8

The 'Son of Man.

As it had been addressed to the prophet Ezekielt, the title Son of Man seemed to contrast the frail and shortlived life of men with the boundless strength and the eternal years of the Infinite GOD. And as applied to Himself by Jesus, it doubtless expresses a real Humanity, a perfect and penetrating community of nature and feeling with the lot of human kind. Thus, when our Lord says that authority was given Him to execute judgment because He is the Son of Man, it is plain that the point of the reason lies, not in His being Messiah, but in His being Human. He displays a genuine Humanity which could deem nothing human strange, and could be touched with a feeling of the infirmities of the race which He was to judge. But the title Son of Man means more than this in its application to our Lord. It does not merely assert His real incorporation with our kind; it exalts Him indefinitely above us all as the representative, the ideal, the pattern Manx. He is, in a special sense, the Son of Mankind, the genuine offspring of the race. His is the Human Life which does justice to the idea of Humanity. All human history tends to Him or radiates from Him. He is the point in which humanity finds its unity; as St. Irenæus says, He 'recapitulates' ity. He closes the earlier history of our race; He inaugurates its future. Nothing local, transient, individualizing, national, sectarian, dwarfs the proportions of His world-embracing Character; He rises above the parentage, the blood, the narrow horizon which bounded, as it seemed, His Human Life; He is the Archetypal Man in Whose presence distinctions of race, intervals of ages, types of civilization, degrees of mental culture are as nothing. This sense of the title seems to be implied in such passages as that in which He contrasts 'the foxes which have holes, and the birds of the air which have nests,' with 'the Son of Man Who hath not where to lay His Head".' It is not the official Messiah, as

t

בן־אדם

i.e. mortal.' (Cf. Gesen. in voc. 8.) It is so used eightynine times in Ezekiel. Compare Num. xxiii. 19; Job xxv. 6, xxxv. 8. În this sense it occurs frequently in the plural. In Ps. viii. 4, 5 and lxxx. 17

it refers, at least ultimately, to our Lord.

u St. John v. 27; Heb. iv. 15.

X

x Urbild der Menscheit.' Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, p. 130, sqq. Mr. Keble draws out the remedial force of the title as signifying that Jesus was the very seed of the woman, the Second Adam promised to undo what the first had done.' Eucharistical Adoration, pp. 31-33.

y › Adv. Hær. III. 18. 1. 'Longam hominum expositionem in Se Ipso recapitulavit, in compendio nobis salutem præstans.'

z St. Matt. viii. 20; St. Luke ix. 58.

Real force of our Lord's question.

9

such; but 'the fairest among the children of men,' the natural Prince and Leader, the very prime and flower of human kind, Whose lot is thus harder than that of the lower creatures, and in Whose humiliation humanity itself is humbled below the level of its natural dignity.

As the Son of Man then, our Lord is the Messiah; He is a true member of our human race, and He is moreover its Pattern and Representative; since He fulfils and exhausts that moral Ideal to which man's highest and best aspirations have ever pointed onward. Of these senses of the term the first was the more popular and obvious; the last would be discerned as latent in it by the devout reflection of His servants. For the disciples the term Son of Man implied first of all the Messiahship of their Master, and next, though less prominently, His true Humanity. When then our Lord enquires 'Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?' He is not merely asking whether men admit what the title Son of Man itself imports, that is to say, the truth of His Humanity or the truth of His Messiahship. The point of His question is this:—what is He besides being the Son of Man? As the Son of Man, He is Messiah; but what is the Personality which sustains the Messianic office? As the Son of Man, He is truly Human but what is the Higher Nature with which this emphatic claim to Humanity is in tacit, but manifest contrast? What is He in the seat and root of His Being? Is His Manhood a robe which He has thrown around a Higher form of pre-existent Life, or is it His all? Has He been in existence some thirty years at most, or are the august proportions of His Life only to be meted out by the days of eternity? 'Whom say men that I the Son of Man am?'

