Bible Dictionaries
Back to Christ

　　BACK TO CHRIST.—The movement or tendency described in the phrase ‘back to Christ’ belongs mainly to the past half century, and both its wide extent and its far-reaching consequences for religious thought justify us in regarding it as the most important theological event of the period.

　　The phrase can be received as a correct description of the movement, only under the explanation that the return has not been to the Christ of dogma, but to the Christ of history. This distinction must be kept clearly in view. The Christ of dogma is Christ as exhibited in the creeds—the eternally begotten Son of God, the second Person in the Trinity, who, for our redemption, assumed our human nature and submitted to death as an atonement for our sins. He is the God-man, a Divine Person with two natures and two wills. It is evident that these determinations move in a different region from that of empirical reality. They cannot be established on merely historical evidence; they have their ground in a judgment of faith. What we have in dogma is not a portrait of the historical Jesus in the religious and ethical traits of His character, but a speculative construction of His Person; not an account of His historical ministry, but a doctrinal interpretation of it. The Christ of history is the concrete Person whose image meets us in the Gospels; the Christ of dogma is the complex of metaphysical or doctrinal characters which the Church, on the ground of its faith, attributed to this Person. So far the distinction is clear enough, and meets with general acceptance. The difficulty begins when we raise the question whether such facts as the Virgin-birth, the Miracles (in the strict sense of the word), and the Resurrection are to be included in our conception of the historical Christ as resting upon historical evidence, or whether they are not rather to be transferred from the domain of history to that of faith. The question will come up again; in the meantime it may be sufficient to call attention to the ambiguity which must attach to the term ‘historical Christ’ so long as it remains undecided.

　　When we speak of a return to the Christ of history, we imply that His image has been lost sight of, or at least obscured. It was not doubtless the intention of the Church that its doctrinal determinations should supplant the concrete reality in the thought and faith of the community. But this was what actually happened. More and more the historical Person was overshadowed by the speculative construction, the historical ministry by the formulas in which its significance was summed up. The figure of Jesus disappeared behind the pre-existent Logos, the earthly ministry behind the idea of the Incarnation, the cross behind the doctrine of the Atonement. This result is not to be explained by the fact that dogma, from its controversial character, attracted to itself an undue share of attention and interest as compared with matters that had never been in dispute. The cause lay deeper. It is to be found in the conception of Revelation and of Faith that has dominated the Catholic and also, to a large extent, the Protestant Church. Revelation has been understood as the supernatural communication of a system of doctrine; Faith, as the submission of the mind to doctrine on the ground of its authority. The emphasis has thus been thrown, not on the historical life, but on the dogmatic construction. The historical life has occupied only a secondary place, its significance being found mainly in the basis it supplies for this construction or interpretation.

　　1. Causes of the movement.—What are the causes that have contributed to restore the figure of Jesus to its place in the centre of religious thought? We shall mention three as the chief.

　　(a) The first is the application of historical criticism to the Gospel narrative. In 1835, D. F. Strauss published his Leben Jesu, and this book proved the starting-point of a critical movement the end of which is not yet in sight. The results of Strauss’ criticism were almost purely negative: the Gospel story was resolved into a tissue of myths. There are still writers who find in that story only the most meagre basis of fact; but their conclusions are far from representing the general results of the movement, which are much more positive than negative in their character, much more constructive than destructive. If doubt has been cast on some of the facts related about Jesus, and if the influence of subsequent ideas has been detected here and there in the presentation of His life and teaching, the substantial truth of the Gospel narrative has been amply vindicated. Moreover, the critical study of the NT has done for Christ what that of the OT has done for the prophets. It has reconstructed the contemporary background, given us a better understanding of His teaching, and enabled us to see the Man and His work in their human environment. To this enlarged historical knowledge and new feeling for the historical, we owe the recognition of the fact that the Christ of history is one thing and the conception of His Person that sprang up on the soil of the Church’s faith another. As early as the Fourth Gospel the two images had been blended into one. Still further, criticism has contributed to the return to Christ by the mere fact that it has brought the problem of His historical reality and significance into the centre of attention and interest. Up to the appearance of the Leben Jesu the problems that occupied the theological field were almost purely speculative: when Christ was considered, it was as the vehicle or symbol of certain speculative ideas. The retirement of the speculative behind the historical is one of the signs of the times.

　　(b) A second and even more important factor in the movement ‘back to Christ’ is the widespread dissatisfaction with the traditional statements of Christianity. Since the rationalistic movement of the 18th cent. the history of dogma has been in the main a history of disintegration. Those who seek to go behind the creeds, back to the source of our religion, proceed on the ground that the creeds do not represent, with any sufficient correctness or adequacy, either the conceptions that Jesus taught or the significance that His Person has for faith. All we can do here is to indicate the main lines which the criticism of dogma has followed.

