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Understanding the Scriptures

F >> Francis McConnell >> Understanding the Scriptures




Of course there are those who believe that it is impossible for Christ
to be a revelation of the human without also being a revelation of the
Divine. We have no desire to quarrel with this position, though we find
it more optimistic than convincing. Incredible as it may seem at first
thought, the universe might theoretically be regarded as a system ruled
over by a Deity who had brought forth a character like that of Christ
just for the sake of seeing what he could achieve in the way of a
masterpiece, without being himself fundamentally involved in self-
revelation. Christ might conceivably be a sort of poetic dream of the
Almighty rather than a laying bare of the Almighty's own life. We find
that human authors by an effort of great imagination fashion creations
in a sense completely different from themselves. It might be
theoretically urged that the character of Christ is different from the
character of God. If this seems very far-fetched, let us remind
ourselves then that there are those in the present world who conceive of
Christ as the very highest peak of human existence and yet deny that he
has any sort of significance as a revelation of the forces back of the
world. Such thinkers maintain that Christ is the best the race has to
show, and yet affirm that the race is but an insignificant item in the
total massiveness of the universe. The Bible establishes the faith of
men against skepticism like this by making the Christ-ideal for God
himself so attractive and appealing.

There are those who proclaim that we do not need any revelations of God
to make then human ideal fully significant--the human ideal stands by
itself. Some such thinkers go consistently the full length of saying
that they are willing to keep their eyes open to the hopelessness of the
universe. They can see nothing beyond this life but total oblivion.
Nevertheless, with their eyes open they will fight on manfully to the
end and take the final leap into the dark without flinching. They are
very apt to add that their philosophy is the only unselfish one; that
the desire of men for any sort of help from conceptions about the Divine
is selfishness where it is not sentimentalism. It is fair to say that
such doctrines seldom meet large response. The reason is not that men
selfishly seek out a God for the sake of material reward that may come
to them, but that they seek him for the sake of finding a resting place
for their minds and souls, for the sake of cherishing an end which seems
in itself worth while, for the sake of laying hold on a universe in
which they can feel at home. If this is selfishness, then the activities
of the human soul in its highest ranges are selfish. If it is selfish to
long for a universe in which the heart can trust, it is selfish also to
enjoy the self-satisfaction with which some of these thinkers profess to
be ready to take their leap into the night. As we scan the history of
Christianity since the day of the Founder we are impressed that
religious organizations as such which arise within Christianity tend to
survive in proportion as they make central the significance of Christ as
the revealer of the character of God. We would not for a moment
underestimate the importance of those groups of Christians who take
Christ merely as a prophet who lived the noblest life and exalted his
truth by the noblest death. Many such believers manifest the very purest
devotion to Christ. They are his disciples. But the historic fact is
that organizations founded on such doctrines alone do not win sweeping
triumphs. On their own statement the most they hope to do is to spread
the leaven of their doctrine into the thinking of other groups of
Christians. Their service in this respect is not to be disparaged, for
at all times the more orthodox opinion of Christ, so called, needs the
leavening of emphasis on the humanity of Christ. But after all these
allowances it is just to affirm that theology which sees only the human
in Christ does not come to vast power, and that clearly because the
world is chiefly interested in the question with which the entire
biblical revealing movement deals, namely, what is the nature of God?
With that question answered we can best understand the nature of man and
the possibility of communion between man and God.

