BOOKS.
THIS is a book which will make its mark in the history of Anglican theology. Mr. Gore is not only deeply imbued with that patristic and ecclesiastical learning which is indispensable for the discussion of the issues between the Roman Catholic Church and our own, but he has, what is not often combined with it, that reality of spiritual insight and that courage in facing the doubts of our time which prevent his ecclesiastical and patristic learning from reducing him to the position of an ecclesiastical antiquarian instead of a spiritual teacher. It is not often that we find a writer so full of exact learning as Mr. Gore, so entirely destitute of the Dryasdust characteristics.
We have never seen the difference between the value attached by the early Church to the simple facts, the "deposit" of re- vealed truth, and the freedom with which the mediwval Church ignored these facts in her inferences from assumptions which are beyond the verification of the human intellect, more powerfully and accurately drawn out than in the following striking passage, in which, as it seems to us, Mr. Gore puts his finger on the very centre of the issue between the Church which uses dogma only to prevent an encroachment on the re- vealed teaching of Christ, and the Church which uses dogma as a positive enlargement of the sphere of revelation. As Mr. Gore says sententiously, the earlier dogmatic decrees "are but the hedge, the New Testament is the pasture-ground ;" but the mediEeval Church treated dogmatic decrees as if they enlarged the knowledge of the substance of revelation. We cannot conceive a more admirable statement of the issue between the two Churches as to the use of those abstract propositions for the exact meaning and truth of which we have no secnrity,—as, for example, the proposition that our Lord, even in his human life, always enjoyed the beatific vision, and was therefore virtually omniscient in his human no less than in his divine nature,—tban the following statement of Mr. Gore's :—
"Thus the Gospels present us with a Christ, divine and human, whose personality, if complex and difficult to analyse, yet presents a marvellous and impressive unity. The four great dogmas are our guides in contemplating the picture, and the Gospels respond to the anticipations which they raise, and fill up the meagre out- line into a living whole. They show us a Christ, really one with God and really made man; Himself God, but acting in love to us under conditions of growth and experience and limitation and suffering and victory, which really belong to the manhood which He took—took, not as the veil of His glory merely, but as the real sphere of His action. But take up a mediaeval or later dogmatic treatise on the Incarnation, and follow the course of the argument. It lays down first of all the fundamental dogmas, and then pro- ceeds to argue that such and such results must follow. As the • The Incarnation of the Son of God. Being the Bampton. Lectures for the Year 1801. By Charles Gore, Lk. London: John Murray. manhood is taken into personal union with the Godhead, so as man. Jesus Christ must have possessed, infused into his manhood, all that it is capable of receiving, and that from the first ; but man- hood is capable of enjoying the fullness of the beatific vision, tho knowledge of all things past, present, and future ; therefore the manhood of Christ had all knowledge of past, present, and future, and the fullness of the beatific vision ; therefore, He can never have been ignorant even in His human mind. He can never have grown to know what He did not know before. He can never have experienced any break in the vision of God. Athwart the course of such abstract argumentation occur interjected certain isolated texts of Scripture : Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the Son.' 'Ho grew in wisdom.' Ho cried, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?' Rapidly they are explained away. Alternative interpretations ' are suggested, which in fact do not interpret, but contradi ; and we are assured that our Lord only seemed to grow in wis.loni, but really had no need for growth, or said He did not know, meaning only that He would not tell, or cried out as if He were desolate, while in fact He was never really deprived of the consolations of tho Father's presence. Thus we are led on through a series of deductions, drawn syllogistically from the abstract dogmas considered as positive sources of information—the isolated Bible texts being used only as illustrations, or as supplying material to be explained away. This is the misuse of dogma, not its use. The dogmas are only limits, negatives which block false lines of development, notice-boards which warn us off false approaches, guiding us down the true road to the figure in the Gospels, and leaving us to contemplate it unimpeded and with the frankest gaze." (pp. 107-8.) It seems to us hardly possible to attach too much im- portance to this contrast. If we keep to the explicit evidence we have of the impression made by Jesus Christ upon the Church while he lived upon earth, it is impossible to ignore either the humanity or the divinity of Christ. Passage after passage affirms his real humanity and its limitations, asserting his growth in wisdom as in stature, and "in favour with God and man ;" asserting also his passionate prayer that if it were possible (implicitly indicating that, in his human nature, he felt no certainty whether it might not be possible) the cup of agony might pass from him ; reciting his repeated questions for information,—as to the meaning of the Scriptures addressed to the doctors in the Temple, as to who touched him in the crowd, as to where they had buried Lizarus,—and recording his express denial that he knew either the day or the hour of his second coming. Of all these it is impossible to ignore the natural and simple drift, without suggesting that our Lord in his human career was rather acting a part than living the perfect life. On the other hand, it is eivally im- possible to deny the frequent and plain affirmations of his divinity, affirmations which, as Mr. Gore finely says, we are allowed rather to " overhear" than to hear,— for instance, when our Lord speaks of himself as the only Son of God, in contrast to all the prophets who had been simply servants; when the Lord of the Vineyard assumes that the labourers in it "will reverence" his son, even though they bad ill-treated and killed the ser- vants; again, when we hear the bold assertion that "no man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son shall reveal him,"—that Christ and the Father are one, and that whosoever has seen him has seen the Father,—that the Father and Son were to unite in sending a Spirit who would take of each of their personal life and show its secrets to those who united themselves to God. The Apostles, in spite of their severely monotheistic faith, accept quite naturally this teaching as to the three divine persons, and, as Mr. Gore shows, before the end of the first century, when "The Teaching of the Apostles" was already in the hands of the Church, the Trinitarian formula is adopted in the baptism of Christians without the faintest sign that