xviii. 15, 16, bring out the broad providential, governing and
energizing activity; Ps. cvii. 20; Wisd. xvi. 12, emphasize the redemptive activity in the narrower sense. All these ideas really underlie the Prologue, though they do not all receive equally explicit expression. The dominant thought of the Prologue is the thought of creation, revelation and redemption wrought by ‘the living God’—that old comprehensive genuinely Hebraic name—but wrought by Him through His Son, who is also His Word.
The phrase that has just been used brings us round to another aspect of the Prologue, which also takes us away from Philo and back to the Old Testament, or to sources still more immediately Christian. If there is any truth in the contention that the doctrine of the Prologue governs the rest of the Gospel, it must be not directly as a doctrine of the Logos, but rather (as has been pointed out especially by Grill and H. J. Holtzmann) indirectly through those two great constituent conceptions of Life and Light which together make up, and are embraced under, the doctrine of the Logos. The antecedents of these two conceptions are to be sought far more in the Old Testament, and on the direct line of Christian development, than in any language of Philo’s. As has just been said, ‘the living God’ is not only a strictly Hebraic and Old Testament idea, but one of the most fundamental of all the ideas of which the Hebrew mind and the Old Testament have been the vehicles. The Prologue to the Fourth Gospel is essentially based upon this idea, and works it out in a form that is also determined by the Old Testament. The significant combination of Life and Light, which is so characteristic of the Prologue and which so runs through the Gospel, can hardly have any other ultimate source than Ps. xxxvi. 9: ‘With thee is the fountain of life; in thy light shall we see light,’ the first half of which has an important parallel in Jer. ii. 13, ‘my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.’ There is of course the difference that what in the Old Testament is ascribed directly to Jehovah, in the Gospel is ascribed to the Logos. That is part of the Evangelist’s method, which we may assume to be at work all through. But not only does the combination of Life and Light belong essentially to the Old Testament and not to Philo, but each of these ideas taken separately has without doubt an Old Testament and not a Philonic basis. It is true enough that Philo makes use of metaphors derived from ‘Life’ and ‘Light,’ and applies them to the Logos, as he is indeed profuse in metaphors of this character; they are part of his literary embroidery. It is also quite possible that the metaphors were in the first instance suggested to him by the same Old Testament passages. But the use in the Fourth Gospel is far deeper and more pregnant with meaning. It is also rightly urged that the use in the Gospel, more particularly of the conception of Life, is really incompatible with Philo’s system. The teaching of Philo is at bottom dualistic; for him matter is evil, and his object is to remove God from contact with it. In St. John there is no dualism. The writer conceives of matter as penetrated with the divine. Alike God and the Word of God work downwards and outwards, through spirit to the material envelope and vesture of spirit. There is no inconsistency between the spiritual and the material quickening, both of which are taught distinctly in the Gospel. ‘As the Father raiseth the death and quickeneth them, even so the Son also quickeneth whom he will’ (John v. 21); ‘As the Father hath life in himself, even so gave he to the Son also to have life in himself’ (ver. 26). Both Father and Son are a principle of life which takes possession at once of soul and body, which imparts alike ethical and spiritual vitality to the disciple of Christ on earth, and that eternal life which is not something distinct from this but really the continuation of it in the world to come. No one can fail to see the powerful comprehensiveness of this idea, which incorporates and assimilates with ease such Jewish notions as that of the resurrection of the body, where Philo’s dualism makes a break and condemns his system either to superficiality or inconsequence.
Another point that would be of importance if the facts were really as is often alleged, is the use of the term Paraclete. Philo, like St. John, has this term; and if it were true that with him too it is a designation of, or directly in connection with, the Logos, that would greatly strengthen the case for the view that St. John was really borrowing from him. But the doubts on this head, first raised by Heinze, and more recently enforced by Dr. Drummond and Dr. Grill, appear to be perfectly valid[59]. It is not the Logos that is called Paraclete, but the Cosmos[60].
We observe that the Cosmos, which is compared to the high priest’s vestments, is also described as ‘son (of God).’ This is very contrary to the usage of the Evangelist, for whom the Cosmos (in the sense in which he uses the word) is far more the enemy of God than His son.
All these points together make up a wide divergence between Philo’s doctrine and that of the Fourth Gospel. They go far to justify Harnack’s epigrammatic saying that ‘even the Logos has little more in common with that of Philo than the name, and its mention at the beginning of the book is a mystery, not the solution of one’ (_History of Dogma_, i. 97). We may discount the epigram a little, as one has to discount all epigrams; but when we have done this, there remains in it a large and substantial truth.
iv. Possible avenues of connexion.
It does not follow that I would deny all connexion between the Philonian Logos and St. John’s. My doubt is whether this connexion can have been literary. I find it difficult to picture to myself the Evangelist sitting down to master the diffuse tomes of Philo. Where is the interest that would impel him to do this? Philo is a student and a philosopher. He is a philosopher who operates with a sacred text, and therefore has unlimited opportunity for applying and expounding his philosophy. But the Evangelist is interested in none of his theorems for their own sake. There is only one thing that he seeks. He wants a formula to express the cosmical significance of the Person of Christ. When he has got that, he is satisfied. For the purpose of filling up his formula and working out its meaning, he goes not to Philo but to the Old Testament. There, and in his own experience, he finds all the data that he needs.
