in a similar way (Luke xviii. 14). The saving transaction, however, described by both is essentially the same. It may perhaps seem strange to us that the idea of faith, which the apostolic preaching has made so familiar and so important to us, does not stand out in the teaching of Jesus beside that of repentance. Only once or twice in the Synoptics (Mark ix. 42; Matt. xviii. 6) do we find the phrase "believe in me"; and this isolation suggests the conjecture that it has been introduced into the words of Jesus here from the later

phraseology of the Church. But yet this putting of the demand for faith in the background, which is connected with a historical circumstance to be alluded to immediately, the circumstance that His person seems only gradually to the Lord Himself to have come to the central place in His doctrine of salvation, is only of a formal nature. Belief in God's grace is self-evidently the other side of repentance. Jesus, as already mentioned, requires faith in the gospel as a matter of course (Mark i. 15), without which the glad message to men could have no effect at all. Jesus has further claimed faith for His heavenly Father and His love (Mark ix. 42, xv. 32); and how would it have been possible to avoid extending this trust to Him who was indeed the revelation of this Father, and the personal surety of His love? The conduct of those who sought His help, to whom He says so often "thy faith hath saved thee," is at bottom a faith in Christ, though in a most elementary form; and when Jesus afterwards presupposes a combined confession of, and praying in, His name on the part of the disciples (Matt. x. 32, xviii. 20), or when He calls on men to receive Him, or come to Him in order to learn of Him or allow themselves to be guided by Him (Matt. xi. 28-30), it cannot be denied that the only thing wanting here is the formal expression πιστεύειν εἰς χριστόν, the idea and requirement of a personal trustful attachment to Him being present throughout. We have the clearest evidence of the identity of repentance and faith in the narrative of the woman who was a sinner (Luke vii. 36 f.), the forgiveness of whose sin Jesus establishes and confirms with the words: "Thy faith hath saved thee."1

1 That the forgiveness of sin in this narrative is not based on love, as one constantly hears even from Protestant theologians, is evident. For

§ 5. THE WAY OF SALVATION.

SONSHIP AND SANCTIFICATION

The immediate fruit of forgiveness, received on the ground of repentance and faith, is, according to the teaching of Jesus, sonship with God. It represents, in some respects, a restoration to an original but lost condition, such as is exemplified in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. For God is in Himself Father, and therefore man is meant and fitted to be His child; but only he who from the heart has turned to God, and received forgiveness, can know and feel himself to be His child. Accordingly, Jesus does not ascribe to all men, or to all Israelites, the divine adoption (or sonship, Matt. v. 45), but only to His disciples. He does so by speaking to them again. and again of "your Father," and giving them the right to pray: "Our Father in heaven." In conformity with the twofold ground of this relation, which rests on change of mind and on forgiveness, Jesus now deduces from it the most blessed rights of children, as well as the most earnest obligations of children. As to the first: it relieves His disciples from all earthly care, which their heavenly Father takes upon Himself (Matt. vi. 25 f.). It places them in the least detail of life under the fatherly providence of God, without whose will not a hair of their head will be injured (Matt. x. 30). It gives them the right to pray for the forgiveness of the debts in which they are being constantly involved, and for defence against the temptations which are ever afresh threatening them. It introduces them into the most cordial relation of confidence and prayer to a Father in heaven, who-much more faithful than an earthly father-will never give them a stone instead of bread (Matt. vii. 9 f.). But as these filial rights, at the same time, pass of themselves into filial duties -into the duty of not losing faith, but of continuing to pray, seek, knock (Mark xi. 22 f.; Matt. vii. 7 f.)—of not praying if, according to ver. 4, the much or little love is the effect of the rich or meagre forgiveness received, it cannot possibly at the same time be thought of as the cause. According to this, the λέγω σοι, ἀφέωνται αὐτῆς αἱ ἁμαρτίαι αἱ πολλαί, ὅτι ἠγάπησιν πολύ, would have to be thus expounded. Her sins must be forgiven her, for she can show the effects of that forgiveness. She has shown Me much grateful love. The following words, & dè öníyou ἀφίεται, ὀλίγον ἀγαπᾶ, confirm this causal relation of forgiveness and love.

