gave an account of the meaning of the event, no matter how brief that account may have been, He was overstepping the line that separates an undogmatic religion, or even a dogmatic religion that teaches only eternal principles, from one that is rooted in the significance of definite historical facts; He was placing a great gulf between Himself and the philosophic modern liberalism which to-day incorrectly bears His name.
In another way also the teaching of Jesus was rooted in doctrine. It was rooted in doctrine because it depended upon a stupendous presentation of Jesus’ own Person. The assertion is often made, indeed, that Jesus kept His own Person out of His gospel, and came forward merely as the supreme prophet of God. That assertion lies at the very root of the modern liberal conception of the life of Christ. But common as it is, it is radically false. And it is interesting to observe how the liberal historians themselves, so soon as they begin to deal seriously with the sources, are obliged to admit that the real Jesus was not all that they could have liked Jesus to be. A Houston Stewart Chamberlain,[1] indeed, can construct a Jesus who was the advocate of a pure, “formless,” non-doctrinal religion; but trained historians, despite their own desires, are obliged to admit that there was an element in the real Jesus which refuses to be pressed into any such mould. There is to the liberal historians, as Heitmüller has significantly said, “something almost uncanny” about Jesus.[2]
This “uncanny” element in Jesus is found in His Messianic consciousness. The strange fact is that this pure teacher of righteousness appealed to by modern liberalism, this classical exponent of the non-doctrinal religion
- ↑ Mensch und Gott, 1921. Compare the review in Princeton Theological Review, xx, 1922, pp. 327-329.
- ↑ Heitmüller, Jesus, 1913, p. 71. See The Origin of Paul’s Religion, 1921, p. 157.
