The surpassingly significant fact, that Christ's chief work in the establishment of the kingdom of God, as seems to me beyond doubt, was his personal association with a few men; that, probably, a full third, perhaps more, of his very brief so-called public ministry was taken up with a period of definitely sought comparative retirement with the inner circle of the disciples—all this points to the same recognition of the fundamental importance in Christ's eyes of such a reverence for the person. The kingdom of God can be founded only by the full winning of free persons into his discipleship. The kingdom is first and last a kingdom of free persons, in Dr. Mulford's language, always a "Republic of God." Professor Peabody's emphasis on the essential importance of Christ's individualism, that "Jesus approaches life from within, through the inspiration of the individual,"[112] it need not be said, goes upon the same assumption of Christ's reverence for the person.
In his really public ministry the same spirit appears; for Jesus seems to me here constantly to be standing with a kind of moral shudder between the spirit of contempt in the Pharisees and Sadducees, and the outraged personality of the common people, even of the publicans and sinners. He feels the contempt even for these least, as a blow in his own face.
That glimpse which the Revelation gives us of Christ standing and knocking at the heart's closed door, is a true picture forevermore not only of the attitude of Christ's earthly life, but of God's eternal relation to us. Men may over-ride and outrage us, and even think that they show the more love thereby; God, never. This principle, then, we may take as absolutely crucial, in our judgment of God's dealings with us.
(2) In Creation.—It is fundamental even in creation. The very fact of the creation of persons implies it. Such a creation can have no significance, if, in the language already quoted from Howison, God's "consciousness is void of that recognition and reverence of the personal initiative of other minds which is at once the sign and the test of the true person."
And if love is, for a moment, to be thought of as the motive of creation, it required for any satisfaction of it, persons who could freely respond to that love.
The definite bestowal of the fateful gift of moral freedom, with the practical certainty of sin—the creation of beings who could choose against him—shows how deeply planted in the very being of God is this principle of reverence for the person.
Here, too, the impossibility of arbitrary divine decrees meets us. This would be treating a person as a thing, and God himself may not do that and remain God. If a man cannot see his way to a faith both in the divine foreknowledge and in the moral initiative of men, therefore, he must not hesitate to choose even the divine nescience of the free acts of men, rather than think of God as compelling men. Our whole moral universe tumbles about our ears, if he who is the source of all is not in earnest with persons. And yet there is much theological thinking, of which the common notions of a personal reign of Christ on the earth may be taken as an example, that practically looks to a kingdom by compulsion. A kingdom of free spirits cannot be merely decreed.
(3) In Providence.—And this same principle of reverence for personality must be felt to be the guiding motive and key, as well, in the providence and government of God. God keeps his hands off. He must so act as to call out, not to suppress, individual initiative.
This is, perhaps, the deepest reason for a sphere of law, that there may be a realm in which a person can have his own free development, uninterfered with by any moral compulsion.
If, now, this sphere of law is to be any true training ground for character, as we saw in the third chapter, results must not be forthwith set aside, the mutual influence of men must hold all along the line.