Now before proceeding to consider further this modified adoption of the theory of a developing Christology, let us notice briefly whereto this notion may lead, and to what lengths it is being pushed, by theologians less moderate in its application. We are all familiar with the cry so often heard today, “Back to Christ.” What does it mean on the lips of theologians? A return to the simplicity and power of the truth as it is in Jesus? Alas! far from it. Here is an article by an accredited New Theology teacher on “The Christ Question,” which illustrates clearly what is being echoed so widely. “Back to Christ” is his cry too, and the way in which he interprets that ambiguous motto is instructive, to say the least. The article is throughout a plea for distinguishing between what he calls the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. This in the interest of a theory he has that the latter is something in the nature of an ideal, “an ever-growing, ever-advancing, ever-expanding ideal,” quite separate and separable from the real historic Jesus of Nazareth. In claiming that it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the “Return to Jesus which is manifest in modern thought,” he declares—
“Jesus is understood to-day better than in any previous age. Like a fossil that has long lain embedded in the Silurian rocks, so the actual historic Jesus has been buried under mountains of Christological dogma. And perhaps the greatest service that has been rendered to religious thought within recent years has been the excavation of the real Jesus of history. To change the figure, as an artist removes the grime, the dust, the whitewash from some long lost but newly discovered portrait, until the perfect likeness looks out again: and rewards his loving patience, so the labors of the truth-loving critic have at last re-discovered the lost likeness of the Prophet of Nazareth.”
Now, in itself this may look like nothing but elegant rodomontade, but our theologians will discover, if they follow on, that here is one who simply carries on their identical idea of development to its legitimate issue, only, he is much more consistent and thorough-going in his application of it. They admit the principle of development and imagine that by confining it to the New Testament they save the situation. That is to say, they allow the whitewash, but deny the grime and the dust. They do not deny the fossilizing (the figure is unhappily only a too fitting one for what has transformed living truth into cold dogma, from which all life has departed); but affirm the process of stratification only during the apostolic age. Possibly the later mountains of dogma do not appear to them to bury the truth, but to uplift and manifest it. But here is one who quite boldly takes their theory of the development of Christology in the New Testament, uses it to prove that ascriptions of deity to Christ are simply accretions on the original history, and roundly charges apostles with these practices of embellishing the simple truth, and overlaying it with dogma. After all, there is nothing like candor.
Notice how, in dealing with the New Testament evidence, the very same course is pursued as in the sketch indicated above—Paul’s Epistles, the Synoptical Gospels, and the Gospel of John.
“Paul,” he says, “delivered Christianity from Jewish limitations, but at the same time he started the movement which took it away from its Galilean simplicity. The speculations of the Apostle concerning Christ became the starting point of theology... All the same it was a departure from the life and teaching of Jesus. What triumphed was not the religion of Jesus, but certain speculations about the Christ that resembled very little the Galilean Gospel.”
Then as to the Synoptics. “They are not histories so much as ideals of Him which grew up in the hearts of His friends after a lifetime of loving reverence... They are all molded and shaped by one great idea. Jesus was the Jewish Messiah... bearing evidence throughout of the influence of this atmosphere in the mythological accretions they add to the simple life of Jesus.”
Finally, as to John’s Gospel. “It is impossible for us to conceive of any single individual speaking as Jesus is represented as speaking in the Fourth Gospel—’I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.’ ‘If ye knew me ye would know my Father also. I and my Father are one.’ But that is just the way the Gospel writer would naturally speak of the ideal and divine Christ, who was living in his mind and heart, the eternal word who had come down from heaven, the ideal man, the indwelling image of perfect manhood.”
