As in the case of Zarathustra, as in the case of Gotama the Buddha, as in the case of Plato, so in the case of Jesus of Nazareth—for the right understanding of this supreme teacher of the way of life for man, we must pay attention to the background on which He appears and what He is able to take for granted. So only can we appreciate His true originality.

§ 1

Jesus of Nazareth, then, was by origin and training purely a child of Israel. It is true that the Hellenistic civilization was near at hand in Galilee, but there is no trace of its influence in the Gospel story. Jesus took His stand wholly on the Hebrew tradition about the unity and character of God the Creator, and the nature of man, and the glorious destiny of Israel.1 One important element in this tradition was, as we have seen, the assurance that, at last, in spite of the long-continued rebellion of man, God was to come into His own, as in heaven so on earth. This assurance appears in the Gospel in the phrase “the kingdom of God.” But this does not mean merely the sovereignty of God, but the sovereignty of God as realized and perfected in Israel; and generally as finding its centre in the anointed king of David’s family, the “Christ,” the final and adequate representative of God. The best minds in Israel had indeed foreseen that this consummation of the vocation of Israel was to have a world-wide effect—it was to enable Israel to become the evangelist of the nations, so that thus finally in Abraham’s seed should “all the families of the earth be blessed”; but still the perfecting of Israel was to be the first step, and that would require the moral and spiritual regeneration of that sinful people. That had been the constant message of the prophets; and when they failed to find the response they desired in the mass of Israel, they turned to the faithful remnant—the group who had ears to hear—and declared them the true Israel. “Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me.”2

This was exactly the message by which John the Baptist prepared the way for the Lord. He was an inheritor of the old ethical spirit of the prophets, which after long years of deadness revived in him with a new power. Already in him the conflict between the prophetic spirit and the Pharisaic legalism is apparent. The only new point in his preaching was the announcement that the kingdom of God, the realization of God’s rule in Israel, was immediately to be expected. The coming of the Lord to “visit” Israel in the person of the Christ was close at hand. But, as usual, Israel was found quite unfit to welcome Him. His coming could only be their condemnation. They were not good grain fit for the harvest of God, but rather chaff fit only for the furnace. Therefore they must repent. There was still opportunity for such repentance as would bring into being a new Israel, a people prepared for the Lord. And John used as his symbolic instrument in promoting this national regeneration a baptism or purification with water, accompanied with a public confession of sins. The ruling classes, Sadducees and Pharisees, paid no heed to John, as they “rejected the counsel of God for themselves”3; but he made a deep impression on the mass of the people, and it was into the fruit of his mission that Jesus entered. He took up John’s message, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the good tidings.”4

And in the beginning of Jesus’ mission in Galilee5 it was only the goodness of the tidings which was in evidence. Here was a truly wonderful prophet who loved and cared for the poor and oppressed people, every one of them, who was endowed with an overwhelming authority alike over the diseases of men, over the spirits of evil and over the forces of nature, and who spoke, as no one had ever heard a man to speak, as if He held from God the right to act in His name, even to revise the accepted tradition of the scribes, even to give a new law, or a new version of the old law, to the people of God.

But splendid as was the first impression made by Jesus, it soon became apparent, especially to Himself, that the situation contained the seeds of inevitable failure. The first enthusiastic faith in Jesus the wonderful healer was not deep enough for His purpose. If he had multitudes to listen to Him and to come to be healed, He made few real disciples. It was obvious why the wealthy and powerful classes, such as the Sadducean high-priestly family in Jerusalem, and the Herodians in Galilee, should be set against Him, for He had a horror of selfish power and of wealth, which He openly denounced and ridiculed. It was obvious, again, why the most respected class in the nation, the Pharisees, and the official scribes of their persuasion, should be up in arms against Him, for His criticisms of the official religion cut very deep. The “wine” He offered the people to drink was obviously a very “new wine,” and the ecclesiastics in authority were bound to maintain that “the old was good.” But it is even more important to notice that His absolute refusal to use or contemplate the use of force in the interest of religion set against Him all the “patriots” or nationalists in a people amongst whom, since the days of the Maccabæan rebellion, religion had been commonly identified with the hope of a military and victorious Messiah. Galilee teemed with rebellious spirits, and Jesus absolutely turned His back upon them, even when, in admiration of His seemingly boundless power, they would have come by force and made Him a king.

