THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHRIST OF HISTORY.

The doctrine of Divine Immanence leads naturally and inevitably to the modern problem, as it is sometimes stated, of the connection between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Experience. The greatest need of mankind is a moral dynamic. Ideas and ideals, however excellent, fail when the attempt is made to realise them. The only possibility is that of some inner power which will provide man with the secret of realising his ideals and of ' possessing his possessions ' (Obad. 17). It is the glory of Christianity that this is provided in the redemptive Person and Work of Jesus Christ. If there is one word more than another that sums up what Christianity can do for man, it is the word δύναμις, and Christ is revealed to us as the δύναμις of God (1 Cor. i. 24), and His Gospel is said to be the δύναμις of God unto salvation (Rom. i. 16). But the pressing problem is how to come in contact with the historical yet exalted Divine Person Who was revealed on earth eighteen centuries ago. It is a far cry from the life and needs of to-day to the Palestine of the first century. How can an event in time ages ago become efficacious for man to-day? Is the influence of Christ anything more than that of other commanding personalities who have left this earth? Is His a case merely of posthumous influence?1 One way of answering this question is to refer us back to the Historical Christ of the Gospels in order to discover the essential features of the inner life of Jesus as the standard of our life to-day. This is the meaning of the well-known phrase, ' Back to Christ.' But we need something more than a Christ of the past. However beautiful it may be, a picture of centuries ago will not be adequate for human needs to-day. We must have a Christ for the present, and be told how the Christ of Palestine can touch, meet, and satisfy our sinful life to-day.

' If by your scholarship you so make to live again the classic scenes in which the Nazarene moved and taught that I am made painfully conscious of the long centuries that intervening divide Him from me: then all the more, if you would secure the abiding of my faith in Him, you must let me see how He can still reach me, and stand for me, the wings of His affluent personality outstretched to cover me.'2

Besides, there is an equally serious matter facing us if we attempt to realise afresh the Historical Jesus.

' Even if you got back to Christ ever so surely, it would be no gain; you would be face to face with something which had its value and significance for its own place and time, no doubt, but something which, like all things historical, has not more than a relative and transient importance, and cannot therefore supply the basis and rule of religion which you crave.'3

From other quarters comes the suggestion that there is no need to concern ourselves with personality, that ideas are sufficient, and that we should concentrate our attention on them; Love, Pity, Righteousness, Sympathy, and the like. But here again we enquire whether this really meets the need. It may suit the thinker — though even this may be doubted — but will it satisfy the average man? If there is one thing writ large upon modern life it is that ideas are powerless apart from Personality, and we know that the ideas of Christ were the expression of Himself, so that we must have some power of transmuting ideas into reality. It cannot be too often or too definitely emphasised that ' an ideal may charm the intellect, but it cannot satisfy the heart.'4

' It is in vain, however, that we seek to escape the intellectualism of Jesus the doctrinaire by the impression of Jesus the hero or saint. Ethical magnetism will not deliver us from the bondage to mere knowledge, nor from the cult of the religious genius and his illumination. The choice between Jesus the prophet and Christ the Redeemer is in the long run imperative and sharp.'5

Others again endeavour to solve the problem by laying all stress on personal experience as something quite independent of historical fact and criticism. It is argued that even if we knew little or nothing about the life of Christ on earth, we should still be able to experience His grace as Saviour and Friend. Now, while there is profound tnith in this argument from experience, yet experience as the sole foundation of life is a very different matter, and even those who take this line are compelled to predicate some knowledge, however slight, of the Jesus of History. Experience, to be of any use, must be experience of something, and it is therefore impossible to be independent of history, or to rest content in some vague sentiment. No modern writer has put the matter more clearly than Dr. Forsyth in his emphasis upon the importance of experience and his equal insistence on its proper position and real limitations.

' We do not believe things because of an experience, but we do in an experience. They are true not by the experience, but for it.'6

' The great matter therefore is not that I feel, but what I feel. If I believe in Christ it is not because I feel Him, but because I feel Him.'7

' The real ground of our certitude, therefore, is the nature of the thing of which we are sure, rather than the nature of the experience in which we are sure.'8

This shows, as Forsyth says, that experience is the medium not the canon, the sphere not the source of knowledge and certainty.9 Our life must therefore be based upon something far more and other than experience, or else we shall be the prey of variableness of knowledge and constant flukes of conviction.

