Horace Bushnell · 10 of 21

Chapter IV. How He Becomes So Great a Power. · Part 2

In this manner Jesus goes to his cross; and the manner of his trial and death, though supported with a His death takes away all confidence. transcendent dignity on his part, that makes him even the chief figure in the scene, are yet so thoroughly contemptuous and ignominious, that the poor disciples are obliged to confess to themselves, if not to others, that their much loved Messiah is now stamped as another exploded pretender! A great reaction begins however, to be visible in the minds of the multitude. As the Roman governor himself, before whom he was dragged to a mock trial for sedition, was quite shaken out of self-possession, by the dignity of his manner under the questioning—quailing visibly in the sense of a mysterious something in the man, justifying, equivocating, consenting, condemning, giving him up to his accusers, and washing his hands to be clear of the innocent blood—so in the death-scene of the cross, slave’s death though it be, in the outward ignominy of the form, the multitude grow serious, and drop out their jeers in awe of his felt majesty, and finally go home, at another swing of oscillation, smiting their breasts in dumb confession of their murderous crime. They had expected nothing of him, and, for just that reason, they are the more easily impressed by the strange power in him—under such ignominy, dying in such majesty. Not so with his disciples. They had expected every thing of him, and now that he is dead, every expectation is blasted. Even their profound respect, unwilling as they are to shake it off, and tenderly as they would fain cling to it still, is yet a really blasted confidence, now that he is dead under such ignominy. The two senators, Nicodemus and Joseph, come with their spices, revealing what impressions they have felt of his wonderful character, and daring now to show their respect just because he is dead. Finally, on the third day morning, it is rumored among the disciples that he is risen, but their soul is under such a weight of stupor that they can not believe it. And two of them we find trudging back homeward to Galilee, sad, and heavy-hearted, and weeping, as it were, in doleful refrain —“We thought it had been he that should have redeemed Israel!”

Where now is the power? We have been exploring a large field, hunting down along the whole course of Christ’s life, expecting, looking to see, The power is not yet. the great name rolled up into volume and majesty, but that any thing we have found should have power to new-create the moral sentiments and affinities of mankind, we can hardly believe. We have seen, between the infancy and the death, a great many strange things, and a great many lovely. Coruscations of glory have been shooting out, all along the remarkable history. But there have been severities, and repellences, and discouraging tokens, blended so continually with the story, and the end of it is so dark, if not weak, that we get no such densely compacted unity of impression, as belongs to a great moral power. We are put in a maze, or even a thrilling kind of mystery, but that all-the-while cumulative power and weight, that great name which is to be a gospel of life in men’s hearts, does not appear. And yet there is, it may be, a certain latent heat in the facts we have noted, that is finally to become sensible heat, or blaze into splendor. No life becomes a power, till we somehow get the clue of it. A great many human characters are very much of a riddle, till they come on to the crisis of fact, where their objects, and ends, and secret aims, are all discovered, and where the seeming faults and contrarieties, that were mysterious, get their solution—all to be approved in the admirable and wise unity that could not sooner appear.

Christ only differs here from such mysterious, peculiar men, in the fact that he dies before the clue is The resurrection is the crisis of his glory. given. It is only the resurrection and ascension back into glory, that bring us out the true point of understanding. Now his most extraordinary nature and mission, for the first time, come distinctly into thought. Now, since he has gone up visibly into heaven, we begin to understand what he meant, when he said, that he came down from heaven. We conceive him as the incarnate Word, and begin to look upon his glory, as the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. In him now there may be more than we saw, a greater name and power; for the righteousness and love of God are in him, and it puts a new face on his whole life, that he is here to save the world.

We begin back now at the point of his infancy and we follow him onward again, going over all the points we have named, but with results how different! Every thing falls into place, and every step onward is the unfolding of power. The wonderful authority becomes more wonderful; in the right of a superior nature to give it sanction, the severity becomes majesty; knowing who the teacher is, what before was truth brightens into a glorious wisdom; the soft-looking innocence of the life becomes a kind of general transfiguration; the agony, that seemed to be wanting in magnanimity, becomes the love-groan, as it were, of his mysterious nature; the crushing defeat of the death breaks into immortal victory. Whatever, in a word, seemed weak, distracted, contrarious, takes on a look of progressive order, and falls into chime, as a necessary factor in his divinely great character. And so the merely human beginning grows into what is more and more visibly superhuman, dying into boundlessness and glory, as the sun when it sets in the sea. The rising and the ascension put us on the revision, and helped us to conceive who he was; but now he is so great that the rising does not raise him any more, and the ascension does not glorify him.

