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TechGnosis Myth Magic Mysticism in the Age of
Information Erik Davis Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Erik Davis
ISBN(s): 9781852427726, 1852427728
Edition: Updated Edition With New Afterword
File Details: PDF, 1.50 MB
Year: 2005
Language: english
TECHGNOSIS ERIK DAVIS UPDATED EDITION WITH NEW AFTERWORD

TechGnosis

ERIK DAVIS
MYTH, MAGIC AND MYSTICISM IN THE AGE OF INFORMATION

'TechGnosis IS STIMULATING and original, learned AND READABLE. ERIK DAVIS OFFERS a WIDE-RANGING
AND CONSISTENTLY THOUGHT-PROVOKING GUIDE TO THE HIDDEN CIRCUITRY OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL
UNCONSCIOUS. INVALUABLE’ GEOFF DYER
From the printing press to the telegraph, through radio, TV and the Internet, TechGnosis explores the
mystical impulses that lie behind our obsession with information technology. In this dazzling book, writer
and cyber guru Erik Davis demonstrates how religious imagination, magical dreams and millennialist
fervour have always permeated the story of technology.

Through shamanism to Gnosticism, voodoo to alchemy, Buddhism to evangelism, TechGnosis peels away
the rational shell of info tech to reveal the utopian dreams, alien obsessions and apocalyptic visions that
populate the ongoing digital revolution.

Erik Davis offers a unique and fascinating perspective of technoculture, inviting comparisons to Marshall
McLuhan, Greil Marcus and William Gibson.

‘Beautifully written, carefully conceived and absolutely accessible’ Observer

‘TechGnosis is a masterpiece of informed polemic, welding seemingly disparate blocks of knowledge and
thought into a coherent, challenging whole with passion, erudition and wit’ Independent

ISBN 1-85242-77 2 - 8
A FIVE STAR PAPERBACK
FROM SERPENT’S TAIL
Cover design by WALL
UK£9.99/Popular Cuture
/Mind, body and spirit/$18.00
WWW.SERPENTSTAIL.COM
9 7 8 1 8 45 2 72 7 2 6
Erik Davis is a fifth-generation Californian who currently
resides in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Wired, The
Village Voice, Gnosis, and other publications, and he has lectured
internationally on technoculture and the fringes of religion. He
can be contacted at his website: www.techgnosis.com
For this edition of TechGnosis Erik Davis has written a new
afterword.

Praise for TechGnosis

“TechGnosis is stimulating and original, learned
and readable. Erik Davis offers a wide-ranging and
consistently thought-provoking guide to the hidden
circuitry of the technological unconscious. Invaluable”
Geoff Dyer
“A most informative account of a culture whose
secular concerns continue to collide with their
supernatural flip side”
Sadie Plant, Voice Literary Supplement
“Beautifully written, carefully conceived and
absolutely accessible, TechGnosis proves that it’s time
we sat up and took notice”
Observer
“ TechGnosis is a masterpiece of informed polemic,
welding seemingly disparate blocs of knowledge and
thought into a coherent, challenging whole with
passion, erudition and wit”
Independent
“Brilliant” Guardian
“Surfing Davis’s datastream makes for an
exhilarating ride”
Publishers Weekly
 “Davis’s dense, playful prose crackles with energy and
enthusiasm in his attempt to map the mythos of
technology”
Daily Telegraph
“Davis is trenchant, entertaining and timely; a Zeitgeist book”
The Times
“Like its subject, this is a stimulating and electric tool for
anyone caught in the Net”
Attitude Magazine
“Davis jumps from religious philosophy to the
telegraph, from the cult of Santeria to HTML to LSD, draw­
ing erudite conclusions throughout”
The Face
“Davis cites many sources, synthesizing information in ways
that make the synapses effervesce”
Gnosis Magazine
 TECHGNOSIS

ERIK DAVIS
myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library on request

The right of Erik Davis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Copyright © 1998, 2004 Erik Davis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.

First published by Harmony Books,

a division of Crown Publishers, Inc., New York

First published in the UK in 1999 by Serpents Tail.

4 Blackstock Mews, London N4 2BT

First published in this 5-Star edition in 2004

Website: www.serpentstail.com

Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham, pic

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For My Folks
 contents

acknowledgements ix

INTRODUCTION
crossed wires 3
I imagining technologies 14
II the alchemical fire 49

III the gnostic infonaut 92

IV techgnosis, american-style 123

V the spiritual cyborg 155

VI a most enchanting machine 196

VII cyberspace: the virtual craft 226

VIII the alien call 267

IX datapocalypse 299

X third mind from the sun 341

XI the path is a network 376
AFTERWORD
beyond the boom 397
endnotes 409
index 421
 acknowledgments

It would be impossible to fully trace the network of minds and

hearts that helped bring this book into being, but some specific
shout-outs are definitely in order. A number of the ideas animati ng
Tech Gnosis have been pulsing in my brain for nearly a decade, and
I am indebted to a handful of teachers and editors who have helped
me shape them into worthy prose at various stages of my writing
career: my undergraduate thesis advisers at Yale, Richard Halpern
and David Rodowick; former Village Voice editors Jeff Salamon,
Scott Malcolmson, Lisa Kennedy, and Joe Levy; Gnosis editors Jay
Kinney and Richard Smoley; and ace cybercritic Mark Dery, who
asked me to write the essay that formed the seed crystal for the
present work. Even more invaluable have been the coundess
kaleidoscopic conversations about philosophy, science, and spirit I
have had over the years with my great friends Julian Dibbell, JP
Harpignies, and Marcus Boon, all of whom challenged me to find
my own weird path into technoculture and to face the difficulties
of writing it down head-on.
My buddy Dan Levy harangued me into shaping my stray
thoughts into a book project, and then convinced someone to
actually buy it. Relationships with huge and distant corpora­
tions can be rocky: thanks to Harmony editors Andrew Stuart,
who swooped in midway to save the day with his generous
attention and sharp suggestions, and Peter Guzzardi, who
kindly shepherded TechGnosis through the end game. The book
you hold would be a flabbier and more error-ridden thing were
x TECHGNOSIS

it not for the perceptions, pens, and pencils of my manuscript

readers, who, if they have not already been mentioned, include
Margaret Wertheim, papa Russ Davis, Rachel Koenig, David
Ulansey, Jeff Gorvetzian, and my mother Sandra Zarcades, who
lent her razor-sharp copyediting skills to many of its drafts.
Wef Linson helped me keep perspective throughout the
daily grind with his spiritual ruminations and carefree cracks,
while the Midtown Niki Starving Writers Fund allowed me to
focus on the task at hand. Thanks as well to the large circle of
comrades and netminds who took the time to swap ideas, give
me encouragement, or feed me nifty memes: Peter Lamborn
Wilson, Mark Pesce, Scott Durham, Spiros Antonopoulos,
Molly McGarry, Manuel DeLanda, Hermano Vianna Jr., Jordan
Gruber, Terence McKenna, Charles Cameron, Tom Lane, James
O’Meara, Paul Miller, Kate Ramsey, Konrad Becker, Craig
Baldwin, Sam Webster, Mark Stahlman, and Grampa Jake, who
sent me a steady stream of juicy newspaper clippings from the
desert heartland. In particular, Pit Schultz, Diana McCarty, and
the nettime crew plugged me into a community of technology
critics whose trenchant debates helped me keep my cosmologi­
cal feet on the ground.
Everyone knows that no single individual can write a book,
even though one person, i.e., me, must take responsibility for its
perhaps inevitable flaws and errors. This does not mean that
writing TechGnosis did not sometimes make me feel as though I
were alone in the Siberian wastes, trying to claw my way out of
an ice cave with a toothbrush and a Bic lighter. I thank all gods
for my love, Jennifer Dumpert, who not only scraped me up
from the bottom of the barrel on a regular basis, but whose wis­
dom, patience, and incisive feedback helped me weave this labor
into a life of riches.
All that remains is the possibility of communication.
—Captain Jean Luc-Picard
TECHGNOSIS
 INTRODUCTION
crossed wires

