Person of Christ (continued) – Pestilence

Person of Christ (continued)

3. The Johannine picture of Jesus impresses the reader, from the first, by a certain wonderful and harmonious transcendence. Incessu patet deus, we say instinctively; this is in very deed God manifest in the fiesh. Such a figure is not of our world; yet, on the other hand, it would be a grave mistake to conceive Him as out of touch with the realities of human life. No misgiving should ever have been felt as to the genuine humanity of the Christ of St. John (cf. Burkitt. The Gospel History, p. 233). Can we forget His weariness at Jacob’s well. His tears beside the grave of Lazarus, His joy in the fellowship of the Twelve, the dark troubles of His foreboding soul. His thirst upon the cross? Especially does His real oneness of nature with us come out in His uninterrupted dependence upon God, which is accentuated in the most striking way. The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do (5:19; cf. 7 S^s 10:37 ‘sent’ of God, a commissioned ambassador to whom words and works have alike been ‘given,’ whose knowledge and power are mediated to Him by the Spirit, who seeks the glory of God, and finds His meat and drink in doing a higher will. His human dependence, however, is not a commonplace fact which might have been assumed; it really springs out of the creative ground of His special Sonship, or, in other words, it is the form taken by the Eternal Sonship under the conditions of human life. The lite of the Son is wholly rooted in the Father’s. Their reciprocal love and knowledge, it is true, are frequently insisted on; yet, although the Son is uniformly dependent on the Father, it would be seriously untrue to St. John to say that the Father is dependent on the Son. The relation leaves a real subordinateness, a human inferiority, on Jesus’ side. Again, this dependence is conceived in genuinely ethical terms; it is mediated by motives, feelings, desires, surrenders, not mechanically necessitated by the properties of a Divine substance, or the stiff categories of an a priori metaphysic. All that Jesus says of Himself is perfectly religious in character; It is meant to express personal relations humanly, and so to enable human faith to grasp the only true God through Jesus Christ whom He has sent. For St. John, then, Jesus is truly and perfectly man; what distinguishes Him from other men is His unique relation to the Father. The idea of a new birth from above, a prelude to union with God indispensable for others, is nowhere applied to Him.

4. Just as in the Synoptics, Jesus is depicted in the Fourth Gospel as striving to tree the Twelve from earthly and political ideas of His purpose. And, as a result of His care and teaching, it dawns upon them gradually that the boon He offers is Divine and universal. An early stage of the process is marked by St. Peter’s words: ‘We have believed and know that thou art the Holy One of God’ (B^s); and it is one proof, out of many, of the Evangelist’s substantial accuracy, that he does not introduce at this point ideas of the Eternal Sonship of the Logos. But it is as Son that our Lord would have them know Him. Hebrews 8 the phrase ‘my Father’ 30 times, on nine occasions so addressing God directly; and at least 17 times He calls Himself ‘Son’ or ‘Son of God.’ We can hardly doubt that wherever this term ‘Son’ occurs in the Johannine literature, its primary reference is to the historical Christ, known in the realm of human fact; and it denotes Him as holding to God a relation of unique intimacy and love. Thus in the great word 1 John 4:10 ‘God . . . sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins,’ the writer is thmking of Jesus of Nazareth, the historic Messiah. St. John, however, loves always to go back to ultimate truths; and his Gospel outstrips the others by the assertion that this relation of Sonship is really anterior to time and history. Jesus has lived previously in a state conditioned by personal relationships (n"); in it (so the present writer, with some hesitation, judges) the pre-incarnate One was already Son, and was by nature possessed of a imique knowledge of God which was somehow capable of reproducing itself in His earthly consciousness (1 3).

