28. Weiss. Christus. Die Anfänge des Dogmas
Von Professor D.
Johannes Weiss, Heidelberg.
Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher für die deutsche christliche Gegenwart. Tübingen. 1909. Verlag von J. C. B.
Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
Christologie des Urchristentums. Von Johannes Weiss (in Schiele's "Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart," i.
1909, coll. 1711 ff.).
Paulus und Jesus. Von Johannes Weiss. Berlin: Verlag von Reuther und Reichard. 1909.
Jesus im Glauben des Urchristentums. Von Johannes Weiss.
Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 1910.
Jesus von Nazareth. Mythus oder Geschichte? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Kalthoff, Drews, Jensen. Von
Johannes Weiss. Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 1910.
Die Geschichtlichkeit Jesu. Von Professor Johannes Weiss und Professor Georg Grützmacher. Tübingen: Verlag von J.
C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 1910. 1 here is no representative of contemporary German thought with T respect to the criticism of the Gospel history and the origins of Christianity who is better worth listening to than Johannes Weiss. Of a temper but little less radical than William Wrede himself, he approaches
Wrede also in sharpness of vision, independence of spirit, and bluntness of speech. He may perhaps even not unfairly be looked upon as Wrede's successor as the enfant terrible of the "liberal" school. The very thoroughgoingness of his naturalism makes him bold; he abandons without fear entrenchments which have become habitual to "liberal" thought, and frankly declares untenable contentions which "liberals" have been accustomed to treat as key-positions; he is so secure in his naturalism, it seems, as scarcely to feel the need of any protection for it whatever. As we read his treatises we are sensible of coming into contact with a vigorous mind, stored with learning, bent on understanding the origin of Christianity and its record—understanding them, of course, as a naturalistic mind understands "understanding," which means just the discovery of the complex of causes and conditions out of which they naturally proceeded and the processes by which they naturally came into being; but nevertheless understanding them—in which is involved also the
exact ascertainment of the precise things which are to be naturalistically accounted for. In both stages of this proceeding he is very instructive to us.
In his attempts to determine the exact things which are to be explained from natural causation, he displays a very unusual clearness and acuteness of perception and becomes a not unwelcome guide to many points of difficult exegesis and historical construction. In his attempts to naturalize the things thus determined, he makes unwontedly plain to us the violence of the assumptions on which alone the naturalization of the origins of the Christian religion can be accomplished.
By some chance it was bought about that Johannes Weiss gave repeated expression to his views on the great subject of the Christology of the New
Testament during the early months of 1909. Then came the publication of Arthur Drews's "Die Christusmythe," and in the early months of 1910 the sudden bursting into flame of the fire that it had kindled and that had been smoldering for the preceding year. Of course Johannes Weiss, in company with his fellow "liberals," was drawn into this controversy, by which the entire structure of the "liberal" Christology was thrown violently on the defensive; and in his effort to treat a sensational subject unsensationally he was led to give another expression to his Christological conceptions. Thus, we have from him a series of little volumes put forth within the limits of a twelvemonth, in which his ideas concerning Jesus and the development during the New Testament period of the thought of His followers concerning Him, are stated over and over again with different audiences in view and with different and even opposite antagonists in mind. We cannot complain that we are left in any doubt as to how he himself thinks of Jesus or as to how he thinks Jesus' first followers thought of Him.
