The Christian Church possesses the authentic history of the life of Jesus Christ in the form of four Gospels. These differ widely from one another in the way they apprehend and present the particulars of the life of Jesus. This difference often exhibits a strong appearance of contradiction, and even real formal contradiction. And yet by their perfect harmony in essential outlines, they unquestionably present the person of one only man, and one only divine revelation in Him. Nay, in giving their particulars, they so fit into one another as to give unitedly the richest presentation of the one living form of Christ and His history. This fact, the appearance of the one Gospel in the four different Gospels, has been considered by a criticism alien to the spirit of Christianity, as the affliction, or even the evil fate of the Church, because that harmony of the four Gospels veils itself always more and more to this criticism. The spirit of the Church, on the other hand, which, in its scientific form, is not less the truly critical spirit, has always seen in the same fact a priceless possession of the Church, a peculiar storehouse of its Gospel treasures, because, through all the diversities of the Gospels, it has always clearly perceived their unity—the one Gospel. (See above, vol. i. p. 193.)

That false and disordered criticism could not, however, have arrived at this judgment of despair, or, it may be, of malignant joy, regarding the meaning of the four Gospels for the Church, had not the fact mentioned, the purest unity of the Gospel in the richest manifoldness of the Gospels, become for it a dark enigma, with which it has ever-increasing and truly Tantalus-like trouble and distress. This fact could not fail to become for it such an enigma, because, in judging it, it proceeded on an entirely false hypothesis. It assumed that the historical knowledge contained in the Gospel history must present itself as protocol or notary knowledge, and must evince its truth by being open to no objections, not even to sophistical and pettifogging objections. It would not, however, have come to this, had it not set out from entirely false principles, according to which there exists an eternal and insoluble contradiction between the divine and the human, and, in consequence of that, between the objective and the subjective, and very specially between the general and the individual.

Genuine criticism, on the other hand, sees in the same fact, not an enigma but a mystery, in which the treasure is carefully enveloped; and this mystery becomes always clearer to it, the more it learns to understand the life of Christ as the life of the God-man, and Christian life as divine-human. If Christ had revealed the Godhead in a form excluding the truth of human nature from it, such a revelation must have obliterated every truly human peculiarity in the organs also who received it. If, on the other hand, the history of His life had been only the unfolding of an eminent human life partly shut up in itself, He would not have been recognized in all the distinctness of one and the same spirit as altogether the same person by the different biographers. But because He was the God-man, in whom Godhood and manhood were united, He stamped His image and life on the witnesses who beheld Him with a power and distinctness of the Divine Spirit which necessarily produced the like view in all, but at the time with human gentleness and definableness, which permitted, nay, even invited each of them to appropriate Him according to his own peculiar character and way of seeing. Thus the mysterious fact of only one conception of the life of Jesus, set forth with manifold richness of view, proceeded necessarily from His divine-human personality, and its peculiar effects upon men. Nothing but the perfect impress of the God-man upon elect men could have produced this extraordinary phenomenon, the one Gospel in the four Gospels.

Yet this appearance could not have presented itself in so perfectly pure a form as it really did, had not the God-man communicated the operation of His life in its entire perfection, that is, in the power of His Spirit, to them who were called to be His biographers. Had He not quite subjugated them or carried them along by His Divine Spirit, had He not entirely consecrated them to be His organs, the fact would have been shown by their furnishing us with four portraitures of Christ, all more or less, and indeed fundamentally differing.¹ But they were elect Christians, of primitive and apostolic times, fully matured in the complete view of His life; they could therefore give full scope to their peculiarities in setting it forth, and yet continue perfectly certain of being in entire harmony. They all portrayed only the one Christ. But if, on the other hand, it had not been in the form of perfect humanity that our Lord brought His divine life into contact with their human life, their peculiarity would not have been free, and we should have had in their Gospels only four more or less similar copies of the one heavenly code of law contained in His life, but as being the purest original copies, we should not have been able to distinguish from one another these four treatises instinct with life from the Prince of life. But as the God-man had consecrated them to be men of God, they could give such lively representations of Him as He ruled over and in men during His manifestation, and became embodied in humanity by revelation. Thus, as the revelation of humanity was perfected in the God-man Himself by the perfection of the revelation of the Godhead in Him, and vice versa, so the Evangelists also, when they attained to a state of perfect devotedness to Christ, must also have attained to the full development of their distinctive peculiarities, and, conversely, with the latter attained to the former. Hence we draw the following definite conclusions:—The more clearly we discern the distinctive characteristics of each of the four Gospels, the more clearly do we see the one Gospel manifesting itself in each and every part of them; or, in other words, the more clearly we see the peculiarities of the Evangelists, the more clearly do we see their unity; and the more we recognize through them the distinctive form of Christ’s humanity, with so much the greater clearness does the light of His divinity shine upon us.

