Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 53:210 (Apr 1896)
Article: Studies In Christology
Author: Frank Hugh Foster

BSac 53:210 (April 1896) p. 250

Studies In Christology1

Prof. Frank Hugh Foster

IX.

The Biblical Facts

We now approach in these studies the center of the problem. It has been remarked that “It is only when men are firmly convinced that Christ is God that the problem suggested by his human nature will press upon their minds and demand consideration.” But such is the immemorial conviction of the church. And yet it is conceivable, improbable as it may be, that the church was all along mistaken in this belief, and that Christ is not really God; and, hence, that the christological problem has no real foundation in facts for which a reconciliation is required. We must revert, therefore, to the beginning of our subject ere we can enter upon the dogmatic discussion of the union of the two natures in Christ, and ask the question anew for ourselves, Whether we are to believe, in this nineteenth century, and with all the light upon the Scriptures and upon every other appropriate source of information which we possess, in the proper deity of Jesus Christ. Let us begin with the Scripture teaching.

The earliest source of biblical teaching which is afforded us in the New Testament, according to the divisions of “biblical theology” so-called, are the discourses of Jesus. Even the three synoptic Gospels furnish evidence of some reflection by their writers upon the story they have to tell, objective as

BSac 53:210 (April 1896) p. 251

they are in most of their representations. The evidences of the wonder which Jesus excited, and of the display in him of a something which was more than ordinary humanity, with the innocent art by which it is sought to produce like impressions on the reader, are examples of this element contributed by the writers of the synoptics to the simple narrative they have to give. But the discourses of Jesus are not thus modified. They are an objective report. And they are the primary, as they are the highest, source we possess. It is the merit of the recent writers in biblical theology, of Wendt and Beyschlag, as well as of the more conservative Nösgen, to have shown that in their teachings the discourses of the Fourth Gospel harmonize entirely with those of the first three. The picture of Jesus Christ given by himself according to these four witnesses is one.

Neither the designation of himself by Jesus as Son of man nor as Son of God was intended to indicate directly his deity. The former was a somewhat indirect, but an unequivocal, expression of his claim to be the Messiah of the Old Testament; the latter expressed the peculiarly intimate relation of love and communion in which he stood with the Father. The expression “Son of David “poi...