Philip Schaff et al. · 5 of 8

The Christ of the Gospels. · Part 3

There is but one rational explanation of this sublime mystery, and this is found in Christ’s own testimony concerning his superhuman and divine origin. This testimony challenges at once our highest regard and belief, from the absolute veracity which no one ever denied him, or could deny, without destroying at once the very foundation of his universally-conceded moral purity and greatness.

Christ strongly asserts his humanity, and calls himself, in innumerable passages, the Son of man. This expression, while it places him in one view on a common ground with us as flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, already indicates, at the same time, that he is more than an ordinary individual, not merely a son of man, like all other descendants of Adam, but the Son of man—the man in the highest sense, the ideal, the universal, the absolute man, the second Adam descended from heaven, the head of a new and superior order of the race, the King of Israel, the Messiah. The same is the case with the cognate term, “The Son of David,” which is frequently given to Christ, as by the blind men, the Syrophenician woman, and the people at large. The appellation does not express, as many suppose, the humiliation and condescension of Christ simply, but rather his elevation above the ordinary level, and the actualization in him and through him of the ideal standard of human nature under its moral and religious aspect, or in its relation to God. This interpretation is suggested grammatically by the use of the definitive article, and historically by the origin of the term in Daniel vii, 13, where it signifies the Messiah as the head of a universal and eternal kingdom. It commends itself, moreover, at once as most natural and significant in such passages as, “Ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” “He that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, which is in heaven.” “The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins.” “The Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath.” “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” “The Son of man cometh in the glory of his Father.” “The Son of man is come to save.” “The Father hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man.” Even those passages which are quoted for the opposite view, receive in our interpretation a greater force and beauty from the sublime contrast which places the voluntary condescension and humiliation of Christ in the most striking light, as when he says, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head;” or, “Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” Thus the manhood of Christ, rising far above all ordinary manhood, though freely coming down to its lowest ranks, with the view to their elevation and redemption, is already the portal of his Godhead.

But he calls himself at the same time, as he is most frequently called by his disciples, the Son of God in an equally emphatic sense. He is not merely a son of God among others, angels, archangels, princes, and judges, and redeemed men, but the Son of God as no other being ever was, is, or can be, all others being sons or children of God only by derivation or adoption, after a new spiritual birth, and in dependence of his absolute and eternal Sonship. He is, as his favorite disciple calls him, the “only begotten” Son, or as the old Catholic theology expresses it, “eternally begotten of the substance of the Father.” In this high sense the title is freely given to him by his disciples, without a remonstrance on his part, and by God the Father himself at his baptism and at his transfiguration.

Christ represents himself, moreover, as being not of the world, but sent from God, as having come from God, and as being in heaven while living on earth. He not only announces and proclaims the truth as other messengers of God, but declares himself to be the “Light of the world,” “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” “the Resurrection and the Life.” “All things,” he says, “are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.” He invites the weary and heavy laden to come to him for rest and peace. He promises life in the highest and deepest sense, even eternal life, to every one who believes in him. He claims and admits himself to be the Christ, or the Messiah of whom Moses and the Prophets of old testify, and the King of Israel. He is the Lawgiver of the new and last dispensation, the Founder of a spiritual kingdom coextensive with the race, and everlasting as eternity itself, the appointed Judge of the quick and the dead, the only Mediator between God and man, the Saviour of the world. He parts from his disciples with those sublime words which alone testify his Divinity: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

Finally, he claims such a relation to the Father as implies both the equality of substance and the distinction of person, and which, in connection with his declarations concerning the Holy Spirit, leads with logical necessity, as it were, to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. For this doctrine saves the Divinity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, without affecting the fundamental truths of the unity of the Godhead, and keeps the proper medium between an abstract and lifeless monotheism and a polytheistic tritheism.