' It is not so much peace we crave, not comfort. That may be but an experience. What we crave is strength, power, confidence, a stand-by (παράκλητρος) — One Who is our peace. To grasp that is faith; and by that we live, and not by our experience as such. We live not by experience, but by something experienced, not by knowing but by being known.'10

The deepest thing in human experience does not rise out of the depths of the soul, though it rises within the soul's area, but it descends from the depths of God.'11

The fact is that we cannot sunder the Christ of Experience from the Jesus of History without losing both, and when this is the result, our uncertainty is greater than ever.

' Nothing produces more uncertainty than a constant reference to subjective experience alone. It is detaching the Spirit from the Word, and the hour from its history. Some of the experiential Churches seem almost as much bewildered with Modernism as the authoritative Churches, when one gets below the surface.... In various ways religious uncertainty dogs the steps of an excessive subjectivity, such as marks an age that has just discovered the value of experience and can think of nothing else.'12

What, then, is the true solution of this problem? There is vital truth in all the suggestions we have contemplated, but none of them alone is the whole truth. The solution is only found in taking all three and uniting them by means of that which gives vitality and force to them all, namely, that which is the unique feature of Christianity as a Divine revelation. In a word, the answer to our question is found in the Holy Spirit. ' He shall glorify Me.' Some time ago a thoughtful French pastor expressed to the writer great perplexity in the face of the fact that while scholars often spent years in arriving at adequate conclusions about the Jesus of the Gospels, unlettered Christian people became convinced of the reality of Jesus Christ through experience, with scarcely any difficulty. He could not understand the reason for these very different results. ' May it not be due/ he was asked, ' to the Holy Spirit '? ' How so? ' he replied, ' the Holy Spirit does not witness to a man's heart that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, lived at Nazareth, worked in Capernaum, and died in Jerusalem.' ' No,' was the answer, ' but the Holy Spirit is admittedly the Spirit of Truth, and the fact that He does witness to Jesus and does make Him real to the soul, and that He does not do this in regard to Mohammed, or Buddha, or Plato, is surely a proof that the facts about Jesus are true, or the Holy Spirit would not witness to them.' ' I never thought of that,' he said; ' I believe this will resolve my difficulty.' There must be some philosophical explanation why the intuitions of faith should be capable of receiving support from the historical events of Christ's Death, Burial, and Resurrection. In a recent review in the Times the matter was thus summed up:

' If faith can use the facts recorded in the Gospels to justify belief in the divinity of the Person of Whom they are recorded, those facts must have a peculiar significance. There must be something in them which makes them different from other facts of history. The evangelists show this in their record of the miraculous works of the Gospel. Those works are something more than wonders. They are congruous to the character of the Worker, and signs of Divine Power existing in Him. Whatever we think about Christ, He is what He is. Faith does not create, it apprehends. It does not feed on itself; it goes out to One Who can meet its demands and respond to its energies. But when Faith has once taken this Person as its full satisfaction, it must strive to " account " for Him.'13

The Holy Spirit applies Christ's redemption to the soul. He reveals the Lord Jesus in His three-fold office as Prophet, Priest, and King: Prophet to reveal; Priest to redeem; King to rule. This is the true solution of the relation of facts to faith. The Atonement of Christ, to which His Divine Personality gave abiding efficacy, becomes ours by the work of the Holy Spirit. It is He Who transforms the God of one time into the God for all time as He makes Him real to the receptive heart.

It is impossible to rest in any vague idea of a general Divine influence.

' The action of the Holy Spirit, an action different from the general spiritual presence of the Creator in His universe, inseparably bound up with the historic act of Jesus Christ, and differentiating that act from every other that has taken place in history, as the pointed outcrop of the Moral Act which is the soul and sustenance of things. Apart from the Holy Ghost, with His individualising and time-destroying action, there is no means of making the past present in the Christian sense.'14

A mere ' cosmic principle ' is wholly insuificient. While we believe and rejoice in the doctrine of the Divine Logos as the Light that ' lightens every man coming into the world,' something much more than this is required for human life. Indeed, even the Logos is mainly redemptive in Christianity, and if man is to face the facts of sin he must possess some specific spiritual power which can only come from a redemptive Divine Personality. Christ is at once Saviour, Lord, and God, and in order ' to do justice to all the phenomena with which we have to deal,' we must

' lay equal emphasis on the historical Jesus and on His exaltation into eternal life, and His perpetual presence with us through His Spirit in the very character which His history reveals.'15

This necessity of the Divine redemptive Personality calls for the strongest emphasis to-day. Justification and Sanctification come through the truth, apprehended and appropriated by faith, but truth is only ' as in Jesus ' (Eph. iv. 2i), Who is 'the Truth' (John xiv. 6). And faith loses its power if it be not constantly grounded on the historical fact of a Person.

