The Things Which Remain | Page 5

of grace which the student of nature alone can not see. God is a spirit. The human spirit refined, purified, sees Him in proportion to its purification.
[Sidenote: Modern Christology.]
[Sidenote: Former Limitations.]
[Sidenote: Ritual Statement.]
[Sidenote: Aim of Christianity.]
[Sidenote: Likeness to God.]
In respect of "Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord," it may, it must, be said He remains in full and glorious vigor as the Redeemer of mankind. The marked difference between our time and a half-century ago with respect to Christ is in the extension, rather than the diminution of His relation to salvation and the extension of the idea of salvation itself. In the former days men's eyes were almost wholly fixed on His death and its relation to salvation in the future life. Seldom indeed was the value of the following text taken into consideration: "For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more being reconciled we shall be saved by His life." There is less disposition to dogmatize as to theories of the atonement. Most, I think, come to feel that no one view contains the full significance of Christ's death. Have you noticed how the Ritual puts it in the order of the Lord's Supper? "Didst give Thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our Redemption; who made there [on the cross] by His oblation of Himself once offered a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world." The men who wrote that struggled to interpret His death by every possible phase of its meaning. In our time we have come to see that the aim of Christ and Christianity is to develop character and that this must be gained in time that we may be ready for eternity. Thus the death of Christ as the ultimate of self-sacrifice persuades us to the death of sin in us that we may live renewed in God; "rise from our dead selves to higher things." His life persuades us as the condition and example of growth to move on from the first self-surrender into the habit and fact of constant obedience and therefore "into the likeness of God's dear Son."
The consciousness, well-nigh universal, of the nobility of self-sacrifice is that which gives vitality and vogue among the masses to the doctrine of the atonement. Self-sacrifice becomes more rare as wealth and refinement modify men and women. He that has much is loath to lose or leave it. Hence the rich generally fight in security. The poor meet the bullets first.
Bad as is the conduct of some trades-unionists, it is among these toilers that great deeds of sympathy and generosity are done. How they tax themselves to help each other! How their women work for each other when one is unable to care for herself or her children! Their doctrine that "an injury to one is a wrong to all" has much that is Christlike in it. Let us who believe in an atoning Christ rejoice that as long as men honor bravery--self-sacrifice unto death for country, home, or the life of dear ones; as long as they build monuments to generals, soldiers, firemen, physicians who die for others, so will the world be slow to disbelieve the doctrine that "Jesus Christ tasted death for every man."
[Sidenote: John's Logos.]
[Sidenote: An Anthropomorphic God.]
More, too, is made of His life before the Incarnation. The pre-existence of Christ is an essential element in Christianity. "His eternal relation to God is the only way of conceiving Him which answers to His real greatness."[4] The Christ was present and active in the creation. John's use of the word "Logos" is right. "Logos" is not merely a result but a Force. It is not only the speech, but the speaker. Let us admit once for all that the fact, much belabored of the critics, is a fact. Let us not be afraid of the word which expresses it. God must be anthropomorphic if He exists. We can come nowhere near to thinking out any other kind of God. Christ has the value of God to devout Christians because in the fullness of His moral perfections He expresses God so far as we can know Him and man so far as man can hope and grow.
[Footnote 4: Denney. Studies in Theology.]
[Sidenote: How Son of God.]
Is His Sonship different from ours, or only an expansion of the fullness and perfection of our sonship? This last seems to me a most important question. If He was born as we were born--that is, as to the beginning of His earthly life, there can be no pre-eminent sense in which He was the Son of God. He was either a happy accident of natural birth or a "sport" in