Let us now look at the corporate life, or at the fellowship of the individual with the Redeemer. We may best describe its beginning, since it is conditioned by a free acceptance, by the term calling—the whole official activity of Christ began with just such a call. But the share of the Redeemer in the common life, viewed as continuing, we are fully justified in calling soul-bestowal (Beseelung), primarily with reference to the corporate life—as indeed the Church is called His Body. In just the same way Christ is to be the soul also in the individual fellowship, and each individual the organism through which the soul works. The two things are related as in Christ the divine activity present in the act of union is related to that activity in the state of union, and as in God the activity of creation is related to that of preservation. Only that here it is still clearer how each moment of a common activity can be regarded also as a calling, and likewise how the calling proper can be regarded as soul-bestowal. But this formula, too, we shall employ in another place.

3. This exposition is based entirely on the inner experience of the believer; its only purpose is to describe and elucidate that experience. Naturally, therefore, it can make no claim to be a proof that things must have been so; in the sphere of experience such proof is only possible where mathematics can be used, which is certainly not the case here. Our purpose is simply to show that the perfect satisfaction to which we aspire can only be truly contained in the Christian’s consciousness of his relation to Christ in so far as that consciousness expresses the kind of relation which has been described here. If this content be lacking in the Christian consciousness, then either the perfect satisfaction must come from some other quarter, or it does not exist at all, and we must be content with an indefinite appeasement of conscience, such as may be found without any Redeemer; and in that case there would be no special possession of divine grace in Christianity at all. Now these negations cannot be logically refuted; they can only be removed by actual facts: we must seek to bring doubters to the same experience as we have had.

Now such a presentation of the redeeming activity of Christ as has been given here, which exhibits it as the establishment of a new life common to Him and us (original in Him, in us new and derived), is usually called by those who have not had the experience, ‘mystical.’ This expression is so extremely vague that it seems better to avoid it. But if we are willing to keep so close to its original use as to understand by it what belongs to the circle of doctrines which only a few share, but for others are a mystery, then we may accept it. Provided that we recognize that no one can be received into this circle arbitrarily, because doctrines are only expressions of inward experiences—whoever has these experiences ipso facto belongs to the circle; whoever has not, cannot come in at all. But an analogy to this relation may be pointed out in a sphere which is universally familiar. As contrasted with the condition of things existing before there was any law, the civil community within a defined area is a higher vital potency. Let us now suppose that some person for the first time combines a naturally cohesive group into a civil community (legend tells of such cases in plenty); what happens is that the idea of the state first comes to consciousness in him, and takes possession of his personality as its immediate dwelling-place. Then he assumes the rest into the living fellowship of the idea. He does so by making them clearly conscious of the unsatisfactoriness of their present condition by effective speech. The power remains with the founder of forming in them the idea which is the innermost principle of his own life, and of assuming them into the fellowship of that life. The result is, not only that there arises among them a new corporate life, in complete contrast to the old, but also that each of them becomes in himself a new person—that is to say, a citizen. And everything resulting from this is the corporate life—developing variously with the process of time, yet remaining essentially the same—of this idea which emerged at that particular point of time, but was always predestined in the nature of that particular racial stock. The analogy might be pushed even further, to points of which we shall speak later. But even this presentation of it will seem mystical to those who admit only a meagre and inferior conception of the civic state.

Let us be content, then, that our view of the matter should be called mystical in this sense; naturally everything to be derived from this main point will be called mystical too. But just as this mystical view can substantiate its claim to be the original one, so too it claims to be the true mean between two others, of which I shall call the one the magical way, and the other the empirical. The former admits, of course, that the activity of Christ is redemptive, but denies that the communication of His perfection is dependent on the founding of a community; it results, they maintain, from His immediate influence upon the individual: and for this some take the written word to be a necessary means, others do not. The latter show themselves the more consistent, but the more completely they cut themselves loose from everything originating in the community the more obvious becomes the magical character of their view. This magical character lies in an influence not mediated by anything natural, yet attributed to a person. This is completely at variance with the maxim everywhere underlying our presentation, that the beginning of the Kingdom of God is a supernatural thing, which, however, becomes natural as soon as it emerges into manifestation; for this other view makes every significant moment a supernatural one. Further, this view is completely separatist in type, for it makes the corporate life a purely accidental thing; and it comes very near being docetic as well. For if Christ exerted influence in any such way as this—as a person, it is true, but only as a heavenly person without earthly presence, though in a ‘truly personal way—then it would have been possible for Him to work in just the same way at any time, and His real personal appearance in history was only a superfluous adjunct. But those who likewise assume an immediate personal influence, but mediate it through the word and the fellowship, are less magical only if they attribute to these the power of evoking a mood in which the individual becomes susceptible to that personal influence. They are more magical still, if these natural elements have the power of disposing Christ to exert His influence; for then their efficacy is exactly like that attributed to magic spells. The contrary empirical view also, it is true, admits a redemptive activity on the part of Christ, but one which is held to consist only in bringing about an increasing perfection in us; and this cannot properly occur otherwise than in the forms of teaching and example. These forms are general; there is nothing distinctive in them. Even suppose it admitted that Christ is distinguished from others who contribute in the same way to our improvement, by the pure perfection of His teaching and His example, yet if all that is achieved in us is something imperfect, there remains nothing but to forgo the idea of redemption in the proper sense—that is, as the removal of sin—and, in view of the consciousness of sin still remaining even in our growing perfection, to pacify ourselves with a general appeal to the divine compassion. Now, teaching and example effect no more than such a growing perfection, and this appeal to the divine compassion occurs even apart from Christ. It must therefore be admitted that His appearance, in so far as intended to be something special, would in that case be in vain. At most it might be said that by His teaching He brought men to the point of giving up the effort, previously universal, to offer God substitutes for the perfection they lacked. But since the uselessness of this effort can be demonstrated, already in our natural intelligence we have the divine certainty of this, and had no need to obtain it elsewhere. And probably this view is chiefly to blame for the claim of philosophy to set itself above faith and to treat faith as merely a transitional stage. But we cannot rest satisfied with the consciousness of growing perfection, for that belongs just as much to the consciousness of sin as to that of grace, and hence cannot contain what is peculiarly Christian. But, for the Christian, nothing belongs to the consciousness of grace unless it is traced to the Redeemer as its cause, and therefore it must always be a different thing in His case from what it is in the case of others—naturally, since it is bound up with something else, namely, the peculiar redemptive activity of Christ.

§ 101. The Redeemer assumes the believers into the fellowship of His unclouded blessedness, and this is His reconciling activity.

1. If this assumption into the fellowship of Christ’s blessedness were independent of the assumption into the power of His God-consciousness, or even if the former were to follow from the latter, the teleological nature of Christianity would be changed. But just as in God blessedness and omnipotence are balanced, mutually conditioned, and yet also independent of each other, so also in the Person of Christ blessedness and the power of the God-consciousness must be balanced in the same way, one conditioning the other and each independent of the other. Accordingly we can say that it must be the same with the effective influence of Christ. Either this must be simply admitted, or else there must be two contrasted ways of regarding Christianity, complementary to each other, one of them presenting it as an effort after blessedness for the sake of the power of the God-consciousness, the other vice versa. But since the effective influence of Christ arises only in so far as a receptivity or a longing for it pre-exists in its object, so the reconciling activity can only manifest itself as a consequence of the redemptive activity because the consciousness of sin, in itself and not as a source of evil, forms the necessary basis of that longing, inasmuch as in the case of the individual evil is not connected with sin. So if we think of the Redeemer’s activity as an influence upon the individual, we are bound to make the reconciling factor follow upon the redemptive and issue from it. But we equate the two thus far, that the communication of blessedness no less than the communication of perfection is given immediately in the assumption into vital fellowship with Christ.

2. Now in view of the exact parallel between this proposition and the preceding one, so that regarded in and by themselves they might fittingly have been run together into one, this seems hardly to need explanation. On the one hand, every activity in Christ proceeded from the being of God in Him, and this activity was never hindered by any resistance of His human nature. Similarly, the hindrances to His activity never determined any moment of His life until the perception of them had been taken up into His inmost self-consciousness, which was so completely one with His powerful God-consciousness that they could appear in it only as belonging to the temporal form of the perfect effectiveness of His being. On the other hand, it was still less possible that hindrances arising out of His own natural or social life could be taken up in this innermost consciousness as hindrances; they could be no more than indications of the direction set for His activity. Similarly, the redeemed man too, since he has been assumed into the vital fellowship of Christ, is never filled with the consciousness of any evil, for it cannot touch or hinder the life which he shares with Christ. All hindrances to life, natural and social, come to him even in this region only as indications. They are not taken away, as if he were to be, or could be, without pain and free from suffering, for Christ also knew pain and suffered in the same way. Only the pains and sufferings do not mean simple misery, for they do not as such penetrate into the inmost life. And this holds good also of his consciousness of the sin still occurring in his life. It cannot have its source in his new life; he refers it therefore only to the corporate life of general sinfulness, which still has a place in him. Not that it is not pain and suffering, so far as he clings to his own personality; but it reaches the life of Christ in him only as an indication of what he has to do; consequently there is in it no misery. The assumption into vital fellowship with Christ, therefore, dissolves the connexion between sin and evil, since morally the two are no longer related to each other, even if from the merely natural point of view the one is the consequence of the other. Morally, however, each of them by itself is regarded solely in relation to the task of the new life. Hence, just as the redemptive activity of Christ brings about for all believers a corporate activity corresponding to the being of God in Christ, so the reconciling element, that is, the blessedness of the being of God in Him, brings about for all believers, as for each separately, a corporate feeling of blessedness. Therein, too, their former personality dies, so far as it meant a self-enclosed life of feeling within a sensuous vital unity, to which all sympathetic feeling for others and for the whole was subordinated. But what remains as the self-identity of the person is the peculiar way of apprehending and perceiving, which as individualized intelligence so works itself into the new common life that relatively to this factor also the activity of Christ is person-forming, in that an old man is put off and a new man is put on. Here too, if we wish to note similarities between the activity of Christ in forming the new corporate life and the divine activity in forming the personality of Christ, we shall be able to distinguish a first moment, which corresponds to the act of union as first beginning, and as such can only look back to what preceded, and a second, which represents the state of union, and, as expressing continuance, also looks forward to the future. Now here the beginning is the disappearance of the old man, and so also of the old reference of all evil to sin, that is, the disappearance of the consciousness of deserving punishment. Consequently the first thing in the reconciling aspect is the forgiveness of sins.⁸ For in the unity of life with Christ all relation to the law ceases, since the general movement contrary to sin, proceeding from Him, begins.⁹ But the state of union is the real possession of blessedness in the consciousness that Christ in us is the centre of our life, and this in such a way that this possession exists solely as His gift, which, since we receive it simply by His will that we should have it, is His blessing and His peace. But the same thing is true here again, that each moment or aspect may at the same time be regarded in accordance with the formula of the other. For in the first moment the whole development is already implicitly contained, but at the same time in every later moment the first persists; for the fact that this possession of blessedness is pervaded throughout by sin (a fact which our recurrence to Christ makes it all the more impossible for us to overlook) always points on in turn to the forgiveness of sins.

3. Obviously our proposition is mystical in the same sense as the previous one, and its truth also can only be proved in experience. But in the same sense it too stands intermediate between a magical view, which destroys all naturalness in the continuous activity of Christ, and an empirical, which reduces it altogether to the level of ordinary daily experience, and thus does not make its supernatural beginning and its distinctive peculiarity the fundamental things in it.

