14

Christ and the negative criticism.

Christian thought to do such homage as is possible to its great Object; they are so many proofs of the interest which Jesus Christ necessarily provokes in the modern world, even when it is least disposed to own His true supremacy.

Nor is the direction which this interest has taken of late years in the sphere of unbelieving theological criticism less noteworthy in its bearings on our present subject. The earlier Rationalism concerned itself chiefly with the Apostolical age. It was occupied with a perpetual analysis and recombination of the various influences which were supposed to have created the Catholic Church and the orthodox creed. St. Paul was the most prominent person in the long series of hypotheses by which Rationalism professed to account for the existence of Catholic Christianity. St. Paul was said to be the 'author' of that idea of a universal religion which was deemed to be the most fundamental and creative element in the Christian creed St. Paul's was the vivid imagination which had thrown around the life and death of the Prophet of Nazareth a halo of superhuman glory, and had fired an obscure Jewish sect with the ambition of founding a spiritual empire able to control and embrace the world. St. Paul, in short, was held to be the real creator of Christianity; and our Lord was thrown into the background, whether from a surviving instinct of awe, or on the ground of His being relatively insignificant. This studied silence of active critical speculation with respect to Jesus Christ might indeed have been the instinct of reverence, but it was at least susceptible of a widely different interpretation.

In our day this equivocal reserve is no longer possible. The passion for reality, for fact, which is so characteristic of the thought of recent years, has carried critical enquiry backwards from the consciousness of the Apostle to that on which it reposed. The interest of modern criticism centres in Him Who is ever most prominently and uninterruptedly present to the eye of faith. The popular controversies around us tend more and more to merge in the one great question respecting our Lord's Person: that question, it is felt, is bound up with the very existence of Christianity. And a discussion respecting Christ's Person obliges us to consider the mode of His historical manifestation; so that His Life was probably never studied before by those who practically or avowedly reject Him so eagerly as it is at this moment. For Strauss He may be no more than a leading illustration

Answers to Christ's question, (1) the Ebionilic. 15

of the applicability of the Hegelian philosophy to purposes of historical analysis; for Schenkel He may be a sacred impersonation of the anti-hierarchical and democratic temper, which aims at revolutionizing Germany. Ewald may see in Him the altogether human source of the highest spiritual life of humanity; and Renan, the semi-fabulous and somewhat immoral hero of an oriental story, fashioned to the taste of a modern Parisian public. And what if you yourselves are even now eagerly reading an anonymous writer, of far nobler aim and finer moral insight than these, who has endeavoured, by a brilliant analysis of one side of Christ's moral action, to represent Him as embodying and originating all that is best and most hopeful in the spirit of modern philanthropy, but who seems not indisposed to substitute for the creed of His Church, only the impatient proclamation of His Roman judge. Aye, though you salute your Saviour in Pilate's words, Behold the Man! at least you cannot ignore Him; you cannot resist the moral and intellectual forces which converge in our day with an ever-increasing intensity upon His Sacred Person; you cannot turn a deaf ear to the question which He asks of His followers in each generation, and which He never asked more solemnly than now: Whom say men that I the Son of Man am k?'

II. Now all serious Theists, who believe that God is a Personal Being essentially distinct from the work of His hands, must make one of three answers, whether in terms or in substance, to the question of the text.

1. The Ebionite of old, and the Socinian now, assert that Jesus Christ is merely man, whether (as Faustus Socinus himself teaches) supernaturally born of a Virgin, or (as modern. Rationalists generally maintain) in all respects subject to ordinary natural laws m, although of such remarkable moral eminence, that He may, in the enthusiastic language of ethical admiration, be said to be 'Divine.' And when Sabellianism would escape from the manifold self-contradictions of Patripassianism", it too becomes no less Humanitarian in its doctrine as to the Person of our Lord, than Ebionitism itself. The Monarchianism of Praxeas or of Noetus, which denied the

* On recent 'Lives' of our Lord, see Appendix, Note A. 1 Chr. Rel. Brevissima Inst. i. 654: Illum esse hominem in virginis utero, et vi conceptum.'

m Wegscheider, Instit. § 120, sqq.

De Christi essentiâ ita statue: sic sine viri ope Divini Spiritûs

n Cf. Tertull. adv. Prax. c. 2.

16

(2) The Arian answer.

distinct Personality of Christo while proclaiming His Divinity in the highest terms, was practically coincident in its popular result with the coarse assertions of Theodotus and Artemon P. And in modern days, the phenomenon of practical Humanitarianism, disguised but not proscribed by very vehement protestations apparently condemning it, is reproduced in the case of such well-known writers as Schleiermacher or Ewald. They use language at times which seems to do the utmost justice to the truth of Christ's Divinity: they recognise in Him the perfect Revelation of God, the true Head and Lord of human kind; but they deny the existence of an immanent Trinity in the Godhead; they recognise in God no pre-existent Personal Form as the basis of His Self-Manifestation to man; they are really Monarchianists in the sense of Praxeas; and their keen appreciation of the ethical glory of Christ's Person cannot save them from consequences with which it is ultimately inconsistent, but which are on other grounds logically too inevitable to be permanently eluded 9. A Christ who is 'the perfect Revelation of God,' yet who is not personally God,' does not really differ from the altogether human Christ of Socinus; and the assertion of the Personal Godhead of Christ can only escape from the profane absurdities of Patripassianism, when it presupposes the eternal and necessary existence in God of a Threefold Personality.