I believe that there is a connexion between Greek, or Hellenistic, speculation and the Fourth Gospel. But I can conceive of this best through the medium of personal intercourse and controversy. How did St. Paul get his first knowledge of Christianity? Doubtless through his own vehement attacks upon Christians, which he found so calmly and steadfastly resisted; or, it may be, through the disputations in the synagogues and in the law courts, of which he was the witness. We may well believe that St. John extended his knowledge in the same way. Partly he would learn from foe, and partly from friend. In a place like Ephesus he would from time to time hold controversy with philosophers of the stamp of Justin. But, apart from this, in the Christian community itself he would find germs of teaching such as had been planted by the Alexandrian Jew Apollos. We are left to conjecture; and we have so few positive data to go upon, that our conjectures are of necessity vague. The Evangelist need not have waited for his arrival in Ephesus to come in contact with the idea of the Logos, not perhaps in its full Philonian form but in a form that might lead up to the Philonian. Philo (as we have seen) drew largely from the Stoics; and there were Stoics in the cities of Decapolis[61]. At a centre like Antioch they would be found in greater numbers; and at such a centre it would be quite possible to fall in with a wandering disciple or disciples of Philo. I have long thought that it would facilitate our reconstruction of the history of early Christian thought, if we could assume an anticipatory stage of Johannean teaching, localized somewhere in Syria, before the Apostle reached his final home at Ephesus. This would account more easily than any other hypothesis for the traces of this kind of teaching in the _Didaché_, and in Ignatius, as well as in some of the earliest Gnostic systems.
We cannot verify anything. We have no materials for the purpose. We can only deal a little with probabilities. But behind all probabilities it is enough for us to know that there must have been many avenues by which the conception of the Logos may well have reached the Apostle besides that of the direct and systematic study of the writings of Philo.
II. Relation of the Prologue to the rest of the Gospel.
1. View of Harnack.
Mention has been made above of Harnack’s view as to the relation of the Prologue to the main body of the Gospel. He holds that the Prologue is really separable from this, that it is of the nature of a postscript, or after-thought, rather than a preface. He regards it as not so much the statement of a programme to be worked out in the Gospel as a sort of ‘covering letter,’ intended to commend the work to cultivated Gentile or Hellenistic readers.
This view has in its favour the obvious fact that the word λόγος, wherever it occurs in the body of the Gospel, is used in its ordinary and familiar sense, and not in the special sense given to it in the Prologue. In face of this fact it seems at first sight difficult to treat the Prologue as containing the leading idea that runs through and determines the character of the rest of the Gospel. And yet it is well known that many writers have so treated it—and conspicuously the two French scholars, M. Jean Réville and the Abbé Loisy.
There are two ways of escaping the inference just referred to. One is that of which I have just been speaking, the method adopted by Dr. Julius Grill in his recent work on the origin of the Fourth Gospel, to take as the leading idea, not the Logos but the combination of Life and Light which the Evangelist gives as equivalent to the Logos[62]. The other is to follow in the track of M. Loisy, and to treat the doctrine of the Logos as a summary name for the whole ‘theology of the Incarnation[63].’
2. View of Grill.
It is easy (as I have said) to bring under the head of Life and Light all the miracles in the Gospel, from the miracle at Cana down to the Raising of Lazarus and even the miraculous Draught of Fishes in chap. xxi. Both the first ‘sign’ and the last are instances of the assertion of creative power, and the Healing of the Blind Man in chap. ix, where this aspect is more subordinate, illustrates the activity of Christ as the Light of the World, a text on which the concluding paragraph of the chapter enlarges.
Besides the miracles there are many other allusions to these ideas of Life and Light: notably to the ‘living water’ in the discourse with the Samaritan woman (John iv. 10-14); to the ‘bread of life’ in the discourse in the synagogue of Capernaum (vi. 31-58); in the comment apparently suggested by the libation at the Feast of Tabernacles (vii. 37 f.); in the sayings on Light in viii. 12, xi. 9 f., as well as in chap. ix.
There can be no doubt at all that these ideas of Light and Life are quite fundamental to the Evangelist, and that they fill a large place in his mind. But to say this is not quite the same thing as to say that the Gospel is constructed upon them. The Evangelist has told us in set terms on what the ground-plan of his Gospel is constructed; ‘these (things) are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name’ (xx. 31). There is no need to seek for any other definition of the object and plan of the Gospel than this.
3. View of Loisy.
The same verse may help us to form an estimate of the theory of M. Loisy. So far as ‘the theology of the Incarnation’ is meant to express the same thing, the phrase is certainly justified. And if M. Loisy intends it to be at the same time a paraphrase for the doctrine of the Logos, we can have no objection. At least the only objection we need have would be that he is using a vaguer and more general term, when he might use one that is both definite and characteristic. As a rule, one is more likely to get at the heart of a writer’s meaning by laying stress on the peculiar and individual elements in his teaching, and not on that which he shares with others.
