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BY JOSEPH PARKER (1867)
Chapter 1: The Holy Thing
Many false Christs have gone out into the world. The Christ that was born in Bethlehem has now to compete with the Christ born in the poet’s fancy, carved out of an ideal humanity, or developed out of a benevolent sentiment. This noble, simple Nazarene has been left behind somewhere, probably in the temple, or has passed through so many guises that the characteristic lineaments have been lost. This circumstance is a significant creature of the spiritual civilization of the day. Deepest and truest among its lessons in the doctrine that man must have a Christ. There has ever been a motion, a gravitation, more or less palpable, towards a man who should be the complement of every other man; and who, by the perfectness of his manhood, should be able to restore and preserve the equipoise which universal consciousness affirms to have been disturbed or lost.
The incarnation is the radical mystery in the life of the Christ accepted by the Church. Without following the theologian into doctrine, we are bound to follow the historian into matters of fact. The historian introduces a man, under the name of Jesus, who was begotten as not other man was ever begotten. He does not represent the usual conditions of human birth, but stands alone among all men. The mysteriousness of his origin, even if it be but a supposition, will supply an easily available test of his entire life and teaching; the man who begins as no other man has ever began must continue as no other man ever continued.
In other senses than that of the procreation of human life, there have been miraculous conceptions in every age—conceptions by the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost, too. Every foremost thought of God among men, every struggle of the soul in the direction in which God is supposed to have gone, has been an effect of divine operation upon the mind. In Jesus Christ alone have we a life which claims to have been produced immediately by a superhuman relation to the human body. Yet, though so produced, “the holy thing” born of the Virgin did not collide with the human race as an unexpected antagonistic element, but took his place in the human family by a process which, on one side, was fitted to awaken awe, and on the other, to excite sympathy. The world of the East had been accustomed to what may be termed miraculous conceptions on the intellectual sphere, as the world of the West has since become. Intellectual history presents a succession of births, quite, in their degree and according to their nature, as inexplicable as any occurrence that could transpire in the material sphere. “The Holy Ghost has come upon, and the power of the Highest has overshadowed,” all who have wrought upon the springs of civilization, and enriched the resources of human life: poem and picture, book and statue, that have touched the world’s soul, and given it any hint that there was a portion of the universe beyond the narrow visual line, or a deeper life in itself than could be sustained by bread alone, have been, notwithstanding the apparent irreverence of the expression, miraculous conceptions, fruits of the Spirit’s strife with the human mind. The Spirit had to move upon intellectual chaos, and now all orderliness, or beauty, or music, is attributable to his power. The grim spectra of traditional orthodoxy may shudder at the notion; yet, rather than pronounce the genius of civilization atheistic, it may be more reverent to describe it as a conception and production of the divine energy operation through human instrumentalities. The excess of difficulty is on the side of atheism, not of inspiration. On such a subject men, are not required to be more orthodox than the Bible itself. Moses hesitated not to say that the Lord had called by name Bezaleel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and had “filled him with the Spirit of God, wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, and to devise curious works, to work in gold and in silver and in brass, and in the cutting of stones to set them, and in the carving of wood to make any manner of cunning work.” Art is thus set among the miraculous conceptions, and civilization is robed as a worshiper in the outer court of the Temple. Still we have not a man who claims in a peculiar sense to have God’s life in his veins. We have seen God in heart; can we see God in blood?
It is important to remember, what one would have thought could never have been forgotten, that there is a document written by many scribes, which profess to be an authentic history of a Man who openly claimed to have been begotten by the Holy Ghost. How can we test the validity of such a claim? Without inquiring whether there are any other ways, there is certainly this simple and effectual plan: Is the mystery of the life consistent with the alleged mystery of the origin? Is the doctrine consistent with the birth? If the man be found to be in perfect accord with the mystery—in portion, so to speak, to it; if there be no break in the rhythm between the “sayings” of the teacher and the alleged revelation of the angel who foretold his birth; then this unity of mystery becomes itself an argument which compels certain conclusions. If, on the other hand, the phenomena of the birth and the tone of the doctrine be discrepant; if the cloud of mystery has been employed to conceal defect of stature; then the claim to have been begotten by the Holy Ghost is not only unsupported, but positively contradicted. The present inquiry will revert again and again to the consistency between the declared divinity of the fatherhood and the teaching of him who was begotten.
