The Testimony of Christ: His Divine Filiation and the Redemptive Value of His Death

Article II — Testimony of Christ Regarding His Divine Filiation and the Redemptive Value of His Death

I. Heterodox opinions. The Modernist position, condemned among the propositions of Lamentabili, holds that the divinity of Christ is nowhere actually proved from the Gospels, but is rather a dogma that Christian feeling gradually deduced from the idea of the Messiah; that in every Gospel text the title “Son of God” is simply equivalent to “Messiah,” and by no means implies that Christ is the true and natural Son of God; and that the whole teaching on the expiatory death of Christ is not evangelical at all but purely Pauline in origin.

Many Rationalists — Renan, Weiss, Wendt, Harnack among them — go somewhat further, acknowledging in Christ a genuine “divine filiation” higher than mere Messiahship, while still denying that Jesus, in virtue of that filiation, is true God. Renan famously wrote that Jesus was simply the individual who had taken the greatest step of any man toward divinity. Our Lord is in fact called “Son of God” in the Gospels more than fifty times, and the phrase must be read in context: taken in a wide sense, it applies to any upright and God-fearing person; taken in its strict sense, it is reserved for the Second Person of the Trinity, “the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” (John 1:18); and it is sometimes used loosely as a rough equivalent for “Messiah” by those — such as the unclean spirits Christ silenced — who had not yet grasped His true divinity (Mark 3:12). But in the Synoptic Gospels themselves it is certain that Jesus declared Himself to possess the divine nature outright, and not merely, as good Christians do, to participate in it by grace — the sense in which St. Peter describes believers as “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).

II. The Synoptic Gospels.

(A) Christ claimed rights and privileges belonging to God alone. Seven distinct instances may be noted. (1) He claimed to be greater than any mere creature — greater than Jonah and Solomon (Matt. 12:41–42), greater than David, who called Him “Lord” (Mark 12:36), greater than Moses and Elijah, who attended Him at the Transfiguration (Matt. 17:3), greater than John the Baptist (Matt. 11:9, 11), and greater even than the angels who ministered to Him (Mark 1:13) and who belonged to Him (Matt. 16:27; 24:31). (2) He claimed for Himself the exercise of faith, obedience, and love even to the sacrifice of every other human bond, even life itself: “he that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37); “there is no man that hath left … father, or mother, or children … for my sake, and for the gospel, who shall not receive an hundred times as much … and in the world to come life everlasting” (Mark 10:29–30). (3) He spoke as supreme Legislator: “you have heard that it was said to them of old … but I say to you” (Matt. 5:21–48); He forbade the divorce that Moses, “because of the hardness of your heart,” had permitted (Matt. 5:32; 19:9); and He claimed to be “Lord even of the sabbath” (Mark 2:28). (4) He worked miracles in His own name — “he said to the man sick of the palsy, Arise” (Matt. 9:6), He calmed the storm with a word (Mark 4:39) — in marked contrast to the Apostles, who worked their own miracles explicitly in the name of Jesus (Acts 3:6; 4:10). (5) He claimed the power to forgive sins outright: “be of good heart, son, thy sins are forgiven thee” (Matt. 9:2–7), and He communicated this same power to others (Matt. 18:18). (6) He claimed to be judge of the living and the dead: “you shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of the power of God, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62; cf. 8:38; 13:26), sending His angels to gather His elect from the four winds (Matt. 24:30–31). (7) He promised to send the Holy Ghost, a divine mission (Luke 24:49), and He accepted adoration without demur (Matt. 8:2; 28:9; 14:33) — where Peter, Paul, Barnabas, and even the angels of heaven, by contrast, are recorded as expressly refusing such adoration, since they have no claim to it (Acts 10:25–26; 14:14; Apoc. 19:10; 22:8).