When we conceive the glorification of Christ, and the completion of his great name, as a revision or revised How revisions of character affect our impressions. impression, to which we are incited by his resurrection and ascension, we are not without many illustrations. I send these sheets to the press, when our great nation is dissolving, as it were, in its tears of mourning, for the great and true Father whom the assassins of law and liberty have sent on his way to the grave. What now do we see in him, but all that is wisest, and most faithful, and worthiest of his perilous magistracy. A halo rests upon his character, and we find no longer any thing to blame, scarcely any thing not to admire, in the measures and counsels of his gloriously upright, impartial, passionless, undiscourageable rule. But we did not always see him in that figure. When, already three full years of his time were gone by, many of us were doubtful whether most to blame or to praise, and many who most wanted to praise, had well nigh lost their confidence in him, and even retained their respect with difficulty. But the successes he deserved began, at last, to come, and the merit of his rule to appear. We only doubted still whether wholly to approve and praise. A certain grotesqueness and over-simplicity, in spite of all our favoring judgments, kept off still the just impression of his dignity, and suffered us to only half believe. But the tragic close of his life added a new element, and brought on a second revision; setting him in a character only the more sublime, because it is original and quite unmatched in history. The great name now of Abraham Lincoln emerges complete, a power of blessing on mankind, and a bond of homage in the feeling of his country forever. Shall we not see, in this humbler and yet striking example, how it is that moral power, even the moral power of Christ, emerges finally and is crowned, only when the necessary point of revision is reached? So it is that Christ begins to be known as “the wisdom of God and the power”—“the power of God unto salvation.” This, too, is what an apostle means when he prays, that he may “know him, and the power of his resurrection.” It is not the omnipotent power that raised him, which he longs to know, but the heart-power, the power of his great name and glory, which began to be discovered and conceived, when he rose from the dead. And the same exactly is true of another famous passage, if only we had time to make out the interpretation, where he says—“And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.”

If then so great a power has been obtained by Christ, in the matter of his life, we shall expect, of course, to see it in effects on human life and character The power is proved by its effects. that correspond. And we have not far to go before we find them. A few weeks after, when the disciples are waiting to be endued with power from on high, even for the promised Spirit, who should take the things of Christ and show them unto men, convincing thus of sin, of righteousness, and a judgment to come, a new scene is suddenly opened in their assembly, by the arrival of the promise; whereupon the preaching of the great, hitherto unknown, gospel is inaugurated as a power on the world. The cloud that was on Peter’s mind is now taken away; his understanding is opened; and suddenly grasping the true meaning of his Master’s life and death, as a gospel of salvation for men, he begins to preach it. He goes over the outline of his Lord’s miracles and death, turning his discourse principally on the matter of the resurrection, and proclaiming him boldly, as the ascended king of the world. “Therefore being by the right of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear.” And then he turns directly down upon the consciences of the assembly all the tremendous guilt of their crime in his crucifixion.—“Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye have crucified both Lord and Christ.”

The result was that thousands in the immense assembly, overwhelmed and utterly broken down, by the sense of their guilt, turned themselves, by faith, as the apostles exhorted, to the now ascended victim of their malice, for the remission of their sins. And how mightily are they changed! It is as if some irruption of heaven’s love had broken into them; as it verily has, in the person of the just now hated and murdered Nazarene. They appear to hardly know, as yet, what has befallen them. They are so happy in their dear, mysterious fellowship, that there are not hours enough in the day and the night for their enjoyment of it. The city converts sell their goods and possessions to feed the pilgrims on a longer stay, and they go on breaking bread, in open hospitality, from house to house, eating their meat with gladness, and praising God as they go.

This now is the power; first a convincing power, next a power of love begetting love —how great a power it is and is to be, we may perceive in these its first effects. By this power it was that the apostles and first Christians gained their rapid victories over the learning and philosophy, and finally the military empire of the heathen world. They went every where preaching Christ and his resurrection, testified every where the great name Jesus, saying—“there is none other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved.”