;

The disciples reply, that at that time, in the public opinion of Galilee, our Lord was, at the least, a preternatural personage. On this point there was, it would seem, a general consent. The cry of a petty local envy which had been raised at Nazareth, 'Is not this the Carpenter's Son?' did not fairly represent the matured or prevalent opinion of the people. The people did not suppose that Jesus was in truth merely one of themselves, only endued with larger powers and with a finer religious instinct. They thought that His Personality reached back somehow into the past of their own wonderful history. They took Him for a saint of ancient days, who had been re-invested with a bodily form. He was the great expected miracle-working Elijah; or He was the disappointed prophet who had followed

ΙΟ

St. Peter's Confession.

His country to its grave at the Captivity; or He was the recently-martyred preacher and ascetic John the Baptist; or He was, at any rate, one of the order of the order which for four hundred years had been lost to Israel; He was one of the Prophets.

Our Lord turns from these public misconceptions to the judgment of that little Body which was already the nucleus of His future Church: 'But whom say ye that I am?' St. Peter replies, in the name of the other disciplesa, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.' In marked contrast to the popular hesitation which refused to recognise explicitly the justice of the claim so plainly put forward by the assumption of the title 'Son of Man,' the Apostle confesses, 'Thou art the Christ.' But St. Peter advances a step beyond this confession, and replies to the original question of our Lord, when he adds 'The Son of the Living God.' In the first three Evangelists, as well as in St. John, this solemn designation expresses something more than a merely theocratic or ethical relationship to God b. If St. Peter had meant that Christ was the Son of God solely in virtue of His membership in the old Theocracy, or by reason of His consummate moral glory, the confession would have

a St. Chrysostom, in loc., calls St. Peter τò στóμa tŵv åñootóλwv, 8 πανταχοῦ θερμός.

b See Lect. V. p. 246, sqq.

c The title of sons' is used in the Old Testament to express three relations to God. (1) God has entered into the relation of Father to all Israel (Deut. xxxii. 6; Isa. lxiii. 16), whence he entitles Israel 'My son,' 'My firstborn' (Exod. iv. 22, 23), when claiming the people from Pharaoh; and Ephraim, My dear son, a pleasant child' (Jer. xxxi. 20), as an earnest of restoration to Divine favour. Thus the title is used as a motive to obedience (Deut. xiv. 1); or in reproach for ingratitude (Ibid. xxxii. 5; Isa. i. 2, xxx. 1, 9; Jer. iii. 14); or especially of such as were God's sons, not in name only, but in truth (Ps. lxxiii. 15; Prov. xiv. 26; and perhaps Isa. xliii. 6). (2) The title is applied once to judges in the Theocracy (Ps. lxxxii. 6), ‘I have said, Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.' Here the title refers to the name Elohim, given to the judges as representing God in the Theocracy, and as judging in His Name and by His Authority. Accordingly to go to them for judgment is spoken of as going to Elohim (Deut. xvii. 9). (3) The exact phrase 'sons of God' is, with perhaps one exception (Gen. vi. 2), used of superhuman beings, who until the Incarnation were more nearly like God than were any of the family of men (Job i. 6, ii. 1, xxxviii. 7). The singular, 'My Son,' 'The Son,' is used only in prophecy of the Messiah (Ps. ii. 7, 12; and Acts xiii. 33; Heb. i. 5, v. 5), and in what is believed to have been a Divine manifestation, very probably of God the Son (Dan. iii. 25). The line of David being the line of the Messiah, culminating in the Messiah, as in David's One perfect Son, it was said in a lower sense of each member of that line, but in its

Modern interest in the subject.

II

involved nothing distinctive with respect to Jesus Christ, nothing that was not in a measure true of every good Jew, and that may not be truer far of every good Christian. If St. Peter had intended only to repeat another and a practically equivalent title of the Messiah, he would not have equalled the earlier confession of a Nathanaeld, or have surpassed the subsequent admission of a Caiaphase. If we are to construe his language thus, it is altogether impossible to conceive why 'flesh and blood' could not have 'revealed' to him so obvious and trivial an inference from his previous knowledge, or why either the Apostle or his confession should have been solemnly designated as the selected Rock on which the Redeemer would build His imperishable Church.