He always distinguishes himself from God the Father, who sent him, whose work he came to fulfill, whose will he obeys, by whose power he performs his miracles, to whom he prays, and with whom he communes as a self-conscious personal being. And so he distinguishes himself with equal clearness from the Holy Spirit, whom he received at his baptism, whom he breathed into his disciples, and whom he promised to send, and did send on them as the other Paraclete, as the Spirit of truth and holiness, with the whole fullness of the accomplished salvation. But he never makes a similar distinction between himself and the Son of God; on the contrary, he identifies himself with the Son of God, and uses this term, as already remarked, in a sense which implies much more than the Jewish conception of the Messiah, and nothing short of the equality of essence or substance. For he claims as the Son a real self-conscious pre-existence before man, and even before the world, consequently also before time, for time was created with the world. “Before Abraham was,” he says, “I am;” significantly using the past in the one, and the present in the other case, to mark the difference between man’s temporal and his own eternal mode of existence; and in his intercessory prayer he asks to be clothed again with the glory which he had with the Father before the foundation of the world. He assumes divine names and attributes. As far as consistent with his state of humiliation, he demands and receives Divine honors. He freely and repeatedly exercises the prerogative of pardoning sin in his own name, which the unbelieving scribes and Pharisees, with a logic whose force is irresistible on their premises, looked upon as blasphemous presumption. He familiarly classes himself with the infinite majesty of Jehovah in one common plural, and boldly declares, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father;” “I and my Father are one.” He co-ordinates himself, in the baptismal formula, with the Divine Father and Divine Spirit, and allows himself to be called by Thomas, in the name of all the Apostles, “My Lord and my God.”

These are the most astounding and transcendent pretensions ever set up by any being. He, the humblest and lowliest of men, makes them repeatedly and uniformly to the last, in the face of the whole world, even in the darkest hour of suffering. He makes them not in swelling, pompous, ostentatious language, which almost necessarily springs from false pretensions; but in a natural, spontaneous style, with perfect ease, freedom, and composure, as a native prince would speak of the attributes and scenes of royalty at his father’s court. He never falters or doubts, never apologizes for them, never enters into an explanation. He sets them forth as self-evident truths, which need only be stated to challenge the belief and submission of mankind.

Now, suppose for a moment a purely human teacher, however great and good—suppose a Moses or Elijah, a John the Baptist, an Apostle Paul or John, not to speak of any father, schoolman, or reformer—to say, “I am the Light of the world;” “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life;” “I and my Father are one;” and to call upon all men, “Come unto me,” “Follow me,” that you may find “life” and “peace,” which you cannot find anywhere else; would it not create a universal feeling of pity or indignation? No human being on earth could set up the least of these pretensions without being set down at once as a madman or a blasphemer.

But from the mouth of Christ these colossal pretensions excite neither pity nor indignation, nor even the least feeling of incongruity or impropriety. We read and hear them over and over again without surprise. They seem perfectly natural and well sustained by a most extraordinary life, and the most extraordinary works. There is no room here for the least suspicion of vanity, pride, or self-deception. For eighteen hundred years these claims have been acknowledged by millions of people of all nations and tongues, of all classes and conditions, of the most learned and mighty as well as the most ignorant and humble, with an instinctive sense of the perfect agreement of what Christ claimed to be with what he really was. Is not this fact most remarkable? Is it not a triumphant vindication of Christ’s character, and an irresistible proof of the truth of his pretensions? There is no other solution of the mighty problem within the reach of human learning and ingenuity.

Let us briefly review, in conclusion, the various attempts of Unitarians and unbelievers to account for the character of Christ without admitting his Divinity.

The semi-infidelity of Socinians and Unitarians is singularly inconsistent. Admitting the faultless perfection of Christ’s character, and the truthfulness of the Gospel history, and yet denying his Divinity, they must either charge him with such egregious exaggeration and conceit as would overthrow at once the concession of his moral perfection, or they must so weaken and pervert his testimony concerning his relation to God as to violate all the laws of grammar and sound interpretation. Channing, the ablest and noblest representative of American Unitarianism, prefers to avoid the difficulty which he was unable to solve. In his discourse on the Character of Christ, he goes almost as far as any orthodox divine in assigning to him the highest possible purity and excellency as a man; but he stops half way, and passes by in silence those extraordinary claims which are inexplicable on merely human principles. He approaches, however, the very threshold of the true faith in the following remarkable passage, which we have a right to quote against his own system: “I confess,” he says, “when I can escape the deadening power of habit, and can receive the full import of such passages as the following, 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest;’ 'I am come to seek and to save that which was lost;’ 'He that confesseth me before men, him will I confess before my Father in heaven;’ 'Whosoever shall be ashamed of me before men, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed when he cometh in the glory of the Father, with the holy angels;’ 'In my Father’s house are many mansions: I go to prepare a place for you;’ I say, when I can succeed in realizing the import of such passages, I feel myself listening to a being such as never before and never since spoke in human language. I am awed by the seriousness of greatness which these simple words express; and when I connect this greatness with the proofs of Christ’s miracles, which I gave you in a former discourse, I am compelled to exclaim with the Centurion, 'Truly this was the Son of God.’”

But this is not all. We have seen that Christ goes much further than in the passages here quoted; that he forgives sins in his own name, that he asserts pre-existence before Abraham and before the world—not only ideally in the mind of God, for this would not distinguish him from Abraham or any other creature, but in the real sense of self-conscious personal existence—that he claims and receives divine honors and attributes, and calls himself equal with the great Jehovah. How can a being so pure and holy, and withal so humble and lowly, so perfectly free from every trace of enthusiasm and conceit, as Dr. Channing freely and emphatically asserts Christ to have been, lay claim to any thing which he was not in fact? Why then not also go beyond the exclamation of the heathen Centurion, and unite with the confession of Peter and the adoration of the skeptical Thomas, “My Lord and my God?” Unitarianism admits too much for its own conclusions, and is, therefore, driven to the logical alternative of falling back upon an infidel, or of advancing to the orthodox, Christology. Such a man as Channing, who was certainly under the influence of the holy example of Christ, would not hesitate for the choice, as we may infer from his general spirit, and from his last address, delivered at Lenox, Mass., 1842, shortly before his death, where he said: “The doctrine of the Word made flesh shows us God uniting himself intimately with our nature, manifesting himself in a human form, for the very end of making us partakers of his own perfection.”

The infidelity of the enemies of Christianity is logically more consistent, though absolutely untenable in the premises. It assumes either imposture, or enthusiasm, or poetical fiction.

The hypothesis of imposture is so revolting to moral, as well as common sense, that its mere statement is its condemnation. It has never been seriously carried out, and no scholar of any decency and self-respect would now dare to profess it. How, in the name of logic and experience, could an impostor, that is, a deceitful, selfish, depraved man, have invented and consistently maintained, from beginning to end, the purest and noblest character known in history, with the most perfect air of truth and reality? How could he have conceived, and successfully carried through, in the face of the strongest prejudices of his people and age, a plan of unparalleled beneficence, moral magnitude, and sublimity, and sacrificed his own life for it? The difficulty is not lessened by shifting the charge of fraud from Christ upon the Apostles and Evangelists, who were any thing but designing hypocrites and deceivers, and who leave upon every unsophisticated reader the impression of an artless simplicity and honesty rarely equaled, and never surpassed, by any writer, learned or unlearned, of ancient or modern times. What imaginable motive could have induced them to engage in such a wicked scheme, when they knew that the whole world would persecute them even to death? How could they have formed, and successfully sustained, a conspiracy for such a purpose, without ever falling out, or betraying themselves by some inconsistent word or act? And who can believe that the Christian Church, now embracing nearly the whole civilized world, should, for these eighteen hundred years, have been duped and fooled by a Galilean carpenter, or a dozen illiterate fishermen? Verily this lowest form of Rationalism is the grossest insult to reason and sense, and to the dignity of human nature.

