' To know .Jesus in the true waj' means to know that He died for us, that He piled our sins upon Himself, so that we hold all our own affairs as nothing, and let them all go and cling only to the faith that Christ has given Himself for us, and that His sufferings and piety and virtues are all mine. When I know this, I must hold Him dear in return, for I cannot help loving such a man.'
Here Ave reach the kernel of the Reformation thought about Christ Jesus, and the master-thought Avhich distinguishes its theology from all previous teaching about God and the Person of Chi'ist.
Luther lets us see, over and over again, that he believed that the only thing Avorth considering in theology Avas the Divine Avork of Christ and the exjjerience Ave have of it through faith. He did not believe that tliei'e Avas any real knoAvledge of God without these limits. Luther, as Ad. Harnack says, ' in his relation to God, only thought of God at all as he knew Him in Christ.' Beyond them there is the unknoAvn God of philosophical paganism, the God Avhom JeAvs, Turks, and pagans ignorantly Avorship. No one can really knoAv God save through the Christ of history. Hence, Avith Luther, Christ fills the Avhole sphere of God : ' He that hath seen me hath seen the Father,' and con- versely, ' He that hath not seen me hath not seen the Father.' The historical Jesus Christ is for Luther the revealer, and the only revealer, of the Father. The revelation is given in the marvellous experience of faith in Avhich Jesus compels us to see God in Him — the Avhole of God, Avho has kept back nothing Avhich He could have given us. This is the distinctive mark of the Avay in Avhich the Reformers regarded Christ ; all theology is Christ- ology ; they kneAv no other God than tlie God who had manifested Himself in the historical Christ, and made us see in the miracle of faith that He is our salvation.
' There is only one article and rule in theology. He who has not a full and clear grasp of it is no theologian ; namely, true faith and trust in Christ. Into this article all the others flow, and without this they are nothing' (Erlangen ed. vol. Iviii. 398). ' In my heart there rules alone, and shall rule, this one article, namely, faith on my dear Lord Christ, which is, of all my thoughts on things spiritual and Divine, the only beginning, middle, and end ' {ib. Iviii. 63).
The early Christians had said of Jesus that He must be conceived of as belonging to the sphere of God (2 Clement, i. : dSiKcpol, ourws Set 7//xas (Ppoveiv irepl 'IijcoO XptcroO, ilis Trept 6eov). The Reformers added : and that He fills the Avhole sphere of God, so that there is room for no other vision of God than that Avhich Christ gives us. This master- thought of Reformation theology simplified Chris- tian doctrine in a Avonderful Avay. It justified Luther's rejection of the complicated discussions of the Schoolmen, and his accusation that Avhat he called their ' sophistry ' was partly pagan ; and it also shoAved clearly that Christian worshii) ought to be simplified too.
The reader of the second part of the second book of the Sum ma Theologiw of Thomas Aquinas cannot help seeing that the really evangelical aspirations of the great Schoolmen are every- where thwarted and finally slain outright because the theologian has to start with the thought that God has been first defined as either the A bsolute, or the Priminn M ovens, or the Causa ejficiens prima, or the Intelligens a quo omnes res naturales ordinantur in yjiiem— conceptions which can never imprison, without de- stroying, the vision of the Father who has revealed Himself to us in Jesus Christ. What have Christians to do, the Reformers asked, with a great Eternal Something, which is not the world, when they have the Father? It would have been well had their followers in after generations realized this principle, and the Church might have been sjiared the 17th cent. Scholasticism, where God was defined as the Principiinn essendi et coijno- scendi, where His purpose in salvation became a Divine decree, taking the place of the category of substance, and where the- ology, borrowing as much from Aristotle as from the Scriptures, became a second-rate metaphysic.
The older theology had never grasped the thought that Jesus Christ filled the whole siihere of God. It limited the work of Christ to the procuring of forgiveness of sins, and left room outside Christ for many operations of Divine grace which were supposed to begin when the work of forgiveness was ended. So there grew up the complex system of expiations and satisfac-
CHRIST IN REFORMATION THEOLOGY
863
tions, of magical sacraments and saints' intercessions, which made the mediaeval Christian life so full of sui)erstitions, and, to all seeming, so empty of Christ. To the medix'val theologian all these could be justified, because they came from that portion of the sphere of God which was, as it were, beyond Christ. The influence of Christ was exhausted, they thought, when bare forgiveness had been won ; and the grace needed for all holj' living came from oi)erations of the grace of God which did not necessarily come through .Jesus Christ. But when the Reformers thought of God, they thought of Christ and of Christ alone. The grace of God was always to them the grace of Christ ; the Holy Spirit was the Spirit of Christ ; the presence of God was the presence of Christ, and the possession of God was the possession of Christ. They could not, therefore, regard grace as a mys- terious something, different from the soul and outside it, and at the same time different from Christ and outside Him also. Grace became simply the possession of, and the presence of, Christ, who is the whole God. This simplified the Christian life, and swept away at once the whole complex system which ha(l bred so much superstition.