Now, far be it from us to belittle the splendor of this scientific vision. Modern scientific searchers are, indeed, finding innumerable illustrations of the greatness of God. There is every reason why the scientific investigator should rejoice in a calling which enables him to think God's thoughts after him; but when a scientist will have it that his belief in God arises only from his technical investigations, we must declare our suspicion that he is employing his findings to confirm a faith already held, though that faith may be part of his unconscious spiritual possessions. Many times the scientist is determined that the scientific discoveries shall look in theistic directions just to satisfy the imperious though unconscious demands of his own soul. Some scientists are theists just because they are bound to be so, for the close contemplation of the entire situation in the material realm does not make for any adequate theistic verdict. It is hard indeed to believe that the nice adjustments of matter and force occur without the governance of a supervising intelligence. There are too many facts which suggest skill to make it easy to believe that the natural world is just the outcome of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Science itself very likely establishes a presumption in favor of a governing mind, but the deeper question is as to the character of that mind. Is it a moral mind? At this point the hopeful evolutionist will break out that the progress is so definitely from lower to higher that no one ought to doubt the benevolence of the Power moving upward through all things. Evolution is, indeed, full of promises to one who already trusts in the goodness of God; but the progress from lower to higher is not always unmistakable. Often the survival of the fittest is just a survival of those fittest to survive, and not the survival of those who ought to survive. There are too many things which survive which ought to be killed off. Simple good can give way to complex evil without at all violating the requirements of the evolutionistic formula. But even if we concede all that the scientist claims for his conception of God; if we grant that terms like "omnipresence" and "omniscience" and "progress" clothe themselves with new force in the Copernican and Newtonian and Darwinian terminology, we must nevertheless insist that none of this rises to the moral height of the biblical teaching. Nor are we willing to admit that the biblical doctrine is to be discounted because it grew up amid small theories of the material universe. The old Hebrew views of the physical system, outdated as they are now, are nevertheless full of sublimity on their own account. But even if they were infinitesimal as compared with the vast stretches of modern scientific measurements, the moral grandeur of the idea of God of which they were the framework stands forth unmistakably. We must not permit the quantitative bigness of modern scientific notions to obscure the qualitative fineness of the biblical ideal of God. Modern philosophy comes also and announces that it has a better God than that of the Scriptures. The most imposing modern philosophical systems are those which proclaim some form of idealism. The gist of the idealistic argument always is that the world itself is nothing apart from thought; that thought-relationships rule in and through all things; that there are no things-in-themselves; that there can be no hard-and-fast stuff standing apart from God. Things must come within the range of thought or go out of existence. There is no alternative. Now, thought implies a thinker, and this implication carries us at once to God. Here, again, we have no desire to question the cogency of the argument. We are ready to admit that this is the strongest theistic argument that has thus far been built. To be sure, there are some questions that inevitably suggest themselves: What is the thinker? Is it impersonal thought, as some have maintained? Is it just the sum of all forms of consciousness—our consciousnesses being organs or phases of the Supreme Consciousness? Or is the thinker strictly personal, carrying on a thought-world by the power of his will and calling into existence finite thinkers in his own image? Assuming that the world is the expression of the thought of a Personal Thinker who acts in the forces of nature and creates men in his own image, the further question arises as to the character of that Thinker. While returning the heartiest thanks to the idealist for his argument—full as it is of aid for the Christian system—we have to protest that the argument does not lift us to the full height of the ideal of God inculcated in the Scriptures. And if this is true of the majestic systems of idealism, how much more is it true of the other and less convincing systems which are just now having their day! We have already spoken of pragmatism as possessing validity as a method, but pragmatism can hardly cherish pretension of being itself a system of religious philosophy.

Some very strenuous searchers after divine treasures have professed to discover value in various non-Christian religions. They have patiently studied the great Indian world-views, for example, which are admittedly the most important religious creations outside of Christianity. These students come back to us with fragments of doctrines, gems of ethical wisdom, traces of sublimity from the Indian sacred books. It would be foolhardy not to receive any genuine treasures, no matter what the mine from which they have been quarried. We are all eager to admit the immeasurable possibilities of the Oriental type of thinking for the development of Christianity, but Oriental systems thus far have been chiefly significant as indicating what stupendous religious powers can do when they are off the track. The Indian systems of religion have run loose in India. As a result, nowhere in the world has religion been taken more seriously and more sincerely than by the Indian peoples. It is simply impossible to bring the charge against the Indian races that they have not made the most of their religion. The final indictment to be passed upon the Indian systems is that while the Indian peoples have made the most of those systems, the systems have made least of the Indian peoples; and this because of the defects in the conception of the Divine itself. It is doubtful whether the Indian could call his highest gods personal. If he declares them personal, he can hardly make them moral in the full sense; that is to say, in the sense of exerting their force on the world in favor of justice and righteousness and love.

Now, it is just in the quality of moral force that the God of the Scriptures shows his superiority. The entire revealing process can be looked upon as one long story of the moralization of the idea of God. Let it be granted that the biblical idea was at the beginning marked by the naive and the crude. Personally, we have never been able to see the pertinency of the reasonings which make the Hebrew Jehovah as imperfect as some students would have us believe. Nevertheless, for the sake of the argument we will admit limitations in the early Hebrew conception of God. Even with such concession, however, the outstanding characteristics of that God were from the beginning moral. Suppose that Jehovah was at the beginning just a tribal Deity. The difference between Jehovah and other tribal deities was that the commandments which were conceived of as coming from him looked in the direction of increasing moral life for the people, and these moral demands upon the chosen people were conceived of as arising out of the nature of Jehovah himself. To be sure, the early narratives employ expressions like "the jealousy of God," but even a slightly sympathetic reading of the Scriptures indicates that the jealousy was directed against whatever would harm human life. In the mighty pictures of the patriarchs the heroes speak to their God as if the same moral obligations rested upon God as upon themselves. There is nothing finer in the Old Testament than Abraham's challenge, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