The latter view likewise starts from the connexion between sin and evil, and rightly infers that when sin is taken away so also is evil. But since this connexion principally holds good for social evil alone, and is exact even for this only if we consider a large corporate life as a rounded whole, whereas in every individual part of that life inward improvement may well be accompanied by increasing evil, because of its connexion with the rest, the growing improvement of the individual can furnish no guarantee at all that he is being set free from evil and cannot form a basis of blessedness. Even along with increasing perfection the fact remains not only that he encounters hindrances to life, but that they are such as in the light of the sin still present in him have the aspect of punishment. It follows that this reconciliation only very accidentally takes the form of enjoyment and possession; in essence it can never be set forth as more than hope. But in either form it is not, so far as content is concerned, anything peculiarly Christian, nor can it as enjoyment have a greater strength, or as hope possess a higher degree of certainty, within Christianity than without. And how slight this is everywhere, history clearly shows. For, altogether apart from Christianity, the dispute is constantly recurring as to whether evil in the world is really growing less, or only changing its form while in sum remaining what it has ever been. Not only so, but within the Christian Church itself the same doubt constantly reappears, and this the more strongly the less experience there is of the enjoyment of the unclouded blessedness of Christ, and the more recourse is had to that general hope. And, quite contrary to Christ’s own assurance,¹⁰ that blessedness is relegated to the life beyond time, and thus clearly declared to be independent of the gradual improvement. But in that case Christ has part in our blessedness or salvation only through His influence upon this progressive improvement, which means that a specific difference between Him and other men is of little importance.

Only those views of Christ’s reconciling activity appear to be magical which make the impartation of His blessedness independent of assumption into vital fellowship with Him. This means that the forgiveness of sins is made to depend upon the punishment which Christ suffered, and the blessedness of men itself is presented as a reward which God offers to Christ for the suffering of that punishment. Not, of course, that the thought of our blessedness as a rewarding of Christ is altogether to be rejected—on the contrary, we shall have to speak of that later. Nor that all connexion between the suffering of Christ and the forgiveness of sins is to be denied. But both ideas become magical when blessedness and forgiveness are not mediated through vital fellowship with Christ. For within this fellowship the impartation of blessedness, as explained above, is a natural one; whereas without this the rewarding of Christ is nothing but divine arbitrariness. And this in itself is always something magical, but it is especially so when something so absolutely inward as blessedness is supposed to have been brought about externally, without any inner basis. For if it is independent of life in Christ, then, since man does not have the source of blessedness in himself, it can only have been infused into each separate individual somehow or other from without. In no less magical a way is the forgiveness of sins achieved, if the consciousness of deserving punishment is supposed to cease because the punishment has been borne by another. That in this way the expectation of punishment might be taken away is conceivable; but this is merely the sensuous element in the forgiveness of sins. The properly ethical element, the consciousness of deserving punishment, would still remain. And this therefore would have to disappear as if conjured away, without any reason. And to what extent something even of this view has passed over into Church doctrine is a question we shall have to discuss below.

4. Now if we compare the connected view here set forth with the two alternative views which have just been cited, they certainly suggest the reflection that in our view, the suffering of Christ has nothing to say, so that there has not even been an opportunity to raise the question whether, and to what extent, it belongs to redemption or to reconciliation. But the only conclusion to be drawn from this postponement of the question is that no reason existed for adducing it as a primitive element either in the one place or in the other. And this is so far correct, that otherwise no complete assumption into vital fellowship with Christ, such as makes redemption and reconciliation completely intelligible, would have been possible before the suffering and death of Christ. As an element of secondary importance, however, it belongs to both; immediately to reconciliation, and to redemption only mediately. The activity of Christ in founding the new corporate life could really emerge in its perfect fulness—although belief in this perfection could exist even apart from this—only if it yielded to no opposition, not even to that which succeeded in destroying His person. Here, accordingly, the perfection does not lie properly and immediately in the suffering itself, but only in His giving up of Himself to it. And of this it is only, as it were, a magical caricature, if we isolate this climax, leave out of account the foundation of the corporate life, and regard this giving up of Himself to suffering for suffering’s sake as the real sum-total of Christ’s redemptive activity. But so far as reconciliation is concerned, our exposition makes it obvious that, in order to effect assumption into the fellowship of His blessedness, the longing of those who were conscious of their misery must first be drawn to Christ through the impression they had received of His blessedness. And here too the situation is that belief in this blessedness might be present even apart from this, but that none the less His blessedness emerged in its perfect fulness only in that it was not overcome even by the full tide of suffering. The more so that this suffering arose out of the opposition of sin, and that therefore the Redeemer’s sympathy with misery, ever present, though without disturbing His blessedness, from the time of His entrance into the corporate life of sin, had here to enter on its greatest phase. And here it is not the giving up of Himself to suffering, as something that forms part of the redemptive activity, but the suffering itself which is the full confirmation of belief in the Redeemer’s blessedness. But here again it is only a magical caricature of this which, completely overlooking the necessity of an imperturbable blessedness in Christ, finds the reconciling power of His suffering precisely in the fact that He willingly gave up even His blessedness, and experienced, even if only for moments, real misery. So far as Church doctrine is not wholly free from this idea either, we shall return to the matter below.

The climax of His suffering, we hold then, was sympathy with misery. This, however, at once involves the further conclusion that no suffering which is not bound up with the redemptive activity of Christ can be regarded as belonging to reconciliation, because suffering of that sort would also have no connexion with the Redeemer’s opposition to misery, and so it could belong to the reconciliation only in a magical way. Now Christ’s sufferings can be thought of in this connexion with His redemptive activity only when regarded as a whole and a unity; to separate out any particular element and ascribe to it a peculiar reconciling value, is not merely trifling allegory if done in teaching, and worthless sentimentality in poetry; probably it is also seldom free from a defiling admixture of superstition. Least of all is it proper to ascribe such a special reconciling value to His physical sufferings; and that for two reasons. On the one hand, these sufferings in themselves have only the loosest connexion with His reaction against sin. On the other hand, our own experience teaches us that an ordinary ethical development and robust piety have as their reward the almost complete overcoming of physical sufferings in the presence of a glad spiritual self-consciousness, whether personal or corporate. Certainly they can never suppress that consciousness, nor make a moment of blessedness any less blessed. But in order that the exposition just given may serve as an all-round test in scrutinizing Church formulæ, it must be brought into relation to our general formula of the creation of human nature as completed through Christ, so as to convince ourselves that in this twofold activity of Christ such creation is really fully accomplished. For whatever in human nature is assumed into vital fellowship with Christ is assumed into the fellowship of an activity solely determined by the power of the God-consciousness; therefore adequate to every new experience and extracting from it all it has to yield. It is at the same time assumed into the fellowship of a satisfaction which rests in that activity and which cannot be disturbed by any outside influence. Now that each assumption of this sort is simply a continuation of the same creative act which first manifested itself in time by the formation of Christ’s Person; that each increase in the intensity of this new life relatively to the disappearing corporate life of sinfulness is also such a continuation, must now be clear; and that in this new life man achieves the destiny originally appointed for him, and that nothing beyond this can be conceived or attempted for a nature such as ours—all this requires no further exposition.

However exactly this presentation of the subject may correspond to the immediate consciousness of the Christian, so that it recognizes itself in it, still it is inevitable that, as it stands half-way between the empirical and the magical interpretations, it should be mistaken by each of these for the opposite one. For, on the one hand, since a spiritual thing like the foundation of a corporate life must be spiritually achieved, and there is no spiritual influence but the presentation of oneself in word and deed, the Redeemer could only enter into our corporate life by means of such self-presentation, thereby attracting men to Himself and making them one with Himself. Now to warn those who lean to the side of magic, this touchstone must be kept before them, whether their conception really agrees with the possibility of conceiving the effective influence of Christ under this historical natural form. And nothing is easier than for them to misunderstand this, and to imagine that Christ must work simply in the ordinary human way as teacher and example, the divine in Him being altogether left out of account. But on the other hand, the distinction between such a Christ and Christ as we here understand Him, can only be made plain by reference to ‘Christ in us,’ whereas the relation of teacher and pupil, like that of pattern and imitation, must always remain an external one. If, however, those who lean to the empirical view were asked whether they too had a real experience of vital fellowship with Christ, they would only too easily misunderstand the question, and suppose that they were being asked to assent to the objectionable magic view. For that reason we shall leave wide room on both sides open, not only for the Christian Church as a whole, but also for the Protestant Church, in which all these differences are present, in order that, wherever there is a recognition of Christ—and the danger of letting this go is just as great on the side of the magical extreme as on that of the empirical—and so long as such an extreme has not yet been reached, we may always: be able to maintain fellowship, and by means of it bring all ever nearer to the centre.

§ 102. Church doctrine divides the whole activity of Christ into three offices, the prophetic, the priestly, and the kingly.

1. At first sight this division has against it the appearance of being very arbitrary. It looks as if from the great number of Biblical expressions used by Christ Himself one in particular had been chosen and the others set aside, and to this one two others added, which were used, not by Christ Himself, but only by His disciples.¹¹ If then pictorial expressions are to be used at all, unquestionably the picture of the Shepherd, which was used by Christ Himself and repeated by Peter, has a better right (it will be said) than the expressions ‘High Priest’ and ‘Prophet.’ Now if this really were the case—that out of a number of equally justifiable expressions, all of them pictorial, these had been selected, more or less by accident—then it would be surprising (since pictorial expressions are always hard to define, and therefore in a dialectical discussion almost inevitably involve great inconveniences) that such a presentation had been able to maintain itself for so long without being supplanted by some other even if it were one no less arbitrary; and not only so, but one would reasonably hesitate to make any further use of this form of expression in a strictly theological treatment. But these expressions are not to be put on one level with other pictorial expressions; manifestly their purpose is to be sought in the comparison they indicate between the achievements of Christ in the corporate life founded by Him and those by which in the Jewish people the theocracy was represented and held together, and this comparison is not even to-day to be neglected in the system of doctrine. For even if it is equally true that this presentation is rather characteristic of the earliest formative period of the faith (when it certainly was necessary to bring the anti-Jewish element in Christianity into evidence under the Jewish form itself) than fitted to be a persistent type of doctrine, this would only mean that these forms alone cannot suffice for us. When we have, however, developed the subject in our own way, as above, on the basis of our own Christian experience, it is still worth while to preserve a continuity with those original presentations, for the first theoretical interpretation of Christianity was based upon a comparison of the new Kingdom of God with the old. And so we have to show that our conception is in agreement with that which the earlier Christians formed for themselves, when they represented the offices of Christ as new and intensified forms of those through which in the old covenant the divine government was revealed.

2. Of course we are here concerned rather with the idea of these authorities [prophet, priest, and king] in Judaism than with their historical development. The kings were properly the representatives of the God of Israel; to them the government was entrusted, in order that the people might be held together and the common life, where necessary, renewed and purified. The priests were the guardians of the temple and the shrines, and presided over the immediate relation of the people to God, bringing requests and offerings before Him, and bringing back from God forgiveness and blessing. The prophets were men specially called and sent forth by God, belonging to both sides, God and man, and mediating between them, but not so constantly as the priests. For although there were schools of the prophets, yet there was no uninterrupted succession of prophets in the narrower sense. In the hour of need the prophet arose, now from the ranks of either kings or priests, now from the midst of the people, with a message of warning when one of the appointed authorities had erred from the right path, of revival when the original spirit threatened to be extinguished by the dead letter. Now in order to make clear the relation of the Kingdom of heaven to this earthly theocracy, Christ, on whom alone the Kingdom rests, is represented as uniting all these three offices in Himself. The meaning of this is that in this Kingdom of God (which, it is always understood, is not of this world) the establishment and maintenance of the fellowship of each individual with God, and the maintenance and direction of the fellowship of all members with one another, are not separate achievements but the same; and further, that these activities and the free dominion of the Spirit in knowledge and doctrine do not spring from a different source but from the same.

