And what was Paul’s commentary which lifted the bare facts up into the loftier region?  This—­as for the person, Jesus Christ ’declared to be the son of God with power’—­as for the fact of the death, ’died for our sins according to the Scriptures.’  Let in these two conceptions into the facts—­and they are the necessary explanation and presupposition of the facts—­the Incarnation and the Sacrifice, and then you get what Paul calls ‘my gospel,’ not because it was his invention, but because it was the trust committed to him.  That is the Gospel which alone answers to the facts which he deals with; and that is the Gospel which, God helping me, I have for forty years tried to preach.

We hear a great deal at present, or we did a few years ago, about this generation having recovered Jesus Christ, and about the necessity of going ‘back to the Christ of the Gospels.’  By all means, I say, if in the process you do not lose the Christ of the Epistles, who is the Christ of the Gospels, too.  I am free to admit that a past generation has wrapped theological cobwebs round the gracious figure of Christ with disastrous results.  For it is perfectly possible to know the things that are said about Him, and not to know Him about whom these things are said.  But the mistake into which the present generation is far more likely to fall than that of substituting theology for Christ, is the converse one—­that of substituting an undefined Christ for the Christ of the Gospels and the Epistles, the Incarnate Son of God, who died for our salvation.  And that is a more disastrous mistake than the other, for you can know nothing about Him and He can be nothing to you, except as you grasp the Apostolic explanation of the bare facts—­seeing in Him the Word who became flesh, the Son who died that we might receive the adoption of sons.

I would further point out that a clear conception of what the theme is, goes a long way to determine the method in which it shall be proclaimed.  The Apostle says, in the passage which is parallel to the present one, in the previous chapter, ‘We preach Christ crucified’; with strong emphasis on the word ‘preach.’  ‘The Jew required a sign’; he wanted a man who would do something.  The Greek sought after wisdom; he wanted a man who would perorate and argue and dissertate.  Paul says, ‘No!’ ’We have nothing to do.  We do not come to philosophise and to argue.  We come with a message of fact that has occurred, of a Person that has lived.’  And, as most of you know, the word which he uses means in its full signification, ’to proclaim as a herald does.’