Horace Bushnell · 9 of 21

Chapter IV. How He Becomes So Great a Power. · Part 1

IN his descent to the flesh, we might naturally expect that Christ would bring all deific perfections with him, and have them expressed in his person. And this, indeed, is true; but with the large qualification that they will be expressed only by degrees, and under conditions of time; that is, under such laws of expression as pertain to humanity. In one view, God is emptied of his perfections in becoming incarnate, and has them all to acquire and bring into evidence, by the same process of right living that obtains character and weight for men. Otherwise the incarnation would be no real fact. It must be with Christ as with men, and moral power, as we commonly use the term, among men, is the power that a man finally gets, by the courses and achievements of a great and worthy life, to impress and sway other men. The subject may be dead, or he may be still alive; his name awakens homage, inspires, becomes an argument in itself, by which opposition is concluded, or assent determined; all because of some great virtue, or victory, or championship of right and beneficence, accomplished in his life. It is a power cumulative in its very nature. Once the man had it not; as regards any such thing, he was virtually nobody. But the process of his life was such that Moral power is cumulative. power grew up with it, rolled up into volume and majesty, in the facts and doings of it. If he was a benefactor, like Howard, his name became a power, through the trains of good, led on by his works and sacrifices. If he was a saint, like Savonarola or George Fox, his inspirations obtained for him the homage due to God’s oracle. If he was a preacher, like Whitfield, the immense crowds, conquered by his words, prepared other and greater crowds, to be half-conquered even before he spoke. If he was a hero, proved by many righteous victories, his soldiers went to the fight, with victory perched on their banners beforehand. In all such examples, we perceive that moral power is a growth, and the result of a process. It is what a man once had not, but now has. It was not in his nature, as a child, or a youth, or even as a man; but it has been conquered, or obtained by the conduct of his life. We sometimes say that it is contributed by the admiration of men, but it is not contributed gratis; it is won by deeds and represented by facts.

And this, exactly, is what we are to understand by the moral power of God in the gospel of his Son. It Attribute power is different. is a new kind of power—the greatest and most sovereign power we know—which God undertakes to have by obtaining it, under the human laws and methods. Hence the incarnation. God had a certain kind of power before; viz., that which may be called attribute power. By attributes we mean what we attribute to God, when we think God, or unfold our idea of God as the Absolute Being. As being infinite and absolute, we ascribe to him certain attributes, or perfections. Such attributes, or perfections, are a kind of abstract excellence, such as we bring out, or generate, by our own intellectual refinements on the idea of God, to answer to our own intellectual demands. Still, as God is infinite, the perfections are distant. We hardly dare think them, if we could, into our finite molds. We almost reason them away. Thus God, we say, is omnipotent, therefore he will bring to pass exactly all that he desires; and does, in fact, desire nothing but what comes to pass. Again, God is eternally sovereign; therefore he regrets nothing, as we do; for what he wills he does. Again, God is omniscient, knowing every thing beforehand; therefore every thing is immovably fixed beforehand. Still again, God is infinitely happy; therefore he is impassible and can not suffer in feeling any way. Yet once more, God is immutably just; and must therefore have his justice satisfied by the necessary quantum of suffering. And so it turns out that, in making up an attribute power, we very nearly think away, or annihilate, all that creates an effective impress on our sentiment and character We make him great, but we also make him thin and cold. We feel him as a platitude, more than as a person. His great attributes became dry words; a kind of milky-way over our heads; vast enough in the matter of extension, but evanescently dim to our feeling.