3. Now in what way the whole redemptive and reconciling activity of Christ, as just described,¹² is completely reproduced in terms of these three offices, can be shown only in the exposition which follows. But so much at least we can point out here and now—that if we ascribe to the Redeemer only one of these three functions, and neglect the others, or, alternatively, completely exclude one of them, then that harmony between the old covenant and the new is destroyed, and the peculiar quality of Christianity is endangered. For to claim for Christ the prophetic office alone means limiting His effective influence to teaching and admonition relatively to a form of life already in existence either before Him or apart from Him, and to a relation to God already established apart from Him at some other point; and on such an interpretation the peculiar element in Christianity is seriously overshadowed. It is just the same if we ascribe to Him the two formative activities, but exclude Him from the prophetic activity, with its character of direct spiritual stimulation. For then one cannot see how, if the power of the living word is to have no share in the work, the Kingdom of God can arise except in some magical way. If, on the other hand, we exclude the kingly office, then the other two taken together, though certainly they unite each redeemed individual closely to the Redeemer, yet supply no relation to a corporate life, and so produce only an unpleasing and even, when more closely observed, an unchristian separatism. Lastly, if the high-priestly office is passed over, but the other two retained, then the prophetic activity could be related only to the kingly, and consequently, if we are to remain true to the original type, all religious content would be lacking. On the other hand, if Christ be represented solely as High Priest, it would be almost impossible to avoid the magical conception of His influence. Similarly, if we retain only the kingly dignity, and think of Christ solely as forming and directing the Church, the immediate relation of the individual to the Redeemer would be endangered, and we should have strayed in the direction of the Roman Church, which makes this relation dependent at once upon the Church and upon those who direct its government. Now where there is revealed an interdependence of this sort, there is also a presumption that what is so bound up together is also complete.

§ 103. First Theorem.—The prophetic office of Christ consists in teaching, prophesying, and working miracles.

1. These three activities also constituted the dignity of the Old Testament prophets. Certainly the essential thing was always stimulus by means of teaching and admonition; but in all important instances, where the teaching had some definite occasion, it at once became prophecy (since the idea of the divine retribution was dominant), now threatening, now promising, in agreement with the original type created when the law was given. But since the prophets never appeared except in connexion with crimes or public misfortunes, which might be supposed always to involve the guilt of those to whom they had to speak, they required, in default of an outward vocation to which they might have appealed, some special proof of their authority. Hence miracles were expected or assumed as a token of their divine mission. It was only the absence of this third mark of a prophet that made it possible for the Baptist to say that he was no prophet,¹³ in spite of his very definite divine vocation. For he certainly had taught and prophesied,¹⁴ but the gift of miracles had not been granted him,¹⁵ and hence he would not be troubled with a useless question about it.

In Christ these three signs of a prophet did not follow one from the other; all three were one from the very outset. For the preaching of the Kingdom of God was both teaching and prophecy, and the Kingdom of God itself is properly the miracle accomplished by Christ; but since its fulfilment began simultaneously with the preaching, all three elements were present in one and the same germ, and we can differentiate them only as this germ develops further.

2. That the prophetic voice had fallen silent was a fact which had long been generally admitted when Jesus appeared. Instead, there was then a tradition of doctrine in the schools of the scribes. This made no claim to be anything more than tradition; it was gradually extended by the subtle combinations of distinguished scholars, and in connexion with it there was also an official practice of teaching in the synagogues. But Christ could not belong to any of the sects into which the scribes were divided; as little could He undertake any official activity which would have involved Him in other duties, and have limited Him in a way incompatible with His appointed work. But since, outside the activity of the scribes, there was complete freedom of teaching, He was able to come before the people in a regular way, as soon as He had reached the age required by custom. Thus no exception to His competence to teach could be taken by any public authority. The teaching office of Christ, therefore, means only His determination to make the fullest possible use of this freedom. Thus for Him no other occasion was needed for any particular act of teaching than the presence, individually or in groups, of those who were anxious to be taught; His conversation was all of the nature of teaching, so far as the subject and the conditions permitted. And to this extent it must certainly be admitted that Christ taught, in this wider sense, even before His public ministry began; still, that He taught publicly as a boy remains a mistaken view, and one entirely without foundation in the Gospel story,¹⁶ but resembling the apocryphal stories. Similarly, there is really only one Gospel testimony¹⁷ which connects the beginning of His public appearance with His reception of the baptism of John; and the explanation which Jesus Himself gives of this circumstance forbids the supposition that by this baptism He became something which He had not been before, or that He received an authority or a consecration which was not already His. The former supposition is incompatible with belief in the originality of the divine in His person; and for the latter there is no external authority of any kind in the rite instituted by John. The only value, therefore, which we can attribute to this transaction is that it helps us to understand His public appearance historically: He marked His more open transition from seclusion to public life by an act of confession which inevitably evoked a more definite opinion about Him, to which He was able to attach His teaching. For the people His work as a teacher came to an end with His arrest, but for the disciples only with His ascension. It seems to have been His chief work in the days of the resurrection, partly to expound the Scripture to His disciples, without doubt establishing the way in which they were afterwards to make use of it among their people; partly also to complete His injunctions as to the corporate life deriving from Him, and so to establish that life more securely. It is obvious, therefore, how essentially this teaching activity on Christ’s part belonged to the redemptive activity described above. But so far as the source of the teaching is concerned, that of the prophets’ teaching (although their participation in teaching came to them in the form of a special divine call) was always simply the law; their calling was entirely concerned with the relation between God and the people, and the end to which they worked was a purely national one. Now it was part of Christ’s regard for the law not to destroy the law; hence He recognized and affirmed the national obligation towards it. Nevertheless, just as His inspiration was not a transient one, dependent on individual occasions supplied by the state of the people, and just as He is not to be regarded as merely a product of human nature in a specifically national form, so too the inner development of His thoughts could not be dependent on the law. Moreover, to regard His teaching as a purification and a development of the ethics current among the people, springing out of universal human reason, is part of the empirical conception we have rejected. Rather, the source of His teaching was the absolutely original revelation of God in Him. In Him the contrast between learning and teaching was only the contrast between the influence of the divine principle in Him upon the receptivity of His spiritual organ (so as to yield a pure apprehension of the human conditions confronting Him in their bearing on man’s relation to God) and the influence of the same principle upon the spontaneity of His spiritual organ. But since receptivity always involves spontaneity, His teaching was already forming itself imperceptibly in His learning; and this first development of His own thought was already the source of His astonishing questions.¹⁸ Naturally, however, after spontaneity had gained the upper hand, and teaching had come to be His constant preoccupation, the law no less than the Messianic hopes was the point of connexion at which He developed His preaching of the new corporate life to be founded by Him—the Kingdom of God.

Hence, if the content of Christ’s teaching is to be specially stated here (although in point of fact our task throughout has been simply to expound that teaching), then here also we should first have to recur to the prophetic element. The prophet felt it incumbent on him to do full justice by his preaching to the impulse which he felt had come to him from God, and to pass on its full content to his hearers—always a limited and definite task. In the same way, Christ’s self-determination to teach was the task of satisfying fully the powerful (which also means the creative) God-consciousness, as it took shape in His spiritual organ, and of so reproducing it in His teaching that thereby the assumption of men into His fellowship might be effected. No other measure is applicable here of the success of His teaching, and consequently of its perfection. Naturally His discourses were sometimes more general in character, sometimes more detailed; sometimes they were more the pure outflowing of what was in Him, sometimes they had a closer bearing on some outward occasion; and the attempt has for long been made to distinguish the more essential from the more subordinate and accidental, though in very different ways. We can only say that everything is essential so far as it is connected with His self-presentation, for it was only by the proclamation of His peculiar dignity that men could really be invited to enter into the fellowship offered them. And so these three parts are inseparable from one another as constituting the essence of His teaching—the doctrine of His Person, which is at the same time, in its outward aspect, the doctrine of His calling, or of the communication of eternal life in the Kingdom of God, and in its inward aspect, the doctrine of His relation to Him Who had sent Him, or of God as His Father, revealing Himself to Him and through Him. So that everything which belongs to His high-priestly and kingly office must likewise appear in His teaching, since He proclaimed His mission to raise men to fellowship with God and to rule spiritually. And only that is accidental in His teaching which contains least of this, and keeps most to the historical situation, and bears on the given national factor. To emphasize the latter above the former leads very easily to a dangerous distinction between a teaching of Christ and a teaching about Christ (as something merely additional), and undeniably imperils what is specifically Christian, as if all that is involved were some improvements upon natural ethics and natural theology—which, besides, are represented as if human reason must have found them out by itself. But with this proviso, there is room enough for Christians of different temperaments to hold for their own use predominantly to one or another of these elements.

But further, this original revelation of God in Christ is so adequate and also so inexhaustible, that, so far as this first aspect is concerned, Christ is manifestly at once the climax and the end of all prophecy. No presentation of our relationship to God can arise outside the sphere in which Christ is recognized, which would not fall short of that revelation; nor can any possible advance within the Christian Church ever bring us to the point either of perceiving anything imperfect in the teaching of Christ Himself, for which we could substitute something better, or of conceiving anything which aids man’s understanding of his relation to God more spiritually, more profoundly, or more perfectly than Christ has done. Indeed, with the assumption that Christian doctrine is capable of being perfected in a way which implies our transcending Christ, the assumption of Christ’s peculiar dignity would have to be given up. Even the most admirable later achievements in this sphere can never be more than a correct development of what lies undeveloped in His utterances, as we possess them, or, as the connexion of thought assures us, must even then have been before His mind. Now if Christ is the climax of all prophecy because of the perfection of His preaching, proceeding from a divine impulse, He is so also because even as teacher He is not one among many of His like. And He is the end of all prophecy, because no new teaching can arise which, after His, would not be false; that is to say, from now on all true teaching in this sphere goes back, not to Moses and the law, but to the Son. He is also the end of prophecy for this reason, that now there can be no such thing as an independent personal inspiration, but only a being inspired by Him.

This only remains to be said, that, like the teaching of the prophets, His too was always the direct utterance of His whole being, hence not to be separated from the total impression His being made. And from this it follows for His teaching, that (since His inspiration was not transient but constant) every utterance of His moved spirit in speech and accompanying expression contains elements of teaching, and serves as confirmation of His teaching proper, inasmuch as it bears witness to the being of God in Him.

3. The prediction of the Old Testament prophets, so far as we can form conclusions about the whole from what remains to us, was of two kinds. One kind was special prediction, directed to an individual event; since it rested upon the two chief concepts of the Jewish religion, the divine election of the people and divine retribution, it was for the most part hypothetical, and formed an addition to teaching which conveyed warning, encouragement, and comfort, in accordance with the spirit of the law. The other kind rose above the individual event to an exposition of the universal, and as such claimed absolute value—this was Messianic prediction. The first kind was a foretelling in the proper sense; in its more or less definite assertions it attained now a higher, and now a lower degree of accuracy. In Messianic prophecy, the individual assertions, more or less, are nothing but an external vesture, so that it often remains uncertain whether this point or that does or does not really belong to the prediction itself. But its essence consists in this, that it spoke of the future of God’s true messenger. The idea of that messenger could be grasped by individuals only in limited fashion, by each in his own way; but rightly understood it always involved the end of those two Jewish conceptions of retribution and election. Now Christ, as the Messiah appearing in person, could only predict messianically concerning what had not yet appeared but would be fulfilled by means of the same activity as that from which the prediction itself proceeded; that is, He could predict only concerning the further development of His Kingdom or its completion. Hence this prediction was precisely the same thing as His teaching; in this sense He prophesied without foretelling.¹⁹ But neither could He foretell the merely accidental, for everything so to be described is without value in His Kingdom, and thus could not be the object either of investigation or of premonition. He could foretell, therefore, only the end of such institutions as rested upon those limited concepts of election and retribution; and this He did, not hypothetically, but with the perfect accuracy belonging to His infallible perfection. His certainty in this foretelling, indeed, must be identical with the certainty of His own mission. In both connexions, therefore, Christ is the climax of prophecy. And just as He is the climax, so too He is the end. For essential prophecy has now been completely fulfilled, since the Spirit has been poured out; nothing essential can be thought of which is still lacking to the kingdom of God; to point forward to anything new which is still to occur would necessarily be to preach another gospel. It is just the same with the foretelling. Apostolic prediction—what there is of it²⁰—we can regard only as an interpretation or an echo of Christ’s prediction; there was only one occasion for it which did not yet exist in His time—namely, the application to hostile heathendom of prophecies similar to those which He had uttered against Judaism. For the rest, along with those limited concepts there disappeared the basis and support for all prophecy such as is attached exclusively to a heightened excitation of the devout soul. All that remains is such prophecy as can arise from an intelligent and comprehensive view of human relations and from a true and deep sympathy. But to no prediction, whatever its content, and however great its accuracy, and however wonderfully the pictures of an excited faculty of premonition may occasionally come true, can we ascribe a sacred character.