This book is written in the shadow of the millennium, that arbi­

trary but incontestable line that the Western imagination has
drawn in the sands of time. It is also written in the conviction
that one hardly needs to be decked out in a biblical sandwich
board or wired to the gills with the latest cyborg gear to feel the
glittering void of possibility and threat growing at the heart of
our profoundly technologized society. Even as many of us spend
our days, in that now universal Californiaism, surfing the datas-
tream, we can hardly ignore the deeper, more powerful and
more ominous undertows that tug beneath the froth of our lives
and labors.
You know the scene. Social structures the world over are
melting down and mutating, making way for a global McVil-
lage, a Gaian brain, and a whole heap of chaos. The emperor
of technoscience has achieved dominion, though his clothes
are growing more threadbare by the moment, the once noble
costume of Progress barely concealing far more wayward am­
bitions. Across the globe, ferocious postperestroika capitalism
yanks the rug out from under the nation-state, while the planet
spits up signs and symptoms of terminal distress. Boundaries
dissolve, and we drift into the no-man’s zones between syn­
thetic and organic life, between actual and virtual environ­
ments, between local communities and global flows of goods,
information, labor, and capital. With pills modifying person­
ality, machines modifying bodies, and synthetic pleasures and
4 TECHGNOSIS

networked minds engineering a more fluid and invented sense

of self, the boundaries of our identities are mutating as well.
The horizon melts into a limitless question mark, and like the
cartographers of old, we glimpse yawning monstrosities and
mind-forged utopias beyond the edges of our paltry and pro­
visional maps.
Regardless of how secular this ultramodern condition appears,
the velocity and mutability of the times invokes a certain
supernatural quality that must be seen, at least in part, through
the lenses of religious thought and the fantastic storehouse of the
archetypal imagination. Inside the United States, within whose
high-tech bosom I quite self-consciously write, the spirit has
definitely made a comeback—if it could be said to have ever left
this giddy, gold rush land, where most people believe in the Lord
and his coming kingdom, and more than youd guess believe in
UFOs. Today God has become one of Times favorite cover boys,
and a Black Muslim numerologist can lead the most imaginative
march on the nations capital since the Yippies tried to levitate the
Pentagon. Self-help maestros and corporate consultants
promulgate New Age therapies, as strains of Buddhism both
scientific and technicolor seep through the intelligentsia, and half
the guests on Oprah pop up wearing angel pins. The surge of
interest in alternative medicine injects non-Western and ad hoc
spiritual practices into the mainstream, while deep ecologists turn
up the boil on the nature mysticism long simmering in the
American soul. This rich confusion is even more evident in our
brash popular culture, where science-fiction films, digital
environments, and urban tribes are reconfiguring old archetypes
and imaginings within a vivid comic-book frame. From The X-
Files to occult computer games, from Xena: Warrior Princess to
Magic: The Gathering playing cards, the pagan and the para­
normal have colonized the twilight zones of pop media.
These signs are not just evidence of a media culture exploit­
ing the crude power of the irrational. They reflect the fact that
people inhabiting all frequencies of the socioeconomic spectrum
are intentionally reaching for some of the oldest navigational
tools known to humankind: sacred ritual and metaphysical
 crossed wires | 5
speculation, spiritual regimen and natural spell. For some super­
ficial spiritual consumers, this means prepackaged answers to
the thorny questions of life; but for many others, the quest for
meaning and connection has led individuals and communities
to construct meaningful frameworks for their lives, worldviews
that actually deepen their willingness and ability to face the
strangeness of our days.
So here we are: a hypertechnological and cynically postmodern
culture seemingly drawn like a passel of moths toward the
guttering flames of the premodern mind. And it is with this
apparent paradox in mind that I have written TechGnosis: a secret
history of the mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain
the Western world’s obsession with technology, and especially with
its technologies of communication.
My topic may seem rather obscure at first, for common
sense tells us that mysticism has no more in common with tech­
nology than the twilight cry of wild swans has with the clatter
of Rock’em Sock’em Robots. Historians and sociologists inform
us that the West’s mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiri­
tual transformations, and apocalyptic visions crashed on the sci­
entific shores of the modern age. According to this narrative,
technology has helped disenchant the world, forcing the ances­
tral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular
game plans of economic development, skeptical inquiry, and
material progress. But the old phantasms and metaphysical
longings did not exactly disappear. In many cases, they dis­
guised themselves and went underground, worming their way
into the cultural, psychological, and mythological motivations
that form the foundations of the modern world. As we will see
throughout this book, mystical impulses sometimes body-
snatched the very technologies that supposedly helped yank
them from the stage in the first place. And it is these techno-
mystical impulses—sometimes sublimated, sometimes acknow­
ledged, sometimes masked in the pop detritus of science fiction
or video games—that TechGnosis seeks to reveal.
For well over a century, the dominant images of technology
have been industrial: the extraction and exploitation of natural
6 TECHGNOSIS

resources, the mechanization of work through the assembly line,

and the bureaucratic command-and-control systems that large and
impersonal institutions favor. Lewis Mumford called this
industrial image of technology the “myth of the machine,” a myth
that insists on the authority of technical and scientific elites, and in
the intrinsic value of efficiency, control, unrestrained technological
development, and economic expansion. As many historians and
sociologists have recognized, this secular image was framed all
along by Christian myths: the biblical call to conquer nature, the
Protestant work ethic, and, in particular, the millennialist vision of
a New Jerusalem, the earthly paradise that the Book of Revelation
claims will crown the course of history. Despite a century of
Hiroshimas, Bhopals, and Chernobyls, this myth of an engineered
utopia still propels the ideology of technological progress, with its
perennial promises of freedom, prosperity, and release from disease
and want.
Today a new, less mechanized myth has sprung from the
brow of the industrial megamachine: the myth of information,
of electric minds and boundless databases, computer forecasts
and hypertext libraries, immersive media dreams and a plane­
tary blip-culture woven together with global telecommunication
nets. Certainly this myth still rides atop the same mechanical
behemoth that lurched out of Europe’s chilly bogs and con­
quered the globe, but for the most part, TechGnosis will focus
on information technologies alone, placing them in their own,
more spectral light. For of all technologies, it is the technologies
of information and communication that most mold and shape
the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self.
From the moment that humans began etching grooves into
ancient wizard bones to mark the cycles of the moon, the process
of encoding thought and experience into a vehicle of expression has
influenced the changing nature of the self. Information technology
tweaks our perceptions, communicates our picture of the world to
one another, and constructs remarkable and sometimes insidious
forms of control over the cultural stories that shape our sense of the
world. The moment we invent a significant new device for
communication—talking drums, papyrus scrolls, printed books,
 crossed wires 7