This result had been mitigated, somewhat, by his works and word and Providence, before the coming of Christ. But the tendency still was to carry back all the more genial impressions thus unfolded, and merge them in the attribute-power, by which, as an unseen, infinite being, we had before contrived to think and to Christ incarnated to obtain moral power. measure his character. Till, finally, in the fullness of time, he is constrained to institute a new movement on the world, in the incarnation of his Son. The undertaking is to obtain, through him, and the facts and processes of his life, a new kind of power; viz., moral power; the same that is obtained by human conduct under human methods. It will be divine power still, only it will not be attribute power. That is the power of his idea. This new power is to be the power cumulative, gained by Him among men, as truly as they gain it with each other. Only it will turn out, in the end, to be the grandest, closest to feeling, most impressive, most soul-renovating, and spiritually sublime power that was ever obtained in this or any other world.

Hence that peculiar and continually recurring set of expressions in the New Testament which appear, in one form or another, to attribute so much to the name of Jesus. For if we can rightly distinguish between a name and a fame, if we can exclude the airy fictions of repute and coveted applause, conceiving that the name obtained by Jesus signifies the condensed reality of all that he is, no power will be so genuine, or vital, or so like a sun-rising on transgression.

There will, accordingly, be distinguished, more or less clearly, in all the varied uses referred to, some notion or associated impression of power; The “name” of Jesus is the power he obtains. as if there were embodied, somehow, in this name Jesus, a fund of universal soul-help; or as if, being in this name were the same as to be in a really divine element of good. This too, for the manifest reason, that the whole personal life-history of Jesus, all that he was, felt, suffered, and did, is gathered into it, and was originally designed to be, that he might be the new moral power of God. Thus, to glorify this name and make it such a power is seen to be God’s purpose from the first. Which purpose glimmers dimly in the direction, “they shall call his name Jesus;” for it is to be a saving name. And again it appears more visibly afterwards, when he answers the prayer of Jesus, “Father glorify [in me] thy name,” by a voice out of heaven, saying—“I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.” And again, at a still later period, when his work is complete, and he gives it to his apostle to say, magnifying both the power and the name together—“showing us the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe, by setting him [in our mortal apprehension] above all principalities, and powers, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but in that which is to come.”

Christ, also, we can easily perceive, has a like impression of God’s purpose in his life; as when speaking of, or to, or before, his disciples, he says—“gathered in my name;” “ask in my name;” “cast out devils in my name;” “a chosen vessel in my name;” “I have manifested thy name.”

The apostles coming after are even more explicit, as we should expect them to be. They even dare to How the apostles do every thing in this name. speak of this great name as a name obtained—“Being made so much better in this name. than the angels, as he hath, for his heritage, obtained a more excellent name than they.” They are “baptized” in it. They are “justified in” it. They “do all for” it. They “are reproached for” it. They “teach in his name.” They “preach it boldly.” They promise salvation to such as “believe in it.” They “have life through” it. They work miracles and say, “by the name of Jesus this man is made whole.” Having it consciously upon them, in their inmost feeling, they “hold it fast,” and are “hated of all men for” it. Every one “that nameth it” they conceive must “depart from all iniquity.” And, last of all, they read this name “in the forehead” of the glorified. How could it be otherwise when God Himself comes into human life, and makes himself a name there, by human acts, in human molds of conduct, that represents even the pleroma of his divine perfections?

Accordingly when, Peter, another apostle, declares that “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we can be saved,” we shall not take the “name whereby” as a cold, theoretic, far-off method of reference, to some theologic matter of judicial satisfaction, but as meaning just what the language implies; viz., power—the power of God unto salvation. We only recognize in his language the fact, so abundantly testified in all the other terms referred to, that the incarnate ministry and life of Christ are designed of God, to obtain, and have, in fact, obtained a new moral power for the regeneration of lost men. What we say, at this point, is not theory but is constantly affirmed by the New Testament Scriptures.

Assuming, now, this view of Christ and his gospel, it remains to go forward and trace the process of his life; showing how, and by what methods, and stages, this grand, cumulative, power is rolled up into the requisite body and volume.

