Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/38

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JESUS AND THE GOSPEL

acter of the salvation which men owe here and now to the Christ who is to come. 'Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for remission of your sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit' (Acts 238). Remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit: these are the present religious experiences which are offered to men through faith in the 'eschatological' Christ. But these are supremely gifts of God, and we do not appreciate truly the place of Christ in the apostle's faith until we see that where salvation is con- cerned He stands upon God's side, confronting men. The most vivid expression is given to this in Acts 233: 'Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He hath poured forth this which ye see and hear.' There can be no doubt that in this passage Peter looks upon Jesus in His exaltation as forming with God His Father one Divine causality at work through the Spirit for the salvation of men. His humanity is not questioned or curtailed; it has been spoken of without prejudice in words which immediately precede. But His relation to those experiences which constitute Christian life is that of being their Author, the Divine Source from which they come; he is not to Christian faith a Christian, but all Christians owe their being, as such, to Him. We may have any opinion we please about the rightness or the wrongness of this, but it is not possible to question the fact. We may argue that the history of the Church, like that of the human race, began with a fall — that the apostolic belief in the Resurrection was a mistake, and the spiritual experiences which accompanied it morbid phenomena to be referred to the mental pathologist; but even if we do, we must admit that primitive Christianity gave Jesus in its faith the extraordinary place which has just been described. He is the Christ,