The first book upon our list, entitled "Christ: the Beginnings of the Dogma," appears in the well-known series of "liberal" handbooks publishing under the general title of "History-of-Religion Peoples' Books
for the Present-Day Christianity of Germany," and is accordingly of a semipopular character. It undertakes to describe the development of the doctrine of the Person of Christ through the New Testament period under the successive rubrics of "the Belief of the Primitive Community," "Paul," and "the Christology after Paul"; and in doing this, it seeks to preserve a strictly historical point of view. It opens with these words: " 'What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He?'—so still runs to-day the burning question by which our church is split up, many earnest Christians disquieted, and not a few conscientious men hindered from entering into a close relation to the Person of Jesus and His religion. No attempt will be made in the following pages to give a definitive reply to this question: the author feels no call whatever to obtrude his convictions in this matter on others. He certainly thinks it would be desirable, however, that even those who are not theologians, so far as they are earnest inquirers and not afraid of a little labor, should come to clearness as to what the earliest witnesses to our religion really teach with respect to the Person of Christ, what the old difficult and obscure terms 'Son of God' and 'Son of Man,' 'Lord' and 'Messiah' really meant at first, and what convictions of belief the oldest confessors intended to express by them." Of course the historical objectivity announced in this declaration is not preserved in the discussion itself (or, for that matter, throughout this declaration itself), as indeed it could not be. The author is soon found reading his own faith back into the primitive
Christian community and, indeed, making his booklet a historical argument for his own point of view. In another one of the little volumes, indeed,—that entitled "Paul and Jesus" (pp. 4–5)—he drops the mask entirely and openly pleads the cause of his personal Socinianism against that Christianity which he confesses to be, and to have been since the beginning, dominant. "Primitive Christianity," he says there, "is—at least in one part of it—Christ-religion, that is, there stands at its center an inner
relation of faith to the exalted Christ. This form of religion has throughout the millenniums passed as the real Christianity, and there are still to-day innumerable Christians who know and wish no other form of faith. They live in the most intimate communion of soul with the 'Lord,' pray to Him and long to see Him face to face. Alongside of this there flows another religious stream which is no longer able to find a religious relation to the exalted Christ and has its full satisfaction in permitting itself to be led to the Father by Jesus of Nazareth. Both forms of religious life stand in our church side by side; it were to be wished that they would tolerate one another and that the preaching of the Gospel should not suffer violence from either of them. I make no concealment of my profession, along with the majority of recent theologians, of the second of these views, and my hope that this view will gradually become dominant in our church. But as a historian I must say that it is widely different from the ruling view of primitive Christianity, from the Pauline view. On the other hand, however,
I must decidedly maintain that the historical Jesus, as far as we can perceive Him, saw His task in drawing His followers into the direct experience of sonship with God, without demanding any place for Himself in their piety."
The second publication on our list is the article on "The Christology of Primitive Christianity" in Schiele's new religious Cyclopædia. It follows the same lines as the first—of which it is in point of fact only a somewhat condensed repetition, coinciding with it often in its very language.
From these two the fourth—"Jesus in the Faith of Primitive Christianity"—differs only in that it professes to give account of the varieties not of doctrinal but of religious attitude towards Jesus which follow one another in the New Testament development. We read in its introductory words: "The task which my theme sets me, is not to describe the origin of the doctrine of Christ in primitive Christianity: it is not the
oldest forms of confession and systems of belief which are the subject of this recital. I wish to try to show what place Jesus occupied in the religion of the earliest Christians, how their religious life stood related to Him, and what they got from their faith in Him for their practical life-task." The schematization of this new theme, however, turns on the same pivot as before—"the weighty religious personality of Paul"; and the chief forms of the religious relation to Jesus are held to be determined by the circumstance whether they are or are not affected by the influence of Paul's modes of feeling and expression. There are treated in turn, therefore, "belief in Jesus before Paul, Paul himself, and the post-Pauline piety, especially that of John." It has been found impossible, moreover, of course, to describe religious attitudes save in terms of religious conceptions; so that what we get is, after all, another account of the varieties of doctrinal attitude towards
Jesus, reflected in the pages of the New Testament, differing from its companions only in its greater warmth of tone and the greater generality of its treatment. And even these differences are due doubtless as much to the original end for which this brochure was prepared, as to its particular subject. It was delivered as an address to the Thirteenth Conference of Christian Students held at Aarau in March, 1909, and was published first in the Proceedings of that Conference, whence it has been reprinted in this pamphlet.
