us’ is no mere memory of a distant
past. It is not natural force of feeling, nor the strength with
which self-discipline may brace the will. It is a living, ener-
gizing, transforming influence, inseparable from the presence of a
‘quickening Spirit” such as is in very deed our glorified Lord.
If Christ bids us follow Him, it is because He Himself is the
enabling principle of our obedience. If He would. have us be
like unto Himself, this is because He is willing by His indwelling
Presence to reproduce His likeness within us. If it is His Will
that we should grow up unto Him in all things Who is the Head,
even Christ’; this is because His life-giving and life-sustaining
power is really distributed throughout the body of His memberst.
Of ourselves we are ‘miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked ¥,’
But we take counsel of Him, and buy of‘ His gold tried in the
fire ;’ and forthwith we ‘can do all things through Christ That ἡ
strengtheneth usv.’ It is the-Spiritual Presence of Christ in the
Church and in Christian souls which makes the systematic imi-
tation of Christ something else than a waste of energy”. But if
the Christ Whom we imitate be truly human, the Christ Who
thus creates and fertilizes moral power within us must be Divine.
His Divinity does not disturb the outline of that model which
is supplied by His Manhood; while it does furnish us with a
stock of inward force, in the absence of which an imitation of
the Perfect moral Being would be a fruitless enterprise.
P Rom. viii. 29. 42 Cor. xiii. 5. ΤΙ Cor. xv. 45. 5 Eph. iv. 15.
t Ibid. i.23; iv.16. "Rev. 1.17. Phil.iv.13. Οὔ Eph. iv. 15-24.
‘vill |
488 Moral fruitfulness of faith in Christ’s Godhead.
pe RAIA Oe Ale δ
2. Indeed, it is precisely this belief in the Divinity of our
Lord which has enriched human life with moral virtues such as
civilized paganism could scarcely have appreciated, and which it
certainly could not have created. The fruitfulness of this great
doctrine in the sphere of morals will be more immediately appa-
rent, if we consider one or two samples of its productiveness.
(2) When Greek thought was keenest, and Greek art most
triumphantly creative, and Greek political life so organized as
to favour in a degree elsewhere unknown among men the play
of man’s highest natural energies, Greek society was penetrated
through and through by an invisible enemy, more fatal in its
ravages to thought, to art, to freedom, than the sword of any
Persian or Macedonian foex. And already in the age of the early
Ceesars, Rome carried in her bosom the secret of her impending
decline and fall in the coming centuries. St. Paul detected and
exposed it in termsY which are not more explicit than those
employed by Tacitus and Juvenal. The life-blood of a race may be
drained away less nobly than on the battle-field. Every capacity
for high and generous exertion, or for the cheerful endurance of
suffering at the bidding of duty, all the stock of moral force on
which a country can rely in its hour of trial, may be sapped,
destroyed, annihilated by a domestic traitor. So it fared with
imperial Rome. The fate of the great empire was not really de-
cided on the Rhine or on the Danube. Before the barbarians had
as yet begun to muster their savage hordes along the frontiers
of ancient civilization, their work had wellnigh been completed,
their victory had been won, in the cities, the palaces, nay, in the
very temples of the empire. And upon what resources could the
old Pagan Society fall back, in its alarm at, and struggle with
this formidable foe? It could not depend upon the State. The
Emperor was the State by impersonation ; and not unfrequently
it happened that the Emperor was the public friend and patron
of the State’s worst enemy. Nox could any reliance be placed
upon philosophy. Doubtless philosophy meant well in some of
‘its phases, in some of its representatives. But philosophy is
much too feeble a thing to enter the lists successfully with animal
passion; and, as a matter of fact, philosophy has more than once
been compelled or cajoled into placing her intellectual weapons
at the disposal of the sensualist. Nor did religion herself, in
her pagan guise, supply the needed element of resistance and
cure. Her mysteries were the sanction, her temples the scene,
* Dollinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. 9. i. 2. p. 684, etc.
Y Rom. i. 24-32.
[ Lecr.
Lts relation to the grace of Purity. 489
her priests the ministers of the grossest debaucheries: and the
misery of a degraded society might have seemed to be complete,
when the institutions which were designed to shed some rays of
light and love from a higher sphere upon the woes and brutalities
of this lower world, did but consecrate and augment the thick
moral darkness which made of earth a very hell 2.
Now, that Jesus Christ has breasted this evil, is a matter of
historical fact. His victory is chronicled, if not in the actual
practice, yet in the conventional standard of modern society.
Certainly the evil in question has not been fairly driven beyond
the frontiers of Christendom ; the tone of our social intercourse,
the sympathies of our literature, the proceedings of our law-courts,
would remind us from time to time ‘that the Canaanite is yet
in the land.’ But if he is not yet expelled from our borders, at
least he is forced to skulk away from the face of a society which
still names the Name of Jesus Christ. The most advanced
scepticism among us at the present day does not venture with
impunity to advocate habits which were treated as matters of
course by the friends of Plato: even the licence of our sensuous
poetry does not screen such advocacy from earnest and general
indignation. This is because, far beyond the circle of His true
worshippers, Jesus Christ has created in modern society a pub-
lic opinion, sternly determined to discountenance and condemn
moral mischief, which yet it may be unable wholly to prevent.
This public opinion is sometimes tempted to disown its real
parentage and its undoubted obligations. Instead of rejoicing
to confess itself the pupil of Christ, it imagines schemes of
independent morality framed altogether by human thinkers,
which. may relieve it of its sense of indebtedness to our Lord.
But as a matter of fact, all that is thus true and wholesome in the
national mind is an intellectual radiation from that actual mass
of living purity, wherewith the Healer of men has beautified the
lives of millions of Christians. And how has Jesus made men
pure? Did He insist upon prudential and hygienic considerations?
Did He prove that the laws of the physical world cannot be
strained or broken with physical impunity? No. For, at least,
He knew human nature well; and experience does not justify the
anticipation that scientific demonstrations of the physical con-
sequences of sensual indulgence will be equal to the task of check-
ing the surging impetuosity of passion. Did Christ, then, call
men to purity only by the beauty of His Own example? Did He
z Dillinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. 9. ii. 4. p. 718 sqq.
Vit |
490 Purity created by faith in a Divine Christ.
only confront them with a living ideal of purity, so bright and
beautiful as to shame them into hatred of animal degradation ?
Again I say, Jesus Christ knew human nature well. If He had
only offered an example of perfect purity, He would but have
repeated the work of the ancient Law ; He would have given us
an ideal, without the capacity of realizing it ; He would have at
best created a torturing sense of shortcoming and pollution,
stimulated by the vision of an unattainable standard of perfection.
Therefore He did not merely afford us in a Human form a fault-
less example of chaste humanity. He did more. He did that
which He could only do as being in truth the Almighty God.
He made Himself one with our human nature, that He might
heal and bless it through its contact with His Divinity. He
folded it around His Eternal Person ; He made it His own ; He
made it a power which could quicken and restore us. And then,
by the gift of His Spirit, and by sacramental joints and bands,
He bound us to 108 ; He bound us through it to Himself; nay,
He robed us in it; by it He entered into us, and made our
members His own. Henceforth, then, the tabernacle of God is
with men? ; and ‘corpus regenerati fit caro Crucifixi.’ Hence-
forth Christian humanity is to be conscious of a Presence within
109, before which the unclean spirit cannot choose but shrink
away discomfited and shamed 4, The Apostle’s argument to the
Corinthian Christians expresses the language of the Christian
conscience in presence of impure temptations, to the end of time.
‘Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall
I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members
of an harlot? God forbide” From that day to this, the recoil
from an ingratitude which a Christian only can exhibit, the dread
of an act of sacrilege which a Christian only can commit, the
loving recognition of an inward Presence which a Christian only
can possess—these have been the controlling,sustaining, hallowing
motives which by God’s grace have won the victory. But these
motives are rooted in a doctrine of Christ’s sacramental union
with His people, which is the veriest fable unless the indwelling
Christ be truly God. The power of these motives to sustain us
in purity varies with our hold on the master-truth which they so
entirely presuppose. Such motives are strong and effective when
our faith in a Divine Christ is strong; they are weak when our
faith in His Divinity is weak ; they vanish from our moral life,
® Col. ii. 19. b Rev. xxi. 3. © Col. i. 27; 2 Cor. ἜΗΙ 5.
4 St. Luke iv. 33. ¢ 1 Cor. vik ΤΕΣ
[ LECT.
The grace of FTumility. 491
and leave us a prey to our enemy, when the Godhead of Jesus is
explicitly denied, and when the language which asserts the true
incorporation of an Almighty Saviour with our frail humanity is
resolved into the fantastic drapery of an empty metaphor.
(8) If the civilized pagan was impure, he was also proud and
self-asserting. He might perhaps deem overt acts of pride an
imprudence, on the ground that they were likely to provoke a
Nemesis from some spiteful deity. The fates were against con-
tinued prosperity ; and it was unwise to boast of that which
they waited to destroy,—
‘Invida fatorum series, summisque negatum
Stare dit, nimioque graves sub pondere lapsusf,’
But when this prudential consideration did not weigh with him,
the pagan gave full scope to the assertion of self in thought,
word, and act. The sentiment of pride was not in conflict with
his higher conscience, as would be the case with Christians. He
indulged it without scruple, nay rather upon principle,—
‘Secundas fortunas decent superbie 8.’
He was utterly unable to see intrinsic evil in it; and it pene-
trated in a subtle but intense form into the heart of those better
ethical systems which, like the later Stoicism, appeared most
nearly to rival the moral glories of the Gospel. Pride indeed
might seem to have been the misery of paganism rather than its
fault. For man cannot detach himself from himself. Man is
to himself, under all circumstances, an ever-present subject of
thought ; but whether this thought is humbly to correspond to
the real conditions of his existence, or is to assume the propor-
tions of a turgid and miserable exaggeration, will depend on the
question whether man does or does not see constantly and truly
that One Being Who alone can reveal to him his true place in
the moral and intellectual universe. Paganism was not humble,
because to paganism the true God was but a name. ‘The whole
life and thought of the pagan world was therefore very naturally
based on pride. Its literature, its governments, its religious
institutions, its social organization and hierarchy, its doctrines
about human life and human duty—all alike were based on the
principle of a boundless self-assertion. They were based on that
cruel and brutal principle which in the end hands over to the
keenest wit and to the strongest arm the sceptre of a tyranny,
that knows no bounds, save those of its strongest lust, checked
and controlled by the most lively apprehensions of its selfish
f Lucan i. 70. & Plaut. Stich. ii. 1. 27.
vu |
492 Lhe grace of Humility how far a product
foresight. Now how did Jesus Christ confront this power of
pride thus dominant in the old pagan world. By precept? Un-
doubtedly. ‘The kings of the Gentiles,’ He said to His followers,
‘exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority
upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so,’
‘Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased ; and he that hum-
bleth himself shall be exaltedi” By example? Let us listen to
Him. ‘Learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and
ye shall find rest unto your soulsk” ‘If I your Lord and Master
have washed your feet, ye ought to wash one another’s feet 1.
But why was His example so cogent? What was it in Jesus
Christ which revealed to man the moral beauty and the moral
power of the humiliation of self? Was it that being a Man,
Who had within His grasp the prizes which are at the command
of genius, or the state and luxuries which may be bought by
wealth, He put these things from Him? If He was only Man,
did He really forego wealth and station? Were they ever—at
least on a great scale—within His reach? Even if it be thought
that they were; was His renunciation of them a measure of
‘that mind which is in Christ Jesus™,’ to which St. Paul directs
the gaze of the practical Christian? St. Paul, as we have seen,
meant something far higher than the refusal of any earthly
greatness when he drew attention to the self-renunciation of his
Lord and Master. ‘Being in the form of God, ... He emptied
Himself of His glory, and took on Him the form of a slave.’
Historically speaking, it is not Christ’s renunciation of earthly
advantages which has really availed to make Christians humble.
The strongest motives to Christian humility are, first, the nearer
sight of God’s Purity and Blessedness which we attain through
communion with His Blessed Son, and next, or rather especially,
as the Apostle points out, the real scope and force of Christ’s
own example. Christ left the glory which He had with the
Father before the world was, to become Man. He ‘took upon
Him our flesh, and suffered death upon the Cross, that all man-
kind might follow the example of His great humility®.’ There-
fore the manifestations of humility in Christendom have varied,
on the whole, correspondingly with earnestness of belief in that
pre-existent glory from which the Redeemer bent so humbly to
the Cross of shame. Certainly, in Jesus this deepest of hu-
miliations was the fruit of His charity for souls ; whereas, in us,
h St. Luke xxii. 25. i Thid. xiv. 11. * St. Matt. xi. 29.
1 St. John xiii. 14. m Phil. ii, 5. τὶ Ibid. 6, 7. ᾿
° Collect for Sunday before Easter.
[ LECT.
of γατίζ in the Divinity of Christ. 493
humble thoughts and deeds are the necessary because the just
expression of a true self-knowledge. Yet, nevertheless, the
doctrine of Christ's true Godhead, discerned through the
voluntary lowliness and sufferings of His Manhood, braces
humility, and rebukes pride at the bar of the Christian con-
science. Can men really see God put such honour on humility,
and be as though they saw it not? Can a creature, who has
nothing good in him that he has not received, and whose moral
evil is entirely his own, behold the Highest One thus teaching
him the truthful attitude of a created life, without emotion, with-
out shame, without practical self-abasement? What place is there
for great assertions of self in a man who sincerely believes that
he has been saved by the Death of the Incarnate Son of God?
Who has the heart to vaunt his own opinion, or to parade his
accomplishments, or to take secret pleasure in income or station
or intellectual power, when he reflects upon the astonishing
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, when He was rich, for our
sakes became poorP? Itis the Incarnation which has confronted
human pride, by revealing God clearly to the conscience of men,
but also, and especially, by practically setting the highest possible
honour upon extreme self-humiliation. It is the Incarnation
which has led men to veil high gifts, and to resign places of in-
fluence, and to forego the advantages of wealth and birth, that
they might have some part, however fractionally small, in the
moral glories of Bethlehem and Calvary. It is the Incarnation
which has thus saved society again and again from the revo-
lutionary or despotic violence of unbridled ambitions, by bringing
into the field of political activity the corrective, compensating
force of active self-denial, An enthusiasm for withdrawal from
the general struggle to aggrandise self has fascinated those wor-
shippers of an Incarnate God, who have learnt from Him the
true glory of taking the lowest place at the feast of human life.
But the motive for such repression of self is powerful only so
faras faith in Christ’s Godhead is clear and strong. The culture
of humility does not enter into the ordinary schemes of natural
ethics ; and Humanitarian doctrines are found, as a rule, to
accompany intellectual and social self-assertion. It has been
true from the first, it is true at this hour, that a sincere faith
which recognises in the Son of Mary, laid in His manger and
nailed to His Cross, none other than the Only-begotten Son of
God, is the strongest incentive to conquer the natural pride of
P 2 Cor. viii. 9.
ΥΙΠ7
494 The grace of charity how far a product
the human heart, and to learn the bearing of a little childa—
that true note of predestined nobility—in the Kingdom of
Heaven.
(y) Let us take one more illustration of the moral fruitfulness
of a faith in the Divinity of our Saviour. There is a grace, to
which the world itself does homage, and which those who bend
neither heart nor knee before the world’s Redeemer admit to be
the consequence of His appearance among men.
