Religious Reality | Page 6

upon
Jesus because it cannot do otherwise. A judgment like that is the
conclusion--it ought not to be taken as the starting-point--of faith.
There are many, of course, who are willing to begin by assuming
provisionally that it is true, upon the authority of others who bear
witness to it: and that is not an unreasonable thing to do, provided a
man afterwards verifies it in the experience of his own life. But belief
in the divinity of Jesus is too tremendous a confession lightly to be
taken for granted by mere half-believers of a casual creed. Convictions
worth having must sooner or later be fought for: they must be won by
the sweat of the brow. And if a man is not content permanently to defer
to the authority of others, he ought not to begin by taking for granted
the doctrine that Jesus is GOD. He ought to begin as the Apostles
began, by taking seriously the Man Christ Jesus.

CHAPTER II
THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER
It was characteristic of the ancient Jews that they had a vital belief in
the living GOD: and belief in GOD, and that of a far more real and
definite kind than the modern Englishman's vague admission of the
existence of a Supreme Being, was a thing which Jesus was able to take
for granted in those to whom He spoke. GOD to the Jew was the GOD

of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, holy and righteous, gracious and
merciful: active and operative in the world, the Controller of events:
having a purpose for Israel and for the world, which in the process of
the world's history was being wrought out, and which would one day
find complete and adequate fulfilment in the setting up of GOD'S
Eternal Kingdom.
What Jesus did by His life and teaching was to deepen and intensify
existing faith in GOD by the revelation of GOD as Father, and to revive
and quicken the expectation of GOD'S Kingdom by the proclamation of
its near approach. The application to GOD of the term "Father" was not
new: but the revelation of what GOD'S Fatherhood meant in the
personal life and faith of Jesus Himself as Son of God was something
entirely new: while in Jesus' preaching of the Divine Kingdom there
was a note of freshness and originality, and a spiritual assurance of
certainty, which carried conviction of an entirely new kind to the minds
and hearts of those who listened.
All the more overwhelming must have seemed to the disciples the
disaster of their Master's crucifixion. It was not merely that the hopes
which in their minds had gathered about His person were shattered:
their very faith in GOD Himself, and in the goodness of GOD, was for
the time being torn up by the roots. Nothing but an event as real and as
objective as the Crucifixion itself could have reversed for them this
impression of sheer catastrophe. The resurrection of Jesus, which was
for them the wonder of wonders, not only restored to them their faith in
Him as the Christ of GOD, now "declared to be the Son of GOD with
power by the resurrection from the dead"; it also relaid for them the
foundations of faith in GOD and in His goodness and love upon a basis
of certainty henceforth never to be shaken. "This is the message which
we have heard of Him and declare unto you, that GOD is light, and in
Him is no darkness at all."
Meanwhile what of Jesus Himself--this Christ, through their
relationship to whom they had come by this new experience of the
reality of GOD? In symbolical vision they saw Him ascend up into the
heavens and vanish from bodily sight: in pictorial language they spoke

of Him as seated at GOD'S right hand. They were assured
nevertheless-- and multitudes in many generations have echoed their
conviction--that He was still in their midst unseen, their living Master
and Lord. Instinctively they prayed to Him. Through Him they made
their approach to the Father. He had transformed for them their world.
He was the light of their lives. In Him was truth. He was their way to
GOD.
All the great movement of Christian thought in the New Testament is
concerned in one way or another with the working out of this
experienced significance of Jesus. The maturest expression of what He
meant to them is contained in the great reflective Gospel--an
interpretation rather than a simple portrait of the historical Jesus--
which is ascribed by tradition to S. John. The Christ of the Fourth
Gospel is man, with all the attributes of most real and genuine
manhood: but He is also more than man. He is the self-utterance--the
Word--of GOD. He came forth from GOD, and