But neither Sadducees nor Pharisees nor Herodians nor Zealots made up the bulk of the poor and distressed people of Galilee. The common people heard Jesus gladly. But they were engrossed in getting their livelihood, and they soon found that the moral claim He was making upon them was something so profound, and so revolutionary in respect of ordinary ideas of the good life, that they had neither time nor inclination to entertain it. If they had “the faith to be healed”—that is, faith in Jesus sufficient to bring them to Him to be healed—they had not “the ears to hear”—the deeper faith such as could make them His disciples. So, though Jesus had many hearers, He had few real disciples; and He knew it.

He acted then exactly like the old prophets and like John the Forerunner. He concentrated all His attention on fashioning a New Israel which, in succession to the Old Israel, was to be the true church of God, and which came in later days to be known simply as “the Church.” He recognized that, though Israel in the mass had refused Him and would refuse Him, and was accordingly doomed under the irreversible judgment of God which would speedily follow, yet that God’s purpose in Israel had not failed: He was sent exclusively to preach the good tidings to Israel. That meant, therefore, that He was to devote all the time that remained to Him on earth to evoking, instructing, and, in rudimentary fashion, organizing the New Israel, so that, after He was gone out of sight, it would be strong enough to stand against all storms of opposition and carry the Gospel into all the world. Jesus could not have identified Himself, as He did, with the figure of the Suffering Servant of Jehovah in the later Isaiah without knowing that He was set to be “the light of the Gentiles”; but of this world-wide evangelization Israel—not Israel as it stood in obstinate hardness of heart, but the true Israel which He was framing to take its place—was the divine instrument.

The Liberal Protestant school of critics, which has been so much in evidence, has taught us a valuable lesson in emphasizing the mission of Jesus as an ethical prophet—the preacher of the good life for man; but they have often missed the very plain fact that His teaching was, with more and more intensity, directed to fashioning the “little flock” who were to be the heirs of the “kingdom,” so that they might form, in a world which would fear them and hate them, an element as sharply distinctive, as luminously bright, and as unmistakably outlined, as salt is in food, as a lamp in a dark room, as a city set on a hill. Jesus was, as Sir John Seely long ago in Ecce Homo explained with such admirable penetration, before all things the “Founder.”6

This same lesson has been missed by the Apocalyptic School. It is quite true that Jesus was apocalyptic. He was not merely the ethical prophet with wonderful gifts of healing. His vision was occupied with the divine climax. But He foresaw this “coming of the kingdom” in stages. In one sense it had already come in His coming among men—“the kingdom of God is come upon you”; in another sense it would come in the judgment on Jerusalem and that speedily, within the lifetime of men then alive; but positively it was to find its expression in the New Israel which was to carry the Gospel into all the world; so, only so, could the world be made ripe for the great consummation, which, alike in the case of those who should welcome the message and of those who should refuse it, alike for eternal fruition or eternal judgment, must close the vista of human history as Jesus saw it.7 We are blinding our eyes to the evidence if we neglect any of these elements in the expectation of Jesus.

If Jesus was the wise founder of a visible society destined to play the central part in God’s purpose for the world, we should naturally expect that He would occupy Himself greatly with its organization. We find, however, that He did this, in the sense which the words would ordinarily carry, very little. In one important matter, the matter of marriage, He appears to have laid down an explicit law, as St. Paul, St. Mark and St. Luke report8; but in the ordinary sense He was not a legislator. He did nothing at all comparable to what Plato did in his Laws for his ideal community. As He refrained from dogmatic statements or theological definitions, so He refrained from legislative enactments. He proposed, it appeared, to inspire His church (in a most realistic sense) with His Spirit; and to leave it to the church to deal with issues as they should arise with the assistance of this divine Paraclete, the agent or representative of God.

Nevertheless, a certain rudimentary organization He did give His society. He appointed officers in the persons of the Twelve Apostles, of whom Peter was the chief, and He gave them authority such as the scribes had held in Old Israel and had misused—to “bind” and “loose,” that is, to legislate by prohibition or permission, and to absolve or retain sins, that is, to exercise discipline over individuals; and He described such a ministry as a permanent feature in His household till He should “come again.” Also He gave His society two rites at any rate, a rite of initiation (baptism) and a rite of fellowship (the Holy Communion). The evidence of St. Paul’s epistles and of the Acts raises it, it seems to me, above all reasonable suspicion that the Church from the very beginning of its history believed itself to have been endowed by Christ with these institutions and authoritative commissions, and this gives us the best reason for accepting the narratives in the Gospels which record their institution or imply them.

We should notice that so deeply was it impressed upon the mind of the primitive Church that Jesus (if the expression may be pardoned) staked His all on the Church, that there does not appear the least suggestion in the New Testament that His great salvation or His covenant of grace is to be found outside it.9 There is, in other words, no idea to be found there of a membership of Christ which is not also membership in the Church which is the New Israel.

