The Fourth gospel, the heart of Christ

Front matter

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Preface

" 'T^HE fourth Gospel is the Heart of Christ," is the -L enthusiastic language of Ernesti, from whom we borrow the words of our title-page. Expositors both ancient and modern, who regard the four Gospels as veritable history, have generally manifested the same preference. " Written by the hand of an angel,'' says Herder ; and Schleiermacher, who with his school delighted in " the mystic of the four Evangelists," says that his soul must have been pervaded by eternal childlike Christmas joys.

But sentiments of admiration are not evidence to other minds who do not find through John those depths of living water which those who are more contemplative have ever found. No book has been the subject of a more searching or a more adverse criticism than the fourth GospeL The history of the controversy, with the motives of it, is exceedingly interesting and instructive, and I had sketched it in two chapters of this work, but was obliged to omit them in order to bring the volume within convenient size. It is the controversy of half a century between some of the ablest theologians and profoundest scholars. The historical evidence was first seriously assailed by Bretschneider in 1820, who then published his ** Probabilia," and who contended that the author of the fourth Gospel belonged to the first half of tl]e second century, and wrote it k

IV PREFACE.

with a dogmatic purpose, namely, to propagate the doctrine of the deity of Christ. He was ably answered, and the only change which the whole discussion then produced was a new value placed upon the Gospel of John. Bretschneider himself retracted his doubts.

But the Critical Philosophy, dating from Kant, and running by a swift and irresistible logic into Pantheism, gave birth to a new school of Biblical criticism ; a criticism vastly more ingenious than the old rationalism, and wrought of finer threads than it had ever spun. It finds its ablest expounder in Ferdinand Christian Baur, an Hegelian of the left wing, that is, the pantheistic, who breaks up the whole New Testament Canon, and runs it anew in pantheistic moulds, fortunately with the calmness and the icy clearness by which his style is distinguished. He furnishes Strauss, we think, with all the ideas and arguments which a Christian believer would care to notice or answer. Whatever we say of his criticism, and the philosophy that determines and inspires it, his three works, the History of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, of the Atonement, of the Christian Gnosis, place the student of Christian history under immense obligations.

Where learned men have disputed, unlearned men are apt to think there must be hopeless uncertainty. They do not remember that when learned men dispute with theories predetermined, their disputes are only the play of hypotheses, and that the verdict of the common understanding is better than theirs. That the hermeneutics of the Tiibingen School are a dance of this sort, is shown by the constant shifting of its positions and its mutually destructive theories. There was a pre-determination to

PREFACE, V

make Christianity serve as a mould of Pantheism with its nomenclature unchanged.

Meanwhile as the dust of the controversy clears off, the calm wisdom of Neander, who put in a plea for entire freedom of debate, and who saw what the result must be, becomes apparent. No one went into it with a spirit more sweet and beautiful than his. To his name must be added a list long and illustrious, to enumerate which would be to suggest works of learning and scholarship, the most profound and reverent of this age or any other, especially in the departments of Christian history and evidence. Never was it more signally shown how great is the service of doubt and denial in rendering faith and affirmation clear, pronounced, and intelligent. Not only the sand was cleared away, disclosing the old foundations more deeply and broadly, but new facts were brought to light, and new fields discovered, running down like sunny glades through opening mist to the Personality w^hich the Christian ages date from. The result is that by the verdict of the best scholarship of modern times not predetermined to Pantheism, no facts of equal antiquity, judged by the reasonable rules of historical evidence, stand out in surer prominence than the fundamental facts of the New Testament narratives ; no heights of history thus remote lie on the horizon in mellower sunlight or clearer outline. Among the names in this great debate of half a century, whether disclosing the external grounds of Christianity or its divine contents, are, along with that of Neander, Ullman, Dorner, Tholiick, Schaff, Julius Miiller, Giesler,

VI PREFACE,

It is not in my plan to write a book of Christian evidences merely, but to evolve the contents of the Johannean writings, which clearly apprehended are their own evidence, and prove Christianity itself a gift direct from above and not a human discovery. But the exposition would not be at all satisfactory, especially after past discussions and denials, if we left out the historical ground of the fourth Gospel, or left it to be suspected that this ground had been shaken or disturbed. We shall see that this has not been the case. Indeed, it is very difficult to make a sharp line of division between external and internal evidence, and show where one shades off into the other, as much as it is to tell where the soul and body are joined together. Brought home to us in their all-reconciling power, the essential truths of the fourth Gospel imply and necessitate the form and covering in which they appear ; or conversely beginning with their historic basis, the evidence grows and brightens all the way inward to the central light which shines out, encircles, and irradiates the whole.

