SECTION VIII

the plan of Jesus

It was the blessed result of the temptation which Jesus passed through in the wilderness, that the whole course, as it was to be developed in perfect fidelity to God, was shaped clearly before His eyes, and settled in the choice of His heart. When He wrestled with the tempter, who wished to take from Him the attested evidence of His divine mission, the whole evidence unrolled itself, and He grasped it as a clear plan of His career. The first man passed beyond his former condition of life by transgression; the second by the preservation of His righteousness. When He rejected the satanic plan in all its parts, He gained the most definite and perspicuous counterpart of it, the plan of His future, of His earthly sojourn.

May we be allowed to describe this ideal conception of His career, which Christ gained by the temptation, as His own plan? The term is at all events easily misunderstood, and at the best is feeble in relation to the great thought which in this case it must bear; and yet it is not easy to find a substitute for it. Christ gained in the wilderness a distinct survey of His real course through life. But the most powerful, freest self-determination was connected with this survey, which might, therefore, be regarded as His choice. He had chosen His life’s course when He returned from the wilderness. But this choice was not merely dynamic, but a deliberate arrangement of various parts-an internal programme—the ideal delineation of His pilgrimage. If we seek for the most suitable word to designate this ideal draught of the career of Jesus, we shall be led back to the word Plan.¹

Not only does reflection form plans, but enthusiasm. Plan, indeed, often stands in contrast to the simple, noble frankness of disposition as a product of calculating design. But the discipline of the Spirit which refines the enthusiasm that pours itself forth irregularly, and which leads to clearness of perception respecting its functions, also compels to the formation of a plan. Not only civil concerns, diplomatic negotiations, and political intrigues rest upon definite plans, but still more the glorious works of art. A perfect work of art is, in its essential characteristics, prepared before its actual execution. Now it would be decidedly at variance with Christ’s life, if we were to admit that He had not reached this ideal formation of His life in His inner man, but proceeded to His work with a blind enthusiasm. The New Testament age begins from the first in a decided consciousness, which is in unison with the highest rapture of inspiration. This is the specific nature of Christianity, that, on the one hand, its enthusiasm is not pathological or pythical, and that, on the other, its clearness of spirit and consciousness is not reflection or enlightening of the finite by the finite. Therefore provision was made that Christ might enter on His career with perfected consciousness and developed distinctness.

We have already seen that Christ’s plan could not be that of a political Messiah. Christ would have contradicted His own nature and calling, if He had wished to erect the political transformation of the world on the rotten basis of the corruption, religious and moral, of the ancient world. Even John the Baptist was far above such modern, demagogical ideas, to say nothing of Christ. But if Christ had first of all proceeded in such a false direction, and had been punished in it by failure, and thus thrown into the purely spiritual direction, after such a check He could not possibly have accomplished the pure ideal work of the world’s redemption. We may without any hesitation affirm that this would have been a fatal blow to the doctrine, precluding, that is, its application to moral relations. For a false swing of the pendulum, when it is over, is always followed by a counter vibration which is sure to produce a one-sidedness, even if it does not rebound again into the false. But a one-sidedness, such as might prove an ornament to the life of an Augustin, would form a remediless defect in the life of Jesus.² And such a one-sidedness there would have been, if Christ had wished to confine His mission and agency for all ages to the spiritual. The institution, of the holy sacrament clearly proves that Christ intended to take possession of the whole phenomenal world. The sacraments represent this taking possession in symbolically significant beginnings. They form the germ of the world’s transformation; and since they constitute what belongs to the essence of the Church, we may regard the Church as the seed-corn of Christ’s commonwealth.