We are not specially interested in the growth of the ideas as to the power of God, though we repeat that it is difficult for us to believe that the early Hebrews thought of their Deity as so narrowly limited in power as some modern students seek to prove. The conception of the might of Jehovah grew through the centuries and followed upon the extension of the knowledge of the Hebrews about the world in which they lived. If tomorrow morning some revolutionary astronomical discovery should convince us that the solar system is much vaster than we have ever imagined, the theist would, of course, extend the thought of the sway of God to all that solar system. If there were some method of becoming aware that the bodies of the entire astronomical system are millions of times more numerous than scientists ever have dreamed, the theist would, of course, maintain that the righteous purpose of his God reaches to all of these bodies. The growth of the Hebrew idea was somewhat parallel to this. Even when the Hebrew thought of the outside peoples as having gods of their own; he believed that as soon as his God came into conflict with the other gods, he would shatter them with his might. By the time the first chapters of Genesis were written the Hebrew conceived of God as creator of all things, and thereafter the growth of the belief in the power of God kept pace with the enlarging view of the world.

We repeat that we are not much concerned with the growth of the idea of the power of God. We are, however, interested in the manifest teaching or direct implication of the Scriptures that from the beginning the Hebrews thought of God as under obligation to use his power for moral ends. What the moral ends were depended upon the growth of the moral ideal. At the very beginning it was believed that since God had chosen the people of Israel to be his people, he must fight their battles for them. It is from this point of view that we must deal with the early idea of God as a God of battles. God was wielding his force for a moral purpose. Moreover, if God had chosen a people to be the channel through which he was to reveal himself to the world, he must be very patient with that people. How sublime is the Old Testament belief in the patience of God toward Israel! To use the phrase of our later days, God accommodated himself to the progress which the people could make. When the prophets called upon the people to walk with God, they implied a willingness on God's part to walk with the people. If they must lengthen their stride, he must shorten his; he must bear with them in their inadequate notions; he must judge their efforts by the direction in which they were tending rather than by any achievement in itself.

It is from the point of view of their growing apprehension of God as moral that we can best understand the ferocity of the Israelite toward the so-called heathen peoples. The boasting of the Israelites over the slaughter of outsiders must be understood from the faith in the moral destiny which the prophets conceived the God of Israel to hold in store for his people. The reason assigned for cruelties and warfares upon heathen peoples was the abominations practiced by those peoples. Of course it is possible for a student obsessed with the modern doctrine of the economic determinism of history to say that we have in the story of the Hebrew development just the play of economic forces with moral aims assigned as their formal justification. Assuming that the narratives of the conquest of Canaan are true, what the Hebrews desired—these economists tell us—was the milk and the honey. They made their so-called advance in obedience to God an excuse for taking possession of the milk and the honey. Now, he would be blind indeed who would deny that economic values do play their part in wars of conquest; he would be foolish who would deny that wars always do justify themselves by appealing to lofty religious motives, but nevertheless the impact of the Hebrew history upon the life of the world has been a moral impact, due to the belief of the Hebrews that they were instruments in the hands of a moral God. If we could behold the abominations in heathenism upon which the old prophets looked, we would sympathize quite readily with an impulse which might seem to call for outright destruction. A friend of mine, a man of the most sensitive Christian feeling, once stood on the banks of the Ganges and watched people by the hundreds and thousands going through religious ceremonials, some of which were defiling and others silly. In the midst of the reeking vileness of one scene in particular he said that he felt for the moment an impulse like that of the old prophets to cry out for the destruction of the entire mass. The situation seemed so dreadful and so hopeless! All this passed in an instant to the loftier feeling of compassion, but the stirring of the more primitive impulse was really moral in its foundation. In any case, the old Hebrew notion was of a God who would put a growing moral ideal in the first place.

It is not necessary for us to attempt to trace the steps of the growth of the moral ideal for God. As we have said, that ideal kept pace with the growth of the ideal for man. We must call attention, however, to the fact that the growth of the ideal was in the direction of increasing emphasis upon the responsibilities that go with power. The Hebrew may not have definitely phrased the responsibility, but he nevertheless shows his increasing realization of the obligations resting upon God. When we reach the later prophets we discern that his moral obligation upon God himself becomes more and more a determining factor. There appear glimpses of belief that God must not only fight for his people, but that he must suffer in their sufferings. It is of little consequence for our present purpose whether the suffering servant of Jehovah of the later Israelitish Scriptures is a group of persons or an individual. The implication is that the suffering is a revelation of Jehovah himself. Moreover, there appears a widening stream of emphasis on the tenderness of God's care for his people. The Hebrew writers comparatively early broke away from the thought of God as merely philanthropically inclined toward Israel. They did not think of him as bestowing gifts which were without cost to himself. They show him as deeply involved in the life of the nation and as caring for his people with an infinite compassion. This enlarging revelation was made clear to the people through the utterances of prophets, the decrees of lawgivers, the songs of psalmists, the interpretations of historians, and the warnings of statesmen. Slowly and surely, moreover, the people attained grasp on the doctrine that the greatest revelation of God is the revelation in human character itself. They began to look forward to the coming of one who would in himself embody the noblest and best in the divine life, who would gather up in himself all the ideals and purposes toward which the law and the prophets had looked. New Testament revelation as such we leave to the later chapters, but we have come far enough, we think, to warrant us in saying that only he can understand the Scriptures who sees that the chief fact about the Scriptures is the emphasis on the moral nature of God. Other Scriptures besides that of the Hebrews—we might say scientific, philosophical, extra-Christian Scriptures—have stood for the existence of God; but none have stood for the existence of such a God as the God of the Bible. The salient feature of the Bible is its thought of God.



