| CHAPTER II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF GOD | Title page | CHAPTER IV. THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE OF GOD |
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WE argued in the last chapter that the two streams of Hebrew and Greck thought about God flowed together in Christianity, but we may take it as certain that the Hebrew influence is the predominant ono in the New Testament. Recont criticism has pointed out some apparent connexion between St. Paul’s thought and the mystery religions of the Hellenistic world, and it is probable that his vocabulary at least, if not his ideas, was affected by the terms current in the popular and living religion of the pagan Roman Empire. But the discovery of analogies has been made the basis of an unjustifiable exaggeration of St. Paul’s debt to the non-Jewish circle of religious and mythological notions, and the trend of opinion is now back to the surely obvious conclusion that the Apostle of the Gentiles thought and felt always with the background of Hebrew monotheism. The Johannine writings, particularly in the prologue to the Gospel, bear traces of the impact of Greek philosophical ideas, and the prevailng view is still that the conception of the Logos is derived, perhaps indirectly, from the speculations of philosophers. Even here, however, the influence of Greek thought is questioned and it is held by some that the idea of the Word of God can be assigned a wholly Hebraic ancestry. The minute questions of scholarship which any discussion of these points would involve are outside our scope and we shall assume here that the New [ p. 44 ] Testament as a whole is the production of men for whom the Jewish idea of God was the unconscious premiss of all their thinking.
When we are concerned with the central element in the New Testament, the person and teaching of Jesus, the question is not really open to discussion. There can be no doubt that His thought and His experience of God emerge wholly from within the sphere of Palestinian, Judaism. He was a Jew of the First Century if not perhaps, as Dr. McGiffert adds, “a devout and loyal Jew ”. To understand the words of Jesus and the thought of God which He expressed we need know nothing of the philosophy of Hellenism or of the mystery religions, but we need to know much of the Law and the Prophets, and perhaps also of Eschatological writers.
There will be general agreement that, in some sense, the New Testament is the fountain head of the Christian experience of God and that it must remain normative for alllater Christian generations. Though our conception of God may be enlarged and modified by the centuries of reflection which have elapsed and by the mass of new knowledge about the Universe which the last two hundred years have brought, any idea of God which can be called Christian must be in harmony with that which is presented to us in the New Testament as a whole and particularly in the records of the life and words of the Lord. It follows that we are not free to construct our conception of God in abstraction from history. We are not engaged. upon original speculation. Our starting point is a creative experience which comes to us mediated through human testimony and documents of various historical reliability. Such a situation has seemed to many intolerable, and they have enlarged upon the unreasonableness of resting truth concerning God upon this foundation. Spinoza’s [ p. 45 ] words are well-known : “ The truth of an historical narrative, however assured, cannot give us a knowledge nor consequently the love of God, for love of God springs from knowledge of Him, and knowledge of Him should be derived from general ideas in themselves certain, 80 that the truth of an historical narrative is very far from being a necessary requisite for our attaining our highest good.”[1] On this point Christianity is committed to an opposite opinion, and depends to some extent upon an historical narrative.
The Christian position in this matter may be defended against Spinoza and others on more than one ground. If our analysis of the religious consciousness is correct, we are led to conclude that man’s experience of God does not originate in, nor does it consist of, the possession of “general ideas”, however true those ideas may be. It arises from a direct apprehension of a certain quality or aspect of the world. Very much as the intellectual construction of the order of nature is built up from the immediate data of sense, the concept of Deity is fashioned from the data of the religious experience. That experience may indeed be “ explained ” or summed up in general concepts of theology, but the concepts are always inadequate, and are no more than the earthen vessel in which, for a time, the experience of the Divine Element in reality may be contained. The point of view which Spinoza states in this quotation belongs to the rationalist era which has passed away. The modern world is not rationalist in the true meaning of that ambiguous term : it does not rely on the deduction of consequences from self-evident principles. On the contrary, the scientific method, which is the real distinguishing mark of our present phase of culture, begins from the other end. [ p. 46 ] It sts out from the data of experience, and its general ideas are reached in the attempt to interpret what is given. The modern scientific temper, therefore, has no reason for objecting to a theology which starts from experience. Nor can it safely protest against reliance upon human testimony and records for acquaintance with the data to be interpreted, for science itself is in precisely the same situation. The phenomena with which it deals are known by observation, record and narration. The researcher must depend on human testimony. If he were confined to principles which are to him self-evident and experiences which he himself has had he could make no progress towards a science of nature. In the same way, the solitary thinker secking unaided for the Diyine with the support only of his own spiritual experience and power of reflection will get but a short distance on the road and reach but a meagre conception of God. The testimony which might have given richness to his belief and assurance to his faith has been omitted from his calculation, and he is in the position of a student of science who ignored the current textbooks and the observations of fellow enquirers. In the New Testament is to be sought, not a speculative doctrine of God, but the data which such a doctrine must take into account.[2]
To grasp the New Testament experience of God in any full sense is clearly impossible, for it is always beyond our power to enter completely into a creative moment of life. We are constrained to admit, therefore, at the outset that our enterprise is bound to be in some degree a failure ; but it will be an absolute and unrelieved failure if, at the conclusion of our study, we have nothing more than a collection of ideas about God, material for a work on New [ p. 47 ] Testament theology. We must aim at recapturing something of that new energy of soul of which the New Testament is the creation, allowing, in Croce’s phrase, the thoughts and imagination and emotions of that still living past to vibrate again in our own spirits. But we must here draw a distinction. Some writers, while justly asserting that the essential element in Christianity is a typical experience of God manifested in history, deduce from this that particular historical facts and even particular historical persons are of quite secondary importance. So Dr. Bosanquet writes: “The study of Christianity is the study of a great world-experience ; the assignment to individuals of shares in its development is a problem for scholars, whose conclusions, though of considerable human interest, can never be of supreme importance.[3] Opinions not dissimilar have been defended by Josiah Royce[4] and by the more extreme Roman Catholic Modernists.[5] Our approach to the subject is quite different. So far from attempting to minimize the dependence of Christianity upon historical events, we begin with the conviction that our religion rests upon an experience of God which was enjoyed by historical persons and, in a supreme degree, by one historical Person ; but at the same time we would add that the Christian religion can only remain pure and powerful in so far as that history is not mere historical data but becomes real for us by living again in our souls through the creative imagination, becoming thus for us present fact.
Our first and fundamental task is to grasp, so far as we can, the consciousness of God possessed by Jesus. If we are to carry out our line of thought we cannot avoid [ p. 48 ] this enquiry, for we have agreed that the truly Christian conception of God must be based upon that consciousness. The difficulties and objectioris to any such investigation are obvious. To some minds it will appear presumptuous and irreverent. We shrink naturally from reflection upon the inner life of One towards whom our proper and normal attitude is adoration, for we feel that reflection can hardly be separated from criticism. We must sympathize with this repugnance, which is more than justified by the excesses of some psychologists who find in the Son of Man an example of those “ complexes ” which seem to form the main article of faith in some cireles. But the objection does not lie against an effort reverently to understand the thoughts of Jesus concerning His Father. Nor need we fear that knowledge so obtained will lower our reverence for Him. On the contrary, it will place that reverence upon a firmer basis.
Another more serious objection, however, arises. On any view which cares to keep in touch with the main stream of Christian belicf, we should have to admit that the mind of Jesus is beyond our comprehension, and that we cannot hope to penetrate its secret places, because the analogous experience is lacking in ourselves. While confessing the truth of this, we must still maintain that the mind of Christ cannot be wholly closed to us. Even though a dog may penetrate but a small way into the thoughts of his master yet he ponetrates some way, and by that penetration he lives. It would be a strange paradox if One who called Himself the Son of Man were entirely beyond man’s understanding. There are, however, scholars, who are not careful to keep on terms with orthodoxy, who yet maintain, on other grounds, the incomprehensibility of the inner experience of Jesus. Professor Rudolph Bultmann may serve as a notable instance. [ p. 49 ] In his remarkable book, Jesus, he contends that a reconstruction of the Lord’s experience is impossible because the evangelical records have left us no material for it. They do not interest themselves in this matter, and their evidence, such as it is, is vitiated by the mixture of legendary matter. This disability, however, Bultmann argues, need cause us no regret, for the experience of Jesus is not important for us. His significance for the world lies not in what He experienced but in “ what He willed ”, not in His thought but in His work. In this respect, it is added, He resembles all creative minds, for their distinguishing mark is that they have been interested not at all in themselves, in those “ personalities” of which we make so much, but in what they set themselves to do. We too should be interested in “ what they willed ”—not so much in what they achieved, or in the sum of effects which they produced, but in what they intended.
