PKKACHIXG CHRIST
PREACHING CHRIST
399
only ditterence was that He knew a better way of doing the will of God than that wliich the scribes of His day enforced on the people, and that He called men to leave their traditions and learn of Him. Wellhausen not only removes from the mind of Christ in this way everything that in Christian preaching has ever been known as gospel, everything that could by any possibility be regarded as contributing to Christology and Soteriology, but the great mass of what up till now has oeen regarded by criticism as the best attested part of the Evangelic record, the words of Jesus common to Matthew and Luke. Most of the parables, too, are sacriticed. Even the few in Mark are not all genuine, and Wellhausen feels free to pass severe strictures alike on those of Matthew and of Luke. All that need be said of this is, that if Jesus had been no more than Wellhausen represents Him to be, then it is inconceivable that either the Gospels or the gospel could ever have been generated from any impulse He could impart to human minds. As Jlilicher puts it (Thcol. Literaturztg. 1905, No. 23), the primitive Church is thus made to appear richer, greater, and freer than its Head : in Jerusalem it surpasses Him by producing the marvellous Evangelic history, in St. Paul it sur- passes Him by producing a new imposing theoiy of redemption. The historian looks in vain for anything an.alogous to this elsewhere. We do not understand how it could be done. We do not understand how the Chiu-ch so suddenly lost the power of doing it. We do not understand how a man like St. Paul, we may say how men like those who wrote all the NT Iwoks except tiie Gospels, should have been so incapable of writing a page which reminds us of them. Although it is true to say that truth guarantees only itself, not its author, the truths exhibited by the Evangelists iiave a way of coalescing into a sum of truth which is iden- tical with Jesus. As Deissmann has expressed it,* they are not separate pearls threaded on a string, but flashes of the same diamond. Separately thej' guarantee themselves, but collectively they are a spiritual evidence to the historical reality of the great Person to whom the gospel owes its being, and to whom all preaching is a testimonj^. There is a kind of criticism which tacitlj^ assumes that it is a mistake to believe in Christ as those who tirst preached Him believed ; He was a Person who appeared in histoiy, and therefore cannot have the absolute significance which must attach to the object of religious faith, and which does attach to Jesus throughoiit the NT. Such criticism makes it its business to reduce this figure to a true scale — which means to make His personality exactly like oui- own, and His consciousness exactly what our own may be. Wellhausen illustrates the direct application of this criticism to the Gospels ; we see how it is brought to bear on the Epistles in such a remark as Wernle's, that a faith in Christ like that of St. Paul (which as good as deified its object) implies a certain want of faith in the living God. The consciousness of God must have decayed or lost its vital intensity in the Apostle before he could write the Epistle to the Colossians. Such a writing, we are almost invited to think, is on the way to justify the Jewish sneer : the creed of Christians is that there is no God, but that Jesus is His Son. In the face of criticism of this type, we hold with confidence the trustworthiness of the Evangelic representation, and venture to say that no NT writer, not even St. Paul or St. John, has anything to say of the absolute significance of Jesus, in all the relations of God and man, which goes beyond Jesus' consciousness of Himself as
* ' Evangelium u. Urchristentum ' in Beitrdae zur Weiter- eniwickelung der christlichen Religion, p. 85.
the Gospels preserve it. And, further, we venture to say that no NT writing, however casual or informal, falls short of the testimony which Jesus, according to the Evangelists, bears to Himself. Everywhere Jesus has the place which He claims for Himself, and Christians are conscious of an absolute dependence on Him for their standing towards God. To give Him this place is the only way to preach Christ.
8. The earliest specimens of Apostolic preaching are the sermons of St. Peter in Acts. Their value is universally acknowledged. According to Schmiedel (Encyc. JBibl. i. 48), ' almost the only ele- ment that is historicallv important (in the early chapters of Acts) is the Christology of the speeches of Peter. This, however, is important in the highest degi'ee. ... It is hardly possible not to believe that this Christology of the speeches of Peter must have come from a primitive source.' It starts with the historical person as such : ' Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God to you by mu-acles and portents and signs which God wrought through him, as j'ou yourselves know' (Ac 2"). This approbation of Jesus by His wonderful works might seem confuted by His death, but to this the Apostle has a twofold answer. On the one hand, the death itself was Divinely necessary ; He was delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, evidence of Avhich was found in the Scriptures (Ac 2^, cf. 1 Co 15^). On the other hand, it was annulled by the resurrec- tion of Jesus and His exaltation to God's right hand. It was this that made Him both Lord and Christ, and in this character He determined for the Apostles and for all men their whole relation to God. To Hin: they owed already the gift of the Holy Ghost ; and, as St. Peter explicitly states elsewhere (Ac W^- ^' 15*), to receive the Holy Ghost is to be religiously complete. To His coming thej- looked for times of refreshing, indeed for the ' times of the restoration of all things, whereof God spake by the mouth of his holy prophets that have been from of old' (3-^). All projihecy, to put it otherwise, is conceived as Messianic ; all the hopes which God has inspired are hopes to be fulfilled through Christ. He is Prince of life (3^^), Lord of all (lO^S), ordained of God as Judge of living and dead (10'*^). Those who repent, believe, and are baptized in His name receive remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost (2^ 10^). All these expressions imply that fi'om the very beginning Jesus had for His disciples that absolute significance which we have seen be- longed to His own consciousness of Himself ; but in addition to this, it is put with singular force in a passage which expresses nothing else : ' There is not salvation in any other : for there is no other name under heaven given among men, wherebj- we must be saved ' (4^-). It may be possible to strip from the gospel of St. Peter, without detriment to its essence, some of that vestui-e of eschatologi- cal Messianism which it necessarily wore at the time ; but it is not possible that religion should be to us what it was to him, — it is not possible, in the original sense of the words, to preach Christ — unless we give to Christ that same significance in all the relations of God and man which He has in St. Peter's preaching. It is not too much to say that side by side with his frank recognition of Jesus as a man (2—), whose career in histoiy he could himself look back upon, St. Peter regarded Jesus in His exaltation as forming with God His Father one Divine causality at work for the salva- tion of men. It was only in virtue of so regarding Him that he could preach Him as he did, and essentially similar convictions are still necessary if preaching is to be called preaching Christ, ft is not necessary to argue that the Christology of the