§ 2

I have stressed at starting this idea of Jesus as the founder of a visible commonwealth, to be in the world but not of it, because it controls our thought of Him as an ethical teacher—a teacher of the good life for man. For Him, as for others among the great teachers we have been considering, the good life was contemplated as life in a specific community—Israel as it was to be. Let us proceed now to consider its main features as Jesus taught it, and to obviate certain misconceptions.

The good life, as taught by Jesus, was wholly based upon a specific idea of God and His purpose, as made manifest in action in the history of Israel and as declared by His prophets. There is nothing resembling metaphysical argument on behalf of God to be found in His teaching. He appeals to Israel as already recognizing the one true God, and as having had in a long experience knowledge of Him and His will and ways—for example, both of His mercy and of His judgment, and of His good purpose for Israel, with which He expects them to correspond; but also He would plainly have them understand that God has more to teach them about Himself and about His purpose, and that He, Jesus, has unique authority to speak this new “word of God.” “No one,” he said, “knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.”

The novelty in His teaching about God lay in the emphasis He laid on His fatherhood. The recent Jewish tradition, in awful reverence for God, had taught men to fear even to utter His name. They preferred to speak of “the heavens.” Now, Jesus spoke of God as “transcendent” indeed—your Father which is in heaven—but He brought Him down nearer to common men, and He emphasized His “tender mercies,” by the familiar use of the term “Father”—“my Father,” and “your Father.” “Father,” then, was not a new title for God, but the emphasis Jesus laid on it was new. It brought into clear light the equal love of God for every individual soul and His care for every part of His creation. “Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father.” This did not detract from His awful justice. That which God cannot do is to tolerate sin, or take the obstinate soul into fellowship with Himself. The tremendous responsibility to save or to destroy his own soul must still lie with each individual, and the only legitimate fear remains the fear of a God who has—not the will but the power “to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

But God’s fatherhood means that He will do His utmost for His sons. He will search for each one, follow him, welcome him home. He gives no preference to persons of dignity or position. “It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.” He hates the pride of place, or the arrogant selfishness which leads any individual, powerful by virtue of his wealth or learning, to despise another or exploit him as an instrument for his own advantage. And the worst sins—such as the world count worst—are no obstacle to God’s ready acceptance of the sinner, if only the soul will turn to Him and put itself in His hands.

In any established society a distinction grows up between disreputable and respectable sins. Disreputable sins are such as interfere with the seemly order of society, with property and the peace of the home. Such are theft or violence, or adultery and licence, or atheism and rebellion. But other sins, though they may be verbally acknowledged as such, are in fact connived at. They are quite consistent with respectability. But Jesus would destroy any such distinction. Plainly in His eyes, pride, avarice, contempt and selfishness are at least as bad as fornication or violence. He loved to show the friendliness of God to disreputable people and outcasts—publicans, Samaritans, harlots—to stimulate their repentance, and to welcome them with the freest absolution. He came “not to call the righteous but sinners.” And there is irony in the word “righteous.” It means “self-righteous.” And His quite evident judgment was that these righteous people quite as much needed fundamental repentance as the sinners. Indeed, spiritual sins, such as pride, Jesus saw to be harder to repent of than the more scandalous. “The publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you” highly respected Pharisees. Jesus also dealt with women, bad women and good women alike, as having the same spiritual worth and capacity as men, though He showed no sign of making any woman one of His official agents or apostles.

No one can deny that the ethical teaching of Jesus, based on His thought of God, was in the eyes of respectable society deeply revolutionary and “upsetting.” Plato, in his Laws, contemplates a state of society in which the only legitimate “fear” would be the fear of the best public opinion, and that would be a sufficient protection. Jesus, on the other hand, shows a dread of public opinion as the guardian of the moral standard. “How can you believe,” He said to the Pharisees, who belonged to a class in which public opinion was very strict—“how can you believe which seek honour one of another?” There is only one real ground of goodness, and that is free and absolute correspondence with God as He has revealed Himself in the past, and is now revealing His mind and character in Jesus.