It was therefore Christ’s leading thought in the predetermination of His career, that He wished to lay the foundation of a new world deep in the spiritual life of humanity, by spiritual operations. Since He had descended into the depths of the world’s corruption which confronted Him in the temptation, even to the point where He could seize and destroy it in its foundations, He saw clearly that in all-subduing love, in the firmest confidence, in perfect humility, and with the greatest boldness of spirit, He must go down even to hell; that He could find the world’s deliverance only in the most awful world’s judgment, and even in the deepest death of His own life. Thus was He obliged to lay the foundation of His work deep in the foundations, or rather in the abysses, of the spiritual world. The more He thus measured the spiritual depths of His work, the fainter must have been the prospect of bringing it into manifestation in the days of His earthly pilgrimage; but the more clearly must He have seen before Him the whole world-historical descent into hell, which He, and with Him the Church, had to experience in the world, and the more must the future unfolding of His economy in the world have appeared as the bright image of an unchangeable glory, as an infinitely splendid ascension to heaven. But especially it appeared to the Lord absolutely necessary to veil the consciousness of His divine dignity and Messiahship as a great mystery from the profane mind of His nation. The Jews could not hear of the Messiah without being intoxicated with political fanaticism on His account, or with hierarchical fanaticism, incurring guilt towards Him even to death. And yet it was absolutely needful that men should learn to know Him as the Messiah in order to find salvation in Him. Hence it was Christ’s first business to veil or unveil the mystery of His inner life with the clearest foresight of redeeming love, according to the measure of the spiritual necessities of the world. Thus in the wilderness He carefully veiled Himself before the tempter, in the garb of a plain man, a pious Jew. He expressed the glory of His inner life in Scripture passages, in, if we may so say, catechetical words. And when the Jews wished to make Him a king, when the demon of political enthusiasm began to work, He withdrew from the excited multitude and retired apart to pray. When the demoniacs proclaimed the fact of His Messiahship, which they had perhaps become cognizant of by a morbid relation of the soul to His consciousness, He rebuked them. He trusted Himself to no one, for He well knew what was in man (Joh 2:24). It is an evidence of the heavenly fervour which His heart maintained under all this caution, that He at once made known His dignity to the Samaritan woman; that almost immediately He told this poor sin-laden female that He was the Messiah (Joh 4:26). To her He ventured to reveal His Messianic dignity, for in Samaria there was not the danger connected with this revelation which in Judea made such a revelation impossible. And herein the power of His self-determination is manifest, which enabled Him to control the ardour of His soul, that He guarded His inner man with so perfect a mastery in humility from the profanation of the Jews. How long did Christ wait before He raised the conviction of the disciples themselves to full certainty that He was the Messiah! But it is a fact of appalling solemnity, that He did not impart the secret of His Messianic glory to the head of the nation, the high priest, till it had been demanded of him as a judicial confession, and the non-recognition of His real dignity had so far prevailed, that this confession was the occasion of His death (Mat 26:64). Not till then was His secret fully secured from the boundless chiliastic worldliness which confronted Him, when He divulged it in the most solemn manner before the Sanhedrim of His nation, and not till then was completed the veiling of Christ’s life from all the profane spirits and thoughts in the world. With the crown of thorns and the reed sceptre, He came into the midst of the world’s history in a form in which He could be manifest only by His spirit to the best, the elect of men. And still the cloud of Christ’s world historical ignominy ever veils the holy of holies of His nature from the eyes of those who would turn spiritual glory into carnal. But though Christ, at the beginning of His public life, was firmly resolved to use the name of Messiah only with the greatest caution, since the Jews would have cherished a radically false notion of Him, as soon as they received Him under this name; yet, in His divine truthfulness, He could not help designating His unique nature by a corresponding expression. For this purpose He found the phrase the Son of Man, which is employed in the prophecies of Daniel (7:13). Jewish expectation had not laid hold of this expression, as of the other Old Testament designations of the Messiah,³ and yet it was as characteristic as any other. It gave prominence to exactly that side in the nature of Christ which was to form the special redeeming counterpoise to the illusions of the Jews and of the world. The Jews expected in their Messiah the Son of God. This Son of God was, indeed, to be also a man, but not in the free universality of the human, but in the sense of pharisaic Judaism, and in the sense of a superhuman royal dignity—a demon-like Jew of extraordinary power. To this morbid expectation, Christ opposed His humanity and humaneness when He called Himself the Son of man. He wished above all things to be known as a true man-as a poor pilgrim (Mat 8:20)—as a man of the meanest appearance, who might easily be misjudged (Mat 12:32)—as a child of man who, like every other, was subject to the eternal decrees of God (Mat 26:24); yea, as one who was looked down upon contemptuously by mankind, despised and rejected; who was to be the most marked man on the scale of human misery (Mar 8:31). Already as such a human being, belonging to the human race, in the reality of His life and sufferings the Lord contradicted the fantastic, orientally exaggerated image of a king, by which the Jew celebrated his Messiah as superhumanly prosperous. But also in the sense of humaneness, of free philanthropy, Christ wished to represent mankind. In the forbearance with which He treated His infatuated adversaries (Luk 9:56); in the universality with which He devoted His saving love to all the lost (Luk 19:10); in the power, lastly, with which He exercised His humaneness in the heroic service of philanthropy in His redeeming death (Mat 20:28),—He presented the bright image of divine humanity as the soul of the life, in opposition to the Jewish pride of ancestry which would have subjected the human race to Judaism, divesting it as far as might be of its proper humanity. But this expressive demonstration of His being man leads to the conviction, that Jesus in a peculiar sense felt as man. He was not a singular particular man, but the Man simply as the Prince of men. But He was not only the Man simply, but the Son of man, since He was descended from humanity through the Virgin. Humanity had been pregnant with Him in its wrestling after the righteousness of God, in its aspirations it had brought Him forth under the operation of the Spirit. In the power of this descent He represented the second, higher generation of humanity; He is the second man, the man of the Spirit who is from heaven—the wondrous flower which appears as a bright flame of heaven on the top of the old, dark, decaying genealogical tree of earthly humanity (Joh 3:13).⁴ Christ therefore expressed the perfected spirituality of His natural human life when He came forward with this name. With this He demands of the hierarchy in Israel, of His own nation, and of the whole world, perfect regeneration by His Spirit (Joh 3:3). But although Christ adopted the title, Son of man, in order to express and carry out the contrariety between His life and the Messianic expectation of the Jews, and all the chiliastic worship in the world of noble birth and genius, yet He did not thereby wish to contradict in the least the true, prophetic Messianic expectation in Israel. He was perfectly aware that He was announced as the Son of man by the prophets, and also that this name denoted the Messiah. The words He uttered in the Sanhedrim—‘Hereafter ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven’ (Mat 26:64)—very distinctly allude to the designation of the Messiah in the prophecies of Daniel. Jesus had therefore consciously selected from among the titles of the Messiah, exactly that which marked Him as the future Judge of the world. But He chose it on this account, because, among the various designations of the theocratic Prince, it was the title that seemed suited to preserve or divulge His incognito among His nation, in proportion as it might be needful. But at that juncture, when the hierarchy were on the point of condemning the Messiah, He found it necessary to bring forward very distinctly the Old Testament use of this name in reference to the Messiah, and by which He was accustomed to appear in their midst, in order that they might not be able to accuse Him of having led them into a mistake respecting His nature by using a non-theocratic name. He did this in a declaration respecting the Son of man, which made it clear that He was the same wonderful Son of man of whom Daniel had prophesied. In the same degree, therefore, as this name served for the concealment of His nature, it also served for unveiling it to all susceptible spirits. It has, in the course of the world’s history, taken under its protection the doctrine of the incarnation of God against all idealist or gnostic attempts to explain away the personality of Christ;—the doctrine of the divine destiny of humanity, against all monkish or materialistic contempt of human life;—and lastly, the doctrine of the universal call of humanity to salvation, against the perversions of the doctrine of election;—with strong and powerful efficiency. In truth, this title of Christ encloses a richness of meaning which is continually unfolding itself with increasing glory, and can fully manifest its hidden splendour only when the Son of man shall summon the world before Him in His judicial glory.⁵ (Joh 5:27; Mat 25:31.)