This is what it comes to at last— “the ideal man,” “perfect manhood.” With similar arguments our teachers expect to reinforce the doctrine of His “perfect Godhead.” But it may be more than doubted if there is any such strengthening of the evidence as they look for in such a way of reasoning. There is grave risk in adopting such premises at all. Indeed this modern distinguishing of “Christ” from “Jesus” in this way, and tracing the development of what the Christ-like idea is thought to imply, is just one of those novel ideas on the subject which we have spoken of as fraught with peril. We may recognize quite clearly where we are in the New Theology quoted from above. “Every spirit that confesseth not Jesus Christ come in the flesh is not of God.” Thus the teaching under notice here more particularly seems to be deficient in its lack of giving that full value to apostolic testimony which is also impressed upon us. “We are of God,” says the Apostle; “he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth us not. Hereby know we the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” We are warned in this Scripture against giving ready credence to any and everything advanced as spiritual truth. There is the activity of the spirit of error, as well as that of the Spirit of truth, to be taken account of in the sphere of religious thought, and as a means of distinguishing the one from the other we are supplied with two tests. The true confession of “Jesus Christ come in the flesh” is the one. The reception of the apostles’ doctrine as of God, with all that that it implies, is the other. It certainly implies, this latter claim does, that what the apostles wrote they assuredly did under the full and unerring direction of the Spirit of God, else could not their teaching be so unequivocally associated with His name. “Hereby know we the Spirit of truth.” How this can be reconciled with the thought of a slowly dawning consciousness thus late in their minds of Jesus their Master’s divinity may be left to these apologists to explain. Certainly to a plain person it seems contradictory, and the teaching that affirms it derogatory in a measure both to that particular truth, and to the apostolic testimony regarding it.
Besides, let any ordinarily attentive reader of the New Testament say if this so-called development is really so self-evident as is affirmed. Taking as bare facts for the moment the two things—the gradual compiling of the New Testament, book by book, and its references to Christ’s Godhead or deity—it cannot be denied that these latter are both more numerous and fuller as time goes on; that, as; general rule, the later the book chronologically, the more ample the elaboration of Christ’s relation to God. But does this of necessity imply that correspondingly primitive or developed phases of Christology were contemporaneous with these as the faith of the church? Does it not occur to any that the fuller treatment of a point may keep pace with the growing measure in which it is being denied or perverted? That is to say, that the chronological order of the books of the New Testament, as far as can be ascertained, and the fuller emphasizing of the truth as to Christ’s person, synchronize, go hand in hand, more by reason of the growing prevalence of anti-Christian doctrine than of anything else. There is a principle evident ‘in the New Testament, which we are apt to give less weight to than we ought, and that is, that God in His wise providence allowed error of every shade and form to appear in the apostles’ own days, while still the truth was being communicated through them. Like offenses, it must needs be that heresies should come. We owe it to His wise ordering that the advent of the various germinant forms of error occurred in time for exposure and refutation from inspiration’s pen, ere the canon closed. On this ground, then, we conclude that, if more frequent allusion to, or more forcible reiteration of Christ’s Godhead is found in the later written portions of the New Testament, it is indicative really of another and more common form of development—that of error. Then, whatsoever the more frequent insistence on it latterly may be, the true deity of Christ is just as plain in the first as in the last of the New Testament writings, not to speak of the Old Testament, where this theory of development cannot apply. Christ, in fact, is the one great theme of scripture, and its testimony is unanimous and consistent throughout that He was nothing less than “God over all, blessed forever.”
