More, too, is made of His life before the Incarnation. The pre-existence of Christ is an essential element in Christianity. "His eternal relation to G.o.d is the only way of conceiving Him which answers to His real greatness."[4] The Christ was present and active in the creation. John"s use of the word "Logos" is right. "Logos" is not merely a result but a Force. It is not only the speech, but the speaker. Let us admit once for all that the fact, much belabored of the critics, is a fact. Let us not be afraid of the word which expresses it. G.o.d must be anthropomorphic if He exists. We can come nowhere near to thinking out any other kind of G.o.d. Christ has the value of G.o.d to devout Christians because in the fullness of His moral perfections He expresses G.o.d so far as we can know Him and man so far as man can hope and grow.
[Footnote 4: Denney. Studies in Theology.]
[Sidenote: How Son of G.o.d.]
Is His Sonship different from ours, or only an expansion of the fullness and perfection of our sonship? This last seems to me a most important question. If He was born as we were born--that is, as to the beginning of His earthly life, there can be no pre-eminent sense in which He was the Son of G.o.d. He was either a happy accident of natural birth or a "sport" in evolution.
[Sidenote: The Virgin Birth.]
This brings us to that doctrine which is the greatest challenge to the doubter: "Conceived by the Holy Ghost; born of the Virgin Mary,"--a doctrine fiercely fought by Harnack and yet by no means to be dismissed as he dismisses it. His teaching on this point seems to me the result of his theory of Christianity. If one seeks to rid Christianity of the supernatural, here is the place to begin.
[Sidenote: Dignity of the Story.]
[Sidenote: A Greater Puzzle.]
But who will not feel the force of the position that, granted G.o.d was to be incarnate, the story of Christ"s incarnation is the n.o.blest and most probable? He is not born of a man"s l.u.s.t nor of a woman"s desire--but of the submission of untainted womanhood to the direct creative power of G.o.d. The alternative to this is the Divinest man in all the world born of sinning and not yet married parents. If the new doctrine of heredity be true that men may inherit good as well as evil, we still have an astounding fact to account for; namely, the birth of such a child from such conditions, that is, with all the good kept in and all the bad left out.
[Sidenote: Parthenogenesis a Fact.]
When men speak of a virgin birth as incredible and impossible and as the weakest of all Christian doctrine, do they know or have they forgotten that parthenogenesis (virgin birth) is a fact in nature; existing, for example, in as highly organized insects as the honey bee? There are other insects which are parthenogenetic at one time and s.e.xually productive at another. There are also hints of it in human life known to anatomists which can not be fully discussed here.
[Sidenote: Among the Bees.]
[Sidenote: A Small Departure from Nature.]
The virgin queen bee produces males in abundance, but can not produce females until she has made her nuptial flight and met her mate in an embrace invariably fatal to him. Nor does she ever need to meet another. From that time on, she is the fruitful mother of every kind of bee life the hive needs; the undeveloped females called neuters and those who become queens by being fed on royal food. Virgin birth is therefore imbedded in nature"s order. To occur in the human species nature need call in no novelty. Christ, if born of a virgin, was born with the smallest possible departure from the order of nature. A process known in a lower form of life was carried into the higher to produce the unique being called for by the spiritual needs of mankind.
[Sidenote: The Historical Statement.]
Pa.s.sing over the historical a.s.sertions which follow the doctrine of the virgin birth, "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried," because there is nothing in these statements difficult or incredible, we reach the doctrine of His resurrection, "the third day He rose from the dead," a doctrine next to that of the virgin birth in natural difficulty of acceptance.
[Sidenote: Christ"s Resurrection.]
[Sidenote: Surprise of Disciples.]
[Sidenote: The Fact Accounts for History.]
Faith in this seems to me to depend on how far we have accepted Christ"s Deity and His incarnation. If by the Holy Ghost we have been able "to say that Jesus is the Lord;" if by that blessed energy we perceive His Divine mastership; if by the same energy we feel that He has transformed us into the image of His dear Son; raising us "from the death of sin into the life of righteousness" it is not difficult to believe that Jesus "the power of the Resurrection" rose from the dead. "The fact of the Resurrection and belief in the fact is not explicable by any antecedent conditions apart from its truth."[5] The disciples did not expect what they saw. His death was for them so far as we can see, without hope. They were not able yet to interpret His prophecy that He would build again His temple, nor understand the spirituality of His kingdom. These facts seem to me utterly to demolish the theory of a vision called up by eager, yea, agonizing, expectation. The idea of the Resurrection justifies His prophecies as to Himself and the fact accounts, better than any theory which denies the fact, for the faith and founding of the early Church as well as for the course of subsequent history and of the believer"s experience.
[Footnote 5: Westcott. The Revelation of the Risen Lord.]
[Sidenote: Slow Belief in Resurrection.]
