ARTICLE XXIII. The Christ of Paul.-[The portraiture of Jesus Christ to be obtained from the Four Great Epistles (Romans, I. and II. Corinthians, and Galatians).]1 The name of the German University of Tübingen brings to mind a company of scholars and writers whose work has had a profound effect upon the thought of the Christian world respecting the historical basis of the Christian faith. Not that the results at which this school of critics arrived have been adopted. On the contrary, in most essentials they have been long since outgrown and rejected by the leading scholars of Germany and the world. But the Christian world has by no means returned to the position it occupied before the conflict aroused by the publications of this school. The effects of that conflict have been nothing less than marvelous. The man who is unquestionably entitled to be called the head of this school is Ferdinand Christian Baur, who died at Tübingen twenty-five years ago. One of the ablest men that Germany has ever produced the ablest without exception in his field, I think I may say-endowed with great acuteness and ingenuity, marvelous objectivity, perfect fearlessness of consequences, and indefatigable industry, he stood at the head of a movement which gave Christianity as a historical faith such a shock as it had never before received, and which for half a century carried everything before it in Germany. Yet if any one should suppose that the work of Baur and his school was an unmixed injury to the cause of historical Christianity, or that in its ultimate results it was an injury at all, I should dissent from that opinion most decidedly. Christian thought in Germany in the time of Baur was asleep. and needed to be waked up. It was bound with the fetters of traditionalism, and needed to be freed from them. The Christian faith rested upon foundations whose historical truth and stability had up to that time been assumed. They had never been thoroughly, candidly, fearlessly tested and proved. 1 Given as a lecture to the students of the Tufts College Divinity School. 25 Such thorough and fearless testing of foundations is a task almost never undertaken, in the first instance, by those who fully accept and are fully satisfied with the system built upon them. The beginnings of criticism are almost always negative and destructive in their tendency. It is only when provoked and called out in this way that positive and constructive criticism is, ordinarily, called out at all. It was the negative and destructive criticism of Baur and his compeers, the results of which swept away, or seemed to sweep away, the very foundations of Christianity as a historical faith, which availed, and which alone could have availed, to stir the sluggish current of Christian thought, and incite believers in historical Christianity to examine, carefully and thoroughly, the foundations of their faith, and to establish them, such of them as should sustain the examination and could be established, incontrovertibly. It was necessary that this destructive criticism should be extreme, affecting things regarded as fundamental; otherwise it would have excited little interest and called forth little investigation and response. It was necessary that the task be ably done; otherwise it would not have put the ablest writers and thinkers of Germany and of the world upon their mettle and called out their best efforts in defense of what they had been accustomed to look upon as the indubitable foundations of their Christian faith. As a result of this extreme negative and destructive criticism and of the activity in investigation which it called forth, the Christian faith stands to-day upon an incomparably firmer historical basis than ever before- and that notwithstanding the apparently well-nigh utter demolition of that basis by this criticism. In reality, there are few men whom the Christian Church, aud particularly the cause of historical Christianity, has greater reason to thank than Baur and his associates of the Tübingen school. The results of this criticism, as applied to the commonly accepted documents of Christianity - namely, the canonical books of the New Testament, are, in brief, as follows: Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament five only - are genuine that is to say, written by those whose names they bear. These are, first, the four great Epistles of Paul, Romans (except the last two chapters), I. and II. Corinthians and Galatians, written by the great apostle to the Gentiles between A. D. 54 and 59, and the Apocalypse, written by the apostle John, A. D. 68. All the other books are spurious—that is, not written by the persons to whom they are ascribed. They all owe their origin to some definite dogmatic or theological aim, or as the Germans express it, tendenz, whence this theory of New Testament criticism is often called the Tendenz theory. - Almost immediately after the death of Jesus his followers were divided into two increasingly divergent and growingly hostile parties. On the one side stood the Jewish Christians, clinging to the Mosaic Law, and even seeking, many of them, at least, to impose it upon Gentile converts to Christianity. On the other the Gentile Christians. At the head of the first party stood all the original apostles without exception, Peter