We may be permitted to pick up the thread of the argument in the last
chapter and ask again what moral purposes rule the forces of this world.
It must indeed be an odd type of mind that does not at least
occasionally ask what this world is for, and what all this cosmic
commotion is about. It is well for all of us to do the best we can
without asking too many hard questions, but the queries will at times
come up and with the normal human being they are not likely easily to
down. We are in the midst of powers which defy our intellects. We do not
go far in the attempt to read the secrets of nature around us without
discovering that all we can hope to spell out is the stages by which
things come to pass, and the mechanisms by which they fit themselves
together. Why they come to pass is beyond us, except in a most limited
sense. The purposes for which events occur in this world are not self-
evidently clear. Explanations of purposes only make matters worse; and
at any moment this problem of the mystery of the universe may take
personal significance in the form of a blow upon the individual which
seems to mock all hope of anything worth while in human life. There is
nothing more futile than the attempts even of ministers to divine the
meanings of afflictions or of those inequalities of lot which attend the
natural order. The preachers can encourage us to make the most of a bad
lot, but their guesses as to why these things are ordinarily add to our
burdens. No, the mind of itself just by contemplation of the things as
they are cannot find much light. This enigma has always been before the
philosophers in the form of the question as to physical suffering. A
number of plausible answers have been made as to the reasons for pain in
the present order. Leibnitz said that even the Almighty creating the
finite world had to adjust himself to some limitations for the good of
the whole; that if some forces are to run in one direction, there must
be mutual concession and compromise in the adjustment of manifold other
activities; and that all this involves at least apparent stress and
injustice at particular points. This sounds well enough, but why the
afflictions of the individual who happens to be one of the particular
points should be just what they are is a mystery. The upshot is that the
ordinary man--the plain man, as we call him--must either give up the
whole problem by seeking to forget it, or must rebel against it, or he
must find relief in a God whom he can trust without being able to fathom
his plans.

The tragedy of physical affliction is light as compared to the tragedies
which arise in any conscience which seeks to take moral duties
seriously. To be sure, we live at present in a rather complacent age so
far as the struggles of conscience are concerned. The advice of the
world is to do the best we can and let the rest go. We are not to take
ourselves too seriously. But the long moral advances of the race have
come through those who have taken the voices of conscience seriously.
Now, what can a sensitive conscience make of moral duty? Assume that we
have before us the exalted Christ ideal, and accept this as the guide of
our lives--assume that we even have hope of some day attaining to that
ideal--the distracting question is bound to jump at us: Are we doing
enough? Have we sacrificed enough for those in worse plight than
ourselves? And what about our past mistakes? Shall we go back and try to
undo these? At the very best that might be like unraveling through the
night what we have spun through the day. It will not do to dismiss this
as unhealthiness or morbidness of mind. William James has shown pretty
conclusively that the so-called normal or healthy-minded moral life is
apt to be shallow. The great moral tragedy of the race is the distance
between the ideal and any possible attainment. We can console ourselves
by saying that noble discontent is the glory of man; but that does not
get us far. There is only one way out, and that is to trust that we are
dealing with a Christlike God, that his attitude toward us is the
attitude of Jesus toward men. It is impossible to feel that in
discipleship with Jesus men were complacent about their own moral
perfections on the one hand, or harassed with self-reproaches on the
other. They were advancing toward the realization of an ideal in
companionship with One who not only in himself realized the human ideal,
but who taught them that all the forces of the world would work together
with them in their climb toward perfection, and that God would be
patient with their blunders.