God therefore is to be put absolutely and unconditionally first in the thought of each man. There will be times, Jesus intimates, when He will seem a hard and unjust taskmaster, “taking up that he had not laid down, and reaping that he had not sown”; then as a hard taskmaster men must accept Him, and strain every nerve to obey Him, as those who have no being apart from God and no rights against Him, though they will assuredly find out that the estimate of Him as a taskmaster or a merely sovereign power is very far from the true estimate. This same sense of the penetrating supremacy of God appears when Jesus drives back the idea of the sinfulness of sin behind the outward act, which is all that man can see, and all which can claim and win human applause, to the thought of the heart and the motion of the will. Morally speaking, the value of right action and the guilt of wrong action lie simply in the will—in” the heart of man.” In the regard of Jesus humanity is undoubtedly a fallen being, needing in every individual specimen repentance and a new birth. But the sin which binds him and dooms him lies not in the body or anything which properly belongs to his nature as God made him (there is not a trace of dualism in the teaching of Jesus), but it lies simply in the perverted will—in “the heart of man.” Let that turn to God—to the Father—and all will be well; for the redemption which Jesus brought was redemption of the whole man.10

Perhaps there is no point at which wholehearted acceptance by Jesus of nature, including human nature, as fundamentally good is more evident than in the parables which formed so large an element in His teaching; for it would seem on reflection that the very principle of the parables proper—as distinct from such moral tales, miscalled parables, as Dives and Lazarus or the Rich Fool—-is that if we get down to any fundamental law of nature or of human action, whether in bad men or good men, we get to something which is also divine, and can therefore suggest to us the ways of God.

Many of the world’s teachers about God have been mystics; and the great mystics of all ages and races—Indian, Jewish, Greek, Muhammadan, Christian—have always been occupied in emphasizing the “oneliness” of God; and the mystic’s quest has been union with or absorption into the One. But Jesus, though He is constantly spoken of as absorbed in prayer, spoke no word of the mystical quest. For instance, the mystics have talked much about prayer, but have generally tended to merge prayer in adoration, and to depreciate the asking for particular good things. Jesus, as befitted one who recognized absolute dependence upon God as the true secret of life, naturally insisted much on prayer, and inculcated an unlimited belief in its efficacy; and He did, it is true, in the pattern prayer which He gave to His disciples, put first the petition, “Hallowed be thy name,” that is, adoration. But all His teachings about prayer emphasize its primary sense of asking—importunate asking—for the supply of a felt want, that is, its petitionary meaning; and He taught that our power to win from God a favourable answer to our petitions depends in part upon the fervour of our faith in God’s goodness and His power—which shows itself in importunate asking—but also in part on the conforming of our desires to the mind of God, as He, Jesus, reveals that mind. This is the meaning of prayer “in the name” of Jesus. It means in conformity with His spirit or point of view. Prayer therefore implies adoration of God for His own sake, and meditation on Him, but it remains true that prayer, as Jesus taught it, is mainly petitionary, and petitionary especially in the sense that we should ask for all that makes men effective agents of the kingdom of God. The “mystical quest” is markedly absent or kept quite in subordination. This subordination leads us to consider the meaning Jesus gave to the love of God.

§ 3

Jesus, as all the world knows, found the summary of the divine law in two sayings of the Pentateuch.11 The first of all commandments is, “Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is this. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.” Mankind in general, when it has thought seriously about the matter, has been prone to complain that this teaching, though given as elementary, is impossibly high and, in fact, impracticable. This is in great part because it has mistaken the meaning of the word “love.” It knows what love means in the love of man and woman, parents and children. This is a feeling or passion which cannot be controlled or summoned at will, and which a man can seldom experience towards God, or towards men in general, whom often he “doesn’t like.” But this emotion or feeling, which is what we commonly mean by “love,” is expressed by a Greek word (ἔρως) which never occurs in the New Testament. The Greek word for love in the New Testament (ἀγάπη) does not signify any sort of emotion, but a deliberate disposition of the will—something which is within everyone’s control if he chooses to have it so. We can put God indisputably first; and we can care impartially for the interests of those we like and those we don’t like.

The two commandments mean in fact just this—“As thou art absolutely dependent upon God in all respects, and hast learned to recognize in Him a purpose of pure goodness towards every man, so do thou, as in reason and duty bound, enthrone Him supreme over thy whole being. Seek first His kingdom and righteousness, and deliberately dispose all thy faculties in response to Him. That is to love God. And to love thyself is to recognize that the gift of life (which most men so grievously misuse) is a good thing, and thou art bound to make the best of it for time and for eternity—that is to save thy soul; and that can only be by ordering thy whole being in correspondence with God. And to love thy neighbour as thyself is to recognize absolutely that with God is no respect of persons—that every man counts in His sight for one and no man for more than one, for God has no favourites. Therefore thou wilt deliberately study to think of every man and to behave towards him as towards one who lives like thyself in the regard of God—God, whose burning indignation is kindled against anyone who fails actively to further His good purpose for every other man, as he has opportunity.”

