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THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 MODERN CHRISTIAN 
 
 HOW MUCH CAN HE ACCEPT OF 
 TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY? 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD H. EPPENS 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 
 
 1911 
 
X 
 
 ^/ 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 Copyright, 1911 
 Sherman, French & Company 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 The following pages contain no attempt to 
 solve the insoluble questions of modern 
 thought. What has been aimed at is simply a 
 statement concerning the central facts of 
 Christian faith and worship. There are many 
 people to whom the penumbra of faith is too 
 congenial to allow them to feel at ease in the 
 bright light of the central sun. Some of these 
 may appreciate an honest expression con- 
 cerning the difficulties of their position. Those 
 whose faith has suffered total eclipse — if there 
 be any such — will not be influenced by another 
 person's assurance that the sun still shines 
 unto the coming of the perfect day. With 
 those who have reached finality about the mo- 
 mentous questions of Christian prayer, the 
 writer seeks no quarrel. He is aware that he 
 has nothing to offer them. 
 
 But perhaps it may not be out of place to as- 
 sert that the purpose of these pages is not to 
 unsettle cherished convictions. The writer's 
 own faith in God and God's message to man 
 would make such a negative proceeding impos- 
 sible. The modem man is asking questions. 
 He wants to know. If he remains humbly con- 
 scious of his limitations and is willing to try 
 out, patiently, whatever the progress of human 
 thought presents, he shall have nothing to fear 
 
 304010 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 of the war of words over debatable subjects. 
 What is not true will fall of its own weight; 
 what is true and of God will stand forever. 
 
 E. H. E. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 The Center of Theology .... 1 
 
 The Influence of Paul .... 9 
 
 Paul's Solution of the Christ-Problem . l6 
 
 The Use of the Term God as Applied to 
 
 Jesus ...... 24 
 
 The Difficulties of Paul's Position . . SI 
 
 The Influence of the Easter Stories . 35 
 
 Value of the New Testament in Marking 
 
 the Growth ..... 45 
 
 Worship of Christ ..... 50 
 What Can We Ascertain Concerning Jesus? 
 
 The Negative Side .... 56 
 What Can We Ascertain Concerning Jesus? 
 
 The Positive Side .... 68 
 
 The Supplement to History ... 74 
 The Religion of Jesus .... 84 
 **LoRD, Teach Us How to Pray" . . 95 
 What is Christian Prayer? . . .105 
 
 Prayer to Jesus in Modern Times — Hym- 
 
 NOLOOY . . . . . .111 
 
 The Reasons for Prayer to Jesus . 119 
 
 The Case of the Modern Man . .135 
 
 The Call of Nature . . . .139 
 
 What Immanence Contributes to Worship 155 
 What Jesus is to Us Today . . . l65 
 The Standard Applied to Life . .174 
 
THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 MODERN CHRISTIAN 
 
 THE CENTER OF THEOLOGY 
 
 Thoughts, like heavenly bodies, move in 
 cycles. Periods of obscuration are followed 
 by periods of intense illumination. For long 
 seasons an important truth may entirely be 
 cut off from view by a relatively small but 
 more immediately important body of ideas, only 
 to burst upon our astonished gaze with the 
 suddenness of a new discovery. And the chances 
 are that in a very short time some "discoverer" 
 will present himself with the triumphant an- 
 nouncement that he has had a vision of a new 
 world, and the public, always anxious to see 
 something new, will stare and marvel at the 
 wonderful progress of truth. It is at lihis 
 point that the student of the past usually in- 
 trudes to put the discovery into the right light 
 and to show that it is, most probably, but the 
 emergence of some old, neglected, or forgotten 
 fact. 
 
 In theology one of these many binary systems 
 of thought is represented by the terms Jesus 
 and God. The two extremes express themselves 
 in the opposite statements that theology is the 
 science of God, and that our theology must 
 be christo-centric. That Christ occupies or 
 
tp » ) 
 
 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 ought to occupy the commanding position in 
 the theological world has been hailed again and 
 again as the grand discovery of modem times. 
 This is true not only of the so-called devotional 
 literature of today, but it applies to serious 
 and ponderous productions, and the pulpits, 
 from the metropolis to the logging camp, re- 
 peat the news. 
 
 In view of the urgency with which this view 
 is presented it becomes absolutely imperative 
 to examine afresh the basis of so far-reaching 
 a claim and to see, if possible, in how far the 
 authentic facts of history fit themselves into 
 the theory. 
 
 That the place of Christ is at the very center 
 of our religious life and thought is anything 
 but a new claim ; the whole cultus of the church 
 gives a practical demonstration of its antiquity. 
 It will be our business in the following pages 
 to authenticate, approximately, how far this 
 tendency is associated with the life of Chris- 
 tianity and how far it is justified by the prac- 
 tices of its founders and its inspirer, and by 
 the inferences which the modern man is bound 
 to make from the modern conception of God 
 and His universe. 
 
 There have never been voices wanting, to 
 tell us that the demand that our theology be 
 christo-centric grows out of a confusion of 
 terms. And yet the demand was a most natural 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 3 
 
 one in the circumstances. Was not theology 
 largely responsible for that mountain of rubbish 
 that had been piled up between God and the 
 soul, cutting off all means of communication 
 with the other world? The term rubbish is 
 used advisedly, as indicating what is, in the 
 business of religion, relatively worthless, though 
 we are conscious that we shall never be able 
 to repay the debt we owe to past generations 
 of sturdy thinkers and path-finders who tried 
 to make God accessible and comprehensible to 
 man. 
 
 Nevertheless, the practical result was that the 
 God so earnestly sought seemed to recede far- 
 ther into the distance with every fresh attempt 
 to bring him down to earth. The theology 
 which eventually proved to be triumphant and 
 which, today, enjoys the prestige of a solid 
 following was the one that had put the trans- 
 cendence of God at the head of its whole pro- 
 gram. To safeguard that tenet men were will- 
 ing to sacrifice much — even the freedom of the 
 will and the goodness of creation. 
 
 In many quarters the conviction became irre- 
 sistible that the ultimate ground of the universe 
 was beyond the reach of the human mind, and 
 the general apathy of agnosticism made all 
 further progress in that direction impossible. 
 Science, omniscient, infallible, and brooking no 
 contradiction, had put up the warning, " No 
 
4 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 Thoroughfare!" — and that had settled the 
 matter for many whose hearts were hungering 
 for the living God. 
 
 For it has become a settled conviction that 
 it is a capital crime for the mind to trespass 
 on forbidden ground. Practically all the con- 
 fusion of thought, all the conflicts between 
 science and theology, all the so-called crises in 
 belief would have been avoided if all the engag- 
 ing parties had but kept on their own side of 
 the fence marking off the natural boundaries, 
 and had refused to meddle with matters that 
 were none of their business. Man has ever 
 been careless about observing the truism that 
 efficiency in one department of intellectual 
 activity is no guarantee of a similar efficiency 
 in another department of intellectual activity. 
 A prince on one side of a line may make only 
 an indifferent hewer of wood on the other side. 
 In some matters a humble goat herd may be a 
 better authority than a whole ecumenical 
 council. 
 
 The modern mind will be scientific or noth- 
 ing. And science has nothing to do with God. 
 It was not an explosion of irreverent bravado, 
 but a plain statement of fact, when the author 
 of the Mecanique Celeste told Napoleon that 
 he had no need of the hypothesis of God. For 
 an astronomer to fold his hands at a celestial 
 mystery and to say Kismet — this is so because 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 6 
 
 God wills it — is simply the abdication of as- 
 tronomy. One may try to judge of the inten- 
 tions of the creator by what seem to be the 
 purposes of creation; but the causes to which 
 the visible phenomena are traced have nothing 
 to do with God. Scientists may be and often 
 are ardent theists. A cloud of witnesses shows 
 that scientific preeminence is thoroughly com- 
 patible with a Christian faith; Copernicus, Kep- 
 ler, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Agassiz, Von 
 Baer, Ohm, Joule, Maedler, Pasteur, Lord 
 Kelvin, the Herschels, De Candolle, Von Lie- 
 big, Rob. Mayer, many of whom were strictly 
 orthodox, were in no way handicapped by their 
 religious beliefs. "When I was at Cambridge," 
 wrote Romanes, "there was a galaxy of genius 
 in that department (mathematics) emanating 
 from that place such as had never before been 
 equalled. And the curious thing is that all the 
 most illustrious names were ranged on the side 
 of orthodoxy." 
 
 But science, as science, is coldly and inevit- 
 ably atheistic, and when it reaches the limits 
 of its chosen province, permits its followers to 
 say merely — Ignoramus, and hands the un- 
 solved problems over to the philosopher. This 
 is not due to perversity, but to the definite 
 limitations of which the mind is conscious, 
 imposed on it as a condition of intellectual pro- 
 gress. To a psalmist the heavens may declare 
 
6 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 the glory of God and the earth and her trea- 
 sures show his handiwork, to the devoutest min- 
 eralogist a splendent quartz crystal, the very 
 triumph of nature's marvelous molecular 
 powers, is nothing but a prism, with apparently 
 hexagonal pyramids, of the hardness seven, be- 
 longing to the rhombohedral type, with weak 
 double refraction under crossed nicols, made of 
 silicon dioxide. And stars are so much gas, 
 and the iris is a monocotyledon, and man is 
 homo sapiens^ a primate mammal, and God and 
 man are of the same image. Lagrange's 
 answer to the bon-mot of sceptical La Place 
 was to the effect that nevertheless God, as a 
 hypothesis, accounted for many things. Which 
 was perfectly true, only, to "account for 
 things" is rather the business of the poet and 
 of the prophet, and they are abundantly able 
 to lift this burden from the stooping shoulders 
 of the less ambitious scientist. 
 
 One natural result of this division of labor 
 in an age when the poet and the prophet were 
 at a discount and when the scientist held the 
 center of the stage, was a lurking, uneasy sus- 
 picion that God was, perhaps, nothing but an 
 unnecessary hypothesis anyway. 
 
 And the recovery of God was, for many a 
 mind, along the way pointed out by Jesus of 
 Nazareth nineteen hundred years ago. Heaven 
 was again made accessible via Palestine. What 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 7 
 
 wonder that men hailed the new christology 
 as a deliverer from the house of bondage ! Here 
 was a veritable Ariadne's cord that promised 
 salvation! And straightway "christology" be- 
 came a word to conjure with. 
 
 Furthermore, this new interest, with all its 
 overemphasis, afforded a long overdue relief 
 from the entities and quiddities, the attributes 
 and proofs, the absolute and the unconditioned, 
 with which theology had been content to juggle 
 for ages. The questions whether infants dying 
 before baptism could be saved, whether there 
 was a devil, whether this was the best possible 
 world, whether truth was truth because God 
 willed it, gave place to mightier matters about 
 God's intimate relations to a suffering and as- 
 piring humanity and the possibility of an ap- 
 proach between the two parties. 
 
 In these matters Jesus had spoken the deliver- 
 ing word. What he had taught bore the 
 authority of truth, though it contradicted all 
 the scribes and pharisees. The finest and 
 deepest revelation we have concerning God 
 came, as a matter of fact, through him. To 
 convey this message from God to man consti- 
 tuted, as he believed, his very life-work. To 
 reveal himself, to put himself at the center of 
 his message, was utterly foreign to his habits 
 of thinking. It will be more convenient to 
 examine the content of this message later on 
 
8 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 (p. 84, ff.) ; but it is well to bear in mind 
 that the theology of Jesus — if with a somewhat 
 violent stretch of words we may thus designate 
 his opinions about rehgion — centered in God. 
 The implications of this are so far-reaching 
 and so subversive that many have refused to 
 subscribe to what seems so simple and self-evi- 
 dent a statement. For this standard will tre- 
 mendously effect our estimate of many sayings 
 about things not divine as recorded in the 
 gospels. 
 
 It is notorious what the Christian imagina- 
 tion and pious homage afterwards did with the 
 authentic words; the New Testament furnishes 
 abundant documentary evidence that quite early 
 the tendency to shift the emphasis made itself 
 felt even among those who were most interested 
 in preserving the memory of Jesus and his 
 wonderful words. In saying this we expose 
 ourselves to the danger of being misunderstood 
 in quarters where the finding of "tendencies" 
 has lost all credit and where the fiction is still 
 bravely exploited that Baur and company 
 busied themselves with the very caput mortuum 
 of criticism, done to death by careful scholar- 
 ship and supplied with a convincing obituary 
 by Lightfoot and others. Such corpses have 
 a strange fatality about them in that they often 
 revive when they seem buried for good. So, 
 at least, it has happened with the tendenz- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 9 
 
 theory. For it may be stated with the utmost 
 confidence that if there is any one certain re- 
 sult which we owe to the comparative study 
 of the gospel narratives it is the conviction that 
 Jesus did not speak as the fourth gospel re- 
 ports him to have spoken. To make Christ 
 the central and controlling point of theology 
 was perfectly in accord with the Johannine tra- 
 dition, though it could be done only at the 
 expense of the other traditions ; as a matter 
 of fact it meant putting the revealer in the 
 place of the revelation. The message was lost 
 in the messenger. 
 
 The central fact of the redemptive drama, 
 the very key and raison d'etre of the life and 
 death of Jesus is the revelation that there is 
 a loving God. This is the essence of the good 
 news. A christian theology is impossible with- 
 out the appreciation of the truth that it was 
 Jesus who brought this news, and he who admits 
 that is in no danger of ignoring or of under- 
 estimating the christological factors of redemp- 
 tion. But back of the whole scheme that cul- 
 minates in the appearance and the work of 
 Jesus is the moving force : " God sent his Son." 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF PAUL 
 
 Whoever is, in any way, interested in a dis- 
 cussion of the place of Christ in the thought of 
 today is obliged to begin with the influence 
 
10 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 of the apostle Paul. Not only does the christian 
 church owe to Paul practically all the stock 
 in trade of christology, not only are the tech- 
 nical terms of theology essentially Pauline, but 
 in our attempt to get at the real Jesus we shall 
 find that we will have to fight our way, step 
 by step, through a mass of obstructions that 
 owe their existence in large part to his writ- 
 ings. It is an old story that Paul had come to 
 introduce something new into the simple gospel. 
 For a long time, and to an astonishingly large 
 proportion of the early Christians — the judaiz- 
 ing element in general — Paul was looked upon 
 as an arch-heretic. 
 
 It is not necessary to make a fault of this. 
 Paul was, after all, a man of flesh and blood, 
 not a coldly calculating machine, grinding out 
 doctrines, such as some recent writers have 
 pleased to describe him. The whole Pauline 
 christology was built up to honor Jesus, not 
 to bury him. That he was, in reality, buried 
 was less the result of what Paul had laboriously 
 thought out than the result of the theologi- 
 cal vice of assuming that these forms, though 
 they were sometimes wofuUy loose-jointed, 
 were the final and perfect receptacles of divine 
 truth. For centuries theology was pure idola- 
 try, in which Paul supplanted all other claim- 
 ants to the loyalty of believers. His writings 
 supplied the standard of belief. There was 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 11 
 
 no other. What he said was final with the 
 church. He was one of those fortunate, or 
 unfortunate, men — Plato and Aristotle and 
 Kant were others — ^who wield such a power over 
 the intellectual activity of whole eras that even 
 their most ludicrous blunders are surrounded 
 with a sacrosanct aureola. The time is not 
 yet past when the student of religion can find 
 his dearest convictions about Jesus demolished 
 with the supposedly unanswerable, " But what 
 does the Bible say.?" and find his mouth stuff'ed 
 with — a quotation from the epistle to the 
 Romans ! 
 
 One is led to wonder what Paul himself would 
 have had to say to this sort of procedure. He 
 was not the kind of a man to refuse homage 
 where homage was due; he was not above us- 
 ing the tricks of rhetoric himself. It is sur- 
 prising what an amount of space is consumed 
 in the exercise of logical sleight-of-hand (note 
 the exegetical monstrosities in Galatians S and 
 4, Romans 4 and 10, and I Corinthians 9, 
 with the rabbinical idea about the oxen!) But 
 these were simply arguments addressed to in- 
 dividuals with their mental peculiarities, meant 
 to drive home some definite truths. If he had 
 foreseen that the day was coming when his own 
 words would be given apodictic value, and when 
 his personality was to overshadow and to sup- 
 plant the very person whom to proclaim and 
 
12 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 to explain was his whole life-work, he would, 
 no doubt, have refused to dictate a single word. 
 Those are least true to Paul's spirit who ima- 
 gine that he has spoken the last word about 
 God and about Jesus Christ and about sin. 
 
 For it was his one object to proclaim Christ 
 and him crucified; to do anything else was, in 
 his estimation, a sufficient reason for those 
 terrible anathemas which he was the first to 
 hurl against schismatics; everything else was 
 but idle dross and empty sound. And yet the 
 irony of history would have it that in the suc- 
 ceeding clash of warring minds the champion 
 should get practically all the honors, and the 
 cause championed should be forgotten. The 
 benevolent Caesar obliterated his patrimony. 
 
 " When could they say, till now, that talk'd of Rome, 
 That her wide walls encompass 'd but one man?" 
 
 So it happened in the history of the church. 
 
 The evidential value of what Paul believed 
 and taught concerning Jesus is determined by 
 his own personal experience. That experience 
 had nothing to do with the historical Jesus. 
 That may be, to many, a hard saying, but it 
 is literally true. Paul begins where Jesus ends. 
 The history of a man's influence may not begin 
 until after his death, the history of the man 
 himself ends with his death. The death on 
 the cross is the starting point for Paul's the- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 18 
 
 ology. And when the start was once made it 
 proceeded in a direction which was sure to end, 
 by and by, in what has been defined as a re- 
 gular Christ-mythology. The doctrine of 
 Christ's preexistence overpowered all interest 
 in the details of the merely human life. Of 
 this preexistent state Paul is sure — his con- 
 version, the resurrection, the whole scheme of 
 salvation is dependent upon its truth. Like 
 all fundamental truths it is taken for granted. 
 Paul does not argue the case; it is an axiom 
 to be presupposed, and it is true, it must be 
 true, because it explains so much that could 
 not be explained in any other fashion. 
 
 Now it may be affirmed that no person who 
 had stood under the spell of that wonderful 
 life as it developed in the hill towns of Galilee, 
 and which was cut short by that judicial murder 
 in Jerusalem would ever have constructed or 
 been able to construct the elaborate machinery 
 which we hear creaking through some of the 
 arguments which Paul employs to unite the 
 heavenly Christ and the historical Jesus. The 
 demand that is upon orthodoxy to accomplish 
 this task is, even today, responsible for some 
 marvelous manipulations. And Paul was a pio- 
 neer in the business. 
 
 The modem reader is always in danger of 
 forgetting that Paul knew no "gospels" such 
 as have come down to us. His work was done 
 
14 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 long before the piety of the early church had 
 collected and set in order, as Luke tells us, 
 the narrative of that short life, tracing " the 
 course of all things accurately from the first." 
 The church was too busy to make literature; 
 it was making life. So he was unable to check 
 off his speculations and regulate them with any 
 documents which might have carried weight 
 comparable to that which he was accustomed 
 to attach to the Old Testament. His persistent 
 use of arguments drawn from that source shows 
 what he would have done if he had had more 
 than an ever so reliable tradition, based on the 
 hearsay of men whom the fourth gospel, which 
 was composed under Pauline influences, system- 
 atically represents as having misunderstood the 
 Master's words. 
 
 With Paul it is a matter of pride, almost, 
 that he did not know Jesus intimately, after 
 the flesh. And faith in him had nothing to 
 do with the actual message which formed the 
 content of Q — the main source employed by 
 the synoptists when they made their attempt 
 to write "gospels". It would be simply impos- 
 sible to deduce a Pauline theology from the 
 gospel as proclaimed by Jesus. We shall find, 
 on investigation, that Jesus did not much con- 
 cern himself about the reasons for things in 
 general and faith in particular; Paul is always 
 trying to justify God's ways with man. Jesus 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 16 
 
 has no system of ethics, all lengthy discussions 
 on the subject notwithstanding, no theodicee, 
 no "plan of salvation," no philosophy of his- 
 tory, without all of which paulinism is utterly 
 unthinkable. 
 
 In one way this independence over against 
 the actual life facts was a priceless blessing, 
 for it gave Paul an opportunity to prove to 
 all coming times that faith in Christ is not 
 contingent upon the acceptance of this or that 
 detail of history, just as such details may fail 
 to carry conviction, in spite of all their histori- 
 cal vouchers. There is no danger that Paul 
 will ever be charged with disloyalty to his 
 Master and Savior, now that history has proved 
 his system to have been right and that of the 
 judaizers to have been wrong. And yet he 
 is satisfied to ignore vastly interesting matters, 
 of which he must have heard discussions, matters 
 which, to say no more, were at least as impor- 
 tant as any theory about justification could 
 possibly be. And the facts that he seemed to 
 know absolutely nothing of the dogma of the 
 miraculous birth, that the colliding accounts 
 of the resurrection event gave him so little 
 uneasiness that he didn't even take the trouble 
 of showing why he believed in his transub- 
 stantiation idea, and that all along he could 
 insist on the supremacy of Jesus Christ as Lord 
 over all solely on the strength of his own 
 
16 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 wonderful experience and some fragmentary 
 bits of tradition: all this makes his example 
 a factor of inestimable value to the apologist 
 of today when even the man in the street is be- 
 ginning to suspect that the facts of history and 
 the legends of pseudo-history fail to exhaust the 
 meaning of things. 
 
 In most things the church has been willing 
 to walk as a captive, chained to his chariot 
 wheels ; but it has refused to imitate his example 
 of acting as a sovereign over the innumerable 
 accidentals of history. 
 
 Paul's solution of the christ-problem 
 
 The question as to what rank the exalted 
 Christ (for none other has the least interest 
 for him) occupies in Paul's system is a rather 
 complicated one. For he was a manysided man, 
 and fearlessly attacked problems which were 
 sure to involve the most accomplished dialecti- 
 cian in a tangle of contradiction, some of which 
 he noticed and tried to remove, while others 
 were handed over to later times. It was an 
 ominous legacy: what a mass of expositions 
 and explanations and harmonizations has been 
 piled up to smooth the way and connect the 
 isolated peaks! Paul was a mortal, but the 
 Pauline theology was inspired, in the premises, 
 and the interpreters did what they thought their 
 duty. The end was that the man was inter- 
 preted out of existence. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 17 
 
 This is, obviously, not the place to discuss 
 the various methods he used to help himself, 
 but it will be necessary to mention a few of 
 the more prominent facts to show that even he 
 had his difficulties with the nature of the god- 
 head — ^the puzzle that was soon to split Chris- 
 tendom into fiercely fighting sections. Paul 
 was perfectly innocent of the coming mischief, 
 the trouble lay not so much with his explana- 
 tions — man can but do his best — as with the 
 subject. Still, he had dared to explain and 
 justify God's ways, and when a man does that 
 he is sure to invite trouble upon his head. It 
 is not an extravagance to say that it was he 
 who sowed the wind which soon developed into 
 the whirlwind that tore the churches into frag- 
 ments. 
 
 As already stated, to Paul Christ's preexist- 
 ence was not something to be argued and estab- 
 lished; it is assumed, without argument, need- 
 ing no proof, perhaps admitting no proof, 
 withal so certain that he is free to build up his 
 whole system upon it. 
 
 But this preexistence did not necessarily in- 
 volve, as one might suppose, the idea of the 
 divinity of Jesus. As a learned Pharisee, versed 
 in Alexandrian and Hebrew lore, he was per- 
 fectly at home in the mystical speculations about 
 that Being through whom the world had been 
 made and which eventually became the mouth- 
 
18 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 piece of God's messages to humanity. It was 
 the peculiarly Jewish hope that sometime this 
 Being would manifest itself on earth. The 
 messianic hope and the doctrine of the logos, 
 a word to be made flesh, together formed the 
 one great subject for debate with all intelligent 
 Jews who were not hopelessly entangled in the 
 business of building a hedge around the law 
 and of commenting on the comments of the 
 original comments of the rabbis. 
 
 This Being, whatever it was, was distinct 
 from God, and yet almost everything that 
 could be predicated of God could also, in some 
 sense, be applied to it. The times were ripe 
 for God's messenger to appear, the kingdom 
 was at liand. Even in the Gentile world there 
 were vague anticipations, flashes of prophecy 
 came from far-off lands like the coruscations 
 of a hot summer evening. The nations had 
 been asking wearily. Watchman, what of the 
 night ? 
 
 And lo, here are rumors of the wonderful 
 deeds and the astonishing sayings of a Gali- 
 lean teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. Whether he 
 ever claimed to be the messiah outright is a 
 question that is not so easily settled as some 
 seem to imagine. Those who deny that he did 
 are at present in a hopeless minority, but they 
 have at least shown, now that the old proof -text 
 method is on its last legs, that it is unsafe to 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 19 
 
 dogmatize about things that happened ages 
 ago. However, the historical fact remains, un- 
 touched by any reasonable doubts, that it was 
 as a messiah that Jesus was put to death. The 
 ideals of many had been realized in him; many 
 had hoped that it was he who would redeem 
 Israel — it required no more than that vision 
 on the road to Damascus and the subsequent 
 study of what facts were accessible to convince 
 the zealous Saul that these despised "Chris- 
 tians," were right in their claims. 
 
 He was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, 
 as he says in his defense before Herod Agrippa, 
 but proclaimed the crucified Jesus as the glori- 
 fied Christ. Investing the historical character 
 with all the transcendent attributes of a super- 
 natural being, he far outdid even the disciples 
 in determining the lines along which the religion 
 of Christ was to be developed. 
 
 Not that Paul was perfectly sure himself 
 as to how this new investiture of Jesus with 
 what were practically divine powers was to be 
 justified. A careful reading of his letters can- 
 not fail to show that occasionally his ideas 
 about monotheism got a terrible jolt. He was 
 first of all a Jew, then a Christian. His manip- 
 ulations of the prepositions in, with, through, 
 by, above, his anxiety to prove a God over all, 
 his carefulness to distinguish between God and 
 Christ shows that in his own mind there were 
 
m THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 some difficulties about his explanation which 
 were rather uncomfortable, and which he was 
 unable to remove. 
 
 No one can tell what might have happened 
 if the convenient and adaptable figure of speech 
 "Son of God" had not offered itself as a key 
 to the wards of this complicated lock. Indeed, 
 it may confidently be asserted that without this 
 phrase a goodly portion of his theology would 
 never have been constructed. We are all, per- 
 force, slaves to the letter, and it has ever been 
 a waste of time to bemoan the inevitable; 
 trouble arises only when we ignore or forget 
 the condition of this bondage. 
 
 Here was a great truth that needed expres- 
 sion — perhaps ithe most momentous truth of 
 which we can form any conception — that God 
 can have an active and vital relation to his 
 universe, that He is not far from each one of 
 us, and that humanity can partake of His very 
 nature. What formula could best express 
 this relation? What set of words would leave 
 the smallest number of false impressions? 
 Where everything was but a mere approxima- 
 tion, which one was it that could boast of the 
 greatest historical dignity, and appealed most 
 intimately to the halting intelligence of man? 
 The term Son of God best told the truth. 
 
 This required no lengthy, metaphysical argu- 
 ment to make it plausible ; it was not the result 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 21 
 
 of subtle thinking; it was just the most natural 
 way of stating the facts. The son was bom (a 
 "son" must be born, well understood!) and his 
 name was Immanuel, God with us. 
 
 The point to be remembered in this connec' 
 tion is that "son of God" is, for a Christian, 
 nothing but a figure of speech, as is, in very 
 fact, every term drawn from human experi- 
 ence and relations and applied directly to God. 
 At the risk of being misunderstood one is forced 
 to say this even of the personality of God. 
 What word or set of words can adequately de- 
 scribe Him.'^ Most of the endless lucubrations 
 about the metaphysical and the physical son- 
 ship that make so much christology a weariness 
 to the flesh would have been avoided if this had 
 been kept in mind. 
 
 Gunkel has given convincing proof that 
 wherever the idea of sons of God is introduced 
 in the Old Testament we have the strongest 
 reasons for suspecting the influence of extra- 
 israelitish, i. e., polytheistic religions. Pure 
 monotheism has no room for the idea that God 
 may have a son, or a father, for that matter. 
 As for the term "mother of God," consecrated 
 through long usage, that would strike many 
 Christian believers fully as irreverent as the 
 analogous, if frivolous "grandmother of God." 
 
 Procreation in any but a metaphorical sense 
 breaks up the unity of the godhead. But the 
 
ftSt THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 objectionable term, inadequate as it was, had 
 to be used if there was to be any progress in 
 the work of accounting for the faith that ani- 
 mated the early church. Needless to say, a va- 
 riety of ideas found shelter in this flexible 
 phrase, ranging all the way from the legal fic- 
 tion of adoption to the mythological efforts to 
 establish a direct line of physical descent be- 
 tween God and the babe bom of Mary. For 
 any person who allows a figure of speech to run 
 away with him is, like Voltaire's Habakkuk, ca- 
 pable of anything, even of creating genealo- 
 gies. 
 
 With Paul the title "Son of God" oscillates 
 between two points: 1. Christ is pre-existent, 
 the son of God with power (Rom. 1, 4) of the 
 same nature as God's, the image of the invis- 
 ible God (Col. 1, 15) descended from Him, or 
 adopted by Him, above all created beings in 
 heaven or on earth. 2. He is also different from 
 the Father, "and when all things have been sub- 
 jected unto Him then shall the Son also himself 
 be subjected to Him . . . that God may be all 
 in all." (1 Cor. 15, 28). What we are to Christ, 
 Christ is to God, (1 Cor. 11, 3), he is the me- 
 dium of creation, but also the firstborn of all 
 creation. 
 
 In the confusion of these and many other at- 
 tributes one fact stands out clearly and signifi- 
 cantly : however near Paul comes to identifying 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 23 
 
 the natures of God and of the exalted, glorified 
 Christ, he cannot get his pen to write outright, 
 Jesus Christ is God. (The solitary text, Ro- 
 mans 9, 5, may be discussed more profitably 
 later on.) 
 
 A typical passage occurs in the chapter con- 
 cerning things sacrificed to idols, I Cor. 8, 4fF. 
 Here he takes the ground that though idols are 
 mere simulacra, yet they are, after a fashion, 
 something more, for they can even be counted, 
 there are many so-called gods — and there are 
 many lords (Paul had no occasion to deny the 
 reality of other lords in the course of this ar- 
 gument) — "yet to us there is one God, the 
 Father, of whom are all things and we unto 
 him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom 
 are all things, and we through him." 
 
 No modern exposition could show more 
 plainly than do these carefully chosen words 
 that he is determined to distinguish between 
 God the Father and Jesus Christ the Lord. 
 
 Such passages can be found by the score, 
 even in arguments where the Pauline Christ- 
 theology is most highly developed, and they 
 speak volumes for the natural reserve and care- 
 fulness of a man who often gives the impression 
 that he is all fire and impetuosity, whose main 
 object is to carry his point. 
 
5e4 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 THE USE OP THE TERM GOD AS APPLIED TO 
 JESUS 
 
 For the sake of completeness it will be well 
 to group the passages in the New Testament in 
 which the term God is directly applied to Jesus. 
 
 That divine powers and prerogatives are 
 given to him is not a matter for debate. And 
 it may be said, quite properly, that where we 
 have the thing we need not quarrel about 
 names. But the fact to be noted is that in 
 naming Jesus the various writers generally and 
 instinctively use other predicates than that of 
 God. 
 
 The fog of sundry theological controver- 
 sies, now happily dissipated in civilized parts, 
 has somewhat obscured the real state of affairs, 
 and so the matter became the subject of careful 
 study. The results have been tabulated quite 
 systematically. 
 
 These tables show that among some sixty odd 
 appellations given to the Master in the whole 
 New Testament "Jesus" leads, being found in 
 610 places. Then foUow "Christ" (272), "Lord'* 
 (193 — of which the Pauline literature supplies 
 150), "Son of God" (77), "Son of Man" (73), 
 "Our Lord," with the addition Jesus Christ 
 or Christ Jesus, etc. (63), "Teacher" — ^in 
 many cases but a polite form of address (40), 
 "King" (25), "Savior" (10).* 
 • Vid. Studierstube 1905, p. 20 flf. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 25 
 
 It must always remain a question in the 
 minds of many whether such word-counting and 
 word-weighing is worth the time expended upon 
 it, invariably so with those who prefer to de- 
 pend upon their own intuitions and then talk 
 about the "destructive results of criticism" and 
 sneer at theology made in Germany or Holland 
 or Switzerland, as though its willingness to take 
 infinite pains proved it to be of an inferior sort, 
 especially when its conclusions turn out to be a 
 trifle unconventional. The fact is that no sci- 
 ence worth the name is possible without an enor- 
 mous amount of just this kind of painful 
 drudgery. The main business of science is not 
 to be interesting, but to be accurate even at 
 the risk of becoming dry as dust. 
 
 But the importance of early Christian usage 
 in the matter of the naming of Jesus abund- 
 antly justifies this labor in this particular di- 
 rection. There is no indication anywhere that 
 it is going to obscure the weightier matters of 
 the law and the gospel. 
 
 It is notable in the circumstances that the 
 term God as applied to Jesus is found to have 
 been used but six (or five) times. 
 
 (1) John 20, 28. "Thomas answered and 
 said unto him. My Lord and my God." The 
 value of this saying will be determined by what 
 is known to have been the consistent policy of 
 the writer of the fourth gospel with regard to 
 
«6 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 the personality of Jesus. That the term should 
 be used only once, and then put into the mouth 
 of a Thomas, at that, is most surprising. The 
 problem with John would be to explain why he 
 does not use it oftener. Another factor which 
 will have to be considered in weighing this sec- 
 tion of the gospel is given in the conclusion, 
 upon which there seems to be a pretty general 
 agreement, that its present shape is largely due 
 to the quarrel which the early church had with 
 the docetics. Otherwise the risen Jesus would 
 probably never have been represented as invit- 
 ing the touch of the incredulous Thomas — only 
 ten verses after the noli me tangere to Mary: 
 *'Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to 
 the Father." The only reasonable conclusion 
 seems to be that in the interval Jesus has as- 
 cended unto the Father. The ascension had 
 not robbed the body of Jesus of its tangibility, 
 and that surely would put a quietus on any at- 
 tempt to show that he was only a seeming man, 
 with a make-belief body. Needless to say, this 
 ascension has, if anything, added to the super- 
 natural attributes of this veridical body. It 
 should also be noted that the "my" of Thomas 
 modifies and restricts the meaning of "God." 
 The writer does not make the unqualified asser- 
 tion that Jesus is God. 
 
 (2) Titus 2, 13. "Looking for ... . the 
 glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 27 
 
 Christ." Marginal rendering: "of our great 
 God and Savior." That it is absolutely useless 
 to base any argument upon this verse either for 
 or against the identity of Jesus Christ with the 
 Father is vouched for sufficiently by the fact 
 that interpreters are hopelessly divided as to 
 the meaning of the connective "and." The ques- 
 tion will never be decided on grammatical 
 grounds so much as by the dogmatic preposses- 
 sions for or against the doctrine of Christ's 
 deity. A reference to any standard commentary 
 will show that the evenly balanced considera- 
 tions will somehow incline on the side of the 
 writer's beliefs. Commentators are human be- 
 ings, with whom the wish is often father of the 
 thought. The main argument on the one side 
 centers on the employment of one article for 
 the two appellatives ; on the other side the gen- 
 eral usage of the New Testament is made deter- 
 minative. The personal equation of the re- 
 spective writers must always be considered in 
 settling the question to one's own satisfaction. 
 (3) 2 Peter 1, 1. "The righteousness of our 
 God and (the) Savior Jesus Christ." The un- 
 mistakable marks of this epistle are decisive 
 for placing the date of composition in a time 
 when the apostolic tradition concerning Jesus 
 was beginning to be colored by the doctrinal 
 interests of the second century. The late date 
 of this epistle speaks strongly for the identifi- 
 
«8 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 cation of "our God" and "the Savior Jesus 
 Christ"; it also supplies a reliable criterion 
 when one wants to estimate the value of the 
 phrase as evidence of apostolic usage. For the 
 rest, the grammatical difficulties of interpreta- 
 tion involved in (2) reappear in the discussion 
 of this passage. 
 
 (4) Jude, verse 25. "To the only God our 
 Savior." This reference is included to illustrate 
 the usage of the pastoral epistles which intro- 
 duces the term savior as descriptive of God, 
 found elsewhere only in the Magnificat (Luke 
 1, 47.) "My spirit hath rejoiced in God, my 
 Savior." That Jesus cannot be meant is plain 
 from the context: "To the only God our Sa- 
 vior, through Jesus Christ our Lord be glory, 
 etc." 
 
 (5) In Hebrews 1, 8, the writer applies an 
 Old Testament passage (Psalm 45, 6f.) directly 
 to Jesus. Christ, the Son, whom all the angels 
 of God are to worship, supplants God ; "but of 
 the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is forever 
 and ever, etc." In other words, the words of 
 a nuptual ode, written to magnify the marriage 
 of a king to a beautiful bride — a secular song 
 that somehow got into the canon — are directly 
 put into the mouth of God to predicate deity 
 of the Son. The introduction of the epistle 
 is sufficient evidence that the writer did not 
 identify the Son, through whom God spoke, 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN «9 
 
 with very God himself. The passage under 
 consideration is only a quotation, more or less 
 apposite. 
 
 (6) We now come to the last and most 
 important case, Romans 9, 5. "Of whom is 
 Christ as concerning the flesh who is over all 
 God blessed forever amen." This may be 
 called the classic illustration of the importance 
 of commas. What those words mean to the 
 reader will depend entirely upon the method 
 of punctuation he is pleased to adopt. The 
 original texts, lacking commas and periods, 
 give no aid in deciding the controversy. Is 
 Christ here called God over all, blessed forever.'' 
 Or are these words simply a doxology.? It is 
 purely a matter of interpretation; and the 
 history of this interpretation, a most wearisome 
 affair, is calculated to make the unsophisticated 
 lay reader ask, why so much agitation about 
 nothing.? He cannot be blamed for refusing 
 to thresh over the old straw yet once again. 
 Sanday and Headlam give a cursory account 
 of this history (International Crit. Com., in 
 loco) and their guarded and qualified conclu- 
 sion is that " throughout there has been no 
 argument which we have felt to be quite con- 
 clusive." The following points deserve con- 
 sideration : 
 
 a. The usage of Paul, with whom, certainly, 
 the ascription of such words to Christ would 
 be abnormal. 
 
60 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 b. The usage of the fathers — they generally, 
 like most expositors of the earlier days, referred 
 the words to Christ. 
 
 c. The astonishing suddenness with which 
 Christ is made God over all — which is the last 
 thing Paul, or for that matter, any other New 
 Testament writer would think of. 
 
 d. The appropriateness or inappropriateness 
 of a doxology in this place, both sides finding 
 their champions. 
 
 The upshot of the whole controversy is noth- 
 ing but a grand Perhaps. Perhaps Paul had 
 Christ in mind, perhaps he was true to his 
 principle recorded in all his epistles, and re- 
 fused, here, too, to break his rule. At the most, 
 the words would be the expression of a dithy- 
 rambic mood, forming the climax of one of his 
 most exalted declarations, which might well end 
 with a fervid Amen ! That the statement is a de- 
 liberate pronouncement concerning the identity 
 of Christ and God few would care to assert. 
 
 It is rather significant that in every case 
 where, by any stretch of interpretation, the 
 term God is applied to Jesus, the risen, glorified 
 Christ is meant; i. e., the practice finds no justi- 
 fication in the usage of the disciples during 
 the life-time of the Master. The conviction 
 that found utterance in these and similar terms 
 was the result of subsequent thinking, of a 
 constructive theological tendency, and as such 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 31 
 
 was aU but certain to intrude itself into the rec- 
 ords of the early church. 
 
 As an argument to be used by those who 
 are interested in establishing the position that 
 the New Testament writers refuse to attribute 
 deity to Christ, the value of these facts is, 
 of course, nil; but they show, emphatically, 
 how circumspect these annalists and workers 
 and thinkers were when it became a question 
 of substituting the newly found messiah for 
 the God of their fathers. In this, as in so 
 many other matters that seem so strange if 
 not inconceivable to the western mind, they re- 
 mained true to the instincts of their Jewish 
 nationality. A pure Greek or a pure Hindoo, 
 explicating the mysteries of a Greek or an 
 Indian Christ, would have found his difficulties 
 and his scruples in entirely different quarters. 
 
 THE DIFFICULTIES OF PAUl's POSITION 
 
 Paul's task was to unite the heavenly Christ 
 and the earthly Jesus, and that could be done 
 only at the expense of the one or the other. 
 That he failed to complete the task is proved 
 by the history of heresies and contradictory 
 christologies which are not the most engaging 
 episodes in Christianity. It is most significant 
 that Paul could be quoted in opposite camps, 
 as holding mutually exclusive opinions. 
 
 The dilemma he had to face may be stated 
 
82 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 thus: If Christ was to save man from sin he 
 had to be true man, with a definite, real experi- 
 ence of the power of sin. If Christ was " very 
 God of God" he could not have had such an 
 experience. And yet humanity was to be saved 
 — through Christ, the Christ that was more 
 than man ! This contradiction shows that even a 
 Paul found it impossible to unite God and man, 
 and we shall have to reconcile ourselves to the 
 fact that, in the matter of the incarnation, he 
 failed to reach solid ground. His own confes- 
 sion was, "For now we know in part." 
 
 The nearest he came to a solution was in 
 the much discussed Philippians 2, 6-11. Here 
 was a splendid opportunity to express himself 
 unequivocally on the nature of Christ. The 
 involved turn " who, existing in the form of 
 God etc." would never have occurred to any- 
 one whose belief could be expressed in a simple 
 "who, being (a) God — became a man." The 
 exhortation is that the Philippians cultivate 
 a humble, lowly frame of mind. If the self- 
 emptying process of one having the form of 
 God and sharing equal honors with God is 
 a good example (have this mind in you — ) a 
 forterioriy the incarnation of a God would have 
 been a better example. Or, to approach the 
 subject from the other side: supposing that 
 the real humanity of Christ was the issue — and 
 with Paul the becoming "flesh" was a real de- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 33 
 
 basement — who would be satisfied with speak- 
 ing of the form of a slave, the likeness of men, 
 and being found in fashion as a man? Doesn't 
 the language show that Paul had something 
 in reserve which could not be predicted of a 
 real man, or of a real God? Was not this 
 another one of those unfathomable mysteries? 
 
 Later generations, that could not boast of 
 producing men with the splendid acumen of a 
 Paul, could hardly be blamed for taking refuge 
 in docetism, in which the real humanity evapor- 
 ated into a specter, in which the manhood of 
 Jesus was but an illusion and a sham; or for 
 getting enmeshed in the doctrine of the gnostics, 
 according to which the "heavenly Christ" in- 
 habits the man Jesus for a while and forsakes 
 him just before death. Both notions were 
 objectionable, for the one involved a fraud and 
 the other involved a mere makeshift. But they 
 were almost respectable compared with the later 
 absurdity which flowered out in the idea that 
 Jesus was both, at one and the same time, God 
 who could know and do and be all things, and 
 man who could not know and do and be all 
 things. One could at least attach some mean- 
 ing to the docetic and gnostic positions. 
 
 At all events, according to this passage in 
 the epistle to the Philippians the elevation to 
 divine glory did not, as a matter of fact, take 
 place until after the death. " He humbled him- 
 
34 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 self, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, 
 the death of the cross. Wherefore also God 
 highly exalted him." The exaltation follows 
 the debasement. Here the distinction becomes 
 prominent, once more, and is carried through 
 to the end. Jesus receives a new name, the 
 name Lord, which is the badge of his new 
 sovereignty, which forms the content of the new 
 creeds and all this is done — " to the glory of 
 God the Father:" so Paul concludes and saves 
 his monotheism. The road was a difficult one, 
 but it ended aright. 
 
 This predicate of Lord (kyrios) is more than 
 a polite or dignified form of address. As a 
 title it is destined to receive a religious signifi- 
 cance. Everything we associate with worship, 
 with adoration is given with this name. 
 
 Of course, this name, which is over all names, 
 was bound to cast its rays of glory over the 
 records which we owe to the loyalty of the 
 early church. Virgin-birth stories were inevit- 
 able in the circumstances. Anyone acquainted 
 with the penchant of antiquity for such stories 
 and with the naive willingness of the human 
 imagination to account for anything unusual 
 in an unusual way, would find it harder to 
 explain the absence of any efi^orts in this 
 direction than their appearance, in so beauti- 
 ful and dignified a setting, in the Christian doc- 
 uments. Where a virgin-birth is missing — 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 36 
 
 — John seems to know nothing of it — ^the idea 
 of the incarnate Logos, which is God, more 
 than takes its place. 
 
 In the phrase Jesus Christ, the Lord, is 
 couched not only the original creed of the new 
 church, but it supplies the starting point for 
 the theology of a new cult. We are here on 
 the track of a new movement. Paul foretells 
 the time when all knees shall bow at that name. 
 The first person who did that after the death 
 of Jesus — during the lifetime the act of wor- 
 ship was hardly to be distinguished from a 
 specially reverent form of homage and greet- 
 ing — ^marked the birth of that new religion 
 which to this day the majority of Christians 
 wiU admit to be the only true and legitimate 
 Christianity, the Christianity which accepts 
 Jesus Christ as the object of religion. 
 
 Paul's letters record the attempt to bridge 
 the hiatus between the old religion and the new 
 by means of a theology, and to justify the 
 innovation. It was, in the nature of the case, 
 a hard task; but no man was better equipt to 
 undertake it, and it is highly improbable that 
 the human mind can get much nearer to a solu- 
 tion of it than he did. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE EASTER STORIES 
 
 What part did the belief in the resurrection 
 of Jesus play in this new movement.? This 
 
36 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 might be answered in a single word: it is not 
 at all stretching things to say that without 
 this belief, the Christian church would never 
 have been born. A Christianity is possible with- 
 out it; historical Christianity is unthinkable 
 without it. 
 
 The documents of the New Testament were 
 all composed under the influence of the con- 
 viction that the cross and the tomb had been 
 vanquished and that Jesus lived in a physical 
 sense. There is not a single exception. It is 
 a mistake to imagine that at least the primitive 
 gospel of Mark is free from the compelling 
 charm which this fixed idea exerted on the 
 members of the early Christian community. The 
 second gospel is much more than a bald narra- 
 tive of what happened during the lifetime of 
 Jesus. We may refuse to speculate on the 
 mooted question of the lost conclusion; but its 
 very introduction reveals the theological ten- 
 dency : " The beginning of the gospel of Jesus 
 Christ, the Son of God." As we have seen, 
 Paul's interest lies in the aggrandizement of 
 the risen glorified Christ. And a John without 
 the miraculous element that culminates in the 
 resurrection from the grave would be like the 
 proverbial Hamlet with Hamlet left out 
 entirely. 
 
 It would be misleading to say that the gospels 
 are the creation of the early church, and it 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 37 
 
 would be inaccurate to say that the church is 
 the product of the gospels; both church and 
 gospels are the precipitate (the one through 
 Paul and the others, indirectly, through the 
 band of disciples) of that atmosphere that was 
 charged with the belief in the continued, post- 
 mortem presence of Jesus. Jesus was daily 
 proving his power as the very Son of God; the 
 church was a living testimony declaring him 
 to be such, with power, " through the resur- 
 rection from the dead." 
 
 This is the all but unanimous opinion of the 
 students of all schools. 
 
 With the birth of the new church came a 
 new worship. This worship centered, naturally, 
 in the risen Lord. " One effect of the resur- 
 rection was to develop so exalted a conception 
 of Christ in the Church that homage which 
 cannot be distinguished from worship, came to 
 be addressed to him." (Hasting's Bible Dic- 
 tionary, article 'Worship.') 
 
 Suggesting that, as a matter of fact, it was 
 the belief in the resurrection which effected this 
 revolution rather than the resurrection itself, 
 which quite early met its denier s, we cannot 
 see how else the Christian religion is to be 
 explained. All other attempts have met the 
 same fate which overtook Gibbon's famous, or 
 rather notorious, "causes." He, it will be re- 
 called, was content to believe that the Christian 
 
38 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 faith vanquished the other established religions 
 for five reasons. These were: 1. The zeal 
 of the Christians. 2. The doctrine of immor- 
 tality. 3. The miracles attributed to the church. 
 4. The purity of the Christian morality. 6. 
 The political power of the Christian state. All 
 these he, indeed, admitted to be but secondary 
 causes, and history, confessedly, has nothing 
 to do with any others; but even on his plan 
 he failed to go back far enough. There were 
 powerful principles, beliefs, standards, influ- 
 ences, purposes, but all of them, put together, 
 would have failed to explain Christianity with- 
 out the life of Jesus. 
 
 It must be understood, however, that this 
 conviction that Jesus had risen, taken as a 
 historical fact, rests on quite different grounds 
 from that which supports any theory of the 
 resurrection proper, not to mention any bodily 
 coming out of the tomb on the third day 
 
 There are few controversies that have suffered 
 from worse confusion than the one dealing with 
 the resurrection of Jesus. On the one hand 
 are those who insist that if Jesus did not 
 (bodily) rise from the tomb " our faith is in 
 vain." On such an assumption giving up the 
 belief in the empty tomb is equivalent to a 
 denial of the central fact of Christianity. It 
 is an honored and honorable company of in- 
 telligent and consecrated men that have drawn 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 39 
 
 upon all the resources of scholarship and piety 
 and tradition to establish this position. 
 
 On the other hand are those who are unable 
 to admit that the documents warrant such a 
 belief, much as they might like to accept it. 
 With them it is simply a question of evidence, 
 and they aver that the evidence is not strong 
 enough. And in support of their view they 
 point to a mountain of difficulties that stands 
 in the way of making the traditional belief 
 plausible. They will, as a matter of course, 
 insist that Christianity rests on a rather pre- 
 carious foundation if it rests on a tomb, be it 
 empty or not. 
 
 It is only in recent years that one has been 
 able to study the matter objectively, without 
 incurring the acrid opposition of those de- 
 fenders of the faith who were prone to look 
 upon all negative results as the outgrowth of 
 skeptical prejudice. It used to be the fashion 
 to asseverate that those who denied the reality 
 of the physical resurrection did so simply be- 
 cause they had no use for miracles. But the 
 very fact that the negative school inevitably 
 substituted one set of difficulties by another 
 soon made that fashion supremely ridiculous. It 
 became evident to all parties that there was no 
 getting rid of mysteries. It only remained 
 to decide which explanation was most in accord- 
 ance with the data available. The tactics that 
 
40 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 depended on calling all vision theories fraudu- 
 lent, mythical, hypocritical, delusive, utterly 
 failed to discredit the various objections made 
 to the traditional belief. It was discovered 
 that calling names settled no arguments. Also 
 it was discovered that the theory of deliberate 
 hardening of hearts, and selfwilled blindness 
 ran counter to all psychology. Men do not 
 shut their eyes to obvious truth — because they 
 cannot do so. 
 
 One fact stands out clearly, whatever a 
 patient textual criticism will establish in the 
 end: it is only as a matter of faith that the 
 man of today will accept the resurrection of 
 Jesus. If he is not willing to acknowledge the 
 life of the Lord as a continuous presence in 
 his own soul no amount of documentary evi- 
 dence, and be it a hundred times more reliable 
 than the evidence in hand, will drive him to 
 the conclusion that Jesus came out of the tomb. 
 He will say, " If I see a man living he need 
 give me no evidence that he was bom." Any- 
 way, a resurrection nineteen hundred years 
 ago is far from being a proof that Christ is 
 living today. 
 
 Now it is not strictly accurate to say that 
 this is a belief in the resurrection. By resur- 
 rection is generally meant the restoration to 
 life of what had died — the body. " I believe 
 in the resurrection of the hody^' is redundant. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 41 
 
 It is only the body that can be resurrected. 
 Very few Christians today believe that the soul 
 needs a resurrection. And in this connection 
 it will be profitable to keep in mind that to 
 the modern the term spiritual body is wellnigh 
 meaningless, signifying about as much as a 
 white sound or a ten pound imagination. Sir 
 Oliver Lodge, who certainly cannot be cited 
 as prejudiced against any of the authenticated 
 facts of spiritism calls (Substance of Faith, 
 p. 114) a spiritual body, "an unknown, hypo- 
 thetical entity." Besides that, the life and 
 the influence of Christ's spirit is not a matter 
 that need be documented and verified as a fact 
 in history, somewhat after the order of his 
 death — ^the whole history of Christianity offers 
 itself as a proof. 
 
 But the evidence for such a unique event 
 as Jesus' coming out of the tomb, on the third 
 day, will have to be something entirely different 
 to carry conviction to an unbelieving mind. 
 It may be that no amount of evidence, short of 
 actual experience, would be sufficient to anyone 
 who has elevated the inviolability of natural 
 law into an axiom of his thinking. It surely 
 is a rash statement, not supported by the facts, 
 to say that the resurrection of Jesus, viz. from 
 the tomb, on the third day, is one of the best 
 attested facts of history. The voluminous 
 polemical literature that has grown up around 
 
42 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 this "fact" is abundant evidence that this is 
 not so. Men do not write libraries to prove 
 that once upon a time Hannibal crossed the 
 Alps or that the sun shines in the sky. 
 
 As for the obnoxious contraditions in the 
 records, though they have obviously received 
 more than their share of attention, they are 
 anything but disposed of as yet. It still re- 
 mains true what Lessing wrote in 1778 in his 
 polemic against Goetze on the Wolfenbuettel 
 Fragments — a polemic that is as lively read- 
 ing today, as such things go, as it ever was. 
 The words are notable. 
 
 " Die Fragmente meines Ungenannten enthal- 
 ten so mancherlei Dinge, welche mein Bischen 
 Scharfsinn und Gelehrsamkeit gehoerig aus- 
 einander zu setzen, nicht zureicht. Ich sehe hier 
 und da, auf tausend Meilen, keine Antwort. 
 Mcine Bewunderung, ein solches Werk nicht 
 gekannt zu haben, kann nur durch die andere 
 Verwunderung uebertrofFen werden, wenn man 
 mir zugleich auch ein Werk nennt, worin Das 
 alles schon seine Abfertigung erhalten, welches 
 ich eben so wenig gekannt haette. Auch eben 
 so wenig noch kenne." 
 
 That the rationalist argument to the effect 
 that because the records contradict each other, 
 therefore the resurrection report is incredible, is 
 invalid, goes without saying, today. 
 
 Taken all in all it is most in keeping with 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 43 
 
 the actual condition of things to admit that 
 the resurrection of Jesus is a mystery. 
 
 As a matter of history, the faith of the 
 primitive church did not depend upon the con- 
 viction that the tomb was empty. The evidence 
 for that part of the Easter story rests, mainly, 
 upon the testimony of the women who went 
 out of Jerusalem among the rock-tombs on the 
 morning of the third day, and it is not at all 
 certain that the women were correct in their 
 inference that the Lord was risen, nor is it 
 certain that they had made no mistake about 
 the whereabouts of the actual tomb, among 
 so many, where the body had been deposited. 
 Some, we read, did not believe the story, any- 
 way. 
 
 The faith of the church, of Peter and Paul 
 and all the rest, depended upon the fact that 
 Jesus was seen after his death. The empty 
 tomb argument becomes prominent only in the 
 controversial, apologetic literature of later 
 times ; when the apostles wanted to asseverate 
 their belief that Jesus lived it was generally 
 with an emphatic "and he was seen." 
 
 Accordingly the tomb retired into the back- 
 ground, and what happened there will probably 
 never be settled, conclusively, on textual 
 grounds. The subject will continue to exercise 
 all who are interested in the doctrinal aspects 
 of Christianity, but as a point to be settled 
 
44 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 by the historian it will, to judge by past re- 
 sults, be left hanging in the air. It is more in 
 harmony with these actual results for us to 
 say, as Du Bois Reymond once said in another 
 connection, we do not know, and shall not know, 
 this side of the grave, than to speak about 
 "best attested facts in history." 
 
 The historical "evidence" may be the cause 
 of the belief of some; it may be the result of 
 that belief; it is too late to determine which. 
 Lake (p. 252f.) puts the case thus: "Those 
 who still believe in the necessity (that the resur- 
 rection must imply an empty tomb) are justi- 
 fied in making the same inference (made by 
 the women and the evangelists) but those of 
 us who believe that the resurrection need not 
 imply an empty tomb are justified in saying 
 that the narrative might have been produced 
 by causes in accordance with our belief, and 
 that the inference of the women is one which 
 is not binding on us. The empty tomb is for 
 us doctrinally indefensible and is historically 
 insufficiently accredited." 
 
 Whatever be the explanation adopted by the 
 reader, the fact remains that the disciples be- 
 came convinced that their Lord lived. This 
 conviction rested upon what was to them per- 
 fectly reliable evidence. There was always the 
 possibility that they might have made some 
 mistakes about the details; and if the body 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 46 
 
 never came out of the grave it would still be 
 a gross exaggeration to say, it would be a mon- 
 strous falsehood to say, that the Christian re- 
 ligion is founded on a delusion or a fraud. 
 But there was no doubt about the one essential. 
 When Jesus walked with them on the shores 
 of Lake Tiberias and over the rolling fields of 
 Galilee they had confided their most secret 
 thoughts to him, and looked to him in their 
 needs and obeyed his every gesture. His death 
 on the cross had robbed them of the bodily 
 presence; but now that they were certain that 
 his death need not change their relations, what 
 more natural than that they should continue 
 to confide in him, to ask him for advice and 
 guidance? The miracle of Easter — for such 
 it was to them, and not a perfectly normal, 
 anticipated event — ^translated their veneration 
 for the Master into a higher power. We wit- 
 ness the birth of a new cultus in which the 
 historical Jesus, who had died an ignominious 
 death, is supplanted by the glorified Christ. 
 
 VALUE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT IN MARKING 
 THE GROWTH 
 
 It is comparatively easy to trace the growth 
 of this new practise through the pages of the 
 New Testament. The fourth gospel gives a 
 vivid picture of what the primitive community 
 soon learned to think and teach about Jesus. 
 
46 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 It is useless to speculate as to what may turn 
 out to be the final and acceptable decision re- 
 specting the authorship of that wonderful 
 gospel — agreement on the subject seems no 
 nearer at hand than it was in 1792 when E. 
 Evanson published The Dissonance of the Four 
 generally received Evangelists ; but even among 
 those who feel constrained to accept the re- 
 ceived tradition that John is a veritable aposto- 
 lic writing there is practical unanimity that 
 it is more valuable as a witness for what the 
 early Christians thought about Jesus than as a 
 reliable account of his life. 
 
 But John is not the only theologizing book 
 in the New Testament. Even the most sober 
 chronicler is unable to escape the influences of 
 his time, and they will leave their traces in 
 his record. The question concerning the amount 
 of this influence is at present one of the hotly 
 debated points in academic circles, where the 
 synoptic problem has lost nothing of its old- 
 time attractiveness. Every history, even the 
 most cautious, presents a double record, one 
 of the time which it describes and another of 
 the time in which it was written ; and the second, 
 with all its elusiveness, may be the more import- 
 ant of the two. A third factor looms up with 
 the reminder that a number of hands were busy 
 and a number of objects pursued before some 
 of these writings assumed the shape in which 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 47 
 
 they have finally come down to us. Each hand 
 has left its mark, each purpose its hint. To 
 unravel this skein of many colored silks re- 
 quires patience, reverence, and sympathy, and, 
 last but not least, the historic sense which can 
 distinguish where a color-blind eye sees nothing 
 but a monotonous gray. 
 
 The subject fairly bristles with questions. We 
 simply advert, once more, to the fact that Mark 
 himself was caught up in the currents of 
 thought that swept over the Jewish world be- 
 fore the year 70. And what can be said of 
 Mark must be said, only with assurance made 
 a hundredfold more sure, of Matthew and of 
 Luke. One illustration will be sufficient to char- 
 acterize the spirit that controlled the writers. 
 
 The risen and ascending Jesus is represented 
 by Matthew as giving his disciples final in- 
 structions concerning their subsequent life- 
 work. 
 
 " And Jesus came to them and spake unto 
 them, saying, All authority hath been given 
 unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye there- 
 fore and make disciples of all nations, baptiz- 
 ing them into the name of the Father and of 
 the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them 
 to observe all things whatsoever I commanded 
 you; and lo, I am with you always, even unto 
 the end of the world." (Matthew 28, 18-20.) 
 
 In this so-called great commission the follow- 
 
48 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 ing points stand out distinctly: a. Jesus is 
 made to claim that all authority in heaven and 
 on earth is henceforth vested in him. b. A 
 definite program of making converts is an- 
 nounced, c. The whole world is to be, from now 
 on, the theatre of missionary effort, d. Baptism 
 is enjoined upon the new converts, e. This 
 baptism is to be administered in the name of 
 the Trinity, f. Jesus makes himself the center 
 of the body of truth to be taught, g. He 
 promises his spiritual presence to his disciples 
 to the end of the time. (" The Lord is the 
 Spirit.") 
 
 It may be that the command to baptize is 
 an interpolation. The persistent use by Euse- 
 bius of a formula which omits all reference to 
 baptism has been held to be a sufficient rea- 
 son why we should suspect the accuracy of the 
 manuscripts that have come down to us, and 
 which all agree in inserting the command. But 
 apart from this questionable point and the con- 
 current evidence that baptism in the early years 
 of the church was in the name of Christ and 
 not in the name of the Trinity, the passage 
 is certainly a most astonishing pronouncement 
 if it is assumed to come directly from the lips 
 of Jesus. It contains, in nuce, the whole pro- 
 gram of primitive Christianity. It is the charter 
 of a full-fledged church, created to perpetuate 
 the memory and the spirit of Jesus Christ, the 
 Lord of all. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 49 
 
 Nothing could more plainly show the purpose 
 animating the writers, unless it be what is prob- 
 ably the original conclusion of the fourth 
 gospel : " Many other signs therefore did Jesus 
 in the presence of His disciples, which are not 
 written in this book; but these are written in 
 order that ye may believe that Jesus is the 
 Christ, the Son of God, and in order that be- 
 lieving ye may have life in His name." 
 
 It is a task which still remains to be done 
 thoroughly, to show how this one, confessed 
 plan runs through the gospels, determining the 
 choice of material and the use made of it, the 
 omissions made here and there, the repetitions 
 and inversions and variations abounding in the 
 record. Such a study would establish convinc- 
 ingly how far the gospels are removed from 
 being "lives of Christ." History, as a science, 
 does not purpose the promulgating of definite 
 beliefs or the religious betterment of its devo- 
 tees; it just states available facts orderly and 
 draws the necessary conclusions. 
 
 All this, however, does not alter the fact 
 that, on the whole, the documents are suffici- 
 ently complete and thoroughly reliable as a rec- 
 ord of how deeply the compelling character of 
 Jesus has affected the apostolic church. They 
 are priceless as witnesses to the influence of his 
 words and example, and when the largest deduc- 
 tions have been made the impression still remains 
 
60 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 that those writers got nearer to the real Jesus 
 and his spirit than is possible to the most 
 penetrating mind of today, equipt with all the 
 apparatus criticus of the schools. This ap- 
 plies, too, to the letters of Paul. With all 
 their speculation and dogmatizing, much of 
 which is foreign to our habits of thought, they 
 come out of the furnace of criticism practically 
 unscathed. And whatever doubts may still at- 
 tach to any picture of the Master, reconstructed 
 out of the materials of the narratives, all such 
 doubt dissolves into thin air when the matter 
 of primitive Christian belief is discussed. The 
 picture of the church, what there is of it, is 
 trustworthy. What does it tell us about the 
 new, to a Jew, revolutionary, departure that 
 expresses itself in Christ-worship.? 
 
 WORSHIP OF CHRIST 
 
 To begin with, a new element presents it- 
 self in the prayer that is offered to God " in 
 the name of Jesus." John 16, 23f. establishes 
 this usage : " If ye shall ask anything of the 
 Father, He will give it you in My name; 
 Hitherto have ye asked nothing in My name: 
 ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be 
 made full." And verse 26 : " In that day ye 
 shall ask in My name," followed by the signifi- 
 cant rejection of all thoughts of intercession, 
 " and I say not unto you that I will pray the 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 51 
 
 Father for you; for the Father himself loveth 
 you," and, consequently needs no transmitter 
 to hear the prayer. Petitions to be heard for 
 the sake of Jesus becomes possible only after 
 the idea that the ineffable life has a propitia- 
 tory influence with God has become fully de- 
 veloped. 
 
 It was an enormous stride when the first 
 Christian offered his prayer directly to the 
 exalted Jesus. This act marked the beginning 
 of a new religion, the Christian religion. 
 
 Such an event does not happen every day. 
 Just now it is quite fashionable to exploit "new" 
 religions, springing up over night and wither- 
 ing away, all of them, in the heat of the noon- 
 day sun. Their discoverers do not lack imagina- 
 tion and enthusiasm. But what is new about 
 them is generally also illusory, and what is 
 of real value is old. In religion, the ever vari- 
 able, the very genius of humanity expresses 
 itself, and because humanity is homogeneous 
 that expression will conform to a few definite 
 types. Christianity is one of these. 
 
 This act of prayer to Jesus must be carefully 
 distinguished from the practices of the disciples 
 during the life-time of their Lord. Worship 
 as then addressed to Jesus was purely an act of 
 homage. The lepers prostrated themselves be- 
 fore the great healer, those who came to ask 
 favors "worshipped," i. e., they assumed atti- 
 
5« THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 tudes of humble supplication. In the account 
 of the temptation Satan is represented as re- 
 questing this act of prostration as a symbol 
 of submission to his authority. This oriental 
 custom had no religious significance. The same 
 should be said of the petitions addressed to him 
 in the natural course of things. When the dying 
 malefactor on the cross says, " Jesus, remember 
 me when thou comest in thy kingdom," he was 
 but making a request such as one man may make 
 to another. There is no suggestion of worship 
 in the modern sense of the word. 
 
 The death scene of Stephen (Acts 7.) gives 
 one of the earliest illustrations of this new 
 departure : " He looked up steadfastly into 
 heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus 
 standing on the right hand of God. . . . And 
 they stoned Stephen, calling out and saying, 
 Lord (kurie) Jesus, receive my spirit. And he 
 kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, 
 lay not this sin to their charge." 
 
 It is important to remember the approxi- 
 mate date of this event. The terminus ad 
 quern is given with the conversion of Saul. Just 
 how long before that the martyrdom took place 
 it is impossible to determine. It could not have 
 been very long. The date of the conversion 
 is given by Harnack as 30, Ramsay 33, von 
 Soden 31-35, Zahn, Zeittafel, 35. If the sub- 
 stantial trustworthiness of Acts is assumed, 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 53 
 
 the distinct worship of Jesus can accordingly 
 be authenticated as having been practiced at 
 least as early as 35, i. e., at the most four or 
 five years, more probably within a year or so, 
 after the death of Jesus. 
 
 The possible objection that this prayer of 
 Stephen may be nothing but a projection, into 
 our account, of a later theological idea seems 
 to be disposed of when it is ascertained that 
 the story of Pentecost lacks the least hint at 
 such a practise; and the argument of Peter 
 would certainly not have suffered for the in- 
 troduction of the thought that this Jesus, cru- 
 cified by the Jews, had become the object of 
 divine worship. The presence of that element 
 would have been more easily explained, especi- 
 ally if, as it has been suggested (von Dob- 
 schuetz, Ostern und Pfingsten), the account of 
 Pentecost is nothing but the description of 
 another christophany. Romans 8 is sufficient 
 warrant for that supposition. Outside of that, 
 we meet ever and anon with the idea that the 
 Lord is the Spirit, (2 Cor. 3, 17.) and as long 
 as the Holy Spirit and the glorified Christ are 
 interchangable terms, as they obviously were 
 for quite a while, the composition of such an ac- 
 count is quite within the limits of possibility. 
 But the very hypothesis of such a composition 
 will have to draw upon sufficient time to allow 
 the development of at least the rudiments of 
 
54 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 Christ-worship, which we find missing in the 
 Pentecost account. 
 
 Our conclusion is that it is not unreasonable 
 to suppose that Jesus was accorded the honor 
 of genuine religious adoration very soon after 
 his crucifixion. 
 
 Prayer to Jesus was the main custom of 
 the first Christians distinguishing them from 
 the rest of the Jews. Paul had authority to 
 bind all those that called upon the name of 
 the Lord Jesus. He greets the saints of Corinth, 
 " with all that call upon the name of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ." " To call upon the name of 
 " is a hebraism used in the Old Testa- 
 ment for worship of Jehovah. 
 
 We have already discussed the passage in 
 which Paul predicts that all knees shall bow 
 in the lordly name of Jesus; it was seen that 
 the glory of God the Father still overshadowed 
 everything else. We have also seen that the 
 New Testament writers, with a practical unani- 
 mity, hesitate to apply to Jesus Christ any 
 name that might be a virtual denial of their 
 monotheism. 
 
 It remains to show that all this did not pre- 
 vent the gradual growth of a prayer cultus in 
 which Jesus assumes all the superlative pre- 
 rogatives that are associated with an object 
 of religious worship. 
 
 Stephen prays to the Lord that he may 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 55 
 
 forgive the Jews who are stoning him. This 
 is a reminiscence, no doubt, of the scene on 
 Calvary. 
 
 In 1 Thess. 3, 11 God the Father and the 
 Lord Jesus are jointly invoked " to direct our 
 ways unto you." In other words, Jesus assumes 
 the function of a providence or celestial guide. 
 
 2 Thess. 2, 16 the office of the Holy Spirit 
 is bestowed on Jesus : " Now our Lord Jesus 
 Christ himself, and God our Father, . . . com- 
 fort your hearts and estabHsh them in every 
 good work and word." 
 
 The Gospel of John offers a variant of this 
 thought when Jesus is represented as promising 
 to send the Spirit who will do this work. 
 
 Paul's thorn in the flesh, which came as a 
 messenger of Satan to buffet him, whatever it 
 was, was held to be troubling him subject to 
 the will of the sovereign Christ : " Concerning 
 this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it 
 might depart from me." And then a veritable 
 though unfavorable answer to these prayers 
 is recorded ; " And he hath said unto me. My 
 grace is sufficient for thee." (2 Cor. 12, 8 
 and 9.) 
 
 In the later apocalyptical writings the Lamb, 
 which is the slain Jesus, is worshipped. 
 
 And the conclusion of 2 Peter gives, after a 
 description of the dies irae, a doxology in which 
 Jesus actually supplants God : " To our Lord 
 
56 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 and Savior Jesus Christ be the glory both now 
 and forever. Amen." Compare with this John 
 5, 23 : " That all may honor the Son even as 
 they honor the Father J'^ 
 
 Pliny's letter to the emperor Trajan (A. D. 
 107.), one of the most valuable documents bear- 
 ing on the usages in the primitive church, re- 
 cords that the whole fault of the accused 
 Christians was that they were wont to meet to- 
 gether on a stated day before it was light, and 
 sing among themselves alternately a hymn to 
 Christ, as to God, quasi deo. 
 
 Finally, 2 Clement begins, " Brethren, we 
 ought so to think of Jesus Christ as of God." 
 The barriers have been demolished, the fine dis- 
 tinctions have disappeared. 
 
 WHAT CAN WE ASCERTAIN CONCERNING JESUS? 
 THE NEGATIVE SIDE 
 
 And now, after establishing the fact of Jesus- 
 worship in the apostohc community, we shall 
 have to face the all-important question: Did 
 Jesus in any way encourage such a tendency? 
 Can he be taken as an authority for this prac- 
 tice.'* Can we infer from his recorded words 
 that he anticipated or intended a development 
 in worship along this line.'' 
 
 It might be less disconcerting to many if 
 such question marks were blandly ignored. Such 
 marks used to be considered the sign of the 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 57 
 
 beast. A sense of security councils evasion. 
 To use the language of romanticism " the devil 
 walks with us. He comes to us a real person, 
 copper-colored face, head a little on one side, 
 forehead knit, ashing questions T^ 
 
 For here is the parting of the ways and we 
 shall have to follow the one or the other. The 
 one path, if followed without wavering, will 
 end in the discovery of practically the whole 
 christology, ready-made, in the recorded words 
 of Jesus. The other path is shorter, less easy, 
 and ends in a modest, but decided non licet. It 
 involves us in the whole Leben Jesu discipline. 
 The fundamental question is. What can we 
 find out about Jesus, the man of Nazareth ? 
 
 The reader need hardly be reminded that to 
 the biblical scholar of the present age the first 
 way indicated is practically impassable, for it 
 is choked up with the rank growth of spiritual 
 adaptations, harmonizations and compromises. 
 It is, in very truth, a winding way. Here may 
 be found, in full flower, the idea that Jesus 
 must have planned everything from the begin- 
 ning, here flourish the orchids of theological 
 speculation: that the man Jesus could be ignor- 
 ant of what must have been known to him as 
 God, that the disciples must have misunderstood 
 his words, that only that is true and catholic 
 which has always, everywhere, been believed by 
 everybody, that providence can permit no 
 
58 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 blunders in the education of the human race, 
 that ten thousand words spoken in an inspired 
 tongue must surely be worth more than five 
 words of understanding. This way leads 
 through the tropical garden of the Gospel of 
 John. 
 
 It is only here and there that the second, 
 shorter path crosses the first. In other words, 
 abandoning the figure before it becomes too 
 cumbersome, the critical method only occasion- 
 ally busies itself with the material which formed 
 the main stock-in-trade of the traditional school, 
 prophecy, anticipations, miraculous knowledge, 
 providential hardening of hearts, disciplinary 
 blindness, and the synthetic homilies extracted 
 from the Bible. 
 
 The critical method has its own, all but in- 
 superable difficulties. These do not grow out 
 of the obstructions piled up by fear and despair 
 and a sense of solicitous loyalty to what has 
 been received from the fathers. For here, as 
 elsewhere, it is still pertinent to ask: "Who 
 ever knew of the truth to be put to shame in 
 an open encounter with error.?" 
 
 The greatest difficulty grew out of the neces- 
 sity of making the most exactly of those ele- 
 ments which the gospel writers were most liable 
 to overlook. As has been noted, their energies 
 went into the reproduction of the Christ as 
 he appeared to the consciousness of the young 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 69 
 
 church, history being their last aim; whereas 
 we are interested in getting behind this picture 
 to the veritable Man of Nazareth. 
 
 He who says that this is a distinction with- 
 out a difference thereby admits, in so many 
 words, that the arch-problem of the New Testa- 
 ment does not exist for him, and he will natur- 
 ally wonder at all this hair-splitting of the 
 ingenious critic — if he does not just condemn 
 it all in the lump as a wicked perversion. 
 
 Now there have not been wanting aU but 
 compelling voices to tell us that the quest is 
 hopeless. To try to get at the mind in Jesus 
 is held, in some circles, equivalent, for difficulty, 
 to reading the riddle of the universe, the assump- 
 tion being that we can no more read what was 
 in him than a quadruped can read what is in 
 us. The questions which Jehovah hurls out 
 of the whirlwind at Job are directly applied 
 to Jesus, and it is expected that, like Job, the 
 modern scholar refrain from being too curious. 
 And this caution is certainly in order. Rever- 
 ence is the first condition of knowing the truth. 
 Greatness is always incomprehensible to medio- 
 crity. In Jesus Christ were elements of purity 
 and godlikeness to which our lives respond but 
 faintly. Of all the theories concerning the 
 life of Christ that one is probably the least 
 profitable which assumes that the secret of Jesus 
 wiU ever be laid bare by the dissecting knife 
 
60 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 of the critic, though there is one other that 
 runs it hard for gratuitous uselessness, namely 
 the one which takes it for granted that 
 all one needs to do to get at it, is to read 
 the gospels by the light of nature. The sub- 
 ject is not just a matter of so many texts to 
 be quoted pro or con any given conception 
 of Jesus' personality. And where the devoted 
 disciples stumbled we shall probably fail to 
 reach finality. We shall never know what was 
 in the mind of the Master. There is one con- 
 solation : it is not necessary that we should. 
 
 The picture of Jesus as projected upon the 
 pages of scholarship is, confessedly, but a sil- 
 houette, giving the barest outlines; all the fine 
 nuances, the lines that reveal character, the 
 smile of sympathy, the fire of zeal, the pene- 
 trative eye, are hidden in the blackness of our 
 ignorance. The ordinary methods of psycho- 
 logy fail us here, and "ideal" reconstructions 
 are not especially noted for their verisimilitude. 
 Anyway, they belong to the province of the 
 poet, not to that of the scientist. 
 
 What we do not know about Jesus is indeed 
 appalling. And the more is said, with an air 
 of certainty, about matters which our mature 
 judgment calls uncertain, the darker becomes 
 the darkness. 
 
 The record, on the most favorable hypo- 
 thesis, is a mere fragment. There are also 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 61 
 
 many other things which Jesus did, the which 
 if they should be written every one, I suppose 
 that even the world itself would not contain 
 the books that should be written. Thus at 
 least one thoughtful writer puts the matter. 
 Reconstructing an extinct species from a fossi- 
 lized bone, as paleontologists are sometimes 
 credited with doing, were no harder task than 
 a solution of the problem given with the lost 
 elements of Jesus' life 
 
 And what has survived, what has been re- 
 corded, gives little more than a dry chronicle 
 of events mixed with gnomic sayings and dis- 
 cussions about their meaning. This record is 
 written, for the most part, in the language of 
 a generation that believed in diabolical posses- 
 sion, stars that could drop to earth like over- 
 ripe figs, the end of the world, miracles that 
 were so much thaumaturgy, the " manifest des- 
 tiny" of a specially chosen nation, theophanies, 
 angelologies, virgin births. 
 
 Furthermore, a translation of a transcrip- 
 tion of a tradition, carried together from vari- 
 ous and varying sources by men not one of 
 whom had seen or heard Jesus, can hardly be 
 said to present a very imposing mass of 
 evidence. 
 
 The work done with this scanty material is 
 one of the triumphs of the human mind. The 
 negative aspect of some of the results have 
 
62 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 blinded many to the fact that they are an endur- 
 ing monument, not to scholastic vagaries and 
 mistaken theories — they get no monuments 
 built for them — but of what patience will accom- 
 plish when applied to the task of piecing to- 
 gether sadly mutilated bits of a far-off past. 
 The story of the synoptic problem belongs to 
 the same chapter which records the discovery 
 of Neptune and the deciphering of the Rosetta 
 stone. The Ur-markus and the procession of 
 redactors ticketed with algebraic symbols may 
 not be very impressive when they emerge from 
 the study into the light of common day, but 
 to sneer at the work done, as some who also 
 love the truth have allowed themselves to do, 
 betokens a total blindness to some of the most 
 puzzling difficulties encountered in a careful 
 study of the life of Christ. 
 
 The positive results reached have more than 
 justified the infinite pains taken. Nor can it 
 be said that the work is finished today. There 
 are "problems" which will sorely try the steel of 
 the doughtiest discoverer to come. 
 
 It may not be useless, it will at least help 
 to prevent that note of finality which voices 
 itself in apodictic statements about what must 
 be, to mention a few of the outstanding un- 
 solved riddles. 
 
 For one thing, it has not yet been fully 
 settled what proportion of the records is "the- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 63 
 
 ology," and what can, in a large sense, be called 
 "history." 
 
 The order and the independence of the 
 gospels, though an enormous amount of in- 
 genuity has been brought into action, and 
 though the "sources" are slowly assuming some 
 definite form, are still largely hypothetical. 
 
 The chronology is still a jumble. Even such 
 elementary things as the dates of the birth and 
 of the death of Jesus are full of snares. 
 
 Dalman and A. Meyer are practically the 
 only ones whose researches in the language 
 spoken by Jesus — surely a sine qua non of 
 correct interpretation — have become common 
 property. 
 
 The Son of Man controversy is only at its 
 beginning. 
 
 The investigations in " the mind in Christ" 
 are the first timid attempts to ally psychology 
 with biblical criticism. The pioneers Balden- 
 sperger, Adamson, and Schwartzkopff would be 
 the first to admit that. 
 
 With the eschatology of Jesus comes a troop 
 of attendant question-marks about the kingdom, 
 the messiah, and the parousia. 
 
 That the tendency theories and the vision 
 hypotheses are not as good as dead and buried, 
 as some had fondly imagined and triumphantly 
 proclaimed, can be verified by a most cursory 
 glance into the present-day literature on the 
 resurrection. 
 
64 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 Who will speak the delivering word about 
 the miracles, the Gadarene swine, the demoniacs, 
 the blasted fig-tree? The so-called free-think- 
 ers ? ! 
 
 And the Johannine problem is still with us, 
 although the various schools are at last begin- 
 ning to cultivate a cordial frame of mind. 
 
 Need it be said that, in the nature of the 
 case, it is characteristic of problems that some- 
 thing be known about them? We are not try- 
 ing to show that scholarship is in a way to 
 commit suicide; but the indications are that 
 no theological Alexander need weep tears at 
 the borders of so many undiscovered countries. 
 
 The whole Leben Jesu discipline has split into 
 a multitude of separate specialties which, in 
 their complexity, are absolutely beyond the 
 grasp of a single mind. To write anything ap- 
 proximating a real Life of Christ would turn 
 out to be a task for collaborative effort, like an 
 encyclopedia or a dictionary. In all candor 
 it must be said that no man with scientific 
 pretensions would think of making the venture 
 today. 
 
 And with all this infinite amount of labor, 
 taken at its worthiest, we get little more than 
 the shell, the mummy. This is a painful situ- 
 ation for the Christian student. How the heart 
 yearns for a glimpse of the true Jesus, the 
 friend of man! Do we feel that hunger when 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 65 
 
 we face the coldly critical, dissective and anti- 
 septic results of scholarship? We feel it no 
 less when we see what the unbounded loyalty 
 of a John has made of him. And what the 
 theologies have done to complete the havoc has 
 filled many a simple soul with a pathetic and 
 agonizing longing; we would see Jesus and 
 are given a composite photograph of what the 
 men of sixty generations — thought he was! 
 
 It was inevitable that loud voices should be 
 heard, insisting on the validity, for living men, 
 of the living witness of Jesus Christ in the 
 personal (and why not, then, in the national?) 
 experiences that make up the history of Chris- 
 tianity. It is, after all, but a weighing of opin- 
 ion against opinion. Surely today's thinking 
 men, the living epistles of the church, have a 
 message as important as any dehvered to us 
 from the past? God's revelation has not suf- 
 fered bankruptcy, thus far. If Schleiermacher 
 and his school had never written a word, if 
 Ritschl had never been born, the very genius 
 of Christianity would, in time, have forced it- 
 self through and beyond the shell of docu- 
 ments, and taken up its parable against the 
 wordcramming and the microscopic and micro- 
 tomic laboratory theology. When all has been 
 said, when every stray bit of information re- 
 corded in the extra-canonical literature has been 
 made to contribute its mite to the grand total: 
 
ee THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 "What do you read, my Lord? — ^Words, words, 
 words!" And the sober, practical sense of the 
 Christian will indorse the sentiment in the pre- 
 face of Johnson's Dictionary: "I am not yet 
 so lost in lexicography as to forget that words 
 are the daughters of earth, and that things are 
 the sons of heaven." 
 
 The earthly life was lived, was only a memory, 
 when its awful significance dawned upon the 
 consciousness of man. And then it was too 
 late to ask questions, and to take notes. There 
 had been no time to make records while Jesus 
 lived, and the kingdom, where chronicles were 
 useless, was fast approaching. When, at last, 
 the many took it in hand to draw up a narra- 
 tive concerning those things which had been 
 fulfilled, there was sure to be confusion. 
 
 To assume that the lost or unrecorded pas- 
 sages out of this life might have added much 
 to our knowledge and explained why the early 
 church found it so easy to elevate Jesus into 
 the theological Christ, is about as profitable 
 as the theory that the lost manuscripts of the 
 gospels must have been infallible. That was 
 the last ditch in the fight about verbal inspira- 
 tion. To expect much help from the discovery 
 of new material is a council of desperation. 
 It will not help us. 
 
 To indicate how grave the situation is, in 
 spite of all our well-meant efforts to strain 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 67 
 
 the meaning of the smallest point, and to show 
 how little meaning there is to the general 
 nervousness felt whenever the least elimination 
 is suggested, we need only remind ourselves that 
 we do not even know, for a certainty, what 
 Jesus believed concerning the resurrection of 
 the dead. Did he teach a general resurrection? 
 Luke 14, 14 represents him as speaking of 
 the recompense in the resurrection of the just, 
 and in Luke 20, 35f. we have the statement 
 about the sons of the resurrection, who are 
 " accounted worthy to attain to that world, and 
 the resurrection from the dead," neither marry- 
 ing nor being given in marriage. To quote 
 the words of certain parables in favor of a more 
 settled opinion will not solve the difficulty. 
 
 One avenue of approach to the mind of Jesus 
 seemed to open with the suggestion that the 
 post-exilic literature of the Jews, the apoca- 
 lypses and other contemporaneous productions 
 ought to be studied more carefully. Jesus grew 
 up in the atmosphere which ripened these fruits 
 of the speculative mind. He was familiar with 
 these matters. He could not escape their in- 
 fluence. Didn't the book of Baruch, the 
 Psalms, and Daniel mightily impress his imagi- 
 nation? Could he not hold his own against 
 the pharisees who were always quoting the say- 
 ing of the rabbis, meeting them on their own 
 level? 
 
68 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 And yet the hope at their hand to reconstruct 
 his world is a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp. This 
 literature sheds a flickering, fitful light on the 
 New Testament, to be sure, but we venture to 
 say that for a study of the mind in Jesus it is 
 a most unprofitable, disappointing source of 
 information. The whole mass of rabbinical 
 learning is like the proverbial haystack, and 
 it will never be a very popular life-work for 
 many to search for the authentic needle it no 
 doubt contains. The distinctive thing about 
 Jesus is not what he inherited or borrowed, but 
 what he possessed over and above his con- 
 temporaries and his countrymen. 
 
