Chapter 12

It does not seem to me possible to recognize the claim of any historical Religion to be final and ultimate, unless it include within itself a principle of development. Let me, as briefly as I can, illustrate what I mean. It is most clearly and easily seen in the case of Morality. If the idea of a universal Religion is to mean that any detailed code of Morals laid down at a definite moment of history can serve by itself for the guidance of all human life in all after ages, we may at once dismiss the notion as a dream. In nothing did our Lord show his greatness and the fitness of his Religion for universality more than in abstaining from drawing up such a code. He confined himself to laying down a few great principles, with illustrations applicable to the circumstances of his immediate hearers. Those principles require development and application to the needs and {166} circumstances of successive ages before they can suffice to guide us in the details of conduct. To effect this development and application has been historically the work of the Church which owes its origin to the disciples whom he gathered around him. If we may accept the teaching of the fourth Gospel as at least having germs in the actual utterances of our Lord, he himself foresaw the necessity of such a development. At all events the belief in the continued work of God's Spirit in human Society is an essential principle of the Christian Religion as it was taught by the first followers of its Founder. Take for instance the case of slavery. Our Lord never condemned slavery: it is not certain that he would have done so, had the case been presented to him. Very likely his answer would have been 'Who made me a judge or a divider,' or 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.' No one on reflection can now fail to see the essential incompatibility between slavery and the Christian spirit; yet it was perhaps fourteen hundred years before a single Christian thinker definitely enunciated that incompatibility, and more than eighteen hundred years before slavery was actually banished from all nominally Christian lands. Who can doubt that many features of our existing social system are equally incompatible with the principles of Christ's teaching, and that the {167} accepted Christian morality of a hundred years hence will definitely condemn many things which the average Christian Conscience now allows?

And then there is another kind of development in Ethics which is equally necessary. The Christian law of Love bids us promote the true good of our fellow-men, bids us regard another man's good as equally valuable with our own or with the like good of any other. But what is this good life which we are to promote? As to that our Lord has only laid down a few very general principles--the supreme value of Love itself, the superiority of the spiritual to the carnal, the importance of sexual purity. These principles our consciences still acknowledge, and there are no others of equal importance. But what of the intellectual life? Has that no value? Our Lord never depreciated it, as so many religious founders and reformers have done. But he has given us no explicit guidance about it. When the Christian ideal embraced within itself a recognition of the value and duty of Culture, it was borrowing from Greece. And when we turn from Ethics to Theology, the actual fact of development is no less indisputable. Every alteration of the ethical ideal has brought with it some alteration in our idea of God. We can no longer endure theories of the Atonement which are opposed to modern ideas of Justice, though they were quite compatible with {168} patristic or medieval ideas of Justice. The advances of Science have altered our whole conception of God's mode of acting upon or governing the world. None of these things are religiously so important as the great principle of the Fatherhood of God, nor have they in any way tended to modify its truth or its supreme importance. But they do imply that our Theology is not and cannot be in all points the same as that of the first Christians.

Now with these presuppositions let us approach the question of that great structure of formal dogma which the Church has built upon the foundation of Christ's teaching. A development undoubtedly it is; but, while we must not assume that every development which has historically taken place is necessarily true or valuable, it is equally unphilosophical to assume that, because it is a development, it is necessarily false or worthless. Our Lord himself did, indeed, claim to be the Messiah; the fact of Messiahship was what was primarily meant by the title 'Son of God.' Even in the Synoptists he exhibits a consciousness of a direct divine mission supremely important for his own race; and, before the close, we can perhaps discover a growing conviction that the truth which he was teaching was meant for a larger world. Starting from and developing these ideas, his followers set themselves to devise terms which should express their own sense of their Master's unique {169} religious value and importance, to express what they felt he had been to their own souls, what they felt he might be to all who accepted his message. Even to St. Paul the term 'Son of God' still meant primarily 'the Messiah': but in the light of his conception of Jesus, the Messianic idea expanded till the Christ was exalted to a position far above anything which Jewish prophecy or Apocalypse had ever claimed for him. And the means of expressing these new ideas were found naturally and inevitably in the current philosophical terminology of the day. With the fourth Gospel, if not already with St. Paul, there was infused into the teaching of the Church a new element. From the Jewish-Alexandrian speculative Theology the author borrowed the term Logos to express what he conceived to be the cosmic importance of Christ's position. He accepted from that speculation--probably from Philo--the theory which personified or half-personified that Logos or Wisdom of God through which God was represented in the Old Testament as creating the world and inspiring the prophets. This Logos through whom God had throughout the ages been more and more fully revealing Himself had at last become actually incarnate in Jesus Christ. This Word of God is also described as truly God, though in the fourth Gospel the relation of the Father to the Word--at {170} least to the Word before the Incarnation--is left wholly vague and undefined.

