THE HISTORICAL AND THE INWARD CHRIST.
THERE was once a widespread fear that exact methods of historical research would deprive us of that luminous divine Figure toward whom the world had reverently turned its face for more than eighteen centuries. Some suspected that our records of His life were crowded with myth and legend, others believed that the singular story which had so profoundly touched the world’s heart was the creation of highly wrought enthusiastic disciples. To-day, after more than half a century of critical sifting and acute probing, this luminous Life is more firmly established as the central fact of history than ever before.
“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows
Or decomposes but to recompose
Becomes my universe which loves and knows.”
It is not my purpose at present to retell the story, or to point out how much criticism has left unshaken. I want rather to show how the historical Christ, as a revelation of God, fits into a cosmic system of evolution and how He is related to the Spirit that witnesses with our spirits and is the inward life of the Saints of all ages and lands.
I shall not use the language or the methods of theology. I shall feel my way along the great arteries of human experience and try to throw light and suggestion rather than to establish some final and complete dogma. To begin at once with the problem before us, how shall we think of Christ? Was He man? Was He God? Was He some miraculous union of two essentially unrelated natures? Here are the questions which have split the Christian world up into camps and which have busied schoolmen in all the centuries.
The difficulty in almost all the theological discussions on the subject has been that they started with God and man isolated, separated, unrelated. No true revelation of such a God ever could be made through a human life, for divinity and humanity on this theory are conceived as two totally diverse natures. Modern psychology and recent studies of social life have made us familiar with a deeper view of human personality and have prepared for a more adequate study of Divine personality than was possible when the historic creeds were formulated. We know that God and man are conjunct and that neither can be separated absolutely from the other. There never has been any doubt of man’s need of God, but we now know that God also needs us and that our lives are mutually organic. Every clew which leads us to God shows Him to us as a spiritual and social Being—in no sense solitary and self-sufficient. Our own self-consciousness, our own ideals, our passion for the unrealized, imply and involve more than an impersonal energy at the heart of things. There must be a spiritual matrix for this living, throbbing, growing social organism in which personal life is formed. Our own experience carries in itself the implication of a genuinely spiritual Person at the heart of the universe of whom we all partake. The spiritual history of the race has forever settled this elemental fact, at least for all who feel the full significance of life. It is not an assumption, it is not a mere belief—it is involved in all we feel and know and are. But a spiritual, personal Being must reveal Himself. An unmanifested God—unknown and unknowable—is no God at all. He would be abstract and unreal. The least human person who poured his life out into those about him—who loved and suffered for the sake of another—would be a higher being than an infinite God shut up in the closed circle of His own self life. It is a law as old as the morning star that one must lose himself to find himself, must give to get, must go forth bearing precious seed in order to come again with sheaves of harvest. The moment it is settled that there is a divine Person as the ultimate reality of the universe, it is also settled that He will reveal Himself, that He will put His Life into manifold manifestations and that He will find His joy in “working all things up to better,” to use Clement’s phrase.
So long as the processes of evolution were confined to the plant and brute there could be no revelation of anything but force; or at most there could be only dawnings of anything higher. The forms of life which won in the struggle and survived were manifestations of power—they hardly implied anything more. The tough spine and the strong jaw and the sharp claw were all that mattered. Everything that appeared was pushed into existence by a force from behind. There was no sign or hint of freedom, or of life formed under the sway of a vision or an ideal. Things moved “for a million aeons through the vast, waste dawn” toward a goal, but the goal was never in sight and it played no part in the process.
John Fiske has, somewhere, denied the truth of the proverb that “nature abhors leaps,” and he has given a beautiful illustration from the cutting of a cone. If you pass a plane parallel to the base of a cone you cut a circle. If you tilt the plane slightly the curve becomes an ellipse. The ellipse grows more eccentric as the tilting increases and finally without any warning your plane cuts a parabola whose sides curve off into infinity and never touch ends again. Some such mighty leap appears in the process of evolution. Up to a certain point life evolved by forces working a tergo.[2] There is a slight tilt in the system and a being appears capable of selecting a goal for himself and of acting to attain it, a being who could live in some degree for a world as it ought to be.[3]
This is what in America we call “the great divide”—the watershed which determines the streams of a continent. As soon as there was a being who could select ideals and live for conscious ends a new kind of evolution began. The other side of “the divide,” evolution had been physical,—body, and body function had been the goal. This side “the divide,” it was spiritual and social, and the goal was the evolution of the man within man. The things which mattered now were love, sacrifice, service, goodwill rather than “tooth and claw.” Before, nature’s goal had been along the line of least resistance. Now, the line of march set straight against instinct and along the line of greatest resistance. There could be advance on this side “the divide,” only as the ideal became clearer and its sway more coercive.