And this name is a greater power now than it was then, and has a greater hold of the world. It penetrates more and more visibly our sentiments, The power increases still. opinions, laws, sciences, inventions, modes of commerce, modes of society, advancing, as it were, by the slow measured step of centuries, to a complete dominion over the race. So the power is working and so it will till it reigns. Not that Christ grows better, but that he is more and more competently apprehended, as he becomes more widely incarnated among men, and obtains a fitter representation to thought, in the thoughts, and works of his people. If in some particular century the gospel seems to suffer a wave of retrocession, it is only gathering power for an other great advance. Bad power dies, right power never. Prophecy, or no prophecy, such a Christ of God could not come into the world, without a certainty coming in his train, that all the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever.

I can not better close this exposition, than by citing a single passage of Scripture, that contains and sums up Glorious affirmation of the power. all we have been trying to show, in the briefest and most pregnant testimony possible, every syllable of which deserves to be profoundly meditated by itself—“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus; who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and, being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross; wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name that is above every name; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

The historical exposition of the moral power of Christ, or of the process by which it is obtained, is now finished, and yet certain points of rational consequence remain to be suggested, which could not be crowded into the body of it, without creating an No dogmatic statement possible. appearance of distraction. The view of Christ’s mission, I have been trying to establish, excludes the possibility, it will be seen, of any dogmatic formula, in which it may be adequately stated. It is not a theorem, or form of thought, but a process, and the process includes all the facts of a life. It will also be seen how the apostle labors, in the passage just cited, even to condense an outline view of it into seven full verses of his epistle; in which also it is made sufficiently evident, that the Scriptures themselves do not know how to make up any formula of three or four lines, that will adequately express, in the manner of our theologians, the import of Christ’s reconciling work. That work, accurately speaking, consisted in exactly the whole life of Jesus; all that he said and did, and, to human impression, was, in the conditions through which he passed. No such life was ever written even of a man. Not even the gospels themselves are any thing more than brief outline records. And one of the writers distinctly intimates the impossibility of a complete narrative, because it would make the record too cumbersome to have any value—the world itself would scarcely contain the books. How then can any formula, or brief summation of words, be imagined to fitly represent the meaning of the life-work of Christ, when that meaning is exactly the power obtained by the life, and can be represented only by the facts, of which it is the character and expression.

Christ I just said is not a form of thought. He is no proposition. He is given, neither by nor to, logical The reality of Christ is what he expresses. definition. He is no quantitative matter, like a credit set in a book, or a punishment graduated by satisfaction. His reality is what he expresses, under laws of expression; the power, the great name, he thus obtains under forms of human conduct that make their address to reason, conviction, feeling, passion, sympathy, imagination, faith, and the receptivities generally of the moral nature. What rational person ever imagined that he could state, in a defined formula, the import of any great character; Moses, for example, Plato, Scipio, Washington. Hence the necessary poverty, and almost mockery, of all attempts to put the work of Christ in formula, or to dogmatize it in a proposition, or church article. The Iliad, or Paradise Lost could as well be formulized in that manner as his gospel. We can give the “Argument” of these, in so many headings for so many books; but the epic power will be wholly in the acts and incidents that fill the books, never in their “Argument.” So we can say of Christ’s work, and of the sublime art-mystery of his incarnate life, what is not absurd, what may even be of use—we do so when we call it God’s method of obtaining power over fallen character—still it must be left us to feel, that just nothing of the power, that is of the whole living truth, is in the account we have given. Nothing we can say of the power will appear to have much power in it; for nothing raises the true sense of that power, but just what he did, taken just as he did it. The most that can be hoped is, that, by what of dissertation we may indulge, the sense of his work and the facts by which his power is obtained, may be unlocked more easily.

In this manner, four points, in particular, may yet be made, in regard to the process and effect of his life, that will render the power of it still more intelligible, and so far more impressive.

1. That the kind of moral power obtained by Christ is different from any which had been obtained by men, more difficult, deeper, and holier. He No similar power among men. founds no school of philosophy, heads no revolution, fights no great battle, achieves no title to honor, such as the world’s great men have achieved. Men consciously feel, that a strong power is somehow gathering about his person, but will only know, by and by, what it is. It is the power, in great part, of sorrow, suffering, sacrifice, death, a paradox of ignominy and grandeur not easily solved. Honor, in the common sense of that term, can make nothing of it. Fame will not lift her airy trumpet, to publish it, and would only mock it if she did. If we call him a hero, as some are trying to do, then all other heroes appear to be scarcely more than mock heroes in the comparison.

