I. No serious and thoughtful man can treat such a subject

with indifference. I merely do you justice, my brethren, when I defy you to murmur that we are entering upon a merely abstract discussion, which has nothing in common with modern human interests, congenial as it may have been to those whom some writers have learnt to describe as the professional word- warriors of the fourth and fifth centuries. You would not be guilty of including the question of our Lord’s Divinity in your catalogue of tolerabiles ineptice. There is that in the Form of the Son of Man which prevails to command something more than attention, even in an age so conspicuous for its boisterous self-assertion as our own, and in intellectual atmospheres as far as possible removed from the mind of His believing and adoring Church. Never since He ascended to His Throne was He the object of a more passionate adoration than now; never did He encounter the glare of a hatred more intense and more defiant : and between these, the poles of a contemplation incessantly di- rected upon His Person, there are shades and levels of thought and feeling, many and graduated, here detracting from the highest
full sense only of Messiah, ‘I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to Me a Son’ (2 Sam. vii. 14; Heb. i. 5; Ps. Ixxxix. 27). The application of the title to collective Israel in Hos. xi. 1, is connected by St. Matthew (ii. 15) with its deeper force as used of Israel’s One true Heir and Repre- sentative. Cf. Mill, Myth. Interp. p. 330. Compare too the mysterious intimations of Prov. xxx. 4, Ecclus, li, 10, of a Divine Sonship internal to the Being of God. ἃ St. John i. 49. 9 St. Matt. xxvi. 63,
1]
12 Christ and modern culture.
expressions of faith, there shrinking from the most violent extremities of blasphemy. A real indifference to the claims of Jesus Christ upon the thoughts and hearts of men is scarcely less condemned by some of the erroneous tendencies of our age -than by its characteristic excellences. An age which has a genuine love of historical truth must needs fix its eye on that august Personality which is to our European world, in point of creative influence, what no other has been or can be. An age which is distinguished by a keen esthetic appreciation, if not by any very earnest practical culture of moral beauty, cannot but be enthusiastic when it has once caught sight of that incompar- able Life which is recorded in the Gospels. But also, an anti- dogmatic age is nervously anxious to attack dogma in its central stronghold, and to force the Human Character and Work of the Saviour, though at the cost of whatever violence of critical mani- pulation, to detach themselves from the great belief with which they are indissolubly associated in the mind of Christendom. And an age, so impatient of the supernatural as our own, is irritated to the highest possible point of disguised irritability by the spectacle of a Life which is supernatural throughout, which positively bristles with the supernatural, which begins with a supernatural birth, and ends in a supernatural ascent to heaven, which is prolific of physical miracle, and of which the moral wonders are more startling than the physical. Thus it is that the interest of modern physical enquiries into the laws of the Cosmos or into the origin of Man is immediately heightened when these enquiries are suspected to have a bearing, however indirect, upon Christ’s Sacred Person. Thus your study of the mental sciences, aye, and of philology, ministers whether it will or no to His praise or His dishonour, and your ethical specula- tions cannot complete themselves without raising the whole question of His Authority. And such is Christ’s place in history, that a line of demarcation between its civil and its ecclesiastical elements seems to be practically impossible ; your ecclesiastical historians are prone to range over the annals of the world, while your professors of secular history habitually deal with the central problems and interests of theology.
If Christ could have been ignored, He would have been ignored in Protestant Germany, when Christian Faith had been eaten out of the heart of that country by the older Rationalism. Yet scarcely any German ‘thinker’ of note can be named who has not projected what is termed a Christology. The Christ of Kant is the Ideal of Moral Perfection, and as such, we οὐ told,
LECT.