When therefore the Lord was certain that He must veil the consciousness of His Messianic glory before the world, and could only unfold it with the greatest caution,—that the gradual disclosure of this dignity is the judgment of the world, and that its completed revelation will coincide with the final judgment, it was at the same time decided in His soul that He must abide under the law in Israel until the time of His personal glorification. He was, therefore, consciously ‘made under the law’ (Gal 4:4). He was obedient to human ordinances, as ordinances of God, even unto death, the death of the cross (Php 2:8), in order to communicate His divine-human life to the life of the world, to implant it in the world. In the apostle’s words just quoted the progressive stages of this obedience to the lowest depths are indicated. In the human jurisdiction to which the Lord was subjected, there appears a definite succession of stages in the historic exhibition of eternal ideal right in which He moved, as a peculiar life-element, one with His own life. The first form of historic right appears in the monotheistic original laws of the patriarchs (Joh 7:22). To these laws He was already bound by circumcision. Its second form appears in the theocratic national law of Israel given by Moses. This law also He acknowledged in His life and conduct (Joh 7:23), and intimated to the Jews that He was placed under it (Mar 10:19). Further, the historic right took a third form in the teachings of the prophets. These also were held sacred by the Lord, as He plainly showed by submitting to John’s baptism, which He did in order to fulfil all righteousness. These three historical forms of eternal right appeared to Him as the pure lineaments of ideal life—as the several outlines of revelation, which in His life attained their living realization; and so far He distinguishes them, taken together as holy writ, or as the law and the prophets, very distinctly from the later historical stage of order and right,—that is, from the maxims of the scribes, the decisions of the hierarchical government, and the administration of political power. The three former stages of right embrace the theocratical forms of historical right; the three latter, its hierarchical and political forms. But although in these latter forms of right He perceived great and serious misrepresentations of eternal right, and even flagrant contradictions, yet He valued them as regulations of life, to which He at all times rendered obedience in their limited sphere. We can therefore regard these forms as the second half of the stages of historical right. The ordinances of the elders form, then, the fourth historical unfolding of right: He also declares their national authority in express terms (Mat 23:2-3; Mat 23:23). The ecclesiastical government in Israel forms the fifth region of historical valid right. To this jurisdiction also He submitted with free recognition as an Israelite (Mat 5:22),⁶ even to death (Mat 26:64). Lastly, the sixth form of historical right is seen in the political authorities that confronted the Lord as an abstract, purely civil power. This power also He acknowledged in its sphere, as a power ordained by God (Mat 22:21) over the property and lives of those under it. He became obedient to this political right, even to the death of the cross, on the accursed tree which the Romans had planted in the land. Thus, from the stage of ideal right, which He specified as ‘from the beginning’ (Mat 19:8), from the first stage of which the right proceeds through all the stages, and which forms with them a cycle of seven stages of right, He descended to the lowest stage, and endured the extremest or most horrible destiny of the lowest stage—the cross, with entire resignation to the will of the Father. This obedience exhibits the historical consummation of the Incarnation, we might say, the historically satisfied consummation. But such an obedience Christ could not have rendered, if it had not been from the first His decided resolution. But the sharpness and decisiveness of His historical fidelity appear in all these spheres of right in the most luminous indications. He withdrew Himself from the people who would have made Him a king; for He felt Himself to be a subject—His kingdom was not of this world: this was His political obedience. On the demand of the Sanhedrim, He made the declaration on oath that He was the Messiah: thus He acted as a member of the Jewish commonwealth. He gave a reply to the scribes by answering them out of the Old Testament, and allowed their gnat-straining to pass as long as it did not contradict higher laws. He held the prophetic right sacred, with a strictness which, as we have seen, went beyond that of the Baptist. But he adhered to the Mosaic right with a decisiveness which even curbed the first enthusiastic liberalism of the disciples. He clearly saw that He must confine Himself and His ministry, during His earthly pilgrimage, to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Mat 15:24); and it is a very significant fact, that He granted aid to the Canaanitish woman only on the urgent intercession of His disciples. He could not begin His work among the heathen at the risk of destroying His work in Israel—that is, first of all, among His own disciples,—and therefore He let their intercession precede His aid. Just looking at this completeness of the national fidelity, we might assert that He was the most punctilious Jew, the King of the Jews. But He was so, because He was the Christ. His perfected love entered into all the conditions of its revelation arid victory, in the whole historic form of a servant, in which alone it could complete its work with heavenly freedom. The Lord in His ministry paid particular attention to the patriarchal right; in His plan for the extension of His kingdom He placed the Samaritans as theocratic Monotheists before the Gentiles (Act 1:8), and He gave as a reason for visiting Zaccheus the publican, that he also was a son of Abraham (Luk 19:9). Abstract cosmopolites and legal theorists have no notion of free love in this scrupulous attention to the conditions of historical fidelity.

