‘Christ in you, or the Spirit of Christ in you; these are not different realities; but the one is the method of the other. It is in the Person of Christ that the Eternal God is revealed in manhood to man. It is in the Person of His Spirit that the Incarnate Christ is Personally present within the spirit of each several man. The Holy Ghost is mainly revealed to us as the Spirit of the Incarnate[[65]].’
It is to the language of St. Paul and St. John that we go for proof that the Holy Spirit is a Person; but it is also from their language that we learn how intimately He is associated with the other Divine Persons.
We are led up to what is in later theological language called the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It is well known that some of the most important data for this doctrine are derived from the Fourth Gospel, especially from the last discourse. And whatever is found in St. John may be paralleled in substance from St. Paul.
3. Comparison with the Synoptic Gospels.
Now I am not going to maintain that, if one of us had been an eye-witness of the Life of Christ, the profound teaching of which I have just given an outline would have seemed to him to bear the same kind of proportion to the sum total of His teaching that it bears in the Fourth Gospel. By the essential conditions of the case it could not be so. It is this particular kind of teaching which the Evangelist specially wishes to enforce; and, in order to enforce it, he has singled out for his narrative just those scenes in which it came up—those and, broadly speaking, no others.
We have seen that in regard to this teaching there is a very large amount of coincidence between St. Paul and St. John. We shall have presently to consider what is the nature and ground of this coincidence, how it arose and what relation it implies between the two Apostles. But before going on to this, we must first ask ourselves how far it can be verified by comparison with the Synoptic Gospels. It is right to look for such verification, however much we may be convinced that these Gospels are an extremely partial and fragmentary representation of all that Christ said and did. Even a modern biography, contemplated perhaps during the life-time of its subject, and actually begun soon after his death, will only contain a tithe (if he is a really great man) of his more significant acts and sayings. But those who attempted to write what we wrongly call Lives of Christ did not, as it would seem, for the most part even begin to do so or make preparations for beginning for some thirty years after the Crucifixion, when the company of the apostles and intimate disciples was already dispersed, or at least in no near contact with the writers[[66]]. We have only to ask ourselves what we should expect in such circumstances. And I think we should find that our expectations were fully borne out if we were to compare together the contents of the oldest documents, those of the Logia with the Mark-Gospel, and those of the special source or sources of St. Luke with both. The amount and value of the gleanings which each attempt left for those who came after tells its own story.
But if we do not expect that the Synoptic Gospels would be in the least degree exhaustive in the materials they have preserved for us from the Life of Christ, we might be sure that their defects would be greatest in regard to the class of teaching with which we are at present concerned. It is teaching of a kind that might perhaps haunt the minds of a few gifted and far-sighted individuals, but would certainly fall through the meshes of the mind of the average man. It was this very fact, as we have seen, which prompted the Fourth Evangelist to write his Gospel. The externals of the Lord’s Life he recognized as having been adequately told; but it was just the profoundest teaching and some of the most significant acts that had escaped telling, and that he himself desired to rescue from oblivion.
We must therefore be content if we can verify a few particulars. We must not from the outset expect to be able to do more. And we must be still more content if these particulars show by their character that they are fragments from a much larger wreckage, that they are what we might call chance survivals of what had once existed on a much larger scale.
We concluded our sketch of the Christology of the Fourth Gospel by speaking of the data which it contained for the doctrine of the Trinity. These however are only data. It is perhaps a little surprising that the only approach to a formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity occurs not in St. John but at the end of the Gospel of St. Matthew (xxviii. 19). I am of course well aware that this part of the First Gospel is vigorously questioned by the critics. I am prepared to believe myself that the passage is a late incorporation in the Gospel; and antecedently I should not say that we had strong guarantees for its literal accuracy. But then—this is an old story, so far as I am concerned, and I must apologize for introducing it, but I cannot leave the point unnoticed—how are we to explain that other remarkable verse that occurs at the end of the second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 Cor. xiii. 14)? This familiar three-fold benediction must have had antecedents; it must, I should say, have had a long train of antecedents. The most adequate explanation of it seems to me to be that the train of antecedents started from something corresponding, something said at some time or other, in the teaching of our Lord[[67]]. I fully believe that the hints and intimations of a Trinity that we find scattered about the New Testament have their origin ultimately in the teaching of Christ. Apart from this, how could the conception have been reached at so early a date? For 2 Corinthians must in any case fall between 53-57 A.D.[[68]]
Let us work our way backwards through another of the hints. We have seen that the coming of the Paraclete is described in the Fourth Gospel as a return of Christ to His own. Are there any parallels for this in the Synoptic Gospels? Not exactly, because the two things are not brought into combination. But we have on the one hand distinct predictions of the activity of the Holy Spirit after the departure of Christ. For instance: