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From the very beginning of this discussion we have been dealing with the church, and I suspect that there is not a page in this book on which this word, or some other designating the same reality, does not appear. This is bound to be true in a discussion of Christ because, as we have seen, the new community is an essential aspect of the meaning of Christ. The church came into existence, not after the event, but along with the event, and is really inseparable from it at every stage, just as the event is inseparable from the church. In every reference we have made to the elements comprising the historical event through which the revelation occurred, the creation of the community has been included. The church is thus not so much the consequence of the event as its culmination.

But the church is also the continuation of the event. The church and the ancient Hebrew-Jewish community, with which it is continuous, together form the historic stream of which the event, in the stricter sense in which we have for the most part been using the term, is the center. It is thus only through the church that you and I have any contact with the event. Having begun our discussion of Christ in the realm of our religious experience, it is appropriate that we also conclude it there. We are doing just that when we now speak of the church, for whatever is distinctively Christian in our experience has come to us by that route. In so far as we know Christ, we know him in and through the life of the community.

Obvious as this is once it is seen, it is not always seen. Just as we sometimes fail to recognize how dependent we actually are upon the historical revelation, falsely supposing that our knowledge of God has been derived entirely or largely from nature and reason, so also often, having accepted the fact of revelation, we think of it as having been made directly to us as individuals and thus regard ourselves as being at every essential point independent of the community. The community, in fact, is, according to this view, more dependent upon the believers than the believers upon the community.

Those who take this position are likely to point either to the Spirit or to the New Testament as the medium through which the revelation has reached them, but in doing so they overlook the relation in which each of these stands to the church.

As for the New Testament, we have already discussed the Gospels as products of the church’s life, reports of the way Jesus was remembered, still known, and interpreted in the primitive Christian communities; the character of the epistles as reflecting the life and thought of the church is just as clear. The New Testament as a whole is the byproduct of the church’s experience -- not the creator of the church, but its creation, or, more accurately, God’s creation through the church. Thus, if the New Testament leads us to Christ, it does so by leading us into the church. Whether we know it or not, we do not enter the presence of Christ except along with others: if we do not approach him in the company of some contemporary Christian or group of Christians, then we do so in the company, and with the help, of Peter, Paul and John and the unnamed communities whose memories and faith are conveyed to us in the Gospels. In the second case, no less than in the first, we are dependent upon the church.

Nor can the Spirit be regarded as taking the place of the community as the agency or medium by which the historical revelation reaches the individual. For the Spirit is the principle of the church’s life and, though he exists and works outside, can be known nowhere else in just the way he is known there. On any level, one cannot know the "spirit" of a group without belonging to it: the "Holy Spirit," in the case of the church, fills the place of this "spirit" and becomes (as Theodore O. Wedel reminds us [The Coming Church [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1945.]) the community’s esprit de corps. There is no clear doctrine of the Spirit in the New Testament, although the reality of the Spirit is known in every part. Sometimes the Spirit seems to be identified with the living Christ: "The Lord is the "Spirit," writes Paul. The familiar fourteenth chapter of John also identifies the two when it represents Jesus as referring to his own return and to the coming of the Spirit as to one event. At other times the Spirit is alluded to less personally, but not less substantially (the Spirit in the New Testament is never "spirit" in our abstract or subjective sense), as the presence or power of God, which God is ready to "pour out" upon us or with which he may "fill" us. But however defined, the Spirit of Christ is known only in the community of Christ. Although one may feel the pull and power of the Spirit from outside, we can find him only within. If the Spirit draws us, he draws us into (or ever more deeply into) the community.

Only there can the revelation in Christ and the Revealer himself be found. This has always been true. In New Testament times individuals apart from the community of faith, may have had some knowledge of the man Jesus of Nazareth, but the Lord Jesus Christ could only be corporately known. Christ could, of course, be known in individual personal fellowship, but only when this knowledge was mediated by the fellowship of believers. We have already referred to Paul’s use of the phrase "in Christ" when he means "in the Christian community." The New Testament is not always talking about the church only because it takes the church so completely for granted -- just as we are likely to take the light for granted when we are asked to describe what we see around us.

The very words with which we find ourselves addressing or designating the God of our faith remind us of the social character of the medium of the revelation. We cannot call him by some proper name; he has no such name. We cannot identify him by referring to some formal characteristic like righteousness or love (for everything depends upon the particular concrete meaning of such a term: other "Gods" have been thought of as loving and righteous, not to mention omnipotence, omniscience, and the rest). What we actually do is to call him "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." In other words the only "name" of God we know contains also the name of another. We worship not a private God, but the God of Christ and therefore the God of those who belong to him. Is there any conceivable way in which that God can be known except in and through the historical community?

The church has been referred to as the culmination of the event, and now we are in position to see that this is true, not simply chronologically, but in a far more important sense. The teleological meaning of the event, its purpose, in so far as it is given us to see it, is to be found in the creation of the community. The most adequate and accurate single way of describing the saving meaning of the event (or the saving "work" of the person) is by saying that God through Christ brought into existence a new people -- a people in which he could be known, in precisely the way he is known there, as righteous love, as grace and truth, and could thus reconcile us to himself. Such reconciliation with the God who made us and made us for himself means also reconciliation within ourselves and between ourselves and others -- the overcoming of all hostilities within and without. This reconciliation is salvation, and it has all the worth which the New Testament and the classics of Christian devotion are constantly ascribing to it: life abundant, joy unspeakable and full of glory, peace that passes all understanding, confidence and hope like an anchor firmly fixed. But this reconciliation is found within the community and in the nature of the case can be found only there. For what is reconciliation but the restoration of community? And what is the Christian fellowship (in its true character) but community thus restored?

As to how or why it happened that the event we have been discussing culminated in this particular kind of community and had this particular reconciling effect, we shall do well not to seek too definite and sure an answer. Nothing organic can be explained: temporal occasions and sequences can be found, but not adequate causes. We know that when seed, soil and season meet, the plant will grow, but as to just why it does we do not know and shall never know. Even if we discover, as we well may, what are the conditions under which life emerges from inorganic matter, we shall have discovered only the when of life, not its how or why. History is not different: we see the close connection of event with event, but as to why a particular "cause" issues in a particular "effect" we do not know. Thus we know that the event upon whose unity and complexity we have been insisting throughout this discussion culminated in the formation of the community in which God makes himself known in a particular concrete way as both righteous and forgiving and through which the new life of the Spirit, the distinctive Christian life, is imparted. But this is all we know -- and all we need to know,

From the very beginning it was felt that the more exact location of this mystery of God’s action was the death and resurrection of Christ, which we have often identified as marking the decisive moment or phrase of the event. The early church used many metaphors to suggest this: Jesus in his death offered a sacrifice for our sins which we were not able or worthy to offer; he paid a debt we could not discharge; or took on himself a penalty we could not pay. Other "explanations" were more objective: Christ’s dying was the moment when he who had met and defeated Sin, now met Death and, as the resurrection showed, defeated that demonic enemy also, thus freeing us from bondage to guilt and fear and restoring us to our true (original) nature as children of God; or Christ’s death is the sign and, indeed, the actual realization, of that complete identification of Christ with us men, which was prerequisite to his being a true and effective Mediator; or his death is a mark and consequence of his perfect obedience, by which the disastrous train of "man’s first disobedience" was finally and forever broken.

None of these ways of seeking to express the meaning of the death of Christ can be taken as accurate in the same way we take a chemical formula or a mathematical equation or even a date in history to be accurate. (What has been said about both creeds and story will perhaps be remembered here.) But they remind us of the fact that the death of Christ was not only the vivid and poignant focus of the church’s memory of Jesus (as death is always likely to be in our memory of another), but also that it became almost at once the symbol of what was realized to be the crucial meaning of the event.

The reason for such a development is not far to seek. It is sin and death which confront faith in God with its severest (indeed, with its only severe) test. No "revelation" of God which does not show him dealing effectively with these enemies of man, these destroyers of the meaning of his life, can be a saving revelation. It was seen very early by the first witnesses of the event that its unique character consisted largely in the fact that this was precisely what God had been doing. It was not a matter of theory or even of faith, but of fact, that, as a result of what had occurred, forgiveness had been made available to them and a new life of the Spirit, in its quality immortal, had begun to flow around and through them. This was the very meaning of life in the Christian community. But just why had this happened? Manifestly a new victory over sin and death had been won on their behalf. But how?

The event being what it was, the explanation of the new fact could take only one form: Jesus had won this victory. He had been tempted in all points as we are, but had failed not. He had suffered death, yea death upon the cross, but he had loosed its bonds. The burden of the Christian message was not that Christ was sinless in some Godlike sense, but that he had conquered sin; not that he could not die, but that he had conquered death; not that our enemies had not touched him -- they had and had done their worst to him -- but that they could not master him. No wonder the death and resurrection, which stand at the center of the event, stand also at the center of the story! The death was an offense to the Jews, and the resurrection nonsense to the Greeks, but together they are the secret of the power of the gospel. The cross, a perfect symbol of the suffering and death of Christ and of the sin which inflicted them, is also the symbol of the love of God, which conquered both, freeing us from fear and reconciling us, making us one again, with himself, which is our true life.

But all of this is only a way -- even if, as I should say, the only possible way -- of conveying the meaning of the reconciliation actually found within the newly created fellowship. The one fact, essential and sure, was that the event which the first believers had witnessed, had culminated in the community, into which they had been incorporated, and that in this community a new life of the Spirit was to be found. However it might be explained, God was known there as holy love, moving to penitence and offering both pardon and a new righteousness, and becoming himself, as thus known, the ground of faith in the ultimate meaning of life and of hope of its fulfillment. The purpose of God in Christ was the bringing into existence of this community. The Christian life was -- and is -- life within this community of Christ.

I have just used the words, love, faith and hope, and these indicate, better than any other terms could, the essential characteristics of this life. It is not by accident that Paul writes, "And now abideth faith, hope, love -- these three." Together they possess a certain completeness and finality. One does not readily find a term which deserves to stand beside them or see a way in which any one of them can be dispensed with. The close relation between them can be expressed in many different ways. We may say that hope without faith is not really hope and that faith without hope is not really faith; that faith is the foundation of hope and that love is the ground of faith. Or reversing the direction, we may say that love, when it is fulfilled, includes faith, and that faith, when it is fully and truly itself, includes hope. Or perhaps it is truer still to say that love and faith, belonging indissolubly together, blossom inevitably into hope.

It is interesting to reflect upon why Paul places these terms in just the order in which they stand -- faith, hope, love. There are obvious rhetorical reasons for placing love in last place: The final clause, "the greatest of these is love," follows much more naturally and effectively upon "faith, hope, love" than it would, say, upon "love, faith, hope." One must not assume, however, that Paul has arranged the terms consistently in the order of increasing importance. He would certainly have regarded faith as more important than hope if he had been forced to make a distinction of that kind between two terms of such supreme significance and so intimately connected in his mind. We hope because we believe, he would have said; not, we believe because we hope. There is a kind of so-called hope which produces a kind of so-called faith; but such hope is mere wishfulness and such faith is mere credulity. Real hope always rests back upon faith; real faith never rests back upon hope.

But it is also true, I would urge, that real faith always involves hope as a corollary. To find an ultimate meaning in existence is also to look forward confidently to the ultimate fulfillment of existence. Faith is not dependent upon hope -- faith takes the first step -- but hope always follows closely after it, if indeed faith and hope do not walk together once that first step is taken. We hope only because we believe; but if we believe, we shall hope. Faith and hope are thus bound inseparably together, but faith comes first.