The pamphlet on "Paul and Jesus" is also a reprint, in this case in enlarged form, from an article which appeared in the Monatschrift für
Pastoraltheologie. It does not, however, like the "Jesus in the Faith of Primitive Christianity," bear its original practical purpose stamped upon its face. In form it is a purely critical inquiry in which Weiss orients himself on the question of Paul's relation to Jesus, particularly with reference on the one side to Wrede's radicalism—by which Paul was made the real founder of what we know as Christianity, a wholly new phenomenon, far more
unlike Jesus than Jesus was unlike the higher forms of Jewish piety—and on the other, to the replies to Wrede of men like Kölbing, Kaftan, and Jülicher. Needless to say that Weiss's attitude is far nearer to Wrede's than to that of Wrede's critics. Although he recognizes a much closer relation of Paul to Jesus, and a much more profound influence upon Paul by Jesus— insisting even (for purposes of his own, especially in order to render the naturalization of the appearance of Jesus on the road to Damascus easier) on a personal acquaintance of Paul with Jesus—he is yet as emphatic as Wrede himself in conceiving Paul's Christianity as essentially a different religion from that of Jesus, as at bottom not a development but a transformation of it: "I therefore cannot agree that Paul's Christology and doctrine of Atonement was fundamentally only a further spinning out of a thread already begun by Jesus; and from the point of view of the historian,
I hold the sharp exaggerations of Wrede more right than the softenings of his opponents" (p. 8). In making this position good he necessarily requires to review the development of Christological doctrine in the early Christian community, so that there is much material in this pamphlet too which runs parallel to the discussion in its companions and Weiss is quite right in speaking of the series as, conceived from an internal point of view, a single work, whose several sections mutually illuminate one another.
The last two documents in our list—entitled respectively, "Jesus of Nazareth: Myth or History?" and "The Historicity of Jesus"—are separated from their fellows by the circumstance that their face is turned in an opposite direction and they make it their task to vindicate the views common to the whole series against a sudden attack from the rear. The little pamphlet on "The Historicity of Jesus" is of weighty enough contents to claim our especial attention did it stand alone. But the contribution to it of Johannes Weiss is little more than a succinct and gracefully worded repetition of the main conclusions to which he gives more extended
expression in the larger document which lies before us under the name of "Jesus of Nazareth," and with this larger treatise in our hands we may neglect the smaller. As our present concern is with Weiss's views, we may also pass over with only a word Georg Grützmacher's lecture combined with his in the smaller publication. It is an interesting discussion from the point of view of the historian, of Drews's new religion, and a very strong reassertion as over against Drews's (and also, of course, the SocialDemocratic) view of the origins of Christianity, of the principle that great religious movements are always rooted in great religious personalities, and every great religion has and must have a personal founder. With so much hint of the contents of the smaller pamphlet we may be permitted to turn from it to the larger. This gives us the manuscript basis of two lectures delivered in Berlin in the height of the excitement aroused by the exploitation of the assault upon the historicity of the man Jesus, of which Arthur Drews had become the popular exponent. But it attempts very much more than the mere refutation of this assault, as indeed it needed to do, if it was to have any substance. For the assault itself, it must be acknowledged, is in itself pitiably weak, and required rather to be exposed than answered. Its exposure is certainly admirably managed by Johannes
Weiss, though it is, no doubt, drawn out to an inordinate length—for which he duly apologizes in his Preface. When he had pointed out that the fundamental trouble with Jensen is that he cannot read, expressed his sincere sympathy with Drews for his severe attack of "mythologitis, complicated with that infantile ailment etymologitis," and courteously given utterance to the hope that W. B. Smith's mathematics may be better than his theology,—he had perhaps said all that needed to be said in their direct refutation. The contention of these writers that Jesus never existed cannot by any possibility be true, and the grounds they urge in its defense are a mere mass of crudities. The "positive" theologians of Germany have
therefore very properly simply passed them by unnoticed. The "liberal" theologians are not, however, in a position to do this. For, however absurd the central contention of the new school is, and however weakly it is supported, it yet lies on the face of things that the method employed by the new school in defense of it is just the method of the "liberal" theologians themselves—their method "reduced to absurdity" no doubt, but nevertheless in all essentials the same method. It has lain in the necessity of the case, therefore, that the "liberal" theologians should orient themselves carefully with reference to the new views; and this is what Weiss undertakes in this book.
