Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

to the second question. When we look back from the Christian religion as the New Testament exhibits it, and as it is still exhibited in the Christian Church, to the historical Jesus, we see a Person, who is not only equal to the place which Christian faith assigns Him, but who assumes that place naturally and spontaneously as His own. Partly the inevitable ascendency which He exercised over those around Him, and the unspeakable obligations under which He laid them in their life toward God, evoked within them the sense of what was due to Jesus; but partly also Jesus revealed His consciousness of what He was, of what He was doing, and of what He claimed from men, in startling and unparalleled words. The resurrection of Jesus, and His consciousness of Himself as thus revealed, are at once the guarantee and justification of the historical Christian faith.

Before proceeding to what seem the inevitable inferences from this, it may be worth while to refer in passing to two objections which are sure to present themselves to some minds. On the one hand, there are those to whom the questions raised are in their very nature irksome; it seems to them absurd that religion, the higher life of the spirit, should be in any way entangled in such investigations, or dependent on their results. It must, they think, live upon immediate certainties of its own, be the answers what they may to questions of the kind we have been considering. This mental temper is widely diffused. It speaks, for example, in the broad distinction which is sometimes drawn between Faith and Knowledge. 'In Faith,' to quote Goethe as representing this view, 'everything depends on the fact of believing; what we believe is quite secondary. Faith is a profound sense of security, springing from confidence in the All-powerful, Inscrutable Being. The strength of this confidence is the main point. But what we think of this Being depends

on other faculties, or even on other circumstances, and is altogether indifferent.' What we are concerned with, however, is not faith indefinitely, faith as a profound sense of security springing from confidence in a Being of whom we know nothing, but faith in a specifically Christian sense-that is, faith with characteristics or qualities or virtues which are somehow due to Christ. It is idle to say that this is independent of what we know of Christ. It is Christ known who makes it what it is: we have Christian faith only as we believe in God through Him. The same criticism is applicable to the famous aphorism of Lessing, to which so many have appealed as a way of shaking off the spiritual bondage (as they think it) of subjection to history: 'accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.' Christianity does not mean the recognition of necessary truths of reason, but an attitude of the soul to God, determined by Christ; and history is not to the religious man a chapter of accidents, but the stage on which a Divine purpose is achieved which could not be more ineptly described than by calling it accidental. Religion can no more be simplified by making it independent of history than respiration would be simplified by soaring beyond the atmosphere. What we have always to do, after making such distinctions as have been illustrated from Goethe and Lessing, is to transcend them. Our vital convictions, the faiths by which we live, are not formed in vacuo; they are generated in us by what has happened. If the past is eliminated from the present, the historical from the eternal, it is hard to say what is left. The historical realities which we have been considering-the Personality, the Self-consciousness, the Resurrection, the growing Ascendency of Jesus-are anything but 'contingent historical truths.' Whatever we mean when we speak of Divine necessity may be predicated of all. Al

though Christianity is a historical religion, its saving truth is not only in the past; it is here, in the living Christ and in the experience of Christians. It has its foundation laid in historical facts, no doubt; but it has at the same time its witness in itself, for the consciences of sinful men, needing and seeking God. It is the combination of the historical fact in the past with its Divine meaning and relevance in the present, in which the whole weight of the evidence lies; and it is the testimony of believers, speaking in the power of the spirit, which is used by God to make the historical eternal-that is, to make it living, present, and divinely strong to save.

On the other hand, there are those who on critical grounds, or what they believe to be such, will demur to the answer we have given to the second of our two questions. That answer, they will hold, ascribes to our gospels a higher historical value than they possess. The real way to look at these documents is that which recognises that they mark stages in a process which began with Jesus, but which terminates in the prologue to the fourth gospel, or even in the Nicene Creed. This process, which we may call that of idealising Jesus, or representing Him in history as acting in the rôle which He fills in Christian faith, was not indeed completed when our gospels were written, but it had gone a considerable way. It had gone so far, in fact, that the historical Jesus is irrecoverably lost to us; we do not know what He was, we only know how those who believed in Him represented Him to their own minds. The plausibility of such statements depends entirely upon their generality, and as soon as we come to close quarters with Him it disappears. In investigating our second question we did not appeal to the gospels without criticism, but to the two oldest documentary sources which criticism has recognised-Mark, and a non-Marcan source used by

Matthew and Luke. These represent what was believed and taught of Jesus in the Christian Church during the sixties of the first century. This is a period at which many who knew Jesus must have survived, and there are sound reasons for believing that the two documents named were connected with two members of the apostolic circle-Mark being indirectly dependent on Peter, while the non-Marcan document was probably the work of Matthew. Even if we admit the process of idealising to be real, these are fair guarantees for a close connexion with history. But the process is often exaggerated and misconceived. If we start behind all the evidence, with an assumed Jesus who is exactly what other men are, of course there is an immense amount of idealising to be allowed for; everything in short, is idealising—that is, everything is imaginary and fictitious-by which Jesus is brought into a positive connexion with the Christian religion. Obviously this is an unsound mode of arguing. Jesus had unquestionably a positive connexion with the Christian religion. It owes its being to an impulse communicated by Him. But that impulse cannot have been alien to the phenomena which it generated; there must have been that in Jesus which was in some kind of keeping with the idealisation of Him in the Church's faith. To admit this, however, is to admit that the Jesus exactly like ourselves who is assumed to stand behind the gospel history, is an illegitimate assumption; if He had been no more than we are, the wonder of the Christian religion and of the New Testament would never have come to be. The necessity of maintaining continuity between Jesus and the movement which issued from Him, when taken in connexion with the closeness of the witnesses to the facts, creates a presumption in favour of the historical representation of the oldest sources which goes far to balance the idealising process referred to. Further,

as we have seen already, there is a self-guaranteeing power in the inner life of Jesus which assures us we are in contact with reality in the gospels; the spiritual truth is so unquestionable that it carries the conviction of historical truth along with it. The mind of Christ, as we have come in contact with it in those two ancient authorities, does not strike us at all as a product of idealising or theologising tendencies in the mind of the Church. We know what theology is, we know what poetry is, and the most significant utterances in which Jesus reveals Himself have not the character of either the one or the other. They are vital, individual, unparalleled. The more closely they are studied, the more apparent it becomes that they must be taken at their full value if we are to see what Jesus was and what place He claimed in the relations of God and man. It is well worth observing, too, in a matter in which some minds are sure to be impressed by authorities, that the two most recent and searching studies of this subject by independent scholars have been entirely favourable to the historical character of the gospel picture, and entirely unfavourable to the idea that Jesus has been idealised, or theologised, by the evangelists, past recognition. Weiss asserts that the matter contained in Q-and Q as he has reconstructed it contains a vastly greater proportion of the gospel story than we have appealed to-shows no trace whatever of being influenced by later Christological ideas; and in this he is substantially supported by Harnack. Harnack, indeed, thinks that Q represents Jesus as dominated by the sense of His Messiahship, from beginning to end of the gospel story, more strictly than the facts warrant; but the facts, as he himself expiscates them from Q's report of the words of Jesus, include these: that He who even in His present existence is more than a prophet and greater than John, He who is the Son, will be the future King and Judge.

« ZurückWeiter »