The Henson Journals

[157]

Monday, September 12th, 1921.

I finished revising the proofs, & sent them to Macmillan. The "Yorkshire Post" reports, apparently in full, a sermon preached last night in Carlisle Cathedral by the Dean, Rashdall. It is described as "Dean Rashdall's Apologia": and reads very orthodoxly. He enlarges on his statement – 'the only one of my assertions which there is any excuse for treating as at all novel or startling' – that 'Our Lord did not Himself claim divinity’:–

"But because Our Lord did not Himself claim divinity that is no reason why we shd not attribute divinity to Him. The Church has called Christ God – God as well as man. And I believe the Church has been right in so calling Him. The doctrine of Christ's divinity is, as a matter of history, due to the conviction of Christ's followers that in Him there had been made a self–revelation of God which was full, final, capable of saving the world. I believe we shall get a much higher, truer, and more satisfying conception of Christ's divinity when we rest it mainly upon the testimony of conscience, of Christian experience in the individual and in the Church at large, upon the inward light that lighteth every man, than when we make it depend upon some express claim of Christ or some doubtful deduction from His words."

But surely the principal, and indeed the only sufficient reason why we should acknowledge the historic Jesus as Devine is that, being what He was, He did claim, directly or by unmistakable suggestion, that He knew Himself to be so. His claim thus made was authenticated by the Resurrection, [158] and is continually authenticated afresh by His self–revelation in the Saints. Why should I believe that He gives trustworthy – still less full & final – knowledge about God unless I have some better assurance of His unique competence to reveal the Father than my own opinion of Him can provide?

Is there no place for faith: i.e. trust in Him? that must mean that I accept His account of Himself, & act on my acceptance. It is His Claim that I concede, not merely a judgement of my own on His character. I concede His claim because when I do so in homage, involuntary & complete to His character. He brings me under a Divine coercion to which I must yield. "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar–Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven". Rashdall says that "in the first three Gospels it is simply a truism to say that our Lord does not claim divinity": but surely He did claim, even in the synoptic version of Him, to be superhuman, to have an unique relation to the Father, to be charged with functions which imply Divinity. If it be replied that the Messianic conception embraced all these, we must point out that He stretched that conception until it implied Divinity. Nor can we simply, in deference to the critics, strike out the remarkable "Johannine " passage (S. Matt xi.5–27: S.Lk x.21,22) which appears in the first two synoptics, & which in the first introduces the wonderful invitation. "Come unto me, all ye that labour & are heavy laden & I will give you rest". Behind the New Testament as a whole lies a Witness of Jesus, of which but a few fragments have survived in the Synoptics, which explains he assumption of His Divineness which everywhere underlies it.

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