The Jesus of HistoryGlover, T. R. (Terrot Reaveley)
Religion
The Jesus of History
Glover, T. R. (Terrot Reaveley)
Jesus Christ -- Historicity
Jesus brings men back to the ultimate fact. Our views are too
short and too narrow. He would have us face God, see him and realize
him--think in the terms of God, look at things from God's point of
view, live in God and with God. In modern phrase, he breaks up our
dogmatism and puts us at a universal point of view to see things
over again in a new and true perspective.
How and where did he begin himself? Whence came his consciousness of
God, his gift for recognizing God? We do not know. The story of his
growth, his inward growth, is almost unrevealed to us. We are told
that he learnt "by the things which he suffered" (Heb. 5:8), and
that he "increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and
man" (Luke 2:52). Where does anyone begin, who takes us any great
distance? It is very hard to know. Where did our own thoughts of God
begin? What made them? How did they come? There is an inherited
element in them, but how much else? Whence came the inherited
element? How is it that to another man, with the same upbringing as
ours, everything is different, everything means more? Remark, at any
rate, in the teaching of Jesus, that there is no mysticism of the
type so much studied to-day. There is nothing in the least
"psychopathic" about him, nothing abnormal--no mystical vision of
God, no mystical absorption in God, no mystical union with God, no
abstraction, nothing that is the mark of the professed mystic. Yet
he speaks freely of "seeing God"; he lives a life of the closest
union with God; and God is in all his thoughts. A phrase like that
of Clement of Alexandria, "deifying into apathy we become monadic,"
is seas away from anything we find in the speech of Jesus. That is
not the way he preaches God. He is far more natural; and that his
followers accepted this naturalness, and drew him so, and gave his
teaching as he gave it, is a fresh pledge of the truthfulness of the
Gospels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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