(B) Jesus repeatedly affirms that He is Son of God in a strict and literal sense. (1) “All things are delivered to me by my Father; and no one knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son” (Matt. 11:27; Luke 10:21–22) — the authenticity of this text is admitted by the great majority of critics, and even Loisy grants that its meaning is the same as that of the Johannine prologue. (2) Christ’s reply to Peter’s confession — “flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father” (Matt. 16:16–17) — is significant: some critics object that the bare confession of Messiahship hardly required so great a revelation, but if Peter’s affirmation could be known only from the Father, this itself points to a genuine revelation of divine filiation, even if Peter did not yet grasp its full theological content as later defined by the Church. It should be noted that in Mark’s parallel account (8:29) the words are simply “Thou art the Christ,” and in Luke’s (9:20) “the Christ of God” — yet from Christ’s own answer it is clear that Peter had in fact affirmed something more than bare Messiahship, since the Messianic signs had already been openly recognized by Andrew, Philip, and Nathanael from the very beginning of Christ’s ministry (John 1:41, 49). (3) Christ’s reply to Caiaphas before the Sanhedrin (Matt. 26:63–65) — “hereafter you shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of the power of God, and coming in the clouds of heaven” — provoked the high priest to tear his garments and cry out “blasphemy,” precisely because divine filiation, a seat at God’s right hand, and the exercise of supreme power belong to no mere Messiah. Compare this with the Jews’ own explanation elsewhere: “the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he did not only break the sabbath, but also said God was his Father, making himself equal to God” (John 5:18); with the attempted stoning after “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30); and with their words to Pilate, “we have a law, and according to the law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God” (John 19:7; cf. Mark 14:61; Luke 22:66–70). (4) Christ’s own question to the Jews — “what think you of Christ? whose son is he?” — drew the reply “David’s”; but if David himself, in the Psalms, calls the Messiah “my Lord,” David’s son must in some sense be David’s superior, and equal to God Himself (Matt. 22:42–46; cf. Mark 12:35–37; Luke 20:41–44) — a text whose authenticity Wendt, Dalman, Weiss, Stapfer, Wernle, and O. Holtzmann all accept, though Loisy denies its genuineness, holding the divinity it implies to be later teaching gradually deduced by Christian feeling from the idea of the Messiah. (5) The baptismal commission — “all power is given to me in heaven and in earth … teach ye all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost … and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (Matt. 28:18–20) — realizes the ancient prophecy that His name should be called Emmanuel, “God with us” (Is. 7:14; Matt. 1:23). Loisy denies the authenticity of this text without real justification, though he admits it is already found in the Didache (7:1) and was universally known throughout the Church by the beginning of the second century. From the text itself it is clear (a) that the one to whom all power in heaven and earth is given holds a prerogative that belongs to God alone, and (b) that the baptismal formula asserts an equality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost that implies their consubstantiality — as St. Thomas observes, the substance of the Father exceeds the grasp of any created intelligence, and so too does the substance of the Son. (6) The Parable of the Vineyard and the Husbandmen (Mark 12:1–12; Matt. 21:33–46; Luke 20:1–19) is transparent in its application: the servants sent by the lord of the vineyard represent the prophets (cf. Matt. 23:31ff.), while the “most dear son and heir” is clearly more than a prophet, more than the Messiah — compare the opening words of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, in these days, hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world; who being the brightness of his glory, and the figure of his substance … sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high” (Heb. 1:1–3).

Conclusion. In the Synoptic Gospels, then, Christ’s declarations of His own eminent dignity consistently transcend mere Messiahship and express a genuine divine filiation that makes Him equal to God — that is, they express the mystery of the Trinity itself. This teaching cannot be explained as a gradual idealization introduced after His death, for there was simply no time for such a process: it is certain that the Apostles, from the very day of Pentecost, taught not merely that Jesus was the Messiah but that He was God.