Omnipotence covers the whole ground of difficulty as to the possibility of such a conception as is claimed on behalf of Jesus Christ. No argument, therefore, need be started in defense of that side of the question. Given the existence of God, and the power required to bring out the alleged result will be granted too; defect of power will be defect of Godhead, and defect of Godhead is an absurdity. Yet the entire Christ, so to speak, coming from God without human interposition would have increased the difficulty of his acceptance among men. We can see how a union between the divine and human would have many advantages: if the Man spoke the language of earth with the accent of heaven; if he encouraged men by his common human nature to approach him, and then gave them assurance that the human enshrined the divine; he would complete by his power what he had begun by his weakness. This much we can see merely as an argument, without conceding that the facts which are yet to be collated bear it out. Are there any traces of quality in Christ’s life and teaching? Anything that would confirm his claim to have descended from heaven? On the very face of the life there are many such traces; and in a more subtle and incidental way there are hints and testimonies which should be scrutinized and estimated. We find Christ in the midst of a great multitude, and then he goes no man knowing whither; he sends his disciples to buy food, and then tells them that he has meat to eat which they know not of; in the very act of talking to man, he says that he is in heaven; he is willing to be identified as the son of Mary, yet never speaks of any father but God; he is known to have no opportunities of technical learning, yet his wisdom is acknowledged by the doctors of law; he submits to the fury of the ruffian band, yet talks of the legions of angels who wait but his prayer; all through we have these dualistic turns of speech—one part of the sentence plain, the other haloed with strange glory or lost in gloom. This is a mere matter of fact, as found upon the face of the document which professes to contain the life of Jesus Christ. All this any skeptic would say, in common with any Christian. So far the matter is literary, not theological. Still there is an outline of an argument shaping itself from this view. The argument of consistency takes its inception at this point.
The so-called discrepancies on matters of fact which some readers have professed to find, upon a collation of the fourfold narrative, are less than nothing. History can never be written. It can only be hinted at, and most dimly outlined, from the particular standpoint which the historian has chosen to occupy. It is only by courtesy that any man be called an historian. Seldom do men so flatly contradict each other as upon points of fact. Incompleteness marks all narrations. No man can fully write even his own life. On reviewing the sheets which were to have told everthing, the autobiographer is truck with their reticence and poverty. Two processes are synchronous in the act of writing, the process of the pen and the process of the mind; and because the mind sees the subject in all its magnitude and bearings, it considers itself rather than the reader, who approaches the question from an outside point. Men cannot print tones, glances, sighs, or tears. The heart always suffers by being translated into speech. Readers bring their own methods of reading, and often the book which is essentially musical is dishonored by a vitiated articulation. The life of Christ has suffered much in the same way; it suffered by being written at all, and that it has outlived its suffering is one of the firmest proofs that there is a divine spirit in earthly words. The life is before us in fragments only, and the most that we can do is to inquire whether the fragments lie in one direction, bear any evidence of having been cut out of the same rock, or testify to anything like unity of purpose.
It must be remembered that Jesus Christ had been the absorbing theme of all ages prior to his advent. This circumstance alone marks him off from all other men. The hope of his coming had kept society together, preserving it from intellectual and moral annihilation. When Christ came, long chapters of prophecy were to be closed like gates through which a king or conqueror had passed. The prayers of many ages were to be answered. The prophecies respecting him were marked by that strange dualism which attached to his life: taken separately as mere statements of fact, they are contradictory; but looked at in the light of the dual nature which he claimed, there is immediate and perfect reconciliation. The great paradoxes of prophecy were harmonized in the greater paradox of the life. Christ was “a root out of a dry ground,” yet he was “the flower of Jesse and the plant of renown;” he was “despised and rejected of men,” yet he was “the desire of all nations;” he was “without form and comeliness,” yet he was “the fairest among ten thousand, and altogether lovely;” he was “the Child,” yet he was “the Ancient of days.” Thus we are detained on the same line of mystery. Prophecy and fulfillment are different phases of the same paradox. The range of evidence is thus extended, so that any man claiming to be Christ must be brought for judgement to the standard of prophecy. This fact does much to clear the field of intruders, and to narrow the ground of competition. Christ distinctly threw himself upon the prophecy, and challenged scribe and doctor and rabbi to “search the Scriptures.” There was no wish to escape the test of written prediction, but a determination to abide by a careful search of the records which were regarded as having been received immediately from God. He began at Moses and all the prophets, and showed from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. No challenge could be bolder. He