But this declares at the same time the relation of the Christian Church to the above-mentioned mystery of the Gospel in four shapes. This mystery can never become an enigma to the Church herself, for the simple reason that Christ lives in her—lives in her as the God-man, and so trains and moulds her that she can see the divine-human. For the understanding of the God-man always leads to understanding also the divine-human character of the Gospel records. Thus, as certainly as the Church of Christ must always unfold herself with increasing glory, so certainly shall what is mysterious in this fact become always more and more clear to her. But as her life in this transition stage may be overcast with clouds, her understanding of the harmony of the four Gospels may and must be proportionally obscured. And in so far the varying estimate of this fact may become a barometer of the varying dispositions in Christian theology. We cannot affirm that theology has reached its ideal when it loses sight of the peculiarities of the four Gospels in contrast to their unity, or sees these peculiarities in only their most paltry forms, so that Matthew is regarded as a kind of writer of chronicles, Mark as an epitomizer, Luke as a compiler, and John as supplementing the others. This theory has been held: it was one of the symptoms of a legal view of Christianity in general which misapprehended the human element both in Christ and in His disciples, and for that very reason could not attain to the riches of the knowledge of His divinity, the fulness of which is laid before us only in His human organization.

Just as little can we believe that theology was in a flourishing condition when men of the schoolmaster spirit began to lose the unity of the life and the Spirit of Christ behind apparent contradictions and contradictory appearances (different ways of presenting things). In the first case the mystery was resolved into a contracted formula, and in the latter stamped as a dark enigma,² while its very design is to invite us to a divine-human, genuinely Christian, believing and free view of the God-man.

But this mystery, even when obscured, still exercises its essential power. All Christianity works pedagogically in the stages preparatory to a decided Christian life, and so does this fact. It is the great schoolmaster which continually compels thousands of small masters to enter into the service of the history of the life of Christ, makes them occupy themselves incessantly with a history, which certainly would have had much less powerful attraction for them, had it been transmitted to them in a single biography, written with all possible plainness; and impels them to many toilsome services for the explanation of the Gospels, which are to be found in even the worst productions of a criticism destitute of the spirit of Christianity.

But this fact leads all real Christians to seek the true enjoyment of the life of Christ for salvation, not in detached and external views, but in the simple impression produced by His character, and in the essential characteristics of His walk and work.

This fact, that four Gospels are employed to set forth the one Gospel, is well fitted for combating the unfree faith in the letter, and for declaring the rightfulness of the most living subjectivity in Christianity. For as soon as a man of this literalizing faith seeks support, in his sense, in the four Gospels, the critic comes to deprive him of his sluggish peace, destitute of spirit and life. And as soon as he ventures to assail subjective Christianity, the four Gospels meet him, like guardian spirits of true Christian subjectivity. They are the first great types of a living view and historical reflection, in which the divine objective has transformed itself in the enjoyment of free individuality, and this again has transformed itself in devotedness to the objective revelation of God. But the view here referred to, is that which is distinctively Christian, rising on the one hand, above abstract objective empiricism, and on the other, above abstract subjective (fanciful) idealism.

Again, this phenomenon of the one Gospel in the four Gospels shows that the highest individual freedom, in beholding and declaring Christ, must prove that it is genuine Christian freedom of spirit, by attaining to such an apprehension of Christ as constitutes, with the apprehensions of other Christians, one clear and harmonious living form. The spirit of true Christianity cannot detach itself from the word of the Gospel, for the word is its life and organ of life; it cannot oppose Gospel to Gospel, for they all are images of the one ministry of Christ. Least of all can it seek to produce a new Gospel which contradicts the old: this would rather have indicated the operation of a human power which had torn itself away from the divine life in Christ. The four Gospels are a proof that true freedom of spirit comes from the spirit of true freedom—the Spirit of Christ, who does not separate spirits from one another in the great question of their relation to Him, but rather unites them in oneness of knowing and declaring His nature. Thus the four Gospels are not like four inexact witnesses, obscuring by their testimony the unity and clearness of the life of Jesus, but like four free and faithful witnesses, displaying fully to us, by the simple and characteristic view given by each, the riches of the life of Jesus.

