The inner significance of each term will point to the real experience of the man using it. He employs a metaphor, a simile, or a technical term to explain something. Can we penetrate to the analogy which he finds between the Jesus of the new experience and the old term which he uses? Can we, when we see what he has experienced, grasp the substance and build on that to the neglect of the term? When we look at the terms, we find that the essence of sacrifice was reconciliation between God and man (we shall return to this a little later), and that the Messiah was understood to be destined to achieve God's purpose and God's meaning for mankind and for each man. We find, again, that the inner meaning of the Logos is that through it, and in it, God and man come in touch with each other and become mutually intelligible. Reconciliation, the victory of God, the mutual intelligibility of God and man—all three terms centre in one great thought, a new union between God and man. That, so far as I can see, is the common element; and that is, as men have conceived it, the very heart of the Christian experience.
In the third place, we can utilize the new experiments made upon Jesus Christ in the Reformation and in other revivals. They come nearer to us; for the men who report are more practical and more scholarly in the modern way; they are more akin to us both in blood and in ideas. Luther, for example, is a great spirit of the explorer type. He went to scholarship and learnt the true meaning of "metanoia"—that it was "re-thinking" and not "penance"—and he grasped a new view of God there. From scholarship he gained a truer view of Church history than he had been taught; and this too helped to clear his mind. Above all, as "a great son of fact" (Carlyle's name for him), his chief interest was the exploration of Jesus Christ—would Christ stand all the weight that a man could throw upon him without assistance? And Luther found that Christ could; and he at once turned his knowledge into action, as the world knows. "Justification by faith" was his phrase, and he meant that we may trust Jesus Christ with all that we are, all that we have been, and all that we hope to be; that Jesus himself will carry all; that Jesus himself is all; that Jesus is at once Luther's eternal salvation, and his sure help in the next day's difficulty—his Saviour for ever from sin, and his great stand-by in translating the Bible for the German people and in writing hymns for boys and girls. "Nos nihil sumus", he wrote, "Christus solus est omnia".[35] In the case of every great revival—the Wesleyan revival, and the smaller ones in the United States, in the north of Ireland, in Wales—in every one we find that, where anything is really achieved, it is done by a new and thoroughgoing emphasis on Jesus Christ. It may be put in language which to some ears is repulsive, in metaphors strange or uncouth; but whatever the language, the fact that underlies it is this—men are brought back to the reality, the presence, the power, and the friendship of Jesus Christ; they are called to a fresh venture on Jesus Christ, a fresh exploration: and again and again the experience of a lifetime has justified the venture.
This brings us to the most effective and fundamental method in the exploration of Jesus, in some ways the most difficult of all, or else the very simplest. The Church has been clear that there is nothing like personal experiment, the personal venture. It is the only clue to the experience. The saying of St Augustine (Sermon 43, 3), "Immo Credo ut intelligas," is to many of our minds offensive—I think, because we give not quite the right meaning to his "Credo". But, if the illustrations are not too simple, swimming and bicycling offer parallels. A man will never understand how water holds up a human body, as long as he stays on dry land. In practical things, the venture comes first; and it is hard to see how a man is to understand Christ without a personal experience of him. All parents know how much better bachelors and maiden sisters understand children than they do; but as soon as these great authorities have children of their own, the position is altered a little.
The change that Jesus definitely operates in men, they have described in various ways—rebirth, salvation, a new heart, and so forth. What they have always emphasized in Jesus Christ, is that they find he changes their outlook and develops new instincts in them, and that in one way and another he saves from sin; and they have been men who have learnt and adopted Jesus' own estimate of sin. When, then, we remember that, with his serious view of sin, he undertook man's redemption from it; when we add to this some real reflection upon how much he has already done, as plain matter of history, to "take away the sin of the world," we surely have something to go upon in our attempt to determine who he is. The question will rise, Have Christians overstated their experience, or even misunderstood it? Has forgiveness been, in fact, achieved—or salvation from sin? Can sin be put away at all? What will the evidence for this be? I do not know what the evidence could be, except the new life of peace with God, and all the sunshine and blessing that go with it. This new life is at all events all the evidence available; and how much it means is very difficult to estimate without some personal experience.
Here again the great theories of Redemption will help us to recover the experience they are to explain; and once more we may note that they are not the work of small minds or trivial natures, however badly they have been echoed. Substitution implies at any rate some serious confession of guilt before God, some strong sense of a great indebtedness to Christ. The theory of Sacrifice implies the need of reunion with God. Robertson Smith, in his "Early Religion of the Semites" brings out that the essence of ancient sacrifice was that the tribe, the sacrificial beast and the god were all of one blood; the god was supposed to be alienated; the sacrifice was offered by the party to the quarrel who was seeking reconciliation, namely, the tribe. When we look at the New Testament, we find that the emphasis always lies on God seeking reconciliation with man (cf. 2 Cor. 5:19). The theory of ransom—a most moving term in a world of slavery—implies the need of new freedom for the mind, for the heart and the whole nature, from the tyranny of sin. All these are similes; and tremendous structures of theory have been built on every one of them—and for some of these structures, simile, or, in plainer language, analogy, is not a sufficient foundation. It is probably true that all our current explanations of the work of Christ in Redemption have in them too large an element of metaphor and simile. Yet Christian people are reluctant to discard any one of them; and their reluctance is intelligible. There is a value in the old association, which is found by new experience. Every one of these old similes will contribute to our realization of the work of Christ, in so far as it is a record of experience of Christ, verified in one generation after another. We shall make the best use of them, when we are no longer intimidated by the terminology, but go at once to what is meant—to the facts.