 This implies no strictures on the splendid 
 work of those scholars, from Scherer down to 
 Bousset, who have gone through this sheer in- 
 terminable pile of learning. We can never 
 have too clear a background for the figure of 
 the Lord. It is only as a key to the under- 
 standing of the personality itself that this work 
 will always be found wanting. 
 
 WHAT CAN WE ASCERTAIN CONCEENING JESUS? 
 THE POSITIVE SIDE 
 
 It may be a positive relief to some to turn 
 from all this to a statement of the facts which 
 stand out as reasonably well authenticated. 
 
 There are some things we know. Jesus was 
 not a myth. The denial of Kalthoff and others, 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 69 
 
 that such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ever 
 lived involves such a tour de force in the inter- 
 pretation of documents and such a multiplica- 
 tion of incredible hypotheses that it will never 
 be taken seriously by those who have acquainted 
 themselves thoroughly with the available ma- 
 terial. In face of this denial the old position 
 of the apologetic theologians is still perfectly 
 sound: it is absurd to imagine, seriously, that 
 any man or any set of men should ever have 
 been able to invent such a character and make 
 him speak as he is reported to have spoken. 
 Such a supposition would call for as great a 
 miracle as the emergence of a real Jesus Christ 
 into history. It means doing violence to all the 
 canons of research. It cannot draw upon a shred 
 of evidence to make itself , passably presentable 
 in the council of historians. It only needs to be 
 stated to be condemned. It was profitable that 
 the denial should be made, in a dignified way, 
 by men who commanded a hearing in circles 
 competent to handle the subject, for it occa- 
 sioned a renewed examination of the very 
 foundation of the Christian faith, an examina- 
 tion which each generation is bound to make 
 for itself. No age has the right to take its 
 faith for granted. It must be earned and 
 fortified with reasons that are constantly open 
 to revision. 
 
 In this case, once more, the ancient landmarks 
 
70 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 were found to be unremoved. As was said long 
 ago: it would take a Jesus to invent a Jesus. 
 
 What, then, do we know, beyond a reason- 
 able doubt? 
 
 We know that the parents of Jesus belonged 
 to the socalled middle class. He was a Gali- 
 lean (hence the occasional surmise that he may 
 have been, not a Jew, but an Aryan, the Gali- 
 leans being a mixed race with its roots in Baby- 
 lon). He was probably born in Nazareth. It 
 was there that he grew into manhood among 
 brothers and sisters, among neighbors and ac- 
 quaintances who illustrated the proverb that a 
 prophet is not without honor save in his own 
 country or among his own people. His own 
 mother failed to detect what pious worshippers 
 of a later age beheld streaming from him at 
 every point, an energy, a goodness, a wisdom, 
 a love that marked him as unique among the 
 children of men. 
 
 After reaching maturity he abandoned his 
 father's trade and took up the profession of 
 a peripatetic teacher. The hope of Israel, the 
 desire of the ages, the whole moral desolation 
 and the political distraction of the times be- 
 came to him a call to proclaim the good news 
 of God's nearness to his countrymen. John 
 the Baptist had helped to shape events. Never 
 man spake like Jesus, and the bonafide cures 
 wrought upon the bodies and the souls of the 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 71 
 
 expectant multitudes only deepened the general 
 impression that a loving God was about to 
 visit His people. This was the gospel as pro- 
 claimed to an ever widening circle of sympa- 
 thizers. And the power which was, for him, 
 renewed in the long hours of communion with 
 God whom he knew to be his father, went 
 out to many who hailed him as the promised 
 one, whose coming the prophets had foretold. 
 
 Under the pressure of the inevitable opposi- 
 tion on the part, especially, of the pharisees, 
 the guardians of Israel's orthodoxy, the teach- 
 ing of Jesus assumed a decidedly apocalyptic 
 character. Dark hints foreshadowed the impend- 
 ing national catastrophe. Did Jesus care to 
 assume the crown of Messiah.? We know, at 
 least, that the politico-social program of the 
 nation was utterly distasteful to him. He 
 preferred to develop the conception of a spirit- 
 ual kingdom in which the ties of the mosti 
 intimate kinship were to mean less than the 
 fatherhood of God. No doubt his trying 
 experiences in his own home had helped to 
 give prominence to this idea. Disappointment 
 followed upon the heel of expectation. His 
 own people consider him insane; Nazareth 
 repudiates him; the official representatives of 
 the pure religion take courage. 
 
 A vile conspiracy cuts off a public ministry 
 of one and one-half to two years' duration, 
 
72 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 practically all of which was confined to a small 
 section of his native land. Israel remains true 
 to her traditions of killing her heaven-sent 
 messengers. Gethsemane shows the agonizing 
 soul of the disappointed, yet resigned Master, 
 who was intent on obeying the Father's will. 
 Nobody, be it friend or foe, could possibly 
 have invented a description of such an agony, 
 ending with its " My God, my God, why hast 
 Thou forsaken Me?" The gloom of Calvary 
 has settled upon the final scene of the Son of 
 Man. It is perfectly feasible to suppose that 
 Jesus had foreseen the outcome, and the re- 
 sultant reflexions supplied the germ for that 
 luxuriant growth of apocalyptic speculations 
 which fill so large a part of the gospel narra- 
 tives. 
 
 All that remains to be mentioned is a few 
 recollections of scattered teachings, pieced to- 
 gether without much reference to their chrono- 
 logical order, some opalescent traditions of this 
 wonderful personality who had spoken strangely 
 beautiful words and had done the works of 
 a prophet. 
 
 This is what history knows of Jesus. We 
 shall have to show, directly, that the science 
 of history does not exhaust the meaning of 
 that life, that it may even have missed what is 
 in reality the main thing about it. A religion 
 that is content to find its main props in definite 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 73 
 
 historical events (" if so and so did not happen, 
 then your faith is in vain") may satisfy the 
 intellectual demands of the thinker, but it can 
 hardly be said to satisfy that craving for real- 
 ity, called the hunger for God, which has ever 
 esteemed one deep personal experience worth 
 a century of events ever so well documented. 
 Besides, there is a great multitude of witnesses 
 to show that their faith is not in vain — if re- 
 sults count — ^though they refuse to commit 
 themselves to the events in question. 
 
 How fragmentary this record is becomes 
 obvious when the long account of the last week 
 is allowed to appear in the proper perspective, 
 when the speeches, parables, and discussions 
 are put into a class by themselves, when the 
 passages that deal with other characters — ^phar- 
 isees, priests, sadducees, John the Baptist, 
 Peter, John, Judas and all the rest — are put to 
 one side, and when the legendary element is re- 
 duced to its lowest terms, the original kernel of 
 truth. It is a sobering fact that nothing which 
 may by any courtesy be called a biography can 
 possibly be reconstructed from such material. 
 Though it is a palpable exaggeration to say 
 that we are certain only of what Jesus did not 
 say and did not do, yet the records, even when 
 studied through the microscope that seems to 
 enlarge the all but invisible details of the gospel, 
 are a sore disappointment to every reader who 
 
74 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 is looking for more than shattered and scattered 
 bits. The precious vase is gone, the sherds 
 remain. 
 
 THE SUPPIiEMENT TO HISTORY 
 
 But this is not all. There is a compensation 
 for this irreparable loss. The authentic his- 
 tory of those short years is supplemented by the 
 witness about Jesus. The larger part of the 
 New Testament is a witness to his influence; 
 but for his work it would never have been writ- 
 ten. The Christian experience, the soulful tes- 
 timony of the loyal disciples, the vital evidences 
 presented by what became, in course of time, 
 the Christian church: all this modifies, enor- 
 mously, our judgment of what is, on its positive 
 side, so scanty a result. 
 
 Carlyle once said that it is impossible to 
 build a house without truth — ^how then a world- 
 religion? The experiences of the disciples after 
 the terrible days of the passion brought out 
 what was latent all along: this was indeed the 
 Son of God, The truth could not be burked by 
 the enemy, it could not be obscured by friends. 
 And so the cross, the very weapon that had 
 given all messianic pretensions, not to say di- 
 vine pretensions (we are speaking after the 
 manner of man) the coup-de-grace, was meta- 
 morphosed into the dazzling emblem of victory. 
 What was once an unqualified offense became an 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 75 
 
 irresistible argument. The ensuing quarrels 
 of contending parties, each claiming to be the 
 truest representative of the new religion, are 
 wearying enough, the world is sick of theories 
 about the "persons" in the Godhead, the social 
 gospel of today has crowded out almost all in- 
 terest in such speculations, but they all show — 
 even the wellnigh blasphemous definitions of the 
 early symbols — that there was something about 
 Jesus which the eye-witnesses had failed to see 
 and the ear-witnesses had failed to hear. And 
 the history of 1900 years is proof that the 
 grave where Joseph of Arimathea had laid the 
 dead body was not the last word of the life of 
 Jesus. 
 
 The early strange traditions about the resur- 
 rection of the crucified body and about an im- 
 pending parousia show how deeply the first 
 converts felt the necessity of accounting for the 
 new life. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is a 
 concrete expression of this need. The influence 
 of the dead, yet living Lord had to be ex- 
 plained. The disciples, it is well to remember, 
 were a practical society of believers, not a re- 
 public of letters. They had no special pro- 
 gram to follow, no preconceived scheme, least 
 of all the one of palming off a fraud upon pos- 
 terity, no philosophy of any description; but 
 they had a thousand facts of daily experiences, 
 absolutely new in their manifestation, to be ac- 
 counted for in some way. 
 
76 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 So the christophanies, the christologies, and 
 the complete machinery of a Jesus-cult gradu- 
 ally got into motion. They all expressed at 
 least one conviction, which had grown out of 
 their experiences, and was based upon the reli- 
 able observation of many: He is risen. Many 
 could say with Paul "I live, yet not I, but Christ 
 that liveth in me." Paul's entire theology is an 
 amplification of this spiritual experience. The 
 historical Jesus, as time passes on and the 
 memory becomes dimmed and unreliable, fades 
 away in the brighter light of the new Christ, 
 not known after the flesh. Without Jesus, 
 Christ would have been impossible; as Christ, 
 Jesus became the center of the church's inter- 
 est; Jesus, the Christ, henceforth was the Lord, 
 as they confessed. 
 
 It only remained for the prologs of Mat- 
 thew and Luke to supply a setting for this su- 
 pernatural picture, and for John to speculate 
 on pre-existence, and the deification, which Paul 
 had always evaded, was complete. Exit for al- 
 most one thousand nine hundred years all inter- 
 est in the Man of Nazareth. No wonder there 
 are uncertainties about his mission and his 
 message ! 
 
 We may, in this place, most conveniently 
 mention two points concerning the message of 
 Jesus a^ it affected the apostoHc tradition. 
 
 One of the storm-centers at present is found 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 77 
 
 in the question whether Jesus ever encouraged 
 the idea that he was the promised one, the long- 
 expected Messiah. It is impossible to close this 
 debate for good as long as the question of the 
 evidential value of the eschatological chapters 
 especially in Matthew and in Luke remains un- 
 settled. The question raises no difficulties for 
 him who considers the gospels all of one piece. 
 Of course, Jesus claimed to be the Messiah — 
 and straightway the whole battery of the dis- 
 credited proof -text method is wheeled into posi- 
 tion to defend the point. 
 
 We have to reckon with the possibility, how- 
 ever, that these passages are the effect and not 
 the cause of the messianic expectations of the 
 first generation after Christ. It is in reality 
 a question of probabilities. And the appear- 
 ances are rather in favor of the supposition 
 that, to some extent, the Lord shared these con- 
 victions. The evidence is an indirect one; it is 
 found in the whole tenor of apostolic Christian- 
 ity. While here and there we find it impossible 
 to resist the reasons for rejecting certain state- 
 ments as authentic, yet the whole spirit of the 
 apostolic age, the attitude of expectation on the 
 part of Paul and the other Christians indicates 
 that some of the Master's words pointed that 
 way. At any rate, Jesus' authority would best 
 explain the unanimous opinion that he was the 
 Messiah. The sayings about the impending 
 
78 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 world-catastrophe, the coming of the Son of 
 Man in the clouds of the sky, the suddenness 
 and the nearness of this event are all the more 
 certainly an echo of his own words because they 
 were never really fulfilled. This is but the ap- 
 plication of the well-known canon in criticism 
 that of two readings the more difficult one 
 should be followed. Certainly no disciple would 
 have ventured to put such unfulfillable words 
 into the mouth of the Master. This argument 
 will probably be decisive with most students of 
 the debatable question. 
 
 The second point, to be considered a little 
 more at length, has to deal with the relation of 
 the original gospel to the theology of the first 
 disciples, notably of Paul. 
 
 The situation is perhaps most rapidly char- 
 acterized when one states what the church added 
 to that simple gospel. Paul's interests con- 
 verge on the questions about the atonement, rec- 
 onciliation, justification. These interests are 
 conspicuously absent in the recorded words of 
 Jesus. Paul, not Jesus, is the creator of the 
 language of theology. 
 
 This language was shaped and adopted to 
 explain, as far as possible, the mystery of the 
 cross. The cross is no part of the gospel that 
 Jesus preached. It did not enter into his plans 
 about the reconstruction of the kingdom, of the 
 world, along quasi-messianic lines. It was a 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 79 
 
 reluctant afterthought, if that, forced upon 
 him by the bitter opposition of the Jewish hier- 
 archy. Gethsemane proves that to the last he 
 expected relief; he hoped that the bitter cup 
 might pass. What he looked for did not hap- 
 pen — it is only heroic souls that do not break 
 down in such circumstances. He had faith 
 enough in God, his father, to trust that some- 
 how the cause he represented would still be suc- 
 cessful. If he had lived he would, like Paul, 
 have adjusted himself to the changing condi- 
 tions. 
 
 His followers gradually gave up their hopes 
 concerning a visible theocracy; chiliasm became 
 a heresy in the churches. But the eternal hope 
 about the kingdom of God on earth — which 
 was the ideal of Jesus — could not be throttled. 
 The daily prayer of the Christian with its 
 "Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in 
 heaven" is the expression of that hope. 
 
 That prayer is the best bequest the Lord 
 left his followers. It has nothing to do with 
 theology. Christian theology did not begin 
 until the necessity arose to account for the new 
 religion. By that time the original freshness 
 of the impression the Master had made was 
 gone. Hinc illae lacrymae. 
 
 So the questions arose, to be asked by de- 
 vout men in all succeeding ages and especially 
 today when the true difference between the 
 Christian religion and the religion of the Christ 
 
80 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 emerges into the consciousness of so many. 
 These questions have been set in every scale of 
 human emotion, from the dull and melancholy 
 plaint of despair to the shrill challenge of a 
 cocksure skepticism. And the answers have been 
 as various as man with his hopes, his prejudices, 
 his hatreds, his ignorance, his ideals, his reli- 
 gion: Are we still Christian? Is it possible for 
 the modern man to be Christian? Can a life be 
 lived, today, according to the original gospel? 
 Who is going to settle the foul debate in the 
 churches as to who best represents the true 
 spirit of Jesus? How best can we force our way 
 through to the original message without doing 
 injustice to the later generations of men who 
 also tried to reproduce and justify the truth of 
 our religion? Has there ever been, is there ever 
 going to be a satisfactory explanation of that 
 unique life? Is it not true, in a way, that the 
 cause of Jesus perished when he died? 
 
 It is deplorable that these questions have so 
 often been associated with the inclination to be- 
 little the apostle Paul, whose theology repre- 
 sents the first decided break with the simplicity 
 of the gospel as preached by Jesus. The anti- 
 thesis Jesus — Paul has well-nigh been worked 
 to death. Who founded the church, Jesus or 
 Paul? Who has the credit of first seeing the 
 world-wide possibilities of this new gospel: the 
 Master or the disciple? What is the religion 
 of the historic church: Christianity or Paulin- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 81 
 
 ism? Thus the contrasts multiply. A formid- 
 able literature, claiming the credit of having 
 rescued the real Jesus, has elevated these con- 
 trasts into a veritable challenge to the age. 
 
 For this awakened interest in the life of 
 Jesus has, in too many cases, implied a competi- 
 tion between a dry-as-dust, clap-board, facti- 
 tious theology, and a hearty, nervous, human 
 religion, in which Paul has been forced to play 
 a truly pitiful part. The "Back to Christ" 
 people, though well-meaning, have often pre- 
 sented themselves in the rather ungracious light 
 of a man who has climbed a high prominence by 
 means of a convenient ladder and then kicks 
 the ladder away as a useless encumbrance. The 
 scaffolding is not the building ; but the building 
 could never have been reared without it. It 
 was through Paul that they were led to Jesus, 
 and now Paul is an obstruction; "he is not the 
 Christ" — which he never pretended to be! So 
 they repeat the slander and indorse the foolish 
 onslaught of Swinburne: 
 
 "Though death seem life, and night 
 Bid lear call darkness light, 
 Time, faith, and hope keep trust through sorrow and 
 shame, 
 Till Christ, by Paul cast out, 
 Return, and all the rout 
 Of raging slaves whose prayer defiles his name 
 
 Rush headlong to the deep, and die. 
 And leave no sign to say that faith once heard them 
 He." 
 
82 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 The fact is, that the nearer we get to Jesus 
 the more evident it becomes that it was Paul 
 who had best caught his spirit ; he was truer to 
 it than the pillar-apostles, who opposed him, 
 for a season. 
 
 Paul was anything but a recluse, grinding out 
 theories about man's first disobedience and the 
 fruit of that forbidden tree. He was the most 
 practical man in the apostolic age. His heart 
 beat warm with sympathy for the new converts 
 in many towns. In the most abstruse argu- 
 ments about God and sin he will stop and give 
 kindly advice about the homeliest affairs of 
 human life. Nothing human seemed alien to 
 this much-travelled, many-sided man. The 12th 
 chapter of his letter to the Romans shows that 
 he knew how to speak the language of the man 
 in the street — a language of simple terms about 
 the elemental things of life. No man — not 
 even John! — ever spoke more sweetly of love 
 (1 Cor. 13) or more manly of freedom, or more 
 prophetically of duty. Modesty was as charac- 
 teristic of him as it is of every truly great man. 
 
 And with all that his understanding of the 
 central truths of Christianity was simply un- 
 canny. No man since has in the remotest de- 
 gree approximated, for cogency and downright 
 force, his exposition of the Christian faith. 
 Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards drew their 
 strength from him. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 83 
 
 And yet he would be only a slave of Jesus 
 Christ. "He must increase, but I must de- 
 crease." As a slave he would carry the vase 
 he had fashioned for the service of mankind. 
 "An earthen vessel," he would have called it, 
 though the artificer had shown marvelous skill 
 in making it convenient for handling and beau- 
 tiful to look upon. Into the creation of the vase 
 he had put his whole soul and it was, in truth, 
 such a masterpiece that in the end the world 
 forgot to ask what was its one purpose, its rea- 
 son for being. He had formed it to carry water, 
 slave that he was, to parching souls. The 
 water was the main, the indispensable thing, 
 and that had been supplied by his Lord and 
 Savior, Jesus Christ. Many a meaner vessel 
 has been filled from this wonderful vase; men 
 have come again and again, and its contents 
 are not exhausted yet, for it is the water of life 
 that brings refreshing to the nations. Paul 
 had got it at the very spring ; he knew it to be 
 the one thing needed: "I make known to you, 
 brethren, as touching the gospel which was 
 preached by me that it is not after man. For 
 neither did I receive it from man, nor was I 
 taught it, but it came to me through revelation 
 of Jesus Christ." To serve him was his chosen 
 life-work, not to please men with theological 
 finesse or agreeable doctrine, least of all to sup- 
 plant him, the latchet of whose sandals he, too. 
 
84 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 would have considerd himself unworthy to loose. 
 It was not his fault when later generations 
 forgot the water for the vase — ^the religion for 
 the theology. 
 
 THE RELIGION OF JESUS 
 
 It is generally held that every serious depart- 
 ure from the teachings of Jesus concerning 
 God involves a corresponding corruption of 
 Christianity. If this is true — and in a sense it 
 is true — of the teachings, it must surely also be 
 true of his practises. The church has set her- 
 self an ideal, and that ideal happens to be em- 
 bodied in the person of Jesus. To follow him is 
 still considered, by most Christians, the surest 
 way of reaching humanity's goal. 
 
 If this is so there can be no task more im- 
 portant than to find out, if that is at all pos- 
 sible, what was his essential faith. What he 
 believed about God, and how he felt towards 
 God: this ought to be determinative of Chris- 
 tian belief and Christian practise. We have 
 our own lives to live, and our own ideals to 
 construct, but for this life-business none can 
 equip us better than the One who has given his 
 name to modern civilization. 
 
 What he thought about evil, death, immor- 
 tality, heaven, character, does not come within 
 the limits of this discussion ; nor need we be de- 
 tained here by any detailed examination of his 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 85 
 
 attitude towards the duties one man owes an- 
 other — the particularly modern expression of 
 all true religion. If these subjects are touched 
 upon at all it is only with reference to their 
 bearings on the central subject of his relation 
 to God. 
 
 As for what Jesus thought about the 
 one hundred and one interests which dis- 
 tinguish the first century from the twen- 
 tieth, Christianity has been forced to the 
 practical admission that that is of compara- 
 tively little importance to us. Whatever is tem- 
 poral, local, accidental in life is unworthy to 
 assume the importance of first principles. To 
 elevate chance remarks addressed to certain in- 
 dividuals in special circumstances into rules of 
 conduct universally and eternally valid is the 
 surest way of turning the sweetly natural life 
 of Jesus into a grotesque caricature. This pol- 
 icy is the mother of most of the abortive at- 
 tempts to translate Jesus into the twentieth 
 century and Palestine into America or England 
 or Germany. He is the Savior of men not be- 
 cause he compels assent in every field of human 
 endeavor, but because he is the acknowledged 
 master of their souls. This consideration will, 
 likewise, mitigate somewhat the disappointment 
 when it is seen how many interests, vital to our 
 modern existence in which, for better or for 
 worse, we must fight it out, are ignored, abso- 
 lutely, in his message to man. 
 
86 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 As regards those elements which for textual 
 or historical reasons appear in the least ques- 
 tionable, we are in duty bound to eliminate them 
 altogether when the attempt is made to reduce 
 his religion to its simplest terms. For instance, 
 it would be indefensible to draw upon his escha- 
 tological sayings that are so thoroughly satu- 
 rated with ideas drawn from Jewish apoca- 
 lypses. Again, the avowed purpose and method 
 of John warns the student that its contribu- 
 tions are unavailable, however useful they may 
 be in other directions. Christ was not the center 
 of Jesus' religion. A similar caveat is in order 
 with reference to some portions of the synop- 
 tics. Once again, the parabolic sections of the 
 gospels, embodying perhaps the most genuine 
 teaching of Jesus, (it will be recalled that 
 John does not transmit a single one) will have 
 to be used as parables. Luckily the time is 
 about past when, in the not over-elegant but ex- 
 pressive phrase, they were made to go on all 
 fours. And yet, once more, at every step one 
 is under the obligation of considering how much 
 the whole world-conception of antiquity was 
 bound to mold the thoughts of Jesus. We do 
 not believe that this has ever been done thor- 
 oughly. The ancient and the modem not only 
 differ, they differ violently, without a single 
 chance of a compromise, in their views about 
 earth, heaven, hell, God, man, matter, spirit, 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 87 
 
 energy, space, creation, law. Science unequivo- 
 cally contradicts the antique guesses at these 
 matters. And Jesus stood under the spell of 
 this world-conception. Who will say that 
 Jesus meant the same thing that occurs to a 
 modern astronomer, devout and not mad, when 
 he spoke of Our Father who is in heaven? 
 
 When the ground is thus cleared it will be 
 seen that the religion of Jesus was extremely 
 simple — as all true religion is bound to be, for 
 it is the one aboriginal trait of humanity. A 
 man's religion is given with his relations to God. 
 That relation is the primitive thing about the 
 universe. 
 
 To Jesus, God is everything, and communion 
 with him is the very life of the soul. This de- 
 termines his whole religious faith. Even his 
 ethics is cast in religious terms. To do good 
 and to abstain from evil simply because good- 
 ness is right and evil is wrong is an alien 
 thought which has to be smuggled into the New 
 Testament before it can be read as a text-book 
 on morals. This may be said about character. 
 Jesus believed that character, actions, life, not 
 beliefs, constituted the important thing about 
 religion. Those shall be blest who are humble 
 and meek and righteous and merciful and peace- 
 able and pure in heart. But even so, character 
 is just a means of reaching God. All life is to 
 be lived with reference to the God who gave it 
 
88 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 and who watches over it. "Hate father and 
 mother," he could say with a magnificent ex- 
 aggeration and an apparent disregard for the 
 human affections, so God be but followed. God 
 will recompense him who loses all — father, 
 mother, brother, sister, goods, even life (or 
 soul: note that in Jesus' mother-tongue there 
 was no difference between soul and life.) 
 
 This God is in some ways inscrutable (He 
 alone knows about the end of things) ; nobody 
 can be like Him in absolute goodness ("Why 
 callest thou me good.^* Nobody is good but God" 
 — Matthew's version being a palpable soften- 
 ing of the real words) ; He has the power to 
 destroy and to cast in gehenna; He is the su- 
 preme Lord, the one master to be served. The 
 first commandment is: The Lord our God, the 
 Lord is one, and thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, 
 and with all thy mind, and with all thy 
 strength. (Mark 12, 29f.) He is the final ar- 
 biter of our lot: "to sit on my right hand or 
 on my left hand is not mine to give, but it is 
 for them for whom it hath been prepared of 
 my Father." (Mat. 20, 23). 
 
 It is notable how dominant the idea was that 
 man should do God's will. This may be called 
 his favorite way of describing true piety. Who 
 was the Master's nearest kin? He that doeth 
 the will of my Father who is in heaven. Who 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 89 
 
 should get into the palace of the great king? 
 Not every one that saith Lord, Lord, but he that 
 doeth the will of my father in heaven. 
 
 Into what a wilderness of contradictions, 
 dense and wild and gloomy, has man strayed in 
 the matter of worshipping God ! God was, and 
 God could hear, and life was full of misery and 
 disillusion and enemies. Man has ever believed 
 that through prayer this God could be influ- 
 enced to change aff^airs to suit man's needs and 
 desires, from the totemist to the theist, from 
 Elijah to Moody, from Paul to Luther. And 
 into the darkness of dense superstition and im- 
 pious arrogance and pious half -knowledge and 
 childlike uncertainty Jesus throws a ray with 
 the power of a searchlight: "Thy will be done 
 on earth as it is in heaven." 
 
 Dare a thirsty nation pray for rain, a frantic 
 mother for the life of her only babe.? No 
 doubt; they always have and always will. But 
 what about the answers to such prayers.? They 
 do not supply material to be used as proofs of 
 the value of prayer. God'^s will will he done 
 soToehow. Here Jesus spoke in plain terms ; 
 this was his deepest conviction; and the 
 nemesis of doubt and unfaith has caught vast 
 multitudes simply because they did not care to 
 take him at his word. He did not deprecate 
 petition in prayer as such, he used it himself; 
 but when the iron went into his soul and the 
 
90 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 flesh rebelled against the injustice of men, when 
 the cup was found to hold not a draught from 
 paradise but the verjuice of sad disappoint- 
 ment, in his extremity he could say, "Neverthe- 
 less, not my, but Thy will be done." This scene, 
 which no friend would ever have invented and 
 no foe could ever have invented, gives charac- 
 ter to the faith of Jesus better than all the 
 isolated remarks which the loyalty of men has 
 arranged into "sermons" about the kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 This God of Jesus, whose will would be done, 
 could forgive sin; His providence embraces all 
 things from the dying sparrow and the wilting 
 lily to the comfort of His loved children; into 
 the hands of this God he could commit his 
 spirit in peace. 
 
 To extend the kingdom of this his God was 
 the Master's business. As a servant he was 
 willing to do this work, ministering unto the 
 needs of others, one of many servants, begin- 
 ning the work which, as he felt, later genera- 
 tions were to engage in with even greater suc- 
 cess. What mattered all the rabbinic discus- 
 sions about the right interpretation of the law, 
 the incursions of the Roman empire into the 
 precincts of a holy land, and the general 
 malaise of the people? The kingdom was the 
 thing! To establish it God had sent him into 
 the world. Now it was at hand. And procla- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 91 
 
 mation was to be made that its king was a God 
 of love, a Father, for short. 
 