But faith and love are also bound inseparably together, and love comes first. Faith does not lead to love, but love to faith. We believe because we love -- or, better, because we are loved, for while faith and hope are primarily human attitudes or acts, love, as the New Testament uses the term, belongs preeminently to God. Love is the love of God -- not primarily our love of God (Nygren [A. Nygren. Agape and Eros, English translation by A. G. Hebert (London: S. P. C. K., 1932), Part I.] is surely right here), but God’s love of us. This love of God is revealed in Christ. Faith is our response to that love — our apprehension of its reality, our deep sense of the need of it, our act of trusting ourselves absolutely to it. Love comes before faith, because God’s action comes before our own. God’s love calls forth our faith. Faith then issues, as we have seen, in hope. We hope for the future fulfillment (although if we are wise we will not dare predict too precisely the form that fulfillment will take) because we already know in faith the love of God, who can do all things. In so far as we then express in our actions the same love towards others, it is not our love which we express; it is the love of God, received in faith, flowing through us. Love, before it is our vocation, is God’s nature; and before it is our act, it is God’s gift.

According to a familiar text, the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews begins: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." The Revised Standard Version changes "substance" to "assurance" and "evidence" to "conviction," replacing the objective with subjective terms. And this is proper, because faith, as well as hope, is primarily subjective: it is based on ‘substance" and "evidence"; it is not itself substantial or evidential. But what cannot be said of faith and hope can be said of love: Love is the actual substance of things hoped for, the actual evidence of things not seen. Love, in the Christian sense, is the reality of God already present and operative in Christ. Thus faith, based on love, is not mere faith; and hope, based on love and faith, is not mere hope. We are confident that our hope will be fulfilled, because in the actual presence of the love of God, it is already being fulfilled. We possess even now the earnest, the advance installment, of our inheritance. "By faith we have access into this grace wherein we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. . . . And our hope will not disappoint us for the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which has been given unto us (Rom. 5:1 ff.).

But all of this happens within the community: the love is revealed there; the Spirit is given there; the faith and hope are to be found there.

No contemporary theological question is so urgent as the question of the nature and function of the church. Is the church one among many human institutions committed to the achievement of certain socially approved ends, or is the church a divinely created community in which God makes himself known in a unique and supremely authentic way? Is the church a voluntary association of individuals, or is it a people God has chosen and ordained? Does the church have an objective salvation to offer, or only some helpful thoughts? Do the sacraments of the church stand for something ultimately real, or are they merely pious exercises, valuable only because of the psychological effect they have on those who practice them? These are obviously important theological questions, and for the men and women who are engaged actively in the work of the church they are particularly poignant personal questions.

We can answer them positively and confidently only when we see the necessary relation in which the church stands to the event in the first century to which we find ourselves tracing the origin of what is most precious in our own lives. If God did in fact make a unique and supreme revelation of himself in that event; if God was actually in Christ reconciling the world unto himself; if something of decisive importance for humanity really happened in connection with the life and death of Jesus, however different may be the theological terms in which we attempt to express that meaning -- if this is our faith, the church becomes immeasurably the most significant of human communities, for it was within its experience that the revealing event first occurred and it is in its experience that the meaning of that event has been conveyed from one generation to another. Baptism is seen as the celebration of one’s entrance upon membership in a community of transcendent significance, and participation in the Lord’s Supper as an act of actual communion with the living Christ, who is its center and head. The church is seen as the bearer, although an unworthy bearer, of a unique and indispensable revelation; as the medium, although an imperfect medium, of a spiritual life for lack of which men and nations are dying.

For upon the event, as the Christian is bound to see things, depends nothing less than the meaning of human history. It is not easy to believe in the meaning of history, although even a generation ago we thought it was. We then talked about the inevitability of progress by natural evolution and were quite sure the perfect world order was soon to come. But not only has that optimistic mood disappeared under the pressure of events, but also we recognize that even then the facts did not justify it. We have come to a realization of the depth and recalcitrance of moral evil in ourselves and in all men, to a recognition of the limitations implicit in our finitude, to an understanding of the realities of man’s political, economic and social life, which make any easy optimism impossible. In the light of that experience, we have read history again, noting the rise and fall of nations and cultures in cycles which in the perspective seem as short and are apparently as final and futile as the life-span of a man, evil manifesting itself continually in the same hideous forms, good winning its victories but also suffering its defeats, as century follows century and our tiny planet is hurled on its precarious way among the stars. And what does it all come to? What ground do these facts provide us for faith and hope?. . .

But if God did in fact choose to reveal himself in history, as Christian faith affirms, that act becomes the sign and guarantee of a purpose of God in history, a purpose to which all of nature is subordinate. History ceases to be formless and void; it takes on character and order. It is seen to have a center, and by that same token we know it will have an end -- not a merely fortuitous end, as by an accident to our planet or a burning out of the sun, but a true end, a decisive end, because God’s purpose in and through it will have been fulfilled.

That purpose is the "bringing of many sons to glory"; the creation in fact of the family of God, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named; the coming to pass, whether in heaven or on earth or in some new heaven and earth, of the kingdom of his love. The full meaning of that purpose we cannot know: only "an earnest of our inheritance" has been given us, and "eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has entered into the heart of man what God has prepared." But because that purpose exists, and only because it exists, do history and our own lives have meaning. The decisive ground of our faith that it exists is the historical revelation, which began with the calling of Israel and culminated in the great event -- the life and death and rising again of Jesus and the coming into being of the community of Christ the Lord.

Earlier we considered the elements which, at the least, must be regarded as belonging to the event. These were found to be the man Jesus, his life, death and resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the creation of the community. None of these elements, we saw, can be omitted. What we mean by "Jesus Christ" is the whole of which these are indispensable parts. But although we had no hesitancy in affirming that the event cannot be less than this whole, we attempted, it will be recalled, no maximum definition. Indeed, we recognized that no absolute maximum, or outer, limits can be set to this or, for that matter, any other event, short of the limits of history itself.

But although we cannot draw an absolute line except at the ends of history, we can draw it there. If the reality we are considering is an historical event, by definition anything nonhistorical or "suprahistorical" is excluded from it. This does not mean, of course, that nothing nonhistorical is real; the whole purpose of the event, according to Christian faith, was to provide an historical medium for the revelation of God, who is the ultimate reality above and beyond history as well as within it. But the statement does mean that nothing nonhistorical can be an element in the event itself.

Now all of the elements we have proposed as essentially constituting the event are historical elements: the man Jesus, his life, teaching, death and resurrection, the creation of the church by the Spirit are all truly historical. It may be objected by some that the resurrection and the coming of the Spirit are not, properly speaking, historical since they did not occur publicly, but only within the experience of a limited group. But such a criterion of the "historical" cannot be sustained. It may well be true that nothing purely private and individual can be called historical -- the historical is essentially social -- but it does not follow from this that nothing is historical which is not universally witnessed or experienced, even by those who are physically situated to witness or experience it. As a matter of fact, if such a criterion were applied, Jesus himself, as his character is presented in the Gospels, could not be regarded as an historical person since nothing is more certain than that only relatively few of those who had some contact with him recognized this character. The indubitable fact is that the resurrection of Christ, no less than the life of Jesus, did occur, whether everybody witnessed it or not. The church is beyond any doubt historical, and its very existence is a testimony to this occurrence.

But as much as this cannot be said of certain other "occurrences" which the New Testament and the creeds have affirmed, such occurrences as God’s sending the pre-existent Christ to earth, the ascension of Christ, and his coming again to judge the quick and the dead. These are all matters of traditional Christian belief and they all stand in some relation to the revelation, but they are matters of belief, not of empirical fact, and therefore do not belong essentially to the event itself. They stand at least one place removed from what is actually given within the experience of the community. They belong not to the event, but to the "story." This distinction between history and story is an important one and deserves more attention than has usually been given to it.

The story is as familiar to the average Christian as the history. Indeed, the story includes the history and many of us never think of the history except in the context which the story provides. For most purposes it is just as well that this is true, but for purposes of clear theological definition, it is important always to have in mind where the history leaves off and the story takes up.

Although the story is told with some variations in the several parts of the New Testament, its general outline is clear and, in view of the general variety of New Testament religion, amazingly consistent. The story is nowhere more succinctly and effectively presented than by Paul in Phil. 2:6-11:

This is the story in its briefest form. As we read it, we find ourselves filling in from Paul and others: It was out of love for mankind that Christ came into the world and it was out of love of mankind that God sent him or permitted him to come. One is led to imagine a high colloquy in Heaven between the Father and the Son as to the necessity of this sacrifice. Man, God’s creature, made in his own image and for fellowship with himself, has by his disobedience, by his misuse of God’s gift of freedom, become hopelessly embroiled in tragedy and death. He is held body and soul by Sin and is unable to extricate himself. Only God can save him -- and how can even God save him unless he comes to where man is and deals directly with man’s enemy? Therefore, it is decided that Christ shall lay aside his heavenly status and powers and himself become man. Thus it happened that Jesus was born, lived a brief and strenuous life of unfailing devotion to the will of God, preached the good tidings of the salvation he had come to bring, repulsed all the attacks of man’s demonic enemies, carried his obedience so far as to die. But just as he had successfully resisted Sin, so he conquered Death. He arose from the dead and ascended to the Heaven from which he had come. There he now reigns with the Father and thence he shall come at the end of all things to judge the world and to save those who have put their trust in him and who thus through faith have been permitted to enter the community of those who share in his victory over Sin and Death.

This summary, susceptible of modification and amplification at many points, is intended only as a reminder of what is as familiar to us as the songs our mothers taught us.

Now it is clear that while this story embodies historical elements -- the life and death of Jesus, his resurrection, and the continuing life of the community of faith -- it also contains elements which are not historical. The pre-existence of Christ, his decision to come into this world as a man, his struggle with demonic powers and his triumph over them, his ascension to heaven, where he reigns at God’s right hand awaiting the time of his return -- these are parts, not of the event, but of the story. This does not mean that they are not true, but, rather, that if true, they are true in a different way from that in which the account of the earthly life and the affirmation of the resurrection are true. These latter are true in the sense that the earthly life and the resurrection actually took place; but one can hardly use the term "take place" in connection with "occurrences" which transcend time and place altogether. These belong, indeed, not to the sphere of temporal occurrences at all, but to the sphere of ultimate and eternal reality. The story is not an account of the event, but a representation of the meaning of the event. The story is true if that representation is true and adequate; it is false only if the meaning of the event is misrepresented or obscured.

It will be recalled perhaps that in our examination of the Gospels we saw the importance of recognizing two facts about them: first, that they bring us the career of Jesus only as transfigured, and, secondly, that they are more, rather than less, true on that account. Now I should like to urge the importance of two somewhat analogous facts about the story: first, that it is a story, and, secondly, that the story is true.

Neglect of the fact that the story is a story betrays us not only into a sterile and irrelevant literalism, but also into an unnecessarily rigid and divisive dogmatism. The criterion of truth for a story is a different criterion from that which applies to history. In the case of an alleged historical incident, the appropriate question is, "Did it happen?" That question may also be asked of the story, but it is not in that case the essential question. One’s acceptance of the story as true does not depend upon one’s giving an affirmative answer to that question. Hamlet is true or false without the slightest reference to the question whether there was a Prince of Denmark by that name. Or, to take a much better illustration for our purposes, one may accept as true the story of man’s creation and fall, as found in Gen. 1-3, without supposing for a moment that those chapters give us an accurate account of an actual happening. Indeed, it might plausibly be argued that the essential and universal meaning of this ancient story can be grasped most profoundly only when the story is set free from any connection with an actual occurrence in time and space. I have no interest in making such an argument, but I would insist that those who believe the story happened and those who believe it did not -- or, at any rate, do not believe that it did -- should both recognize that their beliefs at this particular point are largely irrelevant. A story is a story. You do not believe it by believing it happened, and you do not deny it by denying that it happened. The important question about the story of man’s creation and fall is whether we believe what it is trying to say about God and man and human history. To believe, or deny, a story is to believe, or deny its meaning.