We come still closer to the facts in the less metaphorical terms of the New Testament. For example, there is the New Covenant. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews went back to a great phrase in Jeremiah, and by his emphasis on it he helped to give its name to the whole New Testament—"I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah" (Heb. 8:8-12; Jer. 31:31-34). Using this passage, he brings out that there is a new relation, a new union, between God and man in Jesus. He speaks of Jesus as a mediator bringing man and God together (Heb. 8:6)—language far plainer to us than the terminology of sacrifice, which he employed rather to bring home the work of Jesus with feeling and passion to those who had no other vocabulary, than to impose upon Christian thinkers a scheme of things which he clearly saw to be exhausted. Then there is Paul's great conception of Reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18-20). Half the difficulties connected with the word "Atonement" disappear, when we grasp that the word in Greek means primarily reconciliation. As Paul uses the noun and the verb, it is very plain what he means—God is in Christ trying to reconcile the world to himself. These attempts to express Christ's work in plain words take us back to the great central Christian experience—to the great initial discovery that the discord of man's making between God and man has been removed by God's overtures in Christ; that the obstacles which man has felt to his approach to God—in the unclean hands and the unclean lips—have been taken away; and that with a heart, such as the human heart is, a man may yet come to God in Jesus, because of Jesus, through Jesus.
The historical character of Christian life and thought is surely evidence that Jesus Christ has accomplished something real; and when we get a better hold of that, the problem of his person should be more within our reach. The splendid phrase of Paul—"Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5:1)—or that of 1 Peter: "In whom ye rejoice … with joy unspeakable and full of glory" (1 Pet. 1:8)—gives us the keynote. The gaiety of the Early Church in its union with Jesus Christ rings through the New Testament and the Christian fathers from Hermas to Augustine. The Church has come singing down the ages.[36] The victory over sin—no easy thing at any time—is another permanent feature of Christian experience. The psychological value of what Dr. Chalmers called "the expulsive power of a new affection" is not enough studied by us. Look at the freedom, the growth, the power of the Christian life—where do they all come from? We cannot leave God out of this. At any rate, there they are in the Christian experience; and where does anything that matters flow from but from God? There is again the evidence of Christian achievement; and it should be remarked that the Christian always tells us that he himself has not the power, that it comes from God, that he asks for it and God gives it. As for the easy explanation of all religious life by "auto-suggestion," we may note that it involves a loose and unscientific use of a more or less scientific theory—never a very safe way to knowledge. In any case, it has been pointed out, the word adds nothing to the number of our facts; nor is it quite clear yet that it eliminates God from the story any more than the term "digestion" makes it inappropriate to say Grace before meat. All these things—peace, joy, victory, and the rest—follow from the taking away of sin, and imply that it no longer stands between God and man. All this is the work of the historical Jesus. It is he who has changed the attitude of man to God, and by changing it has made it possible for God to do what he has done. If God, in Paul's phrase, "hath shined in our hearts" (2 Cor. 4:6), it was Jesus who induced men to take down the shutters and to open the windows. It is all associated, historically, with the ever-living Jesus Christ, and with God in him.
This brings us to the central question, the relation of Jesus with
God—the problem of Incarnation. After all that has been said, we
shall not approach it "a priori". We are too apt to put the
Incarnation more or less in algebraic form:
x+y=a,
where a stands for the historical Jesus Christ, and x and y respectively for God and man. But what do we mean by x and y? Let us face our facts. What do we know of man apart from Jesus Christ? Surely it is only in him that we realize man—only in him that we grasp what human depravity really is, the real meaning and implications of human sin. It is those who have lived with Jesus Christ, who are most conscious of sin; and this is no mere morbid imagination or fancy, it rests on a much deeper exploration of human nature than men in general attempt. Not until we know what he is do we see how very little we are, and how far we have gone wrong. It is his power of help and sympathy that teaches us the hardness of our own hearts, our own fundamental want of sympathy. Again, until a man knows Jesus Christ, he has little chance of even guessing the grandeur of which he himself is capable. A man has, as he says, done his best—for years, it may be, of strenuous endeavour; and then comes the new experience of Jesus Christ, and he is lifted high above his record, he gains a new power, a new tenderness, and he does things incredible. We do not know the wrong or the right of which man is capable, till we know Jesus Christ. The y of our equation, then, does not tell us very much.