Ever since man was man he has transcended the actual and lived by vision, which means, I think, that finite and infinite are not sundered and that we always partake of more than just ourselves. Beyond the edge of what we are there is always dawning a farther possibility—that which we ought to be—the a fronte compulsion.[4] This is one of God’s ways of revealing Himself. It is a man’s chief glory—the glory of the imperfect.
“Growth came when, looking your last on them all
You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day
And cried with a start—what if we so small
Be greater and grander the while than they?
Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature?
In both, of such lower types are we
Precisely because of our wider nature;
For time, theirs—ours, for eternity.
Today’s brief passion limits their range;
It seethes with the morrow for us and more.
They are perfect—how else? They shall never change.
We are faulty—why not? We have time in store.”[5]
This slow unveiling of the ideal, of the goal, is, I believe, the divine method of making man, and it makes us feel at once how nearer than near God is and how all the way on and up He is in the very tissue and fabric of our lives—no foreign creator who moulded us out of clay and left us to run, or to run down, like a clock.
For centuries man won his slender spiritual victories, cultivated his rugged virtues, sloughed off some marks of ape and tiger and formed habits of altruism under the influence of ideals which the highest personal types of the race revealed. These types of men were focus points, manifesting in some feeble measure the ultimate reality and casting out hints of the line of march. Sometimes they were conscious that they were organs of a larger Life which used them, sometimes they were girded, like Cyrus, for a divine mission, though they knew not Him whom they served. Thus the unbroken revelation of the infinite was slowly made, as the age could bear it—“God spake at sundry times and in divers manners.”
Strangely enough the loftiest men of the pre-Christian period were always vaguely or dimly forecasting a diviner life than any ordinary type of man revealed. The human heart was always groping for an unveiling of God which would set the race to living on a new level. This longing rose among the Hebrews to a steady passion which burned brighter as the clouds in their national sky grew blacker. There was a Christ ideal centuries before Christ actually came in the flesh, though this ideal was always deeply tinged and colored by the age which gave it birth. But even so, it lighted the sky of the future and gave many a man heart and hope through long periods of dreary pessimism. When lo, a tilting of the plane, and the ellipse becomes a parabola with infinite stretch of curve!
“In fullness of time God sent forth His Son.” How shall we think of Jesus that is called the Christ? Speaking first in the terms of evolution, I think of Him as the type and goal of the race—the new Adam, the spiritual norm and pattern, the Son of Man who is a revelation of what man at his height and full stature is meant to be; and this is the way Paul thought of Him: “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” Eph. IV, 13. “Whom he did foreknow, he did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son that He might be the first born among many brethren.” Rom. VIII, 29. “The expectation of the whole creation is waiting for the manifestation of sons of God.” Rom. VIII, 19.
The actual fact is that this Life has, profoundly or remotely, touched every personal life in Europe for a thousand years and has been the goal and standard for all aspiring souls. He is the pattern in the mount, the a fronte force which has drawn the individual and the race steadily up to their higher destiny. On the spiritual side of “the great divide” the goal is in sight and the goal is an efficient factor in the process of the evolution of the man within man.
But this pattern-aspect of the Christ life is only one aspect, and we must not raise it out of due balance and perspective. Christ is God humanly revealed. As soon as we realize that personality is always a revelation of the ultimate reality of the universe there are no metaphysical difficulties in the way of an actual incarnation of God. It is rather what one would expect. There is no other conceivable way in which God could be revealed to man. If He is a personal being; if He is love and tenderness and sympathy, and not mere force, only a Person can show Him. And if we are not kindred in nature, if we have not something in common, in a word if we are not conjunct, then it is hard to see how any revelation of Him could be made which would mean anything to us. But if we are conjunct, as our own self-consciousness implies, then an incarnation, a complete manifestation in Personality, or as Paul puts it, “in the face of Jesus Christ,” is merely the crown and pinnacle of the whole divine process.
If we are wise we shall not bother ourselves too much over the metaphysical puzzles which the schoolmen have formulated. We no longer have the puzzle which was so urgent with them, how two natures, pole-wide apart, could be united in one Person, for we now know that divinity and humanity are not pole-wide apart. There is something human in God and something divine in man and they belong together.