But this attention to conditions in the life of Christ because it was a perfectly conscious act of pure love, and because it was in unison with His life, could appear only as a result of the purest self-limitation and of the freedom of His Spirit. He never could render historic obedience, so as to place Himself in contradiction to eternal right, to the divine righteousness which was His very life. Rather could He only so exhibit His fulfilling of the law, that, by virtue of the ideal feeling of right, He corresponded to the ideal life-point in the historic right itself, to the will of God in Him; and therefore He decidedly rejected every claim in which the historic right contradicted the ideal, or, which is the same thing, in which the lower right contradicted the higher. Wherefore from the first He could not allow the semblance to arise, of being in His inner man an unwilling servant of the existing public constitution. He wished His own historical obedience to be regarded as an act of freedom. Thus He preserved divine freedom even in submission to Pilate (Joh 18:36), and equally before the disciples (Mat 26:53) and before the armed band (ver. 55), and especially by His dignified silence before the Sanhedrim. With such an express preservation of His Messianic dignity He observed the Sabbath (Mat 12:8); He paid the temple-tax (Mat 17:27); and appealed to the testimony of John the Baptist (Joh 5:33-34), to the writings of Moses (Joh 5:46), and lastly, to His correspondence with the spiritual vision of Abraham (Joh 8:56; Joh 8:58). If especially we estimate, according to their full meaning, the words which He spoke before the Sanhedrim respecting His judicial glory, they will strike us as an appeal from their judgment to the tribunal of God, and as a summons to appear before His own tribunal at His second coming to judge the world.

These protestations of Jesus ought to secure the world from the false notion that He was fettered by its ordinances according to its own want of freedom. But His own life was ensured by the circumstance that He recognized, in the discharge of His historical obedience, the completion of His destiny and the fulfilment of Scripture (Mat 26:54). It was clear to Him that only in this way of self-renunciation could He attain to the most complete manifestation of Himself as bringing salvation to the world. The entire unfolding of the fidelity of His heart, of the holiness of His spirit, was possible only by means of this most complete obscuration of His glory. But in this sense He also fulfilled the law and His own destiny. His life gave a new shape and meaning to all the forms into which its contents were poured. By His political obedience He shed a lustre on the sphere of civil order, as a sphere of the all-powerful governing righteousness of God; He thereby made the civil obedience even of the oppressed free. He caused the suffering of the oppressed to appear as a suffering of national retribution (Joh 19:11), and the suffering of the innocent as a seed-time of blessing and honour. In the sphere of political relations, He always kept the domain of God separate from that of Cæsar; and since by this means he set the spirit and conscience at liberty, He sowed likewise the seeds of civil freedom. But His ecclesiastical obedience to the Sanhedrim must have put the final seal to His Messianic manifestation. The Sanhedrim rendered His cause this service, that it made Him attest His Messiahship on oath before the highest ecclesiastical judicature in the world, and it was chiefly owing to their opposition that the whole riches of His life were unfolded. The disputations of Jesus with the scribes laid the foundation for unveiling the New Testament in the Old, and for distinguishing the New Testament form of revelation from that of the Old. His faithful adherence to the prophets contributed to bring forward several features and stages of His life in all their spiritual depth and world-historical importance. Then, lastly, as to His relation to the law, He could not fail to perceive that the pure theocratic lineaments of the law were the outline of a life infinitely rich, namely, of His own, and that for that reason they must necessarily be transferred into the lines of eternal beauty, of the divine-human life, as soon as He filled them up with the contents of His own life. Under His breath all the buds on the thorn-bush of the Old Testament law must unfold, and the roses of the New Covenant expand in profusion. The law pronounces a curse on the transgressor, at the same time it announces a blessing, the blessedness of the righteous. In its negations it describes all the forms of the sinner; but in its positivity and unity it is the sketch of the holy life of the God-man. But in this deep reference to Christ, the so-called moral law—the civil social law of Moses—did not stand alone; the ceremonial, or ecclesiastical social law, was also included. It was a shadowy representation of the life and sufferings of Christ, so that every form of it acquired in the conduct of Christ a New Testament significance. The pilgrimages of Christ to attend the feasts of the law became the journeyings of free, beneficent love; and from the feast of the Passover bloomed forth the Holy Supper. But the types of this law were sufficient of themselves to reveal to the Lord the grievous termination of His life. If He had not been familiarized with the dark side of His future by the serious portents of His sacrificial death in the history of His childhood, by so many a bitter experience of His youth, and by the predictions of the prophets, yet the fearful symbolic language of the sacrificial system would have led to the same result. For He, in whose spirit the Theocracy was consummated, must certainly have known how to interpret the spirit of its signs. The same holds good of the theocratic dignities which were comprehended in the name of the Messiah. He would not have understood the official title of His own being, had He not been conscious that in the actual anointing of His spirit’s fulness all the theocratic offices and dignities were united according to their deepest meaning in His personality, and were to be realized in His vocation. He must have been perfectly aware that His being, as the complete revelation of the Father, was itself prophecy completed; that in His pure self-surrender to the Father, the full meaning of the sacerdotal office appeared, and it became His calling to give Himself for the life of the world; that, finally, His Spirit was the true, eternal King of humanity, and therefore by His Spirit He was to establish His kingdom in the world. Thus, in the consciousness of His Messianic dignity the chief outlines of His ministry were given. But these outlines came out more distinctly to His view by means of the lineaments of the law and the intimations of the prophets.

