h the question of that
great structure of formal dogma which the Church has built upon the
foundation of Christ's teaching. A development undoubtedly it is; but,
while we must not assume that every development which has historically
taken place is necessarily true or valuable, it is equally
unphilosophical to assume that, because it is a development, it is
necessarily false or worthless. Our Lord himself did, indeed, claim to
be the Messiah; the fact of Messiahship was what was primarily meant by
the title 'Son of God.' Even in the Synoptists he exhibits a
consciousness of a direct divine mission supremely important for his
own race; and, before the close, we can perhaps discover a growing
conviction that the truth which he was teaching was meant for a larger
world. Starting from and developing these ideas, his followers set
themselves to devise terms which should express their own sense of
their Master's unique {169} religious value and importance, to express
what they felt he had been to their own souls, what they felt he might
be to all who accepted his message. Even to St. Paul the term 'Son of
God' still meant primarily 'the Messiah': but in the light of his
conception of Jesus, the Messianic idea expanded till the Christ was
exalted to a position far above anything which Jewish prophecy or
Apocalypse had ever claimed for him. And the means of expressing these
new ideas were found naturally and inevitably in the current
philosophical terminology of the day. With the fourth Gospel, if not
already with St. Paul, there was infused into the teaching of the
Church a new element. From the Jewish-Alexandrian speculative Theology
the author borrowed the term Logos to express what he conceived to be
the cosmic importance of Christ's position. He accepted from that
speculation--probably from Philo--the theory which personified or
half-personified that Logos or Wisdom of God through which God was
represented in the Old Testament as creating the world and inspiring
the prophets. This Logos through whom God had throughout the ages been
more and more fully revealing Himself had at last become actually
incarnate in Jesus Christ. This Word of God is also described as truly
God, though in the fourth Gospel the relation of the Father to the
Word--at {170} least to the Word before the Incarnation--is left wholly
vague and undefined.

From these comparatively simple beginnings sprang centuries of
controversy culminating in