Philosophy and reason and proofs of logic cannot greatly help us here.  No man was ever yet argued into the kingdom of God.  We cannot convince ourselves of our souls.  For we are creatures, not minds; lives, not ideas.  Only life can convince life; only a Person but, of course, a transcendent person that is more like Him than like us, can make that Other-who-lives certain and sure for us.  This necessity for some intermediary who shall be a human yet more-than-human proof that God is and that man may be one with Him; this reinforcing of the old argument from subjective necessity by its verification in the actual stuff of objective life, has been everywhere sought by men.

Saviours, redeemers, mediators, then, are not theological manikins.  They are not superfluous figures born of a mistaken notion of the universe.  They are not secondary gods, concessions to our childishness.  They, too, are called for in the nature of things.  But to really mediate they must have the qualities of both that which they transmit and of those who receive the transmission.  Most of all they must have that “other” quality, so triumphant and self-verifying that seeing it constrains belief.  A mediator wholly unlike ourselves would be a meaningless and mocking figure.  But a mediator who was chiefly like ourselves would be a contradiction in terms!

So we come back again to the old problem.  Man needs some proof that he who knows that he is more than dust can meet with that other life from whose star his speck has been derived.  Something has got to give him powerful reinforcement for this supreme effort of will, of faith.  If only he could know that he and it ever have met in the fields of time and space, then he would be saved.  For that would give him the will to believe; that would prove the ultimate; give him the blessed assurance which heals the wounds of the heart.  Then he would have power to surrender.  Then he would no longer fear the gulf, he would walk out onto it and know that as he walked he was with God.

Some such reasoning as this ought to make clear the place that Jesus holds in Christian preaching and why we call Him Saviour and why salvation comes for us who are of His spiritual lineage, through Him.  Of course it is true that Jesus shows to all discerning eyes what man may be.  But that is not the chief secret of His power; that is not why churches are built to Him and His cross still fronts, defeated but unconquerable, our pagan world.  Jesus was more-than-nature and more-than-human.  It is this “other” quality, operative and objectified in His experience within our world, which gives Him the absoluteness which makes Him indispensable and precious.  The mystery is deepest here.  For here we transfer the antinomy from thought to conduct; from inner perception to one Being’s actual experience.  Here, in Him, we say we see it resolved into its higher synthesis in actual operation.