it alarmed or in any sense surprised the conscience of the Apostles :— "It is important to notice that there is no moment when Jesus Christ expressly reveals this doctrine. It was overheard, rather than heard. It was simply, that in the gradual process of inter- course with Him, His disciples came to recognise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as included in their deepening and enlarging thought of God. Christ was often speaking of His relation as Son to the Father, nor did He ever allow His disciples to confuse their sonship with His : He spoke of my Father' and of your Father,' never—except when dic- tating to them the words of their prayer—of 'our Father.' His Sonship belonged to that transcendental being of His, which in spite of all the close human fellowship which they enjoyed with Him, the disciples could not fail to recognise and to acknowledge. In the higher world He stood in the intimate relationship of a son, an only son, to a father. Moreover, He spoke not only of the Father, but also of the Holy Ghost as in a sense greater than Himself upon earth, and as a person who, like Himself, could be blasphemed; plainly as in the fullest sense divine. In His last discourse, it appeared that the Holy Ghost was to take His own place when He had gone. He was to be His vicar and substitute in the hearts of the apostles, and in the church. It appeared
also, that though He was to be the divine person with whom the disciples were to be in most immediate contact, yet He was third,, not second, among the sacred Three, proceeding from, and sent from, the Father and the Son. Moreover, it became plain that these divine Three were not distinct individuals, who could act separately or apart ; there appeared an inseparable unity and 'co-inherence.' among them. Thus the coming of the Holy Ghost was not merely to supply the absence of the Son, but to complete
His presence. In the coming of the Spirit the Son too was to come ; in the coming of the Son, also the Father. 'He will come unto you,' I will come unto you,' 'We will come unto you,' are interchangeable phrases. The process is not easy to describe, but it came about that the apostles learned to think of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as included in the being of God, and that without wavering for a moment in their sense of the divine unity. The name of the one God, as our Lord finally named it in the formula of baptism, is the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. It is remarkable that the apostles seem to have experienced no intellectual difficulty in regard to this Trinity in the Godhead. I suppose this is to be accounted for, by the fact that difficulties in logic do not trouble us at all where facts of ex- perience are in question. Thus we are often ludicrously at fault in attempting to give a logical account of quite familiar experiences, for example, of the inner relations of those three strangely independent elements of our own spiritual being, will and reason and feeling, or of the relation of mind and body. But our inability to explain facts logically goes no way at all to alter our sense of their reality." (pp. 131-2.) A very impressive part of Mr. Gore's Lectures deals with the astonishing assumption of Dr. Hatch, in his recent Hibbert Lectures, that theological dogma was the product of the
third and fourth centuries, and that it was, in fact, an innova- tion on the original Christianity, which in his view rested on no abstract theology at all. To this Mr. Gore replies :—
"It is then a fact of the most astonishing kind, that the Hibbert Lectures recently published,—which result in the posi- tion, that the theological propositions of the creed are no part of original Christianity, and need be no part of the Christianity of the future, which speak of Christianity as passing from being a rule of life in the beginning to a creed in the process of centuries, —should actually have left out of consideration the theology of the apostolic writers. Is there theology in St. Paul, St. John, and even St. James ? Does that theology represent or misrepresent the religion of Jesus Christ ? These questions are not considered. Is the theology of the Nicene creed any more metaphysical, or only more technical, than the theology of St. Paul or St. John ? This question again is not considered. Now it seems to me that a book written about the development of Christian theology, which omits any real examination of the New Testament writers, is like a work written to account for the later French empire which should omit any serious consideration of the great Napoleon." (pp. 99-100.) By way of leading up to this, Mr. Gore goes to the writings which even the negative critics regard as the earliest, the four Epistles of St. Paul which were all in circulation by the year 58 A.D., and which are avowedly founded on the beliefs which he found in the Church twenty years earlier, within ten years of Christ's death ; and he shows that these Epistles, no less than the earliest Gospels, have a theology of their own which is most explicit, and which the earlier dogmatic Councils are mainly engaged in defending against the rationalising and destructive influence of mere speculation. This part of his work is exceedingly effective, and shows, what most of the negative critics now admit, that the theological view of Christ taken in the Nicene Council, was substantially the view of the Church of the first century, though that view was not at that time so technically expressed. He shows us, what we can hardly understand even the most negative critic denying, that at the Resurrection "the Apostles' lives were rapidly driven round sharp turning with a force that only objective facts can exercise," and that their theology arose out of the reflections which the Resurrection and their memory of all the events which preceded, and as they now saw, led up to the Resurrec- tion, absolutely forced upon them.
We must reserve the last three lectures for consideration in a separate article, but we will add here that the readers of Mr. Gore's book will be struck as much by its literary force and fineness of appreciation as by its large range of reading and its subtlety of apprehension. He has an appreciation for the facts of the Gospels which is not only that of a sensitive mind, but that of a keen literary insight. What, for instance, could be more exact or more true than his statement (p. 57) that Christ was so resolute and deliberate in making his appeal to the faith of his disciples, and in educating carefully in them the faculty of faith, that "He refused to demonstrate mathe- matically what he wished them to believe, nay, rather, He appears as giving men loopholes for escape, and not pressing conviction too forcibly on them." Where he found faith least, there he made least attempt to overcome scepticism. He was willing to leave in doubt those who might have been driven into a wilful resistance to the truth by too convincing a proof that it was their own temper of mind, and not the lack of facts justifying belief, which kept them in doubt. Yet this is but one of many illustrations of Mr. Gore's fine insight into the spirit of the Gospels.
Previous page
