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God in religion had been disturbed, and his capa- city to respond to God’s revelation had been de- stroyed by sin, in Him also was accomplished that redemption from the guilt, power, lust, and curse of sin, and that restoration to the knowledge, love, and life of God, which made it possible for man.to receive Christ’s revelation of God and to enter on the realization of His ideal of religion. In com- pleting, Christ transcended the Hebrew religion and revelation. He came in the fulness of the time, but He was sent into the world by the Father. Accordingly, we have to recognize in Him two aspects—a historical and a metaphysical, a natural and a supernatural. It is not within the scope of this article to discuss the evidence for His Divinity (see article JESUS CHRIST in vol. ii.). Let it suffice to assert that it seems to the writer impossible otherwise to account, without violation of all historical probability, for the records of His teaching, work, character, and influence which have come down to us ; for the growth, the spread, and the worth of the society He founded ; for the moral and spiritual forces which proceed from Him to transform the life of individuals, nations, races; and that it appears to him both true and right to regard the universe as the gradual fulfil- ment of a purpose of self-revelation in a series of existences of ever higher worth, greater truth, and nobler grace, which is not closed by man, capable under limitations of understanding and welcoming this revelation, but finds its most fitting and worthy close in the union of the Creator and the creature, the Word who became flesh. But be it noted that the truth, worth, and claim of the Christian religion and revelation depend on the reality of the Divine incarnation. There may be a better religion and a truer revelation, although our intelligence cannot conceive their character and content, if Christ be only one of the prophets. Only if He is the Son, can we be quite sure that we have found at last, and can never again lose, the infinite and eternal Father.
There cannot be an adequate discussion here of the doctrine of the Person of Christ. But to de- termine accurately the range and limits of the revelation in Him, the limitations necessarily in- volved in a Divine incarnation (see article INCAR- NATION in vol. ii.) must be recognized. We must inquire how far the mode, the form, and even the content, of His teaching was dependent on His relation to His age and His people. Without entering into the very complex problems which His knowledge raises, it seems necessary for the purpose of this article to state two general prin- ciples. Firstly, He knew all that it was necessary for Him to know, that, as Son, He might reveal the Father, and that, as Saviour, He might re- deem mankind from sin and death, and restore it to truth, love, holiness, God. His was unerrine moral insight and spiritual discernment. Secondly, as regards the facts about nature and history, which men can discover for themselves by the ‘exercise of their faculties of perception and reasoning, He probably knew what and as His age and people knew. All questions about God’s character and purpose, and man’s duty and destiny, He can answer with infallible authority. But questions about the authorship of a writing, or the date of an event, or the cause of a disease, it was not His mission to answer; and, therefore, regarding all such matters we are warranted in believine that He emptied Himself of all Divine omniscience, Although we cannot account for Him by birth, training, surroundings, yet He must be inter- preted through the thought and life of His ace and race. As born of Mary and of the seed ‘of David, as brought up in the home, and doubtless taught in the school at Nazareth, as seeking His
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knowledge of God in the beliefs, fulfilling the will of God in the laws, and observing the worship of God in the rites of Judaism, as linking His pre- cepts with the commands, His words with the teaching, and His claims with the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures, He stands in close and constant relation to the Divine revelation to the Hebrew people. He so attached Himself to it, that we may trace along three lines its progress towards Him.
4. Christ’s connexion with the OT.—The truth entrusted to the Hebrew people was the concep- tion of the character and purpose of God (see article Gop in vol. ii.). As the Divine discipline of Israel advanced, this conception became richer, wider, purer. At first thought of as might, then as wisdom and righteousness, He is at last con- ceived as longsufiering, mercy, pity, even love. At first viewed as so bound up with the fortunes of His people that their disasters are His dis- honour, He is at last seen to fulfil His larger ends in their loss and ruin. At first regarded as pleased with offerings and won by worship, He is at last recognized as served by pure hearts, clean hands, and true lips. To this spiritual and ethical prophetism, and not to the legal and ceremonial Judaism of His own time, did Jesus ally Himself, and gave to this teaching a wider range and a deeper reach. The conception of God has a very intimate connexion with the organization of life. In the Hebrew people the idea of God was in a pre-eminent degree the regulative principle of life, the national law, and the social morality. All the teaching of the prophets and all the efforts of the reformers were directed to bring the life of the people into accord with its faith. It was this morality which Jesus accepted, unfolding its full meaning, and applying its principles to the inward motives as well as the outward actions, making wider the circle of those to whom the duties were due, correcting imperfections which had been allowed for the hardness of men’s hearts, but, above all, supplying stronger and sweeter motives in the recognition of man’s filial relationship to God, by the inspiration of His own moral enthu- siasm and example, and by the constraining love of gratitude to Him for His sacrifice and salva- tion. As God came to be more clearly known, and the claims of righteousness to be more fully recognized, a need was more and more felt. The loftier the view of God and His will became, the greater did men’s shortcomings appear to be. Of this sense of need was born the hope (see article MESSIAH in vol. iii.) of God’s help; and just as God was known to be merciful as well as just, did this hope gain assurance; and just as men learned their helplessness and the failure of all their efforts at oy font. did the hope gain urgency ; and just as they learned in national disaster God’s method of dealing with sin, did the hope gain dis- tinctness. The true Messianic hope was born of a moral need, and grew for a religious end. The false Messianic hope was the offspring of an un- ethical patriotism and an unspiritual bigotry. Christ fulfilled the true Messianic hope, and was rejected by the Jewish people because He would not accept the false; yet even this true Messianic hope He transcended. Whatever was merely national, legal, ceremonial, had no fulfilment ; only what was universal, ethical, spiritual, was realized in Him. He did not leave what He took from the Old Testament as He found it, but transformed it, and it is only as fulfilled by Christ that the older revelation has authority for the Christian Church.