The objection has been made that this reduces Jesus’ spiritual escperience as man to a mere show; yet it is surely possible to believe that Jesus’ knowledge of God was expenmental, as beine mediated by the unmeasured gift of the Holy Spirit, without denying that its ultimate sources are to be found in His eternal being. Room must always be left, no doubt, for the possibility that words ascribed to Jesus regarding His own pre-existence, and spoken in wonderful hours of a more than human self-consciousness, have undergone a certain modification with the lapse of time, in the direction of intensifying the original light and shade. It is scarcely credible that Jesus should haye spoken so plainly of His pre-temporal life with God as that His meaning was transparent to ordinary people; this would make the silence of the Synoptics unintelligiDle. It is altogether more likely that on this subject, as on the subject of His Messiahship, are justified in believing that He did utterwords, mysterious yet significant, which, as pondered lay a mind like St. John’s, were clearly seen to involve pre-existence, not of a so-called ideal sort, but real and personal. Even so careful a student as Titius has said, ‘I cannot regard it as impossible that the general NT idea of the pre-existence of Christ goes back to sayings of Jesus Himself, and that the Johannine discourses especially are based on really historical material.’‘

5. The last stage of Jesus’ claim to and interpreta^ tion of the name ‘Son (of God)’ is given in His prediction of the glory to which He should rise, and of His future presence in spirit with His followers (especially chapters 13£f.). The primary meaning of Sonship had been a relation to the Father of uniquely close love; it now transpires that, as Son, Jesus is destined to share in the Father’s omnipotence and universal sway. In the words (13), ‘Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands,’ no convincing reason can be offered for limiting ‘all things’ to the function of revelation and redemption, and barring out omnipotence as such. Besides, the Evangelist is quite familiar with the idea that Jesus is originally Lord and Possessor of men, irrespectively of their faith in Him; He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. Hence in his view the Divine power to which Jesus rises is not unsuited to His nature, or gained by usurpation; it is given Him by God, for only so could He receive anything (3), and it answers to the glory which He had before the world was. We see this truth breaking fully on the minds of the Twelve after the Resurrection; and the cry of Thomas, ‘my Lord and my God’ (20). marks the great discovery. In the risen One the Apostle discerns the Victor over death, the Lord of glory; and realizing in that moment of inexpressible relief how in Christ he had all that Jehovah Himself could be, he grasps Him as having for faith the value, because the reality, of God. Nowhere in the N’T is the implication more clear that religious faith in Jesus Christ is really equivalent to faith in His Divinity.

6. These general conclusions are strengthened by an examination of the title Son of Man, as used in the Fourth Gospel. Here also the name is put only on Jesus’ lips. Perhaps the accent is shitted slightly from His vocation to His Person; the writer employs the name in accordance with his higher view of our Lord’s nature to express His personal uniqueness. As in the Synoptics, the term is undoubtedly Messianic (12) and while in this Gospel it is not put in direct relation to the Second Coming, yet it is noticeable that the majority of passages in which Jesus speaks of Himself as Son of Man are references to His exaltation (3:14 8 12), or His glorifying (12 13), it being implied that Divine glory befits and still awaits Him; and this is a link with one side of the Synoptic representation. The other class of Synoptic passages bearing on the work of the Son of Man has also its parallel in Johannine verses, which describe the Son of Man as giving meat which endureth to everlasting life (6), or attach the possession of life to eating His fiesii and drinking His blood, or declare that He must be lifted up on the cross. In point of fact, however, no appreciable distinction can be drawn between what, in the Fourth Gospel, is predicated of the Son of God and of the Son of Man. Both are Messianic names, raised, as it were, to their highest power; one expressing the origin of Jesus’ Person in God, the other His human affiliation. Yet, for St. John, the title ‘Son of Man’ always appears to carry something of the suggestion that tor Jesus it is a wonderful thing that He should be man at all. Though in all points perfectly human, heaven is ever open to Him; He is present there perpetually, beholding God with immediate vision (3:13), and He will yet ascend up where He was before (.6’^).

7. Other forms of thought in which the higher nature of Jesus is set forth in the Fourth Gospel are rich in theological implication. He is the Vine in which His followers inhere and grow as living branches (ISM); He is the Resurrection and the Life, to believe in whom is to overcome death (11) He is the Bread of Life which by faith men eat, and live (6). In all such utterances the distinction between Christology and soteriology has vanished. To sustain a relation of vital, inner unity with, and suffusion of, human souls Is manifestly beyond the power of any lower than God Himself; and this is really the basal argument for the Deity of Christ which we can see to be implicit in the NT as a whole.

