SECTION VI

the effect of the ideal history: the sacred remembrance

Great characters manifest themselves by great exhibitions of their power. These exhibitions are confirmed by the great impressions they produce within the sphere of their operation. These impressions, finally, continue in the abundant, clear, and powerful reminiscences of those whose minds were affected by them. The stronger the impression a man has received, the greater will be the power with which it will, during his whole life, prevail over all weaker impressions and remembrances. The more general this impression is, and the greater the number of the minds who share it, the longer will its memory survive, both in the private intercourse and public announcements of a community. But if the impression be a religious, a practical, a vital one, it must of necessity be exhibited in the life of the community, whose very spiritual being stands in constant interaction with this its remembrance. In proportion, finally, as this impression is consolatory and elevating, will the memorial, in which it resounds through the world, and through time, be a sacred one. It was consequently inevitable, that the effect of the life of Jesus should be impressed and perpetuated, in a sacred memorial upon the life, and within the circle of His followers, by means of the Gospel history; for the most powerful effect which mankind ever experienced, lay in the exhibition of His divine-human life, by which the glory of God was fully manifested in the midst of mankind. Hence the remembrance of Him and of His history is the predominating historical thought of the human race, and surpasses all other human remembrances. The effect of Christ’s life has, from the very first, affected through its divine power the whole human race, by means of that agitation which it produced among His immediate followers. It is an effect still propagated by means of the members of His Church, and one which will never cease till it has penetrated the whole body of humanity. As a religious influence, however, or rather as the religious influence, proceeding as it does from perfect religion, it constitutes a church, whose spiritual life is identical with its remembrance. The highest solemnity of the Christian life, e.g., is the showing forth of the death and victory of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. If then we contemplate the matter of the Gospel history in the impression it has left on Christian life, in the assurance of the manifestation of God, of the atonement, of victory over death, and of the heavenly glory of Christ and His people, the conclusion is irresistible, that in this definite and full memorial of the Christian Church we behold a sacred memorial to all mankind of the great days and great facts of their reunion with God. The effect of Christ’s life and deeds may be regarded generally as the greatest shock ever experienced by mankind.¹ As such it naturally commanded the attention even of the enemies of Christ, and of those who unconsciously experienced its agency in their very enmity. His enemies could not free themselves from the remembrance of Him, though they deformed it into a caricature, through the false medium of their self-delusion, as they had before experienced only exasperation and delusion through their perversion of His agency. The watchful and zealous hatred which, according to the Acts of the Apostles, was ever excited by the announcement of Christ’s death and resurrection, bears witness to this. The Roman power, whose representative, Pontius Pilate, had, in his weak and false hesitation, suffered himself to be seduced to the execution of the Jewish designs against Jesus, received by this execution its first impulse to an inimical disposition towards Christ. It was in the sphere of this inimical disposition, that the accounts propagated by Tacitus and Suetonius² concerning Christ were formed. Even in the high places of Roman life, the spirits of the day very soon received a faint impression of that great spiritual conflict and victory, whose effects were from henceforth to agitate the world.

This inimical representation of the agency of Christ, expressed in obscure traditions concerning Him, was surrounded by a more general sphere of indefinite astonishment at the spiritual power He displayed. Under such an impression did Josephus write of Christ.³

But within the circle of the recipient minds of the elect, the impression left by Christ’s personality was a bright and blessed one, condemning the old life of sin, and implanting the new life of love and righteousness. Here, then, the remembrance of Christ was a continual festival. In this form it must, according to its very nature, so outweigh and outlast, illuminate and purify, all the other remembrances of believers, and bring them into inward connection with itself, as to become the enlightening and penetrating principle of all those other remembrances. How could it indeed fail to become the principle of all the remembrances of Christians, when it became the principle of their whole Christian life?

