VI. But if belief in our Lord’s Divinity, as taught by St.

John, cannot be reasonably objected to on such grounds as have been noticed, can it be destroyed by a natural explanation of its
upgrowth and formation? Here, undoubtedly, we touch upon a suspicion which underlies much of the current scepticism of the day; and with a few words on this momentous se we may conclude the present lecture.
Those who reject the doctrine that Christ is God are con- fronted by the consideration that, after the lapse of eighteen centuries since His appearance on this earth, He is believed in and worshipped as God by a Christendom which embraces the
* On this subject, see Martensen, Christl. Dogmat. § 132.
270 Theory of ‘Deification by enthusiasm,
most civilized portion of the human family. The question arises how to account for this fact. There is no difficulty at all in accounting for it if we suppose Him to be, and to have pro- claimed Himself to be, a Divine Person. But if we hold that, as a matter of history, He believed Himself to be a mere man, how are we to explain the world-wide upgrowth of so extra- ordinary a belief about Him, as is this belief in His Divinity ? Scepticism may fold its arms and may smile at what it deems the intrinsic absurdity of the dogma believed in; but it cannot ignore the existing prevalence of the belief which accepts the dogma. The belief is a phenomenon which at least challenges attention. How has that belief been spread? How is it that for eighteen hundred years, and at this hour, a conviction of the truth of the Godhead of Jesus dominates over the world of Christian thought? Here, if scepticism would save its intellec- tual credit, it must cease from the perpetual reiteration of doubts and negations, unrelieved by any frank assertions or admissions of positive truth. It must make a venture; it niust commit itself to the responsibilities of a positive position, however inexact and shadowy; it must hazard an hypothesis and be prepared to defend it.
Accordingly the theory which proposes to explain the belief of Christendom in the Godhead of Christ maintains that Christ was ‘deified’ by the enthusiasm of His first disciples. We are told that ‘man instinctively creates a creed that shall meet the wants and aspirations of his understanding and of his heart *.’ The teaching of Christ created in His first followers a passionate devotion to His Person, and a desire for unreserved submission to His dictatorship. Not that Christ’s Divinity was decreed Him by any formal act of public honour; it was the spontaneous and irregular tribute of a passionate enthusiasm. Could any expres- sion of reverence seem exaggerated to an admiration and a love which knew no bounds? Could any intellectual price be too high to pay for the advantage of placing the authority of the Greatest of teachers upon that one basis of authority which is beyond assault? Do not love and reverence, centring upon a friend, upon a memory, with eager intensity, turn a somewhat impatient ear to the cautious protestations of the critical reason, when any such voice can make itself heard? Do they not pass by imperceptible degrees into adoration? Does not adoration take for granted the Divinity of the object which it has learned
= Feuerbach, Geist. ἃ, Christenth, Einl, [ Lect.
St. Fohn’s writings fatal to the theory. 271
imperceptibly and unreflectingly to adore? The enthusiasm created by Jesus Christ in those around Him, thus comes to be credited with the invention and propagation of the belief in His Divinity. ‘So mighty was the enthusiasm, that nothing short of that stupendous belief would satisfy it. The heart of Christendom gave law to its understanding. Christians wished Christ to be God, and they forthwith thought that they had sufficient reasons for believing in His Godhead. The feeling of a society of affectionate friends found its way in process of time into the world of speculation. It fell into the hands of the dia- lecticians, and into the hands of the metaphysicians; it was analysed, it was defined, it was coloured by contact with foreign speculations ; it was enlarged by the accretion of new intellectual material. At length Fathers and Councils had finished their graceless and pedantic task, and that which had at first been the fresh sentiment of simple and loving hearts was duly hardened and rounded off into a solid block of repulsive dogma.’
Now St. John’s writings are a standing difficulty in the way of this enterprising hypothesis. We have seen that the fourth Gospel must be recognised as St. John’s, unless, to use the words of Ewald, ‘we are prepared knowingly to receive falsehood and to reject truth. But we have also seen that in the fourth Gospel, Jesus Christ is procldimed to be God by the whole drift of the argument, and in terms as explicit as those of the Nicene Creed. We have not then to deal with any supposed process of deification, whereby the Person of Jesus was ‘transfigured’ in the apprehension of sub-apostolic or post-apostolic Christendom. It is St. John who proclaims that Jesus is the Word Incarnate, and that the Word is God. How can we account for St. John’s conduct in representing Him as God, if He was in truth only man? It will not avail to argue that St. John wrote his Gospel in his old age, and that the memories of his youthful companion- ship with Jesus had been coloured, heightened, transformed, idealized, by the meditative enthusiasm of more than half a century. It will not avail to say that the reverence of the beloved disciple for his ascended Master was fatal to the accuracy of the portrait which he drew of Him. For what is this but to misapprehend the very fundamental nature of reverence? Truth is the basis, as it is the object of reverence, not less than of every other virtue. Reverence prostrates herself before a great- ness the reality of which is obvious to her; but she would cease to be reverence if she could exaggerate the greatness which pro- vokes her homage, not less surely than if she could depreciate
v]