If this proposition has not hitherto received such definite doctrinal expression in the Protestant Church as in consistency it has been given here, perhaps such expression is also more necessary now than before, and in all likelihood it will meet with little opposition in the Church itself. And this, not only because it essentially belongs to the naturalization of the Kingdom of God in the world, but because the whole previous practice of our Church shows that it invariably regards any claim to the gift of prophecy as symptomatic of fanaticism. For us at present, therefore, it remains only to interpret the prophecies of Christ and the Apostles. But that is a task which can only be done in accordance with the rules of the art of interpretation, not with an arbitrariness which would be justified only in the measure in which it itself was prophecy. But all foretellings, both those derived from the historical sense and those derived from inexplicable capacities for premonition, must be left to the natural science of mind.

4. Although it was laid down that even wonders and signs were not to protect the prophet who spoke against Jehovah and His law,²¹ yet this very fact makes it clear that when people thought of a prophet they always thought also of wonders and signs.²² With reference to the Redeemer, we might of course²³ surmise it to be natural in a higher order of things that He should have even miraculous powers at His command; but from this comparison with the Jewish prophets it is clear in what sense Christ Himself and His disciples could appeal to His miracles, and yet why Christ, when signs and wonders were demanded of Him, refused to do them. For even the wonders of the prophets were not intended to evoke faith in their Messianic prophecies, and could not do so; their purpose was to evoke faith in their conditional predictions in order to induce people to do what had to be done. But Christ gave no such conditional predictions about Himself, and faith in His relation to the Messianic idea was meant to proceed solely from the direct impression made by His Person.²⁴ That is why Christ never availed Himself of His miraculous powers in any definite connexion with the demands He made or His statements about Himself,²⁵ but (in the same way as everyone avails himself of his natural powers) according as opportunity offered of doing good by them.

In those days the true recognition of Christ might in individual instances be evoked by miracles; elsewhere it found a confirmation in them; but it might never be properly based upon them. Hence for us, so far as our faith is concerned, they cannot but be altogether superfluous. For miracles can only direct the spiritual need to a definite object in virtue of their immediate impressiveness, or, if it has already been directed thither, justify this inner relation in an external way.²⁶ This impressiveness, however, is lost in proportion as the person who is to believe is at a distance from the miracle itself in space and time. What takes the place of miracles for our time is our historical knowledge of the character, as well as of the scope and the duration, of Christ’s spiritual achievements. In this we have an advantage over the contemporaries of the Redeemer, and a witness whose power increases exactly in proportion as the impressiveness of the miracles is lost. But what does this mean except that our attention is directed away from the individual, more physical, miracles to the general spiritual miracle, which begins with the person of the Redeemer and is completed with the completion of His Kingdom? Our faith in the external miracles wrought by Christ, as deeds which were not wrought by Him in accordance with rules learned anywhere, and whose success cannot be traced to natural laws recognized by us as valid for all time—this faith belongs not so much to our faith in Christ directly as to our faith in Scripture.

For we cannot include these phenomena in the field of nature familiar to us without having recourse to presuppositions such that the trustworthiness of the whole body of our records concerning Christ is imperilled.²⁷ And this conviction will probably be the result of the controversy now being waged on this question, and as a conviction will be the more living and the more universal the greater the candour and the intelligence with which the controversy is carried on.

If we confine ourselves to these individual miracles, then we cannot make it so clear as we did in the case of teaching and prophecy that Christ is also the climax of miraculous activity. For in Christ’s miracles we have nothing which definitely raises them, in and by themselves, above other similar miracles of which we have stories from many various times and places. But if we consider the total spiritual miracle, then we must declare Him to be the climax, all the more definitely that we recognize that—apart from Him—this total spiritual miracle could not have been achieved by all the powers of spiritual nature as we know it. But equally certainly Christ is also the end of miracle. For the surer it is that by Christ redemption has been completed, so that whatever is yet in store for the human race, so far as fellowship with God is concerned, is to be regarded only as a further development of Christ’s work, not as a new revelation, the more reason we have for rejecting everything that claims to offer miraculous evidence for a new achievement in the sphere of spiritual life. Only new natural epochs—or even new historical epochs, so long as they are not in the sphere of religion—could still be announced by miracles; and in that case to pass judgment on such miracles is purely a matter for natural science.

On this point too we can scarcely say there is a fixed doctrine in the Protestant Church. Yet Luther’s words²⁸ on the matter show clearly enough that he did not regard the great change in the Church which he helped to bring about (in spite of the fact that, at least in a subordinate sense, it was the beginning of a new corporate life) as a point of development such that it needed to be supported by the power of working miracles. Also this doctrine has the support of a maxim which we may regard as having become dominant in the Protestant Church by tacit agreement, namely, that we assume the presence of superstition wherever new miracles are represented and believed to have occurred for the confirmation of Christianity. Against this it might be objected that our proposition certainly cannot be admitted strictly and literally, since the miracles of the disciples of Christ were just as well attested as His own, and He manifestly bequeathed to them His power of working miracles. And since (it might be argued) it can in no sense be proved that these miraculous gifts were suddenly to die out with the death of the Apostles, so much anyhow is certain, that Christ Himself did not claim to be the end of miraculous powers, while it must be left undecided whether these gifts really have gradually died out, or whether perhaps they do not still persist in the Church, or at least revive periodically. To this the answer is that the same thing holds true of the miracles of the Apostles as of their prophecies, and that Christ transmitted to them the power of working miracles only as a sign to accompany the earliest preaching. Even if it cannot be strictly proved that the Church’s power of working miracles has died out (and this the Roman Church denies), yet in general it is undeniable that, in view of the great advantage in power and civilization which the Christian peoples possess over the non-Christian, almost without exception, the preachers of to-day do not need such signs. And in every individual case it will always be possible to show that alleged miracles, whatever spiritual aim may be ascribed to them, would always be inadequate to it, and consequently that they are superfluous. Indeed, the Roman Church itself, by the manner in which in one case it limits miracles, and in another scrutinizes them, betrays no great confidence in the principle which it sets up.

§ 104. Second Theorem.—The priestly office of Christ includes His perfect fulfilment of the law (i.e. His active obedience), His atoning death (i.e. His passive obedience), and His intercession with the Father for believers.

1. The difficulty of presenting the total activity of Christ under these forms of the old covenant occurs chiefly in this section. For one thing, the analogy between that part of the effective influence of Christ which must be assigned to this section, if a place is to be found for it at all, and the functions of the High Priest, is less conspicuous. For another, many aspects of the functions of the High Priest, which must be paralleled in Christ, reveal themselves in activities of the Redeemer which one would be more inclined to assign to one of the other two offices. Thus the extraordinary, but most significant, function of the High Priest, that of receiving instructions from Jehovah in the Holy of Holies, has no direct analogy in the work of Christ. In so far as Christ received from His Father all instructions which He imparted to His followers,²⁹ this must be reckoned chiefly to His prophetic activity. The benedictions which the High Priest pronounced over the people remind us of what we have already ascribed to the reconciling activity of Christ, but Church doctrine does not expressly include it in that activity. Yet since the benediction of Christ cannot be simply a wish, but must be a real gift, His benediction must be involved in His governing and directing activity; indeed, the Epistle to the Hebrews undoubtedly conceives of a kingly activity in addition to the high-priestly. So there remain only symbolical actions. Among these the functions of the Day of Atonement are the most impressive. But we cannot think of relating any of these to the special functions of Christ which have just been mentioned. While if we regard the High Priest as being at the same time the head of the priesthood, so that its performances are traceable to him, then he would be the agent of the people with Jehovah, and this would be completely expressed by the idea of representation. On the other hand, nothing is said directly about a legal perfection of the High Priest, and the atoning death of Christ, regarded as a sacrifice, has nothing corresponding to it. So far as the first point is concerned, two things should be kept in mind. First, that personal physical perfection was essential in the High Priest. The nearest direct parallel to this in the doctrine of the person of Christ is, of course, His sinless perfection. And second, and chiefly, that before the High Priest entered upon the official performances of the Day of Atonement—and to these, as his most characteristic duties, we must pay particular attention—he had to purify himself in many different ways, and to bring a sin-offering for himself and his house, in virtue of which he was then held to be legally perfect. And so far as the other point is concerned, the fact that Christ offered Himself is to be disregarded in this connexion. For in so far as He Himself was the offering, He is to be compared to the sacrificial animal. Not only is this mode of expression found in various places in the Bible,³⁰ but this twofold reference has also passed over into confessional documents,³¹ so that it is the more necessary for us to distinguish the two aspects from each other; and yet here we should have to think of Christ principally as the sacrificer, not as the offering. As the sacrificer, however, He is active, and His suffering can be only an accompaniment, and can have its ground solely in sympathy with sin, which of course we may also presuppose in the High Priest, especially in his acts of atonement. Yet here a new difficulty arises, namely, that both the active and the passive obedience of Christ belong entirely to His self-presentation, and consequently to His prophetic office; just as His intercession or representation, since it cannot be thought of as lacking in effect, seems to coincide wholly with His government. Here too, then, we shall have to make a distinction on both sides, and set forth the representation of Christ here only in so far as it is something different from His government, and His twofold obedience only in so far as it is something different from His self-presentation or His proclamation of the divine will by word and deed.

2. If we begin by dividing the obedience of Christ into active and passive, we are by no means to imagine that these two are so divided that they occupied different parts of His life, as is commonly supposed—that the passive obedience began only with His arrest, while the active had expressed itself from the beginning of His public life up to that point. For not only can there be no suffering at all without reaction, which is always activity; we have already established the special conclusion with regard to Christ,³² that we can separate off no moment in His life which does not contain His powerful God-consciousness, and that this can manifest itself only as activity—activity which, even where it appears as reaction (and this of course it does in His sufferings proper), could never be anything else than the most perfect fulfilment of the divine will; as indeed His perfect submission, without complaisance on the one side, or bitterness or ill-humour on the other, is the crown of His active obedience. Similarly, there is never any activity without some definite occasion — which always presupposes a passive state; and just as little is there ever any activity without limits to what is effected by it—and these limitations also are felt as suffering. Now both those occasions and those limitations came to Christ out of the corporate life of universal sinfulness; and thus every instance of opposition which He experienced during His active life, every snare of His adversaries, and equally the indifference with which many passed Him by, became for Him suffering, because in it He had a sympathetic feeling of the world’s sin, and thus carried that sin; so that this suffering accompanied Him throughout His whole life. Looked at more closely, then, active and passive obedience were bound up with each other at every moment. The one term, therefore, describes simply the condition, pleasing and completely satisfying to God, in which Christ was receptive towards everything which came to Him from the corporate life of sin, in that He accepted everything solely as it was related to the task to be discharged by means of the potency of his God-consciousness, in the most perfect and the purest way. The other describes the parallel condition of His self-activity relatively to everything which it was incumbent on Him to do for the corporate life which He had come to call into being—the meaning of all this being that He never conceived any other purpose than this. But both receptivity and self-activity, and hence both active and passive obedience, were present in all the moments of Christ’s life. The action of Christ without the suffering could not have been redemptive, nor the suffering without the action reconciling; and on that account redemption cannot be ascribed to the active obedience alone, nor reconciliation to the passive obedience alone, but both to both.