From these comparatively simple beginnings sprang centuries of controversy culminating in that elaborate system of dogma which is often little understood even by its most vigorous champions. You know in a very general way the result. The Logos was made more and more distinct from God, endowed with a more and more decidedly personal existence. Then, when the interests of Monotheism seemed to be endangered, the attempt was made to save it by asserting the subordination of the Son to the Father. The result was that by Arianism the Son was reduced to the position of an inferior God. Polytheism had once more to be averted by asserting in even stronger terms not merely the equality of the Son with the Father but also the Unity of the God who is both Father and Son. The doctrine of the Divinity of the Holy Ghost went through a somewhat similar series of stages. At first regarded as identical with the Word, a distinction was gradually effected. The Word was said to have been incarnate in Jesus; while it was through the Holy Ghost that the subsequent work of God was carried on in human hearts. And by similar stages the equality of the Holy Ghost to Father and to Son was gradually evolved; while it was more and more strongly asserted that, in spite of the eternal distinction of {171} Persons, it was one and the same God who revealed Himself in all the activities attributed to each of them.

Side by side with these controversies about the relation between the Father and the Word, there was a gradual development of doctrine as to the relation between the Logos and the human Jesus in whom he took up his abode. Frequently the idea of any real humanity in Jesus was all but lost. That was at last saved by the Catholic formula 'perfect God and perfect man'; though it cannot be denied that popular thought in all ages has never quite discarded the tendency to think of Jesus as simply God in human form, and not really man at all. Even now there are probably hundreds of people who regard themselves as particularly orthodox Churchmen who yet do not know that the Church teaches that our Lord had a human soul and a human will.

What are we to make of all that vast structure, of the elaboration and complication of which the Constantinopolitan Creed which we miscall Nicene and even the so-called Athanasian Creed give very little idea to those who do not also know something of the Councils, the Fathers, and the Schoolmen? Has it all a modern meaning? Can it be translated into terms of our modern thought and speech? For I suppose it hardly needs demonstration--that such {172} translation is necessary, if it be possible. I doubt whether any man in this audience who has not made a special study of the subject, will get up and say that the meaning of such terms as 'substance,' 'essence,' 'nature,' 'hypostasis,' 'person,' 'eternal generation,' 'procession,' 'hypostatic union,' and the like is at once evident to him by the light of nature and an ordinary modern education. And those who know most about the matter will most fully realize the difficulty of saying exactly what was meant by such phrases at this or that particular moment or by this or that particular thinker. A thorough discussion of this subject from the point of view of one who acknowledges the supreme claims of Christ upon the modern mind, and is yet willing fairly to examine the traditional Creed in the light of modern philosophical culture, is a task which very much needs to be undertaken. I doubt if it has been satisfactorily performed yet. Even if I possessed a tithe of the learning necessary for that task, I could obviously not undertake it now. But a few remarks on the subject may be of use for the guidance of our personal religious life in this matter:

(1) I should like once more to emphasize the fact that the really important thing, from the point of view of the spiritual life of the individual soul, is our personal attitude towards our Lord himself and his teaching, and not the phrases in which we express {173} it. A man who believes what Christ taught about God's Fatherhood, about human brotherhood and human duty, about sin, the need for repentance, the Father's readiness to forgive, the value of Prayer, the certainty of Immortality--the man who finds the ideal of his life in the character of Jesus, and strives by the help which he has supplied to think of God and feel towards God as he did, to imitate him in his life, to live (like him) in communion with the Father and in the hope of Immortality--he is a Christian, and a Christian in the fullest sense of the word. He will find in that faith all that is necessary (to use the old phrase) for salvation--for personal goodness and personal Religion. And such a man will be saved, and saved through Christ; even though he has never heard of the Creeds, or deliberately rejects many of the formulae which the Church or the Churches have 'built upon' that one foundation.

(2) At the same time, if we believe in the supreme importance of Christ for the world, for the religious life of the Church and of the individual, it is surely convenient to have some language in which to express our sense of that importance. The actual personal attitude towards Christ is the essential thing: but as a means towards that attitude it is of importance to express what Christ has actually been to others, and what he ought to be to ourselves. Children {174} and adults alike require to have the claims of Christ presented to them before they can verify them by their own experience: and this requires articulate language of some kind. Religion can only be handed down, diffused, propagated by an organized society: and a religious society must have some means of handing on its religious ideas. It is possible to hold that under other conditions a different set of terms might have expressed the truth as well as those which have actually been enshrined in the New Testament, the Liturgies, and the Creeds. But the phrases which have been actually adopted surely have a strong presumption in their favour, even if it were merely through the difficulty of changing them, and the importance of unity, continuity, corporate life. It is easier to explain, or even if need be, alter in some measure the meaning of an accepted formula than to introduce a new one. Religious development has at all times taken place largely in this way. Our Lord himself entirely transformed the meaning of God's Fatherhood, Messiahship, the Kingdom of God, the people of God, the true Israel. At all events we should endeavour to discover the maximum of truth that any traditional formula can be made to yield before we discard it in favour of a new one. If we want to worship and to work with Christ's Church, we must do our best to give the maximum of meaning {175} to the language in which it expresses its faith and its devotion.

(3) We must insist strongly upon the thoroughly human character of Christ's own consciousness. Jesus did not--so I believe the critical study of the Gospels leads us to think--himself claim to be God, or to be Son of God in any sense but that of Messiahship. He claimed to speak with authority: he claimed a divine mission: he claimed to be a Revealer of divine truth. The fourth Gospel has been of infinite service to spiritual Christianity. It has given the world a due sense of the spiritual importance of Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Perhaps Christianity could hardly have expanded into a universal Religion without that Gospel. But we cannot regard all that the Johannine Christ says about himself as the _ipsissima verba_ of Jesus. The picture is idealized in accordance with the writer's own conceptions, though after all its Theology is very much simpler than the later Theology which has grown out of it permits most people to see. We must not let these discourses blind us to the human character of Christ's consciousness. And this real humanity must carry with it the recognition of the thoroughly human limitations of his knowledge. The Bishop of Birmingham has prepared the way for the union of a really historical view of Christ's life with a reasonable interpretation of the Catholic {176} doctrine about him, by reviving the ancient view as to the limitation of his intellectual knowledge;[2] but the principle must be carried in some ways further than the Bishop himself would be prepared to go. The accepted Christology must be distinctly recognized as the Church's reflection and comment upon Christ's work and its value, not as the actual teaching of the Master about himself.

(4) It must likewise be recognized that the language in which the Church expressed this attitude towards Christ was borrowed from Greek Metaphysics, particularly from Plato and Neo-Platonism in the patristic period, and from Aristotle in the Middle Ages. And we cannot completely separate language from thought. It was not merely Greek technical phrases but Greek ways of thinking which were imported into Catholic Christianity. And the language, the categories, the ideas of Greek Philosophy were to some extent different from those of modern times. The most Platonically-minded thinker of modern times does not really think exactly as Plato thought: the most Catholic-minded thinker of modern times, if he has also breathed the atmosphere of modern Science and modern Culture, cannot really think exactly as Athanasius or Basil thought. I {177} do not suppose that any modern mind can think itself back into exactly the state of mind which an ancient Father was in, when he used the term Logos. This central idea of the Logos is not a category of modern thought. We cannot really think of a Being who is as distinct from the Father as he is represented as being in some of the patristic utterances--I say advisedly some, for widely different modes of thought are found in Fathers of equal authority--and yet so far one with him that we can say 'One God, one spiritual Being, and not two.' Nor are we under any obligation to accept these formulae as representing profound mysteries which we cannot understand: they were simply pieces of metaphysical thinking, some of them valuable and successful pieces of thinking, others less so. We must use them as helps, not as fetters to our thought. But, though we cannot think ourselves back into exactly the same intellectual condition as a fourth- or fifth-century Father, there is no reason why we should not recognize the fundamental truth of the religious idea which he was trying to express. A modern Philosopher would probably express that thought somewhat in this manner. 'The whole world is a revelation of God in a sense, and still more so is the human mind: all through the ages God has gone on revealing Himself more and more in human consciousness, especially through the prophets and other {178} exceptionally inspired men. The fullest and completest revelation of Himself was made once for all in the person and teaching of Jesus, in whom we recognize a revelation of God adequate to all our spiritual needs, when developed and interpreted by the continued presence of God's Spirit in the world and particularly in the Church which grew out of the little company of Jesus' friends.'