272 Could St. Fohn have ‘deified’ a human friend?
or deny it. The sentiment which, in contemplating its object, abandons the guidance of fact for that of imagination, is disloyal to that honesty of purpose which is of the essence of reverence ; and it is certain at last to subserve the purposes of the scorner and the spoiler. St. John insists that he teaches the Church only that which he has seen and heard. Even a slight swerving from truth must be painful to genuine reverence; but what shall we say of an exaggeration so gigantic, if an exaggeration it be, as that which transforms a human friend into the Almighty and Everlasting God? If Jesus Christ is not God, how is it that the most intimate of His earthly friends came to believe and to teach that He really is God?
Place yourselves, my brethren, fairly face to face with this difficulty ; imagine yourselves, for the moment, in the position of St. John. Think of any whom you have loved and revered, beyond measure, as it has seemed, in past years. He has gone; but you cling to him more earnestly in thought and affection than while he was here. You treasure his words, you revisit his haunts, you delight in the company of his friends, you represent to yourself his wonted turns of thought and phrase, you con over his handwriting, you fondle his likeness. These things are for you precious and sacred. Even now, there are times when the tones of that welcome voice seem to fall with living power upon your strained ear. Even now, the outline of that countenance, upon which the grave has closed, flits, as if capriciously, before your eye of sense. The air around you yields it perchance to your intent gaze, radiant with a higher beauty than it wore of old. Others, you feel, may be forgotten as memory grows weak, and the passing years bring with them the quick succession of new fields and objects of interest, press- ing importunately upon the heart and thoughts. But one such memory as I have glanced at, fades not at the bidding of time.
It cannot fade; it has become a part of the mind which clings to it. Some who are here may have known those whom they thus remember; a few of us assuredly have known such. But can we conceive it possible that, after any lapse of time, we should ever express our reverence and love for the unearthly goodness, the moral strength, the tenderness of heart, the fearlessness, the justice, the unselfishness of our friend, by saying that he was not an ordinary human being, but a superhuman person? Can we imagine ourselves incorporating our recollections about him with some current theosophic doctrine elevating him to the rank of a Divine hypostasis? While he lies in his silent eek can
LECT,
Mankind not prone to ‘deify’ human virtue. 273
we picture ourselves describing him as the very absolute Light and Life, as the Incarnate Thought of the Most High, as stand- ing in a relationship altogether unique to the Eternal and Self- existent Being, nay, as being literally God? To say that ‘St. John lived in a different intellectual atmosphere from our own,’ does not meet the difficulty. If Jesus was merely human, St. John’s statements about Him are among the most preposterous fictions which have imposed upon the world. They were advanced with a full knowledge of all that they involved. St. John was at least as profoundly convinced as we are of the truth of the unity of the Supreme Being. St. John was at least as alive as we can be to the infinite interval which parts the highest of creatures from the Great Creator. If we are not naturally lured on by some irresistible fascination, by the poetry or by the credulity of our advancing years, to believe in the Godhead of the best man whom we have ever known, neither was St. John. If Jesus had been merely human, St. John would have felt what we feel about a loved and revered friend whom we have lost. In proportion to our belief in our friend’s goodness, in proportion to our loving reverence for his character, is the strength of our conviction that we could not now do him a more cruel injury than by entwining a blasphemous fable, such as the ascription of Divinity would be, around the simple story of his merely human life. This ‘deification of Jesus by the enthusiasm’ of St. John would have been consistent neither with St. John’s reverence for God, nor with his real loyalty to a merely human friend and teacher, St. John worshipped the ‘jealous’ God of Israel; and he has recorded the warning which he himself received against wor- shipping the angel of the Apocalypsey. If Christ had not really been Divine, the real beauty of His Human Character would have been disfigured by any association with such legendary exaggeration, and Christianity would assuredly have perished within the limits of the first century.