III. Confirmation from the Acts of the Apostles. Even pronounced Rationalists — Renan, Reuss, Harnack among them — attribute the whole of Acts to Luke, the companion of Paul, probably composed about A.D. 63–64, and in any case before A.D. 70 (the old Tübingen dating of A.D. 150 has long been abandoned; Harnack himself now proposes A.D. 78–83, or perhaps as early as 60–70). Peter’s discourse in the Temple declares: “the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified his Son Jesus … but the author of life you killed, whom God hath raised up from the dead” (Acts 3:13–15) — and the “author of life” can, by definition, be no one but God. When Peter was interrogated by the high priest and the elders as to the name by which a miracle had been worked, he replied that it was “by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth,” adding, “neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:10–12). When later released from prison and questioned again, he declared: “we ought to obey God, rather than men. The God of our fathers hath raised up Jesus … him hath God exalted with his right hand, to be prince and saviour, to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins” (Acts 5:29–31) — Jesus alone, on Peter’s own testimony, is Saviour of souls and the one who grants remission of sins. At the Council of Jerusalem, Peter again insists: “why tempt you God to put a yoke upon the necks of the disciples … but by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we believe to be saved, in like manner as they also” (Acts 15:10–11). Throughout Acts, Jesus is repeatedly called “Lord” by Peter, “Lord of all” (Acts 10:36), and one “appointed by God to be judge of the living and of the dead” (Acts 10:42); the Apostles work miracles and confer baptism in His name; and the dying Stephen cries out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59). In these discourses, delivered immediately after Pentecost, the faith of the primitive Church already stands complete: Christ is believed to be Son of God, Author of life, Lord of all, Saviour of all, Judge of the living and the dead. There is simply no room, chronologically, for any process of idealization between these primitive documents and the composition of the Gospels themselves. Let Rationalists explain, if they can, how so momentous and supposedly novel a doctrine as Christ’s divinity could have been accepted — against every instinct of their inherited, rigorously monotheistic faith — by converted Jews, and then diffused throughout the whole primitive Church. The historical record, in fact, points the other way: it was the heretical Ebionites who denied the divinity of Christ, and who were, as the Apostolic Fathers themselves record, unanimously condemned by the Church for that very denial.

IV. Confirmation from the Epistles of St. Paul. When Paul explicitly affirms the divinity of Christ, he never announces it as a new or previously unheard-of dogma, but consistently as one already generally received. Even critics such as Harnack and Jülicher allow that the Thessalonian epistles, the Corinthian epistles, Romans, Ephesians, and Philippians were all written within the first Christian generation, between roughly A.D. 49 and 64. A selection of Paul’s principal testimonies makes his teaching unmistakable. “When the fulness of time was come, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law … and because you are sons, God hath sent the spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying: Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:4–6) — Christ is thus Son of God according to the spirit of sanctification, even while being of the seed of David according to the flesh (cf. Rom. 1:3–4). “God sending his own Son, in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3); “he that spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32).

Paul affirms, further, the eternal pre-existence of the Son before the Incarnation. The minds of unbelievers are blinded, he writes, “that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ … who is the image of God, should not shine unto them” (2 Cor. 4:4); and in one of the great Christological passages of the New Testament, he describes the “Son of his love” as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for in him were all things created in heaven and on earth … he is before all, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church … because in him it hath well pleased the Father, that all fulness should dwell” (Col. 1:15–20). Here the Son is called Creator outright — and of God the Creator it is elsewhere written, “of him, and by him, and in him, are all things” (Rom. 11:36); the Son is thus set forth as equal to the Father. A famous and disputed text — “of whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is over all things, God blessed for ever, Amen” (Rom. 9:5) — turns on a question of punctuation debated among editors, but the Fathers of the Church, almost without exception, read the words as a direct affirmation of Christ’s divinity. Elsewhere Paul writes: “we preach Christ crucified: unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Gentiles foolishness: but unto them that are called … Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God … who of God is made unto us wisdom, and justice, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:23–30); “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead corporally” (Col. 2:9). Most striking of all is the great kenotic hymn of Philippians: “let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:5–7) — the word here translated “form” (morphē) means, precisely, “essence” or “divine nature,” as follows from its pairing with “equal to God”; no clearer statement could be made of the Son’s glorious pre-existence before the Incarnation.