Christ and recent philosophy. 13
he is to be carefully distinguished from the historical Jesus, since of this Ideal alone, and in a transcendental sense, can the statements of the orthodox creed be predicated’. The Christ of Jacobi is a Religious Ideal, and worship addressed to the historical Jesus is denounced as sheer idolatry, unless beneath the recorded manifestation the Ideal itself be discerned and honoured &. According to Fichte, on the contrary, the real in- terest of philosophy in Jesus is historical and not metaphysical; Jesus first possessed an insight into the absolute unity of the being of man with that of God, and in revealing this insight He communicated the highest knowledge which man can possess ἢ, Of the later Pantheistic philosophers, Schelling proclaims that the Christian theology is hopelessly in error, when it teaches that at a particular moment of time God became Incarnate, since God is ‘external to’ all time, and the Incarnation of God is an eternal fact. But Schelling contends that the man Christ Jesus is the highest point or effort of this eternal incarnation, and the beginning of its real manifestation to men: ‘none before Him after such a manner has revealed to man the Infinite i,’ And the Christ of Hegel is not the actual Incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, but the symbol of His incarnation in humanity at largej, Fundamentally differing, as do these con- ceptions, in various ways, from the creed of the Church of Christ, they nevertheless represent so many efforts of non-
1 Religion as der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. Werke, Bd. x. P. 73, esp. p. I
& Schrift von ‘len Géttl. Dingen, p. 62, sq
h Anweisung zum seligen Leben Vorl, δ᾽ EC wone Bd. v. p. 482.
i geri tiber die methode des Akad. Studien. Werke, Bd. v. p. 298, sq
Jj Rel. Phil, Bd. ii. p. 263. This idea is developed by Strauss. See his Glaubenslehre, ii. 209, 544. ; and Leben Jesu, Auf. 2, Bd. ii. p. 739, 544. * Der Schliissel der ganzen Christologie ist, das als Subject der Priidikate, welche die Kirche Christo beilegt, statt eines Individuums eine Idee, aber eine reale, nicht Kantisch unwirkliche gesetzt wird. .. . Die Menscheit ist die Vereinigung der beiden Naturen, der Menschgewordene Gott... Durch den. Glauben an diesen Christus, namentlich an Seinen Tod und seine Auferstehung wird der Mensch vor Gott gerecht, d. h., durch die Belebung der Idee der Menscheit in sich,’ &c. Feuerbach has carried this forward into 2608 materialism, and he openly scorns and denounces Christianity: Strauss
more recently described Feuerbach as ‘the man who put the dot upon
the i which we had found,’ and he too insists upon the moral necessity of rejecting Christianity ; Lebens und Characterbild Marklins, pp. 124, 125, 8qq., quoted by Luthardt, Apolog. p. 301. Other disciples of Hegel, such as Marheinecke, Rosenkranz, and Gischel, have endeavoured to give to a master’s teaching a more positive direction. Ι
14 Christ and the negative criticism.
Christian thought to do such homage as is possible to its great Object; they are so many proofs of the interest which Jesus Christ necessarily provokes in the modern world, even when it is least disposed tg own His true supremacy.
Nor is the direction which this interest has taken of late years in the sphere of unbelieving theological criticism less noteworthy in its bearings on our present subject. The earlier Rationalism concerned itself chiefly with the Apostolical age It was occupied with a perpetual analysis and recombination of the various influences which were supposed to have created the Catholic Church and the orthodox creed. St. Paul was the most prominent person in the long series of hypotheses by which Rationalism professed to account for the existence of Catholic Christianity. St. Paul was said to be the ‘author’ of that idea of a universal religion which was deemed to be the most fundamental and creative element in the Christian creed: St. Paul’s was the vivid imagination which had thrown around the life and death of the Prophet of Nazareth a halo of superhuman glory, and had fired an obscure Jewish sect with the ambition of founding a spiritual empire able to control and embrace the world. St. Paul, in short, was held to be the real creator of Christianity; and our Lord was thrown into the background, whether from a surviving instinct of awe, or on the ground of His being relatively insignificant. This studied silence of active critical speculation with respect to Jesus Christ might indeed have been the instinct of reve- Ὁ rence, but it was at least susceptible of a widely different interpretation.
In our day this equivocal reserve is no longer possible. The passion for reality, for fact, which is so characteristic of the thought of recent years, has carried critical enquiry backwards from the consciousness of the Apostle to that on which it reposed. The interest of modern criticism centres in Him Who is ever most prominently and uninterruptedly present to the eye of faith. The popular controversies around us tend more and more to merge in the one great question respecting our Lord’s Person: that question, it is felt, is bound up with the very existence of Christianity. And a discussion respecting Christ’s Person obliges us to consider the mode of His historical manifestation; so that His Life was probably never studied before by those who practically or avowedly reject Him so eagerly as it is at this moment. For Strauss He may be no more than a leading ee
LECT.