for forgiveness from God without promising forgiveness towards our debtors (Matt. vi. 14, 15), of not praying for deliverance from temptation without watching against falling into temptation (Matt. xxvi. 41); so He requires them to evince their divine sonship by the moral imitation of their heavenly Father (Matt. v. 45), and recognises no one as His brother or sister, that is, as a child of God, save those who do the will of His Father in heaven (Mark iii. 35; Luke xi. 28). Looked at from this side, the divine sonship, which is on the one hand a blessed possession, presents itself on the other as an ideal which is yet to be realised, as the infinite task of being perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect (ὅπως γένησθε υἱοὶ, K.T.λ. Matt. v. 45, 48); and so there is an absolute idea of the divine sonship which is only realised in the completed kingdom, in the resurrection and glorification of the perfected righteous (Luke xx. 36). The work of salvation, therefore, is by no means finished with the fundamental work of conversion and forgiveness done once for all, but behind the narrow gate of entrance lies the steep path of sanctification, which leads to life only at the high goal of perfection (Matt. vii. 14). It is to His disciples, to the children of God, that Jesus unfolds those heights and depths of that new doctrine of righteousness which estimates anger as murder, and the unchaste look as adultery. And no grace once received defends a man against the constantly possible misuse of freedom, a ruinous unfaithfulness, which by turning grace to licentiousness necessitates its recall (Matt. xviii. 23 f., xxv. 14-30; Luke xix. 11-27). Yet Jesus could say of His training of His own in righteousness: "My yoke is easy, and My burden is light." Salvation when experienced is a power of God stirring in the man, which makes its ever higher requirements easier of fulfilment. If man, transformed inwardly by the renewing of his mind, is changed from a corrupt into a good tree, he will also naturally bear good fruit (Matt. vii. 18). He who has received forgiveness has experienced a love that wins the heart, and love experienced, kindles grateful love in return, and in this is found the highest incitement to the fulfilling of all divine commandments (Luke vii. 47). So that in keeping with the law which we have observed throughout of the co-operation of freedom and grace, human faithfulness is

BEYSCHLAG.-I.

ΙΟ

indeed claimed at every step towards perfection (Luke xii. 42), and yet the divine faithfulness has taken the lost but recovered lamb upon its shoulders, and now bears it homeward by its strength (Luke xv. 5).

§ 6. MEANS OF SALVATION, WORD AND MIRACLE

What then are Jesus' means of salvation, the revealed facts of the kingdom by which these effects are to be brought about? If all signs are not deceptive, a gradual development of the teaching of Jesus in reference to this matter took place, as He repeatedly brings new points of view to light in the experience thrust upon Him in His public life.1 If we deny this progress, as there is still a prevalent disposition to do, owing to the force of dogmatic custom, and assume that from the very first as at the last, with the same consciousness throughout, He connected salvation with His person and His death of sacrifice, then we make His preaching, as it lies before us in the Synoptists, not only unintelligible but untrue, for He would then have thought and taught differently. Not that Jesus had ever to correct Himself in His doctrine of salvation, or to give up a standpoint which He had taken, but He had repeatedly to complete and merge the preceding view in a higher and deeper. First and above all-and this cannot be denied He considered the word of glad tidings as the essential means of salvation, and thankfully welcomed, in connection with it, the miracles granted by the Father, as supporting and confirming His preaching (Matt. xi. 2—6), yet without regarding them as absolutely necessary. The word, the testimony of what was in Him, flowing from the depth of His consciousness, was indeed the simplest form of the revelation, and the most indispensable-since all revelations of God to man must reckon on being understood ere they can be operative, and cannot be at all believed without being understood (Matt. xiii. 11, xix. 51; Luke viii. 12). The prophets who appeared before Him had been equipped with the word as the one means of salvation, and He had something mightier to say than Jonah or Solomon (Matt. xii. 41, 42). He appears therefore with the unmistakable assurance of being 1 Cf. my Leben Jesu, i. 231 and 351 ff.

able to convert and save His people by the preaching of the gospel. He knows Himself as anointed and sent to preach (Luke iv. 18), and still at a later period of His public life He demands of His contemporaries that they repent at His mere preaching, without signs and wonders, as the people of Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah (Matt. xii. 41 f.; Luke xi. 29 f.). And how should He not? His word was the word of the living God, the glad tidings that the kingdom of heaven had come near, the setting forth of the eternal love of the Father in heaven; and it was confirmed by its agreement with the law and prophets, by the fulfilling of the deepest needs of the human heart, and by the divine fruits which it produced wherever it found a good lodgment. Above all, the Parable of the Sower, the significant firstling of His parables of the kingdom, unfolds to us the ideas of Jesus of the saving power of the word. The word of the kingdom is like a good seed. As there is a wonderful power of life latent in a seed, an entire life development, so in the word of God there is the creative power and development of the new life from God which the human heart needs. It now, of course, depends on the nature of the soil, that is, the heart, whether this seed is to develop its nature and power or not. As the seed which fell by the wayside, or on stony ground, or among thorns, did not from the first, or at least in the end, come to anything, so the productive power of the new life, wherever it is met by stupidity, frivolity, or worldliness, is frustated from the first, or after a transient effect, or even after a partial success. in some, at least, the divine word germinates, and not only germinates, but throws out roots and forms ears, and so finally brings forth the fruits of a life from God, thirty, sixty, and an hundredfold (Mark iv. 3 f.; Matt. xiii. 3 f., 18 f.; Luke viii. 4 f.). The disciples were the living evidences of the truth of this parable. In them germinated and grew a new life, which He could compare with new wine which should not be put in old bottles (Mark ii. 22), and so He could see in this disciple community as He does in the further Parable of the Seed field (Mark iv. 26-29), and of the Tares among the Wheat (Matt. xiii. 34 f.), a planting of God from which will at last proceed the great harvest of the completed kingdom of God. And on this sowing of the word there came the miracles granted Him

But