A Christian View of Robert Keable

SOME of us who have been interested in the papers by Robert Keable, published in the Atlantic Monthly, have waited, to pass comment, until we could read his more fully developed study in book form, The Great Galilean. Miss Case, who writes on ‘The Middle Way,’ in the February number, has put her finger on the real weakness of Keable’s solution of the problem of Christ.

Suppose we try to translate Keable’s thought into homely everyday phraseology. What is his argument? It sounds absurd, as thus translated, but here it is: —

1. We must distinguish between the historical Christ and the traditional Christ — the Christ whose story is told in the Synoptic Gospels, and the glorified Christ in whom, very early, men found an unveiling of the heart of God, to whom they came to give worship and pay divine honors, and about whose birth miraculous accounts were given.

2. As for the historical Christ, Keable says that we cannot discover enough certain information about him to write a biographical note of decent newspaper length. The material in the Gospels cannot be accepted, he declares, as trustworthy; we know less than nothing of the facts.

3. As for the traditional Christ, he declares that much of what the Church has taught is pure myth, without foundation of fact — a lovely lyric, a poetic ideal.

4. Nevertheless, we do know (somehow, but just how we are left to guess) what this Christ taught, about sin, sex, and so forth — all of which is told by Keable most fascinatingly, by taking from the Gospels what may be twisted into support of his views, leaving out the rest, and at best studying the whole most superficially. In passing, let it be said that he displays but the slightest knowledge of the assured results of the most careful critical study of the Gospels, and that he draws his picture by falling back upon the very Gospels which he has discarded as discredited and as not furnishing enough fact to fill the space of a newspaper obituary notice!

5. Nevertheless, again, we need the traditional Christ. We must have a God to worship; we must have an ideal to lead us on; we must have certain divine values. Well, there are no ‘values’ finer, purer, truer, more winsome, more compelling, more worship-inspiring, than those we find in the traditional Christ. We cling to them, therefore, as myths, as thought-forms, even though we cannot root the tradition in historic fact.

There are just two questions one may ask about this curious piece of Christology: —

1. How can we expect plain, everyday folk to follow its logic? Why suppose that they will worship a Christ who does not now exist and never did exist, who is fancy, not fact, even though the fancy be wonderfully beautiful? We do not worship mythological figures; we do not bow low before lovely statuary, or adore beautiful pictures, or do homage to printed pages of poetry. You can’t tell your little children, who have believed in Santa Claus, that the story is a fairy tale, and then expect them to continue to send their childish notes to Kriss Kringle through the mail. If they do continue to send him letters, after you have assured them that ‘Santa Claus is only father and mother,’you soon have a suspicion that there is something they want, and they understand perfectly well, if they can still play at the delusion, that somehow ‘the right party’ will send the desired gifts. But what sort of character will issue out of such practice? And what sort of character will be produced by the hocus-pocus Mr. Keable, in all seriousness, proposes in this plea for a mythical Christ?

2. Why does Mr. Keable, after tossing aside as unreliable the only records we have of Christ’s life and teaching alleged to be historical, weave out of the story he has rejected a summary of the teaching Jesus gave on sin, sex, and so forth, which does, indeed, emphasize some things which Christ taught, though leaving out much that counterbalances and modifies it? Why but because Mr. Keable’s conscience demanded that he draw up some apology for his own life?

If his book is an apologia, and at the last he felt that he needed to make it, perhaps he was, indeed, coming back to God at the end and regaining Christian faith. There are indications that this may be the fact in the very last of his writings — the chapter, ‘From the Known to the Unknown,’ not contained in his book, but printed in the Atlantic Monthly of April 1928, describing the challenge he had just received to tell what he still believed, after all his years of doubt and wanderings. Here is his confession of faith: —

‘I give my allegiance to the beauty and honesty and simplicity of that figure who is symbolized among us as Jesus Christ, Son of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, who rose again the third day from the dead.’ Maybe then, in the extreme end of life, wearied by much thinking, but buoyed up by the creed and stimulated by the beauty of that almost mythical figure, men might be found who would breathe with perhaps their last whisper, ‘I believe in God.’

If there is any living man who can say, in the face of the living world around him, that he does not believe in the irresistible, enabling, marvelous certainty of Life, he can be left to his own devices. It does not in the least matter that Life is inexplicable and incomprehensible. The fact is that, the more a man is alive, the more he knows that he’s alive. The more he thinks and reads, the more he is struck by the achievements of Life on earth. . . . Life everlasting seems more difficult, but the adjective is one upon which science, however reluctantly, is being more and more desperately driven. . . .

Christ himself was not annihilated, whatever happened on the third day after the crucifixion. His life has not merely been continuous — it has been ever-increasing. His thoughts, his message, his spirit, are enormously more alive to-day than ever they were when he lived on earth. When he died, a few thousands only had ever even heard of him; to-day as many millions think of him as a living personality. That he is a living personality I do not doubt. One need not be a spiritualist for that. It is literally true that that insignificant change which we call death has had no dominion over him. It will have no dominion over any of us, and less still has it had dominion over the finest of the sons of men. . . .

Such is the known. And the unknown? It is wonderful how the perfect simplicity and matchless rhythm of the old words chime in one’s head. Despite the temptation to paraphrase them just that little which would make them more intelligible to modern minds, I shall not do so. ‘ Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.’

What if Life is God?

A man who could write words like these may have walked stumblingly even to the last, but he was not far from the Kingdom of God.

CHARLES FISKE