The gospel in the Gospels

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Preface

THE title of the present volume is intended to in dicate that, while it aims to be an exposition of the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ, it does not purpose to be a whole or final exposition of that Gospel. It looks forward definitely to a further and fuller expression of it. We have here to do with the Gospel, not in its developed utterance as that of the New Testament or of the Church, but only so far as it is contained in our canonical Gospels or can by ourselves be deduced from them. My own position is that, while the Gospel as an act or fact is complete in Jesus Christ Himself, the rationale of its operation hi human salvation is best interpreted and stated by St. Paul. My true objective point has therefore been the completer construction of the Gospel according to St. Paul, to be treated in a volume to follow the present one. That the epistles of St. Paul are an interpretation only, and not a trans formation nor even an essential modification, of the Gospel of our Lord is — next to the hope of casting a single new ray of light upon the nature of the Gospel itself — the point which I have most at heart to prove in the end.

Indeed, in opposition to what is claimed in high quarters to be the well-nigh acknowledged conclusion viii Preface

of present criticism, my own firm conviction is that the variant conceptions of the Gospel in the New Tes tament, so far from being different gospels, are con sistent and mutually completive aspects of the one and only Gospel. In proportion as we conceive the Gospel of God in its entirety and in its immensity, in just that degree do all scriptural, as well as all truly Christian and catholic, statements of it, no matter how partial and seemingly contradictory in themselves, fall into their proper places and serve to magnify the greatness and harmony of the whole. If the Gospel is divine at all, it is the divinest fact of the universe, the final cause of creation, the end for which all else exists. Mistake any one fragment or aspect of it for the whole, and all the other fragments and aspects will be involved in confused and hopeless contention with it for the usurped position. Let the whole stand out for itself in its complete proportions, and every part falls of itself into its proper place, and is confirmed and supported in it by every other part.

On the other hand, however necessary it is for us to know the whole Gospel in order to know any part, it is equally necessary if we would know the whole that we shall not ignore or neglect any one or more of the parts. Besides other grievous consequences, it is only as we do full justice to the claims of every least frag ment of the Gospel, that we can guard legitimately or effectively against the fatal withdrawals from the unity of Christianity of the parts that are denied rightful expression within it. Moved by these considerations, I look forward to an entrance into the full mind of the

Preface ix

New Testament by way of a comprehensive comparison of all its diverse points of view and variant expressions of the Gospel.

Not only so, but in this volume itself, which is but part of the proposed plan, I have recognized the fact that even within the narrower limits of the Gospels which give us our record of the Gospel, there are not only possible but actual diverse impressions of what the Gospel is; and that not only is full justice due to each such impression, taken by itself and for its own sake, but that the very fullest justice to each is the only way of arriving at the truth of all, or at the truth of the whole of which they are the complementary and neces sary parts. The one great lesson that must forerun and make ready the Christian unity of the future is this: that contraries do not necessarily contradict, nor need opposites always oppose. What we want is not to surrender or abolish our differences, but to unite and compose them. We need the truth of every va riant opinion and the light from every opposite point of view. The least fragment is right in so far as it stands for a part of the truth. It is wrong only when, as so often, it elevates into a ground of division from the other fragments just that which in reality fits it to unite with and supplement them.

What has been said may indicate at least the spirit and temper in which the study before us is sought to be conducted. I speak here, of course, only in general ities; the concrete application or use of the principles enunciated must be found and judged in the book itself.

x Preface

As a matter of form rather than of substance, I feel that there will be a question as to the success with which the promise of method or procedure has been carried out in the volume before us. The matter is treated in the following order: (1) the Gospel of the Common Humanity, (2) the Gospel of the Work, and (3) the Gospel of the Person of our Lord. And each of these is to be considered, as far as possible, by itself and independently of the others. There are those who hold the first of these and not the other two, or the first two and not the third — at least in the full sense hi which we think Christianity includes them all. And we were under obligation to do full justice to the point of view of all. If I have succeeded but imperfectly in doing this, if I have at times, contrary to promise, run the lower position up into the higher, or anticipated the higher in the lower, it is at least a question where the responsibility lies. It may be that what I myself believe to be, not three gospels, but three aspects or stages of one and the same Gospel, may indeed be so. And it may be that they themselves do, of themselves and in spite of us, so run up together into one, that it is impossible for us, however honest we may be in the effort to do justice to each by itself, to keep them apart; so predetermined are they, and determined, to find each its own meaning and fulfilment, not in the sep arate truth of each, but hi the united and common truth of all.