Heathenism, as being impure and proud, was consistently
unloving. For as the one vice eats out the delicacy and heart
of all true tenderness, so the other systematically enthrones
self upon the ruins of the unselfish affections. Despite the
Utopian sketches which have been drawn by the philosophers of
the last century, the sentiment of ‘humanity’ is too feeble a
thing to create in us a true love of man as man, Man does not,
in his natural state, love his brother man, except it be from
motives of interest or blood-relationship. Nay, man regards all
who are not thus related to him as forming the great company
of his natural rivals and enemies, from whom he has nothing to
expect save that which the might or the prudence of self-interest
may dictate.
τὸ yap οἰκεῖον πιέζει
πάνθ᾽ ὁμῶς" εὐθὺς δ᾽ ἀπήμων κραδία
κᾶδος aud’ ἀλλότριοντ,
Such is the voice of unchristianized nature: man’s highest love
is the love of self, varied by those subordinate affections which
minister to self-love: and society is an agglomeration of self-
loving beings, whose ruling instincts are shaped by force or by
prudence into a political whole, but who are ever ready, as op-
portunity may arise, to break forth into the excesses of an
unchecked barbarism. Contempt for and cruelty towards the
slave, hatred of the political or literary rival, suspicious aversion
for the foreigner, disbelief in the reality of human virtue and of
human disinterestedness, were recognised ingredients in the
temper of pagan times. The science of life consisted in solving
a practical equation between the measure of evil which it was
desirable to inflict upon others, and the amount of suffering
which it might be necessary to endure at their hands. Love of
mankind would have seemed folly to a society, the recognised
law of whose life was selfishness, and whose vices culminated in
a St. Matt. xviii. 3. τ Pind. Nem. i. 82.
[ LECT.
of farth in the Divinity of Christ. 495
a mutual hatred between man and man, class and class, race
and race, thinly veiled by the hollow conventionalisms which
distinguished Pagan civilization from pure barbarism§.
How did Jesus Christ reform this social corruption? He gave
the New Commandment. ‘This is My commandment, that ye
love one another, as I have loved yout.’ But was His love merely
the love of a holy man for those whose hearts were too dull and
earthly to love Him in return? Could such a human love as
this have availed to compass a moral revolution, and to change
the deepest instincts of mankind? Is it not a fact that Christians
have measured the love of Jesus Christ as man measures all love,
by observing the degree in which it involves the gift of self?
Love is ever the gift of self. It gives that which costs us some-
thing, or it is not love. Its spirit may vary in the degree of
intensity, but it is ever the same. It is always and everywhere
the sacrifice of self. It is the gift of time, or of labour, or of
income, or of affection ; it is the surrender of reputation and of
honour ; it is the acceptance of sorrow and of pain for others.
The warmth of the spirit of love varies with the felt greatness
of the sacrifice which expresses it and which is its life. There-
fore the love of the Divine Christ is infinite. ‘He loved me,’
says an apostle, ‘and gave Himself for me¥.’ The ‘Self’ which
He gave for man was none other than the Infinite God: the
reality of Christ’s Godhead is the truth which can alone measure
the greatness of His love. The charities of His earthly life are
but so many sparks from the central column of flame, which
burns in the Self-devotion of the Eternal Son of God. The
agonies of His Passion are illuminated each and all with a moral
no less than a doctrinal meaning, by the momentous truth that
He Who is crucified between two thieves is nevertheless the
Lord of Glory. From this faith in the voluntary Self-immolation
of the Most Holy, a new power of love has streamed forth into
the soul of man. Of this love, before the Incarnation, man not
only had no experience ; his moral education would not have
trained him even to admire it. But the Infinite Being bowing
down to Self-chosen humiliation and agony, that, without violat-
ing His essential attributes, He might win to Himself the heart
of His erring creatures, has provoked an answer of grateful love,
5 Tit. iii. 3: ἦμεν γάρ ποτε καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀνόητοι, ἀπειθεῖς, πλανώμενοι, Sov-
λεύοντες ἐπιθυμίαις καὶ ἡδοναῖς ποικίλαιβ, ἐν κακίᾳ καὶ φθόνῳ διάγοντες,
στυγητοὶ, μισοῦντες ἀλλήλουϑ.
ὑ St. John xv, 12. ἃ Gal, ii. 20,
vill |
496 Charity, a product of faith τη Christ's Divinity.
first towards Himself, and then for His sake towards His crea-
tures. Thus ‘with His Own right Hand, and with His holy
Arm, He hath gotten Himself the victory’ over the selfishness
as over the sins of man. ‘We love Him because He first loved
usY.’ If human life has been brightened by the thousand
courtesies of our Christian civilization ; if human pain has been
alleviated by the unnumbered activities of Christian charity ; if
the face of Christendom is beautified by institutions which cheer
the earthly existence of millions; these results are due to
Christian faith in the Charity of the Redeemer, which is infinite
because the Redeemer is Divine. And thus the temples of
Christendom, visibly perpetuating the worship of Christ from
age to age, are not the only visible witnesses among us to His
Divine prerogatives. The hospital, in which the bed of anguish
is soothed by the hand of science under the guidance of love ;
the penitentiary, where the victims of a selfish passion are raised
to a new moral life by the care and delicacy of an unmercenary
tenderness ; the school, which gathers the ragged outcasts of our
great cities, rescuing them from the ignorance and vice of which
else they must be the prey ;—what is the fountain-head of these
blessed and practical results, but the truth of His Divinity, Who
has kindled man into charity by giving Himself for man? The
moral results of Calvary are what they are, because Christ is
God. He Who stooped from heaven to the humiliations of the
Cross has opened in the heart of redeemed man a fountain of
love and compassion. No distinctions within the vast circle of
the human family can narrow or pervert its course ; nor can it
cease to flow while Christians believe, that Christ crucified-for
men is the Only-begotten Son of God.
It is therefore an error to suppose that the doctrine of our
Lord’s Divinity has impoverished the moral life of Christendom
‘by removing Christ from the category of imitable beings.’ For
on the one hand, the doctrine leaves His Humanity altogether
intact ; on the other, it enhances the force of His example as a
model of the graces of humility and love. Thus from age to age
this doctrine has in truth fertilized the moral soil of human life,
not less than it has guarded and illuminated intellectual truth.
How indeed could it be otherwise? ‘If God spared not His
Own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all, how shall He not
with Him also freely give us all things?’ Who shall wonder if
wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption are
= Ps. xcviii; 2. Y 1 St. John iv. 10.
[ LECT.
----ςς--ς-ς-ςςςς-ς-ς- ὃὦἝἝἪἝἜἝὁὁ ὁ ὁ ὀὌῬὩΦ6]ρῃοΧἯ ὄΌΟΌΟἝΟΌΟΘὃΘὃὁ͵ ΛὁᾶΘῬΘθΘθΘή ᾽ ὁΠὁὃὃ
hRecapitulation. 497
a = ne a ET SI aR or
given with the gift of the Eternal Son? Who shall wonder if by
this gift, a keen, strong sense of the Personality and Life of God,
and withal a true estimate of man’s true dignity, of his capacity,
through grace, for the highest forms of life, are guarded in the
sanctuary of human thought? Who shall gainsay it, if along
‘with this gift we inherit a body of revealed and certain truth,
reposing on the word of an Infallible Teacher ; if we are washed
in a stream of cleansing Blood, which flows from an atoning
fountain opened on Calvary for the sin and uncleanness of ἃ
guilty world ; if we are sustained by sacraments which make us
really partakers of the Nature of our God; if we are capable of
virtues which embellish and elevate humanity, yet which, but for
the strength and example of our Lord, might have seemed too
plainly unattainable 1
For the Divinity of God’s Own Son, freely given for us |
sinners to suffer and to die, is the very heart of our Christian |
faith. It cannot be denied without tearing out the vitals of a
living Christianity. Its roots are struck far back into the pro-
phecy, the typology, the ethics, of the Old Testament. It alone
supplies a satisfactory explanation of the moral attitude of Jesus ©
Christ_ towards His-contemporaries.. It is the true key to His —
teaching, to His miracles, to the leading mysteries of His life, to
His power of controlling the issues of history. As such, it is
put forward by apostles who, differing in much besides, were
made one by this faith in His Divinity and in the truths which
are bound up with it. It enters into the world of speculative
discussion ; it is analysed, criticized, denounced, proscribed, be-
trayed ; yet it emerges from the crucible wherein it has been
exposed to the action of every intellectual solvent that hostile
ingenuity could devise ; it has lost nothing from, it has added
nothing to, its original significance ; it has only been clothed in
a symbol which interprets it to new generations, and which lives
in the confessions of the grateful Church. Its later history is
explained when we remember the basis on which it really rests. |.
The question of Christ’s Divinity is the question of the truth or
falsehood of Christianity. ‘If Christ be not God,’ it has been
truly said, ‘He is not so great as Mohammed.’ But Christ’s
moral relation to Mohammed may safely be left to every un-
sophisticated conscience ; and if the conscience owns in Him the
Moral Chief of humanity, it must take Him at His word when
He unveils before it His superhuman glory.
But the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity does not merely bind us
to the historic past, and above all to the first records of Chris-
vil]: Kk
498 Christ’s Divinity the strength of Fis Church,
tianity ; it is at this hour the strength of the Christian Church.
There are forces abroad in the world of thought which, if they
could be viewed apart from all that counteracts them, might well
make a Christian fear for the future of humanity. It is not
merely that the Church is threatened with the loss of possessions
secured to her by the reverence of centuries, and of a place of
honour which may perhaps have guarded civilization more effec-
tively than it can be shewn to have strengthened religion. The
Faith has once triumphed without these gifts of Providence ;
and, if God wills, she can again dispense with them. But never
since the first ages of the Gospel was fundamental Christian
' truth denied and denounced so largely, and with such passionate
animosity, as is the case at this moment in each of the most
civilized nations of Europe. It may be that God has in store
for His Church greater trials to her faith than she has yet
experienced ; it may be that along with the revived scorn of the
old pagan spirit, the persecuting sword of pagan hatred will yet
be unsheathed. Be it so, if so He wills it. The holy city is
strong in ‘knowing ‘that God is in the midst of her, therefore
shall she not be removed ; God shall help her, and that right
early. The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms are
moved; but God hath shewed His Voice, and the earth shall |
melt away.’ When the waters of human opinion rage and swell,
and the mountains shake at the tempest of the same, our Divine
Lord is not unequal to the defence of His Name and His
Honour. If the sky seem dark and the winds contrary ; if ever
and anon the strongest intellectual and social currents of our
civilization mass themselves threateningly, as if to overwhelm
the holy bark as she rides upon the waves; we know Who is
with her, unwearied and vigilant, though He should seem to
sleep. His presence forbids despondency ; His presence assures
us that a cause which has consistently conquered in its day of.
apparent failure, cannot but calmly abide the issue. ‘ Although
the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines ;
the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no
meat; the flocks shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be
no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy
in the God of my salvation.’
Would that these anxieties might in God’s good providence
work out a remedy for the wounds of His Church! Would
that, in presence of the common foe, and yet more by clinging
to the common faith, Christians could learn to understand each
other! Surely it might seem that agreement in so stupendous
[ LECT.
-
ΝΠ ΑωἰἬΊἶΕ ο΄ “ὁ ἕἝΠἕ ὃὦὃ τ
and a rallying-point for disunited Christendom, 499
a belief as the Divinity of our Crucified Lord might avail to
overshadow, or rather to force on a reconciliation of the differ-
ences which divide those who share it. Is it but the indulgence
of a fond dream to hope that a heartier, more meditative, more
practical grasp of the Divinity of Jesus will one day again unite
His children in the bonds of a restored unity? Is it altogether
chimerical to expect that Christians who believe Christ to be
truly God, will see more clearly what is involved in that faith,
and what is inconsistent with it ; that they will supply what is
wanting or will abandon what is untenable in their creed and
practice, so that before men and angels they may openly unite
in the adoring confession of their Divine Head? The pulse
quickens, and the eyes fill with tears, at the bare thought of
this vision of peace, at this distant but blessed prospect of a
reunited Christendom. What dark doubts would it not dispel !
What deep consolations would it not shed forth on millions of
souls! What fascination would not the spectacle of concordant
prayer and harmonious action among the servants of Christ
exert over the hearts of sinners! With what majestic energy
would the reinvigorated Church, ‘terrible as an army with
banners,’ address herself forthwith to the heartier promotion of
man’s best interests, to the richer development of the Christian
life, to more energetic labours for the conversion of the world!
But we may not dwell, except in hope and prayer, upon the
secrets of Divine Providence. It may be our Lord’s purpose to
shew to His servants of this generation only His work, and to
reserve for their children the vision of His glory. It must be
our duty, in view of His revealed Will, and with a simple faith
in His Wisdom and His Power, to pray our Lord ‘that all they
that do confess God’s Holy Name, may agree in the truth of
His Holy Word, and live in unity and godly love.’
But here we must close this attempt to reassert, against some
misapprehensions of modern thought, the great truth which
guards the honour of Christ, and which is the most precious
feature in the intellectual heritage of Christians. And for you,
dear brethren, who by your generous interest or by your warm
sympathies have so accompanied and sustained him, what can
the preacher more fittingly or more sincerely desire, than that
any clearer sight of the Divine Person of our glorious and living
Lord which may have been granted you, may be, by Him,
blessed to your present sanctification and to your endless peace ?
If you are intellectually persuaded that in confessing the true
Godhead of Jesus you have not followed a cunningly-devised
vir | Kke
500 Conclusion.
fable, or the crude imagination of a semi-barbarous and distant
age, then do not allow yourselves to rest content with this intel-
lectual persuasion. A truth so sublime, so imperious, has other
work to do in you besides shaping into theoretic compactness a
certain district of your thought about the goodness of God and
the wants of man. The Divine Christ of the Gospel and the
Church is no mere actor, though He were the greatest, in the
great tragedy of human history; He belongs not exclusively
or especially to the past; He is ‘the Same yesterday, to-day,
and for ever. He is at this moment all that He was
eighteen centuries ago, all that He has been to our fathers,
all that He will be to our children. He is the Divine and
Infallible Teacher, the Healer and Pardoner of sin, the Source
of all graces, the Conqueror of Satan and of death—now, as
of old, and as in years to come. Now as heretofore, He is
‘able to save unto the uttermost them that come unto God
by Him ;’ now, as on the day of His triumph over death,
‘He opens the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers ;’ now,
as in the first age of the Church, He it is ‘that hath the key
of David, that openeth, and no man shutteth ; and shutteth,
and no man openethz.’ He is ever the Same; but, as the
children of time, whether for good or evil, we move onwards in
perpetual change. The hours of life pass, they do not return ;
they pass, yet they are not forgotten ; ‘pereunt et imputantur.’
But the present is our own ; we may resolve, if we will, to live
as men who live for the glory of an Incarnate God. Brethren,
you shall not repent it, if, when life’s burdens press heavily, and
especially at that solemn hour when human help must fail, you
are able to lean with strong confidence on the arm of an
Almighty Saviour. May He in deed and truth be with you,
alike in your pilgrimage through this world, and when that
brief journey is drawing to its close! May you, sustained by
His Presence and aid, so pass through the valley of the shadow
of death as to fear no evil, and to find, at the gate of the eternal
world, that all the yearnings of faith and hope are to be more
than satisfied by the vision of the Divine ‘King in His
Beauty !’
z Rev. iii. 7.