There is no wrong or impropriety in calling Christ a hero, if we do not assume that, having found him in the class of heroes, we have thus accounted for his wonderful eminence, on the ground of his mere natural manhood. I believe that I have once or twice spoken, casually, of the heroic element in his life; and I In what sense Christ was a hero. have hesitated much, whether I should not present him more deliberately in this figure. The only reason why I should not is that, regarding him as the manifestation, or demonstration, of God, the honor I should claim for him might only seem to put him below the scale of divinity and not in it. And yet, in as far as he ranges in the scale, or under the conditions, of humanity, obtaining a name and a power under such conditions, it is even a gloriously divine token for him, that he so visibly, remarkably, immeasurably, transcends all known examples of heroism. Besides there is a very important matter to be gained by such a conception of his character. We conceive him in the travail of his suffering life and sacrifice, we magnify his tenderness and patience and submission to the cross, we call him the Lamb that is offered for our sin, and pressing wholly on this side of passivity, we are in no small danger of enfeebling the moral power he is obtaining by his life. Accordingly, to right the conception we get by such overdoing of his passive and submissive virtue, there is needed also some just reference to the energetic, and positive, and really grand heroism of his mission. For really there is nothing, in all the heroic characters, whether of history, or fiction, at all comparable to the sublime figure he maintains, in his very humble, or, as we might even say, dejected ministry.

He plainly does not think himself that he is in the passive key, even when he suffers most; but he calmly asserts the power he has to keep his life unharmed against all enemies—“No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again.” Nothing compels him to die, but the grandly heroic motive supplied by his love to his enemies. All true martyrs we conceive to be God’s heroes; but what martyr ever bore witness to the truth, whose death had not some reference to the original, transcendent martyrdom of the Son of God? Heroes throw their life upon their cause, by inspiration from it; he had meat and drink and home for his houseless body, in the work he had taken upon him, and knowing that he must die for his cause, he could say “how am I straitened till it be accomplished.” Heroes are men who go above all the low resentments; he could even pray the prayer of pity and apology for his enemies, when dying under their hands. Great souls are not flurried and disconcerted by the irruption of great dangers; behold the solid majesty of this man’s silence, this provincial man, this country mechanic, when so many fierce accusations, by so many fierce conspirators in high life, are hurled against him. Heroes that die, and bear themselves nobly in the terrible hour of their conflict, are commonly caught without much warning, and are fortified by the tremendous excitement of the hour; Christ was facing death for at least three whole years, and waiting for his time to come; yet never weakened, or swerved, by the doom that he knew to be on him, but comforting his great mind constantly in the hope that, when he should be lifted up, he would draw all men to him. The great causes of heroes are commonly under the eye, and are more or less computable in their time; but Christ, the poor rustic of Nazareth, undertakes a cause and kingdom that comprehend the world, and require a run of time outreaching all definite computation, and shows not half the misgivings of the great heroes of the world, who expect their triumph and perhaps their meed of fame, within a few short years.. There was never, we may safely say, any such instance of self-devotion among men, never so little of heat or excitement, never such firmness coupled with such tenderness and gentleness, never such oblivion of popularity, never such incapacity to be humbled by ignominy. So that if we speak of heroes, we are tempted either to say that he is no hero at all, or else the only hero. And here it is that the moral power we have seen him obtaining culminates. In this fact, the almost feminine passivity we are likely to figure as the total account of his character, reveals the mighty underwork and robust vigor of a really immortal confidence and tenacity. The moral power he obtains, in a character of such transcendent heroism corresponds. We make no true account of it, till we take it as the supernatural flowering on earth, of a glory that he had before the world was.

The example most nearly correspondent, among men is that of Socrates, and yet the superficial, almost flashy merit of his power, heroic as he certainly was, is about the most striking result of a just comparison. There had been different opinions about Socrates before, and many scholars even now do not hesitate Socrates the nearest human example. to speak lightly of his coarse manners, and the general lightness and rudeness of his character. Be the truth what it may, in regard to these matters, there was certainly a remarkable dignity, and even sublimity in his death. Arraigned and sentenced to death unjustly, for a mere political offense, he refused, as a philosopher and good citizen, to save his life by an escape that would make him a violator of the laws of his country; and the Athenian people had been sufficiently exercised in political matters to appreciate the merit of such a sacrifice. A great popular reaction immediately followed, that overwhelmed his accusers, and made his name, forever after, one of the great powers of the world. A merely casual reaction followed the death of Christ, in the same manner, but it came to no practical issue, just because the sacrifice he made of his life was too deep in its heroic meaning to be practically valued, and too profoundly accusatory to awaken sympathy. He died for no ends of patriotic devotion, or even of moral reformation, as regards the social wrongs and destructive vices of the world, but for the state of sin itself and the recovery of souls to God—just that kind of benefaction which only a very few of mankind, such as Plato, for example, and like meditative teachers here and there, had once thought of as a want, or could even begin to conceive. To such a kind of sacrifice the world itself was a dead receptivity, and it was to be the glory of his power, that he could open a receptivity where there was none; that he could stir the consciousness of lost men deeply enough to make the state of sin a dread reality, and the want of reconciliation to God the prime necessity of their being. And just here lies the wonder of his power; that he opens such a sense of the holy and of men’s relations to a holy God, as to make his own public, where there was none, and create the very homage by which he is to be received; raising nature up to ask the supernatural, and join herself to it, in a faith that goes above all of this world’s honors, homages, and applauses.