So let us agree to disagree, if conscientiously we must, in all our manifold differences; and, bringing all our differences together, let us see if they are not wiser

Preface xi

than we, and if they cannot and will not of themselves find agreement in a unity that is higher and vaster than we.

W. P. DuBosE SEWANEE, St. Luke's Day, 1905

Table Of Contents

PAGE

PREFACE vii

Part First The Gospel Of The Earthly Life Or

THE COMMON HUMANITY

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I. The Impression of the Earthly Life of Jesus . . 15

II. The Growth and Preparation of Jesus 28

III. The Divine Sonship of Humanity 42

IV. The Son of Man 51

V. The Kingdom of God 63

VI. The Authority of Jesus 74

VII. The Blessedness of Jesus 86

VIII. The Beatitudes 97

IX. The Beatitudes — Continued 109

X. The Death of Jesus 119

Part Second The Gospel Of The Work Or

PAGE

XI. The Saviour from Sin 131

XII. Sin and its Treatment 142

XIII. The Sinlessness of Jesus 154

XIV. The True Baptism and Baptizer 166

XV. The Resurrection 180

xiii xiv Table of Contents

Part Third The Gospel Of The Person Or

PAGE

XVI. The Problem of the Person 199

XVII. The Mystery of the Birth 210

XVIII. Ideal Pre-existence 221

XIX. The Gospel in St. John 234

XX. The Logos 248

XXI. The Incarnation . . . „ 260

XXII. The Trinity 274

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

THE question of the present is, and we may safely assume that more and more the question of the future is going to be — What is Christianity ? There was probably never a time when more, and a more real, interest was felt in the truth of Christ and Christianity. There was certainly never a time when so many and so conflicting conceptions existed as to the meaning of Christ and Christianity.

When the necessity was first laid upon Christianity to define itself, the process by which it did so was one of gradual and progressive but strict and thorough going exclusion. Not only was nothing permitted the name which contradicted the nature, but nothing that fell short at any point of the totality of the truth of Christianity, as Christianity understood itself. It was not only the truth and nothing but the truth, — it was the whole truth or nothing, the highest or none. What ever may be said of the spirit or temper in which to too great an extent this process of exclusion was carried out to the bitter end, from no point of view can we with propriety deprecate the result of it. God may have made the wrath of man as well as his zeal and devotion to praise Him, but humanly speaking no other spirit or temper, and no other method, could have effected the working out to its logical conclusion and expression the principle or truth implicitly contained in Chris tianity.

Unquestionably truth is one, and only error is mani fold. Truth is one and is a whole, and not seldom we can say that that which is less than the truth is as un true as that which is contrary to it. But, for all that, there may be a time when for the truth's sake a very different temper, and a very different and even an opposite method, may be most proper and most useful in dealing with it. I propose — with what right or propriety only the result can determine — to treat the sadly vexed question of Christianity by a process the reverse of that which was necessary in the begin ning, by a process of inclusion rather than of exclusion. So far from saying that only that is true which is the whole truth, I bring forward the complementary and not contradictory fact that that which has in it any part of the truth is so far true. I hold that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is so true and so living in every part that he who truly possesses and truly uses any broken fragment of it may find in that fragment something — just so much — of gospel for his soul and of salvation for his life. In testing and illustrating this fact, if it be such, it will not be necessary for us to examine each one of the parts into which Christianity is broken up in these days. There are a few stages or degrees of faith in Christ and Christianity in one or other of which every phase worth considering is contained and under which it may be sufficiently considered for our purpose.

In the first place, there is many a profoundly re ligious — and shall we not say Christian ? — soul, including now some of the greatest upon earth, whose faith in Jesus may be expressed somewhat as follows: They will not undertake to say anything of our Lord, theirs as well as ours, before His appearance by birth in the world or after His departure by death from it. On such points as these they are at the best, or at the most, agnostic. But between these two points of birth and death, in the earthly life lived in common with us all, in the simple fact that Jesus Christ was the man He was and lived the life He lived, they find as much of gospel and of salvation as, they think, humanity can or humanity ought to receive on this earth. What or how much that truly is, it shall be our first task care fully and sympathetically to examine and measure. Let us call this gospel, or so much of the Gospel as this, the gospel of the earthly life, or of the common humanity, of our Lord.