Answers to Christ’s guestion, (1) the E-bionttic. 15
of the applicability of the Hegelian philosophy to purposes of historical analysis; for Schenkel He may be a sacred im- personation of the anti-hierarchical and democratic temper, which aims at revolutionizing Germany. Ewald may see in Him the altogether human source of the highest spiritual life of humanity; and Renan, the semi-fabulous and somewhat immoral hero of an oriental story, fashioned to the taste of a modern Parisian public. And what if you yourselves are even now eagerly reading an anonymous writer, of far nobler aim and finer moral insight than these, who has endeavoured, by a brilliant analysis of one side of Christ’s moral action, to represent Him as embodying and originating all that is best and most hopeful in the spirit of modern philanthropy, but who seems not indisposed to substitute for the creed of His Church, only the impatient proclamation of His Roman judge. Aye, though you salute your Saviour in Pilate’s words, Behold the Man! at least you cannot ignore Him; you cannot resist the moral and intellectual forces which converge in our day with an ever-increasing intensity upon His Sacred Person; you cannot turn a deaf ear to the question which He asks of His followers in each generation, and which He never asked more solemnly than now: “ Whom say men that I the Son of Man amk?’
1. Now all serious Theists, who believe that God is a Personal Being essentially distinct from the work of His hands, must make one of three answers, whether in terms or in sub- stance, to the question of the text.
1. The Ebionite of old, and the Socinian now, assert that Jesus Christ is merely man, whether (as Faustus Socinus himself teaches) supernaturally born of a Virgin}, or (as modern Rationalists generally maintain) in all respects subject to or- dinary natural laws™, although of such remarkable moral eminence, that He may, in the enthusiastic language of ethical admiration, be said to be ‘Divine. And when Sabellianism would escape from the manifold self-contradictions of Patripas- sianism®, it too becomes no less Humanitarian in its doctrine as to the Person of our Lord, than Ebionitism itself. The Monarchianism of Praxeas or of Noetus, which denied the
Κ On recent ‘ Lives’ of our Lord, see Appendix, Note A.
1 Chr. Rel. Brevissima Inst. i. 654: ‘De Christi essentia ita statue: Tilum esse hominem in virginis utero, et sic sine viri ope Divini Spiritds vi conceptum.’
m Wegscheider, Instit. § 120, sqq. neCf, Tertull. adv, Prax. c. 2.
1)
16 (2) The Arian answer.
distinct Personality of Christ® while proclaiming His Divinity in the highest terms, was practically coincident in its popular result with the coarse assertions of Theodotus and Artemon?, And in modern days, the phenomenon of practical Humani- tarianism, disguised but not proscribed by very vehement pro- testations apparently condemning it, is reproduced in the case of such well-known writers as Schleiermacher or Ewald. They use language at times which seems to do the utmost justice to the truth of Christ’s Divinity : they recognise in Him the perfect Revelation of God, the true Head and Lord of human kind ; but they deny the existence of an immanent Trinity in the Godhead; they recognise in God no pre-existent Personal Form as the basis of His Self-Manifestation to man; they are really Monar- chianists in the sense of Praxeas; and their keen appreciation of the ethical glory of Christ’s Person cannot save them from consequences with which it is ultimately inconsistent, but which are on other grounds logically too inevitable to be permanently eluded4, A Christ who is ‘the perfect Revelation of God,’ yet who ‘is not personally God, does not really differ from the altogether human Christ of Socinus; and the assertion of the Personal Godhead of Christ can only escape from the profane absurdities of Patripassianism, when it presupposes the eternal and necessary existence in God of a Threefold Personality.
2. The Arian maintains that our Lord Jesus Christ existed before His Incarnation, that by Him, as by an instrument, the Supreme God made the worlds, and that, as being the most ancient and the highest of created beings, He is to be wor- shipped; that, however, Christ had a beginning of existence (ἀρχὴν ὑπάρξεως), that there was a time when He did not exist (jv ὅτε οὐκ jv); that He has His subsistence from what once was not (ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἔχει τὴν ὑπόστασιν 1), and cannot therefore
ο ‘Hee perversitas, que se existimat meram veritatem possidere, dum unicum Deum non alias putat credendum quam si ipsum eundemque et Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum dicat. Quasi non sic quoque unus sit omnia, dum ex uno omnia, per substantie scilicet unitatem, et nihilominis custodiatur oixovoulas sacramentum, que unitatem in trinitatem disponit, tres dirigens, Patrem et Filium, et Spiritum Sanctum.’ Adv. Prax. c. 2.
