The Fundamentals - 1917: Vol.2

Revelation of the Fatherhood of God 229 Gospel of John out of court, and then we are told that with the Gospel of John gone the real work of Christ was just in His message, making known the Father to men, and that the Christological character that we impose upon the Gospel was something foisted upon it later, and not something lying in the mind and thought of Jesus Christ Himself. But I do not see how men can take that view of it until they cut out also the ll tli chapter of Matthew. Christ sets forth there the essen­ tially Christological character of His gospel just as unmis­ takably as it is set forth anywhere in the Gospel of John: “No man knoweth the Son save the Father; and no man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.” What I mean is just this,-that the only defense of the Unitarian position is a ripping of the Gospel apart so that you cannot recognize it as the Gospel any more. You cannot tear Christ’s revelation of the fatherhood of God away from the person of Christ. He did not expose the fatherhood of God by what He said; He exposed the father­ hood of God by what He was; and it is a species of intellectual misconception to take certain words of His and say those words entitle us to believe in God as our Father, while we reject Jesus Christ as His Divine Son, and think that it is pos­ sible to hold to the first article of our Christian creed without going on to the second article of it, “And I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.” CHRIST IS ALU If you and I subtract from our conception of God what we owe to the person of Jesus Christ, we have practically nothing left. The disciples knew that they would have little left. When it was proposed that they should separate them­ selves from Christ and the revelation that He was making, these men stood absolutely dumbfounded. “Why, Lord,” they said, “what is to become of us ? We have no place to go. Thou hast the words of eternal life. There is nothing for us in

Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker