Section I

the relations of time and place among which Christ appeared

It was as a prophet of Israel that Christ entered upon His public ministry; His abode was in an inconsiderable district of the Jewish land; His age was coincident with about the middle of that of the first Roman emperors. With respect to the ordinary view of the circumstances of the world, He lived, as far as locality is concerned, in a corner of the world, and, as far as time is concerned, in the midst of a great period. With respect, however, to the proper and actual view of the circumstances of the world, His appearance constituted the fulness of time. The pre-christian development of mankind came to a close with Him; the æon of the ancient times was ended. The maturity of the ancient times was manifested by great points of union in its several tendencies, and altogether became, by the strictest inward relations, one great unity, in which the significance of the time was concentrated. In the life of Jesus, all the powers of the world concurred to bring about the catastrophe which was at once the world’s condemnation and deliverance.

In Christ Himself was perfected the development of the true lineage of humanity, of the sacred commerce between heaven and earth, or of the christological life. Heavenly humanity appeared in the Son of man in its concentration, in its personal unity, filled with the quickening Spirit, and in this divine fulness, mighty to save. Thus did Christ appear as the honour and climax of human nature, its positive unity and holiness.

But the appearance of this positive unity was met by its negative; viz., by the fact that humanity, as a whole, had now come to a state of mature receptivity. Humanity had now become a world (οἰκουμένη) both needing, and capable of, redemption; a world united in government, civilization, and language; in preparedness for the manifestation of God in the flesh; in religious knowledge and expectation; by the exigencies of ruin, by despair, by yearning and desire, had the gates been widened, and the world’s door thrown open for the King of glory to come in. The earthly glory of Judaism had decayed, and its best instruments were therefore capable of understanding and accepting the Messiah of a spiritual world, the King of the kingdom of truth. The heathen world, on the contrary, was, through some of its noblest sons, the proselytes of the gate and of righteousness, everywhere acquainted with the actual historical Monotheism of the synagogue,¹ which must be well distinguished from heathen abstract Monotheism—a Monotheism merely philosophical in its tenets, and cowardly in its utterances—and had reached just that frame of mind in which only the highest, the ultimate word of this Monotheism, the Gospel, was wanting. This unity, which we, according to the analogy of polar relations, designate negative, corresponded with the positive unity: the fulness of life, and the life to be filled, the positive and negative pleroma (Joh 1:16; Eph 1:23), were mutually present; hence the fulness of the time was come, the beginning of the marriage festival, in which the union of the Lord with His Church is to take place.

The incarnation of the Son of God and the glorification of humanity did not, however, take place among a sinless generation, but in a world fallen and degenerate. Hence this manifestation could only be effected under the grave form of redemption, the redemption only under the terrible form of a sentence of death. The concentration of light was encountered by the concentration of darkness; and as, on the one side, the Holy One of Israel united with the world’s receptivity, so, on the other side, did the corrupt external pietism of Israel, which ripened into obduracy in presence of the actual holiness of Christ, unite with the corruption of the heathen world, which had now attained its climax, in the resolution to reject Him, and therefore in the guilt by which the unbelieving world condemned itself. It was not till this sentence was passed, that Christ could be perfected as the Redeemer of such a world (Heb 2:10), or the world become capable of receiving such a Redeemer (Gal 6:14).

The corruption of the spurious, externalized piety among that chosen nation, whose external aspect had symbolically represented, and whose inmost nature had actually represented, the positive pole of the manifestation, appears in the fact, that in the greater number of its members, the pretension to external holiness was most decidedly prominent where there was most lack of it internally. But the spuriousness of this pretension, and the completeness of the corruption therein manifested, were displayed in the three forms it assumed, which, as separate parties, were utterly at variance with each other. The most respected and dominant sect was that of the Pharisees, the casuistic and trifling interpreters of the law; their holiness consisted chiefly in that rank over-growth of precepts and observances with which they stifled and corrupted revelation. They were strangers to the spiritual character of Old Testament Christology; the increase of forms and observances was to them in the place of the increase of life; while the reform or criticism of their traditions was an abomination to them. But while the Pharisees designated the whole mass of legal tradition in Israel as sacred, the Sadducees left to the Old Testament development of revelation only its first beginnings; their holiness consisted in converting the Mosaic law into a final, deistic, moral law, and boasted of righteousness in an observance of this mutilation of it. Thus they misconceived the development of the theocratic seed exhibited in the prophets, and deadened the germinating power and vitality of the Mosaic law itself by their view of it; their standpoint being the miserable one of an abstract negation. Besides these corruptions, which may be distinguished, the one as an adding to, the other as a taking from revelation, there was but a third possible, namely, its alteration. This was represented in the system of the Essenes, who sought their holiness in separating the spiritual elements of the theocracy from their true connection, and exhibiting them mingled with heathen notions, in an unreal, highly incorporeal, and devoted life. In their abhorrence of the concrete, they sacrificed all that was corporeal and social in revelation to a spiritualistic separatism, which is always skilful in exhibiting isolated breathings and ideas of the divine life in special dedications and exercises, but can never attain to the dedication of the whole actual life, because it is its property to contemn the universality of revelation in the popular Church of God. The first of these sects ruled, according to their own peculiar notions, over the superstition of the nation, and its external worship; the second, as a cowardly element of scepticism, manifested both in the opinions and by the reserve of the upper classes, pervaded the theocratic government with dismal effect; the third lived in voluntary excommunication, which it sought to palliate by a pacifying demeanour towards the sacred rites of the people. It is quite in accordance with the character of these sects, that the Pharisees should especially urge on the crucifixion of Christ, that the Sadducees should seek to suppress the announcement of His resurrection; while the Essenes kept as far aloof from the scene and events of Christ’s life as if they had not existed, on which account they are never met with as active agents in the Gospel narrative.