(5) I do not think at the present day even quite orthodox people are much concerned about the technicalities of the conciliar Theology, or even about the niceties of the Athanasian Creed. They are even a little suspicious sometimes that much talk about the doctrine of the Logos is only intended to evade a plain answer to the supreme question of the Divinity of Christ. You will expect me perhaps to say something about that question. I would first observe that the popular term 'divinity of Christ' is apt to give a somewhat misleading impression of what the orthodox teaching on the subject really is. For one thing, it is apt to suggest the idea of a pre-existent human consciousness of Jesus, which would be contrary to Catholic teaching. The Logos--the eternal Son or Reason of God--pre-existed; but not the man Jesus Christ who was born at a particular moment of history, and who is still, according to Catholic Theology, a distinct human soul perfectly and for ever united with the Word. {179} And then again, it is apt to suggest the heretical idea that the whole Trinity was incarnate in Christ, and not merely the Word. Orthodox Theology does not teach that God the Father became incarnate in Christ, and suffered upon the Cross. And lastly, the constant iteration of the phrase 'Divinity of Christ' tends to the concealment of the other half of the Catholic doctrine--the real humanity of Christ. To speak of the God-manhood of Christ or the indwelling of God in Christ would be a truer representation even of the strictest orthodox doctrine, apart from all modern re-interpretations. But even so, when all this is borne in mind, it may be asked, What is the real meaning of saying that a man was also God? I would answer, 'Whether it is possible to give a modern, intelligible, philosophically defensible meaning to the idea of Christ's Divinity depends entirely upon the question what we conceive to be the true relation between Humanity in general and God.' If (as I have attempted to show) we are justified in thinking of all human consciousness as constituting a partial reproduction of the divine Mind; if we are justified in thinking of human Reason, and particularly of the human Conscience, as constituting in some measure and in some sense a revelation by means of which we can rise to a contemplation of the divine nature; if Personality (as we know it in man) is the highest category within our knowledge; then {180} there is a real meaning in talking of one particular man being also divine; of the divine Reason or Logos as dwelling after a unique, exceptional, pre-eminent manner in him.

As Dr. Edward Caird has remarked, all the metaphysical questions which were formerly discussed as to the relation between the divine and the human nature in Christ, are now being discussed again in reference to the relation of Humanity in general to God. We cannot say intelligibly that God dwells in Christ, unless we have already recognized that in a sense God dwells and reveals Himself in Humanity at large, and in each particular human soul. But I fully recognize that, if this is all that is meant by the expression 'divinity of Christ,' that doctrine would be evacuated of nearly all that makes it precious to the hearts of Christian people. And therefore it is all-important that we should go on to insist that men do not reveal God equally. The more developed intellect reveals God more completely than that of the child or the savage: and (far more important from a religious point of view), the higher and more developed moral consciousness reveals Him more than the lower, and above all the actually better man reveals God more than the worse man. Now, if in the life, teaching, and character of Christ--in his moral and religious consciousness, and in the life and character which {181} so completely expressed and illustrated that consciousness--we can discover the highest revelation of the divine nature, we can surely attach a real meaning to the language of the Creeds which singles him out from all the men that ever lived as the one in whom the ideal relation of man to God is most completely realized. If God can only be known as revealed in Humanity, and Christ is the highest representative of Humanity, we can very significantly say 'Christ is _the_ Son of God, very God of very God, of one substance with the Father,' though the phrase undoubtedly belongs to a philosophical dialect which we do not habitually use.