Love is, therefore, both Godward and man-ward, a deliberate disposition which can be made a matter of choice and effectively cultivated if we will. As in the long run our feelings follow our will, on the whole, so we may find ourselves feeling warm affection towards God, and towards those whom we set ourselves to love in intention and action. But the command concerns not the feeling but the will.

Here, then, we have a complete philosophy of life—as being co-operation with the gracious purpose of God, who has let us know His mind towards mankind. Its aim is to realize the fatherhood of God in the brotherhood of man. But mankind, as it is, is not fit for this divine sonship or human brotherhood. The function of the Church, as being the brotherhood12 of those reborn to sonship, is to exhibit in the world the true expression of humanity. “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” “We [the disciples] know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.” If Jesus’ teaching about God is, as we have seen, so un-mystical (in the sense in which we commonly use the word), it is surely because He would have us deeply recognize that there is no other expression of love to God which is acceptable to Him except that of setting ourselves deliberately to correspond with His gracious and universal purpose for our brother man.

Incidentally, from this point of view we can easily understand the sense in which Jesus was, or was not, other-worldly. Certainly He did not speak as one who held that God’s good purpose would be, or could be, consummated in the world of our present experience. He anticipated judgment, particular and universal, on “this world.” He steadily bids us be prepared for a situation—the “last days”—in which the good cause shall seem infinitely weak. Certainly He bids us look to another world to rectify the false values and restore the right estimates of things and of persons—a tremendous reversal of this world’s judgments. He treats as merely folly the living for this life and its transitory goods. He dogmatically affirms the resurrection of the individual to the life beyond and judgment upon him according to his works. Thus in one sense Jesus is utterly other-worldly. This world is no more than a place of probation or “soul-making.” For final achievement we must look beyond.

But in the history of the Christian religion “other-worldliness” has taken another meaning and character. “The saints” have sometimes appeared as satisfied in mystical absorption or as ignoring this world as something merely doomed to perdition—and thus have behaved as if they had no call to remedy its abuses. This, as we have seen, is flatly anti-Christian. The function of the Church in this world is to exhibit the spirit of brotherhood in action in present-day society. It is this spectacle which is to win the world. To tolerate misery among men, without feeling the call to remedy it, is to fall under the final reprobation—“inasmuch as ye did it not.” If the final “city of God,” the “New Jerusalem,” is to be a new creation founded on the ruins of the old, still the new and perfect world turns out to be only this world remade; all the materials of the “city of God” have been fashioned or have to be fashioned here. Moreover, Jesus, as the revealer of the mystery (or secret) of the kingdom, does nothing towards satisfying men’s greedy curiosity about the life beyond. There is a life beyond, and what will prevail there is God’s goodwill and justice. To know that is enough to keep faith firm and hope radiant and love active. But our curiosity concerning the nature of the future life is plainly not to be satisfied. All our attention in this life, as disciples of Jesus, is to be occupied in corresponding here and now with the gracious purpose of God in the building of His kingdom. There is no real love of God which does not find expression in the deliberate service of men.

There appears to have been, in fact, very little speculation in the Early Church about after-world problems, though there was a good deal of “spiritualism” in the world about them.

§ 4

We observe in the Gospels that Jesus gave kindly recognition to all sorts of good-natured actions—“the cup of cold water only” given to one of His disciples. He plainly did not regard mankind as it stands as only bad. Nevertheless, He demanded something much more than this natural goodness for the citizens of His commonwealth. The demand He makes on them both Godward and manward is extreme. It is the extreme of self-devotion, the extreme of self-control, the extreme of meekness, the extreme of unselfishness, which He sets before them. It is true that, speaking as He did in proverbs, the proverbial instances He gives cannot be taken literally and turned into general laws. When He bids us pluck out the eye, or cut off the hand, which has been the advocate of sin, He is, no doubt, not to be taken literally. But what He certainly does literally require is complete control of the flesh by the spirit, and He does literally assure us that to win this complete self-control we must make even an extreme sacrifice of exterior liberty. “Narrow is the gate, and straitened the way, that leadeth unto life and few there be that are finding it.” There can be no question that, while He represented the life to which He was calling men as indeed a glorious and blessed thing—a “pearl of great price”—yet also He bade them count the cost of buying it, and the cost was everything that they had to give.