[uecr. vit] —
|
NOTES.
NOTE A, on Lecture I.
THE works upon the Life of our Lord alluded to in the text are
the following.
1. Das Leben Jesu, von Dr. F. D. Strauss. 1835. This work
passed through several editions, and in 1864 was followed
up by Das Leben Jesu, fiir das Deutsche Volk bearbettet.
Leipsig, Brockhaus.
Strauss’ argument is chiefly concerned with the differences
between the Evangelists, and with the miraculous features of
their narratives. He regards the miracles as ‘myths,’ that is to
say, as pure fictions. His position is, that the speculative ideas
about Jesus which were circulating in the first century were
dressed up in a traditional form, the substance of which was
derived from the Messianic figures of the Old Testament. This
violent supposition was really dictated by Strauss’ philosophy.
Denying the possible existence of miracle, of the supernatural, of
the invisible world, and even the existence of a personal living
God, Strauss undertakes to explain the Gospel-history as the
natural development of germs previously latent in the world of
human life and thought. Upon the ground that nothing is
absolute, that all is relative, Strauss will not allow that any one
man can absolutely have realized the ‘idea’ of humanity. ‘The
sanctity of Jesus was only relative; and, speaking historically,
Jesus fell far below the absolute Idea to which the thought of the
Apostolical age endeavoured to elevate Him by the ‘mythical’
additions to his ‘Life.’ Thus Strauss’ criticism is in reality the
application of Hegel’s doctrine of ‘absolute idealism’ to the
Gospel narratives. ‘It is,’ observes Dr. Mill, ‘far more from a
ἈΞ 2
502 Note A. On ‘Lives’ of Our Lord.
desire of working out on a historical ground the philosophical
principles of his master, than from any attachment to mythical
theories on their own account, that we are clearly to deduce the
destructive process which Strauss has applied to the Life of
Jesus.’ (Myth. Interpr. p. 11.)
Strauss’ later work is addressed not to the learned, but to the
German people, with a view to destroying the influence of the
Lutheran pastors. He observes in his Preface : ‘ Wer die Pfaffen
aus der Kirche schaffen will, der muss erst das Wunder aus der
Religion schaffen.’ (Vorrede, p. xix.) With this practical object
he sets to work ; and although the results at which he arrives
are perhaps more succinctly stated than in his earlier book, the
real difference between them is not considerable. He makes
little use of the critical speculations on the Gospels which have
been produced in Protestant and Rationalistic Germany during
the last thirty years. Thus he is broadly at issue with the later
Tiibingen writers on the subject of St. Mark’s Gospel; he
altogether disputes their favourite theory of its ‘ originality,’ and
views it as only a colourless réswmé of the narratives of St. Mat-
thew and St. Luke. His philosophical theory still, however,
controls his religious speculations : Jesus did for religion what
Socrates did for philosophy, and Aristotle for science. Although
the appearance of Jesus in the world constituted an epoch, He
belonged altogether to humanity: He did not rise above it ;
He might even be surpassed. The second book, like the first, is
an elaboration of the thesis that ‘the idea cannot attain its full
development in a single individual of the species ;’ and to this
elaboration there are added some fierce attacks upon the social
and religious institutions of Europe, designed more particularly
to promote an anti-Christian social revolution in northern
Germany.
2. Das Charakterbild Jesu, ein biblischer Versuch, von Dr. Daniel
Schenkel. 2te Auflage. Wiesbaden, 1 864.
Dr. Schenkel begins by insisting upon the ‘irrational’ cha-
racter of the Church’s doctrine of the Union of two Natures in
our Lord’s Person. Nothing, he thinks, short of the oppression
with which the medieval Church treated all attempts at free
thought can account for the perpetuation of such a dogma. The
Reformers, although they proclaimed the principle of free enquiry,
yet did not venture honestly to apply it to the traditional doc-
trine of Christ’s Person ; primitive Protestantism was afraid of
Note A. Οὐ ‘Lives’ of Our Lord. 503
the consequences of its fundamental principle. The orthodox
doctrine accordingly outlived the Reformation; but the older
Rationalism has established a real claim upon our gratitude by in-
sisting upon the pure Humanity of Christ, although, Dr. Schenkel
thinks, it has too entirely stripped Him of His ‘Divinity,’ that
is to say, of the moral beauty to which we may still apply that
designation. As for the Christ of Schleiermacher, he is a pro-
duct of the yearnings and aspirations of that earnest and gifted
teacher, but he is not, according to Schenkel, the Jesus of
history. Strauss does in the main, represent Jesus such as He
was in the reality of His historical life; but Strauss’ repre-
sentation is too much tinged with modern colourings ; nor are
his desolating negations sufficiently counterbalanced by those
positive results of this thoroughgoing ‘criticism’ upon which
Dr. Schenkel proposes to dwell. For the future, faith in Christ
is to rest on more solid bases than ‘auf denen des Aberglaubens,
der Priesterherrschaft, und einer mit heiteren oder schreckenden
Bildern angefiillten Phantasie.’ (p. 11.)
Dr. Schenkel makes the most of the late Tiibingen theory of
the ‘originality, as it is called, of St. Mark, and of the non-
historical character, as he maintains, of the Gospel of St. John ;
although he deals very ‘freely’ with the materials, which he re-
serves as still entitled to historical consideration. Dr. Schenkel
does not hold that the Evangelistic account of Christ’s miracles
is altogether mythical ; it has, he thinks, a certain basis of fact.
He admits that our Lord may have possessed what may be
termed a miraculous gift, even if this should be rightly explained
to be only a rare natural endowment. He had a power of calm-
ing persons of deranged mind ; His assurances of the pardon of
their sins, acting beneficially on their nervous system, produced
these restorative effects. Dr. Schenkel holds it to be utterly
impossible that Jesus could have worked any of the ‘ miracles of
nature ;’ since this would have proved him to be truly God. All
such narratives as His calming the storm in the lake are there-
fore part of that ‘torrent of legend’ with which the historical
germ of His real Life has been overlaid by later enthusiasms.
The Resurrection, accordingly, is not a fact of history ; it is a
creation of the imaginative devotion of the first disciples. (See
Ρ. 314.) Dr. Schenkel considers the appearances of our Risen
Lord to have been only so many glorifications of His character
in the hearts of those who believed in Him. Τὸ them He was
manifested as One who lives eternally, in that He has founded
His kingdom on earth by His word and His Spirit.
504 Note A. On ‘Lives’ of Our Lord.
The main idea of Dr. Schenkel’s book is to make the Life of
Jesus the text of an attack upon those who are Conservatives in
politics and orthodox Lutherans in religion. It is not so much
a biography, or even a sketch of character, as a polemical
pamphlet. The treatment of our Lord’s words and actions, and
still more the highly-coloured representation of the Pharisees,
are throughout intended to express the writer’s view of schools
and parties in Lutheran Germany. The Pharisees of course are
the orthodox Lutherans; while Jesus Christ is the political
demagogue and liberal sceptic. With some few exceptions, the
etiquette of history is scrupulously observed ; and yet the really
historical interest is as small, as the polemical references are
continuous and piquant. The woes which Jesus pronounces
against the Pharisees are not directed simply against hypocrisy
and formalism; ‘the curse of Christ,’ we are told, ‘like the
trumpet of the last Judgment, lights for ever upon every church
that is based upon tradition and upon the ascendancy of a
privileged clergy.’ ‘Der Weheruf Jesu ist noch nicht verklungen.
Er trifft noch heute, wie eine Posaune des Gerichts, jedes auf die
Satzungen der Ueberlieferung und auf die Herrschaft eines mit
Vorzugsrechten ausgestatteten Klerus gegriindete Kirchenthum.’
(p. 254.) Perhaps the most singular illustration of profane reck-
lessness in exegesis that can easily be found in modern literature
is Dr. Schenkel’s explanation of the sin against the Holy Ghost.
This sin, he tells us, does not consist, as we may have mistakenly
supposed, in a deliberate relapse from grace into impenitence ; it
is not the sin of worldly or unbelieving persons. It is the sin of
orthodoxy ; it is a ‘Theologisch-hierarchischer Verhiirtung und
Verstockung ;’ and those who defend and propagate the ancient
faith of Christians, in spite of rationalistic warnings against doing
so, are really guilty of it. (Charakt. p. 106.)
Dr. Schenkel has explained himself more elaborately on some
points in his pamphlet ‘Die Protestantische Freiheit, in ihrem
gegenwiartigen Kampfe mit der kirchlichen Reaktion.’ Wies-
baden, 1862. He fiercely demands a Humanitarian Christology
(Ρ. 153). He laments that even Zwingli’s thought was still
fettered by the formule of Niczea and Chalcedon (p. 152), nay,
he remarks that St. Paul himself has assigned to Christ a rank
which led on naturally to the Church-belief in the Divinity of
His Person (p. 148). That belief Dr. Schenkel considers to be
a shred of heathen superstition which had found its way into the
circle of Christian ideas (ibid.); while he sorrowfully protests
that the adoration of Jesus, both in the public Services of the
Note A. On‘Lives’ of Our Lord. τος
Church and in the Christian consciousness, has superseded that
of God the Father. ‘Vom fiinften Jahrhundert bis zur Reforma-
tion (he might have begun four centuries earlier and gone on for
three centuries later) wird Jesus Christ durchgiingig als der
Herrgott verehrt’ (p. 149). Indeed, throughout this brochure
Dr. Schenkel’s positions are simply those of the old Socinianism,
resting however upon a Rationalistic method of treatment, which
in its more logical phases regards much of what Socinianism
itself retains, as the yoke of an intolerable orthodoxy.
3. Geschichte Christus’ und Seiner Zeit, von Heinrich Ewald.
Gottingen, 1857. 2te Ausgabe.
This work is on no account to be placed on the level of those
of Strauss or Schenkel, to which in some most vital particulars
it is opposed. Indeed, Ewald’s defence of St. John’s Gospel, and
his deeper spirituality of tone, must command a religious in-
terest, which would be of a high order, if only this writer
believed in our Lord’s Godhead. That this, unhappily, is not
the case, will be apparent upon a careful study of the concluding
chapter of this volume on ‘ Die Ewige Verherrlichung, pp. 496--
504,—beautiful as are some of the passages which it contains.
His explanation of the titles ‘Son of God’ and ‘Word of God,’
Ῥ. 502, 1s altogether inadequate; and his statement that ‘nie
hat Jesu als der Sohn und das Wort Gottes sich mit der Vater
und Gotte Selbst (from whom Ewald accordingly distinguishes
our Lord) verwechselt oder vermessen sich selbst diesem gleich-
gestellt,’ is simply contradicted by St. John v. and x.
4. Die Menschliche Entwickelung Jesu Christi, von Th. Keim.
Ziirich, 1861. Die geschichtliche Wiirde Jesu, von Th. Keim,
Ziirich, 1864. Der geschichtliche Christus, Hine Rethe von
Vortragen mit Quellenbeweis und Chronologie des Lebens
Jesu, von Th. Keim. Ziirich, 1866.
Dr. Keim, although rejecting the fourth Gospel, retains too
much of the mind of Schleiermacher to be justly associated with
Drs. Strauss or Schenkel. Dr. Keim, indeed, sees in our Lord
only a Man, but still an eminently mysterious Man of incom-
parable grandeur of character. He recognises, although in-
adequately, the startling self-assertion of our Lord; and he
differs most emphatically from Strauss, Schenkel, and Renan in
recognising the real sinlessness of Jesus. He admits, too, the
historical value of our Lord’s eschatological discourses ; he does
506 Note A. On ‘Lives’ of Our Lord.
not regard His miracles ‘of nature’ as absolutely impossible ;
and he heartily believes in the reality of Christ’s own Resurrec-
tion from the dead. He cannot account for the phenomenon of
the Church, if the Resurrection be denied. Altogether he seems
to consider that the Life of Jesus as a spiritual, moral, and, in
some respects, supernatural fact, is unique; but an intellectual
spectre, the assumed invariability of historical laws, as we con-
ceive them, seems to interpose so as to prevent him from
drawing the otherwise inevitable inference. Yet for such as
he is, let us hope much.
5. La Vie de Jésus, par HL. Renan. Paris, 1863.
Of this well-known book it may suffice here to say a very few
words. Its one and only excellence is its incomparable style.
From every other point of view it is deplorable. Historically, it
deals most arbitrarily with the data upon which it professes to
be based. Thus in the different pictures of Christ’s aim and
action, during what are termed the second and the third periods
of His Ministry, a purely artificial contrast is presented. Theo-
logically, this work proceeds throughout on a really atheistic
assumption, disguised beneath the thin veil of a pantheistic
phraseology. It assumes that no such being as a personal God
exists at all. The ‘god’ with whom, according to M. Renan,
Jesus has such uninterrupted communion, but from whom he is
so entirely distinct, is only the ‘category of the ideal.’ It is,
however, when we look at the ‘ Vie de Jésus’ from a moral point
of view, that its shortcomings are most apparent in their length
and breadth. Its hero is a fanatical impostor, who pretends to
be and to do that which he knows to be beyond him, but who
nevertheless is held up to our admiration as the ideal of hu-
manity. In place of the Divine and Human Christ of the
Gospels, M. Renan presents us with a character devoid of any
real majesty, of any tolerable consistency, and even of the con-
stituent elements of moral goodness. If M. Renan himself does
not perceive that the object of his enthusiasm is simply an
offence to any healthy conscience, this is only an additional
proof, if one were needed, of the fatal influence of pantheistic
thought upon the most gifted natures. It destroys the sensitive-
ness of the moral nerve. Enough to say that M. Renan presents
us with a Christ who in his Gethsemane was possibly thinking
of ‘les jeunes filles qui auraient peut-¢tre consenti ἃ l’aimer,’
(p. 379.)
Note A. On‘Lives’ of Our Lord. κοῦ
It ought perhaps here to be added that M. de Pressensé’s
work, ‘Jésus-Christ, son Temps, sa Vie, son CHuvre,’ Paris, 1865,
although failing (as might be expected) to do justice to the
sacramental side of our Lord’s Incarnation and Teaching, is yet
on the whole a most noble contribution to the cause of Truth,
for which the deep gratitude of all sincere Christians cannot but
be due to its accomplished author.
6. Hece Homo; a Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus
Christ. London and Cambridge, Macmillan, 1866.
Every one who reads ‘Ecce Homo’ must heartily admire the
generous passion for human improvement which glows through-
out the whole volume. And especial acknowledgment is due to
the author from Christian believers, for the emphasis with
which he has insisted on the following truths :—
Christ’s moral sublimity.
Christ’s claim of supremacy.
Christ’s success in His work.
Incidentally, moreover, he has brought out into their true
prominence some portions of the truth, which are lost sight of
by popular religionists in England. As an example of this, his
earnest recognition of the visibility of the Society founded by
Christ may be instanced. But, on the other hand, the writer
has carefully avoided all reference to the cardinal question of
Christ’s Person ; and he tells us that he has done this deliber-
ately. (Pref. to 5th Ed. p. xx.) The result however is, that his
_ book is pervaded, as it seems to many of his readers, by an es-
sential flaw. It is not merely that our Lord’s claims cannot be
morally estimated apart from a clear estimate of His Person.
