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The Christian Religion in Its Doctrinal Expression
Edgar Young Mullins

The Deity of Jesus Christ

1. A Necessary Article Of Faith

FOR the Christian believer the deity of Christ is a necessary article of faith for the following reasons:

1. First, Jesus works in us a divine result. There is an urgent necessity in Christian experience which cannot be ignored. We must either formally repudiate Christ as Redeemer, or go on and construe him as Redeemer. If he is not divine he has become a tremendous burden to Christianity. We must either estimate him as no more than a great teacher or a great saint, or else we must recognize in him God manifest in the flesh. For the believer there can be no hesitation. In his redeeming work in the Christian Jesus has done the following things: He has made religion a free and autonomous activity of man’s spirit in direct relations with God. He has created a world of spiritual realities for the redeemed man and holds him in stedfast communion with that world. He has revealed God as eternal Father, whose fundamental character is righteous love which ever seeks the lost. Jesus has also disclosed the inner being of God as a sphere in which that love is active in the relations between the eternal Father and the eternal Son.

2. This conviction that Christ is God, arising out of the redeeming activity of Christ, contains implicitly a group of great intuitions which lie at the heart of man’s spiritual life. It contains the psychological intuition of the self and the not-self, since it knows Another in the inner life of the soul. It contains the ethical intuition of right and wrong because the Christian’s choice of Christ is the supreme choice of duty as such. It contains the rational intuition in its twofold form as the perception of the distinction between truth and error, and of cause and effect. Christ as the truth is for the believer distinguished from all forms of error in the religious life. He is distinctly and explicitly recognized as the cause producing the effects in the morally transformed life. The several forms of the religious intuition are also involved in the experience of redemption through Christ: such as our sense of dependence of the finite upon the infinite; and also our sense of unrest and inner conflict which finds relief and inner blessedness through the discovery of the soul’s true object.

3. The Christian believer holds the deity of Christ for the further reason that his experience of God in Christ unifies and completes many lines of evidence. Logic and philosophy draw inferences from objective facts and arrive at rational belief in God. In our redemption in Christ we find God as a fact. The psychology of religion presents us the manifestations of the religious consciousness of man. But it leaves unsolved the problem of causes. Christ gives us the solution. Physical science deals with causation in the sense of continuity or the conservation of energy, and never rises above the chain of material forces. Our experience of redemption in Christ is an experience of free causation, in which through personal interaction Christ draws us to himself and becomes a transforming power within. The study of comparative religion introduces us to a great mass of interesting data, but leaves unsolved the problem of the unity, coherence, and finality of religion. Our experience in Christ brings all religious values to a focus and unifies the religious life and fulfils its highest ideals. The philosophy of religion seeks to apply the rational process to the phenomena of religion, but remains abstract and unstable until the thinker himself knows experientially the religious object. Our experience in Christ puts us in possession of the realities of the spiritual life and affords the material out of which the philosophy of religion may construct its world-view.

4. Our belief in the deity of Christ arises also from the fact that our redemption in him is not a merely individual experience. It is also social and historical. A new spiritual order arose with the Christian movement. It has continued through Christian history. The creeds of Christendom witness to the great fundamental facts. No one can understand Christian history without recognizing the centrality of Christ in the experience of the individual and of the church. Many errors and abuses have arisen. Many lapses from the lofty standards of Christ’s kingdom have occurred. But the great central truth remains. Jesus Christ stands at the heart of the whole movement.

5. Through the historical connections of faith we are brought back to the New Testament itself. There it is abundantly clear that the risen Jesus is everywhere regarded as the Lord of the church and the redeemer of man. His resurrection from the dead was a great crisis and turning-point in his Messianic work. It marked a new stage in the development of the divine purpose of redemption in and through him. It was the gospel of the risen Jesus that transformed the early disciples. By the side of the resurrection we must place certain other great facts which come to us through the synoptic records of his life and work. One of these is the sinlessness of Jesus. Another is his Messianic consciousness. Yet another is his self-disclosure as the religious object and final judge and only mediator between God and man. And finally, his unique relations as Son with the eternal Father.

On any critical view whatever as to the sources of the synoptic Gospels which is tenable, the above facts stand forth in great clearness. Certain forms of modern religious philosophy, in an abstract and unhistorical and uncritical manner, seek to eliminate some of the above elements. But if the Gospels are permitted to speak at all, they speak the message as we have outlined it. The message is clear and unequivocal.