In one of his footnotes (p. 16) Weiss somewhat tartly remarks, that despite his respect for Schmiedel, he must say he might have been in better business than in giving W. B. Smith's book on "The Pre-Christian Jesus," a send-off by providing it with a preface. But Schmiedel did much more than give Smith's book a "send-off" by providing it with a preface. He very distinctly suggested in that preface that Smith's method is the "scientific" method, and his results therefore worthy of respectful consideration. Weiss himself does not find himself in a position to object in principle to the method (p. 14), or indeed to reject in the mass the results, of this new radicalism. He esteems Kalthoff's method, indeed, above that of Drews or Jensen; but this seems mainly due to Kalthoff's restriction of himself largely to generalities without proceeding to those details in the handling of which the absurdities of Drews and Jensen are most amusingly manifested. And he may distinguish between their results as more or less acceptable; but in the fundamental contentions of the new speculators he more or less fully shares. They cannot assert with more energy than he does, for example, that the whole Christ-theology of the Church is mythical. He is not even in a position to offer effective opposition when they declare that this mythical
Christ-theology is the aboriginal Christian theology, behind which there is
—nothing. He does indeed for himself declare that there is behind it a more primitive Christianity, a Christianity to which Jesus is just a man who has been exalted after His death to world-dominion—an "adoptionist
Christology," as it is the fashion to call it. But he discovers this more primitive view by very unconvincing methods of dealing with the records, all of which, he is compelled to admit, already present the higher
Christology. As the result of Weiss's own criticism of the documents it is plain enough that the adherents of Jesus from the beginning held Him to be just God manifest in the flesh; and Weiss himself has been led by this fact to seek and find a pre-Christian basis for their high Christology. He still supposes, indeed, that this was first brought into Christain circles by Paul; but there seems no reason why, if it were in the air, others than Paul might not have been affected by it, even indeed Jesus Himself, who, Weiss does not doubt, believed in His own Messiahship and might very well have believed therefore even on naturalistic grounds in His "transcendental"
Messiahship. In any event, the plain truth is that when Drews asserts roundly that "the Jesus of the oldest Christian communities is not, as is commonly thought,"—that is, in liberal" circles—"a deified man, but a humanized God" ("Die Christusmythe," 1910, p. 211), he announces a fact which cannot be successfully denied, and it is the announcement of this indefeasible fact which gives all its force to the movement which he represents. One would think that, already trembling on the verge of the recognition of this fact on his own account, Weiss would in the face of its new assertion, now from the radically naturalistic and no longer "positive" side, simply admit it and adjust his theories to it.
But the establishment of this fact, we must observe, is nothing less than the death-blow of the old "liberalism." The fundamental contention of the old "liberalism" is not merely that Jesus was a mere man, but that He was only gradually deified in the thought of His followers. The "liberal"
theologians may conceal for a time the seriousness of the blow they have received by crying out loudly upon the fantastic element of the new speculation—its attempt to eliminate the figure of Jesus altogether and to hang the whole account of the origin of Christianity on a myth. Any number of pamphlets, however, on "the burning question," "Did Jesus ever live?" will not extricate them from their difficulties. It has been driven home to men's consciousness afresh that Christianity is rooted not in the deification of a man but in the incarnation of a God, and whatever else may come out of the controversy it will no longer be possible for the bald
Socinianism which has dominated German theological thought for a generation or two to rule the minds of men. Negative theology must find a better way of accounting for the origin of Christianity than by the religious impression made on men's hearts by the happy, holy life of the man Jesus who trusted Himself wholly to the love of His Father. The transition, as we have said, ought not to be difficult for men like Johannes Weiss who already stands so near to the new platform that a very short step indeed would place him fairly on it. He already believes that "there was already existing among Jews and heathen alike before the appearance of Jesus a Christology, that is a doctrine of the Messiah, or at least the materials for a Christology, and at the moment when the Messiah was found in the person of Jesus, the scattered elements, which lacked only a combining middle-point, gathered together like a crystal about its core" ("Christus," pp. 4–5; Schiele's "Die
Religion," col. 1713). He already believes that this fact accounts for the rapidity of the development of a high Christology among the followers of Jesus. And he already thus reduces the rôle of Jesus in the production of this high Christology to that of a mere occasion for the crystallization of elements already in solution in contemporary thought. A very little earlier dating of the process would enable him to free himself from his unjustified assumption of a precedent "adoptionist" Christology; and it should not
require a very much further attentuation of the role of Jesus in it to dispense with His "impression" altogether. And then, what would he have more than Kalthoff or Drews or Jensen—except a little sounder scholarship and a little more reasonable mode of picturing the origin and growth of the "Christ-myth"?