The corrupt pietism of Israel was quite prepared, under these three forms, to misconceive the true glory of Israel, the Messiah, and either to reject Him or expose Him to the heathen, nay, to deliver Him up to the jurisdiction of the heathen world.

The maturity of heathen corruption is evidenced by the fact, that the Romish power was capable, at the instance of Jewish fanaticism, of perpetrating, under the forms of their proud and perfected administration of justice, that great ‘judicial murder’ against the person of Christ. Pilate, the powerful representative of the Roman Emperor and of the civilization of his universal dominion, suffers himself to bend, to crack, to break, in his threefold capacity of ruler, judge, and philosopher, before the storm of Jewish fanaticism. The power of the Roman eagle becomes subservient to the fury of a conquered and hated people; the venerable and exalted Roman Forum passes sentence of death upon acknowledged innocence; the aristocratic and ironical philosopher, who penetrates the motives of Christ’s enemies, and smiles at His doctrine as an inoffensive and harmless enthusiasm, lowers himself through fear of the people into the executioner of fanaticism. Pilate, however, does not thus stand before us merely as an individual, he represents the secular spirit of his times; and his soldiers, by their active co-operation in the crucifixion, express the savage temper of those legions which conquered and governed the world. Thus an alliance of hierarchy, despotism, and revolution, the latter being represented by the Jewish people, together with an alliance of superstition and unbelief in the Pharisees and Sadducees, took place at the crucifixion of Christ, in which the union of the world in its enmity against Christ, was announced in a world-famed and decisive incident. As however that world of light which is opposed to this world of darkness, manifests its life in its contrasted positive and negative poles, so do we perceive in this alliance also, the contrast of positive Jewish hatred, and negative heathen irresolution, through whose union that condemnation of Christ, which condemned the whole world, took place.

Since, however, in Christ perfect love exists in presence of the world’s complete banded hatred, a struggle necessarily ensues, in which love is outwardly subdued, but inwardly victorious. The world is condemned while it is saved; its entire ruin is evidenced in the fact it accomplishes; it rejects its own honour, its glory, by rejecting Christ. Thus it is outdone and convicted by the justice of God; it loses its right to live and to boast of eternal righteousness. But the same world is saved while it is condemned; this its extremity of guilt renders its need of salvation complete, and its salvation is perfected by the victory of love in its innocent faithful Head and Saviour. The victory of Christ’s love over the world’s enmity is the victory of God’s grace over the curse.

Thus did Christ enter the midst of the world and of time, and lay the foundation of a new æon surpassing the old time, or rather He founded this new æon upon the old time. The reception of His Gospel is the beginning of eternal (æonian) life, its rejection the beginning of eternal misery. Hence the forces which concurred in bringing about the holy catastrophe of the Gospel are continually reappearing in the great constellations of the world’s history; the same forms, the same contrasts, in ever-increasing approaches to universality and maturity, till at length the perfect universality of the last struggle between light and darkness, cannot but introduce the end of the world’s career.