3. In comparing Christ, as regards His active obedience as thus defined, with the High Priest, we must, of course, consider only the original institution of this office, not what it degenerated into in reality. The High Priest, in virtue alike of his setting-apart and of the seclusion of his life in the precincts of the temple, was very favourably situated. It was not easy for him to neglect anything pertinent to his calling, nor was anything likely to be demanded of him which was out of keeping with his dignity and thus apt to injure it. Also it was much easier for him than for anyone else to keep clear of ceremonial defilements. These privileges had to be granted to human weakness if, in relation to his people, he was to represent even symbolically that which Christ actually was in relation to men. For the people were in constant danger, indeed almost in constant consciousness, of defilement. But the High Priest through his setting-apart was relieved of all worldly affairs, and even of the most natural duties, if to fulfil them involved even a slight defilement. It was his function to represent the pure man, who as such was alone authorized to officiate at the yearly sacrifice of atonement, by way of supplement to all the sacrifices which the people were ceaselessly offering through the priesthood as a whole. Thus the people, living at a greater or less distance from the temple, seemed to itself to be living also at a greater distance from God—a distance which was only temporarily lessened by the alternation of the times of divine service and those of ordinary business. But the function of the High Priest was to counterbalance these fluctuating movements by remaining constantly in the immediate neighbourhood of the temple, even although he actually entered it only at prescribed times and for prescribed purposes. Now just this is the essential thing in the high-priestly significance of the active obedience of Christ. For that it is His action alone which completely corresponds to the divine will, and gives pure and full expression to the dominion of the God-consciousness in human nature—this is the basis of our relationship to Him; and on the recognition of this everything specifically Christian is based. What this implies is that, apart from connexion with Christ, no individual man, nor yet any part of the corporate life of men is at any time, in and for itself, righteous before God or an object of His good pleasure. And just as of the whole Jewish people the High Priest alone appeared immediately before God, and God saw the whole people as it were only in him, so Christ too is our High Priest because God sees us, not each of us for himself, but only in Christ. In living fellowship with Christ no one wishes to be anything for himself, nor yet to be regarded by God as anything. Each one wishes to appear only as animated by Christ, and as a part of His work which is still in process of development; so that even that which has not yet been altogether united with Him is still related to the same animating principle, because it is yet to be animated by Him some day. Thus, just as the High Priest was then, so Christ is now, the One who presents us pure before God in virtue of His own perfect fulfilment of the divine will. Because of His life in us, the impulse to the fulfilling of that will is also active in us, so that in this connexion with Him we too are objects of the divine good pleasure. This is the meaning (characteristic of our view, and from a Christian standpoint unobjectionable) of the often misunderstood expression, that Christ’s obedience is our righteousness, or that His righteousness is imputed to us.³³ Such an expression is very easy to misunderstand, and it certainly cannot be thoroughly defended except on the assumption of a common life—which for that matter is also most definitely assumed in the conception of the High Priest. Thus we are also enabled to distinguish the prophetic value of Christ’s obedience from the high-priestly. To the prophetic office of Christ belongs everything which is proclamation, and so self-presentation as well, not in words only, but also in deed. This, however, is addressed to men in view of their opposition to Christ, in order to make them susceptible of union with Him. Hence the obedience of Christ in this aspect of it is held up³⁴ even for all who are in the Church, and bears on the distinction between Christ and them which still persists. But the high-priestly value of His obedience relates to His union with us, in so far, that is, as in virtue of the vital fellowship existing between Him and us His pure will to fulfil the divine will is active in us also, and we therefore share His perfection, if not in execution, at least in impulse.³⁵ Our union with Him, accordingly, although it never attains more than relative manifestation, is yet recognized by God as absolute and eternal, and is affirmed as such in our faith.

There are only two things in the ordinary presentation against which we must still be on our guard. First, the active obedience of Christ must not be presented as the perfect fulfilment of the divine law. For law always denotes a distinction and a severance between a higher will which commands, and an imperfect will which is subordinate to it. In this sense the claim must certainly be made for Christ that He was not subject to the law, since, even if in view of the two natures a twofold will be ascribed to Him, yet the two even so must be in complete agreement.³⁶ But just as little can it be said that He willingly subjected Himself to the law; for not even willingly could He bring Himself so to differ from the divine will that it could become a law for Him. The active obedience of Christ was rather His perfect fulfilment of the divine will.³⁷ But if what is in question is the Mosaic law, in so far as it chiefly prescribed performances and abstentions, then to this He certainly was subject so far as His personality was concerned,³⁸ so that it cannot be said that He undertook its fulfilment willingly. But the high-priestly worth of His obedience could not have consisted in this alone, except in so far as it was part of His fulfilment of the divine will. The second point is this, that if we are to express ourselves with any accuracy we cannot say, either, that Christ fulfilled the divine will in our place or for our advantage. That is to say, He cannot have done so in our place in the sense that we are thereby relieved from the necessity of fulfilling it. No Christian mind could possibly desire this, nor has sound doctrine ever asserted it. Indeed, Christ’s highest achievement consists in this, that He so animates us that we ourselves are led to an ever more perfect fulfilment of the divine will.³⁹ Not only so; but He cannot have done it in the sense that the failure to please God which is present in us in and for ourselves, should or could, as it were, be covered by Christ’s doing more than was necessary to please Him. For only that which is perfect can stand before God; hence even Christ Himself had (to put it so) nothing to spare, which could be distributed among us, whether we regard the completeness of His fulfilment in outward acts (which, moreover, for reasons which will emerge more clearly later, would be quite un-Protestant) or whether we regard only the purity of the inward sentiment.

Neither can He have fulfilled the divine will in any way for our advantage, as if by the obedience of Christ, considered in and for itself, anything were achieved for us or changed in relation to us. The true view is that the total obedience—δικαίωμα—of Christ avails for our advantage only in so far as through it our assumption into vital fellowship with Him is brought about, and in that fellowship we are moved by Him, that is, His motive principle becomes ours also—just as we also share in condemnation for Adam’s sin only in so far as we, being in natural life-fellowship with him and moved in the same way, all sin ourselves.⁴⁰

4. We come now to the passive obedience of Christ. It has already been stated above that the resemblance to the High Priest is here only a very general one. So we cannot use it to explain the connexion between the passive obedience of Christ and His redeeming and reconciling activity, especially since nothing is said about the High Priest enduring evil, while this is assumed to be the important element in the passive obedience of Christ, with the result that His feeling as sacrificer and His suffering as sacrificed or as sacrifice are confused. If for the present we allow this confusion, we are thrown back upon the fact that in every human society, so far as it can be regarded as a self-enclosed whole, there is as much evil as sin; and that while the evil is certainly the punishment of the sin, yet each individual does not wholly and exclusively suffer precisely the evil which is connected with his personal sin.⁴¹ Therefore it can be said, in every case in which anyone suffers evil not connected with his own sin, that he suffers punishment for others; and as the causality of this sin has now exhausted itself, these others, in virtue of his punishment, can no longer be affected by the evil. Now in order that Christ should assume us into the fellowship of His life, it was necessary that He should first have entered into our fellowship. He without sin, so that no evil could arise from the presence of sin in Him, must enter into the fellowship of the sinful life where, along with and as a fruit of sin, evil is constantly arising. Hence it must be said of Him, that His suffering in this fellowship, if occasioned by sin—and from merely natural evils He never suffered—was suffered for those with whom He stood in fellowship, that is, for the whole human race, to which He belongs, not only because no ‘particular fellowship within the human race can be completely isolated, but also by His own deliberate choice. Not only was the distinction between Jews and Gentiles abolished, in real fact, alike by His manifestation as ideal man and more particularly in His consciousness; but for one thing His activity had already, at least indirectly, a bearing on the Gentiles, and for another thing, and especially in the last days of His life, He was surrounded by Judaism and heathendom, as political and religious authorities, causing His suffering, and representing the sin of the whole world. If we abstract from those evils which did not properly have any high-priestly character, and regard only the suffering which He experienced as High Priest, it is obvious that the sympathy with sin, conditioned as it is in Him as human experience by this situation, must have been brought to its climax in this alliance of the two chief classes of sinners against His sinless personality. Now just as this sympathy with human guilt and liability to punishment was the initiatory motive in redemption (as every definite human activity is preceded by a determining impression), so too the highest degree of just this sympathy was the direct inspiration of the greatest moment in the work of redemption. And as victory over sin rose out of this,⁴² and along with sin its connexion with evil has also been overcome, by the substitution of equivalents we may say that through the suffering of Christ punishment is abolished, because in the fellowship of His blessed life even the evil which is in process of disappearing is no longer at least regarded as punishment.⁴³

What has now been set forth is the real meaning of the statements that Christ by His willing surrender of Himself to suffering and death satisfied the divine justice, as that which had ordained the connexion between sin and evil, and thus set us free from the punishment of sin.⁴⁴ Everywhere within the specific sphere of Christianity this is easily intelligible and easily defensible, though the statements are often criticized from without. And from this presentation it must be possible to deduce whatever in the way of appropriation of Christ’s suffering (as distinct from its exemplary value, which belongs to His prophetic office) has proved fruitful in Christian piety. Even that form of the doctrine which sometimes appears one-sided, and which concentrates the whole power of redemption almost exclusively in the suffering of Christ, and so finds satisfaction in this alone, may readily be understood in this light. For in His suffering unto death, occasioned by His steadfastness, there is manifested to us an absolutely self-denying love; and in this there is represented to us with perfect vividness the way in which God was in Him to reconcile the world to Himself, just as it is in His suffering that we feel most perfectly how imperturbable was His blessedness. Hence it may be said that the conviction both of His holiness and of His blessedness always comes to us primarily as we lose ourselves in the thought of His suffering. And just as the active obedience of Christ has its properly high-priestly value chiefly in the fact that God regards us in Christ as partners in His obedience, so the high-priestly value of His passive obedience consists chiefly in this, that we see God in Christ, and envisage Christ as the most immediate partaker in the eternal love which sent Him forth and fitted Him for His task.