The author professes to be answering the question, ‘What was
Christ’s object in founding the Society which is called by His
Name?’ Now to attempt to answer this question, while dis-
missing all theological consideration of the dignity of Christ’s
Person, involves the tacit assumption that the due estimate of
His Person is not relevant to the appreciation of His Work; in
other words, the assumption, that so far as the evidence yielded
by the work of Christ goes, the Christology of the Nicene Creed is
at least uncertain. The author of ‘Ecce Homo’ is however either
a Humanitarian, or he is a believer in our Lord’s Divinity, or
he is undecided. If he is a Humanitarian, then the assumption
is, as far as it goes, in harmony with his personal convictions ;
only it should, for various and obvious reasons, have been more
508 Note A. On ‘Lives’ of Our Lord.
plainly stated, since, inter alia, it embarrasses his view of our
Lord’s claims and character with difficulties which he does not
recognise. If he believes in Christ’s Divinity, then in his forth-
coming volume (besides rewriting such chapters as chap. 2, on
The Temptation) he will have to enlarge very seriously, or
rather altogether to recast, the account which he has actually
given of Christ’s work. If the writer be himself in doubt as to
whether Christ is or is not God, then surely he is not in a
position to give any account whatever of Christ’s work, which
is within the limits of human capacity on one hypothesis, and as
utterly transcends them on the other. In short, it is impossible
for a man to profess to give a real answer to the question, what
Christ intended to accomplish, until he has told us who and
what Christ was. That fragment of Christ’s work of which we
gather an account from history contributes its share to the
solution of the question of Christ’s Person; but our Lord’s
Personal Rank is too intimately bound up with the moral
justification of His language, and with the real nature and range
of His action upon humanity, to bear the adjournment which
the author of ‘ Hcce Homo’ has thought advisable.
There are several errors in the volume which might seem to
shew that the author is himself unfamiliar with the faith of the
Church ; as they would not have been natural in a person who
believed it, but who was throwing himself for the time being
into the mental position of a Humanitarian in order the better
to do justice to his arguments. For instance, the author con-
founds St. John’s Baptism with Christ’s. He supposes that
Nicodemus came to Jesus by night in order to seek a dispen-
sation from being publicly baptized, and so admitted into
Christ’s Society. He imagines that Christ prayed on the Cross
only for the Roman soldiers who actually crucified Him, and
not for the Pharisees, against whom (it is a most painful as well
as an unwarranted suggestion) He continued to feel fierce
indignation. This indeed is an instance of the author’s ten-
dency to identify his own imaginations with the motives and —
feelings of Jesus Christ, where Scripture is either silent or
points in an opposite direction. The author is apparently
carried away by his earnest indignation against certain forms
of selfish and insincere vice, such as Pharisaism; nor is he
wholly free from the disposition so to colour the past as to make
it express suggestively his own feelings about persons and
schools of the present day. The naturalistic tone of his thought
is apparent in his formula of ‘enthusiasm,’ as the modern equi-
Note A. Οκπκ.' }τρος᾽ of Our Lord. τος
J
valent to inspiration and the gift of the Holy Spirit; in his
general substitution of the conception of anti-social vice for the
deeper Scriptural idea of sin; and in his suggestion that Chris-
tians may treat the special precepts of Christ with the same
‘boldness’ with which He treated those of the law of Moses.
Of the practical results of his book it is difficult to form an
estimate. In some instances it may lead to the contented sub-
stitution of a naturalistic instead of a miraculous Christianity,
of philanthropic ‘ enthusiasm’ instead of a supernatural life, of
loyalty to a moral reforming hero, instead of religious devotion
to a Divine Saviour of the world. But let us also trust that so
fearless a recognition of the claims of Christ to be the King
and Centre of renewed humanity, may assist other minds to
grasp and hold the truth which alone makes those claims, taken
as a whole, justifiable ; and may recruit the ranks of our Lord’s
true worshippers from among the many thoughtful but unin-
structed persons who have never faced the dilemma which this
volume so forcibly, albeit so tacitly, suggests.
* ΩΣ * *
Since these words were written, the volume under discussion
has found an apologist, whose opinion on this, as on any other
subject, is a matter of national interest®. Ifthe present writer
has been guilty of forming and propagating an unjust estimate
of a remarkable work, he may at least repair his error by
referring his readers to pages, in which genius and orthodoxy
have done their best for the Christian honour of ‘Ecce Homo.’
These pages must indeed of necessity be read with sympathy
and admiration, if not with entire assent, by all who do not
consider a theological work to have been discredited, when it is
asserted to uphold some positive truth. But it may also be a
duty to state briefly and respectfully why, after a careful con-
sideration of such a criticism, the present writer is unable
to recognise any sufficient reason for withdrawing what he
has ventured to say upon the subject. Unquestionably, as
Mr. Gladstone urges, it is allowable in principle to teach only
a portion of revealed truth, under circumstances which would
render a larger measure of instruction likely to perplex and
repel the learners. But then such teaching must be loyally
consistent with the claims of that portion of the truth, which is,
provisionally, left untaught ; and this condition does not appear
a ¢Ecce Homo,’ by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone. Strahan & Co.
London, 1868. [Reprinted from ‘Good Words.’ ]
510 Note A. On ‘Lives’ of Our Lord.
to be satisfied by ‘Ecce Homo, if it be, as we may hope, only a
preparation for a second volume which will assert in plain lan-
guage the Deity of our Adorable Lord. The crucial chapter on
the Temptation altogether ignores our Lord’s true and higher
Personality ; as it also appears to ignore the personal presence
of the Tempter. ‘What is called Christ’s Temptation is the
excitement of His Mind which was caused by the nascent con-
sciousness of supernatural power, p. 12. Such a description
fails altogether to do justice to the real issues involved; it
might apply with equal propriety to a struggle in the soul of
an apostolic man. Even if this chapter does not imply Christ’s
inward sympathy with outward solicitations to accept a wrong
choice, it could never have been written by a person who kept
clearly before his mind the truth of our Lord’s Divinity.
Mr. Gladstone draws out and insists upon an analogy between
the original function of the three Synoptic Evangelists in the
first propagation of the Faith, and the present function of ‘Ecce
Homo.’ But this analogy would appear to be disturbed by the
following considerations. First, there is nothing in ‘Ecce Homo’
which corresponds to the great Christological texts in the Synop-
tists. To these texts Mr. Gladstone has indeed referred, but
they do not readily harmonize with his representation of the
gradual unveiling of Christ’s Person. Indeed they teach a doc-
trine of Christ’s Person which is virtually identical with that of
St.John. Are there any passages in ‘Ecce Homo’ which, like
St. Matt. xi. 27, or St. Luke x. 22, place the Christological belief
of the writer beyond reach of question? Secondly, the ethical
atmosphere of ‘ Ecce Homo’ differs very significantly from that
of the Gospels. The Gospels present us with the Scriptural idea
of Sin, provoking God’s wrath and establishing between God
and man a state of enmity: and this idea points very urgently—
at least in a moral universe,—to some awful interposition which
shall bring relief. But the Biblical idea of sin is a vitally
distinct thing from the impoverished modern conception of
anti-social vice, in which man and not God is the insulted
and offended person, and by which the protection of individual
rights and the well-being of society are held to be of more
account than the reign of peace and purity within the soul.
The idea of sin points to a Divine Redeemer : the idea of anti-
social vice points to an improved system of human education.
Thirdly, the first and third Evangelists preface their records of
the Ministry with an account of the Nativity. That account
clearly attributes a Superhuman Personality to Christ; and thus
Note B. On the word ‘Elohim’ in the O. 7. 511
it places the subsequent narrative in a light altogether different
from that suggested by the opening chapter of ‘Ecce Homo,’ And
the first verse of St. Mark’s Gospel is sufficiently explicit to range
him as to this matter, side by side with St. Matthew and St. Luke.
The real needs of our time are more likely to be known to
public men who come in contact with minds of every kind than
to private clergymen. But it would have appeared to the
present writer that an economical treatment of the Faith which
might have been possible and natural in the first age of its pro-
mulgation, must fail of its effect at the present day. Whether
men believe the Gospel or not, its real substance and con-
tents are now fairly before the world; and it is increas-
ingly felt that the question whether Christ is or is not God,
is really identical with the question of His moral character.
On this account the reticence of the author of ‘Ecce Homo’ still
appears to the present writer to be a matter for regret ;
although he gratefully admits that Mr. Gladstone’s commentary
will have gone far to make the work which has suggested it, as
useful to the cause of truth, as, with characteristic generosity,
Mr. Gladstone believes that work to be, if read without the aid
of so happy an interpretation.
NOTE B, on Lecture II.
The word ‘ Elohim’ is used in the Old Testament—
(1) Of the One True God, as in Deut. iv. 35, 1 Kings xviii.
21, etc., where it has the article ; and without the article,
Gen. i. 2, xli. 38; Exod. xxxi. 3, xxxv. 31; Numb. xxiv.
2, etc;
(2) Of false gods, as Exod. xii. 12; 2 Chron. xxviii. 23 ;
Josh. xxiv. 15 ; Judg. vi. 10, ete.
(3) Of judges to whom a person or matter is brought, as
representing the Divine Majesty in the theocracy, yet not
in the singular, Exod. xxi. 6, xxii. 7, 8, (in Deut. xix. 17
it is said in the like case that the parties ‘shall stand
before the Lorp,’ m7) ; and in allusion to the passages in
Exodus, Ps. Ixxxii. 1, 6, ‘Recte Abarbenel observavit,
judices et magistratus nusquam vocari to7>x nisi respectu
loci judicii, quod 101 Dei judicia exerceant.’ (Ges. )
512 Note C. On Our Lord’s Temptation.
(4) There is no case in which the word appears from the
context to be certainly applied, even collectively, to super-
human beings external to the Divine Essence. ‘Nullus
exstat locus, says Gesenius, ‘in quo hee significatio vel
necessaria vel pre ceteris apta sit.’ In Ps, Ixxxii. 1, the
word is explained by verses 2 and 6 of the ‘sons of God,
1.6. judges ; cf. especially verse 8. Yet in Ps. xevii. 7, the
UXX, Vulg., Syr. translate ‘angels ;’ the Chaldee para-
phrases ‘the worshippers of idols : in Ps. exxxviii. 1, the
LXX and Vulg. render ‘angels,’ the Chald. “ judges,’ the
Syr. ‘kings;’ in Ps. viii. 2, the Chald. too renders ‘angels,’
and is followed by Rashi, Kimchi, and Abenezra (who
quotes Elahin, Dan. ii, rr), and others. It is possible that
the earlier Jewish writers had a traditional knowledge that
Dmybx might be taken as trndym3a, Job i. 6; ii, τ; xxxviii.
17, and ἘΞ 5 8.
(5) But, however this may be, it remains certain that Elohim
is nowhere used with the singular of any except Almighty
God.
NOTE C, on Lecture IV.
On our Lord’s Temptation, viewed in its bearing
upon His Person.
The history of our Lord’s temptation has been compared
to an open gateway, through which Socinianism may enter
at will to take possession of the Gospel History. This language
proceeds upon a mistaken idea of what our Lord’s temptation
really was.
A. How far could Jesus Christ be ‘tempted’? How far
could any suggestion of Satan act upon His Manhood ἢ
1. Here we must distinguish between
(a) Direct temptation to moral evil, i.e. an appeal to a
capacity of self-will which might be quickened into
active disobedience to the Will of God; and
(8) What may be termed indirect temptation, that is,
an appeal to instincts per se innocent, as belonging to
man in his unfallen state, which can make obedience
wear the form of a painful effort or sacrifice.
ΝΠ Μ᾿ π᾿ ἶε““--π τθ“ρη7 ͵“΄ὅ8ἕἝΒ8ἙῬΘ8.ὁ(Ὁ
Note C. On Our Lord’s Temptation. 513
2. Now Jesus Christ, according to the historians of the
Temptation, was—
(α) Emmanuel, St. Matt. i. 23. That this word is used
by St. Matthew to mean ‘God is with us, as a title of
Christ, like ‘Jehovah nissi,’ appears partly from the
parallel of Isa, ix. 6, partly from the preceding αὐτός
(v. 22), used with reference to Jesus. Mary’s Son is
to be Jesus, not as witnessing to a Divine Saviour
external to Himself (as was the case when Joshua bore
the name), but as being Himself God the Saviour.
(8) Υἱὸς Θεοῦ, St. Luke i. 35. This title is directly con-
nected with our Lord’s supernatural Birth, and so, al-
though applied to His Manhood (τὸ γεννώμενον), yet
implies a pre-existent superhuman Personality in Him.
3. This Union of the Divine and Human Natures in Christ
was not fatal to the full perfection of either. In particular
it did not destroy in Christ’s Manhood those limitations which
belong properly to creaturely existence. A limitation of know-
ledge in Christ’s Human Intelligence would correspond to a
limitation of power in His Human Will.
But it was inconsistent with the presence of anything in
Christ's Manhood that could contradict however slightly the
Essence of the Perfect Moral Being, in other words, the Holi-
ness of God. This would have been the case with falsehood in
Christ’s Human Intelligence, or with any secret undeveloped
propensity to self-will, that is (in a creature), to moral evil, in
Christ’s Human Will. If the Incarnate Christ could have erred
or sinned ; the Incarnation, we may dare to say, would have
been a phantom.
_ The connection between Christ’s Personal Godhead, and the
complete sinlessness of His Manhood was well understood by
Christian antiquity. Thus Tertullian: ‘Solus homo sine pec-
cato Christus, quia et Deus Christus’ (De An. c. 13). Thus in
the synodical letter of Dionysius of Alexandria to Paulus of
Samosata, it is argued that εἰ μὴ yap ἢν ὁ Χριστὸς αὐτὸς ὁ dv Θεὸς
Λόγος, οὐκ ἠδύνατο εἶναι ἀναμάρτητος. Οὐδὲις γὰρ ἀναμάρτητος εἰ μὴ
εἷς ὁ Χριστὸς ὡς καὶ ὁ Πατὴρ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, καὶ τὸ ἽΔγιον Πνεῦμα
(Labbé, Cone. 1. p. 855). So St. Augustine, still more explicitly,
teaches: ‘Ut autem Mediator Dei et hominum homo Christus
Jesus non faceret propriam, que Deo adversa est, voluntatem,
non erat tantim homo, sed Deus et homo: per quam mirabilem
L | :
14 Lote C. On Our Lord’s Temptation.
i ine ee
singularemque gratiam humana in illo sine peccato ullo posset
esse natura. Propter hoc ergd ait, Descendi de ccelo, non ut
faciam voluntatem meam, sed voluntatem ejus qui me misit
(Joh. vi. 38): ut ea caussa esset tante obedientize que omnind
sind ullo peccato esset hominis que gerebat, quia de ccelo de-
scenderat ; hoc est, non tantum homo, vertm etiam Deus erat’
(Contr. Sermon. Arianor., 6. vii. 6. 6). Again, ‘Ista nativitas
profectd gratuita conjunxit in unitate persone hominem Deo,
carnem Verbo.... Neque enim metuendum erat, ne isto in-
effabili modo in unitatem persone ἃ Verbo Deo natura humana
suscepta, nullum in se motum male voluntatis admitteret’ (De
Correp. et Grat., ὁ. xi. n. 30). Again, he gives-as a reason for
the Divine Incarnation, ‘ Ut intelligant homines per eandem
gratiam se justificari ἃ peccatis, per quam factum est ut homo
Christus nullum habere posset peccatwm’ (Enchir. ad Laur.,
c. 36, n, 11 ; compare Ench. 6. 40. See also the passages from
St. Athanasius and St. Cyril Alex. qu. by Petav., De Incarnat.,
lib. xi. ο. 10, § 6). Theodorus of Mopsuestia was anathematized
at the Fifth Gicumenical Council of Constantinople, A.D. 553,
for maintaining among other things that our Lord was ὑπὸ
πάθων ψυχῆς καὶ τῶν τῆς σαρκὸς ἐπιθυμιῶν ἐνοχλούμενον, καὶ τῶν
χειρόνων κατὰ μικρὸν χωριζόμενον, καὶ οὕτως ἐκ προτροπῆς ἔργων
βελτιώθεντα, καὶ ἐκ πολιτείας ἄμωμον καθίσταντα (Con. Const., ii.
can. xii.; Labbé, v. p. 575). The language of Theodorus was
felt to ignore the consequences of the Personal Union of the
Two Natures: it was practically Nestorianism.