We have, of course, to allow for the modifications of Jesus’ words which Christian piety and theology have caused. There is little doubt that the sayings about the End have been sharpened in the tradition under the influence of the eschatological hopes which prevailed in some sections of the Apostolic church, and a comparison of Matthew with Mark shows perhaps that motives of reverence have been at work to prune away expressions which were distasteful to the Christian feeling of veneration for Jesus.[6] The Johannine gospel again is so plainly narrative coloured by theology that we can use it only with caution for the knowledge of the historical Jesus, though it is a document of the highest importance for our knowledge of the outcome of Christ’s life and teaching. When we have made these admissions, however, we are [ p. 50 ] far from the conclusion that Jesus’ thought and experience of God must be for us a closed book. Even Professor Bultmann holds that we have ample material for a knowledge of what Jesus willed. The theory that we can know this yet be wholly in the dark concerning Jesus’ consciousness of God rests upon a psychology which is surely one of the strangest. Obviously we cannot separate the will from the personality in this arbitrary manner. What a man wills is the best possible evidence of the nature of his personality and his experience, for the will is the self in action.
We will first ask what.we know of the form of Jesus’ experience of God. We need not labour the point that He passed through stages of development, growing “in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and man”, At the present day there is no disposition to question the genuinely human character of Christ’s life. It must be confessed that we have no real evidence on which to found a detailed account of the spiritual growth of the Saviour prior to the commencement of the public ministry. Probability and His own utterances make it safe to assert that He was nourished on the Old Testament, growing up in a circle of simple traditional piety. We do not know whether His environment was one in which Messianic hopes were vivid or whether His youth was passed among those who were affected by eschatological ideas, but He was certainly greatly influenced by the Prophets and His life and teaching are a revival of the prophetic ministry.
The salient features of Christ’s experience of God are its unbroken and triumphant character. Jesus comes before us as one who is unshakably sure of God, so sure that the question whether God exists would have no meaning for Him. There is no word of His which hints [ p. 51 ] at the possibility of doubt. This assurance of God is immediate. Itrests upon a direct apprehension and not upon any train of reasoning or conscious appeal to authority. This obvious truth has naturally led to the description of Jesus as the supreme mystic, and, if by mysticism we mean simply the direct apprehension of God by the soul, the title is just ; but if something more definite than this is intended the case is less clear, Attempts have been made to show that there is a regular outline of development in the spiritual life of the true mystic and that it passes through three or four definite phases. Miss Evelyn Underhill, in her beautiful and impressive book the Mystic Way, has tried to discriminate these phases in the life of Christ. In the opinion of the present writer the thesis of the book can only be substantiated by a tour de force, though the author has taught us much by the way. The spiritual experience of Jesus does not fall into any scheme of this kind, and we may specially observe that there is nothing really analogous to those periods of depression and dereliction which form a part of the personal history of “normal” mystics.
The unbroken and triumphant nature of Jesus’ communion with God has often been represented in theology by the assertion of the Lord’s “ sinlessness ”. The aspect of His life to which this word calls attention is of great importance. There is no hint in the recorded sayings of Christ that He was conscious of any moral failure or had any feeling of the need for personal repentance and forgiveness. We cannot too much reflect upon this striking fact, remembering, at the same time, that the suggestion of overweening self-confidence is one which could scarcely live in the mind of anyone who had read the Gospels. But it is perhaps unfortunate that so much stress should have been laid on this word. It is negative, [ p. 52 ] and therefore suffers from two inherent defects: it is incapable of proof, and it cannot adequately convey the positive nature of Jesus’ communion with God. No conceivable fullness of tradition would be sufficient to demonstrate absolute sinlessness, and it is logically absurd to hope to do so on the basis of the very imperfect records which we possess. Moreover, a word which suggests the refraining from wrong action falls grievously short of the mark when it is put forward as desoribing Jesus. Ideas such as sinlessness are included within the positive phrase “ filial consciousness”. Christ is, in His own inner consciousness, from first to last the Son of God. The note of discord and disharmony with God is absent from the words of Jesus. The experience of alienation was never His, The words from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?” have been taken as the exception to this statement.[7] It may be that they are the expression of the bitterness of the feeling of failure which was the supreme pang of the Saviour, but it seems equally possible to take them as indicating that He was repeating the great psalm of consolation in the moment of deepest trial, and through these words keeping His thought firmly concentrated upon the God who was “ throned upon the praises of Israel”.
