The view of ' nature - miracle ' at the root of Sanday's position will be examined in the follow- ing section, but meanwhile two considerations may be urged in criticism of this depreciation of the bodily resurrection. (1) It is no doubt true that faith to-day is to be exercised directly in the Exalted and Glorified Lord, but our faith must ultimately rest on historical fact, and it is diliicult to understand how Christian faith can ever be really indilierent or 'agnostic' with regard to the facts about the empty tomb and the Risen Body, which form so essential a part of the apostolic evidence. To make the belief in the physical resurrection of merely temporary significance — to set the Apostolic Church agoing — while now it may be cast aside as 'no longer necessary,' is to spurn the ladder by which we have risen to our Christian faith and to leave this faith 'in the air.' It is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive how faith in an Exalted Lord could ever have been attained if the fact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus had not first been recognized. It is founded basally on the belief that the resurrection of Jesus was the actual raising in glory and power of that which was sown in dishonour and weakness ; .and faith can never be indilierent to this its historical foundation. (2) To sit loose to the bodily resurrec- tion of Jesus is to do less than justice to the full- ness of the apostolic representation of the essential constitutive significance of the Resurrection for the
Christian faith (see above, IV. ii.). The ri.sing of Jesus from the grave was for the Apostle at once the guarantee and the ground of the Christian'.s full redemjition and immortality, body as well as spirit having its place in the renewed Kingilom of tiod, ' who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it nuiy be conformed to the body of his glory ' (Ph 3-'). If the body of Jesus rotted away in the grave, then what guarantee have we that material forces are not after all .supreme, and that Christ is indeed Lord over all, in nature as well as in grace, Lord of life and of death ? The Resurrection-lJody is indeed not the same natural human body that was laid in the grave. It is this body so changed as to be described as a 'sjiiritual ' body, but this is very dill'erent from rejiresentiiig it as simply dro)jped and lost, left behind ii the grave to see corruption. The plain queslion to be answered is, Was the body of Jesus left lying in the tomb on the hillside ot Jerusalem, or in some other tomb, or was it not? If it was, what then '; Let us suppose it to be firmly established that, instead of being raised, the body of Jesus was for some reason removed from the tomb in which it was first laid, and buried elsewhere, and that this or .something like this is all the ground there is, beyond the pious imaginations of the disciples, for the belief that the body of Jesus was raised trom the grave. On this supposition the apostolic doctrine of redemption becomes seriously attenuated, and our Christian faith turns out to be a very diii'erent thing from what it was for the early Church.
The view under criticism is really based not so much on a scientific examination of the historical evidence as on a dogmatic or philosophical attitude which, while seeking to preserve what is essential to Christian faith, could sacrifice the supernatural in the physical realm as being what Herrmann explicitly calls it, ' a great hindrance to men to- day' (Communion-, p. 80) in the way of accepted Christianity. That this is so is recognized with characteristic frankness by Sanday in this pamph- let. It is professedly because he finds the evidence on behalf of the bodily Resurrection unsatisfactory that he ranges himself with the 'modernists' in doubting the fact. But this denial or minimizing of the bodily Resurrection is made, he recognizes, in an apologetic interest, viz. of commending Christianity to the 'modern mind' by removing what he calls ' the greatest of all stumbling-blocks ' in the way of its acceptance, the admission of miracle in the physical realm. ' I know,' he says, ' that the suggestions I have made will come with a shock to the great mass of Christians ; but in the end I believe that they will be thankfully welcomed. What they would mean is that the greatest of all stumbling-blocks to the modern mind is removed, and that the beautiful regularity that we see around us now has been, and will be, the law of the Divine action from the beginning to the end of time ' (Bishop Gore's Challenife to Criti- cism, p. 30). The ground of this repugnance to the recognition of the physical supernatural or 'nature-miracle' will be considered in the follow- ing section.
LlTERATCRB. — On the Spiritual-Significance Theory see J. H. Skrine, Miracle aiul History, London, ini'2; J. Orr, 7'hc Chri^- tiatl View of God arid the World, Edinburgh, 1803, lect. vi. note C (p. 612 ff.'); D. W. Forrest, Christ ot nistorn and of Ex- perience', do., 1914, p. 15811. ; B. Lucas, Fifth Gospel, London, 1907, p. 160.