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carries him to the final goal of human religious need. When he parts from the Twelve it is not to leave them downcast, but as men that stand gazing up into Heaven, beholding there, as Stephen did, their Advocate with God. Is it any wonder that when their faith returns it is to recognize him in the breaking of the bread; and not as a mere ghost, not as a mortal returned again to earth, but as one that liveth and was dead and behold he is alive for evermore, and hath the keys of death and hell." Paul's gospel does not indeed go back to Galilee. But would you expect it to? The gospel of Jesus had moved forward since then, to become what Paul preaches, a gospel of personal redemption, a "gospel of the Reconciliation, how that God by the agency of Christ was restoring a guilty world to His favor,15 not imputing unto men their trespasses.'

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15 Only a historical study of the word "reconcile "

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(KaтaάσσEш), especially of its occurrence in Jewish literature of Paul's time and later (in the religious sense it does not occur before the Maccabean period), will dispel the false impression made by modern renderings of the passage above quoted. Thayer's Lexicon makes unmistakably clear, it does not mean merely dispel enmity," as if it were a hostile feeling on the world's part which required to be removed; but "restore to favor," and the succeeding clause "not imputing to men their trespasses" shows that such is here the sense. God, through the agency of Christ, was restoring an unworthy world to His favor.

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LECTURE III

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THE GOSPEL

1. The Apostleship not from Man

The preceding lecture was really an attempt to take position at the vantage point of Paul, and look back (though with other eyes than his) at the career of Jesus, then unrecorded save for the ordinance of the memorial Supper and the answering rite of self-dedication by baptism into his name. To-day we ask how it comes to pass that Paul's view is so different from ours. He continues Jesus' work; but admittedly it is a transfigured gospel.

We have seen that even before Jesus took up the interrupted work of John the Baptist the movement could properly be called a "gospel of reconciliation," though of course in a quite different sense from Paul's. It was a national movement a movement in the spirit and power of Elijah to "turn the heart of Israel back again." By repentance and faith the children would be turned to the Father, and the Father to the children. God's anger, so manifest in the evil case of his people, would be appeased before it brake forth into wrath, and the long-awaited forgiveness and salvation would appear. As the author of the Second Source puts it, John came "bringing a way of justification" which the publicans and harlots entered by repentance and faith, though the Pharisees held aloof.1 That which began 1 See the article "John as Preacher of Justification by Faith " in Expositor VIII, 93 (Sept., 1918).

as a national movement became more and more individual. By force of adverse circumstance, or, if you choose to put it so, by the providence of God, Jesus' direction of this upheaval of reawakened prophecy was forced more and more into channels of individual and personal religion. With his death it transcended the limits of mortality as it had previously transcended those of mere nationality. In the end the supreme expression of his gospel became the symbolic utterance of the Sacrament. Having loved his own he loved them to the end, and made the fate he would not seek to escape a ground of appeal to God on their behalf. Baptism, adopted almost at once by his followers upon the reawakening of their faith, was an answering self-dedication in penitent loyalty to the risen Lord.

Thus Christianity, as Saul the persecutor first came in contact with it, was more than a reform. It was almost a new religion. Saul, at least, refused to recognize it as any longer within the pale of Judaism, and priests and scribes agreed with him. This new religion found expression for its essential meaning in its two observances, and as yet had found no other utterance. It was a gospel of "grace," the renewed "favor" of God obtained by the martyrdom and intercession of the Lord Jesus Christ. What the law had not been able to do through all the long struggle of Synagogue leaders with popular frailty had (in Christian belief) been at last accomplished. God had been reconciled to a penitent, believing people. The proof of it was already patent in Jesus' time. Together with his message of forgiveness to the penitent had come the power of God to heal. The inquirers from John could report what they had seen and heard. In view of these "powers of the Spirit Jesus could denounce the opposition of the scribes as impious and declare the Kingdom potentially already begun. Even greater works followed the

resurrection. The Spirit of adoption moved the votaries of the Crucified to cry, "Abba, Father," in manifestations which were taken as the fulfillment of the promise of the "outpouring of the Spirit in the last days." There had been progress, therefore, from the Baptism of John to the Baptism of the Spirit. There had been both intensification of the message and change in its nature; and the new brotherhood would have been the last to deny it. They rather gloried in it. The water of the Jews' manner of purifying had been changed into wine.

The change was analogous to that which came over prophecy with the extinction of the national political life. Apocalypse is prophecy universalized and transcendentalized. It is also individualized. With the death of Jesus something similar was seen to have taken place in his gospel. Defeated on earth it had taken refuge in heaven. Rejected as a program for the nation, it had become universal, offering an ideal for the individual lost son, were he Jew or Gentile. The gospel was transfigured. Old things were passed away; behold all had become new.

We have to-day a group of religious leaders in whom the prophetic, ethical motive predominates over the mystical and sacerdotal. These raise the cry: "We have had too much of Paul, too much of individual salvation. Social salvation is the need of our times. Back to Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount!" Another group follow the opposite tendency, denying the very existence of a historical Jesus, and assuring us that all the religious values of Christianity are to be found in the idea of the dying and rising Redeemer-God common to the mystery religions of the time. The latter tendency curiously recalls the teaching of Marcion, Cerinthus, and the Docetic Gnostics. These found no

difficulty with a Christ-emanation assuming temporary embodiment in Jesus (or indeed any other avatar). Individual fellowship with this divine Being insured immortality. What they could not tolerate was a real, flesh and blood Leader, a High priest and King of humanity. But surely the mythical interpretation of the gospel record has little to contribute to the science of religion. Science of any kind must deal with objective historic fact. The larger its basis in concrete reality the better. A science of mythology is possible; but a record of life in real moral union with the Father in Heaven is a better basis for the scientific student of religion, as well as for the convert.

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What primitive Christianity rejoiced in as an accomplished fact was access for Jew and Gentile in one new Spirit unto the common Father." That consciousness and its basis of historic fact should be the province of our study. But present-day enquiry seems largely taken up with reaction against what is termed the theologizing" gospel of Paul, resenting his emphasis upon personal redemption and the life of the individual soul in God." The cry is: "Back to Galilee, with its simple ethics of brotherhood, and its social goal of a commonwealth of humanity.”

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We have many brilliant scholars (I have already mentioned Arnold Meyer of Zürich, and might now add the lamented William Wrede)2 in whose view the new faith incurred a loss that quite outweighed the gain when it secured as its chief interpreter to the Greekspeaking world Saul of Tarsus, the converted scribe and sanhedrist. Back to Jesus, is the cry. Back to the simple doctrine of the Prophet of Nazareth. Genuine Christianity is the monotheistic humanitarianism of the prophets stripped of its temporal and racial limitations.

2 See also H. Mackintosh, Natural History of the Christian Re ligion. 1894.

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