It was therefore evident to the Lord at the commencement of His public life, that he came to fulfil the law and the prophets; that is, to unfold by His life no less than by His teaching the whole ideal contents of those lineaments of the law and intimations of the prophets, according to the spirit from which they emanated. But it belonged to this fulfilment that He interpreted the three theocratic forms of the historic right by the ideal law, and that by the same law He adjusted the three hierarchico-political forms of the historic right—that, generally, He corrected the lower laws by the higher, and thus restored the true ideal order of ordinances in the exhibition of the supremacy and subordination of the various rights. The development of historic right, as it is conducted by the hierarchy or by political rulers (the civil power), appears oftentimes as a tedious gradual inversion of the eternal ordinances of right by which the undermost becomes changed to the uppermost. The rights of Cæsar often supplant the rights of God by being made rights of conscience; ecclesiastical regulations often paralyze the exposition of Scripture by quenching the Spirit; the expositor often obscures the prophets and law of God by false glosses. In this manner a slow and secret revolution is going on in a thousand ways under the surface of the most quiet historic conformity to the law, and an unbounded desolation is effected in the domain of the spiritual life. These insidious revolutions in the history of the world are sure to be done away with by reforming spirits. Thus Christ as a reformer confronted the revolutionary desolation which the hierarchy of His nation especially had caused. Generally, He vindicated in the widest extent the ideal order of the historical relations of right. He held the power of the magistrate sacred as ordained by God, and was subject to it in its sphere; but he would not be fettered by it in the sphere of His prophetic calling. When Herod, His prince, wished to scare Him away by artifice from the scene of His ministry in Galilee, He answered his messengers, ‘Go ye and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected’ (Luk 13:32). And when the same prince ‘hoped to have seen some miracle from Him, and questioned Him in many words, He answered him nothing’ (Luk 23:8-9). To Pilate He spoke of his sin, and stood in his presence as the King in the kingdom of truth. However, He appears to have acknowledged his judicial right, chiefly because He had been delivered to him by the Sanhedrim (Joh 18:34; Joh 19:11). For, in matters of Jewish ecclesiastical law, He regarded the Sanhedrim as the supreme court. But when the Sanhedrim or Pharisaism wished to obstruct Him in His higher dignity, in His prophetic calling, He gave way not a single step. Collisions on this ground He never shunned in the least: this is shown by the frequent cures He performed on the Sabbath. He pronounced a woe on the scribes and Pharisees because they broke the law of the Sabbath by their traditions (Matt. 23; Mar 7:13). But He also showed how the law of Moses was subordinate to the fundamental monotheistic law of the patriarchs; and, lastly, how it was subordinate to the ideal original law of humanity (Mat 12:8; Mar 2:27; Mar 3:4), and how even the patriarchal regulations—for instance, the custom of divorce sanctioned by Moses—ought to be determined according to this primeval law, which was at one with the moral nature of man and the immediate expression of the divine will (Mat 19:9). Indeed, there can be no real contradiction between the theocratic rights as they proceed from the patriarchs, from Moses and the prophets, and the eternal primeval laws, but the former are to be explained by the latter. But Christ could not possibly have restored the ideal order of right with such exact and discriminating certainty, had He not been animated by the spirit of the law. In this spirit He could unfold, arrange, and fill up the law, and therefore change it into spirit and life. The entire ideal contents of all divine and human rights were taken up into His very life. Therefore not a tittle of the law perished; every single declaration of it was found again in His life, in the form of the Spirit.

It was evident to our Lord at the commencement of His ministry, that in this manner He must come forward as a reformer of the historical relations of right in His age. The restoration of the ideal stages of right was therefore an essential element of His plan. But this consciousness must necessarily have produced in Him the anticipation of His sufferings, and indeed of His civil doom. Had He not been conversant with the predictions of the prophets concerning the sufferings of the Messiah, and had He come in no other way to this anticipation, yet He would have reached it with perfect certainty from the conflict between the divinely firm decisiveness of His heavenly ideality or holiness, and the petrified rigidity of the hierarchical statutes and social corruptions. In the necessary consequence of the system which stood opposed to Him, the entire depth of suffering which awaited Him might be unfolded to His view. No sooner was His rejection on the part of the hierarchy certain, than the certainty must also have been present to His soul, that they would deliver Him up to the Gentiles. This delivering up, of which He had already found an announcement in the prophets (Mat 21:42), was the central point of His anticipations, and a chief ingredient in the grief which always pressed heavy on His soul. But then the result of this act of the hierarchy could not be concealed from the spirit of Christ. He foresaw that the Gentiles would reject Him as well as the Jews; and as He was aware that the severest punishment of the Romans, the strongest expression of the world’s curse, consisted in crucifixion, His spirit would always descry as the last object in the path of His sufferings, the death of the cross. As often as in spirit He looked down the precipice of the rejection which awaited Him, His eye found no resting-place short of the abyss of misery and shame on the cross. In such an anticipation, the particular features of His suffering would more easily present themselves the more closely they were connected with the nature of this suffering; as, for example, the spitting with excommunication, the scourging with the crucifixion. But it was simply impossible that Christ could look down into the whole abyss of His sufferings and crucifixion, without perceiving with equal clearness the opposite heights of His glorification. This glorification was assured to Him by faith in the Father, in His righteousness and faithfulness, and by the voice of the prophets as well as by the consciousness of being without a parallel, and by the inner power of life and victory which marked His personal being. But as His death was unparalleled, so likewise must His life appear to Him: deep as was the descent, so high would be the ascent; steep as was the precipice of descent, so would the exaltation be sudden and lofty; appalling to an unheard-of degree as was His judgment, so would His vindication be wonderful and glorious. Thus the mystery of His resurrection would be disclosed to the Lord by this distinct foresight of His humiliation. Lastly, in order to mark His foresight most exactly as christological, we must observe that in His death He must have seen the centre and beginning of the final judgment of the world, and therefore in His victory have looked for the principle, the real beginning of the future resurrection, and, of course, the resurrection of individuals.