Now the Christian story is a story, and it is of first importance that we recognize it as such.

But equally important is the recognition that this story is true -- and true not merely in the sense in which all true stories are true, but also in a very special sense. Stories generally are true when they might be true. Hamlet, to which reference has been made, is true in so far as the characters of the play are life-like, their motivations understandable, their actions consistent and credible. In other words, to be true the play must be true to life as life is universally experienced and observed. The more deeply it probes into the play of interests and motives, the more precisely it analyzes the subtler aspects of human relationships, the more profoundly true it is. Still, such a story is true only because it might be true.

But the biblical stories of man’s creation, fall, and redemption would, as regards their really important significance, be false if only such truth could be affirmed of them. These biblical stories, while not being accounts of actual incidents, nevertheless have a connection with actuality which stories of the ordinary kind do not need to have, Thus the creation story is true only if God is in fact the Creator of the heavens and the earth and of man in his image, and the story of the fall is true only if man is in fact alienated from God and thus actually falling short of the glory of his own true nature and destiny. In other words, these biblical stories, which are not self-conscious literary creations but genuine emergents from the experience of a religious community -- these stories are attempts to express an understanding of the relation in which God actually stands to human life, and they are true in any really important sense only if that understanding is correct.

This distinction is even more clear when we consider the story of Christ. This story is not only connected with actuality in the general sense which can be asserted of the earlier biblical stories -- that is, God is in fact our Redeemer from Sin and Death -- but it is also related in the most intimate and necessary fashion with a specific historical occurrence. The actual life, death and resurrection of a man form the great center of the story. The meaning which the story as a whole sets forth is the meaning which was actually discovered in the event itself.

There is, therefore, a certain inevitability about this story, as was hinted earlier in a reference to the creeds. It cannot be replaced or, in its essential structure, modified. The meaning it expresses cannot be expressed otherwise. Metaphor can always be substituted for metaphor and parable for parable; and although one parable or metaphor may be judged more apt or effective than another, none can be thought of as indispensable. But the story of Christ is absolutely unique and irreplaceable; and this is true not only because it includes the account of an actual historical event as a part of itself but also because it is itself, in all of its essential parts, the creation of the event. The story came into being as a phase of the community’s life and is as truly an element in the event as the community itself.

The story came into being because the meaning of the whole event, as it was realized and fulfilled within the experience of the community, was too great for merely historical terms to express it. For the event was known to be nothing less than the revealing, reconciling, redeeming act of God. God had drawn near in Christ. This was not mere metaphor; this had happened. But simply to affirm this is virtually to tell the Christian story; for when that story is stripped to its essential elements, is it not seeking to say just that, and indeed only that? Thus although the event took place on earth, the story, which embodies the meaning of the event, begins in heaven and ends there. Can anyone, even now, to whom the event has occurred think of it as beginning or ending anywhere else? Can the heights and depths of the meaning of the event be expressed in any other way? To witness the event is to believe the story.

But the point must be made again that although the Christian will inevitably believe the story (and often we do not know how deeply we do believe it), it is important for him always to realize that it is a story he is believing. Otherwise, he is likely to become rigid and harsh in his orthodoxy, and his conception of Christ may become an instrument for dividing the body of Christ.

Perhaps our thinking in this perplexing area may be somewhat clarified if a distinction is made between what may be called the historical, the ontological, and the mythological. The Christian confession involves all three elements, and we properly understand the meaning of the term "mythological" in this connection only if the truth and importance of the other terms are recognized. By the "historical" element in Christian faith is meant, of course, the event we have been considering through these chapters, and it must not be forgotten that the resurrection of Christ, the coming of the Spirit, and the creation of the community (different ways, perhaps, of referring to the same reality) are as much a part of it as are the personality and life of Jesus of Nazareth. By "ontological" I mean the God, who stands above and beyond history as well as within it, who has acted in and through the event, making himself known as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. By "mythological" I refer to the suprahistorical elements in the story which came into being within the Christian community as the only possible way to express this transcendent and redemptive meaning of the event.

Not one of these elements can be omitted or neglected without the destruction or distortion of the essential meaning of the Christian confession. Gnosticism in every form, ancient and modern, affirms the ontological and the mythological, but disparages or despises the historical: the Christian "gospel" becomes a mere story with its universal meaning. Fundamentalism in all its forms, traditionalist and sectarian, affirms the ontological and the historical, but repudiates the category of the mythological, thus manifesting either insensitiveness to the vastness of the mystery of God’s being and purpose, or else ignorance of the true nature and the necessary limits of history. It is left for certain types of modernism to recognize elements historical and mythological in the Christian tradition, but to deny the reality of the God of Christian faith, thus robbing both history and story of ultimate meaning.

But if this last position destroys meaning, the other two seriously distort it. All three are false to Christian experience, in which history, faith and story are fused inseparably. As members of the historical community we have witnessed the event, Jesus Christ the Lord, and in faith we have received its meaning as the saving act of God, but when we try to express, or even to grasp, that meaning, neither philosophical nor historical terms will serve our purpose, and our thinking and speech, whether we recognize it or not, become inevitably mythological.

But the myth, or story, in its own appropriate way, is as true as the history with which it is so intimately connected, and as the faith which it was created to express.

As we turn our attention to the problem presented by the miracles of the Gospels we are manifestly considering a phase of the same subject as engaged us in the preceding chapter. The reasons for giving that problem particular consideration are, first, that it offers an excellent opportunity of applying and illustrating the principles just discussed and, secondly, that it constitutes for many, because of what are felt to be its religious implications, a special problem of quite peculiar urgency.

The first question is obviously simply a question of historical fact: Did the miracles occur? Granted the general view of the nature of the Gospels which we have been considering, this question is not only proper but inevitable, and it deserves a straightforward answer. The second question to which we must come is concerned with the religious implications of the answer we shall find ourselves making to the historical query.

At the beginning of this discussion recognition again must be given to the fact that the greatest of the miracles, the resurrection, stands near the very heart of the Christian event. Not only must it be recognized that the resurrection occurred -- we have seen that our own being as members of the community bears witness to it -- but also that no naturalistic or purely psychological explanation of it is adequate. Of this fact and its inescapable significance as representing a special act of God I have said enough perhaps in preceding chapters, but it is especially important that this should be remembered in connection with this discussion of the miracles.

Indeed, the resurrection is most significant not because it is a miracle in and of itself, but because it is a mighty sign and symbol of the miraculous character of the entire event. As everything I have tried to say from the very beginning of this book will have reminded us, the primary element of Christian faith is the recognition that the occurrence, or series of occurrences, to which we must trace the origin not only of the church but also of whatever is distinctive and most precious in our own life as religious persons -- this occurrence, or cluster of occurrences, was not an ordinary event, standing simply in a natural succession to other ordinary events, but represented rather, a special and uniquely significant divine act, a purposeful deed of God for our salvation. Of this event, thus received and understood, the resurrection is both the culmination and the symbol. To deny the resurrection is to deny the event; to affirm the event is to affirm the resurrection.

The resurrection, however, is in an altogether different category from the many miraculous incidents which the Gospels record as having taken place during Jesus’ earthly career. The resurrection is an essential part of the event and is witnessed to continuously in the existence of the church and in the presence of the Spirit; this cannot be said of these miraculous incidents. So far as we can know from anything in our experience, they may, or may not, have happened. Speaking broadly, I should say that they did not. We may well believe that Jesus had a strange power in quieting disturbed and distraught persons (who would have been called demoniacs) and that he cured many persons ill in other ways. Not only is the Gospel evidence for such healings exceedingly good, but they are also congruous with the character of Jesus and with historical probabilities generally. But it will be readily granted that to say this is not to acknowledge the historicity of miracles in any commonly accepted sense.

The doubt that the miracles occurred need not rest upon any a priori denial of the possibility of miracles. I do not see how any believer in God can entertain any such a priori judgment -- who are we to say what can or cannot happen? -- and the incongruity of such a presupposition is even more manifest when it is entertained by one who recognizes the miraculous character of the whole event of which Jesus’ career was the center. If that occurrence as a whole represents a special divine act in human life and history, how can the possibility of any number of miracles within it be ruled out? To recognize, however, that we have no right to deny the possibility of the miracles is by no means the same thing as affirming the fact of them. Such an affirmation can be made only if the historical evidence is sufficient to support it.

But when the disinterested student examines this evidence, he is not likely to find it very convincing. For one thing, he cannot fail to observe that the element of the miraculous grows in bulk and importance as one moves from our earlier sources to the later. Paul’s letters, our earliest literary sources, say nothing of any miracles in the earthly life. Let it be granted that Paul has little of any kind to say about the earthly life; still, one would have expected some hint of the existence of extraordinary wonders in the career of Jesus if he had known of them. The doubt that he had any such knowledge is confirmed by the observation that he finds the deepest significance of the earthly career in its utter humiliation: "He emptied himself"; he "took the form of a slave"; "he was rich but for our sakes became poor." Jesus’ possession of miraculous powers, it is not unreasonable to believe, would have represented for Paul a qualification of that complete identification with man, that complete sharing of man’s lot, which was at the heart of Paul’s whole conception of Christ. According to Paul, Jesus was "declared to be the son of God . . . by the resurrection from the dead." There is nothing to indicate that Paul thought of this "declaration" as having been in any way anticipated by the appearance of any divine "glory" in the earthly career. Everything, indeed, points the other way. Paul’s conception of the significance of the earthly life would have been vitiated by such a doctrine.

But as we move from Paul to the Synoptic Gospels, we find a different Christological conception and an abundance of miracles. It is now believed that Jesus was, in effect, "declared to be the Son of God" long before the resurrection -- at his baptism according to Mark or at his birth (according to Matthew and Luke). Thus, his whole earthly life, or at least his entire public career, is given a character and significance which, earlier, had belonged only to his present exalted resurrection life. To be sure, this character and significance of the earthly life was regarded as having been somewhat hidden; the declaration was not quite a public declaration -- this is made especially plain in Mark, the earliest Gospel -- but hints and signs of the truth were constantly breaking through for all who had eyes to see. Jesus reveals, at least to a few chosen associates, not only miraculous healing powers, but also powers over nature: he calmed the sea; he walked on the water; he multiplied the loaves and fishes; he raised the dead; and supernatural portents attended his own birth and death. It is not hard to show a heightening of the miraculous as we move from Mark to Matthew to Luke, but the miracles are an integral and important feature of all these Gospels, although there is some indication that the writers were aware of the fact that Jesus’ own generation had for the most part not witnessed them. Hence, the artificial secrecy with which the miracles are so often surrounded.

But when we reach the Fourth Gospel we find all such restraint and reticence abandoned. Jesus is constantly "showing forth his glory" in various mighty works. The miracles, though fewer than in the Synoptics, are greater and vastly more impressive. Moreover, the marks of human limitation and weakness (other than merely physical weakness) which the Synoptics contain are in this Gospel eliminated or obscured: Jesus is not tempted and is rarely, if ever, deeply troubled; there is no struggle in Gethsemane and no despairing cry from the cross; Jesus occasionally asks a question, but never to learn something he does not already know; he prays, but not because he needs either help or assurance.

This account of the growth of the miraculous from earlier and later sources is much too quick and summary to be adequate, and is designed only as a reminder of what is already familiar. But is it not clear that we have here an instance of that "transfiguration" of the earthly life about which we were thinking in the preceding chapter? The miraculous is, by and large, an aspect of Jesus’ career as seen in retrospect and in the light of the resurrection. Indeed, in some cases it is actually suggested that the disciples recalled the miracle only after the resurrection or, at any rate, spoke of it only then. The miracles mark the reading back into earlier stages of the event of what is, after the resurrection, recognized to be the meaning of the whole. The earthly life tends to be transfigured in every part. Every miracle is indeed a miniature transfiguration scene.