Our Lord’s Manhood then, by the unique conditions of its
existence, was believed to be wholly exempt from any pro-
pensity to, or capacity of, sinful self-will. When, as in the
temptation on the mountain, He was beset by solicitations
to evil from without, He met them at once ina manner which
shewed that no inward element of His Human Nature even felt
their power. For, as St. Athanasius says, He was δίχα σαρκικῶν
θελημάτων καὶ λογισμῶν ἀνθρωπίνων, ἐν εἰκόνι καινότητος (Contr.
Apollinar., lib. ii. c. 10). The sharpest arrows of the tempter
struck Him, but, like darts lighting upon a hard polished
surface, they glanced aside. Moreover, as it would seem, the
Personal Union of the Two Natures in our Lord involved, at
least, the sight of the Beatific Vision by our Lord's Humanity :
and if we cannot conceive of the blessed as sinning while they
worship around the throne, much less can we conceive it in
One in Whom ‘dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.’
Thus to any direct temptation to evil He was simply inaccessible,
ππππρΠρᾧΨἕΨΦΦπ τ “ς΄ a ΄’Π Πὀ’Ρ̓’’ ὀῸ
Note C. On Our Lord’s Teniptation. 515
to Whom alone the words fully belong, ‘I have set God always
before Me, for He is on My right Hand, therefore I shall not
fall,’
4. But the Personal Union of our Lord’s Manhood with His
Godhead did not exempt It from simple human instincts, such
as, for example, a shrinking from bodily pain. For, ‘As Man’s
Will, so the Will of Christ hath two several kinds of operation ;
the one natural or necessary, whereby it desireth simply what-
soever is good in itself, and shunneth as generally all things
which hurt ; the other deliberate, when we therefore embrace
things as good, because the age of understanding judgeth them
good to that end which we simply desire... . These. different
inclinations of the will considered, the reason is easy how
in Christ there might grow desires, seeming but being not in
deed opposite, either the one of them unto the other or either
of them unto the Will of God’ (Hooker, E.P. v. 48, 9 ; ef
St. John xii. 27). Upon our Lord’s Human Will in its inchoate
or rudimentary stage of Desire, uninformed by Reason, an ap-
proaching trial might so far act, as a temptation, as, for instance,
to produce a wish that obedience might be compatible with
escape from suffering. But it could not produce, even for one
moment, any wish to be free from the law of obedience itself
since such a wish could only exist where the capacity for sinful
self-will was not absolutely excluded. The utmost that tempta-
tion could do with our Lord, was to enhance the sacrificial cha-
racter of obedience, by appealing to an innocent human instinct
which ran counter to its actual requirements.
B. This statement of the matter will perhaps suggest some
questions,
I. Is it altogether consistent with the Scripture language
which represents our Lord as κατὰ πάντα τοῖς ἀδελφοῖς ὁμοιωθείς
(Heb. ii. 17); as πεπειραμένος κατὰ πάντα καθ' ὁμοιότητα (Heb. iv,
15); aS One Who ἔμαθεν ἀφ᾽ ὧν ἔπαθε τὴν ὑπακοήν (Heb. v. 7) 2
Yes. For Holy Scripture qualifies this language by describing
Him as χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας (Heb. iv. 15); as ὅσιος, ἄκακος, ἀμίαντος,
κεχωρισμένος ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτωλῶν (Heb. vii. 26); and by connect-
ing His manifestation as the Saviour with the entire absence of
any sinful element within Himself: ἐκεῖνος ἐφανερώθη, iva τὰς ἅμαρ-
τίας ἡμῶν ἄρῃ, καὶ ἁμαρτία ἐν αὐτῷ οὐκ ἔστι (1 St. John iil. 5). It
is clear that Holy Scripture denies the existence, not merely of any
sinful thinking or acting, but of any ultimate roots and sources
of sin, of any propensities or inclinations, however latent and
rudimentary, towards sin, in athe Incarnate Christ. When
L12
nr TSS Ὀ΄΄ το ---ο-.--.-.-.-----ΟΦοΟος.-ΟθῬ.ςς.
516 Note C. On Our Lorad’s Temptation.
therefore Scripture speaks of His perfect assimilation to us,
to our condition, our trials, our experiences, this language
must be understood of physical and mental pain in all their —
forms. It cannot be understood of any moral assimilation ;
He is, according to Scripture, the absolutely Sinless One; we
are, by nature, corrupt.
2. ‘Is this account consistent with the exigencies of our
Lord’s Redemptive Work?’ Did He conquer sin for us, when
His victory was won under conditions differing from our own !
Certainly. He is not less truly representative of our race,
because in Him it has recovered its perfection. His victory is
none the less real and precious, because, morally speaking, it
was inevitable. Nay, this perfect internal sinlessness, which
rendered Christ inaccessible to direct temptation to evil, was
itself essential to His redemptive relationship to the human
family. It accordingly was deliberately secured to Him by His
Virgin-Birth, which cut off the entail of inward corruption.
He could not have been the Sinless Victim, offered freely for
a sinful world, δίκαιος ὑπὲρ ἀδίκων (1 St. Pet. 11]. 18), unless
He had been thus superior to the moral infirmities of His
brethren.
3. But does not such an account impair the full form of our
Lord’s example ?
Certainly an example is in a sense more powerful when
it is set by one who is under exactly the same moral circum-
stances as ourselves. And, if Christ our Lord had been a
sinner, or at any rate had had sinful dispositions within Him,
He would so far have been more entirely what we really
are; although He would have been unable to redeem us.
If, like His apostle, He had beheld ‘another law in His
members warring against the law of His mind, He would
have come not in ‘the likeness of sinful flesh,” but in flesh
that was actually sinful, and so exactly like our own. But
then He took our nature upon Him, precisely in order to
expel sin altogether from it, and thus to shew us of what it was
capable, by shewing us Himself. The absence of an absolute
identity of moral circumstances between Him and ourselves, is
more than compensated by our possession of what else we could
not have had, a Perfect Model of Humanity. We gain in the
perfection of the Moral Ideal thus placed before us, to say
nothing of the perfection of the Mediator between God and
Man, more than we can lose in moral vigour, upon discovering
that His obedience was wrought out in a Nature unlike our
Note D. Unity of the Father and the Son. 517
own in the one point of absolute purity. And by His grace,
we ourselves are supernaturalized, and ‘can do all things.’
4. But does not such an account reflect upon the moral
greatness of our Lord? Is not an obedience ‘which could not
but be, less noble than an obedience which triumphs over
pronounced disinclination to obey? In other words, does not
this account practically deny Christ’s moral liberty ἢ
No. The highest liberty does not imply the moral capacity
of doing wrong. God is the one perfectly free Being ; yet God
cannot sin. The free movement of a moral being, who has not
fallen, is not an oscillation between sin and moral truth; it
is a steady adherence to moral truth. To God sin is im-
“possible. To created natures sin is not impossible; but it
is always, at first, a violation of the law of their being ; they
must do violence to themselves in order to sin. So it was in
Eden ; so it is, in its degree, with the first le a man tells now.
Our Lord’s inaccessibility to sin was the proof and glory of His
Moral Perfection. ‘Nonne de Spiritu Sancto et Virgine Maria
Dei Filius unicus natus est, non carnis concupiscentia sed
singulari Dei munere? Numquid metuendum fuit, ne accedente
setate homo ille libero peccaret arbitrio? An ideo in illo non
libera voluntas erat; ac non tantd magis erat, quanto magis
peccato servire non poterat?’ (S.Aug., De Preedestinatione
Sanctorum, ¢. 15, n. 30.)
The real temptation of a Sinless Christ is not less precious
to us than the temptation of a Christ who could have sinned,
would be. It forms a much truer and more perfect contrast to
the failure of our first parent. It occupies a chief place in that
long series of acts of condescension which begins with the
Nativity, and which ends on the Cross. It is a lesson for all
times as to the true method of resisting the tempter. Finally,
it is the source of that strength whereby all later victories over
Satan have been won: Christ, the sinless One, has conquered
the enemy in His sin-stained members. ‘By Thy Temptation,
good Lord, deliver us.’
NOTE D, on Lecture IV.
On ‘Moral’ explanations of the Unity of the Father
and the Son.
Referring to a passage which is often quoted to destroy the
dogmatic significance of St. John x. 30, Professor Bright has well
observed that ‘the comparison in Bt. John xvii. 21, and the
----.. . ο.ς τυ ϑ..0.
518 Note E. The Presbyter ohn and the A postle,
unity of Christians with each other in the Son has sometimes
been abused in the interests of heresy.’ ‘The second unity,’ it
has been said, ‘is simply moral ; therefore the first is so.’ But
the second is not simply moral ; it is, in its basis, essential, for
we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones ; it
is the mysterious incorporation into His Sacred Manhood which
causes the oneness of affections and of will. Thus also in the
higher sphere, the Father and the Son are one in purpose,
because They are consubstantial. ‘Those,’ says Olshausen on
St. John x. 30, ‘who would entertain the hypothesis—at once
Arian, Socinian, and Rationalistic—that & εἶναι refers only to
unity of will, not of nature, should not forget that érge unity of
will without unity of nature is something inconceivable. Hence,
if Christ speaks of unity of will between Himself and His
people, this can subsist only so far as such unity of will has
been rendered possible to them by a previous communication
of His nature’ (Eighteen Sermons of St. Leo, p. 132).
NOTE E, on Lecture V.
‘The Presbyter John’ and the Apostle.
Who was the author of the Second and Third Epistles attri-
buted to St. John the Evangelist in the present Canon of the
New Testament ?
I. The existence of a ‘Presbyter J ohn,’ a contemporary of the
Apostle, depends on the following evidence :—
(1) Papias in Eus. iii. 39 names him with Aristion separately
_ from St. John, as a disciple of the Lord. Eusebius adds
that this confirms the report of (a) two Johns in Asia who
had been in close relations with our Lord, (8) two tombs
at Ephesus both bearing the name of John.
(ii.) Dionysius of Alexandria, in Eus. vii. 25, ascribes the
authorship of the Apocalypse to ‘the Presbyter John,’
as Eusebius himself was inclined to do. Dionysius repeats
the story of the two tombs.
(iii.) The ‘ Apostolical Constitutions’ (vil. 47) says that a
second John was made Bishop of Ephesus by the Apostle
St. John.
(iv.) St. Jerome (Catal. Script. ὁ. 9 and 18) makes a state-
ment to the same effect ; he says that John the Presbyter’s
Note E. The Presbyter Fohn and the Apostle. 519
tomb is still shewn at Ephesus, although some maintained
that both tombs were memorials of St. John the Evan-
gelist.
Dr. Déllinger admits that John Presbyter lived as a contem-
porary of the Evangelist, and that his grave could be seen at
Ephesus next to St. John’s. (First Age of the Church, p. 113,
Eng. trans., 2nd edit.)
II. But this admission would not necessarily involve the
further admission that the Presbyter John was the author of
the Second and Third Epistles ascribed to the Apostle. All
that can be advanced in favour of the Presbyter’s authorship is
stated by Ebrard (Hinleitung) ; the ordinary belief being de-
fended by Liicke, Huther, Wordsworth, and Alford. Among
reasons for it are the following :—
i. The argument from style. The differences upon which
Ebrard lays such stress may fairly be accounted for by the
distinct character and object of the two Epistles ; while their
general type of language and thought is unmistakeably Johan-
nean. Bretschneider denied that the Apostle had written any
one of the three Epistles. Yet he had no doubt of the fact
that all three had been written by a single author.
ii. Church-tradition.
(a) The great authority, in this matter especially, of St. Ire-
neus; Her. 1.16.3; iii. 16.8. (See Alford.) Neither
St. Irenzeus nor Polycrates had ever heard, it would ap-
pear, of the Presbyter John, which shews at least that
he cannot have been an eminent person in the Church.
(8) That of Clement and Dionysius of Alexandria (see
Alford); Aurelius, quoted by St. Cyprian in Cone.
Carth.; St. Jerome, cf. Ep. 2 ad Paulinum, Ep. ad
Evagrium.
(y) On the other hand, Origen was doubtful about the
authorship as about many other things. (Eus. vi. 25.)
The two Epistles are not even mentioned by Tertullian
or Theodoret. They were rejected, together with the
other Catholic Epistles, by Theodore of Mopsuestia.
(8) The late reception of the two Epistles into the canon
of so many Churches may be accounted for, according
to Ebrard, by (1) their private character; (2) the fact
520 Note δὶ The Worship of Fesus Christ
that one was addressed to a woman; (3) the amount
of matter in them common to the first Epistle (7). The
verdict of the Muratorian Fragm. is doubtful. The
Peschito probably did not contain either. Eusebius
reckons them among the Antilegomena; yet his own
opinion appears in Dem. Ey. iii. 5. (See Alford.)
iil. Nothing against the apostolic authorship can be inferred
from the title ὁ πρεσβύτερος, St. Paul calls himself 6 πρεσβύτης
(Philem. 9), and St. Peter 6 συμπρεσβύτερος (1; Pet: vase
Probably ‘the Presbyter’ John did not assume the title until
after the death of the Apostle. St. John may have used it
in his private correspondence either to hint at his age, or as
a formal title the force of which was at once recognized and
admitted, Surely the Presbyter would have added to ὁ πρεσ-
βύτερος, his name Ἰωάννης, An Apostle could afford to omit
his name. The authority too, of which the writer of the third
Epistle is conscious in his reference to Diotrephes, seems incon-
sistent with the supposition of a non-apostolical authorship.
NOTE F, on Lecture VII.
The worship of Jesus Christ as prescribed by the Authorized
Services of the Church of England.
A. In a letter to the Editor of the ‘Times,’ dated August 9,
and published in that journal on September 26, 1866, Dr. Colenso
writes as follows :—
‘I have drawn attention to the fact that out of 180 collects
and prayers contained in the Prayer-book, only three or four at
most are addressed to our Lord, the others being all addressed
through Christ to Almighty God. I have said that there are
also ejaculations in the Litany and elsewhere addressed to
Christ. But I have shewn that the whole spirit and the general
practice of our Liturgy manifestly tend to discourage such wor-
ship and prayer, instead of making it the ‘“ foundation-stone”
of common worship.’