The theory that Jesus was deified by enthusiasm assumes the existence of a general disposition in mankind which is unwar- ranted by experience. Generally speaking men are not eager to believe in the exalted virtue, much less in the superhuman origin or dignity, of their fellow-men. And to do them justice, the writers who maintain that Jesus was invested with Divine honours by popular fervour, illustrate the weakness of their own principle very conspicuously. While they assert that nothing
Υ Rev. xxii. 9. Vv ] 7
274 Llluminative Office of the Holy Ghost.
was more easy and obvious for the disciple of the apostolic age than to believe in the Divinity of his Master, they themselves reject that truth with the greatest possible obstinacy and deter- mination ; well-attested though it be, now as then, by historical miracles and by overwhelming moral considerations; but also proclaimed now, as it was not then, by the faith of eighteen cen- turies, and by the suffrages of all that is purest and truest in our existing eivilization.
But, it is suggested that the apostolic narrative itself bears out the doctrine that Jesus was deified through enthusiasm by its account of the functions which are ascribed, especially. in St. John’s Gospel, to the Comforter. Was not the Comforter sent to testify of Jesus? Is it not said, ‘He shall glorify Me’? Does not this language look like the later endeavour of a religious phrenzy, to account for exaggerations of which it is conscious, by a bold claim to supernatural illumination ?
Now this suggestion implies that the last Discourse of our Lord is in reality a forgery, which can no more claim to repre- sent His real thought than the political speeches in Thucydides can be seriously supposed to express the minds of the speakers to whom they are severally attributed. Or, at the least, it im- plies that a purely human feeling is here clothed by language ascribed to our Lord Himself with the attributes of a Divine Person. Of course, if St. John was capable of deliberately attributing to His Master that which He did not say, he was equally capable of attributing to Him actions which He did not do; and we are driven to imagine that the closest friend of Jesus was believed by apostolical Christendom to be writing a history, when in truth he was only composing a biographical novel. But, as Rousseau has observed, in words which have been already quoted, the original inventor of the Gospel history would have been as miraculous a being as its historical Subject. And the moral fascination which the last discourse possesses for every pure and true soul at this hour, combines with the testi- mony of the Church to assure us that it could have been spoken by no merely human lips, and that it is beyond the inventive scope of even the highest human genius. Those three chapters which M. Renan pronounces to be full of ‘the dryness of meta- physics and the darkness of abstract dogmas’ have been, as a matter of fact, watered by the tears of all the purest love and deepest sorrow of Christian humanity for eighteen centuries. Never is the New Testament more able to dispense with ae
LECT.
Guidance of the Spirit and natural observation. 275
evidence than in those matchless words; nowhere more than here is it sensibly divine,
Undoubtedly it is a fact that in these chapters our Lord does promise to His apostles the supernatural aid of the Holy Spirit. It is true that the Spirit was to testify of Christ” and to glorify Christ ἃ, and to guide the disciples into all truth». But how? * He shall take of Mine and shall shew it unto you®;’ ‘He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto youd.” The Holy Spirit was to bring the words and works and character of Jesus before the illuminated intelligence of the Apostles. The school of the Spirit was to be the school of reflection. But it was not to be the school of legendary invention. Acts, which, at the time of their being witnessed, might have appeared trivial or common- place, would be seen, under the guidance of the Spirit, to have had a deeper interest. Words, to which a transient or local value had been assigned at first, would now be felt to invite a world-wide and eternal meaning. ‘These things understood not His disciples at the first,’ is true of much else besides the entry into Jerusalem®. Moral, spiritual, physical powers which, though unexplained, could never have passed for the product of purely human activity, would in time be referred by the Invisible Teacher to their true source; they would be regarded with awe as the very rays of Deity.
Thus the work of the Spirit would but complete, systematize, digest the results of previous natural observation. Certainly it was always impossible that any man could ‘say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost’ The inward teaching of the Holy Ghost alone could make the Godhead of Jesus a certainty of faith as well as a conclusion of the intellect. But the intel- lectual conditions of belief were at first inseparable from natural contact with the living Human Form of Jesus during the years of His earthly life. Our Lord implies this in saying, ‘ Ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with Me from the beginning.” The Apostles lived with One Who combined an exercise of the highest miraculous powers with a faultless human
* St. John xv. 26: ἐκεῖνος μαρτυρήσει περὶ ἐμοῦ.
@ Ibid. xvi. 14: ἐκεῖνος ἐμὲ δοξάσει.
Ὁ Ibid. ver. 13: ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν.
¢ Ibid. vers. 14, 15: ἐκ τοῦ ἐμοῦ λήψεται, καὶ ἀναγγελεῖ ὑμῖν.
