5. If we bring these ideas to a jJoint, we shall say that to preach Christ means to preach Jesus in the absolute significance for God and man Avhich He had to His own consciousness and to the faith of the first witnesses ; and to preach Him as exalted, and as having this absolute significance now and for ever. The question then arises, In what forms did Jesus Himself present this absolute signi- ficance to His own mind ? How did He conceive it, and body it forth to others, so as to make an adequate impression on them ? And are the forms of thought and of imagination which He employed for this purpose in a given historical environment as indispensable to us, and as binding in our totally ditterent environment, as they were for those with Aviiom Jesus stood face to face ? To preach Christ it is necessary to be able to answer these questions not at hapliazard, but on principle ; and the answer may sometimes seem difficult.
To proceed by illustration : (n) One of the ways in whicii Jesus represented His absolute significance for the true religion was this : He regarded Him- self as the Messiah. The jNIessianic role was one which could be filled only by one Person, and He Himself was the Person in question ; He and no other was the Christ. But is ' the Christ ' a con- ception of which we, in another age and with other antecedents, can make use for the same purpose ? Only, it must be answered, if we employ the term witli much latitude. What it suggests to us, as already pointed out, is the continuity of revela- tion, and tbe fulfilment through Jesus of all the hopes which, through history and prophecy, God had kindled in human hearts ; it is the possibility of using it to express this that justifies us in retain- ing the name. But it is certain that for those who first came to believe in Jesus as the Christ the name was much more definite than it is for us ; it had a shape and colour that it has no longer ; it had expectations connected with it which for us have lost the vitality they once possessed. In par- ticular, the eschatological associations of the term have not, in their NT form, the importance for us •which they had for the first believers. In the teaching of Jesus these associations cluster round the title ' the Son of Man,' which, at least after the
confession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi, is used as synonymous with ' the Christ ' ; the Son of jNIan is i(.lentified with Jesus, and comes again, after His sutiering and death, to establish the Kingdom, in the glory of His Father with the holy angels (Mk 8^'- ^, Mt 10^^ 16-'). This coming again, or, as the original disciples conceived it, this coming {Trapovaia) in the character of the Christ, was expected, by those who first preached and received the gospel, to take place in their own generation ; and it is difficult to argue that this expectation could have any other basis than the teaching of Jesus Himself. Nothing was more characteristic of primitive Christianity ; it was the very essence of what the early Church meant by hope ; it was for it part of the very meaning of ' the Christ.' Account has been taken, in art. AUTHORITY OF Christ (vol. i. p. 149), of any considerations which go to qualify the certainty with which we ascribe to Jesus Himself this eschato- logical conception of the consummation of God's Kingdom, and especially this conviction as to its imminence ; but if we do connect it with Him, and regard it as part of ■what is meant when He repre- sents Himself as the Christ, clearly history requires us to recognize the inadequacy of that conception to be the vehicle of the truth. The Kingdom of God has been coming ever since Jesus left the world ; but Jesus Himself, after nearly two thou- sand years, has not yet come in like manner as the disciples saw Him going into heaven (Ac 1^^). We still believe that the Kingdom of God is coming ; we believe this because we believe in Jesus ; we believe that it is coming only through Him and as He comes ; that is what the Christian of to-day means when he says we believe in Him as the Christ. But even the belief in His exalta- tion to God's right hand does not make possible for us that particular kind of expectation of His coming which burnt with so intense a flame in the breast of the Apostolic Church ; quite apart from any preference or efibrt, our outlook on the future is different from theirs ; and, while we do not abate in the least our recognition of the sole sovereignty of Jesus, and our assurance that God's Kingdom can come and God's promises be fulfilled through Him alone, we are compelled, apparently, to recognize that in infusing into the disciples His own assurance of the final triumph of God's cause in His own person, our Lord had to make use of representations which have turned out unequal to the truth. He had to put His sense of the absolute significance of His Person for God and man into a form which was relative to the mind of the time. The eschatological Christ, coming on the clouds of heaven, and coming in the lifetime of some who heard His voice, was one expression for Jesus of this absolute significance ; and it is as such an expression — that is, as an assurance of the speedy triumph of God's cause in and through Him, and not in its spectacular detail — that we believe in it. It is not rejecting the absolute signi- ficance of Jesus to say that this spectacular detail is relative to the age and its mental outlook ; but it would be a rejection of it, and a repudiation of Jesus as the Christ, if we denied that the Kingdom of God — however experience enables us to picture its coming and consummation — comes and is con- summated through Him alone. This truth must be preached if we really preach Christ.