crystal sets, computers, pagers—we partially reconstruct the self

and its world, creating new opportunities (and new traps) for
thought, perception, and social experience.
By their very nature, the technologies of information and
communication—“media” in the broad sense of the term—are
technocultural hybrids. On the one hand, they are crafted things,
material mechanisms that are conceived, constructed, and
exploited for gain. But media technologies are also animated by
something that has nothing to do with matter or technique. More
than any other invention, information technology transcends its
status as a thing, simply because it allows for the incorporeal
encoding and transmission of mind and meaning. In a sense, this
hybridity reflects the age-old sibling rivalry between form and
content: the material and technical structure of media impose
formal constraints on communication, even as the immediacy of
communication continues to challenge formal limitations as it
crackles from mind to mind, pushing the envelope of intelligence,
art, and information flow. By creating a new interface between the
self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become
part of the self, the other, and the world beyond. They form the
building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, for what
we now increasingly think of as “the social construction of reality.”
Historically, the great social constructions belong to the
religious imagination: the animistic world of nature magic, the
ritualized social narratives of mythology, the ethical inwardness of
the “religions of the book,” and the increasingly rationalized
modern institutions of faith that followed them. These various
paradigms marked their notions and symbols in the world around
them, using architecture, language, icons, costumes, and social
ritual—and often whatever media they could get their hands on.
For reasons that cannot simply be chalked up to the desire for
power and conformity, the religious imagination has an
irrepressible and almost desperate urge to remake the mental world
humans share by communicating itself to others. From
hieroglyphs to the printed book, from radio to computer networks,
the spirit has found itself inside a variety of new botdes, and each
new medium has become, in a variety of contradictory ways, part
8 TECHGNOSIS

of the message. When the Norse god Odin swaps an eye for the gift
of the runes, or when Paul ofTarsus writes in a letter that the Word
of God is written in our hearts, or when New Age mediums
“channel spiritual information,” the ever-shifting boundaries
between media and the self are redrawn in technomystical terms.
This process continues apace, although today you often
need to dig beneath the garish, commercialized, and oversatu­
rated surface of the information age to find its archetypes and
metaphysical concerns. The virtual topographies of our millen­
nial world are rife with angels and aliens, with digital avatars
and mystic Gaian minds, with utopian longings and gnostic sci­
ence fictions, and with dark forebodings of apocalypse and
demonic enchantment. These figures ride the expanding and
contracting waves of media fads, hype, and economic activity,
and some of them are already disappearing into an increasingly
market-dominated information culture. But though techno­
mystical concerns are deeply intertwined with the changing
sociopolitical conditions of our rapidly globalizing civilization,
their spiritual forebears are rooted in the long-ago. By invoking
such old ones here, and bringing them into the discourse and
contexts of contemporary technoculture, I hope to shine a light
on some of the more dangerous and unwieldy visions that
charge technologies. Even more fundamentally, however, I hope
my secret history can provide some imaginal maps and mystical
scorecards for the metaverse that is now swallowing up so many
of us, all across network earth.

You may think you are holding a conventional book, a solid

and familiar chunk of infotech with chapters and endnotes and a
linear argument about the mystical roots of technoculture. But that
is really just a clever disguise. Once dissolved in your mindstream,
TechGnosis will become a resonating hypertext, one whose links
leap between machines and dreams, information and spirit, the
dustbin of history and the alembics of the soul. Instead of “taking
a stand,” TechGnosis ranges rather promiscuously across the
disciplinary boundaries that usually chop up the world of thought,
 crossed wires 9

drawing the reader into a fluctuating play network of polarities and

hidden networks. The connections it draws are many: between
myth and science, transcendent intuition and technological
control, the virtual worlds we imagine and the real world we
cannot escape. It is a dreambook of the technological unconscious.
Perhaps the most important polarity that underlies the
psychological dynamics of technomysticism is a yin and yang I will
name spirit and soul. By soul, I basically mean the creative
imagination, that aspect of our psyches that perceives the world as
an animated field of powers and images. Soul finds and loses itself
in enchantment; it speaks the tongue of dream and phantasm,
which should never be confused with mere fantasy. Spirit is an
altogether different bird: an impersonal, incorporeal spark that
seeks clarity, essence, and a blast of the absolute. Archetypal
psychologist James Hillman uses the image of peaks and valleys to
characterize these two very different modes of the self. He notes
that the mountaintop is a veritable logo of the “spiritual” quest, a
place where the religious seeker overcomes gravity in order to win
a peak experience or an adamantine code worthy of ruling a life.
But the soul forswears such towering and otherworldly views; it
remains in the mesmerizing vale of tears and desires, a fecund and
polytheistic world of things and creatures, and the images and
stories that things and creatures breed.
Spirit and soul twine their way throughout this book like the
two strands of DNA, both enchanting and spiritualizing media
technologies. On the one hand, we’ll see that technologies can
serve as the vehicles for spells, ghosts, and animist intuitions. On
the other, they can provide launching pads for transcendence, for
the disembodied flights of gnosis. The different “styles” of spirit
and soul can even be seen in the two basic encoding methods that
define media: analog and digital. Analog gadgets reproduce signals
in continuous, variable waves of real energy, while digital devices
recode information into discrete symbolic chunks. Think of the
difference between vinyl LPs and music compact discs. LPs are
inscribed with unbroken physical grooves that mimic and re­
present the sound waves that ripple through the air. In contrast,
CDs chop up (or “sample”) such waves into individual bits,
10 TECHGNOSIS

encoding those digital units into tiny pits that are read and
reconstructed by your stereo gear at playback. The analog world
sticks to the grooves of soul—warm, undulating, worn with the
pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up
the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than
corporeality. The analog soul runs on the analogies between things;
the digital spirit divides the world between clay and information.
In the first chapter, I will trace the origins of these two strands
of technomysticism to the ancient mythological figure of Hermes
Trismegistus, a technological wizard who will inaugurate the dance
between magic and invention, media and mind. Tracing this
hermetic tradition into the modern world, I will discuss how the
discovery of electricity sparked animist ideas and occult
experiences even as it laid the groundwork for the information age.
Next, I will recast the epochal birth of cybernetics and the
electronic computer in a transcendental light provided by the
ancient lore of Gnosticism. Then I’ll show how the spiritual
counterculture of the 1960s created a liberatory and even magical
relationship to media and technology, a psychedelic mode of
mind-tweaking that feeds directly into todays cyberculture.
Finally, I’ll turn to our “datapocalyptic” moment and show how
the UFOs, Gaian minds, New World Orders, and techno-utopias
that hover above the horizon of the third millennium subliminally
feed off images and compulsions deeply rooted in the spiritual
imagination.
Given the delusions and disasters that religious and mystic
thought courts, some may legitimately wonder whether we might
not be better off just completing the critical and empirical task
undertaken by Freud, Nietzsche, and your favorite scientific
reductionist. The simple answer is that we cannot. Collectively,
human societies can no more dodge sublime imaginings or
spiritual yearnings than they can transcend the tidal pulls of eros.
We are beset with a thirst for meaning and connection that
centuries of skeptical philosophy, hardheaded materialism, and an
increasingly nihilist culture have yet to douse, and this thirst
conjures up the whole tattered carnival of contemporary religion:
oily New Age gurus and Pentecostal crusaders, existential
 crossed wires | 11

Buddhists and liberation theologians, psychedelic pagan ravers and

grizzled deep ecologists. Even the cosmic awe conjured by science
fiction or the outer-space snapshots of the Hubbell telescope calls
forth our ever-deeper, ever-brighter possible selves.
While I certainly hope that Tech Gnosis can help strengthen the
wisdom of these often inchoate yearnings, I am more interested in
understanding how technomystical ideas and practices work than I
am in shaking them down for their various and not inconsiderable
“errors.” Sober voices will appear throughout my book like a
chorus of skeptics, but my primary concern remains the spiritual
imagination and how it mutates in the face of changing tech­
nologies. William Gibson’s famous quip about new technologies
—that the street finds its own uses for things—applies to what
many seekers call “the path” as well. As we will see throughout this
book, the spiritual imagination seizes information technology for
its own purposes. In this sense, technologies of communication are
always, at least potentially, technologies of the sacred, simply
because the ideas and experiences of the sacred have always
informed human communication.
By appropriating and re-visioning communication
technologies, the spiritual imagination often fashions symbols and
rituals from the technical mode of communication it employs:
hieroglyphs, printing press, the online database. By reimagining
technologies in this way, new meanings are invested into the
universe of machines, and new virtual possibilities emerge. The
very ambiguity of the term information, which has made it such an
infectious and irritating buzzword, has also allowed old intuitions
to pop up in secular guise. Today, there is so much pressure on
information—the word, the concept, the stuff itself—that it
crackles with energy, drawing to itself mythologies, metaphysics,
hints of arcane magic. As information expands beyond its reductive
sense as a quantitative measure of meaning, groups and individuals
also find room to resist and recast the dominant technological
narratives of war and commerce, and to inject their fractured
postmodern lives with digitally remastered forms of community,
imagination, and cosmic connection.
Of course, as any number of “new paradigm” visionaries or
12 j TECHGNOSIS

Wired magazine cover stories prove, it’s easy to lose one’s way
in the maze of hope, hype, and novelty that defines the infor­
mation age. As any extraterrestrial anthropologist beaming down
for a look-see would note, the computer has definitely become
an idol—and a rather demanding one at that, almost as thirsty
for sacrifice as the holy spirit of money itself. Since the empire
of global capitalism is wagering the future of the planet on tech­
nology, we are right to distrust any myths that obscure the enor­
mous costs of the path we’ve taken. In the views of many
prophets today, crying in and for the wilderness, the spiritual
losses we have accrued in our haste to measure, exploit, and
commodify the world are already beyond reckoning. By sub­
mitting ourselves to the ravenous and nihilistic robot of science,
technology, and media culture, we have cut ourselves off from
the richness of the soul and from the deeply nourishing net­
works of family, community, and the local land.
I deeply sympathize with these attempts to disenchant
technology and to deflate the banal fantasies and pernicious hype
that fuel todays digital economy. In fact, Tech Gnosis will hopefully
provide some ammo for the debate. But as both the doomsdays of
the neo-Luddites and the gleaming Tomorrowlands of the techno-
utopians prove, technology embodies an image of the soul, or
rather a host of images: redemptive, demonic, magical,
transcendent, hypnotic, alive. We must come to grips with these
images before we can creatively and consciously answer the
question of technology, for that question has always been fringed
with phantasms.
One thing seems clear: We cannot afford to think in the
Manichean terms that often characterize the debate on new
technologies. Technology is neither a devil nor an angel. But
neither is it simply a “tool,” a neutral extension of some rock-
solid human nature. Technology is a trickster, and it has been
so since the first culture hero taught the human tribe how to
spin wool before he pulled it over our eyes. The trickster shows
how intelligence fares in an unpredictable and chaotic world;
he beckons us through the open doors of innovation and traps
us in the prison of unintended consequences. And it is with
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does not insist upon the same purity of family
life which Homer describes in Ulysses and
Penelope. Charles Kingsley, in Alton Locke,
remarks that the spirit of the Greek tragedy
was 'man mastered by circumstance'; that of
modern tragedy is “man mastering
circumstance.” But the Greek tragedians, while
showing man thus mastered, do still represent
him as inwardly free, as in the case of
Prometheus, and this sense of human freedom
and responsibility appears to some extent in
Socrates.

Plato (430-348) held that morality is pleasure in

the good, as the truly beautiful, and that
knowledge produces virtue. The good is
likeness to God,—here we have glimpses of an
extra-human goal and model. The body, like all
matter, being inherently evil, is a hindrance to
the soul,—here we have a glimpse of hereditary
depravity. But Plato “reduced moral evil to the
category of natural evil.” He failed to recognize
God as creator and master of matter; failed to
recognize man's depravity as due to his own
apostasy from God; failed to found morality on
the divine will rather than on man's own
consciousness. He knew nothing of a common
humanity, and regarded virtue as only for the
few. As there was no common sin, so there was
no common redemption. Plato thought to reach
God by intellect alone, when only conscience
and heart could lead to him. He believed in a
freedom of the soul in a preëxistent state
where a choice was made between good and
evil, but he believed that, after that
antemundane decision had been made, the
fates determined men's acts and lives
irreversibly. Reason drives two horses, appetite
and emotion, but their course has been
predetermined.

[pg 184]
Man acts as reason prompts. All sin is
ignorance. There is nothing in this life but
determinism. Martineau, Types, 13, 48, 49, 78,
88—Plato in general has no proper notion of
responsibility; he reduces moral evil to the
category of natural evil. His Ideas with one
exception are not causes. Cause is mind, and
mind is the Good. The Good is the apex and
crown of Ideas. The Good is the highest Idea,
and this highest Idea is a Cause. Plato has a
feeble conception of personality, whether in
God or in man. Yet God is a person in whatever
sense man is a person, and man's personality is
reflective self-consciousness. Will in God or man
is not so clear. The Right is dissolved into the
Good. Plato advocated infanticide and the
killing off of the old and the helpless.

Aristotle (384-322) leaves out of view even the

element of God-likeness and antemundane evil
which Plato so dimly recognized, and makes
morality the fruit of mere rational self-
consciousness. He grants evil proclivities, but
he refuses to call them immoral. He advocates
a certain freedom of will, and he recognizes
inborn tendencies which war against this
freedom, but how these tendencies originated
he cannot say, nor how men may be delivered
from them. Not all can be moral; the majority
must be restrained by fear. He finds in God no
motive, and love to God is not so much as
mentioned as the source of moral action. A
proud, composed, self-centered, and self-
contained man is his ideal character. See
Nicomachean Ethics, 7:6, and 10:10; Wuttke,
Christian Ethics, 1:92-126. Alexander, Theories
of Will, 39-54—Aristotle held that desire and
reason are the springs of action. Yet he did not
hold that knowledge of itself would make men
virtuous. He was a determinist. Actions are free
only in the sense of being devoid of external
compulsion. He viewed slavery as both rational
and right. Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 76
—“While Aristotle attributed to the State a more
complete personality than it really possessed,
he did not grasp the depth and meaning of the
personality of the individual.” A. H. Strong,
Christ in Creation, 289—Aristotle had no
conception of the unity of humanity. His
doctrine of unity did not extend beyond the
State. “He said that ‘the whole is before the
parts,’ but he meant by ‘the whole’ only the
pan-Hellenic world, the commonwealth of
Greeks; he never thought of humanity, and the
word ‘mankind’ never fell from his lips. He
could not understand the unity of humanity,
because he knew nothing of Christ, its
organizing principle.” On Aristotle's conception
of God, see James Ten Broeke, in Bap. Quar.
Rev., Jan. 1892—God is recognized as personal,
yet he is only the Greek Reason, and not the
living, loving, providential Father of the Hebrew
revelation. Aristotle substitutes the logical for
the dynamical in his dealing with the divine
causality. God is thought, not power.