4 Ibid. xiv. 26: ἐκεῖνος ὑμᾶς διδάξει πάντα, καὶ ὑπομνήσει ὑμᾶς πάντα ἃ εἶπον ὑμῖν.
9 St. John xii, 14-16.
j 1 Cor, xii, 3: οὐδεὶς δύναται εἰπεῖν Κύριον Ἰησοῦν, εἰ μὴ ἐν Πνεύματι ᾿Αγίῳφ. Vv. Ττ2
276 Bearing of St. Fohn's intimacy with our Lord
character, and Who asserted Himself, by implication and ex- pressly, to bé personally God. The Spirit strengthened and formalized that earlier and more vague belief which was created by His language; but the language which had fallen on the natural ears of the Apostles was His; and it was the germinal principle of their riper faith in His Divinity.
The unbelief of our day is naturally anxious to evade the startling fact that the most intimate of the companions of Jesus is also the most strenuous assertor of His Godhead. There is a proverb to the effect that no man’s life should be written by his private servant. That proverb expresses the general conviction of mankind that, as a rule, like some mountain scenery or ruined castles, moral greatness in men is more picturesque when it is viewed from a distance. The proverb bids you not to scrutinize even a good man too narrowly, lest perchance you should dis- cover flaws in his character which will somewhat rudely shake your conviction of his goodness. It is hinted that some un- obtrusive weaknesses which escape public observation will be obvious to a man’s everyday companion, and will be fatal to the higher estimate which, but for such close scrutiny, might have been formed respecting him. But in the case of Jesus Christ the moral of this cynical proverb is altogether at fault. Jesus Christ chooses one disciple to be the privileged sharer of a nearer intimacy than any other. The son of Zebedee lies upon His bosom at- supper; he is ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’ Along with St. Peter and St. James, this disciple is taken to the holy mount, that he may witness the glory of his Transfigured Lord. He enters the empty tomb on the morning of the Resur- rection. He is in the upper chamber when the risen Jesus blessed the ten and the eleven. He is on the mount of the Ascension when the Conqueror moves up visibly into heaven. But he also is summoned to the garden where Jesus kneels in agony beneath the olive trees; and alone of the twelve he faces the fierce multitude on the road to Calvary, and stands with Mary beneath the cross, and sees Jesus die. He sees more of the Divine Master than any other, more of His glory, more too of His humiliation. His witness is proportioned to his nearer and closer observation. Whether he is writing Epistles of en- couragement and warning, or narrating heavenly visions touch- ing the future of the Church, or recording the experiences of those years when he enjoyed that intimate, unmatched com- panionship,—St. John, beyond any other of the sacred writers, is the persistent herald and teacher of our Lord’s se
LECT.
on the Christology of his writings. 277
How and by what successive steps it was that the full truth embodied in his Gospel respecting the Person of his Lord made its way into and mastered the soul of the beloved disciple, who indeed shall presume to say? Who of us can determine the exact and varied observations whereby we learn to measure and to revere the component elements even of a great human cha- racter? The absorbing interest of such a process is generally fatal to an accurate analysis of its stages. We penetrate deeper and deeper, we mount higher and higher, as we follow the complex system of motives, capacities, dispositions, which, one after another, open upon us. We cannot, on looking back, say when this or that feature became distinctly clear to us. We know not now by what additions ahd developments the general impression which we have received took its shape and outline. St. John would doubtless have learnt portions of the mighty truth from definite statements and at specified times. The real sense of prophecy 8, the explicit confessions of disciples}, the assertions by which our Lord replied to the malice or to the ignorance of His opponentsi, were doubtless distinct elements of the Apostle’s training in the school of truth. St. John must have learned something of Christ’s Divine power when, at His word, the putrid corpse of Lazarus, bound with its grave-clothes, moved forward into air and life. St. John must have learned yet more of his Master’s condescension when, girded with a towel, Jesus bent Himself to the earth, that He might wash the feet of the traitor Judas. Each miracle, each discourse supplied a distinct ray of light; but the total impression must have been formed, strengthened, deepened by the incidents of daily inter- course, by the effects of hourly, momentary observation. For every human soul, encased in its earthly prison-house, seeks and finds publicity through countless outlets. The immaterial spirit traces its history with an almost invisible delicacy upon the coarse hard matter which is its servant and its organ. ‘he un- conscious, involuntary movements of manner and countenance, the unstudied phrases of daily or of casual conversation, the emphasis of silence not less than the emphasis of speech, help in various ways to complete that self-revelation which every indi- vidual character makes to all around, and which is studied by
® St. John xii. 41: ταῦτα εἶπεν Ἡσαΐας, ὅτε εἶδε τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐλάλησε περὶ αὐτοῦ. Isa, vi. 9.
