By H. Wheeler Robinson, M.A. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1911.1
The task which Mr. Robinson has set before himself, put briefly, is the restatement in modern terms of the essential features of Christian anthropology. He occupies, however, the very modern standpoint which conceives everything as in a flux. What the Christian doctrine of man is, is therefore not a fixed thing but an ever changing—perhaps Mr. Robinson would prefer to say, an ever developing—quantity. It must be conceived as process, and studied as history. Even “its statement in terms of to-day can be no more than a cross-section of this continuous development” (p. 2). There is no way of stopping the flow and obtaining once for all a precipitate. We can tell what Christian men used to think about man—what the writers of the New Testament thought, and how, standing on the shoulders of the writers of the Old Testament, they came to think it; what the Christian men of any subsequent age thought and how, standing on the shoulders of the preceding ages, they came to think it. We can tell what the Christian men of to-day think, and how, in the midst of the influences which play upon them they have come to think it. But who can tell what the Christian man of to-morrow will think? And above all who can isolate from the steadily flowing stream, we will not merely say the constant elements, the elements which, up to to-day, have remained characteristic of Christian thought, but the permanent elements, the elements which will always remain characteristic of Christian thought? The weakness of the genetic method to which Mr. Robinson commits himself is revealed in such questions. We may speak of the Christian doctrine of man “beginning historically with the life and teaching of Jesus Christ”; we may represent the whole subsequent historical development as but “the record of the germination and growth of the seed sown by Jesus Christ”; we may declare that it has never “lost its vital continuity with Him who is its source”; we may praise it for its power to slough off what is outworn and to assimilate new elements which in the enlarging knowledge of the increasing years present themselves to it. But what we cannot gloze is that we have on this ground lost all right to speak of any such thing as the Christian doctrine of man. There have already been many doctrines of man held temporarily by Christians, and for aught we know there will be many more. Unless we can lay our hands upon a continuous teaching characteristic of all who are Christians, bearing the mark not only of constancy so far, but of permanency forever, it is idle to talk about “the Christian doctrine of man.” There is no such thing.
What is needed to give us a really Christian doctrine of man is obviously an authoritative standard of Christian doctrine. And Mr. Robinson has no such authoritative standard of Christian doctrine. The only authority which he ultimately recognizes is just his own personal decisions as to what were right and fitting (pp. 273–274). If we say, with our fathers, that the Scriptures are authoritative, clearly their authority rests on the inspiration of their writers, and the inspiration of their writers is reducible to “the Christian experience created in them by the Spirit of God.” But we have Christian experience as well as they and from the same source. “The potential authority of the Scriptures becomes actual over us only through the continuity of this experience within us, as mediated by the historic society.” That is to say, we company with Christians; by our association with them a Christian experience is begotten in us which we refer to the Spirit of God; we see this same Christian experience reflected in the Scriptures; and so far, but only so far, we recognize them as authoritative. This, Mr. Robinson speaks of as a “unity of the historical and individual consciousness” which “goes back,” he declares, “at last to the Spirit of God, on whom both depend.” Thus he transmutes the “Schriftprinzip” of the fathers into a “Geistprinzip,” but a “Geistprinzip” which reduces at last to a mere “Selbstprinzip.” For he proceeds: “This is the religious expression of what is more than a pragmatic appeal to consciousness; we may put it philosophically by saying that the only rational appeal to authority is ultimately an appeal to intrinsic truth.” Whatever manifests itself to us as intrinsically true we accept as true. It is its self-evidencing quality which authenticates it to us. This is the language of Lessing and the old Rationalism. Only, by it, they reduced what could be accepted as true to rational axioms. Mr. Robinson does not wish to do that. “We appeal,” he says, “to the intrinsic truth, the self-evidencing credibility of the experience which runs through Bible, and Church, and the life of the Christian man to-day.” There is something else, in his view, in man, the source of sound convictions of truth, besides the bare rational faculty: but there is no other source of sound convictions of truth than what is in man. We accept as true only what evinces itself to us, being what we are, as true on intrinsic grounds: only what is self-evident to us. The Scriptures have no authority to us; their contents are accepted by us only so far as they accredit themselves to us on intrinsic grounds. Even the testimony of Jesus is without authority to us. This does not mean that we have no reverence for Jesus or fail to recognize His uniqueness among men. “We may emphasize as we may, and ought, the closeness of His relation to the ideals of Israel, the intimate interweaving of His thought as well as His life with all the tendencies of His time; we may recognize the limitations to His power in the defeat of His hopes for Israel, and the limitations to His knowledge, as in the eschatological outlook of some at least of the discourses ascribed to Him in the Synoptic Gospels; the fact remains that there is a uniqueness in His own consciousness of Himself, in the historic presentation of His personality in the New Testament, and in His influence on the subsequent centuries of human life, that forbids us to regard Him as simply one of ourselves” (p. 279). It only means that whatever we think of Him, we cannot always think well of what He teaches us, and therefore cannot accept His deliverances as authoritative enunciations of truth. “Not only did the Light of the World shine first on Semitic faces, and flash its glory to us from the jewels of Oriental parable and paradox, but, in the humility of the Incarnation, the divine Thought was moulded to the pattern of Jewish conceptions. In particular, the eschatology of the Gospels is distinctively Jewish, and its influence on Christian thought has been out of all proportion to the worth of its forms. Scientific conceptions of the world and of the limits of its material destiny have replaced the panorama of Jewish apocalypse in the modern man’s imaginative forecasts; the ultimate questions lie beyond both modern and ancient forms” (pp. 80–81). We may manage perhaps to believe in Jesus; we cannot always believe Him. We have no authoritative guide to truth except our own personal judgment, depending, as Mr. Robinson would add, on the Spirit of God.