The question as to the character of God becomes more vital the longer we
reflect. The growing conscience of our time demands that two conceptions
be kept together--that of power and that of moral responsibility. We
cannot hold a person responsible unless he has power; we cannot give a
person power unless he is willing to act under responsibility. This
realization is fast modifying all our relations to politics, to finance,
to industry, even to private duties. We are swiftly moving toward the
day when society will insist that any measure of power which has an
outreach beyond the circle of the holder's personal affairs shall be
acquiesced in by society only on condition that the holder of that power
be willing definitely to assume responsibility to society. What we
demand of men we demand also of God, and we have the scriptural warrant
for believing that these human demands are themselves hints concerning
the nature of God. Now, no one doubts the power of God. All scientific
and philosophic trends are toward the centralization of power in some
unitary source. All our study of nature and of society convinces us that
there is a unity of power somewhere. If this be true, there must be
raised with increasing persistence the question as to whether the World-
Power is acting under a sense of moral responsibility. There were days
when this problem was not raised as it is now. Men assumed for centuries
that the king could do no wrong; that he could order his people about in
the most arbitrary fashion. In our own time we have seen advocacy of the
doctrine that the man of wealth is a law unto himself in the handling of
the power that comes with wealth. Such mistakes never were really a part
of the biblical idea. In shaping the threefold notion of priest and
prophet and king to make the people familiar with the functions of
God-sent leadership the strokes of emphasis always fell on the
responsibility of the prophet to proclaim his message at whatever cost
to himself, of the priest to keep in mind the sacredness of his office,
and of the king to rule in righteousness. These demands were inevitably
carried up to God: and in Christ the supreme effort is made to convince
us that we can trust in the God of Christ, though we may not be able to
understand him. This is not the place for an attempt at determining the
essentials of the Christ career. Some features of that life, however, as
illustrating responsibility in the use of power can be hinted at here.
Take the story of the temptation. We are not concerned now with the
historic form in which the temptation occurred. After the historians
have made all the changes in the drapery of the story they choose, the
fact remains that the temptation narrative deals with the essential
problems of any leader confronted with a task like that of Christ. The
Messianic consciousness was a consciousness of power. How should the
power be used? Should it be used to minister to human needs like those
of hunger? That would promise a quick solution of a sort. The peoples
would eagerly rally around the new deliverer. Should there be an attempt
to utilize the political machinery of the time? There could be no doubt
of the effectiveness of this plan. Should the exalted lofty spiritual
state of the Master be relied upon to carry him through spectacular
displays of extraordinary might that would capture the popular mind?
Each of these suggestions presented its advantages. Each might have been
rightfully followed by some one with less power than Jesus had; but for
him any one of them would have involved a misuse of power, and hence he
cast them all aside.

The miracles reported of Christ have this for their peculiarity, that
they show a power conceived of as divine used for a righteous purpose.
It is significant that practically all the miracles described are those
of healing or of relief. The kind of miracle that an irresponsible
leader would have wrought is suggested by the advice of James and John
to Jesus to call down fire on an inhospitable Samaritan village. The
reported reply of Jesus, "Ye know not what spirit you are of," is the
final comment on such use of power. Now, after we have made the most of
the miracles recorded of Jesus, after we have made them seem just as
extraordinary in themselves as possible, their most extraordinary
feature is this use to which the power was put; and on the other hand,
if we strip the miracles of everything that suggests breach of natural
law and make them just revelations of super-normal control over nature
through laws like those whose existence and significance we are
beginning to glimpse to-day, still we cannot empty these narratives of
their significance as revealing a morally responsible use of force. Let
us be just as orthodox as we can, the purpose of the use of the forces
is the supreme miracle; let us be just as destructively radical as we
please, we cannot eliminate from the Scriptures this impression of
Christ as one who used power with a sense of responsibility. This
revelation is one which the ages have always desired.

We must be careful to keep in mind the connection of the Christ life
with what came before it and what has proceeded from it. Here we have
the advantage which comes of regarding the Bible as the result of a
process running through the centuries. If the Bible were not a library,
but only a single book, written at a particular time, we might well be
attracted by the nobility of its teachings, but might despair of ever
making the teachings effective. There is no proving in syllogistic
fashion that Jesus was what he claimed to be, or that he was what his
disciples thought of him as being; but when we see a massive revealing
movement centering on the idea of God as revealed in Christ, when we see
the acceptance of the spirit of Christ opening the path to communion
with the Divine, and when we find increasing hosts of persons finding
larger life in that approach to the Divine, we begin to discern the vast
significance of the scriptural doctrine that in Christ we have the
revelation of the Christlike God.