The whole idea of Christ’s true and essential divinity being a conception of Him reached by His disciples only after long reflection, and entertained or expressed with any measure of clearness only as the New Testament closed, appears puerile to the last degree once we bring in faith as the medium of their apprehension of Him. The truth as to His person, we may see from many instances, was impressed upon them from the very first moment of their spiritual contact with Him, and the nature of that impression points to faith as the means of their spiritual illumination. Faith is so different from the mere intellectual “conceptions” we hear so much of; and nowhere is this more apparent than here in this matter of what the disciples may have thought as to Christ’s person. When we think of it all, the close and intimate intercourse between them and Himself; their daily observation of Him, His words and His ways; above all, their acquaintance with all the claims He made for Himself, and the calm conviction they had of these claims being valid, should we not speak less of their “conceptions” and more of their “conclusions”? Truly a blessed thing is faith! So sure of its ground, so clear of uncertainty! This by reason of being grounded on divine testimony. “To them it was given to believe on Him.” When Peter confessed Him “Son of the living God,” did not our Lord declare “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjonas.” Had it been flesh and blood which revealed it unto him, we should indeed look for some such development as is spoken of; but faith, resulting from what “my Father in heaven has revealed,” does not conform to such rules, or take so long to reach a conclusion. Does not our Lord Jesus Himself in His intercessory prayer (John 17) over and over again make clear that His own gathered round Him then had, whatever their failure, even ere this entertained true thought of His person and mission. “They have known,” He says, “that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee.” “They have known surely (of a truth),” He says again, “that I am come out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.” The cardinal distinction between the world and His own is, He declares that (while “the world hath not known thee”), “these have known that thou hast sent me.” Was this knowledge rudimentary? a faint idea of some indefinable greatness in their illustrious Rabbi? Was such as this all the knowledge He predicted of them? “This is life eternal,” He said, and that specifically was His gift to those whom the Father had given Him, “this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” Mark the association of personages, if the term may be allowed. There is co-ordination of Jesus Christ and the only true God implied here, it is sometimes said. There is, and it is expressed in such a way as betokens it the characteristic Christian revelation. A late and proportionately high revelation of Jesus, forsooth! Was this, or was it not, from the first the clear testimony concerning the Lord Jesus? Was this, or was it not, the confession of those with whom he companied when on earth? On one occasion, when He inquired of them, “Will ye also go away?” “Lord, to whom shall we go?” was their reply, “thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art the Holy One of God.”
Where our divines err in this matter, it is to be feared, is in that common respect of reading into others’ experience the circumstances of our own. The truth of God is to them largely a question of theology, Christology a branch of it, the true divinity of the Lord Jesus a doctrine to be gradually conceived, slowly reasoned out, and scientifically established. Consequently they imagine a like process in the early disciples and the writers of the New Testament. When shall they learn that there is such a thing in the spiritual realm as faith? such a thing as the certitude that comes from receiving divine testimony? such a thing that conviction is borne in upon the heart when God is realized as present and addressing men? Rudimentary Christology or not, was there nothing of this in those who followed the Lord when here on earth? or under the inspiration of God penned His truth for our guidance and instruction? Really now, could “God manifest in the flesh” be the true character of Christ’s incarnation, and men in spiritual contact with Him escape conviction of it—immediate conviction of it? Nay, verily. For Jesus of Nazareth to be to them, while they had His presence, no more than Jesus of Nazareth, and the idea of His being the Christ a subsequent idealistic investiture of that historical figure with the draperies that Christological dogma spun round it, is a thing quite incredible in itself; and how much out of keeping with Scripture one need not say. Rather there do we see that Christ Jesus, the eternal Son of God, the Word made flesh, approved Himself such to the earliest glimmering of faith in His own. and won from them then, as He does from all true believers still, the voluntary confession, “My Lord and my God.”
In fine, from all that the New Testament teaches about Him, whether it be the testimony of the Synoptists (thought to be the most rudimentary Christologists, but in reality quite sufficiently establishing who and what Christ really was): or that of Paul in his epistles (reckoned to give the doctrine in a more advanced stage of its evolution—really only presenting the same truth as to basis, but distinctly characterized, as might be expected by the witness of one to whom from heaven the Lord Jesus revealed Himself, and whose testimony consequently was of a heavenly and glorified Christ): or that of John in his Gospel (not the final form after the influence of Gentile modes of thought and expression had molded it into symmetry, but the grand, full, four-square witness of the one whose province it particularly was—in pursuance of that divine design impressed upon all the scriptures to manifest Jesus as the only begotten Son of God)—whichever of the writers be selected, from each will be found a testimony unvarying, and from all a witness uniform and complete; a record given which presents a life and teaching and character, a position and glory, and a personality and power absolutely incomprehensible on any other ground than that the One described is expressly what the creeds claims Him to be, “Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.”
[J- T.]
(Continued from page 80)