If this is the character of the miracles of the Gospels we are in position to appreciate their truth without believing in their actuality. For "transfigurations" are never concerned with the actuality of facts but with the truth of meanings. Indeed, a transfiguration might be thought of as representing falsification at one level for the sake of truth at another, infidelity to fact for the sake of fidelity to meaning. Artists are constantly making such transfigurations. The portrait painter does not hesitate to alter the contour of a feature to bring out the meaning of a face. It is not enough to say that such transfigurations are excusable on occasions or can be justified; one must recognize that they are often absolutely necessary if the true meaning of the whole is to be expressed.

Thus I should say that if the story of Jesus’ life had been told just as it seemed -- and in a sense was -- at the time it was occurring, that story would not have been adequately or truly told or that life was a part of a supremely significant, a divine event, the event through which God, the Creator and the Ruler of all nature as well as the Lord of history, was entering into man’s life with new redemptive power; but that fact was not grasped clearly, if at all, till the event had reached its culmination in the resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, and the creation of the community. The story of Jesus’ life could not have been adequately told until then. It might have been accurately photographed earlier, but it could not have been truly portrayed.

No part of the Gospel tradition is so obviously legendary in its detail as the early chapters of Matthew and Luke, in which the circumstances of the birth of Jesus are recorded. Hardly a single item in these chapters can be surely trusted: even the time and place of the birth are not beyond legitimate question. And as for the wealth of miraculous detail, how can one possibly think it actually happened so? And yet what Christian would want the story of the birth of Christ told otherwise? What Christian would willingly surrender the appearance of the angels to the shepherds and the "multitude of the heavenly host" singing a hymn never heard before on land or sea, or the star dropping low from the skies to guide the magi from far away mysterious lands to the Judean village and the stable who God himself lay a tiny baby in the arms of his mother? It is inconceivable that these stories will ever be surrendered and this can be said, not because they are familiar stories or beautiful stories, but because they are in the profoundest sense true stories. They convey -- as no matter-of-fact way -- of describing the birth of Jesus could -- the supreme importance of the birth of Christ as the initial phase of the total event in which "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." No one to whom the meaning of the total event has been revealed will ever find the birth stories either untrue or irrelevant.

And so again we are brought back to the event as a whole as the matter of real significance for Christian faith. The event as a whole was an act of God. This does not mean that it was not also in every part a divine event. But each part was divine because it participated in a divine whole, not because it was divine in and of itself. The whole event was a miracle. To see this is to realize that it matters little, if at all, whether any particular part of it was in some special or separate sense miraculous. The question of miracles in the New Testament becomes religiously and theologically important only when the miraculous character of the whole event is made dependent upon the answer we give to it. But the character of the entire event as an act of God cannot properly be made dependent upon this answer. That character made itself known quite apart from any particular miraculous incident or any number of such incidents together. The resurrection might seem to be an exception here; but the resurrection, as I have been at pains to point out, is more than a miraculous incident. It is a mighty sign and symbol of the miraculous character of the total event.

The resurrection was not the final miracle of a series, but the first. It was not accepted because of earlier miracles, but earlier miracles were accepted because of the resurrection. For the resurrection was the moment when not only the spiritual lordship of Jesus began but when also the whole earthly life was "transfigured" before his disciples -- the moment when the event they had witnessed and were still witnessing was realized to be one whole and to be in its wholeness an act of God.

In the preceding chapter we were considering the bearing of our thesis upon the problem of Christian unity. The assertion was made that we can come nearer to agreeing on the significance of the event from which our own religious life, as well as the history of the church, takes its start, than we can on a definition of the nature of the person, who stood at the center of the event and whom we all acknowledge as our living Master and Lord. I suggest that we now consider the bearing of our thesis upon two other problems, the problem of the historicity of the Gospels and the special problem posed by the miracles of the New Testament. In the preceding chapter the emphasis was placed upon the fact of the event; in this and the following chapter the stress will fall upon the necessity of regarding the event as one indissoluble whole and of finding its significance in its character as a whole rather than in some particular part or aspect of it.

The problem which the Gospels involve for the modern Christian is twofold: it is an interesting and difficult historical problem and a poignant and perplexing religious problem. The historical problem can be stated in some such way as this: "We know that the Gospels were written more than a generation after the events they relate occurred and that they bring us the preaching and teaching of the churches -- or of some of them -- after the Christian movement had emerged into a Gentile environment. The experiences and needs of these churches, as well as of their predecessors, have undoubtedly left their mark upon the traditions the Gospel writers have compiled. All of this being true, we are bound to ask how far the ‘real facts’ of Jesus’ life and teaching have been overlaid by legendary, theological, and utilitarian accretion. To what extent has ‘history’ been modified by ‘interpretation’? How accurately and surely can we recover the facts about the historical Jesus?" The religious problem is closely related: "How can we consider such questions as those just asked without acknowledging that we really cannot know these facts about Jesus with any real assurance? And how can we make such an acknowledgment without surrendering the sound historical basis of our faith?"

Any attempt at solving the former of these problems -- what I have called the historical problem -- falls outside the scope of this discussion, but it is of vital importance that we recognize the inescapability of the problem itself. The insight into the character of the Gospels as "church books" -- not pieces of disinterested historical writing but compilations of traditions, based upon memories of Jesus, the knowledge of him as living Master, and reflections upon his significance, and serving evangelistic, didactic, and apologetic purposes within the early church -- this insight is undoubtedly true. And it is obvious that one cannot recognize this fact about the Gospels without acknowledging a priori that they do more (or less) than bring us a "plain, unvarnished" account of the mere facts of Jesus’ career.

That they bring us, indeed, not Jesus "as he was" in some simple objective sense, but Jesus as he was remembered and therefore to some extent interpreted, in the generations immediately following his life is one of the surest results of biblical study over many decades. The discovery of this fact about the Gospels is often popularly attributed to a contemporary school of scholars known as "Form critics," but the fact was well established long before this particular school emerged and rests upon grounds considerably wider and firmer than those which support this school’s particular claims. No intelligent and open-minded reader of the Gospels can fail to see these grounds once they are called to his attention, and their validity can be quickly tested and demonstrated without the necessary help of any esoteric or technical learning.

The historical problem presented by the Gospels is, then, not the problem of determining whether the character of the early Christians, their faith, and the exigencies of their life and work have colored and overlaid the facts of Jesus’ teaching and life, but is, rather, the problem of determining just how we should use our knowledge of this fact in our efforts to get back to the so-called historical Jesus’ own words and life. The question is not whether we should allow for a "contribution" from the early church, but how much allowance should be made and precisely where.

The answers various students find themselves making to these last questions are bound to be diverse. But there can be little doubt that the contribution of early Christian experience and faith is very great. I would reject as uncalled for and unsound the skepticism of those scholars who hold that we have no trustworthy indications whatever as to the character, the teaching and the career of Jesus of Nazareth, but I would be inclined to agree that there are not many particular points where we can feel absolute assurance, We can be sure that Jesus said a certain kind of thing, but not that he said just this thing or that. We can be sure that he acted in a particular characteristic way, but often not that he did just this or that. We can trust the impression of the person which the Gospels convey to us even if we have reason to doubt the accuracy of many of the reports of that person’s words and acts.

But the very use of the word "impression" reminds us that Jesus comes to us through the life of the church and speaks to us only through that medium. We do not find Jesus in the Gospels in some purely objective, and therefore abstract, sense; we find him as he was remembered, known and believed in by those whose life and thought are reflected in these early records.

Now, as we have seen, the assertion of this fact seems to many Christians to involve a disparagement of the value of the Gospels and hence to raise an acute religious question. "If," these persons ask, "the Gospels cannot be trusted to take us back directly to the facts concerning Jesus of Nazareth, what happens to the historical basis of our faith? To be sure," they go on to say, "we are interested in the life and thought of the early church, but this is not the matter of most vital concern to us. What most deeply concerns us is the person who lived and taught in Galilee; our faith rests upon the words and acts of this man, and unless the Gospels give us an accurate and trustworthy account of them, not only have they little, if any, value for us, but the historical ground of our faith is shaken, if not destroyed."

Some, under the pressure of such a conviction as this, go to all lengths in denying that the Gospels do in fact bring us anything else than a completely accurate record of Jesus’ life and words. Others are willing to grant that the Fourth Gospel contains some later interpretative matter, but insist that the Synoptic Gospels are quite purely "historical." Others, forced to retreat still further, take refuge in the virtual infallibility of Mark and Q, widely recognized literary sources of the Synoptic Gospel tradition. Others still, forced to acknowledge what is undoubtedly the fact, that the Gospels, every one of them and in every part of each, bear some trace of the community’s response to and understanding of Jesus, seek rather feverishly to recover an irreducible minimum of objective historical fact by methods of literary and historical criticism applied with varying degrees of expertness.

I may easily be misunderstood at this point and want very much not to be. I believe in the importance of the "quest of the historical Jesus." Not only does it seem to me inevitable that men should want to know all that can be known about the man Jesus, as about any other historical figure, but I should say also that the effort to get back to the ipsissima verba and acta of Jesus of Nazareth is an indispensable theological task. We have seen that Jesus’ life and teaching is an essential element in the event in which the revealing act of God took place. Those who deny the importance of that element and the value of seeking to identify and understand it are on the way to denying the importance of the entire event. They are moving, whether they know it or not, towards Docetism.

But there is no occasion for the feverish concern over this issue which is often felt by Christians. This is true not only because, as we have seen, the memory of Jesus himself is embedded in the life of the church and is carried in its heart -- a memory which no historical criticism can possibly discredit -- but also because the real medium of the revelation is the event as a whole, and not any particular part of the event, however important. Now the Gospels bring us that event as a whole, and thus are not less, but more, valuable than if they were the simple "objective" accounts we sometimes suppose we want and need. If the "object" about which we are concerned is this total event, then the Gospels are objective, even if not simple. Indeed, they could not be simple and still be true and adequate, since their function is to represent and convey an event which, as we have seen, was highly complex. Two facts about it, both of them already noted, are particularly relevant to this problem of the Gospels and need to be considered again, somewhat more fully.

The first of these is the fact that the response of his disciples to Jesus and to all that happened in connection with him is as truly a part of the event as any other element in it. We have already more than once been reminded of the fact that historical events always have two sides -- the external occasion and the human response, the thing "out there" and the way in which this "objective" element is received and appropriated. The two elements are inseparable. It is a mistake to suppose that the thing "out there" is the real event and the response only a consequence of it. The response belongs essentially to the event itself, just as the experience of seeing belongs essentially to the nature of light. There could be light waves (or something comparable) without the presence also of eyes, but there could not be light. So there might be a happening, in some meager sense, without social response, but not what is properly called an historical event,

In the case of the event we are considering, the response began as loyalty to a man and some measure of understanding and acceptance of his message; it ended as the faith that in and through the total event which had been witnessed the supremely revealing and saving act of God who made and sustains the world had occurred. This response was continuous, although the resurrection marked the crisis in its development -- the moment when loyalty to the person reached its climax and when faith in the meaning of the event as an act of God became for the first time clear and sure -- but at every stage this response was a constituent and creative element in the event itself, and the event had not fully happened until this response of faith had been fully made.

It goes without saying that many who were in some sense acquainted with Jesus of Nazareth knew of no act of God in and through him. Some of these regarded him as an enemy, others with indifference or only casually, and others still with varying degrees of appreciation. This appreciation of the man and the teacher, even when it stopped there, is not to be despised, as is the fashion in some quarters; there is evidence that Jesus responded to it gratefully, and there is no reason why we should not gladly acknowledge its truth and worth. Indeed, faith in Christ rested firmly upon such appreciation of Jesus, as it does still. But if this appreciation of the man was not eventually caught up into the recognition that, in the total event of which his historical life was the first phase, God had acted for our salvation -- if this did not happen, the reality we have been calling "the Lord Jesus Christ" was not known.

