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Page 20
When, then, we speak of the Christ of history, we mean not the figure of
Jesus as reproduced by scientific research apart from Christian faith,
but the Christ of the four gospels, whose figure corresponds to the
religious impression received from the historic Jesus by His earliest
followers. _Lives of Christ_ by historical students have their value
when our main aim is historical information; but the best of them is
poor indeed compared with our gospels when we wish to attain the life of
Christ's followers. The humblest reader of the New Testament has the
same chance with the most learned scholar of attaining a true knowledge
of Jesus for religious purposes; and Jesus remains, as He would surely
wish to remain, a democratic figure accessible to all in the simply told
narratives of the evangelists.
Each age seems to have its own way of phrasing its religious needs; and
various elements in the picture of Jesus have been prized by the
succeeding ages as of special worth. Our generation finds itself
religiously most interested in three outstanding features in the record
of His life:
(1) _His singular religious experience._ His first followers were
impressed with His unique relation to God when they saw in Him the
awaited Messiah. The narratives represent Him as invariably trusting,
loving, obeying the Most High as the Father, Lord of heaven and earth.
His sayings lay special stress on God's tender personal interest in
every child of His, on His stern judgment of hypocrites, on His
Self-sacrificing love, and on His kindness to the unthankful and the
evil. While it is not easy for us with the limited materials at hand to
discriminate clearly between the elements in Jesus' thought of God which
He shared with His contemporaries, and those which were His own
contribution, so discerning a believer as Paul, reared in the most
earnest circles of Jewish thought, could not name the God to whom he had
been brought through Jesus, without mentioning Jesus Himself; God was to
him "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." The Deity Paul
worshipped may be described as that loving Response from the unseen
which answered the trust of Jesus; or rather that personal Approach to
man from the unseen which produced Jesus. Men who had not been atheists
before they became Christians are addressed by another writer as
"through Jesus believers in God." It is not enough to say that in Jesus'
experience God was Father; others before Him, both within and without
Israel, had known the Divine Fatherhood. It was the fatherliness in God
which evoked and corresponded to Jesus' sonship, that formed His new and
distinctive contribution. A mutual relationship is expressed in the
saying: "No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know
the Father, save the Son." Moving familiarly as a man among men, Jesus
did not hesitate to offer them forgiveness, health, power, life; and to
offer all these as His own possessions through His peculiar touch with
the Most High--"All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father." In
the words of the late Professor G.W. Knox, "Jesus set forth communion
with God as the most certain fact of man's experience, and in simple
reality made it accessible to everyone."
His consciousness of God was not something wholly new; He was not "a
lonely mountain tarn unvisited by any stream," but received into His
soul the great river of a nation's spiritual life. He was the heir of
the faith of His people, and regarded Himself as completing that which a
long line of predecessors had begun. He did not find it necessary to
invent new terms to express His thought; but as He passed the old words
through the alembic of His mind they came out with new meaning. His
originality consisted in His discriminating appropriation of His
inheritance, and in His using it so that it became alive with new power.
Madame de Sta�l said that Rousseau "invented nothing, but set everything
on fire." Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with
God, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown
before. The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman Empire,
with a few thousands of proselytes here and there in the larger towns
about the Mediterranean, became in a generation a force which entirely
supplanted the Jewish missionary movement and rapidly spread throughout
the world.
(2) _A singular character._ More striking than anything Jesus said or
did is what He _was_. That which He worshipped in the God He trusted, He
Himself embodied. We can estimate His character best, not by trying to
inventory its virtues (for a very similar list might be attributed to
others of far less moral power) but by feeling the effect He had on
those who knew Him. They are constantly telling us how He amazed them,
awed them, and bound them to Himself. Their superlative tribute to Him
is that, holding His own pure and exalted view of God, they felt no
incongruity in thinking of Him as beside God on the throne. It may have
been their belief in His Messiahship, accredited by His resurrection and
destining Him to come with power and judge the world, that led them to
place Him at the right hand of God; but there was the place where He
seemed to them to belong. None have ever conceived God more highly than
they who said, "God is love," and these men set Jesus side by side with
God. The evangelists do not attempt to describe what He was like; they
let us hear Him and watch Him, as He lived in the memories of those who
had been with Him; and He makes His own impression. The crowning tribute
is that we have no loftier adjective in our vocabulary than
"Christlike."
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