But the question how far either M. Loisy or Dr. Grill has succeeded in defining the root-idea of the Gospel is after all only secondary. The real issue is not as to the accuracy of the definition, but as to the nature of the relation which is pre-supposed between the root-idea, the principle which covers the plan and object of the Gospel, and the narrative of which the main body of the Gospel consists. If I may speak for a moment of the leading idea, not of St. John but of M. Loisy, I am afraid that the tendency, if not the purpose, of his whole book is to convict the author of the Gospel of writing fiction where he professes to write fact. ‘The theology of the Incarnation’ is a euphemism which is meant to describe the Gospel as from end to end allegory and symbol, the product of an idea and not of reality.
M. Loisy, we all know, occupies a peculiar position. His criticism is radical and destructive, but he believes himself to bring back as faith what his criticism has destroyed. Few recent writers have left less of the Fourth Gospel standing as solid history; but at the same time he is a dutiful son of his Church, and what the Church accepts he also accepts as true. There can hardly be any doubt that the Church, as far back as we can trace its convictions, regarded the Fourth Gospel as strictly historical. If it had not done so, it is very questionable whether the Church itself would have taken the shape it did. There are many in these days who, if they followed M. Loisy as a critic, would find it very hard to follow him as a theologian. They are not a little perplexed to understand how he himself can reconcile the two trains of his thinking. That, however, is his own affair, with which outsiders are not concerned. But they are greatly concerned to know whether or not his criticism is sound. There is no doubt at all that the Fourth Gospel expresses the Evangelist’s ‘theology of the Incarnation.’ It expresses it, but is it the product of it? Has it no more substantial foundation than an idea? Is it history, or is it fiction? That is the great and vital question to which we must address ourselves more directly in the next lecture.
Footnote 55:
Réville, _La doctrine du Logos_, p. 67.
Footnote 56:
Grill, p. 218.
Footnote 57:
Ibid., p. 114. Philo’s word for ‘interpreter,’ however, is not cognate with that used by St. John.
Footnote 58:
Ibid., pp. 115-26.
Footnote 59:
Drummond, _Philo Judaeus_, ii. 237-9; Grill, pp. 133-6.
Footnote 60:
The main passage is _Vit. Mos._ iii. 14.
Footnote 61:
That accomplished scholar P. Wendland points to the tendency to attach the Stoical idea of the λόγος specially to Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth. He quotes from Cornutus (_temp._ Nero) τυγχάνει δὲ ὁ Ἑρμῆς ὁ λόγος ὤν, ὃν ἀπέστειλαν πρὸς ἡμᾶς ἐξ οὐρανοῦ οἱ θεοί. Hermes is the messenger of the gods, and communicates their will to men; and it is conceivable that the use of the term λόγος in connexion with him may have in some slight degree suggested, or prepared the way for, its use in connexion with the new revelation. See _Christentum u. Hellenismus_ (1902), p. 7.
Footnote 62:
_Entstehung d. vierten Evang._ i. 4-31, 87 ff.
Footnote 63:
_Le Quatrième Evangile_, p. 98: ‘Les observations précédentes et tout ce qu’on a remarqué touchant le caractère du quatrième Evangile prouvent suffisamment que la théologie de l’incarnation est la clef du livre tout entier, et qu’elle le domine depuis la première ligne jusqu’à la dernière.’
LECTURE VII The Christology of the Gospel
1. The Gospel not a Biography.
Once more we fall back upon our main position. The Evangelist is writing a spiritual Gospel, and his whole procedure is dominated by that one fact. His object is to set forth Christ as Divine, not only as Messiah but as Son of God, as an object of faith which brings life to the believer.
It follows that all criticism which does not take account of this—and how large a part of the strictures upon the Gospel does not take account of it!—is really wide of the mark. M. Loisy, for instance, brings a long indictment against the Gospel for not containing things that it never professed to contain. It never professed to be a complete picture of the Life of the Lord. It never professed to show Him in a variety of human relationships. It never professed to give specimens of His ethical teaching simply as such. It did not profess to illustrate, and it does not illustrate, even the lower side of those activities that might be called specially divine, as (e. g.) the casting out of demons.
The Gospel is written upon the highest plane throughout. It seeks to answer the question _who_ it was that appeared upon earth, and suffered on Calvary, and rose from the dead and left disciples who revered and adored Him. And this Evangelist takes a flight beyond his fellows inasmuch as he asks the question who Christ was in His essential nature: What was the meaning—not merely the local but the cosmical meaning—of this great theophany?
