WHY God became man we shall consider in the second part of this book, together with certain precisions as to what is meant by the truth that Christ is God and some of the immeasurable things that flow from it. Our present concern is simply with the new way opened to man for the knowledge of God by the sheer fact of the Incarnation, the fact that at a given moment of history God took to Himself a human nature and made it so utterly His own that, remaining God without diminution or dimming of His Divinity, He was still truly man, and remains forever man. To know that Christ is God sheds a great light upon Christ as we shall see; for the moment our concern is with the light it sheds upon God.
It is worth stating explicitly why this new way to the knowledge of God is so vast and vital. Apart from the Incarnation, man could know of God only in God's nature. Man could, for example, know God as Infinite Power, creating the universe from nothing, and this is true knowledge and very valuable. But if it is true knowledge, it is undeniably rather remote knowledge. We have in ourselves no experience of creating anything at all from nothing, none of the insight that comes from shared experience. We have no notion of what is involved in creating something from nothing and only the most shadowy notion, born of reflection and not of experience, of what is meant by being infinite. For such things we have in ourselves no measuring-rod. But to see God not simply in His own nature, but being and doing and suffering in OUR nature, is a very different matter. And reading the Gospels that is precisely what we do see? God obeying His mother, God paying taxes, God receiving hospitality, God receiving insults, God tormented by hunger and thirst, God loving, God angry: and these things we can measure, for we have done them all ourselves.
In all this first part, we are in search of light upon God as He is in Himself. Christ Our Lord gives us a great flood of light by what He has to tell us about God, as we shall see in a moment; but with all reverence we may feel that He gives us more light upon God by being than by saying.
This, I think, explains something about Our Lord's way of revealing the primary fact about Himself which puzzles many readers of the Gospels. They feel that He made an unnecessary mystery about it: if He was God, it would surely have been simpler for Him to say so in the plainest words at the very outset of His mission. So people say, believers in His Divinity as an expression of puzzlement, unbelievers as a challenge to the truth of the doctrine. Notice, at any rate, that Our Lord's action in this matter was of set policy: He did, quite deliberately, make a certain mystery about Who and What He was. His enemies felt it. We have the Jews demanding indignantly:
How long wilt thou go on keeping us in suspense? If thou art the Christ, tell us openly. (John x. 24.)
But it was not only from His enemies that the full knowledge was long held. Between the Birth in Bethlehem and the Death on Calvary there is probably no single episode of Our Lord's life better known than the scene by the lake at Caesarea Philippi, when Peter answered and said:
Thou art Christ the Son of the Living God;
and Jesus answered him:
Blessed art thou, Simon son of Jona; it is not flesh and blood, it is My Father Who is in Heaven that has revealed this to thee. And I tell thee this in My turn: that thou art Peter, and it is upon this rock that I will build my Church; and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.
In the splendour of this climax, we tend to see what went before it rather in shadow. However often we have read the passage, the mind leaps forward to this, and thus is in danger of missing a good deal of the light in what immediately leads up to it. We remember of course St. Peter's great answer. If we press our memory a little harder, we remember what question St. Peter was answering: but it may be doubted if many of us see how very startling a question it was. For Our Lord had asked the Apostles:
Who do you say that I am?
Realize that these were the men who had been His inseparable companions so long: and yet so late in their companionship He could ask them Who they thought He was. Clearly He had not told them; just as clearly He had had good reason for not telling them.
The reason, one may in all reverence surmise, why He did not begin by telling either His friends or His enemies that He was God was that they were Jews, and the Jews believed in God. It is only an age deficient in the realization of God's majesty that could be surprised that Christ Jesus should only gradually have led men to the realization of a truth, which such men would find so shattering. I have already spoken of our modern tendency to treat God as an equal, or at any rate to overlook the immeasurable difference between His infinity and our finitude. In such an atmosphere, men think with a certain naivety of God as an interesting person to meet, and of themselves happily engaging in an interchange of views with Him upon the running of His universe, they making their suggestions and God explaining His difficulties and everybody feeling the better for the interchange. In such an atmosphere nothing seems more natural than that God should simply introduce Himself, and with the minimum of ceremony.
