Gospels

'The theology of the gospels!' some will exclaim in dismay, 'and we verily thought the gospels were a refuge from theology!' This is an attitude towards the religion of Jesus Christ and its records with which it is often impossible not to feel a certain sympathy. To be deep in the history of the church, and especially of its creeds, is for many just persons to acquire a more or less legitimate suspicion of theology in connection with the vital religion which breathes upon them as they turn back to the simple pages of the gospels. They know, or think they know, what theology has been and done; in a number of cases its services to Christianity seem to have been accompanied by results which are irrelevant, if not positively injurious, to such faith in the living Christ as the gospels commend; its associations have been so generally with intellectualism and formalism, with a stereotyped presentation of the Christian religion in the phraseology and categories of some philosophical system, which rapidly became a source of embarrassment to ordinary people, that it is not altogether surprising to catch a persistent sense of relief in the popular conviction that the gospels at any rate leave no room for the intrusion of theology, and at the same time to detect a corresponding sense of resentment when that conviction is challenged or modified.

Nearly forty years ago a German critic published a rather bitter and despairing monograph upon what he called Die Christlichkeit der heutigen Theologie. His thesis was that theology had invariably played the traitor to Christianity, that no theology could be called Christian, and that theology had, in fact, destroyed the Christian religion. The spirit of this protest is shared by many who would not agree with its arguments or objects. So far as the New Testament is concerned, they would be perfectly willing to let Paul's theology go, but they would claim the gospels as documents of religion and not of theology, documents of the faith in its pure, pre-theological phase. Theology is the theory of a religion; it stands to personal faith as the theory of aesthetics stands to poetry, as botany to life in the field or garden. Theology is listening to what man has to say about God; personal religion, on the other hand, is man listening to God, and this is what the gospels mean. To speak of 'the theology of the gospels' is a contradiction in terms.

Nevertheless, it is reasonable to speak of the theology of the gospels. There is theology behind even their most spontaneous pages, and they do not cease on that account to be gospels. We may even add, it is because they mirror an experience which tends to become conscious of its issues in history and nature, that they are gospels.

The reluctance to admit this is based upon an antipathy to theology in general, which is not unintelligible, and which is by no means confined to the place of the unlearned. Theologies have tended to insist upon the acceptance of doctrines as if they possessed some virtue in themselves which enabled them to become practically a substitute for the life of personal experience which they interpret. Is it so with the theology of the gospels? Upon the contrary, the reverse is the case. Such a tendency may be felt, it is true, within the theology of the Fourth gospel, but the motto for all the four gospels might be found not unfairly in the words used by the writer of the Fourth to define his purpose : These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his Name. They are interpretations of Christ, written from faith and for faith, in order to inspire and instruct Christian life within the churches; they are not documents which interpose doctrines between the soul and Jesus. From one point of view it is hardly adequate or even accurate to speak about 'the testimony' of the gospels. That phrase suggests a subject or person who is in need of testimony, whose character and claims require to be authenticated before a suspicious and uncertain audience. Now, it is true that there is an apologetic element in the gospels which corresponds to this idea.