the deity of christ (robert e. speer, 1909)

8/12/2019 The Deity of Christ (Robert E. Speer, 1909)

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The Deity of ChristAn Address delivered at NorthfieldWith Three Supplementary Notes

ByROBERT E. SPEER

^New York Chicago Toronto

Fleming H. Revell CompanyLondon and Edinburgh


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Copyright, 1909, byFLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth AvenueChicago: 80 Wabash AvenueToronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.London: 21 Paternoster SquareEdinburgh: 100 Princes Street


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The Deity of ChristCHRISTIANITY is the only one of

the great religions of the worldwhich calls itself by the name of

its founder. Other great religions arenamed after their founders by us. Theyare not so named by their own adherents.This is not a mere accident ; it is a fact ofthe deepest significance. To be sure, tliename Christian was given originally byenemies but it was given by them becausefrom without they had already discernedthe essential and distinguishing character ulthe new religion, and had been impressedby the inseparable connection which, theysaw, existed between it and its founder JesusChrist. The disciples of the new religionpresently accepted the name as the mobtappropriate name possible for them andtheir faith. They themselves were awarethat the relationship in which they stoodJO Jesus Christ was the central and funda-

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''''^'helDtity of Christmental thing in their religion. So long asHe had been on earth their religion hadconsisted in personally following Him, infinding their fellowship in His company,in drawing their nourishment from Hiswords, and in resting their hearts on thepeace and quiet which they found withHim. And after He was gone they per-ceived that their religion consisted in arelationship to Him of a far more vital andwonderful kind than they had understoodwhile He was here. For now they real-ized that their religion did not consist inthe mere memory of a good man who wasgone, in the effort to recall the thingsthat He had said, and to comfort theirhearts with recollections of joyful hourswhich they had had with Him in the daysof His flesh. They realized that their re-ligion consisted in a living relationship toHim, as still a living person with them,which their faith was not a recollection ofwhat Jesus had taught, or the mere mem-ory of a lovely human character, but a liv-ing relationship to an abiding, supernat-ural Person.

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The Deity of ChristThis is the fundamental thing in Chris-tianity. The name ** Christian '* is only a

sign of that which is most radical andessential in its character. The main prob-lem of Christianity is this of Jesus Christ

:

Who was He, and what are we to think ofHim? We cannot do any thinking aboutChristianity at all that is direct or ade-quate without coming at once to think ofthe problem of the person of Jesus Christ,who stands at the heart of His religion,without whom the Christian religion is notthe religion of Christ.

I know there are many voices to-daywhich tell us that this is not necessary. Iwas in a gathering a little while ago madeup largely of college presidents and pro-fessors, in which the subject under dis-cussion was the evangelical basis of theYoung Men's Christian Association in ourcolleges and universities. It was a littlecompany of fifteen or twenty men. Oneof the college presidents in the group, aminister in an evangelical church, ex-pressed it as his own opinion that thequestion of the divinity of Jesus Christ

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The Deity of Christphysical in that sense. But if he meantthat the deity of Christ was metaphysicalin the sense that it was impractical, that itwent out into the speculative regions wherelife is not lived, then he was utterly andabsolutely wrong ; for nothing can be morereal, more practical, more near, more fun-damental for every one of us than thequestion of what we are to think and whatwe are to do wnth the person of Jesus

hrist, who declared Himself to be, and isbelieved by the Church to be, the very Sonof the living God.We simply must think about that prob-lem. We must think about it, for one

thing, because Christ can have no mean-ing for feeling unless He has a mean-ig also for thought. As mature beingse cannot attach a feeling value to any-ling to which we cannot attach a thoughtilue. That song we were joining in a

moment ago, More Love to Thee, OChrist/' has no meaning whatever exceptthe meaning derived from the thoughtdue we attach to Jesus Christ. If you

think of Christ merely as you would think[9]


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The Deity of Christof Julius Caesar, then the song has no moresignificance than if we were singing ** Morelove to thee, O JuUus Csesar/' All themeaning springs from the thought valuewe put upon Jesus Christ. Those menand women who tell us to-day that we cankeep Christ for religious values even whenwe have lost Christ in His thought valueare preaching an absolutely fallacious andmeaningless gospel ; for Christ will staywith us in our religious life. He will staywith us as an adequate living value inour hearts only so long as we give HimHis rightful place in our thoughts aboutHim and His person.