Contents

PRELIMINARY.

PACK

I. The Supernatural • 3

III. The Immanence of God .32

Part I. The Historical Argument

CHAPTER

I. Gnosticism 39

II. Saint John at Ephesus 51

III. The Johannean Writings 64

IV. The Scope, Purpose, and Spirit of the Apocalypse 91 V. The Witnesses of the Second Century . . 112

VI. The Witnesses of the Second Century . .131

VII. Christianity as a New Influx of Power . . 165

VIII. The Pause in History 184

Part II. Historic Memorials

I. The Four Gospels in Organic Unity ... 197

II. Jesus of Matthew is the Logos of John . . 220

III. The Mystery of Birth 226

IV. Nazareth 239

V. The Forerunner 247

VI. The Homes of Jesus 255

VII. Jesus in the Desert 266

VIII. The Last Meeting by the Jordan .... 285

Vlll CONTENTS.

PART IIL

THE PRIVATE MINISTRY OF JESUS.

CHAPTER PAGE

II. The First Visit at Jerusalem 304

III. The Second Visit at Jerusalem . . . . 319

IV. Removal to Capernaum . . . . . . 328

V. The Third Visit at Jerusalem ... . 338 VI. The Fourth Visit at Jerusalem . . . .352

VII. The Fifth and Last Visit at Jerusalem . . 370

VIII. The Night of the Last Supper . . . .379

X. The Reappearings of Jesus 394

XL The Person of Jesus Christ 404

Part IV. The Johannean Theology

I. The Cosmology of Plato 415

II. Its Character and Influence . . . . . 429

III. The Johannean Cosmology 442

IV. The Transparencies of Nature .... 456 V. The Word made Flesh 467

VI. The Logos Doctrine 484

VII. The Johannean Atonement . , ; . . 501

VIII. Converging Lines 512

IX. The Thrones in Heaven. Conclusion . . 525

Appendix

A. The Easter Controversy 537

B. The Birth of Christ . 544

C. The Preexistence 546

D. Personality and Personification .... 550

PRELIMINARY.

" It has always happened that in the ranks of the scientific army some have been found who refuse to credit the marvels which observation is continually revealing on every hand. Despite all the known wonders of the universe the circumstance that the sole available interpretation of observed facts involves some surprising conclusion, is held by such men to be a sufficient reason for rejecting the observations of the most trustworthy. The value of scientific observation seems enhanced in their eyes precisely as its fruits are insignificant." — R. A. Proctor.

THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

THE SUPERNATURAL.

A LL the great religions acknowledge at least two -^^^ ranges of existence. This material plane of being which we apprehend by the organs of sense, we must believe in, as it nourishes and enfolds us from our cradles. No one ever denied it. Philosophers dispute about the essence of matter ; about what is behind these natural phenomena, and whether anything at all ; but no one denies that the phenomena themselves exist. Those who deny the existence of matter only deny that it exists in itself, or in other words that it has any substratum of its own. The world of sight, sound, and fragrance that lies over against the senses and through them becomes an object of perception, is believed in alike by peasant and philosopher, and this by common consent we call

NATURE or THE NATURAL WORLD.

In this natural world there is nothing stable. All is mobility and change. Not only the animal and vegetable life on its surface constantly disappear and reappear, but the rocks become disintegrated and enter into other forms of existence. Going back through longer reaches of history we find that the oceans and the mountains have been subject to vast changes by subsidence and upheaval, and that the aspect of the earth is transformed from one epoch to another. The very same elements by changes of combination produce the most diversified forms ; and the minerals, the waters, the forests, the flowers of the field and the winds that blow over them, are those same elements commingling by new affinities . and proportions, giving the endless ebb and flow which we delight to witness around us in the sea of matter. Man himself is involved in these perpetual revolutions. He appears on the surface of nature, is dominated by it through the stages of his threescore and ten, and then melts into its bosom and disappears. The order of sequence, according to which all these changes take place, we call by universal consent the LAWS OF NATURE. To discovcr these changes and recombinations by patient observation or by subtile analysis is the business of science ; to group them in their class and order and so determine their law of sequence is the business of natural philosophy.

The Christian believer acknowledges another and higher range of existence. Nature, we $aid, discharges man from her keeping and domination, and all that the senses knew of him dissolves and recombines in her earths and ethers and flowers. So one hundred generations have passed away since Christ appeared upon the earth. More than three hundred generations have come and gone since the creation of man, all of whom nature nursed on her bosom and then received back their crumbling forms and sent them anew into her unending circulations. The number of human beings then who exist at this moment on the surface of the earth, compared with those who have existed, is only an insignificant fraction of that whole which we call humanity ; only as a single page of one great volume ; only as the last cluster of leaves that flutter in the great forest that has shed its foliage.

