NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY Jlnb other tn of iEutUatino; tfje ogpel fKessajje HEBREWS vi. I, 2. Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection ; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toiuards God, of the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment . 351 NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY " Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples and said unto Him, Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another ? Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see : the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them." ST. MATTHEW xi. 2-5. ALTHOUGH the celebration of this day l is a com- paratively modern appendix to the feasts of the Christian year, it is very fitting that an opportunity should be given us to ask ourselves what conclusion ought we to draw from the facts we have com- memorated ; what is the only theory which will make these things credible. We have commemor- ated the day of the birth and the day of the death of the Founder of our religion ; and in this there is nothing to be ashamed of, whatever theory we hold about Him ; for all must allow that He was one of the world's greatest benefactors, and' filled 1 Preached at Great St. Mary's, Cambridge, on Trinity Sunday, 1880. B 2 NON- MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY i a place in its history such as scarcely any other has occupied : and that therefore those who bear His name may rightly strive that His life and death should not be forgotten. But we preceded our commemoration of His birth by a season of preparation, and we thereby signified our belief that His appearance in the world had been no chance birth of time, but an event long prepared in the Divine counsels, prefigured in the ceremonies of the Mosaic law, announced beforehand by the Jewish prophets in predictions which, as the time of His coming drew near, became more numerous and more distinct. In a special festival we cele- brated His Conception as an exception to the laws of human generation. In commemorating His Nativity we acknowledged it as signalised by miracle, and in our glad hymns we echoed the strains in which the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks heard the heavenly host welcome the glad tidings of great joy. We not only com- memorated His death, but, three days after, we declared our belief that death had not been able to hold Him captive. On this belief we found our own hopes for future reunion with those we have loved ; for (in the Apostle's words) if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. We celebrated His glorious Ascension I NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY 3 into heaven, and last Sunday testified our gratitude for that, when He departed from this world, He did not leave His people orphans, but gave them another Comforter, who should abide with them for ever. And now the question comes What mean we by all this service? Did the facts which we com- memorate really happen ? If not, why do we commemorate them? Then, indeed, have we cause to be ashamed, not for ourselves only, but for the whole Christian Church throughout the world, and from nearly the apostles' times to our own, that the true history of Him by whose name we are called has been so overlaid with fable, and that it is with the fabulous part we have all been almost exclusively taught to occupy our minds, and thereon to rest our hopes. On the other hand, if these facts did happen, things are true of Jesus of Nazareth which are true of no one else that ever lived in the world. He is a unique person in the world's history. And the more we think on the matter, the less can we be satisfied in ascribing to Him any dignity short of Divine. It seems to me, then, that the answer to the ques- tion, Have we a right to call ourselves Christians ? depends on our answer to two questions which really reduce themselves to one : Are the things commemorated in the feasts of the Christian 4 NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY i year true, and was Jesus of Nazareth a unique person ? I. There were among the Socinians of a former generation those who rejected the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, but who yet felt no difficulty in admitting the truth of some, if not all, of the supernatural facts of the Gospel history, and in ascribing to the New Testament books a Divine inspiration distinct in kind from any which can be attributed to the best of human productions. It may be safely said that the times in which such an attitude of mind was possible have passed away never to return. Any difficulties which are felt now relate to the belief in supernatural facts, not to the acceptance of the doctrinal inferences which such facts once admitted suggest. Nay, it will be found that the admission of the doctrine in which we this day profess our belief sweeps away at once the most formidable difficulties which now stand in the way of the acknowledgment of the supernatural facts. There has been a tendency of recent years to sneer at the evidential school of the last century, as if Lardner, Paley, and the rest had failed in the task they set themselves, and as if their failure did not much matter to us who have a more sure foundation for our faith. Such sneers indicate a I NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY 5 complete failure to