5. Relation of Christ to the NT.—Between the two Testaments there is not only an interval of time, there is also a change of religious thought
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and life. A trinitarian conception of God takes the place of a unitarian; instead of a national there is an individual and thus universal relation of man to God: a ceremonial is superseded by a spiritual worship of God; an outward is changed to an inward morality ; the hope of a deliverance promised yields to the assurance of a salvation possessed. Of course these contrasts are subject to some qualification, as there are parts of the OT which anticipate some of the higher elements of the NT, and there are features in the Apostolic Church as presented in the NT which are sur- vivals of the lower elements of the OT. But that a new creation had been accomplished, no one comparing the two literatures can doubt. How can the NT be accounted for? Not by a mythical process (Strauss), nor by polemical tendencies (Baur), but by the historical person and work, life and death of Jesus Christ. The writers of the Gospels and Epistles give us what is an adequate explanation of their character and contents. In Jesus they had learned to recognize and confess not only the Messiah, but the Son of the living God, in more than the Messianic sense, even the Lord from heaven, and the Word who became flesh. As Healer and Teacher He stood alone above other men. He could not be ensnared by sin, or holden of death. As Crucified, He was to them the power and the wisdom of God unto salvation. In Him, as Risen and Ascended, God was reconciling the world unto Himself. This conception of Him which they give us as not only His own claim for Himself, but as the witness of their own experience of what He had been to them in the flesh or was still in the Spirit, is in perfect harmony with the words which they report as fall- ing from His lips, and the deeds which they record as done by His hands. The Evangelical history and the Apostolic interpretation are in perfect unison. Whatever common sources the Evangelists used, each writes from his own standpoint, and their representations agree. It is unintelligible and in- credible that this portrait of sinless perfection and gracious beauty can be a work of the imagination, and not a copy of reality. Four imperfect men could not have succeeded in producing this har- monious picture. Surely the impression and influ- ence of the Original so inspired the writers that they were able to preserve for all time and all lands the grace and glory of the life of which only for a short time a few men were the witnesses. But the NT offers not only this record, but also an interpretation ; and there is at present a ten- dency to distinguish these two very sharply from one another. Some scholars and thinkers strive to free Christianity as Jesus taught it from the Hellenistic metaphysics of St. John and the Rab- binie exegesis of St. Paul. We must, therefore, inquire whether the Apostolic interpretation does not belong to the revelation in Christ, whether in disowning St. John’s philosophy and St. Paul’s theology we are not refusing Christ’s own testi- mony to Himself by His Spirit in St. John and St. Paul. It seems necessary to insist that not only Christ’s consciousness of Himself, but also the Christian consciousness of Him, belongs to His revelation. If the Person and work of Christ are the objective cause in the revelation, the spiritual contemplation of St. John and the moral conflict of St. Paul are the subjective effect ; and the one should not be separated from the other. To know Christ fully, we must not only know what He said and did Himself, but also what He made of the men who fully surrendered themselves to His grace and truth. To grasp His truth in its en- tirety, we must know it not only as expressed in Him, but also as it finds expression in men of varied capacity and different character. He must
promise which dwell in Him.
present Himself not only as the perfect ideal, but also as the sufficient power for realizing that ideal in imperfect men. When we see Him taking men so different from Himself in nature, habit, char- acter, and making them like Himself, the crooked straight and the rough plain, then only do we learn the fulness of power and the surety of Because in St. John’s conception of the Person of Christ we can discern his mental habits, and in St. Paul’s doc- trine of Christ’s work we can discover his char- acter and experiences, it by no means follows that either of them is false. Nay, rather it follows that Christ evoked what was truest in St. John and best in St. Paul, and that the mind of the one and the soul of the other enable us better to understand Christ, who made them both what they were. He was the centre of numberless relations, the source of countless developments, the cause of manifold influences. Through many varied per- sonalities He needed to exhibit the content of His Person. With regard to St. Paul especially there is an inclination among those whose spiritual ex- perience has not afforded them the ability to understand his, to maintain that his views about sin and grace are morbid, exaggerated, unnatural, too much coloured by the Judaism which he claimed to have laid aside, too much involved in the legalism which he professed to be contending against. The lack of such an experience as St. Paul’s gives no man the right or reason to deny its worth, which has been proved to many in the history of the Christian Church because they have shared it. To the present writer, at least, it seems beyond all doubt that without St. Paul’s interpre- tation of the relation of Christ to sin, law, death, grace, and life, the revelation of God in Christ would not have been complete. Is not St. Paul’s view of the Cross one of those truths which Christ could not fully disclose to His disciples, because they could not bear it, but into which the Spirit of truth led them? Is it altogether vain to suggest that St. Paul never knew Christ according to the flesh that he might gain his knowledge of Christ in the Spirit through inward struggle and anguish, and might thus in his writings give expression to an experience through which many after him would be called to pass? St. Paul’s interpretation of Christ’s work has not lacked the confirmation of some of the most notable Christian experiences. The criticism which imagines that when it has traced the exegetical methods of St. Paul to the Rabbinic schools, or the philosophical terminology of St. John to Alexandrian speculation, it has adequately accounted for what is distinctive in them, deludes itself. Behind their words there is their personal experience. These but afford the form, that gives the content. Had St. John not seen all in Christ and Christ in all, the doctrine of the Logos had never been. Had St. Paul not passed from sorrow and struggle to peace and power in Christ, he would never have construed the work of Christ as he does. The personalities have to be accounted for, and not merely their forms of speech traced. We may freely and frankly recognize much that was temporary and local in the modes of expressing the truth, and yet be warranted in asserting that the truth ex- pressed is permanent and universal.