If man lives only within the conditions of nature and is only returned into her endless circulations, then the natural world is the only one that exists to him, and he may expect to know of nothing beyond its phenomena. But Christianity affirms that when nature quits her grasp upon him, he still lives on, that only his visible coverings dissolve and recombine with the natural elements, while the man himself emerges beyond her sphere, subject no longer to her conditions and laws. It follows, of course, on the Christian theory, that the three hundred generations of human beings whom this natural world has discharged from its domination are still alive and active. Hence Christianity affirms a sphere of life above nature, more vast and more thronged with people, and whose empire is ever enlarging, since the stream of existence has discharged its immortal contents for more than six thousand years into those endless abodes.

This higher range of existence is called by common consent the supernatural, because it is above the dominion of natural law. This is what men generally mean when they speak of a supersensible or supernatural world. This preeminently is the sense apprehended by Christian faith when it transcends the sphere of natural change and sees the things that are invisible. Every one has a right to make his own definitions, but he is bound consistently to abide by them when made, and not confound things eternally distinct in themselves.

The word nature doubtless is made to have other significations, and indeed passes through an extended range of secondary meanings. We sometimes speak of the nature of man as meaning the whole aggregate of human qualities which make him what he is. Then again we discriminate and speak of his physical, intellectual, and spiritual natures. One who is disposed to play with words may call all beings and things from the mineral up to the highest angel created 7zattireSy and then by this definition he may deny that there is anything above nature except God Himself. Or he may follow up this game of words yet farther. Cicero writes a treatise, " De Natura Deorum,'' and we speak familiarly of the Divine nature, meaning the sum of Divine qualities and attributes ; and one who should be so disposed, and could afford the time for such logomachy, might place all beings and things, including God Himself, under the category of nature ; and then of course it would be very easy for him to prove that the supernatural has no existence.

Plainly nothing is gained by these tricks of language. The words nature and sicpernaturaly or the nature-world and the spirit-world, whether put in contrast or correlation, have a meaning fixed and well apprehended in the popular judgment, and we gain nothing but confusion when we try to disturb it. Herein moreover the popular judgment and the most philosophical are in perfect agreement. With both alike, the nature-world is this range of existence conditioned by time and space, and subject to the laws of space and temporal change ; whereas the range of existence conceived as out of time and space, and therefore beyond the dominion of natural law, is the supersensible or supernatural world. Thus Kant uniformly discriminates these two spheres of being, — nature, the realm of sensible phenomena conditioned by space ; and a cogitable world above space defecated of sense and free of natural law, and therefore supersensible and supernatural.^

Of these two ranges of being thus discriminated, how they are related and how contrasted, which is the substance and which the shadow, there is an immense divergence of opinions and beliefs. By the

1 See chapter iii. of Semple's Metaphysic of Ethics ; or see Kant's Kritik of Practical Reason^ passim.

Christian theory man is the connecting hnk between them. He lives in both. He is the child of nature, and at the same time the heir of immortality. But that is first which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual. He is born with only a natural consciousness, and the heavy wrappages of sense become the first basis of his existence. -He is involved in nature, and he may even pass through all her transformations from the infant to the man, with hardly a dream of aught else than the natural life. Then the supernatural will be to him a phantasy and a chimera. He may honestly deny its existence altogether. Dominated by sensible appearances what more strange than to suppose a man can be alive after he is dead ? Beyond sense the imagination " stretches out the stones of emptiness," and to think of that infinite vacancy as our final abode, or as capable of yielding a revelation to us out of its eternal silence, is to such a man the most hideous of all absurdities. Men have lived and passed away from this plane of being with no belief in any other, simply because none^other than the natural consciousness was awakened within them ; or, in other phrase, because they only lived and died as natural men.