It is not surprising if in the pursuit of this object the Evangelist has laid himself open to the charge of being partial or onesided. Those who use such terms are really, as we have seen, judging by the standard of the modern biography, which is out of place. The Gospel is, admittedly and deliberately, not an attempt to set forth the whole of a life, but just a selection of scenes, a selection made with a view to a limited and sharply-defined purpose. The complaint is made that it is monotonous, and the complaint is not without reason. The monotony was involved, we might say, from the outset in the concentration of aim which the writer himself acknowledges. And in addition to this it is characteristic of the writer that his thought is of the type which revolves more than it progresses. The picture has not that lifelike effect which is given by the setting of a single figure in a variety of circumstances. The variety of circumstance was included among those bodily or external aspects (τὰ σωματικά) which the writer considered to have been sufficiently treated by his predecessors. He described for himself a narrower circle. And it was because he kept within that circle, because he goes on striking the same chord, that we receive the impression of repetition and monotony. Perhaps the intensity of the effect makes up for its want of extension. But at any rate the Evangelist was within his rights in choosing his own programme, and we must not blame him for doing what he undertook to do.
We may blame him, however, if within his self-chosen limits the picture that he has drawn for us is misleading. That is the central point which we must now go on to test. The object of the Gospel would be called in modern technical language to exhibit a Christology. Is that Christology true? Does it satisfy the tests that we are able to apply to it? Can we find a suitable place for it in the total conception that we form of the Apostolic Age? Does it belong to the Apostolic Age at all; or must we, to understand it, come down below the time of the Apostles? To answer these questions we must compare the Christology of the Fourth Gospel with that of the other Apostolic writings, and more particularly with that of the Synoptic Gospels, of St. Paul, and of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
It does not take us long to see that the Christology of the Fourth Gospel has the closest affinity with this group of Epistles—we may say, with the leading Epistles of St. Paul and with that other interesting Epistle of which we know, perhaps, or partly know, the readers but do not know the author. It is worth while to bring in this because the unmistakable quotation from it in Clement of Rome proves it to belong to the Apostolic Age.
2. The Christology of St. John compared with that of St. Paul and of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
The meeting-point of all the authorities just mentioned—indeed we might say the focus and centre of the whole New Testament—is the title ‘Son of God.’ But whereas the Synoptic Gospels work up to this title, St. John with St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews work downwards or onwards from it. What I mean is this. The Synoptic Gospels show us how, through the conception of the Messiah and the titles equivalent to it, by degrees a point was reached at which the faith of the disciples found its most adequate expression in the name ‘Son of God.’ The culminating point is of course St. Peter’s confession represented at its fullest in the form adopted by St. Matthew, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Matt. xvi. 16). In the Synoptic Gospels, and we may say also in the historic order of events, this confession is a climax, gradually reached; and we are allowed to see the process by which it was reached. ‘Son of God’ is the highest of all the equivalents for ‘Messiah.’ And in the Synoptic Gospels we have unrolled before us, wonderfully preserved by a remarkable and we may say truly providential accuracy of reproduction with hardly the consciousness of a guiding idea, the historic evolution, spread over the whole of the public ministry, by which at its end the little knot of disciples settled upon this term as the best and amplest expression of its belief in its Master. We have seen that the Fourth Gospel is by no means wanting in traces of this evolution. But these too are traces, preserved incidentally and almost accidentally, without any deliberate purpose on the part of the author: they are the product of his historical sense, as distinct from the special object and the large idea that he had before his mind in writing his Gospel. This special object and large idea presuppose the title as it were full-blown. It was not to be expected that an evangelist sitting down to write towards the end of the first century should unwind the threads of the skein which, some fifty or sixty years before, had brought his consciousness to the point where it was. To him looking back, the evolutionary process was foreshortened; and we have seen that as a consequence he allowed the language that he used about the beginning of the ministry to be somewhat more definite than on strictly historical principles it should have been. That he should do so was natural and inevitable—indeed from the point of view of the standards of his time there was no reason why he should be on his guard against such anticipations. If we distinguish between the gradual unfolding of the narrative and the total conception present to the mind of the writer throughout from the beginning, we should say that this conception assumes for Christ the fullest significance of Divine Sonship.
More than this: we see, when we come to study the Gospel in detail, that the writer not only assumes the full idea of Sonship but has also dwelt upon it and thought about it and followed it out through all the logic of its contents. We may say that it is not only he that has done so but practically all the thinking portion of the Church of his time. We may see this from the comparison of St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews, not to speak of other New Testament writers. The Synoptists hardly come under the head of thinkers. They are content to set down facts and impressions without analysis and without reflection. But long before St. John sat down to write, those who really were thinkers had evidently asked themselves what was the meaning and what was the origin of that title ‘Son of God’ by which the Church was agreed to designate its Master. The more active minds had evidently pressed the inquiry far home. They did not stop short at the Baptism; they did not stop short at the Birth: they saw that the Divine Sonship of Christ stretched back far beyond these recent events; they saw that it was rooted in the deepest depths of Godhead. It is true both of St. Paul and of the Epistle to the Hebrews—that is, assuming that the Epistle to the Colossians is St. Paul’s—that they have not only the doctrine of the Son but the doctrine of the Logos, all but the name.