 Jesus felt that the service of this Father must 
 be something better and more ennobling than a 
 formal religion of rites and sacrifices; that His 
 laws must be spiritually interpreted; that faith 
 in such a God helps to overcome difficulties even 
 to the healing of body and soul ; that in prayer 
 one could come near unto Him; that love for 
 Him was the fulfillment of all demands upon hu- 
 manity; that the brotherhood of all was the 
 practical expression of that love; and that to 
 proclaim these old truths with a new emphasis 
 and to realize them, as had never been done be- 
 fore, in his own life, was why he had come into 
 this world. 
 
 Every man has a mission; his life carries a 
 message. This was Jesus' mission ; this was his 
 message; it centered in God, the Father. 
 
 Repeatedly the question has been asked: 
 Now that our changed world-conception had 
 forced us to change our views concerning the 
 nature of God, dare we say that Jesus was 
 right about this his message .'^ 
 
 Many a time the right of Jesus to speak so 
 authoritatively about God has been challenged 
 — oftenest by noisy infidels, sometimes by bur- 
 dened, godseeking souls. For religion is a one- 
 to-one relation, impatient of interruptions and 
 external authorities. Strange as it may seem, 
 
92 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 especially in view of the terrible history of re- 
 ligious despotisms over the souls of millions, 
 man is still ever ready to test the validity of the 
 received faith, and when he does that authori- 
 ties do not count. Here is the one sphere where 
 he will be his own master. In any science he is 
 willing to defer to the opinion of the man who 
 knows, who has mastered the subject; no in- 
 telligent person would consent to express an 
 opinion on the properties of radium before 
 having mastered all its discoverers have had to 
 say about it. Medicine has its high-priests, and 
 the law a sanctity which is truly awe-inspiring 
 to one unacquainted with the ways of the 
 courts. But when God is the subject for discus- 
 sion every novice deems himself as wise as Cal- 
 vin or Spinoza. The theologian is on the de- 
 fensive. Every man will be his own high-priest, 
 and nothing is sacred but by the consent of the 
 devotee. 
 
 We believe that Jesus, when he spoke of God, 
 his Father, was wrong no more than the mod- 
 ern man is wrong when he speaks of God in 
 terms of cosmic forces and ethical values and 
 intellectual judgments. Forces and values and 
 judgments do not exist in vacuo, but always 
 presuppose something behind them. So with 
 the terms used by Jesus. 
 
 All terms applied to God are figures of 
 speech; there is no exception. The statement 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 93 
 
 that God is a father, a king, a spirit, a person, 
 only adumbrates the truth. It does not clearly 
 define or exhaust the truth. Language made 
 by man halts in the presence of God. God is 
 a father, and He is much more. God is spirit, 
 and He is much more. God is a person and 
 He is much more. He is very love. And what 
 is Love.** We know what it is, but we do not 
 define it in words. 
 
 No — modern science will not convict Jesus of 
 error when he speaks of God any more than the 
 Bible will convict philosophy of error when it 
 speaks of God. Jesus and Kant and Micah 
 and Browning all speak of the same God — 
 there is only one — who is over all, blessed for- 
 ever. Amen. 
 
 It is only because Jesus is eternally and su- 
 premely right about God that a rejection of 
 him means, for all whom he forced and forces 
 to face the one great issue, a rejection of God. 
 It was only so far as he bore the message of 
 God that he demanded and demands allegiance. 
 The dignity and the authority of kingship is 
 vested in the ambassador only because and in 
 so far as he represents the king. That one 
 should accept him for his own sake was no 
 part of his program as a savior. He came as 
 a servant. His God, who is our God, was the 
 Lord. 
 
 Time came when this simple truth seemed 
 
94 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 inadequate to his followers. The primal, 
 cosmic has always been too big for man and 
 so he has had recourse to definitions and dilu- 
 tions and special applications. Soon the battle 
 began to rage about words that might signify 
 many things, yea, that to the human under- 
 standing might signify nothing! We are not 
 yet agreed what is meant by incarnation, mira- 
 cles, propitiation. Holy Spirit, resurrection, 
 immortality, and a hundred other words that 
 hint at facts. The time even came when men 
 thought they could do service to God by extir- 
 pating any goodness in the world that was not 
 allied with the official body of belief. Pagan 
 virtues were but shining vices, and exemplary 
 holiness in men might, so John Rogers taught, 
 be nothing but " a cloak to hide their gross 
 and absurd doctrine." Heresy trials, as the 
 church has at last grudgingly admitted, are 
 held to determine not whether any objection- 
 able statements are in accordance with the 
 truth — when did heresy trials ever tend or pur- 
 pose to establish truth? — but whether they are 
 in accordance with a certain body of pronounce- 
 ments, a creed, accepted by a certain body of 
 men, the clergy, as the official belief of a body 
 of worshippers, the church. 
 
 That religion, the communion of the soul 
 with its God, could not be crushed by this 
 monstrous weight of words is due simply to 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 95 
 
 the fact that religion cannot be crushed by 
 anything. We are smitten with a hunger for 
 God and our hearts are restless until they find 
 their rest in Him. 
 
 "lord, teach us how to pray." 
 
 We have seen how the practise grew which 
 made Jesus the object of religious adoration. 
 We have tried to trace, in barest outline, the 
 religion of Jesus himself. It is almost nuga- 
 tory to inquire whether he encouraged this 
 practise, or whether his religion is any justi- 
 fication of this practise. 
 
 But at the risk of repetition we shall ask, 
 more specifically, What did he teach about 
 prayer.? This will help us to decide whether 
 the church did well in addressing songs to 
 Jesus, qiuisi deo. 
 
 What can be said about the memory of Jesus 
 is especially applicable to his prayer-life; it 
 will always provide an effective counterweight 
 to hold down the too exuberant imagination 
 that delights in enlarging upon uncertain mat- 
 ters. If it had not been for this memory of the 
 veritable man who grew, worked, suffered, and 
 died — though it is noticeable how pale it eventu- 
 ally got — there is no telling to what lengths the 
 church would have gone in its speculations 
 about the "natures" of Christ. The fantastic 
 mythologies of other religions are an indica- 
 
96 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 tion of what is produced by the human mind 
 when allowed to deviate unchecked from the 
 sober facts of life. The full flower of this 
 tendency, so far as it was allowed to develop, 
 may be sought in the various "gospels" of 
 James, Thomas, Pseudo-Matthew, Nicodemus, 
 with the corresponding "Acts" and Apocalypses 
 of later legend-making centuries. 
 
 But there was always the authentic record 
 that brought men back to earth. The fathers 
 might theologize, a Plato might speculate, and 
 our modern Utopians play with pictures, in the 
 end men had to echo the confession of Faust : 
 
 "l have, alas! Philosophy, 
 Medicine, Jurisprudence too. 
 And to my cost Theology, 
 With ardent labor, studied through. 
 And here I stand, with all my lore. 
 Poor fool, no wiser than before." 
 
 If Jesus had never lived the world would 
 probably have beheld today a very high form 
 of religion — this is a matter of course with 
 every one who is committed to the principle 
 of a growth upwards, a progress in the pro- 
 cess of the ages — but it would not have been 
 the Christian religion. The Christian religion 
 is conditioned by the appearance and the char- 
 acter of the historical person of Jesus Christ, 
 
 It is certain that Jesus prayed. A dutiful 
 son of Israel, he observed the stated hours of 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 97 
 
 worship and followed the forms prescribed. 
 While he did not hesitate to abrogate — abro- 
 gate is the word, and not just fulfil or spirit- 
 ualize — any letter that had outlived its useful- 
 ness, yet his whole spiritual being must have 
 been determined by the religious life of his 
 time and people. The prayers he was taught 
 in childhood must have made a lasting impres- 
 sion on the boy. He had learned that prayer 
 was a duty. He had learned that it was not 
 to be interrupted to salute even a king or to 
 uncoil a serpent that had wound itself around 
 the foot of the worshipper. (Mishnah, Berak- 
 hoth 30.) 
 
 How did he pray.? The New Testament 
 gives us as good as no information that is of 
 much help in deciding this matter. He could 
 not have prayed the " Lord's prayer," which 
 was given as a model to be followed by his 
 disciples ; his prayer-life is shrouded in mystery. 
 When he prayed he retired into solitude, and 
 he deprecated the sensational, spectacular 
 standing in public places affected by the 
 pharisees. 
 
 And yet we are able to help ourselves. It 
 is certain that Jesus attended the services of 
 the Jewish synagog; it is highly probable that 
 he occasionally acted as the Sheliach Tsibbur, 
 reading the section for the Sabbath and lead- 
 ing the devotions of the service. The third 
 
98 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 gospel contains a record of such a synagog 
 service in his home-town Nazareth. This ser- 
 vice began, according to ancient custom, with 
 two prayers. 
 
 Here, then, we have some real prayers of 
 Jesus. It will be interesting to note them. (vid. 
 Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the 
 Messiah, Book III, chapter 10.) 
 
 The first prayer was: — 
 
 "Blessed be Thou, O Lord, King of the 
 world, Who formest the light and createst the 
 darkness. Who makest peace, and createst every- 
 thing ; Who, in mercy, givest light to the earth, 
 and to those who dwell upon it, and in Thy 
 goodness, day by day, and every day, renewest 
 the works of creation. Blessed be the Lord 
 our God for the glory of His handiworks, and 
 for the light-giving lights which He has made 
 for His praise. Selah. Blessed be the Lord 
 our God, Who has formed the lights." 
 
 And the second: — 
 
 " With great love hast Thou loved us, O* 
 Lord our God, and with much overflowing pity 
 hast Thou pitied us, our Father and our King. 
 For the sake of our fathers who trusted in 
 Thee, and Thou taughtest them the statutes 
 of life, have mercy upon us, and teach us. 
 Enlighten our eyes in Thy Law; cause our 
 hearts to cleave to Thy commandments; unite 
 our hearts to love and fear Thy name, and we 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 99 
 
 shall not be put to shame, world without end. 
 For Thou art a God Who preparest salvation, 
 and us hast Thou chosen from among all nations 
 and tongues, and hast in truth brought us near 
 to Thy great Name — Selah — that we may lov- 
 ingly praise Thee and Thy Unity. Blessed 
 be the Lord, Who in love chose His people 
 Israel." 
 
 After these invocations, as we would now call 
 them, came the recital of the Schema — the 
 Jewish creed — and this was followed by the 
 real prayers or "Benedictions." There were 
 nineteen of these, six of which — ^the most anci- 
 ent ones — were generally recited on the Sabbath, 
 together with more informal, extemporaneous 
 ones, specimens of which are given in the Tal- 
 mud. Jesus, no doubt, used these Benedictions. 
 We give the first and the eighteenth, which were 
 recited with bent body : — 
 
 I. "Blessed be the Lord our God, and the 
 God of our fathers, the God of Abraham, and 
 the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; the 
 Great, the Mighty, and the Terrible God, the 
 Most High God, Who showeth mercy and kind- 
 ness. Who createth all things. Who re- 
 membereth the gracious promises to the fathers, 
 and bringeth a Savior to their children's chil- 
 dren, for His own Name's sake, in love. O 
 King, Helper, Savior, and Shield! Blessed art 
 Thou, O Jehovah, the Shield of Abraham." 
 
100 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 XVIII. " We give praise to Thee, because 
 Thou art He, Jehovah, our God, and the Grod 
 of our fathers, for ever and ever. The Rock 
 of our life, the Shield of our salvation. Thou 
 art He, from generation to generation. We 
 laud Thee, and declare Thy praise. For our 
 lives which are bound up in Thy Hand, for our 
 souls which are committed to Thee, and for 
 Thy wonders which are with us every day and 
 for Thy marvelous deeds and Thy goodnesses 
 which are at all seasons, evening, and morning, 
 and midday — Thou Gracious One, for Thy com- 
 passions never end. Thou Pitying One, for Thy 
 mercies never cease, forever do we put our 
 trust in Thee. And for all this, blessed and 
 exalted be Thy Name, our King, always, world 
 without end. And all the living bless Thee — 
 Selah — and praise Thy name in truth, O God, 
 our Salvation and our Help. Selah. Blessed 
 art Thou, Jehovah. The Gracious One is Thy 
 Name, and to Thee it is pleasant to give praise." 
 
 The Book of Psalms, with which the Lord 
 was familar, will supply additional material. 
 Gethsemane and Golgotha contribute the per- 
 sonal element. It is psychologically impossi- 
 ble that those scenes should have been invented 
 by friend or foe. 
 
 Jesus prayed to God, his Father, and he 
 expected his disciples to pray to God, their 
 Father. Neither the practise of the Master 
 
MODERN CHRlSTrAN '' io^ 
 
 nor his recorded teachings give the least justi- 
 fication to the Jesus-worship which grew up 
 so fast after his death. When Origen said: 
 " All prayer must be offered to the Father," 
 he had behind him the positive instructions of 
 Jesus, for he taught his followers, if he 
 taught them anything at all about prayer, that 
 they should pray to " Our Father who art in 
 heaven." The normative form, when the doc- 
 trine of the Trinity becomes thoroughly articu- 
 lated, is prayer in the Spirit, through the Son, 
 to the Father, 
 
 Even so good a Catholic as Loisy — it is well 
 known how in spite of all modernist sympathies 
 and papal edicts, Loisy insists on being at heart 
 a true Son of the Catholic church — can say 
 in UEvangile et VEglise, written to prove that 
 all we find in the church today is only the 
 development of the original germinal truth, that 
 the worship of Christ and the worship of Saints 
 did not belong to the gospel of Jesus. The two 
 are yoked together. This worship, to be sure, 
 expresses some eternal principle. To secure 
 the Catholic dogma of a historical continuity 
 something must be found out of which this cult 
 grew; to be catholic it must have been believed 
 semper, ubique et ah omnibus. The eternal 
 truth that divinity could be mirrored in human- 
 ity found a new and most fruitful expression. 
 Perpetuate this expression and you have the 
 
i'J2 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 Jesus cult. According to Loisy you have even 
 more. You have the cult of the Virgin Mary, 
 Mother of God, and the promiscuous cult of 
 the saints. All this had to come. Thus wisdom 
 is justified of her children and the history of 
 the church, which means Catholicism, supplies 
 both the esse and the posse of a rational and 
 orthodox Christianity. (Vid. Christliche Welt 
 15, 1909.) Whether the explanation will be 
 acceptable will depend upon one's idea of the 
 church; the important thing is that the church 
 soon felt herself called upon and competent to 
 make the extension. 
 
 We believe that Jesus never in the least justi- 
 fied or encouraged the practise. Nevertheless, 
 the Christians of the first century, and of all 
 following centuries, felt little compunction 
 about this innovation; they probably thought, 
 if they thought of it at all, that they were 
 acting in his spirit. 
 
 It was easy for the first Christians to do so. 
 And in a time when an Antiochus Epiphanes 
 and a Seleucus were supposed to be the off- 
 spring of God and emperors of various degrees 
 were supposed to share the dignity and honor 
 of divinity itself, they could without difficulty 
 take the final step which Paul always hesitated 
 to take, and call Jesus God outright. Under 
 the stress of such widespread influences the 
 virgin-birth stories and the genealogies going 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 103 
 
 back, as in Luke, to God Himself, took their 
 start. 
 
 The Graeco-Roman world had accepted Alex- 
 ander as a son of Zeus and Olympias, Augustus 
 as a son of Jupiter and Attia, Plato as a son 
 of Apollo and Periktione. Detailed stories of 
 a supernatural origin and nature were told of 
 Rameses II., Sargon, Eakus, Delphos, Minosj 
 Hercules, Esculapius, Scipio Africanus, Simon 
 Magus, and a host of other gods, and kings, 
 and great men. Without going to the length 
 of claiming that these stories are of a piece 
 with the sublime story of Jesus Christ one may 
 still say, unhesitatingly, that these common and 
 all but universal traditions throw a flood of 
 light on the New Testament efforts in an anala- 
 gous field. To ignore it altogether is to put 
 the life of Jesus into a false light. 
 
 It is not possible to trace the story of the 
 application of such ideas to the Man of Naza- 
 reth, the Savior of men. To what lengths well 
 intentioned people will go can be seen in the 
 " Ancient Prayer" abomination that is bedevil- 
 ing literally millions today. This religious tit- 
 bit, because of its utter fatuity really deserves 
 to be buried in silence. But we shall append the 
 document simply as a sample of what some wor- 
 shippers in the twentieth century can fabricate 
 and endorse and pass along, now that we had 
 thought the shackles of superstition had 
 
104 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 dropped from a tortured humanity. It will 
 tend to make us modest when we feel inclined 
 to condemn the name-worshippers and fetish- 
 worshippers of other times and climes. It is 
 painfully evident that vast numbers of Chris- 
 tians are today supremely indifferent to the 
 work done by the biblical scholar and the histo- 
 rian. This "ancient prayer" letter is circulat- 
 ing in different forms. One is the following: — 
 
 " 'Oh, Lord Jesus, I implore Thee to bless 
 all mankind! Keep us from all evil by Thy 
 precious blood; and take us to dwell with Thee 
 in eternity.' This was sent me by a friend. 
 Copy it and see what will happen. It is said 
 that those who will not write this prayer will 
 meet with some great misfortune; those who 
 will write it nine times will receive some great 
 joy on the ninth day. It was said in Jerusalem 
 that he who would write this prayer will be 
 delivered from all evil and calamity. Do not 
 break this chain. Make a wish while writing 
 this, and do not fail to write it nine times and 
 send it to nine friends." — 
 
 Fortunately there is a respectable number 
 of recipients who are willing to risk the danger 
 of breaking the chain, otherwise those letters 
 would multiply like gnats in the summer-time. 
 But it is a melancholy thought which is 
 prompted by such a caricature of prayer. How 
 far has Christianity, in many of its adherents. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 105 
 
 travelled from the simple religion of Jesus 
 Christ! All the way from the prayer in the 
 spirit and truth to the fetishism that adores 
 the true cross and the precious blood, that seeks 
 special blessings in "making a wish" over letters 
 concocted of childishness, falsehood, and purest 
 Aberglaube. A timely pendent is supplied by 
 those whose finest enthusiasm for Christian 
 work expresses itself in the desire just to get 
 into heaven and to look on the Lord's face. 
 That is the highest ambition, and glory enough 
 for man ! It is enough to make angels weep. 
 
 WHAT IS CHRISTAIN PEAYER.? 
 
 How a man prays will depend upon what 
 kind of a man he is. What he is, what his 
 nature craves, and what his ideal is, will be 
 expressed nowhere so well as in his prayers. 
 
 All service ranks the same with God, we are 
 told; and it is probably true that a prayer 
 is a prayer though there's nothing in it — but 
 the desire to pray. To be sure, there is a vast 
 difference between " battering the gates of 
 heaven with storms of prayer," whether in- 
 dulged in by the giants of the religious world 
 or by a despairing castaway, and the calm inter- 
 course between soul and soul that alone reaches 
 the heights of spiritual adoration and aspira- 
 tion; but the essential character of prayer as 
 communion with God is thereby not affected. 
 
 The literature on prayer has grown to such 
 
106 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 proportions that it is sheer interminable. Al- 
 though the supposedly materialistic, if not athe- 
 istic, spirit of the age has forced many a man 
 to confess, with Romanes, " I have not prayed 
 for a quarter of a century," there is no abate- 
 ment either in praying or in writing about 
 prayer. The soul, which is " incurably religi- 
 ous," cannot help it. Man does not need to try 
 to pray; he will pray in spite of himself and 
 in the starkest opposition to his closet philo- 
 sophy. One day he may prove all prayer ab- 
 surd and contrary to the fixed order of the 
 universe, and the next may see him on his 
 knees, muttering the publican's petition. For 
 we are all human. We need God, and man 
 cannot even swear without praying: every male- 
 diction is a concession to the religious claims 
 of humanity. 
 
 And since the claims and the needs are various 
 prayer will take on endless forms. " To one, 
 prayer is chiefly emotional fellowship ; to an- 
 other, it is more largely self-devotion to God- 
 like moral ideals; to a third, it expresses the 
 impulse to action; to a fourth, it is reverent 
 reflectiveness in the presence of the deepest 
 truths of life and destiny." (Coe, The Re- 
 ligion of a Mature Mind, p. 356.) It is the 
 variable and always varying expression of the 
 soul's vitality. 
 
 There is no standard. It is compatible with 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 107 
 
 the most extravagant views of God and of the 
 soul. A praying man will do anything, so 
 he but express himself. He will use the language 
 of childish superstition which debases the noblest 
 end of devotion. He will bully the universe 
 on the assumption that his prayer, if only fer- 
 vent enough, will be omnipotent. He will in- 
 struct God in the niceties of some recondite 
 and palsied theology. He will challenge the 
 Power that is over all to do its worst or its 
 best for foe or friend. He will sing Te Deums 
 in the midst of the mutilated bodies of thousands 
 of slaughtered innocents. He will grovel in the 
 dust a crushed sinner or hurl back upon God 
 the imputation that mankind is to be blamed 
 for its misdeeds, and that He had better man's 
 forgiveness give — or take! He will drive bar- 
 gains with Heaven. He will expect the repeti- 
 tion of a set form of words to act like a charm, 
 and to take the place of wisdom, foresight, 
 thrift, and work. He will remind the Never- 
 forgetting One of His promises, and impor- 
 tune a reluctant Judge, and anticipate the nor- 
 mal workings of His world. 
 
 Or he will come to get renewed courage and 
 hope and strength to fight life's battle like a 
 man. He will remind himself of the benefic- 
 ence of God's laws. He will speak his thoughts, 
 not as though God needed to be told, but be- 
 cause the telling brings relief and clears the 
 
108 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 way for wise action. He will use the language 
 of childlike faith which a loving Father knows 
 how to interpret, and to heed, and to correct, 
 and to discount, if need be. He will praise 
 God from whom all mercies flow and thank the 
 Lord for He is good, for His lovingkindness 
 endureth forever. He will make God a confident 
 in all his plans, trusting that wisdom may come 
 to him in the quiet hours of self-devotion and 
 meditation, and at the last fall asleep a'babbl- 
 ing o' green fields and still waters where the 
 shepherd of souls has led his beloved. 
 
 Wherever man aspires or hopes, or loves, or 
 works, or thinks right thoughts he prays, i. e., 
 he establishes a personal relation with the Power 
 greater than himself that makes for justice 
 and law and goodness. Essentially it turns out to 
 be a co-operation with that Power, not a thau- 
 maturgic control over it. This co-operation 
 may go to the extent of practical identifica- 
 tion with it. "Communion" and "union" are 
 no farther apart in being than in language 
 Language is, as it were, but a vehicle for the 
 transfer of spirit. To talk means to transfer, 
 communicate, commit one's self to another be- 
 ing. Whether there come any special favors 
 by way of response — ^vulgo, answers — is utterly 
 beside the mark. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 109 
 
 '' No, be man and nothing more — 
 Man who, as man conceiving, hopes and fears. 
 And craves and deprecates, and loves and loathes. 
 And bids God help him, till death touch his eyes, 
 And show God granted most, denying all. 
 
 In other words, the reason for prayer is 
 found somewhere in the prayer itself, it brings 
 it's own reward; it's value is independent of 
 any more or less satisfactory answers, whose 
 apologetic usefulness is always gauged by the 
 antecedent belief or unbelief of man. 
 
 The elements of normal Christian prayer are : 
 1. that God's will be done; 2. that man culti- 
 vate the frame of mind in which he will be glad 
 to assist God in the doing of His will; and 3. 
 that this co-operation bring strength and peace 
 and satisfaction — a sense of real harmony with 
 God's universe. Needless to say, the action of 
 such a prayer is reciprocal: man acts and is 
 acted upon, speaks and is spoken to, thinks and 
 is thought of, by God. 
 
 Who or what is this being — God.^^ Prayer 
 is the identification and communion or union 
 with God. How can these definitions satisfy 
 as long as men shall fail to agree on the nature 
 of that being.? Here ignorance extends her 
 sable wand, the supreme mistress of the situa- 
 tion. Agreeable to the ancient and inherited 
 custom, it is here that the ferocious battle of 
 words rages most. 
 
 As many gods, so many kinds of prayer. To 
 
110 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 say that prayer is addressed to God only simply 
 means confusion doubly confounded. There 
 are cases on record of well-intentioned preachers 
 addressing "The Absolute" in prayer! Self- 
 communion — ^musing — has, with some, all the 
 true marks of prayer. The dead yet living 
 ancestors have a pretty strong claim upon be- 
 ing among the original objects of prayer. The 
 saints are held to pray to God, and many pray 
 to them. Mary, the " Mother of God," and 
 Jesus, the " Son of God," have both their 
 devotees by the million. Idol, pagan and Chris- 
 tian, receive the devotion of man in spite of 
 all rationalisms to the contrary. And nature 
 worship is, as shall be shown farther on, much 
 more than a convenient figure of speech. These 
 various modes of worship are part and parcel 
 of our humanity. It is illusive to suppose that 
 we can slough off the whole coil of our past 
 history, our traditions and habits, our fears 
 and flickering hopes the moment we have in- 
 vented the intellectual statement as the expres- 
 sion of a reasonable conviction : God is One. 
 
 God is One. So be it. But man is not a 
 mere thinking machine, turning out syllogisms. 
 He is swayed by many feelings, the football 
 of many forces. If the worship of many gods 
 be paganism, there is much paganism in Chris- 
 tianity. Polytheism was, in some respects, too 
 good a guess at the nature of the universe to 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 111 
 
 be thrown out, bag and baggage, as soon as 
 the better explanation occurred to man. Pan 
 is not dead yet, pace all the mournful poets 
 that romanticism has produced. 
 
 It was religion that found tongue in all 
 this imperfect and ignorant worship, with its 
 rites, and incantations, and adjurations. The 
 world sorely needed its prophets ; it needed Jesus 
 Christ to declare the only true God to whom 
 altars had been reared in all ages and in all 
 countries, wherever there were human hearts 
 and human needs. 
 
 PRAYER TO JESUS IN MODERN TIMES 
 
 HYMNOLOGY 
 
 The prayer chain that was given on a pre- 
 vious page represents, confessedly, an extreme 
 development of a religious cult in Christendom. 
 It would be unfair to leave the impression that 
 the tendency which started with a martyr's 
 " Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" was bound to 
 grow into such a vagary. Extravagances are 
 marked and notable only because they are an 
 exaggeration of a normal type. 
 
 We believe that norm to be present in the 
 hymns sung by the church, true to the tradi- 
 tion as recorded by Pliny, in honor of Jesus. 
 
 The recorded prayers of individuals, Augus- 
 tine's, Luther's, Wesley's, Beecher's are the per- 
 sonal expressions of private opinion and feel- 
 
112 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 ing, and have only in the smallest degree be- 
 come public property ; and the liturgical prayers 
 prescribed by the rubric of special denomina- 
 tions are the official declaration only of the 
 convictions of their respective communicants. 
 
 Naturally there are vast differences. It is 
 one of the many merits of the Book of Common 
 Prayer that its prayers avoid the invertebrate 
 sentimentalism which intimacy with the God of 
 Love has so often engendered. Much of this 
 historic volume has been outgrown, some of 
 its detailed petitions are grotesquely out of 
 place in the mouth of a modern worshipper 
 and can hardly be used without a violent wrench 
 of one's sense of the eternal fitness of things; 
 thus does the progress of the ages make an- 
 cient knowledge uncouth. Would a revision elide 
 these objectionable features.? Hardly. The 
 Book of Common Prayer is of one piece, the 
 splendid embodiment of a definite historic tem- 
 per. It is a historic document. Some day 
 a new one may do for coming centuries what 
 it has done for the past. But it will be a por- 
 tentously difficult task to improve upon its 
 prayers. They do not speak the language of 
 immanence; but for dignity and sobriety, they 
 are wellnigh inimitable. A cursory reading, 
 better still, the habitual use of the various 
 collects will fill one with a devout admiration 
 for the restraint of the writers. We note, in 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 113 
 
 passing, that it is the rarest exception where 
 these prayers are addressed directly to Jesus. 
 He is generally introduced in the stereotype 
 phrase that concludes most of them : " Through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." 
 
 It is the hymns of Christendom that are the 
 common possession of all churches. They are 
 sung by all people. Thinkingly or mechani- 
 cally the worshippers have repeated the old 
 phrases until they are, today, an integral part 
 of our religion. Many a person may not be 
 able to recite a single psalm, the phrases of 
 his daily prayer may be threadbare from over 
 much use, but it will go hard to find one whose 
 life has not absorbed several of the old hymns 
 sung by father and mother when childhood was 
 impressionable and the memory fresh and 
 strong. 
 
 These hymns are, in an astonishingly large 
 number, prayers directed to the exalted Jesus. 
 What Jesus is to the authors and to the thought- 
 ful singers can be determined by an examina- 
 tion of the epithets applied to Him. 
 
 We shall take, by way of illustration, the 
 forty-nine hymns that have special reference 
 to Jesus, as given in a popular hymnal that 
 is used by many churches of a number of de- 
 nominations. Other hymnals would yield a simi- 
 lar result. 
 