But if it is this reality to which we return as the source of our religious life, why should we not want and expect the Gospels to reflect it in its full richness?

The second fact about the event which I have referred to as particularly relevant to our discussion of the value of the Gospels is closely related to the first. This is the fact that the resurrection is as truly a part of the event as the career and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

To say this is to take for granted -- what indeed has been taken for granted throughout this discussion -- that the resurrection of Christ is not to be thought of as a mere belief which arose as a result of reflection on the "real" event (namely, the career of Jesus), but that the resurrection belongs essentially to the event itself. The resurrection was a genuine occurrence: no more truly a forward projection of the memory of Jesus than the memory of Jesus was a backward projection of the faith in the risen Christ. To be sure, as we have already had reason to note more than once, Jesus could not have been remembered just as he was remembered except for the continuing knowledge of him as living and present; so also he could not have been known as living and present if he had not been also remembered. Memory and faith were fused indivisibly and reacted constantly on each other in the crucial early period, as indeed they still do. Nevertheless, just as memory had an objective occasion in the career of Jesus, so the faith had an objective occasion in the resurrection. The intrinsic nature of this "objective occasion" we shall not try to define -- can we ever define the intrinsic nature of what is given in any experience? -- but the fact of the resurrection is indisputable.

Now if we really accept this fact, we have no cause, or right, to limit authentic words and acts of Christ to the earthly life. Indeed, the kind of feverish anxiety, to which reference has been made, to establish the location of a word attributed to Christ within the career of Jesus of Nazareth may plausibly be taken to betray a fundamental doubt of the resurrection. The emphasis again is on the word "feverish." That we should seek to determine which of the words attributed to Jesus of Galilee and Judea were actually spoken by him is, as I have already tried to say, not only inevitable but also important. I have no sympathy with those who because they see -- or think they see -- the truth concerning the resurrection despise the scholarly quest for the "Jesus of history." But is there not some warrant for saying that when concern on this point becomes anxious and fearful, some doubt of the resurrection is betrayed?

I confess that this question often occurs to me when I find certain lovers of the Fourth Gospel resorting to every conceivable argument in order to make the point that this Gospel contains the ipsissima verba of the teacher of Galilee. The vast and obvious differences in style, subject matter, and idea between the characteristic teachings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and the equally characteristic discourses ascribed to him in the Fourth Gospel make this undertaking difficult in the extreme, but do not preclude the attempt. This defense of the accuracy of the Fourth Gospel in reporting the words of Jesus is undertaken, in spite of what must appear to the disinterested student insuperable obstacles, because to these lovers of the Gospel the alternative seems to be surrendering the authenticity of some of the most precious and manifestly true of Christ’s reported words: "I am the bread of life . . . I am the light of the world . . . I am the good shepherd . . . If you continue in my words . . . you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free . . . He that drinketh of this water shall thirst again, but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst . . . I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live . . . I am the way, the truth and the life; no one cometh to the Father but by me" . . . and many more. "We cannot doubt these words," these Christians say, "because they answer to the realities of our own religious life. Christ has spoken these very words, even to us; how can we doubt their authenticity?"

But if the risen Christ, Christ the Spirit, is as truly a reality as Jesus of Nazareth, why be so anxious to locate these words within the historical career? The author of the Fourth Gospel is not reporting what he remembers as having been said by Jesus in Galilee or Judea but what he has heard the living Christ (identical and continuous with this remembered one) say in Ephesus or Alexandria. The same thing, of course, is often true of Paul and others, although they do not cast their material in the dramatic dialogue form chosen by this author. To recognize this about the character and intention of the Fourth Gospel is not to assume that everything in it represents an authentic report of what the Spirit was saying to the churches; some statements in it, attributed to Jesus, quite clearly represent the writer’s own opinions and even prejudices, as, for example, the vigorous anti-Semitic statements of the Gospel. We cannot expect perfect reporting from men like ourselves, whether of the words of the "historical Jesus" or of those of the living Christ. Still, there can be no question that the greatest utterances of the Fourth Gospel are authentic utterances, that is, utterances of Christ -- but they are the utterances of Christ not simply as remembered but as known still. Indeed, does not that Christ himself say, "I am the resurrection and the life"?

Although it is most obviously true of the Fourth Gospel that it is written throughout from the point of view of the resurrection, the same thing can be said in principle of the Synoptics. They too were composed by men who had witnessed the entire event and whose knowledge of the meaning of that event as a whole inevitably colored their report of the facts remembered about the first stages of it. The earthly life no longer appeared to them, or could appear to them, as it had originally appeared. It had been "transfigured." The suggestion is often made that the transfiguration scene in the Synoptic Gospels represents a resurrection appearance of Jesus brought back into the story of the earthly life. Whether this be actually true or not, it is certainly symbolically true. The transfiguration represents the invasion of memory by faith, the backward movement of the Spirit into the realm of remembered facts, a step -- perhaps the first step -- toward the absorption of the earthly career in the resurrection life, a process which was to culminate, at least so far as canonical literature goes, in the Fourth Gospel, where there is no transfiguration scene only because the whole career of Jesus has now been transfigured.

In so far as this process of transfiguration has obscured or distorted important elements in the historical life of Jesus -- as in some measure has undoubtedly occurred -- it is unfortunate and untrue. But in so far as it has forced, and enabled, successive generations of Christians to realize the fact that the source of the revelation is not two events but one, the process is both fortunate and true. We are mistaken if, with the fundamentalists, we deny or ignore the fact of this transfiguration and imagine that things always were as they later seemed; but we are likewise mistaken if, in the manner of modernists, we deny or ignore the value and truth of this transfiguration and thus fail to recognize the unity and transcendent meaning of the whole event and the exalted significance of the earthly life as a part of it.

Reference has been made several times in the course of this discussion to the divisiveness of the Christological issue. If Christ himself has been and is still the principle of our unity, the attempt to define the meaning of Christ has just as surely been the major occasion of controversy and division. I believe that this attempt has had this kind of effect because the church has tried to define abstractly in terms of the metaphysical essence of a person’s nature what was at first received concretely as the divine meaning of an historical event; or, to say the same thing somewhat differently, we have tried to interpret the revelation in Christ as a static thing residing in a person when it was really a dynamic thing taking place in an event.

The earliest church did not fail to apprehend this real character of the revelation, as we have already had occasion to observe. One cannot read the New Testament without gaining the impression that this literature was produced by a community standing in the white glow of what was felt to be a supremely momentous event. This event was connected intimately and throughout with Jesus; and his importance as a person, both remembered and still known. cannot be exaggerated. But this person was conceived to be the central factor in an act of God, and it is this act which has largest theological significance in the New Testament.

I have already indicated the elements which belonged to this event as you and I look back to it: the appearance of the man Jesus, his life and death and resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the creation of the church. These same elements were recognized also by the primitive believers as essential elements in what had happened among them. But at this point emerges a rather important difference between their view and ours. They would not have spoken of the event as "having happened"; as they saw it, the event was still happening. They did not look back to it, as Christians very soon perforce were doing; they stood in the midst of it. It was happening around them, and at least one phase of the event was still to occur. This would be the return of Christ from Heaven to serve as God’s agent in the final judgment and redemption, with which history would end and the life of the "world to come" would be fully inaugurated. Thus, the event as they understood it was the final, the eschatological, event, and the whole New Testament is dominated by the conviction that this event has already begun to happen and will soon be consummated,

Now even a glance at the long course of eschatological reflection among the Jews will reveal that it was concerned predominantly with the culminating event of history and only in a secondary sense and measure with the personal agent through whom this event would be brought to pass. To the Christian, writes R. H. Charles,

In other words, the Jewish prophet looked forward with greatest interest and conviction not to the appearing of a person but to the occurrence of an event.

This same subordination of person to event in Jewish prophecy and apocalyptic appears also in the wide variety of ways in which the "Messiah" was conceived by those who expected his coming at all. I have placed the word "Messiah" in quotation marks because, strictly speaking, the term designates only one of these several ways, namely, the ideal King, usually of David’s line, who would reign as God’s vicegerent over a restored Israel. Probably this was the most prevalent and persistent form under which the eschatological agent or mediator was thought of, and thus it is not surprising that the term "Messiah" tended to spread and to some extent did spread over the whole field and to attach itself to forms originally quite distinct and essentially quite different. At least three of these alternative forms can be distinguished, although many scholars would deny that the term "Messiah" was generally applied to them in pre-Christian times: the Prophet, the Priest, and the "Son of Man."

The Prophet and the Priest, like the King, are obviously idealizations of typical leaders within the nation. (These forms could be combined in various ways. The Messiah could be King. Prophet, and Priest -- all in one. There is evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Qumran community expected two Messiahs, a King and a Priest. See also earlier comments. The "Son of Man" was a mysterious superhuman figure who would appear from Heaven in the last days to bring God’s judgment and salvation. The literary evidence that the expectation of a "Messiah," in so far as such an expectation existed at all, took these several forms is indisputable, although at points meager, and can be found cited in Charles and other writers on Jewish eschatology. My point here is only that this variety of conception is another indication of the relative unimportance of this phase of the eschatological hope.

It should be added that even where a "Messiah" is expected, the emphasis always upon his office or function, not upon his nature. The King, the Priest, the Prophet are significant because of the part they are to play in God’s judging and redemptive action, not because of what they are in themselves. There is no evidence of any current speculation upon their metaphysical nature. They are to be men, different from others only in that they have been especially chosen and anointed and especially endowed for a supremely important task. The Son of Man belongs obviously to another category; he is a superhuman person. But even he is important because of the role he is to play in the final event. The emphasis is always upon the action of God, not upon the nature of his agent.

When one moves from this background of beliefs and hopes into the New Testament, whose writers speak for a community which is sure that these beliefs and hopes are now being actually fulfilled, one finds, as we have seen, the same emphasis upon event: God has "visited and redeemed his people"; he has "raised up Jesus"; he has "poured out [his] Spirit upon all flesh"; he has "done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do"; he has "disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in Christ"; he "who commanded the light to shine out of darkness has shined in our hearts." In a word, the final act of God in history, the act with which history will close, is under way. The culminating event is occurring and with the return of Christ will be brought to glorious completion. The first form of the Christological question was: "What has God done through Christ?" or, better perhaps: "What is God doing? What is the meaning of the event which we have witnessed and of which we have been made a part?"

But although the real basis of the community’s life was always the total event we have described, its attempt to give a rational explanation of its life took more and more the form of an effort to define the nature of the person. The fundamental ground for such a development was the indubitable fact that Jesus had been and was still the incomparably important, the central and decisive, factor in the event. Since what had happened had happened around, in connection with and through him, and since this happening was interpreted as being the eschatological event, it was to be expected not only that Jesus should be designated "Messiah" but also that this "Messiah" should become the symbol of the entire event. To deny the Messiahship of Jesus was to deny the revealing and saving character of the event from which the church took its rise, To affirm the divine significance of that event was to affirm the divine role, if not the divine nature, of Christ. The vivid memories of Jesus and the fact of his continuing Lordship in the community would make such a development all but inevitable, and the exigencies of evangelism and apologetic only accelerated it. Thus it happened that the Messiahship of Jesus was from the beginning vastly more important in the revised eschatological pattern of the Christians than Messiahship in the abstract had normally been in the traditional pattern of the Jews.

