imagine that we can have Christ's gospel apart from Christ.

Now, according to the teaching of the Gospels, all Christ's life--all He
was and said and did--is a revelation of the love of God. But the crown
of the revelation was given in His death. It is the Cross which was, in
a special and peculiar sense, as Christ Himself declared,[21] the glory
both of the Father and the Son. And the apostles, with a unanimity which
can only be explained as the result of His own teaching, always
associate God's love with Christ's death in a way in which they never
associate God's love with Christ's life. "God," says St. Paul,
"commendeth His own love toward us, in that ... Christ died for us."

Christ's death, then, we say, establishes the love of God. But how does
this come to pass? How does the death of one prove the love of another?
If--to use a very simple illustration--I am in danger of drowning, and
another man, at the cost of his own life, saves mine, his act
undoubtedly proves his own love; but how does it prove anything
concerning God's love? If the apostle had said, "_Christ_ commendeth His
own love towards us, in that He died for us," we could have understood
him; but how, I ask again, does Christ's death prove _God's_ love? The
question is answerable, as indeed the whole of the New Testament is
intelligible, only on the assumption of the Trinitarian doctrine of
Christ. If Christ were indeed the Son of God, standing to God in such a
relation that what He did was likewise the doing of God the Father, we
can understand the apostle's meaning. On any other hypothesis his
language is a riddle of which the key has been lost. A further question
still remains to be answered. I said just now that if St. Paul had
written, "_Christ_ commendeth His own love towards us, in that He died
for us," we could have understood Him. But here, also, something is
implicit which requires to be made explicit. How does Christ in His