Just removed from this state, and rising out of it, are the first faint dawnings of the supernatural, the first guessings and gropings towards it. But as yet it is apprehended only as dim and spectral. Thus the ghosts of Homer live in the underworld depleted

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of all that fresh and throbbing life which they lived on the earth, and are described as the fleeting shades of what they were. What a contrast between the Greece that flourished on the sun-bright hills and plains and breathed her transparent ethers and developed into graceful and glorious manhood, and the Greece of her spirit-world reduced to its pale and ghostly existence, and pining for terrestrial air ! Not yet did the common mind or even the minds of the poets themselves come to any practical faith in the Supernatural. For with individuals and peoples not yet evolved from the despotic grasp of nature, this world is the substance and the other is the shadow. Removed somewhat farther from sensuous unbelief, and indicative of a higher intellectual culture than blind instinctive gropings, is that faith which comes from the deductions of the reason but which refuses to affirm aught else than the simple fact of the supernatural. This is the position of Kant, who declines to accept the doctrine as the gift of revelation, but only as his own conclusion from a well-constructed syllogism. He does not pretend to prove it with " apodictic certainty," and he protests that we have no right to envisage it to the eye of faith, for then we fly ofl* among the chimeras of the fabulists and poets. We must cogitate the supernatural and describe it only by negatives. It is the absence of nature ; it is spaceless and timeless ; it is the perfect defecation of all sensuous life, and beyond this, says Kant, the reason has no right to go.

lO THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

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A more full and aflfirmative faith than this is quite conceivable. It is conceivable, that is, that the supernatural may not only be believed in as the result of a syllogism and a balance of probabilities, but may be envisaged to the eye of faith ; that man no longer involved completely in nature but evolved in part from her despotic grasp, and having a higher consciousness clearly and divinely opened, may be so brought front to front with super-sensible realities that their gleaming ranks and far-dissolving perspectives shall lie on the soul as brightly and surely as Nature does on the organs of sense, and that the consummation of our religious faith and Christian culture shall give us, the supersensible world the eternal reality and Nature its feebler adumbration, — that the sun-bright substance itself, and this the moving shadow projected on the dial-plate.

But is there any probability that such a disclosure as this will be given to mortals ? Let us see.

Once admit the simple truth of man's immortality, and how vast and far-reaching are the conclusions that flow from it ! How dull and laggard are our minds in coming up to the reality ! There are to-day about a thousand million human beings upon the earth. At the end of a year, twenty millions will have passed away from it and twenty millions new-born will have come in their places. Hundreds are going and hundreds coming while I write these sentences. In less than fifty years, a number equal to the whole thousand miUions will have put on immortality, and an equal number will have filled up the earthly ranks thus broken. The successive generations that have passed on within eight thousand years, the time during which man has probably been an inhabitant of the earth, would number by a moderate computation, one hundred times a thousand millions of people. This great multitude, moreover, are our own kith and kin ; our brethren elder born, whose hearts have throbbed with the same passions and yearnings and aspirations. And unless the mighty prophecies that go up from our collective humanity are a mockery and a lie, unless the groanings of the creation and its travailings in pain fail eternally of deliverance, then that great company of these uncounted millions who aspired to a better state, have had their hopes fulfilled ; have risen to an existence which has been brought into nearer communion with the Divine, and been enriched and ennobled by being freed from our earthly incumbrance. How immeasurably then in height, in breadth, in dignity, and power, does the supernatural transcend the natural ! And when we speak of humanity only as pertaining to the race on earth, how do we narrow down the conception and degrade it ! If those uncounted generations of men and women have not been disrobed of their human^ ity by death, but if on the other hand it throbs with a diviner love, then the pulses of their being still beat in harmony with ours as one family of the living God, and like God Himself, are nearer to us on the spiritual side, because there are no walls of flesh between us.

" But then our concern is only with the practical ; with our duties here upon the earth, and our fellowbeings who share with us its trials and sorrows. We must relieve the burdens which we can touch now and here, and not follow our imaginations into realms which are uncertain and remote."

Only with the practical ! Do we become practical only by bending prone and working mechanically with our hands, without any faith to inspire our industries and turn them to works of love or alleluiahs of praise } Does the practical consist only in finding the swiftest methods of locomotion in the barter of commodities, in changing money, and in handling dirt.? And when you speak of our fellowbeings as part of the great orb of humanity in which we are all insphered and involved, must we think of it only as it rounds outward and downward among Africans, Patagonians, the Chinese, and the Esquimaux ; or must we think of it also as it rounds upward into light, and expands in those continents vaster and more densely peopled which He in a broader and warmer sunshine from the eternal throne }

" The burdens which we can touch now and here ! " What were the burdens which lay on the minds of the two thousand of our fellow-bemgs who have died since I began this chapter an hour ago ? What are the burdens on the minds of the three hundred and fifty thousand whose feet are now stumbHng on the last verge of mortal existence which they will quit forever before eight days have elapsed ; whose failing eyes look for the twinkle of some star in the darkness of the infinite Beyond ? What are the burdens on the minds of the twenty millions who are crowding after them and will follow them before the year has closed ? What are the burdens now and everywhere on our toiling, hoping, and aspiring humanity, conscious of the rapid changes of time, and groping for a foothold on the solid floors of eternity ? They are not burdens which any " practical " man can touch unless he has stood himself where the clouds have been rifted above him and disclosed those higher and broader continents reposing in the peace of God.