In the second place, we have to thinkabout Christ and who He was because weare thinking beings, and wherever we gowe have to take our minds along with us.I cannot go any place and leave my mindbehind me. I cannot carry my body ormy emotions into a certain attitude towardsChrist without also carrying my rationalprocesses along with me. I cannot takemyself apart. I am a unit. I can onlyfeel about those things that I think about

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The Deity of Christand will about. It is impossible for me tohave any relationship to Jesus Christ what-ever except as I think about Christ andarrange my mind with reference to Him.It is intellectually maudlin and foolish tosay Christian and ** Christianity un-less we mean something by those words.What do we mean ?

In the third place, we have got to thinkabout Christ because He is a fact. Youcannot get rid of a fact by saying ** I willnot think about it You look back acrossthe years and there stands Jesus Christdemanding that you reckon with Him, that\ ou give Him His place, that you thinkabout Him, and relate Him to all the otherfacts that you know. Jesus Christ is nota doctrine ; Jesus Christ is not a theory ormyth ; Jesus Christ is not a mere imagi-nation of men of our day ; Jesus Christ isa great fact in history and in the life of men

;

nd you and I are bound to think about thatfact, to account for it and value it, to deter-mine what the quality of that fact is, whatthe relations of that fact are to our presentlife to-day, and to all the life of humanity.


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The Deity of Christ'iAnd once more, we have to think about

this question because it was the only ques-tion that interested Jesus Christ. So manytimes we are told to-day that it does notmatter what men thinks that it only matterswhat men do. It is a wonderful contrast toturn back to the Gospels and find Jesus re-versing this emphasis. What men thoughtwas what interested Him. He had no in-terest in a man^s clothes ; he had a sec-ondary interest in a man^s external acts.What did interest Him was what men hadinside their hearts, because from withinflowed all those great forces that were todetermine the outer life. And so His greatquestion, as He went up and down theworld mingling with men, was the simplequestion, ** What do you think about Me?Who am I ? ^^

So, if we have never done any clear,consecutive thinking about Jesus Christ,we ought to begin to do that thinkingnow. There will come a time in our liveswhen we will have to do it. We mustreckon with Jesus Christ and determinefor ourselves whose Son we believe Him

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The Deity of Christto be, and what conviction regarding Hisperson we are to hold. Well would it befor us if to-day we should go straight hometo what is not only the fundamental prob-lem of Christianity but the very bottom-most issue of our human life and face forourselves that old question : Who is JesusChrist? What do we believe Him to be?Was He in any unique sense the one Sonof the Living God ? And I want to statein the simplest way I can the grounds formy own personal faith in the deity of ourLord Jesus ChristL I believe, first oi all, in the deity of

our Lord Jesus Christ because of His char-acter ; for it seems to me, in the greatlanguage of Horace Bushnell, that thecharacter of Jesus forbids His possibleclassification with men/' The argumentof the whole volume, Nature and theSupernatural, is concentrated by Bush-nell, in that one chapter, **The Character

I Jesus Forbidding His Possible Classifi-cation with Men.'* For Christ was such aMan that He could not have been a mereman. He was a Man so great, so perfect,

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T'he Deity of Christthat He must have been more than just aman. Now we can put the matter in avery summary fashion at this point. Ifour Lord was only a man, if His char-acter was merely human, then Bowdoin,Yale, Bryn Mawr, and Vassar ought to beturning out better men and women thanHe was. If our Lord was only a man,it is strange that the nineteenth centurycannot produce a better one. He was bornin an obscure and contemptible province.He grew up in no cultured and refinedcommunity. He was the Child of a poorpeasants home, of a subject race. YetHe rises sheer above all mankind, the onecommanding moral character of humanity.Now, if Jesus was all that just as a mereman, the world should long ago have ad-vanced beyond Him.

It would not be so if it were a questionof intellectual genius, because we all realizethat intellectual genius is a matter of en-dowment and gift, and a man cannot beheld responsible for not being as able aman intellectually as another. But we allfeel that each of us can be held responsible

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The Deity of Christfor not being as good a man as any otherman. We know that moral character is aduty of each one of us, and there is noth-ing in perfect moral goodness which ourown conscience does not tell us we arebound ourselves to attain. And so Ichallenge you who believe that JesusChrist was merely a man, to reconcilethat belief with the fact that you arenot a better character than He was. Withnineteen hundred years of His influenceupon the world, with advantages pos-sessed by us such as He never dreamedof in His day, if Christ's character waspurely human, it ought long ago to havebeen surpassed and there ought to be inthe world to-day many men and womenwho are superior in their character to Him.

This is a crude, though I think properdilemma. If Christ was only a man weare bound to surpass Him. If He wasmore than a man, we are bound to obeyHim. I do not mean to let the point gomerely with this general statement, how-ever. I believe that Jesus Christ is theSon of God, and proved to be such by the

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The Deity of Christelements of character in Him not to befound in men.

