Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/858

Rh The doc- preted in a purely spiritual sense} triﬂe Of doctrine here enunciated on faith. faith. 834 N o less spiritual is the As elsewhere in this Gospel (i. 50; iii. 1, 2; iv. 39-41 ; xx. 29; and, if rightly considered, vi. 536), the author lightly esteems belief based on “mighty works” or wonders. The right faith is that of the Samaritans, who, rising out of the lower wondcr—faitli, attain to the higher faith which comes from hearing Christ (iv. 42). For to this, and to no other testimony, does Christ, in the Fourth Gospel, make His ultimate appeal. Christ does not indeed despise the testimony of John to Himself, but He does not accept it as a ﬁnal basis for the true faith (v. 32-34). IIe appeals to the Scriptures, it is true, but rather as an unerring guide to the true source of faith than as being of themselves able to generate faith in the reader (v. 39). What then is the living ﬁnal testimony to which He appeals’! It is to IIis “works,”——not the “mighty works,” or “wonders,” but all “the works (épya) which the Father hath given Me to do,” meaning the whole of His life, and including both words and deeds. In other words, the Fourth Gospel appeals to that which we should call the inﬂuence of the life of Jesus, but which the evangelist better calls the “ Spirit” of Jesus, passing from Jesus to His disciples, and from those disciples to others who had not seen J esus—as the ﬁnal testimony, convincing every honest heart, and generating in every conscience that loves the light a belief in Jesus as the true Light. Iu the synoptists, “faith ” is, for the most part, that half physical thrill of trust in the presence of Jesus which enables the limbs of a paralysed man to make the due physical response to the emotional shock consequent on the word “ arise,” so that in the strength of that shock the paralytic is enabled to shake off the disease of many years; or, at the highest, it is a thrill through the inner being, whereby the soul shakes off the burden of sin. But in the Fourth iospel faith implies even more than in Paul's Epistles; it is a faculty that tests, transmntes, and develops the recipient soul; it means a trust in Christ, not only as a sacriﬁce, nor as propitiation, nor as iniracle-worker, nor as Son of God, but as source and object of all love, and the be-all and end-all of every human life. If such a Being is best expressed by “ Word,” then the human receptiveness of such a Being will be best expressed by the metaphor of “hearing.” Accordingly the Samaritans believe, not because of miracles, nor because He told the woman “all that ever she did,” but because they had enjoyed His pre- sence for two days, and had heard Him. “Now we believe, not because of thy saying; for we have heard Him our- selves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.” Here we have at last a doctrine not bor- rowed from Philo, a doctrine that constitutes the great difference between Philo’s philosophy and the religion of the Fourth Gospel, making the latter a powerful and life- inspiring motive for all classes of men, while the former remains a barren philosophy ﬁt only for meditative hermits. For in Philo, faith, as in the Old Testament (Lightfoot, Galatians, pp. 1 5 4-162), has a passive meaning—trustworthi- ness, stability, constancy,—rather than the active meaning of trust, by which the lower nature is raised to the level Of the higher; the “dog” to the level of “ man ” (Bacon, Essa]/8, xvi. 79); the man to the level of Christ, and, throiigh Christ, to God (1 Cor. iii. 23). Faith, in Philo, is a prize rather than an effort, a harbour rather than a voyage ; it is “ the only _sure and infallible good, the solace of life, the fulﬁlment of worthy hopes” (Lightfoot, G'al., p. 158) ; whereas, in the New Testament, it is the faculty by which one is able to trust in Christ, to love Christ, and to serve Christ—a faculty implying continuous effort, loyal and enthusiastic service, and progressive activity. The 1 Compare Philo, .De Profugis, 10, “Some that are living are «lead ; and some that are dead live.” GOSPELS [FOURTH GOSPEL. nearest approach in Philo to the Pauline and J ohannine faith is perhaps in the words that describe it as “the entire amelioration of the soul which leans for support on Him who is the cause of all things, who is able to do all things, and willeth to do those which are most excellent ” (Eb. p. 158) ; but even this, though the same in theory, is very different in practice from the faith of the New Testament. 