Now I know that there are many who will not agree with me; I know also that the position is not easy to prove, though, as we shall see, I believe that there are a number of definite facts that at least suggest it. But for myself I suspect so strongly as to be practically sure that in these processes of thought the apostolic theologians, as we may call them, were not altogether original. They were not without a precursor; they did not invent their ideas for the first time. I believe that we shall most reasonably account for the whole set of phenomena if we suppose that there had been intimations, hints, _Anhaltspunkte_, in the discourses of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. We have as a matter of fact such hints or intimations in the Fourth Gospel. The Evangelist may have expanded and accentuated them a little—he may have dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s—but I believe that it is reasonable to hold that they had been really there. The Founding of Christianity is in any case a very great phenomenon; and it seems to me simpler and easier, and in all ways more probable, to refer the features which constitute its greatness to a single source, to the one source which is really the fountain-head of all. Without that one source the others would never have been what they were.
The fact that St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews had substantially arrived at a Logos doctrine before any extant writing has mentioned the name, seems to throw light on the order of thought by which the Fourth Evangelist himself arrived at his doctrine of the Logos. It is the coping-stone of the whole edifice, not the foundation-stone. It is a comprehensive synthesis which unites under one head a number of scattered ideas. From this point of view it would be more probable that the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel was a true preface, written after the rest of the work to sum up and bind together in one mighty paragraph the ideas that are really leading ideas, though scattered up and down the Gospel. Whether it was actually written last does not matter. What I mean is that the philosophic synthesis of the events recorded in the Gospel came to the Evangelist last in the order of his thought; the order was, history first and then philosophic synthesis of the history. No doubt the synthesis was really complete before the Apostle began to write his Gospel; the writing of the Prologue may or may not have followed the order of his thought. It may have been, as Harnack thinks, a sort of commendatory letter sent out with the Gospel; or it may be that the Gospel was written out in one piece upon a plan present from the first to the writer’s mind. The order of genesis and the order of production do not always coincide; and it is really a very secondary consideration whether in any particular instance they did or not.
We do not know exactly at what stage in his career the Evangelist grasped the idea of the Logos. We should be inclined to think comparatively late, from the fact that it has not been allowed to intrude into the historical portion of the Gospel. The various ideas which are summed up under the conception of the Logos appear there independently and in other connexions. As we have just seen, in St. Paul also and in the Epistle to the Hebrews the arch is fully formed before the key-stone is dropped into it.
Whatever we may think about this, there is a close parallelism between the whole theology, including the Christology, of St. Paul and St. John. Both start from the thought of an Incarnation (John i. 14; Rom. viii. 3; Gal. iv. 4; Phil. ii. 7, 8; Col. i. 15; and with the latter part of the same verse, cp. Col. i. 19; ii. 9). In both St. John and St. Paul the union of the Son with the Father is not only moral but a union of essential nature (cp. John i. 1, 2, 14; x. 30, 38; xiv. 10, 11, 20; xvii. 21, 23 with 2 Cor. v. 19; Col. i. 13, 15, 19; ii. 9). Between the Son and the Father there is the bond of mutual love, of a love supreme and unique (that is the real meaning of μονογενής in John i. 14, 18; cp. xvii. 23, 24, 26 and Rom. viii. 3, 32; Eph. i. 6; Col. i. 13). As a consequence of this relation between the Son and the Father, which has its roots in the eternal past (John i. 1, 2; xvii. 5, 24), there was also complete union of will in the work of the Son upon earth (John v. 30; vi. 38; xiv. 31; xvii. 16: cp. Phil. ii. 8; Heb. v. 7, 8). Thus the acts of the Son are really the acts of the Father, the natural expression of that perfect intimacy in which they stand to each other (v. 19, 20; viii. 29; x. 25, 37, 38). The reciprocity between them is absolute, it is seen in the perfection of their mutual knowledge (vii. 29; viii. 19; x. 15; xvii. 25); so that the teaching of the Son is really the teaching of the Father (vii. 16; viii. 26, 28, 38; xii. 49, 50; xiv. 10, 24; xv. 15). What the Son is, the Father also is. Hence the life and character and words of the Son, taken as a whole, constitute a revelation of the Father such as had never been given before (vi. 46; xiv. 7-10: cp. i. 14, 18)[64].
Thus we are brought to another central idea of the Fourth Gospel, the function of the Son as revealing the Father. For this, again, we have a parallel in an impassioned passage of St. Paul:
‘The god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn upon them. For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. Seeing it is God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. iv. 4-6).
It may be true that this idea, though central with St. John, is subordinate with St. Paul; but it is distinctly recognized—just as, conversely, the doctrine of the Atonement, though clearly implied, is less prominent with St. John than with St. Paul.
The close resemblance between the teaching of St. John and St. Paul does not end with the exposition of the character and mission of the incarnate Son; it is exhibited no less in what is said about the Holy Spirit. The teaching of the Fourth Gospel on the subject of the Spirit repeats in a remarkable way certain leading features in its teaching about the Son. The Father is in the Son (as we have seen), and the Son is one with the Father; and yet the Son is distinct (in the language of later theology, a distinct Person) from the Father; and in like manner the Paraclete is ‘another’ than the Son (xiv. 16), and is sent by the Son (xv. 26; xvi. 7); and yet in the coming of the Spirit the Son Himself returns to His people (xiv. 18; cf. iii. 28).