But not only was His personal glorification present to His soul, but also its world-historical unfolding in the glorification of the Church. His Church must suffer with Him and be glorified with Him. And as it was impossible to separate His own destiny from that of His Church, it was equally impossible to disjoin the efficacy of His death from the efficacy of His resurrection. Hence His death appeared to Him as the beginning of the glorification of His name and of His work in the world (Joh 3:14; Joh 12:23). With His death the entire ancient period of the world was brought to its completion, especially its law and its prophecy. He became free from the law on the cross, since a distorted representation of the law crucified Him. Henceforth the entire essence of the law was preserved and enshrined in the life of His spirit; but its whole form, as to its religious importance, was exploded and dissipated. His death, therefore, was purely identical with the abolition of the rights of the Jewish hierarchy, as well as with the annihilation of the ancient value of the temple (Joh 2:19). His spirit was now released from all Jewish legal restraints; His new life belonged to Him alone in His free glory, but in His love it belonged to mankind. His Church also was called to enter by His death into this communion of His freedom. As Christ’s Church, it is essentially free in Him; and when it submits to legal restraints, it does this in the spirit of freedom, in the unfolding of its life for the world, and in its ardent desire to imbue the life of the world with its own life. As a royal and priestly Church, as the bride equal in dignity of birth to Himself (Mat 22:2), the Church, which was to be the reward of His sufferings, stood before His soul.

Christ’s foresight could not indeed take the shape of reflection or laborious deduction. But still the threads of the essential relations between the events of His future were the already marked track which must have been lighted up before His eye, when the prophetic spirit in Him, as by flashes of lightning, threw one great illumination after another over the field of His future. And it is necessary that we should most clearly perceive these essential relations, if we would properly estimate the full distinctness, the bold relief, of so many separate features in the future as foreseen by Christ. If, for example, we have recognized the cross as the lowest depth in the region of the ancient curse of the world, we conceive that the Lord with His deepest humiliation was already assured of His death on the cross. But His foresight was matched by His resolution to persist firmly and intrepidly in the path of His Father’s guidance—to reject all the enticements to bypaths as satanic voices—in all the sufferings which He was destined to meet on this path, to look only to the Father’s regulative will, and in the judgment which this will ordained for the guilt of the world, to welcome the atonement, and with perfect acquiescence in this judgment, to complete the atonement for the world.