1"or—faith being neutral and colourless and taking its colour from its objcct—how different must needs be even the faith that is based upon the things that are “most excellent ” from the faith that rises to the Father through such a one as Jesus of Nazareth, concerning whom even the most incredulous must admit that He made peace in man's troubled heart, banished sin from those who trusted in Iliin, and “constrained” (2 Cor. v. 14) even His bitterest perse- cutor to join in laying the foundations of His empire.‘-’ In the discourse that follows the miracle of the feeding of the ﬁve thousand,3 it is noteworthy that the author speaks of the eucharistic food not as the Lord’s body and blood, but as His “flesh” and blood. Most characteristi- cally: for “ flesh ” is, as in Paul’s epistles, a principle, an element, and the author desires to show that the Lord’s ﬂesh and blood are the only satisfying element for the human soul. He has before spoken of blood and ﬂesh and man (i. 13) as antagonistic elements to the divine elements; now he wishes to point out the divine elements themselves, and they are the ﬂesh and blood of the Word, who “became ﬂesh” (i. 14, crc‘ip.f e’-ye’:/cro) for men. Here, as before, we must add that the use of this language—“Whoso eateth My ﬂesh and drinketh My blood ”—in a public dis- course is quite unlike anything in the synoptists, and though it represents the essence of the teaching of the Lord’s supper, somewhat ampliﬁed, it can hardly be considered in its chronological, or even perhaps in its artistic place, as a public discourse here. Yet it is necessarily placed here to account for the desertion of many of His fol lowers. plained. stitution of His Kingdom, alienating, step by step, the Pharisees, Herod, the patriots or Galileans, the followers of John the Baptist, and at last the whole of His country- men, till He is compelled to ﬂee from Herod to the neighbourhood of Czcsarea Philippi, where, as an exile with no more than twelve other outcast companions, He who had never revealed Himself to be the Messiah ﬁnds, upon questioning His disciples, that they have been led by the divine guidance to the sense that He and He alone nmst needs be their Iledeemcr; so that the seed of ‘-3 It is a remarkable fact that this evangelist never uses the noun -/rr'a'-rig, which is frequently used by the synoptists, while he uses the verb -/rurreiﬁew about twice as often as it is used by all the synoptists put together. He appears to prefer to contemplate faith, not as in itself a virtue, but rather as a mental act or state taking its quality from its object. Note also that he seems to distinguish between 1ria"rei'Iew ,um and -/mr-rei’:ew eis e’p.s'. The former is generally used in questions and negations (v. 38; viii. 45, 46; x. 38), or else of temporary and pro- gressive trust, c._r]., trust in God, in the word of Jesus, or in the Scriptures ; all of which are regarded as preparatory acts leading to that ﬁnal state of trust which can only be obtained by coming to Jesus (iv. 50 i v. 24; v. 46; v. 47 (bis); x. 38). The latter (1ru:r1’ei'IeuI eis) denotes the ﬁnal state of ﬁxed trust and repose on Jesus, and it is only once used by the synoptists (Matth. xviii. 6; ?Mk. ix. 42). 3 Nothing has been said here about the difference of John’s chrono- logy from that of the synoptists, because, if the Fourth Gospel is a spiritual rather than an historical composition, it is scarcely to be expected that its chronology should be limited by historical consi- derations; and, in any case, the subject is too large a one to be dis- cussed liere. Canon Westcott remarks (Gospels, p. 285) that “ a very strong case has been made out by Mr Browne (Ordo Sccclorum) for the limitation of the Lord's ministry to a single year. If there were direct evidence for the omission of 1-22 1ra'.a'Xa in John vi. 4, his argu- ments would appear to be convincing.” The context suggests that the words 1-?) mitrxa may not improbably be an insertion based on a sense of the spiritual meaning of the narrative rather than on history. In the synoptists the desertion is otherwise ex— 'l‘h There we see Jesus, as He develops the coii— f“;"