apprehend that ours is a historical religion, the cardinal tenet of which is that some eighteen centuries ago there was in this world One who was like no one else who ever lived in the world, and who then did a work for the benefit of the world which none but He could have accomplished. All those celebrations of the Christian year of which I spoke are nothing but an expanded expression of our faith in the articles of the baptismal creed. Without such faith I do not see how any one can rightly call himself a Christian. If we can imagine ourselves asking any of the ancient teachers whom the Church has honoured, What must a man do before you can acknowledge him as a Christian ? he would no doubt answer, He must be baptized. And what is necessary before he can be baptized ? He must believe. And what is the belief of which you require him to make public profession ? "I believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord ; who was born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried, and the third day rose again from the dead, who ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father, whence He cometh to judge the quick and the dead ; and I believe in the Holy Ghost, in the Holy Church, 6 NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY I the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the flesh." 1 For almost the entire, if not the entire, of the duration of the Christian Church no one was recognised as a member of it without some such profession of belief as I have read ; and you will have observed that the articles of that pro- fession are, for the most part, exactly those which the feasts of the Christian year successively present to us for our meditation. But several of these articles relate to historical facts, and our belief in these must be obtained by evidence of the same nature as that on which we believe other historical facts. Our belief that our Lord suffered under Pontius Pilate must be justified by the same kind of evidence as that on which we believe that there was such^a person as Pontius Pilate. Our belief that our Lord rose again on the third day must be justified by the same kind of evidence as that on which we believe that He was crucified and was buried. It is impossible to evolve a historical fact out of our internal consciousness, or to have any real belief that anything took place 1 800 years ago, merely because we wish it did, and 1 The form here translated is the baptismal creed of the early Roman Church. On the proof of its great antiquity, see Caspari, Quellen zur Geschichte des Taufsymbols uttd der Glattbetisregel, part iii . ; Gebhardt and Harnack's Apostolic Fathers, fasc. i. , 2, p. 115, or an article which I contributed to the Contemporary Review^ August 1878. I NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY 7 because we find such a belief comforting and consolatory. Writers on evidences, then, have undertaken no needless task when they have set themselves to inquire whether our belief in the facts of the Christian creed can be justified by the ordinary rules of historical investigation. If they have failed in what they tried to establish, we must be forced to admit that the faith which the Christian Church has always held rests on no solid foundation. It must be owned, however, that times have changed since the natural course of a defender of Christianity was accounted to be that he should establish the occurrence of certain miracles, and offer these as credentials of a divine revelation. Nowadays instead of regarding the miraculous part of Christianity as the foundation on which the remaining part rests, many look on this miraculous part as the overburdening weight under which, if it cannot be cleared away, the whole fabric must sink. Only get rid of this and we may still have, we are told, a very noble religion. If we will but surrender the Christian miracles we may still have our Christ No honours will be too great for Him, no language too lofty to describe the services He has rendered humanity. II. But is such a compromise possible ? In the 8 NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY 1 first place, if our Lord be worthy of all the rever- ence which we are permitted to pay Him, we can- not in judging of His miracles leave out the con- sideration how did He judge of them Himself? How did He teach others to judge of them ? I do not dwell on the fact that in the fourth Gospel His mighty works are always represented as signs wrought by Him to testify a divine commission ; it suffices to refer to that story the account of which I read as recorded in the text. It is com- mon to two of the Synoptic Evangelists, Matthew and Luke. If we are to discriminate the records of our Saviour's sayings into more or less trust- worthy, this story must be regarded as belonging to one of the earliest forms in which sayings of His were committed to writing. And the sub- stance of it is, that when He was asked if it was He of whom the prophets of the nation had spoken, He on whom the expectations of the nation were fixed, He appealed to His miracles, or rather perhaps to the correspondence of those mighty works with what the prophets had told concerning Him " The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them." If the wonders re- lated of Him are to be reduced to exaggeration, misconception, natural occurrences falsely attri- I NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY 9 buted to supernatural causes, we must say that the mistake which His Church has made was made in His own lifetime, and was shared by Himself. In one of the earliest attempts made in this century to write a non-miraculous life of Jesus, the method of accepting the Gospel narratives as in their substance true, but depriving them of their super- natural character, was fairly worked out ad absur- dum} Our Lord had been believed to walk upon the water, but this was because He had been seen walking on rising ground close to the lake, and by a precipitate judgment of the disciples had been imagined to walk on the surface of the water : the story that He had been transfigured arose out of the fact that the disciples had seen the beams of the morning sun brilliantly reflected from His garments : the story that He had mira- culously multiplied the food of the 5000 arose out of the fact that the multitude had been influ- enced by the examples of Himself and His dis- 'ciples, each to bring out his private store and share it with his neighbours, so that all ate and were satisfied. I need not repeat in detail how improb- ability is heaped upon improbability, until the explanation how Jesus of Nazareth came to be 1 The reference is to Paulus, whose Commentary on the Gospels appeared in the very first years of the century. His Life of Jesus came out in 1828. io NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY i regarded as a miracle-worker presents us with a story quite as inconsistent with human experience as that He actually wrought the wonderful works attributed to Him. No one can treat this method of naturalistic interpretation with more scorn than does Strauss, who declares that if the Gospels be once admitted as historical records, it is impossible to eliminate miracle from the life of Jesus. 1 But what if giving up the historical character of the Gospels as we have them now, we transfer our allegiance to a supposed original Gospel, from untrustworthy enlargement of which our present Gospels took their rise ? May it not then be possible for criticism to reduce the Gospel narrative to a form, in which the method of naturalistic interpretation shall not be inapplicable ? Some of the more refractory miracles will have been cleared away, and the total number so greatly reduced that the calculus of probabilities will no longer present so appalling a result, when, in order to measure the probability of the non-miraculous life* of Jesus, we multiply together the chances against the truth of each particular explanation. I am far from denying the possibility that criticism may be able in the texts of our present Gospels to dis- tinguish, with more or less confidence, material derived from an earlier document. That the task 1 Das Lebenjesu (1864), p. 18. I NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY II is enormously difficult may be inferred from the want of agreement between the able men who have attempted to perform it : that it is impossible I do not venture to say. But two things I think we may safely say. One that this task, if ever it is performed, cannot be accomplished by any mere mechanical process. For instance, it may be a very important step, in the process of ascertaining the facts with which criticism must deal, to take out the words common to the three Synoptic Gos- pels. 1 But it would be clearly irrational if we were to imagine that criticism had then finished its work, and that we might jump to the con- clusion that in these common words, and these only, we had the original document. Such a pro- cess involves the assumption (the unreasonableness of which is seen the moment the assumption is put into words) that, on the supposition that such a document existed, and that it was made use of by three subsequent compilers, each of these com- pilers was bound to incorporate every particular of it in his work, so that an omission by any one of them condemns the part left out as no portion of the original Gospel. So far is this from being true, that I very confidently believe that if such a document existed there are things which we 1 This work has been carefully done by Mr. Rushbrooke in his Synopticon, published by Macmillan. 12 NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY I now find in no Gospel but St. Mark's which certainly formed part of it. And if in our search for the original document the concurrence of the three witnesses is not necessary, neither again is it sufficient. Unless we can say with certainty that none of the Evangelists made use of the work of another, we cannot be certain- that all the things they have in common were independently taken from their common source. But I think it more important to express my belief, in the second place, that in this matter criticism will not do its work successfully unless it is single-minded and works without any arriere pens/e. If the investigation is prompted by the hope or dominated by the expectation that the discovered residuum of the Gospels will be non- miraculous, it must end in failure. For it will be in vain to have got rid of all other miracles if we are forced to leave behind the miracle of our Lord's resurrection, and what can we imagine to have been the date of a Gospel which did riot contain this miracle ? It must certainly have been earlier than any of the Epistles of St. Paul, in whose mind our Lord's resurrection is one of the most