 We find the following: — Lord, Guard, 
 
114 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 Leader, Christ, Sun of my Soul, Savior dear, 
 Jesus, Son, Master, (dear) Redeemer, David's 
 Holy Son, Dear Shepherd, Incarnate Word, The 
 Lord my Righteousness, Jesus Christ our King 
 and Head, Christ the King of Glory, Lamb, 
 Matchless King, Lord of Love, Lord of Heaven 
 and Earth, Lord of Peace, Prince of Peace, 
 Lord of Years, Potentate of Time, Creator 
 of the Rolling Spheres, Jesus Holy Jesus, Lord 
 of All, My God and King, My gracious Master 
 and my God, Our Holy Lord and King (to 
 thee alone we sing). Brother, Friend, Jesus the 
 God of Love, Prince of Glory, Eternal King, 
 King Triumphant, King of Angels, The In- 
 carnate Deity, Jesus our Immanuel, Sun of 
 Righteousness, Son of God, Son of Man, Judge, 
 Man of Sorrows, The Resurrection Thou, Con- 
 queror, etc., etc. This list could be extended 
 ad lihitum, so as to include thousands of names 
 and descriptive terms. (Cf. Boehmer's study 
 of the subject, Studier-Stuhe 1905.) 
 
 A special subdivision contains twenty-nine 
 hymns of " Communion with Christ," and the 
 prayers that follow are practically all addressed 
 to him. Some of the finest and most endear- 
 ing songs of the church need but be mentioned 
 to show what a hold this practise has on the wor- 
 shippers. For here we find Bernard de Clair- 
 vaux's O Jesus, King most wonderful. Thou 
 Conqueror renowned; Jesus, I love Thy charm- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 115 
 
 ing Name, 'Tis music to mine ear; Jesus, the 
 very thought of Thee, With sweetness fills my 
 breast ; Wesley's Love Divine, all love excelling ; 
 O Holy Savior, Friend unseen; I am Thine, 
 O Lord, I have heard Thy voice ; Blessed Savior, 
 Thee I love; Savior, more than life to me, I 
 am clinging, clinging close to Thee; Come, 
 my soul, thy suit prepare, Jesus loves to an- 
 swer prayer; Pass me not, O gentle Savior, 
 Hear my humble cry; More love to Thee, O 
 Christ. 
 
 The first thing that strikes the reader of 
 such lists is the remarkable wealth of descrip- 
 tive names which piety has coined; the second 
 is the recurrence of those lordly and kingly 
 terms, that emphasize the transcendence of 
 Jesus over man and over all. These hymn- 
 books cultivate a rather robust faith in the 
 majestic power and glory of the Master. They 
 are (let us be grateful for that!) refreshingly 
 free from the sickening sweetishness that makes 
 so many hymns of the pietists offensive to 
 modem taste: Sweet Jesus, Darling Jesus, My 
 Sweet Heart, My Lovely Bridegroom et id 
 genus omne. Many a worshipper during the 
 renaissance preferred to donate to his church 
 a St. Sebastian rather than a Peter or a John 
 because St. Sebastian was pictured as a comely, 
 athletic youth, good to look upon ; so the post- 
 reformation days often cultivated this ecstatic. 
 
116 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 neurotic style, in which the most delicate affairs 
 of private life were allegorized and spiritualized 
 into religion, and the language past muster 
 just because it betokened an intimate relation 
 with the Heart of hearts. What is religion but 
 a perfect abandon, anyway? The melodies of 
 ancient love songs had done service in the 
 churches, tavern doggerel had supplied the text 
 for chants, a Song of Solomon had been twisted 
 into a parable of Christ the Bridegroom and 
 the Church his Bride; then why not draw upon 
 the phraseology of youthful love to depict the 
 sweet experiences of the soul? Wesley invokes 
 " Jesus, Lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom 
 fly;" the followers of Zinzendorf went farther, 
 and the only reason many of their songs are 
 not classed with erotic literature is that they 
 are, at the worst, still the vehicle of true religi- 
 ous adoration. 
 
 It is mainly, then, as the Lord of all things 
 that Jesus is invoked in our songs. On this 
 idea the changes are rung in every key and 
 mood. Of course, the man in the pew, and, 
 too often, the man in the pulpit too, is per- 
 fectly innocent of any attempt to justify this 
 procedure. He sings thus because the church 
 sings thus, and he prays to Jesus because his 
 father did so before his time, and there is an 
 end of the matter. 
 
 And many a person who would have liked 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN IIT 
 
 to ask questions has found the path blocked 
 with the equation Jesus-God, and for fear of 
 getting entangled in the briars of all the here- 
 sies has returned the way whence he had come. 
 There is no use in verbal niceties and philo- 
 sophical refinements and subtle distinctions when 
 the church has settled it for all times. And 
 so he will sing vociferously, because unthink- 
 ingly, "Hark, ten thousand harps and voices 
 sound the note of praise above ! Jesus reigns and 
 Heaven rejoices. Jesus reigns, the God of 
 Love. See! He sits on yonder throne! Jesus 
 rules the world alone!" 
 
 Our hymn-books are full of such sentiments. 
 Whether *' Jesus" is used or " God" will often 
 depend upon the exigencies of the rhyme or the 
 rhythm. The popular taste is not very particu- 
 lar in such matters : all people who are not 
 white are black; stones have one color, to wit, 
 stone-color; one star differeth not from another 
 in glory; a whale is a fish; and the Bible is 
 the word of God. 
 
 A passage in the Journal Intvme of Amiel is 
 not without interest in this connection: — 
 
 Every religion proposes an ideal and a model. 
 The Christian ideal is sublime, and its model 
 of a divine beauty. We may hold aloof from 
 the churches, and yet bow ourselves before 
 Jesus. We may be suspicious of the clergy, 
 and refuse to have anything to do with cate- 
 
118 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 chisms, and yet love the Holy and the Just, 
 who came to save and not to curse. Jesus will 
 always supply us with the best criticism of 
 Christianity, and when Christianity has passed 
 away the religion of Jesus will in all proba- 
 bility survive. After Jesus as God we shall 
 come back to faith in the God of Jesus. 
 
 But to distinguish here and to draw lines 
 is not without danger to the peace of many 
 a mind. Fine discrimination is, in the large 
 matters of religion, a passport to the synthesis 
 of all the heresies. And when all has been said 
 that can be said, there may still be some good 
 reason for this popular choice. Lampe must 
 have his religion, too; and that religion must 
 be practical. It must work; and if it works, 
 it must be true. 
 
 And there is no denying that this religion, 
 though it is not and never was the Christianity 
 of Christ, has been helpful to millions. We 
 are all distant relations of poor Lampe, though 
 it may be a bit humiliating to acknowledge 
 the impeachment. In the shadow of the valley 
 of death, at the brink of the grave, on the 
 battle-field, and in the agony of mortal disease 
 men have spoken to Jesus the Sympathizer and 
 have been strengthened for their final struggle. 
 Victory has come to their cause and peace to 
 their souls, and they were convinced that their 
 prayers were heard. There are many ways 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 119 
 
 of praying, and they may all be genuine. The 
 results prove them to be so. 
 
 THE REASONS FOR PRAYER TO JESUS 
 
 We proceed to inquire into the reason why 
 so many prefer to address their prayer to Jesus. 
 It is certain that the great majority take their 
 prayers and their hymns ready-made and ask 
 no questions for comfort's sake. These do not 
 concern us. But when a Wesley, or Luther, or 
 Doddridge falls into the habit it cannot be put 
 down to plain carelessness. There must be seri- 
 ous reasons that weigh heavier than any scruples 
 to encroach upon the sovereignty of God. We 
 shall mention four of the more prominent ones. 
 
 I. The overpowering feeling of gratitude to 
 Jesus. 
 
 That the intense absorption into the suffer- 
 ings of Jesus, the pious contemplation of the 
 five wounds should seek and find expression in 
 more or less ecstatic utterances addressed to the 
 Man of Sorrows could have been foreseen. The 
 history of monastic Christianity gives many an 
 episode of religious self -hypnosis induced by the 
 prolonged study of Jesus' passion. The classic 
 case is that of St. Francis of Assisi. With 
 him and his congeners abnegation and castiga- 
 tion and mortification become the virtues of re- 
 ligion not only because the flesh needed to be 
 curbed and the world denied and the devil 
 
120 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 shunned, but because the divine life of the Lord 
 had ended in such a painful fashion. The 
 disciple would be no better than the Master. 
 
 But aside from that, vicarious suffering will 
 always compel the sympathy of man. Greater 
 love has no man than that he will give his life 
 for his friends. The human heart naturally 
 responds to any genuine sacrifice. Who has 
 not caught himself, on the receipt of some favor, 
 audibly thanking the thoughtful friend for his 
 kindness or his devotion? That at the moment 
 he was a thousand miles away made no differ- 
 ence. 
 
 The circumstantial account of what Jesus 
 had experienced during the last few days of 
 his life, especially when interpreted in the light 
 of some atonement doctrine, was enough to 
 prompt psalms of thanksgiving in any but the 
 most selfish hearts. No language was expres- 
 sive enough to do proper obeisance to the sacred 
 Head, now wounded, with grief and shame 
 weighed down, now scornfully surrounded with 
 thorns, its only crown. Innocent suffering out- 
 rages the human sense of justice and it puts 
 the beneficiary under eternal obligations. 
 
 So, in moments of patriotic exaltation, we 
 thank our forefathers, under the spell of ora- 
 torical persuasion, for their heroic patience, for 
 enduring the hardships of pioneers, for labor- 
 ing that we might enjoy and battling that we,, 
 their children, might have peace. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 121 
 
 This is more than rhetoric. A worthy child 
 must feel grateful for all this. Building monu- 
 ments and observing memorials is the least it 
 will do. It will voice its feelings in words, and 
 then nothing will be more natural than the 
 apostrophe of thanksgiving. 
 
 Among the Japanese Christians the custom 
 is still observed of thus addressing the souls of 
 the departed. When their beloved missionary, 
 Dr. Cate, died, his spirit was invoked: "How 
 can we who have been taught and led by you 
 fail to be stimulated by your example to do 
 aU we can to carry out your wishes? When 
 you fell asleep, we were given strength. . . .Be 
 at rest. The liberality, the sympathy, the 
 patience, the many fine traits of character which 
 your life taught us, along with your departed 
 spirit, will ever abide in us. You will remain 
 our teacher for all times. You are not dead. 
 You live and work among us still." . . . (Com- 
 pare The Open Court, June, 1909.) 
 
 And even those believers who may refuse to 
 submit to the spell which the cross on Calvary 
 exerts will find in their own spiritual experiences 
 a point of contact with the Man of Nazareth. 
 He is the pathetic figure in history. And deep 
 speaks unto deep. What Jesus did, or tried 
 to do against insuperable odds, as it turned 
 out, will elicit a response in every heart that 
 has ever aspired or loved and lost. Mankind 
 
ia« THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 will ever be debtor to him for his life and his 
 influence. It is natural to want to thank him 
 for this gift. 
 
 II. The doctrine of God's transcendence. 
 
 The inane function which was once given 
 to God of sitting apart and watching the world 
 go round lost considerable credit when men once 
 began to think seriously of the Pauline state- 
 ment, " In him we live and move and have our 
 being." And what little credit was left went 
 the moment the modem conception of God took 
 the field. 
 
 Much has been written about the rediscovery 
 of Jesus Christ. It was the rediscovery of 
 God that made it impossible for many a devout 
 soul to off^er prayer to Jesus. The paradox 
 was solved — as we shall try to show — with those 
 who took the logical step and conceded that 
 all life and movement and being could be predi- 
 cated as consisting in God. That did not 
 debase God, and it certainly did not debase 
 His universe. 
 
 But there was a bogy that frightened many 
 an honest soul from going to such lengths. 
 With most believers there has never been any 
 serious danger that God get too near man. The 
 difficulty has been in the other direction: God 
 was too far off from us. The Great Unknown 
 dwelt on the limits or, better still, beyond the 
 limits of the cosmos, and it was the business 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 123 
 
 of prayer to bridge this yawning chasm. It 
 is no exaggeration, but the soberest truth, when 
 we say that for the vast majority of mankind 
 God lives " in heaven." " Our Father who art 
 in W5" would be blasphemy to them. " Our 
 Father in whom we are" would be nonsense. 
 
 Both science and theology are responsible for 
 this condition. The physicist and the theolo- 
 gian, jointly, secularized the universe, so to 
 speak, and God was pushed out, step by step, 
 from one department to another until He 
 reached the starting-point; creation was the 
 jumping-ofF place. And the doctrine of the 
 eternity of matter, or, what amounts to the 
 same thing, the persistence of energy refused 
 even that last foot-hold to the God of our 
 fathers. Second causes were held to explain 
 all. Law with a capital letter assumed the scep- 
 ter wrested from the Almighty's hand, and the 
 Final Cause retired beyond the reach of the 
 finest instrument and the subtlest mind. 
 
 Does God transcend His world.?' Most 
 assuredly, if He is what is generally meant by 
 a God. Transcendence is a mighty, magnifi- 
 cent truth. And this truth has given theology 
 its dignity. What is man that God should 
 be mindful of him.? Before God the nations 
 are as a drop of the bucket, as grasshoppers, 
 as grass that is cast into the oven and burned. 
 He is from everlasting to everlasting. Before 
 
124 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 the mountains were made He was. We became, 
 God is the ever-present I Am. Men say that 
 astronomy enlarges the mind. Theology begins 
 where astronomy ends. Small visions mean 
 small ideals, small aims are incompatible with 
 thinking God's thoughts. 
 
 It may be that the greatness of God will 
 belittle man. Mountains make cathedrals ridi- 
 culously small. This has certainly been the 
 practical result in Christendom. It cannot be 
 said that Calvin's glorious scheme did justice 
 to the freedom and the sovereignty of man, the 
 crown of creation, difficult as we may find it 
 to escape his logic about God. But that is 
 due to the incapacity of the human understand- 
 ing. The mind has to assent to the argu- 
 ments for the greatness of God, though the 
 heart will straightway refuse to admit the full 
 consequences. Still, both the Calvins and the 
 Darwins of the past succeeded in putting a 
 great 'gulf between heaven and earth which 
 it was very hard to leap. This was not their 
 intention. Darwin, especially, protests empha- 
 tically and repeatedly in The Origin of Species 
 against the idea that the rejection of special 
 providences need be construed into a removal 
 of God from the world. The protest was, as 
 is usual in such cases, entirely ignored. 
 
 But no matter what the intentions were, the 
 net result of all these speculations and investi- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 125 
 
 gations, of theologic affirmation and scientific 
 negation was that God had been silenced. Like 
 Elijah of old the skeptic stood and mocked: 
 " Cry aloud : for He is a god : either He is 
 musing, or He is gone aside, or He is on a 
 journey, or peradventure He sleepeth and must 
 be awaked." But there was no voice, nor any 
 that answered. 
 
 And lo! here was an intermediary! Jesus 
 stood at the threshold of the modern era and 
 revealed his God to man. Men had thought 
 that those who had seen him had seen the 
 Father. God was invisible, dwelling in a light 
 where no man cometh; Jesus was a living, 
 breathing, sympathizing personality. In him 
 God descended to earth. Heaven and earth 
 kissed each other. The word became flesh, and 
 we beheld his glory, the glory of the unique 
 Son of God. Moreover, this flesh-and-blood 
 Jesus had felt our weaknesses; we were sure 
 he would know how to help us; he had been 
 tempted; we were sure he would make allow- 
 ances. He was bone of our bone, whereas God 
 was everlasting, without body, parts, or pas- 
 sions, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness 
 etc. 
 
 It may be said, parenthetically, that these 
 creeds with their statements concerning God 
 would, of themselves, have been enough to drive 
 many a hungry soul to pray to Jesus — if in 
 
126 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 them Jesus himself had not been made even 
 more unreal and phantastic than God. The 
 church, as distinguished from the priesthood, 
 was less concerned about the purity of the doc- 
 trine than about religion. It wanted to wor- 
 ship. And since God had quit the field and had 
 retired into the empyrean of theologic fog Jesus 
 became, with millions, the natural object of the 
 manifold petitions and thanksgivings. When 
 Jesus, too, retired under the pressure of the 
 creeds, or rather of the temper that produced 
 the creeds, Mary and all the saints filled the 
 breach. The distance between God and man 
 may be measured by the number of intermedi- 
 aries thought necessary to carry the mortal's 
 prayers to their destination. This applies to 
 Jews, Mahommedans, Pagans and Christians — 
 wherever the cult of saints has gained a foot- 
 hold. 
 
 III. The holiness of God. 
 
 God's transcendence is of cosmic significance; 
 His holiness is ethical. In the first place it is 
 a question whether finite man can, by any pos- 
 sibility, approach God; in the second it is a 
 question whether sinful man ought, by any 
 canons of propriety, to approach Him. The 
 sinner feels that he dare not come, and has 
 no right to come, into the presence of the Just 
 and Holy One. 
 
 It has been the weak spot in so much of our 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 127 
 
 much vaunted socalled liberal thinking that it 
 has been frivolous in its conception of a holy 
 God. It has tried to persuade itself into be- 
 lieving that whatever is is eternally right. When 
 Renan and Emerson and Arnold wrote about 
 the universe they did not, like Old Testament 
 prophets, first think of the moral order of the 
 universe, that could be broken into and shat- 
 tered. Sin has been thinned out into weakness 
 or immaturity. Murder is insanity, as the law 
 deponeth. Twentieth century pseudo-philoso- 
 phy has at last caught the old serpent and 
 drawn her poison fangs: behold! they were 
 nothing but an error of mortal mind. 
 
 With anyone to whom sin appears in its 
 oldtime aspect of a monstrous diabolical wrong, 
 a veritable snake in the garden of plenty, a 
 holy God is sure to strike terror to the imagina- 
 tion. Sacrificial rites have never lacked the 
 appeasing element; the angry god was to be 
 mollified, the primordial demands for justice 
 were to be satisfied. Hecatombs became, in 
 many an instance, a sop offered to an outraged 
 deity that wanted blood. It got blood, catar- 
 acts of blood. The history of religion is 
 written in blood. The Druid in his grove, the 
 Baal priest on Carmel, the Levite in the temple, 
 the Indian under juggernaut, the dervish on 
 his cruel hooks, all and many more swelled the 
 sanguinary flood. What will a man not give 
 to save his soul.? Even his first-born. 
 
128 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 It is a pleasant, but altogether delusive, 
 flattery to suppose that Christianity could, over 
 night, cast off this burden of our common hu- 
 manity. The sacrifice, indeed, went ; the final en- 
 tering into the holy place, once for all time, of 
 the great high-priest of souls completed and 
 abolished that system for most Christians. 
 Though even here one is bound to walk cir- 
 cumspectly when one thinks of the vestiges of 
 paganism that survive in the numerous super- 
 stitious practises among supposedly Christian 
 peoples. But the grand, aboriginal superstition 
 has persisted through all the changes of time, 
 namely, that a holy God can be appeased, if 
 not through a bloody or bloodless offering, then 
 through the intercession of some especially in- 
 fluential person. 
 
 The barbarism of an appeased or appeasable 
 god is moribund, but one can easily gauge the 
 potency of the intercession idea by a survey 
 of our hymnology with its one hundred and 
 one variations on the tune, " Jesus plead for 
 me." These songs are sung today; they form 
 a surprisingly large proportion of the contents 
 of most hymnals. 
 
 Any possible disclaimers to the effect that 
 Jesus would not pray to the Father for us are 
 immediately negatived with the decisive refer- 
 ence to the universal practise of mankind (when 
 did one man ever refuse to pray for another.'') 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 129 
 
 and to the particular case of the Lord of whom 
 the gospel even records a complete, ready-made 
 sample of an intercessory prayer. 
 
 But let an intermediary, a mediator once 
 come between an austere God and a trembling, 
 fearful sinner and it will soon be discovered that 
 it is not every man's privilege to preserve his 
 doctrine of monotheism intact. There is much 
 praying to Jesus which it would be false to 
 call polytheistic, all the once common unitarian 
 claims to the contrary notwithstanding; and 
 it is a cogent question whether we shall ever 
 discover a better formula than that of the trin- 
 ity with which to explain the inexplicable, and 
 to define the indefinable, God. Yet who would 
 deny that for vast multitudes of Christianized 
 people the doctrine of the trinity is absolutely 
 indistinguishable from the crassest polytheism.'* 
 
 To the average mind yonder was an inac- 
 cessible being who dwelt in serene loftiness, in 
 a purity that burned like fire. No mortal could 
 look on him and live. And here was another 
 being, a sympathizing man who was sinless, who 
 had somehow escaped the universal taint. He 
 shared God's nature and could therefore com- 
 mune with Him. It is not clear how god-fear- 
 ing yet god-seeking sinners could have failed 
 to avail themselves of his good graces. Chris- 
 tianity said, God is love; conscience said, the 
 greater the love the greater the holy zeal 
 
130 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 against unrequited love; and in desperation 
 mankind flung itself upon the bosom of Jesus. 
 He, at least, would understand. 
 
 This line of approach to Jesus was not fol- 
 lowed by all Christians. The person who has 
 drawn the full consequences of the gospel truth 
 that God is love is not impressed very much with 
 the benefits of such a roundabout way to God. 
 He will insist that in prayer, too, a straight line 
 is the shortest distance between two points, 
 especially when there are no obstructions lying 
 between. However, there is no doubt that to 
 many the way around is not just the best but 
 the only possible way into heaven. It avoids 
 the wall of living fire which is raised between 
 the uncleanness of man and the holiness of God. 
 
 IV. The dogma of the deity of Christ. 
 
 Standing, as we do, in the midst of the battle 
 that is going on today about the personality 
 of Jesus Christ, and remembering how little, 
 after all, avail the offensive debates on this 
 age-old problem, it will be our duty to be 
 modest about any claims or denials we may 
 all personally be inclined to make. 
 
 Most sane people believe that Jesus was 
 divine. It is the fine distinctions that are drawn 
 after this is stated that invite the odium and 
 the recriminations among a certain class of the- 
 ologians. 
 
 Now when a man asseverates such a belief 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 131 
 
 it is only a matter of common politeness for 
 the rest to take him at his word and not to 
 give him the lie direct by telling him that he 
 does not mean what he says, that his word 
 "divine" does not signify divine, that he has 
 no right to appropriate venerable language to 
 serve his oblique purposes, or whatever else the 
 sense of propriety may suggest at the moment. 
 Language was made for man; and besides, no 
 two men mean identically the same thing when 
 they use the word "horse." Divinity, what- 
 ever it may all be, is certainly bigger than any 
 man's — ^though he were a Solomon — conception 
 about it. The person who most abuses language 
 is he who would make it a desiccated, leathern 
 mummy. When such a one objects: "X. does 
 not believe in the divinity of Christ," he only 
 means, though he does not think of it, that 
 X. does not believe in the particular construc- 
 tion it has pleased the objector and his com- 
 panions to put upon that flexible word "divin- 
 ity." We repeat, most modem people admit 
 that Jesus was divine. 
 
 But the ways diverge the moment we attempt 
 definition. Latet dolus in generalihus, likewise 
 in specifications! And yet there is a common 
 ground. Even the stifFest, most inveterate 
 Jesus-worshipper will hesitate to admit that 
 the two terms God and Jesus are in terchan gable 
 oflPhand, meaning practically the same thing, 
 
132 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 somewhat after the fashion of synonyms. There 
 is a difference. And where there is a difference 
 there is not identity, notwithstanding all the 
 verbiage of the Athanasian symbol. Our 
 clumsy, imperfect language hints at this condi- 
 tion, offering us the words divinity and deity 
 (Goettlichheit and Gottheit). Some, indeed, 
 aver that they see no more difference between 
 them than between the old-fashioned tweedle- 
 dum and tweedle-dee, and it is not very helpful 
 to talk about nuances to people who admit 
 they cannot see. Suffice it to say that the two 
 terms would not be in existence if they were 
 not both needed to describe the true state of 
 affairs. 
 
 And on the other hand — for it will not pro- 
 fit much to thresh over the musty straw of 
 this controversy — ^there are people to whom the 
 deity of Jesus Christ presents no difficulties 
 who yet refuse, peremptorily, to pray to Jesus 
 as God. How can these things be? asks the 
 unsophisticated man who does not believe that 
 consistency is a vice of small minds. We do 
 not stop to inquire; we only state the fact that 
 we have met with such. 
 
 In general, however, it may be claimed that 
 the deity of Jesus and prayer to him stand 
 and fall together. Many mortals feel the need 
 of prayer. Jesus is God because they pray to 
 him; most mortals will pray to a god when 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 133 
 
 they pray at all. Jesus is God, therefore they 
 pray to him. And this is probably the main 
 reason for worship. God and worship are coter- 
 minous. Prayer is, in a large sense, union 
 and communion with the god or the gods of 
 the worshipper. 
 
 The worship of saints is no exception to this 
 general rule. It would contribute much to the 
 clearness of thought if the undeniable fact were 
 always given its due weight that many a ven- 
 erable saint on the calendar is nothing but an 
 old pagan god redivivus. Diana and Escula- 
 pius and Venus and the whole pantheon of gods 
 could be Christianized as well as their adorers. 
 For the nations, on assuming Christianity, were 
 not so glibly to be cheated out of their old 
 divinities; they burned their idols and then 
 transferred the idol attributes to some respect- 
 able Christian names that enjoyed the odor of 
 sanctity. They were the old friends in new 
 faces, and the church was satisfied, and the 
 converts were satisfied too. In St. Peter's in 
 Rome stands a statue said to have been cast 
 by Leo the Great from an ancient Jupiter 
 Capitolinus, and it is now called St. Peter — the 
 object of the veneration of millions. Which 
 things, as Paul saith, contain an allegory. 
 
 Jesus Christ is not Marduk or any other 
 Gentile divinity; least of all is he a myth. He 
 was a real personality, who lived in an ascer- 
 
134 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 tainable time, in a definite place. His moral 
 greatness has nothing to do with the creations 
 of man's imagination that invented three-headed 
 gods and other monstrosities to pray to. His 
 contemporaries, who also had some judgment, 
 beheld in him a splendor as of another world. 
 It took some time to draw the inevitable con- 
 sequences from all the testimony of what he 
 had said and done. These his contemporaries 
 were like other people, and by that token, were 
 unable to see the whole truth as it was revealed 
 in Jesus. They could not bear it then. But 
 when, dispassionately and without any undue 
 haste, the sympathetic mind sifted and weighed 
 the record it was seen that in Jesus, God Him- 
 self had walked on earth, that in him God 
 had got nearer to humanity than ever before — 
 and we today can say, heartily, than ever since. 
 
 These we believe to be the four chief reasons 
 for prayer to Jesus. He deserves the thanks 
 of mankind for his unselfish devotion to its 
 welfare ; he has bridged the yawning chasm be- 
 tween heaven and earth; he has brought peace 
 to souls justly troubled about their sins, their 
 transgressions of the laws of a holy God; he 
 has presented himself to mankind as the very 
 embodiment or personification, the truest expres- 
 sion, so far, of the great Goodness we call God. 
 
 Accordingly he has been held worthy to 
 be praised, quasi deo, even until this day. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 135 
 
 One word needs to be added. Even the Chris- 
 tians who cannot honestly pray to the exalted 
 Christ cannot fairly be charged with leaving 
 Christ out of their prayers. They pray as 
 he taught us ; they pray to God as he revealed 
 Him; they pray in his name; and they will 
 even say "for his sake," whatever that may 
 mean in the circumstances. Christian prayer 
 in a Christian land, offered by Christians, is 
 impossible without Christ. 
 
 THE CASE OF THE MODERN MAN 
 
 This, then, is the situation. What has the 
 typical modern to say to it.? We suspect the 
 reader will not have to go very far to find 
 him. That this modem is a person of religious 
 propensities will not be questioned, for he is 
 human. 
 
 To begin with, he feels no desire to make 
 special thanksgiving to a Jesus who lived — as 
 he hears — 1900 years ago. "Religion," says 
 he, " is a personal relation to God, and has noth- 
 ing to do with events and systems and personali- 
 ties of other days. Jesus is a definite, historical 
 fact, the most important, because the most in- 
 sistent datum of history. But my religion has 
 nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with data 
 of history. And if historical science should 
 ever prove that Jesus never existed (which it 
 wiU not) I should still cling to faith beyond 
 
136 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 the forms of faith." He would resent as a 
 gross libel the attempt to dispose of him by 
 attaching to him the name of any one theolo- 
 gian and leveling him to the ground with an 
 ism. What he feels is symptomatic of today, 
 not just of one particular school. 
 