2. The Arian maintains that our Lord Jesus Christ existed before His Incarnation, that by Him, as by an instrument, the Supreme God made the worlds, and that, as being the most ancient and the highest of created beings, He is to be worshipped; that, however, Christ had a beginning of existence (ȧрxǹv vñáρέews), that there was a time when He did not exist (v оte oùк hv); that He has His subsistence from what once was not (ég ok övtwv ëxel tǹv útóoтaσi 1), and cannot therefore

• 'Hæc perversitas, quæ se existimat meram veritatem possidere, dum unicum Deum non aliàs putat credendum quam si ipsum eundemque et Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum dicat. Quasi non sic quoque unus sit omnia, dum ex uno omnia, per substantiæ scilicet unitatem, et nihilominùs custodiatur olkovoμías sacramentum, quæ unitatem in trinitatem disponit, tres dirigens, Patrem et Filium, et Spiritum Sanctum.' Adv. Prax. c. 2.

P Euseb. Hist. Eccl. v. 28: Vidv äv0pwπov yevéolai tòv Zwτîpa. Tert. de Præscr. Hær. c. 53. App.; Theodoret, Hær. Fab. lib. ii. init.

a Cf. Dorner, Pers. Christi, Band ii. p. 153. Schleiermacher, although agreeing with Schelling and Hegel in denying an immanent Trinity in the Godhead, did not (Dorner earnestly pleads) agree in the Pantheistic basis of that denial. P. C. ii. p. 1212. Compare Ewald, Geschichte Christus', P. 447, quoted by Dorner.

r Socrates, i. 5.

(3) Answer of the Catholic Church.

17

be called God in the sense in which that term is applied by Theists to the Supreme Being $.

3. In contrast with these two leading forms of heresy stands that which has ever been and is the faith of the whole Catholic Church of Christ: 'I believe in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made, Being OF ONE SUBSTANCE WITH the Father; By Whom all things were made; Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made Man.'

Practically indeed these three answers may be still further reduced to two, the first and the third; for Arianism, no less than Sabellianism, is really a form of the Humanitarian or naturalist. reply to the question. Arianism does indeed admit the existence of a pre-existent being who became incarnate in Jesus, but it parts company with the Catholic belief, by asserting that this being is himself a creature, and not of the very Substance of the Supreme God. Thus Arianism is weighted with the intellectual difficulties of a purely supernatural Christology, while yet it forfeits all hold upon the Great Truth which to a Catholic believer sustains and justifies the remainder of his creed. The real question at issue is not merely whether Christ is only a man; it is whether or not He is only a created being. When the question is thus stated, Arianism must really take its place side by side with the most naked Deism; while at the same time it suggests, by its incarnation of a created Logos, the most difficult among the problems which meet a believer in the Hypostatic Union of our Lord's Two Natures. In order to escape from this position, it virtually teaches the existence of two Gods, each of whom is an object of worship, one of whom has been created by the Other; One of whom might, if He willed, annihilate the other t. Thus in Arianism reason and faith are equally

Cf. further Waterland, Defence of Some Queries, Works (ed. VanMildert), vol. i. pp. 402, 403.

t Waterland, Works, vol. i. p. 78, note f. Bp. Van-Mildert quotes from Mr. Charles Butler's Historical Account of Confessions of Faith, chap. x. sect. 2, a remarkable report of Dr. Clarke's conference with Dr. Hawarden in the presence of Queen Caroline. After Dr. Clarke had stated his system at great length and in very guarded terms, Dr. Hawarden asked his permission to put one simple question, and Dr. Clarke assented. 'Then,' said Dr. Hawarden, 'I ask, Can God the Father annihilate the Son and the Holy Ghost? Answer me Yes or No.' Dr. Clarke continued for some time in deep thought, and then said, 'It was a question which he had never

18 The three answers are practically two.

disappointed: the largest demands are made upon faith, yet the Arian Christ after all is but a fellow-creature; and reason is encouraged to assail the mysteries of the Catholic creed in behalf of a theory which admits of being reduced to an irrational absurdity. Arianism therefore is really at most a restingpoint for minds which are sinking from the Catholic creed downwards to pure Humanitarianism; or which are feeling their way upwards from the depths of Ebionitism, or Socinianism, towards the Church. This intermediate, transient, and essentially unsubstantial character of the Arian position was indeed made plain, in theory, by the vigorous analysis to which the heresy was subjected on its first appearance by St. Athanasius ", and again in the last century, when, at its endeavour to make a home for itself in the Church of England, in the person of Dr. Samuel Clarke, it was crushed out, under God, mainly by the genius and energy of the great Waterland. And history has verified the anticipations of argument. Arianism at this day has a very shadowy, if any real, existence; and the Church of Christ, holding in her hands the Creed of Nicæa, stands face to face with sheer Humanitarianism, more or less disguised, according to circumstances, by the thin varnish of an admiration yielded to our Lord on æsthetic or ethical grounds.

III. At the risk of partial repetition, but for the sake of clearness, let us here pause to make two observations respecting that complete assertion of the Divinity of our Lord for which His Church is responsible at the bar of human opinion.

1. The Catholic doctrine, then, of Christ's Divinity in no degree interferes with or overshadows the complemental truth of His perfect Manhood. It is perhaps natural that a greater emphasis should be laid upon the higher truth which could be apprehended only by faith than on the lower one which, during the years of our Lord's earthly Life, was patent to the senses of men. And Holy Scripture might antecedently be supposed to take for granted the reality of Christ's Manhood, on the ground of there being no adequate occasion for full, precise, and reiterated assertions of so obvious a fact. But nothing is more remarkable in Scripture than its provision for the moral and intellectual needs of ages far removed from those which are traversed by the books included in the Sacred

considered.' Mahomed had done so: Rodwell's Korân, p. 541. On the 'precarious' existence of God the Son, according to the Arian hypothesis, see Waterland's Farther Vindication of Christ's Divinity, ch. iii. sect. 19.

See Lect. VII.