Our modern thought of God as immanent in His world and in men enables us, perhaps more easily than some of our predecessors, to fit the figure of Christ into our minds.  The discovery of the Divine in the human does not surprise us.  We think of God as everywhere manifesting Himself, but His presence is limited by the medium in which it is recognized.  He reveals as much of Himself through nature as nature can disclose; as much through any man as he can contain; as much through the complete Man as He is capable of manifesting.  Nor does this Self-revelation of God in Jesus do away for us with Jesus’ own attainment of His character.  Immanent Deity does not submerge the human personality.  Jesus was no merely passive medium through which God worked, but an active Will who by constant cooeperation with the Father “was perfected.”  If there was an “emptying,” there was also a “filling,” so that we see in Him the fulness of God.  How He alone of all mankind came so to receive the Self-giving Father remains for us, as for our predecessors, the ultimate riddle, a riddle akin to that which makes each of us “indescribably himself.”  And as for the origin of His unique Person, we have no better explanations to substitute for those of the First Century; the mystery of our Lord’s singular personality remains unsolved.

While our reflections almost necessarily end in guesses, or in impenetrable obscurities, our experience of Christ’s worth can advance to ever greater certainty.  We follow Him, and find Him the Way, the Truth and the Life.  We trust Him and prove His power to save unto the uttermost.  We come to feel that no phrase applied to Him in the New Testament is an exaggeration; our own language, like St. Paul’s, admits its inadequacy by calling Him God’s “unspeakable gift.”  We see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in His face; He is to us the Light of life; and we live and strive to make Him the Light of the world.  Though we may never be able to reason out to our satisfaction how God and man unite in Him, we discover in Him the God who redeems us and the Man we aspire to be.  Jesus is to us (to borrow a saying of Lancelot Andrewes’) “God’s as much as He can send; ours as much as we can desire.”

CHAPTER IV

GOD

The word “God” is often employed as though it had a fixed meaning.  His part in an event or His relation to a movement is discussed with the assumption that all who speak have in mind the same Being.  “God” is the name a man gives to his highest inspiration, and men vary greatly in that which inspires them.  One man’s god is his belly, another’s his reputation, a third’s cleverness.  Napoleon reintroduced the cult of the God of authority, by establishing the Concordat with Rome, because as he bluntly put it, “men require to be kept in order.”  A number of socially minded thinkers, of whom the best known is George Eliot, deified humanity and gave themselves to worship and serve it.  “Whatever thy heart clings to and relies on,” wrote Luther, “that is properly thy God.”  A Christian is one who clings to Him in whom Jesus trusted, one who responds to the highest inspirations of Jesus of Nazareth.  And a glance over Church history leaves one feeling that few Christians, even among careful thinkers, have had thoroughly Christian ideas of God.