CHAPTER V

THE BOOK OF CHRIST

It is of course the merest commonplace to say that the revelation of God in the Scriptures comes to its climax in Christ. The revelation in Christ gathers up all that is loftiest in the utterances of the Old Testament and gives it embodiment in a human life. It is legitimate to declare that there is little either in the teaching of Christ or in his character that is not at least foreshadowed in the Old Testament. The uniqueness of the Christ revelation consists in the manner in which the separate streams of truth of the law and the prophets and the seers and the poets are merged together in the Christ teaching, and in the fine balance with which the ideal characteristics seen from afar by the saints of the older day were realized in the living Christ. We might justly say that a devout reader of the Old Testament could find rich elements of the Christ revelation even if he should never see a page of the New Testament. The virtue of the New Testament, however, is that all the elements revealed throughout the course of the historic periods of Israel's career are bound together in the life and character of Christ. It is no mere epigram to say that if the greatest fact about the Scriptures is God, the greatest fact about God is Christ. Any thorough study of the Scriptures must revolve around Christ as its center. If the Scriptures mean anything, they mean that in Christ we see God. Of course it is open to the skeptic to reply that in all this the Scriptures are completely mistaken; but he cannot maintain that this is not what the Scriptures mean. The Book comes to its climax with an honest conviction that Christ is the consummate revelation of God. The day when men could charge any sort of manipulation of the material by Scripture writers for unworthy doctrinal purposes is past. We have in another connection said that each of the New Testament books was, indeed, written with a definite aim, but this does not mean that facts and teachings were twisted out of their legitimate significance. That Christ is the supreme gift of God to men is so thoroughly built into the biblical revelation that there is no digging that idea out without wrecking the entire revelation itself. To maintain anything else would be to do violence to the entire scriptural teaching. The burden of the entire New Testament is that God is like Christ.

This may seem to some to be a reversal of present-day approach to the study of the Christ. We may appear to be attacking the problem from the divine angle rather than from the human. Why not ask what Christ was rather than what God is? It is indeed far from our purpose to minimize the rich significance of the humanity of Jesus, but we are trying now to get the scriptural focus. We do not believe that we can secure that focus by looking upon the character of Christ as a merely human ideal. The might of the scriptural emphasis is that Christ is the revelation of God. We are well aware that ordinary theological debate has centered on the question as to the extent to which Christ is like God. The Bible is colored with the belief that God is like Christ. This may seem at first glimpse to be a very fine discrimination, but the importance of that discrimination appears when we reflect that mankind is more eager to learn the character of God than to learn how far a man can climb toward divinity. In all such discussions as this we proceed at peril of being misunderstood, but we must repeatedly affirm that important as is the problem as to the human ideal set forth in Christ, the divine ideal set forth in him is more significant as explaining the hold of the Bible on men. Is it not sufficient for us to behold a lofty human ideal in the portrait of Christ without such emphasis on this ideal as also a revelation of the divine character? The answer depends upon what we are most interested in. If we care most for a perfect and symmetrical human life, we reply that we find that perfection and symmetry in Christ. In our second chapter we laid such stress upon the importance of the enlarging human ideal that we have committed ourselves to the importance of the Christ ideal as a revelation of the possibilities of human life. But if we take that ideal in itself without any reference to the character of God, how much enlargement does it bring us? As members of the human race we can indeed be proud that a human being has climbed to such moral stature as did Jesus, but what promise does that give that any other human being can attain to his stature? As a member of the human race I can be profoundly thankful for a philosopher like Kant. I can, indeed, dedicate myself to the study of the Kantian philosophy with some hope of mastering it. I can seek to reproduce in my life all the conditions that surrounded the life of the great metaphysician, but I cannot hope to make myself a Kant. Strive as I may, such transformation is out of the question. I may attain great merit by my struggle, but I cannot make myself a Kant. The more intensely I might struggle, the more convinced I would become of the futility of my quest, and the genius of the philosopher might tower up at the end as itself a grim mockery of my ambition. So it is with the Christ if he is not a revelation of the God life at the same time that he is an idealization of the human life. Viewed as a revelation of God's character the Christ life is the hope of all the ages. Viewed only as a masterpiece of human life it might well be the despair of mankind.

Of course there are those who believe that it is impossible for Christ to be a revelation of the human without also being a revelation of the Divine. We have no desire to quarrel with this position, though we find it more optimistic than convincing. Incredible as it may seem at first thought, the universe might theoretically be regarded as a system ruled over by a Deity who had brought forth a character like that of Christ just for the sake of seeing what he could achieve in the way of a masterpiece, without being himself fundamentally involved in self- revelation. Christ might conceivably be a sort of poetic dream of the Almighty rather than a laying bare of the Almighty's own life. We find that human authors by an effort of great imagination fashion creations in a sense completely different from themselves. It might be theoretically urged that the character of Christ is different from the character of God. If this seems very far-fetched, let us remind ourselves then that there are those in the present world who conceive of Christ as the very highest peak of human existence and yet deny that he has any sort of significance as a revelation of the forces back of the world. Such thinkers maintain that Christ is the best the race has to show, and yet affirm that the race is but an insignificant item in the total massiveness of the universe. The Bible establishes the faith of men against skepticism like this by making the Christ-ideal for God himself so attractive and appealing.

There are those who proclaim that we do not need any revelations of God to make then human ideal fully significant—the human ideal stands by itself. Some such thinkers go consistently the full length of saying that they are willing to keep their eyes open to the hopelessness of the universe. They can see nothing beyond this life but total oblivion. Nevertheless, with their eyes open they will fight on manfully to the end and take the final leap into the dark without flinching. They are very apt to add that their philosophy is the only unselfish one; that the desire of men for any sort of help from conceptions about the Divine is selfishness where it is not sentimentalism. It is fair to say that such doctrines seldom meet large response. The reason is not that men selfishly seek out a God for the sake of material reward that may come to them, but that they seek him for the sake of finding a resting place for their minds and souls, for the sake of cherishing an end which seems in itself worth while, for the sake of laying hold on a universe in which they can feel at home. If this is selfishness, then the activities of the human soul in its highest ranges are selfish. If it is selfish to long for a universe in which the heart can trust, it is selfish also to enjoy the self-satisfaction with which some of these thinkers profess to be ready to take their leap into the night. As we scan the history of Christianity since the day of the Founder we are impressed that religious organizations as such which arise within Christianity tend to survive in proportion as they make central the significance of Christ as the revealer of the character of God. We would not for a moment underestimate the importance of those groups of Christians who take Christ merely as a prophet who lived the noblest life and exalted his truth by the noblest death. Many such believers manifest the very purest devotion to Christ. They are his disciples. But the historic fact is that organizations founded on such doctrines alone do not win sweeping triumphs. On their own statement the most they hope to do is to spread the leaven of their doctrine into the thinking of other groups of Christians. Their service in this respect is not to be disparaged, for at all times the more orthodox opinion of Christ, so called, needs the leavening of emphasis on the humanity of Christ. But after all these allowances it is just to affirm that theology which sees only the human in Christ does not come to vast power, and that clearly because the world is chiefly interested in the question with which the entire biblical revealing movement deals, namely, what is the nature of God? With that question answered we can best understand the nature of man and the possibility of communion between man and God.