Although it seems now hardly necessary to stay to compare this simple presentation with those artificial constructions⁴⁵ which never tire of bringing together all sorts of reasons to prove the necessity or the appropriateness of Jesus’ suffering and death, yet there still remain serious misunderstandings which we must dispose of. The first is this, that although it is in a specially impressive way from His suffering that we gain a true understanding of Christ, yet this is no justification for the triviality of the so-called ‘wounds-theology,’ once very widespread but now almost obsolete, which thought to find the deep import of the suffering of Christ in its sensuous details, and hence, for the sake of allegorical trivialities, broke up into details the totality of Christ’s suffering. Underlying this was a confusion of thought; what can only be attributed to Christ as a sacrifice or victim was transferred to His high-priestly dignity. The victim has no independent activity; it is completely passive in everything which happens to it. So Christ too was perfectly passive in respect of those details of His suffering as to which He had no choice, and which consequently are not to be regarded as being for Him significant elements in experience. The second misunderstanding is to take the formula, that through the suffering of Christ the punishment of sin is taken away—a formula perfectly correct when interpreted as explained above—to mean that He bore the punishment, that is, that His suffering was equal to the sum of the evils constituting the amount of the punishment for the sins of the human race, since otherwise the divine righteousness would not have been satisfied. From which it naturally follows, since the total sin of the human race cannot be reckoned anything less than infinite, that the suffering also was infinite. If now the suffering of Christ and His death, although limited to a definite space of time and relative to a capacity for suffering infinitely diminished by His higher spiritual power, is thus to be equated to the total of human suffering for sin, postulated as infinite, then it is scarcely possible to avoid the supplementary assumption that the divine nature in Him also shared in the suffering.⁴⁶ This presentation of the matter, contradicting as it does the incapacity of the divine nature for suffering (a truth long recognized even in this doctrine), certainly can offer no defence to any serious attack by its opponents. But this misunderstanding only reaches its height in the view that the suffering of Christ is a transference of punishment in the still more exact sense that God (who nevertheless, according to the doctrine of the Church itself, is not in general the Author of punishment) appointed His suffering for the Redeemer as punishment, so that Christ is supposed to have felt the primary and most direct punishment of sin, namely, the divine wrath, as striking Him and resting upon Him. This theory, on the one hand, deprives the human consciousness of Christ of all human truth, by regarding as His personal self-consciousness what from the nature of the case could in Him be only sympathy.⁴⁷ And, on the other hand, it is obviously based on the assumption that there is an absolute necessity in the divine punishment, without any regard to the natural connexion of punishment with moral evil. This again can hardly be divorced from a conception of the divine righteousness which has been transferred to God from the crudest human conditions. Now if we take these two elements together, as they are united in the phrase vicarious satisfaction, we must surely admit that it is not fitting to stamp it as the phrase in which these aspects of the high-priestly work of Christ should be comprised. But perhaps the protest against this expression (which, of course, has already been attacked on many sides, yet continues to be the expression current in the Church) cannot be set forth more effectively than by demonstrating how it would have to be reinterpreted if it is to be accepted at all. Instead of taking it as a single expression which refers equally both to the active and to the passive obedience—as it claims to do—we must divide it up, and apply ‘vicarious’ only to the passive, and ‘satisfaction’ only to the active obedience. For Christ certainly made satisfaction for us by becoming, through His total action, not only the beginning of redemption in time, but also the eternally inexhaustible source, adequate for every further development, of a spiritual and blessed life. But this satisfaction is in no sense ‘vicarious’; it could not have been expected of us that we should be able to begin this life for ourselves, nor does the act of Christ set us free from the necessity of pursuing this spiritual life by our own endeavour in fellowship with Him. On the other hand, the suffering of Christ is certainly vicarious, and that with respect to both its elements. For He had sympathy with sin in perfect measure even in regard to those who had not yet themselves become miserable through consciousness of it. While the evils which He suffered were vicarious in this general sense, that one in whom there is no moral evil ought not to suffer; hence when he does experience evil, he is struck instead of those in whom the moral evil is. But this ‘vicarious’ quality in no way makes ‘satisfaction’; so far as the first element is concerned, because those who are not yet miserable must first become so in order to be able to be received by Christ; so far as the other element is concerned, because it does not exclude other suffering of the same sort. Rather, all those who are assumed into the fellowship of Christ’s life are called to share the fellowship of His suffering,⁴⁸ until the time when sin has been completely overcome and through suffering satisfaction has been made in the corporate life of humanity. Until then all suffering, even on the part of one who is only relatively innocent, always has a vicarious character. If, however, we wish to regard these two aspects of the high-priestly office of Christ in their indivisibility (that is, so far as it is possible to include the suffering under the activity), then we may turn the expression about, and call Christ our satisfying representative: in the sense, first, that in virtue of His ideal dignity He so represents, in His redemptive activity, the perfecting of human nature, that in virtue of our having become one with Him God sees and regards the totality of believers only in Him; and, second, that His sympathy with sin, which was strong enough to stimulate a redemptive activity sufficient for the assumption of all men into His vital fellowship, and the absolute power of which is most perfectly exhibited in His free surrender of Himself to death, perpetually serves to make complete and perfect our imperfect consciousness of sin. It was just like the complementary sacrifice of the High Priest: that had special reference to those trespasses which had not been consciously recognized, so that his sympathy, regarded as the source of his action, took the place of that consciousness, and the people then felt themselves as free from all anxiety about divine punishment for the sins they had committed as if each one himself had fulfilled everything that the law required where there was consciousness of sin.

Only one misunderstanding still remains to be guarded against at this point; we must not set forth Christ’s surrender of Himself to death as a free decision on His part in any other sense than that which is here taken as fundamental, namely, that His self-surrender was identical with His persistence in redemptive activity. For otherwise the suffering of Christ, so far as it must be regarded as His own act, appears arbitrary, because in that case He must simply have appointed Himself to the suffering as such; and that which, if regarded as a divine ordinance, would be that irrational necessity of retribution which we have already disposed of, would, as the free act of Christ, be an arbitrary self-torture—a pattern for the arbitrary mortifications of the Roman Church, by the transference of which it is possible for one person to set another free from punishment. But in addition to this, we should still need to take precautions—and it is impossible to see how our precautions could be successful—lest the example of Christ might be taken to afford a justification of voluntary death, even of the sort which is absolutely unchristian. For if we wish to assert the reality of human moral nature in Christ, we must not ascribe to Him, even in this connexion, any other rules of conduct than such as we have to recognize as valid for us all; otherwise there would be a danger that His life would cease to be an example, and consequently that it would cease to be an ideal. Thus, so far as self-preservation is a duty at all, it must be true of Christ also that if He foresaw His death, and if there was any means of avoiding it without dereliction of duty, He was bound to make use of it, as He had done previously.⁴⁹ The only thing He was not bound to do was to ask for the help of angels,⁵⁰ or in this struggle to call to His aid any miraculous power. He must therefore have accepted it as a duty involved in His vocation to appear in the holy city for this feast, in spite of the foreknowledge He possessed;⁵¹ and beyond question it was an element in the development of this great crisis that Christ met His death in His zeal for His vocation relatively to His Father’s law, just as truly as His opponents—at least the best among them—condemned Him to death in their professional zeal for the law. If, nevertheless, we wish to regard even this from the standpoint of the divine decree, then we must concede that it behoved the Perfecter of faith to die a death which should be not simply an occurrence, but at the same time a deed in the highest sense of the word, in order that in this too He might proclaim the full dominion of the spirit over the flesh. By a natural death, whether due to accidental illness or the result of the weakness of old age, this could have become evident only accidentally and in a lesser degree. But this danger, too, of presenting the voluntary character of Jesus’ death in a doubtful light, will best be avoided by keeping to the method we have hitherto followed, and making real use of it. For the atoning sacrifice of the High Priest was also a free action, though a professional one, on the one side conditioned by the sin of the people, and on the other following an established divine ordinance without arbitrariness of any kind.

5. Finally, Christ’s representation of us before God, if we take the word in its usual meaning (that is, as either, more generally, the direction of another’s business, or, more specifically, and more in the dominant Biblical sense, the bringing of the wishes of another before a third party and urging him to grant them), seems hardly to be at all separable from His kingly office. For how can that which Christ is thought of as obtaining from His Father be separated from that which He Himself as king brings about, and determines by laws and ordinances of government? If then the phrase is to have any reality, if it is not as an undefined middle term to introduce confusion into our treatment, it must be confined to things which either do not belong at all, or at least do not wholly belong, to the Kingdom of Christ; either this, or as a part of His activity it too must have been carried on during His earthly life, just like other parts—otherwise He would not have been a perfect High Priest. The New Testament passages upon which the use of the term is chiefly based⁵² give little definite guidance, since it is not clear that in all of them the reference is to the High Priest; they seem rather to proceed from different points of view. Hence we had better keep to the conception of the high-priestly function, and bring in chiefly His appearing before God on our behalf.⁵³ And, if in doing so the distinction mentioned above is observed, then the representation will consist chiefly of two things: Christ appears before the Father, first, to establish our fellowship with Him, and then, further, to support our prayer before the Father. For the Kingdom of Christ extends only over those who have already been assumed into vital fellowship with Him; while the gradual addition of individuals to this realm depends upon the divine Providence with regard to them. But just as in general this fellowship is sought for us by Christ, and is granted by God for His sake, so it is not only in His high-priestly prayer that we have the memorable fact of this representation; that is indicated also in everything which He says about His prayer,⁵⁴ not even excluding statements which seem to be contradictory, and also in what is said about His prayer by others.⁵⁵ As regards the rest, if we proceed wholly on the principle that whatever does not belong to the Kingdom of God must also be excluded from the subjects of our prayer,⁵⁶ then in the spiritual sphere there are some things which are not so exclusively spiritual in character that they are not also interwoven with the general world order, and some which are not entirely determined by the general rules and ordinances properly to be deduced from the kingly dignity of Christ. And when He bids us pray to the Father ourselves, the fact that it is to be prayer in His name involves the certainty of a co-operation on the part of Christ which hallows our prayer by purifying and perfecting our consciousness of God. Now this co-operation is His representation of us, in the sense that it is only through Him that our prayer comes acceptably and effectively before God. In virtue, therefore, of that relation to us which is based upon His peculiar dignity, He remains the representative of the whole human race, for, like the High Priest, He brings our prayer before God and conveys to us the divine blessings. Faith in that part of this work which lies beyond Christ’s earthly career is in no sense dependent on knowledge—which is denied us—of the character of His exalted life, but only on the content and dignity of His personality in relation to God and to us, as these have been set forth above.

6. Now just as, in accordance with all that has been said, Christ is the climax of the priesthood, and far beyond all comparison even with the High Priest, so He is also the end of all priesthood. For that which is the essential thing in the conception of priesthood, that of which every earlier priesthood was only an imperfect indication, has been given absolutely and once for all in Christ; for He is the most perfect mediator for all time between God and every individual part of the human race, of which no one, in and for himself, could be in any sense an object for God, nor could enter into any connexion with Him. Hence, now that the true and eternal priesthood is known, there is no place for any arbitrarily devised priesthood—a mere copy of the real—nor for any further sacrifice: all human institutions of this sort are abolished. But at the same time, the high-priesthood of Christ has passed over to the fellowship of the faithful, so that Christians as a whole are called a priestly nation.⁵⁷ Two things are clearly involved in this. First, that among themselves all distinction between priests and laity is abolished. Even the Apostles never claim for themselves anything that can properly be called priestly, so that the revival of the priesthood in the Church must be viewed as one of the greatest misapprehensions. But second, Christendom as a whole, as the human race already united to the Redeemer, stands to the rest of humanity in the relation in which the priests stood to the laity. For it is only in so far as there exists a real vital fellowship with Christ at least in one part of the race that there is also a relationship between Him and the rest. Hence in this sense the Christian community, as inseparable from Christ, appears before God for the whole race and represents it. On the other hand, there can be no talk at all of any special intercession and representation on the part of individuals in the community of the perfected.⁵⁸ Similarly, all the activity of Christendom as a whole on behalf of the Gospel belongs to the active obedience of Christ, but nothing follows from this as to a meritoriousness of individual good works done by the faithful. The same is true also of all sufferings for the sake of the Gospel in the widest sense: they belong to the atoning suffering of Christ,⁵⁹ but nothing follows from this as to arbitrary mortifications—any more than there was anything arbitrary in Christ’s suffering. Hence Christ remains the end of the priesthood, for all this is high-priestly only in so far as it is really at the same time Christ’s doing and suffering. These last-mentioned inferences—and they are perfectly natural—ought surely of themselves to suffice to secure its place in our system for a mode of presentation which has been attacked by almost all modern dogmatic theologians since Ernesti.⁶⁰

§ 105. Third Theorem.—The kingly office of Christ consists in the fact that everything which the community of believers requires for its well-being continually proceeds from Him.

1. The term ‘king’ has, and had in the time of Christ, many meanings; and there is a great difference between its strict official use and its vague polite use. It is, therefore, impossible to base our presentation upon an exegetical decision on the questions in what sense Christ was asked whether He was a king,⁶¹ and whether He answered in the same sense or another. Rather we must keep to the recollection, not yet extinct, that the conception of king was opposed on the one hand to that of a tyrant, whose power was just as unlimited, but not natural; and on the other hand, to that of the authorities of a society, who possessed only a limited and delegated power, conferred on them by the governed themselves. A tyranny, on the other hand, always involved the possibility, not to say the assumption, that the power which had been arbitrarily seized was also selfish, and might have other aims than the free development and the natural prosperity of those over whom it was exercised. In contrast with both, the lordship of Christ is as unlimited as that of the animating principle always is when it is neither outwardly hindered nor inwardly weakened. Moreover, it is in the interest of those over whom it is exercised, as obviously follows from the facts that it is nothing but the lordship of that element whose weakness in themselves men deplore, and that submission to His lordship must always be voluntary. But the kingly power has this in common with the other two, that its object cannot be an individual as such, but only a society, and the individual only in so far as he belongs to the society. Individuals, then, submit voluntarily to the lordship of Christ; but in so doing they at the same time enter a society to which they did not previously belong. So that, in attributing a kingly dignity to Christ, we are eo ipso declaring ourselves definitely opposed to the contention that Christ did not intend to found an organic community, but that the society of believers came into being, or was formed, later, without His injunction. But since, at the same time, no one enters this community except by submitting himself to Christ’s lordship, it follows that Christ Himself initiated this Kingdom, and is thus without any predecessor in His kingly dignity.

