Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/97

 fact that this divine presence is essentially identical with what is human.

Christ calls Himself the Son of God and the Son of Man; these titles are to be taken in their strict meaning. The Arabs mutually describe themselves as the son of a certain tribe; Christ belongs to the human race; that is His tribe. Christ is also the Son of God; it is possible to explain away by exegesis the true sense of this expression, the truth of the Idea, what Christ has been for His Church, and the higher Idea of the truth which has been found in Him in His Church, and to say that all the children of men are children of God, or are meant to make themselves children of God, and so on.

Since, however, the teaching of Christ taken by itself belongs to the world of ordinary figurative ideas only, and takes to do with inner feeling and disposition, it is supplemented by the representation of the Divine Idea in His life and fate. That Kingdom of God, as constituting the content of Christ’s teaching, is at first the Idea in a general form, represented as yet in a general conception; it is by means of this individual man that it enters into the region of reality, so that those who are to reach that Kingdom can do it through that one individual.

The primary point is, to start with, the abstract correspondence between the acts, deeds, and sufferings of this teacher, and His own teaching, the fact that His life was wholly devoted to carrying it out, that He did not shun death, and that He sealed His faith by His death. The fact that Christ became a martyr for the truth has an intimate connection with His appearing thus on the earth. Since the founding of the Kingdom of God is in direct contradiction with the actually existing State, which is based on a different view of religion, and which ascribes a different character to it, the fate of Christ, whereby—to put it in human language—He became a martyr for the truth, is in close connection with the manner of His appearing above referred to.