The actual character of this person, the course his life had taken, and the values he soon came to hold for the members of the community led also to a new definition of the word "Messiah." Since Jesus was the Messiah, whatever belonged essentially to his significance belonged also to the essential meaning of Messiahship. By and large, it may be said that all the terms in which the hopes of Israel had been traditionally expressed were utilized and additional Old Testament terms which at first had had no such significance were discovered and pressed into service. Moreover, conceptions originally and probably up to this time quite distinct were combined and fused. We cannot undertake any detailed description of Christological reflection in the early and ancient church. The barest summary must suffice.

There can be no doubt, as we have seen, that almost from the moment of the resurrection Jesus was regarded as the Messiah. At first, his Messiahship was thought of as beginning only with the resurrection, but very soon it was believed that he had been the Messiah throughout his career. But although he conformed to the true Messianic pattern in being (as was supposed at least) a descendant of David, his kingship did not generally follow traditional lines. He had been put to death, had been raised from the dead, and was believed to be in Heaven awaiting the time of his return, when he would be fully manifested as God’s Messiah. None of these features belonged to any previous conception of the Messiah in the original sense of that term, although the present waiting in Heaven for the time of his manifestation conformed to the pattern associated, as we have seen, with the supernatural Son of Man. In as much, however, as Jesus had been ‘born the Son of David according to the flesh" and was now "installed as Son of God. . . by the resurrection from the dead," features of both the human Messiah pattern and the superhuman Son of Man pattern applied to him, and the two conceptions were inseparably fused. The title Son of Man dropped out of use almost at once, if indeed the churches ever employed it, but the functions of the Son of Man became the functions of the risen Christ.

The death of Jesus conformed to no previous pattern and undoubtedly was originally a stumbling-block to believers, just as Paul tells us it was still for unbelieving Jews. Paul himself seems to have adopted a conception according to which Jesus the Messiah must die in order to meet and destroy Death, just as he must be "in the flesh" in order to meet and conquer Sin. This view represents an adaptation of the original Messiah idea: the Messiah defeats, not human, but demonic foes. The Epistle to the Hebrews lets us see that it was not very long before the relevance of the traditional conception of the Priest as a type of the "Messiah" became evident. Jesus was the High Priest after the order of Melchizedek" -- the High Priest who fulfilled and therefore abolished the whole sacrificial cult when he offered his own blood as a sacrifice in the heavenly sanctuary. Hints of this view are to be found also in Paul. And perhaps even earlier than the relevance of this priestly conception was observed, the possibility of interpreting the "Suffering Servant" passage in Isaiah 53 as a Messianic prophecy had been discerned: "He was led as a lamb to the slaughter. . . . As the sheep before her shearers is dumb, he opened not his mouth. . . . He was bruised for our iniquity. . . .The chastisement of our peace was upon him and by his stripes are we healed" (Is. 53:7, 5).

It is interesting to note in this connection -- although this is not the place for an adequate discussion -- that little use is made of the category of the Prophet in the interpretation of Jesus’ Messianic role. One would have supposed that the prominence of teaching and preaching in Jesus career would have made that category seem the most obvious and natural of all. Yet it is used hardly at all. (The only clear case seems to be Acts 3:22 ff.) To be sure, in the earliest tradition Jesus is sometimes called a prophet, but the term is apparently used in its ordinary sense and is soon displaced by messianically significant terms. Indeed, the fact that Jesus was actually called a prophet makes even more remarkable the fact that he is rarely in the New Testament identified with the Prophet. The explanation of this omission is probably the fact that John the Baptist had been interpreted by his disciples as a "Messiah" of that type and had become so firmly established in the Prophet’s role that the early Christians (at any rate, before the Fourth Gospel) made no effort to dislodge him from that position. They gave their own interpretation to the role, however. The Prophet, according to the Christians, was not the Messiah, but the herald of the Messiah. The defense of this view required some alteration of the text of Malachi, but that was easily managed: "Behold, I will send my messenger; he shall prepare the way before me," becomes under their hand, "Behold I send my messenger before thy face; he shall prepare thy way." What was originally a reference to God’s own coming becomes a reference to the Messiah’s. With the exception of this one category, however, every form of messianic expectation was applied to Jesus, and even this one, that of the Prophet, already preempted for John, was turned to good account in Christian apologetics: the Prophet had indeed come, but his purpose was to announce the coming of Jesus, the real Messiah, and to prepare his way.

All of these terms, though involving the recognition of the supreme importance of Jesus, are concerned more with his role and function than with his nature. Or, to speak more accurately, the unique nature of Jesus is thought of as consisting in God’s unique action in him, not in some unique essence. The lines cannot be sharply drawn, however: one could not believe that God had accomplished so much in and through Jesus and had exalted him to so supreme a status without soon asking, "What then was the essential nature of this Jesus that he can have become the agent of God’s redemptive purpose?" Even the earliest parts of the New Testament are not free from interest in this question, and by the time we reach some of the later books this interest has become very important.

As early as Paul the doctrine of Jesus’ pre-existence was prevalent, and there is some evidence in his letters that he identified the Pre-existent Christ with the hypostatized Logos or Wisdom of God, who according to certain Hellenistic Jewish teachers, functioned as God’s agent and mediator in creating and sustaining the world. Whether Paul exemplifies this development is subject to question, but there can be no doubt that before the New Testament period ends, such an understanding of Jesus is well established. It appears clearly enough in Hebrews and is quite explicit and unmistakable in the Fourth Gospel: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. . . . And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten son of the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1: 1 ff.).

Thus the revelation in Christ, at first received as an act of God in and through an event of which Jesus was the heart and center, tends more and more to be interpreted as God himself become a man. The Christological question, which was originally a question about the eschatological and soteriological significance of an event, has become a question about the metaphysical nature of a person. This process reaches its culmination in the fourth and fifth centuries, when the attention of theologians was focused almost entirely upon the question of the nature of the person. Was he co-eternal with the Father and of the same substance? Or was he only of "like substance" and "was there a time when the Son was not"? Just how were the human and the divine elements in his personality related to each other? Did Christ have two natures? Such questions threatened for a while to divide the church. For the great majority of Christians they were answered satisfactorily at Nicaea and Chalcedon in the adoption of the doctrine of the Trinity with its assertion of Christ’s co-eternity and co-substantiality with the Father and with the doctrine of his nature as being the perfect and indissoluble union of two quite distinct but complete and authentic natures; but a significant minority in the church, then and ever since, has found these answers either unintelligible or incredible.

In so far as these ancient answers have been divisive, they have been so, I should say, because many of those who have accepted them as well as all those who have rejected them have failed to see their true intention. These answers are true not because they are metaphysically accurate descriptions of the nature of a person -- how can we hope to define in this sense the nature of Christ when we have no idea how to define our own nature? -- but because they are authentic and effective representations of the nature of an event. To say this is to anticipate what will be said a little later about the Christian "story," but the point is of the greatest importance at this stage of our discussion. These ancient answers, I repeat, are authentic symbols of God’s uniquely and supremely revelatory act in Christ. They are thus true symbols of the meaning of Christ in the life and faith of the church; and, because they are the symbols historically developed to express that meaning, they can never be replaced. If Christians are ever to be united creedally, it will be upon the basis of these ancient creeds. But that can happen only if these creeds are recognized to be the symbols of God’s revealing and saving action, not metaphysically accurate descriptions of the nature of his agent. Christ is "of one substance with the Father"; but the utmost, and inmost, it is given us to know of God’s "substance" is that he is love -- as such he is revealed in Christ -- and love is not a metaphysical essence but personal moral will and action.

To see this is to see that the emphasis we are placing throughout this discussion upon event is not a disparagement of the importance of the person of Christ. (May God forbid!) What we are trying to say is that his supreme importance is best seen when he is viewed as the living creative center of the supremely important event of human history, and also that the "nature" of Christ is most truly known under that same category: God’s action is the divine nature of Christ. I would not dare say how far Norman Pittenger would go in supporting the position of this book, but with his definition of the "divinity" of Christ as contained in the following sentence, I would completely and wholeheartedly agree: "Jesus, is then, truly human; he is truly divine. The divine in him is God at work in and through him, the act of God which he is, appearing in the world of men as a man, and performing that supreme function which as Savior and Source of new strength, he has actually performed." (Christ and Christian Faith (New York: Round Table Press, 1941), p. 66. Quoted by permission of the publisher.) The act of God which he is -- God has drawn near in Christ; he has visited and redeemed his people. This is the only essential, as it is the ultimately unifying, Christian confession.

So far we have done little more than point to the event in which the spiritual community to which we belong had its beginning and through which the revelation of God, which we have received, was made. We must now attempt to define that event more carefully. We have several times identified it, quite easily and accurately, as the event of which the career of Jesus was the center. But what are its limits? What can properly be regarded as included within it?

One does not need to be more than a casual student of history to know how difficult it is to set limits to any historical event. One finds, indeed, that absolute limits cannot be set short of the limits of history itself. Historical events are not mere isolated occurrences, and history is not a mere aggregation of such occurrences. History is an organic whole, and the events which make it up participate in one another. In the final analysis no event can be altogether excluded from every other event. If then we ask, "When did the event which we are considering begin and when did it end?" the only possible absolute answer must be, "It began when history itself began and it will end only when history itself shall end."

But granted the impossibility of setting absolute limits to this event or of regarding any part of history as being entirely irrelevant to it, degrees of relevance can surely be discerned. The event which bears the name of Jesus Christ is more clearly and more closely related to some parts of history than to other parts. As any event must, it belongs not only to history as a whole, but also in a special sense to its own particular stream. This stream began (in the restricted sense in which any segment of history may be said to "begin") when the Hebrew people first became a self-conscious community with Yahweh as its God; and now for nearly twenty centuries it has been identified as the Christian community and, in the broader sense, as the culture of Christendom.

Of this particular movement of history Jesus Christ is the center. By such a statement we do not mean, of course, that the same span of time follows as precedes that event -- this is only very approximately true and will become increasingly less true as the centuries pass. Nor do I intend merely to refer to the temporal fact that Christ’s appearing marks the moment when Christianity emerged out of Judaism, Jesus Christ is the center in a more profound and thoroughgoing sense. He is the center of meaning in the entire movement. Christian history is not something merely added to Hebrew-Jewish history; it represents an appropriation and transfiguration of that history. New meanings are found in ancient happenings and thus the ancient happenings are themselves transformed. As Jesus is described as talking with Moses and Elijah on the mount of transfiguration, so early Christianity talked with Judaism, teaching as well as learning. In Christ’s presence, Moses and Elijah were also transfigured. The Hebrew. Jewish element within the Hebrew-Jewish-Christian stream is something profoundly different from Hebrew-Jewish culture simply as such. Whether this difference is regarded as representing a distortion of the reality or as being a disclosure of its true meaning will depend upon one’s point of view. There can be no question about what will be the Christian’s judgment. A member of the Christian community will, simply in virtue of that fact, see it as disclosure.

But the event in which this disclosure of the meaning of Judaism is made -- this historical "mount of transfiguration" -- is the same event in which, as we saw on the meaning of the life of the Christian church and of our own life within it is also revealed. Thus, this event, Jesus Christ, not only belongs in a peculiarly intimate and important sense to the stream of history which is the bearer of our spiritual life but it also imparts to that stream its distinctive character. So true is this that the whole spiritual movement of Hebrew-Jewish-Christian culture might in a certain perspective be thought of as a single event and might appropriately be called by his name. The event would thus be said to have begun when Israel began and to include the whole history of the church down to this moment,

But this event has in turn a center, And it is with this center that we are particularly concerned. Acknowledging that no absolute limits can be set to this central moment, that it cannot be precisely bounded on any side, must we not, even so, recognize that when we use the term Jesus Christ we are usually thinking primarily not of an extended movement in history, but of something that happened in Palestine within a specific and rather limited period nearly twenty centuries ago? It is in that sense that the term Is, for the most part, used in this discussion.