(i) First of all, there was the supernat-uralness of His claims. '* I am come thatye might have life.'' I am the light ofthe world. I am not come to condemn,but to save the world.'' ** I am the way,and the truth, and the life : no manCometh unto the Father but by Me. Nowa man cannot talk that way. If youshould say in reply that the words I havequoted are from the Gospel of John, andthat they do not actually represent whatJesus said but only what John afterwardsput into His lips, I should demur; butwithout stopping to do so, I would say now,Very well, turn to the Gospel of Matthewand find the passage which criticism stillleaves to us, in which Christ says just asmuch as He says anywhere in the Gospelof John: **A11 things have been givenunto Me of My Father : and no man know-eth the Son, save the Father ; and no manknoweth the Father save the Son, and heto whomsoever the Son willeth to revealHim. Come unto Me, all ye that labour

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' 'The Deity of Christand are heavy laden, and I will give yourest. Take My yoke upon you, and learnof Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart:

1 ye shall find rest unto your souls.1 iiere is supernatural claim here just suchas you will find in the deepest of our Lord's

i^ed utterances in the Gospel of John.Ur, turn to the Sermon on the Mount. Itis full of unique self-assertion. Who is this

ing man who stands on the shores ofGalilean Sea and sets aside the doc-

iiiijes of the fathers? ** Ye have heard itsaid so and so, but I say unto you ;^' andwho closes His discourse with the declara-tion, Many will say unto Me in that day,Lord, Lord, did we not cast out devils inThy name ? and I will say unto them, Inever knew you, depart from Me.'* Whois this who thus sets Himself up as thevery touchstone of human life in the day ofjudgment?Our Lord by His claims set Himself in

a class absolutely apart from men. NowHe either made these claims or He did notmake them. If He did not make them,then we know nothing whatever about His


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The Deity of Christlife, and what took place in the past, forthe evidence of the fact that Christ madethese claims is as good as any historicalevidence that we possess. If He did makethese claims, they were either true or false.If they were false, then Christ instead ofbeing a man of high character, as all menhave recognized Him to be, was a merefalsifier, an impostor. But if they weretrue, then He was as He claimed to be, theSon of God.

(2) Observe further, not only did Jesusput forth supernatural claims, but thoseclaims were attested by our Lord's ownconsciousness. Let any of us set our-selves up to be divine and see how quicklywe will fall down to the earth from anysuch pinnacle. Our own deeds would belieus and our own consciousness break downunder the palpable falsehood. In Acre,Syria, the head of the Behais, AbbasEflendi, has actually claimed to be Godthe Father incarnate on earth. But hesimply could not carry it through. Hecould not bear himself godlikely. Butwe look on the outer and even more

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The Deity of Christon the inner life of Christ. It actually sus-tained the tremendous, worid-upheavingclaims that He put forth to be the unique,supernatural Son of the living God. Menare turning now as never before to thestudy of Christ's consciousness, the mostwonderful problem in human history, andthey are finding in the inner thought ofChrist and the inner life of Christ, in theintegrity of it, the way in which He wasable to carry through to the end thesetremendous claims of His, a new argumentfor the truth and reality of these claims.How clearly it shone out at the lastwhen hanging upon the cross, with the twothieves on either side of Him I He diedlike the God He had claimed to be, so thatthe hard-hearted centurion, who stood andwatched Him die, said to himself, Well, 1have been by many a dying man, but Inever saw one who died like this. Trulythis man was the Son of God. But themanner of His death only consummatedthe sustained sincerity of His life, I be-lieve in the deity of Christ on the score ofHis character not only because He put

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The Deity of Christforth claims to be supernaturally unique,but because His own inner spiritual experi-ences supported and vindicated theseclaims.

(3) And because of the universality andeternity of His character, I believe in thecleity of Jesus Christ. Of course He hadto be born in a given age, among a givenpeople, and He was born away back inthe first century and in the Jewish race.It was impossible that there should be anincarnation without its being somewhereand somewhen. But the wonderful thingis, that though Christ came in a given ageand in a given race He transcends thatage and that race and is felt by every raceand every age to be its ideal and its Lord,the satisfaction of all its spiritual needs.We see this aspect of His character illus-trated in the universality and eternity ofthe sympathies that find expression in Hisparables. Some of you have seen, per-haps, a little book of illustrations of theparables that appeared a short while ago.They were by a modern artist. He hadtaken eight or ten of the parables out of