William James has classified religious persons into two groups—the “ once-born ” and the “ twice-born”.[8] The former are those who have grown in communion with God by serene progress from grace to grace, the latter those who have attained spiritual and moral stability through violent conversion, from sin and impotence to peace and power. In James’s opinion nearly all the original and creative minds in religion have belonged to the second [ p. 53 ] category. Jesus, however, appears to stand outside theso classes, or rather, in some respects, to come under both. While, as we have said, He did not pass through a stage in which right relations with God were attained out of a previous condition of lower and distracted life, there is abundant evidence that this unbroken fellowship with God was maintained in the face of almost overwhelming temptations.[9] The experience of Jesus included the knowledge of the mystery and the force of evil, though not participation in it.
One further remark may be made on the form of our Lord’s experience of God. We have argued that Schleiermacher’s formula to describe the essential nature of religion, “a fecling of absolute dependence ”, is defective on the ground, among others, that it omits the feeling of co-operation which is equally fundamental. The religious life of Jesus plainly exhibits both these elements. Throughout the words of Christ there is the sense of a dependence which is unlimited. It is God who clothes the grass of the field. Just as the Hebrew poets saw in nature and human life the direct action of God, so Jesus traces all events and all the life of man to the Creative Will. The “ little faith ” of men is shown by their refusal to rely upon God for the natural no less than spiritual needs. But this feeling of utter dependence does not exclude the thought of co-operation ; the fellowship with God is a true fellowship of will, and the spiritual consciousness of Christ is certainly not independent of moral effort. The Fourth Gospel puts into the mouth of Jesus the words, “ My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me.”[10] They are spiritually true and an apt summary of the impression which the Synoptic Gospels produce on our [ p. 54 ] minds. The whole inner life of the Lord was concentrated upon preserving that conformity and free co-operation with the Divine Will. Any conception of the Person of Christ which obscures that central fact is untrue to the historical data and gives us a Christ who, however much He may be decorated with the trappings of theological veneration, is definitely lower than the heroic figure which stands out from the records. Jesus is never nearer to us and, at the same time, never more clearly our Master than in the Agony in the Garden,[11] when we are allowed to sco something of the intensity of effort by which this active co-operation was sustained.
We now proceed to consider the content of Christ’s experience and thought of God. In this we shall be compelled to recognize the presence of two main factors —the prophetic and the eschatological. One of the most important results of recent study of the New Testament is the recognition of the influence of the apocalyptic writings and circle of ideas on the Apostolic Church and, to some extent, upon the thought of Jesus Himself. The degree of this influence, and indeed the question whether it had any place in the teaching of Jesus, are matters of controversy. All would, however, confess that we must take into consideration that type of piety and religious imagination which elaborated the idea of the coming end of the age and the supernatural rule of God. There is, nevertheless, little difference between the doctrine of God held by the apocalyptic writers and that which was the outcome of the line of Hebrew Prophets. The thought of God which Jesus accepted without question was the Jewish thought, and it makes little difference whether prophetic or apocalyptic forms were uppermost in His [ p. 55 ] mind. The Jewish idea of God is quite different from the Greek. As we have seen, it arose through a contrasted process of development, and the marks of this contrast are plainly present in its final form. For Judaism God is not an_object_of intellectual knowledge, nor is His nature known through speculative wisdom. God for Judaism is creative Will. He is known through His revelation, in Law and Prophets and in the events of history and nature, which are the direct products of His Will. This creative Will is sovereign, beyond understanding. “Let all the earth fear the Lord, let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spake and it was done ; he commanded and it stood fast.” The world and all that it contains exist for the glory of God. “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created ; and thou renewest the face of the ground. Let the glory of the Lord endure forever ; let the Lord rejoice in his works.”[12]
The God of Hebrew religion is thus both living and remote. He stands in relation to men as Creator, sovereign Ruler, and Judge. In His holiness, which through the work of the Prophets becomes inseparable from righteousness, there remains the note of awefulness, which goes back in its origin to the shuddering dread of primitive worship. But the God of Judaism is also noar ; working in history, showing His will in the Law, entering into covenant relations with His chosen people, “ dwelling with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit ”.[13]