Leaving however a fuller discussion of the interpretation of this particular text, let us note that the question raised at Cæsarea Philippi is still the great question before the modern world. Whom do men say now that Jesus, the Son of Man, is ?

I. No serious and thoughtful man can treat such a subject with indifference. I merely do you justice, my brethren, when I defy you to murmur that we are entering upon a merely abstract discussion, which has nothing in common with modern human interests, congenial as it may have been to those whom some writers have learnt to describe as the professional wordwarriors of the fourth and fifth centuries. You would not be guilty of including the question of our Lord's Divinity in your catalogue of tolerabiles ineptiæ. There is that in the Form of the Son of Man which prevails to command something more than attention, even in an age so conspicuous for its boisterous self-assertion as our own, and in intellectual atmospheres as far as possible removed from the mind of His believing and adoring Church. Never since He ascended to His Throne was He the object of a more passionate adoration than now; never did He encounter the glare of a hatred more intense and more defiant: and between these, the poles of a contemplation incessantly directed upon His Person, there are shades and levels of thought and feeling, many and graduated, here detracting from the highest

full sense only of Messiah, 'I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to Me a Son' (2 Sam. vii. 14; Heb. i. 5; Ps. lxxxix. 27). The application of the title to collective Israel in Hos. xi. I, is connected by St. Matthew (üi. £5) with its deeper force as used of Israel's One true Heir and Representative. Cf. Mill, Myth. Interp. p. 330. Compare too the mysterious intimations of Prov. xxx. 4, Ecclus. li. 10, of a Divine Sonship internal to the Being of God. d St. John i. 49. e St. Matt. xxvi. 63.

I 2

Christ and modern culture.

expressions of faith, there shrinking from the most violent extremities of blasphemy. A real indifference to the claims of Jesus Christ upon the thoughts and hearts of men is scarcely less condemned by some of the erroneous tendencies of our age than by its characteristic excellences. An age which has a genuine love of historical truth must needs fix its eye on that august Personality which is to our European world, in point of creative influence, what no other has been or can be. An age which is distinguished by a keen æsthetic appreciation, if not by any very earnest practical culture of moral beauty, cannot but be enthusiastic when it has once caught sight of that incomparable Life which is recorded in the Gospels. But also, an antidogmatic age is nervously anxious to attack dogma in its central stronghold, and to force the Human Character and Work of the Saviour, though at the cost of whatever violence of critical manipulation, to detach themselves from the great belief with which they are indissolubly associated in the mind of Christendom. And an age, so impatient of the supernatural as our own, is irritated to the highest possible point of disguised irritability by the spectacle of a Life which is supernatural throughout, which positively bristles with the supernatural, which begins with a supernatural birth, and ends in a supernatural ascent to heaven, which is prolific of physical miracle, and of which the moral wonders are more startling than the physical. Thus it is that the interest of modern physical enquiries into the laws of the Cosmos or into the origin of Man is immediately heightened when these enquiries are suspected to have a bearing, however indirect, upon Christ's Sacred Person. Thus your study of the mental sciences, aye, and of philology, ministers whether it will or no to His praise or His dishonour, and your ethical speculations cannot complete themselves without raising the whole question of His Authority. And such is Christ's place in history, that a line of demarcation between its civil and its ecclesiastical elements seems to be practically impossible; your ecclesiastical historians are prone to range over the annals of the world, while your professors of secular history habitually deal with the central problems and interests of theology.

If Christ could have been ignored, He would have been ignored in Protestant Germany, when Christian Faith had been eaten out of the heart of that country by the older Rationalism. Yet scarcely any German 'thinker' of note can be named who has not projected what is termed a Christology. The Christ of Kant is the Ideal of Moral Perfection, and as such, we are told,