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The Deity of Christtheir old Oriental setting and given thema modern setting. One of them was apicture of a girl sitting in a restaurantwith wine glasses on the table before her.Another girl, a Salvation Army lass, wascoming through with her tambourine, col-lecting gifts. Beneath were the words: Five of them were wise, and five of themwere foolish. Another was the picture ofthe Pharisee and the publican. The poorman was sitting in ragged clothes in thelast pew of the church, and the wealthyman, standing in his self-contentment andpower, was taking the collection and hold-ing the plate at a distance for this poorman to put his coin in. Another was thepicture of the man with the talents. A

ung man sat alone at his club, withI'owed head, while round about him theair was filled with figures of others whohad toiled, while the opportunities of hislife had been lost and thrown away ; andbeneath was the simple verse taken fromour Lord's parable of the talents: Andhe went and hid his talent in a napkin andburied it in the ground.'* These parables

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The Deity of Christcome driving right home into the heart ofour modern life as though they had beenspoken to-day. And these parables of ourLord's, spoken nineteen hundred years ago,cast first of all in His native setting in theEast, but always and everywhere alive,are only typical of the universality andeternity of His living sympathies. He isthe world's still distant ethical ic^eal. Heis still the friend of all. The first centuryJew is the w^hole world's and all the cen-turies* Saviour.

(4) And from the perfect balance ofHis character I believe that Jesus Christis the Divine Son of God. Every one hassome of the characteristics of Christ, butno one has all of them. We develop onegood quality at the expense or the atrophyor the stricture of some other quality. OurLord bound up in Himself all the differentqualities of the perfect human character asno other man has ever done.

(5) But not to prolong an analysis ofHis character unduly, think of only oneother outstanding fact in it. I mean thefact of His sinlessness. No other great

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T^he Deity of Christteacher ever dared to utter Jesus* chal-lenge : ** Which of you convinceth Me ofsin.'* No one has thought of claimingsinlessness for other great religious teach-ers. In none of the sacred books of anyother religion is its founder represented asa sinless man. The very conception of asinless character was never invented byanybody. It only came to men's mindsas they saw it worked forth in the char-acter of Jesus of Nazareth. There is mar-vellous significance in this fact. He wasthe holiest man that ever lived. Every-body looks back upon Him as the mostnderfuUy perfect character. And Hewas the one Man who was never penitent,who never asked God to forgive Him for

vthing, who walked right through lifeunrepentant, without ever being aware thatHe had done or thought anything wrong.Father, forgive them,*' He prayed, but

ver Father, forgive Me.*' Find a singlegreat human character whose goodnessdoes not rest on a sense of utter personalunworthiness, whose goodness does notspring from the deep realization of having

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The Deity of Christbeen forgiven much by the great and lov-ing God. But here is Jesus of Nazareth,the one character to whom we all lookback as the best of men, absolutely im-penitent, and He died impenitent becausethere was nothing in His life for which Heneeded to ask forgiveness. If you can be-lieve that this character was merely human,then you are a very credulous soul. Tobelieve that this character was merely hu-man is a belief more wonderful far, involv-ing more strain to human faith, than thesimple conviction that we can account forthe character of Christ by believing Himto be what He claimed to be ; namely, theSon of the Living God.

II. In the second place, I believe in thedeity of Christ because of His teaching ; notonly because of the form and authority ofHis teachingthough that was wonderfulenough to impress in the deepest way theimagination of those who heard HimforHe taught, as Matthew recorded in com-ment on the Sermon on the Mount, as onehaving authority and not as the Scribes.** This man spake, said those sent by the

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The Deity of ChristSanhedrin to arrest Him, ** as never manspake. But I am thinking now not of theform and the power of His teaching, but ofthe substance of it. I believe the substanceof Christ's teaching sets Him ofl absolutelyfrom the class of mere human teachers.

(i) First of all, consider His teachingregarding God. Where did He find outwhat He knew about God? He taughtthings about God which the world neverknew before, and which the world had notbeen able to discover for itself. To-day,as a matter of fact, almost the whole con-tent of our knowledge of God is due to theteaching, the life, and the example of JesusChrist There is something to be learnedabout God from the heavens and the worldround about us. But in the case of peoplewho deny the divinity of Christ and whosay they believe in God, that God inwhom they believe is the God aboutwhom they would know little or nothing

j esus Christ had not come and revealedHim by what He was, as well as by whatHe said. You cannot reveal God bywords ; you cannot bring to men an idea[25]