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Notes

1. The Cross of Christ symbolically denotes the central point of this world and of time, towards which all the contrasts of the world converge, to terminate the ancient forms of their agency and to develop themselves again under new ones. The world confronts the one Christ as a concentrated unity; the Jews and the Romans, the representatives of all religious and secular culture, all ranks and conditions, hierarchy, monarchy, democracy, were united in the coalition which perpetrated the crucifixion, as well as all human sins, all the bad passions of mankind, and all unclean spirits. This contrast—Christ in the power of light, the world under the power of darkness—expresses indeed the mightiest struggle, the most decided dualism. The true unity, however, which this incident produced, is that of the providential government of God and the heart of Christ,—the providential government of God, which, by the doom of crucifixion, brought to perfection, in the very heat of the battle, the redeeming work of Christ, and the need of redemption on the part of man; the heart of Christ, in which love, as infinite love to the world, endured with infinite compassion the world’s condemnation, and as infinite love to the Father, welcomed and grasped in this sentence both deliverance and reconciliation. But out of this unity arises a new contrast; the Crucified One, who gives Himself to the believing world as its Saviour, is to the unbelieving world a sign of condemnation. In this great event are seen all the great powers of the world in their most powerful state of excitement. Israel is divided into the crucifying people, and the crucified Lord. Israel delivers Christ to the heathen. The whole world crucifies Him; hence it appears as a world subdued by Heathenism. The true Israel, in its concentration and perfection in Christ alone, opposes it; for the Jews who crucified Him were then, in a theocratic sense, heathens and nothing else; nay, the last and worst among the heathen, since they had thus cast away their Israelite glory. The heathen, however, were no longer mere heathen, after Christ had been delivered up, and had delivered Himself up, to them by the surrender of love. The receptive among them now formed a unity together with the receptive of Israel; nay, it was they who formed the majority of these receptive ones, and consequently formed also, by their reception of Christ, the people of His possession. Thus the parts played by Israel and the Gentiles in the world’s history were changed; the poles changed places with each other under the influence of the great storm—the first became last. This effect of the Cross expresses, on one side, the infinitely delicate interworking of all relations in the history of the world, and between heaven and earth; on the other, the infinite intelligence of the overruling divine mind amidst the interworking of all these relations.

2. It is a defective view of the Jewish sects, to describe the Pharisees alone as the self-righteous among them, since they rather did but exhibit one special kind of self-righteousness, viz., the casuistic, while the Sadducees were guilty of rationalistic, and the Essenes of spiritualistic, ascetic self-righteousness. In this respect the names of the several sects are significant. The name of the Pharisees, פְִרוּשִׁין, is derived by Suidas from פָּרַשׁ in the sense of to separate, to distinguish, so that the Pharisees represent those who were distinguished from the other Jews by their holiness-set apart, pious ones (see Winer, J. W. B. ii. 290). But the title would, in this sense, be far more applicable to the Essenes than to the Pharisees, who lived specially among the people. If, however, we consider the general meaning of Pharisaism, we find that it exhibits exactly that bitter separatism in which corrupt Judaism appeared in the presence of Heathenism, and in its separation there from. Thus the Pharisees were, with respect to the heathen, those complete separatists which the Jews in general are said to have been, according to the assumption of rationalism, but which, as merely Israelites, they certainly were not. ‘This tendency,’ says Winer, ‘was probably first impressed upon them after the restoration of the Jewish commonwealth in Palestine (in the time of Ezra), and is properly the characteristic of exclusive Judaism, as distinguished from Hebraism. This disposition very naturally evoked another, viz., Sadduceeism. But certainly neither formed sects, properly so called, in an ecclesiastical or political sense, before the period of the native Jewish princes (the Maccabees). The effect of this pharisaic effort in presence of the heathen world was manifest, not only in the behaviour observed toward the heathen themselves, but also toward those who seemed to be infected by their blood and spirit, toward Samaritans and publicans. (Comp. Josephus, Antiq. xvii. 2, 4 and xviii. 1.) It may be questioned whether the word Pharisee may not be referred to act. Part. פּוֺרֵשׁ, as others have conceived; the word פּוֹרֵשׁ meaning actual separation, strict severance, subtle distinction. This expresses the relation in which the Pharisees stood to the law: they explained it as discriminating casuists, developing their precepts and observances from it. In any case, the Pharisees were self-righteous, or, to define them more clearly, observers of traditions and rites. The Sadducees also made pretensions to legal righteousness. Epiphanius (Hæres. i. 14) derives their name from the fact that they thus named themselves from a notion of possessing a righteousness corresponding to their view of the law (the law in its mutilation). If, however, the word cannot be directly derived from צַדִּיק (righteous), but must first be referred to a proprium, צַדּוֹק,² yet the relation between this noun and the adjective צַדִּיק is unmistakeable, and must have been significant to a sect which boasted of fulfilling a pure and sharply defined law. The Sadducees, then, were self-righteous in the sense of obedience to a revealed duty-rationalists seeking righteousness in duty. The Essenes, finally, sought to be righteous in the sense of entire severance from the common and profane, in virtue of strict devotedness, renunciation, and religious exercises, nay, even of inward devotedness. This pretension is evidenced in their whole mode of life, and expressed by their name, which is a mutilation of חֲסִדִים (ὅσιοι), the pious, the holy, and at all events denotes an internal as well as an external piety. Even this common characteristic of pretensions to holiness, expresses the alienation of these tendencies from Christianity. With respect to the Old Testament, however, they represent three separate kinds of corruption. The principle of outward piety which animates Pharisaism, poisons religion, and forces it into a wild and rank luxuriance of precepts and observances. The principle of doubt which governs Sadduceeism, not only cuts off prophecy, that noble plant of the theocracy, as a weed, but even kills its roots. The Thorah is to this school only a literal codex; hence it denies that the doctrine of the resurrection is contained therein, just as unspiritual rationalism is unable to discover it in the entire Old Testament. Thus Sadduceeism properly represents a belief in a mutilated revelation; while Essenism, on the other hand, represents an actual alteration of revelation. The relations of rank among its members are opposed to the institution of the Church of God; the legal celibacy of the majority, to the Old Testament consecration of marriage; aversion to anointing with oil, and avoidance of participation in the temple sacrifices (comp. Neander’s Life of Jesus Christ, p. 40, note), denote a spiritualism which had overstepped connection with the theocracy (Joseph. Bell. Jud. ii. 8; Philo, quod probus liber). When the youthful education of Christ was formerly attributed to the Essenes, this was a proof that the true relation of this sect to the economy of the kingdom of God was not yet understood. Its morbid spiritualism points to dualistic assumptions, to heathen Gnostic elements, especially expressed in its view that the body is the prison of the soul (Joseph. Bell. Jud. ii. 8, 11). Consequently the relations of this tendency explain the fact, that it was idealized by Philo. Even the views of the three parties, respecting the relations between God and man, were one and all unchristological; all that happened being attributed by the Essenes to fate, by the Sadducees to human freedom, by the Pharisees partly to fate, partly to human freedom (Josephus, Antiq. xiii. 5, 9, and Bell. Jud. ii. 8, 14). That elements existed in each of these tendencies,—namely, piety in Pharisaism, a struggle for spiritual freedom in Sadduceeism, and the cultivation of the inner life in Essenism,—which in noble minds might lead to an alliance with Christianity, is not denied by what we have advanced.³

