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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Walter F. Adney - Principal of Lancashire Independent College 1903 -1909; born Ealing, Middlesex, England; educated New College, London; seventeen years Congregational minister at Acton; fourteen years professor of New Testament exegesis and Church history at Hackney College, London; lecturer in history of doctrine at the University of Manchester; editor of the "Century Bible"; D.D. from St. Andrew's, Scotland; author of "The Hebrew Utopia," "From Christ to Constantine," "From Constantine to Charles the Great," "Theology of the New Testament" (which has been translated into Japanese), "Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther," "Canticles and Lamentations" (Expositor's Bible), "Women of the New Testament," "How to Read the Bible," "A Century's Progress," "St. Luke and Galatians and Thessalonians" (Century Bible), etc.


"As truth is in Jesus." - Eph. 4 : 21.

We hear this phrase very frequently quoted, but too often in ways that miss the pith and point of it. Sometimes it is used quite indefinitely, for the whole realm of Christian doctrine; and sometimes it is applied in a peculiar manner to a singularly constricted scheme of ideas to which its admirers confine that great word "gospel." Both of these usages show a failure to catch the original tone of the phrase.

This should be suggested to us by the simplicity of the name of our Lord. It is just "Jesus" - the bare personal name, shorn of all titles and honors, of all reference to his kingship and divine nature. That is quite unusual in the epistles - most unusual with Paul. In the epistles - especially in Paul's Epistles - we nearly always have some such expression as "Jesus Christ," "Christ Jesus," "Christ" alone, "the Lord," "the Lord Jesus Christ." But when we go back to the gospels we come upon the simple name "Jesus." In a word, that is the name our Lord bears in the gospels, while "Christ" is specifically His name in the epistles.

Now this is not merely a question of words. "Jesus" was our Lord's personal name, the name by which He was known in His boyhood and obscurity at Nazareth, before any dreamed who He was, and what lie was to become; it was the name by which lie was known to the end by those people who rejected His high claims.

Why, then, does Paul here strip the name of the titles of honor and reverence which the disciples had learned to attach to it? If we examine a few of their passages in the epistles where this is done, we shall see that they all point in one and the same direction. They all call our attention to the earthly life of our Lord, to that life which we have in the gospel story.

Truth in Jesus, then, is truth in the life of Jesus on earth; to us it is truth contained and revealed in the gospel story.

But, you will ask, why, then, was this not stated more clearly? Why do we not read "the truth which Jesus taught?" Because, there is a closer relation between Jesus and truth than there is between the mere teacher and his lesson. As a matter of fact, I suppose nobody can teach well any truth except that which is in him. A man must have assimilated an idea and made it part of himself before he can impart it effectively to others. Phillips Brooks tells us "and none knew it better than he" that a sermon should be truth passing through the experience of the preacher, and Henry Ward Beecher once said, "Preaching is the preacher laying his heart on the people."

But it is even more than that with our Lord's teaching of truth; because His vital and personal relation to it is peculiarly intimate. John the Baptist was "a voice crying in the wilderness," a voice, the message everything, the speaker a negligible quantity. But Jesus is more than a voice - He is truth incarnate. So He can say, "I am the light of the world," "I am the truth."

We often hear of the return to Christ which our age has witnessed, and if we ask, what are the most modern ideas in religion? The answer is, "The ideas of the Sermon on the Mount." Apparently some people are just discovering these ideas for the first time - to them; and the discovery is a perfect revelation for them. But we have not all the truth Jesus is prepared to give us when we have His words. The words of Him who spake as never man spake are of incomparable worth. When a scrap of a papyrus containing six or eight very doubtful sentences ascribed to our Lord is discovered, its contents are devoured with the keenest interest. There is an admirable little book entitled, "The Master's Guide," in which the sayings of Jesus collected from the New Testament are arranged under the headings of various topics. You can not read such a book without feeling that what it contains is altogether unique. Here we have the regalia of the kingdom of heaven, every sentence a gem. And yet we should be heavy losers if we gave up the four gospels in exchange for such a book as this. It is not enough to know what Jesus said. We want to know Jesus Himself, Jesus - as He is revealed in deed and life as well as in word and teaching. Here we have the truth He brings to us in its fullness and vitality and power - "as truth is in Jesus."