" Our concern only with duties here on the earth." Yes, — but very possibly a view from the earth's illumined summits rather than its hollows and flats will show us what those duties are. Some centuries ago the philosophers thought that this earth was the centre of the universe and the most important part of it ; the sun, moon, and stars being lamps for philosophers to see by. Even Plato thought the earth was the first and oldest of the sidereal gods, and at the centre of the axis of the Cosmos regulating the movement of the whole. They did not imagine that the earth, and the whole solar and planetary system to which it belongs, were but the lackeys of vaster systems which wheel them at will through the fields of space, and that the radiance of our brightest summer s day would be but a dimly lighted candle in the near presence of those monarchs of the skies whose thousand-fold blaze would turn us to ashes if it were not cooled and softened by distance. Very possibly it may be found in like manner when the sphere of our knowledge rounds upward as well as outward and downward, that it will show us relations and harmonies of which before we had never dreamed ; and that we should find the supernatural realms of being running into the natural, and controlling the latter with attractions and repulsions which we should be much wiser and better for knowing. Who shall decide beforehand and deny the probabilities as to whether the Divine Providence will openly disclose to us those supernatural realms where our humanity is glorified, compared with which all our little day on the earth is but the prologue of a mighty drama !

Once admit that man is immortal, and that death is only a physical change, and we shall find that many of the fallacies of naturalism are speedily dis - pelled. Naturalism, for example, scouts the idea of a " personal devil" as one of the chimeras of super- 'stition. But personal devils have trod the earth for ages. What is the essence of deviltry but the inversion of the powers of man, turning them against God, against society, and against humanity. What but this has gendered the wrongs, the murders, the cruel oppressions which have afflicted the world ? Men who incarnate deviltry here leave this world by the hundred every week simply by dropping their mortal coverings. If death has not extinguished their being, it follows by the plainest and shortest logic that the personality of the devil, whether individually or in the complex, is one of the stern facts of the universe both on its mortal and immortal side, and that those who deny it slide into the very superstition which they charge upon orthodoxy, viz., that there is some moral magic in death-beds to change sinners into saints. Possibly when the supernatural shall disclose itself as that other hemisphere of our humanity, where it culminates continually, we shall find that our ascetic and our blindfold theologies alike will have their superstitions sifted out of them ; and that to split the universe by a horizontal line and leave the natural below to itself, is to leave it to bewildering fantasies, or, what is quite as bad, leave it to gravitate heavily into dust and mire.

MIRACLES.

A LIVING writer defines a miracle thus : " An -^^- event inexplicable from the effect and concurrence of finite causes ; which appears as the inworking of the supreme infinite cause, or God, for the purpose of proving to the world God's nature and will ; especially of introducing a Divine Messenger, of holding him to life, guiding him in his work and authenticating his credentials with men ; this divine wonder-working so shaping itself as to operate through the messenger as a power conferred upon him once for all to bear witness concerning Him ; its efficacy connecting itself with an appeal to God on the part of the wonder-worker, so that God Himself on his account breaks through the chain of natural events and lets the supernatural come in." The writer cites alleged examples of such Divine interference : the miraculous birth of Christ, his exceptional childhood, the scene at his baptism, and his ascension. ^

A most lame and lumbering definition, implying all through that miraculous power is one superimposed from without, standing apart by itself, as in

some sense hitched on, not rather the exaltation of the faculties themselves under the action of universal laws, natural, spiritual, and divine.

We hold this definition utterly unwarrantable from any claims which Jesus ever made in his own behalf, no way applying to the events cited or to any facts of the New Testament, practically false and philosophically absurd. If God is immanent in nature and in man, and the supernatural is involved in the natural, there can be no such thing as "interference" or '' breaking through." Nature is the perpetual efflorescence of the Divine Power ; the natural is the unbroken evolution of the supernatural ; history from the first man to the last is the progressive unrolling of the plan of the infinite Providence in which great events and small are taken up and glorified. Who but an atheist doubts '^ the inworking of the supreme infinite cause." And who but those who ascribe the authorship of nature to a mechanic and not a Creator, believes that this inworking is exceptional and not universal, intermittent like the winding of a clock and not freshly creative every hour } Who among the myriads of messengers which God has sent into the v/orld, ever came without being "introduced" and "authenticated" by the Divine power operating through Him and passing into works that bore witness to his message t

A miracle, as we apprehend it, is exactly what is implied in its etymology, — a surprise. It is an event