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The Deity of Christentirely outside their experience simply bytalking to them in words ; you have got toshow it to them in life. Christ could neverhave revealed God by a mere doctrine.He could not by any possibility havebroken open the shell of man^s limited no-tions of God and expanded these notionsto the great realities to which Christdid expand them by merely proclaimingintellectual opinions concerning God. Youcan only give men a new idea of God byshowing it to them in life. This is the wayyou do it to-day. There is no other way.It is what Christ did nineteen hundred yearsago,not by talking about this ideal, butby Himself being this God in front of theireyes.And here we come upon what it seems

to me is the saddest irony of all humanhistory; that Jesus Christ Himself hascreated the difficulty in the way of men'sfaith in His deity. You ask men why theydo not believe in the incarnation to-day,and they tell you that they cannot believethat their God, so spiritual, so high, couldbe brought down into humanity. Where

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The Deity of Christdid they get that God so spmtual and sohigh ? Why, out of the God who wasincarnate in humanity. The mere fact ofthis larger idea of God which Christ by theincarnation gave is now made by manymen the reason why they will not believe in^Hrist and the incarnation through which

ne that idea of God ever could havelie to us. You and I would not haveh difficulty in believing in Christ as

^ id, if Christ had not been God. It wasthe very fact that Christ was God thatgave us these notions of God that havecreated, I will not say wholly, but in largepart, the difficulties in the way of ourfaith in the incarnation. Surely the manwho will sit down and contemplate therevelation of God in Christ and think allthe implications of the situation throughwill at last say to himself exacUy whatThomas said when his eyes at last wereonened, ** My Lord and my God.2) And I believe in the deity of Christnot only because of His teaching about Godbut also because of His teaching aboutman. He told us things about man that

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The Deity of Christwe never knew before, that are not knownin the world to-day except where the in-fluence of Christ^s life has reached, bring-ing them to man. It was only Christ whotold man what a good man may be andmust be, who gave man his ideal of hisown duty and destiny and possibility ofcharacter. It was only Christ who camenear to man and assured him of the greatspiritual possibility and duty of unity withhis fellows, that has become one of thegreat words of our time, but of which inreality we have come to conceive onlythrough the influence of Jesus Christ. AGerman ethnologist once said that thedeepest thing ever uttered by Saint Paulis that word of his about there being inJesus Christ ** neither male nor female,Greek nor barbarian, bond nor free.These were the three great lines of cleavagethat cursed the world before Christ, thatcurse the world everywhere now outside ofChrist. That curse was obliterated byChrist^s new revelation to man of his rela-tion to his brother.

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The Deity of Christnot only on the ground of His teaching-about God and man but also because ofHis ethical teaching. We have concededfar too much in the study of comparativeethics to the non-Chrisdan religions. Notonly are the non-Christian religions desti-tute of our LxDrd's great teaching about Godand man, but they do not have in themthose fundamental moral principles whichChrist brought into the world, and overwhich He poured a whole flood of illuminat-ing glory from God. Take Christ's greatethical conceptions, such as truth and dutyand purity and love and righteousness, andwhere can you find in any of the non-Chris-tian religions any great moral conceptionscorresponding to, or that anywhere ap-proach the great moral ideas which JesusChrist brought into the world and whichHe both taught and lived. We can restour argument for the deity of Christ, forHis absolute separateness from man, on theground of the magnitude and uniquenessof His contribution to the moral life alone.On God and man and morals He has spokenthe last word. ** The attempt to add to or

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The Deity of Christimprove on the teaching of Christ/^ LordAvebury recognizes, *' seems vain and evenarrogant.'^ On the ground, accordingly,not only of what He was, but also of whatHe taught, I believe in the deity of ourLord Jesus Christ.

in. In the third place, not alone on theground of His character and doctrine, buton the ground of the acts which He didwhile here on earth, I believe in the deityof Christ. I am not speaking now of Hismiracles on nature, though I have notrouble with them; they are exactly thethings I believe God incarnate in humanflesh would do. But I pass them by tospeak about what He did on human life.There is the miracle of His influence onthe twelve apostles. He took those menbarring, of course, the one who failed Himignorant, unlettered, with no early ad-vantages, fishermen many of them, adultmen when He took them under His in-fluence, and He made these hard men thefinest gentlemen of His time. He sent outthese eleven ignorant, uninfiuential men toshake the world. He made them the foun-

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The Deity of Christdations on which He built His indestruc-tible kingdom. Where could you find agreater miracle than that? Hepaade othermen and women also, and^is work onlife was crowned at the last by the out-standing miracle of His own resurrection.I believe there is no fact in history betterattested than our Lord's resuirection. Itrests upon evidences stronger than anyother evidences that we have of any otherevent, as strong as the evidence we havefor what took place on the fourth of July,1776. And I believe that we may rest assecurely on the evidences of the resurrec-tion as we may on the evidences that therewas ever a Declaration of Independence.You say, we have it now. I say, we havea living Christ now. You say, men sawsigned. I say, men saw Him rise. Yousay there is a nation living whose existencetestifies to the Declaration of Independ-ence. I say, there is a kingdom of Christin existence that bears witness to the factthat something lifted it out of the death inwhich it lay when He hung upon His cross.It was saved by nothing less than His