The hypothesis of enthusiasm, or self-deception, though less disreputable, is equally unreasonable in view of the uniform clearness, calmness, and self-possession, humility, dignity, and patience of Christ—qualities the very opposite to those which characterize an enthusiast. We might imagine a Jew of that age to have fancied himself the Messiah and the Son of God, but instead of opposing all the popular notions, and discouraging all the temporal hopes of his countrymen, he would, like Barcocheba of a later date, have headed a rebellion against the hated tyranny of the Romans, and endeavored to establish a temporal kingdom. Enthusiasm, which in this case must have bordered on madness itself, instead of calmly and patiently bearing the malignant opposition of the leaders of the nation, would have broken out in violent passion and precipitate action. “The charge,” says Dr. Channing, “of an extravagant, self-deluding enthusiasm, is the last to be fastened on Jesus. Where can we find the traces of it in his history? Do we detect them in the calm authority of his precepts; in the mild, practical, and beneficent spirit of his religion; in the unlabored simplicity of the language with which he unfolds his high powers, and the sublime truths of religion; or in the good sense, the knowledge of human nature, which he always discovers in his estimate and treatment of the different classes of men with whom he acted? Do we discover this enthusiasm in the singular fact, that while he claimed power in the future world, and always turned men’s minds to heaven, he never indulged his own imagination, or stimulated that of his disciples, by giving vivid pictures, or any minute description, of that unseen state? The truth is, that, remarkable as was the character of Jesus, it was distinguished by nothing more than by calmness and self-possession. This trait pervades his other excellences. How calm was his piety! Point me, if you can, to one vehement, passionate expression of his religious feelings. Does the Lord’s Prayer breathe a feverish enthusiasm? . . . His benevolence, too, though singularly earnest and deep, was composed and serene. He never lost the possession of himself in his sympathy with others; was never hurried into the impatient and rash enterprises of an enthusiastic philanthropy; but did good with the tranquillity and constancy which mark the providence of God.”

But the champions of this theory may admit all this, and yet fasten delusion upon the disciples of Christ, who were so dazzled by his character, words, and works, that they mistook an extraordinary man for a divine being, and extraordinary cures for supernatural miracles. This is the view of the older German Rationalism, and forms a parallel to the heathen rationalism of Euhemerus, of the Cyrenaic school, who explained the gods of the Greek mythology as human sages, heroes, kings, and tyrants, whose superior knowledge or great deeds secured them divine honors, or the hero-worship of posterity. It was fully developed, with a considerable degree of patient learning and argument, by the late Professor H. E. G. Paulus. He takes the Gospel history as actual history; but by a critical separation of what he calls fact from what he calls the judgment of the actor or narrator, he explains it exclusively from natural causes, and thus brings it down to the level of every-day events. This “natural” interpretation, however, turns out to be most unnatural, and commits innumerable sins against the laws of hermeneutics, and against common sense itself. To prove this, it is only necessary to give some specimens from the exegeses of Paulus and his school. The glory of the Lord which, in the night of his birth, shone around the shepherds of Jerusalem, was simply an ignis fatuus, or a meteor; the miracle at Christ’s baptism may be easily reduced to thunder and lightning, and a sudden disappearance of the clouds; the tempter in the wilderness was a cunning Pharisee, and only mistaken by the Evangelists for the devil, who does not exist except in the imagination of the superstitious; the supposed miraculous cures of the Saviour turn out on closer examination to be simply deeds either of philanthropy, or medical skill, or good luck; the changing of water into wine was an innocent and benevolent wedding joke, and the delusion of the company must be charged on the twilight, not upon Christ; the daughter of Jairus, the youth of Nain, Lazarus, and Jesus himself, were raised not from real death, but simply from a trance or swoon; and the ascension of the Lord is nothing more than his sudden disappearance behind a cloud, that accidentally intervened between him and his disciples! And yet these very Evangelists, who must have been destitute of the most ordinary talent of observation, and even of common sense, have contrived to paint a character, and to write a story, which in sublimity, grandeur, and interest, throws the productions of the proudest historians into the shade, and has exerted an irresistible charm upon Christendom for these eighteen hundred years! No wonder that those absurdities of a misguided learning and ingenuity hardly survived their authors. It is a decided merit of Strauss, that he has thoroughly refuted the work of his predecessor, and given it the deathblow. But his own theory has shared no better fate.