certain of facts a fact so certain that a doctrine is convicted of falsity if it involves the denial of the resurrection. " If there be no resur- I NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY 13 rection of the dead then is Christ not risen, and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain ; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ have perished." But we need not come down so late as Paul. Those who believe and those who disbelieve in our Lord's resurrection can at least have no diffi- culty in agreeing as to the date at which such a belief arose. If a year had elapsed, if six months had elapsed, from the time at which our Lord had died on the cross the death of shame, and if during all that time no sign had clouded over the com- pleteness of the triumph of His enemies, if His followers had for so long a time been forced to acquiesce in the conviction that He who had saved others had been unable to save Himself, we may say with certainty that it would have been impos- sible to revive their crushed expectations, and that one who should then first come to them with the story of a resurrection would find them in no state of mind to give it credence. Or take the thing another way. They who, denying a real resurrection of Jesus, attempt to 14 NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY I explain the rise of a belief in it, appeal to the fact that there often remains on the mental retina the image of a luminous object after the object itself has been withdrawn. The face long familiar and long loved refuses to vanish from our mental vision, or is ever starting up unbidden. So the minds of those to whom Jesus was inexpressibly dear, and who had built on Him all their hopes, could not let His image go. Their prophet could not die. Thus whether or not Jesus of Nazareth actually did rise again, it was inevitable that His followers should believe that He did. I shall not discuss whether or not this explanation is suffi- cient, but it is evident that the exaltation of mind which it assumes on the part of our Lord's disciples only belongs to the time when their loss was still fresh. It is not conceivable after the time when the first poignancy of grief, which refuses to realise its loss, is succeeded by that dull pain which con- fesses that life has got to be lived on after all that made it dear has gone. Thus, if we are forbidden to hold the article of our creed, On the third day He rose again from the dead, we shall be forced to substitute, On or about the third day it came to be believed that He rose again from the dead. It follows that our chronology can find no place for a non-miraculous Gospel. At the very earliest date that we can imagine the history of our Lord's i NON- MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY 15 life put into writing, the story of the resurrection must have come to form an essential part of it. Criticism, then, can give us no help to eliminate this miracle from the record. A gospel which does not tell of a resurrection from the dead is an impossibility. If any critic imagine that he has arrived at such a gospel, the result condemns the method he has employed. If in this part of the history the authorities to which we have access exhibit greater variety than elsewhere, we must not infer that each had to supplement from his own resources an original narrative defective in this part, but rather that it was for this part of the story materials were so abundant that selection became necessary. In sum, then, a non-miraculous Christianity is as much a contradiction in terms as a quadrangular circle ; when you have taken away the super- natural, what is left behind is not Christianity. It is not the religion which the apostles preached ; it is not that into which converts were baptized ; it is not that for which martyrs gave their lives. There might be differences of enumeration if we were asked to state what were the supernatural facts which we should pronounce essential to Christianity ; but on this point we can be agreed that Christianity requires faith in a supernatural person. For any one who tries to clear away the 1 6 NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY I supernatural from Christianity has got to deal with the question, What think you of Christ ? Did He differ from other men in degree or in kind ? Was He, however pre-eminent above His fellows, a man who possibly may in other ages or other parts of the world have had His equals, and as time goes on, for all we know, may have His superior? Or was He a person altogether unique in the history of humanity ? Certain it is that nothing less than this is what His Church has always claimed for Him. From the earliest times Christians refused to acknowledge as belonging to their body those who admitted with Jesus sharers in His honour. There were those who set up images of Christ along with those of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and others, 1 but such obtained no recognition as fellow-disciples from the Christian body. And if it was thought a degradation to Christ to place Him on a level with philosophers, still more distasteful to Christians was the project attributed to the eclectic liberality of a half -con verted emperor to find room for their master in a pan- theon of heathen divinities. 2 He was not one who could share His glory with another. 1 So Irenaeus tells of the Carpocratians (H