The life of the God-man is the revelation of an infinity of riches—of the fulness of life as life. For in Him we have unfolded to view the fulness of the Godhead as well as of manhood, and so, in the unity of His life, the fulness of the divine-human life has appeared to us in its glory, in an endless stream of truth (the true light) and of grace (sin-uprooting love). But for this very reason, the life of Jesus was too rich to be set forth in its fulness or portrayed in all its essential outlines by any one man (see above, vol. i. p. 197). The Lord had need of twelve apostles of the most different minds and dispositions, to communicate to the world by founding His Church all that was contained in His life. He called four evangelists, who form a harmonious double contrast (a spiritual square), to make known to His Church the full tenor of the history of His life. Four is the number of the world, three is the number of the Spirit, and twelve is the number of the world, moved, penetrated, and renewed by the Spirit of God. There had to be twelve apostles, because they had to represent not only the world, but also the Spirit of Christ which is to impenetrate it. There was need of only four evangelists, because they had to represent the four forms of the receptivity of the world, or the fourfold relation of the life of Christ in its essential characteristics to the one life of the world, while the Spirit of Christ was represented through their literary labours in the matter-of-fact character of the Gospel history. The one Gospel which pervades the four Gospels represents the threefoldness of the Spirit of God, and so, in connection with the four Evangelists, it exercises a twelvefold influence on the world.

The view which sees in the number four the number of the world in its totality, is wide-spread. It is expressed, e.g., when we speak of the four winds, or the four corners of heaven. But in Scripture the world is regarded as quadriform, not only as to its outward extension, but also as to the fundamental ideas by which it is upheld, as to the most essential form in which God is revealed. These four fundamental ideas recur in manifold variations; but their most general shapes are the form of conditionality or passivity, and of originativeness or free power; of the tendency to cultivation or humanization—humanism in the wider sense, and of the tendency towards the infinite, or ideality in the narrower sense. Now as man is the image of the self-revealing God, and therefore, as microcosm, the reflected image of the world, these characteristics must reappear in their most definite shape in this life.³

The first idea reappears to us as the arrangement which obtains in the historic connection of all men. Every man enters into history as a single link in the great chain of personal relations; and thus he is naturally conditioned by his whole race, so that he must come under the influence of the whole race, even if he were its youngest member. But the second idea comes to counterbalance this, in the fact, that every man, notwithstanding his historic conditionality, comes, in his individuality, on the stage of life as a free agent, with an original power by which he becomes an organ of divine influence, which irresistibly casts down the obstacles which stand in its way; so that he comes forward as an entirely new factor in the world’s history. This contrast seems to find its balance in the third idea, which is very characteristically expressed in the peculiarities of human nature, in man’s conditioned freedom or free conditionality, which expresses his tendency to cultivation, his conceptions of proportion, definiteness, and beauty, and thus realizes itself in the idea of humanism in the narrower sense. Man answers the purpose for which he was created by becoming entirely man, by feeling his whole race in himself when he suffers, and by labouring for all mankind when he acts. Yet when he thus lives with free devotedness for his race, he cannot lose himself in its poverty; the deepest impulse of his being seeks rather to surmount all the connections in which he is involved, that he may attain to their idea on which they are founded in the kingdom of the Spirit. Consequently, the fourth fundamental idea, that of ideality, as it makes itself known in its more definite form in the sphere of man, as the tendency to raise up the whole life in the light of the Eternal Spirit, comes into juxtaposition with the idea of humanism in life. Man passes and repasses over the outwardly real, to rise up into the kingdom of the ideal; nay, he changes, by the light of the Spirit, the real itself into the symbol of an ideal, higher reality. The first antithesis, that of the first two ideas, indicates the reality of human life as conditioned by historic connections; the second, that of the two latter, indicates its ideality as rising above these connections—both taken in the wider sense. Man is the passive and active historic or real being; he is at the same time the humanly formative (transforming the general in the particular), and the heavenward aspiring (transforming the particular in the general), super-historic or ideal being.