We may be permitted to pick up the thread of the argument in the last chapter and ask again what moral purposes rule the forces of this world. It must indeed be an odd type of mind that does not at least occasionally ask what this world is for, and what all this cosmic commotion is about. It is well for all of us to do the best we can without asking too many hard questions, but the queries will at times come up and with the normal human being they are not likely easily to down. We are in the midst of powers which defy our intellects. We do not go far in the attempt to read the secrets of nature around us without discovering that all we can hope to spell out is the stages by which things come to pass, and the mechanisms by which they fit themselves together. Why they come to pass is beyond us, except in a most limited sense. The purposes for which events occur in this world are not self- evidently clear. Explanations of purposes only make matters worse; and at any moment this problem of the mystery of the universe may take personal significance in the form of a blow upon the individual which seems to mock all hope of anything worth while in human life. There is nothing more futile than the attempts even of ministers to divine the meanings of afflictions or of those inequalities of lot which attend the natural order. The preachers can encourage us to make the most of a bad lot, but their guesses as to why these things are ordinarily add to our burdens. No, the mind of itself just by contemplation of the things as they are cannot find much light. This enigma has always been before the philosophers in the form of the question as to physical suffering. A number of plausible answers have been made as to the reasons for pain in the present order. Leibnitz said that even the Almighty creating the finite world had to adjust himself to some limitations for the good of the whole; that if some forces are to run in one direction, there must be mutual concession and compromise in the adjustment of manifold other activities; and that all this involves at least apparent stress and injustice at particular points. This sounds well enough, but why the afflictions of the individual who happens to be one of the particular points should be just what they are is a mystery. The upshot is that the ordinary man—the plain man, as we call him—must either give up the whole problem by seeking to forget it, or must rebel against it, or he must find relief in a God whom he can trust without being able to fathom his plans.

The tragedy of physical affliction is light as compared to the tragedies which arise in any conscience which seeks to take moral duties seriously. To be sure, we live at present in a rather complacent age so far as the struggles of conscience are concerned. The advice of the world is to do the best we can and let the rest go. We are not to take ourselves too seriously. But the long moral advances of the race have come through those who have taken the voices of conscience seriously. Now, what can a sensitive conscience make of moral duty? Assume that we have before us the exalted Christ ideal, and accept this as the guide of our lives—assume that we even have hope of some day attaining to that ideal—the distracting question is bound to jump at us: Are we doing enough? Have we sacrificed enough for those in worse plight than ourselves? And what about our past mistakes? Shall we go back and try to undo these? At the very best that might be like unraveling through the night what we have spun through the day. It will not do to dismiss this as unhealthiness or morbidness of mind. William James has shown pretty conclusively that the so-called normal or healthy-minded moral life is apt to be shallow. The great moral tragedy of the race is the distance between the ideal and any possible attainment. We can console ourselves by saying that noble discontent is the glory of man; but that does not get us far. There is only one way out, and that is to trust that we are dealing with a Christlike God, that his attitude toward us is the attitude of Jesus toward men. It is impossible to feel that in discipleship with Jesus men were complacent about their own moral perfections on the one hand, or harassed with self-reproaches on the other. They were advancing toward the realization of an ideal in companionship with One who not only in himself realized the human ideal, but who taught them that all the forces of the world would work together with them in their climb toward perfection, and that God would be patient with their blunders.

The question as to the character of God becomes more vital the longer we reflect. The growing conscience of our time demands that two conceptions be kept together—that of power and that of moral responsibility. We cannot hold a person responsible unless he has power; we cannot give a person power unless he is willing to act under responsibility. This realization is fast modifying all our relations to politics, to finance, to industry, even to private duties. We are swiftly moving toward the day when society will insist that any measure of power which has an outreach beyond the circle of the holder's personal affairs shall be acquiesced in by society only on condition that the holder of that power be willing definitely to assume responsibility to society. What we demand of men we demand also of God, and we have the scriptural warrant for believing that these human demands are themselves hints concerning the nature of God. Now, no one doubts the power of God. All scientific and philosophic trends are toward the centralization of power in some unitary source. All our study of nature and of society convinces us that there is a unity of power somewhere. If this be true, there must be raised with increasing persistence the question as to whether the World- Power is acting under a sense of moral responsibility. There were days when this problem was not raised as it is now. Men assumed for centuries that the king could do no wrong; that he could order his people about in the most arbitrary fashion. In our own time we have seen advocacy of the doctrine that the man of wealth is a law unto himself in the handling of the power that comes with wealth. Such mistakes never were really a part of the biblical idea. In shaping the threefold notion of priest and prophet and king to make the people familiar with the functions of God-sent leadership the strokes of emphasis always fell on the responsibility of the prophet to proclaim his message at whatever cost to himself, of the priest to keep in mind the sacredness of his office, and of the king to rule in righteousness. These demands were inevitably carried up to God: and in Christ the supreme effort is made to convince us that we can trust in the God of Christ, though we may not be able to understand him. This is not the place for an attempt at determining the essentials of the Christ career. Some features of that life, however, as illustrating responsibility in the use of power can be hinted at here. Take the story of the temptation. We are not concerned now with the historic form in which the temptation occurred. After the historians have made all the changes in the drapery of the story they choose, the fact remains that the temptation narrative deals with the essential problems of any leader confronted with a task like that of Christ. The Messianic consciousness was a consciousness of power. How should the power be used? Should it be used to minister to human needs like those of hunger? That would promise a quick solution of a sort. The peoples would eagerly rally around the new deliverer. Should there be an attempt to utilize the political machinery of the time? There could be no doubt of the effectiveness of this plan. Should the exalted lofty spiritual state of the Master be relied upon to carry him through spectacular displays of extraordinary might that would capture the popular mind? Each of these suggestions presented its advantages. Each might have been rightfully followed by some one with less power than Jesus had; but for him any one of them would have involved a misuse of power, and hence he cast them all aside.