The last hypothesis, of a poetical fiction, was matured and carried out, with a high degree of ability and ingenuity, by the speculative or pantheistic rationalism of Strauss. This writer sinks the Gospel history, as to its origin and reality, substantially to a par with the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome. Without denying altogether the historical existence of Jesus, and admitting him to have been a religious genius of the first magnitude, he yet, from pantheistic premises, and by a cold process of hypercritical dissection of the apparently contradictory accounts of the witnesses, resolves all the supernatural and miraculous elements of his person and history into myths, or imaginary representations of religious ideas in the form of facts, which were honestly believed by the authors to have actually occurred. The ideas symbolized in these facts are declared to be true in the abstract, or as applied to humanity as a whole, but denied as false in the concrete, or in their application to an individual. The authorship of the evangelical myths is ascribed to the primitive Christian society, pregnant with Jewish Messianic hopes, and kindled to hero-worship by the appearance of the extraordinary person of Jesus of Nazareth, whom they took to be the promised Messiah. But this theory is likewise surrounded by insurmountable difficulties. Who ever heard of a poem unconsciously produced by a mixed multitude, and honestly mistaken by them all for actual history? How could the five hundred persons to whom the risen Saviour is said to have appeared, dream the same dreams at the same time, and then believe it as a veritable fact, at the risk of their lives? How could a man like St. Paul submit his strong and clear mind, and devote all the energies of his noble life, to a poetical fiction of the very sect whom he once persecuted unto death? How could such an illusion stand the combined hostility of the Jewish and heathen world, and the searching criticism of an age of high civilization, and even of incredulity and skepticism? How strange that unlettered and unskilled fishermen, and not the philosophers and poets of classic Greece and Rome, should have composed such a grand poem, and painted a character to whom Strauss himself is forced to assign the very first rank among all the religious geniuses and founders of religion! The poets must, in this case, have been superior to the hero; and yet the hero is admitted to be the purest and greatest man that ever lived! Where are the traces of a fervid imagination and poetic art in the Gospel history? Is it not, on the contrary, remarkably free from all rhetorical and poetical ornament, from every admixture of subjective notions and feelings, even from the expression of sympathy, admiration, and praise? The writers evidently felt that the story speaks best for itself, and would not be improved by the art and skill of man. Their discrepancies, which at best do not in the least affect the picture of Christ’s character, but only the subordinate details of his history, prove the absence of conspiracy, attest the honesty of their intention, and confirm the general credibility of their account. Verily the Gospel history, related with such unmistakable honesty and simplicity, by immediate witnesses and their pupils, proclaimed in open daylight from Jerusalem to Rome, believed by thousands of Jews, Greeks, and Romans, sealed with the blood of Apostles, Evangelists, and saints of every grade of society and culture, is better attested by external and internal evidence than any other history. The same negative criticism which Strauss applied to the Gospels would with equal plausibility destroy the strongest chain of evidence before a court of justice, and resolve the life of Socrates, or Charlemagne, or Luther, or Napoleon, into a mythical dream. The secret of the mythical hypothesis is the pantheistic denial of a personal living God, and the à priori assumption of the impossibility of a miracle. In its details it is so complicated and artificial that it cannot be made generally intelligible; and in proportion as it is popularized it reverts to the vulgar hypothesis of intentional fraud, from which it professed at starting to shrink back in horror and contempt.

With this last and ablest effort, infidelity seems to have exhausted its scientific resources. It could only repeat itself hereafter. Its different theories have all been tried and found wanting. One has in turn transplanted and refuted the other, even during the life-time of their champions. They explain nothing in the end; on the contrary, they only substitute an unnatural for a supernatural miracle, an inextricable enigma for a revealed mystery. They equally tend to undermine all faith in God’s providence in history, and deprive poor and fallen humanity, in a world of sin, temptation, and sorrow, of its only hope and comfort in life and in death.