h St. John i. 49. After our Lord’s words implying His omnipresence, Nathanael says, ‘Pai, σὺ ef ὁ Tids τοῦ Θεοῦ.
i St. John viii. 58, ἄο, v]
278 St. Fohn’s witness based on personal experience.
allin each. Not otherwise did the Incarnate Word reveal Him- self to the purest and keenest love which He found and chose from among the sons of men. One flaw or fault of temper, one symptom of moral impotence or of moral perversion, one hasty word, one ill-considered act, would have shattered the ideal for ever. But, in fact, to St. John the Life of Jesus was as the light of heaven; it was as one constant unfailing outflow of beauty, ever varying its illuminating powers as it falls upon the leaves of the forest oak or upon the countless ripples of the ocean. In the eyes of St. John the Eternal Person of Jesus shone forth through His Humanity with translucent splendour, and wove and folded around Itself, as the days and weeks passed on, a moral history of faultless grandeur. It was not the disciple who idealized the ‘Master; it was the Master Who revealed Himself in His majestic glory to the illumined eye and to the entranced touch of the disciple. No treachery of memory, no ardour of temperament, no sustained reflectiveness of soul, could have compassed the transformation of a human friend into the Almighty and Ever- lasting Being. Nor was there room for serious error of judg- ment after a companionship so intimate, so heart-searching, so true, as had been that of Jesus with St. John. And thus to the beloved disciple the Divinity of his Lord was not a scholastic formula, nor a pious conjecture, nor a controversial thesis, nor the adaptation of a popular superstition to meet the demands of a strong enthusiasm, nor a mystic reverie. It was nothing less than a fact of personal experience. ‘That Which was from the beginning, Which we have heard, Which we have seen with our eyes, Which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life; (for the Life was manifested, and we have seen It, and bear witness, and shew unto you that Eternal Life, Which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That Which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.’
[τ᾿ στ᾿.
LECTURE VI.
OUR LORD’S DIVINITY AS TAUGHT BY ST. JAMES, ST. PETER, AND ST. PAUL.
And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship ; that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision,—GAL, ii. 9.
THE meditative temper of thought and phrase, which is so cb- servable in St. John, may be thought to bear in two different manners upon the question before us in these lectures. On the one hand, such a temper, regarded from a point of view entirely naturalistic, must be admitted to be a guarantee against the pre- sumption that St. John, in his enthusiastic devotion to Jesus, committed himself to hasty beliefs and assertions respecting the Person of his Friend and Master. An over-eager and undis- criminating admiration would not naturally express itself in metaphysical terminology of a reflective and mystical character. But on the other hand, it may be asked whether too much stress has not been laid by the argument of the last lecture upon the witness of St. John? Can the conclusions of a mind of high- strung and contemplative temper be held to furnish reasons on which the Church may build a cardinal point of belief in the religion of mankind? May not such a belief be inextricably linked to the moral and intellectual idiosyncrasies of a single man? The belief may indeed be the honest and adequate result of that particular measure and kind of observation and reflection
τ which one saintly mind has achieved; and as such it may be
a worthy object of philosophical interest and respect. But is not this respect and interest due to it on the precise ground that it is the true native product of a group of conditions, which co- exist nowhere else save in the particular mind which generated it Ἷ Will a faith, of such origin, bear transplantation into the VI