The miracles reported of Christ have this for their peculiarity, that they show a power conceived of as divine used for a righteous purpose. It is significant that practically all the miracles described are those of healing or of relief. The kind of miracle that an irresponsible leader would have wrought is suggested by the advice of James and John to Jesus to call down fire on an inhospitable Samaritan village. The reported reply of Jesus, "Ye know not what spirit you are of," is the final comment on such use of power. Now, after we have made the most of the miracles recorded of Jesus, after we have made them seem just as extraordinary in themselves as possible, their most extraordinary feature is this use to which the power was put; and on the other hand, if we strip the miracles of everything that suggests breach of natural law and make them just revelations of super-normal control over nature through laws like those whose existence and significance we are beginning to glimpse to-day, still we cannot empty these narratives of their significance as revealing a morally responsible use of force. Let us be just as orthodox as we can, the purpose of the use of the forces is the supreme miracle; let us be just as destructively radical as we please, we cannot eliminate from the Scriptures this impression of Christ as one who used power with a sense of responsibility. This revelation is one which the ages have always desired.

We must be careful to keep in mind the connection of the Christ life with what came before it and what has proceeded from it. Here we have the advantage which comes of regarding the Bible as the result of a process running through the centuries. If the Bible were not a library, but only a single book, written at a particular time, we might well be attracted by the nobility of its teachings, but might despair of ever making the teachings effective. There is no proving in syllogistic fashion that Jesus was what he claimed to be, or that he was what his disciples thought of him as being; but when we see a massive revealing movement centering on the idea of God as revealed in Christ, when we see the acceptance of the spirit of Christ opening the path to communion with the Divine, and when we find increasing hosts of persons finding larger life in that approach to the Divine, we begin to discern the vast significance of the scriptural doctrine that in Christ we have the revelation of the Christlike God.

In this discussion we have been careful to avoid the terms of formal and creedal orthodoxy. This is not because the present writer is out of sympathy with these terms, but because he is trying to keep to the main impression produced by the New Testament. The fundamental scriptural fact is that in Jesus the early believers saw God; they came to rest in God as revealed in Christ. This is true of the picture of Christ in the earliest New Testament writings. Modern scholarship has not been able to find any documents of a time when the disciples did not think of Jesus as the revealer of God. If the disciples had not thought of Jesus thus, they would have found little reason to write of him. Now the scriptural authors employ various terms to declare the unique intimacy of Christ with God. In these expositions Jewish and Greek and even Roman thought terms play their part. Passages like the opening sentences of the fourth Gospel, or like the great chapter in the Philippians, are always profoundly satisfying and suggestive in their interpretation of the fundamental fact, but that fundamental fact itself is the all-essential —that in Christ the New Testament writers thought of themselves as having seen God, and as having gazed into the very depths of the spirit of the Father in heaven. Believing as we do, moreover, in the helpfulness of the creedal statements of the church, we must nevertheless avow that such statements are secondary to the impression made upon the biblical writers by actual contact with the Christ. We must not lose sight of the primacy of that impression as we study our Scriptures. We must not limit the glory of the impression itself by the limitations of some of the explanations which we undertake. Much harm has been done the understanding the Scriptures by speaking as if some of our creedal statements concerning Christ are themselves Scriptures! The scriptural Christ is greater than any creedal characterization of Christ thus far undertaken.

Of recent years an attempt has been made to prove that no such person as Jesus ever existed. The attempt has proved futile, but it has had a significance altogether different from what the propounders of the theory intended. The original aim was to show the contradictions of the testimony concerning Jesus and the inadequacies of the testimony to his existence as an historical Person. The result has been to show that the real significance of the Christ life is not to be found in any particular utterance, or in any specific deed, but in the total impact that he made upon the consciousness of man as suggesting the immediate presence of the Divine. The quality of the Christ life satisfies us in the inner depths as bearing witness to the quality of the God life. We have no sympathy with the views of the critics just mentioned; but we must say that no matter how the thought of God in Christ got abroad, no matter how mistaken our thought of the historical facts at the beginning of the Christian era, the belief in the Christlike God nevertheless did get abroad. There is no effacing that conception from the New Testament. No matter what detailed changes in the narrative itself radical criticism may think itself capable of making, the door was opened wide enough in the Christ for the divine light to stream through. We said in the last chapter that the most important feature of the biblical revelation is God himself. We must now say that the supreme fact about God is Christ.



CHAPTER VI

THE BOOK OF THE CROSS

If the central feature of the Scriptures is their idea of God, and if the climax of the biblical revelation is Christ, the greatest fact about Christ from the point of view of the Bible is his cross. We say fact advisedly, for we are not dealing with the theories that have sprung up to interpret the meaning of the cross. We are trying to deal solely with the direct impressions which seem to have been made upon the scriptural writers as to the place of the cross in the revealing movement.

We said in the last chapter that the Scriptures reach their climax in the doctrine that God is in Christ. The cross of Christ carries to most effective revelation the Christlike character of God. While we are not treating now the various creedal dogmas as to the person of Christ, we must not forget that those dogmas have essayed as part of their task the bringing of God close to men. The truth embodied in the text that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world is essential to knowing the Scriptures. We have seen that even as a warrior Jehovah was thought of as willing to bear his part of the burdens of the chosen people. We have seen growing the idea that Jehovah was under moral obligation to carry through the uplifting work which he had begun. We have seen prophets attain to glimpses of the meaning of suffering for the divine life, and we have beheld the culmination in the suffering of Christ. In those perplexing phrases of the creeds like, "Very God of very God," the aim of the church has been perfectly clear—to guard the scriptural idea that God was so truly in Christ that the sufferings of Christ were the sufferings of God. Even when least intelligible the pain of men becomes more easily borne if men can believe that in some real sense their pain is also the pain of God. That God is Christlike in capacity to suffer is in itself a revelation of no small consequence.