We shall not, again, be over-anxious about the question of nativity. Note the grandeur and the simplicity of Paul’s text about it: “God sent forth His Son born of a woman,” and there he stops with no attempt to furnish details. John is equally lofty: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory.” There is no appeal to curiosity. There is no syllable about the how. Two synoptic gospels have given us a simple story of the nativity which has profoundly impressed men in all ages and which will always appeal to the deepest instincts in us. But the method of Christ’s coming, embodied in these two accounts, must not be forced. The devout soul must be free, as both Paul and John were free, to leave the how wrapped in mystery. That He came out of our humanity we shall always believe. That He came down out of the highest divinity we shall equally believe. That He was a babe and increased in wisdom, that He learned as He grew, that He was tempted and learned through temptation, are all necessary steps, for there is no other path to spiritual Personality and He must have been “made perfect through sufferings,” or He could not have been the Captain of salvation.
Speculations and dogmas have taken men’s thoughts away from verifiable facts. Here was a life which settled forever that the ultimate reality is Love. He brought into focus, or rather He wove into the living tissue of a personal life, the qualities of character which belong to an infinitely good being and with quiet simplicity He said, “If you see me you see the Father.”
I have spoken, perhaps, as though the revelation of the human goal, and the unveiling of the divine Character were two different things. Christ does both, but both are one. If you bring a diamond into the light you occasion a double revelation. There is a revelation of the glorious beauty of the jewel. While it lay in the dark you never knew its possibilities. It was easily mistaken for a piece of glass. Now it flashes and burns and reveals itself because it has found the element for which it was meant. But there is also at the same time a revelation of the mystery of light. You discover now new wonders and new glories in light itself. Most objects absorb part of its rays and imperfectly transmit it to the eye. Here is an object which tells you its real nature. Now you see it as it is. So Christ shows us at once man and God. In a definite historic setting and in the limitations of a concrete personal life, Christ has unveiled the divine nature and taught us to say “Father” and He has, in doing that, showed us the goal and type of human life. The Son of God and the Son of Man is one person.
Now comes our second question how shall we think of the inward, the spiritual, the eternal Christ? The first interpreters, notably Paul and John, early in their experience, came to think of Christ as a cosmic Being. They read the universe in the light of His revelation and soon used His name to name the entire manifestation of God: “In Him,” says Paul, “all things consist.” “All things were made by Him,” says John, “and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life and the life was the light of men.” John 1, 2, 3. It was through Him that they first learned that God is Spirit, it was through Him that their own spiritual life was heightened and that they became conscious of a Spirit surging into their own souls and they connected this whole wider manifestation of God with Him. They were right too in doing so. Christ’s revelation of God had produced such spiritual effects upon them that they could now find Him within themselves, for God’s spiritual presence in us is always proportioned to our capacity to have Him there. And then, too, they were now for the first time able to interpret that which they felt within themselves. If they found God, it was because they had found Christ.
But they were right in a deeper sense. If we think of the historical Christ, as I have tried to set forth, as the manifestation of the Divine and the human in a single personal Life then wherever man finds God humanly revealed he properly names the revelation with the historic name. The historic incarnation was no final event. It was the supreme instance of God and man in a single life—the type of continuous Divine-human fellowship. God’s human revelation of Himself is not limited to a single date. As Athanasius so boldly said: He became man that we might become divine. Christ is the prophesy of a new humanity—a humanity penetrated with the life and power of God and this continued personal manifestation of God through men is Christ inwardly and spiritually revealed.
It is a primary truth of Christianity that God reaches man directly. No person is insulated. As ocean floods the inlets, as sunlight environs the plant, so God enfolds and enwreathes the finite spirit. There is this difference, however, inlet and plant are penetrated whether they will or not. Sea and sunshine crowd themselves in a tergo. Not so with God. He can be received only through appreciation and conscious appropriation. He comes only through doors that are purposely opened for Him. A man may live as near God as the bubble is to the ocean and yet not find Him. He may be “closer than breathing, nearer than hands or feet,” and still be missed. Historical Christianity is dry and formal when it lacks the immediate and inward response to our Great Companion; but our spirits are trained to know Him, to appreciate Him, by the mediation of historical revelation. A person’s spiritual life is always dwarfed when cut apart from history. Mysticism is empty unless it is enriched by outward and historical revelation. The supreme education of the soul comes through an intimate acquaintance with Jesus Christ of history. One who wished to feel the power of beauty would go to some supreme master of color and form who could exhibit them on canvas and not merely lecture about them. One who desired to feel the power of harmony would go, not to the boy with his harmonica, but to the Beethovens or Mozarts of the race who have revealed what an instrument and a human hand can do. So he who wishes to realize and practice the presence of God must inform himself at the source and fount, must come face to face with Him who was the highest human revelation of God. No one of us can interpret his own longings or purposes until he reads them off in the light of some loftier type of personality. That person understands himself best who grows intimate in fellowship with some noble character. And any man who wishes to discover the meaning of the inward voice and to interpret the divine breathings which come to human souls needs to be informed and illuminated by the supreme revelation of the ages.
