CHAPTER IV

THE WORK OF CHRIST

We must now pass on to investigate the doctrine of Christ's work. Some intimations respecting the character of this work have been given in laying down a doctrine about his person. But it is necessary, for the sake of distinctness, to disengage this portion of our subject for separate consideration. It relates to that which Christ accomplished, and in the order of providence was intended to accomplish, for the benefit of mankind. Christianity is a religion of salvation, and Christ himself said that he had come to seek and save the lost. But salvation is a vague word, denoting only deliverance from something; and therefore its nature may be, and has been, very variously conceived. Hence we have to inquire what it is, and how it is or has been effected.

Philo, in speaking of the work of Moses, refers to him under the four aspects of king, legislator, high-priest, and prophet, and in each of these assigns to him the highest rank.2 Similarly it became customary with theologians to divide the functions of Christ into prophetic, sacerdotal, and regal, and to consider the nature of his work under these three heads. This is rather an artificial division; for

1 Luke xix. 10.

2 De Vita Mosis, II, § 1, with the subsequent treatment.

3 See for instance Cat. Rom., Pars I, de artic. II, cap. iii. § x., where they are described as trium personarum partes.' The distinction is found in Eusebius, H.E., I, 3, 'alone high-priest of the universe, and alone king of all creation, and alone chief prophet of the prophets.'

whereas Christ was literally a prophet, it is only figuratively that he can be called priest or king, and it is never well to forget that he was in fact a layman, and belonged to a humble class in society. Still, so vast a structure of doctrine has been built, especially on the assumption of his priesthood, that it will be convenient to follow the usual division.

I. The Prophetic Office

1

The prophetic office of Christ was fulfilled by his teaching. This constituted the chief work of his active ministry, and to it a primary place ought always to be assigned. To suppose that we can honour himself while we neglect his teaching, and make no effort to conform our lives to it, is a fatal error, but one into which men are easily tempted to fall. He himself foresaw the danger: Why do ye call me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?' 'If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments.'2 This truth must be obvious to any mind that will deal honestly with itself. It is not to honour, but to insult him, to bestow on him empty praise, and profess to be his follower, while you care nothing for the aims on which his heart was set, and think that his principles are very nice for a world that never existed, but are supremely silly for such a world as that in which we live. But if, as Christians, we feel bound by his teaching, some important questions arise, to which we must endeavour to give candid and true answers.

First, we must ask, was Christ infallible? At no very distant date theologians of every school, Unitarian no less than Catholic, would have answered this question in the affirmative, and would at the same time have asserted that the records of his teaching were infallible. But recently a great change has taken place; and some even of those who

1 Luke vi. 46; or, as it stands in Matthew vii. 21, Not every one who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven.'

2 John xiv. 15.

believe that Christ was God incarnate have, as we have seen, removed his infallibility by their doctrine of Kenosis. This is a stupendous change; for it destroys the foundation-stone of the whole fabric of ecclesiastical dogma, and it is certainly strange that any who think that God himself laid aside his omniscience, in order to render his revelation fallible, should continue to believe in the infallibility of assemblies of wrangling bishops. But we must examine this question for ourselves. The proposition that Christ was infallible is inherently incapable of proof. It means that he can never have entertained the smallest error in any branch of knowledge, that whatever views he held upon any conceivable subject, literary, historical, scientific, as well as moral and religious, precisely corresponded with the facts; and of this there is or can be no evidence, either intellectual or spiritual. The doctrine of his infallibility is simply a postulate, wrongly, though not unnaturally, founded on the reverence with which his teaching is justly regarded; and as men came to rely more and more on external authority, they were the more compelled to assert this as the fundamental assumption on which all doctrinal reasoning must be based, and the denial of which excluded a man altogether from the pale of Christianity.

Appeal, however, may be made to the testimony of Jesus himself. He always taught with authority, and confidently set aside whatever displeased him in the religion of the day. He said, 'To this end have I been born, and to this end have I come into the world, that I may bear witness to the truth';1 and again, ‘I did not speak from myself; but the Father who sent me himself gave me a commandment what I should say and what I should speak.' But these and similar sayings, which we may reasonably believe to be correctly reported, at least in substance, fall far short of a claim to infallibility. They clearly refer to the general tenor of his teaching, and especially to that part of it which 1 John xviii. 37. 2 John xii. 49.

placed him in sharp antagonism to the popular religion of his time. That the great spiritual principles, which shone as a heavenly light within his soul, were true and Divine he was absolutely convinced. They were no inventions of his own, but the Word of God revealed in his conscience and his heart; and he felt that it was laid upon him as a Divine commandment to utter them. This kind of conviction is characteristic of the prophetic soul in all times. The prophet is driven to speak what comes to him as a message from heaven, and would condemn himself as unfaithful if he concealed it in his own breast. Indeed, every man who is moved by deep spiritual conviction, which transcends all his selfish limitations and prepossessions, has something of this experience. But in its most transcendent form it does not guarantee the infallibility of everything that the prophet may utter. In matters that lie apart from his prophetic insight he may follow the opinions of his time, and the demand that we must believe everything that he says or nothing has neither reason nor spirituality to commend it, but is simply the requirement of laziness and incompetence.

But though it is impossible to prove that Christ was infallible, it might be equally impossible to disprove it, and we might have to be content without returning any answer to our question. There is, however, some evidence to which we must now attend. Even if we limit our view to the sphere of faith and morals, we may fairly infer from historical facts that it was no part of Christ's purpose to communicate a dogmatic revelation. It is in the interests of dogma that his infallibility is insisted on; and when a statement respecting the providential purpose of Christianity is put forward, it is a legitimate mode of testing this to consider what condition of facts might be reasonably anticipated if the statement were correct, and then to argue that the statement is not correct because the facts are not there. It is very easy to misrepresent this mode of argument, as though it were impugning the wisdom of Divine providence; and therefore we must

carefully observe that it does nothing of the kind, but only questions a particular human interpretation of providence. It assumes that the means which God adopts for the fulfilment of his purposes must be the best adapted to secure the end in view; and that therefore we may infer from the means which lie open to our observation the nature of the purpose which is beyond the range of our immediate knowledge. Now, if it had been the purpose of God or of Christ to communicate a supernatural system of dogma, the great teacher would surely have followed a very different method from that which the Gospels attribute to him. The required system is nowhere to be found in the records of his life; and it is necessary to resort to the pure fiction that he taught it to the Apostles, who handed it down to their successors. Again, if his teaching was intended to have the stamp of Divine infallibility, we should expect the written records. of it to be widely different from what they are; for an infallibility which was necessary for the world's salvation would surely not have been allowed to disappear at the first stage of its transmission. But what are the facts? Jesus spoke in Aramaic, and, as our Gospels are written in Greek, we have only translations of what he said. We have no reason for supposing that his words were reported at the time when they were spoken, and any Aramaic records of them which may have once existed were written from recollection, and could have no guarantee of absolute accuracy. In any case these Aramaic records have been allowed to perish; and the Greek translations of them. preserved in the Gospels, which were written more than a generation after the death of Christ, prove, by their variations in reporting the same utterances, that the original words had become uncertain, and whatever infallibility they may have once possessed was lost in transmission. And again, we cannot always be sure of the meaning of Christ's sayings, as they stand in the Gospels, for they actually receive different interpretations; and therefore, in passing into our minds,

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