2. It is a very great point, as regards the kind of power, Christ is obtaining, that he humanizes God to God humanized to us. men. I have already spoken of the necessary distance and coldness of a mere attribute power, such as we ourselves generate, when trying to think God as the Absolute Being. The incarnate life and history of Jesus meet us here, at the point of our weakness. God is in Christ, consenting to obtain the power, by which he will regain us to him. self, under our own human conditions. He is in our plane, acting with us and for us, interpreted to our sympathies by what he does and is, in social relationship with us. His perfections meet us in our own measures, not in the impossible measures of infinity; and so he becomes a world-king in the world, and not above it and far away from it. We know him, in just the same way as we know one another. He becomes the great Head Character in human history, by living in it Himself—such a kind of power, as being once in it, can never be gotten out of it, any more than if it were a new diffusive element in the world’s atmosphere. God is no more a theosophy, or mere phosphorescence of our human intelligence; no more a theophany, like those casual appearances of the Jehovah Angel in the old dispensation—all which left him a God more separate, in a sense, than before, as any such unveiling by mere phantasm must—but a God-human or God-man, born into our race itself, and even into a place in our human tables of genealogy. And since we are so deep in the senses, he contrives to meet us there, that we may hear, see with our eyes, look upon, handle him with our hands. Nay, he comes directly into our bodies themselves, by the healing of his inward touch, and occupies a great part of his ministry in works that take hold of our sympathy, by means of our diseases. No greater advance on human sensibility, we may fairly say, could possibly be made, than is in fact made, in this wonderful chapter of humanization, that contains the teachings, healings, tender condescensions, and sufferings, of the divine man Jesus. He builds up anew, so to speak, and before our eyes, in the open facts of his ministry, the divine perfections themselves, and the moral power he obtains in doing it is just what it must be; a name that is above every name.

3. It is another great article of his power, that he is able to raise, at once, the sense of guilt and attract the confidence of the guilty. By his purity of life, by the sublime reach of his very simple doctrine, by his terrible warnings and reproofs, by his persistent coupling of It both wakens guilt and draws confidence. disease, in all his healings, with sin, by the sorrows and the suffering patience of his life, by the bitter ignominy of his death, followed by the Spirit coming after his resurrection, to show the things of his life to men in their true light of meaning—by all these piercing demonstrations he stirs the conviction of guilt, as never it was stirred before, and yet with no such consequences of revulsion from God, as belongs to the natural action of guilt. The feeling of guilt, under mere natural conviction, is a feeling of recoil. The instinctive language of it is—“I was afraid and hid myself.” It shoves the soul off from God and then it pictures God as being withdrawn from it. A certain chill is felt when he is thought of, and the soul shivers in cold dread of his purity. But the incarnate Saviour, taking his place with us in our bad level, after the manner just described, stops the natural recoil of our guilt, and marries even our self-condemnation to confidence. Great as our guilt is, Christ, we see, can be our sponsor for all the wrong and damage of it. As the guilt kept him not away from us, so it shall not keep us away from him. Nay as it even drew him after us, shall it not also draw us after him? True we have sinned, our sin is upon us, and not even his forgiveness can ever annihilate the fact of our sin; but if he has come over it all to be the righteousness of God upon us, may we not come away from it, and be the righteousness of God in him? And so when the tough and sturdy fact of our guilt would thrust us quite away from God, Christ so far reverses every thing with us by the wonderful power of his ministry, that our guilt is even made to be the argument that draws us, and, as it were, fastens our confidence. It would almost seem to be a miracle, and yet the result is only a simple incident of that great moral power, by which he is able to reverse every thing in the fallen condition of our sin. We come now—