 He sympathizes with the modern spirit as 
 applied to religion. Therefore he wiU have 
 turned his back on the whole transcendental 
 business of theology — a transcendent God 
 simply transcends his mind and his active 
 interests. It will always be passing strange 
 to him that man should have had so little sense 
 of humor as to posit such a transcendent 
 God and in the next breath discourse on Him 
 as though He were known in all His length 
 and breadth and height. What man can under- 
 stand, plainly, is not transcendent; and what 
 transcends man, just as plainly, will never form 
 the subject of his thought. And with all the 
 mystery that surrounds the matter, God is at 
 least held to be like us, in part. We were made 
 in His image. If we cannot, in part, under- 
 stand Him we can understand nothing. 
 
 Furthermore, the modem man no longer feels 
 himself to be a miserable sinner. In the mouth 
 of ninety-nine out of a hundred people who use 
 those self-deprecatory words they are a mean- 
 ingless, preposterous phrase. He knows him- 
 self to be imperfect and sinful and unholy, 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 137 
 
 but he is not miserable over it. This is plain 
 fact. He tries to make the best of it in what 
 he believes to be a very good world on the whole, 
 and he trusts God for the rest. He under- 
 stands the resentment of the little girl who 
 protested : " I am not a miserable sinner. I 
 am happy, and try to be good." Whether 
 this is a symptom of joyous health or of a 
 fatal disease has not been decided yet to the 
 satisfaction of everybody. But Christianity has, 
 in practise, decided that a sinner need not be 
 miserable because there is an angry God to 
 haunt one's waking moments. "For God so 
 loved the world" that fear of Him is a virtual 
 denial of His goodness. And "perfect love cast- 
 eth out fear." 
 
 Finally, the divinity of Jesus, is, to him, no 
 sufficient reason why he should adopt the custom 
 of addressing the Master in prayer, as we have 
 seen. In many cases the prayer comes first, 
 unpremeditated, free, natural, without any an- 
 tecedent verifications or weighing of proba- 
 bilities. He will pray, being first a man and 
 secondly a modern, because he has to pray, 
 and all questions about divinity or deity are 
 after thoughts. That a being is immensely 
 better, greater, wiser, stronger than man, is, 
 of itself, no more than a predisposing cause, 
 certainly not a compelling reason why he should 
 be worshipped. This is true though the virtues 
 
138 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 be multiplied and magnified to infinity, for with 
 them all God may yet be no more than a Nietz- 
 schean, apotheosized Overman. 
 
 Such are some of the characteristic beliefs 
 which many men share today unblushingly ; un- 
 blushingly because naturally. Strength is in 
 their bones, and wisdom is in their brains, and 
 God is in their hearts. 
 
 And still one asks: Has not something gone 
 out of their lives that might have sweetened 
 their repose and deepened their spiritual per- 
 ceptions? With all this has not a sense of 
 oppression taken hold of their souls.? 
 
 Rationalism is a duty. We no longer sneer 
 at a faith that reasons, any more than at a 
 reason that confesses to have a faith. But does 
 this rationalism get at more than half the truth? 
 What is the whole duty of man? The answer 
 comes with the reminder that every man is an 
 incurable mystic, bound by a thousand invisible 
 cords to the spirit-world, immersed in a sea of 
 mystery. And here, who knows? Jesus Christ 
 is yet to make his finest conquests. 
 
 Such are the signs of the times. Guesses 
 thicken the air. From the gloom of the un- 
 known are emerging ghosts, banshees, devils, 
 dual, triple, and multiple personalities, until the 
 universe is awhir with Hfe. They appear to be 
 clothed with the mantle of respectability. The 
 Mothers — as Goethe called them — the elemental 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 139 
 
 forces of nature are stirring as though pre- 
 paring for a wondrous epiphany. Already 
 science has seen fit to abandon its unbending, 
 cavaHer disdain of the mysteries. The jargon 
 and the quackery of the Cagliostros and the 
 Blavatskys of yesterday are in a fair way to 
 retire before some of the more authentic and 
 intelligible apocalypses. Thus far the unseen 
 universe had been the limbo for gibbering fools 
 and vile deceivers and visionary poets : who will 
 say that they have exhausted its meaning.'' 
 
 And the modern man stands undecided, ex- 
 pectant. To him, too, will come the vision, as 
 it did in other days, and then Jesus, the Master 
 of the spirit, will come into his own, then men 
 shall not be ashamed to express their trust in 
 the powers that condition this universe, in the 
 "God," the "Goodness," the "Life," the "Love" 
 back of and in all — ^the something 
 
 '* Whose dwelling is the light of setting sun, 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and the mind of man ; 
 A motion and a spirit, which impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought. 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 THE CALIi OF NATUEE 
 
 We believe that nature has, for such people, 
 living in such a time and having such interests, 
 a religious significance far transcending any- 
 thing which the old "natural religion" reason- 
 
140 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 ing could yield. Nature is vastly more than a 
 magazine stocked with "designs," to supply 
 man with cogent arguments for the beneficence 
 or the power of God, arguments which have been 
 thrown into the attic of theological science to 
 make room for the notion of purpose. Also, it 
 is more than the "garment of God." Storehouses 
 and garments may be very convenient, but they 
 permit no vital, intimate relationships with 
 thinking and loving and living man. 
 
 What is called nature, the totality of natural 
 phenomena, is, among many other things, the 
 manifestation of life. Nature is alive, somehow. 
 Even matter — dead matter, they used to say — 
 metals, crystals, worlds, as also the hypothetical 
 molecules, atoms, corpuscles, electrons, manifest 
 energy or are manifest energy. And energy is — 
 
 But here we are walking on air. Nature, too, 
 is part of the great mystery in the presence of 
 which the proudest intellect needs to cultivate a 
 becoming modesty. Science but spells out the 
 letters in which the riddle of the universe is 
 written; it does not give us its solution. 
 
 The desire to commune with nature, to re- 
 spond somehow to the spirit in and of this uni- 
 verse, is not only legitimate, it is inevitable. 
 Though philosophy may ignore this movement, 
 and the churches may thunder against it, and 
 the physical sciences may ridicule it, the man we 
 have tried to describe will still follow the 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 141 
 
 promptings of his heart. The soul seeks and 
 finds its companion and mate. It refuses to be 
 satisfied with an oflScial declaration, delivered 
 once for all, that nature is godless, or dead, or 
 Maya — an illusion, and that one needs to turn 
 from it to gain peace; and it is persuaded that 
 a purely objective study of an inanimate crea- 
 tion is a sheer waste of time. The soul must im- 
 part itself. Like speaks to like. It listens for 
 a response. And many among the wisest of 
 mankind have declared, on the basis of their 
 own inner experience, that the response has 
 come. 
 
 It would be hasty to conclude that this whole 
 process is only the projection into nature of 
 what is in ourselves, making of ourselves dupes 
 to believe what we have invented, Narcissus wor- 
 shipping his own image. We feel that the some- 
 thing supplied by nature and inherent in it is 
 akin to, yet different from, ourselves. And no 
 sophistication, no rationalism can convince the 
 average thinker that this feeling is pure illusion. 
 He will even construct for himself a theory of 
 an "earth-soul," though he may never have 
 heard of Fechner, he will people this universe 
 with demons and angels, he will extend his no- 
 tion of God, just so he may satisfy the longing 
 for his kind. When alone he feels himself least 
 alone. The wings of the Presences keep up the 
 pulsations of nature, and there is an instream- 
 
142 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 ing of thought and vitality we lacked before. 
 The mystagog is in favor as never before, and, 
 what is more, he has vindicated his right to a 
 hearing. 
 
 A glance at the literature of this new mysti- 
 cism of nature will show what a hold it has taken 
 on the minds especially of the younger thinkers 
 of today. There are voices not to be despised, 
 that tell us that the more of a mystic a man is 
 the more of a man he is. Intelligence, by itself, 
 leads into a blind alley. Philosophy is a hodge- 
 podge of contradictions. Will, taken as the 
 great solvent, reduces us all to hopeless pessi- 
 mists. If you do not feel it, you shall never 
 understand it! 
 
 No matter, then, that the rationalist smiles 
 at the word "mystic." History is on the .side 
 of the visionary. Where there is no vision the 
 people perish. Religion is almost synonymous 
 with it. It is the breath of life in poetry and 
 in art. Music, if it is ever to be more than an 
 exercise in harmonics or a pleasing exposition 
 of mathematical formulae, must speak to the 
 soul; it's we musicians know. 
 
 A hundred new cults, churches, lodges, 
 leagues have got started. Much of their hocus- 
 pocus is a pitiful commentary on the intelli- 
 gence of their members, so that a man of parts 
 is actually ashamed to join them. But they 
 stand as a witness of one thing: that the old 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 143 
 
 rationalisms have failed to satisfy. And, to cap 
 the climax, reluctant, proud, self-sufficient sci- 
 ence is being forced to make terms with these 
 phenomena. 
 
 Maeterlinck's The Life of Bees and its Eng- 
 lish congeners have struck a vibrant chord in 
 the hearts of thousands. Nature books are as 
 popular as the latest fiction. A modem school 
 of nature-poets, with the Austrian Reiner Maria 
 Rilke at their head, is making all nature the re- 
 vealment of the omnipresent God. The Kepler- 
 bund can announce accessions of over a thou- 
 sand in less than three months. And its mem- 
 bers are recruited not from the masses who in- 
 dorse every new fashion, but from the men who 
 are thoroughly interested in the meanings of na- 
 ture. They have united, according to their con- 
 stitution, under a name which is the symbol of 
 the true love of science and the deepest religious 
 sentiment. Johannes Mueller, Ralph W. Trine, 
 Ellen Key, Herman — ^to mention only a few 
 representing the most divergent types of reli- 
 gious beliefs — have this in common, that they 
 are all trying to give an answer to the youth 
 who stands face to face with nature, mysteri- 
 ous, sphinx-like, caressing, insinuating, and 
 who wants to read her riddle. 
 
 These are the prophets of the present genera- 
 tion. And they will speak their message even 
 to the predicating of life and intelligence and 
 
144 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 souls to stars and plants and animals and whole 
 worlds. Much of it may be but clever guessing, 
 striking one as grotesque, but it has the unde- 
 niable merit of finding sympathizers. 
 
 This tendency to make friends with nature, 
 and with the whole universe, like a Christianized 
 Thoreau, is not just a fad, least of all is it a 
 literary or esthetic trick of the trade. That 
 were too easy an explanation. There probably 
 never was a soul that has felt deeply and thought 
 carefully that has not, at some time, caught it- 
 self "talking" to nature. And the communion 
 has brought relief. It has satisfied when noth- 
 ing else would satisfy. It has even been apothe- 
 osized into a religion. Nature is "loved," and 
 "revered," and "worshipped." One does not have 
 to be a Rousseau or a Wordsworth to understand 
 such feelings. And the thorough working out 
 of the doctrine of divine immanence, to one who 
 is not afraid of the old scarecrow of pantheism, 
 has at least this much to its credit, that it has 
 supplied man with a respectable reason for this 
 so persistent a penchant. 
 
 Pantheism has been under the ban mainly be- 
 cause it seemed to make too serious inroads upon 
 our conception of personality as applied to God. 
 It has thus had its weakness, as every other con- 
 ception is bound to have when it begins to make 
 exclusive claims to accord with truth. "Person- 
 ality" is only one of many symbols that man has 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 145 
 
 applied to God. But it has crowded hard on 
 conceptions not included in the term personality. 
 Anything that seemed to secure God as a person 
 was more than welcome; everything that seemed 
 to endanger the person was thrice anathema. 
 And since the word had, perforce, to be filled 
 with a human content, every theory that did not 
 offer a divinity in the likeness of a man was, of 
 course and as a matter of fact, held to be dan- 
 gerous to faith. 
 
 Modesty has not been the most prominent vir- 
 tue with many of those who have been loudest 
 in condemning pantheism. We know but little 
 of God, but the little we do know is a sufficient 
 warrant for the belief that the pantheist has, 
 in some way, got hold of a truth which might 
 otherwise have been neglected, a truth which 
 contributes to the enrichment of the concept 
 God. Pantheism as an exclusive form of theism 
 overshot the mark and robbed its followers of 
 some of the sweetest consolations of religion. 
 Love, devotion, prayer, consciousness, are con- 
 tingent upon facts which it has unceremoniously 
 ignored. 
 
 But the gains that were made in this direction 
 have always been at the expense of the great- 
 ness and the super-human character of deity. 
 
 The historic puzzle how to combine the good 
 of both sides without compounding with their 
 attendant evils will never be solved by man. 
 
146 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 Theology will never get beyond a compromise. 
 There is no danger that the human side of God 
 be lost to mankind, seeing that that is the only 
 side we can ever know ; but there is danger that 
 man proceed in his speculations on the assump- 
 tion that this human character, raised to the 
 n-th power and sublimated into something su- 
 perhuman, accounts for the whole God. To throw 
 pantheism overboard, bag and baggage, simply 
 because it involved the denial of what is very 
 dear to the heart, is hardly the fair way of 
 doing justice to its positive contribution to the 
 knowledge of God. Whether it is a brave thing 
 to do is also worth pondering. 
 
 The impetus given to modern thinking by 
 Herder and Schleiermacher and Goethe is enough 
 to show the folly of such a procedure. And 
 the profound influence of the writings of 
 Spinoza, even today, though they are a warn- 
 ing that the mind, unaided, is incapable of solv- 
 ing the logical contradiction involved in pure 
 pantheism, would have to be put down as one 
 of the absurdest phenomena of modern times — • 
 on the theory that his speculations about the 
 " Universal Being" are unadulterated nonsense. 
 
 But restore God into the universe, where the 
 Greek found Him, where the poet feels Him, 
 and where natural theology, grudgingly, has 
 been allowed to discover Him, to show, mainly, 
 how unsatisfactory a revelation in and through 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 147 
 
 nature can be made as compared to a revela- 
 tion above and in spite of nature ; dare to trust 
 that it is impossible to thin out or dilute God 
 or that man should be able to attribute to Him 
 what is not in Him and of Him and look for 
 " God in nature and nature in God ;" say with 
 Sir O. Lodge that the term God, if it is to 
 have any meaning at all, must at least include 
 everything we have so far been able to discover 
 as existent in the universe — and then Mrs 
 Browning's : 
 
 Earth's cram'd with Heaven 
 And every common bush afire with God/' 
 
 becomes more than a banal, threadbare poetic 
 conceit, but the sober proclamation of a joyous 
 fact. 
 
 And then, too, you have at least one reason 
 which the modern man will listen to, for the 
 worship, not only of Jesus, very God of God, 
 but of every embodiment of God. If there 
 is any revulsion it will have to come, not be- 
 cause of the poverty of this conception, but 
 because of the embarrassment of riches it offers, 
 God is no beggar, that man should exhaust the 
 richness of His being. 
 
 For, in the last analysis, it is the God, where- 
 ever He is — and, ex hypothesis He is every- 
 where — that compels the worship. That is true 
 of all religion, from that of the lowest fetish 
 worshipper to that of the emancipated trans- 
 
148 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 cendentalist. He would be a bold man who 
 should put down the hundreds of apostrophes 
 addressed by a Wordsworth to the Powers of 
 the Air, the Sea, the Mountain, the Grove, as so 
 much fantastic makebelief , and attempt to draw 
 a hard and fast line between them and prayer. 
 
 The most certain of all the facts ascertain- 
 able about the universe is that it is from first 
 to last profoundly spiritual. The life of the 
 spirit is the fundamental truth. Dead matter, 
 the idola that has bewitched whole generations 
 of scientists, is nothing but a huge assumption. 
 The world is more than a mechanism. 
 
 It was as early as 1869 that Hirn, the French 
 physicist, announced his three ultimate prin- 
 ciples: the atom, the force, the soul; the atom 
 acted upon by the force, and the force acted 
 upon by the soul. And more recently Mendele- 
 jefF, Russia's greatest chemist, has written: 
 " The mark of our modem scientific realism is 
 the recognition of three irreducible principles, 
 matter, energy, and spirit." This may be bad 
 news to the confirmed monist of either wing, 
 bound to resolve the many into the one, but it 
 certainly permits a belief that the spiritual con- 
 ception and interpretation of this universe is 
 perfectly reasonable, and, what is final with 
 many a man today, thoroughly "scientific." 
 Whatever more the world may be, it is at least 
 responsive to man's spiritual cravings and akin 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 149 
 
 to his higher self, otherwise our Wordsworths 
 are all so many incarnations of Peter Bell. And 
 the heart confirms the statement. 
 
 But how does God — the God of ages past — 
 fare in this loosening of erstwhile rigid ideas.? 
 Is not a God who is thus indissolubly bound 
 up with the universe, matter, energy, and all, 
 dangerously near to extinction.? That He is 
 different from the God as imagined by past 
 generations is true, and that is no unmitigated 
 loss. Furthermore, He is, beyond a doubt, dif- 
 ferent from the imaginings of the present. No 
 mind hath read the secret thoughts of God, least 
 of all he who pretends to know what God is 
 and what He cannot be. All our ideas are but 
 approximations. But does the present emphasis 
 on a sympathizing, self -imparting, all-embrac- 
 ing being, inextricably bound up with a blunder- 
 ing humanity and a world full of contradictions, 
 really offer sufficient satisfaction to guarantee 
 its general truthfulness.? For, needless to say, 
 a false god will not, in the long run, satisfy 
 the heart of man. 
 
 Now to some the notion of a God who is 
 subject to all the vicissitudes of this varying 
 universe is a gigantic absurdity. A sympathiz- 
 ing, i.e. a suffering God, a God who needs 
 matter and force to express himself, who grows 
 with man, whose goodness is not just a babe's 
 unearned innocence, but a positive achievement. 
 
150 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 who feels the deprivations of his children, who 
 can live in their Hfe and die in their death — 
 imagine, if possible, a dead God ! — : to call such 
 ideas confusing would be too mild ; many would 
 call them nothing but the starkest nonsense. 
 
 And yet even a "suffering" God hints at a 
 fact in the cosmic process ; historic Christianity, 
 for one thing, is unthinkable without it. In 
 some way the logical contradiction has got it- 
 self metamorphosed into a mere paradox that 
 has captivated the mind. It would be doing 
 the fathers of the church little honor to suppose 
 that they had rationaHzed over this matter, but 
 they felt certain that He had borne our griefs 
 and carried our sorrows. The common man 
 to whom the Athanasian creed is more a jumble 
 of incompatibilities than a sacred symbol, thanks 
 to his training of the sense of reality, may re- 
 pudiate the theology. But he cannot repudiate 
 the hunger of his soul. Surely, the venerable 
 fathers were above trying to mystify mankind 
 with a huge, preposterous trick; they meant 
 to express what may be inexpressible, but is 
 still a truth, namely, that God entered into 
 Jesus (the modern creed-maker might prefer 
 to say, as into all men so also into Jesus) and, 
 for humanity, is practically nonexistent except 
 in so far as He does thus enter into and reveal 
 himself in a proper medium which we can under- 
 stand. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 151 
 
 Music is, but not without the ear; light is, 
 but not without the eye; love is, but not with- 
 out the heart; God is, but not without His 
 universe. And in this universe — or multiverse 
 — ^humanity represents the goal. And in this 
 humanity Jesus of Nazareth represents the ideal. 
 
 Whether immanence or transcendence is held 
 to carry the larger portion of the truth will 
 depend almost wholly upon one's training and 
 personal prejudices; to many it will ever be 
 a question whether it is really worth while to 
 busy one's self with the riddle and whether the 
 idea really solves any practical questions. 
 Truly, he who wants but three meals a day 
 and peace at any price and is satisfied to travel 
 the safe road worn smooth and hard by the 
 countless feet of the generations that asked 
 no questions for conscience's sake, just so he 
 get his soul saved, will thereby escape some 
 very trying difficulties. 
 
 What, for instance, becomes of the problem 
 of evil? How often that challenge has been 
 supposed to settle all debate! Evil — a part 
 of God! There is nothing further to be said. 
 Anathema sit ! 
 
 Those who live in glass houses are not gener- 
 ally supposed to throw stones. To be ready 
 with the taunt that immanence does not explain 
 evil is hardly a gracious attitude especially 
 when assumed by those whose theology has 
 
152 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 simply capitulated before this hete noire as a 
 **mystery," or fallen back on an anti-god, more 
 or less devilish, much as if a pestilence were 
 explained by a comet. The pot, besides, should 
 not call the kettle black, especially in the theolo- 
 gical world. To the challenge, "What do you 
 do with the problem of evil.?" the believer in 
 immanence may quietly say, " I leave it exactly 
 where you have left it. If the non-solution 
 of this ancient puzzle is a valid objection to 
 my views, it is no less a valid objection to 
 your views ; for, confessedly, you have notori- 
 ously failed to get it abolished or even explained, 
 and so we are companions in ignorance and in 
 misery. Let us stop throwing stones and calling 
 names, and be thankful for the little light that 
 shines into our lives !" 
 
 Plainly, the you're-another argument has no 
 scientific or philosophical value; but it has a 
 practical value if it only reminds the human 
 understanding of its limitations. "Let know- 
 ledge grow from more to more, but more of 
 reverence in us dwell." 
 
 The argument that may be drawn from nature 
 in the matter of goodness or evil is, at best, 
 a two-edged sword. It was early seen that the 
 proving of a beneficent God or a beauty-loving 
 God from a good or a beautiful world was a 
 sure way of getting into a most embarrassing 
 situation. It was worth no more than the ana- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 153 
 
 logous proving of a devil or some such male- 
 ficent being from the world's evil, though it 
 were defined as only the absence of good, or 
 the relatively good compared to the relatively 
 best. For to talk of a permissive God is little 
 better than a quibble, and besides, leaves the 
 difficulty exactly where it was before. Mankind 
 owes much to the teleological argument — among 
 other things the wholesale fitting of facts to 
 theories. That God, providentially, supplied 
 mankind with cork trees in Spain to enable us 
 to make stoppers for bottles — to use the classic 
 illustration — might pass muster; but when said 
 bottles were filled with disease-producing 
 whiskies the beneficence had to abdicate. Natur- 
 ally such a flexible theory could not long satisfy 
 the thinker. He was led to wonder what kind 
 of a teleology the drunkard who emptied the 
 bottle might construct. Or, eliminating the dis- 
 turbing factor of freedom, he asked himself 
 what kind of an appeal this teleology would 
 make to the luckless fish that dangles from the 
 hook of the theological hunter, especially as 
 regards the special creation of this particular 
 fisherman and that devilish hook and line which 
 prove his speedy ruination .^^ Would the fish 
 reflect on how beneficent a scheme it is to be 
 skinned and absorbed by the King of Creation .f* 
 Teleology, it began to appear, rested on too 
 shifting a basis to be of much use for apolo- 
 getic purposes. 
 
154 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 This was seen even by so devout a soul as 
 Pascal, who begins his well-known thoughts on 
 the existence of God with a summary rejection 
 of all proofs drawn from nature. " I admire," 
 wrote he, " the boldness with which these persons 
 undertake to speak of God, in addressing their 
 discourses to the ungodly. Their first chapter 
 is devoted to proving the existence of Deity by 
 the works of nature." He did not, it is true, 
 reject these socalled proofs on purely intellect- 
 ual grounds so much as for practical reasons, 
 Scripture with its heavens declaring the glory 
 of God etc., acting as a check for him. But 
 his own experience was enough to persuade him 
 that such proofs gave the Christian but a 
 poor support and that nothing was more cal- 
 culated to bring contempt upon it. " It is a 
 mark of feebleness to prove God from nature." 
 The splendid unconsciousness of the misery of 
 this world which makes Bossuet's rhetoric so 
 serene and majestic, prophecy ing smooth things, 
 is at a world's remove from the agonizing, dis- 
 traught temper of Pascal who challenges heaven 
 to explain and justify the contradictions of 
 nature. 
 
 Pascal and Bossuet represent the two types 
 of the mind which looks out upon the world. 
 Four eyes see more than two. And the world 
 is not yet exhausted. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 156 
 
 WHAT IMMANENCE CONTRIBUTES TO WORSHIP 
 
 It is evident that immanence, the modem word 
 to conjure with, fails to dispose of many of the 
 exasperating riddles which the past has be- 
 queathed to the present. It is not the great 
 cure-all and solve-all in the sickly and shadowy 
 world of doubt. It fails us when we apply 
 it to some of the personal interests of man- 
 kind. With certain reservations we may say 
 of it what Froude said about the pantheistic 
 system of Spinoza : that the spiritual life which 
 alone gives meaning to humanity glides away 
 before the dissecting knife and leaves it but a 
 corpse to work upon. But this is true of every 
 intellectual attempt to grasp being. 
 
 ** Thought is deeper than all speech. 
 Feeling deeper than all thought; 
 
 Souls to souls can never teach 
 
 What unto themselves was taught. 
 
 We are spirits clad in veils; 
 
 Man by man was never seen; 
 All our deep communing fails 
 
 To remove the shadowy screen. 
 
 Heart to heart was never known. 
 
 Mind with mind did never meet; 
 We are columns left alone 
 As a temple once complete. ' * 
 
 Christopher P. Cranch. 
 One solid contribution to the subject of chris- 
 tology can be put down to its credit. The 
 idea of an immanent God has opened to thou- 
 
166 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 sands, and will open to many more as soon as 
 its implications are realized, the only avenue 
 of approach in sight to God in Jesus Christ, 
 the savior and helper of men. 
 
 The old theological reasoning had, with large 
 numbers, had its day. They had got past the 
 stage of the " Jesus cult." This stage had 
 satisfied the heart but not the intelligence. The 
 next stage was characterized by a supreme con- 
 tempt for all saint-worship, mariolatry, relic- 
 veneration, and the like. Prayers to Jesus were 
 here put into the same category. It now be- 
 came a settled conviction that there is but one 
 God, who would give His glory to none other. 
 If God was not jealous His worshippers would 
 be jealous for Him with a burning jealousy. 
 This satisfied the mind that craved for unity, 
 but not the heart that wanted sympathy. The 
 third stage brought the solving word. Men 
 will worship God, nothing but God, wherever 
 He is. And where is He? He is everywhere. 
 He is in Jesus. God was and is in Christ, re- 
 conciling the world to Himself. Let it be said 
 once more, it is the God, in the last analysis, 
 that alone can compel worship; whether He 
 comes to man in human form, or on the wings 
 of the whirlwind, or in the still small voice of 
 conscience, makes little difference. The synthe- 
 sis was complete: heart and head are at peace 
 with one another. Those who have never been 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 157 
 
 forced to fight the matter out to a finish will 
 hardly appreciate the relief that the gospel of 
 the indwelling spirit of God has brought to man. 
 
 There are, indeed, many who have never felt 
 the difficulty which some of the popular elements 
 of Christian worship present to a mind that is 
 so constituted as to be forced to invade even 
 the holy of holies and analyze the sacred 
 feelings of prayer. The great majority of 
 Christians would probably deny, offhand, that 
 their homage to the exalted Christ involved the 
 least usurpation of God's supreme rights. The 
 problem does not exist for them. And what- 
 ever the solution is which in the end will be 
 most profitable, it will have to come from other 
 sources. An ounce of experience is, in such 
 things, worth more than a ton of speculation. 
 
 What suggestions have come from that 
 quarter have too often been colored with the 
 wellnigh offensive tendency to find in all nega- 
 tive results the expression of a willful and blind 
 skepticism. Sympathy has never distinguished 
 those who have taken it upon themselves to run 
 down suspicious innovations. Consequently the 
 first alarm that was sounded — ^the echoes are still 
 reverberating in the woods — was to save the 
 inherited christology. The theology could go 
 begging. Philosophy was ruled out of court. 
 Science was balked. A vast array of ecclesi- 
 astical scare-crows fluttered in the breeze to keep 
 
158 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 the enemy from the sacred precincts of Chris- 
 tian prayer. It was "proved" (probably with 
 some quotations from the fourth gospel) that it 
 was absurd to have any scruples and that only 
 hypercriticism would ever have thought of mud- 
 dying the clear waters of the received faith. 
 
 It cannot be said, in spite of all efforts at 
 popularizing the modern results of biblical 
 scholarship, that the popular trend is in the 
 direction of a careful study of the moot questions 
 of criticism. The average Christian is like the 
 faithful son of the Catholic church — he believes 
 what the church believes, though it would puzzle 
 him sorely sometimes to tell what that belief 
 might be. If correct belief or opinion — "ortho- 
 doxy" — were the condition of salvation there 
 would have to be a new adjustment of values 
 which would play havoc with many a church — 
 for they cannot all be correct! 
 
 With the critical methods we have nothing 
 to do at present; as for the critical temper, 
 that can be antidoted no more than an inborn 
 aptitude for learning mathematics or languages. 
 One man dislikes music, a second has red hair, 
 a third, forsooth, is critical: such idiosyncracies 
 are not to be changed or deplored. They must 
 be accepted. It is the results — not unmarred 
 by uncertainty and rashness and quite orthodox- 
 like dogmatism — that alone concern us here. 
 
