THE ISSUE OF THE INVESTIGATION
We have now passed in review the whole body of designations which are applied to our Lord in the Fundamental pages of the New Testament. We ^he'chrS^ cannot fail to be impressed with the Community variety of these designations and the richness of their suggestion. It would be a pleasant task to develop all their implications. This would, however, take us too far afield for our present purpose. Let it suffice to observe that at bottom they seem to be charged with three specific convictions on the part of the Christian community, to which they give endlessly repeated and endlessly varied expression. Christ is the Messiah; Christ is our Redeemer; Christ is God: these are the great asseverations which are especially embodied in them. All three are already summed up in the angelic announcement which was made to the shepherds at His birth: “ I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of David the Saviour, who is Christ the Lord” (Lk 2^^). The whole New Testament may be said to be an exposition and enforcement of that announcement: and in the course of this exposition and enforcement it teaches us many things. Above all, it places beyond dispute the main fact with which we have now to deal, this fact, to wit, that the whole Christian community.
The Issue of the Investigation 299 and that from the very beginning, was firmly convinced that Jesus Christ was God manifest in the flesh.
There really can be found no place for doubt of this fact. But upon its emergence as an indubitable fact This Conviction it becomes plain that it is freighted with OuTLord’? significance. The fact that the
Teaching whole Christian community from the very beginning held, as to its fundamental principle, to the deity of its founder, is a very remarkable fact, and surely needs accounting for. 'And it will be found difficult to impossibility adequately to account for it except upon the assumption that the founder of Christianity really was a divine person. This universal and uniform conviction of the deity of Christ in the primitive Christian body in a word implies the actual Qdeity of Christ, as its presupposition. It cannot be supposed that the whole body of the first Christians firmly believed in the deity of their Master without evidence — ^without much evidence — without convincing evidence. The primary item of this evidence was no (^doubt our Lord’s own self-assertion: and this is a fact of the first importance which is immediately given in the fact of the universal and uniform belief in our 'jtLord’s deity which characterized the first age of the Church. That belief cannot possibly be accounted for except on the supposition that it was founded in our Lord’s teaching. As certain as it is then that the primitive Christians were firmly and without exception convinced of our Lord’s deity, so certain is it that our Lord — as indeed He is represented to have done in the uniform tradition — asserted Himself to be a divine person. And now we must go further. As certainas it is that these two things are true, that the whole
Christian community believed their Lord to be divine and that Jesus taught that He was divine, so certain it is that neither of them could be true if it were not true that our Lord was divine.
We have already remarked that the Christian community cannot be supposed to have formed and im- And Something iT^O'^^bly fixed in their hearts the con- More than His viction that their Lord was divine Teaching without evidence — much evidence — convincing evidence. We have also pointed out that the primary item of this evidence was our Lord’s own assertion. But there certainly must have been more evidence than our Lord’s bare assertion. Men do not without ado believe everyone who announces himself to be God, upon the bald announcement alone. There mlist have been attendant circumstances which supported the announcement and gave it verisimilitude, — ■ nay, cogency — or it would not have had such power over men. Our Lord’s life, His teachings. His character, must have been consonant with it. His deeds as well as His words must have borne Him witness. The credit accorded to His assertion is the best possible evidence that such was the case. We can understand how His followers could believe Him divine, if in point of fact He not only asserted Himself to be divine but lived as became a God, taught as befitted a divine Instructor, in all His conversation in the world manifested a perfection such as obviously was not human: and if dying. He rose again from the dead. If He did none of these things can their firm and passionate faith in His deity be explained?
