ianity could hardly have expanded into a universal
Religion without that Gospel. But we cannot regard all that the
Johannine Christ says about himself as the _ipsissima verba_ of Jesus.
The picture is idealized in accordance with the writer's own
conceptions, though after all its Theology is very much simpler than
the later Theology which has grown out of it permits most people to
see. We must not let these discourses blind us to the human character
of Christ's consciousness. And this real humanity must carry with it
the recognition of the thoroughly human limitations of his knowledge.
The Bishop of Birmingham has prepared the way for the union of a really
historical view of Christ's life with a reasonable interpretation of
the Catholic {176} doctrine about him, by reviving the ancient view as
to the limitation of his intellectual knowledge;[2] but the principle
must be carried in some ways further than the Bishop himself would be
prepared to go. The accepted Christology must be distinctly recognized
as the Church's reflection and comment upon Christ's work and its
value, not as the actual teaching of the Master about himself.

(4) It must likewise be recognized that the language in which the
Church expressed this attitude towards Christ was borrowed from Greek
Metaphysics, particularly from Plato and Neo-Platonism in the patristic
period, and from Aristotle in the Middle Ages. And we cannot
completely separate language from thought. It was not merely Greek
technical phrases but Greek ways of thinking which were imported into
Catholic Christianity. And the language, the categories, the ideas of
Greek Philosophy were to some extent different from those of modern
times. The most Platonically-minded thinker of modern times does not
really think exactly as Plato thought: the most Catholic-minded thinker
of modern times, if he has also breathed the atmosphere of modern
Science and modern Culture, cannot really think exactly as Athanasius
or Basil thought. I {177} do not suppose that any modern mind can
think itself back into exactly the state of mind which an ancient
Father was in, when he used the term Logos. This central idea of the
Logos is not a category of modern thought. We cannot really think of a
Being who is as distinct from the Father as he is represented as being
in some of the patristic utterances--I say advisedly some, for widely
different modes of thought are found in Fathers of equal authority--and