stood at the close of the great prophetic dispensation, and said, “The prophets wrote of me;” and looking forward to the evolution of time, and tracing the course of religious education and development, he commanded that his name should be taught in “all nations.” It was not, then, on some recondite and insignificant point that Christ claimed his position in the world, but on the broad ground of completed prophecy. He was the fruit which was to be produced by the roots of promise and hope which God had from the beginning put into the hearts of men. He closed the troubled era of prophecy, and opened a most gorgeous apocalypse, which took its power and glory entirely from his own name. If any challenge could have developed a rival, or brought into prominence the lawful heir of the heritage described by the prophets, this would have done so. An unlearned man addressing the sages of his time, who held the first literature of the world—not only unlearned, but garbed as a peasant, poor in his known ancestry, and unsupported by any visible authority—said, “Open your scrolls, and read the prediction of my person and power; consult the prophets, and see if I bear not the hitherto misread signs of Messiahship; recall the music of the minstrels of Israel, and say whether not my heart be accord with their rhythm.” This made it hard work for an impostor. The empiric may have brilliant vision sod the future, but it is perilous for him to challenge his contemporaries to go far back in search of his ancestral roots. The case as laid down in the biographic document compels us to go beyond Bethlehem if we would understand the purpose of the birth. We have hardly turned the first page of the Bible until we feel that a new and marvelous element has been interjected into the history of man, which gives life and tone and purpose to the whole current of earthly affairs. The generations are centralized in one idea. From Abraham to David, from David to the caring away into Babylon, and from Babylon until Herod reigned in Judea, there is a life far below the surface. From behind the prophetic veil, or through it, there glows the image of a man, stranger to everybody, yet friendly to all. A marvelous image it is, so indistinct, yet so positive; gentle, yet carrying awful power, as the summer cloud carries lightning; very near, yet distant as the unseen God. We feel this in coming along the Biblical line; feel that almost at any moment a Man might stand up in the very likeness and majesty of God; and a strange, fascinating spell binds the reader, until having passed the prophecies he comes to the Star, and the Virgin, and the Child. That Child had been the mystery of all his reading; there, in infant life, lay the explanation, itself a mystery, of all the tumultuous events and hopeful promises which made up the sum of prophetic history. We cannot understand the Child without at leafs recognizing that it is alleged that he came up from unbeginning time to express, audibly and visibly, what otherwise could never have been known of God.
The opening chapter of the Gospels is more than a catalogue of names. It is the Old Testament summarized; it is human history in miniature; an assembly of the Past convened to witness the birth of “the holy thing, called the Son of God.” We go through the list to the manger-cradle, and the heart saddens at more than one point in this illustrious succession: strange threads have been woven into this web—the patriarch is here, and the king; the pure woman, and the dissolute man; eldest sons, and sons younger than their brethren; names which make men proud of manhood, and names we would “willingly let die.” Marvelous pedigree, indeed! It will surely be a great risk to attempt to get out of this mass a Man who will stand firm in all crises. The world has already lost one Adam, may it not lose another? In the case of the federal man the reading was brief and simple” we had the Creator and the creature at once sentence; we moved at one step from God to Adam. In this second case, we have to proceed from Adam to God. In Genesis, the work was easy ; in Matthew, it seems as if we could never find the promised Life. We wonder at what point of so desolate a Horeb God will fix his tabernacle of fire.
We are bound to consider the value of the fact that Christ throws himself upon the past; he chooses his own tribunal, and it is one to which no Jew at least could object. Looking at the subject generally, this much is clear—that the mystery of the birth is in keeping with the mystery of the prophecy; and it now remains to be seen whether the mystery of the doctrine is in harmony with both. Whatever a fuller examination may disclose, there is before us, even so far, a great breadth of homogenous mystery—unique, unbroken, unparalleled. Any discrepancy here would vitiate the whole succession. No lapse of time, no combination of of circumstances, can repair an error at this point. A well-known rule in law will hold good here: “Quod initio vitiosum est, tractu temporis convalescere non potest.” [“That which is void from the beginning cannot become valid by lapse of time.”] If Christ is to command our confidence he must continue to be what his claim to the prophetic past, and the alleged preternatural conditions of his incarnation, necessitate. A common man cannot be tolerated after so uncommon a beginning. If he be only a young man of high and most ambitious spirit, he has chased a most perilous course, a course which must break down somewhere. It cannot be an easy task hypocritically to represent a God upon the earth, without now and again letting the mask slip aside. How can the finite steadily carry the Infinite, when the Infinite is at war with him? Christ must be more than a good man, or worse than the worst man. If he be not God, he is the enemy of God.
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