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colors he can, but we can make out from his picture that life and property were secure, trade and agriculture were carried on peacefully. A protest is necessary against the view maintained in this book, and by many Christian writers of the present day, that the people responded to Jesus' message of the Kingdom because they were ground down by economic need. It might be more fairly contended that the mission of Jesus was made possible by the comparative quiet and prosperity of the times. The mass of men were living under stable conditions and could now attend to a purely spiritual message. Dr. Klausner devotes a highly important section to the Jewish religious parties. On the Pharisees he writes with a special knowledge, and frankly recognizes that the charges made against them in the Gospels were in a measure just. The rabbinical literature itself distinguishes various classes of Pharisees, and accuses some of them of pride and hypocrisy. The account of the Zealots and the Essenes is also valuable, but some of the conclusions will not pass without question. A place is assigned to the Zealots which they do not seem to have occupied until long after the time of Jesus, while much that is said of the Essenes is pure conjecture. Doctrines are attributed to them of which we have no trace in the known sources-particularly, a mystical conception of the Messiah, "bound up with a supernatural idea of social equality and perfect worship." Dr. Klausner apparently assumes that the central portion of the book of Enoch is an Essene document, though for this very doubtful thesis he adduces no proof. His account of the Essenes is the more misleading as he makes their influence all-important for the Christian movement. "Whatever of primitive Christianity is not derivable from Pharisaism may be sought for in Essenism" (p. 262).

In his main narrative Dr. Klausner takes his guidance almost solely from Mark. He is acquainted with the general results of Gospel criticism, but he has not sufficiently mastered them to appreciate their full bearing on the history. His judgment on most of the debated questions is that of the intelligent amateur. It is assumed that Jesus, from the moment of his baptism, believed himself to be the Messiah, accepting the title partly in a national, partly in a spiritual, sense. His teaching, while essentially that of the Pharisees, was distinguished from it in four points: (1) its main purport was the near approach of the Kingdom of Heaven; (2) it laid the whole stress on the moral, as against the ceremonial, law; (3) it broke away from Scripture and Torah; (4) it was accompanied with works of healing which appeared miraculous. Dr. Klausner holds to the conventional view that the initial success of Jesus was followed by a reaction. Not only did he excite the enmity of Herod Antipas and the Phari

sees, but the common people fell away from him when they found he was not to play the part of a national deliverer. Nevertheless, he went up to the Passover feast to proclaim himself the Messiah, and was confident of triumph. The idea of a suffering Messiah (embodied later in the doctrine of the Messiah ben-Joseph) had not yet arisen, and Jesus cannot have entertained it. In Jerusalem, however, his position became desperate, especially when his cleansing of the temple had provoked the Boethusian Sadducees, who were notorious for their crafty politics and ruthless methods. It was they who caused his arrest, and after a preliminary inquiry (not to be regarded as a formal trial), handed him over to Pilate. For the final condemnation the Roman governor was alone responsible.

A closing section is devoted to the teaching of Jesus, with a strong emphasis on its purely Jewish character. "Throughout the Gospels there is not one item of teaching which cannot be paralleled either in the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, or the talmudic and midrashic teaching of the period near to the time of Jesus." Why, then, has it always been rejected by the Jews, as it was in Jesus' own lifetime? Dr. Klausner finds the answer to this riddle in the perception by all Jews that by its ethical onesidedness and disregard of actual conditions it was destructive of Judaism. "The strength of Judaism is that it breaks down the dividing wall between religion and daily life, making daily life an essential part of religion, and religion an essential part of daily life." Jesus divorced religion from life. He made it an abstract ideal which can never be realized in practice, and can much less become the driving and integrating force in the life of a nation. To this criticism the answer from the Christian side is obvious. Jesus did indeed separate the vital elements of Judaism from the ceremonial law and the particular interests of the nation, and in this lay his greatness and his originality. It may be true that the sayings, taken individually, have all some parallel in Judaism, but this does not mean, as Dr. Klausner is fond of quoting from Wellhausen, that "Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jew." The Jewish teaching is revised in the light of a new principle which is radically opposed to Judaism.

No one can read the book without admiration for its learning, its fair-mindedness, its genuine sympathy with much that we prize most in the character and thought of Jesus. It goes far toward removing the stupid prejudice which has hitherto made it impossible for Jew and Christian to understand each other. That such a book should be the first fruits of the new Zionist culture may be taken as a happy augury. At the same time the book is disappointing, or shall we say reassuring? Christian scholars, knowing little of the vast rabbinical literature, have always

felt that it concealed some precious knowledge which might change their whole conception of the origins of Christianity. No one has explored the mysterious treasure-house more thoroughly than Dr. Klausner, and it cannot be said that he has added anything of real importance to what we know already. He has corrected in some minor points our usual interpretation of passages and incidents in the Gospels. He has explained Jewish customs and ideas which have been imperfectly understood. But the great problems of the life of Jesus remain as they were before. They are not to be solved except by a profounder study of the Gospels themselves. E. F. SCOTT

UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY RENASCENT

Professor Cross's new book on "Christian Salvation" is an auspicious omen, to those of us who hope for a revival of systematic theology. It was beginning to look as if the age of systematic theology had passed forever. Henceforth, we were to have historical dissertations on the development of dogma, philosophical discussions concerning mechanism and teleology, and psychological analyses of the religious consciousness; but no further attempt was to be made to formulate a comprehensive Christian philosophy of life. Professor Cross's admirable little book-lucid, undogmatic, with a restrained fervor about it that sometimes reminds one of William Newton Clarke-shows that the constructive impulse in American theology has not really died out, but merely bided its time, waiting for the completion of certain necessary critical processes.