 These results can be described with approxi- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 159 
 
 mate correctness in the simple statements that 
 our speculations concerning Jesus Christ have 
 had to take their place in the natural order of 
 modern thinking, that a definite line has been 
 drawn between the facts of his life and the 
 facts of faith, and that, if Christian worship 
 is to be justified at all, it must be justified in 
 a way that takes account of the new vision of 
 God which many thinking, spiritually minded 
 men, not scientists by profession, have declared 
 has come to man. 
 
 Such men are among the most reverent dis- 
 ciples of Jesus, and they deny that the lily 
 of the valley needs any gilding to be made 
 beautiful, or that an aureole around the Lord's 
 head adds anything to his spiritual dignity. 
 They prefer the real Jesus, so far as he can 
 be recovered, walking in the midst of men as 
 a divine guide to the Father, to a byzantine 
 fresco hung up in the vaulted arches of this 
 earth's cathedral, darkened with the smoke of 
 incense and incrusted with the manifold layers 
 of color which pious souls have added to en- 
 hance his unearthly beauty. 
 
 And such men pray. But the chances are 
 that when they pray they will only rarely be 
 drawn to commune with an exalted Jesus who 
 acts as a substitute for God, or an interlocuter 
 and mediator warding off the darts of wrath. 
 They will pray to God directly and not ask 
 
160 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 anybody, " Or a pro nobis ^ Their heavenly 
 Father is near enough to hear them, and good 
 enough to answer, if that be wise, without the 
 intervention of a third person who has a kinder 
 heart or a deeper sympathy or a louder voice 
 or a greater influence to bring worshipper and 
 worshipped together. 
 
 They will be careful not to give room to the 
 thought that there is a special advantage in 
 shifting the direction of prayer. And if all 
 this seems too revolutionary — religion is the 
 most conservative force on earth! — and if the 
 heart demands a face-to-face relation with Jesus 
 as the best revelation of God humanity knows 
 of, they will, to say the least, refrain from any 
 petitions which degenerate into such sentiments 
 as: "When the full light of heavenly day — 
 Reveals my sin of dread array. Say thou hast 
 washed them all away, — O say, thou plead'st 
 for me." Whether such a praying relationship 
 between them and Jesus involves, necessarily, 
 a similar relationship to Mary, the dead, and 
 all other souls here and beyond, will have to be 
 decided by the individual worshipper. 
 
 One cannot too often insist that this is done 
 to glorify God and to honor His servants. The 
 present day Christian respectfully demurs to 
 the gratuitous assumption that his attitude 
 implies any disloyalty to the person of Jesus. 
 A single glance at the pages of church history 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 161 
 
 will convince one that the monopoly of such a 
 loyalty and of the desire to follow and to obey 
 Jesus is not held by those who sing the Coro- 
 nation Hymn with the old-time fervor and with 
 its old-time meaning. There is a growing 
 brotherhood in the churches, with a spiritual 
 bond, recruited from the various denominations, 
 and vitalized by the desire to establish the king- 
 dom of love, though the theological heavens 
 fall. Its members speak the same language — 
 the language of the heart. The life of the 
 spirit is of more importance to them than the 
 most perfect intellectual assents and agreements. 
 Sometimes they are charged with taking liber- 
 ties with the inherited language of Christianity. 
 They use the old words but with a new mean- 
 ing, a most prolific source of misunderstand- 
 ing. This does not appear honest to those who 
 believe that the meanings of words are unalter- 
 ably fixed. This is unfortunate, but inevitable. 
 Mankind today will not do, though it be con- 
 strued into a sign of insincerity, what mankind 
 has never done: invent new terms when old ones 
 serve just as well. The terms God and salva- 
 tion have never been yoked to fixed, definite, 
 universally accepted ideas. Anyone who has his 
 doubts need only ask the first six men he meets 
 for a definition of religion, and analyse the 
 results. The privilege which Jesus and Paul 
 enjoyed, the compulsion that was upon them, 
 
162 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 thus to adapt the old word to the new life, is 
 an integral part of man's intellectual being. No 
 man can escape this necessity, not even those 
 who resent the ensuing confusion. 
 
 Only, the hand of nature must not be forced. 
 It should never be forgotten that the instinct 
 of the church was essentially correct when it op- 
 posed those who went too fast in applying to 
 Jesus Christ and his world the new world con- 
 ceptions that were bound to arise. But these 
 things had to come. They grew out of the 
 memory of this wonderful personality. 
 
 The human heart will, in the end, be true to 
 its ideals. The ideal in religion was expressed 
 by none better than by Jesus. His influence 
 was the one essential thing. The Christian 
 church would never have been without Paul, 
 but Paul would never have been without Jesus. 
 All our speculations are based on the life. The 
 life's the thing — the explanations, the guesses, 
 the creeds and fine spun theories all point back 
 to that Galilean appearance which gave history 
 a new start. God was in Christ and we beheld 
 his glory, the glory of the only begotten Son 
 of God, full of grace and truth. The hopes 
 of the ages centered in him; we thought that 
 it was he who would redeem Israel. The per- 
 sonality had drawn us nearer to God, just as the 
 fourth gospel anticipated. 
 
 It was no part of the original gospel as pro- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 163 
 
 claimed by him that one should have to take a 
 definite stand towards him, except in so far 
 as he stood for the messenger of God; but the 
 message and the messenger were so intimately 
 related that he himself soon became the touch- 
 stone of religion. Not what he said about 
 God, but what he was through God, has become 
 the criterion for those who have learned of him. 
 
 This opened the flood-gates of speculation 
 and almost swamped the message the recovery 
 of which has been the task of modern criticism. 
 
 And now that we are beginning to feel solid 
 ground under our feet once more and can ascer- 
 tain, within reasonable limits, what his business 
 was and what he wanted to say we are willing 
 to indorse the report, never man spoke as he 
 spoke. 
 
 And this admission, when it comes from the 
 camp of comparative religion, of the religions- 
 geschichtliche wing, carries somewhat more 
 weight than do the foregone conclusions of the 
 schools that made it their business, by hook or 
 by crook, to prove the Christ from above. 
 
 The gospel as proclaimed by Jesus is still 
 the standard according to which souls are being 
 judged, and since no one could apply this 
 standard as well as he it was inevitable that 
 our weal or our woe should be decided by our 
 attitude towards his person. 
 
 To say that the worship of such a one is 
 
164 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 a superstition does not help to explain the 
 power he has over mankind. "Who say ye 
 that I am?" is still the test question. And 
 the "ye" are not Paul and John, nor Stalker 
 and Holtzmann and Sabatier, not even Matthew 
 and Mark and Luke, but the individual Chris- 
 tians. Peter's testimony means less to the 
 modern man, be he scholar, or artist, or artisan, 
 than the personal verification of that power 
 in God's messiah. We have believed and know 
 that he is the Christ, the Son of the living 
 God. 
 
 The modern is heartily tired — some of our 
 theologians have not discovered it yet! — of the 
 fine distinctions in the Godhead, of the antithe- 
 sis between divinity and humanity, between the 
 natural and the supernatural. The fiction of 
 the universal man, which has not yet been ban- 
 ished from respectable society, affects him as 
 would a universal star, or animal, or plant. He 
 who has once thought himself into the present, 
 real throbbing world with its mysterious, illimit- 
 able God, so great and yet so near, — closer than 
 breathing and nearer than hands and feet, the 
 poet says — who has outlived the stage where 
 it was natural to imagine a God stepping out 
 of heaven into a lesser earth, who hesitates to 
 assert, 'Here matter ends and mind begins,' who 
 believes all nature miraculous, and who feels 
 that a humanized God is as reasonable as a dei- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 165 
 
 fied man (both being mysteries) will refuse, cat- 
 egorically, to spend any time in constructing 
 doctrines about the nature of Jesus. 
 
 Something survived the death of Jesus. The 
 resurrection stories are not needed to prove that, 
 in fact, do not prove that. But the history of 
 1900 years supplies a proof which no sensational 
 discovery of science or radical result of criticism 
 will ever weaken. The cross was a blank denial 
 of many claims and cancelled many hopes ; but 
 it also shows that the little we know of his life, 
 the little that was expressed in his life was not 
 the measure of Jesus' greatness. 
 
 History does not say all, though it says much. 
 The Christian consciousness has not abdicated 
 at the bar of modern criticism. And while it 
 should be cheerfully admitted that this con- 
 sciousness has nothing to do with the proofs 
 of historical facts, and that the historical method 
 alone is competent to pass on the truth 
 of such facts, the inner light will always help 
 to determine the spiritual meaning of the facts 
 so ascertained. 
 
 That is the reason why the fourth gospel, 
 with all its guess-work and its theology, is 
 still accepted as essentially true to life. If it 
 does not present many indubitable facts, it at 
 least presents the true spirit. 
 
 WHAT JESUS IS TO US TODAY 
 
 The Kalthoif -Drews answer, the socialist an- 
 
166 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 swer, the therapeutic answer to the clamoring 
 of the heart for a savior leave a void which is 
 the best proof that they have failed to hit upon 
 the truth. 
 
 Jesus is the inspiration of the modem world. 
 The comparisons with Buddha and other in- 
 spirers of various ages and peoples will never 
 satisfy the interested parties on either side. It 
 is perfectly proper and rather profitable to 
 compare the genius of Christianity and that of 
 Buddhism, for here we have authentic facts, 
 spread over many years, to correct any too 
 exuberant bias and to hold prejudice down to 
 reality. But as for the personalities that stand 
 back of these two religions, both of them are 
 so enshrouded in mystery that any parallel is 
 sure to beg the question of superiority to begin 
 with, and will probably break down through 
 lack of sympathy. An educated mussulman 
 will prove Islam the religion of common sense; 
 a Swami Vivekananda is sure that Vedanta is 
 the key to the truth; and tomorrow's cult will 
 dethrone all the gods of the pantheon and put 
 in their place a new divinity, the very phoenix 
 of goodness. But this subjectivity can be at 
 least regulated, if not wholly removed, in the 
 study of what the various religions have done 
 for humanity. 
 
 This study is not altogether agreeable, for 
 to raise one hero in the rank means, with many. 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 167 
 
 the relative degradation of all others, and it is 
 not made easier by the bald charge, made on 
 the basis of what is worst in the heart of man, 
 that religion is a bar to all true progress. The 
 Sanballets are not all dead yet. That sort of 
 thing generally winds up with the peurile ap- 
 peal to the world to have done with the old 
 gods and to start a new and only true ism. 
 A fatality that dogs these new messiahs is their 
 unconscionable lack of humor. 
 
 Now, much as it may go against the grain 
 of some, the influence of Jesus in the western 
 world is absolutely unescapable. This is not 
 a matter of choice. The deliberately anti-chris- 
 tian man of the world has to submit to it. What- 
 ever our civilization is, for good or for 
 bad, it would not be what it is if 1900 years 
 ago Jesus had not been born in an obscure 
 village in Palestine. No amount of sophistica- 
 tion can get around that. In a spirit of para- 
 doxical bravado one may, for a change, speak 
 of the influence of civilization on Christianity; 
 in general this would be putting the cart before 
 the horse. 
 
 The facts of Christian experience, the events 
 of many centuries show the Christ to be alive 
 forevermore. In his own field he admits no 
 rivals. In other fields others may be supreme. 
 In what is called the modem world Christ is 
 the one deciding factor. There is none more 
 
168 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 important. " The atmosphere of Europe has 
 been saturated for some fifteen centuries with 
 Christian principles and however far the re- 
 bellion against the Church may have spread, 
 it may still be called the Moral University of 
 the world, — not merely the greatest, but the 
 only great School of Virtue existing. While 
 this is so it is idle for any virtue that springs 
 up in its neighborhood to claim to be indepen- 
 dent of it. Christian influences are in the air; 
 our very conception of virtue is Christian; the 
 tone, the habits of sentiment and language — in 
 short, all the associations of virtue — have been 
 furnished by the discipline of the Christian 
 Church." (Ecce Homo.) And the influence of 
 the church for good was dependent upon the 
 personality of her Lord. 
 
 But this falls far short of doing justice to 
 the situation. The fact of this influence being 
 granted, what is it that thus secured and secures 
 the place of Jesus in modern life? 
 
 And here the so-called liberal Christian joins 
 with the traditional theology in announcing his 
 belief that Jesus is, in very fact, the savior 
 of our lives. That this savior should have 
 presented himself under diff^erent aspects to dif- 
 ferent schools in diff'erent ages, need disturb 
 no one. Many minds, many ideas. That the 
 accepted meaning was not always the correct 
 meaning, the history of doctrine abundantly 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 169 
 
 shows. Orthodoxy is no guarantee of correct- 
 ness; its theology was not even certain to be 
 biblical, which, on the assumption of its cham- 
 pions, was enough to condemn it. 
 
 One chapter, at least, is closed. The modem 
 world can get no help out of any theory of 
 makebelief; imputation, redemption, propitia- 
 tion, with their suggestion of subterfuge, are 
 hardly compatible with the dignity of Deity. 
 The saviorship of Jesus no longer implies the 
 juridical fiction of a justification, conceived in 
 legal or sacrificial terms. Paul and the Old 
 Testament did not delimit the plan of salvation. 
 The Jesus-paid-it-all, I-lay-my-sins-on-Jesus 
 sentiment, the language of a lawyer or of a 
 priest, utterly fails to interest. We think less 
 of propitiation than of the power we lack to 
 avoid sin. We still hear the cry " Wretched 
 man that I am, who shall deliver me from the 
 body of this death?" But the answer is sure 
 to come : " I thank God — ^through Jesus Christ" 
 ■ — ^who is the deliverer; not a Hercules in fury, 
 or a Prometheus unbound, not a God out of the 
 machine to readjust the universe and "save 
 the world," but a savior who came to show us 
 the way to God and to show us how that way 
 might be travelled. Dale states the case tersely 
 when he says (Atonement, p. 336) that what- 
 ever we may say about the remission of sins, 
 it does not follow that the remission of sins in^ 
 
170 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 eludes the blessings which are necessary to com- 
 plete our salvation. 
 
 It was perfectly natural for Paul to make 
 so much of justification; it is no less natural 
 that the emphasis should have shifted to the 
 new life which Jesus made possible for us to- 
 day. So the death of the Savior, as the one 
 great factor in the work of "redemption," lost 
 some of its meaning to the modem man; he 
 refuses to separate it — as Paul practically 
 did — from the totality of the life. The power 
 of the blood, with all its possibilities for fetish- 
 worship and Christianized magic, at the best, 
 was never an unobjectionable concept. 
 
 But to stop here were to leave a wrong impres- 
 sion. 
 
 All Christians believe in the forgiveness of 
 sins. They also believe in the life everlast- 
 ing — and that is, after all, the issue towards 
 which all things converge, the one positive 
 towards which all negatives tend. In Jesus the 
 possibilities of that life were manifested to the 
 world. The death of the Nazarene was a sign 
 of how seriously he took his mission of estab- 
 lishing this new regime in the hearts of his 
 friends. 
 
 Historically, the whole theology of the church 
 is founded in the meaning of this one episode — 
 the death on the cross. As has since happened 
 to other offensive things in Christendom, the 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 171 
 
 gibbet's offense was turned into a glorious apol- 
 ogy. It is the guarantee of the goodness of 
 God. Practically, the church is finding herself 
 at last — it was high time! — face to face with 
 the very life, the person of Jesus. And the 
 Christian consciousness gives triumphant testi- 
 mony that here is one indeed who can show us 
 the Father's love, and thereby bring life and 
 immortality to light. 
 
 Thus the saviorship of Jesus is inextricably 
 bound up with his educative mission — "to show 
 us the Father." The old theology subdivided 
 this work into three parts : the formal teaching, 
 the miracles, and the influence of his per- 
 sonality. 
 
 Nothing can better illustrate how the modem 
 mind has outgrown this tendency to classify 
 the factors of Jesus' life than the fact that the 
 first and the second have so far receded into 
 the background as to be nearly invisible. 
 
 The teaching has been so sublimated in the 
 furnace of literary criticism until Hamack can 
 say without troubling the spirits that all that 
 we can know about the teaching of Jesus — bar- 
 ring the first three gospels — can easily be 
 written on a single quarto page. That is, 
 by itself, insufficient as the basis for a world- 
 religion. 
 
 With the second the case is still more parlous. 
 Miracles are about tabooed in many quarters. 
 
172 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 It is characteristic of the feelings in theological 
 circles generally that in a representative gather- 
 ing of the church's guardians the ingenuous 
 remark can be dropped that it was unsafe in 
 a mixed audience to discuss miracles freely! 
 Reputations might suffer, in truth, if all spoke 
 their minds freely. 
 
 It is probably true that much which is said 
 about the miracles as a special intrusion of God 
 into the universe is based upon a misconception 
 of what this universe is and of what God is ; but 
 the ominous retiring of miracle as a reliable 
 revelation of the Father shows, at the very 
 least, that as an aid to faith today it can easily 
 be overworked. 
 
 Frances Power Cobbe was one speaking of 
 the absurdity of founding religion on histories 
 of miracles. "Ah, les miracles!" exclaimed 
 D'Azeglio, " je n'en crois rien. Ce sont de 
 coups d'etat celestes." Whether the remark 
 was a perfectly fair one may be doubted; but 
 the exceptional in nature — and nothing that 
 happens in nature is supernatural — is certainly 
 no safe criterion in judging what God is any 
 more than a coup d'etat is the expression of 
 the normal development of a government. 
 
 The third subject — ^the personality — has 
 taken possession of the field. It is another 
 case of " He must increase, but I must decrease." 
 
 The Johannine " Who hath seen me, hath 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN ITS 
 
 seen the Father," gets very near to the core of 
 this new theology — which is as old as Christian- 
 ity. The Christian believes that in Jesus we got 
 nearer to the heart of God than ever before. 
 God has always been our Father, but we lacked 
 the power to grasp the fact. Then His inter- 
 locuter came — " This is the Father's good plea- 
 sure," he told us ; " My Father worketh hither- 
 to, and I work;" "Who doeth His will, he 
 is my brother." And better than that — ^he 
 hved a hfe so pure and godly that these chance 
 remarks seemed perfectly natural, and the eyes 
 of men were opened. 
 
 Many men have lived since his time, and 
 many have spoken wise words. The strength 
 and the wisdom of the past has helped them to 
 do marvelous things. Standing on the shoulders 
 of so many generations, they have enjoyed a 
 large vision that has brought comfort to weak 
 souls. We have learned to look with sympathy 
 upon the wise men of other eras and are anxi- 
 ously studying their bibles for more light. But 
 the discipline of comparative religion endorses 
 the ancient report that never another man spoke 
 as he spoke or was what he was. 
 
 The exceptional character of Jesus must 
 always modify the thought that he is our great 
 exemplar. The case is probably overdrawn when 
 Forrest says {The Christ of History and of 
 Experience, p. 308), "As a mere example He 
 
174 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 is no encouragement to us, for His moral experi- 
 ence has different conditions from ours." Even 
 the "mere example" of a perfect, sinless being 
 may help a sinner to aspire. A blind man may 
 be depressed at the thought that he must go 
 through the world with reality at one entrance 
 quite shut out, yet he is helped by the eye-sight 
 of his friends. But it is a fact that " the pecu- 
 liarity of His attitude is that it cannot be imi- 
 tated. Here is a note we cannot sound. It is 
 as if He said, I am first; there is no second." 
 The best Christian dare not say. As he was thus 
 will I be — it needs but a fair trial to disillusion 
 him; he may only say, As he was thus ought 
 I to be. Jesus represents humanity at its best. 
 We cannot imitate Jesus. So be it. It is 
 not wise that we should. Every man's main 
 business is to be true to himself. But this is 
 facilitated when one has learned how others 
 have done that. An ideal is an inspiration. 
 This is no less true when that ideal is associated 
 with a definite personality. Jesus was some of 
 the things that we desire to be, that we imagine 
 as the standard of life to which Paul aspired 
 and to which we shall aspire until we shall have 
 reached the fulness of the stature of the man- 
 hood of Christ. 
 
 THE STANDARD APPLIED TO LIFE 
 
 Whatever the reason may have been, Jesus 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 175 
 
 avoided, on principle, the giving of an elaborate 
 set of regulations which was sure to go to 
 pieces, as monasticism abundantly testified, when 
 erected into a final authority on matters of con- 
 duct. His kingdom was not of this world. His 
 business was so important that he could ill 
 spare the time, even if he had ever thought 
 of doing so, to accomplish work which others 
 might accomplish just as well. His whole natural 
 bent was of a kind to render it antecedently 
 improbable that he would care to make a Code 
 Napoleon, or the laws of a Genevan theocracy, 
 or the rules of the Franciscan order. In such 
 matters his followers were to follow the tradi- 
 tional authorities, Moses and the prophets. 
 They too had spoken of God and for God. 
 
 The life, fragmentarily recorded though it 
 is, warrants no other conclusion. It is a most 
 inadequate conception which seeks in the New 
 Testament a text-book on Christian casuistry, 
 which makes the Sermon on the Mount a law- 
 book for the Republic of God and metamor- 
 phoses its reputed author into a second Moses. 
 
 But one thing such a "sermon" does indi- 
 cate: it shows that the standards of Jesus could 
 be expressed in simple terms, and that they 
 were not meant to be unattainable. There are 
 many precious stones lying loose in the gospels 
 which the artist in Matthew has refused to fit 
 into his brilliant mosaic; here and there we 
 
176 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 detect the hand that rejects the material not 
 suited to his design, that cuts some promising 
 gem to set off the beauty of a wonderful picture. 
 But taken all in all this literary production 
 shows better than anything else what Jesus 
 stood for. The Sermon on the Mount is not the 
 whole of Christianity, as some have imagined; 
 but nothing else, taken by itself, can so well 
 teach what was the Master's aim. 
 
 For the sake of definiteness, then, rather than 
 completeness, it will be practicable to indicate 
 the nature of Jesus' thought as there expressed. 
 
 Reduced to the lowest terms, we have, after 
 the beatitudes, the following clear-cut in- 
 junctions : 
 
 Let your beneficent light shine! 
 
 Change nothing about the Scripture ! 
 
 Do not get angry ! 
 
 Forgive ! 
 
 Do not commit adultery! 
 
 Pluck out the offending eye, or hand, or 
 foot! 
 
 Do not divorce your faithful wife! 
 
 Do not swear! 
 
 Do not oppose evil! 
 
 Love your enemies! 
 
 Perform your righteousness, your devotions, 
 your mortifications, in secret! 
 
 Do not babble in prayer ! 
 
 Pray as I teach you: Our Father who art 
 in heaven etc. ! 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 177 
 
 Do not gather earthly riches! 
 
 Do not worry about life, food, and clothing! 
 
 Seek first the Kingdom of God and His 
 righteousness ! 
 
 Do not be censorious! 
 
 Do not waste your treasures! 
 
 Remember that persistent prayer is always 
 heard ! 
 
 Always, fair play! 
 
 In life, choose the narrow way ! 
 
 Shun lying prophets! 
 
 That is all; the outline, so to speak, of a 
 Christian ethic. These are not rules, to be 
 modified with many a but and if. As rules of 
 conduct they lack something, otherwise it would 
 be easy to construct a perfectly normal Chris- 
 tianity. Jesus was free to adapt the Old Testa- 
 ment to his purposes ; it is not surprising that 
 his disciples, once they had learned to follow 
 the Master, once they had learned that his 
 authoritative personality was more important 
 than the rules, felt free to carry this beginning 
 to its logical conclusion. 
 
 The story of this movement is told in the 
 historic eff^ort of the early church to make a 
 clean sweep of the old legal system, culminat- 
 ing in the glorious liberty of the children of 
 God. As rules, these commands and prohibitions 
 were sure to work havoc, for they still permitted 
 man to neglect the weightier matters. Here 
 
178 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 monasticism came to grief. Here a Tolstoy 
 was sure to alienate many who otherwise would 
 have lent a sympathetic ear. 
 
 Man will do anything for his religion. He 
 will obey the absurdest rules ; and he will break 
 the most sacred injunctions with equal consci- 
 entiousness. The old negro's statement was a 
 perfectly sober one : " I have broken every one 
 of the commandments, but, thank the Lord! 
 I haven't lost my religion!" 
 
 It is not the Jewish itinerant teacher, speak- 
 ing under the stress of certain local restrictions, 
 who guides the twentieth century; it is not the 
 interpreter of the Mosaic code of laws ; it is 
 not even the preacher of the sermon on the hill- 
 side — we were not there to catch the veritable 
 words of power that made fishermen into world- 
 conquerors: our authority is the spirit of the 
 loving, living Christ. And where one has the 
 opportunity to interpret the principles of such 
 an one it seems a despicable thing to haggle 
 over the ipsissima verba relating to mere con- 
 temporary conventions, as many of them do. 
 
 Arranging these sayings and all else which 
 is in any way related to that wonderful person- 
 ality in their proper perspective, we can see 
 that Jesus is still our authority, because he 
 has supplied us with a spiritual basis for our 
 religion. The history of the church is largely 
 a history of evasion; but we cannot rid our- 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 179 
 
 selves of the haunting thought that if we could 
 only live up to such a standard it would be 
 weU with the world, and many a hard task 
 would solve itself. Even our social problems 
 would fade away in the light of the social gospel, 
 though we must admit that Jesus had but little 
 to say about work and play and capital and 
 pauperism and the insanity of war. 
 
 For in the religious world, which controls 
 every other world, it is none other than Jesus 
 whose words are decisive for the western mind. 
 For his sake we are willing to quit our theoriz- 
 ing; for his sake we will abolish our scruples 
 about the mint, anise, and cummin of belief; 
 in his name we can now call all men brothers; 
 in his name we can call upon God, who is the 
 Father of us all, as the One who is over all, 
 and in all, and through all. We can say, in 
 effect, what M. Claudius once wrote : " He who 
 cannot believe in Jesus must see to it how he 
 will manage without Him. We cannot do that. 
 We need someone to help us live and to help 
 us die, and we know of no other person whom 
 we would rather have. As He believed, so we 
 believe; we can safely put ourselves into His 
 and our Father's hands." 
 
 Thus we have reached the end of our tortu- 
 ous road. Some will ask themselves, was it worth 
 travelling.? Any road is worth travelling that 
 leads us to God. 
 
180 THE DILEMMA OF THE 
 
 This is what the journey has yielded: 
 Theology has always engaged the mind of 
 thinking man. Man is a seeker after God. 
 In this search the emergence of Jesus Christ 
 has become determinative. It was Paul who was 
 responsible for the shifting of the interest 
 among the early Christians. He owed all to 
 the supernatural Christ; to magnify this his 
 Savior and Lord became his life-work. The 
 magnification of the Lord can be traced through- 
 out the New Testament. For the church the 
 Easter message that the Lord was alive for- 
 evermore was decisive. It was natural that 
 this Lord of Life should become the inspirer 
 of a new religion. We can ascertain but little 
 of the earthly life of Jesus, but it is reason- 
 ably certain that his ultimate aim was, not 
 the creation of a new religion, but the establish- 
 ing of God's kingdom. His whole world cen- 
 tered in God. His prayer-life shows that. But 
 the disciples of the primitive church felt free 
 to draw him into their prayer-life. This was 
 not without its dangers. But a man's prayers 
 cannot be made to conform to hard rules. The 
 hymns of the church give a poetic expression 
 to this freedom. Christians desire to pray to 
 Jesus because they are cognizant of his un- 
 selfish work, because he seemed to be nearer 
 to them than the great and holy God, and be- 
 cause of the conviction that he was the very 
 
MODERN CHRISTIAN 181 
 
 embodiment of God. But with the modern 
 interests in life has come a readjustment of 
 some of the claims of the Christian religion. 
 For one thing, the world appears under a dif- 
 ferent aspect to the man of today. In this 
 world we can see something of God. All the 
 indications are that God is not far from each 
 one of us, that we all have our being in Him. 
 It is the God in nature, in man, in Jesus Christ, 
 whom man worships. In Jesus dwelt the ful- 
 ness of the Godhead bodily — ^the compulsion is 
 upon the Christian mind to acknowledge his 
 supremacy, if not in all the minor interests of 
 life, in the large matters of the soul's religion. 
 The modern Christian may have lost some 
 things; what is left stands out all the more 
 prominently, like some granitic Alp from whose 
 sloping foot-lands the torrents have washed 
 away the debris of the ages. These crumbling 
 fragments came from the heights, it is true; 
 but they also impeded our way to the summit. 
 Up there the stars shine in celestial splendor. 
 There is no reason why the man of today shall 
 not have as much assurance as Peter had. To 
 the plaintive query of the Master: Would ye 
 also go away.'' we can say. Lord, to whom then 
 shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal 
 life; and we have believed and know that Thou 
 art the Holy One of God. 
 
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