Possibly we do not always fully realize the nature of the issue here brought before us. Here is a young
The Issue of the Investigation 301 man scarcely thirty-three years of age, emerged from obscurity only for the brief space of three years, living
Including during those years under the scorn of the
Something world, which grew steadily in intensity Very Conclusive ^nd finally passed into hatred, and dying at the end the death of a malefactor: but leaving behind Him the germs of a world-wide community, the spring of whose vitality is the firm conviction that He was God manifest in the flesh. If anything human is obvious it is obvious that this conviction was not formed and fixed without evidence for it of the most convincing kind. The account His followers themselves gave of the matter is that their faith was grounded not merely in His assertions, nor merely in the impression His personality made upon them in conjunction with His claims, — but specifically in a series of divine deeds, cujpiinating in His ri^ng from the dead, setting its seal upon His claims and the impression made by His personality. This is the account of the great place the Resurrection of Christ takes in the Apostolic propaganda. It is the seal set by heaven upon the truth of His deity as proclaimed in His teaching. It is safe to say that apart from evidence so convincing the high claims of Jesus could not have been met with such firm and unquestioning faith by His followers. This very faith becomes thus a proof of the truth of His claims.^
“ It appears to me that without the cooperation of the two main causes here indicated, first the impression made by the personality of Jesus, His works and His claims for Himself, before His crucifixion, and then the evidence which convinced His disciples of His resurrection, faith in Him as a supernatural Christ could not have been established so universally from the first.”
And so, in fact, is the mere fact that He made these claims. We have seen that the fact that He made Not Supposable these claims is not only asserted by all that Jesus made His followers, but is safeguarded by False Claims their faith in His deity, which were inexplicable without it. But it is evident that He could not have made such a claim unless what He claimed was true. We are not absurdly arguing that the claim to be God is one which cannot be made by a human being untruly. What is it that the folly or wickedness of men will not compass? But why should we absurdly argue that Jesus may be supposed to have done whatever we think within the compass of human__folly or human wickedness? Was Jesus the silliest of men; or the most wicked? The point is not that no man could make such a claim untruly, but that Jesus could not make it untruly! Many men there have been, and are, who might do so; some have done so — men who were vilely impostors or wildly in^ne. Is Jesus to be classed with these men? Are we to ask with Renan how far Jesus may be supposed to have gone in assuming a role He knew He had no claim upon? Are we to ask, with Oscar Holtzmann, was Jesus a fanatic? These are the alternatives: grossly deceiving; grossly deceived; or else neither deceiving nor deceived, but speaking the words of soberness and truth. He, the flower of human sanity; He, the ripe fruit of human perfection; can He be supposed to have announced to His followers that He was above all angels, abode continually in equal intercourse with the Father, shared with Him in the ineffable Name — and it not be true? As Dr. Gwatkin* crisply puts it,
The Issue of the Investigation 303
“ There is a tremendous dilemma here which must be faced: assuming that the tremendous claim ascribed to Him is false, one would think it must have disordered His life with insanity if He made it Himself, and the accounts of His life if others invented it.”
This witness is true. Neither Jesus nor His followers could have invented the claims to deity which Jesus is reported to have made for Himself: for the truth of these claims is needed to account both for Jesus and for His followers.
We have no intention of stopping here to argue these points; if indeed to establish them they need more The Issue the argument than their mere statement. It the Source them in order to indicate the gain we register upon ascertaining, as we have ascertained, that the entire Christian community from the very first was firmly convinced of the deity of its Lord. That fact established, it carries with it the truth of the conviction. For the conviction, in the circumstances in which it was formed and held, cannot be accounted for save on the assumption of the existence of compelling evidence for it, and this compelling evidence must include in it the claims of Jesus, which in turn cannot be accounted for save on the assumption of their truth. Grant that Jesus was really God, in a word, and everything falls orderly into its place. Deny it, and you have a Jesus and a Christianity on your hands both equally unaccountable. And that is as much as to say that the ultimate proof of the deity of Christ is just — Jesus and Christianity. If Christ were not God, we should have a very different Jesus and a very different Christianity. And that is the reason that mod- ern unbelief bends all its energies in a vain effort to abolish the historical Jesus and to destroy historical Christianity. Its instinct is right: but its task is hopeless. We need the Jesus of history to account for the Christianity of history. And we need both the Jesus of history and the Christianity of history to account for the history of the world. The history of the world is the ^ product of the precise Christianity which has actually existed, and this Christianity is the product of the precise Jesus which actually was. To be rid of this Jesus we must be rid of this Christianity, and to be rid of this Christianity we must be rid of the world-history which has grown out of it. We must have the Christianity of history and the Jesus of history, or we leave the world that exists, and as it exists, unaccounted for. But so long as we have either the Jesus of history or the Christianity of history we shall have a divine Jesus.