280 St. Fohn’sChristology,shared by theother apostles.
moral and mental soil around? Can it be nourished and handed on by minds of a different calibre, by characters of a distinct cast from that in which it originally grew? Dr. Samuel Johnson, for instance, had private beliefs which were obviously due to the tone and genius of his particular character. These beliefs go far to constitute the charm of the picture with which we are familiar in the pages of Boswell. But our respect for Dr. Johnson does not force us to accept each and all of his quaint convictions. They are peculiar to himself, being such as he was. We admire them as belonging to the attractive and eccentric individuality of the man. We do not suppose that they are capable of being domesticated in the general and diversified mind of England. Now, if it be hinted that some similar estimate should be _ formed respecting St. John’s doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity, the present, for obvious reasons, is not the moment to insist upon a consideration which for us Christians must have paramount weight, namely, that St. John was taught by an infallible Teacher, by none other than God the Holy Ghost. But let us remark, first of all, the fact that St. John did convey to a large circle of minds his own deep conviction that his Friend and Master was a Divine Person; paradoxical as that conviction must at first have seemed to them. If we could have travelled through Asia Minor at the end of the first century of our era, we should have fallen in with a number of persons, in various ranks of society, who so entirely believed in St. John’s doctrine, as to be willing to die for it without any kind of hesitation But it would have been a mistake to suppose that the prevalence of the doctrine was due only to the activity of St. John. While St. John was teaching this doctrine under the form which he had been guided to adopt, a parallel communication of the sub- stance of the doctrine was taking place in several other quarters. St. John was supported, if I may be allowed to use such an ex- pression, by men whose minds were of a totally distinct natural cast, and who expressed their thoughts ina religious phraseology which had little enough in common with that which was current
* The Apocalypse was probably written immediately after Domitian’s persecution of the Church. Antipas had been martyred at Pergamos. (Rev. ii. 13.) St. John saw the souls of martyrs who had been beheaded- with the axe; εἶδον τὰς ψυχὰς τῶν πεπελεκισμένων διὰ Thy μαρτυρίαν ᾿Ιησοῦ. (Rev. xx. 4.) This was the Roman custom at executions. In the perse- cution under Nero other and more cruel kinds of death had been inflicted. The Bishops of Pergamos (Ibid. ii. 13) and Philadelphia (Ibid. iii. 8) had confessed Christ. St. Clement of Rome alludes to the violence of this perse- cution, (Ep. ad Cor. 6.) The Apostle himself was banished to ae
LECT.
Doctrinal bearings of the meeting at Ferusalem. 281
in the school of Ephesus. Nevertheless it will be our duty this morning to observe, how radical was their agreement with St. John, in urging upon the acceptance of the human race the doctrine that Jesus Christ is God.
Very ingenious theories concerning a supposed division of the Apostolical Church into schools of thought holding antagonistic beliefs have been advanced of late years. And they have had the effect of directing a large amount of attention to the account which St. Paul gives, in his Epistle to the Galatians, of his inter- view with the leading Apostles at Jerusalem >, The accuracy of that account is not questioned even by the most destructive of the Tiibingen divines. According to St. Ireneus and the great majority of authorities, both ancient and modern, the interview took place on the occasion of St. Paul’s attendance at the Apo- stolical Council of Jerusalem. St. Paul says that St. James, St. Peter, and St. John, who were looked upon as ‘pillars’ of the Church, among the Judaizing Christians as well as among Christians generally, gave the right hands of fellowship to him- self and to Barnabas. ‘It was agreed,’ says St. Paul, ‘that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision.’ Now the historical interest which attaches to this recorded division of labour among the leading Apostles is sufficiently obvious; but the dogmatic interest of the passage, although less direct, is even higher than the historical. This passage warrants us in inferring at least thus much ;—that the leading Apostles of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ were not hopelessly at issue with each other on a subject of such central and primary importance as the Divine and Eternal Nature of their Master.
It might well seem, at first sight, that to draw such an inference at all within the walls of a Christian church was itself an act for which the faith of Christians would exact an apology. But those who are acquainted with the imaginative licence of recent theories will not deem our inference altogether im- pertinent and superfluous. Of late years St. James has been represented as more of a Jew than a Christian, and as holding in reality a purely Ebionitic and Humanitarian belief as to the Person of Jesus. St. Paul has been described as the teacher of such a doctrine of the Subordination of the Son as to be prac- tically Arian. St. Peter is then exhibited as occupying a feeble undecided dogmatic position, intermediate to the doctrines of St. Paul and St. James; while all the three are contrasted with
> Gal. ii. 1-10. vi |
282 The Apostles not indifferent to doctrinal truth.
the distinct and lofty Christology said to be proper to the gnosis of St. John. Now, as has been already remarked, the historical trustworthiness of the passage in the Galatians has not been disputed even by the Tiibingen writers. That passage repre- sents St. John as intimately associated, not merely with St. Peter. but with St. James. It moreover represents these three apostles as giving pledges of spiritual co-operation and fellowship, from their common basis of belief and action, to the more recent con- vert St.Paul. Is it to be supposed that St. Paul could have been thus accepted as a fellow-worker on one and the same occasion by the Apostle who is said to be a simple Humani- tarian, and by the Apostle whose whole teaching centres in Jesus considered as the historical manifestation of the Eternal Word ? Or are we to imagine that the apostles of Christ anticipated that indifference to doctrinal exactness which is characteristic of some modern schools? Did they regard the question of our Lord’s Personal Godhead as a kind of speculative curiosity; as a scholastic conceit; as having no necessary connexion with vital, essential, fundamental Christianity? And is St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, only describing the first great ec- clesiastical compromise, in which truths of primary importance were sacrificed for an immediate practical object, more ruthlessly than on any subsequent occasion ?