‘It appears,’ Dr. Colenso further observes, ‘that the practice
in question is not based on any Scriptural or Apostolical
authority, but is the development of a later age, and has very
greatly increased within the Church of England during the
last century, beyond what (as the Prayer-book shews) was the
rule at the time of the Reformation—chiefly, as I believe,
through the use of unauthorized hymns.’
in the Services of the Church of England. 521
1. Now here it is to be observed, first of all, that prayer to
our Lord is either right or wrong. If it is right, if Jesus Christ
does indeed hear and answer prayer, and prayer to Him is
agreeable to the Divine Will, then three or four hundred collects
addressed to Him (supposing the use of them not to imply a
lack of devotion to the Eternal Father and to the Holy Spirit)
are quite as justifiable as three or four. If such prayer is wrong,
if Jesus Christ does not hear it, and it is opposed to the real
Will of God, then a single ejaculation, a single Christe Eleison,
carries with it the whole weight of a wrongful act of worship,
and is immoral, as involving a violation of the rights of God.
Dr. Colenso says that prayer to Jesus Christ is ‘not based on
Scriptural or Apostolical authority, but is the development of a
later age.’ He does not mean to assert that ‘development’ is a
sufficient justification of a Christian doctrine or practice ; since
he is assigning a reason for the discouragement which he feels
it to be his duty to offer to the practice of prayer to our Lord.
But, if his reason be valid, ought it not to make any one such
prayer utterly out of the question? It is not easy to understand
the principle upon which, after admitting that ‘three or four
Collects’ in the Prayer-book are addressed to our Lord, Dr. Co-
lenso adds, ‘I am prepared to use the Liturgy of the Church of
England as it stands.’
To a clear mind, unembarrassed by the difficulties of an unten-
able position, this painful inconsistency would be impossible.
Either Jesus Christ is God or He is not; there is no third
alternative. If He is God, then natural piety makes prayer to
‘Him inevitable: to call Him God is to call Him adorable.
If He is not God, then one-tenth part of the worship which
the Church of England in her authorized formularies offers to
Him is just as idolatrous as a hundred litanies, such as ours,
would be. Dr. Colenso would not explain his use of ‘ Christ,
have mercy upon us’ as Roman Catholics explain an ‘Ora pro
nobis. If one such ‘ejaculation’ is right, then prayer to our
Lord for an hour together is right also. In short, it is not a
question of more or fewer prayers to Christ; the question is,
Can we rightly worship Him at all ?
2. Dr. Colenso maintains that ‘the whole spirit and the
general practice of our Liturgy manifestly tend to discourage’
prayer to our Lord.
What is meant by the ‘whole spirit’ of our Liturgy? If this
expression is intended to describe some sublimated essence,
altogether distinct from the actual words of the Prayer-book,
522 Note F. The Worship of Fesus Christ
it is of course very difficult to say what it may or may not
‘tend’ to ‘discourage.’ But if the ‘whole spirit’ of a document
be its intellectual drift and purpose as gathered from its actual
words, and from the history of its formation, then we may say
that Dr. Colenso’s assertion is entirely opposed to the facts of
the case.
(a) The devotional addresses to our Lord Jesus Ghrist alone
in the Church Service gre as follows :—
Daily Service, Morning and Evening—
Verses of the Te Deum . : . . 16
‘Christ, have mercy upon us’ δ ‘ ὃ 2
Prayer of St.Chrysostom ς . . : 2
Litany—
Invocation, ‘O God the Son’. ᾿ ° a I
‘Remember not, Lord’ . : Ξ ‘ - I
Deprecations ; : . . . . 5
Obsecrations F i ‘ . 2
‘In all time of our tribulation’ , é : I
Petitions . ‘ 5 3 21
‘Son of God, we beseech Thee, ᾿ οἷο. : Ι
“Ὁ Lamb of God, That,’ ete. : : 2
“Ὁ Christ, hear us? , ; ; ; A I
‘Christ, have mercy upon us’ : ‘ I
Preces, ‘From our enemies’ : : ‘ IO
Prayer of St.Chrysostom . ᾿ . : Ι
Collects—
Third Sunday in Advent β . ‘ ‘ I
St. Stephen’s Day . 3 : - : : I
First Sunday in Lent . ° : . . Ι
Communion Office—
Of the three parts of the Gloria in Excelsis . 2
Solemnization of Matrimony—
‘Christ, have mercy upon us’ : Ν é I
Visitation of the Sick—
‘Remember not, Lord’ : : é ; I
‘Christ, have mercy upon us’ ; I
“Ὁ Saviour of the world, Who by Thy Cross’. I
271 the Services of the Church of E ngland. 523
Burial of the Dead—
‘In the midst of life, ete. . . . Ι
‘Christ, have mercy upon us’ ? ; : Ι
Churching of Women—
‘Christ, have mercy upon us’ : C2273 I
Commination—
‘Christ, have mercy upon us’ : : : Ι
Prayers to be used at Sea—
“Ὁ blessed Saviour, That didst save’ I
‘Christ, have mercy upon us’ 3 : : I
0 Christ, hear us’ ‘ i I
——.
83
---. .
(8) Devotional addresses to our Lord conjointly with the
Eternal Father and the Holy Ghost :—
Daily Morning and Evening Services, not including
the Psalms—Gloria Patri at least
Athanasian Creed—Gloria Patri, : - ; I
Litany—
‘O Holy, Blessed, and Glorious tes TIMLEY. : I
Gloria Patri . : : ° . I
Collect for Trinity Sunday . : : : ‘ I
Communion Office—
Preface for Trinity Sunday . : . - Ι
Ter Sanctus . : ; ς : : Ι
Matrimony—Gloria Patri ; I
Visitation of the Sick—Gloria Patri I
Burial of the Dead—Gloria Patri at least I
Churching of Women—Gloria Patri I
Commination—Gloria Patri I
Psalter—Gloria Patri . 5 ᾿ 171
Prayers to be used at Sea—
Gloria Patri . ; ἢ F 4
‘God the Father, God the Son,’ pica d ὃ Ι
524 Note F. The Worship of Fesus Christ
Besides this, there are at the end of Collects seven ascriptions
of Glory, addressed to Christ our Lord with the Father and the
Holy Spirit. In one Collect (Ordering of Deacons) such an
ascription is addressed to Christ alone.
(y) It should further be added, that in each of the Ordina-
tion Services the whole of that large part of the Litany which
is addressed to our Lord is repeated, with the exception of
the Prayer of St. Chrysostom; while in the Doxology, twice
repeated, at the end of the Veni Creator, Christ 15 praised with
the Father and the Holy Ghost. Nor should the solemn Bene-
dictions in the Name of the Three Blessed Persons which occur
in the Communion, the Confirmation, and the Marriage Services,
be forgotten in estimating the devotional attitude of the Church
towards our Lord. For a view of the real amount of change
in the Prayer-book which would be necessary in order to expel
from it the worship of our Lord, see ‘The Book of Common
Prayer of the Church of England adapted for general use in
other Protestant Churches.’ London, William Pickering, 1852.
This compilation appears to have been the work of a Socinian ;
as those Protestant Dissenters who believe in the Godhead of
our Lord would regard most of its ‘adaptations’ as shocking
to their dearest convictions.
(8) Of the Collects for Sundays or Holy-days now addressed
to the Father, only two (those for the Fourth Sunday in Advent
and Sunday after Ascension) were, in the old Ritual, prayers to
Christ. Yet of these, it happens that the former was, in its
original form, as it stood in the Sacramentary of Gelasius, ad-
dressed to the Father (Muratori, Lit. Rom. i. 680): and the
latter was not originally a Collect, but an antiphon for the second
vespers of the Ascension, which Ven. Bede sang shortly before
his death. Another prayer, beginning ‘ Hear us,’ in the Visita-
tion Office, was a prayer to our Lord until 1661. On the other
hand, of the three Collects now addressed to our Lord, that for
the First Sunday in Lent dates from 1549, that for the Third
Sunday in Advent from 1661, while that for St. Stephen’s Day,
originally a prayer to the Father, became a prayer to the Son
in 1549, and was enlarged and intensified, as such, in 1661.
The Office for Use at Sea, containing prayers to Christ, also
belongs to 1661. :
In order to do justice to the spirit of the Reformers of the
sixteenth century on this subject, two facts should be noted.
1. Prayers to our Lord abound in the semi-authorized Primers
which were put out at that period. In Edward the Sixth’s
im the Services of the Church of England. 525
Primer of 1553 there are sixteen. In Elizabeth’s Primer of
1559 there are twenty-two. In one portion of the Preces Pri-
vatee of 1564 there are twenty-one. In the ‘Christian Prayers’
of 1578 there are fifty-five.
2. On the other hand, from all of these manuals, as from the
public services of the Church, all addresses to any created being
were rigorously excluded. And one effect of the expulsion of
antiphons and hymns addressed to the Blessed Virgin and other
Saints from the Liturgy of the Church of England, has been to
throw the praises, prayers, and adorations, which the Church of
England publicly addresses to our Lord Jesus Christ, into a
sharper prominence than belonged to such prayers in pre-
Reformation times, or than belongs to them now in the Church
of Rome.
The old Puritanism would have shrunk with horror from
the discouragement of prayer to our Lord. Witness the speech
of Sir E. Dering in the Long Parliament of 1641, after an order
of the House of Commons forbidding men to bow at the Name
of Jesus :—
‘Was it ever heard before, that any men of any religion, in
any age, did ever cut short or abridge any worship, upon any
occasion, to their God? Take heed, Sir, and let us all take heed,
whither we are going. If Christ be Jesus, if Jesus be God, all
reverence, exterior as well as interior, is too little for Him.
I hope we are not going up the back stairs to Socinianism !’
(Southey, Book of the Church, Ῥ' 462.) 5
*
B. The ae of Christ our Lord in the Litany fine lately
been explained by a very popular and accomplished writer@,
upon principles, which, if they could be admitted, would deny to
it the significance assigned to it in these Lectures. After com-
menting on the historical origin of Litany-worship in the fifth
century, and on the compilation of our own Litany at the
Reformation, the Dean of Westminster observes that the Litany
forms the most remarkable exception to the ordinary practice
of the Church, in respect of addressing prayers to God the
Father. The Dean then proceeds :—
‘It is not perhaps certain that all the petitions are addressed
to Christ our Saviour? ; but, at any rate, a large portion are so
4 His Godhead, the
seat of His Single Personality,
i, 23, notes) 22 ΣΕ ἢ
implies Co-equality and Con-
substantiality, iv. 181; co-exist-
ent with His perfect Manhood,
v. 262 sq.; vill. 450; intimated
and affirmed in. Old Testa-
ment, ii. 48 sq.; gradually un-
folded, i. 39 ; v. 273; implied in
much of His language, iv. 173 sq.;
explicitly revealed by Him, 177
sq.; titles expressing it, vi. 312
sq.-; in fact necessary to His
moral excellence, iv. 196 sq., 205 ;
Vi. 311; attested by Synoptists as
by St. John, v. 244 sq.; proclaimed
by Apostles, Lect. v. and vi.;
vii. 428 ; not imagined by ‘enthu-
siasm,’ v. 267 ; confessed by the
early Church, vii. 406 sq.; pro-
tects truths of natural religion,
Vill. 444 8q.; supports other
truths of faith, iii. 146; vi. 298;
Vili. 453 56.
Christianity, social results of, iii.
130; vill. 488 sq.; causes of its
success, ili. 132 sq.
Christian life, the, dependent on
Christ, iii. 127.
Chronology of St. John and the
Synoptists, v. 224, note.
Chrysostom, St., as a commentator,
vil. 417; on Arianism, vi. 317,
note.
Church, the, not a ‘republic,’ iii.
100; originality of its conception,
110; continuous progress of, 118 ;
present prospects of, 1203 viii.
498; universality of, vi. 333;
INDEX.
541
losses and divisions of, iii. 121 ;
recuperative powers of, 131 ; sus-
tained by faith in a Divine Christ,
145; vili. 498; supernatural life
of, vi. 329, 333 Sq.
Cicero, scepticism of, ili. 139.
Clarke, Dre Arianism of, i. 18.
Clement of Alexandria, St., on
St. John’s Gospel, v. 212; on
worship of Christ, vii. 382, 387 ; :
on His Divinity, 413 ; inaccurate
language of, 418, 423.
Clement of Rome, St., on Nero’s
persecution, vi. 277.
Colenso, Dr., rejects Deuteronomy,
vill. 469, 470; denies Christ’s
Infallibility, ib. and 454, 455;
his objections to worship of Christ,
Note F
Coleridge on Socinian worship of
Christ, vii. 405 ; criticises Atha-
nasian Creed, 438.
Colossians, Epistle to, character of,
vi. 281, note ; 332.
Common Prayer, Book of, i. 40;
viii. 474, 481; Note D.
‘ Communicatio idiomatum,’ γ. 258 ;
vi. 306, note.
Comte, his philosophy and ritual,
Ng LeA.
Conception, the Immaculate, defini-
tion of, not parallel to that of
Homoousion, vii. 427 sq.; im-
pugned and on what grounds by
Cardinal Turrecremata, Note G.
Confucianism, spread of, not paral-
lel to that of Christianity, ili. 134.
Constitutions,the A postolical,vii.388.
Coquerel on St. James, vi. 285, note.
Corinthians, Epistles to, character
of, vi. 329 8q.
Council, Fifth General, vii. 371, note;
Sixth General, v. 263, note.
Councils, i. 25, 37; vii. 420.
Creation, how Incarnation is re-
lated to it, v. 265; ascribed to
Christ, vi. 319.
Creator, prerogatives of the, i. 29;
iv. 200; Vv. 233; vii. 360.
Creeds, scope of modern objections
to, i. 34 sq. ; lasting necessity of,
vii. 436 sq.
Crucifixion, the, a stumbling-block,
311, 137, $41;
Cyprian, St., on Christ’s Divinity,
vii. 415.
Cyril of Alexandria, St., on limita-
tion of human knowledge in
Christ, viii. 461 ; on His Sacrifice,
477; οὁἢ Sacraments, 481, 482,
notes.
Cyril of Jerusalem, St., on reality
“of Christ’s Manhood, 1. 263 ὁπ
efficacy of His Death, viii. 477.
D.
Daniel, Book of, on ‘Son of Man,’
i. 6: iv. 173, 191; on Christ’s
dominion, ii. 88 ; iii, 111.
Davidie period of Prophecy, ii. 79
sq.
Decretals, the False, viii. 470.
‘ Definition,’ theological, objected to,
1.5.
Deism, unable to guard the idea of
God, viii. 444 sq.
Deutero-canonical books, ii. 61 sq.
Deuteronomy, recognized by Christ,
Vill. 447.
‘Development,’ doctrinal, sense of
the term, vil. 426 sq.
Diognetus, letter to, vii. 411.
Dionysius of Alexandria, St., ortho-
dox although misunderstood, vii.
416 sq., 425, 430; on the Pres-
byter John, Note H.
Dionysius of Rome, St., vii. 425.
Divinity of our Lord, see “ Christ.’
Docetism, i. 19, 24, 25; ll. 69; ν
231,°247.
Doctrinal position of the Lectures,
1. 34.