Salvation, says Cross, is not an exclusively Christian or exclusively religious concept. The desire for betterment belongs to man as man, and every form of betterment-economic, cultural, moral-is a form of salvation. If Christianity concentrates its attention upon a change in "soulquality" as the essential thing in salvation, that is only because the development of better personalities is the key to the whole problem of human betterment. Ultimately, Christian salvation aims to be "inclusive of all true benefits to men."

Only in modern Protestantism does the Christian conception of salvation come to clear expression. Jesus himself did not fully foresee the nature of the redemptive movement that was to issue from his own life

1Christian Salvation: A Modern Interpretation. By George Cross. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925. 254 pages. $2.50.

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and teachings. The apostles, on account of their apocalyptic expectations, failed to grasp it.5 Pagan religions and philosophies (trotz Harnack) helped to enrich and elucidate it, though they did in part corrupt it. The fathers of the Protestant Reformation, impeded by a legal and supernaturalistic theory of the divine government, failed to state it, though they did live it. Only the modern Protestant, with his humanized conceptions of justice, his thoroughly personalized ethics, and his scientific view of man's place in the natural order is in a position to see clearly what has been the secret of Christian living from the beginning: "Salvation is found in the unfolding of an ever higher self-consciousness, in the attainment of an ever worthier personal life, and this can come to us in no other way than by the impartation to us of the dynamic of another personality."

This conception of salvation is worked out in its individual, social, and cosmic implications in the later chapters of the book. Chapters viii, x, and xi, treating of "Sin and Forgiveness," "The Saved Community," and "The World to Come," are the essential chapters; and they are eloquent.

If we ask how it is that the "dynamic of another personality" saves the individual by helping him attain an "ever worthier personal life," we may find the process figuratively described in such legalistic terms as "justification" and "atonement"; but we find the process actually going on, at maximum intensity, wherever one individual forgives another. "Salvation comes by way of forgiveness. This is the way of betterment for all mankind."10 By identifying himself with the sinner and seeking to understand his sin, the person sinned against communicates his own mind to the sinner, giving him now for the first time a sense of his sin, and at the same time giving him power to transcend it. By forgiveness, both are raised to a higher plane, whereas resentment and retaliation would have dragged both down.

Every sinner has his own savior, who is at the same time his judge: the man whom he has wronged. Forgiveness thus appears to be "an exercise of grace from man to man.' "11 It is; and yet I am conscious, whenever I exercise this saving grace, that it did not originate with me; "It came down through the ages and generations to me, being constantly en

P. 223.

Chap. ii.

P. 69.
'Chaps. iii and iv.

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Chap. v.

'P. 155. Cf. p. 124: "Salvation, in the true Christian sense, means the progressive fulfilment of the inner potencies of our human spirit."

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riched in its course through each new exercise of it by each one who has forgiven another. . . . . This is 'the grace that was in our Lord Jesus Christ.' It is he who gave it the momentum with which it has passed down to us today and is taking possession of the world."12 It is no accident that Jesus has come to bear pre-eminently the name of Savior: "Idealization of Jesus by Christians is a reflex of his own idealization of the human personality for its own sake."13 If we are to forgive men, we must believe in their hidden possibilities; Jesus has done more to kindle this faith than any one who has ever lived.

Cross's gospel of salvation has been, so far, a gospel for individuals. Indeed, by comparison with his late colleague, Walter Rauschenbusch, he might be classed as an individualist. He finds fault with Royce11 for teaching that "it is the community that is originally holy and worthful," and the individual who needs salvation. On the contrary, it is more often the community that needs salvation, and it is the recalcitrant individual who rebels against his community, like Luther at Worms,15 who is the savior. But Cross is not an opponent of the "social gospel." Christian salvation, though it begins with the creative individual, is social—yes, and cosmic-in its outcome. "When Jesus created in the breast of his first disciple a faith in his personal worth he projected into the life of humanity an impulse that seems bound to issue in the formation of a community as broad as the life of the race . . . . . a community in which all persons have become sacred and the world of which they are denizens has become a sanctuary, all its forces being contributory to one supreme end."16 If we take as our basic Christian affirmation the supreme worth of personality and its supremacy in the cosmos,17 we cannot admit that anything-no, not death itself18-can be an insuperable obstacle to the redeeming love of God in Jesus Christ.

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Professor Cross describes the object of his book as "evangelistic,' and he addresses it primarily to the educated layman. He seems not always to have kept his original object in view, for one encounters large tracts of arid, severely academic discussion, especially in the historical chapters. It is to be hoped that neither the layman nor the theologian will be dissuaded from reading the book by these stylistic fluctuations, for there is much of value in it for both.

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