But we must now take into view the great modification which these four ideas, or fundamental characteristics of human life, have suffered through sin—bringing disorder into it, and the counteracting effects of divine grace and man’s longing after righteousness. They now appear to us ranged in a series of new configurations—on the one side in the direction of the curse, on the other in that of the blessing. The general history of the human race appears to us as a contest or struggle with the curse and for the blessing in the life of man. The main characteristic of this historic connection is the suffering of man under the curse of sin, and his struggle with this curse. When he wholly surrenders himself to the curse, the result is destruction; when he combats it in the strength of his own moral nobility, until that gives way before the power of his unhappy lot and his guilt, the tragic is presented; but when he struggles with it in devotedness to God, the priestly spirit is exhibited, which strives for and points to atonement. The heroic energy of historic man shows itself in the train of destruction—in deeds of despotism, and violence of every kind (the strong man becomes the scourge of God): when this energy struggles with sin, it appears in its severe, warlike, knightly, and judicial function; and finally, it appears in its most beautiful form when, approximating to the form of the Prince of Peace (Solomon), it establishes works or institutions of peace.

Humanism, or the fairer side of human nature, errs so far in its perversion, that it seeks to transform even the corrupted conditions of life,⁴ and puts a fair appearance upon the hateful reality. In its nobler struggles with sin it becomes the founder of human culture and refined manners; and with all its might (its poetry and art, its political and police arrangements) pushes the hateful into the background, as is shown by the Greek culture. But when humanism acts under the guidance of the Spirit of God, it becomes consecrated compassion, which does not seek to hew the noble human form out of the marble block, but to restore it from the shattered shapes of suffering humanity.⁵ Thus the ideal impulse of the human spirit towards the infinite may take a wrong direction. It goes furthest astray when it represents the common and the lowest reality, including sin, as a state of things conformable to the idea (Pantheism). Its human struggle with the morally evil is shown when it makes a sharp distinction between the ideal and life, and constantly subordinates life to the ideal, but despairs of ever attaining to the ideality of life (Dualism). But when the human ideal tendency comes under the influence of God’s Spirit, it arrives at the presentiment or prophetic surmise of the Logos, the true personal ideality, or the ideal, personal Being, in whom the whole world is destined to find its ideality.

Now all the characteristics we have been speaking of have found their unity and fulfilment in Christ, because their unity, the idea of the God-man, has been realized in Him. He is the perfected historic character—the Heir of the human race—the Heir of its whole historic curse and of all its spiritual blessing—the Son of man; and so the character in whom all tragedy is fulfilled and transformed to priestliness—all priesthood fulfilled and made into atonement for mankind. He is the Lamb of God, who bears the sin of the world. Thus He was historically prefigured in particular by the tragic people, the Jews; thus the spirit of the Greek tragedy had a presentiment of Him; and in this form Matthew presents Him. Its symbol is the sacrificial bullock.

But while He was infinitely conditioned by His historic circumstances, Christ showed Himself to be the originative individuality—the new, second man—the free, who has entered on the scene as the pure strength of God, cast down all obstacles, overcome all the enemies of man, and become for him a new destiny, which is purely salvation and life. Thus He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah. In this form He was historically prefigured, mainly by the Romans; and thus Mark described Him to Roman Christians in the first instance. The symbol of this form is the lion.

But the strength He exerted, and the lion-like energy with which He finished His work, were not more remarkable than the delicacy and gentleness of perfect, fair, and free humanity with which He wrought. He is the great Master of humanism, who has felt in Himself the whole race, and in free compassion wholly devoted Himself to it—who, through the new birth of men, which is perfected in their resurrection, evokes from the deepest ground of life a new culture, new human forms, new life, new brilliancy of beauty, new poetry, and new songs. In this aspect He is the fairest among the children of men, the Saviour, the Physician of His race. The Greeks, in their plasmic impulses, historically prefigured His life. Luke delineated Him (in the first instance, for Christians of Grecian culture) in this form. Its symbol is the man.

But in the midst of His ceaseless action, the spirit of solemn contemplation, and of a clear and penetrating glance directed to the ideal ground of things, never forsook Him. As He Himself was the concrete, personal ideality of mankind, and the reality encompassing it, He always clearly knew, and lovingly, graciously, and rejoicingly beheld in the depths of His own being, the whole ideality of man—his divine destination in the Spirit of His Father, and announced it in His word and walk. Thus He has manifested the ideality to which mankind are predestined in Him, and which they are to attain to through Him. In this aspect He has at once presented all the pure relations of reality in reference to the eternal purpose of God, and consecrated them to transparent symbols of things eternal. Nay, by His having shone upon and condemned sin as the exact opposite of the idea, and fairly separated it from God’s judgments in the ill it occasions, He has exhibited to us the spiritual consecration of suffering itself; and His most expressive revelation is the announcement of the ideality of His cross. By His death He decided the glorification of His life and of the life of mankind in a new world; in His resurrection He revealed this glorification. In this form Christ is set before us as the heavenward-tending, in whom man has attained to infinitude. The historic type or prognostic of Christ in this form, was the people who built the Gothic domes. Its symbol is the eagle; and John has represented it in a Gospel which confessedly waits for its age.⁶