Doctrine and morals, in Apostolic
writings, vi. 281, 288.
Dogma, modern dislike of, i. 37; v
267; inseparable from religion, i.
3,4; the Christ of, identical with
the Christ of history, iv. 152. See
‘ Creeds.’
Déllinger, on ‘ apotheoses’ at Rome,
i. 27, note; on Stoicism, ili. 144,
note ; on ἁρπαγμόν, vi. 316, note;
on John Presbyter, Note E.
Dorner, on Schleiermacher, i. 16 ; on
Jewish Theology, ii. 70; on ‘Son
of Man,’v. 250; on St. John and
the Synoptists, 255; on Justin
Martyr, vii. 422.
πτττ΄- -------ς----- - οτος. 9 5 Ὁ συ.
542
INDEX.
E.
Ebionitism, i.15 ; v. 221, 247.
‘Ecce Homo,’ i. 15 ; Note A; on
Christ’s foundation of a Society,
111. 110; on His miracles, iv. 161 :
on His humility, 195; on His
condescension, vi. 310.
Ecclesiasticus, date of, ii. 64.
* El,’ ii.'87.
Elizabeth, her greeting of Mary, v.
248,
Ellicott, Bishop, on passages in
St. Paul, vi. 312, 315, notes ; on
human limitations in Christ, viii.
463, note.
‘Elohim,’ ii. 48; Note B.
Emanatists, vii. 430.
‘Emmanuel,’ ii. 88; vy. 247.
Enoch, Book of, i. ἥν 1: 102.
Enthusiasm, Christ not deified by,
ν. 207.
Ephesians, Epistle to, vi. 281, note,
332.
Ephesus, Council of, v. 258.
Eucharist, the Holy, iv. 157; v. 2 52;
Vi. 330; vii. 389 ; viii. 481.
Eulogius, against Agnoete, viii.
62.
Putyekidntee v. 261 ; viii. 462.
Evangelists, fundamentally at one
in their representations of Christ,
V. 244 56.
Ewald, his view of Christ, i. 15,16;
Note A ; on St. John’s Gospel, v.
218, 268.
Ezekiel, sense of ‘Son of Man’ in,
1. ὃ
F
Faith, grace of, as described by
St. Paul, vi. 340 sq.
Faith, the, once delivered, vii.
427 Sq.
‘Fountain of Deity,’ a title of God
the Father, iv. 181, 200 ; vii, 422.
Félix, on originality, iii. 106.
Feuerbach, his view of Christ, i. 1 2:
his naturalistic theory of religion,
v. 267,
Fichte, his definition of religion, i.
3; his view of Christ, 13.
Firmilian, vii. 431.
Freewill in man, v. 265.
G.
Galatians, Epistle to, vi. 327, 328,
349-
“Generation, Eternal,’ of the Son,
iv. 182 ; vii. 422, 423.
Genesis, ii. 48.
Gesenius, ii. 61.
Gibbon, his ‘five causes,’ iii, 1 ὭΡΙ:
his sneer at ‘ the iota,’ vii, 435.
Gladstone, on ‘Ecce Homo,’
Note A.
‘Gloria in excelsis,’ the, vii. 386.
‘Glory,’ in St. John’s Gospel, v.
230.
Gnosticism, ii. 69 ; v. 220, 221, 239;
vi. 281, note, 308, 309.
Gop, the true idea of, i. 303 viii.
448; not secured by Deism, 444
sq.; Pantheistic misuse of the
Name, i. 20; Vili. 451, note.
Goethe, on originality, iii. 106 ; his
admiration of the heathen mind,
70.
Grace, vi. 233.
Gregory of Nazianzen, St., on A-
rianism, vii. 437, note; on ‘ig-
norance,’ viii. 461.
Gregory of Nyssa, St., on Arianism,
Vil. 437, note, 438.
Guizot, on originality of Christ’s
‘plan,’ iii, 112.
H.
Hebrews, Epistle to, vi. 281, note,
320.
Hegel, his definition of religion, i. 33
his view of Christ, ΤΩΣ
Hengstenberg, ii. 86.
Heracleon, v. 216.
Herder, on St. John’s Gospel, v.
208.
Heresy, how viewed by St. J ohn,
v. 242; by St. Paul, vi. 279, 336.
Hilary, St., on Homoousion, vii.
431, note.
Hippolytus, St.,‘Philosophumena’ of,
v. 216; on Christ’s Divinity, vii.
415; inaccurate language of, 418,
Historical estheticism, its objec-
tion to dogma, i. 34; ‘historical
spirit,’ the, iv. 151.
‘ Homoiousion,’ the, vii. 435,
INDEX.
‘Homoousion,’ history of the term,
i. 32; vii. 430; see Lect. VII. ;
how criticised by moderns, 358 ;
explains early Church’s worship
of Christ, 359 sq.; summarizes
her Christology, 405 sq.; a ‘de-
_ velopment’ only by explanation,
426 sq.; why rejected by Council
of Antioch, 431.
Hooker, on ‘being in Christ,’ vi.
347; on human limitations in
Christ, viii. 466; on Hypostatic
— Union, 476.
Hope, its necessity and uses, ii. 72 ;
Israel sustained by, 75.
‘Humanity,’ era of, iii. 130; idea
of, protected by the Incarnation,
Vill. 451, 494.
Humanitarianism, i. 15, 25; vi. 292,
323, 3373 Vil. 425; Vill. 473.
Humanity of our Lord, see ‘ Christ.’
Humility, Christ’s Incarnation the
great motive to, vili. 491 sq.
Hymns, fragments of, in the Epi-
stles, vi. 327, 328; value of, as
expressing Christian doctrine, vii.
385 sq.
‘Hypostasis,’ history of the term,
1.55
‘ Hypostatic Union,’ i. 17, 23, note,
257 8q.; viii. 464, 470.
1.
Ignatius, St., alludes to St. John,
v. 2143; on worship of Christ, vii.
379; on His Divinity, 411.
‘Ignorance’ and ‘error,’ not iden-
tical, viii. 468.
‘Image of God,’ a title of Christ,
vi. 317.
Incarnation, the, illustrated by mys-
teries in our present being, v.
260; how related to Creation,
265; secures belief in a living
God, viii. 447; protects dignity
of man, 451. See ‘ Christ.’
‘Inferential Theology,’ viii. 440 sq.;
Inspiration, 11. 45 sq. ; Vv. 219.
Treneus, St., i. 8; on the Four
Gospels, v. 210; on Christ’s Di-
vinity, vii. 413; on His human
‘ignorance,’ 459.
Isaiah, prophecy of, its Messianic
543
richness, and its unity, ii. 83 sq. ;
his self-abasement, iv. 164.
Israel, Messianic hopes of, ii. 74 5ᾳ.;
a Theocracy, iii. 99.
J
Jackson, Dr., on Hypostatic Union,
v. 258, 259, notes.
Jacobi, his view of Christ, i. 13.
James, St., Epistle of, vi. 278, 280,
282 sq.
Jehovah, name of, ii. 88.
Jeremiah, prophecy of, ii. 84, 88,
Jerome, St., on Christian society,
11, 125, note; on Ante-nicenes,
vii. 421.
Jerusalem, council of, vi. 278, 287.
Jesus, Name of, ii. 88 ; v. 247, notes.
Jews, their history a witness to
Christ, 11. 97; hostility of, to
Christianity, 137, 138.
Job, ‘Wisdom’ referred to in, ii.
59.
Sahn Baptist, St., 111. 111.
John Damascene, St.,on Hypostatic
Union, v. 258, 259, notes; on
Two Energies, v. 264, note.
John the Evangelist, St., see Lect.
V.; life and character of, 240 sq.,
269, 273 sq.; compared with St.
Paul, vi. 282, 250; Gospel of, its
authenticity, v. 208 sq.; its three
purposes, 219 sq.; internal diffi-
culties urged against it, 224,
note; its relation to the other
Gospels, 244 sq.; Epistles of,
238 sq.; vii. 374; Revelation of,
see ‘ Apocalypse.’
John Presbyter, Note E.
Jowett, Prof., on Philo, ii. 67, 68,
notes.
‘ Joyful Light,’ hymn, vii. 387.
Judaizers, vi. 281, 332, 348, 349.
Jude, St., Christology of, vi. 301,
302.
Justification, i. 41 3 vi. 342.
Justin Martyr, St., on ‘the Angel
of the Lord, ii. §5 ; his testimony
to St. John’s Gospel, v. 214; on
worship of Christ, vil. 381; on
Christ’s Divinity, 412 ; difficulties
in his language, 418 sq.
Juvenal, 111, 140; vill. 488.
544
INDEX.
K,
Kant, his definition of religion, i. 3 ;
his view of Christ, i. 12.
Keble, iii. 129, 130; on ‘Son of
Man,’ i. 8, note.
Keim, iii. 113, note; Note A.
‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ foundation
and laws of the, 111. 099 sq. See
‘Church,’
Klee, on question of ‘ignorance,’
vill. 458 sq., notes.
Kuhn, ii. 63.
‘ Kyrie Eleison,’ the, vii. 388.
L.
Lactantius, on worship of Christ,
vill. 395; inaccurate language of,
419.
Tntindiierene on Creeds, Vii. 437.
Law, Christianity a new, vi. 287.
Lazarus, raising of, iv. 157,202 ; v.
274.
Lecky, on originality of Christ’s
teaching, iii. 110, note; on ‘ reve-
rence,’ vii. 360, note.
Leibnitz, on human ‘ignorance’ in
Christ, viii. 464, note.
Leo, St., on Hypostatic Union,
v. 257, note.
Litany, the, i. 40; viii. 474.
‘Little Labyrinth,’ the, vii. 426,
note.
Liturgies, Mozarabic and Eastern,
᾿ vii. 389, 390.
Logos, the, in Philo, ii. 62 sq.; in
St. John, v. 227sq.; in St. James,
vi. 2885 in St. Peter, 298 ; ἐνδιά-
Oeros and προφορικός, vii. 418.
Lucian, scoffs at worship of Christ,
Vii. 392.
Lucian of Antioch, vii. 419.
Luke, St., his narrative of the
Nativity, v. 247.
Luther, asserts the ‘ubiquity’ of
Christ’s manhood, viii. 463.
M.
Manhood of our Lord, see ‘ Christ.’
Manicheeans, vil. 430.
Mansel, Prof., on ‘Reason’ in Plato,
ii. 64, note.
Marcion, v. 211, 216.
Martensen, v. 238, 247, notes; viii.
481, note.
Martyrs, the, iv. 144, 145; pray to
Christ in their agony, vii. 398 sq.,
406 sq.
Mary, the B.V., i. 19; iv. 165 ;
V. 247, 248, 257, 258; vii. 433.
Materialism, viii. 451.
Matthew, St., his narrative of the
Nativity, v. 247.
Melchisedec, vi. 321.
Melito, St., on Christ’s Divinity, vii.
412, 426.
‘Memra,’ the, ii. 63, 70.
Messiah, hope of the, ii. 69, 77; its
debasement, g1. See ‘Christ.’
‘ Metaphysics,’ inseparable from reli-
gion, i. 41 ; viii. 444.
Meyer, on σάρξ, i. 19, note ; on Philo,
Vv. 229, note; on dignity and pre-
existence of Christ, iv. 182, 183,
188; v. 228; vi. 319, notes.
Mill, Dr., on narratives of N ativity,
v. 247, note; on limitation of
Christ’s human knowledge, viii.
460, note; on Strauss, note A, p.
502. ;
‘Ministration,’ ascribed to Christ,
Vil. 421.
Miracles, evidence from, iii. 145 ; of
Christ, iv. 153 sq.
Mohammedanism, based on a dogma,
i. 4 ; its spread no parallel to that
of Christianity, iii. 133.
Monarchianism, vii. 421.
Monophysitism, i. 25.
Monotheism, of Israel, ii. 67, 76,
95; of Christianity, v. 2703 vi.
307 sq.
Monothelitism, i. 25 ; v. 261.
Montanism, v. 217.
Moses, ii. 47, 53:
Muratorian Fragment, the, v. 212.
Mystery no bar to faith, v. 264.
Mysticism, iv. 185, 198; in St. John,
Vi. 351.
N.
‘Name of God,’ sense of, ii. 50.
Napoleon I. on Christ’s Divinity,
ili. 147, 148.
Nathanael, Christ’s words to, viii.
465 ; confession of, i. 11; iv.177;
Vv. 273.
Naturalism, ii. 76, 89; iii. 108; vi.
308.
INDEX. :
545
‘Natures’ of Christ, the Two, v.
256 sq.
Neander, on Christ as Pattern
Man, i. 8, note; on preparations
for Christianity, ii. 71; on the
Logos, v. 226; on SS. Paul and
John, vi. 351; on Celsus, vii. 392,
note.
Neighbour, idea of, vi. 288, note.
Neo-platonism, vii. 356.
Nestorianism, iii. 121 ; v. 257; viii.
463.
New Testament, Christology of,
summarized, vii. 428.
Newman, Dr., on repixwpyars, i. 33,
note; on Bp. Bull, vii. 419, note ;
on Homoousion, 430, note.
Newman, F. W., his ‘Phases of
Faith,’ i. 42 ; denies Christ’s moral
perfection, i. 23; iv. 166, 198,
notes; on His claim to be the
Judge, 173; on His Self-assertion,
196, note; on His death, 197,
note.
Nicza, Council of, ii. 94; vii. 429
sq.; Creed of, i. 18; iv. 200, note;
V. 256 ; Vil. 359, 410, 432, 434 8q.;
Vill. 473.
Nicholas I., his use of False Decre-
tals, viii. 471.
Noetus, i. 15 ; vii. 425.
Nonconformists, iii. 124.
Novatian, on progressive revelation,
il. 47; on prayer to Christ, vii.
384.
Ollivant, Bp., on Isaiah, ii. 83.
Olshausen, i. 6; vi. 347, note.
Omniscience, in Christ, viii. 456,
466.
‘ Only-begotten,’ the, v. 233.
‘Operations’ in Christ, two, v. 263,
264, notes.
Ophites, the, v. 217.
Origen, as a commentator, vii. 417 ;
on worship of Christ, 385, 392 sq. ;
on Christ’s Divinity, 414, 417,
418; questionable language of,
418 sq.
Original sin, i. 23.
Orthodoxy, vi. 336, 337.
ῬῚ
Paganism, its hostility to Chris-
tianity, iii, 139 sq.; St. Paul’s
judgment of, vi. 308; its notice
of the worship of Christ, vii. 391
sq.; its moral corruption, i. 2;
lil, 140; viii. 488 sq.
Pantheism, i. 26 sq. ; viii. 448 sq.
Papias, v. 215.
‘ Parables ofthe Kingdom, iii. 1038q.
Paraclete, the Montanists’, v. 217,
note.
Passion, vast significance of the,
vill. 473 sq.; its virtue de-
pendent on Christ’s Divinity, vi.
298 ; Vili. 476 sq.
Pastoral Epistles, the, vi. 336, 337.
Patripassianism, i. 15, 16.
Paul, St., has been called the creator
of Christianity, i. 14; his conver-
sion, iii. 138; his interview with
the leading apostles, vi. 278;
characteristics of his style, 281;
his teaching on Christ’s Manhood,
303 sq.; on the Divine Unity,
307 sq.; on Divinity of Christ,
explicitly, 311 sq.; and implicitly,
323 sq.; his account of faith,
282, 339 sq.; of regeneration,
344 sq.; his opposition to Ju-
daizers, 348 sq.; contrast between
him and St. John, 350 sq.
