III THE HISTORIC CHRIST THE POINT OF VIEW OF MODERN SCHOLARSHIP TWENTY years ago Orthodox Theology was awakened with a start by the present Bishop of Oxford to a clear recognition of the fact that the human knowledge of our Lord was limited within the scientific and historical horizon of the mind of His own age. And I imagine that at the present time there are few theologians by whom this position is not accepted, not merely as being plain on the very face of the Gospel narrative, but from the further reflection that we cannot logically deny it without making His humanity unreal. To do that would be to capitulate at the last to that recurrent tendency, against which, under the names of Docetism, Apollinarianism, or Monophysitism, the Church fought hard and long in earlier ages. Those who would forbid us to consider the mind of Christ as that of an historical individual largely moulded by the special environment and the special culture of His own country and His own time, virtually forbid us to allow Him a truly human mind at all. What, then, is left of the "humanity of Christ "a humanity without a truly human mind? In the last few years the turn has come for "Liberal Theology" to experience the shock of a not dissimilar awakening at the hands of Johannes Weiss, Schweitzer, and other writers of the "Eschatological School," of whom the best known in this country are the late Father Tyrrell and Professor Burkitt of Cambridge. Liberal Theology had always recognised that on the intellectual side the mind of our Lord belonged to His own age and not to ours, but it had quite unconsciously made the tacit assumption that His moral and religious ideals were only a glorified forecast of those of cultured respectability in the nineteenth century, "tuning His denial of the world to our acceptance of it." The name of Christ in Christendom is so closely bound up with every conception of what is highest in morals and religion that all unsuspectingly each man reads back into the mind of our Lord the ideals of his own class and culture, his own age and country, or it may be of his own fragmentary branch of the Church Universal, and takes for granted that the principles most valued by himself were central to the Master also. The Eschatological School protests that this is an anachronism, and that the key to the understanding of His life and teaching is to be found in those religious hopes and ideas which recent researches in the field of what is known as Apocalyptic Eschatology have shown to have dominated the minds of so many of His contemporaries. "As of old," says Schweitzer, Jacob wrestled with the angel, so German theology wrestles with Jesus of Nazareth and will not let Him go until He bless it—that is, until He will consent to serve it and will suffer Himself to be drawn by the Germanic spirit into the midst of our time and our civilisation. But when day breaks the wrestler must let Him go; He will not cross the ford with us. Jesus of Nazareth will not suffer Himself to be modernised. . . . But He does bless those who have wrestled with Him, so that though they cannot take Him with them, yet, like men who have seen God face to face and received strength in their souls, they go on their way with renewed courage, ready to do battle with the world and its powers." Modern lives of Christ, whether written from a radical or from a conservative standpoint, have been too modern. The pseudo-Romantic Christ of Renan, and the "bourgeois Christ" of Rationalistic liberalism are quite as far removed from the actual historical figure as the personified abstraction of scholastic logic or the sentimental effeminacy dear to Christian Art. But if we agree with Schweitzer here, yet it is not without a feeling that he himself cannot quite escape the charge of modernising, and that his own boldlyoutlined portrait is a little like the Superman of Nietzsche dressed in Galilean robes. From the point of view of a purely historical interpretation the advance made by the Eschatological School is threefold. Firstly, it approaches the subject not from the standpoint of the twentieth century, but from one which recent discovery has shown to have been normal in the Judaea of our Lord's own time. Secondly, it can accept at their full face value all the sayings of our Lord reported in the Synoptic Gospels. Many of these had to be explained away and interpreted in an unnatural sense by the older Orthodoxy. The older Liberalism either did the same thing or took the shorter cut of affirming that they were not authentic. The new school accepts them as they stand. Thirdly, the " great gulf" supposed by all who had felt the influence of the Tübingen School of Liberal Theology to have been fixed between the Christology of St. Paul, even in its earliest development, and that of the Twelve simply disappears, and with it the paradox that historical Christianity was created by St. Paul and not by Christ.2 From the point of view of religion the gain seems to be no less. Ever since the "Illumination" of the eighteenth century orthodox theology has been on 1 Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 310. 2 Cf. Essay IV. p. 157. the defensive-obliged to concede this, but still holding to that; surrendering x but clinging desperately to y. A more hopeless position can hardly be imagined for a religion of which the very life and essence consists in its being an attack and a challenge to the world. A Christ whom apologists have first to "save" is little likely to save mankind. Liberal Theology, on the other hand, seeking, or rather assuming, in Christ the rationalist's ideal could at best only discover one less "rational" than the seeker. The student, then, had to face the uninspiring choice between a Liberalism that could almost patronise its Christ and an Orthodoxy that must needs "defend" Him,-and neither conception to be found in the Gospels without some violence to the text. But the Christ whom this newer school reveals is a solitary arresting figure, intensely human, yet convinced of His call to an office and a mission absolutely superhuman-a conviction which one will attribute to fanaticism, another to inspiration, -calling men to follow Him along a path which to some will appear the way of folly, to others the way of life. He came not to bring peace but division, and to "separate them one from another as a shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats.' Fresh light is always blinding, especially to those who see it first, and new views rarely secure attention except when pushed to extremes. That this is the case with the Eschatological School, and especially with Schweitzer, its literary genius, few will deny. Nor is the work of the great scholars of the older generation, the great conservatives of this country, and the great liberals of Germany, superseded. One who in his enthusiasm for the things which to-day has found forgets the discoveries of all the years of yesterdays will never see but a broken fragment of truth. Out of the crucible of criticism, kept at white-heat by all the schools combined, the metal has been poured, and as the moulding sand is brushed away we catch a |