Theology and the Social Consciousness / A Study of the Relations of the Social Consciousness to Theology (2nd ed.)

by Henry Churchill King

It is easy, no doubt, to indulge in a false polemic against the miraculous and metaphysical. One of the surest bits of autobiography we have from Christ, the narrative of the temptations, implies, as Sanday has acutely pointed out,[97] the clear consciousness on the part of Christ of the possession of what we call supernatural powers. It is a far less simple problem to rid the gospels of the miraculous element, than our age, with its greatly exaggerated estimate of the mathematico-mechanical view of the world, is likely to think. The so-called miraculous in connection with Christ is not to be impatiently and dogmatically set aside.[98] So, too, the demand of thought, that we form finally some metaphysical conception of the great personality which we meet in Christ cannot be denied as wholly illegitimate. All this is to be freely granted and asserted.

But it is of the greatest importance for Christian thought, that it still keep Christ's own absolute subordination of both the miraculous and metaphysical to the moral and the spiritual. The same narrative of the temptation, that so clearly implies supernatural powers in Christ, has its whole point in Christ's answering determination absolutely to subordinate these supernatural powers to moral and spiritual ends. His whole ministry evinces the greatest pains upon this point. And he evidently thinks a theory of his metaphysical relation to God (as ordinarily conceived) of so little vital importance that even such slight hints as we get of it in the New Testament apparently do not come from him at all. The present tendency, therefore, naturally demanded by the social consciousness, to emphasize the moral and spiritual in Christ in asserting his supremacy, is quite in harmony with Christ's own insistence. He will be followed for what he is in himself.

The real supremacy of Christ, his truest divinity, we may be sure, comes out for our time in those statements which we are able to make concerning his inner spirit. Here, and here only, the real power of his personality gets hold upon us. What are these grounds of the supremacy of Christ? How is it that we come to God through him?

3. The Moral and Spiritual Grounds of the Supremacy of Christ.[99]—(1) In the first place, Jesus Christ is the greatest in the greatest sphere, that of the moral and spiritual; and this, by common consent of all men. Both the depth and the consensus of conviction concerning Christ are profoundly significant. If our earth has ever seen one of whom it could be truly said, He is a moral and spiritual authority, preëminently the one great authority in this greatest sphere,—that person is Jesus Christ. Seeing the moral problem more broadly than any other ever saw it, tracing the motives of life more deeply than any other ever traced them, applying those principles of the life which he sees with a tact and delicacy and skill that no other ever approached, speaking with an authority in this moral and spiritual sphere to which no other can for a moment lay claim,—this man is easily the greatest in the greatest sphere.

It is, perhaps, to say only the same thing in a little different way, when one says with Fairbairn, that Christ is transcendent among founders of religion, "and to be transcendent here is to be transcendent everywhere, for religion is the supreme factor in the organizing and the regulating of our personal and collective life."[100] The present age is, more than any other, the age of the scientific study of religion. The last forty years, indeed, have seen such attention to the study of comparative religion as the world never saw before. What has been the outcome of that study? To make the relative position of Jesus among the founders of religion lower? I do not so understand it. No, the outcome is such that it is a manifestly inadequate statement to say, that he is transcendent among the founders of religion. The very most that we may hope to say about the founder of any other religion is, that in some single particular at a long distance he can be brought into comparison with Jesus. But let one think for a moment what it means for a man to be a founder of religion. We talk of leadership. Do we know what a founder of religion does? He makes the light, in which millions of men look upon all the events of their life, in which they see the past of the world's history, in which they look forward to the entire future. The very mood and atmosphere of men's lives are determined by these founders of religion; and among these preëminent leaders, Jesus, beyond all mistake, is transcendent.

Let the nature of his kingdom, too, be his witness. He calmly aims to found a kingdom that shall be spiritual, universal, eternal. One must face the fact that this man of Nazareth in Syrian Galilee, purposes in coolness of deliberation to found a kingdom that shall be absolutely spiritual, that shall make no appeal to any of the lower elements of man; one must see that this man, in those temptations through which he passed concerning the form of his work, deliberately set aside the kingdom by bread, the kingdom by marvel and ecstasy, and the kingdom by force, and purposed to found a kingdom solely upon moral and spiritual forces. And observe that he confidently expects this kingdom to be universal—appealing to men of all races and of all times, and to be eternal—still standing when all else shall have passed away. And upon his belief in this character of his kingdom he stakes his life, and calmly gives to himself as the goal of his life the establishment of just such a kingdom; and remains to the end confident of his success. The mere vitality of will in such a purpose is hard to take in, and alone may well give us pause.

And because he is the greatest in the greatest sphere, transcendent among founders of religion, the founder of a kingdom spiritual, universal, and eternal, he becomes for us a "personalized conscience," a spiritual, moral authority for us even beyond our own conscience—an authority that grows upon us with our growth, and submission to which is earth's highest moral test.

(2) And there must be added to this first proposition, that Jesus is the greatest in the greatest sphere, a second: He alone is the sinless and impenitent one. And it is to be noticed that it is this man who sees more clearly than any other the moral and spiritual, who knows, as no other does, what character is and what moral life means,—it is he, who claims to be the sinless one. No other ever intelligently made this claim; for no other was it ever intelligently made. The words of the great historian Ranke seem to us to be simple truth when he says: "More guiltless and more powerful, more exalted and more holy has naught ever been on earth than his conduct, his life, and his death. The human race knows nothing that could be brought even afar off into comparison with it." Only such an one could intelligently make for himself the claim of sinlessness. And for no other was this claim of sinlessness ever intelligently made. Men know each other too well to make it for others when moral consciousness has fully awakened. But he fights his battle in the wilderness, and there is no record of failure so far as he himself can see it, and none that disciple ever ascribed.

And this claim of sinlessness for Christ is to be urged, not so much because of any special statements by Christ as because of that remarkable fact to which Dr. Bushnell has called attention,—his impenitence. Jesus alone among all good men is a man of "impenitent piety;" and by this he is marked off absolutely from every other good man. What happens in the life of any other good man is this: that, as he goes forward, the sense of sin grows upon him, the ideal rises before him and he feels increasingly that his own life is inferior to it. Of Jesus this is not true. He shows no sign of consciousness of failure. There is no evidence that he feels that he has fallen short in any degree. He is absolutely without that universal characteristic of all other good men, absolutely without penitence. Contrast him for a moment with the man, who perhaps all would agree was the greatest of all his disciples, the man to whose devotion there seems to be no limit—the Apostle Paul; and notice, that years after his persecution of the church and of the cause of Jesus, with growing sense of what Jesus is, and of his own inexhaustible debt to him, there comes over him with increasing, not lessening, power the sense of his sin, and he writes to the Ephesians, "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given me that I might preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ;" and in one of the very last letters that comes down to us from him, says again, "Faithful is the saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." What evidence have we that Christ ever felt in the slightest degree such penitence?

(3) But more than this is true. With the highest ideal, Jesus not only does not consciously fall short of it, but consciously rises up to it, and, as Herrmann says, "compels us to admit that he does rise to it." It were very much that a man with any ideal, however inferior, should be able to say to himself, I have not fallen short of this ideal; but that one, who sees more clearly than any other in the realm of the moral and spiritual, and who has an ideal of simply absolute love and of unbounded trust in God,—that he should show not only no consciousness of falling short, but should consciously rise to his ideal and compel us to admit that he rises to it: this is a fact unparalleled in the history of the world. It is far more than mere sinlessness; there is here a positiveness of moral achievement so great—a fact so tremendous—that we seem able but feebly to take it in.