Paulus of Samosata, i. 25; vii. 425;
rejected the worship of Christ,
vii. 386 ; his cavil at Homoousion,
430, 431.
Paulus, rationalist, i. 42.
Peace, secured by Christ, vi. 333.
Pearson, Bp., on adoration of Christ,
Vii. 379, note.
Pelagianism, viii. 487.
Pentateuch, quoted by Christ, viii.
454 56.
Περιχώρησι, i. 33, note.
Persecution, Pagan, ili. 144.
‘Person,’ use of the term, i. 32, 33;
of Christ, One and Divine, v.
256 sq.
Personality, idea of, ii. 67, note ; of
God, i. 30; Vili. 444 86.
Persons in the Godhead, iptimated
in Old Testament, 11, 48 sq.
Peschito, the, v. 212.
Petavius, ii. 67 ; vii. 419, 424.
Peter Lombard, ν. 261, note; viii.
480, note.
Nn
546
INDEX.
Peter, St., his confession, i. 10, 11;
Christology of his sermons, vi.
291 sq.; of his Epistles, 294 sq.
Pharisaism, iv. 162.
Philanthropy, Christian, 111. 130;
Vili. 494.8q.; spirit of, in St. John,
V. 241, 242.
Philip the Apostle, St., his question
to Christ, iv. 177, 178.
Philip the Deacon, St., on Isaiah’s
prophecy, vi. 292.
Philippians, Epistle to, vi. 335.
Philo, his theory of the Logos con-
trasted with St. John’s doctrine,
ii. 62:54. ; v. 229, note ; his indif-
ference to Messianic hopes, ii.
69, 91 ; on Law of Moses, iii. 137.
Philosophy, Christianity not a mere,
iii. 127; Gentile, how far a pre-
paration for Christianity, 11. 70 ;
moral weakness of, iil. 144, note ;
viii. 488 ; language of, how used
by the Church, vii. 429.
Pietism, i. 41, 42.
‘Plan’ of Christ, characteristics of
the, 111. 115.
Platonism, 11. 64; vi. 347.
Pliny, the elder, iii. 139.
Pliny, the younger, testimony of, to
worship of Christ, vii. 391.
Poetry, Greek, a sadness in, ii. 76.
Polycarp, St., testimony of, to St.
John, v. 214; on Divine dignity
of, and worship of, Christ, vii.
380, 412.
Polytheism, ii. 48 ; iii. 133.
Position taken in the Lectures, i.
34:
Positivism, iii. 135, note; viil. 445.
Practical knowledge of Christ, vi.
299 ; Vill. 464.
Praxeas, Monarchianism of, i. 15,
16; vil. 449.
Prayer offered by Christ, as man,
i. 22; to Christ, see ‘ Adoration.’
Pre-existence of Christ, iv. 186 sq.
Presence of God, in souls, i. 31;
iv. 186.
Pressensé, Note A, p. 507;0n Christ’s
‘plan,’ 111. 113, 115, note; on St.
John’s Gospel, v. 218, note.
Priesthood of Christ, vi. 338 ; viii.
485.
Priestley, viii. 473.
Priestly blessing, the, in the Law,
ii. 50.
Prophecy, Messianic, three stages
of, ii. 78 sq.; St. Peter’s use of,
Vi. 294, 295.
Prophet, Christ the great, ii. 79.
Prophets, the, ii. 74, 77, 79, 90, 92 ;
vi. 292; their sense of personal
sinfulness, iv. 164.
Protevangelium, the, ii. 78.
Proverbs, ‘Wisdom’ in the, ii. 59, 60.
Providence, Divine, iv. 180, 181;
vill. 446.
Prudentius, hymns of, vii. 408, 409,
notes.
Psalms, the Messianic, ii. 80 sq.
Purity, Christian grace of, viii. 489,
499.
Pusey, Dr., on Book of Enoch, i. 7,
note; on Messianic prophecies,
li. 80, 81, 87 sq., notes; on Ter-
tullian, v. 211, note.
R.
Rabbi, title of, iii. 109.
Rabbinical schools, ii. 75; their
Messianic doctrine, 90 ; their later
invention of a double Messiah,
86.
Racovian Catechism, vii. 404, 405.
Rationalism, the older, i. 12, 14;
Note A, p. 503; modern, iii.
122, 123.
Recapitulation of the argument,
Vill. 497. .
Redemption, vi. 298, 211, 3373 Vii.
477, 478.
Regeneration, St. Paul’s doctrine
of, vi. 344 8q.; Vill. 490.
Reign of Christ, i. 36; ii. 843 iii.
125.
Religion, definitions of, i. 3, 4; its
object a Person, 36. See ‘ Dog-
ma.’
Renan, Note A; his view of Christ,
i. 15; on Hillel, iii. 107; on Ga-
lilean influences, 108 ; his expla-
nation of Christ’s success, 136 8q.;
how he differs from Strauss, 146,
147; on the Gospel miracles, iv.
161, 202, note; denies Christ’s Re-
surrection, 154; criticises Chan-
ning, 158, note; denies that
Christ claimed to be God, 178,
INDEX.
547
+
198, note; on His Self-assertion,
196, 202, notes ; on His ‘sincerity,’
201; on St. John’s Gospel, v. 220,
note, 271; his use of the word
‘God,’ viii. 451, note.
Resurrection of Christ, the, Christi-
pouty based on truth of, iv. 154
sq. ; preached by SS. Peter and
Paul, Vi. 293, 324, 325.
Reuss, on prologue of St. John, v
228, 231, 236, 237, notes; on 6
av....aidvas, vi. 313; on re-
generation, 345, note.
Revelation, the Christian, i. 2 ; vii.
435; belief in, necessitates a the-
ology, Vili. 441.
Reverence, necessarily truthful, v.
268; Lecky’s use of the word,
vii. 360, note.
‘Rhetoric,’ charge of, against the
Fathers, vii. 413.
Richter, J. P., on Christ, iii. 149.
Ritual, Jewish, impressed a sense
of sin, ii. 77.
Romans, Epistle to, vi. 281, 329.
Rousseau, on the Gospel history,
iii. 133; v. 271; on early propa-
gation of Christianity, iii. 149,
note; on possibility of miracles,
iv. 155.
Ruinart, his ‘Acta Sincera,’ vii.
399 sq., notes.
8.
Sabbath, Christ’s claim to work on,
iv. 179 sq.
Sabellianism, i. 15, 33, note; iv.
1843 Vv. 234; Vi. 314, note; Vii.
422, 425.
Sacraments, iii. 128; v. 223; vi.
301, 342, 345, 349, 3525 Vill.
479 84+, 490, 497-
Sacrifice of Christ, viii. 477, 478,
483.
Salvador, on Christ’s claim to for-
give sins, iv. 175, note; to work
on Sabbath, 180, note; on His
testimony before the High Priest,
190, 191.
Sanhedrin, the, iv. 190, 1091.
Saviour, Christ the Divine, iii. 150 ;
V. 249; Viii. 500.
Scepticism, in middle ages, iii. 123.
Schelling, his definition of religion,
1. 3; his view of Christ, 13; on
Indian ‘ incarnations,’ 28.
Schenkel, Note A; his view of
Christ, 1. 15 ; on Hillel, iii. 108 ;
his theory of a growth in Christ’s
claims, 115; rejects the Gospel
miracles, iv. 153, 154; denies
possibility of Hypostatic Union,
v. 256.
Schleiermacher, theological position
of, i. 16; v. 209; vi. 318, note ;
his definition of religion, 1. 4 ;
allows Christ’s originality, iii. 108;
accepts St. John’s Gospel, v. 209.
Scotists, the, ii. 56.
Scripture, Holy, its sense often se-
cured by non-scriptural terms, i.
42; its organic unity, 11. 44 sq.
Scrivener, on Codex A, vi. 312,
note.
Self-assertion of Christ, i. 5; iii.
126; iv. 163 sq.; Vv. 255.
Semi-Arians, vii. 435, 436.
Seraphim, the, in Isaiah, ii. 51.
Sermon on the Mount, ‘the, i. 315
Via TOOMIOl atv. 162, 167; vi.
290, note.
Sermons, the Apostolical, ii. 80;
vi. 291 8q., 324 56.
Servetus, vii. 404, note.
‘ Shekinah,’ the, v. 235, note.
‘ Shiloh,’ ii. 78.
Simeon, ii. 92; song of, v. 249.
Sin, sense of, ii. 69, 76; iv. 164;
Note A, p. 509.
Sinlessness of Christ, i. 23 ; iv. 165;
v. 263; Vi. 305.
Smith, Dr. Payne, on Isaiah, ii.
81, note.
Society, Christ the Founder of a
spiritual, iii. 99 sq., 131; Vi. 322.
Socinianism, i. 15, 26, 30, 40; iv.
154, 158, note, 181, 189, note ;
v. 237, note; vii. 404; Vili. 471,
480.
Socinus, i. 15; iv. 188, note; vi.
313, note ; vii. 404, 405.
Solomon, ii. 81.
‘Son oF Gop,’ meaning of the
title, i. 10; ii. 80; iv. 100, 101;
ν. 233 8q-, 246, 247, 250.
‘Son oF May,’ i. 6 sq.; iv. 173,
Igl.
Nn2
548
INDEX.
Se Ss
‘Sons of God,’ i. το, note.
Soul, the human, v. 260; nobility
of the, vii. 355; in Christ, i. 21,
25 ; V. 235, note, 261, 262; vi.
298, note.
Spener, i. 42.
Spheres of Christ’s existence, two,
v. 258, note; viii. 463, 464.
Spinosa, vili. 450.
SPIRIT, THE HOLY, office of, iii. 128,
1325 V. 270 8q.5 Vi.’ 295.
‘ Sprout’ of David, Christ the, ii. 84;
vi. 289.
Stephen, St., his speech, vi. 292 ; his
dying prayer to Christ, vii. 368,
6
399.
Stier, on ‘ self-restraint’ in Christ’s
teaching, iv. 187, note.
Stoicism, iii. 117, note, 144; Viil.
1
sie Note A; his view of Christ,
i. 13; iii. 146; on texts implying
Christ’s pre-existence, iv. 189; on
Fourth Gospel, v. 209.
‘ Subordination’ of the Son, iv. 199;
vi. 306, note, 323; Vil. 422 sq.,
438, note.
‘ Subsistences’ in the one Godhead,
5.
Suffering, a note of the Messiah, ii.
85, 86; ignored by Jews, gI.
‘ Supernatural,’ the, in life of Christ,
Be Ua ΤῊ 2.
Sympathy of Christ, i. 25.
Synoptist Gospels, doctrinal agree-
ment of with St. John’s, v. 244 sq.
T.
Tacitus, ili. 139, 140; vil. 207 ; viii.
488,
Targums, ii. 78, 80.
Tatian, v. 213; vil. 418, 426.
‘Te Deum,’ the, vii. 388.
Teacher, ideal of a, iv. 168, 169;
Christ the Infallible, viii. 453 sq.,
500.
Temptation, the, of Christ; its
bearing upon the doctrine of His
Person, Note C ; its real limits,
ib.
‘ Tersanctus,’ the, vii. 386.
Tertullian, date of, v. 211, note ; on
Christ’s true Manhood, i. 25, 26;
on martyrdoms, iii. 144,145; on
the four Gospels, v. 211; against
Tacitus, vii. 397; on Christ’s
Divinity, 415; questionable lan-
guage of, 419, 421.
Θεανδρικὴ ’Evépyeia, v. 263.
Theism, i. 15; vi. 3313 villi. 444 sq.
Theodoret, viii. 467.
Theodotus of Byzantium, i. 16 ; vii.
424.
Theology, necessary to religion, i.
3 8q.; Vill. 441.
‘Theophanies,’ the, in Old Testa-
ment, li. 51 sq.
Theophilus on St. John’s Gospel, v.
203; questionable language of,
Vil. 409.
Theosophy, Alexandrian, ii. 70; Ju-
daizing, vi. 332.
‘ Theotokos,’ the, v. 257, 258, note.
Thessalonians, Epistles to, vi. 328.
Thomas, Apostle, St., his confession,
vii. 366.
Thomas Aquinas, St., on the Incar-
nation, v. 259, 261, notes ; against
Immaculate Conception, vii. 434,
note.
Thomas & Kempis, teaching of, v.
186, note.
Tischendorf, on St. John’s Gospel,
v. 214, 218, notes.
Transfiguration, the, v. 253 ; vi. 300.
Trench, Abp., on Christ’s ‘ works,’
Vv. 235, note.
Trinitarianism, i. 34, note ; ii. 50.
TRINITY, immanence of the, i. 16;
early intimations of the, li. 50, 51;
referred to by St. Paul, vi. 335.
Truth, Christ the, iii. 126, 142.
Tiibingen School, the, v. 210, 215 ;
vi. 278; Note A, p. 503.
Turrecremata, Cardinal, vii. 432,
note; account of his work on
the Conception of the Blessed
Virgin Mary, Note G.
U.
Ullmann, on Christ’s sinlessness, iv.
165; on Thomas & Kempis, 186,
note.
Unbelief, modern, strength and
weakness of, 111. 123, 1243 vill.
498.
INDEX.
549
Union of Christ with His people,
ili, 127; iv. 185, 186; vi. 334,
347, 348.
Unity of Christ’s Person, see ‘ Hy-
postatic Union’ ; of the Godhead,
see ‘ Monotheism’ ; of the Father
and the Son, essential, iv. 182 sq. ;
_ on the ‘moral’ unity, see Note D ;
of Scripture, ii. 44 sq. ; of Christ's
members, vi. 333, 334; of Christ-
endom, ili, 122 ; viii. 499.
Universality of Christ’s work, vi.
349.
ἵν"
Valentinians, v. 216 ; vii. 256, 430.
Virginal birth of Christ, i. 15, 23;
ii. 88, note.
Virtues flowing from Christ’s Hu-
manity, i. 25 ; vi. 348; viii. 481.
Wis
Waterland, i. 18, 42, note.
Westcott, on St. John’s Gospel, v.
212 8q., 224, notes.
Wetstein, v. 313, note.
Will of God, the, i. 30.
Wills in Christ, two, v. 261 sq.
Wilson, W., on the trial of Christ,
iv.“ 191, note. .
‘Wisdom,’ in Old Testament, ii. 59
56.
Wisdom, Book of, ii. 62 ; vi. 322.
‘Word,’ see ‘ Logos.’
‘Works,’ Christ’s miracles so called,
iv. 156; v. 235, note.
‘ World,’ the, in St. John, v. 238.
Worship, see ‘ Adoration.’
Yi.
Young, on Christ’s character, iv.
102, note.
Z.
Zacharias, song of, v. 248.
Zealots, the, iii. 137.
Zechariah, Messianic language of,
ii. 84, 85, 80.
Zephyrinus, vii. 425.
Zwinglianism, viii. 480 sq.
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Texts specially referred to.
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vil. 367
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OXFORD:
Texts specially referred to.
BY T, COOMBE, M.A., E. B. GARDNER, E, P. HALL, AND H. LATHAM, M.A.,
PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.
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