　　When we examine the formulas of Nicaea and Chalcedon, in which the Being of God and the Person of Christ are determined, we find one basal conception underlying them all. It is the conception of Substance. God is conceived primarily as the Absolute Substance; that is to say, as the indeterminate, unchanging and permanent ground of the knowable world of variety, change, and transience. Christ is true God because He shares in the Divine Substance; and because He has taken up human nature or substance into union with His Divine substance, He is also true man. The inner relations of the Godhead—Fatherhood, Sonship, the Procession of the Holy Spirit—are all expressed in terms of this category. It is true that the Church had other things to say about God and Christ than those of its formulas; still the formulas were regarded as conveying the deepest and most vital truths, and their acceptance was made the criterion of orthodoxy and the condition of salvation. If the ethical was recognized, it occupied only a subordinate position in comparison with the metaphysical. Now, what is this idea of Substance which plays so great a rôle in the creeds? It was not derived from Christ or the New Testament. It was borrowed from I Hellenistic philosophy; and what it originally answered was not any religious need, but the purely intellectual demand that all the manifoldness of this time-world shall be reducible to the unity of a single principle. Even from a philosophical point of view the idea of Substance is open to fatal objections as a principle by which to explain personal or, indeed, any relations. To modern thought Substance is not a concrete reality; it is nothing more than the most abstract of all ideas. To hypostatize abstractions, equip them with causal power, and employ them as principles of explanation, was a peculiarity of Greek thought, and one that it is hopeless to revive. The use which the creeds make of this idea is even more objectionable when considered from the standpoint of religion. Absolute Substance has nothing in common with the holy, personal Will of the prophets, or with the gracious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. One cannot, on such a foundation, build up a Christian conception of God. And to say that Christ is Divine in virtue of His participation in the Divine Substance, is not to present Him in any character that makes Him the object of our trust. What gives Christ His significance for faith is the fact that in His Person and ministry faith recognizes the revelation of God’s gracious will towards sinful men. To substitute a divinity of Substance for a divinity of Revelation is to remove Christ from the realm of faith into that of speculation; and, further, since the category of substance is at bottom a physical category, it is to rank the physical above the personal and ethical.

　　In formulating these metaphysical doctrines, the Church no doubt believed that it was safeguarding vital religious interests. What seemed at stake was nothing less than the reality of the salvation mediated by Christ. But, it is contended, the conception of salvation that the Nicene and Chalcedon formulas were designed to safeguard is not an ethical, but a metaphysical, or, more correctly, physical, conception. The evil from which deliverance is sought is not primarily sin; it is the mortality that belongs to our fallen nature; and the good salvation brings is not ethical communion with God, but participation in eternal life, which is thought of as a natural quality of the Divine substance. Human substance is deified, invested with the quality of immortality, by being taken up into and penetrated by Divine substance. It is this metaphysical conception of salvation that requires a metaphysical Christ. Christ must be God and man in the substantial sense, since it was in His Person that the penetration ( [Note: Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 306.]

　　Though the need for such a construction can be demonstrated, the construction itself is not to be regarded as a work of human freedom. We receive it as authoritatively given. To traditional theology the authority is inspired Scripture, the witness of the Apostolic writers no less than Christ’s self-witness. It is characteristic of the Christo-centric school that, with a freer view of inspiration, it admits only the self-witness as the ultimate authority. Only Christ Himself could know and reveal the secret of His unique personality. The doctrine of the Apostolic writers is not to be regarded as the product of a religions experience created by Christ, but as the reproduction or development of ideas received from Christ’s lips. These writers are only the channel by which the interpretation has reached us, not its source.

　　A doctrinal conception of Revelation requires as its correlate a conception of Faith as primarily an intellectual act. Faith must be defined as the assent of the mind to a proposition on the ground of authority. This assent, however, though the primary element in faith, is not treated as the whole of it; it becomes effective only when reinforced by the practical elements of feeling and will.

　　More fruitful, perhaps, than its attempt at a fresh grounding of doctrine has been the contribution of the Christo-centric school to the revision of doctrine. It has sought to free the formulas that describe the Triune Being of God and the Person and work of Christ from their over-relinement, to translate them into the categories of modern thought, and to make them more ethical and less metaphysical.

　　(2) We pass to a second, and much more radical phase of the movement. To many, ‘back to Christ’ means back from historical Christianity, the religion founded upon Christ, to the religion which Christ taught, and which we see embodied in His life. More than a century ago the position was summed up by Leasing in his famous saying, ‘The Christian religion has been tried for eighteen centuries; the religion of Christ remains to be tried.’