Of course, it will be understood, that Christ is not aiming directly at the. obtaining of such a name, or such a power of impression. He can not, How he obtains the name. of course, be ignorant of the result to be perfected thus in his life. Not even a man of ordinary intelligence will be ignorant of the respect and homage that must be obtained, by what is morally great and good in action. But that is not the motive for such action. It was not with Christ. As some great hero thinks of his country, when he takes the field to serve his country, so Christ thought of the world to be saved, when he came to save the world. He came with the lost world upon his feeling, gave himself to it in sacrifice, bore it in vicarious sacrifice, plead with it, suffered for it, made himself of no reputation, took upon him the form of a servant and a servant’s labor; whereupon God hath highly exalted him and given him a name that is above every name, a power that is itself salvation. The moral power obtained is a result and not any direct motive.

How then does it come?—let us see if we can trace the process. When the holy child is born, he has no Nothing in his name at the first. moral power at all. The halo which the painters show about his head is not there. He is simply the child of two very humble people, in a very mean provincial town. There was a good deal more circumstance and prospect in Washington’s infancy than in his; and yet the moral power of that little one’s name, George, had nothing of the ring that a great life and history will afterwards give it. Nor is it any thing if the name is called Immanuel; nobody will see any meaning in that, at present. The meaning itself is yet to be obtained.

There had been some remarkable prophecies over the child, not much regarded, of course, till afterwards. A few very pleasant facts are given concerning his childhood and youth, which will signify a great deal more, as recollections, than they do to present observation. His look and manner, as he grows up, are winning to every body. He is subject to his parents and a model of filial duty. His custom is to be always at the synagogue worship. On a certain occasion, when he is but twelve years old, he astonishes the doctors of the temple, by his wonderful questions; and there it is that he drops the remarkable intimation, specially noted by his mother, that he “must be about his Father’s business;” in which, as we can see, he already begins to be a little conscious of his great calling, which makes it all the more remarkable, that he still struggles on eighteen years longer, hurried by no forwardness, or impatience, till the full idea of his great ministry takes possession of his life. During this whole period, he confesses no sin, and, as far as we can judge, rectifies no mistake; and, if these negative facts had been noted by any body, as plainly they could not be, his piety would certainly have been seen to be of a most singular and even superhuman order.

On the whole, it does not appear that, previous to entering on his public ministry, when he was thirty years old, he has done any thing more The name is not obtained before his ministry. than to beautifully and exactly fulfill his duties. His name is good, true, lovely; but as far as possible from being a name above every name. A certain moral power is felt in him, of course, by those who are with him, but. what he is to be, in this respect, is, as yet, quite hidden from discovery.

But the time has now come for his great ministry to begin. The dim presentiment of his work, which he called his “Father’s business” opens into a definite, settled, consciousness of his call. As it were by the revelation of the Spirit, he clearly perceives what he is to do, and what to suffer; that he is to go down into the hell of the world’s corporate evil, to be wounded and galled by the world’s malice, and bear the burden of the world’s undoing as a charge upon his love; and so, by agonies of sacrifice, including a most bitter death, to reconcile men to God and establish the eternal kingdom of God in their hearts. The work attracts him, and yet his soul, or at least his natural human feeling, recoils. Smitten, as it were, by a kind of horror, he is hurried off into the wilderness, to wrestle with his temptations; groaning there alone, under the heavy load he is to bear, and bowing his reluctant humanity to the call, by the discipline of fasting. He comes out victorious, but as a victor spent. The angels of God recruit him by their tender and cheering ministry, and he goes to his work.

No man of the race, it is quite safe to say, ever went to the calling of his life against impediments of natural sensibility so appalling. Men do often make great and heroic sacrifices in a cause already undertaken, but he undertakes the forlornest, most appalling sacrifice, fully perceiving what it is to be beforehand. Men have the brave will raised in them afterwards, by the heat of encounter; he has his victory at the beginning, alone, in a desert, where only love and God, in the moods of silence, come to his aid. In this simple beginning of Christ, there is character enough to create a moral power never before conceived, never since realized. But it does not appear that even the facts of his temptation were made known, till some time after—when, or how, we can only guess. He goes into his work, therefore, as a merely common man, a Nazarene carpenter, respected for nothing, save as he compels respect by ]his works and his words.

Meantime John has been testifying, as a prophet, of another, who is to come, or is even now at hand, whose shoes even he is not worthy to untie, and by whom the kingdom of heaven is to be set up on earth. And this other, viz., Jesus, comes to him shortly after to be baptized; when he breaks out, in prophetic vision, as soon as he perceives him coming—“Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.” The consecrating dove lights upon him in his baptism, and a voice out of heaven declares—“This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” And yet even John is so little impressed, or so little believes in what he hears, shortly after, of his miracles and his doctrine, that he sends to inquire, as if he might still be only an ordinary man, possibly an impostor, “art thou he that should come, or look we for another?” As yet he has not made impression enough for God’s love and power by his ministry, beautiful and wonderful as it is, to even hold a prophet’s opinion of him up to the pitch of his own prophetic testimony!

But he goes on with his ministry for three years; traveling on foot, sleeping in desert places and upon the mountain tops, associating mostly with How the ministry goes on. the poor and humble, who have scarcely cultivation enough to yield him any fit return of sympathy, or even to be duly impressed by his miracles. The learned and select are alienated from him, partly for this reason. They deny his miracles, or they charge them openly to his conspiracy with devils.

His doctrine is wonderful to every body—what can be more wonderful than his sermon on the mount? The people were astonished and rightly; for there was never any such utterance in the world before. There was no learning, no cabalistic juggle in his words; he taught them “as one having authority and not as the scribes.” This kind of impression was always made by him, and the puzzle was that a man who had never learned—the son of a mean provincial, in a mean provincial town—could discourse with such intelligence, in a manner so nearly divine. A company of bailiffs sent out to arrest him, just before the close of his ministry, were as profoundly impressed by his manner and words as if the angel in the sun had spoken to them, and could only go back and report—“Never man spake like this man.” And yet it does not appear that Christ grew, at all, on the public sentiment, by means of his discourses. He only mystified, a little, the public feeling, and made himself a character about as much more suspicious and dangerous.

A few persons of a specially honest and fair temperament were so wrought upon, by his miracles, and manners, and words, as to feel the impression of some very strange, or even sacred power in his life; Mary and Martha, for example, and the centurion, and the two senators Nicodemus and Joseph, and probably all his apostles—not excluding even Pilate, who was evidently shaken out of all confidence, by the sense he had of some strange quality, in the manner and bearing of the victim he is compelled to sacrifice. And yet there was a certain wavering, probably, in all these minds, as if they could not imagine him, or guess, after all, how he might turn out. Their misgivings half took away what would have been their opinions. What they felt in him, therefore, was not so much a power as a possibility of power. Nothing was immovably fastened, save, perhaps, in the centurion, or the woman that came with her box of ointment, and, it may be, one or two other of his disciples. Great things have been done by him, wonderful beauties of feeling unfolded, and yet all these are felt dubiously under a kind of peradventure.

And the reason plainly enough is, that no point of view, as respects his person, has yet been attained to, that will verify the facts and impressions of his life. His friends think he is the Messiah, but they have only the faintest notions who the Messiah is, or is to be. His person is not conceived, and so it results that his doings make a seemingly rough compound of strange things, jumbled together in a kind of moral confusion that has really no right to be very impressive.

As we go back to inventory the matter of his life, we find some things that are wonderfully sublime, some that are deep in the spirit of wisdom, Sublime and wise, and so far impressive. some that repel and hold aloof, some that bear a grotesque look, some that are attractive and subduing to feeling as nothing else ever was, and some that even discourage confidence. The sublime things are such as these; the virtue that went out of him, when faith touched the hem of his garment; the raising of the widow’s son; the healing of the lepers; the voice out of heaven; the stilling of the sea; the transfiguration, and all the matter of his last discourses and prayer as given by John. In these facts the glory of deity and of heaven appears to be let into the world, and made visible in it. But they were witnessed only here and there, and, for the most part) by different classes of persons; creating rather mazes of’ wonder, than a settled feeling of homage and awe.

The wise things, such as indicated even a marvelous diplomatic talent, in the good sense of the term, were his answer to the Pharisees, who came to entangle him with the government—“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s;” the confusion he brought upon the chief priests and elders, coming with a like artful design, when he answered their question—“By what authority,” by another question—“The baptism of John, whence was it;” his reply to the puzzle or catch of the Sadducees—“Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife shall she be,” by his Scripture citation and his inference from it—“I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob; God is not the God of the dead, but of the living;” and more than all by his fearfully impressive reserve, and the brief, but immensely significant intimations he gave to Pilate about his kingship, as the king of truth; taking, in fact, all courage out of the man, by the superstitious dread awakened in his feeling. No teacher, prophet, or champion of truth, ever evinced such complete insight of men, or was ever able to reduce them to utter confusion so easily, by his mastery of their motives and points of weakness. His profoundly artful enemies in fact, were all in sunlight before him.

The points in which he repelled and set aloof multitudes that came to be his clients and followers were such as these—he would not have a partisan, and as most men expect to be taken as partisans, Sometimes he repelled by his manner. when they adhere to another, they were chilled and could not long follow him; he offended their Jewish prejudices without scruple m the matter of the Sabbath, and also in the matter of their exclusive nationality by the declaration of a universal kingdom, where the men of all nations should come from the east, and the west, and the north, and the south, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; he turned the preposterous learning of the lawyers and scribes to derision; he galled the consciences of many who were righteous in the law, by his terrible exposures of their motives and their hearts; he made God fearfully great and holy by his doctrine of future punishment; his terms of discipleship were uninviting and severe—ye shall be baptized with my baptism, hated of all men for my name’s sake; take up your cross and follow me; if any man hate not father and mother yea and his own life also he can not be my disciple; resist not evil; consent to serve and suffer, even as the Son of man came to minister, and give his life a ransom for many. He made nothing of the popular favor, nothing of gaining or retaining friends, which, though it was one of the sublimities, even of his character, as regarded by us, was in fact only a continual offense to the men of his time.

Some few of the facts of his life bore a grotesque look, at the time, and could easily be turned to ridicule, as indeed they have been since. Thus when the woman is brought before him craftily, by her accusers, to Sometimes he was grotesque. obtain his judgment on her sin, he writes abstractedly on the ground, lifting himself up at length to shoot in his bolt—“let him that is without sin cast the first stone”—and then stooping down again to write on the ground as before. This would be ridiculed in a man, as a figure of mere hocus-pocus. And yet the mystery of the manner, the silence, the abstraction, roused the consciences of the accusers to such a degree, that they heard even terrible thunders within, and shortly drew off, one by one, and left him quite alone. No most eloquent sermon could have done as much. No stroke of natural eloquence was ever more impressive. We have also what some have called another grotesque figure in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Multitudes go forth to meet him, branches of palm-trees are thrown in his way, as if it were the day of his crowning, and the great concourse of the people and the children in the temple, after he arrives, fill the air, as it were by some outburst of inspiration, with the cry, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!” And yet he comes riding upon an ass! Neither does it raise at all the dignity of his figure, that he fulfills a prophecy; for that is probably not observed at the time. Besides a prophecy that requires the great Messiah to celebrate his triumph in such a figure puts inspiration itself under a ban of derision, till we are able to see as could not be seen till some time after, how this outward type represents a king riding into power among men, through a suffering and sadly humiliated life. What livery or mounting then will he most fitly take for his type, in such a procession? on what shall he ride, but on one of the humblest and least airy-gaited of the animals?

