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If this was Jesus' consciousness of Himself, as we come into contact with it in history, there is clearly room to look for wonderful things without discounting them as idealising. It is indeed not the formal testimonies, in which high titles are assigned to Him, which impress us most with the sense of what Jesus is. In one place or another these may be due to misapprehension, even though it is admitted that He sometimes used them. It is the informal utterance of His greatness which is so arresting and inevitable, and no scepticism can shake our conviction that never man spake as this man-about Himself. He stands alone, not only in the faith of His followers, but in His own apprehension of what He is to God and man.

It is hardly possible to appreciate these conclusions unless we try to show their bearing on the religious conditions of the present. No one will deny that there is much confusion both within the Church and outside of it as to what the Christian religion essentially is. Nor is it only evangelic Churches that labour under such perplexities. As recent events have shown, even the Church of Rome, with all the emphasis it lays upon the principles of tradition and authority, is as sorely embarrassed as to the proper way of dealing with its modernist members, as any of the Protestant communions. Such an inquiry as we have just concluded ought to provide both the Churches and seeking souls outside the Churches with principles to steady themselves by in the present distress.

B. Weiss, Die Quellen der synoptischen Ueberlieferung, 89. Ein Einfluss späterer christologischer Vorstellungen auf die Stoffe in Q ist in keiner Weise nachzuweisen. So also, in speaking of what he regards as an independent source-which he calls L-and which runs through Luke from beginning to end, he says: Auch die Lukasquelle geht nirgends ueber die urchristliche Auffassung von der Person Jesu hinaus ib. 80; and of Luke as a whole: Die Hauptsache ist, dass von einer irgendwie höher entwickelten Christologie im Lukasevangelium nicht die Rede sein kann. Cf. Harnack, Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 169.

On the one hand, the conclusions which we have reached are entirely reassuring to those who stand in the line of historical Christianity. Speaking of it, not as a theological system, but as a religious life, Christianity has always given to Jesus a supreme place in its faith. Christians have lived a life, or have aimed at least to live a life, in which all their relations both to God and man were determined by Christ. They owed to Him all that made their religion what it was: the knowledge of the Father, the forgiveness of their sins, the new life in the spirit, the assurance of immortality. Their faith in God was in the proper sense Christian faith, because it was in the first instance faith in Him. Now this is the conception of Christianity which our investigation of the New Testament has also discovered, and it is a conception which is vindicated when we look to Christ Himself as the oldest records disclose Him. Those who live in the faith which has just been described live in the line of New Testament Christianity, and of the mind of Christ about His own place in the relations of men and God. They have the same religion as those whose spiritual life is reflected in the New Testament. Their attitude to Christ is the same, and so is their attitude to God through Christ. This is the point at which evangelical Christianity is right, and at which all its protests against a broad churchism which would give Christ another or a lower place than He has in the New Testament faith are justified. It is the point at which evangelical Christianity even in the Church of Rome is justified in refusing to negotiate with a modernism which by assuming that Christ cannot possibly have been anything but what we are makes the ascription to Him of His supreme place in faith impossible. There can be no Christianity at all, in the only sense in which Christianity can be seen in the New Testament, in the only sense in which it is a

religion answering to the mind of Christ about His own place and calling, unless Christ is established in the place which the faith of the Church has always given Him. He must have His place because He claims it and because it is His due.

But there is more than this to say. What Christ claims and what is His due is a place in the faith of men -in other words, it is an attitude of the soul to Himself as He is presented to us in the gospel. We are bound to Him, in that wonderful significance which He has for the life of the soul, that unique and incommunicable power which He has to determine all our relations to God and man. To be true Christians, we are thus bound to Him; but we are not bound to anything else. But for what He is and for what He has done, we could not be Christians at all: but for our recognition of what He is, but for our acceptance of what He has done, and our sense of infinite obligation to Him as we realise the cost at which He has done it, we could not tell what Christianity means. But we are not bound to any man's or to any church's rendering of what He is or has done. We are not bound to any Christology, or to any doctrine of the work of Christ. No intellectual construction of what Christ's presence and work in the world mean is to be imposed beforehand as a law upon faith, or a condition of membership in the Church. It is faith which makes a Christian; and when the Christian attitude of the soul to Christ is found, it must be free to raise its own problems and to work out its own solutions. This is the point at which 'broad' churchism is in the right against an evangelical Christianity which has not learned to distinguish between its faith--in which it is unassailable -and inherited forms of doctrine which have been unreflectingly identified with it. Natural as such identification may be, and painful as it may be to separate

in thought things which have coalesced in strong and sacred feelings, there is nothing more certain than that the distinction must be recognised if evangelical Christians are to maintain their intellectual integrity, and preach the gospel in a world which is intellectually free. We are bound to Christ, and would see all men so bound; but we must leave it to Christ to establish His ascendency over men in His own way-by the power of what He is and of what He has done-and not seek to secure it beforehand by the imposition of chains of our forging.

It is one of the most urgent needs of the Church at the present moment to have both these truths recognised in their full extent. There can be no Christianity to maintain if the evangelical truth is not asserted that Christ must have in the faith of men no less or lower place than He has had from the beginning, or than He Himself, as we have seen, deliberately assumed; but there can be no hope of appealing to the world in which we live to give Christ such a place in its faith if we identify doing so with the acceptance beforehand of the inherited theology or Christology of the Church. This is not said with any indifference to theology or Christology, with any feeling that Christ and His place in the world, and especially in the relations of God and man, are not worth thinking about. On the contrary, there is nothing which is so much worth thinking about, nor so certain to stimulate thought if only thought is left free. Nor is it said on the other hand with any indifference to the place of Christ: that is assumed to be indisputable from the outset. The problem is to find a way of securing the two things: unreserved recognition of the place which Christ has always held in evangelical faith, and entire intellectual freedom in thinking out There is no necessary inconsistency in the combination; it has been realised in every orig

what this implies.

inal Christian thinker, and the true teachers of the Church are one prolonged illustration of it. Not only great theologians, but great evangelists like Zinzendorf and Wesley have explicitly recognised it. To refer to the former. He was, says his biographer, indifferent to many things to which the theologians of his time attached supreme importance; for he believed that all who love the Saviour meet in a spiritual unity raised infinitely above the barriers erected between the different Churches by differences of rite and tradition; and even by their errors. Although,' he wrote, 'I am and mean to remain a member of the evangelical (i.e. the Lutheran) Church, nevertheless I do not bind Christ and His truth to any sect; whoever believes that he is saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus by living faith, that is to say, whoever seeks and finds in Christ wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, is my brother; and for what remains, I regard it as an unprofitable task, or as rather injurious than profitable, to examine what his opinions are, or what his exegesis. In this sense,' he goes on, 'I admit that it makes no difference to me that a man is heterodox-but in this sense only.'1 Similar passages might be multiplied from Wesley. In his Journal, under date May 18, 1788, he says: 'I subjoined (to his sermon on "Now abideth faith, hope, love; these three") a short account of Methodism, particularly insisting on the circumstances-There is no other religious society under heaven which requires nothing of men in order to their admission into it but a desire to save their souls. Look all around you, you cannot be admitted into the Church (i.e. the Church of England), or society of the Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Quakers, or any others, unless you hold the same opin

1

F. Bovet, Le Comte de Zinzendorf, 146. The passage quoted is from a letter of Zinzendorf, dated June 20, 1729.

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