' The prominent thing in Christianity is not a seer's eternal truth but a Person's eternal deed and gift. It is not the doctrine but the Cross. In the beginning was the endless Act. And the Cross is here taken not as the closing incident of the martyr life of Jesus, but, first, as the supreme action of the Son of God, and the supreme crisis of man's fate, and, second, as the eternal act of a Person thus present with us still.'16

AND THE CHRIST OF HISTORY 209

A spiritual life unrelated to historical Christianity is doomed to failure, and no number of references to ' the Eternal Christ ' can ever make up for the possession of the Christ of the Gospels.

' The shadowy Jesus of the new Idealism, with the Absolute Life of the Spirit in the background, as a philosophical substitute for the living God, is not likely to prove a Captain of Salvation for a sinning and perishing world. The Christ of the New Testament is a living Lord, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, and " this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." '17

We must continually return to, and rest on the facts of our faith, and for this we shall need the presence and power of the Holy Spirit Who glorifies Christ and makes Him real to the heart. Any philosophy or mysticism which endeavours to dispense with the historic Christ, and any humanitarianism which would have us rest satisfied with the human Christ, stand condemned as untrue to the New Testament revelation, and unsatisfying to the deepest needs of humanity.

One of the most striking illustrations of this is found in a well-known book, Communion with God, by Herrmann, who, perhaps more than any other writer of his theological school, has impressed himself by his intense devoutness on the minds and hearts of many thinkers. Yet when tested by the simple, but all-sufficient criterion of the New Testament, the presence and power of the Holy Spirit of God in human life, the inadequacy and insufficiency of Herrmann become manifest, so that even his greatest admirers are compelled to acknowledge that he falls short of the full New Testament revelation.

' I do not think Herrmann's noble and vivid picture of the action on us of the inner life of Jesus really lifts us above profound moral impressionism; it does not give the regeneration.'18

Herrmann fails because he stops short with the portrait of Jesus given in the Gospels, and would have us believe that God acts upon us exactly as if Christ were now alive and acting as He did on His earliest disciples. The inadequacy of this is patent to all readers of the New Testament.

' Herrmann seeks in vain to combine the idea that grace comes only through a person, with the contradictory idea that grace comes through a portrait. Personalized grace is the New Testament teaching everywhere.'19

It is only in the presence of the living Christ, mediated by the knowledge of His earthly life of redemption through the constant action of the Holy Spirit, that all the needs of mankind are met and satisfied.

' Faith is not dependent upon a bare historical judgment; yet the historical judgment is indispensable to faith.... We must have the revelation of God in Christ in order to the experience. The living experience and not the historical judgment is the sphere in which the momentous issues are finally settled. Without the living experience the historical judgment would not convince. But this would not be due to lack of evidence, but to the character of the objects to which the evidence refers.'20

And it is the unique presence of the Spirit in His work of revealing Christ to the soul that constitutes the essential difference between Christianity and all other religions.

Literature. — Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ; Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ; Denney, Jesus and the Gospels; Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology; Forrest, The Christ of History and Experience; Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus; Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, ch. vi.; Mullins, Freedom and Authority in Religion, ch. ii.; Denney, Expositor, Eighth Series, Vol. V. p. 12, ' Christianity and the Historical Christ.' See also Bibliography in the present author's Christianity is Christ.

1 In the treatment of this subject some material from the author's Christianity is Christ is utilised, pp. 1 12-120.

2 Johnston Ross, The Universality of Jesus, p. 15 ff.

3 Denney, ' Christianity and the Historical Christ,' Expositor, Eighth Series, Vol. V. p. 14 (January, 1913).

4 Quoted in Streatfeild, The Self-Interpretation of Jesus Christ, p. 41.

5 Forsyth, ' Intellectualism and Faith,' The Hibbert Journal, Vol. XI. p. 326 (January, 1913). Also Denney, ut supra, p. 15.

6 Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, p. 30.

7 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 34.

8 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 58.

9 Forsyth, op. cit. pp. 66, 83.

10 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 89.

11 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 172. See also pp. 182, 201, 237.

12 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 393.

13 Review of J. M. Thompson's Through Fact to Faith.

14 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 129.

15 Denney, op. cit. p. 28.

16 Forsyth, ' Intellectualism and Faith,' The Hibbert Journal, Vol. XI. p. 325 (January, 1913).

17 Davison, ' Eucken on Christianity,' London Quarterly Review, April, 1912, p. 225.

18 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 326, note.

19 Mullins, Freedom and Authority in Religion, p. 313.

20 Mullins, op. cit. pp. 362, 363.