What is perhaps most startling in this picture is the apparent equivalence of the woman-man and man-God relation with the relation between Christ and God, or, in Trinitarian language, with the relation between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. As a layman and a comparatively recently reclaimed apostate I have of course, no intention of building a theological system still less of setting up a catena of New Testament metaphors as a criticism of the Nicene or the Athanasian creed, documents which I wholly accept. But it is legitimate to notice what kinds of metaphor the New Testament uses; more especially when what we are in search of is not dogma but a kind of flavour or atmosphere. And there is no doubt that this kind of proportion sum A:B : : B:C is quite freely used in the New Testament where A and B represent the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. Thus St Paul has already told us earlier in the same epistle that we are of Christ and Christ is of God (3:23). Thus again in the Fourth Gospel, Our Lord Himself compares the relation of the Father to the Son with that of the Son to His flock, in respect of knowledge (10:15) and of love (15:9).
I suggest, therefore, that this picture of a hierarchical order in which we are encouraged though, of course, only from certain points of view and in certain respects to regard the Second Person Himself as a step, or stage, or degree, is wholly in accord with the spirit of the New Testament. And if we ask how the stages are connected the answer always seems to be something like imitation, reflection, assimilation. Thus in Galatians 4:19, Christ is to be formed inside each believer the verb here used meaning to shape, to figure, or even to draw a sketch. In First Thessalonians (1:6) Christians are told to imitate St Paul and the Lord, and elsewhere (1 Corinthians 11:1) to imitate St Paul as he in turn imitates Christ thus giving us another stage of progressive imitation. Changing the metaphor we find that believers are to acquire the fragrance of Christ, redolere Christum (2 Corinthians 2:16): that the glory of God has appeared in the face of Christ as, at the creation, light appeared in the universe (2 Corinthians 4:6); and, finally, if my reading of a much disputed passage is correct, that a Christian is to Christ as a mirror to an object (2 Corinthians 3:18).
These passages, you will notice, are all Pauline; but there is a place in the Fourth Gospel which goes much further so far that if it were not a Dominical utterance we would not venture to think along such lines. There (5:19) we are told that the Son does only what He sees the Father doing. He watches the Fathers operations and does the same
alt="image"/> or copies. The Father, because of His love for the Son, shows Him all that He does. I have already explained that I am not a theologian. What aspect of the Trinitarian reality Our Lord, as God, saw while He spoke these words, I do not venture to define; but I think we have a right and even a duty to notice carefully the earthly image by which He expressed it to see clearly the picture He puts before us. It is a picture of a boy learning to do things by watching a man at work. I think we may even guess what memory, humanly speaking, was in His mind. It is hard not to imagine that He remembered His boyhood, that He saw Himself as a boy in a carpenters shop, a boy learning how to do things by watching while St Joseph did them. So taken, the passage does not seem to me to conflict with anything I have learned from the creeds, but greatly to enrich my conception of the Divine sonship.
Now it may be that there is no absolute logical contradiction between the passages I have quoted and the assumptions of modern criticism: but I think there is so great a difference of temper that a man whose mind was at one with the mind of the New Testament would not, and indeed could not, fall into the language which most critics now adopt. In the New Testament the art of life itself is an art of imitation: can we, believing this, believe that literature, which must derive from real life, is to aim at being creative, original, and spontaneous? Originality in the New Testament is quite plainly the prerogative of God alone; even within the triune being of God it seems to be confined to the Father. The duty and happiness of every other being is placed in being derivative, in reflecting like a mirror. Nothing could be more foreign to the tone of scripture than the language of those who describe a saint as a moral genius or a spiritual genius thus insinuating that his virtue or spirituality is creative or original. If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for creativeness even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours. I am not here supporting the doctrine of total depravity, and I do not say that the New Testament supports it; I am saying only that the highest good of a creature must be creaturely that is, derivative or reflective good. In other words, as St Augustine makes plain (De Civ. Dei 12, cap. 1), pride does not only go before a fall but is a fall a fall of the creatures attention from what is better, God, to what is worse, itself.