In this discussion we have been careful to avoid the terms of formal and
creedal orthodoxy. This is not because the present writer is out of
sympathy with these terms, but because he is trying to keep to the main
impression produced by the New Testament. The fundamental scriptural
fact is that in Jesus the early believers saw God; they came to rest in
God as revealed in Christ. This is true of the picture of Christ in the
earliest New Testament writings. Modern scholarship has not been able to
find any documents of a time when the disciples did not think of Jesus
as the revealer of God. If the disciples had not thought of Jesus thus,
they would have found little reason to write of him. Now the scriptural
authors employ various terms to declare the unique intimacy of Christ
with God. In these expositions Jewish and Greek and even Roman thought
terms play their part. Passages like the opening sentences of the fourth
Gospel, or like the great chapter in the Philippians, are always
profoundly satisfying and suggestive in their interpretation of the
fundamental fact, but that fundamental fact itself is the all-essential
--that in Christ the New Testament writers thought of themselves as
having seen God, and as having gazed into the very depths of the spirit
of the Father in heaven. Believing as we do, moreover, in the
helpfulness of the creedal statements of the church, we must
nevertheless avow that such statements are secondary to the impression
made upon the biblical writers by actual contact with the Christ. We
must not lose sight of the primacy of that impression as we study our
Scriptures. We must not limit the glory of the impression itself by the
limitations of some of the explanations which we undertake. Much harm
has been done the understanding the Scriptures by speaking as if some of
our creedal statements concerning Christ are themselves Scriptures! The
scriptural Christ is greater than any creedal characterization of Christ
thus far undertaken.

Of recent years an attempt has been made to prove that no such person as
Jesus ever existed. The attempt has proved futile, but it has had a
significance altogether different from what the propounders of the
theory intended. The original aim was to show the contradictions of the
testimony concerning Jesus and the inadequacies of the testimony to his
existence as an historical Person. The result has been to show that the
real significance of the Christ life is not to be found in any
particular utterance, or in any specific deed, but in the total impact
that he made upon the consciousness of man as suggesting the immediate
presence of the Divine. The quality of the Christ life satisfies us in
the inner depths as bearing witness to the quality of the God life. We
have no sympathy with the views of the critics just mentioned; but we
must say that no matter how the thought of God in Christ got abroad, no
matter how mistaken our thought of the historical facts at the beginning
of the Christian era, the belief in the Christlike God nevertheless did
get abroad. There is no effacing that conception from the New Testament.
No matter what detailed changes in the narrative itself radical
criticism may think itself capable of making, the door was opened wide
enough in the Christ for the divine light to stream through. We said in
the last chapter that the most important feature of the biblical
revelation is God himself. We must now say that the supreme fact about
God is Christ.




CHAPTER VI

THE BOOK OF THE CROSS

If the central feature of the Scriptures is their idea of God, and if
the climax of the biblical revelation is Christ, the greatest fact about
Christ from the point of view of the Bible is his cross. We say
_fact_ advisedly, for we are not dealing with the theories that
have sprung up to interpret the meaning of the cross. We are trying to
deal solely with the direct impressions which seem to have been made
upon the scriptural writers as to the place of the cross in the
revealing movement.

We said in the last chapter that the Scriptures reach their climax in
the doctrine that God is in Christ. The cross of Christ carries to most
effective revelation the Christlike character of God. While we are not
treating now the various creedal dogmas as to the person of Christ, we
must not forget that those dogmas have essayed as part of their task the
bringing of God close to men. The truth embodied in the text that the
Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world is essential to knowing
the Scriptures. We have seen that even as a warrior Jehovah was thought
of as willing to bear his part of the burdens of the chosen people. We
have seen growing the idea that Jehovah was under moral obligation to
carry through the uplifting work which he had begun. We have seen
prophets attain to glimpses of the meaning of suffering for the divine
life, and we have beheld the culmination in the suffering of Christ. In
those perplexing phrases of the creeds like, "Very God of very God," the
aim of the church has been perfectly clear--to guard the scriptural idea
that God was so truly in Christ that the sufferings of Christ were the
sufferings of God. Even when least intelligible the pain of men becomes
more easily borne if men can believe that in some real sense their pain
is also the pain of God. That God is Christlike in capacity to suffer is
in itself a revelation of no small consequence.