Now we are often reminded that this is an age when Pilate's weary question - perhaps I should say his cynical question: "What is truth?" is being asked with a new intensity of interest. It is an age of many questions. Unfortunately, it is also an age of many answers, an age of many voices all clamorous for a hearing, each offering its own solution of the riddles of existence. If any of us are driven to seek peace in the intellectual Nirvana of agnosticism, it is not for want of a gospel, it is rather from the bewilderment of the claims of too many gospels. But how otherwise are we to escape from this confusion of cries, this babel of utterances, and all the perplexity it engenders and the despair of ever reaching truth to which it points?

I answer; we must turn a deaf ear to the whole of them, and seek truth in Jesus. We must leave the library and enter our chamber; take with us our New Testament; turn to the gospels; make a study of them - a study with this specific end in view - to discover truth.

Immediately we begin thus to study Jesus, so to say, at first hand in these gospel portraits, one characteristic most strikes us. As a leader He is quite sure of what He has to say. There is a ring of certainty in all His words. Never was there a teacher more positive, if you like to put it so, more dogmatic. We have our views, we cherish our Opinions, we balance arguments and measure probabilities. You never find Jesus doing anything of the kind. You never hear Him talking of His views or His opinions; you never hear Him speaking in our hazy style: "On the whole, considering all the facts of the case, I am inclined to venture the assertion that this or that may turn out to be the explanation of it." If you discovered a new logion in language such as that, you would declare it a forgery beyond doubt. For the style of Jesus, even when dealing with the most profound mysteries of existence, is thus: "Verily, verily, I say unto you." I do not say that He claimed omniscience on earth. He even repudiated it. But what He did assert He asserted with unhesitating decision.

But is it enough to be positive? We all of us know very positive people - popes who claim infallibility, although no Vatican council has voted it them - and we are not inclined to surrender our judgment to them on demand. Do we not often find people to be positive exactly in proportion to the limited range of their knowledge? The less a person knows the more sure he is of everything; while the wider his horizon becomes, the slower and more hesitating he will be in making a distinct assertion.

It is not enough, then, to say that anyone is very positive. We must first face the question as to who it is that speaks to us with this singular decisiveness. I doubt not there are many among us who are perfectly satisfied on that point, who are well assured that Jesus is the very Son of God dwelling ever in the bosom of the Father, who can almost see the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

But if it be the case that we have not all reached this position of calm assurance, if the uncertainty and questioning of the age have driven some of us into wondering thoughts about the very being and nature of Christ, how is it possible to take His direct assurance as the settlement of all doubt? We must begin at a more preliminary stage.

Consider the case of the expert, who condescends to leave his advanced studies for a little while, and instruct us in some of the more elementary principles of his science. What a firm grip he has of the subject! With what ease he moves from point to point! His only difficulty is not to go too far, and lead his audience out of their depth. Plainly, he is master of the situation. And when he sits down nothing pleases him better than to be questioned on anything in the lecture. At once he is ready to explain it more fully, and his ex tempore explanation is as learned and as masterly as the set lecture. You can not take him at a disadvantage. You can sit at the feet of such a man with the utmost confidence. Clearly he has a right to speak with authority.

Now is it not clear, when you study the gospel story, that Jesus is an expert in religion, by the side of whom the greatest theologian appears but as an amateur dabbling in a subject too large for him? It may seem almost irreverent to use such a title as "expert" for Jesus Christ; He is so much more. But then He is at least that. Here, surely, we may be all agreed. What is to us, alas! too much a strange subject, one that we neglect for a multitude of minor interests, was to Him a region in which He was perfectly at home. He lived in it and spoke out from it as from the depths of His daily experience.