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The Deity of Christrising again from the dead. Without arisen Christ there is no adequate explana-tion of the resurrection of Christianity.You say the historic evidence does notysatisfy every one. I say, it convinces allwho would be convinced if they saw Himrise with their own eyes. Because of whatHe did while here upon the earth, I be-lieve Him to be the Son of God,, -^

IV. Further, I believe in the deity ofChrist because of His posthumous in-fluence. He is doing in the world stillthings just as wonderful as anything Hedid in the world nineteen hundred yearsago. Napoleon turned once at St. Helenato Count Montholon with the inquiry, Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was? '*The question was declined, and Napoleonproceeded, **Well, then, I will tell you.Alexander, Csesar, Charlemagne, and Ihave founded great empires, but uponwhat did these creations of our genius de-pend? Upon force 1 Jesus alone foundedHis empire upon love, and to this veryday millions would die for Him. ... Ithink I understand something of human

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The Deity of Christnature, and I tell you all these were menand I am a man. None else is like Him.Jesus Christ was more than a man. . . .I have inspired multitudes with such a de-votion that they would have died for me,. . . but to do this it was necessarythat I should be visibly present, with theelectric influences of my looks, of mywords, of my voice. When I saw menand spoke to them I lighted up the flamesof self-devotion in their hearts. . . .Christ alone has succeeded in so raisingthe mind of man towards the unseen thatit becomes insensible to the barriers oftime and space. Across a chasm of eight-een hundred years Jesus Christ makes ademand which is, above all others, difficultto satisfy. He asks for that which a phi-losopher may often seek in vain at thehands of his friends, or a father of his chil-dren, or a bride of her spouse, or a man ofhis brother. He asks for the human heartHe will have it entirely to Himself. Hedemands it unconditionally, and forthwithHis demand is granted. Wonderful Indefiance of time and space, the soul of

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The Deity of Christman with all its powers becomes an an-nexation to the empire of Christ. All whosincerely believe in Him experience thatremarkable supernatural love towardsHim. This phenomenon is unaccount-able ; it is altogether beyond the scope ofman^s creative powers. Time, the greatdestroyer, is powerless to extinguish thesacred flame ; time can neither exhaust itsstrength nor put a limit to its range. Thisit is which strikes me most. I have oftenthought of it. This it is which proves tome quite conclusively the divinity of JesusChrist.'^We see to-day in the world a work be-ing done that no man could do. JuliusCaesar is not raising dead men to-day,Martin Luther is not taking men dead intrespasses and sins and washing themwhite as the very snows, redeeming themto new and powerful life. Christ is doingthat to-day. He is taking the roue andthe debauchee out of the gutter, and Heis making them pure and sending themout with cleansed consciences to do thework of men in the world. He is taking

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The Deity of Christthe weakling, the man or woman withno strength of character, without enoughstrength of passion to go down into thegutter, and He moulds them to strengthand usefulness. And He is redeeminggood people, which is the most wonderfulthing of all. He is taking the proud and theselfish and the pitiless. He is taking the richwho have everything and do not know thatthey are poor, the clothed who think theyare clothed and do not know that they arenaked,Christ is taking them and reveal-ing the realities of their own life to themand giving them the realities of His life.And what no man ever didChrist is re-leasing men from the shame and guilt ofsin as well as delivering them from itsfMDwer. This work which we see Christdoing to-day in the lives of men is no hu-man work. /To-day, as of old, Christ istransforming being, doing the work of Godon the life of man.

Christ is still, as He has always been,the great transformer of the life of theworld. We cannot explain the influencewith which Christ has wrought upon the

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The Deity of Christlife of the world on the theory of Hismerely naturalistic character. Buddhism,Hinduism, Confucianism, Mohammedan-ism by their results have proved that theirfounders were not divine. But Christ hasbeen doing here a work only God coulddo. He has changed the world. He hasreconstructed human society. He has cre-ated and sustained the highest moral life.His living principles have ordered allhuman progress, /it is far more irrationalto attribute these effects to inadequatecauses than it is to say that they musthave a cause adequate to produce them.They are the work of God ; by the handof God they must have been done. Thosewho have experienced them in their ownsouls know that it was by God in Christthat they were done.

