was secured, it i- imr -ucli a phenomenon which makes Him the Christ to us. Its value now lies in showing that He regarded Himself as the Christ, the promised King. And so with the argument from miracles, which, though not formallj- put, is perhaps as characteristic of the Second Gospel as the argument from prophecj- is of the First. The works of Jesus, in the largest sense, ^ — all that He did and the power which it implied, — go to give Him the importance He has in our minds. But we do not limit His works to the class commonly called miraculous ; the impression left on the minds of men by His whole being anil action gathers up into itself much more than this. The argu- ments from prophecy and from miracles are formal ways of expressing truth> which really contain much more than these forms can cany ; and our impression of the truths is too direct, immediate, and complex to have justice done it by such argu- ments.
i. While, however, the inadequacy of such argu- ments to their purpose must be admitted, the pur- pose of the argixments is not to be overlooked. What those who first called Je^us the Christ, or preached Him as such, intended tu do, was to put Him in a place which no other could share. What- ever else the name meant, it meant the King ; and there was only one King. In the Christian religion Jesus was never one of a series, a person who could be classified, and be shown to His proper place in the line of gi'eat personalities who have contributed to the spiritual uplifting of the race. The study of Comparative Keligion has fostered a tendency to regard Him in this light ; but it cannot be said too strongly that to admit the legitimacy of such a tendency is to abandon from the very root all that has ever been known to history as Christianity. The NT is quite unequivocal about this. From the beginning Christians call Jesus 'Lord' (1 Co 12^), and recognize that God has given Him the name which is above every name (Ph 2''). All other men in the NT meet as equals on the same level, and all bow before Him as King. In His exaltation He confronts men as one Divine causality with the Father, working for their salvation. Historical Christianity, said Emerson ( ]]'orks. Bell's I ed. ii. 195), has dwelt and dwells with noxious exaggeration about the peison of Jesus. As a criticism of some kinds of interest in dogmatic Christologj", this may be tnie ; but if it is meant to reflect on the devotion of Christians to Jesus as a Person, it is completely beside the mark. To Christians this Person has been from the beginning, and will be for ever, what no other can be. To talk of Him as the same in kind with other pro- phets or founders of religions, — with Moses and Isaiah, with Confucius or Buddha, or, what is even harder to understand, with Mohammed,— is to sur- render anything that a NT Christian could have recognized as Christ ianitj*. To preach Christ at all we must preach Him as Kvpios and novo-ievrjs. The first name secures His unshared place in I'ela- tion to men. as the latter does in relation to God ; and unless He fills such a jilace, Christianity has no raison d'etre. That it has is the assumption of this article, as it is the fact presented in the NT. It is, in fact, the differentia of Christianity as a religion that the distinction which can sometimes be dra\vn between a person and the cause for which he stands is in it no longer valid. To preach what Jesus preached is not preaching Christianity unless the thing preached is preached in its essential relation to Him. The truth which He announces is not indej>endent of Himself ; it is in the world only as it is incarnate in Hirn. Thus, to take as an example what many regard as the supreme category in the teaching of Jesus — the Kingdom of God : what is meant by preaching Christ here ? It
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PREACHING CHRIST
is very likely impossible for us to understand pre- cisely ■what the expression ' Kingdom of God ' con- veyed in the mental atmosphere of Judaism or of the 1st cent, generally. It may be impossible for us even to understand with certainty and precision ■what Jesus Himself on any given occasion meant it to convey. All .shades of meaning run through it, — political, eschatological, spiritual ; national, uni- versal ; here, coming : how can anyone tell whether in preaching the Kingdom of God he is preaching Christ? The answer is clear if we reinember that the Kingdom of God in His sense could come only in and through Him, and that its character is ultimately determined by that fact. He Himself, in the sense at least of being God's representative, is King in it (Mt 13-»i 20^1 25^^ Lk 23^), and it is from what we know of Him, including ultimately His resurrec- tion and exaltation, that all our conceptions of the Kingdom must be derived. To preach the cause and ignore the Person, or to preach the cause as of universal import and to assign to the Person an importance in relation to it Avhich He only shares with an indefinite number of others, is to be untrue to the facts as the Gospels present them. Even preaching the Kingdom of God is not preaching Christ imless the Kingdom is preached as one which owes its character to the fact that Jesus is its King, and the certainty of its consummation to the fact that Jesus shares the throne of God. Christianity is not abstract optimism ; it is optimism based on the exaltation of Jesus, and on the know- ledge of God as revealed in Him.