It is as when a party of travelers climbing some wild and dangerous mountain find themselves enveloped in cloud. All trace of direction is lost. A yawning gulf may be at their feet. But one is well on in advance of the rest. He has reached the ridge and passed. the cloud; and he calls back to the others, "It is all clear here; I can see the way right on to the summit; follow me and you will be safe." His position of advance gives him authority to speak. As we listen to the voice of Jesus coming to us through the clinging mists that blot out the landscapes for us and chill our hearts, we discover that this is a voice from the heights. Is it nothing that Jesus can say, "Follow me! He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness" He, too, is on the mountain above us - how far exalted, perhaps we may not yet see; but, at all events, well in advance - yes, and well in advance of all the world's great thinkers and teachers of religion. Is it nothing that from this high ground He speaks with the voice of sure knowledge and decisive utterance? And then, as I have said, it is not only by His words that He guides us. His person, His life, His character are luminous and illuminating.

Let us see how this conception of truth, as truth is in Jesus, may apply to various regions of thought and life, and consider what answer to the questions that most perplex us may be found in the Jesus of the gospels, in the actual contents of these records. The inquiry is not mystical; it is literary and historical. As such it may not be finally satisfactory to all minds, still it is the path of light.

First, let us look at the region of the practical. The deepest, darkest doubt - a doubt vastly more unsettling than any amount of speculative uncertainty, worse even than what is called religious skepticism, because it cuts at the root of all religion and all goodness - is moral doubt. So long as a man can keep "conscience as the noontide clear," with unhesitating faith in goodness and unwavering determination to pursue it at all hazards, he can never be utterly at sea. All may seem lost, sky and ocean mixed in the fury of tempest; and yet, while the anchor of conscience holds, the vessel will ride the storm. But if this anchor is dragged, if the very fundamental ideas of right and wrong are tossing in confusion, the peril is great indeed. There is absolutely nothing to prevent drifting on to the rocks. It is no longer the eclipse of faith. It is the shipwreck of faith. Beware of that horror of horrors - moral skepticism.

But how is it to be escaped? When we turn from theory to fact, the world, as we see it, does not seem to show that sharp distinction, that impassable gulf, that vast distance as from pole to pole, between good and evil. The two are strangely intermingled. If even a good man looks down into the lower regions of his nature, he may be startled to discover there the lurking possibilities of the crimes of a Borgia. When some one who has been respected universally as a pillar of virtue suddenly falls, or is suddenly found out in some base action, the sight of such unexpected wickedness sends a shock through society, and tempts the world to say that all men are alike; or with the only difference that some sin openly while others hide their misdeeds; that some are honest knaves and the rest but hypocrites.

This miserable cynicism must shrink for very shame in the presence of Jesus Christ. Will anybody venture to read the story of His life and still maintain that there is no reality in goodness? For see what it comes to! If virtue is a myth, if the moral law is an illusion, if there is no essential distinction between good and evil, then there is no essential distinction between Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot. And by all the appalling distance from the awful purity of the Savior to the sordid vileness of the traitor, the essential distinction between good and evil is proved to us. If not in St. Francis, if not in John, if in no saint, or martyr, or apostle, still, as the last resort, in Jesus, assuredly, we can see the moral law vindicated. He magnifies this law and makes it honorable. He established the eternal reality of goodness. That truth we may see in Jesus.

The frequency of failure provokes the further question whether life is not altogether a mistake. As some lives are spent, it is difficult to resist that dismal conclusion. There are stained and misshapen lives that appear like spots and blotches in creation, their very existence a blight upon society. Are there not, too, multitudes of lives which, if not thus stamped with offensiveness, yet are no comfort to the livers of them and no blessing to others - poor, withered, doleful lives spent in a round of weary drudgery, with no prospect of relief but by the merciful hand of death? I am afraid it must be admitted there are ways of living that do not seem to make life worth the trouble of lungs in drawing breath, and heart in driving blood to keep them going. It is possible for any of us to live in such a mode-servile in poverty or self-indulgent in luxury. It might be well for all of us occasionally to put the question to ourselves point blank, are we living in a way that is worth all the cost to ourselves and others?