Such was the conception of God which Jesus received from His environment and did not radically modify. It was a view common to the greater Prophets and the eschatological writers. The latter conceived God as the holy and sovereign Ruler of the whole earth, but in two [ p. 56 ] respects perhaps their emphasis was changed. The remoteness of God from the present order was suggested by their pessimistic outlook upon the condition of the world, Incurably evil and disobedient, it would go from disastor to disaster until the catastrophe which should usher in the reign of God. The God of Apocalyptic was more definitely the determiner of all destiny than the God of the Prophets. Determinism was the presupposition of eschatology. The fore-ordained series of events known to the divine Providence was revealed to the scer who disclosed the secret to the elect. The exaggerations of the eschatological school of New Testament interpretation as expounded by Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer may be rejected, but it is difficult to believe that the idea of the Kingdom of God, which was the centre of Jesus’ public teaching, had not in the mind of the hearers and of the Teacher some eschatological colouring. Doubtless the cruder pictures of the end and the world to come have little place in the Gospels, and probably had no place in the authentic words of the Lord. It was a spiritual consummation to which He looked forward and not a revenge on the enemies of the nation. Itwas a vindication of the righteousness of God which had no vindictiveness. Nevertheless we are compelled to recognize that the elements of the eschatological idea were present in Jesus’ thought, and they are sufficient to put His view of the relation of God to the world and to history in a very different mental context from our own. The Kingdom of God was the direct act of God ; it had nothing to do with humanism or progress towards an earthly Utopia brought about by the co-operation of men of good will. It would be misleading to overlook this difference or to fall into the vulgar error of patronizing our Lord as a good liberal or a precursor of sentimental socialism.
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We must maintain, however, that the prophetic and not the eschatological element is the most profound in Jesus’ doctrine of God. This is true of the teaching concerning the Kingdom. Though the Kingdom is certainly represented as a future gift of God, none the less it has already come in the hearts of those who respond to the proclamation of the good news. The thought of the New Covenant written in the heart and depending no more on external ordinances and instruction, which is the profoundest and most spiritual conception of the relation of God and man contained in the Old Testament, is constantly suggested.[14] Is it not Jeremiah’s New Covenant of which Jesus speaks on the night before His passion ?[15] This is the Kingdom which comes not with observation,[16] which grows in secret, which is within, It is this thought of the Kingdom which explains the nature of the ethical teaching. Some modern eschatological critios have argued that the moral teaching of Christ had no important place in His own view of His mission, and that the rules of life which we find in the Sermon on the Mount are “ interims Ethik”, stop-gap regulations hastily thrown out for the short space which will elapse before the end. Nothing could be further from the truth. The New Covenant is the inward covenant, and the righteousness required therefore was one of motive and spring of action —not merely conformity to an external rule.
The God of Jesus is, like the God of the Prophets and the Exchatologists, a Righteous and Holy God, and therefore a Judge who makes stern demands upon men. The common opinion that Jesus came preaching forgivenoss of sins is not false, but by itself tends to a mistaken emphasis, He came, first of all, proclaiming the need for repentance, [ p. 58 ] the lamentable falling short of all sorts of people when compared with the requirements of God. Dr. MeGiffert has spoken truly “He demands more than was generally demanded rather than less, He set up a higher ethical standard and insisted upon a more perfect conformity to it. Like Amos, He emphasized life rather than ritual and required justice and mercy rather than sacrifice. He judged His generation severely and believed that it needed a thorough moral reformation ; with a view thereto He was concerned less to offer men pardon than to summon them to righteousness, less to comfort than to convict of sin.”[17]
In the Old Testament, and specially in the later Isaiah, the righteousness of God, and His judgment, are connected with His salvation. So far from the justice of God being in opposition to His mercy it is because God is righteous that He saves. There is no god else beside me: a just God and a saviour.”[18] I bring near my righteousness, it shall not be far off, and my salvation shall not tarry.”[19]
We aro thus led, in the sequence of the doctrines about God, to that which has often been claimed as the peculiar and even the only essential idea in our Lord’s teaching—the Fatherhood of God. That belief in the Fatherhood of God was original and characteristic with Jesus cannot of course be held by anyone whose reading of the Old Testament has proceeded so far as Psalm cifi, It is, on the contrary, even asserted by Dr. McGifflert that Jesus did not go beyond the accepted teaching of Judaism in this part of His teaching about God, and it must be admitted that a great part of what Jesus has to say on this matter can be paralleled from [ p. 59 ] Jewish sources. We owe to Dr. Montefiore a clear statement of the real departure which the Gospel made from the standpoint of the best Pharisees.[20] The injunction to seek out the sinful, to constrain them to come into the Kingdom, was a new note. But this new note of ethical adventure was based, as was everything in Christ’s teaching, upon his thought of God, Here is the fresh and truly revolutionary interpretation of the Divine Fatherhood. God’s love is active not passive, it goes out to seck and save those who are lost. It is as unwearied as the shepherd who looks for the lost sheep.[21] On this foundation rests the missionary and expansive impulse of the Christian Church. It is the root of the Pauline doctrine of redemption. “At the heart of the Christian doctrine of God’s dealings with the world is the conviction, proclaimed as a gospel, that the costliest effort has been made by God Himself.”