Epicurus (342-270) regarded happiness, the

subjective feeling of pleasure, as the highest
criterion of truth and good. A prudent
calculating for prolonged pleasure is the highest
wisdom. He regards only this life. Concern for
retribution and for a future existence is folly. If
there are gods, they have no concern for men.
“Epicurus, on pretense of consulting for their
ease, complimented the gods, and bowed them
out of existence.” Death is the falling apart of
material atoms and the eternal cessation of
consciousness. The miseries of this life are due
to imperfection in the fortuitously constructed
universe. The more numerous these
undeserved miseries, the greater our right to
seek pleasure. Alexander, Theories of the Will,
55-75—The Epicureans held that the soul is
composed of atoms, yet that the will is free.
The atoms of the soul are excepted from the
law of cause and effect. An atom may decline
or deviate in the universal descent, and this is
the Epicurean idea of freedom. This
indeterminism was held by all the Greek
sceptics, materialists though they were.

Zeno, the founder of the Stoic philosophy (340-

264), regarded virtue as the only good.
Thought is to subdue nature. The free spirit is
self-legislating, self-dependent, self-sufficient.
Thinking, not feeling, is the criterion of the true
and the good. Pleasure is the consequence, not
the end of moral action. There is an
irreconcilable antagonism of existence. Man
cannot reform the world, but he can make
himself perfect. Hence an unbounded pride in
virtue. The sage never repents. There is not the
least recognition of the moral corruption of
mankind. There is no objective divine ideal, or
revealed divine will. The Stoic discovers moral
law only within, and never suspects his own
moral perversion. Hence he shows self-control
and justice, but never humility or love. He
needs no compassion or forgiveness, and he
grants none to others. Virtue is not an actively
outworking character, but a passive resistance
to irrational reality. Man may retreat into
himself. The Stoic is indifferent to pleasure and
pain, not because he believes in a divine
government, or in a divine love for mankind,
but as a proud defiance of the irrational world.
He has no need of God or of redemption. As
the Epicurean gives himself to enjoyment of the
world, the Stoic gives himself to contempt of
the [pg 185]world. In all afflictions, each can
say, “The door is open.” To the Epicurean, the
refuge is intoxication; to the Stoic, the refuge is
suicide: “If the house smokes, quit it.” Wuttke,
Christian Ethics, 1:62-161, from whom much of
this account of the Greeks systems is
condensed, describes Epicureanism and
Stoicism as alike making morality subjective,
although Epicureanism regarded spirit as
determined by nature, while Stoicism regarded
nature as determined by spirit.

The Stoics were materialists and pantheists.

Though they speak of a personal God, this is a
figure of speech. False opinion is at the root of
all vice. Chrysippus denied what we now call
the liberty of indifference, saying that there
could not be an effect without a cause. Man is
enslaved to passion. The Stoics could not
explain how a vicious man could become
virtuous. The result is apathy. Men act only
according to character, and this a doctrine of
fate. The Stoic indifference or apathy in
misfortune is not a bearing of it at all, but
rather a cowardly retreat from it. It is in the
actual suffering of evil that Christianity finds
“the soul of good.” The office of misfortune is
disciplinary and purifying; see Seth, Ethical
Principles, 417. “The shadow of the sage's self,
projected on vacancy, was called God, and, as
the sage had long since abandoned interest in
practical life, he expected his Divinity to do the
same.”
The Stoic reverenced God just because of his
unapproachable majesty. Christianity sees in
God a Father, a Redeemer, a carer for our
minute wants, a deliverer from our sin. It
teaches us to see in Christ the humanity of the
divine, affinity with God, God's supreme interest
in his handiwork. For the least of his creatures
Christ died. Kinship with God gives dignity to
man. The individuality that Stoicism lost in the
whole, Christianity makes the end of the
creation. The State exists to develop and
promote it. Paul took up and infused new
meaning into certain phrases of the Stoic
philosophy about the freedom and royalty of
the wise man, just as John adopted and
glorified certain phrases of Alexandrian
philosophy about the Word. Stoicism was lonely
and pessimistic. The Stoics said that the best
thing was not to be born; the next best thing
was to die. Because Stoicism had no God of
helpfulness and sympathy, its virtue was mere
conformity to nature, majestic egoism and self-
complacency. In the Roman Epictetus (89),
Seneca (65), and Marcus Aurelius(121-180),
the religious element comes more into the
foreground, and virtue appears once more as
God-likeness; but it is possible that this later
Stoicism was influenced by Christianity. On
Marcus Aurelius, see New Englander, July,
1881:415-431; Capes, Stoicism.

4. Systems of Western Asia. Zoroaster (1000 B.

C. ?), the founder of the Parsees, was a dualist,
at least so far as to explain the existence of evil
and of good by the original presence in the
author of all things of two opposing principles.
Here is evidently a limit put upon the
sovereignty and holiness of God. Man is not
perfectly dependent upon him, nor is God's will
an unconditional law for his creatures. As
opposed to the Indian systems, Zoroaster's
insistence upon the divine personality furnished
a far better basis for a vigorous and manly
morality. Virtue was to be won by hard struggle
of free beings against evil. But then, on the
other hand, this evil was conceived as originally
due, not to finite beings themselves, but either
to an evil deity who warred against the good,
or to an evil principle in the one deity himself.
The burden of guilt is therefore shifted from
man to his maker. Morality becomes subjective
and unsettled. Not love to God or imitation of
God, but rather self-love and self-development,
furnish the motive and aim of morality. No
fatherhood or love is recognized in the deity,
and other things besides God (e. g., fire) are
worshiped. There can be no depth to the
consciousness of sin, and no hope of divine
deliverance.

It is the one merit of Parseeism that it

recognizes the moral conflict of the world; its
error is that it carries this moral conflict into the
very nature of God. We can apply to Parseeism
the words of the Conference of Foreign Mission
Boards to the Buddhists of Japan: “All religions
are expressions of man's sense of dependence,
but only one provides fellowship with God. All
religions speak of a higher truth, but only one
speaks of that truth as found in a loving
personal God, our Father. All religions show
man's helplessness, but only one tells of a
divine Savior, who offers to man forgiveness of
sin, and salvation through his death, and who is
now a living person, working in and with all
who believe in him, to make them holy and
righteous and pure.” Matheson, Messages of
Old Religions, says that Parseeism recognizes
an obstructive element in the nature of God
himself. Moral evil is reality; but there is no
reconciliation, nor is it shown that all things
work together for good. See Wuttke, Christian
Ethics, 1:47-54; Faiths of the World (St. Giles
Lectures), 109-144; Mitchell, in Present Day
Tracts, 3: no. 25; Whitney on the Avesta, in
Oriental and Linguistic Studies.

[pg 186]
Mohammed (570-632 A. D.), the founder of
Islam, gives us in the Koran a system
containing four dogmas of fundamental
immorality, namely, polygamy, slavery,
persecution, and suppression of private
judgement. Mohammedanism is heathenism in
monotheistic form. Its good points are its
conscientiousness and its relation to God. It has
prospered because it has preached the unity of
God, and because it is a book-religion. But both
these it got from Judaism and Christianity. It
has appropriated the Old Testament saints and
even Jesus. But it denies the death of Christ
and sees no need of atonement. The power of
sin is not recognized. The idea of sin, in
Moslems, is emptied of all positive content. Sin
is simply a falling short, accounted for by the
weakness and shortsightedness of man,
inevitable in the fatalistic universe, or not
remembered in wrath by the indulgent and
merciful Father. Forgiveness is indulgence, and
the conception of God is emptied of the quality
of justice. Evil belongs only to the individual,
not to the race. Man attains the favor of God by
good works, based on prophetic teaching.
Morality is not a fruit of salvation, but a means.
There is no penitence or humility, but only self-
righteousness; and this self-righteousness is
consistent with great sensuality, unlimited
divorce, and with absolute despotism in family,
civil and religious affairs. There is no knowledge
of the fatherhood of God or of the brotherhood
of man. In all the Koran, there is no such
declaration as that “God so loved the world”
(John 3:16).

