We may be permitted to pick up the thread of the argument in the last chapter and ask again what moral purposes rule the forces of this world. It must indeed be an odd type of mind that does not at least occasionally ask what this world is for, and what all this cosmic commotion is about. It is well for all of us to do the best we can without asking too many hard questions, but the queries will at times come up and with the normal human being they are not likely easily to down. We are in the midst of powers which defy our intellects. We do not go far in the attempt to read the secrets of nature around us without discovering that all we can hope to spell out is the stages by which things come to pass, and the mechanisms by which they fit themselves together. Why they come to pass is beyond us, except in a most limited sense. The purposes for which events occur in this world are not self-evidently clear. Explanations of purposes only make matters worse; and at any moment this problem of the mystery of the universe may take personal significance in the form of a blow upon the individual which seems to mock all hope of anything worth while in human life. There is nothing more futile than the attempts even of ministers to divine the meanings of afflictions or of those inequalities of lot which attend the natural order. The preachers can encourage us to make the most of a bad lot, but their guesses as to why these things are ordinarily add to our burdens. No, the mind of itself just by contemplation of the things as they are cannot find much light. This enigma has always been before the philosophers in the form of the question as to physical suffering. A number of plausible answers have been made as to the reasons for pain in the present order. Leibnitz said that even the Almighty creating the finite world had to adjust himself to some limitations for the good of the whole; that if some forces are to run in one direction, there must be mutual concession and compromise in the adjustment of manifold other activities; and that all this involves at least apparent stress and injustice at particular points. This sounds well enough, but why the afflictions of the individual who happens to be one of the particular points should be just what they are is a mystery. The upshot is that the ordinary man—the plain man, as we call him—must either give up the whole problem by seeking to forget it, or must rebel against it, or he must find relief in a God whom he can trust without being able to fathom his plans.
The tragedy of physical affliction is light as compared to the tragedies which arise in any conscience which seeks to take moral duties seriously. To be sure, we live at present in a rather complacent age so far as the struggles of conscience are concerned. The advice of the world is to do the best we can and let the rest go. We are not to take ourselves too seriously. But the long moral advances of the race have come through those who have taken the voices of conscience seriously. Now, what can a sensitive conscience make of moral duty? Assume that we have before us the exalted Christ ideal, and accept this as the guide of our lives—assume that we even have hope of some day attaining to that ideal—the distracting question is bound to jump at us: Are we doing enough? Have we sacrificed enough for those in worse plight than ourselves? And what about our past mistakes? Shall we go back and try to undo these? At the very best that might be like unraveling through the night what we have spun through the day. It will not do to dismiss this as unhealthiness or morbidness of mind. William James has shown pretty conclusively that the so-called normal or healthy-minded moral life is apt to be shallow. The great moral tragedy of the race is the distance between the ideal and any possible attainment. We can console ourselves by saying that noble discontent is the glory of man; but that does not get us far. There is only one way out, and that is to trust that we are dealing with a Christlike God, that his attitude toward us is the attitude of Jesus toward men. It is impossible to feel that in discipleship with Jesus men were complacent about their own moral perfections on the one hand, or harassed with self-reproaches on the other. They were advancing toward the realization of an ideal in companionship with One who not only in himself realized the human ideal, but who taught them that all the forces of the world would work together with them in their climb toward perfection, and that God would be patient with their blunders.
The question as to the character of God becomes more vital the longer we reflect. The growing conscience of our time demands that two conceptions be kept together—that of power and that of moral responsibility. We cannot hold a person responsible unless he has power; we cannot give a person power unless he is willing to act under responsibility. This realization is fast modifying all our relations to politics, to finance, to industry, even to private duties. We are swiftly moving toward the day when society will insist that any measure of power which has an outreach beyond the circle of the holder's personal affairs shall be acquiesced in by society only on condition that the holder of that power be willing definitely to assume responsibility to society. What we demand of men we demand also of God, and we have the scriptural warrant for believing that these human demands are themselves hints concerning the nature of God. Now, no one doubts the power of God. All scientific and philosophic trends are toward the centralization of power in some unitary source. All our study of nature and of society convinces us that there is a unity of power somewhere. If this be true, there must be raised with increasing persistence the question as to whether the World-Power is acting under a sense of moral responsibility. There were days when this problem was not raised as it is now. Men assumed for centuries that the king could do no wrong; that he could order his people about in the most arbitrary fashion. In our own time we have seen advocacy of the doctrine that the man of wealth is a law unto himself in the handling of the power that comes with wealth. Such mistakes never were really a part of the biblical idea. In shaping the threefold notion of priest and prophet and king to make the people familiar with the functions of God-sent leadership the strokes of emphasis always fell on the responsibility of the prophet to proclaim his message at whatever cost to himself, of the priest to keep in mind the sacredness of his office, and of the king to rule in righteousness. These demands were inevitably carried up to God: and in Christ the supreme effort is made to convince us that we can trust in the God of Christ, though we may not be able to understand him. This is not the place for an attempt at determining the essentials of the Christ career. Some features of that life, however, as illustrating responsibility in the use of power can be hinted at here. Take the story of the temptation. We are not concerned now with the historic form in which the temptation occurred. After the historians have made all the changes in the drapery of the story they choose, the fact remains that the temptation narrative deals with the essential problems of any leader confronted with a task like that of Christ. The Messianic consciousness was a consciousness of power. How should the power be used? Should it be used to minister to human needs like those of hunger? That would promise a quick solution of a sort. The peoples would eagerly rally around the new deliverer. Should there be an attempt to utilize the political machinery of the time? There could be no doubt of the effectiveness of this plan. Should the exalted lofty spiritual state of the Master be relied upon to carry him through spectacular displays of extraordinary might that would capture the popular mind? Each of these suggestions presented its advantages. Each might have been rightfully followed by some one with less power than Jesus had; but for him any one of them would have involved a misuse of power, and hence he cast them all aside.