being the most prominent, and at the head of the other Paul. That is to say, there were, almost from the first, two divergent and hostile parties among Christians, the Petrine and the Pauline and two very different forms of the gospelPetrinism and Paulinism. This conflict continued beyond the lifetime of all the original apostles, except possibly John. Finally, being pressed by the attacks of heretics, and seeing the value and indeed the necessity of unity, various irenic or conciliatory overtures were made on both sides. All the books of the New Testament, spurious and genuine alike, were written with one or another of these aims they were either Petrine, Pauline, or mediating. Of the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew is the oldest, and the only one written before the destruction of Jerusalem, A. D. 70. It is Petrine in tendency, yet upon the whole contains the most trustworthy account of the life and sayings of Jesus. Luke is decidedly Pauline in tendency, was written after A. D. 70, and is less trustworthy. Mark is later than either, a bare compilation from them, and not entitled to be regarded as an independ ent source at all. The book of the Acts is an irenic document of later date. Then come the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles to the Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Phillippians, and those of Peter and James. The latest books of the New Testament are the so-called Pastoral Epistles of Paul and the Fourth Gospel, all written well into the 2d century, the last not earlier than 170-180 A. D. All these are irenic or mediating, from one side or the other. I have not stated thus, in briefest outline, the main points of the Tübingen criticism of the New Testament books, in order to combat or even to discuss them. That is a task for which I am by no means competent. Moreover, it has already been done, and well done. A part of the results of this school, generally in a much modified form, have been adopted, and now form a part of the productive capital of Christian scholarship. Much more has been effectually refuted, notably the theory respecting the Fourth Gospel, to which our own Dr. Abbot gave the final death-blow a few years since. As a system it has become altogether obsolete in the country where it originated. - It is not at all my intention to oppose the results of this criticism. On the contrary, I propose in this lecture to plant myself precisely upon one of its most characteristic positions that the genuine New Testament - that is to say, the collection of documents actually written by contemporaries of Jesus consists of but five books, the four great Epistles of Paul and the Apocalypse. These are the only really contemporary documents referring to the origin of Christianity that we have. Taking this most extreme position of the destructive criticism, and putting the Apocalypse aside as not to our present purpose, we are to suppose, for this lecture, the whole New Testament, save these Epistles, to be blotted out of existence, and our inquiry is to be, What kind of a portraiture of Christ is to be obtained from these four Epistles? What kind of an idea of him,- of his person, of his life, of his mission, should we get if all our knowledge must be drawn from these four books alone? We will admit the most ex treme position that any reputable critic ever took regarding the documents of our faith, and inquire What then? What remains to us of the Christ? It is to be borne in mind that the Epistles of Paul were designed for a practical purpose—they were written to particular churches, and to meet particular exigencies in those churches. They were not written for the purpose of telling us of the nineteenth century about Christ. Much of what they do teach us, therefore, we shall expect to be taught not directly, but simply by implication, which fact, however, if the implication be clear and fair, does not in any degree impair the value of the evidence. Still one remark more. The whole question of inspiration is to be laid aside, and these four Epistles are to be regarded as carrying simply the authority of Paul as a contemporary and competent human witness. They give us, so far as they go, what Paul thought and believed about his Master. I. Paul's teaching respecting the person of Christ. 1. The Christ of Paul is a preëxistent being. It is presupposed in Gal. iv. 4: When the fulness of the time came, God [Sanioreiler] sent forth his Son, born of a woman. 'Eğan. sent forth from himself. The word used implies a personal existence of the Son with God before the sending and before the birth. Compare Rom. viii. 3: "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending [réuas] His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, etc.", where the connection and ring of the passage suggests the same thought, though it is not necessarily implied in the word, as in the other case. Compare also Rom. i. 3, 4: Jesus Christ, born of the seed of David according to the flesh, declared to be the Son of God with power. 2 Cor. v. 16. But in 2 Cor. viii. 9 it is not only implied but taught." For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich." There never was a time in his earthly career when Jesus could have been called rich; no time when he could be said |