The Epistle to the Hebrews adds its own testimony: “God … hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world. Who being the brightness of his glory, and the figure of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, making purgation of sins, sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high” (Heb. 1:2–3); “thou in the beginning, O Lord, didst found the earth: and the works of thy hands are the heavens” (Heb. 1:10) — establishing Christ’s superiority over the prophets, over Moses, and over the angels alike. He is, further, priest and mediator forever: “he is able also to save for ever them that come to God by him: always living to make intercession for us” (Heb. 7:25). Many critics hold that Paul is the substantial author of Hebrews, even if he made use of an amanuensis in its composition; Harnack himself suggests Barnabas as a possible author, and dates the epistle to about A.D. 65–95.

V. The Gospel of St. John — the testimony of Christ regarding His own divinity. John’s Gospel repeatedly shows Jesus calling Himself “Son of Man” — an expression of His humility, and of the subjection of His human nature to the Father — while at the same time affirming, again and again, that He is “Son of God” and “Lord.” “You call me Master, and Lord; and you say well, for so I am” (John 13:13). “Father, the hour is come, glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee … all my things are thine, and thine are mine” (John 17:1–2, 10). “Hereupon therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he did not only break the sabbath, but also said God was his Father, making himself equal to God. Then Jesus answered … as the Father raiseth up the dead, and giveth life; so the Son also giveth life to whom he will. For neither doth the Father judge any man, but hath given all judgment to the Son … as the Father hath life in himself, so he hath given to the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:18–26). “You are from beneath, I am from above: you are of this world, I am not of this world” (John 8:23). “From God I proceeded and came … I came not of myself, but he sent me” (John 8:42). “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again I leave the world, and I go to the Father … I am not alone, because the Father is with me” (John 16:28–33). Most direct of all: “amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham was made, I am” (John 8:58). “And now glorify thou me, O Father, with thyself, with the glory which I had, before the world was, with thee … because thou hast loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:5, 24). “Not that any man hath seen the Father; but he who is of God, he hath seen the Father” (John 6:46). “As the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father” (John 10:15). “All things whatsoever the Father hath, are mine: therefore I said, that he shall receive of mine, and shew it to you” (John 16:15). “Philip, he that seeth me, seeth the Father also … do you not believe, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?” (John 14:9–10). “I and the Father are one. The Jews then took up stones, to stone him” (John 10:30–31). “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

These declarations express precisely the same truth as the words recorded in Matthew and Luke — “all things are delivered to me by my Father; and no one knoweth the Son, but the Father” — and are no less clear than the great prologue of John’s own Gospel: “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us … no man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” To sum up briefly: at the beginning of His ministry, Jesus was regarded by His disciples simply as “the Christ,” the Messiah — yet even as the Christ, He already held, for them, the value of God; after His Resurrection He was acclaimed as “the Lord”; and finally Paul made explicit what had been implicit from the first, that Jesus was the pre-existing Son of God. The explicit declaration of Christ’s divinity, in other words, met with no real resistance when it came, because it simply made explicit a belief already implicitly present in the primitive Church from its very beginning.

Excursus: three schools of Rationalist criticism. Given the weight of this testimony, it is worth briefly weighing the three chief schools of Rationalist criticism concerning “the Jesus of History,” which, whatever their differences, are united in one thing: an a priori rejection of the miraculous and the supernatural in religion as such.

(a) The Liberal Protestant school, of which Harnack is the chief representative, reduces the whole of the Gospel to a cluster of general religious ideas — God the Father, Providence, the sonship of all men before God, the infinite value of the human soul — treating the doctrines of the Resurrection, the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the visible Church as alien to the true spirit and intention of Jesus Himself; on this view, the Christ of Pauline and Johannine theology, and even the Christ already presented in Acts, stands at a great distance from “the Jesus of history,” who is reduced to a purely ethical teacher. A prominent Modernist churchman, addressing an audience in Philadelphia, went so far as to describe a whole second class of Christian dogmas — the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection on the third day — as beliefs the Christian religion might well survive without.