8. The sum and climax of the matter — and this quite irrespective of the Logos idea, to which we shall come immediately — is that God is personally in Jesus, and Jesus In God (10). The simplest and deepest words in the Gospel point to this: ‘I and the Father are one’ (10; cf. 17) ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (14?; cf. 12). By these sayings the mind is led in the direction of a simple modalism, but no theory of it is furnished. The Father given personally in Jesus is the object of saving faith. Jesus is Life and Light in a sense which is absolute (John 1:4, 9, 1 John 6). In Him there is a real advent and inhabitation of God Himself — this faith is certain of and unconditionally asserts; yet what the ontological presuppositions of it may be is a remote and derivative question, and even the Logos idea, which St. John applies at this point, is not fitted, perhaps is not designed, to take us more than a certain distance towards theoretic insight. No explanation, no combination of categories, even an Apostle’s, is able to place us where we see the life of God on its inner side. What as believers we are sure of, is that in Jesus the God of heaven and earth is personally apprehensible, actually present in history — enlightening our eyes in all knowledge because first possessing us as our inward life. This is the keynote of the Johannine Christology; the faith out of which the Gospel is written and which it seeks to wake in other minds, is that Jesus and God are one. Attempts to discredit this unity by describing it as no more than a unity of will are simply wide of the mark. Will, the living energy of persons, is the most real thing in the universe; it is the ultimate form of being; and the suggestion that behind the will there may lie a still more real Divine ‘substance,’ a more authentic region from which, after all, Jesus is excluded, is a figment of obsolete metaphysic. If it is possible to express In human language the essential and inherent Godhead of Jesus Christ, the thing has been done in the relevant statements of this Gospel.

9. Nevertheless, in the Fourth Gospel, as in the NT generally, this unity with God is viewed as being compatible with real subordination. ‘My Father is greater than I’ (14). In 10 Jesus speaks of Himself as One whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world. Yet this is but the relation which belongs to Fatherhood and Sonship as such; for, as LUtgert has expressed it, ‘the superordination of God above Jesus does not consist in God’s reserving anything to Himself; on the contrary. Hebrews 7 Himself wholly to Jesus, making Him monarch of the whole world; what it does consist in is the fact that God is everywhere the Origin, the Giver, the Foundation, while Jesus is the obedient and receptive organ of His purpose.’

10. Turning now to the Prologue, and Its characteristic ideas, let us note first of all that the study of it comes properly at this point, after we have concluded our more general survey. As’ preface, the Prologue stands first, but we may well believe that it was the last to be written. Touching the origin of the term ‘Logos,’ while we need not assert that St. John took it from Philo, yet it is extremely probable that the influence of Philonic thought went to decide which term out of those supplied by the OT and the Targums (Wisdom, the Spirit, the Word) he should choose. ‘The Word’ had long been familiar to the Hebrew mind as designating the principle of revelation, and it had received from Greek philosophy a certain cosmic width of significance. The Evangelist, it would seem, took it as singularly fitted to express to men of that time the Divine light and life present in Jesus Christ; but, writing in Asia Minor, he took it without prejudice to the full Christian meaning it was to bear. It is, besides, a term which must have been in some sort familiar to the Church; for it is introduced without comment. In St. John’s use of it, too, ethical and soteriologioal considerations are supreme; ‘Logos’ receives its colour and atmosphere from the term ‘Son,’ as denoting the historic Jesus. What the Apostle is setting forth, in short, is not a Greek theologoumenon, but the total impression made by Christ’s personality. And when we recall how St. Paul had said that all things were created by Christ and for Him (Colossians 1:16). it is easy to see how strong were the interior tendencies of faith conducting to this identification of the Jesus of history with the creative Word of God.

In v. 1 three weighty affirmations are made as to the Logos: (a) He existed from the beginning, i.e. eternally; (6) His relation to God was living and personal in character;(c) His place is in the sphere of Godhead. Stevens, with a terminology slightly too developed, but with substantial accuracy, says of the content of this verse: ‘the author aflirms a distinction, but a community of essence, between the Word and the Father.’ It is next asserted that the ‘Logos’ is the medium alike of creation and of revelation, that He has a universal relation to men (vv. 4, 9), that having been in the world from the first, but unrecognized, He is now come personally, and has given to all who receive Him the right to become children of God (vv. 11, 12) Commentators invite us to note the solemn fashion in which v. 14 attaches itself and corresponds to v. 1. The Word is indeed the subject of discourse throughout, but He has not been specifically named in the interval; now, however, in v. 14, the announcement of the Incarnation is laid, point for point, alongside of the previous declaration of the absolute being of the Word. The simple phrase, ‘the Word became flesh,’ appears to signify that He passed into a new phase of being — a phase of human mortality, weakness, dependence — becoming individualized as a man, yet retaining personal continuity with that which He was before.