[22] In this faith in the Fatherhood of God as including the outreaching love which pursues all men, is implicit the universality of the Christian message. The New Testament as a whole contains a twofold idea of the Divine Fatherhood which is derived from the teaching of Jesus Himself. In the widest sense God is the Father of the whole creation ; His mercy is over all His works. This embraces even the lower orders of life, so that not a sparrow falls to the ground without the Father.[23] And the evil and the good alike share in the benefits of sun and rain which are bestowed with gonerous impartiality. But in a special sense God becomes Father to those who have responded to the love which secks them and have become members of the Kingdom. In the Apostolic version of Christianity this second and more specific fatherhood and sonship arises out of the new status into [ p. 60 ] which the individual enters by being joined with Christ and sharing His life. The true fatherhood is not of nature but by grace.[24] In Dr, Scott Lidgett’s words, it is “not merely genial, not vague and expansive, but is, so to speak, concentrated in the highest spiritual and moral values.”[25] Wo have become sons of God from being children of wrath by the spirit of adoption in which we ery Abba, Father, says St. Paul.[26] We who once were part of the world which lies in darkness and the power of the Evil One are now children of God, says St. John, “and it doth not yet appear what we shall be but . . . we shall be like him.”[27]
There is, as we have remarked, nothing in the words of Jesus which resembles a philosophical argument, nor is there any indication that He conceived the necessity or possibility of finding rational grounds for His belief ; but there is a suggestion of a process of thought which has some resemblance with one which has played a great part in speculative theology. The via eminentiae has been the chief method by which theistic philosophers have sought to determine the divine attributes. As used by the Scholastic theologians this argument consists in the inference from qualities or “ perfections ” in the created world to their existence “in a more eminent manner ” in God. Thus from the attribute of knowledge in finite beings we may conclude the attribute of omniscience in God, from will that of omnipotence. Some train of reflection of this kind was present in our Lord’s mind. “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father.”[28] But it is important to observe the different application of this “how much more”. Whereas the [ p. 61 ] Scholastic argument starts from abstract qualities, considered apart from the personal life in which they appear, and then arrives at an abstract notion of God, Jesus sets out from the highest human personal life, from the concrete self and its relations, and takes them as being faint shadows of the perfect but not less concrete and personal life of God. This is in fact the continuation of that anthropomorphic theology which we have already insisted upon—from human personality to the divine.
Did Jesus’ conception of the Fatherhood of God lead Him to the thought of a universal mission and a worldwide brotherhood in the Kingdom? Were the privileges of sonship in the full sense open to all those who were children of the Father by reason of His creation ? There can be no doubt that the Apostolic Church came so to interpret Him, but the evidence for Christ’s own explicit teaching on this subject is not so unequivocal as we might expect. We find Him saying that He was not sent to any but “ the lost sheep of the House of Israel ”,[29] and the struggle which took place in the primitive Church over the inclusion of the Gentiles may suggest that the tradition contained no clear indication of the Lord’s will on this matter. It is difficult to believe that the earliest Christians would have hesitated in launching out into the deep of the world outside Judaism if they had in mind definite commands of Jesus. On the other hand, there are sayings about the Kingdom such as that about the “many who shall come from the East and from the West ”,[30] parables such as that of the Good Samaritan,[31] and the incident of the Centurion’s servant,[32] which would support the conclusion that Jesus interpreted the Fatherhood of God in a wider sense than was immediately [ p. 62 ] comprehensible to His disciples. It is, however, clear that the thought of God which Jesus held and from which His whole teaching proceeded was quite inconsistent with any restricted view of the area of God’s grace; even though it may be possible that He did not explicitly draw the universalistic conclusion, it was there to be drawn by those who meditated upon the Lord’s words and works. The attitude of Christ to the ceremonial law confirms this conclusion. The letter of the law is brushed aside when it stands in the way of mercy, humanity, or human well-being in general. The food restrictions and the idea of ceremonial pollution affected the daily life of every Jew throughout the world, and were the main root of that social exclusiveness which constituted the great defect. of Jewish morality. St. Mark is not wrong in adding to the words of Jesus the comment, “ This He said making all meats clean”.[33] In uttering those memorable words our Lord was practically cancelling the whole system of the Mosaic law and its ancient taboos as a matter of eternal moral obligation. He could not have been altogether unconscious of this tendency. The practical abrogation of the ceremonial law removed the bar upon the Gentiles. This inference from the moral teaching of Jesus confirms the impression made by the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the incident concerning the Centurion.[34] We may safely hold that our Lord’s conception of the Divine Fatherhood was universal in its scope, even though He may not have explictly announced the unrestricted validity of His gospel.
