The Jesus of History

by T. R. Glover

and they reach an immense flood of river-water. It was new life at once; but it did not necessarily mean the immediate exploration of everything, the instant completion of geographical discovery. It was life and the promise of more to follow. The history of the Church is a record, we may put it, both of the discovery of the River of Life and of the exploration of its course and its sources, and of what lies behind it. But the discovery and the exploration are different things, and the first is quicker and more certain than the second. Most of us will admit that we have not gone very far up into that Continent. The object of this chapter is not to attempt to survey or compendiarise Christian exploration of Jesus, but to try to find for ourselves a new approach to an estimate of the historical figure who has been and remains the centre of everything.

We may classify the records of the Christian exploration roughly in three groups. In the early Christian centuries, we find endless thought given to the philosophical study of the relation of Christ and God. It fills the library of the Early Church, and practically all the early controversies turn upon it. The weak spot in all this was the use of the "a priori" method. Men started with preconceptions about God—not unnaturally, for we all have some theories about God, which we are apt to regard as knowledge. But knowledge is a difficult thing to reach in any sphere of study; and men assumed too quickly that they had attained a sound philosophical account of God. They over-estimated their actual knowledge of God and did not recognize to the full the importance of their new experience. This may seem ungenerous to men, who gave life and everything for Jesus Christ, and to whose devotion, to whose love of Jesus, we owe it that we know him—an ungenerous criticism of their brave thinking, and their independence in a hundred ways of old tradition. Still it is true that the weakness of much of their Christology—and of ours—is that it starts with a borrowed notion of God, which really has very little to do with the Christian religion. To this we shall return; but in the meantime we may note that here as elsewhere preconceptions have to be lightly held by the serious student. Huxley once wrote to Charles Kingsley: "Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth that is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before the fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever end Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing …. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this." So Huxley wrote about the study of natural science. In this great inquiry of ours we have to learn to be patient enough—we might say, ignorant enough—to do the same. The Early Church had a faith in Greek philosophy, which stood in its way, brave and splendid as its thinkers were.

Our second group is represented roughly by the Hymn Book. The evidential value of a good hymn book will stand investigation. Of course a great many hymns are mere copies, and poor copies; but the Hymn Book at its best is a collection of first-hand records of experience.[33] In the story of the Christian Church doxology comes before dogma. When the writer of the Apocalypse breaks out at the very beginning: "Unto him that loved us and washed[34] us from our sins in his own blood . . . be glory and dominion for ever and ever" (Rev. 1:5), he is recording a great experience; and his doxology leads him on to an explanation of what he has felt and known—to an intellectual judgement and an appreciation of Christ. The order is experience,—happiness and song—and then reflection. The love and the cleansing, and the joy, supply the materials on which thought has to work. We have always to remember that thought does not strictly supply its own material, however much it may help us to find it. Philosophy and theology do not give us our facts. Their function is to group and interpret them.

Our third group of records is given to us by the men of the Reformation. We have there two great movements side by side. There is Bible translation, which means, in plain language, a decision or conviction on the part of scholars and thinkers, that the knowledge of the historical Jesus, and of men's first experiences of him, is of the highest importance in the Christian life. The whole Reformation follows, or runs parallel with, that movement. It is essentially a new exploration of what Jesus Christ can do and of what he can be.

In dealing with all these three groups of records, we have to note the seriousness of the men who made the experiments, their energy of mind, their determination to reach real facts and, in Cromwell's great phrase, to "speak things." They will have the truth of the matter. Intricate and entangled as is the history, for instance, of the Arian controversy—that controversy which "turned on a diphthong," as Carlyle said in his younger days—it represented far more than mere logomachy, as Carlyle saw later on. It followed from a determination to get at the real fact of who and what Jesus Christ is; and the two words, that differed by a diphthong, embodied diametrically opposite conceptions of him. With all the super-subtlety that sometimes characterizes theologians, these men had a passion for truth. It led them into paths where our minds find a difficulty in following; but the motive was the imperative sense that thinking men must examine and understand their supreme experience—a motive that must weigh with men who are in earnest about life. The great hymns of the Church—such as the "Dies Irae" of Thomas of Celano, or Bernard's "Jesu dulcis memoria", or Toplady's "Rock of Ages"—are transcripts from life, made by deep-going and serious minds. The writers are recording, with deep conviction of its worth, what they have discovered in experience. A man who takes Christ seriously and will "examine life," will often find in those great hymns, it may be with some surprise, an anticipation of his own experience as Bunyan did in Luther's Commentary on Galatians. Livingstone had "Jesu dulcis memoria"—the Latin of it—ringing in his head as he travelled in unexplored Africa. Men who did such work—work that lasts and is recognized again and again to be genuine by others busy in the same field—cannot have been random, light-hearted creatures. They were, in fact, men tested in life, men of experience of wide and deep experience—men with a gift for living, developed in heart as well as in brain. The finest of Greek critics, Longinus, said that, "The great style ("hupsos") is an echo of a great soul." Neander said—and it is again and again true—that "it is the heart that makes the theologian." Where we find a great hymn or a great theology, we may be sure of finding a great nature and a great experience behind it.