P Euseb. Hist. Eccl. v. 28: ψιλὸν ἄνθρωπον γενέσθαι τὸν Σωτῆρα. Tert. de Prescr. Her. c. 53. App.; Theodoret, Her. Fab. lib. ii. init.
4 Cf. Dorner, Pers. Christi, Band ii. p.153. Schleiermacher, although agreeing with Schelling and Hegel in denying an immanent Trinity in the Godhead, did not (Dorner earnestly pleads) agree in the Pantheistic basis of that denial. P. C. ii. p. 1212. Compare Ewald, Geschichte Christus’, p. 447, quoted by Dorner.
τ Socrates, i. 5.
J LEcT.
(3) Answer of the Catholic Church. 17
be called God in the sense in which that term is applied by Theists to the Supreme Being 8.
3. In contrast with these two leading forms of heresy stands that which has ever been and is the faith of the whole Catholic Church of Christ: ‘I believe in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made, Being oF ONE SUBSTANCE WITH the Father ; By Whom all things were made; Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made Man.’
Practically indeed these three answers may be still further reduced to two, the first and the third; for Arianism, no less than Sabellianism, is really a form of the Humanitarian or naturalist reply to the question. Arianism does indeed admit the exist- ence of a pre-existent being who became incarnate in Jesus, but it parts company with the Catholic belief, by asserting that this being is himself a creature, and not of the very Substance of the Supreme God. Thus Arianism is weighted with the intellectual difficulties of a purely supernatural Christology, while yet it forfeits all hold upon the Great Truth which to a Catholic believer sustains and justifies the remainder of his creed. The real question at issue is not merely whether Christ is only a man; it is whether or not He is only a created being. When the question is thus stated, Arianism must really take its place side by side with the most naked Deism; while at the same time it suggests, by its incarnation of a created Logos, the most dif- ficult among the problems which meet a believer in the Hypo- static Union of our Lord’s Two Natures. In order to escape from this position, it virtually teaches the existence of two Gods, each of whom is an object of worship, one of whom has been created by the Other; One of whom might, if He willed, anni- hilate the other *, Thus in Arianism reason and faith are equally
* Cf. further Waterland, Defence of Some Queries, Works (ed. Van- Mildert), vol. i. pp. 402, 403.
ὁ Waterland, Works, vol. i. p. 78, note f. Bp. Van-Mildert quotes from Mr. Charles Butler’s Historical Account of Confessions of Faith, chap. x. sect. 2, a remarkable report of Dr. Clarke’s conference with Dr. Hawarden in the presence of Queen Caroline. After Dr. Clarke had stated his system at great length and in very guarded terms, Dr. Hawarden asked his per- mission to put one simple question, and Dr. Clarke assented. ‘Then,’ said Dr. Hawarden, ‘I ask, Can God the Father annihilate the Son and the Holy Ghost? Answer me Yes or No.’ Dr, Clarke continued for some time r| deep thought, and then said, ‘It was a question which he had never I σ
18 The three answers are practically two.
disappointed: the largest demands are made upon faith, yet the Arian Christ after all is but a fellow-creature; and reason is encouraged to assail the mysteries of the Catholic creed in behalf of a theory which admits of being reduced to an irrational absurdity. Arianism therefore is really at most a resting- point for minds which are sinking from the Catholic creed downwards to pure Humanitarianism ; or which are feeling their way upwards from the depths of Ebionitism, or Socinianism, towards the Church. This intermediate, transient, and essen- tially unsubstantial character of the Arian position was indeed made plain, in theory, by the vigorous analysis to which the heresy was subjected on its first appearance by St. Athanasius, and again in the last century, when, at its endeavour to make a home for itself in the Church of England, in the person of Dr. Samuel Clarke, it was crushed out, under God, mainly by the genius and energy of the great Waterland. And history has verified the anticipations of argument. Arianism at this day has a very shadowy, if any real, existence; and the Church of Christ, holding in her hands the Creed of Nicwa, stands face to face with sheer Humanitarianism, more or less disguised, according to circumstances, by the thin varnish of an admiration yielded to our Lord on esthetic or ethical grounds.