In the second place, in reading the Gospels and try ing to understand them according to their intention, it cannot escape the attention of most of us that, however essentially and completely human we see the life of Jesus to be, still we cannot but also see that as human it transcends the ordinarily possible limits of the human. There is no one of the Gospels, there was no Gospel before the Gospels, which does not end necessarily, which does not from the beginning mean to end, in the resurrection. But it is not only that; — in our Lord's own clear consciousness, in the unquestioning con cession on the part of all the records, of His personal sinlessness, we have a fact which as much transcends the powers and limits of all other earthly life as His resurrection does. The Gospel from the beginning was not at all that Jesus most perfectly represented our common nature or illustrated our human life, but that He brought with Him something into our nature and life which was not there before, and raised them into something which was not themselves or their own, and to which they could attain only in and through Him. What that was was expressed hi the Christian consciousness that Jesus Christ is the human, but the divine-human, conqueror and destroyer of sin and of death. Let us call this second phase or stage of the Gospel the gospel of the resurrection.

In the third place, however sincerely and genuinely human we may regard the life and life-work of Jesus, when once we have recognized in His accomplishment or attainment as man that which transcends human accomplishment or attainment — however it may be in the line of man's higher nature and destiny — we have raised inevitably a further question. How does this man break through or pass beyond the possibil ities of universal human nature as it is? How does that which is born of the flesh become in Him more than flesh ? The immediate answer was and is : The work wrought in humanity through the life in it of Jesus Christ was no mere act of humanity, however exceptional. It was a work wrought by God in hu manity. If, on the one side, it was humanity fulfilling or completing itself in God, it was only so because, on the other side, it was equally and primarily God ful filling and completing humanity in Himself. How then was the so unique or exceptional personality of

Jesus to be accounted for or explained? Was He only a human individual exceptionally blessed or graced ? Or, while perfect man, was He, just because perfect man, something more than man ? Perfection is no mark of our common humanity, and needs a very high accounting for. So from the beginning begins a questioning which Christianity answers for itself in the gospel of the Incarnation.

There is no form of faith in Jesus Christ true enough to be called a gospel or vital enough to be a salvation which, measured by its own self-limitation, may not be classed under one or other of these several " gospels," or phases or stages of the one Gospel. I claim for each that, if it be real and vital and true so far as it goes, it is, so far as it goes, a gospel, and brings in it just so much of salvation.

Our interest in these days in so far undertaking an advocacy of partial truths of the Gospel is no, true or false, sympathy with partial truth, but interest in the truth itself, whole and perfect. The fact of which we are not yet fully aware, and gainst which we have not yet sufficiently guarded, is this: that the so-called whole of truth is quite as apt to ignore or pervert the parts, as the parts are to be blind to the other parts and to the whole. So true is this, that it is a common fact that in larger and more catholic forms of Christianity not merely aspects but important truths and even living powers of the Gospel are so lost to sight and use that we may have to go outside to find them at all, perchance in some fragmentary sect which has been driven outside by its overpowering sense of the importance or necessity of knowing and using them. It is no weak concession then, or condescending charity, that ought to lead us to do full justice to what we con sider mutilated or incomplete conceptions of Chris tianity. We ought to go to them in humility, to learn of them sides and uses of the truth which it may well be they understand better than ourselves. So I go, for example, to the gospel of only the earthly life and the common humanity of our Lord to learn many a lesson and catch many a vision and inspiration of the truth as it is in Jesus, which I am sure is lost to those of us who in the higher ignore the details of the so-called lower side of that divinely human life.

We are to study the Gospel as it is to be found in the Gospels. And there is a threefold view of the Gospels somewhat corresponding to the three stages of the Gospel which we have been considering.

The first and main function of at least the Synoptic Gospels would seem to have been purely reportorial. By far the larger part of them is pure record. They are reports, without note or comment, of our Lord's appearance or appearances, where He went, what He said and did. Never were there writings in which there was so little of the writers, so clear and uncoloured an impression of their subject. But this is not abso lutely or entirely so. Before our Gospels attained their present form there had been no little reflection upon the whole earthly appearance, and no little inter pretation of the words, the work, and the person of Him who had left so deep a mark upon the world.