Here again the parallel is quite remarkable between St. Paul and St. John. If we take a passage like Rom. viii. 9-11 we see that, in this same connexion of the work of the indwelling Spirit among the faithful, He is described at one moment as the Spirit of God, at another as the Spirit of Christ, and almost in the same breath we have the phrase, ‘If Christ is in you’ as an equivalent for ‘If the Spirit of Christ is in you.’ The latter phrase is fuller and more exact, but with St. Paul, as well as with St. John, it is Christ Himself who comes to His own in His Spirit.
No writer that I know has worked out the whole of this relation with more philosophical and theological fulness and accuracy than Dr. Moberly in his _Atonement and Personality_. And I am tempted to quote one short passage of his (where I should like to quote many), because it seems to me to sum up in few words the fundamental teaching of St. Paul and St. John.
‘Christ in you, or the Spirit of Christ in you; these are not different realities; but the one is the method of the other. It is in the Person of Christ that the Eternal God is revealed in manhood to man. It is in the Person of His Spirit that the Incarnate Christ is Personally present within the spirit of each several man. The Holy Ghost is mainly revealed to us as the Spirit _of the Incarnate_[65].’
It is to the language of St. Paul and St. John that we go for proof that the Holy Spirit is a Person; but it is also from their language that we learn how intimately He is associated with the other Divine Persons.
We are led up to what is in later theological language called the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It is well known that some of the most important data for this doctrine are derived from the Fourth Gospel, especially from the last discourse. And whatever is found in St. John may be paralleled in substance from St. Paul.
3. Comparison with the Synoptic Gospels.
Now I am not going to maintain that, if one of us had been an eye-witness of the Life of Christ, the profound teaching of which I have just given an outline would have seemed to him to bear the same kind of proportion to the sum total of His teaching that it bears in the Fourth Gospel. By the essential conditions of the case it could not be so. It is this particular kind of teaching which the Evangelist specially wishes to enforce; and, in order to enforce it, he has singled out for his narrative just those scenes in which it came up—those and, broadly speaking, no others.
We have seen that in regard to this teaching there is a very large amount of coincidence between St. Paul and St. John. We shall have presently to consider what is the nature and ground of this coincidence, how it arose and what relation it implies between the two Apostles. But before going on to this, we must first ask ourselves how far it can be verified by comparison with the Synoptic Gospels. It is right to look for such verification, however much we may be convinced that these Gospels are an extremely partial and fragmentary representation of all that Christ said and did. Even a modern biography, contemplated perhaps during the life-time of its subject, and actually begun soon after his death, will only contain a tithe (if he is a really great man) of his more significant acts and sayings. But those who attempted to write what we wrongly call Lives of Christ did not, as it would seem, for the most part even begin to do so or make preparations for beginning for some thirty years after the Crucifixion, when the company of the apostles and intimate disciples was already dispersed, or at least in no near contact with the writers[66]. We have only to ask ourselves what we should expect in such circumstances. And I think we should find that our expectations were fully borne out if we were to compare together the contents of the oldest documents, those of the _Logia_ with the Mark-Gospel, and those of the special source or sources of St. Luke with both. The amount and value of the gleanings which each attempt left for those who came after tells its own story.
But if we do not expect that the Synoptic Gospels would be in the least degree exhaustive in the materials they have preserved for us from the Life of Christ, we might be sure that their defects would be greatest in regard to the class of teaching with which we are at present concerned. It is teaching of a kind that might perhaps haunt the minds of a few gifted and far-sighted individuals, but would certainly fall through the meshes of the mind of the average man. It was this very fact, as we have seen, which prompted the Fourth Evangelist to write his Gospel. The externals of the Lord’s Life he recognized as having been adequately told; but it was just the profoundest teaching and some of the most significant acts that had escaped telling, and that he himself desired to rescue from oblivion.
We must therefore be content if we can verify a few particulars. We must not from the outset expect to be able to do more. And we must be still more content if these particulars show by their character that they are fragments from a much larger wreckage, that they are what we might call chance survivals of what had once existed on a much larger scale.
We concluded our sketch of the Christology of the Fourth Gospel by speaking of the data which it contained for the doctrine of the Trinity. These however are only data. It is perhaps a little surprising that the only approach to a formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity occurs not in St. John but at the end of the Gospel of St. Matthew (xxviii. 19). I am of course well aware that this part of the First Gospel is vigorously questioned by the critics. I am prepared to believe myself that the passage is a late incorporation in the Gospel; and antecedently I should not say that we had strong guarantees for its literal accuracy. But then—this is an old story, so far as I am concerned, and I must apologize for introducing it, but I cannot leave the point unnoticed—how are we to explain that other remarkable verse that occurs at the end of the second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 Cor. xiii. 14)? This familiar three-fold benediction must have had antecedents; it must, I should say, have had a long train of antecedents. The most adequate explanation of it seems to me to be that the train of antecedents started from something corresponding, something said at some time or other, in the teaching of our Lord[67]. I fully believe that the hints and intimations of a Trinity that we find scattered about the New Testament have their origin ultimately in the teaching of Christ. Apart from this, how could the conception have been reached at so early a date? For 2 Corinthians must in any case fall between 53-57 A.D.[68]
Let us work our way backwards through another of the hints. We have seen that the coming of the Paraclete is described in the Fourth Gospel as a return of Christ to His own. Are there any parallels for this in the Synoptic Gospels? Not exactly, because the two things are not brought into combination. But we have on the one hand distinct predictions of the activity of the Holy Spirit after the departure of Christ. For instance:
‘When they deliver you up, be not anxious how or what ye shall speak.... For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you’ (Matt. x. 19, 20).