In one respect indeed we may dare to say that the ethical claim of Jesus was an “interim ethic.” I refer to the absolute claim which He made for the renunciation of all earthly ties. This is especially evident in St. Luke, as when Jesus is reported to have turned upon the multitudes who followed Him with strangely repellent words—“If any man cometh unto me and hateth not his own father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple… Whosoever he be of you that renounceth not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.” Shortly afterwards, we notice, He is not represented as making any such claim on Zacchæus, whom He accepts and blesses. Doubtless by the “disciples” He meant the little band who literally followed Him, especially the Twelve. These, however unfit at present, He was preparing for the task which lay immediately before them, that of being the first heralds of His Gospel in a hostile world. For this tremendous task He needed absolute and literal detachment—absolute and literal renunciation of everything that the world values. And, after the extraordinary experiences of failure and recovery through which the Twelve passed in the Holy Week, Jesus got in them what He wanted. He had for His agents a band of men whose feet were planted upon a rock, wholly without cares, ready for anything.

Later we find St. Paul giving high honour to such complete detachment, the opportunity for which he finds especially in the celibate life. But the general tone of the epistles of the New Testament is different. They are written to people who are assumed to be living the normal life of husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants—who are addressed as possessing private property (though under an obligation to dispose of it in trust for the community as well as for their own family), and who are expected to have a judicial system of their own to protect legitimate rights. In all this there is no real lowering of the moral standard of Jesus. The claim that a man must die to the worldly world and all its notions, if he is to live “the life that is life indeed,” is as obvious throughout the New Testament as in the Gospels. But in the absolute and literal claim made in the Gospels for renunciation of all worldly ties there is something—I will not say temporary, for the need of it is recurrent and the claim has been constantly repeated in the call to the monastic life—but at least special, and made in view of the special emergency of the moment.

But even when this concession is made, the ethical claim of Jesus remains tremendous in its depth and range. He was no ordinary reformer. The ordinary reformer fixes his mind on certain changes in the ordering of society which he sees to be necessary, and, to secure support for these, he is prepared to take men as he finds them and make the best of them for his own purposes. Jesus was a reformer indeed—essentially of the deepest and most revolutionary kind—of the society of Israel. But He was content with no piecemeal reforms. He would be no “judge or divider” in a society rotten at the core. He demanded a fresh start on a basis of absolute truth. He was not an “ascetic” in the narrower or technical sense of the term. He contrasts Himself with John the Forerunner, who was. But if asceticism means the heroic venture to recover the true meaning and value of life, and its true liberty, by absolutely exalting the spirit over the flesh and absolutely subordinating the spirit to God, Christ was indeed a teacher of asceticism.

Sometimes writers who have noticed the horror which Jesus showed of the proud pretentiousness of ecclesiastics and the selfishness of the wealthy and powerful, and His respect for “the average man” and for his intelligence, and His peremptory demand for justice in human life, have spoken of Jesus as a leader of democracy. But if democracy means, as it does, an appeal to majorities or a putting things to the vote, the Commonwealth which Jesus was founding, though there would be found in it some of the characteristic features of democracy, cannot be called by that name. Jesus had a profound contempt for majorities. It was a theocracy He was founding, though with God brought closer to men than in the old theocracy of Israel—something not based by any means on the opinions of its citizens but on the word of God, as spoken by one who was Lord and Christ. And, in respect of the general society amidst which it was to live as a kingdom within a kingdom, it was to be an aristocracy, representing the true humanity of sonship to God and brotherhood among men, and winning a reluctant admiration by the essential dignity and beneficence of its common life—thus acting as a leaven in a corrupt world, even when men would not pay the price necessary for belonging to it. But its power of being “the leaven” depended on its being first of all “the salt,” “the light,” the “city set on a hill” in marked separation from the surrounding world.

It is true—most lamentably true—that since the days of Constantine, by the recognition of indiscriminate baptism, by the abandonment of discipline, by the reckless adoption of the principle of established churches, the Church of Christ has dared absolutely to reverse the method of its Master, and thereby has lost its ethical distinctness and its moral power as a corporate body. But I am not now looking so far forward. Throughout the period of three centuries before what is called the “conversion of the Empire”—throughout the period during which the unpopularity of the Church and its liability to persecution helped it to sustain, on the whole, its ethical standard—it was faithful to the method of Jesus; it was a society of persons who had died to live. That was what Christian baptism meant, not symbolically only but really.

§ 5

The analysis which I have attempted to give of the teaching of Jesus, as it is recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, shows that a coherent and systematic vision and revelation concerning God and nature and man underlies His ethical teaching. And when this latter is reduced to something like systematic form, the question may be raised whether parallels to its every element and detail may not be found in other ethical systems.