Meanwhile, however, Weiss throws himself along with his fellow "liberals" valiantly into the not difficult task of defending "the historical
Jesus" from the assaults of Kalthoff and Drews and Jensen. And incidentally, while doing so, he makes clearer his own views as to the origins of Christianity and its records. It is exceedingly pleasant to see him in the unwonted rôle of an apologist; and it must be confessed that he plays the part very well. They tell us that it came to such a pass in ancient Rome that two augurs could not meet one another without smiling. But Weiss can develop quite a sound method of criticism in the face of Jensen and Kalthoff and Drews with no apparent shamefacedness. We read for instance
(pp. 83–84) this: "In theological investigation there are especially in dominant operation two manias. First, there is the tendency, before the understanding of a narrative in itself has been acquired, to go off in search of what lies behind it—for the mythological, astral, or even political antecedents.… I do not at all deny the value of such a world-embracing history of ideas, but it is hard to carry it out in a really scientific manner, and it is of doubtful value to trace back to primitive forms of thought complicated, refined, and individual phenomena.… Secondly, there all too often intrudes between the source and the reader a really morbid scepticism.… If it is unscientific to give credence to a writer on his mere word, it is just as unscientific to refuse credence to a source where what it relates is wholly unexceptionable merely because it could no doubt possibly be fabulous.… Over against our evangelical tradition, not merely the miraculous stories, there is arrayed to-day a mood of what I can call nothing
else but distrust, which in no way arises from the matter itself, but from an excess of critical feeling, which goes often enough hand in hand with a touching lack of critical sense.…" If only Weiss would follow his own prescription! For this is the same Weiss who, having framed for himself a pretty scheme of the development of the Christological thought of the Church—a scheme which supposes Jesus to have made no claims to a divine dignity for Himself, but His followers first to have exalted Him, after His death, to the side of God as world-ruler, then, under the influence of Stoic ideas to have made Him a kind of secondary God (Paul), and finally to have put Him quite on a level with God (John)—on finding that the entire body of New Testament writers present a Jesus who was divine and claimed to be divine, seeks to wrest from them unwilling testimony to an "earlier" view of which they themselves know nothing and vigorously contradict; on finding no "direct evidence" of an "adoptionist Christology" among Christ's earliest disciples endeavors to make indirect evidence of its early prevalence out of records which certainly did not bear this meaning to those who have transmitted them to us; on finding Paul openly declaring
Christ to be nothing less than God over all, just, without a scintilla of objective ground for doing so, throws out the text in which Paul makes this declaration as "inconceivable" in Paul's mouth—that is, discordant with Weiss's theory of what Paul ought to have said ("Christus," p. 29)! In other words, he sustains his radical position only by neglecting his own prescribed methods of sound critical procedure. Thus he seems to hang between two destinies. Either he must continue to use the methods common to him and his more radical opponents, and then he can scarcely escape their extremities of negation. Or else he must follow the sounder methods he tells them they ought to follow, and then he can surely not fail ultimately to reach "conservative" conclusions. It appears to be only a new instance of the old difficulty: "I see the good; the evil I pursue."
In would be interesting to call attention to the numerous matters of importance to the understanding of early Christian Christology on which Weiss speaks in these treatises with his usual point and force. This notice is, however, already long; and perhaps it will suffice, after what has been already said, simply to transcribe, in concluding, the opening and closing words of the two formal presentations of his views upon the early development of Christological thought. In these passages, he himself sums up the substance of his findings.
The opening words we take in the form in which they occur in the article in Schiele's Cyclopædia (coll. 1712 f.):
"It is a burning question for science as well as for the Church: On what does the belief of Christianity in the Son of God, in His deity, in His names 'Lord' and 'Son of Man' rest? How did this belief come into being? The older theology did not see any problem in this question; for it was self-evident to it, that the belief of the early Christians merely gave clear expression to what Jesus Himself had witnessed of Himself. The primitive Christian Christology was, therefore, only the fit description of what was actually given in the Person of the Lord. The newer theology, since it strives to conceive the historical personality of Jesus ever more clearly as purely human, feels a problem here. How was it possible that the early Christians should so unhesitatingly and with such assurance transfer a fullness of divine predicates to a personality the human traits of which are still recognizable by us? And—to sharpen the problem— how can it be explained, that so lofty and developed a doctrine did not work itself out in a long development, but
lies before us essentially complete already in the oldest literary witnesses, the epistles of Paul? The newer theology answers: this rapid development of Christology to its highest and farthest-reaching expression has its ground in this—that, already before the appearance of Jesus a Christology existed among Jews and Hellenists alike, that is to say, a doctrine of the Messiah, or at least the materials for a Christology; and at the moment when the Messiah was discovered in the Person of Jesus, the scattered elements, which had lacked only a combining center, gathered together like crystals around their core. There was hardly needed any particular reflection; the same expressions which had been in use previously of the future Messiah, were applied at once to the present Messiah—of course with the adjustments which were required by what was peculiar to Jesus, especially by His death on the cross; and the Christology was in substance complete. But there never was a Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, however completely worked out, which had power to transmute the longings for a better future into the joyful assurance that the fulfillment of the hope had come. And all Hellenistic speculation about the highest middle-being between God and man could never awaken the clear and inspiring conviction that the divine
Logos was present in a particular, well-known, heartwinning personality. This transformation of speculation into religious intuition, of a Messiah-idea into a Jesus-figure
—this combination of hitherto disconnected elements of conception into a fixed middle-point—presupposes a power of attraction of which we cannot form a strong enough
notion. What a powerful indirect or direct influence must Jesus' personality have exerted upon the souls of His adherents, that they should have believed such things about Him and have been ready to die for this belief! Thus there lies at the basis of the doctrine of Christ, at every stage of its development, a belief in Jesus which we must sympathetically feel, even though often enough it seems choked by speculation."
