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PREACHING CHRIST
PREACHING CHRIST
is easy to see the dangers connected with this situation. If Ave take the sentence, ' Jesus is the Christ,' we may put the emphasis either on the subject or the predicate. We can conceive how a Jew, whose imagination was on flame with the apocalyptic hopes associated with the Messiah, might allow these hopes, when he accepted the Christian faith, to overpower the person of Jesus ; Jesus, so to speak, would become nothing to him but the person through whom expectations Mere to be realized which in their origin had nothing to do with Jesus. There may be occasions in the NT where we have to ask whether something of this kind has not taken place, but they are not conspicuous. In the NT, when it is said that Jesus is the Chi-ist, the emphasis is always as much on the subject as on the predicate. The proof of the proposition is always found in some- thing which has been done by or to Jesus. In point of fact, it is found in the first instance in His resurrection and exaltation to God's right hand. It is this participation in the sovereignty of God that makes Him Lord and Christ ; and the content of this, in all essentials, is not derived from the Messianic dogmatic of the Jewish schools, but from the experience of the Apostles them- selves. This experience has two aspects, the one in the stricter sense historical, the other in the stricter sense spiritual. The one, put briefly, is, ' We have seen the Lord ' ; the other, ' He hath poured forth this — the new life at Pentecost — which ye see and hear ' (Ac 2^^). The one is I'epre- sented by the series of witnesses to the resurrec- tion cited by St. Paul in 1 Co 15^"^ the other by the series of new sjiiritual experiences and convic- tions to which he can appeal in 1 Co 15'^"^^ It is the testimony of the Apostles to the resurrection of Jesus, and experience of the new life in His spirit, not any pre-Christian Christology, or Jewish Messianic dogmatic, that define for the first Chris- tians the content of the title ' the Christ.' And it may safely be said, to begin with, that there is no such thing as preaching Christ unless it is the preaching of One ivho 1'a.^.s and reigns. If Jesus is at the right hand of God, — if He is behind every revival of spiritual life in the Church, — then He is the Christ, and can be preached as such ; but if not, not.
2. At first, naturally, great stress was laid upon this. The Apostles sincerely believed that they had seen the Lord, and they could not conceive of their calling as having anything in it to take i^re- cedence of this — that they were witnesses of the resurrection, and therefore of the Messiahship of Jesus. No doubt this gave its whole character to primitive Christianity ; but if we accept the testi- mony of the Apostles to the resurrection, we shall be slow to say that it transformed its character, and made it a new and essentially an inferior thing as compared with the religion of Jesus. Jesus was not forgotten when the Apostles, appeal- ing to the resurrection and to Pentecost, argued that He was the Christ, God's King, through whom all the hopes which God had inspired were to be fulfilled. Harnack, indeed, has argued that in its eagerness to prove that Jesus is the Christ — that is, to discharge a task in apologetic theology —the Church spent too much of the force which ought to liave been given to teaching men to observe all things whatsoever He had commanded (Dogmengesrh.^ i. 57 f.). But there is no necessary antagonism between the two things, and except for their faith in His exaltation as the Christ the Apostles would never have taught anything at all. Weinel (Pcailus, 108 f.) represents the same ten- dency in a much less guarded form. 'After the death of Jesus,' he says, 'the ethical religion of redemption, which had entered the world with
Jesus, underwent its most decisive transformation of a formal kind ; it ceased to be the religion of sonship to God, and became faith in the Christ- nature of the man Jesus. . . . The disciples de- manded faith in Him as the Messiah exalted to God, and in the conception of His death as an atonement appointed by God for sins. With the experience of the resurrection and with this dogma of the death of the Messiah, the Christ-religion, Christianity in the narrower sense, begins.' One almost wonders if Weinel thinks it a pity that Jesus rose from the dead, or that His disciples believed that He did, and were overpoweringly influenced by a faith so tremendous ; but this apart, the assumption in all criticism of this sort is that when the Apostles preached Jesus as the Christ they concentrated all their attention on the predicate of the proposition, which owed no part of its import to Jesus, and treated the subject as if it had no meaning. Even on a priori grounds we should say this was improbable, and there is a very significant piece of evidence that it is not true. This is found in the qualifications of the man appointed to take the place of Judas. His function was to be a witness to the resurrection — that is, to the Messiahship of Jesus ; he was, in other words, to be a preacher of the Christ. But he was chosen from ' the men that have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, beginning from the baptism of John unto the day that he was received uji from us' (Ac !-"•)• To preach Christ, even in the days when belief in the resurrection was so overpowering, one required to have a full know- ledge of Jesus. It is idle to say that Jesus is the Christ if we do not know who or what Jesus is. It has no meaning to say that an unknown person is at God's right hand, exalted and sovereign ; the more ardently men believed that God had given them a Prince and a Saviour in this exaltation, the more eager would they be to know all that could possibly be learned about Him. If there were men alive who had lived in His company, they would wait assiduously on their teaching (2^^). They would be more than curious to know what spirit He was of, and whether they could detect in His appearance and career on earth ' the works of the Christ' (Mt IP). They would expect to find some kind of moral congruity between His life on the one hand, and His transcendent dignity and calling on the other ; there would be a de- mand, from the very beginning, for facts about Him. From this point of view, then, we may say that preaching Christ is not taking leave of Jesus in any sense or to any extent ; it is preaching Jesus exalted and sovereign.