The miracles reported of Christ have this for their peculiarity, that they show a power conceived of as divine used for a righteous purpose. It is significant that practically all the miracles described are those of healing or of relief. The kind of miracle that an irresponsible leader would have wrought is suggested by the advice of James and John to Jesus to call down fire on an inhospitable Samaritan village. The reported reply of Jesus, "Ye know not what spirit you are of," is the final comment on such use of power. Now, after we have made the most of the miracles recorded of Jesus, after we have made them seem just as extraordinary in themselves as possible, their most extraordinary feature is this use to which the power was put; and on the other hand, if we strip the miracles of everything that suggests breach of natural law and make them just revelations of super-normal control over nature through laws like those whose existence and significance we are beginning to glimpse to-day, still we cannot empty these narratives of their significance as revealing a morally responsible use of force. Let us be just as orthodox as we can, the purpose of the use of the forces is the supreme miracle; let us be just as destructively radical as we please, we cannot eliminate from the Scriptures this impression of Christ as one who used power with a sense of responsibility. This revelation is one which the ages have always desired.
We must be careful to keep in mind the connection of the Christ life with what came before it and what has proceeded from it. Here we have the advantage which comes of regarding the Bible as the result of a process running through the centuries. If the Bible were not a library, but only a single book, written at a particular time, we might well be attracted by the nobility of its teachings, but might despair of ever making the teachings effective. There is no proving in syllogistic fashion that Jesus was what he claimed to be, or that he was what his disciples thought of him as being; but when we see a massive revealing movement centering on the idea of God as revealed in Christ, when we see the acceptance of the spirit of Christ opening the path to communion with the Divine, and when we find increasing hosts of persons finding larger life in that approach to the Divine, we begin to discern the vast significance of the scriptural doctrine that in Christ we have the revelation of the Christlike God.
In this discussion we have been careful to avoid the terms of formal and creedal orthodoxy. This is not because the present writer is out of sympathy with these terms, but because he is trying to keep to the main impression produced by the New Testament. The fundamental scriptural fact is that in Jesus the early believers saw God; they came to rest in God as revealed in Christ. This is true of the picture of Christ in the earliest New Testament writings. Modern scholarship has not been able to find any documents of a time when the disciples did not think of Jesus as the revealer of God. If the disciples had not thought of Jesus thus, they would have found little reason to write of him. Now the scriptural authors employ various terms to declare the unique intimacy of Christ with God. In these expositions Jewish and Greek and even Roman thought terms play their part. Passages like the opening sentences of the fourth Gospel, or like the great chapter in the Philippians, are always profoundly satisfying and suggestive in their interpretation of the fundamental fact, but that fundamental fact itself is the all-essential—that in Christ the New Testament writers thought of themselves as having seen God, and as having gazed into the very depths of the spirit of the Father in heaven. Believing as we do, moreover, in the helpfulness of the creedal statements of the church, we must nevertheless avow that such statements are secondary to the impression made upon the biblical writers by actual contact with the Christ. We must not lose sight of the primacy of that impression as we study our Scriptures. We must not limit the glory of the impression itself by the limitations of some of the explanations which we undertake. Much harm has been done the understanding the Scriptures by speaking as if some of our creedal statements concerning Christ are themselves Scriptures! The scriptural Christ is greater than any creedal characterization of Christ thus far undertaken.
Of recent years an attempt has been made to prove that no such person as Jesus ever existed. The attempt has proved futile, but it has had a significance altogether different from what the propounders of the theory intended. The original aim was to show the contradictions of the testimony concerning Jesus and the inadequacies of the testimony to his existence as an historical Person. The result has been to show that the real significance of the Christ life is not to be found in any particular utterance, or in any specific deed, but in the total impact that he made upon the consciousness of man as suggesting the immediate presence of the Divine. The quality of the Christ life satisfies us in the inner depths as bearing witness to the quality of the God life. We have no sympathy with the views of the critics just mentioned; but we must say that no matter how the thought of God in Christ got abroad, no matter how mistaken our thought of the historical facts at the beginning of the Christian era, the belief in the Christlike God nevertheless did get abroad. There is no effacing that conception from the New Testament. No matter what detailed changes in the narrative itself radical criticism may think itself capable of making, the door was opened wide enough in the Christ for the divine light to stream through. We said in the last chapter that the most important feature of the biblical revelation is God himself. We must now say that the supreme fact about God is Christ.