The facts, in which he drew on human feeling by the loving and subduing energy of his own, compose the staple, we may almost say, of his life. His tenderness. All his healings, raised in dignity by the manifestly divine power in which they are wrought, display such assiduity of kindness and devotion to the forlornest conditions and bitterest pains of a world under sin, as to make up a kind of gospel in the plane of bodily treatment; engaging most tenderly just those fallen sensibilities that must be engaged, and yet could not, by mere demonstrations of spiritual excellence. His union to the poor in their sad lot, and his beautiful tenderness to their wants and troubles, attract their personal sympathy and gratitude in the same manner. His call, “come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden”—it is as if heaven’s love to the world were going forth to its weary, sin-burdened millions, from a heart large enough to contain them all, and strong enough to give them rest. His love to little children takes the feeling, not of children, but of every body. His domestic, home-like feeling when with Mary and Martha, and his yet more intensely human sensibility, when he weeps and groans at the grave-side of their brother—what a spell of more than mortal majesty is there in his, “Lazarus, come forth,” answered by the bursting tomb and rising form of the man! How touching his delicacy, when, by loving anticipation, he calls those “friends,” who were not, and speaks of his death as a laying down of his life for his friends. What woman’s heart will not be drawn to him by his manner to Mary, when she comes to him with her box of ointment, and when he commends her, in her simple tribute of love, as he never did any other of mankind; telling her that her little gospel shall go down the ages with his, to be witnessed for a memorial of her. His “one of you shall betray me,” how sadly and tenderly is it spoken, bitter and dreadful as the charge it lays most certainly is. His whole farewell discourse and prayer, as given at large by John, full of the loftiest assumptions, and tenderest promises, and lowliest protestations of brotherhood—warm, and gentle, and strong, as inherent divinity should be—what greater, more subduing power of love, on a race broken loose from God, can we even imagine to be embodied in mortal words!

And yet, over against all these affecting and subduing demonstrations in his life, there were a great many Baffled expectation. things, we know, which, at the time, seemed even to discourage confidence in him. For example he was baffling always the expectations of his friends; they could hardly name an expectation, and they had abundance of them, which he did not forthwith take away, by the notification of some loss, or cross of dejection, which to them wore a look totally opposite to every feeling they had respecting the great Messiah. Not to multiply instances in which he tried their confidence by other methods, we pass directly to the two great closing facts of his life, his agony and crucifixion. His work is now done, and nothing remains, but to let others bring him to the murderous end they are planning to accomplish. His whole feeling is now loose upon him, respited by no occupation; and the dreadful burdens of concern for men, which his divine love, too strong for the body, rolls down upon him, press him, as it were, to the ground. He beholds the corporate curse, too, of the world’s evil and madness just ready to burst upon his person, and though he is not moved by fear, his pure innocence struggles heavily, with instinctive horror, before that retributive phrensy, which is going to baptize itself in his blood! No so grand mystery of divine feeling was ever before or after set before the gaze of mortals. But his friends are at no point of view, where they can even begin to conceive it. His person, his errand, his work, are as yet wholly beyond the reach even of their guesses. They have seen strange gleams of quality in him, they have been drawn, repelled, impressed, astounded and thoroughly posed by his mystery, and they only try to settle the whirl of their brain by calling him a great prophet, Messiah, the Christ, thinking him virtually always as a man. And now, in the agony, just after his triumphal entry into the city, when they look to see him rise and take on his kingship, he collapses in weakness, without any visible reason; falling on the ground, groaning, writhing, dripping in bloody sweat, like grapes in the wine-press, and calling on God and men for help, in meeting some unknown calamity that he does not name. It is as if he were just at the end of his pretensions, and struggling, as a convict might, under his impending doom. All heart is taken away from his disciples at once; their confidence in him is fatally broken; as we can plainly see in the fact that when he is arrested, an hour or two after, they forsake him utterly. Peter makes one or two wild slashes for him with his sword, and then he too is gone; only he will hang about the hall when the trial goes on, carefully denying his discipleship.