With perfect fitness, then, we speak of the inward Presence as the spiritual Christ. It is the continuation of the same revelation which was made under the “Syrian blue.”
The procession of the Holy Ghost is a continuous revelation and exhibition of Christ within men. Whether we use the expression Holy Spirit or Christ within or spiritual Christ, we mean God operating upon human spirits and consciously witnessed and appreciated in them. “The Lord is the Spirit,” cries Paul when, with unveiled face, he discovers that he is being transformed into His image from glory to glory. “Joined to the Lord in one Spirit,” is another testimony of the same sort.
Unfortunately the doctrine of the Christ within—“the real presence”—has generally been held vaguely, and it has easily run into error and even fanaticism. The most common error has come from the prevalent view that when the Spirit—the inward Christ—comes in, the man goes out. It has been supposed that the finite is suppressed and the infinite supplants it and operates instead of it. This view is not only contrary to Scripture, but also contrary to psychological possibility. What really happens is that the human spirit through its awakened appreciation appropriates into its own life the divine Life which was always near and was always meant for it. The true view has been well put by August Sabatier[6]: “It is not enough to represent the Spirit of God as coming to the help of man’s spirit, supplying strength which he lacks, an associate or juxtaposed force, a supernatural auxiliary. Paul’s thought has no room for such a moral and psychological dualism, although popular language easily permits it. His thought is quite otherwise profound. There is no simple addition of divine power and human power in the Christian life. The Spirit of God identifies itself with the human me into which it enters and whose life it becomes. If we may so speak, it is individualized in the new moral personality which it creates. A sort of metamorphosis, a transubstantiation, if the word may be permitted, takes place in the human being. Having been carnal it has become spiritual. A ‘new man’ arises from the old man by the creative act of the spirit of God. Paul calls Christians [πνευματικόι], properly speaking, ‘the inspired.’ They are moved and guided by the Spirit of God. The spirit dwells in them as an immanent virtue, whose fruits are organically developed as those of the flesh. Supernatural gifts become natural, or rather, at this mystical height, the antithesis created by scholastic rationalism becomes meaningless and is obliterated.” That is precisely my view and if I had not found it here so well said I should have put the same idea into my own words. There are no known limits to the possible translation of the Spirit of God—the Eternal Christ—into human personality. There are all degrees and varieties of it as there are all degrees and varieties of physical life. One stands looking at a century-old oak tree and he wonders how this marvelous thing ever rose out of the dead earth where its roots are. As a matter of fact it did not. A tree is largely transformed sunlight. There is from first to last an earth element to be sure, but the tree is forever drawing upon the streams of sunlight which flood it and it builds the intangible light energy into leaf and blossom and fibre until there stands the old monarch, actually living on sunshine! But the little daisy at its feet, modest and delicate, is equally consolidated sunshine, though it pushes its face hardly six inches from the soil in which it was born. So one spirit differs from another spirit in glory. Some have but feebly drawn upon the Spiritual Light out of which strong lives are builded, others have raised the unveiled face to the supreme Light and have translated it into a life of spiritual beauty and moral fibre. Thus the revelation of God in the flesh goes on from age to age. The Christ-life propagates itself like all life-types—the last Adam proves to be a life-giving spirit. He is the first born among many brethren. The actual re-creation, the genuine identification of self with Christ may go on until a man may even say—“Christ lives in me;” “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus;” “It has pleased God to reveal His Son in me.”
“See if, for every finger of thy hands,
There be not found, that day the world shall end
Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ’s word,
That He will grow incorporate with all,
With me as Pamphylax, with him as John,
Groom for each bride! Can a mere man do this?
Yet Christ saith, this He lived and died to do.
Call Christ, then, the illimitable God.”
I DO.