It is much to see that belief became belief only with great difficulty.
The idea of the Resurrection was strange and alarming to the disciples.
"They were terrified and affrighted and supposed they beheld a spirit."
Slowly by tests of sense as well as by persuasions of teaching did the disciples come to believe that the Christ of the Resurrection was the same Christ who suffered on the cross.
[Sidenote: Not an Invention.]
[Sidenote: An Eye-witness Story.]
It seems impossible that the Resurrection could have been an invention or that the account of it could be a work of the imagination. The last is almost as great a miracle as the Resurrection itself. In detail, in naturalness, even in the presence of difficulties and hindrances to easy belief of the story, the narrative seems that of an eye-witness. No reasoning can bring faith, however, to one who denies the miraculous. As a fact, the Resurrection is incapable of naturalistic explanation. To those who deny the miraculous I can only again point out how Huxley cuts out the _a priori_ argument from Hume as worthless. As quoted in his biography, Huxley says: "We are not justified in the _a priori_ a.s.sertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to us, can not change. The a.s.sumption is illegitimate because it involves the whole point in dispute."
[Sidenote: Ascent into Heaven.]
[Sidenote: The Ascension.]
[Sidenote: Nature not Wholly Love.]
[Sidenote: Evil and Good.]
Necessarily miraculous also is the doctrine, "He ascended into heaven."
In this He pa.s.sed from the visible into the invisible; from the conditions of human life to those of the life of a spirit; from the work of redemption to that of intercession. If His resurrection be accepted, His ascension presents no difficulties to faith. This, with His incarnation, and the facts of His earthly life are the manifestation of the tender side of G.o.d to the senses even as His wisdom and power are shown to the senses by the facts and laws of nature. As to the doctrine, "G.o.d is love," nature"s word can never be conclusive. In the natural kingdom joy and sorrow, ease and pain, love and hate, kindness and cruelty, trust and terror exist side by side, as do life and death. No man concludes, from nature alone, that G.o.d is ruled by love. Because man can not conclude this, Ormuzd and Ahriman are found substantially in all religions, as in that of the Pa.r.s.ees, except in the Christian. Here the warfare is not to be eternal. The victory of good is to come. Divine help is promised, that it may be secured in every soul. The conquest of evil by good is within that Christian omnipotence which Paul knew. "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me." It requires a Christ to show that the path to rest is through toil; that the way to ease is through suffering; that the highway to life pa.s.ses through death. Only thus can "mortality be swallowed up of life."
[Sidenote: The Meaning of Jesus.]
[Sidenote: Christ as Revealer.]
In the unity of the G.o.dhead, Christ is G.o.d in manifestation, redemption, intercession, judgment. In the Trinity, in which we must believe G.o.d exists, Jesus Christ is the personality expressive, at first visibly and now invisibly, of the tender qualities of the Divine nature which, manifested in part in the world of nature, are there so linked with severity as to require special and peculiar revelation in the person of Jesus Christ in order that G.o.d may be understood both as transcending nature and as eternal love.
Surely the doctrine, "I believe in the Holy Ghost," will remain. It is a misfortune that the word "ghost" has, in our English use, an unworthy and terrifying significance. On this account it were well if we could subst.i.tute for constant use the word "Spirit."
[Sidenote: The Holy Ghost.]
[Sidenote: The Energy of G.o.d.]
[Sidenote: The Interpreter.]
The Holy Spirit is the energy of G.o.d, whether working as Creator or in the processes of redemption. It stirs us to the depths when we consider that the Author of the worlds, the Source of the energies is He who transforms, renews, sanctifies, and witnesses in us. There is no question as to the pervasiveness and competence of the Power which "works in us to will and to do of His good pleasure." We are taught to trace all our religious uplift to the highest possible source. We gather a great sense of our worth by the dignity of this a.s.sociation as we do of the condescension of our Lord in making His home in our hearts. This Holy Spirit is in all Christians the energy of the entire spiritual life. By this we do the things which by nature we can not do. His is that Divine impulse which initiates, continues, matures, and satisfies the life of G.o.d in us. It is the indwelling, all-pervading Holy Spirit, which interprets that great word, "I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be one as We are."
[Sidenote: The Doctrine of Energy.]
And if the most advanced philosophy should yet be confirmed as true that there is nothing really but energy, none the less would the doctrine of the Holy Spirit abide. Back of all the individual energies of humanity; back of all the forces of nature is the supreme energy of G.o.d. If creation be our theory, it is the Spirit of G.o.d which broods on the face of the waters. If evolution be our creed, it is "in Him we live and move and have our being." All science is but the knowing of His way of working, and all theology is but the discovery of His mind. To know Him is to know all things. The latest Christian will be saying, "I believe in the Holy Ghost."
[Sidenote: The Forgiveness of Sin.]
[Sidenote: Huxley on Depravity.]