Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 062:247 (Jul 1905)
Article: The Christocentric Theology: A Review And A Criticism
Author: John Wright Buckham

The Christocentric Theology: A Review And A Criticism

Prof. John Wright Buckham

1

The history of the human spirit is the history of an ageless and tireless search after ultimate truth. This is the real quest of the Holy Grail. Truth that is relative and peripheral, that comes short of the absolute, that does not lie at the very center and heart of reality,—the universe is full of that, and they who seek it find. But it does not meet the imperious craving of the deeper soul of man. Pursued by a divine unrest, humanity enters every avenue and explores every realm of truth in search of this supreme verity. The world without and the world within suffer violence for the truth’s sake. Door after door has flown open before the persistent probing of natural science. Secret after secret has yielded itself up, and yet science is as far from the ultimate truth as ever. Philosophy has fared far into the boundless mysteries of the life of the mind, and caught glimpses of the truth of truth, but philosophy, too, is baffled and unsatisfied for want of some principle or some Person who will solve the problem of the ultimate meaning of existence. With Plato, she still waits for one, “be it God or God-inspired man, who will teach us our religious duties and take away the darkness from our eyes.” What if, as of old, there standeth One among us whom philosophy knows not! It is possible that philosophy and psy-

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chology, which have hitherto left Christ wholly unheeded, may find in his unique consciousness an unexpected factor in the solution of their problems.

2

“Man is the measure of all things,” was one of the pro-foundest words of ancient philosophy. What if that were true in an even profounder sense than he who said it dreamed! What if there were one Man so much nobler, more normal, more perfect, than all his fellows, as to become the standard of attainment and the goal of progress? Would not He, by the very fact of his supremacy, be the true measure of all things? Surely He would be the measure of humanity, for it is impossible to understand mankind save through the highest exponent. He would also be the Revealer of God, since God can be understood only through human manifestation. Of Nature, too, He would be the key, since Nature can only be understood through one whose perfect accord with her Author enables him to interpret her ultimate meaning.

If, as Lewes says, “we can understand the amoeba and the polyp only by a light reflected from the study of man,” and if we can understand man only through the perfect man. Christology and Science cannot be wholly unrelated.

It is a colossal claim, almost overwhelming in its scope and daring, that Jesus Christ is thus central in knowledge, in history, and in life. And yet the conviction has emerged again and again, in one form and another, in the history of thought, and steadily and inevitably we of to-day seem to be led toward a new and vastly larger affirmation of it in what has come to be known as the Christocentnc Theology. With wide-open eyes to all that this centrality of Christ involves, in the reading of human history, in the interpretation of the universe, in the

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apprehension of God, men of the profoundest thought and widest scholarship are turning to the Christocentric view, not as a scheme to re-enthrone Christianity, but in disinterested sincerity, as affording the only sufficient and satisfying solution of the problem of existence. To a brief sketch of the rise and progress of this Christocentric theology, let us first attend, and then to a consideration of its chief omission,—an omission that mars its self-consi...