Though the need for such a construction can be demonstrated, the construction itself is not to be regarded as a work of human freedom. We re- ceive it as authoritatively given. To traditional theology the autliority is inspired Scripture, the witness of the Apostolic writers no less than Christ's self-witness. It is characteristic of the Christo-centric school that, with a freer view of inspiration, it admits only the self-witness as the ultimate authority. Only Christ Himself could know and reveal the secret of His unique person- ality. The doctrine of the Apostolic writers is not to be regarded as the product of a religious experience created by Christ, but as the repro- duction or development of ideas received from Christ's lips. These writers are only tlie channel by which the interpretation has reached us, not
• Fairbaim, I'htlosophy of the Christian Iteliyiun, p. 306.
BACK TO CHRIST
BACK TO CHRIST
165
A tloctiinal coiiueptiuu of llevelatioii requires as its correlate a conception of Faith as primarily an intellectual act. Faith must be delined as tlie assent of the mind to a proposition on the ground of authority. This assent, however, though the primary element in faith, is not treated as the whole of it ; it becomes effective only when re- inforced by the practical elements of feeling and will.
More fruitful, perhaps, than its attempt at a fresh groundinfj of doctrine has been the contribu- tion of the Christo-centric school to the revision of doctrine. It has sought to free the formulas that describe the Triune Being of God and the Person and work of Christ from their over-relinement, to translate them into the categories of modern thought, and to make them more ethical and less metaphysical.
(2) Wo pass to a second, and much more radical phase of the movement. To many, ' back to Christ ' means back from historical Christianity, the re- ligion founded upon Christ, to the religion which Christ taught, and which we see embodied in His life. More than a century ago the position was summed up by Lessing in his famous saying, ' The Christian religion has been tried for eighteen centuries ; the religion of Christ remains to be tried.'
That the stream of religion flows purer at its fountainhead than at its lower reaches is a fact which the study of every historical religion con- firms. As a religion advances through history, it loses something of its idealism and becomes more secular, takes up foreign elements, accumulates dogmas and ceremonies, parts with its simplicity and spontaneity, and Ijccomes more and more a human construction. And every religious reform has signified a throwing off of foreign accretions, and a return to the simplicity and purity of the .source. Did not Christ Himself represent a re- action from the elaborate lethal and ceremonial system of Judaism to the simpler a,nd more ethical faith of the proiihets? The Reformation was a return to piimitive Christianity, but less to Christ than to St. Paul. But we must, it is maintained, go behind even St. Paul and the early disciples. It is true, indeed, that, in the NT, Cliristianity is not the complex thing it afterwards became ; still, the process of intellectual and ceremonial elaboration has begun. If we have not the fully- developed .system of dogma and sacrament, we have at least the germs out of which it arose ; and while much must be regarded as the legitimate development of princi|3les implicit in Christ's gospel, there is also the introduction of a foreign element.
Let us contrast at one or two points the gospel as proclaimed by Jesus with the Church's render- ing of it. Jesus' gospel contains no Christology. It is the glad tidings of a Father in heaven, whose love and care embrace all His creatures, in whose eyes every human soul is precious, and who is at once the righteous Judge and the pitiful, forgiving Saviour. Jesus was conscious of His unique posi- tion as the Mediator of salvation, but He never (according to the Synoptic tradition) required faith in Himself in the same sense as He required faith in God. God was the one object of faith ; and if Jesus called men to Himself, it was only that He might lead them to God, and teach them to love, trust, and obey God. Turning to the gospel of the Church, we find a doctrine of Christ's Person at the heart of it. To believe the gospel is no longer, in the first place at least, to receive God's message of love and forgiveness, and to obey His summons to repentance, trust, and service ; it is to believe that Jesus is Messiah, a pre-existent, heavenly Being, the second Person in the Trinity.
A doctrine of Jesus' Person is substituted for the Heavenly Father as the immediate object of faith.
A,i,'iuii, Jesus' go.spel contains nothing like a developed doctrine of Redemption. The question as to the rationale of forgiveness is never raised, and there is no hint of the inability of God to forgive without a propitiation. Forgiveness is presented as flowing directly from God's fatherly love (Lk 15). And as little do we find the other propositions included in the Church's doctrine of Redemption. Jesus, indeed, teaches that none is good (Mt 19"), that even at the best we are un- profitable servants, who have done no more than our duty (Lk 17'") ; but He knows nothing of inherited guilt, radical corruption of human nature, human inability to do any good work. In the gospel of Jesus we are in the region of direct moral intuition ; nothing is there merely because apologetic or .system required it. We are also in the region of moral sanity. There is nothing of asceticism, and no attempt to culti- vate a feeling of sinfulness. Men are bidden strive to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect (Mt 5*'). Comparing the gospel of the Church with that of Christ, we tind com- plication instead of simplicity, theological con- struction instead of intuition, and sometimes morbidness and exaggeration in place of sanity.