V. And now, last of all, why is it thatif we have grounds for belief in the deityof Christ such as these there are so manymen and women who do not believe thatChrist is the Son of God? Well, in thefirst place, some of them have never doneany thinking about it. They have listened

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The Deity of Christto what other people have said, and whatthe other people have said was only whatthey heard somebody else say. They them-selves have never done any real, conscien-tious, consecutive thinking about the prob-lem of Christ at all. Some of our want offaith in Christ simply springs from shal-lowness, superficiality, or utter neglect ofany thinking about Christ.

In the second place, a great many haveno adequate conception of the person ofChrist simply because they have neverstudied the original documents. If youwill saturate your mind and heart with thefour Gospels for twelve months, if you willread them through, all four every week,and not only read them but dwell uponthe character of Christ as it comes outthere, letting your imagination play withthe freedom of the Spirit of life upon thatlife of Christ, that word of Christ, thatpersonality of Christ, you will come backtwelve months from now with your faithin the deity of Christ as the Son of Godabsolutely unassailable.

In the third place, a great many do not[37]


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The Deity of Christbelieve in His deity simply because theydo not know how absolutely the worldneeds God incarnate in the flesh. I havea dear friend, who says that he neverrealized how it must be that Christ wasthe Son of God until during his universitycourse he went down to work in the countyjail. Sunday after Sunday as he sat downamong the prisoners in that jail, amongmen of darkened souls, men of rotted-outcharacters, men who were hopeless aboutthis world and the world to come, menwho were as dead as any man could everbe when his body was laid down in hisgrave, he realized as he had never realizedbefore that, if there never had been anincarnation, by the very character of Godthere must be one ; because it was neces-sary that there should come into the worldsomewhere and some time that great re-lease of divine and transforming powerwithout which the world in its death couldnever live. We believe it came nineteenhundred years ago once for all in Jesus ofNazareth.And lastly, there are men and women

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The Deity of Christwho do not believe in the deity of Christsimply because they have never tried Him.The deity of Christ is not a mere doctrineor proposition. It is a living theory of

[being, and the way you test it is not aloneto go back and examine all these evi-'^^ Mces which we have been running

T in this hasty and inadequate way.ill way you test it is to try Christw ]. r He is what He claims to be. I

, supij' >se that many of you read in an issueof The Sunday-School Times last winter

)f. Edward Everett Hale's article on the:mge wrought in him by his experience

' r Jesus Christ as the Son of God. He hadt grown up to believe in the deity ofristfar otherwise. But he had donethinking for himself, and at last he came

' night in a litde prayer-meeting in the' of Schenectady, where he lived, to thelit where he made up his mind that they way to find out was to experiment.put Christ to the test and he found Himinely true and truly divine. If what

i have said here could only so farremove the intellectual difficulties which

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The Deity of Christany of you may feel as to make it pos-sible for you to put Christ to the test, youtoo would find Him true.No one leaned on Him in vain when Hewas here ; no one leans on Him in vainto-day. Would that we might see Him inthe fullness of His glory as He is : Son ofMan, indeed, Son of God as well; Sonof Man because only so could God evercome near us and lay hold of our livesand assure us that His will for us was whatwe see in Christ ; Son of God because onlyso could we ever get strength to rise intoGod. '' Who say ye that I am ? '' was thequestion He asked Simon Peter by Caes-area Philippi of old. **And who say yethat I am?'^ is the question He is askingof each of us here now. God grant thatthe same Father who revealed the truthto Simon Peter that day may enable us tobehold the truth to-day, that we may an-swer as he answered, *' Thou art the Christ,the Son of the living God. That is whatHe is. Is He that to us ?

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Three Supplementary Notes

I On Christ's Self-Assertion and Lowli-ness

'T On the Inadequacy of the UnitarianView

ill. Professor Edward Everett Hale*s Ex-perience


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Note IOn Christ's Self-Assertion and LowlinessTHE late Richard Holt Hutton,Editor of The Spectator, in his

essay on Christian Evidences/'speaks of the supernaturalness

Christ^s foresight in perceiving thatse extraordinary claims of His wouldaccepted by men and be found bym to be entirely consistent with His

1 vliness of soul. That Christ shouldiiive understood the personal relation inwhich His immediate disciples would stand

> Him/' says Mr. Hutton, was perhaps are instance of discernment such as, no

(1 )iibt, many great men have shown. Butthit He should deliberately have demandedsame kind of attitude towards Himselfm all future disciples, as He certainly

1, and have gained what He asked in very act, does seem to me one of thevu*est marks of supernatural knowledgethe human heart which could be given.

