By William Sanday, D.D., LL.D., Litt.D. Oxford University Press, American Branch. 1910.1
Publicity is one of the striking characteristics of our times. Our Village Improvement Societies, demanding the removal of all fences, are but a symbol of a universal temper. Perhaps Dr. Sanday is the first scholar, however, who has deliberately elected to do his studying in the public view. He has, as it were, knocked down the walls of his study, and, taking his seat in the open, invited all that pass by to observe him writing his great book on the Life of Christ. It is pleasant to be taken thus into a great scholar’s confidence; and we have all profited by the series of charmingly written volumes in which Dr. Sanday has laid before us the processes of his preliminary studies for his great task. The volume now before us, he tells us, is probably the last of these, and it does not yield in interest to either of its predecessors. We confess, however, to a certain decrease in the interest with which we look forward to the work to which they lead up, as we have read one after the other of these preliminary studies. They pass in review a great mass of modern research, and whatever they touch upon they illuminate. It would be difficult to find a more sympathetic survey of the recent literature of Gospel criticism or a more useful guide to the intricacies of modern constructions of the person of Christ. But it is possible for width of sympathy itself to become a snare; there are other qualities than breadth of importance to a teacher of fundamental religious truth; and it is not strange that the term “latitudinarianism” has even acquired an evil connotation. As we have reread, one after the other, Dr. Sanday’s preliminary studies, while our admiration of the extent of his learning and the clearness of his comprehension of the currents of recent thought has steadily grown, misgivings have grown with it of the firmness of his grasp on the fundamental problems which must underlie and give its body to a Life of Christ which would do justice to the deposit of faith. It was distinctly not reassuring to observe the nature of the hospitality which he accorded in the earliest of these volumes to certain very wiredrawn hypotheses as to the personality of the author of the Fourth Gospel. It was not more reassuring to observe the nature of the commendation which he gave in the second of them to Albert Schweitzer’s brilliant, in some respects surely epoch-making, but sadly negative history of what Schweitzer’s translators call, not unfairly from their point of view, “the quest of the historical Jesus.” Nor does reassurance come with the present volume, with the feebleness of its hold upon the Biblical and Historical Christologies, its readiness to fly for refuge to doubtful modern speculations as supplying the key to the mystery of our Lord’s person, its determination to have a Jesus who in all His earthly manifestations was, phenomenally, “strictly human.” If the outline given on pp. 179 ff. of what Dr. Sanday calls “the working of our Lord’s consciousness,” in which is briefly traced His career from the cradle to the grave, is to furnish, as seems likely, the schematization of the coming Life of Christ, the mold which is to determine the lines of its structure, then, we may as well say frankly at once, we shall have no interest in the new Life of Christ whatever. For then it will be nothing but one more of those “reduced” Lives of Christ, of which the world has already too many, the writers of which, deserting the testimony of the sources, have as Renan puts it “imputed themselves to their victim,” and, creating a Jesus after their own image, permitted Him to function only within the limits of their own consciousness. It will be a matter of sincere regret if, after the warnings of even a Wrede and a Schweitzer, Dr. Sanday should only again “psychologize” the Life of Christ.
The title of the present volume—“Christologies Ancient and Modern”—might lead one to expect to find it a historical sketch of Christological thought in the Church, or perhaps a critical discussion of the chief Christological theories which have been current in the Church. It is not quite either of these. Its leading motive is rather the suggestion of a new Christological theory, the Christological theory which is to underlie the forthcoming Life of Christ. Even so, however, the general drift of ancient Christological thought up to Chalcedon, and the chief forms of German Christological construction of the last century are lightly sketched, to form a background against which the new suggestion may be thrown out. These sketches are drawn, of course, by the hand of a master, although only leading principles are brought out, with no attempt to enter into details. In these circumstances probably we ought not to scrutinize with too much care the occasional details which are rapidly alluded to. Otherwise we might question the description of Tertullian’s Trinity, without qualification, as “what is called an ‘economic Trinity’ ” (p. 26), and we should certainly demur to the rendering of his οἰκονομίας sacramentum by “the mystery of the divine appointment” (p. 25). Dr. Sanday himself at a later point uses the term “economy” in Tertullian’s sense, when (p. 45) he speaks of projecting “our ideas of Personality into the internal economy of the Godhead”—which, by the way, is precisely what Tertullian was in the act of doing, when he wrote the passage which Dr. Sanday quotes. The language which is used in speaking of the Chalcedonian formula (pp. 52–55) again does not seem to us to retain perfect exactness. The Chalcedonian fathers would seem to have done all they could to save themselves from the charge of conceiving the Two Natures as “separable and separate,” when they solemnly declared that they were united ἀδιαιρέτως, Leo’s “agit utraque natura quod proprium est cum alterius communicatione” would seem to preclude the supposition that these two natures were conceived as “operating distinctly”; and the emphatic “without confusion, without conversion” of the decree, would certainly appear to render it impossible to describe it as allowing “by a system of mutual give-and-take” “for the transference of the attributes from one nature to the other”—which is a characteristic feature not of the Chalcedonian but of the Old-Lutheran Christology. Nor do we think it happy (p. 104) to take over Paul’s words in 2 Cor. 5:19 in the form, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself,” without remark, as a fair expression of the Ritschlian view of Christ’s person. We suppose it to be unquestionable that these words, as they stand in Paul’s epistle, have a Soteriological rather than Christological content, and should be read, “God was, in Christ, reconciling the world with Himself,” or to put its full point upon it, “It was God who was reconciling the world with Himself in Christ”; and it is hardly desirable to perpetuate a perversion of an apostolical phrase by making it in its perverted use the vehicle of a special Christological hypothesis. Small incidental matters of this kind, however, are scarcely more worth adverting to than the incapacity the American publishers show (pp. 27, 40, 51, 121) to print a Greek phrase correctly, a matter which must be especially mortifying to Dr. Sanday and his British publishers alike, to whom such things are unwonted.