6. With the rest of the NT in mind, the ques- tion is naturally raised at this point, whether Jesus gave any further definition to the idea of media- tion than that which we find in this passage. All men owe to Him the knowledge of God as Father, but how does He impart it ? All men nmst become His debtors if tliey are to have the benefit of this supreme revelation : is there anything which more than another enables us to estimate the dimensions of this debt ? If there is, then in preaching Christ that thing would require to have a coiTesjionding prominence. It is obvious that Jesus mediates the knowledge of God to men, not by His words only, but, as is .shown elsewhere (AUTHORITY OF 'Christ, vol. i. p. 149), by His being and life as well. It is the Son in whom the Fatlier is re- vealed, and everj-thing in the Son contributes to the revelation : His teaching, His works. His intercourse with others, His sufferings and death. The revelation is made in and through all these, and none of them can be omitted in preaching- Christ. To borrow words of Wellhausen which are not without a misleading element {Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, p. 114) : ' His religion is found not only in what He taught publicly, but in His nature and bearing under all circumstances, at home and on the street, in what He said and did not say, in what He did consciouslj' or with- out being conscious of it, in the way in which He ate and drank and rejoiced and suffered. His Person, with which they had the privilege of intercourse in daily life, made an even deeper impression on His' disciples than His teaching.' All this is true, but not the whole truth. The NT in all its parts lays a quite peculiar emphasis on the death of Christ, and in doing so it is not false
to His own conception of the way in which He mediated the knowledge of the Father to men. His death, it may be said, does not require to be interpreted otherwise than His life ; it is His life carried to a consistent consummation under the circumstances of the time ; it is part of His life, not sometliing distinct from it. This also is true, but, according to the representation in the Gospels, it is less than the whole truth. His death is a part of His life which has an essential relation to His work as the revealer of the Father, and the King in the Kingdom of God ; it was recognized by Jesus Himself as Divinely necessary, it was the subject of frequent instruction to His disciples, and it is commemorated by His will in the most solemn rite of Christian worship (see Mk 8^' 9^^ 10** 10^' 1424 a,nd il). It is a fair inference from this, combined with the place taken by the Passion in the Evangelic narratives, and the place given to the interpretation of Christ's death in the Epistles, that to preach Christ it is necessary to represent His death as a main part, or rather as the main part, of the cost at -which His work of mediation is done. In what particular way it is td be construed is an ulterior question. Our general conception of the moral orcler of the world, our sense of indi- viduality and of the solidarity of the race, our ajjprehension of sin as generic, or constitutional, or voluntary, the mental equipment with which we approach the whole subject, maj- determine us to interpret it in waj's which are intellectually dis- tinguishable ; no given explanation of the death of Jesus can claim finality any more than any given interpretation of His Person. But just as we may saj^ that Christ is not preached unless the Person of Christ is presented in its absolute significance for religion, as the one Person through whom the knowledge of the Father is mediated to men, so we may say further that Christ is not preached in the sense which answers to His own consciousness of what He was doing, unless it is made clear and central that His mediation necessitated and there- fore cost His death. In the simplest words, it is necessary to say, in preaching Christ, not only that He is fjiovoyevrjs and Mediator, but that He died for men. It was not for Him to insist on this as a doctrine ; it was for the Church to apprehend it as a fact, and to put it into doxologies (Rev P 5**) ; but in doing so, it could go back to unmistakable words of Jesus Himself, and to the sacrament which speaks for Him more impressively than any words. 7. Jesus' consciousness of Himself, Mhich, how- ever Iiard it may be for us to apjirehend it, has certainly the character just described — in other words, is a consciousness of His absolute and in- comi^arable significance for all the relations of God and man — must lie at the heart of all preaching of Avhich He is the object. He had this significance while He moved among men on the earth, and it was declared and made unmistakable to His dis- cijiles when He rose from the dead. It is on Jesus' consciousness of Himself, therefore, including His consciousness of His vocation, and on His exalta- tion to God's right hand, that the preaching of Christ rests. As has already been remarked (see § 3), the writer of this article assumes that in the Synoptic Gospels we have a representation given of the consciousness of Jesus, on the truth of whicii we can quite securely proceed. No doubt this has been .questioned, most recently and radically by Wellhausen. The Gospels (to put it concisely) were written by Christians, and Jesus was not a Christian. They contain the gospel, that is, the Christian religion ; but He knew nothing about the gospel, although it is put into His lips. He was a Jew. He preached no new faith. He taught men to do the will of God, which like all Jews He found in the Law and the other sacred books. The