My brethren, the answer to these questions could not be really doubtful to any except the most paradoxical of modern theorists. To say nothing of St. Peter and St. Jude, St. Paul's general language on the subject of heresy*, and St. John’s parti- cular application of such terms as ‘the liar’ and ‘antichrist 4’ to Cerinthus and other heretics, make the supposition of such in- difference as is here in question, in the case of the apostles, utterly inadmissible. If the apostles had differed vitally respect-
© He speaks of αἱρέσεις in the sense of sectarian movements tending to or resulting in separation from the Church, as a form of evil which becomes the unwilling instrument of good (1 Cor. xi. 19). And αἱρέσεις are thus classed among the works of the flesh (Gal. v. 20). Using the word in its sense of dogmatic error on vital points, St. Paul bids Titus reject a ‘heretic’ after two warnings from the communion of the Church: αἱρετικὸν ἄνθρωπον μετὰ μίαν καὶ δευτέραν νουθεσίαν παραιτοῦ (Tit. iii. 10). On the inviolate sacredness of the apostolical doctrine, cf. Gal. i. 8: ἐὰν ἡμεῖς ἢ ἄγγελος ἐξ ovpavod εὐαγγελίζηται ὑμῖν παρ᾽ ὃ εὐηγγελισάμεθα ὑμῖν, ἀνάθεμα ἔστω. Cf. 2 Pet. ii, 1.
4 1 St. John ii. 22: τίς ἐστιν 6 ψεύστης, εἰ μὴ ὁ ἀρνούμενος ὅτι Inocis οὐκ ἔστιν ὃ Χριστός ; οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ ἀντίχριστος, 6 ἀρνούμενος τὸν Πατέρα καὶ τὸν Υἱόν. πᾶς ὃ ἀρνούμενος τὸν Ὑἱὸν, οὐδὲ τὸν Πατέρα ἔχει. Cf. Ibid. iv. 3; 2 δύ. John 7.
{ LECT.
The A [postles preach one Divine Christ. 283
ing the Person of Christ, they would have shattered the work of Pentecost in its infancy. And the terms in which they speak of each other would be reduced to the level of meaningless or insincere conventionalities®, Considering that the Gospel pre- sented itself to the world as an absolute and exclusive draught of Divine truth, contrasted as such with the perpetually-shifting forms of human thought around it; we may deem it antecedently probable, that those critics are mistaken, who profess to have discovered at the very fountain-head of Christianity at least three entirely distinct doctrines, respecting so fundamental a question as the personal rank of Christ in the scale of being. Undoubtedly it is true that as the Evangelists approach the Person of our Lord from distinct points of view, so do the writers of the apostolic epistles represent different attitudes of the human soul towards the one evangelical truth; and in this way they impersonate types of thought and feeling which have ever since found a welcome and a home in the world-embracing Church of Jesus Christ. St. James insists most earnestly on the moral obligations of Christian believers; and he connects the Old Testament with the New by shewing the place of the law, now elevated and transfigured into a law of liberty, in the new life of Christians. He may indeed for a moment be engaged in refuting a false doctrine of justification by faithf. But this is because such a doctrine prevents Christians from duly recogniz- ing those moral and spiritual truths and obligations upon which the Apostle is most eagerly insisting. Throughout his Epistle,
¢ St. Paul associates himself with the other apostles as bearing the stress of a common confessorship for Christ (2 Cor. xii. 12). The apostles are, together with the prophets, the foundations of the Church (Eph. ii. 20). The apostles are first in order (Eph. iv. 11). Although the grace of God in himself had laboured more abundantly than all the apostles, St. Paul terms himself the least of the apostolic college (1 Cor. χν. 9). The equality of the Gentile believers in Christ with the Jewish believers was a truth made known to St. Paul by special revelation, and he called it his Gospel; but it implied no properly doctrinal difference between himself and the apostles of the circumcision. The harmonious action of the apostles as a united spiritual corporation is implied in such passages as 2 Pet. iii. 2, St. Jude 17; and neither of these passages affords ground for Baur’s inference respecting the post-apostolic age of the writer. In 2 St. Pet. iii. 15, 16, St. Peter distinguishes between the real mind of ‘our beloved brother Paul’ as being in perfect agreement with his own, and the abuse which had been made by teachers of error of certain difficult truths put forward in the Pauline Epistles: δυσνόητά τινα, ἃ of ἀμαθεὶς καὶ ἀστήρικτοι στρεβλοῦσιν ws καὶ τὰς λοιπὰς γραφὰς, πρὸς τὴν ἰδίαν αὐτῶν ἀπώλειαν.