But if Christ was so familiar in His spirit with the fearful path of death on which He was to accomplish His work,—and with the glory which awaited Him on that path,—the question arises, How, with a clear foresight of the future, could He lead a genuine human life devoted to the present? In our times there has been a disposition to find manifold contradictions between the separate elements of such a foresight, and opposite moods or states of feeling in the life of Jesus. It has been asked, for instance, if Jesus was certain of His glorification, how could He be so deeply agonized in Gethsemane? or, if this suffering of death still stood before Him, how could He triumph beforehand in His high-priestly prayer? How could He weep at the grave of Lazarus, when He was on the point of raising Him from the dead? All these questions seem to proceed from a mode of viewing things, which is more conversant with the nature of petrifactions than with the nature of the human soul. The human heart, placed between the infinite and the finite, and forming the centre of these two departments of life, has a wonderful facility in evil as well as in good of varying its moods in quick succession—now in ‘heavenly ecstasy,’ and anon ‘exceeding sorrowful unto death;’ and more or less to lose sight of the greatest good fortune near at hand in the misfortune of the present moment, or of the heaviest impending calamity in the enjoyment of the passing hour. Is not all the cheerfulness of human life confronted by the certainty of death? Do not all the tears of the pious flow under the anticipation that a harvest of joy is awaiting them. In relation to this subject, modern criticism has framed a category of impossibilities, which we must regard as a perpetual petrifying of the human heart, begun under the operation of a philosophic abstraction which looks with contempt on concrete life. But the more competent we are to estimate the giant-harp of human emotion and the quick alternation of its tones, the more able shall we be to understand that region in which the human soul appears in heroic proportions, and where the fiercest battle of life is fought out in the most varied situations, under the liveliest play of the strongest emotions. In this freshness and power of human nature, Jesus was also the Prince of His race. It belonged to the healthy state of His human life, that with a genuine human bearing and disposition He could reveal heaven, and conquer hell, and experience in His own mental moods the whole contrast of descent to hell and ascension to heaven. This healthy state of His life may be compared to a finished musical performance. The life of Jesus is, first of all, to be regarded in its rhythm as a complete life. He moves in the measure of the most correct succession of His internal states of feeling; He does not with His states of feeling lag behind the time or measure of reality, and as little does He impatiently hasten before it. Hence His future lies before Him in correct perspective. He cannot possibly derange the order of His life’s course. He could not, on the one hand, as a dreamer in a literal sense, anticipate the particular circumstances of His future experience; nor, on the other hand, could He ever live a day without observing the strict relation of every step to His final aim. From this fundamental law of His life’s course resulted the rhythmical, that is, measured recurrence in the presentiment of His death as well as in the presentiment of His glory. This rhythm of His life was connected with its dynamic perfection. Christ spent every instant as a moment of eternity. He gave to every experience its correct intonation. He often allowed extraordinary phenomena, such as the storm on the lake, to pass over His soul like mere shadows, while an incident apparently insignificant, such as that of the Greeks wishing to see Him (Joh 12:20), agitated Him violently. But He so correctly estimated impressions, that His counteraction of them was perfectly proportional. This delicately adjusted dynamic gives His life the expressiveness of a vitality and power combining heavenly tenderness and strength: the gentlest tones, the slightest breathings, alternate with such as are the sharpest, strongest, and most startling. Hence Christ estimated every event according to its just importance: the signs of His future must have met Him in all His experiences with constantly increasing distinctness; for every single moment has the significance of a symbol for all the moments with which it forms a whole. Thus to Christ’s eye the dark night of His betrayal began to cast its shadows from the first embezzlement which Judas committed on the common stock. When Peter protested against His crucifixion, He probably saw at that hour a clear prognostic that this disciple would afterwards deny Him. And since every important fact had in the spiritual hearing of Christ the tone of its precise significance, so the hosannahs of the feast of palms could as little efface from His expectations the approaching crucifixion, as the cry, ‘Crucify Him!’ could efface the resurrection. If it be asked, How was it possible for the life of Jesus to represent itself in these refined, ideal, dynamic relations, we must seek the solution in its melodious beauty. The life of our Lord had in all its parts a complete lyric elevation and musical euphony, since He apprehended every fact of experience in God, and set forth every fact of activity with divine freedom. His consciousness stript from every experience the fact of evil, as that which, was opposed to God and must come to nought, and sent it back to hell, in order to receive the fact itself as a consecrated ordinance from the hand of God. Even His last agony and judgment appeared to Him as a cup in the Father’s hand, as a holy cup of the purest gold, which, in spite of the intense bitterness of its contents, He was ready to empty for the health of the world. His life, therefore, was sustained in all its utterances by the beautiful euphony of a bass, in which the pure human heart constantly rested in God’s fulness; and the eternal glory of God revealed itself in the sensibility and distinctness of man perfected in beauty. This melody of the life of Jesus allowed no disturbance to spring up in His inner man respecting His future; but, in consequence of the opulence of His soul’s life, it must needs unfold itself in the most exquisite harmony. It was in the nature of the case, that the soul of Christ could not be governed or wholly filled by any natural mood (Naturstimmung) of human life or by any single exclusive affection. With one pure feeling which moved Him, every other was in unison, as is conformable to life in the Spirit. And when one feeling expressed itself as the predominant tone in the highest degree, the other opposite one came forth in the purest harmonic relation. The two deepest feelings of His soul, relative to His future, were the presentiment of His condemnation and the presentiment of His glory. These two secrets, the one most mournful, the other most blessed, were moving jointly and incessantly in His heart. In the captivating form of a blessed sadness, or of a veiled heavenly cheerfulness, which we may regard as the usual mental frame of Jesus, we see the gently moving counterpoise of those fundamental feelings. The weights often oscillated according to the impressions which Christ received; sometimes one scale sank, sometimes the other. But never did the one feeling completely vanish before the other. In Gethsemane Christ appears dissolved in anguish and sorrow, especially in shuddering horror at the wickedness of the world; and with what touching pathos He here craves for human sympathy! and with what sublimity He raises Himself up! The prayer of His deepest agony on the cross, in which He divulges the crushing sense of being forsaken by God, is at the same time the expression of the highest confidence. And as in this manner the related tones of opposite moods are ever sounding together, we understand how it was that ofttimes the occasions of the Lord’s greatest joy were exchanged at once for the deepest sadness, as, for example, the jubilation on His entrance into Jerusalem; while inversely His bitterest experiences could indirectly call forth the most glorious outbursts of joy, as was shown in the wonderful elevation of His soul after the traitor had left the company of the disciples. Thus Jesus overcame what was dangerous in every single affection by the free, harmonious, collective feeling of His life. But the perfection of this harmony was shown by His walking in the Spirit, and therefore the riches of His life always harmonized as a united whole in His spiritual life. By this power of His inner life, He resolved His prospects into His presentiments, His presentiments into His fundamental dispositions, and these again into the spirit of His life. The same may also be affirmed of His plan. Notwithstanding the clearness of its leading outlines, and the continual unfolding of its several portions, this plan still necessarily maintained the free, flexible form of the spiritual life in which Christ Himself moved. The words of Christ distinctly indicate that its separate lines always met in the primary thought, that He was going to the Father. From this primary thought the separate parts of His plan would always enter into new combinations, just according to the train of circumstances through which Christ passed. What He saw the Father do, that He also did. He therefore always met the objective universe, in which He beheld the Father’s work, with a self-determination in which His own work combined with that of the Father in an act which should issue in the transformation of the world.

Thus, then, the life-plan of Jesus, as it was completed during the temptation in the wilderness, consisted in a self-determination, developed according to its fundamental principles, always unfolding according to its individual traits, and renewing itself in the Spirit,—a self-determination according to which He wished to combine His Messianic life with the life of the world. But as He combined His whole being and its world-historical name in general with the world by a definite unfolding of His life, so this especially holds good of the separate blessings of His life. He combined, that is to say, the power of His life, salvation, with the faith of the world in the form of His miracles. But the light of His life—the truth—He presented to the world under the guise of parables. Lastly, He made the blessedness of His life become the inheritance of the world by founding the kingdom of God. These fundamental forms of the revelation of His life we have now to contemplate.