As we seek to define this "something that happened," we must be on our guard lest we do so too narrowly. There are limits beyond which the procedure of seeking a center within a center must not be pressed. The innermost central event cannot be identified, for example, with the birth of Jesus, or with his death, or with his resurrection. It cannot be identified with the personality of the human Jesus or with the appearance of the so-called Christ-faith. None of these elements is the center around which the total Christian event has occurred; rather, they are integral and interdependent parts of that center. We do not identify the central event, Jesus Christ, when we separate off one or another of these elements; on the contrary, we destroy the integrity and reality of the event. On this point we shall want to speak later at greater length. At the moment we are concerned only to urge that the central historical event in and through which the Christian revelation occurred, is itself a complex of events -- a cluster or closely knit series -- and that to reduce it to absolute simplicity is to destroy it.

The various elements can be identified in different ways; but I should say that this central event must be thought of as including, whatever words may be used in designating them, the personality, life and teaching of Jesus, the response of loyalty he awakened, his death, his resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the faith with which the Spirit was received, the creation of the community. It may be possible to add to these factors, but I would urge that we cannot reduce them further. Not a single one of them can be dispensed with. They form together an indivisible historical moment. And it is in and through this moment as a whole that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ made himself known.

In thus analyzing the elements in this moment, as well as in describing as I have its inner significance, I do not believe I am doing more than to draw out some of the implications of the common Christian experience and conviction which we considered in an earlier chapter. However divergent our views may be on other matters, I venture to affirm that we all agree in recognizing the several elements I have indicated as being present in the event we call by Christ’s name as well as in ascribing to this event, as one and indissoluble, a supreme revelatory significance.

This double fact of the complexity of the event, on the one hand, and its integrity and indissolubility, on the other, is of such major importance for the argument of this book that it may be well to examine the fact itself somewhat more thoroughly before we go on to consider several of its implications and bearings.

I have ventured to sum up the constituent elements in the central and crucial event -- and because of their importance for our discussion it may not be amiss to name them again -- by referring to the personality, the life and teaching of Jesus, the response of loyalty he awakened, his death, his resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the faith with which the Spirit was received, the creation of the community. It was urged that though it might be possible to add to these factors, we could not reduce them. This restriction applies, of course, to the "substance" of these factors, not to their number or arrangement. Seven or eight items appear in the analysis just proposed, but obviously they could be so grouped and conceived as to be either fewer or more. One might think, for example, of the life and death of the man Jesus as a single factor, rather than two; or of the deepening response of his disciples to the total event -- earthly life and resurrection -- as one factor instead of two. Likewise the resurrection and the coming of the Spirit and perhaps also the creation of the community might be conceived of as a single element. But the possibility of such modifications in the form which analysis may take does not alter the fact of the complexity of the event we are considering or allow for the exclusion in substance of any of the factors I have mentioned.

It is not difficult to establish the indispensability of these several factors, if by "indispensability" is meant their actual presence and actual importance within the event, and not some theoretical or logical necessity. Agreement on such a necessity would be far to seek, and of dubious importance even if found. But our purpose all along has been to remind ourselves of the facts of our religious life, to describe the meaning Christ actually has for us; not to develop a logically consistent Christology. And when I speak of the essential character of these elements in the event, I mean simply that we actually find them there and that, so far as we can see, the event would have been altogether different if any one of them had been missing.

Let us briefly notice the several elements I have mentioned. To begin with the first and most obvious: When we speak of Christ, we certainly have in mind the man whose personality and the general character of whose life emerge clearly enough in the Gospels, the man who was remembered as speaking such words as are found in the Sermon on the Mount and in the fifteenth chapter of Luke and, more important, as being himself the person who could have spoken them. Attempts have often been made to show that this man never lived, that he is entirely the product of early Christian imagination, but these attempts have at no time succeeded in convincing more than a few, and it is inconceivable that they would ever convince the Christian, for the event whose historicity is to him more than the conclusion of an argument but is witnessed to by his own being as a Christian -- this event includes the appearance in history of this man.

But, someone says, suppose that tomorrow or next day indisputable historical evidence should come to light showing that this appearance did not really take place? The only possible answer a Christian can make to such a supposition is to say, "Such evidence will not come to light." The community bears in its heart a memory of Jesus and it is inconceivable that it should either modify radically the character of that memory or deny its validity. Theoretically, on the basis of sufficient evidence, it might do so; but the evidence would actually never be sufficient. This does not mean, as we shall see in the next two chapters, that we can regard every item in the Gospels as belonging to this authentic and abiding memory. It does not mean that we can feel absolute confidence in the original authenticity of any separate word or act of Jesus merely as such. It does mean that he was himself remembered as being the kind of person he was, that this memory has come down to us in the Christian community, both in the New Testament and as a "living voice," and that as members of that community we have entered into this memory. To be a Christian is to remember Jesus; and one can hardly remember Jesus and at the same time entertain a serious doubt of his existence.

But when we speak of Christ and thus remember Jesus, we think not only of his life but also, and in a special way, of his death. He not only lived, and lived as he did; he also died, and died as he did. This death, although in one sense simply an element in the life of Jesus, has always been the object of special attention, both in theology and devotion, and undoubtedly has a place of special significance in the event to which we find ourselves looking back in memory and faith. To this fact the symbol of the cross bears witness. Although we shall be returning to this theme again, we shall not attempt, either now or later, any adequate explanation of why this should be true. The simplest explanation, and certainly part of the answer, is that it was actually in connection with his death that the whole concrete meaning of Jesus’ life came home to his disciples with greatest force, poignancy and truth. The cross was the center of their memory of Jesus, and since our memory of him is theirs conveyed to us, it is the center of ours too.

But the cross is central in a more objective sense. It is one pole in the most decisive phase in the development of the event, the other pole being, of course, the resurrection. The first community was convinced that he who had died lived again. They were convinced of this not primarily because some of them had had visual experiences of him, but because the Spirit had come upon them. We too are convinced that he who died lives still, and in our case too this conviction is not the consequence of visual experiences reported in the Gospels and Epistles, but of the presence of the Spirit in the community. This Spirit authenticates itself both as a divine Spirit -- it comes from God -- and also as the Spirit of Christ. No argument can establish the fact that the Spirit is from God or that it is the Spirit of Christ or even that the Spirit exists at all. But one who belongs to the community knows the Spirit and knows whence the Spirit comes and knows also who the Spirit is. The Spirit comes from God and is the abiding presence of Christ. The one remembered is still known. The one known as the divine center of the church’s life is the very one who is also remembered. The Spirit is the Lord; "the Lord is the Spirit." The Christian life is life not only in Christ but also with Christ. The one who lived and died -- even he! -- lives still; and it is possible still both to walk with him in the way and to know him in the breaking of bread. This is the meaning of the resurrection in any sense that matters; and is it to be doubted that the resurrection thus defined belongs essentially to the event we are discussing? Thus defined, it is not a mere belief, but a part of the empirical ground in the life of the community upon which sound belief of whatever kind must rest.

The other elements in our analysis have been presupposed in all that has been said: namely, the response of the first disciples to Jesus and to all that happened in connection with him and the creation of the church by the coming of the Spirit. We cannot speak of any historical event without having in mind the social context in which the event occurred. Events take place among and within persons and to "objectify" them completely is to destroy them. When we spoke of the life and death of Jesus, we spoke of them as remembered, and when we spoke of the resurrection, we spoke of it as occurring within the experience of the first disciples. An objective element is present in each case: Jesus is not a mere memory -- in that case he would not be a memory. The resurrection is not a mere faith -- in that case it would not be a faith. Both memory and faith point beyond themselves to the more objective occasions which gave rise to them. Still, we know Jesus the man of Galilee only as he was, and is, remembered; and we know Christ the Spirit only as he was, and is, still known. The actual event includes both objective and subjective elements -- and the one kind of element is as real and essential as the other.

In the same way the creation of the church is an element in the event, for the church is in a true sense its human side. The church is the community which came into being with the event and in which the event in its totality occurred. It is the community of loyalty, devoted memory, and faith, which answer to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ; and therefore it is the community in which alone the life, death, and resurrection of Christ as a revelatory event took place. To some of us such a statement may appear at first to represent too "high" a doctrine of the church; but actually the significance of the church can hardly be defined in terms too exalted since the revelation of God in Christ took place only within it and has been conveyed to us only there. Where we are likely to go astray is not in formulating too high a doctrine of the significance of the church but in identifying the church too readily or exclusively with some existing group or institution. The church, as we have been using the term, is nothing less than one side of the event itself. This is certainly part of our meaning when we speak of it as the body of Christ.

Not one of these elements in the event stands alone. They all belong together and to one another and participate in one whole. It is through this whole, and through nothing less than this whole, that the revealing act of God occurred.

A brief recapitulation of what has been attempted so far in this discussion may be in order at this point. First, it was affirmed as a simple fact about us that we are dependent upon the revelation of God in Christ for what is most precious in the knowledge of God which has been given us. We then considered what is meant by the word "Christ" and concluded that the word, as we use it, designates most obviously a person, but, equally truly, an event and a community. Of these three categories I sought to show that event has a certain primacy and that it is, on the whole, the most appropriate and useful category for the understanding of the revelation, involving also, as it does, the other two. We then sought to define what is meant by the event. It was recognized that it has no absolute outer limits except those of history itself, but that it belongs in a special sense to the Hebrew-Jewish-Christian stream, and that it is, more particularly, the central and decisive moment in that historical movement. This moment is not a single happening, but a cluster of inseparable and mutually interdependent elements, which might be summed up in the words, "Jesus and all that happened in connection with him." It was through this event as a whole, rather than through anything outside of it or any element or combination of elements within it, that the revelation which is the source of what is most distinctive and precious in our own spiritual life took place.

The recognition that it was through an event, and through that event as a whole, that God made Himself known in the characteristic way in which He is known within the Christian community -- this recognition has certain practical consequences which I propose that we now consider. There are at least three of these: (1) the recognition of this fact frees us from excessive preoccupation with the insoluble and divisive problem of the "nature" of Jesus; (2) it frees us from a certain immoderate anxiety about the "historicity" of the Gospels; and (3) it places the miracles of the New Testament in true perspective. The following three chapters will be concerned with these three bearings of the major theme.

The statement has just been made that distinctively Christian theology begins with the affirmation of the revelation of God in Christ, and that this affirmation is a necessary corollary of the acknowledgment of the reality and distinctiveness of the Christian life itself. I have insisted, therefore, that this first step toward an ecumenical theology all Christians can take together and that there is a sense in which we do in fact take it together, whether we recognize that we do or not.

At the risk of seeming repetitious I would urge again that when we speak of a common acceptance of this revelation, we are not referring to the "revelation" of any intellectual belief or any system of such beliefs: obviously, we would not agree that any such "revelation" has taken place. We are using the term in its true sense, to mean the disclosure of an objective personal reality. God has made himself known in Christ. At any rate, we know him so; and to deny the reality of this revelation would be to deny the validity of what knowledge of God has been vouchsafed to us. It should also be pointed out that such a statement does not shut out the possibility of other revelations, although it is hard to see how the particular reality, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, could be known elsewhere or otherwise than in and through Christ. But the common and all-important affirmation with which we start is not a dogmatic assertion that God has revealed himself only in Jesus Christ, but the glad confession that he has revealed himself there to us.

But what is Jesus Christ? What do we mean when we speak of revelation "in" or "through" Christ? Here is the question which, we have seen, we cannot help asking but which is likely to prove so divisive. It may be both rash and hopeless for me to attempt a unifying answer to this question. But such an answer is so urgently needed that discussion among Christians of the lines it should take is surely always appropriate, and any sincere attempt, however feeble, to clarify and formulate the meaning of Christ may prove to have some value. To such an attempt these chapters are devoted.

At the outset, it should be observed that a valid answer to the Christological question must, on the one hand, give full weight to the empirical fact of the revelation and, on the other, must avoid including as an essential element of itself anything not at least latent or implicit in that empirical fact. The question of the meaning of Jesus Christ has been divisive because one or the other of these criteria has so often not been present. Either we have refused or for some other reason failed frankly and joyously to avow the fact that the God of all nature and history has made himself known to us in Christ, or else we have drawn unwarranted inferences from this fact or defined its meaning in ways not determined by the fact itself, at the same time insisting that all others should do the same. Both of these faults -- shall we call them the characteristic faults of the liberal and the conservative? -- must, if possible, be avoided. A true Christology will begin with a full recognition of the fact of the revelation in Christ and will not range beyond the empirical meaning of that fact. It must be added, however, that such a Christology will not fail to take into account the full scope of that empirical meaning. A doctrine of Christ which disregards or fails to do justice to important elements in the common Christian experience of Christ -- I am excluding anything merely individual or esoteric -- will be as inadequate as the doctrine which, at important points, bears no direct or necessary relation to this experience. Here, then, is the kind of Christology at which we should aim and toward which I hope we may move in these pages.

We may well begin by seeking to define more carefully just what is the empirical reality which must be the ground -- and the only ground -- of an adequate Christology. The formal designation can be made easily enough: When we refer to "Jesus Christ," we are referring to the historical reality about which we were thinking in the preceding chapter -- the reality from which the Christian community took its beginning and by which the continuing character of that community has been determined, the reality in and through which the revelation of God, known within the church, took place.

But when we proceed from mere designation to some attempt at description, we face no easy task, as the history of Christological discussion will plainly show. This reality, just because it is a concrete reality, is infinitely rich and complex, and no simple or single category will suffice for an adequate description of it. Indeed, if the Christian community’s experience of Jesus Christ should be examined with this question of description and definition in mind, we should discover, I believe, that the reality with which we are concerned appears under no fewer than three aspects: (1) as the event or closely knit series of events in and through which God made himself known; (2) as the person who was the center of that event or complex of events; and (3) as the community which both came into existence with the event and provided the locus of it.

The New Testament is much more concerned with pointing to Christ than with defining him, but it would not be hard to show that he appears there also under these same three aspects. Sometimes the word "Christ" means primarily the event, sometimes primarily the person, and sometimes primarily the community. I say "primarily" in each case because it would be a mistake to suppose that any one of these three categories is ever entirely absent when Christ is referred to. The empirical reality, Jesus Christ, always involves all three; but one or another category may be dominant at a given moment or in a given context. (I am aware of that philosophical view in which "person" is entirely subsumed under the category of "event" and in which therefore the distinction I am proposing between the two categories is rendered impossible: the person is an event and nothing more, as indeed is everything else. Although in general this dynamic way of thinking about the nature of reality appeals to me as sound and is congenial to the argument of this book, nevertheless I confess that I do not find it possible to think of personality as being exhaustively definable in such terms. But this philosophical question [which I lack technical competence to handle] is really irrelevant to the point I am trying to make. I am using the word "person" in its ordinary sense to designate an individual possessed of self-consciousness and will [whatever be the essential nature of personality]. and "event" in its usual meaning of historical occurrence.)

A few illustrations will perhaps be useful. When Paul says, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20), or "My desire is to depart and be with Christ" (Phil. 1:23) -- in these statements he is clearly speaking primarily of a person. This person is not merely an historical person, in the sense of being someone remembered; he is also both known as a spiritual presence in intimate intercourse and believed to reside in Heaven, where the believer will eventually see him face to face. But under these several aspects or through these several phases, a person clearly appears, and the word Christ in these passages, and in scores of others, unmistakably refers to this person.

But when Paul writes, "In Christ God was reconciling the world unto himself" (II Cor. 5:19), he is thinking primarily not of the person simply as such, but of the event which happened around and in connection with that person. He is thinking of the whole historical occurrence, or cluster of occurrences, with which and out of which the church came into existence. This way of speaking is not altogether strange to us in other connections. In somewhat the same way we may speak of Washington when we really have in mind the American Revolution and the beginning of the republic. This analogy must not be pressed, for the person Jesus was far more decisively and pervasively present in the event with which the Christian movement began than was Washington as a person in the establishment of the American nation; besides, there is nothing corresponding to the resurrection in the latter. The same thing could be said of any other similar analogy. Still, the reference may serve to illustrate the way in which a personal name can come to stand for an event. The more significant the person as a factor in the event, the more likely such an identification is. Small wonder, then, that when Paul wishes to refer to the event in and through which the reconciling act of God has occurred, he should call the event or cluster of events by Christ’s name, since Christ was in so important a sense the determinative center of it. His great statement, just quoted, is not an answer to the question, "Who was Jesus?" but to the question, "What was God doing in and through the event of which Jesus was the center?" He answers, "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself."

But when the same Apostle asserts, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive" (I Cor. 15:22), he is making a somewhat different use again of the name. "Christ" here stands for the new order of relationships between men and God and among men, the new and divine community, which is preeminently heavenly and eschatological but which in a real though partial sense has come into historical existence with the event and in which the believer is already incorporated. As natural men, Paul is saying, we die; as members of the new community we share proleptically in the life of the world to come, the new and divine order which is indeed already breaking in upon us. An even clearer example of this use of the name is found in Paul’s statement: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28). We are "in Christ" in the sense that we are members of his body.

It is interesting to note in passing that the proposed analysis of the meaning of the term "Christ" provides a possible clue to the meaning of the phrase "in Christ," found in all three of the passages just quoted and characteristically (though by no means exclusively) Pauline. Allowing for the fact that the Greek preposition e n was used very widely and loosely in the New Testament period, we may still recognize a certain strangeness in its use in connection with the name of a person. But if this name often also signifies the event and the community, this strangeness disappears. If one will examine the occurrences of e n C r i s t y in the New Testament, one will find that they divide rather evenly as between those which are used in allusions to God’s action (when the meaning "event" would be paramount) and those which are found in references to the situation of the believer (when the conception of community, the body of Christ, is dominant). To cite a few additional examples, this time chosen almost at random from the early chapters of Ephesians: when the readers of that letter are addressed as "the faithful in Christ Jesus" (1:1), the idea of the new supernatural community is surely most immediately in the writer’s mind; but in such a passage as "That you may know . . . what is the abundant greatness of his power toward us who believe according to the working of his mighty power which he wrought in Christ" (1 :18 f.), the conception of event is just as clearly dominant. When the same writer says, "Now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off are brought near by the blood of Christ" (2: 13), one cannot tell whether he has event or community primarily in mind. If he is thinking principally of the new situation of the believer, the emphasis is upon the community. But if he is thinking more particularly of the means God has used to bring this new situation to pass, then event is the more important category for the understanding of his thought.

The assertions of the several passages of Scripture we have examined may or may not be altogether acceptable to us. Certainly we could not be expected to adopt them as our own without considerably more elaboration and clarification of their meaning than the last few paragraphs have attempted. But at the moment we are concerned, not with the truth of statements, but with the significance of terms. My only point is that in the New Testament the meaning of "Jesus Christ" involves, in varying degrees of relevance, the three categories, event, person and community. The same thing is true, I have ventured to say, of the actual empirical meaning of Christ for you and me.

The importance of these three aspects of this meaning, as well as their intimate interconnectedness, appears the more clearly when we ask which of them is most significant for the formulation of the doctrine of Christ. Granted that all of them are present and are essential, which has preeminence? A good case could be made for each of the three. The person is the center of the event and also of the community -- the event occurs around him and the community is formed around him. But the community is both the locus of the event and the place where alone the person is remembered and still known. But just as inclusive, at the very least, is the event in which the person played his decisive part and out of which the community emerged. The truth is that these three are one -- essential aspects of the same reality -- and we cannot think of Jesus Christ without employing, implicitly if not consciously, these three categories.

Nevertheless, I do not believe one can reflect long on this reality without recognizing that the category of the event has, for purposes of theological definition, a certain primacy. I am convinced not only that this is true, but also that our attempts at stating an acceptable doctrine of Christ have often failed largely because we have lost sight of this primacy. Concerning this failure I intend to speak at some length later; just now let me try to state the grounds for regarding the reality Jesus Christ as being under its primary aspect an event.

The real issue here is between the event and the person, not between the event and the community. For all of its importance, no one, I believe, would deny on reflection that the church has, as compared with both person and event, a secondary character. To be sure, it was only in the community that the meaning of the event was realized and thus it was only there that the event in the full sense occurred, but, even so, it would obviously be truer (or at least less false) to say that the event produced the church than that the church produced the event, although the Christian would prefer to say that God created both. The meaning of Jesus Christ first came to realization in the Christian community and has been conveyed to us through that community, but no one would claim that it originated there. Back of the church, even though also present in and with it, stand the person and the event.

But which of these categories is the more accurate and adequate? Is it more exactly true to say that the church was formed by a person or that it sprang from an event? Both of these statements are so obviously true as to suggest a doubt that the distinction we are discussing can really be drawn: The person was the event; the event was the person. There is more than a merely rough truth in such an identification, as has been said; one reality is being designated under both terms. But, for all that, there is a difference between these two ways of considering that reality. Both ways are appropriate and indispensable. But one of the major purposes of these chapters is to urge that when we are seeking to define the meaning of the revelation of God in Christ, event is the more appropriate and adequate category. Several reasons for this view may be indicated.

First, it would not be difficult to show that this category is the more inclusive. The person may be the dominant, altogether decisive, factor in the event -- in this case, he obviously is -- but the event contains more than the person. It contains, for example, the historical context in which the person lived his life. It contains the response which others made to him, the way in which they received him, the social consequences of his life. It contains everything remembered which happened to the person or in connection with him and the meanings and values which were found in those happenings.

But just because event is thus inclusive, it is only through the event that one can gain any true impression of the person. The person is reflected in the event as in a mirror (or rather a whole circle of mirrors), and facets of his reality can be seen only there. Persons of history are known only as participants in events. They cannot be known otherwise except as pale abstractions and therefore not as persons at all. To see a person in his full concreteness and in his true character is to see him in and through the events of which he is a part. To speak of the person as being thus, in a sense, less than the total event which happens around him, is not to disparage the person. The greatness of any individual is the greatness of the event of which his life is the center. This is pre-eminently and, because of the resurrection, in a special sense true of Jesus. Still another reason for insisting upon the primacy of the event as the category for interpreting Jesus Christ is that it is par excellence the historical category, and the reality we are seeking to interpret is essentially an historical reality. We began this discussion by reflecting upon the origins of our own religious life and upon the origins of the church. In both cases we found ourselves returning to something that happened twenty centuries ago. To something that happened -- we attempted at the time to go no further in describing it. But to say even so much is to indicate that what we are talking about is primarily an event. For revelation, as we have seen, is an act of God making himself known. The revelation in Christ, in any sense in which either our experience or really primitive Christian doctrine confirms it, is not most truly represented by the statement that Jesus Christ was God, as certain types of later Christian orthodoxy have tried to say it, nor yet by the modern liberal view that Jesus was a picture of God, showing us "what God is like." The revelation is best represented by the statement that Jesus Christ was an act of God -- or, if one prefers, that in him took place the revealing act of God. But if revelation is an act, the medium of revelation is an event.

There can be no doubt that the most primitive church understood it so. One cannot read the New Testament without realizing that it was produced by a community standing in the glow of a supremely significant event. Before there was much speculation on the "nature" of the person and long before any dogmatic statements about that nature were attempted, the members of the community knew that they stood at the great climacteric moment of all history, that in and through the things which had happened among them and of which they were witnesses, God had visited and redeemed his people.