THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST
Sac—Mr. Robert Boothby, in his new book, I Fight to Live, which was interestingly reviewed in these columns recently, makes a statement which would be to me incredible as coming from the pen of an eminently sound writer, had I not seen it for myself. He says, on page 408, speaking of Jesus Christ: " It is significant that, of all prophets who have claimed .divine attributes, Jesus was the least concerned to persuade His followers to believe any special proposition about Himself. Whether He thought He was the Chosen One' of God' . . . or that He was Himself the ' Son of Man,' is a matter of controversy between theologians, and can be left to them." Quite what was the extent of other prophets' categorical claims to divine attributes is beside the point here. For the obvious and only purpose of Mr. Boothby's statement is to assert that that claim on Jesus's part was very low down on His list of priorities when pro- claiming His public message. The question arises, Has Mr. Boothby read the Gospels? Yes, he has What he goes on to say affords evidence of the fact. Then what went wrong, for goodness sake?
If there be one self-evident fact which is obtrusively and inevadably apparent on, almost every page of the Gospels it is this: That Jesus Christ set the fact of His being the " Chosen One" of God, the " Son of Man," and the fact of His own Divine Person, so prominently in the forefront of all His message and mission, making that fact the basis of all that He did, and the justification of all that He said, that it was the very door by which, and by which alone, men were to find entrance into the Kingdom of 'God. It was the all-pervading emphasis of all that He taught. It was the basic assumption of the very tone He adopted in His ethical teaching. It was the sine quti non of His whole system. To such an extent, indeed, was this the case, That if He was not God manifest in flesh, speaking simply and normally of the things He knew as truth (as I might say, " I am Trevor Dyer, son of David Dyer, of Leicester "), then two alternatives are before us. Either Jesus Christ was a consummate and blasphemous liar or He was insane.—Yours faithfully, 33 Eastwood Drive, Rainham, Essex. 0. TREVOR DYER.
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