The historical word, by which the Gospel narrative has been handed down to us, corresponds with the historical power of the Gospel life. These two aspects of Christ’s continual operation are fundamentally identical. Consequently, the Church may either be regarded as a lasting and real remembrance of Him, or as the continuous operation of His life. As the moon, though a thousand times more distant, is nearer to our room than the lamp in a neighbour’s house, because its effect is a thousand times more powerful, and as the sun again is infinitely nearer than the moon, though with respect to space only, it again is situated at an immensely greater distance,⁴ so is Christ, though so far removed from us as to His glorified body by the external relations of space, infinitely nearer to us by the power of His operation than any man in our immediate neighbourhood; nay, He is with us, and through faith. He is in us, by the power of this His operation. These are the ideal relations of space. So also the geography of the spirit and of love has very different estimates of nearness and distance on earth from the geography of mathematical science. And that which is here said of space, is equally applicable to time. According to the Christology of space, Christ is said to be here, in virtue of the effect He produces, just as the sun is said, in virtue of what it effects, to be in and on the earth. According to the Christology of time, or according to the chronology of the Christian mind, the Church, when celebrating the remembrance of the Lord, and proclaiming it to others, rightly says, ‘He was but just now here, and He will soon come again: He comes quickly.’ The Christology of time is not understood by those⁵ who say that the apostles were misled by an enthusiastic excitement, in their announcements that the Lord’s coming was at hand. They were but giving expression to that elevation of feeling, wherewith the mature Christian, as an heir of God and of eternity, looks upon time, so that to him, as to his God, according to the measure of his spirituality, a thousand years are as one day. In this respect, the highest conception of time may be explained by a still higher. The glorious entry of Luther into Worms is fresher and nearer to us, than the more modern disputes of Lutheran theologians; and Hermann the Cheruscan seems but just now to have led the Germans to victory over Rome, while the last trial for witchcraft seems already quite ancient history. But the memory of Christ, of His death and victory, surpasses all other human remembrances in ever youthful freshness. The ever-enduring Church of Christ is His ever-enduring memorial.

But we have here more especially in view that remembrance of Him still living in the historic word, which must have originated in the apostolic Church. This remembrance must of necessity be proportionate to the unique effect produced by Christ’s life, and therefore infinitely profound and powerful, fully developed and definite, and, in its totality or completeness, blessed and sacred. The men whom Christ had apprehended, might forget everything else; but Him, His work, His deeds, His sufferings, the manifestations of His glory, they could not forget. The Spirit of Christ, poured out upon them at the conclusion of His work, was the unifying principle which connected all their remembrances, the vital element which renewed and preserved them. They must have felt themselves impelled by the mighty effect Christ’s life had upon them, to be ever recalling to each others’ memories, and proclaiming to the world, the great facts upon which it rested. Their life was blended with the Gospel history; their reconciliation to God and their salvation were identified with it; hence the glorious treasure of their Gospel reminiscences could not possibly fade. They saw in the life of the Lord Jesus the supreme miracle which had brought deliverance to the world: its facts, therefore, must have been continually filling them with silent, deep, and glorious emotion. ‘It was about the tenth hour,’ says John, when relating his first meeting with Jesus (Joh 1:39). He could no more forget the hour, than a mother could forget that wherein her child had been born into the world. Mary kept all the sayings which glorified her Saviour-Son, in her heart. ‘We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard,’ declared the apostles, before the Sanhedrim. No man can be hindered from proclaiming those great, most certain, and most glorious experiences, in which his own spiritual life originated, and by which it has continued to grow.⁶ Hence the preaching of the apostles was a giving vent to those words of joy which gushed forth from the abundance of their own animated reminiscences. It has of late been asserted that the apostles did not set forth the Gospel history, but only announced the dogmas of Christianity. Evangelical metaphysics perhaps? But the very first dogma of Christianity—the Word was made flesh—is also an historical fact. And therefore the sublimity and vigour of apostolic teaching consisted in the fact, that they proclaimed the word of Christ in its living union with facts; or, in other words, that the facts of His life, and especially of His death and resurrection, were set forth in the ideality of His word; these being the two parts of the living unity, in which this teaching was delivered to our faith. Certainly these two great facts, the death and resurrection of Christ, formed the key-note of apostolic testimony. But could the death of Christ have obtained its own special importance to their hearers, if they had not also depicted the chief features of His life? And could they have represented His resurrection as a certain fact, if they had not also narrated His subsequent appearances? It is certain that the Evangelists made it a part of their task to hand down copious details of this kind. Whence, then, should they have derived their materials, if not from the communications of the witnesses who held immediate intercourse with the Lord? These witnesses were the living Gospel; the Church, with which the most copious, the clearest, and brightest reminiscences of Jesus were as entirely one as the scent of a fresh-blown rose is one with the rose.

Those writers who, in our days, are beginning to deny all certainty and trustworthiness to apostolic tradition with respect to the life of Jesus, seem to have lived so long in the region of modern literature and periodicals, where one wave so quickly swallows up another, where the latest novelty so rapidly fades before another, and where one point of view is so hastily abandoned for another, as to have gradually lost the power of forming a clear conception of the fervour, uniqueness, and power of the apostolic memory. As children of time, serving the temporal god, the process-god, with a memory revolving in constant change of impressions, about the feverish unrest of an unstable heart, they are the very antipodes to those happy men who, living by the power of Christ’s Spirit with Him in His eternity, preserved in the tranquil depths and fervent emotions of their hearts, and in constant sabbatic peace, the most divine and solemn remembrance of His life, His death, and His glorification; in whose inner life the facts of the New Testament ever continued novelties, retaining the original brilliancy of blooming flowers, of molten silver, or of the eternal thoughts of God. In our days of worldliness and newspapers, the contents of the memory are ever more and more perplexed and saddened by the unrest of the heart; while the great experiences and remembrances of the apostolic Church maintained their imperishable brightness and beauty, because they were founded upon a heart-life penetrating to the depths of eternity, reposing on God, filled with all the fulness of Christ.

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Notes

While we may agree with Hug (Einleit. ins N. T.), that the apostles did not perhaps in public assemblies so recount the history of Christ’s life according to its circumstances and sequence, that their statements could have been formed into historical books; it does not follow that in their instruction, ‘so far as it was merely historical,’ they limited themselves ‘to the sufferings of the Lord, His death, and that pillar of their doctrine, His resurrection.’ When Weisse appeals, in support of this view (die ev. Gesch. p. 21, &c.), to the small amount of Gospel narrative contained in the apostolic Epistles, the great difference between the oral agency of the apostles, by which they founded churches, and the written agency, by which they built them up, is not sufficiently borne in mind.⁷

1) [See an eloquent passage in Ewald’s Geschichte Christus’ und seiner Zcit., Pref. xi. (Ed. 1857). ‘For all time,’ he says, ‘ this divine-human life has become the most brilliant light ; and who can still love error, who can hang his head and doubt, if once he has opened his eyes in this light? In what time, iu what condition, in what breast does not this inextinguishable light shine ?’—ED.]

2) Tacitus, Ann. xv. 44; Suetonius, Vita Claud. c. 25.

3) Josephus, Ant. xviii. 3, 3.

4) Distant as the sun may be from our eyes, so soon as it is perceived, it is, by means of the rays proceeding from it, immediately in our eye. There is between the seeing eye, as such, and the seen sun, as such, no space which can hinder the vision and consequent enjoyment of the sun; the beam brings it as near as is necessary for the eye to see it, without injury. All that we can enjoy of the sun comes to us in its beams; by its beams all space between us and it is as good as annihilated. Thus do I, by means of a sensible image, form a conception of the agency of Christ, while He is at a distance from me, and personally visible and present in some one of the heavens.—See Lavater's Jesus Christus stets dasselbc, p. 31.

5) [In the last instance by Renan (Vie de Jesus, p. 275): ‘Que tout cela fut pris à la lettre par les disciples et par le maitre lui-méme à certains moments, c’est ce qui éclate dans les écrits du temps avec une evidence absolue. Si la premitre génération chrétienne a une croyance profonde et constante, c’est que le monde est sur le point de finir,’ &c. What Jowett has to say on this ‘error of the apostles’ may be seen in his Epistles of St Paul, i. p. 120.—ED.]

6) No Christian can be forbidden to bear testimony to his own blessedness in fellowship with Christ; this inalienable right makes him truly a preacher, as the right of hearty intercession makes him truly a priest.

7) [The whole of the third chapter of Westcott's Introduction to the Study of the Gospels should be consulted on this point, and especially the remarks on the form of the apostolic preaching, p. 158.—ED.]