In the next chapter I shall be insisting upon the unity of tendency in—if not all, yet most of the theories of the good life which we have been considering; and I am not proposing to discuss in detail whether there are actually any ethical maxims which Jesus alone enunciated. Certainly there is no ethical system in which humility and charity hold so dominant a place as in His; or in which “the expulsive power of a new affection” over all lawless lusts is so apparent. But the originality of Jesus lies not nearly so much in the substance of His moral instruction as (1) in its method. His proverbs, His paradoxes, His incomparable parables, His way of meeting men’s “plain questions” not by “plain answers” but by asking another question, thus forcing the questioner to see that deeper thought ought to have led him to ask a quite different sort of question, and to ask it not of Jesus but of himself—it is all these features in His method which fascinate and astonish any open-hearted enquirer and make him repeat the old cry—“Never man spake like this man!” Never was any teaching given which was at once so stimulating to the will, so novel to the imagination and so self-evidencing to the reason.

(2) But justly to estimate His originality we must look farther on: we must think in what form the ethical teaching of Jesus went out into the world—that is, we must study the Epistles. They are all in larger part ethical, and this ethical teaching of the epistles is beyond comparison lovely; and it is in its whole substance the teaching of Jesus. It gives exactly the same paramount place in the good life to humility—Godward and manward—and to brotherly love. It demands the same combination of unresisting meekness with inflexible courage and audacity in face of the world. But if we ask what is really new in all this, we shall probably find ourselves reduced to the conclusion that it is not—or not so much—newness of substance as newness of motive and spirit. What a world of fresh motives and what an abundant source of new power for living the good life the Christian society had received! That is the last consideration on which I desire to concentrate your attention.

“The Gospels”—the four little written books so called—were not the first literary output of the new Church, and their detailed memorials of Jesus do not represent the first gospel as it was preached. For that you must go to the beginning of the Acts and the fundamental assumptions of St. Paul’s earliest Epistles. The first dominant note is that of the resurrection on the third day of the crucified Jesus. Under the strain of the humiliating experience of the Cross the vacillating faith of the Apostles had failed. But the experience of the subsequent days had driven their innermost selves, as it were, round a sharp corner to a wholly fresh outlook. They had been absolutely wrong and Jesus absolutely right. God had altogether vindicated Him. He was exalted as Lord and Christ to the supreme throne of the universe. There was nothing left to do but to obey His call. His was the one name of salvation, and though Israel had rejected Him the offer was still open, first to Israel and then (it appeared) to all the world. All that was needed was faith in His Name and the self-surrender of faith.

But it was something more than a glorified Christ in the heavens in which they believed. At the beginning John the Baptist had taught his disciples to expect from the Christ the baptism, not of water only as in his baptism, but of the Spirit. Before His death Jesus had sought to fill His disciples’ minds with the expectation of this gift as the chief object of His coming. And that Spirit had come in sensible power upon them some ten days after Jesus had disappeared for the last time from their eyes, and after that first outpouring on the original group of brethren, He had come successively to all who had received baptism, normally through the laying-on of the hands of the apostles, so that the reception could be looked back to as an event at a particular moment of their experience. And this Spirit was the Spirit of God, but also and therefore the Spirit of Jesus. Jesus was not to them merely a past example, or a remote Lord, but an inward presence and power. A mere example in past history becomes in experience a feebler and feebler power, all the more if the example is that of a genius, of a more than ordinary man. But the example of Jesus was something much more than a memory. For He who had taught them in the past how to live was alive in the heavenly places, and was working within them by His Spirit, moulding them inwardly in conformity with the pattern He had shown them outwardly. They were individually very members of the body of Christ, instinct with His life—eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Moreover, as “members” they were never alone. The holy community both required their assistance and also gave them its strong support. The divine grace on which they depended they were taught to look for in sacraments of Christ’s institution, which were ceremonies of the society, and bound the spiritual life of the individuals into its close fellowship.

I need not go on particularizing what in the gross will be apparent to every fairly open-eyed student of the Epistles and the Acts—that the real originality in the Christian ethics lies not only in the fresh light thrown on moral duties, but also, and much more, in the abundant richness of the motives and supplies of power newly opened to the believer in Christ. We may believe or disbelieve the “good tidings”; but no one can read the Acts and Epistles and doubt what the good tidings were. They were tidings of a new self-disclosure of God and of new sources of spiritual power opened to man. It was only after the first Christians had received and believed the message, and had become members of the Holy Community, that they began to receive, first by word of mouth and then in written form, the apostolic memories of how Jesus had first appeared, and how He had taught and worked and lived and suffered and died and risen.