Let us sum up our general results so far. First of all, whatever be the worth of the consensus of Christian opinion—and we have to decide how much it is worth, bearing in mind the type of man who has worked and suffered to make it in every age; and, I think, it runs high, as the work of serious and explorative minds—the consensus of Christian opinion gives the very highest name to Jesus Christ. Men, who did not begin with any preconception in his favour, and who have often had a great deal of difficulty in explaining to others—and perhaps to themselves—the course by which they have reached their conclusions, claim the utmost for Jesus—and this in spite of the most desperate philosophical difficulties about monotheism. With a strong sense of fact, with a deepening feeling for reality, with a growing value for experience, and with bolder ventures upon experience, men have found that their conception of Jesus deepens and grows; he means more to them the more they are. And, as was noted in the first chapter, in a rational universe, where truth counts and error fails, the Church has risen in power with every real emphasis laid on Jesus Christ. What does this involve?

So far our records. To-day we are living in an era when great scientific discoveries are made, and more are promised. Geology once unsettled people about Genesis; but closer study of the Bible and of science has given truer views of both, and thinking people are as little troubled about geology now as about Copernican astronomy. At present heredity and psychology are dominating our minds—or, rather, theories as to both; for though beginnings have been made, the stage has not yet been reached of very wide or certain discovery. There is still a great deal of the soul unexplored and unmapped. No reasonable person would wish to belittle the study either of evolution or of psychology; but the real men of science would probably urge that lay people should take more pains to know the exact meaning and scope of scientific terms, and to have some more or less clear idea in their minds when they use them. However, all these modern discoveries and theories are, to many men's minds, a challenge to the right of Christians to speak of Jesus Christ as they have spoken of him, a challenge to our right to represent the facts of Christian life as we have represented them—in other words, they are a challenge to us to return to experience and to see what we really mean. If our study of Jesus in the preceding chapters has been on sound lines, we shall feel that the challenge to face facts is in his vein; it was what he urged upon men throughout.

The old problem returns upon us: Who and what is this Jesus Christ? We are involved in the recurrent need to re-examine him and re-explore him.

There are several ways of doing so. Like every other historical character Jesus is to be known by what he does rather than by "a priori" speculation as to what he might be. In the study of history, the first thing is to know our original documents. There are the Gospels, and, like other historical records, they must be studied in earnest on scientific lines without preconception. And there are later records, which tell us as plainly and as truthfully of what he has done in the world's history. We can begin, then, with the serious study of the actual historical Jesus, whom people met in the road and with whom they ate their meals, whom the soldiers nailed to the cross, whom his disciples took to worshipping, and who has, historically, re-created the world.

The second line of approach is rather more difficult, but with care we can use Christological theories to recover the facts which those who framed the theories intended to explain. We must remember here once more the three historical canons laid down at the beginning. We must above all things give the man's term his meaning, and ask what was the experience behind his thought. When we come upon such descriptions of Jesus as "Christ our Passover" (1 Cor. 5:7), or find him called the Messiah, we must not let our own preconceptions as to the value of the theories implied by the use of such language, nor again our existing views of what is orthodox, determine our conclusions; but we must ask what those who so explained Jesus really meant to say, and what they had experienced which they thought worth expressing. These people, as we see, were face to face with a very great new experience, and they cast about for some means of describing and explaining it. A slight illustration may suggest the natural law in accordance with which they set about their task of explanation. A child, of between two and three years old, was watching his first snow-storm, gazing very intently at the flying snow-flake, and evidently trying to think out what they were. At last he hit it; they were "little birds." It is so that the mind, infant or adult, is apt to work—explaining the new and unknown by reference to the familiar. Snow-flakes are not little birds; they are something quite different; yet there is a common element—they both go flying through the air, and it was that fact which the child's brain noticed and used. To explain Jesus, his friends and contemporaries spoke of him as the Logos, the Sacrifice, "Christ our Passover," the Messiah, and so forth. Of those terms not one is intelligible to us to-day without a commentary. To ordinary people Jesus is at once intelligible—far more so than the explanations of him. Historically, it is he himself who has antiquated every one of those conceptions, and, so far as they have survived, it has been in virtue of association with him. They are the familiar language of another day. "No one," said Dr. Rendel Harris, "can sing, 'How sweet the name of Logos sounds.'" Synesius of Cyrene did try to sing it, but most human beings prefer St. Bernard or John Newton.