Now the time has passed when men are able to ques tion the historical personality or identity of the man Christ Jesus. And the time has passed too when they can depreciate the uniqueness and permanence, not to say finality, of His impression upon human history and human destiny. No less is the time past when our Gospels can be resisted or rejected as in the main truthful and true reports of how Jesus appeared and what He said and did in His life on earth. But there are men, among the greatest, and scholars the most learned, the most conscientious, the most devout, who, while able to accept so much of the Gospels as is of pure record, find themselves unable to receive what they conceive to be the results and additions of later reflection upon and later human interpretation of the actual facts of the Gospel.

No one can deny that it is legitimate for a properly equipped criticism — by which I mean a criticism competent to judge of spiritual as well as natural facts and phenomena — to apply the strictest historical tests to the historical facts of Christianity. Making the best, which means also the most critical, use of their mate rials, profound and devout students construct out of the records as we have them the truest, completest, and most self-consistent conception they can of the person of the great founder of Christianity. In doing this they pass by or reject those elements which seem to them inconsistent or incongruous, as not belonging to the objective fact to be reported but originating in the sub jective impression and interpretation of the reporters, or of later believers generally. Such a mode of treatment is not only not to be condemned, but it is not to be avoided. But it will be a long time before a critical acumen sufficiently true and adequate, spiritual enough as well as scientific and philosophical enough, will be generally developed to give us permanent results on this line. Meantime each succeeding and temporarily successful such attempt will be subjected to the tests of time and ever-enlarging experience, and will survive or perish according to its truth or falsity. Still we shall never attain to the larger and truer criticism of the future except as we are trained in the cruder and confessedly still imperfect criticism of the present. And it is only through the growth and discipline of the critical faculty and function, of the powers of dis crimination and judgment, that we can be educated to a higher understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the highest truth. In the first stage, therefore, of our study of the Gospel I shall follow, as best I may, in the track of the critics. I shall endeavour to admit nothing in the Synoptic Gospels and as of the Gospel which the best present criticism will not admit as pure record, as being of the objective truth of which they are the truthful reporters.

We have recognized the fact that beside the bare record or report of objective fact which constitutes the bulk of the Synoptic Gospels, they all more or less abundantly contain matter that may or may not be objectively true also, but that is the subjective con ception and interpretation of the objective facts on the part of the writers, or of the Church which they repre sent. This Christian or Church interpretation takes two directions and assumes two forms. It is first an interpretation of what we call " the work " of our Lord, meaning by that the purpose and result of His whole human life — as, for example, atoning, redeeming, new-creating, etc. It is often, of course, difficult to separate between pure record and subjective inter pretation, inextricably intermixed as they are. As an instance, the account of the intimate connection be tween the successive ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus is doubtless largely simple report of the facts. It is common to all the Gospels and seems to have been from the first the starting point of the public life and of all the stories of Jesus. Yet I think we shall see that in the form which the narrative has uniformly assumed there has been already embodied, in the conti'ast between John and Jesus, and more especially in the significance of their respective baptisms, a state ment and interpretation of the whole work of Jesus than which nothing could be more comprehensive or exact. With regard to all subsequent reflection and interpretation of the life and work of Jesus it must be at least admitted that it is separable in thought from the objectively true facts which it undertakes to explain. At the same time it has itself to be understood and accounted for. We have seen that the ultimate and complete form assumed by reflection upon and ex planation of the life-work of Jesus Christ is to be found in what I have called the second phase of the Gospel, the gospel of the resurrection : Jesus Christ — the con queror of sin and destroyer of death, the author and finisher of holiness, of righteousness, of eternal life.