But can anybody ask that question concerning Jesus Christ? To His contemporaries He was a failure, meeting the doom of the enthusiast who braves the conventions of the world, cut off in young manhood, tortured and killed by the death of the vilest criminal. And yet, we know that He did not fail. If ever any life was a success, the life of Jesus was. It was the life which reversed the whole course of history, and laid the foundation of the upward movement of mankind. Life a failure? Apparently so in some instances, as far as we can see in this world; but not the life of the Crucified. And, therefore, we may conclude that just in proportion as we follow Christ our lives, too, will not fail. I do not know what to say of many lives, but looking at it in the light of truth, I am perfectly certain that the Christian life, the life of self-denial and service, cross-bearing and Christ-likeness, is not and can not be a failure. This is as the truth of life is in Jesus.

The same rule applies when we turn to more mysterious regions of speculative inquiry. Questions are raised concerning the nature of Christ, such questions as rent the Church in fierce internal conflicts in the ages of the great Christian fathers. Out of these conflicts came the creeds that were to settle the dogmas of the believer for all subsequent ages. But to many of us these creeds are not final utterances. They affirm, they do not prove, neither do they explain. To some people they only appear to "darken counsel with words without knowledge." It is not thus that we determine any truth of science. Why should we expect to settle theological truth in so preposterous a method of finality? Why should the twentieth century bow down to the fourth century, dumb and submissive, in this the most difficult of questions, and in this alone? Surely, we have learned a more ex¬cellent way. The naturalist is not satisfied to study in old libraries; he examines the objects of nature. It is this inductive method of Bacon that opened the door to science. Is it unreasonable to apply the same method in religion? If we do, the right way to know Christ is not to analyze creeds, it is to make a study of the Jesus of the gospels. What a picture we have there - babe of Bethlehem, boy at Nazareth, carpenter in the workshop, preacher by the lakeside, brother in the home, healer of the sick, victim on the cross, firstborn from the dead! Watch Him as He moves along His brief, strange course. Humblest of men, yet making the highest claims; most modest, yet never confessing to a fault.

A person of dull conscience may defend himself against all fault-finding. As a rule, this unruffled sense of rectitude is exactly proportionate to the torpor of conscience. The awakened conscience is self-accusing. And so it comes about that the holiest man is the most eager to repudiate the title to holiness, that the saint is the first to confess himself a sinner.

But Jesus makes no such confession. He is keenly alive to the evil of sin, and He is unfaltering in the denunciation of hypocrisy. We can not say He is callous and indifferent to evil. Yet He never confesses sin of His own; claiming to forgive sin in others, He always speaks as though there were none in Himself. And His life bears out this personal conviction. Neither is He conscious of sin, nor can anybody detect it in Him. This is the first wonder of His life - the sinlessness of Jesus. In this He is quite alone and apart. How shall we explain it? He gives us His own explanation: "I and my Father are one." Apostles, evangelists, those who watched Him most closely, who knew Him best, give the same explanation when they describe Him as the Son of God. I can see no other adequate explanation of the gospel record than this assertion of the divinity of Christ. This is not merely a dogma of the creeds - it is a truth in Jesus, a truth in the gospels, a truth that shines out of the ancient pages; to my mind and to many minds the only way of accounting for what is recorded there.

Again, it may be that we are opprest with the larger mystery of existence. What is the meaning of this vast, perplexing system of things, in the midst of which we live, which we call universe? Is it but an interminable nexus of forces, or is there mind behind force? Is there God? If so, what is God? The existence of the world points to a cause; the order of the universe suggests a mind; the beauty of nature a soul; the bountifulness of life a heart. And yet, when we have reached these conclusions, Mill's terrible indictment of nature confronts us. Apparently all is not wise and good. Earthquakes, famine, flood, plague - what are these?

