Isaac Haldeman - Christ, Christianity and the Bible

“I and my Father are ONE.”

The picture would represent a great crowd of scowling, fierce, angry Jews, their hands filled with stones – some of them drawn back, the whole figure intense with readiness to cast the fatal stone – and Jesus, standing a little distance apart, looking calmly on.

Underneath the picture I would have written in great golden letters (letters so artistic, so startling, so wonderful in form, that at the risk of art itself – almost at the risk of minimizing the picture at the first glance, subordinating it to interest in the letters and dividing the mind of the onlooker between the actual scene and the letters themselves) – I would have written in letters that should smite the eye and the innermost thinking of the beholder, the words recorded in the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel, given by the Jews in reply to the demand of Jesus when, speaking with amazement, he asks, “For what good work do ye stone me?” I would have every gazer at the picture read these words till they rose up in vastness against him, smiting his attention as the very stones in the hands of the Jews – these words:

“For a good work we stone thee not but for blasphemy; and because that thou BEING A MAN MAKEST THYSELF GOD.”

The Jews were not deceived.

They knew what he had done.

They knew that he claimed to be no less than very God himself.

There can be no doubt that he claimed to be God.

There need be, really, no discussion about it.

The New Testament records the claim.

I am not making any issue as to whether the New Testament is true, or reliable. I am saying thus far, only, that the New Testament (the Gospels of the New Testament), in language concerning which there can be no possible mistake or even ground for misinterpretation, records the fact that Jesus Christ did claim to be Almighty God.

If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God (as he claimed to be) he was not a good man (as it is said he was).

The proposition ought to be self-evident.

No mere man can claim to be God and be good.

He who, as mere man, claims to be God, robs God of the glory that is exclusively his.

He who thus claims to be God, and bids men go into eternity trusting him as God, is a deceiver.

No man who robs God of equality, and who deceives men into believing that he is God, can be good – he is a wicked and blasphemous deceiver.

There is only one way in which the character of Jesus Christ can be saved on this claim of his to be God – if that claim were not true.

It can be saved only by assuming that he was self-deceived; that he sincerely believed himself to be God, but was blinded and held fast by his own mistaken concept.

But the man who claims to be Almighty God, and claims it as he did, can be self-deceived only when he is a mental weakling, unbalanced in mind, or absolutely insane.

None of these things can be predicated of Jesus Christ.

On the contrary, he was the most intellectual man the world has ever known.

Mark how he met the wisdom and the genius of the men who surrounded him. Again and again they came to him with crafty and perplexing questions. With a word he solved their problems, flashed truth into their shame-smitten faces, and silenced them. In all the universe there is no soul meaner, more contemptible, more cowardly, and utterly lost to every sense of decent manhood than the man who, for the sake of entangling a good man in his speech, asks him questions in public, before an audience ready at every turn to misquote and misinterpret his slightest utterance; and that is what they did. They came to him, not with the desire to know the truth, but to confound him, cast him down and destroy his prestige with the people. To every question he gave an answer having in it spiritual truth, but bearing the unmistakable stamp of rare wisdom and intellectual superiority.

His words, the simple speech he used in the midst of them, or alone with his disciples, have been the impulse of the mightiest intellectual activity the world has ever known. Out of his words have grown systems of theology that may well call for all there is of brain power and capacity in those who study them. Here are to be found the keenest speculations and the farthest outreach of metaphysical suggestion and the most detailed analysis of which the human mind is capable. Book after book, treatise after treatise, discourse after discourse, have been produced out of the simplest and most detached things he said. No man can read his speeches and not find the mind stimulated, shocked, quickened and impelled forward even upon the most daring lines of thought.

It would be easy to call the roll of the princes and kings in the realm of intellect, men whose thoughts burn and flame like great quenchless lights; men whose minds are the storehouses of knowledge, and whose utterances by word and pen have moved the quickest and most forceful lives in the world. It would be easy to call the long roll of these names shining like stars and constellations in the firmament of thought – princes and kings of intellect who acknowledge that Jesus Christ is not only superior to them morally and spiritually, but intellectually.

What man is there to-day with any degree of mental self-respect who would dare to stand up and assert himself the equal of Jesus Christ intellectually?

Without necessity of demonstration, it ought to be a truth beyond question that Jesus Christ was the most intellectual man the world has ever known.

Such a man as that could not be self-deceived.

If he were not Almighty God he knew it.

He knew it as well as these good Unitarians, and these wondrously advanced scholars who cannot get beyond the glamour of his humanity.

He knew it at first hands.

If he were not Almighty God – if he were only a man – he knew it, knew it through and through, in every fibre of his being.

There is no possibility then whatever for him to have been deceived.

If he were not deceived, if he knew he was not God, then —

HE WAS NOT A GOOD MAN.

This is his own argument:

A young man came to him and said, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may inherit eternal life? and he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God .”

The argument is simple enough.

“You call me good. God alone is good. If I am not God, I am not good.”

Not good!

Nay! If he were not God, he was the most wantonly wicked man of whom I ever heard.

If he were not God, not only does disaster fall upon himself in the total destruction of his character, and in the consequent and final driving of him from the suffrage and consideration of men, but the disaster falls upon all who have put their faith in him.

If Jesus Christ were not God, then he never forgave the sins of a single soul, and all those throughout the two thousand years who have gone into eternity trusting in his name have gone into that eternity unforgiven and unshrived of God.

If Jesus Christ were not God, then he has not forgiven the sin of a single human being alive to-day.

You had sinned! There were memories of the sins you had committed. They allowed you no rest. They gave you anguish of mind. Others could not forgive you. You could not forgive yourself. The consciousness that you stood naked before the all-seeing eye of a holy God; that he knew the circumstances and every detail thereof, down to the very intents and purposes lying behind your deeds, and even your thoughts; that he looked into and saw all that was in your heart; in the consciousness growing clearer and stronger and more terrible each day that you had no excuse, no place that you could hold for a moment; that if he summoned you to his presence, you would stand in the white light of his unmixed holiness, and the inexorable and unrelenting wrath of his essential antagonism and just hatred against sin; all this consciousness taking voice in you and through you, cried out in your soul, “I am guilty and undone.” And this filled you with a horror of great darkness and the utter blackness of a hopeless despair. Then you heard the voice of Jesus Christ saying, “Come unto me.” “Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.” You came. You fell at his feet. You owned his death as your atoning sacrifice. You claimed him as your substitute. You claimed forgiveness through his blood. He said to you, as he said to the paralytic, “Thy sins are forgiven thee.” You rose and went away as when one is released from a galling chain; as when a burden that was crushing to earth has been lifted from the sore, bleeding shoulder; as when one who has been tossed on a midnight sea enters the haven while the dawn is breaking, casts anchor and touches shore. For years you have had peace. The memory of your sins are there (for though God when he forgives forgets them, you cannot). Like David, perhaps, you cry, “My sin is ever before me!” The sin marks are there as the nail holes in the wall, but you have been able to look at them and have peace because you have said to yourself, “I am not an unwhipped of justice, my sins have been punished in my substitute; they have been fully answered for in his blood. He has forgiven me and justified me and made me clean. In him I stand clothed in the very ‘righteousness of God.’ I hate my sin and despise it for what it is in itself, for what it made him, my redeemer, to endure, but I have peace because he has fully satisfied in my behalf. I have actually satisfied in him and am delivered before God’s court of holiness both from the guilt and the demerit of sin. I have, in short, gone through the judgment with Christ on the cross . He has pronounced forgiveness – absolution – upon me, and he has done so by virtue of his power and authority as the living one in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the godhead bodily – as my saviour and my God he has forgiven me and I am at peace.”