And in St. Luke’s version of the promise as to answers to prayer, the Holy Spirit is spoken of as imparted to the believer:
‘If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?’ (Luke xi. 13).
The gift of the Holy Spirit in connexion with prayer is one of the topics in the Last Discourse as recorded by St. John. On the other hand there are in the Synoptics remarkable allusions to the continued presence of Christ with His people. Such is that which follows immediately upon the verse about Baptism in the threefold Name: ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.’ And in Matt. xviii. 20, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them[69].’ Wendt connects this last passage with the instances in which acts done in the name of Christ and for the benefit of His followers are spoken of as though they were done to Him. For instance, ‘Whosoever shall receive one of such little children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever receiveth me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me’ (Mark ix. 37; cf. Luke x. 16; Matt. xxv. 40). Wendt goes on to dilute the meaning of these allusions. He would make them mean no more than that such actions have the same value and the same reward as though they were done to Christ. But the ascending series is against this: ‘Whosoever receiveth Me, receiveth not Me, but Him that sent Me.’
And once again we have to ask, what is the origin of all those passages in the Epistles, where St. Paul speaks of the _solidarity_ between Christ and the whole body of the faithful, so that in that extraordinary phrase the sufferings of His Apostle actually fill up or supplement the sufferings of Christ (ἀνταναπληρῶ τὰ ὑστερήματα τῶν θλίψεων τοῦ Χριστοῦ, Col. i. 24)?
The existence of such passages suggests the probability—and indeed more than probability—that there were others like them, but more directly didactic and expository, which have not been preserved. The Fourth Gospel contains some specimens of this teaching; but that Gospel and the Synoptics together rather give specimens of a class of teaching than make any approach to an exhaustive record of all that our Lord must have said on these topics.
We have seen that the Synoptic Gospels distinctly represent our Lord as the Jewish Messiah. They represent Him as filled from the first with the consciousness of a mission that is beyond that of the ordinary teacher or prophet. He taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes. The demoniacs recognized in Him a presence before which they were awed and calmed. He took upon Himself to forgive sins, with the assurance that those whom He forgave God also would forgive. He called Himself, in one very ancient form of narrative, ‘Lord of the sabbath.’ He did not hesitate to review the whole course of previous revelation, and to propound in His own name a new law superseding the old. He evidently regarded His work on earth as possessing an extraordinary value. He was Himself a greater than Solomon, a greater than Jonah; and, what is perhaps more remarkable, He seems to regard His own claim as exceeding that of the whole body of the poor (‘Ye have the poor always with you ... but Me ye have not always’). As His teaching went on, He began to speak as though His relation to the human race was not confined to His life among them, but as though it would be continued and renewed on a vast scale after His death; He would come again in the character of Judge, and He would divide mankind according to the service which (in a large sense) they had rendered, or not rendered, to Him.
These are a number of particulars which helped to bring out what there was extraordinary in His mission. By what formula was it to be described and covered? It was described under the Jewish name ‘Messiah,’ with its various equivalents. Among those equivalents, that which the apostolic generation deemed most adequate was ‘the Son of God.’ One of the Synoptic Gospels says expressly that He applied this title to Himself (Matt. xxvii. 43), and it is quite possible that He did so, but critical grounds prevent us from laying stress upon the phrase. On two great occasions (the Baptism and Transfiguration) the title is given to Him by a voice from heaven. But only in a single passage (Matt. xi. 27; Luke x. 22) is there anything like an exposition of what is contained in the title. The mutual relation of the Father and the Son is expressed as a perfect insight on the part of each, not only into the mind, but into the whole being and character of the other.
Different critics have dealt with this saying in different ways. Harnack, in his famous lectures, gave it the prominence that it deserves, but at the same time reduced its meaning, in accordance with his generally reduced conception of Christianity. His exegesis tended to limit the peculiar knowledge of the Son to His special apprehension of the truth of Divine Fatherhood. M. Loisy demurs to this. He says:
‘There is clearly involved a transcendental relation, which throws into relief the high dignity of the Christ, and not a psychological reality, of which one cannot see the possibility in respect to God. The terms Father and Son are not here purely religious, but they have already become metaphysical; theological and dogmatic speculation has been able to take hold of them without greatly modifying their sense. There is only one Father and only one Son, constituted, in a manner, by the knowledge that they have of one another, absolute entities the relations of which are almost absolute[70].’