The closing words we take in the form in which they occur in the tractate, "Christus" (pp. 87–88):
"We have traveled over a long road: from the JewishChristian idea of a political Messiah to the doctrine of the heavenly Messiah and Son of God; from the adoptionistic exaltation-Christology to the doctrine of the preëxistent
'Man' and 'Son of God,' and to the Logos-Pneuma-Christ; through the difficult questions of the incarnation to the conception and presentation of the Gospels. The total impression has been that primitive Christianity made use of already existing forms and ideas, in which to bring to expression, in a manner capable of being understood by all, and yet at the same time absolute and determinative, the overwhelming impression made by the Person of Jesus.
Predicates were sought out which declared that there were contained in Him the ideal, and the highest religious goods.
To the men of old time the predicate of deity offered itself continually for this purpose. In varied forms this was
applied to Jesus. Thus, however, the problem was raised that nevertheless the true humanity which was perfectly clearly preserved in memory and tradition, should not be lost. The efforts to find a solution, which were made, are altogether incomplete and only create new questions. A chain of inexpressibly complicated and in the highest degree unhappy controversies attached itself to this, until the famous compromise-formula of 'one Person in two Natures' was invented, which can never give satisfaction, no matter how acutely it may be thought out. For the question must be continually raised afresh how it can be imagined that Godhood and manhood can be united in a single earthly person. For the modern man striving earnestly and longingly after clearness and certainty all these Christological formulas have already about them something strange and foreign, because they are products of the utterly different soil of ancient thought. What was altogether easy for an ancient man to conceive, that a man should be in reality an incarnate God—as, for example, the Roman emperor or Antiochus Epiphanes—or that a Plato might be the Son of a God, cannot make entrance into our minds, because we feel much too sharply the unpassable boundary line that divides the divine and the human. From all the stammering attempts to express the nature of Christ in formulas, we can learn only how mighty the personality must have been which has inspired men to such a faith, stirred their phantasy after such a fashion, and occupied their thought through thousands of years. The less we are able to understand and adopt the Christology the more
strongly are we thrown back upon the Person of Jesus. To understand Him, to receive our impression from Him, to let ourselves be drawn by Him into His life with the Father— this is more important than to find a formula of confession, in which we may be at once dogmatically correct and historically true."
These words are surely very pathetic. For what is their burden but just this: we are modern men, and as modern men simply cannot believe in a divine Christ; but we cannot do without Jesus and will therefore think of Him as greatly as we can—as a truly heroic man. Meanwhile what is most strongly borne in on us as we read is that Weiss does not find his merely human Jesus in the records but imposes him on the records. The whole effort of the newer theology, he says, is "to conceive the historical personality of Jesus ever more clearly as purely human." The test of all conceptions of Christ is, Do they offer us a merely human Christ? The one thing that cannot be allowed is that that Man who walked the earth and has created the new world, was in any respect more than man. At all hazards we must not allow that God has entered in this Man into the sphere of human life. The rock of offense is the Incarnation: and anything is more credible than that. When we make our Socinianism the major premise of all our reasoning, is it strange that what we take out of our premises as our conclusion is just Socinianism?
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, ix. 1911, pp. 332–342.