Not even the most summary account of Christ’s religious experience can be complete without some reference to the [ p. 63 ] figure of the Suffering Servant of God.[35] We have seen that His idea of God, though selecting the noblest aspects of Hebraic tradition, was not original in the sense that it had no roots in the past. To admit this is not to deny the towering originality of Jesus, but to agree that He came to fulfil the religious aspirations of His people, and to complete the ethical monotheism of the Prophets. One phase of His spiritual pilgrimage, however, is governed by a thought which is in the strictest sense original. The Messiah had never before been connected with the idea. of suffering. That the Messianic Age would be preceded by woes had been hinted in the Prophets and became a commonplace of Eschatology. The unknown author of poems which are included in the latter part of the book of Isaiah had painted the immortal picture of the Servant of God who was innocent yet afilicted for the healing of his people. Jesus fused together the two figures of the Messiah and the Servant. The passages in which the Servant theme is developed were plainly constantly in the mind of Jesus. The voice heard at the Baptism recalled the prophetic apostrophe : “ Behold my servant whom I uphold ; my chosen in whom my soul delighteth ; Lhave put my spirit upon him.”[36] The first preaching at Nazareth is based upon the same portion of prophetic literature. The response to the question of the Baptist is full of reminiscences of the same passages. Doubtless this circle of ideas is behind the mysterious saying of the Lord that He had come to be a servant and “ to give His life a ransom for many.[37] There can be little doubt that Jesus thought of Himself as both Messiah and Servant. In this fusion of religious figures we may read the reason for the [ p. 64 ] Passion, Jesus could have avoided the clash with the authorities which led to His death, He voluntarily challenged them with the purpose of bringing in the Kingdom. Jesus Himself wills to bear the woes which were the necessary prelude of the Messianic Age.
The Christian doctrine of God is brought sooner or later to the mystery of the cross. This is inevitable, for the cross is essential for the understanding of Jesus’ thought of God. The Father’s will, as He believed, led Him there, and refused to allow that cup to pass away from Him.[38] The kind of God in whom Jesus believed was One who required His suffering. We shall not see the deep things of the Christian idea of God if we attempt to minimise this fact. One disastrous deduction which theology has often made from it we will avoid. Some doctrines of the Atonement have suggested that God demands some suffering to satisfy His justice before He will forgive sinners, and this suffering Christ bore. At first sight perhaps, it might seem as though this pernicious superstition had its germ in the mind of Christ in that He believed He must wring the Kingdom from the grudging hand of God by the supreme sacrifice. This belief would certainly have been at strange variance with the conception of Fatherhood, and we should be forced to suppose that the earlier trust in the loving Father was replaced at the end by a gloomier and lower faith. The key to the understanding of this mystery is surely to realize that it was the Messiah who was suffering. Jesus conceived Himself as the representative of God, as the centre of the Kingdom, the Son of Man who was to come in the clouds of Heaven with the holy angels. It was therefore fitting that the representative of God should show that generous love which is the nature of God and should Himself bear the brunt of [ p. 65 ] the struggle with the power of evil. The cross is the culmination of Jesus’ faith that God is love and that the expression of love is self-sacrifice.