(b) The Apocalyptic school holds that the “Christ” of the Gospels is not, properly speaking, an earthly figure at all, but one to be manifested in glory only at the end of time, along the lines of the heavenly figure pictured in the pre-Christian Similitudes of Enoch; the earthly Jesus, on this view, was not Himself the Christ, but believed Himself merely destined to become the Christ at an imminently expected Day of Judgment — so that “the Jesus of history” is reduced to little more than an apocalyptic seer.

(c) The Hellenistic school, represented by Bousset and by Kirsopp Lake, holds that the idea of “the Jesus of History” underwent a double transformation: first, the historical Jesus — who, on this view, preached only the coming of the Kingdom of God and a duty of fellowship in righteousness, love, mercy, and forgiveness — was transformed by His own early community into the heavenly “Apocalyptic Christ”; and second, a further transformation occurred once the message reached the great Hellenistic centres, Antioch, Tarsus, and Damascus, where the pagan world was already steeped in sacramental “mystery cults.” It was Paul’s genius, on this account, to fuse the old Jewish monotheistic and apocalyptic inheritance with these new Hellenic religious ideas into a developed doctrine of “Jesus the Lord” — and the sacramental theology and ecclesial system of the Catholic Church were then built on this later, largely Hellenistic foundation, leaving “the Jesus of history” himself a dim and comparatively powerless figure.

Whatever their differences, then, all three schools share the same underlying premise — that the miraculous and the properly supernatural cannot, in principle, be historically credible — and it is this a priori assumption, rather than the actual weight of the historical evidence surveyed above, that chiefly governs their divergent reconstructions of “the Jesus of history.”

VI. The Atonement. Modernists further assert that the doctrine of the Atonement is nowhere present in the Gospels themselves, but is a purely Pauline development. Against this the Gospel evidence itself is decisive.

(A) The Synoptic Gospels. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me: wherefore he hath anointed me, to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath sent me to heal the contrite of heart” (Luke 4:18; cf. Mark 1:38). “The Son of man is come to save that which was lost … it is not the will of your Father, who is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish” (Matt. 18:11, 14). “The Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a redemption for many” (Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45). “The Son of man shall be betrayed to the chief priests and the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles to be mocked, and scourged, and crucified: and the third day he shall rise again” (Matt. 20:18–19; cf. Mark 10:33–34). At the Last Supper: “this is my body, which is given for you … this is the chalice, the new testament in my blood, which shall be shed for you” (Luke 22:19–20; cf. Matt. 26:28; Mark 14:24).

(B) The Gospel of St. John. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep” (John 10:11). “My sheep hear my voice: and I know them, and they follow me. And I give them life everlasting” (John 10:27–28). “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me, walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). “Amen, amen, I say unto you: he that believeth in me, hath everlasting life. I am the bread of life” (John 6:47). “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live” (John 11:25). “I am the vine, you are the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing” (John 15:4–5). “No man cometh to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). “God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting” (John 3:16). “I lay down my life for my sheep” (John 10:15). “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself” (John 12:32).

(C) St. Paul. “All have sinned, and do need the glory of God. Being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath proposed to be a propitiation, through faith in his blood” (Rom. 3:23–25). “As by the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners: so also by the obedience of one, many shall be made just” (Rom. 5:19). God “spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32). “Christ also hath loved us, and hath delivered himself for us, an oblation and a sacrifice to God, for an odour of sweetness” (Eph. 5:2).

These Pauline texts illuminate the deep and lasting popular appeal of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, whose propitiatory character an old English hymn on the Mass captures well, in speaking of the priest at the altar as one who, with Christ interceding for us above, “here presents, here spreads forth” the one true and perfect offering, “the one true, pure, immortal sacrifice.”