Christ Himself, however, indicates still another contrast, when He describes His Kingdom as not of this world, and so distinguishes it in yet another way from both those others. This negative description involves in the first place that His kingly power is not immediately concerned with the disposal and arrangement of the things of this world—which means that nothing remains as the immediate sphere of His kingship but the inner life of men individually and in their relation to each other. It involves further, that for the exercise of His lordship He makes use of no means which are dependent upon the things of this world, i.e. of no constraint which requires superiority in material forces, nor yet of enticements or threatenings of any kind which require support of that kind and make a merely sensuous appeal—for that, too, belongs to this world. But this is by no means to say that the kingly power of Christ began only after He had been raised above the earth, still less—as might be held—that it covers only His exalted life; He Himself says, not that He will be a king, but that He is one; and not only did He prove Himself a king during His earthly life—by giving laws for His community, by sending out His servants for its extension, by imposing rules of conduct and giving directions as to the way in which His commanding will should be carried out⁶²—but His kingly power is and remains everywhere and always the same. For those laws and directions do not grow old, but remain valid, with undiminished force, in the Church of Christ; and if for the future He refers His disciples to His spiritual presence, yet even that does not make a distinction between different times. For even His original influence was purely spiritual, and was mediated through His bodily appearance not otherwise than even now His spiritual presence is mediated through the written Word and the picture it contains of His being and influence—so that even now His directive control is not simply a mediate and derived one. So that, keeping in mind what was said above, we may say that His government of us bears the same relation to our activity in His name as His representation of us does to our prayer in His name. Indeed, it is also obvious that since He stands to the totality of believers in exactly the same relation as the divine nature in Him does to the human, animating and taking it up into the fellowship of the original life, His lordship too is in the strictest sense a sole lordship, for no one else is in a position to share it. Thus, just as Christ has no predecessor in the society governed by Him, but is its original founder, so too He has in it no successor and no representative. For He exercises His lordship through ordinances which He Himself established,⁶³ and has Himself declared these to be sufficient,⁶⁴ so that nothing is now necessary but the right application of these; and to apply them is the common task of those who are ruled by Christ, just because they are His subjects. Even if at any time they could transfer this task, either to one individual or to several—though of course they could not do so without giving up their vital relation to Christ—yet any such individual would be only their representative, and not a representative of Christ.⁶⁵ So that among believers there is nowhere any lordship other than His alone.

2. The difficulty in regard to this part of the work of Christ consists especially in defining aright the kingly power of Christ in relation to the general divine government (a difficulty which cannot be overlooked once the subject is somewhat more closely scrutinized from a theoretical point of view), and further in defining it aright relatively to secular government (a difficulty which at once emerges in the practical treatment of the question).

The customary division of the Kingdom of Christ into the kingdom of power, the kingdom of grace, and the kingdom of glory helps us little. We have first to break it up so as to comprehend under the two latter the proper object of Christ’s kingly activity, namely, the world which has become participant in redemption, while under the kingdom of power we understand the world as such, and in itself. But in taking this position, we seem to lend ourselves to the extravagant notion that there belonged to Christ a kingdom of power, as it were, before the kingdom of grace, and independent of it. Now, to say the least, such a kingdom could not possibly belong to His redemptive activity; and if the Apostles knew of such a kingdom belonging to the Word,⁶⁶ it must have been a knowledge which, because unconnected with redemption, could not belong to Christian piety either. Anyone who thinks it necessary to interpret the expressions which they use with reference to Christ as the Word made flesh, the God-man and the Redeemer,⁶⁷ or which Christ uses of Himself,⁶⁸ as if they attributed to Him the governance of the whole world, involves himself in a contradiction, not only with all the passages in which Christ Himself offers petitions to the Father and refers to what the Father has retained in His own power, but also with all passages which express His intention to establish an immediate relationship, both of petition and response, between believers and the Father. It is true that occasionally there is to be found even within the Protestant Church a form of doctrine, and here and there, in conjunction with it, even a type of Church service which leaves room (all the prayers being addressed solely to Christ) only for a relationship of believers to Christ, to the exclusion of the Father. But we must, with Scripture and very much more with the Church, pronounce this a dubious innovation. If, however, this rock is to be avoided, by the power of Christ we can understand only that power which begins with the kingdom of grace and is essentially included in it. And this itself is a power over the world only in so far as believers are taken out of the midst of the world, and the fellowship of believers or the kingdom of Christ can increase only as the world (as the antithesis of the Church) decreases, and its members are gradually transformed into members of the Church, so that evil is overcome and the sphere of redemption enlarged. But even this is a power of Christ over the world which proceeds only from the kingdom of grace, i.e. it exists in virtue of the influence of the command to preach given by Christ and perpetually valid in the Church. On the other hand, what part of the world, or what individual, becomes ripe for the fruitfulness of this preaching before other parts, or before other individuals, is a matter belonging to the kingdom of power, which the Father has retained for Himself.⁶⁹ Accordingly, the only things which remain subject to Christ’s direct control are the forces of redemption implanted in the Church; and it would be a rather unfruitful distinction, and not even correctly described, if we called His Kingdom a kingdom of grace in so far as these forces show themselves effective in a purely inward way, for sanctification and edification, and a kingdom of power in so far as they are employed in the overcoming of the world; for these two things it is quite impossible to separate from each other. The distinction, however, between the kingdom of grace and the kingdom of glory is usually taken to be that the latter follows upon the former, so soon as all-Christ’s subjects have been placed in full possession of all the benefits won for them, and no longer have any contact with the world—an assumption which we shall consider more closely later. Here it need only be remarked, with reference to the kingly dignity of Christ, that if the assumption is taken strictly then there can be no other activity in this Kingdom than one of expressive representation, in which case the exercise of a general directive power is reduced to a minimum. Hence we can certainly regard it as a glory of Christ that He has no more to suffer, even in sympathy, with the whole body of believers, because it has been finished and perfected; but in no sense is this a condition which should be described as a Kingdom. Thus there remains only the one kingdom of grace as Christ’s true kingdom, as indeed it is the only one a consciousness of which really emerges in our moods of devotion, the only one of which we require knowledge for our guidance, because our active faith must be directed towards it. The two other terms in the customary division we can use only to determine the scope of this very kingdom of grace. In calling it a kingdom of power we are asserting, not only that the extension of the influence of Christ over the human race knows no limits, and that no people is able to offer it a permanently effective opposition, but also that there is no stage of purity and perfection which does not belong to Christ’s Kingdom. And in calling it a kingdom of glory we are confessing our belief—of course in connexion with that highest purity and perfection, only approximately given in experience—in an unlimited approximation to the absolute blessedness to be found in Christ alone.

So far as the distinction between the kingly power of Christ and civil government is concerned, it would seem, after what has been said, that nothing is easier than to distinguish exactly between the two in conception. For civil government is unquestionably an institution which belongs to the general divine government of the world,⁷⁰ and even by His own declaration is accordingly as such alien to Christ’s Kingdom. On the other hand, civil government is a legal thing, and exists everywhere, even where there is no Christian religion. Hence, since it springs out of the corporate life of sinfulness, and everywhere presupposes this (for of course for the sanction of its laws it reckons upon the force of sensuous motives), it cannot as such have the slightest authority in the Kingdom of Christ. On this view the two powers seem to be held entirely apart from each other, so that the sole lordship of Christ in His Kingdom remains secure although His followers conduct themselves in worldly affairs in accordance with the regulations of the secular government, and regard everything that comes to them from it as coming from the divine government of the world.⁷¹ But how greatly the situation is altered as soon as we think of the secular government as exercised by Christians over Christians, is clearly to be seen in the fact that, on the one side, the Church has attempted to control the secular government in the name of Christ, while on the other, the Christian magistracy as such has claimed for itself the right to regulate the affairs of the society of believers. In order not to introduce at this point anything which belongs to Christian Ethics—from which even the theological principles of Church Law must be derived—the only question we shall here have to propound is whether the Kingdom of Christ is changed in extent through the entrance of this new material relationship. Now it is certainly true that Christ must completely control the society of believers, and consequently that every member of the society must show himself, wholly and in every part of his life, to be governed by Christ. But since this depends entirely upon the inner vital relationship in which each individual stands to Christ, and since there can be no representative who exercises the kingly office of Christ in His name, this simply means that everyone, whether magistrate or private citizen, has to seek in the directions given by Christ, not indeed right directions for his conduct under civil government (for this is always a matter of the art of politics), but certainly the right temper of mind even in this relationship. On the other hand, it also remains true that no one can exert influence upon the society of believers except in the measure in which he is a pre-eminent instrument of Christ’s kingly power,⁷² since otherwise the sole lordship of Christ would be imperilled. And this does not at all depend on his outward vocation;⁷³ one who is called as a bond-servant is not therefore a bond-servant in the society, but a freedman of the Lord, and similarly he who is called as a lord does not therefore become a lord in the society, but only a bond-servant of Christ like everyone else.⁷⁴ So that the civil contrast between magistrate and private citizen loses all significance in the Church; it makes no difference to a man’s relationship to the kingly power of Christ.

3. In this way, then, we have separated the kingly power of Christ, on the one hand, from the power which the Father has retained for Himself, while on the other we have set it beyond all the resources of the civil power. The latter is undoubtedly the way in which what Luther called ‘the two swords’ should be kept separate from each other. We may therefore say of this part also of the work of Christ, as of the former ones, that He is the climax and the end of all spiritual kingship; and this will hold true in and for itself as well as relatively to this separation. In and for itself we must compare His lordship with every other purely spiritual power, and all the relationships of master and scholars, pattern and imitators, law-giver and law-receivers, we must put far below it—they stand on a vastly lower level, and are only concerned with individual parts of the life of the human spirit. The same is true of the founders of other religions, who neither evoked a temper of mind opposed to former habits and customs, as Christ did (rather they accommodated themselves to these in various ways), nor, as Christ did, called the whole human race under their lordship. In the same way He is the end of all such kingship, for there is just as little possibility of a similar kingdom after His,⁷⁵ as there is that a similar one should now exist or should ever have existed alongside of it. But He is both climax and end, only in so far as the above-mentioned separation is maintained. For it is part alike of the purity and of the perfection of His spiritual power that sensuous motives can have no share whatever in it. That is why Christianity is neither a political religion nor a religious state or a theocracy. The former are those religious fellowships which are regarded as the institutions of a particular civil society, and which rest upon the assumption that the religion is derived from civil legislation, or is related as a subordinate movement to the same higher impulse which first called the civil organization into being, so that for the sake of the civil society its members also unite in a religious fellowship, which therefore is animated by the common spirit of the society and by patriotism—these being ‘fleshly motives’ in the Scriptural sense. Theocracies, on the other hand, are religious fellowships which as such have subordinated the civil society to themselves; in which consequently political ambition aims at pre-eminence within the religious fellowship, and there is the underlying assumption that the religious society, or the divine revelation upon which it rests, was able to call into being the civil society—which in this sense is possible only for religious fellowships which are nationally limited. To both, then, political religions as well as theocracies, Christ puts an end through the purely spiritual lordship of His God-consciousness; and the stronger and the more extensive His Kingdom becomes, the more definite becomes the severance between Church and State, so that in the proper outward separation—which, of course, may take very different forms—their agreement is ever more perfectly worked out.

