The Double Search: Studies in Atonement and Prayer

by Rufus M. Jones

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.