from His people, there is the new sense of what He has done for them. The new covenant is made. By sin men are separated from God, but by God's act in Christ they are reconciled to Him. "What the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh," God, sending His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, has done and is doing. Like other men St. Paul feels the need of a Saviour. He knows that in Christ, and in the corporate life of the Christian community, he has found one. Everywhere he sees men's lives ruined by sin, and not least his own life. The good which he would, he cannot do the evil which he would not, that he practises. "O, wretched man that I am," he cries, "who shall deliver me from the body of this death? And sure and certain is his answer, for it is based upon a living experience-he knows the truth of his own life: "I thank God, through Jesus Christ. Through His acceptance of Christ he feels himself, sinner though he is, at peace with God. In and through Christ he knows himself able to overcome the world. "I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me." On the side of Christ he feels himself driven along by a force that is higher than himself and brought into the presence of God, and this gives him, in every trial and every difficulty, the assurance of ultimate victory. "I know in whom I have trusted." "I live, yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.” And, be it remembered, this is not mere meaningless jargon, the repetition of empty phrases. It is the perfectly honest attempt of a man, of like passions with ourselves, to describe the deepest experience of his life. It cannot be doubted that it was this experienced power of the life of Christ, as a real force working in the world, drawing all men to Himself and to God, which created in the Christian community the consciousness that it was God who was working in the life of Christ' and that He had, 1 Cf. Essay V. p. 217. in that life, fulfilled His promises to the Fathers. And it was this same experienced power which enabled the Church to survive the non-fulfilment of the expectation of the immediate return of the Messiah on the clouds of heaven and in great glory, and which still is the real basis of the conviction of Christian people that "the gates of hell shall not prevail." Yet the hope which expressed itself in apocalyptic imagery, though it was gradually transformed, was never abandoned. Hope is an essential element of all religious faith, and the experienced power of the life of Christ intensified the Christian hope. God had spoken and acted,—that was the primary element in the Christian consciousness; but there was still, as in the Old Testament, a looking forward, only now the hope was inspired by a new confidence. What God has done in Christ is the earnest of what He will do. It is because He has wrought redemption for His people, that "the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God"-" even we ourselves, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption." "Now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him even as He is." It is not necessary, for our present purpose, to consider the various attempts made by the New Testament writers to interpret and systematize their faith. There is considerable theological development both in the New Testament and throughout the whole course of Christian history. The experienced fact of 1 Romans viii. 19, 23. 66 21 John iii. 2. Christianity is and will ever be the religion of sure salvation, brought by Jesus and to be experienced by His believers already during their present life. This does not exclude Christian hope. On the contrary, the more present salvation is experienced in mankind, the stronger Christian hope will be. . . . The Christian is a new creature, but he looks for a new heaven and a new earth, and his prayer will be for ever as His Lord taught him-Thy kingdom come (Von Dobschütz, Eschatology of the Gospels, pp. 205-7). reconciliation to God through Christ (the fact of atonement) gave rise to the numerous doctrines of the Atonement; the experienced power of the life of Christ gave rise to all the subsequent Christological speculation. With this theological development we are not here concerned; what is important for our present purpose is the religious experience itself—the same in its essential character as that described in the Old Testament, differing from it, however, in its degree and in its method-it is through Christ that men enter into that communion with God for which their souls thirst. But it is because they are religious men, because they are already conscious of communion with God and assured of His goodness and His love, that they see in Christ God's self-revelation to men.2 No man can say Jesus is Lord, save in the Spirit: it is only the eye of faith which can see that Christ is Divine. It is, as has been said, the existence among the Biblical writers of this faith in God which is the fact of supreme importance in relation to the Bible. Viewed simply as a fact it is, even to the non-religious man, to the man, that is, who does not share it, at the least an interesting phenomenon. In the nature of things the faith itself challenges attention and demands explanation. How are we to account for its origin ? II. THE ORIGIN OF THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF THE BIBLICAL WRITERS "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness." "Commit thy way unto the Lord, and put thy trust in Him." "The Lord upholdeth the way of the righteous; the way of the ungodly shall be broken." 1 Cf. Essays IV., V. and VI. 2 In this sense, at any rate, we see how the Old Testament is the preparation for the New Testament. It is, of course, also true that the New Testament is the climax of the Old Testament, and that the knowledge of God revealed in Christ must govern our whole attitude towards the Bible. Cf. Essay V. p. 219. It is clear that this belief in God's goodness and over-ruling Providence is not a mere colligation of observed facts. To the non-religious man, the facts of life seem not only susceptible of, but insistently to demand, a widely different interpretation. Not so does creation reveal the Creator. Nature, "red in tooth and claw," hard, cruel and unsympathetic, careful of the type, careless of the individual life The sin and sorrow in the world, the stream Of children helpless, and the sighs of slaves all shriek against this faith in the love and goodness of God. "In the measure that a man tries to live widely, deeply, and nobly, he is bound to become a pessimist. If optimism is usually associated with the youth and pessimism with the age of persons or peoples, it is because pessimism is the verdict of experience. Whether in himself, or in the world, if a man has ideals for both, he is bound to find not only failure, but an iron law of inevitable failure."1 Doubtless this is an overstatement, but it is so far true that it makes it impossible to suppose that the faith of the Biblical writers in the goodness of God has been arrived at as an inference from the facts of the world. Nor is it possible to explain the origin and persistence of their faith by supposing that they were blind to those facts which, to the non-religious man, seem inconsistent with it. Theirs was not the sheltered faith of country folks who live beneath The shadow of the steeple, and have no knowledge of what we call "the real facts of life." It is not merely a shallow criticism, but on the face of it wholly false, to speak of them as "arm1 Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross Roads, pp. 117-18. chair optimists.' They see all the difficulties and state them boldly. They were as acutely conscious of man's littleness in the vastness of the universe as any modern. The God who measures the waters in the hollow of His hands, and meteth out the heavens with a span, who weighs the mountains in a scale and the hills in a balance, before whom all nations are as nothing what can be the value to Him of a man's life?"What is man that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?" Nor were they blind to the evil, both moral and physical, which there is in the world. They see it not less, but more plainly than other men. The dominant note of the Bible is not "All's right with the world," but rather "Who will show us any good?" Not the least striking fact about the Bible is that those of its writers who are most deeply convinced of the goodness of God, are most keenly conscious of the existence of evil. "There is none righteous, no, not one; There is none that understandeth, There is none that seeketh after God; They have all turned aside, they are together become unprofitable; There is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one." 1 Nor did the apparently conflicting facts, what we call the problem of evil, present themselves to the Biblical writers in any less acute forms than they do to us to-day. Nowhere is the paradox of faith more striking than in the life of Christ. No other teacher so taught and so firmly held a belief in the love and goodness of God, and in His universal Providence. "The hairs of your head are all numbered." "Be not anxious for the morrow." "Your Heavenly Father knows what things ye have need of." More than this, He had a consciousness of a unique relationship to God 1 Romans iii. 10-12. St. Paul repeats and endorses the Psalmist's sweeping condemnation. |