Jesus Christ is the one Person in human history to whom the history of all persons points. In his personality, all personality, both of God and man, finds concrete definition and full expression. In our age it has come to be somewhat common to say that Christ is the center of history. It is fitting that we seek, even in an all too brief and inadequate way, to discover why this is true, from the standpoint of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. A character so unique to thought, sufficient to love, and efficient to conscience and will, is the consummation of the Scriptural message to man. It will be helpful to every thoughtful mind to lay hold more clearly and closely on this Person.

      The composite portrait of the Person [16] given in the fourfold Gospel must of necessity be the basis of study. Reverently and humbly we shall seek to apprehend the mind of the Lord as he lived among men, and to see the words of the Gospel record as he saw them--expressions of his own mind of filial devotion toward God and fraternal compassion toward man. Only by the kinship of like-mindedness may we get behind the words to the mind which gave them forth; to see the Jewish past, its promise and prophecies, its Scriptures and sacrifices, its law and its religion, as Jesus saw them and related himself to them; to penetrate yet deeper into his consciousness of God and man and see how he related himself to them; to see with Jesus the new order of thought and life, the new society and fellowship he introduced and instituted on earth, is the path which must be trod.

      To invigorate the knowledge so gained by living it and teaching it is the joyous task of Christian faith, the privilege of individual discipleship, the obligation of collective responsibility laid upon the Church of Christ. To indicate the bare outlines and initial steps of this pathway of intimate companionship is before us.

Jesus as Related to God.

      The portrait drawn of the wonderful Person by Matthew and Mark and Luke is from the standpoint of human conditions, circumstances and setting. As in one picture from different angles of vision they set forth the incarnation as "the divine life of man," our human nature perfected, exalted, lifted to the plane of divine energy and power in the midst of our human relations and limitations. John, on the other hand, portrays the same wonderful Person as living on the earth "the human life of God." The very beginning of a true Christian theology is to combine these portraits--not by any mechanical superimposition of one picture upon the other, but by a process of growth. Indeed, the process is that of a synthesis possible only to spiritual sympathy. Failure to arrive at such a subjective view-point, and the consequent lack of this sympathy and synthesis, has been the blight of our dogmatic and systematic theologies.

I. JESUS KNOWS GOD.

      In a very solemn affirmation Jesus raised himself above all prophets and teachers, as regards both the kind and degree of his knowledge of God. His claim is unequivocal and imposing. "No man knoweth the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him" (Matt. 11:27). Such knowledge as a Son only could have of the Father's inmost heart, knowledge true, full and perfect, Jesus represents himself as possessing. Higher and completer knowledge is impossible. Knowing himself to have this understanding, Jesus earnestly and vigorously resented the questioning of his knowledge of God (John 8:54-55).

II. JESUS EMBODIES GOD.

      Only the insanity of a disordered human mind or the sanity of Deity can make this claim, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). "Thou, Father, in me, and I in Thee--" (John 17:21-23). Brushing aside the unrealities of mysticism, it must be noted that Jesus throws down the gauntlet of sufficient proof of his claims in a most practical and workable form. The passage is the one justification of both Christ and the Church of Christ for the exalted claims of the Christian faith. "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do them, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father" (John 10:37-38). Divine energy embodied discloses itself in works worthy of God.

III. JESUS IS CO-EQUAL WITH GOD.

      "The Father worketh hitherto, and now I am working" (John 5:17, 19-21, 26-27). With these words Jesus begins the most surprising announcement ever made to human hearing. Throughout the self-disclosure Jesus identifies himself and his activities with the energies of the ever-present God; he claims creative power in himself because of his unique relation to God as a Son; he claims to be the source of life and the agent of divine judgment. Human reason, imagination, judgment, every faculty of intellect, stop short in such a presence. He must be rejected and God dishonored (John 5:23, 12:42-47), or accepted as "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28-29).

IV. JESUS IS THE ONE REVEALER OF GOD.

      Man has no need deeper and higher than a working, practical knowledge of God. A teacher who can lead man direct to the Father will never be old-fashioned or out-of-date. Philip voiced [17] the quest, the universal cry of the human heart (John 14:8), and the universal answer stands for all time and all ages: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father but by me." "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me" (John 14:6; Matt. 11:27-30).

Jesus as Related to Man.