　　That the stream of religion flows purer at its fountainhead than at its lower readies is a fact which the study of every historical religion confirms. As a religion advances through history, it loses something of its idealism and becomes more secular, takes up foreign elements, accumulates dogmas and ceremonies, parts with its simplicity and spontaneity, and becomes more and more a human construction. And every religious reform has signified a throwing off of foreign accretions, and a return to the simplicity and purity of the source. Did not Christ Himself represent a reaction from the elaborate legal and ceremonial system of Judaism to the simpler and more ethical faith of the prophets? The Reformation was a return to primitive Christianity, but less to Christ than to St. Paul. But we must, it is maintained, go behind even St. Paul and the early disciples. It is true, indeed, that, in the NT, Christianity is not the complex tiling it afterwards became; still, the process of intellectual and ceremonial elaboration has begun. If we have not the fully-developed system of dogma and sacrament, we have at least the germs out of which it arose; and while much must be regarded as the legitimate development of principles implicit in Christ’s gospel, there is also the introduction of a foreign element.

　　Let us contrast at one or two points the gospel as proclaimed by Jesus with the Church’s rendering of it. Jesus’ gospel contains no Christology. It is the glad tidings of a Father in heaven, whose love and care embrace all His creatures, in whose eyes every human soul is precious, and who is at once the righteous Judge and the pitiful, forgiving Saviour. Jesus was conscious of His unique position as the Mediator of salvation, but He never (according to the Synoptic tradition) required faith in Himself in the same sense as He required faith in God. God was the one object of faith; and if Jesus called men to Himself, it was only that He might lead them to God, and teach them to love, trust, and obey God. Turning to the gospel of the Church, we find a doctrine of Christ’s Person at the heart of it. To believe the gospel is no longer, in the first place at least, to receive God’s message of love and forgiveness, and to obey His summons to repentance, trust, and service; it is to believe that Jesus is Messiah, a pre-existent, heavenly Being, the second Person in the Trinity. A doctrine of Jesus’ Person is substituted for the Heavenly Father as the immediate object of faith.

　　Again, Jesus’ gospel contains nothing like a developed doctrine of Redemption. The question as to the rationale of forgiveness is never raised, and there is no hint of the inability of God to forgive without a propitiation. Forgiveness is presented as flowing directly from God’s fatherly love (Luke 15). And as little do we find the other propositions included in the Church’s doctrine of Redemption. Jesus, indeed, teaches that none is good (Matthew 19:17), that even at the best we are unprofitable servants, who have done no more than our duty (Luke 17:10); but He knows nothing of inherited guilt, radical corruption of human nature, human inability to do any good work. In the gospel of Jesus we are in the region of direct moral intuition; nothing is there merely because apologetic or system required it. We are also in the region of moral sanity. There is nothing of asceticism, and no attempt to cultivate a feeling of sinfulness. Men are bidden strive to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Comparing the gospel of the Church with that of Christ, we find complication instead of simplicity, theological construction instead of intuition, and sometimes morbidness and exaggeration in place of sanity.

　　Finally, while the teaching of Jesus places the centre of gravity in the will, the Church transfers it to the intellect. ‘This do and thou shalt live’ (Luke 10:28) is the command of Jesus: what the Church requires is belief rather than conduct.

　　The gospel of Jesus represents the crown of religion; it is the highest and, in its innermost nature, the final stage of religious development. No other historical religion can endure a moment’s comparison with it. And the religions manufactured out of a few philosophical principles have still less claim to serious consideration, since they are wholly lacking in everything that gives a religion vitality. It can be said with literal truth that, for any civilized community, the choice is not between Christianity and some other religion, but between Christianity and no religion at all.

　　While the religion of Jesus is regarded as the one faith capable of meeting the need of this and of every age, it is not meant that it can he reproduced in every detail. We must distinguish between central and peripheral elements, and between the enduring spirit and the passing form of manifestation. We cannot, for example, revive the primitive expectation of the world’s speedy end, or the ideas about angels, Satan, unclean spirits as the agents in disease, which Jesus shared with His contemporaries. The gospel must be translated into the language of to-day, and its spirit applied to the relations of our modern life.

　　How is Jesus Himself regarded by those who represent this type of thought? All speculative Christology, whether Biblical or ecclesiastical, is rejected, and it is asserted that such Christology has no basis in the language which Jesus used about Himself. Further, it is held that not Jesus, but the God whom Jesus revealed, is the immediate object of our faith. At the same time, the unique significance of Jesus, not only in the history of religion but also for the individual, is earnestly recognized. We quote the confession of Bousset: ‘Thou art our leader, to whom there is none like, the leader in the highest things, the leader of our soul to God, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.’*