The submission of Islam is submission to an

arbitrary will, not to a God of love. There is no
basing of morality in love. The highest good is
the sensuous happiness of the individual. God
and man are external to one another.
Mohammed is a teacher but not a priest.
Mozley, Miracles, 140, 141—“Mohammed had
no faith in human nature. There were two
things which he thought men could do, and
would do, for the glory of God—transact
religious forms, and fight, and upon these two
points he was severe; but within the sphere of
common practical life, where man's great trial
lies, his code exhibits the disdainful laxity of a
legislator who accomodates his rule to the
 recipient, and shows his estimate of the
recipient by the accommodation which he
adopts.... ‘Human nature is weak,’ said he.”
Lord Houghton: The Koran is all wisdom, all
law, all religion, for all time. Dead men bow
before a dead God. “Though the world rolls on
from change to change, And realms of thought
expand, The letter stands without expanse or
range, Stiff as a dead man's hand.” Wherever
Mohammedanism has gone, it has either found
a desert or made one. Fairbairn, in Contemp.
Rev., Dec. 1882:866—“The Koran has frozen
Mohammedan thought; to obey is to abandon
progress.”Muir, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 14
—“Mohammedanism reduces men to a dead
level of social depression, despotism, and semi-
barbarism. Islam is the work of man;
Christianity of God.” See also Faiths of the
World (St. Giles Lectures, Second Series), 361-
396; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 1:448-
488; 280-317; Great Religions of the World,
published by the Harpers; Zwemer, Moslem
Doctrine of God.

3. The person and character of Christ.

A. The conception of Christ's person as presenting
deity and humanity indissolubly united, and the
conception of Christ's character, with its faultless and
all-comprehending excellence, cannot be accounted
for upon any other hypothesis than that they were
historical realities.

The stylobate of the Parthenon at Athens rises

about three inches in the middle of the 101 feet
of the front, and four inches in the middle of
the 228 feet of the flanks. A nearly parallel line
is found in the entablature. The axes of the
columns lean inward nearly three inches in their
height of 34 feet, thus giving a sort of
pyramidal character to the structure. Thus the
architect overcame the apparent sagging of
horizontal lines, and at the same time increased
the apparent height of the edifice; see Murray,
Handbook of Greece, 5th ed., 1884, 1:308, 309;
Ferguson, Handbook of Architecture, 268-270.
The neglect to counteract this optical illusion
has rendered the Madeleine in Paris a stiff and
ineffective copy of the Parthenon. The Galilean
peasant who should minutely describe these
peculiarities of the Parthenon would prove, not
only that the edifice was a historical reality, but
that he had actually seen it. Bruce, Apologetics,
 343—“In reading the memoirs of the
evangelists, you feel as one sometimes feels in
a picture-gallery. Your eye alights on the
portrait of a person whom you do not know.
You look at it intently for a few moments and
then remark to a companion: ‘That must be like
the original,—it is so life-like.’ ” Theodore
Parker: “It would take a Jesus to [pg
187]forge a Jesus.” See Row, Bampton
Lectures, 1877:178-219, and in Present Day
Tracts, 4: no. 22; F. W. Farrar, Witness of
History to Christ; Barry, Boyle Lecture on
Manifold Witness for Christ.

(a) No source can be assigned from which the

evangelists could have derived such a conception.
The Hindu avatars were only temporary unions of
deity with humanity. The Greeks had men half-
deified, but no unions of God and man. The
monotheism of the Jews found the person of Christ a
perpetual stumbling-block. The Essenes were in
principle more opposed to Christianity than the
Rabbinists.

Herbert Spencer, Data of Ethics, 279—“The

coëxistence of a perfect man and an imperfect
society is impossible; and could the two coëxist,
the resulting conduct would not furnish the
ethical standard sought.” We must conclude
that the perfect manhood of Christ is a miracle,
and the greatest of miracles. Bruce,
Apologetics, 346, 351—“When Jesus asks: ‘Why
callest thou me good?’ he means: ‘Learn first
what goodness is, and call no man good till you
are sure that he deserves it.’ Jesus' goodness
was entirely free from religious scrupulosity; it
was distinguished by humanity; it was full of
modesty and lowliness.... Buddhism has
flourished 2000 years, though little is known of
its founder. Christianity might have been so
perpetuated, but it is not so. I want to be sure
that the ideal has been embodied in an actual
life. Otherwise it is only poetry, and the
obligation to conform to it ceases.” For
comparison of Christ's incarnation with Hindu,
Greek, Jewish, and Essene ideas, see Dorner,
Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, Introduction. On
the Essenes, see Herzog, Encyclop., art,:
Essener; Pressensé, Jesus Christ, Life, Times
and Work, 84-87; Lightfoot on Colossians, 349-
419; Godet, Lectures in Defence of the
Christian Faith.
(b) No mere human genius, and much less the
genius of Jewish fishermen, could have originated
this conception. Bad men invent only such characters
as they sympathize with. But Christ's character
condemns badness. Such a portrait could not have
been drawn without supernatural aid. But such aid
would not have been given to fabrication. The
conception can be explained only by granting that
Christ's person and character were historical realities.

Between Pilate and Titus 30,000 Jews are said

to have been crucified around the walls of
Jerusalem. Many of these were young men.
What makes one of them stand out on the
pages of history? There are two answers: The
character of Jesus was a perfect character, and,
He was God as well as man. Gore, Incarnation,
63—“The Christ of the gospels, if he be not true
to history, represents a combined effort of the
creative imagination without parallel in
literature. But the literary characteristics of
Palestine in the first century make the
hypothesis of such an effort morally
impossible.”The Apocryphal gospels show us
what mere imagination was capable of
producing. That the portrait of Christ is not
puerile, inane, hysterical, selfishly assertive,
and self-contradictory, can be due only to the
fact that it is the photograph from real life.

For a remarkable exhibition of the argument

from the character of Jesus, see Bushnell,
Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332. Bushnell
mentions the originality and vastness of Christ's
plan, yet its simplicity and practical adaptation;
his moral traits of independence, compassion,
meekness, wisdom, zeal, humility, patience; the
combination in him of seemingly opposite
qualities. With all his greatness, he was
condescending and simple; he was unworldly,
yet not austere; he had strong feelings, yet was
self-possessed; he had indignation toward sin,
yet compassion toward the sinner; he showed
devotion to his work, yet calmness under
opposition; universal philanthropy, yet
susceptibility to private attachments; the
authority of a Savior and Judge, yet the
gratitude and the tenderness of a son; the most
elevated devotion, yet a life of activity and
exertion. See chapter on The Moral Miracle, in
Bruce, Miraculous Element of the Gospels, 43-
78.
B. The acceptance and belief in the New Testament
descriptions of Jesus Christ cannot be accounted for
except upon the ground that the person and
character described had an actual existence.

[pg 188]
(a) If these descriptions were false, there were
witnesses still living who had known Christ and who
would have contradicted them. (b) There was no
motive to induce acceptance of such false accounts,
but every motive to the contrary. (c) The success of
such falsehoods could be explained only by
supernatural aid, but God would never have thus
aided falsehood. This person and character,
therefore, must have been not fictitious but real; and
if real, then Christ's words are true, and the system
of which his person and character are a part is a
revelation from God.

