Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/29



{{c|

BOOK I
}}

It has been said above that in the New Testament we are confronted with a religious life in which everything is determined by Christ, and the question we have to consider is whether this is really so. Is there such a thing as New Testament Christianity, a spiritual phenomenon with a unity of its own, and is this unity constituted by the common attitude of all Christian souls to Christ?

The instinctive answer of those who have been brought up in the Christian faith is in the affirmative. They cannot doubt that New Testament Christianity is one consistent thing. They are equally at home in all parts of the New Testament; they recognise throughout in it the common faith, the faith which gives Jesus the name which is above every name. This instinctive assurance of the unity of the New Testament is not disturbed by even the keenest sense of the differences which persist along with it. Criticism is a science of discrimination, and the critical study of the New Testament has had the greater part of its work to do in bringing into relief the distinctions in what was once supposed to be a uniform and dead level. The science of New Testament theology, if it is a science, has defined the various types of primitive teaching by contrast to one another; it has taught us