But as all the fundamental ideas of human life have found their glorification in the fulness of the life of Christ, so He lays hold of the world by all its qualities which tend to and are fitted to receive the divine-human life. We are not to imagine, however, that these tendencies are equally diffused in all men. In the one, the prevalent idea is that of historic, tragic, or priestly struggling and suffering; in another, that of individual heroic energy; and while one prefers the poetic or artistic, plasmic path of humanism, another decidedly takes the contemplative and philosophic direction to the kingdom of the Spirit.

This diversity is seen in the purest distinctiveness and ripest Christian consecration in the four Evangelists, and for this very reason they were chosen to receive a fourfold view of the riches of the life of Christ, and to act as intermediaries between it and the spiritual life of the world. They are, therefore, as we saw (vol. i. p. 140), designated by the symbols of the cherub forms, which, according to Old Testament view, represented the fourfold configuration of the entire fulness of the revelation of Jehovah, and as symbolic figures of this, overshadowed the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies. We have followed tradition in assigning one of the symbols to each of the Evangelists, but have thought proper to interchange the symbols given to Matthew and Luke.

This view of the Gospels, descending from the early Church, declares, in the first place, that the four Evangelists should be conceived of as four distinct and different individualities, who by their affinities and contrasts form one expressive whole—an organic whole which represents, on the one hand, the unfolding of the one fulness of Christ in a fourfold form, and on the other, the manifold receptivity of the world in its essential characteristics for the life of Christ, and in both respects the intermediation of the life of Christ with the spiritual life of the world. In the second place, it declares that the peculiarities of the four Evangelists have been expressed most exactly in the four Gospels, so that they give four specifically distinct views of the life of Christ. It declares, thirdly and lastly, that the Gospels collectively are stamped throughout as organisms whose peculiarity must show itself in the definiteness of their leading thought, as well as in their various parts—in their composition, as well as in their manner of representing things. And just because the impress of these peculiarities is perfect, the four Gospel histories do not give four different Gospels, but always exhibit the one Gospel in a new form.⁷ For it is the fundamental principle of the doctrine of Christianity, that here the full revelation of the divine is accomplished in the glorification of the human, and this again in the revelation of the divine. Thus the four Gospels being written by the Evangelists, who were full of Christ, form collectively a sacred record of His life.

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Notes

1. The Gospels being organic forms, having each its own special leading idea, it follows that single sections of them must be explained by this distinctness of character; e.g., the different accounts of the Easter history.

2. Thiersch, in his sterling work, Versuch zur Herstellung des historischen Standpunktes für die Kritik der neutestamentlichen Schriften (p. 128 ff.), has brought forward much that is new and appropriate for explaining the diversities of the four Gospels; yet he does not give the deepest ground of these diversities which is the characteristic disposition of the four Evangelists, and the fixed fact, that they, as New Testament and free witnesses of the Christ of their faith, could not but abide by their natural peculiarities even while composing their Gospels.

1) As many really suppose they do, by making, like Weisse, or the Strauss-Bauer and Strauss-Baur school, a distinction between the Christ of the synoptists and the Christ of John.

2) It is quite a fair thesis to maintain that a criticism which thinks of the literary activity out of which the four Gospels arose as sunk into a corpse-like moral and spiritual condition (compilations, pseudo-authorships, fixed ideas, neither in the poetic style nor in the historic, but producing gospels in an elsewhere unheard-of genus of fiction)—it is quite fair we say, to maintain that such a criticism must itself be in a corpse-like condition.

3) In the fact that humanism can appear as a special characteristic of man in his totality, along with other characteristics (as is also the case in the cherubim forms), we have an intimation of the essential distinction between the merely humane man and the true man of God (the Christian).

4) It is characteristic, that the first lyric passage in the Old Testament is Lamech's song, in which, with poetic embellishment, he relates to his two wives a dark deed of his life, Gen. iv. 23, 24

5) It is not by chance that the Greeks were the earliest masters of medicine.

6) Its glorification, however, must be near; for it has lately been nailed to the cross, along with the thieves of counterfeit workmanship.

7) The Gospel according to Matthew, according to Mark, &c