Dr. Strauss, by far the clearest and strongest of all assailants of the Gospel history, seems to have had a passing feeling of the disastrous tendency of his work of destruction and the awful responsibility he assumed. “The results of our inquiry,” he says in the closing chapter of his “Life of Jesus,” “have apparently annihilated the greatest and most important part of that which the Christian has been wont to believe concerning his Jesus, have uprooted all the encouragements which he has derived from his faith, and deprived him of all his consolations. The boundless store of truth and life which for eighteen hundred years have been the aliment of humanity, seems irretrievably devastated; the most sublime leveled with the dust, God divested of his grace, man of his dignity, and the tie between heaven and earth broken. Piety turns away with horror from so fearful an act of desecration, and strong in the impregnable self-evidence of its faith, boldly pronounces that, let an audacious criticism attempt what it will, all which the Scriptures declare and the Church believes of Christ will still subsist as eternal truth, nor needs one iota of it to be renounced.” Strauss makes, then, an attempt, it is true, at a philosophical reconstruction of what he vainly imagines himself to have annihilated as an historical fact by his sophistical criticism. He professes to admit the abstract truth of the orthodox Christology, or the union of the Divine and human, but perverts it into a purely intellectual and pantheistic meaning. He refuses divine attributes and honors to the glorious Head of the race, but applies them to a decapitated humanity. He thus substitutes, from pantheistic prejudice, a metaphysical abstraction for a living reality, a mere notion for an historical fact, a progress in philosophy and mechanical arts for the moral victory over sin and death, a pantheistic hero-worship or self-adoration of a fallen race for the worship of the only true and living God, the gift of a stone for the bread of eternal life!

Humanity scorns such a miserable substitute, which has yet to give the first proof of any power for good, and which will never convert or improve a single individual. It must have a living head, a real Lord and Saviour from sin and death. With renewed faith and confidence, it returns from the dreary desolations of a heartless infidelity and the vain conceits of a philosophy falsely so called, to the historical Christ, and exclaims with Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life: and we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Yes! there he lives, the Divine man and incarnate God, on the ever fresh and self-authenticating record of the Gospels, in the unbroken history of eighteen centuries, and in the hearts and lives of the wisest and best of our race. Jesus Christ is the most certain, the most sacred, and the most glorious of all facts, arrayed in a beauty and majesty which throws the “starry heavens above us, and the moral law within us,” into obscurity, and fills us truly with ever-growing reverence and awe. He shines forth like the self-evidencing light of the noonday sun. He is too great, too pure, too perfect to have been invented by any sinful and erring man. His character and claims are confirmed by the sublimest doctrine, the purest ethics, the mightiest miracles, the grandest spiritual kingdom, and are daily and hourly exhibited in the virtues and graces of all who yield to the regenerating and sanctifying power of his Spirit and example. The historical Christ meets and satisfies our deepest intellectual and moral wants. Our souls, if left to their noblest impulses and aspirations, instinctively turn to him as the needle to the magnet, as the flower to the sun, as the panting hart to the fresh fountain. We are made for him, and “our heart is without rest until it rests in him.” He commands our assent, he wins our admiration, he overwhelms us to humble adoration and worship. We cannot look upon him without spiritual benefit. We cannot think of him without being elevated above all that is low and mean, and encouraged to all that is good and noble. The very hem of his garment is healing to the touch; one hour spent in his communion outweighs all the pleasures of sin. He is the most precious and indispensable gift of a merciful God to a fallen world. In him are the treasures of true wisdom, in him the fountain of pardon and peace, in him the only substantial hope and comfort in this world and that which is to come. Without him, history is a dreary waste, an inextricable enigma; with him, it is the unfolding of a plan of infinite wisdom and love. He is the glory of the past, the life of the present, the hope of the future. Mankind could better afford to lose the whole literature of Greece and Rome, of Germany and France, of England and America, than the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Not for all the wealth and wisdom of this world would I weaken the faith of the humblest Christian in his Divine Lord and Saviour; but if, by the grace of God, I could convert a single skeptic to a child-like faith in Him who lived and died for me and for all, I should feel that I had not lived in vain.