t St. James ii. 14-26. vr]
284 They exhibit distinct types of the one doctrine.
doctrine is, comparatively speaking, thrown into the background ; he is intent upon practical considerations, to the total, or well- nigh total, exclusion of doctrinal topics. St. Paul, on the other hand, abounds in dogmatic statements. Still, in St. Paul, doc- trine is, at least, generally brought forward with a view tc some immediate practical object. Only in five out of his four- teen Epistles can the doctrinal element be said very decidedly to predominates. St. Paul assumes that his readers have gone through a course of oral instruction in necessary Christian doc- trine»; he accordingly completes, he expands, he draws out into its consequences what had been already taught by himself or by others. St. Paul's fiery and impetuous style is in keeping with his general relation, throughout his Epistles, to Christian dogma. The calm enunciation of an enchained series of consequences flowing from some central or supreme truth is perpetually in- terrupted, in St. Paul, by the exclamations, the questions, the parentheses, the anacoloutha, the quotations from hymns, the solemn ascriptions of glory to the Source of all blessings, the outbursts by which argument suddenly melts into stern denun- ciation, or into versatile expostulation, or into irresistible appeals to sympathy, or into the highest strains of lyrical poetry. Thus it is that in St. Paul primary dogma appears, as it were, rather in flashes of light streaming with rapid coruscations across his pages, than in highly elaborated statements such as might abound throughout a professed doctrinal treatise of some later
Ξε And yet in these five Epistles an immediate practical purpose is generally discernible. In the Romans the Apostle is harmonizing the Jewish and Gentile elements within the Catholic Church, by shewing that each section is equally indebted to faith in Jesus Christ fora real justification before God. In the Galatians he is opposing this same doctrinal truth to the destructive and reactionary theory of the Judaizers. In the Ephesians and Colossians he is meeting the mischievous pseudo-philosophy and Cabbalism of the earliest Gnostics, here positively and devotionally, there polemically, by in- sisting on the dignity of our Lord’s Person, and the mystery of His relation to the Church. In the Hebrews, written either by St. Paul himself or by St. Luke under his direction, our Lord’s Person and Priesthood are exhibited in their several bearings as a practical reason against apostasy to Judaism (it would seem) of an Alexandrian type.
b 1 Thess. iii. 10: νυκτὸς καὶ ἡμέρας ὑπὲρ ἐκ περισσοῦ δεόμενοι εἰς τὸ ἰδεῖν ὑμῶν τὸ πρόσωπον, καὶ καταρτίσαι τὰ ὑστερήματα τῆς πίστεως ὑμῶν. The Apostle desires to see the Roman Christians, not that he may teach them any supplementary truths, but to confirm them in their existing belief (εἰς τὸ στηριχθῆναι ὑμᾶς, Rom. i. 11) by the interchange of spiritual sympathies with himself. See 1 Cor. xv. 1; Gal. i. 11, 12, iv. 13, 143 1 Thess. ii. 2; 2 Thess. ii. 15. Compare 1 St. John ii, a1: οὐκ ἔγραψα ὑμῖν, ὅτι οὐκ οἴδατε τὴν ἀλήθειαν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι οἴδατε αὐτήν.
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St. Yames erroneously deemed Ebionitic. 285
age; and yet doctrine, although it might seem to be introduced incidentally to some general or special purpose, nevertheless is inextricably bound up with the Apostle’s whole drift of practical thought. As for St.John, he is always a contemplative and mystical theologian. The eye of his soul is fixed on God, and on the Word Incarnate. St. John simply describes his intui- tions. He does not argue; he asserts. He looks up to heaven, and as he gazes he tells us what he sees. He continually takes an intuition, as it were, to pieces, and recombines it; he resists forms of thought which contradict it; but he does not engage in long arguments, as if he were a dialectician, defending or attacking a theological thesis. Nor is St. John’s temper any mere love of speculation divorced from practice. Each truth which the Apostle beholds, however unearthly and sublime, has a directly practical and transforming power; St. John knows nothing of realms of thought which leave the heart and con- science altogether untouched. Thus, speaking generally, the three Apostles respectively represent the moralist, the practical dogmatist, and the saintly mystic; while St. Peter, as becomes the Apostle first in order in the sacred college, seems to blend in himself the three types of Apostolical teachers. His Epistles are not without elements that more especially characterize St. John; while they harmonize in a very striking manner those features of St. Paul and St. James which seem most nearly to approach divergence. It may be added that St. Peter’s second Epistle finds its echo in St. Jude.