Nothing could be more hazardous thanthis emphasis laid by any human being

rpecially one who from the very fw^X.eaches lowliness of heart, and predicts the[43]


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The Deity of Christshortness of His life and the ignominiousviolence of His endon Himself as thesource of an enduring power, and thecorner-stone of a divine kingdom. Thenecessity of loving Him, the perpetualfame of her who anointed Him for Hisburial, the grief that will be rightly felt forHim when He leaves the earth, the identi-lication of men^s duty to each other, evento * the least of these, My brethren,* withtheir duty to Him,all these are assump-tions which run through the whole Gospelquite as strikingly as does the clear knowl-edge of the frailty of the human materialsChrist has chosen, and of the supernaturalcharacter of the power by which He in-tended to vivify those means. ThoughHis kingdom is to be the kingdom ofwhich a little child is the type, the king-dom in which it is the * meek ^ who areblessed, in which it is the * poor in spirit *who are to be the rulers, yet in this He isonly saying in other words that He is to bethe life of it, since it is because He is * meekand lowly in heart * that those who come toHim shall find rest to their souls. Whetheryou choose to say that it is in spite of thishumility or because of this humility, yet ineither case Christ proclaims Himself as thetrue object of love, and the permanentcentre of power throughout the kingdom

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The Deity of ChristHe proclaims. He not only declares thatHis departure will be the first legitimatecause of mourning to His followers * Canthe children of the bride-chamber mourn aslong as the bridegroom is with them ? Butthe days will come when the bridegroomshall be taken from them, and then shallthey fast 'but even to all others the loveof Him is to predominate over all otherlove. * He that loveth father or mothermore than Me is not worthy of Me, and hethat loveth son or daughter more than Meis not worthy of Me.' Exclusion from Hispresence is everywhere treated as thatouter darkness where there are weepingand gnashing of teeth. His vision of thespiritual future of untrue men is of men cry-ing to Him, * Lord, Lord 1 ' and entreatingHim to recognize them, to whom He will becompelled to say, * I never knew you : de-part from Me, ye that work iniquity.' Hejustifies with warmth all honour paid toHim personally ; * The poor ye have al-ways with you, but Me ye have not al-ways ; ' ' Verily I say wherever this gospelshadl be preached in the whole world, thereshall also this, which this woman hathdone, be told for a memorial of her.' Isnot that most hazardous policy for any onenot endowed with supernatural knowledge?Consider only what usually comes with self-

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The Deity of Christassertion much less astounding than this ina human being, and yet what actuallycame of it in our Lord^s case. The greatestof the world's teachers made light of them-selves. Socrates treats his own death asof no moment. The Jewish prophets neverthink of treating their own careers as ofany significance apart from the messagethey deliver. And as a rule in the world,when a man magnifies himself with gentle-ness and simplicity, we smile ; we may findhim lovable, but there is always a littlelaughter mingled with our love. Whenhe does it arrogantly or imperiously, weare revolted. In either case, the firstgeneration which does not personallyknow him puts aside his pretentions asirrelevant, if not even fatal, to his great-ness. But how was it with Christ ? Thefirst great follower who had never knownHim in the flesh, St. Paul, takes up thisvery note as the key-note of the new world.To him, ' to live is Christ, to die is gain.'His heart is * hid with Christ in God.' Hiscry is, * Not I, but Christ that workethin me.* He makes his whole religiousphilosophy turn on the teaching of ourLord, that He is the Vine, and His disci-ples the branches. In the land of the oliveSt. Paul adapts the image to the husbandryof the olive. Again, Christ is the Head^

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The Deity of Christand men the members. And what is true ofSt. Paul is true of all those in whom theChristian faith has shown its highest geniusin subsequent ages. These sayings ofChrist as to Himself the centre of humanctions and the light of human lives, in-

id of repelling men, interpret their ownhest experience, and K?em but the voicem interior truth and the assurance of an;>erishable joy.*'

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Note IIOn the Inadequacy of the Unitarian ViewTHERE are deeper considerationsthan these of which I have

spoken for rejecting the Unita-rian view of the person of Jesus

Christ. Mr. Hutton sets these forth as thereason for Maurice's departure from theUnitarianism of his father. *' What then,asks he in an essay on '' Maurice and theUnitarians, **is meant by saying thatMaurice's rejection of Unitarianism wasthe result of an ardent yearning after acentre of more perfect unity with others,others generally differing from himself,than he had ever been able to find in Uni-tarianism ? It means just this, thatMaurice regarded the self-revelation ofGod within whose eternal nature theresomething more complex and more mySterious than merely lonely will and loneljpower, as the best guarantee of which h1 D- W

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