But here is the dilemma - if there is no God, in the end we must go back to chance, and chaos is the parent of all things. Evolution introduces an orderly process, but it is only a process, a method, not a cause. Evolution inspired by God is a sublime theory of creation. Evolution without God is but a product of chance. Then even with this theory we are forced back on something like the daring epicurean notion so brilliantly set forth by the Roman poet Lucretius - a fortuitous concourse of atoms, falling, as he had it, through space, and jostling one another incessantly in the vast cascade of them till they ultimately chance to fall into a condition of order. If that be true, then Jesus Christ is the result of such a chance, a product of blind and purposeless evolution - His life but as one speck of foam flung up from the dark ocean of existence.

And further, if there is no mind in the universe, if the brain secretes thought and the liver secretes bile, then we must come to this wild and desperate conclusion that the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the prodigal son are byproducts of certain chance combinations of phosphates and nitrates in the brain of an organism to which we misleadingly attach the greatest of names. It is abhorrent to state such a conclusion; yet we must be honest; we must be consistent. There is no alternative. This is the conclusion to which we must be driven on the materialistic hypothesis.

Philosophers have described animals as automatons, and there are men whose sheer animalism of existence encourages the hypothesis. These are the excuses for materialism. But it breaks down utterly in the presence of Jesus. The credulity of the Christian is as nothing to the credulity of the materialist who can believe that all we read in the gospel story is but a fine and vaporous emanation of chemical elements. The being of God and the existence of mind, of soul, of spirit, are vindicated by the very being of Jesus. These truths are to be seen in Him.

There is one more question to which I wish to apply this solvent of the truth that is found in the gospels, the truth as it is in Jesus - the question of a future life. We must all feel that much of what is said on this subject will not bear a very close scrutiny. There are times when we can not be satisfied with conventional notions. When we stand by the open grave of a very dear friend, or when the doctor has warned us that we should do well to put our affairs in order, as the summons may come to us at any moment; when it has become clear that close at hand "the shadow sits and waits for us," then, in these moments of intense reality, we can not be satisfied with the flowers of hymnology and pulpit eloquence, and we ask in grim earnest Job's straight question: "If a man die shall he live again?"

What is Christ's answer to that pregnant question? It is a very remarkable answer - quite one by itself - reticent, yet clear and positive. Jesus paints no fancy pictures of elysian fields where happy souls walk in meads of asphodel; He draws no plan of a heavenly city with gates of pearl and streets of gold. To the curiosity that hungers for information about the forms and manners of the life beyond He is perfectly silent. But to the deeper hunger for life after death He is most reassuring. He is as positive on this subject as on any other. His words are few, but they are quite clear and absolutely unwavering. While we halt and hesitate, and falter and tremble, before the mystery of death, He, above our mists, standing there in the light, is certain. Surely, this means much!

What can be more decisive than such words as these: ?He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live?; "in my Father's house are many places of rest. If it were not so I would have told you." I do not know any statement of the case more exact and true than that in Richard Baxter"s most honest hymn:

My knowledge of that life is small, The eye of faith is dim;
But 'tis enough that Christ knows all, And I shall be with Him.

And here we have a further confirmation beyond the words and direct teaching of Jesus - His own resurrection. Jesus was raised up from the dead; He came back from beyond the shadows - the first-born among many brethren. That is in the record of the gospels. The very existence of the Church - itself a resurrection after the despair of Calvary - is witness to the resurrection of Jesus, and that in turn is witness to the life eternal.

To any, then, who may be distrest by the wild, free questions of our day; to any who may be bewildered by the hosts of conflicting voices each offering its own reply, this is one way of life and guidance. Study the gospels. Come to a first-hand knowledge of Jesus. Learn of Him. Consider what a Master of His subject He is, how clear His vision, how serene His assurance, how positive His utterance, how real His life! All else may waver; mists may gather round the cherished convictions of childhood. Jesus abides, the light of the world and the light of the ages. In Him shall we see light.

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