In the cross of Christ we see exalted with surpassing power the belief that God acts out of righteousness in his relation to the universe and to men. It must needs be that Christ suffer. The writers seem unable to escape the conviction that they are beholding the working of divinely inevitable moral necessities. These moral obligations are not to be conceived of as external to God or imposed on him from outside of himself. In the Scriptures they seem, rather, to be expressions of his own nature. When the writers of theories about the cross lay stress on those profound obligations of God toward moral law which must be discharged in the work of redemption, the Scriptural basis underneath such theories is the implication that God, by the very fact of what he is, must act righteously. His power is not his own in such sense that he can act from arbitrary or self-centered motives. The Judge of all the earth must do right, at whatever cost to himself. The Scriptures keep close to the thought of God as a supremely powerful Being under supreme responsibility in the use of his power. If we can believe the Scripture that in Christ we see God, and that the bearing, of Christ during his suffering reveals really and uniquely the bearing of God himself, we have a revelation of the grasp with which moral responsibility holds the Almighty against even any momentary slip into arbitrariness. Sometimes we hear the sufferings of Christ preached as a pattern of nonresistance for men. It is permissible thus to interpret the cross within limitations; but this is not the essential aspect of the cross, as explaining its hold on men. The all-important doctrine as to the use of power is hinted at in the Master's word that he had but to call for legions of angels if he so chose. Under most extreme provocation the forces of the Almighty held to their appointed task. If the Almighty had been conceived of as a Despot or an Egotist, he would have been expected to resort at once to revengeful violence in the presence of such insults as those of the persecutors of the Son of God. The Source of all activity can hardly be conceived of as passive; but the passivity of the Christ of the cross suggests that no outrage by men can divert the almighty power from its moral purpose. This is really a gathering together and lifting on high of the doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount, that God maketh the sun to shine upon the just and the unjust, and causeth his rain to fall on the evil and the good. That is to say, while the Bible thinks of the cross as laying bare the Almighty's reaction against evil, it also thinks of that cross as showing a God who will not be disturbed by any merely "personal" considerations. We behold the Almighty's use of power for the advance of a moral kingdom. The Almighty is set before us as exerting all his power for the relief of men. The cross makes the profoundest revelation of the moral fixedness and self- control of God so long as we hold to the scriptural representation. It is to be regretted that many theological theories break away from the Scripture basis and build upon assumptions which are artificial, not to say unmoral: or, rather, in their striving after system they get away from the atmosphere of moral suggestiveness with which the Gospels and Epistles surround the cross. That God will do his part in the redemption of men is set before us in the cross. That part can be nothing short of making men yearn to be like Christ and of aiding them in their struggle for the Christlike character. It will be remembered that in the last chapter we called attention to the hopelessness of the Christian ideal viewed as an ideal in itself without a dynamic to help men to realize the ideal. If Christ is only to reveal to us the character toward which men are to strive, we are in despair. That one man has reached such perfection is in itself no promise that other men may reach that perfection. Moreover, the excellence of Christ is not only a moral excellence; or if it is moral excellence, that excellence involves a balance of intellectual attributes which is for us practically out of reach. Now, Christ is the ideal, but the ideal is one toward which we not only labor in our own strength, but one whose attainment by us is an object of solicitude for God himself. And so we see in the cross a patience which will bear with men to the utmost, and which will reenforce them as they press toward the goal. The glory of Christianity is largely hi the paradox that it sets before men an unattainable ideal and then commands them to attain the ideal. If the cross is nothing but a revelation of an ideal for men, this paradox is insoluble and intolerable. In the scriptural light of the cross, however, we catch the glory not of an abstract ideal, but of a Father's love for his children —not of the commands of conscience in the abstract, but of the desires of a personal Friend who will lift men as they stumble and fall. The ground for this patience seems as we read to be in the very nature of God himself. God has brought men into this world without consulting them, he has dowered them with the terrific boon of freedom, he has set them in hard places; but he has done this out of a moral and loving purpose. He therefore makes more allowances for men than exacting men ever can make for themselves. He puts at the service of men so much of his power as they can appropriate by their moral effort. The Christ of the cross is taught as the truth about God—the God who is at once the supremely real and the supremely ideal places his powers at the service of men who would make their Christ-ideal progressively real in themselves.

