THE RATIONALE OF FAITH
Plain Speaking. By the, Rev. T. R. R. Stebbing, (T. Fisher Unwin. 75. Bd.) THE origins and development of Christian belief must interest every thoughtful mind at Eastertide, or at least be implicit in its observance. Conviction as to the actuality of what is recorded to hive happened at the first Easter, under whatever aspect of truth that event is apprehended, is essential to Christianity. Yet, when we face the fact of Christianity itself, the subject is not a simple one. A certain process took place, containing within itself a crucial and extraordinary crisis ; and we do not know when precisely that crisis occurred or what brought it about. Most of the books whose names are gilien above are concerned, more or less, with its probable history and its psychological results, the learned and well- documented thesis presented by Dr. :Hatch to the University of Strasbourg specifically so, yet none really unravels its mystery. And the strange thing is that the earliest Christian writings are in precisely inverse sequence, logically, to the development of belief of which we have spoken.
What happened, then ? A faith somehow became Faith, and, as the centuries of systematization 'went on, " the Faith." Men passed over from trust in the faith of Jesus Christ, " a just man who went about doing good,'I to faith in Him as a cosmic Christ, the Son of God. In the. words of Dr. Machetes- simply -written book, We are Christians not because we have faith in God like the faith in God which Jesus Himself had, but because we have faith in Him."
A lengthy and obscure process, it will be said. Obscure, perhaps, beneath that seal of reticence which. guards the inmost secrets of each individual soul ; but not lengthy. For that other most curious fact of literary history comes in here. The Epistles, which develop the doctrine of the cosmic Christ, of One who not only was a man, but, in the words of the Creed, " is Man," and " of the substance of the Father," came first ; the Gospels, with their human record, last. So that the idea preceded the history, and the record confirmed but did not originate the doctrine. This is so strange a reversal of the order of events which we might have expected that even now, perhaps largely becausethe Gospels are grouped before the Epistles in our New Testaments, its significance is not realized, and cries such as the recent " Back to Jesus " are raised. People, fancy that they are returning on the track of the early Christian consciousness. But the footprints point the other way.
Nevertheless, it is fascinating to picture the part which the Gospels, when they appeared, must have played in the spread of the Gospel. We do not remember that the task has yet been attempted. But, among the imaginative, impressionable, story-loving populations of the Mediterranean seaboard, ever on the look-out for " some new thing," these narratives, still unequalled as pure literature, must have caught like wildfire. Glance, if we may make the comparison without irreverence, at any literature of at all the like kind of that age. Take even the picaresque " novel " of Petronius —and the " Satyricon " is the first father of the modern novel— the works of Apuleius, of Lucian ; take the later, very scanty and very dreary, Greek - love-tales, with their inevitable -pattern and its concluding shipwreck, killing off the bad, and smiting the good, and then read the Sayings, the Parables, the
Life, the Death, of Jesus. To praise would be worse than impertinence. Only it is here, surely, that we find the most potent reinforcement of the first preaching of Christianity that can be conceived, coming as it did at the entry of a fresh age and generation to that which had " known Christ in the flesh."
How the stories must have passed -from mouth to mouth, been retold by the firesides of lonely villages, in encampments of pilgrimages and wandering tribes, on marches of the
Roman legions, in that shadowy, bygone world. Even': we still feel the almost intolerable- throb, telling of some eteMal
agony and yet of victory through that agony, as the words " I am the Resurrection and the Life " meet and strive with the farewells in the earthly lives of each of us. It was with a true instinct that Dickens, who knew his fellow-men; set those words and the words that follow them, without comment, after the fall of the guillotine on the Place de la Revolution.
Stich a sentence- carries its own warrant to the Christian consciousness. Like others of unearthly radiance in the Fourth Gospel, there are difficulties in its setting. Perhaps the story of the raising of Lazarus is the most subtly interesting, as well as the most curiously baffling, of all the records of wonder in the Gospels. Mr. Stebbing, in one of the reprints of many thoughtful papers on various subjects of scientific and general import, shows himself more aware of the latter than of the former quality in the story. We cannot pretend to enter upon the problems of the Johannine narrative, connected as they are with the question of its undetermined authorship, further than to say that the eleventh chapter may afford as many clues as obstacles to an understanding of the whole,' which is symbolic theology touched with personal reminiscence. It is just the proportion of actual reminiscence that is doubtful.
We pass in quite another spirit from Mr. Stebbing's frank but, within his own limits, fair scepticism as to what he holds is mere thaumaturgy (we do not think that his vision ranges far) to the volume of " Easter Sermons." Several of these, especially the least emotional, are admirable, par- ticularly so in view of the fact that all preachers know Easter as the most difficult of subjects. The Bishop of Birmingham, and Canon Carnegie, the one insisting on all existence having an immortal meaning, the other on the Resurrection of Christ being the only guarantee of progress, have each a vital message. But on Easter Day hearers as well as preachers feel the imminent pressure of unearthly realities, and words, however welcome, only touch the fringe of our holiest hopes, our highest aspirations. We turn again wistfully to. the last chapters of the Fourth Gospel, and we know, somehow, though we cannot tell the source of our conviction as we read, that " the record is true." The gross is not the end of the Creed. " Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturri saeculi."
Previous page