      Philosophical speculation, seeking to construe the "two natures" of Jesus Christ in terms accurate and adequate to the satisfaction of reason, has wrought havoc with a fundamental fact of the incarnation. A simple, sublime, and transforming truth has too long been obscured and lost from popular view. Our human nature, the present, patent consciousness of self, which is in each of us, is of such a quality that the divine nature, the very being of the God eternal, can blend with it without, on the one hand, degrading God, or, on the other hand, destroying the conscious identity of self in man. To this conception classical philosophy has been, and will be, forever blind. The "wisdom of this world" dismissed Paul at Athens with airy mockery (Acts 17:32). From that day to this philosophy, as such, cannot and dare not face the related facts of incarnation and resurrection. For in proportion as reason attempts to construe mind and nature in the light of these truths, there is no stopping place short of Christian theism and Christian faith.

I. JESUS KNOWS MAN.

      It seems never to have occurred (until after the resurrection), to those who were with him in the flesh that Jesus was anything else, either less or more, than a man. His own friends thought him mildly insane (Mark 3:21). His brothers did not believe in him (John 7:3-5). The chief charge against him, indeed, was that, being simply human, he sought to make people believe him more than man (John 10:33). So much was he like his followers in outward appearance that the kiss on the cheek was the only sure designation of him by the betrayer (Mark 14:44). On the other hand, he himself, unknown by man (Matt. 11:27), knew man perfectly (John 2:24-25). For centuries men have been slowly acquiring the raw material out of which may yet come a science of psychology. We are just learning the printer of psychophysics. Because Jesus was alive with keen insight and alert with penetrating sympathy, because he knew the mind of God in his holiness, and at the same time felt all the sting and stain of sin in the mind of man, Jesus knew man better than man has ever known himself, or ever will, with all his anthropological sciences, except he learn from Christ Jesus the secrets of knowledge which are born only of sympathy and Godly compassion.

II. JESUS EMBODIED MAN.

      It is as easy to toy with Jesus' humanity as to trifle with his divinity. Indeed, the "human view" of Jesus of Nazareth devitalizes the one and emasculates the other. When we come behind the written record of his words and deeds to the mind of him; only when we company in spirit with him from the baptism to the last heart-crushed breath on the tree; only as we feel our way along, heart to heart with him through his life on earth, only so do we discern in him--not merely a man, even of superlative goodness and grace, not merely a man among men, where we are weak, pure where we are defiled, and sinless where we are sinful--but a comprehensive, universal man, one man who embodies in himself what all men are, one who is our whole mankind in his individual person. Except for the concrete embodiment of this ultimate truth in Jesus Christ, the mind of man had never attained unto it.

III. JESUS IS CO-EQUAL WITH MAN.

      Upon this fact, the co-equality of Jesus with man as with God, hinges the possibility of each soul of man receiving reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ (Romans 5:10-11). Were Jesus less than man or less than God, any reconciliation effected by him would, of necessity, be partial, local and temporary, and not complete, illocal, and eternal. The traditional theologies of the church sought to construe God apart from Christ Jesus, and in the same way to construe mankind apart from Jesus Christ. For this very reason, all philosophies of the atonement have broken down with their own weight or been broken through because of their insufficiency.

IV. JESUS IS THE ONE REVEALER OF MAN.

      Next to the quest for God, and, in reality, inseparable from it, is the abiding and abounding hunger of the human heart to know the meaning of our human life with all its varied experiences. What am I? What am I here for? Why must [18] I suffer this? Such queries vex the heart of man, and, turn where it will, the quest of the soul is vain till it comes to the Christ. Here that which has been hid is made plain. No oracular discussion or detailed instruction about man is found in the Scriptures, but rather a perfect disclosure of the meaning and purpose of human life is found lived out in utter fulness. Jesus exhibits no discriminating sense of the "accidents" of births, of sex or race or religion or economic condition. He knows no male or female, Barbarian Scythian, Jew or Greek, rich or poor, bond or free. All alike are persons. To all despite squalor and moral filth, the deference of love is due, disapproving love for the sinner, to be sure, but love for every person. Nowhere else in all history of man in time is there another revelation of the nature and purpose of human life, comparable in kind to this one found in Jesus Christ. In one, life He exhibits both man's highest idea of God, and God's ideal of every man.

Jesus as Related to Judaism.