In the cross of Christ we see exalted with surpassing power the belief
that God acts out of righteousness in his relation to the universe and
to men. It must needs be that Christ suffer. The writers seem unable to
escape the conviction that they are beholding the working of divinely
inevitable moral necessities. These moral obligations are not to be
conceived of as external to God or imposed on him from outside of
himself. In the Scriptures they seem, rather, to be expressions of his
own nature. When the writers of theories about the cross lay stress on
those profound obligations of God toward moral law which must be
discharged in the work of redemption, the Scriptural basis underneath
such theories is the implication that God, by the very fact of what he
is, must act righteously. His power is not his own in such sense that he
can act from arbitrary or self-centered motives. The Judge of all the
earth must do right, at whatever cost to himself. The Scriptures keep
close to the thought of God as a supremely powerful Being under supreme
responsibility in the use of his power. If we can believe the Scripture
that in Christ we see God, and that the bearing, of Christ during his
suffering reveals really and uniquely the bearing of God himself, we
have a revelation of the grasp with which moral responsibility holds the
Almighty against even any momentary slip into arbitrariness. Sometimes
we hear the sufferings of Christ preached as a pattern of nonresistance
for men. It is permissible thus to interpret the cross within
limitations; but this is not the essential aspect of the cross, as
explaining its hold on men. The all-important doctrine as to the use of
power is hinted at in the Master's word that he had but to call for
legions of angels if he so chose. Under most extreme provocation the
forces of the Almighty held to their appointed task. If the Almighty had
been conceived of as a Despot or an Egotist, he would have been expected
to resort at once to revengeful violence in the presence of such insults
as those of the persecutors of the Son of God. The Source of all
activity can hardly be conceived of as passive; but the passivity of the
Christ of the cross suggests that no outrage by men can divert the
almighty power from its moral purpose. This is really a gathering
together and lifting on high of the doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount,
that God maketh the sun to shine upon the just and the unjust, and
causeth his rain to fall on the evil and the good. That is to say, while
the Bible thinks of the cross as laying bare the Almighty's reaction
against evil, it also thinks of that cross as showing a God who will not
be disturbed by any merely "personal" considerations. We behold the
Almighty's use of power for the advance of a moral kingdom. The Almighty
is set before us as exerting all his power for the relief of men. The
cross makes the profoundest revelation of the moral fixedness and self-
control of God so long as we hold to the scriptural representation. It
is to be regretted that many theological theories break away from the
Scripture basis and build upon assumptions which are artificial, not to
say unmoral: or, rather, in their striving after system they get away
from the atmosphere of moral suggestiveness with which the Gospels and
Epistles surround the cross. That God will do his part in the redemption
of men is set before us in the cross. That part can be nothing short of
making men yearn to be like Christ and of aiding them in their struggle
for the Christlike character. It will be remembered that in the last
chapter we called attention to the hopelessness of the Christian ideal
viewed as an ideal in itself without a dynamic to help men to realize
the ideal. If Christ is only to reveal to us the character toward which
men are to strive, we are in despair. That one man has reached such
perfection is in itself no promise that other men may reach that
perfection. Moreover, the excellence of Christ is not only a moral
excellence; or if it is moral excellence, that excellence involves a
balance of intellectual attributes which is for us practically out of
reach. Now, Christ is the ideal, but the ideal is one toward which we
not only labor in our own strength, but one whose attainment by us is an
object of solicitude for God himself. And so we see in the cross a
patience which will bear with men to the utmost, and which will
reenforce them as they press toward the goal. The glory of Christianity
is largely hi the paradox that it sets before men an unattainable ideal
and then commands them to attain the ideal. If the cross is nothing but
a revelation of an ideal for men, this paradox is insoluble and
intolerable. In the scriptural light of the cross, however, we catch the
glory not of an abstract ideal, but of a Father's love for his children
--not of the commands of conscience in the abstract, but of the desires
of a personal Friend who will lift men as they stumble and fall. The
ground for this patience seems as we read to be in the very nature of
God himself. God has brought men into this world without consulting
them, he has dowered them with the terrific boon of freedom, he has set
them in hard places; but he has done this out of a moral and loving
purpose. He therefore makes more allowances for men than exacting men
ever can make for themselves. He puts at the service of men so much of
his power as they can appropriate by their moral effort. The Christ of
the cross is taught as the truth about God--the God who is at once the
supremely real and the supremely ideal places his powers at the service
of men who would make their Christ-ideal progressively real in
themselves.

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