3. When Christ was born, Judea, though dependent upon Rome, had still a king of its own (Herod). When He was crucified, it had already been for some time under the government of the Romans, after the proscription of the ethnarch Archelaus, Pontius Pilate being the sixth governor who ruled over the country. According to ancient theocratic privileges, this subjection would have been but a temporary visitation. The delivering up, however, of Christ to the Gentiles extinguished the ancient theocratic rights of the nation. When the return of Israel to the faith, and their national restoration, are announced in our days, such an event is quite in conformity with the prophetic promise; but when the reinstatement of the nation in its ancient privileges in the kingdom of God is promised, this is entirely opposed, not only to the priesthood of the universal Church of Christ over all nations, but also to the fact that the hereditary theocratic rights of Israel were forfeited by the crucifixion of Christ.

4. On the notion of the Æֶon, compare the work, Unsere Unsterblichkeit, und der Weg zu derselben, Kempten, Dannheimer 1836, p. 12. Æֶon or eternity is not that which has no end and no beginning. ֶon is nature returning in its vital movement from hidden beginnings to developments also hidden.—Æֶon is the inward period of development of things, the inward time of things.’

1) [The leavening of the heathen world by Jewish influences, the condition of the Jewish people themselves, and the prevalent expectation of a Messiah, are excellently treated by Ewald (Geschichte Christus und seiner Zeit, p. 55, &e., 2d ed.). And besides the Church histories, see on these same points Bishop Blomfield’s Traditional Knowledge of a Promised Redeemer. Much also may be learnt from Trench’s exquisite Hulsean Lectures on Christ the Desire of all nations.—ED.]

2) According to the explanation by which the Rabbis derived the word from Sado, a founder of this sect, who is said to have been a disciple of Antigonus Socho, whose instructor, Simeon the Just, lived in the time of Alexander the Great, [Antigonus was president of the Sanhedrim 300-260 years before Christ, and taught that God was to be served out of pure love, and not from fear of punishment or hope of reward, from which doctrine Sadoc concluded that there was no future world of retribution.—ED.]

3) [According to Neander, the Sadducees were less likely to embrace Christianity than either of the other sects, For fuller information on the Jewish sects, see Drusius, de tribus sectis Judeorum, which has been incorporated by Triglandius with other works on kindred subjects, and published in two vols, 4to. Delft, 1703.—ED.]