The power of the Bible over men centers around the teaching that the cross not only reveals God as morally bound to redeem men, but that it also shows us the divine aim in redemption. Men are to be redeemed by seeking for forgiveness in the name of the moral life set on high by the cross, but the repentant soul is to show its sincerity by devotion to the task and spirit of cross-bearing. The aim of the cross is to bring men together into a fellowship of the cross, in a fellowship of suffering for the sake of the moral triumph to be won at the end. We are accustomed to think of suffering as implying the possibility of joy. The man who can feel keen sorrow can feel keen joy; they who have the power to weep have also the power to laugh. In the final kingdom the weeping shall be turned into joy. But, according to the Scriptures, it is not necessary for the disciples to wait until the consummation before entering into the joy of their Lord. There is an entrance to the divine mind through bearing the cross. Those who desired to learn of Christ as true disciples were expected to take up the cross and carry it daily. The Master also declared that the disciples were to think of themselves as blessed when they endured persecution for righteousness' sake, for men had persecuted the prophets in all ages. The implication is that knowledge of and sympathy with the prophets came out of cross-bearing like that of the prophets. To use a simple illustration: a student of the careers of the leaders of any reform might gather a mass of information about the reformers in an outside kind of fashion, as by the study of books, or by visits to the scenes of their struggles. Such a student, however, could not master the inner spirit of a reformer's life until he himself had battled for some cause at risk to himself. So the man who seeks to bear the cross of Christ is on the path to sympathetic inner knowledge of the spirit of Christ. In our second chapter we called attention to the truth that approach to knowledge of God is through the doing of the will of God. Doing of the will, according to Jesus, means much more than just a round of good deeds. It means carrying the burdens which are inevitable in cross-bearing. There is good reason for believing that the very highest step in spiritual learning is taken only through the willingness to bear the cross. In our modern educational systems we lay varying degrees of stress upon the importance of different methods of acquiring knowledge. There is at the bottom of the scale the method of mastering the instruction of the teacher by attention and reflection. There is, next, the method of learning through one's own experiment—through using microscope or telescope or textbook for oneself. There are, further, the social aids to the quickening of the mind as groups of students study and discuss together. But the deepest knowledge comes as the student feels his sympathy and feeling involved. If he must pay himself out for the acquisition of the truth, or if he must defend his conclusions at great cost to himself, this experience which involves the feeling involves also the sharpening of the intellect. The eyes of the soul are opened to the subtler intuitions. Thus it is in the revelations of the divine purpose in the Scriptures. It is hard to make out how anybody can hope to master a revelation of a cross-bearing God without himself being a cross-bearer. In the New Testament narratives of Passion Week the Master is reported as winning his surest convictions of the presence of God and of the victory of his truth at the very instant when he entered into the extreme depths of suffering. In the after days it was when the saints faced stoning that they saw the heavens opening; it was the apostle who had suffered hardships almost too numerous to mention who got the most positive conviction of the reward which awaited him. In the school of Christ the very heaviest stress must fall upon the indispensability of cross-bearing as a means to understanding.

Not only does the biblical revelation see in the cross of Christ the culminating manifestation of the character of God, and of the purpose of God in redemption, but it also shows to us the divine method in helping men. We have spoken of those who dwell upon the Master's nonresistance as a model of passivity in the presence of evil. The example of Christ when thus treated is in danger of being misinterpreted. The Christ of the cross was passive so far as physical force was concerned; but he was never more intensely active in the higher ranges of his faculties—in self-control and in alertness to the finer whisperings of the spirit. The Christ's non-resistance to the physical might of evil is not to be interpreted as acquiescence on the part of the Divine toward the ravages of evil, but, rather, as the divine method of thwarting evil by allowing it to reveal itself. No amount of preaching about the nature of evil can equal in eloquence the self-revelations of that nature as it works itself out into expression. While in a degree the self-revelation of evil put forth against Christ was unique, yet we must remember that the sins which put Christ to death are just those commonest in all time. Judas was disappointed. He carried spite no more tenaciously than the ordinary heart is capable of treasuring it. Caiaphas desired simply to hold his own position and preserve the peace of his nation. Very likely the type of opinion in the midst of which Caiaphas moved would have pronounced that he rendered a disagreeable, but nevertheless necessary patriotic service in his condemnation of Christ. Pilate too meant well, but was afraid of the crowd. His friends may have commended his administrative wisdom in allowing the people to have their own way. It was the play of just such ordinary forces of sin against an extraordinary holiness that made it impossible for the mightiest revelation ever vouchsafed to man to work through the earthly activity of Jesus for more than a few months. The Scripture does not have much to do with abstract sins; with concrete sins of men as we actually find them, it has much to do.

The Scriptures make it very clear that there is something which satisfies God himself in the work of redemption. God acts out of moral obligation, out of self-respect, out of love. But he acts always in respect for men as free moral beings. The cross appeals to the free spirit of men to behold the nature of evil, and to flee from that evil toward their redeeming God. If the redemption is to be a moral redemption, the last detail of the method must be moral. The power of the Almighty must not be used to break down freedom of men. It would be theoretically possible for an almighty power to bring to bear such pressures upon human wills as to crush them, but the strongest representation of the power of God in the New Testament does not go to the length of hinting at interference with the freedom of men. Men are to be saved as free men or not at all. We might conceivably imagine the Almighty as granting such indubitable vision of the material rewards of righteousness and the material loss of unrighteousness as would irresistibly draw masses of a certain grade of men into the Kingdom without a morally free consent to righteousness. Or we might conceive of the Almighty as so weighing this or that factor of environment as to diminish almost to the vanishing point the free choice of men. This kind of compulsion would not be moral. The only compulsions of the cross are those of a moral God splendidly attractive on his own account.

It will have occurred to some readers by this time that we have said very little about the love of God in our discussion of the Scriptures, whereas that love is the outstanding feature of the biblical revelation. Our reply is that we have been trying to be true to the impression made by the Scriptures as to the kind of love which we must think of as expressing the deepest fact in God's life. We would not in the least minimize the truth that love is the last word of the scriptural revelation; but in our modern life we are apt to get away from the quality of the love revealed in the Bible. The love of the cross is built upon the righteousness which runs through the Sacred Book from the beginning to the end. A god of indifferent moral quality might love. The old Greek gods had favorites upon whom they lavished their affections. A god might be conceived of as an amiable and well-wishing father, foolishly indulgent toward his children. The love of the New Testament, however, is the love of a Father who dares to appeal to the children to make heroic response; and who shows his own love for them in the lengths to which he will go for them. Moral love will go the full length of heroic self-sacrifice. We cannot help believing that it is the quality of God's love, rather than the mere fact of that love, which is the explanation of the power of the biblical teaching.

A friend of mine many years ago wrote a book which he called The Hero God. The publishers objected to the title because they saw in it a touch of sensationalism. No title, however, could have more adequately set forth the biblical God. God is the hero of the Bible. His heroism appears in growing revelation from the beginning. It shows itself superbly in his willingness to bear the burdens of mankind and in the appeals which he makes for response from men. The picture is of a God who dares to believe in men and who dares to call on them for the extremes of self-sacrificing devotion, not to himself as an arbitrary Person, but to himself as the center of the moral life which is above all other life worth while. It is open to anyone to object that this biblical picture does not necessarily hold good for God; but it is hardly possible to object that the picture is not biblical. The picture stands in its own right and makes its own appeal. The only way to test it in life is to yield to its appeal.

If we are asked to account for the power of the Bible, we are at a loss for any one single statement. The most compendious reply is the magnetism of the love of God as revealed in Christ. This is so broad, however, that it may not make a direct and vivid impression. We may say, then, that one element of the magnetism of the biblical revelation is the magnetism of the appeal to the heroic. Whatever else the Bible may or may not be, it is not a book of soft and easy things. Breaths of the most rigorous life blow across every page. It is made for man in that it calls men to the service of the highest and best. The religious systems which make the fewest and least demands upon their followers most speedily fall away; those that call for the utmost are most likely to meet the enthusiastic response. There is a frank honesty about the biblical appeal which holds a charm for all men in whom there are any sparks of real manhood. The severities of the Christian life are nowhere disguised. Men are never lured on by false pretenses. The path is the path of cross-bearing, and the reward is the comradeship between God and man as they together work toward the highest goal, a comradeship which of itself brings relief to men burdened with the mystery of the universe and agonized by remorse over sin. This essay is quite as significant for what it has not said as for what it has said. In our omissions we have tried to keep clear the main outlines of scriptural revelation. We have sought to hold fast to principles rather than to discuss details. We have done this because we have believed that there is more value for religious understanding in pointing out the loftier biblical peaks which give the direction of the whole range than in tracing out pathways through detailed passages. Moreover, we have been afraid to employ many theoretical terms lest we blur the quick moral impressions made by the Scripture phrasings. For example, it may be objected that our treatment of the character of God is altogether inadequate. We have not thus far said a word about the Trinity, for example, or about atonement. The reason is that we believe that any theories about God must base themselves upon the moral suggestions of the Scriptures; and our business is with these rather than with the theories. The received revelation concerning God would warrant us in fashioning any theory as to the richness of his inner constitution which might even measurably satisfy our minds. The scriptural atmosphere as to the moral life in God must, however, be kept in the chief place in all of our theological theories. Atonement must be interpreted chiefly in terms of ethical steadiness if it is to build on a biblical foundation. But the instant we use formal terms like "Trinity" and "atonement" we have taken at least one step away from the Scriptures. Again, we have said nothing about Divine Providence. The Bible is full of instances of providences, but here also we have preferred to let the fundamental moral character of the biblical God speak for itself. We may have our own belief that there is no scriptural warrant for that separation which obtains in much theology between the processes of God and the processes of nature. We may admit that the Hebrew had no very systematically framed theory of the processes of nature, but he deemed God to be in such close touch with nature as easily to control its forces for a good end. In two accounts of the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites we have an apparent contradiction which is at bottom not a contradiction. In one account God seems to cause the waters to wall up on both sides of the Israelites in defiance of the laws of nature. In another God accomplishes the drying of the path through the blowing of a strong east wind. The Hebrew would not have troubled himself much with the apparent contradiction, for he would have conceived of God as the chief factor in either event, and of his purpose as having the right of way. There is thus no great value in discussing specific instances as long as the care of God for his children is the animating purpose of the entire biblical content. So with answers to prayer—the God who is willing to go for men to the lengths revealed in the cross will surely answer any prayer worth answering. The essential is to lift prayer up into harmony with the entire revealing and redeeming movement, and to conceive of it as a fitting of the whole life into the purposes of a moral God. Certain general requirements would always have to be met. Prayer would have really to deal with what is best for the individual, best for those around him, and most in harmony with the character of God himself. So, again, with the progress of the kingdom of God on earth—the God of whose nature the cross is the final revelation can be trusted to do the best possible for the Kingdom here and now. Much debate about the second coming of Christ misses the great moral principles which are the heart of the Christian revelation and loses itself in the incidental forms in which those principles were declared. The best preparation for the coming of the kingdom of Christ is absorption in the principles of Christ and in the spirit of Christ. To get away from these in our search for external and material conditions which are the mere vehicle of the biblical thought is not only to pursue a will-o'-the-wisp, but to injure true spiritual progress. Jesus has given us the spiritual principles which must control the destiny of any society here and now. In the light of the Christ-faith revealed in the cross we must not despair of the redemption of men by the city-full and by the nation-full, for the greatest confidence ever placed in men is the implied trust of the cross of Christ. The Almighty at the beginning paid an immense tribute to the human race when he flung it out into the gale of this existence. In the light of the cross we cannot believe that He expected the race to sink. In the cross the Christ who revealed God's own mind showed the length he was willing to go in confidence that men would finally turn to him with all the powers of their lives. To throw up our hands and say that the world is getting worse and we can do nothing without a speedy physical return of the Christ is to overlook the spiritual forces of the cross.

We have said nothing about immortality. What the Scriptures themselves say is largely incidental. The Master did not allow himself to be drawn into any extended conversation about the details of a future life, but he did give us the God of the cross. In the presence of that cross we can profess the utmost confidence in the eternal life of the sons of God, while at the same time acknowledging the utmost ignorance as to any of the material conditions of the future life. It is commonly assumed that the resurrection of Christ proves that we shall likewise rise, but the rising of Christ does not of itself prove that others shall rise. The cross, however—showing the extent to which the Divine is willing to go for men—is the ground of our hope. God will not leave his loved ones to see corruption. In a word, the cross of Christ gathers up all the biblical truth. It is a revelation of God's own character, of his hope for men, of the methods by which he seeks to win men, and of the ground of our faith in a right outcome for men and for society.

We may be permitted to summarize by saying that scientific and historical biblical study is a preparation for the knowledge of the Scriptures; that it is exceedingly important that the student approach with the correct preliminary point of view. The revelation of the inner significance, however, does not dawn until there is recognition of the need of obedience to the principles laid down in the Scriptures. And this obedience must be broad enough to include zeal for the uplift of our fellow men in all phases of their lives. Out of righteous living the devoted life, we believe, will see that the greatest fact of the Bible is God; that the greatest fact of God is Christ; that the greatest fact of Christ is the cross.

THE END