In formulating these metaphysical doctrines, the Church no doubt believed that it was safeguarding vital religious interests. What seemed at stake was nothing less than the reality of the salvation mediated by Christ. But, it is contended, the con- ception of salvation that the Nicene and Chalcedon formulas were designed to safeguard is not an ethical, but a metapliysical, or, more correctly, physical, conception. The evil from which deliver- ance is sought IS not primarily sin ; it is the mor- tality that belongs to our fallen nature ; and the good salvation brings is not ethical communion with God, but participation in eternal life, which is thought of as a natural quality of the Divine substance. Human substance is deified, invested with the quality of immortality, by being taken up into and penetrated by Divine substance. It is this metaphysical conception of salvation that requires a metaphysical Christ. Christ must be God and man in the substantial sense, since it was in His Person that the penetration (fVixwp'/ins) of human substance by Divine took place. It is obvious that such a conception of Christ's Person can have littlo or no significance for those who regard religious relationships as being at their deepest and highest personal and ethical. An ethical conception of Redemption, as a change in our relation to God ettected within our conscious- ness, requires us to seek the significance of Christ not in the metaphysical background of His nature, but in the ethical and religious traits of His charac- ter, which disclose to us the heart of God, and have the power to awaken within us the response of love and faith.
In the theology of the Greek Church the work of Christ was summed up in His Incarnation. In that act salvation was already achieved. A more practical and ethical conception entered the Church with the great figure of Augustine. The meta- physical antithesis of mortal, creaturely life and eternal, Divine life retired before the ethical an- tithesis of sin and glace. There was a transference of empliasis from the metaphysical Incarnation to the ethical Atonement. The change marked an important advance. Yet in the doctrine of the Atonement as formulated by Anselm, and even as subsequently modified, the etliical does not appear in its purity, but only under the form of the
juristic. The work of Christ is interpreted by means of categories borrowed from the legal dis- cipline of the Roman Church. But ethical re- lationships and ethical ends cannot be adequately expressed in terms of criminal law. The juristic no less than the metaphysical conceptions of the old theology have lost their hold on the modern mind. We interpret religious relations now in terms of ethics and psychology.
(f) The third cause that has operated in bringing the historical Person and work of Christ into the foreground, has been the new sense — reflected in the writings of men like Goethe, Emerson, and Carlyle — of the importance of great personalities as factors of historical change and progress. Neither Catholicism nor traditional Protestantism can be said to have shown much appreciation of the re- ligious and ethical forces that radiate from Jesus as a historical personality. The saving activity of God in Christ has been conceived either in a mysti- cal, semi-mechanical way, as afl'ecting us through an operation in the substance or background of our being ; or, again, rationalistically, as mediated through ideas or doctrines. The Rationalism of the 18th century and the speculative philosophy of the 19th, while rejecting tlie former of these views, only accentuated the latter. History was resolved into a dialectic of ideas : not personalities but idea-s were regarded as the creative forces. In the specu- lative theology of the Hegelian period, thereligious importance of Jesus was found almost solely in the fact that He was the introducer or the symbol of tlie supreme religious idea. This idea — the essen- tial oneness of God and man, man as the eternal Son of God — is the active and creative thing. There is still a large and important school, repre- sented by writers like Green, Edward Caird, Pfleiderer, A. Dorner, which continues the Hege- lian tradition. But the past half century has witnessed a reaction from this exaggerated in- tellectualism. It is being more and more widelj' recognized that the elevation and enrichment of man's spiritual life have been efl'ected far less by the movements and instincts of the mass, or by the introduction and development of ideas, than by the appearance on the stage of history of great creative personalities. Such personalities are fountains of life for many succeeding generations. In no pro- vince is their importance so marked as in that of religion. And Christ is the supreme personality. It was the impression produced by His Person, even more than the new ideas He taught, that created the Christian Church. ' The life was the light of men.' And in whatever way we account for it, it is certain tliat Christian ideas cannot be separated from Christ without being stripped of much of their power to maintain themselves in men's minds and hearts. The recognition of sucli facts has had no small share in bringing the Person of Christ into the centre of religious thought.
2. Theological reconstruction. — We pass from the causes that have brought about a return to the historical Christ, to consider some of the attempts at theological reconstruction or revision to which the movement has led. What is its dogmatic significance ? The movement is not a uniform one ; it has taken various directions ; and wliile most of the thought of the day confesses its influence, this influence is much more marked in some cases than in others. We need not take into account a writer like Gore, who, though insisting on the importance of a knowledge of the historical Christ, yet derives his theology not from Christ, but from the (Ecu- menical Councils ; or like Loisy, who, indeed, dis- tinguishes between the Christ of history and the Christ of faith, but yet allows the former little significance except as the starting-point of the