      In human history, Jesus was a Jew, a child of the Hebrew race, a son of Israel, an heir of the covenant "promise made to the fathers." Throughout his life he observed perfectly the spirit of "the law that was given by Moses." At the same time ruthlessly aside the accumulated ceremonial exactions whereby the traditions of men had transformed the gifts of God from a boon into a burden. In the twenty-third chapter of Matthew is recorded the culmination of his withering rebuke of those who, through wilful blindness, persistently go after even the right thing in the wrong way. He came not to destroy the law (Matt. 5:17-19) by casting it away, but by filling it to the full, showing that in him it had achieved its divine purpose. He exalts life above the law, by living the life of God and man beyond the reach of law (Romans 8:3-4). When they killed him, the exponents of the whole law, Israel as a state, as a religion, and as a prescribed code, in the chosen representatives of elders, chief priests and scribes (Mark 10:32-34), cut the last cord which bound Jesus to the system of Judaism. Henceforth he is no Jew, but Saviour of all who believe in his name.

      'Tis a wondrous story, not briefly told, how Jesus "fulfilled the law;" how he took to himself the hidden meaning of all the prophets from Moses on (Luke 24:25-27); how he took the law unto himself, and became himself the new law (II Cor. 5:14-15; Gal. 2:20); how he took all the sacrifices made under the law unto himself, and became himself the one sufficient sacrifice for sin and peace and gratitude (John 1:29; Heb. 9:23-28); how he took the temple itself into himself and became himself the one temple of meeting between God and man (John 2:19-21); how he took all worship unto himself, and became himself, in his compassionate help, the only acceptable worship of God by man (John 4:21-25). It is a story of breathless spiritual interest. Those who would read other than the bare chapter headings of how it pleased God to sum up all things in Christ (Eph. 1:7-12), will find it writ large, for him who has eyes to see, on every page of the Christian Scriptures.

Jesus as Related to the Church.

      Jesus himself spoke little about the church. He spoke much about the kingdom. But what Jesus personally did say concerning the church is significant; what he said by the Spirit through the apostles is much more in quantity but not more meaningful. For the whole nature and function and scope of the church can be discovered from what Jesus was and said and did.

I. JESUS AS BUILDER OF THE CHURCH.

      In language unmistakable Jesus declared that he himself would build the church (Matt. 16:18). Yet, strangely enough, as men think of buildings and the task of building, from the moment of that declared purpose "began Jesus to show unto his disciples, that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up" (Matt. 16:21). Except for that last clause we had been bewildered. For, clearly, the purpose to build the church became more certain and deathless when Jesus "was raised on the third day" (I Cor. 15:4), and the nature of the church is made clear now that the builder is Spirit as God is Spirit (John 4:24). Men may build up great creedal statements, great ecclesiasticisms, great theologies, great disciplines and great societies, but let no man forget that it is the purpose of the Christ who dieth no more (Romans 8:10) to be the one Builder of his own church (Matt. 16:18; I Cor. 3:5-9), and his church will be spiritual because he is Spirit. [19]

     
II. JESUS AS THE FOUNDATION OF HIS CHURCH.

      For twenty centuries men have been experimenting, building all sorts of churches on all sorts of foundations. Practically everything has been well tried except for living men simply and whole-heartedly to accept the living foundation of Jesus' own choosing and let the living builder build them in his own way into a spiritual temple, a living organism. Other foundations have been laid and tried, Peter, philosophy, propositions,--but all all in vain. Says Jesus, as he looks forward and sees elders and chief priests and scribes and death--and the Father, "upon this rock will I build." "This rock" is his deathless self. Lest any should stumble and mistake the figure, by the mouth Of him whom the living Christ calls to be his witness to the Gentiles, the Spirit of Jesus declares, "Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (I Cor. 3:11). Truly Jesus had no great need to speak many things concerning the church. This is enough.

      From what Jesus did in the flesh we can know of a certainty what is the process by which, as a living builder, he builds his church upon himself as the living foundation.

      It is conceivable and possible--speaking after the fashion of men--that Jesus might have proceeded differently than he did in assembling the material and providing for the building of his church on the earth. For instance, he might have chosen--still speaking after the fashion of men--one Jew and one Gentile and given them whatever preparation they lacked, and sent them to their separate tasks. Or, he might--still humanly speaking--have chosen one man and one woman, and with them have instituted one home as the nucleus of the church. But he did not. Say not to yourself, it is foolish to set up such suggestions and surmises as possible courses of divine procedure. For more than sixty generations men have been trying out suggestions more foolish than these. What Jesus did do was to call to company with himself men of every diversity of taste and tendency and temper, and form them into a society where every love of greatness is swallowed up in the greatness of love (Matt. 18:1-5), where his own mind is the sole social bond and tie, and where loyalty to him is the sole condition of fellowship in the society. Think you that the actual Christian religion will ever be the ideal religion of Christ? Will men, sometime, come in child-likeness of trust and confidence and belief and submit themselves to the divine process of being builded by Christ into a perfect church?

Jesus Christ as Prophet.

      The thought-world of the human mind, how versatile it is and varied, how full of eager quests and restless discontent, how daring and audacious! What triumphs does the intellect achieve, now in a century of philosophy and literature, now in a century of science and discovery! But when all man's mental best is measured by the side of the universe of mysteries and mystery in which we are immersed, how less than little does it all appear! Yet here, close by, is One who waits, asking only attention and stillness in the soul, wishing to declare the mind of God and give the satisfying explanation of the inquiries of mind and of the inquiring mind itself. Reason will find rest only when it rests on "the power of God and the wisdom of God" (I Cor. 1:24). Thus is he our sufficient Prophet.

Jesus Christ as Priest.

      The feeling-world of the human mind, how vast it is and dominant! Our loves and hates, our hopes and terrors, our aspirations and ambitions, our preferences and prejudices! How these all do sway our waking moments and follow us sometimes even into sleep! So all-encompassing, indeed, do these become that men are moved to say, What we do earnestly hope for, that we are. Over against it all, we are so impotent to give expression to the surges of the soul. When we would express to each other the depths within us, no art of speech or contrivance made by man can scale the heights for us or sound the depths. If we are so to each other, how then shall man declare his mind unto God? Nay, who shall reach through all the earth and time and gather to himself the groanings gleaned from near and far and declare unto God for us our supplications and intercessions, our gratitude and praise? There is but one Priest for man, Jesus Christ (Hebrews 6:17-20; 9:11-22, Romans 8:26-27).

Jesus Christ as King.

      Who call describe it--that most subtle mystery which the human mind enshrouds? Here in a world, a universe, we cannot apprehend, and still less [20] comprehend, man moves about and makes, moment by moment, his own choices and decisions; he resolves on incentives and reacts on impulses; he fashions and forms his purposes and cherishes or rejects his motives; he accuses his own deceptiveness or approves his conscious rectitude. Such is the mystery of self-control, such the wonder of conscious direction of effort to satisfy desire, such is the miracle of the will to do, and the stubborn wont. What man is he, and where, who has made his highest will to do only the will of the living God (Romans 3:21-27)? Into this inscrutable inner chamber of the human heart, into conscience and will, the Man, Christ Jesus, comes declaring his kingship, and claiming his sovereign privilege to rule in all the might of love and righteousness. No lesser King can rule in such a realm. The perfect, universal Man, the perfect Son of the living God,--his is the Kingdom and dominion. He is our King (Hebrews 2:17-18; 4:14-15; 7:25; 10:10-14).

      Thus is it that Jesus Christ enters into the inmost being of the individuals whom he draws unto himself, being lifted up, and by becoming in diverse and divers men the one sufficient Prophet and Priest and King, he creates a kinship in them and constitutes the new society, the living organism which exists only to express his mind, his heart, his will. This living organism is the church of Jesus Christ.

Christ Jesus the Reigning Head of the Church.

      Speaking after the fashion of men, it is not at all strange that, though more than sixty generations have passed from earth since Jesus was raised from the dead, men have not yet seriously set to themselves the task of making "the household of God," the family of like-minded "saints," "the holy temple" in which each individual is "builded together" with all the others into a living "habitation of God in the Spirit " (Eph. 2:19-22). The natural world with its political ideas and ideals, its economic conditions and situations, its social forms and associations, presses upon us, colors our thinking, beclouds our programs, obscures our insight, thwarts our occasional glimpses of spiritual privilege and duty, and hides from us our true selves, our Scriptures and our Christ. In a vague and theoretical way we recognize the pre-eminence and power of the glorified Redeemer, but he has seemed so far removed from our daily world of grind and obligation. We "are yet carnal" (I Cor. 3:1-3). But, Christ helping us, we are throwing off the grave clothes of our burial in spiritual darkness. We begin to know, in all lands of earth, that the headship of the living Christ is no mere phrase on the lip, but a miracle-working energy in man's daily life; that "in the church and in Christ Jesus is the glory of God unto all generations" (Eph. 3:21); that "through the church is made known the manifold wisdom of God, unto the principalities and powers in the heavenlies" (Eph. 3:10); that every continent and every nation and every tongue is the purchased possession of him who, "with his own precious blood" (Acts 20:28); secured the church unto himself.