Perhaps this is a little exaggerated in the opposite direction to Harnack. Still I believe it to be in the main right. The mutual knowledge of the Father and the Son rests upon their essential community of nature. But, having recognized this, M. Loisy goes on, with what I cannot but think singular levity, to cast doubt upon the passage. He regards the whole context in St. Matthew as a sort of psalm based upon the last chapter (li) of Ecclesiasticus; and he ascribes it not to our Lord, but to the tradition of the early Church.
This is far from being a favourable specimen of Biblical criticism. We have only to set the two passages side by side to estimate its value. It is possible enough that there are reminiscences not only of this, but of other passages of Ecclesiasticus and of other books in the mind of speaker or writer[71]. We might conceive of a defining phrase here or there being due to the Evangelist and suggested by such reminiscences. Or we might conceive of Christ Himself going back in thought (as well He might) to the invitation of personified Wisdom. There would be nothing strange in either supposition. The New Testament everywhere takes up the threads of the Old, and is not confined to the Jewish Canon. But in any case the materials thus supplied are entirely recast; and the whole passage (‘Come unto Me,’ &c.) bears the inimitable stamp of one Figure, and only one[72].
The truth is that in the Synoptic Gospels, as well as in the Fourth, there is really a mysterious background, though we see less of the attempt to pierce it. These simple-looking sayings are not so simple as they seem. To take, for instance, one upon which we have touched, ‘he that receiveth you, receiveth Me, and he that receiveth Me, receiveth Him that sent Me.’ The words are almost childlike in their simplicity, and yet they lead up to the highest heights, and down to the deepest depths. No doubt we may rationalize it all away, if we please. We may shut out the mystery from our minds. But we shall not keep it out for long.
Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death, A chorus-ending from Euripides— And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as nature’s self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul.
There is a movement perhaps on a large scale, like the Bentham period in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, or the sceptical and deistical period a hundred years earlier, and it seems as though everything were to be made clear and intelligible, and the conscience and soul of men were not to be troubled by phantoms any more. And then there come ‘Lake Poets,’ or an ‘Oxford Movement,’ and the other world, the old world, all comes back again; and the forces that try to restrain it are snapped like Samson’s withes.
The reason appears to be that these very clear outlines are always obtained by omissions or suppressions that are artificial, and do not do justice to the wonderful richness and subtlety either of the human mind or of the powers that work upon it.
4. Interpretation of these Relations between the Synoptic Gospels, St. Paul and St. John: Alternative Constructions.
These comparisons that we have just been instituting between the Synoptic Gospels, St. Paul, and St. John raise a very large question, a question involving nothing less than our whole construction of the history of the Apostolic Age.
It is becoming more and more the custom with the left wing of critical writers to make the most fundamental part of Christianity, the pivot teaching of the New Testament, an invention of St. Paul’s. St. John is only the chief of his disciples. According to these writers primitive Christianity, the genuine Christianity, loses itself in the sands, or is represented, let us say, deducting the stress on the Mosaic Law, by the sect of the Ebionites. It is St. Paul who strikes out the new road; and the writer whom we call St. John follows him in it. The attempt of this later writer to supply a historical basis for Paulinism, holds good only in appearance. The teaching which it puts into the mouth of Jesus is in no sense an antecedent of the teaching of St. Paul, but a product of it.
Here, for instance, is a trenchant statement of the position.
‘The Fourth Gospel derived this importance, lasting long beyond the time of his birth, from its having bridged over the chasm between Jesus and St. Paul, and from its having carried the Pauline Gospel back into the life and teaching of Jesus. It is only through this gospel that Paulinism attains to absolute dominion in the theology of the Church.... Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Redeemer of the world, is for John as well as Paul the core and centre of Christianity. And, moreover, John’s Christology is Pauline in all its important features—the Son of God who was with God in heaven, and was sent by God upon earth, the Mediator of creation, the God of Revelation of the Old Testament, the Son of Man from heaven, as Paul, too, called Him. And the chief object of His coming into the world is the atonement by means of His death.... The whole of the Johannine theology is a natural development from the Pauline. It is Paulinism modified to meet the needs of the sub-apostolic age. Two important consequences follow from this. There is no Johannine theology by the side of and independent of the Pauline. Luther already felt this clearly, and he understood something of the matter. John and Paul are not two theological factors, but one. Were we to accept that St. John formed his conception of Christianity either originally or directly from Jesus’ teaching, we should have to refuse St. Paul all originality, for we should leave him scarcely a single independent thought. But it is St. Paul that is original; St. John is not. In St. Paul’s letters we look, as through a window, into the factory where these great thoughts flash forth and are developed; in St. John we see the beginning of their transformation and decay.’ Wernle, _Beginnings of Christianity_, ii. pp. 262, 264, 274 f. (E. T.).
Nothing could be clearer. And by reason of his clearness and boldness of statement Wernle is an excellent representative of the whole school; for what he asserts in set terms is really presupposed by a number of other writers who do not assert it. It remains for us to ask, Is this construction of the early history of Christianity tenable?
Two Preliminary Remarks.
Before I attempt to answer this question, there are two remarks that I should like to make upon it.