The other direction taken by Christian reflection has to do with not the work but the person of our Lord. But it was not the less inevitable, and has equal claim to validity. Admit the nature of the work, and you cannot escape or avoid the question of the person of the worker. There may be doubt as to whether or to what extent this question is raised or answered in the Synoptic Gospels. Whether or no what we call the Gospel of the Infancy is at all part of the record, or at any rate of the primitive or original record, this at least is certain about it. It did not belong to the very earliest form of either oral or written gospel, which began, as in St. Mark, with the public life, and knows, or at least includes, as yet nothing of the previous private history of Jesus. When it is later included, it may indeed be so as fuller record of facts, to fill out a completer nar rative from more perfect information. But unques tionably there was a further motive for its introduction. The question was up of the mystery of the person of the Lord. It is not answered in the Gospel of the In fancy it is true. In all the stories of the birth there is nothing which affirms or necessarily postulates a pre vious personal existence. But at least the line of reflection and interpretation is entered upon which finds no possible or satisfactory close until it completes and expresses itself in the Prologue of St. John, — that is to say, in the Gospel of the Incarnation.

Part First The Gospel Of The Earthly Life Or

THE COMMON HUMANITY

THE IMPRESSION OF THE EARTHLY LIFE OF JESUS

WE are, in this part of our work, to study the Gospel upon the lower plane of the common humanity which our Lord shared with ourselves. From the records of which we are to make use we exclude not only the Fourth Gospel, but the Gospel of the Birth and Infancy and whatever other portions of the Synoptic Gospels may reasonably be supposed to belong to a later stage of gospel representation. Confining ourselves then as nearly as we may to the primitive gospel of pure record, we are prepared to make to criticism the fol lowing admissions:

In the first place, the historical appearance of Jesus Christ, taken as a whole, was distinctly and completely a human appearance. He made a great, a boundless claim upon human faith and allegiance, but it was not a claim which He Himself based upon any essential personal difference between Himself and the common or universal humanity. He did not demand allegiance upon the ground of His being more than man, but solely upon the ground of what He was as man. He nowhere in His lifetime asserts, or was understood by those who stood nearest Him to assert, His divine personality. The highest claim He admits is that in response to Peter's confession: Thou art the Christ, or Thou art the Christ of God, or — in the fullest form reported — Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. These were all alike well understood Messianic expressions. The Messiah was to be in a very high sense the representative and expression of God's pres ence upon earth, but in no sense, as yet, which implied his own personal deity. Indeed the passive form and signification of the word Messiah or Anointed One emphasized the fact that the essence of Messiahship was humanity indwelt and sanctified by Deity. This is not at all to deny that there was a higher claim in volved in our Lord's personality. But the claim did not appear, was not asserted, in His earthly life. The claim of divinity was to rest solely upon what He was and accomplished in humanity, and it waited upon that consummation to assert itself. Meanwhile, Jesus' whole appearance was, as we have said, distinctively a human one, — a man indeed always with God, and with whom God always was, but still always, in His highest knowledge, in His most mysterious powers, a man. Even after His resurrection He is still to St. Peter "Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved unto you of God by mighty works which God did by Him in the midst of you."

Upon what grounds in His lifetime did the Apostles accept our Lord's Messiahship ? Not, certainly, upon any which had been anticipated or expected as signs of the Messiah. Not chiefly, I think we may say, upon the ground of His possession and exercise of mysterious powers. To the mind of His time He Himself had to distinguish those powers from those of Beelzebub by an appeal to their opposite quality or character. He depre cated, and trusted not Himself to, a faith that rested only on miracles. I think we may say that what He was really believed on for was — Himself, what He was as man. It was His divinity indeed, but a divinity mani fested or visible to them only in the quality and charac ter of His humanity, in the perfection of His human holiness, in the spiritual power of His human life. Why did they cling to Him through every trial of their faith ? To whom else, having even imperfectly known Him, could they go ? To them He had the words, already to them He was The Word, of eternal life. That was His permanent credential, and that was His only plea.

If we turn to those who still in our own day decline to go for their gospel beyond the earthly life and the common humanity of our Lord — what answer will they give for clinging to His person and finding their salvation in His life? I think we may say that the answer as it has shaped itself to that question is some thing like the following: Humanity continues, and will always continue, to believe and to find itself in Jesus, because Jesus embodies and expresses to humanity the truth of itself; the truth, the beauty and the good ness of itself. And truth, beauty, and goodness are the sum of what is of value, and ought to be of interest, to humanity. But why and how does Jesus Christ represent to us all that? We do not know; we need not know. He does; we accept the fact, because it is self-demonstrating; we cannot go the length of the explanations, because we believe they extend beyond the limits of our knowledge or proof.