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Notes

1. On the unveiling of the Old Testament economy as accomplished by Christ, see Harnack, Jesus der Christ, p. 5. ‘We must conceive of this “old to be fulfilled,” to which Christ refers, as an undivided whole, since He damaged it in no portion, He neither took away nor weakened any essential part. Hence an unprejudiced exegetical survey sees no reason for dividing the ideas of ὁ νόμος and οἱ προφῆται in a connection where their fulfilment is spoken of, but applies it to their full contents. Nor can we understand by what right each single chief division is to be taken for anything else than the whole law, and for the whole prophetic agency, when that designation (as is almost universally allowed) embraces the entire Old Testament, according to the constant phraseology of the New Testament.ʼ—P. 11.

2. In the teaching of Christ a doctrine of right (a law) is contained, which comprises much sharper and more developed distinctions than is commonly admitted. he sphere that rules all positive spheres of right is that of ideal right, which is similar to the eternal in man, or to the essence of the Son of man, This right has been transplanted into the world in the form of the Gospel. The three spheres in which positive right has its sources, or in which ideal right becomes positive, are the circles of the Patriarchal, the Mosaic and the Prophetic Right. The patriarchal right has become fixed by tradition under the form of the Noachic ordinances, to which some other, precepts belong. It is the right which forms the world-historical basis of monotheistic culture. Circumcision is the symbol of this sphere ; it marks the religious civilization of the individual. The essential in which the symbol is fulfilled is regeneration, especially the general culture. This stage of right is perpetuated in the general morality of the cultivated world. The Mosaic right is the basis of monotheistic educated society, of which the characteristic is, that every individual is estimated as a person. So especially is the Sabbath made for man—for his personality. In particular, it protects dependent persons in their eternal rights. The essential of the Mosaic right reappears in Christian state-life. Lastly, prophetic right is the development of positive right according to its spiritual nature, in its spiritual infinity; the unfolding of the ideal law in the positive. This sphere has to exhibit the law in life. It is full of blessing and danger. The false prophet must be distinguished from the true. But he is judged according to his relation to the essential principles of the theocratic society, according to the positive divine law. This province of right is perpetuated in the free Church, and in science, art, and literature generally. The three following circles of right, which are exhibited in the maxims of the scribes, in the Sanhedrim, and in political power, are the circles of the interpretation, the application, and the administration of right. The concrete, Christianly grounded, and educated state embraces these circles, as well as the theocratic, in living unity. They appear singly in the region of the Academic Faculties, which express themselves by systems and opinions ; in the region of Jurisprudence, according to right as it has been laid down; and in the region of Government, which carries into effect what has been determined by law. The theocratic idea of the state has its highest point in the right of the sovereign to show mercy; on the other hand, its lowest point is seen in the police: this restores the theocratic power in reference to the abandoned class.

1) Two of the most distinguished theologians of our time hold opposite opinions in reference to the use of this word in the representation of the life of Jesus. Ullmann expresses himself against the word (On the Sinlessness of Jesus, p. 92). Neander is in favour of it (Life of Jesus Christ, p. 80 [Bohn’s ed.]). But Neander does not dispute Ullmann’s view as to its meaning. He only claims for the word plan a higher sense in this connection. [‘The “plan” of our Saviour’s ministry is a topic which most of the modern lives of our Lord discuss with a very unbecoming freedom.’—Ellicott, p. 99.—ED.]

2) See Ullmann On the Sinlessness of Jesus. This theologian has successfully combated the view mentioned above.

3) Neander rightly directs attention to the fact, that this want of familiarity with the meaning of the name the Son of man, among the Jews, may be inferred from John xii. 34.

4) See my work, Ucber den geschichtlichen Charakter, &c., p. 68. Weisse, die evang. Geschichte. Weisse is mistaken in regarding the view here given as a novel explanation, as any one may be convinced by the preceding quotation. The author of the first work had already obtained this view from another. Weisse’s assertion, that this name is placed in the Gospel history in opposition as good as expressed to the name of the Messiah, is certainly novel.

5) [For the title itself as found in Daniel, see Hengstenberg's Christology, iii. 83 (Clark's Tr.) ; and for the reasons of our Lord s adoption of it, see Doruer on the Person of Christ, i. 54 (Tr.) ED.]

6) The words ʻWhosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the councilʼ, are probably not merely figurative. They rather express the sharpest historical right. Whosoever marks his brother as a heretic, encroaches on the province of the Sanhedrim, who have to decide legally on points of doctrine ; he must therefore submit himself, with his brother, to the Sanhedrim.

7) [The literature of this, as indeed of all the topics connected with the life of Christ, is given by Hase in his Leben Jesu. Renan throughout represents Jesus as rather passively moulded by His age than determining His own character and life ; and regarding His idea of His work, he says, p. 121: ‘ Beaucoup de vague restait sang doute dans sa pensée, et un noble sentiment, bien plus qu’un dessein arrété, le poussait h Teuvre sublime qui s’est realisée par lui, bien que d’une maniére fort différente de celle qu’il imaginait.’ Some valuable remarks on the apologetic significance of the plan of Jesus are made by Young in The Christ of History, pp. 44 ff, and by Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, p. 207.—ED.]