These four stages, then, are discernible in the movement of thought in the Prologue: (1) The Word in His original, eternal being; (2) the Lord who comes to- His own as Life and Light; (3) the only Son of the Father; (4) the full name of the Person before the Evangelist’s mind throughout, Jesus Christ. The series is not strictly chronological, but it follows a well-defined gradation of ideas; and from the fashion in which it ends, we can perceive that the term ‘Logos’ is an ancillary and theoretic one, secondarily interpretative of Jesus as a historic personality, and that, although it stands here as first in the order of thought, it was last in the order of the Evangelist’s reflexion. The Prologue, it is clear, has nothing to say as to the mode of Incarnation; but when we connect it, as we ought to do, with the Gospel to which it is prefixed, we can perceive the motive to which Incarnation is due, namely, the Divine purpose of giving eternal life to a perishnig world. Unlike St. Paul, however, St. John conceives the advent of the Son, not as a humiliation, but as a means of revelation.

11. In the First Epistle of John the unity of God and Christ is so strongly felt that the two subjects are used almost interchangeably; so, for example, in S^". Again and again everything is afiirmed to depend on the coming of the Son of God in the flesh, as Saviour of the world. At one or two points we seem to be observing the first movements of a dogmatic Christology (2:22 4:3; cf. 2 Jn ‘). The writer is chiefiy concerned to assert the identity of the saving word of life with Jesus Christ, a dooetic between the two, and to seelc some other path to fellowship with God than that which lay through the mediation of Jesus the Messiah.

VII. CoNCLnsioN. — As we survey the different views of Christ set forth in the NT, the sovereign freedom with which Apostolic believers contemplated Jesus, and told what they saw in writings which have been quite truly described as ‘literature, not dogma,’ is infinitely impressive. The looked at Jesus each through his own eyes; and to try to force their statements into outward harmony is totally to mistake the genius of Christian faith. On the other hand, all grasped in Christ the reality of a present God of grace, and in this decisive fact lies the deeper, inward unity of NT doctrine. It is tempting to regard the various types of Apostolic Christology as elements in an advancing and organic series. Thus it might be asked whether the Synoptics do not give us the Jesus of history, and St. Paul the living Christ, while St. John fuses both together in an anti-docetic way. It is a reasonable question; for, so far as Christology is concerned, St. John does build upon St. Paul, and St. Paul upon the faith of the primitive society. Nevertheless, it is probably truer on the whole to the facts if we think of NT minds as different prisms, through which the one white light of Jesus’ Person fell, and was analyzed into different colours.

Two certainties are common to the writers with whom we have been dealing: (1) That the life and consciousness of Jesus were entirely human in form; (2) that this historic life, felt and known as possessed of a redeeming supernatural content, is somehow inseparably one with the eternal life of God Himself. Again, it is implied wherever the matter comes up, that it is one and the same personal subject which passes through the three stages of pre-existence, historical life, and exaltation. Again, we are certain to go wrong unless we note that the NT is guided, in its Christological passages, by what is really a soteriological interest. Dr. Dale’s question: What must Christ’s relation to men be in order that He should be able to die for them? is entirely faithful to the Apostolic attitude. The Person of the Messiah must be of a quality that answers to His function as Redeemer of the world. ‘All the Christology of the NT,’ as Kahler has justly said, ‘is but the statement of the presuppositions and guarantees of that which believers may have, should have, and actually do have, for fellowship with God, m the Crucified and Exalted One.’ The chief problem which the NT bequeathed to dogmatic theology is that of thinking out and construing to intelligence two things which the Apostles simply put side by side — the true Deity of Jesus Christ and His real subordination to the Father. It lies beyond the scope of this article, however, to follow the problem into the Patristic and later ages.

H. R. Macintosh.

FEBT7DA. — See Perida.

Pestilence

See Medicine, p. 598.