There is one further question which is prompted by a meditation on the place of the cross in Jesus’ experience of God. In some sense the cross was accepted by Him as inevitable, and it has been held that His conception of the Providence of God was so strict that He believed every event to be predetermined in the divine plan. We have already observed that He thought of all things as depending upon the will of God, and in expressing this truth He ignores secondary causes, passing straightway to the Creative Cause, The writers of eschatological literature again, as we have seen, on the whole take a determinist view of history, and in so far as the eschatological idea is present in our Lord’s teaching it suggests that He accepted the same theory of the inviolable providential plan. We must add that the Fourth Gospel seems to represent Christ as advancing, through all the acts of a foreordained drama, to the cross which He foreImew as His appointed destiny. Some of the unquestionably authentic sayings of Jesus may suggest, at first sight, a belief in the absolute determination of all events by God’s will, though it need hardly be said that the abstract problem of freedom and necessity is not before His mind. The sayings which suggest determination are, however, counterbalanced by others, and His thought in the main does not depart from the prophetic conviction that it is in the power of men “to hear or to forbear”. The ultimate dependence of all things upon God’s creative will does not abrogate the freedom of men or the possibility ofrebellion, Though indeed no sparrow falls to the ground without the heavenly Father,[39] it is not said that the fall [ p. 66 ] is directly due to the will or predetermination of the Father. Clearly Jesus admitted the existence of evil spirits and attributed to them illness and disease which are contrary to the will of God.’ Speaking of an infirm woman He does not say “ this woman whom God hath afflicted ”, but “this woman whom Satan hath bound”.[40] The inevitable cross was not made necessary by an inexorable fate nor by a fixed and unalterable plan, but by the deeds of men which were not inevitable and the conditions which those deeds had brought into being. He who prayed in the Garden that the cup might pass could scarcely have believed that it had been preordained as in all circumstances necessary ; and indeed it would be a strange paradox to assert that in Jesus’ belief all happenings are the direct consequence of God’s will, since it is the burden of His preaching that the will of God is not done, and that men must repent in order that it may be done in them and pray and labour that it may be done in the world.
| CHAPTER II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF GOD | Title page | CHAPTER IV. THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE OF GOD |
Tractatus Theologico-politicus, cap. IV. ↩︎
Cf. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Chapter I. ↩︎
Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 79. ↩︎
Cf. his Problem of Christianity. ↩︎
Cf. Loisy, l’Evangile et l’Eglise. ↩︎
This may be disputed, cf. H. J. White in Church Quarterly Review, 1915. ↩︎
St. Mark XV. 34, cf. Ps. XXII. ↩︎
Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 80. ↩︎
See, for instance, St. Matt. IV.; XVI. 21f.; XXVI. 39ff. and parallel passages in St. Mark and St. Luke. ↩︎
St. John IV. 34. ↩︎
St. Matt. XVI. 36 ff.; St. Mark XIV. 32 ff; St. Luke XXV. 40 ff. ↩︎
Ps. XXXIII. 9; CIV. 30, 315 of. Bultmann, Jesus, p. 123. ↩︎
Isa. LVII. 15 ↩︎
Jer. XXXI. 31-34. ↩︎
St. Luke XXII. 20. ↩︎
St. Luke XVII, 21 ↩︎
God of the Early Christians, pp. 11, 12. ↩︎
Isa. XLV. 21. ↩︎
Isa, XLVI. 13. ↩︎
The Synoptic Gospels. Vol. I, p. CXVIII. ↩︎
St. Luke XV. 4-7. ↩︎
J. K. Mozley, The Doctrine of God, p. 90. ↩︎
St. Matt. X. 29. ↩︎
St. John x. 12. ↩︎
God, Christ and the Church, pp. 1-31. ↩︎
Rom. VIII. 15. ↩︎
1 John III. 2. ↩︎
St. Matt. VII. 11 ↩︎
St. Matt. XV. 24. ↩︎
St Matt. VIII. 11; St. Luke XIII. 29. ↩︎
St. Luke X. 30-37. ↩︎
St. Luke VII. 2-10. ↩︎
St. Mark VII. 19 ↩︎
St. Luke X. 30-37; St. Luke VII. 7; St. Matt. VIII. 20. Rashdall : The Idea of Atonement, pp. 16 ff. See the whole of Rashdall’s valuable discussion of this question. ↩︎
Isa, LXII. ↩︎
Isa. XLII. 1. ↩︎
St. Luke IV. 18; St. Matt. XI. 5; St. Luke VII. 22; St. Mark X. 45 ; Isa, LIII. 11. ↩︎
St. Mark XIV. 36 and parallels. ↩︎
St. Matt. X. 29. ↩︎
St. Luke XIII. 16. ↩︎