“The counterfeit may for a season Deceive the

wide earth; But the lie waxing great comes to
labor, And truth has its birth.” Matthew Arnold,
The Better Part: “Was Christ a man like us? Ah,
let us see, If we then too can be Such men as
he!” When the blatant sceptic declared: “I do
not believe that such a man as Jesus Christ
ever lived,” George Warren merely replied: “I
wish I were like him!” Dwight L. Moody was
called a hypocrite, but the stalwart evangelist
answered: “Well, suppose I am. How does that
make your case any better? I know some pretty
mean things about myself; but you cannot say
anything against my Master.” Goethe: “Let the
culture of the spirit advance forever; let the
human spirit broaden itself as it will; yet it will
never go beyond the height and moral culture
of Christianity, as it glitters and shines in the
gospels.”

Renan, Life of Jesus: “Jesus founded the

absolute religion, excluding nothing,
determining nothing, save its essence.... The
foundation of the true religion is indeed his
work. After him, there is nothing left but to
develop and fructify.” And a Christian scholar
has remarked: “It is an astonishing proof of the
divine guidance vouchsafed to the evangelists
that no man, of their time or since, has been
able to touch the picture of Christ without
debasing it.” We may find an illustration of this
in the words of Chadwick, Old and New
Unitarianism, 207—“Jesus' doctrine of marriage
was ascetic, his doctrine of property was
communistic, his doctrine of charity was
sentimental, his doctrine of non-resistance was
such as commends itself to Tolstoi, but not to
many others of our time. With the example of
Jesus, it is the same as with his teachings.
Followed unreservedly, would it not justify
those who say: ‘The hope of the race is in its
extinction’; and bring all our joys and sorrows
to a sudden end?”To this we may answer in the
words of Huxley, who declares that Jesus Christ
is “the noblest ideal of humanity which
mankind has yet worshiped.” Gordon, Christ of
To-Day, 179—“The question is not whether
Christ is good enough to represent the
Supreme Being, but whether the Supreme
Being is good enough to have Christ for his
representative. John Stuart Mill looks upon the
Christian religion as the worship of Christ,
rather than the worship of God, and in this way
he explains the beneficence of its influence.”

John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 254—“The

most valuable part of the effect on the
character which Christianity has produced, by
holding up in a divine person a standard of
excellence and a model for imitation, is
available even to the absolute unbeliever, and
can never more be lost to humanity. For it is
Christ rather than God whom Christianity has
held up to believers as the pattern of perfection
for humanity. It is the God incarnate, more than
the God of the Jews or of nature, who, being
idealized, has taken so great and salutary hold
on the modern mind. And whatever else may
be taken away from us by rational criticism,
Christ is still left: a unique figure, not more
unlike all his precursors than all his followers,
even those who had the direct benefit of his
personal preaching.... Who among his disciples,
or among their proselytes, was capable of
inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of
imagining the life and character revealed in the
Gospels?... About the life and sayings of Jesus
there is a stamp of personal originality
combined with profundity of insight which, if we
abandon the idle expectation of finding
scientific precision where something very
different was aimed at, must place the Prophet
of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those
who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very
first rank of the men of sublime genius of
whom our species can boast. When this
preëminent genius is combined with the
qualities of probably the greatest moral
reformer and martyr to that mission who ever
existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to
have made a bad choice in pitching on this man
 as the ideal representative and guide of
humanity; nor even now would it be easy, even
for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of
the rule of virtue from the abstract into the
concrete than the endeavor so to live that
Christ would approve our life. [pg 189]When
to this we add that, to the conception of the
rational sceptic, it remains a possibility that
Christ actually was ... a man charged with a
special, express and unique commission from
God to lead mankind to truth and virtue, we
may well conclude that the influences of
religion on the character, which will remain
after rational criticism has done its utmost
against the evidences of religion, are well worth
preserving, and that what they lack in direct
strength as compared with those of a firmer
belief is more than compensated by the greater
truth and rectitude of the morality they
sanction.”See also Ullmann, Sinlessness of
Jesus; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 129-
157; Schaff, Person of Christ; Young, The Christ
in History; George Dana Boardman, The
Problem of Jesus.

4. The testimony of Christ to himself—as being a

messenger from God and as being one with God.
Only one personage in history has claimed to teach
absolute truth, to be one with God, and to attest his
divine mission by works such as only God could
perform.

A. This testimony cannot be accounted for upon the

hypothesis that Jesus was an intentional deceiver:
for (a) the perfectly consistent holiness of his life; (b)
the unwavering confidence with which he challenged
investigation of his claims and staked all upon the
result; (c) the vast improbability of a lifelong lie in
the avowed interests of truth; and (d) the
impossibility that deception should have wrought
such blessing to the world,—all show that Jesus was
no conscious impostor.

Fisher, Essays on the Supernat. Origin of

Christianity, 515-538—Christ knew how vast his
claims were, yet he staked all upon them.
Though others doubted, he never doubted
himself. Though persecuted unto death, he
never ceased his consistent testimony. Yet he
lays claim to humility: Mat. 11:29—“I am meek
and lowly in heart.” How can we reconcile with
humility his constant self-assertion? We answer
that Jesus' self-assertion was absolutely
essential to his mission, for he and the truth
were one: he could not assert the truth without
asserting himself, and he could not assert
himself without asserting the truth. Since he
was the truth, he needed to say so, for men's
sake and for the truth's sake, and he could be
meek and lowly in heart in saying so. Humility
is not self-depreciation, but only the judging of
ourselves according to God's perfect standard.
“Humility” is derived from “humus”. It is the
coming down from airy and vain self-
exploitation to the solid ground, the hard-pan,
of actual fact.

God requires of us only so much humility as is

consistent with truth. The self-glorification of
the egotist is nauseating, because it indicates
gross ignorance or misrepresentation of self.
But it is a duty to be self-asserting, just so far
as we represent the truth and righteousness of
God. There is a noble self-assertion which is
perfectly consistent with humility. Job must
stand for his integrity. Paul's humility was not of
the Uriah Heep variety. When occasion
required, he could assert his manhood and his
rights, as at Philippi and at the Castle of
Antonia. So the Christian should frankly say out
the truth that is in him. Each Christian has an
experience of his own, and should tell it to
 others. In testifying to the truth he is only
following the example of “Christ Jesus, who
before Pontius Pilate witnessed the good
confession” (1 Tim. 6:13).

B. Nor can Jesus' testimony to himself be explained

upon the hypothesis that he was self-deceived: for
this would argue (a) a weakness and folly amounting
to positive insanity. But his whole character and life
exhibit a calmness, dignity, equipoise, insight, self-
mastery, utterly inconsistent with such a theory. Or it
would argue (b) a self-ignorance and self-
exaggeration which could spring only from the
deepest moral perversion. But the absolute purity of
his conscience, the humility of his spirit, the self-
denying beneficence of his life, show this hypothesis
to be incredible.

Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 39—If

he were man, then to demand that all the
world should bow down to him would be
worthy of scorn like that which we feel for
some straw-crowned monarch of Bedlam.
Forrest, The Christ of History and of [pg
190]Experience, 22, 76—Christ never united
with his disciples in prayer. He went up into the
mountain to pray, but not to pray with them:
Luke 9:18—“as he was alone praying, his
disciples were with him.” The consciousness of
preëxistence is the indispensable precondition
of the total demand which he makes in the
Synoptics. Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 81, 82
—We value the testimony of Christians to their
communion with God. Much more should we
value the testimony of Christ. Only one who,
first being divine, also knew that he was divine,
could reveal heavenly things with the clearness
and certainty that belong to the utterances of
Jesus. In him we have something very different
from the momentary flashes of insight which
leave us in all the greater darkness.

Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 5—“Self-respect is

bottomed upon the ability to become what one
desires to be; and, if the ability steadily falls
short of the task, the springs of self-respect dry
up; the motives of happy and heroic action
wither. Science, art, generous civic life, and
especially religion, come to man's rescue,”—
showing him his true greatness and breadth of
being in God. The State is the individual's larger
self. Humanity, and even the universe, are parts
of him. It is the duty of man to enable all men
to be men. It is possible for men not only
truthfully but also rationally to assert
themselves, even in earthly affairs. Chatham to
the Duke of Devonshire: “My Lord, I believe I
can save this country, and that no one else
can.” Leonardo da Vinci, in his thirtieth year, to
the Duke of Milan: “I can carry through every
kind of work in sculpture, in clay, marble, and
bronze; also in painting I can execute
everything that can be demanded, as well as
any one whosoever.”

Horace: “Exegi monumentum ære perennius.”

Savage, Life beyond Death, 209—A famous old
minister said once, when a young and zealous
enthusiast tried to get him to talk, and failing,
burst out with, “Have you no religion at all?”
“None to speak of,”was the reply. When Jesus
perceived a tendency in his disciples to self-
glorification, he urged silence; but when he saw
the tendency to introspection and inertness, he
bade them proclaim what he had done for them
(Mat. 8:4; Mark 5:19). It is never right for the
Christian to proclaim himself; but, if Christ had
not proclaimed himself, the world could never
have been saved. Rush Rhees. Life of Jesus of
Nazareth, 235-237—“In the teaching of Jesus,
two topics have the leading place—the Kingdom
of God, and himself. He sought to be Lord,
rather than Teacher only. Yet the Kingdom is
not one of power, national and external, but
one of fatherly love and of mutual
brotherhood.”

Did Jesus do anything for effect, or as a mere

example? Not so. His baptism had meaning for
him as a consecration of himself to death for
the sins of the world, and his washing of the
disciples' feet was the fit beginning of the
paschal supper and the symbol of his laying
aside his heavenly glory to purify us for the
marriage supper of the Lamb. Thomas à
Kempis: “Thou art none the holier because
thou art praised, and none the worse because
thou art censured. What thou art, that thou art,
and it avails thee naught to be called any better
than thou art in the sight of God.” Jesus'
consciousness of his absolute sinlessness and
of his perfect communion with God is the
strongest of testimonies to his divine nature
and mission. See Theological Eclectic, 4:137;
Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 153; J. S. Mill,
Essays on Religion, 253; Young, Christ of
History; Divinity of Jesus Christ, by Andover
Professors, 37-62.
If Jesus, then, cannot be charged with either mental
or moral unsoundness, his testimony must be true,
and he himself must be one with God and the
revealer of God to men.

Neither Confucius nor Buddha claimed to be

divine, or the organs of divine revelation,
though both were moral teachers and
reformers. Zoroaster and Pythagoras apparently
believed themselves charged with a divine
mission, though their earliest biographers wrote
centuries after their death. Socrates claimed
nothing for himself which was beyond the
power of others. Mohammed believed his
extraordinary states of body and soul to be due
to the action of celestial beings; he gave forth
the Koran as “a warning to all creatures,” and
sent a summons to the King of Persia and the
Emperor of Constantinople, as well as to other
potentates, to accept the religion of Islam; yet
he mourned when he died that he could not
have opportunity to correct the mistakes of the
Koran and of his own life. For Confucius or
Buddha, Zoroaster or Pythagoras, Socrates or
Mohammed to claim all power in heaven and
earth, would show insanity or moral perversion.
But this is precisely what Jesus claimed. He was
 either mentally or morally unsound, or his
testimony is true. See Baldensperger,
Selbstbewusstsein Jesu; E. Ballentine, Christ his
own Witness.

[pg 191]
IV. The Historical Results of the Propagation of
Scripture Doctrine.

1. The rapid progress of the gospel in the first

centuries of our era shows its divine origin.

A. That Paganism should have been in three

centuries supplanted by Christianity, is an
acknowledged wonder of history.

The conversion of the Roman Empire to

Christianity was the most astonishing revolution
of faith and worship ever known. Fifty years
after the death of Christ, there were churches
in all the principal cities of the Roman Empire.
Nero (37-68) found (as Tacitus declares) an
“ingens multitudo” of Christians to persecute.
Pliny writes to Trajan (52-117) that they
“pervaded not merely the cities but the villages
and country places, so that the temples were
nearly deserted.” Tertullian (160-230) writes:
 “We are but of yesterday, and yet we have filled
all your places, your cities, your islands, your
castles, your towns, your council-houses, even
your camps, your tribes, your senate, your
forum. We have left you nothing but your
temples.” In the time of the emperor Valerian
(253-268), the Christians constituted half the
population of Rome. The conversion of the
emperor Constantine (272-337) brought the
whole empire, only 300 years after Jesus'
death, under the acknowledged sway of the
gospel. See McIlvaine and Alexander, Evidences
of Christianity.

B. The wonder is the greater when we consider the

obstacles to the progress of Christianity:

(a) The scepticism of the cultivated classes; (b) the

prejudice and hatred of the common people; and (c)
the persecutions set on foot by government.

(a) Missionaries even now find it difficult to get

a hearing among the cultivated classes of the
heathen. But the gospel appeared in the most
enlightened age of antiquity—the Augustan age
of literature and historical inquiry. Tacitus called
the religion of Christ “exitiabilis
superstitio”—“quos per flagitia invisos vulgus
Christianos appellabat.” Pliny: “Nihil aliud inveni
quam superstitionem pravam et immodicam.”If
the gospel had been false, its preachers would
not have ventured into the centres of
civilization and refinement; or if they had, they
would have been detected. (b) Consider the
interweaving of heathen religions with all the
relations of life. Christians often had to meet
the furious zeal and blind rage of the mob,—as
at Lystra and Ephesus. (c) Rawlinson, in his
Historical Evidences, claims that the Catacombs
of Rome comprised nine hundred miles of
streets and seven millions of graves within a
period of four hundred years—a far greater
number than could have died a natural death—
and that vast multitudes of these must have
been massacred for their faith. The
Encyclopædia Britannica, however, calls the
estimate of De Marchi, which Rawlinson
appears to have taken as authority, a great
exaggeration. Instead of nine hundred miles of
streets, Northcote has three hundred fifty. The
number of interments to correspond would be
less than three millions. The Catacombs began
to be deserted by the time of Jerome. The
times when they were universally used by
Christians could have been hardly more than
two hundred years. They did not begin in sand-
pits. There were three sorts of tufa: (1) rocky,
used for quarrying and too hard for Christian
purposes; (2) sandy, used for sand-pits, too
soft to permit construction of galleries and
tombs; (3) granular, that used by Christians.
The existence of the Catacombs must have
been well known to the heathen. After Pope
Damasus the exaggerated reverence for them
began. They were decorated and improved.
Hence many paintings are of later date than
400, and testify to papal polity, not to that of
early Christianity. The bottles contain, not
blood, but wine of the eucharist celebrated at
the funeral.

Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 256-

258, calls attention to Matthew Arnold's
description of the needs of the heathen world,
yet his blindness to the true remedy: “On that
hard pagan world disgust And secret loathing
fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made
human life a hell. In his cool hall, with haggard
eyes, The Roman noble lay; He drove abroad,
in furious guise, Along the Appian Way; He
made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And
crowned his hair with flowers,—No easier nor
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