I have called this naive, and naive it is to the point of drivelling. No Jew of Our Lord's day, however sinful he might have been, would have felt like that for an instant. If Christ Our Lord had begun with the announcement that He was God, and they had believed Him, they would simply have fallen flat on their faces and never got up. To men with their awareness of the majesty of God, the truth that Christ was God had to be broken very gradually or it would have broken them. If we read the Gospels with this in mind, we can see how marvellously Our Lord brought the Apostles to realization. His method was not to tell them, but to bring them to a point where they would tell Him. They saw Him doing things and heard Him saying things? things that only God had a right to do (like forgiving sins and supplementing the law God had given on Sinai), things that only God could truthfully say ("I and the Father are one"; "Before Abraham was made, I am"; "No one knows the Son but the Father and no one knows the Father but the Son"); they reflected upon what they had seen and heard; and a wild hypothesis began to form in their minds; and at times they felt surer of it as certain things seemed incapable of any lesser explanation, and again at times they felt unsure, as certain things could not be fitted at all into their present concept of God. But with all this advance and recoil, the sum of their movement was advance: and at last came St. Peter's confession:
Thou art Christ, Son of the Living God,
rewarded so marvelously by Our Lord as we have seen. Yet as far as the words of Peter go, they contain nothing that has not been said by another Apostle at the very first calling of the Apostles. For Nathanael had said (John i.49):
Thou, Master, art the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel.
What difference did Christ Our Lord see between the confession of Nathanael, and the confession of Peter? Partly, we may suppose, the difference lay in this: that St. Peter's confession was a true act of faith, made under the impulsion of the grace of God?
It is not flesh and blood, but my Father Who is in Heaven that has revealed this to thee.
Nathanael's confession was an act of human reason; Christ had just made a mysterious reference to a fig tree, obviously some incident Nathanael thought known only to himself, and the only way he could rationally account for Christ's knowing it was to assume that Christ must be more than man. Similarly we find all the Apostles reaching out towards a supernatural explanation when Our Lord calmed the storm with a word; and they said one to another:
Who is this, who is obeyed even by the winds and the sea? (Mark iv. 40.)
But bit by bit their human reason was bringing them to see that there could be only the one explanation - was bringing them, that is, to the point where their minds were ready to receive the impulsion of God's grace and make the act of Faith, after which they held the truth not by human reason, which of itself can go on wavering endlessly, but with the sure support of the grace of God. That point Peter reached first.
Nor was that the only difference between Peter's confession and Nathanael's. In Peter's words there was a far fuller content of meaning: they look toward that moment when St. Thomas, totally renouncing his too human doubt, cried out to Jesus:
My Lord, and my God.
Today it is almost a distinguishing mark of Catholics that they see a real function for the Apostles. In non-Catholic writing, no more important function can be found for them than to be foils to the brilliancy of their Master, which is to say fools asking their foolish questions to bring out the wisdom of His answers, very much the function of Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Yet they meant something very important to Our Lord?
You have not chosen Me, I have chosen you.
And even if we hold it not surprising that those Christians who have lost the sense of the divinely-founded hierarchical structure of the Church should not see the function of the Apostles as the first members of that hierarchy, it is still surprising that any Christian should overlook this other function to which we have been leading up. For these were the men who knew Christ before they knew He was God. Had they known from the beginning, they might simply have feared Him, and fear would have made a bar to any progress in intimacy. But by the time they knew beyond the possibility of uncertainty that He was God, it was too late to have only fear. For by the time they knew He was God, they had come to know that He was love. If they had known that Christ was God first, then they would have applied their idea of God to Christ; as it was, they were able to apply their knowledge of Christ to God. The principal fruit for them and for us of their three years of companionship with Him was the unshakeable certainty of His love for men; and it was St. John, the Apostle He loved best, who crystallized the whole experience for us in the phrase of his first Epistle,
God is Love. (iv. 8.)
We may ask why the Jews did not know this already, for God had shown them His love often enough, and in the Old Testament His love is wonderfully stated.
The Lord is compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and plenteous in mercy (Psalm cii. 8);
that is strong enough, yet it is not the strongest thing of its sort. In Isaias (xlix.15) there is a phrase which would seem to reach the very limit of divine tenderness:
Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? And if she should forget, yet will I not forget thee.
The truth is that love arises and abides most easily and naturally where there is community of nature, and until God took our nature and became man that way did not exist: God-made-man could love us with human love? and this, though a lesser thing than divine love, can be very comforting to our weakness. Nowhere in the Old Testament did it occur to anyone to call God what they were to call God-made-man, " the friend of sinners". The Jews knew that God had spoken to man and done great things for man, but He had not BEEN man.
The moral for us is simple: in our approach to God we are helped enormously by seeing Him in our nature; and for the mind this means a continual study of Christ whereby the Apostles' experience of Him becomes our own personal experience, their intimacy becomes our intimacy. We cannot always analyse intimacy; but there is no mistaking it: we know the person quite differently. You do not learn intimacy, or reap the fruit of someone else's. You grow into it. In the Gospels one really can grow into this intimacy with Our Lord, precisely because the evangelists do not obtrude their own personalities. Anyhow, know Him we must. There is no other way to full knowledge of God, Christ has said so. In other words we have to vivify all that hard thinking about the Infinite by the closest companionship with Our Lord Jesus Christ. By both the mind grows towards the knowledge of God, which is its health. At first we may find one more instance of an experience we have had already namely the difficulty of getting two apparently dissimilar things into the one picture. We can think with ease and joy about Christ Our Lord, we can exercise our minds with no ease at all and precious little joy upon the Infinite, but our problem is to realize the two as one God. The solution is as before, to use our mind with all its might upon both, and bit by bit we shall begin to find that one sheds light upon the other, and we begin at least in glimpses to see that it is but the one light.
As a practical matter then,
it is to be recommended that the user of this
book will accompany all the rest of his reading and thinking
by a steady reading
of the Gospels,
steadily reminding himself at each incident and each phrase
of Our Lord
that He Who said this and did this
is God Himself,
Infinite Existence.
This is the way to make the philosophy come alive.
Francis Thompson has said that no pagan ever saw the same tree as Wordsworth;
it is certainly truer to say that no pagan ever saw the same Infinity and Eternity
and Immensity as we who have seen God companioning with men.
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One result of this reading of the Gospels will be to find what Our Lord showed us about God by being God. Another will be to find what Our Lord shows us about God by what He has to say of God. There is a lot to be said for making one's own list of the texts in which Christ Our Lord tells us of God, grasping them in their context and returning to them again and again . Most of them, naturally, treat of God in His dealings with and judgments of the human race. Save perhaps in the proportion of statements about God's love to statements about His justice, it would be hard to find among these anything that has not already been told us in the Old Testament. There is a new atmosphere, but if it is impossible not to feel the difference, it is almost impossible to lay a precise finger on it - if one happens to know the Old Testament at all well: everything makes us realize how vast a communication about Himself God had already given His chosen people.
In a handful of statements Our Lord covers the ground of the philosophers: God is a spirit (John iv. 24); He is perfect (Mt. v. 48); He dwells in secret (Mt. vi. 18); He is good and He only (Mt. xix. 17); to Him all things are possible (Mt. xix. 26); He has never ceased working, that is maintaining creation in being (Jn. v. 44); He is the one only God (Mk. xii. 29-33). It is a vast reassurance to the mind to have God as it were ratifying the words with which human language has tried to utter Him. It is true that no word of human speech, no concept of the human mind, is adequate; but word and concept are not therefore useless, for God has used them. We may have precious little notion of what they mean in an infinite nature, but the little is precious. They do not give all light, but light-giving they are. God uses them for that.
Our Lord uses them: God had already used them: for not here either do we find anything that is not in the Old Testament. But there is a third sort of statement, which does constitute a new element in God's revelation of Himself to men. As we read what Our Lord tells us of God, we are bound to become conscious of two elements constantly recurring, and recurring in combination - the element of ONENESS and the element of PLURALITY.
I say that this was new. There are in the Old Testament stray hints and gleams of it, but they are no more than that. Thus in the first chapter of Genesis, God says (verse 26)
Let us make man to our image and likeness,
and in the next verse we read,
And God made man to his image and likeness:
the plural words "us" and "our" seem to suggest that there were several persons; the singular word "his" that they were somehow one. I do not mean that the human writer of Genesis knew how apt to the reality of God were the words he wrote: but God Who inspired him knew it. Anyhow it did not strike the Jews, even by Christ's day, as requiring any special comment. To us again there is something fascinating in the fact that the word for God,"Elohim" is plural: yet it takes a verb in the singular and, if an adjective goes with it, that is in the singular too. But again it did not strike the Jews, or the Canaanites (who had the same usage), that this had any special significance. Of another sort, there are descriptions of Wisdom which seem to suggest a second person within the Godhead, for example,
And Thy wisdom with Thee, which knoweth Thy works, which then also was present with Thee when Thou madest the world (Wisdom ix.9).
If this is no more than a way of saying that God did not lack the attribute of wisdom at the time when He made the world, it seems a rather elaborate way of stating an obvious truth. To us who have heard Our Lord's explicit revelation, such things are full of suggestion. But they did not lead the Jews, nor were they of a sort inescapably to lead them, to the truth that God, remaining one, is yet in some mysterious way more than one. To a truth so astounding, indeed, one must be led inescapably or one will not arrive there at all. It is not the sort of truth that one will leap to embrace on a mere hint.
Our Lord did not stop at a hint. As I have said, He insists on an element of plurality, returning to it again and again. There is of course no faintest mitigation of the utter monotheism of the Jews. Our Lord quotes God's own revelation to them:
Hear, O Israel: the Lord thy God is One God.
But there is a new element of more-than-oneness which does not contradict the oneness but somehow enriches it. Thus (John x.30) He says
I and the Father are One.
Here there is clearly a statement of two who are yet one. In the last two verses of St. Matthew's gospel we find Our Lord saying:
Baptizing them in the NAME of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Here we have plurality again, this time three, yet the unity is stated in the use of the word "name", not "names".
This combination of oneness and plurality is most evident in Our Lord's discourse to the Apostles at the Last Supper. The whole of this discourse, from the fourteenth chapter of St. John to the seventeenth, should be read and read again: everything is in it. But for the moment our concern is with these two elements in what Our Lord has to tell us of the Godhead. In this discourse the special note is what can only be called a certain interchangeability. What I mean by this will appear from some examples. Thus in the fourteenth chapter we find Philip the Apostle saying to Our Lord:
Let us see the Father,
and Our Lord answering him:
Whoever has seen Me, has seen the Father.
We find this same notion, which I have been driven to call clumsily interchangeability, in what Our Lord has to say of answer to prayer, the sending of the Holy Ghost, God's abiding in our souls. Thus He says (John xvi.23):
If you ask the Father anything in My name, He will give it to you.
But He had already said (John xiv.14):
If you shall ask Me anything in My name, that I will do.
Of the sending of the Holy Ghost, He had said (John xiv.16):
I will ask the Father and He shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you forever.
Thus the Father is to send the Holy Ghost. But a little later (John xvi.7) Our Lord says: "If I go, I will send the Paraclete to you."
We have just heard Our Lord saying that the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, is to abide with us forever; but a few verses later, in answer to a question of St. Jude, Our Lord says:
If anyone love Me He will keep My word and my Father will love him and We will come to him and will make our abode with him.
Heaven knows what His hearers made of all this as they heard the words come
from His lips.
What He was revealing was the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity.
He revealed it because He wanted us to know it.
We must try.
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