tism is to us and in us, that is the truth or the reality of it. And it was not the blood as such of even the death on Calvary; it was the blood as symbol and actual expression of the Eternal Spirit in which and through which the life was offered up without spot to God. It was the eternal spirit of it all that made that particular crucifixion what it was, that converted that particular death into a resurrection unto eternal life. So, all uniting in and taken together as one, they make up God's triple witness concerning His Son. And that witness is this, that God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath the life. As the sonship was a resurrection sonship, so the life is distinctively a resurrection life. It looks back to, it is conditioned upon, it rests on, the truth of the initial water and the consummating blood. That is to say, it must have begun with a whole-minded and whole-hearted act of self-consecration to God, involving a repentance unto the putting away of sin and a faith that means and that will be holiness; our life must accept and intend all that was accomplished in that of our Lord, and that is expressed in His death and resurrection. And what was meant in the water must be consummated and realized in the blood. We must in the end have ourselves in the perfection of our repentance died to sin and in the perfection of our faith risen into life. The completed transition from death into life can to any profit have taken place in another for us only as by baptism with His spirit it can be effectuated in ourselves in Him. XVI THE PROBLEM OF THE PERSON AN adequate interpretation of the work of Jesus Christ cannot but involve and raise a question as to His personality. We have either to lower our conception of the work or else to elevate the matter of His person to the height of an unavoidable and all-important problem. We have summed up the catholic or practically universal interpretation of the work in the one word the resurrection. But to that word we have attributed a far wider signification than is apparent to any one who does not see it through the whole mind of the New Testament. It is true that we profess here to be interpreting only the Gospels, but it would be absurd, in doing so, to limit our attention so exclusively to the Gospels themselves as to ignore the way in which they were understood by the Christian mind of the time. Our only concern must be to interpret the Gospels themselves as exactly and correctly as we can, and if in this we are assisted to the truth by the mind of St. Paul, for example, so much the greater gain. The only thing to be guarded against is the possibility, in that case, of importing from St. Paul or any other extraneous source an interpretation which is not at least implicitly the meaning or truth of the Gospels. |