Critique One - Part Five - A Truth Ignored

"I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men...Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment...I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people know to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects." Having believed to have dealt a serious enough blow to the existence of God and to immortality, Mr. Russell moves on to Christ in his paragraphs entitled The Character of Christ, Defects in Christ's Teaching and The Moral Problem. As a Christian I must admit I was pretty upset at my first reading. A number of assertions were made and scriptures cherry-picked and taken out of context or with complete misunderstanding to press his point. I did read the section a few more times, however, as I myself only desire a hearing for the Gospel of Christ and felt the least I could do was not dismiss these ideas out of hand. I spent a day and a half thinking of his assertions and how to address them. It finally occurred to me that in all three of these sections there was common glaring void, a proverbial elephant in the room being ignored, Truth.

I capitalize Truth intentionally with respect to Francis Schaeffer who spoke extensively about true-truth and its necessity. Mr. Russell bases his entire criticism of Christ on whether in his mind Christ was "...the best and wisest of men." He then looks at bits and pieces of scripture and summarily decides he doesn't like Christ's viewpoint on several issues. Mr. Russell's fatal mistake here is never considering the question, "Is what Christ said true?" In simplest terms, truth is correspondence. If I say the grass in my yard is green, then the truth or falsehood of that statement is found by witnessing if the grass in my yard is in fact green. This is the question at hand with regard to Christ. Mr. Russell is not alone in his dislike of the idea of Hell, and he sees Christ's discussion of it as cruel. What if Hell is a reality, what if Hell is an actual place of eternal torment? If that is true, then cruelty would be not to tell people of its existence and provide a way of escape.

A full and exhaustive defense of Jesus as the Messiah is not possible here due to space and has been dealt with in much finer form in other works. I would offer two things for consideration. First, Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life. He did not say He knew of the truth, He said He was the truth. If truth is correspondence, then Jesus was saying that He corresponded completely with every prophecy of what the Messiah would be when he came as foretold in the Old Testament. I will leave it to each reader to find out what those prophecies were and if Jesus in fact fleshed out each one. I believe that He did.

Second, Jesus forgave sins. I only recently gave serious thought to what that actually means. If someone were to yell at me for no reason and later realize their error and then ask to be forgiven for the offense, then I could acknowledge my forgiveness. It is an entirely different matter for me to approach someone on the street and tell them that I forgive them their sins. I have no idea against whom they have sinned! Furthermore, I am not the one offended! For Jesus to speak with people and during the discourse pronounce their sins forgiven, He was saying that they had sinned against Him, that He was the party offended, and further that He had the authority to forgive them.

Who is the man who could be so audacious as to make these pronouncements. Philip Schaff puts it this way: "Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mahomet, and Nepoleon; without science and learning, He shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and schools combined; without the eloquence of schools, he spoke words of life such as never were spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of any orator or poet; without writing a single line, He has set more pens to motion, and furnished more themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art and sweet songs of praise, than the whole army of great men if ancient and modern times. Born in a manger, and crucified as a malefactor, He now controls the destinies of the civilized world, and rules a spiritual empire which embraces one-third of the inhabitants of the globe. There never was in this world a life so unpretending, modest and lowly in its outward form and condition, and yet producing such extraordinary effects upon all ages, nations and classes of men. The annals of history produce no other example of such complete and astonishing success in spite of the absence of those material, social, literary, and artistic powers and influences which are indispensable to success for a mere man."

Jesus was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. He was the fulfillment of the promise long before made to the world, and the one identified by the man from the wilderness who said He was the One to be followed. He was fully God and fully man. Malcolm Muggeridge in his "Jesus: The Man Who Lives" says, "Jesus had previously told the disciples that whatever was prayed for sincerely in his name would be granted, to that point that mountains could be made to move themselves by prayer. If, therefore, he had truly asked God to deliver him from betrayal by Judas and all its consequences, his prayer would surely have been answered, and he have been spared the agony and bloody sweat that lay ahead. But, of course, there was the proviso; it must be, not as he willed, but as God willed. And it was God's will that he should be nailed to a cross, and thereby, as the victim of this, perhaps the cruellest form of execution ever devised, provide mankind for ever after with a fount of joy and hope, an inspiration to high endeavor, and a certainty of salvation."

This is the Jesus in whom Mr. Russell chose to disbelieve. Not merely a man like you or I who didn't measure up to his personal subjective preferences for stature or wisdom, but the way, the truth and the life. We must all set about looking at this Jesus and either accepting who He claimed to be and the evidences of what He said and did or denying Him.

Once again, i'd like to close by considering the outworking of Mr. Russell's worldview with regard to Jesus. We must always take a worldview and its assertions to their logical conclusion. Again, Mr. Muggeridge is much more eloquent in making these outworkings plain, "If, as often seems to be the case, we have driven Jesus away, or at any rate back to the catacombs, then we are totally at the mercy of our rulers, whoever they may be and whatever their ideology on behalf of which they purport to govern. The only antidote to the poison from Caesar's laurel crown comes from Jesus's crown of thorns. He alone can deliver us from the monstrosities and buffooneries of power, as has been discovered by the most perceptive spirits of our time, such as Sozhenitsyn. Faced with power at its most unbridled and most brutal, they turn for help and comfort, not to Universal Declarations of Human Rights and other pronouncements, solemn undertakings, Covenants and Charters in a similar vein, but to the man wearing a crown of thorns, decked out in a red robe of absurdity and with a court of jeering soldiers. There alone the sting of power is drawn and its pretensions are exploded, and the princes of this world have no recourse but, like Judas, to flee into the night."