Postscript to this Division.—Only after we have concluded our treatment of the whole of the doctrine of Christ are we in a position to see what kind of meaning is to be given to the two contrasted states of humiliation and exaltation ascribed to Him. For these expressions, when taken as precisely as a place in the system must involve, cannot be applied either to the relationships of the Person by itself, or of the Work by itself, nor to the relationship of the Work to the Person. In the first place, the term ‘humiliation,’ taken strictly, presupposes a higher being which existed previously. But what this is, we cannot discover, so long as we abide by the unity of the Person. It may rightly be called an exaltation, that Christ became the first-fruits of the resurrection, and sits at the right hand of God; and in comparison His earthly condition may be called a lower one—but not a humiliation, for the Person of Christ began only when He became man. On such terms the Person of Christ is divided, and since the divine in Him is regarded as something special existing from eternity, its descent to earth takes on the appearance of a humiliation. But to the absolutely highest and eternal—which necessarily remains always self-identical—no humiliation can possibly be attributed. It would follow from this that, from the same point of view, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the fellowship of believers must also be a humiliation—all the more that human nature in us is not pure and sinless as it was in the Person of Christ. Nay more, in view of the omnipresence of God in all finite creatures, creation itself would be a humiliation; and this, although the glorification of God is actually given as the purpose of creation. But if we accept the term ‘humiliation’ instead of the more exact ‘state of lowliness,’ but hold fast to the unity of the Person, even so the antithesis reveals itself as a mere deception, or at least as merely an appearance for others but not a reality for Christ Himself. For how can one have been conscious of the lowliness of His state who speaks of His relationship to God the Father in such a way⁷⁶ that even to be set at His right hand could not be regarded as an exaltation? If, further, we think of the customary conception of the two natures and of a mutual impartation of the attributes of each, we cannot refer the humiliation to the union of the two natures (for that remains even if the humanity of Christ be exalted to the right hand of God), but only to the divine nature, either in so far as it refrains from the use of its attributes, or in so far as along with them it must accept those of the human nature. Now the latter circumstance remains unaltered in the state of exaltation as well. For since the distance between God and every finite being is infinite, it remains unchanged whether we think of humanity in its present state or in advanced development. The former has only slightly more plausibility. For if (and this is involved in this mode of presentation) even in the state of lowliness exceptions to the non-use of divine attributes occurred in virtue of the free will of Christ,⁷⁷then of course the renouncement of them itself must have been voluntary. Indeed, we must assert this, even without any regard to exceptions; for no compulsion can be laid upon the divine nature. In fact, we must rather say that a compulsion to make use of those attributes against His free will would have been a humiliation. But we cannot imagine that even in the state of exaltation Christ makes a more complete use of them. For if all the attributes of the divine nature are active without intermission in the human nature, then all activities of the human nature must be at rest without intermission; which is the same as saying that so far as its activity was concerned the human nature was absorbed by the divine, and there remained only its passive aspect—and this is quite contrary to the original assumption. But how, again, could we conceive an uninterrupted use of the divine qualities, if we are really to think of Christ as representing us before the Father, and making requests for us in view of sin—that is, as sympathetically sharing in the conflicts of the warring Church? So that even here there remains only a less or more, which cannot justify the use of such expressions. And it hardly need be said that this antithesis cannot be related to the functions of Christ either. For even if we were to say that the kingly function is by far the highest, even so the prophetic and the priestly were next to it, and were not opposed to it as lowly functions—for it was in no lowly attitude that Christ exercised the prophetic activity.

If now, in view of the complete untenability of this formula, we inquire what its origin was, the answer is that its only basis is a passage of Scripture,⁷⁸ whose devotional and—when we regard the whole context—rhetorical character indicates no intention that the expressions used should be set up as a fixed didactic formula. Besides, it would follow from this passage that the exaltation of Christ is simply a reward appointed Him by God for the humiliation, without direct connexion either with His peculiar dignity or with the completion of His work. But the way in which Paul here sets up Christ as an example is quite compatible with the view that his starting-point was simply the appearance of lowliness in Christ’s life as well as in His death. In the transmission of doctrine, accordingly, we are perfectly entitled to set this formula aside; it may justly be entrusted to history for safe keeping.

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Footnotes

1. Cf. § 88. ↩

2. Cf. § 63, 1 and 2. ↩

3. Gal. 2²⁰, Rom. 8¹⁰, John 17²³, 2 Cor. 13⁵. ↩

4. Rom. 6²·⁶·¹¹, 1 Pet. 2²⁴. ↩

5. Col. 3¹⁰, Eph. 4²²·²⁴. ↩

6. John 16³³. ↩

7. John 16¹⁹. ↩

8. Rom. 8¹, 1 John 1⁸. ⁹ 2¹. ². ↩

9. Gal. 2¹⁹⁻²¹ 5²²⁻²⁴. ↩

10. 1 John 5²⁴. ↩

11. Apart from the Epistle to the Hebrews, the conception of the ‘High Priest’ occurs (but only indirectly) in Paul (Rom. 5¹¹), and in Peter (1 Pet. 2²¹), and in John (1 John 2¹); Christ calls Himself a prophet in Luke 13³³, and less directly in similar passages. ↩

12. 100 and 101. ↩

13. John 1²¹. ↩

14. Matt. 3¹⁰. 16. 17. ↩

15. John 10⁴¹. ↩

16. Luke 2⁴⁶. ⁴⁷. ↩

17. Luke 4¹⁴; but compare also Acts 1²¹. ²². ↩

18. Luke 2⁴⁷. ↩

19. Acts 1⁷. ↩

20. I do not include here the Revelation of John; I cannot admit its apostolic origin. ↩

21. Deut. 13¹·⁵. ↩

22. See above (§ 103. 1). ↩

23. Cf. § 14, Postscript, pp. 70 ff. ↩

24. Matt. 16¹⁶, John 1¹⁴. ¹⁶ 4⁴² 6⁶⁸. ⁶⁹ 7²⁵. ²⁶. ↩

25. Even John 11⁴² is no exception to this, although I cannot argue the point here. ↩

26. This last must also be the sense of John 20³⁰. ³¹. ↩

27. Cf. § 99. ↩

28. ‘The same signs as the Apostles did might easily happen even to-day if there were any need’ (W.A. xi. pp. 1294, 1339). ↩

29. John 7¹⁶ 8²⁶ 17⁸. ↩

30. Eph. 5², Heb. 9²⁶. ↩

31. Maneat ergo hoc in causa, quod sola mors Christi est vere propitiatorium sacrificium (Apol. Conf. p. 255). Oblatio Christi semel facta, perfecta est redemtio propitiatio et satisfactio pro omnibus peccatis (Conf. Angl. xxxi. p. 138). Similarly Conf. Tetrap. xix. p. 354; Declar. Thorun. p. 425. ↩

32. See § 94, 2. ↩

33. Eam ob causam ipsius obedientia … qua nostra causa sponte se legi subjecit, eamque implevit, nobis ad iustitiam imputatur (Sol. decl., p. 585). Jesus Christus nobis imputans omnia sua merita, et tam multa sancta opera, quae praestitit pro nobis ac nostro loco est nostra iustitia (Conf. Belg. xxii. p. 183). ↩

34. Phil. 2⁵⁻⁸, 1 Pet. 2²¹. ↩

35. Cf. § 88, 3. ↩

36. But this, of course, is not what is meant in Sol. decl., p. 605: tam non fuit legi subjectus, quam non fuit passioni et morti obnoxius, quia dominus legis erat. ↩

37. John 4³¹ 5¹⁹. ³⁰ 6³⁸. ↩

38. Gal. 4⁴. ↩

39. John 15². ⁵. ⁸. ¹¹. ↩

40. Rom. 5¹². ¹⁸. ↩

41. Cf. § 77. ↩

42. John 12²⁴. ↩

43. Rom. 8²⁸. ↩

44. Deus ergo propter solum Christum passum et resuscitatum propitius est peccatis nostris, etc. (Expos. simpl. xv. p. 41). Hunc … credimus … unica sui ipsius oblatione Deo … pro nostris … peccatis satisfecisse … sicque morte sua triumphum egisse, etc. (Conf. Mylhus. iv. p. 104). Profitemur quod … anima et corpore passus est, ut pro populi peccatis plane satisfaceret, etc. (Conf. Scot. ix. p. 149). Ad haec passus mortuus et sepultus, ut pro me satisfaceret meamque culpam persolveret (Catech. maj., p. 495). ↩

45. Among others, Reinhard, Dogm., §§ 107 and 108, pp. 401 ff. ↩

46. This is expressed, not obscurely, in the whole context of the passage quoted above from the Sol. decl., p. 696, although throughout, so far as words are concerned, the proposition that the divine nature does not suffer is not abrogated. For it is at the same time maintained that the human nature became capable of suffering this only through its union with the divine, which is the same as saying, through the divine. With this, further, agrees the fact that this credal document—which of course is open to serious criticism—also teaches practically the opposite of the view here set forth: Reiicimus … quod fides non respiciat tantum obedientiam Christi, sed divinam ipsius naturam, quatenus videlicet ea in nobis habitet et operetur, et quod per hanc inhabitationem nostra coram Deo peccata tegantur (p. 697). ↩

47. It has given me much pleasure to read that the late J. J. Hess, too, could not bring himself to regard the passage Matt. 27⁴⁶ as a description by Christ of His own state of misery, but only as the first words of the Psalm, quoted with reference to what follows. ↩

48. Matt. 10²⁴⁻²⁸, John 15¹⁸⁻²¹. ↩

49. Luke 4³⁰, John 8⁵⁹. ↩

50. Matt. 26⁵³. ↩

51. Matt. 16²¹ and elsewhere; cf. John 11⁷⁻⁹; cf. ver. 56. ↩

52. Rom. 8³⁴, Heb. 7²⁵, 1 John 2¹; but it is to be noticed that both the expressions found here, ὑπερεντυγχάνειν and παράκλητος, are also used elsewhere of the Holy Spirit, ↩

53. Heb. 9²⁴. ↩

54. John 14¹⁶ 16²⁶ 17⁹, Luke 22³², ↩

55. Luke 6¹² and elsewhere; Heb. 5⁷. ↩

56. Matt. 6³³. ↩

57. 1 Pet. 2⁹. ↩

58. Credimus quoniam Jesus Christus datus est nobis unicus advocatus … quicquid homines de mortuorum sanctorum intercessione commenti sunt nihil aliud esse quam fraudem et fallacias satanae, ut homines a recta precandi forma abduceret (Conf. Gallic. xxiv. p. 119). ↩

59. 2 Cor. 1⁵ 4¹⁰. ↩

60. See his Diss. de triplici munere Christi. ↩

61. John 18³³, Matt. 27¹¹. ↩

62. Matt. 10⁵⁻¹⁴ 18¹⁵⁻²⁰ 28¹⁹⁻²⁰. ↩

63. Eph. 4¹¹⁻¹⁶. ↩

64. Matt. 21²⁰, John 15⁹·¹⁰ 17⁴. ↩

65. Expos. simpl. xvii. p. 50: Ecclesia non potest ullum aliud habere caput quam Christum … Nam ut ecclesia corpus est spirituale, ita caput habeat sibi congruens spirituale utique oportet. ↩

66. John 1²·³. ↩

67. Heb. 1²·³. ↩

68. Matt. 11²⁷ 28¹⁸; cf. John 17⁵·²²·²⁴. ↩

69. Acts 1⁷, John 6⁴⁴. ↩

70. Rom. 13¹·². ↩

71. Aug. Conf. xvi.: Quia Evangelium tradit iustitiam aeternam cordis, interim non dissipat politiam aut oeconomiam, sed maxime postulat conservare tanquam ordinationes Dei et in talibus ordinationibus exercere caritatem. ↩

72. This is also the basis of the rule of Peter, Acts 1²¹, and of the procedure of the Church as related in Gal. 2⁷·⁹. ↩

73. Expos. simpl. xxx. p. 91: Si magistratus sit amicus adeoque membrum ecclesiae, utilissimum excellentissimumque membrum est, quod ei permultum prodesse eamque peroptime iuvare potest. ↩

74. 1 Cor. 7²². ↩

75. Heb. 1²⁷: even 1 Cor. 15²⁸ does not contradict this. ↩

76. John 1⁵¹ 4³⁴ 5¹⁷. ²⁰ff.· 6⁵⁷ 8²⁹ 10³⁰. ³⁶, etc. etc. ↩

77. Sol. decl., p. 767: divinam suam majestatem pro liberrima voluntate quando et quomodo ipsi visum fuit etiam in statu exinanitionis manifestavit. ↩

78. Phil. 2⁶⁻⁹. None of the other passages cited in this connexion contributes anything to the question. ↩