The joyful message centred upon what had come to be recognized as the new name of God—the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Later the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Son, and the accompanying doctrine of the Trinity in Unity, became a matter of theological and philosophical interest and of bitter controversy, with the result that, especially in the speculative East, after the (nominal) acceptance of Christianity by the Empire, the Christian religion tended to appear rather as a theological system to be accepted in faith than as a life to be lived.

I do not speak as one who doubts the intellectual value or validity of the Christian theology. But Christianity did not come into the world as a new theological system. It came into the world as a life to be lived by a community—a blessed life of union with God and fellowship among men. And the new theological terms made their appearance, not as abstract ideas, but as living motives or forces constraining and enabling men for the living of the good life.

APPENDED NOTE

THE AUTHORITATIVENESS OF JESUS

There can be no question that Jesus taught as one having authority, and that He assumed that those who had ears to hear, those whose inward light had not been allowed to become darkness, would recognize what He said for truth. But it strikes one with astonishment to discover how widely different was His method of teaching with authority from what has been commonly found in the dogmatic system of the Church. Faith has too often been allowed to appear as the mere willingness to receive the statements of ecclesiastical authority with passive acceptance. But it is plain that Jesus strove in every way to encourage enquiry. There is about His teaching no touch of obscurantism. He shrank from making dogmatic statements. Plainly He preferred to stimulate the minds of His disciples to discover the truth (e.g. the truth about Himself) for themselves. Occasionally He makes a dogmatic statement, as about the indissolubility of marriage or the reality of the Life Beyond. But it is very rare. The faith which He so urgently and constantly demanded was self-surrender to God, and to the Good Life which is God’s will for man, and to Himself as “the way and the truth and the life” embodied. This faith was no doubt found to involve the acceptance of doctrines by the intellect and the recognition of historical facts. But the assumption is always that “he that willeth to do God’s will shall know of the teaching whether it be of God.” The primary adventure of faith is always the acceptance of the claim of the Life.

• 1.

  The Psalm of Zechariah (Luke ii.) is a summary of the hope of Israel as it lay just behind the Mission of Jesus. Luke i. and ii. describe the atmosphere of the pious homes whence Jesus came. It should be noted that in i. 78 probably the true reading gives us “shall visit,” not “hath visited.” The psalm has turned from retrospect to anticipation.

• 2.

  Is. viii. 18.

• 3.

  Luke vii. 30; Mark xi. 31.

• 4.

  Mark i. 15.

• 5.

  I am leaving out in this necessarily brief summary the question of an earlier self-announcement of Jesus in Judæa and Jerusalem, as represented in the Fourth Gospel, which I am yet convinced we must accept as historical.

• 6.

  Ecce Homo summarizes the mission of Jesus Christ as that of “a moralist speaking with authority, and perpetuating his doctrine by means of a Society”; so also “Renan thought that the strongest proof of the originality of Jesus is not to be found in the novelty of the truths He taught, these having been for the most part anticipated by the prophets of Israel in the eighth century B.C., but in the society He created. In saying this Renan did less than justice to the originality of the teaching of Jesus, but he emphasized something which Jesus Himself regarded as of great importance—the creation of a society.”—H. H. Scullard, Ethics of the Gospel (Student Christian Movement), p. 66.

• 7.

  I am here leaving aside the question, which I have sought to deal with elsewhere (see Reconstruction of Belief, pt. ii, cap. v), whether Jesus announced the immediate coming of the End. The evidence, however, points to the fact that while He anticipated the immediacy of certain stages or elements in the manifestation of the kingdom, He refused to name any date for its consummation.

• 8.

  1 Cor. vii. 10; Mark x. 11, 12; Luke xvii, 18.

• 9.

  This is only rightly understood if we carefully distinguish the idea of the Covenant of Salvation from the idea of the final acceptance of the individual in the ultimate judgment of God. As to this, we are to judge nothing before the time. “Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and the children of the kingdom be cast into the outer darkness.”

• 10.

  In His treatment of man as a whole, Jesus retains the Jewish psychology in which “the soul” is not in antithesis to the body, but includes it: see Pedersen’s Israel (Oxf. Press), pp. 99 ff.

• 11.

  Deut. vi. 4 and Lev. xix. 18; see Mark xii. 28 ff.

• 12.

  The expressions “sonship” and “brotherhood” are used in the N.T. almost only with reference to the Holy Community. Perhaps Acts xvii. 28 and Matt. xxv. 40, are the possible exceptions, and both are doubtful.