Christ Jesus the Life of the Church.

      It has seemed unto us as a parable, a figure of speech, a metaphor, and no literal and actual reality, that the church is the body of Christ, the only body he has on the earth, the living organism chosen by the wisdom of God to express the embodied mind of Christ to men, and to be the living agency of communication between the human universe and the spiritual God. We have read the words often enough and seriously enough, but our eyes have been holden and our understanding has been dead. It may be that our false sciences, our mechanical physics and our dead psychologies have tended to deepen our darkness. At all events, since we have come to realize that the soul is the life of the body; that the whole soul makes the whole body alive; that the body is a living organism only by reason of its union with soul; that soul is tangible in this world only by reason of its union with a body; that the soul without body is, at least, no concrete factor in the life we live in the flesh--since we have come to weave together into a definite science these simple commonplaces of familiar observation, the reality of the relation between Christ and his church is become a more significant reality.

      Read again the words: "to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all" (Eph. 1:22-23); "unto the building up of the body of Christ" (Eph. 4:12); "even so ought husbands also to love their own wives as their own bodies--even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body" (Eph. 5:28-30); "and he is the head of the body, the church--that in all things He [21] might have the pre-eminence" (Col. 1:18); "and not holding fast the Head, from whom all the body, being supplied and knit together through the joints and bands, increaseth with the increase of God" (Col. 2:19); "I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God" (I Cor. 11:3); "For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body being many, are one body; so also is Christ. For in one spirit were we all baptized into one body--and were all made to drink of one spirit. And whether one member suffereth, all the members suffer with it; or one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members each in his part" (I Cor. 12:12-13, 26-27). In sharp contrast with these truths of infinite spiritual import, the past and current history of the church, of the churches, and of Christians in the church, can be contemplated only with a moral shudder and a great cry of heart to God for pity and forgiving mercy.

Christ Jesus the Judge.

      The judicial function Of Messiah was not found in the ancient oracles. By so much does the "promise" made to Israel outrun the prophetic anticipations of the Jewish faith which Jesus Christ fulfilled. Both in person and in the apostles by the Spirit does the Lord of Life claim the privilege of final discernment and determination over all the race. He came to redeem. Because of his Sonship of God and man, Jesus takes to himself this function. In one recorded conversation is contained the most stupendous and momentous self-revelation ever made in human hearing (John 5:17, 19-47). This passage in the gospel by John is all inexhaustible wealth of spiritual disclosure. Any attempt at an exposition of it here is impossible. In verses 22-30, Jesus shows both divine and the human reasons why he alone is competent, qualified, adequate and appointed, not only to exercise the executive functions of divineness through the church in the world and be, himself, the law of life in the church for the world, but also to be, as Son of God and son of man, the final arbiter of character and destiny.

      In another portion of the Scriptures is a relation which no unaided and unguided human hand could pen. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the pivotal of the religion of Christ in human history. It is a bewildering fact for science and philosophy and the rock of Christian faith. Basing the revelation upon this changeless and unchangeable reality, Paul unfolds the final end of life and time. When the last enemy is abolished for the last man, and the Victim of men is become the Victor of man, "when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all" (I Cor. 15:20-28). When the mind of man pauses and confronts the mind of God in Christ, when the eternal tragedy of the Cross in the middle of time is realized even faintly, when the student of history and lover of his fellowmen and Christ contemplates the love of Christ for man and the urgency of Christ Jesus in the history of man, the lifted hand falls nerveless, the head droops in contrition too deep to be felt, and the heart cries, Even so, come, Lord Jesus"! The voice replies: "Go, teach all the nations; baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; teaching them to do all things whatsoever I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the age." [22]

[DH 16-22.]